Grief's sharpest thorn hard pressing on my breast, 440 I strive, with wakeful melody, to cheer And call the stars to listen: every star 445 And charm thro' distant ages: wrapt in Pris'ner of darkness! to the silent hours, I roll their raptures, but not catch their 510 450 Dark, tho' not blind, like thee, Mæonides! Or his, who made Mæonides our own.1 455 What, now, but immortality can please? 515 Which opens out of darkness into day! 460 How had it blest mankind, and rescu'd From NIGHT III. NARCISSA Then welcome, death! thy dread har- Age and disease; disease, tho' long my That plucks my nerves, those tender strings of life; Death, that absolves my birth; a curse without it! Rich death, that realizes all my cares, Toils, virtues, hopes; without it a chimera! Death, of all pain the period, not of joy; 520 Joy's source, and subject, still subsist unhurt; 490 Which, pluckt a little more, will toll the 525 One, in my soul; and one, in her great sire; Tho' the four winds were warring for my dust. Yes, and from winds, and waves, and central night, Tho' prison'd there, my dust too I reclaim, (To dust when drop proud nature's proudest spheres,) And live entire. Death is the crown of life: Were death denied, poor man would live in vain; Were death denied, to live would not be life; Were death denied, ev 'n fools would wish to die. 530 Death wounds to cure: we fall; we rise; we reign! Spring from our fetters; fasten in the skies; Where blooming Eden withers in our sight: 1 Genesis, 37:25; Numbers, 32:1-30. From NIGHT VI. THE INFIDEL RECLAIMED 430 Earth were a rude, uncolor'd chaos still. Objects are but th' occasion; ours th' exploit ; Ours is the cloth, the pencil, and the paint, Which nature's admirable picture draws; And beautifies creation's ample dome. 435 Like Milton's Eve, when gazing on the lake,1 Man makes the matchless image, man admires: Say then, shall man, his thoughts all sent abroad, Superior wonders in himself forgot, His admiration waste on objects round, 440 When heaven makes him the soul of all he sees Absurd; not rare! so great, so mean, is away; Then melts into the spring: soft spring, with breath Favonian, from warm chambers of the south, Recalls the first. All, to re-flourish, fades; From NIGHT IX. THE CONSOLATION As when a traveller, a long day past, In painful search of what he cannot find, At night's approach, content with the next cot, There ruminates awhile, his labor lost; 5 Then cheers his heart with what his fate affords, And chants his sonnet to deceive the time, Till the due season calls him to repose: Thus I, long-travell'd in the ways of men, And dancing, with the rest, the giddy maze, 10 Where disappointment smiles at hope's career; Warn'd by the languor of life's evening ray, At length have hous'd me in an humble shed; Where, future wand'ring banish'd from my thought, And waiting, patient, the sweet hour of rest, 15 I chase the moments with a serious song. Song soothes our pains; and age has pains to soothe. 1 gentle, like Favonius, the west wind 10 like the beggar who dreampt himself a prince. But why are originals so few? Not because the writer's harvest is over, the 5 great reapers of antiquity having left nothing to be gleaned after them; nor because the human mind's teeming time is past, or because it is incapable of putting forth unprecedented births; but because illustrious examples engross, prejudice, and intimidate. They engross our attention, and so prevent a due inspection of ourselves; they prejudice our judg ment in favor of their abilities, and so lessen the sense of our own; and they intimidate us with the splendor of their renown, and thus under diffidence bury our strength. Nature's impossibilities and those of diffidence lie wide asunder. But there are who write with vigor and success, to the world's delight and their own renown. These are the glorious fruits where genius prevails. The mind of a man of genius is a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysium, and fertile as Tempe; it enjoys a perpetual spring. Of that spring, originals are the fairest flowers; imitations are of quicker growth but fainter bloom. Imitations are of two kinds one of nature, one of authors. The 15 first we call originals, and confine the term imitation to the second. I shall not enter into the curious enquiry of what is or is not, strictly speaking, original, content with what all must allow, that some com- 20 positions are more so than others; and the more they are so, I say, the better. Originals are and ought to be great favorites, for they are great benefactors; they extend the republic of letters, and add a new province to its dominion. Imitators only give us a sort of duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before, increasing the mere drug of books, while all that makes them valuable, knowledge and genius, are at a stand. The pen of an original writer, like Armida's wand, out of a barren waste calls a blooming spring. Out of that blooming spring, an imitator is a transplanter of laurels, which sometimes die on removal, always languish in a foreign soil. And 25 80 35 40 45 We read imitation with somewhat of his languor who listens to a twice-told tale. Our spirits rouse at an original that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn what news from a foreign land. though it comes like an Indian prince, adorned with feathers only, having little of weight, yet of our attention it will rob the more solid, if not equally new. Thus every telescope is lifted at a new-discovered star; it makes a hundred astronomers in a moment, and denies equal notice to the sun. But if an original, by being as 50 excellent as new, adds admiration to surprise, then are we at the writer's mercy; on the strong wind of his imagination, we are snatched from Britain to Italy, from climate to climate, from pleasure to pleasure; we have no home, no thought, of our own till the magician drops his pen. And then falling down into ourselves, we awake to flat realities, lamenting the change, 55 Had Milton never wrote, Pope had been less to blame. But when in Milton's genius, Homer, as it were, personally rose to forbid Britons doing him that ignoble wrong, it is less pardonable, by that effeminate decoration, to put Achilles in petticoats a second time. How much nobler had it been, if his numbers had rolled on in full flow, through the various modulations of masculine melody, into those grandeurs of solemn sound which are indispensably demanded by the native dignity of heroic song! How much nobler, if he had resisted the temptation of that Gothic demon,2 which modern poesy tasting, became mortal! O how unlike the deathless, divine harmony of three great names (how justly joined!) of Milton, Greece, and Rome! His verse, but for this little speck of mortality in its extreme parts, as his hero had in his heel, like him, had been invulnerable and immortal.3 But unfortunately, that was undipt in Helicon, as this in Styx. Harmony as well as eloquence is essential to poesy; and a murder of his music is putting half Homer to death. Blank is a term of diminution; what we mean by blank verse is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaimed, reënthroned in the true language of the gods, who never thundered, nor suffered their Homer to thunder, in rhyme. . . . When such an ample area for renowned adventure in original attempts lies before 1 Pope's offence in translating Homer was doubled by the use of riming couplets. 2 rime According to popular legend, Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, was plunged by his mother into the waters of Styx, and his whole body made invulnerable, except the heel by which he was held. us, shall we be as mere leaden pipes, conveying to the present age small streams of excellence from its grand reservoir of antiquity, and those too, perhaps, mudded 5 in the pass? Originals shine like comets; have no peer in their path; are rivaled by none, and the gaze of all. All other compositions (if they shine at all) shine. in clusters, like the stars in the galaxy, 10 where, like bad neighbors, all suffer from all, each particular being diminished and almost lost in the throng. If thoughts of this nature prevailed, if ancients and moderns were no longer con15 sidered as masters and pupils, but as hardmatched rivals for renown, then moderns. by the longevity of their labors, might one day become ancients themselves. And old time, that best weigher of merits, to keep 20 his balance even, might have the golden weight of an Augustan age1 in both his scales; or rather our scale might descend, and that of antiquity (as a modern match for it strongly speaks) might kick the beam. ROBERT BLAIR (1699-1746) From THE GRAVE While some affect2 the sun, and some the shade, Some flee the city, some the hermitage, Their aims as various as the roads they take In journeying through life; the task be mine 5 To paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb; Th' appointed place of rendezvous, where all These travellers meet. Thy succors I implore, Eternal King! whose potent arm sustains The keys of hell and death.-The Grave, dread thing! 10 Men shiver when thou'rt nam'd: nature, appall'd, Shakes off her wonted firmness. - Ah, how dark Thy long-extended realms, and rueful wastes! 1A period when literature is at the height of purity and refinement, so called because the reign of Augustus Caesar (31 B. C.-14 A. D.) was the golden age of Latin literature. The term is commonly applied in English literature to the time of Queen Anne (1702-14) because the writers of that period modeled their work upon that of the ancients. choose: prefer |