"The moving accident is not my trade:
To freeze the blood I have no ready arts:
'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade,
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.
As I from Hawes to Richmond did repair,
It chanced that I saw standing in a dell
Three aspens at three corners of a square,
And one, not four yards distant, near a well.
What this imported I could ill divine:
And, pulling now the rein my horse to stop,
I saw three pillars standing in a line,
The last stone pillar on a dark hill-top.
The trees were gray, with neither arms nor head;
Half-wasted the square mound of tawny green;
So that you just might say, as then I said,
"Here in old time the hand of man hath been."
I looked upon the hill both far and near,
More doleful place did never eye survey;
It seemed as if the spring-time came not here,
And Nature here were willing to decay.
I stood in various thoughts and fancies lost,
When one, who was in shepherd's garb attired,
Came up the hollow:--Him did I accost,
And what this place might be I then inquired.
The shepherd stopped, and that same story told
Which in my former rhyme I have rehearsed.
"A jolly place," said he, "in times of old!
But something ails it now; the spot is curst.
You see these lifeless stumps of aspen wood--
Some say that they are beeches, others elms--
These were the bower; and here a mansion stood,
The finest palace of a hundred realms!
The arbour does its own condition tell;
You see the stones, the fountain, and the stream;
But as to the great lodge! you might as well
Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream.
There's neither dog nor heifer, horse nor sheep,
Will wet his lips within that cup of stone;
And oftentimes, when all are fast asleep,
This water doth send forth a dolorous groan.
Some say that here a murder has been done,
And blood cries out for blood: but, for my part,
I've guessed, when I've been sitting in the sun,
That it was all for that unhappy hart.
What thoughts must through the creature's brain have passed!
Even from the top-most stone, upon the steep,
Are but three bounds--and look, Sir, at this last--
--O Master! it has been a cruel leap.
For thirteen hours he ran a desperate race;
And in my simple mind we cannot tell
What cause the hart might have to love this place,
And come and make his death-bed near the well.
Here on the grass perhaps asleep he sank,
Lulled by this fountain in the summer-tide;
This water was perhaps the first he drank
When he had wandered from his mother's side.
In April here beneath the scented thorn
He heard the birds their morning carols sing;
And he, perhaps, for aught we know, was born
Not half a furlong from that self-same spring.
But now here's neither grass nor pleasant shade;
The sun on drearier hollow never shone;
So will it be, as I have often said,
Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone."
"Gray-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well;
Small difference lies between thy creed and mine:
This beast not unobserved by Nature fell;
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.
The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep, and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
The pleasure-house is dust:--behind, before,
This is no common waste, no common gloom;
But Nature, in due course of time, once more
Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom.
She leaves these objects to a slow decay,
That what we are, and have been, may be known;
But at the coming of the milder day,
These monuments shall all be overgrown.
One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she shews, and what conceals,
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."
Mr. Wordsworth is at the head of that which has been denominated the
Lake school of poetry; a school which, with all my respect for it, I do
not think sacred from criticism or exempt from faults, of some of which
faults I shall speak with becoming frankness; for I do not see that the
liberty of the press ought to be shackled, or freedom of speech
curtailed, to screen either its revolutionary or renegado extravagances.
This school of poetry had its origin in the French revolution, or rather
in those sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution; and
which sentiments and opinions were indirectly imported into this country
in translations from the German about that period. Our poetical
literature had, towards the close of the last century, degenerated into
the most trite, insipid, and mechanical of all things, in the hands of
the followers of Pope and the old French school of poetry. It wanted
something to stir it up, and it found that some thing in the principles
and events of the French revolution. From the impulse it thus received,
it rose at once from the most servile imitation and tamest common-place,
to the utmost pitch of singularity and paradox. The change in the
belles-lettres was as complete, and to many persons as startling, as the
change in politics, with which it went hand in hand. There was a mighty
ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and people. According
to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new. Nothing that
was established was to be tolerated. All the common-place figures of
poetry, tropes, allegories, personifications, with the whole heathen
mythology, were instantly discarded; a classical allusion was considered
as a piece of antiquated foppery; capital letters were no more allowed
in print, than letters-patent of nobility were permitted in real life;
kings and queens were dethroned from their rank and station in
legitimate tragedy or epic poetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere;
rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, and regular metre
was abolished along with regular government. Authority and fashion,
elegance or arrangement, were hooted out of countenance, as pedantry and
prejudice. Every one did that which was good in his own eyes. The object
was to reduce all things to an absolute level; and a singularly affected
and outrageous simplicity prevailed in dress and manners, in style and
sentiment. A striking effect produced where it was least expected,
something new and original, no matter whether good, bad, or indifferent,
whether mean or lofty, extravagant or childish, was all that was aimed
at, or considered as compatible with sound philosophy and an age of
reason. The licentiousness grew extreme: Coryate's Crudities were
nothing to it. The world was to be turned topsy-turvy; and poetry, by
the good will of our Adam-wits, was to share its fate and begin _de
novo_. It was a time of promise, a renewal of the world and of letters;
and the Deucalions, who were to perform this feat of regeneration, were
the present poet-laureat and the two authors of the Lyrical Ballads. The
Germans, who made heroes of robbers, and honest women of cast-off
mistresses, had already exhausted the extravagant and marvellous in
sentiment and situation: our native writers adopted a wonderful
simplicity of style and matter. The paradox they set out with was, that
all things are by nature equally fit subjects for poetry; or that if
there is any preference to be given, those that are the meanest and most
unpromising are the best, as they leave the greatest scope for the
unbounded stores of thought and fancy in the writer's own mind. Poetry
had with them "neither buttress nor coigne of vantage to make its
pendant bed and procreant cradle." It was not "born so high: its aiery
buildeth in the cedar's top, and dallies with the wind, and scorns the
sun." It grew like a mushroom out of the ground; or was hidden in it
like a truffle, which it required a particular sagacity and industry to
find out and dig up. They founded the new school on a principle of sheer
humanity, on pure nature void of art. It could not be said of these
sweeping reformers and dictators in the republic of letters, that "in
their train walked crowns and crownets; that realms and islands, like
plates, dropt from their pockets": but they were surrounded, in company
with the Muses, by a mixed rabble of idle apprentices and Botany Bay
convicts, female vagrants, gipsies, meek daughters in the family of
Christ, of ideot boys and mad mothers, and after them "owls and
night-ravens flew." They scorned "degrees, priority, and place,
insisture, course, proportion, season, form, office, and custom in all
line of order":--the distinctions of birth, the vicissitudes of
fortune, did not enter into their abstracted, lofty, and levelling
calculation of human nature. He who was more than man, with them was
none. They claimed kindred only with the commonest of the people:
peasants, pedlars, and village-barbers were their oracles and bosom
friends. Their poetry, in the extreme to which it professedly tended,
and was in effect carried, levels all distinctions of nature and
society; has "no figures nor no fantasies," which the prejudices of
superstition or the customs of the world draw in the brains of men; "no
trivial fond records" of all that has existed in the history of past
ages; it has no adventitious pride, pomp, or circumstance, to set it
off; "the marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe;" neither tradition,
reverence, nor ceremony, "that to great ones 'longs": it breaks in
pieces the golden images of poetry, and defaces its armorial bearings,
to melt them down in the mould of common humanity or of its own upstart
self-sufficiency. They took the same method in their new-fangled "metre
ballad-mongering" scheme, which Rousseau did in his prose paradoxes--
of exciting attention by reversing the established standards of opinion
and estimation in the world. They were for bringing poetry back to its
primitive simplicity and state of nature, as he was for bringing society
back to the savage state: so that the only thing remarkable left in the
world by this change, would be the persons who had produced it. A
thorough adept in this school of poetry and philanthropy is jealous of
all excellence but his own. He does not even like to share his
reputation with his subject; for he would have it all proceed from his
own power and originality of mind. Such a one is slow to admire any
thing that is admirable; feels no interest in what is most interesting
to others, no grandeur in any thing grand, no beauty in anything
beautiful. He tolerates only what he himself creates; he sympathizes
only with what can enter into no competition with him, with "the bare
trees and mountains bare, and grass in the green field." He sees nothing
but himself and the universe. He hates all greatness and all pretensions
to it, whether well or ill-founded. His egotism is in some respects a
madness; for he scorns even the admiration of himself, thinking it a
presumption in any one to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to
understand him. He hates all science and all art; he hates chemistry, he
hates conchology; he hates Voltaire; he hates Sir Isaac Newton; he hates
wisdom; he hates wit; he hates metaphysics, which he says are
unintelligible, and yet he would be thought to understand them; he hates
prose; he hates all poetry but his own; he hates the dialogues in
Shakespeare; he hates music, dancing, and painting; he hates Rubens, he
hates Rembrandt; he hates Raphael, he hates Titian; he hates Vandyke; he
hates the antique; he hates the Apollo Belvidere; he hates the Venus of
Medicis. This is the reason that so few people take an interest in his
writings, because he takes an interest in nothing that others do!--The
effect has been perceived as something odd; but the cause or principle
has never been distinctly traced to its source before, as far as I know.
The proofs are to be found every where--in Mr. Southey's Botany Bay
Eclogues, in his book of Songs and Sonnets, his Odes and Inscriptions,
so well parodied in the Anti-Jacobin Review, in his Joan of Arc, and
last, though not least, in his Wat Tyler:
"When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Where was then the gentleman?"
(--or the poet laureat either, we may ask?)--In Mr. Coleridge's Ode to
an Ass's Foal, in his Lines to Sarah, his Religious Musings; and in his
and Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, _passim_.
Of Mr. Southey's larger epics, I have but a faint recollection at
this distance of time, but all that I remember of them is mechanical and
extravagant, heavy and superficial. His affected, disjointed style is
well imitated in the Rejected Addresses. The difference between him and
Sir Richard Blackmore seems to be, that the one is heavy and the other
light, the one solemn and the other pragmatical, the one phlegmatic and
the other flippant; and that there is no Gay in the present time to give
a Catalogue Raisonne of the performances of the living undertaker of
epics. Kehama is a loose sprawling figure, such as we see cut out of
wood or paper, and pulled or jerked with wire or thread, to make sudden
and surprising motions, without meaning, grace, or nature in them. By
far the best of his works are some of his shorter personal compositions,
in which there is an ironical mixture of the quaint and serious, such as
his lines on a picture of Gaspar Poussin, the fine tale of Gualberto,
his Description of a Pig, and the Holly-tree, which is an affecting,
beautiful, and modest retrospect on his own character. May the
aspiration with which it concludes be fulfilled! [11]--But the little
he has done of true and sterling excellence, is overloaded by the
quantity of indifferent matter which he turns out every year, "prosing
or versing," with equally mechanical and irresistible facility. His
Essays, or political and moral disquisitions, are not so full of
original matter as Montaigne's. They are second or third rate
compositions in that class.
___
[11]
"O reader! hast thou ever stood to see
The Holly Tree?
The eye that contemplates it well perceives
Its glossy leaves,
Ordered by an intelligence so wise
As might confound the Atheist's sophistries.
Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen;
No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;
But as they grow where nothing is to fear,
Smooth and unarm'd the pointless leaves appear.
I love to view these things with curious eyes,
And moralize;
And in the wisdom of the Holly Tree
Can emblems see
Wherewith perchance to make a pleasant rhyme,
Such as may profit in the after time.
So, though abroad perchance I might appear
Harsh and austere,
To those who on my leisure would intrude
Reserved and rude,
Gentle at home amid my friends I'd be,
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.
And should my youth, as youth is apt I know,
Some harshness show,
All vain asperities I day by day
Would wear away,
Till the smooth temper of my age should be
Like the high leaves upon the Holly Tree.
And as when all the summer trees are seen
So bright and green,
The Holly leaves their fadeless hues display
Less bright than they,
But when the bare and wintry woods we see,
What then so cheerful as the Holly Tree?
So serious should my youth appear among
The thoughtless throng,
So would I seem amid the young and gay
More grave than they,
That in my age as cheerful I might be
As the green winter of the Holly Tree."--
___
It remains that I should say a few words of Mr. Coleridge; and there
is no one who has a better right to say what he thinks of him than I
have. "Is there here any dear friend of Caesar? To him I say, that
Brutus's love to Caesar was no less than his." But no matter.--His
Ancient Mariner is his most remarkable performance, and the only one
that I could point out to any one as giving an adequate idea of his
great natural powers. It is high German, however, and in it he seems to
"conceive of poetry but as a drunken dream, reckless, careless, and
heedless, of past, present, and to come." His tragedies (for he has
written two) are not answerable to it; they are, except a few poetical
passages, drawling sentiment and metaphysical jargon. He has no genuine
dramatic talent. There is one fine passage in his Christobel, that which
contains the description of the quarrel between Sir Leoline and Sir
Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine, who had been friends in youth.
"Alas! they had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain:
And thus it chanc'd as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother,
And parted ne'er to meet again!
But neither ever found another
To free the hollow heart from paining--
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away I ween
The marks of that which once hath been.
Sir Leoline a moment's space
Stood gazing on the damsel's face;
And the youthful lord of Tryermaine
Came back upon his heart again."
It might seem insidious if I were to praise his ode entitled Fire,
Famine, and Slaughter, as an effusion of high poetical enthusiasm, and
strong political feeling. His Sonnet to Schiller conveys a fine
compliment to the author of the Robbers, and an equally fine idea of the
state of youthful enthusiasm in which he composed it.
"Schiller! that hour I would have wish'd to die,
If through the shudd'ring midnight I had sent
From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,
That fearful voice, a famish'd father's cry--
That in no after moment aught less vast
Might stamp me mortal! A triumphant shout
Black Horror scream'd, and all her goblin rout
From the more with'ring scene diminish'd pass'd.
Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity!
Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood,
Wand'ring at eve, with finely frenzied eye,
Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood!
Awhile, with mute awe gazing, I would brood,
Then weep aloud in a wild ecstacy!"--
His _Conciones ad Populum_, Watchman, &c. are dreary trash. Of his
Friend, I have spoken the truth elsewhere. But I may say of him here,
that he is the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man
of genius. He is the only person from whom I ever learnt any thing.
There is only one thing he could learn from me in return, but _that_ he
has not. He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had
angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished
him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour
and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings
of his imagination lifted him from off his feet. His voice rolled on the
ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of
thought. His mind was clothed with wings; and raised on them, he lifted
philosophy to heaven. In his descriptions, you then saw the progress of
human happiness and liberty in bright and never-ending succession, like
the steps of Jacob's ladder, with airy shapes ascending and descending,
and with the voice of God at the top of the ladder. And shall I, who
heard him then, listen to him now? Not I! . . . That spell is broke; that
time is gone for ever; that voice is heard no more: but still the
recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of long-past years, and
rings in my ears with never-dying sound.
"What though the radiance which was once so bright,
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow'r;
I do not grieve, but rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy,
Which having been, must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In years that bring the philosophic mind!"--
I have thus gone through the task I intended, and have come at last
to the level ground. I have felt my subject gradually sinking from under
me as I advanced, and have been afraid of ending in nothing. The
interest has unavoidably decreased at almost every successive step of
the progress, like a play that has its catastrophe in the first or
second act. This, however, I could not help. I have done as well as I
could.