Have enrich'd with borrow'd grace
Her high birth no pride imparts,
For she blushes in her place.
Folly boasts a glorious blood--
She is noblest, being good!
....*....*....*....*
She her throne makes reason climb,
While wild passions captive lie;
And each article of time
Her pure thoughts to heaven fly.
All her vows religious be--
And her love she vows to me!
The second part of these poems, dedicated to Castara as "the WIFE," have
not less variety and beauty, though there were, of course, fewer
incidents to record. The first Sonnet, "to Castara, now possest of her
in marriage," beginning "This day is ours," &c. has more fancy and
poetry than tenderness. The lines to Lord Powis, the father of Castara,
on the same occasion, are more beautiful and earnest, yet rich in
fanciful imagery. Lord Powis, it must be remembered, had opposed their
union, and had been, with difficulty, induced to give his consent. The
following lines refer to this; and Habington asserts the purity and
unselfishness of his attachment.
Nor grieve, my Lord, 'tis perfected. Before
Afflicted seas sought refuge on the shore,
From the angry north wind; ere the astonish'd spring
Heard in the air the feathered people sing;
Ere time had motion, or the sun obtained
His province o'er the day--this was ordained.
Nor think in her I courted wealth or blood,
Or more uncertain hopes; for had I stood
On the highest ground of fortune,--the world known,
No greatness but what waited on my throne--
And she had only had that face and mind,
I with myself, had th' earth to her resigned.
In virtue there's an empire!
Here I rest,
As all things to my power subdued; to me
There's nought beyond this, the whole world is SHE!
On the anniversary of their wedding-day, he thus addresses her:--
LOVE'S ANNIVERSARY.
Thou art returned (great light) to that blest hour
In which I first by marriage, (sacred power!)
Joined with Castara hearts; and as the same
Thy lustre is, as then,--so is our flame;
Which had increased, but that by Love's decree,
'Twas such at first, it ne'er could greater be.
But tell me, (glorious lamp,) in thy survey
Of things below thee, what did not decay
By age to weakness? I since that have seen
The rose bud forth and fade, the tree grow green,
And wither wrinkled. Even thyself dost yield
Something to time, and to thy grave fall nigher;
But virtuous love is one sweet endless fire.
"To Castara, on the knowledge of love," is peculiarly elegant; it was,
probably, suggested by some speculative topics of conversation,
discussed in the literary circle he had drawn round him at Hindlip.[53]
Where sleeps the north wind when the south inspires
Life in the Spring, and gathers into quires
The scatter'd nightingales; whose subtle ears
Heard first the harmonious language of the spheres;
Whence hath the stone magnetic force t'allure
Th'enamour'd iron; from a seed impure.
Or natural, did first the mandrake grow;
What power in the ocean makes it flow;
What strange materials is the azure sky
Compacted of; of what its brightest eye
The ever flaming sun; what people are
In th' unknown world; what worlds in every star:--
Let curious fancies at these secrets rove;
Castara, what we know we'll practise--love.
The "Lines on her fainting;" those on "The fear of death,"--
Why should we fear to melt away in death?
May we but die together! &c.
On her sigh,--
Were but that sigh a penitential breath
That thou art mine, it would blow with it death,
T' inclose me in my marble, where I 'd be
Slave to the tyrant worms to set thee free!
His self-congratulation on his own happiness, in his epistle to his
uncle, Lord Morley; are all in the same strain of gentle and elegant
feeling. The following are among the last addressed to his wife.
Give me a heart, where no impure
Disorder'd passions rage;
Which jealousie doth not obscure,
Nor vanity t' expense engage;
Not wooed to madness by quaint oathes,
Or the fine rhetorick of cloathes;
Which not the softness of the age
To vice or folly doth decline;
Give me that heart, Castara, for 'tis thine.
Take thou a heart, where no new look
Provokes new appetite;
With no fresh charm of beauty took,
Or wanton stratagem of wit;
Not idly wandering here and there,
Led by an am'rous eye or ear;
Aiming each beauteous mark to hit;
Which virtue doth to one confine:
Take thou that heart, Castara, for 'tis mine.
It was owing to his affection for his wife, as well as his own retired
and studious habits, that Habington lived through the civil wars without
taking any active part on either side. It should seem that, at such a
period, no man of a lofty and generous spirit could have avoided joining
the party or principles, either of Falkland and Grandison, or of Hampden
and Hutchinson. But Habington's family had already suffered, in fortune
and in fame, by their interference with State matters; and without, in
any degree, implicating himself with either party, he passed through
those stormy and eventful times,
As one who dreams
Of idleness, in groves Elysian;
and died in the first year of the Protectorate, 1654. I cannot discover
the date of Castara's death; but she died some years before her husband,
leaving only one son.
There is one among the poems of the second part of Castara, which I
cannot pass without remark; it is the Elegy which Habington addressed to
his wife, on the death of her friend, Venetia Digby, the consort of the
famous Sir Kenelm Digby. She was the most beautiful woman of her time:
even Lord Clarendon steps aside from the gravity of history, to mention
"her extraordinary beauty, and as extraordinary fame." Her picture at
Windsor is, indeed, more like a vision of ideal loveliness, than any
form that ever trod the earth.[54] She was descended from the Percies
and the Stanleys, and was first cousin to Habington's Castara, their
mothers being sisters. The magnificent spirit of her enamoured husband,
surrounded her with the most gorgeous adornments that ever were invented
by vanity or luxury: and thus she was, one day, found dead on her couch,
her hand supporting her head, in the attitude of one asleep. Habington's
description exactly agrees with the picture at Althorpe, painted after
her death by Vandyke.
What's honour but a hatchment? what is here
Of Percy left, or Stanley, names most dear
To virtue?
Or what avails her that she once was led
A glorious bride to valiant Digby's bed?
She, when whatever rare
The either Indies boast, lay richly spread
For her to wear, lay on her pillow _dead_!
There is no piercing the mystery which hangs round the story of this
beautiful creature: that a stigma rested on her character, and that she
was exculpated from it, whatever it might be, seems proved, by the doves
and serpents introduced into several portraits of her; the first,
emblematical of her innocence, and the latter, of her triumph over
slander: and not less, by these lines of Habington. If Venetia Digby had
been, as Aubrey and others insinuate, abandoned to profligacy, and a
victim to her husband's jealousy, Habington would scarce have considered
her noble descent and relationship to his Castara as a matter of pride;
or her death as a subject of tender condolence; or the awful manner of
it a peculiar blessing of heaven, and the reward of her virtues.
Come likewise, my Castara, and behold
What blessings ancient prophecy foretold,
Bestow'd on her in death; she past away
So sweetly from the world as if her clay
Lay only down to slumber. Then forbear
To let on her blest ashes fall a tear;
Or if thou'rt too much woman, softly weep,
Lest grief disturb the silence of her sleep!
The author of the introduction to the curious Memoirs of Sir Kenelm
Digby, has proved the absolute falsehood of some of Aubrey's assertions,
and infers the improbability of others. But these beautiful lines by
Habington, seem to have escaped his notice; and they are not slight
evidence in Venetia's favour. On the whole, the mystery remains
unexplained; a cloud has settled for ever on the true story of this
extraordinary creature. Neither the pen nor the sword of her husband
could entirely clear her fame in her own age: he could only terrify
slander into silence, and it died away into an indistinct murmur, of
which the echo alone has reached our time.--But this is enough:--the
echo of an _echo_ could whisper into naught a woman's fair name. The
idea of a creature so formed in the prodigality of nature; so completely
and faultlessly beautiful; so nobly born and allied; so capable (as she
showed herself on various occasions,) of high generous feeling,[55] of
delicacy,[56] of fortitude,[57] of tenderness;[58] depraved by her own
vices, or "done to death by slanderous tongues," is equally painful and
heart-sickening. The image of the asp trailing its slime and its venom
over the bosom of Cleopatra, is not more abhorrent.
FOOTNOTES:
[52] It was the mother of William Habington who addressed to her
brother, Lord Mounteagle, that extraordinary letter which led to the
discovery of the Gunpowder Plot.
_Nash's History of Worcestershire._
[53] The family seat of the Habingtons, in Worcestershire.
[54] There are also four pictures of her at Strawberry Hill, and one of
her mother, Lady Lucy Percy, exquisitely beautiful. At Gothurst, there
is a picture of her, and a bust, which, after her death, her husband
placed in his chamber, with this tender and beautiful inscription
Uxorem amare vivam, voluptas: defunctam, religio.
[55] Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby, pp. 211, 224. Introduction, p. 27.
[56] Memoirs, pp. 205, 213. Introduction, p. 28.
[57] Memoirs, p. 254.
[58] Memoirs, p. 305.
CHAPTER VIII.
CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED.
THE TWO ZAPPI.
We find among the minor poets of Italy, a charming, and I believe a
singular instance of a husband and a wife, both highly gifted, devoting
their talents to celebrate each other. These were Giambattista
Zappi,[59] the famous Roman advocate, and his wife Faustina, the
daughter of Carlo Maratti, the painter.
Zappi, after completing his legal studies at Bologna, came to reside at
Rome, where he distinguished himself in his profession, and was one of
the founders of the academy of the Arcadii. Faustina Maratti was many
years younger than her husband, and extremely beautiful: she was her
father's favourite model for his Madonnas, Muses, and Vestal Virgins.
From a description of her, in an Epithalamium[60] on her marriage, it
appears that her eyes and hair were jet black, her features regular, and
her complexion pale and delicate; a style of beauty which, in its
perfection, is almost peculiar to Italy. To the mutual tenderness of
these married lovers, we owe some of the most elegant among the lighter
Italian lyrics. Zappi, in a Sonnet addressed to his wife some time after
their union, reminds her, with a tender exultation, of the moment they
first met; when she swept by him in all the pride of beauty, careless or
unconscious of his admiration,--and he bowed low before her, scarcely
daring to lift his eyes on the charms that were destined to bless him;
"Who," he says, "would then have whispered me, the day will come when
you will smile to remember her disdain, for all this blaze of beauty was
created for you alone!" or would have said to her, "Know you who is
destined to touch that virgin heart? Even he, whom you now pass by
without even a look! Such are the miracles of love!"
La prima volta ch'io m'avenni in quella
Ninfa, che il cor m'accese, e ancor l'accende,
Io dissi, e donna o dea, ninfa si bella?
Giunse dal prato, o pur dal ciel discende?
La fronte inchino in umil atto, ed ella
La merce pur d'un sguardo a me non rende;
Qual vagheggiata in cielo, o luna, o stella,
Che segue altera il suo viaggio, e splende.
Chi detto avesse a me, "costei ti sprezza,
Ma un di ti riderai del suo rigore!
Che nacque sol per te tanta bellezza."
Chi detto avesse ad ella: "Il tuo bel core
Sai chi l'avra? Costui ch'or non t'apprezza"
Or negate i miracoli d'Amore!
The first Sonnet in Faustina's Canzoniere,
Dolce sollievo delle umane cure,
is an eulogium on her husband, and describes her own confiding
tenderness. It is full of grace and sweetness, and feminine feeling:
Soave cortesia, vezzosi accenti,
Virtu, senno, valor d'alma gentile,
Spogliato hanno 'l mio cor d'ogni timore;
Or tu gli affetti miei puri innocenti
Pasci cortese, e non cangiar tuo stile
Dolce sollievo de' miei mali, amore!
Others are of a melancholy character; and one or two allude to the death
of an infant son, whom she tenderly laments. But the most finished of
all her poems is a Sonnet addressed to a lady whom her husband had
formerly loved;[61] the sentiment of which is truly beautiful and
feminine: never was jealousy so amiably, or so delicately expressed.
There is something very dramatic and picturesque in the apostrophe which
Faustina addresses to her rival, and in the image of the lady "casting
down her large bright eyes:" as well as affecting in the abrupt recoil
of feeling in the last lines.
SONETTO.
Donna! che tanto al mio bel sol piacesti!
Che ancor de' pregi tuoi parla sovente,
Lodando, ora il bel crine, ora il ridente
Tuo labbro, ed ora i saggi detti onesti.
Dimmi, quando le voci a lui volgesti
Tacque egli mai, qual uom che nulla sente?
O le turbate luci alteramente,
(Come a me volge) a te volger vedesti?
De tuoi bei lumi, a le due chiare faci
Io so ch'egli arse un tempo, e so che allora--
Ma tu declini al suol gli occhi vivaci!
Veggo il rossor che le tue guance infiora;
Parla, rispondi! Ah non rispondi! taci
Taci! se mi vuoi dir ch'ei t'ama ancora!
TRANSLATION.
Lady, that once so charm'd my life's fair Sun,[62]
That of thy beauties still he talketh oft,--
Thy mouth, fair hair, and words discreet and soft.
Speak! when thou look'dst, was he from silence won?
Or, did he turn those sweet and troubled eyes
On thee, and gaze as now on me he gazeth?
(For ah! I know _thy_ love was then the prize,
And then he _felt_ the grace that still he praiseth.)
But why dost thou those beaming glances turn
Thus downwards? Ha! I see (against thy will)
All o'er thy cheek the crimsoning blushes burn.
Speak out! oh answer me!--yet, no, no,--stay!
Be dumb, be silent, if thou need'st must say
That he who once adored thee, loves thee still.[63]
Neither Zappi nor his wife were authors by profession: her poems are
few; and all seem to flow from some incident or feeling, which awakened
her genius, and caused that "craving of the heart and the fancy to break
out into voluntary song, which men call inspiration." She became a
member of the Arcadia, under the pastoral name of Aglaura Cidonia; and
it is remarkable, that though she survived her husband many years, I
cannot find any poem referring to her loss, nor of a subsequent date:
neither did she marry again, though in the prime of her life and beauty.
Zappi was a great and celebrated lawyer, and his legal skill raised him
to an office of trust, under the Pontificate of Clement XI. In one of
his Sonnets, which has great sweetness and picturesque effect, he
compares himself to the Venetian Gondolier, who in the calm or the storm
pours forth his songs on the Lagune, careless of blame or praise, asking
no auditors but the silent seas and the quiet moon, and seeking only to
"unburthen his full soul" in lays of love and joy--
Il Gondolier, sebben la notte imbruna,
Remo non posa, e fende il mar spumante;
Lieto cantando a un bel raggio di Luna--
"Intanto Erminia infra l'ombrose piante."
That Zappi could be sublime, is proved by his well-known Sonnet on the
Moses of Michel Angelo; but his forte is the graceful and the gay. His
Anacreontics, and particularly his little drinking song,
Come faro? Faro cosi!
are very elegant, and almost equal to Chiabrera. It is difficult to
sympathize with English drinking songs, and all the vulgar associations
of flowing bowls, taverns, three times three, and the table in a roar.
An Italian _Brindisi_ transports us at once among flasks and vineyards,
guitars and dances, a dinner _al fresco_, a group _a la Stothard_. It is
all the difference between the ivy-crowned Bacchus, and the bloated
Silenus. "Bumper, Squire Jones," or, "Waiter, bring clean glasses," do
not _sound_ so well as
Damigella
Tutta bella
Versa, versa, il bel vino! &c.
FOOTNOTES:
[59] Born at Imola, 1668; died at Rome, 1719.
[60] See the Epithalamium on her marriage with Zappi, prefixed to their
works.
[61] Probably the same he had celebrated under the name of Filli, and
who married another. Zappi's Sonnet to this lady, "Ardo per Filli," is
elaborately elegant; sparkling and pointed as a pyramid of gems.
[62] "Il mio bel sol" is a poetical term of endearment, which it is not
easy to reduce gracefully into English.
[63] Translated by a friend.
CHAPTER IX.
CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED.
LORD LYTTELTON.
Lord Lyttelton has told us in a very sweet line,
How much the _wife_ is dearer than the _bride_.
But his Lucy Fortescue deserves more than a mere allusion, _en passant_.
That Lord Lyttelton is still remembered and read as a poet, is solely
for her sake: it is she who has made the shades of Hagley classic
ground, and hallowed its precincts by the remembrance of the fair and
gentle being, the tender woman, wife, and mother, who in the prime of
youth and loveliness, melted like a creature of air and light from her
husband's arms,
"And left him on this earth disconsolate!"
That the verses she inspired are still popular, is owing to the power of
_truth_, which has here given lasting interest to what were otherwise
_mediocre_. Lord Lyttelton was not much of a poet; but his love was
real; its object was real, beautiful, and good: thus buoyed up, in spite
of his own faults and the change of taste, he has survived the rest of
the rhyming gentry of his time, who wrote epigrams on fans and
shoe-buckles,--songs to the Duchess of _this_ and the Countess of
_that_--and elegies to Miras, Delias, and Chloes.
Lucy Fortescue, daughter of Hugh Fortescue, Esq. of Devonshire, and
grand-daughter of Lord Aylmer, was born in 1718. She was about
two-and-twenty when Lord Lyttelton first became attached to her, and he
was in his thirty-first year: in person and character she realized all
he had imagined in his "Advice to Belinda."[64]
Without, all beauty--and all peace within.
....*....*....*....*
Blest is the maid, and worthy to be blest,
Whose soul, entire by him she loves possest,
Feels every vanity in fondness lost,
And asks no power, but that of pleasing most:
Her's is the bliss, in just return to prove
The honest warmth of undissembled love;
For her, inconstant man might cease to range,
And gratitude forbid desire to change.
To the more peculiar attributes of her sex--beauty and tenderness,--she
united all the advantages of manner,--
Polite as she in courts had ever been;
and wit--the only wit that becomes a woman,--
That temperately bright
With inoffensive light
All pleasing shone, nor ever past
The decent bounds that wisdom's sober hand
And sweet benevolence's mild command,
And bashful modesty before it cast.
Her education was uncommon for the time; for _then_, a woman, who to
youth and elegance and beauty united a familiar acquaintance with the
literature of her own country, French, Italian, and the classics, was
distinguished among her sex. She had many suitors, and her choice was
equally to her own honour and that of her lover. Lord Lyttelton was not
rich; his father, Sir Thomas Lyttelton, being still alive. He had
perhaps never dreamed of the coronet which late in life descended on his
brow: and far from possessing a captivating exterior, he was extremely
plain in person, "of a feeble, ill-compacted figure, and a meagre sallow
countenance."[65] But talents, elegance of mind, and devoted affection,
had the influence they ought to have, and generally do possess, in the
mind of a woman. We are told that our sex's "earliest, latest care,--our
heart's supreme ambition," is "to be fair." Even Madame de Stael would
have given half her talents for half Madame Recamier's beauty! and why?
because the passion of our sex is to please and to be loved; and men
have taught us, that in nine cases out of ten we are valued merely for
our personal advantages: they can scarce believe that women, generally
speaking, are so indifferent to the mere exterior of a man,--that it has
so little power to interest their vanity or affections. Let there be
something for their hearts to honour, and their weakness to repose on,
and feeling and imagination supply the rest. In this respect, the
"gentle lady married to the Moor," who saw her lover's visage in his
mind, is the type of our sex;--the instances are without number. The
Frenchman triumphs a little too much _en petit maitre_, who sings,
Grands Dieux, combien elle est jolie!
Et moi, je suis, je suis si laid!
He might have spared his exultation: if he had sense, and spirit, and
tenderness, he had all that is necessary to please a woman, who is
worthy to be pleased.
Personal vanity in a woman, however misdirected, arises from the idea,
that our power with those we wish to charm, is founded on beauty as a
female attribute; it is never indulged but with a reference to
another--it is a _means_, not an _end_. Personal vanity in a man is
sheer unmingled egotism, and an unfailing subject of ridicule and
contempt with all women--be they wise or foolish.
To return from this long _tirade_ to Lucy Fortescue.--After the usual
fears and hopes, the impatience and anxious suspense of a long
courtship,[66] Lord Lyttelton won his Lucy, and thought himself
blest--and was so. Five revolving years of happiness seemed pledges of
its continuance, and "the wheels of pleasure moved without the aid of
hope:"--it was at the conclusion of the fifth year, he wrote the lines
on the anniversary of his marriage, in which he exults in his felicity,
and in the possession of a treasure, which even then, though he knew it
not, was fading in his arms.
Whence then this strange increase of joy?
He, only he can tell, who matched like me,
(If such another happy man there be,)
Has by his own experience tried
How much the _wife_ is dearer than the _bride_!
Six months afterwards, his Lucy was seized with the illness of which she
died in her twenty-ninth year, leaving three infants, the eldest not
four years old.[67] As there are people who strangely unite, as
inseparable, the ideas of fiction and rhyme, and doubt the sincerity of
her husband's grief, because he wrote a monody on her memory, he shall
speak for himself in prose. The following is an extract from his letter
to his father, written two days before her death.
"I believe God supports me above my own strength, for the sake of my
friends who are concerned for me, and in return for the resignation with
which I endeavour to submit to his will. If it please Him, in his
infinite mercy, to restore my dear wife to me, I shall most thankfully
acknowledge his goodness; if not, I shall most humbly endure his
chastisement, which I have too much deserved. These are the sentiments
with which my mind is replete; but as it is still a most bitter cup, how
my body will bear it, if it must not pass from me, it is impossible for
me to foretell; but I hope the best.--Jan. 17th, 1747."
* * * * *
I imagine Dr. Johnson meant a sneer at Lord Lyttelton, when he says
laconically,--"his wife died, and he _solaced_ himself by writing a long
monody on her memory."--In these days we might naturally exclaim against
a widowed husband who should _solace_ himself by apostrophes to the
Muses and Graces, and bring in the whole Aonian choir,--Pindus and
Castalia, Aganippe's fount, and Thespian vales; the Clitumnus and the
Illissus, and such Pagan and classical embroidery.--What should we have
thought of Lord Byron's famous "Fare thee well," if conceived in this
style?--but such was the poetical vocabulary of Lord Lyttelton's day:
and that he had not sufficient genius and originality to rise above it,
is no argument against the sincerity of his grief. Petrarch and his
Laura (_apropos_ to all that has ever been sung or said of love for five
hundred years) are called, in a very common-place strain, from their
"Elysian bowers;" and then follow some lines of real and touching
beauty, because they owe nothing to art or effort, but are the immediate
result of truth and feeling. He is still apostrophising Petrarch.
What were, alas! thy woes compar'd to mine?
To thee thy mistress in the blissful band
Of Hymen never gave her hand;
The joys of wedded love were never thine!
In thy domestic care
She never bore a share;
Nor with endearing art
Would heal thy wounded heart
Of every secret grief that fester'd there:
Nor did her fond affection on the bed
Of sickness watch thee, and thy languid head
Whole nights on her unwearied arm sustain,
And charm away the sense of pain:
Nor did she crown your mutual flame
With pledges dear, and with a father's tender name.
....*....*....*....*
How in the world, to me a desert grown,
Abandon'd and alone,
Without my sweet companion can I live?
Without her lovely smile,
The dear reward of every virtuous toil,
What pleasures now can pall'd Ambition give?
One would wish to think that Lord Lyttelton was faithful to the memory
of his Lucy: but he was neither more nor less than man; and in the
impatience of grief, or unable to live without that domestic happiness
to which his charming wife had accustomed him, he married again, about
two years after her death, and too precipitately. His second choice was
Elizabeth Rich, eldest daughter of Sir Robert Rich. Perhaps he expected
too much; and how few women could have replaced Lucy Fortescue! The
experiment proved a most unfortunate one, and added bitterness to his
regrets. He devoted the rest of his life to politics and literature.
About ten years after his second marriage, Lord Lyttelton made a tour
into Wales with a gay party. On some occasion, while they stood
contemplating a scene of uncommon picturesque beauty, he turned to a
friend, and asked him, with enthusiasm, whether it was possible to
behold a more pleasing sight? Yes, answered the other--the countenance
of the woman one loves! Lord Lyttelton shrunk, as if probed to the
quick; and after a moment's silence, replied pensively--"_once_, I
thought so!"[68]
Lord Lyttelton brings to mind his friend and patron, Frederick Prince of
Wales (grandfather of the present King). From the impression which
_history_ has given of his character, no one, I believe, would suspect
him of being a poet, though he was known as the patron of poets. He
sometimes amused himself with writing French and English songs, &c. in
imitation of the Regent Duc d'Orleans. But, assuredly, it was not in
imitation of the Regent he chose his own wife for the principal subject
of his ditties. In the same manner, and in the same worthy spirit of
imitation of the same worthy person, he tried hard to be a libertine,
and laid siege to the virtue of sundry maids of honour; preferring all
the time, in his inmost soul, his own wife to the handsomest among her
attendants. His flirtations with Lady Archibald Hamilton and Miss Vane
had not half the grace or sincerity of some of his effusions to the
Princess, whom he tenderly loved, and used to call, with a sort of
pastoral gallantry, "ma Sylvie." One of his songs has been preserved by
that delicious retailer of court-gossip, Horace Walpole; and I copy it
from the Appendix to his Memoirs, without agreeing in his flippant
censure.
SONG.
'Tis not the languid brightness of thine eyes,
That swim with pleasure and delight,
Nor those fair heavenly arches which arise
O'er each of them, to shade their light:--
'Tis not that hair which plays with every wind,
And loves to wanton o'er thy face,
Now straying o'er thy forehead, now behind
Retiring with insidious grace:--
....*....*....*....*
'Tis not the living colours over each,
By Nature's finest pencil wrought,
To shame the fresh-blown rose and blooming peach,
And mock the happiest painter's thought;
But 'tis that gentle mind, that ardent love
So kindly answering my desire,--
That grace with which you look, and speak, and move!
That thus have set my soul on fire.
To Dr. Parnell's[69] love for his wife (Anne Minchin), we owe two of the
most charming songs in our language; "My life hath been so wondrous
free," and that most beautiful lyric, "When your beauty appears," which,
as it is less known, I give entire,
When your beauty appears
In its graces and airs,
All bright as an angel new dropt from the skies,
At distance I gaze, and am aw'd by my fears,
So strangely you dazzle my eyes.
But when without art,
Your kind thoughts you impart,
When your love runs in blushes through every vein;
When it darts from your eyes, when it pants at your heart,
Then I know that you're woman again.
"There's a passion and pride,
In our sex," she replied;
"And thus, might I gratify both, I would do,--
Still an angel appear to each lover beside,
But still be a woman for you!"
This amiable and beloved wife died after a union of five or six years,
and left her husband broken-hearted. Her sweetness and loveliness, and
the general sympathy caused by her death, drew a touch of deep feeling
from the pen of Swift, who mentions the event in his journal to Stella:
every one, he says, grieved for her husband, "they were so happy
together." Poor Parnell did not, in his bereavement, try Lord
Lyttelton's specifics: he did not write an elegy, nor a monody, nor did
he marry again;--and, unfortunately for himself, he could not subdue his
mind to religious resignation. His grief and his nervous irritability
proved too much for his reason: he felt what all have felt under the
influence of piercing anguish,--a dread, a horror of being left alone:
he flew to society; when that was not at hand, he sought relief from
excesses which his constitution would not bear, and died, unhappy man!
in the prime of life; "a martyr," as Goldsmith tells us, "to conjugal
fidelity."
FOOTNOTES:
[64] See his Poems.
[65] Johnson's Life of Lord Lyttelton.
[66] See in his Poems,--the lines beginning
On Thames's banks a gentle youth
For Lucy sighed with matchless truth,
And
Your shape, your lips, your eyes are still the same.
[67] Her son was that eccentric and profligate Lord Lyttelton, whose
supernatural death-bed horrors have been the subject of so much
speculation. He left no children.
The present Earl of Mountnorris, (so distinguished for his Oriental
travels when Lord Valentia,) is the grandson of Lucy Fortescue.
[68] Lord Lyttelton's Works, 4to.
[69] Born in Dublin, 1679; died 1717.
CHAPTER X.
CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED.
KLOPSTOCK AND META.
Then is there not the German Klopstock and his Meta,--his lovely,
devoted, angelic Meta? As the subject of some of her husband's most
delightful and popular poems, both before and after her marriage,--when
living, she formed his happiness on earth; and when, as he tenderly
imagined, she watched over his happiness from heaven--how pass her
lightly over in a work like this? Yet how do her justice, but by
borrowing her own sweet words? or referring the reader at once to the
memoirs and fragments of her letters, which never saw the light till
sixty years after her death?--for in her there was no vain-glory, no
effort, no display. A feeling so hallowed lingers round the memory of
this angelic creature, that it is rather a subject to blend with our
most sacred and most serious thoughts,--to muse over in hours when the
heart communes with itself and is still, than to dress out in words, and
mingle with the ideas of earthly fame and happiness. Other loves might
be poetical, but the love of Klopstock and his Meta was in itself
_poetry_. They were mutually possessed with the idea, that they had been
predestined to each other from the beginning of time, and that their
meeting on earth was merely a kind of incidental prelude to an eternal
and indivisible union in heaven: and shall we blame their fond faith?
It is a gentle and affectionate thought,
That in immeasurable heights above us,
Even at our birth, the wreath of love was woven
With sparkling stars for flowers![70]
All the sweetest images that ever were grouped together by fancy,
dreaming over the golden age; beauty, innocence, and happiness; the
fervour of youthful love, the rapture of corresponding affection;
undoubting faith and undissembled truth;--these were so bound together,
so exalted by the highest and holiest associations, so confirmed in the
serenity of conscious virtue, so sanctified by religious enthusiasm; and
in the midst of all human blessedness, so wrapt up in futurity,--that
the grave was not the close, but the completion and the consummation of
their happiness. The garland which poesy has suspended on the grave of
Meta, was wreathed by no fabled muse; it is not of laurel, "meed of
conqueror and sage;" nor of roses blooming and withering among their
thorns; nor of myrtle shrinking and dying away before the blast: but of
flowers gathered in Paradise, pure and bright, and breathing of their
native Eden; which never caught one blighting stain of earth, and though
dewed with tears,--"tears such as angels shed!"
* * * * *
The name of Klopstock forms an epoch in the history of poetry. Goethe,
Schiller, Wieland, have since adorned German literature; but Klopstock
was the first to impress on the poetry of his country the stamp of
nationality. He was a man of great and original genius,--gifted with an
extraordinary degree of sensibility and imagination; but these being
united to the most enthusiastic religious feeling, elevated and never
misled him. His life was devoted to the three noblest sentiments that
can fill and animate the human soul,--religion, patriotism and love. To
these, from early youth, he devoted his faculties and consecrated his
talents. He had, even in his boyhood, resolved to write a poem, "which
should do honour to God, his country, and himself;" and he produced the
Messiah. It would be difficult to describe the enthusiasm this work
excited when the first three cantos appeared in 1746. "If poetry had its
saints," says Madame de Stael, "then Klopstock would be at the head of
the calendar;" and she adds, with a burst of her own eloquence, "Ah,
qu'il est beau le talent, quand on ne l'a jamais profane! quand il n'a
servi qu'a reveler aux hommes, sous la forme attrayante des beaux arts,
les sentiments genereux, et les esperances religieuses obscurcies au
fond de leur coeur!"
Such was Klopstock as a poet. As a man, he is described as one of the
most amiable and affectionate of human beings;--"good in all the
foldings of his heart," as his sweet wife expressed it; free from all
petty vanity, egotism, and worldly ambition. He was pleasing, though not
handsome in person, with fine blue animated eyes.[71] The tone of his
voice was at first low and hesitating, but soft and persuasive; and he
always ended by captivating the entire attention of those he addressed.
He was, to his latest moments, fond of the society of women, and an
object of their peculiar tenderness and veneration.
Klopstock's first serious attachment was to his cousin, the beautiful
Fanny Schmidt, the sister of his intimate friend and brother poet,
Schmidt. He loved her constantly for several years. His correspondence
with Bodmer gives us an interesting picture of a fine mind struggling
with native timidity, and of the absolute terror with which this gentle
and beautiful girl could inspire him, till his heart seemed to wither
and sicken within him from her supposed indifference. The uncertainty of
his future prospects, and his sublime idea of the merits and beauties of
her he loved, kept him silent; nor did he ever venture to declare his
passion, except in the beautiful odes and songs which she inspired.
Speaking of one of those to his friend Bodmer, he says, "She who could
best reward it, has not seen it; so timid does her apparent
insensibility make me."
Whether this insensibility was more than apparent is not perfectly
clear: the memoirs of Klopstock are not quite accurate or satisfactory
in this part of his history. It should seem from the published
correspondence, that his love was distinctly avowed, though he never
had courage to make a direct offer of himself. Fanny Schmidt appears to
have been a superior woman in point of mind, and full of admiration for
his genius. She writes to him in terms of friendship and kindness, but
she leaves him, after three years' attachment on his part, still in
doubt whether her heart remain untouched,--and even whether she _had_ a
heart to be touched. He intimates, but with a tender and guarded
delicacy, that he had reason to complain of her coquetry;[72] and, with
the sensibility of a proud but wounded heart, he was anxious to prove to
himself that his romantic tenderness had not been unworthily bestowed.
"All the peace and consolation of my after life depends on knowing
whether Fanny _really_ has a heart?--a heart that _could_ have
sympathised with mine?"[73] He had commissioned his friend Gleim to
plead his cause, to sound her heart in its inmost depths; and in return,
received the intelligence of her approaching union with another. "When
(as he expresses it) not a hope was left to be destroyed," he became
calm; but he suffered at first acutely; and this ill-fated attachment
tinged with a deep gloom nearly four years of his life. While in
suspense, he continually repeats his conviction that he can never love
again. "Had I never seen her, I might have attached myself to another
object, and perhaps have known the felicity of mutual love! But now it
is impossible; my heart is steeled to every tender impression." The
sentiment was natural; but, fortunately for himself, he was deceived.
In passing through Hamburgh, in April 1751, and while he was still under
the influence of this heart-wearing attachment to Fanny, he was
introduced to Meta Moeller. The impression she made on him is thus
described, in a letter to his friend and confidant, Gleim.
"You may perhaps have heard Gisecke mention Margaret Moeller of Hamburgh.
I was lately introduced to this girl, and passed in her society most of
the time I lately spent at Hamburgh. I found her, in every sense of the
word, so lovely, so amiable, so full of attractions, that I could at
times scarcely forbear to give her the name which is to me the dearest
in existence. I was often with her alone; and in those moments of
unreserved intercourse, was insensibly led to communicate my melancholy
story. Could you have seen her in those moments, my Gleim! how she
looked and listened,--and how often she interrupted me, and how tenderly
she wept! and if you knew how much she is my friend; and yet it was not
for _her_ that I had so long suffered. What a heart must she possess to
be thus touched for a stranger! At this thought I am almost tempted to
make a comparison; but then does a mist gather before mine eyes, and if
I probe my heart, I feel that I am more unhappy than ever." Again he
writes from Copenhagen, "I have reread the little Moeller's letters;
sweet artless creature she is! She has already written to me four times,
and writes in a style so exquisitely natural! Were you to see this
lovely girl, and read her letters, you would scarce conceive it possible
that she should be mistress of the French, English, and Italian
languages, and even conversant with Greek and Italian literature." But
it were wronging both, to give the history and result of this attachment
to Meta in any language but her own. Since the publication of
Richardson's correspondence, the letters addressed to him, in English,
by Meta Klopstock, have become generally known; but this account would
be incomplete were they wholly omitted; and those who have read them
before, will not be displeased at the opportunity of re-perusing them:
her sweet lisping English is worth volumes of eloquence.
"You will know all what concerns me. Love, dear Sir, is all what me
concerns, and love shall be all what I will tell you in this letter. In
one happy night I read my husband's poem--the Messiah. I was extremely
touched with it. The next day I asked one of his friends who was the
author of this poem? and this was the first time I heard Klopstock's
name. I believe I fell immediately in love with him; at the least, my
thoughts were ever with him filled, especially because his friend told
me very much of his character. But I had no hopes ever to see him, when
quite unexpectedly I heard that he should pass through Hamburgh. I wrote
immediately to the same friend, for procuring by his means that I might
see the author of the Messiah, when in Hamburg. He told him that a
certain girl in Hamburg wished to see him, and, for all recommendation,
showed him some letters in which I made bold to criticize Klopstock's
verses. Klopstock came, and came to me. I must confess, that, though
greatly prepossessed of his qualities, I never thought him the amiable
youth that I found him. This made its effect. After having seen him two
hours, I was obliged to pass the evening in company, which never had
been so wearisome to me. I could not speak; I could not play; I thought
I saw nothing but Klopstock. I saw him the next day, and the following,
and we were very seriously friends; on the fourth day he departed. It
was a strong hour, the hour of his departure. He wrote soon after, and
from that time our correspondence began to be a very diligent one. I
sincerely believed my love to be friendship. I spoke with my friends of
nothing but Klopstock, and showed his letters. They rallied me, and said
I was in love. I rallied them again, and said they must have a very
friendship-less heart, if they had no idea of friendship to a man as
well as a woman. Thus it continued eight months, in which time my
friends found as much love in Klopstock's letters as in me. I perceived
it likewise, but I would not believe it. At the last, Klopstock said
plainly that he loved; and I startled as for a wrong thing. I answered
that it was no love, but friendship, as it was what I felt for him; we
had not seen one another enough to love; as if love must have more time
than friendship! This was sincerely my meaning; and I had this meaning
till Klopstock came again to Hamburg. This he did a year after we had
seen one another the first time. We saw, we were friends; we loved, and
we believed that we loved; and a short time after I could even tell
Klopstock that I loved. But we were obliged to part again, and wait two
years for our wedding. My mother would not let me marry a stranger. I
could marry without her consentment, as by the death of my father my
fortune depended not on her; but this was an horrible idea for me; and
thank Heaven that I have prevailed by prayers! At this time, knowing
Klopstock, she loves him as her son, and thanks God that she has not
persisted. We married, and I am the happiest wife in the world. In some
few months it will be four years that I am so happy; and still I dote
upon Klopstock as if he was my bridegroom. If you knew my husband, you
would not wonder. If you knew his poem, I could describe him very
briefly, in saying he is in all respects what he is as a poet. This I
can say with all wifely modesty; I am all raptures when I do it. And as
happy as I am in love, so happy am I in friendship;--in my mother, two
elder sisters, and five other women. How rich I am! Sir, you have willed
that I should speak of myself, but I fear that I have done it too much.
Yet you see how it interests me."
I have somewhere seen or heard it observed, that there is nothing in the
Romeo and Juliet more finely imagined or more true to nature than
Romeo's previous love for another. It is while writhing under the
coldness and scorn of his proud, inaccessible Rosaline, she who had
"forsworn to love," that he meets the soft glances of Juliet, whose eyes
"do comfort, and not burn;" and he takes refuge in her bosom, for she
Doth grace for grace, and love for love allow;
The other did not so.
With such a grateful and gratified feeling must Klopstock have gathered
to his arms the devoted Meta, who came, with healing on her lips, to
suck forth the venom of a recent wound. He has himself beautifully
expressed this in one of the poems addressed to her, and which he has
entitled the Recantation. He describes the anguish he had suffered from
an unrequited affection, and the day-spring of renovated hope and
rapture which now dawned in his heart.
At length, beyond my hope the night retires,
'Tis past, and all my long lost joys awake,
Smiling they wake, my long forgotten joys,
O, how I wonder at my altered fate! &c.
and exults in the charms and tenderness of her who had wiped away his
tears, and whom he had first "taught to love."
I taught thee first to love, and seeking thee,
I learned what true love was; it raised my heart
From earth to heaven, and now, through Eden's groves,
With thee it leads me on in endless joy.
This little poem has been translated by Elizabeth Smith, with one or two
of the graceful little songs addressed to Meta, under the name of
_Cidli_. This is the appellation given to Jairus' daughter in the
"Messiah;" and Meta, who was fond of the character, probably chose it
for herself. The first cantos of this poem had been published long
before his marriage, and it was continued after his union with Meta, and
at her side. Nothing can be more charming than the picture of domestic
affection and happiness contained in the following passage of one of her
letters to Richardson:--apparently, she had improved in English, since
the last was written.--"It will be a delightful occupation for me to
make you more acquainted with my husband's poem. Nobody can do it better
than I, being the person who knows the most of that which is not
published; being always present at the birth of the young verses, which
begin by fragments here and there, of a subject of which his soul is
just then filled. He has many great fragments of the whole work ready.
You may think that persons who love as we do, have no need of two
chambers; we are always in the same: I, with my little
work,--still--still--only regarding sometimes my husband's sweet face,
which is so venerable at that time, with tears of devotion, and all the
sublimity of the subject. My husband reading me his young verses, and
suffering my criticisms."
And for the task of criticism, Meta was peculiarly fitted, not less by
her fine cultivated mind and feminine delicacy of taste, than by her
affectionate enthusiasm for her husband's glory. "How much," says
Klopstock, writing after her death, "how much do I lose in her even in
this respect! How perfect was her taste, how exquisitely fine her
feelings! she observed every thing, even to the slightest turn of the
thought. I had only to look at her, and could see in her face when a
syllable pleased or displeased her: and when I led her to explain the
reason of her remarks, no demonstration could be more true, more
accurate, or more appropriate to the subject. But in general this gave
us very little trouble, for we understood each other when we had
scarcely begun to explain our ideas."
And that not a stain of the selfish or earthly should rest on the bright
purity of her mind and heart, it must be remarked that we cannot trace
in all her letters, whether before or after marriage, the slightest
feeling of jealousy or doubt, though the woman lived whom Klopstock had
once exalted into a divinity, and though she loved her husband with the
most impassioned enthusiasm. She expresses frankly her admiration of the
odes and songs addressed to Fanny: and her only sentiment seems to be a
mixture of grief and astonishment, that any woman could be so insensible
as not to love Klopstock, or so cruel as to give him pain.
Though in her letters to Richardson she speaks with rapture of her hopes
of becoming a mother, as all that was wanting to complete her
happiness,[74] she had long prepared herself for a fatal termination to
those hopes. Her constant presentiment of approaching death, she
concealed, in tenderness to her husband. When we consider the fond and
entire confidence which existed between them, this must have cost no
small effort of fortitude: "she was formed," said Klopstock, "to say,
like Arria, 'My Paetus,' 'tis not painful:" but her husband pressed her
not to allow any secret feeling to prey on her mind; and then, with
gratitude for his "permission to speak," she avowed her apprehensions,
and at the same time her strong and animated trust in religion. This
whole letter, to which I must refer the reader, (for any attempt I
should make to copy it entire, would certainly be illegible,) is one of
the most beautiful pieces of tender eloquence that ever fell from a
woman's pen: and that is saying much. She is writing to her husband
during a short absence. "I well know," she says, "that all hours are not
alike, and particularly the last, since death, in my situation, must be
far from an easy death; but let the last hour make no impression on you.
You know too well how much the body then presses down the soul. Let God
give what he will, I shall still be happy. A longer life with you, or
eternal life with Him! But can you as easily part from me as I from you?
You are to remain in this world, in a world without _me_! You know I
have always wished to be the survivor, because I well know it is the
hardest to endure; but perhaps it is the will of God that you should be
left; and perhaps you have most strength."
This last letter is dated September 10th, 1754. Her confinement took
place in November following; and after the most cruel and protracted
sufferings, it became too certain that both must perish,--mother and
child.
Klopstock stood beside her, and endeavoured, as well as the agony of his
feelings would permit, to pray with her and to support her. He praised
her fortitude:--"You have endured like an angel! God has been with you!
he _will_ be with you! were I so wretched as not to be a Christian, I
should now become one." He added with strong emotion, "Be my guardian
angel, if God permit!" She replied tenderly, "You have ever been mine!"
He repeated his request more fervently: she answered with a look of
undying love, "Who would not be so!" He hastened from the room, unable
to endure more. After he was gone, her sister,[75] who attended her
through her sufferings, said to her, "God will help you!"--"Yes, to
heaven!" replied the saint. After a faint struggle, she added, "It is
over!" her head sunk on the pillow, and while her eyes, until glazed by
death, were fixed tenderly on her sister,--thus with the faith of a
Christian, and the courage of a martyr, she resigned into the hands of
her Creator, a life which had been so blameless and so blessed, so
intimate with love and joy, that only such a death could crown it, by
proving what an angel a woman _can_ be, in doing, feeling, and
suffering.[76]
* * * * *
It was by many expected that Klopstock would have made the loss of his
Meta the subject of a poem; but he early declared his resolution not to
do this, nor to add to the collection of odes and songs formerly
addressed to her. He gives his reasons for this silence. "I think that
before the public a man should speak of his wife with the same modesty
as of himself; and this principle would destroy the enthusiasm required
in poetry. The reader too, not without reason, would feel himself
justified in refusing implicit credit to the fond eulogium written on
one beloved; and my love for her who made me the happiest among men, is
too sincere to let me allow my readers to call it in question." Yet in a
little poem[77] addressed afterwards to his friend Schmidt, and probably
not intended for publication, he alludes to his loss, in a tone of deep
feeling, and complains of the recollections which distract his sleepless
nights.
Again the form of my lost wife I see,
She lies before me, and she dies again;
Again she smiles on me, again she dies,
Her eyes now close, and comfort me no more.
He indulged the fond thought that she hovered, a guardian spirit, near
him still,--
O if thou love me yet, by heavenly laws
Condemn me not! I am a man and mourn,--
Support me though unseen!
And he foretells that, even in distant ages,--"in times perhaps more
virtuous than ours," his grief would be remembered, and the name of his
Meta revered. And shall it not be so?--it must--it will:--as long as
truth, virtue, tenderness, dwell in woman's breast--so long shall Meta
be dear to her sex; for she has honoured us among men on earth, and
among saints in Heaven!
And now, how shall I fill up this sketch? Let us pause for a moment, and
suppose the fate of Meta and Klopstock reversed, and that _she_ had been
called, according to her own tender and unselfish wish, to be the
survivor. Under such a terrible dispensation, her angelic meekness and
sublime faith would at first have supported her; she would have rejoiced
in the _certainty_ of her husband's blessedness, and in the yearning of
her heart she would have tried to fancy him ever present with her in
spirit; she would have collected together his works, and have occupied
herself in transmitting his glory as a poet, without a blemish, to the
admiration of posterity; she would have gone about all her feminine
duties with a quiet patience--for it would have been _his_ will; and
would have smiled--and her smile would have been like the moonlight on a
winter lake: and with all her thoughts loosened from the earth, to her
there would never more have been good or evil, or grief, or fear, or
joy: space and time would only have existed to her, as they separated
her from _him_. Thus she would have lived on dyingly from day to day,
and then have perished, less through regret, than through the intense
longing to realize the vision of her heart, and rejoin him, without whom
all concerns of life were vain, and less than nothing. And this, I am
well convinced,--as far as one human being may dare to reason on the
probable result of certain feelings and impulses in another,--would
have been the lot of Meta, if left on the earth alone, and desolate.
If Klopstock acted differently, let him not be too severely arraigned;
he was but a man, and differently constituted. With great sensibility,
he possessed, by nature, an elasticity of spirit which could rebound, as
it were, from the very depths of grief: his sorrow, intense at first,
found many outward resources:--he could speak, he could write; his
vivacity of imagination pictured to him Meta happy; and his habitual
religious feeling made him acquiesce in his own privation; he could
please himself with visiting her grave, and every year he planted it
with white lilies, "because the lily was the most exalted among flowers,
and she was the most exalted among women."[78] He had many friends, to
whom the confiding simplicity of his character had endeared him: all his
life he seems to have clung to friendship as a child clings to the
breast of the mother; he was accustomed to seek and find relief in
sympathy; and sympathy, deeply felt and strongly expressed, was all
around him. With his high intellect and profound feeling, there was ever
a child-like buoyancy in the mind of Klopstock, which gained him the
title of _der ewigen jungling_--"The ever young, or the youth for
ever."[79] His mind never fell into "the sear and yellow leaf," it was a
perpetual spring: the flowers grew and withered, and blossomed again,--a
never-failing succession of fragrance and beauty; when the rose wounded
him, he gathered the lily; when the lily died on his bosom, he cherished
the myrtle. And he was most happy in such a character, for in him it was
allied to the highest virtue and genius, and equally remote from
weakness and selfishness.
About four years after the death of Meta, he became extremely attached
to a young girl of Blackenburg, whose name was Dona; she loved and
admired him in return, but naturally felt some distrust in the warmth
of his attachment; and he addressed to her a little poem, in which,
tenderly alluding to Meta, he assures Dona that _she_ is not less dear
to him or _less_ necessary to his happiness[80]--
And such is _man's_ fidelity!
This intended marriage never took place.
Twenty-five years afterwards, when Klopstock was in his sixtieth year,
he married Johanna von Wentham, a near relation of his Meta; an
excellent and amiable woman, whose affectionate attention cheered the
remaining years of his life.
Klopstock died at Hamburg in 1813, at the age of eighty: his remains
were attended to the grave by all the magistrates, the diplomatic corps,
the clergy, foreign generals, and a concourse of about fifty thousand
persons. His sacred poems were placed on his coffin, and in the
intervals of the chanting, the ministering clergyman took up the book,
and read aloud the fine passage in the Messiah, describing the death of
the righteous.--Happy are they who have so consecrated their genius to
the honour of Him who bestowed it, that the productions of their early
youth may be placed without profanation on their tomb!
He was buried under a lime-tree in the churchyard of Ottensen, by the
side of his Meta and her infant,--
Seed sown by God, to ripen for the harvest.
FOOTNOTES:
[70] Coleridge's Wallenstein.
[71] Bodmer, after the publication of the Messiah, invited the author to
his house in Switzerland. He had imaged to himself a most sublime idea
of the man who could write such a poem, and had fancied him like one of
the sages and prophets of the Old Testament. His astonishment, when he
saw a slight-made, elegant-looking young man leap gaily from his
carriage, with sparkling eyes and a smiling countenance, has been
pleasantly described.
[72] Klopstock's Letters, p. 145.
[73] Klopstock's Letters.
[74] "I not being able to travel yet, my husband has been obliged to
make a voyage to Copenhagen. He is yet absent; a cloud over my
happiness! He will soon return; but what does that help? he is yet
equally absent. We write to each other every post; but what are letters
to presence? But I will speak no more of this little cloud, I will only
tell my happiness. But I cannot tell you how I rejoice!--A son of my
dear Klopstock's! O, when shall I have him?"--_Memoirs_, p. 99.
[75] Elizabeth Schmidt, married to the brother of Fanny Schmidt.
[76] Meta was buried with her infant in her arms, at Ottenson, near
Altona. She had expressed a wish to have two passages from the Messiah,
descriptive of the resurrection, inscribed on her coffin, but one only
was engraved:--
"Seed sown by God to ripen for the harvest."
_See Memoirs_, p. 197.
[77] Translated by Elizabeth Smith, of whom it has been truly said, that
she resembled Meta, and to whom we are indebted for her first
introduction to English readers.
[78] Memoirs.
[79] Klopstock says of himself, "it is not my nature to be happy or
miserable by halves: having once discarded melancholy, I am ready to
welcome happiness."--_Klopstock and his Friends_, p. 164.
[80]
Du zweifelst dass ich dich wie Meta liebe?
Wie Meta lieb' Ich Done dich!
Dies, saget dir mein hertz liebe vol
Mein ganzes hertz! &c.
CHAPTER XI.
CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED.
BONNIE JEAN.
It was as Burns's _wife_ as well as his early love, that Bonnie Jean
lives immortalized in her poet's songs, and that her name is destined to
float in music from pole to pole. When they first met, Burns was about
six-and-twenty, and Jean Armour "but a young thing,"
Wi' tempting lips and roguish e'en,
the pride, the beauty, and the favourite toast of the village of
Mauchline, where her father lived. To an early period of their
attachment, or to the fond recollection of it in after times, we owe
some of Burns's most beautiful and impassioned songs,--as
Come, let me take thee to this breast,
And pledge we ne'er shall sunder!
And I'll spurn as vilest dust,
The world's wealth and grandeur, &c.
"O poortith cold and restless love;" "the kind love that's in her e'e;"
"Lewis, what reck I by thee;" and many others. I conjecture, from a
passage in one of Burns's letters, that Bonnie Jean also furnished the
heroine and the subject of that admirable song, "O whistle, and I'll
come to thee, my lad," so full of buoyant spirits and artless affection:
it appears that she wished to have her name introduced into it, and that
he afterwards altered the fourth line of the first verse to please
her:--thus,
Thy Jeanie will venture wi' ye, my lad;
but this amendment has been rejected by singers and editors, as injuring
the musical accentuation: the anecdote, however, and the introduction of
the name, give an additional interest and a truth to the sentiment, for
which I could be content to sacrifice the beauty of a single line; and
methinks Jeanie had a right to dictate in this instance.[81] With
regard to her personal attractions, Jean was at this time a blooming
girl, animated with health, affection, and gaiety: the perfect symmetry
of her slender figure; her light step in the dance; the "waist sae
jimp," "the foot sae sma'," were no fancied beauties:--she had a
delightful voice, and sung with much taste and enthusiasm the ballads of
her native country; among which we may imagine that the songs of her
lover were not forgotten. The consequences, however, of all this
dancing, singing, and loving, were not quite so poetical as they were
embarrassing.
O wha could prudence think upon,
And sic a lassie by him?
O wha could prudence think upon,
And sae in love as I am?
Burns had long been distinguished in his rustic neighbourhood for his
talents, for his social qualities and his conquests among the maidens of
his own rank. His personal appearance is thus described from memory by
Sir Walter Scott:--"His form was strong and robust, his manner rustic,
not clownish; with a sort of dignified simplicity, which received part
of its effect, perhaps, from one's knowledge of his extraordinary
talents; * * * his eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character
and temperament; it was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed, (I say,
literally, _glowed_) when he spoke with feeling and interest;"--"his
address to females was extremely deferential, and always with a turn
either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention
particularly. I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon remark
this;"[82]--and Allan Cunningham, speaking also from recollection, says,
"he had a very manly countenance, and a very dark complexion; his
habitual expression was intensely melancholy, but at the presence of
those he loved or esteemed, his whole face beamed with affection and
genius;"[83]--"his voice was very musical; and he excelled in dancing,
and all athletic sports which required strength and agility."
Is it surprising that powers of fascination, which carried a Duchess
"off her feet," should conquer the heart of a country lass of low
degree? Bonnie Jean was too soft-hearted, or her lover too irresistible;
and though Burns stepped forward to repair their transgression by a
written acknowledgment of marriage, which, in Scotland, is sufficient to
constitute a legal union, still his circumstances, and his character as
a "wild lad," were such, that nothing could appease her father's
indignation; and poor Jean, when humbled and weakened by the
consequences of her fault and her sense of shame, was prevailed on to
destroy the document of her lover's fidelity to his vows, and to reject
him.
Burns was nearly heart-broken by this dereliction, and between grief and
rage was driven to the verge of insanity. His first thought was to fly
the country; the only alternative which presented itself, "was America
or a jail;" and such were the circumstances under which he wrote his
"Lament," which, though not composed in his native dialect, is poured
forth with all that energy and pathos which only truth could impart.
No idly feigned poetic pains,
My sad, love-lorn lamentings claim;
No shepherd's pipe--Arcadian strains,
No fabled tortures, quaint and tame:
The plighted faith--the mutual flame--
The oft-attested powers above--
The promised father's tender name--
These were the pledges of my love! &c.
This was about 1786: two years afterwards, when the publication of his
poems had given him name and fame, Burns revisited the scenes which his
Jeanie had endeared to him: thus he sings exultingly,--
I'll aye ca' in by yon town,
And by yon garden-green, again;
I'll aye ca' in by yon town,
And see my bonnie Jean again!
They met in secret; a reconciliation took place; and the consequences
were, that bonnie Jean, being again exposed to the indignation of her
family, was literally turned out of her father's house. When the news
reached Burns he was lying ill; he was lame from the consequences of an
accident,--the moment he could stir, he flew to her, went through the
ceremony of marriage with her in presence of competent witnesses, and a
few months afterwards he brought her to his new farm at Elliesland, and
established her under his roof as his wife, and the honoured mother of
his children.
It was during this _second-hand_ honeymoon, happier and more endeared
than many have proved in their first gloss, that Burns wrote several of
the sweetest effusions ever inspired by his Jean; even in the days of
their early wooing, and when their intercourse had all the difficulty,
all the romance, all the mystery, a poetical lover could desire. Thus
practically controverting his own opinion, "that conjugal love does not
make such a figure in poesy as that other love," &c.--for instance, we
have that most beautiful song, composed when he left his Jean at Ayr (in
the _west_ of Scotland,) and had gone to prepare for her at Elliesland,
near Dumfries.[84]
Of a' the airts the win' can blaw, I dearly love the west,
For there the bonnie lassie lives, the lass that I love best!
There wild woods grow and rivers row, and mony a hill between;
But day and night, my fancy's flight is ever wi' my Jean!
I see her in the dewy flowers, I see her sweet and fair--
I hear her in the tuneful birds, wi' music charm the air.
There's not a bonnie flower that springs by fountain, shaw, or green--
There's not a bonnie bird that sings, but minds me o' my Jean.
O blaw ye westlin winds, blaw soft among the leafy trees!
Wi' gentle gale, fra' muir and dale, bring hame the laden bees!
And bring the lassie back to me, that's aye sae sweet and clean,
Ae blink o' her wad banish care, sae lovely is my Jean!
What sighs and vows, amang the knowes, hae past between us twa!
How fain to meet! how wae to part!--that day she gaed awa!
The powers above can only ken, to whom the heart is seen,
That none can be sae dear to me, as my sweet lovely Jean!
Nothing can be more lovely than the luxuriant, though rural imagery, the
tone of placid but deep tenderness, which pervades this sweet song; and
to feel all its harmony, it is not necessary to sing it--it is music in
itself.
In November 1788, Mrs. Burns took up her residence at Elliesland, and
entered on her duties as a wife and mistress of a family, and her
husband welcomed her to her home ("her ain roof-tree,") with the lively,
energetic, but rather unquotable song, "I hae a wife o' my ain;" and
subsequently he wrote for her, "O were I on Parnassus Hill," and that
delightful little bit of simple feeling--
She is a winsome wee thing,
She is a handsome wee thing,
She is a bonnie wee thing,
This sweet wee wife of mine.
I never saw a fairer,
I never lo'ed a dearer,--
And next my heart I'll wear her,
For fear my jewel tine!
and one of the finest of all his ballads, "Their groves o' green
myrtle," which not only presents a most exquisite rural picture to the
fancy, but breathes the very soul of chastened and conjugal tenderness.
I remember, as a particular instance--I suppose there are thousands--of
the tenacity with which Burns seizes on the memory, and twines round the
very fibres of one's heart, that when I was travelling in Italy, along
that beautiful declivity above the river Clitumnus, languidly enjoying
the balmy air, and gazing with no careless eye on those scenes of rich
and classical beauty, over which memory and fancy had shed
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth;
even then, by some strange association, a feeling of my childish years
came over me, and all the livelong day I was singing, _sotto voce_--
Their groves o' sweet myrtle let foreign lands reckon,
Where bright-beaming summers exalt the perfume;
Far dearer to me yon lone glen o' green bracken,
Wi' the burn stealing under the long yellow broom!
Far dearer to me are yon humble broom bowers,
Where the blue-bell and gowan lurk lowly unseen,
For there, lightly tripping among the wild flowers,
A' listening the linnet, oft wanders my Jean.
Thus the heath, and the blue-bell, and the gowan, had superseded the
orange and the myrtle on those Elysian plains,
Where the crush'd weed sends forth a rich perfume.
And Burns and Bonnie Jean were in my heart and on my lips, on the spot
where Virgil had sung, and Fabius and Hannibal met.
Besides celebrating her in verse, Burns has left us a description of his
Bonnie Jean in prose. He writes (some months after his marriage) to his
friend Miss Chalmers,--"If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners,
and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the
multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the
handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and
the kindest heart in the country. Mrs. Burns believes, as firmly as her
creed, that I am _le plus bel esprit, et le plus honnete homme_ in the
universe; although she scarcely ever, in her life, (except reading the
Scriptures and the Psalms of David in metre) spent five minutes
together on either prose or verse. I must except also a certain late
publication of Scots Poems, which she has perused very devoutly, and all
the ballads in the country, as she has (O, the partial lover! you will
say) the finest woodnote-wild I ever heard."
After this, what becomes of the insinuation that Burns made an unhappy
marriage,--that he was "compelled to invest her with the control of his
life, whom he seems at first to have selected only for the gratification
of a temporary inclination;" and, "that to this circumstance much of his
misconduct is to be attributed?" Yet this, I believe, is a prevalent
impression. Those whose hearts have glowed, and whose eyes have filled
with delicious tears over the songs of Burns, have reason to be grateful
to Mr. Lockhart, and to a kindred spirit, Allan Cunningham, for the
generous feeling with which they have vindicated Burns and his Jean.
Such aspersions are not only injurious to the dead and cruel to the
living, but they do incalculable mischief:--they are food for the
flippant scoffer at all that makes the 'poetry of life.' They unsettle
in gentler bosoms all faith in love, in truth, in goodness--(alas, such
disbelief comes soon enough!) they chill and revolt the heart, and "take
the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love to set a blister
there."
"That Burns," says Lockhart, "ever sank into a toper, that his social
propensities ever interfered with the discharge of the duties of his
office, or that, in spite of some transitory follies, he ever ceased to
be a most affectionate husband--all these charges have been insinuated,
and they are all _false_. His aberrations of all kinds were occasional,
not systematic; they were the aberrations of a man whose moral sense was
never deadened--of one who encountered more temptations from without and
from within, than the immense majority of mankind, far from having to
contend against, are even able to imagine," and who died in his
thirty-sixth year, "ere he had reached that term of life up to which the
passions of many have proved too strong for the control of reason,
though their mortal career being regarded as a whole, they are honoured
as among the most virtuous of mankind."
We are told also of "the conjugal and maternal tenderness, the prudence,
and the unwearied forbearance of his Jean,"--and that she had much need
of forbearance is not denied; but he ever found in her affectionate
arms, pardon and peace, and a sweetness that only made the sense of his
occasional delinquencies sting the deeper.
She still survives to hear her name, her early love, and her youthful
charms, warbled in the songs of her native land. He, on whom she
bestowed her beauty and her maiden truth, dying, has left to her the
mantle of his fame. What though she be now a grandmother? to the fancy,
she can never grow old, or die. We can never bring her before our
thoughts but as the lovely, graceful country girl, "lightly tripping
among the wild flowers," and warbling, "Of a' the airs the win' can
blaw,"--and this, O women, is what genius can do for you! Wherever the
adventurous spirit of her countrymen transport them, from the spicy
groves of India to the wild banks of the Mississippi, the name of
Bonnie Jean is heard, bringing back to the wanderer sweet visions of
home, and of days of "Auld lang Syne." The peasant-girl sings it "at the
ewe milking," and the high-born fair breathes it to her harp and her
piano. As long as love and song shall survive, even those who have
learned to appreciate the splendid dramatic music of Germany and Italy,
who can thrill with rapture when Pasta
Queen and enchantress of the world of sound,
Pours forth her soul in song;
or when Sontag
Carves out her dainty voice as readily
Into a thousand sweet distinguished tones,
even _they_ shall still have a soul for the "Banks and braes o' bonnie
Doon," still keep a corner of their hearts for truth and nature--and
Burns's Bonnie Jean.
* * * * *
While my thoughts are yet with Burns,--his name before me,--my heart and
my memory still under that spell of power which his genius flings
around him, I will add a few words on the subject of his supernumerary
loves; for he has celebrated few imaginary heroines. Of these rustic
divinities, one of the earliest, and by far the most interesting, was
Mary Campbell, (his "Highland Mary,") the object of the deepest passion
Burns ever felt; the subject of some of his loveliest songs, and of the
elegy "to Mary in Heaven."
Whatever this young girl may have been in person or condition, she must
have possessed some striking qualities and charms to have inspired a
passion so ardent, and regrets so lasting, in a man of Burns's
character. She was not his first love, nor his second, nor his third;
for from the age of sixteen there seems to have been no interregnum in
his fancy. His heart, he says, was "completely tinder, and eternally
lighted up by some goddess or other." His acquaintance with Mary
Campbell began when he was about two or three and twenty: he was then
residing at Mossgiel, with his brother, and she was a servant on a
neighbouring farm. Their affection was reciprocal, and they were
solemnly plighted to each other. "We met," says Burns, "by appointment,
on the second Sunday in May, in a sequestered spot by the banks of the
Ayr, where we spent a day in taking a farewell, before she should embark
for the West Highlands, to arrange matters among her friends for our
projected change of life." "This adieu," say Mr. Cromek, "was performed
with all those simple and striking ceremonials which rustic sentiment
has devised to prolong tender emotions and to impose awe. The lovers
stood on each side of a small purling brook; they laved their hands in
the stream, and holding a Bible between them, pronounced their vows to
be faithful to each other." This very Bible has recently been discovered
in the possession of Mary Campbell's sister. On the boards of the Old
Testament is inscribed, in Burns's handwriting, "And ye shall not swear
by my name falsely, I am the Lord."--_Levit._ chap. xix. v. 12. On the
boards of the New Testament, "Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt
perform unto the Lord thine oaths."--_St. Matth._ chap. v. v. 33., and
his own name in both. Soon afterwards, disasters came upon him, and he
thought of going to try his fortune in Jamaica. Then it was, that he
wrote the simple, wild, but powerful lyric, "Will ye go to the Indies,
my Mary?"
Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,
And leave old Scotia's shore?
Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,
Across the Atlantic's roar?
O sweet grows the lime and the orange,
And the apple on the pine;
But all the charms o' the Indies
Can never equal thine.
I hae sworn by the heavens to my Mary,
I hae sworn by the heavens to be true;
And sae may the heavens forget me
When I forget my vow!
O plight me your faith, my Mary!
And plight me your lily-white hand;
O plight me your faith, my Mary,
Before I leave Scotia's strand.
We hae plighted our faith, my Mary,
In mutual affection to join;
And curst be the cause that shall part us--
The hour, and the moment of time!
As I have seen among the Alps the living stream rise, swelling and
bubbling, from some cleft in the mountain's breast, then, with a broken
and troubled impetuosity, rushing amain over all impediments,--then
leaping, at a bound, into the abyss below; so this song seems poured
forth out of the full heart, as if a gush of passion had broken forth,
that could not be restrained; and so the feeling seems to swell and
hurry through the lines, till it ends in one wild burst of energy and
pathos--
And curst be the cause that shall part us--
The hour, and the moment of time!
A few months after this "day of parting love," on the banks of the Ayr,
Mary Campbell set off from Inverary to meet her lover, as I suppose, to
take leave of him; for it should seem that no thoughts of a union could
then be indulged. Having reached Greenock, she was seized with a
malignant fever, which hurried her to the grave in a few days; so that
the tidings of her death reached her lover, before he could even hear of
her illness. How deep and terrible was the shock to his strong and
ardent mind,--how lasting the memory of this early love, is well known.
Years after her death, he wrote the song of "Highland Mary."[85]
O pale, pale now those rosy lips
I oft hae kiss'd so fondly!
And clos'd for aye the sparkling glance
That dwelt on me sae kindly!
And mouldering now in silent dust,
The heart that lo'ed me dearly;
But aye within my bosom's core
Shall live my Highland Mary.
The elegy to Mary in Heaven, was written about a year after his
marriage, on the anniversary of the day on which he heard of the death
of Mary Campbell. The account of the feelings and the circumstances
under which it was composed, was taken from the recital of Bonnie Jean
herself, and cannot be read without a thrill of emotion. "According to
her, Burns had spent that day, though labouring under a cold, in the
usual work of his harvest, and apparently in excellent spirits. But as
the twilight deepened, he appeared to grow 'very sad about something,'
and at length wandered out into the barn-yard, to which his wife, in her
anxiety for his health, followed him, entreating him, in vain, to
observe that frost had set in, and to return to his fire-side. On being
again and again requested to do so, he always promised compliance, but
still remained where he was, striding up and down slowly, and
contemplating the sky, which was singularly clear and starry. At last,
Mrs. Burns found him stretched on a heap of straw, with his eyes fixed
on a beautiful planet, 'that shone like another moon,' and prevailed on
him to come in."[86] He complied; and immediately on entering the house
wrote down, as they now stand, the stanzas "To Mary in Heaven."
Mary Campbell was a poor peasant-girl, whose life had been spent in
servile offices, who could just spell a verse in her Bible, and could
not write at all,--who walked barefoot to that meeting on the banks of
the Ayr, which her lover has recorded. But Mary Campbell will live to
memory while the music and the language of her country endure. Helen of
Greece and the Carthage Queen are not more surely immortalised than this
plebeian girl.--The scene of parting love, on the banks of the Ayr, that
spot where "the golden hours, on angel-wings," hovered over Burns and
his Mary, is classic ground; Vaucluse and Penshurst are not more
lastingly consecrated: and like the copy of Virgil, in which Petrarch
noted down the death of Laura, which many have made a pilgrimage but to
look on, even such a relic shall be the Bible of Highland Mary. Some
far-famed collection shall be proud to possess it; and many hereafter
shall gaze, with glistening eyes, on the handwriting of _him_,--who by
the mere power of truth and passion, shall live in all hearts to the end
of time.
* * * * *
Some other loves commemorated by Burns are not very interesting or
reputable. "The lassie wi' the lint white locks," the heroine of many
beautiful songs, was an erring sister, who, as she was the object of a
poet's admiration, shall be suffered to fade into a shadow. The subject
of the song,
Had we never lov'd sae kindly--
Had we never lov'd sae blindly--
Never met--or never parted--
We had ne'er been broken-hearted,
was also real, and I am afraid, a person of the same description. Of
these four lines, Sir Walter Scott has said, "that they were worth a
thousand romances;" and not only so, but they are in themselves a
complete romance. They are the _alpha_ and _omega_ of feeling; and
contain the essence of an existence of pain and pleasure, distilled
into one burning drop. Of almost all his songs, the heroines are real,
though we must not suppose he was in love with them all,--that were too
unconscionable; but he sometimes sought inspiration, and found it, where
he could not have hoped any farther boon. In one of his letters to Mr.
Thompson, for whose collection of Scottish airs he was then adapting
words, he says, "Whenever I want to be more than ordinary _in song_, to
be in some degree equal to your divine airs, do you imagine I fast and
pray for the celestial emanation?--_tout au contraire_. I have a
glorious recipe, the very one that, for his own use, was invented by the
divinity of healing and poetry, when erst he piped to the flocks of
Admetus,--I put myself on a regimen of admiring a fine woman."
Thus, the original blue eyes which inspired that sweet song, "Her ee'n
sae bonnie blue," belonged to a Miss Jeffreys, now married, and living
at New York. We owe "She's fair and she's false," to the fickleness of a
Miss Jane Stuart, who, it is said, jilted the poet's friend, Alexander
Cunningham.--"The bonnie wee thing," was a very little, very lovely
creature, a Miss Davies; and the song, it has been well said, is as
brief and as beautiful as the lady herself. The heroine of "O saw ye
bonnie Leslie," is now Mrs. Cumming of Logie: Mrs. Dugald Stewart,
herself a delightful poetess, inspired the pastoral song of Afton Water;
and every woman has an interest in "Green grow the Rushes." All the
compliments that were ever paid us by the other sex, in prose and verse,
may be summed up in Burns's line,
What signifies the life o' man, an' 't were na for the lasses O?
It were, however, an endless task to give a list of his heroines; and
those who are curious about the personal history of the poet, of which
his songs are "part and parcel," must be referred to higher and more
general sources of information.[87]
Burns used to say, after he had been introduced into society above his
own rank in life, that he saw nothing in the _gentlemen_ much superior
to what he had been accustomed to; but that a refined and elegant woman
was a being of whom he could have formed no previous idea. This, I
think, will explain, if it does not excuse, the characteristic freedom
of some of his songs. His love is ardent and sincere, and it is
expressed with great poetic power, and often with the most exquisite
pathos; but still it is the love of a peasant for a peasant, and he
wooes his rustic beauties in a style of the most entire equality and
familiarity. It is not the homage of one who waited, a suppliant, on the
throne of triumphant beauty. "He drew no magic circle of lofty and
romantic thought around those he loved, which could not be passed
without lowering them from stations little lower than the angels."[88]
Still, his faults against taste and propriety are far fewer and lighter
than might have been expected from his habits; and as he acknowledged
that he could have formed no idea of a woman refined by high breeding
and education, we cannot be surprised if he sometimes committed
solecisms of which he was scarcely aware. For instance, he met a young
lady (Miss Alexander, of Ballochmyle,) walking in her father's grounds,
and struck by her charms and elegance, he wrote in her honour his well
known song, "The lovely lass of Ballochmyle," and sent it to her. He was
astonished and offended that no notice was taken of it; but really, a
young lady, educated in a due regard for the _convenances_ and the
_bienseances_ of society, may be excused, if she was more embarrassed
than flattered by the homage of a poet, who talked, at the first glance,
of "clasping her to his bosom." It was rather precipitating things.
FOOTNOTES:
[81] "A Dame whom the graces have attired in witchcraft, and whom the
loves have armed with lightning--a fair one--herself the heroine of the
song, insists on the amendment--and dispute her commands if you
dare!"--_Burns's Letters._
[82] Lockhart's Life of Burns, p. 153.
[83] Life of Burns, p. 268.
[84] Life of Burns, p. 247.
[85] Beginning,--
"Ye banks and braes and streams around
The castle o' Montgomerie."
As the works of Burns are probably in the hands of all who will read
this little book, those who have not his finest passages by heart, can
easily refer to them. I felt it therefore superfluous to give at length
the songs alluded to.
[86] Lockhart's Life of Burns.
[87] To the "Reliques of Burns, by Cromek;" to the Edition of the
Scottish Songs, with notes, by Allan Cunningham; and to Lockhart's Life
of Burns.
[88] Allan Cunningham.
CHAPTER XII.
CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED.
MONTI AND HIS WIFE.
Monti, who is lately dead, will at length be allowed to take the place
which belongs to him among the great names of his country. A poet is ill
calculated to play the part of a politician; and the praise and blame
which have been so profusely and indiscriminately heaped on Monti while
living, must be removed by time and dispassionate criticism, before
justice can be done to him, either as a man or a poet. The mingled grace
and energy of his style obtained him the name of _il Dante grazioso_,
and he has left behind him something striking in every possible form of
composition,--lyric, dramatic, epic, and satirical.
Amid all the changes of his various life, and all the trying
vicissitudes of spirits--the wear and tear of mind which attend a poet
by profession, tasked to almost constant exertion, Monti possessed two
enviable treasures;--a lovely and devoted wife, with a soul which could
appreciate his powers and talents, and exult in his fame; and a daughter
equally amiable, and yet more beautiful and highly gifted. He has
immortalised both; and has left us delightful proofs of the charm and
the glory which poetry can throw round the purest and most hallowed
relations of domestic life.
When Monti was a young man at Rome, caressed by popes and nephews of
popes, and with the most brilliant ecclesiastical preferment opening
before him, all his views in life were at once _bouleverse_ by a
passion, which does sometimes in real life play the part assigned to it
in romance--trampling on interest and ambition, and mocking at
Cardinals' hats and tiaras. Monti fell into love, and fell out of the
good graces of his patrons: he threw off the habit of an _abbate_,[89]
married his Teresa, in spite of the world and fortune; and instead of an
aspiring priest, became a great poet.
Teresa Pichler was the daughter of Pichler, the celebrated gem engraver.
I have heard her described, by those who knew her in her younger years,
as one of the most beautiful creatures in the world. Brought up in the
studio of her father, in whom the spirit of ancient art seemed to have
revived for modern times, Teresa's mind as well as person had caught a
certain impress of antique grace, from the constant presence of
beautiful and majestic forms: but her favourite study was music, in
which she was a proficient; her voice and her harp made as many
conquests as her faultless figure and her bright eyes. After her
marriage she did not neglect her favourite art; and she, whose talent
had charmed Zingarelli and Guglielmi, was accustomed, in their hours of
domestic privacy, to soothe, to enchant, to inspire, her husband. Monti,
in one of his poems, has tenderly commemorated her musical powers. He
calls on his wife during a period of persecution, poverty and
despondency, to touch her harp, and, as she was wont, rouse his sinking
spirit, and unlock the source of nobler thoughts.
Stendi, dolce amor mio! sposa diletta!
A quell' arpa la man; che la soave,
Dolce fatica di tue dite aspetta.
Svegliami l'armonia, ch' entro le cave
Latebre alberga del sonoro legno,
E de' forti pensier volgi la chiave!
There is a resemblance in the _sentiment_ of these verses, to some
stanzas addressed by a living English poet to his wife;--she who, like
Monti's Teresa, can strike her harp, till, as a spirit caught in some
spell of his own teaching, music itself seems to flutter, imprisoned
among the chords,--to come at her will and breathe her thought, rather
than obey her touch!--
Once more, among those rich and golden strings,
Wander with thy white arm, dear Lady pale!
And when at last from thy sweet discord springs
The aerial music,--like the dreams that veil
Earth's shadows with diviner thoughts and things,
O let the passion and the time prevail!--
O bid thy spirit through the mazes run!
For music is like love, and must be won! &c.[90]
The Italian verses have great power and beauty; but the English lines
have the superiority, not in poetry only, but in rhythmical melody. They
fall on the ear like a strain from the harp which inspired them--full,
and rich, and thrilling sweet,--and not to be forgotten!
To return to Monti:--no man had more completely that temperament which
is supposed to accompany genius. He was fond, and devoted in his
domestic relations; but he was variable in spirits, ardent, restless,
and subject to fits of gloom. And how often must the literary disputes
and political _tracasseries_ in which he was engaged, have embittered
and irritated so susceptible a mind and temper! If his wife were at his
side to soothe him with her music, and her smiles, and her
tenderness,--it was well,--the cloud passed away. If she were absent,
every suffering seemed aggravated, and we find him--like one spoiled and
pampered, with attention and love,--yielding to an irritable
despondency, which even the presence of his children could not
alleviate.
Che piu ti resta a far per mio dispetto,
Sorte crudel? mia donna e lungi, e io privo,
De' suoi conforti in miserando aspetto
Egro qui giaccio, al' sofferir sol vivo![91]
But the most remarkable of all Monti's conjugal effusions, is a canzone
written a short time before his death, and when he was more than seventy
years of age. Nothing can be more affecting than the subdued tone of
melancholy tenderness, with which the grey-haired poet apostrophises her
who had been the love, the pride, the joy of his life for forty years.
In power and in poetry, this canzone will bear a comparison with many of
the more rapturous effusions of his youth. The occasion on which it was
composed is thus related in a note prefixed to it by the editor.[92]
When Monti was recovering from a long and dangerous illness, through
which he had been tenderly nursed by his wife and daughter, he
accompanied them "in villeggiatura," to a villa near Brianza, the
residence of a friend, where they were accustomed to celebrate the
birth-day of Madame Monti; and it was here that her husband, now
declining in years, weak from recent illness and accumulated
infirmities, addressed to her the poem which may be found in the recent
edition of his works; it begins thus tenderly and sweetly--
Donna! dell' alma mia parte piu cara!
Perche muta in pensosa atto mi guati?
E di segrete stille,
Rugiadose si fan le tue pupille? &c.
"Why, O thou dearer half of my soul, dost thou watch over me thus mute
and pensive? Why are thine eyes heavy with suppressed tears?" &c.
And when he reminds her touchingly, that his long and troubled life is
drawing to its natural close, and that she cannot hope to retain him
much longer, even by all her love and care,--he adds with a noble
spirit,--"Remember, that Monti cannot wholly die! think, O think! I
leave thee dowered with no obscure, no vulgar name! for the day shall
come, when, among the matrons of Italy, it shall be thy boast to
say,--"I was the love of Monti.""[93]
The tender transition to his daughter--
E tu del pari sventurata e cara mia figlia!
as alike unhappy and beloved, alludes to her recent widowhood. Costanza
Monti, who inherited no small portion of her fathers genius, and all her
mother's grace and beauty, married the Count Giulio Perticari of Pesaro,
a man of uncommon taste and talents, and an admired poet. He died in the
same year with Canova, to whom he had been a favourite friend and
companion: while his lovely wife furnished the sculptor with a model for
his ideal heads of vestals and poetesses. Those who saw the Countess
Perticari at Rome, such as she appeared seven or eight years ago, will
not easily forget her brilliant eyes, and yet more brilliant talents.
She, too, is a poetess. In her father's works may be found a little
canzone written by her about a year after the death of her husband, and
with equal tenderness and simplicity, alluding to her lonely state,
deprived of him who once encouraged and cultivated her talents, and
deserved her love.[94]
Vincenzo Monti died in October 1828:--his widow and his daughter reside,
I believe, at Milan.
FOOTNOTES:
[89] Worn by the young men who are intended for the Church.
[90] Barry Cornwall.
[91] Opere Varie v. iii. This sonnet to his wife was written when Monti
was ill at the house of his son-in-law, Count Perticari.
[92] Edit. 1826, vol. vi.
[93] In the original, Monti designates himself by an allusion to his
chef-d'oeuvre--"Del Cantor di Basville."
[94] Monti, Opere, vol. iii. p. 75.
CHAPTER XIII.
POETS AND BEAUTIES,
FROM CHARLES II. TO QUEEN ANNE.
Thus, then, it appears, that love, even the most ethereal and poetical,
does not always take flight "at sight of human ties;" and Pope wronged
the real delicacy of Heloise when he put this borrowed sentiment into
her epistle, making that conduct the result of perverted principle,
which, in _her_, was a sacrifice to extreme love and pride in its
object. It is not the mere idea of bondage which frightens away the
light-winged god;
The gentle bird feels no captivity
Within his cage, but sings and feeds his fill.[95]
It is when those bonds, which were first decreed in heaven
To keep two hearts together, which began
Their spring-time with one love,
are abused to vilest purposes:--to link together indissolubly,
unworthiness with desert, truth with falsehood, brutality with
gentleness; then indeed love is scared; his cage becomes a dungeon;--and
either he breaks away, with plumage all impaired,--or folds up his
many-coloured wings, and droops and dies.
But then it will be said, perhaps, that the splendour and the charm
which poetry has thrown over some of these pictures of conjugal
affection and wedded truth, are exterior and adventitious, or, at best,
short-lived:--the bands were at first graceful and flowery;--but sorrow
dewed them with tears, or selfish passions sullied them, or death tore
them asunder, or trampled them down. It may be so; but still I will aver
that what has been, _is_:--that there is a power in the human heart
which survives sorrow, passion, age, death itself.
Love I esteem more strong than age,
And truth more permanent than time.
For happiness, _c'est different!_ and for that bright and pure and
intoxicating happiness which we weave into our youthful visions, which
is of such stuff as dreams are made of,--to complain that this does not
last and wait upon us through life, is to complain that earth is
_earth_, not heaven. It is to repine that the violet does not outlive
the spring; that the rose dies upon the breast of June; that the grey
evening shuts up the eye of day, and that old age quenches the glow of
youth: for is not such the condition under which we exist? All I wished
to prove was, that the sacred tie which binds the sexes together, which
gives to man his natural refuge in the tenderness of woman, and to woman
her natural protecting stay in the right reason and stronger powers of
man, so far from being a chill to the imagination, as wicked wits would
tell us, has its poetical side. Let us look back for a moment on the
array of bright names and beautiful verse, quoted or alluded to in the
preceding chapters: what is there among the mercurial poets of Charles's
days, those notorious scoffers at decency and constancy, to compare with
them?--Dorset and Denham, and Sedley and Suckling, and Rochester,--"the
mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,"--with their smooth emptiness, and
sparkling common-places of artificial courtship, and total want of moral
sentiment, have degraded, not elevated the loves they sang. Could these
gallant fops rise up from their graves, and see themselves exiled with
contempt from every woman's toilet, every woman's library, every woman's
memory, they would choak themselves with their own periwigs, eat their
laced cravats, hang themselves in their own sword-knots!--"to be
discarded thence!"
Turn thy complexion there,
Thou simpering, smooth-lipp'd cherub, Coxcombry,
Ay, there, look grim as hell!
And such be the fate of all who dare profane the altar of beauty with
adulterate incense!
For wit is like the frail luxuriant vine,
Unless to virtue's prop it join;
Though it with beauteous leaves and pleasant fruit be crown'd,
It lies deform'd and rotting on the ground!
These lines are from Cowley,--a great name among the poets of those
days; but he has sunk into a _name_. We may repeat with Pope, "Who now
reads Cowley?" and this, not because he was licentious, but because,
with all his elaborate wit, and brilliant and uncommon thoughts, he is
as frigid as ice itself. "A little ingenuity and artifice," as Mrs.
Malaprop would say, is well enough; but Cowley, in his amatory poetry,
is all artifice. He coolly sat down to write a volume of love verses,
that he might, to use his own expression, "be free of his craft, as a
poet;" and in his preface, he protests "that his testimony should not be
taken against himself." Here was a poet, and a lover! who sets out by
begging his readers, in the first place, not to believe him. This was
like the weaver, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, who was so anxious to
assure his audience "that Pyramus was not killed indeed, and that he,
Pyramus, was not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver." But Cowley's amatory
verse disproves itself, without the help of a prologue. It is, in his
own phrase, "all sophisticate." Even his sparkling chronicle of
beauties,
Margaretta first possest,
If I remember well, my breast, &c.
is mere fancy, and in truth it is a pity. Cowley was once in love, after
his querulous melancholy fashion; but he never had the courage to avow
it. The lady alluded to in the last verse of the Chronicle, as
Eleonora, first of the name,
Whom God grant long to reign,
was the object of this luckless attachment. She afterwards married a
brother of Dr. Spratt, Bishop of Rochester,[96] who had not probably
half the poet's wit or fame, but who could love as well, and speak
better; and the gentle, amiable Cowley died an old batchelor.
These writers may have merit of a different kind; they may be read by
wits for the sake of their wit; but they have failed in the great object
of lyric poetry: they neither create sympathy for themselves; nor
interest, nor respect for their mistresses: they were not in
earnest;--and what woman of sense and feeling was ever touched by a
compliment which no woman ever inspired? or pleased, by being addressed
with the swaggering licence of a libertine? Who cares to inquire after
the originals of their Belindas and Clorindas--their Chloes, Delias, and
Phillises, with their pastoral names, and loves--that were any thing but
pastoral? There is not one among the flaunting coquettes, or profligate
women of fashion, sung by these gay coxcomb poets--
Those goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay,
Yet empty of all good wherein consists
Woman's domestic honour and chief praise,
who has obtained an interest in our memory, or a permanent place in the
history of our literature; not one, who would not be eclipsed by Bonnie
Jean, or Highland Mary! It is true, that the age produced several
remarkable women; a Lady Russell, that heroine of heroines! a Lady
Fanshawe;[97] a Mrs. Hutchinson; who needed no poet to trumpet forth
their praise: and others,--some celebrated for the possession of beauty
and talents, and too many notorious for the abuse of both. But there
were no poetical heroines, properly so called,--no Laura, no Geraldine,
no Saccharissa. Among the temporary idols of the day, (by which name we
shall distinguish those women whose beauty, rank, and patronage,
procured them a sort of poetical celebrity, very different from the halo
of splendour which love and genius cast round a chosen divinity,) there
are one or two who deserve to be particularised.
The first of these was Maria Beatrice d'Este, the daughter of the Duke
of Modena, second wife of James Duke of York, and afterwards his queen.
She was married, at the age of fifteen, to a profligate prince, as ugly
as his brother Charles, (without any of his captivating graces of figure
and manner,) and old enough to be her grandfather. She made the best of
wives to one of the most unamiable of men. All writers of all parties
are agreed, that slander itself, was disarmed by the unoffending
gentleness of her character; all are agreed too, on the subject of her
uncommon loveliness: she was quite an Italian beauty, with a tall,
dignified, graceful figure, regular features, and dark eyes, a
complexion rather pale and fair, and hair and eyebrows black as the
raven's wing: so that in personal graces, as in virtues, she fairly
justified the rapturous eulogies of all the poets of her time. Thus
Dryden:--
What awful charms on her fair forehead sit,
Dispensing what she never will admit;
Pleasing yet cold--like Cynthia's silver beam,
The people's wonder, and the poet's theme!
She captivated hearts almost as fast as James the Second lost them;
And Envy did but look on her and died![98]
Her fall from the throne she so adorned; her escape with her infant son,
under the care of the Duc de Lauzun;[99] her conduct during her
retirement at St. Germains, with a dull court, and a stupid bigoted
husband; are all matters of history, and might have inspired, one would
think, better verses than were ever written upon her. Lord Lansdown
exclaims, with an enthusiasm which was at least disinterested--
O happy James! content thy mighty mind!
Grudge not the world, for still thy Queen is kind,--
To lie but at whose feet, more glory brings,
Than 'tis to tread on sceptres and on kings![100]
Anne Killegrew, who has been immortalised by Dryden, in the ode,[101]
Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies!
does not seem to have possessed any talents or acquirements which would
render her _very_ remarkable in these days; though in her own time she
was styled "a grace for beauty and a muse for wit." Her youth, her
accomplishments, her captivating person, her station at court, (as maid
of honour to Maria d'Este, then Duchess of York,) and her premature
death at the age of twenty-four, all conspired to render her interesting
to her contemporaries; and Dryden has given her a fame which cannot die.
The stanza in this ode, in which the poet, for himself and others,
pleads guilty of having "made prostitute and profligate the muse,"
Whose harmony was first ordain'd above
For tongues of angels and for hymns of love!
--the sudden turn in praise of the young poetess, whose verse flowed
pure as her own mind and heart; and the burst of enthusiasm--
Let this thy vestal, heaven! atone for all!
are exceedingly beautiful. His description of her skill in painting both
landscape and portraits, would answer for a Claude, or a Titian. We are
a little disappointed to find, after all this pomp and prodigality of
praise, that Anne Killegrew's paintings were mediocre; and that her
poetry has sunk, not undeservedly, into oblivion. She died of the
small-pox in 1685.
The famous Tom Killegrew, jester (by courtesy) to Charles the Second,
was her uncle.
There was also the young Duchess of Ormond, (Lady Mary Somerset,
daughter of the Duke of Beaufort.) She married into a family which had
been, for three generations, the patrons and benefactors of Dryden; and
never was patronage so richly repaid. To this Duchess of Ormond, Dryden
has dedicated the Tale of Palemon and Arcite, in an opening address full
of poetry and compliment;--happily, both justified and merited by the
object.
Lady Hyde, afterwards Countess of Clarendon and Rochester, was in her
time a favourite theme of gay and gallant verse; but she maintained with
her extreme beauty and gentleness of deportment, a dignity of conduct
which disarmed scandal, and kept presumptuous wits as well as
presumptuous fops at a distance. Lord Lansdown has crowned her with
praise, very pointed and elegant, and seems to have contrasted her at
the moment, with his coquettish Mira, Lady Newburgh.
Others, by guilty artifice and arts,
And promised kindness, practise on our hearts;
With expectation blow the passion up;
_She_ fans the fire without one gale of hope.[102]
Lady Hyde was the daughter of Sir William Leveson Gower, (ancestor to
the Marquis of Stafford,) and mother of that Lord Cornbury, who has been
celebrated by Pope and Thomson.
The second daughter of this lovely and amiable woman, lady Catherine
Hyde, was Prior's famous Kitty,
Beautiful and young,
And wild as colt untam'd,
the "female Phaeton," who obtained mamma's chariot for a day, to set the
world on fire.
Shall I thumb holy books, confin'd
With Abigails forsaken?
Kitty's for other things design'd,
Or I am much mistaken.
Must Lady Jenny frisk about,
And visit with her cousins?
At balls must she make all this rout,
And bring home hearts by dozens?
What has she better, pray, than I?
What hidden charms to boast,
That all mankind for her must die,
Whilst I am scarce a toast?
Dearest Mamma! for once, let me
Unchain'd my fortune try:
I'll have my Earl as well as she,
Or know the reason why.
Fondness prevail'd, Mamma gave way:
Kitty, at heart's desire,
Obtain'd the chariot for a day,
And set the world on fire!
Kitty not only set the world on fire, but more than accomplished her
magnanimous resolution to have an Earl as well as her sister, Lady
Jenny.[103] She married the Duke of Queensbury; and as _that_ Duchess of
Queensbury, who was the friend and patroness of Gay, is still farther
connected with the history of our poetical literature. Pope paid a
compliment to her beauty, in a well-known couplet, which is more refined
in the application than in the expression:--
If Queensbury to strip there's no compelling,
'Tis from a handmaid we must take a Helen.
She was an amiable, exemplary woman, and possessed that best and only
preservative of youth and beauty,--a kind, cheerful disposition and
buoyant spirits. When she walked at the coronation of George the Third,
she was still so strikingly attractive, that Horace Walpole handed to
her the following impromptu, written on a leaf of his pocket-book,
To many a Kitty, Love, his car,
Would for a day engage;
But Prior's Kitty, ever fair,
Obtained it for an age!
She is also alluded to in Thomson's Seasons.
And stooping thence to Ham's embowering walks,
Beneath whose shades, in spotless peace retir'd,
With her the pleasing partner of his heart,
The worthy Queensb'ry yet laments his Gay.--_Summer._
The Duchess of Queensbury died in 1777.[104]
Two other women, who lived about the same time, possess a degree of
celebrity which, though but a sound--a name--rather than a feeling or an
interest, must not pass unnoticed; more particularly as they will
farther illustrate the theory we have hitherto kept in view. I allude to
"Granville's Mira," and "Prior's Chloe."
For the fame of the first, a single line of Pope has done more than all
the verses of Lord Lansdown: it is in the Epistle to Jervas the
painter--
With Zeuxis' Helen, thy Bridgewater vie,
And these be sung, till Granville's Mira die!
Now, "Granville's Mira" would have been _dead_ long ago, had she not
been preserved in some material more precious and lasting than the
poetry of her noble admirer: she shines, however, "embalmed in the lucid
amber" of Pope's lines; and we not only wonder how she got there, but
are tempted to inquire who she was, or, if ever she was at all.
Granville's Mira was Lady Frances Brudenel, third daughter of the Earl
of Cardigan. She was married very young to Livingstone, Earl of
Newburgh; and Granville's first introduction to her must have taken
place soon after her marriage, in 1690: he was then about twenty,
already distinguished for that elegance of mind and manner, which has
handed him down to us as "Granville the polite." He joined the crowd of
Lady Newburgh's adorers; and as some praise, and some lucky lines had
persuaded him that he was a poet, he chose to consecrate his verse to
this fashionable beauty.
In all the mass of poetry, or rather rhyme, addressed to Lady Newburgh,
there is not a passage,--not a single line which can throw an interest
round her character; all we can make out is, that she was extremely
beautiful; that she sang well; and that she was a most finished,
heartless coquette. Thus her lover has pictured her:
Lost in a labyrinth of doubts and joys,
Whom now her smiles revived, her scorn destroys;
She will, and she will not, she grants, denies,
Consents, retracts; advances, and then flies.
Approving and rejecting in a breath,
Now proffering mercy, now presenting death!
She led Granville on from year to year, till the death of her first
husband, Lord Newburgh. He then presented himself among the suitors for
her hand, confiding, it seems, in former encouragement or promises; but
Lady Newburgh had played the same despicable game with others: she had
no objection to the poetical admiration of an accomplished young man of
fashion, who had rendered her an object of universal attention, by his
determined pursuit and tuneful homage, and who was then the admired of
all women. She thought, like the coquette, in one of Congreve's
comedies,
If there's delight in love, 'tis when I see
The heart that others bleed for--bleed for me!
But when free to choose, she rejected him and married Lord Bellew. Her
coquetry with Granville had been so notorious, that this marriage caused
a great sensation at the time and no little scandal.
Rumour is loud, and every voice proclaims
Her violated faith and conscious flames.
The only catastrophe, however, which her falsehood occasioned, was the
production of a long elegy, in imitation of Theocritus, which concludes
Lord Lansdown's amatory effusions. He afterwards married Lady Anne
Villiers, with whom he lived happily: after a union of more than twenty
years, they died within a few days of each other, and they were buried
together.
Lady Newburgh left a daughter by her first husband,[105] and a son and
daughter by Lord Bellew: she lived to survive her beauty, to lose her
admirers, and to be the object in her old age of the most gross and
unmeasured satire; the flattery of a lover elevated her to a divinity,
and the malice of a wit, whom she had ill-treated, degraded her into a
fury and a hag--with about as much reason.
Prior's Chloe, the "nut-brown maid," was taken from the opposite
extremity of society, but could scarce have been more worthless. She was
a common woman of the lowest description, whose real name was, I
believe, Nancy Derham,--but it is not a matter of much importance.
Prior's attachment to this woman, however unmerited, was very sincere.
For her sake he quitted the high society into which his talents and his
political connexions had introduced him; and for her, he neglected, as
he tells us--
Whate'er the world thinks wise and grave,
Ambition, business, friendship, news,
My useful books and serious muse,
to bury himself with her in some low tavern for weeks together. Once
when they quarrelled, she ran away and carried off his plate; but even
this could not shake his constancy: at his death he left her all he
possessed, and she--his Chloe--at whose command and in whose honour he
wrote his "Henry and Emma,"--married a cobler![106] Such was Prior's
Chloe.
Is it surprising that the works of a poet once so popular, should now be
banished from a Lady's library?--a banishment from which all his
sprightly wit cannot redeem him.--But because Prior's love for this
woman was real, and that he was really a man of feeling and genius,
though debased by low and irregular habits, there are some sweet
touches scattered through his poetry, which show how strong was the
illusion in his fancy:--as in "Chloe Jealous."
Reading thy verse, "who cares," said I,
"If here or there his glances flew?
O free for ever be his eye,
Whose heart to me is always true!"
And in his "Answer to Chloe Jealous."
O when I am wearied with wandering all day,
To thee, my delight, in the evening I come.
No matter what beauties I saw in my way,
They were but my visits, but thou art my home!
The address to Chloe, with which the "Nut-brown Maid" commences,
Thou, to whose eyes I bend, &c.
will ever be admired, and the poem will always find readers among the
young and gentle-hearted, who have not yet learned to be critics or to
tremble at the fiat of Dr. Johnson. It is perhaps one of the most
popular poems in the language.
FOOTNOTES:
[95] Spenser.
[96] Spence's Anecdotes, Sing. edit.
[97] See her beautiful Memoirs, recently published.
[98] Dryden's Works, by Scott, vol. xi, p. 32.
[99] The Duc de Lauzun of Mademoiselle de Montpensier.
[100] Granville's Works,--"Progress of Beauty".
[101] "To the pious memory of the accomplished young lady, Mrs. Anne
Killigrew, excellent in the two sister arts of poesy and painting."
[102] See the lines on Lady Hyde's picture in Granville's poems.
[103] Lady Jane Hyde married the Earl of Essex.
[104] On the death of Gay, Swift had addressed to the Duchess a letter
of condolence in his usual cynical style. The Duchess replied with
feeling--"I differ from you, that it is possible to comfort one's self
for the loss of friends, as one does for the loss of money. I think I
could live on very little, nor think myself poor, nor be thought so; but
a _little_ friendship could never satisfy one. In almost every thing but
friends, another of the same name may do as well; but _friend_ is more
than a name, _if_ it be any thing."--This is true; but, as Touchstone
says--"much virtue in _if_!"
[105] Charlotte, Countess of Newburgh in her own right, from whom the
present Earl of Newburgh is descended.
[106] Spence's Anecdotes.
CHAPTER XIV.
STELLA AND VANESSA.
It is difficult to consider Swift as a poet. So many unamiable,
disagreeable, unpoetical ideas are connected with his name, that, great
as he was in fame and intellectual vigour, he seems as misplaced in the
temple of the muses as one of his own yahoos. But who has not heard of
"Swift's Stella?" and of Cadenus and Vanessa? Though all will confess
that the two devoted women, who fell victims to his barbarous
selfishness, and whose names are eternally linked with the history of
our literature, are far more interesting, from their ill-bestowed,
ill-requited and passionate attachment to _him_, than by any thing he
ever sung or said of _them_.[107] Nay, his longest, his most elaborate,
and his most admired poem--the avowed history of one of his
attachments--with its insipid tawdry fable, its conclusion, in which
nothing is concluded, and the inferences we are left to draw from it,
would have given but an ignominious celebrity to poor Vanessa, if truth
and time, and her own sweet nature, had not redeemed her.