CONTENTS.

LECTURE I.

INTRODUCTORY.--ON POETRY IN GENERAL.

LECTURE II.

ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER.

LECTURE III.

ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON.

LECTURE IV.

ON DRYDEN AND POPE.

LECTURE V.

ON THOMSON AND COWPER.

LECTURE VI.

ON SWIFT, YOUNG, GRAY, COLLINS &c.

LECTURE VII.

ON BURNS, AND THE OLD ENGLISH BALLADS.

LECTURE VIII.

ON THE LIVING POETS.

LECTURE I.--INTRODUCTORY

ON POETRY IN GENERAL.

The best general notion which I can give of poetry is, that it is the

natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an

involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by

sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.

In treating of poetry, I shall speak first of the subject-matter of

it, next of the forms of expression to which it gives birth, and

afterwards of its connection with harmony of sound.

Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It

relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind.

It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what

so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape, can be

a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart

holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot

have much respect for himself, or for any thing else. It is not a mere

frivolous accomplishment, (as some persons have been led to imagine) the

trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours--it has been

the study and delight of mankind in all ages. Many people suppose that

poetry is something to be found only in books, contained in lines of ten

syllables, with like endings: but wherever there is a sense of beauty,

or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the

growth of a flower that "spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and

dedicates its beauty to the sun,"--_there_ is poetry, in its birth. If

history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its

materials lie deeper, and are spread wider. History treats, for the most

part, of the cumbrous and unwieldly masses of things, the empty cases in

which the affairs of the world are packed, under the heads of intrigue

or war, in different states, and from century to century: but there is

no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man, which

he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen

to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is not a

branch of authorship: it is "the stuff of which our life is made." The

rest is "mere oblivion," a dead letter: for all that is worth

remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is

poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse,

admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is

that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises

our whole being: without it "man's life is poor as beast's." Man is a

poetical animal: and those of us who do not study the principles of

poetry, act upon them all our lives, like Moliere's _Bourgeois

Gentilhomme_, who had always spoken prose without knowing it. The child

is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the

story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet, when he

first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers; the countryman,

when he stops to look at the rainbow; the city-apprentice, when he gazes

after the Lord-Mayor's show; the miser, when he hugs his gold; the

courtier, who builds his hopes upon a smile; the savage, who paints his

idol with blood; the slave, who worships a tyrant, or the tyrant, who

fancies himself a god;--the vain, the ambitious, the proud, the

choleric man, the hero and the coward, the beggar and the king, the rich

and the poor, the young and the old, all live in a world of their own

making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others

think and act. If his art is folly and madness, it is folly and madness

at second hand. "There is warrant for it." Poets alone have not "such

seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cooler

reason" can.

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;

The madman. While the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.

The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heav'n to earth, from earth to heav'n;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination."

If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same. If it is

a fiction, made up of what we wish things to be, and fancy that they

are, because we wish them so, there is no other nor better reality.

Ariosto has described the loves of Angelica and Medoro: but was not

Medoro, who carved the name of his mistress on the barks of trees, as

much enamoured of her charms as he? Homer has celebrated the anger of

Achilles: but was not the hero as mad as the poet? Plato banished the

poets from his Commonwealth, lest their descriptions of the natural man

should spoil his mathematical man, who was to be without passions and

affections, who was neither to laugh nor weep, to feel sorrow nor anger,

to be cast down nor elated by any thing. This was a chimera, however,

which never existed but in the brain of the inventor; and Homer's

poetical world has outlived Plato's philosophical Republic.

Poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the

passions are a part of man's nature. We shape things according to our

wishes and fancies, without poetry; but poetry is the most emphatical

language that can be found for those creations of the mind "which

ecstacy is very cunning in." Neither a mere description of natural

objects, nor a mere delineation of natural feelings, however distinct or

forcible, constitutes the ultimate end and aim of poetry, without the

heightenings of the imagination. The light of poetry is not only a

direct but also a reflected light, that while it shews us the object,

throws a sparkling radiance on all around it: the flame of the passions,

communicated to the imagination, reveals to us, as with a flash of

lightning, the inmost recesses of thought, and penetrates our whole

being. Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms;

feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings. Poetry puts a spirit

of life and motion into the universe. It describes the flowing, not the

fixed. It does not define the limits of sense, or analyze the

distinctions of the understanding, but signifies the excess of the

imagination beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or

feeling. The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite

sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is

impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link

itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine

itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the

aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner, and by

the most striking examples of the same quality in other instances.

Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, for this reason, "has something divine

in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by

conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of

subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do." It is

strictly the language of the imagination; and the imagination is that

faculty which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, but as

they are moulded by other thoughts and feelings, into an infinite

variety of shapes and combinations of power. This language is not the

less true to nature, because it is false in point of fact; but so much

the more true and natural, if it conveys the impression which the object

under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for

instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear--

and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it

into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. "Our

eyes are made the fools" of our other faculties. This is the universal

law of the imagination,

"That if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy:

Or in the night imagining some fear,

How easy is each bush suppos'd a bear!"

When Iachimo says of Imogen,

"------The flame o' th' taper

Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids

To see the enclosed lights"--

this passionate interpretation of the motion of the flame to accord with

the speaker's own feelings, is true poetry. The lover, equally with the

poet, speaks of the auburn tresses of his mistress as locks of shining

gold, because the least tinge of yellow in the hair has, from novelty

and a sense of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the

imagination than the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic stature

to a tower: not that he is any thing like so large, but because the

excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual

size of things of the same class, produces by contrast a greater feeling

of magnitude and ponderous strength than another object of ten times the

same dimensions. The intensity of the feeling makes up for the

disproportion of the objects. Things are equal to the imagination, which

have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror,

admiration, delight, or love. When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge

his cause, "for they are old like him," there is nothing extravagant or

impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there

is no other image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his

wrongs and his despair!

Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in

describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the

forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by

blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most

striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned

species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of

sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses

the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it;

exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples

with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us

back upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our

being or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the

rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest

contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, "Nothing but his

unkind daughters could have brought him to this;" what a bewildered

amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to

conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down,

and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood,

supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the

mad scene, "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see,

they bark at me!" it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make

every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude and

insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes, searching

every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last remaining

image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast, only to

torture and kill it! In like manner, the "So I am" of Cordelia gushes

from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love

and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years. What a

fine return of the passion upon itself is that in Othello--with what a

mingled agony of regret and despair he clings to the last traces of

departed happiness--when he exclaims,

------"Oh now, for ever

Farewel the tranquil mind. Farewel content;

Farewel the plumed troops and the big war,

That make ambition virtue! Oh farewel!

Farewel the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,

The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,

The royal banner, and all quality,

Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war:

And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats

Th' immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,

Farewel! Othello's occupation's gone!"

How his passion lashes itself up and swells and rages like a tide in

its sounding course, when in answer to the doubts expressed of his

returning love, he says,

"Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

To the Propontic and the Hellespont:

Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,

Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,

Till that a capable and wide revenge

Swallow them up."--

The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemona is at that

line [sic],

"But there where I had garner'd up my heart,

To be discarded thence!"--

One mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passion excites our

sympathy without raising our disgust is, that in proportion as it

sharpens the edge of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the

desire of good. It enhances our consciousness of the blessing, by making

us sensible of the magnitude of the loss. The storm of passion lays bare

and shews us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our

existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we

desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast; the

action and re-action are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only

gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate

participation with the antagonist world of good; makes us drink deeper

of the cup of human life; tugs at the heart-strings; loosens the

pressure about them; and calls the springs of thought and feeling into

play with tenfold force.

Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part

of our nature, as well as of the sensitive--of the desire to know, the

will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these

different parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. The

domestic or prose tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural, is

in this sense the least so, because it appeals almost exclusively to one

of these faculties, our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and Lillo,

for this reason, however affecting at the time, oppress and lie like a

dead weight upon the mind, a load of misery which it is unable to throw

off: the tragedy of Shakspeare, which is true poetry, stirs our inmost

affections; abstracts evil from itself by combining it with all the

forms of imagination, and with the deepest workings of the heart, and

rouses the whole man within us.

The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry, is not any thing

peculiar to it as poetry, as a fictitious and fanciful thing. It is not

an anomaly of the imagination. It has its source and ground-work in the

common love of strong excitement. As Mr. Burke observes, people flock to

see a tragedy; but if there were a public execution in the next street,

the theatre would very soon be empty. It is not then the difference

between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are

satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose: nor do

the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of murders and

executions about the streets, find it necessary to have them turned into

penny ballads, before they can dispose of these interesting and

authentic documents. The grave politician drives a thriving trade of

abuse and calumnies poured out against those whom he makes his enemies

for no other end than that he may live by them. The popular preacher

makes less frequent mention of heaven than of hell. Oaths and nicknames

are only a more vulgar sort of poetry or rhetoric. We are as fond of

indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of

others. We are as prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate

in our hopes of good. If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer will

be, Because we cannot help it. The sense of power is as strong a

principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and

pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or

beauty. It is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to

express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration.

"Masterless passion sways us to the mood

Of what it likes or loathes."

Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred

and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every

refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a

bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of

deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to

grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm

our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to

contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest eloquence of

passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our

conception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or

dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of

the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot

get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the

thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and

tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. When Pope says of the Lord Mayor's

shew,--

"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,

But lives in Settle's numbers one day more!"

--when Collins makes Danger, "with limbs of giant mould,"

------"Throw him on the steep

Of some loose hanging rock asleep:"

when Lear calls out in extreme anguish,

"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,

How much more hideous shew'st in a child

Than the sea-monster!"

--the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and

of indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied. We see the thing

ourselves, and shew it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in

spite of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it. The imagination, by

thus embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the

indistinct and importunate cravings of the will.--We do not wish the

thing to be so; but we wish it to appear such as it is. For knowledge is

conscious power; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dupe,

though it may be the victim of vice or folly.

Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the

passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than

the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic

critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common

sense and reason: for the end and use of poetry, "both at the first and

now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature," seen through the

medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means

of literal truth or abstract reason. The painter of history might as

well be required to represent the face of a person who has just trod

upon a serpent with the still-life expression of a common portrait, as

the poet to describe the most striking and vivid impressions which

things can be supposed to make upon the mind, in the language of common

conversation. Let who will strip nature of the colours and the shapes of

fancy, the poet is not bound to do so; the impressions of common sense

and strong imagination, that is, of passion and indifference, cannot be

the same, and they must have a separate language to do justice to

either. Objects must strike differently upon the mind, independently of

what they are in themselves, as long as we have a different interest in

them, as we see them in a different point of view, nearer or at a

greater distance (morally or physically speaking) from novelty, from old

acquaintance, from our ignorance of them, from our fear of their

consequences, from contrast, from unexpected likeness. We can no more

take away the faculty of the imagination, than we can see all objects

without light or shade. Some things must dazzle us by their

preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our

curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these

various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their

stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the

glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning

nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry

visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent

moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light. This is also one

part of nature, one appearance which the glow-worm presents, and that

not the least interesting; so poetry is one part of the history of the

human mind, though it is neither science nor philosophy. It cannot be

concealed, however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a

tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the

wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally

visionary, the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things

to their natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful

pretensions. Hence the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is

much the same; and both have received a sensible shock from the progress

of experimental philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon that gives

birth and scope to the imagination; we can only fancy what we do not

know. As in looking into the mazes of a tangled wood we fill them with

what shapes we please, with ravenous beasts, with caverns vast, and

drear enchantments, so in our ignorance of the world about us, we make

gods or devils of the first object we see, and set no bounds to the

wilful suggestions of our hopes and fears.

"And visions, as poetic eyes avow,

Hang on each leaf and cling to every bough."

There can never be another Jacob's dream. Since that time, the heavens

have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. They have become averse

to the imagination, nor will they return to us on the squares of the

distances, or on Doctor Chalmers's Discourses. Rembrandt's picture

brings the matter nearer to us.--It is not only the progress of

mechanical knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that

are unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe

of the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look

with more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of

the fabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we

are less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions

of wild beasts or "bandit fierce," or to the unmitigated fury of the

elements. The time has been that "our fell of hair would at a dismal

treatise rouse and stir as life were in it." But the police spoils all;

and we now hardly so much as dream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is only

tolerated in this country for the sake of the music; and in the United

States of America, where the philosophical principles of government are

carried still farther in theory and practice, we find that the Beggar's

Opera is hooted from the stage. Society, by degrees, is constructed into

a machine that carries us safely and insipidly from one end of life to

the other, in a very comfortable prose style.

"Obscurity her curtain round them drew,

And siren Sloth a dull quietus sung."

The remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead to a

solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting and

poetry. I do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem that

the argument which has been sometimes set up, that painting must affect

the imagination more strongly, because it represents the image more

distinctly, is not well founded. We may assume without much temerity,

that poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or connoisseurs

talk on stilts about the poetry of painting, they shew that they know

little about poetry, and have little love for the art. Painting gives

the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a

thing contains in itself: poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any

manner connected with it. But this last is the proper province of the

imagination. Again, as it relates to passion, painting gives the event,

poetry the progress of events: but it is during the progress, in the

interval of expectation and suspense, while our hopes and fears are

strained to the highest pitch of breathless agony, that the pinch of the

interest lies.

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.

The mortal instruments are then in council;

And the state of man, like to a little kingdom,

Suffers then the nature of an insurrection."

But by the time that the picture is painted, all is over. Faces are

the best part of a picture; but even faces are not what we chiefly

remember in what interests us most.--But it may be asked then, Is there

anything better than Claude Lorraine's landscapes, than Titian's

portraits, than Raphael's cartoons, or the Greek statues? Of the two

first I shall say nothing, as they are evidently picturesque, rather

than imaginative. Raphael's cartoons are certainly the finest comments

that ever were made on the Scriptures. Would their effect be the same if

we were not acquainted with the text? But the New Testament existed

before the cartoons. There is one subject of which there is no cartoon,

Christ washing the feet of the disciples the night before his death. But

that chapter does not need a commentary! It is for want of some such

resting place for the imagination that the Greek statues are little else

than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart. They

have not an informing principle within them. In their faultless

excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they

are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty

they are deified. But they are not objects of religious faith to us, and

their forms are a reproach to common humanity. They seem to have no

sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration.

Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined

with passion and fancy. In its mode of conveyance, it combines the

ordinary use of language with musical expression. There is a question of

long standing, in what the essence of poetry consists; or what it is

that determines why one set of ideas should be expressed in prose,

another in verse. Milton has told us his idea of poetry in a single

line--

"Thoughts that voluntary move

Harmonious numbers."

As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the

song and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts

that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change

"the words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo." There is a striking

instance of this adaptation of the movement of sound and rhythm to the

subject, in Spenser's description of the Satyrs accompanying Una to the

cave of Sylvanus.

"So from the ground she fearless doth arise

And walketh forth without suspect of crime.

They, all as glad as birds of joyous prime,

Thence lead her forth, about her dancing round,

Shouting and singing all a shepherd's rhyme;

And with green branches strewing all the ground,

Do worship her as queen with olive garland crown'd.

And all the way their merry pipes they sound,

That all the woods and doubled echoes ring;

And with their horned feet do wear the ground,

Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring;

So towards old Sylvanus they her bring,

Who with the noise awaked, cometh out."

_Faery Queen_, b. i. c. vi.

On the contrary, there is nothing either musical or natural in the

ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary

and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the

voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements

in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or

correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with

which they are conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the

inequalities, and harshnesses of prose, are fatal to the flow of a

poetical imagination, as a jolting road or a stumbling horse disturbs

the reverie of an absent man. But poetry makes these odds all even. It

is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying as

it were "the secret soul of harmony." Wherever any object takes such a

hold of the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting

the heart in tenderness, or kindling it to a sentiment of enthusiasm;--

wherever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind,

by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, to bring all other

objects into accord with it, and to give the same movement of harmony,

sustained and continuous, or gradually varied according to the occasion,

to the sounds that express it--this is poetry. The musical in sound is

the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought is the sustained

and continuous also. There is a near connection between music and

deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing. As often as articulation passes

naturally into intonation, there poetry begins. Where one idea gives a

tone and colour to others, where one feeling melts others into it, there

can be no reason why the same principle should not be extended to the

sounds by which the voice utters these emotions of the soul, and blends

syllables and lines into each other. It is to supply the inherent defect

of harmony in the customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an

echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo to itself--to

mingle the tide of verse, "the golden cadences of poetry," with the tide

of feeling, flowing and murmuring as it flows--in short, to take the

language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread

its wings where it may indulge its own impulses--

"Sailing with supreme dominion

Through the azure deep of air--"

without being stopped, or fretted, or diverted with the abruptnesses and

petty obstacles, and discordant flats and sharps of prose, that poetry

was invented. It is to common language, what springs are to a carriage,

or wings to feet. In ordinary speech we arrive at a certain harmony by

the modulations of the voice: in poetry the same thing is done

systematically by a regular collocation of syllables. It has been well

observed, that every one who declaims warmly, or grows intent upon a

subject, rises into a sort of blank verse or measured prose. The

merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way "sounding always the

increase of his winning." Every prose-writer has more or less of

rhythmical adaptation, except poets, who, when deprived of the regular

mechanism of verse, seem to have no principle of modulation left in

their writings.

An excuse might be made for rhyme in the same manner. It is but fair

that the ear should linger on the sounds that delight it, or avail

itself of the same brilliant coincidence and unexpected recurrence of

syllables, that have been displayed in the invention and collocation of

images. It is allowed that rhyme assists the memory; and a man of wit

and shrewdness has been heard to say, that the only four good lines of

poetry are the well known ones which tell the number of days in the

months of the year.

"Thirty days hath September," &c.

But if the jingle of names assists the memory, may it not also quicken

the fancy? and there are other things worth having at our fingers' ends,

besides the contents of the almanac.--Pope's versification is tiresome,

from its excessive sweetness and uniformity. Shakspeare's blank verse is

the perfection of dramatic dialogue.

All is not poetry that passes for such: nor does verse make the whole

difference between poetry and prose. The Iliad does not cease to be

poetry in a literal translation; and Addison's Campaign has been very

properly denominated a Gazette in rhyme. Common prose differs from

poetry, as treating for the most part either of such trite, familiar,

and irksome matters of fact, as convey no extraordinary impulse to the

imagination, or else of such difficult and laborious processes of the

understanding, as do not admit of the wayward or violent movements

either of the imagination or the passions.

I will mention three works which come as near to poetry as possible

without absolutely being so, namely, the Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson

Crusoe, and the Tales of Boccaccio. Chaucer and Dryden have translated

some of the last into English rhyme, but the essence and the power of

poetry was there before. That which lifts the spirit above the earth,

which draws the soul out of itself with indescribable longings, is

poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name, by being

"married to immortal verse." If it is of the essence of poetry to strike

and fix the imagination, whether we will or no, to make the eye of

childhood glisten with the starting tear, to be never thought of

afterwards with indifference, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe may be

permitted to pass for poets in their way. The mixture of fancy and

reality in the Pilgrim's Progress was never equalled in any allegory.

His pilgrims walk above the earth, and yet are on it. What zeal, what

beauty, what truth of fiction! What deep feeling in the description of

Christian's swimming across the water at last, and in the picture of the

Shining Ones within the gates, with wings at their backs and garlands on

their heads, who are to wipe all tears from his eyes! The writer's

genius, though not "dipped in dews of Castalie," was baptised with the

Holy Spirit and with fire. The prints in this book are no small part of

it. If the confinement of Philoctetes in the island of Lemnos was a

subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek tragedies, what shall we

say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of the Greek hero on

leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with the

reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of

confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever

cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls

its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his

heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds him. Thus he

says,

"As I walked about, either in my hunting, or for viewing the

country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me

on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the

woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner,

locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an

uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. In the midst of the greatest

composures of my mind, this would break out upon me like a storm, and

make me wring my hands, and weep like a child. Sometimes it would take

me in the middle of my work, and I would immediately sit down and sigh,

and look upon the ground for an hour or two together, and this was still

worse to me, for if I could burst into tears or vent myself in words, it

would go off, and the grief having exhausted itself would abate." P.

50.

The story of his adventures would not make a poem like the Odyssey,

it is true; but the relator had the true genius of a poet. It has been

made a question whether Richardson's romances are poetry; and the answer

perhaps is, that they are not poetry, because they are not romance. The

interest is worked up to an inconceivable height; but it is by an

infinite number of little things, by incessant labour and calls upon the

attention, by a repetition of blows that have no rebound in them. The

sympathy excited is not a voluntary contribution, but a tax. Nothing is

unforced and spontaneous. There is a want of elasticity and motion. The

story does not "give an echo to the seat where love is throned." The

heart does not answer of itself like a chord in music. The fancy does

not run on before the writer with breathless expectation, but is dragged

along with an infinite number of pins and wheels, like those with which

the Lilliputians dragged Gulliver pinioned to the royal palace.--Sir

Charles Grandison is a coxcomb. What sort of a figure would he cut,

translated into an epic poem, by the side of Achilles? Clarissa, the

divine Clarissa, is too interesting by half. She is interesting in her

ruffles, in her gloves, her samplers, her aunts and uncles--she is

interesting in all that is uninteresting. Such things, however intensely

they may be brought home to us, are not conductors to the imagination.

There is infinite truth and feeling in Richardson; but it is extracted

from a _caput mortuum_ of circumstances: it does not evaporate of

itself. His poetical genius is like Ariel confined in a pine-tree, and

requires an artificial process to let it out. Shakspeare says--

"Our poesy is as a gum

Which issues whence 'tis nourished, our gentle flame

Provokes itself, and like the current flies

Each bound it chafes." [1]

I shall conclude this general account with some remarks on four of

the principal works of poetry in the world, at different periods of

history--Homer, the Bible, Dante, and let me add, Ossian. In Homer,

the principle of action or life is predominant; in the Bible, the

principle of faith and the idea of Providence; Dante is a

personification of blind will; and in Ossian we see the decay of life,

and the lag end of the world. Homer's poetry is the heroic: it is full

of life and action: it is bright as the day, strong as a river. In the

vigour of his intellect, he grapples with all the objects of nature, and

enters into all the relations of social life.

___

[1] Burke's writings are not poetry, notwithstanding the vividness of

the fancy, because the subject matter is abstruse and dry, not natural,

but artificial. The difference between poetry and eloquence is, that the

one is the eloquence of the imagination, and the other of the

understanding. Eloquence tries to persuade the will, and convince the

reason: poetry produces its effect by instantaneous sympathy. Nothing is

a subject for poetry that admits of a dispute. Poets are in general bad

prose-writers, because their images, though fine in themselves, are not

to the purpose, and do not carry on the argument. The French poetry

wants the forms of the imagination. It is didactic more than dramatic.

And some of our own poetry which has been most admired, is only poetry

in the rhyme, and in the studied use of poetic diction.

___

He saw many countries, and the manners of many men; and he has brought

them all together in his poem. He describes his heroes going to battle

with a prodigality of life, arising from an exuberance of animal

spirits: we see them before us, their number, and their order of battle,

poured out upon the plain "all plumed like estriches, like eagles newly

bathed, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls, youthful as May, and

gorgeous as the sun at midsummer," covered with glittering armour, with

dust and blood; while the Gods quaff their nectar in golden cups, or

mingle in the fray; and the old men assembled on the walls of Troy rise

up with reverence as Helen passes by them. The multitude of things in

Homer is wonderful; their splendour, their truth, their force, and

variety. His poetry is, like his religion, the poetry of number and

form: he describes the bodies as well as the souls of men.

The poetry of the Bible is that of imagination and of faith: it is

abstract and disembodied: it is not the poetry of form, but of power;

not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but

aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It

is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone

in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth,

and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of

faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs

the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity, and

a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it

became more universal, for the Infinite is present to every thing: "If

we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we

turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from it." Man is thus

aggrandised in the image of his Maker. The history of the patriarchs is

of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race of people, the

inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations which are to come

after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed, is vast, unformed,

obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon it--an invisible hand is

suspended over it. The spirit of the Christian religion consists in the

glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the Hebrew dispensation,

Providence took an immediate share in the affairs of this life. Jacob's

dream arose out of this intimate communion between heaven and earth: it

was this that let down, in the sight of the youthful patriarch, a golden

ladder from the sky to the earth, with angels ascending and descending

upon it, and shed a light upon the lonely place, which can never pass

away. The story of Ruth, again, is as if all the depth of natural

affection in the human race was involved in her breast. There are

descriptions in the book of Job more prodigal of imagery, more intense

in passion, than any thing in Homer, as that of the state of his

prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him by night. The metaphors

in the Old Testament are more boldly figurative. Things were collected

more into masses, and gave a greater _momentum_ to the imagination.

Dante was the father of modern poetry, and he may therefore claim a

place in this connection. His poem is the first great step from Gothic

darkness and barbarism; and the struggle of thought in it to burst the

thraldom in which the human mind had been so long held, is felt in every

page. He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which

separates the ancient and the modern world; and saw the glories of

antiquity dawning through the abyss of time, while revelation opened its

passage to the other world. He was lost in wonder at what had been done

before him, and he dared to emulate it. Dante seems to have been

indebted to the Bible for the gloomy tone of his mind, as well as for

the prophetic fury which exalts and kindles his poetry; but he is

utterly unlike Homer. His genius is not a sparkling flame, but the

sullen heat of a furnace. He is power, passion, self-will personified.

In all that relates to the descriptive or fanciful part of poetry, he

bears no comparison to many who had gone before, or who have come after

him; but there is a gloomy abstraction in his conceptions, which lies

like a dead weight upon the mind; a benumbing stupor, a breathless awe,

from the intensity of the impression; a terrible obscurity, like that

which oppresses us in dreams; an identity of interest, which moulds

every object to its own purposes, and clothes all things with the

passions and imaginations of the human soul,--that make amends for all

other deficiencies. The immediate objects he presents to the mind are

not much in themselves, they want grandeur, beauty, and order; but they

become every thing by the force of the character he impresses upon them.

His mind lends its own power to the objects which it contemplates,

instead of borrowing it from them. He takes advantage even of the

nakedness and dreary vacuity of his subject. His imagination peoples the

shades of death, and broods over the silent air. He is the severest of

all writers, the most hard and impenetrable, the most opposite to the

flowery and glittering; who relies most on his own power, and the sense

of it in others, and who leaves most room to the imagination of his

readers. Dante's only endeavour is to interest; and he interests by

exciting our sympathy with the emotion by which he is himself possessed.

He does not place before us the objects by which that emotion has been

created; but he seizes on the attention, by shewing us the effect they

produce on his feelings; and his poetry accordingly gives the same

thrilling and overwhelming sensation, which is caught by gazing on the

face of a person who has seen some object of horror. The improbability

of the events, the abruptness and monotony in the Inferno, are

excessive: but the interest never flags, from the continued earnestness

of the author's mind. Dante's great power is in combining internal

feelings with external objects. Thus the gate of hell, on which that

withering inscription is written, seems to be endowed with speech and

consciousness, and to utter its dread warning, not without a sense of

mortal woes. This author habitually unites the absolutely local and

individual with the greatest wildness and mysticism. In the midst of the

obscure and shadowy regions of the lower world, a tomb suddenly rises up

with the inscription, "I am the tomb of Pope Anastasius the Sixth": and

half the personages whom he has crowded into the Inferno are his own

acquaintance. All this, perhaps, tends to heighten the effect by the

bold intermixture of realities, and by an appeal, as it were, to the

individual knowledge and experience of the reader. He affords few

subjects for picture. There is, indeed, one gigantic one, that of Count

Ugolino, of which Michael Angelo made a bas-relief, and which Sir Joshua

Reynolds ought not to have painted.

Another writer whom I shall mention last, and whom I cannot persuade

myself to think a mere modern in the groundwork, is Ossian. He is a

feeling and a name that can never be destroyed in the minds of his

readers. As Homer is the first vigour and lustihed, Ossian is the decay

and old age of poetry. He lives only in the recollection and regret of

the past. There is one impression which he conveys more entirely than

all other poets, namely, the sense of privation, the loss of all things,

of friends, of good name, of country--he is even without God in the

world. He converses only with the spirits of the departed; with the

motionless and silent clouds. The cold moonlight sheds its faint lustre

on his head; the fox peeps out of the ruined tower; the thistle waves

its beard to the wandering gale; and the strings of his harp seem, as

the hand of age, as the tale of other times, passes over them, to sigh

and rustle like the dry reeds in the winter's wind! The feeling of

cheerless desolation, of the loss of the pith and sap of existence, of

the annihilation of the substance, and the clinging to the shadow of all

things as in a mock-embrace, is here perfect. In this way, the

lamentation of Selma for the loss of Salgar is the finest of all. If it

were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it would only

be another instance of mutability, another blank made, another void left

in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes him so

often complain, "Roll on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy on your

wing to Ossian!"

LECTURE II.

ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER.

Having, in the former Lecture, given some account of the nature of

poetry in general, I shall proceed, in the next place, to a more

particular consideration of the genius and history of English poetry. I

shall take, as the subject of the present lecture, Chaucer and Spenser,

two out of four of the greatest names in poetry, which this country has

to boast. Both of them, however, were much indebted to the early poets

of Italy, and may be considered as belonging, in a certain degree, to

the same school. The freedom and copiousness with which our most

original writers, in former periods, availed themselves of the

productions of their predecessors, frequently transcribing whole

passages, without scruple or acknowledgment, may appear contrary to the

etiquette of modern literature, when the whole stock of poetical

common-places has become public property, and no one is compelled to

trade upon any particular author. But it is not so much a subject of

wonder, at a time when to read and write was of itself an honorary

distinction, when learning was almost as great a rarity as genius, and

when in fact those who first transplanted the beauties of other

languages into their own, might be considered as public benefactors, and

the founders of a national literature.--There are poets older than

Chaucer, and in the interval between him and Spenser; but their genius

was not such as to place them in any point of comparison with either of

these celebrated men; and an inquiry into their particular merits or

defects might seem rather to belong to the province of the antiquary,

than be thought generally interesting to the lovers of poetry in the

present day.

Chaucer (who has been very properly considered as the father of

English poetry) preceded Spenser by two centuries. He is supposed to

have been born in London, in the year 1328, during the reign of Edward

III. and to have died in 1400, at the age of seventy-two. He received a

learned education at one, or at both of the universities, and travelled

early into Italy, where he became thoroughly imbued with the spirit and

excellences of the great Italian poets and prose-writers, Dante,

Petrarch, and Boccace; and is said to have had a personal interview with

one of these, Petrarch. He was connected, by marriage, with the famous

John of Gaunt, through whose interest he was introduced into several

public employments. Chaucer was an active partisan, a religious

reformer, and from the share he took in some disturbances, on one

occasion, he was obliged to fly the country. On his return, he was

imprisoned, and made his peace with government, as it is said, by a

discovery of his associates. Fortitude does not appear, at any time, to

have been the distinguishing virtue of poets.--There is, however, an

obvious similarity between the practical turn of Chaucer's mind and

restless impatience of his character, and the tone of his writings. Yet

it would be too much to attribute the one to the other as cause and

effect: for Spenser, whose poetical temperament was an effeminate as

Chaucer's was stern and masculine, was equally engaged in public

affairs, and had mixed equally in the great world. So much does native

disposition predominate over accidental circumstances, moulding them to

its previous bent and purposes! For while Chaucer's intercourse with the

busy world, and collision with the actual passions and conflicting

interests of others, seemed to brace the sinews of his understanding,

and gave to his writings the air of a man who describes persons and

things that he had known and been intimately concerned in; the same

opportunities, operating on a differently constituted frame, only served

to alienate Spenser's mind the more from the "close-pent up" scenes of

ordinary life, and to make him "rive their concealing continents," to

give himself up to the unrestrained indulgence of "flowery tenderness."

It is not possible for any two writers to be more opposite in this

respect. Spenser delighted in luxurious enjoyment; Chaucer, in severe

activity of mind. As Spenser was the most romantic and visionary,

Chaucer was the most practical of all the great poets, the most a man of

business and the world. His poetry reads like history. Every thing has a

downright reality; at least in the relator's mind. A simile, or a

sentiment, is as if it were given in upon evidence. Thus he describes

Cressid's first avowal of her love.

"And as the new abashed nightingale,

That stinteth first when she beginneth sing,

When that she heareth any herde's tale,

Or in the hedges any wight stirring,

And after, sicker, doth her voice outring;

Right so Cresseide, when that her dread stent,

Open'd her heart, and told him her intent."

This is so true and natural, and beautifully simple, that the two things

seem identified with each other. Again, it is said in the Knight's

Tale--

"Thus passeth yere by yere, and day by day,

Till it felle ones in a morwe of May,

That Emelie that fayrer was to sene

Than is the lilie upon his stalke grene;

And fresher than the May with floures newe,

For with the rose-colour strof hire hewe:

I n'ot which was the finer of hem two."

This scrupulousness about the literal preference, as if some question of

matter of fact was at issue, is remarkable. I might mention that other,

where he compares the meeting between Palamon and Arcite to a hunter

waiting for a lion in a gap;--

"That stondeth at a gap with a spere,

Whan hunted is the lion or the bere,

And hereth him come rushing in the greves,

And breking both the boughes and the leves:"--

or that still finer one of Constance, when she is condemned to death:--

"Have ye not seen somtime a pale face

(Among a prees) of him that hath been lad

Toward his deth, wheras he geteth no grace,

And swiche a colour in his face hath had,

Men mighten know him that was so bestad,

Amonges all the faces in that route;

So stant Custance, and loketh hire aboute."

The beauty, the pathos here does not seem to be of the poet's seeking,

but a part of the necessary texture of the fable. He speaks of what he

wishes to describe with the accuracy, the discrimination of one who

relates what has happened to himself, or has had the best information

from those who have been eye-witnesses of it. The strokes of his pencil

always tell. He dwells only on the essential, on that which would be

interesting to the persons really concerned: yet as he never omits any

material circumstance, he is prolix from the number of points on which

he touches, without being diffuse on any one; and is sometimes tedious

from the fidelity with which he adheres to his subject, as other writers

are from the frequency of their digressions from it. The chain of his

story is composed of a number of fine links, closely connected together,

and rivetted by a single blow. There is an instance of the minuteness

which he introduces into his most serious descriptions in his account of

Palamon when left alone in his cell:

"Swiche sorrow he maketh that the grete tour

Resouned of his yelling and clamour:

The pure fetters on his shinnes grete

Were of his bitter salte teres wete."

The mention of this last circumstance looks like a part of the

instructions he had to follow, which he had no discretionary power to

leave out or introduce at pleasure. He is contented to find grace and

beauty in truth. He exhibits for the most part the naked object, with

little drapery thrown over it. His metaphors, which are few, are not for

ornament, but use, and as like as possible to the things themselves. He

does not affect to shew his power over the reader's mind, but the power

which his subject has over his own. The readers of Chaucer's poetry feel

more nearly what the persons he describes must have felt, than perhaps

those of any other poet. His sentiments are not voluntary effusions of

the poet's fancy, but founded on the natural impulses and habitual

prejudices of the characters he has to represent. There is an inveteracy

of purpose, a sincerity of feeling, which never relaxes or grows vapid,

in whatever they do or say. There is no artificial, pompous display, but

a strict parsimony of the poet's materials, like the rude simplicity of

the age in which he lived. His poetry resembles the root just springing

from the ground, rather than the full-blown flower. His muse is no

"babbling gossip of the air," fluent and redundant; but, like a

stammerer, or a dumb person, that has just found the use of speech,

crowds many things together with eager haste, with anxious pauses, and

fond repetitions to prevent mistake. His words point as an index to the

objects, like the eye or finger. There were none of the common-places of

poetic diction in our author's time, no reflected lights of fancy, no

borrowed roseate tints; he was obliged to inspect things for himself, to

look narrowly, and almost to handle the object, as in the obscurity of

morning we partly see and partly grope our way; so that his descriptions

have a sort of tangible character belonging to them, and produce the

effect of sculpture on the mind. Chaucer had an equal eye for truth of

nature and discrimination of character; and his interest in what he saw

gave new distinctness and force to his power of observation. The

picturesque and the dramatic are in him closely blended together, and

hardly distinguishable; for he principally describes external

appearances as indicating character, as symbols of internal sentiment.

There is a meaning in what he sees; and it is this which catches his eye

by sympathy. Thus the costume and dress of the Canterbury Pilgrims--of

the Knight--the Squire--the Oxford Scholar--the Gap-toothed Wife

of Bath, and the rest, speak for themselves. To take one or two of these

at random:

"There was also a nonne, a Prioresse,

That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy;

Hire gretest othe n'as but by seint Eloy:

And she was cleped Madame Eglentine.

Ful wel she sange the service divine

Entuned in hire nose ful swetely;

And Frenche she spake ful fayre and fetisly,

After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,

For Frenche of Paris was to hire unknowe.

At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle;

She lette no morsel from hire lippes falle,

Ne wette hire fingres in hire sauce depe.

* * * * * *

And sikerly she was of great disport,

And ful plesant, and amiable of port,

And peined hire to contrefeten chere

Of court, and ben estatelich of manere,

And to ben holden digne of reverence.

But for to speken of hire conscience,

She was so charitable and so pitous,

She wolde wepe if that she saw a mous

Caughte in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.

Of smale houndes hadde she, that she fedde

With rosted flesh, and milk, and wastel brede.

But sore wept she if on of hem were dede,

Or if men smote it with a yerde smert:

And all was conscience and tendre herte.

Ful semely hire wimple ypinched was;

Hire nose tretis; hire eyen grey as glas;

Hire mouth ful smale; and therto soft and red;

But sickerly she hadde a fayre forehed.

It was almost a spanne brode, I trowe."

"A Monk there was, a fayre for the maistrie,

An out-rider, that loved venerie:

A manly man, to ben an abbot able.

Ful many a deinte hors hadde he in stable:

And whan he rode, men mighte his bridel here,

Gingeling in a whistling wind as clere,

And eke as loude, as doth the chapell belle,

Ther as this lord was keper of the celle.

The reule of Seint Maure and of Seint Beneit,

Because that it was olde and somdele streit,

This ilke monk lette olde thinges pace,

And held after the newe world the trace. [*]

He yave not of the text a pulled hen,

That saith, that hunters ben not holy men;--

Therfore he was a prickasoure a right:

Greihoundes he hadde as swift as foul of flight:

Of pricking and of hunting for the hare

Was all his lust, for no cost wolde he spare.

I saw his sleves purfiled at the hond

With gris, and that the finest of the lond.

And for to fasten his hood under his chinne,

He had of gold ywrought a curious pinne:

A love-knotte in the greter end ther was.

His hed was balled, and shone as any glas,

And eke his face, as it hadde ben anoint.

He was a lord ful fat and in good point.

His eyen stepe, and rolling in his hed,

That stemed as a forneis of a led.

His botes souple, his hors in gret estat,

Now certainly he was a fayre prelat.

He was not pale as a forpined gost.

A fat swan loved he best of any rost.

His palfrey was as broune as is a bery."

___

[*] PG transcriber's note:

"space" instead of "trace" in some editions.

___

The Serjeant at Law is the same identical individual as Lawyer

Dowling in Tom Jones, who wished to divide himself into a hundred

pieces, to be in a hundred places at once.

"No wher so besy a man as he ther n'as,

And yet he semed besier than he was."

The Frankelein, in "whose hous it snewed of mete and drinke"; the

Shipman, "who rode upon a rouncie, as he couthe"; the Doctour of

Phisike, "whose studie was but litel of the Bible"; the Wif of Bath, in

"All whose parish ther was non,

That to the offring before hire shulde gon,

And if ther did, certain so wroth was she,

That she was out of alle charitee;"

--the poure Persone of a toun, "whose parish was wide, and houses fer

asonder"; the Miller, and the Reve, "a slendre colerike man," are all of

the same stamp. They are every one samples of a kind; abstract

definitions of a species. Chaucer, it has been said, numbered the

classes of men, as Linnaeus numbered the plants. Most of them remain to

this day: others that are obsolete, and may well be dispensed with,

still live in his descriptions of them. Such is the Sompnoure:

"A Sompnoure was ther with us in that place,

That hadde a fire-red cherubinnes face,

For sausefleme he was, with eyen narwe,

As hote he was, and likerous as a sparwe,

With scalled browes blake, and pilled berd:

Of his visage children were sore aferd.

Ther n'as quicksilver, litarge, ne brimston,

Boras, ceruse, ne oile of tartre non,

Ne oinement that wolde clense or bite,

That him might helpen of his whelkes white,

Ne of the knobbes sitting on his chekes.

Wel loved he garlike, onions, and lekes,

And for to drinke strong win as rede as blood.

Than wolde he speke, and crie as he were wood.

And whan that he wel dronken had the win,

Than wold he speken no word but Latin.

A fewe termes coude he, two or three,

That he had lerned out of som decree;

No wonder is, he heard it all the day.--

In danger hadde he at his owen gise

The yonge girles of the diocise,

And knew hir conseil, and was of hir rede.

A gerlond hadde he sette upon his hede

As gret as it were for an alestake:

A bokeler hadde he made him of a cake.

With him ther rode a gentil Pardonere--

That hadde a vois as smale as hath a gote."

It would be a curious speculation (at least for those who think that

the characters of men never change, though manners, opinions, and

institutions may) to know what has become of this character of the

Sompnoure in the present day; whether or not it has any technical

representative in existing professions; into what channels and conduits

it has withdrawn itself, where it lurks unseen in cunning obscurity, or

else shews its face boldly, pampered into all the insolence of office,

in some other shape, as it is deterred or encouraged by circumstances.

_Chaucer's characters modernised_, upon this principle of historic

derivation, would be an useful addition to our knowledge of human

nature. But who is there to undertake it?

The descriptions of the equipage, and accoutrements of the two kings

of Thrace and Inde, in the Knight's Tale, are as striking and grand, as

the others are lively and natural:

"Ther maist thou se coming with Palamon

Licurge himself, the grete king of Trace:

Blake was his berd, and manly was his face,

The cercles of his eyen in his hed

They gloweden betwixen yelwe and red,

And like a griffon loked he about,

With kemped heres on his browes stout;

His limmes gret, his braunes hard and stronge,

His shouldres brode, his armes round and longe

And as the guise was in his contree,

Ful highe upon a char of gold stood he,

With foure white bolles in the trais.

Instede of cote-armure on his harnais,

With nayles yelwe, and bright as any gold,

He hadde a beres skin, cole-blake for old.

His longe here was kempt behind his bak,

As any ravenes fether it shone for blake.

A wreth of gold arm-gret, of huge weight,

Upon his hed sate full of stones bright,

Of fine rubins [sic] and of diamants.

About his char ther wenten white alauns,

Twenty and mo, as gret as any stere,

To hunten at the leon or the dere,

And folwed him, with mosel fast ybound.--

With Arcita, in stories as men find,

The grete Emetrius, the king of Inde,

Upon a stede bay, trapped in stele,

Covered with cloth of gold diapred wele,

Came riding like the god of armes Mars.

His cote-armure was of a cloth of Tars,

Couched with perles, white, and round and grete.

His sadel was of brent gold new ybete;

A mantelet upon his shouldres hanging

Bret-ful of rubies red, as fire sparkling.

His crispe here like ringes was yronne,

And that was yelwe, and glitered as the Sonne.

His nose was high, his eyen bright citrin,

His lippes round, his colour was sanguin,

A fewe fraknes in his face yspreint,

Betwixen yelwe and blake somdel ymeint,

And as a leon he his loking caste.

Of five and twenty yere his age I caste.

His berd was wel begonnen for to spring;

His vois was as a trompe thondering.

Upon his hed he wered of laurer grene

A gerlond freshe and lusty for to sene.

Upon his hond he bare for his deduit

An egle tame, as any lily whit.--

About this king ther ran on every part

Ful many a tame leon and leopart."

What a deal of terrible beauty there is contained in this

description! The imagination of a poet brings such objects before us, as

when we look at wild beasts in a menagerie; their claws are pared, their

eyes glitter like harmless lightning; but we gaze at them with a

pleasing awe, clothed in beauty, formidable in the sense of abstract

power.

Chaucer's descriptions of natural scenery possess the same sort of

characteristic excellence, or what might be termed _gusto_. They have a

local truth and freshness, which gives the very feeling of the air, the

coolness or moisture of the ground. Inanimate objects are thus made to

have a fellow-feeling in the interest of the story; and render back the

sentiment of the speaker's mind. One of the finest parts of Chaucer is

of this mixed kind. It is the beginning of the Flower and the Leaf,

where he describes the delight of that young beauty, shrowded in her

bower, and listening, in the morning of the year, to the singing of the

nightingale; while her joy rises with the rising song, and gushes out

afresh at every pause, and is borne along with the full tide of

pleasure, and still increases, and repeats, and prolongs itself, and

knows no ebb. The coolness of the arbour, its retirement, the early time

of the day, the sudden starting up of the birds in the neighbouring

bushes, the eager delight with which they devour and rend the opening

buds and flowers, are expressed with a truth and feeling, which make the

whole appear like the recollection of an actual scene:

"Which as me thought was right a pleasing sight,

And eke the briddes song for to here,

Would haue rejoyced any earthly wight,

And I that couth not yet in no manere

Heare the nightingale of all the yeare,

Ful busily herkened with herte and with eare,

If I her voice perceiue coud any where.

And I that all this pleasaunt sight sie,

Thought sodainly I felt so sweet an aire

Of the eglentere, that certainely

There is no herte I deme in such dispaire,

Ne with thoughts froward and contraire,

So ouerlaid, but it should soone haue bote,

If it had ones felt this savour sote.