Yet still he pauses. Why? Because he has not told us why he is there;--because he is in the hands of the Poet of the Human Kind, the poet of 'those common things that our ordinary life consisteth of,' who will have of them an argument that shall shame that 'resplendent and lustrous mass of matter' that old philosophers and poets have chosen for theirs;--because the rare accident--the wild, poetic, unheard-of accident--which has brought a man, old in luxuries, clothed in soft raiment, nurtured in king's houses, into this rude, unaided collision with nature;--the poetic impossibility, which has brought the one man from the apex of the social structure down this giddy depth, to this lowest social level;--the accident which has given the 'one man,' who has the divine disposal of the common weal, this little casual experimental taste of the weal which his wisdom has been able to provide for the many--of the weal which a government so divinely ordered, from its pinnacle of _personal_ ease and luxury, thinks sufficient and divine enough for _the many_,--this accident--this grand poetic accident--with all its exquisite poetic effects, is, in this poet's hands, the means, not the end. This poor king's great tragedy, the loss of his social position, his broken-heartedness, his outcast suffering, with all the aggravations of this poetic descent, and the force of its vivid contrasts--with all the luxurious impressions on the sensibilities which the ideal wonders of the rude old fable yield so easily in this Poet's hands,--this rare accident, and moving marvel of poetic calamity,--this 'one man's' tragedy is not the tragedy that this Poet's soul is big with. It is the tragedy of the Many, and not the One,--it is the tragedy that is the rule, and not the exception,--it is the tragedy that is common, and not that which is singular, whose argument this Poet has undertaken to manage. 'Come, bring us to your hovel.' The royal command is obeyed; and the house of that estate, which has no need to borrow its title of plurality to establish the grandeur of its claim, springs up at the New Magician's word, and stands before us on the scientific stage in its colossal, portentous, scientific grandeur; and the king--the king--is at the door of it: the _Monarch_ is at the door of the _Many_. For the scientific Poet has had his eye on that structure, and he will make of it a thing of wonder, that shall rival old poets' fancy pieces, and drive our entomologists and conchologists to despair, and drive them off the stage with their curiosities and marvels. There is no need of a Poet's going to the supernatural for 'machinery,' this Poet thinks, while there's such machinery as this ready to his hands unemployed. 'There's something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.' There's no need of going to the antique for his models; for he is inventing the arts that will make of this an _antiquity_.