Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/345

A STRANGE BOOK 329 For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dadona, when out of their sense, have conferred great benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life ; but when in their senses, few or none. . . . There is also a third kind of madness, of those who are possessed by the Muses ; which enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers, with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But he who, having no touch of the Muses' mad- ness in his soul, and comes to the door, and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art — he, I say, and his poetry, are not admitted ; the sane man is nowhere at all, when he enters into the rivalry with madmen. I might tell of many other deeds which have sprung from inspired madness," &c. In harmony with this Platonic doctrine are the serious invocations of Divine aid by the loftiest earlier and later poets, though the appeal to the Muses became in the course of centuries so thoroughly senseless a matter of routine with mediocre and clever versifiers, that Byron did well to prick the bubble with the frank impertinence of his " Hail, Muse ! et cetera. — We left Juan sleeping." Homer, surely in devout earnestness, calls upon the heavenly Muses to sing. Lucretius, the most inspired of Latin poets, serious enough in his opening prayer to Venus Genetrix, "symbol of the all-pervading living force of nature, legendary mother of the Romans," as is made manifest by " the intense earnestness of the language, the words plain and simple in themselves, yet instinct with life and passion " (Munro's second edition, 1866 ; Book i, note 2, vol. i. p. 341, 342). So Dante, in the first canto of the " Purgatory," invokes the sacred Muses, and in the first of the "Paradise," Apollo ; and in the second grandly declares, warning off those unworthy to accompany him, that his barque