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merely suggested by it, as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is rendered impossible by their immediate neighborhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of faith, as the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is, in a less degree, brought about in the instances to which I have been objecting, by the baffled attempts of the author to make him believe.

Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word, for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE Of all subjects in the wide range of thought, the Death of Christ is that which Fiction should approach most warily. Milton left it untouched. The "narrow basis" of the Paradise Regained seems to me one of the numberless proofs of the mighty master's judgment; the whole poem is comprised within the limits of that passage of our Lord's history which is least defined in Holy Writ,-the sojourn in the wilderness,-and could best bear to have an invention grafted into it. To bring angels and devils, not mentioned in the Scripture narrative of the Death and Passion, around the cross, or into any sort of connexion with it, either in foreground or background, that narrative being so full as it is of actual facts and par ticulars, is to jar, if not absolutely to shock, the feelings of most readers. When fanciful fiction is brought so near to sacred history of the most definite character, we recoil, and feel as if the former clashed with the latter, and was broken against it, like the china vase against the vessel of iron. This collision the plan of Cumberland's poem involved, and poets of greater genius than he, in an enterprise of like nature, have but failed, I think, more splendidly. The author of Calvary thought himself well off because he had so much fine subject ready to his hand. It was just that which ruined him. He had not capital enough to invest in such an undertaking; for the more is given, in this way, to the poet, the more is required out of his own brain, for the oinois, which must be made with materials furnished by himself, whatever he adopts for the foundation matter. A man may even take from various places a certain amount of material ready wrought, as Milton did, and yet add that, in the using of it, which makes the result entirely his own. S. C.]

EXCURSION characteristic of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When, on the contrary, this information renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments, and information, a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes of anecdote? Finally, when this, and this alone, could have induced a genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of fact (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure “ornament of society lately deceased" in some obscure town) as

66

Among the hills of Athol he was born;
There, on a small hereditary farm,
An unproductive slip of rugged ground,
His Father dwelt; and died in poverty;
While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,
The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,
A little One-unconscious of their loss.
But ere he had outgrown his infant days
His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,
Espoused the teacher of the Village School;
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction."

"From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,
In summer, tended cattle on the Hills;

But, through the inclement and the perilous days
Of long-continuing winter, he repaired

To his Step-father's School,"—&c.21

21 [Book i., P. W., vi., p. 7. The first three lines of the first passage are now alone retained. The story of the Step-father is left out, and the narrative proceeds thus :

"His parents, with their numerous offspring, dwelt:

A virtuous household," &c.

In the next paragraph the fifth line now is

"Equipped with satchel, to a school, that stood," &c. S. C.]

For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet; and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.

Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils results. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.

The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this class I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28, and 62 of the Poems,22

22 [The anecdote for Fathers: stanzas 4-13. Two of these stanzas are now condensed into one, and a new one is added. P. 62 in vol. i. is a blank. Probably Mr. C. referred to the same page in vol. ii., which contains Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, from the line

O'er whom such thankful tears were shed

When Falcons were abroad for prey.

I have heard my father object to the paragraph

Alas when evil men are strong,

I believe on account of its too much retarding the impassioned flow of the poem, and thus injuring its general effect, though the passage is beautiful in itself and in harmony with the rest.

The transitions and vicissitudes in this noble Lyric I have always thought rendered it one of the finest specimens of modern subjective poetry which our age has seen. The ode commences in a tone of high

Vol. i., and the first eighty lines of the Sixth Book of THE EXCURSION.23

Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the by, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale.

It is a well known fact, that bright colors in motion both make and leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such lines, as

gratulation and festivity-a tone not only glad but comparatively even jocund and light-hearted. The Clifford is restored to the home, the honors and estates of his ancestors. Then it sinks and falls away to the remembrance of tribulation-times of war and bloodshed, flight and terror, and hiding away from the enemy-times of poverty and distress, when the Clifford was brought, a little child, to the shelter of a northern valley. After a while it emerges from those depths of sorrow-gradually rises into a strain of elevated tranquillity and contemplative rapture; through the power of imagination, the beautiful and impressive aspects of nature are brought into relationship with the spirit of him, whose fortunes and character form the subject of the piece, and are represented as gladdening and exalting it, whilst they keep it pure and unspotted from the world. Suddenly the Poet is carried on with greater animation and passion-he has returned to the point whence he started-flung himself back into the tide of stirring life and moving events. All is to come over again, struggle and conflict, chances and changes of war, victory and triumph, overthrow and desolation. I know nothing in lyric poetry more beautiful or affecting than the final transition from this part of the ode, with its rapid metre, to the slow elegiac stanzas at the end, when from the warlike fervor and eagerness, the jubilant menacing strain which has just been described, the Poet passes back into the sublime silence of Nature, gathering amid her deep and quiet bosom a more subdued and solemn tenderness than he had manifested before:-it is as if from the heights of the imaginative intellect his spirit had retreated into the recesses of a profoundly thoughtful Christian heart. S. C.]

23 [P. W., vi., pp. 205-208-as far as "genuine fruits." S. C.]

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in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye which is indeed "the bliss of solitude?" Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to

"And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils."24 Vol. i., p. 328

The second instance is from Vol. ii., page 12,25 where the

24 [I wandered lonely. P. W.,. ii, p. 93. And yet the true poetic heart "with pleasure fills" in reading or remembering this sweet poem. How poetry multiplies bright images like a thousand-fold kaleidoscope—for how many "inward eyes" have those daffodils danced and fluttered in the breeze, the waves dancing beside them! S. C.]

25 [Gipsies. P. W., ii., p. 105. These lines are in themselves very grand. The last three are now replaced thus:

"Oh better wrong and strife

(By nature transient) than this torpid life;
Life which the very stars reprove

As on their silent tasks they move!

Yet, witness all that stirs in heaven or earth!
In scorn I speak not; they are what their birth
And breeding suffer them to be:
Wild outcasts of society."

I hope it is not mere poetic partiality, regardless of morality, that makes so many readers regret the sublime conciseness of the original conclusion.

"Oh better wrong and strife!

Better vain deeds or evil than such life!"

if unexplained, might pass for a strong figure of speech, the like to which might be shown both in sacred and profane writings. Thus in the Blind Highland Boy the Poet exclaims,

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though his way was probably to destruction, in order to express with

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