Lectures on the English Poets Part 11

All pay themselves the compliment to think They, one day, shall not drivel; and their pride On this reversion takes up ready praise; At least, their own; their future selves applauds; How excellent that life they ne'er will lead!

Time lodg'd in their own hands is Folly's vails: That lodg'd in Fate's, to Wisdom they consign; The thing they can't but purpose, they postpone.

'Tis not in Folly, not to scorn a fool; And scarce in human Wisdom to do more.

All Promise is poor dilatory man, And that through every stage. When young, indeed, In full content we, sometimes, n.o.bly rest, Un-anxious for ourselves; and only wish, As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise.

At thirty man suspects himself a fool; Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan; At fifty chides his infamous delay, Pushes his prudent purpose to Resolve; In all the magnanimity of thought Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.

And why? Because he thinks himself immortal.

All men think all men mortal, but themselves; Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread; But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air, Soon close; where past the shaft, no trace is found.

As from the wing no scar the sky retains; The parted wave no furrow from the keel; So dies in human hearts the thought of death.

Ev'n with the tender tear which nature sheds O'er those we love, we drop it in their grave."

His Universal Pa.s.sion is a keen and powerful satire; but the effort takes from the effect, and oppresses attention by perpetual and violent demands upon it. His tragedy of the Revenge is monkish and scholastic.

Zanga is a vulgar caricature of Iago. The finest lines in it are the burst of triumph at the end, when his revenge is completed:

"Let Europe and her pallid sons go weep, Let Afric on her hundred thrones rejoice," &c.

Collins is a writer of a very different stamp, who had perhaps less general power of mind than Young; but he had that true _vivida vis_, that genuine inspiration, which alone can give birth to the highest efforts of poetry. He leaves stings in the minds of his readers, certain traces of thought and feelings which never wear out, because nature had left them in his own mind. He is the only one of the minor poets of whom, if he had lived, it cannot be said that he might not have done the greatest things. The germ is there. He is sometimes affected, unmeaning, and obscure; but he also catches rich glimpses of the bowers of Paradise, and has lofty aspirations after the highest seats of the Muses. With a great deal of tinsel and splendid patch-work, he has not been able to hide the solid sterling ore of genius. In his best works there is an attic simplicity, a pathos, and fervour of imagination, which make us the more lament that the efforts of his mind were at first depressed by neglect and pecuniary embarra.s.sment, and at length buried in the gloom of an unconquerable and fatal malady. How many poets have gone through all the horrors of poverty and contempt, and ended their days in moping melancholy or moody madness!

"We poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness."

Is this the fault of themselves, of nature in tempering them of too fine a clay, or of the world, that spurner of living, and patron of dead merit? Read the account of Collins--with hopes frustrated, with faculties blighted, at last, when it was too late for himself or others, receiving the deceitful favours of relenting Fortune, which served only to throw their sunshine on his decay, and to light him to an early grave. He was found sitting with every spark of imagination extinguished, and with only the faint traces of memory and reason left --with only one book in his room, the Bible; "but that," he said, "was the best." A melancholy damp hung like an unwholesome mildew upon his faculties--a canker had consumed the flower of his life. He produced works of genius, and the public regarded them with scorn: he aimed at excellence that should be his own, and his friends treated his efforts as the wanderings of fatuity. The proofs of his capacity are, his Ode on Evening, his Ode on the Pa.s.sions (particularly the fine personification of Hope), his Ode to Fear, the Dirge in Cymbeline, the Lines on Thomson's Grave, and his Eclogues, parts of which are admirable. But perhaps his Ode on the Poetical Character is the best of all. A rich distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden cloud envelopes it; a honeyed paste of poetic diction encrusts it, like the candied coat of the auricula. His Ode to Evening shews equal genius in the images and versification. The sounds steal slowly over the ear, like the gradual coming on of evening itself:

"If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, Like thy own solemn springs, Thy springs and dying gales,

O nymph reserv'd, while now the bright-haired sun Sits on yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts With brede ethereal wove, O'erhang his wavy bed:

Now air is hush'd, save where the weak-ey'd bat, With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn,

As oft he rises midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum.

Now teach me, maid compos'd, To breathe some soften'd strain,

Whose numbers stealing through thy darkling vale May not unseemly with its stillness suit, As musing slow, I hail Thy genial, lov'd return!

For when thy folding star arising shews His paly circlet, at his warning lamp The fragrant Hours and Elves Who slept in flow'rs the day,

And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge, And sheds the fresh'ning dew, and lovelier still, The pensive Pleasures sweet Prepare thy shadowy car;

Then lead, calm Votress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallow'd pile, Or upland fallows grey Reflect its last cool gleam.

But when chill bl.u.s.t'ring winds, or driving rain, Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut, That from the mountain's side Views wilds and swelling floods,

And hamlets brown, and dim discover'd spires, And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil.

While Spring shall pour his show'rs, as oft he wont, And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve!

While Summer loves to sport Beneath thy lingering light;

While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves; Or Winter yelling through the troublous air, Affrights thy shrinking train, And rudely rends thy robes;

So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed, Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipp'd Health, Thy gentlest influence own, And hymn thy favourite name."

Hammond, whose poems are bound up with Collins's, in Bell's pocket edition, was a young gentleman, who appears to have fallen in love about the year 1740, and who translated Tibullus into English verse, to let his mistress and the public know of it.

I should conceive that Collins had a much greater poetical genius than Gray: he had more of that fine madness which is inseparable from it, of its turbid effervescence, of all that pushes it to the verge of agony or rapture. Gray's Pindaric Odes are, I believe, generally given up at present: they are stately and pedantic, a kind of methodical borrowed phrenzy. But I cannot so easily give up, nor will the world be in any haste to part with his Elegy in a Country Church-yard: it is one of the most cla.s.sical productions that ever was penned by a refined and thoughtful mind, moralising on human life. Mr. Coleridge (in his Literary Life) says, that his friend Mr. Wordsworth had undertaken to shew that the language of the Elegy is unintelligible: it has, however, been understood! The Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College is more mechanical and common-place; but it touches on certain strings about the heart, that vibrate in unison with it to our latest breath. No one ever pa.s.ses by Windsor's "stately heights," or sees the distant spires of Eton College below, without thinking of Gray. He deserves that we should think of him; for he thought of others, and turned a trembling, ever-watchful ear to "the still sad music of humanity."--His Letters are inimitably fine. If his poems are sometimes finical and pedantic, his prose is quite free from affectation. He pours his thoughts out upon paper as they arise in his mind; and they arise in his mind without pretence, or constraint, from the pure impulse of learned leisure and contemplative indolence. He is not here on stilts or in buckram; but smiles in his easy chair, as he moralises through the loopholes of retreat, on the bustle and raree-show of the world, or on "those reverend bedlams, colleges and schools!" He had nothing to do but to read and to think, and to tell his friends what he read and thought. His life was a luxurious, thoughtful dream. "Be mine," he says in one of his Letters, "to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon." And in another, to shew his contempt for action and the turmoils of ambition, he says to someone, "Don't you remember Lords ------ and ------, who are now great statesmen, little dirty boys playing at cricket? For my part, I do not feel a bit wiser, or bigger, or older than I did then." What an equivalent for not being wise or great, to be always young! What a happiness never to lose or gain any thing in the game of human life, by being never any thing more than a looker-on!

How different from Shenstone, who only wanted to be looked at: who withdrew from the world to be followed by the crowd, and courted popularity by affecting privacy! His Letters shew him to have lived in a continual fever of petty vanity, and to have been a finished literary coquet. He seems always to say, "You will find nothing in the world so amiable as Nature and me: come, and admire us." His poems are indifferent and tasteless, except his Pastoral Ballad, his Lines on Jemmy Dawson, and his School-mistress, which last is a perfect piece of writing.

Akenside had in him the materials of poetry, but he was hardly a great poet. He improved his Pleasures of the Imagination in the subsequent editions, by pruning away a great many redundances of style and ornament. Armstrong is better, though he has not chosen a very exhilarating subject--The Art of Preserving Health. Churchill's Satires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players, are as good as the subjects deserved--they are strong, coa.r.s.e, and full of an air of hardened a.s.surance. I ought not to pa.s.s over without mention Green's Poem on the Spleen, or Dyer's Grongar Hill.

The princ.i.p.al name of the period we are now come to is that of Goldsmith, than which few names stand higher or fairer in the annals of modern literature. One should have his own pen to describe him as he ought to be described--amiable, various, and bland, with careless inimitable grace touching on every kind of excellence--with manners unstudied, but a gentle heart--performing miracles of skill from pure happiness of nature, and whose greatest fault was ignorance of his own worth. As a poet, he is the most flowing and elegant of our versifiers since Pope, with traits of artless nature which Pope had not, and with a peculiar felicity in his turns upon words, which he constantly repeated with delightful effect: such as--

"------His lot, though small, He sees that little lot, the lot of all."

"And turn'd and look'd, and turn'd to look again."

As a novelist, his Vicar of Wakefield has charmed all Europe. What reader is there in the civilised world, who is not the better for the story of the washes which the worthy Dr. Primrose demolished so deliberately with the poker--for the knowledge of the guinea which the Miss Primroses kept unchanged in their pockets--the adventure of the picture of the Vicar's family, which could not be got into the house-- and that of the Flamborough family, all painted with oranges in their hands--or for the story of the case of s.h.a.green spectacles and the cosmogony?

As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth new powers from Mr.

Liston's face. That alone is praise enough for it. Poor Goldsmith! how happy he has made others! how unhappy he was in himself! He never had the pleasure of reading his own works! He had only the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and the consolation of being hara.s.sed to death with his own! He is the most amusing and interesting person, in one of the most amusing and interesting books in the world, Boswell's Life of Johnson. His peach-coloured coat shall always bloom in Boswell's writings, and his fame survive in his own!-- His genius was a mixture of originality and imitation: he could do nothing without some model before him, and he could copy nothing that he did not adorn with the graces of his own mind. Almost all the latter part of the Vicar of Wakefield, and a great deal of the former, is taken from Joseph Andrews; but the circ.u.mstances I have mentioned above are not.

The finest things he has left behind him in verse are his character of a country school-master, and that prophetic description of Burke in the Retaliation. His moral Essays in the Citizen of the World, are as agreeable chit-chat as can be conveyed in the form of didactic discourses.

Warton was a poet and a scholar, studious with ease, learned without affectation. He had a happiness which some have been prouder of than he, who deserved it less--he was poet-laureat.

"And that green wreath which decks the bard when dead, That laurel garland crown'd his living head."

But he bore his honours meekly, and performed his half-yearly task regularly. I should not have mentioned him for this distinction alone (the highest which a poet can receive from the state), but for another circ.u.mstance; I mean his being the author of some of the finest sonnets in the language--at least so they appear to me; and as this species of composition has the necessary advantage of being short (though it is also sometimes both "tedious and brief"), I will here repeat two or three of them, as treating pleasing subjects in a pleasing and philosophical way.

_Written in a blank leaf of Dugdale's Monasticon_

"Deem not, devoid of elegance, the sage, By Fancy's genuine feelings unbeguil'd, Of painful pedantry the poring child; Who turns of these proud domes the historic page, Now sunk by Time, and Henry's fiercer rage.

Think'st thou the warbling Muses never smil'd On his lone hours? Ingenuous views engage His thoughts, on themes uncla.s.sic falsely styl'd, Intent. While cloister'd piety displays Her mouldering roll, the piercing eye explores New manners, and the pomp of elder days, Whence culls the pensive bard his pictur'd stores.

Not rough nor barren are the winding ways Of h.o.a.r Antiquity, but strewn with flowers."

_Sonnet. Written at Stonehenge._

"Thou n.o.blest monument of Albion's isle, Whether, by Merlin's aid, from Scythia's sh.o.r.e To Amber's fatal plain Pendragon bore, Huge frame of giant hands, the mighty pile, T'entomb his Britons slain by Hengist's guile: Or Druid priests, sprinkled with human gore, Taught mid thy ma.s.sy maze their mystic lore: Or Danish chiefs, enrich'd with savage spoil, To victory's idol vast, an unhewn shrine, Rear'd the rude heap, or in thy hallow'd ground Repose the kings of Brutus' genuine line; Or here those kings in solemn state were crown'd; Studious to trace thy wondrous origin, We muse on many an ancient tale renown'd."

Nothing can be more admirable than the learning here displayed, or the inference from it, that it is of no use but as it leads to interesting thought and reflection.

That written after seeing Wilton House is in the same style, but I prefer concluding with that to the river Lodon, which has a personal as well as poetical interest about it.

"Ah! what a weary race my feet have run, Since first I trod thy banks with alders crown'd, And thought my way was all through fairy ground, Beneath the azure sky and golden sun: When first my Muse to lisp her notes begun!

While pensive memory traces back the round Which fills the varied interval between; Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.-- Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure No more return, to cheer my evening road!

Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure Nor useless, all my vacant days have flow'd From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime mature, Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestow'd."

I have thus gone through all the names of this period I could think of, but I find that there are others still waiting behind that I had never thought of. Here is a list of some of them--Pattison, Tickell, Hill, Somerville, Browne, Pitt, Wilkie, Dodsley, Shaw, Smart, Langhorne, Bruce, Greame, Glover, Lovibond, Penrose, Mickle, Jago, Scott, Whitehead, Jenyns, Logan, Cotton, Cunningham, and Blacklock.--I think it will be best to let them pa.s.s and say nothing about them. It will be hard to persuade so many respectable persons that they are dull writers, and if we give them any praise, they will send others.

But here comes one whose claims cannot be so easily set aside: they have been sanctioned by learning, hailed by genius, and hallowed by misfortune--I mean Chatterton. Yet I must say what I think of him, and that is not what is generally thought. I pa.s.s over the disputes between the learned antiquaries, Dr. Mills, Herbert Croft, and Dr. Knox, whether he was to be placed after Shakspeare and Dryden, or to come after Shakspeare alone. A living poet has borne a better testimony to him--