"Perish! let there only be One remembrance more sublime Of the songs of Albion, Driven from his ancestral streams Chastening terror;-What though yet Poesy's unfailing river, Which through Albion winds for ever As the ghost of Homer clings As the love from Petrarch's urn Yet amid yca hills doth burn, A quenchless lamp by which the heart The city that did refuge thee." In earlier days the greatest poets addressed themselves more to the passions or heart-emotions of their fellow-men than to their thoughts or mind-emotions. The passions were then in their natural state, and held their natural places in the character. They were not made sickly by a false refinement, or stimulated to a diseased and incessantly craving state. Men loved and hated to excess, perhaps; but there was nothing factitious in their love or hatred. The tone of poetry, even when employed on the most tragic subjects, might waken in the hearer's heart a chord of joy; for in such natural sorrow there was a healthful life, an energy which told of healing yet to come and the endless riches of love and hope. How different is its tone in Faust and Manfred; how false to simple nature, yet how true to the time! As the mechanism of society has become more complex, and must be regulated more by combined efforts, desire after individuality brings him who manifests it into a state of conflict with society. This is felt from a passion, whether it be love or ambition, which seeks to make its own world independent of trivial daily circumstances, and struggles long against the lessons of experience, which tell it that such singleness of effort and of possession cannot be, consistently with that grand maxim of the day, the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Not until equally enlightened and humble, can the human being learn that individuality of character is not necessarily combined with individuality of possession, but depends alone on the zealous observance of truth. Few can be wise enough to realize with Schiller, that "to be truly immortal one must live in the whole." The mind struggles long, before it can resolve on sacrificing any thing of its impulsive nature to the requisitions of the time. And while it struggles it mourns, and these lamentations compose the popular poetry. Men do not now look in poetry for a serene world, amid whose vocal groves and green meads they may refresh themselves after the heat of action, and in paradisaical quiet listen to the tales of other days. No! dissatisfied and represt, they want to be made to weep, because, in so doing, they feel themselves in some sense free. All this conflict and apparently bootless fretting and wailing mark a transition-state—a state of gradual revolution, in which men try all things, seeking what they hold fast, and feel that it is good. But there are some, the pilot-minds of the age, who cannot submit to pass all their lives in experimentalizing. They cannot consent to drift across the waves in the hope of finding somewhere a haven and a home; but, seeing the blue sky over them, and believing that God's love is every where, try to make the best of that spot on which they have been placed, and, not unfrequently, by the aid of spiritual assistance, more benign than that of Faust's Lemures, win from the raging billows large territories, whose sands they can convert into Eden bowers, tenanted by lovely and majestic shapes. Such are Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. They could not be satisfied, like Byron, with embodying the peculiar wit or peculiar sufferings of the times; nor like Scott, with depicting an era which has said its say and produced its fruit: nor like Campbell, with occasionally giving a voice and a permanent being to some brilliant moment or fair scene. Not of nobler nature, not more richly endowed than Shelley, they were not doomed to misguided efforts and baffled strivings; much less could they, like Moore, consider poetry merely as the harmonicus expression of transient sensations. To them Poetry was, must bc, the expression of what is eternal in man's nature, through illustrations drawn from his temporal state; a representation in letters of fire, on life's dark curtain, of that which lies beyond; philosophy dressed in the robes of Taste and Imagination; the voice of Nature and of God, humanized by being echoed back from the understanding hearts of Priests and Seers! Of course this could not be the popular poetry of the day. Being eminently the pro duct of reflection and experience, it could only be appreciated by those who had thought and felt to some depth. I confess that it is not the best possible poetry, since so exclusively adapted to the meditative few. In Shakspeare, or Homer, there is for minds of every grade as much as they are competent to receive, the shallow or careless find there amusement; minds of a higher order, meaning which enlightens and beauty which enchants them. This fault which I have admitted, this want of universality is not surprising, since it was necessary for these three poets to stand apart from the tide of opinion, and disregard the popular tastes, in order to attain firmness, depth, or permanent beauty. And they being, as I have said, the pilot-minds of their time, their works enjoy a growing, though not a rapidly growing, popularity. Coleridge, in particular, is now very much read, nor, notwithstanding his was but occasional homage to the shrine of poesy, was he the least valuable votary of the three, since, if he has done least, if his works form a less perfect whole, and are therefore less satisfactory than those of the other two, he is far more suggestive, more filled with the divine magnetism of intuition, than they. The muse of Southey is a beautiful statue of crystal, in whose bosom burns an immortal flame. We hardly admire, as they deserve, the perfection of the finish, and the elegance of the contours, because our attention is so fixed on the radiance which glows through them. Thus Southey is remarkable for the fidelity, and still more for the grace, of his descriptions; for his elegant manner of expressing sentiments noble, delicate, and consistent in their tone; for his imagination, but, more than all, for his expansive and fervent piety. In his fidelity of description there is nothing of the minute accuracy of Scott. Southey takes no pleasure in making little dots and marks; his style is free and bold, yet always true, sometimes elaborately true, to nature. Indeed, if he has a fault, it is that he elaborates too much. He himself has said that poetry should be "thoroughly erudite, thoroughly animated, and thoroughly natural." His poetry cannot always boast of the two last essentials. Even in his most brilliant passages there is nothing of the heat of inspiration, nothing of that celestial fire. which makes us feel that the author has, by intensifying the action of his mind, raised himself to communion with superior intelligences. It is where he is most calm that he is most beautiful; and, accordingly, he is more excellent in the expression of sentiment than in narration. Scarce any writer presents to us a sentiment with such a tearful depth of expression; but though it is a tearful depth, those tears were shed long since, and Faith and Love have hallowed them. You nowhere are made to feel the bitterness, the vehemence of present emotion; but the phonix born from passion is seen hovering over the ashes of what was once combined with it. Southey is particularly exquisite in painting those sentiments which arise from the parental and filial relation whether the daughter looks back from her heavenly lover, and the opening bowers of bliss, still tenderly solicitous for her father, whom she, in the true language of woman's heart, recommends to favour, as "That wretched, persecuted, poor good man ;" or the father, as in "Thalaba," shows a faith in the benignity and holiness of his lost daughter, which the lover, who had given up for her so high a destiny, wanted ;—or, as in "Roderick," the miserable, sinful child wanders back to relieve himself from the load of pollution at the feet of a sainted mother; always— always he speaks from a full, a sanctified soul, in tones of thrilling melody. |