Preface by the Editor.
Upon the death of Mr. Allston, it was determined, by those who had
charge of his papers, to prepare his biography and correspondence, and
publish them with his writings in prose and verse; a work which would
have occupied two volumes of about the same size with the present. A
delay has unfortunately occurred in the preparation of the biography
and correspondence; and, as there have been frequent calls for a
publication of his poems, and of the Lectures on Art he is known to
have written, it has been thought best to give them to the public in
the present form, without awaiting the completion of the whole
design. It may be understood, however, that, when the biography
and correspondence are published, it will be in a volume precisely
corresponding with the present, so as to carry out the original
design.
I will not anticipate the duty of the biographer by an extended notice
of the life of Mr. Allston; but it may be interesting to some readers
to know the outline of his life, and the different circumstances under
which the several pieces in this volume were written.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON was born at Charleston, in South Carolina, on the
5th of November, 1779, of a family distinguished in the history of
that State and of the country, being a branch of a family of the
baronet rank in the titled commonalty of England. Like most young
men of the South in his position at that period, he was sent to New
England to receive his school and college education. His school days
were passed at Newport, in Rhode Island, under the charge of Mr.
Robert Rogers. He entered Harvard College in 1796, and graduated in
1800. While at school and college, he developed in a marked manner
a love of nature, music, poetry, and painting. Endowed with senses
capable of the nicest perceptions, and with a mental and moral
constitution which tended always, with the certainty of a physical
law, to the beautiful, the pure, and the sublime, he led what many
might call an ideal life. Yet was he far from being a recluse, or from
being disposed to an excess of introversion. On the contrary, he was
a popular, high-spirited youth, almost passionately fond of society,
maintaining an unusual number of warm friendships, and unsurpassed by
any of the young men of his day in adaptedness to the elegancies and
courtesies of the more refined portions of the moving world. Romances
of love, knighthood, and heroic deeds, tales of banditti, and stories
of supernatural beings, were his chief delight in his early days. Yet
his classical attainments were considerable, and, as a scholar in the
literature of his own language, his reputation was early established.
He delivered a poem on taking his degree, which was much admired in
its day.
On leaving college, he returned to South Carolina. Having determined
to devote his life to the fine arts, he sold, hastily and at a
sacrifice, his share of a considerable patrimonial estate, and
embarked for London in the autumn of 1801. Immediately upon his
arrival, he became a student of the Royal Academy, of which his
countryman, West, was President, with whom he formed an intimate and
lasting friendship. After three years spent in England, and a shorter
stay at Paris, he went to Italy, where he spent four years devoted
exclusively to the study of his art. At Rome began his intimacy with
Coleridge. Among the many subsequent expressions of his feeling toward
this great man, none, perhaps, is more striking than the following
extract from one of his letters:--"To no other man do I owe so much,
intellectually, as to Mr. Coleridge, with whom I became acquainted
in Rome, and who has honored me with his friendship for more than
five-and-twenty years. He used to call Rome the silent city; but I
never could think of it as such while with him; for, meet him when and
where I would, the fountain of his mind was never dry, but, like the
far-reaching aqueducts that once supplied this mistress of the world,
its living stream seemed specially to flow for every classic ruin over
which we wandered. And when I recall some of our walks under the pines
of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I have once
listened to Plato in the groves of the Academy." Readers of Coleridge
know in what estimation he held the qualities and the friendship of
Mr. Allston. Beside Coleridge and West, he numbered among his friends
in England, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, Sir George Beaumont, Reynolds,
and Fuseli.
In 1809, Mr. Allston returned to America, and remained two years
in Boston, his adopted home, and there married the sister of Dr.
Channing. In 1811, he went again to England, where his reputation as
an artist had been completely established. Before his departure, he
delivered a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge.
During a severe illness, he removed from London to Clifton, at which
place he wrote "The Sylphs of the Seasons." In 1813, he made his
first, and, with the exception of "Monaldi," twenty-eight years
afterwards, his only publication. This was a small volume, entitled
"The Sylphs of the Seasons, and other Poems," published in London;
and, during the same year, republished in Boston under the direction
of his friends, Professor Willard of Cambridge and Mr. Edmund T. Dana.
This volume was well received, and gave him a place among the first
poets of his country. The smaller poems in that edition extend as far
as page 289 of the present volume.
Beside the long and serious illness through which he passed, his
spirit was destined to suffer a deeper wound by the death of Mrs.
Allston, in London, during the same year. These events gave to his
mind a more earnest and undivided interest in his spiritual relations,
and drew him more closely than ever before to his religious duties.
He received the rite of confirmation, and through life was a devout
adherent to the Christian doctrine and discipline.
The character of Mr. Allston's religious feelings may be gathered,
incidentally, from many of his writings. It is a subject to be treated
with the reserve and delicacy with which he himself would have had it
invested. Few minds have been more thoroughly imbued with belief in
the reality of the unseen world; few have given more full assent to
the truth, that "the things which are seen are temporal, the things
which are not seen are eternal." This was not merely an adopted
opinion, a conviction imposed upon his understanding; it was of the
essence of his spiritual constitution, one of the conditions of his
rational existence. To him, the Supreme Being was no vague, mystical
source of light and truth, or an impersonation of goodness and truth
themselves; nor, on the other hand, a cold rationalistic notion of an
unapproachable executor of natural and moral laws. His spirit rested
in the faith of a sympathetic God. His belief was in a Being as
infinitely minute and sympathetic in his providences, as unlimited
in his power and knowledge. Nor need it be said, that he was a firm
believer in the central truths of Christianity, the Incarnation and
Redemption; that he turned from unaided speculation to the inspired
record and the visible Church; that he sought aid in the sacraments
ordained for the strengthening of infirm humanity, and looked for the
resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
After a second residence of seven years in Europe, he returned to
America in 1818, and again made Boston his home. There, in a circle of
warmly attached friends, surrounded by a sympathy and admiration which
his elevation and purity, the entire harmony of his life and pursuits,
could not fail to create, he devoted himself to his art, the labor of
his love.
This is not the place to enumerate his paintings, or to speak of his
character as an artist. His general reading he continued to the last,
with the earnestness of youth. As he retired from society, his taste
inclined him to metaphysical studies, the more, perhaps, from their
contrast with the usual occupations of his mind. He took particular
pleasure in works of devout Christian speculation, without, however,
neglecting a due proportion of strictly devotional literature. These
he varied by a constant recurrence to the great epic and dramatic
masters, and occasional reading of the earlier and the living
novelists, tales of wild romance and lighter fiction, voyages and
travels, biographies and letters. Nor was he without a strong interest
in the current politics of his own country and of England, as to which
his principles were highly conservative.
Upon his marriage with the daughter of the late Judge Dana, in 1830,
he removed to Cambridge, and soon afterwards began the preparation of
a course of lectures on Art, which he intended to deliver to a select
audience of artists and men of letters in Boston. Four of these he
completed. Rough drafts of two others were found among his papers, but
not in a state fit for publication. In 1841, he published his tale of
"Monaldi," a production of his early life. The poems in the present
volume, not included in the volume of 1813, are, with two exceptions,
the work of his later years. In them, as in his paintings of the
same period, may be seen the extreme attention to finish, always his
characteristic, which, added to increasing bodily pain and infirmity,
was the cause of his leaving so much that is unfinished behind him.
His death occurred at his own house, in Cambridge, a little past
midnight on the morning of Sunday, the 9th of July, 1843. He had
finished a day and week of labor in his studio, upon his great picture
of Belshazzar's Feast; the fresh paint denoting that the last touches
of his pencil were given to that glorious but melancholy monument of
the best years of his later life. Having conversed with his retiring
family with peculiar solemnity and earnestness upon the obligation and
beauty of a pure spiritual life, and on the realities of the world to
come, he had seated himself at his nightly employment of reading and
writing, which he usually carried into the early hours of the morning.
In the silence and solitude of this occupation, in a moment,
"with touch as gentle as the morning light," which was even then
approaching, his spirit was called away to its proper home.