"When Diocletian's self-corrected mind
The imperial fasces of a world resigned,
Say, why we trace the labors of his spade
In calm Salona's philosophic shade?
Say, when contentious Charles renounced a throne,
To muse with monks unlettered and unknown,
What from his soul the parting tribute drew,
What claimed the sorrows of a last adieu?"--_Rogers_.
"And say, when summoned from the world and thee,
I lay my head beneath the willow-tree,
Wilt thou, sweet mourner! at my stone appear,
And soothe my parting spirit lingering near?"--_Campbell_.
But the likeness is found everywhere--in phrase, in imagery, in
topics, and in tone. When, after a lapse of twenty-seven years, Mr.
Rogers produced his poem of Human Life, what a change of manner, what
a transformation of style had taken place in him! No longer the
grandiloquent invocations were found; no longer the sounding style, no
longer the easy recurrence of the cadence, pausing on the cæsura and
falling at the close of the line. Here the whole rhythm and
construction were of a new school and a new generation. The style was
more simple and more vigorous. The sentences marched on with a rare
recurrence of the cæsura, the cadence did not fall with the end of the
line, but oftener far in the middle of it, and the verse abounded with
triplets.
"He reads thanksgiving in the eyes of all--
All met as at a holy festival!
--On the day destined for his funeral!
Lo! there the friend, who, entering where he lay,
Breathed in his drowsy ear--'Away, away!
Take thou my cloak--Nay, start not, but obey!
Take it, and leave me.'"
What a total revolution is here! The old chime is gone, the old melody
is exchanged for a new. All depends on entirely new principles, and
seeks to give pleasure through an utterly fresh medium. But the poem
itself is one of the most beautiful things in any language. It is
human life from the cradle to the tomb, with all its pleasures,
aspirations, trials, and triumphs. Every thing which clings round the
spirit of man as precious, every thing which wins us onward, and
sustains us in sorrow, and soothes us under the infliction of
wrong--the glory of public good, and the hallowed charm of domestic
affection, is thrown into this poem, with the art of a master and the
great soul of a sanctified experience. Never either were the varied
scenes of English life more sweetly described. The wedding and the
burial, the village wake and the field sports, the battle and the
victory, all are blended inimitably into the great picture of
existence, and at times the aged minstrel rises into a strain of power
and animation, such as rebuke the doubters of those attributes in him.
"Then is the age of admiration--Then
Gods walk the earth, or beings more than men;
Who breathe the soul of inspiration round,
Whose very shadows consecrate the ground!
Ah! then comes thronging many a wild desire,
And high imagining, and thought of fire!
Then from within, a voice exclaims--'Aspire!'
Phantoms, that upward point, before him pass,
As in the cave athwart the wizard's glass;
They, that on youth a grace, a luster shed,
Of every age, the living and the dead!"
Still this poem of Human Life is but the life of one section of our
fellow-men--that of the gentry. It is curious, that it does not
descend into the midst of the multitude, and give us any of those deep
and somber shades which abound so much in Crabbe. The reason is
obvious. Crabbe had seen it and felt it. He had been born among it,
and had himself to struggle. Rogers has gone on that easy path of life
that is paved with gold, and "the huts where poor men lie," therefore,
probably never for a moment protruded themselves through the charmed
circle of his poetic inspiration. Happily for him his are fully the
Pleasures of Memory. Yet it is not the less true, or less honorable,
that in actual life, there is no man who has remembered the struggling
more sympathetically, nor has held out so generous a hand to the aid
of unfriended merit.
From the Voyage of Columbus the following extract will afford an
example of the beautiful description and rich imaginative power which
abound in that poem:--