As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically

the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe,

its Inner Life; so Shakespeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer

Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies,

humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at

the world, men then had. As in Homer we may still construe Old Greece;

so in Shakespeare and Dante, after thousands of years, what our Modern

Europe was, in Faith and in Practice, will still be legible. Dante has

given us the Faith or soul; Shakespeare, in a not less noble way, has

given us the Practice or body. This latter also we were to have; a man

was sent for it, the man Shakespeare. Just when that chivalry way of

life had reached its last finish, and was on the point of breaking

down into slow or swift dissolution, as we now see it everywhere, this

other sovereign Poet, with his seeing eye, with his perennial singing

voice, was sent to take note of it, to give long-enduring record of

it. Two fit men: Dante, deep, fierce as the central fire of the world;

Shakespeare, wide, placid, far-seeing, as the Sun, the upper light of

the world. Italy produced the one world-voice; we English had the

honour of producing the other.

Curious enough how, as it were by mere accident, this man came to us.

I think always, so great, quiet, complete and self-sufficing is this

Shakespeare, had the Warwickshire Squire not prosecuted him for

deer-stealing, we had perhaps never heard of him as a Poet! The woods

and skies, the rustic Life of Man in Stratford there, had been enough

for this man! But indeed that strange outbudding of our whole English

Existence, which we call the Elizabethan Era, did not it too come as

of its own accord? The 'Tree Igdrasil' buds and withers by its own

laws,--too deep for our scanning. Yet it does bud and wither, and

every bough and leaf of it is there, by fixed eternal laws; not a Sir

Thomas Lucy but comes at the hour fit for him. Curious, I say, and not

sufficiently considered: how everything does co-operate with all; not

a leaf rotting on the highway but is indissoluble portion of solar and

stellar systems; no thought, word or act of man but has sprung withal

out of all men, and works sooner or later, recognizably or

irrecognizably, on all men! It is all a Tree: circulation of sap and

influences, mutual communication of every minutest leaf with the

lowest talon of a root, with every other greatest and minutest portion

of the whole. The Tree Igdrasil, that has its roots down in the

Kingdoms of Hela and Death, and whose boughs overspread the highest

Heaven!--

In some sense it may be said that this glorious Elizabethan Era with

its Shakespeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had

preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle

Ages. The Christian Faith, which was the theme of Dante's Song, had

produced this Practical Life which Shakespeare was to sing. For

Religion then, as it now and always is, was the soul of Practice; the

primary vital fact in men's life. And remark here, as rather curious,

that Middle-Age Catholicism was abolished, so far as Acts of

Parliament could abolish it, before Shakespeare, the noblest product

of it, made his appearance. He did make his appearance nevertheless.

Nature at her own time, with Catholicism or what else might be

necessary, sent him forth; taking small thought of Acts of Parliament.

King-Henrys, Queen-Elizabeths go their way; and Nature too goes hers.

Acts of Parliament, on the whole, are small, notwithstanding the noise

they make. What Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephens, on the

hustings or elsewhere, was it that brought this Shakespeare into

being? No dining at Freemasons' Tavern, opening subscription-lists,

selling of shares, and infinite other jangling and true or false

endeavouring! This Elizabethan Era, and all its nobleness and

blessedness, came without proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless

Shakespeare was the free gift of Nature; given altogether

silently;--received altogether silently, as if it had been a thing of

little account. And yet, very literally, it is a priceless thing. One

should look at that side of matters too.

Of this Shakespeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a

little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the

best judgement not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is

slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakespeare is the chief of

all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world,

has left record of himself in the way of literature. On the whole, I

know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take

all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth;

placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so

true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea! It has been said,

that in the constructing of Shakespeare's Dramas there is, apart from

all other 'faculties' as they are called, an understanding manifested,

equal to that in Bacon's _Novum Organum_. That is true; and it is not

a truth that strikes every one. It would become more apparent if we

tried, any of us for himself, how, out of Shakespeare's dramatic

materials, _we_ could fashion such a result! The built house seems all

so fit,--everyway as it should be, as if it came there by its own law

and the nature of things,--we forget the rude disorderly quarry it was

shaped from. The very perfection of the house, as if Nature herself

had made it, hides the builder's merit. Perfect, more perfect than any

other man, we may call Shakespeare in this: he discerns, knows as by

instinct, what condition he works under, what his materials are, what

his own force and its relation to them is. It is not a transitory

glance of insight that will suffice; it is deliberate illumination of

the whole matter; it is a calmly _seeing_ eye; a great intellect, in

short. How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will

construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will

give of it,--is the best measure you could get of what intellect is

in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent;

which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true

_beginning_, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task

the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must _understand_

the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the

fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself

to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its

embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, _Fiat lux_, Let there be

light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there, is _light_

in himself, will he accomplish this.

Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting,

delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakespeare is

great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is

unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare.

The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its

inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light

before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative,

we said: poetic creation, what is this too but _seeing_ the thing

sufficiently? The _word_ that will describe the thing, follows of

itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not

Shakespeare's _morality_, his valour, candour, tolerance,

truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can

triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world!

No _twisted_, poor convex-concave mirror, reflecting all objects with

its own convexities and concavities; a perfectly _level_ mirror;--that

is to say withal, if we will understand it, a man justly related to

all things and men, a good man. It is truly a lordly spectacle how

this great soul takes in all kinds of men and objects, a Falstaff, an

Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets them all forth to us in their

round completeness; loving, just, the equal brother of all. _Novum

Organum_, and all the intellect you will find in Bacon, is of a quite

secondary order; earthy, material, poor in comparison with this. Among

modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost nothing of the same rank.

Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare, reminds me of it. Of him

too you say that he _saw_ the object; you may say what he himself says

of Shakespeare: 'His characters are like watches with dial-plates of

transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the

inward mechanism also is all visible.'

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things;

what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped up in these

often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye

that something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You

can laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or

other genially relate yourself to them;--you can, at lowest, hold your

peace about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till

the hour come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them! At

bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have

intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or

failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at

all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on

accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents,--perhaps on

his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his

boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart

of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for what soever exists

has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and

exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of

Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort

soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, _See_. If

you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together,

jingling sensibilities against each other, and _name_ yourself a Poet;

there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in

action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old

Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are

ye sure he's _not a dunce_?' Why, really one might ask the same thing,

in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider

it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's not a dunce? There is,

in this world, no other entirely fatal person.

For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a

correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare's faculty,

I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all

under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they

were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect,

imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a

capital error. Then again, we hear of a man's 'intellectual nature',

and of his 'moral nature', as if these again were divisible, and

existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms

of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to

speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It

seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part,

radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep for

ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but _names_; that

man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is

essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy,

understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same

Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other,

physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know

all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man,

what is this but another _side_ of the one vital Force whereby he is

and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see

how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or

want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he

has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is _one_; and

preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.

Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but,

consider it,--without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a

thoroughly immoral _man_ could not know anything at all! To know a

thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing,

sympathize with it: that is, be _virtuously_ related to it. If he have

not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the

courage to stand by the dangerous-true at every turn, how shall he

know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge.

Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the

pusillanimous for ever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is

mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely.--But does

not the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where

the geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the

world, what more does he know but this and the like of this? Nay, it

should be considered too, that if the Fox had not a certain vulpine

_morality_, he could not even know where the geese were, or get at the

geese! If he spent his time in splenetic atrabiliar reflections on his

own misery, his ill usage by Nature, Fortune and other Foxes, and so

forth; and had not courage, promptitude, practicality, and other

suitable vulpine gifts and graces, he would catch no geese. We may say

of the Fox too, that his morality and insight are of the same

dimensions; different faces of the same internal unity of vulpine

life!--These things are worth stating; for the contrary of them acts

with manifold very baleful perversion, in this time: what limitations,

modifications they require, your own candour will supply.

If I say, therefore, that Shakespeare is the greatest of Intellects, I

have said all concerning him. But there is more in Shakespeare's

intellect than we have yet seen. It is what I call an unconscious

intellect; there is more virtue in it than he himself is aware of.

Novalis beautifully remarks of him, that those Dramas of his are

Products of Nature too, deep as Nature herself. I find a great truth

in this saying. Shakespeare's Art is not Artifice; the noblest worth

of it is not there by plan or precontrivance. It grows up from the

deeps of Nature, through this noble sincere soul, who is a voice of

Nature. The latest generations of men will find new meanings in

Shakespeare, new elucidations of their own human being; 'new harmonies

with the infinite structure of the Universe; concurrences with later

ideas, affinities with the higher powers and senses of man.' This

well deserves meditating. It is Nature's highest award to a true

simple great soul, that he get thus to be _a part of herself_. Such a

man's works, whatsoever he with utmost conscious exertion and

forethought shall accomplish, grow up withal _un_consciously, from the

unknown deeps in him;--as the oak-tree grows from the Earth's bosom,

as the mountains and waters shape themselves; with a symmetry grounded

on Nature's own laws, conformable to all Truth whatsoever. How much in

Shakespeare lies hid; his sorrows, his silent struggles known to

himself; much that was not known at all, not speakable at all: like

_roots_, like sap and forces working underground! Speech is great; but

Silence is greater.

Withal the joyful tranquillity of this man is notable. I will not

blame Dante for his misery: it is as battle without victory; but true

battle,--the first, indispensable thing. Yet I call Shakespeare

greater than Dante, in that he fought truly, and did conquer. Doubt it

not, he had his own sorrows: those _Sonnets_ of his will even testify

expressly in what deep waters he had waded, and swum struggling for

his life;--as what man like him ever failed to have to do? It seems to

me a heedless notion, our common one, that he sat like a bird on the

bough; and sang forth, free and offhand, never knowing the troubles of

other men. Not so; with no man is it so. How could a man travel

forward from rustic deer-poaching to such tragedy-writing, and not

fall in with sorrows by the way? Or, still better, how could a man

delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth, so many suffering heroic

hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered?--And now, in

contrast with all this, observe his mirthfulness, his genuine

overflowing love of laughter! You would say, in no point does he

_exaggerate_ but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that

pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakespeare; yet he is always in

measure here; never what Johnson would remark as a specially 'good

hater'. But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods; he heaps

all manner of ridiculous nicknames on the butt he is bantering,

tumbles and tosses him in all sorts of horse-play; you would say,

roars and laughs. And then, if not always the finest, it is always a

genial laughter. Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty; never. No

man who _can_ laugh, what we call laughing, will laugh at these

things. It is some poor character only _desiring_ to laugh, and have

the credit of wit, that does so. Laughter means sympathy; good

laughter is not 'the crackling of thorns under the pot'. Even at

stupidity and pretension this Shakespeare does not laugh otherwise

than genially. Dogberry and Verges tickle our very hearts; and we

dismiss them covered with explosions of laughter: but we like the poor

fellows only the better for our laughing; and hope they will get on

well there, and continue Presidents of the City-watch.--Such laughter,

like sunshine on the deep sea, is very beautiful to me.

* * * * *

We have no room to speak of Shakespeare's individual works; though

perhaps there is much still waiting to be said on that head. Had we,

for instance, all his plays reviewed as _Hamlet_, in _Wilhelm

Meister_, is! A thing which might, one day, be done. August Wilhelm

Schlegel has a remark on his Historical Plays, _Henry Fifth_ and the

others, which is worth remembering. He calls them a kind of National

Epic. Marlborough, you recollect, said, he knew no English History but

what he had learned from Shakespeare. There are really, if we look to

it, few as memorable Histories. The great salient points are admirably

seized; all rounds itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it

is, as Schlegel says, _epic_;--as indeed all delineation by a great

thinker will be. There are right beautiful things in those Pieces,

which indeed together form one beautiful thing. That battle of

Agincourt strikes me as one of the most perfect things, in its sort,

we anywhere have of Shakespeare's. The description of the two hosts:

the worn-out, jaded English; the dread hour, big with destiny, when

the battle shall begin; and then that deathless valour: 'Ye good

yeomen, whose limbs were made in England!' There is a noble Patriotism

in it,--far other than the 'indifference' you sometimes hear ascribed

to Shakespeare. A true English heart breathes, calm and strong,

through the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive; all the better

for that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel. This man too

had a right stroke in him, had it come to that!

But I will say, of Shakespeare's works generally, that we have no full

impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works

are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that

was in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory,

imperfect, written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and

there a note of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that

come upon you like splendour out of Heaven; bursts of radiance,

illuminating the very heart of the thing: you say, 'That is _true_,

spoken once and forever; wheresoever and whensoever there is an open

human soul, that will be recognized as true!' Such bursts, however,

make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is,

in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakespeare had to write for

the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could,

into that and no other mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us

all. No man works save under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his

own free Thought before us; but his Thought as he could translate it

into the stone that was given, with the tools that were given.

_Disjecta membra_ are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man.

* * * * *

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare may recognize that he

too was a _Prophet_, in his way; of an insight analogous to the

Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to

this man also divine; _un_speakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven:

'We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!' That scroll in Westminster

Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any Seer.

But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante

the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call

Shakespeare the still more melodious Priest of a _true_ Catholicism,

the 'Universal Church' of the Future and of all times? No narrow

superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or

perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold

hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men

worship as they can! We may say without offence, that there rises a

kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakespeare too; not unfit to make

itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony

with these, if we understood them, but in unison!--I cannot call this

Shakespeare a 'Sceptic', as some do; his indifference to the creeds

and theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neither

unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; no sceptic,

though he says little about his Faith. Such 'indifference' was the

fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand

sphere of worship (we may call it such); these other controversies,

vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.

But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious

thing and set of things, this that Shakespeare has brought us? For

myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact

of such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all;

a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?--And, at bottom, was it not

perhaps far better that this Shakespeare, everyway an unconscious man,

was _conscious_ of no Heavenly message? He did not feel, like Mahomet,

because he saw into those internal Splendours, that he specially was

the 'Prophet of God': and was he not greater than Mahomet in that?

Greater; and also, if we compute strictly, as we did in Dante's case,

more successful. It was intrinsically an error that notion of

Mahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood; and has come down to us

inextricably involved in error to this day; dragging along with it

such a coil of fables, impurities, intolerances, as makes it a

questionable step for me here and now to say, as I have done, that

Mahomet was a true Speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious

charlatan, perversity, and simulacrum, no Speaker, but a Babbler! Even

in Arabia, as I compute, Mahomet will have exhausted himself and

become obsolete, while this Shakespeare, this Dante may still be

young;--while this Shakespeare may still pretend to be a Priest of

Mankind, of Arabia as of other places, for unlimited periods to come!

Compared with any speaker or singer one knows, even with Aeschylus or

Homer, why should he not, for veracity and universality, last like

them? He is _sincere_ as they; reaches deep down like them, to the

universal and perennial. But as for Mahomet, I think it had been

better for him _not_ to be so conscious! Alas, poor Mahomet; all that

he was _conscious_ of was a mere error; a futility and triviality,--as

indeed such ever is. The truly great in him too was the unconscious:

that he was a wild Arab lion of the desert, and did speak out with

that great thunder-voice of his, not by words which he _thought_ to be

great, but by actions, by feelings, by a history which _were_ great!

His Koran has become a stupid piece of prolix absurdity; we do not

believe, like him, that God wrote that! The Great Man here too, as

always, is a Force of Nature: whatsoever is truly great in him springs

up from the _in_articulate deeps.

* * * * *

Well: this is our poor Warwickshire Peasant, who rose to be Manager of

a Playhouse, so that he could live without begging; whom the Earl of

Southampton cast some kind glances on; whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many

thanks to him, was for sending to the Treadmill! We did not account

him a god, like Odin, while he dwelt with us;--on which point there

were much to be said. But I will say rather, or repeat: In spite of

the sad state Hero-worship now lies in, consider what this Shakespeare

has actually become among us. Which Englishman we ever made, in this

land of ours, which million of Englishmen, would we not give up rather

than the Stratford Peasant? There is no regiment of highest

Dignitaries that we would sell him for. He is the grandest thing we

have yet done. For our honour among foreign nations, as an ornament to

our English Household, what item is there that we would not surrender

rather than him? Consider now, if they asked us, Will you give up your

Indian Empire or your Shakespeare, you English; never have had any

Indian Empire, or never have had any Shakespeare? Really it were a

grave question. Official persons would answer doubtless in official

language; but we, for our part too, should not we be forced to answer:

Indian Empire, or no Indian Empire; we cannot do without Shakespeare!

Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare

does not go, he lasts for ever with us; we cannot give up our

Shakespeare!

Nay, apart from spiritualities; and considering him merely as a real,

marketable, tangibly-useful possession. England, before long, this

Island of ours, will hold but a small fraction of the English: in

America, in New Holland, east and west to the very Antipodes, there

will be a Saxondom covering great spaces of the Globe. And now, what

is it that can keep all these together into virtually one Nation, so

that they do not fall out and fight, but live at peace, in brotherlike

intercourse, helping one another? This is justly regarded as the

greatest practical problem, the thing all manner of sovereignties and

governments are here to accomplish: what is it that will accomplish

this? Acts of Parliament, administrative prime-ministers cannot.

America is parted from us, so far as Parliament could part it. Call it

not fantastic, for there is much reality in it: Here, I say, is an

English King, whom no time or chance, Parliament or combination of

Parliaments, can dethrone! This King Shakespeare, does not he shine,

in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet

strongest of rallying-signs; _in_destructible; really more valuable in

that point of view, than any other means or appliance whatsoever? We

can fancy him as radiant aloft over all the Nations of Englishmen, a

thousand years hence. From Paramatta, from New York, wheresoever,

under what sort of Parish-Constable soever, English men and women are,

they will say to one another: 'Yes, this Shakespeare is ours: we

produced him, we speak and think by him; we are of one blood and kind

with him.' The most common-sense politician, too, if he pleases, may

think of that.

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate

voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the

heart of it means! Italy, for example, poor Italy lies dismembered,

scattered asunder, not appearing in any protocol or treaty as a unity

at all; yet the noble Italy is actually _one_: Italy produced its

Dante: Italy can speak! The Czar of all the Russias, he is strong,

with so many bayonets, Cossacks, and cannons: and does a great feat in

keeping such a tract of Earth politically together; but he cannot yet

speak. Something great in him, but it is a dumb greatness. He has had

no voice of genius, to be heard of all men and times. He must learn to

speak. He is a great dumb monster hitherto. His cannons and Cossacks

will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante's voice is still

audible. The Nation that has a Dante is bound together as no dumb

Russia can be.--We must here end what we had to say of the

_Hero-Poet_.

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT

1784-1859

AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION

WHAT IS POETRY? (1844)

Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say,

considered not merely as poetic feeling, which is more or less shared

by all the world, but as the operation of that feeling, such as we see

it in the poet's book, is the utterance of a passion for truth,

beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by

imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of

variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever the universe contains;

and its ends, pleasure and exaltation. Poetry stands between nature

and convention, keeping alive among us the enjoyment of the external

and the spiritual world: it has constituted the most enduring fame of

nations; and, next to Love and Beauty, which are its parents, is the

greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found in all things, and

of the probable riches of infinitude.

Poetry is a passion,[25] because it seeks the deepest impressions; and

because it must undergo, in order to convey, them.

[25] _Passio_, suffering in a good sense,--ardent subjection

of one's-self to emotion.

It is a passion for truth, because without truth the impression would

be false or defective.

It is a passion for beauty, because its office is to exalt and refine

by means of pleasure, and because beauty is nothing but the loveliest

form of pleasure.

It is a passion for power, because power is impression triumphant,

whether over the poet, as desired by himself, or over the reader, as

affected by the poet.

It embodies and illustrates its impressions by imagination, or images

of the objects of which it treats, and other images brought in to

throw light on those objects, in order that it may enjoy and impart

the feeling of their truth in its utmost conviction and affluence.

It illustrates them by fancy, which is a lighter play of imagination,

or the feeling of analogy coming short of seriousness, in order that

it may laugh with what it loves, and show how it can decorate it with

fairy ornament.

It modulates what it utters, because in running the whole round of

beauty it must needs include beauty of sound; and because, in the

height of its enjoyment, it must show the perfection of its triumph,

and make difficulty itself become part of its facility and joy.

And lastly, Poetry shapes this modulation into uniformity for its

outline, and variety for its parts, because it thus realizes the last

idea of beauty itself, which includes the charm of diversity within

the flowing round of habit and ease.

Poetry is imaginative passion. The quickest and subtlest test of the

possession of its essence is in expression; the variety of things to

be expressed shows the amount of its resources; and the continuity of

the song completes the evidence of its strength and greatness. He who

has thought, feeling, expression, imagination, action, character, and

continuity, all in the largest amount and highest degree, is the

greatest poet.

Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be made visible to the

mind's eye, and whatsoever of music can be conveyed by sound and

proportion without singing or instrumentation. But it far surpasses

those divine arts in suggestiveness, range, and intellectual

wealth;--the first, in expression of thought, combination of images,

and the triumph over space and time; the second, in all that can be

done by speech, apart from the tones and modulations of pure sound.

Painting and music, however, include all those portions of the gift of

poetry that can be expressed and heightened by the visible and

melodious. Painting, in a certain apparent manner, is things

themselves; music, in a certain audible manner, is their very emotion

and grace. Music and painting are proud to be related to poetry, and

poetry loves and is proud of them.

Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science ceases to be merely

such, and to exhibit a further truth; that is to say, the connexion it

has with the world of emotion, and its power to produce imaginative

pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, for instance, what flower it is we

see yonder, he answers, 'a lily'. This is matter of fact. The botanist

pronounces it to be of the order of 'Hexandria Monogynia'. This is

matter of science. It is the 'lady' of the garden, says Spenser; and

here we begin to have a poetical sense of its fairness and grace. It

is

The plant and flower of _light_,

says Ben Jonson; and poetry then shows us the beauty of the flower in

all its mystery and splendour.

If it be asked, how we know perceptions like these to be true, the

answer is, by the fact of their existence--by the consent and delight

of poetic readers. And as feeling is the earliest teacher, and

perception the only final proof, of things the most demonstrable by

science, so the remotest imaginations of the poets may often be found

to have the closest connexion with matter of fact; perhaps might

always be so, if the subtlety of our perceptions were a match for the

causes of them. Consider this image of Ben Jonson's--of a lily being

the flower of light. Light, undecomposed, is white; and as the lily is

white, and light is white, and whiteness itself is nothing _but_

light, the two things, so far, are not merely similar, but identical.

A poet might add, by an analogy drawn from the connexion of light and

colour, that there is a 'golden dawn' issuing out of the white lily,

in the rich yellow of the stamens. I have no desire to push this

similarity farther than it may be worth. Enough has been stated to

show that, in poetical as in other analogies, 'the same feet of

Nature', as Bacon says, may be seen 'treading in different paths'; and

that the most scornful, that is to say, dullest disciple of fact,

should be cautious how he betrays the shallowness of his philosophy by

discerning no poetry in its depths.

But the poet is far from dealing only with these subtle and analogical

truths. Truth of every kind belongs to him, provided it can bud into

any kind of beauty, or is capable of being illustrated and impressed

by the poetic faculty. Nay, the simplest truth is often so beautiful

and impressive of itself, that one of the greatest proofs of his

genius consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated by

nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, its own wonder,

might, or playfulness. Hence the complete effect of many a simple

passage in our old English ballads and romances, and of the passionate

sincerity in general of the greatest early poets, such as Homer and

Chaucer, who flourished before the existence of a 'literary world',

and were not perplexed by a heap of notions and opinions, or by doubts

how emotion ought to be expressed. The greatest of their successors

never write equally to the purpose, except when they can dismiss

everything from their minds but the like simple truth. In the

beautiful poem of _Sir Eger, Sir Graham and Sir Gray-Steel_ (see it in

Ellis's _Specimens_, or Laing's _Early Metrical Tales_), a knight

thinks himself disgraced in the eyes of his mistress:--

Sir Eger said, 'If it be so,

Then wot I well I must forgo

Love-liking, and manhood, all clean!'

_The water rush'd out of his een!_

Sir Gray-Steel is killed:

Gray-Steel into his death thus thraws[26]

He _walters[27] and the grass up draws;_

* * * * *

_A little while then lay he still

(Friends that him saw, liked full ill)

And bled into his armour bright._

[26] throes?

[27] welters,--throws himself about.

The abode of Chaucer's _Reeve_, or Steward, in the _Canterbury Tales_,

is painted in two lines, which nobody ever wished longer:

His wonning[28] was full fair upon an heath,

With greeny trees yshadowed was his place.

[28] dwelling.

Every one knows the words of Lear, 'most _matter-of-fact_, most

melancholy.'

Pray, do not mock me;

I am a very foolish fond old man,

Fourscore and upwards:

Not an hour more, nor less; and, to deal plainly

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

It is thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and the implied power of

writing with exuberance, if need be, that beauty and truth become

identical in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, a balm

in our tears, is drawn out of pain.

It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely imagination, when the

poet can write a commentary, as it were, of his own, on such sufficing

passages of nature, and be thanked for the addition. There is an

instance of this kind in Warner, an old Elizabethan poet, than which I

know nothing sweeter in the world. He is speaking of Fair Rosamond,

and of a blow given her by Queen Eleanor.

With that she dash'd her on the lips,

_So dyèd double red:

Hard was the heart that gave the blow,

Soft were those lips that bled._

There are different kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them

necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them

possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as

follows:--First, that which presents to the mind any object or

circumstance in every-day life; as when we imagine a man holding a

sword, or looking out of a window;--Second, that which presents real,

but not every-day circumstances; as King Alfred tending the loaves,

or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier;--Third,

that which combines character and events directly imitated from real

life, with imitative realities of its own invention; as the probable

parts of the histories of Priam and _Macbeth_, or what may be called

natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural;--Fourth, that

which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature; as

Homer's gods, and Shakespeare's witches, enchanted horses and spears,

Ariosto's hippogriff, &c.;--Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate

or aggravate one image, introduces another; sometimes in simile, as

when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the

coming of night-time: sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a

word, as in Milton's 'motes that _people_ the sunbeams'; sometimes in

concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing,

past or even future, as in the 'starry Galileo' of Byron, and that

ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet 'murdered' applied to the

yet living victim in Keats's story from Boccaccio,--

So the two brothers and their _murder'd_ man

Rode towards fair Florence;--

sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which

makes one circumstance stand for others; as in Milton's grey-fly

winding its '_sultry_ horn', which epithet contains the heat of a

summer's day;--Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a

variety of circumstances take colour from one, like nature seen with

jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine;

as when in _Lycidas_, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and

the flocks are made to sympathize with a man's death; or, in the

Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking

of love--

Parea che l'erba le fiorisse intorno,

_E d'amor ragionasse quella riva!_

_Orlando Innamorato_, Canto iii.

or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very

light in the chamber, and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself;

or in the 'witch element' of the tragedy of _Macbeth_ and the May-day

night of _Faust_;--Seventh, and last, that which by a single

expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but

surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular

description; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge's _Christabel_,

where the unsuspecting object of the witch's malignity is bidden to go

to bed:

Quoth Christabel, So let it be!

And as the lady bade, did she.

Her gentle limbs did she undress,

_And lay down in her loveliness;--_

a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very

smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter

_l's_.

I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely

inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any

instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into

accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of

comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn

from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into

the _Friar of Orders Grey_, out of Beaumont and Fletcher:

Weep no more, lady, weep no more,

Thy sorrow is in vain;

_For violets pluck'd the sweetest showers

Will ne'er make grow again._

And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; such as

Antony's likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear's

appeal to the old age of the heavens; Satan's appearance in the

horizon, like a fleet 'hanging in the clouds'; and the comparisons of

him with the comet and the eclipse. Nor unworthy of this glorious

company, for its extraordinary combination of delicacy and vastness,

is that enchanting one of Shelley's in the _Adonais_:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of eternity.

I multiply these particulars in order to impress upon the reader's

mind the great importance of imagination in all its phases, as a

constituent part of the highest poetic faculty.

The happiest instance I remember of imaginative metaphor, is

Shakespeare's moonlight 'sleeping' on a bank; but half his poetry may

be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of

discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none out of the pale of mythology

and the East are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to

Shakespeare's Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may grudge to prose the

discovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described

by her inventor in the story of _Peter Wilkins_; and in point of

treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of Spenser, some of the monsters

in Dante, particularly his Nimrod, his interchangements of creatures

into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I

think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's

_Christabel_, may rank even with the creations of Shakespeare. It may

be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare had bile and nightmare enough

in him to have thought of such detestable horrors as those of the

interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge,

half-blockish enormity of Nimrod,--in Scripture, the 'mighty hunter'

and builder of the tower of Babel,--in Dante, a tower of a man in his

own person, standing with some of his brother giants up to the middle

in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunderclap is a whisper,

and hallooing after Dante and his guide in the jargon of a lost

tongue! The transformations are too odious to quote: but of the

towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the 'fearful joy' of a

specimen. It was twilight, Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil

were silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions of hell,

when the sound of a tremendous horn made him turn all his attention to

the spot from which it came. He there discovered through the dusk,

what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are no towers, said his

guide; they are giants, standing up to the middle in one of these

circular pits.

I look'd again; and as the eye makes out,

By little and little, what the mist conceal'd

In which, till clearing up, the sky was steep'd;

So, looming through the gross and darksome air,

As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain,

And error quitted me, and terror join'd:

For in like manner as all round its height

Montereggione crowns itself with towers,

So tower'd above the circuit of that pit,

Though but half out of it, and half within,

The horrible giants that fought Jove, and still

Are threaten'd when he thunders. As we near'd

The foremost, I discern'd his mighty face,

His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk,

With both the arms down hanging by the sides.

His face appear'd to me, in length and breadth,

Huge as St. Peter's pinnacle at Rome,

And of a like proportion all his bones.

He open'd, as we went, his dreadful mouth,

Fit for no sweeter psalmody; and shouted

After us, in the words of some strange tongue,

Ràfel ma-èe amech zabèe almee!--

'Dull wretch!' my leader cried, 'keep to thine horn,

And so vent better whatsoever rage

Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat

And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion!

Lo! what a hoop is clench'd about thy gorge.'

Then turning to myself, he said, 'His howl

Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he

Through whose ill thought it was that humankind

Were tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say nought:

For as he speaketh language known of none,

So none can speak save jargon to himself.'

_Inferno_, Canto xxxi, ver. 34.

Assuredly it could not have been easy to find a fiction so uncouthly

terrible as this in the hypochondria of Hamlet. Even his father had

evidently seen no such ghost in the other world. All his phantoms were

in the world he had left. Timon, Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero,

Macbeth himself, none of Shakespeare's men had, in fact, any thought

but of the earth they lived on, whatever supernatural fancy crossed

them. The thing fancied was still a thing of this world, 'in its habit

as it lived,' or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy. Its

lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the

stage. Caliban himself is a cross-breed between a witch and a clown.

No offence to Shakespeare; who was not bound to be the greatest of

healthy poets, and to have every morbid inspiration besides. What he

might have done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante, I know

not: all I know is, that in the infernal line he did nothing like him;

and it is not to be wished he had. It is far better that, as a higher,

more universal, and more beneficent variety of the genus Poet, he

should have been the happier man he was, and left us the plump cheeks

on his monument, instead of the carking visage of the great, but

over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Florentine. Even the

imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a 'nervous

gentleman' compared with Shakespeare, was visited with no such dreams

as Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose to make himself thinner (as

Dante says _he_ did) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions of

nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus. Chaucer, for all he

was 'a man of this world' as well as the poets' world, and as great,

perhaps a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides being one of

the profoundest masters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart

to conclude the story of the famished father and his children, as

finished by the inexorable anti-Pisan. But enough of Dante in this

place. Hobbes, in order to daunt the reader from objecting to his

friend Davenant's want of invention, says of these fabulous creations

in general, in his letter prefixed to the poem of _Gondibert_, that

'impenetrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron

men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, are easily

feigned by them that dare'. These are girds at Spenser and Ariosto.

But, with leave of Hobbes (who translated Homer as if on purpose to

show what execrable verses could be written by a philosopher),

enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily feigned as Ariosto

and Spenser feigned them; and that just makes all the difference. For

proof, see the accounts of Spenser's enchanted castle in Book the

Third, Canto Twelfth, of the _Faerie Queene_; and let the reader of

Italian open the _Orlando Furioso_ at its first introduction of the

Hippogriff (Canto iii, st. 4), where Bradamante, coming to an inn,

hears a great noise, and sees all the people looking up at something

in the air; upon which, looking up herself, she sees a knight in

shining armour riding towards the sunset upon a creature with

variegated wings, and then dipping and disappearing among the hills.

Chaucer's steed of brass, that was

So horsly and so quick of eye,

is copied from the life. You might pat him and feel his brazen

muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to what he thought childish, made a

childish mistake. His criticism is just such as a boy might pique

himself upon, who was educated on mechanical principles, and thought

he had outgrown his Goody Two-shoes. With a wonderful dimness of

discernment in poetic matters, considering his acuteness in others, he

fancies he has settled the question by pronouncing such creations

'impossible'! To the brazier they are impossible, no doubt; but not to

the poet. Their possibility, if the poet wills it, is to be conceded;

the problem is, the creature being given, how to square its actions

with probability, according to the nature assumed of it. Hobbes did

not see, that the skill and beauty of these fictions lay in bringing

them within those very regions of truth and likelihood in which he

thought they could not exist. Hence the serpent Python of Chaucer,

_Sleeping against the sun upon a day,_

when Apollo slew him. Hence the chariot-drawing dolphins of Spenser,

softly swimming along the shore lest they should hurt themselves

against the stones and gravel. Hence Shakespeare's Ariel, living under

blossoms, and riding at evening on the bat; and his domestic namesake

in the _Rape of the Lock_ (the imagination of the drawing-room) saving

a lady's petticoat from the coffee with his plumes, and directing

atoms of snuff into a coxcomb's nose. In the _Orlando Furioso_ (Canto

xv, st. 65) is a wild story of a cannibal necromancer, who laughs at

being cut to pieces, coming together again like quicksilver, and

picking up his head when it is cut off, sometimes by the hair,

sometimes by the nose! This, which would be purely childish and

ridiculous in the hands of an inferior poet, becomes interesting, nay

grand, in Ariosto's, from the beauties of his style, and its

conditional truth to nature. The monster has a fated hair on his

head,--a single hair,--which must be taken from it before he can be

killed. Decapitation itself is of no consequence, without that

proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has fought this phenomenon on

horseback, and succeeded in getting the head and galloping off with

it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at. How is he to discover

such a needle in such a bottle of hay? The trunk is spurring after him

to recover it, and he seeks for some evidence of the hair in vain. At

length he bethinks him of scalping the head. He does so; and the

moment the operation arrives at the place of the hair, _the face of

the head becomes pale, the eyes turn in their sockets_, and the

lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse.

Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet;

The eyes turn'd in their sockets, drearily;

And all things show'd the villain's sun was set.

His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse,

And giving the last shudder, was a corse.

It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his companion wherever he

goes, even in the most supernatural region, that the poet, in the

words of a very instructive phrase, takes the world along with him. It

is true, he must not (as the Platonists would say) humanize weakly or

mistakenly in that region; otherwise he runs the chance of forgetting

to be true to the supernatural itself, and so betraying a want of

imagination from that quarter. His nymphs will have no taste of their

woods and waters; his gods and goddesses be only so many fair or

frowning ladies and gentlemen, such as we see in ordinary paintings;

he will be in no danger of having his angels likened to a sort of

wild-fowl, as Rembrandt has made them in his Jacob's Dream. His

Bacchuses will never remind us, like Titian's, of the force and fury,

as well as of the graces, of wine. His Jupiter will reduce no females

to ashes; his fairies be nothing fantastical; his gnomes not 'of the

earth, earthy'. And this again will be wanting to Nature; for it will

be wanting to the supernatural, as Nature would have made it, working

in a supernatural direction. Nevertheless, the poet, even for

imagination's sake, must not become a bigot to imaginative truth,

dragging it down into the region of the mechanical and the limited,

and losing sight of its paramount privilege, which is to make beauty,

in a human sense, the lady and queen of the universe. He would gain

nothing by making his ocean-nymphs mere fishy creatures, upon the plea

that such only could live in the water: his wood-nymphs with faces of

knotted oak; his angels without breath and song, because no lungs

could exist between the earth's atmosphere and the empyrean. The

Grecian tendency in this respect is safer than the Gothic; nay, more

imaginative; for it enables us to imagine _beyond_ imagination, and to

bring all things healthily round to their only present final ground of

sympathy,--the human. When we go to heaven, we may idealize in a

superhuman mode, and have altogether different notions of the

beautiful; but till then we must be content with the loveliest

capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of Greece were still beautiful

women, though they lived in the water. The gills and fins of the

ocean's natural inhabitants were confined to their lowest semi-human

attendants; or if Triton himself was not quite human, it was because

be represented the fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they

did the fairer.

To conclude this part of my subject, I will quote from the greatest of

all narrative writers two passages;--one exemplifying the imagination

which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly, without

confounding them; the other, that which paints events and

circumstances after real life. The first is where Achilles, who has

long absented himself from the conflict between his countrymen and the

Trojans, has had a message from heaven bidding him reappear in the

enemy's sight, standing outside the camp-wall upon the trench, but

doing nothing more; that is to say, taking no part in the fight. He is

simply to be seen. The two armies down by the sea-side are contending

which shall possess the body of Patroclus; and the mere sight of the

dreadful Grecian chief--supernaturally indeed impressed upon them, in

order that nothing may be wanting to the full effect of his courage

and conduct upon courageous men--is to determine the question. We are

to imagine a slope of ground towards the sea, in order to elevate the

trench; the camp is solitary; the battle ('a dreadful roar of men,' as

Homer calls it) is raging on the sea-shore; and the goddess Iris has

just delivered her message, and disappeared.

But up Achilles rose, the lov'd of heaven;

And Pallas on his mighty shoulders cast

The shield of Jove; and round about his head

She put the glory of a golden mist,

From which there burnt a fiery-flaming light.

And as, when smoke goes heavenward from a town,

In some far island which its foes besiege,

Who all day long with dreadful martialness

Have pour'd from their own town; soon as the sun

Has set, thick lifted fires are visible,

Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky,

And let the neighbours know, who may perhaps

Bring help across the sea; so from the head

Of great Achilles went up an effulgence.

Upon the trench he stood, without the wall,

But mix'd not with the Greeks, for he rever'd

His mother's word; and so, thus standing there,

He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout,

Added a dreadful cry; and there arose

Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.

And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blown

Against a town by spirit-withering foes,

So sprang the clear voice of Aeacides.

And when they heard the brazen cry, their hearts

All leap'd within them; and the proud-maned horses

Ran with the chariots round, for they foresaw

Calamity; and the charioteers were smitten,

When they beheld the ever-active fire

Upon the dreadful head of the great-minded one

Burning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn.

Thrice o'er the trench divine Achilles shouted;

And thrice the Trojans and their great allies

Roll'd back; and twelve of all their noblest men

Then perish'd, crush'd by their own arms and chariots.

_Iliad_, xviii. 203.

Of course there is no further question about the body of Patroclus. It

is drawn out of the press, and received by the awful hero with tears.

The other passage is where Priam, kneeling before Achilles, and

imploring him to give up the dead body of Hector, reminds him of his

own father; who, whatever (says the poor old king) may be his troubles

with his enemies, has the blessing of knowing that his son is still

alive, and may daily hope to see him return. Achilles, in accordance

with the strength and noble honesty of the passions in those times,

weeps aloud himself at this appeal, feeling, says Homer, 'desire' for

his father in his very 'limbs'. He joins in grief with the venerable

sufferer, and can no longer withstand the look of 'his grey head and

his grey _chin_'. Observe the exquisite introduction of this last

word. It paints the touching fact of the chin's being imploringly

thrown upward by the kneeling old man, and the very motion of his

beard as he speaks.

So saying, Mercury vanished up to heaven:

And Priam then alighted from his chariot,

Leaving Idaeus with it, who remain'd

Holding the mules and horses; and the old man

Went straight indoors, where the belov'd of Jove

Achilles sat, and found him. In the room

Were others, but apart; and two alone,

The hero Automedon, and Alcimus,

A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been

At meals, and had not yet remov'd the board.

Great Priam came, without their seeing him,

And kneeling down, he clasp'd Achilles' knees,

And kiss'd those terrible, homicidal hands,

Which had deprived him of so many sons.

And as a man who is press'd heavily

For having slain another, flies away

To foreign lands, and comes into the house

Of some great man, and is beheld with wonder,

So did Achilles wonder to see Priam;

And the rest wonder'd, looking at each other.

But Priam, praying to him, spoke these words:--

'God-like Achilles, think of thine own father!

To the same age have we both come, the same

Weak pass; and though the neighbouring chiefs may vex

Him also, and his borders find no help,

Yet when he hears that thou art still alive,

He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes

To see his dear son coming back from Troy.

But I, bereav'd old Priam! I had once

Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say

That one is left me. Fifty children had I,

When the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb;

The rest my women bore me in my house.

The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen'd;

And he who had no peer, Troy's prop and theirs,

Him hast thou kill'd now, fighting for his country,

Hector; and for his sake am I come here

To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom.

But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and think

Of thine own father, and have mercy on me:

For I am much more wretched, and have borne

What never mortal bore, I think on earth,

To lift unto my lips the hand of him

Who slew my boys.'

He ceased; and there arose

Sharp longing in Achilles for his father;

And taking Priam by the hand, he gently

Put him away; for both shed tears to think

Of other times; the one most bitter ones

For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness

Lay right before Achilles: and the other,

For his own father now, and now his friend;

And the whole house might hear them as they moan'd.

But when divine Achilles had refresh'd

His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left

His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,

And rais'd the old man by the hand, and took

Pity on his grey head and his grey chin.

_Iliad_, xxiv. 468.

O lovely and immortal privilege of genius! that can stretch its hand

out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our

eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man

of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, _if

he had thought of it_. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are

necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact.

They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be

kept back; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without

feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without

imagination, there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their

kind, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been

encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative

would have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical, a style too

much carried away; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes;

the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those.

We should have been told nothing of the 'grey chin', of the house

hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man

aside; much less of that yearning for his father, which made the hero

tremble in every limb. Writers without the greatest passion and power

do not feel in this way, nor are capable of expressing the feeling;

though there is enough sensibility and imagination all over the world

to enable mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth

into their hearts.

The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure absence of ideas, in

commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional metaphor, or such images

and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse

and writing. Addison's _Cato_ is full of them.

Passion unpitied and successless love

_Plant daggers in my breast._

I've sounded my Numidians, man by man,

And find them _ripe for a revolt_.

The virtuous Marcia _towers above her sex_.

Of the same kind is his 'courting the yoke'--'distracting my very

heart'--'calling up all' one's 'father' in one's soul--'working every

nerve'--'copying a bright example'; in short, the whole play, relieved

now and then with a smart sentence or turn of words. The following is

a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another

tragedy of Addison's time--the _Mariamne_ of Fenton:

Mariamne, _with superior charms_,

_Triumphs o'er reason_: in her look she _bears_

A paradise of ever-blooming sweets;

Fair as the first idea beauty _prints_

In the young lover's soul; a winning grace

Guides every gesture, and obsequious love

_Attends_ on all her steps.

'Triumphing o'er reason' is an old acquaintance of everybody's.

'Paradise in her look' is from the Italian poets through Dryden. 'Fair

as the first idea', &c., is from Milton, spoilt;--'winning grace' and

'steps' from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are

stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt: just as when a

great writer borrows, he improves.

To come now to Fancy,--she is a younger sister of Imagination, without

the other's weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely

so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most

affecting analogies; the perception of sympathies in the natures of

things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with their

resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical

creations.

--Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid

Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,

_And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane,

Be shook to air._

_Troilus and Cressida_, Act iii, sc. 3.

That is imagination;--the strong mind sympathizing with the strong

beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.

Oh!--and I forsooth

In love! I that have been love's whip I

_A very beadle to a humorous sigh!--_

A domineering pedant o'er the boy,--

This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,

This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,

_Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,

The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans_, &c.

_Love's Labour's Lost_, Act iii, sc. 1.

That is fancy;--a combination of images not in their nature connected,

or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and

having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its

smiling subjector.

Silent icicles

_Quietly shining to the quiet moon._

Coleridge's _Frost at Midnight_.

That, again, is imagination;--analogical sympathy; and exquisite of

its kind it is.

'You are now sailed _into the north of my lady's opinion_;

where you will hang _like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard_,

unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.'

_Twelfth Night_, Act iii, sc. 2.

And that is fancy;--one image capriciously suggested by another, and

but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to

it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal spirits, the 'Dutchman's

beard' is made to represent the lady!

Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the

comic. _Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Paradise Lost_, the poem of Dante, are full

of imagination: the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and the _Rape of the

Lock_, of fancy: _Romeo and Juliet_, the _Tempest_, the _Faerie

Queene_, and the _Orlando Furioso_, of both. The terms were formerly

identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be

found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It

presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;--of 'images' in the

sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other

hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition

([Greek: Phantasma], appearance, _phantom_), has rarely that freedom

from visibility which is one of the highest privileges of

imagination. Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, speaking of some beautiful

music, says:

It gives a very echo to the seat

Where Love is throned.

In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the

fancy, the assumption of Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a

solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the

passion of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at all.

Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of

what is called Imagination.

One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy,

as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is

busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe.

Fancy turns her sister's wizard instruments into toys. She takes a

telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and

sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the

child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister

takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of

gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and

capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings

to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with

smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together,

and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not

incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her

company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of

less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great

imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also,

the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the

strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer,

Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope

has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy;

Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone,

of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal

perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-Titania

scenes from the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_] will be found in the

present volume.[29] See also his famous description of Queen Mab and

her equipage, in _Romeo and Juliet_:

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs;

The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers:

Her traces of the smallest spider's web;

Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c.

[29] Leigh Hunt's _Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from

the English Poets_, 1844.

That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty

rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace

from Drayton's _Nymphidia_:

This palace standeth in the air,

By necromancy placèd there,

That it no tempest needs to fear,

Which way soe'er it blow it:

And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon,

Whence lies a way up to the moon,

And thence the fairy can as soon

Pass to the earth below it.

The walls of spiders' legs are made,

Well morticèd and finely laid:

He was the master of his trade

It curiously that builded:

_The windows of the eyes of cats:_

(because they see best at night)

And for the roof instead of slats

Is cover'd with the skins of bats,

_With moonshine that are gilded._

Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet's _Muse's

Elysium_:

Of leaves of roses, _white and red_,

Shall be the covering of the bed;

The curtains, vallens, tester all,

Shall be the flower imperial;

And for the fringe it all along

_With azure hare-bells shall be hung.

Of lilies shall the pillows be,

With down stuft of the butterfly._

Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John

Suckling, in his _Ballad on a Wedding_, has given some of the most

playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like

twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed:

_Her feet beneath her petticoat,

Like little mice stole in and out,

As if they fear'd the light:_

But oh! she dances such a way!

_No sun upon an Easter day_

Is half so fine a sight.

It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur, to compare a

lady's dancing with the sun. But as the sun has it all to himself in

the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is

imagination fairly displacing fancy. The following has enchanted

everybody:

Her lips were red, _and one was thin_

_Compared with that was next her chin,

Some bee had stung it newly._

Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave.

With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by which verse

ought to be modulated, and oneness of impression diversely produced,

it has been contended by some, that Poetry need not be written in

verse at all; that prose is as good a medium, provided poetry be

conveyed through it; and that to think otherwise is to confound letter

with spirit, or form with essence. But the opinion is a prosaical

mistake. Fitness and unfitness for _song_, or metrical excitement,

just make all the difference between a poetical and prosaical subject;

and the reason why verse is necessary to the form of poetry, is, that

the perfection of poetical spirit demands it;--that the circle of its

enthusiasm, beauty and power, is incomplete without it. I do not mean

to say that a poet can never show himself a poet in prose; but that,

being one, his desire and necessity will be to write in verse; and

that, if he were unable to do so, he would not, and could not, deserve

his title. Verse to the true poet is no clog. It is idly called a

trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same

enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their

satisfaction and effect. Verse is no more a clog than the condition of

rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the roundness and order of

the globe we live on is a clog to the freedom and variety that abound

within its sphere. Verse is no dominator over the poet, except

inasmuch as the bond is reciprocal, and the poet dominates over the

verse. They are lovers, playfully challenging each other's rule, and

delighted equally to rule and to obey. Verse is the final proof to the

poet that his mastery over his art is complete. It is the shutting up

of his powers in '_measureful_ content'; the answer of form to his

spirit; of strength and ease to his guidance. It is the willing

action, the proud and fiery happiness, of the winged steed on whose

back he has vaulted,

To witch the world with wondrous horsemanship.

Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, and 'tuneful

planetting' of the poet's creations, which is produced of necessity by

the smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and the

harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the

beautiful. Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must, of

necessity, leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over its

forms, unmanifested; and verse flows as inevitably from this condition

of its integrity, as other laws of proportion do from any other kind

of embodiment of beauty (say that of the human figure), however free

and various the movements may be that play within their limits. What

great poet ever wrote his poems in prose? or where is a good prose

poem, of any length, to be found? The poetry of the Bible is

understood to be in verse, in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a

good word for those prose enlargements of some fine old song, which

are known by the name of Ossian; and in passages they deserve what he

said; but he judiciously abstained from saying anything about the

form. Is Gesner's _Death of Abel_ a poem? or Hervey's _Meditations_?

The _Pilgrim's Progress_ has been called one; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan

had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and one of no mean

order: and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as was

compatible with so lofty an affinity; and this is the reason why it

stopped where it did. He had a craving after the beautiful, but not

enough of it in himself to echo to its music. On the other hand, the

possession of the beautiful will not be sufficient without force to

utter it. The author of _Telemachus_ had a soul full of beauty and

tenderness. He was not a man who, if he had had a wife and children,

would have run away from them, as Bunyan's hero did, to get a place by

himself in heaven. He was 'a little lower than the angels', like our

own Bishop Jewells and Berkeleys; and yet he was no poet. He was too

delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in his devotions, to join in

the energies of the seraphic choir.

Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one;

and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of

strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness,

_variety_, and _oneness_;--oneness, that is to say, consistency, in

the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every

pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. _Strength_ is

the muscle of verse, and shows itself in the number and force of the

marked syllables; as,

Sonòrous mètal blòwing màrtial sòunds.

_Paradise Lost._

Behèmoth, bìggest born of eàrth, ùphèav'd

His vàstness.

_Id._

Blòw wìnds and cràck your chèeks! ràge! blòw!

You càt[)a]r[)a]cts and hurricànoes, spòut,

Till you have drènch'd our stèeples, dròwn'd the còcks!

You sùlphurous and thoùght-èxecuting fìres,

Vaùnt coùriers of òak-clèaving thùnderbòlts,

Sìnge my whìte hèad! and thòu, àll-shàking thùnder,

Strìke flàt the thìck rotùndity o' the wòrld!

_Lear._

Unexpected locations of the accent double this force, and render it

characteristic of passion and abruptness. And here comes into play the

reader's corresponding fineness of ear, and his retardations and

accelerations in accordance with those of the poet:

Then in the keyhole turns

The ìntr[)i]c[)a]te wards, and every bolt and bar

Unfastens.--On [)a] s[)u]dd[)e]n òpen fly

W[)i]th [)i]mpètuous recoil and jarring sound

The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate

Harsh thunder.

_Paradise Lost_, Book II.

Abòm[)i]n[)a]bl[)e]--unùtt[)e]r[)a]bl[)e]--and worse

Than fables yet have feigned.

_Id._

Wàll[)o]w[)i]ng [)u]nwì[)e]ldy--[)e]nòrmous in their gait.

_Id._

Of unusual passionate accent, there is an exquisite specimen in the

_Faerie Queene_, where Una is lamenting her desertion by the Red-Cross

Knight:

But he, my lion, and my noble lord,

How does he find in cruel heart to hate

Her that him lov'd, and ever most ador'd

_As the gòd of my lìfe?_[30] Why hath he me abhorr'd?

[30] Pray let not the reader consent to read this first half

of the line in any manner less marked and peremptory. It is a

striking instance of the beauty of that 'acceleration and

retardation of true verse' which Coleridge speaks of. There

is to be a hurry on the words _as the_, and a passionate

emphasis and passing stop on the word _god_; and so of the

next three words.

The abuse of strength is harshness and heaviness; the reverse of it is

weakness. There is a noble sentiment--it appears both in Daniel's and

Sir John Beaumont's works, but is most probably the latter's,--which

is a perfect outrage of strength in the sound of the words:

Only the firmest and the _constant'st_ hearts

God sets to act the _stout'st_ and hardest parts.

_Stout'st_ and _constant'st_ for 'stoutest' and 'most constant'! It is

as bad as the intentional crabbedness of the line in _Hudibras_:

He that hangs or _beats out's_ brains,

The devil's in him if _he_ feigns.

_Beats out's brains_, for 'beats out his brains'. Of heaviness,

Davenant's _Gondibert_ is a formidable specimen, almost throughout:

With sìlence (òrder's help, and màrk of càre)

They chìde thàt nòise which hèedless yòuth affèct;

Stìll coùrse for ùse, for heàlth thèy clèanness wèar,

And sàve in wèll-fìx'd àrms, all nìceness chèck'd.

Thèy thoùght, thòse that, unàrm'd, expòs'd fràil lìfe,

But nàked nàture vàliantly betrày'd;

Whò wàs, thoùgh nàked, sàfe, till prìde màde strìfe,

But màde defènce must ùse, nòw dànger's màde.

And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like a heavy preacher

thumping the pulpit in italics, and spoiling many ingenious

reflections.

Weakness in versification is want of accent and emphasis. It generally

accompanies prosaicalness, and is the consequence of weak thoughts,

and of the affectation of a certain well-bred enthusiasm. The writings

of the late Mr. Hayley were remarkable for it; and it abounds among

the lyrical imitators of Cowley, and the whole of what is called our

French school of poetry, when it aspired above its wit and 'sense'. It

sometimes breaks down in a horrible, hopeless manner, as if giving way

at the first step. The following ludicrous passage in Congreve,

intended to be particularly fine, contains an instance:

And lo! Silence himself is here;

Methinks I see the midnight god appear.

In all his downy pomp array'd,

Behold the reverend shade.

_An ancient sigh he sits upon!!!_

Whose memory of sound is long since gone,

_And purposely annihilated for his throne!!!_

_Ode on the singing of Mrs. Arabella Hunt._

See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison about music:

For ever consecrate the _day_

To music and _Cecilia_;

Music, the greatest good that mortals know,

And all of heaven we have below,

Music can noble HINTS _impart!!!_

It is observable that the unpoetic masters of ridicule are apt to make

the most ridiculous mistakes, when they come to affect a strain higher

than the one they are accustomed to. But no wonder. Their habits

neutralize the enthusiasm it requires.

_Sweetness_, though not identical with smoothness, any more than

feeling is with sound, always includes it; and smoothness is a thing

so little to be regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worthless in

poetry but for some taste of sweetness, that I have not thought

necessary to mention it by itself; though such an all-in-all in

versification was it regarded not a hundred years back, that Thomas

Warton himself, an idolater of Spenser, ventured to wish the following

line in the _Faerie Queene_,

And was admirèd much of fools, _wòmen_, and boys--

altered to

And was admirèd much of women, fools, and boys--

thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of

'women'! (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex,

very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet). Any

poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in all small poets, as

sweetness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace

and delicacy,--of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser

is full of it,--Shakespeare--Beaumont and Fletcher--Coleridge. Of

Spenser's and Coleridge's versification it is the prevailing

characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between

variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the continuous,--'linked

sweetness long drawn out'. Observe the first and last lines of the

stanza in the _Faerie Queene_, describing a shepherd brushing away the

gnats;--the open and the close _e's_ in the one,

As gèntle shèpherd in sw[=e][=e]t [=e]ventide--

and the repetition of the word _oft_, and the fall from the vowel _a_,

into the two _u's_ in the other,--

She brusheth _oft_, and _oft_ doth màr their m[=u]rm[)u]rings.

So in his description of two substances in the handling, both equally

smooth:

_Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother._

An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume

before us. His beauty revolves on itself with conscious loveliness.

And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see

also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from the

poem called the _Day Dream_! Observe both the variety and sameness of

the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants:

My eyes make pictures when they're shut:--

I see a fountain, large and fair,

A willow and a ruin'd hut,

And _thee_ and _me_ and Mary there.

_O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow;

Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow._

By _Straightforwardness_ is meant the flow of words, in their natural

order, free alike from mere prose, and from those inversions to which

bad poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, but chiefly to

accommodate their rhymes. In Shadwell's play of _Psyche_, Venus gives

the sisters of the heroine an answer, of which the following is the

_entire_ substance, literally, in so many words. The author had

nothing better for her to say:

I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success

to your hopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore your

sister's beauty and deplore her scorn: which they shall do

no more. For I'll so resent their idolatry, as shall content

your wishes to the full.

Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and expression, how was the

writer to turn these words into poetry or rhyme? Simply by diverting

them from their natural order, and twisting the halves of the

sentences each before the other.

With kindness I your prayers receive,

And to your hopes success will give.

I have, with anger, seen mankind adore

Your sister's beauty and her scorn deplore;

Which they shall do no more.

For their idolatry I'll so resent,

As shall your wishes to the full content!!

This is just as if a man were to allow that there was no poetry in the

words, 'How do you find yourself?' 'Very well, I thank you'; but to

hold them inspired, if altered into

Yourself how do you find?

Very well, you I thank.

It is true, the best writers in Shadwell's age were addicted to these

inversions, partly for their own reasons, as far as rhyme was

concerned, and partly because they held it to be writing in the

classical and Virgilian manner. What has since been called Artificial

Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction to Natural; or

Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first

sources. But when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in

other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always

written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear

Shadwell's antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what

is used for the sake of emphasis in common discourse, and this only in

one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal

character of the Duke of Buckingham:

A man so various, that he seemed to be

Not one, but all mankind's epitome:

Stiff in opinions, _always in the wrong_,

_Was everything by starts, and nothing long;_

But in the course of one revolving moon

Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:

Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking,

_Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking._

_Blest madman!_ who could every hour employ

_With something new to wish or to enjoy!_

Railing and praising were his usual themes;

And both, to show his judgement, in extremes:

So over violent, or over civil,

_That every man with him was god or devil._

In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;

_Nothing went unrewarded, but desert._

Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late,

_He had his jest, and they had his estate._

Inversion itself was often turned into a grace in these poets, and may

be in others, by the power of being superior to it; using it only with

a classical air, and as a help lying next to them, instead of a

salvation which they are obliged to seek. In jesting passages also it

sometimes gave the rhyme a turn agreeably wilful, or an appearance of

choosing what lay in its way; as if a man should pick up a stone to

throw at another's head, where a less confident foot would have

stumbled over it. Such is Dryden's use of the word _might_--the mere

sign of a tense--in his pretended ridicule of the monkish practice of

rising to sing psalms in the night.

And much they griev'd to see so nigh their hall

The bird that warn'd St. Peter of his fall;

That he should raise his mitred crest on high,

And clap his wings and call his family

To sacred rites; and vex th' ethereal powers

With midnight matins at uncivil hours;

Nay more, his quiet neighbours should molest

_Just in the sweetness of their morning rest._

(What a line full of 'another doze' is that!)

_Beast of a bird!_ supinely, when he _might_

Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light!

What if his dull forefathers used that cry?

Could he not let a bad example die?

I the more gladly quote instances like those of Dryden, to illustrate

the points in question, because they are specimens of the very highest

kind of writing in the heroic couplet upon subjects not heroical. As

to prosaicalness in general, it is sometimes indulged in by young

writers on the plea of its being natural; but this is a mere

confusion of triviality with propriety, and is usually the result of

indolence.

_Unsuperfluousness_ is rather a matter of style in general, than of

the sound and order of words: and yet versification is so much

strengthened by it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that it

could not but come within the category of its requisites. When

superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal

spirits, as in Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of luxury,

as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrichment as well as overflow),

there is no worse sign for a poet altogether, except pure barrenness.

Every word that could be taken away from a poem, unreferable to either

of the above reasons for it, is a damage; and many such are death; for

there is nothing that posterity seems so determined to resent as this

want of respect for its time and trouble. The world is too rich in

books to endure it. Even true poets have died of this Writer's Evil.

Trifling ones have survived, with scarcely any pretensions but the

terseness of their trifles. What hope can remain for wordy mediocrity?

Let the discerning reader take up any poem, pen in hand, for the

purpose of discovering how many words he can strike out of it that

give him no requisite ideas, no relevant ones that he cares for, and

no reasons for the rhyme beyond its necessity, and he will see what

blot and havoc he will make in many an admired production of its

day,--what marks of its inevitable fate. Bulky authors in particular,

however safe they may think themselves, would do well to consider what

parts of their cargo they might dispense with in their proposed voyage

down the gulfs of time; for many a gallant vessel, thought

indestructible in its age, has perished;--many a load of words,

expected to be in eternal demand, gone to join the wrecks of

self-love, or rotted in the warehouses of change and vicissitude. I

have said the more on this point, because in an age when the true

inspiration has undoubtedly been reawakened by Coleridge and his

fellows, and we have so many new poets coming forward, it may be as

well to give a general warning against that tendency to an

accumulation and ostentation of _thoughts_, which is meant to be a

refutation in full of the pretensions of all poetry less cogitabund,

whatever may be the requirements of its class. Young writers should

bear in mind, that even some of the very best materials for poetry are

not poetry built; and that the smallest marble shrine, of exquisite

workmanship, outvalues all that architect ever chipped away. Whatever

can be so dispensed with is rubbish.

_Variety_ in versification consists in whatsoever can be done for the

prevention of monotony, by diversity of stops and cadences,

distribution of emphasis, and retardation and acceleration of time;

for the whole real secret of versification is a musical secret, and is

not attainable to any vital effect, save by the ear of genius. All the

mere knowledge of feet and numbers, of accent and quantity, will no

more impart it, than a knowledge of the 'Guide to Music' will make a

Beethoven or a Paisiello. It is a matter of sensibility and

imagination; of the beautiful in poetical passion, accompanied by

musical; of the imperative necessity for a pause here, and a cadence

there, and a quicker or slower utterance in this or that place,

created by analogies of sound with sense, by the fluctuations of

feeling, by the demands of the gods and graces that visit the poet's

harp, as the winds visit that of Aeolus. The same time and quantity

which are occasioned by the spiritual part of this secret, thus become

its formal ones,--not feet and syllables, long and short, iambics or

trochees; which are the reduction of it to its _less_ than dry bones.

You might get, for instance, not only ten and eleven, but thirteen or

fourteen syllables into a rhyming, as well as blank, heroical verse,

if time and the feeling permitted; and in irregular measure this is

often done; just as musicians put twenty notes in a bar instead of

two, quavers instead of minims, according as the feeling they are

expressing impels them to fill up the time with short and hurried

notes, or with long; or as the choristers in a cathedral retard or

precipitate the words of the chant, according as the quantity of its

notes, and the colon which divides the verse of the psalm, conspire to

demand it. Had the moderns borne this principle in mind when they

settled the prevailing systems of verse, instead of learning them, as

they appear to have done, from the first drawling and one-syllabled

notation of the church hymns, we should have retained all the

advantages of the more numerous versification of the ancients, without

being compelled to fancy that there was no alternative for us between

our syllabical uniformity and the hexameters or other special forms

unsuited to our tongues. But to leave this question alone, we will

present the reader with a few sufficing specimens of the difference

between monotony and variety in versification, first from Pope,

Dryden, and Milton, and next from Gay and Coleridge. The following is

the boasted melody of the nevertheless exquisite poet of the _Rape of

the Lock_,--exquisite in his wit and fancy, though not in his numbers.

The reader will observe that it is literally _see-saw_, like the

rising and falling of a plank, with a light person at one end who is

jerked up in the briefer time, and a heavier one who is set down more

leisurely at the other. It is in the otherwise charming description of

the heroine of that poem:

On her white breast--a sparkling cross she wore,

Which Jews might kiss--and infidels adore;

Her lively looks--a sprightly mind disclose,

Quick as her eyes--and as unfix'd as those;

Favours to none--to all she smiles extends,

Oft she rejects--but never once offends;

Bright as the sun--her eyes the gazers strike,

And like the sun--they shine on all alike;

Yet graceful ease--and sweetness void of pride,

Might hide her faults--if belles had faults to hide;

If to her share--some female errors fall,

Look on her face--and you'll forget them all.

Compare with this the description of Iphigenia in one of Dryden's

stories from Boccaccio:

It happen'd--on a summer's holiday, }

That to the greenwood shade--he took his way, }

For Cymon shunn'd the church--and used not much to pray. }

His quarter-staff--which he could ne'er forsake,

Hung half before--and half behind his back;

He trudg'd along--not knowing what he sought,

And whistled as he went--for want of thought.

By chance conducted--or by thirst constrain'd,

The deep recesses of a grove he gain'd:--

Where--in a plain defended by a wood, }

Crept through the matted grass--a crystal flood, }

By which--an alabaster fountain stood; }

And on the margent of the fount was laid--

Attended by her slaves--a sleeping maid;

Like Dian and her nymphs--when, tir'd with sport,

To rest by cool Eurotas they resort.--

The dame herself--the goddess well express'd,

Not more distinguished by her purple vest--

Than by the charming features of the face--

And e'en in slumber--a superior grace:

Her comely limbs--compos'd with decent care, }

Her body shaded--by a light cymar, }

Her bosom to the view--was only bare; }

Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied--

For yet their places were but signified.--

The fanning wind upon her bosom blows-- }

To meet the fanning wind--the bosom rose; }

The fanning wind--and purling stream--continue her repose. }

For a further variety take, from the same author's _Theodore and

Honoria_, a passage in which the couplets are run one into the other,

and all of it modulated, like the former, according to the feeling

demanded by the occasion:

Whilst listening to the murmuring leaves he stood--

More than a mile immers'd within the wood--

At once the wind was laid.|--The whispering sound

Was dumb.|--A rising earthquake rock'd the ground.

With deeper brown the grove was overspread-- }

A sudden horror seiz'd his giddy head-- }

And his ears tinkled--and his colour fled. }

Nature was in alarm.--Some danger nigh

Seem'd threaten'd--though unseen to mortal eye.

Unus'd to fear--he summon'd all his soul,

And stood collected in himself--and whole:

Not long.--

But for a crowning specimen of variety of pause and accent, apart from

emotion, nothing can surpass the account, in _Paradise Lost_, of the

Devil's search for an accomplice:

There was a plàce,

Nòw nòt--though Sìn--not Tìme--fìrst wroùght the chànge,

Where Tìgris--at the foot of Pàradise,

Into a gùlf--shòt under ground--till pàrt

Ròse up a foùntain by the Trèe of Lìfe.

_In_ with the river sunk--and _wìth_ it _ròse_

Sàtan--invòlv'd in rìsing mìst--then soùght

Whère to lie hìd.--Sèa he had search'd--and lànd

From Eden over Pòntus--and the pòol

Maeòtis--_ùp_ beyond the river _Ob_;

Dòwnward as fàr antàrctic;--and in lèngth

Wèst from Oròntes--to the òcean bàrr'd

At Dàriën--thènce to the lànd whère flòws

Gànges and Indus.--Thùs the òrb he ròam'd

With nàrrow sèarch;--and with inspèction dèep

Consìder'd èvery crèature--whìch of àll

Mòst opportùne mìght sèrve his wìles--and foùnd

The sèrpent--sùbtlest bèast of all the fièld.

If the reader cast his eye again over this passage, he will not find a

verse in it which is not varied and harmonized in the most remarkable

manner. Let him notice in particular that curious balancing of the

lines in the sixth and tenth verses:

_In_ with the river sunk, &c.

and

_Up_ beyond the river _Ob_.

It might, indeed, be objected to the versification of Milton, that it

exhibits too constant a perfection of this kind. It sometimes forces

upon us too great a sense of consciousness on the part of the

composer. We miss the first sprightly runnings of verse,--the ease and

sweetness of spontaneity. Milton, I think, also too often condenses

weight into heaviness.

Thus much concerning the chief of our two most popular measures. The

other, called octo-syllabic, or the measure of eight syllables,

offered such facilities for _namby-pamby_, that it had become a jest

as early as the time of Shakespeare, who makes Touchstone call it the

'butterwoman's rate to market', and the 'very false gallop of verses'.

It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the

ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other

superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and

pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So far from

compressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything

to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dryden, compare

Gay, even in the strength of Gay,--

The wind was high, the window shakes;

With sudden start the miser wakes;

Along the silent room he stalks,

(A miser never 'stalks'; but a rhyme was desired for 'walks')

Looks back, and trembles as he walks:

Each lock and every bolt he tries,

In every creek and corner pries;

Then opes the chest with treasure stor'd,

And stands in rapture o'er his hoard;

('Hoard' and 'treasure stor'd' are just made for one another)

But now, with sudden qualms possess'd,

He wrings his hands, he beats his breast;

By conscience stung, he wildly stares,

And thus his guilty soul declares.

And so he denounces his gold, as miser never denounced it; and sighs,

because

Virtue resides on earth no more!

Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this

measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it was

capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old musical

professors the minstrels, and dividing it by _time_ instead of

_syllables_;--by the _beat of four_ into which you might get as many

syllables as you could, instead of allotting eight syllables to the

poor time, whatever it might have to say. He varied it further with

alternate rhymes and stanzas, with rests and omissions precisely

analogous to those in music, and rendered it altogether worthy to

utter the manifold thoughts and feelings of himself and his lady

Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite sense of solemn

strangeness and licence (for there is witchcraft going forward), to

introduce a couplet of blank verse, itself as mystically and

beautifully modulated as anything in the music of Gluck or Weber.

'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,

And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock;

Tu-whit!--Tu-whoo!

And hark, again! the crowing cock,

_How drowsily he crew._

Sir Leoline, the baron rich,

Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;

From her kennel beneath the rock

She maketh answer to the clock,

_Fòur f[)o]r th[)e] qùart[)e]rs [)a]nd twèlve f[)o]r th[)e] hoùr,_

Ever and aye, by shine and shower,

Sixteen short howls, not over loud:

Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.

_Is the nìght chìlly and dàrk?

The nìght is chìlly, but nòt dàrk._

The thin grey cloud is spread on high,

It covers, but not hides, the sky.

The moon is behind, and at the full,

And yet she looks both small and dull.

The night is chilly, the cloud is grey;

(These are not superfluities, but mysterious returns of importunate

feeling)