Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakspeare's negligence (if negligence it was) had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner. ton startles one, considering the tendency of that great poet to subject his nature to art; yet I have dipped, while writing this, into "Paradise Lost," and at the second chance have lit on the following:

The assertion about Mil

The gray

Dawn, and the Pleiades before him danced,
Shedding sweet influence. Less bright the moon,
But opposite, in levelled west, was set

His mirrour, with full force borrowing her light.

The repetition of the e in the fourth line is an extreme case in point, being monotonous to express one-ness and evenness. Milton would have relished the supper which his young successor, like a page for him, has set forth. It was Mr. Keats who observed to me, that Milton, in various parts of his writings, has shown himself a bit of an epicure, and loves to talk of good eating. That he was choice in his food, and set store by a good cook, there is curious evi

dence to be found in the proving of his Will; by which it appears, that dining one day "in the kitchen," he complimented Mrs. Milton, by the appropriate title of "Betty," on the dish she had set before him; adding, as if he could not pay her too well for it, "Thou knowest I have left thee all." Henceforth let a kitchen be illustrious, should a gentleman choose to take a cutlet in it. But houses and their customs were different in those days.

CALAMITIES FOLLOWING CALAMITIES.

There was a listening fear in her regard,

As if calamity had but begun;

As if its vanward clouds of evil days

Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.

This is out of the fragment of “ Hyperion," which is truly like the fragment of a former world. There is a voice in it grander than any that has been uttered in these times, except in some of Mr. Wordsworth's sonnets; though the author, in a noble verse, has regretted its inadequacy to his subject.

Oh how frail

To that large utterance of the early Gods!

OAKS CHARMED BY THE STARS.

As when upon a tranced summer-night
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust

Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;
So came these words and went.

A GOD RECLINING IN SORROW.

And all along a dismal rack of clouds,
Upon the boundaries of day and night,

He stretch'd himself, in grief and radiance faint.

THE ELDER GODS DETHRONED.

Mnemosyne was straying in the world;
Far from her throne had Phoebe wandered;
And many else were free to roam abroad;
But for the main here found they covert drear,
Scarce images of life, one here, one there,
Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor,
When the chill rain begins at shut of eve,

In dull November, and their chancel vault,
The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.

[blocks in formation]

But I shall fill my book with quotations. A criticism, entering more into the nature of the author's genius, may be found by any one who wishes to see it, in the "Indicator." One or two passages, however, in the fine lyrical pieces in this volume, must be noticed. One is on a sculptured vase, representing a procession with music; upon which the author says, with an intensity of sentiment, at once original in the idea, and going home, like an old thought, to

the heart

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou can'st not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss;
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair."

Upon this beautiful passage, a sapient critic observed, that he should like to know how there could be music unheard. The reader will be more surprised to know who it was that asked what was the meaning, in the fol

lowing ode, of a beaker "full of the warm south." As Mr. Keats's poems are in few hands, compared to what they will be, I will not apologize for transcribing the whole of a beautiful poem, which in a very touching manner falls in with the poetical biography of the author, having been composed by him while he lay sleepless and suffering under the illness which he felt to be mortal.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In most melodious plot

Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green;
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
Oh for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

« ZurückWeiter »