When I take down my copy of Keats, and look through it and beyond it, I feel that while it is left to me I cannot be wholly shorn of my friends. It is the only album of photographs I possess. The faces I see in it are not for any eye but mine. It is my private portrait gallery, in which hang the portraits of my dearest friends. The marks and blots are intelligible to no eye but mine; they are the cherished hieroglyphics of the heart. I close the book; I lock up the hieroglyphics; I feel certain the book will last my time. Should it survive me and pass into new hands--into the hands of some boy now unborn, who may pluck out of it posies of love-phrases for his fresh-cheeked sweetheart--he will know nothing of the import these marginal notes bore to one who has gone before him; unless, indeed, out of some cemetery of ephemeral literature he digs up this key--this Rosetta stone.
The sublime is dying. It has been pining a long time. At last dissolution has set in. Nothing can save it but another incursion of Goths and Huns; and as there are no Goths and Huns handy just now, the sublime must die out, and die out soon. You can know what a man is by the company he keeps. You can judge a people by the ideas they retain more than by the ideas they acquire. The philology of a tongue, from its cradle to its grave, is the social history of the people who spoke it. To-day you may mark the progress of civilisation by the decay bf the sublime. Glance at a few of the nations of earth as they stand. Italy and Spain still hold with the sublime in literature and art, although, being exhausted stocks, they cannot produce it any longer. France is cynical, smart, artistic, but never was and never can be sublime, so long as vanity rules her; and yet, by the irony of selection, sublime is one of her favourite words. Central Europe has had her sublime phases, but cannot be even thought of now in connection with the quality; and Russia and Turkey are barbarous still. If we come to the active pair of nationalities in the progress of current civilisation, the United States and England, we find the sublime in very poor case.