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These it pleased the people exalted, as you may well imagine, by the afflatus of liberty to collect in a vast mass on the site of the New York Stock Exchange, the great altar of Plutus, whereon millions of human beings had been sacrificed to him, and there to make a bonfire of them.
Animals did not know how to lie, wherein they were different from human beings, and while human beings were not prophets, at least in modern times, animals, for all he knew, might be, and he certainly intended to believe that the six, for the present, enjoyed the prophetic afflatus. "I accept the omens as you give them," he said aloud.
To Standish O'Grady we turn for tales, with a kind of bardic afflatus about them, of the hero age of legendary Ireland tales which drew attention to the romantic Celtic past of myth and saga, and must have been an inspiration to more than one writer of the younger generation.
Certain it is that the divine afflatus from the nostrils of the god Plutus seemed to have descended upon Philip Sheldon; for he had entered the Stock Exchange an inexperienced stranger, and he held his place there amongst men whose boyhood had been spent in the offices of Capel-court, and whose youthful strength had been nourished in the chop-houses of Pinch-lane and Thread-needle-street. Mrs.
In 1667 Milton published "Paradise Lost," and in 1672 Bunyan gave to the world his allegory, "Pilgrim's Progress." There was no inspiration to genius in the cause of King and Cavaliers. But the stern problems of Puritanism touched two souls with the divine afflatus.
Gifted with almost superhuman insight and energy himself, he too often credited his paladins with possessing the same divine afflatus. Furthermore, he had a supreme contempt for his enemies. Victorious in a hundred fights over second-rate opponents in his youth, he could not now school his hardened faculties to the caution needed in a contest with Wellington, Gneisenau, and Blücher.
Yes, she's a talented dear, though she hardly knows a needle from a crowbar, and will make herself one great blot some of these days, when the 'divine afflatus' descends upon her, I'm afraid." And Nan rubbed away with sisterly zeal at Di's forlorn hose and inky pocket-handkerchiefs. "Where is Laura?" proceeded the inquisitor.
I can go on in this style, like Tennyson's brook, for ever, your worship." His worship was afraid that he might make the offer good, and the poet was released, after promising to imbibe less frequently when he felt the divine afflatus about to descend upon him.
Swift would have done it; but Swift was in many ways a voice crying in the wilderness, and Swift was not, strictly speaking, a poet at all. Byrom would have done it; but Byrom was emphatically a minor poet. Cowper could at least in and for his day boast the major afflatus, and Cowper did not disdain vernacular truth.
His fame was due to the perfection of a single book; he ranked as a potentate in STYLE. But literary perfection, whether in prose or poetry, is a fragile quality, an afflatus irregular, independent, unamenable to orders; the official tributes of a Laureate we compliment at their best with the northern farmer's verdict on the pulpit performances of his parson: "An' I niver knaw'd wot a mean'd but I thow't a 'ad summut to saay, And I thowt a said wot a owt to 'a said an' I comed awaay."
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