MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW.-Page 205. This most majestic ode-one of the few greatest of its kind—is a model of noble rhythm and especially of cadence. To print it whole would be impossible, and one of the very few excisions in this book is made in the midst of it. Dryden, so adult and so far from simplicity, bears himself like a child who, having said something fine, caps it with something foolish. The suppressed part of the ode is silly with a silliness which Dryden's age chose to dodder in when it would. The deplorable rattling bones' of the closing section has a touch of it. SONG, FROM ABDELAZAR.-Page 209. It is a futile thing-and the cause of a train of futilities-to hail 'style' as though it were a separable quality in literature, and it is not in that illusion that the style of the opening of Aphra Behn's resounding song is to be praised. But it is the style-implying the reckless and majestic heart-that first takes the reader of these great verses. HYMN.-Page 209. Whether Addison wrote the whole of this or not,-and it seems that the inspired passages are none of his-it is to me a poem of genius, magical in spite of the limited diction. ELEGY TO THE MEMORY OF AN UNFORTUNATE LADY.-Page 210. Also in spite of limited diction-the sign of thought closing in, as it did fast close in during those years-are Pope's tenderness and passion communicated in this beautiful elegy. It would not be too much to say that all his passion, all his tenderness, and certainly all his mystery, are in the few lines at the opening and close. The Epistle of Eloisa is (artistically speaking) but a counterfeit. Yet Pope's Elegy begins by stealing and translating into the false elegance of altered taste that lovely and poetic opening of Ben Jonson's 'What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?' All the gravity, all the sweetness, one might fear, must be lost in such a change as Pope makes. 'What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade Yet they are not lost. Pope's awe and ardour are authentic, and they prevail; the succeeding couplet-inimitably modulated, and of tragic dignity-proves, without delay, the quality of the poem. The poverty and coldness of the passage (towards the end), in which the roses and the angels are somewhat trivially sung, cannot mar so veritable an utterance. The four final couplets are the very glory of the English couplet. LINES ON RECEIVING HIS MOTHER'S PICTURE.—Page 213. Cowper, again, by the very directness of human feeling makes his narrowing English a means of absolutely direct communication. Of all his works (and this is my own mere and unshared opinion) this single one deserves immortality. LIFE.-Page 217. This fragment (the only fragment, properly so called, in the present collection) so pleased Wordsworth that he wished he had written the lines. They are very gently touched. THE LAND OF DREAMS.-Page 217. When Blake writes of sleep and dreams he writes under the very influence of the hours of sleep-with a waking consiousness of the wilder emotion of the dream. Corot painted so, when at summer dawn he went out and saw landscape in the hours of sleep. SURPRISED BY JOY.-Page 229. It is not necessary to write notes on Wordsworth's sonnets-the greatest sonnets in our literature; but it would be well to warn editors how they print this one sonnet; 'I wished to share the transport' is by no means an uncommon reading. Into the history of the variant I have not looked. It is enough that all the suddenness, all the clash and recoil of these impassioned lines are lost by that 'wished' in the place of turned.' The loss would be the less tolerable in as much as perhaps only here and in that heart-moving poem, 'Tis said that some have died for love, is Wordsworth to be confessed as an impassioned poet. STEPPING WESTWARD.-Page 243. This and the preceding two exquisite poems of sympathy are far more justified, more recollected and sincere than is that more monumental composition, the famous poem of sympathy, Hartleap Well. The most beautiful stanzas of this poem last-named are so rebuked by the truths of nature that they must ever stand as obstacles to the straightforward view of sensitive eyes upon the natural world. Wordsworth shows us the ruins of an aspen-wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place forlorn because an innocent creature, hunted, had there broken its heart in a leap from the rocks above; grass would not grow, nor shade linger there "This beast not unobserved by Nature fell, His death was mourned by sympathy divine.' And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted to be these arid woodland ruins-cruelly, because the common sight of the day blossoming over the agonies of animals and birds is made less tolerable by such fictions. We have to shut our ears to the benign beauty of this stanza especially 'The Being that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, For the unoffending creature whom He loves.' We must shut our ears because the poet offers us, as a proof of that 'reverential care,' the visible alteration of nature at the scene of suffering-an alteration we are obliged to dispense with every day we pass in the woods. We are tempted to ask whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us-upon such grounds! -to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more than a fictitious sign or a false proof? To choose from Wordsworth is to draw close a net with very large meshes-so that the lovely things that escape must doubtless cause the reader to protest; but the poems gathered here are not only supremely beautiful but exceedingly Wordsworthian. YOUTH AND AGE.-Page 256. Close to the marvellous Kubla Khan—a poem that wrests the secret of dreams and brings it to the light of verse-I place Youth and Age as the best specimen of Coleridge's poetry that is quite undelirious-to my mind the only fine specimen. I do not rate his undelirious poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as it is, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tenderness of some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; the likeness to some poor nigh-related guest' with the three lines that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.-Page 258. This poem is surely more full of a certain quality of extreme poetry-the simplest 'flower of the mind,' the most single magicthan any other in our language. But the reader must be permitted to call the story silly. Page 265. Coleridge used the sun, moon, and stars as a great dream uses them when the sleeping imagination is obscurely threatened with illness. All through The Ancient Mariner we see them like apparitions. It is a pity that he followed the pranks also of a dream when he impossibly placed a star within the tip of the crescent. Page 266. The likeness of 'the ribbed sea sand' is said to be the one passage actually composed by Wordsworth,-who according to the first plan should have written The Ancient Mariner with Coleridge 'and perhaps the most beautiful passage in the poem,' adds one critic after another. It is no more than a good likeness, and has nothing whatever of the indescribable Coleridge quality. Coleridge reveals, throughout this poem, an exaltation of the senses, which is the most poetical thing that can befall a simple poet. It is necessary only to refer, for sight, to the stanza on 'the moving Moon' at the bottom of page 267; for hearing, to the supernatural stanzas on page 271; and, for touch, to the line 'And still my body drank.' ROSE AYLMER.-Page 281. Never was a human name more exquisitely sung than in these perfect stanzas. THE ISLES OF GREECE.-Page 286. One really fine and poetic stanza-of course, the third; three stanzas that are good eloquence-the fourth, fifth, and seventh; and one that is a fair bit of argument-the tenth-may together perhaps carry the rest. HELLAS.-Page 290. The profounder spirit of Shelley's poem yet leaves it a careless piece of work in comparison with Byron's. The two false rhymes at the outset may not be of great importance, but there is something annoying in the dissyllabic rhymes of the second stanza. Dissyllabic rhymes are beautiful and enriching when they fall in the right place; that is, where there is a pause for the second little syllable to stand. For example, they could not be better placed than they would have been at the end of the shorter lines of this same stanza, where they would have dropped into a part of the pause. Another sin of sheer heedlessness-the lapse of grammar in The Skylark, at the top of page 296-will remind the reader of the special habitual error of Drummond of Hawthornden. THE WANING MOON.-Page 298. In these few lines the Shelley spirit seems to be more intense than in any other passage as brief. ODE TO THE WEST WIND.-Page 299. This magnificent poem is surely the greatest of a great poet's writings, and one of the most splendid poems on nature and on poetry in a literature resounding with odes on these enormous themes. THE INVITATION.-Page 303. No need to point to a poem that so shines as does this lucent verse. LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.-Page 316. Keats is here the magical poet, as he is the intellectual poet in the great sonnet following; and it is his possession or promise of both imaginations that proves him greater than Coleridge. In his day they seem to have found Coleridge to be a thinker in his poetry. To me he seems to have had nothing but senses, magic, and simplicity and these he had to the utmost yet known to man. Keats was to have been a great intellectual poet, besides all that in fact he was. ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.-Page 320. Of the five odes of Keats, the Nightingale is perhaps the most perfect, and certainly the most imaginative. But the Grecian Urn is the finest, even though it has fancy rather than imagination, for never was fancy more exquisite. The most conspicuous idea-the emptying of the town because its folk are away at play in the tale of the antique urn-is merely a fancy, and a most antic fancy-a prank; it is an irony of man, a rallying of art, a mockery of time, a burlesque of poetry, divine with tenderness. The six lines in which this fancy sports are amongst the loveliest in all literature: the 'little town,' the peaceful citadel,'-were ever simple adjectives more happy? But John Keats's final moral here is undeniably a failure; it says so much and means so little. The Ode to Autumn is an exterior ode, and not in so high a rank, but lovely and perfect. The Psyche I love the least, because its fancy is rather weak and its sentiment effusive. It has a touch of the deadly sickliness of Endymion. None the less does it remain just within the group of the really fine odes of English poets. The eloquent Melancholy more narrowly escapes exclusion from that group. Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty. at the Edinburgh University Press |