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He even went from city to city, a sort of prose rhapsodist, or like a modern lecturer, reciting his history, an honored and extraordinary man, a sort of Humboldt, having mastered everything.
A rhapsodist stood on a pine stump chanting in excellent voice Alcæus’s hymn to Apollo. And more willingly the orator stopped on the edge of a throng of the better sort, which listened to a man of noble aspect reading in clear voice from his scroll. “Æschylus of Athens,” whispered a bystander. “He reads choruses of certain tragedies he says he will perfect and produce much later.”
Any one who has fallen under the impression, so industriously propagated by the ingenious enmity of Jefferson's old age, that Patrick Henry was a man of but meagre information and of extremely slender intellectual resources, ignorant especially of law, of political science, and of history, totally lacking in logical power and in precision of statement, with nothing to offset these deficiencies excepting a strange gift of overpowering, dithyrambic eloquence, will find it hard, as he turns over the leaves on which are recorded the debates of the Virginia convention, to understand just how such a person could have made the speeches which are there attributed to Patrick Henry, or how a mere rhapsodist could have thus held his ground, in close hand-to-hand combat, for twenty-three days, against such antagonists, on all the difficult subjects of law, political science, and history involved in the Constitution of the United States, while showing at the same time every quality of good generalship as a tactician and as a party leader.
The sensible is an impenetrable empire, but ideas are certitudes, and upon these he dwells with rapt and mystical enthusiasm, a great poetical rhapsodist like Xenophanes, severe dialectician as he is, believing in truth and beauty and goodness.
He who will adhere only to the universal, and makes a blur of the special, is a rhapsodist; he who can apprehend only the special, being blind and callous to the universal, is a chatterer and magpie.
Could one write so of her hands and not love them well? But the power, the power that she had! Hear her rhapsodist.
Jevons thinks, to be explained as "inserted by a rhapsodist wishing to make his extract complete in itself." However, Mr. Jevons thinks that rhapsodists, anxious to recite straight on from the dream to the battle, added II. 35-41, "the only lines which represent Agamemnon as believing confidently in his dream." We have argued that he only believed till he awoke, and then, as always, wavered.
I forbear to tell what he was going to do to that Bedouin that owned it. It makes my blood run cold to think of it. Another was going to scalp such Bedouins as fell to his share, and take his bald-headed sons of the desert home with him alive for trophies. But the wild-eyed pilgrim rhapsodist was silent. His orbs gleamed with a deadly light, but his lips moved not.
We are learning to think now, so poetry has come to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are romantic, and we are not romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson.
Not art, but a sign, a presentiment of an art, that may grow from the present seeds, that may rise into some stately and unpremeditated efflorescence, as the rhapsodist rose to Sophocles, as the miracle play rose through Peele and Nash to Marlowe, hence to the wondrous summer of Shakespeare, to die later on in the mist and yellow and brown of the autumn of Crowes and Davenants.
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