hearts separated by the roar of seas--yet all too too short when 'tis
thought how small a number lead from the cradle to the grave--brought
Ranald and Flora once more into each other's arms. Alas! for the poor
soldier! for never more was he to behold that face from which he kissed
the trickling tears. Like many another gallant youth, he had lost his
eyesight from the sharp burning sand--and was led to the shieling of his
love like a wandering mendicant who obeys the hand of a child. Nor did
his face bear that smile of resignation usually so affecting on the calm
countenances of the blind. Seldom did he speak--and his sighs were
deeper, longer, and more disturbed than those which almost any sorrow
ever wrings from the young. Could it be that he groaned in remorse over
some secret crime?
Happy--completely happy, would Flora have been to have tended him like a
sister all his dark life long, or, like a daughter, to have sat beside
the bed of one whose hair was getting fast grey, long before its time.
Almost all her relations were dead, and almost all her friends away to
other glens. But he had returned, and blindness, for which there was no
hope, must bind his steps for ever within little room. But they had been
betrothed almost from their childhood, and would she--if he desired
it--fear to become his wife now, shrouded as he was, now and for ever,
in the helpless dark? From his lips, however, her maidenly modesty
required that the words should come; nor could she sometimes help
wondering, in half-upbraiding sorrow, that Ranald joyed not in his great
affliction to claim her for his wife. Poor were they to be sure--yet not
so poor as to leave life without its comforts; and in every glen of her
native Highlands, were there not worthy families far poorer than they?
But weeks, months, passed on, and Ranald remained in a neighbouring hut,
shunning the sunshine, and moaning, it was said, when he thought none
were near, both night and day. Sometimes he had been overheard muttering
to himself lamentable words--and, blind as his eyes were to all the
objects of the real world, it was rumoured up and down the glen, that he
saw visions of woeful events about to befall one whom he loved.
One midnight he found his way, unguided, like a man walking in his
sleep--but although in a hideous trance, he was yet broad awake--to the
hut where Flora dwelt, and called on her, in a dirge-like voice, to
speak a few words with him ere he died. They sat down together among the
heather, on the very spot where the farewell embrace had been given the
morning he went away to the wars; and Flora's heart died within her,
when he told her that the Curse under which his forefathers had
suffered, had fallen upon him; and that he had seen his wraith pass by
in a shroud, and heard a voice whisper the very day he was to die.
And was it Ranald of the Red-Cliff, the bravest of the brave, that thus
shuddered in the fear of death like a felon at the tolling of the great
prison-bell? Ay, death is dreadful when foreseen by a ghastly
superstition. He felt the shroud already bound round his limbs and body
with gentle folds, beyond the power of a giant to burst; and day and
night the same vision yawned before him--an open grave in the corner of
the hill burial-ground without any kirk.
Flora knew that his days were indeed numbered; for when had he ever been
afraid of death--and could his spirit have quailed thus under a mere
common dream? Soon was she to be all alone in this world; yet when
Ranald should die, she felt that her own days would not be many, and
there was sudden and strong comfort in the belief that they would be
buried in one grave.
Such were her words to the dying man; and all at once he took her in his
arms, and asked her "If she had no fears of the narrow house?" His whole
nature seemed to undergo a change under the calm voice of her reply; and
he said, "Dost thou fear not then, my Flora, to hear the words of doom?"
"Blessed will they be, if in death we be not disunited." "Thou too, my
wife--for my wife thou now art on earth, and mayest be so in
heaven--thou too, Flora, wert seen shrouded in that apparition." It was
a gentle and gracious summer night--so clear, that the shepherds on the
hills were scarcely sensible of the morning's dawn. And there at
earliest daylight, were Ranald and Flora found, on the greensward, among
the tall heather, lying side by side, with their calm faces up to
heaven, and never more to smile or weep in this mortal world.
AN HOUR'S TALK ABOUT POETRY.
Ours is a poetical age; but has it produced one Great Poem? Not one.
Just look at them for a moment. There is "The Pleasures of Memory"--an
elegant, graceful, beautiful, pensive, and pathetic poem, which it does
one's eyes good to gaze on--one's ears good to listen to--one's very
fingers good to touch, so smooth is the versification and the wire-wove
paper. Never will "The Pleasures of Memory" be forgotten till the world
is in its dotage. But is it a Great Poem? About as much so as an
ant-hill, prettily grass-grown and leaf-strewn, is a mountain purple
with heather and golden with woods. It is a symmetrical erection--in the
shape of a cone--and the apex points heavenwards; but 'tis not a
sky-piercer. You take it at a hop--and pursue your journey. Yet it
endures. For the rains and the dews, and the airs and the sunshine, love
the fairy knoll, and there it greens and blossoms delicately and
delightfully; you hardly know whether a work of art or a work of nature.
Then there is the poetry of Crabbe. We hear it is not very popular. If
so, then neither is human life. For of all our poets, he has most
skilfully woven the web and woven the woof of all his compositions with
the materials of human life--homespun indeed; but though often coarse,
always strong--and though set to plain patterns, yet not unfrequently
exceeding fine is the old weaver's workmanship. Ay--hold up the product
of his loom between your eye and the light, and it glows and glimmers
like the peacock's back or the breast of the rainbow. Sometimes it seems
to be but of the "hodden grey;" when sunbeam or shadow smites it, and
lo! it is burnished like the regal purple. But did the Boroughmonger
ever produce a Great Poem? You might as well ask if he built St Paul's.
Breathes not the man with a more poetical temperament than Bowles. No
wonder that his old eyes are still so lustrous; for they possess the
sacred gift of beautifying creation, by shedding over it the charm of
melancholy. "Pleasant but mournful to the soul is the memory of joys
that are past"--is the text we should choose were we about to preach on
his genius. No vain repinings, no idle regrets, does his spirit now
breathe over the still receding Past. But time-sanctified are all the
shows that arise before his pensive imagination; and the common light of
day, once gone, in his poetry seems to shine as if it had all been dying
sunset or moonlight, or the new-born dawn. His human sensibilities are
so fine as to be in themselves poetical; and his poetical aspirations so
delicate as to be felt always human. Hence his Sonnets have been dear to
poets--having in them "more than meets the ear"--spiritual breathings
that hang around the words like light around fair flowers; and hence,
too, have they been beloved by all natural hearts who, having not the
"faculty divine," have yet the "vision"--that is, the power of seeing
and of hearing the sights and the sounds which genius alone can awaken,
bringing them from afar out of the dust and dimness of evanishment.
Mr Bowles has been a poet for good fifty years; and if his genius do not
burn quite so bright as it did some lustres bygone--yet we do not say
there is any abatement even of its brightness: it shines with a mellower
and also with a more cheerful light. Long ago, he was perhaps rather too
pensive--too melancholy--too pathetic--too woe-begone--in too great
bereavement. Like the nightingale, he sang with a thorn at his
breast--from which one wondered the point had not been broken off by
perpetual pressure. Yet, though rather monotonous, his strains were most
musical as well as melancholy; feeling was often relieved by fancy; and
one dreamed, in listening to his elegies, and hymns, and sonnets, of
moonlit rivers flowing through hoary woods, and of the yellow sands of
dim-imaged seas murmuring round "the shores of old Romance." A fine
enthusiasm too was his--in those youthful years--inspired by the poetry
of Greece and Rome; and in some of his happiest inspirations there was a
delightful and original union--to be found nowhere else that we can
remember--of the spirit of that ancient song,--the pure classical
spirit that murmured by the banks of the Eurotas and Ilissus, with that
of our own poetry, that like a noble Naiad dwells in the "clear well of
English undefiled." In almost all his strains you felt the scholar; but
his was no affected or pedantic scholarship--intrusive most when least
required; but the growth of a consummate classical education, of which
the career was not inglorious among the towers of Oxford. Bowles was a
pupil of the Wartons--Joe and Tom--God bless their souls!--and his name
may be joined, not unworthily, with theirs--and with Mason's, and
Gray's, and Collins'--academics all; the works of them all showing a
delicate and exquisite colouring of classical art, enriching their own
English nature. Bowles's muse is always loth to forget--wherever she
roam or linger--Winchester and Oxford--the Itchin and the Isis. None
educated in those delightful and divine haunts will ever forget them,
who can read Homer, and Pindar, and Sophocles, and Theocritus, and Bion,
and Moschus, in the original; Rhedicyna's ungrateful or renegade sons
are those alone who pursued their poetical studies--in translations.
They never knew the nature of the true old Greek fire.
But has Bowles written a Great Poem? If he has, publish it, and we shall
make him a Bishop.
What shall we say of "The Pleasures of Hope?" That the harp from which
that music breathed, was an Aeolian harp placed in the window of a high
hall, to catch airs from heaven when heaven was glad, as well she might
be with such moon and such stars, and streamering half the region with a
magnificent aurora-borealis. Now the music deepens into a majestic
march--now it swells into a holy hymn--and now it dies away
elegiac-like, as if mourning over a tomb. Vague, indefinite, uncertain,
dream-like, and visionary all; but never else than beautiful; and ever
and anon, we know not why, sublime. It ceases in the hush of night--and
we awaken as if from a dream. Is it not even so?--In his youth Campbell
lived where "distant isles could hear the loud Corbrechtan roar;" and
sometimes his poetry is like that whirlpool--the sound as of the wheels
of many chariots. Yes, happy was it for him that he had liberty to roam
along the many-based, hollow-rumbling western coast of that
unaccountable county Argyllshire. The sea-roar cultivated his naturally
fine musical ear, and it sank too into his heart. Hence is his prime
Poem bright with hope as is the sunny sea when sailors' sweethearts on
the shore are looking out for ships; and from a foreign station down
comes the fleet before the wind, and the very shells beneath their
footsteps seem to sing for joy. As for Gertrude of Wyoming, we love her
as if she were our own only daughter--filling our life with bliss, and
then leaving it desolate. Even now we see her ghost gliding through
those giant woods! As for "Lochiel's Warning," there was heard the voice
of the Last of the Seers. The Second Sight is now extinguished in the
Highland glooms--the Lament wails no more,
"That man may not hide what God would reveal!"
The Navy owes much to "Ye Mariners of England." Sheer hulks often seemed
ships till that strain arose--but ever since in our imagination have
they brightened the roaring ocean. And dare we say, after that, that
Campbell has never written a Great Poem? Yes--in the face even of the
Metropolitan!
It was said many long years ago in the _Edinburgh Review_, that none but
maudlin milliners and sentimental ensigns supposed that James Montgomery
was a poet. Then is Maga a maudlin milliner--and Christopher North a
sentimental ensign. We once called Montgomery a Moravian; and though he
assures us that we were mistaken, yet having made an assertion, we
always stick to it, and therefore he must remain a Moravian, if not in
his own belief, yet in ours. Of all religious sects, the Moravians are
the most simple-minded, pure-hearted, and high-souled--and these
qualities shine serenely in "The Pelican Island." In earnestness and
fervour, that poem is by few or none excelled; it is embalmed in
sincerity, and therefore shall fade not away, neither shall it
moulder--not even although exposed to the air, and blow the air ever so
rudely through time's mutations. Not that it is a mummy. Say rather a
fair form laid asleep in immortality--its face wearing, day and night,
summer and winter, look at it when you will, a saintly--a celestial
smile. That is a true image; but is "The Pelican Island" a Great Poem?
We pause not for a reply.
Lyrical Poetry, we opine, hath many branches--and one of them,
"beautiful exceedingly" withbud, blossom, and fruit of balm and
brightness, round which is ever heard the murmur of bees and of birds,
hangs trailingly along the mossy greensward when the air is calm, and
ever and anon, when blow the fitful breezes, it is uplifted in the
sunshine, and glows wavingly aloft, as if it belonged even to the
loftiest region of the Tree which is Amaranth. That is a fanciful,
perhaps foolish form of expression, employed at present to signify
Song-writing. Now, of all the song-writers that ever warbled, or
chanted, or sung, the best, in our estimation, is verily none other than
Thomas Moore. True that Robert Burns has indited many songs that slip
into the heart, just like light, no one knows how, filling its chambers
sweetly and silently, and leaving it nothing more to desire for perfect
contentment. Or let us say, sometimes when he sings, it is like
listening to a linnet in the broom, a blackbird in the brake, a laverock
in the sky. They sing in the fulness of their joy, as nature teaches
them--and so did he; and the man, woman, or child, who is delighted not
with such singing, be their virtues what they may, must never hope to be
in Heaven. Gracious Providence placed Burns in the midst of the sources
of Lyrical Poetry--when he was born a Scottish peasant. Now, Moore is an
Irishman, and was born in Dublin. Moore is a Greek scholar, and
translated--after a fashion--Anacreon. And Moore has lived much in towns
and cities--and in that society which will suffer none else to be called
good. Some advantages he has enjoyed which Burns never did--but then how
many disadvantages has he undergone, from which the Ayrshire Ploughman,
in the bondage of his poverty, was free! You see all that at a single
glance in their poetry. But all in humble life is not high--all in high
life is not low; and there is as much to guard against in hovel as in
hall--in "auld clay-bigging" as in marble palace. Burns sometimes wrote
like a mere boor--Moore has too often written like a mere man of
fashion. But take them both at their best--and both are inimitable. Both
are national poets--and who shall say, that if Moore had been born and
bred a peasant, as Burns was, and if Ireland had been such a land of
knowledge, and virtue, and religion as Scotland is--and surely, without
offence, we may say that it never was, and never will be--though we love
the Green Island well--that with his fine fancy, warm heart, and
exquisite sensibilities, he might not have been as natural a lyrist as
Burns; while, take him as he is, who can deny that in richness, in
variety, in grace, and in the power of art, he is superior to the
ploughman. Of "Lalla Rookh" and "The Loves of the Angels," we defy you
to read a page without admiration; but the question recurs, and it is
easily answered, we need not say in the negative, did Moore ever write a
Great Poem?
Let us make a tour of the Lakes. Rydal Mount! Wordsworth! The Bard! Here
is the man who has devoted his whole life to poetry. It is his
profession. He is a poet just as his brother is a clergyman. He is the
Head of the Lake School, just as his brother is Master of Trinity.
Nothing in this life and in this world has he had to do, beneath sun,
moon, and stars, but
"To murmur by the living brooks
A music sweeter than their own."
What has been the result? Seven volumes (oh! why not seven more?) of
poetry, as beautiful as ever charmed the ears of Pan and of Apollo. The
earth--the middle air--the sky--the heaven--the heart, mind, and soul of
man--are "the haunt and main region of his song." In describing external
nature as she is, no poet perhaps has excelled Wordsworth--not even
Thomson; in imbuing her and making her pregnant with spiritualities,
till the mighty mother teems with "beauty far more beauteous" than she
had ever rejoiced in till such communion--he excels all the brotherhood.
Therein lies his especial glory, and therein the immortal evidences of
the might of his creative imagination. All men at times "muse on nature
with a poet's eye,"--but Wordsworth ever--and his soul has grown more
and more religious from such worship. Every rock is an altar--every
grove a shrine. We fear that there will be sectarians even in this
Natural Religion till the end of time. But he is the High Priest of
Nature--or, to use his own words, or nearly so, he is the High Priest
"in the metropolitan temple built in the heart of mighty poets." But has
he--even he--ever written a Great Poem? If he has--it is not "The
Excursion." Nay, "The Excursion" is not a Poem. It is a Series of Poems,
all swimming in the light of poetry; some of them sweet and simple, some
elegant and graceful, some beautiful and most lovely, some of "strength
and state," some majestic, some magnificent, some sublime. But though it
has an opening, it has no beginning; you can discover the middle only by
the numerals on the page; and the most, serious apprehensions have been
very generally entertained that it has no end. While Pedlar, Poet, and
Solitary breathe the vital air, may "The Excursion," stop where it will,
be renewed; and as in its present shape it comprehends but a Three Days'
Walk, we have but to think of an Excursion of three weeks, three months,
or three years, to have some idea of Eternity. Then the life of man is
not always limited to the term of threescore and ten years. What a
Journal might it prove at last! Poetry in profusion till the land
overflowed; but whether in one volume, as now, or in fifty, in future,
not a Great Poem--nay, not a Poem at all--nor ever to be so esteemed,
till the principles on which Great Poets build the lofty rhyme are
exploded, and the very names of Art and Science smothered and lost in
the bosom of Nature from which they arose.
Let the dullest clod that ever vegetated, provided only he be alive and
hear, be shut up in a room with Coleridge, or in a wood, and subjected
for a few minutes to the ethereal influence of that wonderful man's
monologue, and he will begin to believe himself a Poet. The barren
wilderness may not blossom like the rose, but it will seem, or rather
feel to do so, under the lustre of an imagination exhaustless as the
sun. You may have seen perhaps rocks suddenly so glorified by sunlight
with colours manifold, that the bees seek them, deluded by the show of
flowers. The sun, you know, does not always show his orb even in the
daytime--and people are often ignorant of his place in the firmament.
But he keeps shining away at his leisure, as you would know were he to
suffer eclipse. Perhaps he--the sun--is at no other time a more
delightful luminary than when he is pleased to dispense his influence
through a general haze, or mist--softening all the day till meridian is
almost like the afternoon, and the grove, anticipating gloaming, bursts
into "dance and minstrelsy" ere the god go down into the sea. Clouds too
become him well--whether thin and fleecy and braided, or piled up all
round about him castle-wise and cathedral-fashion, to say nothing of
temples and other metropolitan structures; nor is it reasonable to find
fault with him, when, as naked as the hour he was born, "he flames on
the forehead of the morning sky." The grandeur too of his appearance on
setting, has become quite proverbial. Now in all this he resembles
Coleridge. It is easy to talk--not very difficult to speechify--hard to
speak; but to "discourse" is a gift rarely bestowed by Heaven on mortal
man. Coleridge has it in perfection. While he is discoursing, the world
loses all its commonplaces, and you and your wife imagine yourself Adam
and Eve listening to the affable archangel Raphael in the Garden of
Eden. You would no more dream of wishing him to be mute for a while,
than you would a river that "imposes silence with a stilly sound."
Whether you understand two consecutive sentences, we shall not stop too
curiously to inquire; but you do something better, you feel the whole
just like any other divine music. And 'tis your own fault if you do not
"A wiser and a better man arise to-morrow's morn."
Reason is said to be one faculty, and Imagination another--but there
cannot be a grosser mistake; they are one and indivisible; only in most
cases they live like cat and dog, in mutual worrying, or haply sue for a
divorce; whereas in the case of Coleridge they are one spirit as well as
one flesh, and keep billing and cooing in a perpetual honeymoon. Then
his mind is learned in all the learning of the Egyptians, as well as the
Greeks and Romans; and though we have heard simpletons say that he knows
nothing of science, we have heard him on chemistry puzzle Sir Humphrey
Davy--and prove to his own entire satisfaction, that Leibnitz and
Newton, though good men, were but indifferent astronomers. Besides, he
thinks nothing of inventing a new science, with a complete nomenclature,
in a twinkling--and should you seem sluggish of apprehension, he endows
you with an additional sense or two, over and above the usual seven,
till you are no longer at a loss, be it even to scent the music of
fragrance, or to hear the smell of a balmy piece of poetry. All the
faculties, both of soul and sense, seem amicably to interchange their
functions and their provinces; and you fear not that the dream may
dissolve, persuaded that you are in a future state of permanent
enjoyment. Nor are we now using any exaggeration; for if you will but
think how unutterably dull are all the ordinary sayings and doings of
this life, spent as it is with ordinary people, you may imagine how in
sweet delirium you may be robbed of yourself by a seraphic tongue that
has fed since first it lisped on "honey-dew," and by lips that have
"breathed the air of Paradise," and learned a seraphic language, which,
all the while that it is English, is as grand as Greek and as soft as
Italian. We only know this, that Coleridge is the alchymist that in his
crucible melts down hours to moments--and lo! diamonds sprinkled on a
plate of gold.
What a world would this be were all its inhabitants to fiddle like
Paganini, ride like Ducrow, discourse like Coleridge, and do everything
else in a style of equal perfection! But pray, how does the man write
poetry with a pen upon paper, who thus is perpetually pouring it from
his inspired lips? Read "The Ancient Mariner," "The Nightingale," and
"Genevieve." In the first, you shudder at the superstition of the
sea--in the second, you thrill with the melodies of the woods--in the
third, earth is like heaven;--for you are made to feel that
"All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame!"