He certainly resembled his father, who, by the way, wore out two women
without any satisfaction to himself, because they did not come up to his
supra-refined standard of the delicacy which is so perceptible in his
verses. That's your poet. He demands too much from others. The
inarticulate son had set up a standard for himself with that need for
embodying in his conduct the dreams, the passion, the impulses the poet
puts into arrangements of verses, which are dearer to him than his own
self--and may make his own self appear sublime in the eyes of other
people, and even in his own eyes.
Did Anthony wish to appear sublime in his own eyes? I should not like to
make that charge; though indeed there are other, less noble, ambitions at
which the world does not dare to smile. But I don't think so; I do not
even think that there was in what he did a conscious and lofty confidence
in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power which leads men so
often into impossible or equivocal situations. Looked at abstractedly
(the way in which truth is often seen in its real shape) his life had
been a life of solitude and silence--and desire.
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