"Waters above! Eternal springs!
The dew that silvers the Dove's wings!
O welcome, welcome to the sad!
Give dry dust drink, drink that makes glad.
Many fair Evenings, many flowers
Sweetened with rich and gentle showers,
Have I enjoyed, and down have run
Many a fine and shining Sun;
But never, till this happy hour,
Was blest with such an evening shower!"
What a curious felicity about the repetition of "drink" in the fourth
line.
"Isaac's Marriage" is one of the best of the pieces, but is too long for
insertion.
"THE RAINBOW"
has seldom been better sung:
"Still young and fine! but what is still in view
We slight as old and soil'd, though fresh and new.
How bright wert thou, when Shem's admiring eye
Thy burnisht, flaming Arch did first descry!
When Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot,
The youthful world's gray fathers in one knot,
Did with intentive looks watch every hour
For thy new light, and trembled at each shower!
When thou dost shine darkness looks white and fair,
Forms turn to Musick, clouds to smiles and air:
Rain gently spends his honey-drops, and pours
Balm on the cleft earth, milk on grass and flowers.
Bright pledge of peace and Sunshine! the sure tye
Of thy Lord's hand, the object[47] of His eye!
When I behold thee, though my light be dim,
Distant and low, I can in thine see Him
Who looks upon thee from His glorious throne,
And mindes the Covenant 'twixt _All_ and _One_."
[47] Gen. ix. 16.
What a knot of the gray fathers!
"Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot!"
Our readers will see whence Campbell stole, and how he spoiled in the
stealing (by omitting the word "youthful"), the well-known line in his
"Rainbow"--
"How came the world's gray fathers forth
To view the sacred sign."
Campbell did not disdain to take this, and no one will say much against
him, though it looks ill, occurring in a poem on the rainbow; but we
cannot so easily forgive him for saying that "Vaughan is one of the
harshest even of the inferior order of conceit, having some few
scattered thoughts that meet our eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild
flowers on a barren heath."
"Rules and Lessons" is his longest and one of his best poems; but we
must send our readers to the book itself, where they will find much to
make them grateful to "The Silurist" and to Mr. Pickering, who has
already done such good service for the best of our elder literature.
We have said little about the deep godliness, the spiritual
Christianity, with which every poem is penetrated and quickened. Those
who can detect and relish this best, will not be the worse pleased at
our saying little about it. Vaughan's religion is deep, lively,
personal, tender, kindly, impassioned, temperate, central. His religion
grows up, effloresces into the ideas and forms of poetry as naturally,
as noiselessly, as beautifully as the life of the unseen seed finds its
way up into the "bright consummate flower."
* * * * *
Of "IX. Poems by V.," we would say with the _Quarterly_, {baia men alla
RHODA}. They combine rare excellences; the concentration, the finish,
the gravity of a man's thought, with the tenderness, the insight, the
constitutional sorrowfulness of a woman's--her purity, her
passionateness, her delicate and keen sense and expression. We confess
we would rather have been the author of any one of the nine poems in
this little volume, than of the somewhat tremendous, absurd, raw, loud,
and fuliginous "Festus," with his many thousands of lines and his
amazing reputation, his bad English, bad religion, bad philosophy, and
very bad jokes--his "buttered thunder" (this is his own phrase), and his
poor devil of a Lucifer--we would, we repeat (having in this our _subita
ac saeva indignatio_ run ourselves a little out of breath), as much
rather keep company with "V." than with Mr. Bailey, as we would prefer
going to sea for _pleasure_, in a trim little yacht, with its free
motions, its quiet, its cleanliness, to taking a state berth in some
Fire-King steamer of one thousand horse-power, with his mighty and
troublous throb, his smoke, his exasperated steam, his clangor, and fire
and fury, his oils and smells.
Had we time, and were this the fit place, we could, we think, make
something out of this comparison of the boat with its sail and its
rudder, and the unseen, wayward, serviceable winds playing about it,
inspiring it, and swaying its course,--and the iron steamer, with its
machinery, its coarse energy, its noises and philosophy, its ungainly
build and gait, its perilousness from within; and we think we could show
how much of what Aristotle, Lord Jeffrey, Charles Lamb, or Edmund Burke
would have called genuine poetry there is in the slender "V.," and how
little in the big "Festus." We have made repeated attempts, but we
cannot get through this poem. It beats us. We must want the _Festus_
sense. Some of our best friends, with whom we generally agree on such
matters, are distressed for us, and repeat long passages with great
energy and apparent intelligence and satisfaction. Meanwhile, having
read the six pages of public opinion at the end of the third and
People's edition, we take it for granted that it is a great performance,
that, to use one of the author's own words, there is a mighty
"_somethingness_" about it--and we can entirely acquiesce in the
quotation from _The Sunday Times_, that they "read it with astonishment,
and closed it with bewilderment." It would appear from these opinions,
which from their intensity, variety, and number (upwards of 50), are
curious signs of the times, that Mr. Bailey has not so much improved on,
as happily superseded the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes, of the Divine
Comedy, of Paradise Lost and Regained, of Dr. Faustus, Hamlet, and
Faust, of Don Juan, the Course of Time, St. Leon, the Jolly Beggars, and
the Loves of the Angels.
He is more sublime and simple than Job--more royally witty and wise,
more to the quick and the point than Solomon--more picturesque, more
intense, more pathetic than Dante--more Miltonic (we have no other word)
than Milton--more dreadful, more curiously blasphemous, more sonorous
than Marlowe--more worldly-wise and clever, and intellectually _svelt_
than Goethe. More passionate, more eloquent, more impudent than
Byron--more orthodox, more edifying, more precocious than Pollok--more
absorptive and inveterate than Godwin; and more hearty and tender, more
of love and manhood all compact than Burns--more gay than Moore--more
{myrianous} than Shakspeare.
It may be so. We have made repeated and resolute incursions in various
directions into his torrid zone, but have always come out greatly
scorched and stunned and affronted. Never before did we come across such
an amount of energetic and tremendous words, going "sounding on their
dim and perilous way," like a cataract at midnight--not flowing like a
stream, nor leaping like a clear waterfall, but always among
breakers--roaring and tearing and tempesting with a sort of
transcendental din; and then what power of energizing and speaking, and
philosophizing and preaching, and laughing and joking and love-making,
_in vacuo_! As far as we can judge, and as far as we can keep our senses
in such a region, it seems to us not a poem at all, hardly even
poetical--but rather the materials for a poem, made up of science,
religion, and love, the (very raw) materials of a structure--as if the
bricks and mortar, and lath and plaster, and furniture, and fire and
fuel and meat and drink, and inhabitants male and female, of a house
were all mixed "through other" in one enormous _imbroglio_. It is a sort
of fire-mist, out of which poetry, like a star, might by curdling,
condensation, crystallization, have been developed, after much purging,
refining, and cooling, much time and pains. Mr. Bailey is, we believe,
still a young man full of energy--full, we doubt not, of great and good
aims; let him read over a passage, we dare say he knows it well, in the
second book of Milton on Church Government, he will there, among many
other things worthy of his regard, find that "the wily subtleties and
refluxes of man's thoughts from within," which is the haunt and main
region of his song, may be "painted out and described" with "_a solid
and treatable smoothness_." If he paint out and describe after this
manner, he may yet more than make up for this sin of his youth; and let
him take our word for it and fling away nine tenths of his adjectives,
and in the words of Old Shirley--
"Compose his poem clean without 'em.
A row of stately SUBSTANTIVES would march
Like Switzers, and bear all the fields before 'em;
Carry their weight; show fair, like Deeds enroll'd;
Not Writs, that are first made and after filed.
Thence first came up the title of Blank Verse;--
You know, sir, what Blank signifies;--when the sense,
First framed, is tied with adjectives like points,
Hang 't, 'tis pedantic vulgar poetry.
_Let children, when they versify, stick here
And there, these piddling words for want of matter.
Poets write masculine numbers._"