_"The Emigrant, or Reflections," &c._
Mr. Hammond, in the notice which he was so kind as to take of this
POEM, suggested the alteration of the title from "Reflections" to
"Reveries." In retaining the first title, I do not do so because I
think it best, but merely because it was the first title, and the one
under which the extracts were given.
It seems to the author, if he may dare to hazard the remark, that the
stanza in which he has attempted to write, has advantages over even
the Spenserean stanzas. He understands the latter to be that in which
the Fairy Queen, from whose author it takes its name--Beattie's
Minstrel, Thompson's Castle of Indolence, Byron's Childe Harold, &c.
&c., are written. The following is a stanza of it, from Childe
Harold:
The starry fable of the Milky Way
Has not thy story's purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds. Oh! holiest nurse!
No drop of that clear spring its way shall miss
To thy sire's heart, replenishing its source
With life, as our free souls rejoin the Universe.
Here, the reader will perceive that, in a stanza of nine lines, there
is a necessity for the second, the fourth, the fifth, and the seventh
lines to rhyme together; and that the sixth, eighth and ninth lines
must, also, rhyme together. To make the stanza correct, with these
complicated embarrassments of rhyme, must not only cause great
trouble, sometimes, to the easiest versifier, but to succeed in doing
so, critically, he must often sacrifice a happy expression, a striking
phrase, or a beautiful line. "Words are things," says Mirabeau; and,
to the poet, they are things of potency. They are at once tools and
materials in his headwork.
Any one who has read Childe Harold, must have observed that even the
Lord of Poets, with all his powers of language, was often thus
hampered, and that, for the sake of preserving the force of an
expression, or a striking word, he used what are no rhymes at all, if
Monk Lewis' remark to Scott, "that a bad rhyme is no rhyme," be true.
Whereas, by making the stanza of but eight lines and having the first
four lines to rhyme alternately, and the last four immediately, and by
having the concluding line an Alexandrine, as in the Spenserean
stanzas, the difficulty, arising from the necessity of having so many
similar rhymes, would be obviated, and the poet would have much
greater facilities in expressing himself well, without impairing the
dignity or strength of what might still be called, from its many
resemblances, the Spenserean stanzas; at the same time, the monotony
would be avoided, of which criticism has complained so much in the
works of Pope and Goldsmith.
Very few readers of poetry, in the first poems which they open, are
fond of those, no matter how great their merits, which are written in
the Spenserean stanzas. They have to acquire a taste for it. They
delight in simpler styles: this is one reason of Scott's great
popularity with many persons who seldom read any other poet, except
perhaps, Burns. And even to those who have a natural taste for poetry,
but who have not much cultivated it, the Spenserean stanza seems
complicated, and, I will even venture to say, at first untunable; and
it is not at the first perusal that they perceive the beauties of
those poems which are written in this style.
These remarks are hazarded very hastily. It would be much more
difficult for the author to build the complicated verse of the
Spenserean stanza, than this which he has attempted; and, therefore,
perhaps, very rashly, he concludes that it would be more difficult for
others; and, moreover, we easily persuade ourselves that what is most
easily done it is best to do.