You cannot survey the work of Van Dyck in this collection,
so full of deep suggestion, showing an intellect so vivid and so
refined, a mastery of processes so thorough and so intelligent, without
the old wonder of what he would have done in that ripe age when Titian
and Murillo and Shakespeare wrought their best and fullest, and the old
regret for the dead,--as Edgar Poe sings, the doubly dead in that they
died so young. We are tempted to lift the veil that hides the unknown,
at least with the furtive hand of conjecture; to imagine a field of
unquenched activity where the early dead, free from the clogs and
trammels of the lower world, may follow out the impulses of their
diviner nature,--where Andrea has no wife, and Raphael and Van Dyck no
disease,--where Keats and Shelley have all eternity for their lofty
rhyme,--where Ellsworth and Koerner and the Lowell boys can turn their
alert and athletic intelligence to something better than war.
A CASTLE IN THE AIR
I have sometimes thought that a symptom of the decay of true kinghood in
modern times is the love of monarchs for solitude. In the early days
when monarchy was a real power to answer a real want, the king had no
need to hide himself. He was the strongest, the most knowing, the most
cunning. He moved among men their acknowledged chief. He guided and
controlled them. He never lost his dignity by daily use. He could steal
a horse like Diomede, he could mend his own breeches like Dagobert, and
never tarnish the lustre of the crown by it.
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