"The praise of beggars," "the cries of London,"
the traits of actors just grown "old," the spots in "town" where the
country, its fresh green and fresh water, still lingered on, one after
another, amidst the bustle; the quaint, dimmed, just played-out farces,
he had relished so much, coming partly through them to understand the
earlier English theatre as a thing once really alive; those fountains
and sundials of old gardens, of which he entertains such dainty
discourse:--he feels the poetry of these things, as the poetry of things
old indeed, but surviving as an actual part of the life of the present,
and as something quite different from the poetry of things flatly gone
from us and antique, which come back to us, if at all, as entire
strangers, like Scott's old Scotch-border personages, their oaths and
armour. Such gift of appreciation depends, as I said, on the habitual
apprehension of men's life as a whole--its organic wholeness, as
extending even to the least things in it--of its outward manner in
connection with its inward temper; and it involves a fine perception of
the congruities, the musical accordance between humanity and its
environment of custom, society, personal intercourse; as if all this,
with its meetings, partings, ceremonies, gesture, tones of speech, were
some delicate instrument on which an expert performer is playing.
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