One of the most elegant of literary recreations is that of tracing
poetical or prose imitations and similitudes; and there are few men of
letters who have not been in the habit of making parallel passages, or
tracing imitation in the thousand shapes it assumes.—D’ISRAELI.
She fair, divinely fair, fit love for gods.
MILTON, “Paradise Lost.”
A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
And most divinely fair.
TENNYSON, “Dream of Fair Women.”
Auld Nature swears the lovely dears
Her noblest work she classes, O;
Her ‘prentice han’ she tried on man,
And then she made the lasses, O.
BURNS, “Green Grow,” etc.
This thought was anticipated in “Cupid’s Whirligig,” a play by Edward
Sharpham, first printed in 1607: “Man was made when Nature was but an
apprentice, but woman when she was a skilful mistress of her art.”
“But, oh! eternity’s too short
To utter all Thy praise.”
So wrote Addison, in the well-known hymn. Young writes in the “Christian
Triumph,”—
“Eternity, too short to speak Thy praise!
Or fathom Thy profound of love to man!”
These writers were contemporaries. Did the same thought occur to each
independently, or did one borrow from the other?
In Dr. Johnson’s epitaph on Goldsmith, in Westminster Abbey, occurs the
expression, “Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury, in drawing a comparison between the
eloquence of Cicero and that of Demosthenes, says, “He adorns everything
he touches.”
Authority melts from me.
“Antony and Cleopatra,” iii, 2.
Authority forgets a dying king.
TENNYSON, “Mort d’Arthur.”
Woe to thee O land when thy king is a child.
Ecclesiastes, x, 16.
Woe to the land that’s governed by a child.
“Richard III.,” ii, 3.
Falstaff, in the Second Part of “King Henry IV.,” act i, scene 2, says,
“I am not only wit in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.”
If Plato may be believed, Socrates made use of a similar expression
about two thousand years before Shakespeare was born. Speaking to
Protagoras, Socrates says, “For who is there but you? who not only claim
to be a good man, for many are this, and yet have not the power of
making others good. Whereas you are not only good yourself, but also the
cause of goodness in others.”—_Jowett’s Translation._
Time flies, my pretty one! These precious hours are very sweet to thee;
make the most of them. Now, even now, as thou twinest that brown curl on
that finger—see! it grows gray!
FREDERICK LOCKER, “My Confidences.”
I will not argue the matter; time wastes too fast. Every letter I trace
tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of
it, more precious—my dear Jenny—than the rubies about thy neck, are
flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return
more; everything presses on—whilst thou art twisting that lock,—see! it
grows gray!
STERNE, “Tristram Shandy.”
Sir, for a quart d’ecu[5] he will sell the fee simple of his salvation,
the inheritance of it, and cut the entail from all remainders.
“All’s Well that Ends Well,” iv., 3.
Footnote 5:
The fourth part of the smaller French crown, about sixteen cents.
Who, if some blockhead should be willing
To lend him on his soul a shilling,
A well-made bargain would esteem it,
And have more sense than to redeem it.
CHURCHILL, “The Ghost.”
Many witty authors compare the present time to an isthmus or narrow neck
of land, that rises in the midst of an ocean, immeasurably diffused on
either side of it.
—_Spectator_, 590.
Lo, on a narrow neck of land,
’Twixt two unbounded seas I stand
Secure, insensible. WESLEY.
This narrow isthmus ’twixt two boundless seas,
The past, the future, two eternities.
MOORE, “Lalla Rookh.”
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
LONGFELLOW, “Elizabeth.”
Like driftwood spars which meet and pass
Upon the boundless ocean-plain,
So on the sea of life, alas!
Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Terrace at Berne.”
O, my friend!
We twain have met like ships upon the sea,
Who hold an hour’s converse, so short, so sweet;
One little hour! and then away they speed
On lonely paths, through mist, and cloud, and foam,
To meet no more. ALEXANDER SMITH.
The Rev. John Beecher, who may be remembered in connection with a
criticism upon one of Lord Byron’s poems, was the author of this
passage: “As ships meet at sea a moment together, when words of greeting
must be spoken, and then away again in the darkness; so men meet and
part in this world.”
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise.
POPE, “Criticism.”
And climb the Mount of Blessing, whence, if thou
Look higher, then perchance thou mayest—beyond
A hundred ever-rising mountain lines,
And past the range of Night and Shadow,—see
The high heaven dawn of more than mortal day.
TENNYSON, “Tiresias.”
Cowley, in his “Davideis,” says of the Messiah:
Round the whole earth his dreaded name shall sound,
And reach to worlds that must not yet be found.
And Pope, in his “Essay on Criticism,” referring to the Grecian and
Roman poets, says:
Nations unborn your mighty name shall sound,
And worlds applaud that must not yet be found.
In the ballad of Lochinvar, in “Marmion,” are the following lines:
She looked down to blush,
And she looked up to sigh,
With a smile on her lips,
And a tear in her eye.
In Samuel Lover’s song, “Rory O’More,” we also find this:
Now Rory be aisy,
Sweet Kathleen would cry;
Reproof on her lip,
But a smile in her eye.
In the Greek “Anthology” is an epigram by an unknown writer, which is
thus translated:
Two evils, poverty and love,
My anxious bosom tear;
The one my heart would little move,
But love I cannot bear.
Burns reproduces this thought in a song sent to his friend Thomson:
O poortith cauld, and restless love,
Ye wreck my peace between ye;
But poortith a’ I could forgie,
An ‘twerna for my Jeanie.
Douce, in his “Illustrations of Shakespeare,” quotes from Marlowe’s
translation of Ovid’s “Art of Love:”
For Jove himself sits in the azure skies
And laughs below at lovers’ perjuries,
and says that from these lines of the “Ars Amatoria” Shakespeare took
At lovers’ perjuries,
They say, Jove laughs.—“Romeo and Juliet.”
Christopher Marlowe died in 1593, and the earliest quarto edition of
Romeo and Juliet appeared in 1597.
Happy the man who his whole time doth bound
Within the enclosure of his little ground.
COWLEY, “Claudian.”
Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground. POPE, “Solitude.”
Eve, in “Paradise Lost,” addressing Adam, says:
With thee conversing I forget all time
All seasons and their change,
Wesley echoes this couplet, hymn 214, in addressing Christ:
With thee conversing we forget
All time, all toil, all care.
Cowley, in a paraphrase of one of Horace’s Epodes, says:
Nor does the roughest season of the sky
Or sullen Jove all sports to him deny.
He runs the mazes of the nimble hare;
His well-mouthed dogs’ glad concert rends the air.
These lines appear in Pope’s “Windsor Forest” thus modified:
Nor yet, when moist Arcturus clouds the sky,
The woods and fields their pleasing toils deny;
To plains with well-breathed beagles we repair,
And trace the mazes of the circling hare.
In Thomson’s “Seasons” we find in Winter the expression, “contiguous
shade,” and in Summer the line,
A boundless deep immensity of shade.
Cowper, in “The Task,” has a line which he evidently owes to Thomson,
Some boundless contiguity of shade.
Churchill says in “The Farewell”:
Be England what she will,
With all her faults she is my country still.
Cowper, who admired Churchill’s poetry as strongly as he detested his
principles, says in “The Task”:
England, with all thy faults I love thee still.
But several years before Churchill wrote “The Farewell,” the profligate
Bolingbroke concluded a letter to Dean Swift as follows: “Dear Swift,
with all thy faults I love thee entirely; make an effort and love me
with all mine.”
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies!
How silently and with how wan a face!
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
With what a silent and dejected pace
Dost thou, wan Moon, upon thy way advance—
HENRY KIRK WHITE, “Angelina.”
There is a well-known anecdote of Marshal Blücher, who, on his progress
through London, is recorded to have expressed his wonder and cupidity at
the wealth of the metropolis in some such words as “Was für Plunder.” In
Malcolm’s “Sketches of Persia” is the following:
Seeing my [Afghan] friend quite delighted with the contemplation of this
rich scene [Calcutta], I asked him, with some exultation, what he
thought of it. “A wonderful place to plunder,” was his reply.
One to destroy is murder by law,
And gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe;
To murder thousands takes a specious name,
War’s glorious art, and gives immortal fame.
YOUNG, “Love of Fame.”
One murder makes a villain,
Millions a hero; kings are privileged
To kill; and numbers sanctify the crime.
BISHOP PORTEUS, “Essay on Death.”
Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not,
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?
By their right arms the conquest must be wrought.
BYRON, “Childe Harold.”
’Tis well! from this day forward we shall know
That in ourselves our safety must be sought;
That by our own right hands it must be wrought.
WORDSWORTH, “Sonnets.”
The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is
to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.
“Hamlet,” iii, 2.
True, said the knight, the ornaments of comedy ought not to be rich and
real, but feigned and artificial, like the drama itself, which I would
have thee respect, Sancho, and receive into favor, together with those
who represent and compose it; for they are all instruments of great
benefit to the commonwealth, holding, as it were, a looking-glass always
before us, in which we see naturally delineated all the actions of life.
CERVANTES, “Don Quixote.”
Pitiful enough were it, for all these wild utterances, to call our
Diogenes wicked. Unprofitable servants as we all are, perhaps at no era
of his life was he more decisively the Servant of Goodness, the Servant
of God, than even now when doubting God’s existence.
CARLYLE, “Sartor Resartus.”
I am not unmindful of the saying of an eminent Presbyterian, Dr. Norman
Macleod, that many an opponent of dogma is nearer to God than many an
orthodox believer; or of the words of Laertes on the dead Ophelia and
the priest:
“A ministering angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling.”
W. E. GLADSTONE, “Religious Thought.”
Evil is wrought by want of thought
As well as want of heart.
HOOD, “Lady’s Dream.”
Time to me this truth has taught
(’Tis a treasure worth revealing),
More offend from want of thought
Than from any want of feeling.
CHARLES SWAIN.
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
SCOTT, “Old Mortality.”
A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty
Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.
ADDISON, “Cato.”
The life of a man of virtue and talent, who should die in his thirtieth
year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than that of a
miserable, priest-ridden slave who dreams out a century of dulness.
SHELLEY, “Notes to Queen Mab.”
The most striking scene in “Ivanhoe” is where Rebecca, pursued by Front
de Bœuf on the tower of the castle, threatens to throw herself from the
battlement saying, that “the Jewish maiden would rather trust her soul
with God than her honor to the Templar.” Sir David Dundas tells a story
of a Scotch laird who, to escape a criminal indictment, disappeared in
1715. Thirty years afterwards, 1745, he returned, and was arrested and
tried for his life. The prosecution relied on the evidence of an
ex-bailiff of the laird, who had undertaken to identify him. After
gazing at him, he told the judge that he was “verra like his maister,”
but on looking at him “weel he doubted, indeed he felt sure that he was
not his maister at all,” and as there were no other witnesses, the case
broke down. The Presbyterian minister of the place vented his
indignation on the witness in the strongest terms,—
“Where, you perjured villain, do you expect to go after death, lying to
God as you have done to-day?”
“Weel, weel, meenister,” was the reply, “what you say may be a’ verra
true, but you see I’d raither trust my soul with my Maker than my
maister with thae fellows.”
In the altercation between Dr. Johnson and Beauclerk (April 16, 1779) as
reported by Boswell, Beauclerk said:
“Mr. —— (Johnson’s friend Fitzherbert), who loved buttered muffins, but
durst not eat them because they disagreed with his stomach, resolved to
shoot himself; and then he ate three buttered muffins for breakfast
before shooting himself, knowing that he should not be troubled with
indigestion.”
In “Pickwick Papers,” chap, xiv, Sam Weller says:
“‘How many crumpets at a sittin’ do you think ‘ud kill me off at once?’
says the patient.
“‘I don’t know,’ says the doctor.
“‘Do you think half a crown’s worth ‘ud do it?’ says the patient.
“‘I think it might,’ says the doctor.
“‘Three shillins’ worth ‘ud be sure to do it, I s’pose,’ says the
patient.
“‘Certainly,’ says the doctor.
“‘Wery good,’ says the patient.
“‘Good night.’
“Next mornin’ he gets up, has a fire lit, orders in three shillins’
worth o’ crumpets, toasts ’em all, eats ’em all, and blows his brains
out.”
Washington Irving’s “Pride of the Village,” in his “Sketch Book,” has
for its backbone the pathetic story of a blasted life and a broken
heart, which, it seems likely, may have afforded to Tennyson the
suggestion for his exquisite May Queen, inasmuch as Irving’s “Pride of
the Village” was also “Queen of the May,” “crowned with flowers and
blushing and smiling in all the beautiful confusion of girlish
diffidence and delight.” And then in a later scene we see her wasted and
hectic. “She felt a conviction that she was hastening to the tomb, but
looked forward to it as a place of rest. The silver cord that had bound
her to existence was loosed, and there seemed to be no more pleasure
under the sun.” The Laureate’s May Queen is touched by the sweetness “of
all the land about and all the flowers that blow;” and the “Pride of the
Village” would “totter to the window, where, propped up in her chair, it
was her enjoyment to sit all day and look out upon the landscape.” The
May Queen of the poet exults in the honeysuckle that “round the porch
has woven its wavy bowers,” and she is anxious when she is gone little
Effie should “train the rose-bush that she set about the parlor window,”
and to Irving’s “Pride of the Village” “the soft air that stole in
[through the lattice] brought with it the fragrance of the clustering
honeysuckle which her own hands had trained round the window.” The May
Queen reaches forward to view her grave “just beneath the hawthorne
shade” and wills that Effie shall not come to see her till it be
“growing green,” and in Irving’s sketch “evergreens had been planted
about the grave of the village favorite, and osiers were bent over to
keep the turf uninjured.”
Ah, Christ, that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved that they might tell us
What and where they be.
TENNYSON, “Maud.”
Oh that it were possible we might
But hold some two days’ conference with the dead!
From whom I should learn somewhat I am sure
I never shall know here.
WEBSTER, “Duchess of Malfy.”
The dead! the much-loved dead!
Who doth not yearn to know
The secret of their dwelling place,
And to what land they go?
What heart but asks, with ceaseless tone,
For some sure knowledge of its _own_.
MARY E. LEE.
The trapper had remained nearly motionless for an hour. His eyes alone
had occasionally opened and shut. Suddenly, while musing on the
remarkable position in which he was placed Middleton felt the hand which
he held grasp his own with incredible power, and the old man, supported
on either side by his friends, rose upright to his feet. For a moment he
looked around him as if to invite all in presence to listen (the
lingering remnant of human frailty), and then, with a fine military
elevation of the head, and with a voice that might be heard in every
part of that numerous assembly, he pronounced the word “Here.”
FENIMORE COOPER, “The Prairie.”
At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to toll, and Thomas
Newcome’s hands outside the bed feebly beat a tune, and just as the last
bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted
up his head a little and quickly said, “Adsum,” and fell back. It was
the word we used at school when names were called, and lo, he, whose
heart was as that of a little child, had answered to his name, and stood
in the presence of the Master.
THACKERAY, “The Newcomes.”
And as he looked around, she saw how Death the consoler,
Laying his hand upon many a heart, had healed it forever.
LONGFELLOW, “Evangeline.”
In the Greek Anthology, likening Death to a healer of pain and sorrow is
expressed in an epigram of Agathias:
Why fear ye Death, the parent of repose,
That puts an end to penury and pain?
His presence once, and only once, he shows,
And none have seen him e’er return again.
But maladies of every varying hue
In thick succession human life pursue.
I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. NATHAN
HALE, “Last Words,” Sept., 1776.
What pity it is
That we can live but once to serve our country!
ADDISON, “Cato.”
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
WORDSWORTH, “Sonnets.”
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn.
DR. HOLMES, “Nautilus.”
’Tis said with Sorrow Time can cope;
But this I feel can n’er be true;
For by the death-blow of my Hope
My Memory immortal grew.
BYRON, “Written Beneath a Picture.”
They said that Love would die when Hope was gone,
And Love mourned long, and sorrowed after Hope;
At last she sought out Memory, and they trod
The same old paths where love had walked with Hope,
And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears.
TENNYSON, “The Lover’s Tale.”
The following paraphrase is from the German of Lessing:
While Fell was reposing himself on the hay
A reptile concealed bit his leg as he lay;
But all venom himself, of the wound he made light,
And got well, while the scorpion died of the bite.
Similar is the last stanza of Goldsmith’s “Elegy on the death of a Mad
Dog” in the “Vicar of Wakefield:”
But soon a wonder came to light,
That showed the rogues they lied,
The man recovered of the bite,
The dog it was that died.
Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of death.
YOUNG, “Night Thoughts.”
Virtue’s a bridge (near the Cross whereby
We pass to happiness beyond the spheres)
Whose arches are faith, hope, and charity,
And what’s the water but repentant tears?
THOMAS BANCROFT.
I saw fair Cloris walk alone,
When feathered rain came softly down,
And Jove descended from his tower
To court her in a silver shower.
The wanton snow flew to her breast,
Like little birds into their nest,
And overcome with whiteness there,
For grief it thawed into a tear,
Thence falling on her garment’s hem,
To deck her froze into a gem. STRODE.
Those envious flakes came down in haste,
To prove her breast less fair;
Grieving to find themselves surpassed,
Dissolved into a tear. DODSLEY.
There are a thousand doors to let out life;
You keep not guard of all: and I shall find,
By falling headlong from some rocky cliff,
Poison, or fire, that long rest.
MASSINGER, “Parliament of Love.”
At once give each inquietude the slip,
By stealing out of being when he pleased,
And by what way; whether by hemp or steel:
Death’s thousand doors stand open.
BLAIR, “The Grave.”
Her cheek [the Sultana Gulbeyaz] began to flush, her eyes to sparkle,
And her proud brow’s blue veins to swell and darkle;
She stood a moment as a Pythoness
Stands on her tripod, agonized, and full
Of inspiration gathered from distress.
BYRON, “Don Juan.”
The Countess [Amy Robsart] stood in the midst of her apartment like a
juvenile Pythoness, under the influence of the prophetic fury. The veins
in her beautiful forehead started into swollen blue lines—her cheek and
neck glowed like scarlet—her eyes were like those of an imprisoned
eagle.
SCOTT, “Kenilworth.”
Of some for glory such the boundless rage
That they’re the blackest scandal of their age.
YOUNG.
On Butler, who can think without just rage?
The glory and the scandal of the age. OLDHAM.
Drayton, in one of his Elegies, says:
Next these learn’d Johnson in this list I bring,
_Who had drunke deepe of the Pierian spring_.