Page images
PDF
EPUB

NO. V.-SILENT LOVE.

I have a little girl, and she

All times, unbid, will climb my knee,
And hide her face, all silently,
Upon my breast,- -so lovingly!
But not a word she speaks to me,
This fondling child upon my knee.
I wonder what it is that she
Saith by thus loving silently.

Oh, sure, she saith, no tongue can tell
The bliss that from pure love doth well,
As waters in some cavern cell

15th Nov. 1849.

Where coolness, shade, and silence dwell,
And the fast gushing liquid bell

Hueless and noiseless still doth swell,

As aye

it bursts; then, down the dell,
Seeks rest within the lake's deep shell.

As Heavenly Wisdom, Heavenly Love.-
Implanted in us from above,

By silent growth it doth improve,

And ever upward welling move,

Until the brook a sea doth prove,*

O'er which aye broods the Heavenly Dove.—

Boundless and fathomless this sea

Of Love, in it's intensity.

The Love, implanted by the Son,
Adoring aye the Three in One,

(Its source and end one and the same,)
Hath greater bliss than tongue can name,
Greater than aught the heart conceives.—
Silent it turns to Him Who gives
It's life and growth, in adoration
Veiling it's face for meditation.

This Love, in it's intensity,
Lost in it's own immensity,
Embraceth fast the Mystery
It cannot know, but only see,
Though dimly still, still lovingly
In voiceless contemplation.

SPHYNX.

་་

Ecclus. xxiv. 31, 32.

Errata in "Songs of Childhood." Vol. 2. p. 390-91.

In 'SHYNESS" line 2, for "Kiss thee, and detain thee here?" read-"Kiss thee-and kiss thee-and detain thee here?

In "OLD TOYS" line 12, and again line 32, for "maist" read "maint." In line 23, for "rings" read "ring."

IV.

LUDWIG UHLAND.

The Meister-Singers of Germany were, perhaps, pre-eminent among that renowned company of Romantic Poets who charmed the heart of Europe from Gibraltar to the Baltic, from the Bay of Biscay to the Gulf of Venice, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. This period, commonly known as the Swabian Era of German Poetry, under the gentle rule of the house of Hohenstauffen, produced a series of lyrical romances which, combining all the grace and harmony and gaiety of the Provençal chanzos and sirventes, were untarnished by their metaphysical allusions and speculative abstraction. The form which these brilliant and tender effusions took, (as, indeed, it has been well remarked, poetry will be always found to do," in every country where there is much curiosity and intelligence, but little reading,")* was that of the ballad; a form in which an excellence since unapproached was achieved by its inventors, the Homerids; but which, whether from intuition, or from reflex discernment, has typed the first era of every metrical literature. An accomplished critic has suggested that the Sháh Námah, and the Mahábhárata are constituted of a number of poems originally separate-each a complete ballad; in the same manner as it appears now to be agreed that the Iliad was composed. The analysis and specimens of the Heldenbuch (Hero-book,) and the Nibelungen Lied (Lay of the Nibelungen) which have been so ably written by Carlyle, make it more than probable that the splendid tale of Etzel and Siegfried is amalgamated of a series of compositions of which, (as in the Iliad‡) the general unity marks a combination of purpose; but of which no more need Conrad, or Eschenbach, or Öfterdingen, or Klingsohr be the single author, than one Homer of the eliminated story of Achilles' revenge. Herder, the German Poet and Philosopher, collected and arranged by the law of epic unity the various romances of the Cid which Ferdinand of Castile, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, printed from the current traditions without regard to chronological order. Perhaps it might not be impossible, or even difficult, to construct an epic of

* Macaulay. Lays of Ancient Rome. p. 9.

† Fauriel. Sur les Romans Chevaleresque.

Mr. Grote has happily remarked how very few of the elements of the Iliad are completely separable from their place in the poem.-Hist. of Greece, II. 267.

sufficient congruity from the many noble ballads of our own tongue.*

But the time comes, in every nation which emerges from its primitive simplicity, when both the taste and the genius for ballad poetry is cramped and at length destroyed by advancing civilization. Comparative researches, the studied expression of complex forms of thought, the lingual refinement incident on a high culture of the intellect, all tend to blunt the sensibilities to the rude impressiveness of intuitive utterances. "The Minnesingers," as it has been well expressed, "in Germany, as in all other countries, gave place to the Didactic; for Literature ceased to be a festal melody, and addressing itself rather to the intellect than to the heart, became as it were a school lesson." And poetry seldom fares well in an age of speculative investigation, any more than in times of such prosaic hankering for the practical as is the mark of those wherein we live. It did not in Germa. ny, as any one may discern who will take the "Historic Survey" of her Poetry, as William Taylor of Norwich misnamed his three volumes of notices, criticism and translations, after a separation from the country-and one might imagine from nearly all its recent literature, for more than forty years. It was, however, just during those forty years -from 1790 to 1830, that the German mind made such unexampled progress no less in poetical than in every other ideal conception-the era of the Schlegels, of Schiller, of Goethe, of Richter and Novalis, of Tieck-and-not least to be honoured among this galaxy of worthies, of Ludwig Uhland.

We do not mean to say that Taylor was quite unacquainted with all these worthies. On the contrary, in some of his later pages, we have some depreciatory remarks on Schiller and Goethe as compared with Kotzebue-three pages of criticism, in our opinion, enough to ruin the authority of the whole book. Of the other names, as far as we can find, no notice is taken throughout this "Historic Survey." Now it is as the reviver of the romantic poetry of Minnesing

* Mr. Macaulay ascribes a higher degree of excellence to the English and Lowland Scotch ballads of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, than to the Castilian; and suggests that there is little doubt that oblivion covers many English songs equal to any that were publishd by Bishop Percy, and many Spanish songs as good as the best of those which have been so happily translated by Mr. Lockhart.

ers, those tender, delicate and impassioned ballads which prince and peasant, knight and lady, clerk and laic, old and young sung or listened to with equal purity and delight, that Ludwig Uhland is to be especially loved and honoured. We claim not for him so high a literary rank among the worthies of his era as Professor Wolfe has recorded. But we do profess that this partial friend's panegyric on his character is placed beyond all doubt by the gentleness, the good feeling, the delicate beauty of his writings. He has not much of the directly religious element in his compositions-and yet there is such a stream of latent piety-such a love of God and God's creatures-such invariable purity-such chaste sensibility-such child-like simplicity, without sickly sentimentality-( we speak of the general quality of his poems-for like the English" Naturdichter" of the same era and very much the same tone, our "Lake School," he does now and then tarnish his page with a whine and a conceit) ;—-that one cannot doubt that he has a heart redolent of piety and peace. The world, it may be, has lost much by the admirable amenity and amiability of his nature. For the last thirty years, he has done little or nothing as a poet, having been called to occupy a seat in the house of representatives at Wirtemburg, where, according to Goethe's prophecy, the politician and the patriot have "swallowed up the poet." This is so far to be lamented; for, as the same great genius remarked, "Swabia has many men able and eloquent enough to conduct public business, but only one poet like Uhland."

Such is the man to the development of whose genius, as far as our slender appliances and slenderer powers admit, we shall devote some pages; sincerely trusting that we shall render no unacceptable service to many of our readers, if we can succeed in transposing even a very moderate portion of the kindliness of our author. We have constructed our versions with a design to make them, on the whole, as correct transcripts of the original letter and spirit, as under all the limitations we have imposed on ourselves, we are able to do. But translation,

"I could write of him through whole pages, and yet not praise him thoroughly to my own satisfaction for his patriotism, his love of mankind, his noble nature, and all the beautiful qualities of his character. Never has a man been so universally beloved and revered in Germany; and I never read or heard his name mentioned, without demonstrations of respect, and declarations of sincerest affection."

VOL. III.

F

at best, is but a very imperfect means of representing genius; and although we are persuaded that the restrictions under which we have laboured are necessary; still they are severe, and we are well aware have constrained us to many inelegancies, and rhythms which will often fall unpleasantly on such "limatæ et teretes aures" as we may well be proud to know they will be submitted to. And so, in extenuation, we may be allowed to say that we have endeavoured to accomplish a correct syllabation of the exact metres of the original, without any violent mutation of its tone and language. And this we believe all who will attempt similar operations on the metres of Uhland will find practicable only by a sacrifice of some elegance. For a very large portion of his writings are composed in the redondilha, and other trochaic measures ;—and it is well known that the English language, from a deficiency of final-vowel syllables, does not easily take a trochaic accentuation. However, believing with Sismondi that "the structure of verse, that mechanical part of poetry, is singularly connected, by some secret and mysterious associations, with our feelings and our emotions, and with all that speaks to our hearts," we have considered that, upon the whole, the method we have adopted may be that whereby we shall do least violence to the contour of our poet.

What German minstrelsy had grown to be, between the decline of minnesong, and its revival under Frederic the Great,-what were the trite apologues and laboured moralities with which the heavy reign of the emergent understanding supplanted the gentler dynasty of the fancy, may be learned from the elegant allegorical ballad with which we open our specimens.*

A LEGEND.

The legend of the lady
Can scarce be strange to you,
Who deep in green-wood slumbered
Some hundred summers through;
This wondrous lady's title
May somewhat stranger be;
For I but lately heard it:-

"Tis "German Poesy."

Two mighty fays approached her
A child, like princess fair;
They halted at her cradle
With birthday presents rare.
And nimbly spake the first one,
Ha, Babe! but smile on me;
For I with prick of spindle
Give timely end to thee."

66

*In this poem, and this alone, we have been compelled to a slight metrical liberty. Finding it impracticable to construct a version so literal as we wish, with two rhymes in every alexandrine couplet, we have omitted the cæsural assyllabation which has place in the original.

« PreviousContinue »