w
So softly that ye onward sing,
For in the middle earth ye cling.
O gentlest woods, — your birds' kind song,
How had you that so virtuous lay?
Among you let me linger long,
And seek the arborous dim-lit way,
And listen to your light wind's play.
And thou, the essence of the flowers,
My bride, my joy, my own dear wife,
Who melted in thine eyes those hours,
Those hours with sunlight richly rife?
Art thou a song of earnest life?
WILLIAM TELL'S SONG.
WHERE the mountain cataracts leap,
And the stern wild pine builds fast,
And the piercing crystals keep
Their chains for the glaciers vast,
I have built up my heart with a stony wall,
I have frozen my will for a tyrant's fall.
As the crag from the high cliff leaps,
And is ground to fine dust below,
As the dreaded avalanche creeps,
And buries the valleys in woe,
So tyranny sinks 'neath my mountain heart,
So slavery falls by my quivering dart.


262
(Oct.
A Letter.
A LETTER.
As we are very liable in common with the letter-writing
world, to fall behindhand in our correspondence, and a little
more liable because, in consequence of our editorial function,
we receive more epistles than our individual share, we have
thought that we might clear our account by writing a quarterly
catholic letter to all and several who have honored us in verse,
or prose, with their confidence, and expressed a curiosity to
know our opinion. We shall be compelled to dispose very
rapidly of quite miscellaneous topics.
And first, in regard to the writer who has given us his
speculations on Rail-roads and Air-roads, our correspondent
shall have his own way. To the rail-way, we must say, like
the courageous lord mayor at his first hunting, when told the
hare was coming, “Let it come, in Heaven's name, I am not
afraid on 't.” Very unlooked for political and social effects
of the iron road are fast appearing. It will require an expan-
sion of the police of the old world. When a rail-road train
shoots through Europe every day from Brussels to Vienna, from
Vienna to Constantinople, it cannot stop every twenty or thirty
miles, at a German customhouse, for examination of property
and passports. But when our correspondent proceeds to Fly-
ing-machines, we have no longer the sinallest taper light of
credible information and experience left, and must speak on
a priori grounds. Shortly then, we think the population is
not yet quite fit for them, and therefore there will be none.
Our friend suggests so many inconveniences from piracy out
of the high air to orchards and lone houses, and also to other
high fliers, and the total inadequacy of the present system of
defence, that we have not the heart to break the sleep of the
good public by the repetition of these details. When children
come into the library, we put the inkstand and the watch on
the high shelf, until they be a little older; and nature has set
the sun and moon in plain sight and use, but laid them on the
high shelf, where her roystering boys may not in some mad
Saturday afternoon pull them down or burn their fingers. The
sea and the iron road are safer toys for such ungrown people;
we are not yet ripe to be birds.
In the next place, to fifteen letters on Communities, and the
Prospects of Culture, and the destinies of the cultivated class,
what answer ? Excellent reasons have been shown us why the
writers, obviously persons of sincerity and of elegance, should
be dissatisfied with the life they lead, and with their company.
They have exhausted all its benefit, and will not bear it much


1843.]
263
A Lelter.
longer. Excellent reasons they have shown why something
better should be tried. They want a friend to whom they can
speak and from whom they may hear now and then a reasona-
ble word. They are willing to work, so it be with friends.
They do not entertain anything absurd or even difficult. They
do not wish to force society into hated reforms, nor to break
with society. They do not wish a township, or any large
expenditure, or incorporated association, but simply a concen-
tration of chosen people. By the slightest possible concert per-
severed in through four or five years, they think that a neighbor-
hood might be formed of friends who would provoke each other
to the best activity.
They believe that this society would fill up the terrific
chasm of ennui, and would give their genius that inspi-
ration which it seems to wait in vain. But the selfishness !!
One of the writers relentingly says, What shall my uncles
and aunts do without me? and desires to be distinctly un-
derstood not to propose the Indian mode of giving decrepit
relatives as much of the mud of holy Ganges as they can
swallow, and more, but to begin the enterprise of concen-
tration, by concentrating all uncles and aunts in one delightful
village by themselves ! – so heedless is our correspondent of
putting all the dough into one pan, and all the leaven into
another. Another objection seems to have occurred to a sub-
tle but ardent advocate. Is it, he writes, a too great wilfulness
and intermeddling with life, — with life, which is better ac-
cepted than calculated ? Perhaps so; but let us not be too
curiously good; the Buddhist is a practical Necessitarian ; the
Yankee is not. We do a good many selfish things every day ;
among them all, let us do one thing of enlightened selfishness.
It were fit to forbid concert and calculation in this particular,
if that were our system, if we were up to the mark of self-
denial and faith in our general activity. But to be prudent in
all the particulars of life, and in this one thing alone religiously
forbearing; prudent to secure to ourselves an injurious society,
temptations to folly and despair, degrading examples and ene-
mies; and only abstinent when it is proposed to provide our-
selves with guides, examples, lovers ! -
We shall hardly trust ourselves to reply to arguments by
which we would too gladly be persuaded. The more discon-
tent, the better we like it. It is not for nothing, we assure
ourselves, that our people are busied with these projects of a
better social state, and that sincere persons of all parties are
demanding somewhat vital and poetic of our stagnant society.
How fantastic and unpresentable soever the theory has hitherto
seemed, how swiftly shrinking from the examination of prac-
tical men, let us not lose the warning of that most significant


264
(Oct.
A Letter.
dream. How joyfully we have felt the admonition of larger
natures which despised our aims and pursuits, conscious that a
voice out of heaven spoke to us in that scorn. But it would be
unjust not to remind our younger friends that, whilst this aspi-
ration has always made its mark in the lives of men of thought,
in vigorous individuals it does not remain a detached object,
but is satisfied along with the satisfaction of other aims. To
live solitary and unexpressed, is painful, - painful in proportion
to one's consciousness of ripeness and equality to the offices of
friendship. But herein we are never quite forsaken by the
Divine Providence. The loneliest man after twenty years dis-
covers that he stood in a circle of friends, who will then show
like a close fraternity held by some masonic tie. But we are im.
patient of the tedious introductions of Destiny, and a little faith-
less, and would venture something to accelerate them. One thing
is plain, that discontent and the luxury of tears will bring
nothing to pass. Regrets and Bohemian castles and ästhetic
villages are not a very self-helping class of productions, but are
the voices of debility. Especially to one importunate corres.
pondent we must say, that there is no chance for the æsthetic
village. Every one of the villagers has committed his several
blunder ; his genius was good, his stars consenting, but he
was a marplot. And though the recuperative force in every
man may be relied on infinitely, it must be relied on, before it
will exert itself. As long as he sleeps in the shade of the
present error, the after-nature does not betray its resources.
Whilst he dwells in the old sin, he will pay the old fine.
More letters we have on the subject of the position of young
men, which accord well enough with what we see and hear.
There is an American disease, a paralysis of the active faculties,
which falls on young men in this country, as soon as they have
finished their college education, which strips them of all manly
aims and bereaves them of animal spirits, so that the noblest
youths are in a few years converted into pale Caryatides to
uphold the temple of conventions. They are in the state of
the young Persians, when “that mighty Yezdam prophet"
addressed them and said, “Behold the signs of evil days are
come; there is now no longer any right course of action, nor
any self-devotion left among the Iranis.” As soon as they have
arrived at this term, there are no employments to satisfy them,
they are educated above the work of their times and country,
and disdain it. Many of the more acute minds pass into a
lofty criticism of these things, which only embitters their sensi-
bility to the evil, and widens the feeling of hostility between
them and the citizens at large. From this cause, companies of
the best educated young men in the Atlantic states every week
take their departure for Europe; for no business that they have


1843.)
265
A Letter.
in that country, but simply because they shall so be hid from
the reproachful eyes of their countrymen, and agreeably enter-
tained for one or two years, with some lurking hope, no doubt,
that something may turn up to give them a decided direction.
It is easy to see that this is only a postponement of their proper
work, with the additional disadvantage of a two years' vacation.
Add that this class is rapidly increasing by the infatuation of
the active class, who, whilst they regard these young Athenians
with suspicion and dislike, educate their own children in the
same courses, and use all possible endeavors to secure to them
the same result.
Certainly we are not insensible to this calamity, as described by
the observers or witnessed by ourselves. It is not quite new and
peculiar, though we should not know where to find in literature
any record of so much unbalanced intellectuality ; such unde-
niable apprehension without talent, so much power without
equal applicability, as our young men pretend to. Yet in
Theodore Mundt's * account of Frederic Holderlin's “Hype-
rion,” we were not a little struck with the following Jeremiad of
the despair of Germany, whose tone is still so familiar, that we
were somewhat mortified to find that it was written in 1799.
“ Then came I to the Germans. I cannot conceive of a people more
disjoined than the Germans. Mechanics you shall see, but no man;
priests, but no man; thinkers, but no man. Is it not like some battle-
field, where hands and arms and all members lie scattered about, whilst
the life-blood runs away into the sand? Let every man mind his own,
you say, and I say the same. Only let him mind it with all his heart,
and not with this cold study, literally, hypocritically to appear that
which he passes for, but in good earnest, and in all love, let him be that
which he is; then there is a soul in his deed. And is he driven into a
circumstance where the spirit must not live, let him thrust it from him
with scorn, and learn to dig and plough. There is nothing holy which is
not desecrated, which is not degraded to a mean end among this people.
It is heartrending to see your poet, your artist, and all who still revere
genius, who love and foster the Beautiful. The Good! They live in
the world as strangers in their own house; they are like the patient
Ulysses whilst he sat in the guise of a beggar at his own door, whilst
shameless rioters shouted in the hall and ask, who brought the rag-
gamuffin here? Full of love, talent and hope, spring up the darlings
of the muse among the Germans; come seven years later, and they flit
about like ghosts, cold and silent; they are like a soil which an enemy
has sown with poison, that it will not bear a blade of grass. On earth
all is imperfect! is the old proverb of the German. Aye, but if one
should say to these Godforsaken, that with them all is imperfect, only
because they leave nothing pure which they do not pollute, nothing
holy which they do not defile with their fumbling hands; that with
them nothing prospers; because the godlike nature which is the root of
* Geschichte der Literatur der Gegenwart. 1842. p. 56.
VOL. IV. —NO. II.
34


266
(Oct.
A Letter
all prosperity, they do not revere; that with them, truly, life is shallow
and anxious and full of discord, because they despise genius, which
brings power and nobleness into manly action, cheerfulness into endu-
rance, and love and brotherhood into towns and houses. Where a
people honors genius in its artists, there breathes like an atmosphere
a universal soul, to which the shy sensibility opens, which melts self-
conceit, - all hearts become pious and great, and it adds fire to heroes.
The home of all men is with such a people, and there will the stranger
gladly abide. But where the divine nature and the artist is crushed,
the sweetness of life is gone, and every other planet is better than the
earth. Men deteriorate, folly increases, and a gross mind with it;
drunkenness comes with disaster; with the wantonness of the tongue
and with the anxiety for a livelihood, the blessing of every year
becomes a curse, and all the gods depart.”
The steep antagonism between the money-getting and the
academic class must be freely admitted, and perhaps is the more
violent, that whilst our work is imposed by the soil and the sea,
our culture is the tradition of Europe. But we cannot share the
desperation of our contemporaries, least of all should we think
a preternatural enlargement of the intellect a calamity. A
new perception, the smallest new activity given to the percep-
tive power, is a victory won to the living universe from chaos
and old night, and cheaply bought by any amounts of hard-
fare and false social position. The balance of mind and body
will redress itself fast enough. Superficialness is the real dis-
temper. In all the cases we have ever seen where people were
supposed to suffer from too much wit, or as men said, from a
blade too sharp for the scabbard, it turned out that they had not
wit enough. It may easily happen that we are grown very idle
and must go to work, and that the times must be worse before
they are better. It is very certain, that speculation is no suc-
cedaneum for life. What we would know, we must do. As if
any taste or imagination could take the place of fidelity! The old
Duty is the old God. And we may come to this by the rudest
teaching. A friend of ours went five years ago to Illinois to
buy a farm for his son. Though there were crowds of emi-
grants in the roads, the country was open on both sides, and
long intervals between hamlets and houses. Now after five
years he has just been to visit the young farmer and see how
he prospered, and reports that a miracle has been wrought.
From Massachusetts to Illinois, the land is fenced in and
builded over, almost like New England itself, and the proofs
of thrifty cultivation everywhere abound;- a result not so
much owing to the natural increase of population, as to the
hard times, which, driving men out of cities and trade, forc-
ed them to take off their coats and go to work on the land,
which has rewarded them not only with wheat but with
habits of labor. Perhaps the adversities of our commerce have


1843.)
267
A Letter.
not yet been pushed to the wholesomest degree of severity.
Apathies and total want of work and reflection on the imagina-
tive character of American life, &c. &c., are like seasickness,
which never will obtain any sympathy, if there is a wood pile
in the yard, or an unweeded patch in the garden ; not to men-
tion the graver absurdity of a youth of noble aims, who can
find no field for his energies, whilst the colossal wrongs of the
Indian, of the Negro, of the emigrant, remain unmitigated,
and the religious, civil, and judicial forms of the country are
confessedly effete and offensive. We must refer our clients back
to themselves, believing that every man knows in his heart the
cure for the disease he so ostentatiously bewails.
As far as our correspondents have entangled their private
griefs with the cause of American Literature, we counsel them
to disengage themselves as fast as possible. In Cambridge
orations, and elsewhere, there is much inquiry for that great
absentee American Literature. What can have become of it?
The least said is best. A literature is no man's private concern,
but a secular and generic result, and is the affair of a power
which works by a prodigality of life and force very dismaying
to behold, - the race never dying, the individual never spared,
and every trait of beauty purchased by hecatombs of private
tragedy. The pruning in the wild gardens of nature is never
forborne. Many of the best must die of consumption, many of
despair, and many be stupid and insane, before the one great
and fortunate life, which they each predicted, can shoot up into
a thrifty and beneficent existence.
But passing to a letter which is a generous and a just tribute
to Bettina von Arnim, we have it in our power to furnish our
correspondent and all sympathizing readers with a sketch,*
though plainly from no very friendly hand, of the new work of
that eminent lady, who in the silence of Tieck and Schelling,
seems to hold a monopoly of genius in Germany.
"At last has the long expected work of the Frau von Arnim
here appeared. It is true her name is not prefixed ; more prop-
erly is the dedication, This Book belongs to the King, also the
title; but partly because her genius shines so unmistakeably
out of every line, partly because this work refers so directly to
her earlier writings, and appears only as an enlargement of them,
none can doubt who the author is. We know not how we
should characterize to the reader this most original work.
Bettina, or we should say, the Frau von Arnim, exhibits her
eccentric wisdom under the person of Goethe's Mother, the
* We translate the following extract from the Berlin Correspondence
of the Deutsche Schnellpost of September.


268
[Oct.
A Letter.
Frau Rath, whilst she herself is still a child, who, (1807) sits
upon the shawl' at the foot of the Frau Rath, and listens
devoutly to the gifted mother of the great poet. Moreover,
Bettina does not conceal that she solely, or at any rate princi-
pally, propounds her views from the Frau Rath. And in fact,
it could not be otherwise, since we come to hear the newest philo-
sophical wisdom which makes a strange enough figure in the
mouth of Goethe's mother. If we mistake not, the intimate
intercourse with Bruno Bauer is also an essential impulse for
Frau von Arnim, and we must not therefore wonder if the Frau
Rath loses her way in pure philosophical hypotheses, wherein
she avails herself of the known phrases of the school. It is
true, she quickly recovers herself again, clothes her perceptions
in poetical garb, mounts bravely to the boldest visions, or, (and
this oftenest happens,) becomes a humorist, spices her dis-
courses in Frankfort dialect by idiomatic expressions, and hits
off in her merriest humors capital sketches. For the most part,
the whole humoristic dress seems only assumed in order to
make the matter, which is in the last degree radical, less inju-
rious. As to the object of these 'sayings and narratives re-
ported from memory' of the Frau Rath, (since she leads the
conversation throughout,) our sketch must be short. “It is
Freedom which constitutes the truest being of man. Man
should be free from all traditions, from all prejudices, since
every holding on somewhat traditional, is unbelief, spiritual
selfmurder. The God's impulse to truth is the only right belief.
Man himself should handle and prove, ‘since whoever reflects on a
matter, has always a better right to truth, than who lets himself
be slapped on the cheek by an article-of-Faith. By Sin she
understands that which derogates from the soul, since every
hindrance and constraint interrupts the Becoming of the soul.
In general, art and science have only the destination to make
free what is bound. But the human spirit can rule all, and,
in that sense, 'man is God, only we are not arrived so far as to
describe the true pure Man in us.' If, in the department of
religion, this principle leads to the overthrow of the whole his.
torical Christendom, so, in the political world, it leads to the
ruin of all our actual governments. Therefore she wishes for a
strong reformer, as Napoleon promised for a time to be, who,
however, already in 1807, when these conversations are ascribed
to the Frau Rath, had shown that instead of a world's liberator,
he would be a world's oppressor. Bettina makes variations on
the verse,' and wake an avenger, a hero awake!' and in this
sense is also her dedication to read. It were noble if a stronger
one should come, who in more beautiful moderation, in per-
fecter clearness of soul and freedom of thought, should plant
the tree of equity. Where remains the Regent, if it is not the


1843.)
269
A Letter.
genius of humanity ? that is the Executive principle, in her
system. The state has the same will, the same conscience-
voice for good and evil as the Christ; yet it crumbles itself
away into dogmaticalness of civil officers against one another.
The transgressor is the state's own transgression ! the proof that
it, as man, has trespassed against humanity. The old state's
doctors, who excite it to a will, are also its disease. But they
who do not agree in this will, and cannot struggle through soul- ,
narrowing relations, are the demagogues, against whom the
unsound state trespasses, so long as it knows not how to bring
their sound strength into harmony. And precisely to those
must it dedicate itself, since they are its integration and restora-
tion, whilst the others who conform to it, make it more sunken and
stagnant. If it be objected, that this her truth is only a poetic
dream which in the actual world has no place, she answers;
'even were the truth a dream, it is not therefore to be denied ;
let us dedicate our genius to this dream, let us form an Ideal
Paradise, which the spiritual system of Nature requires at our
hands.' 'Is the whole fabric of state, she asks, only a worse
arranged hospital, where the selfish or the ambitious would fasten
on the poor human race the foolish fantastic malversations of
their roguery for beneficent coöperation ? and with it the
political economy, so destitute of all genius to bind the useful
with the beautiful, on which these state's doctors plume them-
selves so much, and so with their triviality exhibit, as a pattern
to us, a wretched picture of ignorance, of selfishness, and of
iniquity; when I come on that, I feel my veins swell with wrath.
If I come on the belied nature, or how should I call this spectre of
actuality! Yea justly ! No! with these men armed in mail against
every poetic truth, we must not parley ; the great fools' conspi.
racy of that actuality-spectre defends with mock reasoning its
Turkish states'-conduct, before which certainly the revelation
of the Ideal withdraws into a poetic dream-region. But
whilst the existing state in itself is merely null, whilst the trans-
gressor against this state is not incorporated with its author-
izations with its directions and tendencies, so is the transgressor
ever the accuser of the state itself. In general, must the state
draw up to itself at least the lowest class, and not let it sink in
mire; and Bettina lets the Frau Rath make the proposal, instead
of shutting up the felon in penitentiaries, to instruct him in the
sciences, as from his native energies, from his unbroken powers,
great performances might be looked for. But in order also 10
show practically the truth of her assertions, that the present
state does not fulfil its duties especially to the poorest class, at
the close of the book are inserted, • Experiences of a young
Swiss in Voigtland.' This person visited the so-called Family-
houses, which compose a colony of extremest poverty. There


270
[Oct.
New Books.
he went into many chambers, listened to the history of the life,
still oftener to the history of the day, of the inhabitants; in-
formed himself of their merit and their wants, and comes to the
gloomiest results. The hard reproaches, which were made
against the Overseers of the Poor, appear unhappily only too
well founded. We have hastily sketched, with a few literal quo-
tations, the contents of this remarkable book of this remark-
able woman, and there remains no space further to elaborate
judgment. The highflying idealism, which the Frau von Arnim
cherishes, founders and must founder against the actuality which,
as opposed to her imagination, she holds for absolute nothing.
So reality, with her, always converts itself to spectres, whilst
these dreams are to her the only reality. In our opinion an
energetic thorough experiment for the realization of her ideas
would plunge us in a deeper misery than we at present have to
deplore."
NEW BOOKS.
The Huguenots in France and America.
The Huguenots is a very entertaining book, drawn from ex-
cellent sources, rich in its topics, describing many admirable
persons and events, and supplies an old defect in our popular
literature. The editor's part is performed with great assiduity
and conscience. Yet amidst this enumeration of all the geniuses,
and beauties, and sanctities of France, what has the greatest
man in France, at that period, Michael de Montaigne, done, or
left undone, that his name should be quite omitted ?
The Spanish Student. A Play in Three Acts. By H. W.
Longfellow.
A pleasing tale, but Cervantes shall speak for us out of La
Gitanilla.
“You must know, Preciosa, that as to this name of Poet,
few are they who deserve it, and I am no Poet, but only a
lover of Poesy, so that I have no need to beg or borrow the
verses of others. The verses, I gave you the other day, are
mine, and those of to-day as well ;— but, for all that, I am no
poet, neither is it my prayer to be so."
“ Is it then so bad a thing to be a poet ?” asked Preciosa.
“Not bad,” replied the Page, “but to be a poet and nought
else, I do not hold to be very good. For poetry should be like
a precious jewel, whose owner does not put it on every day,


1843.)
271
New Books.
nor show it to the world at every step; but only when it is fit-
ting, and when there is a reason for showing it. Poetry is a
most lovely damsel; chaste, modest, and discreet; spirited, but
yet retiring, and ever holding itself within the strictest rule of
honor. She is the friend of Solitude. She finds in the foun-
tains her delight, in the fields her counsellor, in the trees and
flowers enjoyment and repose ; and lastly, she charms and in-
structs all that approach her.”
The Dream of a Day, and other Poems. By James G. Perci-
val. New Haven. 1843.
Mr. Percival printed his last book of poems sixteen years
ago, and every school-boy learned to declaim his “ Bunker
Hill," since which time, he informs us, his studies have been
for the most part very adverse to poetic inspirations. Yet here
we have specimens of no less than one hundred and fifty differ-
ent forms of stanza. Such thorough workmanship in the poet-
ical art is without example or approach in this country, and de-
serves all honor. We have imitations of four of the leading
classes of ancient measures, – the Dactylic, Iambic, Anapes-
tic, and Trochaic, to say nothing of rarer measures, now never
known out of colleges. Then come songs for national airs,
formed on the rhythm of the music, including Norwegian, Ger-
man, Russian, Bohemian, Gaelic, and Welsh, — Teutonian
and Slavonian. But unhappily this diligence is not without its
dangers. It has prejudiced the creative power,
“And made that art, which was a rage."
Neatness, terseness, objectivity, or at any rate the absence of
subjectivity, characterize these poems. Our bard has not
quite so much fire as we had looked for, grows warm but does
not ignite; those sixteen years of "adverse' studies have had
their effect on Pegasus, who now trots soundly and resolutely
on, but forbears rash motions, and never runs away with us.
The old critics of England were hardly steadier to their triad
of “Gower, Lydgate, and Chaucer," than our American maga-
zines to the trinity of “ Bryant, Dana, and Percival.” A gentle
constellation truly, all of the established religion, having the
good of their country and their species at heart. Percival has
not written anything quite as good on the whole as his two
fast associates, but surpasses them both in labor, in his mimetic
skill, and in his objectiveness. He is the most objective of the
American Poets. Bryant has a superb propriety of feeling,
has plainly always been in good society, but his sweet oaten
pipe discourses only pastoral music. Dana has the most estab.


272
(Oct.
New Books.
lished religion, more sentiment, more reverence, more of Eng.
land; whilst Mr. Percival is an upright, soldierly, free-spoken
man, very much of a patriot, hates cant, and does his best.
We notice in London a new edition of Chapman's Transla-
tion of the Iliads of Homer, illustrated with wood-engravings
aſter Flaxman. Charles Lamb says, “Chapman would have
made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not shown himself
to be one ; for his Homer is not so properly a translation, as
the stories of Achilles and Ulysses rewritten.” We trust this
new edition will find its way here, the older one being very
rare.
Orion, an Epic Poem, in Three Books, 137 pp. By R. H.
Horne, Author of “Cosmo de Medici," &c. Price one farthing.-
From certain extracts from this Epic, it is better than some of
the late Epics, but incomparable in its price.
It is grateful to notice a second edition of Tennyson's
Poems.
A new work of Manzoni is announced, - Storia della
Colonna Infame di Alessandro Manzoni.
The translations of Mary Howitt from the Swedish having
succeeded, a work from the Danish, — King Eric and the Out-
laws: or, the Throne, the Church, and the People in the
Thirteenth Century; translated by Jane Chapman, — has been
published.
In France the monstrous undertaking of the reprint of the
“ Moniteur" from 1789 to 1799, is nearly complete, since of
thirty-two volumes, of which it will consist, already twenty-nine
have appeared. Twenty-five volumes contain the history of
three great revolutionary Assemblies, the Notables, the States
General, and the Convention. Four volumes are devoted to the
Directory.


James to blarke
THE DIAL.
VOL. IV.
JANUARY, 1844.
No. III.
THE YOUTH OF THE POET AND THE PAINTER.
(Continued from p. 174 of last Number.]
LETTER X.
EDWARD ASHFORD TO JAMES HOPE.
Lovedale.
I have been reading Wordsworth with some attention,
on these cold evenings, in my chimney corner, having no
better book. I cannot understand how he engaged so
large a share of praise, or how he can be set among illus,
trious poets. Yet the age places him among the first. I
suspect, he and Southey owe part of their renown to the
quantity of verse they have written. These heavy volumes,
bearing such immense freights of decent poetry, deter their
readers from insisting on finding pure gold, and the few
really good lines, scattered in many places, gleam like
jewels, and illumine the rest with deceptive light.
Did not Wordsworth make a radical mistake to write
verses on a plan? I have no conception of any thing
which has a right to be called poetry, unless it come living
out of the poet's nature, like the stream gushing from the
rock, free and clear. It demands life from the depths of
character, and must be written necessarily.
I have tried many people, in the hope of finding among
them some one with whom I can fully sympathize. I have
the part of the hermit left to play, and begin seriously to
think I will attempt it. I do sympathize with you, but it
is as men feel for each other, rather in pursuit than senti-
ment. I wislı some woman to come, such as I picture in
my dreams. I feel I was born for intimate sympathy, yet
find little except with trees and fields. I peep into the
VOL. IV. — NO. III.
35


274
(Jan.
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
windows of the cottages, where families sit around bright
wood-fires, all bound together by a circle of firelight, so
that no frosts can form in the centre of their being, but I
cannot enter, — for how bare are the walls, and how square
the rooms! I crave the hearth on these chill evenings, but
my roof must be open to the sky, and the keen rays of the
stars shine for my candle. I can feel soft arms willing to
clasp me; the steel fetters of strength do not glitter round
their wrists; I must have something more than affection.
It is tiresome to wander in society, knock at every door,
gain admittance, and find the old arrangement of settees,
coal-grates, centre-tables, and Turkish carpets. O for a
lofty hall, with the sun shining crimson and purple through
its dome, while on the walls hang pictures, and statues
stand in the niches, with some music from a lute sounding,
and no need of artificial warmth, but the sun always! I
would have the windows unglazed, and let the winds rush
through on dizzy storms, and rain and snow enter as they
please, and the stars glow dazzling. I have found decency
everywhere, and what they call a respectable appearance,
without a spark of wildfire.
You seem better than the rest, but as one of my own
sex, I cannot come to you, as I would to the other, — you
are only half the sphere, as well as I. I am fortunate to
foresee my path among these sands of time. I now feel
desolate, like the bird who has neither mate nor nest, and am
wild and proud, as if I would not resign myself to solitude
without war. Yet this day of tempest will pass, and I
shall walk calm and resigned, and build myself a hut, if I
have nothing in it, except a broken branch of some last
year's tree. There, if I secure quiet, with some smiling
fields from the window, I can whistle as if content.
I delight to catch glimpses of sunlight in others' fortunes,
and it makes me smile to see others glad. These bending,
cheerful natures, which sing as gaily as the little birds on
the bough after a shower, in the bright, golden sunshine,
come and alight on the bare walls of my existence, and the
rays of their light blue plumage are reflected for a second
in the surface of my solitary lake, whose grey waves melt
on some side into the azure radiance. Yet these passing
gleams of brightness fade soon, and seem to leave a darker
tint behind, as after the autumn sunsets, charged as they


1844.)
275
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
JOY.
are with splendid gorgeousness, the woods scowl in hard
outlines; I don't know that I am better for these ; I only
see what these soft, sunny characters enjoy.
I met a little child, who roved among the ferns, moving
her large wild eyes, dark as the raven's plumage, yet bright
in their depths, gracefully from tree to rock ; a silent, mo-
tionless mirth, and a smile about her small, crimson mouth,
though I never heard her laugh. I saw her passing before
me, like a sunbeam with its shadow, and one day she came
to my skiff, and we sailed far up the river. I love children,
yet they never satisfy me, for I must have some toil, and
some defeat, to cling 10, yet this child seems more than
any being I have met. She is not affectionate, yet remains
to my memory, a gipsy figure, moving among the woods,
and I have been pleased to find these solitary places
haunted by a creature so genial. Childhood is a painting
set in health and artlessness, and a time cut out of existence,
that we can parallel with nothing beside, for we cannot
bring it back, and see it aſar, as we do heaven. It is like
a bower, or a desert, made of the greenest trees, and
planted inside with flowers, while about its leafy walls, are
rude cliffs not even moss-covered, bare sands where no
blade of grass grows, and heat that mocks life ; in the
midst a clear spring of delicious water rises, where swim
gold and silver fish, and the light from them tints the
air to the door of the delightful place; the sound of the
fountain dances gaily, and sends a gush of music into the
flowery roof. No wonder the old people talk so much
about the time when they were young. This little child
brought me a bunch of ferns, and hung them over the
kitchen fire, and sat herself down in the corner, gazing
with her large, dark, motionless eyes. I did not speak,
and when the firelight played with its changing red over
her low forehead and brown cheeks, I seemed to have some
creature out of the world of gipsies. She was sent away
somewhere the next day, and I shall not see her again, but
then one meets such children often. If they came once,
and then would stay a day, I believe they would form such
sunny memories, we should have gold beams for our recol-
lections.
E. A.


276
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Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
LETTER XI.
EDWARD ASHFORD TO JAMES HOPE.
Lovedale.
My Dear Hope,
I send some of my journal, as I promised. I know you
will procure little from it, yet it will furnish some picture
of the life I lead. It is not a record of what I do, but
what I feel
How cold came the wind from the misty sea, with its
sad, grey clouds, yet I love thee, Autumn. Even if thy
looks are sorrowful, a joy dwells within thy grief. I feel
that nature has her sorrows, and I am not alone in mine,
even if my Autumn continues through the year. My
spring is forming in the depths of my chill heart; the
flowers, if concealed, are sown, and one sunny day will
warm them into life. I long for that, — to throw myself
into the sunniest joy a human soul ever knew. I sat in the
pine woods, upon the red carpet of spires, dropping and
accumulating for a century (and above waved the century-
old trees), while the ravens sailed over, mingling hoarse
cries with the gentle whispers of the forest, as the painful
sounds of life flow among the sweet songs of heaven.
Night dwells in these evergreen bowers, while the ocean's
music murmurs and carries me to the pebbly beaches of the
blue floor of the moving sea. I remember the waves, as
the memories of a better world stand with folded arms, in
the sunny bowers of childhood. I should love to build my
cottage in the pine woods, yet it would be too solitary.
I am reflected from the forms of nature, yet their grace-
ful aspects do not adorn my figure, and I see myself, as I
am, a poor wanderer, seeking shelter in the tempest of the
world from the winds and cold rains. I blame myself, and
not the world, for the jarring image. I have come to my-
self late. Perhaps if I had been shaped, when a little
child, by the beautiful thoughts of the poet, and baptized
in the sea of lovely forms, I should never have entered this
sandy desert, whose end flies as I advance, and whose
entrance I find equally inaccessible. Yet I cannot deplore


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Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
my history more than my companions, for they are all un-
satisfied as I am. No one of them is perfect; they have
some flaw, some speck, and their great endeavor is to hide
this from themselves. I differ in exposing mine ; I am
desirous to see my solitude in its true proportion, to know
how much I can trust others, and how far depend on my-
self. If my efforts fail, when I seek to express my life, let
me at least have the satisfaction of knowing the origin
of my ill success; give me light, even if it be a torch,
to brighten my errors. I would try every thing, - every
art, every man ; no failure can prevent a new trial, though
I have taken the wrong so many times that I can hardly
tread the right, during these ill-fashioned days of time.
Let me be great enough to stand resigned till death's
golden key opens the gate of the next eternity.
THE BIRD'S SONG.
I heard the song of a forest bird,
Sweet was the note in my grateful ear,
It came like the tone of a friendly word,
It was finished, and gentle, and clear,
Yet the singer I saw not, though near.
I hear the bird's song wherever I go,
For it echoes my inward desire,
But the minstrel I deem does not venture below
The far clouds, -- his world is a higher,
His altar is lit by a purer fire.
Sing on thou sweet anthem, — to me,
Though viewless, thou seemest a tone,
That one day shall come in full melody,
And the singer be near, and my own,
Even if now I wander alone.
I grow more attached to this beautiful place each day.
It is fitted for a home to some wanderer like me, and
though I feel I must, before many days, set my sails to the
wind and dash through the green billows, far from the
sheltered coves, I shall remember these green spots, which
should make the earth a heaven. Sweet river, fair groves,
and peaceful fields, receive thanks from a spirit folded for
a few flying moments, in your tender arms; receive the


278
[Jan.
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
assurance, that if it were mine, I should delight to cele-
brate your gifts in fitter strains. How impoverished I feel,
when I return to the house, after one of my long walks,
with the beauty yet standing in my eyes, because I can
give none of it away, and know that presently it will fade
even from my consciousness.
I am a wanderer from a distant land,
There the clouds glow in crimson, and the flames
Of a perpetual summer fill the air.
Noon never falls into dull twilight; trees
Swell in their ruby foliage, and no hand
Cold and regardless plucks the endless bloom.
Shadows fall deep red, and yellow, softening mists
Robe the white temple's pillars with rich gold.
No tears are shed among those sunny years,
For the high day walks garlanded with love.
LETTER XII.
RICHARD ASHFORD TO EDWARD ASHFORD.
Doughnut.
My Dear NED,
I wrote some days since an unfortunate letter, I suppose,
under a severe twinge of rheumatism, as I learn you put
an interdict upon correspondence between us. What if an
interdict will not go far enough to cover the whole ground,
for in the first place, you must interdict me from writing;
then the postmaster-general from sending my letters after
they are written, and then, further, your own heart,
which I know is as soft as lamb's wool, from opening and
reading them, after they are written, sent, and have reached
you. An old head like mine, through whose hair the
storms have blown in three circumnavigations of the globe,
can afford to have a few of these inland gales winter in its
locks; and yet, Ned, why you severely interdict ine from
sending an occasional epistle, I cannot understand. This,
however, shall be the final blast of your uncle's trumpet,
and would it might prove a Jericho horn, and batter down
the grey walls of morbidness, which yesterday and to-
morrow have built round your existence. Finally, I have


1844.)
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Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
worked upon your mother's reason, and she has agreed
with herself and Heaven, to leave you in unending still-
ness, by which I mean, she has constituted me, with your
consent, trustee of your pecuniary finances, unless you
prefer taking them into your hands.
In the mean time I transmit an account of your property,
so far as I have obtained it, by several drillings, musters,
and overhaulings of the lawyer, and Mr. Penny, who has
long been captain of your mother's purse. In the first
place, I find ten shares in the Rotten Twine Company,
originally valued at one hundred dollars per share, purchased
by Mr. Penny for seventy dollars per share, worth, as I see
by the Doughnut Chronicle (which serves me for blotting
paper), fifty dollars per share. My notion is, that, as the
Rotten Twine Company has broke three times, it will
break again; so, with your leave, and without Mr.
Penny's, I shall sell the ten shares. Next, a farm in Mid-
dlebury, originally bought for fifteen hundred dollars by
skilful Mr. Penny, at your mother's request, they both
considering the earth solid and good to buy. I have made
inquiries into its present price, and find it will sell for near
one thousand dollars, and have had an offer by a neighbor,
who sees the wood waving from his window, and the red
grass and mullens in the fields, and who, as he needs fire-
wood and sheep pasture, like many another country booby,
ihinks he will lay out his savings, now in the bank, earning
him his six per cent., upon land, which every year will run him
more than six per cent. in debt. Then, twenty shares in the
Heydiddle Railroad, which will yield, the directors say, in ten
years, after all expenses paid, including their own, newspa-
per puffs, directorial dinners, cow-killing and cart-breaking,
eight per cent. yearly interest. Ned, the Heydiddle Railroad
affords amusement for these directors, with its sherry wine,
roast-beef, and turkey dinners, but what could have led Mr.
Penny to pay two thousand dollars and get so little for his
pains, neither of us can see, unless it was, because Mr. Penny
was a director. With your consent, I shall sell the Hey-
diddle Railroad, with the Rope and Twine Company. The
next investment of Mr. Penny is three thousand dollars in
Eastern lands, and I have pumped much mud and bilge-
water, to say nothing of good, clean drinking water, out of Mr.
Penny and the lawyer, but I can say, that neither of these
speculators will make a chart of the land, or give me any


280
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Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
point to steer by. I shall, with your permission, enter into
correspondence with all persons in Maine, and find where
these lands lie, what they are worth, and who will buy
them, and proceed to sell them for cash. Mr. Penny's
next purchase was three shares in the Solar Microscope Exhi-
bition, which cost one hundred dollars per share, and is now
offered for five dollars ; this has yearly produced two visits to
the Ashford family, under the escort of Mr. Penny, who had
each time to exhibit bis certificate of stock, and his own right
to enter, which he held under a greasy ticket signifying that he
was an original life-subscriber. I advise you, with Mr. Pen-
ny's consent, to hold fast to these shares, for you may, one
day, like to see eels in vinegar yourself. You have a share in
the Sticker library, worth originally two hundred dollars,
and have the right of taking out three books once a month,
by paying six per cent yearly on the cost of your share, and a
farther trifle of three dollars, which goes straight into the
bowels of poor Peter the librarian. As you never took out
books, nor went to the library, and as your inother subscribes
to Mrs. Rundle's Circulating Library, whose whole volumes
you might purchase with your one share in the Sticker,
and further, as the Sticker share would not bring fifty dol-
lars, perhaps it would be well to transfer it to Mrs. Rundle,
and enable her to let the waste water of the Sticker marsh
into her own basin.
There are in the Doughnut Bank two thousand dollars be-
longing to you, which will yield six per cent., like a good cow
that gives a certain quality and quantity of milk. My notion
is, that we sell all and sundry your other stocks and invest-
ments, and lump them in this Bank; if you only make
six per cent. a year, you will never lose ten. The directors
I have watched the last three years with open eyes, and
conclude they are crusty, miserly fellows, who love money
too well to part with one farthing, and consider whatever
is in the Bank theirs, so far as it enables them to make
their six per cent. You may expect six hundred dollars, clear,
a year, if you will put your money in this Bank, which I ex-
pect will support you, or keep your head above water, which
is considered necessary now-a-days. I live on two hundred
a year, and have for the last ten years, so, with me, living on a
small means is no experiment. I purchase my clothes on
the same day with some other boarder at my house, and


1844.)
281
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
find, after four seasons, he has renewed his eight times,
while mine are yet wearing as well as ever. Thus, I never
spend any money for clothes now, because mine are all
bought; I consider I have purchased the articles I require
in this line. In winter I spend every day but Sunday out
of my room ; in this way I save all my fuel, except a
seventh part, and this I borrow. I sit from nine in the
morning till one, at which time I dine, by the bar-room
fire, and read the paper, and talk with the landlord. In
the afternoon, I have a round of ten stores I visit, spend
part of an hour in each, and wile away my evenings in the
parlor; so I spend nothing for lights. I board on an origi-
nal plan, as I consider it. Thus, I do not agree to eat any
one meal at any one particular place, and by not stipula-
ting, am always prepared to accept every invitation. If
none of my acquaintance remember me, at the hour for
meals, I purchase one cent's worth of crackers, and dine
off that, or drink tea, or take breakfast off of it. Wines,
beers, or druggist's small waters, I never purchase, as my
stomach turns sour on every such introduction of drink.
I resolve never to expend more than six cents, any one
day, for food. You may ask where my money goes, to
which I reply, that nominally I live on two hundred dol-
lars a year, but actually on one hundred dollars. I expend
something on books, music, and tobacco, three departments
I value beyond clothes, food, and physic. But then, my
tobacco only costs me three dollars a year, and as I buy
cigars by the bushel, and pipe-tobacco by the barrel, I get
as much as I want for a series of years for a five dollar bill.
I pay no poll-tax, no minister's-tax, no school-tax, and no
fiddler's-tax, because I migrate from Doughnut to Pulten-
ham, according to the visits of the tax-gatherer, and am
thus a citizen of no place, and belong generally.
Your uncle, Dick.
LETTER XIII.
MATHEWS GRAY TO JAMES HOPE.
Eaton.
I have thought more of your letter respecting Edward,
and not only that, but have had an interview with Mrs.
VOL. IV. - NO. III.
36


282
(Jan.
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
Ashford. She found I was interested in her son, who, of
course, is the interesting subject which she has for conver-
sation. I think I have enlightened her in the premises,
and I trust our melancholy poet will be left to the enjoyment
of his reflections undisturbed. She was with difficulty
persuaded, that a young man, left to his own inclinations,
could become any thing but an idler, and a spendthrift in
addition. It was inconceivable to her, that any young
man could have the least pretence to sally into a new
country, out of the formal path which his ancestors followed
five hundred years, and was for bringing him at once to the
city, and placing him in a counting-room. I told her, her
son would never put himself in such a situation, however
much she desired it, and when she became satisfied of this,
she abandoned the idea. Mrs. Ashford is not a miserly
woman, but has that unaccountable folly of many generous
people, and thinks that all money not spent according to
custom is thrown away. The fact of Edward's pecuniary
independence made little impression on her, and any dis-
posal of his means, unless devoted to some formal business
in a city, she considered a misfortune.
You express some fear, that Edward, instead of being a
poet, will be a dreamer, and after he has written some
musical verses, enter manhood, to become an elegant,
literary man, or a prosaic rhymer. It is true, he has one
great disadvantage to contend with, he has not the grand
teacher, -- poverty. His means are sufficient, and his days
will not be spent in toil to conquer enough from the
world to feed his body with on the morrow. I do not
regret this, I have long wished to see a poet nursed by
nature, not obliged to struggle with indigence, and whose
only cares and toils should be a sacrifice to the muse.
His present melancholy has in it the elements of salvation.
This struggle between sorrow and a desire to be cheerful,
this question which must be asked every day, whether his
faith is not strong enough to find in life sovereign bliss, -
this mining into the depths of existence to grasp the glit-
tering charm which lies hidden under the cold granite of
his present fortune, will stand him instead of poverty, con-
test with men, cultivation, and experience. A great sor-
row shows the deepest vein of life, and no man has been a
dreamer, who has wrestled bravely in youth with a giant


1844.)
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Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
despair. If Edward sat weakly down, as he would if this
sorrow had any sentimentalism, and yielded his career to
the hand of chance, nerveless, bashful, and envious, we
might resign him to the poor lead of every trifling circum-
stance; but when you mark what vigorous faith lurks under
every expression of sadness, how healthy his life is when it
breaks the chains of his prison-house, and finds a vent in
song, you must conclude that he is fighting the great battle
of knowledge against ignorance, which every man, who has
proved any thing, has first been obliged to conquer in.
His contest will be more than the experience of a thousand
worldly people. It is an unfortunate mistake, which I think
your constitution leads you into, with many of your tem-
perament, to suppose our best and most useful experiences
flow from the external. Let us first know ourselves, which
result can come only from contest with inward difficulties,
and never from what we catch from the passing shades
which hover around, and whose exteriors we see, and then
no man can be concealed, because our destiny is one and
the same. Let us omit this struggle, let us go into life,
or into nature, and be acted upon from without, and though
the beginning may be fair, the ending will be disappoint-
ment. For my part, I rejoice at Edward's present situa-
tion, and hope he will be left to himself, in nature, there to
battle with the fiend of ignorance. Were he not so deli-
cately constituted, had he the power of warding off circum-
stances, was it not necessary for him to surrender himself
to many more impressions than the mass of men, I should
not insist so positively upon his placing himself among the
woods and fields. Thus finely formed, when every dis-
cordant tone jars on the chords of his most delicate heart,
I am glad nature surrounds him, and when I further con-
sider that he is a poet, both by this education and an evi-
dent predilection from his earliest years, I rejoice yet
more. We need some poets truly bred in nature, who
have gone out, not to look at trees and sunsets, and put
them into their note-books, but drawn by an inevitable
necessity, to unburden their hearts, and confess their im-
perfections, before the stern beauty of the perfect. Our
poetry is too full of conventional existence, and we neg-
lect verses often if newly written, as if there could be
nothing true in them, because the expression of nature is


284
[Jan.
Youth of the Poet and the Painter.
not caught, while the note of social life sounds continually.
I am out of patience with the tameness of late poetry; it
is a feeble imitation of what in its time was good, and
suited the age, and I feel that we demand an actual feel-
ing of nature, which poets have lost. Our social life does
not admit us into the sanctuary of human nature, but tosses
us some chips, some crumbs of feeling or thought, as if the
strong, healthy, abundant nature of man had dwindled
into a pretty scholar, apt at feeding the birds from the
window, while his tasks of courage were forgotten.
It is a good part in Edward's history, that he has courage
to make disappointments, — to sing his song to the end,
though assured his verses will prove unsatisfactory. Those
poets who have halted, and could not say at the end of
life, as Michael did, “anchora imparo," to use an old
illustration, never went into the depths of the art, never
used their powers except as amateurs. I am glad you
tell me, Edward cannot be satisfied with any poem he
makes, for I am convinced, with his constitution, he will
never tire, until he makes verse which shall be much to
him, and yet that he will never cease to write. I think it
will be long before he finds his true position, and till then
he cannot estimate the place of any other person. How it
is I cannot say, but there is, in people of his description,
a power of misrepresenting the exact capacities of those
by whom they are surrounded. It looks impossible for
them to address themselves friendlily to those with whom
they sympathize imperfectly, and they demand from all,
character and entertainment, which only a very few can
ever yield.
Truly yours,
M. G.


1844.)
285
Translation of Dante.
TRANSLATION OF DANTE.*
Many of us must remember our introduction to the
Prince of Tuscan Poets. We had formed perhaps the
dim vision of a Miltonic hell, enveloped in smoke and
flame, dusky, lurid, indistinct, out of which peered gaunt
shapes of horror. The Italians told us how hard he was
to read,-how impossible for any but an Italian to under-
stand, -how obscure-enigmatical--allegorical. We heard
that no one has ever yet fully and fairly explained him.
All conspire to make us approach with awe this dim and
tremendous shadow. With how different feeling do we
now look back. We tell our good Italian friends that the
beautiful explains itself, and may be found by Italians or
English alike. The allegory he hides so deeply was tem-
porary, and whether it means this or that, is of little im-
portance to us,—but the poetry, in which it is enveloped,
belongs to all time, and can be understood by all men. To
his language, at first unusual, we discover in a few cantos
the key. His rhyme, which impeded at first, soon seems
to us the only medium that could adapt itself to his varied
theme. The Terza Rima does not flow, but walks,--does
not declaim, but converses, philosophizes, reasons,-above
all, describes,—and, however difficult to us, in Dante, it
seems to be the natural frame of sentences among his in-
terlocutors. Instead of obscurity or vagueness, we find an
unexampled clearness, rendered transparent by images
that with a single word give the most forcible pictures.
The whole scene passes before our eyes. Rightly is the
poem called Commedia, for it is like a history seen, and
not read. The Inferno is full of physical horrors,—and we
often hear a disgust expressed at them, --but our experience
has been that the moral always overcomes the physical, and
the dire torments pass away from our minds, wbile Frances-
ca, Farinata, Ugolino, La Pia, remain fixed forever. Who
forgets not the fiery sepulchre when Farinata himself for-
* The first ten Cantos of the Inferno of Dante newly translated into English
verse. By T. W. PARSONS. Ticknor. 1843.


286
(Jan.
Translation of Dante.
gets it in his pride and grief for Florence and his friends ;-
or when the father of Guido forgets it to ask after his son ?
It is only the mean men in Dante's hell, that are overcome
by the torments; the majestic Ulysses speaks with un-
changed voice after ages of pain. When we are well
acquainted with Dante, the terrible is to us but a back-
ground for pictures of such beauty and tenderness as are
perhaps without parallel.
So many reviews, books, and magazine articles have of
late years been busy with the subject, that now-a-days it is to
be hoped students are better prepared what to expect than
chanced in our day. Every body has read a few cantos, that
has read Italian at all. Many have read the Inferno; but
to almost all the Purgatorio and the Paradiso remain un-
sought mines. Still, from an Italian author, Dante is be-
coming a world-author ; the knowledge of him is no longer
confined to Italian scholars, -and it is a fair sign of the
times that here we have in Boston a new and good trans-
lation.
We took up this book, not a little prejudiced ; for who
with the deep music of the original ringing in his ears, but
must view the best translation with some aversion ? And
verily were all the world acquainted with originals, trans-
lators would stand but a poor chance, if indeed they could
under such circumstances exist. A translation is neither
more nor less than a paraphrase, only in a different lan-
guage; and this is the only answer to give to those who
insist that if there be any meaning in a poet, it can be
translated, that the thought cannot escape if the words are
rendered by equivalents. But let any one paraphrase Shak-
speare, and see what work he will make of it. Hence is a
translator's in one respect the most ungrateful of all literary
tasks. Yet is it one of the most honorable and most useful,
for few can go to the fountain heads, and none can go to
them all; and without the labors of conscientious transla-
tors, not the Bible only, but our Plato and Æschylus would
be sealed books to most of us. Goethe translated Phèdre,
and Benvenuto Cellini, and several other works; and
thus much is certain, that to produce good translations,
especially of poetical works, requires rare talents.
Cary is faithful, and literal, and has been a very useful
translator, so far as we can speak from imperfect knowl-


1844.)
287
Translation of Dante.
edge, but seems to possess quite a faculty of giving a
prosaic translation of a poetical passage. Mír. Parsons is
spirited, often poetical; not always literal enough. A
translator is bound to clip nothing, above all, in an author
who, like Dante, has never an unnecessary word or line.
We take the first lines of the Second Book as an illustration
both of the poet and his translators.
Lo giorno se n'andava, e l'aere bruno
Togliera gli animai che sono in terra
Dalle fatiche loro : ed io sol uno
M'apparechiava a sostener la guerra
Si del cammino, e si della pietate
Che ritrarrà la mente che non erra.
Cary translates-
Now was the day departing, and the air,
Imbrowned with shadows, from their toils released
All animals on earth ; and I alone
Prepared myself the conflict to sustain,
Both of sad pity, and that perilous road
Which my unerring memory shall retrace.
Mr. Parsons-
Day was departing, and the dusky light
Freed earthly creatures from their labor's load;
I only rose and girt myself to fight
The struggle with compassion, and my road,
Paint it, my memory, now in truth's own hue!
Literally-
"Day was departing, and the dark air
Took away the animals that are upon the earth
From their labors. And I alone
Prepared myself to sustain the war,
Both of the journey and of pity,
Which my mind that does not err shall retrace.
In the original the picture of departing day is marked,
and so beautiful as to arrest attention and fix itself in the
memory. Mr. Cary is faithful, and does not injure the
picture by adding or taking away a word, and is not un-
poetical. In Mr. Parsons " freed earthly creatures from
Their labor's load” does not sufficiently render “ toglieva
gli animai che sono in terra dalle fatiche loro," this descrip-
tion cannot be compressed without taking away its individ-
uality and making it commonplace; and although the
meaning is sufficiently clear, the rendering is not artistic; it


288
(Jan.
Translation of Dante.
has missed the points of the original, and does not arrest
the attention, nor produce the effect of the original.
In the celebrated lines with which the third canto be-
gins, “Per me si va,” &c., Cary is again literal and true,
but with a lamentable want of the majesty of Dante's verses,
which are unequalled in their solemn impressiveness.
Per me si va nella città dolente:
Per me si va nell'eterno dolore:
Per me si va tra la perduta gente:
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore :
Fecemi la divina potestate,
La somma sapienza, e'l primo amore.
Dinanzi a me non fur cose create,
Se non eterne; ed io eterno duro.
Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate.
Cary-
“ Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd;
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
Parsons-
Through me ye reach the city of despair:
Through me eternal wretchedness ye find :
Through me among Perdition's race ye fare:
Justice inspired my lofty Founder's mind;
Power, love and wisdom,heavenly, first, and most high,
Framed me ere aught created else had been,
Save things eternal, and eterne am I.
Leave here all hope, O ye who enter in.
Mr. Parsons here has evidently the advantage. He
keeps sufficiently close to his original, and is at the same
time spirited, and his lines give somewhat the feeling of
the original which Cary's, though literal, do not.
The episode of Francesca and Paolo has been so many
times translated, that it must be looked upon as a test
passage. Our translator shows both the merits and defects
we have noticed above. His translation is spirited, and
forms a whole, and reads well together; but there are sins
both of omission and commission-for instance-


1844.)
289
Translation of Dante.
“ Da ch' io intesi quell' anime offense
“ Chinai 'l viso, e tanto l' tenni basso
" Fin che 'l Poeta mi disse, che pense ?
“Quando risposi cominciai : Oh lasso, &c.
Literally-
When I heard those troubled souls,
I bent down my head and held it down
Until the poet said to me; what are you thinking ?
When I answered, I began, &c.
All this Mr. Parsons has compressed into two lines :
“ During their speech, low down I hung my head,
“What thinkest thou? inquired my guide, &c.
Now this is really cutting the matter too short. Dante
thought it worth while to write four whole lines, full of
meaning, in order to express the effect that the hearing of
the story had upon him, and these lines in the original
give wonderful life and reality to the whole scene. We
see Dante's deliberate, grand motion as he inclines his
head, heeding nothing till his companion asks to rouse
him, what are you thinking? Nor does he even then at
once recover, but as he says, “ When I answered, I be-
gan,” &c.
And again the language in the original is as simple as
possible. “Francesca ! thy sufferings make me weep, sad
and pitying,''-any man might say, but “My pitying soul
thy martyr throes unman,” is hardly simple enough.
We wish not to be over-critical, but rather to represent
the difficulty of the undertaking, for in the whole range of
literature it would be hard to select a harder book. Dante
is so condensed, that not a line, or a thought, or even a word
can be spared. A verbose writer may be compressed, but
Dante's words are thoughts; you cannot compress, you can
only leave out. Because " the fear that had remained all
night in the lake of my heart” is hard to render into Eng-
lish verse, the translator has no right to leave it out. On
the other hand, a man of fine taste would lie awake half
the night with anxiety, if he found himself obliged by the
rhyme to say the beasts “ were freed from their labor's
load,” when Dante only said they were freed from their
labors.
VOL. 1V. _ NO. III.
37


290
(Jan.
Homer.
We believe the time is past, when a distinction can be
made between a free and a literal translation of a great
work. A translation must be literal, or it is no translation.
And if the translator cannot be free and literal at once, if
he cannot learn to move freely and gracefully in his irons,
he is wanting in a prime requisite. It is in vain to speak
of translating in the spirit of an original, without confining
one's self too closely to the text. You may thus produce
as good a work as Pope's Homer, but no translation.
On the whole, we feel most grateful to Mr. Parsons for
undertaking this work. We think he has done well, but
he can do much better. We counsel bim never to leave a
passage, till he is sure that he has united a full and faithful
rendering of the whole he finds in his author, with that
simple and vigorous expression of the original. To avoid,
above all, general expressions, where Dante uses individuals ;
the temptation is often great, but weakness is the sure
result. As it is, we have no little pride, that our city should
produce a mark of so much devotion to the highest walks
of pure literature.
HOMER. OSSIAN. CHAUCER.
EXTRACTS FROM A LECTURE ON POETRY, READ BEFORE THE CONCORD
LYCEUM, NOVEMBER 29, 1843, BY HENRY D. THOREAU.
HOMER.
The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly
prove false by setting aside its requisitions. We can
therefore publish only our advertisement of it.
There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is
rhymed or measured, is in form as well as substance
poetry; and a volume, which should contain the con-
densed wisdom of mankind, need not have one rhythm-
less line. Yet poetry, though the last and finest result,
is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn,
and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken


1844.]
291
Homer.
or done. It is the chief and most memorable success,
for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. What
else have the Hindoos, the Persians, the Babylonians, the
Egyptians, done, that can be told ? It is the simplest
relation of phenomena, and describes the commonest sen-
sations with more truth than science does, and the latter
at a distance slowly mimics its style and methods. The
poet sings how the blood flows in his veins. He per-
forms his functions, and is so well that he needs such
stimulus to sing only as plants to put forth leaves and
blossoms. He would strive in vain to modulate the re-
mote and transient music which he sometimes hears,
since his song is a vital function like breathing, and an
integral result like weight. It is not the overflowing of
life but its subsidence rather, and is drawn from under the
feet of the poet. It is enough if Homer but say the sun sets.
He is as serene as nature, and we can hardly detect the en-
thusiasm of the bard. It is as if nature spoke. He pre-
sents to us the simplest pictures of human life, so that
childhood itself can understand them, and the man must
not think twice to appreciate his naturalness. Each
reader discovers for himself, that succeeding poets have
done little else than copy his similes. His more memo-
rable passages are as naturally bright, as gleams of sun-
light in misty weather. Nature furnishes him not only
with words, but with stereotyped lines and sentences from
her mint.
“As from the clouds appears the full moon,
All shining, and then again it goes behind the shadowy clouds,
So Hector, at one time appeared among the foremost,
And at another in the rear, commanding; and all with brass
He shone, like to the lightning of ægis-bearing Zeus."
He conveys the least information, even the hour of the
day, with such magnificence, and vast expense of natural
imagery, as if it were a nessage from the gods.
" While it was dawn, and sacred day was advancing,
For that space the weapons of both flew fast, and the people fell;
But when now the woodcutter was preparing his morning meal
In the recesses of the mountain, and had wearied his hands
With cutting lofty trees, and satiety came to his mind,
And the desire of sweet food took possession of his thoughts;
Then the Danaans by their valor broke the phalanxes,
Shouting to their companions from rank to rank.”


292
(Jan.
Homer.
When the army of the Trojans passed the night under
arms, keeping watch lest the eneiny should re-embark
under cover of the dark,
• They, thinking great things, upon the neutral ground of war,
Sat all the night ; and many fires burned for them.
As when in the heavens the stars round the bright moon
Appear beautiful, and the air is without wind;
And all the heights, and the extreme summits,
[heart;
And the shady valleys appear; and the shepherd rejoices in his
So between the ships and the streams of Xanthus
Appeared the fires of the Trojans before Ilium.”
The "white-armed goddess Juno," sent by the Father
of gods and men for Iris and Apollo,
“ Went down the Idæan mountains to far Olympus,
As when the mind of a man, who has come over much earth,
Sallies forth, and he reflects with rapid thoughts,
There was I, and there, and remembers many things;
So swiftly the august Juno hastening flew through the air,
And came to high Olympus.”
There are few books which are fit to be remembered
in our wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the
serenest days, and imbodies still all the sunlight that fell
on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can
lower its height or din its lustre; but there it lies in the
last of literature, as it were the earliest, latest production
of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us
with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch,
and swathed in linen ; the death of that which never
lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us,
and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The
statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad
still meets the sun in his rising.
So too, no doubt, Homer had his Homer, and Orpheus
his Orpheus, in the dim antiquity which preceded them.
The mythological system of the ancients, and it is still
the only mythology of the moderns, the poem of man-
kind, interwoven so wonderfully with their astronomy,
and inatching in grandeur and harmony with the archi-
tecture of the Heavens themselves, seems to point to a
time when a miglitier genius inhabited the earth. But
man is the great poet, and not Homer nor Shakspeare;
and our language itself, and the common arts of life are
s


1844.)
293
Ossian.
his work. Poetry is so universally true and independent
of experience, that it does not need any particular biogra-
phy to illustrate it, but we refer it sooner or later to some
Orpheus or Linus, and after ages to the genius of hu-
manity, and the gods themselves.
OSSIAN.*
The genuine remains of Ossian, though of less fame and
extent, are in many respects of the same stamp with the
Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than
Homer, and in his era we hear of no other priest than he.
It will not avail to call him a heathen because he personi-
fies the sun and addresses it; and what if his heroes did
66 worship the ghosts of their fathers," their thin, airy, and
unsubstantial forms ? we but worship the ghosts of our
fathers in more substantial forms. We cannot but respect
the vigorous faith of those heathen, who sternly believed
somewhat, and are inclined to say to the critics, who are
offended by their superstitious rites, don't interrupt these
men's prayers. As if we knew more about human life and
a God, than the heathen and ancients. Does English
theology contain the recent discoveries ?
Ossian reminds us of the most refined and rudest eras,
of Homer, Pindar, Isaiah, and the American Indian. In
his poetry, as in Homer's, only the simplest and most en-
during features of humanity are seen, such essential parts
of a man as Stonehenge exhibits of a temple; we see the
circles of stone, and the upright shaft alone. The phe-
nomena of life acquire almost an unreal and gigantic size
seen through his mists. Like all older and grander poetry,
it is distinguished by the few elements in the lives of its
heroes. They stand on the heath, between the stars and
the earth, shrunk to the bones and sinews. The earth is
a boundless plain for their deeds. They lead such a sim-
ple, dry, and everlasting life, as hardly needs depart with
* " The Genuine Remains of Ossian, Literally Translated, with a Preliminary
Dissertation, by Patrick Macgregor. Published under the Patronage of the
Highland Society of London. I vol. 12mo. London, 1-41." We take pleasure
in recommending this, the first literal English translation of the Gaelic originals
of Ossian, which were left by Macpherson, and published agreeably to his inten-
tion, in 1807.


294
(Jan.
Ossian.
the flesh, but is transmitted entire from age to age. There
are but few objects to distract their sight, and their life is
as unincumbered as the course of the stars they gaze at.
“ The wrathful kings, on cairns apart,
Look forward from behind their shields,
And mark the wandering stars,
That brilliant westward move."
It does not cost much for these beroes to live. They
want not much furniture. They are such forms of men
only as can be seen afar through the mist, and have no
costume nor dialect, but for language there is the tongue
itsell, and for costume there are always the skins of beasts
and the bark of trees to be had. They live out their years
by the vigor of their constitutions. They survive storms
and the spears of their foes, and perform a few heroic
deeds, and then,
“ Mounds will answer questions of them,
For many future years."
Blind and infirm, they spend the remnant of their days
listening to the lays of the bards, and feeling the weapons
which laid their enemies low, and when at length they die,
by a convulsion of nature, the bard allows us a short misty
glance into futurity, yet as clear, perchance, as their lives
had been. When Mac-Roine was slain,
“ His soul departed to his warlike sires,
To follow misty forms of boars,
In tempestuous islands bleak."
The hero's cairn is erected, and the bard sings a brief sig-
nificant strain, which will suffice for epitaph and biography.
* The weak will find his bow in the dwelling,
The feeble will attempt to bend it."
Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized his-
tory appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the
arts of luxury. But the civilized man misses no real refine-
ment in the poctry of the rudest era. It reminds him that
civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it
does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of
finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the
civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor.
We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slen-
der, dark-haired Normans.


1844.)
295
Ossian.
The profession of the bard attracted more respect in
those days from the importance attached to fame. It was
his province to record the deeds of heroes. When Ossian
hears the traditions of inferior bards, he exclaims,
“I straightway seize the unfutile tales,
And send them down in faithful verse."
His philosophy of life is expressed in the opening of the
third Duan of Ca-Lodin.
“ Whence have sprung the things that are ?
And whither roll the passing years?
Where does time conceal its iwo heads,
In dense impenetrable gloom,
Its surface marked with heroes' deeds alone ?
I view the generations gone ;
The past appears but dim;
As objects by the moon's faint beams,
Reflected from a distant lake.
I see, indeed, the thunder-bolts of war,
But there the unmighty joyless dwell,
All those who send not down their deeds
To far, succeeding times.”
The ignoble warriors die and are forgotten;
“Strangers come to build a tower,
And throw their ashes overhand;
Some rusted swords appear in dust;
One, bending forward, says,
• The arms belonged to heroes gone;
We never heard their praise in song.'”
The grandeur of the similes is another feature which
characterizes great poetry. Ossian seems to speak a gi-
gantic and universal language. The images and pictures
occupy even much space in the landscape, as if they could
be seen only from the sides of mountains, and plains with a
wide horizon, or across arms of the sea. The machinery is
so massive that it cannot be less than natural. Oivana says
to the spirit of her father, “Grey-haired Torkil of Torne,"
seen in the skies,
“Thou glidest away like receding ships.”
So when the hosts of Fingal and Starne approach to battle,
“With murmurs loud, like rivers far,
The race of Torne hither moved.”
And when compelled to retire,
“ dragging his spear behind,
Cudulin sank in the distant wood,
Like a fire upblazing ere it dies."


296
[Jan.
Ossian.
Nor did Fingal want a proper audience when he spoke;
“ A thousand orators inclined
To hear the lay of Fingal.”
The threats too would have deterred a man. Vengeance
and terror were real. Trenmore threatens the young war-
rior, whom he meets on a foreign strand,
“ Thy mother shall find thee pale on the shore,
While lessening on the waves she spies
The sails of him who slew her son.''
If Ossian's heroes weep, it is from excess of strength, and
not from weakness, a sacrifice or libation of feruile natures,
like the perspiration of stone in summer's heat. We
hardly know that tears have been shed, and it seems as if
weeping were proper only for babes and heroes. Their
joy and their sorrow are made of one stuff, like rain and
snow, the rainbow and the mist. When Fillan was worsted
in fight, and ashamed in the presence of Fingal,
“He strode away forth with,
And bent in grief above a stream,
His cheeks bedewed with tears.
From time to time the thistles gray
He lopped with his inverted lance."
Crodar, blind and old, receives Ossian, son of Fingal, who
comes to aid him in war,
66 "My eyes have failed,' says he, · Crodar is blind,
Is thy strength like that of thy fathers ?
Stretch, Ossian, thine arm to the hoary-haired.'
I gave my arm to the king.
The aged hero seized my hand;
He heaved a heavy sigh;
Tears flowed incessant down his cheek.
Strong art thou, son of the mighty,
Though not so dreadful as Morven's prince. .
Let my feast be spread in the hall,
Let every sweet-voiced minstrel sing;
Great is he who is within my wall,
Sons of wave-echoing Croma.'”
Even Ossian himself, the hero-bard, pays tribute to the su-
perior strength of his father Fingal.
“ How beauteous, mighty man, was thy mind,
Why succeeded Ossian without its strength ? "


1844.)
297
Chaucer.
CHAUCER.
What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry
of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakspeare
and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray.
Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin
before it, seems well advanced toward its fall, and laden
with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal
tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering
and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and
fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in
the blasts of ages. We cannot escape the impression, that
the Muse has stooped a little in her flight, when we come
to the literature of civilized eras. Now first we hear of
various ages and styles of poetry, but the poetry of runic
monuments is for every age. The bard has lost the dignity
and sacredness of his office. He has no more the
bardic rage, and only conceives the deed, which he form-
erly stood ready to perform. Hosts of warriors, earnest for
battle, could not mistake nor dispense with the ancient
bard. His lays were heard in the pauses of the fight.
There was no danger of his being overlooked by his con-
temporaries. But now the hero and the bard are of differ-
ent professions. When we come to the pleasant English
verse, it seems as if the storms had all cleared away, and
it would never thunder and lighten more. The poet has
come within doors, and exchanged the forest and crag for
the fireside, the hut of the Gael, and Stonehenge with its
circles of stones, for the house of the Englishman. No
hero stands at the door prepared to break forth into song
or heroic action, but we have instead a homely Englishman,
who cultivates the art of poetry. We see the pleasant fire-
side, and hear the crackling faggots in all the verse.
The towering and misty imagination of the bard has de-
scended into the plain, and become a lowlander, and keeps
flocks and herds. Poetry is one man's trade, and not all
men's religion, and is split into many styles. It is pastoral,
and lyric, and narrative, and didactic.
Notwithstanding the broad humanity of Chaucer, and the
many social and domestic comforts which we meet with in
his verse, we have to narrow our vision somewhat to con-
VOL. IV. No. III.
38


298
(Jan.
Chaucer.
sider him, as if he occupied less space in the landscape, and
did not stretch over hill and valley as Ossian does. Yet,
seen from the side of posterity, as the father of English
poetry, preceded by a long silence or conſusion in history,
unenlivened by any strain of pure melody, we easily come
to reverence him. Passing over the earlier continental
poets, since we are bound to the pleasant archipelago of
English poetry, Chaucer's is the first name after that misty
weather in which Ossian lived, which can detain us long.
Indeed, though he represents so different a culture, and
society, be may be regarded as in many respects the Homer
of the English poets. Perhaps he is the youthfullest of
them all. We return to him as to the purest well, the
fountain furthest removed from the highway of desultory
life. He is so natural and cheerful, compared with later
poets, that we might almost regard him as a personification
of spring. To the faithful reader his muse has even given
an aspect to his times, and when he is fresh from perusing
him, they seem related to the golden age. It is still the
poetry of youth and liſe, rather than of thought; and though
the moral vein is obvious and constant, it has not yet ban-
ished the sun and daylight from his verse. The loftiest
strains of the muse are, for the most part, sublimely plain-
tive, and not a carol as free as nature's. The content
which the sun shines to celebrate from morning to evening
is unsung. The muse solaces herself, and is not ravished
but consoled. There is a catastrophe implied, and a tragic
element in all our verse, and less of the lark and morning
dews, than of the nightingale and evening shades. But in
Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and
serenity of youth, than in the more modern and moral
poets. The Iliad is not sabbath but morning reading, and
men cling to this old song, because they have still moments
of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an
appetite for more. He represents no creed nor opinion,
and we read him with a rare sense of freedom and irre-
sponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were au-
tochthones of the soil.
Chaucer had eminently the habits of a literary man and
a scholar. We do not enough allow for the prevalence of
this class. There were never any times so stirring, that
there were not to be found some sedentary still. Through


1844.)
299
Chaucer.
all those outwardly active ages, there were still monks in
cloisters writing or copying folios. He was surrounded by
the din of arms. The battles of Hallidon Hill and Neville's
Cross, and the still more memorable battles of Crecy and
Poictiers, were fought in his youth, but these did not con-
cern our poet much, Wicliffe much inore. He seems to
have regarded himself always as one privileged to sit
and converse with books. He helped to establish the lite-
rary class. His character, as one of the fathers of the
English language, would alone make his works important,
even those which have little poetical merit. A great philo-
sophical and moral poet gives permanence to the language
he uses, by making the best sound convey the best sense.
He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely
but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the
court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a litera-
ture, and rendered a similar service to his country to that
which Dante rendered to Italy. If Greek sufficeth for
Greek,' and Arabic for Arabian, and Hebrew for Jew, and
Latin for Latin, then English shall suffice for him, for any
of these will serve to teach truth“ right as divers pathes
leaden divers folke the right waye to Rome.” In the Tes-
tament of Love he writes, “Let then clerkes enditen in
Latin, for they have the propertie of science, and the
knowinge in that facultie, and lette Frenchmen in their
Frenche also enditen their queinte termes, for it is kyndely
to their mouthes, and let us shewe our fantasies in soche
wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge."
He will know how to appreciate Chaucer best, who has
come down to him the natural way, through the meagre
pastures of Saxon and ante-Chaucerian poetry; and yet
so human and wise he seems after such diet, that he is
liable to misjudge him still. In the Saxon poetry extant,
in the earliest English, and the contemporary Scottish
poetry, there is less to remind the reader of the rudeness
and vigor of youth, than of the feebleness of a declining
age. It is for the most part translation or imitation merely,
with only an occasional and slight tinge of poetry, and
oftentimes the falsehood and exaggeration of fable, without
its imagination to redeem it. It is astonishing to how few
thoughts so many sincere efforts give utterance. But as
they never sprang out of nature, so they will never root


300
[Jan.
Chaucer.
themselves in nature. There are few traces of original
genius, and we look in vain to find antiquity restored,
humanized, and made blithe again, by the discovery of
some natural sympathy between it and the present. But
when we come to Chaucer we are relieved of many a load.
He is fresh and modern still, and no dust settles on his true
passages. It lightens along the line, and we are reminded
that flowers have bloomed, and birds sung, and hearts
beaten, in England. Before the earnest gaze of the reader
the rust and moss of time gradually drop off, and the
original green life is revealed. He was a homely and
domestic man, and did breathe quite as modern men do.
Only one trait, one little incident of human biography
needs to be truly recorded, that all the world may think
the author fit to wear the laurel crown. In the dearth we
have described, and at this distance of time, the bare pro-
cesses of living read like poetry, for all of human good or ill,
heroic or vulgar, lies very near to them. All that is truly
great and interesting to men, runs thus as level a course,
and is as unaspiring, as the plough in the furrow.
There is no wisdom which can take place of humanity,
and we find that in Chaucer. We can expand in his
breadth and think we could be that man's acquaint-
ance. He was worthy to be a citizen of England,
while Petrarch and Boccacio lived in Italy, and Tell
and Tamerlane in Switzerland and in Asia, and Bruce
in Scotland, and Wickliffe, and Gower, and Edward the
Third, and John of Gaunt, and the Black Prince, were bis
own countrymen; all stout and stirring names. The fame of
Roger Bacon came down from the preceding century, and
the name of Dante still exerted the influence of a living
presence. On the whole, Chaucer impresses us, as greater
than his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shak-
speare, for he would have held up his head in their com-
pany. Among early English poets he is the landlord and
host, and has the authority of such. The affectionate
mention, which succeeding early poets make of him, coup-
ling him with Homer and Virgil, is to be taken into the
account in estimating his character and influence. King
James and Dunbar of Scotland speak with more love and
reverence of him, than any modern author of his predeces-
sors of the last century. The same childlike relation is


1844.7
301
Chaucer.
without parallel now. We read him without criticism for
the most part, for he pleads not his own cause, but speaks
for his readers, and has that greatness of trust and reliance
which compels popularity. He confides in the reader, and
speaks privily with him, keeping nothing back. And in
return his reader has great confidence in him, that he tells
no lies, and reads his story with indulgence, as if it were
the circumlocution of a child, but discovers afterwards that
he has spoken with more directness and economy of words
than a sage. He is never heartless,
“ For first the thing is thought within the hart,
Er any word out from the mouth astart.”'.
And so new was all his theme in those days, that he had
not to invent, but only to tell.
We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit. The
easy height he speaks from in his Prologue to the Canter-
bury Tales, as if he were equal to any of the company
there assembled, is as good as any particular excellence in
it. But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is
not transcendent poetry. For picturesque description of
persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry;
yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never
is. Humor, however broad and genial, takes a narrower
view than enthusiasm. The whole story of Chanticlere
and Dame Partlett, in the Nonne's Preeste's tale, is genuine
humanity. I know of nothing better in its kind, no more
successful fabling of birds and beasts. If it is said of
Shakspeare, that he is now Hamlet, and then Falstaff, it
may be said of Chaucer that he sympathizes with brutes as
well as men, and assumes their nature that he may speak
from it. In this tale he puts on the very feathers and
stature of the cock. To his own finer vein he added all
the common wit and wisdom of his time, and every where
in his works his remarkable knowledge of the world, and
nice perception of character, his rare common sense and
proverbial wisdom, are apparent. His genius does not soar
like Milton's, but is genial and familiar. It shows great
tenderness and delicacy, but not the heroic sentiment. It
is only a greater portion of humanity with all its weakness.
It is not heroic, as Raleigh's, nor pious, as Herbert's, nor
philosophical, as Shakspeare's, but it is the child of the


302
(Jan.
Chaucer.
English muse, that child which is the father of the man.
It is for the most part only an exceeding naturalness, per-
fect sincerity, with the behavior of a child rather than of a
man.
Gentleness and delicacy of character is every where ap-
parent in his verse. The simplest and humblest words
come readily to his lips. No one can read the Prioress'
tale, understanding the spirit in which it was written, and
in which the child sings, O alma redemptoris mater, or the
account of the departure of Constance with her child upon
the sea, in the Man of Lawe's tale, without feeling the na-
tive innocence and refinement of the author. Nor can we
be mistaken respecting the essential purity of his character,
disregarding the apology of the manners of the age. His
sincere sorrow in his later days for the grossness of his
earlier works, and that he “cannot recall and annull”
much that he had written, “but, alas, they are now con-
tinued from man to man, and I cannot do what I desire,”
is not to be forgotten. A simple pathos and feminine gen-
tleness, which Wordsworth occasionally approaches, but
does not equal, are peculiar to him. We are tempted to say,
that his genius was feminine, not masculine. It was such
a feminineness, however, as is rarest to find in woman,
though not the appreciation of it. Perhaps it is not to
be found at all in woman, but is only the feminine in man.
Such pure, childlike love of nature is not easily to be
matched. Nor is it strange, that the poetry of so rude an
age should contain such sweet and polished praise of na-
ture, for her charms are not enhanced by civilization, as
society's are, but by her own original and permanent re-
finement she at last subdues and educates man.
Chaucer's remarkably trustful and affectionate character
appears in his familiar, yet innocent and reverent, manner
of speaking of his God. He comes into his thought with..
out any false reverence, and with no more parade than the
zephyr to his ear. If nature is our mother, then God is
our father. There is less love and simple practical trust in
Shakspeare and Milton. How rarely in our English tongue
do we find expressed any affection for God. There is no
sentiment so rare as the love of God. Herbert almost
alone expresses it, “ Ah, my dear God!” Our poet uses
similar words, and whenever he sees a beautiful person, or


1844.]
303
Chaucer.
other object, prides himself on the “ maistry" of his God.
He reverently recommends Dido to be his bride,
“ if that God that heaven and yearth made,
Would have a love for beauty and goodnesse,
And womanhede, trouth, and seneliness."
He supplies the place to his imagination of the saints of
the Catholic calendar, and has none of the attributes of a
Scandinavian deity.
But, in justification of our praise, we must refer the
hearer to bis works themselves; to the Prologue to the
Canterbury Tales, the account of Gentilesse, the Flower
and the Leat, the stories of Griselda, Virginia, Ariadne,
and Blanche the Dutchesse, and much more of less distin-
guished merit. There are many poets of more taste and
better manners, who knew how to leave out their dulness,
but such negative genius cannot detain us long; we shall
return to Chaucer still with love. Even the clown has
taste, whose dictates, though he disregards them, are higher
and purer than those which the artist obeys; and some
natures, which are rude and ill developed, have yet a higher
standard of perfection, than others which are refined and
well balanced. Though the peasant's cot is dark, it has
the evening star for taper, while the nobleman's saloon is
meanly lighted. If we have to wander through many dull
and prosaic passages in Chaucer, we have at least the satis-
faction of knowing that it is not an artificial dulness, but
too easily matched by many passages in life, and it is,
perhaps, more pleasing, after all, to meet with a fine
thought in its natural setting. We confess we feel a dis-
position commonly to concentrate sweets, and accumulate
pleasures, but the poet may be presumed always to speak
as a traveller, who leads us through a varied scenery, from
one eminence to another, and, from time to time, a single
casual thought rises naturally and inevitably, with such
majesty and escort only as the first stars at evening. And
surely fate has enshrined it in these circumstances for some
end. Nature strews her nuts and flowers broadcast, and
never collects them into heaps. This was the soil it grew
in, and this the hour it bloomed in; if sun, wind, and rain,
came here to cherish and expand the flower, shall not we
come here to plack it ?


304
Jan.
Poetry.
A true poem is distinguished, not so much by a felicitous
expression, or any thought it suggests, as by the atmosphere
which surrounds it. Most have beauty of outline merely,
and are striking as the form and bearing of a stranger, but
true verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very kernel
of all friendliness, and envelope us in their spirit and fra.
grance. Much of our poetry has the very best manners,
but no character. It is only an unusual precision and
elasticity of speech, as if its author had taken, not an in-
toxicating draught, but an electuary. It has the distinct
outline of sculpture, and chronicles an early hour. Under
the influence of passion all men speak thus distinctly, but
wrath is not always divine.
There are two classes of men called poets. The one
cultivates life, the other art; one seeks food for nutriment,
the other for flavor ; one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies
the palate. There are two kinds of writing, both great and
rare ; one that of genius, or the inspired, the other of in-
tellect and taste, in the intervals of inspiration. The former
is above criticism, always correct, giving the law to criti-
cism. It vibrates and pulsates with life forever. It is
sacred, and to be read with reverence, as the works of
nature are studied. There are few instances of a sustained
style of this kind ; perhaps every man has spoken words,
but the speaker is then careless of the record. Such a
style removes us out of personal relations with its author,
we do not take his words on our lips, but his sense into
our hearts. It is the stream of inspiration, which bubbles
out, now here, now there, now in this man, now in that.
It matters not through what ice-crystals it is seen, now a
fountain, now the ocean stream running under ground.
It is in Shakspeare, Alpheus, in Burns, Arethuse; but
ever the same. The other is self-possessed and wise. It
is reverent of genius, and greedy of inspiration. It is con-
scious in the highest and the least degree. It consists with
the most perfect command of the faculties. It dwells in a
repose as of the desert, and objects are as distinct in it as
oases or palms in the horizon of sand. The train of
thought moves with subdued and measured step, like a
caravan. But the pen is only an instrument in its hand,
and not instinct with life, like a longer arm. It leaves a
thin varnish or glaze over all its work. The works of
Goethe furnish remarkable instances of the latter.


1844.)
305
Poetry.
There is no just and serene criticism as yet. Our taste
is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's
work, but never yea to his hope. It invites him to adorn
his deformities, and not to cast them off by expansion, as
the tree its bark. We are a people who live in a bright
light, in houses of pearl and porcelain, and drink only light
wines, whose teeth are easily set on edge by the least
natural sour. If we had been consulted, the back bone of
the earth would have been made, not of granite, but of
Bristol spar. A modern author would have died in infancy
in a ruder age. But the poet is something more than a
scald, “a smoother and polisher of language”; he is a
Cincinnatus in literature, and occupies no west end of the
world, but, like the sun, indifferently selects his rhymes,
and with a liberal taste weaves into his verse the planet
and the stubble.
In these old books the stucco has long since crumbled
away, and we read what was sculptured in the granite.
They are rude and massive in their proportions, rather than
smooth and delicate in their finish. The workers in stone
polish only their chimney ornaments, but their pyramids
are roughly done. There is a soberness in a rough aspect,
as of unhewn granite, which addresses a depth in us, but a
polished surface hits only the ball of the eye. The true
finish is the work of time and the use to which a thing is
put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids. Art
may varnish and gild, but it can do no more. A work of
genius is rough-hewn from the first, because it anticipates
the lapse of time, and has an ingrained polish, which still
appears when fragments are broken off, an essential quality
of its substance. Its beauty is at the same time its strength,
and it breaks with a lustre. The great poem must have
the stamp of greatness as well as its essence. The reader
easily goes within the shallowest contemporary poetry, and
informs it with all the life and promise of the day, as the
pilgrim goes within the temple, and hears the faintest
strains of the worshippers ; but it will have to speak to
posterity, traversing these deserts through the ruins of its
outmost walls, by the grandeur and beauty of its pro-
portions.
VOL. IV. — NO. III.
39


306
[Jan.
Lines.
LINES.
Later
Thou hast learned the woes of all the world
From thine own longings and lone tears,
And now thy broad sails are unfurled,
And all men hail thee with loud cheers.
The flowing sunlight is thy home,
The billows of the sea are thine,
To all the nations shalt thou roam,
Through every heart thy love shall shine.
The subtlest thought that finds its goal
Far, far beyond the horizon's verge,
Oh, shoot it forth on arrows bold,
The thoughts of men, on, on to urge.
Toil not to free the slave from chains,
Think not to give the laborer rest;
Unless rich beauty fills the plains,
The free man wanders still unblest.
All men can dig, and hew rude stone,
But thou must carve the frieze above;
And columned high, through thee alone,
Shall rise our frescoed homes of love.


1844.]
307
Tragedies.
THE MODERN DRAMA.*
A TRAGEDY in five acts ! — what student of poetry, -
(for, admire, 0 Posterity, the strange fact, these days of
book-craft produce not only inspired singers, and en-
chanted listeners, but students of poetry,) — what student
in this strange sort, I say, has not felt his eye rivetted to
this title, as if it were written in letters of fire ? has not
heard it whispered in his secret breast ? - In this form
alone canst thou express thy thought in the liveliness of
life, this success alone should satisfy thy ambition !
Were all these ardors caught from a genuine fire, such
as, in favoring eras, led the master geniuses by their suc-
cessive efforts to perfect this form, till it afforded the
greatest advantages in the smallest space, we should be
glad to warm and cheer us at a very small blaze. But it
is not so. The drama, at least the English drama of our
day, shows a reflected light, not a spreading fire. It is
not because the touch of genius has roused genius to pro-
duction, but because the admiration of genius has made
talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.
This is not an observation to which there are no ex-
ceptions, some we shall proceed to specify, but those who
have, with any care, watched this ambition in their own
minds, or analyzed its results in the works of others, can-
not but feel, that the drama is not a growth native to this
age, and that the numerous grafts produce little fruit,
worthy the toil they cost.
'Tis, indeed, hard to believe that the drama, once in-
vented, should cease to be a habitual and healthy expres-
sion of the mind. It satisfies so fully the wants both of
sense and soul, supplying both deep and light excite-
ments, simple, comprehensive, and various, adapted either
* The Patrician's Daughter, a tragedy, in five acts, by J. Westland Marston;
London ; C. Mitchel, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, 1841.
Athelwold, a tragedy in five acts, by W. Smith, Esq.; William Blackwood
and Sons. London and Edinburgh, 1842.
Strafford, a tragedy, by John Sterling. London; Edward Moxon, Dover
Street, 1843.


308
[Jan.
The Modern Drama.
to great national and religious subjects, or to the private
woes of any human breast. The space and time occu-
pied, the vehicle of expression fit it equally for the enter-
tainment of an evening, or the closet theme of meditative
years. Ædipus, Macbeth, Wallenstein, chain us for the
hour, lead us through the age.
Who would not covet this mirror, which, like that of
the old wizards, not only reflects, but reproduces the
whole range of forms, this key, which unlocks the realms
of speculation at the hour when the lights are boldest
and the shadows most suggestive, this goblet, whose sin-
gle sparkling draught is locked from common air by walls
of glittering ice? An artful wild, where nature finds no
bound to her fertility, while art steadily draws to a whole
its linked chain.
Were it in man's power by choosing the best, to attain
the best in any particular kind, we would not blame the
young poet, if he always chose the drama.
But by the same law of faery which ordains that wishes
shall be granted unavailingly to the wisher, no form of
art will succeed with him with whom it is the object
of deliberate choice. It must grow from his nature in a
certain position, as it first did from the general mind in a
certain position, and be no garment taken from the shin-
ing store to be worn at a banquet, but a real body grad-
ually woven and assimalated from the earth and sky
which environed the poet in his youthful years. He may
learn from the old Greek or Hindoo, but he must speak
in his mother-tongue.
It was a melancholy praise bestowed on the German
Iphigenia, that it was an echo of the Greek mind. O give
us something rather than Greece more Grecian, so new,
so universal, so individual !
An “ After Muse," an appendix period must come to
every kind of greatness. It is the criticism of the grand-
child upon the inheritance bequeathed by his ancestors.
It writes madrigals and sonnets, it makes Brutus wigs,
and covers old chairs with damask patch-work, yet happy
those who have no affection towards such virtu and en-
tertain their friends with a pipe cut from their own grove,
rather than display an ivory lute handed down from the


1844.)
Shakspeare.
309
old time, whose sweetness we want the skill to draw
forth.
The drama cannot die out: it is too naturally born of cer-
tain periods of national development. It is a stream that
will sink in one place, only to rise to light in another.
As it has appeared successively in Hindostan, Greece,
(Rome we cannot count,) England, Spain, France, Italy,
Germany, so has it yet to appear in New Holland, New
Zealand, and among ourselves, when we too shall be
made new by a sunrise of our own, when our population
shall have settled into a homogeneous, national life, and
we have attained vigor to walk in our own way, make
our own world, and leave off copying Europe.
At present our attempts are, for the most part, feebler
than those of the British “ After Muse," for our play-
wrights are not from youth so fancy-fed by the crumbs
that fell from the tables of the lords of literature, and
having no relish for the berries of our own woods, the
roots of our own fields, they are meagre, and their works
bodiless ; yet, as they are pupils of the British school, their
works need not be classed apart, and I shall mention one
or two of the most note-worthy by-and-by.
England boasts one Shakspeare - ah! that alone was
more than the share of any one kingdom, —such a king !
There Apollo himself tended sheep, and there is not a
blade of the field but glows with a peculiar light. At
times we are tempted to think him the only genius earth
has ever known, so beyond compare is he, when looked
at as the myriad-minded ; then he seems to sit at the
head of the stream of thought, a lone god beside his urn;
the minds of others, lower down, feed the current to a
greater width, but they come not near him. Happily, in
the constructive power, in sweep of soul, others may be
named beside him : he is not always all alone.
Historically, such isolation was not possible. Such a
being implies a long ancestry, a longer posterity. We
discern immortal vigor in the stem that rose to this
height.
But his children should not hope to walk in his steps.
Prospero gave Miranda a sceptre, not his wand. His
genius is too great for his followers, they dwindle in its
shadow. They see objects so early with his eyes, they


310
[Jan.
Music.
can hardly learn to use their own. “They seek to pro-
duce from themselves, but they only reproduce him.”
He is the cause why so much of England's intellect
tends towards the drama, a cause why it so often fails.
His works bring despair to genius, they are the bait and
the snare of talent.
The impetus he has given, the lustre with which he
dazzles, are a chief cause of the dramatic efforts, one
cause of failure, but not the only one, for it seems proba-
ble that European life tends to new languages, and for a
while neglecting this form of representation, would ex-
plore the realms of sound and sight, to make to itself
other organs, which must for a time supersede the
drama.
There is, perhaps, a correspondence between the suc-
cessions of literary vegetation with those of the earth's
surface, where, if you burn or cut down an ancient wood,
the next offering of the soil will not be in the same kind,
but raspberries and purple flowers will succeed the oak,
poplars the pine. Thus, beneath the roots of the drama,
lay seeds of the historic novel, the romantic epic, which
were to take its place to the reader, and for the scene, the
oratorios, the opera, and ballet.
Music is the great art of the time. Its dominion is
constantly widening, its powers are more profoundly re-
cognized. In the forms it has already evolved, it is equal
to representing any subject, can address the entire range
of thoughts and emotions. These forms have not yet
attained their completeness, and already we discern many
others hovering in the vast distances of the Tone-world.
The opera is in this inferior to the drama, that it pro-
duces its effects by the double method of dialogue and
song. So easy seems it to excite a feeling, and by the
orchestral accompaniments to sustain it to the end, that
we have not the intellectual exhilaration which accom-
panies a severer enjoyment. For the same reasons, noth-
ing can surpass the mere luxury of a fine opera.
The oratorio, so great, so perfect in itself, is limited in
its subjects; and these, though they must be of the
graver class, do not properly admit of tragedy. Minds
cannot dwell on special griefs and seeming partial fates,
when circling the universe on the wings of the great


1844.]
311
The Ballet.
chorus, sharing the will of the Divine, catching the sense
of humanity.
Thus, much as has been given, we demand from mu-
sic yet another method, simpler and more comprehensive
than these. In instrumental music, this is given by the
symphony, but we want another that shall admit the
voice, too, and permit the association of the spectacle,
The ballet seems capable of an infinite perfection.
There is no boundary here to the powers of design and
expression, if only fit artists can be formed mentally and
practically. What could not a vigorous imagination do,
if it had delicate Ariels to enact its plans, with that facil-
ity and completeness which pantomime permits. There
is reason to think we shall see the language of the eye,
of gesture and attitude carried to a perfection, body made
pliant to the inspirations of spirit, as it can hardly be
where spoken words are admitted to eke out deficiencies.
From our America we hope some form entirely new, not
yet to be predicted, while, though the desire for dramatic
representation exists, as it always must where there is any
vigorous life, the habit of borrowing is so pervasive, that
in the lately peopled prairies of the West, where civiliza-
tion is bnt five years old, we find the young people acting
plays, indeed, and “on successive nights to overflowing
audiences,” — but what? Some drama, ready made to
hand by the fortunes of Boon, or the defeats of Black
Hawk ? Not at all, but — Tamerlane and the like
Bombastes Furioso, and King Cambyses vein to the
"storekeepers ” and laborers of republican America.
In this connection let me mention the drama of Meta-
mora, a favorite on the boards in our cities, which, if it
have no other merit, yields something that belongs to
this region, Forrest having studied for this part the
Indian gait and expression with some success. He is
naturally adapted to the part by the strength and dignity
of his person and outline.
To return to Britain.
The stage was full of life, after the drama began to
decline, and the actors, whom Shakspeare should have
had to represent his parts, were born after his departure
from the dignity given to the profession by the existence
of such occasion for it. And again, out of the existence


312
(Jan.
Actors
of such actors rose hosts of playwrights, who wrote not
to embody the spirit of life, in forms, shifting and inter-
woven in the space of a spectacle, but to give room for
display of the powers of such and such actors. A little
higher stood those, who excelled in invention of plots,
pregnant crises, or brilliant point of dialogue, but both
degraded the drama, Sheridan scarcely less than Cibber;
and Garrick and the Kembles, while they lighted up the
edifice, left slow fire for its destruction.
A partial stigma rests, as it has always rested, on the
profession of the actor. At first flash, we marvel why.
Why do not men bow in reverence before those, who hold
the mirror up to nature, and not to common nature, but
to her most exalted, profound, and impassioned hours ?
Some have imputed this to an association with the
trickeries and coarse illusions of the scene, with paste-
board swords and crowns, mock-thunder and tinfoil
moonshine. But in what profession are not mummeries
practised, and ludicrous accessories interposed ? Are the
big wig of the barrister, the pen behind the ear of the
merchant so reverend in our eyes ?
Some say that it is because we pay the actor for amus-
ing us; but we pay other men for all kinds of service, with-
out feeling them degraded thereby. And is he, who has
administered an exhilarating draught to my mind, in less
pleasing association there, than he who has administered
a febrifuge to the body ?
Again, that the strong excitements of the scene and its
motley life dispose to low and sensual habits.
But the instances, where all such temptations have been
resisted, are so many, compared with the number engaged,
that every one must feel that here, as elsewhere, the
temptation is determined by the man
Why is it then that to the profession, which numbers
in its ranks Shakspeare and Moliere, which is dignified
by such figures as Siddons, Talma, and Macready, re-
spect is less willingly conceded than applause? Why is
not discrimination used here as elsewhere? Is it the
same thing to act the "Lady in Comus," and the Lady in
“She stoops to Conquer,” Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,
and Sir Lucius O'Trigger? Is not the actor, according
to his sphere, a great artist or a poor buffoon, just as a


1844.]
Roman Actor.
313
lawyer may become a chancellor of the three kingdoms,
or a base pettifogger !
Prejudice on this score, must be the remnant of a bar-
barism which saw minstrels the pensioned guests at
barons' tables, and murdered Correggio beneath a sack of
copper. As man better understands that his positive
existence is only effigy of the ideal, and that nothing is
useful or honorable which does not advance the reign of
Beauty, Art and Artists rank constantly higher, as one
with Religion. Let Artists also know their calling, let
the Actor live and die a Roman Actor, * more than Raph-
* We may be permitted to copy, in this connection, the fine plea of
Massinger's " Roman Actor.”
PARIS. If desire of honor was the base
On which the building of the Roman empire
Was raised up to this height; if, to inflame
The noble youth, with an ambitious heat,
To endure the posts of danger, nay, of death,
To be thought worthy the triumphal wreath,
By glorious undertakings, may deserve
Reward, or favor from the commonwealth;
Actors may put in for as large a share,
As all the sects of the philosophers :
They with cold precepts (perhaps seldom read)
Deliver what an honorable thing
The active virtue is : but does that fire
The blood, or swell the veins with emulation,
To be both good and great, equal to that
Which is presented on our theatres ?
Let a good actor, in a lofty scene,
Show great Alcides, honored in the sweat
Of his twelve labors; or a bold Camillus,
Forbiding Rome to be redeemed with gold
From the insulting Gauls, or Scipio,
After his victories, imposing tribute
On conquered Carthage; if done to the life,
As if they saw their dangers, and their glories,
And did partake with them in their rewards,
All that have any spark of Roman in them,
The slothful arts laid by, contend to be
Like those they see presented.
SECOND SENATOR. He has put
The consuls to their whisper.
Paris. But 'tis urged
That we corrupt youth, and traduce superiors.
When do we bring a vice upon the stage,
That does go off unpunished ? Do we teach,
By the success of wicked undertakings,
Others to tread in their forbidden steps ?
VOL. IV. - NO. III.
40


314
(Jan
Roman Actor.
ael shall be elected Cardinals, and of a purer church ; and
it shall be ere long remembered as dream and fable, that
the representative of " my Cid” could not rest in conse-
crated ground.
In Germany these questions have already been fairly
weighed, and those who read the sketches of her great
actors, as given by Tieck, know that there, at least, they
took with the best minds of their age and country their
proper place.
And who, that reads Joanna Baillie's address to Mrs.
Siddons, but feels that the fate, which placed his birth in
another age from her, has robbed him of full sense of a
We show no arts of Lydian panderism,
Corinthian poisons, Persian flatteries,
But mulcted so in the conclusion, that
Even those spectators, that were so inclined,
Go home changed men. And for traducing such
That are above us, publishing to the world
Their secret crimes, we are as innocent
As such as are born dumb. When we present
An heir, that does conspire against the life
Of his dear parent, numbering every hour
He lives, as tedious to him; if there be
Among the auditors one, whose conscience tells him
He is of the same mould,- WE CANNOT HELP IT.
Or, bringing on the stage a loose adulteress,
That does maintain the riotous expense
Of her licentious paramour, yet suffers
The lawful pledges of a former bed
To starve the while for hunger; if a matron,
However great in fortune, birth, or titles,
Cry out, 'Tis writ for me!- WE CANNOT HELP IT.
Or, when a covetous man's expressed, whose wealth
Arithmetic cannot number, and whose lordships
A falcon in one day cannot fly over;
Yet he so sordid in his mind, so griping
As not to afford himself the necessaries
To maintain life, if a patrician,
(Though honored with a consulship) find himself
Touched to the quick in this, - WE CANNOT HELP IT.
Or, when we show a judge that is corrupt,
And will give up his sentence, as he favors
The person, not the cause ; saving the guilty
If of his faction, and as oft condemning
The innocent, out of particular spleen;
If any in this reverend assembly,
Nay, even yourself, my lord, that are the image
Of absent Cæsar, feel something in your bosom
That puts you in remembrance of things past,
Or things intended, - 'Tis not in us TO HELP IT,
I have said, my lord, and now, as you find cause,
Or censure us, or free us with applause.


1844.)
315
Mrs. Siddons.
kind of greatness whose absence none other can entirely
supply.
The impassioned changes of thy beauteous face,
Thy arms iinpetuous tost, thy robe's wide flow,
And the dark tempest gathered on thy brow,
What time thy flashing eye and lip of scorn
Down to the dust thy mimic foes have borne;
Remorseful musings sunk to deep dejection,
The fixed and yearning looks of strong affection;
The actioned turmoil of a boson rending,
Where pity, love, and honor, are contending;
Thy varied accents, rapid, fitful, slow,
Loud rage, and fear's snatch'd whisper, quick and low,
The burst of stifled love, the wail of grief,
And tones of high command, full, solemn, brief;
The change of voice and emphasis that threw
Light on obscurity, and brought to view
Distinctions nice, when grave or comic mood,
Or mingled humors, terse and new, elude
Common perception, as earth's smallest things
To size and form the vesting hoar frost brings.
* * * Thy light
* *
* from the mental world can never fade,
Till all, who've seen thee, in the grave are laid.
Thy graceful form still moves in nightly dreams,
And what thou wert to the rapt sleeper seems,
While feverish fancy oft doth fondly trace
Within her curtained couch thy wondrous face;
Yea, and to many a wight, bereft and lone,
In musing hours, though all to thee unknown,
Soothing his earthly course of good and ill,
With all thy potent charın thou actest still.
Perhaps the effect produced by Mrs. Siddons is still more
vividly shown in the character of Jane de Montfort, which
seems modelled from her. We have no such lotus cup to
drink. Mademoiselle Rachel indeed seems to possess as
much electric force as Mrs. Siddons, but not the same im-
posing individuality. The Kembles and Talma were cast
in the royal mint to commemorate the victories of genius.
That Mrs. Siddons even added somewhat of congenial glory
to Shakspeare's own conceptions, those who compare the
engravings of her in Lady Macbeth and Catharine of Ara-
gon, with the picture drawn in their own minds from ac-
quaintance with these beings in the original, cannot doubt ;
the sun is reflected with new glory in the majestic river.
Yet, under all these disadvantages there have risen up
often, in England, and even in our own country, actors


316
(Jan.
Modern Dramatists.
who gave a reason for the continued existence of the thea-
tre, who sustained the ill-educated, flimsy troop, which com-
monly fill it, and provoked both the poet and the playwright
to turn their powers in that direction.
The plays written for them, though no genuine dramas,
are not without value as spectacle, and the opportunity,
however lame, gives freer play to the actor's powers, than
would the simple recitation, by which some have thought
any attempt at acting whole plays should be superseded.
And under the starring system it is certainly less painful, on
the whole, to see a play of Knowles's than one of Shak-
speare's; for the former, with its frigid diction, unnatural
dialogue, and academic figures, affords scope for the actor
to produce striking effects, and to show a knowledge of the
passions, while all the various beauties of Shakspeare are
traduced by the puppets who should repeat them, and being
closer to nature, brings no one figure into such bold relief
as is desirable when there is only one actor. Virginius,
the Hunchback, Metamora, are plays quite good enough
for the stage at present; and they are such as those who
attend the representations of plays will be very likely to
write.
Another class of dramas are those written by the scholars
and thinkers, whose tastes have been formed, and whose
ambition kindled, by acquaintance with the genuine English
dramatists. These again may be divided into two sorts.
One, those who have some idea to bring out, which craves a
form more lively than the essay, more compact than the
narrative, and who therefore adopt (if Hibernicism may be
permitted) the dialogued monologue to very good purpose.
Such are Festus, Paracelsus, Coleridge's Remorse, Shelley's
Cenci ; Miss Baillie's plays, though meant for action, and
with studied attempts to vary them by the lighter 'shades
of common nature, which, from her want of lively power,
have no effect, except to break up the interest, and By-
ron's are of the same class; they have no present life, no
action, no slight natural touches, no delicate lines, as of one
who paints his portrait from the fact; their interest is
poetic, nature apprehended in her spirit ; philosophic, ac-
tions traced back to their causes; but not dramatic, nature
reproduced in actual presence. This, as a form for the
closet, is a very good one, and well fitted to the genius of


1844.)
317
The Spanish Student.
our time. Whenever the writers of such fail, it is because
they have the stage in view, instead of considering the
dramatis personæ merely as names for classes of thoughts.
Somewhere betwixt these and the mere acting plays stand
such as Maturin's Bertram, Talfourd's Ion, and (now before
me) Longfellow's Spanish Student. Bertram is a good
acting play, that is, it gives a good opportunity to one actor,
and its painting, though coarse, is effective. Ion, also, can
be acted, though its principal merit is in the nobleness of
design, and in details it is too elaborate for the scene. Still
it does move and melt, and it is honorable to us that a
piece constructed on so high a motiv, whose tragedy is so
much nobler than the customary forms of passion, can act
on audiences long unfamiliar with such religion. The
Spanish Student might also be acted, though with no great
effect, for there is little movement in the piece, or develop-
ment of character; its chief merit is in the graceful expres-
sion of single thoughts or fancies ; as here,
All the means of action
The shapeless masses, the materials,
Lie every where about us. What we need
Is the celestial fire to change the flint
Into transparent crystal, bright and clear.
That fire is genius! The rude peasant sits
At evening in his smoky cot, and draws
With charcoal uncouth figures on the wall.
The son of genius comes, foot-sore with travel,
And begs a shelter from the inclement night.
He takes the charcoal from the peasant's hand,
And, by the magic of his touch at once
Transfigured, all its bidden virtues shine,
And in the eyes of the astonished clown,
It gleams a diamond. Even thus transformed,
Rude popular traditions and old tales
Shine as immortal poems, at the touch
Of some poor houseless, homeless, wandering bard,
Who had but a night's lodging for his pains.
But there are brighter dreams than those of fame,
Which are the dreams of love! Out of the heart
Rises the bright ideal of these dreams,
As from some woodland fount a spirit rises
And sinks again into its silent deeps,
Ere the enamored knight can touch her robe!
'Tis this ideal, that the soul of man,
Like the enamored knight beside the fountain,
Waits for upon the margin of life's stream;
Waits to behold her rise from the dark waters
Clad in a mortal shape! Alas! how many


318
[Jan.
Historic Plays.
Must wait in vain! The stream flows evermore,
But from its silent deeps no spirit rises.
Or here,
I will forget her! All dear recollections
Pressed in my heart, like flowers within a book,
Shall be torn out, and scattered to the winds;
I will forget her! But perhaps hereafter,
When she shall learn how heartless is the world,
A voice within her will repeat my name,
And she will say, 'He was indeed my friend.'
Passages like these would give great pleasure in the
chaste and carefully-shaded recitation of Macready or Miss
Tree. The style of the play is, throughout, elegant and
simple. Neither the plot nor characters can boast any
originality, but the one is woven with skill and taste, the
others very well drawn, for so slight handling.
We had purposed in this place to notice some of the
modern French plays, which hold about the same relation
to the true drama, but this task must wait a more conve-
nient season.
One of the plays at the head of this notice also comes in
here, The Patrician's Daughter, which, though a failure as
a tragedy, from an improbability in the plot, and a want of
power to touch the secret springs of passion, yet has the
merits of genteel comedy in the unstrained and flowing
dialogue, and dignity in the conception of character. A
piece like this pleases, if only by the atmosphere of intellect
and refinement it breathes.
But a third class, of higher interest, is the historical, such
as may well have been suggested to one whose youth was
familiar with Shakspeare's Julius Cæsar, and Kings of Eng.
land. Who that wears in his breast an English heart, and
has feeling to appreciate the capabilities of the historic
drama, but must burn with desire to use the occasions
offered in profusion by the chronicles of England and kin-
dred nations, to adorn the inherited halls with one tapestry
more. It is difficult to say why such an attempt should
fail, yet it does fail, and each effort in this kind shows
plainly that the historic novel, not the historic drama, is the
form appropriate to the genius of our day. Yet these
failures come so near success, the spent arrows show so
bold and strong a hand in the marksman, that we would
not, for much, be without them.


1844.]
Taylor.
319
First and highest in this list comes Philip Van Artevelde,
of which we can say that it bears new fruit on the twentieth
reading. At first it fell rather coldly on the mind, coming
as it did, not as the flower of full flushed being, but with
the air of an experiment made to verify a theory. It came
with wrinkled critic's brow, consciously antagonistic to a
tendency of the age, and we looked on it with cold critic's
eye, unapt to weep or glow at its bidding. But, on closer
acquaintance, we see that this way of looking, though in-
duced by the author, is quite unjust. It is really a noble
work that teaches us, a genuine growth that makes us
grow, a reflex of nature from the calm depths of a large
soul. The grave and comprehensive character of the
ripened man, of him whom fire, and light, and earth have
tempered to an intelligent delegate of humanity, has never
been more justly felt, rarely more life-like painted, than by
this author. The Flemish blood and the fiery soul are both
understood. Philip stands among his compatriots the man
mature, not premature or alien. He is what they should
be, his life the reconciling word of his age and nation, the
thinking head of an unintelligent and easily distempered
body, a true king. The accessories are all in keeping,
saplings of the same wood. The eating, drinking, quarrel-
ling citizens, the petulant sister, the pure and lovely bride,
the sorrowful and stained, but deep-souled mistress, the
monk, much a priest, but more a man, all belong to him
and all require him. We cannot think of any part of this
piece without its centre, and this fact proclaims it a great
work of art. It is great, the conception of the swelling
tide of fortune, on which this figure is upborne serenely
eminent, of the sinking of that tide with the same face
rising from the depths, veiled with the same cloud as the
heavens, in its sadness calmer yet. Too wise and rich a
nature he, too intelligent of the teachings of earth and
heaven to be a stoic, but too comprehensive, too poetic, to
be swayed, though he miglit be moved, by chance or passion.
Some one called him Philip the Imperturbable, but his
greatness is, that he is not imperturbable, only, as the
author announces, “not passion's slave.” The gods would
not be gods, if they were ignorant, or impassive; they must
be able to see all that men see, only from a higher point of
view.


320
(Jan.
Taylor.
Such pictures make us willing to live in the widest sense,
to bear all that may be borne, for we see that virgin gold
may be fit to adorn a scabbard, but the good blade is made
of tempered steel.
Justice has not been done by the critics to the admirable
conduct of the Second Part, because our imaginations were
at first so struck by the full length picture of the hero in
the conquering days of the First Part, and it was painful to
see its majesty veiled with crape, its towering strength sink
to ruins in the second. Then there are more grand and
full passages in the First which can be detached and recol-
lected; as,
We have not time to mourn; the worse for us,
He that lacks time to mourn lacks time to mend;
Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure
For life's worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow's held intrusive and turned out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.
That beginning,
To bring a cloud upon the summer day,
or this famous one,
Nor do I now despond, &c.
or the fine scene between Clara, Van Artevelde, and Fa.
ther John, where she describes the death scene at Sesen-
heim's ; beginning,
Much hast thou merited, my sister dear.
The second part must be taken as a whole, the dark
cloud widening and blackening as it advances, while ghastly
flashes of presage come more and more frequent as the
daylight diminishes. But there is far more fervor of genius
than in the First, showing a mind less possessing, more
possessed by, the subject, and finer touches of nature. Van
Artevelde's dignity overpowers us more, as he himself feels
it less ; as in the acceptance of Father John's reproof.
VAN ARTEVELDE.
Father John!
Though peradventure fallen in your esteem,
I humbly ask your blessing, as a man,
That having passed for more in your repute
Than he could justify, should be content,
Not with his state, but with the judgment true


1844.]
321
Taylor.
That to the lowly level of his state
Brings down his reputation.
FATHER JOHN.
Oh my son!
High as you stand, I will not strain my eyes
To see how higher still you stood before.
God's blessing be upon you. Fare you well.
[Erit.
ARTEVELDE.
The old man weeps.
But he reverts at once to the topic of his thought,
Should England play me false, &c.
as he always does, for a mind so great, so high, that it
cannot fail to look over and around any one object, any
especial emotion, returns to its habitual mood with an ease
of which shallow and excitable natures cannot conceive.
Thus his reflection, after he has wooed Elena, is not that
of heartlessness, but of a deep heart.
How little flattering is a woman's love!
And is in keeping with
I know my course,
And be it armies, cities, people, priests,
That quarrel with my love, wise men or fools,
Friends, foes, or factions, they may swear their oaths,
And make their murmur; rave, and fret, and fear,
Suspect, admonish ; they but waste their rage,
Their wits, their words, their counsel ; here I stand
Upon the deep foundations of my faith,
To this fair outcast plighted; and the storm
That princes from their palaces shakes out,
Though it should turn and head me, should not strain
The seeming silken texture of this tie.
And not less with
Pain and grief
Are transitory things no less than joy ;
And though they leave us not the men we were,
Yet they do leave us.
With the admirable passages that follow.
The delicate touches, with which Elena is made to
depict her own character, move us more than Artevelde's
most beautiful description of Adriana.
I have been much unfortunate, my lord,
I would not love again.
VOL. IV. - NO. 111.
41


322
[Jan.
Taylor.
Shakspeare could not mend the collocation of those words.
When he is absent I am full of thought,
And fruitful in expression inwardly,
And fresh, and free, and cordial, is the flow
Of my ideal and unheard discourse,
Calling him in my heart endearing names,
Familiarly fearless. But alas!
No sooner is he present than my thoughts
Are breathless and bewitched, and stunted so
In force and freedom, that I ask myself
Whether I think at all, or feel, or live,
So senseless am I.
Would that I were merry!
Mirth have I valued not before; but now
What would I give to be the laughing front
Of gay imaginations ever bright,
And sparkling fantasies! Oh, all I have,
Which is not nothing, though I prize it not;
My understanding soul, my brooding sense,
My passionate fancy, and the gift of gifts
Dearest to woman, which deflowering Time,
Slow ravisher, from clenchedest fingers wrings,
My corporal beauty would I barter now
For such an antic and exulting spirit
As lives in lively women.
for
Your grave, and wise,
And melancholy men, if they have souls,
As commonly they have, susceptible
Of all impressions, lavish most their love
Upon the blithe and sportive, and on such
As yield their want, and chase their sad excess,
With jocund salutations, nimble talk,
And buoyant bearing.
All herself is in the line,
Which is not nothing, though I prize it not.
And in her song,
Down lay in a nook my lady's brach.
This song I have heard quoted, and applied in such a
way as to show that the profound meaning, so simply ex-
pressed, has sometimes been understood.
See with what a strain of reflection Van Artevelde greets
the news that makes sure his overthrow.
It is strange, yet true,
That doubtful knowledge travels with a speed
Miraculous, which certain cannot match;
I know not why, when this or that has chanced,
The smoke should come before the flash; yet 't is so.


1844.)
323
Taylor.
The creative power of a soul of genius, is shown by
bringing out the poetic sweetness of Van Artevelde, more
and more, as the scene assumes a gloomier hue. The mel-
ancholy music of his speech penetrates the heart more and
more up to the close.
The gibbous moon was in a wan decline,
And all was silent as a sick inan's chamber,
Mixing its small beginnings with the dregs
Of the pale inoonshine, and a few faint stars,
The cold uncomfortable daylight dawned ;
And the white tents, topping a low ground-fog,
Showed like a fleet becalined.
At the close of the vision :
And midınost in the eddy and the whirl,
My own face saw I, which was pale and calm
As death could make it, — then the vision passed,
And I perceived the river and the bridge,
The mottled sky, and horizontal moon,
The distant camp and all things as they were.
Elena, think not that I stand in need
Of faise encouragement; I have my strength,
Which, though it lie not in the sanguine mood,
Will answer my occasions. To yourself,
Though to none other, I at times present
The gloomiest thoughts that gloomy truths inspire,
Because I love you. But I need no prop!
Nor could I find it in a tinsel show
Of prosperous surmise. Before the world
I wear a cheerful aspect, not so false
As for your lover's solace you put on;
Nor in my closet does the oil run low,
Or the light flicker.
ELENA.
Lo, now! you are angry
Because I try to cheer you.
VAN ARTEVELDE.
No, my love,
Not angry; that I never was with you;
But as I deal not falsely with my own,
So would I wish the heart of her I love,
To be both true and brave; nor self-beguiled,
Nor putting on disguises for my sake,
As though I faltered. I have anxious hours;
As who in like extremities has not?
But I have something stable here within,
Which bears their weight.
In the last scenes :


324
(Jan.
Taylor.
CECILE.
She will be better soon, my lord.
VAN ARTEVELDE.
Say worse;
"T is better for her to be thus bereft.
One other kiss on that bewitching brow,
Pale hemisphere of charms. Unhappy girl!
The curse of beauty was upon thy birth,
Nor love bestowed a blessing. Fare thee well!
How clear his voice sounds at the very last.
The rumor ran that I was hurt to death,
And then they staggered. Lo! we're flying all!
Mount, mount, old man; at least let one be saved!
Roosdyk! Vauclaire! the gallant and the kind !
Who shall inscribe your merits on your tombs!
May mine tell nothing to the world but this:
That never did that prince or leader live,
Who had more loyal or more loving friends!
Let it be written that fidelity
Could go no farther. Mount, old friend, and fly!
VAN RYK.
With you, my lord, not else. A fear-struck throng,
Comes rushing from Mount Dorre. Sir, cross the bridge.
ARTEVELDE.
The bridge! my soul abhors – but cross it thou;
And take this token to my Love, Van Ryk;
Fly, for my sake in hers, and take her hence!
It is my last command. See her conveyed
To Ghent by Olsen, or what safer road
Thy prudence shall descry. This do, Van Ryk.
Lo! now they pour upon us like a flood !-
Thou that didst never disobey me yet
This last good office render me. Begone!
Fly whilst the way is free.
What commanding sweetness in the utterance of the
name, Van Ryk, and what a weight of tragedy in the
broken sentence which speaks of the fatal bridge. These
are the things that actors rarely give us, the very passages
to which it would be their vocation to do justice; saying
out those tones we divine from the order of the words.
Yet Talma's Pas encore set itself to music in the mind
of the hearer; and Zara, you weep, was so spoken as to
melt the whole French nation into that one moment.
Elena's sob of anguish:


1844.]
325
Taylor.
Arouse yourself, sweet lady: fly with me,
I pray you hear; it was his last command
That I should take you hence to Ghent by Olsen.
ELENA.
I cannot go on foot.
VAN RYK.
No, lady, no,
You shall not need; horses are close at hand,
Let me but take you hence. I pray you come.
ELENA.
Take him then too.
VAN RYK.
The enemy is near,
In hot pursuit; we cannot take the body.
ELENA.
The body! Oh!
In this place Miss Kemble alone would have had force
of passion to represent her, who
Flung that long funereal note
Into the upper sky?
Though her acting was not refined enough by intellect
and culture for the more delicate lineaments of the char-
acter. She also would have given its expression to the
unintelligent, broken-hearted,
I cannot go on foot.
The body — yes, that temple could be so deserted by its
god, that men could call it so! That form so instinct with
rich gifts, that baseness and sloth seemed mere names in its
almosphere, could lie on the earth as unable to vindicate
its rights, as any other clod. The exclamation of Elena,
better bespoke the tragedy of this fact, than any eulogium
of a common observer, though that of Burgundy is fitly
worded.
Dire rebel though he was,
Yet with a noble nature and great gifts
Was he endowed: courage, discretion, wit,
An equal temper and an ample soul,
Rock-bound and fortified against assaults
Of transitory passion, but below
Built on a surging subterraneous fire,
That stirred and lifted him to high attempts,


- 326
(Jan.
Taylor.
So prompt and capable, and yet so calm;
He nothing lacked in sovereignty but the right,
Nothing in soldiership except good fortune.
That was the grandeur of the character, that its calmness
had nothing to do with slowness of blood, but was "built
on a surging subterranean fire.”
Its magnanimity is shown with a fine simplicity. To
blame one's self is easy, to condemn one's own changes
and declensions of character and life painful, but inevitable
to a deep mind. But to bear well the blame of a lesser
nature, unequal to seeing what the fault grows from, is not
easy; to take blame as Van Artevelde does, so quietly, in-
different from whence truth comes, so it be truth, is a trait
seen in the greatest only.
ELENA.
Too anxious, Artevelde,
And too impatient are you grown of late ;
You used to be so calm and even-minded,
That nothing ruffled you.
ARTEVELDE.
I stand reproved;
'T is time and circumstance, that tries us all;
And they that temperately take their start,
And keep their souls indifferently sedate,
Through much of good and evil, at the last,
May find the weakness of their hearts thus tried.
My cause appears more precious than it did
In its triumphant days.
I have ventured to be the more lavish of extracts that,
although the publication of Philip Van Artevelde at once
placed Mr. Taylor in the second rank of English poets, a
high meed of glory, when we remember who compose the
first, we seldom now hear the poem mentioned, or a line
quoted from it, though it is a work which might, from all
considerations, well make a part of habitual reading, and
habitual thought. Mr. Taylor has since published another
dramatic poem, “Edwin the Fair,” whose excellencies,
though considerable, are not of the same commanding char-
acter with those of its predecessor. He was less fortunate
in his subject. There is no great and noble figure in the
foreground on which to concentrate the interest, froin
which to distribute the lights. Neither is the spirit of an
era seized with the same power. The figures are modern


1844.)
327
Athelwold.
English under Saxon names, and affect us like a Boston
face, tricked out in the appurtenances of Goethe's Faust.
Such a character as Dustan's should be subordinated in a
drama ; its interest is that of intellectual analysis, mere feel-
ings it revolts. The main character of the piece should
attract the feelings, and we should be led to analysis, to
understand, not to excuse its life.
There are, however, fine passages, as profound, refined,
and expressed with the same unstrained force and purity,
as those in Philip Van Artevelde.
Athelwold, another of the tragedies at the head of this
notice, takes up some of the same characters a few years
later. Without poetic depth, or boldness of conception, it
yet boasts many beauties from the free talent, and noble
feelings of the author. Athelwold is the best sketch in it,
and the chief interest consists in his obstinate rejection of
Elfrida, whose tardy penitence could no way cancel the
wrong, her baseness of nature did his faith. This is worked
up with the more art, that there is justice in her plea, but
love, shocked from its infinity, could not stop short of
despair. Here deep feeling rises to poetry.
Dunstan and Edgar are well drawn sketches, but show
not the subtle touches of a life-like treatment.
This, we should think, as well as the Patrician's daugh-
ter, might be a good acting play.
We come now to the work which affords the most inter-
esting theme for this notice, from its novelty, its merits, and
its subject, which is taken from that portion of English his-
tory with which we are most closely bound, the time pre-
ceding the Commonwealth.
Its author, Mr. Sterling, has many admirers among us,
drawn to him by his productions, both in prose and verse,
which for a time enriched the pages of Blackwood. Some
of these have been collected into a small volume, which has
been republished in this country.
These smaller pieces are of very unequal merit; but the
best among them are distinguished by vigor of conception
and touch, by manliness and modesty of feeling, by a depth
of experience, rare in these days of babbling criticism and
speculation. His verse does not flow or soar with the
highest lyrical inspiration, neither does he enrich us by a
large stock of original images, but for grasp and picturesque


328
[Jan.
Sterling.
presentation of his subject, for frequent bold and forceful
passages, and the constantly fresh breath of character, we
know few that could be named with him. The Sexton's
Daughter is the longest and best known, but not the best
of the minor poems. It has, however, in a high degree,
the merits we have mentioned. The yew trec makes a fine
centre to the whole picture. The tale is told in too many
words, the homely verse becomes garrulous, but the strong,
pure feeling of natural relations endears them all.
His Aphrodite is fitly painted, and we should have
dreamed it so from all his verse.
The high inmortal queen from heaven,
The calm Olympian face;
Eyes pure from human tear or smile,
Yet ruling all on earth,
And limbs whose garb of golden air
Was Dawn's primeval birth.
With tones like music of a lyre,
Continuous, piercing, low,
The sovran lips began to speak,
Spoke on in liquid flow,
It seemed the distant ocean's voice,
Brought near and shaped to speech,
But breathing with a sense beyond
What words of man may reach.
Weak child! Not I the puny power
Thy wish would have me be,
A roseleaf floating with the wind
Upon a summer sea.
If such thou need'st, go range the fields,
And hunt the gilded fly,
And when it mounts above thy head,
Then lay thee down and die.
The spells which rule in earth and stars,
Each mightiest thought that lives,
Are stronger than the kiss a child
In sudden fancy gives.
They cannot change, or fail, or fade,
Nor deign o'er aught to sway,
Too weak to suffer and to strive,
And tired while still 't is day.
And thou with better wisdom learn
The ancient lore to scan,
Which tells that first in Ocean's breast
Thy rule o'er all began;


1844.]
329
Sterling.
And know that not in breathless noon
Upon the glassy main,
The power was born that taught the world
To hail her endless reign.
The winds were lond, the waves were high,
In drear eclipse the sun
Was crouched within the caves of heaven,
And light had scarce begun;
The Earth's green front luy drowned below,
And Death and Chaos fought
O'er all the tumult vast of things
Not yet to severance brought.
'T was then that spoke the fateful voice,
And ’mid the huge uproar,
Above the dark I sprang to life,
A good unhoped before.
My tresses waved along the sky,
And stars lea pt out around,
And earth beneath my feet arose,
And hid the pale profound.
A lamp amid the night, a feast
That ends the strife of war,
To wearied mariners a port,
To fainting limbs a car,
To exiled men the friendly roof,
To mourning hearts the lay,
To him who long has roamed by night
The sudden dawn of day.
All these are mine, and mine the bliss
That visits breasts in woe,
And fills with wine the cup that once
With tears was made to flow.
Nor question thou the help that comes
From Aphrodite's hand;
For madness dogs the bard who doubts
Whate'er the gods command.
Alfred the Harper has the same strong picture and noble
beat of wing. Ove line we have heard so repeated by a
voice, that could give it its full meaning, that we should be
very grateful to the poet for that alone.
Still lives the song though Regnar dies.
Dædalus we must quote.
VOL. IV. — NO. 111.


330
(Jan.
Dedalus.
DÆDALUS.
1.
Wail for Dædalus all that is fairest!
All that is tuneful in air or wave!
Shapes, whose beauty is truest and rarest,
Haunt with your lamps and spells his grave!
Statues, bend your heads in sorrow,
Ye that glance 'mid ruins old,
That know not a past, nor expect a morrow,
On many a moonlight Grecian wold!
3.
By sculptured cave and speaking river,
Thee, Dædalus, oft the Nymphs recall;
The leaves with a sound of winter quiver,
Murmur thy name, and withering fall.
4.
Yet are thy visions in soul the grandest
Of all that crowd on the tear-dimmed eye,
Though, Dedalus, thou no more commandest
New stars to that ever-widening sky.
5.
Ever thy phantoms arise before us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
By bed and table they lord it o'er us,
With looks of beauty and words of Good.
6.
Calmly they show us mankind victorious
O'er all that's aimless, blind, and base;
Their presence has made our nature glorious,
Unveiling our night's illumined face.
Thy toil has won them a god-like quiet,
Thou hast wrought their path to a lovely sphere;
Their eyes to peace rebuke our riot,
And shape us a home of refuge here.
8.
For Dædalus breathed in them his spirit;
In them their sire his beauty sees;
We too, a younger brood, inherit
The gifts and blessing bestowed on these.


1844.]
331
Alfred the Harper.
9.
But ah! their wise and graceful seeming
Recalls the more that the sage is gone;
Weeping we wake from deceitful dreaming,
And find our voiceless chamber lone.
10.
Dædalus, thou from the twilight fleest,
Which thou with visions hast made so bright;
And when no more those shapes thou seest,
Wanting thine eye they lose their light.
11.
E’en in the noblest of Man's creations,
Those fresh worlds round this old of ours,
When the seer is gone, the orphaned nations
See but the tombs of perished powers.
12.
Wail for Dædalus, Earth and Ocean!
Stars and Sun, lament for him!
Ages, quake in strange commotion!
All ye realms of life, be dim!
13.
Wail for Dedalus, awful voices,
From earth's deep centre Mankind appall!
Seldom ye sound, and then Death rejoices,
For he knows that then the mightiest fall.
Also the following, whose measure seems borrowed from
Goethe, and is worthy of its source. We insert a part of it.
THE WOODED MOUNTAINS.
Woodland Mountains, in your leafy walks,
Shadows of the Past and Future blend;
'Mid your verdant windings flits or stalks
Many a loved and disembodied friend.
With your oaks and pine-trees, ancient brood,
Spirits rise above the wizard soil,
And with these I rove amid the wood;
Man may dream on earth no less than toil.
Shapes that seem my kindred meet the ken;
Gods and heroes glimmer through the shade;
Ages long gone by from haunts of men
Meet me here in rocky dell and glade.


332
(Jan.
The Wooded Mountains.
There the Muses, touched with gleams of light,
Warble yet from yonder hill of trees,
And upon the huge and mist-clad height
Fancy sage a clear Olympus sees.
'Mid yon utmost peaks the elder powers
Still unshaken hold their fixed abode,
Fates primeval throned in airy towers,
That with morning sunshine never glowed.
Deep below, amid a hell of rocks,
Lies the Cyclops, and the Dragon coils,
Heaving with the torrent's weary shocks,
That round the untrodden region boils.
But more near to where our thought may climb,
In a mossy, leaf-clad, Druid ring,
Three gray shapes, prophetic Lords of Time,
Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, sit and sing.
Each in his turn his descant frames aloud,
Mingling new and old in ceaseless birth,
While the Destinies hear amid their cloud,
And accordant mould the flux of earth.
Oh! ye trees that wave and glisten round,
Oh! ye waters gurgling down the dell,
Pulses throb in every sight and sound,
Living Nature's more than magic spell,
Soon amid the vista still and dim,
Knights, whom youth's high heart forgetteth not,
Each with scars and shadowy helmet grim,
Amadis, Orlando, Launcelot.
Stern they pass along the twilight green,
While within the tangled wood's recess
Some lorn damsel sits, lamenting keen,
With a voice of tuneful amorousness.
Clad in purple weed, with pearly crown,
And with golden hairs that waving play,
Fairest earthly sight for King and Clown,
Oriana or Angelica.
But in sadder nooks of deeper shade,
Forms more subtle lurk frorn human eye,
Each cold Nymph, the rock or fountain's maid,
Crowned with leaves that sunbeams never dry.
And while on and on I wander, still
Passed the plashing streamlet's glance and foam,
Hearing oft the wild-bird pipe at will,
Still new openings lure me still to roam.


1844.)
333
The Wooded Mountains.
In this hollow smooth by May-tree walled,
White and breathing now with fragrant flower,
Lo! the fairy tribes to revel called,
Start in view as fades the evening hour.
Decked in rainbow roof of gossamer,
And with many a sparkling jewel bright,
Rose-leaf faces, dew-drop eyes are there,
Each with gesture fine of gentle sprite.
Gay they woo, and dance, and feast, and sing,
Elfin chants and laughter fill the dell,
As if every leaf around should ring
With its own aerial emerald bell.
But for man 't is ever sad to see
Joys like his that he must not partake,
'Mid a separate world, a people's glee,
In whose hearts his heart no joy could wake.
Fare ye well, ye tiny race of elves;
May the moon-beam ne'er behold your tomb;
Ye are happiest childhood's other selves,
Bright to you be always evening's gloom.
And thou, mountain-realm of ancient wood,
Where my feet and thoughts have strayed so long,
Now thy old gigantic brotherhood
With a ghostlier vastness round me throng.
Mound, and cliff, and crag, that none may scale
With your serried trunks and wrestling boughs,
Like one living presence ye prevail,
And o’erhang me with Titanian brows.
In your Being's mighty depth of Power,
Mine is lost, and melted all away.
In your forms involved I seem to tower,
And with you am spread in twilight grey.
In this knotted stein whereon I lean,
And the dome above of countless leaves,
Twists and swells, and frowns a life unseen,
That my life with it resistless weaves.
Yet, О nature, less is all of thine
Than thy borrowings from our human breast;
Thou, O God, hast made thy child divine,
And for him this world thou hallowest.
The Rose and the Gauntlet we much admire as a ballad,
and the tale is told in fewest words, and by a single pic-
ture; but we have not room for it here. In Lady Jane


334
[Jan.
Sterling.
Grey, though this again is too garrulous, the picture of the
princess at the beginning is fine, as she sits in the antique
casement of the rich old room.
The lights through the painted glass
Fall with fondest brightness o'er the form
Of her who sits, the chamber's lovely dame,
And her pale forehead in the light looks warm,
And all these colors round her wbiteness flame.
Young is she, scarcely passed from childhood's years,
With grave, soft face, where thoughts and smiles may play,
And unalarmed by guilty aims or fears,
Serene as meadow flowers may meet the day.
No guilty pang she knows, though many a dread
Hangs threatening o'er her in the conscious air,
And 'mid the beams from that bright casement shut,
A twinkling crown foreshows a near despair.
The quaint conciseness of this last line pleases me.
He always speaks in marble words of Greece. But I
must make no more quotations.
Some part of his poem on Shakspeare is no unfit prelude
to a few remarks on his own late work. With such a
a sense of greatness none could wholly fail.
With meaning won from him for ever glows
Each air that England feels, and star it knows;
And gleams from spheres he first conjoined to earth
Are blent with rays of each new morning's birth,
Amid the sights and tales of common things,
Leaf, flower, and bird, and wars, and deaths of kings,
Of shore, and sea, and nature's daily round
Of life that tills, and tombs that load the ground,
His visions mingle, swell, command, pass by,
And haunt with living presence heart and eye,
And tones from him, by other bosoms caught,
Awaken flush and stir of mounting thought,
And the long sigh, and deep, impassioned thrill,
Rouse custom's trance, and spur the faltering will.
Above the goodly land, more his than ours,
He sits supreme enthroned in skyey towers,
And sees the heroic brood of his creation
Teach larger life to his ennobled nation.
0! shaping brain! O! flashing fancy's hues !
0! boundless heart kept fresh by pity's dews!
0! wit humane and blythe! 0! sense sublime
For each dim oracle of mantled Time!
Transcendant form of man! in whom we read
Mankind's whole tale of Impulse, Thought, and Deed.


1844.]
335
Sterling.
The may be above, poivers intellectua ideal;
Such is his ideal of the great dramatic poet. It would
not be fair to measure him, or any man, by his own ideal ;
that affords a standard of spiritual and intellectual pro-
gress, with which the executive powers may not corre-
spond. A clear eye may be associated with a feeble hand
or the reverse. The mode of measurement proposed by
the great thinker of our time is not inapplicable. First,
show me what aim a man proposes to himself; next, with
what degree of earnestness he strives to attain it. In both
regards we can look at Mr. Sterling's work with pleasure
and admiration. He exhibits to us a great crisis, with
noble figures to represent its moving springs. His work is
not merely the plea for a principle, or the exposition of a
thought, but an exhibition of both at work in life. He
opens the instrument and lets us see the machinery with-
out stopping the music. The progress of interest in the
piece is imperative, the principal character well brought out,
the style clear and energetic, the tone throughout is of a man-
ly dignity, worthy great times. Yet its merit is of a dramatic
sketch, rather than a drama. The forms want the round-
ness, the fulness of life, the thousand charms of spontaneous
expression. In this last particular Sterling is as far inferior
to Taylor, as Taylor to Shakspeare. His characters, like
Miss Baillie's or Talfourd's, narrate rather than express
their life. Not elaborately, not pedantically, but yet the
effect is that, while they speak we look on them as past,
and Sterling's view of them interests us more than them-
selves. In his view of relations again we must note his
inferiority to Taylor, who in this respect is the only con-
temporary dramatist on whom we can look with compla-
cency. Taylor's characters really meet, really bear upon
one another. In contempt and hatred, or esteem, rever-
ence, and melting tenderness, they challenge, bend, and
transfuse one another.
Strafford never alters, never is kindled by or kindles the
life of any other being, never breathes the breath of the
moment. Before us, throughout the play, is the view of his
greatness taken by the mind of the author; we are not
really made to feel it by those around him ; it is echoed
from their lips, not from their lives. Lady Carlisle is the
only personage, except Strafford, that is brought out
into much relief. Everard is only an accessory, and the


336
(Jan.
Sterling.
king, queen, and parliamentary leaders, drawn with a few
strokes to give them their historical position. Scarcely
more can be said of Hollis; some individual action is as-
signed him, but not so as to individualize his character.
The idea of the relation at this ominous period between
Strafford and Lady Carlisle is noble. In these stern times
he has put behind him the flowers of tenderness, and the
toys of passion.
Lady, believe me, that I loved you truly,
Still think of you with wonder and delight,
Own you the liveliest, noblest heart of woman
This age, or any, knows; but for love ditties
And amorous toys, and kisses ocean-deep,
Strafford and this old Earth are all too sad.
But when the lady had a soul to understand the declara-
tion, and show herself worthy his friendship, there is a
hardness in his action towards her, a want of softness and
grace, how different from Van Artevelde's :
My Adriana, victim that thou art.
The nice point indeed, of giving the hero manly firm-
ness, and an even stern self-sufficiency, without robbing
him of the beauty of gentle love, was touched with rare
success in Van Artevelde. Common men may not be able
to show firmness and persistency, without a certain hardness
and glassiness of expression ; but we expect of the hero,
that he should combine the softness with the constancy of
Hector.
This failure is the greater here, that we need a private tie
to Strafford to give his fall the deepest tragic interest.
Lady Carlisle is painted with some skill and spirit. The
name given her by St. John of “the handsome vixen,”
and the willingness shown by her little page to die, rather
than see her after failing to deliver her letter, joined with
her own appearance, mark her very well. The following
is a prose sketch of her as seen in common life.
Sir Toby Matthew's PORTRAIT OF Lucy PERCY, COUNTESS OF
CARLISLE.
“She is of too high a mind and dignity, not only to seek, but almost
to wish the friendship of any creature : they, whom she is pleased to
choose, are such as are of the most eminent condition, both for power
and employment; not with any design towards her own particular,


1844.]
337
Sterling
either of advantage or curiosity, but her nature values fortunate persons
as virtuous. She prefers the conversation of men to that of women;
not but she can talk on the fashions with her female friends, but she is
too soon sensible that she can set them as she wills; that pre-eminence
shortens all equality. She converses with those who are most distin-
guished for their conversational powers.
Of love freely will she discourse, listen to all its faults, and mark all
its power. She cannot herself love in earnest, but she will play with
love, and will take a deep interest for persons of condition and celeb-
rity.”-See Life of Pym; in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia, Vol. xci., p.
213.
The noblest trait, given her in the play, is the justice
she is able to do Charles, after his treachery has consigned
Strafford to the Tower.
LADY CARLISLE.
And he betrayed you.
STRAFFORD.
He! it cannot be,
There's not a minion in his court so vile,
Holland nor Jermyn, would deceive a trust
Like that I placed in him, nor would belie
So seeming heart felt words as those he spake.
LADY CARLISLE.
He's not entirely vile, and yet he did it.
This, seen in unison with her out-pouring of contempt
upon the king when present, makes out a character. As
a whole, that given her by the poet is not only nobler than
the one assigned her in history, but opposed to it in a vital
point.
The play closes after Strafford has set forth for the scaf-
fold with the ejaculation from her left in the Tower, where
she has waited on his last moments,
“ Alone, henceforth forever!”
While history makes her transfer her attachment to Pym,
who must have been, in her eyes, Strafford's murderer, on
the score of her love of intellectual power, in which all
other considerations were merged. This is a character so
odious, and in a woman, so unnatural, that we are tempted
rather to suppose it was batred of the king for his base and
treacherous conduct towards Strafford, that induced her to
betray to Pym the counsels of the court, as the best means
of revenge. Such a version of her motives would not be
VOL. IV. — NO. 111.
43


338
(Jan.
Sterling.
inconsistent with the character assigned her in the play.
It would be making her the agent to execute her own curse,
so eloquently spoken after she finds the king willing to save
himself by the sacrifice of Strafford's life.
KING CHARLES.
The woman's mad; her passion braves the skies!
LADY CARLISLE.
I brave them not; I but invoke their justice
To rain hot curses on a tyrant's head;
Henceforth I set inyself apart for mischief,
To find and prompt men capable of hate,
Until some dagger, steeled in Strafford's blood,
Knocks at the heart of Strafford's murderer.
KING CHARLES.
His murderer! O God! - no, no, — not that!
(Sinks back into a seat.)
LADY CARLISLE.
And here I call on all the powers above us
To aid the deep damnation of my curse,
And make this treason to the noblest man,
That moves alive within our English seas,
Fatal to him and all his race, whose baseness
Destroys a worth it ne'er could understand.
Stars in your glory, vital air and sun,
And thou, dark earth, our cradle, nurse, and grave,
And more than all, free truth and penal justice,
Conspire with all your dreadful influence
Against his blood, whose crime ye now behold!
Make him a byeword, and a name of woe,
A conquered warrior, and a throneless outcast,
To teach all kings the law of evil power,
Till by an end more friendless and abhorred
Than his great victim's, and with heavier pain,
Let him slink off to a detested grave!
And now I give your majesty leave to go,
And may you carry from my house away,
That fixed incurable ulcer of the heart,
Which I have helped your thoughts to fasten there.
If these burning words had as much power to kindle her
own heart, as they must that of the hearer, we only realize
our anticipations, when we find her sending to the five
members the news of the intention of Charles to arrest
them, thus placing him in a position equally ridiculous and
miserable, having incurred all the odium of this violent
transaction to no purpose. That might well be a proud
moment of gratified vengeance to her, when he stood amid


1844.1
339
Sterling
the sullen and outraged parliament, baffled like a school-
boy, loathed as a thief, exclaiming, “ The birds are flown"
and all owing to “the advices of the honorable Lady Car-
lisle."
The play opens with Strafford's return to London. He
is made to return in rather a different temper from what
he really did, not only trusting the king, but in his own
greatness fearless of the popular hatred. The opening
scenes are very good, compact, well wrought, and showing
at the very beginning the probable fortunes of the scene,
by making the characters the agents of their own destinies.
A weight of tragedy is laid upon the heart, and at the same
time we are inspired with deep interest as to how it shall
be acted out.
Strafford appears before us as he does in history, a grand
and melancholy figure, whose dignity lay in his energy of
will, and large scope of action, not in his perception of
principles, or virtue in carrying them out. For his faith in
the need of absolute sway to control the herd, does not
merit the name of a principle.
In my thought, the promise of success
Grows to the self-same stature as the need,
Which is gigantic. There's a king to guide,
Three realms to save, a nation to control,
And by subiduing to make blest beyond
Their sottish dreams of lawless liberty.
This to fulfil Strafford has pledged his soul
In the unfaltering hands of destiny.
Nor can we fail to believe, that the man of the world
might sincerely take this view of his opponents.
No wonder they whose life is all deception,
A piety that, like a sheep-skin drum,
Is loud because 't is hollow, - thus can move
Belief in others by their swollen pretences.
Wby, man, it is their trade; they do not stick
To cozen themselves, and will they stop at you?
The court and council scenes are good. The materials
are taken from history, with Shakspearean adherence to the
record, but they are uttered in masculine cadences, sinewy
English, worthy this great era in the life of England.
The king and queen and sycophants of the court are too
carelessly drawn. Such unmitigated baseness and folly,
are unbearable in poetry. The master invests his worst


340
[Jan.
Sterling
characters with redeeming traits, or at least, touches them
with a human interest, that prevents their being objects of
disgust rather than contempt or a version. This is the
poetic gift, to penetrate to the truth below the fact. We
need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their
worthlessness.
The council of the parliamentary leaders is far better.
Here the author speaks his natural language from the lips
of grave enthusiastic men. Pym's advice to his daughter
is finely worded, and contains truths, which, although they
have been so often expressed, are not like to find so large
reception, as to dispense with new and manifold utterance.
The Lord has power
To guard his own: pray, Mary, pray to Him,
Nor fear what man can do. A rule there is
Above all circumstance, a current deep
Beneath all fluctuations. This who knows,
Though seeming weakest, firmly as the sun
Walks in blind paths where earthly strongest fall,
Reason is God's own voice to man, ordains
All holy duties, and all truth inspires :
And he who fails, errs not by trusting it,
But deafening to the sound his ear, from dread
Of the stern roar it speaks with. O my child,
Pray still for guidance, and be sure 't will come.
Lift up your heart upon the knees of God;
Losing yourself, your smallness, and your darkness,
In his great light, who fills and moves the world,
Who hath alone the quiet of perfect motion -
Sole quiet, not mere death.
The speech of Vane is nobly rendered.
The conversations of the populace are tolerably well
done. Only the greatest succeed in these; nobody except
Goethe in modern times. Here they give, not the charac-
ter of the people, but the spirit of the time, playing in re-
lation to the main action the part of chorus.
SECOND WOMAN.
There's Master St. John has a tongue
That threshes like a flail.
THIRD WOMAN.
And Master Fiennes
That's a true lanıb! He'd roast alive the Bishop.
CITIZEN.
I was close by the coach, and with my nose


1844.]
341
Sterling.
Upon the door, I called out, Down with Strafford !
And then just so he fixed his eyes on mine,
And something seemed to choke me in the throat;
In truth, I think it must have been the devil!
THIRD CITIZEN.
I saw him as he stept out of the House,
And then his face was dark, but very quiet;
It seemed like looking down the dusky mouth
Of a great cannon.
Everard says with expressive bitterness as they shout
“ Down with Strafford,”
I've heard this noise so often, that it seems
As natural as the howling of the wind.
And again —
For forty years I've studied books and men,
But ne'er till these last days have known a jot
Of the true secret madness in mankind.
This morn the whispers leapt from each to each,
Like a petard alight, which every man
Feared might explode in his own hands, and therefore
Would haste to pass it onward to his friend.
Even in our piping times of peace, nullification and the
Rhode Island difficulties have given us specimens of the
process of fermentation, the more than Virgilian growth of
Rumor.
The description of the fanatic preacher by Everard is
very good. The poor secretary, not placed in the promi-
nent rank to suffer, yet feeling all that passes, through his
master, finds vent to his grief, not in mourning, but a strong
causticity;
The sad fanatic preacher,
In whom one saw, by glancing through the eyes,
The last grey curdling dregs of human joy,
Dropped sudden sparks that kindled where they fell.
Strafford draws the line between his own religion and
that of the puritans, as it seemed to him, with noble phrase
in his last advices to his son.
Say it has ever been his father's mind,
That perfect reason, justice, government,
Are the chief attributes of Him who made,
And who sustains the world, in whose full being,
Wisdom and power are one ; and I, his creature,
Would fain have gained authority and rule,
To make the imagined order in my soul


342
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Sterling
Supreme o'er all, the proper good of man.
But Him to love who shaped us, and whose breast
Is the one home of all things, with a passion
Electing Him amid all other beings,
As if he were beside them, not their all.
This is the snug and dozing deliration
Of men, who filch from woman what is worst,
And cannot see the good. Of such beware.
This is the nobler tone of Strafford's spirit.* That more
habitual to him is heard in his presumptuous joy before
entering the parliament, into which he went as a conqueror,
and came out a prisoner. His confidence is not noble to
us, it is not that of Brutus or Van Artevelde, who, know-
ing what is prescribed by the law of right within the breast,
can take no other course but that, whatever the conse-
quences; neither like the faith of Julius Cæsar or Wallen-
stein in their star, which, though less pure, is not without
religion; but it is the presumption of a strong character
which, though its head towers above those of its compan-
ions when they are on the same level, yet has not taken a
sufficiently high platform, to see what passes around or
above it. Strafford's strength cannot redeem his infatua-
tion, while he struggles; vanquished, not overwhelmed, he
is a majestic figure, whose features t are well marked in
various passages.
Compared with him, whom I for eighteen years
Have seen familiar as my friend, all men
Seem but as chance-born flies, and only he
Great Nature's chosen and all-gifted son.
* His late biographer says well in regard to the magnanimity of his
later days, of so much nobler a tone than his general character would
lead us to expect. “It is a mean as well as a hasty judgment, which
would attribute this to any unworthy compromise with his real nature.
It is probably a juster and more profound view of it, to say that, into a
few of the later weeks of his life, new knowledge had penetrated from
the midst of the breaking of his fortunes. It was well and beautifully
said by a then living poet,
The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.'"
Forster's Life of Strafford, Lurdner's Cabinet Cyclopædia.
" A poet, who was present, exclaimed,
On thy brow
Sate terror mixed with wisdom, and at once
Saturn and Hermes in thy countenance.".
: Life of Strafford, p. 388.
Certainly there could not be a more pointed and pregnant account
given of the man than is suggested by this last line.
.


1844.)
. 343
Sterling
* Van Artevelde also bears testimony to the belief of the
author, that familiarity breeds no contempt, but the reverse
in the service of genuine nobility. A familiarity of eighteen
years will not make any but a stage hero, other than a hero
to his valet de chambre.
King Charles says,
To pass the bill,
Under his eye, with that fixed quiet look
Of imperturbable and thoughtful greatness,
I cannot do it.
Strafford himself says, on the final certainty of the king's
desertion,
Dear Everard, peace! for there is nothing here
I have not weighed before, and made my own.
And this, no doubt, was true, in a sense. Historians,
finding that Strafford expressed surprise, and even indigna-
tion, that the king had complied with Strafford's own letter
releasing him from all obligation to save his life, have in-
timated that the letter was written out of policy. But this
is a superficial view ; it produces very different results from
giving up all to another to see him take it; and, though
Strafford must have known Charles's weakness too well to
expect any thing good from him, yet the consummation
must have produced fresh emotion, for a strong character
cannot be prepared for the conduct of a weak one; there
is always in dishonor somewhat unexpected and incredible
to one incapable of it.
The speeches in parliament are well translated from the
page of bistory. The poet, we think, has improved upon
it in Strafford's mention of his children ; it has not the
theatrical tone of the common narrative, and is, probably,
nearer truth, as it is more consistent with the rest of his
deportment.
He has made good use of the fine anecdote of the effect
produced on Pym by meeting Strafford's eye at the close
of one of his most soaring passages.
* That with familiarity respect
Doth slacken, is a word of common use;
• I never found it so.
Philip Van Artevelde, 2d Part, p. 29.


344
(Jan.
Sterling
PYM.
The King is King, but as he props the State,
The State a legal and compacted bond,
Tying us all in sweet fraternity,
And that loosed off by fraudful creeping hand,
Or cut and torn by lawless violence,
There is no King because the State is gone;
And in the cannibal chaos that remains
Each man is sovereign of himself alone.
Shall then a drunken regicidal blow
Be paid by forfeit of the driveller's head,
And he go free, who, slaying Law itself,
Murders all royalty and all subjection?
He who, with all the radiant attributes
That most, save goodness, can adorn a man,
Would turn his kind to planless brutishness.
His knavery soars, indeed, and strikes the stars,
Yet is worse knavery than the meanest felon's.
(Strafford fixes his eyes on Pym, who hesitates.)
Oh! no, my Lords, Oh I do,
(Aside to Hampden.) His eye confounds me; he* was once
my friend.
(Aloud.) Oh! no, my Lords, the very selfsame rule, &c.
The eloquence of this period could not be improved
upon ; but it is much to select from and use its ebullitions
with the fine effect we admire in this play. Whatever
view be taken of Strafford, whether as condemnatory as
the majority of writers popular among us, the descendants
of the puritans, would promote, or that more lenient and
discriminating, brought out in this play, for which abundant
grounds may be discovered by those who will seek, we
cannot view him at this period but with the interest of
tragedy as of one suffering unjustly. For however noble
the eloquence of the parliamentary leaders in appealing to
a law above the law, to an eternal justice in the breast,
which afforded sufficient sanction to the desired measure,
it cannot but be seen, at this distance of time, that this
* Through the whole of the speech Strafford is described to have been
closely and earnestly watching Pym, when the latter suddenly turning,
met the fixed and faded eyes and haggard features of his early associate,
and a rush of feelings from other days, so fearfully contrasting the youth
and friendship of the past with the love-poisoned hate of the preseni, and
the mortal agony impending in the future, for a moment deprived the
patriot of self-possession « His papers he looked on," says Baillie, " but
they could not help him, so he behoved to pass them." For a moment
only; suddenly recovering his dignity and self-command, he told the
court, &c.-Life of Pym, Cabinet Cyclopædia.


1844.)
345
Sterling
reigned not purely in their own breasts, that his doom,
though sought by them from patriotic, not interested mo-
tives, was, in itself, a measure of expediency. He was the
victim, because the most dreaded foe, because they could
not go on with confidence, while the only man lived, who
could and would sustain Charles in his absurd and wicked
policy. Thus, though he might deserve that the people
on whom he trampled should rise up to crush him, that the
laws he had broken down should rear new and higher walls
to imprison him, though the shade of Eliot called for ven-
geance on the counsellor who alone had so long saved the
tyrant from a speedier fall, and the victims of his own
oppressions echoed with sullen murmur to the “ silver
trumpet” call,* yet, the greater the peculiar offences of
this man, the more need that his punishment should have
been awarded in an absolutely pure spirit. And this it
was not; it may be respected as an act of just retribution,
but not of pure justice.
Men who had such a cause to maintain, as his accusers
had, should deserve the praise awarded by Wordsworth to
him, who,
In a state where men are tempted still
To evil for a guard against worse ill,
And what in quality or act is best
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
Yet fixes good on good alone, and owes
To virtue every triumph that he knows.
The heart swells against Strafford as we read the details
of his policy. Even allowing that his native temper, preju-
dices of birth, and disbelief in mankind, really inclined him
to a despotic government, as the bad best practicable, that
his early espousal of the popular side was only a stratagem
to terrify the court, and that he was thus, though a de-
ceiver, no apostate, yet, he had been led, from whatever
motives, to look on that side ; his great intellect was clear
of sight, the front presented by better principles in that
time commanding. We feel that he was wilful in the
course he took, and self-aggrandizement his principal, if
not his only motive. We share the hatred of his time, as
we see him so triumphant in his forceful, wrongful measures,
But we would not have had him hunted down with such a
*“ I will not repeat, Sirs, what you have heard from that silver trum-
pet." One of the parliament speaking of Rudyard.
VOL. IV. —NO. II.
44


346
[Jan.
Sterling.
hue and cry, that the tones of defence had really no chance
to be heard. We would not have had papers stolen, and
by a son from a father who had entrusted him with a key,
to condemn him. And what a man was this thief, one
whose high enthusiastic hope never paused at good, but
ever rushed onward to the best.
Who would outbid the market of the world,
And seek a holier than a common prize,
And by the unworthy lever of to-day
Ope the strange portals of a better morn.
Begin to-day, nor end till evil sink
In its due grave; and if at once we may not
Declare the greatness of the work we plan,
Be sure, at least, that ever in our eyes
It stand complete before us, as a dome
Of light beyond this gloom; a house of stars,
Encompassing these dusky tents; a thing
Absolute, close to all, though seldom seen,
Near as our hearts, and perfect as the heavens.
Be this our aim and model, and our hands
Shall not wax faint until the work is done.
He is not the first, who, by looking too much at the stars
has lost the eye for severe fidelity to a private trust. He
thought himself “ obliged in conscience to impart the paper
to Master Pym.” Who that looks at the case by the code
of common rectitude can think it was ever his to impart?
What monstrous measures appear the arbitrary construc-
tion put on the one word in the minutes which decided the
fate of Strafford, the freeing the lords of council from the
oath of secrecy under whose protection he had spoken
there, the conduct of the House towards Lord Digby, when
he declared himself not satisfied that the prisoner could
with justice be declared guilty of treason; the burning his
speech by the common hangman when he dared print it,
to make known the reasons of his course to the world,
when placarded as Straffordian, held up as a mark for
popular rage for speaking it.* Lord Digby was not a man
of honor, but they did not know that, or if they did, it had
nothing to do with his right of private judgment. What
could Strafford, what could Charles do more high-handed ?
If they had violated the privileges of parliament, the more
reason parliament should respect their privileges, above all
* See Parliamentary History, Vol. IX.


1844.)
347
Sterling.
the privilege of the prisoner, to be supposed innocent
until proved guilty. The accusers, obliged to set aside
rule, and appeal to the very foundations of equity, could
only have sanctioned such a course by the religion and
pure justice of their proceedings. Here the interest
of the accusers made them not only demand, but insist
upon, the condemnation ; the cause was prejudged by the
sentiment of the people, and the resentments of the jury,
and the proceedings conducted, beside, with the most
scandalous disregard to the sickness and other disadvan-
tageous circumstances of Strafford. He was called on
to answer “if he will come,” just at the time of a most
dangerous attack from his cruel distemper, if he will not
come, the cause is still to be pushed forward. He was
denied the time and means he needed to collect his evi-
dence. The aid to be given him by counsel, after being
deprived of his chief witness“ by a master stroke of policy,"
was restricted within narrow limits. While he prepared
his answers, in full court, for he was never allowed to
retire, to the points of accusation, vital in their import,
requiring the closest examination, those present talked,
laughed, ate, lounged about. None of this disturbed his
magnanimous patience ; his conduct indeed is so noble,
through the whole period, that he and his opponents change
places in our minds; at the time, he seems the princely
deer, and they the savage hounds.* Well, it is all the
better for the tragedy, but as we read the sublime appeals
of Pym to a higher state of being, we cannot but wish that
all had been done in accordance with them. The art and
zeal, with which the condemnation of Strafford was ob-
tained, have had high praise as statesmanlike; we would
have wished for them one so high as to preclude this.
* Who can avoid a profound feeling, not only of compassion, but sym-
pathy, when he reads of Strafford obliged to kneel in Westminster Hall.
True, he would, if possible, have brought others as low; but there is a
deep pathos in the contrast of his then, and his former state, best shown
by the symbol of such an act. Just so we read of Bonaparte's green coat
being turned at St. Helena, after it had faded on the right side. He who
had overturned the world, to end with having his old coat turned! There
is something affecting, Belisarius-like, in the picture. When Warren
Hastings knelt in Westminster Hall, the chattering but pleasant Miss
Burney tells us, Wyndham, for a moment struck, half shrunk from the
business of prosecuting him. At such a sight, whispers in every breast
the monition, Had I been similarly tempted, had I not fallen as low, or
lower ?


348
(Jan.
Sterling
No doubt great temporary good was effected for England
by the death of Strafford, but the permanence of good is
ever in proportion with the purity of the means used to
obtain it. This act would have been great for Strafford,
for it was altogether in accordance with his views. He
met the parliament ready to do battle to the death, and
might would have been right, had he made rules for the
lists; but they proposed a different rule for their govern-
ment, and by that we must judge them. Admit the story
of Vane's pilſering the papers not to be true, that the
minutes were obtained some other way. This measure, on
the supposition of its existence, is defended by those who
defend the rest.
Strafford would certainly have come off with imprison-
ment and degradation from office, had the parliament
deemed it safe to leave him alive. When we consider this,
when we remember the threat of Pym, at the time of his
deserting the popular party, “You have left us, but I will
never leave you while your head is on your shoulders,” we
see not, setting aside the great results of the act, and look-
ing at it by its merits alone, that it differs from the admin-
istration of Lynch law in some regions of our own country.
Lynch law, with us, has often punished the gamester and
the robber, whom it was impossible to convict by the usual
legal process; the evil in it is, that it cannot be depended
upon, but, while, with one hand it punishes a villain, ad-
ministers with the other as s ummary judgment on the
philanthropist, according as the moral sentiment or preju-
dice may be roused in the popular breast.
We have spoken disparagingly of the capacities of the
drama for representing what is peculiar in our own day,
but, for such a work as this, presenting a great crisis with
so much clearness, force, and varied beauty, we can only
be grateful, and ask for more acquaintance with the same
mind, whether through the drama or in any other mode.
Copious extracts have been given, in the belief that thus,
better than by any interpretation or praise of ours, attention
would be attracted, and a wider perusal ensured to Mr.
Sterling's works.
In his mind there is a combination of reverence for the
Ideal, with a patient appreciation of its slow workings in
the actual world, that is rare in our time. He looks re-


1844.)
349
Sterling
ligiously, he speaks philosophically, nor these alone, but
with that other faculty which he himself so well describes.
You bear a brain
Discursive, open, generally wise,
But missing ever that excepted point
That gives each thing and hour a special oneness.
The little key-hole of the infrangible door,
The instant on which hangs eternity,
And not in the dim past and empty future,
Waste fields for abstract notions.
Such is the demonology of the man of the world. It
may rule in accordance with the law of right, but where it
does not, the strongest man may lose the battle, and so it
was with Strafford.
To R. B.
Beloved friend! they say that thou art dead,
Nor shall our asking eyes behold thee more,
Save in the company of the fair and dread,
Along that radiant and immortal shore,
Whither thy face was turned for evermore.
Thou wert a pilgrim toward the True and Real,
Never forgetful of that infinite goal ;
Salient, electrical thy weariless soul,
To every faintest vision always leal,
Even ʼmid these phantoms made its world ideal.
And so thou hast a most perennial fame,
Though from the earth thy name should perish quite;
When the dear sun sinks golden whence he came,
The gloom, else cheerless, hath not lost his light;
So in our lives impulses born of thine,
Like fireside stars across the night shall shine.
c. A. D.


350
[Jan.
Autumn Woods.
AUTUMN WOODS.
-
".
I have had tearful days,
I have been taught by melancholy hours,
My tears have dropped, like these chill autumn showers,
Upon the rustling ways.
Yes ! youth, thou sorrowest,
For these dead leaves, unlike your rising morn,
Are the sad progeny of months forlorn,
Weary and seeking rest.
Thou wert a homeless child,
And vainly clasped the solitary air,
And the gray ash renewed thy cold despair, —
Grief was thy mother mild.
Thy days have sunlight now,
Those autumn leaves thy tears do not deplore,
There flames a beacon on the forest's shore,
And thy unwrinkled brow.
O holy are the woods,
Where nature yearly glorifies her might,
And weaves a rich and frolicsome delight
In the deep solitudes.
Far through the fading trees
The pine's green plume is waving bright and free,
And in the withered age of man to me
A warm and sweet spring breeze.


1844.)
351
Brook Farm.
BROOK FARM.
WHEREVER we recognize the principle of progress, our
sympathies and affections are engaged. However small
may be the innovation, however limited the effort towards
the attainment of pure good, that effort is worthy of our
best encouragement and succor. The Institution at Brook
Farm, West Roxbury, though sufficiently extensive in re-
spect to number of persons, perhaps is not to be considered
an experiment of large intent. Its aims are moderate ; too
humble indeed to satisfy the extreme demands of the age ;
yet, for that reason probably, the effort is more valuable, as
likely to exhibit a larger share of actual success.
Though familiarly designated a " Community,” it is only
so in the process of eating in commons; a practice at
least, as antiquated, as the collegiate halls of old England,
where it still continues without producing, as far as we can
learn, any of the Spartan virtues. A residence at Brook
Farm does not involve either a community of money, of
opinions, or of sympathy. The motives, which bring indi-
viduals there, may be as various as their numbers. In fact,
the present residents are divisible into three distinct classes;
and if the majority in numbers were considered, it is possi-
ble that a vote in favor of self-sacrifice for the common
good would not be very strongly carried. The leading por-
tion of the adult inmates, they whose presence imparts the
greatest peculiarity and the fraternal tone to the household,
believe that an improved state of existence would be devel-
oped in association, and are therefore anxious to promote
it. Another class consists of those who join with the view
of bettering their condition, by being exempted from some
portion of worldly strife. The third portion, comprises
those who have their own development or education, for
their principal object. Practically, too, the institution man-
ifests a threefold improvement over the world at large,
corresponding to these three motives. In consequence of
the first, the companionship, the personal intercourse, the
social bearing are of a marked, and very superior character.


352
[Jan.
Brook Farm.
There may possibly, to some minds, long accustomed to
other modes, appear a want of homeness, and of the
private fireside ; but all observers must acknowledge a
brotherly and softening condition, highly conducive to the
permanent, and pleasant growth of all the better human
qualities. If the life is not of a deeply religious cast, it is
at least not inferior to that which is exemplified elsewhere;
and there is the advantage of an entire absence of as-
sumption and pretence. The moral atmosphere so far is
pure; and there is found a strong desire to walk ever on
the mountain tops of life; though taste, rather than piety,
is the aspect presented to the eye.
In the second class of motives, we have enumerated, there
is a strong tendency to an important improvement in meet-
ing the terrestrial necessities of humanity. The banishment
of servitude, the renouncement of hireling labor, and the
elevation of all unavoidable work to