"You are my true and honorable wife; That visit my sad heart."-Julius Cæsar, Act 2. Does it not seem strange that the imagination of Spenser and Shakspeare should have comprehended the alternate flowing of the blood to and from the heart long before medical science was enriched with the discovery? Thompson has also introduced the Aspen. "Gradual sinks the breeze Into a perfect calm that not a breath Is heard to quiver through the closing woods, The Seasons: Spring. cal specimens that have enriched this rather protracted article, and which I hope have not proved an unacceptable regale to the lovers of intellectual and refined viands. The first is from the pen of Mr. Meek, a gentleman justly celebrated at the South for the delightful lyrics he from time to time gives us. "Ne'er did on mountain lake, Swan the wild mirror break, Breeze 'mid the bending rye, Fountain through flowers are not so divine!" In a ballad of Wm. Shenstone I find a figure similar to Mr. Meek's comparison of the motion of a girl to that of the swan. Shenstone compares to the wild duck and also to flowers. "Soft as the wild-duck's tender young, And glittering near its side; "Fresh as the bordering flowers her bloom; The little halcyon's azure plume Was never half so blue."- Nancy of the Vale. At the conclusion of this article, will you permit me to say one word on the subject of the contempt with which many persons regard the pursuits of literature, and particularly poetry, holding it unworthy the attention of sensible men. Mr. Jefferson has written that "all men are born equal" and the Nation has adopted this as the grand fundamental principle in our political creed. But this equality has been misunderstood by all foreigners, without exception, and many of our own citizens are lamentably ignorant of its true tendency. It means simply legal or political equality, and no intelligent Republican will for a moment resist the doctrine of inequality in a natural or social point of view. Men are not born equal in tastes, in physical or in mental power, and in society there must exist classes, depending upon these differences, and as unequal as are the physical and intellectual endowments of those innumerable and discordant masses which compose the great integral of the Nation. In rights they are equal-in tastes and pursuits and social organization they must be dissimilar, disunited and unequal. Their own happiness requires that the fabric of society should not be composed of parts unsuited to each other united in too intimate association. The great majority of men are mere feedersanimals-whose great business in life is to accumulate money that they may, in the language of the Dean of St. Patrick's, elegant extracts with which I shall close the poeti-To this every thought is devoted. They pursue wealth with all the energies of their nature, as our institutions. It exists every where in civilized though man was alone created for so noble and society, because it arises from a principle in the laudable a purpose. The souls of such men are character of man which will not permit him to love bounded by the circumference of "the Almighty dol- or appreciate that which he cannot understand and lar." Such men despise poetry-though the Bible with which he is incapable of feeling any congeis full of poetry. They despise literary men, litera- niality of taste or disposition. ture and literary avocations, though they are indebted to such men and to such pursuits for the freedom in which they enjoy their own gross and sensual employments. I would that the thousands of men who are now going on in their ceaseless march to eternity, without one thought elevated above the mere necessities of this life, were capable of understanding, of To the innumerable achievements of science loving and of appreciating poetry! It is such a and to the pervading influence of literature, and resource to fall back upon—it so elevates the mind, more particularly to the lofty aspirations of poetry, ennobles the heart-is such a solace in misfortune, how much do we not owe that is useful in com- such a comfort in solitude, such a strengthener of merce and manufactures, that tends to increase the the bonds of honor and virtue, and contains so comforts and diminish the misery of man, that is great a store of quiet and peaceful happiness. noble and salutary in principle and practice? There Poetry has been called light reading, and conis utility in poetry. The verse which the des-sidered on that account unprofitable. Are the wonpised and solitary poet pens in his poverty-stricken derful story of Job, the mystical song of Solomon, chamber incites to noble actions, induces to lofty and the flaming pæans of Isaiah and Habakkuk, character. Its influence is felt through the whole light reading intended merely for amusement? Can frame-work of society, long after the hand which that splendid and complete treatise on philosophy wrote is mouldering in the dust. And when some and theology, the "Essay on Man," be read withblow is stricken for human liberty, or some sen-out profit? The soul of the chivalric Sidney, by tence uttered causing a whole people to vibrate, the reading of a simple English Ballad of the olden perhaps its unseen and incalculable power may have animated the arm that struck or moved the tongue that uttered it. time, was, as he himself has said, aroused as by the blast of a trumpet; and how is it possible to calculate the heroes that have been made, the souls Honor and honesty and patriotism and love of that have been attuned to lofty daring and noble right and repugnance to wrong, respect for ances- deeds, by the innumerable grand poems in our own try, care for posperity, veneration for age, forti- language and in the language of every nation where tude in adversity, temperance in prosperity, are all the art of writing has been known. Poetry, so far the inculcations of poetry. Its legitimate object, from being light reading, is the utmost perfection in connection with science and prose literature, is of thought and language-the concentration of to ameliorate as far as possible the condition of reason-the embodiment of ideality-the vehicle man, to emancipate him from the shackles of error, and by enlarging the liberality of his judgement and his affections, to contribute to his liberty of pursuing that course for happiness which his taste may desire and his reason select. of religion and morality; clothed with the spirit of harmony and beauty it is an angel whose mission is to expand the intellect and to attune the soul to something higher and nobler than the "eating, drinking and sleeping" of mere mortality. There is another class of men, greatly in the We have seen a Great British Minister cheering minority, however, who are the antipodes to those his hours of exile with literary avocations, and of the leaden soul of whom I have spoken, who I will end this gossipping epistle with a quotation are literary men, who write and who read-who from the great Roman Lawyer and Orator whom think-whose pleasures are intellectual, whose that minister has characterised as "That great aspirations are high, whose souls are alive with all man, who had been the savior of his country; those nobler sentiments which make the gold of who had feared in the support of that cause neither the insults of a desperate party nor the daggers of the assassins."* buman nature. There is and always has been a deadly hostility between these two classes confined to no country and to no age, but raging with as much rancour under the Dominion of the Cæsars and in the remoter days of Pericles, in the palmy days of Athenian splendor, as at the present day, in Aristocratic Britain or Republican America. It is the case in Edinburgh as well as in New-York, though it has been erroneously attributed to some peculiarity in * Vide some of Sir Walter Scott's letters in Lockhart's Life of Scott. Cicero in his "Oration for the Poet Archias" says, "Sit igitur, judices, sanctum apud vos, humanissimos homines, hoc poëtæ nomen, quod nulla unquam barbaria violavit. Saxa et solitudines voci respondent, bestiæ sæpe immanes cantu flectuntur, atque consistunt: nos instituti rebus optimis non poëtarum voce moveatur ?" Allow me, Mr. Editor, to conclude with the hope "Reflections on Exile" by the Right Hon. Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolinbroke. that this article will prove neither too long nor too But this well-founded expectation is immediately uninteresting for the pages of your Journal. I shall dashed to the ground by the following sportive certainly feel myself honored in seeing it there pub-lines on a lished. Or, as Byron has it, "The middling poet's miserable volumes Are cursed alike by gods, and men, and columns." And, if it be true, we fear that Mr. Tennyson and his works stand a strong chance of being condemned forever, although, indeed, he can scarcely come under the category even of the "poetæ mediocres." In reading his verses, we are continually reminded of Swift's lines, in his "Rhapsody on Poetry," "From bad to worse and worse they fall, In Poetry the height we know,— "Tis only infinite below." Thus, we speedily ascertain the height of Mr. Tennyson's poetry, but the depth is a more difficult question. We are continually cheated into the hope, that we have reached the lowest pitch of folly and bathos, "But, in the lowest deep, a lower deep, Still threatening to devour me, opens wide." We find that we have to begin our search anew, and, after various efforts, settle down in the conviction that "the worst of all" is not to be found. For instance, when we meet with an inanity like the following, we sincerely hope that there can be nothing worse. CIRCUMSTANCE. "Two children in two neighbor villages Two graves, grass-green, beside a gray church tower, * It may be as well to inform the reader, that the above SKIPPING-ROPE. "Sure never yet was Antelope Stand off! or else my skipping-rope How lightly whirls the skipping-rope ! Go, get you gone, you muse and mope, Nay, dearest, teach me how to hope, This is exactly such a conversation as we might expect to pass between a man like Mr. Tennyson and his Dulcinea, but it is hardly worth putting forth to the world. Our search after "the worst of all" is again renewed by lighting on the two songs to the owl. Of these elegant compositions, the first is sufficiently characterized by its first and last line "When cats run home, and light is come,- To the second, we should render injustice, did we copy less than the last stanza. "I would mock thy chauut anew Thee to woo to thy tu-whit Tu-whoo, tu-whit, tu-whit, tu-wo0-0-0!". The reader will mark the exquisite puns contained in the third and fourth lines, which we have italicised for his convenience. These extracts are sportive, and, in intention at least, witty. But Mr. Tennyson's command over the pathetic is even more remarkable than that over the humorous. How deeply does he not call upon the finest sympathies of our nature by the following inimitable instance of climax, from the affecting ballad of "Oriana!" A lover in battle, aims an arrow at a foeman, but, somehow or other, "The bitter arrow went aside, Oriana! The false, false arrow went aside, The damned arrow glanced aside, It pierced thy heart, my love, my bride, Oriana! Thy heart, my life, my love, my bride, Oriana!" By this masterly selection of adjectives, we are is in rhyme, or, at least, is meant to be so; a fact which brought to observe the almost maniac earnestness we did not discover until we had perused it for the third time in the hope of extracting some meaning from it. We with which the unhappy being dwells upon the found, at last, that it was merely a kind of double of Shaks-fatal accident which has bereaved him, and how, peare's "Seven Ages." in repeating it, his feelings are gradually worked ceived that such profanity finds its own excuse in the terrible anxiety of the unfortunate lover to lay Every turn and glance of thine,* Every lineament divine, There is a good deal of melody about this, and the blame on anything but himself. In all the the words are disposed so as to sound very much range of modern poetry, we remember but one pas-like sense; but it is the sense of the eye and the sage which will bear the slightest comparison with this. We, of course, allude to the celebrated and beautiful scene in which King Arthur is informed of the tragic end of Tom Thumb, by the villainous Red Cow. ear, not of the mind, for if we analyze it, we will find that it is merely Byron's idea, almost smothered beneath an enormous pile of meaningless words. By the way, his odes to his numerous Dulcineas are usually of a somewhat singular nature. Here, in the commencement and conclusion of one addressed to a maiden whose nomme-de-guerre is "Lilian," and who appears to have been so much amused at his peculiar manner of popping the question, that his dignity was outraged. 'Airy, fairy, Lilian, When I ask her if she love me, Praying all I can, If prayers will not hush thee, Like a rose-leaf will I crush thee, Mr. Tennyson appears to be a man of slender intellect, who has inflamed his imagination by believing himself a poet, and has supplied its numerous vacuities by studying the works of others. Thus, as might be expected, his works are one long imitation, sometimes of one poet, and sometimes of another, according to the state of his mind, or the nature of his reading. We trace it in the plots of his ballads, the cast of his thoughts, and in his very style and diction. A few striking instances of this will be noticed as we proceed, but we may as well throw together here a few minor ones which have occurred to us in glancing over his volumes. He has taken divers old women's tales, such as every child has by heart, and cooked them up into long, prosy ballads, completely extracting He is certainly sanguinary, when he wishes to all the naive spirit that is in the original. For crush young ladies "like rose-leaves," because instance, the worn-out incident of a nobleman's they cannot, for their little souls, help laughing at wooing a maiden in humble guise, which has served Were he to follow out this destructive plan all such unfortunate poetasters, until it ought, in fullest extent, he would be a second Nero, common charity, to be set aside as superannuated, and would wish that his readers were collected in is made to do duty, in naked simplicity, in a poem one rose. more than a hundred lines long. A child changed But, to resume the subject of Mr. Tennyson's in the cradle constitutes another of five pages; originality, we may observe, that his usual style is an old fairy-tale, saddled with prologue and epi- a kind of dreamy imitation of the worst parts of logue, moral and "l'envoi," occupies nearly twenty Coleridge and Wordsworth, occasionally throwing pages; and Mr. Tennyson has even gone so far as in an antiquated word or phrase. In a happy manto give us, in the "Miller's Daughter," as original, ner, peculiarly his own, he has managed to mingle, a wretchedly paraphrastic translation of Anacreon's in one common abortion, now the cloudy mystibeautiful little ode " Η Ταντάλου ποτ' εστη. κ. τ. 66 T. λ." As an instance of pilfered thoughts, we may give the following from one of his numerous addresses to his various lady-loves. It is nothing more than an amplification and degradation of Byron's exquisite lines in his description of Zuleika. "Who hath not proved how feebly words essay "How may full-sailed verse express, The luxuriant symmetry VOL. X-31 him. cism of the one, and now the impoverished simplicity which marked the earlier efforts of the other. To make the composition complete, he has adopted Keats' style of rhyming, bringing in ideas for the sake of the rhyme, and contenting himself with a faint jingle of sound; but of this, more anon. Coleridge, however, would seem to be his favorite. The attempted imitation of him may be seen in several of the extracts already given, and we might quote dozens more, although our limits will admit of but one. He has an almost interminable poem, entitled "The Palace of Art," of which the style is affectedly Coleridge's, and the design a base imitation of Thompson's inimitable "Castle of Indolence; but It commences thus-- "I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, I said, 'Oh soul! make merry and carouse, "A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnished brass, Suddenly scaled the light." He must have searched long before finding a "location" so singularly adapted to his purpose. But, granting this, we must accompany him through a long and verbose description of the said "lordly pleasure-house," in which Thompson's is used as a ground plan. When that is safely accomplished, we find his soul, by way of making merry and carousing, begins to metaphysicize in the following profound, yet lucid stanzas: "From shape to shape, at first, within the womb, The brain is modelled," she began. "And, thro' all phases of all thought, I come "All Nature widens upwards. Evermore This is worthy of the author of the "Biographia Literaria" himself. But, to return. It is not to be supposed, that a course of such dissipation and carousing could last forever. Accordingly, though three years passed away happily enough, during the fourth "But in dark corners of her palace stood On white-eyed phantoms, weeping tears of blood, "And hollow shades, enclosing hearts of flame, On corpses three months old at noon she came, James. A quarto to. John. What is it now ? John. Whose house is that I see Beyond the water-mill. James. Sir Edward Head's, &c. And this is called poetry! It is worse than Southey's worst Juvenile Eclogue. Having now described some of Mr. Tennyson's borrowed plumage, we will proceed to examine the peculiarities which mark his own feathers, and should any inconsistency appear to exist in the faults that we find with him, we beg the reader to bear in mind that he has so skilfully contrived to mingle the most opposite errors, that it is almost impossible, in exposing them, to steer clear of apparent contradictions. For instance, we have just quoted a passage as an example of the most naked simplicity. Now, in what appears to be Mr. Tennyson's natural style, one of his greatest faults is a certain vague redundancy of words, which he piles on each other, without eliciting the slightest sense. He will thus ramble on, page after page, perpetually beguiling us with the hope that we are | on the brink of something, until, tired of exclaiming "quo tendis," we retrace our steps, and find that the whole consists of nothing but nonsenseverses. We can almost believe that Horace had him in view in the beginning of his Art of Poetry. 86 Credite, Pisones, isti tabulæ fore librum Persimilem, cujus, velut ægri somnia, vanæ Fingentur species; ut nec pes, nec caput uni Reddatur formæ. * * * Amphora cæpit Institui; currente rotâ, cur urceus exit? As examples of this fault, we may mention a long collection of double-trochaïcs entitled “Lockesly Hall," which occupies twenty pages; "The Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," of thirTwo Voices" of thirty; "The Lady of Shalott:" And this is worthy the author of "The Ancient Mariner." But me must own, that we have no very clear idea what were these three-months-old corpses, uncertain shapes and hollow shades, with their white eyes, tears of blood, dim-fretted foreheads, and hearts of flame; still, we are willing to believe that it was all very terrible, and are, therefore, not at all surprised that it brought his unhappy soul to her senses, and that she left her "Palace of Art," as we do, with disgust; although, unlike us, she looked forward to returning to it at teen pages, and "The Vision of Sin," of as many. some more auspicious period, when these "day By the way, we cannot resist the temptation of night-mares" should have taken themselves off. Now, in the above poem, Mr. Tennyson is evi- quoting a few lines from this said " Vision of Sin," it is such a piece of "rhethoricke sweete." In it, dently laboring under the remarkable delusion of supposing that he is illustrating an important psy-imitated any body or any thing. It is a feather of we certainly cannot accuse Mr. Tennyson of having chological fact. As in this singular opinion he ap-his own, and let him put it in his cap and wear it. pears to be supported by some of his admirers, (the Edinburg Review, among others,) we would recom *"Memoirs of Popular Delusions," by Charles Mackay. |