P. 3, No. iii.—There seems no reason to doubt that Sir Walter Raleigh
was the author of this poem, and that the initials W. R. with which it
appears in Davison’s Rhapsody indicate truly the authorship. It is
abundantly worthy of him; there have been seldom profounder thoughts
more perfectly expressed than in the fourth and fifth stanzas. A certain
obscurity in the poem will demand, but will also repay, study; and for
its right understanding we must keep in mind that ‘affection’ is here
used as in our English Bible, where it is the rendering of πἁθος (Rom.
i. 26; Col. 3, 5), and that ‘affection’ and ‘desire’ are regarded as
interchangeable and equivalent.
P. 4, No. iv.—See Spedding’s Works of Lord Bacon, vol. vii. p. 267
sqq., for the external evidence making it reasonably probable, but
certainly not lifting above all doubt, that the ascription of these
lines to Lord Bacon is a right one.
P. 6, No. vi.—This very remarkable poem first appeared in the second
edition of Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody, 1608; itself a sufficient
disproof of the often-repeated assertion that Raleigh wrote it the night
before his execution, 1618. At the same time this leaves untouched the
question whether he may not at some earlier day have been its author.
There is a certain amount of evidence in favour of this tradition, which
is carefully put together in Hannah’s Poems by Sir Henry Wotton, Sir
Walter Raleigh, and others, 1845, pp. 89-98.
P. 10, No. viii.—The author of these beautiful lines was a minister of
the Scotch Kirk at the close of the sixteenth century. Several stanzas
have been omitted.
P. 21, No. xviii.—This sonnet is the first among the commendatory poems
prefixed to the original edition of The Fairy Queen. As original in
conception as it is grand in execution, it is about the finest
compliment which was ever paid by poet to poet, such as it became
Raleigh to indite and Spenser to receive. Yet it labours under a serious
defect. The great poets of the past lose no whit of their glory because
later poets are found worthy to share it. Petrarch in his lesser, and
Homer in his greater sphere, are just as illustrious since Spenser
appeared as before.
P. 23, No. xx.—I have marked this poem as anonymous, the evidence which
ascribes it to Sir Walter Raleigh being insufficient to prove him the
author of it. It first appeared in England’s Helicon, 1600. In all
known copies of this edition ‘Ignoto’ has been pasted over W. R., the
original signature which the poem bore. This may have arisen from a
discovery on the part of the editor that the poem was not Raleigh’s; but
also may be explained by his unwillingness to have his authorship of it
declared; so that there is here nothing decisive one way or the other.
Other external evidence bearing on the question I believe there is none,
except Izaak Walton’s assertion fifty-three years later (Complete
Angler, 1653, p. 64) that it ‘was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his
younger days.’ No doubt then there was a tradition to this effect;
though ‘younger’ must not be pushed too far, as Raleigh was ten years
older than Marlowe, to whose poem this is a reply. All that we can say
is that there is no name in English literature so great, but that the
authorship of these lines, if this could be ascertained, would be an
additional honour to it.—l. 21-24: In the second edition of Walton’s
Complete Angler, 1655, this stanza appears—I should say, for the
first time, were not this fact brought into question by its nearly
contemporaneous appearance in a broad-sheet (see Roxburgh Ballads,
vol. i. p. 205) which seems by its type to belong, as those expert in
such matters affirm, to the date 1650-55. The stanza there runs,
‘What should you talk of dainties then!
Of better meat than serveth men?
All that is vain; this only good,
Which God doth bless and send for food.’
While Walton may have made, it is also possible that he may have found
ready made to his hand, this beautiful addition to the poem.
P. 24, No. xxii.—Of this poem Dr. Guest (History of English Rhythms,
vol. ii. p. 273) has said, ‘It appears to me extremely beautiful,’ a
judgment from which none who are capable of recognizing poetry when they
see it will dissent. It is found in Campion’s Observations on the Art
of English Poesy, London, 1602. The purpose of the book is mainly to
prove that rhyme is altogether an unnecessary appendage to English
verse; that this does not require, and indeed is better without it. Had
he offered to his readers many lyrics like this, he might have done much
more than by all his arguments he has done to bring them to his opinion.
As it is, the main value which the Observations possess consists in
this exquisite lyric, and, mediately, in the admirable Apology for
Rhyme on Daniel’s part which they called out.
Pp. 27, 28, No. xxv. xxvi.—Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets may be ‘vain and
amatorious,’ as Milton has called his prose romance of The Arcadia;
but they possess grace, fancy, and a passion which makes itself felt
even under the artificial forms of a Platonic philosophy. They are
addressed to one, who, if the course of true love had run smooth, should
have been his wife. When, however, through the misunderstanding of
parents, or through some other cause, she had become the wife of
another, Platonic as they are, they would far better have remained
unwritten.
P. 35, No. xli.—Pope somewhere speaks of ‘a very mediocre poet, one
Drayton,’ and it will be remembered that when Goldsmith visited Poets’
Corner, seeing his monument he exclaimed, ‘Drayton, I never heard of him
before.’ It must be confessed that Drayton, who wrote far too much,
wrote often below himself, and has left not a little to justify the
censure of the one, and to excuse the ignorance of the other. At the
same time only a poet could describe the sun at his rising,
‘With rosy robes and crown of flaming gold;’
and this heroic ballad has a very genuine and martial tone about it. It
is true that every celebration of Agincourt must show pale and faint
beside Shakespeare’s epic drama, Henry the Fifth, and this will as
little endure as any other to be brought even into remote comparison
with that; but for all this it ought not to be forgotten.
P. 39, No. xlii. l. 9: ‘Clarius,’ a surname of Apollo, derived from his
famous temple at Claros, in Asia Minor.—l. 27-30: Prometheus was
‘Japhet’s line,’ being the son of Iapetus, whom Jonson has not resisted
the temptation of identifying, as others have done, with Japhet the son
of Noah, and calling by his name. According to one legend it was by the
assistance of Minerva, ‘the issue of Jove’s brain,’ that Prometheus
ascended to heaven, and there stole from the chariot of the Sun the fire
which he brought down to earth; to all which there is reference here.
P. 40, No. xliii.—It would be difficult not to think that we had here
the undeveloped germ of Il Penseroso of Milton, if this were not shown
to be impossible by the fact that Milton’s poem was published two years
previously to this.
P. 41, No. xliv.—Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised
at least as much as he deserves. This may be so, yet taking into account
the finished beauty of such poems as this and No. 1. of this collection,
poems which, as far as they go, leave nothing to be desired, he has
scarcely been praised more than he deserves. How in earlier times he
was rated the fact that there were twenty-four editions of his poems
will sufficiently testify; though possibly the creed which he professed,
and the death which he died, may have had something to do with this.
Robert Southwell was a seminary priest, and was executed at Tyburn in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the
persistent plottings of too many of these at once against the life of
the Sovereign and the life of the State must altogether fail to justify
or excuse.
P. 44, No. xlvi.—The judgment of one great poet on another his
contemporary, must always have a true interest for us, and it was with
serious regret that I omitted Ben Jonson’s ever-memorable lines on
Shakespeare. Many things a contemporary sees, as none who belong to a
later time can see them; knows, as none other can know; and even where
he does not tell us much which we greatly care to learn about the other,
he is sure to tell us something, whether he means it or not, about
himself and about his age. English literature possesses many judgments
of this kind. What Ben Jonson did for Shakespeare, Cartwright, a
strong-thoughted writer if not an eminent poet, and more briefly
Cleveland here, have done in turn for Jonson; Denham for Cowley; Cowley
for Crashaw; Carew for Donne; Marvell for Milton; Dryden for Oldham.
There is not one of these which may not be read with profit by the
careful student of English literature; and certainly Cleveland must be
allowed very happily to have seized here some of the main excellences of
Jonson.
P. 45, No. xlvii.—Another poem on the same subject, in Byrd’s Psalms,
Sonnets, and Songs, is as a whole inferior to this, but yields one
stanza which is equal in merit to any here:
‘I wish but what I have at will;
I wander not to seek for more;
I like the plain; I climb no hill;
In greatest storms I sit on shore;
And laugh at them that toil in vain
To get what must be lost again.’
P. 46, No. xlix.—Shakespeare’s Sonnets are so heavily laden with
meaning, so double-shotted, if one may so speak, with thought, so
penetrated and pervaded with a repressed passion, that, packed as all
this is into narrowest limits, it sometimes imparts no little obscurity
to them; and they often require to be heard or read not once but many
times, in fact to be studied, before they reveal to us all the treasures
of thought and feeling which they contain. It is eminently so with this
one. The subject, the bitter delusion of all sinful pleasures, the
reaction of a swift remorse which inevitably dogs them, Shakespeare must
have most deeply felt, as he has expressed himself upon it most
profoundly. I know no picture of this at all so terrible in its truth as
in The Rape of Lucrece the description of Tarquin after he has
successfully wrought his deed of shame. But this sonnet on the same
theme is worthy to stand by its side.
P. 48, No. lii.—These lines are appended to the second edition of
Wastell’s Microbiblion, 1629; they are not found in the first,
published under another title in 1623. I have not disturbed the
ascription of them to him, although, considering the general
worthlessness of the book, it must be considered very doubtful indeed.
On the question of the authorship of these lines see Hannah, Poems and
Psalms of Henry King, 1843, p. cxviii.
P. 57, No. lxii.—There are at least half-a-dozen texts of this poem
with an infinite variety of readings, these being particularly numerous
in the third stanza, which I must needs think corrupt as it now stands.
The Reliquiæ Wottonianæ, in which it was first published, appeared in
1651, some twelve years after Wotton’s death; but much earlier MS.
copies are in existence; thus one in the handwriting of Edward Alleyn,
apparently of date 1616. Ben Jonson visited Drummond of Hawthornden two
or three years later, and is reported by him to have had these lines by
heart.
P. 58, No. lxiii.—This poem Bishop Percy believes to have been first
printed in a volume of Miscellaneous Poems by different hands,
published by David Lewis, 1726. The date and authorship is discussed on
several occasions in Notes and Queries, vol. iii. (1st Series) pp. 27,
108, 155, but without much light being thrown upon either.
P. 60, No. lxv.—Carew is commonly grouped with Waller, and subordinated
to him. He is indeed immensely his superior. Waller never wrote a
love-song in grace and fancy to compare with this; while in many of
Carew’s lighter pieces there is an underlying vein of earnestness, which
is wholly wanting in the other.
P. 62, No. lxviii.—Waller’s fame has sadly, but not undeservedly,
declined since the time when it used to be taken for granted that he had
virtually invented English poetry, or one might almost say, the English
language; since an editor of his poems (1690) could write that his was
‘a name that carries everything in it that is either great or graceful
in poetry. He was indeed the parent of English verse, and the first that
showed us our tongue had beauty and numbers in it. The tongue came into
his hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first, and to that degree
that all artists since him have admired the workmanship without
pretending to mend it.’ Compare the twenty-two lines devoted to him in
Addison’s Account of the greatest English Poets, which includes
Congreve, but not Shakespeare! For myself, I confess that I did not find
it very easy to select from the whole range of his poems one which I
much cared to quote. He appears in this to have had in his eye the
graceful epigram of Rufinus beginning,
Πἑμπω σοι, Ρυδὁκλεια, τὁδε στἑφος,
and ending with these lines,
ταῦτα στεψαμένη, λῆξον μεγδλαυχος ἐοῦσα,
ἀνθεις καἰ λήγεις καἰ σὐ καἰ ό στέφανος.
P. 63, No. lxx.—Castara, to whom these beautiful lines are addressed,
was a daughter of William Herbert, first Lord Percy, and either was
already, or afterwards became, the wife of the poet. There are no purer
and few more graceful records of a noble attachment than that which is
contained in the poems to which Habington has given the name of the lady
of his happy love. Phillips, writing in 1675, says, ‘His poems are now
almost forgotten.’ How little they deserved this, how finished at times
his versification was, lines such as the following—they are the first
stanza of a poem for which I could not find room—will abundantly prove.
It is headed, Against them who lay Unchastity to the sex of Women.
‘They meet with but unwholesome springs,
And summers which infectious are,
They hear but when the mermaid sings,
And only see the falling star,
Who ever dare
Affirm no woman chaste and fair.’
P. 76, No. lxxviii.—Milton’s English Sonnets are only seventeen in all:
‘Soul-animating strains, alas! too few.’
They are so far beyond all doubt the greatest in the language that it is
a matter of curious interest to note the utter incapacity of Johnson to
recognize any greatness in them at all. The utmost which he will allow
is that ‘three of them are not bad;’ and he and Hannah More once set
themselves to investigate the causes of their badness, the badness
itself being taken for granted. Johnson’s explanation of this contains
an illustration lively enough to be worth quoting: ‘Why, Madam,’ he
said, ‘Milton’s was a genius that could hew a Colossus out of a rock,
but could not carve heads on cherry-stones.’
P. 76, No. lxxix.—I have obtained room for these lines by excluding
another very beautiful poem by the same author, his Song of the
Emigrants in Bermuda. To this I was moved in part by the fact that the
Song has found its way into many modern collections; these lines, so
far as I know, into none; in part by my conviction that we have here a
poem which, though less popular than the Song, is of a still higher
mood. If after this praise, these lines should, at the first perusal,
disappoint a thoughtful reader, I would ask him to read them a second
time, and, if needful, a third. Sooner or later they will reveal the
depth and riches of meaning which under their unpretending forms lie
concealed.
P. 78, No. lxxx.—This poem will acquire a profound interest, for those
at least who count there is something better in the world than Art, when
we read it in the light of the fact mentioned by Lord Clarendon in his
History of the Rebellion about its author, namely, that ‘after fifty
years spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been,
he died with the greatest remorse for that license, and the greatest
manifestations of Christianity that his best friends could desire;’ so
that in the end the hope which he ventures here timidly to utter was
fulfilled, and one thorn ‘from the dry leafless trunk on Golgotha’ did
prove to him more precious ‘than all the flourishing wreaths by
laureates worn.’
P. 82, No. lxxxiv., l. 8: Campbell has transferred ‘the world’s gray
fathers’ into his poem on the Rainbow; but has no more to say for the
author of these exquisite lines and of three other poems as perfect in
form as in spirit which enrich this volume than this, ‘He is one of the
harshest even of the inferior order of the school of conceit, but he has
some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amid his harsh pages, like
wild flowers on a barren heath.’
P. 83, No. lxxxv. l. 133, 134: These lines are very perplexing. Milton’s
lines on Shakespeare abundantly attest that the true character of the
greatness of England’s greatest poet rose distinct and clear before the
mind of him who in greatness approached him the nearest. But in this
couplet can we trace any sense of the same discernment? ‘Fancy’s child’
may pass, seeing that ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ were not effectually
desynonymized when Milton wrote; nay, ‘fancy’ was for him the greater
name (see Paradise Lost, v. 100-113). ‘Sweetest’ Shakespeare
undoubtedly was, but then the sweetness is so drawn up into the power,
that this is about the last epithet one would be disposed to use about
him. And then what could Milton possibly have intended by ‘his native
woodnotes wild’—the sort of praise which might be bestowed, though with
no eminent fulness, upon Clare, or a poet of his rank. The Midsummer
Night’s Dream and As You Like It are perhaps the most idyllic of his
plays; but the perfect art controlling at every step the prodigality of
nature, in these as in all his works, takes away all fitness from
language such as this, and I can only wonder that of all the
commentators on Milton not one has cared to explain to us what the poet
here meant.
P. 87, No. lxxxvi. l. 18: Memnon, king of Ethiopia (nigri Memnonis arma,
Virgil), who according to the cyclic poets was slain before the walls of
Troy by Achilles, is described in the Odyssey, xi. 522, as the most
beautiful of the warriors there. A sister of his might therefore be
presumed to be beautiful no less. Milton did not, as some say, invent
the sister. Mention is made of her, her name is Hemera (Ήμἑρα), in
Dictys Cretensis. It is she who pays the last honours to the ashes of
her brother.—l. 19: Cassiopeia, ‘starred’ as having been translated
into the heaven, and become a constellation there. She offended the
Nereids by contesting the prize of beauty with them. Milton concludes
that as an Ethiopian she was black, but this is nowhere said.—l.
108-115: Milton does not introduce Chaucer in his Allegro, but in his
Penseroso; seeing in him something beside ‘the merry bard,’ which is
all that Addison can see in the most pathetic poet in the English
language.—l. 116-120: Spenser is here alluded to, of course—‘our sage
and serious poet, Spenser,’ as Milton loved to call him. Contrast his
judgment of Spenser’s allegory, as being something
‘Where more is meant than meets the ear;’
with Addison’s,
‘The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below.’
P. 92, No. lxxvii.—Wordsworth in the Preface to an early edition of his
works calls attention to Cotton’s well-nigh forgotten poetry, some of it
abundantly deserving the oblivion into which it has fallen, but some of
a very rare excellence in its kind. This he does, quoting largely from
his Ode to Winter, mainly with the purpose of illustrating the
distinction between fancy, of which these poems, in his judgment, have
much, and imagination, of which they have little or none. They have a
merit which certainly strikes me more than any singular wealth of fancy
which I can find in them; and which to Wordsworth also must have
constituted their chief attraction, namely, the admirable English in
which they are written. They are sometimes prosaic, sometimes blemished
by more serious faults; but for homely vigour and purity of language,
for the total absence of any attempt to conceal the deficiency of strong
and high imagination by a false poetic diction—purple rags torn from
other men’s garments, and sewn upon his own—he may take his place among
the foremost masters of the tongue. Coleridge has said as much
(Biographia Literaria, vol. ii. p. 96): ‘There are not a few poems in
that volume [the works of Cotton] replete with every excellence of
thought, image, and passion which we expect or desire in the poetry of
the milder Muse, and yet so worded that the reader sees no reason either
in the selection or the order of the words why he may not have said the
very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed
he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury
to his meaning.’ I will add that this poem is drawn out to too great a
length for its own interests, or for my limited space; and several
stanzas toward the close have been omitted.
P. 95, No. lxxxviii.—Johnson has justly praised the ‘unequalled
fertility of invention’ displayed in this poem, and in its pendant,
Against Hope. To estimate all the wonder of them, they should be
read each in the light of the other. In some lines of wretched
criticism, which Addison has called An Account of the greatest English
Poets, there is one exception to the shallowness or falseness of most
of his judgments about them, namely in his estimate of Cowley, which is
much higher than that of the present day, though not too high; wherein
too he has well seized his merits and defects, both of which this poem
exemplifies. These are the first six lines:
‘Great Cowley then (a mighty genius) wrote,
O’errun with wit, and lavish of his thought;
His turns too closely on the reader press,
He more had pleased us, had he pleased us less;
One glittering thought no sooner strikes our eyes
With silent wonder but new wonders rise.’
P. 96, No. lxxxix.—It is evident that in this Prologue and in that
which follows Dryden is on his good behaviour; he has indeed so much
respect for his audience that in all the eighty-five lines which compose
them he has not one profane, and, still more remarkable, not one
indecent allusion. Neither are the compliments which he pays his
hearers, as is too often the case, fulsome and from their exaggeration
offensive, but such as became him to pay and them to receive, and there
is an eminent appropriateness to the time and place in them all. Though
no very accurate scholar, he is yet quite scholar enough to talk with
scholars on no very unequal footing; while the most eminent of those who
heard him must have felt that in strength and opulence of thought, and
in power of clothing this thought in appropriate forms, he immeasurably
surpassed them all.
P. 99, No. xci.—Barten Holyday, Archdeacon of Oxford, and translator of
Juvenal, published in 1661 his Survey of the World, which contains a
thousand independent distiches, of which these are a favourable sample.
Nearly all which I have quoted have more or less point—to my mind the
distinction between the two chief historians of Greece has never been
more happily drawn—and some of them have poetry as well. Yet for all
this the devout prayer of the author in his concluding distich,
‘Father of gifts, who to the dust didst give
Life, say to these my meditations, Live,’
has not been, and will scarcely now, be fulfilled.
P. 103, No. xcv.—This is nothing more than a broad-sheet ballad
published in 1641, the year of Strafford’s execution, with the title
Verses lately written by Thomas Earl of Strafford. Two copies, of
different issues, but of the same date, and identical in text, exist in
the British Museum, while in The Topographer, vol. ii. p. 234, there
is printed another, and in some respects an improved text. The fall of
the great statesman from his pride of place has here kindled one with
perhaps but ordinary gifts for ordinary occasions to a truly poetical
treatment of his theme; as to a certain extent it has roused another,
whose less original ballad in the same year and on the same theme,
bearing the title, The Ultimum Vale or Last Farewell of Thomas Earl of
Strafford, yields as its second stanza these nervous lines:
‘Farewell, you fading honours which do blind
By your false mists the sharpest-sighted mind;
And having raised him to his height of cares,
Tumble him headlong down the slippery stairs;
How shall I praise or prize your glorious ills,
Which are but poison hid in golden pills?’
P. 108, No. xcix.—These spirited lines were found written in an old
hand in a copy of Lovelace’s Lucasta, 1679. We have in them no doubt a
Cavalier Song of our Civil Wars.
P. 108, No. c.—Davenant is scarcely known except by his
strong-thoughted but heavy poem of Gondibert; and very little known, I
should suppose, by this. But three of his poems, this and Nos. cvii. and
clii., show that in another vein, that of graceful half play, half
earnest, few have surpassed him. I know nothing in its kind happier than
clii., which by an oversight has been placed somewhat too late in this
volume.
P. 111, No. ci. l. 43-48: Cicero (De Nat. Deor. 3, 28, and elsewhere)
refers to the remarkable story of Jason, tyrant of Pheræe, whom one
would have stabbed, but did in fact only open a dangerous ulcer in his
body.—l. 59: ‘Adamant’ is here used in the sense of loadstone; as in
Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2, i.
‘You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant,
And yet you draw not iron.’
P. 112, No. cii.—I have dealt somewhat boldly with this poem, of its
twenty-four triplets omitting all but ten, these ten seeming to me to
constitute a fine poem, which the entire twenty-four altogether fail to
do. Few, I think, will agree with Horace Walpole that ‘the poetry is
most uncouth and inharmonious;’ so far from this, it has a very solemn
and majestic flow. Nor do I doubt that these lines are what they profess
to be, the composition of King Charles; their authenticity is stamped on
every line. We are indebted to Burnet for their preservation. He gives
them in his Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton, saying, ‘A very worthy
gentleman who had the honour of waiting on him then [at Carisbrook
Castle], and was much trusted by him, copied them out from the original,
who avoucheth them to be a true copy.’—l. 2: A word has evidently
dropped out here, which is manifestly wanted by the metre, and, as it
seems to me, also by the sense. I have enclosed within brackets the
‘earthly’ with which I have ventured to supply the want.
P. 113, No. ciii.—Marvell showed how well he understood what he was
giving to the world in this ode, one of the least known but among the
grandest which the English language possesses, when he called it
‘Horatian.’ In its whole treatment it reminds us of the highest to which
the greatest Latin Artist in lyrical poetry did, when at his best,
attain. To one unacquainted with Horace, this ode, not perhaps so
perfect as his are in form, and with occasional obscurities of
expression which Horace would not have left, will give a truer notion of
the kind of greatness which he achieved than, so far as I know, could
from any other poem in the language be obtained.
P. 117, No. cv.—I have taken the liberty of omitting nine out of the
twenty-six stanzas of which this fine hymn is composed; I believe that
it has gained much by the omission. The sense that a poor stanza is not
merely no gain, but a serious injury, to a poem, was not Cowley’s; still
less that willingness to sacrifice parts to the effect of the whole,
which induced Gray to leave out a stanza, in itself as exquisite as any
which remain, from his Elegy; which led Milton to omit from the
Spirit’s Prologue in Comus sixteen glorious lines which may still be
seen in his original MSS. at Cambridge, and have been often reprinted in
the notes to later editions of his Poems.—l. 45-56: Johnson has said,
urging the immense improvement in the mechanism of English verse which
we owe to Dryden and the little which had been done before him, ‘if
Cowley had sometimes a finished line, he had it by chance.’ Let Dryden
have all the honour which is justly his due, but not at the expense of
others. There are doubtless a few weak and poor lines in this poem even
as now presented, but what a multitude of others, these twelve for
example, without a single exception, of perfect grace and beauty, and as
satisfying to the ear as to the mind.—l. 68: This line is certainly
perplexing. In all the earlier editions of Cowley which I have examined
it runs thus,
‘Of colours mingled, Light, a thick and standing lake.’
In the modern, so far as they have come under my eye, it is printed,
‘Of colours mingled light a thick and standing lake.’
The line seems in neither shape to yield any tolerable sense—not in the
first, with ‘Light’ regarded as a vocative, which, for the line so
pointed, seems the only possible construction; nor yet in the second,
which only acquires some sort of meaning when ‘colours’ is treated as a
genitive plural. I have marked it as such, but am so little satisfied
with the result, that, were this book to print again, I should recur to
the earlier reading, which, however unsatisfactory, should not be
disturbed, unless for such an emendation as carries conviction with it.
P. 120, No. cvi.—Hallam has said that ‘Cowley upon the whole has had a
reputation more above his deserts than any English poet,’ adding,
however, that ‘some who wrote better had not so fine a genius.’ This may
have been so, but a man’s contemporaries have some opportunities of
judging which subsequent generations are without. They judge him not
only by what he does, but by what he is; and oftentimes a man is
more than he does; leaves an impression of greatness on those who come
in actual contact with him which is only inadequately justified by aught
which he leaves behind him, while yet in one sense it is most true. Many
a man’s embodiment of himself in his writings is below himself; some
men’s, strange to say, is above them, or at all events represents most
transient moments of their lives. But I should be disposed to question
Mr. Hallam’s assertion, judging Cowley merely by what he has left behind
him. With a poem like this before us, so full of thought, so full of
imagination, containing so accurate and so masterly a sketch of the past
history of natural philosophy, we may well hesitate about jumping to the
conclusion that his contemporaries were altogether wrong, rating him so
highly as they did. How they did esteem him lines like these of Denham,
the fragment of a larger poem, not without a worth of their own, will
show:
‘Old mother Wit and Nature gave
Shakespeare and Fletcher all they have;
In Spenser and in Jonson Art
Of slower Nature got the start;
But both in him so equal are,
None knows which bears the happiest share.
To him no author was unknown,
Yet what he wrote was all his own,
He melted not the ancient gold,
Nor with Ben Jonson did make bold
To plunder all the Roman stores
Of poets and of orators.
Horace’s wit and Virgil’s state
He did not steal but emulate!
And when he would like them appear,
Their garb, but not their clothes did wear.’
l. 19-40: Compare with these the lines, inferior indeed, but themselves
remarkable, and showing how strongly Cowley felt on this matter, which
occur in his Ode to Dr. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of
the blood:
‘Thus Harvey sought for truth in Truth’s own book,
The creatures; which by God Himself was writ,
And wisely thought ’twas fit
Not to read comments only upon it,
But on the original itself to look.
Methinks in art’s great circle others stand,
Locked up together, hand in hand,
Every one leads as he is led,
The same bare path they tread,
And dance like fairies a fantastic round,
But neither change their motion nor their ground.’
The same thought reappears, and again remarkably expressed, although
under quite different images, in his Ode to Mr. Hobbs. These are a few
lines:
‘We break up tombs with sacrilegious hands,
Old rubbish we remove.
To walk in ruins like vain ghosts we love,
And with fond divining wands
We search among the dead
For treasure burièd,
Whilst still the liberal earth does hold
So many virgin mines of undiscovered gold.’
Dryden in some remarkable lines addressed to Dr. Charleton expresses the
same sense of the freedom with which Bacon had set free the study of
nature, and the bondage from which he had delivered it:
‘The longest tyranny that ever swayed,
Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed
Their freeborn reason to the Stagirite,
And made his torch their universal light.
So truth, while only one supplied the State,
Grew scarce and dear, and yet sophisticate;
Still it was bought, like emp’ric wares or charms,
Hard words, sealed up with Aristotle’s arms.’
l. 164-182: It ought not to be forgotten that this poem appeared first
prefixed to Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London, London,
1667. Though not published till the year 1667, the year of Cowley’s
death, the book had in great part been printed, as Sprat informs us, two
years before, which exactly agrees with Cowley’s statement here. The
position which the poem thus occupied should be kept in mind, otherwise
the encomium on Sprat’s History might seem dragged in with no
sufficient motive, and merely out of motives of private friendship. It
may be added that the praise is not at all so exaggerated as those who
know Addison’s ‘tuneful prelate’ only by his verse might suppose. The
book has considerable merits, and Johnson speaks of it as in his day
still keeping its place, and being read with pleasure. I only observed
when it was too late to profit by the observation, that after l. 143,
three lines occur, on this the first publication of the poem, which, by
a strange heedlessness, have dropt out of all subsequent editions. They
are as follows:
‘She with much stranger art than his that put
All the Iliads in a nut,
The numerous work of life does into atoms shut.’
P. 129, No. cix.—This chorus, or fragment of a chorus, from the
Thyestes of Seneca, beginning
and ending with these remarkable lines,
Illi mors gravis incubat,
Qui notus nimis omnibus
Ignotus moritur sibi,
seems to have had much attraction for moralists and poets in the
seventeenth century. Beside this paraphrase of it by Sir Matthew Hale,
prefixed to one of his Contemplations, there is a translation by
Cowley, and a third, the best of all, by Marvell, of which these are the
concluding lines:
‘Who exposed to others’ eyes,
Into his own heart never pries,
Death’s to him a strange surprise.’
P. 130, No. cx.—I have detached these two stanzas from a longer poem of
which they constitute the only valuable portion. George Wither (‘a most
profuse pourer forth of English rhyme’ Phillips calls him) was indeed so
intolerable a proser in verse, so overlaid his good with indifferent or
bad, that one may easily forget how real a gift he possessed, and
sometimes showed that he possessed.
P. 131, No. cxii.—When Phillips, writing in 1675, styles Quarles ‘the
darling of our plebeian judgments,’ he intimates the circle in which his
popularity was highest, and helps us to understand the extreme contempt
into which he afterwards fell, so that he who had a little earlier been
hailed as
‘that sweet seraph of our nation, Quarles,’
became a byeword for all that was absurdest and worst in poetry. The
reacquaintance which I have made with him, while looking for some
specimen of his verse worthy to be cited here, has shown me that his
admirers, though they may have admired a good deal too much, had far
better right than his despisers.—l. 25: ‘To vie’ is to put down a
certain sum upon a card; ‘to revie’ is to cover this with a larger, by
which the challenger becomes in turn the challenged.
P. 132, No. cxiii.—Milton’s lines on Shakespeare cannot properly be
counted an epitaph. But setting those aside, as not fairly coming into
competition, this is, in my judgment, the finest and most affecting
epitaph in the English language. Of Pope’s there is not one which
deserves to be compared with it. His are of art, artful, which this is
no less, but this also of nature and natural. With all this it has
grievous shortcomings. Death and eternity raise other issues concerning
the departed besides those which are dealt with here.—This epitaph
contains two fine allusions to Virgil’s Æneid, with which Dryden was
of necessity so familiar. The first, that of l. 7-10 to book v. l.
327-338. At the games with which Æneas celebrates his father’s funeral,
Nisus and his younger friend Euryalus are among the competitors in the
foot-race; Nisus, who is winning, slips, and Euryalus arrives the first
at the goal, and carries off the prize. In the four concluding lines
there is a beautiful allusion to the well-known passage, book vi. l.
860-886, in which the poet deplores the early death of that young
Marcellus, with which so many fair expectations of the imperial family
and of the Roman people perished.
P. 133, No. cxiv.—Elizabeth, wife of Henry Hastings, fifth Earl of
Huntingdon, is the lady commemorated in this fine epitaph, ‘by him who
says what he saw’—for this is the attestation to the truth of all that
it asserts, which Lord Falkland, mindful of the ordinary untruthfulness
of epitaphs, thinks it good to subscribe.
P. 136, No. cxix.—The writer of these lines commanded a vessel sent out
in 1631 by some Bristol merchants for the discovery of the North-West
passage. Frozen up in the ice, he passed a winter of frightful suffering
on those inhospitable shores; many of his company sinking beneath the
hardships of the time. The simple and noble manner in which these
sufferings were borne he has himself left on record (Harris’s Voyages,
vol. i. pp. 600-606); how too, when at length the day of deliverance
dawned, and the last evening which they should spend on that cruel coast
had arrived—but he shall speak his own words:—‘and now the sun was
set, and the boat came ashore for us, whereupon after evening prayer we
assembled and went up to take a last view of our dead; where leaning
upon my arm on one of their tombs I uttered these lines; which, though
perhaps they may procure laughter in the wiser sort, they yet moved my
young and tender-hearted companions at that time to some compassion.’ To
me they seem to have the pathos, better than any other, of truth.
P. 137, No. cxxi.—A few lines from this exquisite monody have found
their way, but even these rarely, into some modern selections. The whole
poem, inexpressibly tender and beautiful as it is, is included in
Headley’s Select Beauties, 1810, but in no other that I know. Henry
King, afterwards Bishop of Chichester, married Anne, the eldest daughter
of Robert Berkeley; she probably died in 1624, and, as we learn from the
poem itself (see vv. 28, 29), in or about her twenty-fourth year. It
would be interesting to know whether this was the lady, all hope to
whose hand he at one time supposed he must for ever renounce, and did
renounce in those other lines, hardly less beautiful, which he has
called The Surrender, and which will be found at p. 65 of this volume.
Henry King’s Poems have been carefully edited by the Rev. T. Hannah,
London, 1843.
P. 141, No. cxxiii.—A rough rugged piece of verse, as indeed almost
all Donne’s poetry is imperfect in form and workmanship; but it is the
genuine cry of one engaged in that most terrible of all struggles,
wherein, as we are winners or losers, we have won all or lost all. There
is indeed much in Donne, in the unfolding of his moral and spiritual
life, which often reminds us of St. Augustine. I do not mean that,
noteworthy as on many accounts he was, and in the language of Carew, one
of his contemporaries,
‘A king who ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit,’
he at all approached in intellectual or spiritual stature to the great
Doctor of the Western Church. But still there was in Donne the same
tumultuous youth, the same entanglement in youthful lusts, the same
conflict with these, and the same final deliverance from them; and then
the same passionate and personal grasp of the central truths of
Christianity, linking itself as this did with all that he had suffered,
and all that he had sinned, and all through which by God’s grace he had
victoriously struggled.
P. 142, No. cxxv.—There is a certain residue of truth in Johnson’s
complaint of the blending of incongruous theologies, or rather of a
mythology and a theology, in this poem—Neptune and Phœbus and Panope
and the Fury mixed up with St. Peter and a greater than St. Peter, and a
fierce assault on the Clergy of the Church. At the same time there is a
fusing power in the imagination, when it is in its highest exercise,
which can bring together and chemically unite materials the most
heterogeneous; and the fault of Johnson’s criticism is that he has no
eye for the mighty force of this which in Lycidas is displayed, and
which has brought all or nearly all of its strange assemblage of
materials into harmonious unity—and even where this is not so, hardly
allows us to remember the fact, so wondrous is the beauty and splendour
of the whole. But in weaker hands the bringing together of all which is
here brought together, and the attempt to combine it all in one poem,
would have inevitably issued in failure the most ridiculous.—l. 32-49:
This and more than one other allusion in this poem implies that King
wrote verses, and of an idyllic character, as would seem. In his
brother’s Elegy, contained in the same volume in which Lycidas first
appeared, as much, and indeed a good deal more is said:
‘He dressed the Muses in the brav’st attire
That e’er they wore.’
If he wrote English verse, and it is difficult to give any other meaning
to these lines, none of it has reached us. A few pieces of Latin poetry
bearing his name are scattered through the volumes of encomiastic verse
which were issued from Cambridge during the time that he, as Fellow and
Tutor of Christ’s, was connected with it. They are only of average
merit.—l. 50: A glorious appropriation of Virgil, Buc. x. 9, 10,
‘Quæ nemora aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellæ
Naiades, indigno cum Gallus amore peribat?’
l. 132: Observe the exquisite art with which Milton manages the
transition from the Christian to the heathen. He assumes that Alpheus
and the Sicilian Muse had shrunk away ashamed while St. Peter was
speaking. In bidding them now to return, he implies that he is coming
down from the spiritual heights to which for a while he had been lifted
up, and entering the region of pastoral poetry once more.—l. 159-164:
These lines were for a long time very obscure. Dr. Todd in his learned
notes, to which I must refer, has done much to dissipate the obscurity,
though I cannot think all is clear even now.
P. 148, No. cxxvi.—These lines are the short answer to a very long
question, or series of questions, which Davenant has called The
Philosopher’s Disquisition directed to the dying Christian. This poem,
than which I know few weightier with thought, unfortunately extends to
nearly four hundred lines—its length, and the fact that it appeals but
to a limited circle of readers, precluding me from finding room for more
than a brief extract from it, and that in this note; but it literally
abounds with lines notable as the following:
‘Tradition, Time’s suspected register,
That wears out Truth’s best stories into tales.’
I am well aware of the evil report under which Davenant labours, and
there are passages in his poems which seem to bear it out, as for
example this, which appears to call into question the resurrection:
‘But ask not bodies doomed to die,
To what abode they go:
Since knowledge is but sorrow’s spy,
It is not safe to know.’
At the same time ‘the Philosopher’ here does not so much deny that
there is any truth for man as that he has any organ whereby, of himself,
he may attain this truth. The poem—it is the dying Christian who is
addressed—opens thus:
‘Before by death you nearer knowledge gain,
(For to increase your knowledge you must die)
Tell me if all that learning be not vain,
On which we proudly in this life rely.
Is not the learning which we knowledge call,
Our own but by opinion and in part?
Not made entirely certain, nor to all,
And is not knowledge but disputed art?
And though a bad, yet ’tis a froward guide,
Who, vexing at the shortness of the day,
Doth, to o’ertake swift time, still onward ride,
While we still follow, and still doubt our way;
A guide, who every step proceeds with doubt,
Who guessingly her progress doth begin;
And brings us back where first she led us out,
To meet dark midnight at our restless inn.
It is a plummet to so short a line,
As sounds no deeper than the sounder’s eyes;
The people’s meteor, which not long can shine,
Nor far above the middle region rise.
This spy from Schools gets ill intelligence,
Where art, imposing rules, oft gravely errs;
She steals to nature’s closet, and from thence
Brings nought but undecyphered characters.
She doth, like India’s last discoverers, boast
Of adding to old maps; though she has bin
But sailing by some clear and open coast,
Where all is woody, wild, and dark within.
Of this forbidden fruit since we but gain
A taste, by which we only hungry grow,
We merely toil to find our studies vain,
And trust to Schools for what they cannot know.’
P. 150, No. cxxviii.—This poem, apart from its proper beauty, which is
very considerable, has a deeper interest, as containing in the germ
Wordsworth’s still higher strain, namely his Ode on Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. I do not mean that
Wordsworth had ever seen this poem when he wrote his. The coincidences
are so remarkable that it is certainly difficult to esteem them
accidental; but Wordsworth was so little a reader of anything out of the
way, and at the time when his Ode was composed, the Silex Scintillans
was altogether out of the way, a book of such excessive rarity, that an
explanation of the points of contact between the poems must be sought
for elsewhere. The complete forgetfulness into which poetry, which,
though not of the very highest order of all, is yet of a very high one,
may fall, is strikingly exemplified in the fact that as nearly as
possible two centuries intervened between the first and second editions
of Vaughan’s poems. The first edition of the first part of the Silex
Scintillans appeared in 1650, the second edition of the book in 1847.
Oblivion overtook him from the first. Phillips in his Theatrum
Poetarum, 1675, just mentions him and no more; and knows him only by
his Olor Iscanus, a juvenile production, of comparatively little
worth; yet seeing that it yields such lines as the following—they form
part of a poem addressed to the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia, our
first James’ daughter—it cannot be affirmed to be of none:
Thou seem’st a rosebud born in snow;
A flower of purpose sprung to bow
To heedless tempests and the rage
Of an incensèd stormy age:
And yet as balm-trees gently spend
Their tears for those that do them rend,
Thou didst nor murmur nor revile,
But drank’st thy wormwood with a smile.’
As a divine Vaughan may be inferior, but as a poet he is certainly
superior, to Herbert, who never wrote anything so purely poetical as
The Retreat. Still Vaughan would probably never have written as he
has, if Herbert, whom he gratefully owns as his master, had not shown
him the way.
P. 154, No. cxxxii.—This poem, so little known, though the work of one
so well known, opens very solemnly and grandly, but does not maintain
itself altogether at the same height to the end. Even as I have given
it, the two concluding strophes are inferior to the others; and this
declension would be felt by the reader still more strongly, if I had not
at once lightened the poem, and brought it within reasonable compass, by
the omission of no less than six strophes which immediately precede
these. It bears date January 14, 1682/3; and was written at season of
great weakness and intense bodily suffering (see his Life edited by
Sylvester, Part III. p. 192); but the actual life of the great
non-conformist divine was prolonged for some eight or nine years more.
P. 163, No. cxxxviii.—I have gladly found room in this volume, as often
as I fairly could, for poems written by those who, strictly speaking,
were not poets; or who, if poets, have only rarely penned their
inspiration, and, either wanting the accomplishment of verse, or not
caring to use it, have preferred to embody thoughts which might have
claimed a metrical garb in other than metrical forms. Poems from such
authors must always have a special interest for us. To the former of
these classes the author of these manly and high-hearted lines belongs,
and another whose epitaph on his companions left behind in the Arctic
regions is earlier given (see No. cxix.). Bacon (for who can deny to him
a poet’s gifts?) and, before all others as a poet in prose, Jeremy
Taylor, belong to the second. It would be more difficult to affirm of
Bishop Berkeley (see No. cxxxvii.), and of Sir Thomas Browne (see No.
cxxxi.), to which of these classes they ought to be assigned.
P. 166, No. cxxxix.—These lines, in their wit worthy of Lucian, and
with a moral purpose which oftentimes Lucian is wholly without, are
called A Fable, but manifestly have no right to the name. I have omitted
six lines, but with reluctance, being as in fact they are among the most
moral lines in the whole poem.
P. 169, No. cxli.—This is a party ballad, and, rightly to understand
it, we must understand the circumstances of which it assumes on our part
a knowledge. In 1727 Admiral Hosier blockaded Porto-Bello with twenty
ships; but was not allowed to attack it, war not having actually broken
out with Spain, and, a peace being patched up, his squadron was
withdrawn. In 1740 Admiral Vernon took Porto-Bello with six ships. It
was apparently a very creditable exploit; but Vernon being an enemy of
Walpole’s, and a member of the Opposition, it was glorified by them
beyond its merits. When they boasted that he with six ships had effected
what Hosier had not been allowed to attempt with twenty, the statement
was a perfectly true one, but in nothing dishonourable to him or to his
employers. Glover is here the mouthpiece of the Opposition, who, while
they exalted Vernon, affected to pity Hosier, who had died, as they
declared, of a broken heart; and of whose losses by disease during the
blockade they did not fail to make the most. It is a fine ballad, and
will do for Glover what his Leonidas would altogether have failed to
do. This we may confidently affirm, whether we quite agree with Lord
Stanhope or not, that it is ‘the noblest song perhaps ever called forth
by any British victory, except Mr. Campbell’s Battle of the Baltic.’
P. 172, No. cxlii.—This poem was for a while supposed to be old, and an
old line has been worked up into it. This was probably the refrain of an
older as it is of the more modern poem, which has Miss Elliott,
(1727-1805), an accomplished lady of the Minto family, for its
author.—l. 1: ‘lilting,’ singing cheerfully.—l. 3: ‘loaning,’ broad
lane.—l. 5: ‘scorning,’ rallying.—l. 6: ‘dowie’ dreary.—l. 8:
‘leglin,’ milkpail.—l. 9: ‘shearing’ reaping.—l. 10: ‘bandsters,’
sheaf-binders.—‘lyart,’ inclining to gray.—‘runkled,’ wrinkled.—l.
11: ‘fleeching,’ coaxing.—l. 14: ‘bogle,’ ghost.
P. 176, No. cxlvi.—One who listens very attentively may catch in these
pretty lines a faint prelude of Wordsworth’s immortal poem addressed to
the same bird.
P. 177, No. cxlvii.—There can scarcely be a severer trial of the poet’s
power of musical expression, of his command of the arts by which melody
is produced, than the unrhymed lyric, which very seldom perfectly
satisfies the ear. That Collins has so completely succeeded here is
itself a sufficient answer to Gray’s assertion that he ‘had a bad ear,’
to Johnson’s complaint, ‘his lines commonly are of slow motion; clogged
and impeded with a cluster of consonants.’ Collins, in whom those lines
of Wordsworth found only too literal a fulfilment,
‘We poets do begin our lives in gladness,
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness,’
has falsified the prediction of Gray. Writing of him and of Warton,
who both had lately died, Gray passes this judgment upon them, ‘They
both deserve to live some years, but will not.’ Half of this prophecy
has come true; and Warton cannot be said to have lasted to our time; but
Collins has now won a position so assured that instead of the ‘some
years’ which were all that Gray would have allotted to him, we may
confidently affirm that he will live as long as any love for English
poetry survives.
P. 181, No. cl.—This and the following poem are of the court, courtly.
At the same time a truly poetical treatment may raise vers de Société
such as these are, into a higher sphere than their own; and if I do not
mistake, it has done so here; and may justly claim for these poems that
they be drawn from the absolute oblivion into which they have fallen.
Ambrose Philips, it is true, has a niche in Johnson’s Poets; but so
much which is stupid, and so much which is worse than stupid, finds its
place there, that for a minor poet, for all except those mighty ones to
whom admission or exclusion would be a matter of absolute indifference,
who are strong enough to burst any cerements, that collection is rather
a mausoleum of the dead than a temple of the living. These poems with
two or three others of like kind—a singularly beautiful one is quoted
in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury—earned for Philips the title of Namby
Pamby, so little were his contemporaries able to appreciate even the
partial return to nature which they display. For a clever travesty of
his style by Isaac Hawkins Browne, beginning,
‘Little tube of mighty power,
Charmer of an idle hour,’
see Campbell’s Specimens, vol. v. p. 361.
P. 186, No. cliii.—This admirable poem has this in common with another
of scarcely inferior merit,
‘And ye shall walk in silk attire,’
that they both first appeared as broad-sheets sold in the streets of
Edinburgh; and, justly popular as they both from the first have been, no
one has ever cared to challenge either of them as his own. This,
however, though not claimed by Mickle, nor included by him in an edition
of his poems published by himself, was after his death claimed for
him, and Allan Cunningham thinks the claim to be fairly made out. It
mainly rests on the fact that a copy of the poem with alterations
marking the text as in process of formation was found among his papers
and in his handwriting. Without inspection of the document, it is
impossible to say what value as evidence it possesses. Certainly
everything else which we know of Mickle’s is rather evidence against his
authorship of this exquisite domestic lyric than for it. Still I have
not felt myself at liberty to disturb the ascription of it to him.
P. 189, No. clv.—The immense superiority of this poem over every other
in the little volume of Hamilton of Bangour’s poems, which was published
at Edinburgh in 1760, some six years after his death, is not easy to
account for. This poem has its faults; that it is a modern seeking to
write in an ancient manner is sometimes too evident; but it is a tragic
story tragically told, the situation boldly conceived, and the treatment
marked by strength and passion throughout. Nothing else in the volume
contains a trace of passion or of power, or is of the slightest value
whatever. The fact that the poet has here come within the circle of the
inspirations of Yarrow cannot of itself be accepted as sufficient to
explain a fact which is certainly a curious one. It is plain from more
than one citation or allusion that Wordsworth, in his Yarrow Unvisited
and Yarrow Visited, had this poem quite as much in his eye as the
earlier ballads whose scene is laid on the banks of the same stream.
P. 199, No. clx.—I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of quoting Mr.
Palgrave’s beautiful criticism of this sonnet, in its own kind of a
beauty so peerless:—‘The Editor knows no sonnet more remarkable than
this which records Cowper’s gratitude to the Lady whose affectionate
care for many years gave what sweetness he could enjoy to a life
radically wretched. Petrarch’s sonnets have a more ethereal grace and a
more perfect finish, Shakespeare’s more passion, Milton’s stand supreme
in stateliness, Wordsworth’s in depth and delicacy. But Cowper’s unites
with an exquisiteness in the turn of thought which the ancients would
have called irony, an intensity of pathetic tenderness peculiar to his
loving and ingenuous nature.’
P. 201, No. clxii.—Gray, who esteemed Tickell ‘a poor short-winded
imitator of Addison,’ qualifies his contempt so far that he adds, ‘His
ballad, however, of Colin and Lucy I always thought the prettiest in the
world.’ After some hesitation I have not thought it pretty enough for a
place in this volume. It is otherwise with the poem for which I have
found room. Johnson’s censure of poems, whether praise or blame, carries
no great weight with it; and when he says of this one, ‘nor is a more
sublime or more elegant funeral poem to be found in the whole compass of
English literature,’ the praise is extravagant. Still it has real
merits, and sounds like the genuine utterance of a true regret for one
who had been the poet’s effectual patron and friend.
P. 204, No. clxiii.—There have been many guesses who the ‘Unfortunate
Lady’ commemorated in these pathetic, but thoroughly pagan, lines may
have been; but the mystery which wraps her story has never been
dispersed. With the ten first lines before us nothing can be idler than
to deny that she was one who had laid violent hands on her own life.
P. 207, No. clxiv.—Robert Levet lived above twenty years under
Johnson’s roof, a dependant and humble friend, and when under it he died
in 1782, Johnson commemorated his genuine worth in these admirable
lines. He is mentioned several times in Boswell’s Life.
P. 209, No. clxvi.—This is the last original piece which Cowper wrote;
and, as Southey has truly observed, ‘all circumstances considered, one
of the most affecting that ever was composed.’ The incident on which it
rests is related in Anson’s Voyage round the World, fifth edition, p.
79.
P. 212, No. clxviii.—This noblest elegy has a point of contact with an
illustrious event in English history. As the boats were advancing in
silence to that night-assault upon the lines of Quebec which should give
Canada to the English crown, Wolfe repeated these lines in a low voice
to the other officers in his boat, adding at the close of the
recitation, ‘Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem
than take Quebec.’ For himself within a few hours that line was to find
its fulfilment,
‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’
We owe to Lord Stanhope (History of England from the Peace of
Utrecht, c. 35) this interesting anecdote.—l. 45-72: Gray, who had
read almost everything, may have here had in his eye a remarkable
passage in Philo, De Sobriet. § 9. Having spoken of the many who were
inwardly equipped with the highest gifts and faculties, he goes on: τὀ
δἐ κάλλος τῶν ἐν ταῖς διανοίαις ἀγαλμάτων οὐκ ίσχυσαν ἐπιδείξασθαι δ’ἀ
πενίαν ἠ ἀδοξίαν, ἠ νόσον σώματος, ἠ τἀς αλλας κῆρας, όσαι τὀν
ἀνθρώπινον περιπολοῦσι βίον. And then he goes on, exactly as Gray does,
to point out how these outward hindrances have circumscribed not merely
the virtues of some but the crimes of others: πάλιν τοίνυν κατἀ τἀ
ἐναντία μυρίους ἐστἰν ἰδιῖν ἀνάνδρούς, ἀκολάστους, ἀφρονας, ἀδίκους,
ἀσεβεῖς ἐν ταῖς διανοίαις ὑπάρχοντας, τὀ δἐ κακίας ἐκάστης αίσχος
ἀδυνατοῦντας ἐπιδεικνυσθαι δἰ ἀκαιμίαν τῶν εἰς τὀ ἁμαρτάνειν καιρῶν.
P. 216, No. clxix.—I have not included hymns in this collection, save
only in rare instances when a high poetical treatment of their theme has
given them a value quite independent of that which they derive from
adequately fulfilling the special objects for which they were composed.
It is thus with this noble poem, which, though not eminently adapted for
liturgic use, is yet to my mind quite the noblest among Charles Wesley’s
hymns. It need hardly be said that the key to it, so far as a key can be
found from without and not from within, lies in the study of Gen. xxxii.
24-32.—l. 59: The attempt to break down in English the distinction
between the perfect and the past participle, and because they are
identical in some instances to regard them as identical in all, has
happily been defeated, at least for the present; but it has left its
mark on much of the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
and Wesley, who here writes ‘strove’ for ‘striven,’ and l. 68, ‘rose’
for ‘risen,’ only does what Shakespeare and Milton have done before him.
P. 241, No. cxci.—Campbell’s Lord Ullin’s Daughter is a poem of
considerable merit, but a comparison of it with this of Shelley (the
motive of the two compositions is identical) at once reveals the
distinction between a poet of first-rate eminence, of ‘imagination all
compact,’ and one of the second order. Both poems are narrative; but the
imagination in one has fused and absorbed the whole action of the story
into itself in a way which is not so much as attempted in the other.
P. 256, No. ccviii.—In Beattie’s Life and Letters of Campbell, vol.
ii. p. 42, we have the original sketch of this poem. It is very
instructive, revealing as it does how one chief secret of success in
poetry may be the daring to omit. As it is there sketched out, extending
as it does to twenty stanzas of six lines each, that is to more than
twice its present length, many of these stanzas being but of secondary
merit, it would have passed as a spirited ballad, and would have
presently been forgotten, instead of taking as it has now done its place
among the noblest lyrics, the trumpet-notes in the language. But indeed
this willingness to sacrifice parts to the interests of the whole is a
condition without which no great poem, least of all a great lyric poem,
which is absolutely dependent for its effects on rapidity of movement,
can be written; and those who would fain escape the inevitable doom of
oblivion which awaits almost all verse will do well to keep ever in
remembrance how immeasurably more in poetry the half will sometimes be
than the whole.
P. 265, No. ccxiv.—There is a mistake here, into which it is curious
that one who had watched so closely as Scott had done the struggle with
Republican and Imperial France should have fallen. It was not Marengo
(1800) but Austerlitz (1805) which did so much to kill Pitt, and with
which is connected the anecdote of his last days here referred to, and
thus related by Lord Stanhope: ‘On leaving his carriage, as he passed
along the passage to his bedroom [at Putney, which he never left], he
observed a map of Europe which had been drawn down from the wall; upon
which he turned to his niece, and mournfully said, “Roll up that map; it
will not be wanted these ten years.”’ (Life of Pitt, vol. iv. p. 369.)
P. 266, No. ccxv.—After the battle of Novara, which had virtually
decided the conflict for a time, but before peace was signed between
Austria and Piedmont, the inhabitants of Brescia rose against their
Austrian garrison, March 21, 1849. They were crushed after a gallant
struggle, but one which had been hopeless from the first.
P. 277, No. ccxix.—This poem is full of allusions to the tragical
issues of Shelley’s first rash and ill-considered marriage—issues which
must have filled him ever after with very deep self-reproach. Far too
slight as the expression of this is here—indeed it is hardly here at
all—we know from other sources that the retrospect was one which went
far to darken his whole after life. This serious fault has not hindered
me from quoting these lines, in many respects of an exquisite tenderness
and beauty, and possessing that deep interest which autobiography must
always possess. One stanza has been omitted.
P. 291, No. ccxxiv.—These lines, written in Greece, and only three
months before his death, are the last which Byron wrote, and, in their
earlier stanzas at least, about the truest. In many of his smaller poems
of passion, and in Childe Harold itself, there is a falsetto which
strikes painfully on the ear of the mind. But it is quite otherwise with
these deeply pathetic lines, in which the spoiled child of this world
passes judgment on that whole life of self-pleasing which he had laid
out for himself, and declares what had been the mournful end of it all.
P. 315, No. ccxlvii.—This, if I mistake not, is the only poem by
Herbert Knowles which survives. It appeared first in The Quarterly
Review, vol. ii. p. 396, with this account of the writer: ‘His life had
been eventful and unfortunate, till his extraordinary merits were
discovered by persons capable of appreciating and willing and able to
assist him. He was then placed under a kind and able instructor, and
arrangements had been made for supporting him at the University; but he
had not enjoyed that prospect many weeks before it pleased God to remove
him to a better world. The reader will remember that they are the verses
of a schoolboy, who had not long been taken from one of the lowest
stations of life, and he will then judge what might have been expected
from one who was capable of writing with such strength and originality
upon the tritest of all subjects.’ It was Southey, I believe, who wrote
thus, in whose estimate of these verses I entirely concur; as it was he
who was prepared to befriend the youthful poet, if he had not passed so
soon beyond the reach and need of human help.
P. 326, No. cclvii.—It is not a little remarkable that one to whom
English was an acquired language, who can have had little or no
experience in the mechanism of English verse, should yet have left us
what Coleridge does not hesitate to call, ‘the finest and most grandly
conceived sonnet in our language’—words, it is true, which he slightly
modifies by adding, ‘at least it is only in Milton and in Wordsworth
that I remember any rival.’
P. 352, No. cclxxii.—This poem is drawn from a small volume with the
title, David and Samuel, with other Poems, published in the year 1859.
Much in the volume has no right to claim exemption from the doom which
before very long awaits all verse except the very best. Yet one or two
poems have caught excellently well the tone, half serious, half
ironical, of Goethe’s lighter pieces; while more than one of the more
uniformly serious, this above all, seem to me to have remarkable merit.
It finds its motive, as I need hardly say, in the resolution of the
Dutch, when their struggle with the overwhelming might of Louis XIV. and
his satellite Charles II. seemed hopeless, to leave in mass their old
home, and to found another Holland among their possessions in the
Eastern world.
P. 354, No. cclxxiii.—During the last Chinese war the following passage
occurred in a letter of the Correspondent of The Times: ‘Some Seiks,
and a private of the Buffs, having remained behind with the grog-carts,
fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning, they were
brought before the authorities, and commanded to perform the kotou. The
Seiks obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would
not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked
upon the head, and his body thrown on a dunghill.’
P. 356, No. cclxxiv.—Turner’s fine picture of the Téméraire, a grand
old man-of-war (it had been, as its name indicates, taken from the
French) towed into port by a little ugly steamer, that so, after all its
noble toils, it might there be broken up, is itself a poem of a very
high order, which has here been finely transferred into verse.
P. 359, No. cclxxviii.—A selection of Walt Whitman’s poetry has very
lately been published in England, the editor of this declaring that in
him American poetry properly so-called begins. I must entirely dissent
from this statement. What he has got to say is a very old story indeed,
and no one would have attended to his version of it, if he had not put
it more uncouthly than others before him. That there is no contradiction
between higher and lower, that there is no holy and no profane, that the
flesh has just as good rights as the spirit—this has never wanted
prophets to preach it, nor people to act upon it; and this is the
sum-total of his message to America and to the world. I was glad to find
in his Drum-taps one little poem which I could quote with real
pleasure.
P. 379, No. ccxcviii.—Tithonus is a noble variation on Juvenal’s
noble line in the 10th Satire, where, enumerating the things which a
wise man may fitly pray for, he includes among these the mind and
temper,
Qui spatium vitæ extremum inter munera ponat
Naturæ:
words which, grand as they are, reappear in still grander form, even
as they are brought into a more intimate connection with this poem in
Dryden’s translation,
‘And count it nature’s privilege to die.’
P. 386, No. ccciv.—Few readers of this and other choice specimens of
American poetry—some of which have now for the first time found their
way into any English anthology—but will share the admiration which I
cannot refuse to express for many among them. It is true that they are
not always racy of the soil, that sometimes they only do what has been
as well done, though scarcely better, in the old land; but whether we
regard the perfect mechanism of the verse, the purity and harmony of the
diction, the gracious thoughts so gracefully embodied, these poems, by
Whittier, by Bryant, by Holmes, by Emerson and by others, do, so far as
they reach, leave nothing to be desired.
