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with joyful alacrity. Like his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he certainly
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and amply equipped with nerve and muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and _savoir faire_. The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the talents which put men _en rapport_ with their kind. The reader of his biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. He is the poet _par excellence_ of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was satisfied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings we look in vain for the
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the
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and it is characteristic that he never revised. Even after the great sorrow of his life, the mood of _Prospice_, though it may have underlain all his other moods, did not suppress or transform them; he
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given out from the mountains before a storm. The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space--relations which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle. There is a hint of it in an early anecdote.
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Why, sir, you are quite a geographer! he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary account of
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[62] But it was only late in life that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its natural outlet. When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time thrust poetry into the shade.
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The more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow, writes his wife,