"'It comes! the temple reels and crashes--Jove!
I thank thee! Vesta! let me sleep with thee!'
And on the bosom of the earthquake rocked
The statues and the pillars, and her brain
Whirled with the earth's convulsions, as the maid
Fell by a trembling image and upraised
A prayer of gratitude; while through the vaults,
In fear and ghastly horror, fled the priest,
Breathing quick curses mid his warning cries
For succor; and the obscene birds their wings
Flapped o'er his pallid face, and reptiles twined
In folds of knotted venom round his feet.
Yet on he rushed--the blackened walls around
Crashing--the spectral lights hurled hissing down
The cold green waters; and thick darkness came
To bury ruin!"
[Footnote 11: Vol. i. p. 159.]
The denouement of the scene is the same in the novel and the poem--a
statue, hurled from its pedestal, strikes the unhallowed violator to
the earth. There is no scene in Baron more actually transcribed from
the Andrian of Terence than this from 'The Last Night of Pompeii!' But
the scene in the amphitheatre, where the Christian Olinthus and the
lover Glaucus are doomed to perish by the fangs of the famished lion,
is still more strikingly similar than any in the novel, except the
description of the destruction. Arbaces, actuated by unholy love of
Ione, is the author of the disgrace and ruin of both these personages;
and the prætor Diomede, in the poem, resolves to sacrifice Pansa to the
African lion, because he loves and determines to possess Mariamne. The
earlier scenes in the amphitheatre are the same; four gladiators are
represented in sanguinary strife, and two as having perished, ere the
command is given to bring the Christian and lover on the arena, and to
loose the Numidian lion. In neither instance, however, will the noble
beast attack his destined victim; but shrinks and cowers in utter
terror, though goaded on to his dreadful feast. We now solicit a
careful comparison of the scenes which succeed, with those which,
nearly two years before Mr. Bulwer's book was conceived, we had wrought
out with no slight study, and presented to our unregarding countrymen.
The closing scene in the Pompeiian amphitheatre, as represented in 'The
Last _Days_ of Pompeii:'
"'Behold how the gods protect the guiltless! The fires of the avenging
Orcus burst forth against the false witness of my accusers!'"
"The eyes of the crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld
with ineffable dismay a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius
in the form of a gigantic pine tree; the trunk, blackness;--the
branches, fire;--that shifted and wavered in its hues with every
moment, now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again
blazed terrifically forth with intolerable glare!
"There was a dead, heart-sunken silence--through which there suddenly
broke the roar of the lion, which, from within the building, was echoed
back by the sharper and fiercer yells of its follow beasts. Dread seers
were they of the burthen of the atmosphere, and wild prophets of the
wrath to come!
"Then there rose on high the universal shrieks of women; the men stared
at each other, but were dumb. At that moment they felt the earth shake
beneath their feet; the walls of the theatre trembled; and beyond, in
the distance, they heard the crash of falling roofs; an instant more,
and the mountain cloud seemed to roll towards them, dark and rapid,
like a torrent; at the same time, it cast forth from its bosom a shower
of ashes, mixed with vast fragments of burning stone! Over the crushing
vines,--over the desolate streets,--over the amphitheatre itself,--far
and wide,--with many a mighty splash in the agitated sea,--fell that
awful shower!
"No longer thought the crowd of justice or of Arbaces; safety for
themselves was their sole thought. Each turned to fly--each dashing,
pressing, crushing against the other. Trampling recklessly over the
fallen,--amid groans, and oaths, and prayers, and sudden shrieks, the
enormous crowd vomited itself forth through the numerous passages.
Whither should they fly?"
Now let us present the description, given in 'The Last _Night_ of
Pompeii,' of the horrors that succeeded the scene of the games:
"Awed, yet untrembling, Pansa calm replied,
'Ye hear no thunder--but Destruction's howl!
Ye see no lightning--but the lava glare
Of desolation sweeping o'er your pride!
Death is beneath, around, above, within
All who exult to inflict it on my heart,
And ye must meet it, fly when, where ye will,
For in the madness of your cruelties
Ye have delayed till every hope is dead.
Let the doom come! our faiths will soon be tried.
Gigantic spectres from their shadowy thrones,
With ghastly smiles to welcome ye, arise.
The Pharaohs and Ptolemies uplift
Their glimmering sceptres o'er ye--bidding all
Bare their dark bosoms to the Omniscient God:
And every strange and horrid mythos waits
To fold ye in the terrors of its dreams.'"
"Like an earthshadowing cypress, o'er the skies
Lifting its labyrinth of leaves, the boughs
Of molten brass, the giant trunk of flame,
The breath of the volcano's Titan heart
Hung in the heavens; and every maddened pulse
Of the vast mountain's earthquake bosom hurled
Its vengeance on the earth that gasped beneath."
"From every cell shrieks burst; hyenas cried
Like lost child stricken in its loneliness:
The giant elephant with matchless strength
Struggled against the portal of his tomb,
And groaned and panted; and the leopard's yell
And tiger's growl with all surrounding cries
Of human horror mingled; and in air,
Spotting the lurid heavens and waiting prey,
The evil birds of carnage hung and watched."
"Vesuvius answered: from its pinnacles
Clouds of farflashing cinders, lava showers,
And seas drank up by the abyss of fire
To be hurled forth in boiling cataracts,
Like midnight mountains, wrapt in lightnings, fell."
"All awful sounds of heaven and earth met now;
Darkness behind the sungod's chariot rolled,
Shrouding destruction, save when volcan fires
Lifted the folds to gaze on agony;
And when a moment's terrible repose
Fell on the deep convulsions, all could hear
The toppling cliffs explode and crash below,
While multitudinous waters from the sea
In whirlpools through the channell'd mountain rocks
Rushed, and with hisses like the damned's speech,
Fell in the mighty furnace of the mount."
"Oh, then, the love of life! the struggling rush,
The crushing conflict of escape! few, brief,
And dire the words delirious fear spake now--
One thought, one action swayed the tossing crowd.
All through the vomitories madly sprung,
And mass on mass of trembling beings pressed,
Gasping and goading, with the savageness
That is the child of danger, like the waves
Charybdis from his jagged rocks throws down,
Mingled by fury--warring in their foam.
Some swooned and were trod down by legion feet;
Some cried for mercy to the unanswering gods;
Some shrieked for parted friends forever lost;
And some in passion's chaos, with the yells
Of desperation did blaspheme the heavens;
And some were still in utterness of woe.
Yet all toiled on in trembling waves of life
Along the subterranean corridors.
Moments were centuries of doubt and dread!
Each breathing obstacle a hated thing:
Each trampled wretch, a footstool to o'erlook
The foremost multitudes; and terror, now,
Begat in all a maniac ruthlessness,
For in the madness of their agonies
Strong men cast down the feeble who delayed
Their flight, and maidens on the stones were crushed," etc.
Let the reader compare each of these extracts with the other, and form
his own opinion of Mr. Bulwer's great powers and originality. These
very remarkable coincidences are followed by others not less
extraordinary and worthy of commemoration:
"But suddenly a duller shade fell over the air. Instinctively he turned
to the mountain, and behold! one of the two gigantic crests, into which
the summit had been divided, rocked and wavered to and fro; and then,
with a sound the mightiness of which no language can describe, it fell
from the burning base, and rushed, an avalanche of fire, down the sides
of the mountain! At the same instant gushed forth a volume of blackest
smoke, rolling on, over air, sea, and earth."
"Bright and gigantic through the darkness, which closed around it like
the walls of hell, the mountain shone--a pile of fire! Its summit
seemed riven in two; or rather above its surface there seemed to rise
two monster-shapes, each confronting each, as demons contending for a
world. These were of one deep blood-red hue of fire, which lighted up
the whole atmosphere far and wide; but _below_, the nether part of the
mountain was still dark and shrouded,--save in three places, adown
which flowed, serpentine and irregular, rivers of the molten lava.
Darkly red through the profound gloom of their banks, they flowed
slowly on, as towards the devoted city. Over the broadest there seemed
to spring a cragged and stupendous arch, from which, as from the jaws
of hell, gushed the sources of the sudden Phlegethon."
Among the Death Cries of Pompeii, as we imagined them, is the following
lyric:
"It bursts! it bursts! and thousand thunders blent,
From the deep heart of agonizing earth,
Knell, shatter, crash along the firmament,
And new hells peopled startle into birth.
Vesuvius sunders! pyramids of fire
From fathomless abysses blast the sky;
E'en desolating Ruin doth expire,
And mortal Death in woe immortal die.
Torrents like lurid gore,
Hurled from the gulf of horror, pour,
Like legion fiends embattled to the spoil,
And o'er the temple domes,
And joy's ten thousand homes,
Beneath the whirlwind hail and storm of ashes boil."
Again says Mr. Bulwer, who boasts that he has succeeded where all
others have failed:
"In the pauses of the showers, you heard the rumbling of the earth
beneath, and the groaning waves of the tortured sea; or, lower still,
and audible but to the watch of intensest fear, the grinding and
hissing murmur of the escaping gases through the chasms of the distant
mountain. Sometimes the cloud appeared to break from its solid mass,
and, by the lightning, to assume quaint and vast mimicries of human or
of monster-shapes, striding across the gloom, hustling one upon the
other, and vanishing swiftly into the turbulent abyss of shade; so
that, to the eyes and fancies of the affrighted wanderers, the
unsubstantial vapors were as the bodily forms of gigantic foes,--the
agents of terror and of death."
Is there nothing similar to the preceding quotation in this?
"Vesuvius poured its deluge forth, the sea
Shuddered and sent unearthly voices up,
The isles of beauty, by the fire and surge
Shaken and withered, on the troubled waves
Looked down like spirits blasted; and the land
Of Italy's once paradise became
The home of ruin--vineyard, grove and bower,
Tree, shrub, fruit, blossom--love, life, light and hope,
All vanishing beneath the fossil flood
And storm of ashes from the cloven brow
Of the dread mountain buried in horror down.
The echoes of ten thousand agonies
Arose from mount and shore, and some looked back
Cursing, and more bewailing as they fled."
------------"what a horrid gleam is flung
Along that face of madness, as it turns
From sea to mountain, and the wild eyes burn
With revelations of the unborn time!
We may not linger--shelter earth denies--
The very heavens like a gehenna lour--
And ocean is our refuge--on--on--on!"
We have seen how remarkably the lions agreed on the impropriety of
making an amphitheatric meal of the lovers; now it appears that the
tiger, who should have eat the Christian, was of the same mind.
"At that moment a wild yell burst through the air; and thinking only of
escape, whither it knew not, the terrible tiger of the African desert
leaped among the throng, and hurried through its parted streams. And so
came the earthquake, and so darkness once more fell over the earth!"
Is it not strange that we should have conceived something much like
this, and explained the motive, too, of such unreasonable conduct in
any wild beast starving?
"Nature's quick instinct, in most savage beasts,
Prophesies danger ere man's thought awakes,
And shrinks in fear from common savageness,
Made gentle by its terror; thus, o'erawed
E'en in his famine's fury by a Power
Brute beings more than human oft adore,
The Lion lay, his quivering paws outspread,
His white teeth gnashing, till the crushing throngs
Had passed the corridors; then, glaring up
His eyes imbued with samiel light, he saw
The crags and forests of the Appenines
Gleaming far off, and with the exulting sense
Of home and lone dominion, at a bound,
He leapt the lofty palisades and sprung
Along the spiral passages, with howls
Of horror, through the flying multitudes
Flying to seek his lonely mountain lair."
We shall not protract this investigation, though many similar passages
might be produced to confirm our assertion that Mr. Bulwer has
appropriated our thoughts, and throughout wrought our descriptions into
his story, and won great profit and fame from the robbery. Those who
read his book, will readily find many descriptions closely resembling
one of the last given in the poem, which we here reprint, and many
references to ancient authors for facts which he derived from us.
"Meantime, charred corses in one sepulchre
Of withering ashes lay, and voices rose,
Fewer and fainter, and, each moment, groans
Were hushed, and dead babes on dead bosoms lay,
And lips were blasted into breathlessness
Ere the death kiss was given, and spirits passed
The ebbless, dark, mysterious waves, where dreams
Hover and pulses throb and many a brain
Swims wild with terrible desires to know
The destinies of worlds that lie beyond.
The thick air panted as in nature's death,
And every breath was anguish; every face
Was terror's image, where the soul looked forth,
As looked, sometimes, far on the edge of heaven,
A momentary star the tempest palled.
From ghastlier lips now rose a wilder voice,
As from a ruin'd sanctuary's gloom,
Like savage winds from the Chorasmian waste
Rushing, with sobs and suffocating screams," etc.
But, though we have been more highly honored by this last _chef
d'oeuvre_ of the honorable Eugene Aram than any author within our
knowledge, yet others are entitled to their property. Speaking of the
skeleton of Arbaces, Bulwer says--
"The scull was of so remarkable a conformation, so boldly marked in its
intellectual, as well as its worse physical developments, that it has
excited the constant speculation of every itinerant believer in the
theories of Spurzheim who has gazed upon that ruined _palace of the
mind_. Still, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, the traveller may
survey that _airy hall_, within whose cunning galleries and elaborate
chambers, once thought, reasoned, dreamed, and sinned, the soul of
Arbaces the Egyptian!"
But Byron said, long ago, in Childe Harold, when gazing on a skull:
"Yes, this was once ambition's _airy hall_,
The dome of thought, _the palace of the soul_," etc.
And, once more, the fashionable Pelham moralizes: "and as the Earth
from the Sun, so immortality drinks happiness from virtue, _which is
the smile upon the face of God_."[12] This he italicises as one of his
most wondrous original reflections--yet it may be found in the Diary of
a Physician.[13]
[Footnote 12: Vol. ii. p. 196.]
[Footnote 13: In the story called 'A Young Man about Town,' we think.]
Mr. Bulwer is particularly conceited and arrogant with respect to his
subject. He asserts that all others have failed in attempting to
describe the destruction of Pompeii, and that, therefore, he will stand
alone, the intellectual monarch of the Ruins. The candid and modest and
original gentleman probably forgot 'Valerius' and Croly and Milman and
Dr. Gray and ourself; but the productions of such persons can be of
little consequence to such a Paul Clifford in letters and Mirabeau in
morals.
Mr. Bulwer, likewise, is ostentatious of his learning, and he quotes
from ancient authors with an air of infinite self-complacency, though
his citations had been conveniently collected, a _century_ since, in
the Archæologia Græca of Archbishop Potter! These volumes now lie
before us, and there may all his erudition be found within a very
accessible compass. His theological knowledge or deistical design, we
know not which, is not more profound or canonical; for he makes his
Christian Olinthus say, that "eighty years ago," that is from the birth
of Christ, "there was no assurance to man of God or of a certain or
definite future beyond the grave"!!
We have now done with Mr. Bulwer, his immoralities, and his
plagiarisms. We have sought to be very brief in our exposition, and,
for the first time that we ever expressed such a desire, we request the
literary periodicals, with which we exchange, to reprint this article.
* * * * *
VISITS AND SKETCHES, at Home and Abroad. By Mrs. Jamieson, author of
the "Characteristics of Women," &c. in 2 vols. New York: Harper &
Brothers. 1834.
We intended to notice these interesting volumes sooner, and recommend
them to our readers as highly entertaining and instructive. Mrs.
Jamieson's style, though not faultless, is very attractive; and
certainly as a female writer, she is hardly surpassed in vigor and
richness. The _first_ volume is principally devoted to sketches of art,
literature and character, comprising _Memoranda_ at Munich, Nuremburg
and Dresden. It also contains a vivid account of the celebrated Bess of
_Hardwicke_, the _old_ Countess of Shrewsbury,--a visit to _Althorpe_,
the ancient seat of the Spencers--and eloquent sketches of the private
and dramatic life of _Mrs. Siddons_, and of _Fanny Kemble_. The
_second_ volume opens with three interesting stories,--the _False One_,
a pathetic oriental tale, a thousand times superior to
Vathek,--_Halloran the Pedlar_, and the _Indian Mother_. It also
contains a very amusing _drama for little actors_,--and concludes with
the _Diary of an Enuyeé_, a performance of much and deserved celebrity.
We shall make occasional selections from this work, for the benefit of
such of our readers as have no opportunity of seeing the volumes
themselves. For the present, we have transferred to our pages the
"Indian Mother," a most affecting story founded on a striking incident
related by Humboldt. The scene being laid in South America, the reader
will be struck with the strong impressions made on Mrs. Jamieson's mind
of that magnificent country, through the medium of description alone.
* * * * *
POEMS, by William Cullen Bryant. Boston: Russell, Odiorne & Metcalfe.
1834.
This new and beautiful edition of Mr. Bryant's poems has undergone the
author's correction, and contains some pieces which have never before
appeared in print. As the elegant china cup from which we sip the
fragrant imperial, imparts to it a finer flavor, so the pure white
paper and excellent typography of the volume before us, will give a
richer lustre to the gems of Mr. Bryant's genius. Not that the value of
the diamond is really enhanced by the casket which contains it, but so
it is that the majority of mortals are governed by _appearances_; and
even a dull tale will appear respectable in the pages of a hot pressed
and gilt bound London annual. In justice to Mr. Bryant however, and to
ourselves, we will state that our first impressions of his great
intellectual power--of his deep and sacred communings with the world of
poetry--were derived from a very indifferent edition of his writings,
printed with bad type, on a worse paper. Mr. Bryant is well known to
the American public as a poet of uncommon strength and genius; and even
on the other side of the Atlantic, a son of the distinguished Roscoe,
who published a volume of American poetry, pronounced him the first
among his equals. Like Halleck, however, and some others of scarcely
inferior celebrity,--his muse has languished probably for want of that
due encouragement, which to our shame as a nation be it spoken, has
never been awarded to that department of native literature. Mr. Bryant,
we believe, finding that Parnassus was not so productive a soil as the
field of politics, has connected himself with a distinguished partizan
newspaper in the city of New York. His bitter regrets at the frowns of
an unpoetical public, and yet his unavailing efforts to divorce himself
from the ever living and surrounding objects of inspiration are
beautifully alluded to in the following lines:
I broke the spell that held me long,
The dear, dear witchery of song.
I said the poet's idle lore
Shall waste my prime of years no more,
For poetry though heavenly born,
Consorts with poverty and scorn.
I broke the spell--nor deemed its power
Could fetter me another hour.
Ah, thoughtless! how could I forget
Its causes were around me yet?
For wheresoe'er I look'd, the while,
Was nature's everlasting smile.
Still came and lingered on my sight
Of flowers and streams the bloom and light,
And glory of the stars and sun;--
And these and poetry are _one_.
They, ere the world had held me long,
Recalled me to the love of song.
* * * * *
LITTELL'S MUSEUM of Foreign Literature, Science and Arts. No. 151. Jan.
1835. A. Waldie. Philadelphia.
This valuable periodical has maintained a high reputation and extensive
circulation for more than twelve years. The January number (1835) may
be considered a new era in its history. The size of its sheet is
enlarged, its type and paper are improved, and its contents display
more richness and variety than usual. The plan of the "Museum" is
certainly most excellent. It is to select and republish from all the
British periodicals of high reputation, every thing which is either of
_present_ or _permanent_ value, omitting the vast mass of matter which
is local to Great Britain or not interesting to an American reader. It
is in fact, a labor-saving machine, by which all the choicest flowers
will be culled from British publications and transplanted in our own
soil, leaving the weeds and trash on the other side of the Atlantic. We
heartily wish Mr. Littell and his co-laborers increased success, and we
shall occasionally draw upon his interesting paper for the use of the
"Messenger." The diffusion of fine writing from abroad, will improve
the taste and invigorate the efforts of our own countrymen.