“To unite earthly love and celestial--‘true to the kindred points of
heaven and home;’ to reconcile time and eternity; to draw presage of
joy’s victory from the delight of the secret honey dropping from the
clefts of rocky sorrow; _to harmonize our instinctive longings for the
definite and the infinite, in the ideal Perfect_; to read creation as a
human book of the heart, both plain and mystical, and divinely written:
such is the office fulfilled by best-loved poets. Their ladder of
celestial ascent must be fixed on its base, earth, if its top is to
securely rest on heaven.”
Beautifully, too, does he describe the birth of Poetry; though one may
doubt its correctness, at least if attributed to the highest kind of
poetry.
“When words of felt truth were first spoken by the first pair, in love
of their garden, their God, and one another, and these words were with
joyful surprise felt to be in their form and glow answerable to the
happy thought uttered; then Poetry sprang. And when the first Father and
first Mother, settling their soul upon its thought, found that thought
brighten; and when from it, as thus they mused, like branchlets from a
branch, or flowerets from their bud, other thoughts came, ranging
themselves by the exerted, yet painlessly exerted, power of the soul, in
an order felt to be beautiful, and of a sound pleasant in utterance to
ear and soul; being withal, through the sweetness of their impression on
the heart, fixed for memory’s frequentest recurrence; then was the
world’s first poem composed, and in the joyful flutter of a heart that
had thus become a maker, the maker of a ‘thing of beauty,’ like in
beauty even unto God’s heaven, and trees, and flowers, the secret of
Poesy shone tremulously forth.”
Whether this be so or not, the highest poetic feeling of which we are
now conscious springs not from the beholding of perfected beauty, but
from the mute sympathy which the creation with all its children
manifests with us in the groaning and travailing which looketh for the
sonship. Because of our need and aspiration, the snowdrop gives birth in
our hearts to a loftier spiritual and poetic feeling, than the rose most
complete in form, colour, and odour. The rose is of Paradise--the
snowdrop is of the striving, hoping, longing Earth. Perhaps our highest
poetry is the expression of our aspirations in the sympathetic forms of
visible nature. Nor is this merely a longing for a restored Paradise;
for even in the ordinary history of men, no man or woman that has fallen
can be restored to the position formerly occupied. Such must rise to a
yet higher place, whence they can behold their former standing far
beneath their feet. They must be restored by attaining something better
than they ever possessed before, or not at all. If the law be a
weariness, we must escape it by being filled with the spirit, for not
otherwise can we fulfil the law than by being above the law. There is
for us no escape, save as the Poet counsels us:--
“Is thy strait horizon dreary?
Is thy foolish fancy chill?
Change the feet that have grown weary,
For the wings that never will.
Burst the flesh and live the spirit;
Haunt the beautiful and far;
Thou hast all things to inherit,
And a soul for every star.”
But the Reviewer must hasten to take leave, though unwillingly, of this
pleasing, earnest, and profitable book. Perhaps it could be wished that
the writer helped his readers a little more into the channel of his
thought; made it easier for them to see the direction in which he is
leading them; called out to them, “Come up hither,” before he said, “I
will show you a thing.” But the Reviewer says this with deference; and
takes his leave with the hope that Mr. Lynch will be listened to for two
good reasons: first, that he speaks the truth; last, that he has already
suffered for the Truth’s sake.