jured up by the description of Una riding “Upon a lowly ass more white than snow, But she much whiter," seen that only the first four lines are "And therein sat a lady fresh and fair, gone; is a hideous image; but it is evident Yet was there not with her else any one, That to her might move cause of merriment ; - To this inwardness, this ideal and idealizing quality of Spenser's soul,we must add its melodiousness. His best thoughts were born in music. The spirit of poetry is not only felt in his sentiments and made visible in his imagery, but it steals out in the recurring chimes of his complicated stanza. Accordingly Spenser, rather than Shakespeare and Milton, who, as Coleridge has remarked, had "deeper and more inwoven harmonies," is commonly adduced in support of the accredited dogma, that verse is as much an essential constituent of poetry as passion and imagination. But it seems to us that poetry is not necessarily opposed to prose, but to what is prosaic. doubtless sometimes finds in verse its happiest and most vital expression; but sometimes verse is a clog, and its management a mechanical exercise. Much of Spenser's, especially in the last three books of The Faery Queene, is mere ingenuity in rhythm and rhyme; and even in the first three books we continually light on passages which are essentially prosaic. Take, for example, the following stanza, descriptive of Immodest Mirth, and it will readily be It "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon that bank !” the poetry is in the single epithet "sleeps"; substitute "lies," and, though the rhythm would be as perfect, the line would be prosaic. The soul of poetry, indeed, is impassioned imagination, using words, but not necessarily verse, in its expression. Bacon wrote verse, and execrable verse it is; but was not Bacon a poet? Is not Milton a poet in his prose? Are not the prose translations of the Psalms of David poetic? The poetic faculty, which is vital, cannot be made to depend on a form which, even in undisputed poets, is so apt to be mechanical. Even should we admit that verse is the body of which poetry is the soul, cannot a soul manifest itself in a body which does not in all respects correspond to it? Cannot the essential spirit of poetry transfigure the rudest, unrhythmic expression, as the soul of Socrates glorified his homely face? It is not, of course, mere imagination which makes a poet; for Aristotle and. Newton were men of great imagination, scientifically directed to the discovery of new truth, not to the creation of new beauty. But imagination, directed by poetic sentiment and passion to poetic ends, does make the poet. And that these conditions are often fulfilled in prose, and a purely poetic impression produced, cannot be denied without resisting the evidence of ordinary experience. And though there is a delicious charm in Spenser's sweetest verse, the finest and rarest elements of his genius were independent of music. That celestial light which occasionally touches his page with an ineffable beauty, and which gave to him in his own time the name of the heavenly Spenser, is a more wonderful emanation from his mind than its subtlest melodies. We especially feel this in his ideal delineations of woman, in which he has only been exceeded by Shakespeare. He has been called the poet's poet; he should also be called the woman's poet, for the feminine element in his genius is its loftiest, deepest, most angelic element. The tenderness, the ethereal softness and grace, the moral purity, the sentiment untainted by sentimentality, which characterize his impersonations of feminine excellence, show, too, that the poet's brain had been fed from his heart, and that reverence for woman was the instinct of his sensibility before it was the insight of his imagination. The inwardness of Spenser's genius, the constant reference of his creative faculty to internal ideals, rather than objective facts, has given his poem a special character of remoteness. It is often objected to his female characters that they are not sufficiently individualized, and are too far removed from ordinary life to awaken human sympathy. It is to be hoped that the latter part of this charge is not true; for a person who can have no sympathy with Una, and Belphœbe, and Florimel, and Amoret, can have no sympathy with the woman in women. But it must be conceded, that though Shakespeare, like Spenser, draws his women from ideal regions of existence, he has succeeded better in naturalizing them on the planet. The creations of both are characterized by remoteness; but Shakespeare's are direct perceptions of objects ideally remote, and strike us both by their naturalness and their distance from common nature. Spenser really sees the objects as distant, and sees them through a visionary medium. The strong-winged Shakespeare penetrates to the region of spiritual facts which he embodies; Spenser surveys them wonderingly from below. Shakespeare goes up; Spenser looks up; and our poet therefore lacks the great dramatist's "familiar grasp of things divine.” It remains to be said, that though Spenser's outward life was vexed with discontent, and fretted by his resentment of the indifference with which he supposed his claims were treated by the great and powerful, his poetry breathes the very soul of contentment and cheer. This cheer has no connection with mirth, either in the form of wit or humor, but springs from his perception of an ideal of life, which has become a reality to his heart and imagination. The Faery Queene proves that the perception of the Beautiful can make the heart more abidingly glad than the perception of the ludicrous. In the soul of this seer and singer, who shaped the first vague dreams and unquiet aspirations of the youth into beautiful forms to solace the man, there is a serene depth of tender joy, ay, "a sober certainty of waking bliss "; and, as he has not locked up in his own breast this precious delight, but sent it in vital currents through the marvels and moralities of The Faery Queene to refresh the world, let no defects which criticism can discern hinder the reader from participating in the deep satisfaction of that happy spirit, and the visionary glories of that celestialized imagination. LAGOS BAR. PART I. HEY say, sir, it's a bad place THEY where a sailor won't go to, and there's many a sailor won't go to the West Coast of Africa; yet somehow, when he does take to it, he can't fancy no other line; it's like the moth and the candle many a time I've been singed for one, but back I used to go, and I dare say I should have been burnt up at last if it hadn't been for something as made me swear as I'd never go to the Coast but only once again. Yes, sir, I've made voyages for everything almost. I 've been to Gambia for ground-nuts and hides, and to Calabar, Brass, and Bonny for palmoil, and to Gaborn for red-wood and teeth, and to the Gold Coast for dust. There's only one trade as I never went into, black ivory, I mean. I can remember the day when there was no danger about it, and pretty well no shame; but I once saw a barracoon, and that seemed to turn me like against it; I was only a lad at the time, but it was long afore I got over that dreadful sight. I've had some queer days on the Coast, and no mistake. More than once I've had my hair off and blisters on my feet; and when Yellow Jack broke out in Bonny, I was pretty well the only white man left. Once I got wrecked in the Congo, and was kept prisoner by the blacks till the agent paid my ransom. They used to make me sit over a fire of damp leaves and red-peppers, and prod me with a spear to make me talk; and as soon as I opened my mouth, the thick biting smoke would pour down my throat fit to smother me outright. Then they'd all burst out laughing, and dance like mad. It made me think of the chafers I used to spin at school; only I did n't like being the chafer. It's a bad place, the Coast, especially for them as trades. In the oil rivers you have to go on trust. The Coast natives don't let the country natives come down to sell their oil themselves. So the captain gives his powder and tobacco and cotton goods to the blacks on the seaboard, and they take them up into the interior where the oil is, and buy it there. Sometimes these middlemen cheat him outright, spending his goods and bringing nothing back. But that don't often happen, otherwise trade would end. What they chiefly do is to dawdle and dawdle, for they hold no 'count o' time, till the captain staying there with his cargo on his mind is drove pretty well crazy with delay. Well, perhaps he takes to drink to fill up his time, and what with that and worry of mind the fever makes but easy work of him. Many and many's the shipmate as I've had die in these arms. And if e'er a one came out fond of reading, and thinking a bit superior to us unedicated men, he was sure to go, just as the best-bred dogs are always took off first by the distemper. Ah, sir, I often thinks of them times now that I am old. Often as I lays in my cot on a hot summer's night onable to sleep, I thinks and I thinks till I does n't know where I am; I hears the mosquitoes a humming round me, and the splashing of the water agen the sides of the room, and the cries of the wild beasts, what are only the people in the street. Then I begins to doze a bit; my head swims; dark things come round me; I see the stars shining above me, and the high black trees upon the shore; I smell the mud and the nasty river fog; and then I see Lagos Bar! and at that I wake up with a scream, and find myself in my little room at home, with my old missus a bending over me, a-wiping the sweat from my forehead and the tears from my eyes; and then we lay and talk of the times gone by, the times gone by, and mostly of Lagos Bar. I suppose that I've told that tale to my wife a thousand times; for often and often its memory comes back to me and leaves me no rest till I 've put it into words. It does n't come always like a horrid dream, but more like a spirit; and sometimes, sir, I think it may be Mary herself. See how the sky shines over there, and the waters seem to dance in gold! At a time like this, when all is calm and still, and shadows are moving in the air, it never fails to come. I feel it now, and then something swells within me, and big thoughts which frighten me lift up my brain; I don't understand these thoughts. I can't bring them out in speech. I can't raise them when I wish. No, sir, they are not my thoughts at all, they are too beautiful for a rude man like me; they come from her; it is Mary, dear Mary, sitting by my poor old worn-out heart, and whispering to me of the happy world to come. [The old sailor remained silent for several minutes, his eyes fixed upon the setting sun; there was a kind of light upon his face somewhat resembling that of the improvvisatore, but steadier and deeper. It gradually died away as the sun dipped below the sea; he glanced at me, looked a little confused, and asked me for a light. As soon as he had lighted his pipe, he began of his own accord to tell me his story thus: -] It was in the year '48 I shipped as mate aboard the Saucy Sal o' Liverpool. She was a fore-and-aft schooner, clipper rigged, and as neat a little craft as one would wish to see. As we dropped down the Mersey, with a sou'westerly breeze, I felt quite proud of being in her. But I thought it a pity she should sail for the Coast, where, what with sun and sea-worms, a vessel soon loses all her good looks, and her seaworthiness, too, sometimes. When we got near the mouth of the river, the skipper went below, and brought up two ladies. If Queen Victoria had turned out to be aboard, I couldn't have been more surprised. Here we were with the land dim in the distance, and only a red buoy tossing about to show that we weren't at sea. They would have to go back in the pilot-boat, with the wind and tide contrairy, and the night fast coming on. It was plain to see that they were mother and daughter, and that they'd been crying together down below. Their eyes showed red when they lifted up the drooping lids, and their pale cheeks were all seamed with where the tears had run. Neither of them looked. at our skipper after he had brought 'em up, and it was this that puzzled me. There he stood, a little ways off them, leaning agen the vessel's side; sometimes a-looking at them out of the corner of his eye, sometimes at the pilot, who was putting on his pea-coat. Presently he caught my eye, and I went up to him. "Let me know when the pilot-boat comes up alongside, Mr. Andrews,- quietly, you know." "It's plain enough," thinks I, "that they're going back; I suppose they're his mother and sister, and that's why they 've been crying. But how is it that they never give him a word, or so much as a look, and seem altogether so much wrapped up in themselves?" The In a few minutes I looked at the captain, and touched my cap. pilot went up to him and shook hands. The two ladies were sitting whispering to each other, and did not notice it. Captain Langlands, he looked about him in an awkward kind of way, walked a bit towards 'em, and then stopped short like a man who has something to do which he does n't like to begin. Just then they looked up. The pilot in his pea-coat, the sailors idling about, looking aft, and, more than all, our captain's face, showed 'em as the time was come. They got up without a word, and walked to the waist of the vessel, and then I began to understand. The old lady turned round and took her daughter in her arms, and squeezed her, oh, so hard! and when Langlands took hold of her to help her down, she looked at him full in the eyes, and said gently, "May God forgive you, James!" At this his face turned, and he trembled like a hare. Now she was in the boat, which slipped quickly astarn. "Haul aft the main sheets!" shouted the skipper in a hoarse voice. The girl ran aft and hung over the taffrail; she was within a foot of me then, for I was standing by the wheel. In a moment the boat came in sight; her mother was standing up, her bonnet had been blown off, and her gray hairs were flying in the wind; ⚫ she stretched her withered hands towards us, and she never said a word; but her hands, her quivering, clutching, speaking hands! it seemed as if her whole blood and life had streamed into the limbs as was nearest to her child. She reeled and I catched her in my arms, and there she lay for a minute with her head upon my breast. Her face was like marble stone, her eyes were shut, and her lips glued together fast. I had never seen such a delicate thing afore. It seemed like nothing to hold her; and her faceAh! what a beautiful face that was! I seemed lost-like a-looking at her, and never moved, and never turned my eyes away, but stood there all helpless, and her in a deathly swound. me take her, Mr. Andrews," said the captain from behind, and he took her up in his strong arms and carried her below. Then I heard him call out for the key of the medicine - chest, and afterwards he ran up just to "take his departure," that is to note down where we lost sight of the furthest point of land. "Let I was sore puzzled at this, for I'd seen her ring, and I knew it was dead agen reg'ler reg'lations for skippers to take their wives with them to sea. But the second mate soon came up to me and told me all about it. The captain had been engaged to her, it seems, a goodish while, but her mother had all along been dead agen the match: first, because Langlands had the character for being wild, and then he was a sailor, and she had been a sailor's wife herself. However, it happened that he had a stroke of luck: a good bit of money was left him, and the old lady, thinking that now he'd be sure to give up the sea (which likewise he promised to do), gev him the girl. But before three months were gone, Langlands was taken with that feeling which all sailors know. It ain't often a man can shake off the sea while he's young. She's a hard missus; but, even when we do get a chance to get away from her, we're bound to go back to her agen. We say the sailor's life is the roughest there is, and yet we wonder how people can live ashore; though it's lucky as some do, else how would vessels be built, and goods stored? Well, to make it short, Langlands felt sea-wards; and one fine morning his mother-in-law found out that he'd invested a good part of his money in the Saucy Sal, with the agreement with his partners that he was to sail her and have captain's wages for the same. To make matters worse, she found he was bound for the West Coast of Africa, and that her daughter was bent on going with him. All that she could say or do did n't shake 'em. Langlands was determined that he would go: his wife was determined that she would n't be left behind. People think the Coast is worse than it really is, and the old lady took on badly. Langlands assured her that his vessel should never lay inside a river bar, and that his wife should never go ashore. But no she had made up her mind that she was not to see her girl agen. That was why she'd come all the way to the mouth of the river, though she knew it, meant passing the night in rough waters in an open boat. Well, I felt in bad spirits over this. I was sorry for the girl; her face had wrought on me somehow, and I knew that the Coast was no place for a woman, let alone a weakly thing like her. Her husband would have to go ashore if she did n't, and if we were going to lay outside Lagos Bar, why he'd have to cross it pretty often, which is a thing few men like to do. There are plenty of bad bars along that Coast, and I suppose Lagos is the worst. It's so dangerous that companies won't insure goods across it, or would n't |
