NUGE LITTERARIÆ. Luck in Literature. It is curious to note in the history of literature how many authors have owed their fame to a single thought, the chance inspiration of an hour. As there have been painters, not generally much above mediocrity, who have scaled the heights of excellence in a single picture, so there have been poets, ordinarily only second or third rate, whom a solitary ode or sonnet has lifted to the level of the masters of song. In some happy hour, some mental crisis, they have soared on the wings of fancy to a high heaven of invention; but when, flushed with confidence by their success, they have plumed themselves for another not less daring flight, and essayed to "dally with the sun and sport with the breeze," they have "fallen flat, and shamed their worshippers." There is hardly any cultivated man that has not at times brief visitations of fancy and feeling, when his mind is illumined by "thoughts that transcend his wonted themes, and into glory peep; " and if he has a talent for versifying, it is not strange if, after a thousand failures, he chance to make one lucky hit, and embody his casual inspiration in "thoughts that breathe and words that burn." He must be a wretched marksman who in a lifetime of trials has never once put a ball in "the bull's-eye." Pomfret was a poet of this "single-speech-Hamilton " class. Though endowed with one of the most prosaic of minds, he yet chanced one day to blunder upon a lucky theme, and to treat it in a true poetic style. Dr. Johnson and Southey both declared that his poem entitled "The Choice" was the most popular one in the language; but, though it won boundless praise in the author's lifetime, who ever thought of wasting time on his other effusions? The life of his intellect seemed to run itself out in one effort; all the pure juice of the vine flowed into a single glass. The same was true of Lady Anne Barnard, who wrote the inimitable ballad, "Auld Robin Gray," but committed poetical suicide by a continuation; and, again, of an English nobleman, Lord Thurlow (not the great lawyer), who wrote early in this century a volume of verse, mainly doggerel, which was published with the title of "The Doge's Daughter," and ridiculed by The Edinburgh Review. Amidst the wilderness of nonsense there was a sonnet addressed to a water-bird haunting a lake or stream in the winter which was so beautiful as, in the opinion of an acute critic, to merit a place in every anthology of English sonnets. Sir Egerton Brydges was another poet of this class. Had he written only his exquisite sonnet, "Echo and Silence," which Wordsworth and Southey so warmly praised, he might have been admired and envied, and all the world would have lamented that his muse was so chary of her favors. But his subsequent efforts dispelled the charm he had raised, and showed that he was indebted to fortune, not to a real poetic genius, for his success. Though he devoted all his life to the most patient courtship of the muse who had flirted with him for an hour, she never gave him another smile. Akin to this was the case of Wolfe, who produced an ode that provoked universal admiration, and was pronounced by Byron one of the finest in the language. Had the author of "The Burial of Sir John Moore" published only those memorable lines, which have been declaimed in schools and academies and parodied oftener than, possibly, any other English verse, who would have suspected his poverty of imagination? As it was, his succeeding failures betrayed the secret, and showed that his inspiration was fortuitous, and not the result of natural temperament, a flash of fancy only, not the steady blaze of genius. The first shot struck the very Similar remarks might, perhaps, be made of Collins, not the author of the ode on "The Passions," but of "To-morrow," that "truly noble poem, the climax of simple sublimity," as Mr. Francis Turner Palgrave, who places it in his "Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics," justly characterizes it. No one knows whether the author attempted to write any other songs; but if he did, they have passed, like his Christian name and all knowledge of his birthplace, into oblivion. Of Sir William Jones as a poet, what do we know beyond the lines beginning, "What constitutes a state?" or of Herbert Knowles, what more than that he is the author of the sombre lines written in the churchyard of Richmond, Yorkshire, beginning, "Methinks it is good to be here"? Joseph Blanco White was not a poet; yet, though English was to him an acquired tongue, he wrote a sonnet on "Night" which Coleridge does not hesitate to pronounce the grandest and most finely-conceived |