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together with, at least once, in the piece of lovely lunacy called 'The Ape,' a real achievement in the grotesque. His two task-masters, 'Work' and 'Leisure,' both inspire him to more than usual freedom of fancy. And it is among the 'Album Verses' that we find not only those 'whitest thoughts in whitest dress,' which, for the Quakeress, Lucy Barton,

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but also the solemn fancy of the lines 'In My Own Album,' in which a formal and antique measure is put to modern uses, and the jesting figure of 'My soul, an album bright,' is elaborated with serious wit in the manner of the 'metaphysical' poets. And it is under the same covers, and as if done after the same pattern, that we find the most completely successful of his poems, the lines 'On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born.' The subject was one which could not but awaken all his faculties, stirring in him pity, compassionate wonder, a tender whimsicalness; the thought of death and the thought of childhood being always sure to quicken his imagination to its finest utterance. There is good poetical substance, and the form, though not indeed original, is one in which he moves with as natural an air as if he were actually writing two hundred years ago. It was in this brief, packed, 'matterful' way, full of pleasant surprises, that his favourite poets wrote; the metre is Wither's, with some of the woven subtleties of Marvell.

With Lamb, more than with most poets, the subject-matter of his work in verse determines its value. He needs to 'load every rift with ore,' not for the bettering, but for the mere existence, of a poem. In his pleasant review of his own poems he protests, in the name of Vincent Bourne, against 'the vague, dreamy, wordy, matterless poetry of this empty age,' and finds satisfaction in Bourne's Latin verses because 'they fix upon something.' For him that 'something' had to be very definite, in the subject-matter of his own verse; and it was not

with the mere humility of self-depreciation that he wrote to Coleridge in 1796: 'Not that I relish other people's poetry less their's comes from 'em without effort, mine is the difficult operation of a brain scanty of ideas, made more difficult by disuse.' He was a poet to whom prose was the natural language, and in verse he could not trust himself to rove freely, though he had been born a gipsy of the mind.

Even in his best work in verse Lamb has no singing voice. The poetry of those lines 'On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born' is quite genuine, and it has made for itself a form adequate to its purpose; but the verse, after all, is rather an accompaniment than a lifting; and 'la lyre,' it has been rightly said, 'est en quelque manière un instrument ailé.' He speaks in metre, he does not sing; but he speaks more delicately in metre than any one else not born a singer.

CHARLES LLOYD (1775-1839) 1

'YOUR verses are as good and wholesome as prose,' Lamb wrote to Lloyd in the autumn of 1823, long after he had ceased to see him. They have indeed a great resemblance to prose, but are by no means as good as good prose. In his first book of verse, 'Poems on Various Subjects,' 1795, through which he met Coleridge, there is an Ode to Simplicity, and a sonnet 'occasioned by a Domestic's tears at parting from the Author.' These, as well as a sorry address to a beggar woman, seem to have anticipated the unconscious humour of the beginnings of Lamb, Wordsworth and Coleridge. None of the

1 (1) Poems on Various Subjects, 1795. (2) Poems by S. T. Coleridge, second edition, to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd, 1797. (3) Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, 1798. (4) Lines suggested by the Fast, appointed on Wednesday, February 27, 1799, 1799. (5) The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, 3 vols., 1815. (6) Desultory Thoughts in London, Titus and Gissippus, with other Poems, 1821. (7) The Duke of Ormond, a Tragedy, and Beritola, a Tale, 1822. (8) Poems,

three, however, not Southey even, arrived at the pitch of this last stanza, with its inconceivable conclusion:

'Ah! what shall I do, I am poor

Gentle maid!

And nip'd by chill misery's breath

Yet my last penny take,

It may buy a small cake,

And preserve thee a moment from death,
Well-a-day!'

Coleridge, who was afterward to mock Lloyd, Lamb, and himself for these dangerous qualities, was soon writing a sonnet addressed 'To a Friend who asked, How I felt when the Nurse first presented my Infant to me.' In 1797 there appeared a volume of 'Poems by S. T. Coleridge, second edition, to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd.' 'My Coleridge, take the wanderer to thy heart,' he writes, in the muling manner of the moment; but the gloom is already overshadowing him, and we find Poems on 'The Melancholy Man' and 'The Maniac':

'Poor Maniac, I envy thy state

When with sorrow and anguish I shrink;
When shall I be wise- and forget!

For his madness to feel and to think!'

The Quaker appears in the next book of 'blank Verse' written by Lloyd and Lamb, and from this time we get moral musings against 'this evil spirit misnamed Liberty,' together with more wailing of this sort:

'But what have I done that I'm thus forsaken?
Whom have I injured that I'm thus neglected?'

Coleridge and Lamb, no doubt, would be meant, with whom he had quarrelled. The 'desultory Thoughts on London,' written in ottava rima, wandered in a certainly desultory manner, from 'the inefficacy of all worldly objects,' to 'reflection on unfortunate feelings' (of quite a kindly character) and on 'the reformation produced in Newgate by Mrs. Fry.' A tragedy

in verse came next, dull and heavy, with notes and prefaces sometimes as amusing as this: 'It was not until the following Tragedy had gone through the press to nearly the middle of the fourth act, that it struck the author that the feelings of some more serious friends might be hurt by it.' Three volumes of translations from Alfieri had preceded this volume, and it was followed in 1823 by 'Poems,' about which Lamb wrote his criticism. Lamb also said: 'Your lines are not to be understood reading on one leg.'

JOSEPH BLANCO WHITE (1775-1840) 1

JOSEPH BLANCO WHITE was a Spaniard by birth and an Irishman by nationality. He was ordained a priest in Spain, but he abandoned the Catholic Church and came to London as the editor of a Spanish newspaper, afterwards taking orders in the Anglican Church, and finally relapsing into Unitarianism. He is remembered in English literature for a single sonnet, of great beauty, which Coleridge and Leigh Hunt praised with enthusiasm: Coleridge defining it as 'the finest and most grandly conceived sonnet in our language.' The last line suggests Coleridge, in its imaginative philosophy—

'If Light conceals so much, wherefore not Life?'

and an earlier line has a single flash of rhetorical splendour:

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1 Life of Rev. Joseph Blanco White, edited by J. H. Thorn, 3 vols., 1845.

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THOMAS DERMODY was a lyric poet whose best verses were concerned with himself, from the time of the 'Poems written between the thirteenth and sixteenth years of his age,' bidding 'No Satan come, with sawcer eyes,

In shape of Fellows!'

to the later years when he wrote odes to himself:

'Thou prince of jovial fellows,

Whose little span

Is spent 'twixt poetry and ale house.'

Dermody died at the age of twenty-seven in a wretched hovel, shivering over a few embers; an insatiable thirst for drink, together with habits so eccentric, principles so wild, and passions so perverted,' had ruined his life, and left him to die with a 'Hudibras' on the table by his side, and the cynical words on his life: 'You see I am merry to the last.' He wrote with immense facility: his knowledge, from a boy, was astonishing; at fourteen he had acquired Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and a little Spanish. His poems are crude, coarse, vigorous, with a genuine lyrical swing, after this manner:

'Some folks there are, gay, trim and fine,

In silk and sattins, idly flaming;

But she I love is all divine,

Their artful toil and dresses shaming.'

He calls himself 'a giant of genius,' and writes ('oddest of odd compositions') his own epitaph:

'Unnoticed for talents he had, and forgot,

But most famously noticed for faults he had not.'

1 (1) Poems, consisting of Essays, Lyric, Elegiac, etc., by Thomas Dermody, written between the thirteenth and sixteenth years of his age, 1792. (2) The Harp of Erin, 2 vols., 1807.

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