"Les bras élevés et flottans dans les airs, elle s'avance avec une noble aisance et glisse légèrement vers la terre"; "She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat In loose numbers, wildly sweet," "Elle ne dédaigne pas d'écouter les mètres incorrects des jeunes sauvages qui chantent en refrains grossièrement cadencés "; "Yet shall he mount and keep his distant way Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, Beneath the good how far- but far above the great," - "Cependant il s'élevera, et il a marqué sa place à une grande distance des bornes d'un destin vulgaire, trop peut-être audessous des bons poètes, mais bien au-dessus des grands” ! I have spared you the trial of the Scandinavian odes; but hardly think you will desire more. Those from which I have quoted are the most French of Gray's odes. I only wish the translator had attempted them in verse. JOHN. At the worst, it is a pleasure to have one's old associations revived by the line or two here and there which you have quoted from the original poems. The annotators may convince us that Gray never used a thought, image, or word, of his own, in all his verses; we should like him still as a delicate worker in mosaic, and skip all the accusatory notes at the bottom of the page. So much originality is there always in grace! Gray is the Barrington of poets; but who shall get him convicted and transported? And what place is good enough to be a Botany Bay for him? Nihil surripuit quod non ornavit. PHILIP. Gray came when the British Muse was in a deliquium; and, while she was lying as if in articulo mortis, the critics rushed in and took possession of the house as sole legatees. They locked up every thing and put their seals upon it; nothing must be used without a written order from them; not a meal must be served up except it be a hash of yesterday's leavings. Things must take a new turn now; they had no notion of seeing their soon-tobe-sainted kinswoman's substance wasted as it had been, especially when one Shakspeare was majordomo; they would soon have order among the servants in the house, or somebody would smart for it; everything had been too long at sixes and sevens. But, in the midst of their predacious technicalities, in stalks the undoubted eldest son, not a very polished personage, and with hands hardened by coarse familiarity with Mossgiel ploughtails, but the true heir nevertheless. He slaps the powdered wigs of the technical gentlemen in their eyes, and they vanish, like Aubrey's ghost," with a melodious twang," vowing to take the law of him. It was a great mercy that he did not serve them as Ulysses did the waiting-maids. JOHN. To open a volume of Burns, after diluting the mind with the stale insipidities of the mob of rhymers who preceded him, reminds me of a rural adventure I had last summer. Skirting, in one of my walks, a rocky upland which hemmed in the low salt-marsh I had been plashing over, I came, at a sudden turning, upon a clump of wild redlilies, that burned fiercely in a kind of natural fireplace, shaped out for them by an inward bend of the rock. How they seemed to usurp to themselves all the blazing July sunshine to comfort their tropical hearts withal! How cheap and colorless looked the little bunch of blossomed weeds I had been gathering with so much care! How that one prodigal clump seemed to have drunk suddenly dry the whole overrunning beaker of summer to keep their fiery madness at its height ! PHILIP. The poets had been afraid that the light of the natural sun would put their fires out, and kept the shutters fast barred accordingly. Burns, with one lusty spurn of his foot, got rid of all the old clumsy machinery. Men began to fall in love with being natural, and to grow unaffected to the extreme point of affectation. But there is such a thing as being too natural; we must remember that it was with a twig of green mistletoe that Balldur, the Scandinavian Apollo, was slain. Delighted to see Burns whistling and singing after his plough, and wearing his clouted shoon into the Edinburgh drawing-rooms, some ingenious gentlemen, resolved to possess themselves of his secret, whistled and sang louder than he, wore thicker soles, and dragged a plough after them wherever they went. The old poets lived in too sincere an age, and were too truly independent, to think independence a virtue. To try to be independent is to acknowledge our slavery. It was not from ignorance of rules and unities that the old dramatists committed anachronisms, made islands of countries set in the heart of continents, and put English oaths into the mouths of Roman mobs; they broke through such critical cobwebs, for they were never spun to catch eagles in. The laws of poetry, as they are called, are only deductions drawn by certain mathematical minds from the works of established authors; let a new genius come, and these are incompetent to measure him. There is a most delicate, yet most unbending conscience, in the heart of every true poet, from whose approval or rejection of all preestablished laws he feels that there is no appeal. If he prefer the verdict of the world to that of this instinctive voice, it is all over with him; thenceforth he is but an echo, and his immortality as frail as that. What cared our old dramatists for Aristotle's poetics? They laid their scenes in the unchangeable heart of man, and sẽ like Donne's fancy, "Made one little room an everywhere." They scorned to bow the knee to any authors, They knew that he wi whose feet were of clay. strives to keep an act of fealty to slavery secre defies his own consciousness. Some strange prof; idence always makes it public and open as the prostration of King Ottocar. The homage that man does in his secretest soul is visible to al. time; there will be a cringe and stoop in his shoulders in spite of him. The galling mark of the fetter will never out; men read it in every line he writes, hear it in every word he speaks, and see it in every look he looks. Though he be no longer the slave of a coward deference to the opinion of the many, merely because they are the many, he is still the bondman of Memory, who can make him crouch at her bidding. You may think that the writers of that day had no daws to peck at them ; but hear the admired Sir John Harrington, who, in his "Apology for Poesy," says: "We live in such a time in which nothing can escape the envious tooth and backbiting tongue of an impure mouth; and wherein every corner hath a squint-eyed Zoilus that can look aright on no man's doings.” Even King James, whose authorship was most likely as secure from such rubs as any, prefixes this quotation to his "Rules for Scottish Verse." |