human
Can you write me a poem about poetry, aristotle and cha in the style of Clee Garson?
assistant
Sure, here's a poem about poetry, aristotle and cha in the style of Clee Garson:
  The essays here brought together are meant to illustrate English
The greater part of the present collection deals with general
arrangement of the essays is chronological.
Wordsworth's Theory of Diction. (1817)
On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference
to their Fitness for Stage Representation. (1811)
My First Acquaintance with Poets. (1823)
Poetry with reference to Aristotle's Poetics. (1829)
Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties. (1833, revised 1859)
disproportionate to a preface. For, to treat the subject with the
different from those upon which general approbation is at present
unpleasant feeling of disappointment, and that I myself may be
The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose
comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that
 It is worth while here to observe, that the affecting
parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language pure
and universally intelligible even to this day.
prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such
objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry
thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past
feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general
understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree
enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.
It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another
inherent and indestructible; and were there not added to this
further, having abstained from the use of many expressions, in
themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly
demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost all the poetical
In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.
These ears, alas! for other notes repine;
_A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire;_
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their little loves the birds complain.
_I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more because I weep in vain_.
By the foregoing quotation it has been shown that the language of
_essential_ difference between the language of prose and metrical
 I here use the word 'Poetry' (though against my own
judgement) as opposed to the word Prose, and synonymous with
metrical composition. But much confusion has been introduced
into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose,
instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of
Fact, or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is
Metre; nor is this, in truth, a _strict_ antithesis, because
lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing
prose, that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even
were it desirable.
present, both when we praise, and when we censure: and our moral
feelings influencing and influenced by these judgements will, I
believe, be corrected and purified.
sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater
without immediate external excitement.
information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a
between the Poet and the image of things; between this, and the
Biographer and Historian, there are a thousand.
accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment.
directs his attention. He considers man and nature as essentially
nature, with affections akin to those, which, through labour and
length of time, the Man of science has raised up in himself, by
What has been thus far said applies to Poetry in general; but
metre, it is expected will employ a particular language.
sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the
operations of the elements, and the appearances of the visible
universe; with storm and sunshine, with the revolutions of the
It will now be proper to answer an obvious question, namely, Why,
interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature
metre, and that it is injudicious to write in metre, unless it be
generation to generation. Now, if nakedness and simplicity be a
defect, the fact here mentioned affords a strong presumption that
half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole
composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic
situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater
If I had undertaken a SYSTEMATIC defence of the theory here
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
feelings, even of the ludicrous, may be given to my Readers by
expressions which appeared to me tender and pathetic. Such faulty
Long as the Reader has been detained, I hope he will permit me to
I put my hat upon my head
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand.
Immediately under these lines let us place one of the most
justly-admired stanzas of the 'Babes in the Wood.'
These pretty Babes with hand in hand
Went wandering up and down;
But never more they saw the Man
Approaching from the Town.
observed, is an _acquired_ talent, which can only be produced by
thought and a long-continued intercourse with the best models of
whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing
materially from the real language of men in _any situation_. The
Reader or Hearer of this distorted language found himself in a
perturbed and unusual state of mind: when affected by the genuine
followed: under the protection of this feeling succeeding Poets
accomplished by unsettling ordinary habits of thinking, and thus
Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes,
Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise;
No stern command, no monitory voice,
Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice;
Yet, timely provident, she hastes away
To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day;
When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain,
She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain.
How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours,
Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers?
While artful shades thy downy couch enclose,
And soft solicitation courts repose,
Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight,
Year chases year with unremitted flight,
Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow,
Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambush'd foe.
One more quotation, and I have done. It is from Cowper's _Verses
supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk_:
Religion! what treasure untold
Resides in that heavenly word!
More precious than silver and gold,
Or all that this earth can afford.
But the sound of the church-going bell
These valleys and rocks never heard,
Ne'er sighed at the sound of a knell,
Or smiled when a sabbath appeared.
Ye winds, that have made me your sport,
Convey to this desolate shore
Some cordial endearing report
Of a land I must visit no more.
My Friends, do they now and then send
A wish or a thought after me?
O tell me I yet have a friend,
Though a friend I am never to see.
As far as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably
language of impassioned feeling; he undertook a useful task, and
unendangered.
exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life, a language which
injurious, and therefore either need not, or ought not to be
repeat that pleasure of doubtful moral effect, which persons of
elevated rank and of superior refinement oftentimes derive from a
represented. The second is the apparent naturalness of the
language, as far as they can be conceived to have been really
transferred from the minds and conversation of such persons, are
hard-hearted. Let the management of the POOR LAWS in Liverpool,
mountaineers, whose manners have been so often eulogized, are in
product of circumstances common to the class. Take Michael for
instance:
An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb:
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,
And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds,
Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes
When others heeded not, he heard the South
Make subterraneous music, like the noise
Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.
The shepherd, at such warning, of his flock
Bethought him, and he to himself would say,
The winds are now devising work for me!
And truly at all times the storm, that drives
The traveller to a shelter, summon'd him
Up to the mountains. He had been alone
Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
That came to him and left him on the heights.
So liv'd he, until his eightieth year was pass'd.
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the shepherd's thoughts.
Fields, where with chearful spirits he had breath'd
The common air; the hills, which he so oft
Had climb'd with vigorous steps; which had impress'd
So many incidents upon his mind
Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
Which, like a book, preserved the memory
Had fed or shelter'd, linking to such acts,
So grateful in themselves, the certainty
Of honourable gain; these fields, these hills
Which were his living being, even more
Than his own blood--what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasureable feeling of blind love.
The pleasure which there is in life itself.
affection in its ordinary workings.
I've measured it from side to side;
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
Nay, rack your brain--'tis all in vain,
I'll tell you every thing I know;
Which is a little step beyond,
I wish that you would go:
Perhaps, when you are at the place,
You something of her tale may trace.
I'll give you the best help I can:
Before you up the mountain go,
Up to the dreary mountain-top,
I'll tell you all I know.
'Tis now some two-and-twenty years
Since she (her name is Martha Ray)
Gave, with a maiden's true good will,
Her company to Stephen Hill;
And she was blithe and gay,
And she was happy, happy still
Whene'er she thought of Stephen Hill.
And they had fix'd the wedding-day,
The morning that must wed them both;
But Stephen to another maid
Had sworn another oath;
And, with this other maid, to church
Unthinking Stephen went--
Poor Martha! on that woeful day
A pang of pitiless dismay
Into her soul was sent;
A fire was kindled in her breast,
Which might not burn itself to rest.
They say, full six months after this,
While yet the summer leaves were green,
She to the mountain-top would go,
And there was often seen.
'Tis said a child was in her womb,
As now to any eye was plain;
She was with child, and she was mad;
Yet often she was sober sad
From her exceeding pain.
Oh me! ten thousand times I'd rather
That he had died, that cruel father!
*       *       *       *       *
*       *       *       *       *
Last Christmas when we talked of this,
Old farmer Simpson did maintain,
That in her womb the infant wrought
About its mother's heart, and brought
Her senses back again:
And, when at last her time drew near,
Her looks were calm, her senses clear.
No more I know, I wish I did,
And I would tell it all to you:
For what became of this poor child
There's none that ever knew:
And if a child was born or no,
There's no one that could ever tell;
And if 'twas born alive or dead,
There's no one knows, as I have said:
But some remember well,
That Martha Ray about this time
Would up the mountain often climb.
reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of
convey, are fewer and more indiscriminate. This will become still
general law is deducible. For facts are valuable to a wise man,
justly said to form the best part of language. It is more than
probable, that many classes of the brute creation possess
capricious habits of expression;' it may be answered, that the
rustic, but for that of good sense and natural feeling.
exclusively that my opposition is directed.
exhausted or satisfied by a single representation of the image or
exclusively, as that class would use, or at least understand; but
subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their
relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized
peculiar in its language.
In distant countries have I been,
And yet I have not often seen
A healthy man, a man full grown,
Weep in the public roads, alone.
But such a one, on English ground,
And in the broad highway, I met;
Along the broad highway he came,
His cheeks with tears were wet:
Sturdy he seem'd, though he was sad;
And in his arms a lamb he had.
At all times of the day and night
This wretched woman thither goes,
And she is known to every star,
And every wind that blows:
And there, beside the thorn, she sits,
When the blue day-light's in the skies:
And when the whirlwind's on the hill,
Or frosty air is keen and still;
And to herself she cries,
Oh misery! Oh misery!
Oh woe is me! Oh misery!
One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its
subordinate importance. The number of such words would be small
indeed, in our language; and even in the Italian and Greek, they
accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of
certain master intellects, the first established lights of
inspiration, to whom that dialect happened to be native.
Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of
thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too,
In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.
These ears, alas! for other notes repine;
_A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire._
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And newborn pleasure brings to happier men;
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear,
To warm their little loves the birds complain.
_I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more because I weep in vain_,
An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we
neighbour, 'Ah, but when awake do we ever believe ourselves
disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and, vice
frequently will and ought to exist.
co-present. There must be not only a partnership, but a union; an
There is an art which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating nature.
_Pol._ Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so, ev'n that art,
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art,
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
_A gentler scion to the wildest stock;_
And make conceive a bark of ruder kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art,
Which does mend nature--change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.
The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly
combination with other elements of poetry. Thus the previous
Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!
Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallowed her?
beard_', scared by the tremendous voice, with which this monster
answered the challenge of the heroic _Tom Hickathrift_!
And, thus continuing, she said,
I had a son, who many a day
Sailed on the seas; but he is dead;
In Denmark he was cast away;
And I have travelled far as Hull, to see
What clothes he might have left, or other property.
The bird and cage they both were his:
'Twas my son's bird; and neat and trim
He kept it: many voyages
This singing-bird hath gone with him;
When last he sailed he left the bird behind;
As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.
He to a fellow-lodger's care
Had left it, to be watched and fed,
Till he came back again; and there
I found it when my son was dead;
And now, God help me for my little wit!
I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it.
The simplest, and the most familiar things
Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them),
The ancient spirit is not dead;
Old times, thought I, are breathing there;
Proud was I that my country bred
Such strength, a dignity so fair:
She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;
I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate.
technical chemistry) of _mordaunt_ between it and the superadded
passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its
objection, or rather on his objection to this reply, as already
anticipated in his preface.
Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same
_A different object do these eyes require;_
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
_And in my breast the imperfect joys expire._
The second line,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;--
condemn as puerile in a modern poet?
By this the northern wagoner had set
His sevenfold teme behind the steadfast starre,
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre
To all that in the wild deep wandering are:
And chearful chanticleer with his note shrill
Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery carre
In haste was climbing up the easterne hill,
Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.
At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
And Phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurl'd his glist'ring beams through gloomy ayre:
Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway
He started up, and did him selfe prepayre
In sun-bright armes and battailous array;
For with that pagan proud he combat will that day.
attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only
I put my hat upon my head
And walk'd into the Strand;
And there I met another man,
Whose hat was in his hand.
And to the end we may with better ease
Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to show
What were the times foregoing near to these,
That these we may with better profit know.
Tell how the world fell into this disease;
And how so great distemperature did grow;
So shall we see with what degrees it came;
How things at full do soon wax out of frame.
Ten kings had from the Norman conqu'ror reign'd
With intermixt and variable fate,
When England to her greatest height attain'd
Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state;
After it had with much ado sustain'd
The violence of princes, with debate
For titles and the often mutinies
Of nobles for their ancient liberties.
For first, the Norman, conqu'ring all by might,
By might was forc'd to keep what he had got;
Mixing our customs and the form of right
With foreign constitutions he had brought;
Mast'ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight,
By all severest means that could be wrought;
And, making the succession doubtful, rent
His new-got state, and left it turbulent.
Book I, St. vii, viii, and ix.
merit of a poem, must at length be conceded, when a number of
successive lines can be rendered, even to the most delicate ear,
 As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the
Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate, 'I wish you a good
morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same,' into
two blank-verse heroics:--
To you a good morning, good Sir! I wish.
You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.
In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth's works which I have
thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this
would be practicable than I have met in many poems, where an
approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system
guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted
from _The Sailor's Mother_, I can recollect but one instance:
viz. a short passage of four or five lines in _The Brothers_,
that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with
unclouded eye.--'James, pointing to its summit, over which
they had all purposed to return together, informed them that
he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades
passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find
him at the appointed place, _a circumstance of which they
took no heed_: but one of them, going by chance into the
house, which at this time was James's house, learnt _there_,
that nobody had seen him all that day.' The only change which
has been made is in the position of the little word _there_
in two instances, the position in the original being clearly
such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other
words printed in _italics_ were so marked because, though
good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of
common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or
in the connexion by the genitive pronoun. Men in general
would have said, 'but that was a circumstance they paid no
attention to, or took no notice of;' and the language is, on
the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator's
being the _Vicar_. Yet if any ear _could_ suspect, that these
sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words
alone could the suspicion have been grounded.
differences of style it at once inspires and justifies; what
ornament or connexion. For, even as truth is its own light and
evidence, discovering at once itself and falsehood, so is it the
Thee, eye of heaven! this great soul envies not;
By thy male force is all, we have, begot.
In the first East thou now beginn'st to shine,
Suck'st early balm and island spices there,
And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career
At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,
And see at night this western world of mine:
Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,
Who before thee one day began to be,
Or the next stanza but one:
Great destiny, the commissary of God,
That hast mark'd out a path and period
For ev'ry thing! Who, where we offspring took,
Our way and ends see'st at one instant: thou
Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow
Ne'er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,
And show my story in thy eternal book, &c.
As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of
INOCULATION, heavenly maid! descend!
Queen of all harmonious things,
Dancing words and speaking strings,
What God, what hero, wilt thou sing?
What happy man to equal glories bring?
Begin, begin thy noble choice,
And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice.
Pisa does to Jove belong,
Jove and Pisa claim thy song.
The fair first-fruits of war, th' Olympic games,
Alcides offer'd up to Jove;
Alcides too thy strings may move!
But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove?
Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;
Theron the next honour claims;
Theron to no man gives place,
Is first in Pisa's and in Virtue's race;
Theron there, and he alone,
Ev'n his own swift forefathers has outgone.
Ye harp-controling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!
What God? what Hero?
What Man shall we celebrate?
Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,
But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,
The first-fruits of the spoils of war.
But Theron for the four-horsed car,
That bore victory to him,
It behoves us now to voice aloud:
Of renowned fathers
The Flower, even him
Who preserves his native city erect and safe.
impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any
condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it
practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule, guidance, or
The time chosen is early morning, before sunrise, when the jolly
Of small hounds had she that she fed
With roast flesh, milk, and wastel bread.
And ever he rode hinderest of the rout.
The Painter has consequently varied the heads and forms of his
authentic monuments.
And in his hand he bare a mighty bow.
Chaucer describes here a mighty man, one who in war is the worthy
The Prioress follows these with her female Chaplain:
Another Nonne also with her had she,
That was her Chaplaine, and Priests three.
Her companion and her three Priests were no doubt all perfectly
The Friar is a character of a mixed kind:
A friar there was, a wanton and a merry;
but in his office he is said to be a 'full solemn man'; eloquent,
complete rogue, with constitutional gaiety enough to make him a
master of all the pleasures of the world:
His neck was white as the flour de lis,
Thereto strong he was as a champioun.
poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and
Accordingly Chaucer has made his Monk a great tragedian, one who
'Ho,' quoth the Knyght, 'good Sir, no more of this;
That ye have said is right ynough, I wis,
And mokell more; for little heaviness
Is right enough for much folk, as I guesse.
I say, for me, it is a great disease,
Whereas men have been in wealth and ease,
To heare of their sudden fall, alas!
And the contrary is joy and solas.'
Tragedie is to tell a certain story,
As old books us maken memory,
Of hem that stood in great prosperity,
And be fallen out of high degree,
Into miserie, and ended wretchedly.
For the Host who follows this group, and holds the centre of the
But I have omitted to speak of a very prominent character, the
In daunger had he at his own gise,
The young girls of his diocese,
And he knew well their counsel, &c.
The Doctor of Physic is in this group; and the Franklin, the
It snewed in his house of meat and drink.
He would thresh, and thereto dike and delve,
For Christe's sake, for every poore wight,
Withouten hire, if it lay in his might.
Ulyssean art, but with the highest courage superadded.
nine-and-twenty in his company:
Full nine and twenty in a company.
The Merchant cannot be one of the Three Citizens, as his dress is
All were yclothed in o liverie.
Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the
To paint fair Nature, by divine command,
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
A Shakespeare rose: then, to expand his fame
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,
The Actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day:
And till Eternity with power sublime
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,
Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
And earth irradiate with a beam divine.
It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt
anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and
gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and
(without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible
 It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in
_dramatic_ recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who
reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a
great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies,
the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the _Paradise
Lost_ better than any man in England in his day (though I
cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this
tradition), was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon
a level with Milton.
But the practice of stage representation reduces everything to a
controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous
As beseem'd
Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league
passions.
It is common for people to talk of Shakespeare's plays being _so
To return to Hamlet.--Among the distinguishing features of that
Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind for the
I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which
differ from that which the audience receive from those of other
Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public custom breeds--
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand;
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand--
Or that other confession:
Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to thy view,
Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear--
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possest;
Desiring _this man's art, and that man's scope_.
With their darkness durst affront his light,
have foisted into the acting plays of Shakespeare? I believe it
experience, anything was left but to die.
 The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does
not offend us in the reading, it should also not offend us in
the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an Adam
and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they do in the
poem. But in the poem we for a while have Paradisaical senses
given us, which vanish when we see a man and his wife without
clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as
is apparent by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to
make them look not quite naked; by a sort of prophetic
anachronism, antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in
the reading of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes; in the
seeing of it, we are forced to look with our own.
positively destroys the illusion which it is introduced to aid. A
imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of
familiar objects. But to think by the help of painted trees and
caverns, which we know to be painted, to transport our minds to
Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell; or by the aid of a
Time would run back and fetch the age of gold,
And speckled vanity
Would sicken soon and die,
And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould;
Yea Hell itself would pass away,
And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day.
The Garden of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more
 It will be said these things are done in pictures. But
pictures and scenes are very different things. Painting is a
world of itself, but in scene-painting there is the attempt
to deceive; and there is the discordancy, never to be got
over, between painted scenes and real people.
abstraction. It presents to the fancy just so much of external
appearances as to make us feel that we are among flesh and blood,
importance. Mrs. S. never got more fame by anything than by the
manner in which she dismisses the guests in the banquet-scene in
acting, all these non-essentials are raised into an importance,
injurious to the main interest of the play.
gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the
additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of
determined to action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute
actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions
imagination is expressed upon its forms.
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less
closely to that from which this highest delight results: but the
which perceives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all
 _De Augment. Scient._, cap. i, lib. iii.
religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like
participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as
accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the
harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed
composition as includes much action: but every great poet must
action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which
and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the
universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the
particularly.
obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a
portions: a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it
consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to
contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the
composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the
reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human
character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were
awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and
persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in
conceptions in its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful
abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the
subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the
system of divesting the actor's face of a mask, on which the many
monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great
But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
survives. At the approach of such a period, poetry ever addresses
social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects of the
condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the universal
authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and
religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before
conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, become as
It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night's black agents to their preys do rouse.
victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and
expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish
incorporated into our popular religion.
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest
fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is
impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty
gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred
understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His
society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
_iustissimus unus_, in Paradise, and observing a most heretical
personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a
conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far
inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the
mingled as it were the elements of human nature as colours upon a
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the
second poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and
developing itself in correspondence with their development. For
language, in itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of
The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower
mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of
personal advantage.
Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the
definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an
principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure
The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and
their disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are
 Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was
essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were mere
reasoners.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its
approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its
eternity and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all
incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most
difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he
another's garments.
confound.
The second part will have for its object an application of these
correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the
ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet
circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a
comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves
hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words
world.
 This was never written.
High-born Hoel's harp or soft Llewelyn's lay!
With Styx nine times round them,'
degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of
Christianity, which was not to be resisted.
jeunesse ne peut renaitre pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma
Such were the notes our once-lov'd poet sung.
Like to that sanguine flower inscrib'd with woe.
As are the children of yon azure sheen.
His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with
o'erspread,' a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful
traditionally inseparable (though of a different colour) from the
those!
appeared, within the pages of the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected
understanding, there were glimpses, glimmering notions of the
discussions (dull enough) on the age of Methuselah, a mighty
Gallicae_ as a capital performance) as a clever scholastic man--a
genius in the room he would have settled the question in five
inhabit the Hill of Parnassus, to be a Shepherd on the Delectable
acknowledgements and acceptance of this offer (I thought Mr.
----Sounding on his way.
 My father was one of those who mistook his talent after
all. He used to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred
his Letters to his Sermons. The last were forced and dry; the
first came naturally from him. For ease, half-plays on words,
and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have never seen
them equalled.
 He complained in particular of the presumption of his
attempting to establish the future immortality of man,
'without' (as he said) 'knowing what Death was or what Life
was'--and the tone in which he pronounced these two words
seemed to convey a complete image of both.
meagre sentences in the skeleton style of a mathematical
demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page; and, after
baptized in the waters of Helicon!
I returned home, and soon after set out on my journey with unworn
Places_ from the local inscriptions of the same kind in _Paul and
overlooked my window, at the dawn of day, could
----hear the loud stag speak.
_Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman_, I felt that deeper power and
pathos which have been since acknowledged,
In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
While yet the trembling year is unconfirmed.
Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy stream or waterfall,
descriptive pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and
triumphantly that 'his marriage with experience had not been so
having made one for me! We went over to All-Foxden again the day
internal. The one might be termed more _dramatic_, the other more
branches of a copse wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he
channel, with the Welsh hills beyond, and at times descended into
thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was
old-fashioned parlour on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very
profound and discriminating with respect to those authors whom he
 He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at
this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives a
striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa by
Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is
seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and
mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the
beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He
would, of course, understand so broad and fine a moral as
this at any time.
preach that day for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him if he had
Oh memory! shield me from the world's poor strife,
And give those scenes thine everlasting life.
continues.--Enough of this for the present.
But there is matter for another rhyme,
And I to this may add a second tale.
There are many circumstances about this little volume, which tend
In the present instance, this consideration is enforced by the
severely of what was not, at first, intended to come before our
O to have heard th' unearthly symphonies,
Which o'er the starlight peace of Syrian skies
Came floating like a dream, that blessed night
When angel songs were heard by sinful men,
Hymning Messiah's advent! O to have watch'd
The night with those poor shepherds, whom, when first
The glory of the Lord shed sudden day--
Day without dawn, starting from midnight, day
Brighter than morning--on those lonely hills
Strange fear surpris'd--fear lost in wondering joy,
When from th' angelic multitude swell'd forth
The many-voiced consonance of praise:--
Glory in th' highest to God, and upon earth
Peace, towards men good will. But once before,
In such glad strains of joyous fellowship,
The silent earth was greeted by the heavens,
When at its first foundation they looked down
From their bright orbs, those heavenly ministries,
Hailing the new-born world with bursts of joy.
As much have I of worldly good
As e'er my master had:
I diet on as dainty food,
And am as richly clad,
Tho' plain my garb, though scant my board,
As Mary's Son and Nature's Lord.
The manger was his infant bed,
His home, the mountain-cave,
He had not where to lay his head,
He borrow'd even his grave.
Earth yielded him no resting spot,--
Her Maker, but she knew him not.
As much the world's good will I bear,
Its favours and applause,
As He, whose blessed name I bear,--
Hated without a cause,
Despis'd, rejected, mock'd by pride,
Betray'd, forsaken, crucified.
Why should I court my Master's foe?
Why should I fear its frown?
Why should I seek for rest below,
Or sigh for brief renown?--
A pilgrim to a better land,
An heir of joys at GOD's right hand?
That is not home, where day by day
I wear the busy hours away.
That is not home, where lonely night
Prepares me for the toils of light--
'Tis hope, and joy, and memory, give
A home in which the heart can live--
These walls no lingering hopes endear,
No fond remembrance chains me here,
Cheerless I heave the lonely sigh--
Eliza, canst thou tell me why?
'Tis where thou art is home to me,
And home without thee cannot be.
There are who strangely love to roam,
And find in wildest haunts their home;
And some in halls of lordly state,
Who yet are homeless, desolate.
The sailor's home is on the main,
The warrior's, on the tented plain,
The maiden's, in her bower of rest,
The infant's, on his mother's breast--
But where thou art is home to me,
And home without thee cannot be.
There is no home in halls of pride,
They are too high, and cold, and wide.
No home is by the wanderer found:
'Tis not in place: it hath no bound.
It is a circling atmosphere
Investing all the heart holds dear;--
A law of strange attractive force,
That holds the feelings in their course;
It is a presence undefin'd,
O'er-shadowing the conscious mind,
Where love and duty sweetly blend
To consecrate the name of friend;--
Where'er thou art is home to me,
And home without thee cannot be.
My love, forgive the anxious sigh--
I hear the moments rushing by,
And think that life is fleeting fast,
That youth with us will soon be past.
Oh! when will time, consenting, give
The home in which my heart can live?
There shall the past and future meet,
And o'er our couch, in union sweet,
Extend their cherub wings, and shower
Bright influence on the present hour,
Oh! when shall Israel's mystic guide,
The pillar'd cloud, our steps decide,
Then, resting, spread its guardian shade,
To bless the home which love hath made?
Daily, my love, shall thence arise
Our hearts' united sacrifice;
And home indeed a home will be,
Thus consecrate and shar'd with thee.
Louise! you wept, that morn of gladness
Which made your Brother blest;
And tears of half-reproachful sadness
Fell on the Bridegroom's vest:
Yet, pearly tears were those, to gem
A Sister's bridal diadem.
No words could half so well have spoken,
What thus was deeply shown
By Nature's simplest, dearest token,
How much was then my own;
Endearing her for whom they fell,
And Thee, for having loved so well.
But now no more--nor let a Brother,
Louise, regretful see,
That still 'tis sorrow to another,
That he should happy be.
Those were, I trust, the only tears
That day shall cost through coming years.
Smile with us. Happy and light-hearted,
We three the time will while.
And, when sometimes a season parted,
Still think of us, and smile.
But come to us in gloomy weather;
We'll weep, when we must weep, together.
particular cast, than the overflowing warmth of his own natural
disappointment and sorrow; either we are greatly mistaken, or he
----mens onus reponit, et peregrino
Labore fessi venimus Larem ad nostrum--
We turn gladly from our fairy voyage round the world to refresh
comparatively, on that subject of which he must have known
comparatively little.
unquestionable: but experience, we fear, will hardly warrant the
To return to the sacred and domestic poems, thus advantageously
conversation of two persons on scenery, the one originally an
Come Ev'ning, once again, season of peace;
Return, sweet Ev'ning, and continue long!
Methinks I see thee in the streaking west
With matron-step slow-moving, while the night
Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employ'd
In letting fall the curtain of repose
On bird and beast, the other charg'd for man
With sweet oblivion of the cares of day:
Not sumptuously adorn'd, nor needing aid,
Like homely-featur'd night, of clust'ring gems;
A star or two, just twinkling on thy brow,
Suffices thee; save that the moon is thine
No less than her's, not worn indeed on high
With ostentatious pageantry, but set
With modest grandeur in thy purple zone,
Resplendent less, but of an ampler round.
Come then, and thou shalt find thy vot'ry calm,
Or make me so. Composure is thy gift.
And we would set over against it that purely pastoral chant:
Now rosy May comes in wi' flowers
To deck her gay, green spreading bowers;
And now comes in my happy hours,
To wander wi' my Davie.
Meet me on the warlock knowe,
Dainty Davie, dainty Davie,
There I'll spend the day wi' you,
My ain dear dainty Davie.
The crystal waters round us fa',
The merry birds are lovers a',
The scented breezes round us blaw,
A wandering wi' my Davie.
When purple morning starts the hare
To steal upon her early fare,
Then thro' the dews I will repair,
To meet my faithful Davie.
When day, expiring in the west,
The curtain draws o' nature's rest,
I flee to his arms I lo'e best,
And that's my ain dear Davie.
We must just mention one more quality, which may seem, upon
'of love with silence blending,
Slow to begin, yet never ending,
Of serious faith and inward glee'.
melodies--if tones of deep but subdued emotion are what our minds
speaking to or of the true GOD, is all dignity and calmness.
'Contemplative piety,' says Dr. Johnson, 'or the intercourse
between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man,
admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the
merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than
poetry can confer.'
The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by
producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The
topics of devotion are few.
There's not a bonny flower that springs
By fountain, shaw, or green;
There's not a bonnie bird that sings
But minds me of my Jean.
Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the
mind than things themselves afford. This effect proceeds
from the display of those parts of nature which attract,
and the concealment of those which repel, the imagination;
but religion must be shown as it is; suppression and
addition equally corrupt it; and, such as it is, it is known
already.
association with these, the treasures of the memory, and not
clearly inexhaustible, and his powers of discrimination--in other
Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in
the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot be
exalted; infinity cannot be amplified; perfection cannot be
improved.
perhaps, too solemn and awful an argument for this place; and
The employments of pious meditation are faith, thanksgiving,
repentance and supplication. Faith, invariably uniform,
cannot be invested by fancy with decorations. Thanksgiving,
the most joyful of all holy effusions, yet addressed to a
Being without passions, is confined to a few modes, and is
to be felt rather than expressed.
Repentance, trembling in the presence of the Judge, is not
at leisure for cadences and epithets.
feelings of the penitent--to make his compunction as much of 'a
reasonable service' as possible.
To proceed:
Supplication of man to man may diffuse itself through many
topics of persuasion: but supplication to God can only cry
for mercy.
It is not, then, because sacred subjects are peculiarly unapt for
wildness, the other by coarseness, aggravate the evil which they
considering. It goes deeper than any question of mere literary
curiosity. It is a sort of test of the genuineness of those
refinement, than has been known elsewhere or in other times.
Succhi amari intanto ei beve,
E dall' inganno sua vita riceve--
It may be worth while to endeavour to trace this distinction, as
embellishment; and it is in these last, after all, that the chief
But to be understood rightly, we would premise, that there is a
disposition,--the very reverse of that which leads to parody and
caricature,--which is common indeed to all generous minds, but is
Her birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And her conception of the joyous prime,
And all her whole creation did her show
Pure and unspotted from all loathly crime
That is ingenerate in fleshly slime.
So was this Virgin born, so was she bred,
So was she trained up from time to time,
In all chaste virtue and true bounti-hed,
Till to her due perfection she was ripened.
unhandsome treatment, than of incurring ridicule by what would be
diversifying his allegory, and gratifying his affection for his
friends and patrons, without the coarseness of direct compliment.
intermixture with earthly passions: the most awful turns and most
Thus the great epic poem of our language came to be, avowedly, a
Such pleasure she reserved,
Adam relating; she sole auditress.--
What again can be said for the reproachful and insulting tone, in
These blemishes are in part attributable to the times in which he
Though what if earth
Be but the shadow of heav'n, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?
connected with religion. But they do not affect his claim to be
The mention of these latter names suggests the remark, how very
morality and religion.
Yet most of the great names of that age, especially among the
declining age; yet singing on, with unabated cheerfulness, to the
criticize them.
Between that time and ours, the form of sacred poetry which has
Collins's poems) which has obtained any celebrity. We except the
That with the glory of so goodly sight,
The hearts of men, which fondly here admire
Fair-seeming shows, and feed on vain delight,
Transported with celestial desire
Of those fair forms, may lift themselves up higher,
And learn to love, with zealous humble duty,
Th' eternal fountain of that heavenly beauty.
This work is well adapted for the purpose it has in view--the
illustration of the Greek drama. It has been usual for the young
assistance which it pre-eminently requires. Not to mention his
ordinary want of information as regards the history of the drama,
existing Greek plays to be an actual deficiency; nor, again, his
If we were disposed to find fault with a useful work, we should
universities. From a false estimate of the advantages of accurate
dramatic composition. The Greek tragedians are not generally
however, the Greek drama has obtained so extended and lasting a
That the charm of Greek tragedy does not ordinarily arise from
condition of the drama, or a convenience for the introduction of
matter more important than itself. It is often stationary--often
simplicity of the afflicted Philoctetes, which constitutes the
language--to the voices of sorrow, joy, compassion, or religious
withdraw the mind of the poet from the spontaneous exhibition of
termination, is admirable. The character of Oedipus too is finely
provides him only with matter for a stupid and perplexed
astonishment.
kai so kerate krati prospephykenai.
all' e pot' estha ther; tetaurosai gar oun.]
fullness, the majesty and grace of Sophocles; nor rudely and
overpoweringly tragic as Aeschylus; but brilliant, versatile,
imaginative, as well as deeply pathetic.
A Bull, thou seem'st to lead us; on thy head
Horns have grown forth: wast heretofore a beast?
For such thy semblance now.
unfettered effusion of genius. The inferior poem may, on his
 The sudden inspiration, e. g. of the blind Oedipus, in
the second play bearing his name, by which he is enabled,
way to his place of death, in our judgement, produces more
poetical effect than all the skilful intricacy of the plot of
the _Tyrannus_. The latter excites an interest which scarcely
lasts beyond the first reading--the former _decies repetita
placebit_.
 In seeing the picture one is at the same time
learning,--gathering the meaning of things.
But as we have treated, rather unceremoniously, a deservedly high
Poetry, according to Aristotle, is a representation of the ideal.
suggests, and to which as a limit the present system of divine
instrument and medium of observation--these colour each object to
We shall presently show the applicability of our doctrine to the
grave-diggers in _Hamlet_, are in themselves unworthy of their
respective authors, and refer them to the wantonness of exuberant
conceptions, and (as it were) to make friends with the reader's
proposed investigation.
We will notice _descriptive poetry_ first. Empedocles wrote his
physics in verse, and Oppian his history of animals. Neither were
biographer of brutes. Yet a poet may make natural history or
description of rustics, agriculture, and cattle, softened off and
poetry, but it is not pastoral poetry.
 It is the charm of the descriptive poetry of a religious
mind, that nature is viewed in a moral connexion. Ordinary
writers (e. g.) compare aged men to trees in autumn--a gifted
poet will reverse the metaphor. Thus:--
'How quiet shows the woodland scene!
Each flower and tree, its duty done,
Reposing in decay serene,
_Like weary men when age is won_,' &c.
The difference between poetical and historical _narrative_ may be
history of a few. He compresses long controversies into a concise
refines, colours--in fact, _poetizes_. His facts are no longer
misconception of the principle of fiction, which, being the
_Character_ is made poetical by a like process. The writer draws
accidents of attitude, dress, occasional feeling, and transient
fiction. It is not necessary for the ideality of a composition to
consistency and ease. Nor does it exclude the introduction of
reprehensible in the personages themselves. Richard and Iago are
sacrificing more than would be gained; still it is a fault. It is
history.
The department of poetry we are now speaking of, is of much wider
himself, who, whether he is engaged in statement, argument, or
repetition to offend or weary the reader. This faculty seems to
consist in the power of throwing off harmonious sentences, which,
habitually substitutes declamation for poetry.
 We would here mention Rogers's _Italy_, if such a
cursory notice could convey our high opinion of its merit.
 The difference between oratory and poetry is well
illustrated by a passage in a recent tragedy.
_Col._ Joined! by what tie?
By danger--the two hands that tightest grasp
Each other--the two cords that soonest knit
A fast and stubborn tie; your true love knot
Is nothing to it. Faugh! the supple touch
Of pliant interest, or the dust of time,
Or the pin-point of temper, loose or rot
Or snap love's silken band. Fear and old hate,
They are sure weavers--they work for the storm,
The whirlwind, and the rocking surge; their knot
Endures till death.
The idea is good, and if expressed in a line or two, might
have been poetry--spread out into nine or ten lines, it
yields but a languid and ostentatious declamation.
representation of the action and re-action of two minds upon each
characters and fortunes, and strangers to each other, meet. Their
Sardanapalus and Myrrha is fine and ideal, and in the style of
These illustrations of Aristotle's doctrine may suffice.
writers is stamped with the peculiarities of their minds. When
originality is found apart from good sense, which more or less is
(originality being granted) in proportion to the standard of a
writer's moral character, will his compositions vary in poetical
excellence. This position, however, requires some explanation.
 A living prelate, in his Academical Prelections, even
suggests the converse of our position--'_Neque enim facile
crediderim de eo qui semel hac imbutus fuerit disciplina, qui
in id tota mentis acie assuefactus fuerit incumbere, ut quid
sit in rebus decens, quid pulchrum, quid congruum, penitus
intueretur, quin idem harum rerum perpetuum amorem foveat, et
cum ab his studiis discesserit, etiam ad reliqua vitae
officia earum imaginem quasi animo infixam transferat._'
praises of revel and sensuality. It corresponds to a process of
clever reasoning erected on an untrue foundation--the one is a
concerned with the practical, but the poetical nature of revealed
beings taken into divine favour, stamped with his seal, and in
training for future happiness. It may be added that the virtues
virtues: whereas the ruder and more ordinary feelings are the
instruments of rhetoric more justly than of poetry--anger,
indignation, emulation, martial spirit, and love of independence.
poetry he has adopted; less so, in epic or narrative and dramatic
originality of his conceptions, but (it may be) from natural
Dexterity in composition, or _eloquence_ as it may be called in a
The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old
rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific
knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world
True, there are aptitudes of Nature too. Nature does not make all
participators in the 'open secret,' are one.
Vauxhall!' So much for the distinction and identity of Poet and
Shakespeare or Homer of them can be remembered _for ever_;--a day
hardly recognizable. Men worship the shows of great men; the most
another, and of her death soon after. She makes a great figure in
In Dante's Priorship, the Guelf-Ghibelline, Bianchi-Neri, or some
wandering. His property was all confiscated and more; he had the
solace here.
written, in many senses, with his heart's blood. It is his whole
proportionates it all: architectural; which also partakes of the
character of music. The three kingdoms, _Inferno_, _Purgatorio_,
_Paradiso_, look out on one another like compartments of a great
_sincerest_ of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the
perhaps the very purest, that ever came out of a human soul.
memorable, for ever true in the essence of it, to all men. It was
expression of the earnest awe-struck feeling of man towards the
heart-song like this: one feels as if it might survive, still of
existence of it all gone. Like a dream; like the dust of King
But, at any rate, it is not by what is called their effect on the
endeavouring! This Elizabethan Era, and all its nobleness and
Shakespeare's _morality_, his valour, candour, tolerance,
inward mechanism also is all visible.'
Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but,
dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine
intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious
Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not
contrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine
overflowing love of laughter! You would say, in no point does he
_exaggerate_ but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that
tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say,
laughter is not 'the crackling of thorns under the pot'. Even at
Mahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood; and has come down to us
become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be
Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say,
beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by
 _Passio_, suffering in a good sense,--ardent subjection
of one's-self to emotion.
And lastly, Poetry shapes this modulation into uniformity for its
greatest poet.
Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be made visible to the
melodious. Painting, in a certain apparent manner, is things
The plant and flower of _light_,
genius consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated by
nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, its own wonder,
everything from their minds but the like simple truth. In the
Sir Eger said, 'If it be so,
Then wot I well I must forgo
Love-liking, and manhood, all clean!'
_The water rush'd out of his een!_
Sir Gray-Steel is killed:
Gray-Steel into his death thus thraws
He _walters and the grass up draws;_
_A little while then lay he still
(Friends that him saw, liked full ill)
And bled into his armour bright._
 throes?
 welters,--throws himself about.
His wonning was full fair upon an heath,
With greeny trees yshadowed was his place.
 dwelling.
Every one knows the words of Lear, 'most _matter-of-fact_, most
melancholy.'
Pray, do not mock me;
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upwards:
Not an hour more, nor less; and, to deal plainly
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
With that she dash'd her on the lips,
_So dyed double red:
Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled._
possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as
follows:--First, that which presents to the mind any object or
So the two brothers and their _murder'd_ man
Rode towards fair Florence;--
winding its '_sultry_ horn', which epithet contains the heat of a
Parea che l'erba le fiorisse intorno,
_E d'amor ragionasse quella riva!_
_Orlando Innamorato_, Canto iii.
expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but
And as the lady bade, did she.
Her gentle limbs did she undress,
_And lay down in her loveliness;--_
a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very
I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely
accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of
Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
Thy sorrow is in vain;
_For violets pluck'd the sweetest showers
Will ne'er make grow again._
And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; such as
Antony's likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear's
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.
constituent part of the highest poetic faculty.
The happiest instance I remember of imaginative metaphor, is
tongue! The transformations are too odious to quote: but of the
towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the 'fearful joy' of a
I look'd again; and as the eye makes out,
By little and little, what the mist conceal'd
In which, till clearing up, the sky was steep'd;
So, looming through the gross and darksome air,
As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain,
And error quitted me, and terror join'd:
For in like manner as all round its height
Montereggione crowns itself with towers,
So tower'd above the circuit of that pit,
Though but half out of it, and half within,
The horrible giants that fought Jove, and still
Are threaten'd when he thunders. As we near'd
The foremost, I discern'd his mighty face,
His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk,
With both the arms down hanging by the sides.
His face appear'd to me, in length and breadth,
Huge as St. Peter's pinnacle at Rome,
And of a like proportion all his bones.
He open'd, as we went, his dreadful mouth,
Fit for no sweeter psalmody; and shouted
After us, in the words of some strange tongue,
Rafel ma-ee amech zabee almee!--
'Dull wretch!' my leader cried, 'keep to thine horn,
And so vent better whatsoever rage
Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat
And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion!
Lo! what a hoop is clench'd about thy gorge.'
Then turning to myself, he said, 'His howl
Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he
Through whose ill thought it was that humankind
Were tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say nought:
For as he speaketh language known of none,
So none can speak save jargon to himself.'
over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Florentine. Even the
imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a 'nervous
shining armour riding towards the sunset upon a creature with
So horsly and so quick of eye,
is copied from the life. You might pat him and feel his brazen
muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to what he thought childish, made a
_Sleeping against the sun upon a day,_
picking up his head when it is cut off, sometimes by the hair,
sometimes by the nose! This, which would be purely childish and
conditional truth to nature. The monster has a fated hair on his
proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has fought this phenomenon on
lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse.
Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet;
The eyes turn'd in their sockets, drearily;
And all things show'd the villain's sun was set.
His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse,
And giving the last shudder, was a corse.
imagination's sake, must not become a bigot to imaginative truth,
superhuman mode, and have altogether different notions of the
beautiful; but till then we must be content with the loveliest
confounding them; the other, that which paints events and
But up Achilles rose, the lov'd of heaven;
And Pallas on his mighty shoulders cast
The shield of Jove; and round about his head
She put the glory of a golden mist,
From which there burnt a fiery-flaming light.
And as, when smoke goes heavenward from a town,
In some far island which its foes besiege,
Who all day long with dreadful martialness
Have pour'd from their own town; soon as the sun
Has set, thick lifted fires are visible,
Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky,
And let the neighbours know, who may perhaps
Bring help across the sea; so from the head
Of great Achilles went up an effulgence.
Upon the trench he stood, without the wall,
But mix'd not with the Greeks, for he rever'd
His mother's word; and so, thus standing there,
He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout,
Added a dreadful cry; and there arose
Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.
And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blown
Against a town by spirit-withering foes,
So sprang the clear voice of Aeacides.
And when they heard the brazen cry, their hearts
All leap'd within them; and the proud-maned horses
Ran with the chariots round, for they foresaw
Calamity; and the charioteers were smitten,
When they beheld the ever-active fire
Upon the dreadful head of the great-minded one
Burning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn.
Thrice o'er the trench divine Achilles shouted;
And thrice the Trojans and their great allies
Roll'd back; and twelve of all their noblest men
Then perish'd, crush'd by their own arms and chariots.
The other passage is where Priam, kneeling before Achilles, and
So saying, Mercury vanished up to heaven:
And Priam then alighted from his chariot,
Leaving Idaeus with it, who remain'd
Holding the mules and horses; and the old man
Went straight indoors, where the belov'd of Jove
Achilles sat, and found him. In the room
Were others, but apart; and two alone,
The hero Automedon, and Alcimus,
A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been
At meals, and had not yet remov'd the board.
Great Priam came, without their seeing him,
And kneeling down, he clasp'd Achilles' knees,
And kiss'd those terrible, homicidal hands,
Which had deprived him of so many sons.
And as a man who is press'd heavily
For having slain another, flies away
To foreign lands, and comes into the house
Of some great man, and is beheld with wonder,
So did Achilles wonder to see Priam;
And the rest wonder'd, looking at each other.
But Priam, praying to him, spoke these words:--
'God-like Achilles, think of thine own father!
To the same age have we both come, the same
Weak pass; and though the neighbouring chiefs may vex
Him also, and his borders find no help,
Yet when he hears that thou art still alive,
He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes
To see his dear son coming back from Troy.
But I, bereav'd old Priam! I had once
Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say
That one is left me. Fifty children had I,
When the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb;
The rest my women bore me in my house.
The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen'd;
And he who had no peer, Troy's prop and theirs,
Him hast thou kill'd now, fighting for his country,
Hector; and for his sake am I come here
To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom.
But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and think
Of thine own father, and have mercy on me:
For I am much more wretched, and have borne
What never mortal bore, I think on earth,
To lift unto my lips the hand of him
Who slew my boys.'
He ceased; and there arose
Sharp longing in Achilles for his father;
And taking Priam by the hand, he gently
Put him away; for both shed tears to think
Of other times; the one most bitter ones
For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness
Lay right before Achilles: and the other,
For his own father now, and now his friend;
And the whole house might hear them as they moan'd.
But when divine Achilles had refresh'd
His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left
His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,
And rais'd the old man by the hand, and took
Pity on his grey head and his grey chin.
feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without
Passion unpitied and successless love
_Plant daggers in my breast._
I've sounded my Numidians, man by man,
And find them _ripe for a revolt_.
The virtuous Marcia _towers above her sex_.
Of the same kind is his 'courting the yoke'--'distracting my very
Mariamne, _with superior charms_,
_Triumphs o'er reason_: in her look she _bears_
A paradise of ever-blooming sweets;
Fair as the first idea beauty _prints_
In the young lover's soul; a winning grace
Guides every gesture, and obsequious love
_Attends_ on all her steps.
'Triumphing o'er reason' is an old acquaintance of everybody's.
creations.
--Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
_And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,
Be shook to air._
_Troilus and Cressida_, Act iii, sc. 3.
Oh!--and I forsooth
In love! I that have been love's whip I
_A very beadle to a humorous sigh!--_
A domineering pedant o'er the boy,--
This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,
This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,
_Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans_, &c.
_Love's Labour's Lost_, Act iii, sc. 1.
Silent icicles
_Quietly shining to the quiet moon._
Coleridge's _Frost at Midnight_.
'You are now sailed _into the north of my lady's opinion_;
where you will hang _like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard_,
unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.'
_Twelfth Night_, Act iii, sc. 2.
Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the
It gives a very echo to the seat
Where Love is throned.
child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister
incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her
present volume. See also his famous description of Queen Mab and
her equipage, in _Romeo and Juliet_:
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers:
Her traces of the smallest spider's web;
Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c.
 Leigh Hunt's _Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from
That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty
This palace standeth in the air,
By necromancy placed there,
That it no tempest needs to fear,
Which way soe'er it blow it:
And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon,
Whence lies a way up to the moon,
And thence the fairy can as soon
Pass to the earth below it.
The walls of spiders' legs are made,
Well morticed and finely laid:
He was the master of his trade
It curiously that builded:
_The windows of the eyes of cats:_
(because they see best at night)
And for the roof instead of slats
Is cover'd with the skins of bats,
_With moonshine that are gilded._
Of leaves of roses, _white and red_,
Shall be the covering of the bed;
The curtains, vallens, tester all,
Shall be the flower imperial;
And for the fringe it all along
_With azure hare-bells shall be hung.
Of lilies shall the pillows be,
With down stuft of the butterfly._
Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John
twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed:
_Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice stole in and out,
As if they fear'd the light:_
But oh! she dances such a way!
_No sun upon an Easter day_
Is half so fine a sight.
everybody:
Her lips were red, _and one was thin_
_Compared with that was next her chin,
Some bee had stung it newly._
Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave.
enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their
To witch the world with wondrous horsemanship.
Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, and 'tuneful
order: and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as was
strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness,
Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds.
Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheav'd
His vastness.
Blow winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cat[)a]r[)a]cts and hurricanoes, spout,
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! and thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
accelerations in accordance with those of the poet:
Then in the keyhole turns
The intr[)i]c[)a]te wards, and every bolt and bar
W[)i]th [)i]mpetuous recoil and jarring sound
The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder.
Than fables yet have feigned.
But he, my lion, and my noble lord,
How does he find in cruel heart to hate
Her that him lov'd, and ever most ador'd
_As the god of my life?_ Why hath he me abhorr'd?
 Pray let not the reader consent to read this first half
of the line in any manner less marked and peremptory. It is a
striking instance of the beauty of that 'acceleration and
is to be a hurry on the words _as the_, and a passionate
emphasis and passing stop on the word _god_; and so of the
next three words.
Only the firmest and the _constant'st_ hearts
God sets to act the _stout'st_ and hardest parts.
He that hangs or _beats out's_ brains,
The devil's in him if _he_ feigns.
_Beats out's brains_, for 'beats out his brains'. Of heaviness,
With silence (order's help, and mark of care)
They chide that noise which heedless youth affect;
Still course for use, for health they cleanness wear,
And save in well-fix'd arms, all niceness check'd.
They thought, those that, unarm'd, expos'd frail life,
But naked nature valiantly betray'd;
Who was, though naked, safe, till pride made strife,
But made defence must use, now danger's made.
And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like a heavy preacher
thumping the pulpit in italics, and spoiling many ingenious
reflections.
intended to be particularly fine, contains an instance:
And lo! Silence himself is here;
Methinks I see the midnight god appear.
In all his downy pomp array'd,
Behold the reverend shade.
_An ancient sigh he sits upon!!!_
Whose memory of sound is long since gone,
_And purposely annihilated for his throne!!!_
_Ode on the singing of Mrs. Arabella Hunt._
See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison about music:
For ever consecrate the _day_
To music and _Cecilia_;
Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
And all of heaven we have below,
Music can noble HINTS _impart!!!_
neutralize the enthusiasm it requires.
_Sweetness_, though not identical with smoothness, any more than
necessary to mention it by itself; though such an all-in-all in
And was admired much of fools, _women_, and boys--
altered to
And was admired much of women, fools, and boys--
characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between
As gentle shepherd in sw[=e][=e]t [=e]ventide--
She brusheth _oft_, and _oft_ doth mar their m[=u]rm[)u]rings.
My eyes make pictures when they're shut:--
I see a fountain, large and fair,
A willow and a ruin'd hut,
And _thee_ and _me_ and Mary there.
_O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow;
Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow._
nothing better for her to say:
I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success
to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore your
sister's beauty and deplore her scorn: which they shall do
no more. For I'll so resent their idolatry, as shall content
your wishes to the full.
sentences each before the other.
With kindness I your prayers receive,
And to your hopes success will give.
I have, with anger, seen mankind adore
Your sister's beauty and her scorn deplore;
Which they shall do no more.
For their idolatry I'll so resent,
As shall your wishes to the full content!!
Yourself how do you find?
Very well, you I thank.
concerned, and partly because they held it to be writing in the
Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first
written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear
character of the Duke of Buckingham:
A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinions, _always in the wrong_,
_Was everything by starts, and nothing long;_
But in the course of one revolving moon
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking,
_Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking._
_Blest madman!_ who could every hour employ
_With something new to wish or to enjoy!_
Railing and praising were his usual themes;
And both, to show his judgement, in extremes:
So over violent, or over civil,
_That every man with him was god or devil._
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;
_Nothing went unrewarded, but desert._
Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late,
_He had his jest, and they had his estate._
And much they griev'd to see so nigh their hall
The bird that warn'd St. Peter of his fall;
That he should raise his mitred crest on high,
And clap his wings and call his family
To sacred rites; and vex th' ethereal powers
With midnight matins at uncivil hours;
Nay more, his quiet neighbours should molest
_Just in the sweetness of their morning rest._
(What a line full of 'another doze' is that!)
_Beast of a bird!_ supinely, when he _might_
Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light!
What if his dull forefathers used that cry?
Could he not let a bad example die?
strengthened by it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that it
superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal
indestructible in its age, has perished;--many a load of words,
expected to be in eternal demand, gone to join the wrecks of
imagination; of the beautiful in poetical passion, accompanied by
created by analogies of sound with sense, by the fluctuations of
On her white breast--a sparkling cross she wore,
Her lively looks--a sprightly mind disclose,
Quick as her eyes--and as unfix'd as those;
Favours to none--to all she smiles extends,
Oft she rejects--but never once offends;
Bright as the sun--her eyes the gazers strike,
And like the sun--they shine on all alike;
Yet graceful ease--and sweetness void of pride,
Might hide her faults--if belles had faults to hide;
If to her share--some female errors fall,
Look on her face--and you'll forget them all.
Compare with this the description of Iphigenia in one of Dryden's
It happen'd--on a summer's holiday,                        }
That to the greenwood shade--he took his way,              }
For Cymon shunn'd the church--and used not much to pray.   }
His quarter-staff--which he could ne'er forsake,
Hung half before--and half behind his back;
He trudg'd along--not knowing what he sought,
And whistled as he went--for want of thought.
By chance conducted--or by thirst constrain'd,
The deep recesses of a grove he gain'd:--
Where--in a plain defended by a wood,              }
Crept through the matted grass--a crystal flood,   }
By which--an alabaster fountain stood;             }
And on the margent of the fount was laid--
Attended by her slaves--a sleeping maid;
Like Dian and her nymphs--when, tir'd with sport,
To rest by cool Eurotas they resort.--
The dame herself--the goddess well express'd,
Not more distinguished by her purple vest--
Than by the charming features of the face--
And e'en in slumber--a superior grace:
Her comely limbs--compos'd with decent care,    }
Her body shaded--by a light cymar,              }
Her bosom to the view--was only bare;           }
Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied--
For yet their places were but signified.--
The fanning wind upon her bosom blows--                      }
To meet the fanning wind--the bosom rose;                    }
The fanning wind--and purling stream--continue her repose.   }
For a further variety take, from the same author's _Theodore and
Whilst listening to the murmuring leaves he stood--
More than a mile immers'd within the wood--
At once the wind was laid.|--The whispering sound
With deeper brown the grove was overspread--         }
A sudden horror seiz'd his giddy head--              }
And his ears tinkled--and his colour fled.           }
Nature was in alarm.--Some danger nigh
Seem'd threaten'd--though unseen to mortal eye.
Unus'd to fear--he summon'd all his soul,
And stood collected in himself--and whole:
There was a place,
Now not--though Sin--not Time--first wrought the change,
Where Tigris--at the foot of Paradise,
Into a gulf--shot under ground--till part
Rose up a fountain by the Tree of Life.
_In_ with the river sunk--and _with_ it _rose_
Satan--involv'd in rising mist--then sought
Where to lie hid.--Sea he had search'd--and land
From Eden over Pontus--and the pool
Maeotis--_up_ beyond the river _Ob_;
Downward as far antarctic;--and in length
West from Orontes--to the ocean barr'd
At Darien--thence to the land where flows
Ganges and Indus.--Thus the orb he roam'd
With narrow search;--and with inspection deep
Consider'd every creature--which of all
Most opportune might serve his wiles--and found
The serpent--subtlest beast of all the field.
_In_ with the river sunk, &c.
_Up_ beyond the river _Ob_.
The wind was high, the window shakes;
With sudden start the miser wakes;
Along the silent room he stalks,
(A miser never 'stalks'; but a rhyme was desired for 'walks')
Looks back, and trembles as he walks:
Each lock and every bolt he tries,
In every creek and corner pries;
Then opes the chest with treasure stor'd,
And stands in rapture o'er his hoard;
('Hoard' and 'treasure stor'd' are just made for one another)
But now, with sudden qualms possess'd,
He wrings his hands, he beats his breast;
By conscience stung, he wildly stares,
And thus his guilty soul declares.
Virtue resides on earth no more!
Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this
analogous to those in music, and rendered it altogether worthy to
Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite sense of solemn
beautifully modulated as anything in the music of Gluck or Weber.
'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock;
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
_How drowsily he crew._
Sir Leoline, the baron rich,
From her kennel beneath the rock
She maketh answer to the clock,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud:
Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.
_Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark._
The thin grey cloud is spread on high,
It covers, but not hides, the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full,
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chilly, the cloud is grey;
_'Tis a month before the month of May,
And the spring comes slowly up this way._
The lovely lady, Christabel,
Whom her father loves so well,
What makes her in the wood so late,
A furlong from the castle-gate?
She had dreams all yesternight
Of her own betrothed knight;
And she [)i]n th[)e] midnight wood will pray
For the weal [)o]f h[)e]r lover that's far away.
She stole along, she nothing spoke,
The sighs she heav'd were soft and low,
And nought was green upon the oak,
But moss and rarest mistletoe;
She kneels beneath the huge oak tree,
And in silence prayeth she.
The lady sprang up suddenly,
The lovely lady, Christabel!
It moan'd as near as near can be,
But what it is, she cannot tell.
On the other side it seems to be
Of th[)e] huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree.
The night is chill, the forest bare;
Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
(This 'bleak moaning' is a witch's)
There is not wind enough in the air
To move away the ringlet curl
From the lovely lady's cheek--
There is not wind enough to twirl
_The one red leaf, the last [)o]f [)i]ts clan,
Hush, beating heart of Christabel!
Jesu Maria, shield her well!
She folded her arms beneath her cloak,
And stole to the other side of the oak.
What sees she there?
There she sees a damsel bright,
Drest in a robe of silken white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone:
The neck that made that white robe wan,
Her stately neck and arms were bare:
Her blue-vein'd feet unsandall'd were;
And wildly glitter'd, here and there,
The gems entangled in her hair.
I guess 'twas _frightful_ there to see
_A lady so richly clad as she--
Beautiful exceedingly._
Large was his bounty and his soul sincere,
Heav'n did a recompense as largely send;
He gave to misery all he had, _a tear_;
He gain'd from heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) _a friend_.
The fops are proud of scandal; for they cry
At every lewd, low character, 'That's _I_'.
Dryden's _Prologue to the Pilgrim_.
What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
_About two hundred pounds a-year._
And that which was proved true before,
Prove false again? _Two hundred more._
Compound for sins they are _inclin'd to_,
By damning those they have _no mind to_.
----Stor'd with deletery _med'cines_,
Which whosoever took is _dead since_.
The women, and make them draw in
The men, as Indians with a _female_
Tame elephant inveigle _the_ male.
He made an instrument to know
If the moon shines at full or no;
That would, as soon as e'er she _shone, straight_
Whether 'twere day or night _demonstrate_;
Tell what her diameter to an _inch is_,
And prove that she's not made of _green cheese_.
But oh! ye lords of ladies _intellectual_,
Inform us truly,--haven't they _hen-peck'd you all_?
--Let our trumpets sound,
And cleave both air and ground
With beating of our drums.
Let every lyre be strung,
Harp, lute, theorbo, _sprung_
_With touch of dainty thumbs_.
comedy that the world has seen,--Moliere.
Shakespeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that
out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a universalist; the finest
thought does. An idle distinction has been made between taste and
different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty; their
What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and
profit nor general fame by my writings,' says Coleridge, in the
Preface to his Poems; 'and I consider myself as having been amply
perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the
diffusion of millions of enjoyments.
'And a button-maker, after all, invented it!' cries our friend.
disappeared: the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced;
Any accurate representation may therefore be expected to be
enjoyment.'
A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified when it has been
terrible.
And why, it may be asked, have I entered into this explanation
interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an
interesting manner by the art of the Poet. Vainly will the latter
passion. A great human action of a thousand years ago is more
fearlessly assert that _Hermann and Dorothea_, _Childe Harold_,
It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in
excellence: and it was not thought that on any but an excellent
subject could an excellent Poem be constructed. A few actions,
immortal beauty.
This was what a Greek critic demanded; this was what a Greek poet
Athenian required; he required that the permanent elements of his
accordingly he attempts it. An allegory of the state of one's own
asserting it to be 'something incommensurable'.
choosing subjects of present import, or the paramount interest
fundamental excellences of poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt
understands what M. Guizot meant, when he said that Shakespeare
appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of
moderns: but in the accurate limitation of it, the conscientious
impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the
themselves: they know, too, that this is no easy task--[Greek:
delightfully affected by them.
A host of voices will indignantly rejoin that the present age is
inferior to the past neither in moral grandeur nor in spiritual
health. He who possesses the discipline I speak of will content
uncertainty as to what is really to be aimed at which makes our
arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an
delineate firmly: if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great
wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again,
possible way, some explanation.
Oedipus. As moderns, it seems to me, we have no longer any direct
imagination has an affinity for one of them, and that man's for
another.
It has been said that I wish to limit the Poet, in his choice of
Again, with respect to the study of the classical writers of
literature, in art, in religion, in morals; namely, that it is
The word 'Blue', say certain philosophers, means the sensation of
contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely
For instance--
The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.
This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a
They rowed her in across the rolling foam--
The cruel, crawling foam.
 I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these
two orders I mean the Creative (Shakespeare, Homer, Dante),
But both of these must be _first_-rate in their range, though
their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in
_quality_ no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind.
There is quite enough of the best,--much more than we can
ever read or enjoy in the length of a life; and it is a
literal wrong or sin in any person to encumber us with
inferior work. I have no patience with apologies made by
young pseudo-poets, 'that they believe there is _some_ good
in what they have written: that they hope to do better in
time,' &c. _Some_ good! If there is not _all_ good, there is
no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they trouble
us now? Let them rather courageously burn all they have done,
and wait for the better days. There are few men, ordinarily
educated, who in moments of strong feeling could not strike
out a poetical thought, and afterwards polish it so as to be
presentable. But men of sense know better than so to waste
their time; and those who sincerely love poetry, know the
touch of the master's hand on the chords too well to fumble
among them after him. Nay, more than this; all inferior
poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away
the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched
commonalty to good thoughts; and, in general, adds to the
weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable
manner. There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary
men, which have not already been expressed by greater men in
the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more
noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than
to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the
world.
Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of
Acheron 'as dead leaves flutter from a bough', he gives the most
perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness,
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
spirit with the simple, startled words:--
Elpenor! How camest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast
thou come faster on foot than I in my black ship?
 'Well said, old mole! can'st work i' the ground so
Which Pope renders thus:--
O, say, what angry power Elpenor led
To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?
How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind?
I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the
 It is worth while comparing the way a similar question
is put by the exquisite sincerity of Keats:--
He wept, and his bright tears
Went trickling down the golden bow he held.
Thus, with half-shut, suffused eyes, he stood;
While from beneath some cumb'rous boughs hard by,
With solemn step, an awful goddess came.
And there was purport in her looks for him,
Which he with eager guess began to read:
Perplexed the while, melodiously he said,
'_How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?_'
Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some
matter.
So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly,
steadfast; it is not this or that new sight which will at once
To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who represents a man in
despair, desiring that his body may be cast into the sea,
_Whose changing mound, and foam that passed away,_
Might mock the eye that questioned where I lay.
together like a wall, now shaking, now steady, but still the same
Let no man move his bones.
As for Samaria, her king is out off like the foam upon the water.
But nothing of this is actually told or pointed out, and the
'deceive' or 'defeat', without implying any impersonation of the
waves.
I see all the other dark-eyed Greeks; but two I cannot
see,--Castor and Pollux,--whom one mother bore with me. Have
they not followed from fair Lacedaemon, or have they indeed
come in their sea-wandering ships, but now will not enter
into the battle of men, fearing the shame and the scorn that
is in Me?
So she spoke. But them, already, the life-giving earth
possessed, there in Lacedaemon, in the dear fatherland.
Vite, Anna, vite; au miroir
Plus vite, Anna. L'heure s'avance,
Et je vais au bal ce soir
Chez l'ambassadeur de France.
Y pensez-vous, ils sont fanes, ces noeuds,
Ils sont d'hier, mon Dieu, comme tout passe!
Que du reseau qui retient mes cheveux
Les glands d'azur retombent avec grace.
Plus haut! Plus bas! Vous ne comprenez rien!
Que sur mon front ce saphir etincelle:
Vous me piquez, maladroite. Ah, c'est bien,
Bien,--chere Anna! Je t'aime, je suis belle.
Celui qu'en vain je voudrais oublier
(Anna, ma robe) il y sera, j'espere.
(Ah, fi! profane, est-ce la mon collier?
Quoi! ces grains d'or benits par le Saint-Pere!)
Il y sera; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main,
En y pensant, a peine je respire;
Pere Anselmo doit m'entendre demain,
Comment ferai-je, Anna, pour tout lui dire?
Vite un coup d'oeil au miroir,
Le dernier. ----J'ai l'assurance
Qu'on va m'adorer ce soir
Chez l'ambassadeur de France.
Pres du foyer, Constance s'admirait.
Dieu! sur sa robe il vole une etincelle!
Au feu! Courez! Quand l'espoir l'enivrait,
Tout perdre ainsi! Quoi! Mourir,--et si belle!
L'horrible feu ronge avec volupte
Ses bras, son sein, et l'entoure, et s'eleve,
Et sans pitie devore sa beaute,
Ses dix-huit ans, helas, et son doux reve!
Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour!
On disait, Pauvre Constance!
Et on dansait, jusqu'au jour,
Chez l'ambassadeur de France.
beginning to end of it, a single poetical (so called) expression,
atmosphere of truth. He closes all with the calm veracity,
They said, 'Poor Constance!'
singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.'
leaves, or white-hot, with hoar-frost.
overborne by the feeling so far as to exclaim:
Where shall I find him? angels, tell me where.
You know him; he is near you; point him out.
Shall I see glories beaming from his brow,
Or trace his footsteps by the rising flowers?
Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade;
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade;
Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove,
And winds shall waft it to the powers above.
But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain,
The wondering forests soon should dance again;
The moving mountains hear the powerful call,
And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall.
Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his mistress:
Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid,
When thus his moan he made:--
'Oh move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak,
Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie,
That in some other way yon smoke
May mount into the sky.
If still behind yon pine-tree's ragged bough,
Headlong, the waterfall must come,
Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now.'
Take two most exquisite instances from master hands. The Jessy of
If through the garden's flowery tribes I stray,
Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure,
'Hope not to find delight in us,' they say,
'For we are spotless, Jessy; we are pure.'
Compare with this some of the words of Ellen:
'Ah, why,' said Ellen, sighing to herself,
'Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge,
And nature, that is kind in woman's breast,
And reason, that in man is wise and good,
And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge,--
Why do not these prevail for human life,
To keep two hearts together, that began
Their springtime with one love, and that have need
Of mutual pity and forgiveness, sweet
To grant, or be received; while that poor bird--
O, come and hear him! Thou who hast to me
Been faithless, hear him;--though a lowly creature,
One of God's simple children, that yet know not
The Universal Parent, _how_ he sings!
As if he wished the firmament of heaven
Should listen, and give back to him the voice
Of his triumphant constancy and love.
The proclamation that he makes, how far
His darkness doth transcend our fickle light.'
 I cannot quit this subject without giving two more
instances, both exquisite, of the pathetic fallacy, which I
have just come upon, in _Maud_:
For a great speculation had fail'd;
And ever he mutter'd and madden'd, and ever wann'd with despair;
And out he walk'd, when the wind like a broken worldling wail'd,
And the _flying gold of the ruin'd woodlands drove, thro'
the air_.
There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
_The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near!'
And the white rose weeps, 'She is late.'
The larkspur listens, 'I hear, I hear!'
And the lily whispers, 'I wait.'_
misapplied the word 'poetry', but attempting to clear up the
The object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions; and
understanding, the other by offering interesting objects of
contemplation to the sensibilities.
correspond to two distinct, and (as respects their greatest
development) mutually exclusive, characters of mind.
pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live
All this is no bar to the possibility of combining both elements,
character may be of the highest order; as in Goethe's admirable
In limiting poetry to the delineation of states of feeling, and
called descriptive. We deny the charge. Description is not poetry
Thus far our progress towards a clear view of the essentials of
poetry has brought us very close to the last two attempts at a
admiration, or reverence, or awe, or even hatred or terror: and,
unless so coloured, nothing, be it as interesting as it may, is
distinction between poetry and narrative, or between poetry and
tenderness, or pathos, or grief of Mozart or Beethoven. Yet it is
opposite style--that of soliloquy. Who can imagine 'Dove sono'
_heard_? We imagine it _over_heard.
Purely pathetic music commonly partakes of soliloquy. The soul is
conforti', in the opera of _Tancredi_, or the duet 'Ebben per mia
Komm, Hoffnung, lass das letzte Stern
Der Muede nicht erbleichen;
If, from vocal music, we now pass to instrumental, we may have a
In the arts which speak to the eye, the same distinctions will be
poetry, oratory, narrative, and simple imitation or description.
Pure description is exemplified in a mere portrait or a mere
landscape--productions of art, it is true, but of the mechanical
Whatever in painting or sculpture expresses human feeling--or
character, which is only a certain state of feeling grown
artist the most impressive warning our imagination could devise
Coleridge says, an ardent desire of poetic reputation for poetic
philosophic investigation. But the power itself of discriminating
distinguishing whether that of which the mind is conscious be an
culture, as all persons may, the faculty of delineating them
construction, than to be the author of a history, or a novel.
sensuous and spiritual, are connected together. This constitution
actually sees it in poetry.
synchronous, are mostly casual.
_thought_, for their unity and consistency of character, for what
thought; in the other, thought upon feeling. The one writer has a
On the other hand, Wordsworth's poetry is never bounding, never
sympathy with itself in its simplest manifestation, nor enough to
vividness of his emotions and of his sensations had done all. He
seldom follows up an idea; it starts into life, summons from the
sense, or oftener (might we not say invariably?) of both: for the
co-existed with them, and by all feelings which in any degree
poetry which could not emanate but from a mental and physical
constitution peculiar, not in the kind, but in the degree of its
unhappiness; and because greater, so also more various. And such
poetical, really feel more, and consequently have more feeling to
power?
nature) increase of intensity is reflected back upon the feeling
 And this, we may remark by the way, seems to point to
the true theory of poetic diction; and to suggest the true
answer to as much as is erroneous of Wordsworth's celebrated
doctrine on that subject. For on the one hand, _all_ language
which is the natural expression of feeling, is really
poetical, and will be felt as such, apart from conventional
associations; but on the other, whenever intellectual culture
has afforded a choice between several modes of expressing the
same emotion, the stronger the feeling is, the more naturally
and certainly will it prefer the language which is most
peculiarly appropriated to itself, and kept sacred from the
contact of more vulgar objects of contemplation.
contrary, after reading or hearing one or two passages, we
Although a philosopher cannot, by culture, make himself, in the
investigation; that capacity of strong feeling, which is supposed
associations attainable by commoner natures trained to high
perfection, that its own particular law is not so conspicuously
Hence, doubtless, among other reasons, it is, that in an age of
_Enoch Arden, &c._ By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate.
tradition, a vague conviction that poetry is but one of the many
_amusements_ for the light classes, for the lighter hours of all
things, is even now to the coarse public mind nearly unknown.
drawing-room.
 The first words in Lord Jeffrey's celebrated review of
the _Excursion_ were, 'This will never do.'
The doctrine that poetry is a light amusement for idle hours, a
fascinates, but also that its fascination is such as ought to be
circumstances most familiar in themselves, but making a perpetual
permutation.
philosophize; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of
parings of the intellect, and the distillation of the mind; a
picturesque man, the picturesque scene, which is to live on his
The first conversation of Goethe and Schiller illustrates this
conception of the poet's art. Goethe was at that time prejudiced
qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even
With Goethe's natural history, or with Kant's philosophy, we have
distillation of himself: he takes such of his moods as are most
characteristic, as most typify certain moods of certain men, or
Coleridge, for example:
When we were idlers with the loitering rills,
The need of human love we little noted:
Our love was nature; and the peace that floated
On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,
To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:
One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
That, wisely doating, ask'd not why it doated,
And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.
But now I find, how dear thou wert to me;
That man is more than half of nature's treasure,
Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see,
Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
And now the streams may sing for others' pleasure,
The hills sleep on in their eternity.
In the great city we are met again,
Where many souls there are, that breathe and die,
Scarce knowing more of nature's potency,
Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain;
The sad vicissitude of weary pain;--
For busy man is lord of ear and eye,
And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky,
And the thronged river toiling to the main?
Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part
In every smile, in every tear that falls,
And she shall hide her in the secret heart,
Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:
But worse it were than death, or sorrow's smart,
To live without a friend within these walls.
We parted on the mountains, as two streams
From one clear spring pursue their several ways;
And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze,
In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams
To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams
Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise;
Where Petrarch's patient love, and artful lays,
And Ariosto's song of many themes,
Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,
As close pent up within my native dell,
Have crept along from nook to shady nook,
Where flowrets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.
Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,
O'er rough and smooth to travel side by side.
poetry could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly
And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
When we were young, when we could number friends
In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
When with elated hearts we join'd your train,
Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were clos'd and dead to us,
But we receiv'd the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
And if the sacred load oppress'd our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eas'd.
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
In the delightful commerce of the world.
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought's slaves and dead to every natural joy.
The smallest thing could give us pleasure then--
The sports of the country people;
A flute note from the woods;
Sunset over the sea:
Seed-time and harvest;
The reapers in the corn;
The vinedresser in his vineyard;
The village-girl at her wheel.
Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye
Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
Who dwell on a firm basis of content.
But he who has outliv'd his prosperous days,
But he, whose youth fell on a different world
From that on which his exil'd age is thrown;
Whose mind was fed on other food, was train'd
By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
Whose habit of thought is fix'd, who will not change,
But in a world he loves not must subsist
In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
Of his own breast, fetter'd to what he guards,
That the world win no mastery over him;
Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
Who has no minute's breathing space allow'd
To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy:--
Joy and the outward world must die to him
As they are dead to me.
We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be
given--at least in the present state of the critical art--of the
boundary line between poetry and other sorts of imaginative
marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed. They are
circumstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in
objective character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near to choice
strenuous purity with which he depicts character.
A wit once said, that '_pretty_ women had more features than
restraining the fancy, and helping to maintain a singleness of
expression:
There's not a nook within this solemn Pass,
But were an apt Confessional for one
Taught by his summer spent; his autumn gone,
That Life is but a tale of morning grass
Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase
That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes
Feed it 'mid Nature's old felicities,
Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass
Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest,
If from a golden perch of aspen spray
(October's workmanship to rival May)
The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast
That moral teaches by a heaven-taught lay,
Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky;
All bright and open in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
The city now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning,
and the description of the brilliant yellow of autumn--
October's workmanship to rival May,
Milton's purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of
the fiercest spirit
That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,
deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat and Public care,
who, at Satan's instance, proposes the invasion of earth--are as
He ended frowning, and his look denounced
Desp'rate revenge, and battle dangerous
To less than Gods. On th' other side up rose
Belial, in act more graceful and humane:
A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem'd
For dignity composed and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow, though his tongue
Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
Tim'rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear,
And with persuasive accent thus began:
I should be much for open war, O Peers!
As not behind in hate, if what was urged
Main reason to persuade immediate war,
Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast
Ominous conjecture on the whole success:
When he who most excels in fact of arms,
In what he counsels and in what excels
Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,
And utter dissolution, as the scope
Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.
First, what revenge? The tow'rs of Heav'n are fill'd
With armed watch, that render all access
Impregnable; oft on the bord'ring deep
Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing
Scout far and wide into the realm of night,
Scorning surprise. Or could we break our way
By force, and at our heels all hell should rise
With blackest insurrection, to confound
Heav'n's purest light, yet our great Enemy,
All incorruptible, would on his throne
Sit unpolluted, and th' ethereal mould
Incapable of stain would soon expel
Her mischief, and purge oft the baser fire
Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope
Is flat despair. We must exasperate
Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,
And that must end us: that must be our cure,
To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallow'd up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,
Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
Can give it, or will ever? How he can
Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.
Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire
Belike through impotence, or unaware,
To give his enemies their wish, and end
Them in his anger, whom his anger saves
To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?
Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,
Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;
Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst,
Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?
And so on.
decided. A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended. Its
triumph, the highest achievement of the pure _style_ in English
fewest words.
There was a little lawny islet
By anemone and violet,
Like mosaic, paven:
And its roof was flowers and leaves
Which the summer's breath enweaves,
Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,
Pierce the pines and tallest trees,
Each a gem engraven;--
Girt by many an azure wave
With which the clouds and mountains pave
A lake's blue chasm.
We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an
certainly would not have perceived; and he gives to the fishing
village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a
fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality.
The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes,
The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The lustre of the long convolvuluses
That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran
Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world,
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
He could not see, the kindly human face,
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail:
No sail from day to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.
No expressive circumstance can be added to this description, no
enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the
description of Enoch's life before he sailed:
While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,
Or often journeying landward; for in truth
Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean spoil
In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,
Rough-redden'd with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market-cross were known,
But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,
And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall,
Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering.
So much has not often been made of selling fish.
The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art--the first
'peacock yew-tree' are with the 'fresh fish for sale' that Enoch
That want is a want of 'definition'. We must all know landscapes,
Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying,
produced. Shakespeare could accomplish it, for his mind was a
_spring_, an inexhaustible fountain of human nature, and it is no
fullness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it overflow too
The reason is this: literary art, as we just now explained, is
'When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a hot
tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion to traverse.'
though Mr. Tennyson won't speak out, and wraps it up) never are
concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really believes in
When Heaven sends sorrow,
Warnings go first,
Lest it should burst
With stunning might
On souls too bright
To fear the morrow.
Can science bear us
To the hid springs
Of human things?
Why may not dream,
Or thought's day-gleam,
Startle, yet cheer us?
Are such thoughts fetters,
While faith disowns
Dread of earth's tones,
Recks but Heaven's call,
And on the wall,
Reads but Heaven's letters?
itself look grand, and it looks grand when it is making a brave
struggle with foreign foes. But it does not look grand when it is
encumbered with incongruities. It deals, to use the language of
accomplishments, but in himself. He has applied a hard strong
intellect to real life; he has applied the same intellect to the
problems of his age. He has striven to know what _is_: he has
If we wanted to illustrate the nature of grotesque art by an
'Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;
And while above his head a pompion-plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:
'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.
'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.
'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole--He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?
It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very
forward because it just elucidates both our subject and the
characteristics of Mr. Browning. But many other of his best known
Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week,
Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,
Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff,
Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime
Gives us the summons--'t is sermon-time.
Boh, here's Barnabas! Job, that's you?
Up stumps Solomon--bustling too?
Shame, man! greedy beyond your years
To handsel the bishop's shaving-shears?
Stand on a line ere you start for the church.
Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,
Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.
Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
And buzz for the bishop--here he comes.
But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,
And the rest sit silent and count the clock,
Since forced to muse the appointed time
On these precious facts and truths sublime,--
Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,
In saying Ben Ezra's Song of Death.
For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,
Called sons and sons' sons to his side,
And spoke, 'This world has been harsh and strange;
Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
But what, or where? at the last, or first?
In one point only we sinned, at worst.
'The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
And again in his border see Israel set.
When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:
To Jacob's House shall the Gentiles cleave,
So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.
'Ay, the children of the chosen race
Shall carry and bring them to their place:
In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame
When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o'er
The oppressor triumph for evermore?
'God spoke, and gave us the word to keep,
Bade never fold the hands nor sleep
'Mid a faithless world,--at watch and ward,
Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.
By His servant Moses the watch was set:
Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.
'Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came,
By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!
And if, too heavy with sleep--too rash
With fear--O Thou, if that martyr-gash
Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own,
And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne--
'Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
But, the judgement over, join sides with us!
Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine
Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!
'We withstood Christ then? be mindful how
At least we withstand Barabbas now!
Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
To have called these--Christians, had we dared!
Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,
And Rome make amends for Calvary!
'By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel's heritage,
By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace,
By the badge of shame, by the felon's place,
By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship,--
Would wrest Christ's name from the Devil's crew.
Thy face took never so deep a shade
But we fought them in it, God our aid!
A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band,
Christianity gave its new elements of good, or since modern
civilization has removed some few at least of the old elements of
We say 'sane' because there is a most formidable and estimable
Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst of Mr. Browning's
extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed
Which, do they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
the great but vague faith--the unutterable tenets seem to him
conditions--
Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its walls on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin was a pity.
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
At last the people in a body
To the Town Hall came flocking:
''Tis clear', cried they, 'our Mayor's a noddy;
And as for our Corporation--shocking
To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
For dolts that can't or won't determine
What's best to rid us of our vermin!
You hope, because you're old and obese,
To find in the furry civic robe ease?
Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking
To find the remedy we're lacking,
Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!'
At this the Mayor and Corporation
Quaked with a mighty consternation.
A person of musical abilities proposes to extricate the civic
dignitaries from the difficulty, and they promise him a thousand
guilders if he does.
Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eye twinkled
Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cooking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives--
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser,
Wherein all plunged and perished!
--Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,
Swam across and lived to carry
(As he, the manuscript he cherished)
To Rat-land home his commentary:
Which was, 'At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press's gripe:
And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,
And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,
And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks:
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, "Oh rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
So, munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!"
And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said, "Come, bore me!"
--I found the Weser rolling o'er me.'
You should have heard the Hamelin people
Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.
'Go', cried the Mayor, 'and get long poles,
Poke out the nests and block up the holes!
Consult with carpenters and builders,
And leave in our town not even a trace
Of the rats!'--when suddenly, up the face
Of the Piper perked in the market-place,
With a 'First, if you please, my thousand guilders!'
A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;
So did the Corporation too.
For council dinners made rare havoc
With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;
And half the money would replenish
Their cellar's biggest butt with Rhenish.
To pay this sum to a wandering fellow
With a gipsy coat of red and yellow!
'Beside,' quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,
'Our business was done at the river's brink;
We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,
And what's dead can't come to life, I think.
So, friend, we're not the folks to shrink
From the duty of giving you something for drink,
And a matter of money to put in your poke;
But as for the guilders, what we spoke
Of them, as you very well know, was in joke.
Besides, our losses have made us thrifty.
A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!'
The piper's face fell, and he cried,
'No trifling! I can't wait, beside!
I've promised to visit by dinner time
Bagdat, and accept the prime
Of the Head-Cook's pottage, all he's rich in,
For having left, in the Caliph's kitchen,
Of a nest of scorpions no survivor--
With him I proved no bargain-driver,
With you, don't think I'll bate a stiver!
And folks who put me in a passion
May find me pipe to another fashion.'
'How?' cried the Mayor, 'd'ye think I'll brook
Being worse treated than a Cook?
Insulted by a lazy ribald
With idle pipe and vesture piebald?
You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
Blow your pipe there till you burst!'
Once more he stept into the street
And to his lips again
Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
Soft notes as yet musician's cunning
Never gave the enraptured air)
There was a rustling, that seemed like a bustling
Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling.
Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,
And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,
Out came the children running.
All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls.
Tripping and skipping ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
And I must not omit to say
That in Transylvania there's a tribe
Of alien people that ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbours lay such stress,
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterraneous prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why, they don't understand.
fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of nature--the
fatigue--arrives, the hasty reader has passed on to some new
And yet
Think not the living times forget,
Ages of heroes fought and fell,
That Homer in the end might tell;
O'er grovelling generations past
Upstood the Gothic fane at last;
And countless hearts in countless years
Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;
Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
The pure perfection of her dome.
Others I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
And (they forgotten and unknown)
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead had sown.
Forms of intellectual and spiritual culture often exercise their
development evolves ideas, moralities, modes of inward life, and
represses them in turn, has in this way provided that the earlier
detach the highest minds from the past by pressing home its
belonging to a particular generation, which suddenly becomes
conditions he is not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the
statements about him were alike true; he is so receptive, all the
instinct seeks, is the misconception of a backward school of
illustration of the speculative temper is not the Hindoo, lost to
questions. Everywhere he is restlessly scheming to apprehend the
remembered. How did his choice of a controversial interest, his
In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of
... My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external world
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
The external world is fitted to the mind:
And the creation, by no lower name
Can it be called, which they with blended might
In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the
unformulated, analysis of them.
abandonment is an unvexed quietness of heart. No one can read the
My genial spirits fail
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.
It is that flawless temperament in Wordsworth which keeps his
brings one so near the absorbing speculative problems of
life--optimism, the proportion of man to his place in nature, his
That, however, which had only a limited power over Coleridge as
everywhere, and seemed to him to interpret every question.
Wordsworth's poetry is an optimism; it says man's relation to the
sentiment or instinct.
What in Wordsworth is a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a
philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge's talent is a more
intellectual one than Wordsworth's, more dramatic, more
self-conscious. Wordsworth's talent, deeply reflective as it is,
because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge.
Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the
stereotype any one of the many modes of that life; one must
acknowledge that the mind is ever greater than its own products,
interesting because he did not follow this path. Repressing his
everywhere he allows the impress of an inferior theological
The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of
human life, is the horizon for the majority of its
inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and
departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they
vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and
bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher
ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from
uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to
penetrate. To the multitude below these vapours appear now
as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may
intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow, with colours not
their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of
happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few
who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the
feet of their furthest inaccessible falls, have learned that
the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few who,
even in the level streams, have detected elements which
neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains
contained or could supply.
When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my
birthplace and family, Providence, it has often occurred to
me, gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and
that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a
detached individual, a _terrae filius_, who was to ask love
or service of no one on any more specific relation than that
of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free
charities of humanity.
 Biographical Supplement to _Biographia Literaria_, chap.
subject to fits of violent, sometimes fantastic, despondency. He
literary success grew in spite of opposition. He had a strange
effort towards the ideal life, of even a temporary escape of the
communistic dream with its appeal to nature (perhaps a little
In 1798, he visited Germany. A beautiful fragment of this period
success for encouragement or tolerance to any genuinely human
philosophies--that is, in which there was a religious _arriere
pensee_; philosophies which could never be in the ascendant in a
philosophy, and each has his defence of the orthodox belief; but,
Doubtless, for the individual, there are a thousand intermediate
which, as religious men often remind us, is only Christian
accidentally.
The peculiar temper of Coleridge's intellect made the idea of
reconciling this conflict very seductive. With a true speculative
vanity. A dexterous intellectual _tour de force_ has always an
poorer matter becomes vibrant, is really lifted by the spirit.
At forty-two, we find Coleridge saying in a letter:
I feel with an intensity unfathomable by words my utter
nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness in and for myself.
I have learned what a sin is against an infinite,
imperishable being such as is the soul of man. The
consolations, at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do
not possess. On the contrary, the temptation which I have
constantly to fight up against is a fear that, if
annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to
my choice, I should choose the former.
What was the cause of this change? That is precisely the point on
That faintness and continual dissolution had its own consumptive
'In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at
yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the window-pane, I seem
rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical
language for something within me that already and for ever
exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter
is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling, as
if that new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten
or hidden truth of my inner nature.' Then, 'while I was
preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of
thought which had led me to it.'
What a distemper of the eye of the mind! What an almost bodily
distemper there is in that!
philosophy he lived just at the time when that philosophy took an
With this interest, in the _Biographia Literaria_, he refines
consciousness. All through that increasing stir of life this was
glancing cobweb. Coleridge, with Kant, regards all association as
name. In an act of perception there is the matter which sense
colours, curves, sounds into a new whole. Well, this power of
imagination.
human kind, but reflected in a new manner, 'excitement itself
sympathy with nature. Those associative conceptions of the
It is natural that Shakespeare should be the idol of all such
criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first effect in
Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of the waywardness that
He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the
germ from within by the imaginative power according to the
idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea
in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives which
suppose each other.
The organic form is innate; it shapes, as it develops,
itself from within, and the fulness of its development is
one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.
Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime
genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally
inexhaustible in forms; each exterior is the physiognomy of
the being within, and even such is the appropriate
excellence of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a
genial understanding, directing self-consciously a power and
an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.
There 'the absolute' has been affirmed in the sphere of art; and
mechanical; instead of being the most luminous and self-possessed
refining flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness.
Coleridge's criticism may well be remembered as part of the long
pleading of German culture for the things 'behind the veil'. It
itself only that counts.'
What constitutes an artistic gift is, first of all, a natural
universal element in an artistic effort, but towards a subtle
Coleridge has not achieved this side in an equal degree with the
interpretation of Scripture. With regard to the first and second,
Prudence, by which Coleridge means something like Bentham's
'enlightened principle of self-preservation', is, he says, an
inexplicable instinct, a blind motion in the dark, until it is
expanded into morality. Morality, again, is but a groundless
prepossession until transformed into a religious recognition of a
The second necessity of the argument is to prove that 'the idea',
In the world, we see everywhere evidences of a unity, which
the component parts are so far from explaining, that they
necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of
their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at
all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each
union, it has, since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been
customary to call a law. This crocus for instance; or any
other flower the reader may have before his sight, or choose
to bring before his fancy; that the root, stem, leaves,
petals, &c., cohere to one plant is owing to an antecedent
power or principle in the seed which existed before a single
particle of the matters that constitute the size and
visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the
surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the
seed? there, too, the same necessity meets us: an antecedent
unity must here, too, be supposed. Analyse the seeds with
the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid
of your senses, what do you find?--means and instruments; a
wondrous fairy tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of
various sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences; a house of many
chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible.
Nature, that is, works by what we may call 'intact ideas'. It
co-ordinates every part of the crocus to all the other parts; one
One finds, it is hard to say how many, difficulties in drawing
Coleridge's conclusion. To mention only one of them--the argument
ideal'. Coleridge thinks that if we reject the supernatural, the
Our culture, then, is not supreme, our intellectual life is
Some of those who have wished to save supernaturalism--as, for
Of course they conflicted with the understanding, with the common
sterile in Kant, the essential tendency of the German school of
'After the tragedy comes the farce. [The tragedy is Kant's
destructive criticism of the speculative reason.] So far
Immanuel Kant has been playing the relentless philosopher;
he has laid siege to heaven.' Heine goes on with some
violence to describe the havoc Kant has made of the orthodox
belief: 'Old Lampe, with the umbrella under his arm,
stands looking on much disturbed, perspiration and tears of
sorrow running down his cheeks. Then Immanuel Kant grows
pitiful, and shows that he is not only a great philosopher
but also a good man. He considers a little; and then, half
in good nature, half in irony, he says, "Old Lampe must have
a god, otherwise the poor man will not be happy; but man
ought to be happy in this life, the practical reason says
that; let the practical reason stand surety for the
existence of a god; it is all the same to me." Following
this argument, Kant distinguishes between the theoretical
and the practical reason, and, with the practical reason for
a magic wand, he brings to life the dead body of deism,
which the theoretical reason had slain.'
 The servant who attended Kant in his walks.
Theology is a great house, scored all over with hieroglyphics by
bibliolatry Coleridge was saved by the spiritualism, which, in
depreciate historical testimony, perhaps historical realism
intelligence;' nor 'the writers each and all divinely informed as
His judgement on the popular view of inspiration is severe. It is
fantastic interpretations; 'the strange--in all other writings
unexampled--practice of bringing together into logical dependency
dispensations, and for different objects.'
spirit? We know how his life has appeared when judged by absolute
tryphes, habrotetos, chlides, chariton, himerou pothou pater], is
Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
now,--no, not by the strongest party,--neither then could king,
spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.
supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much
Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line,
And the tale of Troy divine.
authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The
language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but
Catholic church,--these collected, too, in long periods, from the
translation on translation. There never was a time when there was
supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every
accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to
faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and
attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him
communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he
history of Shakespeare till now; for he is the father of German
appurtenances were his; that he bought an estate in his native
But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these
parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of
What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?
information which is material, that which describes character and
Shakespeare's being the least known, he is the one person, in all
gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behaviour?
Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man, and
discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
scrutiny of the solar microscope.
In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
translation of things into song is demonstrated.
Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty
closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet
One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his
rumoured abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with
humanity.
picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which
fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, 'very
Koran,--'The heavens and the earth, and all that is between them,
amusement.
world-old question of matter and form, of whether nectar _is_ of
 In the _Prelude_ he attributes this consecration to a
sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked
homeward from some village festival where he had danced all
night:
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly.
A dedicated Spirit.--Book IV.
Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and agent of Sir James Lowther,
The poet's early childhood was passed partly at Cockermouth, and
picturesque time. A common level of interests and social standing
hearsay and distant report. When death knocked at any door in the
difficult art of being himself.
biographer vaguely, 'that the poet's father set him very early to
I to the muses have been bound,
These fourteen years, by strong indentures.
The great event of Wordsworth's schooldays was the death of his
mathematics. The earliest books we hear of his reading were _Don
dependence of the external and internal universe.
Of his disposition as a child little is known, but that little is
heroes in the stories of their childhood. Just so do we find him
punishment of the Reviewers.
Cambridge, but no reflection from them is visible in his earliest
public, and belonged to that class of prophetically appreciative
 _Prelude_, Book III.
While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of institutes and laws hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
... Could a youth, and one
In ancient story versed, whose breast had heaved
Under the weight of classic eloquence,
Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired?
 _Prelude_, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring
to a still earlier date.
In December 1792 Wordsworth had returned to England, and in the
following year published _Descriptive Sketches_ and the _Evening
commenting, sixty years afterward, on a couplet in one of these
And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines
Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines,--
unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was
retrospection. How far could Wordsworth at fourteen have been
narrow. His sense of melody was painfully dull, and some of his
lighter effusions, as he would have called them, are almost
cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last
Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill,
lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf.
_The Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_ show plainly the
Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
Passing his father's bones in future days,
Start at the reliques of that very thigh
On which so oft he prattled when a boy.
To wet the peak's impracticable sides
He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,
Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes
Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies.
Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade
Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
To throw the 'sultry ray' of young Desire;
Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go
Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow;
Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,
And rising by the moon of passion swayed.
The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he
changes 'despotcourts' into 'tyranny'. One of the alterations is
interesting. In the _Evening Walk_ he had originally written
And bids her soldier come her wars to share
Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar.
Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar.
The tremulous sob of the complaining owl
The sportive outcry of the mocking owl.
Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the
revision as to make the dates appended to them a misleading
anachronism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which
'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour:
The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight;
Dark is the region as with coming night;
But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun
The West that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire.
republicans, would have been necessarily scanty. There being no
honest for him to write poems that will never die, instead of
dreams, and regained that equable tenor of mind which alone is
consistent with a healthy productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had
Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet, and, by a good fortune
Cottle show that he was long in giving up the hope of getting it
accepted by some theatrical manager.
Coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part
extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.
In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, and after
literary life of sixty years was in keeping with them.
After spending the winter at Goslar, Wordsworth and his sister
An advertisement prefixed to the _Lyrical Ballads_, as originally
_rationally endeavour_ to impart'. Here is evidence of a retreat
mistake lay. For example, in _The Blind Highland Boy_ he had
originally the following stanzas:
Strong is the current, but be mild,
Ye waves, and spare the helpless child!
If ye in anger fret or chafe,
A bee-hive would be ship as safe
As that in which he sails.
But say, what was it? Thought of fear!
Well may ye tremble when ye hear!
--A household tub like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes,
This carried the blind boy.
nostrils. Study and self-culture did much for him, but they never
I've measured it from side to side,
'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.
sometimes so distasteful. _Simon Lee_, after his latest revision,
And he is lean and he is sick;
His body, dwindled and awry,
Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;
His legs are thin and dry;
Few months of life he has in store,
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell,--
sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives
List! I heard
From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat_,
_Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_.
In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was
Beaumont began. Sir George was an amateur painter of considerable
In March 1805, the poet's brother, John, lost his life by the
reviewers had another laugh, and rival poets pillaged while they
Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806-7 in a house of Sir George
respected the honesty of the man more than he appreciated the
originality of the poet. The Collectorship at Whitehaven (a more
raised to something more than L1,000 a year.
In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland, visiting Yarrow in
_Aeneid_, a specimen of which was printed in the Cambridge
seventieth year) at the University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he
installation of Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University of
We have thus briefly sketched the life of Wordsworth,--a life
proportion to the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows. The
Quincey's judgement, is the portrait of Milton prefixed to
Wordsworth himself departed more and more in practice, as he grew
 How far he swung backward toward the school under whose
influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he
had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The
advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his
_Thanksgiving Ode_ which, if one met with it by itself, he
would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:
While the _tubed engine_ [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.
find a thermometer or barometer called
The well-wrought scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a fickle clime.
Still worse in the _Eclipse of the Sun_, 1821:
High on her speculative tower
Stood Science, waiting for the hour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening.
The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
Viewless obstructions.
imagination. He says of himself, speaking of his youth:
In fine,
I was a better judge of thoughts than words,
Misled in estimating words, not only
By common inexperience of youth,
But by the trade in classic niceties,
The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
From languages that want the living voice
To carry meaning to the natural heart;
To tell us what is passion, what is truth,
What reason, what simplicity and sense.
familiar of the mountains and the dweller on the plain.
wearisome. Yet with what splendours as of mountain-sunsets are we
heavenward with angels ascending and descending! what haunting
fourteen paces from end to end, turn into a virtue his too common
Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it
thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.
incongruity into which he was often led by his earlier theory
dullness of perception in other directions. We cannot help
imaginative quality, a poet of passages. Indeed, one cannot help
uninstructive to learn from his own lips that 'it cost him more
chimney-corner'.
 Nowhere is this displayed with more comic
self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite
the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,--a poem hardly to be
matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage
sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly.
Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
And curst the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
That died to succour me!
O, think ye not my heart was sair
When my love dropt down and spake na mair?
Compare this with,--
Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
That through his brain are travelling,
And, starting up, to Bruce's heart
He launched a deadly javelin:
Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
And, _stepping forth to meet the same_,
Did with her body cover
The Youth, her chosen lover.
And Bruce (_as soon as he had slain_
_The Gordon_) sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant
These are surely the versos of an attorney's clerk 'penning a
stanza when he should engross'. It will be noticed that
Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the
language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as
less modern and familiar. Had he written
And Gordon never gave a hint,
But, having somewhat picked his flint,
Let fly the fatal bullet
That killed that lovely pullet,
it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest.
He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the _Ancient
Mariner_ in the second edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_: 'The
poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the
principal person has no distinct character, either in his
profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been
long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be
supposed himself to partake of something supernatural;
secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted
upon; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary
connexion, do not produce each other; and lastly, that the
imagery is somewhat laboriously accumulated.' Here is an
indictment, to be sure, and drawn, plainly enough, by the
attorney's clerk aforenamed. One would think that the strange
charm of Coleridge's most truly original poems lay in this
very emancipation from the laws of cause and effect.
A hundred times when, roving high and low,
I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
Much pains and little progress, and at once
Some lovely Image in the song rose up,
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea.
 His best poetry was written when he was under the
immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have
felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes
when he speaks of 'those who have been so well pleased that I
should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills
into _their_ main stream' (_Letters, Conversations, and
Recollections of S. T. C._, vol. i, pp. 5-6). Wordsworth
found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of
the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees:
The singing masons building roofs of gold.
This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have
written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the
repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the
singers' (Leigh Hunt's _Autobiography_). Wordsworth writes to
Crabb Robinson in 1837, 'My ear is susceptible to the
clashing of sounds almost to disease.' One cannot help
thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by
 In the Preface to his translation of the _Orlando
Is it a fiend that to a stake
Of fire his desperate self is tethering?
Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,
In solitary ward or cell,
Ten thousand miles from all his brethren?
_Now_--like a tempest-shattered bark
That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
And in a moment to the verge
Is lifted of a foaming surge--
Full suddenly the Ass doth rise!
somewhat too lofty for the service to which they are put.
The movement of Wordsworth's mind was too slow and his mood too
meditative for narrative poetry. He values his own thoughts and
Happy tone
Of meditation slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.
Nature-cure theory does not tend to foster in constitutions less
vigorous than Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugitive and
But when, as I have said, our impartiality has made all those
justify his fame. Even where his genius is wrapped in clouds, the
limitation of range he gains perhaps in intensity and the
Renowned Chaucer lie a thought more nigh
To rare Beaumont, and learned Beaumont lie
A little nearer Spenser;