Spare Hours Part 21

"And since his death we throughly see All thy dark way; Thy shades but thin and narrow be, Which his first looks will quickly fray: Mists make but triumphs for the day."

THE WATER-FALL.

"With what deep murmurs, through time's silent stealth, Doth thy transparent, cool and watry wealth Here flowing fall, And chide and call, As if his liquid, loose Retinue staid Lingring, and were of this steep place afraid."

THE SHOWER.

"Waters above! Eternal springs!

The dew that silvers the Dove's wings!

O welcome, welcome to the sad!

Give dry dust drink, drink that makes glad.

Many fair Evenings, many flowers Sweetened with rich and gentle showers, Have I enjoyed, and down have run Many a fine and s.h.i.+ning Sun; But never, till this happy hour, Was blest with such an evening shower!"

What a curious felicity about the repet.i.tion of "drink" in the fourth line.

"Isaac's Marriage" is one of the best of the pieces, but is too long for insertion.

"THE RAINBOW"

has seldom been better sung:

"Still young and fine! but what is still in view We slight as old and soil'd, though fresh and new.

How bright wert thou, when Shem's admiring eye Thy burnisht, flaming Arch did first descry!

When Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot, The youthful world's gray fathers in one knot, Did with intentive looks watch every hour For thy new light, and trembled at each shower!

When thou dost s.h.i.+ne darkness looks white and fair, Forms turn to Musick, clouds to smiles and air: Rain gently spends his honey-drops, and pours Balm on the cleft earth, milk on gra.s.s and flowers.

Bright pledge of peace and Suns.h.i.+ne! the sure tye Of thy Lord's hand, the object[47] of His eye!

When I behold thee, though my light be dim, Distant and low, I can in thine see Him Who looks upon thee from His glorious throne, And mindes the Covenant 'twixt _All_ and _One_."

[47] Gen. ix. 16.

What a knot of the gray fathers!

"Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot!"

Our readers will see whence Campbell stole, and how he spoiled in the stealing (by omitting the word "youthful"), the well-known line in his "Rainbow"-

"How came the world's gray fathers forth To view the sacred sign."

Campbell did not disdain to take this, and no one will say much against him, though it looks ill, occurring in a poem on the rainbow; but we cannot so easily forgive him for saying that "Vaughan is one of the harshest even of the inferior order of conceit, having some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amidst his harsh pages, like wild flowers on a barren heath."

"Rules and Lessons" is his longest and one of his best poems; but we must send our readers to the book itself, where they will find much to make them grateful to "The Silurist" and to Mr. Pickering, who has already done such good service for the best of our elder literature.

We have said little about the deep G.o.dliness, the spiritual Christianity, with which every poem is penetrated and quickened. Those who can detect and relish this best, will not be the worse pleased at our saying little about it. Vaughan's religion is deep, lively, personal, tender, kindly, impa.s.sioned, temperate, central. His religion grows up, effloresces into the ideas and forms of poetry as naturally, as noiselessly, as beautifully as the life of the unseen seed finds its way up into the "bright consummate flower."

Of "IX. Poems by V.," we would say with the _Quarterly_, a?? ?? ????

????. They combine rare excellences; the concentration, the finish, the gravity of a man's thought, with the tenderness, the insight, the const.i.tutional sorrowfulness of a woman's-her purity, her pa.s.sionateness, her delicate and keen sense and expression. We confess we would rather have been the author of any one of the nine poems in this little volume, than of the somewhat tremendous, absurd, raw, loud, and fuliginous "Festus," with his many thousands of lines and his amazing reputation, his bad English, bad religion, bad philosophy, and very bad jokes-his "b.u.t.tered thunder" (this is his own phrase), and his poor devil of a Lucifer-we would, we repeat (having in this our _subita ac saeva indignatio_ run ourselves a little out of breath), as much rather keep company with "V." than with Mr. Bailey, as we would prefer going to sea for _pleasure_, in a trim little yacht, with its free motions, its quiet, its cleanliness, to taking a state berth in some Fire-King steamer of one thousand horse-power, with his mighty and troublous throb, his smoke, his exasperated steam, his clangor, and fire and fury, his oils and smells.

Had we time, and were this the fit place, we could, we think, make something out of this comparison of the boat with its sail and its rudder, and the unseen, wayward, serviceable winds playing about it, inspiring it, and swaying its course,-and the iron steamer, with its machinery, its coa.r.s.e energy, its noises and philosophy, its ungainly build and gait, its perilousness from within; and we think we could show how much of what Aristotle, Lord Jeffrey, Charles Lamb, or Edmund Burke would have called genuine poetry there is in the slender "V.," and how little in the big "Festus." We have made repeated attempts, but we cannot get through this poem. It beats us. We must want the _Festus_ sense. Some of our best friends, with whom we generally agree on such matters, are distressed for us, and repeat long pa.s.sages with great energy and apparent intelligence and satisfaction. Meanwhile, having read the six pages of public opinion at the end of the third and People's edition, we take it for granted that it is a great performance, that, to use one of the author's own words, there is a mighty "_somethingness_" about it-and we can entirely acquiesce in the quotation from _The Sunday Times_, that they "read it with astonishment, and closed it with bewilderment." It would appear from these opinions, which from their intensity, variety, and number (upwards of 50), are curious signs of the times, that Mr. Bailey has not so much improved on, as happily superseded the authors of Job and Ecclesiastes, of the Divine Comedy, of Paradise Lost and Regained, of Dr. Faustus, Hamlet, and Faust, of Don Juan, the Course of Time, St. Leon, the Jolly Beggars, and the Loves of the Angels.

He is more sublime and simple than Job-more royally witty and wise, more to the quick and the point than Solomon-more picturesque, more intense, more pathetic than Dante-more Miltonic (we have no other word) than Milton-more dreadful, more curiously blasphemous, more sonorous than Marlowe-more worldly-wise and clever, and intellectually _svelt_ than Goethe. More pa.s.sionate, more eloquent, more impudent than Byron-more orthodox, more edifying, more precocious than Pollok-more absorptive and inveterate than G.o.dwin; and more hearty and tender, more of love and manhood all compact than Burns-more gay than Moore-more ???????? than Shakspeare.

It may be so. We have made repeated and resolute incursions in various directions into his torrid zone, but have always come out greatly scorched and stunned and affronted. Never before did we come across such an amount of energetic and tremendous words, going "sounding on their dim and perilous way," like a cataract at midnight-not flowing like a stream, nor leaping like a clear waterfall, but always among breakers-roaring and tearing and tempesting with a sort of transcendental din; and then what power of energizing and speaking, and philosophizing and preaching, and laughing and joking and love-making, _in vacuo_! As far as we can judge, and as far as we can keep our senses in such a region, it seems to us not a poem at all, hardly even poetical-but rather the materials for a poem, made up of science, religion, and love, the (very raw) materials of a structure-as if the bricks and mortar, and lath and plaster, and furniture, and fire and fuel and meat and drink, and inhabitants male and female, of a house were all mixed "through other" in one enormous _imbroglio_. It is a sort of fire-mist, out of which poetry, like a star, might by curdling, condensation, crystallization, have been developed, after much purging, refining, and cooling, much time and pains. Mr. Bailey is, we believe, still a young man full of energy-full, we doubt not, of great and good aims; let him read over a pa.s.sage, we dare say he knows it well, in the second book of Milton on Church Government, he will there, among many other things worthy of his regard, find that "the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thoughts from within," which is the haunt and main region of his song, may be "painted out and described" with "_a solid and treatable smoothness_." If he paint out and describe after this manner, he may yet more than make up for this sin of his youth; and let him take our word for it and fling away nine tenths of his adjectives, and in the words of Old s.h.i.+rley-

"Compose his poem clean without 'em.

A row of stately SUBSTANTIVES would march Like Switzers, and bear all the fields before 'em; Carry their weight; show fair, like Deeds enroll'd; Not Writs, that are first made and after filed.

Thence first came up the t.i.tle of Blank Verse;- You know, sir, what Blank signifies;-when the sense, First framed, is tied with adjectives like points, Hang 't, 'tis pedantic vulgar poetry.

_Let children, when they versify, stick here And there, these piddling words for want of matter.

Poets write masculine numbers._"

Here are some of "V.'s" Roses-

THE GRAVE.

"I stood within the grave's o'ershadowing vault; Gloomy and damp it stretch'd its vast domain; Shades were its boundary; for my strain'd eye sought For other limit to its width in vain.

"Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray, And distant sound of living men and things; This, in th' encountering darkness pa.s.s'd away, That, took the tone in which a mourner sings.

"I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp, Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom; And feebly burning 'gainst the rolling damp, I bore it through the regions of the tomb.

"Around me stretch'd the slumbers of the dead, _Whereof the silence ached upon my ear;_ More and more noiseless did I make my tread, And yet its echoes chill'd my heart with fear.

"The former men of every age and place, From all their wand'rings gather'd, round me lay; The dust of wither'd Empires did I trace, And stood 'mid Generations pa.s.s'd away.

"I saw whole cities, that in flood or fire, Or famine or the plague, gave up their breath; Whole armies whom a day beheld expire, Swept by ten thousands to the arms of Death.

"I saw the old world's white and wave-swept bones A giant heap of creatures that had been; Far and confused the broken skeletons Lay strewn beyond mine eye's remotest ken.

"Death's various shrines-the Urn, the Stone, the Lamp- Were scatter'd round, confused, amid the dead; Symbols and Types were mould'ring in the damp, Their shapes were waning and their meaning fled.

"Unspoken tongues, perchance in praise or woe, Were character'd on tablets Time had swept; _And deep were half their letters hid below The thick small dust of those they once had wept._

"No hand was here to wipe the dust away, No reader of the writing traced beneath; No spirit sitting by its form of clay; No sigh nor sound from all the heaps of Death.

"_One place alone had ceased to hold its prey; A form had press'd it and was there no more; The garments of the Grave beside it lay, Where once they wrapp'd him on the rocky floor._

"_He only with returning footsteps broke Th' eternal calm wherewith the Tomb was bound;_ _Among the sleeping Dead alone He woke, And bless'd with outstretch'd hands the host around._

"_Well is it that such blessing hovers here, To soothe each sad survivor of the throng, Who haunt the portals of the solemn sphere, And pour their woe the loaded air along._

"_They to the verge have follow'd what they love, And on th' insuperable threshold stand; With cherish'd names its speechless calm reprove, And stretch in the abyss their ungrasp'd hand._

"But vainly there they seek their soul's relief, And of th' obdurate Grave its prey implore; Till Death himself shall medicine their grief, Closing their eyes by those they wept before.