'... Cradled into poetry by wrong,
Who learnt in suffering what he taught in song.'
The slightest foibles of this unhappy man have been brought into odious
prominence, for he was the favourite author of his age, and therefore
the property of the public.
That boyish book absolved its author from a father's cares; and he was
one to whom those cares would have been dearest joys, who loved to look
upon a poor man's child. Listen to the music of his sadness--
'I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolv'd in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone,
The lightning of the noon-tide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion!'
The sharp arrows of criticism were successfully directed against that
next volume, and are said to have been the means of hurrying its author
to that world of dreams and shadows, for which, in the critic's opinion,
he was so pre-eminently fitted.
'Where is the youth, for deeds immortal born,
Who loved to whisper to the embattled corn,
And clustered woodbines, breathing o'er the stream
Endymion's beauteous passion for a dream?'
You already smile, my friend; but to know the heights and the depths,
you must turn your attention to those numberless, unread, unheard-of
volumes. Their authors did not suffer from the severity of the critic or
the judge, but were only neglected. If Mephistopheles ever requires rest
and seclusion--But, hark! is there not a laugh? and that grotesque face
in the carved woodwork, how scoffingly it is looking down upon us!--SIR
A. HELPS. _Thoughts in a Cloister._