Thus walke I, lyk a restèlees caityf, restless wretch
And on the ground, which is my modres gate, mother’s
I knokke with my staf, both erly and late,
And seyè, “levè moder, leet me in! say, “Dear mother
Lo, how I vanish, flesh, and blood, and skin! waste away”
Allas! whan shul my bonès be at reste?”
CHAUCER (1340-1400) (_The Pardoner’s Tale_).
* * * * *
Like a shadow thrown
Softly and lightly from a passing cloud,
Death fell upon him, while reclined he lay
For noontide solace on the summer grass,
The warm lap of his mother earth.
WORDSWORTH (_Excursion_ VII, 286).
* * * * *
And O green bounteous Earth!
Bacchante Mother! stern to those
Who live not in thy heart of mirth;
Death shall I shrink from, loving thee?
Into the breast that gives the rose
Shall I with shuddering fall?
G. MEREDITH (_Ode to the Spirit of Earth in
Autumn_).
* * * * *
THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river....
“This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river,)
“The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.”
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
E. B. BROWNING
* * * * *
There is little merit in inventing a happy idea, or attractive situation,
so long as it is only the author’s voice which we hear. As a being whom
we have called into life by magic arts, as soon as it has received
existence, acts independently of the master’s impulse, so the poet
creates his persons, and then watches and relates what they do and
say. Such creation is poetry in the literal sense of the term, and its
possibility is an unfathomable enigma. The gushing fullness of speech
belongs to the poet, and it flows from the lips of each of his magic
beings in the thoughts and words peculiar to its nature.
NIEBUHR (_Letters_, &c., Vol. III, 196).
* * * * *
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the
determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.”
The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a
fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,
awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the
colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach
or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity
and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results;
but, when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and
the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is
probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
SHELLEY (_A Defence of Poetry_).
* * * * *
Who would loose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night?
MILTON (_Paradise Lost_ ii., 146)
“Loose”—by committing suicide.
* * * * *
When the white block of marble shines so solid and so costly, who
remembers that it was once made up of decaying shell and rotting bones
and millions of dying insect-lives, pressed to ashes ere the rare stone
was?
(_Chandos_).
* * * * *
The madness that starves and is silent for an idea is an insanity,
scouted by the world and the gods. For it is an insanity
unfruitful—except to the future. And for the future, who cares—save those
madmen themselves?
* * * * *
... The gods that most of all have pity on man, the gods of the Night and
of the Grave.
* * * * *
Our eyes are set to the light, but our feet are fixed in the mire.
(_Folle-Farine_).
* * * * *
“If the cucumber be bitter, throw it away,” says Antoninus: do the same
with a thought.... There is no cucumber so heavy that one cannot throw it
over some wall.
OUIDA (_Tricotrin_).
Antoninus, 120-180 A.D., the Roman emperor and Stoic
philosopher, usually known by his first two names Marcus
Aurelius, is the author of the well-known _Meditations_. The
quotation is from Bk. VIII., “The gourd is bitter; drop it,
then! There are brambles in the path; then turn aside! It is
enough. Do not go on to argue, Why pray have these things a
place in the world?” etc.
These quotations from Ouida may serve to illustrate the saying
of Pliny the Elder, “No book is so bad but some good may be
got out of it” (Pliny’s Letters, III., 10)—a saying which was
no doubt true until printing let loose on the world such a
multitude of worthless writers.
* * * * *
WHEN WE ALL ARE ASLEEP
When He returns, and finds the World so drear—
All sleeping,—young and old, unfair and fair,
Will He stoop down and whisper in each ear,
“Awaken!” or for pity’s sake forbear,—
Saying, “How shall I meet their frozen stare
Of wonder, and their eyes so full of fear?
How shall I comfort them in their despair,
If they cry out, ‘Too late! let us sleep here’?”
Perchance He will not wake us up, but when
He sees us look so happy in our rest,
Will murmur, “Poor dead women and dead men!
Dire was their doom, and weary was their quest.
Wherefore awake them into life again?
Let them sleep on untroubled—it is best.”
R. BUCHANAN.
* * * * *
CHORUS
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And life, the shadow of death.
And the high gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years;
And froth and drift of the sea;
And dust of the labouring earth;
And bodies of things to be
In the houses of death and of birth;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashioned with loathing and love,
With life before and after
And death beneath and above,
For a day and a night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man.
From the winds of the north and the south
They gathered as unto strife;
They breathed upon his mouth,
They filled his body with life;
Eyesight and speech they wrought
For the veils of the soul therein,
A time for labour and thought,
A time to serve and to sin;
They gave him light in his ways,
And love, and a space for delight,
And beauty and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.
His speech is a burning fire;
With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.
SWINBURNE (_Atalanta in Calydon_).
* * * * *
She (the ship of Odysseus) came to the limits of the world, to the deep
flowing Oceanus. There is the land and the city of the Cimmerians,
shrouded in mist and cloud, and never does the shining sun look down on
them with his rays, neither when he climbs up the starry heavens, nor
when again he turns earthward from the firmament, but deadly night is
outspread over miserable mortals. Thither we came and ran the ship ashore
and took out the sheep; but for our part we held on our way along the
stream of Oceanus, till we came to the place which Circe had declared to
us.
There Perimedes and Eurylochus held the victims, but I drew my sharp
sword from my thigh, and dug a pit, as it were a cubit in length and
breadth, and about it poured a drink-offering to all the dead, first with
mead and thereafter with sweet wine and for the third time with water....
When I had besought the tribes of the dead with vows and prayers, I took
the sheep and cut their throats over the trench, and the dark blood
flowed forth, and lo, the spirits of the dead that be departed gathered
them from out of Erebus. Brides and youths unwed, and old men of many
and evil days, and tender maidens with griefs yet fresh at heart; and
many there were, wounded with bronze-shod spears, men slain in fight with
their bloody mail about them. And these many ghosts flocked together from
every side about the trench with a wondrous cry, and pale fear gat hold
on me.... I drew the sharp sword from my thigh and sat there, suffering
not the strengthless heads of the dead to draw nigh to the blood, ere I
had word of Teiresias....
Anon came up the soul of my mother dead, Anticleia, the daughter of
Autolycus, the great-hearted, whom I left alive when I departed for
sacred Ilios. At the sight of her I wept, and was moved with compassion,
yet even so, for all my sore grief, I suffered her not to draw nigh to
the blood, ere I had word of Teiresias.
Anon came the soul of Theban Teiresias, with a golden sceptre in his
hand, and he knew me and spake unto me: “Son of Laertes of the seed
of Zeus, Odysseus of many devices, what seekest thou _now_, wretched
man—wherefore hast thou left the sunlight and come hither to behold the
dead and a land desolate of joy? Nay, hold off from the ditch and draw
back thy sharp sword, that I may drink of the blood and tell thee sooth.”
So spake he, and I put up my silver-studded sword into the sheath, and
when he had drunk the dark blood, even then did the noble seer speak unto
me....
ODYSSEY, Bk. XI. (_Butcher & Lang’s translation_).
In this weird scene Odysseus is summoning the shade of
Teiresias from the under-world. He has with his sword to keep
off the host of spirits, including that of his own mother, whom
the spilt blood has attracted—and the hero is himself terrified
at the awful spectacle.
What adds to the interest of such a passage is that to the
ancient Greeks this was no imaginary picture but a statement of
actual facts. It will be observed that the dead live in a dark
land, “desolate of joy.”
To the little-travelled Greeks the ocean was a _river_.
* * * * *
For—see your cellarage!
There are forty barrels with Shakespeare’s brand
Some five or six are abroach: the rest
Stand spigoted, fauceted. Try and test
What yourselves call best of the very best!
How comes it that still untouched they stand?
Why don’t you try tap, advance a stage
With the rest in cellarage?
For—see your cellarage!
There are four big butts of Milton’s brew,
How comes it you make old drips and drops
Do duty, and there devotion stops?
Leave such an abyss of malt and hops
Embellied in butts which bungs still glue?
You hate your bard! A fig for your rage!
Free him from cellarage!
R. BROWNING (_Epilogue to Pacchiarotto and
other Poems_).
* * * * *
Though the seasons of man full of losses
Make empty the years full of youth,
If but one thing be constant in crosses,
Change lays not her hand upon truth;
Hopes die, and their tombs are for token
That the grief as the joy of them ends
Ere time that breaks all men has broken
The faith between friends.
Though the many lights dwindle to one light,
There is help if the heaven has one;
Though the skies be discrowned of the sunlight
And the earth dispossessed of the sun,
They have moonlight and sleep for repayment,
When, refreshed as a bride and set free,
With stars and sea-winds in her raiment,
Night sinks on the sea.
SWINBURNE (_Dedication, 1865_).
It is hardly possible for a younger generation to realize the
almost intoxicating effect produced upon us by Swinburne’s new
melodies. Although the _Poems and Ballads_ were largely erotic,
the curious fact is that we were too much carried away by the
beauty and swing of his verse to trouble about the sensual
element in it. That element was in itself an _artificial_
production and not a reflection of the poet’s own emotions, for
he was free from sensuality. It was with us more a question of
_music_. Swinburne himself preferred a musical word or line
to one that would more aptly express his meaning; and in the
“Dedication,” from which the above verses are quoted, several
lines will not bear analysis. However, this was one of our
favourites among his poems.
O daughters of dreams and of stories
That life is not wearied of yet,
Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
Félise and Yolande and Juliette,
Shall I find you not still, shall I miss you,
When sleep, that is true or that seems,
Comes back to me hopeless to kiss you,
O daughters of dreams?
They are past as a slumber that passes,
As the dew of a dawn of old time;
More frail than the shadows on glasses,
More fleet than a wave or a rhyme.
As the waves after ebb drawing seaward,
When their hollows are full of the night,
So the birds that flew singing to me-ward
Recede out of sight.
He asks that his wild “storm-birds of passion” may find a home
in our calmer world:—
In their wings though the sea-wind yet quivers,
Will you spare not a space for them there
Made green with the running of rivers
And gracious with temperate air;
In the fields and the turreted cities,
That cover from sunshine and rain
Fair passions and bountiful pities
And loves without stain?
In a land of clear colours and stories,
In a region of shadowless hours,
Where earth has a garment of glories
And a murmur of musical flowers;
In woods where the spring half uncovers
The flush of her amorous face,
By the waters that listen for lovers
For these is there place?
Though the world of your hands be more gracious
And lovelier in lordship of things
Clothed round by sweet art with the spacious
Warm heaven of her imminent wings,
Let them enter, unfledged and nigh fainting,
For the love of old loves and lost times;
And receive in your palace of painting
This revel of rhymes.
Then come the final verses quoted above. These are somewhat
detached in meaning from the rest, and form a sort of _Envoi_:
“Whatever changes or passes, there is always some beautiful
thing that survives.”
As might be expected Swinburne was much parodied (and indeed
in the _Heptalogia_ and in the poems lately published he
parodied himself). The above poem has been cleverly parodied
by a lawyer, Sir Frederick Pollock. (Although parodies go as
far back as the Fifth Century B.C. I know of no other lawyer
who, _qua_ lawyer, has successfully taken a hand in the game.)
In his parody Pollock’s subject was the great changes effected
by the Judicature Act, when the old Courts of Common Law,
Chancery, and others were consolidated into one Supreme Court,
and the various classes of business assigned to different
“Divisions.” Also owing to changes in procedure, much of the
old technical learning became obsolete. His last verse is as
follows (compare with the second verse quoted above):
Though the Courts that were manifold dwindle
To divers Divisions of one,
And no fire from your face may rekindle
The light of old learning undone,
We have suitors and briefs for our payment,
While, so long as a Court shall hold pleas,
We talk moonshine with wigs for our raiment,
Not sinking the fees.
* * * * *
Wulf died, as he had lived, a heathen. Placidia, who loved him well, as
she loved all righteous and noble souls, had succeeded once in persuading
him to accept baptism. Adolf himself acted as one of his sponsors; and
the old warrior was in the act of stepping into the font, when he turned
suddenly to the bishop and asked, ‘Where were the souls of his heathen
ancestors?’ “In hell,” replied the worthy prelate. Wulf drew back from
the font, and threw his bearskin cloak around him—“He would prefer,
if Adolf had no objection, to go to his own people.” And so he died
unbaptized, and went to his own place.
CHARLES KINGSLEY (_Hypatia_).
This story appears in several old chronicles (_Notes and
Queries, 7th Ser. X, 33_), but the name should be Radbod. He
was Duke or Chief of the Frisians, and the episode probably
occurred in Heligoland, from which island he ruled his people.
* * * * *
I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends
who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything
is less than the best; and I found that I begin at the other extreme,
expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods....
In the morning I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes and mother,
Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old
devil not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions,
we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis.
Everything good is on the highway.
R. W. EMERSON (Essay on _Experience_).
* * * * *
The bee draws forth from fruit and flower
Sweet dews, that swell his golden dower;
But never injures by his kiss
Those who have made him rich in bliss.
The moth, though tortured by the flame,
Still hovers round and loves the same:
Nor is his fond attachment less:
“Alas!” he whispers, “can it be,
Spite of my ceaseless tenderness,
That I am doomed to death by thee?”
AZY EDDIN ELMOGADESSI (_L. S. Costello’s
translation_).
* * * * *
A pine-tree stands all lonely
On a northern hill-top bare,
And, wrapped in its snowy mantle,
It slumbers peacefully there.
Its dreams are of a palm-tree,
Far-off in the morning land,
Which in lone silence sorrows
On a burning, rocky strand.
HEINRICH HEINE (1797-1856)
* * * * *
Many a time
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake.
... Then in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
WORDSWORTH (_The Prelude_, Bk. V).
* * * * *
THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE KNIFE GRINDER
FRIEND OF HUMANITY.
“Needy Knife-grinder! whither are you going?
Rough is the road, your wheel is out of order;
Bleak blows the blast—your hat has got a hole in’t,
So have your breeches!
“Weary Knife-grinder! little think the proud ones,
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike-road,
what hard work ’tis crying all day ‘Knives and
Scissors to grind O!’”
“Tell me, Knife-grinder, how you came to grind knives?
Did some rich man tyrannically use you?
Was it the squire? or parson of the parish?
Or the attorney?
“Was it the squire, for killing of his game? or
Covetous parson, for his tithes distraining?
Or roguish lawyer, made you lose your little
All in a lawsuit?
(“Have you not read the ‘Rights of Man,’ by Tom Paine?)
Drops of compassion tremble on my eyelids,
Ready to fall, as soon as you have told your
Pitiful story.”
KNIFE-GRINDER.
“Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir,
Only last night a-drinking at the Chequers,
This poor old hat and breeches, as you see, were
Torn in a scuffle.
“Constables came up, for to take me into
Custody; they took me before the justice;
Justice Oldmixon put me in the parish-
-stocks for a vagrant.
“I should be glad to drink your Honour’s health in
A pot of beer, if you will give me sixpence;
But for my part, I never love to meddle
With politics, sir.”
FRIEND OF HUMANITY.
“_I_ give thee sixpence! I will see thee damn’d first—
Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to vengeance—
Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded,
Spiritless outcast!”
(_Kicks the Knife-grinder, overturns his wheel, and exit in a transport
of Republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy._)
GEORGE CANNING (_The Anti-Jacobin_).
Written in Sapphics and said to be a parody of a poem of
Southey’s, which was afterwards suppressed.
* * * * *
I loved him, but my reason bade prefer
Duty to love, reject the tempter’s bribe
Of rose and lily when each path diverged,
And either I must pace to life’s far end
As love should lead me, or, as duty urged,
Plod the worn causeway arm-in-arm with friend....
But deep within my heart of hearts there hid
Ever the confidence, amends for all,
That heaven repairs what wrong earth’s journey did,
When love from life-long exile comes at call.
R. BROWNING (_Bifurcation_, 1876)
The lady prefers Duty to Love, but she will remain constant
to her lover, and reunion with him in heaven will make amends
for all. (In the remainder of the poem Browning puts the case
of the lover who, although deserted, is expected to remain
constant through life—and who falls. The lady had disobeyed
Love, because of the hardship and trouble that would follow,
and Browning, whose own married life had been a most happy one,
says this was no excuse.)
* * * * *
We are scratched, or we are bitten
By the pets to whom we cling;
Oh, my Love she is a kitten,
And my heart’s a ball of string.
AUTHOR NOT TRACED.
* * * * *
Some man of quality
Who—breathing musk from lace-work and brocade,
His solitaire amid the flow of frill,
Powdered peruke on nose, and bag at back,
And cane dependent from the ruffled wrist.—
Harangues in silvery and selectest phrase,
’Neath waxlight in a glorified saloon
Where mirrors multiply the girandole.
R. BROWNING (_The Ring and the Book, I_).
This and the next five quotations are word-pictures (see p. 85).
* * * * *
“Oh, what are you waiting for here, young man?
What are you looking for over the bridge?”
A little straw hat with streaming blue ribbons;
—And here it comes dancing over the bridge!
JAMES THOMSON (B.V.) (_Sunday up the River_).
* * * * *
Down in yonder greenè field
There lies a knight slain under his shield;
His hounds they lie down at his feet,
So well do they their master keep.
ANON. (_The Three Ravens_).
* * * * *
When we cam’ in by Glasgow toun,
We were a comely sight to see;
My Love was clad in the black velvet,
And I mysel’ in cramasie. crimson
ANON. (_O waly, waly, up the bank_).
* * * * *
They see the Heroes
Sitting in the dark ship
On the foamless, long-heaving,
Violet sea,
At sunset nearing
The Happy Islands.
M. ARNOLD (_The Strayed Reveller_).
* * * * *
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
COLERIDGE (_The Ancient Mariner_).
The above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 85.)
* * * * *
We take cunning for a sinister or crooked wisdom; and certainly there is
a great difference between a cunning man and a wise man—not only in point
of honesty, but in point of ability.
BACON.
* * * * *
Cunning, being the ape of wisdom, is the most distant from it that can
be. And as an ape for the likeness it has to a man—wanting what really
should make him so—is by so much the uglier, cunning is only the want of
understanding, which, because it cannot compass its ends by direct ways,
would do it by a trick and circumvention.
JOHN LOCKE (_Some Thoughts Concerning Education_, 1693).
* * * * *
A rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool _in circumbendibus_.
S. T. COLERIDGE.
* * * * *
It is only by a wide comparison of facts that the wisest full-grown men
can distinguish well-rolled barrels from more supernal thunder.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Mill on the Floss_).
* * * * *
Let its teaching (the teaching of scientific and other books of
information, the “literature of knowledge”) be even partially revised,
let it be expanded, nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better
order, and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the
literature of power (poetry and what is generally known as _literature_),
surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men.... The
Iliad, the Prometheus of Æschylus—the Othello or King Lear—the Hamlet
or Macbeth—and the Paradise Lost, are triumphant for ever, as long as
the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They
never _can_ transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce _these_ in
new forms, or variations, even if in some things they should be improved,
would be to plagiarize. A good steam engine is properly superseded by a
better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor
a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo.
DE QUINCEY (_Alexander Pope_).