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 REESE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
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 •Accessions No ^j=^^^ 
 
 1 
 
SECOND GALLERY 
 
 LITERARY PORTRAITS. 
 
SECOND GALLERY 
 
 LITERARY PORTRAITS. 
 
 GEORGE GILFILLAN, 
 
 DUNDEE. 
 
 ffUNlVBRsiTX 
 
 EDINBURGH: JAMES HOGG. 
 LONDON: R. GROOMBRIDGE & SONS. 
 
 MDCOCL. 
 
5- > 
 
 J. UOQG, I'lilNTKR, EDINBURGH. 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 The Author, in again appearing before the public, cannot do so 
 without acknowledging the kindness with which his former work was 
 received, both in this and in other lands. It has made him a vast 
 multitude of friends among those whose faces he never hopes to see 
 " in the flesh." He thanks also the Press for the very general indul- 
 gence with which it treated the first production of one then unknown* 
 In the succeeding sketches he has aimed at a tone somewhat more 
 subdued, and a style of criticism more discriminating than in the 
 former. This is not so much a gallery of "heroes" as of notable in- 
 dividuals whom he is sometimes obliged rather sternly to analyse. 
 There is " a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing" 
 — a " time to pull down, as well as a time to build up." Notwith- 
 standing what the cold, the stupid, or the fastidious may say of the 
 acknowledgment, he confesses to a much deeper satisfaction in the 
 practice of praise than of blame, although in both he is sincere. He 
 may add, that he has given " second sittings " in this series, more 
 lengthy than formerly, to several individuals who were somewhat 
 cursorily treated in his first " Gallery." 
 
 He might well have husbanded his enthusiasm, having committed 
 himself to one of the greatest of critical tasks, a review of the " Bards 
 of the Bible," — a subject, to use the language of Dr Croly, " where 
 you cannot think too profoundly, or eulogise too warmly." This task, 
 he may announce, is more than two-thirds achieved, and, if God spare 
 him, he hopes to issue the entire work in spring. 
 
 In answer to many inquiries, the author may also intimate his in- 
 tention of issuing soon a revised edition of his first " Gallery," the 
 other having been long out of print. 
 
 Dundee, 1st December, 1849. 
 

 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 John Milton ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 1 
 
 Mrs Elizabeth Barrett Br(|pi 
 
 
 Lord Byron_ ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 39 
 
 ing 
 
 ... 
 
 269 
 
 George Crahhe ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 61 
 
 MrsSheUgy 
 
 ... 
 
 283 
 
 John Foster ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 81 
 
 William Cohbett 
 
 ... 
 
 296 
 
 Thomas Hood ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 102 
 
 James Montgomery 
 
 ... 
 
 313 
 
 Thomas Macanlay... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 118 
 
 Sidney Smith 
 
 ... 
 
 324 
 
 Br George Croly ... 
 
 ... 
 
 ... 145 
 
 William Anderson 
 
 ... 
 
 330 
 
 Sir Edward Bolwcr Lytton 
 
 ... 160 
 
 Leigh Hunt 
 
 ... 
 
 344 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 
 
 ... 174 
 
 Thomas )Ioore 
 
 ... 
 
 353 
 
 George Dawson ... 
 
 
 ... 196 
 
 Isaac Taylor 
 
 ... 
 
 361 
 
 Alfred Tennyson .._^ 
 
 
 ... 214 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow... 
 
 372 
 
 Professor Mchol ... 
 
 
 ... 231 
 
 Philip James Bailey ... 
 
 *•• 
 
 387 
 
 Mrs Hemans ... 
 
 
 ... 256 
 
 John Sterling 
 
 .t* 
 
 395 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 jfORNjA. 
 
 SECOND GALLERY 
 
 LITERARY PORTRAITS. 
 
 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 Perhaps some may be astonished at the subject select- 
 ed — John Milton. Can anything new, that is true — or 
 true, that is new, be said on such a theme ? Have not the 
 ages been gazing upon this " mighty orb of song " as at the 
 sun ? and have not almost all its gifted admirers uttered 
 each his glowing panegyric, till now they seem to be ranged 
 like planetary bodies round his central blaze ? What more 
 can be said or sung ? Is it not impossible to add to, how- 
 ever easy to diminish, our sense of his greatness ? Is not 
 the ambition rash and presumptuous which seeks to ap- 
 proach the subject anew ? Surely the language of apology, 
 at least, is the fit preface to such a deed of daring. 
 
 No apology, however, do we intend to make. We hold 
 that every one who has been delighted, benefited, or ele- 
 vated by a great author, may claim the privilege of grati- 
 tude, to tell the world that, and how, he has. We hold, 
 too, that the proof of the true greatness of a man lies in 
 this, that every new encomiast, if in any measure qualified 
 for the task, is sure to find in him some new proof that the 
 praises of all time have not been wasted or exaggerated. 
 Who that reads or thinks at all has not frequent occasions 
 to pass by the cairn which a thankful word has reared to 
 Milton's memory ? and who can, at one time or other, re- 
 sist the impulse to cast on it another stone, however rougli 
 
 B 
 
2 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 and small that stone may be ? Such is all we at present 
 propose. 
 
 Every man is in some degree the mirror of his times. A 
 man's times stand over him, as the sun above the earth, 
 compelling an image from the dewdrop, as well as from the 
 great deep. The difference is, that while the small man is 
 a small, the great man is a broad and full, reflection of his 
 day. But the effect of the times may be seen in the baby's 
 bauble and cart, as well as in the style of the painter's pen- 
 cil and the poet's song. The converse is equally true. A 
 man's times are reflective of the man, as well as a man of 
 the times. Every man acts on, as well as is acted on by, 
 every other man. The cry of the child who falls in yonder 
 gutter as really affects the progress of society as the roar of 
 the French Revolution. There is a perpetual process going 
 on of action and reaction, between each on the one side, 
 and all on the other. The characteristic of the great man 
 is, that his reaction on his age is more than equal to its 
 action upon him. No man is wholly a creator, nor wholly 
 a creature of his age. The Milton or the Shakspere is 
 more the creator than he is the creature. 
 
 Some men pass through the atmosphere of their time as 
 meteors through the air, or comets through the heavens — ■ 
 leaving as little impression, and having with it a connec- 
 tion equally slight ; while others interpenetrate it so entirely 
 that the age becomes almost identified with them. Mil- 
 ton was intensely the man of his time ; and, although he 
 shot far before it, it was simply because he more fully felt 
 an^ understood what its tendencies really were ; he spread 
 his sails in its breath, as in a favourable gale, which pro- 
 pelled him far beyond the point where the impulse was at 
 first given. 
 
 A glance at the times of Milton would require to be a 
 profound and comprehensive one ; for the times that bore 
 such a product must have been extraordinaiy. One feature, 
 perhaps the chief, in them was this : Milton's age was an 
 
JOHN MILTON. 3 
 
 age attempting, with sincere, strong, thougli baffled endea- 
 vour, to be earnest, iioly, and heroic. The Church had, 
 in the previous age, been partially and nominally reformed ; 
 but it' had failed in accomplishing its own full deliverance, 
 or the full deliverance of the world. It had shaken off the 
 nightmare of popery, but had settled itself down into a 
 sleep, more composed, less disturbed, but as deadly. Is 
 the Reformation, thought the high hearts which then gave 
 forth their thunder throb« in England, to turn out a mere 
 sham ? Has all that bloody seed of martyrdom been sown 
 in vain ? Whether is worse, after all, the incubus of super- 
 stition, or the sleep of death ? We have got rid of the Pope, 
 indeed, but not of the world, or the devil, or the flesh ; we 
 must, therefore, repair our repairs — amend our amend- 
 ments — reform our Reformation — and try, in this way, to 
 get religion to come down, as a practical living power, into 
 the hearts and lives of Englishmen. We must squeeze 
 our old folios into new facts — we must see the dead blood 
 of the martyrs turned into living trees of righteousness — 
 we must have character as well as controversies — life, life 
 at all hazards, we must have, even though it be through 
 the destruction of ceremonies, the damage of surplices, the 
 dismissal of bishops — ay, or the death of kings. Such was 
 the spirit of that age. We speak of its real onward ten- 
 dency — the direction of the main stream. We stay not to 
 count the numerous little obstinate opposing eddies that 
 were taking chips and straws — Lauds and Clarendons — 
 backwards ; thus, and no otherwise, ran the master current 
 of the brain, the heart, and the hand of that magnificent era. 
 Are we not standing near the brink of another period, 
 in some points very similar to that of English Puritanism ? 
 Is not our age getting tired of names, words, pretensions ; 
 and anxious for tilings, deeds, realities ? It cares no- 
 thing now for such terms as Christendom — Reformed 
 Churches — Glorious Constitution of 1688. It wants a 
 Christendom where the character of Christ — like that of 
 
4 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 Hamlet — is not omitted by special desire : it wants re-re- 
 formed clmrches, and a glorious constitution, tliat will do 
 a little more to feed, clothe, and educate those who sit under 
 its shadow, and have long talked of, without tasting, its 
 blessed fruits. It wants in short, those big, beautiful words 
 — Liberty, Religion, Free Government, Church and State, 
 taken down from our flags, transparencies, and triumphal 
 arches, and introduced into our homes, hearths, and hearts. 
 And, although we have now no CromAvell and no Milton, 
 yet, thank God, we have thousands of gallant hearts, and 
 gifted spirits, and eloquent tongues, who have vowed loud 
 and deep, in all the languages of Europe, that falsehoods 
 and deceptions, of all sorts and sizes, of all ages, statures, 
 and complexions, shall come to a close. 
 
 To Milton's time we may apply the words of inspiration 
 — " The children are brought to the birth, but there is not 
 strength to bring forth." The great purpose of the age 
 was formed, begun, but left unfinished — nay, drowned in 
 slavery and blood. How mortifying to a spirit such as his ! 
 It was as if Moses had been taken up to Pisgah, but had 
 been struck dead before he saw the land of milk and honey. 
 So Milton had laboured, and climbed to the steep summit, 
 whence he expected a new world of liberty and truth to 
 expand before him, but found instead a wilder chaos and 
 a fouler hell than before. But dare we pity him, and need 
 we pity ourselves ? But for Milton's disappointment, and 
 disgust with the evil days and evil tongues on which he 
 latterly fell, he would not have retired into the solitude of 
 his own soul ; and had he not so retired, the world would 
 ^ have wanted its greatest poem — the " Paradise Lost." 
 That was the real fruit of the Puritanic contest — of all its 
 tears, and all its blood : and let those who are still enjoying 
 a result so rich, in gratitude declare " how that red rain 
 did make the harvest grow." No life of Milton, worthy of 
 the name, has hitherto been written. Fenton's sketch is 
 an elegant trifle. Johnson's is, in parts, a heavy invecti\ e 
 
JOHN MILTON. 5 
 
 — in parts, a noble panegyric ; but in nowise a satisfactory 
 life. Sir Egerton Brydges has written rather an ardent 
 apology for his memory than a life. St John's is a piece 
 of clever book-making. There is but, perhaps, one man 
 in Britain, since Coleridge died, fully qualified for supply- 
 ing this desideratum — we mean Thomas De Quincey. We 
 have repeatedly urged it on his attention, and are not with- 
 out hopes that he may yet address himself to a work which 
 shall task even his learning, genius, and eloquence. We 
 propose to refresh ourselves and others, by simply jotting 
 down a few particulars of the poet's career, without pro- 
 fessing to give, on this head, anything new. 
 
 John Milton was born in Bread Street, London — a street 
 lying in what is called, technically, the City, under the 
 shadow of St Paul's — on the 9th of December, 1608. His 
 father was a scrivener, and was distinguished for his clas- 
 sical attainments. John received his early education under 
 a clergyman of the name of Young ; was afterwards placed 
 at St Paul's School, whence he was removed, in his seven- 
 teenth year, to Christ's Church, Cambridge, where he 
 distinguished himself for the facility and beauty of his 
 Latin versification. We are not aware, although placed 
 at such a mathematical university, that he ever excelled 
 in geometry ; it is uncertain whether he ever crossed the 
 Pons asinorum, altliough it is certain that he was whipped 
 for a juvenile contumacy, and that he never expresses 
 any gratitude to his Abna Mater. Universities, in fact, 
 have often proved rather stepmothers, than mothers, to 
 men of genius, as the cases of Gribbon, Shelley, Coleridge, 
 PoUok, and many others, demonstrate. And why ? Be- 
 cause their own souls are to them universities ; and they 
 cannot fully attend to both, any more than they can be in 
 two places at the same time. He originally intended to 
 have entered the Church, l)ut early formed a dislike to 
 subscriptions and oaths, as requiring, what he terms, an 
 " acconmiodatins conscience " — a dislike which he retained 
 
6 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 to the last. He could not stoop his giant stature beneath 
 the low lintel of a test. He was too religious to be the 
 mere partizan of any sect. From college he carried nothing 
 with him but a whole conscience and the ordinary degree 
 of A.M., for he never afterwards received another; indeed 
 the idea of Dr Milton is ludicrous. As well almost speak 
 of Dr Isaiah, Professor IMelchisedec, or Ezekiel, Esq. 
 
 His father, meanwhile, had retired from business, to 
 Horton, Buckinghamshire, where the young Milton spent 
 five years in solitary study. Of these years, little com- 
 paratively is known ; but, to us, they seem among the 
 most interestincf of his life. Then the " dark foundations 
 of his mind were laid ;" then, stored up those profound 
 stores of learning, which were commensurate with his 
 genius, and on which that genius fed, free and unbounded, 
 as a fire feeds on a mighty forest. There, probably, much 
 time was spent in the contemplation of natural scenery, 
 and in the exercises of devotion ; and there he composed 
 those exquisite minor poems, which, alone, would have 
 made his name immortal — " L' Allegro," " II Penseroso," 
 " Comus," and " Lycidas." At the age of thirty, having 
 obtained leave from his father to travel, he visited Paris, 
 Florence, Rome, and Naples. His name had gone be- 
 fore him, and his progress was a triumph. Public dinners 
 and pieces of plate did not abound in those days ; but the 
 nobility of the country entertained him at their mansions, 
 and the literati wrote poems in his praise. 
 
 We may conceive with what delight he found his dreams 
 of the continent realised — with what kindling rapture his 
 eye met the Alps, gazed on the golden plains of Italy, or 
 perused the masterpieces of Italian art in the halls of 
 Florence, or the palaces of Rome. Milton in the Coliseum, 
 or standing at midnight upon Mount Palatine, with the 
 ruins of Rome dim-discovered around him — it were a sub- 
 ject for a painting or a poem. At this time a little inci- 
 dent of romance occurred. In his youth he was extremely 
 
JOHN MILTON. 
 
 handsome, so much so, that he was called the lady of 
 his college. When in Italy, he had lain down to repose 
 during the heat of the day in the fields. A young lady of 
 high rank was passing with her servant ; she was greatly 
 struck with the appearance of the slumberer, who seemed 
 to her eye as one of the angels whom he afterwards de- 
 scribed reposing in the vales of heaven. She wrote a few 
 extempore lines in his praise with a pencil, laid them 
 down at his side, and went on her way. When Milton 
 awoke, he found the lines lying, but the fair writer gone. 
 One account says that he spent some time in searching for 
 her, but in vain. Another (on which Bulwer has founded 
 a poem) relates that she, still stung by the recollection of 
 his beauty, followed him to England ; and was so morti- 
 fied at finding him by this time married that she died of 
 a broken heart. Milton had intended to extend his tour 
 to Sicily and Greece, but the state of affairs in England 
 drew him home. " I deemed it dishonourable," he said, 
 " to be lingering abroad, even for the improvement of my 
 mind, while my fellow-citizens were contending for their 
 liberty at home." There spoke the veritable man and 
 hero, John Milton, one who measured everything by its 
 relatiofi not to delight, but to duty ; and felt himself " ever 
 in his great Taskmaster's eye." The civil war had by 
 this time broken out in flames which were not to be slaked 
 for twenty years, and into which even a king's blood was 
 to fall like oil. Milton, though an admirable fencer, and 
 as brave as his own Michael, thought he might serve the 
 popular cause better by the pen than by the sword. He 
 calmly sat down, therefore, to write down royalty, prelacy, 
 and every species of arbitrary power. At the same time, 
 he opened a school for the education of the young. This 
 has actually formed a count of indictment against him. 
 Milton has been thought by some to have demeaned him- 
 self by teaching children the first elements of knowledge, 
 although it be, in truth, one of the noblest avocations — 
 
8 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 althougli the fact of the contempt in which it is held, ought 
 to be a count of indictment against an age foolish enough 
 to entertain it — although it be an avocation rendered illus- 
 trious by other names besides that of Milton, the names of 
 Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Buchanan, Parr, Johnson, and 
 Arnold — and although the day is coming when the titles 
 of captain, or colonel, or knight-at-arms — yea, and those 
 of king, kaiser, and emperor, will look mean and contemp- 
 tible compared to that of a village-schoolmaster who is 
 worthy of his trade. Louis Philippe, if we are not mis- 
 taken, once taught a school ; and it is, perhaps, a pity that 
 he ever did anything else. The ingenious Mr Punch 
 lately proposed an asylum for discrowned continental 
 monarchs ; we think a better idea would be, if they would 
 set up a joint-stock academy in the neighbourhood of 
 London — Louis Philippe teaching French and fortification 
 — the Emperor of Austria German and Italian — the King 
 of Prussia metaphysics — and the King of Bavaria, assisted 
 by Lola Montes, the elements of morality and religion; 
 Nicholas might, by and by, be appointed president of the 
 academy — Metternich would make a capital head usher; 
 and the whole might be called the Neiu Eoyal Institution. 
 Schoolmaster as he was, and afterwards Latin secretary 
 to Cromwell, Milton found time to do and to write much 
 in the course of the eighteen or twenty years which elapsed 
 between his return to England and the Eestoration. lie 
 found time for writing several treatises on divorce, for 
 publishing his celebrated tractate on education, and his 
 still more celebrated discourse on the liberty of unlicensed 
 printing, for collecting his minor poems in Latin and 
 English, and for defending, in various treatises, the exe- 
 cution of Charles L, and the Government of Cromwell, 
 besides commencing an English History, an English 
 Grammar, and a Latin Dictionary. Meanwhile, his first 
 wife, who had born him three daughters, died in child-bed. 
 Meanwhile, too, a disease of the eyes, contracted by intense 
 
JOHN MILTON. 9 
 
 study, began gradually to eclipse the most intellectual orbs 
 tlien glowing upon earth. Milton has uttered more than 
 one noble complaint over his completed blindness. We 
 could conceive him to have penned an expostulation to 
 the advancing shadow, equally sublime and equally vain, 
 for it was God's pleasure that this great spirit should, like 
 himself, dwell for a season in the thick darkness. And 
 scarcely had the last glimmer of light been extinguished, 
 than, as if the coming calamities had been stayed and 
 spell-bound hitherto by the calm look of the magician, in 
 one torrent they came upon his head; but although it was 
 a Niagara that fell, it fell like Niagara upon a rock. In 
 an evil hour, as it seemed at the time at least, for Britain, 
 for Milton, for the progress of the human race, the restored 
 Charles arrived. The consequences were disastrous to 
 Milton. His name was proscribed, his books burned, him- 
 self obliged to abscond, and it was what some would call 
 a miracle that this blinded Samson was not led forth to 
 give his enemies sport, at the place of common execution, 
 and that the most godlike head in the world did not roll off 
 from the bloody block. But, "man is immortal till his 
 work be done." We speak of accidents and possibilities ; 
 but, in reality, and looking at the matter upon the God- 
 side of it, Milton could no more have perished then than 
 he could a century before. His future works were as 
 certain^ and inevitable, and due at their day, as " summer 
 and winter, as seed-time and harvest." 
 
 Even aftei the heat of persecution had abated, and his 
 life was, by sis^^erance, secure — it was never more — the 
 prospects of Milton were aught but cheering. He was 
 poor, he was blind, he was solitary — his second wife dead ; 
 his daughters, it would appear, were not the most congenial 
 of companions ; his country was enslaved ; the hopes of 
 the Church and of the world seemed blasted ; — one might 
 have expected that disappointment, regret, and vexation 
 would have completed their work. Probably his enemies 
 
J JOHN MTLTON. 
 
 expected so too. Probably tliey said, " We'll neglect him, 
 and see if that does not break his heart — we'll bi*ing down 
 on his head the silence of a world, which was wont to ring 
 with his name." They did not know their man. They 
 knew not that here vf as one of the immortal com'sers, who 
 fed on no vulgar or earthly food. He " had meat to eat 
 that the world knew not of." 
 
 It was the greatest crisis in the history of the individual 
 man. Napoleon survived the loss of his empire ; and men 
 call him great, because he survived it. Sir Walter Scott 
 not only survived the loss of his fortune, but he struggled 
 manfully amid the sympathy of the civilised species to re- 
 pair it. But Milton, amidst the loss of friends, fortune, 
 fame, sight, safety, domestic comfort, long cherished hopes, 
 not only survived, but stood firm as a god above the ruins 
 of a world ; and not only stood firm, but built, alone and 
 unaided, to himself an everlasting monument. Whole 
 centuries of every day life seem condensed in those few 
 years in which he was constructing his work ; and is it too 
 daring a conception — that of the Great Spirit, watching 
 from on high its progress, and saying of it, as he did of his 
 own creation, when finished, "It is very good?" 
 
 But, indeed, his own work it was. For, strong as tliis 
 hero felt himself in his matured learning — in his genius, 
 so highly cultured, yet still so fresh and young, in his old 
 experience, he did not venture to put his hand to the task 
 till, with strong crying and tears, he had asked the inspi- 
 ration and guidance of a higher power. Nor were these 
 denied him. As Noah into the ark of old, the Lord 
 " shut " Milton in within the darkened tabernacle of his 
 own spirit, and that tabernacle being filled with light from 
 heaven, "Paradise Lost" arose, the joint work of human 
 genius and of divine illumination. 
 
 We have seen the first edition of this marvellous poem 
 — a small, humble duodecimo, in ten books, which was the 
 original number; but to us it seemed rich all over, 
 
JOHN MILTON. 11 
 
 as a summer's sunset, with glory. Every one lias heard, 
 probably, of the price, the goodly price, at which it was 
 prized and bought — five pounds, with a contingency of 
 fifteen more in case of sale. For two years before it seems 
 to have slumbered in manuscript, and very likely was the 
 while carried round the trade, seeking for one hardy enough 
 to be its literary accoucheur. But let us not imagine that 
 in our day it would have met with a different reception. 
 We can well fancy Adam Black, or John Murray, saying 
 to Milton, " Splendid poem, sir — great genius in it ; but 
 it wont sell, we fear — far too long — too many learned words 
 in it — odd episode that on sin and death. If you could 
 rub it down into a tragedy, and secure Macready for 
 Satan and Helen Faucit for Eve, it might take ; or, if you 
 could write a few songs on the third French Revolution, 
 or something in the style of ' Dombey and Son.' Good 
 morning Mr Milton." It appeared in 1667, but was a 
 long time of rising to its just place in public estimation. 
 The public preferred AYaller's insipid commonplaces, and 
 Dryden's ranting plays, to the divine blank verse of Mil- 
 ton. A\'aller himself spoke of it as a long, dull poem in 
 blank verse ; if its length could not be considered a merit, 
 it had no other. The case is not singular. Two of the 
 greatest poems in English of this century are, in our judg- 
 ment, Wordsworth's " Excursion" and Bailey's " Festus." 
 Both were for years treated with neglect, although we are 
 certain that both will survive the " Course of Time" and 
 the " Pickwick Papers." Between his masterpiece and 
 his death, little occurred except the publication of some 
 minor, but noble, productions, including " Paradise Re- 
 gained," " Samson Agonistes," " A system of Logic," " A 
 Treatise of True Religion," and a collection of his familiar 
 epistles in Latin. At last, in November 1 647, at the age 
 of sixty-six, under an exhaustion of the vmi^OVers, IMil- 
 ton expired, and that sjnrit, which was " only a little lower 
 than the angels," went avf ay to mingle with his starry kin- 
 
12 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 dred. It is with a certain severe satisfaction that we con- 
 template the death of a man like Milton. We feel that 
 tears and lamentations are here unbecoming, and would 
 mar the solemn sweetness of the scene. With serenity, 
 nay, joy, we witness this majestic man-child caught up to 
 God and his throne, soaring away from the many shadows 
 which surrounded him on earth, into that bright element 
 of eternity, in which he seemed already naturalised. iWho 
 seeks to weep, as he sees the river, rich with the spoils of 
 its long wandering, and become a broad mirror for the 
 heavens, at length sinking in the bosom of the deep?/ Were 
 we permitted to behold a star re-absorbed into its source, 
 melted down in God, would it not generate a deHght, 
 graver, indeed, but as real, as had we stood by its creation ; 
 and although there were no shouting, as on its natal morn, 
 might there not be silence — the silence of joyous wonder 
 among the sons of God? Thus died Milton, the prince of 
 modern men, accepting death as gently and silently as the 
 sky receives into its arms the waning moon. We are re- 
 minded of a description in " Hyperion," of the death of 
 Goethe: "His majestic eyes looked for the last time on 
 the light of a pleasant spring morning. Calm like a god, 
 the old man sat, and, with a smile, seemed to bid farewell 
 to the light of day, on which he had gazed for more than, 
 \,j9ighty years. Books were near him, and the pen which 
 had just dropped from his dying fingers. ' Open the 
 shutters, and let in more light,' were his last words. 
 Slowly stretching forth his hand, he seemed to write in 
 the air, and, as it sank down again and was motionless, the 
 spirit of the old man was gone." 
 
 The next portion of our task is, to speak of the consti- 
 tuents of Milton's mind. Many critics have spoken of him 
 as one who possessed only two or three faculties in a su- 
 preme and almost supernatural degree. They speak of his 
 imagination and intellect as if they were his all. Now, in 
 fact, Milton, as well as Goethe or Shakspere, seems to us 
 
JOHN MTLTO>J. 13 
 
 a many-sided man. lie was complete in all powers and 
 accomplishments, almost as his own Adam. He had. every 
 faculty, both of body and of mind, well developed and finely 
 harmonised. He had philosophic sagacity, and could, upon 
 occasion, reason as acutely as Thomas Aquinas. He had 
 broad grasp as well as subtle discrimination, and some of 
 his treatises nearly exhaust the topics of which they treat. 
 He had, in vast measure, understanding, the power which 
 comprehends ; memory, the power which retains ; imagi- 
 nation, the power which combines and reproduces ; will, 
 the power which moves ; and eloquence, the power which 
 communicates. Pie had, besides, the subordinate talents 
 of wit, sarcasm, invective, rhetoric, and logic; even the 
 characters of the sophist and the buffoon he could adopt at 
 pleasure. In what species of literature did he not shine ? 
 In the epic, in the drama, in the pastoral, in the ode, in 
 the elegy, in the masque, in the sonnet, in the epistle, in 
 the song, in the satire, in the argument, in the essay, in 
 the religious discussion, in the history, and in the etymo 
 logical treatise, he was equally a master. He added more 
 than the versatility of Voltaire to more than the sublimity 
 of Homer. While Voltaire skips from topic to topic with 
 the agility of an elated monkey, Milton's versatility reminds 
 you of the great scripture image, " The moujitains leaping 
 like rams, and the hills like lambs." And if it be asked, 
 what was it that gave him that august air of unity, which 
 has made many overlook his multiform nature? we answer, 
 it was the subordination of all his varied powers to a reli- 
 gious purpose, such as we find in no other uninspired man ; 
 and it was, again, that glare of awful grandeur Avhich shone 
 around him in all his motions, and made even his least 
 efforts, even his failures, and almost his blunders, great. 
 As St Peter's in Rome seems one, because it unites, con- 
 denses, and rounds in all the minutiae and details of its 
 fabric into a dome, so lofty and proud that it seems a copy 
 of the sky to which it points — to imitate as well as to adore 
 
] 4 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 — SO Milton gathers in all the spoils of time, and all the 
 faculties of man, and offers them as in one sacrifice, and 
 on one vast altar to heaven. 
 
 In attempting a climactic arrangement of his poetical 
 works, we may trace his whole life over again, as in a calm 
 under-current; not that, in point of chronological order, 
 his works form a complete history of the man, inasmuch 
 as " Paradise Lost," in which his genius culminated, pre- 
 ceded " Samson Agonistes" — still some of the epochs of his 
 life are distinctly marked by the advancing stages of his 
 writings. Lowest in the scale, then, are usually ranked 
 his Latin poems, which, with many beauties, are rather 
 imitations and echoes of the classical poets than the native 
 utterances of his mind ; it is in them, as in many modern 
 Latin and Greek poems, where the strange dress, the grace- 
 ful veil, the coy half-perceived meaning, as w^ith the 
 beauty of female coquettes, give a factitious interest to very 
 ordinary and commonplace thoughts. Half the merit of 
 the classics themselves springs from the difficulty we have 
 in understanding them, and if we wish effectually to dis- 
 guise nonsense, let us roll it up in Greek or Latin verse, 
 and it may lie there unsuspected for centuries together. 
 Milton could not write nonsense, to be sure, even in Latin, 
 but his usual power and majesty here well nigh forsake 
 him ; and in hexameters and pentameters he walks like a 
 Titan in irons, and in irons wliich are too narrow for his 
 limbs. We may rank next, as next lowest in popular esti- 
 mation, his sonnets. We are not sure, however, but that 
 popular estimation has underrated those productions. Dr 
 Johnson certainly did. When asked once his opinion of 
 Milton's sonnets, he said, " Milton could hew out a Colossus 
 from a rock, but he could not carve heads upon cherry- 
 stones." Literally, of course, he could not do either the 
 one or the other; but had he been a sculptor, we believe 
 that the slightest stroke of his chisel would, as well as his 
 most elaborate work, have evinced the master. Hogarth's 
 
JOHN MILTON. 15 
 
 genius appeared as really in those sketches which he used 
 to draw on his thumb-nail, as in his " Rake's Progress," or 
 " Marriage a la Mode." So Milton's sonnets are sonnets 
 which Milton, and none but Milton, could have written. 
 We see, in the compass of a crown-piece, his most peculiar 
 qualities: his gravity, his severe and simple grandeur, his 
 chaste and chary expression, his holy purpose, and the lofty 
 and solitary character of his soul. His mind might be 
 compared to a mountain river, which, having first torn its 
 way through high rocks, then polishes the pebbles over 
 which it rolls at their base. 
 
 " 'Tis the same wind unbinds the Alpine snow, 
 And comforts violets on their lowly beds." 
 
 We confess, however, that we are not much in love with 
 the structure of the sonnet. Its principle, which is to in- 
 clude into fourteen lines one thought or sentiment, seems 
 too artificial, and savours too much of the style of taste 
 from which have sprung anagrams and acrostics, and the 
 like ingenious follies. When a large thought is success- 
 fully squeezed into it, it reminds us irresistibly of a big 
 head which has worked and wriggled its way into a narrow 
 nightcap; and when a small thought is infused into it, it 
 becomes almost invisible in the dilution. 
 
 We come next to that delightful class of Milton's poems, 
 which we call pastorals, namely, " Arcades," " L'Allegro," 
 and " II Penseroso." They breathe the sweetest spirit of 
 English landscape. They are composed of every-day life, 
 but of every-day life shown under a certain soft ideal 
 strangeness, like a picture or a prospect, through wliich 
 you look by inverting your head. Your wonder is, howi 
 he can thus elevate the tame beauties of English scenery, 
 which are so tiny that they might be fitly tenanted by 
 Lilliputians, and through which men stalk like monstrous 
 giants. " L'Allegro" is an enumeration of agreeable 
 images and objects, pictured each by a single touch, and 
 set to a light easy measure, which might accompany the 
 
1 6 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 blithe song of the milkmaid and the sharp whetting of the 
 mower's scythe. " II Penseroso" is essentially the same 
 scenery, shown as if in soft and pensive moonlight. Both, 
 need we say, are exquisitely beautiful ; but we think the 
 object would have been better gained, could two poets, of 
 different temperaments, have, in the manner of Virgil's 
 shepherds, exchanged their strains of joy and pensiveness 
 in alternate verses, or if Milton had personated both in this 
 way. As the poems are, it is too obviously one mind de- 
 scribing its own peculiar sources of gratification in diffe- 
 rent moods. A modern poet might now, if he had genius 
 enough, effect what we mean, hj describing a contest be- 
 tween Horace and Dante, or Moore and Byron — the one 
 singing the pleasures of pleasure, the other the darker de- 
 lights which mingle even with misery, like strange, scat- 
 tered, bewildered flowers, growing on the haggard rocks 
 of hell! 
 
 An acute critic, in an Edinburgh periodical, has under- 
 taken the defence of " The Town" vei^sus " The Country" 
 as the source of poetry — has called us, among others, to 
 account for preferring the latter to the former — and has 
 ventured to assert that, cceteris paribus, a poet residing in 
 the town will describe rural scenery better than one living 
 constantly in the country, and adduces Milton in proof. 
 We admit, indeed, that there will be more freshness in the 
 feeling of the Cockney, let loose upon the country in spring, 
 be he poet or porter, just as there w^ill be more freshness 
 in the feeling of the countryman entering London for the 
 first time, and gaping with unbounded wonder at every 
 sign, and shop, and shopkeeper he sees. But we main- 
 tain, that those always write best on any subject who are 
 best acquainted with it, wdio know it in all its shades and 
 phases; and that such minute and personal knowledge can 
 only be obtained by long residence in, or by frequent visits 
 to, |;Jie country. We cannot conceive, >vitli this writer, that 
 the country is best seen in the town, any more than that 
 
JOHN MILTON. 17 
 
 the town is best seen in the country. Bennevis is not 
 visible from Edinburgh any more than Edinburgh from 
 Bennevis. We can never compare the beggarly bit of 
 blue sky seen from a corner of Goosedubs, Glasgow, with 
 the " dread magnificence of heaven" broadly bending over 
 Benlomond; nor the puddles running down the Wellgate 
 of Dundee, after a night of rain, with the red roaring tor- 
 rents from the hills, which meet at the sweet village of 
 Comrie. And even the rainbow, when you see it at the 
 end of a dirty street, loses caste, though not colour, and 
 can hardly pass for a relation to that arch of God, which 
 seems erected by the hands of angels, for the passage of 
 the Divine footsteps between the ridges which confine the 
 valley of Glencoe. And among our greatest descriptive 
 poets, how many have resided in the country, either all 
 their lives, or at least in their youth ! Think of Virgil and 
 Mantua, of Thomson and Ednam, of Burns and Mossgiel, 
 of Shelley and Marlowe, of Byron and Lochnagar, of Cole- 
 ridge and Nether Stowey, of Wilson and EUeray, of Scott 
 and Abbotsford, of Wordsworth and Rydal Mount, and of 
 Milton and Horton, where, assuredly, his finest rural pieces 
 were composed; and say with Cowper, the Cowper of 
 Olney, as we have said with him already — " God made the 
 country, and man made the town." 
 
 We pass to two pieces, which, though belonging to diffe- 
 rent styles of poetry, class themselves together by two cir- 
 cumstances — their similar length, and their surpassing ex- 
 cellence — the one being an elegy, and the other a hymn. 
 The elegy is " Lycidas" — the hymn is on the " Nativity of 
 Christ." To say that " Lycidas" is beautiful, is to say that 
 a star or rose is beautiful. Conceive the finest and purest 
 graces of the Pagan mythology culled and mingled, with 
 modest yet daring hand, among the roses of Sharon and 
 the lilies of the valley — conceive the waters of Castalia 
 sprinkled on the flowers which grow in the garden of God 
 — and you have a faint conception of what "Lycidas" 
 
 c 
 
18 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 means to do. Stern but short-sighted critics have objected 
 to this as an unhallowed junction. Milton knew better 
 than his judges. He felt that, in the millennial field of 
 poetry, the wolf and the lamb might lie down together; 
 that everything at least that was beautiful might enter here. 
 The Pagan mythology possessed this pass-word, and was 
 admitted; and here truth and beauty accordingly met, and 
 embraced each other. A museum, he felt, had not the 
 severe laws of a temple. There, whatever was curious, in- 
 teresting, or rare, might be admitted. Pan's pipe might 
 lean upon the foot of the true Cross — Apollo's flute and 
 David's lyre stand side by side — and the thunderbolts of 
 Jove rest peacefully near the fiery chariot of Elijah. 
 
 But what shall we say of his hymn? Out of the He- 
 brew Scriptures, it is (besides his own " Hymn of our 
 First Parents," and Coleridge's " Hymn to Mont Blanc") 
 the only one we remember worthy of the name. When 
 you compare the ordinary swarm of church hymns to this, 
 you begin to doubt whether the piety which prompted the 
 one, and the piety which prompted the other, were of the 
 same quality — whether they agreed in anything but the 
 name. We have here no trash, as profane as it is fulsome, 
 about "sweet Jesus! dear Jesus!" — ^no effusions of pious 
 sentimentalism, like certain herbs, too sweet to be whole- 
 some; but a strain which might have been sung by the 
 angelic host on the plains of Bethlehem, and rehearsed by 
 the shepherds in the ears of the Infant God. Like a be- 
 lated member of that deputation of sages who came from 
 the East to the manger at Bethlehem, does he spread out 
 his treasures, and they are richer than frankincense, sweeter 
 than myrrh, and more precious than gold. With awful 
 reverence and joy, he turns aside to behold this great sight 
 — the Eternal God dwelling in an infant ! Here the fault 
 (if fault it be) with which " Lycidas" has been charged 
 is sternly avoided. From the Stable he repulses the heathen 
 deities, feeling that the ground is holy. And yet, methinks, 
 
JOHN MILTON. 19 
 
 Apollo would have desired to stay — would have lingered 
 to the last moment — to hear execrations so sublime: — 
 
 " The oracles are dumb, 
 
 No voice or hideous hum 
 Runs thi'ough the arch'd roof in words, deceiving 
 
 Apollo from his shrine. 
 
 Can no more divine, 
 With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. 
 
 No nightly trance or breathed spell 
 Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. 
 
 He feels from Judah's land 
 
 The dreadful Infant's hand : 
 The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne. 
 
 Nor all the gods beside 
 
 Dare longer now abide, 
 Nor Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine : 
 
 Our Babe, to show his Godhead true, 
 Can, in his swaddling bands, control the damned crew." 
 
 " Samson Agonistes" is perhaps the least poetical, but 
 certainly by no means the least characteristic of his works. 
 In style and imagery, it is bare as a skeleton, but you see 
 it to be the skeleton of a Samson, It is the purest piece 
 of literary sculpture in any language. It stands before you, 
 like a statue, bloodless and blind. There can be no doubt 
 that Milton chose Samson as a subject, from the resem- 
 blance in their destinies. Samson, like himself, was made 
 blind in the cause of his country; and through him, as 
 through a new channel, does Milton pour out his old com- 
 plaint, but more here in anger than in sorrow. It had re- 
 quired — as the Nile has seven mouths — so many vents to 
 a grief so great and absolute as his. Consolation Samson 
 has little, save in the prospect of vengeance, for the pros- 
 pect of the resurrection-body had not fully dawned on his 
 soul. He is, in short, a hard and Hebrew shape of Milton. 
 Indeed, the poem might have been written by one who had 
 been born blind, from its sparing natural imagery. He 
 seems to spurn that bright and flowery world which has 
 been shut against him, and to create, within his darkened 
 
20 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 tabernacle, a scenery and a companionship of liis own, dis- 
 tinct as the scenery and the companionship of dreams. It 
 is, consequently, a naked and gloomy poem; and as its 
 hero triumphs in death, so it seems to fall upon and crush 
 its reader into prostrate wonder, rather than to create 
 warm and willing admiration. You believe it to be a 
 powerful poem, and you tremble as you believe. 
 
 What a contrast in " Comus," the growth and bloom 
 rather than the work of his youth! It bears the relation 
 to the other works of Milton, that " Romeo and Juliet" 
 does to the other works of Shakspere. We can conceive 
 it the effluence of his first love. He here lets his genius 
 run riot with him — " in the colours of the rainbow live, 
 and play i' the plighted clouds." It is rather a dream than 
 a drama — such a dream as might have been passing across 
 the fine features of the young Milton, as he lay asleep in 
 Italy. It is an exercise of fancy, more than of imagina- 
 tion. And if our readers wish us, ere going farther, to 
 distinguish fancy from imagination, we would do so briefly, 
 as follows: — They are not, we maintain, essentially diffe- 
 rent, but the same power under different aspects, attitudes, 
 and circumstances. Have they ever contemplated the fire 
 at even- tide? then must they have noticed how the flame, 
 after warming and completely impregnating the fuel, breaks 
 out above it into various fantastic freaks, motions, and 
 figures, as if, having performed its work, it were disposed 
 to play and luxuriate a little, if not for its own delectation, 
 for the amusement of the spectator. Behold in the even- 
 ing experiences of the fire the entire history of the mind 
 of genius. There is first the germ, or spark, or living 
 principle, called thought, or intuition, or inspiration. That 
 fiery particle, coming into contact with a theme, a story, 
 with the facts of history, or the abstractions of intellect, 
 begins to assimilate them to itself, to influence them with 
 its own heat, or to brighten them into its own light. That 
 is the imaginative, or shall we call it the transfiguring pro- 
 
JOHN MILTON. 21 
 
 cess, by which dead matter is changed into quick flame — 
 by which an old fabulous Scottish chronicle becomes the 
 tragedy of " Macbeth" — or by which some lascivious tale 
 in an Italian novel is changed into the world-famous, and 
 terribly- true story of " Othello, the Moor of Venice." 
 But after this is done, does the imaginative power always 
 stop here? No; in the mere exuberance of its strength — 
 in the wantonness of its triumph — it will often, like the 
 fire on the hearth, throw out gushes of superfluous but 
 beautiful flame ; in other words, images, " quips, cranks, 
 and wreathed smiles" — and thus and here we find that 
 glorious excrescence or luxury, which we call fancy. 
 Fancy is that crown of rays round the sun M^hich is seen in 
 the valley of Chamouni, but not on the summit of Mont 
 Blanc, where a stern and stripped stillness proclaims col- 
 lected and severe power. It is the dancing spray of the 
 waterfall, not the calm, uncrested, voluminous might of the 
 river; or it may be compared to those blossoms on the 
 apple-tree, which that tree pours forth in the exuberance 
 of its spring vigour, but which never produce fruit. Ima- 
 gination is the war-horse pawing for the battle — fancy, the 
 war-horse curvetting and neighing on the mead. From 
 such notions of imagination and fancy, there follow, we 
 think, the following conclusions: — First, that true fancy is 
 rather an excess of a power.than a power itself. Secondly, 
 that it is generally youthful, and ready to vanish away 
 with the energy and excitement of youth. Thirdly, that 
 it is incident to, though not inseparable from, the highest 
 genius — abounding in Milton, Shakspere, and Shelley — 
 not to be found, however, in Homer, Dante, or "Words- 
 worth. Fourthly, that the want of it generally arises from 
 severity of purpose, comparative coldness of temperament, 
 or the acquired prevalence of self-control; and, fifthly, that 
 a counterfeit of it exists, chiefly to be known by this, that 
 its images are not representative of great or true thoughts ; 
 tliat thev are not original; and that, therefore, their pro- 
 
22 JOHN MTLTON. 
 
 fusion rather augurs a mechanical power of memory than 
 a native excess of imagination. In " Comus" we find ima- 
 gination, and imagination with a high purpose; but more 
 than in any of Milton's works do we find this imagination 
 at play, reminding us of a man whose day's work is done, 
 and who spends his remaining strength in some light and 
 lawful game. Our highest praise of " Comus" is, that 
 when remembering and repeating its lines, we have some- 
 times paused to consider whether they were or were not 
 Shakspere's. They have all his mingled sweetness and 
 strength, his careless grace or grandeur, his beauty as un- 
 conscious of itself as we could conceive a fair woman in 
 some world where there was not even a river, or lalvc, or 
 drop of water to mirror her charms. In this poem, to 
 apply his own language, we have the " stripling cherub," 
 all bloom, and grace, and liveliness; in the "Paradise 
 Lost" we have the " giant angel," the emblem of power 
 and valour, and whose very beauty is grave and terrible 
 like his strength. 
 
 " Paradise Regained" stands next in the catalogue. 
 No poem has suffered more from comparison than this. 
 Milton's preference of it to " Paradise Lost" has generally 
 been quoted as an instance of the adage, that authors are 
 the worst judges of their own works; that, like some 
 mothers, they prefer their deformed and sickly offspring. 
 We should think, however, that even were the work much 
 worse than it is, Milton's liking for it might have been ac- 
 counted for on the principle that authors are often fondest 
 of their last production ; like the immortal Archbishop of 
 Granada, whom Gil Bias so mortally offended by hinting 
 that his sermons were beginning to smell of his apoplectic 
 fit, instead of, as a wise flatterer would have done, stretch- 
 ing out his praises till they threatened to crack against the 
 horizon. But, in truth, Milton was not so much mistaken 
 as people suppose. There are men who at all times, and 
 there are moods in which all men prefer the 23d Psalm to 
 
JOHN MILTON. 23 
 
 the 1 8tli, the first Epistle of John to the Apocalypse ; so 
 there are moods in which we like the " Paradise Regained," 
 with its profound quiet — with its Scriptural simplicity — 
 with its insulated passages of unsurpassed power and gran- 
 deur — with its total want of effort — and with its modest 
 avoidance of the mysterious agonies of the crucifixion, 
 which Milton felt was a subject too sublime even for his 
 lyre — to the more laboured and crowded splendours of the 
 " Paradise Lost." The one is a giant tossing mountains 
 to heaven in trial of strength, and with manifest toil; the 
 other is a giant gently putting his foot on a rock, and leav- 
 ing a mark inimitable, indelible, visible to all after time. 
 If the one remind you of the tumultuous glories and organ- 
 tempests in the Revelation, the other reminds you of that 
 silence which was in heaven for the space of half an hour. 
 The principal defect of this poem is the new and con- 
 temptible light in which it discovers the Devil. The Satan 
 of the " Paradise Lost" had many of the elements of the 
 heroic, and even when starting from his toad-shape, he re- 
 covers his grandeur instantly by his stature reaching the 
 sky. But the Satan of the " Paradise Regained" is a mean, 
 low, crawling worm — a little and limping fiend. He never 
 looks the Saviour full in the face, but keeps nibbling at his 
 heels. And although in this Milton has expressed the 
 actual history of intellect and courage, when separated from 
 virtue, happiness, and hope, and degraded into the servile 
 vassals of an infernal will, yet it is not so pleasing for us 
 to contemplate the completed as it is the begun ruin. 
 Around the former some rays of beauty continue to linger; 
 the latter is desolation turned into despicable use. The 
 Satan of the " Paradise Lost," the high, the haughty, the 
 consciously second only to the Most High, becomes, in the 
 " Paradise Regained," at best, a clever conjuror, whose 
 tricks are constantly bafiled, and might, as they are here 
 described, we think, be bafiled by an inferior wisdom to 
 that of incarnate Omnipotence. 
 
24 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 We pass to the greatest work of Milton's genius; and 
 here we feel as if, in using the word art or genius, we were 
 guilty of profanation ; for so long have we been accustomed 
 to think and speak of the " Paradise Lost," that it seems 
 to us to rank with the great works of nature themselves. 
 "We think of it as of Enoch or Elijah, when just rising out 
 of the sphere of earth's attraction, and catching a brighter 
 radiance than any that earth owns upon their ascending 
 forms. And there are works of genius which seem stand- 
 ing and stretching up towards the measure and the stature 
 of the works of God, and to which these seem to nod in re- 
 sponsive sympathy. For, as the poet says — 
 
 " Earth proudly wears the Parthenon 
 As the best gem upon her zone ; 
 And mornmg opes with haste her lids 
 To gaze upon the Pyramids ; 
 O'er England's abbeys bends the sky 
 As on its friends with kindred eye ; 
 For out of thought's interior sphere 
 These wonders rose to upper air, 
 And nature gladly gave them place, 
 Adopted them into her race, 
 And granted them an equal date 
 With Andes and with Ararat." 
 
 Such a work is that of " Paradise Lost," where earth 
 and heaven appear contending for the mastery — where, as 
 over the morning star, the night and the dawning seem 
 engaged in contest as to the possession of a thing so mag- 
 nificent, because in it, and in fine proportions, gloom and 
 glory — the gloom of hell and the glory of heaven — have 
 met and embraced each other. 
 
 " Paradise Lost" has sometimes been called the most 
 perfect of human productions — it ought to be called the 
 most ambitious. It is the Tower of Babel, the top of 
 which did not, indeed, reach unto heaven, but did certainly 
 surpass all the other structures then upon earth. It stands 
 alone, unequalled — Man's Mountain. It is a Samson throw, 
 
JOHN MILTON. 25 
 
 to reach whicli, in our degenerate days, no one need aspire. 
 Even to higher intelligences it may appear wonderful, and 
 strange as to us those likenesses of the stars and of man 
 which are to be found in flowers and animals. In the lan- 
 guage of Pope, they may 
 
 " Admire such wisdom in an earthly shape, 
 And show a Milton as men show an ape." 
 
 But in proportion, perhaps, as this work rises above the 
 works of man, and hangs aloft like a half-born celestial 
 product, it loses a portion of its interest with " human mor- 
 tals." It is not, on the one hand, a book like the Bible, 
 commanding all belief as well as all admiration ; it is not, 
 on the other hand, a popular and poetical manual, like the 
 " Pilgrim's Progress," commending itself to the hearts of 
 all who have hearts to feel its meaning; nor is it a work 
 valuable to a party, as having enshrined and transfigured 
 some party notion, which, like a gipsy in the wild, had 
 been wandering undistinguished, till a sudden slip of sun- 
 shine had bathed him in transient glory. It is the written- 
 out, illuminated creed of a solitary, independent, daring, 
 yet devout man, which all ages have agreed to admire in 
 Milton's poem. And hence the admiration awarded has 
 been rather general than particular — rather that of the 
 whole than of the parts — rather that of stupified and silent 
 amazement than of keen, warm, and anxious enthusiasm — 
 rather the feeling of those who look hopelessly upon a 
 cloud, or a star, or a glowing west, than of those who look 
 on some great, yet imitable perfection, in the arts of paint- 
 ing, statuary, or poesy. 
 
 We must be permitted a word about the hero of this 
 poem, about its picture of hell, about its pictures of para- 
 dise and heaven, about the representation of Adam and 
 Eve, about its subordinate machinery of angels and devils, 
 and about its place and comparative merits when put be- 
 side the other masterpieces of the human mind. Its hero 
 is undoubtedly, as Dryden long ago asserted, Satan, if the 
 
26 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 most interesting character in tlie book deserves the name 
 of hero — if, for example, Fergus Maclvor, and not Waver- 
 ley, is the hero of that tale — if of Ivanhoe not that insipid 
 personage himself, but Richard, the lion-hearted, be the 
 real hero. Wherever Satan appears, he becomes the 
 centre of the scene. Round him as he lies on the fierj 
 gulf, floating many a rood, the flames seem to do obeisance, 
 even as their red billows break upon his sides. When he 
 rises up into his proper stature, the surrounding hosts of 
 hell cling to him, like leaves to a tree. When he disturbs 
 the old deep of Chaos, its Anarchs, Orcus, Hades, Demo- 
 gorgon own a superior. When he stands on Niphates, and 
 bespeaks that sun which was once his footstool. Creation 
 becomes silent to listen to the dread soliloquy. When he 
 enters Eden, a shiver of horror shakes all its roses, and 
 makes the waters of the four rivers to tremble. Even in 
 heaven, the Mountain of the Congregation on the sides of 
 the north, where he sits, almost mates with the throne of 
 the Eternal. Mounted on the night as on a black charger, 
 carrying all hell in his breast, and the trail of heaven's 
 glory on his brow — his eyes eclipsed suns — his cheeks fur- 
 rowed not by the traces of tears but of thunder — his wings 
 two black forests — his heart a mount of millstone — armed 
 to the teeth — doubly armed by pride, fury, and despair — 
 lonely as death — hungry as the grave — entrenched in im- 
 mortality — defiant against every difficulty and danger, does 
 he pass before us, the most tremendous conception in the 
 compass of poetry — the sublimest creation of the mind of 
 man. There is but one other, which approaches it at a 
 distance — that of Lucifer, in Dante, who appears with three 
 faces : — 
 
 " Under each shot forth 
 Two mighty wings, enormous, as became 
 A bird so vast. Sails never such I saw 
 Outstretched on the wide sea. No plumes had they. 
 But were in texture like a bat, and these 
 He flapped i' the air, that from them issued still 
 
JOHN MILTON. 27 
 
 Three winds, wherewith Cocytus to its depth 
 Was frozen. At six eyes he wept ; the tears 
 Adown three chins, distill'd with bloody foam ! 
 At every mouth his teeth a sinner champ'd, 
 Bruised as with ponderous engine. 
 Judas is he that hath his head within, 
 And phes the feet without ; of the other two, 
 The one is Brutus : lo ! how he doth writhe, 
 And speaks not. The other Cassius, that appears 
 So large of Hmb." 
 
 Nothing can be more frightfully picturesque than this 
 description, but it is, perhaps, too grotesque to be sublime ; 
 and the thought of the Devil being a vast windmill, and 
 creating ice by the action of his wings, is ludicrous. One 
 is reminded of Don Quixote's famous mistake of the wind- 
 mills for giants. 
 
 Burns, in one of his letters, expresses a resolve to buy a 
 pocket-copy of Milton, and study that noble character, 
 Satan. We cannot join in this opinion entirely, although 
 very characteristic of the author of the " Address to the 
 De'il;" but we would advise our readers, if they wish to 
 see the loftiest genius passing into the highest art — if they 
 wish to see combined in one stupendous figure every species 
 of beauty, deformity, terror, darkness, light, calm, convul- 
 sion — the essence of man, devil, and angel, collected into 
 a something distinct from each, and absolutely unique — 
 all the elements in nature ransacked, and all the characters 
 in history analysed, in order to deck that brow with terror — 
 to fill that eye with fire — to clothe that neck with thunder — 
 to harden that heart into stone — ^to give to that port its 
 pride, and to that wing its swiftness — and that glory so 
 terrible to those nostrils, snorting with hatred to God, and 
 scorn to man — to buy, beg, or borrow a copy of Milton, 
 and study the character of Satan, not like Burns, for its 
 worth, but for the very grandeur of its worthlessness. An 
 Italian painter drew a representation of Lucifer so vivid 
 and glowing^ that it left the canvass, and came into the 
 
28 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 painter's soul ; in otlier words, haunted his mind by night 
 and day — became palpable to his eye, even when he was 
 absent from the picture — produced at last a frenzy, which 
 ended in death. We might wonder that a similar effect was 
 not produced upon Milton's mind, from the long presence 
 of his own terrific creation (to be thinking of the Devil for 
 six or ten years together looks like a Satanic possession), 
 were it not that we remember that his mind was more than 
 equal to confront its own workmanship. Satan was not a 
 spasm, but a calm, deliberate production of Milton's mind; 
 he was greater, therefore, than Satan, and was enabled, be- 
 sides, through his habitual religion, to subdue and master 
 his tone of feeling in reference to him. 
 
 Milton's Hell is the most fantastic piece of fancy, based 
 on the broadest superstructure of imagination. It presents 
 such a scene, as though Switzerland were set on fire. Such 
 an uneven colossal region, full of bogs, caves, hollow val- 
 leys, broad lakes, and towering Alps, has Milton's genius 
 cut out from chaos, and wrapped in devouring flames, 
 leaving, indeed, here and there a snowy mountain, or a 
 frozen lake, for a variety in the horror. This wilderness 
 of death is the platform which imagination raises and 
 peoples with the fallen thrones, dominations, princedoms, 
 virtues, and powers. On it the same power, in its playful, 
 fanciful mood, piles up the pandemonian palace, suggests 
 the trick by which the giant fiends reduce their stature, 
 shrinking into imps, and seats at the gates of hell the mon- 
 strous forms of sin and death. These have often been ob- 
 jected to, as if they were unsuccessful and abortional efforts 
 of imagination ; whereas they are the curvettings and mag- 
 nificent nonsense of that power after its proper work — the 
 creation of hell — has been performed. The great merit of 
 Milton's hell, especially as compared to Dante's, is the 
 union of a general sublime indistinctness, with a clear sta- 
 tuesque marking out from, or painting on, the gloom, of 
 individual forms. From a sublime idea of hell, he descends 
 
JOHN MILTON. 29 
 
 to severely- selected particular forms and features. Dante, 
 on the contrary (although literally descending), in reality 
 ascends, on endless lost spirits, as on steps, to that dreadful 
 whole which he calls the Inferno ; and in the strange, in- 
 verted climax lies much of the power of the poem. Milton 
 is the synthetist, Dante the analyst of hell — the one here 
 practises the transcendental, the other the ascendental 
 method. The one describes hell like an angel, passing 
 through it in haste, and with time only to behold its leading 
 outlines and figures — the other, like a pilgrim, compelled 
 with slow and painful steps to thread all its highways and 
 byeways of pain and punishment. Milton has pictured to 
 us the young flames, and unpeopled wastes of hell as well 
 as of earth. By Dante's time, it is overflowing with in- 
 habitants, and teeming with sad incidents. The hell of 
 each has its root as much in the heart as in the imagination 
 — it is to each a red reservoir, into which he pours his ire 
 and disappointment ; but as Milton's sadness was of a 
 milder type than Dante's, so his hell is less savage and 
 more sublime. He gazes reverently, and from a distance, 
 on the awful scene — whereas the fierce Florentine enters 
 into its heart, goes down on his knees to watch more nar- 
 rowly the degradations of the down- trodden damned — nay, 
 applies a microscope to their quivering flesh and fire- 
 shrivelled skin ; nor did Ugolino, over the skull, go to his 
 task with a more terrible and tingling gusto. 
 
 In Milton's Paradise, no less than in his Pandemonium, 
 we find the giant character of his genius. It is no snug 
 garden-plot, — it is no tame, though wide, landscape ; no 
 English hall, with garden and park — it is a large undulat- 
 ing country, as bold as beautiful ; and as in hell he made 
 Switzerland run fire, in Paradise he makes Britain flow 
 with milk and honey. As the one was a wilderness of 
 death, this is a wilderness of sweets. There are roses in 
 it, but there are also forests. There are soft vales, but 
 there are also mountains. There are rippling, dancing 
 
30 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 streams ; but there is also a large, grave river, running 
 south. There are birds singing on the branches ; but there 
 is also Behemoth reposing below. There is the lamb ; but 
 there is the lion too, even in his innocence awful. There 
 is a bower in the midst ; but there is a wall vast and high 
 around. There are our happy parents within ; but there 
 are hosts of angels without. There is perfect happiness ; 
 but there is also, walking in the garden, and running amid 
 the trees, a low whisper, prophesying of change, and cast- 
 ing a nameless gloom over all the region. 
 
 Such is the Paradise of Milton. It is not that of Mac- 
 aulay, whose description of it in " Byron," vivid as it is, 
 gives us the idea rather of a beautiful, holy, and guarded 
 spot, than of a great space, forming a broad nuptial crown 
 to the young world. 
 
 In his Heaven, Milton finds still fuller field for the serious 
 as well as sportive exercise of his unbounded imagination. 
 He gives us the conception of a region immeasurably large. 
 Many earths are massed together to form one continent 
 surrounding the throne of God — a continent, not of cloud, 
 or airy light, but of fixed solid land, with steadfast towering 
 mountains, and soft slumbrous vales ; to which Pollok, in 
 his copy of it, has added, finely, wastes and wildernesses 
 — retreats, even there, for solitary meditation ; and it is 
 a beautiful thought, that of there being hermits even in 
 heaven. Afar, like a cloud, rises, the centre and pinnacle 
 of the region, the throne of Jehovah, now bathed in in- 
 tolerable light, and now shaded by profound darkness. 
 Thus far imagination, sternly and soberly, accomplishes her 
 work. But then she describes the cave, whence, by turns, 
 light and darkness issue — the artillery employed by the 
 rebel angels — their punning speeches to each other — their 
 tearing up mountains — the opening and closing of their 
 wounds — she runs wild ; nor is her wildness beautiful ; it 
 is the play rather of false than of true fancy — rather a 
 recollection of the " Arabian Nights," than the carol and 
 
JOHN MILTON. 31 
 
 spring of a Titanic original faculty. The councils of the 
 Godhead are proverbial for feebleness and prolixity 
 Milton's hand trembles as it takes down the syllables from 
 the Divine lips ; and he returns, with eager haste, to the 
 consult, on the midnight Mount of the Congregation. But 
 the coming forth of the Messiah to destroy his foes is the 
 most sublime passage in the poem. It is a " torrent rap- 
 ture " of fire. Its words do not run, but rush, as if hurry- 
 ing from the chariot of the Son. They seem driven, even 
 as the fiends are driven, before him. Suggested partly by 
 Hesiod's "War of the Giants," and partly by Achilles 
 coming forth upon the Trojans, it is superior to both — ^in- 
 deed, to anything in the compass of poetry. As the Mes- 
 siah, in his progress, snatched up his fallen foes, and drove 
 them before him like leaves on the blast, Milton, in the 
 whirlwind of his inspiration, snatches up words, allusions, 
 images, from Homer, Hesiod, and the Book of God, and 
 bears them, in terror and in triumph, on. As soon call 
 a tornado the plagiarist of the boughs, rafters, houses, and 
 woods which it tears up, and carries forward in the fury 
 of its power, as Milton, in a mood like this. To quote any 
 part of it, were as wise as to preserve a little of the air of 
 a hurricane. We must read it at a sitting ; nay, we can- 
 not ; for, though sitting as we commence it, we will be 
 standing up — feet, hair, and soul — ere we are done. And 
 would, we cry aloud, that the same pen of living fire had 
 described for us that second and sublimer rising of the 
 Son of Man, when he shall be revealed from heaven with 
 his mighty angels ; which must now remain undescribed, 
 till every eye shall see it, and all kindreds of the earth shall 
 wail because of it. Even so. Amen. 
 
 The difficulty which met Milton in his portrait of our 
 first parents was, obviously, to make them perfect, without 
 being unnatural — to make them sinless, and yet distinguish 
 them from angels — to show them human, yet unfallen ; to 
 make, in short, a new thing on the earth, a man and a 
 
32 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 woman, beautiful beyond desire, simple beyond disguise, 
 graceful without consciousness, naked without shame, in- 
 nocent but not insipid, lofty but not proud : uniting, in 
 themselves, the qualities of childhood, manhood, and wo- 
 manhood, as if, in one season, spring, summer, and autumn 
 could be imagined. This was the task Milton had to accom- 
 plish ; and, at his bidding, there arose the loveliest creatures 
 of the human imagination, such as poet's eye never, before- 
 or since, imaged, in the rainbow or the moonshine, or saw in 
 the light of dreams ; than fairies more graceful, than the 
 cherubim and the seraphim themselves more beautiful. It 
 is the very image of God set in clay ; and, in proportion 
 to the baseness of the material, is the costliness and the mas- 
 terdom of the work. " Oh, man ! over all," we exclaim, 
 " be thou blessed for ever. And thou, his sister and spouse, 
 his softer self, man's moon and miniature, may every 
 flower be thy lover, every bird thy morning and evening 
 songstress ; may the day be but thy sunny mantle, and the 
 stars of night seem but gems in thy flowing hair ! " 
 
 Milton's Adam is, himself, as he was in his young man- 
 hood, ere yet the cares of life had ploughed his forehead 
 or quenched his serene eyes. Eve, again, is Milton's life- 
 long dream of what woman was, and yet may be — a dream, 
 from which he again and again awoke, weeping, because 
 the bright vision had passed away, and a cold reality alone 
 remained. You see, in her every lineament, that he was 
 one who, from the loftiness of his ideal, had been disap- 
 pointed in woman. In the words, frequently repeated as 
 a specimen of a hull — 
 
 " Adam, the goodliest man of men, since born 
 His sons — the fairest of her daughters Eve " — 
 
 he has unwittingly described the process by which his 
 mind created them. Adam is the goodliest of his sons, 
 because he is formed from them, by combining their bet- 
 ter qualities ; and thus are the children the parents of their 
 father. Eve is the fairest of lier daughters ; for it would 
 
JOHN MILTON. 83 
 
 require the collected essence of all their excellences to form 
 such another Eve. How beautiful the following words of 
 Thomas Aird ! " Lo ! now the general father and mother ! 
 What a broad, ripe, serene, and gracious composure of love 
 about them ! O ! could but that mother of us all be per- 
 mitted to make a pilgrimage over the earth, to see her 
 many sons and daughters ! How kindly would the kings 
 and queens of the world entreat her in their palaces ! How 
 affectionately would her outcast children of the wilderness 
 give her honey and milk, and wash her feet ! No thought 
 of the many woes she brought upon us ! No reproaches ! 
 Nothing but love ! So generous is the great soul of this 
 world!" 
 
 Let the world, however, take comfort. If Eve has not 
 accomplished such a pleasant peregrination (not so plea- 
 sant, by the way, for her to pass through such infernal 
 nurseries as the " high viced " cities and reeking battle- 
 fields of the earth), her picture and her lord's have visited 
 some millions of her children, who have shown their affec- 
 tion for her by admiring two of the most monstrous of that 
 progeny which French affectation and self-conceit, mistak- 
 ing the pressure of nightmare for the stoop of the god, have 
 ever produced. Approach, ye admirers of Milton's match- 
 less pair, and see them translated into French, and tell us 
 whether you think Monsieur Adam — ^himself a proof (were 
 he a portrait) that the species did not need two progeni- 
 tors, being as much a black as a white; or Madame Eve, 
 smacking more of the Palais Royal than of Paradise — the 
 first man and woman, or the last man and woman — the 
 first noble beginning, or the last meretricious and degraded 
 end of their species ? Such artificial beings, you feel, are 
 quite secure. They cannot fall ; they are fallen already, 
 and too far ever to arise. One is reminded of the words 
 of Shakspere : — " If Adam fell in his innocency, no 
 wonder though John Falstaff fall in his sin." We cease 
 to wonder at their fall, and humbly think that that of Sir 
 
 P 
 
34 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 John, in the gutter before the Boar's Head, Eastcheap, 
 might as soon have provoked the fantastic and forced 
 symptoms of nature's sympathy with which the " Expul- 
 sion" abounds. 
 
 Milton's management of his angels and devils proves as 
 much as anything in the poem the versatility of his genius, 
 the delicacy of his discrimination of character, that Shak- 
 sperean quality in him which has been so much over- 
 looked. To break up the general angel or devil element 
 into so many finely-individualised forms — to fit the lan- 
 guage to the character of each — to do this, in spite of the 
 dignified and somewhat unwieldy character of his style — 
 to avoid insipidity of excellence in his seraphs, and insipi- 
 dity of horror in his fiends — to keep them erect and un- 
 dwindled, whether in the presence of Satan on the one 
 side, or of Messiah on the other — was a problem requiring 
 skill as well as daring, dramatic as well as epic powers. 
 No mere mannerist could have succeeded in it. Yet, what 
 vivid portraits has he drawn of Michael, Raphael, (how 
 like, in their difference from each other, as well as in their 
 names, to the two great Italian painters ! ) Abdiel, Uriel, 
 Beelzebub, Moloch, Belial, Mammon — all perfectly dis- 
 tinct — all speaking a leviathan language, which, in all, 
 however, is modified by the character of each, and in none 
 sinks into mannerism. If Milton had not been the greatest 
 of epic poets, he might have been the second of dramatists. 
 Macaulay has admirably shown how^ or rather that Shak- 
 spere has preserved the distinction between similar cha- 
 racters, such as Hotspur and Falconbridge ; and conceded 
 even to Madame d'Arblay a portion of the same power, 
 in depicting several individuals, all young, all clever, all 
 clergymen, all in love, and yet all unlike each other. But 
 Milton has performed a much more difficult achievement. 
 He has represented five devils, all fallen, all eloquent, all 
 in torment, hate, and hell, and yet all so distinct that you 
 could with difi&culty interchange a line of the utterances 
 
JOHN MILTON. 35 
 
 of each. None but Satan, the incarnation of egotism, 
 could have said — 
 
 " What matter where, if I be still the same ? " 
 
 None but Moloch — the rash and desperate — could thus 
 abruptly have broken silence — 
 
 " My sentence is for open war." 
 
 None but Belial — the subtle, far-revolving fiend, could 
 have spoken of 
 
 " Those thoughts that wander through eternity." 
 
 None but Mammon, the down-looking demon, would 
 ever, alluding to the subterranean riches of hell, have 
 asked the question — 
 
 " What can heaven 
 
 Or, who but Beelzebub, the Metternich of Pandemo- 
 nium, would have commenced his oration with such grave, 
 terrific irony as — 
 
 " Thrones, and imperial powers, offspring of heaven. 
 Ethereal virtues, or these titles now 
 Must we renounce, and, changing style, be called 
 Princes of hell?" 
 
 Shakspere could have done a similar feat, by creating 
 five men, all husbands, all black, and all jealous of their 
 white wives ; or else, five human fiends, all white, all 
 Italian, and all eager to throw salt and gunpowder on the 
 rising flame of jealousy, and yet each distinct from our 
 present Othello and lago ; and this Shakspere might have 
 done, and done with ease, though he did it not. 
 
 Perhaps, to settle the place, and comparative merit, of 
 the " Paradise Lost," is an attempt which appears more 
 difficult than it really is. Milton himself may have, and 
 has a considerable number of competitors, and, in our judg- 
 ment, two superiors : Shakspere and Dante. His work 
 can be compared properly to but two others : the " Iliad " 
 
36 JOUN MILTON. 
 
 and the " Divina Comedia." These are the first three 
 among the productions of imaginative genius. Like Ben- 
 nevis, Benmacdhui, and Cairn toul, still contesting, it is 
 said, the sovereignty of Scotland's hills (now rising above, 
 and now sinking below each other, like three waves of the 
 sea), seem those surpassing masterpieces. We cannot, in 
 our limits, even enter into a field so wide as the discussion 
 of all the grounds on which we prefer the English poem. 
 It is not because it is of later date than both, and yet as 
 original as either. Time should never be taken into ac- 
 count when we speak of an immortal w^ork ; what matters 
 it whether it was written in the morning, in the evening, 
 or at noon ? It is not that it was written amid danger 
 and darkness — who knows how Homer fared as he rhap- 
 sodized the " Iliad?" or who knows not that Dante found 
 in his poem the escape of immeasurable sorrow ? It is not 
 (Warton notwithstanding) that it has borrowed so much 
 from Scripture : such glorious spangles we are ready to 
 shear off, and deduct, in our estimate of the poem's great- 
 ness. It is not that it bears unequivocal traces of a higher 
 path of genius, or that it is more highly or equally finished. 
 But it is that, begun with a nobler purpose, and all but 
 equal powers, it has called down, therefore, a mightier in- 
 spiration. Homer's spur to write or rhapsodize was that 
 which sends the war-horse upon the spears ; and the glory 
 of the " Iliad " is that of a garment rolled in blood. In 
 Dante, the sting is that of personal anguish, and the 
 acme of his poem is in the depth of hell — a hell which he 
 has replenished with his foes. Milton, in fact, as well as 
 in figure, wrote his work to vindicate the " ways of God 
 to men ;" and this purpose never relinquished — penetrat- 
 ing the whole poem straight as a ray passing through an 
 unrefracting medium, gathering around it every severe 
 magnificence and beauty, attracting from on high, from 
 the very altar of celestial incense, burning coals of inspi- 
 ration — becomes at last the poem's inaccessible and im- 
 mortal crown. 
 
JOHN MILTON. 37 
 
 Let us glance for a moment, ere we close, at what was 
 even finer than Milton's transcendent genius — his charac- 
 ter. His life was a great epic itself; Byron's life was a 
 tragi-coraedy; Sheridaiv's was a brilliant farce ; Shelley's 
 was a wild, mad, stormy tragedy, like one of Nat Lee's ; 
 Keat's life was a sad, brief, beautiful lyric; Moore's has 
 been a love-song ; Coleridge's was a " Midsummer Night's 
 Dream;" Schiller's was a harsh, difficult, wailing, but ulti- 
 mately victorious war ode, like one of Pindar's ; Goethe's 
 was a brilliant, somewhat melodramatic, but finished novel ; 
 Tasso's was an elegy ; but Milton, and Milton alone, acted 
 as well as wrote an epic complete in all its parts — high, 
 grave, sustained, majestic. His life was a self-denied life. 
 " Susceptible," says one, " as Burke, to the attractions of 
 historical prescription, of royalty, of chivalry, of an ancient 
 church, installed in cathedrals, and illustrated by old 
 martyrdoms — he threw himself, the flower of elegance, on 
 the side of the reeking conventicle — the side of humanity, 
 unlearned and unadorned." It was a life of labour and toil ; 
 labour and toil unrewarded, save by the secret sunshine of 
 his own breast, filled with the consciousness of divine ap- 
 probation, and hearing from afar the voice of universal 
 future fame. It was a life of purity. Even in his youth, 
 and in the countries of the south, he seems to have remained 
 entirely unsullied. Athough no anchorite, he was tempe- 
 rate to a degree, saying with John Elliot, " Wine is a 
 noble, generous liquor, and we should be thankful for it, 
 but water was made before it." Rapid in his meals, he 
 was never weary of the refreshment of music; his fa- 
 vourite instrument, as might have been expected, being 
 the organ. It was a life not perfect: there were spots on 
 his fame, acerbities of temper, harshness of language, pecu- 
 liarities of opinion, which proved him human, and grappled 
 him with difficulty to earth, like a vast balloon ere it 
 takes its bound upwards. It was in some measure a com- 
 plete life, not a tantalising fragment, nor separated seg- 
 
38 JOHN MILTON. 
 
 ment ; but it evolved as gradually and certainly as a piece 
 of solemn music. It was the life of a patriot, faithful 
 found among the faithless, faithful only he; and Abdiel, 
 that dreadless angel, is just Milton transferred to the skies. 
 It was, above all, the life of a Christian — yes, the life of 
 a Christian, although the Evangelical Alliance would now 
 shut its door in his face. It was a life of prayer, of faith, 
 of meek dependence, of perpetual communing with heaven. 
 Milton's piety was not a hollow form, not a traditional cant, 
 not a bigotry, not the remains merely of youthful impres- 
 sion, as of a scald receiyed in childhood; it was founded 
 on personal inquiry; it was at once sincere and enlightened, 
 strict and liberal ; it was practical, and pressed on his every 
 action and word, like the shadow^ of an unseen presence. 
 Hence was his soul cheered in sorrow and blindness, the 
 more as he lived in daily, hourly expectation of Him whom 
 he called " the shortly-expected King," who, rending the 
 heavens, was to, and shall yet, give him a house from 
 heaven, where they that look out at the windows are not 
 darkened. 
 
 Thus faintly have we pictured John Milton. Forgive 
 us, mighty shade! wherever thou art, mingling in what- 
 ever choir of adoring spirits, or engaged in whatever ex- 
 alted ministerial service above, or whether present now 
 among those " millions of spiritual creatures which walk 
 the earth;" forgive us the feebleness, for the sake of the 
 sincerity of the oiFering; and reject it not from that cloud 
 of incense which, with enlarging volume, and deepening 
 fragrance, is ascending to thy name, from every country 
 and in every language! 
 
 We say, with enlarging volume, for the fame of Milton 
 must not only continue, but extend. And perhaps the day 
 may come, when, after the sun of British empire is set, and 
 Great Britain has become as Babylon, and as Tyre, and 
 even after its language has ceased to be a living tongue, 
 the works of Milton and of Shakspere shall alone preserve 
 
LORD BYRON. 39 
 
 it — for these belong to no country, and to no age, but to 
 all countries, and all ages, to all ages of time — to all cycles 
 of eternity. Some books may survive the last burning, and 
 be preserved in celestial archives, as specimens and memo- 
 rials of extinguished worlds ; and if such there be, surely 
 one of them must be the " Paradise Lost." 
 
 In fine, we tell not our readers to imitate Milton's genius 
 — that may be too high a thing for them ; but to imitate 
 his life, the patriotism, the sincerity, the manliness, the 
 purity, and the piety of his character. When considering 
 him, and the other men of his day, we are tempted to say, 
 " There were giants in those days," while we have fallen 
 on the days of little men — nay, to cry out with her of old, 
 " I saw gods ascending from the earth, and one of them is 
 like to an old man whose face is covered with a mantle" In 
 these days of rapid and universal change, what need for 
 a spirit so pure, so wise, so sincere, and so gifted, as his! 
 and who will not join in the language of Wordsworth? — 
 
 " Milton ! thou shouldst be living at this hour. 
 England hath need of thee. She is a fen 
 Of stagnant waters. We are selfish men. 
 
 Thy soul was like a star; and dwelt apart; 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. 
 So didst thou travel on life's common way, 
 In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 
 The lowliest duties on itself did lay." 
 
 LORD BYRON. 
 
 An objection may meet us on the threshold of this, as 
 well as on that of our previous paper. It may seem that 
 to attempt a new estimate of a character, so thoroughly 
 scrutinised, and so widely appreciated as Byron's, is an 
 
40 LORD BYRON. 
 
 attempt alike hopeless and presumptuous. And if we did 
 approach it with the desire of finding or saying anything 
 absolutely new, we should feel the full force of the objec- 
 tion. But this is far from being our ambition. We have 
 decided to sketch Lord Byron's genius for the following 
 reasons. In the first place, a very minute is never a very 
 wide, a very particular is seldom a very just, scrutiny or 
 estimate. In the second place, the criticism of single 
 works pouring from the press, however acute and admi- 
 rable, is not equivalent to a review of those works taken 
 as a whole. A judgment pronounced upon the first, 
 second, or third storeys of a building, as they successively 
 arise, does not forestal the opinion of one who can over- 
 look the completed structure. Of Byron's several writings 
 we have every variety of separate critiques, good, bad, and 
 indifierent — of his genius, as animating his whole works, 
 we have little criticism, either indifi^erent, bad, or good. 
 In the third place, the tumult which all Byron's produc- 
 tions instantly excited, the space they cleared and burnt 
 out for themselves, falling like bombshells among the 
 crowd, the strong passions they awakened in their readers, 
 through that intense personality which marked them all, 
 rendered cool appreciation at the time impossible. They 
 came upon the public like powerful sermons on an excited 
 audience, sweeping criticism away before them, blotting 
 out principles of art from the memory of the severest 
 judges, whose hearts they stormed, whose passions they 
 inflamed — at the same time that they sometimes revolted 
 their tastes, and sometimes insulted their understandings. , 
 At night there was intoxication — in the morning calm re- 
 flection came. But, in the meantime, the poet was away, 
 his song had become immortal, and the threatened arrows 
 were quietly returned to the quiver again. In the next 
 place, Byron's life and story formed a running commentary 
 upon his works, which tended at once to excite and to be- 
 wilder his readers. His works have now illustrated edi- 
 
LORD BYRON. 4^1 
 
 tions : they did not require this while he lived. Then, his 
 romantic history, partially disclosed, and, therefore, more 
 effective in its interest — his early, hapless love — his first 
 unfortunate publication — his Grecian travels — his resist- 
 less rush into fame — his miserable marriage — his amours 
 — the glorious backgrounds which he chose for his tragic 
 attitudes, Switzerland and Italy — his personal beauty — 
 his very lameness — the odd and yet unludicrous compound 
 which he formed of Vulcan and Venus, of Apollo and 
 Satyr, of favourite and football of destiny — the mysterious 
 spectacle he presented of a most miserable man, composed 
 of all the materials which make others happy — the quaint 
 mixture of all opposites in his character, irreconcileable 
 till in the ruin of death — the cloak of mystery which he 
 now carefully threw over, and now pettishly withdrew 
 from, his own character — the impossibility of either 
 thoroughly hating, or loving, or laughing at him — the 
 unique and many-sided puzzle which he thus made, had 
 the effect of maddening the public, and of mystifying his 
 critics. Hal is charged by Falstaff with giving him medi- 
 cines to make him love him. Byron gave men medicines 
 to educe toward himself a mixture of all possible feelings 
 — anger, envy, admiration, love, pity, blame, horror, and, 
 above all, wonder as to what could be the conceivable 
 issue of a life so high and so low — so earthly and so un- 
 earthly — so spiritual and so sensual — so melancholy and 
 so mirthful, as he was notoriously leading. This was the 
 perpetual stimulus to the readers of his works — this the 
 face and figure, filling the margins of all his pages. This 
 now is over. That strange life is lived — that knot, too 
 hard and twisted for man, is away elsewhere to be solved 
 — that heart, so differently reported of by different opera- 
 tors, has undergone the stern analysis of death. His w^orks 
 have now emerged from that fluctuating and lurid shadow 
 of himself, which seemed to haunt and guard them all ; 
 and we can now judge of them, though not apart from his 
 
42 LORD BYRON. 
 
 personal history, yet undistracted by its perpetual protru- 
 sion. In the next place, Byron was the victim of two op- 
 posite currents in the public feeling — one unduly exalting, 
 and the other unduly depressing his name — both of which 
 have now so far subsided, that we can judge of him out of 
 the immediate or overbearing influence of either. And in 
 the last place, as intimated already, no attempt has been 
 made since his death, either to collect the scattered flowers 
 of former fugitive criticism, to be bound in one chaplet 
 round his pale and noble brow, or to wreathe for it fresh 
 and independent laurels. Moore's life is a long apology 
 for his memory, such as a partial friend might be expected 
 to make to a public then partial, and unwilling to be con- 
 victed of misplaced idolatry. Macaulay's critique is an 
 elegant fasciculus of all the fine things which, it had oc- 
 curred to him, might be said on such a theme — exhibits, 
 besides, the coarse current of Byron's life caught in crystal 
 and tinged with couleur de rose, like a foul winter stream 
 shining in ice and evening sunshine — and has many beau- 
 tiful remarks about his poems ; but neither abounds in 
 original views, nor gives, what its author could so admi- 
 rably have given, a collection of common opinions on his 
 entire genius and works, forming a full-length portrait, 
 ideally like, vigorously distinct, and set, in his own bril- 
 liant imagery and language, as in a frame of gold. 
 
 Our endeavour at present is to make some small contri- 
 bution towards a future likeness of Byron. And whatever 
 may be the effect of our remarks upon the public, and 
 however they may or may not fail in starting from slumber 
 the " coming man " who shall criticise Byron as Thomas 
 Carlyle has criticised Jean Paul, and Wilson, Burns : this, 
 at least, shall be ours — we shall have expressed our honest 
 convictions — uttered an idea that has long lain upon our 
 minds — and repaid, in part, a debt of gratitude which we 
 owe to Byron, as men owe to some terrible teacher, who 
 has at once roused and tortured their minds ; as men owe 
 
LORD BYRON. 4f8 
 
 to the thunderpeal which has awakened them, sweltering, 
 at the hour when it behoved them to start on some journey 
 of life and death. 
 
 We propose to methodise our paper under the following 
 outlines : We would, in the first place, inquire into Byron's 
 purpose. Secondly, into the relation in which he has 
 stood to his age, and the influence he has exerted over it. 
 Thirdly, into the leading features of his artistic execution. 
 Fourthly, speak of the materials on which his genius fed. 
 Fifthly, glance at the more characteristic of his works. 
 And, sixthly, try to settle his rank as a poet. We would 
 first ask at Byron the simple question, " What do you 
 mean ? " A simple question truly, but significant as well, 
 and not always very easy to answer. It is always, how- 
 ever, our duty to ask it ; and we have, in general, a right, 
 surely, to expect a reply. If a man come and make us a 
 speech, we are entitled to understand his language as well 
 as to see his object. If a man administer to us a reproof, 
 or salute us with a sudden blow, we have a double right 
 to turn round and ask, "Why?" Nay, if a man come 
 professing to utter an oracular deliverance, even in this 
 case we expect some glimmer of definite meaning and ob- 
 ject; and if glimmer there be none, we are justified in 
 concluding that neither has there been any oracle. 
 *' Oracles speak : " oracles should also shine. Now, in 
 Byron's case, we have a man coming forward to utter 
 speeches, to administer reproofs, to smite the public on 
 both cheeks — in the attitude of an accuser, impeaching 
 man — of a blasphemer, attacking God — of a prophet ex- 
 pressing himself, moreover, with the clearness and the 
 certainty of profound and dogmatic conviction ; and we 
 have thus more than a threefold right to inquire, what is 
 your drift, what would you have us to believe, or what to 
 do? Now here, precisely, we think, is Byron's fatal 
 defect. He has no such clear, distinct, and overpowering 
 object, as were worthy of securing, or as has secured, the 
 
44 LORD BYRON. 
 
 complete concentration of his splendid powers. His ob- 
 ject ! What is it ? Not to preach the duty of universal 
 despair ; or to inculcate the propriety of an " act of uni- 
 versal, simultaneous suicide;" else, why did he not, in the 
 first place, set the example himself, and from " Leucadia's 
 rock," or Etna's crater, precipitate himself, as a signal for 
 the species to follow? and why, in the second place, did 
 he profess such trust in schemes of political amelioration, 
 and die in the act of leading on a revolutionary war ? Not 
 to teach, nor yet to impugn any system of religion : for if 
 one thing be more certain about him than another, it is, 
 that he had no settled convictions on such subjects at all, 
 and was only beginning to entertain a desire toward form- 
 ing them when the " great teacher," death, arrived. Nor 
 was his purpose merely to display his own powers and 
 passions in imposing aspects. Much of this desire indeed 
 mingled with his ambition, but he was not altogether a 
 vain attitudinizer. There is sterling truth in his taste 
 and style of writing — there is sincerity in his anguish — 
 and his little pieces, particularly, are the mere wringings 
 of his heart. Who can doubt that his brow, the index of 
 tlie soul, darkened as he wrote that fearful curse, the 
 burden of which is " Forgiveness ?" The paper, on which 
 was written his farewell to Lady Byron, is still extant, 
 and it is all blurred and blotted with his tears. His poem, 
 entitled " The Dream," is as sincere as if it had been 
 penned in blood. And was he not sincere in sleep, when 
 he ground his teeth to pieces in gnashing them ? But his 
 sincerity was not of that profound, constant, and consist- 
 ent kind which deserves the stronger name of earnestness. 
 It did not answer to the best description in poetry of the 
 progress of such a spirit, which goes on — 
 
 " Like to the Pontick sea 
 Whose icy current and compulsive course 
 Ne'er feels retirinj^ ebb, but keeps right on 
 To the Propontick and the Hellespont." 
 
LORD BYRON. 45 
 
 It was a sincerity such as the falsest and the most hollow 
 of men must express when stung to the quick ; for hath 
 not he, as well as a Jew, " eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, 
 senses, affections, passions. Is he not fed with the same 
 food, and hurt by the same weapons ? If you prick him, 
 does he not bleed ? If you tickle him, does he not laugh ? 
 If you poison him, does he not die ? And if you wrong 
 him, does he not revenge?" Purpose, therefore, in its 
 genuine simplicity, and quiet deep sincerity, was awanting 
 in Byron's character. And this greatly accounts for the 
 wreck which he became j and for that misery — a misery 
 which was wonderful, passing the wo of man — which sat 
 down upon his spirit. Many accounts have been given of 
 his grief. Macaulay says that he was a spoiled child. 
 Shelley declares — 
 
 " The thought that he was greater than his kind 
 Had struck, methought, his eagle spirit bhnd 
 By gazing at its own exceeding light." 
 
 But the plain prose and English of it lay in his union of 
 intensity of power with the want of intensity of purpose. 
 He was neither one thing nor yet another. Life with him 
 was neither, on the one hand, an earnest single-eyed 
 effort, nor was it, could it be, a mere display. He believed, 
 and trembled as he believed, that it was a serious thing 
 to die, but did not sufficiently, if at all, feel that it was as 
 serious a thing to live. He would not struggle : he must 
 shine ; but could not be content with mere shining without 
 struggle. And hence, ill at ease with himself, aimless 
 and hopeless, " like the Cyclops — mad with blindness," he 
 turned to bay against society — man — and his Maker. And 
 hence, amid all that he has said to the world — and said so 
 eloquently, and said so mournfully, and said amid such 
 wide, and silent, and profound attention — -he has told it 
 little save his own sad story. 
 
 We pass, secondly, to speak of the relation in which he 
 stood to his age. The relations in which a man stands to 
 
 I UNIVERSITY 
 
46 LORD BYRON. 
 
 his age are perhaps threefold. He is either before it or 
 behind it, or exactly on a level with it. He is either its 
 forerunner ; or he is dragged as a captive at its chariot 
 wheels ; or he walks calmly, and step for step, along with 
 it. We behold in Milton the man before his age — not, 
 indeed, in point of moral grandeur or mental power ; for 
 remember, his age was the age of the Puritans, the age of 
 Hampden, Selden, Howe, Vane, and of Cromwell, who 
 was a greater writer than Milton himself — only, it was 
 with the sword that he wrote — and whose deeds were quite 
 commensurate with Milton's words. But in point of libe- 
 rality of sentiment and width of view, the poet strode 
 across entire centuries. We see in Southey the man be- 
 hind his age, who, indeed, in his youth, took a rash and 
 rapid race in advance, but returned like a beaten dog, 
 cowed, abashed, with downcast head, and tail between his 
 legs, and remained, for the rest of his life, aloof from the 
 great movements of society. We behold in Brougham one 
 whom once the age was proud to claim as its child and 
 champion, the express image of its bustling, restless, ver- 
 satile, and onward character, and of whom we still at 
 least say, with a sigh, he might have been the man of his 
 time. In which of these relations, is it asked, did Byron 
 stand to his age ? We are forced to answer, in none of 
 them. He was not before his age in anything — in opinion, 
 or in feeling. He was not, in all or many things, dis- 
 gracefully behind it ; nor did he move with equal and 
 measured step in its procession. He stood to the age in a 
 most awkward and uncertain attitude. He sneered at its 
 advancement, and he lent money, and ultimately lost his 
 life, in attempting to promote it. He spoke with uniform 
 contempt, and imitated with as uniform emulation, the 
 masterpieces of its literature. He abused Wordsworth in 
 public, and in private " rolled him as a sweet morsel under 
 his tongue ;" or rather, if you believe himself, took him as 
 a drastic dose, to purify his bilious and unhappy nature, 
 
LORD BYRON. 4i 
 
 by the strongest contrasted element that he could find. 
 He often reviled and ridiculed revealed religion, and yet 
 read the Bible more faithfully and statedly than most pro- 
 fessed Christians — made up in superstition what he wanted 
 in faith — had a devout horror at beginning his poems, 
 imdertaking his journeys, or paring his nails on a Friday 
 ' — and had he lived, would probably have ended, like his 
 own Giaour, as "brother Byron," with hair shirt, and 
 iron-spiked girdle, in some Achaian or Armenian convent. 
 He habitually trampled on, and seems sometimes to have 
 really despised, the opinion of the public ; and yet, in 
 some points, felt it so keenly, that, says Ebenezer Elliot, 
 " he would have gone into hysterics had a tailor laughed 
 at him." And although, when the " Edinburgh Review" 
 sought to crush him like a worm, he rose from the heel, 
 a fiery, flying dragon ; yet, to the assaults of the meaner 
 creatures of the press, he was pervious all over, and 
 allowed minnikin arrows, which were beneath his laughter, 
 to rouse his rage. Absurd and ludicrous the spectacle of 
 this Laocoon, covered from head to foot with the snakes 
 of supernal vengeance, yet bearing their burden with deep 
 agonised silence, starting and shrieking upon the applica- 
 tion of a thorn, which the hand of some puny passing 
 malignant had thrust into his foot. In one respect we 
 grant that Byron was the spirit of the age ; he was the 
 representative of its wants, its weakness, its discontents, 
 its dark unrest — but not of its aspirations, its widening 
 charity, and its hopeful tendencies. Plis voice was the 
 deep vague moan of the world's dream — his writhing 
 anguish, the last struggle of its troubled slumber : it has 
 since awaked, or is awakening, and, "as a dream when 
 one awakeneth," it is despising, too much despising, his 
 image. He stood high yet helpless between the old and 
 the new, and all the helpless and the hopeless rallied round 
 to constitute him first magistrate over a city in flames- 
 supreme ruler in a blasted and ruined realm. In one 
 
48 LORD BYRON. 
 
 thing he was certainly a prophet ; namely, a prophet of 
 evil. As misery was the secret sting of all his inspira- 
 tion, it became the invariable matter of all his song. In 
 some of his poems, you have misery contemplating ; in 
 others, misery weeping aloud ; in others, misery revolving 
 and reproducing the past ; in others, misery bursting the 
 confines of the world, as if in search of a wider hell than 
 that in which it felt itself environed ; in others, misery 
 stopping to turn and rend its real or imaginary foes ; and 
 in others, misery breaking out into hollow, hopeless, and 
 heartless laughter. (What a terrible thing is the laugh 
 of the unhappy ! It is the very " echo to the seat where 
 sorrow is throned.") But in all, you have misery ; and 
 whether he returns the old thunder in a voice of kindred 
 power and majesty, or sings an evening song with the 
 grasshopper at his feet — smiles the smile of bitterness, or 
 sheds the burning tears of anger — his voice still speaks of 
 desolation, mourning, and wo; the vocabulary of grief 
 labours under the demands of his melancholy genius ; and 
 never, never more, till this scene of tears and sighs be 
 ended, shall we meet with a more authentic and profound 
 expounder of the wretchedness of man. And as such we 
 deem him to have done good service ; first, because he 
 who approaches toward the bottom of human wo, proves 
 that it is not altogether bottomless, however deep ; because, 
 if human grief spring from human greatness, in unveiling 
 the grief he is illustrating the grandeur of man ; and, be- 
 cause, the writings of Byron have saved us, in this coun- 
 try, what in France has been so pernicious, " the litera- 
 ture of desperation : " they are a literature of desperation 
 in themselves ; they condense into one volume what in 
 France has been diluted throughout many, and, conse- 
 quently, our country has drained off at one gulp, and sur- 
 vived the experiment, the poison which our neighbours 
 have been sipping for years to their deadly harm. 
 
 Thus, on the whole, we regard Byron neither a.s, in any 
 
LORD BYRON. 49 
 
 sense, a creator, nor wholly, as a creature of his period ; 
 but rather as a stranger entangled in the passing stream 
 of its crowd, imperfectly adjusted to its customs, indiffer- 
 ently reconciled to its laws — among men, but not of them 
 — a man of the world, but not a man of the age ; and who 
 has rather fallen furiously through it — spurning its heights, 
 and seeking its depths — than left on it any deep or definite 
 impression. Some men are buried and straightway forgot- 
 ten — shovelled out of memory as soon as shovelled into the 
 tomb. Others are buried, and from their graves, through 
 the hands of ministering love, arise fragrant flowers and 
 verdant branches, and thus are they, in a subordinate sense, 
 " raised in glory." Others, again, lie down in the dust, 
 and though no blossom or bough marks the spot, and 
 though the timid shun it at evening-tides as a spot un- 
 blessed — yet, forgotten it can never be, for there lies the 
 record of a great guilty life extinct, and the crown of crime 
 sits silent and shadowy on the tombstone. This is Byron's 
 memorial in the age. But, as even on Nero's tomb " some 
 hand unseen strewed flowers," and as " nothing dies but 
 something mourns," let us lay a frail garland upon the 
 sepulchre of a ruin — itself a desolation — and say Requiescat 
 in pace, as we hurry on. 
 
 We come, thirdly, to speak of the leading features of his 
 artistic execution, and the materials which his genius used. 
 And here there are less mingled feelings to embarrass the 
 critical contemplator. Strong, direct intellect, descriptive 
 force, and personal passion, seem the main elements of 
 Byron's poetical power. He sees clearly, he selects judi- 
 ciously for effect from among the points he does see, and 
 he paints them with a pencil dipped in his own fiery heart. 
 He was the last representative of the English character of 
 mind. His lordly independence and high-spiritedness ; his 
 fearless avowal of his prejudices, however narrow, and 
 passions, however coarse; his constant clearness and de- 
 cision of tone and of style; his manly vigour and direct* 
 
50 LORD BYRON. 
 
 ness; his strong unreasoning instinctive sense; his abhor* 
 rence of mysticism; and his frequent caprices — all savoured 
 of that literature which had reared Drjden, Pope, and 
 Johnson ; and every peculiarity of the English school seems 
 to have clustered in and around him, as its last splen- 
 did specimen. Since then our higher literature is rapidly 
 charging with the German element. Byron was ultimus 
 Momanorum — the last, and with the exception of Shakspere 
 and Milton, the greatest purely English poet. < His manner 
 had generally all the clearness and precision of sculpture ; 
 indeed his clearness serves often to disguise his depth. As 
 obscurity sometimes gives an air of mystic profundity and 
 solemn grandeur to a shallow puddle, so, on the other 
 hand, we have seen pools among the mountains, whose 
 pellucidity made them appear less profound, and vrhere 
 every small shining pebble was a bright liar as to the real 
 depth of the waters ; such pools are many of the poems of 
 Byron, and, we may add, of Campbell. 
 \ His dominion over the darker passions is one of the most 
 obvious features in his poetic character. He rode in a 
 chariot drawn, if we may use the figure, by those horses 
 described in the visions of the Apocalypse, " whose heads 
 were as the heads of lions, and out of their mouths issued 
 fire, and smoke, and brimstone." And supreme is his 
 management of these dreadful coursers. Wherever human 
 nature is fiercest and gloomiest — wherever furnace-bosoms 
 have been heated seven times hotter by the unrestrained 
 passions and the torrid suns of the east and the south — 
 wherever man verges toward the animal or the fiend — 
 wherever misanthropes have folded their arms, and taken 
 their desperate attitude — ^wherever stands " the bed of sin, 
 delirious with its dread " — wherever devours " the worm 
 that cannot sleep, and never dies " — there the melancholy 
 muse of Byron finds its subjects and its haunts. Driven 
 from a home in his country, he seeks it in the mansions of 
 11.11 unhappy hearts, which open gloomily, and admit him 
 
LORD BYRON. 51 
 
 as tlieir tenant and their bard. To escape from one's self 
 is the desire of many, of all the miserable — the desire of 
 the drunkard, of the opium-eater, of those who plunge into 
 the vortex of any dissipation, who indulge in any delicious 
 dream ; but it is the singularity of Byron that he uniform- 
 ly escapes from himself into something worse and more 
 miserable. His being transmigrates into a darker and 
 more demoniac shape ; he becomes an epicure even in 
 wretchedness ; he has supped full of common miseries, and 
 must create and exhaust imaginary horrors. What in- 
 finite pity that a being so gifted, and that might have been 
 so noble, should find it necessary perpetually to evade him- 
 self! Hence his writings abound, more than those of 
 other authors, with lines and phrases which seem to con- 
 centrate all misery within them — with texts for misan- 
 thropes, and mottoes for the mouths of suicides. " Years 
 all winters" — what a gasp is that, and how characteristic of 
 him to whose soul summer had not come, and spring had 
 for ever faded! The charge of affectation has often been 
 brought against Byron's proclamations of personal wo. 
 But no one, we believe, was ever a constant and consistent - 
 hypocrite in such a matter as misery ; and we think we 
 can argue his sincerity, not merely from his personal de- 
 clarations, but from this fact, that all the characters into 
 whom he shoots his soul are unhappy. Tasso writhing in 
 the dungeon, Dante prophesying evil, not to speak of ima- 
 ginary heroes, such as Conrad, Alp, the Giaour, and Childe 
 Harold, betray in what direction ran the master current of 
 his soul; and as the bells and bubbles upon the dark pool 
 form an accurate measurement of its depth, so his mirth, 
 in its wildness, recklessness, and utter want of genuine 
 gaiety, tells saddest tales about the state of a heart which 
 neither on earth nor in heaven could find aught to cheer^ 
 or comfort it. 
 
 Besides those intensely English qualities which we have 
 enumerated as Byron's, there sprung out from him, and 
 
52 LORD BYRON. 
 
 mainly through the spur of wo, a higher power than ap- 
 peared originally to belong to his nature. After all his 
 faculties seemed fully developed, and after critics and 
 craniologists had formed their unalterable estimate of them, 
 he began, as if miraculously, to grow into a loftier shape 
 and stature, and compelled these same sapient judges, slowly 
 and reluctantly, to amend their conclusions. In his " Cain," 
 his " Heaven and Earth," and his " Vision of Judgment," 
 he exhibited the highest form of the faculty divine — the 
 true afflatus of the bard. He seemed to rise consciously 
 into his own region^ and, certainly, for gloomy grandeur, 
 and deep, desolate beauty, these productions surpass all the 
 writings of the period. Now, for the first time, men saw 
 the Pandemonian palace of his soul fully lit, and they 
 trembled at its ghastly splendour; yet, curious it is to re- 
 mark that those were precisely the poems which the public 
 at first received most coldly. Those who shouted applause 
 when he issued the two first elegant, but comparatively 
 shallow, cantos of " Childe Harold," which w^ere the re- 
 flection of other minds, shrank from him when he displayed 
 the terrible riches of his own. 
 
 We need only mention the materials on which Byron's 
 genius fed — and, indeed, we must substitute the singular 
 term — for his material was not manifold, but one: it was 
 the history of his own heart that his genius reproduced in 
 all his poems. \ His poetry was the mirror of himself. 
 
 In considering, fourthly, the more characteristic of his 
 works, we may divide them into his juvenile productions, 
 his popular, and his proscribed works. His juvenile pro- 
 ductions testified to nothing but the power of his passions, 
 tlie strength of his ambition, and the uncertainty of his 
 aims. His " Hours of Idleness" was, in one respect, the 
 happiest hit he ever made: it was fortunate enough to 
 attract abuse from the highest critical authority in the em- 
 pire, and thereby stirred his pride, and effectually roused 
 his faculties. It required a scorching heat to hatch a 
 
LORD BYRON. 53 
 
 Byron! In his " English Bards" he proved himself rather 
 a pugilist than a poet. It is the work of a man of Belial, 
 " flown with insolence and wme,"" His popular productions 
 were principally written when he was still a favourite son 
 of society, the idol of drawing-rooms, and the admired, as 
 well as observed, of all observers. " Childe Harold" is a 
 transcription of the serious SLud publishable partof his jour- 
 nal, as he travelled in Greece, Spain, and Italy. " The 
 Giaour" is a powerful half-length picture of himself. " The 
 Bride of Abydos" is a tender and somewhat maudlin 
 memory of Greece, " The Corsair" was the work of one 
 fierce fortnight, and seems to have brought one period of 
 his life, as Avell as of his popularity, to a glittering point. 
 In all this class of his poems we see him rather revolving 
 the memory of past, than encountering the reality of 
 present, misery. You have pensive sentiment rather than 
 quick and fresh anguish. But his war with society was 
 now about to begin in right earnest ; and in prophetic an- 
 ticipation of this, he wrote his " Parisina" and his *' Siege 
 of Corinth." These were the first great drops of the 
 thunder-storm he was soon to pour down upon the world; 
 and the second of them, in its heat and frenzied haste, 
 proclaims a troubled and distracted state of mind. In 
 referring his medical advisers to it as a proof of his men- 
 tal insanity, he rather blundered; for although it wants 
 the incoherence, it has the fury of madness. It is the most 
 rapid and furious race he ever ran to escape from himself. 
 Then came his open breach with English society, his sepa- 
 ration from his lady, and his growling retreat to his Italian 
 den. But ere yet he plunged into that pool, where the de- 
 gradation of his genius, and where its power were perfect, 
 he must turn round, and close in wilder, loftier measures 
 the sad song of " Childe Harold," which in life's summer 
 he had begun; and strange it was to mark, in those two 
 last cantos, not only their deepened power and earnestness, 
 but their multiplied sorrow. He seemed to have gone 
 
54i LORD BYRON. 
 
 away to Addison's " Mountain of Miseries," and exchanged 
 one burden for a worse — sorrow for despair. He had 
 fallen so low, that suicide had lost its charms ; and when 
 one falls beneath the suicide point, his misery is perfect; 
 for his quarrel then is not with life but with being. Yet 
 how horribly beautiful his conversation with the dust of 
 empires — ^with the gigantic skeleton of Rome — with the 
 ocean, which meets him like that simulacrum of the sea 
 which haunted the madness of Caligula — with all the 
 mighty miserable in the past — with those spirits which he 
 summons from the " vasty deep" — or with those ill-favoured 
 ones " who walk the shadow of the vale of death." He 
 speaks to them as their equal and kindred spirit. " Hell 
 from beneath is moved to meet him at his coming : they 
 speak, and say unto him, Art thou become like unto us?" 
 As another potentate, do those " Anarchs old" — Orcus, 
 Hades, and the " dreaded name of Demogorgon" — admit 
 him into their chaotic company, and make him free of the 
 privileges of their dreary realm. 
 
 Having thus taken a last proud farewell of society, with 
 all its forms and conventionalities, he turned him to the 
 task of pouring out his envenomed and disappointed spirit 
 in works which society was as certain to proscribe as it 
 was to peruse; and there followed that marvellous series 
 of poems to which we have already referred as his most 
 peculiar and powerful productions — most powerful, because 
 most sincere. And yet the public proved how false and 
 worthless its former estimate of Byron's genius had been, 
 by denouncing those, his best doings, not merely for their 
 wickedness, but for their artistic execution. It is humi- 
 liating to revert to the reviews and newspapers of that 
 period, and to read the language in which they speak of 
 " Cain," " Sardanapalus," and the " Vision of Judgment," 
 uniformly treating them as miserable fallings-off from his 
 former self — beneath even the standard of his " English 
 Bards and Scotch Reviewers." " Cain" we regard not 
 
LORD BYRON. 55 
 
 milj as Byron's noblest production, but as one of the finest 
 poems in this or any language. It is such a work as Mil- 
 ton, had he been miserable, would have written. There is 
 nothing in " Paradise Lost" superior to Cain's flight with 
 Lucifer through the stars, and nothing in Shakspere supe- 
 rior to his conversations with his wife Adah. We speak 
 simply of its merits as a, work of art — ^its object is worthy 
 of all condemnation; that is, to paint a more soured and 
 savage Manfred, engaged in a controversy, not merely with 
 himself, but with the system of which he is one diseased 
 ^nd desperate member; in the unequal strife overwhelmed, 
 and, as if the crush of Omnipotence were not enough, 
 bringing down after him, in his fall, the weight of a 
 brother's blood ; and the object of the fable is not, as it ought 
 to have been, to show the madness of all selfish struggle 
 against the laws of the universe, but to more than intimate 
 the poet's belief, that the laws which occasion such a 
 struggle are cruel and unjust. There is an unfair distri- 
 bution of misery and guilt in the story. The misery prin- 
 cipally accrues to. Cain ; but a large proportion of the guilt 
 is caught, as by a whirlwind, and flies up in the face of his 
 Maker. The great crime of the poem is not that its hero 
 utters blasphemies, but that you shut it with a doubt 
 whether these blasphemies be not true* Milton wrote his 
 great poem to "justify the ways of God to man;" Byron's- 
 object seems to be, to justify the ways of man to God — 
 even his wildest and most desperate doings. The pleading 
 is eloquent, but hopeless. It is the bubble on the ridge of 
 the cataract praying not to.be carried over and hurried on. 
 Equally vain it is to struggle against those austere and 
 awful laws by which moments of sin expand into centu- 
 ries of punishment. Yet this was Byron's own life-long 
 struggle, and one which, like men who fight their battles 
 o'er again in sleep, he renewed again and again in every 
 4ream of his imagination. 
 . " The Vision of Judgment," unquestionably the best, 
 
5G LORD BYRON. 
 
 abused, is also one of the best, and by no means the most 
 profane, of his productions. It sprung from the savage 
 disgust produced in his mind by Southey's " double-dis- 
 tilled" cant, in that poem of his on the death of George 
 III. — which, reversing the usual case, now lives suspended 
 by a tow-line from its caricature. All other hatred — that 
 of Johnson — that of Burke — that of Juvenal — that of all, 
 save Junius — is tame and maudlin compared to the wrath 
 of Byron expressed in this poem. Scorn often has the 
 effect of cooling and carrying off rage — but here " the 
 ground burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire." 
 His very contempt is molten ; his tears of laughter, as well 
 as of misery, fall in burning showers. In what single lines 
 has he concentrated the mingled essence of the coolest con- 
 tempt, and the hottest indignation! 
 
 " A better farmer ne'er brushed dew from lawn. 
 A worse king never left a realm undone." 
 
 " When the gorgeous coffin was laid low, 
 It seem'd the mockery of hell to fold 
 The rottenness of eighty years in gold." 
 
 " * Passion ! ' replied the phantom dim, 
 ' I loved my country and I hated him.' " 
 
 There spoke the authentic shade of Junius, or at least 
 a spirit worthy of contending with him for the honour of 
 being the " Best Hater" upon record. 
 
 And yet, mixed with the strokes of ribaldry, are touches 
 of a grandeur which he has rarely elsewhere approached. 
 His poetry always rises above itself, when painting the 
 faded splendour wan — the steadfast gloom — the hapless 
 magnanimity of the prince of darkness. With perfect ease 
 he seems to enter into the soul, and fill up the measure and 
 stature of the awful personage. 
 
 It were unpardonable, even in a rapid review, to omit 
 all notice of " Don Juan," which, if it bring our notion of 
 the man to its lowest point, exalts our idea of the poet. 
 
LORD BYRON. 57 
 
 Its great charm is its conversational ease. How coolly and 
 calmly he bestrides his Pegasus even when he is at the 
 gallop. With what exquisitely quiet and quick transitions 
 does he pass from humour to pathos, and make you laugh 
 and cry at once as you do in dreams. It is less a man 
 writing, than a man resigning his soul to his reader. To 
 use Scott's beautiful figure — " the stanzas fall off as easily 
 as the leaves from the autumnal tree." You stand under 
 a shower of withered gold. And in spite of the endless 
 touches of wit, the general impression is most melancholy ; 
 and not Rasselas, nor Timon, casts so deep a shadow on the 
 thoughtful reader as the " very tragical mirth" of Don 
 Juan. 
 
 In settling, lastly, his rank as a poet, we may simply 
 say, that he must be placed, on the whole, beneath and 
 apart from the first class of poets, such as Homer, Dante, 
 Milton, Shakspere, and Goethe. Often, indeed, he seems 
 to rush into their company, and to stand among them, like 
 a daring boy amid his seniors, measuring himself proudly 
 with their superior stature. And, possibly, had he lived, 
 he might have ultimately taken his place amongst them, 
 for it was in his power to have done this. But life was 
 denied him. The wild steed of his passions — like his own 
 " Mazeppa" — carried him furiously into the wilderness, 
 and dashed him down into premature death. And he now 
 must take his place as one at the very head of the second 
 rank of poets, and arrested when he was towering up to- 
 ward the first. 
 
 His name has been frequently but injudiciously coupled 
 with that of Shelley. This has arisen principally from 
 their accidental position. They found themselves together 
 one stormy night in the streets, having both been thrust 
 out by the strong arm from their homes. One had been 
 kicking up a row and kissing the serving-maids; the other 
 had been trying to rouse the family, but in so awkward a 
 fashion, that in his haste he had put out all the lustres, 
 
58 LORD BYRON. 
 
 and nearly blown up the establishment. In that cold, 
 desolate, moonless night, they chanced to meet — they 
 entered into conversation — they even tried, by drawing 
 near each other, to administer a little kindly warmth and 
 encouragement. Men seeing them imperfectly in the lamp- 
 light, classed them together as two dissolute and disorderly 
 blackguards. And, alas, when the morning came that 
 might have accurately discriminated them, both were found 
 lying dead in the streets. In point of purpose — tempera- 
 ment — ^tendency of intellect — poetical creed — feelings — 
 sentiments — habits — and character, no two men could be 
 more dissimilar. 
 
 We remember a pilgrimage we made some years ago to . 
 Lochnagar. As we ascended, a mist came down over the 
 hill, like a veil dropped by some jealous beauty over her 
 own fair face. At length the summit was reached, though 
 the prospect was denied us. It was a proud and thrilling 
 moment. What though darkness was all around ? It was 
 the very atmosphere that suited the scene. It was " dark 
 Lochnagar." And only think how fine it was to climb up 
 and clasp its cairn — to lift a stone from it, to be in after- 
 time a memorial of our journey — to sing the song which 
 inade it glorious and dear, in its own proud drawing-room, 
 with those great fog-curtains floating around — to pass 
 along the brink of its precipices — to snatch a fearful joy, as 
 we leant over, and hung down, and saw from beneath the 
 gleam of eternal snow shining up from its hollows, and 
 columns, or rather perpendicular seas of mist, streaming up 
 upon the wind 
 
 " Like foam from the roused ocean of deep hell, 
 Where every wave breaks on a living shore. 
 Heaped with the damn'd, like pebbles—" 
 
 tinged, too, here and there, on their tops, by gleams of sun- 
 shine, the farewell beams of the dying day. It was the 
 grandest moment in our lives. We had stood upon many 
 
LORD BYRON. 59 
 
 hills — in sunshine and in shade, in mist and in thunder — 
 but never had before, nor hope to have again, such a feel- 
 ing of the grandeur of this lower universe — such a sense 
 of horrible sublimity. Nay, we question if there be a 
 mountain in the empire, which, though seen in similar 
 circumstances, could awaken the same emotions in our 
 minds. It is not its loftiness, though that be great — nor 
 its bold outline, nor its savage loneliness, nor its mist-lov- 
 ing precipices, but the associations which crown its crags 
 with a "peculiar diadem" — its identification with the 
 image of a poet, who, amid all his fearful errors, had per- 
 haps more than any of the age's bards, the power of in- 
 vesting all his career — yea, to every corner which his fierce 
 foot ever touched, or which his genius ever sung — with 
 profound and melancholy interest. We saw the name 
 Byron written in the cloud-characters above us. We saw 
 his genius sadly smiling in those gleams of stray sunshine 
 which gilded the darkness they could not dispel. We 
 found an emblem of his passions in that flying rack, and 
 of his character in those lowering precipices. We seemed 
 to hear the wail of his restless spirit in the wild sob of the 
 wind, fainting and struggling up under its burden of dark- 
 ness. Nay, we could fancy that this hill was designed as 
 an eternal monument to his name, and to image all those 
 peculiarities which make that name for ever illustrious. 
 Not the loftiest of his country's poets, he is the most sharp- 
 ly and terribly defined. In magnitude and round com- 
 pleteness, he yields to many; in jagged, abrupt, and passion- 
 ate projection of his own shadow, over the world of litera- 
 ture, to none. The Genius of convulsion, a dire attraction, 
 dwells around him, which leads many to hang over, and 
 some to leap down, his precipices. Volcanic as he is, the 
 coldness of wintry selfishness too often collects in the hol- 
 lows of his verse. He loves, too, the cloud and the thick 
 darkness, and comes "veiling all the lightnings of his song 
 in sorrow." So, like Byron besides Scott and Wordsworth, 
 
00 LORD BYRON. 
 
 does Lochnagar stand in the presence of his neighbour 
 giants, Ben-mac-Dhui, and Ben-y-boord, less lofty, but 
 more fiercely eloquent in its jagged outline, reminding us 
 of the via of the forked lightning, which it seems dumbly 
 to mimic, projecting its cliffs like quenched batteries against 
 earth and heaven, with the cold of snow in its heart, and 
 with a coronet of mist round its gloomy brow. 
 
 No poet, since Homer and Ida, has thus, everlastingly, 
 shot his genius into the heart of one great mountain, iden- 
 tifying himself and his song with it. Not Horace with 
 Socrate — not Wordsworth with Helvellyn — not Coleridge 
 with Mont Blanc — not Wilson with the Black Mount — 
 not even Scott with the Eildons — all these are still common 
 property, but Lochnagar is Byron's own — no poet will ever 
 venture to sing it again. In its dread circle none durst 
 walk but he. His allusions to it are not numerous, but its 
 peaks stood often before his eye: a recollection of its gran- 
 deur served more to colour his line than the glaciers of the 
 Alps, the cliffs of Jura, or the "thunder hills of fear," which 
 he heard in Chimari; even from the mountains of Greece 
 he was carried back to Morven, and "Lochnagar, with Ida, 
 looked o'er Troy." Hence the severe Dante-like monu- 
 mental, mountainous cast of his better poetry; for we 
 firmly believe that the scenery of one's youth gives a per- 
 manent bias and colouring to the genius, the taste, and the 
 style, I. €., if there be an intellect to receive an impulse, or 
 a taste to catch a tone. Many, it is true, bred in cities, 
 or amid common scenery, make up for the lack by early 
 travel; so did Milton, Coleridge, and Wilson. But who 
 may not gather, from the tame tone of Cowper's landscapes, 
 that he had never enjoyed such opportunities? And who, 
 in Pollok's powerful but gloomy poem, may not detect the 
 raven hue which a sterile moorland scenery had left upon 
 his mind? Has not, again, the glad landscape of the Howe 
 of the Mearns, and the prospect from the surmounting Hill 
 of Garvock, left a pleasing trace upon the mild pages of 
 
/ 
 
 GEORGE CRABBE. CI 
 
 Beattie's "Minstrel?" Did not Coila colour the genial soul 
 of its poet? Has not the scenery of his "own romantic 
 town" made much of the prose and poetry of Sir Walter 
 Scott what it is? So, is it mere fancy which traces the 
 stream of Byron's poetry in its light and its darkness, its 
 bitterness and its brilliance, to this smitten rock in the 
 wilderness — to the cliffs of Lochnagar? 
 
 GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 To be the poet of the waste places of Creation — to adopt 
 the orphans of the mighty mother — ^to wed her dowerless 
 daughters — to find out the beauty which has been spilt in 
 tiny drops in her more unlovely regions — to echo the low 
 music which arises from even her stillest and most sterile 
 spots — was the mission of Crabbe, as a descriptive poet. 
 He preferred the Leahs to the Rachels of nature: and 
 this he did not merely that his lot had cast him amid 
 such scenes, and that early associations had taught him a 
 profound interest in them, but apparently from native 
 y taste. He actually loved that beauty which stands shiver- 
 ing on the brink of barrenness — loved it for its timidity and 
 its loneliness. Nay, he seemed to love barrenness itself ; 
 brooding over its dull page till there arose from it a strange 
 lustre, which his eye distinctly sees, and which in part he 
 makes visible to his readers. It was even as the darkness of 
 cells has been sometimes peopled to the view of the solitary 
 prisoner, and spiders seemed angels in the depths of his 
 dungeon. We can fancy, too, in Crabbe's mind, a feeling of 
 pity for those unloved spots, and those neglected glories. 
 We can fancy him saying, "Let the gay and the aspiring 
 
62 GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 mate with nature in her towering altitudes, and flatter her 
 more favoured scenes ; I will go after her into her secret 
 retirements, bring out her bashful beauties, praise what 
 none are willing to praise, and love what there are few to 
 love." From his early circumstances, besides, there had 
 stolen over his soul a shade of settled though subdued 
 gloom. And for sympathy with this, he betook himself to 
 the sterner and sadder aspects of nature, where he saw, or 
 seemed to see, his own feelings reflected, as in a sea of 
 melancholy faces, in dull skies, waste moorlands, the low 
 beach, and the moaning of the waves upon it, as if weary 
 of their eternal wanderings. Such, too, at moments, was 
 the feeling of Burns, when he strode on the scaur of the 
 Nith, and saw the waters red and turbid below ; or walked 
 in a windy day by the side of a plantation, and heard the 
 "sound of a going" upon the tops of the trees ; or when he 
 exclaimed, with a calm simplicity of bitterness which is 
 most affecting — 
 
 " The leafless trees my fancy please. 
 Their fate resembles mine." 
 
 Oh! where, indeed, can the unhappy repair, to escape 
 from their own sorrows, or worse, from the unthinking glee 
 or constitutional cheerfulness of others, more fitly than into 
 the wastes and naked places of nature? She will not then 
 and there seem to insult them with her laughing luxuriance 
 — her foliage fluttering, as if in vain display, with the 
 glossy gilding of her flowers, or the sunny sparkle and 
 song of her streamlets. But she will uplift a mightier and 
 older voice. She will soothe them by a sterner ministry. 
 She will teach them "old truths, abysmal truths, awful 
 truths." She will answer their sighs by the groans of the 
 creation travelling in pain ; suck up their tears in the sweat 
 of her great agonies; reflect their tiny wrinkles in those 
 deep stabs and scars on her forehead, which speak of strug- 
 gle and contest ; give back the gloom of their brows in the 
 frowns of her forests, her mountain solitudes, and her 
 
GEORGE CRABBE. 63 
 
 waste midniglit darkness; infuse something, too, of her own 
 sublime expectancy into her spirits; and dismiss them from 
 her society, it may be sadder, but certainly wiser men. 
 How admirably is nature suited to all moods of all men! 
 In spring, she is gay with the light-hearted ; in summer, 
 gorgeous as its sun to those fiery spirits who seem made 
 for a warmer day ; in autumn, she spreads over all hearts 
 a mellow and unearthly joy; and even in winter — when 
 her temple is deserted of the frivolous and the timid, who 
 quit it along with the smile of the sun — she attracts her 
 own few but faithful votaries, who love her in her naked 
 sculpture, as well as in her glowing pictorial hues, and who 
 enjoy her solemn communion none the less that they enjoy 
 it by themselves. To use the words of a forgotten poet, 
 addressing spring — 
 
 " Thou op'st a storehouse for all hues of men. 
 
 To hardihood thou, blustering from the north, 
 RoU'st dark — hast sighs for them that would complain ; 
 
 Sharp winds to clear the head of wit and worth ; 
 And melody for those that follow mirth ; 
 
 Clouds for the gloomy ; tears for those that weep ; 
 Flowers blighted in the bud for those that birth 
 
 Untimely sorrow o'er ; and sides where sweep 
 Fleets of a thousand sail for them that plough the deep." 
 
 Crabbe, as a descriptive poet, differs from other modern 
 masters of the art, alike in his selection of subjects, and in 
 his mode of treating the subjects he does select. Byron 
 moves over nature with a fastidious and aristocratic step 
 — ;touching only upon objects already interesting or en- 
 nobled, upon battle fields, castellated ruins, Italian palaces, 
 or Alpine peaks. This, at least, is true of his " Childe 
 Harold," and his earlier pieces. In the later productions 
 of his pen, he goes to the opposite extreme, and alights, 
 with a daring yet dainty foot, upon all shunned and for- 
 bidden things — ^reminds us of the raven in the Deluge, 
 which found rest for the sole of her foot upon carcasses. 
 
64 GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 where the dove durst not stand — rushes in where modesty 
 and reserve alike have forbidden entrance — and ventures, 
 though still not like a lost archangel, to tread the burning 
 marl of hell, the dim gulf of Hades, the shadowy ruins of 
 the pre-Adamitic world, and the crystal pavement of hea- 
 ven. Moore practises a principle of more delicate selection, 
 resembling some nice fly which should alight only upon 
 flowers, whether natural or artificial, if so that flowers they 
 seem to be ; thus, from sunny bowers, and moonlit roses, 
 and gardens, and blushing skies, and ladies' dresses, does 
 the Bard of Erin extract his finest poetry. Shelley and 
 Coleridge attach themselves almost exclusively to the great 
 — understanding this term in a wide sense, as including 
 much that is grotesque and much that is homely, which the 
 magic of their genius sublimates to a proper pitch of keep- 
 ing with the rest. Their usual walk is swelling and bus- 
 kined : their common talk is of great rivers, great forests, 
 great seas, great continents: or else of comets, suns, con- 
 stellations, and firmaments — as that of all half-mad, wholly 
 miserable, and opium-fed genius is apt to be. Sir Walter 
 Scott, who seldom grappled with the gloomier and grander 
 features of his country's scenery (did he ever describe 
 Glencoe or Foyers, or the wildernesses around Ben-mac- 
 Dhui?), had (need we say?) the most exquisite eye for all 
 picturesque and romantic aspects, in sea, shore, or sky; and 
 in the quick perception of this element of the picturesque 
 lay his principal, if not only descriptive power. Words- 
 worth, again, seems always to be standing above, though 
 not stooping over, the objects he describes. He seldom looks 
 up in wrapt admiration of what is above him; the bend- 
 ing furze-bush and the lowly broom — ^the nest lying in the 
 level clover-field — the tarn sinking away seemingly before 
 his eye into darker depths — the prospect from the moun- 
 tain summit cast far beneath him: at highest, the star 
 burning Ioav upon the mountain's ridge, like an " untended 
 watchfire :" these are the objects which he loves to describe, 
 
GEORGE CRABBE. 65 
 
 and these may stand as emblems of his lowly yet aspiring 
 genius — Crabbe, on the other hand, " stoops to conquer" 
 — nay, goes down on his knees, that he may more accurately 
 describe such objects as the marsh given over to desolation 
 from immemorial time — the slush left by the sea, and re- 
 vealing the dead body of the suicide — the bare crag and 
 the stunted tree, diversifying the scenery of the saline wil- 
 derness — the house on the heath, creaking in the storm, and 
 telling strange stories of misery and crime — the pine in 
 some wintry wood, which had acted as the gallows of some 
 miserable man — the gorse surrounding with yellow light 
 the encampment of the gipsies — the few timid flowers, or 
 "weeds of glorious feature," which adorn the brink of 
 ocean — the snow putting out the iire of the pauper, or lying 
 unmelted on his pillow of death — the web of the spider 
 blinding the cottager's window — the wheel turned by the 
 meagre hand of contented or cursing penury — the cards 
 trembling in the grasp of the desperate debauchee — the 
 day stocking forming the cap by night, and the garter at 
 midnight — the dunghill becoming the accidental grave of the 
 drunkard — the poor-house of forty years ago, with its 
 patched windows, its dirty environs, its moist and miserable 
 walls, its inmates all snuff, and selfishness, and sin — the 
 receptacle of the outlawed members of English society (how 
 different from " Poosie Nancy's I "), with its gin-gendered 
 quarrels, its appalling blasphemies, its deep debauches, its 
 ferocity without fun, its huddled murders, and its shrieks 
 of disease dumb in the uproar around — the Bedlam of forty 
 years ago, with its straw on end under the restlessness of 
 the insane ; its music of groans, and shrieks and mutterings 
 of still more melancholy meaning ; its keepers cold and 
 stern, as the snow-covered cliffs above the wintry cataract ; 
 its songs dying away in despairing gurgles down the miser- 
 able throat ; its cells how devoid of monastic silence ; its 
 " confusion worse confounded," of gibbering idiocy, mono- 
 mania absorbed and absent from itself as well as from the 
 
€G GKORGE CRABBE. 
 
 world, and howling frenzy; its davligLt saddened as H 
 shines into the dim, vacant, or glaring e^^es of those wretched 
 men : and its moonbeams shedding a more congenial ray 
 upon the solitude, or the sick-bed, or the deathbed of de- 
 rangement — such familiar faces of want, guilt, and wo- 
 of nakedness, sterility, and shame, does Crabbe delight in 
 showing us; and is, in very truth, "nature's sternest 
 painter, yet the best." In his mode of managing his de- 
 scriptions, Crabbe is equally peculiar. Objects, in them- 
 selves counted commonplace or disgusting, frequently be- 
 come impressive, and even sublime, when surrounded by 
 interesting circumstances — when show^n in the moonlight 
 of memory — when linked to strong passion — or when 
 touched by the ray of imagination. Then, in Emerson's 
 words, even the corpse is found to have added a solemn 
 ornament to the house where it lay. But it is the pecu- 
 liarity and the daring of this poet, that he often, not always, 
 tries us with truth and nothing but truth, as if to bring the 
 question to an issue — whether, in nature, absolute truth be 
 not essential though severe poetry. On tliis question, cer- 
 tainly, issue was never so fully joined before. In even 
 Wordsworth's eye there is a misty glimmer of imagination, 
 through vvdiich all objects, low as well as high, are seen. 
 Even his "five blue eggs" gleam upon him through a light 
 which comes not from themselves — which comes, it may be, 
 from the Great Bear, or Arcturus and his sons. And when 
 he does — as in some of his feebler verses — strive to see out 
 of this medium, he drops his mantle, loses his vision, and 
 describes little better than would his own " Old Cumber- 
 land Beggar." Shakspere in his witches' caldron, and 
 Burns in "haly table," are shockingly circum,stantial ; but 
 the element of imagination creeps in amid all the disgust- 
 ing details, and the light that never was on sea or shore 
 disdains not to rest on " eye of newt," " toe of frog," " ba- 
 boon's blood," the garter that strangled the babe, the grey 
 I;ni:!= ^•!if*l;irT to ^1 e l^fft of iVc rrnicidal 1-riiife, tiud rll 
 
GEORGE CRABBE. 67 
 
 the rest of the fell ingredients ; Crabbe, on the other hand, 
 would have described the five blue eggs, and besides, the 
 materials of the nest, and the kind of hedge where it was 
 built, like a bird-nesting schoolboy ; but he would never 
 have given the *' gleam." He would as accurately as 
 Hecate, Canidia, or Cuttysark, have given an inventory 
 of the ingredients of the hell-broth, or of the curiosities on 
 the " haly table," had they been presented to his eye : but 
 could not have conceived them, nor would have slipped in 
 that one flashing word, that single cross ray of imagination, 
 which it required to elevate and startle them into high 
 ideal life. And yet in reading his pictures of poor-houses, 
 &c., we are compelled to say, " Well, that is poetry after all, 
 for it is truth ; but it is poetry of comparatively a low order 
 . — it is the last gasp of the poetic spirit : and, moreover, 
 perfect and matchless as it is in its kind, it is not worthy of 
 the powers of its author, who can, and has, at other times 
 risen into much loftier ground." 
 
 We may illustrate still farther what we mean by com- 
 paring the different ways in which Crabbe and Foster (cer- 
 tainly a 2'>rose poet) deal with a library. Crabbe describes 
 minutely and successfully the outer features of the volumes, 
 their colours, clasps, the stubborn ridges of their bindings, 
 the illustrations which adorn them, &c., so well that you 
 feel yourself among them, and they become sensible to 
 touch almost as to sight. But there he stops, and sadly 
 fails, we think, in bringing out the living and moral inter- 
 est which gathers around a multitude of books, or even 
 around a single volume. This Foster has amply done. 
 The speaking silence of a number of books, where, though 
 it were the wide Bodleian or Vatican, not one whisper 
 could be heard, and yet, where, as in an antechamber, so 
 many great spirits are waiting to deliver their messages — 
 their churcliyard stillness continuing even when their 
 readers are moving to their pages, in joy or agony, as to the 
 sAnT-;rl of mnrtinl in'^tnTmcTit*' — thrir awakinnr, n' fran r^.^t^-'^ 
 
68 GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 slumber, to speak with miraculous organ, like the shell 
 which has only to be lifted, and " pleased it remembers 
 its august abodes, and murmurs as the ocean murmurs 
 there " — their power of drawing tears, kindling blushes, 
 awakening laughter, calming or quickening the motions 
 of the life's blood, lulling to repose, or rousing to rest- 
 lessness, often giving life to the soul, and sometimes giv- 
 ing death to the body — the meaning which radiates from 
 their quiet countenances — the tale of shame or glory 
 which their title pages tell — the memories suggested by 
 the character of their authors, and of the readers who 
 have throughout successive centuries perused them — the 
 thrilling thoughts excited by the sight of names and notes 
 inscribed on their margins or blank pages by hands long 
 since mouldered in the dust, or by those dear to us as our 
 life's blood, who had been snatched from our sides — the 
 aspects of gaiety or of gloom connected with the bindings 
 and the age of volumes — the effects of sunshine playing as 
 if on a congregation of happy faces, making the duskiest 
 shine, and the gloomiest be glad — or of shadow suffusing a 
 sombre air over all — the joy of the proprietor of a large 
 library who feels that Nebuchadnezzar watching great 
 Babylon, or Napoleon reviewing his legions, will not stand 
 comparison with himself seated amid the broad maps, and 
 rich prints, and numerous volumes which his wealth has 
 enabled him to collect and his wisdom entitled him to en- 
 joy—all such hieroglyphics of interest and meaning has 
 Foster included and interpreted in one gloomy but noble 
 meditation, and his introduction to Doddridge is the true 
 " Poem on the Library." 
 
 In Crabbe's descriptions the great want is of selection. 
 He writes inventories. He describes all that his eye sees 
 with cold, stern, lingering accuracy — he marks down all 
 the items of wretchedness, poverty, and vulgar sin — counts 
 the rags of the mendicant — and, as Hazlitt has it, describes 
 a cottage like one who has entered it to distrain for rent. 
 
GEORGE CRABBE. 69 
 
 His copies, consequently, would be as displeasing as their 
 originals, were it not that imagination is so much less vivid 
 than eyesight, that we can endure in picture what we can- 
 not in reality, and that our own minds, while reading, can 
 cast that softening and ideal veil over disgusting objects 
 which the poet himself has not sought, or has failed to do. 
 Just as, in viewing even the actual scene, we might have 
 seen it through the medium of imaginative illusion, so the 
 same medium will more probably invest, and beautify its 
 transcript in the pages of the poet. 
 
 As a moral poet and sketcher of men, Crabbe is charac- 
 terised by a similar choice of subject and the same stern 
 fidelity. The mingled yarn of man's everyday life — the 
 plain homely virtues, or the robust and burly vices of 
 Englishmen — the quiet tears which fall on humble beds — 
 the passions which flame up in lowly bosoms — the amari 
 aliquid, the deep and permanent bitterness which lies at the 
 heart of the down-trodden English poor — the comedies 
 and tragedies of the fireside — the lovers' quarrels — the un- 
 happy marriages — the vicissitudes of common fortunes — 
 the early deaths — the odd characters — the lingering super- 
 stitions — all the elements, in short, which make up the 
 simple annals of lowly or middling society, are the mate- 
 rials of this poet's song. Had he been a Scottish clergy- 
 man we should have said that he had versified his Session- 
 book ; and certainly many curious chapters of human life 
 might be derived from such a document, and much light 
 cast upon the devious windings and desperate wickedness 
 of the heart, as well as upon that inextinguishable in- 
 stinct of good which resides in it. Crabbe, perhaps, has 
 confined himself too exclusively to this circle of common 
 things which he found lying around him. He has seldom 
 burst its confines, and touched the loftier themes, and 
 snatched the higher laurels which were also within his 
 reach. He has contented himself with being a Lillo (with 
 occasional touches of Shakspere) instead of something far 
 
70 GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 greater. He has, however, in spite of this self-injustice, 
 eifected much. He has proved that a poet, who looks re- 
 solutely around him — who stays at home — who draws the 
 realities which are near him, instead of the phantoms that 
 are afar — who feels and records the passion and poetry of 
 his daily life — may found a firm and enduring reputation. 
 With the dubious exception of Cowper, no one lias made 
 out this point so effectually as Crabbe. 
 
 And in his mode of treating such themes, what strikes us 
 first is his perfect coolness. Few poets have reached that 
 calm of his which reminds us of Nature's own great quiet 
 eye, looking down upon her monstrous births, her strange 
 anomalies, and her more ungainly forms. Thus Crabbe 
 sees the loathsome, and does not loathe — handles the hor- 
 rible, and shudders not — feels with firm finger the palpi- 
 tating pulse of the infanticide or the murderer — and snuffs 
 a certain sweet odour in the evil savours of putrefying 
 misery and crime. This delight, however, is not an in- 
 human, but entirely an artistic delight — perhaps, indeed, 
 springing from the very strength and width of his sympa- 
 thies. We admire as well as wonder at that almost asbestos 
 quality of his mind, through which he retains his compo- 
 sure and critical circumspection so cool amid the confla- 
 grations of passionate subjects, which might have burned 
 others to ashes. Few, indeed, can walk through such 
 fiery furnaces unscathed. But Crabbe — what an admi- 
 rable physician had he made to a lunatic asylum ! How 
 severely would he have sifted out every grain of poetry 
 from those tumultuous exposures of the human mind ! 
 What clean breasts had he forced the patients to make ! 
 What tales had he wrung out from them, to which Lewis* 
 tales of terror were feeble and trite 1 How he would have 
 commanded them, by his mild, steady, and piercing eye ! 
 And yet how calm would his brain have remained, when 
 others, even of a more prosaic mould, were reeling in sym- 
 pathy with the surrounding delirium ! It were, indeed, 
 
GEORGE CRABBE. 71 
 
 worth while inquiring how much of this coohiess resulted 
 from Crabbe's early practice as a surgeon. That combi- 
 nation of warm inward sympathy and outward phlegm — 
 of impulsive benevolence and mechanical activity — of heart 
 all fire and manner all ice — ^which distinguishes his poetry, 
 is very characteristic of the medical profession. 
 
 In correspondence with this, Crabbe generally leans to 
 the darker side of things. This, perhaps, accounts for his 
 favour in the sight of Byron, who saw his own eagle-eyed 
 fury at man corroborated by Crabbe's stern and near- 
 sighted vision. And it was accounted for partly by Crabbe's 
 -early profession, partly by his early circumstances, and 
 partly by the clerical office he assumed. Nothing so tends 
 to sour us with mankind as a general refusal on their part 
 to give us bread. How can a man love a race which seems 
 combined to starve him? This misanthropical influence 
 Crabbe did not entirely escape. As a medical man, too, 
 he had come in contact with little else than human mise- 
 ries and diseases ; and as a clergyman, h€ had occasion 
 to see much sin and sorrow : and these, combining with 
 the melancholy incidental to the poetic temperament, ma- 
 terially discoloured his view of life. He became a searcher 
 of dark — of the darkest bosoms ; and we see him sitting in 
 the gloom of the hearts of thieves, murderers, and maniacs, 
 and watching the remorse, rancour, fury, dull disgust, un- 
 gratified appetite, and ferocious or stupified despair, which 
 are their inmates. And even when he pictures livelier 
 scenes and happier characters, there steals over them a 
 shade of sadness, reflected from his favourite subjects, as a 
 dark, sinister countenance in a room will throw a gloom 
 over many happy and beautiful faces beside it. 
 
 In his pictures of life, we find an unfrequent but true 
 pathos. This is not often, however, of the profoundest or 
 most heart-rending kind. The grief he paints is not that 
 which refuses to be comforted — whose expressions, like 
 Agamemnon's face, must be veiled — which dilates almost 
 
72 GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 to despair, and complains almost to blasphemy — and which, 
 when it looks to heaven, it is 
 
 " With that frantic air. 
 Which seems to ask if a God be there." 
 
 Crabbe's, as exhibited in " Phoebe Dawson," and other of 
 his tales, is gentle, submissive ; and its pathetic eiFects are 
 produced by the simple recital of circumstances which might 
 and often have occurred. It reminds us of the pathos of 
 " Kosamund Gray," that beautiful story of Lamb's, of which 
 we once, we regret to say, presumptuously pronounced an 
 unfavourable opinion, but which has since commended itself 
 to our heart of hearts, and compelled that tribute in tears 
 which we had denied it in words. Hazlitt is totally wrong 
 when he says that Crabbe carves a tear to the life in marble, 
 as if his pathos w^ere hard and cold. Be it the statuary 
 of wo — has it, consequently, no truth or power? Have 
 the chiseled tears of the Niobe never awakened other 
 tears, fresh and burning, from their fountain ? Horace's vis 
 me flere, &c., is not always a true principle. As the wit, 
 who laughs not himself, often excites most laughter in 
 others, so the calm recital of an affecting narrative acts 
 as the meek rod of Moses applied to the rock, and is 
 answered in gushing torrents. You close Crabbe's tale of 
 grief, almost ashamed that you have left so quiet a thing 
 pointed and starred with tears. His pages, while some- 
 times wet with pathos, are never moist with humour. His 
 satire is often pointed with wit, and sometimes irritates into 
 invective ; but of that glad, genial, and bright-eyed thing 
 we call humour (how well iiamed, in its oily softness and 
 gentle glitter I) he has little or none. Compare, in order 
 to see this, his " Borough" with the " Annals of the Parish." 
 How dry, though powerful, the one ; how sappy the other! 
 How profound the one ; how pawky the other ! Crabbe 
 goes through his Borough, like a scavenger with a rough, 
 stark, and stiff besom, sweeping up all the filth : Gait, like 
 a knowing watchman of the old school — a canni/ Charlie — 
 
GEORGE CRABBE. 73 
 
 keeping a sharp look-out, but not averse to a sly joke, and 
 having an eye to the humours as well as misdemeanours of 
 the streets. Even his wit is not of the finest grain. It 
 deals too much in verbal quibbles, puns, and antitheses 
 with their points broken off. His puns are neither good 
 nor bad — the most fatal and anti-ideal description of a pun 
 that can be given. His quibbles are good enough to have 
 excited the laugh of his curate, or gardener ; but he for- 
 gets that the public is not so indulgent. And though often 
 treading in Pope's track, he wants entirely those touches 
 of satire, at once the lightest and the most withering, as if 
 dropped from the fingers of a malignant fairy — those faint 
 whispers of poetic perdition — those drops of concentrated 
 bitterness — those fatal bodkin-stabs — and those invectives, 
 glittering all over with the polish of profound malignity — 
 which are Pope's glory as a writer, and his shame as a man. 
 We have repeatedly expressed our opinion, that in 
 Crabbe there lay a higher power than he often exerted. 
 We find evidence of this in his " Hall of Justice ■' and his 
 *' Eustace Grey." In these he is fairly in earnest. No 
 longer dozing by his parlour fire over the " Newspaper," 
 or napping in a corner of his " Library," or peeping in 
 through the windows of the " Workhouse," or recording 
 the select scandal of the *' Borough," he is away out into 
 the wide and open fields of highest passion and imagina- 
 tion. What a tale that " Hall of Justice " hears — to be 
 paralleled only in the " Thousand and One Nights of the 
 Halls of Eblis!" — a tale of misery, rape, murder, and furi- 
 ous despair ; told, too, in language of such lurid fire as has 
 been seen to shine o'er the graves of the dead ! But, in 
 " Eustace Grey," our author's genius reaches its climax. 
 Never was madness — in its misery — its remorse — the dark 
 companions, " the ill-favoured ones," who cling to it in its 
 wild way and will not let it go, although it curse them 
 with the eloquence of hell — the visions it sees — the scenery 
 it creates and carries about with it in dreadful keeping — 
 
74 GEORGE CRA1'.BE. 
 
 and the language it uses, high, aspiring, but broken, as the 
 wing of a struck eagle — so strongly and meltingly reveal- 
 ed. And, yet, around the dismal tale there hangs the 
 breath of beauty, and, like poor Lear, Sir Eustace goes 
 about crowned with flowers — the flowers of earthly poetry 
 — and of a hope which is not of the earth. And, at the 
 close, we feel to the author all that strange gratitude which 
 our souls are constituted to entertain to those who have 
 most powerfully wrung and tortured them. 
 
 Would that Crabbe had given us a century of such 
 things. We would have preferred to the " Tales of the 
 Plall," " Tales of Greyling Hall," or more tidings from 
 the " Hall of Justice." It had been a darker Decameron, 
 and brought out more effectually — what the "Village 
 Poorhouse," and the sketches of Elliott have since done — 
 the passions, miseries, crushed aspirations, and latent 
 poetry, which dwell in the hearts of the plundered poor ; 
 as well as the wretchedness which, more punctually than 
 their veriest menial, waits often behind the chairs, and 
 hands the silver dishes of the great. 
 
 We will not dilate on his other works individually. In 
 glancing back upon them as a w^hole, we will endeavour 
 to answer the following questions : 1 st, What was Crabbe's 
 object as a moral poet? 2dly, How far is he original as 
 an artist? 3dly, What is his relative position to his 
 great contemporaries ? And, 4thly, what is likely to be 
 his fate with posterity? 1st, His object The great dis- 
 tinction between man and man, and author and author, is 
 purpose. It is the edge and point of character; it is the 
 stamp on the subscription of genius ; it is the direction 
 on the letter of talent. Character without it is blunt 
 and torpid. Talent without it is a letter, which, un- 
 directed, goes no whither. Genius without it is bullion, 
 sluggish, splendid, uncirculating. Purpose yearns after 
 and secures artistic culture. It gathers, as by a strong 
 suction, all things which it needs into itself. Crabbe's artis- 
 
GEORGE CRABBE. 75 
 
 tic object is tolerably clear, and has been already indicated. 
 His moral purpose is not quite so apparent. Is it to sati- 
 rise, or is it to reform vice ? Is it pity, or is it contempt, 
 that actuates his song ? What are his plans for elevating 
 the lower classes in the scale of society ? Has he any, or 
 does he believe in the possibility of their permanent eleva- 
 tion ? Such questions are more easily asked than answered. 
 We must say that we have failed to find in him any one 
 overmastering and earnest object, subjugating everything 
 to itself, and producing that unity in all his works which 
 the trunk of a tree gives to its smallest, its remotest, to 
 even its withered leaves. And yet, without apparent in- 
 tention, Crabbe has done good moral service. He has 
 shed much light upon the condition of the poor. lie has 
 spoken in the name and stead of the poor dumb mouths 
 that could not tell their own sorrows or sufferings to the 
 world. He has opened the mine, which Ebenezer Elliott 
 and others, going to work with a firmer and more resolute 
 purpose, have dug to its depths. 
 
 2dly, His originality. — This has been questioned by some 
 critics. He has been called a version, in coarser paper 
 and print, of Goldsmith, Pope, and Cowper. His pathos 
 comes from Goldsmith — his wit and satire from Pope 
 — and his minute and literal description from Cowper. 
 If this were true, it were as complimentary to him as his 
 warmest admirer could wish. To combine the characteris- 
 tic excellences of three true poets is no easy matter. But 
 Crabbe has not combined them. His pathos wants alto- 
 gether the naivete of sentiment and curiosa felicitas of ex- 
 pression which distinguish Goldsmith's "Deserted Village." 
 He has something of Pope's terseness, but little of his 
 subtlety, finish, or brilliant malice. And the motion of 
 Cowper's mind and style in description differs as much 
 from Crabbe's as the playful leaps and gambols of a kitten 
 from the measured, downright, and indomitable pace of a 
 hound — the one is the easiest, the other the severest, of 
 
/O GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 describers. Resemblances, indeed, of a minor kind are to 
 be found ; but still Crabbe is as distinct from Goldsmith, 
 Cowper, and Pope, as Bjron from Scott, Wordsworth, 
 and Coleridge. 
 
 Originality consists of two kinds — one, the power of in- 
 venting new materials ; and the other, of dealing with old 
 materials in a new way. We do not decide whether the 
 first of these implies an act of absolute creation ; it implies 
 all we can conceive in an act of creative power; from ele- 
 ments bearing to the result the relation which the Alphabet 
 does to the " Iliad" — genius brings forth its bright pro- 
 geny, and we feel it to be new. In this case, you can no 
 more anticipate the effect from the elements than you can, 
 from the knowledge of the letters, anticipate the words 
 which are to be compounded out of them. . In the other 
 kind of originality, the materials bear a larger proportion 
 to the result — they form an appreciable quantity in our cal- 
 culations of what it is to be. They are found for the poet, 
 and all he has to do is, with skill and energy, to construct 
 them. Take, for instance, Shakspere's " Tempest," and 
 Coleridge's " Anciente Marinere" — of what more creative 
 act can we conceive than is exemplified in these? Of 
 course, we have all had beforehand ideas similar to a storm, 
 a desert island, a witch, a magician, a mariner, a hermit, a 
 wedding-guest ; but these are only the Alphabet to the 
 spirits of Shakspere and Coleridge. As the sun, from the 
 invisible air, draws up in an instant all pomps of cloudy 
 forms — paradises brighter than Eden, mirrored in waters, 
 which blush and tremble as their reflexion falls wooingly 
 upon them — mountains, which seem to bury their snowy 
 or rosy summits in the very heaven of heavens — throne- 
 shaped splendours, worthy of angels to sit on them, flush- 
 ing and fading in the west — seas of aerial blood and fire — 
 momentary cloud-crowns and golden avenues, stretching 
 away into the azure infinite beyond them ; — so, from such 
 stuff as dreams are made of, from the mere empty air, do 
 
GEORGE CRABBE. 77 
 
 those wondrous magicians build up their new worlds, where 
 the laws of nature are repealed — where all things are 
 changed without any being confused — where sound becomes 
 dumb and silence eloquent — where the earth is empty, and 
 the sky is peopled — where material beings are invisible, 
 and where spiritual beings become gross and palpable to 
 sense — where the skies are opening to show riches — where 
 the isle is full of noises — where beings proper to this sphere 
 of dream are met so often that you cease to fear them, 
 however odd or monstrous — where magic has power to shut 
 now the eyes of kings and now the great bright eye of 
 ocean — where, at the bidding of the poet, new, complete, 
 beautiful mythologies, at one time sweep across the sea, and 
 anon dance down from the purple and mystic sky — where 
 all things have a charmed life, the listening ground, the 
 populous air, the still or the vexed sea, the human or the 
 imaginary beings — and where, as in deep dreams, the most 
 marvellous incidents are most easily credited, slide on most 
 softly, and seem most native to the place, the circumstances, 
 and the time. " This is creation," we exclaim ; nor did 
 Ferdinand seem to Miranda a fresher and braver creature 
 than does to us each strange settler, whom genius has 
 planted upon its own favourite isle. Critics may, indeed, 
 take these imaginary beings — such as Caliban and Ariel — 
 and analyse them into their constituent parts ; but there 
 will be some one element which escapes them — laughing, 
 as it leaps away, at their baffled sagacity, and proclaiming 
 the original power of its Creator: as in the chemical 
 analysis of an aerolite, amid the mere earthy constituents, 
 there is something which declares its unearthly origin. 
 Take creation as meaning, not so much Deity bringing 
 something out of nothing, as filling the void ivith his Spirity 
 and genius will seem a lower form of the same power. 
 The other kind of originality is, we think, that of Crabbe. 
 
 Ilt is magic at second-hand. He takes, not makes, his 
 materials. He finds a good foundation — wood and stone 
 
78 GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 in plenty — and he begins laboriously, successfully,, and after 
 a plan of his own, to build. If in any of liis works he ap- 
 proaches to the higher property, it is in " Eustace Grey," 
 who moves here and there, on his wild wanderings, as if to 
 the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp. 
 
 This prepares us for coming to the third question. What 
 is Crabbe's relative position to his great contemporary 
 poets? He belongs to the second class. He is not a 
 philosophic poet, like Wordsworth. He is not, like Shel- 
 ley, a Vates, moving upon the uncertain but perpetual 
 and furious wind of his inspiration. He is not, like 
 Byron, a demoniac exceeding fierce, and dwelling among 
 the tombs. He is not, like Keats, a sweet and melancholy 
 voice, a tune bodiless, bloodless — dying away upon the 
 waste air, but for ever to be remembered as men remember 
 a melody they have heard in youth. He is not, like Cole- 
 ridge, all these almost by turns, and, besides, a psalmist, 
 singing at times strains so sublime and holy, that they might 
 seem snatches of the song of Eden's cherubim, or caught in 
 trance from the song of Moses and the Lamb. To this 
 mystic brotherhood Crabbe must not be added. He ranks 
 with a lower but still lofty band — with Scott (as a poet), 
 and Moore, and Hunt, and Campbell, and Rogers, and 
 Bowles, and James Montgomery, and Southey ; and surely 
 they nor he need be ashamed of each other, as they shine 
 in one soft and peaceful cluster. 
 
 We are often tempted to pity poor posterity on this 
 score. liow is it to manage with the immense number of 
 excellent works which this age has bequeathed, and is be- 
 queathing it? How is it to economise its time so as to 
 read a tithe of them ? And should it in mere self-defence 
 proceed to decimate, with what principle shall the process 
 be carried on, and who shall be appointed to preside over 
 it ? Critics of the twenty-second century, be merciful as 
 well as just. Pity the disjecta wembra of tliose we thought 
 nn'frhty poets. Re^peot nnd fulfil our prmihecier- of im- 
 
GEORGE CRABBE. 79 
 
 mortalitj. If ye must carp and cavil, do not, at least, in 
 luercy, abridge. Spare us the prospect of this last insult, 
 an abridged copy of the "Pleasures of Hope," or "Don 
 Juan," a new abridgment. If ye must operate in this 
 way, be it on " Madoc," or the " Course of Time." Gene- 
 rously leave room for " O'Connor's Child" in the poet's 
 corner of a journal, or for "Eustace Grey" in the space of 
 a crown piece. Surely, living in the Millennium, and rest- 
 ing under your vines and fig-trees, you will have more 
 time to read than we, in this bustling age, who move, live, 
 eat, drink, sleep, and die, at railway speed. If not, we fear 
 the case of many of our poets is hopeless, and that others, 
 besides the author of "Silent Love," w^ould be wise to 
 enjoy their present laurels, for verily there are none else 
 for them. 
 
 Seriously, we hope that much of Crabbe's writing will 
 every year become less and less readable, and less and less 
 easily understood ; till, in the milder day, men shall have 
 difficulty in believing that such physical, mental, and moral 
 degradation, as he describes, ever existed in Britain ; and 
 till, in future Encyclopa3dias, his name be found recorded 
 as a powerful but barbarous writer, writing in a barbarous 
 age. The like may be the case with many, who have 
 busied themselves more in recalling the past or picturing 
 the present, than in anticipating the future. But there are, 
 or have been among us, a few who have plunged beyond 
 their own period, nay, beyond "all ages" — who have seen 
 and shown us the coming eras ; 
 
 '• As in a cradled H ercules you trace 
 The lines of empire in his infant face " — 
 
 and whose voice must go down, in tones becoming more 
 authoritative as they last, and in volume becoming vaster 
 as they roll, like mighty thunderings and many waters, 
 through the minster of all future time ; in lower key, 
 concerting with those more awful voices from within the 
 veil wh'u'li have nlreadv «hnken enrlh. miil wliicli, uttor'^d 
 
80 GEORGE CRABBE. 
 
 "once more," shall shake not earth only, but also heaven. 
 High destiny! but not his whose portrait we have now 
 drawn. 
 
 We have tried to draw his mental, but not his physical 
 likeness. And yet it has all along been blended with our 
 thoughts, like the figure of one known from childhood, like 
 the figure of our own beloved and long-lost father. We 
 see the venerable old man, newly returned from a botani- 
 cal excursion, laden with flowers and weeds (for no one 
 knew better than he that every weed is a flower — it is 
 the secret of his poetry), with his high narrow forehead, 
 his grey locks, his glancing shoe-buckles, his clean dress 
 somewhat ruffled in the woods, his mild countenance, his 
 simple abstracted air. We, too, become abstracted as we 
 gaze, following in thought the outline of his history — his 
 early struggles — his love — his adventures in London — his 
 journal, where, on the brink of starvation, he wrote the 
 affecting words "0 Sally for you'" — his rescue by Burke — 
 his taking orders — his return to his native place — his 
 mounting the pulpit stairs, not caring what his old enemies 
 thought of him or his sermon — his marriage — the entry, 
 more melancholy by far than the other, made years after 
 in reference to it, ^^yet happiness was denied'^ — the publica- 
 tion of his different works — the various charges he occu- 
 pied — his child-like surprise at getting so much money for 
 the "Tales of the Hall" — his visit to Scotland — his mis- 
 taking the Highland chiefs for foreigners, and bespeaking 
 them in bad French — his figure as he went, dogged by the 
 caddie through the lanes of the auld town of Edinburgh, 
 which he preferred infinitely to the new — the " aul' fule" 
 he made of himself in pursuit of a second wife, &c. &c. ; 
 so absent do we become in thinking over all this, that it 
 disturbs his abstraction ; he starts, stares, asks us in to his 
 parsonage, and we are about to accept the offer, when we 
 awake, and, lo I it is a dream. 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 81 
 
 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 There are two classes of character of whom the biography 
 is likely to be peculiarly interesting. One includes those 
 whose lives have been passed in the glare of publicity — > 
 who have bulked largely in public estimation, and who 
 have mingled much with the leading characters of the age. 
 The life of such includes in it, in fact, a multitude of lives, 
 and turns out to be, not a solitary picture, but an entire 
 gallery of interesting portraits. The other class comprises 
 those of whom the world knows little, but is eager to know 
 much — who, passing their lives in severe seclusion, have, 
 nevertheless, given such assurance of their manhood as to 
 excite in the public mind an intense curiosity to know 
 more of their habits, feelings, and history. Such an one 
 was John Foster. While his works were widely circu- 
 lated, and produced a profound impression upon the think- 
 ing minds of the country, himself was to the majority only 
 a name. Few could tell what he was, or where he lived — 
 what were the particulars of his outward history, or what 
 had been the course (^ his mental training. He published 
 little, he seldom appeared at public meetings, his name was 
 never in the newspapers — when he wrote, it was generally 
 in periodicals of limited circulation and sectarian charac- 
 ter, and when he preached, it was to small audiences and 
 in obscure villages. There thus hung about him a certain 
 shade of mystery, shaping itself to the colossal estimate of 
 his genius, which prevailed. He appeared a great man 
 under hiding ; and while some of his ardent admirers found 
 or forced their way into his grisly den, and ascertained the 
 prominent features of his character and facts in his life, 
 more were left in the darkness of mystification and conjec- 
 ture. For twenty years, for instance, we ourselves have 
 
 G 
 
82 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 been entlinsiasts in reference to this writer's genius, and 
 yet, till recently, we never so much as saw his portrait. 
 
 The veil has at length been removed. In the interest- 
 ing volumes before us we find, and principally in his own 
 words, a full and faithful register of the leading events in 
 his life, and of the more interesting movements in his 
 spiritual history. The book is arranged on a plan some- 
 what similar to that adopted in Carlyle's work on Crom- 
 well. The biography constitutes an intermitting chain 
 between the numerous letters, and is executed in a modest 
 and intelligent manner. Besides his correspondence, there 
 are large and valuable excerpts from his journals, and to 
 the whole are appended interesting though slight notices of 
 his character, from the pen of Mr Sheppard. 
 
 Throughout the whole of these volumes we have been 
 impressed with the idea of a mind imperfectly reconciled 
 and indifferently adjusted to the state of society of which it 
 was a part — to the creed to which it had declared its ad- 
 herence — to the very system of things which surrounded it. 
 This is true of many independent and powerful spirits ; but 
 in Foster's mind the antagonism has this peculiarity — it is 
 united to deep reverence and to sincere belief. It is not 
 the fruit of any captious or malignant disposition — it does 
 not spring from any sinister motive. The guilty wish is 
 never, with him, the parent of the gloomy thought. The 
 tremendous doubts which oppress him have forced them- 
 selves into the sphere of his soul, and hang there as if sus- 
 tained by the power of some dark enchantment. You see 
 his mind labouring under an eclipse which will not pass 
 away. In contemplation of the mysteries of earth and 
 time, he stands helpless. Indeed, such gloomy cogitations 
 formed so large a part of his mental scenery, and bad so 
 long ri vetted his gaze, that you can almost conceive him 
 disappointed had they suddenly disappeared. Like the 
 prisoner of Chillon, who, habituated to the gloom of his 
 dungeon, and having made friends with his dismal com- 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 83 
 
 panioiis, at last " regained his freedom with a sigh," Fos- 
 ter woiikl have stared strangely, and almost unhappily, 
 though it had been at the apparition of the " new heavens 
 and the new earth" arising in room of the present, which 
 his melancholy fancy had so dreadfully discoloured. The 
 causes of this habitual gloom seem to have been complex. 
 In the first place, he was naturally a man of a morbid dis- 
 position. His mind fastened and clung to the dark side 
 of every question — to the more rugged horn of each great 
 dilemma — to the shadows, and not to the lights, of every 
 picture. To do this was with him an instinct, which, 
 instead of repressing, he nursed into a savage luxury. 
 Secondly, He was for a large portion of his life a solitary, 
 struggling, and disappointed man — preaching to people 
 who did not understand him, struggling with straitened 
 circumstances, and unsustained, till middle-age, by the 
 sympathy of any female friend. Had a man of his tempera- 
 ment met sooner with the breeze of general and generous 
 appreciation ; and, above all, had he found in youth such, 
 a kindred and congenial spirit as afterwards, in his accom- 
 plished and gifted wife, he had lived a much happier and 
 more useful existence, and taken a kindlier, and, we trust, 
 a truer view of the world and of mankind. Thirdly, As an 
 eloquent writer elsewhere observes, Foster never gave liim- 
 self a real scientific education, and although possessed of 
 keenest sagacity, never rose into the sphere of a great and 
 a trained philosopher. He was to this what a brave 
 bandit is to a regular soldier. Scientific culture is sure 
 to beget scientific calm. The philosopher is taught to take 
 a wide, comprehensive, dispassionate, and rounded view^ of 
 things, which never frets his heart, if it often fails to satisfy 
 his intellect. Foster's glimpses of truth, on the contraiy, 
 are intense and vivid, but comparatively narrow, and are 
 tantalising in exact proportion to their vividness and in- 
 tensity. He sees his points in a light so brilliant that it 
 deepens the surrounding darkness. His minute mode of 
 
84f JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 insight, too, contributed to his melancholy. He looks at 
 objects so narrowly that, as to a microscope, they present 
 nothing but naked and enlarged ugliness. His eye strips 
 away all those fine illusions of distance which are, after 
 all, as real as the nearer and narrower view. This is the 
 curse which blasts him — to see too clearly, and the lens 
 through which he looks becomes truly a " terrible crystal.'* 
 Like Cassandra, he might well wail for his fatal gift. It 
 is a dowry she got in wrath, and has faithfully transmitted 
 to many besides Foster, who may with her exclaim — 
 " ill to me the lot awarded, 
 Thou evil Pythian god." 
 
 From man, thus too utterly bare before him, he turns 
 away, with a deep pensive joy, to Nature, feeling that she 
 is true, were all else untrue — that she is beautiful, were 
 all else deformed — that she stands innocent and erect, 
 though her tenant has fallen — and, like a child in her mo- 
 ther's arms, does he repose, regaining old illusions, and re- 
 calling long-departed dreams of joy. There is something 
 to us peculiarly tender and pathetic in Foster's love of 
 nature. It is not so much an admiration as it is a passion- 
 ate and perpetual longing. It is not a worship, but a love. 
 He throws his being into nature. It is as if he felt his 
 heart budding in the spring trees, his pulse beating high in 
 the midnight tempest and in the ocean billow, his soul 
 shooting up, like living fire, into Snowdon, as he gazes upon 
 it ; or we might almost imagine him the divorced spirit of 
 some lovely scene, yearning and panting after renewed 
 communion, " gazing himself away " into the bosom of na- 
 ture again, while the murmuring of streams, and the song 
 of breezes, and the. waving of pines, were singing of these 
 strange nuptials, the soft epithalamium. He engages in 
 mystic converse with the creation. He seeks for meanings 
 in her mighty countenance, which are not always revealed 
 to him. He asks her awful and unanswered questions. 
 He seems to cry out to the river, " What meanest thou, 
 
JOHN POSTER. 85 
 
 thou eloquent babbler, wilt thou never speak plain, wilt 
 thou never shape me any distinct utterance, from the vague 
 and soft tumults of thine everlasting song ?" — to the rocks 
 and mountains, " Will ye never reveal those secrets of an 
 elder day, which are piled up in your massive walls ; to 
 your solemn hieroglyphics shall there never arrive the 
 key?" but to add, in stern resignation, "Be it so, then; 
 retain your tremendous silence, or utter on your inarti- 
 culate sounds ; better these than the jargon, the laughter, 
 and the blasphemies of the reptile and miscreant race of 
 man ; to you, my dumb kindred, I am nearer and dearer 
 than to those that so speak." 
 
 In forming, however, such a view of man and of life, 
 Foster has committed, we think, an enormous error — the 
 great mistake of his history. He has failed to see the 
 beauty of life, its hopeful tendencies, the dignity of that 
 discipline which is ripening man for a nobler destiny, the 
 soul of goodness which underlies even the evils, the abuses, 
 and the mistakes of the world, and the glory which springs 
 from human suffering, and shines through human tears. 
 In all this he sees little else than unmitigated and unre- 
 deemed misery and guilt, and flies to the prospect of death 
 for relief, as the opium-eater to his drug, or the drunkard 
 to his dram-bottle. "I have yet," he says, toward the 
 close of his life, " one luminary, the visage of death." And 
 in the rising of that pale luminary, that ghostly sun, he 
 expects a reply to all his questionings, and a rest to all the 
 wanderings of hi^ spirit. Surely he expected far too much 
 from such a source. For, in the first place, since the tale 
 of the universe is infinite, can it be told all at once to a 
 finite being ? It is beyond even the might of Death to give 
 to a mind infinite illumination, to which it has failed to 
 give infinite capacity. It may, it must, greatly extend the 
 view, and brighten the medium ; but to suppose that it 
 instantly makes all mysteries plain, were to leave little to 
 do for the vast eternity beyond it. Besides, may not 
 
80 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 mystery continue to be an atmosphere fit for rearing cer- 
 tain future, as it is for rearing certain present, conditions 
 of spiritual being. The caterpillar and the butterfly re- 
 spire the same air. Certain plants, and those of a strong 
 and hardy kind, grow best in the shade. To suppose that 
 Death should explain every enigma is, in fact, to enthrone 
 it in the room of Omnipotence. Thirdly, unless first we 
 be reconciled to life, unless we learn to interpret its sub- 
 lime hieroglyphics, to feel its divine beauty, to read its 
 " open secret," to adore while we wonder at its darkest 
 dispensations, what can death do for us ? The man who, 
 loathing, despising, reviling life, finding only desolation 
 and barrenness in all its borders, turns away from under 
 the vine and the fig-tree, sits with lonely Jonah under his 
 withered gourd, saying, " I do well to be angry, even unto 
 death," is guilty of cowardice, if not of essential suicide : 
 he may be a gifted, but is hardly a heroic man. " It is," 
 says Schiller, " a serious thing to die — it is a more serious 
 thing to live." So it is a great and glorious thing to die ; 
 it is a thing greater, more glorious, god-like, to live a re- 
 signed, active, and " blessed," if not happy life. To use 
 the language of Sartor Resartus, Foster has been in the 
 everlasting no; he has been in the centre of indiiFerence, 
 but he has not reached the everlasting yea; he has not 
 heard, or not received, its sweet and solemn evangel — he 
 has tarried too long in the valley of the shadow of death, 
 and spent many needless hours in the dungeon of the giant 
 Despair; and, worse, has dreamed, that to come forth from 
 its threshold was to reach the Celestial City by a single 
 step ! 
 
 Before proceeding to speak of Foster's merits, we have, 
 in corroboration of these remarks, to advance against him 
 one or two serious charges, made more in sorrow than in 
 anger. We charge him, in the first place, witli a sort of 
 moral cowardice, which it is painful to observe in a man 
 of such gigantic proportions. In his views of moral evil 
 
JOH^; FOSTER. 
 
 87 
 
 there is more of the fascinated fear of the planet-struck 
 than of the strong courage of the combatant. He looks at 
 it rather than seeks to strike it down. Knowing that 
 Omnipotence alone can prostrate it in its entireness — that 
 Omniscience alone can explain its existence — he is not 
 sufficiently alive to the facts that it is reducible, that every 
 one may, in some degree, reduce it, that each smallest re- 
 duction proves that it is not infinite, and that the farther 
 you reduce evil, the nearer you reach the solution of the 
 great problems — why it is, and whence it rose. He seems 
 sometimes to regard the efforts of men to remove, or miti- 
 gate, moral, or even physical, evil, with as much contempt 
 as he would the efforts of barbarians, with their cries and 
 kettle-drums, to drive away an eclipse from off the face of 
 the sun. His own attempts to abate evil are thus paralysed. 
 He keeps, indeed, his post — he maintains the contest — 
 but it is languidly, and with frequent looks cast behind, 
 toward a great reserve of force which he expects to be 
 brought, but which is slow to come, into action. It is the 
 old story of the waggoner and Hercules. The road is 
 miry, the wain is heavy, he is weary, how easy it were for 
 the god to come down and perform the task ! And because 
 he will not yet, Foster becomes sullen, disappointed, and 
 all but desperate. Let no one say that we are not fair 
 judges of a mind so peculiar as his, that we know not Avhat 
 doubts and difficulties oppressed him, or how they affected 
 his spirit. Every thinking mind is haunted, more or less, 
 by precisely those questions which Foster felt himself un- 
 able to solve. Luther felt them in the Warteburg, but 
 bated on account of them not one jot of heart or hope. 
 Evil there was in the world; he was sent to make it less; 
 that -was all he knew, and that was quite sufficient for his 
 resolute and robust spirit. Howard felt them in his " Cir- 
 cumnavigation of Charity," but instead of speculating as 
 to why prisons were needed at all, he went on and made 
 them better. Every missionary to the heathen feels such 
 
88 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 difficulties meeting them in their very darkest shape, and 
 yet perseveres in his holy work, and if he can smite away 
 but a finger from the black colossal statue of evil which 
 stands up before him, is content. Should any deem that 
 we misrepresent Foster's feelings and sentiments on this 
 subject, we refer them to his journals and letters, and par- 
 ticularly to that most withering and unhappy letter ad- 
 dressed to the Rev. John Harris, author of the " Great 
 Teacher," &c. 
 
 We find not less distinct evidence of the same disease 
 in his contributions to the " Eclectic," particularly in his 
 review of " Chalmers's Astronomical Discourses " — in our 
 opinion a very forced, clumsy, and unsatisfactory critique. 
 There, at the supposition of snow existing in some of the 
 other planets, he startles in terror, seeing in it a sign 
 that evil has found its way there as well as here. He is 
 so frightened at this little speck as almost to back out 
 from the discoveries of modern astronomy altogether. Now, 
 we think this a cowardice unworthy, yet characteristic, of 
 Foster ; for, in the first place, what is there so terrific in 
 snow, the pure, innocent, beautiful meteor, falHng from 
 heaven like the shed feathers of the celestial dove, or 
 lying, a many-millioned mirror to the moonbeams? Should 
 not, on the contrary, that far gleam be welcomed as a 
 proof of unity among the heavenly bodies, as attesting the 
 omnipresence of certain general laws, shall we say ? — as a 
 white signal from that stranger land, to tell us that a race 
 of beings, not altogether unallied to us, are there, it may 
 be, engaged in similar struggles, and destined to similar 
 triumphs with ourselves? But, secondly, is snow neces- 
 sarily the sign of-, a curse, or a certain indication of the 
 existence of sin ? This, we think, springs from a theory 
 universally held at one time by a certain school of theo- 
 logians, which the researches of geology have exploded, 
 and which Foster's powerful intellect ought, apart from 
 these, to have taught him to reject, that every species of 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 89 
 
 physical evil is the product of moral, that every slight in- 
 convenience, as well as formidable mischief, may be traced 
 to the same root. Such an absurd theory teaches its vo- 
 taries to cower under the falling snow as under the curse 
 of the Eternal — to find a new testimony to the existence of 
 evil in the icicles — glorious ear-rings ! — which each morn- 
 ing hang under the eaves ; and in every sound, from the 
 earthquake to the sneeze, to overhear the voice of Sin. 
 No ; this will never do. Step forth, John Foster, like a 
 brave man, into that strange snow of Mars, and peradven- 
 ture thou mayest find a braver Evan Dhu, kicking away 
 a luxurious snow-ball from under the head of his retainer, 
 or a gallant footman offering himself up to the wolves in 
 his master's stead, or a noble little band of explorers cut- 
 ting their perilous passage to the summit of some wilder 
 Wetterhorn — finer spectacles, be sure, than wert thou to 
 see ever so many perfect, and perfectly insipid ladies and 
 gentlemen, reclining in some lazy lubberland of perpetual 
 sunshine. Step forth, bathe in the bracing cold of the 
 clime, confront its stern winds, consider its laws of austere 
 and awful progress, and come back a healthier, happier, 
 and better man. 
 
 Had this speculation on snow been only a passing reverie, 
 it had been unworthy any serious notice. But, like the 
 snow on the dusky and dark-red brow of Mars, it lies sig- 
 nificant — a still settled index of much behind and beyond 
 it. It involves in it all the elements of Foster's quarrel 
 with the system of things ; for, as assuredly as in Byron's 
 case, it was a quarrel ; nor wei'e their grounds so dissimilar 
 as might have been at first supposed. Neither knew the 
 real meaning of that grand old fable of Prometheus, as 
 shadowing forth the history of man, nay, forming a dim but 
 colossal type of that higher mystery — the mystery of god- 
 liness — bearing to it such a resemblance as does a battle- 
 ment of evening clouds to the mountains over which it stands, 
 and whose shapes it mutely mimics — the glory of suffering, 
 
90 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 the beauty of sorrow, as teachers, friends, guides, were to 
 them in a great measure veiled. Unphilosophically con- 
 founding physical and moral evil, of which the one seemed 
 to them the monstrous body, the other the malignant soul, 
 of some portentous and unearthly shape, they both bow be- 
 fore it — to the one it becomes a god, his only god, detested 
 and adored ; to the other, an object of melancholy wonder 
 and powerless hatred. Indeed, so similar are the feelings 
 of Foster to those entertained and expressed by the Byron 
 school of sceptics, that, as a profound thinker recently re- 
 marked to us, the change of a single word will serve to 
 •identify them. The Byronding says, since so and so is the 
 case, the Deity must be this and that ; Foster, and his 
 foster-hairns say, if it were this and that, the Deity were so 
 and so. 
 
 But, secondly, we charge Foster with taking up an atti- 
 tude of view and observation which rendered any just con- 
 ception of the universe or its Author impossible, and which 
 a priori throws discredit upon any theory of explanation 
 propounded by himself. His attitude is that of one who 
 confounds the shade over his own mind with the universe 
 which it discolours, in whose eye (as in the well-known 
 fable) the monster-fly swallows up the sun, and who, be- 
 cause he is capable of asking the infinite question, imagines 
 that, therefore, he is able, or entitled to receive, the infinite 
 reply. Nothing but such an infinite answer could appease 
 such inquiries as Foster asks at the earth and the heavens. 
 And because the earth spins round, and the skies shine on 
 in silence, and no such reply as he craves will ascend from 
 their deepest caverns, or come down from their loftiest 
 summits, Foster is disappointed, the more in proportion to 
 his love, just as the more you love any individual, the more 
 you are chagrined if he will not answer you some curious 
 question, but remains obstinately dumb. And though, as 
 we have said, he is fond of questioning nature, and loves 
 her old and solemn harmonies, he is no " Fine-ear" to catch 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 91 
 
 that subtler speech, that fairy music, that " language within 
 language," that angelic strain, which some few purged and 
 prepared spirits, who can the " bird language fully tell, and 
 that which roses say so well," hear, or seem to hear, in the 
 rustle of the leaves awakened at midnight from their dreams 
 of God — in the great psalm of the autumn blasts — in the 
 sweet self- talk of the love- sick summer waves — in the blue 
 smile of the sky — nay, in the hush of evening, and the 
 stammering sparkle of the stars. To these low and silvery 
 whispers, piercing the clash of all common and terrific 
 sounds, like the calm " No" of Shadrach, Meshach, and 
 Abednego, heard amidst the idolatrous symphonies and 
 cymbals on the plain of Dura, Foster's ear is deaf as 
 Byron's. He is aware of their existence, indeed ; he 
 listens to hear them, but they will not speak to him their 
 profoundest tidings; he hears only a great tumult, but 
 knows not what it is — a tumult of grandeur, terror — sweet, 
 and despairing tones, endlessly intermingled — and dies, 
 believing that God is love, but not feeling, with Tenny- 
 son, that 
 
 " Every cloud that spreads above 
 And veileth love itself is Love." 
 
 What Foster demands is precisely that which cannot here, 
 perhaps never, be granted : it is a logical demonstration of 
 the goodness and wisdom of God : such a demonstration 
 seems impossible : it supposes the possibility of a just doubt 
 on such a subject ; and yet if this doubt do once enter the 
 mind, no mere argument can ever expel it. It represents 
 the question as to the character of Deity in the light of a 
 dreadful game, which may possibly go against him. It 
 proves, after all, no more tlian this — that there is a very 
 high probability that God is not a demon. On such blad- 
 ders do some men try to swim on the ocean of the infinite 
 mind. Far better to plunge into it at once, trusting im- 
 plicitly and fearlessly to those voices within the soul — to 
 those whispers in nature — to those smiles on earth below 
 
92 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 and heaven above — to those indefinite but profound im- 
 pressions, not to speak of those distinct declarations of 
 God's Word, which do not demonstrate, but intuitively 
 and irresistibly communicate, the tidings that " All is 
 well!" 
 
 " After all, we are in good hands," was the simple con- 
 clusive reply of a well-conditioned gentleman of our 
 acquaintance to one who had, in a strain of morbid elo- 
 quence, taken the darker side conclusive, because it ex- 
 pressed what is the natural feeling of all untainted and 
 unsophisticated minds, as well as the mature and ultimate 
 result of the highest order of philosophic thinkers. But 
 it is altogether impossible to reach this conclusion through 
 that faithless process which John Foster employs ; as im- 
 possible, as by digging down through the darkness of earth 
 to reach the sun and stars of the antipodes. It is other- 
 wise that Sartor comes out at last into his clear, stern 
 azure. It is otherwise that Goethe meant, it is under- 
 stood, to lead Faust up into his Mount of Vision and 
 temple of worship. 
 
 Our final charge, again, is that he takes too dark, mor- 
 bid, and monkish a view of man and of society. From this, 
 indeed, seem to spring his other errors. He who doubts 
 of man can hardly fail to doubt of God. To believe in 
 man is an indispensable requisite to a proper conception 
 of Deity. Of course we do not mean to deny the doctrine 
 of human depravity ; but we do think that Foster's views 
 of man's nature, whether as exhibited in individual cha- 
 racter or in collective society, are far too stern and harsh. 
 We would as soon judge of an assembly of living men and 
 women from a book of anatomical sketches, as of the true 
 character of the world from Foster's pictures. Earth is 
 not the combination of hell and chaos which he represents 
 it to be. Men are not the pigmy fiends, Lilliputians in 
 intellect, Brobdignagians in crime, from whose society he 
 shrinks in loathing, and the tie connecting himself with 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 93 
 
 whom he would cut in sunder if he could. The past his- 
 tory of society is not that dance of death, that hideous pro- 
 cession of misery and guilt toward destruction, which paints 
 itself on the gloomy retina of his eye. We protest, in the 
 name of our fallen but human perishing, but princely 
 family, against such libels as Gulliver's Travels and Fos- 
 ter's entire works. Were such statements true, we see no 
 help for it but an act of universal, simultaneous suicide, 
 and a giving up of God's creation, on the part of Adam's 
 sons, as a bad job. What a fierce, impotent scowl, he con- 
 tinually casts upon even the innocent amusements of the 
 race — such as children's balls, social parties — begrudging, 
 it would seem, even to doomed and predestinated criminals, 
 such consolations as their case would admit of. More 
 cruel than the ancient crucifiers, he will grant no stupify- 
 ing nor cheering draught to the expiring malefactor. How 
 reluctant, too, he is to admit any moral merit (intellectual 
 merit he is always ready to concede) to those who diifer 
 from him in creed, not, perhaps, more widely than he is 
 found, after all, to diifer from the rest of the Christian 
 world ! How he prowls, like a hyena, round the bedsides 
 of dying sceptics, though repeatedly owning himself so far 
 a sceptic, to drink in their last groans, and insult whether 
 the calm or the horror of their closing hours ; staking thus, 
 in a measure, the holy cause of religion upon a wretched 
 computation of dying beds, upon the pros and cons of the 
 expressions of disease, delirium, and despair — a task fit 
 enough for a contributor to the " Methodist Magazine," but 
 unworthy of a spirit like Foster's. And how slow to ad- 
 mit any degree of interest, or of poetry, or of grandeur, in 
 those colossal faiths which have ruled for ages the great 
 majority of mankind ! — an absurdity as great as though one 
 were to go about to deny the lustre of the serpent's eyes, 
 because his breath was poison, or the beauty of the tiger's 
 skin, because his drink was blood. Ar.d, then, by what a 
 safety-valve he does escape from the ct nsequences of his 
 
94 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 ftitalism, by supposing a general jail-delivery of criminals, 
 who, by his own showing, are no more guilty than the 
 avalanche which destroys the Alpine traveller, or the sandy 
 column which whelms the wanderer in the desert ! 
 
 After all this, it may seem paradoxical to assert that we 
 think Foster an amiable man. He was so, undoubtedly, if 
 universal testimony can be credited ; but he was a slave, 
 in the first place, to unsettled doubts, and, ultimately, to a 
 partial and inconsistent system, as well as, throughout all 
 his life, to a gloomy temperament which clouded his native 
 disposition. His genius reminds us of the moon, but of 
 the moon turned into blood, forced, against her nature, into 
 a lowering, portentous aspect — no longer the still, calm 
 mistress of the night, but a meteor of wrath and fear, 
 emitting at best a gloomy smile, and furnishing a light, fit 
 only to guide the footsteps of murderers, and preside at the 
 assignations of ghosts. We turn, now, gladly from these 
 objections to remark some interesting peculiarities in Fos- 
 ter's character and intellect, as evinced in his " Memoirs," 
 " Correspondence," and articles in the " Eclectic Review." 
 We notice, first, his generosity and width as a critic. Nar- 
 row as a moral judge, he is, as a critic of authors and books, 
 entirely the reverse. He sympathises with all genuine ex- 
 cellence. This alone proves, we think, his superiority to 
 Hall. Hall, we fear, had little admiration for other writers 
 beyond a very few, either inferior to, or cognate with him- 
 self. His treatment of Coleridge, for instance, would be 
 insufferably insolent, were it not ludicrously absurd. 
 Having never taken the trouble to master so much as the 
 language in which Coleridge thought, his verdict on him is 
 as worthless as a plain English scholar's were upon the 
 metres of Pindar. To modern poetry, too, and all its 
 miracles, he was notoriously indifierent. Byron he never 
 read, an omission as contemptible as though he had not gone 
 forth to see a comet which had made itself visible at noonday. 
 Wordsworth and Southcy he liabitually maligned. Now, 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 95 
 
 all this may seem very great to such fawning parasites as 
 the late Dr Balmer, who has carefully recorded it in a bit of 
 Boswellism he contributed to his remains, but seems super- 
 latively unworthy of such a man as Hall. Foster, on the 
 other hand, is a genial and a generous praiser, of much be- 
 neath, much on a level, and much above his own mark. 
 He has a kind word to say for poor Cottle and his Fall 
 of Cambria. He is enthusiastic in his admiration of 
 Hall, Chalmers, Fox, Grattan, Curran, Tooke, &c. Cole- 
 ridge is the god of iiis idolatry, and bitterly does he deplore 
 his miserable habits. Of a transcendant dramatic work 
 (could it be Cain or the Cenci ?) he says, " I was never so 
 fiercely carried off by Pegasus before — the fellow neighed 
 as he ascended." All works he seems to have judged, not 
 by an arbitrary canon of his own or of others' establish- 
 ment, but by the impulse given to his own mind, the stir 
 of respondent strength, whether in contradiction or con- 
 sent, awakened within him, and the joy which they had 
 the power to spread over his melancholy spirit, like sun- 
 shine surprising a sullen tarn into smiles. 
 
 We notice in these volumes numerous evidences of Fos- 
 ter's romantic tendencies. He was a lover of solitary and 
 moonlight walks. " In Chichester there is still a chapel, 
 where the well-worn bricks of the aisles exhibit the traces 
 of his solitary pacings to and fro by moonlight." In all 
 beautiful and majestic scenes he invariably lost himself, as 
 men do in the mazes of a wood. Reverie was his principal 
 luxury, and became his darling sin. In combating the 
 romantic tendency in one of his essays, he is, in reality, 
 fighting with himself; just as, strange to tell, the objections 
 he confutes in his famous sermon on missions reappear, 
 from his own pen, in a letter to Harris, written years 
 afterwards. Formerly we said, " Foster fighting with a 
 fatalist, reminds us of the whole ocean into tempest tossed, 
 to waft a feather, or to drown a fly." Alas, we now find 
 that Foster and the fatalist were forms of the same mind, 
 
06 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 and that the fatalist remains last upon the field. So, hav- 
 ing shrived himself of his original romance by writing an 
 essay against it, the old nature returned with double force 
 than formerly, and was in him to his dying day. In con- 
 nection with this, we notice the abundance and beauty 
 of his natural imagery. No one has turned to more ac- 
 count, in his writings, the charms of nature, and particu- 
 larly the evanescent and ghostly glories of the night, the 
 tints of moonlit flowers, the colours of midnight fields, the 
 shadows of woods, the shapes of mountains resting against 
 the stars, all the fine gradations of the coming on of even- 
 ing, all the wandering voices of the darkness, speaking what 
 in the day they seem to dare not do, and all those " solemn 
 meditations," as peculiar to night as its celestial fires, were 
 well known and inexpressibly dear to the soul of this lonely 
 man. In his use of such images we observe this peculiarity. 
 Some men surround their minds with them unconsciously, 
 they go out to the fields without one thought of collecting 
 images or illustrations, and yet come home laden with them, 
 as with burs or other herbage, which we unwittingly gather 
 in the woods. Foster goes out on express purpose to find 
 them, as if he were a-nutting ; looks at every object with 
 this question. How can I employ you in the expression of 
 truth ? and returns triumphant with a thousand analogies. 
 This, we think, has somewhat affected the naturalness and 
 freedom of his imagery. We should prefer had he allowed 
 the beauties of nature to slide into his soul, and to blend 
 with his thoughts — < 
 
 " Like some sweet beguiling melody; 
 So sweet, we know not we are listenii^g to it." 
 
 Another phase of this romantic tendency was ^is ex- 
 treme attachment to the society of cultivated females, and 
 the conception he formed of the married life as the panacea 
 of his ills. In such company he laid aside the monk, and 
 became all gentleness and good humour. It acted like a 
 spoil upon him, to soothe his most unquiet feelings, and to 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 97 
 
 lay for a season his darkest doubts. It roused, too, the 
 faculties of his mind, and he never was half so eloquent, 
 neither in his writings, nor in the pulpit, nor in the com- 
 pany of his co-mates in intellect, Anderson and Hall, as 
 when, the evening shadows, or the first moonbeams, stealing 
 into the room, he discoursed to " fascinating females," who 
 could understand as well as listen, and feel as well as un- 
 derstand, of the " feelings and value of genius," or of topics 
 dearer and nobler still, while it seemed, in his own beauti- 
 ful words, " as if the soul of Eloisa pervaded all the air." 
 Such moments he relished with the intensest gratification ; 
 they seemed to him foretastes of Paradise, and of the society 
 of angels, and he might well say that they should never be 
 *' forgotten." Out of those " fascinating females" he selected 
 one almost a duplicate of himself — equally intellectual, 
 equally well-informed, equally pious, and equally oppressed 
 with the tremendous darkness of this dark economy. It 
 was like the marriage of two moonlit clouds in the silent 
 sky! To this lady (Miss Maria Snooke — Phoebus, what 
 a name !) he addressed his first celebrated essays. From 
 her society he expected much happiness. On the eve of 
 the marriage, he met, he tells us, " the snow-drops and 
 other signs and approaches of the spring, with a degree of 
 interest which has never accompanied any former vernal 
 equinox." And his expectations seem to have been abun- 
 dantly fulfilled. After many happy years of intercourse, 
 and latterly, on her part, much severe suffering, she died, 
 leaving him less to regret her loss than to grieve that their 
 spirits had not entered together within that mighty veil 
 which had so long tantalised and saddened both. 
 
 " The living are not envied of the dead." But how often 
 are the dead envied of the living ! And no one ever felt 
 this solemn envy more than Foster. We can conceive him 
 kneeling in charnel-houses, and praying their ashes to break 
 silence and speak out. We can conceive him crying aloud 
 amid the midnight hills for some wandering spirit of the 
 
 II 
 
98 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 departed to render up the secret ; and as friend after friend 
 dropped away into the silent land, this impatient eagerness 
 strengthened, and almost amounted to a feeling that those 
 he loved were bound to come back and relieve his harrow- 
 ing anxieties. And it shook him with the very agony of 
 desire when the wife of his bosom and of his soul — his 
 shadow in the other sex, whose doubts, and fears, and de- 
 sires on this subject were the counterpart of his own — de- 
 parted first within the veil. We can image him on his 
 widowed pillow praying for and straining his eyes for her 
 re-appearance — less to see her beloved face once more than 
 to hear some authentic tidings of the shadowy world. But 
 she, too, was silent. She, too, had taken the dread oath 
 of secrecy which all the dead must take ; and he had to 
 recur, in his disappointed loneliness, to the prospect of 
 speedily joining her in that strange company, and of be- 
 coming, in his turn, as intelligent and as uncommunicative 
 as she. 
 
 This supposition is the less extravagant, as we find from 
 these memoirs that Foster was a firm believer in appari- 
 tions, and in all the other departments of what this en- 
 lightened age — which has discovered that the soul of man 
 is a secretion of the brain, and that the snail is growing up 
 by slow stages to the Shakspere (and we suppose the Shak- 
 spere to the Supreme God I) — calls exploded superstitions. 
 He grasped at every line, however frail, which linked him 
 to the spiritual world. If he saw not visions, he dreamed 
 dreams, felt presentiments, shuddered as he almost called 
 up to his imagination the form of a ghost. This " folly of 
 the wise," if a folly it be, he shared with many of the 
 greatest minds of the age — with Napoleon, Byron, Cole- 
 ndge, and Shelley, who all felt that there were some things 
 in heaven and earth more than are dreamt of in our philo- 
 sophies. In Foster these feelings did not amount to fears. 
 They were rather strong yet shuddering desires to know 
 the best or the worst which spiritual beings could tell, or 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 99 
 
 intimate about that future state of existence of which he 
 felt that Revelation had told him little, and Nature no- 
 thing at all. From the company of real solid sorrows, and 
 of men whom he deemed " earthly, sensual, devilish," he 
 turned eagerly, yet pensively, to seek communion with the 
 spirits of the departed ; but even these sad companions 
 were shy to him — they met him not in his solitary walks, 
 and in all his wanderings he was " alone with the night." 
 
 And yet, in spite of all these melancholy musings and 
 romantic tendencies, Foster was a keen, stern, and sarcastic 
 observer of men and manners — of society and political pro- 
 gress. In politics he was a " Radical and something more" 
 — an independent thinker, despising all ties of party, and 
 standing on every question like a fourth estate — one who 
 could sit upon the ground and tell strange stories of the 
 deaths of kings, and who never in one instance sacrificed an 
 atom of the right to an acre of the expedient. It is worth 
 while reading in this work his musings, as of a separate 
 spirit, upon the public transactions of his day. In society, 
 too, he sat an insulated being, whose silence was often more 
 formidable than his words. His face, even when he spoke 
 not, shone a quiet mirror to the " thoughts and intents of the 
 hearts" of those around him, and he came away with their 
 past as well as present history silently inscribed upon his 
 mind. His conversational sarcasm was tremendous. " Was 
 not the Emperor Alexander a very pious man ?" " Very 
 pious," he answered ; " I believe he said grace ere he 
 swallowed Poland." We could quote, if we durst, unpub- 
 lished specimens still racier. Hall himself is said to have 
 felt somewhat nervous in his presence when in this mood ; 
 and there is a floating rumour of a meeting between him 
 and Lord Brougham on some educational question, in which 
 his lordship came off, and shabbily, second best. 
 
 Foster's indolence has been often, but, we think, un- 
 justly, condemned. It ought rather to be deplored. Un- 
 furnished with a regular training, yet furnished with an 
 
100 JOHN FOSTER. 
 
 exquisitely sensitive taste, early '* damned to the mines" of 
 hopeless professional toil, transferred thence to the drudgery 
 of writing for bread — never gifted with a fluent language 
 nor a rapid pen — what wonder that he found composition 
 an ungracious task, or that he shrank from it with a grow- 
 ing and deepening disgust ? Our surprise is that he wrote 
 so much, and not that he wrote so little. Latterly, but for 
 an overwhelming sense of duty, he would not have written 
 at all. If we saw a giant, whose arms had been cut off, 
 moving in impotent strength his bleeding fragments, who 
 would not weep at the spectacle ? In such mutilated might 
 sat Foster at his desk. 
 
 His " Journal and Correspondence" contain much attrac- 
 tive and interesting matter. His letters, without ease, have 
 great sincerity, calm discernment, disturbed by bursts of 
 misanthropical power, as when he calls for a tempest of 
 fire and brimstone upon the Russians, on their invasion of 
 Poland, and a perpetual stream of sarcasm, adds a tart 
 tinge to the whole. His "Journal," on the other hand, is rich 
 in those thoughts which procreate thought in others — in 
 descriptions of natural objects which he encountered — in 
 quiet sidelong glances into human character — in the ex- 
 pression of gloomy and desolate feelings, and in sudden, 
 momentary, and timorous glimpses into the deeper abysses 
 of thought than those where his spirit usually dwells. 
 How grand this, for instance : — " Argument from miracles 
 for the truth of the Christian doctrines. Surely it is fair 
 to believe that those who received from heaven superhuman 
 power received likewise superhuman wisdom. Having 
 rung the great bell of the universe, the sermon to follow 
 must be extraordinary." Hear, again, this criticism on 
 Burke : — " Burke's sentences are pointed at the end — in- 
 stinct with pungent sense to the last syllable ; they are like 
 a charioteer's whip, which not only has a long and effective 
 lash, but cracks and inflicts a still smarter sensation at the 
 end. They are like some serpents, whose life is said to be 
 
JOHN FOSTER. 101 
 
 fiercest in the tail." The whole " Journal," indeed, is a 
 repository of such things. 
 
 How much of Foster's originality lay in his thoughts, or 
 how much in his images, or how much of it resulted from 
 his early isolation from suitable books and kindred minds, 
 we stay not to inquire. As it is, we have in his works 
 the collected thoughts of a powerful mind that has lived 
 " collaterally or aside ** to the world — that never flattered 
 a popular prejudice — that never bent to a popular idol — 
 that never deserted in the darkest hour the cause of liberty 
 — that never swore to the Shibboleth of a party, or, at 
 least, never kept its vow — and that now stands up before 
 us alone, massive and conspicuous, a mighty and mysteri- 
 ous fragment, the Stonehenge of modern moralists. Shall 
 we inscribe immortality upon the shapeless yet sublime 
 structure ? He who reared it seems, from the elevation 
 he has now reached, to answer, No ; what is the thing you 
 call immortality to me, who have cleft that deep shadow 
 and entered on this greater and brighter state of being ? 
 
 We dare not say, w4th a writer formerly quoted, that 
 to " Foster the cloud has now become the sun." But cer- 
 tainly we may say that to him, '' behold the darkness is 
 past, and the true light now shineth," if not in its noonday 
 eiFulgence, yet at least in its mild and twilight softness. 
 In the night he dwelt, and although the visage of death 
 may not have been to him the glorious luminary he ex- 
 pected, yet is it not much that the night is gone, and gone 
 for ever ? "We take our leave of him in his own words — 
 " ' Paid the debt of nature.' No ; it is not paying a debt, 
 it is rather like bringing a note to a bank to obtain solid 
 gold in exchange for it. In this case you bring this cum- 
 brous body, which is nothing worth, and which you could 
 not wish to retain long ; you lay it down and receive for 
 it, from the eternal treasures, liberty, victory, knowledge 
 rapture." 
 
102 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 It is the lot of some men of genius to be born as if in 
 the blank space between Milton's L'Allegro and Pense- 
 roso — their proximity to both originally equal, and their 
 adhesion to the one or the other depending upon casual 
 circumstances. While some pendulate perpetually between 
 the grave and the gay, others are carried off bodily, as it 
 happens, by the comic or the tragic muse. A few there 
 are, who seem to say, of their own deliberate option, 
 "Mirth, with thee we mean to live;" deeming it better to 
 go to the house of feasting than to that of mourning — while 
 the storm of adversity drives others to pursue sad and 
 dreary paths, not at first congenial to their natures. Such 
 men as Shakspere, Burns, and Byron, continue, all their 
 lives long, to pass, in rapid and perpetual change, from 
 the one province to the other; and this, indeed, is the 
 main source of their boundless ascendancy over the general 
 mind. In Young, of the " Night Thoughts," the laughter, 
 never very joyous, is converted, through the effect of 
 gloomy casualties, into the ghastly grin of the skeleton 
 Death — the pointed satire is exchanged for the solemn 
 sermon. In Cowper, the fine schoolboy glee which in- 
 spirits his humour goes down at last, and is quenched like 
 a spark in the wild abyss of his madness — " John Gilpin" 
 merges in the " Castaway." Hood, on the other hand, 
 with his strongest tendencies originally to the pathetic and 
 the fantastic-serious, shrinks in timidity from the face of 
 the inner sun of his nature — shies the stoop of the descend- 
 ing Pythonic power — and, feeling that if he wept at all it 
 were floods of burning and terrible tears, laughs, and does 
 little else but laugh, instead. 
 
THOMAS HOOD. 103 
 
 We look upon this writer as a quaint masquer — as 
 wearing above a manly and profound nature, a fantastic 
 and deliberate disguise of folly. He reminds us of Brutus, 
 cloaking under pretended idiocy, a stern and serious design, 
 which burns his breast, but which he chooses in this way 
 only to disclose. Or, he is like Hamlet — able to form a 
 magnificent purpose, but, from constitutional weakness, 
 not able to incarnate it in effective action. A deep mes- 
 sage has come to him from the heights of his nature, but, 
 like the ancient prophet, he is forced to cry out, " I cannot 
 speak — I am a child !' 
 
 Certainly there was, at the foundation of Hood's soul, a 
 seriousness, which all his puns and mummeries could but 
 indifferently conceal. Jacques, in the forest of Arden, 
 mused not with a profounder pathos, or in quainter lan- 
 guage, upon the sad pageant of humanity, than does he ; 
 and yet, like him, his "lungs" are ever ready to "crow 
 like chanticleer" at the sight of its grotesquer absurdities. 
 Verily, the goddess of melancholy owes a deep grudge to 
 the mirthful magician, who carried off such a promising 
 votary. It is not every day that one who might kave 
 been a great serious poet will condescend to sink into a 
 punster and editor of comic annuals. And, were it not 
 that his original tendencies continued to be manifested to 
 the last, and that he turned his drollery to important ac- 
 count, we would be tempted to be angry, as well as to re- 
 gret, that he chose to play the fool rather than King Lear 
 in the play. 
 
 As a poet. Hood belongs to the school of John Keats 
 and Leigh Hunt, with qualities of his own, and an all but 
 entire freedom from their peculiarities of manner and 
 style. What strikes us, in the first place, about him, is 
 his great variety of subject and mode of treatment. His 
 works are in two small duodecimo volumes ; and yet we 
 find in them five or six distinct styles attempted — and at* 
 tempted with success. There is the classical — there is the 
 
104 THOMAS H001>. 
 
 fancifulj or, as we might almost call it, the " Midsummer 
 Night" — there is the homely tragic narrative — there is- 
 the wildly grotesque — there is the light — and there is the 
 grave and pathetic — lyric. And, besides, there is a style, 
 which we despair of describing by any one single or com- 
 pound epithet, of which his " Elm Tree" and " Haunted 
 House" are specimens — resembling Tennyson's " Talking 
 Oak" — and the secret and power of which, perhaps, lie in 
 the feeling of mystic correspondence between man and in- 
 animate nature — in the start of momentary consciousness^ 
 with which we sometimes feel that in nature's company we 
 are not alone, that nature's silence is not that of death ; 
 and are aware^ in the highest and grandest sense, that we 
 are " made of dust," and that the dust from which we were 
 once taken is still divine. We know few volumes of poetry 
 where we find, in the same compass, so little mannerism, 
 so little self-repetition, such a varied concert, along with 
 such unique harmony of sound. 
 
 Through these varied numerous styles, we find two or 
 three main elements distinctly traceable in all Hood's, 
 poems. One is a singular subtlety in the perception of 
 minute analogies. The weakness, as well as the strength 
 of his poetry, is derived from this source. His serious 
 verse, as well as his witty prose, is laden and encum- 
 bered with thick coming fancies. Hence, some of his finest 
 pieces are tedious, without being long. Little more than 
 ballads in size, they are books in the reader's feeling. 
 Every one knows how resistance adds to the idea of 
 extension, and how roughness impedes progress. Some 
 of Hood's poems, such as " Lycus," are rough as the 
 Centaur's hide ; and, having difficulty in passing along, 
 you are tempted to pass them by altogether. And 
 though a few, feeling that there is around them the 
 power and spell of genius, generously cry, there's true 
 metal here, when we have leisure, we must return to this 
 — yet they never do. In fact, Hood has not been able to 
 
THOMAS HOOD. 105 
 
 infuse human interest into his fairy or mythological crea- 
 tions. He has conceived them in a happy hour ; surely 
 on one of those days when the soul and nature are one — 
 when one calm bond of peace seems to unite all things — 
 when the " very cattle in the fields appear to have great 
 and tranquil thoughts " — when the sun seems to slumber, 
 and the sky to smile — when the air becomes a wide balm, 
 and the low wind, as it wanders over flowers, seems telling 
 some happy tidings in each gorgeous ear, till the rose 
 blushes a deep crimson, and the tulip lifts up a more 
 towering head, and the violet shrinks more modestly away 
 as at lovers' whispers; in such a favoured hour — when 
 the first strain of music might have arisen, or the first 
 stroke of painting been drawn, or the chisel of the first 
 sculptor been heard, or the first verse of poetry been 
 chanted, or man himself, a nobler harmony than lute ever 
 sounded, a finer line than painter ever drew, a statelier 
 structure and a diviner song, arisen from the dust- 
 did the beautiful idea of the "Plea of the Midsummer 
 Fairies" dawn upon this poet's mind : he has conceived 
 his fairies in a happy hour, he has framed them with ex- 
 quisite skill and a fine eye to poetic proportion, but he has 
 not made them alive, he has not made them objects of love ; 
 and you care less for his centaurs and his fairies than 
 you do for the moonbeams or the shed leaves of the forest. 
 How different with the Oberon and the Titania of Shak- 
 spere ! They are true to the fairy ideal, and yet they are 
 human — their hearts warm with human passions, as fond 
 of gossip, flattery, intrigue, and quarrel, as men or women 
 can be — and you sigh with or smile at them, precisely 
 as you do at Theseus and Hippolyta. Indeed, we cannot 
 but admire how Shakspere, like the arc of humanity, al- 
 ways bends in all his characters into the one centre of 
 man — how his villains, ghosts, demons, witches, fairies, 
 fools, harlots, heroes, clowns, saints, sensualists, women, 
 and even his Icings^ are all human, disguises, or half-lengths, 
 
106 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 or miniatures, never caricatures nor apologies for man- 
 kind. How full the cup of manhood out of which he could 
 baptise — now an lago, and now an Ague-cheek — n.ow a 
 Bottom, and now a Macbeth — now a Dogberry, and now 
 a Caliban — now an Ariel, and now a Timon — into the one 
 communion of the one family — nay, have a drop or two to 
 spare for Messrs Cobweb and Mustardseed, who are al- 
 lowed to creep in too among the number, and who attract 
 a share of the tenderness of their benign father. As in 
 Swift, his misanthropy sees the hated object in everything, 
 blown out in the Brobdignagian, shrunk up in the Lilli- 
 putian, flapping in the Laputan, and yelling with the 
 Yahoo — nay, throws it out into those loathsome reflections, 
 that he may intensify and multiply his hatred ; so in the 
 same way operates the opposite feeling in Shakspere. His 
 love to the race is so great that he would colonise with 
 man, all space, fairy-land, the grave, hell, and heaven. 
 And not only does he give to superhuman beings a human 
 interest and nature, but he accomplishes what Hood has 
 not attempted, and what few else have attempted with suc- 
 cess ; he adjusts the human to the superhuman actors — 
 they never jostle, you never wonder at finding them on 
 the same stage, they meet without a start, they part with- 
 out a shiver, they obey one magic ; and you feel that not 
 only does one touch of nature make the whole world kin, 
 but that it can link the universe in one brotherhood, for the 
 secret of this adjustment lies entirely in the humanity 
 which is diffused through every part of the drama. In it, 
 as in one soft ether, float, or swim, or play, or dive, or fly, 
 all his characters. 
 
 In connection with the foregoing defect, we find in 
 Hood's more elaborate poetical pieces no efiective story, 
 none that can bear the weight of his subtle and beautiful 
 imagery. The rich blossoms and pods of the peaflower- 
 tree are there, but the strong distinct stick of support is 
 wanting. This defect is fatal not only to long poems but 
 
THOMAS HOOD. 107 
 
 to all save the shortest ; it reduces them instantly to the 
 rank of rhymed essays ; and a rhymed essay, with most 
 people, is the same thing with a rhapsody. Even dreams 
 require a nexus, a nisus, a nodus, a point, a purpose. Death 
 is but a tame shadow without the scythe. The want of a"^ 
 purpose in any clear, definite, impressive form has neutra- 
 lised the efiect of many poems besides Hood's — some of 
 Tennyson's, and one entire class of Shelley's — whose 
 "Triumph of Life" and "Witch of Atlas "rank with 
 " Lycus " and the " Midnight Fairies "—being, like them, 
 beautiful, diffuse, vague ; and, like them, perpetually pro- 
 mising to bring forth solid fruit, but yielding at length 
 leaves and blossoms only. "^ 
 
 Subtle fancy, lively wit, copious language, and mellow 
 versification, are the undoubted qualities of Hood as a poet. 
 But, besides, there are two or three moral peculiarities 
 about him as delightful as his intellectual ; and they are 
 visible in his serious as well as lighter productions. One is \ 
 his constant lightsomeness of spirit and tone. His verse is 
 not a chant but a carol. Deep as may be his internal me- 
 lancholy, it expresses itself in, and yields to, song. The 
 heavy thunder-cloud of wo comes down in the shape of 
 sparkling, sounding, sunny drops, and thus dissolves. He 
 casts his melancholy into shapes so fantastic, that they lure 
 first himself, and then his readers, to laughter. If he cannot 
 get rid of the grim gigantic shadow of himself, which walks 
 ever before him, as before all men, he can, at least, make 
 mouths, and cut antics behind its back. This conduct is, 
 in one sense, wise as well as witty ; but will, we fear, be 
 imitated by few. Some will continue to follow the unbap- 
 tised terror, in tame and helpless submission ; others will 
 pay it vain homage ; others will make to it resistance 
 equally vain ; and many will seek to drown in pleasure, or 
 forget in business, their impression, that it walks on before 
 them — silent, perpetual, pausing with their rest, running 
 with their speed, growing with their grow^th, strengthening 
 
108 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 with their strength, forming itself a ghastly rainbow on the 
 fumes of their bowl of festival, lying down with them at 
 night, starting up with every start that disturbs their slum- 
 bers, rising with them in the morning, rushing before them 
 like a rival dealer into the market-place, and appearing to 
 beckon them on behind it, from the death-bed into the land 
 of shadows, as into its own domain. If from this dreadful 
 forerunner we cannot escape, is it not well done in Hood, 
 and would it not be well done in others, to laugh at, as we 
 pursued its inevitable steps ? It is, after all, perhaps only 
 the future greatness of man that throws back this gloom 
 upon his infant being, casting upon him confusion and 
 despair, instead of exciting him to gladness and to hope.* 
 In escaping from this shadow, we should be pawning the 
 prospects of our immortality. 
 
 How cheerily rings Hood's lark-like note of poetry 
 among the various voices of the age's song — its eagle 
 screams, its raven croakings, its plaintive nightingale 
 strains ! And yet that lark, too, in her lowly nest, had her 
 sorrows, and, perhaps, her heart had bled in. secret all 
 night long. But now the " morn is up again, the dewy 
 morn," and the sky is clear, and the wind is still, and the 
 sunshine is bright, and the blue depths seem to sigh for her 
 coming; and up rises she to heaven's gate, as aforetime; 
 and as she soars and sings she remembers her misery no 
 more ; nay, hers seems the chosen voice by which Nature 
 would convey the full gladness of her own heart, in that 
 favourite and festal hour. 
 
 No one stops to question the songstress in the sky as to 
 her theory of the universe — " Under which creed, Bezo- 
 nian ! speak or die ! " So, it were idle to inquire of Hood's 
 poetry, any more than of Keats's, what in confidence was 
 its opinion of the origin of evil, or the pedobaptist contro- 
 
 * This thought we copy from Carlyle, who has copied it from the 
 Germans, or our own John Howe. 
 
I 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 109 
 
 versy. His poetry is fuller of humanity and of real piety 
 that it does not protrude any peculiarities of personal be- 
 lief ; and that no more than the sun or the book of Esther 
 has it the name of God written on it, although it has the 
 essence and the image. There are writers who, like se- 
 cret, impassioned lovers, speak most seldom of those ob- 
 jects which they most frequently think of and most fer- 
 vently admire. And there are others whose ascriptions 
 of praise to God, whose encomiums on religion, and whose 
 introduction of sacred names, sound like affidavits, or self- 
 signed certificates of Christianity — they are so frequent, 
 and so forced. It is upon this principle that we would 
 defend Wordsworth from those who deny him the name 
 of a sacred poet. True, all his poems are not hymns ; but 
 his life has been a long hymn, rising, like incense, from a 
 mountain altar to God. Surely, since Milton, no purer, 
 severer, living melody has mounted on high. Yet who can 
 deny that the religion of the " Ode to Sound," and of the 
 " Excursion," is that of the " Paradise Lost," the " Task," 
 and the " Night Thoughts ?" And without classing Hood 
 in this or any respect with Wordsworth, we dare as little 
 rank him with things common and unclean. Hear himself 
 on this point : — 
 
 " Thrice blessed is the man with whom 
 The gracious prodigality of nature — 
 The balm, the bliss, the beauty, and the bloom, 
 The bounteous providence in every feature — 
 llecall the good Creator to his creature ; 
 Making all earth a fane, all heaven its dome ! 
 
 Each cloud-capped mountain is a holy altar ; 
 
 An organ breathes in every grove ; 
 
 And the full heart's a psalter. 
 
 Rich in deep hymns of gratitude and love." 
 
 And amid all the mirthful details of the long warfare 
 which he waged with Cant (from his " Progress of Cant," 
 downwards), we are not aware of any real despite done to 
 
110 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 that spirit of Christianity, to which Cant, in fact, is the 
 most formidable foe. To the mask of religion his motto 
 is, spare no arrows ; but when the real, radiant, sorrowful, 
 yet happy face appears, he too has a knee to kneel and 
 heart to worship. 
 
 r~ But, best of all in Hood is that warm humanity which 
 tjeats in all his writings. His is no ostentatious or syste- 
 matic philanthropy; it is a mild, cheerful, irrepressible 
 feeling, as innocent and tender as the embrace of a child. 
 It cannot found soup-kitchens ; it can only slide in a few 
 rhymes and sonnets to make its species a little happier. 
 Hospitals it is unable to erect, or subscriptions to give, 
 silver and gold it has none ; but in the orisons of its genius 
 it never fails to remember the cause of the poor ; and if it 
 cannot, any more than the kindred spirit of Burns, make 
 for its country " some usefu* plan or book," it can " sing a 
 sang at least." Hood's poetry is often a pleading for those 
 who cannot plead for themselves, or who plead only like 
 the beggar, who, reproached for his silence, showed his 
 sores, and replied, " Isn't it begging I am with a hundred 
 tongues?" This advocacy of his has not been thrown ut- 
 terly away ; it has been heard on earth, and it has been 
 heard in heaven. 
 
 The genial kind-heartedness which distinguished Thomas 
 Hood did not stop with himself. He silently and insen- 
 sibly drew around him a little cluster of kindred spirits, 
 who, without the name, have obtained the character and 
 influence of a school, which may be called the Latter Cock- 
 ney School. Who the parent of this school, properly speak- 
 ing, was, whether Leigh Hunt or Hood, we will not stop to 
 inquire. Perhaps we may rather compare its members 
 to a cluster of bees settling and singing together, with- 
 out thought of precedence or feeling of inferiority, upon 
 one flower. Leigh Hunt and Hood, indeed, have far 
 higher qualities of imagination than the others, but they 
 possess some properties in common with them All this 
 
THOMAS HOOD. Ill 
 
 school have warm sympathies, both with man as an indi- 
 vidual, and with the ongoings of society at large. All have 
 a quiet but burning sense of the evil, the cant, the injus- 
 tice, the inconsistency, the oppression, and the falsehood, 
 that are in the world. All are aware that fierce invective, 
 furious recalcitration, and howling despair, can never heal 
 nor mitigate these calamities. All are believers in their 
 future and permanent mitigation ; and are convinced that 
 literature — prosecuted in a proper spirit, and combined 
 with political and moral progress — will marvellously tend 
 to this result. All have had, or have, too much real or 
 solid sorrow to make of it a matter of parade, or to find or 
 seek in it a frequent source of inspiration. All, finally, 
 would rather laugh than weep men out of their follies, and 
 ministries out of their mistakes ; and in an age which has 
 seen the steam of a tea-kettle applied to change the physi- 
 cal aspect of the earth, all have unbounded faith in the 
 mightier miracles of moral and political revolution which 
 the mirth of an English fireside is yet to effect when properly 
 condensed and pointed. We rather honour the motives 
 than share in the anticipations of this witty and brilliant 
 band. Much good they have done and are doing ; but the 
 full case, we fear, is beyond them. It is in mechanism after 
 all, not in magic, that they trust. We, on the other hand, 
 think that our help lies in the double-divine charm which 
 Genius and Religion, fully wedded together, are yet to 
 wield ; when, in a high sense, the words of the poet shall 
 be accomplished — 
 
 " Love and song, song and love, entertwined evermore, 
 Weary earth to the suns of its youth shall restore." 
 Mirth like that of " Punch " and Hood can relieve many 
 a fog upon individual minds, but is powerless to remove 
 the great clouds which hang over the general history of 
 humanity; and around even political abuses it often plays 
 harmless as the summer evening's lightning, or, at most, 
 only loosens without smiting them down. Voltaire's smile 
 
112 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 showed the Bastile in a ludicrous light, as it fantastically 
 fell upon it ; but Rousseau's earnestness struck its pinnacle, 
 and Mirabeau's eloquence overturned it from its base. 
 There is a call in our case for a holier earnestness, and 
 for a purer, nobler oratory. From the variety of styles 
 which Hood has attempted in his poems, we select the two 
 in which we think him most successful — the homely tragic 
 narrative, and the grave pathetic lyric. We find a speci- 
 men of the former in his " Eugene Aram's Dream." '1 his 
 may be called a tale of the Confessional ; but how much 
 new interest does it acquire from the circumstances, the 
 scene, and the person to whom the confession is made. 
 Eugene Aram tells his story under the similitude of a 
 dream, in the interval of the school toil, in a shady nook 
 of the play-ground, and to a little boy. What a ghastly 
 contrast do all these peaceful images present to the tale he 
 tells, in its mixture of homely horror and shadowy dread! 
 What an ear this in which to inject the fell revelation ! 
 In what a plain yet powerful setting is the awful picture 
 thus inserted ! And how perfect at once the keeping and 
 the contrast between youthful innocence and guilt, grey- 
 haired before its time ! — between the eager, unsuspecting 
 curiosity of the listener, and the slow and difficult throes, 
 by which the narrator relieves himself of his burden of 
 years! — between the sympathetic, half- pleasant, half-pain- 
 ful shudder of the boy, and the strong convulsion of the 
 man ! The Giaour, emptying his polluted soul in the gloom 
 of the convent aisle, and to the father trembling instead of 
 his penitent, as the broken and frightful tale gasps on, is 
 not equal in interest nor awe to Eugene Aram recounting 
 his dream to the child ; till you as well as he wish, and are 
 tempted to shriek out, that he may awake, and find it in- 
 deed a dream. Eugene Aram is not like Bulwer's hero — 
 a sublime demon in love ; he is a mere man in misery, and 
 the poet seeks you to think, and you can think, of nothing 
 about him, no more than himself can. except the one fatal 
 
THOMAS nOOD. 113 
 
 Stain wliicli has made him what he is, and which he long 
 has identified with himself. Hood, with the instinct and 
 art of a great painter, seizes on that moment in Aram's 
 history which formed the hinge of its interest — not the 
 moment of the murder — not the long, silent, devouring re- 
 morse that followed — not the hour of the defence, nor of 
 the execution — but that when the dark secret leapt into 
 light and punishment ; this thrilling, curdling instant, pre- 
 dicted from the past, and pregnant with the future, is here 
 seized, and startlingly shown. All that went before was 
 merely horrible, all that followed is horrible and vulgar : 
 the poetic moment in the story is intense. And how infe- 
 rior the laboured power and pathos of the last volume of 
 Bulwer's novel to these lines ! — 
 
 *' That very night, while gentle sleep 
 The urchin eyelids kiss'd, 
 Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn 
 
 Through the cold and heavy mist ; 
 And Eugene Ai'am walk'd between 
 With gyves upon his wrist." 
 And here, how much of the horror is breathed upon us 
 from the calm bed of the sleeping boy ! 
 
 The two best of his grave, pathetic lyrics are the " Song 
 of the Shirt " and the " Bridge of Sighs." The fir^t was 
 certainly Hood's great hit, although we were as much 
 ashamed as rejoiced at its success. We blushed when 
 we thought that at that stage of his life he needed such an 
 introduction to the public, and that thousands and tens of 
 thousands were now, for the first time, induced to ask, 
 ""Who's Thomas Hood?" The majority of even the 
 readers of the age had never heard of his name till they 
 saw it in " Punch," and connected with a song — first-rate, 
 certainly, but not better than many of his former poems !^ 
 It cast, to us, a strange light upon the chance medleys of 
 fame, and on the lines- of Shakspere — 
 " There is a tide in the affairs of men 
 Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.'' 
 
 I 
 
114 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 Alas ! in Hood's instance, to fortune it did not lead, and 
 the fame was brief lightning before darkness. 
 
 And what is the song which made Hood awake one 
 morning and find himself famous ? Its great merit is its 
 truth. Hood sits down beside the poor seamtress as beside 
 a sister, counts her tears, her stitches, her bones — too trans- 
 parent by far through the sallow skin — sees that though de- 
 graded she is a woman still ; and rising up, swears by Him 
 that liveth for ever and ever, that he will make her wrongs 
 and wretchedness known to the limits of the country and of 
 the race. And hark ! how, to that cracked, tuneless voice, 
 trembling under its burden of sorrow, now shrunk down 
 into the whispers of weakness, and now shuddering up into 
 the laughter of despair, all Britain listens for a moment — 
 and for no longer — listens, meets, talks, and does little or 
 nothing. It was much that one shrill shriek should rise 
 and reverberate above that world of wild confused wailings, 
 which are the true "cries of London ;" but, alas! that it 
 has gone down again into the abyss, and that we are now 
 employed in criticising its artistic quality instead of record- 
 ing its moral effect. Not altogether in vain, indeed, has it 
 sounded, if it have comforted one lonely heart, if it have 
 bedewed with tears one arid eye, and saved to even one 
 sufferer a pang of a kind which Shakspere only saw in 
 part, when he spoke of the " proud man's contumely" — the 
 contumely of a proud, imperious, fashionable, hard-hearted 
 woman — " one that was a woman, but, rest her soul, she's 
 dead." 
 
 Not the least striking nor impressive thing in this " Song 
 of the Shirt" is its half-jesting tone, and light, easy gallop. 
 What sound in the streets so lamentable as the laughter of 
 a lost female ! It is more melancholy than even the death- 
 cough shrieking up through her shattered frame, for it 
 speaks of rest, death, the grave, forgetfulness, perhaps for- 
 giveness. So Hood into the centre of this true tragedy 
 has, with a skilful and sparing hand, dropt a pun or two, 
 
THOMAS HOOD. 115 
 
 a conceit or two ; and these quibbles are precisely what 
 make you quake. " Every tear hinders needle and thread/' 
 reminds us distantly of these words, occurring in the very 
 centre of the Lear agony, " Nuncle, it is a naughty night 
 to swim in." Hood, as well as Shakspere, knew that, to 
 deepen the deepest wo of humanity, it is the best, way to 
 show it in the lurid light of mirth ; that there is a sorrow 
 too deep for tears, too deep for sighs, but none too deep 
 for smiles ; and that the aside and the laughter of an idiot 
 might accompany and serve to aggravate the anguish of a 
 god. And what tragedy in that swallow's back which 
 " twits with the spring " this captive without crime, this 
 suicide without intention, this martyr without the prospect 
 of a fiery chariot ! 
 
 The " Bridge of Sighs" breathes a deeper breath of the 
 same spirit. The poet is arrested by a crowd in the street : 
 he pauses, and finds that it is a female suicide whom they 
 have plucked dead from the waters. His heart holds its 
 own coroner's inquest upon her, and the poem is the ver- 
 dict. Such verdicts are not common in the courts of clay. 
 It sounds like a voice from a loftier climate, like the cry 
 which closes the Faust, " She is pardoned." He knows 
 not — what the jury will know in an hour — the cause of 
 her crime. He wishes not to know it. He cannot deter- 
 mine what proportions of guilt, misery, and madness have 
 mingled with her "mutiny." He knows only she was 
 miserable, and she is dead — dead, and therefore away to a 
 higher tribunal. He knows only that, whate'er her guilt, 
 she never ceased to be a woman, to be a sister, and that 
 death, for him hushing all questions, hiding all faults, has 
 left on her " only the beautiful." What can he do ? He 
 forgives her in the name of humanity ; every heart says 
 amen, and his verdict, thus repeated and confirmed, may 
 go down to eternity. 
 
 Here, too, as in the " Song of the Shirt," the efiect is 
 trebled by the outward levity of the strain. Light and 
 
116 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 gay the masquerade his grieved heart puts on ; bat its every 
 flower, feather, and fringe shakes in the internal anguish 
 as in a tempest. This one stanza (coldly praised by a re- 
 cent writer in the " Edinburgh Review," whose heart and 
 intellect seem to be dead, but to us how unspeakably dear !) 
 might perpetuate the name of Hood : 
 
 " The bleak wind of March 
 
 Made her tremble and shiver, 
 But not the dark arch. 
 
 Nor the black flowing river ; 
 Mad from life's history — 
 Glad to death's mystery 
 Swift to be hurl'd, 
 Anywhere, anywhere 
 Out of the world ! " 
 
 After all this, we have not the heart, as Lord Jeffrey 
 would say, to turn to his " Whims and Oddities," &c. at 
 large. " Here lies one who spat more blood and made 
 more puns than any man living," was his self-proposed 
 epitaph. Whether punning was natural to him or not, w^e 
 cannot tell. We fear that with him, as with most people, 
 it was a bad habit, cherished into a necessity and a disease. 
 Nothing could be more easily acquired than the power of 
 punning, if, as Dr Johnson was wont to say, one's mind 
 were but to abandon itself to it. What poor creatures you 
 meet continually, from whom puns come as easily as per- 
 spiration. If this was a disease in Hood, he turned it into 
 a " commodity." His innumerable puns, like the minnikin 
 multitudes of Lilliput, supplying the wants of the Man 
 Mountain, fed, clothed, and paid his rent. This was more 
 than Aram Dreams or Shirt Songs could have done, had 
 he written them in scores. Some, we know, will, on the 
 other hand, contend that his facility in punning was the 
 outer form of his inner faculty of minute analogical per- 
 ception — that it was the same power at play — that the eye 
 which, when earnestly and piercingly directed, can perceive 
 delicate resemblances in things has only to be opened to 
 
THOMAS HOOD. 117 
 
 see like words dancing into each other's embrace ; and that 
 this, and not the perverted taste of the age, accounts for 
 Shakspere's puns ; punning being but the game of football, 
 by which he brought a great day's labour to a close. Be 
 this as it may. Hood punned to live, and made many sus- 
 pect that he lived to pun. This, however, was a mistake. 
 For, apart from his serious pretensions as a poet, his puns 
 swam in a sea of humour, farce, drollery, fun of every kind. 
 Parody, caricature, quiz, innocent double entendre^ mad ex- 
 aggeration, laughter holding both his sides, sense' turned 
 awry, and downright, staring, slavering nonsense, were all 
 to be found in his writings. Indeed, every species of wit 
 and humour abounded, with, perhaps, two exceptions ; — 
 the quiet, deep, ironical smile of Addison, and the misan- 
 thropic grin of Swift (forming a stronger antithesis to a 
 laugh than the blackest of frowns) were not in Hood. Each 
 was peculiar to the single man whose face bore it, and shall 
 probably re-appear no more. For Addison's matchless smile 
 we may look and long in vain ; and forbid that such a hor- 
 rible distortion of the " human face divine" as Swift's grin 
 (disowned for ever by the fine, chubby, kindly family of 
 mirth!) should be witnessed again on earth! 
 
 " Alas ! poor Yorick. Where now thy squibs ? — thy 
 quiddities ? — thy flashes that wont to set the table in a 
 roar ? Quite chopfallen ?" The death of a man of mirth 
 has to us a drearier significance than that of a more sombre 
 spirit. He passes into the other world as into a region 
 where his heart had been translated long before. To 
 death, as to a nobler birth, had he looked forward ; and 
 when it comes, his spirit readily and cheerfully yields to it, 
 as one great thought in the soul submits to be displaced 
 and darkened by a greater. To him death had lost its 
 terrors, at the same time that life had lost its charms. But 
 " can a ghost laugh or shake his gaunt sides" — is there 
 wit any more than wisdom in the grave ? — do puns there 
 crackle ? — or do Comic Annuals there mark the still pro- 
 
1 1 8 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 cession of the years? The death of a humorist, as the 
 first serious epoch in his history, is a very sad event. In 
 Hood's case, however, we have this consolation : a mere 
 humorist he was not, but a sincere lover of his race — a 
 hearty friend to their freedom and welfare — a deep sym- 
 pathiser with their sufferings and sorrows ; and if he did 
 not to the full consecrate his high faculties to their service, 
 surely his circumstances as much as himself were to blame. 
 Writing, as we are, in Dundee, where he spent some of his 
 early days, and which never ceased to possess associations 
 of interest to his mind ; and owing, as we do to him, a debt 
 of much pleasure, and of some feelings higher still, we can- 
 not but take leave of his writings with every sentiment of 
 good- humour and gratitude. 
 
 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 To attempt a new appraisement of the intellectual charac- 
 ter of Thomas Macaulay, we are impelled by various mo- 
 tives. Our former notice of him* was short, hurried, and 
 imperfect. Since it was written, too, we have had an 
 opportunity of seeing and hearing the man, which, as often 
 happens in such cases, has given a more distinct and tan- 
 gible shape to our views, as well as considerably modified 
 them. Above all, the public attention has of late, owing 
 to circumstances, been so strongly turned upon him, that 
 we are tolerably sure of carrying it along with us in our 
 present discussion. 
 
 The two most popular of British authors are, at present, 
 
 * In GUI' first " Gallery of Portraits." 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY. 119 
 
 Charles Dickens and Thomas Macaulay. The supremacy 
 of the former is verily one of the signs of the times. He 
 has no massive or profound intellect — no lore superior to a 
 schoolboy's — no vast or creative imagination — little philo- 
 sophic insight, little power of serious writing, and little 
 sympathy with either the subtler and profounder parts of 
 man, or with the grander features of nature ; (witness his 
 description of Niagara — he would have painted the next 
 pump better!) and yet, through his simplicity and sin- 
 cerity, his boundless hon hommie, his fantastic humour, his 
 sympathy with every-day life, and his absolute and unique 
 dominion over every region of the Odd, he has obtained a 
 popularity Avhich Shakspere nor hardly Scott in their life- 
 time enjoyed. He is ruling over us like a Fairy King or 
 Prince Prettyman — strong men as well as weak yielding 
 to the glamour of his tiny rod. Louis XIV. walked so 
 erect, and was so perfect in the management of his person, 
 that people mistook his very size, and it was not discovered 
 till after his death that he was a little and not a large man. 
 So many of the admirers of Dickens have been so dazzled 
 by the elegance of his proportions, the fairy beauty of his 
 features, the minute grace of his motions, and the small 
 sweet smile which plays about his mouth, that they have 
 imagined him to be a Scott, or even a Shakspere. To do 
 him justice, he himself has seldom fallen into such an 
 egregious mistake. He has seldom, if ever, sought to alter, 
 by one octave, the note Nature gave him, and which is not 
 that of an eagle, nor of a nightingale, nor of a lark, but of 
 a happy, homely, gleesome " Cricket on the Hearth." Small 
 almost as his own Tiny Tim, dressed in as dandyfied a style 
 as his own Lord Frederick Verisoft, he is as full of the milk 
 of human kindness as his own Brother Cheery ble ; and we 
 cannot but love the man who has first loved all human 
 beings, who can own Newman Noggs as a brother, and 
 can find something to respect in a Bob Sawyers, and some- 
 thing to pity in a lialph Nickleby. Never was a monarch 
 
120 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 of popular literature less envied or more loved ; and while 
 rather wondering at the length of his reign over such a 
 capricious domain as that of letters, and while fearlessly 
 expressing our doubts as to his greatness or permanent 
 dominion, we own that his sway has been that of gentle- 
 ness — of a wide-minded and kindly man ; and take this 
 opportunity of wishing long life and prosperity to " Bonnie 
 Prince Charlie." 
 
 In a different region, and on a higher and haughtier 
 seat, is Thomas Macaulay exalted. In general literature, 
 as Dickens in fiction, is he held to be facile princeps. He 
 is, besides, esteemed a rhetorician of a high class — a states- 
 man of no ordinary calibre — a lyrical poet of much mark 
 and likelihood — a scholar ripe and good — and, mounted on 
 this high pedestal, he " has purposed in his heart to take 
 another step," and to snatch from the hand of the Historic 
 Muse one of her richest laurels. To one so gifted in the 
 prodigality of Heaven, can we approach in any other atti- 
 tude than that of prostration ? or dare we hope for sym- 
 pathy, while we proceed to make him the subject of free 
 and fearless criticism ? 
 
 Before proceeding to consider his separate claims upon 
 public admiration, we will sum up, in a few sentences, our 
 impressions of his general character. He is a gifted but 
 not a great man. He is a rhetorician without being an 
 orator. He is endowed with great powers of perception 
 and acquisition, but with no power of origination. He has 
 deep sympathies with genius, without possessing genius of 
 the highest order itself. He is strong and broad, but not 
 subtle or profound. He is not more destitute of original 
 genius than he is of high principle and purpose. He has 
 all common faculties developed in a large measure, and 
 cultivated to an intense degree. What he wants is the gift 
 that cannot be given — the power that cannot be counter- 
 feited — the wind that bloweth where it listeth — the vision, 
 the joy, and the sorrow, with which no stranger inter- 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY. 121 
 
 meddle th — the " light which never was on sea or shore — 
 the consecration and the poet's dream." 
 
 To such gifts, indeed, he does not pretend, and never 
 has pretended. To roll the raptures of poetry, without 
 emulating its speciosa miracula — to write worthily of heroes, 
 without aspiring to the heroic — to write history without 
 enacting it — to furnish to the utmost degree his own mind, 
 without leading the minds of others one point farther than 
 to the admiration of himself and of his idols, seems, after 
 all, to have been the main object of his ambition, and has 
 already been nearly satisfied. He has played the finite 
 game of talent, and not the infinite game of genius. His 
 goal has been the top of the mountain, and not the blue 
 profound beyond ; and on the point he has sought he may 
 speedily be seen, relieved against the heights which he 
 cannot reach — a marble fixture, exalted and motionless. 
 Talent stretching itself out to attain the attitudes and exal- 
 tation of genius is a pitiable and painful position, but it is 
 not that of Macaulay. With piercing sagacity he has, 
 from the first, discerned his proper intellectual powers, and 
 sought, with his whole heart, and soul, and mind, and 
 strength, to cultivate them. " Macaulay the Lucky" he 
 has been called ; he ought rather to have been called Mac- 
 aulay the Wise. 
 
 With a rare combination of the arts of age and the fire 
 of youth, the sagacity of the worldling and the enthusiasm 
 of the scholar, he has sought self- development as his prin- 
 cipal, if not only end. 
 
 He is a gifted but not a great man. He possesses all 
 those ornaments, accomplishments, and even natural en- 
 dowments, which the great man requires for the full 
 emphasis and effect of his power (and which the greatest 
 alone can entirely dispense with), but the power does not 
 fill, possess, and shake the drapery. The lamps are lit in 
 gorgeous effulgence ; the shrine is modestly, yet magnifi- 
 cently, adorned ; there is everything to tempt a god to de- 
 
122 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 scend ; but the god descends not — or if he does, it is only 
 Maia's son, the Eloquent, and not Jupiter, the Thunderer. 
 The distinction between the merely gifted and the great is, 
 we think, this — the gifted adore greatness and the great ; 
 the great worship the infinite, the eternal, and the god-like. 
 The gifted gaze at the moon like reflections of the Divine 
 — the great, with open face, look at its naked sun, and each 
 look is the principle and prophecy of an action. 
 
 He has profound* sympathies with genius, without pos- 
 sessing genius of the highest order itself. Genius, indeed, 
 is his intellectual god. It is (contrary to a common opinion) 
 not genius that Thomas Carlyle worships. The word genius 
 he seldom uses, in writing or in conversation, except in 
 derision. We can conceive a savage cachinnation at the 
 question, if he thought Cromwell or Danton a great genius. 
 It is energy that he so much admires. With genius, as 
 existing almost undiluted in the person of such men as 
 Keats, he cannot away. It seems to him only a long swoon 
 or 8t Vitus' dance. It is otherwise with Macaulay. If 
 we trace him throughout all his writings, we will find him 
 watching for genius with as much care and fondness as a 
 lover uses in following the footsteps of his mistress. This, 
 like a golden ray, has conducted him across all the wastes 
 and wildernesses of history. It has brightened to his eye 
 each musty page and worm-eaten volume. Each morning 
 has he risen exulting to renew the search ; and he is never 
 half so eloquent as when dwelling on the achievements of 
 genius, as sincerely and rapturously as if he were reciting 
 his own. His sympathies are as wide as they are keen. 
 Genius, whether thundering with Chatham in the House 
 of Lords, or mending kettles and dreaming dreams with 
 Bunyan in Elstowe — whether reclining in the saloons of 
 Holland House with De Stael and Byron, or driven from 
 men as on a new Nebuchadnezzar whirlwind, in the person 
 of poor wandering Shelley — whether in Coleridge, 
 " With soul as strong as a mountain river. 
 Pouring out praise to the Almighty giver;" 
 
TIIOMA& 31ACAULAY. 123 
 
 or in Voltaire shedding its withering smile across the uni- 
 verse, like the grin of death — whether singing in Milton's 
 verse, or glittering upon Cromwell's sword — is the only 
 magnet which can draw forth all the riches of his mind, 
 and the presence of inspiration alone makes him inspired. 
 But this sympathy with genius does not amount to 
 genius itself; it is too catholic and too prostrate. The 
 man of the highest order of genius, after the enthusiasm of 
 youth is spent, is rarely its worshipper, even as it exists in 
 himself. He worships rather the object which genius con- 
 templates, and the ideal at which it aims. He is rapt up 
 to a higher region, and hears a mightier voice. Listening 
 to the melodies of Nature, to the march of the eternal 
 hours, to the severe music of continuous thought, to the 
 rush of his own advancing soul, he cannot so complacently 
 bend an ear to the minstrelsies, however sweet, of men, 
 however gifted. He passes, like the true painter, from 
 the admiration of copies, which he may admire to error 
 and extravagance, to that great original which, without 
 blame, excites an infinite and endless devotion. He be- 
 comes a personification of art, standing on tip-toe in con- 
 templation of mightier Nature, and drawing from her 
 features with trembling pencil and a joyful awe. Macau- 
 lay has not this direct and personal communication with 
 the truth and the glory of things. He sees the universe 
 not in its own rich and divine radiance, but in the reflect- 
 ed light which poets have shed upon it. There are in his 
 writings no oracular deliverances, no pregnant hints, no 
 bits of intense meaning — broken, but broken oif from some 
 supernal circle of thought — no momentary splendours, 
 like flashes of midnight lightning, revealing how much — 
 no thoughts beckoning us away with silent finger, like 
 ghosts, into dim and viewless regions — and he never even 
 nears that divine darkness which ever edges the widest 
 and loftiest excursions of imagination and of reason. His 
 style and manner may be compared to crystal, but not to 
 
124 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 the " terrible crystal" of the prophets and apostles of litera- 
 ture. There is the sea of glass, but it is not mingled with 
 fire, or at least the fire has not been heated seven times, 
 nor has it descended from the seventh heaven. 
 
 Consequently, he has no power of origination. We 
 despise the charge of plagiarism, in its low and base sense, 
 which has sometimes been advanced against him. He 
 never commits conscious theft, though sometimes he gives 
 all a father's welcome to thoughts to which he has not a 
 father's claim. But the rose which he appropriates is sel- 
 dom more than worthy of the breast which it is to adorn ; 
 thus, in borrowing from Hall the antithesis applied by the 
 one to the men of the French Revolution, and by the other 
 to the restored royalists in the time of Charles II., 
 " dwarfish virtues and gigantic crimes," he has taken what 
 he might have lent, and, in its application, has changed it 
 from a party calumny into a striking truth. The men of 
 the Revolution were not men of dwarfish virtues and gigan- 
 tic vices ; both were stupendous when either were pos- 
 sessed : it was otherwise with the minions of Charles. 
 When our hero lights his torch it is not at the chariot of 
 the sun ; he ascends seldom higher than Hazlitt or Hall — 
 Coleridge, Schiller, and Goethe are untouched. But 
 without re-arguing the question of originality, that quality 
 is manifestly not his. It were as true that he originated 
 Milton, Dryden, Bacon, or Byron, as that he originated 
 the views which his articles develop of their lives or 
 genius. A search after originality is never successful. 
 Novelty is even shyer than truth, for if you search after 
 the true, you will often, if not always, find the new ; but 
 if you search after the new, you will, in all probability, 
 find neither the new nor the true. In seeking for para- 
 doxes, Macaulay sometimes stumbles on, but more fre- 
 quently stumbles over, truth. His essays are masterly 
 treatises, written learnedly, carefully conned, and pro- 
 nounced in a tone of perfect assurance ; the Pythian pant- 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY. 125 
 
 ings, the abrupt and stammering utterances of the seer, are 
 awanting. 
 
 In connection with this defect, we find in him little me- 
 taphysical gift or tendency. There is no " speculation in 
 his eye." If the mysterious regions of thought, which are 
 at present attracting so many thinkers, have ever possess- 
 ed any charm for him, that charm has long since passed 
 away. If the "weight, the burden, and the mystery 
 of all this unintelligible world " have ever pressed him to 
 anguish, that anguish seems now forgotten as a night- 
 mare of his youth. The serpents which strangle other 
 Laocoons, or else keep them battling all their life before 
 high heaven, have long ago left, if indeed they had 
 ever approached him. His joys and sorrows, sympathies 
 and inquiries, are entirely of the " earth, earthy," though 
 it is an earth beautified by the smile of genius, and by the 
 midnight sun of the past. It may appear presumptuous 
 to criticise his creed, where not an article has been by 
 himself indicated, except perhaps the poetical first princi- 
 ple that, " Beauty is truth and truth beauty ;" but we see 
 about him neither the firm grasp of one who holds a dog- 
 matic certainty, nor the vast and vacant stretch of one who 
 has failed after much effort to find the object, and wha 
 says, "I clasp — what is it that I clasp?" Toward the 
 silent and twilight lands of thought, where reside, half in 
 glimmer and half in gloom, the dread questions of the 
 origin of evil, the destiny of man, our relation to the lower 
 animals and to the spirit world, he never seems to have 
 been powerfully or for any length of time impelled. We 
 might ask with much more propriety at him the question 
 which a reviewer asked at Carlyle, " Can you tell us, 
 quite in confidence, your private opinion as to the place 
 where wicked people go ?" And, besides, what think you 
 of God ? or of that most profound and awful mystery of 
 godliness? Have you ever thought deeply on such sub- 
 jects at all ? Or if so, why does the language of a cold 
 
126 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 conventionalism, or of an unmeaning fervour, distinguish 
 all your allusions to them? It was not, indeed, your 
 business to write on such themes, but it requires no more 
 a wizard to determine from your writings whether you 
 have adequately thovght on them, than to tell from a man's 
 eye whether he is or is not looking at the sun. 
 
 We charge Macaulay, as well as Dickens, with a sys- 
 tematic shrinking from meeting in a manful style those 
 dread topics and relations at which we have hinted ; and 
 this, whether it springs, as Humboldt says in his own case, 
 from a want of subjective understanding, or whether it 
 springs from a regard for, or fear of, popular opinion, or 
 whether it springs from moral indifference, argues, on the 
 first supposition, a deep mental deficiency, on the second, 
 a cowardice unworthy of their position, or on the third, a 
 state of spirit which the age, in its professed teachers, will 
 not much longer endure. An earnest period, bent on 
 basing its future progress upon fixed principles, fairly and 
 irrevocably set down, to solve the problem of its happiness 
 and destiny, will not long refrain from bestowing the name 
 of brilliant trifler on the man, however gifted and favoured, 
 who so slenderly sympathises with it in this high though 
 late and difiieult calling. 
 
 It follows almost as a necessity from these remarks, that 
 Macaulay exhibits no high purpose. Seldom have so much 
 energy and eloquence been more entirely divorced from a 
 great uniting and consecrating object ; and in his forth- 
 coming history we fear that this deficiency will be glaringly 
 manifest. History, without the presence of high purpose, 
 is but a series of dissolving views — as brilliant it may be, 
 but as disconnected, and not so impressive. It is this, on 
 the contrary, that gives so profound an interest to the writ- 
 ings of Arnold, and invests his very fragments with a cer- 
 tain air of greatness; each sentence seems given in on 
 oath. It is this which glorifies even D'Aubigne's Ro- 
 mance of the Reformation, for he seeks at least to show God 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY. 127 
 
 in history, like a golden thread, pervading, uniting, explain- 
 ing, and purifying it all. No such passion for truth as 
 Arnold's, no such steady vision of those great outshining 
 laws of justice, mercy, and retribution, which pervade all 
 human story, as D'Aubigne's, and in a far higher degree, 
 as Carlyle's, do we expect realised in Macaulay. His his- 
 tory, in all likelihood, will be the splendid cenotaph of his 
 party. It will be brilliant in parts, tedious as a whole — 
 curiously and minutely learned — written now with elabo- 
 rate pomp, and now with elaborate negligence — heated by 
 party spirit whenever the fires of enthusiasm begin to pale 
 — it will abound in striking literary and personal sketches, 
 and will easily rise to and above the level of the scenes it 
 describes, just because few of those scenes, from the cha- 
 racter of the period, are of the highest moral interest or 
 grandeur. But a history forming a transcript, as if in the 
 short-hand of a superior being, of the leading events of the 
 age, solemn in spirit, subdued in tone, grave and testa- 
 mentary in language, profound in insight, judicial in im- 
 partiality, and final as a Median law in effect, we might 
 have perhaps expected from Mackintosh, but not from 
 Macaulay.* 
 
 " Broader and deeper," says Emerson, " must we write 
 our annals." The true idea of history is only as yet 
 dawning on the world ; the old almanac form of history has 
 been generally renounced, but much of the old almanac 
 spirit remains. The avowed partisan still presumes to 
 write his special pleading, and to call it a history. The 
 romance writer still decorates his fancy-piece, and, for 
 fear of mistake, writes under it, " This is a history." The 
 bald retailer of the dry bones of history is not yet entirely 
 banished from our literature — nor is the hardy, but one- 
 sided iconoclast, who has a quarrel with all established 
 
 * This work has since appeared. How far it justifies our prophecy, 
 its candid readers will judge. 
 
128 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 reputation, and would spring a mine against the sun if he 
 could — nor is the sagacious philosophiste, who has access 
 to the inner thoughts and motives of men who have been 
 dead for centuries, and often imputes to deep deliberate 
 purpose what was the result of momentary impulse, fresh 
 and sudden as the breeze, who accurately sums up and 
 ably reasons on all calculable principles, but omits the in- 
 calculable, such as inspiration and frenzy. We are waiting 
 for the full avatar of the ideal historian, who, to the intel- 
 lectual qualities of clear sight, sagacity, picturesque power, 
 and learning, shall add the far rarer qualities of a love for 
 truth only equalled by a love for man — a belief in and 
 sympathy with progress, thorough independence and im- 
 partiality, and an all-embracing charity — and after " Mac- 
 aulay's History of England" has seen the light, may still 
 be found waiting. 
 
 The real purpose of a writer is perhaps best concluded 
 from the effect he produces on the minds of his readers. 
 And what is the boon which Macaulay's writings do actu- 
 ally confer upon their millions of readers ? Much infor- 
 mation, doubtless — many ingenious views are given and 
 developed, but the main effect is pleasure — either a lulling, 
 soothing opiatic, or a rousing and_stimulating gratification. 
 But what is their mental or moral influence ? What new 
 and great truths do they throw like bomb-shells into 
 nascent spirits, disturbing for ever their repose? What 
 sense of the moral sublime have they ever infused into 
 the imagination, or what thrilling and strange joy " beyond 
 the name of pleasure" have they ever circulated through 
 the heart ? What long, deep trains of thought have his 
 thoughts ever started, and to what melodies in other minds 
 have his words struck the key-note ? Some authors 
 mentally " beget children — they travail in birth with chil- 
 dren;" thus from Coleridge sprang Hazlitt ; but who is 
 Macaulay's eldest born ? Who dates any great era in his 
 history from the reading of his works, or has received 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY. 129 
 
 from him even the bright edge of any Apocalyptic revela- 
 tion ? Pleasure, we repeat, is the principal boon he has 
 conferred on the age ; and without under-estimating this 
 (which, indeed, were ungrateful, for none have derived 
 more pleasure from him than ourselves), we must say that 
 it is comparatively a trivial gift — a fruiterer's or a confec- 
 tioner's office — and, moreover, that the pleasure he gives, 
 like that arising from the use of wine, or from the practice 
 of novel-reading, requires to be imbibed in great modera- 
 tion, and needs a robust constitution to bear it. Reading 
 his papers is employment but too delicious — the mind is 
 too seldom irritated and provoked — the higher faculties 
 are too seldom appealed to — the sense of the infinite is 
 never given — there is perpetual excitement, but it is that 
 of a game of tennis-ball, and not the Titanic play of rocks 
 and mountains — there is constant exercise, but it is rather 
 the swing of an easy-chair than the grasp and tug of a 
 strong rower striving to keep time with one stronger than 
 himself. Ought, we ask, a grave and solid reputation, as 
 extensive as that of Shakspere or Milton, to be entirely 
 founded on what is essentially a course of light reading ? 
 
 We do not venture on his merits as a politician or 
 statesman ; but, as a speaker, we humbly think he has 
 been over-rated. He is not a sublime orator, who fulmi- 
 nates, and fiercely, and almost contemptuously, sways his 
 audience ; he is not a subtle declaimer, who winds around 
 and within the sympathies of his hearers, till, like the 
 damsel in the " Castle of Indolence," they weaken as they 
 warm, and are at last sighingly but luxuriously lost ; he is 
 not a being piercing a lonely way for his own mind through 
 the thick of his audience — wondered at, looked after, but 
 not followed — dwelling apart from tliem even while rivet- 
 ing them to his lips ; still less is he an incarnation of moral 
 dignity, whose slightest sentence is true to the inmost soul 
 of honour, and whose plain blunt speech is as much better 
 than oratory, as oratory is better than rhetoric. He is the 
 
 K 
 
130 THOxMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 primed mouth-piece of an elaborate discharge, who pre- 
 sents, applies the linstock, and fires off. He speaks rather 
 before than to his audience. We felt this strongly when 
 hearing him at the opening of the New Philosophical In- 
 stitution in Edinburgh ; that appearance had on us the 
 effect of disenchantment ; our lofty idea of Macaulay the 
 orator — an idea founded on the perusal of all sorts of ful- 
 some panegyrics — sank like a dream. Macaulay the orator ! 
 Why had they not raved as well of Macaulay the beauty ? 
 He is, indeed, a master of rhetorical display ; he aspires to 
 be a philosopher ; he is a brilliant litterateur ; but, besides 
 not speaking oratorically, he does not speak at all, if speak- 
 ing means free communication with the souls and hearts 
 of his hearers. If Demosthenes, Fox, and O'Connell were 
 orators, he is none. It was not merely that we were dis- 
 appointed with his personal appearance — that is sturdy 
 and manlike, if not graceful — it is, besides, hereditary, and 
 cannot be helped ; but the speech was an elaborate and un- 
 graceful accommodation to the presumed prejudices and 
 tastes of the hearers — a piece of literary electioneering — 
 and the manner, in its fluent monotony, showed a heart 
 untouched amid all the palaver. Here is one, we thought, 
 whose very tones prove that his success has been far too 
 easy and exulting, and who has never known by experience 
 the meaning of the grand old words, " perfect through 
 suffering." Here is one in public sight selling his birth- 
 right for a mess of pottage and worthless praise, and who 
 may live bitterly to rue the senseless bargain, for that ap- 
 plause is as certainly insincere as that birthright is high. 
 Here is one who, ingloriously sinking with compulsion and 
 laborious flight, consciously confounds culture with mere 
 knowledge — speaking as if a boarding-school Miss, who 
 had read Ewing's " Geography," were therein superior to 
 Strabo. There, Thomas Macaulay, we thought, thou art 
 contradicting thy former and better self, for we well re- 
 member thee speaking in an article with withering con- 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY l,")! 
 
 tempt of those who prefer to that " fine old geography of 
 Strabo" the pompous inanities of Pinkerton. And dost 
 thou deem thyself, all accomplished as thou art, nearer to 
 the infinite mind than Pythagoras or Plato, because thou 
 knowest more ? And when he spoke again extempore, he 
 sounded a still lower deep, and we began almost to fancy 
 that there must be some natural deficiency in a mind so 
 intensely cultivated, which could not shake as good, or 
 better speeches, than even his first, " out of his sleeve." 
 But the other proceedings and haranguings of that even- 
 ing were not certainly fitted to eclipse his brightness, 
 though they were calculated, in the opinion of many, to 
 drive the truly eloquent to the woods, to find in the old 
 trees a more congenial audience. 
 
 The House of Commons, we are told, hushes to hear 
 him, but this may arise from other reasons than the mere 
 power of his eloquence. He has a name, and there is far too 
 much even in Parliament of that base parasitical element, 
 which, while denying ordinary courtesy to the untried, has 
 its knee delicately hinged to bend in supple homage to the 
 acknowledged. He avoids, again, the utterance of all ex- 
 treme opinions — never startles or offends — never shoots 
 abroad forked flashes of truth ; and, besides, his speaking 
 is, in its way, a very peculiar treat. Like his articles, it 
 generally gives pleasure ; and who can deny themselves an 
 opportunity of being pleased ? Therefore the House was 
 silent — its perpetual undersong subsided — even Roebuck's 
 bristles were wont to lower, and Joseph Hume's careful front 
 to relax — when the right honourable member for Edinburgh 
 was on his legs. But he is, in our idea, the orator who 
 fronts the storm and crushes it into silence — who snatches 
 tlie prejudices from three hundred frowning foreheads and 
 binds it as a crown unto him — and who, not on some othei* 
 and less difficult arena, but on that very field, w^ins the 
 laurels which he is to wear. Those are the eloquent sen- 
 tences which, though hardly heard above the tempest of 
 
132 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 Opposition, yet are heard, and felt as well as heard, and 
 obeyed as well as felt, which bespeak the surges at their 
 loudest, and immediately there is a great calm. 
 
 We are compelled, therefore, as our last general remark 
 on Macaulay, to call him rather a large and broad, than a 
 subtle, sincere, or profound spirit. A simple child of 
 Nature, trembling before the air played by some invisible 
 musician behind him — what picture could be more exactly 
 his antithesis? But neither has he, in any high degree, either 
 the gift of philosophic analysis, or the subtle idealising 
 power of the poet. Clear, direct, uncircumspective thought 
 — vivid vision of the characters he describes — an eye to 
 see, rather than an imagination to combine — strong, but 
 subdued enthusiasm — learning of a wide range, and infor- 
 mation still more wonderful in its minuteness and accuracy 
 — a style limited and circumscribed by mannerism, but 
 having all power and richness possible within its own 
 range, full of force, though void of freedom — and a tone 
 of conscious mastery, in his treatment of every subject, 
 are some of the qualities which build him up — a strong 
 and thoroughly furnished man, fit surely for more massive 
 deeds than either a series of sparkling essays, or what shall 
 probably be a one-sided history. 
 
 In passing from his general characteristics to his parti- 
 cular works, there is one circumstance in favour of the 
 critic. While many authors are much, their writings are 
 little known ; but if ever any writings were published, it 
 is Macaulay's. A glare of publicity, as wide almost as the 
 bunshine of the globe, rests upon them ; and it is always 
 easier to speak to men of what they know perfectly, than 
 of what they know in part. To this there is perhaps an 
 exception in his contributions to " Knight's Quarterly 
 Magazine." That periodical, some of our readers may be 
 aware, was of limited circulation and limited life. " It 
 
 sparkled, was exhaled, and went to ;" yet Professor 
 
 V/ ilsoii has been known to say, that its four or five volumes 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY. 133 
 
 are equal in talent to any four or five in the compass of 
 periodical literature. To this opinion we must respectfully 
 demur ; at least we found the reading of two or three of 
 them rather a hard task, the sole relief being in the papers 
 of Macaulay, and would be disposed to prefer an equal 
 number of " Blackwood," " Tait," or the old " London 
 Magazine." 
 
 Macaulay's best contributions to this are a series of 
 poems, entitled " Lays of the Roundheads." These, though 
 less known than his " Lays of the League," which also 
 appeared in " Knight," are, we think, superior. They are 
 fine anticipations of the " Lays of Ancient Rome." Like 
 Scott, vaulting between Claverhouse and Burley, and 
 entering with equal gusto into the souls of both, Macaulay 
 sings with equal spirit the song of the enthusiastic Cavalier 
 and that of the stern Roundhead. He ccfuld have acted as 
 poet-laureate to Hannibal as well as to the Republic, and 
 his " Lays of Carthage" would have been as sweet, as 
 strong, and more pathetic than his " Lays of Rome." 
 " How happy could he be with either, were t'other dear 
 charmer away." Not thus could Carlyle pass from his 
 " Life of Cromwell" to a panegyric on the " Man of Blood," 
 whose eyes " could hear to look on torture, hut durst not 
 look on warT But Macaulay is the artist, sympathising 
 more with the poetry than with the principles of the great 
 Puritanic contest. 
 
 His " Roman Lays," though of a later date, fall natu- 
 rally under the same category of consideration. These, 
 when published, took the majority of the public by sur- 
 prise, who were nearly as astonished at this late flowering 
 of poetry in the celebrated critic, as were the Edinburgh 
 people, more recently, at the portentous tidings that Patrick 
 Robertson, also, was among the poets. The initiated, how- 
 ever, acquainted with his previous eff*usions, hailed the 
 phenomenon (not as in Patrick's case, with shouts of spurt- 
 ing laughter) but with bursts of applause, which the gene- 
 
134 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 ral voice more tlian confirmed. The day when the " Lays" 
 appeared, though deep in autumn, seemed a belated dog- 
 day, so frantic did their admirers become. Homer, Scott, 
 Wordsworth, and Byron, were now to hide their diminished 
 heads, for an old friend under a new face had arisen to 
 eclipse them all ; and, for martial spirit, we are free to 
 confess the " Lays" have never been surpassed, save by 
 Homer, Scott, and by Burns, whose one epithet, " red wat 
 shod," whose one descrij^tion of the dying Scotch soldier 
 in the " Earnest Cry," and whose one song, " Go fetch for 
 me a pint of wine," are enough to stamp him among the 
 foremost of martial poets. Macaulay's ballads sound in 
 parts like the thongs of Bellona. Written, it is said, in 
 the War-office, the Genius of Battle might be figured bend- 
 ing over the author, sternly smiling on her last poet, and 
 shedding from her wings a ruddy light upon its rapidly 
 and furiously-filling page. But the poetry of war is not of 
 the highest order. Seldom, except when the war is en- 
 nobled by some great cause, as when Deborah uttered her 
 unequalled thanksgiving, can the touch of the sword extract 
 the richest life's blood of poetry. Selfish is the exultation 
 over victory, selfish the wailing under defeat. The song 
 of the sword must soon give place to the song of the bell ; 
 and the pastoral ditty pronounced over the reaping-hook 
 shall surpass all lyrical baptisms of the spear. As it is, 
 the gulph between the " Lays" — amazingly spirited though 
 they be — and intellectual, imaginative, or moral poetry, is 
 nearly as wide as between "Chevy Chase "and " Laodamia." 
 }4esides, the "Lays" are in a great measure centos; the 
 images are no more original than the facts, and the poetic 
 effect is produced through the singular rapidity, energy, 
 and felicity of the narration, and the breathless rush of tlie 
 verse, " which rings to boot and saddle." One of the finest 
 touches, for example, is imitated from Scott. 
 
 " The kites know well the long stern swell 
 That bids the Romans close" — 
 
THOMAS MACALLAN. 135 
 
 Macaulay has it. In the " Ladj of the Lake" it is : — 
 
 *' The exulting eagle scream'd afar, 
 She knew the voice of Alpine's war.*' 
 
 Indeed, no part of the " Lays" rises higher than the better 
 passages of Scott. As a whole, they are more imitative 
 and less rich in figure and language than his poetry ; and 
 we have been unable to discover any powers revealed in 
 them which his prose works had not previously and amply 
 disclosed. In fact, their excessive popularity arose in a 
 great measure from the new attitude in which they pre- 
 sented their writer. Long accustomed to speak to the 
 public, he suddenly volunteered to sing, and his song was 
 harmonious, and between gratitude and surprise was vehe- 
 mently encored. It was as if Helen Faucit were to com- 
 mence to lecture, and should lecture well ; or as though 
 Douglas Jerrold were to announce a volume of sermons, 
 and the sermons turn out to be excellent. This, after all, 
 would only prove versatility of talent ; it would not enlarge 
 our conception of the real calibre of their powers. Nay, 
 we hesitate not to assert that certain passages of Macaulay's 
 prose rise higher than the finest raptures of his poetry, and 
 that the term eloquence will measure the loftiest reaches 
 of either. 
 
 This brings us to say a few words on his contributions 
 to the " Edinburgh Keview." We confess, that had we 
 been called on while new from reading those productions, 
 our verdict on them would have been much more enthu- 
 siastic. Their immediate effect is absolutely intoxicating. 
 Each reads like a new Waverley tale. " More — give us 
 more — it is divine!" we cry, like the Cyclops when he 
 tasted of the wine of Outis. As Pitt adjourned the court 
 after Sheridan's Begum speech, so, in order to judge fairly, 
 we are compelled to adjourn the criticism. Days even 
 have to elapse ere the stern question begins slowly, through 
 the golden mist, to lift up its head — " What have you 
 gained ? Have you only risen from a more refined * Noctea 
 
136 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 Ambrosianae?' Have you only been conversing with an 
 elegant artist ? or has a prophet been detaining you in his 
 terrible grasp ? or has Apollo been touching your trembling 
 ears?" As we answer we almost blush, remembering our 
 tame and sweet subjection ; and yet the moment that the 
 enchantment again assails us, it again is certain to prevail. 
 But what is the explanation of this power ? Is it alto- 
 gether magical, or does it admit of analysis ? Macaulay's 
 writings have one very peculiar and very popular quality. 
 They are eminently clear. They can by no possibility, at 
 tinj time, be nebulous. You can read them as you run. 
 Schoolboys devour them with as much zest as bearded men. 
 This clearness is, vv^e think, connected with, deficiency in his 
 speculative and imaginative faculties ; but it does not so 
 appear to the majority of readers. Walidng in an even 
 and distinct pathway, not one stumbling-stone or alley of 
 gloom in its whole course, no Hill of Difficulty rising, nor 
 Path of Danger diverging, greeted, too, by endless vistas 
 of interest and beauty, all are but too glad, and too grate- 
 ful, to get so trippingly along. Vanity, also, whispers to 
 the more ambitious : " What we can so easily understand 
 we could easily equal ; " and thus are the readers kept on 
 happy terms both with the author and themselves. His 
 writings have all the stimulus of oracular decision, without 
 one particle of oracular darkness. His papers, too, are 
 thickly studded with facts. This itself, in an age like ours, 
 is enough to recommend them, especially when tliese facts 
 are so carefully selected — when told now with emphasis so 
 striking, and now with negligence so graceful ; and when 
 suspended around a theory at once dazzling and slight — 
 at once paradoxical and pleasing. The reader, beguiled, 
 believes himself reading something more agreeable than 
 history, and more veracious than fiction. It is a very waltz 
 of facts that he witnesses ; and yet how consoling to reflect 
 that tliey are facts after all ! Again, Macaulay, as we have 
 repeatedly hinted, is given to paradoxes. But then these 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY. 137 
 
 paradoxes are so harmless, so respectable, so well- 
 behaved — his originalities are so orthodox — and his mode 
 of expressing them is at once so strong and so measured — 
 that people feel both the tickling sensation of novelty and 
 a perfect sense of safety, and are slow to admit that the 
 author, instead of being a bold, is a timorous thinker, one 
 of the literary as well as political juste-milieu. Again, his 
 manner and style are thoroughly English. As his sympa- 
 thies are, to a great degree, with English modes of thought 
 and habits of action, so his language is a stream of English 
 undefiled. All the territories which it has traversed have 
 enriched, without colouring, its waters. Even the most 
 valuable of German refinements — such as that common 
 one of subjective and objective — are sternly shyed. That 
 philosophic diction which has been from Germany so gene- 
 rally transplanted, is denied admittance into Macaulay's 
 grounds, exciting a shrewd suspicion that he does not often 
 require it for philosophical purposes. Scarcely a phrase 
 or w^ord is introduced which Swift would not have sanc- 
 tioned. In anxiety to avoid a barbarous and Mosaic dic- 
 tion, he goes to the other extreme, and practises purism 
 and elaborate simplicity. Perhaps under a weightier bur- 
 den, like Charon's skitf, such a style might break down ; 
 but, as it is, it floats on, and carries the reader with it, in 
 all safety, rapidity, and ease. Again, this writer has — 
 apart from his clearness, his bridled paradox, and his 
 English style — a power of interesting his readers, which we 
 may call, for want of a more definite term, tact. This art 
 he has taught himself gradually ; for in his earlier articles, 
 such as that on " Milton," and the " Present Administra- 
 tion," there were a prodigality and a recklessness — a pro- 
 digality of image, and a recklessness of statement — which 
 argued an impulsive nature, not likely so soon to subside 
 into a tactician. Long ago, however, has he change tout 
 cela. Now he can set his elaborate passages at proper dis- 
 tances from each other ; he peppers his page more spar- 
 
138 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 ingly with the condiments of metaphor and image ; he in- 
 terposes anecdotes to break the blaze of his splendour ; he 
 consciously stands at ease, nay, condescends to nod, the 
 better to prepare his reader, and breathe himself for a 
 grand gallop ; and though he has not the art to conceal 
 his art, yet he has the skill always to fix his reader — al- 
 ways to write, as he himself says of Horace Walpole, " what 
 everybody w^ill like to read." Still further, and finally, he 
 has a quality different from and superior to all these — he 
 has genuine literary enthusiasm, which public life has 
 not yet been able to chill. He is not an inspired child, 
 but he is still an ardent schoolboy ; and what many count 
 and call his vice we count his salvation. It is this un- 
 feigned love of letters and genius which (dexterously 
 managed, indeed) is the animating and inspiring element 
 of Macaulay's better criticisms, and the redeeming point 
 in his worse. It is a love which many waters have been 
 unable to destroy, and which shall burn till death. When 
 he retires from public life, like Lord Grenville, he may 
 say, " I return to Plato and the " Iliad.' " 
 
 We must be permitted, ere we close, a few remarks on 
 some of his leading papers. " Milton" was his " Reuben 
 — his first-born — the beginning of his strength," and 
 thought by many " the excellency of dignity, and the ex- 
 cellency of power." It was gorgeous as an eastern tale. 
 He threw such a glare about Milton that at times you 
 could not see him. The article came clashing down 
 on the floor of our literature like a gauntlet of defiance, 
 and all wondered what young Titan could have launched 
 it. Many inquired, " Starting at such a rate, whither is 
 he likely to go?" Meanwhile the wiser, while admiring, 
 quietly smiled, and whispered in reply, " At such a rate 
 no man can or ought to advance." Meanwhile, too, a tribute 
 to Milton from across the waters, less brilliant, but spring- 
 ing from a more complete and mellow sympathy with him, 
 though at first overpowered, began steadily and slowly to 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY. 139 
 
 gain the superior suffrage of the age, and from that pride 
 of place has not yet receded. On the contrary, Macaulay's 
 paper he himself now treats as the brilliant bastard of his 
 mind. Of such splendida vitia he need not be ashamed. 
 We linger as we remember the wild delight with which 
 we first read his picture of the Puritans, ere it was hack- 
 neyed by quotation, and ere we thought it a rhetorical 
 bravura. How burning his print of Dante! The best 
 frontispiece to this paper on " Milton" would be the figure 
 of Robert Hall, at the age of sixty, lying on his back, and 
 learning Italian, in order to verify Macaulay's description 
 of the " man that had been in hell." 
 
 In what a different light does the review of Croker's 
 "Boswell" exhibit our author! He sets out, like Slien- 
 stone, by saying, " I will, I will be witty ;" and, like him, 
 the will and the power are equal. Macaulay's wit is al- 
 ways sarcasm — sarcasm embittered by indignation, and yet 
 performing its minute dissections with judicial gravity. 
 Here he catches his Rhadamanthus of the Shades, in the 
 upper air of literature, and his vengeance is more ferocious 
 than his wont. He first flays, then kills, then tramples, 
 and then hangs his victim in chains. It is the onset of 
 one whose time is short, and who expects reprisals in an- 
 other region. Nor will his sarcastic vein, once awakened 
 against Croker, sleep till it has scorched poor Bozzy to 
 ashes, and even singed the awful wig of Johnson. We 
 cannot comprehend Macaulay's fury at Boswell, whom he 
 crushes with a most disproportionate expenditure of power 
 and anger. Nor can we coincide with his eloquent en- 
 forcement of the opinion, first propounded by Burke, then 
 seconded by Mackintosh, and which seems to have become 
 general, that Johnson is greater in Boswell's book than in 
 his own works. To this we demur. Boswell's book gives 
 us little idea of Johnson's eloquence or power of grappling 
 with higher subjects — " Rasselas" and the " Lives of the 
 Poets" do. Boswell's book does justice to Johnson's wit, 
 
1 40 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 readiness, and fertility ; but if we could see the full force 
 of his fancy, the full energy of his invective, and his full 
 sensibility to, and command over, the moral sublime, we 
 must consult such papers in the " Idler" as that wonderful 
 one on the Vultures, or in the " Rambler" as Anningate 
 and Ajut, his London, and his Vanity of Human AVishes. 
 Boswell, we venture to assert, has not saved one great 
 sentence of his idol — such as we may find profusely scat- 
 tered in his own writings — nor has recorded fully any of 
 those conversations, in which, pitted against Parr or Burke, 
 he talked his best. If Macaulay merely means that Bos- 
 well, through what he has preserved, and through his own 
 unceasing admiration, gives us a higher conception of 
 Johnson's e very-day powers of mind than his writings 
 supply, he is right ; but in expressly claiming the immor- 
 tality for the " careless table-talk," which he denies to the 
 works, and forgetting that the works discover higher facul- 
 ties in special display, we deem him mistaken. 
 
 In attacking Johnson's style, Macaulay is, unconsciously, 
 a suicide ; not that his style is modelled upon Johnson's, 
 or that he abounds in sesquipedalia verba — he has never 
 needed large or new words, either to cloak up mere com- 
 monplace, or to express absolute originality — but many of 
 the faults he charges against Johnson belong to himself. 
 Uniformity of march — want of flexibility and ease — con- 
 sequent difficulty in adapting itself to common subjects — 
 perpetual and artfully balanced antithesis — were, at any 
 rate, once peculiarities of Macaulay's writing, as well as of 
 Johnson's, nor are they yet entirely relinquished. After 
 all, such faults are only the awkward steps of the elephant, 
 which only the monkey can deride ; or we may compare 
 them to the unwieldy but sublime movements of a giant 
 telescope, which turns slowly and solemnly, as if in time 
 and tune with the stately steps of majesty with which the 
 great objects it contemplates are revolving. 
 
 The article on Byron, for light and sparkling brilliance, 
 
THOMAS MACAU LAY. 141 
 
 is Macaulay's finest paper. Perhaps it is not sufficiently 
 grave or profound for the subject. There are, we think, 
 but two modes of properly writing about Byron — the one 
 is the Monody, the other the Impeachment : this paper is 
 neither. Mere criticism over such dread dust is imperti- 
 nent ; mere panegyric impossible. Either with condem- 
 nation melting down in irrepressible tears, or with tears 
 drying up in strong censure, should we approach the me- 
 mory of Byron, if, indeed, eternal silence were not better 
 still. 
 
 Over one little paper we are apt to pause with a pecu- 
 liar fondness — the paper on "Bunyan." As no one has 
 greater sympathy with the spirit of the Puritans, without 
 having much with their peculiar sentiments, than Carlyle, 
 so no one sympathises more with the literature of that 
 period, without much else in common (unless we except 
 Southey), than Macaulay. The " Pilgrim's Progress" is to 
 him, as to many, almost a craze. He cannot speak calmly 
 about it. It continues to shine in the purple light of 
 youth ; and, amid all the paths he has traversed, he has 
 never forgotten that immortal path which Bunyan's genius 
 has so boldly mapped out, so variously peopled, and so 
 richly adorned. How can it be forgotten, since it is at 
 once the miniature of the entire world, and a type of the 
 progress of every earnest soul. The City of Destruction, 
 the Slough of Despond, the Delectable Mountains, the 
 Valley of the Shadow of Death, Beulah, and the Black 
 River, are still extant, unchangeable realities, as long as 
 man continues to be tried and to triumph. But it is less 
 in this typical aspect than as an interesting tale that Ma- 
 caulay seems to admire it. Were we to look at it in this 
 light alone, we snould vastly prefer " Turpin's Ride to 
 York," or " Tam O'Shanter's Progress to Alloway Kirk." 
 But as an unconscious mythic history of man's moral and 
 spiritual advance, its immortality is secure, though its 
 merits are as yet in this point little appreciated. Bunyan, 
 
14.2" THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 indeed, knew not what he did ; but then he spake inspired 
 his deep heart prompted him to say that to which all deep 
 hearts in all ages should respond ; and we may confidently 
 predict that never shall that road be shut uj) or deserted. 
 As soon stop the current or change the course of the black 
 and bridgeless river. 
 
 We might have dwelt, partly in praise and partly in 
 blame, on some of his other articles — might, for instance, 
 have combated his slump and summary condemnation, in 
 " Dryden," of Ossian's poems — poems which, striking, as 
 they did, all Europe to the soul, must have had some merit, 
 and which, laid for years to the burning heart of Napoleon, 
 must have had some corresponding fire. That, said Cole- 
 ridge, of Thomson's " Seasons," lying on the cottage win- 
 dow-sill, is true fame ; but was there no true fame in the 
 fact that Napoleon, as he bridged the Alps, and made at 
 Lodi impossibility itself the slave of his genius, had these 
 poems in his travelling carriage ? Could the chosen com- 
 panion of such a soul, in such moments, be altogether false 
 and worthless ? Ossian's Poems we regard as a ruder 
 " Robbers" — a real though clouded voice of poetry, rising 
 in a low age, prophesying and preparing the way for the 
 miracles which followed ; and we doubt if Macaulay him- 
 self has ever equalled some of the nobler flights of JMac- 
 pherson. We may search his waitings long ere we find 
 anything so sublime, though we may find many passages 
 equally ambitious, as the " Address to the Sun." 
 
 He closes his collected articles with his " AVarren Hast- 
 ings," as with a grand finale. This we read w^ith the 
 more interest, as we fancy it a chapter extracted from his 
 forthcoming history. As such it justifies our criticism by 
 anticipation. Its personal and literary sketches are un- 
 equalled, garnished as they are with select scandal, and 
 surrounded with all the accompaniments of dramatic art. 
 Hastings' trial is a picture to which that of Lord Erskine, 
 highly wrought though it be, is vague and forced, and 
 
THOMAS MACAULAY. 143 
 
 which, in its thick and crowded magnificence, reminds 
 you of the descriptions of Tacitus, or (singula rconnection I ) 
 of the paintings of Hogarth. As in Hogarth, the varietv 
 of figures and circumstances is prodigious, and each and 
 all bear upon the main object, to which they point like 
 fingers ; so from every face, figure, aspect, and attitude, 
 in the crowded Hall of Westminster, light rushes on the 
 brow of Hastings, who seems a fallen god in the centre of 
 the god-like radiance. Even Fox's " sword" becomes sig- 
 nificant, and seems tothii^st for the proconsul's destruction. 
 But Macaulay, though equal to descriptions of men in all 
 difficult and even sublime postures, never describes scenery 
 well. His landscapes are too artificial and elaborate. 
 When, for example, he paints "Paradise" in Byron, or 
 *' Pandemonium" in Dryden, it is by parts and parcels, 
 and you see him pausing and rubbing his brows between 
 each lovely or each terrible item. The scene reluctantly 
 comes, or rather is pulled into view, in slow and painful 
 series. It does not rush over his eye, and require to be 
 detained in its giddy passage. Hence his picture of India 
 in "Hastings" is an admirable picture of an Indian village, 
 but not of India, the country. You have the "old oaks" 
 — the graceful maiden with the pitcher on her head — the 
 courier shaking his bunch of iron rings to scare away the 
 hyenas — but where the eternal bloom, the immemorial 
 temples, the vast blood-spangled mists of superstition, 
 idolatry, and caste, which brood over the sweltering land 
 — the Scotlands of jungle, lighted up by the eyes of tigers 
 as with infernal stars — the Ganges, the lazy deity of the 
 land, creeping down reluctantly to the sea — the heat, en- 
 compassing the country like a sullen, sleepy hell — the swift 
 steps of tropical death, heard amid the sulphury silence — 
 the ancient monumental look proclaiming that all things 
 here continue as they were from the foundation of the 
 world, or seen in the hazy distance as the girdle of the 
 land — the highest peaks of earth soaring up toward the 
 
144 THOMAS MACAULAY. 
 
 sun, Sirius, the throne of God. Macaulay too much 
 separates the material from the moral aspects of the scene, 
 instead of blending them together as exponents of the one 
 great fact, India. 
 
 But we must stop. Ere closing, however, we are 
 tempted to add, as preachers do, a solid inference or two 
 from our previous remarks. First, we think we can indi- 
 cate the field on which Mr Macaulay is likely yet to gain 
 his truest and permanent fame. It is in writing the 
 literary history of his country. Such a work is still a 
 desideratum ; and no living writer is so well qualified by 
 his learning and peculiar gifts — by his powers and preju- 
 dices — by his strength and his weakness, to supply it. 
 In this he is far more assured of success than in any poli- 
 tical or philosophical history. With what confidence and 
 delight would the public follow his guidance, from the 
 times of Chaucer to those of Cowper, when our literature 
 ceased to be entirely national, and even a stage or two 
 farther ! Of such a " progress " we proclaim him worthy 
 to be the Great-heart ! Secondly, we infer from a retro- 
 spect of his whole career, the evils of a too easy and a too 
 early success. It is by an early Achillean baptism alone 
 that men can secure Achillean invulnerability, or confirm 
 Achillean strength. This was the redeeming point in 
 Byron's history. Though a lord, he had to undergo a 
 stern training, which indurated and strengthened him to a 
 pitch, which all the after blandishments of society could not 
 weaken. Society did not — in spite of our author — spoil 
 him by its favour, though it infuriated him by its resent- 
 ment. But he has been the favoured and petted child of 
 good fortune. There has been no " crook," till of late, 
 either in his political or literary " lot." If he has not al- 
 together inherited, he has approached the verge of the 
 curse, " Wo to you, when al men shall speak well of you." 
 No storms have unbared his mind to its depths. It has 
 been his uniformly to — " Pursue the triumph and partake 
 
DR GEORGE CROLY. 145 
 
 the gale." Better all this for his own peace than for his 
 power, or for the permanent effect of his writings. 
 
 Let us congratulate him, finally, on his temporary defeat 
 in Edinburgh. A few more such victories as he had for- 
 merly gained, and he had been undone. A few more such 
 defeats, and if he be, as we believe, essentially a man, he 
 may yet, in the " strength of the lonely," in the conscious- 
 ness and terrible self-satisfaction of those who deem them- 
 selves injuriously assailed, perform such deeds of derring- 
 do as shall abash his adversaries and astonish even himself. 
 
 DR GEORGE CROLY. 
 
 Not only is the literary divine not a disgrace to his pro- 
 fession, he is a positive honour. His pulpit becomes an 
 eminence, commanding a view of both worlds. He is a 
 witness at the nuptials of truth and beauty, and the gene- 
 ral cause of Christianity is subserved by him in more ways 
 than one ; for, first, the names of great men devoted at once 
 to letters and religion neutralise, and more than neutralise, 
 those which are often produced and paraded on the other 
 side ; again, they show that the theory of science sanctified, 
 and literature laid down before the Lord, has been proved 
 and incarnated in living examples, and does not therefore 
 remain in the baseless regions of mere hypothesis ; and, 
 thirdly, they evince that even if religion be an imposture 
 and a delusion, it is one so plausible and powerful as to 
 have subjugated very strong intellects, and that it will not 
 therefore do for every sciolist in the school of infidelity to 
 pretend contempt for those who confess that it has com- 
 manded and convinced them. 
 
 Literary divines, next to religious laymen, are the chosen 
 
 L 
 
lis T>R GGORGE CROLY. 
 
 chrmpions of Christianity. We say next to laymen, for 
 when they come forth from their desks, their laboratories, 
 ( r observatories^ and bear spontaneous testimony in behalf 
 of religion, it is as though the earth again should help the 
 woman ; and the thunder of a Bossuet, a Massillon, a Hall, 
 or a Chalmers breaking from the pulpit does not speak so 
 loud in behalf of our faith as the " still, small voice" issu- 
 ing from the studious chamber of an Addison, a Boyle, a 
 Bowdler, an Isaac Taylor, and a Cowper. But m.en who 
 might have taken foremost places in the walks of letters 
 and science, and yet have voluntarily devoted themselves 
 to the Christian cause, and yet continue amid all this de- 
 votion tremblingly alive to all the graces, beauties, and 
 powers of literature, are surely standing evidences at least 
 of the sincerity of their own convictions, if not of the truth 
 of that faith on which these convictions centre. And when 
 they openly give testimony to their belief, w^e listen as if 
 we heard science and literature themselves pronouncing the 
 creed or swearing the sacramental oath of Christianity. 
 
 Such an one is Dr George Croly. He might have risen 
 to distinction in any path he chose to pursue ; he has at- 
 tained wide eminence as a literary man ; he has never lost 
 sight of the higher aims of his own profession ; and he is 
 now in the ripe autumn of his powers, with redoubled 
 energy and hope, about to dive down in search of new 
 pearls in that old deep which communicates with the om- 
 niscience of God. He is projecting at present, and has in 
 part begun, to elaborate three treatises on the patriarchs, 
 the prophets, and the apostles, from which great issues may 
 be expected. Meanwhile we propose rapidly running over 
 the general outline of his merits and works. 
 
 Dr Croly is almost the last survivor of that school of 
 Irish eloquence which included the names of Burke, Sheri- 
 dan, Grattan, Curran, and Flood. He has most of the 
 merits, and some of the faults of that school. A singular 
 school it has been, when we consider the circumstances and 
 
DR GEORGE CROLY. 147 
 
 character of the country where it flourished. The most 
 miserable has been the most eloquent of countries. The 
 Avorst cultivated country has borne the richest crop of 
 flowers — of speech. The barrenness of its bogs has been 
 compensated by the rank fiertility of its brains. Its groans 
 have been set to a wild and wondrous music — its oratory 
 has been a safety-valve to its otherwise intolerable wrongs. 
 Yet, over all Irish eloquence, and even Irish humour, there 
 hovers a certain shade of sadness. In vain they struggle 
 to smile or to assume an air of cheerfulness. A sense of 
 their country's wretchedness — their Pariah position — the 
 dark doom that seems suspended over everything connected 
 with the Irish name, lowers over and behind them as they 
 speak or write. Amidst the loftiest flights of Burke's specu- 
 lation, the gayest bravuras of Sheridan's rhetoric, the fieriest 
 bursts of Grattan's or Curran's eloquence, this stamp of 
 the branding-iron — this downward drag of degradation — 
 is never lost sio-lit of or forsjotten. 
 
 Ireland! art thou a living string of God's great lyre, 
 the earth ; or art thou an instrument, thrown aside like a 
 neglected harp, and only valuable for the chance notes of 
 joy or sorrow, mad mirth or despair, which the hands of 
 passengers can discourse upon thee ? Art thou only a way- 
 ward child of the mighty mother, or art thou altogether a 
 monstrous and incurable birth ? Has nature taught thee 
 thy notes of riant mirth or yet richer pathos, or have tor- 
 ture and tyranny, like cruel arts of hell, awoke within thee 
 those slumbering energies which it were well for thee had 
 slept for ever ? Well for thee it may be, but not for the 
 world ; for thy loss has been our gain, and from thy long 
 and living death has flowed forth that long, swelling, sink- 
 ing, always dying, yet never dead music, which now sounds 
 thy requiem, and may peradventure herald thy future re- 
 surrection. 
 
 Dr Croly has not altogether escaped the pervasive gloom 
 of his country's literature. This speaks in tlie choice of 
 
] 48 DR GEORGE CROLY. 
 
 his subjects, and in the lofty, ambitious tone of his manner. 
 He would spring up above the sphere of Ireland's dire at- 
 traction ! " Farthest from her is best." Irish subjects, 
 therefore, are avoided, although from no want of sympathy 
 with Ireland. Regions either enjoying a profounder calm 
 or torn by nobler agonies than those of Erin, are the chosen 
 fields for his muse. Of his country's wild, reckless humour, 
 always reminding us of the mirth of despairing criminals, 
 singing and dancing out the last dregs of their life, Croly 
 is nearly destitute. For this his genius is too stern and 
 lofty. He does not deal in sheet lightning, but in the forked 
 flashes of a withering and blasting invective. But in rich- 
 ness of figure, in strength of language, in vehemence of 
 passion, and in freedom and force of movement, he is emi- 
 nently Irish. Stripped, however, he is — partly by native 
 taste, and partly by the friction of long residence in this 
 country — of the more glaring faults of his country's style, 
 its turbulence, exaggeration, fanfaronade, florid diffusion, 
 and that ludicrous pathos which so often, in lieu of tears of 
 grief, elicits tear-torrents of laughter. To use the well- 
 known witticism of Curran, he has so often wagged his 
 tongue in England that he has at last caught its accent, and 
 his brogue is the faintest in the world. The heat of the 
 Irish blood and its wild poetical afflatus he has not sought, 
 nor, if he had, would have been able to relinquish. 
 
 Dr Croly's principal power is that of gorgeous and elo- 
 quent description. There are five different species of the 
 describer. The first describes a scene or character as it ap- 
 pears to him, but as it really is not, he having, through 
 weakness of sight, or inaccuracy of observation, missed the 
 reality and substituted a vague something, more cognate to 
 himself than to his object. The second is the literal describer 
 — the bare, bald truth before him is barely and baldly caught 
 — a certain spirit that hovered over it, as if on wing to fly, 
 having amid the bustling details of the execution been dis- 
 turbed and scared away. The third is the ideal describer, 
 
DR GEORGE CROLY. 140 
 
 who catches and arrests that volatile film, expressing the 
 lite of life, the gloss of joy, the light of darkness, and tlie 
 wild sheen of death ; in short, the tine or terrible something 
 which is really about the object, but which the eye of the 
 gifted alone can see, even as in certain atmospheres only 
 the rays of the sun are visible. The fourth is the historical 
 describer, who sees and paints objects in relation to their 
 past and future history, who gets so far within the person 
 or the thing as to have glimpses behind and before about 
 it, as if he belonged to it, like a memory or a conscience ; 
 and the fifth is the universal describer, who sees the object 
 set in the shining sea of its total bearings, representing in 
 it more or less fully the great whole of which it is one sig- 
 nificant part. Thus, suppose the object a tree, one will 
 slump up its character as large or beautiful — words which 
 really mean nothing ; another will, with the accuracy of 
 a botanist, analyse it into its root, trunk, branches, and 
 leaves ; a third will make its rustle seem the rhythm of a 
 poem ; a fourth will see in it, as Cowper in Yardley Oak, 
 its entire history, from the acorn to the axe, or perchance 
 from the germ to the final conflagration ; and a fifth will 
 look on it as a mouth and mirror of the Infinite — a slip of 
 Jgdrasil, Or is the object the ocean — one will describe it 
 as vast, or serene, or tremendous, epithets which burden 
 the air but do not exhaust the ocean ; another will regard 
 it as a boundless solution of salt ; a third will be fascinated 
 by its terrible beauty, as of a chained tiger ; a fourth, with 
 a far look into the dim records of its experience, will call 
 it (how different from the foregoing appellations!) the 
 " melancholy main ;" and the fifth will see in it the reflector 
 of man's history, the shadow and mad sister of earth — the 
 type of eternity ! 
 
 These last three orders, if not one, at least slide often 
 into each other, and Dr Croly appears to us a combination 
 of the third and the fourth. His descriptions are rather 
 those of the poet than of the seer. They are rapid, but 
 
3 50 DR GEORGE. CROLY. 
 
 always clear, vivid, strong, and eloquent, and over each 
 movement of his pen, an invisible pencil seems to hang and 
 to keep time. 
 
 Searching somewhat more accurately for a classification 
 of minds, they seem to us to include five orders — the pro- 
 phet, the artist, the analyst, the copiast, and the combina- 
 tion in part of all the four. There is, first, the prophet, 
 who receives immediately and gives out unresistingly the 
 torrent of the breath and power of his own soul, which has 
 become touched by a high and holy influence from behind 
 him. This is no mechanical ofl^ce ; the fact that he is 
 chosen to be such an instrument, itself proclaims his breadth, 
 elevation, power, and patency. There is next the artist, 
 who receives the same influence in a less measure, and who, 
 instead of implicitly obeying the current, tries to adjust, 
 control, and get it to move in certain bounded and modu- 
 lated streams. There is, thirdly, the analyst, who, in pro- 
 portion to the faintness in which the breath of inspiration 
 reaches him, is the more desirous to turn round upon it, to 
 reduce it to its elements, and to trace it to its source. There 
 is, fourthly, the copiast — we coin a term, as he M'ould like 
 to form the far-off sigh of tlie aboriginal thought, which 
 alone reaches him, into a new and powerful spoken word 
 — but in vain. And there is, lastly, the combination of 
 the whole /owr — the clever, nay, gifted mimic, whose light 
 energy enables him to circulate between, and to be some- 
 times mistaken for, them all together. 
 
 Dr Croly is the artist, and in general an accomplished 
 and powerful artist he is. There is sometimes a little of 
 the slapdash in his manner, as of one who is in haste to be 
 done with his subject. His style sometimes sounds like 
 the horse -shoes of the belated traveller, " spurring apace to 
 gain the timely inn." He generally, indeed, goes off at a 
 gallop, and continues at this generous, breakneck pace to 
 the close. He consequently has too few pauses and rests. 
 He and you rush up panting, and arrive breathless at the 
 
DR GEORGE CROLV. 1 .'> I 
 
 summit. xVnd jet there is never any thing erratic or un- 
 gracei'ul about the motion of the tliought or style. If there 
 be not classical repose there is classical rapture. It is no 
 vulgar intoxication — it is a debauch of nectar ; it is not a 
 Newmarket, but a Nemean race. 
 
 Dr Croly's intellectual distinction is less philosophic sub- 
 tlety, than strong, nervous, and manly sense. This, be- 
 lieved with perfect assurance, inflamed with passion, sur- 
 rounded with the rays of imagination, and pronounced 
 with a dogmatic force and dignity peculiarly his own, 
 constitutes the circle of his literary character — a circle 
 which also includes large and liberal knowledge, but which 
 has been somewhat narrowed by the influence of views, in 
 our judgment, far too close and conservative. Especially, 
 as we have elsewhere said, whenever he nears the French 
 Revolution he loses temper, and speaks of it in a tone of 
 truculence, as if it were a virulent ulcer and not a salutary 
 blood-letting to the social system — the stir of a dunghill 
 and not the explosion of a volctano — a few earthworms 
 crawling out of their lair, and producing a transient agi- 
 tation in their native mud, and not a vast Vesuvius moved 
 by internal torments to cast out the central demon and 
 with open mouth to appeal to Heaven. To Croly this re- 
 volution seems more a ray from hell, shooting athwart 
 our system, than a mysterious part of it through which 
 earth must roll as certainly as through its own shadow-^ 
 night; anore a retribution of unmitigated wrath than a 
 sharp and sudden surgical application, severe and salu- 
 tary as cautery itself. Now that we have before us a 
 trinity of such revolutions, we have better ground for 
 believing that they are no anomalous convulsions, but 
 the periodical fits of a singular subject, whom it were far 
 better to watch carefully and treat kindly than to stigma- 
 tize or assault. Bishop Butler, walking in his garden with 
 his chaplain, after a long fit of silent thought, suddenly 
 turned round and asked him, if he did not think that na- 
 
152 Dll GEORGE CROLY. 
 
 tions miglit get mad as well as individuals. What answer 
 the worthy chaplain made to this question we are not in- 
 formed, but we suspect that few now would coincide with 
 the opinion of the bishop. Nations are never mad, though 
 often mistaken and often diseased ; or if mad, it is a fine 
 and terrible frenzy, partaking of the character of inspi- 
 ration, and telling, through all its blasphemy and blood, 
 some great truth otherwise a word unutterable to the 
 nations. What said, through its throat of thunder, that 
 first revolution of France ? It said that men are men, that 
 " God hath made of one blood all nations who dwell upon 
 the face of the earth," and it proved it, alas ! by mingling 
 together in one tide the blood of captains and of kings, of 
 rich and poor, of bond and free : it shattered for ever the 
 notion of men being ninepins for the pleasure of power, 
 and showed them at the least to be gunpowder, a sub- 
 stance always dangerous, and always, if trode on, to be 
 trode on warily. What said the three days of July, 1 830 ? 
 They said, that if austere unlimited tyranny exceed in 
 guilt, diluted and dotard despotism excels in folly, and 
 that the contempt of a people is as effectual as its anger 
 in subverting a throne. And what is the voice with which 
 the world is yet vibrating, as if the sun had been struck 
 audibly and stunned upon his mid-day throne ? It is that, 
 as a governing agent, the days of exj^ediency are number- 
 ed, and that henceforth not power, not cunning, not con- 
 ventional morality, not talent, but truth has been «rowned 
 monarch of France, and, if the great experiment succeed, 
 of the world.* 
 
 It is of Dr Croly as a prose writer principally that we 
 mean to speak. His poetry, though distinguished, and 
 nearly to the same extent, by the qualities of his prose, has 
 failed in making the same impression. The causes of this 
 are various. In the first place, it appeared at a time when 
 
 Alas! alas! This was too evidently written in 1848. 
 
DR GEORGE CROLY. 153 
 
 tlie age was teeming to very riot with poetry. Scott, in- 
 deed, had betaken himself to prose novels ; Southey to his- 
 tories and articles ; Coleridge to metaphysics ; Lamb to 
 " Elia ;" and Wordsworth to his " Recluse," like the alche- 
 mist to his secret furnace. But still, with each new wound 
 in Byron's heart, a new gush of poetry was flowing, and 
 all eyes were watching this martyr of the many sorrows, 
 with the interest of those who are waiting silent or weep- 
 ing for a last breath; and at the same time a perfect crowd 
 of true poets were finding audience, " fit though few." 
 Wilson, Barry Cornwall, Hogg, Hood, Clare, Cunning- 
 hame, Milman, Maturin, Bowles, Crabbe, Montgomery, 
 are some of the now familiar names which were then iden- 
 tified almost entirely with poetical aspirations. Amid such 
 competitors Dr Croly first raised his voice, and only shared 
 with many of them the fate of being much praised, con- 
 siderably abused, and little read. Secondly, more than 
 most of his contemporaries, he was subjected to the dis- 
 advantage which in a measure pressed on all. All were 
 stars seeking to shine ere yet the sun (that woful blood- 
 spattered sun of " Childe Harold") had fairly set. Dr 
 Croly suffered more from this than others, just because he 
 bore in some points a strong resemblance to Byron, a re- 
 semblance which drew forth, both for him and Milman, a 
 coarse and witless assault in " Don Juan." And, thirdly, 
 Dr Croly's poems were chargeable, more than his prose 
 writings, with the want of continuous interest. They con- 
 sisted of splendid passages, which rather stood for them- 
 selves than combined to form a whole. The rich " bugle 
 blooms" were trailed rather than trained about a stick 
 scarce worthy of supporting them, and this, with the mo- 
 notony inevitable to rhyme, rendered it a somewhat tedious 
 task to climb to the reward which never failed to be met 
 with at last. " Paris in 1815," however, was very popular 
 at first ; and " Cataline" copes worthily, particularly in 
 the closing scene of the play, with the character of the 
 
l.>i DR g;:oiigk c'roly. 
 
 gigantic conspirator, whose name even yet rings terribly, 
 as it sounds down from the dark concave of the past. 
 
 His prose writings may be divided into three classes : 
 his fictions, his articles in periodicals, and his theological 
 works. We have not read his " Tales of the Great St Ber- 
 nard," but understand them to be powerful though unequal. 
 His "Colonna, the Painter," appeared in "Blackwood," and, 
 as a tale shadowed by the deadly lustre of revenge, yet 
 shining in the beauty of Italian light and landscape, may 
 be called an unrhymed " Lara." His " Marston, or Memoirs 
 of a Statesman," is chiefly remarkable for the sketches of 
 distinguished characters, here and in France, which are 
 sprinkled through it, somewhat in the manner of Bulwer's 
 " Devereux," but drawn with a stronger pencil and in a 
 less capricious light. To Danton, alone, we think he has 
 not done j ustice. On the principle of ex pede Herculem, 
 from the power and savage truth of those colossal splinters 
 of expression, which are all his remains, we had many 
 3'-ears ago formed our unalterable opinion, that he was the 
 greatest, and by no means the worst man, who mingled in 
 the melee of the Revolution — the Satan, if Dr Croly will, 
 and not the Moloch of the Paris Pandemonium — than 
 Robespierre abler — than Marat, that squalid, screeching, 
 out-of-elbows demon, more merciful — than the Girondin 
 champions more energetic — than even Mirabeau stronger 
 and less convulsive ; and are glad tofind that Lord Brougham 
 has recently been led, by personal examination, to the same 
 opinii^n. The Danton of Dr Croly is a hideous compound 
 of dandyism, diabolism, and power — a kind of coxcomb 
 butcher, who with equal coolness arranges his moustaches 
 and his murders, and who, when bearded in the Jacobin 
 Club, proves himself a bully and a coward. The real 
 Danton, so broad and calm in repose, so dilated and Titanic 
 in excitement, who, rising to the exigency of the hour, 
 seemed like Satan, starting from Ithuriel's spear, to grow 
 into armour^ into power and the weapons of power — now 
 
DR GEORGE CROLY. ] 55 
 
 uttering words which were " half battles," aud now walk- 
 ing silent, and unconscious alike of his vast energies and 
 coming doom, by the banks of his native stream — now 
 pelting his judges with paper bullets, and now laying his 
 head on the block proudly, as if that head were the globe — 
 was long since pointed out by Scott as one of the fittest 
 subjects for artistic treatment, either in fiction or the 
 drama, " worthy," says he, " of Schiller or Shakspere them- 
 selves." 
 
 Dr Croly's highest effort in fiction is unquestionably 
 *•' Salathiel." And it is verily a disgrace to an age, which 
 devours with avidity whatever silly or putrid trash popular 
 authors may be pleased to issue — such inane commonplace 
 as " Now and Then," wiiere the only refreshing things are 
 the " glasses of wine" which are poured out at the close 
 of every third page to the actors (alas, why not to the 
 readers!), naturally thirsty amid such dry work, or the 
 coarse greasy horrors which abound in the all-detestable 
 " Lucretia" — that " Salathicd" has not yet, we fear, more 
 than reached a second edition. It has not, however, gone 
 without its reward. By the ordinary fry of circulating 
 library readers neglected, it was read by a better class, and 
 by none of those who read it forgotten. None but a " lite- 
 rary divine" could have written it. Its style is steeped in 
 Scripture. 
 
 But Croly does more than snatch " live coals from off the 
 altar" to strew upon his style ; his spirit as well as his lan- 
 guage is oriental. You feel yourselves in Palestine, the 
 air is that through which the words of prophets have vi- 
 brated and the wings of angels descended — the ground is 
 scarcely yet calm from the earthquake of the crucifixion — 
 the awe of the world's sacrifice, and of the prodigies which 
 attended it, still lowers over the land — still gapes un- 
 mended the ghastly rent in the vail — and still are crowds 
 daily convening to examine the fissure in the rocks, when 
 one lonely man, separated by his proper crime to his pro- 
 
156 Dli GEORGE CROLY. 
 
 per and unending wo, is seen speeding, as if on the wings 
 of frenzy, toward the mountains of Napthali. It is Sala- 
 thiel, the hero of this story — the Wandering Jew — the heir 
 of the curse of a dying Saviour, " Tarry thou till I come." 
 As an artistic conception, we cannot profess much to ad- 
 mire what the Germans call the " Everlasting Jew." The 
 interest is exhausted to some extent by the very title. The 
 subject predicts an eternity of sameness, from which we 
 shrink, and are tempted to call him an everlasting bore. 
 Besides, we cannot well realise the condition of the wan- 
 derer as very melancholy, after all. What a fine oppor- 
 tunity must the fellow have of seeing the world, and the 
 glory and the great men thereof! Could one but get up 
 behind him, what " pencillings" could one perpetrate by 
 the " way!" What a triumph, too, has he over the baffled 
 skeleton, death ! What a new fortune each century, by sell- 
 ing to advantage his rich " reminiscences!" What a short 
 period at most to wander — a few thousand years, while 
 yonder, the true wanderers, the stars, can hope for no rest ! 
 And what a jubilee dinnermight he not expect, ere the close, 
 as the " oldest inhabitant," with perhaps Christopher North 
 in the chair, and De Quincey (whom some people suspect, 
 however, of being the said personage himself) acting as 
 croupier ! Altogether, we can hardly, without ludicrous 
 emotions, conceive of such a character, and are astonished 
 at the grave face which Shelley, Wordsworth, Mrs Norton 
 (whose " Undying One," by the way, is dead long ago, in 
 spite of a review, also dead, in the " Edinburgh"), Captain 
 Medwyn (would he too had died ere he murdered the me- 
 mory of poor Shelley !), Lord John Russell (who, in his 
 " Essays by a Gentleman who had left his Lodgings," has 
 taken a very, very faint sketch of the unfortunate Ahasue- 
 rus), and Dr Croly put on while they talk of his adven- 
 tures. 
 
 The interest of " Salathiel," beyond the first splendid 
 burst of immortal anguish with which it opens, is almost 
 
DR GEORGE CROLY. J 57 
 
 entirely irrespective of the character of the Wandering 
 Jew. It is chiefly valuable for its pictures of Oriental 
 scenery, for the glimpses it gives of the cradled Hercules 
 of Christianity, and for the gorgeous imagery and unmiti- 
 gated vigour of its writing. Plot necessarily there is 
 none ; the characters, though vividly depicted, hurry past, 
 like the rocks in the " Walpurgis Night" — are seen intensely 
 for a moment, and then drop into darkness ; and the 
 crowding adventures, while all interesting individually, do 
 not gather a deepening interest as they grow to a climax. 
 It is a book which you cannot read quickly, or with equal 
 gusto at all times, but which, like *' Thomson's Seasons," 
 " Young's Niglit Thoughts," and other works of rich mas- 
 siveness, yield intense pleasure, when read at intervals, and 
 in moments of poetic enthusiasm. 
 
 Dr Croly's contributions to periodicals are, as might 
 have been expected, of various merit. We recollect most 
 vividly his papers on Burke (since collected into a volume), 
 on Pitt, and a most masterly and eloquent outline of the 
 career of Napoleon. This is as rapid, as brief almost and 
 eloquent, as one of Bonaparte's own bulletins, and much 
 more true. It constitutes a rough, red, vigorous chart of 
 his fiery career, without professing to complete philosophi- 
 cally the analysis of his character. This task Emerson 
 lately, in our hearing, accomplished with much ingenuity. 
 His lecture was the portable essence of Napoleon. He in- 
 dicated his points with the ease and precision of a lion- 
 showman. Napoleon, to Emerson, apart from his splendid 
 genius, is the representative of the faults and the virtues of 
 the middle class of the age. We heard some of his audi- 
 tors contend that he had drawn two portraits instead of 
 one ; but in fact Napoleon was two, if not more men. In- 
 deed, if you draw first the bright and then the black side 
 of any character, you have two beings, which the skin and 
 brain of the one actual man can alone fully reconcile. The 
 experience of every one demonstrates at the least a dualism, 
 
l.>8 DIl CF.ORGE CROLY. 
 
 and who might not almost any day sit down and write a 
 letter, objurgatory, or condoling, or congratulatory, to " my 
 dear yesterday's self?" Each man, as well as Napoleon, 
 forms a sort of Siamese twins — although, in his case, it 
 was matter of thankfulness that the cord could not be cut. 
 Two Napoleons at large had been too much. 
 
 Of Dr Croly's book on the " Revelation" we have spoken 
 formerly. Under the shadow of that inscrutable pyramid 
 it stands, one of the loftiest attempts to scale its summit 
 and explain its construction ; but to us all such seem as 
 yet ineffectual. A more favourable specimen of his theo- 
 logical writing is to be found in his volume of " Sermons'* 
 recently published. The public has reason to congratu- 
 late itself on the little squable which led to their publica- 
 tion. Some conceited persons, it seems, had thought pro- 
 per to accuse Dr Croly of preaching sermons above the 
 heads of his audience, and suggested greater simplicity ; 
 and, after a careful perusal of them, we would suggest, 
 even Avithout a public phrenological examination of those 
 auditors' heads, that, whatever be their situation in life, 
 they are, if unable to understand these discourses, incapable 
 of their duties, are endangering the public, and should be re- 
 manded to school. Clearer, more nervous, and, in the true 
 sense of the term, simpler discourses, have not appeared 
 ibr many years. Their style is in general pure Saxon — 
 their matter strong, manly, and his own — their figures al- 
 ways forcible, and never forced — their theology sound and 
 scriptural — and would to God such sermons were being 
 j)reached in every church and chapel throughout Britain ! 
 They might recall the many wanderers, who, with weary 
 heart and foot, are seeking rest elsewhere in vain, and 
 might counteract that current which is drawing away from 
 the sanctuaries so much of the talent, the virtue, and the 
 honesty of the land. 
 
 Dr Croly, as a preacher, in his best manner, is faith- 
 fully represented in those discourses, particularly in his 
 
DIl GT:oTIGE CROLY. 159 
 
 sermons on " Stephen," the " Theory of Martyrdom," and 
 the " Productiveness of the Globe." We admire, in contrast 
 v/ith some modern and ancient monstrous absurdities to 
 the contrary, his idea of God's purpose in making his uni- 
 verse — not merely to display his own gloiy, which, when 
 interpreted, means just, like the stated purpose of Cassar, to 
 extend his own name, but to circulate his essence and image 
 . — to proclaim himself merciful, even through punishment 
 — and even in hell-flames to write himself down Love, is 
 surely, as Dr Croly proclaims it, " the chief end" of God ! 
 His sermon on Stephen is a noble picture — we had almost 
 said a daguerreotype — of that first martyrdom. His " Pro- 
 ductiveness of the Globe" is richer than it is original. His 
 " Theory of Keligion " is new, and strikingly illustrated. 
 His notion is, that God, in three different dispensations — 
 tlie Patriarchal, the Mosaic, and the Christian — has de- 
 veloped three grand thoughts : first, the being of God ; 
 secondly, in shadow, the doctrine of atonement ; and 
 thirdly, that of immortality. With this arrangement we 
 are not entirely satisfied, but reserve our objections till the 
 " conclusion of the whole matter," in the shape of three 
 successive volumes on each of these periods, and the idea of 
 each, has appeared, as we trust it speedily shall. 
 
 We depicted, some time since, in a periodical, our visit 
 to Dr Croly's chapel, and the impression made by his 
 appearance, and the part of his discourse we heard. It 
 seemed to us a shame to see the most accomplished clergy- 
 man in London preaching to so thin an audience ; but per- 
 haps it is accounted for partly by the strictness of his Con- 
 servative principles, and partly by the stupid prejudice 
 which exists against all literary divines. 
 
 We are sorry we cannot, ere we conclude, supply any 
 particulars about his history. Of its details we are alto- 
 gether ignorant. In conversation, he is described as power- 
 ful and commanding. Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, we 
 remember, describes him as rather disposed to take the 
 
160 DR GEORGE CROLY. 
 
 leadj but so exceedingly intelligent that you entirely for- 
 give him. He has been, as a literary man, rather solitary 
 and self-asserting — has never properly belonged to any 
 clique or coterie — and seems to possess an austere and 
 somewhat exclusive standard of taste. 
 
 It is to us, and must be to the Christian world, a de- 
 lightful thought, to find such a man devoting the maturity 
 of his mind to labours peculiarly professional ; and every 
 one who has the cause of religion at heart must wish him 
 God speed in his present researches. Religion has in its 
 abyss treasures yet unsounded and unsunned, though strong 
 must be the hand, and true the eye, and retentive the 
 breath, and daring yet reverent the spirit of their success- 
 ful explorer — and such we believe to be qualities possessed 
 by Dr Croly. 
 
 SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 Perhaps the leading authors of the age may be divided 
 into three classes. 1st, Those who have written avowedly 
 and entirely for the few. 2c%, Those who have written 
 principally for the many. And, Sdl^, Those who have 
 sought their audience in both classes, and have succeeded 
 in forming, to some extent, at once an exoteric and an 
 esoteric school of admirers. Of the first class, Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth are the most distinguished specimens. 
 Scott and Dickens stand at the head of the second; and 
 Byron and Bulwer are facile j^rincipes of the third. Both 
 these last named writers commenced their career by ap- 
 pealing to the sympathies of the multitude ; but by and 
 by, either satiated by their too easy success, or driven 
 onward by the rapid and gigantic progress of their own 
 
SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 1 G I 
 
 minds, they aimed at higher things, and sought, nor sought 
 in vain, a more select audience. Byron's mind, in itself 
 essentially unspeculative, was forced upwards upon those 
 rugged and dangerous tracts of thought, where he has 
 gathered the rarest of his beauties, by intimacy with Shelley, 
 by envious emulation of his Lake contemporaries, and, 
 above all, by the pale hand of his misery, unveiling to him 
 heights and depths in his nature and genius, which were 
 previously unknown and unsuspected, and beckoning him 
 onward through their grim and shadowy regions. Be 
 grew, at once, and equally, in guilt, misery, and power. 
 An intruder, too, on domains where some other thinkers 
 had long fixed their calm and permanent dwelling, his ap- 
 pearance was the more startling. Here was a dandy dis- 
 cussing the great questions of natural and moral evil ; a 
 roue in silk stockings meditating suicide and mouthing 
 blasphemy on an Alpine rock ; a brilliant and popular wit 
 and poet, setting Spinoza to music, and satirizing the 
 principalities and powers of heaven, as bitterly as he had 
 done the bards and reviewers of earth. Into those giddy 
 and terrible heights where Milton had entered a permitted 
 guest, in " privilege of virtue ;" where Goethe had walked 
 in like a passionless and prying cherub, forgetting to wor- 
 ship in his absorbing desire to know ; and on which Shelley 
 was wrecked and stranded, in the storm of his fanatical 
 unbelief; Byron is upborne by the presumption and the 
 despair of his mental misery. Unable to see through the 
 high walls which bound and beset our limited faculties 
 and little life, he can at least dash his head against them. 
 Hence, in " Manfred," " Cain," " Heaven and Earth," and 
 " The Vision of Judgment," we have him calling upon the 
 higher minds of his age to be as miserable as he was, just 
 as he had in his first poems addressed the same sad mes- 
 sage, less energetically, and less earnestly, to the commu- 
 nity at large. And were it not unspeakably painful to 
 contemplate a noble mind engaged in this profitless 
 
 M 
 
1()2 SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 " apostlesliip of affliction," this thankless gospel of procla- 
 mation to men, that because they are miserable, it is their 
 duty to become more so ; that because they are bad, they 
 are bound to be worse ; we might be moved to laughter by 
 its striking resemblance to the old story of the fox who 
 had lost his tail. 
 
 In the career of Bulwer, we find a faint yet traceable 
 resemblance to that of Byron. Like him, he began with 
 wit, satire, and persiflage. Like him, he affected, for a 
 season, a melodramatic earnestness. Like him, he was at 
 last stung into genuine sincerity, and shot upwards into a 
 higher sphere of thought and feeling. The three periods 
 in Byron's history are distinctly marked by the three 
 works, " English Bards," " Childe Harold," and " Cain." 
 So " Pelham," " Eugene Aram," and " Zanoni," accurately 
 mete out the stages in Bulwer's progress. Minor points of 
 resemblance might be noted between the pair. Both sprung 
 from the aristocracy; and one, at least, was prouder of 
 what he deduced from Norman blood, than from nature. 
 Bulwer, like Byron, is a distinguished dandy. Like him, 
 too, he has been separated from his wife ; like him, he is 
 liberal in his politics. And while Byron, by way of doing 
 penance, threw his jaded system into the Greek war, Bulwer 
 has with better result leaped into a tub of cold water! 
 Point and brilliance are at once perceived to be the 
 
 eading qualities of Bulwer's writing. His style is vicious 
 from excess of virtue, weak from repletion of strength. 
 Every word is a point, every clause a beauty, the close of 
 every sentence a climax. He is as sedulous of his every 
 stroke, as if the effect of the whole depended upon it. His 
 pages are all sparkling with minute and insulated splendours; 
 not suffused with a uniform and sober glow, nor shown in 
 the reflected light of a few solitary and surpassing beauties. 
 
 Some writers peril their reputation upon one long diflicult 
 leap, and, it accomplished, walk on at their leisure. With 
 others, writing is a succession of hops, steps, and jumps. 
 
SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 103 
 
 This in general is productive of a feeling of tedium. It 
 teases and fatigues the mind of the reader. It is like cry- 
 ing perpetually upon a hearer, who is attending with all 
 his might, to attend more carefully. It at once wearies 
 and provokes, insults the reader, and betrays a certain 
 weakness on the part of the author. If in Bulwer's writ- 
 ings we weary less than in others, it is owing to the artistic 
 skill with which he intermingles his points of humour with 
 those of sententious reflection'or vivid narrative. All is 
 point : but the point perpetually varies " from gay to grave, 
 from lively to severe ;" including in it raillery and reasoning, 
 light dialogue and earnest discussion, bursts of political 
 feeling and raptures of poetical description ; here a sarcasm, 
 almost worthy of Voltaire, and there a passage of pensive 
 grandeur, which Rousseau might have written in his tears. 
 To keep up this perpetual play of varied excellence, re- 
 quired at once great vigour and great versatility of talents: 
 for Bulwer never walks through his part, never proses, is 
 never tame, and seldom indeed substitutes sound for sense, 
 or mere flummery for force and fire. He generally writes 
 his best; and our great quarrel, indeed, with him is, that 
 he is too uniformly erect in the stirrups, too conscious of 
 himself, of his exquisite management, of his complete 
 equipment, of the speed with which he devours the dust ; 
 and seldom exhibits the careless grandeur of one who is 
 riding at the pace of the whirlwind, with perfect self-obli- 
 vion, and with perfect security. 
 
 Bulwer reminds us less of an Englishman Frenchified, 
 than of a Frenchman partially Anglicized. The original 
 powers and tendencies of his mind, his eloquence, wit, 
 sentiments, and feelings, his talents and his opinions, his 
 taste and style, are those of a modern Frenchman. But 
 these, long subjected to English influences, and long trained 
 to be candidates for an English popularity, have been 
 modified and altered from their native bent. In all his 
 writings, however, you breathe a foreign atmosphere, and 
 
164 SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 find very slight sympathy with the habits, manners, or 
 tastes of his native country. Not Zanoni alone, of his 
 heroes, is cut off from country, as by a chasm, or if held 
 to it, held only by ties, which might with equal strength 
 bind him to other planets ; all his leading characters, 
 whatever their own pretensions, or whatever their creator 
 may assert of them, are in reality citizens of the world, 
 and have no more genuine relation to the land whence 
 they spring, than have the winds, which linger not over 
 its loveliest landscapes, and hurry past its most endeared 
 and consecrated spots. Eugene Aram is not an English- 
 man; Rienzi is hardly an Italian. Bulwer is perhaps the 
 first instance of a great novelist obtaining popularity with- 
 out a particle of nationality in his spirit, or in his writings. 
 
 We do not question his attachment to his own principles 
 or his native country; but of that tide of national preju- 
 dice which. Burns says, " shall boil on in his breast till the 
 floodgates of life shut in eternal rest," he betrays not one 
 drop. His novels might all have appeared as translations 
 from a foreign language, and have lost but little of their 
 interest or verisimilitude. This is the more remarkable, 
 as his reign exactly divides the space between that of two 
 others, who have obtained boundless fame, greatly in con- 
 sequence of the very quality, in varied forms, which Bul- 
 wer lacks. Scott's knowledge and love of Scotland, 
 Dickens* knowledge and love of London, stand in curious 
 antithesis to Bulwer's intense cosmopolitanism and ideal 
 indifference. 
 
 Akin to this, and connected either as cause or as effect 
 with it, is a certain dignified independence of thought and 
 feeling, inseparable from the motion of Bulwer's mind. 
 He is not a great original thinker ; on no one subject can 
 he be called profound, but on all, he thinks and speaks for 
 himself. He belongs to no school either in literature or in 
 politics, and he has created no school. He is too proud 
 for a Radical, and too wide-minded for a Tory. ^ He is too 
 
 \ 
 
SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 165 
 
 definite and decisive to belong to the mystic school of let- 
 ters ; too impetuous and impulsive to cling to the classical ; 
 too liberal to be blind to the beauties of either. He has 
 attained, thus, an insulated and original position, and may 
 be viewed as a separate, nor yet a small estate, in our in- 
 tellectual realm. He may take up for motto, ^^ Nullius 
 jurare addictus in verba magistrif^ he may emblazon on his 
 shield " Desdichado." Some are torn, by violence, from the 
 sympathies and attachments of their native soil, without 
 seeking to take root elsewhere; others are early trans- 
 planted, in heart and intellect, to other countries ; a few, 
 again, seem born, rooted up, and remain so for ever. To 
 this last class we conceive Bulwerto belong In the pre- 
 sent day, the demand for earnestness, in its leading minds, 
 has become incessant and imperative. Men speak of it as 
 if it had been lately erected into a new test of admission 
 into the privileges alike of St Stephen's and of Parnassus. 
 A large and formidable jury, with Thomas Carlyle for 
 foreman, are diligently occupied in trying each new aspi- 
 rant, as well as back-speiring the old, on this question : 
 " Earnest or a sham ? Heroic or hearsay ? Under which 
 king, Bezonian ? speak, or die." Concerning this cry for 
 earnestness, we can only say, en passant, that it is not, 
 strictly speaking, new, but old ; as old, surely, as that 
 great question of Deborah's to recreant Reuben, — " Why 
 abodest thou among the sheep-folds to hear the bleating of 
 the flocks ?" or that more awful query of the Tishbite's, — 
 "How long halt ye between two opinions?" that it is, 
 in theory, a robust truth ; and sometimes, in application, 
 an exaggeration and a fallacy; and that, unless preceded 
 by the words " enlightened" and " virtuous," earnestness is 
 a quality no more intrinsically admirable, nay, as blind 
 and brutal, as the rush of a bull upon his foeman, or as the 
 foaming fury of a madman. /Bulwer is not, we fear, in 
 the full sense of the term, an earnest man: nay, we have 
 heard of the great modern prophet of the quality, pro- 
 
166 SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 nouncing him the most thoroughly false man of the age ; 
 and another, of the same school, christens him " a double 
 distilled scent-bottle of cant." In spite of this, however, 
 we deem him to possess, along with much that is affected, 
 much, also, that is true, and much that is deeply sympa- 
 thetic with sincerity, although no devouring fire of purpose 
 has hitherto filled his being, or been seen to glare in his 
 eye. And, as we hinted before, his later writings exhibit 
 sometimes, in mournful and melancholy forms, a growing 
 depth and truth of feeling. Few, indeed, can even spor- 
 tively wear, for a long time, the yoke of genius, without 
 its iron entering into the soul, and eliciting that cry which 
 becomes immortal. 
 
 Bulwer, as a novelist, has, from a compound of conflict- 
 ing and imported materials, reared to himself an indepen- 
 dent structure. He has united many of the qualities of the 
 fashionable novel, of the Godwin philosophical novel, and 
 of the Waverley tale. He has the levity and thoroughbred 
 air of the first ; much of the mental anatomy and philoso- 
 phical thought which often overpower the narrative in the 
 second ; and a portion of the dramatic liveliness, the his- 
 torical interest, and the elaborate costume of the third. 
 If, on the other hand, he is destitute of the long, solemn, 
 overwhelming swell of Godwin's style of writing, and of 
 the variety, the sweet, natural, and healthy tone of Scott's, 
 he has some qualities peculiar to himself — point, polish — 
 at times a classical elegance — at times a barbaric brilliance, 
 and a perpetual mint of short sententious reflections — com- 
 pact, rounded, and shining as new-made sovereigns. We 
 know no novelist from whose writings we could extract so 
 many striking sentences containing fine thoughts, chased 
 in imagery, " apples of gold in pictures of silver." The 
 wisdom of Scott's sage reflections is homely but common- 
 place ; Godwin beats his gold thin, and you gather his 
 philosophical acumen rather from the whole conduct and 
 tone of the story, and his commentary upon it, than from 
 
SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. ] 67 
 
 single and separate tliouglits. Dickens, whenever he 
 moralises, in his own person, becomes insufferably tame 
 and feeble. But it is Bulwer's beauty that he abounds in 
 fine, though not far gleams of insight ; and it is his fault 
 that sometimes, while watching these, he allows the story 
 to stand still, or to drag heavily, and sinks the character 
 of novelist in that of brilliant essay- writer, or inditer of 
 smart moral and political apophthegms. In fact, his works 
 are too varied and versatile. They are not novels or ro- 
 mances so much as compounds of the newspaper article, 
 the essay, the political squib, the gay and rapid disserta- 
 tion ; which, along with the necessary ingredients of fiction, 
 combine to form a junction, without constituting a true 
 artistic whole. 
 
 Reserving a few remarks upon one or two other of his 
 works till afterwards, we recur to the three which seem 
 to typify the stages of his progress ; " Pelham," " Eugene 
 Aram," and *' Zanoni." "Pelham," like " Anastasius," 
 begins with a prodigious affectation of wit. For several 
 pages the reading is as gay and as wearisome as a jest-book. 
 You sigh for a simple sentence, and would willingly dig 
 even for dulness as for hid treasure. The wit, too, is not 
 an irrepressible and involuntary issue, like that from the 
 teeming brain of Hood ; it is an artificial and forced flow ; 
 and the author and his reader are equally relieved, when 
 the clear path of the tale at length breaks away from the 
 luxuriant shrubbery in which it is at first buried, and 
 strikes into more open and elevated ground. It is the 
 same with " Anastasius ;" but "Pelham," we must admit, 
 does not reach those heights of tenderness, of nervous de- 
 scription, and of solemn moralizing, which have rendered 
 the other the prose " Don Juan," and something better. 
 It is, at most, a series, or rather string, of clever, dashing, 
 disconnected sketches ; and the moral problem it works 
 out seems to be no more than this, that, under tke corsets 
 of a dandy, there sometimes beats a heart. 
 
168 SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 In "Eugene Aram," Bulwer evidently aims at a higher 
 mark ; and, in his own opinion, with considerable success. 
 A\^e gather his estimate of this work from the fact that he 
 inscribes a laboured and glowing panegyric on Scott with 
 the words, " The Author of Eugene Aram." Noiv, probably, 
 he would exchange this for " The Author of Zanoni." Nor 
 should we, at least, nor, we think, the public, object to the 
 alteration. "Eugene Aram" seems, to us, as lamentable 
 a perversion of talent as the literature of the age has ex- 
 hibited. It is one of those works in which an unfortunate 
 choice of subject neutralizes eloquence, genius, and even 
 interest. It is with it as with the " Monk" and the " Cenci," 
 where the more splendid the decorations which surround 
 the disgusting object, the more disgusting it becomes. It 
 is, at best, deformity jewelled and enthroned. Not con- 
 tent with the native difficulties of the subject — ^the trite- 
 ness of the story — its recent date — its dead level of cer- 
 tainty — the author has, in a sort of daring perversity, 
 created new difficulties for himself to cope withaL He has 
 not bid the real pallid murderer to sit to his pencil, and 
 trusted for success to the severe accuracy of the portraiture. 
 Him he has spirited away, and has substituted the most 
 fantastic of all human fiends, resembling the more hideous 
 of heraldic devices, or the more unearthly of fossil remains. 
 Call him rather a graft from Godwin's Falkland, upon the 
 rough reality of the actual " Eugene Aram ;" for the worst 
 of the matter is, that, after fabricating a being entirely 
 new, he is compelled, at last, to clash him with the old 
 pettifogging murderer, till the compound monstrosity is 
 complete and intolerable. The philosopher, the poet, the 
 lover, the sublime victim fighting with more " devils than 
 vast hell can hold," sinks, in the trial scene, where pre- 
 cisely he should have risen up like a " pyramid of fire," 
 into a sophister so mean and shallow, that you are reminded 
 of the toad into which the lost archangel dwindled his 
 stature. The morality, too, of the tale, seems to us de- 
 
SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 1G9 
 
 testable. The feelings with which you rise from its pe- 
 rusal, or, at least, with which the author seems to wish you 
 to rise, are of regret and indignation, that, for the sin of 
 an hour, such a noble being should perish, as if he would 
 insinuate the wisdom of quarrel (how vain!) with those 
 austere and awful laws, by which moments of crime expand 
 into centuries of punishment ! It is not wonderful that, 
 in the struggle with such self-made difficulties, Bulwer 
 has been defeated. The wonder is, that he has been able 
 to cover his retreat amid such a cloud of beauties ; and to 
 attach an interest, almost human, and even profound, to a 
 being whom we cannot, in our wildest dreams, identify 
 with mankind. The whole tale is one of those hazardous 
 experiments which have become so common of late years, 
 in which a scanty success is sought at an infinite peril ; 
 like a wild-flower, of no great worth, snatched, by a hardy 
 wanderer, from the jaws of danger and death. We notice 
 in it, however, with pleasure, the absence of that early 
 levity which marked his writing, the shooting germ of a 
 nobler purpose, and an air of sincerity fast becoming more 
 than an air. 
 
 In saying that " Zanoni" is our chief favourite among 
 Bulwer's writings, we consciously expose ourselves to the 
 charge of paradox. If we err, however, on this matter, 
 we err in company with the author himself; and, we be- 
 lieve, with all Germany, and with many enlightened en- 
 thusiasts at home. We refer, too, in our approbation, more 
 to the spirit than to the execution of the work. As a whole, 
 as a broad and brilliant picture of a period and its hero, 
 " Rienzi" is perhaps his greatest work, and " that shield 
 lie may hold up against all his enemies." " The Last Days 
 of Pompeii," on the other hand, is calculated to enchant 
 classical scholars, and the book glows like a cinder from 
 Vesuvius, and most gorgeously are the reelings of that fiery 
 drunkard depicted. The " Last of the Barons," again, as 
 a cautious yet skilful filling up of the vast skeleton of 
 
170 SIR EDAVARD BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 Shakspere, is attractive to all who relish English storj. 
 But we are mistaken, if in that class who love to see the 
 Unknown, the Invisible, and the Eternal, looking in upon 
 them, through the loops and windows of the present; whose 
 footsteps turn instinctively toward the thick and the dark 
 places of the " wilderness of this world ;" or who, by deep 
 disappointment or solemn sorrow, have been driven to take 
 Tip their permanent mental abode upon the perilous verge 
 of the unseen world, if " Zanoni" do not, on such, exert a 
 mightier spell, and to their feelings be not more sweetly 
 attuned, than any other of this writer's books. It is a book 
 not to be read in the drawing-room, but in the fields — not 
 in the sunshine, but in the twilight shade — not in the sun- 
 shine, unless indeed that sunshine has been saddened, and 
 sheathed by a recent sorrow. Then will its wild and mystic 
 measures, its pathos, and its grandeur, steal in like music, 
 and mingle with the soul's emotions, till, like music, they 
 seem a part of the soul itself. 
 
 No term has been more frequently abused than that of 
 religious novel. This, as commonly employed, describes 
 an equivocal birth, if not a monster, of which the worst 
 and most popular specimen is " Coelebs in Search of a 
 Wife." It is amusing to see how its authoress deals with 
 the fictitious part of her book. Holding it with a half 
 shudder, and at arm's-length, as she might a phial of poison, 
 she pours in the other and the other infusion of prose criti- 
 cism, commonplace moralising, sage aphorism, &c., till it is 
 fairly diluted down to her standard of utility and safety. 
 But a religious novel, in the high and true sense of the 
 term, is a noble thought : a parable of solemn truth, some 
 great moral law, written out as it were in flowers : a prin- 
 ciple old as Deity, wreathed with beauty, dramatized in 
 action, incarnated in life, purified by suffering and death. 
 And we confess, that to this ideal we know no novel in this 
 our country that approaches so nearly as " Zanoni." An 
 intense spirituality, a yearning earnestness, a deep reli- 
 
SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 171 
 
 gious feeling, lie like the " soft shadow of an angel's wing'* 
 upon its every page. Its beauties are not of the " earth 
 earthy." Its very faults, cloudy, colossal, tower above our 
 petty judgment-seats, towards some higher tribunal. 
 
 Best of all is that shade of mournful grandeur which 
 rests upon it. Granting all its blemishes, the improbabi- 
 lities of its story, the occasional extravagances of its lan- 
 guage, let it have its praise, for its pictures of love and 
 grief — of a love leading its votary to sacrifice stupendous 
 privileges, and reminding you of that which made angels 
 resign their starry thrones for the " daughters of men ;" 
 and of a grief too deep for tears, too sacred for lamentation, 
 the grief which he increaseth that increaseth knowledge, 
 the grief which not earthly immortality, which death only 
 can cure. The tears which the most beautiful and melting 
 close of the tale wrings from our eyes are not those which 
 wet the last pages of ordinary novels : they come from a 
 deeper source ; and as the lovers are united in death, to 
 part no more, triumph blends with the tenderness with 
 which we witness the sad yet glorious union. Bulwer, in 
 the last scene, has apparently in his eye the conclusion of 
 the " Revolt of Islam," where Laon and Laone, springing 
 in spirit from the funereal pile, are united in a happier re- 
 gion, in the "calm dwelhngs of the mighty dead," where 
 on a fairer landscape rests a " holier day," and where the 
 lesson awaits them, that 
 
 *' Virtue, though obscured on earth, no less 
 Survives all mortal change, in lasting loveliness." ^-t x 
 Amid the prodigious number of Bulwer's other produc- 
 tions, we may mention one or two " dearer than the rest." 
 The " Student," from its disconnected plan, and the fact 
 that the majority of its papers appeared previously, has 
 seemed to many a mere published portfolio, if not an aim- 
 less collection of its author's study-sweepings. This, how- 
 ever, is not a fair or correct estimate of its merits. It in 
 reality contains the cream of Bulwer's periodical writings. 
 
172 SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 
 
 And the " New Monthly Magazine," during his editorship, 
 approached our ideal of a perfect magazine ; combining, as 
 it did, impartiality, variety, and power. His " Conversa- 
 tions with an Ambitious Student in ill health," though 
 hardly equal to the dialogues of Plato, contain many rich 
 meditations and criticisms, suspended round a simple and 
 affecting story. The word " ambitious," however, is un- 
 fortunate ; for what student is not, and should not be, am- 
 bitious ? To study is to climb '* higher still, and higher, 
 like a cloud of fire." Talk of an ambitious chamois or of 
 an ambitious lark, as lief as of an ambitious student. The 
 allegories in the " Student" strike us as eminently fine, 
 with glimpses of a more creative imagination than we can 
 find in any of his writings save " Zanoni." We have often 
 regretted that the serious allegory, once too much affected, 
 is now almost obsolete. Why should it be so ? Shall truth 
 no more have its mounts of transfiguration ? Must Mirza 
 no more be overheard in his soliloquies ? And is the road 
 to the " Den" lost for ever ? We trust, we trow not. In 
 the " Student," too, occurs his far-famed attack upon the 
 anonymous in periodical writing. We do not coincide 
 ^viih him in this. We do not think that the use of the 
 anonymous either could or should be relinquished. It is, 
 to be sure, in some measure relinquished as it is. The 
 tidings of the authorship of any article of consequence, in 
 a Review or Magazine, often now pass with the speed of 
 lightning through the literary world, till it is as well known 
 in the book-shop of the country town, or the post-oflice of 
 the country village, as in Albermarle or George Street. 
 
 But, in the first place, the anonymous forms a very pro- 
 fitable exercise for the acuteness of our young critics, who 
 become, through it, masters in the science of internal evi- 
 dence, and learn to detect the fine Roman hand of this and 
 the other writer, even in the strokes of his t's, and the dots 
 of his i's. Besides, secondly, the anonymous forms for the 
 author an ideal character, fixes him in an ideal position. 
 
SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON. 173 
 
 projects him out of himself; and hence many writers have 
 surpassed themselves, both in power and popularity, while 
 writing under its shelter. So with Swift, in his " Tale of 
 a Tub;" Pascal, Junius, Sydney Smith, Isaac Taylor, 
 Walter Scott ; Addison, too, was never so good as when 
 he put on the short face of the " Spectator." Wilson is 
 never so good, as when he assumes the glorious alias of 
 Christopher North. And, thirdly, the anonymous, when 
 preserved, piques the curiosity of the reader, mystifies him 
 into interest ; and, on the other hand, sometimes allows a 
 bold and honest writer, to shoot folly, expose error, strip 
 false pretension, and denounce wrong, with greater safety 
 and effect. A time may come when the anonymous will 
 require to be abandoned : but we are very doubtful if that 
 time has yet arrived. 
 
 In pursuing, at the commencement of this paper, a 
 parallel between Byron and Bulwer, we omitted to note a 
 stage, the last in the former's literary progress. Toward 
 the close of his career, his wild shrieking earnestness sub- 
 sided into Epicurean derision. He became dissolved into 
 one contemptuous and unhappy sneer. Beginning with 
 the satiric bitterness of " English Bards," he ended with 
 the fiendish gaiety of " Don Juan." He laughed at first 
 that he " might not weep ;" but ultimately this miserable 
 mirth drowned his enthusiasm, his heart, and put out the 
 few flickering embers of his natural piety. The deep 
 tragedy dissolved in a " poor pickle herring," yet mourn- 
 ful farce. We trust that our novelist will not complete his 
 resemblance to the poet, by sinking into a satirist. 'Tis 
 indeed a pitiful sight that, of one who has passed the meri- 
 dian of life and reputation, grinning back, in helpless 
 mockery and toothless laughter, upon the brilliant way 
 which he has traversed, but to which he can return no 
 more. We anticipate for Bulwer a better destiny. He 
 who has mated with the mighty spirit, which had almost 
 reared again the fallen Titanic form of republican Rome ; 
 
174 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 whose genius has travelled up the Rhine, like a breeze of 
 music, "stealing and giving odour;" who, in "England 
 and the English," has cast a rapid but vigorous glance 
 upon the tendencies of our wondrous age ; who, in his 
 verse, has so admirably pictured the stages of romance in 
 Milton's story ; who has gone down a " diver lean and 
 strong," after Schiller, into the " innermost main," lifting 
 with a fearless hand the " veil that is woven with night 
 and with terror ;" and in " Zanoni," has essayed to re- 
 lume the mystic fires of the Rosicrucians, and to reveal 
 the dread secrets of the spiritual world ; must worthily 
 close a career so illustrious.* 
 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 Elsewhere we have spoken shortly, but sincerely, of 
 Emerson, and even at the risk of egotism, we must say, 
 
 * Since the above was written, Bulwer has published three 
 works of consequence, all very different from each other : *' Lu- 
 cretia," a detestable imitation of a detestable school ; " Harold," a 
 fine historical romance ; and " The Caxtons," the sweetest, simplest, 
 most genuine and natural of all his productions. An ingenious friend 
 in " Hogg" has charged us with having painted an incongruous and 
 inconsistent portrait of Bulwer, asserting that our original feeling 
 toward him was that of enthusiastic admiration, but had been modi- 
 fied upon the mere dictum of some eminent friend. This is a total 
 misapprehension. Our feelings of admiration toward Bulwer have 
 rather grown than otherwise. In the year 1840 we wrote rather 
 slightingly of him in the " Dumfries Herald," but we had not then 
 read " Zanoni." To piece together an old and new opinion, is, indeed, 
 an absurd attempt, and leads to an absurd result ; but it is an attempt 
 we have never made, and let the public judge whether it be a result 
 which we have reached. We could retort upon our clever friend, by 
 proving that within one year he expressed two opinions of this very ar- 
 tide. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 175 
 
 that we have been not a little amused at the treatment 
 which our remarks have met with from the press of Ame- 
 rica. So far as we can judge from periodicals and news- 
 papers, from Baltimore to Boston, a cry of universal re- 
 probation has assailed that article. It has fallen between 
 two stools — on the one hand, Emerson's detractors are 
 furious with us, for placing him at the head of American 
 literature, and so far they are right — though a most na- 
 tional writer, to American literature he does not belong. 
 He is among them, but not of them — a separate state, 
 which no Texas negotiation will ever be able to annex to 
 their territory. On the other hand, the school of Tran- 
 scendentalists contend that we do him le? s than justice ; that 
 our lines are unable to measure or to hold this leviathan ; 
 and the opinion of one American author to this effect 
 deeply humiliated us, till accidentally falling in with her 
 own criticisms, and finding that, among other judgments of 
 the same kind, she preferred Southey, as a poet, to Shelley, 
 we were not a little comforted, and began to think that, 
 perhaps, we had as good a right to think and speak about 
 Emerson as herself. " Verily, a prophet hath honour, save 
 in his own country, and among those of his own house" — 
 an expression containing much more truth than it at first 
 seems to imply ; for, indeed, the honour given in one's own 
 country is often as worthless as the neglect or abuse ; and, 
 notwithstanding the well-known French adage, the vilest 
 and commonest of hero-worship is that of valets and para- 
 sites, who measure their idol by the standard of his supe- 
 riority to their own littleness. Hero-worship, however, 
 even in its worst form, is preferable to that spirit of jealousy 
 which pervades much of the American press in reference 
 to Emerson, which, at the mention of his name, elicits in 
 each journal a long list of illustrious-obscure (like a shower 
 of bats from the roof of a barn oa the entrance of a light), 
 in its judgment superior to him — as though a Cockney, in- 
 sulted by a panegyric on Carlyle, as one of the principal 
 
17 G RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 literary ornaments of London, were to produce and parade 
 the names of the subordinate scribblers in the " Satirist," 
 " Literary Gazette," &c., as the genuine galaxy of her 
 mental firmament. With occasional exceptions, the great 
 general rule is — how does a name sound afar ? — does it re- 
 turn upon us from the horizon ? — what impression does it 
 make upon those who, unprejudiced either for or against the 
 author personally — uncircumscribed by clique or coterie — 
 unaltered by adverse, unsoftened by favourable criticism, 
 have fairly brought his works to the test of their own true- 
 feeling and true-telling souls ? 
 
 This has been eminently the case with Emerson. To 
 him Britain is beginning to requite the justice which 
 America, to her honour, first awarded to Carlyle. Sincere 
 spirits, in every part of tlie country, who have, many of 
 them, no sympathy with Emerson's surmised opinions, de- 
 light, nevertheless, to do him honour, as an earnest, honest, 
 and gifted man, caught, indeed, and struggling in a most 
 alien element, standing almost alone in a mechanical coun- 
 try, and teaching spiritual truth to those to many of whom 
 Mammon — not Moses — has become the lawgiver, and Cant 
 — not Christ — the God, but as yet faithful to the mission 
 with which he deems himself to be fraught. 
 
 Alike careless and fearless of the judgment which may 
 be passed by any man here or in America on our opinions, 
 we propose now to extend our former estimate of Emerson 
 — an estimate which has at once been strengthened and 
 modified by the volume of poems he has recently issued. 
 
 And first of his little volume of poems. They are not 
 wholes, but extracts, from the volume of his mind. They 
 are, as he truly calls some of them, " AVoodnotes," as beau- 
 tiful, changeful, capricious, and unfathomable often as the 
 song of the birds. On hearing such notes we sometimes 
 ask ourselves, '^' What sai/s that song which has lapped us 
 in such delicious reverie, and made us almost forget the 
 music in the sweet thoughts which are suggested by it?" 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 177 
 
 Vain the question, for is not the suggestion of such sweet 
 thoughts saying enough, saying all that it was needed to say ? 
 It is the bird that speaks— our own soul alone can furnish 
 the interpretation. So with many of the poems of Emer- 
 son. They mean absolutely nothing — they are mere non- 
 sense-verses — except to those who have learned their 
 cypher, and whose heart instinctively dances to their tune. 
 It is often a wordless music — a wild wailing rhythm — a 
 sound inexplicable, but no more absurd or meaningless than 
 the note of the flute or the thrill of the mountain bagpipe. 
 Who would, or who, though willing, could, translate into 
 common, into all language, that "train of thought and emo- 
 tion, long as the life of the soul, and wide as the firma- 
 ment, which one inarticulate melody can awaken in the 
 mind ? So some of Emerson's verses float us away, listen- 
 ing and lost, on their stream of sound, and of dim sugges- 
 tive meaning. Led himself, as he repeatedly says, " as 
 far as the incommunicable," he leads us into the same 
 mystic region, and we feel that even in Nature there are 
 things unutterable, which it is not possible for the tongue 
 of man to utter, and which yet are real as the earth and 
 the heavens. Coleridge remarks, that wherever you find a 
 sentence musically worded, of true rhythm, and melody in 
 the words, there is something deep and good in the mean- 
 ing too. Mere no-meaning will not wed with sweet sound. 
 We do not profess to be in the secret of some of the more 
 mystic poems in this volume, such as " Uriel" and the 
 " Sphynx." Nor can we think that there is much room 
 behind the mystic screen — where the poet stands — between 
 his song and the " Oversoul ;" but we are ready to apply 
 the old Socratic rule in his behalf — what we understand is 
 excellent, what we do not understand is likely to be excel- 
 lent too. 
 
 A man is often better than his theory, however good 
 and comparatively true that theory be ; and this holds 
 especially true of a poet's creed, which, however dry, hard, 
 
 N 
 
] 78 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 and abstract, flushes into beauty at his touch, even as the 
 poet's cottage has charms about it, which are concealed 
 from the vulgar eye ; and the poet's bride is often by him 
 prodigally clothed with beauties which niggard nature had 
 denied her. What Mr Emerson's creed is, we honestly 
 say we do not know — that all we confidently assert con- 
 cerning it is, that you cannot gather it like apples into 
 baskets, nor grind it like corn into provender, nor wind 
 and unwind it like a hank of yarn, nor even collect it like 
 sunlight into a focus, and analyse it into prismatic points, 1 
 whether five or seven — nor inclose it within all the voca- " 
 bularies of all vernacular tongues ; and yet that it is not so 
 bad or unholy, but that in his mind Beauty pitches her tents 
 around its borders, and Wonder looks up toward it with 
 rapt eye, and Song tunes sweet melodies in its praise, and 
 Love, like the arms of a child seeking to span a giant oak, 
 seeks to draw into her embrace its immeasurable vastness. 
 It is such a creed as a man might form and subscribe in a 
 dream, and when he awoke receive a gentle shrift from 
 wise and gentle confessors. Why criticise or condemn the 
 long nocturnal reverie of a poetic mind, seeking to impose 
 its soft fantasy upon the solid and stupendous universe ! 
 We will pass it by in silence, simply retorting the smile 
 with which he regards our sterner theories, as we watch 
 him weaving his network of cobweb around the limbs of 
 the " Sphynx," and deeming that he has her fast. 
 
 This, indeed, is the great fault of Emerson. He has a 
 penchant for framing brain-webs of all sorts and sizes ; 
 and because they hang beautifully in the sunbeam, and 
 wave gracefully in the breeze, and are to his eye peopled 
 with a fairy race, he deems them worthy of all acceptation, 
 and we verily believe would mount the scaffold, if requisite, 
 fc^ the wildest day-dream that ever crossed his soul among 
 the woods. It was for visions as palpable as the sun that 
 the ancient prophets sacrificed or periled their lives. It 
 was for facts of which their own eyes and ears were cog- 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 179 
 
 nisant that the apostles of the Lamb loved not their lives 
 unto the death. It was not till this age that " Cloudland," 
 nay, dreamland — dimmer still — sent forth a missionary to 
 testify, with rapt look and surging eloquence, his belief in 
 the shadows of his own thoughts. 
 
 Emerson, coming down among men from his mystic 
 altitudes, reminds us irresistibly at times of Rip Van 
 "Winkle, with his grey beard and rusty firelock, descend- 
 ing the Catskill Mountains, from his sleep of a hundred 
 years. A dim, sleepy atmosphere hangs around him. All 
 things have an unreal appearance. Men seem " like trees 
 walking." Of his own identity he is by no means certain. 
 As in the " Taming of the Shrew," the sun and the moon 
 seem to have interchanged places ; and yet, arrived at his 
 native village, he (not exactly like honest Rip) sets up a 
 grocer's shop, and sells, not the mystic draught of the 
 mountain, but often the merest commonplace preparations 
 of an antiquated morality. 
 
 In fact, nothing is more astounding about this writer 
 than the mingled originality and triteness of his matter. 
 Now he speaks as if from inmost communion with the soul 
 of being ; Nature seems relieved of a deep burden which 
 had long lain on her bosom, when some of his oracular 
 words are uttered ; and now it is as if the throat of the 
 thunder had announced the rule of three — as if the old 
 silence had been broken, to enunciate some truism which 
 every schoolboy had long ago recorded in his copy-book. 
 The " Essay on Compensation," for example, proves most 
 triumphantly that vice is its own punishment, and virtue 
 its own reward ; but, so far as it seeks to show that vice 
 is its own only punishment, and virtue is its own only re- 
 ward, it signally fails. The truth, indeed, is this — ^vice 
 does punish, and terribly punish, its victims, but who is to 
 punish vice ? How is it to be gibbeted for the warning of 
 the moral universe ? Can a mere under-current of present 
 punishment be sufficient for this, if there be such a thing 
 
180 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 as a great general commonwealth in the universe at all ? 
 Must it not receive, as the voluntary act of responsible 
 agents, some public and final rebuke ? The compensation 
 which it at present obtains is but comparatively a course 
 of private teaching ; and does not the fact, that it is on the 
 whole unsuccessful, create a necessity for a more public, 
 strict, and effectual reckoning and instruction ? 
 
 Thus, what is true in this celebrated essay is not new ; 
 and what is new is not true. This is not unfrequently the 
 manner of Mr Emerson. To an egregious truism he some- 
 times suddenly appends a paradox as egregious. Like a 
 stolid or a sly servant at the door of a drawing-room, he 
 calls out the names of an old respected guest and of an in- 
 truding and presumptuous charlatan, so quickly and so 
 close together, that they appear to the company to enter as 
 a friendly pair. Of intentional deception on such matters, 
 we cheerfully and at once acquit him ; but to his eye, 
 emerging from the strange dreamy abnormal regions in 
 which he has dwelt so long, old things appear new, and 
 things new to very crudity appear stamped with the autho- 
 rity and covered with the hoary grandeur of age. 
 
 Emerson's object of worship has been by many called 
 nature — it is, in reality, man ; but by man, in his dark 
 ambiguities and inconsistencies, repelled, he has turned 
 round and sought to see his face exhibited in the reflector 
 of nature. It is man whom he seeks everywhere in the 
 creation. In pursuit of an ideal of man, he runs up the 
 midnight winds of the forest and questions every star of 
 the sky. To gain some authentic tidings of man's origin 
 — his nature — past and future history — he listens with 
 patient ear to the songs of birds — the wail of torrents — as 
 if each smallest surge of air were whispering, could he but 
 catch the meaning, about man. He feels that every enigma 
 rans into the great enigma — what is man ? and that if he 
 could but unlock his own heart, the key of the universe 
 were found. Perhaps nature, in some benignant or un- 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 181 
 
 guarded hour, will tell him where that key was lost ! At 
 all events, he will persist in believing that the creation is 
 a vast symbol of man ; that every tree and blade of grass 
 is somehow cognate with his nature, and significant of his 
 destiny ; and that the remotest stars are only the distant 
 perspective of that picture of which he is the central figure. 
 
 It is this which so beautifies nature to his eye — that 
 gives him more than an organic or associated pleasure in 
 its forms, and renders it to him, not so much an object of 
 love or of admiration as of ardent study. To many nature 
 is but the face of a great doll — a well-painted insipidity ; 
 to Emerson it has sculptured on it an unknown but mighty 
 language, which he hopes yet to decipher. Could he but 
 understand its alphabet ! — could he but accurately spell out 
 one of its glorious syllables ! In the light of that flashing 
 syllable he would appear to himself discovered, explained ; 
 and thus, once for all, would be read the riddle of the 
 world ! 
 
 This, too, prevents his intercourse with nature from be- 
 coming either tedious or melancholy. Nature, to most, is 
 a gloomy companion. Sometimes they are tired of it — 
 more frequently they are terrified. " What does all this 
 mean ? what would all this teach us ? what would those 
 frowning schoolmasters of mountains have us to do or 
 learn ?" are questions which, though not presented in form, 
 are felt in reality, and which clear, as by a whip of small 
 cords, the desecrated temple of nature. A few, indeed, 
 are still left standing in the midst alone! And among 
 those few is Emerson, who is reconciled to remain, chiefly 
 through the hope and the desire of attaining one day more 
 perfect knowledge of nature's silent cypher, and more en- 
 tire communion with nature's secret soul. Like an enthu- 
 siastic boy clasping a Homer's " Iliad," and saying, " I 
 shall yet be able to understand this," does he seem to say, 
 " Dear are ye to me, Monadnoc and Agiochook, dear ye 
 Alleganies and Niagaras, because I yet hope (or at least 
 
182 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 those may hope who are to follow me) to unfix your clasps 
 of iron — to unroll your sheets of adamant — to deliver the 
 giant truths that are buried and struggling below you — to 
 arrest in human speech the accents of your vague and 
 tumultuous thunder." 
 
 As it is, his converse with creation is intimate and en- 
 dearing. " Passing over a bare common, amid snow 
 puddles, he almost fears to say how glad he is." He seems 
 (particularly in his " Woodnotes") an inspired tree, his 
 veins full of sap instead of blood ; and you take up his 
 volume of poems, clad as it is in green, and smell to it as 
 to a fresh leaf. He is like the shepherd (in Johnson's fine 
 fable) among the Carpathian rocks, who understood the 
 language of the vultures ; the sounds — how manifold — of 
 the American forest say to his purged ear what they say 
 to few others, and what even his language is unable fully 
 to express. 
 
 Akin to this passionate love of nature is one main error 
 in Emerson's system. Because nature consoles and satisfies 
 him, he would preach it as a healing influence of universal 
 efiicacy. He would send man to the fields and woods to 
 learn instruction and get cured of his many wounds. These 
 are the airy academies which he recommends. But, alas ! 
 how few can act upon the recommendation ! Ho\* few en- 
 tertain a genuine love for nature ! Man, through his un- 
 happy wanderings, has been separated, nay, divorced, from 
 what was originally his pure and beautiful bride — the uni- 
 verse. No one feels this more than Emerson, or has 
 mourned it in language more plaintive. But why will he 
 persist in prescribing nature as a panacea to those who, by 
 his own showing, are incapable of apprehending its virtue ? 
 They are clamouring for bread, and he would give them 
 rocks and ruins. We hold that between man and nature 
 there is a gulf, which nothing but a vital change upon his 
 character, circumstances, and habits can fill up. Ere ap- 
 plying the medicine you must surely premise the stomach. 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 183 
 
 Man, as a collective being, has little perception of the 
 beauty, and none of the high spiritual meaning of creation ; 
 and as well teach the blind religion through the aveuue of 
 the eye as teach average man truth or hope, or faith or 
 purity, through a nature amid which he dwells an alien 
 and an enemy. 
 
 On no subject is there so much pretended, and on none 
 so little real feeling, as in reference to the beauties of 
 nature. We do not allude merely to the trash which pro- 
 fessed authors, like even Dickens, indite, when, against 
 the grain, it is their cue to fall into raptures with Niagara, 
 or the scenery of the Eternal City, but to the experiences 
 of every-day life. How often have we travelled with 
 parties of pleasure (as they are called) whose faces, after 
 the first burst of animal excitement, produced by fresh air 
 and society, had subsided, it was impossible to contemplate 
 without a mixture of ludicrous and melancholy emotions. 
 Besides, here and there, a young gentleman, with elevated 
 eyebrow and conceited side-look, spouting poetry ; and a 
 few young ladies looking intensely sentimental during the 
 spoutation, the majority exhibited, so far as pleasure was 
 concerned, an absolute blank — weariness, disgust, insipid 
 disregard, or positive aversion, to all the grander features 
 of the scenery, were the general feelings visible. Still 
 more detestable were their occasional exclamations of forced 
 admiration, nearly as eloquent, but not so sincere, as the 
 enthusiasm of porkers over their provender. And how 
 quickly did a starveling jest or a wretched pun jerk them 
 down from their altitudes to a more congenial region ! A 
 double entendre told better than the sight of a biforked 
 Grampian. The poppling of a cork was finer music than 
 the roar of a cataract. A silly flirtation among the hazel- 
 bushes was far more memorable than the sudden gleam of 
 a blue lake flashing through the umbrage like another 
 morning. And when the day was over, and the party 
 were returning homewards, it was dismal, amid the deep- 
 
3 84 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 ening shadows of earth and the thickening glories of the 
 eky, to witness the jaded looks, the exhausted spirits, the 
 emptied hearts and souls of those vain fiutterers about 
 nature, w^hom the mighty mother had amused herself with 
 tiring and tormenting, instead of unbarring to them her 
 naked loveliness, or hinting to them one of the smallest 
 secrets of her inmost soul. Specimens these of myriads 
 upon myriads of parties of pleasure, which fashion is yearly 
 stranding upon the shores of nature — to them an inhospi- 
 table coast — and proofs that man, as a species, must grow, 
 and perhaps grow for ages, ere he be fit, even " on tiptoe 
 standing," to be on a level with that " house not made with 
 hands," of which he is now the unworthy tenant. Surely 
 the beauties of nature are an appliance too refined for the 
 present coarse complaints of degraded humanity, which a 
 fiercer caustic must cure. 
 
 Emerson may be denominated emphatically the man of 
 contrasts. At times he is, we have seen, the most common- 
 place, at other times the most paradoxical of thinkers. So 
 is he at once one of the clearest and one of the most ob- 
 scure of writers. He is seldom muddy ; but either trans- 
 parent as crystal or utterly opaque. He sprinkles sen- 
 tences (as divines do scripture quotations) upon his page, 
 which are not only clear, but cast, like glow-worms, a far 
 and fairy light around them. At other times he scatters 
 a shower of paragraphs, which lie, like elf-knots, insulated 
 and insoluble. Hence reading him has the stimulus of a 
 walk amid the interchanging lights and shadows of the 
 woods, or it is like a game of hide-and-seek, or you feel 
 somewhat like the unlearned reader of Howe and Baxter 
 when he comes upon their Latin and Greek quotations. 
 You skip or bolt his bits of mysticism, and pass on with 
 greater gusto to the clear and the open. Whether there 
 be degrees in biblical inspiration or not, there are degrees 
 in his. Now he rays out light, and now, like a black star, 
 he deluges us with darkness. The explanation of all this 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 185 
 
 lies, we think, here — Emerson has naturally a poetic and 
 practical, not a philosophic or subtle mind ; he has sub- 
 jected himself, however, to j)hilosophic culture, with much 
 care, but with partial success; when he speaks directly 
 from his own mind, his utterances are vivid to very bril- 
 liance ; when he speaks from recollection of his teachers, 
 they are exceedingly perplexed and obscure. 
 
 He is certainly, apart altogether from his verse, the 
 truest poet America has produced. He has looked imme- 
 diately, and through no foreign medium, at the poetical 
 elements which he found lying around him. He has 
 " staid at home with the soul," leaving others to gad 
 abroad in search of an artificial and imperfect inspiration. 
 He has said, " If the spirit of poetry chooses to descend 
 upon me as I stand still, it is well ; if not, I will not go a 
 step out of my road in search of it ; here, on this rugged 
 soil of Massachusetts, I take my stand, baring my brow 
 in the breeze of my own country, and invoking the genius 
 of my own woods." Nor has he invoked it in vain. 
 Words, which are pictures— sounds, which are song — 
 snatches of a deep woodland melody — jubilant raptures in 
 praise of nature, reminding you afar off of those old 
 Hebrew hymns, which, paired to the timbrel or the clash 
 of cymbals, rose like the cries of some great victory to 
 heaven — are given to Emerson at his pleasure. His prose 
 is not upon occasion, and elaborately dyed with poetic 
 hues, but wears them ever about it on its way, which is a 
 winged way, not along the earth, but through the high and 
 liquid air. Why should a man like this write verse? 
 Does he think that truth, like sheep, requires a bell round 
 its neck, ere it be permitted to go abroad? Have his 
 thoughts risen irresistibly above the reaches of prose, and 
 voluntarily moved into harmonious numbers? Does he 
 mean to abandon — or could he, without remorse — that 
 wondrous prose style of his, combining the sweet simplicity 
 of Addison with the force of Carlyle ? Is he impatient 
 
186 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 to have his verses set to music, and sung in the streets or 
 in the drawing-rooms ? Let him be assured that, exqui- 
 site as many of his poems are, his other writings are a 
 truer and richer voice, their short and mellow sentences 
 moving to the breath of his spirit as musically as the pine- 
 cones to the breeze. 
 
 When we take into account this author's poetic tenden- 
 cies and idealistic training, we are astonished that he 
 should be often the most practical of moralists. And yet 
 so it is. His refined theories frequently bend down like 
 rainbows, and rest their bases on earth. He often seeks 
 to translate transcendental truth into life and action. 
 Himself may be standing still, but it is as a cannon stands 
 still ; his words are careering over the world, calling on 
 men to be fervent in spirit, as well as diligent in business. 
 There is something at times almost laughable in the sight 
 of this man living "collaterally or aside" — this quiet, 
 wrapt mystic standing with folded arms, like a second 
 Simon Stylites, and yet preaching motion, progress — fer- 
 vent motion, perpetual kindling progress to all around him. 
 Motionless as a finger-post, he, like it, shows the way on- 
 wards to all passers-by. He is, in this respect, very un- 
 like Wordsworth, who would protect the quiet of his fields 
 as carefully as that of his family vault, or as the peace of 
 his own heart ; who, in love for calm, would almost prefer 
 pacing the silent streets of a city of the plague to the most 
 crowded thoroughfares of London, and who hates each 
 railway as if, to use the Scripture allusion, its foundation 
 were laid on his first-born, and its terminus were set up 
 over the grave of his youngest child. Emerson, standing 
 on the shore, blesses the steamers that are sweeping past, 
 and cries, " Sweep on to your destination with your freight- 
 age of busy thoughts and throbbing purposes, and, as you 
 pass, churn up the waters into poetry ;" perched on Mo- 
 nadnoc, he seems to point a path into the cloudland of the 
 future for the rushing railway train, which affects him not 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 187 
 
 with fear, but with hope, for he looks on the machinery of 
 this age as a great scheme of conductors, lying spread and 
 ready for the nobler influences of a coming period. He 
 feels that the real truth is this : railways have not dese- 
 crated Nature, but have left man behind, and it were well 
 that man's spiritual should overtake his physical progress. 
 The great lessons of a practical kind which Emerson 
 teaches, or tries to teach his countrymen, are faith, hope, 
 charity, and self-reliance. He does not need to teach them 
 the cheap virtues of industry and attention to their own 
 interest; certain distinctions between meum and tuumy 
 right and wrong, even he has failed to impress upon their 
 apprehension. But he has been unwearied in urging them 
 to faith — in other words, to realise, above the details of 
 life, its intrinsic worth and grandeur as a whole, as well 
 as the presence of divine laws, controlling and animating 
 it all ; to hope in the existence of an advance as certain as 
 the motion of the globe (a feeling this which we notice 
 with pleasure to be growing in his writings) ; to love, as the 
 mother of that milder day which he expects and prophe- 
 sies ; and to self-reliance, as the strong girdle of a nation's, 
 as well as of an individual's loins, without which both are 
 " weak as is a breaking wave." 
 
 To a country like America, whose dependence upon 
 Britain too often reminds us of an upstart hanging heavily, 
 yet with an air of insolent carelessness, upon the arm of a 
 superior, of what use might the latter lesson be ? " Trust 
 thyself. Cut a strong oaken staff from thy own woods, 
 and rest sturdily, like a woodland giant, upon it. Give 
 over stealing from and then abusing the old country. Kill 
 and eat thine own mutton, instead of living on rotten im- 
 ^orted fricassees. Aspire to originality in something else 
 than national faults, insolences, and brutalities. Dare to 
 be true, honest — thyself, indeed, a new country — and the 
 Great Spirit, who loved thee in thy shaggy primeval 
 mantle, will love thee still, and breathe on thee a breath 
 
188 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 of his old inspiration." Thus, substantially, in a thousand 
 places, does Emerson preach to his native country. 
 
 In judjT^ing, whether of his faults or merits, we ought 
 never to lose sight of what is his real position — he was, 
 and is a recluse. He has voluntarily retired from society. 
 Like the knights of old, who left the society of their mis- 
 tresses to meditate in solitary places upon their charms, 
 he, in love to man, has left him, and muses alone upon his 
 character and destiny. His is not the savage grumbling 
 retreat of a Black Dwarf, nor the Parthian flight of a 
 Byron, nor the forced expulsion of a Shelley, who, seek- 
 ing to clasp all men to his warm bosom, was with loud 
 outcries repelled, and ran, shrieking, into solitude — it has 
 been a quiet, deliberate, dignified withdrawal. He has 
 said, "If I leave you, I shall, perchance, be better able 
 to continue to love you — and perhaps, too, better able to 
 understand you — and perhaps, above all, better able to 
 profit you." And so the refined philanthropist has gone 
 away to chew the cud of sweet and bitter fancy, among 
 the blackberry vines, or by the " leopard-coloured rills," 
 or up the long dim vistas of the forest glades. A healthier 
 and happier Cowper, his retreat made, at the time, as 
 little noise as that of the solitary of Olney. London knew 
 not that one, soon to be the greatest poet of that age, and 
 the most powerful satirist of its own vices, was leaving 
 for the country, in the shape of a poor, timid hypochon- 
 driac. None cried " stole away" to this wounded hare. 
 So Boston nor New England imagined not that their finest 
 spirit had forsaken his chapel for the cathedral of the 
 woods — and they would have laughed you to scorn had 
 you told them so. 
 
 In this capacity of recluse he has conducted himself in a 
 way worthy of the voice which came to him from the heart 
 of the forest, saying, " Come hither and I will show thee 
 a thing." By exercise and stern study he has conquered 
 that tendency to aimless and indolent reverie, which is so 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 189 
 
 apt to assail thinking men in solitude. By the practice of 
 bodily temperance and mental hope, he has, in a great 
 measure, evaded the gloom of vexing thoughts and impor- 
 tunate cravings. His mind has, " like a melon," expanded 
 in the sunshine. 
 
 " The outward forms of sky and earth, 
 Of hill and valley, he has view'd; 
 And impulses of deeper birth 
 Have come to him in solitude." 
 
 Still we cannot say that he has entirely escaped the 
 drawbacks to which the recluse is subject. He has been 
 living in a world of his own — he has been more conversant 
 with principles than with facts — and more with dreams 
 than either. His writing sometimes wants the edge and 
 point which can be gained only by rough contact with the 
 world ; as it is, it is often rather an inarticulate murmur 
 as of a brook, careless whether it be heard or understood 
 or not, than the sharp voice of a living man. Perhaps, 
 also, like most solitaries, he has formed and nursed an 
 exaggerated idea of himself and his mission. In despite 
 to the current of general opinion, he sometimes throws 
 in ruo;ored and crude absurdities, which have come from 
 
 CO ' 
 
 some other source than of the " Oversoul ! " And, alto- 
 gether, through the mist of the sweet vision, which seems 
 the permanent abode of his own mind, he has but imper- 
 fect glimpses of the depth and intensity of that human 
 misery, which is but another name for human life. 
 
 There is another subject where, we humbly think, his 
 views are still more egregiously ^in error. We refer to 
 human guilt. We agree with him in thinking that there 
 is a point of view from which this dark topic may be a 
 theme of gratulation. But we deem him premature and 
 presumptuous in imagining that he has already reached 
 that high angle of vision. If Foster's discoloured sight, 
 on the one hand, gave " hell a murkier gloom," and made 
 
190 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 sin jet uglier than it is, Emerson refines it away to nothing, 
 and really seems to regard the evil committed by man in 
 precisely the same light as the cunning of the serpent and 
 the ferocity of the tiger. Who has anointed his eyes with 
 eye-salve, so that he can look complacently, and with inci- 
 pient praise on his lips, upon the loathsome shapes of 
 human depravity ? What Genius of the western moun- 
 tains has taken him to an elevation, whence the mass of 
 man's wickedness, communicating with hell, and growing 
 up toward retribution, appears but a molehill, agreeably 
 diversifying the monotony of this world's landscape ? The 
 sun may, with his burning lips, kiss and gild pollution, and 
 remain pure ; but that human spirit ought to be supernal 
 which can touch and toy with sin. And if, in his vision 
 of the world, there be barely room for guilt, where is there 
 space left or required for atonement ? 
 
 It was once remarked by us of John Foster, " pity but 
 he had been a wickeder man;" the meaning of which 
 strange expression was this — pity but that, instead of stand- 
 ing at such an austere distance from human frailty, he had 
 come nearer it, and in a larger measure partaken of it him- 
 self ; for, in this case, his conceptions of it would have 
 been juster, mellower, and less terribly harsh. We may 
 parallel this by saying, pity almost but Emerson had been 
 a worse and an unhappier man ; for thus might he have 
 felt more of the evil of depravity, from its remorse and its 
 retribution, and been enabled to counteract that tendency, 
 which evidently exists in his sanguine temperament, to 
 underrate its virulence. 
 
 Like every really original mind, Emerson has been fre- 
 quently subjected to and injured by comparison with others. 
 Because he bears certain general resemblances to others, 
 he must be their imitator or feebler alias. Because he is 
 as tall as one or two reputed giants, he must be of their 
 progeny ! He has been called, accordingly, the American 
 Montaigne — the American Carlyle — nay, a " Yankeepocket 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 191 
 
 edition of Carljle." Unfortunate America ! It has been 
 so long the land of mocking-birds, that when an eagle of 
 Jove at last appears, he must have imported his scream, 
 and borrowed the wild lustre of his eye ! A great original 
 standing up in an imitative country looks so sudden and 
 so strange, that men at first conceive him a force d and 
 foreign production. "We will, on the contrary, cling to our 
 belief, that Emerson is himself, and no other; and has 
 learned that piercing yet musical note to which nations 
 are begining to listen, directly from the fontal source of 
 all melody. We are sure that he would rather be an 
 owl, hooting his own hideous monotone, than the most 
 accomplished of the imitative race of mocking-birds or 
 parrots. 
 
 We think that we can observe in many of Emerson's 
 later essays, and in some of his poems, symptoms of deep- 
 ening obscurity ; the twilight of his thought seems rushing 
 down into night. His utterances are becoming vaguer 
 and more elaborately oracular. He is dealing in deliberate 
 puzzles — through the breaks in the dark forest of his page 
 you see his mind in full retreat toward some remoter Cim- 
 merian gloom. That retreat we would arrest if we could, 
 for we are afraid that those who will follow him thither 
 will be few and far between. Since he has gathered a 
 large body of exoterick disciples, it is his duty to seek to 
 instruct, instead of perplexing and bewildering them. 
 
 Of Emerson's history we have little to tell. He was one 
 of several brothers — all men of promise and genius — who 
 died early, and whose loss, in one of his little poems, he 
 deplores, as the "strong star-bright companions" of his 
 youth. He officiated for some time as a clergyman in 
 Boston. An American gentleman, who attended his 
 chapel, gave us lately a few particulars about his ministry. 
 Noted for the amiability of his disposition, the strictness 
 of his morals, and attention to his duties, he became, on 
 these accounts, the idol of his congregation. His preach- 
 
192 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 ing, however, was not generally popular, nor did it deserve 
 to be. Our informant declared, that while Dr Channing 
 was the most, Emerson was the least, popular minister in 
 Boston, and confessed that he never heard him preach a 
 first-rate sermon till his last, in which he informed his con- 
 gregation that he could conscientiously preach to them no 
 more. The immediate cause of his resignation was his 
 adoption of some peculiar views of the Lord's Supper. In 
 reality, however, the pulpit was not his pride of place. Its 
 circle not only confined his body, but restricted his soul. 
 He preferred rather to stray to and fro along the crooked 
 serpent of eternity ! He went away to think, farm, and 
 write (as the Hutchisons so sweetly sing) in the "old 
 granite state." Thence, save to lecture, he has seldom 
 issued, till his late pilgrimage to Britain. One trial, he 
 has himself recorded to have shot like lightning through 
 the haze of his mystic tabernacle, and to have pierced his 
 soul to the quick. It was the death of a dear child of rare 
 promise, whose threnody he has sung as none else could. 
 It is the most touching of his strains to us, who have felt 
 how the blotting out of one fair young face (albeit not so 
 nearly related) is for a season the darkening of earth and 
 of heaven. 
 
 Since beginning to write, we have had the opportunity 
 of hearing Emerson the lecturer, as well as of meeting 
 Emerson the man, and we shall close by a few jottings on 
 him. Of Emerson the private individual, it were indeli- 
 cate to say much ; suffice it that he has neither tail nor 
 cloven foot, has indeed nothing very remarkable or pecu- 
 liar about him, but is simply a mild and intelligent gentle- 
 man, with whom you might be hours and days in company, 
 without suspecting him to be a philosopher or a poet. His 
 manners are those of one who has studied the graces in the 
 woods, unwittingly learned his bow from the bend of the 
 pine, and his air and attitudes from those into which the 
 serviceable wind adjusts the forest trees, as it sweeps across 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 193 
 
 them. His conversation is at times a sweet rich dropping, 
 like honey from the rock. He is a great man, gracefully 
 disguised under sincere modesty and simplicity of charac- 
 ter ; is totally free from those go a-head crotchets and cants 
 which disgust you in many Americans ; and it is impossible 
 for the most prejudiced to be in his society, and not be im- 
 pressed with respect for the innocence of his life, and re- 
 gard for the unaffected sincerity of his manners. Plain 
 and homely he may be as a wooden bowl, but not the less 
 rich and ethereal is the nectar of thought by which he is 
 filled. A lecturer, in the common sense of the term, he is 
 not ; call liim rather a public monologist, talking rather to 
 himself than to his audience — and what a quiet, calm, com- 
 manding conversation it is ! It is not the seraph, or burn- 
 ing one that you see in the midst of his wings of fire — it is 
 the naked cherubic reason thinking aloud before you. He 
 reads his lectures without excitement, without energy, 
 scarcely even with emphasis, as if to try what can be 
 efiected by the pure, unaided momentum of thought. It 
 is soul totally unsheathed that you have to do with ; and 
 you ask, is this a spirit's tongue that is sounding on its 
 way ? so solitary and severe seems its harmony. There is 
 no betrayal of emotion, except now and then when a slight 
 tremble in his voice proclaims that he has arrived at some 
 spot of thought to him peculiarly sacred or dear, even as 
 our fellow-traveller along a road sometimes starts and 
 looks round, arrived at some land-mark of passion and 
 memory, which to us has no interest; or as an earthly 
 steed might be conceived to shiver under the advent of 
 a supernal horseman — so his voice must falter here and 
 there below the glorious burden it has to bear. There is 
 no emphasis, often, but what is given by the eye, and this 
 is felt only by those who see him on the side view ; neither 
 standing behind nor before can we form any conception of 
 the rapt living flash which breaks forth athwart the spec- 
 tator. His eloquence is thus of that highest kind which 
 
 o 
 
] .04 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 produces great effects at sir. all expenditure of means, and 
 without any effort or turbulence ; still and strong as gra- 
 vitation, it fixes, subdues, and turns us around. To be 
 more popular tban it is, it requires only two elements — 
 first, a more artistic accommodation to the tastes and under- 
 standings of the audience ; and, secondly, greater power 
 of personal passion, in which Emerson's head as well as 
 his nature seems deficient. Could but some fiery breath 
 of political zeal or religious enthusiasm be let loose upon 
 him, to create a more rapid and energetic movement in his 
 style and manner, he would stir and inflame the world. 
 
 His lectures, as to their substance, are very comprehen- 
 sive. In small compass, masses of thought, results of long 
 processes, lie compact and firm ; as 240 pence are calmly 
 enclosed in one bright round sovereign, so do volumes 
 manifold go to compose some of Emerson's vsliort and 
 Sibylline sentences. In his lecture on Napoleon, as we 
 have already seen, he reduces him and the history of his 
 empire to a strong jelly. Eloquence, that ample theme, 
 in like manner he condenses into the hollow of one lecture 
 — a lecture for once which proved as popular as it was pro- 
 found. His intellectual tactics somewhat resemble those 
 of Napoleon. As he aimed at, and broke the heart of 
 opposing armies, Emerson loves to grasp and tear out the 
 trembling core of a subject, and show it to his hearers. In 
 both of these lectures we admired his selection of instances 
 and anecdotes ; each stood for a distinct part of the sub- 
 ject, and rendered it at once intelligible and memorable. 
 An anecdote thus severely selected answers the end of a 
 bone in the hand of an anatomical lecturer : it appeals to 
 sense as well as soul. We liked, too, his reading of a pas- 
 sage from the " Odyssey," descriptive of the eloquence of 
 Ulysses. It was translated into prose — the prose of his 
 better essays — by himself, and was read with a calm classi- 
 cal power and dignity, which made a thousand hearts still 
 as the grave. For five minutes there seemed but two things 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 195 
 
 in the world — the silence, and the voice which was pass- 
 ing through it. 
 
 If men, we have often exclaimed, would but listen as 
 attentively to sermons, as they do to the intimations at the 
 end ! Emerson generally commands such attention; espe- 
 cially, we are told, that during his first lecture in Edin- 
 burgh on Natural Aristocracy it was fine to see him, by 
 his very bashfulness, driven not out of, but into himself, 
 and speaking as if in the forest alone with God and his 
 own soul. This was true self-possession. The audience, 
 too, were made to feel themselves as much alone as their 
 orator. To give a curdling sense of solitude in society, is 
 a much higher achievement than to give a sense of society 
 in solitude. It is among the mightiest acts of spiritual 
 power, thus to insulate the imagination or the conscience 
 of man, and suggests afar off the proceedings of that tre- 
 mendous day, when in the company of a universe each man 
 will feel himself alone. 
 
 In the three lectures we heard from Mr Emerson there 
 did not occur a single objectionable sentence. But there 
 was unquestionably a blank in all, most melancholy to con- 
 template. We have no sympathy with the attempts which 
 have been made to poison the popular mind, and to rouse 
 the popular passions against this gentleman, whether by 
 misrepresenting his opinions or by blackening his motives. 
 He does not believe himself — whatever an ignorant and 
 conceited scribbler in the "United Presbyterian Magazine" 
 may say — to be God. He is the least in the world of a 
 proselytiser. He visited this country solely as a literary 
 man, invited to give literary lectures. Whatever be his 
 creed, he has not, in Scotland at least, protruded it ; and 
 even if he had, it would have done little harm ; for as easily 
 transfer and circulate Emerson's brain as his belief. But, 
 when we think of such a mind owning a faith seemingly 
 so cold, and vague, and shadowy ; and when, in his lec- 
 tures, we find moral and spiritual truths of such importance 
 
196 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 robbed of tbeir awful sanctions, separated like rays cut off 
 from the sun — from their parent system and source — swung 
 from off their moorings upon the Rock of ages — the Infinite 
 and the Eternal — and supported upon his own authority 
 alone — when, in short, the Moon of genius comes between 
 us and the Sun of God, we feel a dreariness and desolation 
 of spirit inexpressible ; and, much as we admire the author 
 and love the man, we are tempted to regret the hour when 
 he first landed upon our shores. Our best wishes, and 
 those of thousands, went with him on his homeward way ; 
 but coupled with a strong desire that a better, clearer, and 
 more definite light might dawn upon his soul, and create 
 around him a true " forest sanctuary." Long has he been, 
 like Jacob, dreaming in the desert : surely the ladder can- 
 not be far off. 
 
 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 The office of an interpreter, if not of the highest order, is 
 certainly very useful, honourable, and, at certain periods, 
 particularly necessary. There are times when the angle 
 at which the highest minds of the age stand to the middle 
 and lower classes is exceedingly awkward and uncertain. 
 Their names and their pretensions are well known ; even 
 a glimmer of their doctrine has got abroad ; some even of 
 their books are read with a maximum of avidity, and a 
 minimum of understanding ; but a fuller reflection of their 
 merits and their views — a farther circulation of their spirit, 
 and a more complete discharge of their electric influences, 
 are still needed. For these purposes, unless the men will 
 condescend to interpret themselves, we must have a sepa- 
 rate class for the purpose. Indeed, such a class will be 
 created by the circumstances. As each morning we 8ee a 
 
GEORGE DAWSON. 197 
 
 grand process of interpretation, when the living light leaps 
 downwards from heaven to the mountain summits, and from 
 these to the low-lying hills, and from these to the deep glens 
 — each mountain and hill taking up in turn its part in the 
 great translation, till the landscape is one volume of glory 
 — so mind after mind, in succession, and in the order of 
 their intellectual stature, must catch and reflect the em- 
 pyrean fire of truth. 
 
 Chief among the interpreters of our time stands Thomas 
 Carlyle. He has not added any new truth to the world's 
 stock, nor any artistic work to the world's literature, nor is 
 he now likely to do so ; but he has stood between the Bri- 
 tish mind and the great German orbs, and flung down on 
 us their light, with a kind of contemptuous profusion, co- 
 loured, too, undoubtedly, by the strange rugged idiosyn- 
 crasy on which it has been reflected. This light, however, 
 has fallen short of the middle class, not to speak of the 
 masses of the community. This translation must itself be 
 translated. For some time it might have been advertised 
 in the newspapers — " Wanted, an interpreter for Sartor 
 Resartus." Without the inducement of any such adver- 
 tisement, but as a volunteer, has Mr George Dawson step- 
 ped forward, and has now for two years been plying his 
 profession with much energy and very considerable success. 
 
 It were not praise — it were not even flattery — it were 
 simply insult and irony, to speak of Mr Dawson in any 
 other light than as a clever, a very clever translator, or, if 
 he will, interpreter, of a greater translator and interpreter 
 than himself. In all the lectures we have either heard or 
 read of, his every thought and shade of thought Avas Car- 
 lyle's. The matter of the feast was, first course, Carlyle ; 
 second, do.; dessert, do.; tovjours, Carlyle: the dishes, dress- 
 ing, and sauce only, were his own. Nor do we at all quar- 
 rel with him for this. Since the public are so highly satis- 
 fied, and since Carlyle himself is making no complaint, and 
 instituting no hue and cry, it is all very well. It is really, 
 
198 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 too, a delightful hachis he does cook, full of pepper and 
 spice, and highly palatable to the majority. Our only 
 proper ground of quarrel would be, if he were claiming 
 any independent merit in the thought, apart from the illus- 
 trations, the wit, and the easy vigorous talk of the exhi- 
 bition. We have again and again been on the point of 
 exclaiming, when compelled to contrast description with 
 reality, We shall henceforth believe nothing till we have 
 seen it with our eyes, and heard it with our ears. The 
 most of the pictures we see drawn of celebrated people seem, 
 after we have met with the originals, to have been painted 
 by the blind. So very many determinedly praise a man 
 for qualities which he has not — if a man is tall, they make 
 him short ; if dark, they give him fair hair ; if his brow be 
 moderate in dimensions, they call it a great mass of placid 
 marble ; if he be an easy, fluent speaker, they dignify him 
 with the name orator ; if his eye kindle with the progress 
 of his theme, they tell us that his face gets phosphorescent, 
 and as the face of an angel. Hence the mortifying disap- 
 pointments which are so common — disappointments pro- 
 duced less by the inferiority than by the unliJceness of the 
 reality to the description. A distinguished painter who 
 visited Coleridge was chagrined to find his forehead, of 
 which he had read ravings innumerable, of quite an ordi- 
 nary size. We watched Emerson's face very narrowly, but 
 could not, for our life, perceive any glow mounting up its 
 pale and pensive lines. We had heard much of Dawson's 
 eloquence, but found that while there was much fluency 
 there was little fire, and no enthusiasm. Distance and 
 dunces together had metamorphosed him, even as a nobler 
 cause of deception sometimes changes a village steeple into 
 a tower of rubies, and plates a copse with gold. 
 
 To call this gentleman a Cockney Carlyle, a transcen- 
 dental bagman, were to be too severe ; to call him a com- 
 bination of Cobbett and Carlyle were to be too compli- 
 mentary. But while there is much in the matter which 
 
GEORGE DAWSON. 199 
 
 reminds you of Caiiyle, as the reflection reminds you of 
 the reality, there is much in his style and manner which 
 recalls William Cobbett. Could we conceive Cobbett by 
 any possibility forswearing his own nature, converted to 
 Germanism, and proclaiming it in his own way, we should 
 have had George Dawson anticipated and forestalled. The 
 Saxon style, the homely illustrations, the conversational 
 air, the frequent appeals to common sense, the broad Angli- 
 canisms, and the perfect self-possession, are common to 
 both, with some important differences, indeed ; since Daw- 
 son is much terser and pointed — since his humour is dry, 
 not rich — and since he is, as to substance, rather an echo 
 than a native, though rude voice. 
 
 To such qualities as we have now indirectly enumerated, 
 we are to attribute the sway he has acquired over popular, 
 and especially over English audiences. They are not, while 
 hearing him, called profoundly either to think or feel. They 
 are not painfully reminded that they have not read. En- 
 thusiastic appeal never warms their blood. A noble self- 
 contempt and forgetfulness is never inculcated. Of reve- 
 rence for the ancient, the past, and the mysterious, there is 
 little or none. They are never excited even to any fervour 
 of destructive zeal. A strong, somewhat rough voice is 
 heard pouring out an even, calm, yet swift torrent of 
 mingled paradoxes and truisms, smart epigrammatic sen- 
 tences, short, cold, hurrying sarcasms, deliberate vulgar- 
 isms of expression, quotations from "Sartor Resartus" and 
 Scripture, and from no other book — never growing and 
 never diminishing in interest — never suggesting an end as 
 near, nor reminding us of a beginning as past — every one 
 eager to listen, but no one sorry when it is done ; the pur- 
 pose of the whole being to shake, we think too much, re- 
 spect for formulas, creeds, and constituted authorities — to 
 inculcate, we think too strongly, a sense of independence 
 and individualism — and to give to the future, we think, an 
 undue preponderance over the past. 
 
200 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 Mr George Dawson has read with considerable care and 
 accuracy the signs of his time. He has watched the direc- 
 tion and the rate of the popular tide, and has cast himself 
 on it with an air of martyrdom. His has been the despe- 
 rate determination at all hazards to sail with the stream. 
 He sees, what only the blind do not, that a new era is begun, 
 in which, as Napoleon said, " there shall be no Alps," M^hen 
 they threatened to impede his march ; our young mind 
 has in like manner sworn there shall be no past, no history, 
 no Bible, no God even, if such things venture to stand 
 across our way, and curb our principle of progress, and is 
 rushing on heroically with this daring multitude. One is 
 amused at the cry of persecution which he raises on his 
 way. The term, to us, in such cases as his, sounds su- 
 premely ludicrous. What, in general, does persecution for 
 conscience-sake now mean? It means, if the subject be a 
 clergyman, the trebling of his audience and the doubling of 
 his income ; if an author, the tenfold sale of his works ; if 
 a man in business, three customers instead of one — not to 
 speak of the pleasures of notoriety, lecturing engagements, 
 gold watches, and pieces of plate. Pleasant and profitable 
 persecution ! even when it is diversified by a little news- 
 paper abuse — the powerless hatred of the deserted party — 
 and some strictures in the magazines ! What comparison 
 between this species of persecution and the treatment which 
 a Wordsworth or a Shelley received ? or what comparison 
 between it and the neglect, contempt, and poverty which 
 now befal many a worthy and conscientious supporter of 
 the Old f We knew an elderly neglected clergyman, who 
 came to a brother minister and said, " 1 wish you would 
 preach against me ; it might bring me into notice." Mr 
 Dawson has been preached, placarded, and prayed into no- 
 tice — a notice in which he has expanded and buorgeoned 
 like a peach-tree in the sunshine, and yet of which he 
 thinks proper to complain as persecution ! Pretty exchange ! 
 an elegant pulpit for a barrel of burning coals — fifteen hun» 
 
GEORGE DAWSON. 201 
 
 dred admiring auditors for a thousand exulting foes — the 
 ** Church" instead of the " Cross" of the Saviour. We 
 really cannot, in this world of wo, find in our hearts one 
 particle of pity to spare for Mr Dawson, nor for any such 
 mellifluous martyrs. 
 
 No eagle soaring and screaming in the teeth of the storm 
 — no thunder-cloud moving up the wind, do we deem our 
 hero ; but> on the whole, a most complacent and beautiful 
 peacock's feather, sailing adown the breeze, yet with an 
 air as if it had created and could turn it if he chose ; or, 
 shall we say, a fine large bubble descending with dignity, 
 as if it were the cataract ? or, shall we try it once more ? 
 a straw, imagining that because it shows the direction, it 
 is directing the wind. If these figures do not give satis- 
 faction, we have fifty more at the service of Mr Dawson's 
 admirers ; for, after all, we must blame his admirers and 
 his enemies more than himself. He has much about him 
 that is frank, open, and amiable. A clever young man, 
 endowed with a rare talent for talk, he began to talk in a 
 manner that oiFended his party. Many, on the other hand, 
 of no party, were struck with surprise at hearing such bold 
 and liberal sentiments uttered from such a quarter. Pure, 
 unmixed Carlylism coming from a Baptist pulpit sounded 
 in their ears sweet and strange, as a " voice from a loftier 
 climate." The rest might have been expected. Between 
 the dislike of his foes, the wild enthusiasm of his friends, 
 the ill-calculated pounce of the Archbishop of York, the 
 real, though borrowed merit of many of his sentiments, 
 and the real native force of his speech — he found himself 
 all at once on a giddy eminence which might have turned 
 stronger heads ; for here was the rarissima avis of a liberal 
 Baptist — a Carlylistic clergyman, a juvenile sage, and a 
 transcendentalist talking English — there was no bird in all 
 Knowesley Park that could be named in comparison. 
 Here, besides, was positively the first Dawson (except 
 Peel's friend) that had, as an intellectual man, been known 
 
202 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 beyond his own doorway. Such circumstances, besides a 
 felt want in the public mind, which he professed to supply, 
 account for the rapid rise of one who had written and done 
 nothing, except a few lectures and sermons, to the summit 
 of notoriety. 
 
 So far as Dawson is a faithful renderer or doer into Eng- 
 lish of Thomas Carlyle's sentiments, we have, we repeat, 
 no quarrel with him. But in some points we dislike his 
 mode of expounding and illustrating these, or if he be in 
 all things an accurate expounder of his principal, why, 
 then, we must just venture to question his principal's in- 
 fallibility. 
 
 Mr Dawson, for instance, sets himself with all his might 
 to inculcate the uselessness of the clergy as teachers of 
 truth, and the superiority of the lecturing class, or pro- 
 phets, as he modestly calls them. Samuel, he told us, was 
 a much greater personage than the priests of his day. We 
 do not, in all points, " stand up for our order." We are 
 far from thinking that the clergy, as a whole, are awake 
 to the necessities of the age, or fully alive to all its tenden- 
 cies. We know that Dr Tholuck, when in this country, 
 was grieved at the want of learning he found in some of 
 our greatest men, and especially at their ignorance of the 
 state of matters in Germany. We know that he advised 
 two eminent Doctors of different denominations to read 
 Strauss's "Life of Christ ; " and that, while one of them de- 
 clined, in very strong language, the other, Dr Chalmers 
 (how like him !) said, " AYell, I will read it, Dr Tholuck ; 
 is't a big book?" Strauss, of course, he recommended, not 
 from sympathy with its theory, but because it is a book as 
 necessary to be read now by the defenders of Christianity 
 as was Gibbon's "History" fifty years ago. But while 
 granting much to Mr Dawson, we are far from granting 
 all. Ministers do not profess to be prophets, except in so 
 far as they are declarers of the divine will, as exhibited in 
 the Scriptures, or as they may be endowed with that deep 
 
GEORGE DAWSON. 203 
 
 vision of truth and beauty which is now, by courtesy, 
 called prophetic sight. But who are prophets, pray, in 
 any other sense ? Who can now pretend to stand to minis- 
 ters in the relation in which that Samuel, who had, in his 
 youth, been awakened by the voice of God, and who. in 
 his manhood, had, by his call, aroused the slumbering 
 thunder, and darkened the heavens by the waving of his 
 hand, stood to the priesthood of Israel ? Not surely George 
 Dawson, Esq., A.M., nor yet Thomas Carlyle — no, nor 
 Fichte and Goethe themselves. Alas ! may we not now, 
 all of us, take up the complaint of the Psalmist ? — 
 
 " Our signs we do not now behold. 
 There is not us among 
 A Prophet more, nor any one 
 Ihat knows the time how long." 
 
 It is, as it was at the close of Saul's guilty and inglorious 
 reign, when God refused to answer by dreams, by Urim, 
 or by prophets ; and when, in defect of the true vision, he 
 went to consult with wizards and quack salvers. We are, 
 indeed, rather more favoured — we have still among us 
 wise and gifted men ; but if we would find prophets, in 
 the highest sense of the word, we must just go back and 
 sit at the feet of those awful bards of Israel — those legis- 
 lators of the future — whose words are full of eyes, and the 
 depth of whose insight communicates with the omniscience 
 of God. As poets, as seers, as teachers, as truthful and 
 earnest men, not to speak merely of their august super- 
 natural pretensions, they still tower alone unsurmounted 
 and unapproached, the Himalayan mountains of mankind. 
 It is easy for a popular lecturer, primed and ready with 
 his three or his six polished and laboured efforts, to sneer 
 at the ministers of Jesus. But it is not so easy for one of 
 this, noAV calumniated class, to keep up for long years a 
 succession of effective appeals to the conscience and to the 
 heart, in season and out of season — through good report 
 
204 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 and through bad report. And it is not particularly kind 
 or graceful in a gentleman, who must have experienced 
 the peculiar difficulties of the order to which he still be- 
 longs, to turn again, and rend them ; enjoying, as he does, 
 even yet, some of the immunities of the class, it is mean in 
 him to shirk its reponsibilities, and, meaner still, to try to 
 shake its credit in the estimation of his countrymen. 
 
 He draws, to be sure, a distinction between a preacher 
 and a man preaching — a distinction as obvious nearly as 
 that between a fiddling man and a man fiddling, a barking 
 puppy and a puppy barking. He is not a preaching man, 
 but a man preaching. What a miserable quibble ! Who 
 means by a preacher anything else than a man who has 
 voluntarily assumed the task of declaring the truth of God 
 to his fellows ? Does one necessarily cease to be a man in 
 becoming a preacher ? Or does one necessarily become a 
 man by ceasing to be, or wishing it to be thought that he 
 has ceased to be, a preacher ? Nay, verily. In fact, a 
 considerable share of Mr Dawson's popularity, with a cer- 
 tain class at least, springs from the preacher-air, and the 
 preacher-phrases, which still cling to his delivery and 
 style. He is little else than a clever lecturer, made out of 
 the elements or ruins of a second-rate preacher. 
 
 In Mr Dawson's lectures we find no variety of thought. 
 Two or three ideas, imported into his mind, are rattled like 
 peas over and over, into a thousand different sounds or dis- 
 cords. The same terms, too, such as subjective and objec- 
 tive, dynamical and mechanical, are perpetually repeated, 
 with a parrot- like iteration. There is in some minds, and 
 in some styles, a gigantic monotony, as in the ocean surges, 
 or in the beams of the sun. But there is also a small 
 mannerism arising from the mimicry of a model — itself, in 
 part, a copy, which can with difficulty be endured for a 
 few nights, and for no more. 
 
 Of course, he proclaims warfare against conventionalisms 
 of speech, and of thought : to call, in prayer, a woman a 
 
GEORGE DAWSON. 205 
 
 handmaiden, the sea the great deep, &c., is with him a grave 
 offence. Words are things. Things ought to be called 
 by their right names. A spade should be a spade : and 
 not, with Dr Johnson, a " broad, semi-wooden, semi-iron, 
 instrument for tearing the bosom of terra firma, the pioneer 
 of the advenient seed." Shade of Dr Johnson ! then, art 
 thou not provoked to ask, What, in the name of wonder, 
 George Dawson, art thou? what callest thou thyself? 
 Art thou infidel, pagan, or Christian, or anything more 
 than a man preaching ? I know not how to entitle thee, 
 positively ; but, negatively, depend upon it, / shall never 
 call thee, by any accident, " a great deep." 
 
 Too often in Mr Dawson's prelections what is new is 
 not true, and what is true is not new. In proclaiming the 
 stern truth that there is something higher than happiness — 
 namely, blessedness — he only repeated the finest sentence 
 in that abysmal volume, " Sartor Resartus." But who in- 
 structed him for once to go beyond his master, and to ridi- 
 cule the phrase, " luxury of doing good?" Because duty 
 can play its high part at times without public fee or reward, 
 has it not always, in its own exercise, " a joy beyond the 
 name of pleasure?" Does not Scripture often appeal to 
 the desire and to the prospect of happiness as stimulants to 
 duty ? Has not the Divine Being annexed even to sacri- 
 fice and to martyrdom a feeling which we may appropriately 
 term " luxury," if luxury mean something at once delicious 
 and rare ? " To be good for good's sake," is the noblest 
 reach of man ; but what does good imply in its very con- 
 ception ? Surely some severe but real delight, partly in 
 present feeling, and partly in future prospect. We know 
 right well the tendency of Mr Dawson's sneer — it is an 
 attempt to scoff out the golden candlestick of celestial bless- 
 edness, as the reward of the good ; although as well might 
 he seek to puff away to-morrow's sun. 
 
 We notice, in connection with all his allusions to religion, 
 a want of moral reverence for the subject. Suppose it were 
 
206 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 true, what he so often intimates, that God has abandoned 
 our present forms of worship, in what spirit should he tread 
 the deserted shrine ? In what spirit did (we beg pardon 
 for the reference) the Son of Man walk in the desecrated 
 and doomed Temple of Jerusalem ? It was not, certainly, 
 with contemptuous disregard, any more than with the cry 
 on his lips, Raze, raze it to its foundation ! It was, doubt- 
 less, with tears in his eyes, as he remembered, " Here God 
 once dwelt." With what coolness, with what propensity to 
 sneer, with what ill-suppressed joy, at these long desola- 
 tions, do some now walk through what they call a ruin, as 
 forsaken as the temple of Jupiter Palatinus. Shame to 
 thee, George Dawson, if this be thy feeling, as we fear it 
 is ! This is not, rely on it, the feeling of thy Master, though 
 he never took the vows of the ministry upon his soul. If 
 we have not totally misconstrued the nature of Thomas 
 Carlyle, he passes through the sanctuary, which he deems 
 now forsaken, nay, a den of thieves, with emotions of pro- 
 foundest sorrow, because, to use the language of Howe, the 
 broken arches, the mouldering inscriptions, and the extinct 
 fire, seem to him but too plainly to testify that the Great 
 Inhabitant is gone. 
 
 Mr Dawson's /o?'^e lies, unquestionably, in his lively and 
 amusing illustrations. His is a species of proverbial phi- 
 losophy. He abounds both in " old saws and modern in- 
 stances." He accommodates the results of philosophy to 
 every-day life, and translates its technicalities into the 
 loose conversation, almost into the slang, of every-day lan- 
 guage. It may be questioned whether in this he does men 
 much service ; for, in the first place, in such a process a 
 great deal that is most valuable necessarily escapes. There 
 are thoughts in every high philosophy which will not bear 
 translation into ordinary speech. Our English vernacular 
 will only look ludicrous as it attempts to girth their great- 
 ness ; and these thoughts are, of course, the deepest and 
 noblest. Secondly, apart from this aboriginal difficulty, 
 
GEORGE DAWSON. 207 
 
 the translator, when also a popular lecturer, is under strong 
 temptation to dilute what truth he does tell too much, and 
 to give his babes, instead of milk, milk and water. And, 
 thirdly, those babes will be exceedingly apt to fancy, after 
 a few such diluted preparations, that they have sudden- 
 ly shot up into men of full age. In the short space of 
 four or five amusing hours, they are quite qualified to 
 chatter Carlylese — to dogmatise on the characteristics and 
 tendencies of the age, and to look with sovereign contempt 
 on ministers, and on all who are weak enough to put their 
 trust in them. We met, some time ago, in a London omni- 
 bus, a good-natured, amusing old lady, at whom we in- 
 quired if she had ever been in Edinburgh. She answered, 
 " No ; but I saw a panoramar of it, which gave me a very 
 good hidear of it." Such a satisfactory panoramaric hidear 
 does Mr Dawson give his auditors of the German philo- 
 sophy, and of Plato. 
 
 When I hear such a preacher, said one, I go home well 
 pleased with him ; when I hear such another, I go home 
 ill pleased with myself. Mr Dawson sends home most of 
 his audience well pleased with him and with themselves, 
 and thinking more of him and of themselves than of his 
 theme. They carry away no stings with them — none of 
 that fine humility, of that divine despair, which contempla- 
 tion of nature's vastness and of man's littleness inevitably 
 produces, and yet which never fails afterwards to excite 
 genuine aspiration. From hearing Professor Nichol, you 
 come home with but one thought, the grandeur of his sub- 
 ject ; in which almost the thought of the lecturer has been 
 lost, to which he has but served meekly to point, like the 
 rod which he holds in his hand. In hearing Samuel Brown 
 you have a similar feeling, blended, however, owing to his 
 youth, with still more admiration for the man, who, at such 
 an age, seems conversant with mysteries so profound, as if 
 he had commenced his studies in an ante-natal state of 
 being. The masterly ease, self-possession, clearness, ir- 
 
208 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 terest, and fluency of Mr Dawson's talk, give you an hour's, 
 or perchance a night's pleasure, and that is all ; for, indeed, 
 he is rather a talker than a teacher. To those who have 
 read Carlyle's Miscellanies and other works, he tells no- 
 thing new ; and those who have not, are in general more 
 amused by the novel and vivid illustrations, than impressed 
 and subdued by what to them ought to be the startling 
 truths. The enthusiast alone can teach, because he alone 
 can feel up to that point where feeling overflows, burning 
 and sometimes scalding into other minds. Mr Dawson 
 may be, we trust is, at heart a sincere man, but he is not 
 an enthusiast ; he has no self-forgetfulness, no rapt emotion 
 of any kind ; he manages his instrument but too dexterously, 
 and to consciously well. We have no conception what he 
 can have made of Switzerland — what shape its rocks, tor- 
 rents, and glaciers have assumed in his mind — what ginger- 
 bread cast of the Alps he has contrived to form, or how his 
 essentially cold and clever style has managed to rise to cope 
 with the magnificent field. Were there any barn-fowl flut- 
 terings, any ghastly contortions of imaginative penury and 
 weakness ? or did he, as we rather suspect, with his wonted 
 tact, avoid the grander features of his subject, and turn 
 aside into paths equally pleasing, less hackneyed, and for 
 him less dangerous ? Let our Glasgow friends, who heard 
 him on this subject, answer the question. Altogether, Mr 
 Dawson's mission seems to us exceedingly uncertain, both 
 as to its purpose and its probable results. We do not see 
 any distinct reason or call why he should have separated 
 himself to that gospel of negations which he preaches. We 
 have asked him already, what is he ? we ask him now what 
 he wishes us to be ? A man who has started from the 
 ranks, who has done so as if in obedience to a voice, " Come 
 out, and be thou separate," ought to be able to tell with 
 some explicitness what he would give us in exchange for 
 what we are in efifect required to resign. But " story," like 
 the knife-grinder, " he has none to tell, sir." He offers, it 
 
GEORGE DAWSON. 209 
 
 is true, relief to doubters — nay, builds a chapel for them, 
 and calls it by the unpretending name, the " Church of the 
 Saviour;" but in truth his teaching only adds fire to 
 fever, and seems to us a masterly machinery for creating 
 or confirming doubt. We grant him readily that doubters 
 — the most interesting and one of the most numerous of 
 classes of men in the present day, including, not now as 
 formerly, merely the vain and the vicious, but many of the 
 sincere, the intelligent, the virtuous and the humble — in- 
 cluding, especially, so many of the young and rising spirits 
 of the time — are not sufficiently attended to in the daily 
 ministrations. Their feelings are not respected, their 
 questions are not fairly answered, their motives and cha- 
 racters are misrepresented, their doubts are flung back un- 
 resolved, contemptuously, in their face ; and hence, many 
 of them are carrying their questions to other oracles, and 
 getting their Gordian knots cut by other swords than that 
 of the Spirit.* 
 
 But let those who have done, repair the injury. Let 
 the various churches of the country set to work with 
 greater zeal, with greater unanimity, and, above all, with 
 greater intelligence, and greater charity, to attend to this 
 most important and neglected class. Let them not dream 
 that merely to abuse Germanism is to answer it. Let 
 them no longer waste their strength and breath in calling 
 Carlyle or Emerson by hard names. Let them demon- 
 strate that their charges against Christianity as dead, are 
 untrue, by showing that its ancient spirit is still alive. 
 Let them remember that the front of sceptical battle is 
 changed since the days of Voltaire and Volney — that the 
 character of the leaders is changed too — and that there 
 must be a corresponding change in the tactics of Christian 
 defenders. Such books as Paley, Watson, Hall on Modern 
 
 * We refer our readers for a more particular elucidation of our 
 views on this subject, to our subsequent paper on Sterling. 
 
 P 
 
210 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 Infidelity, or Olinthus Gregory, the leviathan of German 
 sjepticism takes up but as straw or rotten wood. They 
 split upon his adamantine scales. The onset of Paine and 
 Volney was from below — from the hell of mean passions, 
 politics, and low conceptions of man ; the onset of the 
 German philosophers is from above — from the height of 
 transcendental thought. From a higher eminence ought 
 their onset to be repelled. Dr Chalmers, from that lofty 
 watch-tower which he occupied, and round which, alas ! 
 the shades of evening were gathering fast, saw the big 
 bulking danger — and it was his all but last act to set the 
 trumpet to his mouth, and blow an alarm to the Christian 
 world. Would it had been more widely echoed and obeyed ! 
 Such a tender, general, and enlightened attention to the 
 doubting Thomases of the day, would produce numerous 
 good consequences. It would show religion in her most 
 amiable aspect — having compassion upon the ignorant, 
 and upon those that are out of the way. It would arrest 
 the doubts of many, ere they were hardened into a fierce 
 and aggressive infidelity. It would change every church 
 into a refuge for those who are tossed with tempest, and 
 not comforted — a true " Church of the Saviour;" and it 
 would proclaim to those officious " flatterers," who would 
 rid men of their burdens elsewhere than at the Cross and 
 the Sepulchre, that their occupation was gone. We are 
 not, however, at all sanguine of such results as near. Our 
 wretched divisions and party isms — the bigoted battle we 
 are still disposed to do for the smallest minutiae of our dif- 
 ferent creeds, while its main pillars are so powerfully as- 
 sailed — our general deadness and coldness, seem to augur 
 that some mighty regenerating process is needed by all 
 churches ere they can fully meet wants which are yearly 
 becoming more and more imperious. "Good religious 
 people," writes to us one of the most eminent evangelical 
 ministers in a sister country, " have a great deal to learn, 
 and some of them will never learn anything. They are 
 
GEORGE DAWSON. 2 1 1 
 
 unconscious of the new world in which thej live. They 
 do not know what a different thing the pulpit is, and how 
 different the preacher ought to be, since the new and 
 mighty preacher in the form of the Press has risen up, 
 and occupied so much of the preacher's old ground. The 
 Press and the Pulpit might, and ought to understand each 
 other better than they do." Coinciding in such views, we 
 do not, however, expect that Mr Dawson's pulpit will do 
 much to promote the reconciliation of those two rival 
 powers. He is verily not a preacher, but a man preaching 
 magazine articles, sprinkled Avith Scripture texts. He be- 
 longs to an amphibious order of beings, neither in nor out 
 of the church. "We cannot conceive himself long to re- 
 main at ease in such an ambiguous position, nor that the 
 public can continue to place much confidence in him as a 
 clergyman. It is whispered already that he is sinking as 
 rapidly as he rose. We are not afraid that he will ever 
 be totally overlooked. He is young, ready, fluent, ambi- 
 tious, with much power of mental assimilation, a fertile, 
 teeming brain, and a tongue and pair of lungs perfectly 
 first-rate. Such qualities in bustling times can never fail 
 of their reward, although we should imagine that the lec- 
 ture-room, instead of the chapel, will by-and-by become 
 the favourite field for their exhibition. 
 
 We venture to conclude this from the perusal of his 
 sermon — the opening one of his new chapel — entitled, 
 " The Demands of the Age upon the Church." If this be 
 an average specimen of Mr Dawson's writing or preaching 
 powers, we must warn the public that they are not to ex- 
 pect him to become a Hall in the pulpit, or a Foster at the 
 desk. As a composition, it is loose, careless, even vulgar. 
 Think of an expression like this, occurring in a discourse 
 on such a solemn occasion : " We do not unite on the sly.'* 
 The style is an odd compound of Carljdisms and Pickwick- 
 isms. The bond of union it proposes is no bond at all. 
 A union of common doubts and disbeliefs may form a vast 
 
212 GEORGE DAWSON. 
 
 moral infirmary, but not a churcli. We forewarn hira, 
 that it is difficult now as of old to make bricks without 
 straw, and build a house without cement. That the 
 doubters deserve special tending, he proves satisfactorily. 
 He does not prove the adaptation of his chapel to their 
 case. The spirit of Christianity he would divorce from its 
 eternal principles and facts — an attempt as hopeless as to 
 separate the life of a tree from its leaves, branches, and 
 trunk. The only part of the discourse at all valuable is its 
 statement of the admitted fact, that vital religion is at a low 
 ebb ; but even this he exaggerates, and his notion, that it 
 has passed over to the free-thinkers, is simply not true. 
 We would just beg the public to compare this specimen of 
 the new style of preaching with some of Dr Croly's re- 
 cently published sermons, where they will find vast and 
 varied erudition, burning genius, an eloquent severe, clas- 
 sical and grand, Scriptural sentiment — all the qualities, in 
 short, which Dawson's writing has not — in order to learn 
 what exchange they are required to make, and to be con- 
 vinced that although his church be called the Church of 
 the Saviour, he is not destined to be the saviour of the 
 Church. 
 
 We know full well that such a frank expression of our 
 sentiments will, as did our strictures on Macaulay and 
 Burns, create against us a number of opponents. We are 
 perfectly indifferent. Whenever the trigger of the gun, 
 Truth, is drawn, by however feeble a hand, and a report 
 follows, multitudes of timorous or stupid creatures are sure 
 to rise up alarmed or enraged, and to rend the air with their 
 screams. It will be said that we are actuated by some 
 animus against Mr Dawson, just as a few blockheads ac- 
 cused us of hating a man who had been dead for half a 
 century, and whose genius we had taken fifty opportuni- 
 ties of lauding in terms little short of downright idolatry. 
 We must simply disown any such feeling. We gave Mr 
 Dawson constant attendance and earnest attention. We 
 
GEORGE DAWSON. 213 
 
 were occasionally delighted, and testified it by no feeble or 
 niggardly applause. We saw much about him in private 
 that was pleasing. But a sense of duty, coupled, we 
 grant, with a certain feeling of indignation at the undue 
 prominence which is partly given him, and which in part 
 he assumes, and to which no man possessed merely of me- 
 chanical gifts, however extraordinary, is entitled, have 
 urged us to write as we have written. " It is intolerable," 
 said one, "to think of the literary coteries of London 
 being over-crowed in the accent of an Ecclefechan car- 
 ter." This may be, and is, and ought to be borne, when 
 that accent stirs, warbles, and inflames, under the words 
 of genius. But it is intolerable, that a glib and flowing 
 tongue, conveying borrowed sentiments, in the language 
 of the Pickwick papers, should be listened to as if behind 
 it were flashing the eye of a Burns, or towering the brow 
 of a Shakspere. And it is still more intolerable, that a 
 man without depth, learning, originality, or enthusiasm, 
 should be swaying opinion, or shaking the faith of any in 
 the great inspirations of the past. 
 
 If Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are to be blotted out, let 
 the blank be filled up with names of a somewhat higher 
 calibre — and mighty to start a nobler spirit — than that of 
 George Dawson. 
 
 Our faith in popular lecturing has never been great, and 
 has been lessened by the experiences of several past win- 
 ters. In the course of them, we have heard five or six of 
 the most distinguished of the class, and have not only lis- 
 tened carefully to them, but have watched the efl^ects of 
 their prelections on their audiences. So far as the lec- 
 turers are concerned, our expectations have been exceeded 
 rather than the reverse. All, in diflerent styles, were ex- 
 cellent. All, through very different avenues, found their 
 way to the attention and to the applause of their hearers. 
 One, by a rich anecdotage, and the clear and copious detail 
 of facts, nailed the ears of his audience to his lips. Another 
 
214 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 gathered them around him, talking though he was in an 
 unknown tongue, through the cloudy grandeur of his spe- 
 culation. Another took them captive by the enthusiasm 
 which shone in his face and quivered on his lips. Another 
 passed across them, like a rapid sncfcv-drift, showering on 
 their passive spirits a thick succession of clear, cold sen- 
 tences. All exerted power ; all gave a certain amount of 
 pleasure. Did any much more? Was any permanent 
 elevation given, or lasting effect produced ? Had Scot- 
 land, England, and America, been ransacked for their 
 choicest spirits, only to produce a certain tickling gratifica- 
 tion, at most amounting to a high intellectual treat ? "We 
 do not wish to speak dogmatically on the point, but it is 
 our distinct impression that in a spiritual, not in a pecu- 
 niary sense, the cost outwent the profit. The great ends 
 of teaching were not, and in the space, and in the circum- 
 stances, could hardly have been answered. Multitudes, 
 unprepared by previous reading and training, were brought 
 out by curiosity, or in some cases by a better principle, to 
 hear some of the first men of the age ; listened with most 
 exemplary attention, were thrilled or tickled, but we fear 
 not fed. We are convinced that steady attendance upon 
 one plain single month's course on geology, or modern his- 
 tory, would have done more good than whole years spent 
 in hearing such brilliant birds of passage. 
 
 ALFEED TENNYSOIS^ 
 
 TiiE subject of the following sketch seems a signal example 
 of the intimate relation which sometimes exists between 
 original genius, and a shrinking, sensitive, and morbid 
 nature. We see in all his writings the struggle of a strong 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 215 
 
 intellect to " turn and wind the fiery Pegasus " of a most 
 capricious, volatile, and dream-driven imagination. Tenny- 
 son is a curious combination of impulse, strength, and deli- 
 cacy approaching to weakness. Could we conceive, not 
 an Eolian harp, but a grand piano, played on by the swift 
 fingers of the blast, it would give us some image of the 
 sweet, subtle, tender, powerful, and changeful movements 
 of his verse, in which are wedded artificial elegance, artis- 
 tic skill, and wild, impetuous impulse. It is the voice and 
 lute of Ariel ; but heard not in a solitary and enchanted 
 island, but in a modern drawing-room, with beautiful women 
 bending round, and moss-roses breathing, in their faint 
 fragrance, through the half-opened windows. Here, in- 
 deed, lies the paradox of our author's genius. He is 
 haunted, on the one hand, by images of ideal and colossal 
 grandeur, coming upon him from the isle of the Syrens, 
 the caves of the Kraken, the heights of Ida, the solemn 
 cycles of Cathay, the riches of the Arabian heaven ; but, 
 on the other hand, his fancy loves, better than is manly or 
 beseeming, ' the tricksy elegancies of artificial life — the 
 " white sofas" of his study — the trim walks of his garden 
 — the luxuries of female dress — and all the tiny comforts 
 and beauties which nestle round an English parlour. From 
 the sublime to the snug, and vice vejsa, is with him but a 
 single step. This moment toying on the carpet with his 
 cat, he is the next soaring with a roc over the valley of 
 diamonds. We may liken him to the sea-shell which, sitting 
 complacently and undistinguished amid the commonplace 
 ornaments of the mantelpiece, has only to be lifted to give 
 forth from its smooth ear the far-rugged boom of the ocean 
 breakers. In this union of feminine feebleness and ima- 
 ginative strength, he much resembles John Keats, who at 
 one time could hew out the vast figure of the dethroned 
 Saturn, " quiet as a stone," with the force of a Michael 
 Angelo, and, again, with all the gusto of a milliner, describe 
 the undressing of his heroine in the " Eve of St Agnes." 
 
216 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Indeed, although we have ascribed, and we think justly, 
 original genius to Tennyson, there is much in his mind, 
 too, of the imitative and the composite. He adds the occa- 
 sional langour, the luxury of descriptive beauty, the 
 feminine tone, the tender melancholy, the grand aspirations, 
 perpetually checked and chilled by the access of morbid 
 weakness, and the mannerisms of style which distinguish 
 Keats, to much of the simplicity and the philosophic tone 
 of Wordsworth, the peculiar rhythm and obscurity of Cole- 
 ridge, and a portion of the quaintness and allegorising ten- 
 dency which were common with the Donnes, Withers, and 
 Quarleses, of the seventeenth century. What is peculiar 
 to himself is a certain carol, light in air and tone, but pro- 
 found in burden. Hence his little lyrics — such as " Oriana," 
 " Mariana at the Moated Grange," the " Talking Oak," 
 the " May Queen" — are among his most original and strik- 
 ing productions. They tell tales of deep tragedy, or they 
 convey lessons of wide significance, or they paint vivid and 
 complete pictures, in a few lively touches, and by a few 
 airy words, as if caught in dropping from the sky. By 
 sobs of sound, by half-hints of meaning, by light, hurrying 
 strokes on the ruddy chords of the heart, by a ringing of 
 changes on certain words and phrases, he sways us as if 
 with the united powers of music and poetry. Our readers 
 will, in illustration of this, remember his nameless little 
 song, beginning 
 
 " Break, break, break, 
 On thy cold grey crags, sea ! " 
 
 which is a mood of his own mind, faithfully rendered into 
 sweet and simple verse. It is in composition no more 
 complicated or elaborate than a house built by a child, but 
 melts you, as that house would, were you to see it after the 
 dear infant's death. But than this he has higher moods, 
 and nobler, though still imperfect aspirations. In his 
 " Two Voices," he approaches the question of all ages — 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 217 
 
 Whence evil ? And if he, no more than other specula- 
 tors, unties, he casts a soft and mellow light around this 
 Gordian knot. This poem is no fancy piece, but mani- 
 festly a transcript from his own personal experience. He 
 has sunk into one of those melancholy moods incident to 
 his order of mind, and has become " aweary of the sun," 
 and of all the sun shines upon — especially of his own miser- 
 able idiosyncrasy. There slides in at that dark hour a 
 still small voice : how different from that which thrilled on 
 Elijah's ear in the caves of Horeb ! It is the voice of that 
 awful lady whom De Quincey calls Mater tenehrarum, our 
 lady of darkness. It hints at suicide as the only remedy 
 for human woes. 
 
 " Thou art so full of misery, 
 Were it not better not to be \ " 
 
 And then there follows an eager and uneasy interlocution 
 between the " dark and barren voice," and the soul of the 
 writer, half spurning and half holding parley with its sug- 
 gestions. Seldom, truly, since the speech by which De- 
 spair in Spenser enforces the same sad argument, did mi- 
 santhropy breathe a more withering blight over humanity 
 and human hopes; seldom did unfortunate by a shorter 
 and readier road reach the conclusion, " there is one remedy 
 for all," than in the utterance of this voice. Death in it 
 looks lovely ; nay, the one lovely thing in the universe. 
 Again and again the poet is ready to yield to the desire of 
 his own heart, thus seconded by the mystic voice, and, in 
 the words of one who often listened to the same accents, to 
 " lie down like a tired child, and weep away this life of 
 care." But again and again the better element of his 
 nature resists the temptation, and beats back the melan- 
 choly voice. At length, raising himself from his lethargy, 
 he rises, looks forth — it is the Sabbath morn, and, as he 
 sees the peaceful multitudes moving on to the house of 
 God, and as, like the Anciente Mariner, he " blesses them 
 
*> 
 
 218 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 unaware," straightway the spell is broken, the " dull and 
 bitter voice is gone," and, hark ! 
 
 " A second voice is at his ear, 
 A little whisper, silver-clear," 
 
 and it gives him a hidden and humble hope, which spreads 
 a quiet heaven within his soul. Now he can go forth into 
 the fields, and 
 
 " Wonder at the bounteous hours, 
 The slow result of winter showers. 
 You scarce can see the grass for flowers." 
 
 All nature calls upon him to rejoice, and to the eye of 
 his heart, at least, the riddle is read. Nay, we put it to 
 every heart if this do not, more than many elaborote argu- 
 mentations, touch the core of the difficulty. *' Look up," 
 said Leigh Hunt to Carlyle, when he had been taking the 
 darker side of the question, and they had both come out 
 under the brilliance of a starry night — " look up, and find 
 your answer there!" And although the reply failed to 
 convince the party addressed, who, looking aloft at the 
 sparkling azure, after a deep pause, rejoined, with a sigh, 
 and in tones we can well imagine, so melancholy and far 
 withdrawn, "Oh! it's a sad sight;" yet, apart from the 
 divine discoveries, it was the true and only answer. The 
 beauty, whether of Tennyson's fields — where we " scarce 
 can see the grass for flowers " — or of Leigh Hunt's skies, 
 " whose unwithered countenance is young as on creation's 
 day," and where we find an infinite answer to our petty 
 cavils — is enough to soothe, if not to satisfy, to teach us 
 the perfect patience of expectancy, if not the full assurance 
 of faith. 
 
 Tennyson, in some of his poems as well as this, reveals 
 in himself a current of thought tending towards very deep 
 and dark subjects. This springs partly from the metaphy- 
 sical bias of his intellect, and partly from the morbid emo- 
 tions of his heart. And yet he seems generally to toy and 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 219 
 
 trifle with such tremendous themes — to touch them lightly 
 and hurriedly, as one might hot iron — at once eager and 
 reluctant to intermeddle with them. Nevertheless, there is 
 a perilous stuff about his heart, and upon his verse lies a 
 " melancholy compounded of many simples." He is not 
 the poet of hope, or of action, or of passion, but of senti- 
 ment, of pensive and prying curiosity, or of simple station- 
 ary wonder, in view of the great sights and mysteries of 
 Nature and man. He has never thrown himself amid the 
 heats and hubbub of society, but remained alone, musing 
 with a quiet but observant eye upon the tempestuous 
 pageant which is sweeping past him, and concerning him- 
 self little with the political or religious controversies of his 
 age. There are, too, in some of his writings, mild and 
 subdued vestiges of a wounded spirit, of a heart that has 
 been disappointed, of an ambition that has been repressed, 
 of an intellect that has wrestled with doubt, difficulty, and 
 disease. 
 
 In " Locksley Hall," for instance, he tells a tale of un- 
 fortunate passion with a gusto and depth of feeling, which 
 (unless we misconstrue the mark of the branding-iron) be- 
 tray more than a fictitious interest in the theme. It is a 
 poem breathing the spirit of, and not much inferior to, By- 
 ron's " Dream," in all but that clear concentration of misery 
 which bends over it like a bare and burning heaven over 
 a bare and burning desert. "Locksley Hall," again, is 
 turbid and obscure in language, wild and distracted in feel- 
 ing. The wind is down, but the sea still runs high. You 
 see in it the passion pawing like a lion who has newly 
 missed his prey, not fixed as yet in a marble form of still 
 and hopeless disappointment. The lover, after a season of 
 absence, returns to the scene of his early education and 
 hapless love, where of old he 
 
 " Wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime 
 With the faii'y tales of science, and the long result of time.'* 
 
220 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 A feeling, cognate with, and yet more imperious than those 
 of his high aspirations, springs up in his mind. It arises in 
 spring like the crest of a singing-bird. It is the feeling of love 
 for Amy his cousin, sole daughter of her father's house and 
 heart. The feeling is mutual, and the current of their true 
 love flows smoothly on, till interrupted by the interference 
 of relatives. Thus far he remembers calmly ; but here re- 
 collection strikes the fierce chord of disappointment, and 
 he bursts impetuously forth — 
 
 *' 0, my cousin, shallow-hearted. 0, my Amy, mine no more. 
 0, the dreary, dreary moorland. 0, the barren, barren shore." 
 
 Darting then one hasty and almost vindictive glance down 
 her future history, he predicts that she shall lower to the 
 level of the clown she has wedded, and that he will use his 
 victim a little better than his dog or his horse. Nay, she 
 will become 
 
 " Old and formal, suited to her petty part ; 
 With her little hoard of maxims, preaching down a daughter's 
 heart." 
 
 But himself, alas ! what is to become of him ? Live he 
 must — suicide is too base an outlet from existence for his 
 brave spirit. But what to do with this bitter boon of 
 being? There follow some wild and half-insane stanzas 
 expressive of the ambitions and uncertainties of his soul. 
 It is the Cyclops mad with blindness, and groping at the 
 sides of his cave. He will hate and despise all women, or, 
 at least, all British maidens. He will return to the orient 
 land, whose "larger constellations" saw a father die. He 
 will, in his despair, take some savage woman who shall 
 rear his dusky race. But no — the despair is momentary — 
 he may not mate with a squalid savage ; he will rather re- 
 vive old intellectual ambitions, and renew old aspirations, 
 for he feels within him that the " crescent promise of his 
 spirit has not set." It is resolved — but, ere he goes, let 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 221 
 
 every ray of remaining love and misery go forth in one 
 last accusing, avenging look at the scene of his disappoint- 
 ment and the centre of his wo. 
 
 " Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Loeksley Hall. 
 Now, for me, the woods may wither; now, for me, the roof- tree fall. 
 Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt ; 
 Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt. 
 Let it fall on Loeksley Hall, with rain, or hail, or fire, or snow, 
 For a mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go." 
 
 And thus the ballad closes, leaving, however, with us 
 the inevitable impression that the unfortunate lover is not 
 done with Loeksley Hall nor its bitter memories — that 
 Doubting Castle is not down, nor giant Despair dead — ^that 
 the calls of the curlews around it will still resound in his 
 ears, and the pale face of its Amy, still unutterably be- 
 loved, will come back upon his dreams — that the iron has 
 entered into his soul — and that his life and his misery are 
 henceforth commensurate and the same. 
 
 Among the more remarkable of Tennyson's poems, be - 
 sides those already mentioned, are " The Poet," " Dora," 
 " Recollections of the Arabian Nights," " (Enone," " The 
 Lotos Eaters," "Ulysses," " Godiva ;" and " The Vision 
 of Sin." " The Poet" was written when the author was 
 young, and when the high ideal of his heart was just dawn- 
 ing upon his mind. It is needless to say that his view of 
 the powers and influences of poetry is different with what 
 prevails with many in our era. Poetry is, with him, no 
 glittering foil to be wielded gaily on gala days. It is, or 
 ought to be, a sharp two-edged sword. It is not a baton 
 in the hand of coarse authority — it is a magic rod. It is 
 not a morning flush in the sky of youth, that shall fade in 
 the sun of science — it is a consuming and imperishable fire. 
 It is not a mere amusement for young love-sick men and 
 women — it is as serious as death, and longer than life. It 
 is tuned philosophy — winged science — ^fact on fire — " truth 
 springing from earth" — high thought voluntarily moving 
 
222 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 harmonious numbers. His " Poet" is " dowered with the 
 hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love," and his 
 words " shake the world." 
 
 The author, when he wrote " The Poet," was fresh 
 from school, and from Shelley, his early idol. Ere writ- 
 ing " Dora" he had become conversant with the severer 
 charms of Wordsworth ; and that poem contains in it not 
 one figure or flower — is bare, literal, and pathetic as the 
 book of Ruth. Its poetry is that which lies in all natural 
 life, which, like a deep quiet pool, has only to be disturbed 
 in the slightest degree to send up in dance those bells and 
 bubbles which give it instantly ideal beauty and interest, 
 and suddenly the pool becomes a poem ! 
 
 His " Recollections of the Arabian Nights" is a poem 
 of that species which connects itself perpetually, in feeling 
 and memory, with the original work, whose quintessence 
 it collects. It speaks out the sentiments of millions of 
 thankful hearts. We feel in it what a noble thing was the 
 Arabian mind^ — like the Arabian soil, " all the Sun's" — 
 like the Arabian climate, fervid, golden — like the Arabian 
 horse, light, elegant, ethereal, swift as the wind. " O, for 
 the golden prime of good Haroun Alras-chid ! " O, for one 
 look — though it were the last — of that Persian maid, whom 
 the poet has painted in words vivid as colours, palpable 
 almost as sense. Talk of enchantment ! The " Thousand- 
 and-One Nights" is one enchantment — more powerful than 
 the lamp of Aladdin, or the " Open Sesame " of Ali Baba. 
 The author, were he one — not many — is a magician — 
 a geni — greater than Scott, than Cervantes, equal to 
 Shakspere himself. What poetry, passion, pathos, beauty 
 of sentiment, elegance of costume, ingenuity of contri- 
 vance, wit, humour, farce, interest, variety, tact in transi- 
 tion, sunniness of spirit, dream-like wealth of imagination, 
 incidental but precious light cast upon customs, manners, 
 history, religion — everything, in short, that can amuse or 
 amaze, instruct or delight, the human spirit! Like the 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 223 
 
 " Pilgrim's Progress" — devoured hy boys, it is a devout 
 study for bearded men. 
 
 Tennyson has expressed, especially, the moonlight vo- 
 luptuousness of tone and spirit which breathes around those 
 delicious productions, as vyrell as the lavish magnificence of 
 dress and decoration, of furniture and architecture, which 
 were worthy of the witch element, the sunny climate, and 
 the early enchanted era, where and when they were writ- 
 ten. But we doubt if he mates adequately with that more 
 potent and terrible magic which haunts their higher re- 
 gions, as in the sublime picture of the Prince's daughter 
 fighting with the Enchanter in mid air, or in the myste- 
 rious grandeur which follows all the adventures of Aboul- 
 faouris. With this, too, indeed, he must have sympathy ; 
 for it is evident that he abundantly fulfils Coleridge's test 
 of a genuine lover of the " Arabian Nights." ' Do you 
 admire," said the author of "Kubla Khan" to Hazlitt, 
 " the Thousand-and-One Nights ?" " No," was the answer. 
 " That's because you donH dream." But surely, since the 
 " noticeable man, with large grey eyes," awoke in death 
 from his long life-dream, no poet has arisen of whom the 
 word were more true than of Tennyson, whether in re- 
 proach or commendation, asleep or awake — " Behold this 
 dreamer cometh." 
 
 In " Q^uone," we find him up on the heights of Ida, 
 with the large foot-prints of gods and goddesses still upon 
 its sward, and the citadel and town of Troy, as yet un- 
 fallen, as yet unassailed, visible from its summit. Here 
 the poet sees a vision of his own — a vision which, recorded 
 in verse, forms a high third with Wordsworth's " Lao- 
 damia" and Keats's " Hyperion," in the classical style. 
 Less austere and magnificent than the poem of Keats, 
 which seems not so much a torso of earthly art as a splin- 
 ter fallen from some other exploded world — less chaste, 
 polished, and spiritual, than " Laodamia," that Elgin 
 marble set in Elysian light, it surpasses both in pic- 
 
224 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 turesque distinctness and pathetic power. The story is 
 essentially that of " Locksley Hall," but the scene is not 
 the flat and sandy moorland of Lincolnshire, but the green 
 gorges and lawns of Ida. The deceived lover is Qiinone, 
 daughter of a river god. She has been deceived by 
 Paris, and her plaint is the poem. Melancholy her song, 
 as that of a disappointed woman — melodious, as that of an 
 aggrieved goddess. It is to Ida, her mother mountain, 
 that she breathes her sorrow. She tells her of her lover's 
 matchless beauty — of her yielding up her heart to him — of 
 the deities descending to receive the golden apple from 
 his hands — of his deciding it to Venus, upon the promise 
 of the "fairest and most loving wife in Greece" — of his 
 abandonment of CEnone, and of her despair. Again and 
 again, in her agony, she cries for Death ; but the grim 
 shadow, too busy in hewing down the happy, will not turn 
 aside at her miserable bidding. Her despair at last be- 
 comes fury ; her tears begin to burn ; she will arise ; she 
 will leave her dreadful solitude — 
 
 ** I will rise, and go 
 Down into Troy, and, ere the stars come forth. 
 Talk with the wild Cassandra ; for she says 
 A fire dances before her, and a sound 
 Rings ever in her ears of armed men. 
 What this may be I know not ; but I know 
 That, wheresoe'er I am, by night and day 
 All earth and air seems only burning fire." 
 
 And fancy follows Q^^none to Ilium, and sees the two beau- 
 tiful broken-hearted maidens meeting, like two melancholy 
 flames, upon one funeral pile, mingling their hot tears, ex- 
 changing their sad stories, and joining, in desperate exul- 
 tation, at the prospect of the ruin which is already dark- 
 ening, like a tempest, round the towers and temples of 
 Troy. It is pleasant to find from such productions that, 
 after all, the poetry of Greece is not dead — that the oaks 
 of Delphos and Dodona have not shed all their oracular 
 leaves that the lightnings in Jove's hand are stiU warm — 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 225 
 
 and the snows of Olympus are yet clear and bright, 
 shining over the waste of years — that Mercury's feet are 
 winged still — and still is Apollo's hair unshorn — that the 
 mythology of Homer, long dead to belief, is still alive to 
 the airy purposes of poetry — that, though the " dreadful 
 infant's hand" hath smitten down the gods upon the capi- 
 tol, it has left them the freedom of the Parnassian Hill ; 
 and that a Wordsworth, or a Tennyson, may even now, 
 by inclining the ear of imagination, hear the river god 
 plunging in Scamander — CEnone wailing upon Ida — Old 
 Triton blowing his wreathed horn ; for never was a truth 
 more certain than that " a thing of beauty is a joy for 
 ever." 
 
 We had intended to say something of his " Lotos-eaters," 
 but are afraid to break in upon its charmed rest — to disturb 
 its sleepy spell — to venture on that land "in which it 
 seemed always afternoon " — or to stir its melancholy, mild- 
 eyed inhabitants. We will pass it by, treading so softly 
 that the " blin^ mole may not hear a footfall." Yf e must 
 beware of slumbering, and we could hardly but be dull on 
 the enchanted ground. 
 
 While the "Lotos- eaters" breathes the very spirit of 
 luxurious repose, and seems, to apply his own words, a 
 perfect poem in "perfect rest," "Ulysses" is the incarna- 
 tion of restlessness and insatiable activity. Sick of Ithaca, 
 Argus, Telemachus, and (sub rosa) of Penelope too, the old, 
 much-enduring Mariner King, is again panting for untried 
 dangers and undiscovered lands. 
 
 'O" 
 
 " My purpose holds. 
 To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
 Of all the western stars, until I die," 
 
 Tennyson, with his fine artistic instinct, saw that the idea 
 of Ulysses at rest was an incongruous thought, and has 
 chosen rather to picture him journeying ever onwards to- 
 ward infinity or death — 
 
 Q 
 
226 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 " It may be that the gulphs will wash us down — 
 It may be, we shall reach the happy isles, 
 And see the great Achilles, whom we knew." 
 
 And with breathless interest, and a feeling approaching the 
 sublime, we watch the grey-headed monarch stepping, with 
 his few aged followers, into the bark, which is to be their 
 home till death, and stretching away toward eternity ; and 
 every heart and imagination cry out after him — " Go, and 
 return no more." 
 
 " Godiva" is an old story newly told — a delicate business 
 delicately handled — the final and illuminated version of an 
 ancient and world-famous tradition. Its beauty is, that, 
 like its heroine, it is " clothed on with chastity." It re- 
 presses the imagination as gently and effectually as her 
 naked virtue did the eye. We hold our breath, and shut 
 every window of our fancy, till the great ride be over. 
 And in this trial and triumph of female resolution and 
 virtue, the poet would have us believe that Nature herself 
 sympathised — that the light was bashful, and the sun 
 ashamed, and the wind hushed, till the sublime pilgrimage 
 was past — and that, when it ended, a sigh of satisfaction, 
 wide as the circle of earth and heaven, proclaimed Godiva's 
 victory. 
 
 The " Vision of Sin" strikes, we think, upon a stronger, 
 though darker, chord than any of his other poems. There 
 are in it impenetrable obscurities, but, like jet black or- 
 naments, some may think them dearer for their darkness. 
 You cannot, says Hazlitt, make " an allegory go on all 
 fours." A vision must be hazy — a ghost should surely be 
 a shadow. Enough, if there be a meaning in the mystery, 
 an oracle speaking through the gloom. The dream is that 
 of a youth, who is seen riding to the gate of a palace, from 
 which 
 
 " Came a child of sin. 
 And took him by the curls and led him in." 
 
 He is lost straightway in mad and wicked revel, tempes- 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 227 
 
 tuously yet musically described. Meanwhile, unheeded 
 by the revellers, a " vapour, {the mist of darkness !) heavy, 
 hueless, formless, cold," is floating slowly on toward the 
 palace. At length it touches the gate, and the dream 
 changes, and such a change ! 
 
 ** I saw 
 
 A grey and gap-toothed man, as lean as Death, 
 
 Who slowly rode across a wither'd heath. 
 
 And lighted at a ruined inn.' ' 
 
 And, lighted there, he utters his bitter and blasted feelings 
 in lines, reminding us, from their fierce irony, their mis- 
 anthropy, their thrice- drugged despair, of Swift's " Legion 
 Club;" and — as in that wicked, wondrous poem — a light 
 sparkle of contemptuous levity glimmers with a ghastly 
 sheen over the putrid pool of malice and misery below, and 
 cannot all disguise the workings of that remorse which is 
 not repentance. At length this sad evil utterance dies 
 away in the throat of the expiring sinner, and behind his 
 consummated ruin there arises a *' mystic mountain range," 
 along which voices are heard lamenting, or seeking to ex- 
 plain the causes of his ruin. One says — 
 
 " Behold, it was a crime 
 Of sense, avenged by sense, that wove with time." 
 
 Another — 
 
 " The crime of sense became 
 The crime of malice, and is equal blame." 
 
 A third— 
 
 " He had not wholly quenched his power — 
 A little grain of conscience made him sour." 
 
 And thus at length, in a darkness visible of mystery and 
 grandeur, the " Vision of Sin" closes : — 
 
 " At last I heard a voice upon the slope 
 Cry to the summit, Is there any hope 1 
 To which an answer peal'd from that high land, 
 But in a tongue no man could understand ; 
 And on the glimmering limit, far withdrawn, 
 God made himself an awful rose of dawn.*' 
 
228 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 A reply there is ; l3ut whether in the affirmative or nega- 
 tive we do not know. A revelation there is ; but whether 
 it be an interference in behalf of the sinner, or a display, 
 in ruddy light, of God's righteousness in his punishment, 
 is. left in deep uncertainty. Tennyson, like Addison in his 
 " Vision of Mirza," ventures not to withdraw^ the veil from 
 the left side of the eternal ocean. He leaves the curtain 
 to be the painting. He permits the imagination of the 
 reader to figure, if it dare, shapes of beauty, or forms of 
 fiery wrath, upon the "awful rose of dawn," as upon a 
 vast back-ground. It is his only to start the thrilling sug- 
 gestion. 
 
 After all, we have considerable misgivings about plac- 
 ing Tennyson — for what he has hitherto done — among our 
 great poets. We cheerfully accord him great powers ; 
 but he is, as yet, guiltless of great achievements. His 
 genius is bold, but is waylaid at almost every step by the 
 timidity and weakness of his temperament. His utterance 
 is not proportionate to his vision. He sometimes reminds 
 us of a dumb man with important tidings within, but only 
 able to express them by gestures, starts, sobs, and tears. 
 His works are loopholes, not windows, through which in- 
 tense glimpses come and go, but no broad, clear, and 
 rounded prospect is commanded. As a thinker, he often 
 seems like one who should perversely pause a hundred 
 feet from the summit of a lofty hill, and refuse to ascend 
 higher. " Up ! the breezes call thee — the clouds mar- 
 shal thy way — the glorious prospect waits thee, as a bride 
 for her husband — angels or gods may meet thee on 
 the top — ^it may be thy Mountain of Transfiguration." 
 But, no ; the pensive or wilful poet chooses to remain be- 
 low. 
 
 Nevertheless, the eye of genius is flashing in Tennyson's 
 head, and his ear is unstopped, whether to the harmonies 
 of nature, or to the still sad music of humanity. We care 
 not much in which of the tracks he has already cut out he 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 229 
 
 may choose to walk ; but we would prefer if he were per- 
 suaded more frequently to see visions and dream dreams 
 — like his " Vision of Sin " — imbued with high purpose, 
 and forming the Modern Metamorphoses of truth. We 
 have no hope that he will ever be, in the low sense, a popu- 
 lar poet, or that to him the task is allotted of extracting 
 music from the railway .train, or of setting in song the 
 "fairy tales of science" — the great astronomical or geolo- 
 gical discoveries of the age. Nor is he likely ever to write 
 anything which, like the poems of Burns, or Campbell, can 
 go directly to the heart of the entire nation. For no " Song 
 of the Shirt" even, need we look from him. But the ima- 
 ginativeness of his nature, the deep vein of his moral senti- 
 ment, the bias given to his mind by his early reading, the 
 airy charm of his versification, and the seclusion in which 
 he lives, like a flower in its own peculiar jar, all seem to 
 prepare him for becoming a great spiritual dreamer, who 
 might write not only "Recollections of the Arabian Nights," 
 but Arabian Nights themselves, equally graceful in cos- 
 tume, but impressed with a deeper sentiment, chastened 
 into severer taste, and warmed with a holier flame. Suc- 
 cess to such pregnant slumbers ! soft be the pillow as that 
 of his own " Sleeping Beauty ; " may every syrup of strength 
 and sweetness drop upon his eyelids, and may his dreams 
 be such as to banish sleep from many an eye, and to people 
 the hearts of millions with beauty ! 
 
 On the whole, perhaps Tennyson is less a prophet than 
 an artist. And this alone would serve better to reconcile 
 us to his silence, should it turn out that his poetic career 
 is over. The loss of even the finest artist may be supplied 
 — that of a prophet, who has been cut off in the midst of 
 his mission, or whose words some envious influence or cir- 
 cumstance has snatched from his lips, is irreparable. In 
 the one case, it is but a painter's pencil that is broken ; 
 in the other it is a magic rod shivered. Still, even as an 
 artist, Tennyson has not yet done himself full justice, nor 
 
230 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 built up any structure so shapely, complete, and living, as 
 may perpetuate his name.* 
 
 Alfred Tennyson is the son of an English clergyman in 
 Lincolnshire. He is of a retiring disposition, and seldom, 
 though sometimes, emerges from his retirement into the 
 literary coteries of London. And yet welcome is he ever 
 among them — with his eager physiognomy, his dark hair 
 and eyes, and his small, black tobacco pipe. Some years 
 ago, we met a brother of his in Dumfries, who bore, we 
 were told, a marked, though miniature resemblance to him, 
 a beautiful painter and an expert versifier, after the style 
 of Alfred. 
 
 The particulars of his literary career are familiar to most. 
 His first production was a small volume of poems, pub- 
 lished in 1831. Praised in the "Westminster" elabo- 
 rately, and extravagantly eulogised in the " Englishman's 
 Magazine" (a periodical conducted by William Kennedy, 
 but long since defunct, and which, according to some ma- 
 licious persons, died of this same article) — it was sadly 
 mangled by less generous critics. " Blackwood's Maga- 
 zine" doled it out some severely-sifted praise; and the 
 author, in his next volume, rhymed back his ingratitude 
 in the well-known lines to " Rusty, musty, fusty, crusty 
 Christopher," whose blame he forgave, but whose praise 
 he could not. Meanwhile, he was quietly forming a small 
 but zealous cohort of admirers; and some of his poems, 
 such as " Mariana," &c., were universally read and appre- 
 ciated. His second production was less successful, and 
 deserved to be less successful, than the first. It was 
 stufied with wilful impertinencies and affectations. His 
 critics told him he wrote ill, and he answered them by 
 writing worse. His third exhibited a very different spirit. 
 It consisted of a selection from his two former volumes, 
 
 * His " Princess," published since the above, is a medley of success, 
 failure, and half-success — not even an attempt towards a whole. 
 
PROFESSOR NICHOL. 23 I 
 
 and a number of additional pieces — the principal of which 
 we have already analysed. In his selection, he winnows 
 his former works with a very salutary severity ; but what 
 has he done with that delectable strain of the " Syrens?" 
 We think he has acted well in stabling and shutting up 
 his " Krakens" in their dim, ocean mangers ; but we are 
 not so willing to part with that beautiful sisterhood, and 
 hope to see them again at no distant day, standing in their 
 lovely isle, and singing — 
 
 " Come hither, come hither, and be our lords, 
 For merry brides are we. 
 We will kiss sweet kisses and speak sweet words. 
 
 Ye will not find so happy a shore. 
 Weary mariners all the world o'er. 
 Oh fly, oh fly no more." 
 
 PROFESSOR NICHOL. 
 
 This is the age of public lecturing, and we might spend 
 a long time in discussing its pros and cons, its advantages 
 and its evils. The open and legitimate objects which 
 popular lecturing proposes to itself are chiefly the three 
 following: instruction, excitement, and communication 
 between the higher minds of the age and those of a lower 
 grade. Now, in reference to its utility as an organ of 
 instruction, much may be said on both sides. In public 
 lecturing, truth is painted to the eye ; it is enforced and 
 illustrated by voice, gesture, and action ; it stands in the 
 person of the orator as in an illumined window. The in- 
 formation thus given, attended by a personal interest, and 
 
232 PROFESSOR NICHOL. 
 
 accompanied by a peculiar emphasis, is more profoundly 
 impressed upon the memory ; and many, by the fairy as- 
 pect of truth which is presented, are induced to love and 
 learn, who otherwise would have remained indifferent and 
 distant. On the other hand, the quantity of knowledge 
 communicated by lecturing is seldom large ; and, as to its 
 quality, lecturers are under strong temptations to dilute it 
 down to the capacities of their audience ; and, instead of 
 conducting them from first principles to details, to give 
 them particular facts, and tell them to travel back them- 
 selves to leading principles, an advice which they seldom, 
 if ever, follow. Too often the hearers, however strongly 
 urged to the contrary by their instructors, forget to pursue 
 profounder researches, to seek after higher sources ; and 
 the close of the six or seven lectures is the close of their 
 studies, and furnishes the complement of their knowledge. 
 Often too, the class who have least access to books have 
 also least access to lectures, or even when privileged to 
 attend them, find their special wants but indifferently sup- 
 plied. 
 
 In the excitement produced by good public lecturing, 
 its advocates find a more plausible argument in its favour. 
 It is an amusement so happy and so innocent ; it withdraws 
 so many from the theatre, the card-table, and the tavern ; 
 it gives such a stimulus to nascent intellects ; it creates 
 around the lecturer such circles and semicircles of shining 
 faces ; it rouses in so many breasts the spark of literary 
 and scientific genius ; it commences the manufacture of so 
 many incipient Miltons, no longer mute and inglorious ; 
 and of whole generations of young Arkwrights, worthy of 
 their illustrious progenitor. Nay, we would go a little 
 iarther still : we would " better the instruction." Its ex- 
 citement and pleasure do not stop here. The lecture-room 
 promotes a great many matches ; it brings young ladies 
 and gentlemen into close and intimate propinquity ; it ex- 
 cites active and animated flirtations ; it forms, besides, a 
 
PROFESSOR NicnoL. 233 
 
 pleasant interchange to one class with the card-table — 
 to another, an agreeable lounge on the road to the after- 
 piece ; and to a third, a safe and decent half-way house to 
 a quiet social talk in a quiet alehouse. It is also a nursery 
 for the numerous sprigs of criticism which abound — ^faith- 
 fully figured by the immortal " Punch," in those specimens 
 of the rising generation who deem that, as " for that ere 
 Shakspere, he has been vastly overrated." And last, not 
 least, it permits many a comfortable nap to the hard- wrought 
 doctor, or schoolmaster, or artisan — to whom it matters not 
 whether the lecturer be in the moon or in the clouds, as 
 they are only, like their instructor, absent and lost. 
 
 Joking, however, apart, popular lecturing is undoubtedly 
 a source both of much entertainment and excitement, 
 though we are not sure but that that entertainment is 
 more valued by the luxurious as a variety in their plea- 
 sures, than by the middle and lower classes as a necessity 
 in their intellectual life ; and although we are sure that an 
 undue portion of that excitement springs from the glare of 
 lights, the presence of ladies, the mere " heat, and stare, and 
 pressure," of which Chalmers complained ; and that com- 
 paratively little of it can be traced to the art, less to the 
 genius, and least of all to the subject, of the discourser. 
 
 As a means of communication between men of science 
 and literature and the age, it is, we are afraid, what Mr 
 Home would call a " false medium." You have in it the 
 prophet, shorn, dressed, perhaps scented, perhaps playing 
 miserable monkey-tricks to divert the audience — and not 
 the Moses coming down the Mount, with face shining, but 
 with lips stammering, from that dread communion on the 
 summit ; or if the prophet do preserve his integrity, and 
 speak to the souls instead of the eyes and ears of his au- 
 dience, it is at his proper peril ; wild yawnings, slumbers 
 both loud and deep, not to speak of the more polite hints 
 conveyed in the music of slapping doors and rasping floors, 
 are the reward of his fidelity. We are aware, indeed, that 
 
234 PROFESSOR NICHOL. 
 
 a few have been able to overcome such obstacles, and, in 
 spite of stern adherence to a high object, to gain general 
 acceptance. But these are the exceptions. Their success, 
 besides, has greatly resulted from other causes than the 
 truth they uttered. Certain graces of manner — certain 
 striking points in delivery — a certain melody, to which 
 their thoughts were set — created at the first an interest 
 which gradually, as the enthusiasm of the speaker increased, 
 swelled into a brute wonder, which made you fancy the 
 words " Orpheus no fable," written in a transparency over 
 the speaker's head. But clear steady visions of truth, true 
 and satisfying pleasure, and any permanent or transform- 
 ing change, were not given. The audience were lifted up 
 for a season, like an animal caught in a whirlwind, by the 
 sheer power of eloquence ; they were not really elevated 
 one distinct step — they came down precisely the same crea- 
 tures, and to the same point, as before, and the thing 
 would be remembered by them afterwards as a dream. 
 
 Minds, again, somewhat inferior to the prophetic order, 
 find a far freer and more useful passage to the public ear 
 and intellect, and succeed in giving not only a vague emo- 
 tion of delight, but some solid knowledge, and some lasting 
 result. Such a mind is that of our admirable friend. Pro- 
 fessor Nichol ; and even at the apparent risk of indelicacy, 
 we propose to analyse its constituent qualities, as well as 
 the special causes of his great success as a lecturer. 
 
 The first time we heard of Professor Nichol was on the 
 publication of his "Views of the Architecture of the 
 Heavens," and the first thing that struck us about the pro- 
 duction was the felicity and boldness of its title. The 
 words " Architecture of the Heavens" suggested, first, the 
 thought that the heavens were the building of a distinct 
 divine architect ; secondly, that the building was still in 
 progress ; and, thirdly, that from even this low and dis- 
 tant platform we are permitted glimpses of its gradual 
 growth toward perfection. The essence, in fact, of the 
 
PROFESSOR NICHOL. 235 
 
 nebular hypothesis was contained in the title ; and although 
 that hypothesis is now commonly thought exploded, it is 
 only so far as the visible evidence is concerned — as a pro- 
 bable and beautiful explanation of phenomena, the origin 
 of which is lost in the darkness of immeasurable antiquity, 
 it retains its value. But how suggestive to us at the time 
 was the expression, "Architecture of the Heavens!" 
 Formerly we deemed that when man awaked into exist- 
 ence, the building, indeed, was there in all its magnitude, 
 but that the scaffolding was down — all trace and vestige of 
 the operation elaborately removed — and that the almighty 
 Architect had withdrawn and hid himself. But now we 
 had come upon the warm footprints of omnipotence — the 
 Power was only a few steps in advance; nay, thrilling 
 thought ! we had only to lift our telescopes to behold him 
 actually at work up there, in the midnight sky. The tele- 
 scope enabled us to stand behind the processes of the Eter- 
 nal — it was a wing by which we overtook the great retreat 
 of the Deity, if indeed a retreat it was, and not rather a 
 perpetual progress — a triumphal march onwards into the 
 infinite dark. It brought us ever new, electric, telegra- 
 phic tidings of Him whose goings forth were of old — ^from 
 everlasting — and which were new to everlasting as well. 
 Such were the dim, yet high suggestions, of the nebular 
 hypothesis. If we relinquished them recently with a sigh, 
 we now sigh no more ; for now we have been taught, in 
 a manner most impressive, the immense age of the universe, 
 whose orbs seem hoary in their splendour, and have thus 
 found a new measure for computing our knowledge, or 
 rather for more accurately estimating our ignorance, of the 
 days, of the years, of the right hand of him that is the 
 Most High. How long, we now exclaim, it must be since 
 the Great Artist put his finishing touch to that serene 
 gallery of paintings we call the stars, and yet how perfect 
 and how godlike their execution ; since their lustre, their 
 beauty, and their holy calm are this night as fresh and un- 
 
236 PROFESSOR NICIIOL. 
 
 faded as at the beginning. And how solemn the thouglit, 
 if these works, in the hiding of their Creator, be so magni- 
 ficent, how great must himself be, and how great must he 
 have been, especially as he travailed in birth with such an 
 offspring, amid the jubilant shouts of all-awakening intel- 
 ligence 1 
 
 It is very common to skip the preface in order to get at 
 the book. In this case, we skipped the book to get at the 
 pictures. We read, nay, devoured, the plates — the poems 
 shall we call them — ere we read a word of the letterpress. 
 And most marvellous to us was their revelation of those 
 starry sprinklings, relieved against the dark background — 
 those wild capricious shapes, which reminded you of rear- 
 ing steeds under the control of perfect riders — seeming at 
 once to spurn and to be subject to immutable laws — those 
 unbanked rivers of glory flowing through the universe — 
 why, we seemed standing on a Pisgah, commanding the 
 prospect of immensity itself. But still more striking to 
 overlook, as we then imagined, the laboratory of God, and 
 to see his work in every stage of its progress — the six 
 demiurgic days presented to us contemporaneously and at 
 once. No wonder that such plates enchanted us, and that 
 we seemed gazing on rough copies from the paintings of 
 the Divine hand itself. What a triumph, too, to mind 
 over matter, and to a poor sun-illumined worm, over his 
 haughty torch — to be able, with a pin-jjoint, to indicate, 
 and, if necessary, to hide his place in the firmament ! It 
 was, indeed, an hour much deserving of memory. The 
 folding-doors of the universe seemed to open upon us in 
 musical thunder ; and if we could not as yet enter, yet 
 we could wish, like Mirza, for the wings of a great eagle 
 to fly away within them. It was one of those apocalyptic 
 moments that occur, or that can occur so seldom in life, 
 for it is not every day that we can see, for the first time, 
 in the expanded page of immensity, the charter of our 
 soul's freedom, and feel ourselves " enlarged " to the extent 
 
PROFESSOR NICIIOL. 237 
 
 of the length and breadth, the depth and the height of the 
 creation. 
 
 Returning from a reverie, in which we saw our sun and 
 his thousand neighbour stars quenched like a taper in the 
 blaze of that higher noon, we found ourselves on earth 
 again, and remembered that we had yet to read Dr Nichol's 
 book. And it is the highest compliment we can pay it, to 
 say that it did not dissipate or detract from the impres- 
 sions which the eloquent pictures had produced, and that 
 it gave them a yet clearer and more definite form. It 
 bridged in the foaming torrent of our enthusiasm. It trans- 
 lated (as Virgil does Homer) the stern and literal gran- 
 deurs of night into a mild and less dazzling version. We 
 liked, in the first place, its form. It consisted of letters, 
 and of letters to a lady. This held out a prospect of 
 ease, familiarity, clearness, and grace. Most expounders, 
 hitherto, of astronomical truth, had been either too stilted 
 in their style, or too scientific in their substance. But 
 here was a graceful conversation, such as an accomplished 
 philosopher might carry on with an intelligent female, 
 under the twilight canopy, or in the window recess, as the 
 moon was rising. It in no way transcended female com- 
 prehension, or if it did, it was only to slide into one of 
 those beautiful, bewitching mists, which the imagination 
 of women so much loves. There were, too, a warmth and 
 a heartiness about the style and manner, which distin- 
 guished the book favourably from the majority of scien- 
 tific treatises. These, generally, are cold and dry. Trust- 
 ing, it would seem, to the intrinsic grandeur of the sub- 
 ject, they convey their impressions of it in a didactic and 
 feeble style, and catalogue stars as indiiferently as they 
 would the withered leaves of the forest. Nichol, on the 
 contrary, seems to point to them, not with a cold rod, but 
 with a waving torch. He never " doubts that the stars 
 are fire" — no immeasurable icebergs they, floating in fro- 
 zen air, but glowing, burning, almost living orbs ; and his 
 
238 PROFESSOR NicnoL. 
 
 words glow, burn, and nearly start from the page in unison. 
 We will not deny that this heat and enthusiasm sometimes 
 betray him into splendida vitia — into rhetorical exaggera 
 tions — into passages which sound hollow, whether they are 
 so or not — and worse, into dim and vague obscurities, 
 copied too closely from his own nebulas, where you have 
 misty glimmer, instead of clear, solid land ; but his faults 
 are of a kind which it is far more easy to avoid than to 
 reach, which no sordid or commonplace mind, however ac- 
 . complished, durst commit ; and the spirit which animates 
 his most tasteless combinations of sound, and peeps through 
 his swelling intricacies of sentence, is always beautiful and 
 sincere. Beyond most writers, too, on this theme, he has 
 the power of giving, even to the uninitiated, a clear and 
 memorable idea of his subject — the truths of Astronomy 
 he paints upon the eye and soul of the reader. And this 
 he is enabled to do — first, because he has a clear vision 
 himself, which his enthusiasm is seldom permitted to dull 
 or to distort ; and, secondly, because he seeks — labours — 
 is not satisfied till he has transferred this entire to the 
 minds of his readers, and of his auditors. Thus far of the 
 mere manner of his writing. In considering its spirit, we 
 shall find metal more attractive. This is distinguished by 
 its sincere enthusiasm, its joyous hope, and by its religious 
 reverence. 
 
 What field for enthusiasm can be named in comparison 
 with the innumerous and ever-burning stars — the first ob- 
 jects which attract the eyes of children, who send up their 
 sweetest smiles, and uplift their tiny hands to pluck them 
 down as playthings — the beloved of solitary shepherds, 
 who, lying on the hillside, try to count them in their mul- 
 titudes, call them by names of their own, love those 
 " watchers and holy ones," as if they were companions 
 and friends, and sometimes exclaim, with the great shep- 
 herd king of Israel, " When I consider thy heavens, the 
 work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou 
 
PROFESSOR NICHOL. 239 
 
 hast ordained, what is man !" — the beloved of the mariner, 
 who, pacing his midnight deck, turns often aloft his eye to 
 those starry sparklers, shining on him through the shrouds, 
 
 or — 
 
 " Mirrored in the ocean vast — 
 A thousand fathoms down " — 
 
 the loved of the wakeful, especially of those who are awake 
 through sorrow, who, as they see them trembling through 
 the lattice, feel, or fancy, that they are sympathising with 
 their agonies, and would, if they could, send down a mes- 
 sage from their far thrones that might wipe away their 
 tears — the loved of the astronomer, who, a friendly spy, 
 watches their every motion, and through the tube of his 
 telescope distils into himself the essence of their beauty, 
 their meaning, and their story — the loved of the poet's 
 soul, who snatches many a live-coal of inspiration from 
 their flaming altars — the loved of the Christian, who sees 
 in them the reflection of his Father's glory, the milestones 
 on the path of his Redeemer's departure, and of his return 
 — the loved of all who have eyes to see, understandings to 
 comprehend, and souls to feel their grandeur so unspeak- 
 able, their silence so profound, their separation from each 
 other, and from us so entire, their multitude so immense, 
 their lustre so brilliant, their forms so singular, their order 
 so regular, their motions so dignified, so rapid, and so calm. 
 " If," says Emerson, " the stars were to appear one night 
 in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, 
 and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the 
 city of God which had thus been shown. But night after 
 night come out these preachers of beauty, and light the 
 universe with their admonishing smile." 
 
 It is singular, that while the theory of the stars has been 
 perpetually changing, the conception of their sublime cha- 
 racter has, under every theory, remained nearly the same. 
 While they are believed to be, as in the darker ages, ab- 
 solutely divine, incorruptible, and perfect in their essence, 
 
240 PROFESSOR NICHOL. 
 
 they were not regarded with more enthusiasm, alluded to 
 with more frequency, or lauded with more eloquence, than 
 now, when we know that imperfection, and inequality, de- 
 cay, and destruction, snow, and perhaps sin, have found 
 their way thither, as well as here ; and Dante, amid his 
 innumerable descriptions of the heavenly bodies — and no 
 poet has so many — has said nothing finer in their praise 
 than we find in some of the bursts of Bayly. If science 
 has, with rude hand, torn ofiT from the stars that false lustre 
 of supernaturalism which they bore so long, it has immea- 
 surably multiplied their numbers, unlocked their secrets, 
 at once brought them nearer and thrown them farther oif, 
 and supplied the glitter of superstition by the severe light 
 of law. If they seem no longer the thrones of angels, they 
 are at least porch-lamps in the temple of Almighty God. 
 If no longer the regents of human destiny, they are the 
 Urim and Thummim upon the breast of the Ancient of 
 Days. If not now regarded as a part of the highest heaven, 
 they at least light the way that leadeth to honour, glory, 
 and immortality. From sparks they have broadened into 
 suns ; from thousands they have multiplied into millions. 
 It is ever thus with the progress of genuine truth. Re- 
 morselessly, as it rushes on, it scatters a thousand beauti- 
 ful dreams, slumbering like morning dew-drops among the 
 branches of the wood, but from the path of its progress 
 there rises, more slowly, a stern, but true and lasting glory, 
 before which, in due time, the former " shall no more be 
 remembered, neither come into mind." 
 
 A collection of all the descriptions of the stars, in the 
 poetry and prose of every age, would constitute itself a 
 galaxy. It would include Homer's wondrous one-lined 
 allusions to them — so rapid and so strong, as they shone 
 over Ida, or kept still watch above the solitary Ulysses in 
 his sea-wanderings — the crown they wove over the bare 
 head of the sleepless Prometheus — the glances of power 
 and sympathy which they shed in, through rents in the 
 
PROFESSOR NICIIOL. 211 
 
 night of the Grecian tragedies — the ornate and laboured 
 pictures of Yirgil and Lucretius — ^the thick imagery they 
 supply to the Scripture bards — their perpetual inter- 
 mingling with the Divina Comedia, darting down through 
 crevices in the descending circles of damnation, circling 
 the mount of purgatory, and paving the way to the vision 
 of essential Deity — Shakspere's less frequent but equally 
 beautiful touches — Milton's plaintive, yet serene references 
 to their set glories — Young's bursts of wonder, almost of 
 longing and desire, for those nearer neighbours to the eter- 
 nal throne, which appeared to him to see so far and to 
 know so much — Byron's wild and angry lashing at them, 
 like a sea, seeking to rise, and reach and quench them, on 
 a thousand shipwrecks — Wordsworth's love to them, /or 
 loving and resting on his favourite mountains — Bayly's 
 hymnings of devotion — Chalmers' long-linked swells of 
 pious enthusiasm — and last, not least, our author's raptures, 
 more measured, more artistic, but equally sincere. 
 
 There occurs a passage in one of Byron's letters, written 
 in Venice, where he describes himself, after a debauch, 
 looking out at the night, when he exclaims, " What 
 nothings we are before these stars!" and adds, that he 
 never sufficiently felt their greatness, till he looked at them 
 through Herschel's telescope, and saw that they were worlds 
 We rather wonder at this, for we have always thought 
 that, to a highly imaginative mind, it mattered little 
 whether it looked to the stars through the eye or the tele- 
 scope. Who does not see and feel that they are worlds, 
 if he has a heart and an imagination, as well as an eye ? 
 Who cares for the size of algebraic symbols ? A star, at 
 largest, is but a symbol, and the smaller it seems, the more 
 scope it leaves for imagination. The telescope tends rather 
 to crush and overwhelm than to stimulate — to fill than to 
 fire — some souls. It necessarily, too, deprives the seeing 
 of the stars, so far as they are regarded individually, of 
 many of its finest accessories. The mountain which the 
 
242 PROFESSOR NICHOL. 
 
 star seems to touch — the tree through which it trembles — 
 the soft evening air on which it seems silently to feed — 
 the quick contrasts between it and its neighbouring orbs 
 — its part as one of a constellated family — such poetical 
 aspects of it are all lost, and the glare of illumination falls 
 upon one vast unit, insulated at once from earth, and from 
 the other parts of heaven. It is as though we should apply 
 a magnifying-glass to a single face in a group of painted 
 figures, thereby enlarging one object at the expense of the 
 others, which are not diminished, but blotted out. While, 
 of course, acknowledging the mighty powers and uses of 
 the telescope, and confessing that from no dream did we 
 ever more reluctantly awake than from one which lately 
 transported us to Parsonstown, and showed us the nebula 
 in Orion just dropping to pieces, like a bright dissolving 
 cloud, yet we venture to assert that many derive as much 
 pleasure and excitement from the crescent moon still as in 
 Shakspere's time, a silver bow new bent in heaven — from 
 round, shivering Venus in the green west — from the star 
 of Jove suspended high over head, like the apparent king 
 of the sky — and from those glorious jewels, hanging like 
 two pendants, of equal weight and brilliance, from the ear 
 of night, Orion and the Great Bear, as they could from any 
 revelation of the telescope. This very night we saw what 
 probably impressed our imagination as much as a glimpse 
 of the Rossian glories would have done. The night has 
 been dark and drifting till a few minutes ago. We went 
 out to the door of our dwelling, looking for nothing but 
 darkness, when suddenly, as if flashing out through and 
 from the gloom, and meeting us like a gigantic ghost at 
 our very threshold, we were aware of the presence of 
 Orion, and involuntarily shuddered at the sight. 
 
 All astronomers of high name have been led at first to 
 their science by the workings of an enthusiasm as strong 
 as passion and as high as poetry. We cannot doubt that 
 Newton was from his boyhood fascinated by the beauty of 
 
PROFESSOR NICHOL. 243 
 
 the heavenly bodies, and that his wistful boyish glances at 
 their serene splendour and mystic dance formed the germs 
 of his future discoveries. To some Woolsthorpe reverie of 
 twilight, we may trace the fall of the keys of the universe 
 at the feet of his matured manhood ! Surely a loftier prin- 
 ciple was stirring in him than that which renders the 
 juvenile mechanician uneasy till he has analysed the con- 
 struction of a toy. It was not, in the first instance, the 
 mathematical puzzles connected with them that attracted 
 him to those remote regions ; but it was their remoteness, 
 magnitude, and mystery, which roused him to grapple with 
 their secrets. Ordinary children love to see, and would 
 like to join, the march of soldiers, as they step stately by. 
 The boy Newton burned to accompany, as an intelligent 
 witness and companion, the steps of planets and suns. 
 This enthusiasm never altogether subsided, as many well- 
 known anecdotes prove. But too soon it ceased to express 
 itself otherwise than by silent study and wonder ; it retired 
 deep into the centre of his being, and men, astonished at 
 the lack-lustre look with which the eye of the sage was con- 
 templating the stars, knew not that his spirit was the while 
 gazing at them as with the insatiate glance of an eagle. 
 Thus frequently has it been with astronomers. Their ar- 
 dour diving beyond human sight or sympathy has failed to 
 attract the minds of others, and by coating itself in the ice 
 of cold formulas and petrified words, has repelled many a 
 poetical enthusiast, whose imagination was not his only 
 faculty. We look on Professor Nichol as an accomplished 
 mediator between the two classes of mind, or, as we have 
 formerly called him, an Aaron to many an ineloquent 
 Moses of astronomy. 
 
 How he has preserved his child-like love for his subject- 
 matter we do not know, but certainly we always feel, when 
 reading him, that we are following the track of suns, 
 burning and beneficent as footsteps of God, and not of 
 "cinders of the element," whirled round in a mere me- 
 
244 PROFESSOR NICHOL. 
 
 chanical motion, and cliiefly valuable as lively and cheap 
 illustrations of " Euclid's Elements ! " It is said that he has 
 sacrificed powers of original discovery to popular effect ; 
 but what if this popular effect, in which so many are now 
 participating, should be to rouse the slumbering energies 
 of still mightier geniuses, and give us a few Newtons, in- 
 stead of one fully developed Nichol ! " Ha ! I think there 
 be six Richmonds in the field." 
 
 We like next to, and akin to this, in Professor Nichol, 
 his spirit of hope and joy. This, we think, ought to be, 
 but is not always the result of starry contemplations. We 
 quoted before Carlyle's celebrated exclamation, " Ah, it's 
 a sad sight," as he looked up to a sparkling January sky. 
 Whether we join with him in this, or with Emerson in ex- 
 pressions of jubilant praise, may depend partly upon our 
 state of feeling. In certain moods the stars will appear 
 hearths, in others hells. The moon is bayed at, not by 
 dogs alone. The evening star awakens the gloomy hour 
 of the misanthrope, and shines the signal to the murderer, 
 as well as lights the lover to his assignation with his mis- 
 tress, and the poet to his meeting with the muse. It 
 seems now, besides, evident to most, that the universe 
 being made of one material, struggle, uncertainty, wo, 
 and the other evils to which finitude is heir, are, in all 
 probability, extended to its remotest limits, and that thus 
 the stars are no islands of the blest, but, like our own 
 world, stern arenas of contest, of defeat or of victory. Still 
 there are many reasons why the heavenly bodies should be 
 a permanent spring of cheering, if pensive, thought. There 
 is first their unfathomable beauty. Is it nothing to the 
 happiness of man that God has suspended over his head 
 this book of divine pictures, talking to him in their own 
 low but mighty speech, spotting his nights with sj^lendour, 
 and filling his soul with an inspiring influence which no 
 earthly object can communicate ? Doubts and difiiculties 
 may occupy part of the intervening time, but the first and 
 
PROFESSOR NICHOL. 2 15 
 
 the last feeling of humanity is, " Thanks, endless and 
 boundless, to Heaven for the stars." Secondly, They give 
 us a sense of liberty which no other external cause can do 
 and which must enhance the happiness of man. This was 
 one great good of the discovery of America. It did not, 
 when found, fulfil the dreams of navigators ; it was not a 
 cluster of fortunate isles, filled with happy spirits — the 
 worst passions of man were found among the most beauti- 
 ful scenery in the world ; but its discovery shivered the 
 fetters of usage and prejudice, burst the old moenia mundi; 
 and man, the one-eyed giant, found himself groping and 
 pawing, to say the least, in a wider dungeon, and breath- 
 ing a freer air. But the modern astronomy has broken 
 down stronger walls, and made man, in a sense, free of the 
 universe. What though he has good reason to believe 
 that these many mansions of his Father's house are not, as 
 yet, peopled with the perfect and the happy. To him 
 height and depth have unbared many of their secret mar- 
 vels — new provinces, pointing to innumerable others be- 
 hind, have expanded in the kingdom of the Infinite — every 
 limit and barrier have fled away, and the surprised pri- 
 soner feels his spirit at large, unbounded in a boundless 
 universe. Surely the telescope, in infusing into the mind 
 such a sense of freedom, has been a benefactor to the heart 
 of man, who may exclaim to it, in the language of the 
 Bword song, "Joy-giver, I kiss thee." But, thirdly, the 
 stars diffuse happiness through the thoughtful mind, as 
 revealing a whole so vast that all our partial and gloomy 
 views of it are straightway stamped with imperfection and 
 imbecility. How little and idle our most plausible theories 
 look under the weight of that beaming canopy I Imagine 
 the shellfish, amidst its sludge, dreaming of the constitu- 
 tion of that world of waters which rolls above ! So insig- 
 nificant appears a Locke, a Kant, or a Spinoza, exalted 
 each some five or six feet above his grave, and theorising 
 so dogmatically on the principles of the starry ocean. We 
 
246 PROFESSOR NicnoL. 
 
 seem to see the mighty mother bending down, listening to 
 each tiny but pompons voice, smilingly measuring the size 
 of the sage, and saying, in the irony of the gods, " And is 
 this really thy opinion, my little hero, and hast thou, within 
 that pretty new thimble of thine, actually condensed the 
 sea of truth ? Perge Puer." Thus the midnight sky teaches 
 us at once the greatness and the littleness of man — his 
 greatness by comparison with his past self — his littleness 
 by comparison with the expanse of the universe, and with 
 his future being ; and by both lessons it summonses us to 
 joy; because from the one we are obviously advancing up- 
 wards, and because from the other our doubts are seen to 
 be as little as our resolution of them ; our darkness yet 
 pettier than our light. Why, to one, who could from a 
 high point of view overlook the general scheme of things, 
 the darkest and broadest shadow that ever crossed the 
 mind of man — that ever made him dig for death, or leap 
 howling into perdition — may appear no larger than one 
 dim speck upon a mountain of diamond. 
 
 We stand up, therefore, with Leigh Hunt and Emerson 
 versus Carlyle and oster, for the old name — the happy 
 stars ; and Professor Nichol will come in and complete the 
 majority. Without specially, or at large, arguing the 
 question, he takes it for granted, and sees human immor- 
 tality and infinite progress legibly inscribed on the sky. 
 The words "onwards" and "to come" are to him the 
 rung changes of the sphere-music, and fearlessly, and as 
 in dance, he follows them into the hoary deep. 
 
 We admire, still more. Professor Nichol's spirit of reve- 
 rence. Religion as a human feeling is so natural a deduc- 
 tion from the spectacles of night, that we sometimes fancy, 
 that did man live constantly in a sunless world, and under 
 a starry canopy, he would be a wiser and holier, if a sad- 
 der being. One cause, we imagine, why people in the 
 country are more serious than the same class in towns, is, 
 that they are brought more frequently, with less interrup- 
 
PROFESSOR NICHOL. 247 
 
 tion, and often alone, into contact with the night sky, 
 which falls sometimes on the solitary head heavy as a 
 mantle with studs of gold. " An undevout astronomer," 
 says Young, "is mad." Nor will the case of La Place 
 disprove this poetic adage — if we understand him to mean, 
 by devotion, that general sense of the Infinite in the ima- 
 gination which passes as worship into the heart, and comes 
 out as praise upon the lips. In this sense La Place was a 
 worshipper — and that not merely, as Isaac Taylor intimates, 
 of a law which had frozen into a vast icy idol, but of the 
 warm creation as it shone around him. Still, his worship 
 did not reach the measure, or deserve the name, of piety ; 
 it was the worship of an effect, not of its living, personal, 
 and father-like cause. Nichol, on the other hand, never 
 loses sight of the universe as an instant, ever-rushing ema- 
 nation of the Deity. " God," he says, quoting a friend of 
 kindred spirit, "literally creates the universe every mo- 
 ment." He is led by Boscovich's theory of atoms to sup- 
 pose an infinite Will, producing incessantly all force and 
 motion. And thus the beauty of things seems to him, as 
 it were, an immediate flush upon the cheek of the Maker, 
 and their light a lustre in his eye, and their motion the 
 circulation of his untiring energies ; and yet, withal, the 
 works are never lost in the conception of their Creator, 
 nor the Creator pantheistically identified with the works. 
 The mighty picture, and its mightier background and 
 source, are inseparably connected, but are never confused. 
 He takes up, in short, precisely the view and the atti- 
 tude of the ancient Hebrew prophets, in regard to the ex- 
 ternal universe. To them, that is j ust a bright or black 
 screen concealing God. " Whither can they go from his 
 Spirit? whither can they flee from his presence?" At 
 every step, and in every circumstance, they feel themselves 
 God-inclosed, God-filled, God-breathing men, with a 
 spiritual Presence lowering or smiling on them from th9 
 sky, sounding in wild tempest, or creeping in panic still- 
 
248 PROFESSOR NicnoL. 
 
 ness across the surface of the earth ; and if they turn with- 
 in, lo ! it is there also — an Eye hung in the central dark- 
 ness of their own heart. This sublime consciousness a cold 
 science had in a great measure extinguished. Deity, for 
 a season, was banished from the feeling of men; but we 
 are mistaken if a higher and better philosophy have not 
 brought him back ! — ^brought back the sun to the earth, in 
 bringing back sight to the blind ! Say, rather, a better 
 philosophy, of which our author is not the least eloquent 
 expounder, is bringing back man to a perception of the 
 overhanging Deity. 
 
 On the relations which connect astronomy with revealed 
 religion. Professor Nichol, though not silent, is somewhat 
 less explicit than we could have wished. In the absence 
 of the powerful light which he could have cast upon this 
 topic, we must permit ourselves a few cursory remarks, 
 constituting an outline, which may or may not afterwards 
 be filled up. The Christian Scriptures were, of course, 
 never intended to teach astronomy, any more than to teach 
 botany, or zoology, or conchology, or any other ology, but 
 theology ; their main object is to bear a message of mercy 
 to a fallen race, and their allusions to other subjects are 
 necessarily incidental, brief, glancing for a moment to a 
 passing topic, and then rapidly returning to the main and 
 master theme. It follows, therefore, that if we look into them 
 for a systematic statement of truth on any secular subject, 
 we may look long, and look in vain. Nay, we need not 
 have been surprised, although they had in every point co- 
 incided with floating popular notions of physical subjects, 
 provided they did not fail, by their wonted divine alchemy, 
 to deduce from them eternal lessons of moral truth and 
 wisdom. But as " all things are known to the soul " — as 
 even the mind of genius, in its higher hour, has rare 
 glimpses of subjects lying round about, as well as within, 
 the sphere of its thought — so, much more we might have 
 expected that the divinely inspired soul should have hints 
 
PROFESSOR NTCHOL. 240 
 
 and intimations, occasional and imperfect, of other fields 
 besides its own. Working in ecstacy, was the prophetic 
 mind never to overleap its barriers ? 
 
 We affirm, and could, we think, prove the following pro- 
 positions: — 1st, We find in the Scripture writers not only 
 a feeling of the grandeur of the heavenly bodies, but a 
 sense, obscure, indeed, yet distinct, of their vast magni- 
 tude ; 2dly, No real contradiction to the leading principles 
 of the modern astronomy ; 3dly, One or two hints, that, 
 whether by revelation or otherwise, the true scheme of the 
 universe was understood by more than one of their number; 
 4thly, The recognition, especially, of the principle of a plu- 
 rality of worlds ; and, 5thly, The recognition of the opera- 
 tion of decay, change, convulsion, and conflagration, among 
 the stars. " He hangeth," says Job, " the earth upon no- 
 thing." What a clear and noble gleam of astronomical in- 
 sight was this in that dark age ! In the deep wilderness 
 of Edom did this truth, the germ of the Copernican hypo- 
 thesis, flash upon the soul of the lonely herdsman, as he 
 turned up his eye to a heaven of far more brilliance than 
 ours, through whose serene and transparent air night looked 
 down in all her queen-like majesty. There wandering, the 
 inspired herdsman, and seeing that those orbs which his 
 heart told him were worlds, were suspended and balanced 
 in the mere void, his mind leaped to the daring conclusion, 
 that so, too, was the firm earth beneath his feet ; and with 
 like enthusiasm to that of Archimedes, when he cried 
 ^^ Eureka! eureka!" did he exclaim, "He hangeth the 
 earth upon nothing, and stretcheth out the north over the 
 empty place." 
 
 In like manner, striking is the relation between some 
 admitted facts of astronomy, and some recent speculations 
 in metaphysics, and those remarkable declarations of Scrip- 
 ture concerning the non-permanence of this material frame- 
 work. We will not soon forget a little circumstance of 
 curious coincidence which occurred in our own experience, 
 
250 • PROFESSOR NICHOL. 
 
 in reference to this subject. We had returned from hear- 
 ing, in Dundee, a lecture by a brilliant friend, in which, 
 in his own inimitable way, and as a deduction from his own 
 daring theory, he had described the dissolution of the uni- 
 verse. At family prayers that very evening, in the course 
 of our ordinary reading, occurred the third chapter of Peter, 
 prophesying the same event. We were all, particularly the 
 lecturer himself, struck with it. It seemed a sublime com- 
 mentary from the written word upon the lesson we had 
 heard read us from the stars. So far from looking on it as 
 a mere chance coincidence, we all appeared to hear in it 
 God's own whisper — ^that we had not been hearing or be- 
 lieving a lie. 
 
 We are aware that the magnitude and multitude of the 
 stars have furnished a theme of objection to the sceptic, and 
 have elsewhere attempted to show, that Dr Chalmers has 
 not fully or satisfactorily answered that objection. His 
 " Sermons on the Modern Astronomy" — certainly of this 
 century the most brilliant contribution to the oratory of re- 
 ligion — are not distinguished by his usual originality and 
 force of argument. They repel assumptions by assump- 
 tions ; and, in the exuberant tide of eloquence, the sophism 
 in question is lost sight of, but not drowned. The objection 
 of the sceptic was — Would the Proprietor of a universe so 
 vast have given his Son to die for a world so small ? and, 
 perhaps, the best reply might be condensed in three ques- 
 tions asked in return to the infidel's one. 1st, What is 
 material magnitude compared to mind? 2dly, Can you 
 prove that the vast magnitude on which you found your ob- 
 jection is peopled by moral beings? and, 3dly, What has 
 magnitude to do with a moral question ? What, for in- 
 stance, has the size of a city to do with the moral charac- 
 ter of its inhabitants ? What has the extent of a country 
 to do with the intellectual or moral interest which may or 
 may not be connected with its plains ? Whether is Ben 
 Mac Dhui or Bannockburn the dearer to the Scottish heart, 
 
PROFESSOR NICHOL. 251 
 
 though the one be the prince of Scottish hills, and the 
 other only a poorp lain, undistinguished save by an humble 
 stone, and by the immortal memories of patriotism and 
 courage which gather around that field, where " those who 
 had wi' Wallace bled " bade " welcome to their gory bed, 
 or to victory ?" Whether is more glorious the gay city of 
 Madrid, or the lonely cape of Trafalgar, where the guns of 
 Nelson, from their iron lips, spake destruction to the united 
 fleets of France and Spain? Whether is Mont Blanc or 
 Morgarten the nobler object, though the one be the 
 
 " Monarch of mountains — 
 They crown'd him long ago, 
 On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, 
 With a diadem of snow " — 
 
 and the other only a humble field where the Swiss bafiled 
 their Austrian oppressors, and where " first in the shock 
 with Xuri's spear was the arm of William Tell ?" Whether 
 is more beloved by the Christian's heart Caucasus or Cal- 
 vary ? and yet the one is the loftiest of Asia's mountains, 
 and the other a little hill — ^^a mere dot upon the surface of 
 the globe. So, may there not issue from this remote earth 
 of ours — from the noble deeds it has witnessed — from the 
 nobler aspirations which have been breathed upon it — from 
 the high thoughts which have been thought upon its sur- 
 face — from the eloquent words which have stirred its air 
 into music — from the poets who have wrought its language 
 into undying song — from the philosophers who have ex- 
 plored the secrets of its laws — from the men of God who 
 have knelt in its temples — from the angels who have touched 
 its mountains — from the footsteps of Incarnate Deity, which 
 have imprinted its plains — a burst of glory, before which 
 the lustre of suns, constellations, and firmaments, must 
 pale, tremble, and melt away ? 
 
 Another consideration is important and obvious. If the 
 gi'eatness of the creation and of its God dwindles earth 
 and man, it must dwindle also every separate section of the 
 
252 PROFESSOR NTCHOL. 
 
 universe, and each separate family — for all sections and 
 families, compared to infinity, are less than nothing ; and 
 if special circumstances in man's history called for a special 
 interposition in his behalf, surely the urgency of the de- 
 mand justifies the interference. And as to the question of 
 condescension, the very term involves a false and human 
 conception of God ; or if God did condescend to cojne down 
 to man's condition, it was, in fact, little more than had he 
 condescended to care for and die for angels — the gulph be- 
 tween both ranks of being and himself being boundless. 
 Besides, if, as many suppose, misery and sin extend through- 
 out the universe, may not the scheme of human redemption 
 be only a part of a general process — as Chalmers says, 
 " May not the redemption of many guilty worlds have 
 been laid on the Redeemer's shoulders ; " or if, on the other 
 hand, ours be the sole world that has fallen, would not this 
 alone account for the importance attached to, and the sacri- 
 fices made for it ? Just as, let the meanest man in a king- 
 dom commit a high crime, his insignificance is forgotten 
 — he rises instantly into importance — he is summoned to 
 solemn trial, and on his trial the interest and eyes of an 
 entire nation are suspended ; or let the tiniest hill in a 
 country, so tiny that it was not thought worth while to 
 give it a name, but break out into a volcano, and that fire 
 will become to it as a crown — men will flock from every 
 quarter to see it — it will become the principal feature, the 
 terrible tongue of the region — and the old snow-clad moun- 
 tains will appear diminished in its presence. So {this view 
 Dr Chalmers has admirably amplified, but has not sought to 
 prove the premise on which it would require to be founded), 
 if we should call earth the only blot on the fair page of 
 God's universe, we can thus account why angels have 
 rested on its summits — the voice of God been heard in its 
 groves — and the Son of God, for thirty-three years, ate ils 
 bread, walked on its surface, and at last died for its sins. 
 But, in seeking partially to fill up Dr Nichol's blanks, 
 
PROFESSOR NICIIOL. 253 
 
 let us not forget his redundant merits — the genial glow of 
 his spirit — the rich yet nice exuberance of his language — 
 his tremulous and prolonged sympathy with every note of 
 his theme — the clear telescopic light he casts on what is 
 dark — the fine chiaroscuro in which he often bathes what 
 is clear — the choice flowers of poesy which he culls and 
 wreaths around the drier and barer corners of his discourse 
 — and the rich steam of pious feeling which rises irresistibly 
 from each of his closes, as from a censer of incense. Such 
 qualities we find not only in his first work, but even more 
 finely displayed, we think, in his book on the " Solar 
 System." " We would indite," says Charles Lamb, " some- 
 thing on the solar system. Betty, bring the candles." How 
 the gentle Elia fared in this candle-light excursion he does 
 not inform us. In the absence of authentic details con- 
 cerning this expedition, we have willingly accepted Dr 
 Nichol's more scientific guidance. We have stood with 
 him on the shiniiig summits of the Moon, looked around on 
 the glazed desolation, gone down into the dreader than 
 Domdaniel caverns, and, coming up, asked at the huge 
 overhanging Earth and the stripped stony Sun, the un- 
 answered question — Is this a chaos or a ruin ? We have 
 climbed the tall cliffs of Venus — been motes in Mercury, 
 itself a mote in the near blaze of the Sun — pressed our 
 footprints in the snows of Mars — swam across the star of 
 Jove, so beautiful and large — paused, and wished to pause 
 for ever, under the divine evenings of Saturn, wishing his 
 ring that of eternity — saluted, from Herschel, the Sun, as 
 ihe " Star of Day," far, faint, diminished, discrowned — and 
 from Neptune, as from a promontory, have looked out into 
 the empire of a night like day, while behind us lay a day 
 like night. A winged painter, with bold pinion and bolder 
 pencil, did he lead us from world to world, and his wing 
 seemed to get stronger, and his vision clearer, and his 
 colours more vivid, the dimmer the region, and the farther 
 the flight. 
 
254 PROFESSOR NICHOL. 
 
 If we have, in speaking at such length of Dr Nichol as 
 a writer, left ourselves less room to descant on his merits 
 as a lecturer, our reason is, in both characters he is sub- 
 stantially the same. His writings are just undelivered 
 lectures — his lectures are just spoken books. There are 
 some in whom speaking develops new powers, and who are 
 more at home behind the desk of the lecture-room than be- 
 hind that of the study. There are others in whom speak- 
 ing discovers new deficiencies, and who, from want of prac- 
 tice, or diffidence, or contempt for their audience, lecture 
 below their general powers. Professor Nichol belongs to 
 neither of those classes. Both in the study and the lecture- 
 room, he is the same clear expounder, vivid describer, and 
 tempered enthusiast. His manner, without detracting 
 aught from, adds little or nothing to, the impression of his 
 thought or style, of which it is simply the medium. Its 
 principal quality is ease — an ease not materially impaired 
 by a certain hesitation. Hesitation, we need scarcely say, 
 has often a great charm. How fine sometimes it is accom- 
 panying the prattle of a beautiful child ! And we know 
 some popular divines who have stammered themselves into 
 pulpit celebrity, proving that a fault dexterously managed 
 is worth two merits left in a state of nature. Dr Nichol's 
 hesitation is not great, is confined to his extempore speech, 
 and seems rather to spring from an excess than a deficiency 
 of matter or words. Every little while, too, he resorts to 
 his notes, and reads his fine passages with much gusto and 
 effect. We must say, however, that we prefer him when 
 carrying on his conversations — so lively, explicit, and en- 
 tertaining — with his hearers. 
 
 In this combined character of lecturer and popular 
 writer, Dr Nichol has done more than any man living to 
 uncase science from its mummy confinements, and to make 
 it walk abroad as a free and living thing. And though he 
 should never accomplish much in the walks of positive dis- 
 covery, nor even build up any solid systematic treatise of 
 
PROFESSOR NICHOL. 255 
 
 scientific exposition, he shall not have laboured in vain, 
 nor spent his strength for naught. He has, in his various 
 works and progresses through the country, scattered the 
 profuse seeds of what shall yet be an abundant harvest of 
 astronomical enlightenment and enthusiasm. We have 
 been amazed and delighted to witness the impression he 
 contrives to make upon even humble minds, by the joint 
 effect of his subject — his gorgeous style — his gigantic dia- 
 grams, and the enthusiasm which speaks through his pallid 
 visage and large grey eyes ; and how many " ready-made 
 astronomers" he leaves behind him wherever he goes. 
 
 At the commencement of this century, the popular li- 
 terature of astronomy was in no very palmy condition. 
 Fontenelle, indeed, had defended, with much acuteness 
 and elegance, the doctrine of a " plurality of worlds." Addi- 
 son, like a " child-angel," had prattled a wondrous prattle 
 about the stars, in some of his Saturday " Spectators." But 
 the real text-book of popular prose instruction on this sub- 
 ject was " Ilervey's Meditations" — a book written by a 
 good man, but feeble writer, and chiefly distinguished by 
 its inane glitter. But now, not to speak of Dr Dick, whose 
 lucid, interesting, and widely-read books have done so much 
 to popularise the theme, the genius of Chalmers, Isaac Tay- 
 lor, and others, has made up for the indifference of ages. 
 Still, Nichol is the prose laureate of the stars. From his 
 writings ascends hitherto the richest tribute of mingled in- 
 telligence of their laws — love for their beauty — admira- 
 tion of their still strong order — hope in the prospects of 
 mankind, as reflected in their mirror — and sense, ever pro- 
 found and near, of that unseen Power who counts their 
 numbers, sustains their motions, and makes their thousand 
 eyes the organs and the symbols of his omniscience. 
 
 In some of the Professor's recent works, such as his 
 " Observations on the System of the World," and his 
 Preface to Willm's " Education," we have been a little an- 
 noyed at the quantity of careless writing they contain — at 
 
256 . PROFESSOR NICHOL. 
 
 once loose, obscure, and incorrect — and have been tempted 
 to lay the blame now upon his printers, and now upon his 
 own most incomprehensible and nebulous handwriting. 
 
 We take our leave of this subject with considerable re- 
 gret, both because we are always sorry to part from a frank, 
 friendly, and intelligent companion like Dr Nichol, and 
 because we are even yet sorrier to leave a theme so fasci- 
 nating, even to an unscientific writer, as the " star- eyed 
 science." We cannot close without alluding to the recent 
 death of Miss Herschel, long the associate of Sir William, 
 in his midnight observations, and to whom our author 
 pays an eloquent compliment, in his " Architecture of the 
 Heavens." After long enjoying the brilliant reputation of 
 her brother, and the equally wide and true, if not so bril- 
 liant, reputation of her nephew — retaining, amid the chills 
 of extreme age, all the ardour of her enthusiasm, and en- 
 gaged, it is said, to the last in her favourite pursuit — she 
 has fallen asleep. Every astronomer, surely, is ready to 
 envy her fate, so far as her retaining to the end her post is 
 concerned. To die at the telescope is surely a nobler des- 
 tiny than to die at the cannon, or on the throne.* 
 
 MRS HEMANS. 
 
 Female authorship is, if not a great, certainly a singular 
 fact. And if a singular fact in this century, what must it 
 have been in the earlier ages of the world — when it existed 
 as certainly as now, and was more than now a phenomenon, 
 
 * Since this was written, the Professor has been in America, and 
 the public may soon expect the result in a separate, and, we doubt 
 not, most interesting work. 
 
MRS HEMANS. 257 
 
 Standing often insulated and alone ? If, even in this age, 
 blues are 6/ac/j-balled, and homespun is still the " only wear," 
 and music, grammar, and gramarye are the three elements 
 legitimately included and generally expected in the educa- 
 tion of woman, in what light must the Aspasias and the 
 Sapphos of the past have been regarded ? Probably as 
 lusus naturce, in whom a passionate attachment to literature 
 was pardoned as a pleasant peccadillo, or agreeable insanity ; 
 just as a slight squint in the eye of a beauty, or even a 
 far-off faux pas in her reputation, is still noli unfrequently 
 forgiven. But alas ! in our age, the exception is likely 
 soon to become the rule — the lusus the law ; and, at all 
 events, of female authorship the least gallant of critics is 
 compelled now to take cognisance ; and without absolutely 
 admitting this as our characteristic, we must confess the 
 diffidence as well as the good-will wherewith we approach 
 a subject where respect for truth and respect for the sex 
 are sometimes apt to jostle and jar. 
 
 The works of British women have now taken up, not by 
 courtesy but by right, a full and conspicuous place in our 
 literature. They constitute an elegant library in them- 
 selves ; and there is hardly a department in science, in 
 philosophy, in morals, in politics, in the belles lettres, in 
 fiction, or in the fine arts, but has been occupied, and ably 
 occupied, by a lady. This certainly proclaims a high state 
 of cultivation on the part of the many which has thus 
 flowered out into composition in the case of the few. It 
 exhibits an extension and refinement of that element of 
 female influence which, in the private intercourse of so- 
 ciety, has been productive of such blessed effects — it 
 mingles with the harsh tone of general literature, " as the 
 lute pierceth through the cymbal's clash" — it blends with 
 it a vein of delicate discrimination, of mild charity, and of 
 purity of morals — gives it a healthy and happy tone, the 
 tone of the fireside ; it is in the chamber of our literature, 
 a quiet and lovely presence ; by its very gentleness, over- 
 
258 MRS HEMANS. 
 
 awing as well as refining and beautifying it all. One 
 principal characteristic of female writing in our age is its 
 sterling sense. It is told of Coleridge, that he was accus- 
 tomed, on important emergencies, to consult a female 
 friend, placing implicit confidence in her first instructive 
 suggestions. If she proceeded to add her reasons, he 
 checked her immediately. " Leave these, madam, to me to 
 find out." We find this rare and valuable sense — this 
 shorthand reasoning — exemplified in our lady authors — 
 producing, even in the absence of original genius, or of 
 profound penetration, or of wide experience, a sense of per- 
 fect security, as we follow their gentle guidance. Indeed, 
 on all questions affecting proprieties, decorums, what we 
 may call the ethics of sentimentalism, minor as well as 
 major morals, their verdict may be considered oracular, and 
 without appeal. We remark, too, in the writings of females, 
 a tone of greater generosity than in those of men. They 
 are more candid and amiable in their judgments of authors 
 and of books. Commend us to female critics. They are 
 not eternally consumed by the desire of being witty, astute, 
 and severe, of carping at what they could not equal — of 
 hewing down what they could or would not have built up. 
 The principle, nil admirari, is none of theirs ; and whether 
 it be that a sneer disfigures their beautiful lips, it is seldom 
 seen upon them. And in correspondence with this, it is 
 curious that (in our judgments, and, we suspect, theirs) the 
 worst critics are persons who dislike the sex, and whom 
 the sex dislikes — musty, fusty old bachelors, such as 
 Gifford, or certain pedantic prigs in the press of the 
 present day. Ladies, on the other hand, are seldom se- 
 vere judges of anything, except each other's dress and 
 deportment ; and in defect of profound principles, they 
 are helped out by that fine instinctive sense of theirs, 
 which partakes of the genial nature, and verges upon 
 genius itself. 
 
 Passing from such preliminary remarks, we proceed to 
 
MRS HEMANS. 259 
 
 our theme. We have selected Mrs Hemans as our first 
 specimen of Female Authors, not because we consider her 
 the best, but because we consider her by far the most 
 feminine writer of the age. All the woman in her shines. 
 You could not (unknowing of the author) open a page of 
 her writings without feeling this is written by a lady. Her 
 inspiration always pauses at the feminine point. It never 
 " oversteps the modesty of nature," nor the dignity and 
 decorum of womanhood. She is no sibyl, tossed to and 
 fro in the tempest of furious excitement, but ever a " deep, 
 majestical, and high-souled woman" — the calm mistress of 
 the highest and stormiest of her emotions. The finest com- 
 pliment we can pay her — perhaps the finest compliment 
 that it is possible to pay to woman, as a moral being — is to 
 compare her to " one of Shakspere's women," and to say, 
 had Imogen, or Isabella, or Cornelia become an author, 
 she had so written. 
 
 Sometimes, indeed, Mrs Hemans herself seems seduced, 
 through the warmth of her temperament, the facility and 
 rapidity of her execution, and the intensely lyrical tone of 
 her genius, to dream that the shadow of the Pythoness is 
 waving behind her, and controlling the motions of her song. 
 To herself she appears to be uttering oracular deliverances. 
 Alas ! " oracles speak," and her poetry, as to all effective 
 utterance of original truth, is silent. It is emotion only 
 that is audible to the sharpest ear that listens to her song. 
 A bee wreathing round you in the warm summer morn 
 her singing circle, gives you as much new insight into the 
 universe as do the sweetest strains which have ever issued 
 from this " voice of spring." We are reluctantly compelled, 
 therefore, to deny her, in its highest sense, the name of 
 poet — a word often abused, often misapplied in mere com- 
 pliment or courtesy, but which ought ever to retain its 
 stern and original signification. A maker she is not. 
 What dream of childhood has she ever, to any imagination, 
 reborn ? whose slumbers has she ever peopled with new 
 
2G0 MRS HEMANS. 
 
 and terrible visions ? what new form or figure has she an- 
 nexed, like a second shadow, to our own idiosyncrasy, to 
 track us on our way for ever ? to what mind has she given 
 such a burning stamp of impression as it feels eternity it- 
 self unable to efface ? There is no such result from the 
 poetry of Mrs Hemans. She is less a maker than a musi- 
 cian, and her works appear rather to rise to the airs of the 
 piano than to that still sad music of humanity — the adequate 
 instrument for the expression of which has not yet been in- 
 vented by man. From the tremulous movement, the wail- 
 ing cadences, the artistic pauses, and the conscious-swell- 
 ing climaxes of her verse, we always figure her as modu- 
 lating, inspiring, and controlling her thoughts and words 
 to the tune of some fine instrument, which is less the vehicle 
 than the creator of the strain. In her poetry, consequently, 
 the music rather awakens the meaning, than does the 
 meaning round and mellow off into the music. 
 
 With what purpose does a lady, in whom perfect skill 
 and practice have not altogether drowned enthusiasm, sit 
 down to her harp, piano, or guitar ? Not altogether for 
 the purpose of display — not at all for that of instruction to 
 her audience — but in a great measure that she may develop, 
 in a lawful form, the sensibilities of her own bosom. Thus 
 sat Felicia Hemans before her lyre — not touching it with 
 awful reverence, as though each string were a star, but 
 regarding it as the soother and sustainer of her own high- 
 wrought emotions — a graceful alias of herself. Spring, in 
 its vague joyousness, has not a more appropriate voice in 
 the note of the cuckoo than feminine sensibility had in the 
 more varied but hardly profounder song of the authoress 
 before us. 
 
 We wish not to be misunderstood. Mrs Hemans had 
 something more than the common belief of all poets in the 
 existence of the beautiful. She was a genuine woman, and, 
 therefore, the sequence (as we shall see speedily) is irresis- 
 tible, imbued with a Christian spirit. Nor has she feared to 
 
MRS HEMANS. 2G1 
 
 set her creed to music in her poetry. But it was as a be- 
 trayal, rather than as a purpose, that she so did. She was 
 more the organ of sentiment and sensibility than of high and 
 solemn truth — more a golden morning mist, now glittering 
 and then gone in the sun, than a steady dial at once 
 meekly reflecting and faithfully watching and measuring 
 his beams. 
 
 She was, as Lord Jeffrey well remarks, an admirable 
 writer of occasional verses. She has caught, in her poetry, 
 passing moods of her own mind — meditations of the sleep- 
 less night — transient glimpses of thought, visiting her in 
 her serener hours — the " silver lining" of those cloudy 
 feelings which preside over her darker — and the impres- 
 sions made upon her mind by the more remarkable events 
 of her every-day life — and the more exciting passages of 
 her reading. Her works are a versified Jowr/ia/ of a quiet, 
 ideal, and beautiful life — the life at once of a woman and 
 a poetess, with just enough, and no more, of romance to 
 cast around it a mellow autumnal colouring. The songs, 
 hymns, and odes in which this life is registered, are as soft 
 and bright as atoms of the rainbow ; like them, tears trans- 
 muted into glory, but, no more than they, are great or com- 
 plete. In many poets we see the germ of greatness, which 
 might in happier circumstances, or in a more genial season, 
 have been developed. But no such germ can the most 
 microscopic survey discover in her, and we feel that at her 
 death her beautiful but tiny task was done. Indeed, with 
 such delicate organisation, and such intense susceptiveness 
 as hers, the elaboration, the long reach of thought, the slow 
 cumulative advance, the deep- curbed, yet cherished ambi- 
 tion which a great work requires and implies, are, we fear, 
 incompatible. 
 
 It follows, naturally from this, that her largest are her 
 worst productions. They labour under the fatal defect 
 of tedium. They are a surfeit of sweets. Conceive 
 an orchard of rose-trees. Who would not, stupified and 
 
262 MRS HEMANS. 
 
 bewildered by excess and extravagance of beauty, prefer 
 the old, sturdy, and well-laden boughs of the pear and 
 pippen, and feel the truth of the adage — " The a^jjple tree 
 is the fairest tree in the wood ? " Hence few, compara- 
 tively, have taken refuge in her "forest sanctuary," re- 
 luctant and rare the ears which have listened to her 
 " Vespers of Palermo," her " Siege of Valencia " has 
 stormed no hearts, and her " Sceptic" made, we fear, few 
 converts. But who has not wept over her " Graves of a 
 Household," or hushed his heart to hear her " Treasures 
 of the Deep," in which the old Sea himself seems to speak, 
 or wished to take the left hand of the Hebrew child and 
 lead him up, along with his mother, to the temple service ; 
 or thrilled and shouted in the gorge of " Morgarten," or 
 trembled at the stroke of her "Hour of Death?" Such 
 poems are of the kind which win their way into every 
 house, and every collection, and every heart. They se- 
 cure for their authors a sweet garden plot of reputation, 
 which is envied by none, and with which no one inter- 
 meddles. Thus flowers smile, unharmed, to the bolt which 
 levels the pine beside them. Tapers live while suns sink 
 and disappear. Even a single sweet poem, flowing from a 
 gentle mind in a happy hour, is as " ointment poured forth," 
 and carries a humble name in fragrance far down into 
 futurity, while the elaborate productions of loftier spirits 
 rot upon the shelves. A Lucretius exhausts the riches of 
 his magnificent mind in a stately poem, which is barely 
 remembered, and never read. A Wolfe expresses the 
 emotions of every heart at the recital of Sir John Moore's 
 funeral in a few rude rhymes, and becomes immortal. A 
 Shelley, dipping his pen in the bloody sweat of his lonely 
 and agonised heart, traces voluminous lines of " red and 
 burning" poetry, and his works are known only to some 
 hardy explorers. A Michael Bruce transfers one spring- 
 joy of his dying frame, stirred by the note of the cuckoo, 
 to a brief and tear-stained page ; and henceforth the voice 
 
MRS HEMANS. 2G3 
 
 of the bird seems vocal with his name, and wherever, 
 from the " engulphed navel" of the wood, you hear its 
 strange, nameless, tameless, wandering, unearthly voice, 
 you think of the poet who sighed away his soul and ga- 
 thered his fame in its praise. A Bayley constructs a work 
 " before all ages," lavishes on it imagination that might 
 suffice for a century of poets ; and it lies, on some recherche 
 tables, like a foreign curiosity, to be seen, shown, and lifted, 
 rather than to be read and pondered. A William Miller 
 sings, one gloaming, his " "Wee Willie Winkie," and the 
 nurseries of an entire nation re-echo the simple strain, and 
 every Scottish mother blesses, in one breath, her babe and 
 his poet. We mention this, not entirely to approve, but in 
 part to wonder at it. It is not just that one strain from a 
 lute or a pan's pipe should survive a thunder-psalm — that 
 eifusions should eclipse works. 
 
 Mrs Hemans's poems are strictly effusions ; and not a 
 little of their charm springs from their unstudied and ex- 
 tempore character. This, too, is in fine keeping with the 
 sex of the writer. You are saved the ludicrous image of a 
 double-dyed Blue, in papers and morning wrapper, sweat- 
 ing at some stupendous treatise or tragedy from morn to 
 noon, and from noon to dewy eve — you see a graceful and 
 gifted woman, passing from the cares of her family and the 
 enjoyments of society, to inscribe on her tablets some fine 
 thought or feeling, which had throughout the day existed 
 as a still sunshine upon her countenance, or perhaps as a 
 quiet unshed tear in her eye. In this case, the transition 
 is so natural and graceful, from the duties or delights of 
 the day to the employments of the desk, that there is as 
 little pedantry in writing a poem as in writing a letter, and 
 the authoress appears only the lady in flowei\ Indeed, to 
 recur to a former remark, Mrs Hemans is distinguished 
 above all others by her intense womanliness ; and as her 
 own character is so true to her sex, so her sympathies with 
 her sex are very peculiar and profound. Of the joys and 
 
264 MRS HEMJINS. 
 
 the sorrows, the difficulties and the duties, the trials and 
 the temptations, the hopes and the fears, the proper sphere 
 and mission of woman, and of those peculiar consola- 
 tions which the " world cannot give nor take away," that 
 sustain her even when baffled, she has a true and thorough 
 appreciation ; and her " Records of Woman," and her 
 " Songs of the Affections," are just audible beatings of the 
 deep female heart. In our judgment, Mrs Ellis's idea of 
 woman is trite, vulgar, and limited, compared with that of 
 " Egeria," as Miss Jewsbury used fondly to denote her be- 
 loved friend. What a gallery of Shakspere's female cha- 
 racters would the author of the " Mothers, Daughters, and 
 Women of England" have painted ! What could she have 
 said of Juliet ? How would she have contrived to twist 
 Beatrice into a pattern Miss ? Perdita ! would she have 
 sent her to a boarding-school? or insisted on finishing, ac- 
 cording to the Hannah More pattern, the divine Miranda ? 
 Of that pretty Pagan Imogen, what would she make? 
 Imagine her criticism on Lady Macbeth, or on Ophelia's 
 dying speech and confession, or her revelation of the " Fa- 
 mily Secrets" of the " Merry Wives of Windsor !" 
 
 Next to her pictures of the domestic affections stand 
 Mrs Hemans's pictures of nature. These are less minute 
 than passionate, less sublime than beautiful, less studies 
 than free, broad, and rapid sketches. Her favourite scenery 
 was the woodland, a taste in which we can thoroughly sym- 
 pathise. In the wood there is a fulness, a roundness, a 
 rich harmony, and a comfort, which soothe and completely 
 satisfy the imagination. There, too, there is much life and 
 motion. The glens, the still moorlands, and the rugged 
 hills, will not move, save to one master finger, the finger of 
 the earthquake, who is chary of his great displays ; but be- 
 fore each lightest touch of the breeze the complacent leaves 
 of the woodland begin to stir, and the depth of solitude 
 seems instantly peopled, and from perfect silence there 
 comes a still small voice, so sweet and sudden that it is as 
 
MRS HEMANS. 2C5 
 
 if every leaf were the tongue of a separate spirit. Her 
 favourite season was the autumn, though her finest verses 
 are dedicated to the spring. Here, too, we devoutly par- 
 ticipate in her feelings. The shortening day — the new out- 
 bursting from their veil of daylight of those, in summer, 
 neglected tremblers, the stars — the yellow corn — the grey 
 and pensive light — the joy of harvest — the fine firing of all 
 the groves (not the " fading but the kindling of the leaf") 
 — the frequent and moaning winds — ^the spiritual quiet in 
 which, at other times, the stubble fields are bathed — the 
 rekindling of the cheerful fires upon the hearth — the leaves 
 falling to their own sad music — the rising stackyards — the 
 wild fruit, ripened at the cold sun of the frost — the " in- 
 effable gleams of light dropping upon favourite glens or 
 rivers, or hills that shine out like the shoulder of Pelops" 
 —the beseeching looks with which, trembling on the verge 
 of winter, the belated season seems to say, " Love me well, 
 I am the last of the sisterhood that you can love" — in short, 
 that indescribable charm which breathes in its very air and 
 colours its very light, and sheds its joy of grief over all 
 things, have concurred with some sweet and some sad 
 associations to render autumn to us the loveliest and the 
 dearest of all the seasons. As Mrs Hemans loved wood- 
 land scenery for its kindly " looks of shelter," so she loved 
 the autumn principally for its correspondence with that fine 
 melancholy which was the permanent atmosphere of her 
 being. In one of her letters, speaking of an autumn day, 
 she says, " The day was one of a kind I like — soft, still, 
 and grey, such as makes the earth appear a ' pensive but a 
 happy place.' " We have sometimes thought that much of 
 Wordsworth's poetry should always be read, and can never 
 be so fully felt as in the autumn, when " Laodamia," at 
 least, must have been written. Should not poems, as well 
 as pictures, have their peculiar light, in which alone they 
 can properly be seen ? Should not Scott be read in spring, 
 Shelley in the fervid summer, Wordsworth in autumn. 
 
266 MRS HEMANS. 
 
 Cowper and Byron in winter, Shakspere all the year 
 round ? 
 
 In many points Mrs Hemans reminds us of a poet just 
 named, and whom she passionately admired, namely, 
 Shelley. Like him, drooping, fragile, a reed shaken by the 
 wind, a mighty wind, in sooth, too powerful for the tremu- 
 lous reed on which it discoursed its music ; like him, the 
 victim of exquisite nervous organisation ; like him, verse 
 flowed on and from her, and the sweet sound often over- 
 powered the meaning, kissing it, as it were, to death ; like 
 him, she was melancholy, but the sadness of both was musi- 
 cal, tearful, active, not stony, silent, and motionless, still 
 less misanthropical and disdair ^ul; like him, she was gentle, 
 playful, they could both run about their prison garden, and 
 dally with the dark chains which, they knew, bound them 
 till death. Mrs Hemans, indeed, was not, like Shelley, a 
 vates ; she has never reached his heights nor sounded his 
 depths, yet they are, to our thought, so strikingly alike as 
 to seem brother and sister in one beautiful but delicate and 
 dying family. Their very appearance must have been 
 similar. How like must the girl, Felicia Dorothea Browne, 
 with the mantling bloom of her cheeks, her hair of a rich 
 golden brown, and the ever-varying expression of her bril- 
 liant eyes, have been to the noble boy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 
 when he came first to Oxford, a fair-haired, bright- eyed 
 enthusiast, on whose cheek and brow, and in whose eye 
 was already beginning to burn a fire, which ultimately en- 
 wrapped his whole being in flames ! 
 
 In Mrs Hemans's melancholy, one " simple" was wanting, 
 which was largely mixed in Shelley's, that of faithless de- 
 spondency. Her spirit was cheered by faith — by a soft 
 and noble form of the softest noblest faith — a form, re- 
 minding us much from its balance of human, poetical, and 
 celestial elements, of that of Jeremy Taylor — the " Shak- 
 spere of divines." Although, as we have said, her poetry 
 is not, of prepense and purpose, the express image of her 
 
MRS HEMANS. 
 
 2G7 
 
 religious thought, yet it is a rich illustration of the reli- 
 gious tendency of the female mind. Indeed, females may be 
 called the natural guardians of morality and faith. These 
 shall always be safe in the depths of the female intellect, 
 and of the female heart — an intellect, the essence of which 
 is worship — a heart, the element of which is love. Unhired, 
 disinterested, spontaneous is the aid they give to the 
 blessed cause ; leaning, indeed, in their lovely weakness 
 on the " worship of sorrow," they, at the same time, prop 
 it up through the wide and holy influences which they 
 wield. Their piety, too, is no fierce and foul polemic 
 flame — it is that of the feelings — the quick instinctive 
 sense of duty — the wonder-stricken soul and the loving 
 heart — often it is not even a conscious emotion at all — ^but 
 in Wordsworth's language — they lie in 
 " Abraham's bosom all the year, 
 And God is with them, when they know it not." 
 
 In Mrs Hemans's writings you find this pious tendency 
 of her sex unsoiled by an atom of cant, or bigotry, or ex- 
 clusiveness ; and shaded only by so much pensiveness as 
 attests its divinity and its depth : for as man's misery is 
 said to spring from his greatness, so the gloom which often 
 overhangs the earnest spirit arises from its more immediate 
 proximity to the Infinite and the Eternal. And who 
 would not be ready to sacrifice all the cheap sunshine of 
 earthly success and satisfaction for even a touch of a sha- 
 dow so sublime ? 
 
 After all, the nature of this poetess is more interesting 
 than her genius, or than its finest productions. These 
 descend upon us like voices from a mountain summit, sug- 
 gesting to us an elevation of character far higher than them- 
 selves. If not, in a transcendent sense, a poet, her life was 
 a poem. Poetry coloured all her existence with a golden 
 light — poetry presided at her needlework — poetry mingled 
 with her domestic and her maternal duties — poetry sat 
 down with her to her piano — poetry fluttered her hair and 
 
208 MBS HEMANS. 
 
 flushed her cheek in her mountain rambles — poetry quivered 
 in her voice, which was a " sweet sad melody"' — poetry ac- 
 companied her to the orchard, as she read the " Talisman," 
 in that long glorious summer day which she has made im- 
 mortal — and poetry attended her to the house of God, and 
 listened with her to the proud pealing organ, as to an echo 
 from within the veil. Poetry performed for her a still 
 tenderer ministry ; it soothed the deep sorrows, on which 
 we dare not enter, which shaded the tissue of her history — 
 it mixed its richest cupful of the "joy of grief" for her 
 selected lips — it lapped her in a dream of beauty, through 
 which the sad realities of life looked in, softened and mel- 
 lowed in the medium. What could poetry have done more 
 for her, except, indeed, by giving her that sight " as far 
 as the incommunicable " — that supreme vision which she 
 gives so rarely, and which she bestows often as a curse, 
 instead of a blessing ? Mrs Hemans, on the other hand, 
 was too favourite a child of the Muse to receive any such 
 baleful boon. Poetry beautified her life, blunted and per- 
 fumed the thorns of her anguish, softened the pillow of her 
 sickness, and combined with her firm and most feminine 
 faith to shed a gleam of soft and tearful glory upon her 
 death. 
 
 Thus lived, wrote, suffered, and died " Egeria." With- 
 out farther seeking to weigh the worth, or settle the future 
 place of her works, let us be thankful to have had her 
 among us, and that she did what she could, in her bright, 
 sorely-tried, yet triumphant passage. She grew in beauty ; 
 was blasted where she grew ; rained around her poetry, 
 like bright tears from her eyes ; learned in suffering what 
 she taught in song ; died, and all hearts to which she ever 
 ministered delight, have obeyed the call of Wordsworth, to 
 
 " Mourn rather for that holy spirit, 
 Mild as the spring, as ocean deep ; — ■ 
 For her who, ere her summer faded. 
 Has sunk into a dreamless sleep." 
 
MRS ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWxNINa. 209 
 
 MRS ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 In selecting Mrs Hemans as our first specimen of Female 
 Authors, we did so avowedly, because she seemed to us the 
 most feminine writer of the day. We now select Mrs 
 Browning for the opposite reason, that she is, or at least is 
 said by many to be, the most masculine of our female 
 writers. 
 
 To settle the respective spheres and calibres of the male 
 and the female mind is one of the most difficult of philoso- 
 phical problems. To argue, merely, that because the mind 
 of woman has never hitherto produced a " Paradise Lost,'* 
 or a " Principia," it is therefore for ever incapable of pro- 
 ducing similar masterpieces, seems to us unfair, for various 
 reasons. In the first place, how many ages elapsed e'er the 
 male mind realised such prodigies of intellectual achieve- 
 ment? And do not they still stand unparalleled and 
 almost unapproached ? And were it not as reasonable to 
 assert that man as that woman can renew them no more ? 
 Secondly, because the premise is granted — that woman has 
 not — does the conclusion follow, that woman cannot ex- 
 cogitate an argument as great as the " Principia," or build 
 up a rhyme as lofty as the "Paradise Lost?" Would it 
 not have been as wise for one who knew Milton only as the 
 Milton of "Lycidas" and "Arcades," to have contended 
 that he was incapable of a great epic poem? And is 
 there nothing in Madame De Stael, in Rahel the Ger- 
 maness, in Mary Somerville, and even in Mary Wollstone- 
 craft, to suggest the idea of heights, fronting the very peaks 
 of the Principia and the Paradise, to which woman may 
 yet attain? Thirdly, has not woman understood and 
 appreciated the greatest works of genius as fully as man ? 
 Then may she in time equal them ; for what is true appre- 
 ciation but the sowing of a germ in the mind, which shall 
 
270 MRS ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 ultimately bear similar fruit? There is nothing, says 
 Godwin, which the human mind can conceive, which it 
 cannot execute ; we may add, there is nothing the human 
 mind can understand which it cannot equal. Fourthly, let 
 us never forget that woman, as to intellectual progress, is 
 in a state of infancy. Changed as by malignant magic, 
 now into an article of furniture, and now into a toy of plea- 
 sure, she is only as yet undergoing a better transmigration, 
 and " timidly expanding into life." 
 
 Almost all that is valuable in female authorship has been 
 produced within the last half-century, that is, since the 
 female was generally recognised to be an intellectual crea- 
 ture; and if she has, in such a short period, so progressed, 
 what demi- Mahomet an shall venture to set bounds to her 
 future advancement ? Even though we should grant that 
 woman, more from her bodily constitution than her mental, 
 is inferior to man, and that man, having got, shall probably 
 keep, his start of centuries, we see nothing to prevent 
 woman overtaking, and outstripping with ease, his present 
 farthest point of intellectual progress. We do not look on 
 such productions as " Lear," and the " Prometheus Vine- 
 tus," with the despair wherewith the boy who has leaped 
 up in vain to seize, regards ever after the moon and the 
 stars ; they are, after all, the masonry of men, and not the 
 architecture of the gods ; and if man may surpass, why 
 may not woman, " taken out of his side," equal them ? 
 
 Of woman, we may say, at least, that there are already 
 provinces where her power is incontested and supreme. 
 And in proportion as civilisation advances, and as the 
 darker and fiercer passions which constitute ihefera natura 
 subside, in the lull of that milder day, the voice of woman 
 will become more audible, exert a wider magic, and be as 
 the voice of spring to the opening year. We stay not to 
 prove that the sex of genius i^ feminine, and that those poets 
 who are most profoundly impressing our young British 
 minds, are those who, in tenderness and sensibility — in pe- 
 
MRS ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 271 
 
 culiar power, and in peculiar weakness, are all but females. 
 And whatever may be said of the effects of culture, in 
 deadening the genius of man, we are mistaken if it has 
 not always had the contrary effect upon that of woman, 
 (where do we find a female Bloomfield or Burns ?) so that, 
 on entering on the far more highly civilised periods which 
 are manifestly approaching, she will but be breathing the 
 atmosphere calculated to nourish and invigorate, instead 
 of weakening and chilling, her mental life. Our admirable 
 friend, Mr De Quincey, has, we think, conceded even 
 more than we require, in granting that wom.an can die 
 more nobly than man.* For whether is the writing or the 
 doing of a great tragedy the higher achievement ? Poor 
 the attitude even of Shakspere, penning the fire-syllables 
 of Macbeth, to that of Joan of Arc, entering into the flames 
 as into her wedding suit. What comparison between the 
 face inflamed of a Mirabeau or a Chalmers, as they thun- 
 dered ; and the blush on the cheek of Charlotte Corday, 
 still extant, as her head was presented to the people ? And 
 who shall name the depicter of the death of Beatrice 
 Cenci with that heroine herself ; or with Madame Roland, 
 whose conduct on the scaffold might make one in "love 
 with death ? " If to die nobly demand the highest concen- 
 tration of the moral, intellectual, and even artistic powers 
 . — and if woman has par excellence exemplified such a con- 
 centration, there follows a conclusion to which we should 
 be irresistibly led, were it not that we question the minor 
 proposition in the argument — we hold that man has often 
 as fully as woman risen to the dignity of death, and met 
 him, not as a vassal, but as a superior. 
 
 To say that Mrs Browning has more of the man than 
 any female writer of the period, may appear rather an 
 equivocal compliment; and its truth even may be ques- 
 tioned. We may, however, be permitted to say, that she 
 
 * See in " Tait" a papei' on Joan of Arc. 
 
272 MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING. 
 
 has more of the heroine than her compeers. Hers is a high, 
 heroic nature, which adopts for the motto at once of its life 
 and of its poetiy, "Perfect through suffering." Shelley 
 
 says : — 
 
 " Most wretched men 
 Are cradled into poetry by wrong ; 
 They learn in suffering what they teach in song." 
 
 But wrong is not always the stern schoolmistress of song. 
 There are sufferings springing from other sources — from 
 intense sensibility — from bodily ailment — from the loss 
 of cherished objects, which also find in poetry their natural 
 vent. And we do think that such poetry, if not so power- 
 ful, is infinitely more pleasing and more instructive than 
 that which is inspired by real or imaginary grievance. The 
 turbid torrent is not the proper mirror for reflecting the 
 face of nature ; and none but the moody and the discontent- 
 ed will seek to see in it an aggravated and distorted edition 
 of their own gloomy brows. The poetry of wrong is not 
 the best and most permanent. It was not wrong alone 
 that excited, though it unquestionably directed, the course 
 of Dante's and Milton's vein. The poetry of Shakspere's 
 wrong is condensed in his sonnets — the poetry of his for- 
 bearance and forgiveness, of his gratitude and his happi- 
 ness, is in his dramas. The poetry of Pope's wrong (a 
 scratch from a thorn hedge !) is in his " Dunciad," not in 
 his " Rape of the Lock." The poetry of Wordsworth's 
 wrong is in his " Prefaces," not in his " Excursion." The 
 poetry of Byron's wrong is in those deep curses which 
 sometimes disturb the harmony of his poems ; and that of 
 Shelley's in the maniacal scream which occasionally inter- 
 rupts the pagans of his song. But all these had probably 
 been as great, or greater poets, had no wrong befallen them, 
 or had it taught them another lesson, than either peevishly 
 to proclaim or furiously to resent it. 
 
 Mrs Browning has suffered, so far as we are aware, no 
 wrong from the age. She might, indeed, for some time 
 
MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING. 273 
 
 have spoken of neglect. But people of genius should now 
 learn the truth, that ?ieglect is not lurong ; or if it be, it is a 
 wrong in which they often set the example. Neglecting the 
 tastes of the majority, the majority avenges itself by ne- 
 glecting them. Standing and singing in a congregation of 
 the deaf, they are senseless enough to complain that they are 
 not heard. Or should they address the multitude, and should 
 the multitude not listen, it never strikes them that the fault 
 is their own ; they ought to have compelled attention. Or- 
 pheus was listened to : the thunder is : even the gentlest 
 spring shower commands its audience. If neglect means 
 wilful winking at claims which are/eZ^, it is indeed a wrong ; 
 but a wrong seldom if ever committed, and which com- 
 plaint will not cure — if it means, merely, ignorance of 
 claims which have never been presented or enforced, where 
 and whose is the criminality ? 
 
 To do Mrs Browning justice, she has not complained of 
 neglect nor injury at all. But she has acknowledged her- 
 self inspired by the genius of suffering. And this seems 
 to have exerted divers influences upon her poetry, It has, 
 in the first place, taught her to rear for herself a spot of 
 transcendental retreat, a city of refuge in the clouds. 
 Scared away from her own heart, she has soared upwards, 
 and found a rest elsewhere. To those flights of idealism 
 in which she indulges, to those distant and daring themes 
 which she selects, she is urged less, we think, through 
 native tendency of mind, than to fill the vacuity of a sick 
 and craving spirit. This is not peculiar to her. It may 
 be called, indeed, the "Eetreat of the Ten Thousand;" 
 though strong and daring must be those that can success- 
 fully accomplish it. Only the steps of sorrow — we had 
 almost said only the steps of despair — can climb such dizzy 
 heights. The healthy and the happy mind selects subjects 
 of a healthy and a happy sort, and which lie within the 
 sphere of every-day life and every-day thought. But for 
 minds which have been -wrung and riven, there is a similar 
 
274 MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING. 
 
 attraction in gloomy themes, as that which leads them to 
 the side of dark rivers, to the heart of deep forests, or into 
 the centre of waste glens. Step forth, ye giant children of 
 Sorrow and Genius, that we may tell your names, and 
 compute your multitudes. First, there is the proud thun- 
 dershod ^schylean family, all conceived in the " eclipse" 
 of that most powerful of Grecian spirits. Then follows 
 Lucretius — 
 
 " Who cast his plummet down the broad 
 Deep universe, and said. No God ; 
 Finding no bottom, he denied 
 Divinely the divine, and died, 
 Chief poet upon Tiber side." — (Mrs Browning.) 
 
 There stalk forward, next in the procession, the kings, 
 priests, popes, prelates, and the yet guiltier and mightier 
 shapes of Dante's Hell. Next, the Satan of Milton ad- 
 vances, champing the curb, and regarding even Prometheus 
 as no mate for his proud and lonely misery. Then comes, 
 cowering and shivering on, the timid Castaway of Cowper. 
 He is followed by Byron's heroes, a haughty yet melan- 
 choly troop, with conscious madness animating their gestures 
 and glaring in their eyes. The Anciente Marinere suc- 
 ceeds, now fearfully reverting his looks, and now fixing 
 his glittering eye forward on a peopled and terrible vacancy. 
 And, lastly, a frail shadowy and shifting shape, looking 
 now Laon, now like Lionel, and now like Prometheus, 
 proclaims that Alastor himself is here, the Benjamin in 
 this family of tears. 
 
 " Whither shall I wander," seems Mrs Browning to have 
 said to herself, "to-day to escape from my own sad thoughts, 
 and to lose, to noble purpose, the sense of my own identity ? 
 I will go eastward to Eden, where perfection and happiness 
 once dwelt. I will pass, secure in virtue, the far-flashing 
 sword of the cherubim ; I will knock at the door and enter. 
 I will lie down in the forsaken garden ; I will pillow my 
 head where Milton pillowed his, on the grass cool with the 
 
MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING. 2 / .5 
 
 shadow of the Tree of Life ; and I will dream a vision of 
 my awn, of what this place once was, and of what it was 
 to leave it for the wilderness." And she has passed the 
 waving sword, and she has entered the awful garden, and 
 she has dreamed a dream, and she has, awaking, told it as 
 a " Drama of Exile." It were vain to deny that the dream 
 is one full of genius — that it is entirely original ; and that 
 it never once, except by antithesis, suggests a thought of 
 Milton's more massive and palpable vision. Her Paradise 
 is not a garden, it is a flush on a summer evening sky. 
 Her Adam is not the ftiir large-fronted man, with all man- 
 like qualities meeting unconsciously in his full clear nature 
 — he is a German metaphysician. Her Eve is herselfy 
 an amiable and gifted blue-stocking, not the mere meek 
 motherly woman, with what Aird beautifully calls the 
 " broad, ripe, serene, and gracious composure of love about 
 her." Her spirits are neither cherubim nor seraphim — 
 neither knowing nor burning ones — they are fairies, not, 
 however, of the Puck or Ariel species, but of a new meta- 
 physical breed ; they do not ride on, but split hairs ; they 
 do not dance, but reason ; or if they dance, it is on the 
 point of a needle, in cycles and epicycles of mystic and 
 mazy motion. There is much beauty and power in pas- 
 sages of the poem, and a sweet inarticulate melody, like 
 the fabled cry of mandrakes, in the lyrics. Still we do 
 not see the taste of turning the sweet open garden of Eden 
 into a maze — we do not approve of the daring precedent 
 of trying conclusions with Milton on his own high field of 
 victory — and we are, we must say, jealous of all encroach- 
 ments upon that fair Paradise which has so long painted 
 itself upon our imaginations — where all the luxuries of 
 earth mingled in the feast with all the dainties of the 
 heavens — where celestial plants grew under the same sun 
 with terrestrial blossoms, and where the cadences of seraphic 
 music filled up the pauses in the voice of God. Far diffe- 
 rent, indeed, is Mrs Browning's from Dryden's disgusting 
 
276 MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING. 
 
 inroad into Eden — as different, almost, as the advent of 
 Raphael from the encroachment of Satan. But the poem 
 professed to stand in the lustre of the fiery sword, and this 
 should have burnt up some of its conceits, and silenced 
 some of its meaner minstrelsies. And all such attempts 
 we regard precisely as we do the beauties of the Apocrypha, 
 when compared to the beauties of the Bible. They are 
 as certainly beauties, but beauties of an inferior order — 
 they are flowers, but not the roses which grew along the 
 banks of the Four Rivers, or caught in their crimson cups 
 the " first sad drops wept at committing of the mortal sin." 
 " One blossom of Eden outblooms them all." 
 
 Having accepted from Mrs Browning's own hand sad- 
 ness, or at least seriousness, as the key to her nature and 
 genius, let us continue to apply it in our future remarks. 
 This at once impels her to, and fits her for, the high posi- 
 tion she has assumed, uttering the " Cry of the Human." 
 And whom would the human race prefer as their earthly 
 advocate, to a high-souled and gifted woman ? What voice 
 but the female voice could so softly and strongly, so elo- 
 quently and meltingly, interpret to the ear of him whose 
 name is Love, the deep woes and deeper wants of " poor 
 humanity's afflicted will, struggling in vain with ruth- 
 less destiny ?" Some may quarrel with the title, "The 
 Human," as an affectation ; but, in the first place, if so, 
 it is a very small one, and a small affectation can never 
 furnish matter for a great quarrel ; secondly, we are not 
 disposed to make a man, and still less a woman, an offender 
 for a word ; and thirdly, we fancy we can discern a good 
 reason for her use of the term. What is it that is crying 
 aloud through her voice to Heaven ? It is not the feral or 
 fiendish element in human nature ? That has found an 
 organ in Byron — an echo in his bellowing verse. It is the 
 human element in man — bruised, bleeding, all but dead 
 under the pressure of evil circumstances, under the ten 
 thousand tyrannies, mistakes, and delusions of the world, 
 
MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING. 277 
 
 that has here ceased any longer to be silent, and is speak- 
 ing in a sister's voice to Time and to Eternity — to Earth and 
 Heaven. The poem may truly be called a prayer for the 
 times, and no collect in the English liturgy surpasses it in 
 truth and tenderness, though some may think its tone dar- 
 ing to the brink of blasphemy, and piercing almost to 
 anguish. 
 
 Gracefully from this proud and giddy pinnacle, where 
 she had stood as the conscious and commissioned represen- 
 tative of the human race, she descends to the door of the 
 factory, and pleads for the children enclosed in that crowded 
 and busy hell. The " Cry of the Factory Children" moves 
 you, because it is no poem at all — it is just a long sob, 
 veiled and stifled as it ascends through the hoarse voices 
 of the poor beings themselves. Since we read it we can 
 scarcely pass a factory without seeming to hear this psalm 
 issuing from the machinery, as if it were protesting against 
 its own abused powers. But, to use the language of a 
 writer quoted a little before, " The Fairy Queen is dead, 
 shrouded in a yard of cotton stuif made by the spinning- 
 jenny, and by that other piece of new improved machinery, 
 the souls and bodies of British children, for which death alone 
 holds the patent." From Mrs Browning, perhaps the 
 most imaginative and intellectual of British females, down 
 to a pale-faced, thick- voiced, degraded, hardly human, fac- 
 tory girl, what a long and precipitous descent ! But though 
 hardly, she is human ; and availing herself of the small, 
 trembling, but eternally indestructible link of connection 
 implied in a common nature, our author can identify her- 
 self with the cause, and incarnate her genius in the per- 
 son of the poor perishing child. How unspeakably more 
 affecting is a pleading in behalf of a particular portion of 
 the race, than in behalf of the entire family ! Mrs Brown- 
 ing might have uttered a hundred " cries of the human," 
 and proved herself only a sentimental artist, and awakened 
 little save an echo dying away in distant elfin laughter ; 
 
278 MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING. 
 
 but the cry of a factory child, coming through a woman's, 
 has gone to a nation's heart. 
 
 Although occupied thus with the sterner wants and sor- 
 rows of society, she is not devoid of interest in its minor 
 miseries and disappointments. She can sit down beside 
 little Ella (the miniature of Alnaschar) and watch the 
 history of her day-dream beside the swan's nest among the 
 reeds, and see in her disappointment a type of human hopes 
 in general, even when towering and radiant as summer 
 clouds. Ella's dream among the reeds ! What else was 
 Godwin's Political Justice ? What else was St Simonian- 
 ism ? What else is Young Englandism. And what else 
 are the hopes built by many now upon certain perfected 
 schemes of education, which, freely translated, just mean 
 the farther sharpening and furnishing of knaves and fools ; 
 and now upon a " Coming Man," who is to supply every 
 deficiency, reconcile every contradiction, and right every 
 wrong. Yes, he will come mounted on the red-roan horse 
 of sweet Ella's vision ! 
 
 Shadowed by the same uniform seriousness are the only 
 two poems of hers which we shall farther at present men- 
 tion — we mean her " Vision of Poets," and her " Geral- 
 dine's Courtship." The aim of the first is to present, in 
 short compass, and almost in single lines, the characteristics 
 of the greater poets of past and present times. This under- 
 taking involved in it very considerable difficulties. For, 
 in the first place, most great poets possess more than one 
 distinguishing peculiarity. To select a single differential 
 point is always hazardous, and often deceptive. 2dly, 
 After you have selected the prominent characteristic of 
 your author, it is no easy task to express it in a word, or 
 in a line. To compress thus an Iliad in a nutshell, to im- 
 prison a giant geni in an iron pot, is more a feat of magic 
 than an act of criticism. 3dly, It is especially difficult to 
 express the differentia of a writer in a manner at once 
 easy and natural, picturesque and poetical. In the very 
 
MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING. 270 
 
 terms of such an attempt as Mrs Browning makes, it is 
 implied that she not only defines, but describes the parti- 
 cular writer. But to curdle up a character into one noble 
 word, to describe Shakspere, for instance, in such compass, 
 what sun-syllable shall suffice ; or must we renew Byron's 
 wish ? — 
 
 " Could I unbosom and embody now 
 That which is most within me ; could I wreak 
 My thought upon expression ! 
 
 And that one word were LijTitning, I would speak ; 
 
 But as it is, I live and die unheard. 
 
 With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword." 
 
 Accordingly, this style of portraiture (shall we call it, 
 as generally pursued, the thumb-nail style ?) has seldom 
 been prosecuted with much success. Ebenezer Elliot has 
 a copy of verses after this fashion, not quite worthy of him. 
 What for example, does the following line tell us of Shelley ? 
 
 " Ill-fated Shelley, vainly great and brave." 
 
 The same words might have been used about Sir John 
 Moore, or Pompey. Mrs Browning's verses are far supe- 
 rior. Sometimes, indeed, we see her clipping at a charac- 
 ter, in order to fit it better into the place she has prepared 
 for it. Sometimes she crams the half of an author into a 
 verse, and has to leave out the rest for want of ro3m. 
 Sometimes over a familiar face she throws a veil of words 
 and darkness. But often her one glance sees, and her one 
 word shows, the very heart of an author's genius and cha- 
 racter. Our readers may recur to the lines already quoted 
 in reference to Lucretius, as one of her best portraitures. 
 Altogether this style, as generally prosecuted, is a small 
 one, not much better than anagrams and acrostics — ranks, 
 indeed, not much higher than the ingenuity of the persons 
 who transcribe the " Pleasures of Hope" on the breadth of 
 a crown-piece, and should be resigned to such praiseworthy 
 
280 MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWJSING. 
 
 personages. By far tlie best specimen of it we remember, 
 is the very clever list involving a running commentary of 
 the works of Lord Byron, by Dr M'Ginn ; unless, indeed, 
 it be Gay's " Catalogue Eaisonne" of the portentous poems 
 of Sir Richard Blackmore. Who shall embalm, in a similar 
 way, the endless writings of James, Cooper, and Dickens ? 
 " Lady Geraldine's Courtship," as a transcript from the 
 " red-leaved tablets of the heart " — as a tale of love, set to 
 the richest music — as a picture of the subtle workings, the 
 stern reasonings, and the terrible bursts of passion. — is 
 above praise. How like a volcano does the poet's heart at 
 length explode ! Plow first all power is given him in the 
 dreadful trance of silence, and then in the loosened tem- 
 pest of speech ! What a wild, fierce logic flows forth from 
 his lips, in which, as in that of Lear's madness, the foun- 
 dations of society seem to quiver like reeds, and the moun- 
 tains of conventionalism are no longer found ; and in the 
 lull of that tempest, and in the returning sunshine, how 
 beautiful, how almost superhuman, seem the figures of the 
 two lovers, seen now and magnified through the mist of 
 the reader's fast-flowing tears. It is a tale of successful 
 love, and yet it melts you like a tragedy, and most melts 
 you in the crisis of the triumph. On Geraldine we had 
 gazed as on a star, with dry-eyed and distant admiration ; 
 but when that star dissolves in showers at the feet of her 
 poet lover, we weep for very joy. Truly a tear is a sad 
 yet beautiful thing ; it constitutes a link connecting us 
 with distant countries, nay, connecting us with distant 
 worlds. Gravitation has, amid all her immensity, wrought 
 no such lovely work as when she rounded a tear. 
 
 From this beautiful poem alone, we might argue Mrs 
 Browning's capacity for producing a great domestic tragedy. 
 We might argue it, also, from the various peculiarities of 
 her genius — her far vision into the springs of human con- 
 duct — into those viewless veins of fire, or of poison, which 
 wind within the human heart — her sympathy with dark 
 
MRS ELIZxlBETH BARRET BROWNING. 281 
 
 bosoms — the passion for truth, which pierces often the mist 
 of her dimmer thought, like a flash of irrepressible light- 
 ning — her fervid temperament, always glowing round her 
 intellectual sight — and her queen-like dominion over ima- 
 gery and language. We think, meanwhile, that she has 
 mistaken her sphere. In that rare atmosphere of tran- 
 scendentalism which she has reached, she respires with dif- 
 ficulty, and with pain. She is not " native and endued" 
 into that element. We would warn her off the giddy re- 
 gion, where tempests may blow as well as clouds gather. 
 Her recent sonnets in " Blackwood" are sad failures — the 
 very light in them is darkness — thoughts, in themselves as 
 un tangible as the films upon the window pane, are con- 
 cealed in a woof of words, till their thin and shadowy 
 meaning fades utterly away. Morbid weakness, she should 
 remember, is not masculine strength. But can she not, 
 through the rents in her cloudy tabernacle, discern, far 
 below in the vale, fields of deep though homely beauty, 
 where she might more gracefully and successfully exercise 
 her exquisite genius ? She has only to stoop to conquer. 
 By and by we may — using unprofanely an expression ori- 
 ginally profane — be tempted to say, as we look up the 
 darkened mountain, with its flashes of fire hourly waxing 
 fewer and feebler, " As for this poetess, we wot not what 
 has become of her." 
 
 While we are venturing on accents of warning, we might 
 also remind her that there are in her style and manner 
 peculiarities which a wicked world will persist in calling 
 affectations. On the charge of affectation, generally, we 
 are disposed to lay little stress — it is a charge so easily got 
 up, and which can be so readily swelled into a cuckoo cry ; 
 it is often applied with such injustice, and it so gene- 
 rally attaches to singularities in manner, instead of insin- 
 cerities in spirit and matter. But why should a true man, 
 or a true woman, expose themselves needlessly to such a 
 charge ? We think in general, that true taste in this, as 
 
282 MRS ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING. 
 
 in matters of dress and etiquette, dictates conformity to the 
 present mode, provided that does not unduly cramp the 
 freedom and the force of natural motions. There is, indeed, 
 a class of writers who are chartered libertines — who deal 
 with language as they please — who toss it about as the 
 autumn wind leaves ; who, in the agony of their earnest- 
 ness, or in the fury of their excitement, seize on rude and 
 unpolished words, as Titans on rocks and mountains, and 
 gain artistic triumphs in opposition to all the rules of art. 
 Such are Wilson and Carlyle, and such were Burke and 
 Chalmers. These men we must just take as they are, and 
 be thankful for them as they are. We must just give them 
 their own way. And whether such a permission be given 
 or not, it is likely to be taken. " Canst thou draw out Le- 
 viathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord which thou 
 lettest down ? will he make many supplications unto thee ? 
 will he speak soft words unto thee ? Will the Unicorn be 
 willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib ? canst thou 
 bind him with his band in the furrow ? will he harrow the 
 valleys after thee? wilt thou believe that he will bring home 
 thy seed, and gather into thy barn ? " No : like the tame- 
 less creatures of the wilderness — like the chainless elements 
 of the air — such men obey a law, and use a language, and 
 follow a path of their own. 
 
 But this rare privilege Mrs Browning cannot claim. 
 And she owes it to herself and to her admirers to simplify 
 her manner — to sift her diction of whatever is harsh and 
 barbarous — to speak whatever truth is in her, in the clear 
 articulate language of men — and to quicken, as she well 
 can, the dead forms of ordinary verbiage, by the spirit of 
 her own superabundant life. Then, but not till then, shall 
 her voice break fully through the environment of coteries, 
 cliques, and magazine readers, and fall upon the ear of the 
 general public, like the sound, sweet in its sublimity, simple 
 amid its complex elements, earthly in its cause and un- 
 earthly in its effect upon the soul, of a multitude of waters. 
 
MRS SHELLEY. 283 
 
 MRS SHELLEY. 
 
 Much as we hear of Schools of Authors, there has, pro- 
 perly speaking, been but one in British literature — at least, 
 within this century. There was never, for example, any 
 such thing as a Lake school. A school supposes certain 
 conditions and circumstances which are not to be found 
 among the poets referred to. It supposes, first of all, a 
 common master. Now, the Lake poets had no common 
 master, either among themselves or others. They owned 
 allegiance neither to Shakspere, nor Milton, nor Words- 
 worth. Each stood near, but each stood alone, like the 
 stars composing one of the constellations. A school, again, 
 implies a common creed. But we have no evidence, 
 external or internal, that, though the poetical diction 
 of the Lakers bore a certain resemblance, their poetical 
 creed was identical. Indeed, we are yet to learn that 
 Southey had, of any depth or definitude, a poetical creed 
 at all. A school, again, supposes a similar mode of train- 
 ing. But how different the erratic education of Coleridge, 
 from the slow, solemn, silent degrees by which, without 
 noise of hammer or edge-tool, arose, like the ancient temple, 
 the majestic structure of Wordsworth's mind ! A school, 
 besides, implies such strong and striking resemblances as 
 shall serve to overpower the specific diflferences between the 
 writers who compose it. But we are mistaken if the dissimi- 
 larities between Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey be 
 not as great as the points in w^iich they agree. Take, for 
 example, the one quality of speculative intellect. That, 
 in the mind of Coleridge, was restless, discontented, and 
 daring — in Wordsworth, still, collected, brooding perpetu- 
 ally over narrow but profound depths — in Southey, almost 
 totally quiescent. The term Lake School, in short, applied 
 
284> 
 
 MRS SHELLEY. 
 
 at first in derision, has been retained, principally because 
 it is convenient — nay, suggests a pleasing image, and gives 
 both the public and the critics " glimpses, that do make 
 them less forlorn," of the blue peaks of Helvellyn and 
 Skiddaw, and of the blue waters of Derwent and Win- 
 dermere. 
 
 The Cockney School was, if possible, a misnomer more 
 absurd — striving, as it did, in vain to include, within one 
 term, three spirits so essentially distinct as Ilazlitt, Keats, 
 and Leigh Hunt — the first a stern metaphysician, who had 
 fallen into a hopeless passion for poetry ; the second, the 
 purest specimen of the ideal — a ball of beautiful foam, 
 " cut off from the water," and not adopted by the air ; the 
 third, a fine tricksy medium between the poet and the wit, 
 half a sylph and half an Ariel, now hovering round a 
 lady's curl, and now stirring the fiery tresses of the sun — 
 a fairy fluctuating link, connecting Pope with Shelley. 
 We need not be at pains to cut out into little stars the 
 Blackwood constellation, or dwell on the difierences be- 
 tween a Wilson, a Lockhart, and a James Hogg. 
 
 One school, however, there has appeared within the last 
 fifty years, answering to all the characteristics we have enu- 
 merated, namely, the Godwin school, who, by a common 
 master — the old man eloquent himself — a common philoso- 
 phical as well as poetical belief, common training, that of 
 warfare with society, and many specific resemblances in 
 manner and style, are proclaimed to be one. This cluster in- 
 cludes the names of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecroft, 
 Brockden Brown of America, Shelley, and Mrs Shelley. 
 
 Old Godwin scarcely got justice in Tait's Magazine from 
 Mr De Quincey. Slow, cumbrous, elephantine as he was, 
 there was always a fine spirit animating his most lumpish 
 movements. He was never contemptible — often common- 
 place, indeed, but often great. There was much in him of 
 the German cast of mind — the same painful and plodding 
 diligence, added to high imaginative qualities. His great 
 
MRS SHELLEY. 285 
 
 merit at the time — and his great error, as it proved after- 
 wards — lay in wedding a partial philosophic system with 
 the universal truth of fiction. Hence the element which 
 made the public drunk with his merits at first rendered 
 them oblivious afterwards. So dangerous it is to connect 
 fiction (the finer alias of truth) with any dogma or mythus 
 less perishable than the theogony of Homer, or the Ca- 
 tholicism of Cervantes. After all, what was the theory of 
 Godwin but the masque of Christianity ? Cloaking the 
 leading principle of our religion, its disinterested bene- 
 volence, under a copy of the features of Helvetius and 
 Volney, he went a mumming with it in the train of the 
 philosophers of the Revolution, But when he approached 
 the domain of actual life and of the human afiections, the 
 ugly disguise dropped, and his fictions we hesitate not to 
 characterise as among the noblest illustrations of the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount. But to the public they seemed the 
 reiterations of exploded and dangerous errors — such a load 
 of prejudice and prepossession had been suspended to their 
 author's skirts. And now, the excitement of danger and 
 disgust having passed away from his theories, interest in 
 the works which propounded them has also subsided. 
 " Caleb Williams," once denounced by Hannah More as 
 a cunning and popular preparation of the poison which 
 the "Political Justice" had contained in a cruder form, 
 is now forgotten, we suspect, by all but a very select class. 
 " StLeon," "Fleetwood," "Mandeville," and " Clondesley," 
 with all their varied merits, never attracted attention, ex- 
 cept through the reflex interest and terror excited by their 
 author's former works. Thus political excitement has been 
 at once a raising and a ruining influence to the writings 
 of a great English author — ruining, we mean, at present 
 — for the shade of neglect has yet to be created which can 
 permanently conceal their sterling and imperishable worth. 
 After the majority of the writings of Dickens have perished 
 — after one-half of Bulwer's, and- one-fourth of Scott's 
 
286 MRS SHELLF.Y. 
 
 novels have been forgotten — shall some reflective spirits 
 be found following the fugitive steps of Caleb Williams, or 
 standing bj the grave of Marguerite de Damville, or sym- 
 pathising with the gloom of Mandeville, or of Bethlem 
 Gabor, as they do well to be angry even unto death. If 
 sincerity, simplicity, strength of thought, purity of senti- 
 ment, and power of genius can secure immortality to any 
 productions, it is to the fictions of Godwin. 
 
 Mary Wollstonecroft — since we saw her countenance 
 prefixed to her husband's memoir — a face so sweet, so spi- 
 ritual, so far withdrawn from earthly thoughts, steeped in 
 an enthusiasm so genuine — we have ceased to wonder at 
 the passionate attachment of Southey, Fuseli, and Godwin 
 to the gifted being who bore it. It is the most feminine 
 countenance we ever saw in picture. The " Rights of 
 Women " seem in it melted down into one deliquium of 
 love. Fuseli once, when asked if he believed in the im- 
 mortality of the soul, replied in language rather too rough 
 to be quoted verbatim, " I don't know if you have a soul, 
 but I am sure that / have." We are certain that he be- 
 lieved in the existence of at least one other immortal spirit 
 — that of the owner of the still, serene, and rapt counte- 
 nance on which he hopelessly doted. It is curious that on 
 the first meeting of Godwin and his future wife, they 
 " interdespised" — they recoiled from each other, like two 
 enemies suddenly meeting on the street, and it required 
 much after-intercourse to reconcile them, and ultimately 
 to create that passion which led to their union. 
 
 Mary Wollstonecroft shone most in conversation. From 
 this to composition she seemed to descend as from a throne. 
 Coleridge describes her meeting and extinguishing some 
 of Godwin's objections to her arguments with a light, easy, 
 playful air. Her fan was a very falchion in debate. Her 
 works — " History of the French Revolution," " Wanderer 
 
 of Norway," " Rights of Women," &c have all perished. 
 
 Her own career was chequered and unhappy — her end 
 
MRS SHELLEY. 287 
 
 was premature — she died in childbed of Mrs Shelley (like 
 the sun going down to reveal the evening star) ; but her 
 name shall live as that of a deep, majestical, and high-souled 
 woman — the Madame Roland of England — and who could, 
 as well as she, have paused on her way to the scaffold, and 
 wished for a pen to " record the strange thoughts that were 
 arising in her mind." Peace to her ashes ! How consol- 
 ing to think that those who in life were restless and un- 
 happy, sleep the sleep of death as soundly as others — nay, 
 seem to sleep more soundly — to be hushed by a softer 
 lullaby, and surrounded by a profounder peace, than the 
 ordinary tenants of the grave. Yes, sweeter, deeper, and 
 longer is the repose of the truant child, after his day of 
 wandering is over, and the night of his rest is come. 
 
 Another " wanderer o'er eternity" was Brockden Brown, 
 the Godwin of America. And worse for him, he was a 
 wanderer, not from, but among men. For Cain of old, it 
 was a relief to go forth from his species into the virgin 
 empty earth. The builders of the Tower of Babel must 
 have rejoiced as they saw the summit of their abortive 
 building sinking down in the level plain ; they fled from 
 it as a stony silent satire on their bafiled ambition, and as 
 a memorial of the confusion of their speech — it scourged 
 them forth into the wilderness, where they found peace 
 and oblivion. A self-exiled Byron or Landor is rather to 
 be envied ; for though " how can your wanderer escape 
 from his own shadow?" yet it is much if that shadow 
 sweep forests and cataracts, fall large at morning or even- 
 ing upon Alps and Apennines, or swell into the Demon of 
 the Brockan. In this case misery takes a prouder, loftier 
 shape, and mounts a burning throne. But a man like 
 Brockden Brown, forced to carry his incommunicable sorrow 
 into the press and thick of human society, nay, to coin it 
 into the means of procuring daily bread, he is the true hero, 
 even though he should fall in the struggle. To carry one's 
 misery to market, and sell it to the highest bidder, what a 
 
288 MRS SHELLEY. 
 
 necessity for a proud and sensitive spirit ! Assuredly Brown 
 was a brave struggler, if not a successful one. Amid po- 
 verty, neglect, non- appreciation, hard labour, and the 
 thousand niaiseries of the crude country which America then 
 was, he retained his integrity ; he wrote on at what God- 
 win calls his "storybooks;" he sought inspiration from 
 his own gloomy woods and silent fields ; and his works ap- 
 pear, amid what are called " standard novels," like tall 
 wind-swept American pines amid shrubbery and brush- 
 wood. His name, after his untimely death (at the age of 
 thirty-nine), was returned upon his ungrateful country — 
 fit)m Britain, where his writings first attained eminent 
 distinction, while even yet Americans, generally, prefer 
 the adventure and bustle of Cooper to the stern Dante-like 
 simplicity, the philosophical spirit, and the harrowing and 
 ghost-like interest of Brown. 
 
 Of Shelley, having spoken so often, what more can we 
 say ? He seems to us as though the most beautiful of beings 
 had been struck blind. Mr De Quincey, in unconscious 
 plagiarism from ourselves, compares him to a "lunatic 
 angel." But perhaps, after all, his disease might be better 
 denominated blindness. It was not because he saw falsely, 
 but, as if seeing and delaying to worship the glory of Christ 
 and his religion, that delay was punished by a swift and 
 sudden darkness. Imagine the Apollo Belvidere, animated 
 and fleshed, all his dream-like loveliness of form retained, 
 but his eyes remaining shut ! Thus blind and beautiful 
 stood Shelley on his pedestal, or went wandering, an in- 
 spired sleep-walker, among his fellows, who, alas ! not see- 
 ing his melancholy i^light, struck and spurned, instead of 
 gently and soothingly trying to lead him into the right 
 path. We still think, notwithstanding Mr De Quincey's 
 eloquent strictures in reply, that if pity and kind-hearted 
 expostulation had been employed, they might have had the 
 effect, if not of weaning him from his errors, at least of 
 modifying his expressions and feelings — if not of opening 
 
MRS SHELLEY. 289 
 
 his eyes, at least of rendering him more patient and hope- 
 ful under his eclipse. What but a partial clouding of his 
 mind could have prompted such a question as he asked 
 upon the following occasion ? liaydon, the painter, met 
 him once at a large dinner party in London. During the 
 entertainment, a thin, cracked, shrieking voice was heard 
 from the one end of the table, " You don't believe, do you, 
 Mr Haydon, in that execrable thing, Christianity?" The 
 voice was poor Shelley's, who could not be at rest with any 
 new acquaintance till he ascertained his impressions on that 
 one topic. 
 
 Poets, perhaps all men, best understand themselves. 
 Thus no word so true has been spoken of Shelley, as where 
 he says of himself, that " an adamantine veil was built up 
 between his mind and heart." His intellect led him in one 
 direction — the true impulses of his heart in another. The 
 one was with Spinosa ; the other with John. The contro- 
 versy raged between them like fire, and even at death was 
 not decided. We rejoice, in contrast with the brutal treat- 
 ment he met with while living, to notice the tenderness 
 which the most evangelical periodicals (witness a late num- 
 ber of the " North British Review"), extend to the memory 
 of this most sincere, spiritual, and unearthly of modern 
 men. It is to us a proud reflection, that for at least seven- 
 teen years our opinion of him has remained unaltered. 
 
 It is not at all to be wondered at, that two such spirits 
 as Shelley and Mary Godwin, when they met, should be- 
 come instantly attached. On his own doctrine of a state 
 of pre-existence, we might say that the marriage had been 
 determined long before, while yet the souls were waiting 
 in the great antenatal antechamber ! They met at last, 
 like two drops of water — like two flames of fire — like two 
 beautiful clouds which have crossed the moon, the sky, and 
 all its stars, to hold their midnight assignation over a 
 favourite and lonely river. Mary Godwin was an enthu- 
 siast from her childhood. She passed, by her own account, 
 
 u 
 
290 MRS SHELLEY. 
 
 part of her youth at Broughty Ferry, in sweet and sinless 
 reverie among its cliffs. The place is, to us, iamiliar. It 
 possesses some fine features — a bold promontory crowned 
 with an ancient castle jutting far out the Tay, which here 
 broadens into an arm of the ocean — a beach, in part smooth 
 with sand, and in part paved with pebbles — cottages lying 
 artlessly along the shore, clean, as if washed by the near 
 sea — sandy hillocks rising behind — and westward, the 
 river, like an inland lake, stretching around Dundee, with 
 its fine harbour and its surmounting Law, which, in its 
 turn, is surmounted by the far blue shapes of the gigantic 
 Stuicknachroan and Benvoirlich. Did the bay of Spezia 
 ever suggest to Mrs Shelley's mind the features of the 
 Scottish scene ? That scene, seen so often, seldom fails to 
 bring before us her image — the child, and soon to be the 
 bride, of genius. Was she ever, like Mirza, overheard in 
 her soliloquies, and did she bear the shame, accordingly, 
 in blushes which still rekindle at the recollection ? Did 
 the rude fishermen of the place deem her wondrous wise, 
 or did they deem her mad, with her wandering eye, her 
 rapt and gleaming countenance, her light step moving to 
 the music of her maiden meditation ? The smooth sand 
 retains no trace of her young feet — to the present race she 
 is altogether unknown ; but we have more than once seen 
 the man of genius, and its lover, turn round and look at 
 the spot, with warmer interest, and with brightening eye, 
 as we told them that she had been there. 
 
 We have spoken of Mrs Shelley's similarity in genius 
 to her husband — we by no means think her his equal. She 
 has not his subtlety, swiftness, wealth of imagination, and 
 is never caught up (like Ezekiel by his lock of hair) into 
 the same rushing whirlwind of inspiration. She has much, 
 however, of his imaginative and of his speculative quali- 
 ties — her tendency, like his, is to the romantic, the ethereal, 
 and the terrible. The tie detaining her, as well as him, to 
 the earth, is slender — ^her protest against society is Iiis, 
 
MRS SHELLEY. 291 
 
 copied out in a female hand — her style is carefully and 
 successfully modelled upon his — she bears, in brief, to him, 
 the resemblance which Laone did to Laon, which Astarte 
 did to Manfred. Perhaps, indeed, intercourse with a being 
 so peculiar, that those who came in contact with, either 
 withdrew from him in hatred, or fell into the current of his 
 being, vanquished and enthralled, has somewhat affected 
 the originality, and narrowed the extent of her own genius. 
 Indian widows used to fling themselves upon the i'uneral 
 pyre of their husbands : she has thrown upon that of hers 
 her mode of thought, her mould of style, her creed, her 
 heart, her all. Her admiration of Shelley was, and is, an 
 idolatry. Can we wonder at it ? Separated from him in 
 the prime of life, with all his faculties in the finest bloom 
 of proiiiise, M^ith peace beginning to build in the crevices 
 of his torn heart, and with fame hovering ere it stooped 
 upon his head — separated^ too, in circumstances so sudden 
 and cruel — can we be astonished that from the wounds of 
 love came forth the blood of worship and sacrifice ? Words- 
 worth speaks of himself as feeling for " the Old Sea some 
 reverential fear." But in the mind of " Mary" there must 
 lurk a feeling of a still stronger kind toward that element 
 which he, next to herself, had of all things most passion- 
 ately loved — which he trusted as a parent — to which he 
 exposed himself, defenceless (lie could not swim — he could 
 only soar) — which he had sung in many a strain of match- 
 less sweetness, but which betrayed and destroyed him — 
 how can she, without horror, hear the boom of its waves, 
 or look without a shudder, either at its stormy or its smil- 
 ing countenance? What a picture she presents to our 
 imagination, running with dishevelled hair, along the sea 
 shore, questioning all she met if they could tell her of her 
 husband — nay, shrieking out the dreadful question to tlie 
 surges, which, like a dumb murderer, had done the deed, 
 but could not utter the confession ! 
 
 Mrs Shelley's genius, though true and powerful, is mono- 
 
2J)2 MRS SHELLEY. 
 
 tonous and circumscribed — more so than even her father's 
 — and, in this point, presents a strong contrast to her hus- 
 band's, which could run along every note of the gamut — • 
 be witty or wild, satirical or sentimental, didactic or dra- 
 matic, epic or lyrical, as it pleased him. She has no wit, 
 nor humour — little dramatic talent. Strong, clear descrip- 
 tion of the gloomier scenes of nature, or the darker pas- 
 sions of the mind, or of those supernatural objects which 
 her fancy, except in her first work, somewhat laboriously 
 creates, is her forte. Hence her reputation still rests upon 
 "Frankenstein;" for her "Last Man," " Perkin War- 
 beck," &c., are far inferior, if not entirely unworthy of her 
 talents. She unquestionably made him ; but, like a mule 
 or a monster, he has had no progeny. 
 
 Can any one have forgot the interesting account she 
 gives of her first conception of that extraordinary story, 
 when she had retired to rest, her fancy heated by hearing 
 ghost tales ; and when the whole circumstances of the story 
 appeared at once before her eye, as in a camera obscura ? 
 It is ever thus, we imagine, that truly original conceptions 
 are produced. They are cast — not wrought. They come 
 as wholes, and not in parts. It was thus that " Tam o' 
 Shanter" completed, along Burns' mind, his weird and tipsy 
 gallop in a single hour. Thus Coleridge composed the out- 
 line of his " Ancient Marinere," in one evening walk near 
 Nether Stowey. So rapidly rose " Frankenstein," which, 
 as Moore well remarks, has been one of those striking 
 conceptions which take hold of the public mind at once 
 and for ever. 
 
 The theme is morbid and disgusting enough. The 
 story is that of one who finds out the principle of life, con- 
 structs a monstrous being, who, because his maker fails in 
 forming a female companion to him, ultimately murders 
 the dearest friend of his benefactor, and, in remorse and 
 despair, disappears amid the eternal snows of the North 
 Pole. Nothing more preposterous than the meagre outline 
 
MRS SHELLEY. 293 
 
 of the story exists in literature. But Mrs Shelley deserves 
 great credit, nevertheless. In the first place, she has suc- 
 ceeded in her delineation ; she has painted this shapeless 
 being upon the imagination of the world for ever ; and be- 
 side Caliban, and Hecate, and Death and Life, and all 
 other weird and gloomy creations, this nameless, unfortu- 
 nate, involuntary, gigantic unit stands. To succeed in an 
 attempt so daring, proves at once the power of the author, 
 and a certain value even in the original conception. To 
 keep verging perpetually on the limit of the absurd, and 
 to produce the while all the effects of the sublime, takes 
 and tasks very high faculties indeed. Occasionally, we 
 admit, she does overstep the mark. Thus the whole scene 
 of the monster's education in the cottage, his overhearing 
 the reading of the " Paradise Lost," the " Sorrows of Wer- 
 ter," &c., and in this way acquiring knowledge and refined 
 sentiments, seems unspeakably ridiculous. A Caco-demon 
 weeping in concert with Eve or Werter is too ludicrous 
 an idea — as absurd as though he had been represented as 
 boarded at Capsicum Hall. But it is wonderful how de- 
 licately and gracefully Mrs Shelley has managed the whole 
 prodigious business. She touches pitch with a ladys 
 glove, and is not defiled. From a whole forest of the 
 " nettle danger" she extracts a sweet and plentiful supply 
 of the " flower safety." With a fine female footing, she 
 preserves the narrow path which divides the terrible from 
 the disgusting. She unites, not in a junction of words 
 alone, but in eff*ect, the " horribly beautiful." Her monster 
 is not only as Caliban appeared to Trine ulo — a very pretty 
 monster, but somewhat poetical and pathetic withal. You 
 almost weep for him in his utter insulation. Alone ! 
 dread word, though it were to be alone in heaven ! Alone ! 
 word hardly more dreadful if it were to be alone in hell ! 
 
 " Alone, all, all, alone. _,^^ 
 
 Alone on a wide, wide sea; /^^C^ ^'^'^^^y^ 
 And never a saint took pity on// ^ ^^ -r ■.-fl,'^''^ 
 My soul in agony." \ UN J VE.E SITT 
 
294 MRS SHELLEY. 
 
 Wrapt around by his loneliness, as by a silent burn- 
 ing chain, does this gigantic creature run through the 
 world, like a lion who has lost its mate, in a forest of fire, 
 seeking for his kindred being, but seeking for ever in vain. 
 He is not only alone, but alone because he has no being 
 like him throughout the whole universe. What a solitude 
 within a solitude ! — solitude comparable only to that of the 
 Alchemist in St Leon, when he buries his last tie to hu- 
 manity in his wife's grave, and goes on his way, " friend- 
 less, friendless, alone, alone." 
 
 What a scene is the process of his creation, and espe- 
 cially the hour when he first began to breathe, to open his 
 ill-favoured eyes, and to stretch his ill shapen arms toward 
 his terrified author, who, for the first time, becomes aware 
 of the enormity of the mistake he has committed ; who has 
 had a giant's strength, and used it tyrannously like a giant, 
 and who shudders and shrinks back from his own horrible 
 handiwork ! It is a type, whether intended or not, of the 
 fate of genius, whenever it dares either to revile or to re- 
 sist, the common laws and obligations, and conditions of 
 man and the universe. Better, better far be blasted with 
 the lightnings of heaven, than by the recoil, upon one's 
 own head, of one false, homeless, returning, revenging 
 thought. 
 
 Scarcely second to her description of the moment when, 
 at midnight, and under the light of a waning moon, the 
 monster was born, is his sudden apparition upon a glacier 
 among the high Alps. This scene strikes us the more, as 
 it seems the fulfilment of a fear which all have felt, who 
 have found themselves alone among such desolate regions. 
 Who has not at times trembled lest those ghastlier and 
 drearier places of nature, which abound in our own High- 
 lands, should bear a different progeny from the ptarmigan, 
 the sheep, the raven, or the eagle — lest the mountain should 
 suddenly crown itself with a Titanic sceptre, and the mist, 
 disparting, reveal demoniac forms, and the lonely moor, 
 
MRS SHELLEY. 21)5 
 
 discover its ugly dwarf, as if dropped down from the over- 
 hanging thunder cloud — and the forest of pines show un- 
 earthly shapes sailing among their shades — and the cata- 
 ract overboil with its own wild creations? Thus fitly, 
 amid scenery like that of some dream of nightmare, on a 
 glacier as on a throne, stands up before the eye of his own 
 maker, the miscreation, and he cries out, " Whence and 
 what art thou, execrable shape ! " 
 
 In darkness and distance, at last, the being disappears, 
 and the imagination dares hardly pursue him as he passes 
 amid those congenial shapes of colossal size, terror, and 
 mystery, which we fancy to haunt those outskirts of exist- 
 ence, with, behind them at midnight, "all Europe and 
 Asia fast asleep, and before them the silent immensity and 
 palace of the Eternal, to which our sun is but a porch- 
 lamp." 
 
 Altogether, the work is wonderful as the work of a girl 
 of eighteen. She has never since fully equalled or 
 approached its power, nor do we ever expect that she shall. 
 One distinct addition to our original creations must be con- 
 ceded her — and it is no little praise ; for there are few 
 writers of fiction who have done so much out of Germany. 
 What are they, in this respect, to our painters — to Fuseli, 
 with his quaint brain, so prodigal of unearthly shapes — to 
 John Martin, who has created over his head a whole dark, 
 frowning, but magnificent tvoi^ld — or to David Scott, our 
 late dear friend, in whose studio, while standing surrounded 
 by pictured poems of such startling originality, such austere 
 selection of theme, and such solemn dignity of treatment 
 (forgetting not himself, the grave, mild, quiet, shadowy 
 enthusiast, with his slow, deep, sepulchral tones), you were 
 almost tempted to exclaim, " How dreadful is this place!" 
 
 Of one promised and anticipated task we must, ere we 
 close, respectfully remind Mrs Shelley ; it is of the life of 
 her husband. That, even after Captain Medwyn's recent 
 work, has evidently yet to be written. No hand but hers 
 
296 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 can write it well. Critics may anatomise his qualities — 
 she only can paint his likeness. In proclaiming Ids praise, 
 exaggeration in her will be pardoned ; and in unveiling 
 his faults, tenderness may be expected from her; she 
 alone, we believe, after all, fully understands him; she 
 alone fully knows the particulars of his outer and inner 
 history ; and we hope and believe, that her biography will 
 be a monument to his memory, as lasting as the Euganean 
 hills ; and her lament over his loss as sweet as the ever- 
 lasting dirge, sung in their " late remorse of love," by the 
 waters of the Italian sea.* 
 
 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 William Cobbett, we may, without fear of contradic- 
 tion, call the father of cheap literature. His self-styled 
 " twopenny trash" was the strong seed whence a progeny 
 has sprung, manifold and thick as the " leaves of Yallam- 
 brosa;" and a portion of whatever honour or shame attaches 
 to our present cheap publications must redound to his credit 
 or to his disgrace. And although he was by no means a 
 timid or a squeamish man, we are certain that, could he 
 now raise his head from the dust, it were to look with 
 withering scorn and pity, not unmingled with remorse, 
 upon those myriads of low and loathsome publications at 
 present pouring from the English press — making up for 
 
 * Since writing this, we have read more carefully the " Last Man." 
 Though the gloomiest, most improbable, and most hopeless of books, 
 it abounds in beautiful descriptions, has scenes of harrowing interest, 
 and depicts delicately the character of Shelley, who is the hero of the 
 story. 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 2.97 
 
 their minuteness bj their mischief — for their want of point, 
 by their profanity — for their stupidity, by their licentious- 
 ness — absolutely monopolising millions of readers, and re- 
 minding us of that plague of frogs which swept Egypt, 
 " till the land stank, so numerous was the fry." 
 
 "William Cobbett has been often ably, but never, we 
 think, fully or satisfactorily criticised. We do not refer 
 merely to his political creed and character : these topics 
 we propose to avoid, permitting ourselves, however, the 
 general remark that he was just as able and just as consis- 
 tent a politician as some of his most formidable opponents 
 (such as Peel, Burdett, and Brougham) have since proved 
 themselves to be. Of his literary merits, we remember 
 only three striking pictures, all of which, however, slide 
 into his political aspects. The first is that very eloquent, 
 though somewhat sketchy and one-sided character by 
 Eobert Hall, ending with the words — " a firebrand, not a 
 luminary — the Polyphemus of the mob — the one-eyed mo- 
 narch of the blind." Hall, we imagine, however, was too 
 different a man from Cobbett to appreciate him entirely — 
 too attentive to the construction of his sentences to relish 
 Cobbett's easy, rambling style — too fastidious in his taste 
 to bear with Cobbett's blunt picturesque expressions — too 
 fond of the elegant abstractions of thought to sympathise 
 with Cobbett's passion for, and power over, facts ; still he 
 must have often admired his vigorous dissections of cha- 
 racter, and often chuckled, and even roared, over his rough 
 native humour. Another attempt to contain Cobbett in a 
 crown-piece was made by Lockhart, in what, we think, was 
 the last " Noctes " he contributed to " Blackwood," appear- 
 ing somewhere about the close of the year 1832. It is put 
 into the mouth of Jeffrey, and is very smart, snappish, and 
 pointed, pouring out as briskly as bottled beer, but is not 
 peculiarly characteristic. It is rather an inventory than a 
 picture ; and such an inventory of this modern " man 
 Mountain" as the Lilliputians made of GuUiver when they 
 
2.98 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 emptied his pocl-efs. It is not such a masterly full-length 
 as Lockhart could have executed, and as he has executed 
 of a kindred spirit, John Clerk. The third and best cha- 
 racter is by Hazlitt in his "Table- Talk," and is written with 
 all his wonted discrimination. We remember that he calls 
 him a " very honest man, with a total want of principle," 
 speaks of his "Register" as a "perpetual prospectus," and 
 draws a striking parallel between him and Paine. Our 
 object is somewhat more minutely and in detail to bring 
 this brawniest of men before our readers. 
 
 And, first, of his personal appearance. That was, as 
 generally happens, a thorough, though not an ostentatious 
 index to his character. Those who expected to find in 
 Cobbett a rude truculent barbarian, w^ere, as they deserved 
 to be, disappointed. They found, instead, a tall, stout, 
 mild-faced, broad-shouldered, farmer-looking man, with a 
 spice of humour lurking in his eye, but without one vestige 
 of fierceness or malignity either in his look or demeanour. 
 His private manners were simple, unaffected — almost gen- 
 tlemanly. His mode of addressing an audience was quiet, 
 clear, distinct, and conversational ; and the fury and the 
 fervour of the demagogue alike were wanting. The most 
 sarcastic and provoking things oozed out at his lips like 
 milk or honey. Add to this, perfect self-possession, his 
 usual vein of humour somewhat subdued into keeping with 
 Lis audience, and a certain cajolery in his manner, as the 
 most notable features in his mode of public address. We 
 heard him repeatedly in Edinburgh, during his visit in 1 832. 
 He came to the Modern Athens with as much fear and 
 trembling as could befall a man of his sturdy temperament. 
 He expected, he said, ere he arrived, that the Edinburgh 
 people would " throw him into a ditch," but went away 
 highly gratified with his reception. The truth is, they wel- 
 comed him as a curiosity, and went to see and hear him as 
 a raree show. They showed no genuine appreciation of 
 his talents ; and if they did not lift from the dirt and pelt 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 299 
 
 him with the common calumnies, it was because thej 
 thought it not worth while. He came, tickled their midriils 
 . — they laughed, applauded, and forgot him, as soon as his 
 back was turned. 
 
 It is dangerous to seek to include a whole character in 
 a single epithet, otherwise we might call William Cobbett 
 *' the genius of common sense." Common sense, possessed 
 in an uncommon degree, and backed by powerful passion, 
 often verges, in its eifects and in its nature, on genius. 
 Like genius, it works by intuition ; it does not creep nor 
 walk, but leaps to its conclusion. It is to genius an in- 
 ferior system of shorthand — as swift, but not so beautiful ; 
 or it may be called, genius applied to meaner subjects, and 
 guided by impulses as free but less lofty. Such a home- 
 spun but masculine spirit had perched upon the shoulder 
 of Swift, and came directly from him to Cobbett. 
 
 If ever man deserved, in a subordinate acceptation, the 
 name of " seer," it was the author of tlie " llegister." He 
 did not ratiocinate or inquire ; he saw, and saw at the first 
 opening of his sagacious eye. Sometimes his sight was 
 true, and sometimes false — sometimes healthy, and some- 
 times jaundiced — but it was always sight, and not hear- 
 say ; and as well argue with the testimony of the eye as 
 dispute with him his convictions. This was at once his 
 power and his weakness ; it accounted for his true and 
 strong perception of public characters, and of the ten- 
 dency and issues of public events ; it accounted for his 
 dogmatism, his inconsistency, and his caprice. It was this 
 strong personal sight which made Cobbett maintain his 
 ground against his many far more accomplished and learn- 
 ed rivals. While they were reading, reflecting, deflecting, 
 and circumspecting, he was looking straight forward and 
 right down into the very heart and marrow of his theme. 
 Whilst they were wasting time in trying on pairs of spec- 
 tacles belonging to others, he was using his ow^n piercing 
 pair of eyes. Thus, though taken at tremendous odds, the 
 
300 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 old Serjeant seldom failed of a complete triumph. We own 
 it pleases us — ^it stirs our blood — to think that there has 
 been, even in our time, native vigour enough, in a half- 
 taught man of talent, to neutralise the most accomplished, 
 to level the most learned, to "turn wise men backward 
 and make diviners mad," to startle an age anxious to hide 
 its weakness under the variety of its studies and the mul- 
 tiplicity of its accomplishments, by the tidings that there 
 is yet something better than education — that an " ounce of 
 mother wit" retains its original value — that genius still 
 claims its ancient privileges — and that the breed of intel- 
 lectual Spartaci and Toussaints is not extinct, amid all the 
 cultivated fribbles and martinets of the day. 
 
 Cobbett, if he wanted learning, possessed what was far 
 more valuable — he possessed experience. How few writers 
 have it ! Voltaire speaks of some astonishingly wise young 
 hero who seemed born with experience ; but, as Campbell re- 
 marks, " how few of our heads come into the world with 
 this valuable article ! " Most authors, indeed, go through 
 a certain routine, which is dignified with this name. They 
 pass through school and college ; write their first sonnet 
 or epigram ; fall in love — are received or rejected ; publish 
 their first volume — it is puffed or abused, according to the 
 state of the critic's temper or stomach ; fall into a sulk or 
 a syncope — gradually cool and calm as they rise or fall to 
 their proper level : and this is called experience. Abused, 
 outraged term ! Has an author of almost Miltonic genius 
 run the gauntlet of abusive or detracting criticism for many 
 long years, and yet retained his integrity, his magnanimity, 
 the calm purpose of his soul ? Then let him speak of expe- 
 rience, for assuredly experience has spoken to him. Or, has 
 a man of whom the world was not worthy been driven, for 
 his conscientious convictions, forth from the society of men, 
 and died grey-haired and all but broken-hearted at twenty- 
 nine ? He might have spoken of experience. And did one 
 who could, from native talent, have led armies, cabinets. 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 301 
 
 his country, spend years as a private soldier, visit various 
 lands, and undergo many privations and hardships ? What 
 a different course of experience this — and it was Cobbett's 
 — from the flea-bites of so-called criticism, or the night- 
 mare of an unsold edition ! 
 
 Our strong, burly Serjeant carried his eye with him into 
 the ranks, in all his travels — in the choice of a wife. 
 Wherever he went, he " saw and conquered" — (what need, 
 after all, of this last word ? To see, in the true sense, is 
 always, in the true sense, to conquer. The want of sight 
 is the same thing with the want of success ; and thus Caesar, 
 in his celebrated bulletin, " Veni, vidi, vici," was, for the 
 first and last time, a tautologist) — and home he came, a giant 
 furnished and trained, by an irregular but gigantic educa- 
 tion, for becoming a " fourth estate " in the political and 
 literary world. 
 
 One quality strikingly manifest in Cobbett, and which 
 had been nurtured by his training, is health. He was 
 essentially a healthy man. He did not, it is true, want 
 his peevish and peculiar humours, but the general tone of 
 his mind as well as body was sound and clear. He sig- 
 nally exemplified the words, " Sana mens in sano corpore." 
 Without the Border blood and the minstrel spirit of Scott, 
 he had much of his soundness, geniality, and broad strength. 
 Morbidity was a word he did not recognise as English, 
 Mawkish sentimentalism, in all its shapes, he abhorred ; 
 and cant found in him an inexorable foe. Hence we ac- 
 count for his celebrated criticisms on Shakspere and Mil- 
 ton. In his heart, perhaps, he appreciated both, but was 
 indignant at the false and wholly conventional admiration 
 paid them by the multitude. Or, even granting that his 
 taste was bad, and that, from native inaptitude, he could 
 not feel the more delicate and spiritual beauties of either 
 poet, was he not better to avow it openly than to wear a 
 " foolish face of praise/' and pretend to what he had not ? 
 In his nonsense of abuse there is something infinitely more 
 
S02 "WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 racj and refreshing than in others' nonsense of commen- 
 dation. We prefer him making a football of the "Para- 
 dise Lost," and kicking at it with all his might — impo- 
 tentlj indeed, and to the damage of nothing but his own 
 toes — than to see it shining in illustrated editions in the 
 libraries of those whose simpering imbecilities of affected 
 enthusiasm convince you that they have neither understood 
 nor really read it. Much as we admire Shakspere and 
 Milton, we are not disposed to sacrifice Cobbett as a whole 
 burnt-offering at their shrine. 
 
 In keeping with this quality of health was that cf good- 
 humour. He was the best natured of political writers. 
 Even when abusing his opponents, there was a kindly 
 twinkle in his eye, and you never were sure that he 
 heartily hated them. His high animal spirits, his fine 
 constitution, and his undisturbed self-complacency, all 
 served to carry off and qualify his rage. He dealt with 
 his foes as a kitten with a mouse. They furnished him 
 with so much amusement, and he made others so merry 
 with them, that he began rather to like them than other- 
 wise. The most of them, besides, were so far his inferiors 
 in intellect, that they exerted no magnetism sufficient to 
 draw forth the full riches of his wrath. If he felt deep 
 and deadly animosity to any, it was to the three formerly 
 mentioned. Peel, Burdett, and Brougham, which might 
 suggest, to an ill-natured person, the proverb, " Two of a 
 trade," &c. 1 1 ow different from Junius I Cobbett at most 
 hates ; Junius loathes. Cobbett splashes pails of dirty 
 water over his enemies ; Junius deals in drops, but they 
 are drops of prussic acid. Cobbett, wath loud outcries, 
 knocks down his opponents; Junius steps up and softly 
 whispers in their ear a sentence, an insinuation, a syllable, 
 which withers the very heart within them. To express, 
 by a change of figure, a change of mood and manner in 
 both, Cobbett often covers his enemy with nicknames, 
 w hici) stick but do not scorch : such toys are beneath the 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 303 
 
 deep long hate of Junius ; he scatters firebrands, arrows, 
 and death. 
 
 From health and good-humour, blended with a keen 
 sense of the ridiculous, sprung his faculty of humour, one 
 of the most curious of all his gifts. It is in liim at one 
 time the power of singling out minute absurdities in the 
 conduct, character, style of writing, appearance, or names 
 of his opponents, and by endless repetitions enlarging 
 their ridiculous aspect, till you, the reader, become a mere 
 alias of laughter holding both his sides. It is at another 
 time produced by culling the oddest and lowest figures and 
 allusions from the barnyard or the dunghill, and hanging 
 those mud-garlands about the necks of dignitaries, prelates, 
 statesmen, of majesty itself, till they look supremely ridi- 
 culous. Sometimes he secures his ludicrous effects by the 
 mere daring effrontery of his onset, as in his celebrated 
 chapter, " Errors and Nonsense in a King's Speech ;" 
 often by the unexpected introduction of political or per- 
 sonal allusions amid serious or indifferent subjects ; some- 
 times, as we have seen, by the dexterous use of nicknames 
 and slang ; and often by the sheer power of exuberant and 
 dauntless egotism. 
 
 He had very little of what is strictly called wit, or the 
 power of perceiving unexpected resemblances and con- 
 trasts, and no dry severe irony. Coleridge defined Swift 
 as the soul of Ilabelais in a dry place. Cobbett may per- 
 haps be defined the soul of Swift in a softer, sunnier, sap- 
 pier place. Swift was a machine of humour ; he himself 
 derived neither good nor pleasure from the lavish mirth 
 he distributed to others. Cobbett, on the contrary, was 
 compelled by his own tickling sensations to tickle the whole 
 world besides ; his humour was not a voluntary exercise 
 of power, but a vent for surcharged emotion. 
 
 His gift, as Shakspere has it, of " iteration" he turned 
 to account for more purposes than those of humour. His 
 arguments, his facts, as well as his favourite nicknames. 
 
304 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 such as the " Wen," " Old Bloody," the " Press-gang," &c., 
 he repeated again and again. He sat, like a " starling," 
 opposite the treasury and the bank, and hallooed out what 
 he deemed offensive truths, and recounted untoward events, 
 the more pertinaciously that the truths were offensive, and 
 that the events had been untoward. And then, worst of 
 all, his croaking was so unlike that of all other croakers, 
 it was so funny, so far from a dull monotony, founded so 
 much on fact, and so widely listened to, that government, 
 between amusement and provocation, were " perplexed in 
 the extreme." They durst neither openly laugh nor cry. 
 For here was no hunger-bitten scribbler, no lean Cassius, 
 no wild-eyed emaciated fanatic, but a joyous jolly prophet, 
 six feet high and proportionably broad, whom it was diffi- 
 cult either to bribe or to kill, pouring out his endless pre- 
 dictions and warnings under the sign of a gridiron, on 
 which it was quite as likely that they as that he should be 
 roasted alive. 
 
 Was it from this practice of incessant repetition that 
 there sprang that egotism with which he has been so often 
 charged ? Was it that, as he could not help talking about 
 other things over and over again, so he could not help, 
 much more, talking about himself? Cobbett, in fact, was 
 not more an egotist than the majority of writers, only he 
 spoke of himself directly and not by implication. Some 
 speak of themselves while praising their idols, and others 
 while indulging their hobbies. But William Cobbett, a 
 plain blunt man, instead of veiling his egotism under the 
 guise of sentimental sonnets, or working it up into imagi- 
 nary conversations, or throwing it out into imaginary 
 heroes, writes it down as plain " as downright Shippen or 
 as old Montaigne." We must say we like this trait in his 
 character, believing that there is often more of the spirit 
 of egotism discovered in avoiding than in using its lan- 
 guage. Why, the editorial word " we" contains in it the 
 double-distilled essence of egotism, modest as it looks. And 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 305 
 
 how much intolerable self-conceit is concealed under the 
 phrases " we humbly think," " it appears to us," and "> our 
 feeble voice," &c. Cobbett was as great an enemy to 
 shams as Carlyle. Pie had a vast notion of himself, and 
 he took every opportunity, proper and improper, of de- 
 claring it. Unlike the boy Tell, " he was great, and knew 
 how great he was." His opinion, at any rate, was per- 
 fectly sincere, and as such required, nay, demanded ex- 
 pression. He felt himself, and was, a reality, among mew- 
 ing and moping, painted and gilded, starred, gartered, and 
 crowned phantoms ; and who shall quarrel with him be- 
 cause ever and anon he touched his strong sides and brow 
 with his strong arm, and said, " Here I am, this is solid, 
 were all else the shadow of a shade." Bulwer, our readers 
 are aware, thought proper, many years ago, to quarrel 
 with the use of the anonymous in periodical literature. 
 We think that Cobbett had been a worthier champion for 
 supporting this quarrel than Sir Edward. No mask or 
 visor would ever have become or fitted him. His per- 
 sonality seen at every turning in the lane, every opening 
 in the hedge of his argument — his abuse or his humour- 
 was his power. He was not a knight of chivalry, bearing 
 no device upon his shield, and covering his face in the 
 hollow of his helm, but a Tom Cribb or Spring, open- 
 faced, strong, stripped, and ready to do battle with all 
 comers. The anonymous seemed to him anti-English, and 
 he resigned it to the Italians, the " press-gang," and the 
 author of Junius. 
 
 As Scott seemed to draw into his single self the last 
 national spirit of his country, as Byron was our last purely 
 English poet, so Cobbett was our all but last purely Eng- 
 lish prose writer. He seemed, next to Churchill, the most 
 striking personification of John Bull. There were the 
 brawny form, the swagger, the blustering temper, the 
 broad humour, the pertinacity, the variability, the dogma- 
 tic prejudice, the rudeness, the common sense, the saga- 
 
 X 
 
306 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 citj, the turbulence, the gullosity, and the pugnacity of a 
 genuine Englishman as ever drank beer, bolted bacon, or 
 flourished singlestaiF. How he could upon occasion flatter 
 national prejudices and prepossessions ! How he could stir 
 up into absolute springtide the English blood ! How he 
 used to pelt, when he pleased, the French and the Scotch ! 
 What a chosen champion to the chaw-bacons ! It is not 
 too much to say that he understood his countrymen as 
 well as JSTapoleon did the French, and, had he possessed 
 the fighting talent, could, in the event of a revolution, 
 have led it and risen upon its wave. As it was, for a 
 season he was the real king of the masses, and even after, 
 through want of discretion, he lost his sovereignty, his re- 
 bel subjects, as often has happened in the history of rebel- 
 lions, frequently felt their hearts palpitating, their ears 
 tingling, and their knees instinctively bending to the voice 
 of their ancient leader. 
 
 A pleasing feature in Cobbett's character was his love 
 for the country. We remember him, in one of his " Re- 
 gisters," expressing his wonder that one like himself, who 
 relished intensely all rural sights and sounds, should have 
 passed so large a portion of his life amid the smoke, and 
 din, and strife of cities. It was not, indeed, the great fea- 
 tures of nature that he admired ; its more ethereal aspects, 
 and that mysterious symbolic relation which it bears to the 
 nature and history of man, he did not comprehend, and 
 would have laughed at any one who pretended to do. We 
 can fancy him thus criticising Emerson — " Wonders will 
 never cease. Here comes a Yankee prophet — ^yes, a Yankee 
 prophet — talking transcendental (query, transcendent?) 
 nonsense by the yard, and trying to get that gullible goose 
 John Bull to listen to him, at the rate of seven guineas for 
 each hour's lecture. He'd better — for us, at any rate — 
 have stopped at home, and fed his pigs, or prophesied to his 
 henroost. May I be roasted on a gridiron, if there's not 
 more sense in this one number of the ' Twopenny Trash' 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 307 
 
 than in all that this man Emerson ever wrote or ever will 
 write till his last breath. And yet who'll pay me seven 
 guineas for each of my lectures ? This half-crazy quack, I 
 am told, pulls down the old prophets, Jeremy, Daniel, and 
 the rest, and sets himself up in their stead as prophet Ralph 
 Waldo. I venture to predict to prophet Ralph, that he 
 wont see Boston Bay again ere his gulls would rather by 
 twenty times have their guineas in their pockets than his 
 lectures in their memories. But I beg Ralph's pardon, for 
 it's not in the power of any mortal man, I'm told, to mind 
 one word that Ralph says to them, or to come off with any- 
 thing but a general notion that they have been quacked 
 out of their sixpences. They say that the fellow is rather 
 good-looking, a glib talker, and has a smattering of the 
 German, but never gives his hearers one good round fact 
 in all his lectures ; has no statistics or arguments either ; 
 and you would never guess, while hearing him, whether 
 you were in America or England, the earth or the moon. 
 But enough of prophet Raff. I hope I have settled his 
 hash as effectually as I did that of a much cleverer fellow, 
 squinting prophet Ned, of Hatton Garden." 
 
 Thus Cobbett would have thought and said. Others, 
 with Cobbett's prejudices, but destitute of his powers and 
 his outspoken directness, have recently thought, but have 
 not courage to say the same. And yet, while utterly in- 
 capable of feeling, and of affecting to feel, a high ideal 
 view of nature, he loved sincerely and passionately this 
 green earth, its fresh breezes, its soft waters, and its spring 
 sky, blue, as if newly dyed, as the bridal-curtain of the 
 youthful season. He cared nothing for the stars ; these, 
 which are rather like paintings than works of nature, he 
 disregarded nearly as much as he did the pictures of man's 
 pencil ; he loved the moon only as it lighted up the har- 
 vest-field; but the hedge-rows, the trees, and the corn- 
 fields of merry England grew in his heart, and waved over, 
 and cooled the stream of his life's blood. It is pleasant to 
 
308 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 come upon such passages in his pages. "We linger and coo 
 over them, like a breeze caught amid the woods which sur- 
 round some spot of insulated loveliness. They raise and 
 soften our opinion of the man ; and whenever we are dis- 
 posed to think or speak harshly of William Cobbett, we are 
 calmed by remembering his dying moments, when he re- 
 quested to be carried round his farm, that he might see for 
 the last time the fields which he loved so dearly. The fact 
 that this desire was so strong at death itself proved that it, 
 and no lower or fiercer feeling, was his ruling passion. 
 
 From this love of homely, English nature, and from his 
 minute habits of observation, sprang that abundant and 
 picturesque imagery with which his writings abound. A 
 fresh breeze from the " farm" is always felt passing over 
 his driest discussions, and mingling with his bitterest per- 
 sonalities. It is this which prevents him from being ever 
 vulgar; for, as Hazlitt has remarked, Cobbett is never 
 vulgar, though often coarse. And why ? Because nature, 
 though often coarse, is never vulgar — though often com- 
 mon, is never mean ; and because Cobbett is never him- 
 self, and will never permit his reader to be, long or far 
 away from the sweet, balmy breath of nature. Coleridge, 
 in one of his little poems, speaks of trying, by abstruse 
 research, to steal from himself " all the natural man " — a 
 process difficult, we suspect, in any case, but in Cobbett's, 
 even had he made the attempt, impossible ; for he was no- 
 thing, if not natural. Like Caliban, he seems newly dug 
 out, and smelling strongly of the virgin earth. 
 
 What shall we say of his style ? That it was a forcible 
 and fit expression to his thought — little more. It did not 
 pretend to be elegant ; it was not so accurate as it pre- 
 tended to be. It were not difficult retorting upon many 
 passages of his own writing the lynx-eyed system of criti- 
 cism which he directed against the slovenly compositions 
 of Sidmouth and Wellington. In fact, no style can stand 
 minute criticism, just as the most beautiful countenance 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 309 
 
 shrinks before the eye of the microscope. And let Blair's 
 contemptible cavillings at the style of Addison — whose 
 very errors, like the blunders of a beautiful child, are 
 graceful and interesting — stand a perpetual monument of 
 the folly of going too near to the masterpieces of literature. 
 Cobbett's style is composed of the purest Saxon, and proves, 
 as well as Bunyan's (as Macaulay has remarked), what 
 purposes that simple speech can serve. Subtle distinctions 
 it could not have conveyed ; but Cobbett had none such 
 to convey. Under certain grandeurs of thought, it might, 
 like Charon's boat, have creaked and trembled ; bat Cob- 
 bett required it only to express clear, common sense logic, 
 strong facts, and strong passions ; to beat down his foes, 
 and to cut his own way — and for such work it never failed 
 him. Its general tone was that of a long rambling conver- 
 sation ; its principal design seemed to be to make every 
 smallest shade of his meaning perfectly clear ; its wind- 
 ings and turnings, so distinct and vivid in their variety, 
 reminded you of the hranching veins — with all the repetitions 
 of a law-paper, it was as lively and interesting as a novel. 
 You might grin over it, or guiFaw over it, or frown at it, 
 or fling it from you in a fit of fury ; but it was impossible 
 to sleep over it, or to yawn over it, or to refrain from 
 thinking over it. While statesmen amused themselves 
 with the " Register" (amusement reminding you of the 
 games in Pandemonium !) at their breakfast-tables ; while 
 the " press-gang," their lips the while smacking, and their 
 eyes glistening with delight, proceeded to answer and 
 abuse it, the country parson was reading it in his after- 
 dinner easy-chair, the Paisley weaver had it lying on his 
 loom, and the weary ploughman in his cottage kept him- 
 self awake with its quaint and rich humours. Since the 
 works of Burns, no writings were so much appreciated by 
 all ranks and conditions of men. And the reason of this 
 was to be found in their corresponding qualities. Clear- 
 ness ; simplicity ; picturesque description ; racy, reckless 
 
310 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 humour ; big-boned, brawn j strength ; contempt of con- 
 ventionalisms ; rugged, self-trained reason — in one word, 
 nature — were common to both. The " hairbrained senti- 
 mental trace," which was the peculiar poetic differentia of 
 Burns, of course was wanting in Cobbett, 
 
 One curious but unquestionable cause of Cobbett's po- 
 pularity we must also mention. It was his intense sym- 
 pathy with that organ which those " masters of the mint," 
 phrenologists, have with their usual felicity of coinage, 
 called " gustativeness." How he expands and rejoices in 
 describing all sorts of savoury food! The droppings of 
 Hermon's dew or of Hybla's honey, are to him nothing 
 compared to the droppings from the sausage-pan, or the 
 roasting-jack of an English fireside ! With what lively 
 logic he undertakes the quarrel of "beer versus tea !" with 
 what a deep bass he trolls out the old stave — " Oh, the 
 roast-beef of Old England ! " how profound and edifying 
 his contempt for swipes and potatoes! how sublime he 
 waxes over a sirloin ; how pathetic his reminiscences of 
 the good old days, when " mutton, veal, and. lamb were 
 the food of the commoner sort of people ! " what a whet his 
 "Register" made before dinner! and what a digestive 
 after it ! Here again he resembles Burns — who describes 
 the homely food of Caledonia — her " souple scones" — her 
 " curny ingans, mixed wi' spice," and the other ingredients 
 of the haggis, "great chieftain o' the puddin' race" — not 
 to speak of her tippenny and usqueba — with such infinite 
 gusto ; and Scott, whose books are the best appetisers in 
 the world, and whose good digestion constituted, we ven- 
 ture to say, one-half of his physical, and one-fourth of his 
 mental power. 
 
 In connection with this, we notice a vital defect in Cob- 
 bett's theory of man. He scarcely seems to have risen 
 higher than the conception of him as an animal — a beef- 
 bolting and beer-bibbing animal. If government, and his 
 own strong hand, found him in those articles ; and if Wil- 
 
WILLIAM COBBETT. 3 1 1 
 
 liam Cobbett were permitted to supply him with amuse- 
 ment, besides a little instruction in grammar, in arithmetic, 
 ^and in the evil effects of priestcraft and potatoes, of gin and 
 tea, he might consider himself satisfied. And this was 
 his theory of human life ! this his recipe for human woes! 
 this his mode of filling the infinite cravings of the human 
 heart ! And yet, ere laughing at this " Gospel, according 
 to St Cobbett," and calling it a piggish panacea for a 
 race of erect pigs, let us remember that the utilitarians 
 of our own day do not rise much higher. They trace 
 man's origin from the brutes ; they, by implication, deny 
 his natural superiority to the brutes ; and, consequently, 
 his natural immortality. Denying he was made in God's 
 image, how can they conceive he is ever to reach it ? They 
 systematically overlook his relation to his Maker. They 
 would cut — the puny insects ! — that awful tie which from 
 the beginning has bound our race to the throne of the 
 Eternal ! They would, with insane but impotent hands, 
 quench the only authentic fire of revelation which ever 
 shone from heaven ! They would arrest, if they could, the 
 wheels of that coming One, before whose throne every knee 
 shall bow, and whose authority every tongue shall confess ! 
 They would indeed clothe man with more accomplishments 
 than Cobbett's rude nature recognised ; they would teach 
 man (on the brink of annihilation) to dance, and sing, and 
 play, and recite verses, and babble of green fields, and 
 chatter science, as well as to cat and to drink ; but no more 
 than he would they have him to expand in the prospect, 
 and to shine in the radiance of the future destinies of his 
 immortal being ! In fact, we value Cobbett's theory as the 
 reductio ad absurdam of the utilitarian view ; and we fancy 
 we hear the old Serjeant growling out to those bastards of 
 Bentham — ** If you believe that man is to perish at death, 
 like a pig, why bother yourselves with teaching him lan- 
 guages, music, and science ? Jill his belly, youfoolSy and serui 
 him to sleep" 
 
312 WILLIAM COBBETT. 
 
 But we must not part in bad humour witli Cobbett, nor 
 with anybody else. Pity, after all, is the most appropriate 
 feeling to entertain tOAvards those who judge so meanly of 
 man. And for Cobbett, especially, there are many grounds 
 of excuse — from his early circumstances — from his want 
 of a spiritual education — from the sight of human nature, 
 in its worst forms, which he had in the army — and from 
 the scrambling and precarious life he was compelled to 
 lead afterwards. 
 
 Besides those separate works of his which are so well 
 known, such as his " Cottage Economy," " Legacy to Par- 
 sons," his " Life" of himself, and his " English and French 
 Grammars," &c., we should like to see some judicious hand 
 employed in making selections from the " Register." We 
 despair, indeed, of ever finding the " Beauties of Cobbett" 
 collected into such a nosegay as ladies would like to handle 
 and to smell. Indeed, the term "Beauties of Cobbett" 
 would seem sufiiciently affected and inappropriate. But 
 some one, surely, might give us a collection of Cobbett's 
 " good, strong, and true thiiigs" Nay, let us have some of 
 his shadows, as well as his lights ; some of his racier and 
 more characteristic faults, a prudent selection from his 
 vocabulary of slang, some of his richer passages of egotism, 
 a few of his predictions that have not, and others that have 
 been fulfilled — such a book, in short, as he himself would 
 have acknowledged as a faithful likeness, and as should 
 convey to posterity a just impression of a great English 
 author. 
 
JAMES MONTGOMERY. 313 
 
 JAMES MONTGOMERY. 
 
 Some seven or eiglit years ago, the inhabitants of a large 
 city in the north of Scotland were apprised, by handbills, 
 that James Montgomery, Esq., of Sheffield, the poet, was 
 to address a meeting on the subject of Moravian missions. 
 This announcement, in the language of Dr Caius, " did 
 bring de water into our mouth." The thought of seeing a 
 live poet, of European reputation, arriving at our very door, 
 in a remote corner, was absolutely electrifying. We went 
 early to the chapel where he was announced to speak, and 
 ere the lion of the evening appeared, amused ourselves 
 with watching and analyzing the audience which his cele- 
 brity had collected. It was not very numerous, and not 
 very select. Few of the grandees of the city had conde- 
 scended to honour him by their presence. Stranger still, 
 there was but a sparse supply of clergy, or of the prominent 
 religionists of the town. The church was chiefly filled with 
 females of a certain age, one or two stray " hero wor- 
 shippers " like ourselves, a few young ladies who had read 
 some of his minor poems, and whose eyes seemed lighted 
 up with a gentle fire of pleasure in the prospect of seeing 
 the author of those "beautiful verses on the Grave, and 
 Prayer," and two or three who had come from ten miles 
 off to see and hear the celebrated poet. When he at length 
 appeared, we continued to marvel at the aspect of the plat- 
 form. Instead of being supported by the elite of the city, in- 
 stead of forming a rallying centre of attraction and unity to 
 all who had a sympathy with piety or with genius for leagues 
 round it, a few obscure individuals presented themselves, 
 who seemed rather anxious to catch a little eclat from him, 
 than to delight to do him honour. The evening was rather 
 advanced ere he rose to speak. His appearance, so far as we 
 could catch it, was quite in keeping with the spiritual cast 
 of his poetry. He was tall, thin, bald, with face of sharp 
 
ol4 JAMES MONTGOMERY. 
 
 outline, but mild expression ; and we looked with no little 
 reverence on the eye which had shot fire into the Pelican 
 Island, and on the hand (skinny enough we ween), which 
 had written " The Grave." He spoke in a low voice, sink- 
 ing occasionally into an inaudible whisper : but his action 
 was fiery and his pantomime striking. In the course of his 
 speech he alluded, with considerable effect, to the early 
 heroic struggles of Moravianism, when she was yet alone 
 in the death-grapple with the powers of Heathen darkness, 
 and closed (when did he ever close a speech otherwise ?) by 
 quoting a few vigorous verses from himself. 
 
 We left the meeting, we remember, with two wondering 
 questions in our ears : first, Is this fame ? of what value 
 reputation, which, in a city of seventy thousand inhabitants, 
 is so freezingly acknowledged ? Would not any empty, 
 mouthing charlatan, any "twopenny tear-mouth," any 
 painted, stupid savage, any clever juggler, any dexterous 
 player upon the fiery harp-strings of the popular passions, 
 have enjoyed a better reception than this true, tender, 
 and holy poet? But secondly. Is not this true, tender, 
 and holy poet partly himself to blame ? Has he not put 
 himself in a false position ? Has he not too readily lent 
 himself as an instrument of popular excitement ? Is this 
 progress of his altogether a proper, a poefs progress ? 
 Would Milton, or Cowper, or Wordsworth have submitted 
 to it ? And is it in good taste for him to eke out his ora- 
 tions by long extracts from his own poems ? Homer, it is 
 true, sang his own verses ; but he did it for food. Mont- 
 gomery recites them, but it is for fame. 
 
 We pass now gladly — as we did in thought then — from 
 the progress to the poet-pilgrim himself. We have long 
 admired and loved James Montgomery, and we wept under 
 his spell ere we did either the one or the other. We will 
 not vsoon forget the Sabbath evening — it was in golden 
 summer tide — when we first heard his " Grave" repeated, 
 and wept as we heard it. It seemed to come, as it pro- 
 
JAMES MONTGOMERY. 315 
 
 fessed to come, from the grave itself — a still small voice of 
 comfort and of hope, even from that stern abyss. It was a 
 fine and bold idea to turn the great enemy into a com- 
 forter, and elicit such a reply, so tender and submissive, to 
 the challenge, " Grave, where is thy victory ?" Triumph- 
 ing in prospect over the Sun himself, the grave proclaims 
 the superiority and immunity of the soul — 
 
 " The Sun is but a spark of fire, 
 A transient meteor in the sky; 
 But thou ! immortal as his Sire, 
 Shalt never die." 
 
 Surely no well in the wilderness ever sparkled out to the 
 thirsty traveller a voice more musical, more tender, and 
 more cheering, than this which Montgomery educes from 
 the jaws of the narrow house. Soon afterwards we became 
 acquainted with some of his other small pieces, which then 
 seized and which still occupy the principal place in our re- 
 gards. Indeed, it is on his little poems that the perma- 
 nency of his fame is likely to rest, as it is into them that 
 he has chiefly shed the peculiarity and the beauty of his 
 genius. James Montgomery has little inventive or dra- 
 matic power ; he cannot write an epic ; none of his larger 
 poems, while some are bulky, can be called great; but 
 he is the best writer of hymns (understanding a hymn 
 simply to mean a short religious effusion) in the language. 
 He catches the transient emotions of the pious heart, which 
 arise in the calm evening walk, where the saint, like Isaac, 
 goes out into the fields to meditate ; or under the still and 
 star-fretted midnight ; or on his " own delightful bed ; " or 
 in pensive contemplations of the " Common Lot ;" or under 
 the Swiss heaven, where evening hardly closes the eye of 
 Mont Blanc, and stirs lake Leman's waters with a murmur 
 like a sleeper's prayer : wherever, in short, piety kindles 
 into the poetic feeling, such emotions he catches, refines, 
 and embalms in his snatches of lyric song. As Wordsworth 
 has expressed sentiments which the "solitary lover of 
 
316 JAMES MONTGOMERY. 
 
 nature was unable to utter, save with glistening eye and 
 faltering tongue," so Montgomery has given poetic form 
 and words to breathings and pantings of the Christian's 
 spirit, which himself never suspected to be poetical at all, 
 till he saw them reflected in verse. He has caught and 
 crystallised the tear dropping from the penitent's eye ; he 
 has echoed the burden of the heart, sighing with gratitude 
 to Heaven ; he has ari'ested and fixed in melody the " up- 
 ward glancing of an eye, when none but God is near." In 
 his verse, and in Cowper's, the poetry of ages of devotion 
 has broken silence, and spoken out. Religion, the most 
 poetical of all things, had, for a long season, been divorced 
 from song, or had mistaken pert jingle, impudent fami- 
 liarity, and doggerel, for its genuine voice. It was reserved 
 for the bards of Olney and Sheffield to renew and to 
 strengthen the lawful and holy wedlock. 
 
 Montgomery, then, is a religious lyrist, and as such, is 
 distinguished by many peculiar merits. His first quality 
 is a certain quiet simplicity of language, and of purpose. 
 His is not the ostentatious, elaborate, and systematic sim- 
 plicity of Wordsworth ; it is unobtrusive, and essential to 
 the action of his mind. It is a simplicity, which the dili- 
 gent student of Scripture seldom fails to derive from its 
 pages, particularly from its histories and its psalms. It is 
 the simplicity of a spirit which religion has subdued as well 
 as elevated, and which consciously spreads abroad the wings 
 of its imagination, under the eye of God. As if each 
 poem were a prayer, so is he sedulous that its words be 
 few and well ordered. In short, his is not so much the 
 simplicity of art, nor the simplicity of nature, as it is the 
 simplicity of faith. It is the virgin dress of one of the 
 white-robed priests in the ancient temple. It is a simpli- 
 city which, by easy and rapid transition, mounts into 
 bold and manly enthusiasm. One is reminded of the 
 artless sinkings and soarings, lingerings and hurryings, 
 of David's matchless minstrelsies. Profound insight is 
 
JAMES MONTGOMERY. 317 
 
 not peculiarly Montgomery's forte. He is rather a serajjh 
 than a cherub; rather a burning than a knowing one. 
 He kneels ; he looks upward with rapt eye ; he covers at 
 times his face with his wing ; but he does not ask awful 
 questions, or cast strong though baffled glances into the 
 solid and intolerable glory. You can never apply to him 
 the words of Gray. He never has " passed the bounds of 
 flaming space, where angels tremble as they gaze." He 
 has never invaded those lofty but dangerous regions of 
 speculative thought, where some have dwelt till they have 
 lost all of piety, save its grandeur and gloom. He does 
 not reason, far less doubt, on the subject of religion at all; 
 it is his only to wonder, to love, to weep, and to adore. 
 Sometimes, but seldom, can he be called a sublime writer. 
 In his " Wanderer of Switzerland," he blows a bold horn, 
 but the echoes and the avalanches of the highest Alps will 
 not answer or fall to his reveille. In his " Greenland," he 
 expresses but faintly the poetry of Frost ; and his line is 
 often cold as a glacier. His " World before the Flood" is 
 a misnomer. It is not the young virgin undrowned world 
 it professes to be. In his " West Indies," there is more 
 of the ardent emancipator than of the poet ; you catch but 
 dimly, through its correct and measured verse, a glimpse of 
 Ethiopia — a dreadful appellant, standing with one shackled 
 foot on the rock of Gibraltar, and the other on the Cape of 
 Good Hope, and " stretching forth her hands" to an aveng- 
 ing God. And although, in the horrors of the middle pas- 
 sage, there were elements of poetry, yet it was a poetry 
 which our author's genius is too gentle and timid fully to 
 extract. As soon could he have added a story to Ugolino's 
 tower, or another circle to the Inferno, as have painted 
 that pit of heat, hunger, and howling despair, the hold of 
 a slave vessel. Let him have his praise, however, as the 
 constant and eloquent friend of the negro, and as the lau- 
 reate of his freedom. The high note struck at first by 
 C owper in his lines, '' I would not have a slave," &c., it 
 
318 JAMES MONTGOMERY. 
 
 was reserved for Montgomery to echo and swell up, in re- 
 ply to the full diapason of the liberty of Ham's children, 
 proclaimed in all the isles which Britain claims as hers. 
 And let us hope that he will be rewarded, before the close 
 of his existence, by hearing, though it were in an ear half- 
 shut in death, a louder, deeper, more victorious shout 
 springing from emancipated America, and of saying, like 
 Simeon of old, " Lord, now let thy servant depart in peace, 
 for mine eyes have seen thy salvation." 
 
 The plan of " The Pelican Island" was an unfortunate 
 one, precluding as it did almost entirely human interest, 
 and rapid vicissitude of events ; and resting its power 
 principally upon the description of foreign objects, and of 
 slow though majestic processes of nature. Once, and once 
 only, in this and perhaps in any of his poems, does he rise 
 into the rare region of the sublime. It is in the descrip- 
 tion of the sky of the south, a subject which indeed is itself 
 inspiration. And yet, in that solemn sky, the great con- 
 stellations, hung up in the wondering evening air, the 
 Dove, the Raven, the Ship of Heaven, " sailing from Eter- 
 nity ;" the Wolf, "with eyes of lightning watching the 
 Centaur's spear ; " the Altar blazing, " even at the foot- 
 steps of Jehovah's throne ;" the Cross, " meek emblem of 
 Redeeming love," which bends at midnight as when they 
 were taking down the Saviour of the world, and which 
 greeted the eye of Humboldt as he sailed over the still 
 Pacific, had so hung and so burned for ages, and no poet 
 had sung their praises. Patience, ye glorious tremblers ! 
 In a page of this " Pelican Island," a page bright as your 
 own beams, and like them immortal, shall your splendours 
 be yet inscribed. This passage, which floats the poem, 
 and will long memorize Montgomery's name, is the more 
 remarkable, as the poet never saw but in imagination 
 that unspeakable southern midnight. And yet we are not 
 sure but, of objects so transcendent, the " vision of our 
 own " is the true vision, and the vision that ouojht to be 
 
JAMES MONTGOMERY. 319 
 
 perpetuated in song. For our parts, we, longing as we 
 have ever done to see the Cross of the South, would almost 
 fear to have our longings gratified, and to find the reality, 
 splendid as it must be, substituted for that vast image of 
 bright, quivering stars, which has so long loomed before 
 our imaginations, and so often visited our dreams. Indeed, 
 it is a question, in reference to objects which must, even 
 when seen, derive their interest from imagination, whether 
 they be not best seen by its eye alone. 
 
 Among Montgomery's smaller poems, the finest is the 
 " Stanzas at Midnight," composed in Switzerland, and 
 which we see inserted in Longfellow's romance of Hyperion, 
 with no notice or apparent knowledge of their authorship. 
 They describe a mood of his own mind while passing a night 
 among the Alps, and contain a faithful transcript of the 
 emotions which, thick and sombre as the shadows of the 
 mountains, crossed his soul in its solitude. There are no 
 words of Foster's which to us possess more meaning than 
 that simple expression in his first essay, " solemn medita- 
 tions of the night." Nothing in spiritual history is more 
 interesting. What vast tracts of thought does the mind 
 sometimes traverse when it cannot sleep! What ideas, 
 that had bashfully presented themselves in the light of day, 
 now stand out in bold relief and authoritative dignity ! How 
 vividly appear before us the memories of the past ! How 
 do, alas ! past struggles and sins return to recollection, re- 
 kindling on our cheeks their first fierce blushes unseen in 
 the darkness ! How new a light is cast upon the great 
 subjects of spiritual contemplation ! What a " browner 
 horror " falls upon the throne of death, and the pale king- 
 doms of the grave ! What projects are then formed, what 
 darings of purpose conceived, and how fully can we then 
 understand the meaning of the poet, 
 
 "In lonely glens, amid the roar of rivers, 
 When the still nights were moonless, have I known 
 Joys that no tongue can tell ; my pale lip quivers 
 When thought revisits them !" 
 
320 JAMES MONTGOMERY. 
 
 And when, through the window, looks in on us one full 
 glance of a clear large star, how startlingly it seems, like a 
 conscious, mild, yet piercing eye ; hoAV strongly it points, 
 how soothingly it mingles with our meditations, and, as with 
 a pencil of fire, points them away into still remoter and more 
 mysterious regions of thought ! Such a meditation Mont- 
 gomery has embodied in these beautiful verses : but then 
 HE is up amid the midnight and all its stars ; he is out 
 amid the Alps, and is catching on his brow the living 
 breath of that rarest inspiration which moves amid them, 
 then and then alone. 
 
 We mentioned Cowper in conjunction with Montgomery 
 in a former sentence. They resemble each other in the 
 pious purpose and general simplicity of their writings, but 
 otherwise are entirely distinct. Cowper's is a didactic, 
 Montgomery's a romantic piety. Cowper's is a gloomy, 
 Montgomery's a cheerful religion. Cowper has in him a 
 fierce and bitter vein of satire, often irritating into invec- 
 tive ; we find no traces of any such thing in all Montgo- 
 mery's writings. Cowper's withering denunciations seem 
 shreds of Elijah's mantle, torn ofi" in the fiery whirlwind. 
 Montgomery is clothed in the softer garments, and breathes 
 the gentler genius of the new economy. And as poets, 
 Montgomery, with more imagination and elegance, is en- 
 tirely destitute of the rugged strength of sentiment, the ex- 
 quisite keenness of observation, the rich humour and the 
 awful personal pathos of Cowper. 
 
 Montgomery's hymns (properly so called), we do not 
 much admire. They are adapted, and seem written, for 
 such an assemblage of greasy worshippers, such lank-haired 
 young men, such virgins wise and foolish, such children 
 small and great, as meet to lift up their " most sweet 
 voices" within certain well-known sanctuaries. They have 
 in them often a false gallop of religious sentimentalism. 
 Their unction has been kept too long, and has a savour 
 not of the sweetest : they abound less indeed than many 
 
JAMES MONTGOMERY. 321 
 
 of their class, in such endearing epithets as " dear Lord," 
 "dear Christ," "sweet Jesus," &c. ; but are not entirely free 
 from these childish decorations. That one song, sung by 
 the solitary Jewish maiden in "Ivanhoe" (surely the sweet- 
 est strain ever uttered since the spoilers of Judah did by 
 Babel's streams require of its captives a song, and were 
 answered in that melting melody which has drawn the 
 tears and praises of all time), is worth all the hymn-books 
 that were ever composed, Montgomery's true hymns are 
 those which bear not the name, but which sing, and for 
 ever will sing, their own quiet tune to simple and pious 
 spirits. 
 
 Of Montgomery's prose we might say much that was 
 favourable. It is truly " Prose by a Poet," to borrow the 
 title of one of his works. You see the poet every now and 
 then dropping his mask, and showing himself in his true 
 character. It is enough of itself to confute the vulgar pre- 
 judice against the prose of poets. Who indeed but a poet 
 has ever written, or can ever write good prose, prose that 
 will live ? What prose, to take but one example, is com- 
 parable to the prose of Shakspere, many of whose very 
 best passages — as Hamlet's description of man, FalstafPs 
 death, the speech of Brutus, or that dreadful grace before 
 meat of Timon, which is of misanthropy the quaintest and 
 most appalling quintessence, and seems fit to have preceded 
 a supper in Eblis — are not in verse ? Montgomery's prose 
 criticism we value less for its exposition of principles, 
 or for its originality, in which respects it is deficient, than 
 for its generous and eloquent enthusiasm. It is delightful 
 to find in an author, who had so to struggle up his way to 
 distinction, such a fresh and constant sympathy with the 
 success and the merits of others. In this point he reminds 
 us of Shelley, who, hurled down at one time, by universal 
 acclamation, into the lowest abyss of contempt, both as an 
 author and a man, could look up from it, to breathe sincere 
 admiration toward those who had usurped the place in 
 
 Y 
 
822 JAMES MONTGOMERY. 
 
 public favour to which he was, and knew he was, entitled. 
 We are not reminded of the Lakers, whose tarn-like nar- 
 rowness of critical spirit is the worst and weakest feature 
 in their characters. Truly a great mind never looks so 
 contemptible as when, stooping from its pride of place, it 
 exchanges its own high aspirations after fame for poor 
 mouse-like nibblings at the reputation of others. 
 
 Many tributes have been paid of late years to the " Pil- 
 grim's Progress." The lips of Coleridge have waxed elo- 
 quent in its praise ; Southey and Macaulay have here em- 
 braced each other ; Cheever, from America, has uttered 
 a powerful sound in proclamation of its unmatched merits : 
 but we are mistaken if its finest panegyric be not that con- 
 tained in Montgomery's preface, prefixed to the Glasgow 
 edition. In it all the thankfulness cherished from child- 
 hood, in a poet's and a Christian's heart, toward this benign 
 and beautiful book, comes gushing forth ; and he closes 
 the tribute with the air of one who has relieved himself 
 from a deep burden of gratitude. Indeed, this is the pro- 
 per feeling to be entertained toward all works of genius ; 
 and an envious or malign criticism upon such is not so 
 much a defect in the intellect as it is a sin of the heart. 
 It is a blow struck in the face of a benefactor. A great 
 author is one who presents us with a priceless treasure ; 
 and if we at once reject the boon and spurn the giver, ours 
 is not an error simply, it is a deadly crime. 
 
 The mention of Bunyan and Montgomery in conjunc- 
 tion, irresistibly reminds us of a writer who much resem- 
 bles the one, and into whom the spirit of the other seems 
 absolutely to have transmigrated : we mean Mary Howitt, 
 She resembles Montgomery principally in the amiable 
 light in which she presents the spirit of Christianity. Here 
 the Moravian and the Friend are finely at one. Their 
 religion is no dire fatalism, like Foster's ; it is no gloomy 
 reservoir of all morbid and unhappy feelings, disappointed 
 hopes, baflfled purposes, despairing prospects, turning toward 
 
JAMES MONTGOMERY. 323 
 
 heaven, in their extremity, for comfort, as it is with a very 
 numerous class of authors. It is a glad sunbeam from the 
 womb of the morning, kindling all nature and life into 
 smiles. It is a meek, womanlike presence in the chamber 
 of earth, which meanwhile beautifies, and shall yet redeem 
 and restore it — by its very gentleness righting all its wrongs, 
 curing all its evils, and wiping away all its tears. Had 
 but this faith been shown more fully to the sick soul of 
 Cowper ! were it but shown more widely to the sick soul 
 of earth, 
 
 " Soon 
 Every sprite beneath the moon 
 Would repent its envy vain, 
 And the earth grow young again." 
 
 And how like is Mary Howitt to Bunyan ! Like him, 
 she is the most sublime of the simple, and the most simple 
 of the sublime ; the most literal and the most imaginative 
 of writers. Hers and his are but a few quiet words : but 
 they have the effect of " Open Sesame ;" they conduct 
 into deep caverns of feeling and of thought, to open which 
 ten thousand mediocrists behind are bawling in vain. In 
 "Marien's Pilgrimage" (thanks to the kind and gifted 
 young friend who lately introduced us to this beautiful 
 poem), we have a minor "Pilgrim's Progress," where 
 Christianity is represented as a child going forth on a mis- 
 sion to earth, mingling with and mitigating all its evils ; 
 and is left, at the close, still wandering on in this her high 
 calling. The allegory is not, any more than in Bunyan, 
 strictly preserved ; for Marien is at once Christianity per- 
 sonified and a Christian person, who alludes to Scripture 
 events, and talks in Scripture language ; but the simplicity, 
 the childlikeness, and the sweetness, are those of the 
 gentle dreamer of Elstowe. 
 
 We return to James Montgomery only to bid him fare- 
 well. He is one of the few lingering stars in a very rich 
 constellation of poets. Byron, Coleridge, Southey, Crabbe, 
 
324 SIDNEY SMITH. 
 
 Campbell, Shelley, Keats, are gone : some burst to shivers 
 by their own impetuous motion ; others, in the course of 
 nature, have simply ceased to shine. Three of that cluster 
 yet remain, in Wordsworth, Moore, and Montgomery. Let 
 us, without absurdly and malignantly denying merit to our 
 rising luminaries, with peculiar tenderness cherish these, 
 both for their own sakes, and as still linking us to a period 
 in our literary history so splendid. 
 
 SIDNEY SMITH. 
 
 It is melancholy to observe how speedily, successively, 
 nay, almost simultaneously, our literary luminaries are 
 disappearing from the sky. Every year another and an- 
 other member of the bright clusters which arose about 
 the close of the last, or at the beginning of this century, 
 is fading from our view. Within nineteen years, what 
 havoc, by the "insatiate archer," among the ruling spirits 
 of the time! Since 1831, Robert Hall, Andrew Thomson, 
 Goethe, Cuvier, Mackintosh, Crabbe, Foster, Coleridge, 
 Edward Irving, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Southey, 
 Thomas Campbell, &c., have entered on the " silent land ;" 
 and latterly has dropped down one of the wittiest and 
 shrewdest of them all — the projector of the " Edinburgh 
 Review " — the author of " Peter Plymley's Letters " — the 
 preacher — the politician — the brilliant converser — the 
 " mad wag" — Sidney Smith. 
 
 It was the praise of Dryden that he was the best rea- 
 soner in verse who ever wrote ; let it be the encomium 
 of our departed Sidney that he was one of the best rea- 
 
SIDNEY SMITH. 325 
 
 soners in wit of whom our country can boast. His intel- 
 lect — strong, sharp, clear, and decided — wrought and 
 moved in a rich medium of humour. Each thought, as 
 it came forth from his brain, issued as "in dance," and 
 amid a flood of inextinguishable laughter. The march of 
 his mind through his subject resembled the procession of 
 Bacchus from the conquest of India — joyous, splendid, 
 straggling — to the sound of flutes and hautboys — rather 
 a victory than a march — rather a revel than a contest. 
 His logic seemed always hurrying into the arms of his 
 wit. Some men argue in mathematical formulae ; others, 
 like Burke, in the figures and flights of poetry ; others in 
 the fire and fury of passion ; Sidney Smith in exuberant 
 and riotous fun. And yet the matter of his reasoning 
 was solid, and its inner spirit earnest and true. But 
 though his steel was strong «nd sharp, his hand steady, 
 and his aim clear, the management of the motions of his 
 weapon was always fantastic. He piled, indeed, like a 
 Titan, his Pelion on Ossa, but at the oddest of angles ; he 
 lifted and carried his load bravely, and like a man, but 
 laughed as he did so ; and so carried it that beholders for- 
 got the strength of the arm in the strangeness of the atti- 
 tude. He thus sometimes disarmed anger; for his adver- 
 saries could scarcely believe that they had received a 
 deadly wound while their foeman was roaring in their face. 
 He thus did far greater execution ; for the flourishes of 
 his weapon might distract his opponents, but never him- 
 self, from the direct and terrible line of the blow. His 
 laughter sometimes stunned, like the cachinnation of the 
 Cyclops, shaking the sides of his cave. In this mood — 
 and it was his common one — what scorn was he wont to 
 pour upon the opponents of Catholic emancipation — upon 
 the enemies of all change in legislation-^-upon any indi- 
 vidual or party who sought to obstruct measures which, in 
 his judgment, were likely to benefit the country. Under 
 6uch, he could at any moment spring a mine of laughter ; 
 
326 SIDNEY SMITH. 
 
 and what neither the fierce invective of Brougham nor the 
 light and subtle raillery of JeiFrey could do, his contemp- 
 tuous explosion effected, and, himself crying with mirth, 
 saw them hoisted toward heaven in ten thousand comical 
 splinters. Comparing him with other humorists of a simi- 
 lar class, we might say, that while Swift's ridicule resem- 
 bles something between a sneer and a spasm (half a sneer 
 of mirth, half a spasm of misery) — while Cobbetfs is a grin 
 — Fonblanque's a light but deep and most significant 
 smile — Jeffrey's a sneer, just perceptible on his fastidious 
 lip — Wilson's a strong, healthy, hearty laugh — Carlyle's 
 a wild unearthly sound, like the neighing of a homeless 
 steed — Sidney Smith's is a genuine guffaw, given forth 
 with his whole heart, and soul, and mind, and strength. 
 Apart from his matchless humour, strong, rough, instinctive, 
 and knotty sense was the leading feature of his mind. 
 Everything like mystification, sophistry, and humbug, fled 
 before the first glance of his piercing eye ; everything in 
 the shape of affectation excited in him a disgust ''as im- 
 placable " as even a Cowper could feel. If possible, with 
 still deeper aversion did his manly nature regard cant in 
 its various forms and disguises ; arid his motto in reference 
 to it was, " spare no arrow^s." But the mean, the low, the 
 paltry, the dishonourable, in nations or in individuals, 
 moved all the fountains of his bile, and awakened all the 
 energy of his invective. Always lively, generally witty, 
 he is never eloquent, except when emptying out his vials 
 of indignation upon baseness in all its shapes. His is the 
 ire of a genuine " English gentleman, all of the olden time." 
 It was in this spirit that he recently explained, in his own 
 way, the old distinctions of Meum and Tuum to Brother 
 Jonathan, when the latter was lamentably inclined to 
 forget them. It was the same sting of generous indigna- 
 tion which, in the midst of his character of Mackintosh, 
 prompted the memorable picture of that extraordinary 
 being who, by his transcendent talents and his tortuous 
 
SIDNEY SMITH. 32? 
 
 movements — his head of gold, and his feet of miry clay — 
 has become the glory, the riddle, and the regret of his coun- 
 try, his age, and his species. -j~ 
 
 As a writer. Smith is little more than a very clever, 
 witty, and ingenious pamphleteer. He has effected no 
 permanent chef cV oeuvre ; he has founded no school ; he has 
 left little behind him that the " world will not willingly let 
 die ;" he has never drawn a tear from a human eye, nor 
 excited a thrill of grandeur in a human bosom. His re- 
 views are not preserved by the salt of original genius, nor 
 are they pregnant with profound and comprehensive prin- 
 ciple ; they have no resemblance to the sibylline leaves 
 which Burke tore out from the vast volume of his mind, 
 and scattered with imperial indifference among the nations ; 
 they are not the illuminated indices of universal history, 
 like the papers of Macaulay ; they are not specimens oft 
 pure and perfect English, set with modest but magnifi- | 
 cent ornaments, like the criticisms of Jeffrey or of Hall; 
 nor are they the excerpts, rugged and rent away by violence, 
 from the dark and iron tablet of an obscure and original 
 mind, like the reviews of Foster ; but they are exquisite jewa; 
 d' esprit, admirable occasional pamphlets, which, though now 
 they look to us like spent arrows, yet assuredly have done 
 execution, and have not been spent in vain. And as, after 
 the lapse of a century and more, we can still read with plea- 
 sure Addison's " Old Whig and Freeholder," for the sake 
 of the exquisite humour and inimitable style in which for- 
 gotten feuds and dead logomachies are embalmed, so may it 
 be, a century still, with the articles on B entham's Fallacies 
 and on the Game Laws, and with the letters of the witty and 
 ingenious Peter Plymley. There is much at least in those 
 singular productions — in their clear and manly sense — in 
 their broad native fun — in their rapid, careless, and ener- 
 getic style — and in their bold, honest, liberal, and thoroughly 
 English spirit — to interest several succeeding generations, 
 if not to secure the " rare and regal" palm of immortality. 
 
328 SIDNEY SMITH. 
 
 Sidney Smith was a writer of sermons as well as of poli- 
 tical squibs. Is not their memory eternized in one of John 
 Foster's most ponderous pieces of sarcasm ? In an evil ^. 
 hour the dexterous and witty critic came forth from behind 
 the fastnesses of the Edinburgh Review, whence, in perfect 
 security, he had shot his quick glancing shafts at Metho- 
 dists and Missions, at Christian Observers and Eclectic 
 Reviews, at Owens and Styles, and (what the more wary 
 Jeffrey, in the day of his power, always avoided) became 
 himself an author, and, mirahile dictu, an author of sermons. 
 It was as ifhe wished to give his opponents their revenge ; 
 and no sooner did his head peep forth from beneath the 
 protection of its shell than the elephantine foot of Foster 
 was prepared to crush it in the dust. It was the precise 
 position of Saladin with the Knight of the Leopard, in their 
 memorable contest near the Diamond of the Desert. In 
 the skirmish Smith had it all his own way ; but when it 
 came to close quarters, and when the heavy and mailed 
 hand of the sturdy Baptist had confirmed its grasp on his 
 opponent, the disparity was prodigious, and the discomfiture 
 of the light horseman complete. But why recall the me- 
 mory of an obsolete quarrel and a forgotten field ? The 
 sermons — the causa belli — clever but dry, destitute of ear- 
 nestness and unction — are long since dead and buried ; and 
 their review remains their only monument. 
 
 Even when, within his own stronghold, our author in- 
 termeddled with theological topics, it was seldom with 
 felicity or credit to himself. His onset on missions was a 
 sad mistake ; and in attacking the Methodists, and poor, 
 pompous John Styles, he becomes as filthy and foul-mouthed 
 as Swift himself. His wit forsakes him, and a rabid in- 
 vective ill supplies its place ; instead of laughing, he raves 
 and foams at the mouth. Indeed, although an eloquent and 
 popular preacher, and in many respects an ornament to his 
 cloth, there was one radical evil about Smith ; he had mistaken 
 his profession. He was intended for a barrister, or a lite- 
 
SIDNEY SMITH. 
 
 329 
 
 raiy man, or a member of parliament, or some occupation 
 into which he could have flung his whole soul and strength. 
 As it was, but half his heart was in a profession which, of 
 all others, would require the whole. He became conse- 
 quently a rather awkward medley of buffoon, politician, 
 preacher, literateur, divine, and diner-out. Let us grant, 
 however, that the ordeal was severe, and that, if a very few 
 have weathered it better, many more have ignominiously 
 broken down. jSTo one coincides more fully than we do 
 with Coleridge in thinking that every literary man should 
 have a profession ; but in the name of common sense 
 let it be one fitted for him, and for which he is fitted — 
 one suited to his tastes as well as to his talents — to his 
 habits as well as to his powers — to his heart as well as to 
 his head. 
 
 As a conversationist, Sidney Smith stood high among 
 the highest — a Saul among a tribe of Titans. His jokes 
 were not rare and refined, like those of Rogers and Jekyll ; 
 they wanted the slyness of Theodore Hooke's inimitable 
 equivoque ; they were not poured forth with the prodigal 
 profusion of Hood's breathless and bickering puns ; they 
 were rich, fat, unctuous, always bordering on farce, but 
 always avoiding it by a hair's-breadth. No finer cream, 
 certes, ever mantled at the feasts of Holland House than 
 his fertile brain supplied ; and, to quote himself, it would 
 require a "forty-parson power" of lungs and language to 
 do justice to his convivial merits. An acquaintance of ours 
 sometimes met him in the company of Jeffrey and Macaulay 
 — a fine concord of first-rate performers, content, generally, 
 to keep each within his own part, except when, now and 
 then, the author of the " Lays " burst out irresistibly, and 
 changed the concert into a fine solo. 
 
 Sidney Smith we never saw, and his personnel, therefore, 
 we cannot describe. We always figure him, however, to 
 ourselves as a "round, fat, oily man of God," with a strongly 
 marked forehead, and an unspeakable twinkle in his eye. 
 
330 WILLIAM ANDERSON. 
 
 How far this resembles the original, we leave others to de- 
 termine. Altogether " we could have better spared a 
 better man." Did not his death "eclipse the gaiety of 
 nations?" Did not a Fourth Estate of Fun expire from 
 the midst of us ? Did not even Brother Jonathan drop a 
 tear when he thought that the scourge that so mercilessly 
 lashed him was broken? And shall not now all his ad- 
 mirers unite with us in inscribing upon his grave — " Alas! 
 poor Yorick!" 
 
 WILLIAM ANDERSON, GLASGOW. 
 
 Amid our profusion of sketches, we have never yet per- 
 mitted ourselves to draw a likeness of our venerable father, 
 Samuel Gilfillan of Comrie. We feel at present a strong 
 impulse to do so shortly ; and we know Mr Anderson too 
 well to doubt that he will stand aside gladly for a little, 
 till we limn a yet dearer countenance than his, and analyse 
 a character equally upright and sincere. 
 
 Our father was indeed a very remarkable man. He was 
 not what this fastidious age would call a man of genius, 
 learning, or eloquence ; but for genius he had a genial and 
 impulsive heart — for learning, extensive information — for 
 eloquence, unequalled ease of plain effective address. His 
 form was erect and manly — his brow lofty and marked — 
 his eye quick to restlessness — his hair, as we remember it, 
 tinged with grey — his whole aspect denoting the utmost 
 activity of mind and ardour of character. Though natu- 
 rally impetuous in his temper, and hasty in its expressions, 
 
WILLIAM ANDERSON. 331 
 
 he was one of the most delightful of companions. He was 
 frank to excess — guile had been forgotten in his composi- 
 tion ; he had a childlike gaiety and warmth of manner, 
 from which he rose gently — not, like some, rebounded 
 violently — into dignity ; he was full of talk, and especially 
 of anecdote and allusion, culled from a wide extent of mis- 
 cellaneous reading ; he had a knack, altogether his own, 
 in bringing in his religious views, not like staring strangers, 
 but like welcome and respected guests, into any company 
 and any conversation. He was admirable, too, at adapt- 
 ing himself to all kinds of persons, and had one manner 
 for the peasant, another for his brother-minister, a third 
 for the literary man, a fourth for the religious and high- 
 bred lady, and a fifth for the mere man of the world — yet 
 all natural, easy, and ranking themselves gracefully under 
 the one idiosyncrasy of his character. As a husband and 
 parent, he was affectionate to indulgence. His beaming 
 eye betrayed his deep love — his faltering tones in his Sab- 
 bath-evening addresses to the little circle — the warm pres- 
 sure of his welcoming hand, when any of his family came 
 home from the distant city — ^his all but last look to us as, 
 a few days before his death, he met us returning from the 
 village-library with a precious volume of " Plutarch's 
 Lives" in our hand — his walks with us through the ripe 
 corn-fields of autumn, pouring out the while a stream of 
 information and interesting comment on the objects around 
 — ^the hope and preference, but faintly disguised — even his 
 occasional inequalities of temper, shall all be dear " while 
 memory holds a seat on this distracted globe." As a 
 preacher, he was plain, earnest, serious, always animated, 
 sometimes vehement. All this is true of many preachers 
 besides him ; but few possessed the inexpressible charm, 
 the naivete, the exquisite power of adapting his discourse 
 to every little incident which occurred in the history of 
 his audience, to every smallest surge which took place in 
 its stream. He did not stand up before them as a sublime 
 
332 WILLIAM ANDERSON. 
 
 orator, to fulminate, and fiercely and contemptuously sway 
 — as an eager aspirant for their favourable suffrages, to 
 tickle and to soothe — as the primed mouthpiece of an ela- 
 borate discharge — as a being piercing a lonely way through 
 the thick of his hearers, wondered at, looked after, but not 
 followed (a description this last which some will know 
 how to fit on) ; but as a plain, honest, well-informed, 
 warm-hearted man, conversing on the level of his people, 
 solemnly yet easily, about the matters of their eternity ; 
 and, as the conversation went on, allowing himself the 
 widest range, now beseeching, now threatening, gathering 
 illustrations from every remarkable aspect of the sky above, 
 or any singular incident in his audience below — here quot- 
 ing a verse of poetry which evidently occurred at the mo- 
 ment, there applying an anecdote from his multifarious 
 stores, and here again snatching a shaft from the news- 
 papers of the day, watching the while every countenance, 
 and obliging every one to return the eager glance ; and 
 doing all this with such perfect mastery, and in such evident 
 good faith, as to secure undivided attention, when he did 
 not, as was often the case, awaken deeper emotions — the 
 tears of penitence, the thrill of conviction, the spasm of re- 
 morse, the eager light, forming itself on the upturned coun- 
 tenance, of the "joy that is unspeakable and full of glory." 
 As a writer, he enjoyed more extensive and valuable 
 popularity than perhaps any man in his own body. His 
 works, consisting of papers printed in the " Christian Ma- 
 gazine," and occasional small volumes on religious subjects, 
 were read from Maidenkirk to John o'Groat's, welcomed 
 in many an humble cottage as monthly messengers of glad- 
 ness, and, besides passing through a multitude of impres- 
 sions in this country, translated into French, Dutch, and 
 Kuss. Nor was their popularity to be wondered at, con- 
 sidering their unostentatious and pleasing merits. They 
 were somewhat loosely and illogically comjDOsed ; but so 
 easy in their style, so lucid in their meaning, so short in 
 
WILLIAM ANDERSON. 333 
 
 their structure of sentence, so child-like and Bunyan-like 
 in their tone, so evidently the effusions of an earnest spirit, 
 and sprinkled so knackilj with anecdote, and allusion, and 
 verse, and bits of historic lore, all steeped in genuine 
 Gospel-savour, that we can at once account why readers 
 of all classes and intellects perused them with pleasure and 
 profit. They had no pretension to acute argumentation, 
 or original imagery, or searching thought; but, full of 
 Gospel-marrow and affectionate earnestness, won their 
 way to thousands of pious hearts, and lighted up a lowe of 
 delight on many a cheek, bending at once over the ingle- 
 lUeze and the pleasant page of Leumas. This was his 
 favourite signature, consisting of the letters of his Chris- 
 tian name reversed. 
 
 His death we do well remember, and frequently roll over 
 with melancholy pleasure. He had gone from Comrie to a 
 country hamlet, on a diet (as those occasions were then 
 called) of pastoral visitation. The good people had pro- 
 vided a basket of sloes, knowing his partiality for them. 
 Of these he ate largely, and had scarcely reached home 
 till they affected his system in the shape of severe inflam- 
 mation. This was on Wednesday, the 11th of October, 
 1826. All Thursday and Friday he was in violent an- 
 guish, absolutely shouting for pain, expecting immediate 
 dissolution, and giving advices to his family with aU the 
 earnestness of a dying man. On Saturday there was a 
 delusive pause in the tragedy ; his pains subsided, though 
 the foundation of the disease was not reached ; and he 
 spent the day reading in bed. It was a quiet grey autumn 
 day, and we see him still, self-propped on his pillow, and 
 with eager eye reading " Hervey's Letters," and the Bible. 
 On Sabbath the 15th the dark disease returned to his 
 charge, and would now permit no farther delay. Severe 
 was the struggle, dire the tossings, deep the groans, of this 
 strong man caught in the embrace of one stronger than he. 
 The medical men did their utmost. "We remember seeing 
 
334 WILLIAM ANDERSON. 
 
 a basin of a father's blood, which they had drawn ; we re- 
 member overhearing a consultation among them, the re- 
 sult of which was they could do no more ; we remember 
 the sad silence with which they left the house ; we remem- 
 ber the entrance of members of the family, who had been 
 summoned from a distance to see him ere he died, coming 
 in with red eyes to swell the general grief ; we remember 
 his last exclamation to his nearest earthly relative — " You 
 will be a widow, and a poor widow 1" and her look of calm, 
 speechless sorrow, like that of one seeing from the shore a 
 friend rushing down a remorseless rapid, and his answer- 
 ing glance, expressing, long after he could not speak, a 
 deep interest in her he was leaving, as if even more than 
 his wonted love were glowing in his eye ; we remember 
 the awful hush which reigned throughout the chamber 
 till the presence of death was authentically proclaimed, 
 and the wild sobs which burst out afterwards ; we remem- 
 ber turning round from the deathbed, and looking with a 
 sick and strange emotion to the golden autumn day, the 
 stubble-fields, the lonely hills, the solemn silence of the 
 Sabbath, Avhich seemed to lie in sympathy without ; we 
 remember our first feelings, dreary and desolate beyond 
 expression, on awakening the next morning, and finding 
 ourselves fathe7-less ; and a burst of v/ild grief at the coffin- 
 ing, which shook our young being to its foundations ; and 
 of turning round, in our agony, and gazing through a win- 
 dow northwards, and praying for and almost expecting to 
 see his spirit appearing amid the still moonlight. We 
 need not record how that tumultuous grief gradually sub- 
 sided into a pensive recollection, seated in the heart as 
 much as in the memory, of his dear image — an image which 
 a thousand sunbeams, and showers, and shadows, and sor- 
 rows, and joys, have left uneffaced upon the soul — " It 
 trembles, but it cannot pass away." 
 
 Samuel Gilfillan was a broad-minded, kind-hearted, 
 and thoroughly Christian being. To a greater extent 
 
WILLIAM ANDERSON. 335 
 
 than almost any contemporary in his own church, he had 
 swallowed formulas, forgotten points of distinction, and 
 fastened on points of resemblance between various bodies. 
 Add to this a love for literature, then, as now, rare among 
 Scottish dissenting ministers — a knowledge of many de- 
 partments of the arts and sciences — an impetuous yet holy 
 philanthropy — a generous, self-forgetting enthusiasm — a 
 sympathy with the poor, the neglected, and the forgotten 
 — the principles of a "Whig and something more" — the 
 head, heart, and life of a man and a Christian, and you 
 have the outline of Leumas. 
 
 The parish kirk, near where he lies, is rather a striking 
 object. It stands on a small knoll above the river Earn. 
 It is a whitewashed structure, and its churchyard com- 
 mands a noble prospect. This churchyard, however, 
 would be greatly improved by a circle of trees around it ; 
 for although we do not greatly like the modern style of 
 taste in burying-places — a taste transplanted from the 
 country of Victor Hugo and Voltaire — a taste which has 
 converted graveyards into gardens, sought in vain to dis- 
 guise death and his horrors, and would allow Hervey, 
 were he alive now, to carry on his " Meditations on a 
 Flower- Garden and on the Tombs" in the same place, yet 
 we do stand up for a diadem of trees as the crown of the 
 departed, for a living company over the congregation of 
 the dead, for a speaking as the guardians of a silent multi- 
 tude — their very murmur in the wind, and the ever- renew- 
 ing green of their spring garniture, preaching better than 
 a thousand homilies the truth of resurrection, and return- 
 ing to the question, " Shall these dead live ?" an emphatic 
 and everlasting " Yea." Would that Comrie kirkyard 
 had its synod of trees to whisper this over his dust, whose 
 memory is still cherished amid those pastoral regions with 
 an enthusiasm which is attested by the beaming eye and 
 kindling countenance with which his name is uttered — of 
 one who in all respects realised the poetical pictures of 
 
336 WILLIAM ANDERSON. 
 
 " the good minister " — of one to whom we feel in his se- 
 pulchre all the tenderness of filial affection, and all the 
 reverence of profound esteem — of one who, " having turned 
 many to righteousness, shall shine as the brightness of the 
 firmament, and as the stars^ for ever and ever." 
 
 William Anderson, like the author of this sketch, was 
 born and brought up under the roof and amid the influ- 
 ences of a quiet country Dissenting manse, with this dif- 
 ference, that his excellent father is still alive, and that we 
 lost ours while yet a boy. In Kilsyth, under the shadow 
 of the Campsie Hills, Mr Anderson first breathed the air 
 of life. 
 
 Mr Anderson is a man who has many eccentricities, but 
 all whose oddnesses are cognate with his nature, and do 
 only slenderly disguise it. It is vain to object to the queer- 
 ness of the attitude or action by which the strong man 
 levels you to the dust. In such a case, the smile of 
 laughter might contend with the grin of death. All 
 Glasgow has felt and owned in William Anderson the 
 presence of a strong, simple-minded, clear-visioned, and 
 earnest man, at whom fools might laugh, but whom cold 
 men wondered at, ardent men admired, and wise men 
 understood. 
 
 The Germans were wont to say of Jean Paul Richter 
 that he was the onl?/ one. Among his class, connection, 
 and contemporaries, William Anderson is the onl?/ one. 
 He stands beside or collaterally — quietly, collectedly, and 
 modestly himself. Nor is he a mere made original, a 
 modern antique ; he is one through whose mind all things 
 and thoughts, as they pass, receive a distinct and peculiar 
 tinge, just as light flowing through a painted window ac- 
 complishes the prophecy of the medium, and becomes 
 something finer than itself. Be it that some say that his 
 mind is bended, it is no bend sinister — that his brain is 
 cracked, it is neither the crack of duncedom nor of doom — 
 save to his o];)ponents. 
 
WILLIAxM ANDERSON. 337 
 
 William Anderson possesses the rare quality of power. 
 If he does not make, nor seek to make, he moves^ often 
 without seeking to move. There is sometimes a stormy 
 force about him, which seems superfluous whenever you 
 witness the calm of his better and higher manner, which 
 seems to fold around his audience as completely, irre- 
 sistibly, and tenderly as the blue sky of spring over the 
 mountains and the clouds. Artistic polish or beauty is 
 not often his, but there shines out not unfrequently a 
 stranger and a rarer beauty, that of holiness, from his 
 pages. Something of the sacred fervour, and boldness, 
 and fierceness of the ancient Hebrew mind breathes and 
 burns about him. He has more of the vehemence of the 
 Baptist than of the charity and mildness of the new dispen- 
 sation, save ever and except when children are concerned. 
 Then the old love, which shone in the eye of the Saviour 
 as he said, " Sufl^er the little children to come unto me, and 
 forbid them not," sparkles in his ; and lo ! it is one weaned 
 child discoursing to other weaned children, and from the 
 mouths of babes and sucklings seeking to perfect praise. 
 
 When we speak of Anderson as having more of the old 
 than of the new dispensation, we refer not so much to his 
 views as to his spirit. His views are singularly wide and 
 catholic, so far as the dark and disputed questions in theo- 
 logy are concerned. His heart, too, is warm and generous 
 to a degree. But somehow or other, whether owing to the 
 intense purity of his nature, or to the fervour of his tem- 
 perament, he has fallen at times into outrageous and vio- 
 lent extremes of abuse and invective against those unfortu- 
 nate men who have been led astray by error or vice, par- 
 ticularly if they have published the results of their per- 
 verted powers, and has not unfrequently, instead of leav- 
 ing them and their sins in the hands of their " Father and 
 their God," burst across the limits of the world, anticipated 
 their dooms, and sought to stir into fiercer energy the surge 
 of Almighty vengeance, as if it were slow, sleepy, and 
 
 z 
 
338 WILLIAM ANDERSON. 
 
 reluctant in its movements. He loves, as Charles Lamb 
 says of Southey, " to paint a given king in bliss, and a 
 given chamberlain in torment, even to the eternizing of 
 a cast of the eye in the latter ;" loves to stand by the burn- 
 ing bedsteads of Voltaire, Volney, Rousseau, Burns, and 
 Byron, and interpret the wild Babel of their confused 
 blasphemies and piercing lamentations, forming out of the 
 vague clamours the treble, tenor, counter, and bass of the 
 music of hell. Now, this you might have expected in a 
 fierce inquisitor, forgiven in the worn and desperate Dante, 
 pitied in the narrow and stung Southey ; but in the robust, 
 liberal, and kind-hearted William Anderson, you, or at 
 least we, cannot account for and cannot away with. 
 
 Let us grant, however, that in thus dealing round dam- 
 nation, he is quite impartial. Southey's " Vision of Judg- 
 ment" is just a monstrous binding up of the " Court Calen- 
 dar" with the Book of Life. Our hero does not go over 
 the " Directory" of his city, and jot down his candidates 
 for destruction or salvation, according to their streets or 
 squares. He does not spare the rich transgressor for his 
 wealth, nor the poor sinner for his poverty. Much as he 
 adores genius, he will not permit its painted screen to stand, 
 when it would shade the fierceness of the unquenchable 
 fire — ^he hurls it down straightway. Since Edward Irving 
 died, there has not been pouring from any pulpit such a 
 stream o^ purged perdition. " It is fire and brimstone ^ow 
 the Lord out of Heaven." Still we much prefer, what Mr 
 Anderson also often distils upon his hearers, the soft-drop- 
 ping dew of the Gospel Hermon. 
 
 In many points, Anderson bears a resemblance to Ed- 
 ward Irving. His rich scripturality of quotation, his an- 
 tique cast of phraseology, his long unmeasured sentences, 
 his personal appeals, his sudden short bursts of eloquence, 
 his fearless and sometimes fierce spirit blended with much 
 gentleness, his mixture of cajolerie and real simplicity, his 
 occasional wildness, his sincere and burning enthusiasm. 
 
WILLIAM ANDERSON. 339 
 
 not to speak of his millennial views, render him a striking 
 though smaller similitude of that " Shakspere of preachers" 
 — that embodied flame of meteoric fire, who, like the won- 
 drous tent or temple of electric light we saw lately sus- 
 pended in the sky, hung, broadened, fluctuated, shivered, 
 faded, went out in darkness — the pride, wonder, and terror 
 of our ecclesiastical heavens. 
 
 One quality Mr Anderson possesses, the want of which 
 in Irving was pernicious — we mean, strong manly common 
 sense. An old divine was wont to say, that if you wanted 
 learning — if you wanted even the grace of God — if you 
 wanted anything else, in short, you might get it ; but if 
 you want conunon sense, you will never get it. The most 
 splendid endowments do not compensate for its want ; the 
 most extensive and bitter experience does not communicate 
 it. This pocket-map of man Mr Anderson always carries 
 about with him ; and next to the inestimable divine chart, 
 which no man values more, it has been his most valuable 
 directory, and has saved him harmless where many have 
 sunk to ruin, either been inflated and burst by vanity, or 
 stifiened into salt statues of pride, or gone down the steep 
 places of semi-spiritual semi- sensual destruction. In read- 
 ing Mr Anderson's works, and particularly his volume of 
 sermons issued a few years ago, their main characteristic 
 appears to be akin to this — vigorous, independent, yet cau- 
 tious judgment. The volume contains in it, besides many 
 artistic merits and literary beauties, some highly finished 
 passages, both of reasoning, of fancy, of sarcasm, and of 
 practical appeal. There is, for example, a description of 
 the hypocrite, which might have come from Foster's pen. 
 Passages of similar power has he sprinkled throughout his 
 *' Good Works," on the " Duty of loving God," on the 
 " Evil of Sin," and on the " Reunion of Christian Friends 
 in the Heavenly World." From this last, throughout a 
 piece of fine fancy and feeling, we quote the following 
 touch of real genius : — " Many a mother will not find her 
 
340 WILLIAM ANDERSON. 
 
 son in heaven^ and yet the Saviour will make her happy ; 
 there can be no grief in the Paradise of God, no not even 
 for a perished son. She could not now endure him, and 
 Christ will bring her some other woman's child, who has 
 been seeking for his mother in vain, and He will say 
 * Woman, behold thy son,' and to him ' Behold thy mother,' 
 and the wounds of the hearts of both will be healed." No- 
 thing can be a simpler, yet nothing a finer application of 
 our Saviour's dying words. 
 
 We think, indeed, that if Mr Anderson, in his published 
 works, had been less of a controversialist, and more of an 
 utterer of sweet, musical, and poetical thoughts, such as 
 this we have now quoted, his fame as a writer had been 
 greater than it is. How soon polemical writings die! No 
 one seeks to preserve them, after a certain date, any more 
 than to prop up a fallen thistle or thorn ; but let a flower 
 or a hedge of roses begin to totter to its fall, every passing 
 beggar will become its patron, and discover that there is 
 in his heart some dim instinct of'beauty unknown even to 
 himself. Thus Clark's a priori argument (supposing its 
 credit to fall) would fall amid utter silence, while an attack 
 on the " Romeo and Juliet" of Shakspere would make 
 thousands eloquent, whose very tongues had been proble- 
 matical before. Many even of Protestants would mourn 
 less the want of Chillingworth's work than that of some of 
 the sublime hymns of the Catholic Litany, such as the Dies 
 Irae; and so we would cheerfully have wanted some of Mr 
 Anderson's defences against those who thought him hetero- 
 dox on the points of the "organ" and the " personal reign," 
 rather than those numerous tender and beautiful passages, 
 which illustrate in an uncommon way points common to 
 all Christians. 
 
 Mr Anderson, as a writer, is noted for nerve, contempt 
 of conventionalities, and daring selection of all the words, 
 thoughts, and images which will serve his purpose, culled 
 be they from whatever quarter — from earth, air, sea, 
 
 i 
 
WILLIAM ANDERSON. 341 
 
 heaven, or that "other place." He knows that a true 
 thought, like a true prism, will reflect lights of all kinds 
 and from every quarter. You occasionally find him recol- 
 lecting but never imitating other writers. They are m, but 
 not on and over his eye. Strong and startling as he is 
 sometimes in his expressions, he is seldom wrong m his 
 conclusions. We hear of writers — 
 
 " Ne'er so sure our favour to create, 
 As when they tread the brink of all we hate." 
 
 Mr Anderson is one of this class. He drives his chariot 
 along the brink of a whole chain of precipices, with a suc- 
 cess as perfect as the way is perilous. He seems to love 
 that border-land between truth and error. As you are 
 about to call him an Arminian, he turns round and throws 
 a hlash of Calvinism in your face ; as you are about to 
 charge him with leaning to " universal salvation," he so 
 paints perdition that you seem to hear the roar of its sleep- 
 less fires, and the tossing of the victims on the unmade 
 beds of despair. He does not consider himself bound to 
 reconcile apparently opposite truths, though he is bound 
 to believe both. lie cannot cast a bridge between Ayr 
 and Arran, but he knows that some god or giant yet may. 
 Mr Anderson, as a preacher, has a great variety of styles 
 and manners. He can be, and is, either practical or pro- 
 found — either minute or abstract — either too plain to be 
 pleasant, or too rich and powerful to be plain — either calm 
 or vehement — either commonplace or original. We assisted 
 him lately, and were much interested in the whole ser- 
 vices of the day. His congregation is very large, and is 
 almost — thanks to him — the best singing congregation in 
 Scotland. It was thrilling, almost to the sublime, to hear 
 their morning psalm. His prayers were minute, compre- 
 hensive, and earnest ; his sermon, though not in his highest 
 vein, was interesting and forcible. But the most striking 
 part was his table-service. During the cojisecration prayers 
 
342 WILLIAM ANDE^RSON. 
 
 he holds the elements in his hand. While holding the 
 cup and praying for the coming of Christ — dark, solemn, 
 swarthy as he stood — he reminded us of the " King's cup- 
 bearer." The large assembly seemed eating and drinking 
 consciously under the shadow of the coming chariot ; and 
 if the morning psalm approached the sublime, the evening 
 anthem, sung by the whole congregation standing, exceeded 
 it, and rose to the sublime of dreams, when our vision of 
 the night is heaven. 
 
 Mr Anderson's delivery does not add at all to the im- 
 pression of his matter. It is rather slow and drawling ; 
 his accent and pronunciation are of Kilsyth in the last cen- 
 tury ; his tone is rather nasal, his gesture ungraceful. When 
 he rises, however, into his true power, all this is forgotten 
 in the animation, the forceful bursts, the impassioned truth 
 of a genuine natural orator. The air of eld, too, which 
 breathes around his style, language, appearance, and ad- 
 dress, adds a tart peculiarity to the whole, and you are 
 carried back to the days of Cameron and Ren wick. What 
 a hill-preacher would he have made, as the enemy was 
 coming up, or as a thunderstorm was darkening over the 
 heads of the assembly! 
 
 As a public and platform man, William Anderson exerts 
 great power in Glasgow. Every one believes him sincere, 
 and every one knows him to be one of the ablest, readiest, 
 and raciest of speakers. Here, too, all his strength, im- 
 petuosity, and earnestness, are under the control of discre- 
 tion and sound judgment. His appearance is singular, if 
 not fine. His features are plain, his face is slightly marked 
 with the small-pox, his complexion is dark, but his eye, 
 from its expression of blended sagacity and benevolence, 
 redeems the whole. In private he is homely, social, kindly, 
 full of matter, especially of anecdote and incident illustra- 
 tive of life and character — proner to praise than blame — 
 and, with all his sagacity, simple as a child. Music and 
 infancy are the two mild hobbies he loves to ride, and long 
 
WILLIAM ANDERSON. 343 
 
 may lie ride them ! Like many other men of mark, he has 
 had to fight his way. He was long a wonder unto many. 
 The foolish laughed at, the malignant defamed, the hyper- 
 critical underrated him, and from his peers he received 
 little sympathy or support. But, like all the brave, he 
 struggled on, and was rewarded with victory. His popu- 
 larity, at first excited by the eccentricities, was at last al- 
 lowed calmly to rest on the excellence of his preaching and 
 character. " Those who came to laugh remained to pray," 
 personal and party prejudice was gradually subdued, his 
 oddities mellowed and softened with time, and we may now 
 as safely as we can conscientiously declare, that the United- 
 Presbyterian Church, with all its host of talented men, 
 possesses scarcely one who equals in genius, and very few 
 who surpass in talent, plain, strong, gifted William Ander- 
 son. 
 
 We may just add that Mr Anderson, although not dis- 
 tinguished for pastoral visitation, is most exemplary in 
 waiting on the sick-bed. We heard recently a rather amus 
 ing anecdote of him. Some person called, complaining that 
 he had been eighteen years a member of his congregation 
 and had never been visited by his minister. " You should 
 be very thankful," replied Mr Anderson. " How that, 
 sir?" rejoined Mr B. *' I never visit any but thos© in 
 whose houses God has entered by afiliction. It seems you 
 have been eighteen years without afiliction in your family ; 
 few are so highly privileged. I trust other eighteen years 
 may elapse ere I be in your house, sir. Good morning, Mr 
 B." So may all querulous Bs or blockheads be treated ! * 
 
 * Mr Anderson is just issuing a volume on " Regeneration," which 
 we expect to be quite worthy of him. 
 
344 LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 LEIGH PIUNT. 
 
 The present state of poetry is a subject on which a great 
 deal of nonsense has been written, and on which a greater 
 deal still of nonsense is every day spoken. " We have no 
 poets now-a-days," is the chatter at many a tea-table^ — a 
 chatter which a glance at a few of the present names 
 " flaming on the forehead" of our literary sky, is enough 
 to confute. Beside such veterans as Wordsworth, Wilson, 
 Croly, Montgomery, and our present subject, Leigh Hunt, 
 who are now rather honorary -than active members of the 
 corporation of Apollo, there are numerous aspirants of the 
 laurel, of whom high hopes may be entertained. There is 
 especially a little cluster of earnest poets whom we are at all 
 times delighted to honour, and some of whom we may now 
 briefly characterise, as an introduction not inappropriate to 
 a notice of one who long ago, and in days darker than 
 these, set them a good example, and who then stood almost 
 singular in adding the spirit of the martyr to the accom- 
 plishments of the muses' son. 
 
 We may name, then, Longfellow, Emerson, Bailey, 
 Tennyson, and the Brownings, as the Dii Majorum Gentum 
 of this modern class. 
 
 We name flrst the American poet, Longfellow. We 
 know nothing whatever of his theoretical creed, but we 
 are not blind to the marks of sincerity and of high-minded 
 aspiration which pervade his poetry. He feels what Fos- 
 ter uniformly forgets or denies, the worth of man. He 
 looks at the ruins of the human soul in a certain rich 
 moonlight which softens many an asperity, fills up many a 
 chasm, symmetrises many a disproportion, and sheds a soft 
 golden film, a gossamer of the night, over the whole. His 
 eye, too, is anointed to see innumerable fine and fairy hands 
 
LEIQH HUNT. 345 
 
 repairing the desolation, as well as beautifying its decay. 
 " It is a little thing to be a man," Yes, comparatively it 
 is ; but whence springs the smallness ? Surely from the 
 greatness of the height whence we have fallen, and to 
 which we are invited to aspire. Life and man, like the 
 Jura in the presence of Mont Blanc, dwindle before a 
 greater, which greater in this case is the grandeur of man's 
 ideal of himself and of God. It is little to be, it is far less 
 to doubt of man. Spring but this one leak, and what a black 
 flood of scepticism rushes in — death is regarded with the 
 avidity of a suicide, and it is weU if the Foster does not 
 darken into the Swift. 
 Hear Longfellow : — 
 
 " Not enjoyment and not sorrow 
 Is our being's destined way ; 
 But to live that each to-morroAv 
 Finds us farther than to-day." 
 And again: 
 
 " Life is real, life is earnest, 
 
 And the grave is not its goal : 
 
 ' Dust thou art, to dust returnest,' 
 
 Was not spoken of the soul." 
 
 Such manly lines, rising clear, loud, and bold, like the 
 notes of Chanticleer, dissipate a thousand dismal dreams 
 and terrors of the night. They are not the day, but they 
 are its promise. What we miss in Longfellow is a decided 
 acknowledgment of the realisation which such sentiments 
 as his find in Christianity. His verses are torn from their 
 proper Christian context. Now, a few fresh leaves snapped 
 from the bough may tell that spring has come, but we pre- 
 fer the full tidings of the round tree itself. 
 
 In Emerson we find, amid more power, originality, and 
 perhaps equal sincerity, a more palpably vital defect. What 
 the " hope set before " him in his melancholy gospel is we 
 cannot tell. In his " Threnody " he laments most sweetly 
 and plaintively the loss of a favourite son, and hints at 
 
346 
 
 LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 some obscure and mystic source of consolation, described 
 in the words, that his child is " Lost in God, in Godhead 
 found." Alas ! can he allow his child, with his glorious 
 personality, to slide away into a vague, vast ocean, even as 
 his own dreams among the " blackberry vines " did leave 
 his soul, with no trace behind ? Can he part with a son as 
 with a thought ? Can he believe that the soul which, as it 
 looked through the "blue summer" of his child's eyes, 
 seemed to " span the mystic gulph 'tween God and man," 
 is henceforth an unconscious nonentity, somewhere in the 
 eternal spaces, but with no spring of return to him, and no 
 prospect of encounter with him, save in the cold commerce 
 of the waves of the Pantheistic deep ? Or if he has, apart 
 from this dreary dream, a principle of hope and comfort, is 
 there no word in the ample tongue of Milton and Cole- 
 ridge that can express this hope ? and if there be, why does 
 he delay to inform us what we are to substitute for the 
 simple declaration, " Them that sleep in Jesus shall the 
 Lord bring with him ? " Indeed, over all Emerson's poems, 
 and over those of many of his followers, there hangs a 
 deep gloom. His fun, when he attempts to be humorous, 
 is dull and feeble. It is the drone of the " humble bee," 
 which is quite as melancholy as it is mirthful. He is 
 never so eloquent as when expressing the feelings of one 
 who, from the pursuits of ambition, and the company of 
 men, has sought a sad solace in Nature, which yet without 
 a God can only glare and glitter about his eye and imagi- 
 ation, but not touch his heart. His personal purity, which 
 is that of a guarded dewdrop — has saved him from many 
 pains and penalties ; but we do think that it is the subtlety 
 which so strangely mingles with the simplicity of his na- 
 ture, like the eye of the basilisk looking out from the 
 silvery plumage of the dove, which has veiled from many 
 the fact that he is not a happy man. 
 
 No wonder although, according to a certain rumour, 
 Emerson does not fuUy sympathise with Bailey of "Festus." 
 
LEIGH HUNT. 347 
 
 How can lie ? How can a man who manages his misery so 
 artfully that the deep scar looks like a badge of honour 
 upon his bosom — who can regulate, turn, and wind his 
 madness like a watch — sympathise with one who, with the 
 power and precipitation of a thunder-shower, expresses his 
 whole soul to the world in tumultuous verse? How stiff 
 and measured the extravagances (madness prepense) of 
 Emerson look beside Baile/s unpremeditated hallelujahs! 
 In Emerson you hear a man crying " down" to the idea of 
 a personal deity, which is for ever rising in his truly poeti- 
 cal heart ; to Bailey the universe is but a reflector for the 
 face of a Saviour and God. In Emerson you find a nature, 
 originally poetic and even devout, chilled and strangled by 
 the frost of an imperfect philosophy (as though an eagle on 
 his way to the sun were killed by the cold of our upper at- 
 mosphere); in " Festus" faith is the philosophy, hope is 
 the science, and love the logic of the strain. In Emerson's 
 verse, truth lurks like a guilty thing in single lines, which 
 are rather pinfolds than panoramas ; Bailey's broad nature 
 luxuriates in long, interlinked, and magnificent passages, 
 which rise and rise till no wing short of that of imagination 
 can reach and rest upon their summit. 
 
 Leaving comparisons, we may simply say that, in the 
 two qualities of impulse and earnestness, we have seldom 
 read a work to be compared with " Festus." We care no- 
 thing for its theory — admit its many and monstrous faults 
 — are not careful to answer the charge of imitation in its 
 plan — but the vigour of individual thought, the amplitude 
 of general view, and wealth of imagery — the rough strength 
 of language, and, above all, the deep, sparkling, " blood- 
 power of spirit," so religious and so fervidly sincere, have 
 compelled, like a captive, our at first unwilling admiration. 
 It now resounds in our ears like the Pan-pipe of a belated 
 Titan from his lonely rock, at once bewailing the past, 
 and calling, in no measured strains, for the advent of the 
 future. 
 
348 LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 Of Browning, Mrs Browning, and Tennyson, we need 
 hardly speak, so well are they known and so thoroughly ap- 
 preciated by the lovers of poetry in Britain. Tennyson of 
 the three is the most purely poetical, and perhaps the least 
 prophetic in spirit or purpose. He may be compared to Ariel 
 in the " Tempest." Ariel can pluck up cedars by the roots, 
 but prefers swinging in the blossom which hangs from the 
 bough. He can back and bridle the fiery steed of the 
 lightning, but prefers sucking in time and tune with the 
 sucking bee. He can " flame amazement" over a crowded 
 ship, but would rather fly on the bat's back in the still 
 evenings of summer. From tasks at once mighty and deli- 
 cate, requiring both infinite power and infinite tact, he 
 springs gladly to the more congenial pursuits of an eternity 
 of busy and merry idleness. So Tennyson, with powers 
 which, as Carlyle once said, "might move the world," 
 condescends sometimes to play tricks, to sing snatches, to 
 waver in beautiful gyrations, like the down of the thistle, 
 instead of going straight to his mark, like an arrow or a 
 thunderbolt. In both the Brownings, but especially in the 
 lady, we find a more powerful and condensed purpose, 
 united to imagination of almost equal brilliance. There is 
 in her no dallying with her theme — no drawing back from 
 her pictures, as a painter does to try the effect — no " stay- 
 ing her thunder in mid volley." She is in evident and 
 deep earnest. Each theme sits before her, as a ghost might 
 be supposed to sit before a limner — at once shuddering and 
 admiring ; and you fancy her, at the close, falling back 
 exhausted and trembling, after her faculties had been tasked 
 to their utmost in that unearthly sitting. Seldom has wo- 
 man had a higher or more masculine message to deliver. 
 Yet sorrow hovers over the sublimity of her strains, " like 
 the soft shadow of an angel's wing," and the knowledge she 
 has gained, and the power of moving us she exerts, have 
 been bought at their weight, not in gold, but in fire. 
 
 It is pleasant, in some moods, to pass from these poets, 
 
LEIGH HUNT. 349 
 
 with their passionate, or fierce, or heroic attitudes, to 
 the blended ease and earnestness of Leigh Hunt. He 
 stands among them like an oak amidst the surrounding 
 pines, or birches, or sensitive plants, less tremulous, 
 dark, drooping^ or defiant, to every breath of heaven, but 
 greener, ampler, calmer, albeit ready always to resist 
 strono; aocorression, as well as to shade unassuminor merit. 
 If they aspire to the rank of prophets, he is a patriarch, 
 seated and uttering gentle yet profound responses at his 
 tent-door. 
 
 The highest compliment ever paid to Hunt is, perhaps, 
 that of Byron, who, after a furious and vulgar diatribe 
 against him, owns him to be a " good man." This may 
 seem poor praise, but a cold shower-bath from Hecla were 
 less astonishing than the acknowledgment of any human 
 virtue from the mouth of a man who had set himself ela- 
 borately to erase each vestige of goodness from his own 
 character, and had well nigh succeeded — who had nearly 
 completed an exchange between his heart and the " nether 
 millstone," — and whose praises of all but his personal 
 friends came forth rare and reluctant, as do the audible 
 groans of his proud spirit. Hunt's goodness and talent he 
 always admitted — and with regard to the charge of vul- 
 garity, which now, at this distance of time, is the vulgar 
 person of the two ? Hunt's vulgarity is that of circum- 
 stances and education, Byron's was ingrained in his nature 
 — and neither the Highlands, with their grandeur, nor 
 Holland House, with its varied and brilliant converse, nor 
 Italy, with the recherche society of its better classes, were 
 able to erase the original stamp of the degraded and black- 
 guard lord, which had been transmitted from generations 
 downwards, till it was fortunate in his countenance to meet 
 and contend with the blaze of genius and the pale impress 
 of coming death. 
 
 In om* notion, Thomas Macaulay is an infinitely more 
 vulgar person than Leigh Hunt or even Lord Byron — i^ 
 
350 LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 vulgarity mean the want of all those qualities which go 
 to constitute a gentleman. Our readers, in illustration of 
 this, may take the following anecdote, which we know to 
 be correct. A writer who had, some year or two ago, 
 rather severely, although with a friendly/eeling, criticised 
 Macaulay in one of our leading periodicals, chanced to read 
 Croker's assault upon his " History of England" in the 
 " Quarterly." Struck with its unfairness and with the 
 animus which pervaded it, he wrote Mr Macaulay a note, 
 couched in the most respectful terms, not retracting his 
 former statements, but expressing a manly sympathy with 
 him under an unjust attack. He was not a little surprised 
 to receive an extremely harsh and contemptuous reply, in 
 which the Edinburgh ex-member told his correspondent 
 that he cared neither for his blame nor his praise. Had the 
 writer been a clamorous petitioner for his pelf or his praise 
 — had he approached him in an unfriendly guise, and with 
 unfriendly language, or had he been base enough to have 
 flattered the man whom he had criticised, he could have 
 accounted for such treatment ; as it was he was forced to 
 regard it as a breach of the laws of common courtesy, as a 
 specimen of the wretched airs of aristocracy which upstarts 
 often assume — as the action of a coxcomb, not a gentleman — 
 and we understand told the historian so in language which 
 he is not likely soon to forget or to forgive. Leigh Hunt is 
 incapable, both from geniality and gentlemanly feeling, of 
 such conduct as this. He always dips his pen in a reser- 
 voir compounded of warm blood and of the milk of human 
 kindness. This element, indeed, bathes his whole being 
 and person. It swims in his restless eye — it throbs in his 
 hot hand — it, and not age's winter, seems to have whitened 
 his locks — it gushes out in the jets and sparkles of his con- 
 versation, which is yet evidently only the relick of what it 
 was in earlier times — and it is the mild or mirthful in- 
 spiration of his various writings. 
 Had Hunt been a less sincere and simple-minded person 
 
LEIGH HUNT. 351 
 
 than he has been, he might, we think, have been quite as 
 popular a writer as Thomas Moore. He has the champagne 
 qualities of that writer, without, indeed, so many or such 
 brilliant bubbles of wit and fancy upon the top — and has a 
 world more of body, solidity, and truth. It is his as- 
 suming the fairy shape, that has made some (ourselves 
 at one time included) to underrate his powers. But why 
 did he assume it? Why did he, like the devils in Milton, 
 shrink his stature to gain admission to the halls of Pande- 
 monium? Why did he not rather, in dignified humility, 
 wait without as he was till the great main door was opened, 
 and till in full size and panoply he entered in, and sat down 
 a giant among giants, a god amidst gods? In such figured 
 language we convey our notion at once of Hunt's strength 
 and weakness. He has been, partly owing to circumstances 
 and partly to himself, little other than a glorious trifler. 
 He has smiled, or lounged, or teased, or translated, away 
 faculties which, with proper concentration and a perpetual 
 view toward one single object, had been incalculably bene- 
 ficial to the general progress of literature and of man. 
 
 Moore again seems made for trifling. It is his element. 
 The window pane being his world, may we not call him the 
 fly? His love is skin-deep; his anger, too, is a mere itch 
 on the surface ; his patriotism is easy, beginning and end- 
 ing at the piano ; his friendship all oozes out in a memoir 
 of his departed friend ; his hatred is exhausted in a single 
 satire; and even his melody, while suiting the ivory keys 
 of Lady Blessington's harpsichord, shrinks from the full 
 diapason of the organ or the terrible unity of the fife ; he 
 has no powers which earnestness would much care to 
 challenge as her own. Hunt, on the contrary, has put 
 martial faculties upon perpetual parade — they have walked 
 to and fro to beautiful music, but they have rarely mounted 
 the breach, or even seen the enemy. This has not sprung 
 either from the want of power or of courage, but from a 
 kind of amiable ease of temperament, and, perhaps, also 
 
252 LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 from a defect of constitutional stamina. A soul of fire has 
 been yoked to a nervous and feeble constitution. 
 
 We can hardly charge the author of forty volumes with 
 having written little, but, perhaps, there is not one among 
 all those volumes to which you can point as entirely worthy, 
 and fully reflective, of the powers which are visible in all. 
 Throughout them all you have a beautiful diffusion — over 
 many of them hangs a certain weary langour — in some 
 you are saluted with an explosion of wit like the crackers 
 of a birth-night — and the otliers are full of a pensive poetry, 
 tremulous with sentiment, and starred with the strangest 
 and most expressive epithets. Heart, geniality, humanity, 
 and genius pervade the whole. 
 
 Altogether, we cannot but look upon Hunt's present 
 position as an enviable and fortunate one. He is in the 
 evening of his days, but at evening time it is light with 
 him ; he has outlived many a struggle ; he has survived a 
 storm in which many larger ships were wrecked ; he has 
 not now a single enemy ; his name is a household word 
 throughout the world ; his fame is dear to every lover of 
 poetry and of liberty ; the government of his country has 
 appreciated and rewarded his services. Whatever of the 
 fierce or bitter circumstances had infused into his mind 
 has now been extracted. Above all, milder and juster 
 views of Christianity, its claims and character, seem enter- 
 ing his mind. We will not, therefore, close by wishing 
 him happiness — it is his, we trust, already — but by wishing 
 him long life to enjoy the meek and bright sunset of his 
 chequered and troublous day.* 
 
 * We owe our readers an apology for the brief notices this article 
 contains of authors elsewhere in the book characterised at large. 
 They belonged to the article, and we could not prevail on ourselves 
 to erase them. 
 
THOMAS MOORE. 353 
 
 THOMAS MOOEE. 
 
 To be the poet 77a?' excellence of Ireland, the cleverest man 
 in the cleverest nation in the world, is to hold no mean po- 
 sition, and that position we claim for Thomas Moore. We 
 do not of course mean that he is by many degrees the great- 
 est poet at present alive ; but for sparkle, wit, and brilliance, 
 his country's qualities, he is unsurpassed. The bard of the 
 butterflies, he is restless, gay, and gorgeous as the beauti- 
 ful creatures he delights to depict. It would require his 
 own style adequately to describe itself. Puck putting a 
 girdle round about the globe in forty minutes — Ariel doing 
 his spiriting gently — the Scotch fairy footing it in the 
 moonlight, the stillness of which seems intended to set 
 off the lively and aerial motion — any of these figures may 
 faintly express to us the elegant activities of Moore's mind 
 and fancy. We are never able to disconnect from his 
 idea that of minuteness. Does he play in the " plighted 
 clouds?" It is as a " creature of the element," as tiny as 
 he is tricksy. Does he flutter in the sunbeam ? It is as 
 a bright mote. Does he hover over the form and face of 
 beauty ? It is as a sylph-like sprite, his little heart sur- 
 charged and his small wings trembling with passion. 
 Does he ever enter on a darker and more daring flight ? 
 It is still rather the flight of a fire-fly than of a meteor 
 or a comet. Does he assail powers and potentates ? It is 
 with a sting rather than a spear — a sting small, sharp, 
 bright, and deadly. 
 
 Thomas Moore is a poet by temperament, and by intel- 
 ect a wit. He has the warmth and the fancy of the 
 poet, but hardly his powerful passion, his high solemn 
 imagination or his severe unity of purpose. His verses, 
 therefore, are rather the star-dust of poetry than the 
 sublime thing itself. Every sentence he writes is poetical, 
 but the whole is not a poem. The dancing lightness of 
 
 2 a 
 
354 THOMAS MOORE. 
 
 his motion affects you with very different feelings from 
 those with which you contemplate the grave walk of di- 
 dactic or the stormy race of impassioned poetry. You are 
 delighted, you are dazzled ; you wonder at the rapidity 
 of the movements, the elegance of the attitudes, the per- 
 fect self-command and mastery of the performer; you 
 cry out " Encore, encore," but you seldom weep ; you do 
 not tremble or agonise ; you do not become silent. Did 
 the reader ever feel the blinding and giddy effect of level 
 winter sunbeams pouring through the intervals of a rail- 
 ing as he went along ? This is precisely the effect which 
 Moore's rapid and bickering brilliance produces. Our 
 mental optics are dazzled, our brain reels, we almost 
 sicken of the monotonous and incessant splendour, " dis- 
 tinct but distant, clear, but ah, how cold!" 
 
 Our great quarrel with Moore's poetry, apart from its 
 early sins against morality and good taste, is its want of 
 deep earnestness and of high purpose. Not more trivial 
 is the dance of a fairy in the pale shine of the moon, than 
 are the majority of his poems. And though he did belong 
 to that beautiful family, he could not in his poetry meddle 
 less with the great purposes, passions, and destinies of 
 humanity. What to him are the ongoings and future 
 prospects of what Oberon so finely calls the " human mor- 
 tals?" He must have his dance and his song out. We 
 believe that Thomas Moore is a sincere lover of his kind, 
 and has a deep sympathy with their welfare and progress, 
 but we could scarcely deduce this with any certainty from 
 his serious poetry. Indeed, the term serious, as applied 
 to his verse, is a total misnomer. Byron's poetry has 
 often a sincerity of anguish about it which cannot be mis- 
 taken ; he howls out, like the blinded Cyclops, his agony to 
 earth and heaven. The verse of Wordsworth and Cole- 
 ridge is a harmony solemn as that of the pines in the 
 winter blast. Elliott's earnestness is almost terrific. But 
 Moore flits, and flutters, and leaps, and runs, a very Peri, 
 
THOMAS MOORE. 355 
 
 but who shall never be permitted to enter the paradise of 
 highest song, and to whom the seventh heaven of invention 
 is shut for ever. 
 
 It were needless to dilate upon the beauties which he 
 has scattered around him in this unprofitable career. His 
 fancy is prodigious in quantity and variety, and is as 
 elegant as it is abundant. Image3 dance down about us 
 like hailstones, illustrations breathlessly run after and 
 outrun illustrations, fine and delicate shades melt into 
 others still finer and more delicate, and often the general 
 effect of his verse is like that of a large tree alive with 
 bees, where a thousand sweet and minute tones are 
 mingled in one hum of harmony. Add to this his free 
 flow of exquisite versification, the richness of his luscious 
 descriptions, the tenderness of many of his pictures, and 
 the sunny glow, as of eastern day, which colours the 
 whole, and you have the leading features of his poetical 
 idiosyncrasy. 
 
 But it is as a wit and a satirist that Moore must sur- 
 vive. There is no " horse play in his raillery." It is as 
 delicate as it is deadly. He carves his foeman as a " dish 
 fit for the gods, not hews him as a carcass meet for 
 hounds." Such a gay gladiator, such a smiling murderer 
 as he is! How small his weapon — how elegant his 
 flourishes — how light but sinewy his arm — and how soon 
 is the blow given — the deed done — the victim prostrate ! 
 His strokes are so keen that ere you have felt them you 
 have found death. He is an aristocratic satirist not only 
 in the objects but in the manner of his attack. Coarse 
 game would not feel that fine tremulous edge by which 
 he dissects his highbred and sensitive foes to the quick. 
 We notice, too, in his sarcastic vein, and this very pro- 
 bably explains its superiority, a much deeper and heartier 
 earnestness. When he means to be serious he trifles, 
 when he trifles it is that he is most sincere. His work is 
 play, his play is work. All his political feeling — all the 
 
356 THOMAS MOORE. 
 
 moral indignation he possesses — all the hatred which as 
 an Irishman and a gentleman he entertains for insincerity, 
 humbug, and selfishness in high places — come out through 
 the veil of his witty and elegant verse. Of a great sa- 
 tirist, only one element seems wanting in Moore, namely, 
 that cool concentrated malignity which inspires Juvenal 
 and Junius. He hates, they loathe. He tickles his op- 
 ponent to death, they tear him to pieces. His arrows are 
 polished, theirs are poisoned. His malice is that of a man, 
 theirs is that of a demon. His wish is to gain a great end 
 over the bodies of his antagonists, their sole object is to 
 destroy or blacken the persons of their foes. His is a pub- 
 lic and gallant rencounter, theirs a sullen and solitary 
 assassination. 
 
 Moore may be regarded under the four phases of an 
 amatory poet, a narrative poet, a satirical poet, and a 
 prose writer. As an amatory poet he assumed, every one 
 knows, the nom-de-guerre of Tommy Little, and as such 
 do not his merits and demerits live in the verse of Byron 
 and in the prose of Jeffrey ? These poems, lively, gay, 
 shallow, meretricious, were the sins of youth ; they were 
 not, like " Don Juan," the deliberate abominations of guilty 
 and hardened manhood. Their object was to crown vice, 
 but not to deny the existence of virtue. They were un- 
 justifiably warm in their tone and colouring, but they did 
 not seek to pollute the human heart itself. It was re- 
 served for a mightier and darker spirit to make the des- 
 perate and infernal attempt, and to include in one " wide 
 waft" of scorn and disbelief the existence of faithfulness 
 in man and of innocence in woman. Little's lyrics, too, 
 were neutralised by their general feebleness ; they were 
 pretty, but wanted body, unity, point, and po.ver. Con- 
 sequently, while they captivated idle lads and lovesick 
 misses, they did comparatively little injury. It is indeed 
 ludicrous, looking back through the vista of forty years, 
 and thinking of the dire puddle and pother which such 
 
THOMAS MOORE. 357 
 
 tiny transgressions produced among the critics and moral- 
 ists of the time ; they seem actually to have dreamed that 
 the morality of Britain, which had survived the dramatists 
 of Queen Elizabeth's day, the fouler fry of Charles II.'s 
 playwrights, the novels of Fielding and Smollett, the nu- 
 merous importations of iniquity from the Continent, was 
 to fall before a few madrigals and double-entendres. No, 
 like " dew-drops from the lion's mane," it shook them off, 
 and pursued its way without impediment or pause. What- 
 ever mischief was intended, little we are sure was done. 
 
 As a narrative poet, Moore aimed at higher things, 
 and, so far as praise and popularity went, with triumph- 
 ant success. His ** Lalla Rookh" came forth amid a hum of 
 general expectation. It was rumoured that he had written 
 a great epic poem ; that Catullus had matured into Ho- 
 mer. These expectations were too sanguine to be realised. 
 It was soon found that "Lalla Rookh" was no epic — was not 
 a great poem at all — that it was only a short series of 
 Oriental tales, connected by a slight but exquisite frame- 
 work. Catullus, though stripped of many of his voluptu- 
 ous graces, and much of his false and florid taste, remained 
 Catullus still. And the greatest admirer of the splendid 
 diction, the airy verse, the melodramatic incident, the 
 lavish fancy of the poem, could not but say, if the com- 
 parison came upon his mind at all — " Ye critics, say how 
 poor was this to Homer's style ! " The unity, the compact- 
 ness, the interest growing to a climax, the heroic story, the 
 bare and grand simplicity of style — all the qualities we ex- 
 pect in the epic, were wanting in " Lalla Rookh." It was 
 not so much a poem, indeed, as a rhymed romance. Still 
 its popularity was instant and boundless. If it did not 
 become a g ;eat, still, steadfast luminary in the heaven of 
 song, it flashed before the eye of the world brief, beauti- 
 ful, gorgeous, and frail — 
 
 " A tearless rainbow, such as span 
 The unclouded skies of Peristan." 
 
358 THOMAS MOORE. 
 
 And even yet, after the lapse of twenty years, there are 
 many who, admiring the fine moral of " Paradise and the 
 Peri," or melted by the delicate pathos of the " Firewor- 
 shippers," own the soft seductions of "Lalla Rookh," and in 
 their hearts, if not in their understandings, prefer it to 
 the chaster and more powerful poetry of the age. 
 
 The " Loves of the Angels" was a bolder but not a more 
 successful flight. It was a tale of the " Arabian heaven ; " 
 and there is nothing certainly, in these wondrous "thousand 
 and one nights," more rich, beautiful, and dream-like in 
 its imagination and pathos, as in those impassioned stories. 
 But it was only a castle in the clouds after all — one of those 
 brilliant but fading pomps which the eye of the young 
 dreamer sees " for ever flushing round a summer's sky." Its 
 angels were mere winged dolls compared to the " celestial 
 ardours" whom Milton has portrayed, or even to those proud 
 and impassioned beings whom Byron has drawn. In fact, 
 the poem was unfortunate in appearing about the same 
 time with Byron's " Heaven and Earth," which many be- 
 sides us consider his finest production as a piece of art. Mere 
 atoms of the rainbow fluttering round were the pinions 
 of Moore's angels compared to the mighty wings of those 
 burning ones who came down over Ararat, drawn by the 
 loadstars which shone in the eyes of the " daughters of 
 men," and for which, without a sigh, they " lost eternity." 
 And what comparison between the female characters in 
 the one poem and the two whom we see in the other, 
 waiting with uplifted eyes and clasped hands for the de- 
 scent of their celestial lovers, like angels for the advent 
 of angels ? And what scene in Moore can be named beside 
 the deluge in Byron ; with the gloomy silence of suspense 
 which precedes it — the earnest whispers heard among the 
 hills at dead of night, which tell of its coming — the waters 
 rising solemnly to their work of judgment, as if conscious 
 of its justice and grandeur — the cries heard of despair, of 
 fury, of blasphemy, as if the poet himself were drowning 
 
THOMAS MOORE. 359 
 
 in the surge — the milder and softer wail of resignation 
 mingling with the sterner exclamations — the ark in the 
 distance — the lost angels clasping their lost loves, and 
 ascending with them from the doom of the waters to what 
 we feel and know must be a direr doom ? 
 
 We have spoken already of Moore's character as a 
 witty poet, and need only now refer to the titles of his 
 principal humorous compositions, such as the " Fudge 
 Family in Paris;" the " Twopenny Post-Bag ;" "Cash, 
 Corn, Currency, and Catholics," &c. They constitute a 
 perfect gallery of fun without ferocity, without indecency, 
 and without more malice than serves to give them poig- 
 nancy and point. 
 
 From Moore's " Life of Sheridan" we might almost fancy 
 that, though he had lisped in numbers, and early obtained 
 a perfect command of the language and versification of 
 poetry, yet that he was only beginning, or had but recently 
 begun, to write prose. The juvenility, the immaturity, 
 the false glare, the load of useless figure, the ambition 
 and effort of that production, are amazing in such a man 
 at such an age. It contains, of course, much fine and 
 forcible writing ; but even Sheridan himself, in his most 
 ornate and adventurous prose, which was invariably his 
 worst, is never more unsuccessful than is sometimes his 
 biographer. Perhaps it was but fitting that the life of 
 such a heartless, faithless, though brilliant charlatan, 
 should be written in a style of elaborate falsetto and fudge. 
 
 We have a very different opinion indeed of his " Life of 
 Byron." It is not, we fear, a faithful or an honest record 
 of that miserable and guilty mistake — the life of Byron. 
 We have heard that Dr MacGinn, by no means a squeamish 
 man, who was at first employed by Murray to write his 
 biography, and had the materials put into his hands, re- 
 fused, shrinking back disgusted at the masses of falsehood, 
 treachery, heartlessness, malignity, and pollution which 
 they revealed. The same materials were submitted to 
 
360 THOMAS MOORE. 
 
 Moore, and from them he has constructed an image of 
 his hero, bearing, we suspect, as correct a resemblance to 
 his character as the ideal busts which abound do to his 
 face. When will biographers learn that their business, 
 their sole business, is to tell the truth or to be silent? 
 How long will the public continue to be deceived by such 
 gilded falsehoods as form the staple of obituaries and 
 memoirs ? It is high time that such were confined to the 
 corners of newspapers and of churchyards. We like 
 Moore's " Byron," not for its subject or its moral tone, but 
 solely for its literary execution. It is written throughout 
 in a clear, chaste, dignified, and manly manner; the 
 criticism it contains is eloquent and discriminating, and 
 the friendship it discovers for Byron, if genuine, speaks 
 much for its author's generosity and heart. 
 
 We must not speak of his other prose productions — his 
 " Epicurean," " History of Ireland," &c. The wittiest 
 thing of his in prose we have read is an article in the 
 " Edinburgh Eeview" on " Boyd's Lives of the Fathers," 
 where, as in Gibbon, jests lurk under loads of learning, 
 double-entendres disguise themselves in Greek, puns mount 
 and crackle upon the backs of huge folios, and where you are 
 at a loss whether most to chuckle at the wit, to detest the 
 animus, or to admire the erudition. 
 
 We had nearly omitted, which had been unpardonable, 
 all mention of the *' Irish Melodies" — those sweet and 
 luscious strains which have hushed ten thousand drawing- 
 rooms and drawn millions of such tears as drawing-rooms 
 shed, but which have seldom won their way to the breasts 
 of simple unsophisticated humanity — which are to the 
 songs of Burns what the lute is to the linnet — and which, 
 in their title, are thus far unfortunate that, however me- 
 lodious, they are not the melodies of Ireland. It was not 
 Moore but Campbell who wrote " Erin Mavourneen." 
 " He," says Hazlitt, " has changed the wild harp of Erin 
 into a musical snuff-box." 
 
ISAAC TAYLOR. 361 
 
 Such is our ideal of Thomas Moore. If it do not come 
 up to the estimate of some of his admirers, it is faithful 
 to our own impressions, and what more from a critic can 
 be required ? We only add, that admired bj many as a 
 poet, by all as a wit, he is as a man the object of universal 
 regard ; and we believe there is not one who knows him 
 but would be ready to join in the words — 
 
 " Were it the last drop in the well, 
 'Tis to thee that I would drink ; 
 In that water as this wine, 
 
 The libation I would pour 
 Would be peace to thee and thine, 
 And a health to thee, Tom Moore.'* 
 
 ISAAC TAYLOR. 
 
 Christianity has been much indebted to its lay supporters 
 and defenders. "Without professing to give a complete list 
 of the illustrious laymen who have either advocated its 
 evidences or expounded its doctrines, we may simply re- 
 mind the reader of the names of Milton, Newton, Boyle, 
 Locke, Addison, Lord Lyttelton, Charles Leslie, Soame, 
 Jenyns, Dr Johnson, and Cowper, which belong to other 
 ages than the present ; while, as respects our own times, 
 it may be enough to mention Coleridge, Southey, Douglas 
 of Cavers, Robert Ainslie, Thomas Erskine of Linlathan, 
 Bowdler, Wilberforce, and Isaac Taylor. Of this latter 
 list, Coleridge, partly in his other writings, but chiefly in 
 his "Table-talk," illustrated the general and more remote 
 
362 ISAAC TAYLOR. 
 
 bearings of Christianity, the points where it touches upon 
 the other sciences. Southey has stood up bravely for its 
 external bulwarks, and exemplified its consistent morals. 
 Douglas, to use the language of another, " eagle-eyed and 
 eloquent, has anticipated time, and, surveying the world, 
 has laid down the laws of general amelioration." Ainslie 
 has broken down the great leading principles of religion 
 into simple, portable, and pathetic forms, and from the 
 "strong" has educed "sweetness." Erskine has admirably 
 expounded the internal evidences of Christianity. Bowdler 
 has strev/n chaste flowers and Addisonian graces around its 
 softer and more spiritual aspects. Wilberforce has laid bare 
 its deep practical bearings. And Isaac Taylor has applied 
 to the exposure of its corruptions and counterfeits, the 
 vigour of a more original genius, and the splendour of 
 a richer, more varied, and more dazzling eloquence, as 
 well as entered with a firm yet gentle tread on some of 
 its more mysterious provinces. 
 
 Isaac Taylor styles himself in the title of one of his 
 own chapters, the " Eecluse." He has long ago retired 
 from the world into the sanctuary of his own family and 
 his own soul. There aloft, but not aloof — apart, but not 
 askance — separate, but not utterly secluded — regarding 
 the distant crowd more in sorrow than in anger, and more 
 in love than in sorrow — he parses the " noiseless tenor" of 
 his serene and busy days. " He hears the tumult and is 
 still." His mind dwells habitually in a lone and lofty 
 sphere. The cell of his soul is curiously constructed, ela- 
 borately adorned, hung with antique tapestry, decked 
 with the rich paintings of the past, and steeped through 
 its gorgeous windows in a dim religious light. There 
 seated, he now muses with half-shut eye upon the history 
 of bygone ages — now erects himself to lift the large 
 folios of the fathers — now swells with righteous indigna- 
 tion as he remembers the corruption and degeneracy 
 which so soon and so long supplanted the first faith and 
 
ISAAC TAYLOR. 363 
 
 love of the primitive age — now analyses the palpitating 
 heart of the enthusiast, and now turns to the sterner task 
 of baring the flinty spirit of fanaticism — now maps out the 
 future history of the church and world — and now sinks 
 into sublime reverie, and in the trance of genius sees 
 " Hell, hades, heaven — the eternal how and where — 
 The glory of the dead, and theii* despau-." 
 The leading power of Taylor's mind is not argument, 
 though he reasons often acutely and energetically — ^nor 
 is it imagination, though he has much of this faculty too 
 — nor is it original and native thought, though he strikes 
 out many sparkles of intuition on his way — nor is it elo- 
 quence, though his words are often quick and powerful : 
 it is meditation — that refined action of the mind which 
 is softer than ratiocination, more sublime than thought, 
 calmer than passion, and cooler than genius. He is inspired, 
 not by the muses nor by the furies — is neither full of the 
 demon nor of the god ; but above him hangs the " cherub 
 contemplation," and over him broods for ever her still but 
 radiant wing. He evidently emulates that serene motion, 
 or rather, rest of intellect, in which Plato, under the skies 
 of Greece, rejoiced, and which, beneath the profounder fir- 
 mament of Palestine, " unloosed its golden couplets" over 
 the head of the Essenes and the earlier Christian mystics. 
 While keenly alive to, and indignant at, the errors and 
 abuses of mysticism, he has very strong sympathies with 
 its better spirit — with its voluntary solitude — its abnega- 
 tion of self — its habits of still, spiritual communion with 
 its own soul, and with the works and word of God. He 
 is, above most modern writers, an orientalist. That " land 
 of the east — that clime of the sun," is the country 
 of his adoption. His learning has been collected in the 
 gardens of eastern literature. His imagination has an 
 oriental vastness and brilliancy upon its wings, and he 
 strings his sentences with '* orient pearl." His style, too, 
 seems dyed in the colours of a hotter sun than that of his 
 
364 ISAAC TAYLOR. 
 
 native land. Plis views of divine truth, often clear and 
 definite, not unfrequently shade awaj into the dim, the 
 unformed, and the obscure — into "regions where light 
 glances at an angle only, without diffusing itself over the 
 whole surface." He loves to linger, and it is only a stern 
 sense of duty which prevents him from lingering always, 
 in the dubious and debatable tracts which surround the 
 clear and firm territory of Scripture truth. His piety, too, 
 is peculiar. Though true and sound, it is not the simple, 
 fervid devotion of his father or sister. It is more that of 
 the burning seraph than of the kneeling saint ; it is the 
 rapt contemplation of the divine attributes, rather than 
 the awful abasement of a spirit overwhelmed in the view 
 of its own guilt and misery. Blended, however, with this 
 native tendency toward the lofty, the enthusiastic, and the 
 dangerous realms of speculation — a tendency fostered, be- 
 sides, by the course of his studies and the circumstances 
 of his lot — there are counteracting and balancing elements 
 in his mind, habits of deep submission to the divine tes- 
 timony, a strong basis of solid judgment and varied know- 
 ledge, a distinct though not very deep vein of sarcastic 
 observation, added to all the advantages which natural 
 good sense must ever derive from English blood, birth, and 
 training. 
 
 It is a curious fact in literary history, that many writers 
 have surpassed themselves, both in power and popularity, 
 while writing under the shelter of the anonymous* Swift's 
 " Tale of a Tub," which he never acknowledged, so far 
 surpasses his other writings in fertility of invention, rich- 
 ness of humour, and force of style, that Dr Johnson re- 
 fused to believe it his. Junius was strong only within 
 the circle of that mysterious shadow which even yet rests 
 on his name. Pascal's " Provincial Letters," the best of 
 his works, were issued anonymously. So were those of 
 Peter Plymley. The admirable newspaper criticisms of 
 ** Jonathan," and the eloquent diatribes of 0. P. Q., owed 
 
 I 
 
ISAAC TAYLOR. 365 
 
 not a little of their zest to the obscurity which rested 
 on the names of the authors. Even the Waverley tales 
 lost nothing from the doubt in which their authorship 
 was for a season involved. We cannot tell how much of 
 their power reviewers owe to their position — how much 
 the masking adds to the momentum of their battery. 
 And within a twelvemonth we have witnessed a book, 
 written indeed in an easy and agreeable style, but de- 
 veloping an absurd theory, and swarming with blunders 
 (the "Yestiges of the Natural History of Creation"), 
 rising into popularity upon the twin wings of the mis- 
 chief of its intention and the mystery of its authorship. 
 Whether this be owing to the greater liberty an anony- 
 mous writer enjoys — to the ideal position which, projected 
 as it were out of himself, he for a season occupies — or to 
 the twofold effect of mystification, in stimulating the 
 mind of the writer and provoking the curiosity of the 
 reader — we do not stop to inquire. And perhaps it 
 was in order to take advantage of this principle, that the 
 subject of the present sketch, after having to little pur- 
 pose wooed the attention of the world in propria persona, 
 determined to disguise himself, and walked forth at length 
 in the graceful mask of the author of the " Natural His- 
 tory of Enthusiasm." The issue justified his most san- 
 guine hopes of success. The book was fortunate in the 
 time of its appearance. It came forth when the rage of 
 Rowism and Irvingism was at its height — when in every 
 corner of the land, our old men, and women too, were 
 seeing visions, and our young men and maidens were 
 dreaming dreams. To analyse the subtle steam of en- 
 thusiasm when it was rushing from the boiler — to detect 
 and expose its distinct proportions of false and true — was 
 an attempt daring, hazardous, but useful, and loudly de- 
 manded by the urgencies of the time. It required, too, 
 peculiar qualifications, which seemed all possessed by the 
 anonymous author: learning — he was manifestly a ripe 
 
 \ 
 
366 ISAAC TAYLOR. 
 
 and good scholar ; piety — his work glowed with it ; elo- 
 quence — it heaved in every sentence ; a vantage-ground 
 lifting him above sectarian bias — the most acute were un- 
 able to tell to what denomination he belonged ; soundness 
 of religious sentiment — the strain of the whole work was 
 strictly evangelical ; and last, not least, a sympathy with 
 true enthusiasm, while he exposed and reprobated the 
 false — and the book was no cold analysis, no stern and 
 callous anatomy. The work, besides, was written in an 
 elaborate and ornate style ; and though some of the more 
 fastidious objected to its taste, and some of the more lynx- 
 eyed detected marks of a manner affected and a diction 
 studiously disguised, yet, on the whole, the exclamation 
 of the Christian church was — " Behold, a master risen in 
 Israel !" And straightway the question rose and ran, " Who 
 is he ? " Some bethought themselves of Douglas of Cavers 
 as the probable author, in despite of the most marked dif- 
 ference in sentiment, style, manner, and cast of thought. 
 Others, even less acute, fancied that here was Foster 
 shaking off his giant sleep, and arising a new man — a new 
 man indeed — with a new intellect, a new learning, a new 
 temperament, and a new vocabulary. In certain circles, 
 there were frequent rumours of some great Christian 
 unknown — some gentler Junius — seme wondrous young 
 Titan — who was to astonish, if not revolutionise the reli- 
 gious world. And if here and there a solitary finger 
 pointed to the " Recluse" of Stamford Rivers as the real 
 author, the scornful rejoinder was, "What has he done 
 hitherto — what proportion is there between the ' Elements 
 of Thought' and the * History of Enthusiasm?' Such a 
 lion-like man of God could never have issued from the 
 still parsonage of Ongar." Popular meanwhile the book 
 became, particularly among students, who did their best 
 to imitate its style, or with greater success to imbibe its 
 spirit. Its main leading proposition, that the difference 
 between true and false enthusiasm is a difference of kind 
 
ISAAC TAYLOR. 367 
 
 not of degree — its rich and racy illustration — its famili- 
 arity with the primitive and darker ages of the Church — 
 its grand insulated pictures, as of the Romish hierarchy 
 and the monastic system — its cheerful, sanguine, reli- 
 gious spirit — the rose-coloured glow which rested on its 
 every page — and not less, with some, its blazing faults and 
 deliberate innovations of language — were among the ele- 
 ments of its first success ; and even yet, we believe, in 
 popular estimation, retain it at the head of its author's 
 works. 
 
 Dearer to us, however, we confess, is his second work, 
 the " Saturday Evening." It is a series of sublime medi- 
 tations, bound together by a certain shadowy tie, involving 
 a multitude of topics nearest and dearest to the author's 
 heart, and tinged with the sweet and solemn hues of the 
 approaching Sabbath. " Dreams" they will be, they have 
 been called by the sceptical and the cold ; but such an 
 epithet, while it fails fully to express, fails entirely to 
 damage their character. They open up, to the pious and 
 imaginative, tracts of thought, like golden furrows in an 
 evening sea, or like those glorious vistas which endlessly 
 expand in an evening heaven. They are dreams, but 
 dreams of night, of heaven, of immensity, and eternity ; 
 and if the dream be there, the ladder whose top reached 
 unto the sky is not far off. Philosophical views of the 
 present and the past are not wanting ; but the mind of 
 the contemplatist is perpetually, as if on the wings of the 
 evening, borne away up through the wilderness of worlds 
 above his head — or on to those bright pages of the earth's 
 story which remain to be read — or in amid the starry 
 circles of the heavenly hosts — nay, at times, a step or two, 
 but no more, up towards 
 
 " The sapphire throne — the living blaze, 
 Where angels tremble as they gaze." 
 
 And yet, from the most daring of his excursions, he returns 
 undazzled, and with lessons of practical truth, to his na 
 
368 ISAAC TAYLOR. 
 
 tive homestead of earth. "We like espscially his glimpses 
 of the comiDg Sabbath of the world, which, like a red 
 western heaven seen through trees, perpetually inter- 
 poses its splendid boundary to the stages of his thought. 
 Next to this, we like his " Vastness of the Material Crea- 
 tion," where to " him the book of night is opened wide" — 
 and where he finds that a page thick with suns is not more 
 true or glorious than one leaf of his Bible, where " voices 
 from the depths of space proclaim a marvel and a secret ;" 
 but he discovers the marvel to be the old mystery of god- 
 liness, the secret to be only that of the Lord, which " is 
 with them that fear him." 
 
 By a strange association, this book of " Saturday Even- 
 ing" suggests to us the Saturday papers of the " Spectator." 
 They are " alike, but oh, how different !" Their subjects are 
 the same ; night, the stars, immortality, God, and heaven. 
 But since Addison's time, how much nearer have the stars 
 approached ! and yet, in another sense, how much farther 
 off have they receded ! At what a ratio of more than geo- 
 metric increase has the universe been multiplying to our 
 eyes ! And with regard to the other topics, in what deeper 
 channels do the modern's thoughts flow than those of the 
 gentle " Spectator!" Theirlanguageisthe same; but how 
 different the classic coolness, the careless but inimitable 
 graces, the modest but inestimable ornaments, the ease and 
 sweet simplicity of Addison's English, from the feverish 
 heat and the rich tropical exuberance of Taylor's ! Their 
 religion is the same ; but how diffei ent the faint though 
 true glow of Christianity in Addison's page from that 
 seraphic flame which burns in Taylor's ! In what different 
 ages written! The one a low and languid age — feeble 
 in faith, feebler in love, feeblest of all in hope — in which 
 Addison's sanctified genius shines as a sweet solitary star ; 
 the other a "juncture of eras" — a period of bustle, and 
 heat, and hope, and progress, and anxious uncertainty, and 
 listening silence ; for do not all men expect, sooner or later. 
 
ISAAC TAYLOR. 3G9 
 
 the crisis of the earth to be coming — and do not " all crea- 
 tures sigh to be renewed ?" 
 
 We must permit ourselves a few observations upon 
 " Fanaticism " and the " Physical Theory of a Future Life." 
 "Fanaticism" was unfortunate in its subject. From the 
 black and malevolent passions, even when portrayed by the 
 hand of a master, men in general shrink. To dissect de- 
 formity is a thankless task. And although it is said that 
 the laws of disease are as beautiful as those of health, yet 
 few have the patience or courage to wait till they are ini- 
 tiated into that terrible kind of beauty. Fanaticism, also, 
 was a topic too like enthusiasm to be susceptible of much 
 novelty in the mode of treatment. And here and there 
 you could detect traces of that mannerism and self-imita- 
 tion which betray in authors their fear at least that their 
 vein is nearly exhausted — a fear reminding us of the re- 
 luctance of the mariner to take soundings in a suspected 
 shallow. The style too had not improved from the date of 
 his former work, nay, it bore marks of great efibrt, was 
 uneven and uneasy, and sinned often against the laws of 
 clearness, simplicity, and good taste. Something of the 
 cloudy character of the theme seemed to have infected 
 the writer ; and the language was swollen, as if under the 
 " fanaticism of the scourge." Still the book had bold bursts 
 and splendid sweeping pictures ; and it were worth while 
 contrasting its estimate of Mahometanism with that of 
 Carlyle, and wondering by what strange possibility a sys- 
 tem which appears to the one a vast and virulent ulcer 
 should appear to the other a needful and healthful volcano, 
 and through what transfiguring magic Mahomet the mon- 
 ster of the one becomes Mahomet the hero of the other. 
 
 We hinted a little before, that there was in Taylor's 
 mind a strong but subdued tendency toward the mystic 
 and supernatural. In all his works, he seems standing on 
 the confines of the spiritual world, leaning over the great 
 precipice, and, with beseeching looks, essaying to commune 
 
 2b 
 
370 ISAAC TAYLOR. 
 
 with the tremendous secrets of the final state. Entirely 
 satisfied with the declarations of Scripture, that there is 
 immortality for man, he yet must " ask that dreadful ques- 
 tion at the hills which look eternal" — at the streams which 
 " lucid flow for ever" — at the stars, those bright and pure 
 watchers — at the deepest metaphysics of the human mind 
 — and find in them something more than a faltering per- 
 haps, in addition to the loud, confident, and commanding, 
 " Thus saith the Lord." Nay, in the " Physical Theory of 
 Another Life," he fairly bursts across the barriers, enters 
 like a " permitted guest" within the mighty curtain which 
 divides the living and the dead, and with infinite ingenuity 
 maps out the dim provinces and expounds the mysterious 
 conditions of that strange world. The intention of the 
 work has been often misapprehended. It is no dogmatic 
 dream, like the visions of Swedenborg — no " rushing in 
 where angels fear to tread." Nor is it the mere mechani- 
 cal fancy disporting itself on the theme, as in the reveries 
 of Tucker (to whom Taylor, however, is considerably in- 
 debted) ; it is a long philosophical, modest, and earnest 
 conjecture — a trial, as it were, how far the human mind 
 can go in that shadowy direction, and how far it is possible, 
 by combining psychological principles with Scripture hints, 
 to build up a probable and lifelike scheme of the future 
 existence. How far he has been successful in this attempt 
 we shall, of course, never know till we enter on that solemn 
 state ourselves. But, in the meantime, it is curious to 
 think of this writer's spirit, from the height of eternity, 
 looking back and comparing the continent of glory he has 
 reached with the meagre yet memorable map he drew of 
 it, in the infancy of his being. And yet more curious it 
 were to imagine an actual denizen of that sublime world 
 smiling a gentle smile over this efiTort of the unborn child 
 to conceive of the green earth, the gay sun, and the ever 
 burning stars ! 
 
 The reader would be richly rewarded who should sit 
 
ISAAC TAYLOR. 371 
 
 down and compare the Visions of heaven and hell ascribed 
 to Bunyan with Taylor's theory of a future life. Both are 
 rich, eloquent, and imaginative dreams — but how different 
 in spirit, manner, style, and scientific construction ! Be-. 
 tween the two, what an interval has the religious mind 
 traversed ! What a difference between the " melted gold " 
 and coarse material torments of the one author, and the 
 Ariel-like agonies of Taylor's supposed spirit, thrust out 
 naked amid the quick agencies of an angry universe, where 
 the silent light surrounds it as in a sea of fire, and where, 
 through a thousand avenues, rushes in upon it the wrath 
 of Heaven. And yet the author of these visions (Bunyan 
 he certainly was not) was not only a man of high genius, 
 as some magnificent passages prove, but a thorough scholar ; 
 for its frequent literary allusions and use of scholastic terms 
 sufficiently evince that he was quite up to, if not before, 
 the spirit and learning of his times. How little, after all, 
 do the revolutions of time and the advancement of the 
 human mind add to our real knowledge, however they may 
 modify our feelings and language, in respect to the awful 
 futurity before us ! The path of human progress, on one 
 side so free and boundless, on another is soon met by its 
 uttermost confine on earth, as by a wall of black, soKd, 
 and frowning marble ! 
 
 Isaac Taylor is, as before hinted, of '* virtuous father, 
 virtuous son." The praise of Taylor of Ongar was in " all 
 the churches." His daughter, Jane Taylor, a woman of a 
 highly cultivated and most feminine intellect, authoress of 
 several well known works, has been long dead. Isaac, at 
 first designed for the Dissenting pulpit, became a barrister 
 in preference, but has for many years resided in retirement 
 at Stamford Rivers, educating his family, and prosecuting 
 his own delightful and holy studies. A writer in the 
 *' Edinburgh Review" has given a description of his early 
 feelings and his present habits of life, displaying at once 
 the warmth of personal friendship and the sympathy of 
 
372 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 kindred intellect and kindred sentiments. We learn with 
 interest from it, that Taylor is an expert and eager angler 
 as well as the far-famed author of the " Natural History 
 of Enthusiasm ;" that he spends his Saturday mornings 
 in directing the sports of his dear children; while his 
 Saturday evenings are devoted to the loftiest meditations 
 which can engross the soul of mortal. He is, moreover, 
 a person of animated bearing, brilliant eye, and incessant 
 and eloquent talk. Altogether, we deem him among the 
 most accomplished of modern religious authors, and heartily 
 wish him life and strength to fulfil that great work of his 
 life, from which the tractarian controversy has for a season 
 drawn him aside — the history of the various corruptions 
 of Christianity, which, if worthily completed, as it has been 
 worthily commenced, shall more assuredly and honourably 
 preserve his name, "than though a pyramid formed his 
 monumental fane." 
 
 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 America has been long looking for its Poet, and has 
 been taught by many sages to believe, that hitherto it 
 has been looking in vain. Each new aspirant to the laurel 
 has been scanned with a watchfulness and jealousy, pro- 
 portioned to the height of expectation which had been ex- 
 cited, and to the length of time during which that expec- 
 tation has been deferred ; and because the risen Poet did 
 not supply the vacuum of centuries — did not clear all the 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 373 
 
 space by which Britain had got the start of her daughter 
 — did not include in his single self the essence of Shakspere, 
 Spenser, Milton, and Byron — his genius was pronounced 
 a failure, and his works naught. Tests were proposed to 
 him, from which our home authors would have recoiled. 
 Originalities were demanded of him, which few of our- 
 selves, in this imitative age, have been able to exemplify. 
 As in Macbeth, not the " child's," but the " armed head " 
 was expected to rise first from the vacant abyss. American 
 literature must walk before creeping, and fly before walk- 
 ing. Not unfrequently, our British journals contained pro- 
 grammes of the genius and writings of the anticipated Poet, 
 differing not more from common sense, than from each 
 other. " He must be intensely national," said one authority. 
 " He must be broadly Catholic — of no country," said a se- 
 cond. "He must be profoundly meditative, as his own 
 solitary woods," said a third. " He must be bustling, rapid, 
 and fiery as his own railways," said a fourth. One sighed 
 for an American Milton ; another predicted the uprise of 
 another Goethe, " Giant of the Western Star ;" and a third 
 modestly confined his wishes within the compass of a second 
 Shakspere. 
 
 Pernicipus as, in some measure, such inordinate expecta- 
 tions must have proved to all timid and vacillating minds 
 in America, it did not prevent its bolder and more earnest 
 spirits from taking their own way, — by grafting, upon the 
 stock of imported poetry, many graceful and lovely shoots 
 of native song. In spite of the penumbra of prejudice 
 against American verse, more fugitive floating poetry of 
 real merit exists in its literature than in almost any other. 
 Dana has united many of the qualities of Crabbe to a por- 
 tion of the weird and haggard power of Coleridge's muse. 
 Percival has recalled Wordsworth to our minds, by the 
 pensive and tremulous depth of lys strains. Bryant, with- 
 out a trace of imitation, has become the American Camp- 
 bell, equally select, simple, chary, and memorable. In reply 
 
874} HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 to Mrs Hemans, have been uttered a perfect chorus of 
 voices — 
 
 " Sweet and melancholy sounds, 
 Like music on the waters." 
 
 Emerson has poured forth notes, sweet now as the murmur 
 of bees, and now strong as the roar of torrents ; here cheer- 
 ful as the pipings of Arcadia, and there mournfully melo- 
 dious as the groans of Ariel, from the centre of his cloven 
 pine. And with a voice of wide compass, clear articulation, 
 and most musical tones, has Longfellow sung his manifold 
 and melting numbers. 
 
 The distinguishing qualities of Longfellow seem to be 
 beauty of imagination, delicacy of taste, wide sympathy, 
 and mild earnestness, expressing themselves sometimes in 
 forms of quaint and fantastic fancy, but always in chaste 
 and simple language. His imagination sympathises more 
 with the correct, the classical, and the refined, than with 
 that outer and sterner world, where dwell the dreary, the 
 rude, the fierce, and the terrible shapes of things. The 
 scenery he describes best is the storied richness of the 
 Ehine, or the golden glories of the Indian summer, or the 
 environs of the old Nova Scotian village, or the wide 
 billowing prairie ; and not those vast forests, where a path 
 for the sunbeams must be hewn, nor those wildernesses of 
 snow, where the storm and the wing of the condor divide 
 the sovereignty. In the midst of such dreadful solitudes, 
 his genius rather shivers and cowers, than rises and reigns. 
 He is a spirit of the Beautiful, more than of the Sublime ; 
 he has lain on the lap of Loveliness, and not been dandled, 
 like a lion-cub, on the knees of Terror. The magic he 
 wields, though soft, is true and strong. If not a prophet, 
 torn by a secret burden, and uttering it in wild, tumultuous 
 strains, he is a genuine poet, who has sought for, and found 
 inspiration, now in the story and scenery of his own country, 
 and now in the lays and legends of other lands, whose na- 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 375 
 
 tive vein, in itself exquisite, has been highly cultivated and 
 delicately cherished. 
 
 It is to us a proof of Longfellow's originality, that he 
 bears so well and meekly his load of accomplishments and 
 acquirements. His ornaments, unlike those of the Sabine 
 maid, have not crushed him, nor impeded the motions of 
 his own mind. He has transmuted a lore, gathered from 
 many languages, into a quick and rich flame, which we 
 feel to be the flame of Genius. 
 
 It is evident that his principal obligations are due to 
 German literature, which over him, as over so many at 
 the present day, exerts a certain wild witchery, and is 
 tasted with all the sweetness of the forbidden fruit. No 
 writer in America has more steeped his soul in the spirit 
 of German poetry, its blended homeliness and romance, its 
 simplicity and fantastic emphasis, than Longfellow. And if 
 he does not often trust himself amidst the weltering chaos 
 of its philosophies, you see him, lured by their fascination, 
 hanging over their brink, and rapt in wonder at their 
 strange, gigantic, and ever shifting forms. Indeed his 
 " Hyperion" contains two or three most exquisite bits of 
 transcendentalism. 
 
 Longfellow is rather a romantic and sentimental, than 
 a philosophical poet. He throws into verse the feelings, 
 moods, and fancies of the young or female mind of genius, 
 not the mature cogitations of profound philosophy. His 
 song is woven of moonlight, not of strong summer sunshine. 
 To glorify abstractions, to flush clear naked truth into 
 beauty, to " build " up poems slowly and solidly, as though 
 he were piling pyramids, is neither his aim nor his attain- 
 ment. He gathers, on the contrary, roses and lilies, — the 
 roses of the hedge and lilies of the field, as well as those of 
 the garden, — and wreathes them into chaplets for the brow 
 and neck of the beautiful. His poetry is that of sentiment, 
 rather than of thought. But the sentiment is never false, 
 nor strained, nor mawkish. It is always mild, generally 
 
376 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 manly, and sometimes it approaches the sublime. It touches 
 both the female part of man's mind and the masculine part 
 of woman's. He can at one time start unwonted tears in 
 the eyes of men, and at another kindle on the cheeks of 
 women a glorious glow of emotion, which the term hlush 
 cannot adequately measure ; as far superior to it as is the 
 splendour of a sunset to the bloom of a peach. 
 
 "We have been struck with the variety of Longfellow's 
 poems. He has written hitherto no large, recondite work. 
 His poems are all short — effusions, not efforts. He has ex- 
 hibited no traces of a comic vein. His sphere is that of 
 sentiment, moralising elegantly upon many objects. And 
 yet within that sphere there is little mannerism, repetition, 
 or self-imitation. His sentiment assumes a great variety 
 of aspects. Now it is tender to tears, and now heroic to 
 daring ; now it muses, and now it dreams ; now it is a 
 reverie, and now a rapture ; now it is an allegory, now a 
 psalm, and again a song ; everything, in short, save a 
 monotony. Nor is this the many-sidedness of a mocking- 
 bird. The sentiment of the varied song, as well as the song 
 of the varied sentiment, is ever his own. 
 
 One of the most pleasing characteristics of this writer's 
 works is their intense humanity. A man's heart beats in 
 his every line. His writings all 
 
 " Take a sober colour from the eye, 
 That hath kept watch o'er man's mortahty." 
 
 He loves, pities, and feels with, as well as for, his fellow 
 *' human mortal." Hence his writing is blood- warm. He 
 is a brother, speaking to men as brothers, and as brothers 
 are they responding to his voice. Byron addressed men as 
 reptiles or fiends ; Wordsworth and others soliloquise, care- 
 less whether their voice be listened to or not. But no poet 
 can be loved, as well as admired, who does not speak from 
 the broad level of humanity. If we dare apply the lan- 
 guage, "he must be touched with a fellow-feeling of our in- 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 377 
 
 firmities, and have been tempted in all points as we are." 
 He must have fallen and risen, been sick and sad, been 
 joyful and pensive, drank of the full cup of man's lot, ere 
 he can so write that man will take his writings to his heart, 
 and appropriate them as part of the great general human 
 stock. A prophet may wrap himself up in austere and 
 mysterious solitude ; a poet must come "eating and drink- 
 ing." Thus came Shakspere, Dryden, Burns, Scott, 
 Goethe ; and thus have come in our day Dickens, Hood, 
 and Longfellow. 
 
 Besides this quality of generous, genial manhood, Long- 
 fellow is distinguished by a mild religious earnestness. We 
 do not vouch for the orthodoxy of his creed, but we do 
 vouch for the fine Christianity of his spirit. No poet has 
 more beautifully expressed the depth of his conviction, 
 that life is an earnest reality — a something with eternal 
 issues and dependencies; that this earth is no scene of 
 revelry, or market of sale, but an arena of contest, and a 
 hall of doom. This is the inspiration of his '" Psalm of Life," 
 than which we have few things finer, in moral tone, since 
 those odes by which the millions of Israel tuned their 
 march across the wilderness, and to which the fiery pillar 
 seemed to listen with complacency, and to glow out a 
 deeper crimson in silent praise. To man's now wilder, 
 more straggling, but still God-guided and hopeful progress 
 towards a land of fairer promise, Longfellow's " Psalm" is 
 a noble accompaniment : 
 
 " Life is real! Life is earnest I 
 And the grave is not its goal; 
 * Dust thou art, to dust returnest,' 
 Was not spoken of the soul. 
 
 Not enjoyment, and not sorrow. 
 
 Is our destined end or way; 
 But to act, that each to-morrow 
 
 Find us fax'ther thau to-day. 
 
S78 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 In the world's broad field of battle, 
 
 In the bivouac of Life, 
 Be not like dumb, driven cattle! 
 
 Be a hero in the strife ! 
 
 Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant! 
 
 Let the dead Past bury its dead! 
 Act — act in the living Present! 
 
 Heart witliin, and God o'erhead! 
 
 Lives of great men all remind us 
 
 We can make our lives sublime, 
 And, departing, leave behind us 
 
 Footprints on the sands of time, — 
 
 Footprints, that perhaps another, 
 
 Sailing o'er life's solemn main, 
 A forlorn and shipwrecked brother. 
 
 Seeing, shall take heart again. 
 
 Let us, then, be up and doing, 
 
 With a heart for any fate; 
 Still achieving, still pursuing. 
 Learn to labour and to wait." 
 
 Glancing again critically at Longfellow's poems, we find 
 that his genius is essentially lyrical. Neither the severity 
 of epic power nor the subtlety of the dramatic genius are 
 his. But how swiftly and surely does he respond to those 
 passing impulses which come upon his soul, like winds from 
 the forest, and which, like sudden gusts, are brief, musical, 
 — now swelling into high rapture, and now dying away in 
 tremulous pathos! Mrs Hemans and Sir Walter Scott 
 once coincided in remarking, that each tree gives forth a 
 peculiar cadence to the wind; and we have ourselves 
 noticed, that from the willow there issues a dry, hissing 
 eery sound; from the sycamore a full murmur, as if the tree 
 were one vast bee-hive; from the pine a deep, mellow, 
 lingering tone, as though each cone were an ivory key; and 
 from the oak a strong, sturdy, reluctant rustle, as if it were 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 379 
 
 an unwilling instrument in the hand of the blast. Thus 
 do Longfellow's finer poems play themselves off upon the 
 autumn trees of the Western forest, as upon harps of gold, 
 — one being sad and stern — another, quiet and full, as of 
 many murmurs rounded into one calm — a third, soft and 
 long-drawn — and a fourth, rough, abrupt, and tormented 
 into music. 
 
 Ere speaking of some of his poems in detail, we must 
 permit ourselves a word on the only prose work of his with 
 which we are acquainted — " Hyperion." We shall never 
 forget the circumstances of its first perusal. We took it as 
 our pocket companion with us, on our first walk down the 
 Tweed, by Peebles, Inverleithen, Clovenford, Ashestiel, 
 and Abbotsford. It was fine, at any special bend of the 
 stream, or any beautiful spot along its brink, taking it out, 
 and finding in it a conductor to our own surcharged emo- 
 tions. In our solitude we felt " we are not alone, for these 
 pages can sympathise with us." The course of " Hyperion," 
 indeed, is that of a river, winding at its own sweet will, — 
 now laughing and singing to itself, in its sparkling progress, 
 and now slumbering in still deep pools, — here laving corn- 
 fields and vineyards, and there lost in wooded and sounding 
 glens. Interest it has much — incident, little ; its charm is 
 partly in the "Excelsior" progress of the hero's mind, partly 
 in the sketches of the great German authors, and princi- 
 pally in the sparkling imagery and waving, billowy lan- 
 guage of the book. Longfellow, in this work, is Jean Paul 
 Ritcher, without his grotesque extravagances, or riotous 
 humour, or turbulent force. He seems a lesser and more 
 simple form of the same genus, sprung from him, as the 
 elephant from the mammoth. 
 
 We have just alluded to " Excelsior," one of those happy 
 thoughts which seem to drop down, like fine days, from 
 some serener region, or, like moultings of the celestial dove, 
 which meet instantly the ideal of all minds, and run on 
 afterwards, and for ever, in the current of the human heart. 
 
380 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 We can now no more conceive of a world without " Excel- 
 sior," than of a world without the " Iliad," the " Comus," 
 or the "Midsummer Night's Dream." It has expressed in 
 the happiest and briefest Avay what many minds in the age 
 had been trying in vain to express. Thousands, therefore, 
 were ready to cry out, " That's my thought ; that's my de- 
 sire ; that's myself ; I bear that banner ; I fear not to die 
 that death!" "Excelsior" is the Ledyard of intellectual 
 travellers. He typifies all that is heroic, and high, and dis- 
 interested in the age. "Excelsior!" cries the student, as 
 he climbs the steep ascent of science. "Excelsior!" cries 
 the poet, who takes up Parnassus as but a little thing. 
 " Excelsior !" cries the thinker ; " I have passed the tran- 
 scendental, let me have at the divine." " Excelsior !" cries 
 the liver ; "let me reach virtue, not merely as a law, but 
 as a life." " Excelsior 1" cries everywhere the young time ; 
 " let us onward and upward, though it be into the regions 
 of the storm ; we are weary of the past, let us try what 
 the future will do for us." "Excelsior !" cry the dying, 
 who feel that death is but a door into the infinite ; " let us 
 up and breathe the atmosphere of the stars." More than 
 one brave spirit has departed singing this noble battle-burst 
 of "Excelsior!" 
 
 " Excelsior " is Life and its Psalm personified, Long- 
 fellow has written in it his glowing hopes of the future, as 
 well as his theory of the past. That figure, climbing the 
 evening Alps, in defiance of danger, of man's remonstrance, 
 and the far deeper fascination of woman's love, is a type 
 of man struggling, triumphing, purified by suffering, per- 
 fected in death. And it insinuates strongly the poet's be- 
 lief in that coming era in human history, when the worth 
 and grandeur of man's regenerated life will cast a calm and 
 beauty, at present inconceivable, around his death, and 
 when the roses and chaplets and premature rejoicings of 
 his bridal, shall more worthily await his marriage with the 
 infinite. Who pants and prays not for the arrival of such 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 38 I 
 
 a day, when the sting of death shall thus be taken out — 
 when its grand meaning and porch-like position shall be 
 fully disclosed and vividly realised ? 
 
 Next to ** Excelsior," and the " Psalm of Life," we are 
 disposed to rank " Evangeline." Indeed, as a work of art, 
 it is superior to both, and to all that Longfellow has 
 written in verse. Save " Hyperion " it is his only piece of 
 pure and elaborate art. We began to read it under a cer- 
 tain degree of prejudice at the measure, which has been so 
 vulgarised by Southey, in his lamentable " Vision of Judg- 
 ment." But soon Southey, " Vision of Judgment," and all 
 were forgotten. Acadia — Arcadia it might be called — and 
 the sweet moonlight of Evangeline's face, crowded the 
 whole sky of our imagination. Nothing can be more truly 
 conceived, or more tenderly expressed, than the picture of 
 that primitive Nova Scotia, and its warm-hearted, hospi- 
 table, happy, and pious inhabitants. We feel the air of 
 the " Fore-world " around us. The light of the Golden 
 Age, — itself joy, music, and poetry, — is shining above. 
 There are evenings of summer or autumn tide so exqui- 
 sitely beautiful, so complete in their own charms, that the 
 entrance of the moon is felt almost as a painful and super- 
 fluous addition ; — it is like a candle dispelling the weird 
 darkness of a twilight room. So we feel at first, as if 
 Evangeline, when introduced, were an excess of loveliness 
 — an amiable eclipser of the surrounding beauties. But 
 even as the moon, by and by, vindicates her intrusion, 
 and creates her own " holier day," so with the delicate and 
 lovely heroine of this simple story — she becomes the centre 
 of the entire scene. She is that noblest of characters, a 
 lady in grain. She has borrowed her motions and attitudes 
 from the wind-bent trees ; her looks have kindled at the 
 stars ; her steps she has unwittingly learned from the 
 moving shadows of the clouds. On her way home from 
 confession, " when she had passed, it seemed like the ceas- 
 ing of exquisite music." Thus should all lives be led, all 
 
382 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 Steps be tuned ; and thus they shall, whenever Love, in- 
 stead of Law, shall lead the great dance of human life. 
 Purest of virgins, art thou to be sacrificed ! Finest of 
 vessels, art thou to be dashed in pieces ! It seems almost 
 cruel in the poet to try her so painfully, and to send her 
 to seek her sole redress in heaven. 
 
 We think every reader must feel that the first part of 
 " Evangeline " is far superior to the second. Evangeline's 
 search after her lover is beautifully described, but becomes 
 at last oppressive and painful. "We cry out, in our sorrow 
 and disappointment, for Acadia, with its crowing cocks, 
 bursting barns, flowery meadows, and happy hearts back 
 again. 
 
 The descriptions of American scenery in " Evangeline " 
 are in general extremely picturesque and beautiful. Wit- 
 ness this for example : — 
 
 " Now had the season returned, when the nights grow colder and 
 longer, 
 And the retreating Sun the sign of the Scorpion enters; 
 Birds of passage sail'd through the leaden air from the icebound 
 Desolate northern bays, to the shores of the tropical islands. 
 Harvests were gathered in; and, wild with the winds of September, 
 Wrestled the trees of the forest, as Jacob of old with the angel." 
 
 The picture of the Indian summer is finer still, with the 
 exception of the conceit with which it closes : — 
 
 " Array'd in its robes of russet, and scarlet, and yellow; 
 
 Bright with the sheen of the dew, each glittering tree of the forest 
 Flash'd like the plane tree the Persian adorned with mantles and 
 
 This last line contains a poor and forced memory. 
 What an injury to the glorious forest- tree to compare it 
 to the foolish and contemptible freak referred to. The 
 simile is alike far-fetched and worthless. " I say unto you, 
 that Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of 
 these." 
 
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 883 
 
 By a similar conceit (a mode of writing quite unusual 
 with him) has he spoiled one of his finest passages : — 
 
 " Meanwhile apart in the twilight-gloom of a window's embrasure, 
 Sat the lovers, and whispering together, beholding the moon rise 
 Over the pallid sea, and the silvery mist of the meadows, 
 Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, 
 Blossom'd the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the cmgels." 
 
 Next to the spectacle of a man destroying a noble con- 
 stitution, or marring fine faculties, is that of an author de- 
 liberately spoiling a passage which otherwise had touched 
 or trembled on perfection. It is a case of literary /e^o de se. 
 What business had the idea of a forget-me-not at such a 
 moment? Gabriel Lajeunesse himself, we are certain, 
 enamoured as he was, and even in that most imaginative 
 hour, never could dream of seeing an angel with a knot of 
 stars on his breast while visiting his true love. 
 
 Such faults are rare in this writer. Once or twice, in- 
 deed, he approaches the brink of the bathos, and snatches 
 one of those few, perilous, and precious flowers which bloom 
 along it. Thus, in " Hyperion," he compares a glacier to 
 a gauntlet of ice, thrown down by winter, in defiance 
 of the sun ; a thought so beautiful, that you forget the 
 danger which he has encountered and escaped in finding 
 it for you. 
 
 A striking little copy of verses he has entitled " The 
 Light of Stars." His " bright particular star " is not the 
 " star of Jove, so beautiful and large," nor the star of lovers, 
 Venus, nor the star of suicides, Saturn. It is the star of 
 warriors, " the red light of Mars." We share with him 
 in his feelings. Mars has, to men, more points of interest 
 and sympathy than almost any other planet. One frozen 
 band at least binds us to it. One white signal has been 
 hung out by this near vessel ; snow and winter are there. 
 And if, as analogy would plead, there be inhabitants, these 
 inhabitants must be somewhat like ourselves. There are 
 Jiresy there are hearths, there are homes in Mars ! There 
 
384 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 is struggle, there may be sin, there may be death — there 
 is contest, there is mystery, there may be victory ! What 
 home sounds, what thrilling tones, what an array of signals, 
 what a sheaf of telegraphic rays, from that red planet ! 
 Hear Longfellow — 
 
 " Earnest thoughts within me rise, 
 When I behold afar, 
 Suspended in the evening skies, 
 The shield of that red star. 
 
 star of strength! I see thee stand 
 And smile upon my pain ; 
 
 Thou beekonest with thy mailed hand, 
 And I am strong again. 
 
 Within my breast there is no light, 
 But the cold light of stars; 
 
 1 gave the first watch of the night 
 To the red planet Mars." 
 
 We must not overlook a poem entitled "Footsteps of 
 Angels." Who are the angels who visit and imprint his 
 heart? No cherubim — dim to him amid all their blaze 
 of intelligence. No strange seraphs — cold to him amid 
 all their flames of fire. They are the friends of his youth 
 — the loved of his early heart — now sons and daughters of 
 the grave. The eye of his heart sees them ; the ear of his 
 heart hears their soft footsteps, and their voices so low and 
 sweet. Have all of us not at times such angel visits ! Are 
 we not at this moment summoned to look up, and see and 
 hear them ? Ah ! we know that strong deep-furrowed face, 
 that lofty brow, those locks sprinkled with grey, that eye 
 restless with the fire of intelligence, and with the light of 
 paternal affection. We know too, too well, that young 
 form, that step light as the roe's upon the mountains, that 
 clear blue eye, that brown curling head, that forehead so 
 high, that face so pale and beautiful, over which, ere her 
 ten winters had passed, death had spread a ghastlier pale- 
 
nENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 385 
 
 ness — it is our Agnes, at once sister and child! And we 
 
 " God! if it be thus, and thou 
 Art not a madness and a mockery, 
 We yet might be most happy." 
 
 Longfellow's writings are in general prophetic of, and 
 preparatory for, the grand reconciliation of man, both as 
 regards man the individual, and man the species. In his 
 " Arsenal," and his *' Occultation of Orion," he shadows 
 forth the " coming of the milder day," w^hen there is 
 
 " Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals 
 
 The blast of War's great organ shakes the skies! 
 But beautiful as songs of the immortals, 
 The holy melodies of love arise." 
 
 And both in " Hyperion" and " Evangeline," the agency 
 of sorrow, in purging the eye, subduing the senses, water- 
 ing all the stronger plants in the soul's garden, is abun- 
 dantly recognised. Perhaps still another's " Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress," cut out through rougher ways, darkened by deeper 
 shadows, and exhibiting more the teaching of error than 
 either " Hyperion" or " Sartor," is still desiderated by the 
 age. 
 
 We cannot linger much longer with this delightful 
 writer. He has scattered many other delicious drops of 
 song along his course. Such are — " Rain in Summer," 
 " To a Child," " To the Driving Cloud," and " The Old 
 Clock on the Stairs." These are all amiable carols, inspi 
 rited with poetic life, decorated with chaste image, and 
 shadow^ed with pensive sentiment, like the hand of man- 
 hood laid gently upon the billowing head of a child. 
 
 The character of a translator's own genius may be 
 gathered with considerable accuracy from his selection of 
 pieces to translate. In general, the graceful bends to the 
 graceful, the pensive sighs back to the pensive, and the 
 strong shadows the strong. Longfellow has not dared any 
 
 2c 
 
386 HENRY WADSWORTIl LONGFELLOW. 
 
 lofty heights, or sounded any dark hollows, of foreign poetry. 
 The exquisite patriarchal simplicities of the Swedish ballad 
 have attracted his kindred spirit. It is not " deep calling 
 unto deep." It is one corn-field responding to another, 
 across the hedge, under one soft westerly breeze. Need we 
 do more than allude to " The Children of the Lord's 
 Supper," which, both in verse and spirit, is the model of 
 " Evangeline." Thus he characterises himself as a trans- 
 lator : — " The translation is literal, perhaps to a fault. In 
 no instance have I done the author a wrong, by introducing 
 into his work any supposed improvements or embellish- 
 ments of my own. I have preserved even the measure, 
 that inexorable hexameter in which, it must be confessed, 
 the motions of the English muse are not unlike those of a 
 prisoner dancing to the music of his chains ; and perhaps, 
 as Dr Johnson said of the dancing dog, ' the wonder is not 
 that she should do it so well, but that she should do it at 
 all/" 
 
 We close our paper with feelings of gratitude and respect 
 for our transatlantic author. It is pleasant, in this melan- 
 choly world, to " light upon sueh. certain places," where 
 beautiful dreams, and lofty, generous aspirations, lift us up, 
 on a ladder, into ideal regions, which are yet to become 
 real ; for every such aspiration is a distinct step upwards 
 to meet our expected New Jerusalem of man, "coming 
 down as a bride adorned for her husband." Every volume 
 of genuine poetry, besides, constitutes a cojdI grotto of re- 
 treat, with the altar of a bloodless sacrifice standing in the 
 midst. We love, too, even better than the poetry of this 
 volume, its sunny, genial, human, and hopeful spirit. Per- 
 haps there are more depth and power, certainly there are 
 more peculiarity and strangeness, in Emerson's volume, but 
 over many parts of it is suspended a dry, rainless cloud of 
 gloom, which chills and withers you. You become, it may 
 be, a wiser, but certainly a sadder man. Longfellow sheds 
 a checquered autumnal light, under which your soul, like a 
 
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 387 
 
 river, flows forward, serene, glad, strong, and singing as it 
 flows — 
 
 " Let us then be up and doing, 
 With a heart for any fate; 
 Still achieving, still pursuing, 
 Learn to labour and to wait." 
 
 PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 
 
 These sketches are by no means intended as a complete 
 literary history of the age ; yet we believe that in our two 
 " Galleries" few names of great note will be found altoge- 
 ther omitted. We have not, indeed, analysed at length 
 such writers as Dickens, Thackeray, Home, Robert Brown- 
 ing, or our admirable friend Marston, partly because we 
 are not fully acquainted with their works, and partly be^ 
 cause they have been thoroughly treated by other Avriters. 
 To omit, however, a distinct notice of such a phenomenon 
 as " Festus" were unpardonable, and to this we now ad- 
 dress ourselves. " Festus" is, indeed, a phenomenon. 
 " When I read ^ Festus,' " said poor David Scott to us, 
 " I was astonished to find such work going on in a mind 
 of the present day." It seemed to him, as Edinburgh on 
 first view was called by Haydon, a " giant's dream." In- 
 deed, it much resembles one of Scott's own vast unearthly 
 pictures, the archetypes of which he may have recognised 
 now in that world of shadows, of which he was born and 
 lived a denizen ; for surely, if ever walked a " phantom 
 
388 PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 
 
 amongst men," it was the creator of '• Vasco," " Sarpe- 
 don," and the " Resurrection of the Cross." 
 
 The iirst feeling which affected many besides us at the 
 perusal of " Festus" was a shock of surprise, mixed with 
 pain, and not free from a shade of disgust. If we did not 
 " believe," we trembled ; if we did not sympathise, we 
 shuddered. Everything was so strange that the whole 
 seemed monstrous. We can compare our feelings to no- 
 thing else than Cain's flight with Lucifer through the 
 stars. We found ourselves caught up on dark and mighty 
 wings, through wildernesses of dim and shadowy objects, 
 worlds unpeopled, worlds half-created, worlds peopled by 
 forms so monstrous that solitude seemed sweet in the com- 
 parison — " gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire." But 
 just as disgust and terror were about to drive us away 
 from this weltering chaos, a light appeared, softer than 
 sunlight, warmer than moonlight — the light of genius — 
 which beckoned us on, and in which, at last, all the abor- 
 tional shapes and unearthly scenery became beautiful as 
 the landscapes of a dream. It was an angel after all, and 
 not an eccentric demon, who was our conductor, and we 
 yielded ourselves gladly to his gentle guidance, although 
 the path lay over all prodigious and unspeakable regions. 
 We want words to express the wonder which grew upon 
 us, as each page opened like a new star, and we felt that 
 the riches of thought, and imagery, and language, scattered 
 through the poem, were absolutely " fineless," and that the 
 poet's mind was as vast as his theme. That vague but 
 thrilling wonder has subsided into a calm but profound 
 sense of the various elements of power and beauty which 
 compose the " one and indivisible" " Festus." 
 
 It is, first of all, an original production. Some, indeed, 
 have called it a mere cento from Goethe, Byron, and 
 Shelley. We grant at once that it bears a striking resem- 
 blance to some of the productions of those great three ; but 
 the resemblance is only that of a kindred subject and a 
 
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 389 
 
 kindred elevation. It is a new comet in an old sky. As 
 well call " Manfred" a copy of " Faust," or " Faust" of 
 Job, as trace " Festus" to a slavish imitation of any pre- 
 ceding poem. It takes its place instantly as the lawful 
 member of a family of sublime eccentrics, who have pierced 
 more or less boldly into forbidden regions " beyond the 
 solar path and milky-way," and whose fiery tresses tell on 
 their return that they have neared the ardours now of the 
 light that is full of glory, and now of the flames that shall 
 never be quenched. In all these, however, the argument and 
 object are different. Job, as we mean to show elsewhere, 
 contains a solution of the grand problem of the reconcilia- 
 tion of individual man to God, and to the difficulties of the 
 universe, through a divine medium. " Faust" is a frag- 
 mentary attempt to settle the same question, apart from 
 supernatural aid. " Manfred" howls back to both, that 
 such reconciliation is impossible, and that the riddle of the 
 universe is absolutely illegible by man. Shelley's " Pro- 
 metheus" is the argument of the " Faust" extended from 
 man the individual to man the species ; while Bailey's 
 " Festus" is the argument of Job applied, in like manner, 
 to the whole human family. He takes a similar view to 
 that which Blake has so beautifully developed in his illus- 
 trations of the book of Job. "Festus" is to the one as 
 Job to the other — a type of the fall and recovery of all 
 men. The scene of " Faust" and of " Prometheus" is in 
 earth; that of Job and of "Festus" is (essentially) in 
 eternity. 
 
 That the book of Job is intended to teach universal re- 
 storation we do not, notwithstanding Blake, believe. But 
 one principal object of " Festus" is to promulgate this 
 dream. A lovely dream, verily, it is. That the surprise of 
 a final deliverance should pierce into the darkness of the 
 second death — that heads bowed down on the pillows of 
 despair should be raised up to look and be lightened by the 
 THIRD ADVENT of a morc glorious " star of Lethe" than 
 
390 PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 
 
 was ever Mercury as he descended into the Pagan shades 
 • — that " faces faded in the fire" should glow with the 
 freshness of eternal youth — that the prey should be taken 
 out of the hands of such mighty ones, and the captives 
 from a fate so terrible — that the spring of a sublimer re- 
 surrection should reach the remote Hecla of hell, substi- 
 tuting flowers for flames, and for ice sunshine — that the 
 words of the " Devil's Dream" should be fulfilled even in 
 the case of the eldest born of Anarchy and Sin, — 
 
 " Thou shalt walk in soft white fight with kings and priests abroad, 
 And thou shalt summer high in bliss upon the hills of God" — 
 
 is a most captivating notion, and might be credited, had it 
 the slightest ground in the Word of God, or anywhere but 
 in the poetic fancy or the wild wish of man. As it is, it 
 rises up before ns, a brilliant but unsubstantial and fading 
 pomp, like a splendid evening sky ; or if it die not altoge- 
 ther away, it must be from its connection with the im- 
 perishable fame of " Festus." 
 
 We could have wished that the author of this poem had 
 severed its masses of beauty from a moral or theological 
 system. All such unions are dangerous to poems. Milton, 
 indeed, has surmounted the difficulty ; and while we 
 gpurn Shelley's assertion that the system of Christianity 
 shall by and by only be remembered in Milton's poem, 
 we grant that the "Paradise Lost" is a subordinate evi- 
 dence of its truth, as well as a rich halo around its central 
 and solid greatness. To Pollok's work, again, his high 
 Calvinism has proved partly a blessing and partly a bane 
 — inwrought, as it is, into the entire structure of the poem, 
 it has created either blind partizans or bitter enemies ; only 
 a few have been able to look through the " fire-mist" into 
 the poetical beauties which are hid beneath it. In like 
 manner, while Festus has been adopted and fondled by the 
 large sect (large at least in America) calling itself Univer- 
 salistSjits doctrines have repelled many of the orthodox, who 
 
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 391 
 
 Otherwise would have rejoiced in the "wilderness of sweets" 
 and the forest of grandeurs, which its circuit includes. 
 Nor must Mr Bailey imagine that he has, by his notion of 
 a universal restoration, in any effectual way, recommended 
 religion to the sceptical of the present day. Eternal 
 punishment, fifty years ago, was a great stumbling-block 
 to unquiet spirits. Such have generally now travelled on so 
 far towards Naturalism or Pantheism, that they will not 
 return at the voice of the charmer, charm he never so 
 wisely — they will laugh at the fine dream, as a man w^ould 
 at the offer of sugar- plums for food — and walk on their 
 own ungovernable way. They will ask, must not the 
 reason for a hell at all be an infinite one, and if so, is it 
 not likely to be an eternal reason too ? In every great 
 house is there not a furnace for the dross, as well as a light 
 in the drawing-room ? If sin be of an expansive charac- 
 ter, will not punishment expand along with it ? or, if God 
 means to destroy sin hereafter, why does he not begin by 
 abolishing it here ? And what need, they will ask again, 
 of any hell afterwards, when justice is done now^ ? And, 
 again, your theory may prove the book human, but does it 
 prove it divine ? 
 
 Thus innocuously will the milk and rose-water of 
 Bailey's doctrine drop upon the iron scales of modern 
 scepticism, which seeks now not so much to object to our 
 special form of revelation, as to deny revelation altogether. 
 
 Bailey's originality is not merely that of plan, but of 
 thought and style. He " hath a demon." He speaks as 
 immediately told from behind. All conventionalisms are 
 spurned — all opposites paired — all contradictions recon- 
 ciled — all elements mingled — all tenses lost in the holy 
 and glorious hubbub of " Festus." He is evidently a boy 
 at blood-heat, but an inspired boy. We have been as 
 much amazed to find critics^treating " Festus" — sometimes 
 with praise, sometimes with blame — as an elaborate piece 
 of art, as Byron was to find his " Don Juan" — the child of 
 
392 PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 
 
 gin and sin — treated by the Germans as an artistic work. 
 But Bailey's book is the effect of the intoxication of youth 
 — a powerful and lawful stimulant, which the poor jaded 
 hack of the " Spectator" or "Literary Gazette," or any 
 such sm^ill critic, is as incapable of sympathising with as 
 he is now of imbibing. 
 
 These miserable effigies of critics, when they approach 
 books like " Festus," should really read the " Riot Act ;" for 
 certainly such works do rebel against all arbitrary autho- 
 rity, and do stir the air and load the wind with extravagant 
 liberties of thought and word, which neither they nor 
 their fathers (Rymer, Dennis, &c.) were able to bear. We 
 have, within the last few years, witnessed (through such 
 critics) the strange phenomena of a Dickens deified and 
 a Christopher North (save in Scotland) forgotten, a War- 
 ren's "Now and Then" in its third edition, and Aird's 
 "Poems" scarcely out of their first, Macaulay crowned with 
 the richest laurels of the historic muse, and Thomas De 
 Quincey, with a genius, an intellect, and a learning quali- 
 fying him for an historian as far superior to the ex-Edin- 
 burgh member as was Tacitus to Suetonius, having " no- 
 where to lay his head " — a " Course of Time" and a " Silent 
 Love " in their teens of editions, and " Festus," after ten 
 years, in its third ; phenomena somewhat substantiating 
 the assertion of an old clever clergyman about the march 
 of intellect, " It has certainly been very rapid of late — it 
 has marched out of sight." 
 
 The poem of " Festus," however, has by no means lost its 
 reward. Its evident earnestness — its holy yet charitable 
 spirit — its inexhaustible fountain of imagery — its in- 
 dividual thoughts of splendour, like spots of sunshine lost 
 yet living, amid the dark forests around — its long sweep- 
 ing passages, which seem to grow visibly and audibly 
 before you — its infinite variety — the spirit and music of 
 its songs — the living aspect of its characters — the bold but 
 striking generality of its descriptions — the simplicity, or 
 
 i 
 
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 393 
 
 force, or beauty, or langour, of its language — the broad 
 picture of life it presents — prove it, apart from its theolo- 
 gical pretensions, the poem of the age's hope, even as 
 " Sartor Resartus " is the prose record of the age's expe- 
 rience. We should, perhaps, forbear to add, that besides 
 the warm verdict of the thinking youth of the country, it 
 has gained the praise of Bulwer, Montgomery, Wilson, 
 Tennyson, Binney, David Scott, Professor Nichol, Samuel 
 Brown, and others of equal note. Partial, or insincere, or 
 interested praise (although we by no means apply these 
 terms to the above), and also malicious censure, may be 
 told here to stand aside, inasmuch as " Festus " has written 
 its own indelible impress upon a very broad, true, and re- 
 sponsive section of the intellectual world. " You may know 
 it by its fruits." 
 
 " The young mind of the age!" What a multitude of 
 thoughts crowd on us when we utter these simple words! 
 What mingled hope and fear — what tremulous anticipa- 
 tions rush in, as we think of what it is, and of what it may 
 become — of the work it has to do, and the sufferings it 
 has to endure. Never was there an age when there were 
 so many young, ardent, and gifted spirits — never was there 
 an age when they more required wise guidance. The de- 
 sideratum may be thus expressed, " Wanted, a tutor to the 
 rising age ; he must be a creedless Christian — full of faith, 
 but full of charity — wise in head and large in heart — a 
 poet and a priest — an ' eternal child,' as well as a thoroughly 
 furnished man." 
 
 This advertisement has not yet been fully answered. 
 The work of Carlyle and Emerson has been principally 
 negative, and it seems now nearly perfected. We wait a 
 new teacher, who, by uniting the spirit of Christianity to 
 that of philosophy, shall present us with a satisfactory 
 whole — with nothing less than which our eager inquirers 
 will rest contented. May all the quick and cunning forces 
 of nature combine in forming such an august spirit ! Yet 
 
394 PHILIP JAMES BAILEY. 
 
 are we not at all sanguine of his speedy advent. Things, 
 we fear, must be worse ere they are better. And, perhaps, 
 the deepest hour of the darkness may be cloven by no 
 earthly radiance, but by the wide wings of that advent for 
 which the weary Church and the wearier world, are begin- 
 ning to pant, Avith unutterable groanings. Meanwhile, 
 many gifted spirits, besides Bailey, are working a good 
 work. Some poets of uncommon promise are ever and 
 anon appearing. Among these we may mention the author 
 of " Nimrod," a work containing much fine description and 
 exquisitely developed character. Aytoun has given us 
 one admirable ballad on " Montrose," although his vein is 
 not of the deepest ; Henry Sutton, A. J. Symington, 
 Strype, and William Allingham, are all gifted and pro- 
 mising persons. But our greatest hope is fixed on Sidney 
 Yendys, of Cheltenham ; this young gentleman has written 
 a drama entitled " The Roman," still in MS., of which 
 Shelley himself would not have been ashamed. With 
 something of the diffusion and exaggeration of youth, it 
 has a richness of thought, a felicity of language, a copious- 
 ness of imagery, a music of versification, not easy in any 
 first effort to be paralleled. It contains passages of beauty 
 or power which absolutely startle you, and specimens of 
 every variety of excellence, from the lofty declamation to 
 the melting ballad. We stake whatever critical reputation we 
 have on the prediction, that no recent poem, save " Festus," 
 shall make a profounder impression upon the lovers of 
 poetry when it appears, than " The Eoman." It is a very 
 conflagration of genius, as well as in many parts a high 
 triumph of art.* 
 
 * Bailey's theory is said to be derived, in a great measure, from the 
 writings of that extraordinary man, David Thom of Liverpool. 
 
JOHN STERLING. 395 
 
 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 The removal of a young man of high performance and 
 still higher promise is in all circumstances melancholy. 
 It is more so, if with the youth has expired either a new 
 vein of poetry or a new view of truth ; and it is scarcely 
 less so when the youth has been unconsciously the type of 
 a large class of cultivated and earnest minds, and when 
 his partial successes, baffled endeavours — his admitted 
 struggles, and his premature fate — have been in some mea- 
 sure vicarious. 
 
 These three short and simple sentences appear to us to 
 include, positively and negatively, the essence of the late 
 John Sterling, and shall form the leading heads in our 
 after remarks on his genius and character. He was, 
 in the judgment of all who knew or had carefully read 
 him a person of very distinguished abilities, and of still 
 more singular promise. He did not, in our view of him, 
 exhibit indications of original insight or of creative genius. 
 But he has, from his peculiar circumstances, from his specu- 
 lative and practical history, from his exquisitely-tuned and 
 swiftly-responsive symphonies with his age and its pro- 
 gressive minds, acquired a double portion of interest and 
 importance ; his experience seems that of multitudes, and 
 in that final look of disappointed yet submissive inquiry 
 which he casts up to heaven, he is but the foremost in a 
 long, fluctuating, and motley file. 
 
 The external evidences of his powers and acquirements 
 are numerous and irresistible. In his boyhood he dis- 
 covered striking tokens of a mind keen, sensitive, and 
 -turned in the direction of those high speculations from 
 which his eye, till death, was never entirely diverted. 
 While barely eight, "he distinctly remembered having 
 speculated on points of philosophy, and especially on the 
 
396 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 idea of duty, which presented itself to him in this way — 
 If I could save my papa and mamma from being killed, I 
 know I should at once do it. Now, why ? To be killed 
 would be very painful, and yet I should give my own con- 
 sent to being killed." The solution presented itself as "a 
 dim awe-stricken feeling of unknown obligation." When 
 about nine, " he was much struck by his master's telling 
 him that the word sincere was derived from the practice of 
 filling up flaws in furniture with wax, whence cine sera 
 came to mean pure, not vamped up." This explanation, he 
 said, gave him great pleasure, and abode in his memory, 
 as having first shown him that there is a reason in words 
 as well as in other things. When a boy, he read through 
 the whole " Edinburgh Review," of which his biogi'apher 
 says, " a diet than which hardly any could yield less whole- 
 some food for a young mind, and which could scarcely fail 
 to puff it up with the wind of self-conceit." We doubt the 
 validity of this dictum. We conceive that, to a fresh elastic 
 mind, the crossing of such varied territories of thought, 
 the coming in contact with so many vigorous minds, the 
 acquiring such stores of miscellaneous information, the 
 mere reading of such a mass of masculine English, as the 
 perusal of the entire " Edinburgh Review " implies, must 
 have been beneficial, and tended to aw^aken curiosity, to 
 kindle ambition, to stifle mannerism of style, and, as the 
 likely result of the many severe criticisms in which the 
 book abounds, to allay instead of fanning the feeling of 
 self-conceit. Who but commends the industry of the boy 
 who reads all the English essayists — a course of reading 
 certainly much more dissipating ; or the youth who reads 
 all Bayle's " Dictionary" — a course of reading much more 
 dangerous than the " Edinburgh Review ?" Let the boy 
 read at his pleasure — the youth will study, and the man 
 think and act. 
 
 At Cambridge, Sterling did not greatly distinguish 
 himself, nor did he bear any violent affection to his alma 
 
JOHN STERLING. 897 
 
 mater. For mathematics he had little taste ; the classics 
 he rather relished than thoroughly knew. He early com- 
 menced the study of philosophy, deeming it at once the key 
 to a scientific theology and to a lofty literature, although 
 latterly he all but left the cold and perilous crags of specu- 
 lation for the flowery meadows of poetry and esthetics. At 
 the feet of Coleridge no one ever sat with a feeling of more 
 entire and childlike submission ; the house at Highgate 
 was to him the shrine of a god, and his biographer regrets 
 that he " did not preserve an account of Coleridge's conver- 
 sations, for he was capable of representing their depth, 
 their ever-varying hues, their sparkling lights, their 
 oceanic ebb and flow." He began soon to empty out his 
 teeming mind, in the forms both of verse and prose. In the 
 course of his short life we find him connected, more or less 
 intimately, with the following periodicals : the " Athe- 
 nasum," " Blackwood's Magazine," the " Quarterly," and 
 the London and Westminster " Reviews." At a peculi- 
 arly dull period in the history of " Maga" he appeared, 
 amid a flourish of trumpets, as a "new contributor," and 
 did succeed in shooting a little new blood into her withered 
 veins. In the " Quarterly" he wrote a paper on Tennyson, 
 which was attributed at the time to Henry Nelson Cole- 
 ridge. Differing as he did in many material points from 
 the new school of Radicals who conducted the " Westmin- 
 ster," he seemed more at home in their company than in 
 that of the knights of the Noctes ; and his contributions to 
 their journal are all characteristic. These articles have 
 been reprinted by Dr Hare, and, along with the poems, 
 his tragedy of " Stafford," a few letters, and other remains, 
 constitute all his written claims to consideration. 
 
 He has certainly in them raised no very great or com- 
 pact basis for future fame ; but we are entitled to adduce, 
 in addition, the testimony of his friends, who all speak with 
 rapture of the possibilities of his mind — of his talent aa a 
 debater — and of his ready, vivid, and brilliant talk. In 
 
398 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 him alone Thomas Carljle met his conversational match ; 
 he alone ventured to face him in single combat, and nothing 
 like their rencontres seems to have been witnessed since 
 those of Johnson and Bm-ke. Even in his " Remains " we 
 may find faint yet distinct indications of all the principal 
 features of his intellectual character. These, we think, 
 may be classed under the three general characteristics of 
 sympathy^ 8incerity^ and culture. We do not mean that 
 these sum up the whole of his idiosyncrasy, but simply 
 that they are the qualities which have struck us most for- 
 cibly in the perusal of his works. He had, besides, as a 
 writer, a fine inventiveness, a rich and varied stock of 
 figures, a power of arresting and fixing in permanent 
 shapes the thinnest gossamer abstractions, and the com- 
 mand of a diction remarkable more for its copiousness, 
 flexibility, and strength, than for grace, clearness, or feli- 
 citous condensation. Perhaps his principal claim to repu- 
 tation rests on his criticisms, and their power and charm 
 lie in genial and self-forgetting sympathy. It is too cus- 
 tomary to speak of this as a subordinate quality in a critic, 
 as a veil over his eyes,, and nearly inconsistent with the 
 exercise of analytic sagacity. Those who talk in this 
 manner are not so much guilty of a mistake as of a 
 stupid blunder. Sympathy is closely connected with 
 sight. It is a medium, which, like water poured into a 
 bowl, enables you to see objects previously invisible. It, 
 and it alone, opens a window into the breast and the brain 
 of genius, and shows the marvellous processes which are 
 going on within. It is not merely that the heart often sees 
 farther than the intellect, but it is that sympathy cleanses 
 und sharpens even the intellectual eye. Love, and you 
 will understand. Besides, the possession of powerful sym- 
 pathy with intellect and genius, implies a certain simili- 
 tude of mind on the part of the sympathiser. The blind 
 cannot sympathise with descriptions of scenery, and the 
 lively motion and music of a mountain-stream sound like 
 
JOHN STERLING. 399 
 
 a satire to the lame who limp beside it. To feel with, you 
 must always find yourself m, the subject or the person. 
 Adam Smith doubtless was wrong when he explained 
 every moral phenomenon by sympathy ; it were a more 
 probable paradox to maintain that a man's intellectual 
 power entirely depends upon the depth, width, and warmth 
 of his sympathies, and that Shakspere was the greatest 
 of men because he was the widest of sympathisers. 
 
 Waiving, at this stage of our paper, such speculations, 
 we claim a high place for Sterling, as possessed of catholic 
 and clear-headed sympathy. Merely to copy the names of 
 a few of the characters whom he has analysed with justice, 
 and praised with generosity, is enough to prove this. He 
 has painted Alexander the Great and Wickliffe, Joan of 
 Arc and Gustavus Adolphus, Milton and Burns, Colum- 
 bus and Coleridge, Simonides and Carlyle, Napier and 
 Tennyson. "We find him, too, on friendly terms at once 
 with "Blackwood's Magazine" and the " Westminster Re- 
 view ; " writing in the " Quarterly," and calHng Shelley a 
 " generous heroic being ; " and in his " Tales " and "Apo- 
 logues " imitating the imaginative peculiarities, now of the 
 Gothic, now of the Grecian, and now of the German school. 
 We love this spirit much, not merely as proclaiming a 
 warm heart, but as evincing a wide, keen, and open intel- 
 lect. We contrast it favourably with a portion of the very 
 class to whom Sterling belonged, whose fastidiousness is 
 fast becoming frantic, who are loathing literature itself, 
 although it is by it alone that themselves have risen, and 
 whose hasty, splenetic, and contradictory judgments tend 
 to exert a damping and discouraging influence upon 
 youthful aspirants, who will ask, if such authorities tell us 
 that nothing has yet been done, how can we expect ever to 
 do anything ? Sterling, on the contrary, loved literature 
 for its own sake, and had a true appreciation of its infinite 
 worth and beauty. He was not like Byron, and one or 
 two others we might name, who looked upon literature 
 
400 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 partly as a means for gratifying an ambition to which 
 other avenues were closed, and partly as an outlet for the 
 waste energy and superfluous fury of their natures, when 
 their passions had not entirely exhausted them, and who, 
 upon the first disappointment and chagrin, were ready to 
 rush into another field ; nor did he resemble a class who 
 have mistaken their profession, and expended powers, 
 which might have led them to the highest distinction, in 
 action, in travelling, parliament, or arms, on gaining a 
 dubious literary success, which is despised by themselves ; 
 nor did he rank with the men whose love to literature is 
 confined to an appreciation of those who resemble, or who 
 follow their peculiar style. His circumstances saved him 
 from the miserable condition of a hack author, and from 
 all the heart-burnings, jealousies, and disgusts which de- 
 grade the noble pursuit of literature in his eyes, and turn 
 its beautiful moon into the clouded lantern of a low, lurid, 
 precarious life. Sterling, in his wide and trembling sym- 
 pathies with literary excellence, and in his devoted en- 
 thusiasm for the varied expressions of the beautiful, as 
 well as in the hectic heat and eagerness of his tempera- 
 ment, bore a striking likeness to Shelley, although pos- 
 sessing a healthier, happier, and better balanced nature. 
 
 While freely conceding him such qualities, we protest 
 against some of his critical commissions as well as omis- 
 sions. We are astonished at his silence in reference to 
 John Foster, whose sturdy genius ought to have been 
 known to him, and whose mind was moving more slowly 
 and uneasily through the same process of speculative 
 change with his own. We cannot at all understand his 
 admiration for Montaigne, who appears to have been a 
 very slight sublimation of sensual indifference, and not 
 more honest than the sensual-indifferent wealthy usually 
 are. How grossly unjust he is to Rousseau and Hazlitt, 
 when he calls them " declaimers and dealers in rhetorical 
 falsehood ! " Grant that Rousseau was personally a poor 
 
JOQN STERLING. 401 
 
 scrannell, tortuous, and broken pipe, who can deny that a 
 power, call it his genius or his denaon, discoursed at times 
 upon him sweet and powerful music, to which nations lis- 
 tened because they could not refrain, and which no term 
 like rhetoric, or even oratory, nor any inferior to poetry, 
 touching the verge of prophecy, can at all measure ? No 
 such utterances have come from Hazlitt ; but if he resem- 
 bled Rousseau in occasional bursts of vanity, he was cer- 
 tainly, on the whole, a sincerer man : he egotises at his 
 proper cost — his absurdities seem given in on oath. For 
 downright honesty, and for masses of plain sense, and na- 
 tive acuteness, we are not afraid to compare and prefer 
 many of his essays to those of the old Gascon, and, with all 
 his faults and deficiencies, his match as a mascuUne and 
 eloquent critic has yet to be made. What verbose affairs 
 do even Jeffrey's criticisms,, when collected, appear beside 
 the lectures of Hazlitt, who often expresses the essence of 
 an author by the scratch of his pen, and settles a literary 
 controversy by an epithet. 
 
 Initiation into the mysteries of German philosophy and 
 literatm-e produced in Sterling a considerable degree of 
 indifference towards the English classics. To Addison's 
 essays — those cool, clear, whispering leaves of sunimer, so 
 native and so refreshing — he never alludes, and we cannot 
 conceive him, like Burke^ hushing himself to his last slum- 
 ber, by hearing read the papers in the " Spectator " on 
 the immortality of the soul. And against Dr Johnson he 
 has committed himself in a set attack, of which we must 
 speak more particularly. An author of celebrity main- 
 tains that no person can be a man of talent who does not 
 admire " Dr Johnson, and that all men of eminent ability 
 do admire him." Without pressing the application of this 
 assertion, we do think that those who, in the present age, 
 find in him a hero, discover both candour and penetration 
 — candour to admit and pass by his bulky faults as a 
 writer, and penetration to see his bulky though disguised 
 
 2 D 
 
402 JOIIX STERLING. 
 
 merits as a writer and a man. For one to call him a mere 
 "prejudiced emphatic pedant," is simply to write down 
 one's self an ass. For Coleridge to call him the " over- 
 rated man of his age " (how could the age avoid rating him 
 highly, since he was, save Burke, the greatest man it had?) 
 is for Coleridge to prove himself a privileged person, who 
 said whatever he chose. Sterling's charges may be clas- 
 sified thus : Dr Johnson's productions are " loud and 
 swollen" — he could say nothing of poetry, and has said 
 nothing of Shakspere " worth listening to " — he had no 
 "serene joy" — and he wanted it because he had no " ca- 
 pacity for the higher kinds of thought." To the proof. 
 
 \st, His language was "loud and swollen." Granted. 
 So is a torrent, or a river in flood. So are Thomson's 
 " Seasons," Young's "Night Thoughts," Schiller's " Eob- 
 bers," Coleridge's " Hymn to Mont Blanc," and " Religious 
 Musings," Sterling's " Lycian Painter " and " Last of the 
 Giants," all productions of genuine merit and meaning, and 
 yet all stilted either in style or manner, or both. Johnson 
 is often loud, but seldom boss — he can beat the drum, but 
 he can shiver the castle-gate with his axe too. If his arm be 
 sometimes " swollen " with indolence, it is as often swollen 
 with heavy blows aimed, and not in vain, at the heads of 
 his enemies. His very yawn is thunder — he swings in an 
 easy chair, which many that mock him could not move. 
 You may laugh at the elephant picking up the pin, but 
 not ejaculating ?/o?/, brained and battered, toward the skies. 
 
 2dl2/, He has said nothing of Shakspere or poetry 
 worth listening to. What ! Is his dissertation in Waller 
 on sacred poetry, be it true or false, not worth listening 
 to ? or his panegyric on the " Paradise Lost ? " or his cha- 
 racter of the "Night Thoughts?" or his comparison between 
 Pope and Dry den ? or his picture of a poet in '^ Rasselas ? " 
 or his unanswered overturn of the unities in his essay on 
 Shakspere ? or several other portions of that " ponderous 
 mass of futilities?" or his famous lines on Shakspere? 
 
JOHN STERLIJN'G. 403 
 
 Mark, we are not asserting that all suck passages are of 
 the highest order of philosophical criticism, but we are 
 asserting their intrinsic value, and their immeasurable 
 superiority to the vague, empty, pointless, misty, and 
 pseudo-G-erman disquisitions which stuff many of our 
 principal magazines and reviews in the present day. We 
 are not prepared to sacrifice the poorest passages in the 
 " Lives of the Poets " — nay, not even his notes on Shak- 
 spere (which make Fanny Kemble swear — off the stage), 
 for such a piece of elaborate and recondite nonsense, as re- 
 cently was permitted to appear in a celebrated Scottish re- 
 view, as a paper on Tennyson's " Princess," and was yet 
 not the worst specimen of the kind of criticism referred to. 
 But Sterling accuses Johnson of wanting " serene joy ;" 
 an accusation, alas ! too true. But, how could he have 
 attained this, in the first place, under the pressure of that 
 " vile body" — that huge mass of disease, bad humours, and 
 semi-blindness, which he carried about with him, and 
 under which he struggled and writhed like a giant below 
 Etna ? In the victim of old, yoked consciously to a putri- 
 fying carcass, we may conceive stern submission, but 
 hardly serene joy. We can account for a man like Wil- 
 liam Cobbett, high in health, clear in eye, and with a sys- 
 tem answering, like the crystal mirror of a stream, to every 
 feature of his intellectual faculties, reproaching Johnson 
 with gloom, but must think it a sad mistake, if not an 
 affectation, on the part of a philosophic valetudinarian like 
 John Sterling. Besides, as it has been said that the laws 
 of disease are as beautiful as those of health, the intuitions 
 of disease are as true as those of health. In none of them is 
 the whole truth found ; but even as the jaundiced view is 
 only a partial rendering of the creation and of man, so the 
 view of one in perfect health and strength, with a sanguine 
 temperament, and in circumstances of signal prosperity, is 
 equally imperfect. The one may be called a black or 
 yellow, the other a wfiite lie. Surely the Cockney we have 
 
404 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 elsewhere commemorated as sitting with Carlyle in a rail- 
 way carriage, rubbing his hands, and saying to the grim 
 stranger — " Successful world this, isn't it, sir?" was as far 
 astray as the author of Sartor glaring through the gloomy 
 bile-spotted splendour of the atmosphere which usually sur- 
 rounds his spirit. And whether are more trustworthy the 
 feelings of the man standing before his fire watching the 
 parturition of a pudding, and the simmering of a pot of 
 mulled porter, and exclaiming, "How comfortable!" or 
 those of a traveller perishing among the midnight snows ? 
 There is truth, and equal truth, in all such angular aspects, 
 — there is the whole truth in none of them, nor even in any 
 conceivable mixture of them all. And it were difficult to 
 imagine a man in temperament like Johnson forming essen- 
 tially another view than what rushed in on him from every 
 orifice of his distempered system. 
 
 There i^ a cant in the present day — a cant which Ster- 
 ling was above — about health, healthy systems, healthy 
 views, healthy regulation of body, as producing a healthy 
 tone of mind, as if the soul and stomach were identical, as 
 if good digestion were the same thing with happiness, as 
 if all gloomy and distressing thoughts sprung from bile, 
 as if one had only to lie down under the " wet sheet" to 
 understand the origin of evil, to solve all the cognate, tre- 
 mendous problems of the universe, and to obtain that " re- 
 conciliation" after which all earnest spirits aspire. Easy 
 the process now for obtaining the " peace which passeth 
 understanding!" Poor John Bunyan, why didst thou 
 struggle, writhe, and madden, wade through hells of fire 
 and seas of blood, to gain a result to which cold bathing 
 and barks would have led thee in a month? Foolish 
 Thomas Carlyle, why all that pother about everlasting noes 
 and yeas, instead of anticipating Bulwer in the baptismal 
 regeneration of the cold water cure ? This is a free trans- 
 lation of the doctrines propounded by our modern utilita- 
 rians, who hold that if they had had Dante and Byron in 
 
JOHN STERLING. 405 
 
 their hands, they would have made them happy men, and 
 writers so sweet and so practical, and who can hardly 
 credit you when you tell them that John Foster observed 
 all the " natural laws," and was a gloomy " son of thunder," 
 and that others break them daily, and are as merry as the 
 day is long. It is vain to speak to them of temperament, 
 of hereditary melancholy, of mental penetration so piercing 
 as to amount to distemper, of visions of evil so vivid as to 
 haunt every movement of the spirit, of hectic sensibility, 
 of doubts so strong as to threaten to strangle piety and 
 render devotion at times a torment — let the man but give 
 up tobacco, and he will and must be happy 1 Foster evi- 
 dently did not take enough of exercise, Carlyle smokes, 
 and Cowper went to excess, it is well known, in the " cup 
 that cheers but not inebriates." Hinc illae laclirymae! 
 
 Now, it is of course conceded that a well-regulated phy- 
 sical life will in some measure modify both mental views 
 and mental happiness. But, in the first place, there are 
 constitutions for whom a well-regulated means a generous 
 mode of living. Such was that of Shelley, who, according 
 to the testimony of his friends, was never so well or happy 
 as when, at rare intervals, he departed from his usual fare 
 of vegetables and water. Secondly, " Because thou art 
 virtuous," is there no more vice in the world, no more 
 miserj" — is every dark problem solved — are the old enigmas 
 of death and sin made one whit plainer? nay, in propor- 
 tion to the degree of personal purity is not the feeling of 
 sorrow and disgust at the follies and foulnesses of the world 
 likely to gain strength ? Ah ! the utmost that the cleanest 
 outward life can do is to produce in some minds a feeling 
 that they have evaded, although not met, the grand diffi- 
 culty, to produce in others a selfish self-complacency and 
 forgetfulness, springing from a state of health so unnatu- 
 rally constant as to be in reality a disease, and on minds 
 of the higher order to produce little iiermanent effect at 
 all. From another source must help come. From above, 
 
406 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 from the regions of spiritual truth, must descend that bap- 
 tism of fire which confers ardent hope, if not happiness — 
 that blessedness which is higher and better, even in its im- 
 perfection and chequered light, than the unthinking calm 
 or mechanical gladness of the best regulated animalism. 
 But Johnson, according to Sterling, wanted serene joy, 
 not merely from the peculiarity of his temperament, nor 
 merely from the state of his age and the degree of his cul- 
 ture, as affecting his impressions, but from his incapacity 
 for the higher kinds of thought — as if all possessed of this 
 capacity, as if Coleridge, for instance, or Schiller, or Car- 
 lyle, whom Sterling always ranks in the first class, have 
 been serene, and as if this explanation of Johnson's want 
 of peace were not disproved by a hundred instances of men 
 who, less entitled than he to the praise of the highest ori- 
 ginal or inventive genius — for example, Hall, Southey, 
 Chalmers, and the lately deceased Hamilton of Leeds — 
 have been distinguished by buoyant and child-like felicity. 
 No; we are persuaded that from no defect in Johnson's 
 intellect, but from constitutional causes, sprung his morbid 
 melancholy ; nay, that the strength of his intellect was 
 proved by the control which it exercised over his tempera- 
 ment. A giant maniac required and obtained a giant 
 keeper. Had he possessed the culture and shared in the 
 progress of our age, we are not sure if more than three or 
 four of its literary heroes would have equalled him. Peace 
 to his massive shade ! He was one of the best, greatest, 
 wisest, and most sincere of men. 
 
 While we are engaged in finding fault, we may notice 
 our author's opinions on the connection between intellect 
 and heart. Carlyle had maintained that a truly great in- 
 tellect must always be accompanied by a noble moral 
 -nature ; he had not asserted the converse, that a noble 
 moral nature implies a great intellect. Sterling, in his 
 reply, commits, we think, two mistakes. First, imagining 
 that Carlyle had asserted this untenable converse, he presses 
 
JOHN STERLING. 407 
 
 him with the names of Newton of Olney, Thomas Scott, 
 Calamy, Swartz, and Jeanie Deans, and asks if these were 
 people of high intellect? But although the day includes 
 the hour, the hour does not include the day. Carlyle's 
 idea is, that while the moral nature has been found high 
 and the intellect small, the intellect has never come to its 
 true elevation without the correspondence of the heart. 
 It is a question of facts. In the second place, Sterling 
 and Carlyle attach different meanings to the word intel- 
 lect. With the one it signifies the understanding, and 
 he shows triumphantly how it has wedded wickedness 
 or heartlessness in Tiberius, the Duke of Guise, Lord 
 Bolingbroke, Voltaire, and Talleyrand. With Carlyle it 
 means the higher power of intuition, genius, or reason, 
 which, according to him, while often attended by a train 
 of error-imps, or even big, burly vices, never exhibits pro- 
 found and radical depravity, and is never unattended by a 
 sense of the good, the true, the generous, and the just. It 
 is obviously impossible to settle a controversy where there 
 is a preliminary misunderstanding as to the terms, but we 
 certainly incline to Carlyle's opinion — holding it, however, 
 only as a general rule, and noting two distinct species of 
 exception which we may call the mad and the monstrous 
 case. There is first the mad, in which, as with Rousseau, 
 and perhaps Mirabeau and Byron, a diseased organisation 
 has divided those principles of head and heart which are 
 usually joined in the marriage chamber of the brain of 
 genius. There is, secondly, the monstrous case, where, as 
 in Bacon, the moral sense, if not omitted entirely, seems to 
 exist in an inverse proportion to the intellectual power — 
 where an intellect vast, varied, and weighty as the globe, 
 is balanced by a heart, hard and small as a pin-point. 
 Ought we to add Napoleon as another instance of this 
 second most rare and appalling formation ? 
 
 We mentioned as the second general quality of Sterling 
 his sincerity. Those much abused and desecrated terms, 
 
408 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 truth-seeker and beauty-lover, assumed too often by the 
 selfish and the vain to distinguish them from the common 
 crowd, came of their own accord and rested on his head. 
 And if he did seem toward the close to relax somewhat in 
 his devotion to truth, and to be smit with a fonder aiFec- 
 tion for the beautiful, it was because, while the latter 
 melted into his embrnce, the former fled ever before him 
 into her awful shades. He turned from the haughty 
 Rosalind of truth to the fair young Juliet of beauty. But 
 his love, in both instances, was as pure as it was ardent. 
 You do not see in him the death- wrestle of Arnold, who, 
 like Jacob at Peniel, appears panting as he cries to the 
 mysterious form, " I will not let thee go except thou bless 
 me ; rather crush me by thy weight than tell me nothing." 
 For such painful and protracted struggle Sterling was un- 
 fitted by temperament and by illness ; but if not a rugged 
 athlete, he was a swift runner in this great chase. His 
 mind wrought less than Arnold's by research — more by 
 rapid intuition. With less learning and perseverance, he 
 had incomparably more imagination and more philosophic 
 sagacity. Health and circumstances prevented him from 
 effecting so much as Arnold, or leaving on the age the 
 same impression of fearlessness, truthfulness, and moral 
 power. More than even Arnold was he caught in the 
 meshes of uncertainty, and to both death seemed the 
 dawning of a light which they had yearned after, but 
 never reached on earth. Both died too early for the world, 
 but in time for their own happiness. It is clear that 
 Arnold could not have remained much longer connected 
 with the English Church, nor probably with any. AVhither 
 the restless progress of Sterling's mind would have led him 
 we cannot tell, but it had conducted him to quaking and 
 dangerous ground. Both, while in deep doubt upon many 
 important questions, exhibited on the verge of death a 
 child-like Christianity of spirit and language which it is 
 delightful to contemplate ; and both, through their moral 
 
JOnN STERLING. 409 
 
 likeness to each other, through their position and the pro- 
 gress of their thought, will, notwithstanding many mental 
 dissimilarities, be classed together by posterity as two of 
 the most interesting specimens of the enlightened minds of 
 our strange transition period. 
 
 Sterling's culture was of a peculiar kind. His mind 
 was not ripened under the scorching sun of science, but 
 under the softer and more genial warmth of philosophy and 
 literature. We are not sure if he had ever thoroughly 
 mastered the original works of the German philosophers, 
 or if his metaphysical reading was of an extensive range ; 
 we incline to think that he had acquired much of his know- 
 ledge of Kant and his brethren from the extempore ver- 
 sions of Coleridge, and that it was with the poets and such 
 moral and religious writers of Germany as Schleiermacher 
 that he was familiar. His historical knowledge was rather 
 wide than accurate, and from severe personal research he 
 shrunk with all the reluctance of a sensitive and nervous 
 nature. With the classics of all polite literature he was 
 intimately conversant. His theological attainments were 
 respectable — there is no evidence that they were more, and 
 latterly, indeed, he became deeply prejudiced against the 
 present pretensions, and forms, and modes of investigating 
 that science. His culture, altogether, was rather elegant 
 than strict, rather recherche than profound ; and from this, 
 we think, in part proceeded the uncertainty of his theo- 
 logical views. His clerical profession and his early feel- 
 ings created an intense interest in theological subjects, 
 and a yearning for deeper insight into them, but his tastes 
 and his powers adapted him for a different pursuit. Theo- 
 logy, if we would find aught new in it, requires digging. 
 Sterling could not dig, he could only fly ; his verdicts, 
 therefore, are valuable principally for their sincerity ; they 
 are rapid fir^t impressions, not slow, deliberate, last judg- 
 ments. The very power which rendered him a consum- 
 mate critic of the fine arts, and often an exquisite artist, 
 
410 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 disqualified him for those laborious and complicated pro- 
 cesses which go to build up the great idea of God's rela- 
 tions to mankind. Here he is a tongueless orator, a blind 
 painter, a dumb musician, his powerlessness of execution 
 being proportionate to the strength of his desire. 
 
 A man of genius John Sterling has often been called, 
 nor are we disposed to deny him the precious but indefinite 
 term. His sympathies, his temperament, his mode of 
 thinking, all the moods and tenses of his mind, were those 
 of genius. If not a man of genius, he was a most startling 
 likeness or bust of one. Nevertheless, we have our doubts 
 as to the originality or greatness of his vein. We argue 
 this not, as some would absurdly, from his wide and gene- 
 rous sympathies ; great genius implies a great genial na- 
 ture as necessarily as a great river a great channel for its 
 waters, and a broad nature, like a broad river, must re- 
 flect many objects. We argue it not from finding no ex- 
 tensive or profound work in the list of his writings — this 
 his short life and his long duel with death sufficiently ex- 
 plain ; and still less from his non-popularity (in the popu- 
 lar sense) as an author ; as he never spoke to the empty 
 echo of popular applause, he never expected to receive 
 a reply. But we imagine that we notice in the various 
 productions he has left a sort of tentative process as of a 
 mind distracted by various models and attempting different 
 styles. We observe this not merely in his earlier but in 
 his later works. We never, from the beginning to the end 
 of his career, find him in a path so peculiar and lonely 
 that we cry out, " Let him prosecute this if he can till 
 death." He never gives the impression, amid all his in- 
 dividual brilliancies of thought, invention, and figure, 
 of a new, and whole, and undivided thing, leaving such 
 influence on us as is given by the sight of a new comet in 
 the heavens, or of a Faust, a Festus, or a " Eime of the 
 Anciente Marinere" upon the earth. His genius rather 
 touches, dances on a brilliant and shapeless fire-mist, than 
 
JOHN STERLING. 411 
 
 constructs it into fine or terrible forms. lie has all the 
 variety, vividness, truth, and elo(iuence which constitute 
 an artist who has genius, but not the possession, the self- 
 abandonment, the gigantic monotony, slowly evolving it- 
 self out of the wide circle of early sympathies, and wielding 
 them all to its purpose — the one great thing in nature to 
 tell — the one great thing toward man to do, which distin- 
 guish a prophet whom genius has. 
 
 There are two lights in which to regard Sterling's writ- 
 ings — either as trials of strength or as triumphs of genius. 
 It is in the former light that we are disposed to regard 
 them. They are of almost every variety of style, subject, 
 and merit. We have poems, apologues, allegories, a tra- 
 gedy, criticisms, novels, and fragmentary relics. Seldom 
 do we remember the steep of fame scaled on so many sides 
 by one so young. He resembled a captain who, waiting 
 for the ultimate order of his general, keeps his troops 
 moving hither and thither in what seems aimless and end- 
 less ubiquity. So Sterling hung around all the alleys and 
 avenues of thought, tarrying for the word "march, and 
 secure this or that one" — a word which never came. Yet 
 assuredly his talent, tactics, and earnestness were of no 
 ordinary kind. How much mild pathos has he condensed 
 into the "Sexton's Daughter!" What fine though dim 
 condensations many of his poetical lines are ! How ten- 
 derly and truly docs he touch what we might deem the yet 
 sensitive and shrinking corpse of Wentworth ! Napoleon, 
 too, he has resuscitated ; and it is at the touch of no 
 earthworm that he springs aloft, gigantic, if not triumphant, 
 from the tomb. And throughout the tales and apologues, 
 which principally compose the second volume of his " Re- 
 mains," there are sprinkled beauties of thought, sentiment, 
 and expression, for which forty volumes of modern novels 
 might be searched in vain. 
 
 On his " Thoughts " and " Letters," as in some respects 
 the most interesting of his writings, wc propose to pause 
 
412 
 
 JOUN STERLI^'G. 
 
 for a little. Always are such writings, if from a sincere 
 man, the most direct and genuine issues of his spirit — 
 they are just the mind turned inside out. The naked man 
 that can bear inspection must be handsome ; the naked 
 thought which delights must be beautiful and true. A 
 very good and very clever divine has written *' Adams's 
 Private Thouglits." We are thankful to him ; but what 
 would we give for the private thoughts of Shakspere, 
 Milton, and especially of Burke, since he, less than most 
 men, " hung his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at." 
 Were but some one wiser and greater than Rousseau to 
 shrive himself as honestly as he ! An honest account of his 
 inmost sentiments and his entire history, held up in the 
 hand of any intellectual man, not insane, would stop almost 
 the motions of society till it had been read and pondered. 
 Autobiographies being in general the falsest of books, the 
 exception would be the more prized. And thus, too, we 
 should find that one fearless man had uttered feelings and 
 thoughts participated in by the whole human race, and 
 was the mouth of a dumb humanity. 
 
 Sterling's " Thoughts " are evidently sincere, but as evi- 
 dently a selection. They are the collected cream of his 
 mind. He does not open his soul ad aperturam lihri. 
 He gives us elegant extracts, and some of them might have 
 been better entitled " How I ou*ht to have thought at such 
 and such a time." The whole collection is not so much of 
 " thoughts " as of " after- thoughts." They were published, 
 let us remember, before liis death, in " Blackwood's Maga- 
 zine." Had they been thorough-going utterances and writ- 
 ten in blood, no periodical would have printed them. As 
 it is, many of them are very beautiful and profound. We 
 quote a few : — 
 
 " There is no He that many men will not believe ; there is no man 
 who does not believe many lies ; and there is no man who believes 
 only lies. 
 
 One dupe is as impossible as one twin. 
 
JOHN STERLING. 41 3 
 
 To found an argument for the value of Christianity on external evi- 
 dence, and not on the condition of man and the pure idea of God, is 
 to hold up a candle before our eyes that we may better see the stars. 
 The religion of all Pagans indiscriminately has often been written 
 of by zealous Christians in the worst spirit of Paine and Voltaire. 
 Lies are the ghosts of truths, the masks of faces. 
 The firm foot is that which finds firm footing. The weak falters 
 although it be standing on a rock. 
 
 Goethe sometimes reminds us of a Titan in a court-dress. 
 The prose man knows nothing of poetry, but poetry knows much of 
 him. 
 
 No man is so born a poet but that he needs to be regenerated into 
 a poetic artist. 
 
 There are countenances far more indecent than the naked form of 
 the Medicean Venus. 
 
 Those who deride the name of God are the most unhappy of men, 
 except those who make a trade of honouring him. 
 
 An unproductive truth is none. But there are products which 
 cannot be weighed even in patent scales, nor brought to market. 
 
 There is a tendency in modern education to cover the fingers with 
 rings, and at the same time cut the sinews at the wrist. 
 Better a cut finger than no knife. 
 
 The worst education which teaches self-denial is better than the 
 best which teaches everything else, and not that." 
 
 Sterling's letters are plain, unexcited, and unpretending. 
 Their style, so much simpler than that of his essays and 
 tales, suggests the thought that he must have elaborated 
 the latter. They interest more from their good sense and 
 information than as discoveries of character. They are full 
 of generous and quiet criticism. Thus, of Lamb he says — 
 " I have been looking over the two volumes of his letters, 
 and I am disposed to consider them the pleasantest in the 
 language, not excepting the best of Cowper's, nor Horace 
 Walpole's. He was a man of true genius, though on a 
 small scale, as a spangle may be gold as pure as a doubloon." 
 Speaking of his own poems, he says — " When I think of 
 Christabel, and Herman, and Dorothea, I feel a strong per- 
 suasion that I deserve the pillory for ever writing verses 
 at all. The writings of Schelling, Fichte, and some others, 
 
414 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 give the same uneasy belief as to prose." Again — " Lately 
 I have been reading some of Alfred Tennyson's second 
 volume, and with profound admiration of his truly lyric 
 and idyllic genius. There seems to me to have been more 
 epic power in Keats, that fiery, beautiful meteor ; but they 
 are two most true and great poets. When one thinks of 
 the amount of recognition they have received, one may 
 well bless God that poetry is in itself strength and joy, 
 whether it be crowned by all mankind or left alone in its 
 own magic hermitage. It is true that what new poetry we 
 have is little cared for ; but also true that there is wonder- 
 fully little deserving any honour. Compare our present 
 state with twenty years ago, when Wordsworth, Byron, 
 Shelley, Keats, and Scott as a novelist, were all vigorously 
 productive. Carlyle is the one great star that has arisen 
 since, and he is far more prophet than singer." He gives 
 a striking anecdote of Thorwaldsen : " Did you ever hear 
 the story of his being at a party at Bunsen's, whose house 
 was on the Capitolian Hill, on the site of the temple of 
 Olympian Jove, and where the conversation, as often, 
 under Bunsen's guidance, took a very Christian turn, till 
 Thorwaldsen remarked, through the window commanding 
 a noble prospect of Rome, the modern city, the planet 
 Jupiter in great glory, and, filling his glass, exclaimed, 
 ' Well, here's in honour of the ancient gods ! ' " 
 
 We mentioned at the commencement that we conceived 
 John Sterling's progress was typical of that of a large and 
 interesting class of intellectual persons in the present day. 
 We proceed now to explain what we mean. It is an ex- 
 tremely important and serious aspect of his history at which 
 we must now look. It is at his religion. 
 
 So far as religion can be called constitutional, John 
 SterHng was constitutionally religious. The union of ar- 
 dent temperament, high intellect, and pure morals, gene- 
 rally in this country generates a strong religious appetency, 
 which was manifest in him. Dr Hare has not traced bo 
 
JOHN STERLING. 415 
 
 minutely and clearly as had been desirable the entire pro- 
 gress of his thoughts and feelings on this momentous topic. 
 Indeed, there is throughout all his memoir a shrinking, 
 skulking, and want of plain speaking on the subject, un- 
 worthy of such a man writing on such a man, and this, we 
 know, some of Sterling's warmest friends feel ; but we 
 think we can map it out with considerable accuracy, and 
 in very few and very plain words. From the early piety 
 of genius, he seems to have passed into the early scepticism 
 of genius. While sounding on his dim and perilous way 
 in those troubled waters, the great beacon-light of Cole- 
 ridge attracted and seemed to save him. He became in 
 theory, as he had been in feeling, a Christian. Influenced 
 by his marriage and other circumstances, disciplined by 
 various grave events, and not, he trusts, unguided by the 
 Holy Spirit, he entered the work of the Christian ministry, 
 laboured for six months with exemplary diligence, and was 
 only prevented by illness from prosecuting the calling. 
 Afterwards, a change began gradually to pass over his 
 mind. Loosened from professional ties — burning with a 
 hectic speculation — impatient of the cant, and common- 
 places, and bigotry of ordinary theologians — sick of the 
 senseless controversies of his church — and attracted ever 
 more and more by the learning and genius of Germany, 
 his orthodox belief in Christianity was shattered, though 
 his childlike love for it remained the same. At last he 
 died, it must be told, more than doubtful of the divine 
 origin of Judaism, unsatisfied of the evidences of Christi- 
 anity, and yet ravished with the unutterable beauty and 
 moral grandeur of the latter ; and his almost last words 
 were a request to his sister to hand him the old Bible he 
 was wont to use in Herstmonceux (where he had been 
 curate) among the cottages. 
 
 Such is the plain unvarnished tale of Sterling's religious 
 career. It is a very painful, very interesting, and very 
 instructive narrative. We must be permitted to metho- 
 
416 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 dise our impressions of it under the following remarks : — 
 First, It is not, alas ! a singular case. Secondly, Its causes 
 are not very recondite. And, thirdly, It teaches some 
 momentous lessons. 
 
 1st, The case is not uncommon. Without alluding to 
 innumerable private instances, the process through which 
 Sterling was passing is almost the same with that less fully 
 undergone by Foster and Arnold, and which, in Newman 
 and Parker, in Carlyle and Emerson, may be considered 
 perfected. In Shelley, it was different. In the first place, 
 he unfortunately never enjoyed, we fear, the opportunity 
 of seeing real leligion incarnated in living examples ; with 
 that noble moral poem, sublimer far than a " Paradise 
 Lost," a meek and humble disciple of Jesus, he seems 
 never to have come in contact. 2dly, He was early re- 
 pelled from just views of the subject by the savage 
 stupidity of university tests and treatment. And, 3dly, 
 The motion of his mind was accelerated by that morbid 
 heat and misery which made his life an arm of Styx, and 
 rendered his entire character and history anomalous. 
 Shelley is the caricature of the unsatisfied thinker of the 
 times ; and while, as a poet, admired by all for his poten- 
 tial achievements, his creed, which creed was none, unless 
 a feverish flush on the brow be a fixed principle of the 
 soul, has only influenced those who are weak and morbid 
 through nature, or raw and incondite through youth. 
 Sterling, on the other hand, was the express image of such 
 a thinker, in its highest and purest form. 
 
 Ere inquiring into the causes of that strange new form 
 of scepticism, which has seized so many of our higher 
 minds, let us more distinctly enunciate what it is not, and 
 does not spring from. It is not, as some imagine, a mere 
 disguise which the scepticism of Hume and Voltaire has 
 assumed, better accommodated to the tastes and the pro- 
 gress of the present age. It is not the same with it, even 
 as Satan towering to the sky w^as the same with Satan 
 
JOHN STERLING. 417 
 
 lurking in the toad. It differs from it in many important 
 respects. 1st, It admits much which the unbelief of Paine 
 and Voltaire denied ; it grants the beauty, the worth, and 
 the utility of our religion — nay, contends that, in a sense, 
 it is a divine emanation, the divinest ever given to man. 
 It does not sheathe, but tosses away the old poisoned terms 
 imposture, fraud, priestcraft, cunningly devised fable. 2dly, 
 It approaches religion with a different feeling and motive. 
 It desires to find its very highest claims true. It has no 
 interest that they should be false. The life of such an one 
 as we describe is modelled on the life of Christ ; his lan- 
 guage is steeped in the Bible vocabulary, afo in burning 
 gold. Prayer and its cognate duties he practises^ and his 
 heart is ever ready to rise to the swells of Christian ora- 
 tory and feeling, as the war-horse to the sound of the 
 trumpet. He teaches his children to prattle of Christ, and 
 weeps at eventide as they repeat their little hymns. He 
 gives to the cause of the Gospel, and his cheek glows at 
 the recital of the deeds of a Williams or a Waddell. The 
 sceptic of the eigljteenth century first hated religion, be- 
 cause it scowled on his selfishness — then wished it untrue 
 ■ — aiid then, generally with the bungling haste of over- 
 eagerness, tried to prove it untrue. Thus Paine felt the 
 strong right hand, which, in the " Rights of Man " had 
 coped worthily with the giant Burke, shivered to splinters 
 when he stretched it forth, in the " Age of Reason," against 
 the ^'^ ark of the Lord." The doubter of our day (we 
 speak, of course, of one class) loves religion, wishes it true, 
 reverences every pin and fringe of its tabernacle, tries to 
 convince himself and others of its paramount and peculiar 
 divinity, and if, at last, the shadow of a cloud continues to 
 hang over his head, it fails to disguise the fast-flowing 
 tears wrung from his disappointed spirit. 3dly, It ap- 
 proaches religion, not only with a different feeling, but 
 from a different direction. The sceptic of the eighteenth 
 century approached it from the platform of matter — a plat- 
 
 2e 
 
418 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 form in itself mean, even when including the whole mate- 
 rial universe ; the doubter now looks at it from the loftjr 
 ground of the ideal and the spiritual. " It contradicts the 
 laws of matter," said the one. " I cannot, in all its parts," 
 says the other, " reconcile it with the principles of mental 
 truth." " It is something greater than matter," said the 
 one. " It is something less than mind," says the other. 
 " I cannot grasp it," said the one. " I can but too easily 
 account for much of it," says the other. " It surpasses my 
 standard," said the one. " It does not come up to mine," 
 says the other. " Its miracles to me seem monstrous things 
 w4iich I cannot swallow," said the one. '' To me," says the 
 other, " they appear petty tricks, not impossible to, but un- 
 worthy of, a God." " Its prophecies seem to me all written 
 after the event," said the one. " To me," says the other, 
 "the objection is that they tell so little that is really 
 valuable. AVhat comparison between the fate of a thou- 
 sand empires and one burst of pure truth ?" " The whole 
 thing," said the one, " is too supernatural and unearthly for 
 me." " To me," says the other, " it be^s but too palpable 
 marks of an earthly though unparalleled birth — God's 
 highest, it may be, but not his only or ultimate voice." " I 
 wish I could convince everybody that it was an imposture," 
 said the one. " I wish," says the other, " that I could con- 
 vince myself that it is what the world professes to believe 
 it." " It is strange," said the one, "that, superstition as 
 it is, it wont die." "It is far stranger," says the other, 
 " how, if it be par excellence true, it is dying, and has 
 become little else than a caput mortuum." "But, then, 
 it must be confessed," said the one, " that its external evi- 
 dences are imposing, though not irresistible." " To me," 
 says the other, " these seem its weakness, not its strength ; 
 and as to its vitals — its internal evidences — is it not, like 
 Cato, day after day, tearing them out with its own suicidal 
 hands — is it not rapidly becoming a worldly and mechani- 
 cal, if not a carnal, sensual, and devilish thing?" 
 
JOHN STERLLXG. 419 
 
 Sucli is a fair statement of the difference between the 
 two scepticisms. As we proceed, we shall have occasion 
 to refute the conclusions of the second variety. We now 
 come to its causes. 1st, We may name the over stress 
 which was long laid by the defenders of Christianity upon 
 its external evidences. The effects of this have been per- 
 nicious in various ways. It could not, in the first place, 
 be disguised that many who defended with the most suc- 
 cess the external evidences were, if not secret sceptics, 
 strangers to the living influence, and disbelievers in the 
 peculiar doctrines of the Gospel. Such were Lardner, 
 Watson, Priestley, Wakefield, and Paley. They first threw 
 away the kernel of Christianity, and then did desperate 
 battle in defence of the empty shell. Never were walls and 
 bulwarks, containing nothing^ more heroically defended. 
 The school of Warburton and Hurd, indeed, were of a 
 more Christian class, but their polemical bitterness and 
 personal arrogance were intolerable. 2dly, Even the suc- 
 cessful defence of the evidences seemed a poor exploit, 
 when it was confessedly considered inadequate to impress 
 the vital principles of Christianity upon the mind — stop- 
 ping, it might be, the mouths, but not opening the hearts 
 of its adversaries, whom it drove away from, instead of 
 drawing into, the city of God ; and the loud cheers, which 
 followed each victory over a desperate but unconvinced 
 foe, sounded harsh and horrible, as were one to encore the 
 plunge of a lost spirit into the abyss. 3dly, If external 
 evidences were the principal, if not sole proof of Christi- 
 anity, what became of the belief of the majority of Chris- 
 tians, to whom these evidences were unknown, or who, at 
 least, were quite incapable of estimating the true nature 
 and weight of the argument founded upon them ? If their 
 belief was worthless, must not their Christianity be base- 
 less and worthless too? If it was not, what a slur on 
 those elaborate evidences, which in no instance could reach 
 a result which was daily attained by thousands without 
 
420 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 any external evidence at all ! 4thly, What was the utmost 
 value of external evidences ? -Not to produce demonstra- 
 tive conviction of the truth of Christianity, but only a 
 very high degree of probability. But is the soul, with all 
 its eternal issues, to depend upon a question of degrees, of 
 less and more, of a few grains above or scruples below ? 
 Is there no straighter, higher, nobler road to conviction ? 
 May there not be a voice within us, corresponding with a 
 voice in Christianity, changing a faltering " perhaps " into 
 a loud, confident, and commanding " it is, it must be so ?" 
 Thus felt Pascal, and this is the true history of his faith. 
 He did not, as Cousin pretends, in order to avoid the gulf 
 of universal scepticism, to which his thoughts and researches 
 were leading him, and where he knew perdition weltered 
 at the bottom, turn back and throw himself into the arms 
 of implicit faith, which, like a nurse a child, had followed 
 him to the brink. No, but dissatisfied with the common 
 evidences of Christianity, as demonstrative, he leaned down 
 and listened to the hidden river of his own spirit, as echo- 
 ing the voice of inspiration, and it became to him an oracle 
 — a proof unutterable, an argument unstateable in human 
 terms, only to be fully written out in soul-cypher, and to 
 be fully read by the eye of the soul. 
 
 Pascal, we must observe, felt the utmost value of exter- 
 nal evidence ; he believed that it made the truth of Chris- 
 tianity highly probable — nay, probable in the highest de- 
 gree, though the highest degree of probability is still, of 
 course, remote from absolute mathematical certainty. But 
 there are others who look upon the evidences pro and con 
 as nearly balancing each other, ahd what for them is to 
 turn the scale ? Nay, there are some who conscientiously 
 think that, after all Paley and Watson have written, the 
 evidences con outweigh the evidences pro ; and what can 
 our boasted external argumentations do any more for them? 
 
 Thus has external evidence in a great measure failed of 
 securing its object, and has by this felt failure produced in 
 
JOHN STERLING. 421 
 
 raany of our present thinkers the form of scepticism we 
 now describe and deplore. In our humble judgment, in* 
 stead of miracles being the principal proof of Christianity, 
 Christianity is a much stronger proof of miracles. A 
 Book intrinsically so divine, so simple, so far superior to 
 all others, and so adapted to the wants of human nature, 
 cannot be imagined to be deceiv^ed or to deceive others in 
 the relation of facts. The quantity and singularity of such 
 facts is itself an additional circumstance in their favour. 
 A wise imposture would have sprinkled them more spar- 
 ingly and artistically, and brought down, in no case save 
 in that of necessity, its Deus ex macldna. The great pur- 
 pose of miracles at first was to compel attention to the new 
 system, by the glare of grandeur it threw around it — a 
 finger of supernal light must touch the head of the bashful 
 boy-God, and mark him out to the world ; their main use 
 now is to corroborate a belief which has been formed 
 upon quite independent grounds. " Culture," cries Strauss, 
 " cannot believe in miracles." Culture, however, can and 
 has believed in Christianity, and will not recal its belief, 
 because she wears on her breast and forehead those mys- 
 terious ornaments which speak, not more forcibly than her 
 whole dress and bearing, of a foreign and unearthly origin. 
 Miracles must not be considered as splendid tricks — as 
 mere mighty bravados, which whoso could not equal or 
 explain was compelled to believe, as well as to believe 
 whatever was said in the lecture that should follow or ac- 
 company those experiments. They were rather, in Fos- 
 ter's grand thought, the simple tolling of the great bell of 
 the universe, to announce the great sermon that was to 
 follow ; and as the sermon continues after the bell has rung 
 out, and becomes of its sound a memorial and testimony, so 
 the marvellous words have outlived, and do testify of the 
 marvellous works. 
 
 A second cause of our recent refined scepticism may be 
 found in the narrow, bigoted, and unworthy notions of 
 
422 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 Christianity which prevail, in the obstinacy with which 
 they are retained, in the fury with which they are defend- 
 ed, and in the contrast thus presented to the liberal and 
 fluent motion of the general age. This is a large text, and 
 opens up a field which we have not at present time to em- 
 brace. Religious authorship may be taken as a correct in- 
 dex of the general state of religious culture and progress. 
 Now this has decidedly improved since John Foster wrote 
 his first essays, where he so sternly characterises a large 
 proportion of its writings, where he speaks of " one writer 
 who seems to value religion as an assassin his dagger, and 
 for the same reason — of another, who in all his motions is 
 clad with sheets of lead — of a third, from whose vulgar il- 
 luminations of religious themes you are excessively glad to 
 escape into the solemn twilight of faith — and of a fourth, 
 who represents the Deity as a dreadful king of furies, whose 
 dominion is overshadowed by vengeance, whose music is 
 the cries of victims, and whose glory requires to be illus- 
 trated by the ruin of his creation." For such, perhaps, we 
 may now search our religious literature in vain ; but we 
 could point out some curious specimens still extant : here 
 a writer, who would sacrifice all the records of creation to 
 the arbitrary interpretation of a Hebrew particle; there 
 another, who, in order to prove Christianity the most ex- 
 cellent of the sciences, raves like a maniac against all 
 science, and cares less for the sun, moon, and stars, than 
 for a farthing candle glimmering in the corner of a con- 
 venticle; a third, propounding the horrible doctrine, that 
 if you are not immersed in water you must be immersed in 
 everlasting fire ; a fourth, turning the Bible into a padlock 
 on the chains of the slave ; a fifth, seeking to excommuni- 
 cate from fire and water here, and from water hereafter, 
 one of the most gifted and amiable, albeit misled men of 
 the age, who came an invited and unassuming stranger to 
 our shores; a sixth, hanging around the majestic form of 
 Christianity a dirty finery, picked up from the cast-off 
 
JOHN STERLING. 423 
 
 clothes of second-rate poets, and sinking tlie mother- tongue 
 of heaven into the sickly whine of a mendicant, as though 
 Isaiah had become an old Jewish clothesman ; a seventh, 
 indulging, while defending religion, in the worst of human 
 passions and language, as if rancour, and want ot charity, 
 and spleen, could be baptised and consecrated to Christ's 
 service — as if the raven perched in Noah's ark were not a 
 raven, a bird of foul feeding and bad omen still ; an eighth, 
 peppering bad poems with religion to make them sell ; and 
 a ninth, talking of the fearful secrets of future punishment 
 as coolly as if he were not also in danger of the judgment, 
 and who perhaps goes smacking his lips from the side of 
 the great universe-darkening sacrifice to the Lord Mayor's 
 feast ! Add to this the deluges of commonplace, issuing in 
 the form of religious pamphlets and periodicals of the day, 
 and the thousand Jnarrow and fierce controversial produc- 
 tions which each month spawns, and conceive of the three- 
 piled disgust, which in so many of the refined and intellec- 
 tual darkens into a deeper feeling, and provokes the cry, 
 " If this be religion, better scepticism, pantheism, atheism 
 itself." 
 
 Thisy indeed, thank God, is not religion. But it must 
 bear the reproach of having turned away many who other- 
 wise would have come near and seen this great sight, and 
 found how vast the difierence between those crackling, 
 whizzing, empty, and transient fireworks, and the low light 
 of the wilderness, uneclipsed by the noonday ardours, clear, 
 innocuous, but piercing as the eye of the Inspired, kindled 
 from, and pointing above — the bush ever burning and never 
 consumed. 
 
 Thirdly, The divided and unhappy state of the Church 
 must bear its full share in accounting for the evil, and 
 this the more especially when at present both letters and 
 science are approaching closely the ideal of a common- 
 wealth — when associations of the scientific and literary 
 are the order of the day — when rancorous personalities and 
 
424} JOHN STERLING. 
 
 jealousies are dying out — when an appeal made in behalf 
 of the family of a deceased poet is responded to with such 
 promptitude by men of all politics and creeds, as to show 
 that an electric cord of communication is fast binding the 
 literary world into one. And yet alas ! alas ! for the divi- 
 sions of Reuben, and the rents in the seamless garment of 
 Christ. Where any real love between various parties? 
 Where aught but hasty and ill-considered armistices ? 
 Where any broad comprehensive plan of union ? Where a 
 genuine esprit de corps among Christian churches ? Where 
 any actual unions consummated, except in cases where the 
 parties had come so near before, that their union lost much 
 of its romance — where it seemed more a shaking of hands 
 in the market-place than a marriage, and where, as at the 
 peace of Amiens, everybody on both sides was glad, but 
 nobody proud ? What philosophical examination of prin- 
 ciples, conducted by wise and impartial men, such as 
 should precede a great scheme of permanent union, has 
 ever been even talked of; and are even the meanest and 
 basest of old arts of polemical depreciation and abuse al- 
 together obsolete ? It were long to trace the causes of this 
 sad spectacle, which just amounts to — the church inferior 
 to the world, in culture, in gentlemanly feeling, in Chris- 
 tian charity; but such is the fact, and prodigious the mis- 
 chief which is springing from it. There are other causes 
 which might have been illustrated, such as the contempt 
 and prejudice entertained by many Christians for science 
 and letters — the piece of well or ill adjusted mechanism to 
 which the office of the ministry has been reduced — the su- 
 periority which the press has acquired over the pulpit — 
 the political spirit which our churches of all kinds have 
 been led to cherish — and the infection of German, and, in 
 general, of Continental modes of thought and speech. But, 
 prominent above all, stands the enemy within the camp — 
 the ghastly fact that Christianity has not the vital hold 
 over men which it formerly possessed — that we are now 
 
JOHN STERLING. 425 
 
 rather haunted by its ghost than warmed by its presence — 
 that formality, mechanism, and a thousand other evil influ- 
 ences have crushed and choked it — and that its extension, 
 however wide and rapid, will in all probability extend its 
 evils at even a greater ratio than its advantages — propa- 
 gate more tares than wheat. We unite our feeble voice 
 with that of Chalmers, and James, and Thomas Binney, in 
 proclaiming this alarming state of matters. It cannot now 
 be concealed that a great proportion of the mind of the 
 country — of those who make our laws, who distribute our 
 justice, whose eloquence fills our courts, whose talent in- 
 forms our press, whose energy inspirits our business, 
 whose genius animates our higher literature, whose bene- 
 volence supports our charities, and whose beauty, taste^ 
 and accomplishments decorate and refine our society, have 
 travelled away from churches, and resigned faith in creeds, 
 and that this they have done principally because the charm 
 and the power which were wont to detain them there have 
 departed. Were a dance of the living suddenly turned 
 into a dance of the dead, though there remained the same 
 splendour in the decorations, and the same lustre in the 
 lamps, and even the same grace in the movements, would 
 there remain the same delight in the spectators ? Would 
 not they rush forth in confusion and shrieking dismay at 
 the sight of this ghastly mimicry of life, enacted where its 
 pulse was beating highest, and where its stream most richly 
 and tumultuously ran ? Thus feel many to our deserted 
 churches — deserted not of the dead but of the living, not 
 of worshippers but of G od. Pathetic the unseen Ichabod 
 inscribed on the fallen cathedral — more pensive still the 
 " Here God once dwelt," visible through the moonlight of 
 meditation on the chambers of the soul in ruins ; but, most 
 sorrowful of all, the sight of a large assembly of professing 
 Christians, where all the elegance, splendour, light, de- 
 cency of deportment, eloquence of speaker — where sympa- 
 thetic thrill, awful shadow, heaving breasts, and bursting 
 
426 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 tears themselves, will not disguise the fact that one is 
 absent, and that this place is no more " dreadful" with his 
 presence, nor glorious with his grace. 
 
 The statements thus made must be somewhat qualified. 
 In the first place, we must not be understood to hold that 
 all our modern sceptics are actuated by such motives, or 
 influenced by such causes. Many, we fear, like their 
 brethren in times past, just " hate the light because their 
 deeds are evil," while others are stimulated to scepticism 
 by vanity, pride, or ignorance. There is another class 
 still, very intelligent but very inconsistent, of whom Miss 
 Martineau may stand as a specimen, who, not merely 
 doubting, but absolutely denying all the supematuralism 
 of Scripture, express their respect and reverence for the 
 writers, although, on their own showing, those writers 
 were either fools or rogues. But the class whom Sterling 
 typified, while sorely perplexed about the supernatural 
 part, and even the genuineness and authenticity of many 
 of the documents, are smit to a passion with the grandeur 
 and heavenliness of the system, even to its peculiarities of 
 atonement, spiritual influences, &c. 
 
 Secondly, We must not be understood to homologate the 
 train of ihought which we have ventured to put into the 
 mouth of the Sterling-sceptic, except so far as that relates 
 to the insufficiency of external evidence, nor to insinuate 
 that the causes we have mentioned excuse his scepticism. 
 Prophecy, as well as miracles, we look on as powerfully 
 corroborative of the divinity of religion, and the fate of 
 nations, besides, not being the sole subject of prediction, is 
 very important when taken in connection with that system 
 which they opposed, and which proclaimed their destruc- 
 tion, as well as in itself. The internal evidence of Chris- 
 tianity seems complete, notwithstanding the fact of a par- 
 tial decline ; and the genius of our religion seems absolutely 
 to forbid its contentedly taking its place at the head of 
 other faiths ; it must be all or nothing— a devil's lie or 
 
JOHN STERLING. 427 
 
 divine. And if it does not answer to the sceptic's idea of 
 a unique and solitary emanation from heaven, may not the 
 blame lie not with it, but with the nature of his idea — ^with 
 himself? 
 
 Thirdly, We do not wish, from these giddy heights, to 
 " waft a lesson of despair" to any one. We are sorry for 
 the position of such men as Sterling, but it were to be 
 weaker than old Eli, on their account to tremble for the 
 ark of God. The lessons we do mean to draw are as fol- 
 lows : Istly, of charity ; 2dly, of warning ; 3dly, of shame ; 
 and, 4thly, of courage. 
 
 1st, We have need of much charity at the present crisis. 
 It will not do now to skulk from the field under a flight of 
 nicknames. It will not do to call our opponents miscreants 
 and monsters. There never were many in the world really 
 deserving these names ; fools only can believe that there 
 are many now. Here, at least, in Sterling, Arnold, Foster, 
 we have to do with mist-severed brethren upon one great 
 common march, with sincere lovers of mankind, with prac- 
 tisers of the Christian virtues, with men who diligently 
 discharged the duties of the Christian ministry, and whose 
 latest deathbed murmur was of Christ. While we state 
 their doubts, let us pity the pain and sorrow, amounting 
 almost to distraction and despair, which attended them, 
 and let us inquire, if we- have no difficulties, may it not be 
 because we have never thought at all ? and let us envy 
 them the resolution of their doubts, to which they have 
 now attained, we trust, in that land where the strength of 
 light is not measured by the intensity of shade — where, 
 amid all the constellations which may garnish that upper 
 firmament, that of the " Balance" vibrates no more — where 
 the inhabitants bask in spotless love, and see in perfect 
 vision. No such charity, however, can we or dare we ex- 
 tend to those half-fledged children of impudence and con- 
 ceit, or else of pride and profligacy, in whom this age abounds, 
 who, at the finding of each new difficulty (one, perhaps, 
 
428 JOHN STERLING. 
 
 resolved for centuries), raise a noisy Eureka, as they rush 
 out with their filthy treasure — for those who cull from such 
 writers as Shelley the blood-red stones of his blasphemy, 
 that they may wreathe them into a necklace of ruin for 
 themselves — nor even for those miniatures of Giant De- 
 spair, who seat themselves in we know not what " churches 
 of doubters" or Doubting Castles, to confirm those miscon- 
 ceptions which they cannot or seek not to cure. The 
 charity which would extend to such must verily be of that 
 sort which covers a multitude of sins, and of sinners too. 
 
 2dly, We must take up anew a voice of warning — the 
 voice of him who saw the Apocalypse. There is coming 
 up the church a current of doubt, deeper far and darker 
 than ever swelled against her before — a current strong in 
 learning, crested with genius, strenuous yet calm in pro- 
 gress. It seems the last grand trial of the truth of our 
 faith. Against the battlements of Zion a motley throng 
 have gathered themselves together. Unitarians, atheists, 
 pantheists, doubters, open foes, secret foes, and bewildered 
 friends of Christianity, are all in the field, although no 
 trumpet has openly been blown, and no charge publicly 
 sounded. There are the old desperadoes of infidelity — the 
 last followers of Paine and Voltaire ; there is the soberer 
 and stolider Owen and his now scanty and sleepy troop ; 
 there follow the Communists of France — a fierce but dis- 
 orderly crew ; the commentators of Germany come, too, 
 with pickaxes in their hands, crying, " Raze, raze it to its 
 foundations!" Then you see the garde mohiU — the vicious 
 and the vain youth of Europe ; and on the outskirts of the 
 fight hangs, cloudy and uncertain, a small but select band, 
 whose wavering surge is surmounted by the dark and lofty 
 crests of Carlyle and Emerson. " Their swords are a thou- 
 sand " — their purposes are various ; in this, however, all 
 agree, that historical Christianity ought to go down before 
 advancing civilisation. Sterling and some of his co-mate, 
 the merciful cloud of death has removed from the fields 
 
JOHN STERLING, 429 
 
 while others stand in deep uncertainty, looking in agony 
 and in prayer above. 
 
 3dly, Of shame. While thus the foeman is advancing, 
 v^rhat is Zion about ? Shame and alas ! her towers are well 
 nigh unguarded; herwatchmen have deserted their stations, 
 and are either squabbling in her streets with each other, 
 or have fallen fast asleep. Many are singing psalms, few 
 are standing to their arms. Some are railing at the enemy 
 from the safest towers. The watchman who first perceived 
 the danger and gave the alarm, almost instantly fell back 
 in death. 
 
 4thly, Of confidence. Shall, then, these old and glorious 
 battlements be trodden down? Between the activity of 
 their foes and the supineness of their friends must they 
 perish ? No ; vain is perhaps the help of man, but we, 
 too, will look above. We will turn our eyes to the hills 
 whence our aid is expected. Our grand hope as to the 
 prospects of the world and the church has long lain in the 
 unchanged and unchangeable love of Christ. As long as 
 his great, tremulous, unsetting eye continues, like a star, 
 to watch her struggles as the eye of love the tossings of 
 disease, we shall not fear. And whenever the time arrives 
 for that "Bright and Morning Star" starting from his 
 sphere to save his church, he will no longer delay his com- 
 ing, whether in power or in presence. To save a city like 
 Zion, there might fall the curtain of universal darkness. 
 That curtain shall not fall, but there may, in lieu of it, 
 burst the blaze of celestial light ; and who can abide the 
 day of that appearing ? 
 
 J. HOGG, PKINTEB, EDINBUKGH. 
 
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