Anima Poetae Part 19

To Wordsworth in the progression of spirit, once Simonides, or Empedocles, or both in one--

"Oh! that my spirit, purged by death of its weaknesses, which are, alas!

my ident.i.ty, might flow into thine, and live and act in thee and be thine!"

Death, first of all, eats of the Tree of Life and becomes immortal.

Describe the frightful metamorphosis. He weds the Hamadryad of the Tree [and begets a twy-form] progeny. This in the manner of Dante.

Sad drooping children of a wretched parent are those yellowing leaflets of a broken twig, broke ere its June.

We are not inert in the grave. St. Paul's corn in the ground proves this scripturally, and the growth of infants in their sleep by natural a.n.a.logy. What, then, if our spiritual growth be in proportion to the length and depth of the sleep! With what mysterious grandeur does not this thought invest the grave, and how poor compared with this an immediate Paradise!

I awake and find my beloved asleep, gaze upon her by the taper that feebly illumines the darkness, then fall asleep by her side; and we both awake together for _good_ and _all_ in the broad daylight of heaven.

Forget not to impress as often and as manifoldly as possible the _totus in omni parte_ of Truth, and its consequent interdependence on co-operation and, _vice versa_, the fragmentary character of action, and its absolute dependence on society, a majority, etc. The blindness to this distinction creates fanaticism on one side, alarm and prosecution on the other. Jacobins or soul-gougers. It is an interesting fact or fable that the stork (the emblem of filial or conjugal piety) never abides in a monarchy.

Commend me to the Irish architect who took out the foundation-stone to repair the roof.

Knox and the other reformers were _Scopae viarum_--that is, highway besoms.

The Pine Tree blasted at the top was applied by Swift to himself as a prophetic emblem of his own decay. The Chestnut is a fine shady tree, and its wood excellent, were it not that it dies away at the _heart_ first. Alas! poor me!

[Sidenote: TASTE, AN ETHICAL QUALITY]

Modern poetry is characterised by the poets' _anxiety_ to be always striking. There is the same march in the Greek and Latin poets.

Claudian, who had powers to have been anything--observe in him this anxious, craving vanity! Every line, nay, every word, stops, looks full in your face, and asks and _begs_ for praise! As in a Chinese painting, there are no distances, no perspective, but all is in the foreground; and this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to think that, when a mere stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling.

[Sidenote: A PLEA FOR POETIC LICENSE]

The desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than, _omnibus trutinatis_, they are susceptible of, is one great cause of the corruption of poetry. Both to understand my own reasoning and to communicate it, ponder on Catullus' hexameters and pentameters, his "_numine abusum homines_" [Carmen, lxxvi. 4] [and similar harsh expressions]. It is not whether or no the very same ideas expressed with the very same force and the very same naturalness and simplicity in the versification of Ovid and Tibullus, would not be still more delightful (though even that, for any number of poems, may well admit a doubt), but whether it is _possible_ so to express them and whether, in every attempt, the result has not been to subst.i.tute manner for matter, and point that will not bear reflection (so fine that it breaks the moment you try it) for genuine sense and true feeling, and, lastly, to confine both the subjects, thoughts, and even words of poetry within a most beggarly cordon. _N.B._--The same criticism applies to Metastasio, and, in Pope, to his quaintness, perversion, unnatural metaphors, and, still more, the cold-blooded use, for artifice or connection, of language justifiable only by enthusiasm and pa.s.sion.

[Sidenote: RICHARDSON]

I confess that it has cost, and still costs, my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire, aye, greatly admire, Richardson. His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent! But to understand and draw _him_ would be to produce a work almost equal to his own; and, in order to do this, "_down, proud Heart, down_" (as we teach little children to say to themselves, bless them!), all hatred down! and, instead thereof, charity, calmness, a heart fixed on the good part, though the understanding is surveying all. Richardson felt truly the defect of Fielding, or what was not his excellence, and made that his _defect_--a trick of uncharitableness often played, though not exclusively, by contemporaries. Fielding's talent was observation, not meditation. But Richardson was not philosopher enough to know the difference--say, rather, to understand and develop it.

[Sidenote: HIS NEED OF EXTERNAL SOLACE]

O there are some natures which under the most cheerless all-threatening nothing-promising circ.u.mstances can draw hope from the invisible, as the tropical trees that in the sandy desolation produce their own lidded vessels full of the waters from air and dew! Alas! to my root not a drop trickles down but from the watering-pot of immediate friends. And, even so, it seems much more a sympathy with their feeling rather than hope of my own. So should I feel sorrow, if Allston's mother, whom I have never seen, were to die?

[Sidenote: MINUTE CRITICISM]

Stoddart pa.s.ses over a poem as one of those tiniest of tiny night-flies runs over a leaf, casting its shadow, three times as long as itself, yet only just shading one, or at most two letters at a time.

[Sidenote: DR. PRICE]

A maidservant of Mrs. Clarkson's parents had a great desire to hear Dr.

Price, and accordingly attended his congregation. On her return, being asked "Well, what do you think?" &c., "Ai--i," replied she, "there was neither the poor nor the Gospel." Excellent that on the fine _respectable_ attendants of Unitarian chapels, and the moonshine, heartless head-work of the sermons.

[Sidenote: A _DOc.u.mENT HUMAIN_]

The mahogany tables, all, but especially the large dining-table, [marked] with the segments of circles (deep according to the pa.s.sion of the dice-box plunger), chiefly half-circles, O the anger and spite with which many have been thrown! It is truly a written history of the fiendish pa.s.sion of gambling. Oct. 12, 1806. Newmarket.

[Sidenote: PINDAR]

The odes of Pindar (with few exceptions, and these chiefly in the shorter ones) seem by intention to die away by soft gradations into a languid interest, like most of the landscapes of the great elder painters. Modern ode-writers have commonly preferred a continued rising of interest.

[Sidenote: "ONE MUSIC AS BEFORE, BUT VASTER"]

The shattering of long and deep-rooted a.s.sociations always places the mind in an angry state, and even when our own understandings have effected the revolution, it still holds good, only we apply the feeling to and against our former faith and those who still hold it--[a tendency] shown in modern infidels. Great good, therefore, of such revolution as alters, not by exclusion, but by an enlargement that includes the former, though it places it in a new point of view.

[Sidenote: TO ALLSTON]

After the formation of a new acquaintance, found, by some weeks' or months' unintermitted communion, worthy of all our esteem, affection and, perhaps, admiration, an intervening absence, whether we meet again or only write, raises it into friendship, and encourages the modesty of our nature, impelling us to a.s.sume the language and express all the feelings of an established attachment.

[Sidenote: MORBID SENTIMENT]

The _thinking_ disease is that in which the feelings, instead of embodying themselves in _acts_, ascend and become materials of general reasoning and intellectual pride. The dreadful consequences of this perversion [may be] instanced in Germany, _e.g._, in Fichte _versus_ Kant, Sch.e.l.ling _versus_ Fichte and in Verbidigno [Wordsworth] _versus_ S. T. C. Ascent where nature meant descent, and thus shortening the process--viz., _feelings_ made the subjects and tangible substance of thought, instead of actions, realizations, _things done_, and as such externalised and remembered. On such meagre diet as feelings, evaporated embryos in their progress to _birth_, no moral being ever becomes healthy.

[Sidenote: "PHANTOMS OF SUBLIMITY"]

Empires, states, &c., may be beautifully ill.u.s.trated by a large clump of coal placed on a fire--Russia, for instance--or of small coal moistened, and by the first action of the heat of any government not absolutely lawless, formed into a cake, as the northern nations under Charlemagne--then a slight impulse from the fall of accident, or the hand of patriotic foresight, splits [the one] into many, and makes each [fragment] burn with its own flame, till at length all burning equally, it becomes again one by universal similar action--then burns low, cinerises, and without accession of rude materials goes out.

[Sidenote: A MILD WINTER]

Winter slumbering soft, seemed to smile at visions of buds and blooms, and dreamt so livelily of spring, that his stern visage had relaxed and softened itself into a dim likeness of his dream. The soul of the vision breathed through and lay like light upon his face.

But, heavens! what an outrageous day of winter this is and has been!