"Our Faith and troth
All time and space controls,
Above the highest sphere we meet,
Unseen, unknown, and greet as angels greet."
How comes it that in the fierce fighting days the soldiers were so
tuneful, and such scholars? In the first edition of Lovelace's "Lucasta"
there is a flock of recommendatory verses, English, Latin, even Greek, by
the gallant Colonel's mess-mates and comrades. What guardsman now writes
like Lovelace, and how many of his friends could applaud him in Greek?
You, my Gifted, are happily of a pacific disposition, and tune a gentle
lyre. Is it not lucky for swains like you that the soldiers have quite
forsworn sonneting? When a man was a rake, a poet, a warrior, all in
one, what chance had a peaceful minor poet like you or me, Gifted,
against his charms? Sedley, when sober, must have been an invincible
rival--invincible, above all, when he pretended constancy:
"Why then should I seek further store,
And still make love anew?
When change itself can give no more
'Tis easy to be true."
How infinitely more delightful, musical, and captivating are those
Cavalier singers--their numbers flowing fair, like their scented
lovelocks--than the prudish society poets of Pope's day. "The Rape of
the Lock" is very witty, but through it all don't you mark the sneer of
the contemptuous, unmanly little wit, the crooked dandy? He jibes among
his compliments; and I do not wonder that Mistress Arabella Fermor was
not conciliated by his long-drawn cleverness and polished lines. I
prefer Sackville's verses "written at sea the night before an
engagement":
"To all you ladies now on land
We men at sea indite."
They are all alike, the wits of Queen Anne; and even Matt Prior, when he
writes of ladies occasionally, writes down to them, or at least glances
up very saucily from his position on his knees. But Prior is the best of
them, and the most candid:
"I court others in verse--but I love thee in prose;
And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart."
Yes, Prior is probably the greatest of all who dally with the light lyre
which thrills to the wings of fleeting Loves--the greatest English writer
of _vers de societe_; the most gay, frank, good-humoured, tuneful and
engaging.
Landor is great, too, but in another kind; the bees that hummed over
Plato's cradle have left their honey on his lips; none but Landor, or a
Greek, could have written this on Catullus:
"Tell me not what too well I know
About the Bard of Sirmio--
Yes, in Thalia's son
Such stains there are as when a Grace
Sprinkles another's laughing face
With nectar, and runs on!"
That is poetry deserving of a place among the rarest things in the
Anthology. It is a sorrow to me that I cannot quite place Praed with
Prior in my affections. With all his gaiety and wit, he wearies one at
last with that clever, punning antithesis. I don't want to know how
"Captain Hazard wins a bet,
Or Beaulieu spoils a curry"--
and I prefer his sombre "Red Fisherman," the idea of which is borrowed,
wittingly or unwittingly, from Lucian.
Thackeray, too careless in his measures, yet comes nearer Prior in
breadth of humour and in unaffected tenderness. Who can equal that song,
"Once you come to Forty Year," or the lines on the Venice Love-lamp, or
the "Cane-bottomed Chair"? Of living English writers of verse in the
"familiar style," as Cowper has it, I prefer Mr. Locker when he is tender
and not untouched with melancholy, as in "The Portrait of a Lady," and
Mr. Austin Dobson, when he is not flirting, but in earnest, as in the
"Song of Four Seasons" and "The Dead Letter." He has ingenuity, pathos,
mastery of his art, and, though the least pedantic of poets, is
"conveniently learned."
Of contemporary Americans, if I may be frank, I prefer the verse of Mr.
Bret Harte, verse with so many tunes and turns, as comic as the "Heathen
Chinee," as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of children that
slipped its moorings in the fog. To me it seems that Mr. Bret Harte's
poems have never (at least in this country) been sufficiently esteemed.
Mr. Lowell has written ("The Biglow Papers" apart) but little in this
vein. Mr. Wendell Holmes, your delightful godfather, Gifted, has written
much with perhaps some loss from the very quantity. A little of _vers de
societe_, my dear Gifted, goes a long way, as you will think, if ever you
sit down steadily to read right through any collection of poems in this
manner. So do not add too rapidly to your own store; let them be "few,
but roses" all of them.