IMAGINATION AND PANCY; I SELECTIONS FROM THE ENGLISH POETS SUustrat(be of f^ose jffrst S^equfsfUs of t^tlv ^rt ; WITH MARKINGS OF THE BEST PASSAGES, CRITICAL NOTICES OF THE WRITERS, AND AN ESSAY IN ANSWER TO THE Ql ESTION "WHAT IS POETRY?" BT LEIGH HUNT. HEW EDITION, COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. NEW-YOEK: GEORGE P . PUTNAM, 10 PARK PLACE. 1852 2 17 4/ H^ r%f a 159 FLIGHT OF WITCHES 163 CONTENTS. T Page. THE CHRISTIAN LADY AND THE ANGEL .... 164 LADIES DANCING 166 APRIL AND women's TEARS ... ... IST DEATH . i61 PATIENCE * 167 A WICKED DREAM 168 NATURAL DEATH ..... 169 FUNERAL DIRGE 170 DISSIMULATION 170 BEAUTEOUS MORAL EXAMPLE ....... 171 UNLOV^ELINESS OF FROWNING 171 SELECTIONS FROM MILTON, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE . . .172 Satan's recovery from his downfall 174 the fallen angels gathered again to war . . . 175 VULCAN ... . 177 THE FALLEN ANGELS HEARD RISING FROM COUNCIL . . 177 SATAN ON THE WING FOR EARTH 178 THE MEETING OF SATAN AND DEATH 178 L' ALLEGRO 180 IL PENSEROSO 186 LYCIDAS 191 COMUS THE SORCERER ......... 199 SELECTIONS FROM COLERIDGE, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE , . 202 LOVE ; OR, GENEVIEVE 207 KUBLA KHAN . . 210 YOUTH AND AGE ........ . 212 THE HEATHEN DIVINITIES MERGED INTO ASTROLOGY . . 213 WORK WITHOUT HOPE 214 SELECTIONS FROM SHELLEY, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE . 215 TO A SKYLARK 218 A GARISH DAY 223 CONTEiVlPLATION OF VIOLENCE 224 A ROCK AND CHASM 224 LOVELINESS INEXPRESSIBLE 225 EXISTENCE IN SPACE ^ 225 PEVOTEDNES8 UNREQUIRINQ •...,.. 225 CONTENTS. Tag*' f« A LADY WITH A GUITAR 22fl MUSIC, MEMORY, AND LOVE . 229 SELECTIONS FROM KEATS, WITH CRITICAL NOTICB . . . 230 THE EVE OF ST. AGNES 233 LONELY SOUNDS . . ... • 249 ORION 249 CIRCE AND HER VICTIMS 249 ▲ BETTER ENCHANTRESS IMPRISONED IN THE SHAPE OF A SER- PENT 250 SATURN DETHRONED 250 THE VOICE OF A MELANCHOLY GODDESS SPEAKING TO SATURN. 251 A FALLEN GOD 251 OTHER TITANS FALLEN . . .... 251 ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE .... ... 252 •ONNET ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN's HOMER . . 254 PREFACE. This book is intended for all lovers of poetry and the sis- ter arts, but more especially for those of the most poetical sort, and most especially for the youngest and the oldest : for as the former may incline to it for information's sake, the latter will perhaps not refuse it their good-will for the sake of old favorites. The Editor has often wished for such a book himself; and as nobody will make it for him, he has made it for others. It was suggested by the approbation which the readers of a periodical work bestowed on some extracts from the poets, commented, and marked with italics, on a principle of co-perusal, as though the Editor were reading the pas- sages in their company. Those readers wished to have more such extracts ; and here, if they are still in the mind, they now possess them. The remarks on one of the poems that formed a portion of the extracts (the Eve of Saint Agnes), are repeated in the present volume. All the rest of the matter contributed by him is new. He does not expect, of course, that every reader will agree v/ith the preferences of particular lines or passages, intimated by the italics. Some will think them too numerous ; seme perhaps too few ; many who chance to take up the book, may wish there had been none at all j but these will have viii PREFACE. the goodness to recollect what has just been stated, — that the plan was suggested by others who desired them. The Editor, at any rate, begs to be considered as having mark- ed the passages in nc spirit of dictation to any one, much less of disparagement to all the admirable passages not marked. If he assumed anything at all (beyond what is implied in the fact of imparting experience), it was the pro- bable mutual pleasure of the reader, his companion ; just as in reading out-loud, one instinctively increases one's em- phasis here and there, and implies a certain accordance of enjoyment on the part of the hearers. In short, all poetic readers are expected to have a more than ordinary portion of sympathy, especially with those who take pains to please them ; and the Editor desires no larger amount of it, than he gratefully gives to any friend who is good enough to read out similar passages to himself. The object of the book is threefold ; — to present the public with some of the finest passages in English poetry, so marked and commented ; — to furnish such an account, in an Essay, of the nature and requirements of poetry, as may enable readers in general to give an answer on those points to themselves and others ; — and to show, throughout the greater part of the volume, what sort of poetry is to be considered as poetry of the most poetical kind, or such as exhibits the imagination and fancy in a state of pi'e- dominance, undisputed by interests of another sort. Poe- try, therefore, is not here in its compound state, great or otherwise (except incidentally in the Essay), but in its ele- ment, like an essence distilled. All the greatest poetry in- cludes that essence, but the essence does not present itself in exclusive combination with the greatest /or;7i of poetry. It varies in that respect from the most tremendous to the PREFACE. ix most playful effusions, and from ir -figination to fancy ihrough all their degrees ; — from Homer and Dante, to Coleridge and Keats ; — from Shakspeare in King Lear, to Shakspeare himself in the Midsummer Night's Dream; from Spenser's Faerie Queene, to the Castle of Indolence ; nay, from Ariel in the Tempest, to his somewhat pre- sumptuous namesake in the Rape of the Lock. And pas- sages, both from Thomson's delightful allegory, and Pope's paragon of mock-heroics, would have been found in this volume, but for that intentional, artificial imitation, even in the former, which removes them at too great a distance from the highest sources of inspiration. With the great poet of the Faerie Queene the Editor has taken special pains to make readers in general better ac- quainted ; and in furtherance of this purpose he has ex- hibited many of his best passages in remarkable relation to the art of the Painter. For obvious reasons no living writer is included ; and some, lately deceased, do not come within the plan. The omission will not be thought invidious in an -Editor, who has said more of his contemporaries than most men ; and who would gladly give specimens of the latter poets in future volumes. One of the objects indeed of this preface is to state, that should the Public evince a willingness to have more such books, the Editor would propose to give them, in succes- sion, corresponding volumes of the Poetry of Action and Passion (Narrative ana Dramatic Poetry), from Chaucer to Campbell (here mentioned because he is the latest de- ceased poet) ; the Poetry of Contemplation, from Surrey to Campbell ; — the Poetry of Wit and Humor, from Chau- cer to Byron ; and the Poetry of Song, or Lyrical Poetry, X PREFACE. from Chaucer again (see in his Works his admirable and only song, beginning Hide, Absalom, thy gilded tresses clear), to Campbell again, and Burns, and O'Keefe. These vo. lumes, if he is not mistaken, would present the Public with the only selection, hitherto made, of none hut genuine poe' try ; and he would take care, that it should be unobjection- able in every other respect.* Kensington, Sept. 10, 1844. • While closing the Essay on Poetry, a friend lent me Coleridge's JBto- graphia Liter aria, which I had not seen for many years, and which I mention, partly to notice a coincidence at page 31 of the Essay, not other- wise worth observation ; and partly to do what I can towards extending the acquaintance of the public with a bock containing masterly exposition» of Jie art of poetry. AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION WHAT IS POETRY? INCLUDING REMARKS ON VERSIFICATION. Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say, con- sidered not merely as poetic feeling, which is more or less shared by all the world, but as the operation of that feeling, such as we see it in the poet's book, is the utterance of a pas- sion for truth, beauty and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its lan- guage on the principle of variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever the universe contains; and its ends, pleasure and exaltation. Poetry stands between nature and convention, keeping alive among us the enjoyment of the external and spiritual world : it has constituted the most enduring fame of nations ; and, next to Love and Beauty, which are its parents, is the greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found in all things, and of the probable riches of infinitude. Poetry is a passion,* because it seeks the deepest impressions; and because it must undergo, in order to convey them. It is a passion for truth, because without truth the impression would be false or defective. It is a passion for beauty, because its office is to exalt and re- fine by means of pleasure, and because beauty is nothing but the loveliest form of pleasure. • Passio, suffering ki a good sense, — ardent subjection of one's self to emotioa 2 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION / It is a passion for power, because power is impression tri- /urnphant, whether over the poet, as desired by himself, or over Ithe reader, as aiFected by the poet. I It embodies and illusti'ates its impressions by imagination, or -^images of the objects of which it treats, and other images \brought in to throw liglit on those objects, in order that it may lenjoy and impart the feeling of their truth in its utmost convic- (tion and affluence. It illustrates them by fancy, which is a lighter play of imagi- nation, or the feeling of analogy coming short of seriousness, in order that it may laugh with what it loves, and show how it \ can decorate it with fairy ornament. It modulates what it utters, because in running the whole round of beauty it must needs include beauty of sound ; and because, in the height of its enjoyment, it must show the per- fection of its triumph, and make difficulty itself become part of its facility and joy. And lastly, Poetry shapes this modulation into uniformity for its outline, and variety for its parts, because it thus realizes the last idea of beauty itself, which includes the charm of diversity within the flowing round of habit and ease. Poetry is im aginative passioiju/ The quickest and -subtlest test of the possession of its essence is in expression ; the variety of things to be expressed shows the, amount of its resources ; and the continuity of the song completes the evidence of its strength and greatness. He wlio has thoun-ht, feelinsj, expres- sion, imagination, - action, character, and continuity, all in the largest amount and highest degree, is the greatest poet. Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be made visible to the mind's eye, aad whatsoever of music can be conveyed by sound and proportion without singing or instrumentation. But it far surpasses those divine arts in suggestiveness, range, and intellectual wealth ; — the first, in expression of thought, combi- nation of images, and the triumph over space and time the second, in all that can be done by speech, apart from the tones and modulations of pure sound. Painting and music, however, include all those portions of the gift of poetry that can bs ex- pressed and heightened by the visible and melodious. Painting, WHAT IS POE TRY ? in a certain apparent manner, is things themselves ; music, in a certain audible manner, is their very emotion and grace. Mu- sic and painting are proud to be related to poetry, and poetry loves and is proud of them. Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science ceases to be merely such, and to exhibit a further truth ; that is to say, the connexion it. has with the world of emotion, and its power to produce imaginative pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, for in- stance, what flower it is that we see yonder, he answers, " a lily." This is matter of fact. The botanist pronounces it to be of the order of " Hexandria Monogynia." This is matter of science. It is the " lady " of the garden, says Spenser ; and here we begin to have a poe^'oal sense of its fairness and gi'ace. It is The plant and flower of light, says Ben Jonson ; and poetry then shows us the beauty of the flower in all its mysteiy and splendor. If it be asked, how we know perceptions like these to be true, the answer is, by the fact of their existence, — by the consent and delight of poetic readers. And as feeling is the earliest teacher, and perception the only final proof, of things the most demonstrable by science, so the remotest imaginations of the poets may often be found to have the closest connexion with matter of fact ; perhaps might always be so, if the subtlety of our perceptions were a match for the causes of them. Con- sider this image of Ben Jonson's — of a lily being a flower of light. Light, undecomposed, is white ; and as the lily is white, and light is white, and whiteness itself is nothing hut light, the two things, so far, are not merely similar, but identical. A poet might add, by an analogy drawn from the connexion of light and color, and there is a " golden dawn" issuing out of the white lily, in the rich yellow of the stamens. I have no desire to push this similarity further than it may be worth. Enough has been stated to show that, in poetical as in other analogies, " the same feet of Nature," as Bacon says, may be seen " treading in different paths;" and tha\ the most scornful, tha is to say, AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION dullest disciple of fact, should be cautious how he betrays the shallowness of his philosophy by discerning no poetry in its depths. But the poet is far from dealing only with these subtle and analogi-cal truths. Truth of every kind belongs to him, pro- vided it can bud into any kind of beauty, Dr is capable of being illustrated and impressed by the poetic faculty. Nay, the sim- plest truth is often so beautiful and impressive of itself, that one of the greatest proofs of his genius consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated by nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, its own wonder, might, or playfulness. Hence the complete effect of many a simple passage in our old English ballads and romances, and of the passionate sincerity in general V of the greatest early poets, such as Homer and Chaucer, who flourished before the existence of a "literary world," and were not perplexed by a heap of notions and opinions, or by doubts how emotion ought to be expressed. The greatest of their suc- cessors never write equally to the purpose, except when they can dismiss everything from their minds but the like simple truth. In the beautiful poem of " Sir Eger, Sir Graham, and Sir Gray-Steel" (see it in Ellis's Specimens, or Laing's Easly Metrical Tales), a knight thinks himself disgraced in the eyes of his mistress : Sir Eger said, " If it be so, Then wot I well I must forego Love-liking, and manhood, all clean !" The water rushed out of his een ! Sir Gray-Steel is killed : — Gray-Steel into ]*[s death thus throws (throes ?) He waiters (welters — throws himself about) and the grass lip draws ; * * * * » ..f little while then lay he still {Friends that him saw, liked full ill) And bleu hito his armor bright. The abode of Chaucer's Revr, or Steward, in the Canterbury Tales, is painted in two lines, which nobody ever wished longer : — WHAT IS POETRY ? His wonning (dwelling) was full fair upon an heath, With greeny trees yshadowed was his place. Every one knows the words of Lear, " most matter-of-fact^ most melancholy." Pray do not mock me ; I am a very foolish fond old man Fourscore and upwards : Not an hour more, nor less ; and to deal plainly I fear I am not in my perfect mind It i« thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and the implied power of writing with exuberance, if need be, that beauty and truth become identical in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, a balm in our tears, is drawn out of pain. It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely imagination, when the poet can write a commentary, as it were, of his own, on such sufficing passages of nature, and be thanked for the addition. There is an instance of this kind in Warner, an old Elizabethan poet, than which I know nothing sweeter in the world. He is speaking of Fair Rosamond, and of a blow given her by Queen Eleanor. With that she dash'd her on the lips, So dyed double red: Hard was the heart that gave the blow. Soft were these lips that bled. There are different kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them necessary to the formation of every true poet, and .all of them possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enume- rated as follows : — First, that which presents to the mind any object or circumstance in every-day life ; as when we imagine a man holding a sword, or looking out of a window ; — Second, that which presents real, but not every-day circumstances ; as King Alfred tending the loaves, or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the d} ng soldier ; — Third, that which combines character and events directly imitated from leal life, with imita- tive realities of its own invention ; as the probable parts of the histories of Priam and Macbeth, or what may 'ce called natural AN ANSWER TJ THE QUESTION fiction as distinguished from supernatural ; — Fourth, that which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature ; as Homer's gods, and Shakspeare's witches, enchanted horses and spears, Ariosto's hippogriff, &c. ; — Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate or aggravate one image, introduces another ; sometimes in simile, as when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the coming of night-time : sometimes in metaphor or simile comprised in a word, as in Milton's " motes that people the sunbeams ;" sometimes in concentrating into a ■word the main history of any person or thing, past or even future, as in the " starry Galileo" of Byron, and that ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet " murdered" applied to the yet living victim in Keats's story from Boccaccio — • So the two brothers and their murder' d man Rode towards fair Florence ; — sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality Avhich makes one circumstance stand for others ; as in Milton's grey-fly winding lis '■'■ sultry horn," which epithet contains the heat of a summer's day ; — Sixth, that which reverses this pro- cess, and makes a variety of circumstances take color from one, like nature seen with jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influ- ence of storm or sunshine ; as when in Lycidas, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and the flocks are made to sympathize with a man's death ; or, in the Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking of love — Parea che 1' erba le fiorisse intorno, Ed' amor ragionasse quella rival — Orlando Innamorato, Canto iii. or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very ftght in the chamber and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself ; or in the " witch element" of the tragedy of Mac. beth and the May-day night of Faust ; — Seventh, and last, that which by a single expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular description ; as in that exquisite passage of WHAT IS POETRY ? Coleridge's Christabel, where the unsuspecting object of tha witch's malignity is bidden to go to bed : — Quoth Christabel, So let it be ! And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness ;— a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the let- ter Vs. I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing the most lovely inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mir»i any instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has betM copied into the " Friar of Orders Grey," out of Beaumont and Fletcher: — Weep no more, lady, weep no more, Tliy sorrow is in vain ; For violets pluck'' d the sweetest showers Will ne'er make grow again. And Shakspeare and Milton abound in the very grandest ; such as Antony's likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack ; Lear's appeal to the old age of the heavens ; Satan's appearance in the horizon, like a fleet " hanging in the clouds ;" and the comparisons of him with the comet and the eclipse. Nor un- worthy of this glorious company, for its extraordinary combina- tion of delicacy and vastness, is that enchanting one of Shelley's in the Adjnais : — Life, like a dome of many-colored glass. Stains the white radiance of eternity. 1 multiply these particulars in order to impress upon the reader's mind the great importance of imagination in_alljts phases, as a constituent part of the higliest poetic faculty. The happiest instance I remember of imaginative metaphor AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION is Shakspeare's moonlight " sleeping" on a bank ; but half his poetry may be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none out of the pale of mythology and the East, are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to Shakspeare's Ariel and Caliban ; though poetry may grudge to prose the discovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described by her inventor in the story of Peter Wilkins ; and in point of treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of Spenser, some of the monsters in Dante, particu- larly his Nimrod, his interchangements of creatures into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's Christabel, may rank even with the creations of Shakspeare. It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakspeare had bile and nightmare enough in him to have thought of such detestable hor- rors as those of the interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge, half-blockish enormity of Nimrod, — in Scripture, the " mighty hunter" and builder of the tower of Babel, — in Dante, a tower of a man in his own person, standing with some of his brother giants up to the middle in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunder-clap is a whisper, and halloo- ing after Dante and his guide in the jargon of the lost tongue ! The transformations are too odious to quote : but of the towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the " fearful joy" of a speci- men. It was twilight, Dante tells us, and he and his guide Vir- gil were silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions of hell, when the sound of a tremendous horn made him turn all his attention to the spot from which it came. He there discovered through the dusk, what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are no towers, said his guide ; they are giants, standing up to the middle in one of these circular pits. Come qnando la nibbia si disslpa, Lo sguardo a poco a poco raffigura Cio che cela 1' vapor che 1' aere stipa; Cosi forando V aer grossa e scura Piu e pill appressando in ver lasponda, Fugg^mi errore, e giugnemi paura: PerocchS come in su la cerchia tcnda WHAT IS POETRY ? Montereggion di torri si corona, Cosi la proda che '1 pozzo circonda Torreggiavan di mezza la persona Gli orribili giganti, cui minaccia Giove del cielo ancora, quando tuona : Ed io scorgeva gia' d'alcun la faccia, Le spalle e '1 petto, e del ventre gran parte, E per le coste giu ambo le braccia. * * * * La faccia sua mi parea lunga e grossa Come la pina di san Pietro a Roma : E a sua proporzion eran I'altr' ossa. * * * • Rafel mai amech zabi almi Comincio a gridar la fiera bocca, Cui non si convenien piu dolci salmi. E '1 duca mio ver lui : anima sci.occa, Tienti col corno, e con quel ti disfoga, Quand' ira o altra passion ti tocc^. Cercati al collo, e troverai la soga Che '1 tien legato, o anima confusa, E vedi lui che '1 gran petto ti doga. Poi disse a me : egli stesso s' accusa : Questi e Nembrotto, per lo cui mal coto Pure un linguaggio nel mondo non s' usa. Lasciamlo stare, e non parliamo a voto : Che cosi e a lui ciascun linguaggio, Come T suo ad altrui ch' a nuUo e noto. Inferno, Canto xxxi., Ver. 34. I look'd again ; and as the eye makes out, By little and little, what the mist conceal'd In which, till clearing up, the sky was steep'd ; So, looming through the gross and darksome air, As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain. And error quitted me, and terror join'd : For in like manner as all round its height Montereggione crowns itself with towers, So tower'd above the circuit of that pit. Though but half out of it, and half within. The horrible giants that fought love, and still Are threaten'd when he thunders. As we near'd The foremost, I discern'd his mighty face, His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk, With ooth the arms down hanging by the sides. His face appear'd to me, in length and breadth. 10 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION Huge as St. Peter's pinnacle at Rome, And of a like proportion all his bones. He open'd. as he went, his dreadful mouth. Fit for no s.veeter psalmody ; and shouted After us, in the words of some strange tongue, Rafel ma-e3 amech zabce almee ! — " Dull wretch !" my leader cried, " keep to thine born, And so vent better whatsoever rage Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion ! Lo ! what a hoop is clench'd about thy gorge." Then turning to myself, he said, " His howl Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he Through vhose ill thought it was that humankind Were tong le-confounded. Pass him, and say naught: For as he speaketh language known of none. So none can speak save jargon to himself." Assuredly it could not have been easy to find a fiction so un- couthly terrible as this in the hypochondria of Hamlet. Even his father had evidently seen no such ghost in the other world. All his phantoms were in the world he had left. Timon, Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero, Macbeth himself, none of Shaks- peare's men had, in fact, any thought but of the earth they lived on, whatever supernatural fancy cro.ssed them. The thing fancied was still a thing of this world, " in its habit as it lived," or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy. Its lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the stage. Caliban himself is a cross-breed between a witch and a clown. No offence to Shakspeare ; who was not bound to be the greatest of healthy poets, and to have every morbid inspiration besides. What he might have done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante, I know not : all I know is, that in the infernal line he did nothing like him ; and it is not to be wished he had. It is far better that, as a higher, more universal, and more beneficent variety of the genus Poet, he should have been the happier man he was, and left us the plump cheeks on his monument, instead of the carking visage of the great, but over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Florentine. Even the imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a ** nervous gentleman" compared with Shakspeare, was visited WHAT IS POETRY? 11 with no such dreams as Dante, Or, if it was, he did not choose to malve himself thinner (as Dante says he did) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions ot' nymphs and bowers, to one of tho mud of Tartarus. Chaucer, for all he was " a rnan of this world " as well as the poets' world, and as great, per- haps a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides being one of the profoundest masters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart to conclude the story of the famished father and his children, as finished by the inexorable anti-Pisan. But enough of Dante in this place. Hobbes, in order to daunt the reader from objecting to his friend Davenant's want of invention, says of thefte fabulous creations in general, in his letter pre- fixed to the poem of Gondibert, that " impenetrable armors, en- chanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, are easily feigned by them that dai'e." These are girds at Spenser and Ariosto. But, with leave of Hobbes (who translated Homer as if on purpose to show what execrable verses could be written by a philoso- pher), enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily feigned, as Ariosto and Spenser feigned them ; and that just makes all the difference. For proof, see the accounts of Spenser's en- chanted castle in Book the Third, Canto Twelfth, of the Fairy Queen ; and let the reader of Italian open the Orlando Furioso at its first introduction of the Hinpogriff' (Canto iii., st. 4), where Bradamante, coming to an inn, hears a great noise, and sees all the people looking up at something in the air ; upon which., looking up herself, she sees a knight in shining armor riding towards the sunset upon a creature with variegated wings, and then dipping and disappearing among the hills. Chaucer's steed of brass, that was So horsly and so quick of ve, is copied from trie life. You might pat him and feel his brazen muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to what he thought childish, made a childish mistake. His criticism is just such as a boy might pique himself upon, who was educated on mechanical Drinciples, and thought he had outgrown his Goody Two-shoes- 12 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTICff^ With a wonderful dimness of discernment in poetic matters, considering his acuteness in others, he fancies he has settled the question by pronouncing such creations " impossible !" To the brazier they are impossible, no doubt ; but not to the poet. Their possibility, if the poet wills it, is to be conceded ; the problem is, the creature being given, how to square its actions with probability, according to thr> nature assumed of it. Hobbes did not see, that the skill and beauty of these fictions lay in bringing them within those very regions of truth and likelihood in which he thought they could not exist. Hence the serpent Python of Chaucer, Sleeving against the sun vj)on a day, when Apollo slew him. Hence the chariot-drawing dolphins of Spenser, softly swimming along the shore lest they should hurt themselves against the stones and gravel. Hence Shakspeare's Ariel, living under blossoms, and riding at evening on the bat ; and his domestic namesake in the " Rape of the Lock" (the imagination of the drawing-room) saving a lady's petticoat from the coffee with his plumes, and directing atoms of snufF into a coxcomb's nose. In -^he " Orlando Furioso" (Canto xv., st, 65) is a wild story of a cannibal necromancer, who laughs at being cut to pieces, coming together again like quicksilver, and picking up his head when it is cut off" sometimes by the hair, sometimes by the nose ! This, which would be purely childish and ridiculous in the hands of an inferior poet, becomes inter- esting, nay grand, in Ariosto's, from the beauties of his style, and its conditional truth to nature. The monster has a fated hair on his head, — a single hair, — which must be taken from it before he can be killed. Decapitation itself is of no consequence, without that proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has fought this phenomenon on horseback, and succeeded in getting the head and galloping off with it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at. How is he to discover such a needle in such a bottle of hay 1 The trunk is spurring after him to recover it, and he eeeks for some evidence of the hair in vain. At length he be- thinks himself of scalping the head. He dors so j and the mo- WHAT IS POETRY ? 13 ment the operation arrives at the place of the hair, the face of the head becomes pale, the eyes turn in their sockets, and tha Utb- less pursuer tumbles from his horse. Si fece il viso allor pallido e brutto, Travolse gli occhi, e dimostro a '1 occaso Per manifesti segni esser condutto. E '1 busto che seguia troncato al collo, Di sella cadde, e die 1' ultimo crollo Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet ; The eyes turned in their sockets, drearily ; And all things show'd the villain's sun was set. His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse, And giving the last shudder, was a corse. It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his companion wherever he goes, even in the most supernatural region, that the poet, in the words of a very instructive phrase, takes the world along with him. It is true, he must not (as the Pl-atonists would say) humanize weakly or mistakenly in that region ; otherwise he runs the chance of forgetting to be true to the supernatural itself, and so betraying a want of imagination from that quar- ter. His nymphs will have no taste of their woods and waters ; his gods and goddesses be only so many fair or frowning ladies and gentlemen, such as we see in ordinary paintings ; he will be in no danger of having his angels likened to a sort of wild- fowl, as Rembrandt has made them in his Jacob's Dream. His Bacchus's will never remind us, like Titian's, of the force and fury, as well as of the graces, of wine. His Jupiter will reduce no females to ashes ; his fairies be nothing fantastical ; his gnomes not " of the earth, earthy." And this again will be wanting to Nature ; for it will be wanting to the supernatural, as Nature would have made it, working in a supernatural direc tion. Nevertheless, the poet, even for imagination's sake, must not become a bigot to imaginative truth, dragging it down into the region of the mechanical and the limited, and losino- siffht of its paramount privilege, which is to make beauty, in a human sense, the lady and queen of the universe. He would gain aothing bv making his ocean-nymphs mere fishy creatures, upon 14 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION the plea that such only could live in the water: nis wood- nymphs with faces of knotted oak ; his angels without breath and song, because no lungs could exist between the earth's atmosphere and the empyrean. The Grecian tendency in this respect is safer than the Gothic ; nay, more imaginative ; for it enables us to imagine beyond imagination, and to bring all things healthily round to their only present final ground of sympathy — the human. When we go to heaven, we may idealize in a superhuman mode, and have altogether different notions of the beautiful ; but till then, we must be content with the loveliest capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of Greece were still beautiful women, though they lived in the water. The gills and fins of the ocean's natural inhabitants were confined to their lowest semi-human attendants ; or if Triton himself was not quite human, it was because he represented the fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they did the fairer. To conclude this part of my subject, I will quote from the greatest of all narrative writers two passages ; — one exemplifying the imagination which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly, without confounding them ; the other, that which paints events and circumstances after real life. The first is where Achilles, who has long absented himself from the conflict be- tween his countrymen and the Trojans, has had a message from heaven, bidding him re-appear in the enemy's sight, standing outside the camp-vvall upon the trench, but doing nothing more ; that is to say, taking no part in the fight. He is simply to be seen. The two armies down by the sea-side are contending which shall possess the body of Patroclus ; and the mere sight of the dreadful Grecian chief — supernaturally indeed impressed upon them, in order that nothing may be wanting to the full effect of his courage and conduct upon courageous men—is to determine the question. We are to imagine a slope of ground towards the sea, in order to elevate the trench ; the camp is solitary ; the battle ("a dreadful roar of men," as Homer calls it) is raging on the sea-shore ; and the goddess Iris has just delivered her message, and disappeared. A.vrap A-^'^^EWf (jpro An 0iXo5* a/iipt S" A^l''') QiiOii K^Qifioiai PaX aiyiJa Bvcaavocccrav' WHAT IS POETRY? 15 Anilii ic hi KCa\ri vc(po( E<7Te(j>e Sia Oeaoyv Ap'iircov, CK 6' avrov iai€ (p\oya ■najupavooiuav. 'i2f i' brc KaiTvoi icov e^ acrreoi aidtp' i/cijrat TrjXodev CK vrja-ov, Tt]v Sr/toi ajxipijia^ovTai, 'Oi7-£ TTavr}fitpioi OTvytpoi Kpivoi/rat Aprji A(rTCo; CK aijtcTcptiv' ajia 6' /jeXioj KaraSvvri TLvpuoi Ti ip\cycdovcnv cirriTpijiot, ixl^ire (i' avyi) Viyvcrat ai(T(Tuvna, irzpiKTiovcuaiv ticaOat, Ai KCii TTois (Tvv vnvyif apii a\KTr]pcs iKuivTai' 'Sis Off' A-X^Wrios KCSsKa (pUlTC; aplCTTOl A/^ijJii afoii oxccacn. xai cyxcaiv. Iliad, Lib. xviii., v. VA. But up Achilles rose, the lov'd of heaven ; And Pallas on his mighty shoulders cast The shield of Jove ; and round about his head She put the glory of a golden mist. From which there burnt a fiery-flaming light. And as, when smoke goes heaven-ward from a town. In some far island which its foes besiege, Who all day long with dreadful martialness Have pour'd from their own town ; soon as the sun Has set, thick lifted fires are visible, Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky. And let the neighbors know, who may perhaps Bring help across the sea ; so from the head Of great Achilles went up an effulgence. Upon the trench he stood, without the wall. But mix'd not with the Greeks, for he rever'd 16 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION Kis mother's word ; and so, thus standing there. He shouted ; and Minerva, to his shout, Added a dreadful cry ; and there arose Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult. And as the clear voiae of a trumpet, blown Against a town by spirit-withering foes, So sprang the clear voice of ^acides. And when they heard the brazen cry, their hearts All leap'd within them ; and the proud-maned horses Ran with the chariots round, for they foresaw Calamity ; and the charioteers were smitten, When they beheld the ever-active fire Upon the dreadful head of the great-minded one Burning ; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn. Thrice o'er the trench divine Achilles shouted ; And thrice the Trojans and their great allies RoU'd back ; and twelve of all their noblest men Then perished, crush'd by their own arms and chariots. Of course there is no further question about the body of Patro- clus. It is drawn out of the press, and received by the awfu hero with tears. The other passage is where Priam, kneeling before Achilles, and imploring him to give up the dead body of Hector, reminds him of his own father ; who, whatever (says the poor old king) may be his troubles with his enemies, has the blessing of know- ing that his son is still alive, and may daily hope to see him return. Achilles, in accordance with the strength and noble honesty of the passions in those times, weeps aloud himself at this appeal, feeling, says Homer, " desire" for his father in his very "limbs." He joins in grief with the venerable sufferer, and can no longer withstand the look of " his great head and his grey chin." Observe the exquisite introduction of this last word. It paints the touching fact of the chin's being implor- ingly thrown upward by the kneeling old man, and the very motion of his beard as he speaks. 'S2j apa (pbi>v}irai aircffri npo; jxaxpov O\vjiirov 'Ep^tiaj' npia^of i>, Taipei T cv flti^oj, ETTi T eXnCTai r)jiaTa vavra OipcaOat 'oy irapa aeio, (pepoj S' aTTcpeiari' anoiva. AXX' ai(5jio Bcovs, A^I'Xeu, avrov t eXeriaov, i^'LiTicrajiCvos aov Trarpoi' eyui 6' eXecivortpoi Trtp, ErXijv (5", 01 otiTTCj Tis ciTixOnvios Pporog aWos, A.vSpos ira-tSofovoio iron oto;«i X*'P' opsySjQai. 'S2j (paro' rto 6' apa Trarpo; vij>' ifjiepiv oypat yooio. A.\papevos S' apa ^tipog, airwcaro jj.va yepovra. Tcj Se pvr](iap.ivw, b jtsv 'E/cropoj avSpo(povoio, KXai' aSit/a, irpo-rrapoiOe ttoSmv A-X'^I"! tXvcrdtti' Avrap A;^;(XXeu; (cXaisv Lov Trarep', aWors <5' avTt ITor/ffo<(Xoi'' Tiov Ss arovax'n Kara So>^iaT optxipli, A-Vrvp tirei pa yaoio TSrapvsro Jiof A;^iXXtuf, Kai 6i dKO npaniSoiv rj\d' luep); ti6' airo yviioVj AvrtK aira Bpovov lopro, ytpovra St x^'P'^i ai/tarri, OtKTttpU}V Tro\lOV TE Kapn, TT0\i0V Tt yt tiov. Iliad, Lib. xxiv., v. 463. 18 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION So saying, Mercury vanislied up to heaven : And Priam then alighted from liis chariot. Leaving Idocns with it, who remain'd Holding the mules and horses ; and the old man Went straight in-doors, where the belov'd of Jo^e Achilles sat, and found him. In the room Were others, but apart ; and two nlone. The hero Automedon, and Alcimus, A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been At meals, and had not yet removed the board. Great Priam came, without their seeing him, And kneeling down, he clasp'd Achilles' knees, And kiss'd those terrible, homicidal hands. Which had deprived him of so many sons. And as a man who is prcss'd heavily For having slain another, flies away To foreign lands, and comes into the house Of some great man, and is beheld with wonder, So did Achilles wonder to see Priam ; And the rest wonder'd, looking at each other. But Priam, praying to him, spoke these words : - " God-like Achilles, think of thine awn father ! To the same age have we both come, the same Weak pass ; and though the neighboring chiefs may vet Him also, and his borders find no help, Yet when he hears that thou art still alive, He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes To see his dear son coming back from Troy. But I, bereav'd old Priam ! I had once Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say That one is left me. Fifty children had I, When the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb; The rest my women bore me in my iiouse. The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen d; And he who had no peer, Troy's prop and theirs, Him hast thou kill'd now, fighting for his country, Hector ; and for his sake am I come here To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom. But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and think Of thine own father, and have mercy on me; For I am much more wretched, and have horo% What never mortal bore, I think, on earth, To lift unto my lips the hand of him Wlo slew my boys." WHAT IS POETRY ? 19 He ceased ; and there arose Sharp longing in Achilles for liis father; And taking Priam by the hand, he gently Put him away ; for both shsd tears to think Of other times ; the one, most bitter ones For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness Lay right before Achilles : and the other, For his own father now, and now his friend ; And the whole house might hear them as they moan'd. But when iivine Achilles had refresh'd His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left His heart and limbs, he got up from his tJirone, And rais'd the old man by the hand, and took Pity on his grey head and his grey chin. O lovely and immortal privilege of genius ! that can stretch its hand out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, if he had thought of it. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact. They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be kept back ; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction ;. without imagination, there is' no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their kind, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been en- cumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-con- templative would have given us too many remarks; the over lyrical, a style too much carried away ; the over-fanciful, con- ceits and too many similes ; the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those. We should have been told nothing of the " grey chin," of the house hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man aside ; much less of that yearning for his father, which made ihe hero trem- ble in every limb. Writers without the greatest passion and power do not feel in this way, nor are capable of expressing the feeling ; though there is enough sensibility and imagination all over the world to enable mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth into their hearts. The reverse of imagiration is exhibited in pure absence of 80 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION ideas, in con nonplaces, and, above all, in conventional meta- phor, or such images and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse and writing. Addison's Cato is full of them. Passion unpitied and successless love Plant daggers in my breast. I've sounded my Numidians, man by man, And find them ripe for a revolt. The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex. Of the same kind is his " courting the yoke" — " distracting my very heart" — "calling up all" one's " father" in one's soul — • "working every nerve" — "copying a bright example;" in short, the whole play, relieved now and then with a smart sen- tence or turn of words. The following is a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another tragedy of Addison's time, — the Mariamne of Fenton : — Mariamne, with snpei-ior chartns. Triumphs o'er reason : in hef look she bears A paradise of ever-blooming sweets ; Fair as the first idea beauty prints In her young lover's soul ; a winning grace Guides every gesture, and obse(iuious love Attends on all her steps. "Triumphing o'er reason" is an old acquaintance of every- body's. " Paradise in her look " is from the Italian poets through Dryden. " Fair as the first idea," &;c., is from Milton spoilt ; "winning grace" and "steps" from Milton and TibuUus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt ; just as when a great writer borrows, he improves. To come now to Fancy, — she is a younger sister of Imagina- tion, without the other s weight of thought and feeling. Imagi- nation indeed, purely so called, is all feeling ; the feeling of the subtlest and most affecting analogies; the perception of sympa- thies in the natures of things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is sporting with their resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical creations. WHAT IS POETRY ? 21 Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane. Be shook to air. Troilus and Cressida, Act iii., sc. 3. That is imaginauon ; — the strong miad sympathizing with the strong beastj and the weak love identified with the weak dew- drop. Oh ! — and I forsooth In love ! I that have been love's whip I A very beadle to a humorous sigh ! — A domineering pedant o'er the boy, — This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, — This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid, Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms. The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, &c. Love's Labor's Lost, Act iii., sc. 1 That is fancy ; — a combination of images not in their nature connected, or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure ; and having just enough hold of analogy to betray , it into the hands of its smiling subjector. Silent icicles Quietly shining to the quiet moon. Coleridge's Frost at Midnight. That, again, is imagination ; — analogical sympathy ; and exqui- site of its kind it is. "You are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion ; where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt." Twelfth J^ght, Act iii , sc. 2. And that is fancy ; — one image capriciously suggested by an- other, and but half connected with the subject of discourse ; nay, half opposed to it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's ani- mal spirits, the " Dutchman's beard" is made to represent the lady! Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the se^'ious muse ; Fancy 22 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION to the comic. Macbeth, Lear, Paradise Lost, the poem ol Dante, are full of imagination : the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Rape of the Lock, of fancy : Romeo and Juliet, tha Tempest, the Fairy Queen, and the Orlando Furioso, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such ; and neither is the best that might be found. The term Imagination is too confined : often too material. It presents too invariably the idea of a solid body ; — of " images" in the sense of t'.e plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition (^'IxiviaajKty appearance, phantom), has rarely that freedom from visibility which is one of the highest privileges of imagination. Viola, in Twelfth Night, speaking of some beautiful music, says: — It gives a very echo to the seat, Where Love is throned. In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined ; yet the fancy, the assumption of Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a solid body-; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the pasisidn of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at aH. Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of what is called Imagi- nation. One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy ; and like Melancholy, as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe. Fancy turns her sister's wizard in- struments into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and sallies forth a§ an em- blem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the child-like and sport- ive. She chases butter.^ies, while her sister takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of fashions ; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and capricious ; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the images of wit ; and delights as much to people nature with smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together, and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not WHAT IS POKTRY ? 23 incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her company ; always, in the case of the greatest poets ; often in that of less, though with them she is the greater favorite. Spenser has great imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton ooth al'so, the very g ;*=^atest, but with imagination predominant ; Chaucer, the strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare, and iu comic painting inferior to none ; Pope has hardly any imagina- tion, but he has a great deal of fancy ; Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakspeare alone, of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing will be found in the present volume. See also his famous description of Queen Mab and her equipage, in Romeo and Juliet : — Her waggon-spokes msde of long spinners' legs ; The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers; Her traces of the smallest spider's web ; Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c. That is Fancy, In its playful creativeness. As a small bul pretty rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace from Drayton's Nymphidia : — This palace standeth in the air. By necromancy placed there, That it no tempest needs to fear, Which way soe'er it blow it: And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon. Whence lies a way up to the moon, And thence the Fairy can as soon Pass to the earth below it. The walls of spiders' legs are made, Well morticed and finely laid : He was the master of his trade. It curiously that builded : The windows of the eyes of cats : (because they see best at night) And for the roof instead of slats Is cover'd with the skins of bats With moonshine t ' it are gilded. 24 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet'a Muse's Elysium. or leaves of roses, white and red. Shall be the covering of the bed; The curtains, vallens, tester all, Shall be the flower imperial ; And for the fringe it aL along With azure hare-bells shall be hung. Of lilies shall the pillows be With down stuft of the butterfly. Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John Suckling, in his "Ballad on a Wedding," has given some of the most playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like twinkles in the eye, or cherries bedewed • Her feet beneath her petticoat. Like little mice stole in and out. As if they fear' d the light; But oh ! she dances such a way ! JVb SU71 upon an Easter day. Is half so fine a sight. It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur, to compare a lady's dancing with the sun. But as the sun has it all to him- self in the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is imagination fairly displacing fancy. The followijig has enchanted everybody : — Her lips were red, and one was thin. Compared with that was next her chin. Some bee had stung it newly. Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave. With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by which verse ought to be modulated, and one-ness of impression diversely produced, it has been contended by some, that Poetry need not be written in versa at all ; that prose is as good a me- dium, provided poetry be conveyed through it ; and that to think otherwise is to confound letter with spirit, or form with essence. But the opinion is a prosaical mistake. Fitness and unfitness for WHAT IS POETRY ? 25 song, or metrical excitement, just make all the difference between a poetical and prosaical subject ; and the reason why verse is necessary to the form of poetry, is, that the perfection of poetical spirit demands it; that the circle of enthusiasm, oeauty, and power, is incomplete without it. I do not mean to say that a poet can never show himself a poet in prose ; but that, being one, his desire and necessity will be to write in verse; and that, if he were unable to do so, he would not, and could not, deserve his title. Verse to the true poet is no clog. It is idly called a trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their satisfaction and effect. Verse is no more a clog than the condition of rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the round- ness and order of the globe we live on is a clog to the freedom and variety tliat abound within its sphere. Verse is no domi- nator over the poet, except inasmuch as the bond is reciprocal, and the poet dominates over the verse. They are lovers play- fully challenging each other's rule, and delighted equally to rule and to obey. Verse is the final proof to the poet that his mastery over his art is complete. It is the shutting up of his powers in *' ineasureful conlent ;" the answer of form to his spirit; of strength and ease to his guidance. It is the willing action, the pi'oud and fiery happiness, of the winged steed on whose back he has vaulted, To witch the world with wondrous horsemanship. Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, and " tuneful planetting" of the poet's creations, which is produced of neces- sity by the smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and the harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the beautiful. Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must, of necessity, leave no sense of the beautiful, and -no power over its forms, unmanifested ; and verse flows as inevitably from this condition of its integrity, as other laws of proportion do from any other kind of embodiment of beauty (say ihat of the human figure), however free and various the move- ments may be that play within their limits. What great poet p.\ er wrote his poems in prose ? or where is a good prose poem, of any length, to be found ? The poetry of the Bible is under- 28 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION stood to be in verse, in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a good word for those prose enlargements of some fine old song, which are known by the name of Ossian ; and in passages they deserve what he said ; but he judiciously abstained from saying anything about the form. Is Gesner's D°ath of Abel a poem ? or Hervey's Meditations ? The Pilgrim's Pi-ogress has been called one ; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and one of no mean order; and yet it was of as ungenerous ana low a sort as was compatible with so lofty an affinity ; and this is the reason why it stopped where it did. He had a craving after the beautiful, but not enough of it in himself to echo to its music. On the "other hand, the pos- session of the beautiful will not be sufficient without f©rce to utter it. The autlior of Telemachus had a soul full of beauty and tenderness. He was not a man who, if he had had a wife and children, would have run away from them, as Bunyan's hero did, to get a place by himself in heaven. He was "a little lower than the angels," like our own Bishop Jewells and Berke- leys ; and yet he was no poet. He was too delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in his devotions, to join in the energies of the seraphic choir. Every poet, then, is a versifier ; every fine poet an excellent one ; and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of strength, sweetness, straightforv/ardness, unsuperflu- ousness, vnriett/, and one-ness ; one-ness, that is to say, consist- ency, in the general impression, metrical and moral ; and variety, or every pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. Strength is the muscle of verse, and shows itself in the numbei and force of the marked syllables ; as. Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds. Paradise Ijost. Behemoth, biggest born of earth, uphe&v'd . His vastness. Id. Blow winds and crack your cheeks ? rage ' blow I You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout, Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks ! WHAT IS POETRY 27 You sulphurous and thought-executing fires. Vaunt couriers of 6ak-cle,iving thiinderbolts, Singe my white head ! and thou, all-shaking thiinder, Strike flit the thick rotundity o' the world ! Lear. Unexpected locations of the accent double this force, and render it characteristic of passion and abruptness. And here comes into play the reader's corresponding fineness of ear, and his retardations and accelerations in accordance with those of the poet : — Then in the keyhole turns The intricate wards, and every bolt and bar Unfastens. On a siidden open fly With impetuous recoil and jarring sound The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate Harsh thunder. Par. Lost, Book IL Abominable — unutterable — and worse Than fables yet have feigned. Id. , Wallowing iinwieldj^ — enormous in their gait. Id. Of unusual passionate accent, there is an exquisite specimen in the Fairy Queen, where Una is lamenting her desertion by the Red-Cross Knight : — But he, my lion, and my noble lord, How does he find in cruel heart to hate Her that him lov'd, and ever most ador'd As the gbd of my life ? Why hath he me abhorr'd ? See the whole stanza, with a note upon it, in the present volume. The abuse of strength is harshness and heaviness ; the re- verse of it is weakness. There is a noble sentiment, — it ap- pears both in Daniel's and Sir John Beaumont's works, but is most probably the latter's, — which is a perfect outrage of strength in the sound of the words : — 2S AN ANSWER TO THE QUEST^/N Only the firmest and the constanfst hearts God sets to act the stoufst and hardest parts. Stottt'si and constanfst for " stoutest " and " most constant !" It is as bad as the intenticnal crabbedness of the line in Hudi- bras; He i\ at han^s or bents out's brains, The devil's in him if he feigns. Beats oiJ^s brains, for " beats out his brains." Of heaviness, Davenant's " Gondibert " is a formidable specimen, almost throughout : — With silence (order's help, and mark of care) They chido that noise which heedless youth aflect; Still course for use, for health they clearness we.ir, And save in well-fix'd arms, all nlcencss che^k'd. They thou2:ht, those that, unarmed, cxp6-;'d frail life, But naked nature valiantly betray'd ; Who was, thoiigh naked, safe, till pride made strife. But made defence must vise, now danger's made. And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like a heavy preacher thumping the pulpit in italics, and spoiling many in- genious reflections. Weakness in versification is want of accent and emphasis. It generally accompanies prosaicalness, and is the consequence of vi^eak thoughts, and of the affectation of a certain well-bred enthusiasm. The writings of the late Mr. Hayley were re- markable for it ; and it abounds among the lyrical imitators of Cowley, and the whole of what is called our French school of poetry, when it aspired above its wit and "sense." It some- times breaks down in a horrible, hopeless manner, as if giving way at the first step. The following ludicrous passage in Con- greve, intended to be particularly fine, contains an nstance :— And lo ! Silence himself is here ; Mcthinks I see the midnight god appear. In all t.is downy pomp array'd. Be).: Id the revereid shade. WHAT IS POETRY ? 29 ^n ancient sigh lie sits upon . ' / Whose memory of sound is long since gone, And purposely annihilated for his throne .' ! Ode on the singing of Mrs. .Arabella IfunU See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison about music For ever consecrate the dai/ To music and Cecilia ; ^lusic, the greatest good that mortals know. And all of heaven we have below, Music can noble hints impart .'! ! It is observable that the unpoetic masters of ridicule are apt to make the most ridiculous mistakes, when they come to affect a strain higher than the one they are accustomed to. But no wonder. Their habits neutralize the enthusiasm it requires. Sweetness, though not identical with smoothness, any more than feeling is with sound, always includes it; and smoothness is a thing so little to be regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worthless in poetry but for some taste of sweetness, that I have not thought necessary to mention it by itself; though such an all-in-all in versification was it regarded not a hundred years back, that Tliomas Warton himself, an idolater of Spenser, ven- turc-d to wish the following line in the Fairy Queen, And was admired much of fools, wbmen, and boys — altered to And was admired much of women, fools, and boys — thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of "women!" (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex, very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet.) Any poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in all small poets, as sweetness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace and delicacy, — of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser is full of it, — Shakspeare — Beaumont and Fletcher — Coleridge. Of Spenser's and Cole- ridge's versification it is the prevailing characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between variety and sameness, 30 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION and a voluptuous sense of the continuous, — " linked sweetness long drawn out." Observe the first and last lines of the stanza in the Fairy Queen, describing a shepherd brushing away the gnats ; — the open and the close e's in the one, As gentle shepherd in sweet eventide- and the repetition of the word oft. and the fall from the vowel a, into the two u's in the other, — She brusheth oft, and oft dotl. mar their murmtirings So in his description of two substances in the handling, both equally smooth ;— Each smoother seems than each, a?id each than each seems smoother. An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume before us. His beauty revolves on itself with con- scious loveliness. And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from tlie poem called the Day- Dre-am ! Observe both the variety and sameness of the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants : — My eyes make pictures when they're shut: — I see a fountain, large and fair, A willow and a ruin'd hut, And thee and me and Mary there. O Mary .' make thy gentle lap our pillow ; Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow. By Straightforwardness is meant the flow of words in their natural order, free alike from mere prose, and fi'om those inver- sions to which bad poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, but chiefly to accommodate their rhymes. In Shadwell's play of Psyche, Venus gives the sisters of the heroine an an- swer, of which the following is the eiitire substance, literally, in so many words. The author had nothing better for her io say : " I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success to youi WHAT IS POETRY ? 31 Dopes. I have seen, with anger, mankind adore your sister's beauty and deplore her scorn : which they siiall do no more. For I'll so resent their idolatry, as shall content your A^ishes to the full." Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and ex{>ression, how was the writer to turn these words into poetry or rhyme ? Simply by diverting them from their natural order, and twisting the halves of the sentences each before the other. With kindness I your prayers receive. And to your hopes success will give. I have, with anger, seen mankind adore Your sister's beauty and her scorn deplore ; Which they shall do no more. For their idolatry I'll so resent. As shall your wishes to the full content ! ! This is just as if a man were to allow that there was no poetry in the words, "Flow do you find yourself?" "Very well, I thank you ;" but to hold them inspired, if altered into Yourself how do you find ? Very well, you I thank. It is true, the best writers in Shadwell's age were addicted to tliese inversions, partly for their own reasons, as far as rhyme was concerned, and partly because they held it to be writing in the classical and Virgilian manner. What has since been called Artificial Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction to Natural ; or Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first sources. But when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always wriiten in the most natural and straight- forward manner. Hear Shadwell's antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what is used for the sake of em- phasis in common discourse, and this only in one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal character of the Duke of Buckingham : — A nan so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome ; 38 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong. Was everything by starts, and nothing long ; But in the course of one revolving moon Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon : Then all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking. Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking Blest madman! who could ever} hour employ With something new to wish or to enjoy '. Railing and praising were his usual themes; And both, to show his judgment, in extremes: So over violent, or over civil, Tliat every man with him was god or devil. In squandering wealth was his peculiar art; JVothing went unrewarded, but desert. Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late, He had his jest, and they had his estate. Inversion itself was often turned into a grace in these poets, and may be in others, by the power of being superior to it ; using it only with a classical air, and as a help lying next to them, instead of a salvation which they are obliged to seek. In jesting passages also it sometimes gave the rhyme a turn agree- ably wilful, or an appearance of choosing what lay in its way ; as if a man should pick up a stone to throw at another's head, whei'e a less confident foot would have stumbled over it. Such is Dryden's use of the word might — the mere sign of a tense — in his pretended ridicule of the monkish practice of rising lo sing psalms in the night. And much they griev'd to see so nigh their hall The bird that warn'd St. Peter of his fall ; That he should raise his mitred crest on high. And clap his wings and call his family To sacred rites; and vex th' ethereal powers With midnight matins at uncivil hours ; Nay more, his quiet neighbors should molest Just in the sweetness of their morning rest. (What a line full of " another doze " is that !) Beast of a bird! supinely, when he might Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light! WHAT IS POETRY ? 33 What if his dull forefathers used that cry ? Could he not let a bad example die ? I the more gladly quote instances like those of Dryden, to illustrate the points in question, because they are specimens of the very highest kind of writing in the heroic couplet upon sub- jects not heroical. As to prosaica^ness in general, it is sometimes indulged in by ycung writers on the plea of its being natural ; but this is a mere confusion of triviality with propriety^ and is usually the result of indolence. Unsuperfiuousness is rariier a matter of style in general, than of the sound and order of words : and yet versification is so much strengthened by it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that it could not but come within the category of its requisites. When superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal spirits, as in Beaumont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of luxury, as in Spenser (hi which cases it is enrichment as well as overflow )j there is no worse sign for a poet altogether, except pufe barrenness. Every Woird that could be taken away from a poehi, ilnreferable to either of \he afcove reasons for it, is a damage ; and many such are-dealh ; for there is nothing that posterity seems so determined to resent as this want of respect for its time and trouble. The world is too rich in books to en- dure it. Even true poets have died of this Writer's Evil. Trifling ones have survived, with scarcely any pretensions but the terseness of their trifles. What hope can remain for wordy mediocrity ? Let the discerning reader take up any poem, pen in hand, for the purpose of discovering how many words he can strike out of it that give him no requisite ideas, no relevant ones that he cares for, and no reasons for the rhyme beyond its ne- cessity, and he will see what blot and havoc he will make in many an admired production of its day, — what marks of its inevitable fate. Bulky authors in particular, however safe they may think themselves, would do well to consider what parts of their cargo they might dispense with in their proposed voyage down the gulfs of time ; for many a gallant vessel, thought in- destructible in its age, has perished ; — many a load of words, expected to be in eternal demand, gone to join the wrecks of 4 34 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION self-love, or rotted in the warehouses of change and vicissitude. I have said the more on this point, because in an age when the true inspiration has undoubtedly been re-awakened by Coleridge and his fellows, and we have so many new poets coming for. ward, it may be as well to give a general warning against that tendency to an accumulation and ostentation of thoughts, which is meant to be a refutation in full of the pretensions of all poetry less cogitabund, whatever may be the requirements of its class. Young writers should bear in mind, that even some of the very best materials for poetry are not poetry built ; and that the smallest marble shrine, of exquisite workmanship, outvalues all that architect ever chipped away. Whatever can be dis- pensed with is rubbish. Variety in versification consists in whatsoever can be done for the prevention of monotony, by diversity of stops and cadences, distribution of emphasis, and retardation and acceleration of time ; for the whole real secret of versification is a musical secret, and is not attainable to any vital effect, save by the ear of genius. All the mere knowledge of feet and numbers, of accent and quantity, will no more impart it, than a knowledge of the " Guide to Music" will make a Beethoven or a Paisiello. It is a matter of sensibility and imagination; of the beautiful in poetical passion, accompanied by musical ; of the imperative necessity for a pause here, and a cadence there, and a quicker or slower utterance in this or that place, created by analogies of sound with sense, by the fluctuations of feeling, by the de- mands of the gods and graces that visit the poet's harp, as the winds visit that of ^Eolus. The same time and quantity which are occasioned by the spiritual part of this secret, thus become its formal ones, — not feet and syllables, long and short, iambics or trochees ; which are the reduction of it to its less than dry bones. You might get, for instance, not only ten and eleven, but thirteen or fourteen syllables into a rhyming, as well as blank, heroical verse, if time and the feeling permitted ; and in irregular measure this is often done ; just as musicians put twemy notes in a bar instead of two, quavers instead of minims, according as the feeling they are expressing impels them to fill up the time with short and hurried notes, or with long; or as WHAT IS POETRY? 35 the choristers in a cathedral retard or precipitate the words of the chaunt, according as the quantity of its notes, and the colon which divides the verse of tlie psalm, conspire to demand it. Had the moderns borne this principle in mind when they settled the prevailing systems of verse, instead of learning them, as they appear to have done, from the first drawling and one-sylla- bled notation of the church hymns, we should have retained all the advantages of the more numerous versification of the an- cients, without being compelled to fancy that there was no alter- native for us between our syllabical uniformity and the hexame- ters or other special forms unsuited to our tongues. But to leave this question alone, we will present the reader with a few sufficing specimens of the difference between monotony and variety in versification, first from Pope, Dryden, and Milton, and next from Gay and Coleridge. The following is the boasted melody of the nevertheless exquisite poet of the " Rape of the Lock," — exquisite in his wit and iancy, though not in his num- bers. The reader will observe that it is literally see-saw, like the rising and falling of a plank, with a light person at one end who is jerked up in the briefer time, and a heavier one who is set down more leisurely at the other. It is in the otherwise charming description of the heroine of that poem :— On her white breast — a sparkling cross she wore. Which Jews might kiss — and infidels adore ; Her lively looks — a sprightly mind disclose. Quick as her eyes — and a? unfix'd as those ; Favors to none — to all she smiles extends. Oft she rejects — but never once offends; Bright as the sun — her eyes the gazers strike, And like the sun— ^they shine on all alike ; Yet graceful ease-^and sweetness void of pride, Might hide her faults — if belles had faults to hide ; If to her share — some female errors fall, Look on her face — and you'll forget them all. Compare with this the description of Iphigenia m one of Dry- den's stories from Boccaccio :— It happen'd — on a summer's holiday, That to the greenwood shade — he took his way, For Cymon shunn'd ■"Jie ch irch — and used not much to pray .} .?6 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION ■■) His quarter-staff — which he could ne'er forsake, Hung half before — and half behind his back : He trudg'd along — not knowing what he sought, And whistled as he went — for want of thought. By chance conducted — or by thirst constrain'd. The deep recesses of a grove he gain'd ; — Where — in a plain defended by a wood, Crept through the matted grass — a crystal flood. By which — an alabaster fountain stood ; And on the margent of the fount was laid — Attended by her slaves — a sleeping maid ; Like Dian and her nymphs — when, tir'd with sport. To rest by cool Eurotas they resort. — The dame herself — the goddess well express'd Not more distinguished by her purple vest- Than by the charming features of the face — And e'en in slumber — a superior grace : Her comely limbs — compos'd with decent care, "| Her body shaded — by a light cymarr, )■ Her bosom to the view — was only bare ; J Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied — For yet their places were but signified. — The fanning wind upon her bosom blows — ] To meet the fanning wind — the bosom rose ; > The fanning wind — and purling stream — continue her repose. J For a further variety take, from the same author's Theodore and Honoria, a passage in which the couplets are run one into the other, and all of it modulated, like the former, according to the feeling demanded by the occasion ; Whilst listening to the murmuring leaves he stood — More than a mile immers'd within the wood — At once the wind was laid.] — The whispering sound Was dumb.) — A rising earthquake rock'd the ground. With deeper brown the grove was overspread — "j A sudden horror seiz'd his giddy head — > And his ears tinkled — and his color fled. J Nature was in alarm — Some danger nigh Seem'd threaten'd — though unseen to mortal eye. Unus'd to fear — he summon'd all his soul, And stood collected in hirr.self — and whole : Not long. — WHAT IS POETRY ? 37 But for a crowning specimen cf variety of pause and accent, apart from emotion, nothing can surpass the account, in Para, dise Lost, of the Devil's search for an accomplice ; — There was a place. Now not — though Sin — not Time — first wrought the change. Where Tigris — at the foot of Paradise, Into a gulf — shot under ground — till part Rose up a fountain by the Tree of Life. In with the river sunk — and with it rbse Satan — involv'd in rising mist — then soiight Where to lie hid. — Sea he had search'd — and land From Eden over Pontus — and the pool Mceotis — iip beyond the river Ob ; Downward as far antarctic ; — and in length West from Orontes — to the ocean barr'd At Darien — thence to the land where flows Ganges and Indus. — Thiis the orb he roam'd ' i With narrow search ; — and with inspection deep Consider'd ^very creature — which of all Most opportune might serve his wiles — and foiind The serpent — siabtlest beast of all the field. If the reader cast his eye again over this passage, he will not find a verse in it which is not varied and harmonized in the most remarkable manner. Let him notice in particular that curious balancing of the lines in the sixth and tenth verses : — In with the river sunk, &c., and Up beyond the river Ob. It might, indeed, be objected to the versification of Milton, that it exhibits too constant a perfection of this kind. It some- times forces upon us too great a sense of consciousness on the part of the composer. We miss the first sprightly runnings of verse, — the ease and sweetness of spontaneity. I\Iilton, I think, also too often condenses weiglit into heaviness. Thus much concerning the chief of our two most popular measures. The other, called octosyllahic. or the measure of 38 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION eight syllables, offered such facilities for namhy-'pamhy, that it had become a jest as early as the time of Shakspeare, who makes Touchstone call it the " butterwoman's rate to market," and the " very false gallop of verses." It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and pithy gentle- man. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So far from com- pressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dry- den, compare Gay, even in the strength of Gay — The wind was high — the window shakes With sudden start the miser wakes ; Along the silent room he stalks, (A miser never "stalks;" but a rhyme was desired for "walks") Looks back, and trembles as he walks : Each lock and every bolt he tries, In every creek and corner pries. Then opes the chest with treasure stor'd. And stands in rapture o'er his hoard; (" Hoard" and " treasure stor'd" are just made for one another) But now, with sudden qualms possess'd. He wrings his hands, he beats his breast ; By conscience stung, he wildly stares. And thus his guilty soul de9lares. And so he denounces his gold, as miser never denounced it ; and sighs, because Virtue resides on earth no more ! Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it was capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old WHAT IS POETRY ? 39 musical professors the minstrels, and dividing it by time instead of syllables ; — by the heat of four into which you might get as many syllables as you could, instead of allotting eight syllables to the poor time, whatever it might have to say. He varied it further with alternate rhymes and stanzas, with rests and omis- sions precisely analogous to those in music, and rendered it alto- gether worthy to utter the manifold thoughts and feelings of himself and his lady Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite sense of solemn strangeness and license (for there is witchcraft going forward), to introduce a couplet of blank verse, itself as mystically and beautifully modulated as anything in the music of Gliick or Weber. 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock ; Tu-whit ! — Tu-whoo ! And hark, again ! the crowing cock, How droiosily he crew. Sir Leoline, the baron rich. Hath a toothless mastiff bitch ; From her kennel beneath the rock She maketh answer to the clock Fbur f6r thS qiiartSrs and twelve fdr thi hoilr , Ever and aye, by shine and shower. Sixteen short howls, not over loud : Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. Is the night chilli/ and dark ! The night is chilly, but nbt dark. The thin grey cloud is spread on high, It covers, but not hides, the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full. And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chilly, the cloud is grey ; (These are not superfluities, but mysterious returns of im- portunate feeling) Tis a month before the month of May^ And the spring comes slowly vp this way. The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well. What makes her in the wood so late, A furlong from ^he castle-gate ? 40 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION She had dreams all yesternight Of her own betrothed knight; And she in the midnight wood will pray For the weal of her lover that's far away. She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heav'd were soft and low And naught was green upon the oak, But moss and rarest misletoe ; She kneels beneath tbe huge oak tree. And in silence prayeih she. The lady sprang up suddenly. The lovely lady, Christabel ! It moan'd as near as near can be, But what it is, she cannot tell. On the other side it seems to be Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak trfee The night is chill, the forest bare ; Is it the wind that moajieth bleak ' (This " bleak moaning " is a witch's) There is not wind enough in lae air Tojmove away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek — There is not wind enough to twirl The bne red leaf, the last 6f its clan, TJiat dancSfi 3s bft^n as dance it can. Hanging sd light and hanging sd high. On thS tbpmost twig th&t lod'cs ujj At thl sky Hush, beating heart of Christabel ! Jesu Maria, shield her well ! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak. What sees she there ? There she sees a damsel bright. Dressed in a robe of silken white. That shadowy in the moonlight shone ; The neck that made that white robe wan. Her stately neck and arms were bare : Her blne-vein'd feet unsandall'd were ; And wildly glitter'd, here and ti:ere. The gems entangled in her hair WHAT IS rOETRY? 41 I guess 'twas frightful there to see jf lady so lichly clad as she — Beautiful exceedingly. The principle of Variety in Uniformity is here worked out in a style " beyond the reach of art." Every thing is diversified according to the demand of the moment, of the sounds, the sights, the emotions ; the very uniformity of the outline is gently varied ; and yet we feel that the whole is one and of the same character, the single and sweet unconsciousness of the heroine making all the rest seem more conscious, and ghastly, and ex- pectant. It is thus that versification itself becomes part of the sentiment of a poem, and vindicates the pains that have been taken to show its importance. I know of no very fine versifica- tion unaccompanied with fine poetry ; no poetry of a mean order accompanied with verse of the highest. As to Rhyme, which might be thought too insignificant to mention, it is not at all so. The universal consent of modern Europe, and of the East in all ages, has made it one of the mu- sical beauties of verse for all poetry but epic and dramatic, and even for the former with Southern Europe, — a sustainment for the enthusiasm, and a demand to enjoy. The mastery of it con- sists in never writing it for its own sake, or at least never ap- pearing to do so; in knowing how to vary it, to give it novelty, to render it more or less strong, to divide it (when not in coup, lets) at the proper intervals, to repeat it many times where lux- ury or animal spirits demand it (see an instance in Titania's speech to the Fairies), to impress an affecting or startling remark with it, and to make it, in comic poetry, a new and surprising ac/dition to the jest. Large was his bounty and his soul sincere, Heav'n did a recompense as largely send ; He gave to misery all he had, a tear , He gain'd from heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend. Gray's Elegy. The fops are proud of scandal ; for they cry At every lewd, low character, " That's I" Dryden's Prologue to the Pilgrtm 42 AN ANSWER TO THE :iUESTION What makes all doctrines plain and clear ? Mout two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, Prove false a^rain ? Two hundred more. Compound for sins they are inclin'd to. By damning those thov have no mind to. Stor'd with delecery medicines. Which whosoever took is dead since. Hudibra*. Id. Sometimes it is a grace in a master like But er to force his rhyme, thus showing a laughing wilful power over the most stubborn materials : — Win The women, and make them draw in The men, as Indians with ^. female Tame elephant inveigle the male. Hudibras. He made an instrument to know If the moon shines at full or no ; That would, as soon as e'er she shone, straight Whether 'twere day or night demonstrate ; Tell what her diameter to an inch is. And prove that she's not made oi green cheese. Id. Pronounce it, by all means, grhiches, to make the joke more wilful. The happiest triple rhyme, oerhaps, that ever was written, is in Don Juan : — But oh ! ye lords of ladies intellectual. Inform us truly, — haven't they hen-peck'd you all ? The sweepingness of the assumptioa completes the flowing breadth of effect. Dryden confessed that a rhyme often gave him a thought. Probably the happy word "sprung," in the following passage from Ben Jonson, was suggested by it ; but then the poet musi have had the feeling in him. WHAT IS POETRY ? 43 — Let our trumpets sound, And cleave both air and ground With beating of our drums. Let every lyre be strung, Harp, lute, theorbo, sprung With touch of dainty thumbs. Boileau's trick for appearing to rhyme naturally was to com- pose the second line of his couplet first ! which gives one the crowning idea of the " artificial school of poetry." Perhaps the most perfect master of rhyme, the easiest and most abundant, was the greatest writer of comedy that the world has seen, — Moliere. If a young reader should ask, after all, What is the quickest way of knowing bad poets from good, the best poets from the next best, and so on ? the answer is, the only and two-fold way ; first, the perusal of the best poets with the greatest attention ; and, second, the cultivation of that love of truth and beauty which made them what they are. Every true reader of poetry partakes a more than ordinary portion of the poetic nature ; and no one can be completely such, who does not love, or take an interest in, everything that interests the poet; from the firmament to the daisy, — from the highest heart of man to the most pitiable of the low. It is a good practice to read with pen in hand, marking what is liked or doubted. It rivets the attention, re- alizes the greatest amount of enjoyment, and facilitates refer- ence. It enables the reader also, from time to time, to see what progress he makes with his own mind, and how it grows up towards the stature of its exalter. If the same person should ask, What class of poetry is the highest ? I should say, undoubtedly, the Epic ; for it includes the drama, with narration besides ; or the speaking and action of the characters, with the speaking of the poet himself, whose utmost address is taxed to relate all well for so long a time, par- ticularly in the passages least sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this class has included the greatest poet, is another question still under trial ; for Shakspeare perplexes all such verdicts, even when the claimant is Homer; though, if a judgment may be drawn from his early narratives (Venus and Adonis, and the 44 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION Rape of Lucrece), it is to be doubted whether even Shakspeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that incessant ac. tivity and superfoetation of thought, a little less of which might be occasionally desired even in his plays ; — if it were possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away. Next to Homer and Shakspeare come such narrators as the less univer- sal, but still intenser Dante ; Milton, with his dignified imagina- tion ; the universal, profounr>ly simple Chaucer ; and luxuriant, renaote Spenser — immortal child in poetry's most poetic solitudes : then the great second-rate dramatists ; unless those who are better acquainted with Greek tragedy than I am, demand a place for them before Chaucer : then the airy yet robust universality of Ariosto; the hearty, out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a universalist ; the finest lyrical poets (who only take short flights, compared with the ntirrators) ; the purely contemplative poets who have more thoAight than feeling ; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class may be superior to follow, ers in the train of a higher one, though the superiority is by no means to be taken for granted ; otherwise Pope would be supe- Tior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope.( Imagination, teeming with action and character,, makes the greatest poets ; feeling and thought the next; fancy (by itself) the next p wit the last. Thought by itself makes no poet at. all ; .for the mere conclu- sions of the understanding can at best be only so many intellec- tual matters of fact. Feeling\ even destitute of conscious thought, stands a far better poetical chance ; feeling being a sort of thought without the process of'thinking, — a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And what -is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes the blunders that thought does. An idle distinc- tion has been made between taste and judgment. Taste is the very maker of judgment. Put ah artificial fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the difference be tween judging from taste or tact, and judging from the abstract figment called judgment. The latter does but throw you into guesses and doubts. Hence the conceits that astonish us in the gravest, and even subtlest thinkers, whose tacte is not propor- tionate to their mental perceptions ; men like Donne, for instance ; WHAl' IS POETRY ? 45 who, apart from accidental personal impressions, seem to look at nothing as it really is, but only as to what may be thought of it. Hence, on the other hand, tlie delightfulness of those poets who never violate truth of feeling, whether in things real or imagi- nary ; who are always consistent with their object and its re- quirements ; and who run the great round of nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, but to make themselves and us happy. And lucidly, delightfulness is not incompatible with greatness, willing soever as men may be in their present imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above the power to please. Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great^ writing. This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with a constant detail of thought and feeling like Dante, are justly considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself by the same truth of nature, and sustained power, though in a different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty ; their sphere has more territories less fertile ; but it has enchantments of its own, which excess of thought would spoil, — luxuries, laughing graces, animal spirits ; and not to recognize the beauty and greatness of these, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defective in sympathy. Ev- ery planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and another of the north, and others uniting both. The reader who is too thought- less or too sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too thoughtful or too dull to like anything but the greatest possi- ble stimulus of reflection or passion, are equally wanting in complexional fitness for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ari- osto occasionally says as fine things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakspeare ; but the business of both is to enjoy ; and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the particular, must be aware that there are different songs of the spheres, some fuller of notes, and others of a sustained delight ; and as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or passion, so from the latter you receive a constant harmonious sense of truth and beauty, more agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less exciting. Ariosto, for instance, does not tell a story with the 'i)i'evity and concen- 46 AN ANSWER 10 THE QUESTION trated passion of Dante ; every sentence is not so full of matter nor the style so removed from the indifference of prose ; yet you are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally characteristic of the writer, equally drawn from nature, and substituting a healthy sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. Exclusivenesa of liking for this or that mode of truth, only shows, either that a reader's perceptions are limited, or that he would sacrifice truth itself to his favorite form of it. Sir Walter Raleigh, who w^s as tranchant with his pen as his sword, hailed the Faerie Queene of his friend Spenser in verses in which he said that " Petrarch" was thenceforward to be no more heard of ; and that in all English poetry, there was nothing he counted " of any pHce" but the effusions of the new author. Yet Petrarch is stili living ; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter ; and Shaks- peare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well have said, that myrtles and oaks were to disappear, because acacias had come up. It is with the poet's creations, as with nature's, great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, there poetry is to be found ; whether in productions grand and beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets ; whether in Homer's epic or Gray's Elegy, in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the Schoolmistress of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Na- ture herself, who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who calls upon us to admire all her produc- tions : not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect. I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three memorable words of Milton ; who has said, that poetry, in comparison with science, is " simple, sensuous, and passion- ate." By simple, he means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of imagery ; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that different constructions have been put on some of these words ; but the context seems to mo WHAT iS POETRY ? 47 to necessitate those before us. I quote, however, not from the original, but from an extract in the Remarks on Paradise Lost by Richardson. What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth ; — what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be " in earnest at the moment." His earnestness must be innate and habituai^ ; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. "I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings," says Coleridge, in the Preface to his Poems ; " and I consider my- self as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its ' own exceeding great reward :' it has soothed my afflictions ; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude ; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and sur- rounds me. — Pickering^s edition, p. 10. " Poetry," says Shelley, " lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as me- morials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which ex- ists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively ; he must put himself in the place of anoi.her, and of many others : the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination ; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause." — Essays and Letters, vol i., p. 16. I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these ; but as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is termed useful knowledge, it may be as well to add, that if the poet may be allowed to pique himself on any one tning more than another, compared with those who undervalue him, 43 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION WHAT IS POETRY ? it is on that power of undervaluing nobody, and no attainmenta different from his own, which is given him by the very faculty of imagination they despise. The greater includes the less. .They do not see that their inability to comprehend him argues the smaller capacity. No man recognizes the worth of utility more than the poet : lie only desires that the meaning of the term may not come short of its greatness, and exclude the no- blest necessities of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance, with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad, as the dullest confiner of its ad- vantages to that single idea, or as the greatest two-idead man who varies that single idea with hugging himself on his " but- tons " or his good dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like a magic horse, of the affections tliat are carrying, perhaps, half the passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two- idead man ; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which this wonderful invention is fitted to circu- late over the globe, perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the diffusion of millions of enjoyments. " And a button-maker, after all, invented it !" cries our friend. Pardon me — it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent, and a very poetical man, too, and yet not have been the first man visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical bit of science. It was a nobleman who first thought of it, — a captain who first tried it, — and a but- ton-maker who perfected it. And he who put the nobleman on such thoughts, was the great philosopher. Bacon, who said that poetry had *' something divine in it," and was necessary to the satisfaction of the human mind. SPENSER. 49 SPENSER, BOBN, PROBABLY, ABOUT THE YEAR 1553 DIED, 1598. Three things must be conceded -to the objectors against this divine poet ; first, that he wrote a good deal of allegory ; second, Ihat he has a great many superfluous words ; third, that he weis very fond of alliteration. He is accused also (by little boys) of obsolete words and spelling ; and it njust be added, that he often forces his rhymes ; nay, spells them in an arbitrary manner on purpose to make them fit. In short, he has a variety of faults, real or supposed, that would be intolerable in writers in general. This is true. The answer is, that his genius not only makes amends for all, but overlays them, and makes them beautiful, with "riches fineless." When acquaintance with him is once begun, he repels none but the anti-poetical. Others may not be able to read him continuously ; but more or less, and as an enchanted stream " to dip into," they will read him always. In Spenser's time, orthography was unsettled. Pronunciation is always so. The great poet, therefore, sometimes spells his words, whether rhymed or otherwise, in a manner apparently arbitrary, for the purpose of inducing the reader to give them the sound fittest for the sense. Alliteration, which, as a ground of melody, had been a principle in Anglo-Saxon verse, continued sucii a favorite with old English poets whom Spenser loved, that, as late as the reign of Edward the Third, it stood in the place of rhymi; itself. Our author turns it to beautiful account. Superfiuousness, though eschewed with a fine instinct by Chau- cer in some of his latest works, where the narrative was fullest of action and character, abounded in his others ; and, in spite of 5 so SPENSER. me classics, it had not been recognized as a fault in Spenser's time, when boolis were still rare, and a writer thought himself bound to pour out all he felt and knew. It accorded also with his genius ; and in him is not an excess of weakness, but of will and luxury. And as to allegory, it was not only the taste of the day, originating in gorgeous pageants of church and state, but in Spenser's hands it became such an embodiment of poetry itself, that its objectors really deserve no better answer than has been given them by Mr. Hazliit, who asks, if they thought the allegory would " bite them." The passage will be found a little further on. Spenser's great characteristic is poetic luxury. If you goto him for a story, you will be disappointed ; if for a style, clas- sfcal or concise, the point against him is conceded; if for pathos, you must weep far personages half-real and too beautiful ; if for mirth, you must laugh out of good breeding, and because it pleaseth the great, sequestered man, to be facetious. But if you love poetry well enough to enjoy it for its own sake, let no evil reports of its " allegory" deter you from his acquaintance, for great will be your loss. His allegory itself is but one part allegory, and nine parts beauty and enjoyment ; sometimes an excess of flesh and blood. His forced rhymes, and his sentences written to fill up, which in a less poet would be intolerable, are accompanied with such endless grace and dreaming pleasure, fit to Make heaven drowsy with the harmony, that although it is to be no more expected of anybody to read him through at once, than to wander days and nights in a forest, thinking of nothing else, yet any true lover of poetry, v/hen he comes to know him, would as soon quarrel with repose on the summer grass. You may get up and go away, but will return next day at noon to listen to his waterfalls, and to see, " with half-shut eye," his visions of knights and nymphs, his gods and goddesses, whom he brought down to earth in immortal beauty. Spenser, in some respects, is more southern than the south itself. Dante, but for the covered heat which occasionally con. SPENSER. ^"^ 51 centrates the utmost sweetness as well as venom, would be quite nerthern compared with him. He is more luxurious than Ari- osto or Tasso, more haunted with the presence of beauty. His wholesale poetical belief, mixing up all creeds and mythologies, but with less violence, resembles that of Dante and Boccaccio ; and it gives the compound the better warrant in the more agree- able impression. Then his versification is almost perpetual honey. Spenser is the fartliest removed from the ordinary cares and haunts of the world ofall the poets that ever wrote, except perhaps Ovid ; and this, which is the roason why mere men of business and the world do not like him, constitutes his most bewitching charm with the poetical. He is not so great a poet as Shakspeare or Dante ; — he has less imagination, though more fancy, than Mil- ton. He does not see things so purely in their elements as Dante ; neither can he combine their elements like Shakspeare, nor bring such frequent intensities of words, or of wholesale imaginative sympathy, to bear upon his subject as any one of them ; though he has given noble diffuser instances of the latter in his Una, and his Mammon, and his accounts of Jealousy and Despair. But when you are " over-informed " with thought and passion in Shakspeare, when Milton's mighty grandeurs oppress you, or are found mixed with painful absurdities, or when the world is vexatious and tiresome,, and you have had enough of your own vanities or struggles in it, or when " house and land " them- selves are " gone and spent," and your riches must lie in the regions of the "unknown," then Spenser is " most excellent." His remoteness from every-day life is the reason perhaps why Somers and Chatham admired him ; and his possession of every kind of imaginary wealth completes his charm with his brother poets. Take him in short for what he is, whether greater or less than his fellows, the poetical faculty is so abundantly and beau- tifully predominant in him above every other, though he had pas- sion, and thought, and plenty of ethics, and was as learned a man as Ben Jonson, perhaps as Milton himself, that he has always been felt by his countrymen to be what Charles Lamb called him, the " Poet's Poet." He has had more idolatry and 62 SPENSER. imitation from hif brethren than all the rest put together. The old undramatic poets, Drayton, Browne, Drummond, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, were as full of him as the dramatic were of Shakspeare. Milton studied and used him, calling him the " sage and serious Spenser;" and adding, that he "dared be known to think him a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." Cowley said that he became a poet by reading him. Dryden claimed him for a master. Pope said he read him with as much pleasure when he was old, as young. Collins and Gray loved him ; Thomson, Shenstone, and a host of inferior writers, ex- pressly imitated him ; Burns, Byron, Shelley, and Keats made use of his stanza ; Coleridge eulogized him ; and he is as dear to the best living poets as he was to their predecessors. Spenser has stood all the changes in critical opinion ; all the logical and formal conclusions of the understanding, as opposed to imagina- tion and lasting sympathy. Hobbes in vain attempted to depose him in favor of Davenant's Gondibert. Locke and his friend Molyneux to no purpose preferred Blackmore ! Hume, acute and encroaching philosopher as he was, but not so universal in his philosophy as great poets, hurt Spenser's reputation with none but the French (who did not know him) ; and, by way of involuntary amends for the endeavor, he set up for poets such men as Wilkie and Blacklock ! In vain, in vain. " In spite of philosophy and fashion," says a better critic of that day (Bishop Hurd), "'Faerie Spenser' still ranks highest amongst the poets ; I mean with all those who are either of that house, or have any kindness for it. Earth-born critics may blaspheme ; But all the gods are ravish'd with delight Of his celestial song and music's wondrous might." Remarks on the Plan and Conduct of the Faerie Qtieene (inTodd's edition of Spenser, vol. ii., p. 183). ■ ' " In reading Spenser," says Warton, " if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported." (Id., p. 65.) "Spenser," observes Coleridge, * has the wit of the southern, with the deeper inwardness of the northern genius. Take espe- cial note of the marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Fa«rie Queene. SPENSER. 53 It is in the domains neither of history nor geography : it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles ; it is truly in land of Faerie, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep: and you neither wish nor have the power to inquire, where you are, or how you got there." Literary Remains, vol. i., p. 94. " In reading the Faerie Queene," says Hazlitt, " you see a little withered old man by a wood-side opening a wicket, a giant, and a dwarf lagging far behind, a damsel in a boat upon an en- chanted lake, wood-nymphs and satyrs : and all of a sudden you are transported into a lofty palace, with tapers burning, amidst knights and ladies, with dance and revelry, and song, * and mask and antique pageantry.'— -But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them ; they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think that it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the alle- gory, the allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all the whole is as plain as a pike-stafT. It might as well be pretended, that we cannot see Poussin's pictures for the alle- gory, as that the allegory prevents us from understanding Spenser." Lectures on the English Poets (Templeman's Edi tion, 12n>?., p. 67). 54 SPENSER. ARCHIMAGO'S HERMITAGE, AND THE HOUSE OF MORPHEUS. Archimago, a hypocritical magician, lures Una and the Red-cross Knight into his abode; and while they are asleep, sends to Morpheus, the god of sleep, for a false dream, to produce discord between them. A little lowly hermitage it was Down in a dale, hard by aforesfs side. Far from resort of people, that did pass In travel to and fro : a little wide There was a holy chapel edified. Wherein the hermit duly wont to say His holy things each morn and eventide; Thereby a crystal stream did gently play Which from a sacred fountain welled forth alwayA Arrived there the little house they fill,2 Nor look for entertainment where none was ,• Rest is their feast, and all things at their will. The noblest mind the best contentment has.* With fair discourse the evening so they pass. For that old man of pleasing words had store. And well could file his tongue as smooth as glass : He told of saints and popes, and evermore Jle strew'd an Ave Mary, after and before. The drooping night thus creepeth on them fast ; And the sad humor, loading their eye-lids. As messenger of Morpheus, on them cast Sweet slumbering dew ; the v/hich to sleep them bid:* Unto their lodgings then his guests he rids ; Where, when all drown'd in deadly sleep he finds, He to his study goes, and their amids' His magic books and arts of sundry kinds. He seeks out mighty charms to trouble sleepy minds. SPENSER. 5S Then choosing out few words most horrible {Let none them readlY thereof did verses frame, With which, and other spells like terrible. He bad awake black Pluto's grisly dame. And cursed Heaven ; and spake reproachful shame Of highest God, the Lord of life and light: A bold bad man, that dar'd to call by name Great Gorgon, 6 prince of darkness and dead night; At which Cocytus quakes, and Styx is put to flight. And forth he call'd out of deep darkness dread Legions of sprites, the which, like little flies,' Fluttering about his ever damned head. Await where to their service he applies. To aid his friends, or fray his enemies ; Of those he chose out two, the falsest two And fittest for to forge true-seeming lies ; The one of them he gave a message to, The other by himself staid other work to do He maketh speedy way through spersed air, And through the world of waters wide and deep,* To Morpheus' house doth hastily repair. — ^ Amid the bowels of the eart'n full steep. And low, where dawning day doth never peep. His dwelling is ; there Tcthys his wet bed Doth ever wash, and Cynthia still doth steep In silver dew his ever-drooping head, While sad night over him her mantle black doth spread Whose double gates he findeth locked fast; The one fair fram'd of burnish'd ivory. The other all with silver overcast ; And wakeful dogs before them yVir do lie. Watching to banish Care their enemy. Who oft is wont to trouble gentle Sleep, By them the sprite doih pass in quietly And unto Morpheus comes, whom drowned deep In drowsy fit he finds ; of nothing he takes keep. And more to lull him in his slumber soft, A trickling stream, from high rock tumbling down. And ever drizzling rain upon the loft, Mix'd toith a murmuring wind, much like the soun Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swoun: 58 SPENSER. JVo other noise, nor people's ttoublous cries, Jls still are wont f annoy the walled town. Might there be heard ; but careless Quiet lies. Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies.^" The messenger approaching to him spake But his waste words return'd to him in vain So sound he slept, that naught might him awake. Then rudely he him thrust, and push'd with pain. Whereat he 'gan to stretch : but he again Shook him so hard, that forced him to speak As one then in a dream, whose drier brain Is tost with troubled sights and fancies weak, He mumbled soft, but would not all his silence break The sprite then 'gan more boldly him to wake, And threaten'd unto him the dreaded name Of Hecate : whereat he 'gan to quake, And lifting up his lumpish head, with blame Half angry asked him, for what he came. " Hither," quoth he, " me Archimago sent : He that the stubborn sprites can wisely tame ; He bids thee to him send for his intent A fit false dream, that can delude the sleepei^'s sent."" The god obeyed ; and calling forth straightway A divers dream'^ out of his prison dark, Deliver'd it to him, and down did lay His heavy head, devoid of careful cark ; Wiiose senses all jvere straight benumb'd and stark. He, back returning by the ivory door, Remounted up as light as cheerful lark ; And on his little wings the dream he bore In haste unto his lord, where he him left afore. ' WelUd forth alway. The modulation of this charming stanza is exquisite. Let us divide it into its pauses, and see what we have been liear- A little lowly hermitage it was | Down in a dale, | hard by a forest's side, | Far from resort of people | that did pass In travel to and fro : a little wide I SPENSER. 57 There was a holy chapel edified, | Wherein the hermit duly wont to say His holy things | each morn and eventide ; Thereby a crystal stream did gently play | Which from a sacred fountain welled forth alway. Mark the variety of pauses, of the accentuation of the sylla- bles and of the intonation of the vowels ; all closing in that ex- quisite last line, as soft and continuous as the water it describes. The repetition of the words little and holy add to the sacred snugness of the abode. We are to fancy the little tenement on the skirts of a forest, that is to say, within, but not deeply within, the trees ; the chapel is near it, but not close to it, more embowered ; and the rivulet may be supposed to circuit both chapel and hermitage, running partly under the trees be- tween mossy and flowery banks, for hermits were great cullers of simples ; and though Archimago was a false hermit, we are to suppose him living in a true hermitage. It is one of those pictures which remain for ever in the memory ; and the suc- ceeding stanza is worthy of it. 2 Arrived there the little house they fiH. Not literally the house, but the apartment as a specimen of the house ; for we see by what follows that the hermitage must have contained at least four rooms; one in which the knight and the lady were introduced, two more for their bed-chambers, and a fourth for the magician's study. 3 JSi'or look for entertainment •■vhere none was. " Entertainment" is here used in the restricted sense of treat- ment as regards food and accommodation ; according to the old inscription over inn-doors — " Entertainment for man and horse." < The noblest mind the best contentment has. This is one of Spenser's many noble sentiments expressed in as noble single lines, as if made to be recorded in the copy-books 58 SPENSER. of full-grown memories. As, for example, one which he is fond of repeating : — No service loathsome to a gentle kind. Entire affection scorneth nicer handa. True love loathes disdainful nicety. A.nd that fine Alexandrine, — Weak body well is chang'd for mind's redoubled force. And another, which Milton has imitated in Comus — Virtue gives herself light in darkness for to wade. 5 «' Let none them read." — As if we could ! And yet while we smile at the impossibility, we delight in this solemn injunction of the Poet's, so child-like, and full of the imaginative sense of the truth of what he is saying. 6 A hold bad man that dared to call by name Great Gorgon. This is the ineffable personage, whom Milton, with a propriety equally classical and poetical, designates as The dreaded name Of Demogorgon. Par. Lost, Book ii., v. 905. Ancient believers apprehended such dreadful consequences from the mention of him, that his worst and most potent invokers are represented as fearful of it; nor am I aware that any poet, Greek or Latin, has done it, though learned commentators on Spenser imply otherwise. In the passages they allude to, in Lucan and Statius, there is no name uttered. The adjuration is always made by a periphrasis. Tiiis circumstance is noticed by Boccaccio, who has given by far the best, and indeed, I be- lieve, the only account of this very rare god, except what is abridged from his pages in a modern Italian mythology, and fur- nished by his own authorities, Lactaniius and Theodontus, the latter an author now lost. Ben Jonson calls him " Boccaccio's Demogorgon." The passage is in the firs: book of his Genea- SPENSER. 59 logia Deorum, a work of prodigious erudition for that age, and full of the gusto of a man of genius. According to Boccaccio, Demogorgon (Spirit Earthworker) was the great deity of the rustical Arcadians, and the creator of all things out of brute matter. He describes him as a pale and sordid-looking wretch, inhabiting the centre of the earth, all over moss and dirt, squal- idly wet, and emitting an earthy smell ; and he laughs at the credulity of the ancients in tninking to make a god of such a fel- low. He is very glad, however, to talk about him ; and doubt- less had a lurking respect for him, inasmuch as mud and dirt are among the elements of things material, and thcTpfore par- take of a certain mystery and divineness. '' Legions of sprites, the which like little flies. Flies are old embodiments of evil spirits ; — Anacreon forbids us to call them incarnations, in reminding us that insects are flesh- less and bloodless, avai/joaagxa. Beelzebub signifies the Lord of Flies. 8 7Vie world of waters wide and deep. How complete a sense of the ocean under one of its aspects ! Spenser had often been at sea, and his pictures of it, or in con- nexion with it, are frequent and fine accordingly, superior per- haps to those of any other English poet, Milton certainly, ex- cept in that one famous imaginative passage in which he de- scribes a fleet at a distance as seeming to " hang in the clouds." And Shakspeare throws himself wonderfully into a storm at sea, as if he had been in the thick of it ; though it is not known that he ever quitted the land. But nobody talks so much about the sea, or its inhabitants, or its voyagers, as Spenser. He was well acquainted with the Irish Channel. Coleridge observes, (ut sup.) that " one of Spenser's arts is that of alliteration, which he uses with great effect in doubling the impression of an image." The verse above noticed is a beautiful example, 8 To Morpheus' house doth hastily repair, &c Spenser's earth is not the Homeric earth, a circular flat, or disc, 60 SPENSER. studded with mountains, and encompassed with the " ocean stream." Neither is it in all cases a globe. We must take his cosmography as we find, and as he wants it ; that is to say, poetically, and according to the feeling required by the matter Ml hand. In the present instance, we are to suppose a precipi- 'ous country striking gloomily and far <^ownwards to a cav- «rnous sea-shore, in which the bed of Morpheus is placed, the i^nds of its curtains dipping and fluctuating in the water, which reaches it from underground. The door is towards a flat on the /and-side, with dogs lying " far before it ;" and the moonbeams reach it, though the sun never does. The passage is imitated from Ovid (Lib. ii., ver. 592), but with wonderful concentration, and superior home appeal to the imagination. Ovid will have no dogs, nor any sound at all but that of Lethe rippling over its pebbles. Spenser has dogs, but afar off", and a lulling sound overhead of wind and rain. These are the sounds that men de- light to hear in the intervals of their own sleep. 10 Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies The modulation of this most beautiful stanza (perfect, except for the word tumbling) is equal to that of the one describing the hermitage, and not the less so for being less varied both in pauses and in vowels, the subject demanding a greater monotony. A poetical reader need hardly be told, that he should humor such verses with a corresponding tone in the recital. Indeed it is difficult to read them without lowering or deepening the voice, as though we were going to bed ourselves, or thinking of the ru'ny night that lulled us. A long rest at the happy pause in the last line, and then a strong accent on the word ^ar, put us in jrDssession of all the remoteness of the scene ; — and it is im- proved, if we make a similar pause at h-eard : No other noise, or people's troublous cries. As still are wont to annoy the walled town. Might there be heard ; — but careless quiet lies, Wrapt in eternal silence, — far from enemies. Upton, one of ^rpenser's commentators, in reference to the SPENSER. 01 trickling stream, has quoted in his note on this passage some fine lines from Chaucer, in which, describing the '•' dark valley" of Sleep, the poet says there was nothing whatsoever in the place, save that, A few wells Came running fro the clyffes adowne, That made a deadly sleeping sowne. Smone (in the old spelling) is also Spenser's word. In the text of the present volume it is written soun', to show that it is the same as the word sound without the d ; — like the French and Italian, son, suono. " 'Tis hardly possible," says Upton, " for a more picturesque description to come from a poet or a painter than this whole magical scene." — See Todd's Variorum Spenser, vol. ii., p. 38. Meantime, the magician has been moulding a shape of air to represent the virtuous mistress of the knight ; and when the dream arrives, he sends them, both to deceive him, the one sitting by his head and abusing " the organs of his fancy" (as Milton says of the devil with Eve), and the other behaving in a manner very unlike her prototype. The delusion succeeds for a time. 11 Jl fit false dream th^at can delude the sleeper's sent. Scent, sensation, perception. Skinner says that sent, which we •falsely write scent, is derived a sentiendo. The word is thus frequently spelt by Spenser. — Todd. 31 "A diverse dream." — " A dream," says Upton, "that would occasion diversity or distraction ; or a frightful, hideous dream, from the Italian, sogno diverso." — Dante, Inferno, canto vi. Cerbero, fiera crudele e diversa. (Cerberus, the fierce beast, cruel and diverse.) Inferno, Orlando Innamorato, Lib. i., canto 4, stanza 66. Un grido orribile e diverse. (There rose a cry, horrible and diverse), &c. ie.f Todd't Edition, a$ above, p. 42. 62 SPENSER. The obvious sense, however, as in the case of Dante's Cerberus. I take to be monstrously varied, — inconsistent with itself. The dream is to make the knight's mistress contradict her natural character. THE CAVE OF MAMMON GARDEN OF PROSERPINE. S - Guyon, crossing a desert, finds Mammon sitting amidst his gold in