"IFT OF MICHAEL ?IZiE Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/conversationsonsOOIowerich Conversations ON SOME OF THE OLD POETS. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Witb an 1Intro&uction BY ROBERT ELLIS THOMPSON, S. T. D. " Or, if I would delight my private hours With music or with poem, where, so soon As in our native language, can I find That solace?" — Paradise Regained. THIRD EDITION ENLARGED. PHILADELPHIA: DAVID McKAY, PUBLISHER, 2} South Ninth Street. 1893. •mKiTVTrTiftTTtr 1 CoPYRir.HT, 1893, BY DAVID McKay. TO MY FATHER, CHARLES LOWELL, D. D., WHOM, IF I HAD NOT THE HIGHER PRIVILEGE OF REVERING AS A PARENT, I SHOULD STILL HAVE HONORED AS A MAX AND LOVED AS A FRIEND, THIS VOLUME, CONTAIXIXG MANY OPINIONS FROM 'WHICH HE WILL WHOLLY, YET WITH THE LARGE CHARITY OP A CHRISTIAN HEART, DISSENT, IS INSCRIBED BY HIS YOUNGEST CHILD. "Hail, bards of mightier grasp! on you I chiefly call, the chosen few, Who cast not off the acknowledged guide, \ Who faltered not, nor turned aside; Whose lofty genius could survive Privation, under sorrow thrive." Wordsworth. CNIVERBITT if'ornia^ / VC4/. EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION. These "Conversations on the Old Poets" were published early in 1845, and appeared again in a re- vised edition in 1846. They also were reprinted in London in 1845, but have been out of print for many years. In his " Lectures on the Old English Dramatists" (delivered in 1887, and published, after his death, in 1892), Mr. Lowell speaks of the "Con- versations" as "now a rare book" which he himself had not seen " for many years." He added that " it was mainly about the Old English dramatists, if I am not mistaken," and gives 1843 as its date. This avow- edly imperfect recollection of the book qualifies his adverse criticism of it. As it was then more than forty years since he had published it, and as not less than fifteen volumes of his verse and prose had appeared in the mean time, he well might forget other things than its date. To the editor it was a day to be marked with a Mdiite stone when he first met with it, and his delight was shared by others of his age. In our college years, vi EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION. wliich coiucifled with those of the War, we quarrelled amicably over the relative claims of Mr. Lowell aud of Mr. Longfellow to the first place amoug the Ameri- can jioets. Those of us who held by the less popular poet of course were in the minority ; but we made up in emphasis what we lacked in numbers. This little volume of twenty years before was a godsend to us, as showing in what fields our master had nourished his genius. We shared in that glow Mr. Steadman speaks of as felt by students of a still earlier time, when Mr. Lowell's " early lectures and essays directed them to a sense of what is best in English song." Maturer judgment brings us to see, as did its author, the defects of the book. But we would deprecate the notion that even his later survey of the same fields has superseded the first and freshest of his labors as a critic. As for the faults of the book, Mr. Lowell's reputa- tion can better afford them than our literature can afford its suppression. The work of a writer in his twenty-fifth year might be expected to contain imma- ture judgments, such as that on Ford, which he reverses with emphasis in his « Lectures." There is also a super- abundance of epigrammatic point, which characterized his prose to the last. He never took to heart Corinna's advice to Pindar, to "sow with his hand, and not with the sack's mouth." The merits of these « Conversations," however, are EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION. vii such as would countervail greater faults than these. One is their freshness of impression. " The work," says The London Spectator of April 22, 1893, " is full of a youug mau's generous enthusiasm for everything that is beautiful in poetic thought and dainty in expression. The conversational form allows of discursiveness ; and, whatever may be the critical deficiencies of the book, it has the freshness of youthful delight, and justifies its author's claim of being ' spontaneous and honest.' " Mr. Lowell never was a critic of the " scientific " type Matthew Arnold bade us admire in Sainte-Beuve. So much might be inferred from the repugnance to the French critic's method he expresses in his Lectures. He himself always was guided in criticism rather by his love of things noble and beautiful, and his hatred of things base and ugly, than by the canons of any aesthetic system. This did not involve any carelessness or slov- enliness in his method of procedure. His greater essays represent an amount of labor in preparation far in excess of the week's work which preceded each of ' Sainte-Beuve's Causeries du Liindi. It would have been quite impossible for him to fill thirty-six volumes with essays of literary criticism. AA^'ith all this thorough- ness, however, Mr. Lowell may be called an impres- sionist critic. He is never impersonal. He gives us the thought and emotion which is produced in him by contact with a work of literary art, while he spares no viii EDITORS INTRODUCTION. pains tliat this contact may be as complete and as intel- ligent as possible. And these " Conversations," while they fall far short of his later essays in the matter of exhaustive preparation, do report for us what he received from our earlier writers at a time when his mind was most susceptible to impression. They also are of permanent value because of the place they fill in the development of literary criticism in America. During the first quarter of the Century The Portfolio (Philadelphia, 1800-1827) was the chief authority in such matters, and represented, in rather a feeble way, the canons laid down by Dr. Johnson, scoff- ing at Wordsworth and his fellow-innovators. Dr. Channing, with his three magnificent essays on " ]Mil- ton," " pjonaparte," and " Feuelon " (in The Christian Examiner for 1826-1829), illustrated the large and broad-minded criticism of the best Euglisli school. More directly literary was the work done in The New York Review (1837-1841) by Torrey, Allen, Shedd, and others of the young Coleridgeans, who had sat at the feet of Dr. James Mai-sh at Middlebury. Then came the little group of Transcendentalists with their remarkable quarterly, Tlie D/W (1840-1 843), who rep- resented new infiuences from German culture, and pro- claimed emancipation from all traditions. It was in this literary spring-time that Mr. Lowell began to write, and he was the first in America to EDITORS INTRODUCTION. ix exemplify that new interest iu early English literature which Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, Hazlitt, and others had awakened iu England. These " Conversations," I believe, were our earliest important and intelligent venture in that field. They were the forerunner of the labors of Childs, Hudson, \Miipple, Lounsbury, and other American scholars, and of the Boston alition of the British poets, in which Mr. Lowell was to edit the works of Donne, jSIarvell, Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley. And no field of study outside our own literature can equal this in inter- est and importance to Americans. Whilst English literature since Milton has flowed in a channel different from American, iu Milton and all that precedes him, back even to " Beowulf," we have the succession of writers who are our own intellectual ancestry, and who belong to us as much as to the later English people In some respects even more, for the traditions of old English speech have been better maintained in Ameri- can than English use ; and phrases in Shakespeare and Massinger, M'hich call for explanatory notes in English editions, often need none for Americans. And what is true of the speech may be true often of the mood also. In our less conventional world Chaucer ought to be more intelligible than in a society which has lost fluid- ity and spontaneity. It was therefore no small service to direct American X EDITORS INTRODUCTION. readei-s to their birthright in the older English litera- ture. And when this was done with a charm of manner, a keenness of wit, and a beautj of literary form which made the criticism itself a work of art, the service was the greater. An admiring critic of these "Conversations" re- marks that they should be read in connection with Mr. Lowell's essays on kindred themes in The Pioneer That short-lived monthly, "edited by James Eussell Lowell and Robert Carter," ran through three numbers m the opening months of 1843, but is now very scarce. To this edition of the "Conversations" have been appended the two papers on "Middleton" and on "The English Song- Writers " which Mr. Lowell con- tributed to the first two numbers. The third number contains nothing of his but a brief poem and an apology for his failure to supply an essay-an omis- sion, he says, due to the condition of his eyes. TO THE READER. A PREFACE is always either au apology or an ex- planation ; and a good book needs neither. That I write one, then, proves that I am diffident of the merit of this volume, to a greater degree, even, than an author must necessarily be. For the minor faults of the book, the hurry with which it has been prepared must plead in extenuation, since it was in process of writing and printing at the same time, so that I could never estimate its propor- tions as a whole. This must excuse the too great length of the First Conversation, which I should have divkled, hud I known in time how it would have grown under my hands. Some repetitions may also occur, which I trust the candid reader will refer to the same exculpatory cause The substance of the two other Conversations ap- peared more than two years ago in the '* Boston Mis- cellany," a magazine conducted by my friend N. Hale, Jr., Esq. The articles, as then written, met xii TO THE READER. with some approbation, and I had often been urged to reprint them by friends with whose wishes it was as well my duty as my delight to comply. Yet, I con- fess, I felt strongly reluctant in this matter ; and my reluctance increased, after looking over the articles and seeing how imperfect they were. It then occurred to me, that, by throwing them into the form of conversations, greater freedom would be given them, and that discursiveness, which was their chief fault, (among many others, of style,) would find readier pardon. Some of the deepest as well as the most delightful books have been written in this form in our own language, not to speak of its prevalent use among the Greeks and Latins. I need only mention the names of Izaak "Walton, Walter Savage Landor, and Home Tooke, to recall to mind three of the most prominent among many English examples."* I had no intention of giving them anything like a dramatic turn, and trust I shall not so be censured. They are merely essays, divided in this way to allow them greater ease and frankness, and the privilege of wandering at will. That this license has not been carried to a greater degree than is warranted by the usual suggestiveness of conversation will, I trust, be conceded. If some of the topics introduced seem *Among the pleasantest recent writings in this form. T would mention " The Philosophy of Mystery," hy W. C. Dendy, M. D. TO THE READER. xiii foreign to the subject, I can only say. that tlicy arc not so to my mind, and that an author's object in writing criticisms is not only to bring to light the beauties of tlie works he is considering, but also to ex- press his own opinions upon those and other matters. Wishing, as I did, to preserve as far as possible unaltered, whatever had given pleasui'e to others in the articles as already written, I experienced many difficulties. It is impossible to weld cast-iron, and I had not time to melt it and recast it. I am not bold enough to esteem these essays of any great price. Standing as yet only in the outer porch of life, I cannot be expected to report of those higher mysteries which lie unrevealed in the body of the temple. Yet, as a child, when he has found but a mean pebble, which differs from ordinary only so much as by a stripe of quartz or a stain of iron, calls his companions to behold his treasure, which to them also affords matter of delight and wonder ; so I cannot but hope that my little findings may be pleasant and haply instructive to some few. An author's opinions should be submitted to no arbitration but that of solitude and his own conscience; but many defects and blemishes in his mode of ex- pressing them may doubtless be saved him by submit- ting his work, before publication, to the judgment of some loving friend, — and if to the more refined eye xiv TO THE READER. of a woman, the better. But the liaste with Avhich these pages have been prepared and printed lias pre- chided all but a very trifling portion of them from being judged by any eye save my own. Elmwood, Cambridge, Mass. ,^ iUX»ilVEEbITI '. CONVERSATIONS FIRST CONVERSATION. CHAUCER. JOHN. Heee, you are, I see, as usual, ramparted around with musty volumes of the old poets. I remember how you used to pore over them in the college library. Are you not afraid that the wheels of your mind will get choked with the dust that rises out of these dry mummy-pits ? PHILIP. Even if I were to allow the justice of your last metaphor, I could reply that the dust is at least that of kings. You must remember, also, that even this dust is not M'ithout its uses. The rich brown pigment which our painters use is made out of it; — another material illustration of the spiritual truth, that nothing which ever had a meaning for mankind loses it by the lapse of years. JOHN. It may, however, become so overgrown with moss as hardly to repay the labor of the restoring chisel. But 2 FIBST CONVERSATION. to return to our mummies. Our modern poets seem fully aware of the fact, that what is true of oue art is true also of all the others. They are as fond of using this coloring, made out of dead men's bones, as the painters. One must be turning at every stanza to his glossary, in order to understand them, so full are they of archaisms. They seem to have plagiarized from the cheesemongers, who iuoculate their new cheeses with a bit of mould, to give them the flavor of old ones. PHILIP. An imitation of style is one thing; the use of the same material is quite another. The marble of Pen- telicus may be carved into other shapes as noble as the Phoebus or the Jupiter. It has no prejudice in favor of the Greek mythology ; and Hiram Powers, I fancy, can persuade it to look godlike even in a coat and pantaloons. Language is the marble in which the poet carves ; and, if he find that which the old poets used aptest to his hand, let him not mar his work from an idle prejudice in favor of the quarries of Berkshire or Vermont. You find no fault with Crawford's Orpheus, which sends you to your Lempriere, as you complain that the modern poets do to your glossary. Yet that statue is the more 'guilty of the two ; for that is an attempt to resuscitate the Greek spirit, while these only use what they think the best material in which to convey an idea of to-day. Pericles would be the fittest critic of that ; but oue of our old dra- matists would soon fiud himself beyond his depth in these. CHA UCER. 3 JOHN. You have touched mc in a tender spot. I admit that the fault is not confined to our poets. Our sculp- tors run to Greece, and our painters to Italy. Oiu* Quincy stonecutters, in their Corinthian columns, show almost as much originality of design. I have seen portraits of New York ladies after the Fornarina, and the Washington in our State-house has borrowed the toga of Fabius to hide his continental uniform under. This is what is called being classical ; and it is so in- deed, after " the high Roman fashion ;" for the Romans plundered a temple of its gold and its gods at the same time, stealino; the ideas as well as the freedom of the nation they subjugated. This gave point to the saying of one of their countrymen, that Greece had made a slave of her conqueror. I see the distinction you ■would make between the poets and their brother artists, but I am not yet ready to admit its justice. PHILIP. If you have seen the distinction, you have already admitted its justice. I would find no fault with the painter who should drawthe Virgin with a glory about her head ; for that is as easily credible now as in Giot- to's day. The intellect may be skeptical, but the heafn will believe any beautiful miracle in behalf of what \ lit loves or reveres; and the heart, after all, will have \ the last word in such matters. So the naked figure is in itself beautiful ; but that would be no apology for putting Franklin's head upon the shoulders of the An- tinous. Yet there are examples enough of such fool- ishness. Our artists seem to think that none but a 4 FIRST CONVERSATION. Greek or Roman costume is admissible at the court of posterity. Yet posterity is delighted to greet Burns in his clouted shoou, and I am sure would never receive Washington (who knew better) in the indecent undress of a Roman statue. With our poets the case is differ- ent. They have adopted the style of those who used our noble language ere it had been crossed with the French. The dialect, too, which was contemporary with our translation of the Bible, will for that reason, if for no other, carry a greater solemnity with it than that of any later period. 'The English of that day is racy with the old Saxon idiom,J\vhich was dear to the mass of the people, and which' still maintains its gripe upon all the natural feelings, with which poetry has most to do. Forms and conventionalities put on, as a matter of course, the court-dress of the ISTorman con- querors ; but the heart clung sturdily to its old Saxon homespun, and felt the warmer for it. You talk about the golden age of Queen Anne. It was a French pinchbeck age. JOHN. Stay, not so fast. I like the writers of that period, for the transparency of their style, and their freedom from affectation. If I may trust my understanding of your meaning, our modern versifiers have only made the simple discovery, that an appearance of antiquity is the cheapest passport to respect. But- the cheapest whicli we purchase with subservience is too dear. You yourself have no such prejudice against tiie Augustan age of English literature. I have caught you more CIIA UCEE. 5 than once with the Tatler in your hand, and have heard you praising Drydcu's prefaces. PHILIP. You and I have very different notions of M'liat poetry is, and of what its object should be. You may claim for Pope the merit of an envious eye, which could turn the least scratch u])on the character of a friend into a fester, — of a nimble and adroit fancy, and of an ear so niggardly that it could aiford but one (invariable ctesura to his verse; but when you call him poet, you insult the buried majesty of all earth's no- blest and choicest spirits. Nature should lead the true poet by the hand, and he has far better things to do than to busy himself in counting the warts upon it, as Pope did. A cup of water from Hijipocrene, tasting, as it must, of innocent pastoral sights and sounds, of the bleat of lambs, of the shadows of leaves and flowers that have leaned over it, of the rosy hands of children whose privilege it ever is to paddle in it, of the low words of lovers who have walked by its side in the moonlight, of the tears of the poor Hagars of the world who have drunk from it, w^ould choke a satirif^' His thoughts of the country must have a savor of Jac Ketch, and see no beauty but in a hemp-field. /Poeti_ is something to make us Aviser and better, by contin- ually revealing those types of beaut}' and truth which God has set in all men's souls; 'not by picking out the petty faults of our neighbors to make a mock of. Shall that divine instinct, which has in all ages con- cerned itself only with Avhat is holiest and fairest in life and nature, degrade itself to go about seeking for FIRST CONVERSATION. the scabs and ulcers of the putridest spirits, to grin over with a derision more hideous even than the pitiful quarry it has moused at ? / Asmodeus's gift, of unroofing the dwellings of his neighbors at will, would be the rarest outfit for a satirist, but it would be of no worth to a poet. To the satirist the mere outward motives of life are enough. Vanity, pride, avarice, — these, and the other external vices, are the strings of his unmusical lyre. But the poet need only unroof his own heart. All that makes happiness or misery under every roof of the wide world, whether of palace or hovel, is working also in that narrow yet boundless sphere. On that little stage the great drama of life is acted daily. There the creation, the tempting, and the fall may be seen anew. In that withdrawing closet, solitude whispers her secrets, and death uncovers his face. There sorrow takes up her abode, to make ready a pillow and a resting-place for the weary head of love, whom the whole world casts out. To the poet nothing is moan, but everything on earth is a fitting altar to the supreme beauty. I But I am wandering. As for the poets of Queen Anne's reigu, it is enough to prove what a kennel standard of poetry was then established, that Swift's snuitchy verses are not even yet excluded from the collections. What disgusting stuff, too, in Prior and Parnell ! Yet Swift, perhaps, was the best writer of Engli.sh whom that period produced. Witness his prose. Pope treated the English language as the image-man has served the bust of Shakespeare yonder. To rid it of some external.soils, he has rubbed it down till there is no muscular expression left. It looks very CITA UCER. 7 much as his own " mockery king of snow" must have done after it had begun to melt. Pope is for ever mixino; water with the good old mother's milk of our tongue. You cannot get a straightforward speech out of him. A great deal of his poetry is so incased in verbiage, that it puts me in mind of those important- looking packages which boys are fond of sending to their friends. We unfold envelope after envelope, and at last find a couple of cherry-stones. But in Pope we miss the laugh which in the other case follows the cul- mination of the joke. He makes Homer lisp like the friar in Chaucer, and Ajax and Belinda talk exactly alike. JOIIX. ^Vell, we are not discussing the merits of Pope, but of the archaisms which have been introduced into modern poetry. What you say of the Bible has some force in it. The forms of speech used in our version of it will always impress the mind, even if a2)plied to an entirely diiferent subject. What else can you bring forward ? PHILIP. Only the fact, that, by going back to the more nat- ural style of the Elizabethan writers, our verse has gained in harmony as well as strength. No matter whether Pope is describing the cane of a fop or the speech of a demigod, the pause must always fall on tlie same syllable, and the sense be chopped off by the same rhyme. Achilles cannot gallop his horses round the Avails of Troy, with Hector dragging behind his chariot, except he keep time to the immitigable seesaw of the cou2ilet. 6 FIEST CONVERSATION. the scabs and ulcers of the putridest spirits, to grin over "with a derision more hideous even than the pitiful quarry it has moused at? /Asmodeus's gift, of unroofing the dwellings of his neighbors at will, "would be the rarest outfit for a satirist, but it would be of no worth to a poet. / To the satirist the mere outward motives of life are enough. Vanity, pride, avarice, — these, and the other external vices, are the strings of his unmusical lyre. But the poet need only unroof his own heart. All that makes happiness or misery under every roof of the wide world, whether of palace or hovel, is working also in that narrow^ yet boundless sphere. On that little stage the great drama of life is acted daily. There the creation, the tempting, and the fall may be seen anew. In that withdrawing closet, solitude whispers her secrets, and death uncovers his face. There sorrow takes up her abode, to make ready a pillow and a resting-place for the weary head of love, whom the whole world casts out. To the poet nothing is mean, but everything on earth is a fitting altar to the supreme beauty. ' But I am wandering. As for the poets of Queen Anne's reign, it is enough to prove what a kennel standard of poetry was then established, that Swift's smutchy verses are not even yet excluded from the collections. "What disgusting stuif, too, in Prior and Parncll ! Yet Swift, perhaps, was the best writer of English whom that period produced. AVitness his prose. Pope treated the English language as the image-man has served the bust of Shakespeare yonder. To rid it of some external soils, he has rubl)ed it down till there is no muscular expression left. It looks very CITA UCER. 7 much as his own " mockery king of snow" must have done after it had begun to melt, l^ope is for ever mixing water with the good old mother's milk of our tongue. You cannot get a straightforward speech out of him. A great deal of his poetry is so incased in verbiage, that it puts me in mind of those important- looking padvages which boys are fond of sending to their friends. We unfold envelope after envelope, and at last find a couple of clierry-stones. But in Pope we miss the kiugli whicli in the other ease follows the cul- mination of the joke. He makes Homer lis]) like the friar in Chaucer, and Ajax and Belinda talk exactly alike. JOIIX. Well, we are not discussing the merits of Pope, but of tlie archaisms which have been introduced into modern poetry. What you say of the Bible has some force in it. The forms of speech used in our version of it will always impress the mind, even if applied to an entirely diiferent subject. What else can you bring forward ? PHILIP, Only the fact, that, by going back to the more nat- ural style of the Elizabethan writers, our verse has gained in liarmony as well as strength. No matter Avhether Pope is describing the cane of a fop or the speech of a demigod, the pause must always fall on the same sylkible, and the sense be chopped off by the same rhyme. Achilles cannot gallop his horses round the Avails of Troy, with Hector dragging behind his chariot, except he keep time to the immitigable seesaw of the couplet. 8 FIRST CONVERSATION. JOHN. But all verse and rhyme are as artificial as you say Pope's caesura is. Conceive of Macbeth, a monarch who classed "fools, minstrels, and bards" together in one penal enactment, delivering himself in blank verse ! * PHIUP. Shakespeare knew better than he did how he ought to have talked. But I do not agree with you that either rhyme or verse is unnatural. In the mind and utter- ance of the true poet, every thought and feeling as necessarily and unpremeditately takes it proper metre and its rhymed or unrhymed shape, as a flower takes its peculiar mould of stem and leaf, and entices to its petals from the sunshine their foreordained color and expression. Nor are rhyme and metre without their originals in the landscape. The eye which fails to per- ceive them there Avill be equally incapable of receiving from them in poetry their proper impulses and effects. So surely does Nature furnish us with symbols and indices of whatever is true and legitimate in Art. Some of our thoughts refuse to be written except in rhyme, and, in the hands of a true poet, this is no hindrance, but the rhyme seems always to have a mean- ing of its own, and to add to,- or at least confirm, the sentiment. Metre and rhyme are like the skin of the grape. The thought is the pulp. The one is needed to hold the other together in a compact and beautiful shape. We may throw it away, if we Avill ; but often *See Bellonden's translation of Bocce's Chronicle. The histo- rian adds, " Thir and siclik lawis war usit by King Makbeth ; throw quhilk he governit the rcalme X yeris in (jiid justice." en A UCER 9 the cliief spirit and flavor of the fruit is to be pressed out of it. / \Vithout doubt, the fittest vcliicle for grave and stately thoughts is the blank verse ; and that has not been improved in the dramatic form since the old dramatists, nor in the epic since Milton. AYordsworth has been satisfied with giving us fresh combinations of thought/ and with reasserting the dignity and worth of the poet's calling. As far as metre is concerned, he is the least original of writers. He has imitated all our masters in turn. In his sonnets he has sometimes emulated successfully the condensed gravity of Milton ; but his blauk verse seldom rises to the majestic level of his great precursor. He often reminds us of Cowper, who introduced a new and more conversational manner. Milton's verse suggests nothing meaner than the ocean ; Cowper's has that easy dignity which does not become trivial, even when it describes the simmering of the tea- kettle. I think that Keats saw deeper into the mystery of this noble metre than any modern poet. Tennyson has, perhaps, added another grace to it. JOHN. You attribute a greater state and importance not only to the poet's art, but even to the mere mechanical details of it, than I should be willing to allow. You sometimes remind me of that sect of sonneteers, whom Charles Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, humorously describes as attributing a mystical importance to a capital O. You have, however, the great mass of the critics with you, who usually pay more heed to the material than to the idea which it conveys, aud who do 10 FIRST CONVERSATION. not scruple to break off the nose from a statue, and present it to you as a proof of the excellence of the marble. Beauty of form, correctness of outline, and aptness for use (which last, indeed, demands the other two) seem to be of no account with them. Is it ma- hogany or veneering? is the question v/ith them, and they settle the matter by a slash with their penknives. riiiLip. The zest with which you ran down your last meta- phor persuades me that you agree with me at heart. The great poets, it is true, have not usually at first received the hnprimatur of the critics, for it demands more faith aud more labor than they have to spare, to get at the secret of anything that is greatly worth. We must wrestle with these messengers of heaven, as Jacob did, ere we obtain their blessing ; and then they some- times make a slave of our judgment, so that we halt for it ever after. Richter has lamed Carlyle a little. JOHN. All great ideas come to us, at first, like the gods of Homer, enveloped in a blinding mist ; but to him whom their descent to earth concerns, to him who stands most in need of their help, the cloud becomes luminous and fragrant, and betrays the divinity behind it. At pres- ent, these old poets of yours are in the cloudy state to me. Perhaps you can show me that I am also included in the benefit of their errand. Perhaps you can justify to me, out of their mouths, what now seems to me your extravagant estimate of the rank which belongs to poetry. CHAUCER. 11 PHILIP. Before attempting it, let me add something which occurs to rac on the subject of a metrical disposition of our words. Whether it be an argument in its favor or not I shall not take u[)oii myself to say. At least, the reflection has been forced upon me many times, and not Avithout some touch of painfulness. Even in my slight commerce with society, I have been obliged to notice a certiiin bashfulness which seems to cloo; men in the utterance of a noble or generous thought. We' have become such ephemerides, such hangers-on of King To-day, that we seem hasty to smother with a judicious cough any allusion to our dethroned monarch, God. A harmless kind of dinner-table loyalty, like that of the old Jacobites, may be winked at ; but thor- ough piety, which is the element wherein all good thought and action can alone subsist, is quite out of fashion. We hoard our paltry nutshells of forms after the kernel of truth which they were designed to shelter, and without which they are worthless, has quite with- ered out of them. We spend all our pains in preserv- ing the oiFcast garments of faith, and take care to trans- mit to our children precisely whatever must ask leave of existence from the moth and the rust. Now verse seems to furnish men with a sufficient apology for giving way to their holy enthusiasm. It is the poli- tician's vocation to give us only homoeopathic doses of truth, a grain of the medicine to a whole Niagara of water and froth. The priest is fashioned by his hear- ers, and is too often rather the pillow of down for their consciences, than the conductor of the arrowy lightnings 14 FIRST CONVERSATION. Elizabethan dramatists ; but I have changed ray mind. I remember hearing you say that the obsoleteness of Chaucer's dialect had deterred you from the attempt to read him. JOHN. Yes, I was desirous of a. further acquaintance with a poet whom Drydea and Pope esteemed worthy of their toil in translating. But he is impregnably hemmed in from me by a quickset hedge of obscure and antiquated phrases. PHILIP. So it seems, at first sight. But if you had the stout heart of the prince in the fairy tale, you would soon have broken the charm, and would have found the deserted old palace suddenly full of all the noise and bustle of every-day employment, as well as the laugh- ter and tears of every-day life. You must put no faith at all in any idea you may have got of Chaucer from Dryden or Pope. Dry den appreciated his original better than Pope ; but neither of them had a particle of his humor, nor of the sim})licity of his pathos. The strong point in Pope's displays of sentiment is in the graceful management of a cambric handkercliief. You do not believe a word that Hcloise says, and feel all the while that she is squeezing out licr tears, as if from a lialf-dry sponge. Pope was not a man to understand the quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears fall, and the simple, choking words sobbed out. I know no author so tender as he ; Shakcsjieare himself was hardly so. There is no decla- mation in his grief. Dante is scarcclv more downright CHA UCER. 1^ and plain. To show you how little justice Dryden has done him, I will first read you a few lines from his version of "The Knight's Tale," and then the cor- responding ones of the original. It is the death-scene of Arcite. " Conscience (that of all physic vrorks the last) Caused him to send for Emily in haste ; "With her, at his desire, came Palamon. Then, on his pillow raised, he thus begun : * No language can express the smallest part Of what I feel and suffer in my heart For you, whom best I love and honor most. But to your service I bequeath my ghost ; Which, from this mortal body when untied, Unseen, unheard, shall hover at your side, Nor fright you waking, nor your sleep offend, But wait, officious, and your steps attend. IIuw I have loved / Excuse my faltering tongue; My spirit's feeble and my pains are strong ; This I may say : I only grieve to die, Because I lose my channing Emily.' " JOHN. I am quite losing my patience. The sentiment of Giles Scroggins, and the verse of Blackmore ! Surely, nothing but the meanest servility to his original could excuse such slovenly workmanship as this. PHILIP. There is worse to come. Of its fidelity as a transla- tion you can judge for yourself, when you hear Chaucer. " ' To die when Heaven had put you in my power, Fate could not choose a more malicious hour! What greater curse could envious Fortune give Than just to die when I began to live? 16 FIRST CONVERSATION. Vain men, how vanishing a bliss we crave ! Now warm in love, now withering in the grave! Never, 0, never more to see the sun ! Still dark in a damp vatdf, and still alone ! * This fate is common.' " I wish you especially to bear in raiud the Hues I have emphasized. Notice, too, how the rhyme is impertinently forced upon the attention throughout. AVe can hardly help wondering if a nuncupatory testa- ment were ever spoken in verse before. There is none of this French lustre in Chaucer. " Arcite must die ; For which lie sendeth after Emily, And Palaraon, that was his cousin dear ; Then spake lie thus, as ye shall after hear: ' Ne'er may the wofnl spirit in my heart JDeclare one point of all my sorrow's smart To you, my lady, that I love the most ; But I bequeath the service of my ghost To you aboven any cre-a-ture, Since that my life may now no longer dure. Alas, the woe ! alas, the pains so strong. That I for you have sutlered, — and so long! Alas, the death ! alas, mine Emily ! Alas, the parting of our company ! Alas, my heart's true queen, alas, my wife ! ^ ;My heart's dear lady, ender of my life ! What is this world ? "What asketh man to have? Now with his love, — now in liis cold, cold grave, Alone, Avithouten any company ! Farewell, my sweet ! farewell, mine Emily ! And softly take me in your armes twey (two arms), For love of God, and hearken what I say.' " JOHN. Perfect ! I would not have a word changed, except CHAUCER. 17 the second "cokl" before "grave." It takes away from the simplicity, and injures the effect accordingly. In the lines just before that, I could fancy that 1 heard the dying man gasp for breath. After hearing this, Drydeu's exclamation-marks savor of the play-bills, where one sees them drawn up in })latoons, as a body- guard to the name of an indilferent player, — their number being increased in proportion as the attraction diminishes. And in that seemingly redundant line, " Alone, withouten any company," how does the repetition and amplificatio]i give force and bitterness to the thought, as if Arcite must need dwell on his expected loneliness, in order to feel it fully! There is nothing here about " charming Emily," " en- vious Fortune," — no bandying of compliments, Death shows to Arcite, as he does mostly to those who are cut off suddenly in the May-time and blossom of the senses, as a bleak, bony skeleton, and nothing more, Dryden, I remember, in his " Art of Poetry," gays, " Chaucer alone, fixed on this solid base, In liis old style conserves a modern grace ; Too liappy, if the freedom of his rhymes OflTended not the method of our times." But if what you have read (unless you have softened it greatly) be a specimen of his rudeness, save us from such " method" as that of Dryden ! PHILIP. I hardly changed a syllable. The Avord to which you objected, as redundant, was an addition of my own 2 18 FIRST CONVERSATION. to eke out the measure; "colde" being pronounced as two syllables in Chaucer's time. The language of the heart never grows obsolete or antiquated, but falls as musically from the tongue now as when it was first uttered. Such lustiness and health of thought and expression seldom fail of leaving issue behind them. One may trace a family likeness to these in many of Spenser's lines, and I please myself sometimes with imagining pencil-marks of Shakespeare's against some of my favorite })assagcs in Chaucer. At least, the relationship may be traced through Spenser, who calls Chaucer his master, and to whom Shakespeare pays nearly as high a compliment. JOHN. I sii])pose you refer to the sonnet, usually printed with his, but now generally ascribed to some one else. PHILIP. To Barnaby Barnes ; but hardly, I would fain be- lieve, on sound authoi-ity. At any rate, there is enough in Shakespeare's earlier poems to prove that he admired Spenser fully to the measure of that sonnet. I know nothing more full of delight and encouragement than to ti'ace the influence of one great spirit upon another. It adds to the dignity of both, and gives our love for them a nobler argument. How must Chaucer have become, for a moment, sweetly conscious of his laurel, even in paradise, at hearing his name spoken reverently by Spenser and Milton and WordsM'orth ! CHA UCER. 19 JOHN. I doubt if he were out of purgatory by the time Spenser wrote. You would panh)n anything to a poet wliom you love, and imagine him in paradise forthwith, when very likely his teeth are chattering on this side of the door. Chaucer had his sins to answer for. PHILIP. Nay, I fancy that, if the priests, whose cassocks he stripped from their shoulders, had the arrangement of the afterpiece, we nmst look for him where his bays will hardly keep him cool. It is true that I would pardon more to a poet, because he needs pardon the most. If he be not excellent, he needs it, because he has keener perceptions of goodness ; and if he be sinful, he needs it, because his temptation to evil is in like manner stronger, and his own imagination sometimes unlocks a postern for vice to enter at. God does not weigh crim- inality in our scales. We have one absolute standard, with the seal of authority upon it; and with us an ounce is an ounce, and a pound a pound. If we have winked while Bigotry and Superstition were tampering with the weights, adding a little to one, and stealing as much from another, to suit their convenience, it is our own fault. But God's measure is the heart of the offender, — a balance which varies with every one of us, a balance so delicate that a tear cast in the other side may make the weight of error kick the beam. The recording ano;el had but little trouble in footing Chaucer's account. The uncleanuess of his age has left^ ^ a smutch here and there upon his poems ; but it is only in the miirgin, and may be torn off without injury to 20 "^ FIRST CONVERSATION. the text. His love of beauty was too sincere not to liave made him truly pious. It was not a holyday dress, folded up aud lavendered for one day in the week ; but his singiug-robe, which he wore into the by- lanes aud hovels of every-day life. JOHN. After all, your Chaucer was a satirist, and you should, in justice, test him with the same acid which you aj)plied so remorselessly to Pope. PHILIP. Chaucer's satire is of quite another complexion. A hearty laugh and a thrust in the ribs are his weapons. He makes fun of you to your face, and, even if you wince a little, you cannot help joining in his mirth. He does not hate a vice because he has a spite against the man who is guilty of it. He does not cry, " A rat i' the arras!" and run his sword througli a defenceless old man behind it. But it is not for his humor, nor, indeed, for any one quality, that our old Chaucer is dear and sacred to me. I love to call' him old Chaucer. The farther I can throw him back into the past, the dearer he grows ; so sweet is it to mark how his plain- ness and sincerity outlive' all changes of the outward M'orld. Antiquity has always sometliing reverend in it. Even its most material and perishable form, which we see in pyramids, cairns, and the like, is brooded over by a mysterious presence which strangely awes us. Whatever has been hallowed by the love and pity, by the smiles and tears of men, becomes something more to us than tlie moss-covered epitaph of a buried age. CHA UCER. 21 There was a meaning in the hieroglyphics, wliich Champollion could not make ])lainer. It is only from association with Man that anything seems old. The quarries of the Nile may he coeval with the plant ^.>^6-<*/--^ itself, yet it is only the still fresh dints of the Coptic chisel that gift them with the spell of ancieutncss. Let but the skeleton of a man be found among the remains of those extinct antediluvian monsters, and straightway that which now claimed our homage as a triumph of comparative anatomy shall become full of awe and mystery, and dim with the gray dawnlight of time. Once, from those shapeless holes, a human soul looked forth upon its huge empire of past and future. Once, beneath those crumbling ribs, beat a human heart, that seeming narrow isthmus between time and eternity, wherein there was yet room for hope and fear, and love and sorrow, to dwell, with all their wondrous glooms and splendors. Before, we could have gone no farther back than Cuvier. Those mighty bones of ichthyosauri and plesiosauri seemed rather a record of his energy and patience, than of a living epoch in earth's history. Now, how modern and of to-day seem Memnon and Elephanta ! If there be a venerableness in any out- ward symbols, in which rude and dumb fashion the soul of man fii-st strove to utter itself, how much more is there in the clearer and more inspired sentences of ancient lawgivers and poets ! JOHX. You have contrived very adroitly to get the Deluge between us. I shall not attempt the perilous naviga- tion to your side, and can only wish you a safe return 22 FIRST CONVERSATION. to mine. Caraoens swam ashore from a shipwreck, with the Lusiad in his teeth ; and I hope you will do as much for Chaucer. I long to hear more of him. PHILIP. It would be easier for me to emulate Waterton's ride on the alligator's back, and make an extempore steed of the most tractable-looking ichthyosaurus I can lay hands on. However, here I am safely back again. But before I read you anything else from Chaucer, I must please myself by praising him a little more. His simplicity often reminds me of Homer; but, except in the single quality of invention, I prefer him to the Ionian. Yet we must remember that he shares this deficiency with Shakespeare, who scarcely ever scrupled to ruu in debt for his plots. JOHN. I cannot allow any poverty in Shakespeare. Writing, as he did, with hardly any aim beyond an immediate effect upon the stage, he instinctively felt how much easier it was to . interest his audience in real charac- ters, and in stories with which they were familiar. Invent the most ingenious plots for plays and panto- mimes, and give all the advantage of more exuberant decoration, yet the old stories of the Forty Thieves and Jack the Giant-killer will Avin the unanimous verdict of the nursery. PHILIP. I do not believe that Shakespeare never thought of posterity, nor that any man was ever endowed with marvellous powers without being conscious of it, and CHA UC.ER. 23 desiring to make them felt. Xo man of genius was ever so fully appreciated by contemporaries as to make liim forget the future. A poet must needs be before his own age, to be even with posterity. There will always be an uncomfortable simper and constraint about a man who is aware of the presence of a living audience ; but when he appeals to the future, he selects his hearers wholly from the noble and magnanimous, and there is a grandeur in the eyes that look upon him, which renders anything but sincerity and great- mindeduess impossible. There is ample proof in Shakespeare's sonnets, the most private and personal record of himself which he has left us, and in the care with w^hich he corrected his plays, that he wrote more for readers than for play-goers. But we must come back to Chaucer. There is in him the exuberant freshness and greetmess of spring. Everything he touches leaps into full blossom. His gladness and humor and pathos are irrepressible as a fountain. Dam them with a prosaic subject, and they overleap it in a sparkling cascade that turns even the hindrance to a beauty. Choke them with a tedious theological disquisition, and they bubble up forthwith, all around it, with a delighted gurgle. There is no cabalistic Undine-stone or seal-of-Solomon that can shut them up for ever. {Reading him is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise. Everything is new and sparkling and fragrant. He is of kin to Belpha?be, whose " Birth was of the womb of morning dew, And her conception of the joyous prime." 24 FIRST CONVERSATION. [ I speak now of what was truly Chaucer. I strip away from him all that belonged to the time in which he lived, and judge him only by what belongs equally to all times. For it is only in as far as a poet advances into the universal, that he approaches immortality. There is no nebulosity of sentiment about him, no insipid vagueness in his sympathies. His first merit, the chief one in all art, is sincerity, j He does not strive to body forth something which shall have a meaning; but, having a clear meaning in his heart, he gives it as clear a shape. Sir Philip Sydney was of his mind when he bade poets look into their own hearts and write. He is the most unconventional of poets, and the frankest. If his story be dull, he rids his hearers of all uncomfortable qualms by being himself the first to yawn. _He would have fared but ill in our day, when the naked feelings are made liable to the penalties of an act for the punishment of indecent exposure. .Very little care had he for the mere decencies of life. HVere he alive now, I can conceive him sending a shudder through St. James's Coffee-house, by thrusting his knife into his mouth ; or making all Regent Street shriek for hartshorn, by giving a cab-driver as good as he sent, in a style that would have pleased old Burton. The highest merit of a poem is,- that it reflects alike the subject and the poet. It should be neither ob- jective nor subjective exclusively. Reason should stand at the helm, though the wayward breezes of feeling must puif the sails. Nature has hinted at this by setting the eyes higher than the heart. Chaucer's poems can claim more of the former than of the latter of these excellencies. Observation of outward nature CHA UCER. 25 and life is more apparent in tlieni tlian a deep inward experience, and it is the observation of a ehecrful, un- weai'-ied spirit. His innocent self-forgetfulness gives , us the truest glimpses into his own nature, and, at the / same time, makes his pictures of outward objects won-/ derfully clear and vivid. Though many of his poems are written in the first person, yet there is not a shade of egoism in them. It is but the simple art of the story-teller, to give more reality to what he tells. JOHN. Yes, it Avas not till our own day that the poets dis- covered what mystical significance had been lying dor- mant for ages in a capital I. It seems strange that a letter of such powerful bewitchment had not made part of the juggling wares of the Cabalists and Tlieurgists. Yet we find no mention of it in Rabbi Akiba or Cor- nelius Agrippa. Byron wrought miracles with it. I fear that the noble Stylites of modern song, wlio, from his lonely pillar of self, drew crowds of admiring vota- ries to listen to the groans of his self-inflicted misery, would have l)een left only to feel the cold and hunger of his shelterless pinnacle in Chaucer's simpler day. PtiiLiP. Yes, Byron always reminds me of that criminal who was shut in a dungeon, the walls of which grew every day narrov/er and narrower, till they crushed him at last. His selfishness walled him in, from the first ; so that he was never open to tlie sweet influences of nature, and those sweeter ones which the true heart finds in life. The sides of his jail were semi-transpar- 26 FIRST CONVERSATION. ent, giviug him a muddy view of things immediately about him ; but selfishness always builds a thick roof overhead, to cut off the heavenward gaze of the spirit. And how did it press the very life out of him, in the end ! JOHN. Byron's spirit was more halt than his body. It had been well for him had he been as ashamed, or at least as conscious, of one as of the other. He should have been banished, like Piiiloctetes, to some Isle of Lemnos, where his lameness should not have been offensive and con- tagious. As it was, the world fell in love with the defect. Some malicious Puck had dropped the juice of love-in-idleness upon its eyes, and limping came quite into fashion. We have never yet had a true likeness of Byron. Leigh Hunt's, I think, is more faithful than Moore's. Moore never forget that his friend was a lord, and seemed to feel that he was pay- ing himself a side-compliment in writing a life of him. I always imagine Moore's portrait of Byron with an " I am, my dear Moore, yours &c.," written under it, as a specimen of his autography. But to our poet. You have given ine a touch of his pathos ; let me hear some of the humor which you have commended so higlily. PHILIP. Praise beforehand deadens the flavor of the wine ; so that, if you are disappointed, the blame must be laid upon me. I will read you a few passages from his " Nun's Priest's Tale." It has been modernized by Dryden, under the title of " The Cook and the Fox;" CHA UCER. 27 but he has lost much of ihc raciness of ihc original. I have chosen this tale, because it will, at the same time, give you an idea of his minute observation of nature. I shall modernize it as I read, preserving as nmch as possible the language, and, above all, the spirit of the original. But you must never forget how much our Chaucer loses by the process. The story begins with a description of the poor widow who owns the hero of the story, Sir Chaunticlei'e. Then we have a glimpse of the hero himself. The widow has " A yard enclosed all about With sticks, and also a dry ditch witliout, In which she had a cock higlit Chaunticlere ; In all the land for voice was not his peer; Not merrier notes the merry organ plays Within the churches upon holydays ; And surer was his crowing in his lodge Than is a clock, or abbey horologe : He knew by nature every step to trace Of the equinoctial in his native place, And when, fifteen degrees it had ascended, Then crew he so as might not be amended. His comb was redder than the fine coral, Embattled as it were a castle-wall ; His bill was black, and like the jet it shone ; Like azure were his legs and toes each one ; His nails were white as lilies in the grass, And like the burned gold his color was." JOHN. What gusto ! If he had been painting Arthur or Charlemagne, he would not have selected his colors with more care. AVithout pulling out a feather from his hero's cockhood, he contrives to give him a human interest. How admirable is the little humorous thrur-t 28 FIRST CONVERSATION. at the astronomers, too, in restricting Sir Chauuticlere's knowledge of the heavenly motions to his own village ! PHILIP. Yes, Chaucer has the true poet's heart. One thing is as precious to him ia point of beauty as another. He would have described his lady's cheek by the same flower to which he has here likened the nails of Chaun- ticlere. To go on with our story. "This gentle cock had in his governance Seven wifely hens to do him all pleasaunce, Of whom the fiiirest-colored in the throat Was known as the fair damsel Partelote; Courteous she was, discreet and debonair, Companionable, and bore herself so fair, Sithence the hour she was a seven-night old, Tliat truly she the royal heart did hold Of Chaunticlere bound fast in every limb : He loved her so, that it was well with him : But such a joy it was to hear them sing "When that the bright sun in the east 'gan spring. In sweet accord !" Chaunticlere, one morning, awakens his fair wife Partelote by a dreadful groaning; and, on her asking the cause, informs her that it must have been the eifect of a bad dream he had been haimted by. " ' I dreamed, that, as I roamed up and down, Within our yard, I there beheld a beast, Like to a hound, that would have made arrest Upon my body, and have had me dead. His color 'twixt a yellow was and redy And tipped were his tail and both his cars With black, unlike the remnant of his hairs. His snout was small, and glowing were his eyes: Still, for his look, the heart within me dies.' " CHAUCER. . 29 Partelote treats his fears with scorn. She asks, in- dignautly, " ' IIow durst you now for shame say to your love Tliat anything could make you feel afeard ? Have you no manly heart, yet have a beard ? ' " Slie then gives him a lecture on the physiological causes of dreams, hints at a superfluity of bile, and recommends some simple remedy which her own house- wifely skill can concoct from herbs that grow within the limits of his own manor. She also quotes Cato's opinion of the small faith to be put in dreams. Her lord, who does not seem superior to the common preju- dice against having his wife make too liberal a display of her learning, replies by overwhelming her with an avalanche of weighty authorities, each one of which, he tells her, is worth more than ever Cato was. He concludes with a contemptuous defiance of all manner of doses, softening it toward his lady by an adroit compliment. " ' But let us speak of mirth, and stint of this : Dame Partelote, as I have liope of bliss, Of one thing God hath sent me largest grace ; For, when I see the beauty of your face, You are so scarlet red about your eyes, That, when I look on you, my terror dies ; For just so sure as in principio Midler est hominis covfusio (Madam, the meaning of this Latin is, AVoman is man's chief joy and sovereign bliss), "Whene'er t feel at night your downy side, I am so full of solace and of pride. That T defy the threatenings of my dream.' And, with that word, he flew down from the beam, — 30 FIRST CONVERSATION. For it was day, — and eke his spouses all ; And with a chuck he 'gan them for to call, For he had found a corn lay in the yard : Royal he was, and felt no more afeard ; He looketh as a lion eyes his foes, And roameth up and down upon his toes ; Scarcely he deigneth set his feet to ground ; He chucketh when a kernel he hath found, And all liis wives run to him at his call." JOHN. AVhat an admirable barn-yard picture ! The very- chanticleer of our childhood, whose parallel Bucks county and Dorking have striven in vain to satisfy our maturer vision with ! A chanticleer Avhose memory writes Ichabod upon the most populous and palatial fowl-houses of manhood ! Chaucer's Pegasus ambles along aseasily, and crops the grass and daisies of the roadside as contentedly, as if he had forgotten his wings. PHILIP. Yes, the work in hand is, for the time, noblest in the estimation of our poet. His eye never looks beyond it, or cheats it of its due regard by pining for something; fairer and more worthy. The rovaltv is where he is, whether in hovel or palace. Nothing that God has not thought it beneath him to make does he deem it beneath him to study and prove worthy of all admiration. Wordsworth is like him iu this. JOHN. True, but in Wordsworth the faculty was a conscious acquisition, while iu Chaucer it was au inborn gift. / CHA UCER. 31 Wordsworth attained to it analytically, and so became a philosopher. Chaucer is always a poet. PHILIP. The artificial style of writing, whicli tyrannized when Wordsworth first became sensible of his own powers, so disgusted him as to warp his inborn poetical faith into a fanaticism. That which should have retained the flexible sensibility of a feeling became stiffened into a theory. He has beheld nature through a loophole, whence he could see but on one side of him, though there the view was broad and majestic. His eye has glorified whatever it looked upon, and the clod and the bramble have shared equally in transfiguration with the mountain and the forest. The cloud which tiie sun's alchemy transmutes to gold is, perhaps, not more grateful for that light than the smallest grass- blade which he shines upon ; but the eye reaps a richer harvest of cousolement from it. I cannot look the gift- horse in the mouth, especially when he is the true steed of the Muses, but I should have been more grateful to Wordsworth for a larger bunch of lilies and less darnel. Yet his reducing the movements of his poetical nature to a principle, if it has straitened his revenues from some sources, has not been without its rewards also. It gave surety and precision to his eye, so that it looked at once through all outward wrappages to the very life and naked reality of things, and he has added more to our household words than any other poet since Shake- speare. Most of his work is solid, of the true Cyclopean build. There is no stucco about it, and it will bear the rudest weather of time. Of his defects 32 FIRST CONVERSATION. " Non ragioniam di lor, ma gnarda e passa." Chaucer reminds me oftenest of Crabbe, in the unstudied plainness of his sentiment, and the minute- ness of his descriptions. But, in Crabbe's poetry, Tyburn-tree is seen looming up in the distance, and the bell of the parish workhouse is heard jangling. It had been better for Crabbe if he had studied Chaucer more and Pope less. The frigid artificiality of his verse contrasts almost ludicrously with the rudeness of his theme. It is Captain Kidd in a starched cambric neckcloth and white gloves. When Chaucer describes his Shipman, we seem to smell tar. *' There was also a shipman from far west, For aught, I know, m Dartmouth he abode ; — Well as he could upon a hack he rode. All in a shirt of tow-cloth to the knee ; A dagger hanging by lace had he. About his neck, under his arm adown ; The summer's heat had made his hue all brown. He was a right good fellow certainly. And many a cargo of good wine had he Run from Bordeaux while the tidewaiter slept ; Of a nice conscience no great care he kept, If that he fought and had the upperhand, By water he sent them home to every land ; But in his craft to reckon well the tides, Tiie deep sea currents, and the shoals besides, The sun's height and the moon's, and pilotage, — There was none such from Hull unto Carthage ; Hardy he was and wise, I undertake; His beard has felt full many a tenipest's shake ; He knew well all the havens as they were From Gothland to the Cape de Finisterre, And every creek in Brittany and Spain ; His trusty bark was named the Magdelaine." / CIIA UCER. 33 JOIIX. The "savage Rosa" never dashed tlie lights and sliades upon one of his bandits with more hold and picturesque effect. How tliat storm-grizzled beard stands out froui the canvass! The effect is so real that it seems as if the brown old sea-king had sat for his portrait, and that every stroke of the brush had been laid on witiiin reach of the dagger hanging at his side. Witness the amiable tints thrown in here and there, to palliate a grim wrinkle or a shaggy eyebrow. The poet takes care to tell us that " He was a right good f^jUow certainly," lest his sitter take umbrage at the recital of his smuer- gling exploits in the next verse. And then with what a rough kind of humor he lets us into the secret of his murderous propensities, by hinting that he gave a passage home by water to those of whom he got the upperhand ! In spite of the would-be good-humored leer, the cut- throat look shows through. It may be very pleasant riding M^ith him as far as Canterbury, and we might even laugh at his clumsiness in the saddle, but we feel all the while that we had rather not be overhauled by him upon the high seas. His short and easy method of sending acquaintances thus casually made to their respective homes, l)y water, we should not be inclined to admire so much as he himself would ; especially if, as a preliminary step, he should attempt to add to the convenience of our respiratory organs with that ugly dagger of his, by opening a larger aperture somewhere nearer to the lungs. We should be inclined to distrust 3 34 FIRST CONVERSATION. those extraordinary powers of natation for which he would give us credit. Even Lord Byron, I imagine, would dislike to mount that steed that " knew its rider" so well, or even to " lay his hand upon its mane," if our friend, the Shipman, held the stirrup. PHILIP. The whole prologue to the Canterbury Tales is equally admirable, but there is not time for me to read the whole. You must do that for yourself. I only give you a bunch or two of grapes. To enjoy the fruit in its perfection, you must go into the vineyard yourself, and pluck it with the bloom on, before the flavor of sunshine has yet faded out of it ; enjoying the play of light upon the leaves also, and the apt disposition of the clusters, each lending a grace to the other. JOHN. Your metaphor pleases me. I like the grapes better than the wine which is pressed out of them, and they seem to be a fitting emblem of Chaucer's natural inno- cence. Elizabeth Barrett, a woman whose genius I admire, says very beautifully of Chaucer, " Old Chaucer, with his infantine, Familiar clasp of things divine, — That stain upon his lips is wine." I had rather think it pure grape-juico. The first two lines take hold of my heart so that I believe them intu- itively, and doubt not but my larger acquaintance with Chaucer will prove them to be true. CHA UCER. 35 PHILIP. I admire tliera as much as you do, and to me tlicy seem to condense all that can be said of Cliancer. But one must know him thoroughly to feel their truth and fitness fully. At the first glimpse you get of liis face, you are struck with the merry twinkle of his eye, and the suppressed smile upon his lips, which betrays itself as surely as a child in playing hide-and-seek. It is hard to believe that so happy a spirit can have ever felt the galling of that "Chain wherewith we are darkly bound," or have beaten its vain wings against the insensible gates of that awful mystery whose key can never be enticed from the hand of the warder, Death. But presently the broad, quiet forehead, the look of patient earnestness, and the benignant reverence of the slightly bowed head, make us quite forget the lightsome im])res- sion of our first look. Yet in the next moment it comes back upon us again more strongly than ever. Humor is always a main ingredient in highly poetical natures. It is almost always the superficial indication of a rich vein of pathos, nay, of tragic feeling, below. AVordsworth seems to be an exception. Yet there is a gleam of it in his sketch of that philosopher " Who could peep and botanize Upon his mother's grave," and of a grim, reluctant sort in some parts of Peter Bell and the Wagoner. But he was glad to sink a shaft beneath the surface, where he could gather the 36 FIRST CONVERSATION. more precious ore, and dwell retired from the jeers of a booris^h world. In Chaucer's poetry the humor is playing all the time round the horizon, like heat-light- ning. It is unexpected and unpredictable ; but, as soon as you turn away from watching for it, behold, it flashes again as innocently and softly as ever. It mingles even with his pathos, sometimes. The laugh- ing eyes of Thalia gleam through the tragic mask she holds before her face. In spite of your cold-water prejudices, I must confess that I like Miss Barrett's third line as well as the others. But while we are wandering so far from the poor old widow's yard, that fox, " full of iniquity," " That new Iscariot, new Ganelon, That false dissimulator, Greek Sinon." as Chaucer calls him, may have made clean away with our noble friend Sir Chaunticlere. JOHN. Now, Escnlapius defend tliy bird! The Romans believed that the lion himself would strike his colors at the crowing of a cock, — a piece of natural history to which the national emblems of England and France have figuratively given the lie. But cunning is often more serviceable than bravery, and Sir Russel the fox may achieve by diplomacy the victory to which the lion was not equal. PHILIP. We shall see. Diplomatists are like the two Yankees who swapped jacknives together till each had cleared CHA UCER. 37 five dollars. Such a Sir Philip Sydney among cocks, at least, could not fall without a burst of melodious tears from every civilized bai-nyard. The poet, after lamenting that Sir Chaunticlere had not heeded better the boding of his dream, warns us of the danger of woman's counsel, from Eve's time downward; but takes care to add, " These speeches are the cock's, and none of mine ; For 1 no harm of woman can divine." He then returns to his main argument ; and no one, who has not had poultry for bosom-friends from child- hood, can appreciate the accurate grace and pastoral humor of his descriptions. The fox, meanwhile, has crept into the yard and hidden himself. " Fair in the sand, to bathe lier merrily, Lies Partelote, and all her sisters by, Against the sun, and Chaunticlere so free Sang merrier than the mermaid in the sea (For Physiologus saith certainly How that they sing both well and merrily), And so befell, that, as he cast his eye Among the worts upon a butterfly, 'Ware was he of the fox that lay full low ; Nothing it lists him now to strut or crow. But cries anon, Cuk ! cuk ! and up doth start, As one that is affrayed in his heart." The knight would have fled, as there are examples enough in Froissart to prove it would not have dis- graced his spurs to do, considering the greatness of the odds against him, but the fox plies him with courteous flattery. He appeals to Sir Chaunticlere's pride of birth, pretends to have a taste in music, and is desirous 38 FIRST CONVERSATION. of hearing him sing, hoping all the while to put his tuneful throat to quite other uses. A more bitter fate than that of Orpheus seems to be in store for our feathered son of Apollo ; since his spirit, instead of hastening to join that of his Eurydice, must rake for corn in Elysian fields, with the bitter thought, that not one but seven Eurydices are cackling for him " mperis in aurisy The fox " Says, * Gentle Sir, alas ! what will you do ? Are you afraid of him that is your friend ? Now, certes, I were worse than any fiend, If I to you wished harm or villany ; I am not come your counsel to espy. But truly all that me did hither bring Was only for to hearken how j'ou sing ; _ For, on my word, your voice is merrier even Than any angel hath that is in heaven, And you beside a truer feeling show, Sir, Than did Boece, or any great composer. My Lord, your father (God his spirit bless! And eke your mother, for her gentleness) Hath honored my poor house to my great ease, And, certes. Sir, full fain would 1 you please. But, since men talk of singing, I will say (Else may I lose my eyes this very day), Save you, I never heard a mortal sing As did your father at the daybreaking ; Certes, it was with all his heart he siuig. And, for to make his voice more full and strong, He would so pain him, that with either eye He needs must wink, so loud he strove to cry, And stand upon his tiptoes therewithal. And stretch his comely neck forth long and small. Discretion, too, in him went hand in hand With music, and no man in any land In wisdom or in song did him surpass.' " CHAUCER. ■ 39 JOIIX. I thought Chaucer's portrait of the son perfect, till Sir Russcl hung up his of the father beside it. AA'hv, Vandyke himself would look chalky beside such flesh and blood as this. Such a cock, one would think, might have served a score of Israelites for a sacrifice at their feast of atonement, or have been a sufficient thank- oifering to the gods for twenty Spartan victories. Stripped of his feathers; Plato would have taken him for something more than human. It must have been such a one as this that the Stoics esteemed it as bad as parricide to slay.* PHILIP. The fox continues, "' Let's see, can you your father counterfeit?' This Cliaunticlere his wings began to beat, As one that could not his foul treason spy, So was he ravished by his flattery. Sir Chaunticlere stood high upon his toes, Stretclied forth his neck and held his eyes shut close, And 'gan to crow full loudly for the nonce, When Dan Russel, the fox, sprang up at once. And by the gorget seized Sir Chaunticlere, And on his back toward the wood him bare." Forthwith the seven wives begin a sorrowful ulula- tion ; Dame Partelote, in her capacity as favorite, shrieking more sovereignly than the rest. Another Andromache, she sees her Hector dragged barbarously from the walls of his native Ilium, whose defence and * Cicero, Orat. pro L. Mura?na, I XXIX. 40 FIRST CONVERSATION. prop he had ever been. Then follows a picture which surpasses even Hogarth. " Tlie luckless widow and her daughters two, Hearing the hens cry out and make their woe, Out at the door togetlier rushed anon, And saw liow toward the wood the fox is gone, Bearing upon his back the cock away ; They cried, ' Out, out, alas ! and welaway ! Aha, the fox ! ' and after him they ran. And, snatching up their staves, ran many a man ; Ean Col, the dog, ran Talbot and Gerland, And Malkin, with her distaff in her hand; Ran cow and calf, and even the very hogs, So frighted with the barking of the dogs, And shouting of the men and women eke, Ran till they thought their hearts would break. And yelled as fiends in hell have never done; The ducks screamed, thinking that their sand was run ; Tke geese, for fear, flew cackling o'er the trees ; Out of their hive buzzed forth a swarm of bees; So hideous was the noise, ah, benedmte! Certes, not Jack Straw and his varletry Raised ever any outcry half so shrill. When they some Fleming were about to kill. As that same day was made about the fox : Vessels of brass they brought forth and of box, And horns and bones, on which they banged and blew ; It seemed the very sky would split in two. The cock, who lay upon the fox's back. In all his dread unto his captor spake. And said : ' Most noble Sir, if I were you, I would (as surely as God's help I sue) Cry, " Turn again, ye haughty villains all ! A very pestilence upon you fall ! Now I am come unto the forest's side, Maugre your heads, the cock shall here abide ; I will him eat, i' faith, and that anon.' " Answered the fox, ' Good sooth, it shall be done !' CHAUCER. 41 And, as he spake the word, all suddenly. The cock broke from his jaws deliverly, And high upon a tree he Hew anon. And when the fox saw that tlie cock was gone, * Alas ! O Chaunticlere, alas ! ' (juoth he, 'I have, 't is true, done you some injury. In that I made you for a while afeard. By seizing you from forth your native yard ; But, .Sir, 1 did it with no ill intent ; Come down, and I will tell you what I meant, God help me as I speak the truth to you ! ' 'Nay,' quoth the other, 'then beshrew us two. But first beshrew myself both blood and bones, If thou beguile me oftener than once ; Never again shalt thou by flattery Make me to sing and wink the while mine eye ; For he that winketh, when he most should see, Deserves no help from Providence, pardie.' " JOHX. So our friend Sir Chaunticlere escapes after all. The humorous moral of the story is heightened by the cun- ning Reynard's being foiled with his own weapons. The bare fact of enduing animals with speech and other human properties is, in itself, highly ludicrous. Fables always inculcate magnanimity. To see our weaknesses thus palpably bodied forth in their appro- priate animal costume brings them down from the false elevation to which their association with ourselves had raised them. The next time we meet them in life their human disguise drops off, and the ape or the owl takes our own place or that of our friend. That trea- tise of Baptista Porta's, in which he traces the likeness between men's faces and those of animals, is painful and shocking; but when we casually note a human 42 FIRST CONVERSATION. expression iu the countenance of a brute, it is merely- laughable. In the former instance the mind is carried downward, and in the latter upward. To children there is nothing humorous in ^sop. They read his fables as soberly as they afterwards read Scott's novels. The moral is always skipped, as tedious. The honey-bag is all they seek ; the sting is of no use, save to the bee. Yet, afterwards, we find that- Lucian and Rabelais are dull beside ^sop ; and the greater the seeming incongruity the greater the mirth. PHILIP. Chaucer was aware of this, when he put so much pedantry into the mouth of Cliaunticlcre ; and the fox's allusion to Boethius makes me laugh in spite of myself. Chaunticlere's compliment to Dame Partelote, too, where he expresses the intense satisfaction which he feels in observing that " She is so scarlet red about her eyes," is the keenest of satires upon those lovers who have sung the bodily perfections of their mistresses, and who have set their aifections, as it w-ere, upon this year's leaves, to fall off with them at the bidding of the first November blast of fortune. It was a Platonic notion, to which Spenser gave in his allegiance, that a fair spirit always chose a fair dwelling, and beautified it the more by its abiding. It is tlie sweetest apology ever invented for a physical passion. But I do not like this filching of arrows from heavenly love, to furnish forth the quiver of earthly love withal. Love is the most hospitable of sj^irits, and adorns the interior of his home CHAUCER. • 43 for tlie nobler welconio, not the exterior for the more lordly show. It is not the outside of his dwelling that invites, but the soft domestic murmur stealing out at the door, and the warm, homely light gushing from the windows. No matter into what hovel of clay he enters, that is straightway the palace, and beauty holds hei- court in vain. I doubt if Chaucer were conscious of his sarcasm, but I can conceive of no more cutting parody than a sonnet of Chaunticlere's upon his mis- tress's comb or beak, or other gallinaceous excellency. Imagine him enthusiastic over her sagacity in the hunt- ing of earthworms, and her grace in scratching for them with those toes " White as lilies in the grass," standing upon one leg as he composed a quatrain upon her tail-feathers, and finally losing himself in the melodious ecstasy of her cackle ! There is certainly, as you have said, something ludi- crous in the bare idea of animals indued with human propensities and feelings, and the farther away we gi'\ from any physical resemblance, the more keenly moved is our sense of humor. That king-making jelly of the bees strips Nicholas and Victoria of their crowns and ermine, and makes them merely forked radishes, like the rest of us. And when I learned that there was domestic slavery among certain species of the ants, I could not but laugh, as I imagined some hexapodal McDuffie mounted upon a cherry-stone, and convincing a caucus of chivalrous listeners of their immense supe- riority to some neighboring hill, -whose inhabitants got 44 FIEST CONVERSATION. in their own harvest of bread-crumbs and dead beetles, unaided by that patriarchal' machinery. JOHN. The passage you first read me from the death-scene of Arcite moved me so much that I cannot help wish- ing you would read me something more in the same kind. PHILIP. I were no true lover, if I were to express any fear of your being disappointed. Yet I know not if you and I shall be equally pleased. The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts lias some musical strings in it. But they are tuned diiferently in every one of us, so that the selfsame strain, which wakens a thrill of sympa- thetic melody in one, may leave another quite silent and untouched. For whatever I love, my delight mounts to an extravagance. There are verses which I cannot read without tears of exultation, which to others are merely indifferent. These simple touches, scattered here and there by all great writers, Avhich make me feel that I, and every most despised and outcast child of God that breathes, have a common humanity with those glorious spirits, overpower me. Poetry has a key Avhich unlocks some more inward cabinet of my nature than is accessible to any other power. I cannot explain it, or account for it, or say what faculty it appeals to. The chord which vibrates strongly becomes blurred and invisible in proportion to the intensity of its impulse. Often the mere rhyme, the cadence and sound of the words, awaken this CHA UCER. 45 strange feeling in nic. Not only do all the happy associations of my earthly life, that before lay scat- tered, take beantiful shapes, like iron dust at the approach of the magnet; but something dim and vague, beyond these, moves itself in me, with the uncertain sound of a far-off sea. My sympathy witii remotest eld becomes that of a bystander and an actor. Those noble lines of Shakespeare, in one of his sonnets, drop their veil of mysticism, and become modern and ordinary : — " Xo, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change, Thy pyramids, built up with newer might, To me are nothing novel, nothing strange; They are but dressings of a former sight." The grand symphony of Wordsworth's Ode rolls through me, and I tremble, as the air does with the gatliering thunders of the organ. ]\Iy clay seems to have a sympathy with the mother earth Avhence it was taken, to have a memory of all that our orb has ever witnessed of great and noble, of sorrowful and glad. With the wise Samian, I can touch the mouldering buckler of Euphorbus and claim an interest in it deeper than that of its antiquity. I have been the bosom- friend of Leander and of Romeo. I seem to go behind Musfeus and Shakespeare, and to get my intelligence at first hand. Sometimes, in my sorrow, a line from Spenser steals in upon my memory as if by some vitality and external volition of its own, like a blast from the distant trump of a knight pricking toward the court of Faerie ; and I am straightway lifted out of that sadness and shadow into the sunshine of a 46 FIRST CONVERSATION. previous and long-agone experience. Often, too, this seemingly lawless species of association overcomes me with a sense of sadness. Seeing a waterfall or a forest for the first time, I have a feeling of something gone, a vague regret, that, in some former state, I have druuk up the wine of their beauty, and left to the defrauded present only the muddy lees. Yet, again, what divine over-compensation, when the same memory (shall I call it?), or fantasy, lets fall a drop of its invisible elixir into my cup, and I behold to-day, which before showed but forlorn and beggared, clothed in the royal purple, and with the golden sceptre of a line of majestical ancestry ! JOHN. If I do not understand all that you say, I can at least prove my superiority to vulgar prejudice by be-" lieving in your sincerity. A base mind always takes that for cant in another, which would be such in itself, and is apt to blame any innocent .assertion of peculiar- ity for assumption. Yet, in fact, what is peculiar to any one is not only all that is of worth in him, but is also the most likely to be showing itself on all occa- sions. ^ Poetry does not convey the same impressions to my mind as to yours, but other things have sometimes given me a feeling akin to what you describe. PHILIP. When you speak thus of poetry, you restrict it to what has been written by the jwets, which is but a small part of it yet. In attributing a certain mystical influence to peculiar associations, I said more than I meant to have done. But it is better to say more than CHA UCER. 47 less, and, if I err, may it always be rather upon the side of confidence than of suspicion. I intended to imply that our tastes are so arbitrary as entirely to forbid the establishment of a code of criticism. I doubt if any better reasoning can be given for our likings than the Latin poet gave for his dislikes. We can assert them, but when we strive to explain and apologize for them, we are quite likely to lose ourselves in a mire of cant and conventionality. Jt may be said that it is truth in every case that delights us ; but the next question is Pilate's — " What is truth ? " It is a different thing (let me rather say it assumes a different a>^pect) to each of us, and thus is equally amiable to all. How shall we explain it ? Here is a man who is a scholar and an artist, who knows precisely how every eftect has ''been produced by every great writer that ever lived, and who is resolved to reproduce them. But the heart passes by his pitfalls and traps and care- fully planned springes, to be taken captive by some simple fellow, who expected the event as, little as did his prisoner. The critics fix upon one writer as a standard, and content themselves for a century or two with measuring everybody else by him. They justly enough consider that criticism should be conservative ; but their idea of conservatism is that of a Fakir, who deems it religion to stand upon one leg till all its muscles become palsied and useless. In the course of time, their system, if it ever had vitality, becomes effete. If they commend Hercules, it is for his skill at Omphale's distaff, till the delightful impropriety of their criticism gets them laughed off the stage. Criti- cism seems to be the only profession into which men 48 FIRST CONVERSATION. can jump without any training, and have their judg- ments allowed. Yet the criticism of any work of art demands not only greater natural abilities, but more strenuous and self-sacrificing previous study, than that of an essay in physical or astronomical science. Men, whose capacity for the divine eloquence of music could be filled to overflowing with the muddy inspirations of a barrel-organ, undertake to pronounce off-hand upon the melody of Apollo's lute. Most professional critics are endowed with the ears of Midas without the trans- forming properties of his touch, and they emulate the taste of the animal A\hose most striking outward cha- racteristic they wear in choosing only the burdocks and thistles of an author for their critical aliment. If a man must hang his nest in the boughs of a poem, let him rather imitate the oriole, which adds a beauty to the tree, than the woodpecker, which gains its liveli- hood by picking it full of holes. In fact, the only safe method is to point out what parts of a poem please the critic, and to let the rest go. Posterity will reverse our judgments ninety-nine times in the hundred, and it is certainly better to be censured for kindness than for severity. If the poets have not been dull, they have at least been the causes of a lavish prodigality of dulness in otiier men. Taste is the next gift to genius. They are the Eros and Antcros of Art. Without his brother, the first must remain but a child still. Poets are vulgarly considered deficient in the reasoning faculty ; whereas none was ever a great poet, without having it in excess, and, after a century or two, men become convinced of it. They jump the middle terms of their syllogisms, it is true, and assume pre- CIIA VCER. 49 mises to which the world has not yet arrived ; but time stamps their deductions as invincible. Taste is that faculty which at once perceives, and hails as true, ideas which yet it has not the gift of discovering itself. It is not something to be educated and fostered, but is as truly innate as the creative faculty itself. A man with what is blunderingly called an educated taste is inca- pable of aught but the classic ; that is, he recognizes in a new work that which makes the charm of an old one, and pronounces it worthy of admiration accord- ingly. Put the right foot of the Apollo forward in- stead of the left, and call it Philip of Pokanoket, and he is in ecstasies over a work at once so truly national and classic. He would have stood dumb, and with an untouched heart, before the Apollo fresh from the chisel of the sculptor. JOHN. Very likely. This faculty of taste, which I agree with you in thinking innate, is the first great requisite of a critic. Learning, ingenuity, and boldness are merely its handmaidens. Our critics have been inter- esting in one regard ; they have experimentally demon- strated how long a man will live after the brains are out. This aspect, however, is for the physiologists. No critic that ever lived would have the hardihood to foretell the precise hues of to-morrow's sunset, and then to complain if it gave him an acre of purple and gold more or less. Yet the same man would confi- dently reduce Art to a chessboard, upon which all the combinations are mathematically calculable and ex- haustible, and compel genius, whose very essence is 4 50 FIRST CONVERSATION. freedom, to confine itself to these little arbitrary squares of black and white. PHILIP. And yet the next development of genius is as unpre- dictable as the glory of the next sunset. The critics tell us the day for epics has gone by. Wait till the master comes, and see. Everything is impossible till it is done ; and when the man has come and accom- plished his Avork, the world says, Am I thousands of years old, to be gravelled in my horn-book? The Morld has been to blame in this matter. It has allowed those to be critics who were unfit for anything else. Criticism has been the manor and glebe of those who had no other inheritance, as the Church used to be to the younger sous of the aristocracy in England. And the lion's hide of anonymousness, through which only the judicious catch sight of the betraying ears, has often endued Zoilus with a terror not his own. JOHN. After all, they have only interfered with the larder of genius. They keep it upon a spare diet, that it may sup the more heartily Avith the Muses. Hunger has wrenched many a noble deed from men ; but there is a corrupting leaven of self in all that Ambition cau caress out of them, which soon turns it quite stale and musty. Impletus venter non vult studere libenter w^as the old monkish jiiigle, and let us be grateful in due measure to the critics who have made the poets unwill- ingly illustrate it. CHA UCER. 61 PHILIP. Surely, you jest. A greasy savor of the kitchen intrudes itself into whatever is done for the belly's sake. No. What a man pays for bread and butter is worth its market value, and no more. What he pays for love's sake is gold indeed, which has a lure for angels' eyes, and rings well upon God's touchstone. And it is love that has inspired all true hearts. This is the ample heritage of the poets, and it is of this they have made us heirs. When the true poet is born, a spirit becomes incarnate which can embrace the whole rude earth as with the soft arms of a glorifying atmo- sphere. The inarticulate moan of the down-trodden he shall clothe in language, and so wing it with divine music that the dullest heart shall look up to see it knocking at heaven's gate. The world's joy, erewhile a leaden cloud, shall turn golden under his sunlike look. And when such a spirit comes forth from its heavenly palace, where it had been wrapped softly in the impe- rial purple of noble purposes and happy dreams, and tended by all the majestical spirits of the past, — when it comes forth in obedience to the beckonings of these its benignant guardians, saying, " Behold, my brethren are ahuugered and I will feed them ; they are athii-st and I will give them drink ; my })leuty is for them, else is it beggary and starving," — and is jeered at and flouted because it can speak only the tongue of the heaven whence it came, now foreign and obsolete, — what bewildering bitterness, what trembling even to the deep Godward bases of faith, M'hat trustfulness mocked into despair, become its portion ! The love, rNIVERSITl 62 FIRST CONVERSATION. tlie hope, the faith, which it had sent out before it to briug it tidings of the fair land of promise, come back pale and weary, and cry for food in vain to the famish- ing heart which once so royally entertained them. The beautiful humanity, a vision of which had braced the sinev/s of its nature, and had made all things the vas- sals of its monarch eye, seems to it now but as a sphinx, from whose unchangeable and stony orbs it can win no look of recognition, and whose granite lips move not at its despairing cry. You smile, but let me think it is for sympathy. A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil's weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point. But how many noble hearts have writhed with its venomous stab, and fes- tered Avith its subtle malignity ! JOHN. Yet from some of its hurts a celestial ichor flows, as from a wounded god. I would hardly change the sor- rowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tenser for it, and ring even the clearer and more rav- ishingly. We may be but the chance acquaintance of him who has made us the sharer of his joy, but he who has admitted us to the sanctuary of his grief has made us partakers also of the dignity of friendship. Sorrow, you will allow, if not scorn or neglect, is a good school- master for poets. Why, it has wrenched one couplet of true poetry out of Dr. Johnson. CHA UC.ER. 53 PHILIP. You mean that one iu his " Vanity of Human Wishes," " There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, — Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail." You might have instanced, too, his letter to Lord Chesterfield, though it be not in verse. But ill-for- tune, if it bring out the poetry of a prosaic nature, ■svill but deaden a highly poetical one. - JOHN. Our conversation must here end for to-day. To- morrow I will give you a chance to lecture farther upon your favorite topics. PHILIP. In spite of the covert satire conveyed in your allu- sion to lectures, I will readily forgive it in consideration of the commendable patience you have displayed. Till to-morrow, then, farewell. SECOND CONVEESATION. CHAUCER. PHILIP. Good morning. Your experience of my laboratory, I am glad to see, has not made you unwilling to become my prisoner again. JOHN. I only ask, most enthusiastic alchemist, that, in your search after gold, you will not put any such explosive material into your crucible as shall send us on a voyage through the roof in search of our El Dorado. With this proviso, let us to our experiments again. You agreed with me in my praise of Elizabeth Barrett's lines ; can you give me an illustration of Chaucer's " Infantine, Familiar, clasp of things divine"? PHILIP. It would be difficult. An author's piety cannot be proved from the regular occurrence of certain decorums and respectabilities of religion in his works, but from a feeling which permeates the whole. I have read books in which the name of God Avas never once so much as alluded to, which yet irresistibly persuaded me of the 64 CHA UCER. 55 writer's faitli in liim and childlike love of him. And I have read others, where that blessed name, with a parcntheticiil and systematic piety, made part of every sentence, and only impressed me like the constantly recnrrino- figures upon calico. There is no intentional piety about Chaucer, no French collar-aud-wristband morality, too common in our day. Now, certain days of the week, and certain men, seem to claim a monopoly in religion. It is something quite too costly and precious to make part of every day's furniture. We must not carry it into the street or the market, lest it get soiled. We doff it and hang it up as easily as a Sunday suit. The ancients esteemed it sacrilege to touch what was set apart for the gods. Many of our own time imitate that ethnic scrupulousness,' and carefully forbear religi- on, yet are deemed pious men, too. In Chaucer, you will find a natural j)iety everywhere shining through, mildly and equably, like a lamp set in an alabaster vase. The wise man maintains a hospitable mind. He scruples not to entertain thoughts, no matter how strange and foreign they may be, and to ask news of them of realms which he has never explored. He has no fear of their stirring any treason under his own roof. Chaucer apparently acted upon this principle. He loved speculation, and, when he was running down some theological dogma, he does not mind leaping the church inclosure, and pursuing his prey till it takes refuge under the cassock of the priest himself. But, though he seems not to set much store by forms and outward observances, he is quite too near the days of wonder and belief and earnestness not to be truly religious. 56 SECOND CONVERSATION. The earliest poetry of all countries is sacred j)oetry, or that in which the idea of God predominates and is developed. The first effort at speech which man's nature makes in all tongues is, to pronounce the word " Father." Reverence is the foundation of all poetry. From reverence the spirit climbs on to love, and thence beholds all things. No matter in what Scytiiian fashion these first recognitions of something above and beyond the soul are uttered, they contain the germs of psalms and prophecies. Whether, for a while, the immortal guest rests satisfied with a Fetish or an Apollo, it has already grasped the clew which leads unerringly to the very higliest idea. For reverence is the most keen-eyed and exacting of all the faculties, and, if there be the least flaw in its idol, it will kneel no longer. From wood it rises to gold and ivory; from these, to the yet simpler and more majestic mar- ble; and, planting its foot upon that, it leaps upward to the infinite and invisible. Let our external worship be paid to what gods you will, the soul is restless and dissatisfied until she has soared into the higher region of that true piety in whose presence creeds and forms become mere husks and straw. Always in her intimate recesses the soul builds an altar to the unknown God, and it is here that Poesy Jiiakcs her sacrifices and officiates as authorized priestess. When I assume rev- erence, then, as the very primal essence and life of poetry, I claim for it a nobler stii-p than it has been the fashion to allow it. Beyond Adam runs back its illustrious genealogy. • It stood with Uriel in the sun, and looked down over the battlements of heaven with the angelic guards. In short, it is no other than the CHA UCER. 57 religious sentiment itself. That is poetry \,\\k\\ makes sorrow lovely, and joy solemn to ns, and reveals to us the holiness of things. Faith casts herself upon her neck as upon a sister's. She shows us what glimpses we get of life's spiritual face. What she looks on becomes miraculous, though it be but the dust of the wayside ; and miracles become but as dust, for their simpleness. There is nothing noble without her ; with her there am be nothing mean. What songs the Druids sang within the sacred circuit of Stonehenge we can barely conjecture ; but those forlorn stones doubt- less echoed with appeals to a higher something; and are not even now without their sanctity, since they chronicle a nation's desire after God. Whether those forest-priests worshipped the strangely beautiful ele- ment of fire, or if the pilgrim Belief pitched her tent and for a night rested in some ruder and bleaker creed, there we may yet trace the light footsteps of Poesy, as she led her sister onward to fairer fields, and streams flowing nearer to the oracle of God. JOHN. With you, then, the reading of any poet must begin, like the Romish missal, with a sursum cordn. It is no wonder that you are so sore against jhe critics, for they usually reverse the rule. The ]wets, however, have given them some reason for if. They have seldom been such religious teachers as I should wish to be guided by. Byron seems to have written by a redder light than usually comes from above ; and Milton and Burns show a very anomalous sympathy for that 58 SECOND CONVERSATION. unfortunate pei^sonage whom Latimer calls the only bishop faithful in his diocese, j PHILIP. Byron might have made a great poet. As it is, his poetry is the record of a struggle between his good and his baser nature, in which the latter wins. The fall is great in proportion to the height from which one is hurled. An originally beautiful spirit becomes the most degraded when perverted. It would fain revenge itself upon that purity from which it is an unhappy and restless exile, and drowns its remorse in the drunken- ness and vain bluster of defiance. There is a law of neu- tralization of forces which hinders bodies from sinking beyond a certain depth in the sea; but in the ocean of basene&ithe deeper we get the easier is the sinking. As for the kindness which Milton and Burns felt for the Devil, I am sure God thinks of him with pity a thousand times to their once, and the good Origen believed him not incapable of salvation. JOHN. We have forgotten Chaucer. PHILIP. We shall come to him presently. The straight line is not the line of beauty. There is an oak-wood a mile or two hence, whither I often walk, but I never make for it with the straightforward pertinacity of a turnpike. A clump of golden-rods, or a sprig of succory, is enough to draw me aside; and when I reach my oaks, I bring them a heart more open, and a keener sym- CHA UCER. 50 patliy. Once there, I am not locked up in them, but seek out glimpses of landscape on every side, the enjoy- ment of which I seem to owe to their hospitality. The rustle of their leaves makes my car sympathize in the happiness of my eye; and when I turn wholly l)ack to them again, their shade seems thicker, their vistas more warmly sprinkled with sunshine, and their trunks more royally mantled with moss. Let Chaucer be our oak- wood to-day ./ There is nothing that does not harmonize with and illustrate what we have most at heart, and one key will open all the doors of nature. No man, if he try, can enjoy one thing at a time; nor can he love one thing truly, and be indifferent to any other the most remote. JOHN. It is a bad sign when a man is skilful in apologies. But I shall accept your excuse, since we are met to converse, and not to argue. So now to Chaucer again. PHILIP. I am ready. But this attempting to illustrate a great poet by specimens is like giving an idea of Niagara by a bottle-full of water brought thence, or of Wachuset by a fragment of its granite. I siiall read you now an extract from the " Clerk's Tale." It is the story of " patient Grizzel," and interests me the more from his telling us that he " Learned it at Padua of a worthy clerk, So proven by his word and by his work ; He is dead now, and nailed in his chest, I pray to God to give his soul good rest; Francis Petrarch, the poet laureate, This scholar hight." 60 SECOND CONVERSATION. JOHN. But was Chaucer ever in Italy ? PHILIP. It is highly probable, though not certain. It is not likely that Chaucer would have quoted Petrarch as his authority rather than Boccace, unless the fact be as he states it. I see no reason to doubt it. Besides, incre- dulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return. It is well to distrust what we hear to make us think worse of a man, and to accept a story's pleas- antness as prhad facie evidence of its truth. JOHN. It is certainly agreeable to imagine Petrarch and Chaucer together ; and who knows but Boccace filled up the number of the classic feast? I wonder there is no tradition concerning our poet's journey to Italy, as there is about INIilton's. The graves of poets seem to be the natural soil out of which such sweet legendary flowers grow. PHILIP. The Italians would have had one. They are either very scrupulous, or deficient in originality of invention in such matters ; for precisely the same story is told of Tasso and Pulci, and, I think, of Ariosto. JOHN. You mean that of the bandit's dismissing them courteously, on learning their names. A very Claude Duval of ruffians ! One finds it hard to believe in CHA UCER. Gl three such. Yet it may be true. It could never have happened in England or America, where the mass of the people know less and care less about their poets than in any other countries. Yet our native tongue boasts the greatest and most universal of poets. The Sicilians paid a finer compliment to Euripides, and Milton has immortalized Alexander's homage to the memory of Pindar. PHILIP. The story of Griselda, of course, you know already ; so that I shall need but a short prefiice to what I read. The first trial which the husband makes of his wife's patience is by taking away her infant daughter (her only child), with the avowed purpose of having it murdered. A sergeant is sent to take the babe. At first, Griselda is silent; " But at the last to speak she thus began, And meekly she unto the sergeant prayed (So as he was a worthy gentleman), That she miglit kiss her child before it died : And in her lap the little child she laid. With full sad face, and 'gan the child to bliss, And lulled it, and after 'gan it kiss." JOHN. Very sweet and touching. I like, too, what our modern critics would, in all probability, find fault with, the frequent repetition of the word "child." The poet had put himself so in the mother's place that any less tender epithet would not satisfy him. Nowadays, an author will wade around through a quagmire of verbiage to avoid using the same word over again. The old poets were more straightforward. 62 SECOND CONVERSATION. PHILIP. I am soriy that we have lost the use of the word "bliss" as a verb, so much motherliuess is conveyed by it. " And thus she said, in her benignant voice : ' Farewell, my child ! I shall thee never see ; But, since that I have marked thee with the cross, Of that same father blesscd maj'st thou be, \Vho died for us uj)on a cross of tree : Thy spirit, little child, his care I make, For thou this night must perish for my sake.' " I trow that for a nurse, in such a case. It had been hard this pity for to see ; Well might a mother, then, have cried, alas ! But ne'ertheless so steadfast-souled was she, Tliat she endured all adversity, And meekly to the sergeant there she said, ' Take back again your little youngling maid.' " ' Go now,' said she, ' and do my lord's behest ; But one thing would I pray you of your grace, Unless my lord forbid you, at the least. Bury this little body in some place Where neither birds nor beasts may it displace.' But to that purpose he no word would say, But took the child and went upon his way." You are silent. JOHN. I was listening to hear the mother's tears fall upon the face of her child. The first voice that is heard, after the reading of good poetry, comes ordinarily from the shallowest heart in the company. Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back, till CHAUCER. G3 then. I never knew a woman mIio thought Mell of GriselJa, and I confess I would not choos(; that woman for a wife who did. ■ Her duty as a mother was para- mount to her duty as a wife. As is not uncommon, she betrayed a general principle for the sake of a par- ticular one, which had fastened upon her imagination. Patience, when it is a divine thing, is active, not passive. Chaucer has so tenderly contrived to en- list our pity as to save her from contempt. With what motherly endearment she repeats the word " little,^' as if to move the sympathy of the stone- hearted sergeant I PHILIP. What you say reminds me of a passage in the " Yorkshire Tragedy," one of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. I have seen it somewhere quoted as a proof that it was his. The touch of nature in it is ) worthy of him, but there is nothing in the rest of the drama to sustain the hypothesis. A spendthrift father, in a fit of madness, murders his children. As he seizes one of them, the little fellow, to appease him, calls him- self by the name his father had doubtless given him in happier days. " O, what will you do, fiither ? / am your white hoy." JOHN. That is very touching. How is it that this simple- ness, the very essence of tragic pathos, has become unattainable of late ? I know only one modern drama- tist capable of it, though nothing would seem easier ; I mean Robert Browning. Wordsworth has as deep glances now and then in his poems, but his tragedy of 64 SECOND CONVERSATION. " The Borderers " is as level as a prairie. There is scarce anything tragic about it, except the reading of it ; yet what insight has he shown in some parts of " The Excursion " ! Among a thousand such passages in Shakespeare, there is one which always struck me as peculiarly fine. It is in the first scene of the second act of " King John." Queen Elinor says to Arthur, " Come to tliy grandam, child." Constance replies with sarcastic bitterness, and yet, I fancy, with hot tears in her eyes the while, — " Do, child, go to it' grandam, child; Give grandam kingdom, and it' grandam will Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig. There 's a good grandam." Who but Shakespeare would have dared this baby- talk in such a place ! Yet how admirable ! PHILIP. These simplest thouglits, feelings, and experiences, that lie upon the very surface of life, are overlooked by all but uncommon eyes. Most look upon them as mere \veeds. Yet a Aveed, to him that loves it, is a flower ; and there are times when we would not part with a sprig of chickweed for a whole continent of lilies. No man thinks his own nature miraculous, while to his neighbor it may give a surfeit of Monder. Let him go where he will, he can find no heart so worth a study as his own. The prime fault of modern poets is, that they are resolved to be peculiar. Thoy are not content that it should come of itself, but they CHA UCER. 65 must dig and bore for it, sinking their wells usually through the grave of some buried oi-ginalitv, so that if any water rises it is tainted. Kead most volumes of poems, and you are reminded of a French bill of fare, where everytliing is h /« something else. Even a potato an naturd is a godsend. When will poets learn that a grass-blade of their own raising is worth a bazTow-load of flowers from their ncij^hbor's y-arden ? JOHX. Men ordinarily Avear as many sets of borrowed opinions as the grave-digger in Hamlet wears waist- coats. They look quite burly, till you strip them; and then, too often, you find but a withered anatomy beneath. But, after all, borrowed garments never keep one warm. A curse goes with them, as with Harry Gill's blankets. Nor can one get smuggled goods safely into kingdom-come. How lank and pitifid does one of these gentry look, after posterity's cus- toms-officers have had the plucking of him ! PHILIP. It certainly is odd that it should be so hard to get a man's natural thought from him. No gift seems to be more rare than that of conveying simply and distinctly the peculiar impression which any object makes upon the mind of the recipient. Give a man anything to describe, and he forthwith puzzles himself to talk about it as some other admired person would do; so that we get a thousand worthless books for one good one. And yet the sincere thought which the meanest pebble gives to a human soul is of great price to us. A fa- 5 66 SECOND CONVERSATION. miliar instance may be taken from Ossian. Macpher- sou, who has given us some highly original images, spoils half his work by forgetting that his bard was a Gael, and not a Greek, and by endeavoring to make Ossian speak like Plomer. JOHN. Like Pope's Homer, you mean. This constant reproduction of old thoughts in a new dress recalls to my mind a tragic reminiscence of my childhood. At a museum, upon which I was in tlie habit of monthly exhausting my childish income with the spendthrift ambition of being one day large enough to be charged full price for admission, there was a wax representation of Othello and Desdemona. Who these mythological personages were, I knew not; but Othello seemed to me the model of a fairy prince, and I sought always vainly, in the real world without, for anything like Desdemona. The "Boston Beauty" and "Miss McRea," in the glass case of the next room, could never detain my feet, or wile my heart from its fealty to her. Listen to the catastrophe. Just after a famous murder had been perpetrated, my funds had accunm- lated sufficiently to enable me to visit the .shrine of my romance. The proprietor of that museum may liave a sweet conscience, but I am persuaded that he put a ninepence in his pocket that day which made his pillow uneasy. INIy Desdemona, to glut a depraved public appetite, had been metamorphosed into a ISIr. Jen- kins, and my Othello into his murderer ! That divine wax, " That boon prefigured in my earliest wish," CHA UCEB. 67 whicli I had worshipjicd as never Pygmalion did his image, or the young Roman liis statue of Venus, had been violated. Into that room I never ventured ao-ain I could have broken the nose off the " Boston Beauty " for her look of attemj)ted unconcern, through which the ill-concealed triumpii sparkled. With that feeling of revenge upon itself, with which the heart consoles itself for any loss by rushing to the other extreme, I thenceforward centred all my adoration upon "the great sea-vampire," an entirely original triangular con- ception by an ingenious artist in leather, which my mind, early disciplined to the miraculous by Gold- smith's " Animated Nature," readily accepted as au- thentic. PHILIP. This tragic recollection has, I hope, put your mind in tune for hearing more of Griselda's sorrows. But you must read the rest of her story for yourself. I have many other delicates for you to taste, before we part. Let me read you an exquisite stanza from "Troilus and Creseide." It tells you how Creseide first avowed her love. There is nothing more tender iu Coleridge's " Genevieve." " And, as the early, bashful nightingale Doth hush at first when she begins to sing. If chance she heareth any shepherd's tale, Or in the hedges any rusteling, And then more boldly doth her voice outring ; Cressid right so, when her first dread was spent, Opened her heart and gave her love full vent." I know not where the nightingale is more sweetly 68 SECOND CONVERSATION. touched upon. Shakespeare has alluded to it once or twice, but uot with enthusiasm. Coleridge, in one of his early poems, has given us a high strain of music about it. Milton's sonnet is not so fine as most of his, though the opening is exquisite. JOHN. Keats has written, perhaps, the best ode in the lan- guage, upon this bird. Wherever the learned fix the site of Eden, it will never be in America, where we have neither the nightingale nor the skylark. Yet we have the bobolink and the mocking-bird, in rich compensation. Nor are our northern nights wholly without their music. I have often heard the song- sparrow and the robin at midnight ; and what solitude would be quite lonely, wanting the mournful plaint of the whippoorwill ? The newspapers now and then have lent their diurnal immortality to foolish puning verses upon this last bird ; but the persons who wrote them could never have heard its voice, or they would have wasted their time in some less idle manner. In Virginia and the Carolinas, too, the mocking-bird sings all night, like another Romeo, beneath the leafy bal- cony of his betrothed. How much dignity does the love of nature give to minds otherwise trivial ! White's Selborne has become a classic. If he had chronicled the migrations of kings and queens and dukes and duchesses, he would have deserved only the trunkraaker's gratitude. But his court-journal of blackbirds and goldfinches has won him an inner nook in our memories. CHA UCER. 69 PHILIP. I intend to read you presently another passage from " Troiliis and Creseide," Avhich lias been excellently modernized by \\'ordsworth . But first I \\\\\ show you that Chaucer's love of nature was a paasion with him. Listen to his praise of the daisy. It is in the prologue to his " Legend of Good Women/' and per- haps I am partial to it from its being the favorite of a very dear friend. If the passage have no other merit, it has at least that of being beloved by one whose love is like a crown to whatever it blesses. " Wlien tlie month of May Is come, and I can hear the small birds sing, And the fresh flowers have begun to spring, Good-bve, my book! devotion, too, good-bye I Now this peculiar frame of mind have I, That, among all the flowers of the mead, I love the most that flower w^te and red, "Which men in our town the daisy name ; And such affection draws me unto them. As I have said before, when come is May, That in my bed there dawneth not a day' But I am up and walking in the mead To see this flower against the sunshine spread, "When it upriseth early by the morrow : That blissful sight doth soften all my sorrow ; So glad am I, when I have sight of it. To pay it fealty and reverence fit. As one that is of other flowers the flower, Having all good and honor for her dower, And ever fair alike, and fresh of hue ; And ever I love it with a passion new. And ever shall until my heart shall die: I swear it not, and yet I will not lie." How like a lover he heaj)s praise upon praise, and 70 SECOXD CONVERSATION. protestation on protestation, as if he were fearful the blossom might wither, ere he had done it honor enono-h ! Ah, if we would but pledge ourselves to truth as heartily as we do to a real or imaginary mis- tress and think life only too short because it abridged our time of service, wliat a new world we should have ! Most men pay their vows to her in youth, and go up into the bustle of life, with her kiss warm upon their lips, and her blessing lying upon their hearts like dew; but the world has lips less chary, and cheaper benedictions, and if the broken troth-plight with their humble village-mistress comes over them sometimes with a pang, she knows how to blandish away remorse, and persuades them, ere old age, that their young enthusiasm was a folly and an indiscretion. ^ JOHX. The pillow of their death-bed, however, hears tlie name of the old love again, and is made the confidant of some bitter tears to her memory. But you have given me your daisy snipped short off by the head, as a child does. PHILIP. " Never man loved more hotly in his life, And, when the evening cometh, I run blithe, As soon as e'er the sun begins to west, For fear of night, darkness so hateth she ; Her cheer is in the brightness utterly Of the glad sun, for there she will unclose. Ah, that I have not English rhyme or prose Enough to give this flower its praise aright! My busy spirit, that still thirsts anew To see this flower so young and fresh of hue, CHAUCER. 71 Constrained me witli such a great desire, That in my heart 1 yet can feel its lire, And made me rise before the peep of day, It being now the morning first of May, With glad devotion and heart full of dread, To see the resurrection from tiie dead Of this same liower, wiicn it sliould unclose Against tiie sun that rose as red as the rose W hicii in the breast was of the beast that day He led Agenor's daughter fair away ; And down upon my knees I set me riglit, To greet this flower fresh as best 1 might, Kneeling alway till it unclosed was Among the tender, sweet, and new-sprung grass, That was with blossoms sweet embroidered all, In which methought that I might, day by day. Dwell all throughout tlic jolly month of May, "VVitiiouten sleep, withouten meat or drink: Adown full softly I began to sink. And, leaning on my elbow and my side, Through the whole day I shaped me to abide. For nothing else^ and 1 shall tell no lie, But on the daisy for to feed mine eye, That has good reason why men call it may The daisy, otherwise the eye of day. The empress and the flower of flowers all: I pray to (Jod that fair may it befall, And all that love the flowei-s for her sake !" JOHN. Happy flower, to have received the homage of Chaucer and Wordsworth ! Happier, to have been ever the playmate and favorite of childhood ! There is a true flavor of piety in the whole of the passage you have read ; for he that loves the creature has made ready a shrine for the Creator in his heart. The leaf 72 SECOND CONVERSATION. of a tree lias a more moving exhortation to the love of God written upon it than a leaf of Taylor or Barrow. PHILIP. Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or the ear. There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or other. The Puritans forgot this, and thrust beauty out of the meeting-house and slammed the door in her face. I love such sensuality as that which Chaucer shows in his love of nature. Surely, God did not give us these fine senses as so many posterns to the heart for the Devil to enter at. I believe that he has endowed us with no faculty but for his own glory. If the Devil lias got false keys to them, we must first have given him a model of the wards to make a mould by. The senses can do nothing unless the soul be an accomplice, and, in whatever the soul does, the body will have a voice. In all ages, it has been deemed a Christian virtue to persecute the body. Yet persecution is a soAver of dragon's teeth, from which spring armed men to do battle against her. We have driven the M-orld and the flesh, against their wills, into a league with the Devil. If we provided ourselves with half as many arguments for loving God as we have against forgetting Ivim, we should be both wiser and better. To be a sensualist in a certain kind and to a certain degree is the mark of a ])ure and youthful nature. To be able to keep a just balance between sense and spirit, and to liave the soul welcome frankly all the delicious impulses which flow to it from without, is a good and holy thing. But it must wel- come them as the endearments of a wife, not of a CHAUCER. 73 harlot. A Dryad and a Satyr may drink out of the same spring. A poet must be as sensitive as the yield- ing air, and as pure. To a soul which is truly king of itself, and not a prisoner in its desolate palace, the senses are but keepers of its treasury, and all beautiful things pay their tribute through these, and not to them. If they are allowed to squander the treasure upon their own lusts, the subjects turn niggard and withhold the supjilies. JOHX. All things that make us happy incline us also to be grateful, and I would rather enlarge than lessen the number of these. INIorose and callous recluses have persuaded men that religion is a prude, and have forced her to lengthen her face and contract her brows to suit the character. They have laid out a gloomy turnpike to heaven, upon which they and their heirs and assigns are privileged to levy tolls, and have set up guide- boards to make us believe that all other roads lead in quite an opposite direction. The pleasanter they are, the more dangerous. For my part, I am satisfied that I am upon the right path so long as I can see anything to make me happier, anything to make me love man, and therefore God, the more. God is not far from that heart to which man is near. I would stamp God's name, and not Satan's, upon every innocent pleasure, upon every legitimate gratification of sense; and God would be the better served for it. In what has Satan deserved so well of us that we should set aside such first-fruits for him ? Christianity differs not more widelv from Plato than from the Puritans. 74 SECOND CONVERSATION. PHILIP. The churcli needs reforming now as much as in Luther's time, and sells her indulgences as readily. There are altars to which the slaveholder is admitted, while the Unitarian Avould be put forth as unclean. If it be God's altar, both have a right there, — the sinner most of all, — but let him not go uurebuked. We hire our religion by the quarter, and if it tell any disagree- able truths, we dismiss it, for we did not pay it for such service as this. Christ scourged the sellers of doves out of the temple ; we invite the sellers of men and women in. We have few such preachers now as Nathan was. They preach against sin in the abstract, shooting their arrows into the woundless air. Let sin wrap itself in superfine broadcloth, and put its name on charitable subscription-papers, and it is safe. Mammon gets easy absolution by contributing to the missionary fund. He knows very well that the conversion of the heathen to our modern Christianity is the first step toward deducing them into zealous loyalty to himself. We bandy compliments with him instead of saying sternly, " Get thee behind me ! " The Devil might listen to some preaching I have heard without getting his appetite spoiled. There is a great deal of time and money expended to make men believe that this one or that one will be damned, and to scare or wheedle them into good Calvinists or Episcopalians ; but very little pains is taken to make them good Christians, JOHN. You use plain words. CHA UCER. 75 PHILIP. Pluiu words are best. Truth wants no veil ; the cliastity and beauty of her countenance are defence enougli against all lewd eyes. Falsehood, only, needs to hide her face; for that, unseen, she has learned so well to mimic the gait and feign the voice of Truth as to counterfeit her with ease and safety. Our tono-ue has become so courtly and polite, as Avell-nigh to have forgotten that it has also words befitting indignation and reproof. Some thoughts demand the utmost swell and voluptuousness of language ; they should float like Aphrodite upborne on a summer ocean. For others, the words should be jagged and immitigable and abrupt as the rocks upon the shore. Let the feeling of the moment choose. If melody be needed, the chance shell of the tortoise shall become a lyre which Apollo might sigh for. JOHN. It has never been a safe thing to breathe a whisper against the church, least of all in this country, where it has no prop from the state, but is founded only on the love, or, if you will have it so, the prejudices of the people. Religion has come to be esteemed synonyJ mous with the church ; there are few minds clear enough to separate it from the building erected for its convenience and its shelter. It is this which has made our Christianity external, a task-ceremony to be gone through with, and not a principle of life itself. The church has been looked on too much in the light of a machine, which only needs a little oil, now and then, 76 SECOND CONVERSATION. on its joints and axles, to make it run glibly and per- form all its functions without grating or creaking. Nothing that we can say will be of much service. The reformers must come from her own bosom ; and there are many devout souls among her priests now who would lay down their lives to purify her. The names of infidel and heretic are the sail henitos in which we dress offenders in the nineteenth century, and a bigoted public opinion furnishes the fagots and applies the match ! The very cross itself, to which the sacred right of private judgment fled for sanctuary, has been turned into a whipping-post. Doubtless, there are no nations on the earth so wicked as those which profess Christianity ; and the blame may be laid in great measure at the door of the church, which has always sought temporal power, and has chosen rather to lean upon the arm of flesh than upon that of God. The church has corrupted Christianity. She has decked her person and embroidered her garments with the spoils of pagan altars, and has built her temples of blocks which paganism had squared ready to her hand. We are still Huns and Vandals, and Saxons and Celts, at heart. AVe have carved a cross U])on our altars, but the smoke of our sacrifice goes up to Thor and Odin still. Lately I read in the newspapei^s a toast given at a military festival, by one of those who claim to be the earthly representatives of the Prince of Peace. England and France send out the cannon and the bayonet, upon missionary enterprises, to India and Africa, and our modern Eliots and Brai nerds among the red men are of the same persuasive metal. CHA UCER. 77 PHILIP. Well, well, let us hope for change. There are signs of it ; there has been a growling of thunder round the horizon for many days. We are like the people iu countries subject to earthquakes, who crowd into the churches for safety, but lind that their sacred walls are as fragile as other works of human hands. Nay, the very massiveness of their architecture makes their de- struction more sudden, and their fall more dangerous. You and I have become convinced of this. Both of us, having certain reforms at lieart, and believing them to be of vital interest to mankind, turned first to the church as the nearest helper under God. We have been disappointed. Let us not waste our time in throwing stones at its insensible doors. As you have said, the reformers must come from within. The prejudice of position is so strong that all her servants will unite against an exoteric assailant, melting up, if need be, the sacred vessels for bullets, and using tlie leaves of the holy book itself for wadding. But I will never enter a church from wiiich a prayer goes up for the prosperous only, or for the unfortunate among the oppressors, and not for the oppressed and fallen ; as if God had ordained our pride of caste and our dis- tinctions of color, and as if Christ had forgotten those that are in bonds. We are bid to imitate God ; let us in this also follow his example, whose only revenge upon error is the giving success to truth, and but strive more cheerfully for the triumjili of what we believe to be right. Let us, above all things, imitate lum iu ascribing what we see of wrong-doing to blindness and 78 SECOND CONVERSATION. error, rather than to wilful sin. The Devil loves noth- ing better than the intolerance of reformers, and dreads nothing so much as their charity and patience. The scourge is better upon our backs than in our hands. JOHN. When the air grows thick and heavy, and the clouds gather in the moral atmosphere, the tall steeples of the church are apt to attract the lightning first. Its pride and love of high places are the most fatal of conduc- tors. That small upper room, in which the disciples were first gathered, would always be safe enough. PHILIP. We have wandered too far among these thorns and briers ; let us come back to smoother ground. There are one or two passages in the " Legend of Good Women " which I will read to you. My translations are bald enough, but I adhere as closely as I can to the very words of my author. The number of accented syllables and terminations used in Chaucer's time ren- ders any translation from his poems necessarily less compact and precise than the original. I must often, too, lose much of the harmony of the verse; but I shall not try to conciliate your ear at the expense of faithfulness. Here is a fragment from his story of Thisbe. Pyramus has found her bloody wimple. " He smote him to the heart ; The blood out of the wound as broad did start As water when the conduit broken is. Now Thisbe, who knew nothing yet of this, But sitting in her dread, bethought her thus: * If it so fall out that my Pyramus CHA UCER. 79 Have hastened hither and may me not find, He may esteem me false or eke unkind.' And out she comes, and after him espies Both witli her anxious heart and witli her eyes, And thought, 'Now will I tell him my distress, For fear of death and of the lioness.' And, at the last, her lover hath she found, Abeating with his heels upon tlie ground, All bloody ; and therewith she back doth start, And like the waves to heave began lier heart. And, in a moment, pale as box she grew ; Then looking steadily, right well she knew That it was Pyramus, her own heart's dear. " Who could write ever what a deadly cheer Hath Thisbe now, and how her hair she rent, And how herself began she to torment, And how she lies and swoons upon the ground, And how with tears she filled full his wound. How clippeth she the blood-red corse, alas! How doth the woful Thisbe in this case ! How kisseth she his frosty mouth so cold ! ' Who hath done this ? O, who hath been so bold, To slay my love ? O, speak, my Pyramus ! I am thy Thisbe that calleth thee thus!' And therewithal she lifted up his head This woful man, who was not wholly dead. Hearing that one the name of Thisbe cries, On her cast up his heavy, deadly eves. Then down again, and yielded up the ghost. Thisbe rose up withouten noise or boast, And saw her wimple and his empty sheath. And eke his sword that him hath done to death ; Then spake she thus: 'My woful hand,' quoth she, ' Is strong enough in such a work for me ; For love will give me strength and hardiness To make my wound full large enough, I guess. I will thee follow dead, and I will be Partaker of the death I caused,' quoth she ; 'And although nothing but the death could ever Have force enough thyself and me to sever, 80 SECOND CONVERSATION. Thou shalt no more be parted now from me, Than from thy death ; for 1 will follow thee.'" In choosing my extracts, I have endeavored to avoid those which have ah-eady been modernized by others. A vohime was published in London, three or four years ago, by R. H. Home, containing new versions of some of the best of Chaucer's poems. Many of these are excellent, those by Wordsworth especially. The original plan seems to have been to publish other vol- umes, till a complete translation should be accom- plished. As no continuation has appeared, we must presume that the English have not yet awakened to the merits of their first great poet. Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke deserves well of the lovers of our language for his excellent little volumes, entitled " The Riches of Chaucer," which contain all the better parts of his poems. JOHN. He has another claim upon our esteem also, as hav- ino; been the earliest friend and admirer of Keats. PHILIP. In the next legend, of Dido, there are a few lines which I must read you for their delightful freshness and spirit. " Upon a lowly palfrey, paper-white. With saddle red, embroidered with delight, Of gold the bars, upward embossed high. Sat Dido, rough with gold and jewelry; And she is fair iis is the bright to-morrow. That healeth sick folk of the night's long sorrow. Upon a courser, startling as the tire, Though men might turn him with a little wire, J2neas sat, like Phcebus." CHA UCER. 81 JOHN. How delicious is that coinpreliensive description of Dido's beauty ! It fills the heart at once with a thou- sand images and forewarnings of delight, as the sight of beauty itself does. PHILIP. Yes, beauty seldom affects us so much in the present, as by a prophecy of some yet unfulfilled satisfaction which she has in store for us. She seems to beckon us ever into yet more Elysian realms of quiet and serenity, and is but the guide to something higher and beyond. JOHN. " Startling as the fire " giv^es ns such a picture as inspires and dilates the imagination. Shakespeare's famous description of a horse, in his " Venus and Adonis," with all its minuteness, does not satisfy me as well as this. It seems rather like the fine frenzy of an inspired jockey. In such slight and ordinary touches the power of the poet is best shown. A great subject may lift up a common and even earthy mind, and give it an inspiring breadth of view. But it is only from isolated peaks and summits, in climbing to which the enthusiasm wearies and flags. The strength of a great poet is in his own magnificent eye, which borrows not from without, but lends 'whatever it looks on a dignity and an untiring grace from within. Ever}'^ word of his is like a new-created star or flower, or a new-found one, and sets all our nature astir, as the spring wakes and enlivens the sluggish earth. The heart grows green again and blossoms ; the old tendrils of childish 6 82 SECOND CONVERSATION. sympathy become as supple and delicate as ever, aud, reaching out, grasp and cling to whatever they first chance to touch. PHILIP. You will never describe it. We can never say why Ave love, but only that we love. The heart is ready enough at feigning excuses for all that it does or imagines of wrong ; but ask it to give a reason for any of its beautiful and divine motions, and it can only look upward and be dumb. When we are in the right, we can never reason, but only assert. A weak cause generally has the best in an argument. As you have been so much struck with some isolated expressions used by Chaucer, I will glean a fevv' others for you. It is a pity to knock the jewels out of their setting, but they will shine notwithstanding. Here is a passage, from " The Knight's Tale," describing the Temple of Mars. " A forest first was painted on the wall, In which there dwells nor man nor beast at all, With trees all knotty, knarry, barren, old, With sharp, dead limbs and hideous to behold, Through which ran a rumble and a sough, As if the wind would shatter every bough." There is no such desolation as this in all Lord Byron's nightmare " Darkness." " There saw I first the dark imagining Of Felony and all the compassing ; The cruel ire, as any coal aglow ; The pickpurse, and the palefaced dread also ; The smiler with the knife under the cloak ; The stables burning in the ink-black smoke ; CHA UCER 83 The treason of .the murderiiij^ in the bed ; The open war whh wounds all ovcrbltd ; Contest with bloody knife and sharp meniice; And full of ill sounds was that sorry place. The slayer of himself, too, saw I there, His thick heart's blood hath bathed all his hair, The nail fast-driven through the hair beside, The cold death with the niouth all gaping wide: And in the temple's midst there sat Mischance, AVith pain at heart and sorry countenance; There saw I madness, laughing in his rage; Armed complaint, outcries, and fierce outrage; The carrion in the bush with throat cut through ; A thousand slain whom sickness never slew ; The tyrant with the prey his force had reft ; The town destroyed, that there was nothing left ; There burned the ships that danced upon the main; There lay the hunter by the wild bears slain ; The sow tearing the child right in the cradle ; The cook scalded, in spite of his long ladle ; Kaught was forgot of all the woes of war, The charioteer, o'erridden by his car, Under the wheel full low was cast adown. There also were, of Mars' division, The armorer, the bowyer, and the smith, "Who forgeth the sharp swords upon his stith ; And, painted in a tower that rose on high, Conquest I saw, that sat in sovereignty, AVhile that keen blade did waver o'er his head, Ahanging by a slender strand of thread.'* Mars is described as standiug upon a chariot, — * ""A wolf there stood before him at his feet, With fire-red eyes, and of a man did eat." Yoti will hardly find in Spenser a catalogue like this, so grim and so straightforward. Here is no flourish ; but Chaucer only tells us, or tries to tell us, 84 SECOND CONVERSATION. what he saw. It is abrupt and disjointed, as if -recalled piecemeal by an effort of memoiy. JOHN. I do not overlike personifications, as they are called, yet I shall not soon forget this one of Conquest, sitting under the sword of Damocles. But what have the sow, and the cook with his long ladle, to do in the picture ? PHILIP. Tyrwhitt is as much puzzled as you, but hazards a conjecture that Chaucer was having a sly laugh at the tedious particularity of the Romancers. But I hardly think so, since to me this couplet adds a certain tang and pungency to the taste of the whole passage. It gives it reality, and makes it seem less like a work of the imagination. ' We are loath to fancy so dainty a faculty as the imagination sweeping the greasy floor of the kitchen with her majestic robes, and so are fain to believe that the poet is merely giving us a literal ac- count of what he saw. r JOHN. You have made me a little more liberal in these matters of taste than I once was. The sow eating the child, which the nurse has left deserted in the cradle, gives me as intense an idea of the liorror of war and of the selfishness which danger inculcates, as it is pos- sible to conceive. Horror is poetical. It is the gin and opium of the Muse ; the excitement and thrill are not unpleasing, for once or twice. But a ludicrous idea is inadmissible; it must smooth the grin and CHAUCER. 85 smirk off its face, before it can get entrance into the silent and serene temple of song. PHILIP. Ay, but there is no court-dress there. Words and phrases are vulgar or trivial, according to the ear on which they fall. I confess that I have an ear that will gladly entertain anything that comes plainly and un- masked, and does not impose itself as something supe- rior to what it truly is. There are Nimrods enough of words and syllables, without my joining in the hunt. The Muse can breathe as august melodies through an oaten straw as she can win from Apollo's lute. Chau- cer is never very choice in his language for the mere sake of being so. He is so rich that he can afford a plain simpleness which would be the badge of beggary in a poorer man. He is plain and blunt, and speaks to the point. He thrusts his foot remorselessly through the gossamers of sentimental fancy, though he might have spared them for their making the dew of heaven more visible. When Arcite is dead, " ' Why wouldest thou be dead,' the women cry, That haddest gold enough, and Emily ? ' " " That haddcd gold enough — and Emily." See how the actual life, the life of debtor and creditor, of the butcher and baker, intrudes itself upon the life of ro- mance, nay, takes precedence of it in the mind of this unartificial man. The means first, be they never so humble and prosaic ; and then the poetic end, which casts backward a lustre and a glory upon them. This simplicity of his reminds me of Homer, who gives a 86 SECOND CONVERSATION. bill of fare of all the feasts, as one whose calling had made him sensible of the merits of such delicates by their infrequency. In the " Pardoner's Tale " there is a most graphic simile, which modern taste would probably censure as deficient in dignity. The Pardoner is describing his style of preaching. " Then do I preach as ye have heard before, And tell a hundred idle stories more ; Then do I pain me to stretch forth my neck, And east and west upon the people I beck, As doth a dove sitting upon a barn." Here is another specimen of his simplicity, from the third book of his " Troilus and Creseide." " Consider now if they be not to blame, This kind of folk,— what shall I call them, what? — That boast of women's favors, and by name, Who yet have granted them nor this nor that, Nor think more of them than of my old hat." And, a little further on, " But if a fool were in a jealous rage, I would not set Ai.s sorrow at a mite." Speaking of oracles, Paudarus says, " As for Apollo, and liis servants' laws. Or oracles, they are not worth three straws; For the gods speak in amphibologies, And for one truth they tell us twenty lies." Describing Cressid, too, his frankness creeps out : " Somewhat too low might Cressid's stature be. But for her shape and face, and eke her cheer, CIIA UCER. 87 Creature tliere never was more fair than she ; And oftentimes her manner was, to appear With all her hair hanging in tresses clear Down by her collar o'er her neck behind, Which with a thread of gold she would iipbiiid. And, savinrj that her brows were joined too near, There was no lack in aught I can espy." JOHN. Chaucer is as close and determined an imitator of nature as Poussin, who used to bring home stones and moss in his handkerchief, in order to paint them ex- actly. Such scrupulous honesty betokens the true artist, who is a mathematician in his details, and only lays claim to the title of creator by his fresh and beau- tiful combinations. PHILIP. Now let me glean a few striking expressions which you cannot but admire. When Cressid was carried to the Grecian camp, she had promised Troilus to steal back to him upon a certain evening, and for some time clings to her promise. But Chaucer says, that, ere two full months, the thought of Troilus and Troy " Throughout her heart shall knotless slide." We never feel the whole bitterness of a sorrow at the first blow. It is after we have recovered from the sudden shock of it, and the imagination has leisure to concern itself with details, that we know its whole depth and breadth. Then we find that the little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, has spread itself over our whole heaven, Chaucer has hinted at this in what he says of Troilus. 88 SECOND CONVERSATION. " And, as in winter, when the leaves are reft, Each after other, till the trees are bare, So that there are but bark and branches left, So Troilus, bereft of each welfare, Lies bounden in the ugly bark of care." "When Troilus is first brought to an interview with Cressid, Paudarus " Drew him to the fire, And by that light beheld his countenance, As 't were to look upon an old romance." JOHN. That last is exquisite. The eager flush of love, and the warm, flickering light of the fire upon Troilus's face, scarcely more wavering and uncertain than the expression there, — the whole picture, in short, seems like an old romance with its illuminated borders and capitals, and its stories of love and sorrow. You will not easily find me another comparison like this. PHILIP. At least here is one that touches me more. It is in " The Complaint of Annelida," who has been deserted by the " false Arcite." She says, " Arcite hath home away the key OJ all viy world, and my good hap to come." There is something very pathetic in this. JOHN. Yes. As if she stood in sight of the fair maiden world she had left for the sake of Arcite, and but just ou the outside of happiness, yet was irrevocably locked out. CHA UCER. 89 PHILIP. In " The Book of the Duchess " there is one of the most beautiful portraits of a woraan that Avere ever drawn. Full of life it is, aud of graceful health, with no romantic hectic, or sentimental languish. It is such a figure as you would never look for in a ball-room, but miglit expect to meet in the dewy woods, just after sunrise, when you were hunting for late violets. The lover, who tells Chaucer of her, says, " I was caught So suddenly, that I ne'ertook Counsel of aught but of her look, And of my heart : for her kind eyes So gladly on my heart did rise, That instantly my inmost thought Said it were better to serve her for naught, Than with another to be well." It is too long for me to read you the whole of it, but I will gladden your heart with a feAv lines here and there. I shall hardly more than modernize the words. I should spoil it w'ere I to attempt to translate it into smooth verses. See how joyfully it opens. " I saw her dance so comely, Carol and sing so sweetly. Laugh and play so womanly. And look so debonairly, So goodly speak, and so friendly, That, certes, I trow that nevermore Was seen so blissful a treasore ; For every hair upon her head. Sooth to say, it was not red, And neither yellow nor brown it was, Methought most like to gold it was ; 90 SECOl^D CONVERSATION. And such eyes my lady had, Debonair, good, steady, and glad, Simple, of good size, not too wide ; And then her look was not aside, Nor wandering, but so right and true, That, certes, it took up and drew All that upon her 'gan behold. Even when most full of joy was she, She never could look foolishly, Kor wildly, even when she played ; But ever, methought, her kind eyes said, ^ Par fay, my wrath is all forgiven.' I have not wit that can suffice Her beauty to speak properly, But thus much I dare say, that she Was white, fresh, ruddy, and lively-hued, And every day her beauty newed. And thereto she could so well play "Whate'er she list, that I dare say That she was like a torch-flame bright, Whence every man can take of light Enough, and it hath never the less Of lustre and of comeliness. She had a wit so general. So whole-inclined to all good. That it was ever set by the rood, To swell the store of happiness ; Moreover, I ne'er saw one-less Harmfiil than she to say or do ; I say not that she did not know What evil was, or else had she Known naught of good, as seems to me. INIethought all fellowship was naked AVithout her, having seen her once, As is a crown without the stones." CHAUCER. 91 JOHN. It is like sunshine. It awakens all the dearest and sweetest reeollections of the heart. The best poetry always comes to us leading by the hand the holy asso- ciations and tear-strengthened aspirings of youth, as Vokminia brought to Coriolanus his little children, to plead reproachfully with us, to be tender, and meek, and patient. " Chevy Chase " was like the blast of a trumpet to Sir Philip Sydney ; the passages I love in the poets give me back an hour of childhood, and are like a mother's voice to me. They arc as solemn as the rustle of the Bible-leaves in the old family-prayers. The noisy ocean of life hushes, and slides up his beach with a soothing and slumberous ripple. The earth be- comes secluded and private to me as in childhood, when it seemed but a little meadow-green, guarded all round with trees, for me to pick flowers in ; a play-room, whose sole proprietor and manager I was. When Chaucer wrote this poem, he must have been musing of his early love. How could critic ever grow" so leathern-hearted as to speak sneeringly of love-verses ?, PHILIP. I cannot guess. They are often blamed for their egoism, when, in fact, they are the least egoistical of all writing. If self is anywhere forgotten, it is in these. They are all hymns to the supreme beauty. In all of them the lover would only remind the beloved that their trysting-place is at the foot of that divine altar. The one I have just read a fragment of reminds me of a passage in George AVither's " Philarete," which, both 92 SECOND CONVERSATION. in metre and expression, is brimful of the most joyous simplicity and extravagant fancy. All through it the poet's heart seems to dance for glee, like a child. A truly Arcadian sunshine broods over it. I could think it written before such a thing as sorrow was invented. It is one of those sweet nooks into which the mind can withdraw from the turmoil and hurry of life, and play with the grass and flowers in ungirt ease. Let me read you now, from the " Legend of Cleo- patra," something of a very different kind. It is a bustling description of a sea-fight. " And in the middle sea they chanced to meet ; Up goes the trump ; with shots and shouts they greet, And hasten them to set on with the sun ; With grisly sound outgoeth the great gun, And heartily they hurtle in all at once ; And from the top down tumble the great stones ; In go the grappling-irons full of crooks ; Among the thick ropes run the shearing-hooks ; In with the pole-axe presseth he and he ; Behind the mast beginneth he to flee, And out again, and overboard him drives ; Through this one's side the ragged spear-point rives; This rends the sail with sharp hooks like a scythe, This brings the cup and biddeth them be blithe. This on the hatches poureth slippery pease, With pots of lime together struggle these. And thus the whole long day in fight they spend." In " The Knight's Tale " there is another very much like this, except that tlie scene is on land. " The heralds leave their pricking up and down. And rings the trumpet loud and claidon; There is no more to say, but, east and west, Down go the lances to their stubborn rest, CIU UCER. 93 Plunges the sharp spur in the horse's side, Now see we wlio can joust and who can ride ; There shiver shafts upon the bucklers thick, And through the heart is felt the deadly prick; Up spi-iug the hmces twenty feet in height, Out go tlie sword-bkules as the silver briglit ; Tlie hehnets tough they hew and liack and shred, Out bursts the heart's blood in stern torrents red ; "With mighty maces through the bones tliey crush. And 'mid the thickest of the throng 'gin rush ; There stumble the strong steeds, and down goes all, And under foot they roll as doth a ball ; One with a truncheon foileth at his foe, And one him hurleth from his horse full low ; One through the body is hurt, and they him take, Maugre his head, and bear him to the stake As was agreed, and there he must abide." JOHN. They remind me of some of Leigh Hunt's descrip- tions, tliough he sometimes dwindles a little too much into the inventory style, and counts the nails in the horses' shoes, and the wrinkles in the knights' tunics. Yet no man has ever understood the delicacies and lux- uries of language better than he, and his thouglits often have all the rounded grace and shifting lustre of a dove's neck. PHILIP. He is often too refined to be easily understood by the mob of readers. He is tracing out the nerves and vein- lets, when it had been better for his popularity if he had developed only the muscles and arteries. There is a great difference between being too refined and too minute; and he is as often the one as the other. He gathers together, kernel by kernel, a bushel of corn, 94 SECOND CONVERSATION. and then wonders why we do not admire his picture of a cornfield. Keats and Tennyson are both masters of description, but Keats had the finer ear for all the nice analogies and suggestions of sound, while his e\e had an equally instinctive rectitude of perception in color. Tennyson's epithets suggest a silent picture ; Keats's the very thing itself, with its sound or stillness. JOHN. I remember a stanza of Tennyson's which unites these excellences. " A still, salt pool, locked in with bars of sand, Left on the shore ; which hears all night The plunging seas draw backward from the land Their moon-led waters white." PHILIP. That is one of the most perfect images in any lan- guage, and, as a picture of a soul made lonely and selfish by indulgence in over-refined philosophizing, it is yet more exquisite. But, if Tennyson's mind be more sensitive, Keats's is grander and of a larger grasp. It may be a generation or two before there comes an- other so delicate thinker and speaker as Tennyson ; but it will be centuries before another nature so sponta- neously noble and majestic as that of Keats, and so tender and merciful, too, is embodied. What a scene of despair is that of his where Saturn finds the van- quished Titans ! "Scarce images of life, one here, one there, Lay vast and edgeways, like a dismal cirque Of Druid-stones upon a forlorn moor, When the chill rain begins at shut of eve, In dull November." CHAUCER. 95 And what can be more perfect than this? " So far her voice flowed on, like timorous brook, That, lingering along a pebbled coast. Doth fear to meet the sea ; but sea it met, And shuddered ; for the overwhelming voice Of huge Enceladus swallowed it in wrath : The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks. Came booming thus.'' JOHN. The -world is not yet aware of the wonderful merit of Keats. Men have squabbled about Chatterton, and written lives of Kirke White, while they have treated with contempt the rival, and, I will dare to say, the sometimes superior, of IMilton. The critics gravely and with reverence hold up their bit of smoked glass between you and the lantern at a kite's tail, and bid you behold the sun, undazzled ; but their ceremonious fooleries will one day be as ridiculous as those of the Tahitian priests. Keats can afford to wait, and he will yet be sacred to the hearts of all those who love the triumphs and ovations of our noble mother-tongue. PHILIP. I must please myself with one more quotation from his " Hyperion." After the murmur among the Titans at Saturn's entrance has ceased, " Saturn's voice therefrom Grew up like organ, that begins anew Its strain, when other harmonies, stopped short, Leave the dinned air vibrating silverly." Could sound and sense hai^monize more fitly? In reading it, the voice flows on at first smoothly and 96 SECOND CONVERSATION. equably. At the end of the third verse it pauses ab- ruptly in spite of itself, and in the last vibrates and wavers in accordance with the meaning. You see the art with which the word " vibrating " is placed so as to prevent you from reading the word monotonously. Among the ancient poets I can seldom detect any of the nice feeling of language which distinguishes many of our own. I recognize it in that oft-quoted passage in ^schylus, where Prometheus invokes avfipidfiov yD.aa/ia" in which the long roll of the first syllables, the liquid sound of d.i^rjpcdfiou, and the plashing ripple of yeXaapLa, seem to convey some audible suggestion of the sea. Now and then, I fancy I can trace a few similar glimpses in Ovid, who is to me the truest poet among the Latins, but they would probably elude any but a partial ear. Beside this passage of ^schylus I would set one from Spenser. " With that rolling sea, resounding soft, In his big base, them fitly answered, And on the rocks the waves breaking aloft A solemne meane unto them measured, The whiles sweet Zephyrus loudly whisteled His treble." I cannot doubt but the hissing sound given to the fifth verse by the number of s-s was intentional. JOHX. There is a line in Longfellow's ballad of "The Wreck of the Hesperus" which has always pleased both my imagination and my ear. CHA UCER. 97 PHILIP. I think I know which one you mean. I will repeat it at a venture. It is the last of these two : " And a whooping billow swept her crew Like icicles from her deck." Ara I right? JOHN. Yes. I do not like the epithet " iohoopi7ig '' in the first verse, but I consider the whole of the last admi- rable. A single happy epithet is always wortli a folio of description; and in this the word "icicle" tells the Avhole story. PHILIP. I like it as much as you do. JOHN. In Leigh Hunt's " Hero and Leandcr " there is a descriptive verse which I esteem one of the rarest of its kind. Hero is expecting Leander on the last fatal night. " Hero looked forth, and trembling angured ill, The darkness held its breath so very slill." PHILIP. In this there is the great merit that the ideas sug- gested give vigor and support to the mere external significance. It is very natural that Hero should per- sonify the darkness, and attribute an evil intent to it; and one who meditates or strikes a revengeful blow holds in his breath. There is another version of 7 98 SECOND CONVERSATION, Musseus's story, by Marlow and Chapman, which is crowded full of beauties. Here are a few lines in jjoint. " Buskins of shells all silvered used she And branched with blushing coral to the knee, Where sparrows perched, of hollow pearl and gold, Such as the world would wonder to behold ; These Avith sweet water oft her handmaid fills. Which, as she went, would chenip through their bilk." This is a gift of Marlow's luxurious fancy. He throws down such by the handful. The last verse, you see, illustrates the topic we have sauntered to. I remember that John S. Dwight, who has a very refined insight in such matters, commends Bryant for his excellence in descriptive epithets, and quotes, in sup- port of his opinion, this verse : " With valleys scooped between." This is one of those epithets whose beauty lies in its simplicity and plainness. Ordinary poets, having a natural fellow-feeling with ordinary objects, strive to elevate them by a lofty scaffolding of words, not being able to conceive that the most natural image (so it be drawn from nothing in itself base) is always the most noble. They buckle the cothutni upon the feet of a dwarf, and make him ridiculous by the enforced maj- esty of his gait. The true poet picks up a common reed and entices ravishing melody from it. Humble- ness is always grace, always dignity. The propriety and force of the epithet quoted above is confirmed by its having occurred to another mind, also a highly poetical one. Wesley, in his Journal, says : CHA VCER. 99 " The place in which I preached was an oval spot of ground, surrounded with spreading trees, scooped out, as it were, in tlie side of a hill, which rose round like a theatre." — Houthey^s Life of Wesley (American edition), II. 49. Before we lay down Clmucer, let me read a few more passages. In " The Man of Law's Tale," there is a terribly graphic stanza. " Have ye not sometimes seen a pallid face, Among a press, of him that hath hcen led Toward his death, where he can liope no grace, And such a color in his face hath had, That men might know him that was so bested, Among the crowd of faces in that rout? So Constance stands and looketh her about." Chaucer had a great deal of what is called know- ledge of the world, but it never rendered him sour or contemptuous. Whenever he turns his eye that way, his glance softens with pity or with a good-humored smile. In " The Story of Cambuscan bold," he de- scribes the crowd who gathered about the wonderful brazen horse, each one of whom, in proportion to his ignorance, is anxious to express an opinion about it. He ends by saying, " As unlearned people fancy commonly Of whatsoever thing may chance to be More subtly made than they can comprehend, They (jladly set it domi for some bad end." I am merely reading at randoiu such passages as strike me. In " The Pardoner's Tale," Chaucer de- scribes Death as a weary old man, in a compassionate kind of way that makes us pity him. Three riotous fellows have sworn to be revenged upon Death, if they 100 SECOND CONVERSATION. can find him. Presently, they meet an old man (Death himself), who says to them, — " For I cannot find A man, though I should walk to farthest Ind, Either in any city or village, That would exchange his youth for my old age; And therefore must I keep mine old age still, As long a time as it is God's good will ; Even Death, alas ! my poor life will not have. Thus do I wander like a restless slave, And on the earth, which is my mother's gate, Thus knock I witli my staff, early and late, And say to her, ' Dear mother, let me in ; Lo, how I vanish, flesh, and blood, and skin 1 Alas! when shall my old bones be at rest?'" JOHN. Death lias been hardly ever so tenderly spoken of. It is singular Avhat ugly portraits of him are ordinarily given us. There seems to be but little living faith in the immortality of the soul ; so soon does any idea be- come formal and external, when diluted by the cus- tomariness of a creed. Men do not believe in the next world as they do in London or Boston ; they do not launch upon the ignotuin mare with a shadow of that prophetic belief which girded up the heart of Colum- bus. Most religion-mongers have baited their paradises with a bit of toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with large promise of possessions in their trans- mortal El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chimney-corner but under promise of imaginary islands to govern. For my own part, I think it wiser to make the spirit a staff for the body than the body for the spirit. When the vessel casts off for the voyage, and CHAUCER. 101 the body finds itself left behind, it may well cry out and disturb the whole vicinage with the story of its Avrong. PHILIP. I agree with you that the body is treated with quite too much ceremony and respect. Even religion has veiled its politic hat to it, till, like Christopher Sly, it is metamorphosed, in its own estimation, from a tinker to a duke. Men who would, without compunction, kick a living beggar, will yet stand in awe of his poor carcass, after all that rendered it truly venerable has fled out of it. We agree with the old barbarian epi- taph which affirmed that the handful of dust had been Ninus; as if that which convicts us of mortality and weakness would at the same, time endow us with our high prerogative of kingship over them. South, in one of his sermons, tells us of certain men whose souls are of no worth, but as salt to keep their bodies from putrefying. I fear that the soul is too often regarded in this sutler fashion. Why should men ever be afraid to die, but that they regard the spirit as secondary to that which is but its mere appendage and conveniency, its symbol, its word, its means of visibility? If the soul lose this poor mansion of hers by the sudden con- flagration of disease, or by the slow decay of age, is she therefore houseless and shelterless? If she cast away this soiled and tattered garment, is she therefore naked ? A child looks forward to his new suit, and dons it joy- fidly ; we cling to our rags and foulness. AVe should welcome Death as one who brings us tidings of the finding of long-lost titles to a large family estate, and 102 SECOND CONVERSATION. set out gladly to take possession, though, it may be, not without a natural tear for the humbler home we are leaving. Death always means us a kindness, though he has often a gruff way of offering it. Even if the soul never returned from that chartless and unmapped country, which I do not believe, I would take Sir John Davies's reason as a good one : " But, as Noali's pigeon, which returned no more, Did show she footing found, for all tjie flood ; So, when good souls, departed through death's door, Come not again, it shows their dwelling good." The realm of Death seems an enemy's country to most men, on whose shores they are loathly driven by stress of weather ; to the wise man it is the desired port, where he moors his bark gladly, as in some quiet haven of the Fortunate Isles ; it is the golden west in which his sun sinks, and, sinking, casts back a glory upon the leaden cloud-rack which had darkly besieged his day. After all, the body is a more expert dialectician than the soul, and buffets it, even to bewilderment, with the empty bladders of logic ; but the soul can retire from the dust and turmoil of such conflict, to the high tower of instinctive faith, and there, in hushed serenity, take comfort of the sympathizing stars. We look at Death through the cheap-glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him for the monster which the flawed and crooked glass presents him. You say truly that we have wasted time in trying to coax the body into a faith in what, by its very nature, it is incapable of compre- hending. Hence, a plethoric, short-winded kind of CHAUCER. 103 belief, that can walk at an easy pace over tlic smooth plain, bnt loses breath at the first sharp uphill of life. How idle is it to set a sensual bill of fare before the soul, acting over again the old story of the Crane and the Fox ! JOHN. I know not when we shall hear pure spiritualism preached by the authorized expounders of doctrine. These have suffered the grain to mildew, while they have been wrangling about the husks of form ; and the people have stood by, hungry and half-starved, too intent on the issue of the quarrel to be conscious that they were trampling the forgotten and scattered bread of life in the mire. Thank Heaven, they may still pluck rij)e ears, of God's own planting and watering, in the fields ! In the conclusion to Raleigh's " History of the "World" there is a passage concerning Death, which rolls on with the muffled grandeur of a funeral march. There is something in it which always affects me strangely. I must repeat it to you. " O eloquent, just, and mighty Death ! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded ; what none hatli dared, thou hast done ; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, — IIlc jacctf" PHILIP. Magnificent truly ! — I Iiave but one more promise yet to fulfil, and that is, to read you an extract from " Troilus and Creseidc," modernized by Wordsworth. €NIV or rut '^ \ 7ER8IT1 ! 104 SECOND CONVERSATION. I shall select a few verses, leaving you to read the rest at your leisure. After Cressid has left Troy, Troilus goes in secret to see once more her house, where they had been wont to meet. " Then said he thus : — ' O palace desolate ! O house of houses, once so richly dight ! O palace empty and disconsolate ! Thou lamp, of which extinguished is the light I O palace, whilom day, that now art night ! Thou ought' st to fall, and I to die, since she Is gone who held us both in sovereignty. " ' O of all houses once the crowned boast ! Palace illumined with the sun of bliss! O ring, of which the ruby now is lost ! O cause of woe, that cause has been of bliss! Yet, since I may no better, would I kiss Thy cold doors ; but I dare not for this rout : Farewell, thou shrine, of which the saint is out ! ' " "Forth from the spot he rideth up and down, And everything to his rememberance Came, as he rode by places of the town Where he had felt such perfect pleasure once. ' Lo, yonder saw I mine own lady dance, And in that temple she with her bright eyes, My lady dear, first bound rae captivewise ; "'And yonder, with joy-smitten heart, have I Heard my own Cressids laugh ; and once at play I yonder saw her eke full blissfully ; And yonder once she unto me 'gan say, " Now, my sweet Troilus, love me well, I pray ! " And there so graciously did me behold. That hers unto the death my heart I hold. " 'And at the corner of that selfsame house Heard I my most beloved lady dear, CHA UCER. 105 So womanly, with voice melodious Singing so well, so goodly, and so clear, That in my soul, methinks, I yet do hear The blissful sound ; and in that very place My lady first me took unto her grace.' "Another time he took into his head That every wight, who in the way passed by, Had of him rutli, and fancied that they said, ' I am right sorry Troilus will die !' " And every night, as he was wont to do, Troilus stood the bright moon to behold; And all his trouble to the moon he told. And said, ' I wis, when thou art horned anew, I shall be glad if all the world be true.' " Upon the walls fast also would he walk, To the end that he the Grecian host might see ; And ever thus he to himself would talk : — 'Lo, yonder is mine own bright lady free; Or yonder is it that the tents must be ; And thence doth come this air, that is so sweet That in my heart I feel the joy of it. " ' And certainly this wind, that more and more. By moments, thus increaseth in my face. Is of my lady's sighs heavy and sore : I prove it thus ; for, in no other space, Of all this town, save only in this place. Feel I a wind that soundeth so like pain ; It saith, " Alas ! why severed are we twain ? " ' " I venture to sav that von know nothino; in English (and, if not in that, surely in no other language) rarer in its kind than this. I have made only one change in it, a merely literal one, substituting "doth" for " does," in the sixth line of the last stanza but one. The euphony of the verse seemed to me to demand it. 106 SECOXD COXVERSATIOX. And this leads us back again to the beginning of our conversation. Here is an archaism which the rabble of sibilant sounds in our language not only excuses, but renders necessary, even if an argument might not be legitimately drawn from the loss which melody feels in the banishment of the soft termination th. JOHX. What a sweet fancy is that of Troilus about tlie wind ! It reminds one of Romeo. — I agree with you about the termination th, nor do I think that these little niceties and refinements of lano-uao-e are beneath the dignity of serious study and argument. A stray hair, by its continued irritation, may give more annoy- ance than a sharp blow. PHILIP. In many words this termination is necessaiy to give sufficient prolongation to the sound, as in Unger-dh, murmur-eth, wander-eth, abkl-eth, — words denoting a continuance of action, and which are defrauded of their just amount of expression by being squeezed into a compacter form, and set off with tlie fizz of an s at the end, as in wanders, murmurs, and lingers. Where plaintiveness of tone is demanded, the sweet gravity of this termination should always plead for its use. It is one of the excellences of our lano-uafje. In some words it were manifestly out of place, as in whistles, stops, hisses, slides. In the dramatic form, too, it should be sparingly employed. There, we mostly want dii-ectness, plainness and force, and such exquis- iteness would seem like finery and foppishness. The CHAUCER. 107 sentiment, demanding, as it always does, the keenest and most delicate sympathy from the diction, must decide without appeal in such cases. Milton shows the sensitiveness of his ear most in his earlier poems, especially in " Comns" and "Lycidas." It is remark- able that his blindness seems rather to have lessened than increased this faculty in him. Perhaps our noble philanthrope. Dr. Howe, could explain this. His " Samson Agonistes " is singularly harsh and un- musical, and often far less metrical than the sonorous and enthusiastical sentences which jut out continually above the level of his prose. Coleridge well expressed Shakespeare's mastery over language, when he said that you could no more detrude a word from one of his verses, than you could push out a brick from the side of a house with your finger. Sometimes the language of a whole play seems to be pervaded and tempered by a prevailing sentiment. I have always thought so of that most sombre of his tragedies, " Richard the Second." There is little of his Titanic, heaven-scalins; boldness of metaphor and expression in it ; all is grave, subdued, and mournful ; and you read it under your voice, as if in a funeral chamber. I fear that I have spoken too harshly of the letter s. It often adds much to the expression of a verse, — in the word silence, for example. It is only by the contrast of some slight noise that we can appreciate silence. A solitude is never so lonely as when the wind sighs through it. This is suggested to the ear, and so to the imagination, by the sound of the word. Keats, therefore, did well in bringing together such a cohort of s-s in the opening of his "Hyperion:" 108 SECOND CONVERSATION. " Deep in the shady stillness of a vale, Far sunken from the healthy breath of mom, Far from the fiery moon and eve's one star, *Sat gray-haired -Saturn, silent as a stone, -Still as the silence round about his lair." Do you not feel it ? The whole passage, for some distance farther on, is full of this sighing melody, and so impresses me with its utter loneliness and desertion, that, after repeating it to myself when alone, I am relieved to hear the companionable flicker of the fire, or the tinkling fall of an ember. The same is observ- able in the first lines of Drummond's Tenth Sonnet, and, indeed, throughout the whole of it : " Sleep, Silence, child, sweet father of soft rest, Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings, Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings." Here we feel a kind of hushing sound, as if pre- luding sleep, conveyed by the s-s and the c-s. You must remember that I am speaking of silence as it im- presses the ear only ; for its effect often receives a reinforcement from the eye also, as in the African deserts, which, though they seem the very extreme of stillness by day, when the eye can appreciate their utter loneliness, would not appear more hushed than tliis room in thorough darkness. In the same way that we estimate silence by contrast with the nearest possible approach to it in sound, do we measure dark- ness by a similar comparison with light. This Milton felt, when he said, " Ko light, but rather darkness visible ; " which could not be, except for some presence of light. CHAUCER. 109 like that which Spenser, impressed with the same feel- ing, calls " A little glooming light, much like a shade." There is a passage also in Thomson, \vho had a very nice ear, which is in point. You will see how he changes from the roughness of the r to the smooth glide of the s. " At last, the roused-up river pours along : Resistless, roaring, dreadful, down it comes From the rude mountain and the mossy wild, Tumbling through rocks abrupt, and sounding far; Then o'er the sanded valley floating spreads, Calm, sluggish, silent." So, likewise, in the first four stanzas of Collins's most delicious " Ode to Evening," an ode impregnated with deep calm, and the verses of which seem like the arches of some deserted cloister, each growing silenter as you enter farther into their dim seclusion. I could easily cite passages from Shakespeare and Spenser to show that they well understood this secret. In the word rustle and others of the same kind, the s is full of meaning. Hawtliorne, who has a right in any gathering of poets, will give me an example. It is from his wonderful '' Hollow of the Three Hills." "Before them went the priest, reading the burial-service, while the leaves of his book were rujiiling in the breeze." The expression of the passage suffers by being torn away from its context. An air of silence pervades the whole. It is this property of the letter s to give a feeling of stillness, or of such faint sounds as M'ould 110 SECOND CONVERSATION. be heard only when everything else is hushed, that takes away all force from words like dissonance, which Milton sometimes introduces, as I think, unwisely, — as in this passage from " Comus : " " The wonted roar was up amongst the woods, And filled the air with barbarous dissonance : " where it does not at all harmonize with the imme- diately-preceding " roar." After all, it seems to me that there is no European lang;uao;e so rich in words that echo the sense and feel- ing as the English. The modern French assume a great license in inventing Avords of this kind, but their newness and want of previous association rob them of much of their force. We, it is true, have cheated the r of half of its dignity ; but in the Italian, where it is indulged and petted, it often disturbs much better company with its licensed brabblings. There is no deeper study than this of words ; and I have found in many an otherwise dull and muddy old folio the amplest repayment, when I have met in it a single hint to the clearer understanding of this mystery. \Yhat book are you searching the shelves for ? JOHN. Gray's Letters. There is a passage in one of them on the subject of the resurrection of old M'ords, which is to the point. I suppose I must allow the authority of so classical a writer, though it tell against the opinion I expressed in the first part of yesterday's conversation. Here it is. CHAUCER. Ill "Our poetry lias a languuf^e peculiar to itself; to which almost every one that has written has added sometliing hy enrichinpf it with foreign idioms and derivatives, nay, sometimes words of their own composition or invention. Shakespeare and Milton have heen great creators this way ; and no one more licentious than Pope or Dryden, who perpetually borrow from the former. . . . Our language, not being a settled thing (like the French), has an undoubted right to words of an hundred years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible. In truth, Shakespeare's language is one of his principal beauties, and he has no less advantage over your Addisons and Eowes in this, than in those other great excellences you mention." * PHILIP. Had Gray been a.s untrammelled in his poetrj' as iu liis prose, he would have been as delightful as Gold- smith. — Well, M'e have, as usual when we come together, talked a little about everything. We should hardly have pleased Pythagoras, who enjoined a five years' silence, and whose disciples, as Athenaeus relates, were wont to hold fishes in high esteem ^oy their taci- turnity. " To-morrow to fresh w-oods and pastures new." * Letter LII., to Mr. West. THIRD CONVEESATION. THE OLD DRAMATISTS. JOHN. I BELIEVE it was Dr. Johnson (surely, it was no poet) who first said that all good poetry could be translated into as good prose. It is plain that he saw no distinction between the two, except in the metre and rhyme. I should judge so, at least, from his own verses. PHILIP. He meant that all poetry must be translatable into " common sense," that popular altar upon whose horns dulness and prejudice are so ready to cling. But how is Peo-asus better than a drav-horse, with this market- cart trundling behind him? Doubtless, some of the truest poetry has been written without either rhyme or metre ; but it has lacked one of its highest adornments, and one Avhich the. most poetical thoughts demand. Metre and rhyme are wings to the artist, and crutches to the artificer; they may lift the one to a more empyreal vantage-ground, but they will only change the natural gait of the other for a hobble. Tlie grandest and most noble part of poetry is independent of them. Yet, A\anting these, a poem shall want the 112 THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 113 corapleteuess of its effect. I believe both of tliem to be the instinctive desires of the most amply poetical spirits. I could cite many jweins which would be nothing without them, yet which have the blessed power to lead my heart into the cool stillness of memory, or to the breezy headlands of hope. . JOHN. Prose may do the same. PHILIP. Ay, but not so cheaply and simply. It is a great gift to be able to conceive and express those thoughts Mhich entice us out of the actual into the ideal ; a yet greater one, to utter such as teach us to unite the two ; but, surely, that is the greatest gift of all which super- adds to these a keener and more refined delio;ht. There are moods, too, in which pleasurable emotion is all that the mind is callable of, and the power of bestowing this, merely, is not to be contemned. Beauty is always use. The acanthus-leaves of the capital do not help the pillar as a support, and yet I think that even the iconoclastic hammer of strictest utilitarianism might consistently spare them. There are passages in Milton's prose which fall below his poetry only for want of the majestic grace of his metre. They make life seem fairer to me, they give my heart a manlier brace ; but I am conscious of a barenness in them, which I had never known, perhaps, had he not him- self betrayed it to me by that more lavish splendor of his verse, ever changeful, ever new, pavilioning his thoughts like the cloud arches of a sunset. 114 THIRD CONVERSATIOX. JOHN. If Swift were right wheu he called him the greatest benefactor of mankind, who made two blades of grass grow where one grew before, I would give no mean place to the bestower of a new flower Whatever has given the spirit a fresh delight has established for itself a fair title in fee simple to the room it has taken up on our planet. Your business to day is, to prove the title of the Old Dramatists. PHILIP. Those are the greatest poets who have expressed the largest number of our common thoughts concisely and portably. By conciseness I would not be understood to mean a Spartan and niggardly brevity, or that tight- laced affectation which puts a full stop in place of a comma, and makes expression pant and breathe short. If we tie a bundle too tightly, our packthread is apt to break, and we loose our pains. Feeling and diction soon lose their healthy color, when they are imprisoned together in too narrow a cell. That style is the most concise which expresses a thought best, whether it be in few or many words. A painter would choose a larger canvas, and charge his .palette with richer and more varied colors, to paint a sunset, than to paint a mouse ; yet the one would be as truly concise as the other. Simplicity is neither plain nor bald. JOHX. No. A ray of light seems simple enough, and yet is made up of all the primary colors. THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 115 PHILIP. Aud light is the symbol of truth. As every sub- stance absoi'bs tluit part of the pure ray which its na- ture and constitution desire, and becomes colored ac- cordingly^ so is it with language. Every Mord has a hue of its own, which is its meaning; and a just com- bination of these, whether more or fewer, reproduces that whole of which each is a part, and the general effect is light. The same is true of ideas ; and every man is more or less a poet, in proportion as he has au instinctive understanding of this beautiful and har- monious chromatic chord. To refine a little farther, it is also equally true of the sound of words. Every cue has its proper correlative in color, and may be al- most mathematically demonstrated to be iu or out of tune. JOHN. One would think, then, that a mathematical mind should excel alike in poetry, painting, and music ; and that Euclid, had he been so minded, might have com- bined the excellences of Shakespeare, Raphael, and Beethoven. PHILIP. Not more truly than the prism, iu giving us the same colors, can satisfy and conciliate the eye like the rainbow. I am not sure, however, (since the faculty of analysis is so main an element iu the mind of the artist,) that any one of the great trio you have named might not have made a good mathematician. Chau- cer, when in prison, wrote a treatise on the astrolabe for his sou. Pythagoras, who seems to have had a 116 THIRD CONVERSATION. truly poetical nature, made discoveries in the science of numbers ; Goethe, in colors, in botany, and in anat- omy ; and Coleridge tells us, that Davy, if he had not chosen to be a great chemist, would have been a great poet. But analysis must be a subordinate faculty, or the man, instead of being an artist, l)ecomes an imi- tator, using the same means Avhich others have em- ployed, mathematically rather than instinctively. JOHN. This harmony between sound and color and (you would add) thought is a very enticing one for specula- tion. I had often noticed that particular musical notes gave me a sensation of colors, and was wont to apply it to some action of the associative principle too fine for me to trace the links, till I reflected that neither the organ of smell (which has the most powerful effect on our association with places) nor that of taste was at all excited. When I afterwards found that there was a fixed law in the matter, I was, for a time, in an ec- stacy. I could now understand why it was that cer- tain pieces of music, though there were no discords in the performance of them, were yet very unpleasing to me. The want of harmony was between the different parts. It was as if, in a large picture, the painter should have had the colors of each figure, or of each group, in tune, and yet, failing to keep the other groups in proper harmony, should make his whole canvass jar upon the eye. I remember being very much interested in a book upon the theory of colors, in which was a dia- gram of the musical chromatic scale.* The illustrations * Field's " Theory of Color." THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 117 Avere drawn from our English poets, especially Shakes- peare, wlio was shown never to have struck a false note. Truly, as Falstaff says, " this instinct is a great mat- ter." JNIany of the great painters have been also musi- cians. Raphael and Gerard Douw have painted them- selves in this character. Musical concerts were a favorite subject of Con-eggio's pencil. Gainsborough was as passionately fond of his viol de gamba as of his paints and brushes; and you would probably say that it was the same quality of mind that made him a great painter, which, possessed in a more limited degree, made his younger brother a distinguished mechanician. Benvenuto Cellini, I think, mentions Michel Angelo's love of music, and Avas himself no mean performer. Salv^ator Rosa must have had a sensitive ear, or he would never have been so expert an improvvissatore. Doubtless a book of reference would furnish us with many more examples. Allston was as fond of hearing the rich voice of his niece, as Luther was of his son John's. Page has a delicate appreciation of the finest music ; and I know one, of whose genius as a sculptor I feel well assured,* who is a proficient in the science. The fondness of the painters for St. Cecilia, too, should not be forgotten. Fuseli understood the chromatic force of words as well as of colors, and has left, perhaps, the best descriptive criticism on the pictures which we have. Allstou's forthcoming volume of lectures will, I doubt not, prove him also a master of the effects of language. Nor have the poets shown less fondness for the sister art. Homer several times has a kind word * W. W. Slorv, who, if he keeps the promise of the first luist he has exhihiterl, may soon write himself artis magister. 118 THIRD CONVERSATION. for tlie singers. In the eighth book of the Odyssey, for instance, " Tract yap avOpunoiCLv kirixf^ovLOLOiV^ aoiSol TLfiijq e/1/j.upoi elm Kal a'ldov^." But this may be professional. Shakespeare betrays it often. ISIilton played upon the organ, a congenial instrument. Izaak Walton has recorded Herbert's musical propensity and skill, and Cowper himself tells of his own fondness for Mrs. Unwiu's harpsichord. Goldsmith's flute played the interpreter for him, and paid his way through France. Collins, one of our richest colorists, was passionately fond of music. Now that I have indulged in this refinement of fancy so far, why might I not carry it a step farther, and at once admit form as well as color into this musical party ? PHILIP. You have unconsciously done so already, by your allusions to sculptors. Vitruvius tells us that archi- tects should know something of music, and you remember Madame De Stael's celebrated fancy. If I knew enough of music, I might, perhaps, find nice analogies between its styles and those of architecture. Dwight, who has at once so profound and refined a perception in whatever relates to music, could trace them for us with enthusiastic demonstration. The parallel between some of the architectural and the poetical styles has often struck me. The Grecian cor- responds to the Epic in its severe majesty, its regular columns, and its images, calm and large like those of gods. THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 119 JOHN. I see Milton lias usurped to himself the whole defi- nition of Epic, in your dictionary. Homer's Iliad, with its rapidly shifting scenes, its alarums and incur- sions, differs from the Paradise Lost as widely as Mozart's music from Handel's. Still farther apart stands the })icturesquc and romantic Odyssey, with its Calypso and Cyrce, its Lotophagi and Lestrygons and Cyclops, and the homely glimpse of old Argus, which delighted our childhood. The Nibelungcu song is more like this. It is quite as much Gothic as Grecian. By the way, I wish that Professor Felton Avould give us an edition of the Odyssey uniform with his Iliad. I cannot help liking it the better of the two. PHILIP. We should never look below the best for a standard, and I shall keep fast hold of Milton still. The Drama, in its highest form, the Tragedy, is fitly sym- bolled by the Gothic, having its fixed rules indeed, but admitting of lyrical adornment, and of the quaint corbels of humor here and there, leering, perhaps, over a tomb, the proper types of Shakespeare's clown. The Lyric, again, may find its parallel among the light and graceful buildings of the Moors. JOHN. » We have dwelt lono; enough among these sublima- tions, almost as impalpable as the Greek poet's "dream of the shadow of a smoke." It is well enough to shape likenesses in the changing outlines of a cloud ; 120 THIRD COXVERSATION. but if vre embrace one^ we shall only, like Ixion, beget a mouster. PHILIP. I believe that you have been seduced from your allegiance solely by that plausible metaphor. But it Avill betray you in turn, for you have forgotten that one of the nephelid offspring of that Olympian in- trigue was the instructor of the greatest heroes of antiquity, nay, of the scientific god of medicine him- self. A metaphor, if the correspondence be perfect in all its parts, is one of the safest guides through the labyrinth of truth ; but, should there chance to be a break in the thread, we are left without a clew in the more inextricable maze into which we have suffered it to lead us. As to our sublimations, I will rebuke you out of the mouth of Sir Thomas Browne, who says, " I love to lose myself in a mystery ; to pursue my reason to an Altitudo ! " — to which I heartily assent. JOHN. If poetry be not out of place in the train of these (shall I call them philosophical?) refinements, I should be glad to think myself a day's journey nearer to the "golden stroude" of the dramatists. PHILIP. You might open them almost anywhere, and find an oracle to your purpose. True poetry is never out of place, nor will a good word spoken for her ever fail of some willing and fruitful ear. Even under our thin crust of fashion and frivolity throb the undying t THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 121 fires of the great soul of man, the fountain and centre of all poetry, and which will one day burst forth to wither like grass-blades the vain temples and palaces which forms and conventionalities have heaped smotheringly upon it. Behind the blank faces of the weak and thoughtless, I see, sometimes with a kind of dread, this awful and mysterious presence, as I have seen one of Allston's paintings in a ball-room, over- looking with its serene and steadfast eyes the butterfly throng beneath, and seeming to gaze, from these narrow battlements of time, far out into the infinite promise of the future, beholding there the free, erect, and perfected soul. JOHX. Ah, you have climbed upon the saddle of your Pegasus again, and will leave me far behind. INIen- tion poetry, or anti-slavery, and you go suddenly mad, though in ordinary matters a reasonable fellow enough. They are as fruitful a text to you as the " Kaim o' Kimprunes" to Mr. Oldbuck. I like your enthusiasm very well, but you sometimes jumble them together oddly enough. PHILIP. You forget that I believe the poetical sentiment and what we call the sentiment of natural relision to be identical. Both of them are life-members of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. You are, at heart, as much an Abolitionist as I ; and if you were not, I should suspect the purity of my own principles, if they built uj) a wall between me and my brother. No sin- 122 THIRD CONVERSATION. cere desire of doing good ueed make au enemy of a single human being ; for that is a capacity in which he is by natnre unfitted to shine. It may, and must, rouse opposition ; but that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it, Avhich cannot sympathize with the ojipressor equally as with the oppressed. / It is the high and glorious vocation of Poesy as well to make our own daily life and toil more beautiful and holy to us by the divine ministerings of love, as to render us swift to convey the same blessing to our brother. Poesy is love's chosen apostle, and the very almoner of God. She is the home of the outcast and the w^ealth of the needy. For her the hut becomes a palace, whose halls are guarded by the gods of Phidias, and kept peaceful by the maid-mothers of Raphael. She loves better the poor wanderer whose bare feet know by heart all the freezing stones of the pavement, than the delicate maiden for whose dainty soles Brussels and Turkey have been over-careful ; and I doubt not but some re- membered scrap of childish song hath often been a truer alms than all the benevolent societies could give. She is the best missionary, knowing when she may knock at the door of the most curmudgeonly hearts, without being turned away unheard^ The omnipres- ence of her spirit is beautifully and touchingly ex- pressed in "The Poet," one of the divisions of a little volume of poems by Cornelius Mathews. Were the whole book as simple in thought and diction as the most of this particular poem, I know few modern volumes that would equal it. Let me read you the passage I alluded to. You will see that the poor slave is not forofotten. THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 123 "There sits not on the wilderness's edge. In the dusk lodges of the wintry North, Nor couches in the rice-field's slimy sedge, Nor on the cold, wide waters ventures forth, — Who waits not, in the pauses of his toil, "With hope that spirits in the air may sing; "Who upward turns not at propitious times, Breathless his silent features listening, In desert and in lodge, on marsh and main. To feed his hungry heart and conquer pain." JOHN. Worthy of the fine imagination and the classic taste of Collins ; though he would have found fault, I sus- jject, with the assonance of "sits not" and "waits not," coming in as they do, also, in the same place in their respective verses. But these are trifles. No man ought to stop, looking for motes in such a beaker of pure Hippocrene as this. These lines express a truth, and, in such utterances, the mind does not linger daintily picking choice phrase, as it does for the deck- ing out of a fancy. Truth comes huddling forth like molten iron, which, though it be beautified by the little swarms of bee-like sparks which hover around it, yet runs into the nearest channel and there soon hardens, taking the chance shape of its mould. PHILIP. Those verses do, indeed, express a truth. The love of the beautiful and true, like the dew-drop in the heart of the crystal, remains for ever clear and liquid in the inmost shrine of man's being, though all the rest be turned to stone by sorrow and degradation. The angel, who has once come down into the soul, will 124 THIRD CONVERSATION. not be driven theucc by any sin or baseness even, mnch less by any undeserved oppression or wrong. At the soul's gate sits she silently, with folded hands and downcast eyes ; but, at the least touch of nobleness, those patient orbs are serenely uplifted, and the whole spirit is lightened with their prayerful lustre. Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm, blue sky with its motherly rebuking face. She is the true preacher of the Word ; and when, in time of danger and trouble, the established shepherds have cast down their crooks and fled, she tenderly careth for the flock. On her calm and fearless heart rests weary Freedom, when all the world have driven her from the door with scoflfs and mockin2;s. From her white breasts flows the strong milk which nurses our heroes and martyrs; and she blunts the sharp tooth of the fire, makes the axe edeeless, and dignifies the pillory or the gallows. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail. The more this love is cultivated and refined, the more do men strive to make their outward lives rhythmical and harmonious, that they may accord with that inward and dominant rhythm by whose key the composition of all noble and worthy deeds is guided. To make one object, in 'outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life ; for, the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful, — the human soul. Love never contracts its circles ; they widen by as fixed and sure a law as those around a pebble cast into still water. The angel of love, when, full of sor- THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 125 row, lie followed the first exiles, behiiKl whom the gates of Paradise shut with that mournful clang, of which some faiut echo has liiigeixd in the hearts of all their offspring, unwittingly snapped off and brought away in his hand the seed-pod of one of the never-fad- ing flowers which grew there. Into all dreary and desolate places fell some of its blessed kernels; they asked but little soil to root themselves in, and in this narrow patch of our poor clay they sprang most quickly and sturdily. Gladly they grew, and from them all time has been sown with whatever gives a higher hope to the soul, or makes life nobler and more godlike ; while, from the over-arching sky of Poesy, sweet dew for ever falls to nurse and keep them green and fresh from the world's dust. JOHN. If a drop or two from the phial of my unassisted reason, which you, I fear, would leave in some dark corner upon the shelf, while you are playing off your experiments with the brighter-hued fluids of the lab- oratory, be competent to precipitate the theory which you have dissolved in so splendid a commixture, I should guess that your notion of the good influence of poetry amounts simply to this, — that it maintains the sway of the heart over the intellect. The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very consider- able one; it has no conscience. Napoleon is the readiest instance of this. If his heart had borne any proportion to his brain, he had been one of the greatest men in all history. As it is, his triumphs are of the intellect merely, Mhich memory, iudeed may wonder 126 THIRD CONVERSATION. at, but M'ill never love. He will go down to posterity as a deformity ; like one of those hideous caricatures in plaster of which his countrymen are so fond, (a notice- able fact, by the way, and illustrative of national cha- racter,) whose chief characteristic is a monstrous head out of all proportion to the other members. That ath- letic intellect, its huge muscles hardened and tutored by long training, and grim with the proud dust of imnumbered victories in the wrestling-ring, became weak as a child in the grip of the sturdy, honest heart of England. Whatever magnanimity he has shown has in it an ugly, corrupting spot of forethought, and seems rather the result of intention than of instinct ; as if he were constraining himself into a heroic atti- tude, to be modelled in a statue for posteritv. The intellect can never be great, save in pupilage to the heart. Xay, it can never be truly strong but so. It suspects and mistrusts itself at every turn, and gives way ignominously at last. It sole lust is for power, won it matters not how, and of whatever kind or de- gree. And it cheats itself, too, fancying its straw a spear like a weaver's beam, and strutting ridiculous with its twig sceptre and paper crown. It is because politics have been regarded as an intellectual science, that they have become so proverbially dishonest. The politicians juggle on, buying power at any rate, till the great lubberly national conscience, which their buzz- ings have lulled asleep, wakens with a portentous yawn, and brushes the whole infesting swarm into blank oblivion. Could we but find a statesman with a poet's eye! Burke had but a narrow miss of it. It is only the intellect that can be thoroughlv and THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 127 hideously wicked. It can forget everything in the attainment of its ends. The heart recoils; in its retired places some drops of childh(K)d's dew still linger, defying manhood's fiery noon ; it remembers ; it forecasts ; it dares not leap the black chasm of the life to come. The intellect is haunted in its lonely moments by its weird sisters, whose promises of sway entice it on from one foul deed to another. — What an intellect was Napoleon's ! He was the Goethe of the throne and the camp. And that huge structure which he piled with such wasteful pains was but like the winter palaces of the Czar, being reared by the intel- lect alone, of its icy blocks, crystal, far-shining, yet no match for the silent eye of that all-beholding sun of mankind's moral sense. What pang of the world's sore-distressed heart did he make the lighter? What gleam of sunshine streamed into the dim hovel of our race the more freely and bounteously for him ? The great intellect dies with its possessor ; the great heart, though his name iu whose breast it had its ebb and flow be buried in the mouldered past, survives for ever, beckoning kindred natures to deeds of heroic trust and self-sacrifice. Is Luther dead while Garrison still lives? The intellect would fain bargain with and outwit the future ; the heart buys acceptance of it with a simple smile. This, then, is the great errand of the poet; to keep alive our fealty to the heart, and, even when it has been banished by the usurping intellect, to rouse our loyalty with the despised, and therefore unmolested, persuasion of a song. 128 THIRD CONVERSATION. PHILIP. What you say is true. The intellect, so it be at "work, cares not much for what end. It is for ever moulding with its restless fingers the clay within its reach, and shapes with almost equal pleasure an Apollo or a Priapus. But they err who assert that what we humanly call great must of need be virtuous. For the intellect may seduce the heart, and so, even by wicked means, create something that shall last. This was the case with Voltaire, whose omnipotent sneer, evil in itself, did good as well as evil. To me, one of the most interesting relics of Napoleon is that table- talk of his in his island-jail. A kind of Coleridge- Machiavel, he says something noticeable about every- thing, scrawling the aphoristic commentaries of a general with the cramped precision of an orderly-ser- geant. — Well, a conversation is like a Classical Dic- tionary, where, at the end of every subject, a vide directs you to some other, till you might as well attempt to read Hesiod's stupid Theogony. Let us come back to our old Dramatists. jonx. The old English Dramatists ! with what a vague feeling of pride and reverence do I utter those four words ! Entering the enchanted, and to mo almost untraveled, realm which they " rule as their demense," I feel like the awestruck Goth, when his eyes dro])ped beneath the reverend aspects of the Roman senate, and lie concluded them an assembly of gods ; or more like him who, in searching the w'iudings of a cavern, came suddenly upon King Arthur and his knights, seated, THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 129 as of yore, about the renowned rountl-table. Sileut aud severe they sit, those men of" tlie old fearless time, and gaze with stern eyes upon the womanly new- comer whose limbs have never been galled by the weary harness, aud whose soft arm has never held the lance in rest. PHILIP. Yes; we feel, when we come among them, as if their joys and sorrows were on a more Titanic scale than those of our day. It seems as if we had never suffered and never acted, and yet we feel a noble spur and willingness to endure and to do. They show us the dignity and strength of the soul, and, after reading them, the men we see in the streets look nobler and more manlike, and we find more brotherhood in their before unanswering faces. Their works stand among those of the moderns like the temples aud altars of the ancient dwellers on this continent among the rude hovels of a race of descendants ignorant of their use and origin. Let iis muse awhile in this city of tiie past, and sketch roughly some of the mighty monu- ments yet standing therein. JOHN. It is a little strange that the English, all of whose glorious past belongs equally to us, should pity us for having no antiquity to look back upon, as if that, even were it true, would preclude us from having poets. Besides sharing their own history and tradition Ayitli them, we can also claim our share in the ancientry of this, our adopted hemisphere, and point to monuments, 9 130 THIRD CONVERSATION. set by which their idle Druid-stones are but things of an hour ago. Not that the poet needs any such ob- scurities to grope in, or desires a greater antiquity than that of his own heart, in which are written the same wondrous oracles, uncertain, yet not past finding out, of which all his brethren from Eden downward have deciphered but a few lines. Wherever Shakespeare lays his plots, that ruddy English heart of his was the true meridian, whence the degrees of latitude and longitude were numbered. Paradise and pandemo- nium both found room enough with Milton in that little house in the Artillery Walk. The poet who leans upon the crumbling arm of Eld will never him- self become a part of history. When he crossed the threshold of his own heart, he left his strength behind him ; and, in proportion as he wanders farther thence, he becomes remote from the hearts of all his kind ; his words become a dim nmrmur, with no articulate sylla- ble to claim attention from the ear. — But I interrupt. PHILIP. You interrupt well. In the old dramatists there is the beauty of health, strength, and invincible sincerity. Sorrow there is, as there is in life ; but it is a sorrow that sympathizes with every human being, and is too genuine to be warped into a selfish and gloomy misan- thropy. They wrote before the good English word, feeling, had whined itself into the French one, senti- ment. They were too hardy to need shelter themselves in the soft cloak of sentimentalism, and thought it a worthier and more poetical ambition to emulate the CHAPMAN. 131 angels in love than the devils iu scorn and hate. Byronism would have stood with numbed limbs and chattering teeth, in the sharp, bracing mountain-air in which alone their lungs could find free play. Yet there, amid the bare, majestic rocks, bloom tender Al- pine-flowers of delicatest hue and rarest fragrance, and the sturdy moss creeps everywhere with its heartfelt green, which, even iu cloudy weather, looks as if it had garnered up in itself a store of sunshine. I shall make my first selections from George Chap- man, author of the best translation of Homer, and the friend of Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlow, and other great spirits of his day. I shall Iread to you only those pas- sages which have pleased nie the most heartily, leaving you to suppose at the same time that I leave unread a thousand as good, which do not happen to fit my hu- mor as well. I shall punctuate and emphasize, and even change a syllable, or the order in which it stands, to please my own judgment and ear. JOHN. I like your declaration of independence, for I have generally found, when my reading has led me that way, that the labors of editors and commentators were like the wind Csecias, — whose quality it was, according to Aristotle, to gather clouds, rather than to dispel them. PHILIP. Chapman is a very irregular writer. I might liken him to a hoodwinked eagle, which sometimes, led by an ungovernable prompting of instinctive freedom, soars far up into the clear ether of song, and floats 132 THIRD CONVERSATION. majestical on level wings where this world, with its fret and turmoil, shows in the blue distance only as a silent star ; and which, as suddenly, will dash down again, and almost stun himself against the noisy and dusty earth. This is very natural in one of so impul- sive a temperament. His impetuosity is continually bursting out in hot jets, like little geysers, which often carry the mud and stones along Avith them toward heaven. So eager is he to give vent to a favorite thought or image, that he does not sufficiently heed the intermediate steps, plunging along through mud and brambles till he reach his object. He has little dra- matic power, — that mesmerism by Avhich Shakespeare makes his characters speak and act his own thoughts, without letting his own individuality appear in the matter, — and his plays, taken as wholes, are not very interesting ; but they abound in grand lines, and im- ages full of antique and majestic port. In didactic and moral passages, he comes nearer to Shakespeare than does any one of his contemporaries. JOHN. I think I have seen Chapman somewhere charged with bombast, and with some show of truth, if I may trust some passages quoted. PHILIP. The accusation was probably laid by some critic who could pardon nothing which rose above the dead marsh- level of Pope. He is rugged enough sometimes, but seldom turgid. When his mind has once taken a turn ixi any direction, it receives tributary streams and run- CHAPMAN. 133 nels from every sklc, till it foams and rushes along with the turbulent force of a swollen river. There are some minds to which all true poetry seems inflated, — commonwealths, from which poets are excluded with- out the artificial help of a Platonic edict. The mass of men are so fallen from a true state of nature, that whatever would fain recall them to it, or presupposes it, seems ridiculous and unnatural. Read Milton aloud on the Exchange, and you would be laughed at, as much for what you read, as for reading at all. The multitude take the expression of something they have never felt for an absurdity or an affectation, or worse. So it is if they hear anything which strokes their prej- udices the wrong way. When the king of Denmark sent missionaries to convert the Malabariaus, the Brah- mins expressed their entire satisfaction with the prin- ciples of the Christian religion, except inasmuch as it allowed its believers to eat cow's flesh and to spit. An intelligent Turk, who should come to this country with our Declaration of Independence in his head, would be delighted and surprised to find that a man may carry out in his practice almost any doctrine, save the main one which that instrument inculcates, without any fear of Autocrat Mob. He may preach despotism and be respectable, Mahometanism and he would be run after ; but if he preaches Anti-slavery, he loses caste at once. To us, on the other hand, this seems highly natural and proper. JOHN. God's livery is a very plain one ; but its wearers have good reason to be content. If it have not so 134 THIRD CONVERSATION. much gold lace about it as Satan's, it keeps out foul weather better, and is besides a great deal cheaper. — I do not think that you do Pope justice. His transla- tion of Homer is as bad as it can be, I admit ; but surely you cannot deny the merit of lively and inge- nious fancy to his " Rape of the Lock," nor of know- ledge of life, and a certain polished classicalness to his Epistles and Satires. His portraits are like those of Copley, of fine gentlemen and ladies, whose silks and satins are the best part of them. PHILIP. I cannot allow the parallel. In Copley's best pict- ures, the drapery, though you may almost hear it rustle, is wholly a subordinate matter. Witness some of those in Our college-hall here at Cambridge, that of Madam Boylston especially. I remember being once much struck with the remark of a friend, who con- vinced me of the fact, that Coj)ley avoided the painting of wigs wherever he could, thus getting a step nearer nature. Pope would have made them a prominent object. I grant what you say about the " Rape of the Lock ;" but this does not prove that Pope was a poet. If you wish an instance of a 'pocVs fancy, look into the " Midsummer Night's Dream." I can allow that Pope has written what is entertaining, but surely not poetical. Show me a line that makes you love God and your neighbor better, that inclines you to meek- ness, charity, and forbearance, and I will show you a hundred that make it easier for you to be the odious reverse of all these. In many a pagan poet there is more Christianity. No poet could write a " Dunciad/' CHAPMAN. 135 or even read it. You have persuaded yourself into thinking Pope a poot, as, iu looking for a long time at a stick wliicli we believe to be an animal of some kind, we fancy that it is stirring. His letters are amusing, but do not increase one's respect for him. "When vou speak of his being classical, I am sure that you jest. Your favorite, Collins, is truly a classical writer. For classicahiess does not consist in any amount of Latin and Greek, nor in a body-snatching of dead forms of expression or belief. It is only the plain simplicity of a gentleman. A scholarly air of quiet and repose, an easy dignity, and an unstrained grace pervade it. It may consist with the highest gifts of the imagina- tion, as in tlie delightful poet I have mentioned. The critics, by a strange kind of metonymy, have applied it chiefly to the curious insipidities of the dull, or the mechanic inspirations of the pedantic. Chapman, though a fine scholar, is in no wise classical. His merriment is quite too boisterous, and his enthusiasm too unrestrained. AV^hen we read a classical poet, we feel as if we had entered a marble temple Avhere a cool silence reigns ; a few quiet statues gleam around us, pure and naked ; a few short inscriptions tell of the deeds of heroes ; all is calm, grand, and simple to the highest perfection of art. But if Chapman be not classical, he has the higher merit of earnestness, sin- cerity, and rugged heartiness, not without some touches, here and there, of graceful tenderness and fierce sub- limity. Now let me read to you the ojicning of " Bussy D'Ambois," a tragedy. 136 THIRD CONVERSATION. ^^Eater BussY D'Ambois in mean apparel. " Fortune, not reason, rules the state of things : Reward goes backward ; honor on his head "Who is not poor is monstrous ; only need Gives form and worth to every human seed. As cedars beaten Avith continual storms, So great men flourish ; and do imitate Unskilful statuaries, who suppose (In forming a Colossus), if they make him Straddle enough, strut, and look big and gape, Their work is goodly ; so men merely great In their affected gravity of voice, Sourness of countenance, manners, cruelty, Authority, wealth, and all the spawn of fortune, Think they bear all the kingdom's worth before them ; Yet differ not from those Colossic statues. Which, with heroic form without o'erepread. Within are naught but mortar, flint, and lead. Man is a torch borne in the wind ; a dream But of a shadow, summed with all his substance ; And, as great seamen, using all their wealth And skills in Neptune's deep, invisible paths. In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass, To put a girdle round about the world, — When they have done it, coming near their haven, Are fain to give a warning-piece, and call A poor, stayed fisherman, that never passed His country's sight, to waft and guide them in ; — So, when we wander fiirthest through the waves Of glass}' glory and the gulfs of state. Topped with all titles, spreading all our reaches, As if each private arm would sphere the earth, We must to virtue for her guide resort. Or we shall shipwreck in our safest poil." JOHN. I can hardly persuade myself that the grand meta- phor of the torch did not come from Hebrew lips. I CHAPMAN. 137 know DO other image that would po well express tlie fickleness and uncertainty of our hold on life as this. The likening of virtue, too, to the poor, stayed fisher- man that had never been out of his country's sight is very sweet. With the first part of the passage you read I was rather disappointed. Jkit the last made up for all. PHILIP. I read it that the contrast might be the greater, and also to give you a specimen of his language. He does not, you see, pick his words much. He was in haste to get to the last half of his soliloquy, where he had something to say that pleased him better. You will find that he himself resembles those " unskilful statu- aries" not a little sometimes. The length and in- tricacy even, of the last comparison in what I read pleases me, perhaps from its putting me in mind so much of the golden-mouthed Jeremy Taylor. But Taylor always begins his similes with a " so have I seen," which gives great liveliness and force to them. JOHN. Do you remember one? PHILIP. Many ; who that had ever read one could forget it? " For so have I seen a lark, rising from his bed of grass ar.d soaring upward, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds ; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and unconstant, descending more at every breath of the 138 THIRD CONVERSATION. tempest than he could recover by the liberation and frequent weighing of his wings ; till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over, and did rue and sincj as if he had learned music and motion of an angel as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here below ; so are the prayers of a good man." * JOHN. What a jwet's eye, and heart, and tongue! How lovingly he speaks of the ''poor bird" and the " little creature," and what a soaring melody there is in the ending ! Shelley's " Skylark," almost perfect as it is, has not the fluttering rise and the ecstatic gush of this. No lark ever shook fresher dew from his winirs. o PHILIP. I will give you one more. " But so have I seen the returning sea enter upon the strand, and the waters, rolling toward the shore, throw up little portions of the tide, and retire, as if nature meant to play, and not to change the abode of waters ; but still the flood crept by little step- pings, and invaded more by his progressions than he lost by his retreat, and having told the number of his steps, he possesses his new portion till the Angel calls him back, that he may leave his unfaithful dwelling of the sand: so is the pardon of our sins."t I have quoted two of his comparisons to please you ; let me quote one passage more to please myself. " No man knows, but he that loves his children, how many de- licious accents make a man's heart danca in the pretty conversa- tion of those dear pledges ; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocences, their imperfections, their ne- cessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society."^ * Twenty-five Sermons i)reached at Golden Grove, Sermon V., p. 60. Edit. 1653. t Sermon VIII., p. 97. % Sermon XVIII., p. 236. CHAP.VAN. 139 How I love that dingy old folio, with its huge himps of Greek and Latin, its quaintncss(>s, its meta- physical refinements, its tender sym])atliies, and, above all, its radiant piety, and the poetry which springs out of it, goldening the whole ! I can never help looking upon Tavlor as the last of that noble line of poets who consecrated the first half of the seventeenth century. Chapman loves to draw his heroes of a defiant and indomitable spirit, and with a thorough contempt of all fooleries and shams. I suspect that he has uncon- sciously given us a glimpse of his own nature. In his translation of the lUiad, he is said to show a great partiality to the rough, straightforward Ajax, and to eke out his speeches here and there, with a little added fire of his own. Of this spirit here is a specimen. The king's brother, who wishes to gain over to his own interest so brave a man as D'Ambois, finds him lying on the ground, and says to him : "Turned to earth, alive? Up man ! the sun shines on thee. " D'Ambois. Let it shine ; I am no mote to play in 't, as great men are." So, when D'Ambois is killed, he says proudly, that " Death and Destiny Come behind D' Amboif," as if even they feared to face him. But you will see enough of this in all the passages I shall read to you. — Xo man ever had a larger or nobler idea of the might and grandeur of the human soul than Chapman. He had a great deal of that exulting feeling of strength 140 THIRD CONVERSATION. and self-help which contemporaries endeavor to par- alyze by calling it conceit, but which the heart of pos- terity swells over as the instinct and stamp of great- ness. It is a something which we find iu the lives of all great men ; a recollection, as it were, of wings, which enables them, in the words of Marvell, " Remembering still their former height," to rise above these lower regions of turmoil into a clearer and screner air. It is a feeling of trustfulness, which is needful to those who dare to cast their seed upon these waves of time, that it may float down and come to fruitage iu eternity, and who gladly put by the harlot blandishments of to-day, (so bewitching to small souls,) and find their strength and solace in the approving and prophetic eyes of that infinite to-morrow on whose great heart they rest secure, " Feeling, through all this fleshy dress, Bright shoots of everlastingness." * JOHN. Yes; such feelings are the ravens which God sends to feed these prophets in the wilderness of an unrecog- nizing world; they may seem but unsightly, ill-boding birds to everybody else, but to those whom they sus- tain they appear gentle as doves. God's messengers always look like shabby fellows to the rest of the world, and often are not recognized, even by those of whom they ask hospitality, till they are gone for ever. Entering, they seem simple wayfarers ; it is only when * Vanghan. CHAPMAN. ' 141 they look back upon us that we know the angel-couii- tenauce, with a pang of unavailing sorrow. PHILIP. Chapman seems never so well content as when he makes one of his heroes burst forth in an impetuous (and sometimes nuuldy) flood of scornful independence, asserting proudly the dignity of genius, as overtop- ping all otlier dignities whatever. He was like all his great brethren, (the Avorthy forerunners of the glorious band who set the divine riglit of all temporal power for ever beneath the feet of that diviner right of the eternal soul,) ashamed to bend tlie knee, nay, even to pay common civility to any conventionality, howso- ever seemingly venerable and august. Indeed, tliere is too much scorn and pride in him to consist with the highest genius. For great genius is humble; its con- fidence is not in its own strength, but in that of its cause. Pride cannot fly over the great void gulf be- tween its performance and its hope ; but, if slie tempt the perilous voyage, flutters her vain wings, and drops exhausted into that unfathomable grave. Chapman's independent bearing often breaks down into a mere swagger, and, indeed, is seldom confined within the limits of established propriety. Doubtless he was of opinion, with Fuller, that " it is better to lap one's pottage like a dog, than to eat mannerly with a spoon of the Devil's giving ; " and if he is sometimes bent on believing that all spoons, save a clumsy horn one of his own make, are presents from that liberal gen- tleman, and go about laboriously to lap like a dog UNIVEBSITl . 142 THIRD CONVERSATION. when he had better have eaten like a Christian, (like some who foolishly think a certain rude ungracious- ness of bearing best befitting a radical,) yet we should pardon a great deal to a mistaken love of principle, when the principle is a good one, remembering that the flanks of our own hobbies are bloody with our too fiery spurring, and that enthusiasm is the most amiable of excesses. JOHN. A long sentence, but safely delivered at last. Those radicals you speak of are the deep-seeing philosophers M'ho believe tiiat an innate democracy resides in cow- liide boots, and that a thorough knowledge of govern- ment and a general intelligence upon all subjects soak into the brain from the liberal virtue of a roofless hat; who suspect good breeding for a monarchist in dis- guise; believe that all white men are their brothers on the day before election ; and proudly stand sponsors, while Mr. Dorr (a man who, mistakenly, it is true, but no less surely, would have stabbed true democracy to the heart, by appealing to brute force) is christened over again with the abused name of Algernon Sydney. And yet such men as these play off the puppet-show of our government; such men as these persuade the workingmen of our dear New England to rivet the chains upon three millions of their fellow- workers, and so drug their senses with idle flatteries, as to make them forget, that, while the laborer is bought and sold in one part of a country, he can never be truly re- spected in the other. I can hardly keep my tears down, when I think of it. CHAPMAN. 143 PHILIP. AVlio goes mad now? But I do not wonder. — I said that Chapnum has little dramatic power. His plays seem rather to be soliloquies, s^jokeu by himself from behind the mask of different characters, than true dramas. Yet he has considerable knowledge of character, and shrewd remarks and little natural touches are not infrequent in his i)Iays. Here is an instance of the last. Tamyra, who is secretly in love with D'Ambois, after a speech of his, says, — fearful lest her calling him by name might betray her secret, and yet unable to let slip a chance of saying something in his praise, — " IMcthinks the man hath answered for us well." The king's brotlier, who suspects the truth, turns to her and asks, " Tlie man? Why, Madam, d'ye not know his name?" She answers nobly enough, "Man is a name of honor for a king; Additions take awcvjfrom each chief thing." JOHN. Yes, she covers her retreat with a true woman's skill ; not allowing that she knows D'Ambois, and yet satisfying her love by construing the epithet she had applied to iiim into so jealous a tribute of praise as woukl be content with no place lower than the hio-hest. 144 THIRD CONVERSATION. PHILIP. Something of Beaumont and Fletcher's comes to my mind in illustration : " I watched how fearfully, And j'et how suddenly, he cured his lies ; The right wit of a woman." I shall now go on reading extracts from the rest of this play, and from others ; without following the plot, or any other order than chance or fancy may dictate. Indeed, Chapman's plots are of little importance to him, except as threads for his thoughts to crystallize around. Here are one or two specimens of his exalted notion of greatness, and of the noble vigor and state- liness which animate and expand his verse in the ex- pression of it. '' His words and looks Are like the flashes and the bolts of Jove ; His deeds inimitable, like the sea, Which shuts still as it opes, and leave no tracks Nor prints of precedent for mean men''s acts." D'Ambois. JOHN. Grand, and grandly spoken. PHILIP. The following is even finer, or at least shows more art in expression. " His great heart will not down : 't is like the sea, That — partly by his own internal heat, Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion, Their heat and light, and partly by the place CHAPMAN. 146 O' til' divei-s frames, but chiefly by the moon, Bristled witii surges — never will be won (No, not when the hearts of all those powers are burst) To make retreat into his settled home, Till he be crowned wilh his own quiet foam," jyAmhoig. JOHN. If a poet is fond of the sea, it always prepossesses me ill his favor. The third verse of what you have read has great delicacy and beauty of expression : "Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion : " there is a waviness in its flow, and, at the same time, a gliding melody, wliich suggests both the stars and the ocean. The ending is exquisite; the whole sen- tence seems to swell on and on, like a wave upon the beach, till it breaks into the quiet foam of the last verse, and slides gently to its rippling close. PHILIP. Chapman does not often linger to describe outward nature; he has more important matters at heart. His natural scenery is of the soul, and that mostly of an Alpine character. There is none of that breezy, sum- mer-like feeling in him, which pervaded the verses of the lyric poets a short time after, and has come near to perfection in many descriptive pieces of our own day, " Annihilating all that's made, To a green thought in a green shade," and seeming to be translations from the grasshopjier, butterfly, locust, bird, and bee languages into the ver- 10 146 THIRD CONVERSATION. nacular. Yet he has some passages of great merit in this kind, and which show a very genial eye and ear. JOHN. Whose is that couplet you just quoted? PHILIP. Andrew Marvell's, the generous friend of Milton, the kind-hearted satirist, the brave lover and defender of freedom, whose commendatory verses, you remem- ber, are prefixed to '*' Paradise Lost." He had a rare vein of poetry in him, delicate, yet vigorously healthy. I know no poet who had a greater love of nature, or has poured it forth more sweetly. There is a descrip- tion of grass by him, in a poem addressed to Lord Fairfax, which is full of the ripest foncy and feeling. " And now to the abyss I pass Of that unfathomahle grass, Where men like grasshoppers appear ; But grasshoppers are rjiants there : They, in their squeaking laugh, contemn Us, as we walk more low than them, And from the precipices tall Of the green spires to us do call. To see men through this meadow dive, We wonder how they rise alive ; But, as the mariners who sound. And show upon their lead the ground. They bring up flowers, so to be seen, And prove theifve at the bottom been. No scene that turns with engines strange Doth oftener than these meadows change ; For, when the sun the grass hath vext," The tawny mowers enter next, CHAPMAN. 147 Who seem like Israelites to be, Walki7ig on foot through a green sea; To them the grassy deeps divide And crowd, a lane on eiliier side ; With whistling scythe, and elbow strong, These massacre the grass along." We cannot pardon extravagance in the imagination ; but Fancy would be tame without it, and can never assume her proper nature of joyousness, except she break into it. I know you will thank me if I read a little more. " Thus I, easy philosopher, Among the birds and trees confer; And little now to make me wants Or of the fowls or of the plants ; Give me bnt wings as they, and I Straight floating on the air shall fly ; Or turn me but, and you shall see I was but an inverted tree. Already I begin to call In their most learned original ; And where I language want, my signs The bird upon the bougli divines, And more attentive there doth sit Than if slie were with lime-twigs knit. No leaf doth tremble in the wind, Which I, returning, cannot find : Oat of these scattered Sybil' s-leavcs, Strange prophecies my fancy weaves ; What Rome, Greece, rulestine, e'er said, I in this light mosaic read. The oak -leaves me embroider all. Between which caterpillars crawl, And ivy, with familiar trails, Me licks and clasps, and curls and hales. 148 THIRD CONVERSATION. Under this Attic cope, I move Like some great prelate of the grove ; Then, languishing with ease, I toss On pallets swollen of velvet moss. While the wind, cooling through the boughs, Flatters with air my panting brows. How safe, methinks, and strong behind These trees, I have encamped my mind ; "Where beauty, aiming at the heart. Bends in some tree its useless dart ; And where the world no certain shot Can make, or me it toucheth not ! " Old Walton avouU have clapped his hands at this next: " No serpent new, nor crocodile, Remains behind our little Nile, Unless itself you will mistake, Among these meads the only snake. See in what wanton, harmless folds It everywhere the meadow holds ; And its yet muddy back doth lick, Till as a crystal mirror slick, Where all things gaze themselves and doubt If they be in it or ivilhout ; And for his shade, which therein shines, Narcissus- like, the sun, too, pines. O, what a pleasure 't is to hedge My temples liere with heavy sedge, Abandoning my lazy side, Stretched as a. bank unto the tide ; Or to suspend my sliding foot On the osier' .s uruletermined root, And In its branches tough to hang. While at my lines the fishes twang ! " Thomsons Marvell, Vol. III., p. 217. Now take one little turn with me in his " Garden/' and we will come back to Chapman. CHAPMAN. 149 " Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence, thy sister dear? Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men. Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow ; Society is all but rude To this delicious solitude. " What wondrous life is this I lead ! Ripe apples drop about my head ; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine ; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach ; Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. **' Meanwhile, the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness ; The mind, that ocean where each kind Doth straight its own resemblance find ; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds and other seas, Aimihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade, "Here, at the fountain's sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs doth glide ; There, like a bird, it sits and sings. Then whets and d.aps its silver wings, And, ti'l prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. " How weU the skilful gardener drew, Of flowers and herbs, this dial new! Where, from above, the milder sun Doth through a fragrant zodiac run; 150 THIRD CONVERSATION. And, as it ivorks, the indtistrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and ivholcsome hours He reckoned but ivith herbs and floioers?" Thomson's Marvell, Vol. III., p. 41 2. JOHN. If Milton had written these, we should almost have set them above the " Allegro " and " Penseroso." Cowley's "Grasshopper" and Emerson's "Humblebee" must yield to their luxuriant fancy, their delicate philosophy, and their fresh aptness of expression. They make a summer all round us in this bare Decem- ber-weather ; the roses bloom and the blossoms open their startled eyes upon the bleak twigs, as in Corne- lius Agrippa's opus magnum of necromancy. And then how coolly and silently and fragrantly sweet images and calming thoughts drop wavering down, one after another, upon the heart, like a snow of blos- soms from an overladen bough, making us feel better, and, if gentleness be wise, wiser too ! I have no doubt that these verses were written in winter. The imag- ination is more select than the eye, and we describe things best when they are absent. The eye is puzzled and confounded with the presence of a beautiful object, and is willing to relapse from an analyzing attention into a vague delight. After the object is withdrawn, the imagination does not recreate, but chooses and arranges from the distinctest images of the memory ; and this result, presented again to the eye, is more clear and satisfying than the original vision. CHAPMAN. 151 PHILIP. I am afraid that Chapman's landscapes will look tame and leaden to yon, now that your eye has been put out of tunc by such brilliant colors. The follow- ing verses make one feel as if he had suddenly thrown up the window of a close and dazzling room, and gazed out into the dim, foreboding eyes of Night. Tamyra is expecting D'Ambois, whom she loves unlawfully, at midnight. "Now all ye peaceful regents of the night, Silently gliding exhalations, Languishing winds, and murmuring falls of tvaters. Sadness of heart, and ominous secureness, Enchantments, dead sleeps, all the friends of rest. That ever wrought upon the life of man, Extend your utmost strengths, and this charmed hour Fix like the centre ; make the violent wheels Of Time and Fortune stand ; and great existence (The Maker's treasury) now not seem to be To all but my approaching friends and me." You cannot fail to be struck with the sadness and silence infused into the first five verses by that peculiar property of the letter s which w^e were speaking of. JOIIX. It seems to me the perfection of descriptive poetry; painting, not the objects themselves, but their effect upon the mind reflected back upon them and giving them a color of its own. An unhappy man, if he go into a wood, shall hear nothing but sad sounds there; the tinkle of the brook, the low, ocean-murmur of the cloudy pines, the soft clatter of the leaves, shall all 152 THIRD CONVERSATION. sound funereal to him ; he shall see only the dead limbs upon the trees, and only the inhospitable corners of the rocks, too churlish even for the hardy lichen to pitch his tents upon. For outward nature is but one of the soul's retainers, and dons a festal or a mourn- ing garment according as its master does. There is nothing sad or joyful in nature, of itself. Autumn is often called a melancholy season ; I cannot find it so, though I have often known the summer landscape to seem barer and bleaker than the long gray beach at Nantasket. — No ; there hangs the wondrous lyre within our reach, its dumb chords bearing the unborn music in their womb, which our touch delivers, — a love- ditty or a dirge. I have no patience with nine-tenths of the descriptive verse I read. It is mere cata- loguing, the conciseness and propriety of which an auctioneer might admire, and to him I gladly relin- quish it. If I wish for an account of our flowers, the text-books of Professor Bigelow or Gray will amply suffice me; if of our trees, I will be content with Michaux, one of whose volumes I have often found interesting enough to read it through at a single sit- ting. PHILIP. You must make an exception in favor of what the mere fancy, in one of her indifferent moods, colors to her will. Tiie imagination has no neutralities; it takes either one side or the other, as if by a will of its own, and brings all its resources to the support of it. — Here is something of Fancy's when she was at her happiest : CHAPMAN. 153 " Like a calm Before a tempest, when the silent air Lays her soft ear close to the earth, to hearken For what she fears steals on to ravish her." D'Aitibois. This, too, has a sweet airiness about it : "As, when (he moon hath comforted the night And set the world in silver of her light. The planets, asterisms, and whole state of heaven In beams of gold descending; all the winds Bound up in caves, charged not to drive abroad Their cloudy heads ; an universal peace. Proclaimed in silence of the quiet earth." * Byron s Conspiracy. * The following is fine in another way : " Your Majesty hath missed a noble sight : The Duke Byron, on his brave beast Pastrana; Who sits him like a full-sailed argosy Danced with a lofty billow, and as snug Plies to his bearer, both their motions mixed." Ibid. Chapman excels in metaphors and similes, and as most of them illustrate his descriptive faculty, I will read a few of them. " We must use these lures when we hawk for friends. And wind about them like a subtle river, * For this and all my other extracts from Chapman's " Byron's Conspiracy," and "The Tragedy of the Duke de Byron," I am indebted to the copious and judicious extracts from those plays in the " Retrospective Review," Vol. IV. ; they never having been separately reprinted, and therefore being inaccessible, in this countrv, in their entire form. 154 THIRD CONVERSATION. That, seeming only to run on his course, Doth search still as he runs, and still finds out The easiest parts of entry on the shore. Gliding so slyly by, as scarce he touched, Yet still eats something in it." This is still better : " And this wind, that doth sing so in your ears, I know is no disease bred in yourself. But whispered in by others, who, in swelling Your veins with empty hopes of much, yet able To perform nothing, are like shallow streams. That make themselves so many heavens to sight, Since you may see in them the moon and stars, The blue space of the air, as far from us, To our weak senses, in those shallow streams, As if they were as deep as heaven is high ; Yet, with your middle finger only sound them. And you shall pierce them to the very earth.'' The next is worthy of Shakespeare : Ibid. Ibid. " As you may see a mighty promontory More digged and under-eaten than may warrant A safe supportance to his hanging brows. All passengers avoid him, shun all ground That lies within his shadow, and bear still A flying eye upon him ; — so great men, Corrupted in their grounds, and building out Too swelling fronts for their foundations, "When most they sliould be propped, are most forsaken. And men Avill rather thrust into the storms Of better-grounded states than take a shelter Beneath their ruinous and fearful weight ; Yet they so oversee their faulty bases, ITiai they remain securer in conceit, And that security doth iporse presage Their near destruction than their eaten grounds." Ibid. CHAPMAN. 155 The following verses, expressing Byron's conduct when first imprisoned, are very graphic in idea, and have a vast deal of life in the expression. Notice what a hurry and flutter there is in the metre ; it jerks impatiently to and fro, as the bird would. " As a bird, Entered a closet, which unawares is made His desperate prison, being pursued, amazed And wrathful, beats his breast from wall to wall, Assaults the light, strikes down himself, not out, And, being taken, struggles, gasps, and bites, Takes all his taker's strokings to be strokes, Abhorreth food, and, with a savage will, Frets, pines, and dies, for former liberty." Byron's Tragedy. Chaucer has two passages of which this reminds me, and, as they are very graphic, and I did not read them to you yesterday, I will quote them now. " Men, by their nature, love newfangleness As do the birds that men in cages feed ; For, though thou night and day of them take heed. And strew their cages soft and fair as silk. And give them sugar, honey, bread, and milk. Yet, just so soon as e'er the door is up. They with their glad feet will spurn down their cup. And to the woods straightway on worms to feed." The Squire's Tale. " Take any bird, and put it in a cage, And, though thou hast the forethought of a Mage To foster it tenderly with meat and drink. And every dainty that thou canst bethink, And keep it, too, as cleanly as thou may ; Although the cage with gold be never so gay, Yet had the bird bv twenty thousand fold 156 THIRD CONVERSATION. Be rather in a forest wild and cold, To feed on worms and such like wretchedness." The Manciple's Tale. JOHN. I love these homely comparisons drawn from the humble tragedies of every-day life. A poet who shoots all his arrows at the stars may chance to hit us now and then, but is only by good luck. The heart, which is not so nice in its phrase as the intellect, is more likely to be reached by a humbler aim. I never shall forget the blind despair of a poor little humming- bird which flew through the open window of the nursery where I was playing when a child. I knew him at once for the same gay-vested messenger from Fairy Land, whom I had often watched disputing with the elvish bees the treasures of the honeysuckle by the door-step. His imprisoned agony scarce equalled my own ; and the slender streaks of blood, which his inno- cent, frenzied suicide left upon the ceiling, were more terrible to me than the red witness which Rizzio left on the stair at Holyrood to cry out against his mur- derers. PHILIP. In the poem of " Hero and Leauder," begun by Marlow, and finished by Chapman, our poet's lighter qualities are very attractively displayed. There (as how could it be otherwise in such a subject?) he shows more invention and gracefulness of fancy than anywhere else ; there, as he himself says of Marlow, he stands " Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.'' CHAPMAN. 157 You remember Burus's admirable simile, — " Like snow-flakes falling on a river, A moment white, then gone fur ever" ? Chapman had used it before him, and witli the same application : " Joy graven in sense, like snow in water, wastes ; "Without preserve of virtue, nothing lasts." AYarton and the anonymous editor of 1821 would have Chapman's share in the poem commence later. But I cannot conceive how, with the direct and posi- tive testimony of the style before them, they could doubt that he began with the third " sestyad " of the poem. If this verse, "But time and all-states-ordering ceremony," cannot claim him for father, I will never more put faith in physiognomy. There is too strong a family likeness between this and many verses in his transla- tions to let us doubt their being of the same parentage. For instance : " The golden-rod -sustaining-Argus guide : " " To horse-breed-varying Phrygia likewise send : " " The all-of-gold-made-Iaughterloving dame : " or, to proceed at once to extremities with the doubter, — " On Ida's-top-on-topto-heaven's-pole heaped : " all of which occur in his version of Homer's " Hymn 158 THIRD CONVERSATION. to Venus." Or take these from the "Hymn to Hermes : " " The-that-morn-born-Cyllenius did attain : " " His-born-to-bark-mouth at liim, till, in the end : " " The more-than-ever-certain deities." Marlow had none of this taste for handcuffing words together, till they halt along, melancholy and irregular, like a coffle of slaves under the eaves of the Capitol. I must not leave you to think that the compound epithets in Chapman's translations are all like these. Most of them are extremely fresh and spirited, and the translations are, besides their other great merits, full of interest to the student of language. Generally his epithets are truly " winged words," though his zeal sometimes leads him to tie on rather clumsily three or four additional pairs of pinions, which hang awk- wardly about them and prevent their moving their natural wings. Here is a beautiful passage, opening Avith a simile : " And all the while the red sea of her blood Ebbed with Leander ; but now turned the flood, And all Iter fleet of spirits came swelUnci in With crowd of sail, and did hot fight begin With those severe conceits she too much marked; And here Leander's beauties were embarked. He came in swimming, painted all with joys Such as might sweeten hell ; his thought destroys All her destroying thoughts ; she thowjht she felt His heart in hers ;..... Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes, And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies How her star wandered, washed in smarting brine, For her love's sake, that with immortal wine CHAPMAN. 159 Should be enibatlied, and tiwhn in more heart's-ease Than there be watei-s in the Sestian neas." Hero and Leander. — Third Sestyad. JOHN. I cannot say when I have met with an image that so charmed me as this, — " She saw in Neptune's skies How her star wandered." The suggestion of tlie inverted heaven in the sea, and the making Leander, rosy as lie was with health and youth and love, into a star, bring a truly Grecian delight with them. Ah, the poet's heart is an uu- lighted torch, which gives no help to his footsteps, till love has touched it with flame. PHILIP. You must read the whole poem. If there be a few blurs in it, it is yet one of the clearest and most per- fect crystals in the language, an entire opal, beautiful without the lapidary's help ; but it will shine with true pureness only in " the nunnery Of a chaste breast and quiet mind," like some of Donne's more private and esoteric poems. The same candle may light the soul to its chapel of devotion or its bed of harlotry. — Most of the dramatists of Chapman's time excel in drawing the characters of women. This, no doubt, was partly owing to the greater freedom of intercourse between the sexes, which that less conventional day allowed and en- 160 THIRD CONVERSATION. couraged. Now we have become deep-versed in forms and shallow in realities. We have grown so deli- cately decent that we must need apologize for nature, and make God himself more comme il faut. JOHN. And yet our decency is indecent. Fashion, being the art of those who must purchase notice at some cheaper rate than that of being beautiful, loves to do rash and extravagant things. She must be for ever new, or she becomes insipid. If to-day she have been courteous, she will be rude to-morrow; if to-day thinks her over-refined, to-morrow will wonder at see- ing her relapsed into a semi-savage state. A few years ago, certain elaborate and amorphous structures might be seen moving about the streets, in the whole of which the only symptom of animated nature to be dis- cerned was in the movable feet and ankles which conveyed them along. Now, even that sign of vitality has vanished ; the amorphous structures move about as usual, but their motive principle is as mysterious as that of Maelzel's chess-player. My own theory is, that a dwarf is concealed somewhere within. They may be engines employed for economical purposes by the civic authorities, as their use has been conjectured by an ingenious foreigner, who observed our manners attentively, to be the collection of those particles of mud and dust which are fine enough to elude the birchen brooms of the police, whose duty it is to cleanse the streets. There is more plausibility in this theory, as they are actually provided with a cloth train or skirt of various colors, which seems very well CHAPMAN. 161 adapted to this end. A city poet, remarkable fur the boldness of his metaphorical imagery, has given them the name of *' women," tliough from so nice an analogy as hitherto to have eluded my keenest researches. riiiLir. It must have been the same who gave the title of " full-dress " to the half-dress worn now by females of the better sort at parties, the sole object of which seems to be to prove the wearer's claim to rank with the genus mammifcrw. One-half of the human race, I see, is resolved to get rid of the most apparent token of our great ancestors' fall, and is rapidly receding to a paradisaical simplicity of vesture. Already have the shoulders emerged from their superstitious enthral- ment, and their bold example will no doubt be rapidly followed by equally spirited demonstrations from the rest of the body impolitic. For the sake of con- sistency, we must suppose that train-oil will soon elbow the ices from the supper-table. — But a truce to this cynical vein. It is, nevertheless, mournful, that women, who stint not in large assemblies to show that, to the eyes of strangers which the holy privacy of home is not deemed pure enough to look upon, would yet grow crimson with modest horror, through the whole vast extent of their uncovered superficies, if one but dared to call by its dear English name that which, in the loved one, is the type of all maidenhood and sweetest retirement, — in the wife, of all chastity and whitest thoughts, — and in the mother, of all that is most tender and bounteous. On such a bosom, me- thinks, a rose would wither, and the snowy petals of a 11 162 THIRD CONVERSATION. lily drop away in silent, sorrowful reproof. AVe have grown too polite for what is holiest, noblest, and kind- est in the social relations of life ; but, alas ! to blush, to conceal, to lie, to envy, to sneer, to be illiberal, — these trench not on the bounds of any modesty, human or divine. Yes, our English, which for centuries has been the mother-tongue of honest frankness, and the chosen phrase of freedom, is become so slavish and emasculate, that its glorious Bacons, Taylors, and Mil- tons would find their outspoken and erect natures inapt to walk in its fetters, golden, indeed, and of cunningest Paris workmanship, but whose galling the soul is not nice enough to discern from that of baser metal. The wild singing brook has been civilized; the graceful rudeness of its banks has been pared away to give place to smooth-clipped turf; the bright pebbles, which would not let it pass without tlie tribute of some new music, have been raked out ; and it has become a straight, sluggish canal. JOHN. Yes ; the language has certainly become more pol- ished, and necessarily so. What should you say to a naked Pict, in that famous contradictory costume of Sir Richard Blackmore's, in your drawing-room ? (By the way, I wonder that no critic has discovered that the dress alluded to was made of huWs hide.) Any writer muscular enough can bend the good old Ulys- ses'-bow of our language, and make it hurl its shafts with as sharp a twang as ever. It is not our speech that has grown cowardly and timeserving, but we our- selves ; and we have bribed the language to turn traitor CHAPMAN. 163 with us. Because we do not task it in that cause which is the holiest, because tlic Iminblest and weakest and most despised, of all that call Freedom mother, does it therefore refuse its ancient privilege of thunder to the lips of Phillips, or Douglass, or Burleigh, or Abby Kelly ? Let the mean apartments into which the church and the state have driven the apostles of that humanity which Christ preached and practised answer! Let the unchartered majesty of the blue heaven which has never forbid them the shelter of its soaring canopy, when the poor buildings of human hands have been scoffingly denied them, answer ! PHILIP. Nevertheless, you must allow that the language has lost much of its pristine lustiness, by the taint of Gal- licism which is more and more creeping over it. It has grown so polite and mincing, and in our brave old Saxon-sprung New England, too ! The homely names of man and woman, which sought sanctuary in the cot- tage and the farm-house, from the luxury, effeminacy, and vice of city and court, must now be driven thence also, and our very dairy-maids and ploughmen must be ladles and gentlemen. We may speak of these things as unconcerned spectators ab extra, being necessarily precluded from the privilege of one of these latter titles by virtue of our sex, and from the other by our Abolitionism. Perhaps we may ere long be taught to call our homes jjapa-land and mamma-count ri/, leaving the uncouth names of father and mother to such as are ignorant or gross enough to be natural. Let us forget that we ever so far yielded to the demoralizing tend- 164 THIRD CONVERSATION. ency of our baser natures as to have been suckled at our mother's breasts, (if we can do so, while the pres- ent fashion of feminine full-dress retains its sway,) and do penance in white kid gloves and French boots for the damnable heresy of our childhood, when we enter- tained a theory, unfounded as the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, that straightforward truth was respectable, and that women had other developments besides head and arms, our uninspired eyesight to the contrary not- withstanding ! JOHN. You are getting very merry, and very parenthetical, at the same time. Let the original topic of our con- versation now edge itself in, byway of parenthesis, and let me have a chance of judging for myself of the dig- nity of Chapman's ideas of women. PHILIP. I heartily thank you for distentangling me so adroitly. — Hear Chapman : — " Noble she is by birth made good by virtue ; Exceeding fair ; and her behavior to it Is like a singular musician To a sweet instrument, or else as doctrine Is to the soul, that puts it into act, And prints it full of admirable forms, Without which 't were an empty, idle flame ; Her eminent judgment to dispose these parts Sits on her brow and holds a silver sceptre, Wherewith she keeps time to the several musics Placed in the sacred concert of her beauties : Love's complete armory is managed in her CHAPMAN. 165 To stir affection, and the discipline To check and to affright it from attempting Any attaint might disproportion her, And make lier graces less than circular : Yet her even carriage is as far from coyness As from imiufidesty; in play, in dancing. In sutlbring courtship, in requiting kindness, In use of places, hours, and companies. Free as the sun, and nothing more corrupted ; As circumspect as Cynthia in her vows, As constant as the centre to observe them ; Ruthful and bounteous, never fierce nor dull. In all her courses ever at the full." Monsieur U Olive. I know what your thoughts are now. You are thinking that there is but one to whom the silver- flowing lines may be applied. You think that it is like the " mantle made amiss " of tlie old romance, which made itself too short for one and too long for another, and yet fitted itself to the shape of the true maiden like a bridal garment. JOHN. Nay, you have shot wide. There can be but one in whom each of us can trace the likeness of this rare portrait ; yet it would be doubting the good providence of God, to draw back our heads into the dull tortoise- shell of our selfish unbelief, and refuse to think that there are many such. It is only in love that the soul finds weather as summer-like as that of the clime whence it has been transplanted, and can put forth its blossoms and ripen its fruit without fear of nipping frosts. Never was falser doctrine preached than that love's chief delight and satisfaction lie in the pursuit 166 THIRD CONVERSATION. of its object, whicli won, the cliarm is already flutter- ing its wings to seek some fairer height. This is true only when love has been but one of tlie thousand vizards of selfishness, when we have loved ourselves in the beautiful spirit we have knelt to ; that is, when we have merely loved the delight Ave felt in loving. Then it is that the cup we so thirsted after tastes bitter or insipid, and we fling it down undruuk. Did we empty it, we should find that it was the poor muddy dregs of self at the bottom, which made our gorge rise. If it be God whom we love in loving our elected one, then shall the bright halo of her spirit expand itself over all existence, till every human face we look upon shall share in its transfiguration, and the old forgotten trace of brotherhood be lit up by it ; and our love, instead of pining discomforted, shall be lured upward and upward by low angelic voices, which recede before it for ever, as it mounts from brightening summit to summit on the delectable mountains of aspiration and resolve and deed. PHILIP. You are in the mood now to listen to some favorite passages of mine in one of Taylor's Sermons, in which is a sweet picture of the benign influence of piety in a woman. The extract from Chapman Avhich I last read always brings these into my mind. Let us open the grim-looking old folio once more; there is as much true poetry between its shabby covers as may be found anywhere out of Shakespeare. CIIAPMAX. 167 "I have seen a female religion tlmt wholly dwelt upon the face and tongue; that, like a wanton and inidrossed tree, spends all its juice in suckers and irregular l^ranclics, in leaves and gum, and, after all suciv goodly outsidos, you shall never eat an apple, nor Ije delighted with the beauties nor the perfumes of a hopeful blos- som. But the religion of this excellent lady was of another con- stitution. It took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial graces of a Christian ; in charity and justice; in chastity and modesty; in fair friendships and sweetness of society. She had not very much of the forms and outsidcs of godliness, but she was hugely careful for the power of it, for the moral, essential, and useful parts, such which would make her be, not seem to be, religious. . . . Tn all her religion, and in all her actions of relation toward God, she had a strange evenness and untroubled passage, sliding toward her ocean of God and of infinity with a certain and silent motion. So have I seen a river, deep and smooth, passing with a still foot and a sober face, and paying to the fiscns, the great exchequer, of the sea, the prince of all the watery bodies, a tribute large and full ; and hard by it a little l)rook, skipping and making a noise upon its unequal and neighbor bottom, and, after all its talking and bragged motion, it paid to its common audit no more than the revenues of a little cloud or a contemptible vessel. So have I sometimes compared the issues of her religion to the solemnities and famed outsides of another's piety. It dwelt upon her spirit and was incorporated with the periodical work of every day. . . . The other append- age of her religion, which also was a great ornament to all the parts of her life, was a rare modesty and humility of spirit, a con- fident undervaluing and despising of herself. For, though she had the greatest judgment and the greatest experience of things and persons, that I ever jet knew in a person of her youth and sex and circumstances; yet, as if she knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of herself, and, like a fair taper, when she shined to all the room, yet, round about her own station, she had cast a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but herself. . . . But, so it was that the thought of death dwelt long with her and grew, from the first steps of fancy and fear, to a consent, from thence to a strange credulity and expectation of it ; and, without the violence of sickness, she died, as if she had done it voluntarily and by design, and for fear her expectation should 168 THIRD CONVERSATION. have been deceived, or that she should seem to have had an un- reasonable fear or apprehension, or rather (as one said of Cato) she died as if she were glad of the opportunity." JOHN. Who was this sainted lady ? Such a sermon were almost worth dying for. PHILIP. Frances, Countess of Carberry. A Latin epitaph is prefixed to the sermon, doubtless written by Taylor himself. The first part of it is quite graceful, but it soon becomes anything but Ciceronian. Tlie great advantage of using Latin for such occasions is, that it operates in some measure as a check and curb upon the writer, and makes him dignified in spite of him- self; but when lie breaks free of all restraint, as here, the dead language is more intolerable than the living one. Perhaps another advantage of the Latin for this proverbial flattering kind of literature may be found in the fecundity of its superlatives, there being nothing in our own language that may claim comparison with its glib and liberal issimuses. — I do not know whether one little token of the care with Avhich Taylor regu- lated the golden balance of his periods has ever been noticed. I mean his frequent elision of the letter e in the termination ed, to prevent the reader from accent- ing it. In this he is always guided by so delicate an ear as stands him in stead of metrical rules. JOHN. It is certainly worth remarking. — By putting Taylor and Chapman together, we get such a picture as CHAPMAN. 169 realizes Wordsworth's conception of a perfect woman, such a one as we can love and feel that therein we arc made in God's image; such a one as makes love what it should be, venerable, reverend, not a thing to be lightly treated and i)ut on and off like a glove. PHILIP. Spenser had a noble idea of love : " For love is lord of truth and loyalty, Lifting himself out of the lowly dust, On golden plumes, up to the highest sky, Ahove the reach of loathly, sinful lust ; Such is the power of that sweet passion. That it all sordid baseness doth expel, And the refined soul doth newly fashion, Unto a fairer form." Hymn of Love. Having made an extract from him whom Milton calls " our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas," let me please myself still further by hang- ing a sketch of his beside the others, witli which it harmonizes fitly. He is speaking of a woman's mind : " There dwell sweet love and constant chastity, Unspotted ftiith, and comely womanhood, Eegard of honor, and mild modesty ; There virtue reigns as queen in loyal throne, And giveth laws alone, The which the base affections do obey. And yield their services unto her will ; Nor thought of thing uncomely ever may Thereto approach, to tempt her mind to ill." Epithalamion. 170 THIRD COXVERSATION. Now repeat to yourself what you remember of Ten- nyson's " Isabel," and your mind will be as full of silent silvery images as the heaven is of stars. JOHN. If women fulfilled truly their divine errand, there would be no need of reforming-societies. The memory of the eyes that hung over a ftian in in- fancy and childhood will haunt him through all his after life. If they were good and holy, they will cheer and encourage him in every noble deed, and shame him out of every meanness and compromise. PHILIP. In spite of the side-thrusts which you sometimes make at my Abolitionism, I am persuaded that you go as far as I do in that matter. I know your humor for appearing what you are not, in order, by opposi- tion, to draw out opinions upon the side which you really espouse. Such is your assumed liking for the artificial school of poetry. You are willing to assume any disguise in order to get into the enemy's camp, and, once there, like Alfred, you sing them a song that sends them all to their arms. A little while ago you spoke approvingly of Miss Kelly ; if I had done it, the Thersites-half of your nature would have been aroused at -a breath. Do you really love to hear a woman speak in public ? JOHN. "Why not as well as in private, or at all ? If any have aught worth hearing to say, let them say, it be CHAPMAN. 171 they men or women. Wc have moi-e tlian cnongli prating by those who have nothing to tell n^. I never heard that the Quaker women were the worse for preaching, or the men for listening to them. If we pardon such exhibitions as those of the dancing- females on the stage, surely our prudery need not bristle in such a hedgehog fashion, because a woman in the chaste garb of the Friends dares to plead in public for the downtrodden cause of justice and free- dom. Or perhaps it is more modest and maidenly for a woman to expose her body in public than her soul ? If we listen and applaud, while, as Coleridge says, " Heaves the proud harlot her distended breast, In intricacies of laborious song," must we esteem it derogatory to our sense of refine- ment to drink from the fresh brook of a true woman's voice, as it gushes up from a heart throbbing only with tenderness for our neighbor fallen among thieves ? Here in Massachusetts we burn Popish nunneries, but we maintain a whole system of Protestant ones. If a woman is to be an Amazon, all the cloisters in the world would not starve or compress her into a Cor- delia. There is no sex in noble thoughts, and deeds agreeing with them ; and such recruits do equally good service in the army of truth, whether they are brought in by women or men. Out on our Janus-faced virtue, with its one front looking smilingly to the stage, and its other with shame-shut eyes turned frowningly upon the Anti-slavery Convention ! If other reapers be wanting, let women go forth into the harvest-field of God and bind the ripe shocks of - grain : the com- tJNIVERBIIl ; 172 THIRD CONVERSATION. plexion of their souls shall not be tanned or weather- stained, for the sun that shines there only makes the fairer and Avhiter all that it looks upon. Whatever is in its place is in the highest place; whatever is right is graceful, noble, expedient; and the universal hiss of the world shall fall upon it as a benediction, and go up to the ear of God as the most moving prayer in its behalf. If a woman be truly chaste, that chastity shall surround her, in speaking to a public assembly, with a ring of protecting and rebuk- ing light, and make the exposed rostrum as private as an oratory ; if immodest, there is that in her which can turn the very house of God into a brothel. PHILIP. I shall not dispute the point with you. I love to hear the voices of women anywhere, but chiefly where truth is pleaded for ; they know a shorter way to the heart than those of men do. Chapman valued woman as highly as you do. Hear him. " Let no man value at a little price A virtuous woman's counsel ; her winged spirit Is feathered oftentimes with heavenly words, And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure ; The weaker body, still the stronger soul. O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife, Discreet and loving ! Not one gift on earth Makes a man's life so nighly bound to heaven. She gives him double forces to endure And to enjny, by being one with him, Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense ; And, like the twins Hippocrates reports. If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short ; CHAPMAN. 173 If he lament, she melts licrself in tears ; If he be glad, she triumphs ; if he stir, She moves his way ; And is in alterations passing strange ; Himself divinely varied without change. Gold is right precious, but his price infects With pride and avarice ; authority lifts Hats from men's heads and bows the strongest knees, Yet cannot bend in rule the weakest hearts; Music delights but one sense, and choice meats; One quickly fades, the others stir to sin ; — But a true wife both sense and soul delights, And mixeth not her good with any ill ; Her virtues, ruling hearts, all powers command; All store without her leaves a man but poor, And with her poverty is exceeding store ; No time is tedious with her ; her true worth Makes a true husband think his arms enfold (With her alone) a complete world of gold." Gentleman Usher. Here is something very beautiful : "Exceeding fair she was not, and yet fair In that she never studied to be fairer Than Nature meant her ; beauty cost her nothing." All Fools. Of love he says : " Love is nature's second sun, Causing a spring of virtues where he shines ; And as, without the sun, the world's great eye, All colors, beauties, both of art and nature. Are given in vain to men ; so, without love. All beauties bred in women are in vain. All virtues born in men lie buried ; For love infoi-ms us as the sun doth colors : And, as the sun, reflecting his warm beams Against the earth, begets all fruits and flowers. So loi:e,fair shining in the inward man. 174 THIRD CONVERSATION. Brings forth in him the honorable fruits Of valor, wit, virtue, and haughty thoughts, Brave resolution, and divine discourse." Ibid. JOHX. Yes ; and, wanting love, a man remains nailed to the dreadful cross of self without help or hope. I begin to feel that Chapman is truly a poet. A tricks- ter, a man who loves the art for the applause it wins him, or runs about seeking for Apollo's arrows because they are of gold, concentrates all our admiration upon himself; a true poet makes us forget himself, makes life and the whole human race grow more noble in our eyes. It is only when the instruments are poor and meagre or out of tune, that we think of them, and are conscious of aught but the music they give birth to, or the divine emotions that rise, like Venus, rosy and dripping, from its golden waves. PHILIP. Chapman's poetry abounds in striking aphorisms, which often serve to clench and rivet the sense ; but he is so fond of them, that he welds them on sometimes as if at random, or even sticks them lightly to the text with a frail wafer. In themselves, they -are always full of earnest sense and philosophy. Here are a few examples : " Time's golden tliigh Upholds the flowery body of the earth In sacred harmony, and every birth Of men and actions makes legitimate, Being used aright : the use of time is fate." . Hero and Leander. CHAPMAN. 175 " Custom, vhich the apoplexy is Of bedrid nature^ Ibid. " Who knows not Venus would seem as fair from any spot Of light demeanor, as the very skin 'Twixt Cynthia's brows ! Sin is ashamed of sin." Ibid. " Ah, nothing doth the world with mischiejfdl, Bat want of feeling one another's ill." " That which does good disgraceth no degree." Rid. Ibid. Before I shut '' Hero and Leauder," I will read you a few other passages, though in a wholly different vein, Tiiey show the author in his most graceful and amiable aspect. This is a pretty little rustic landscape : " A country virgin, keeping of a vine. Who did of hollow bulrushes combine Snares for the stubble-loving grasshopper ; And by her lay her scrip that nourished her. Within a myrtle-shade she sat and sung. And tufts of wavering reeds about her sprung, Where lurked two foxes, that, while she applied Her trifling snares, their thieveries did divide, One to the vine, another to her scrip That she did negligently overslip ; By which her fruitful vine and wholesome fare She let be spoiled to make a childish snare." After an unpropitious sacrifice, " Hero wept ; but her affrighted eyes She quickly wrested from the sacrifice, 176 THIRD CONVERSATION. Shut them, and inward for Leander looked, Searched her soft bosom, and from thence she plucked His lovely picture ; which when she had viewed, Her beauties were with all love's joys renewed ; The odors sweetened, and the fires burned clejir ; Leandei-'sform left no ill object there." This is beautiful, and ends with a fine truth : "Her chamber her cathedral-church should be. And her Leander her chief deity. For, in her love, these did the gods forego ; And, though her knowledge did not teach her so, Yet it did teach her this, that wliat her heart Did greatest hold ..... That she did make her god ; and 'twas less naught To leave gods in profession and in thought Than in her love and life ; for therein lie Most of jher duties and their dignity ; And, rati the brainbald world at what it will, Thais the grand atheism that reigns in it still ! " These two similes are very fresh : " His most kind sister all his secrets knew, And to her, singing, like a shoirer he flew." " Home to the mourning city they repair With news as u'holesome as the morning air." I must unwillingly lay down the little volume, and come back to glean a few more aphoristic sentences. " As the light Not only serves to show, but render us Mutually profitable, so our lives. In acts exemplary, not only win Ourselves good names, but do to others give Matter for virtuous deeds by which we live." lyAmbois. " Who to himself is law no law doth need, Offends no law, and is a king indeed." Jbid. CHAPMAN. 177 "Each natural agent works but to this end, To render that it works on like itself." Ibid. " He that observes but as a worldly man That which doth oft succeed, and by the events Values the worth of things, will think it true That Nature works at random : But, with as much proportion, she may make A thing that from the feet up to the throat Hath all the wondrous fabric man should have, And leave it headless, for a perfect man ; As give a full man valor, virtue, learning, "Without an end more excellent than those On whom she no such worthy parts bestows." Ibid. " Virtue is not malicious ; wrong done her Is righted ever, when men grant they err." Monsieur U Olive. " He is at no end of his actions blest, Whose ends will make him greatest and not best." Byron's Tragedy. Here is a flue metaphor : " Thy impartial words Are like brave falcons, that dare truss a fowl Much greater than themselves." D'Ambois. And this : "The chain-shot of thy lust is yet aloft. And it must murder." Ibid. And this " As night the life-inclining stars best shows, So lives obscOre the starriest souls disclose." Epilogue to Translations. 12 178 THIRD CONVERSATION. The passions he calls " Those base foes that insult on weakness, And still fight housed behind the shield of nature." lyAmbois. There is something grand and mysterious in this invocation of a spirit : " Terror of darkness ! O thou king of flames, That with thy music-footed horse dost strike The clear light out of crystal on dark earth, And hurl'st instructive fire about the world. Wake, wake the drowsy and enchanted night That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle ! O thou great prince of shades where never sun Sticks his far-darted beams, whose eyes are made To shine in darkness and see ever best Where men are blindest ! " Ibid. The vague terrors of guilt are thus graphically set forth: " O my dear servant, in thy close embraces / have set open all the doors of danger To my encompassed honor and my life ! Before, I was secure 'gainst death and hell. But now am subject to the heartless fear Of every shadow and of every breath. And would change firmness with an aspen leaf; So confident a spotless conscience is, So weak a guilty." Ibid. Chapman's self-reliant nature is continually peeping forth from under every mask it puts on : " When men fly the natural clime of truth. And turn themselves loose out of all the bounds Of justice and the straight way to their ends. Forsaking all the sure force in themselves, CHAPMAN. 179 To seek without them that wliich is not theirs, The forms of all their comforts are distracted." Byron's Tragedy. Pie thus gives us his notion of what a man sliould be: "Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind, Elven till his sail-5'ards tremble, his masts crack, And his rapt ship run on her sides so low. That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air. There is no danger to a man who knows What life and death are ; therms not any law HJxceeds his knowledge ; neither is it lauful That he shoidd stoop to any other law : He goes before them and commands them all, Who to himself is a law rational." Byron's Conspiracy. JOHN. Altogether noble ! The first few verses illustrate v\-ell the natural impetuosity which so much distin- guished Chapman's character, as I gather it from what you have read ; and the last six exhibit the philosophic 3;ravity and wisdom to which habits of reflection and the life of a scholar had tempered it. He must have been one of those incongruities we sometimes meet with; a man, calm and lofty in his theory, but velie- nient and fiery to excess in action, — whose very still- ness, like the sleep of the top, seems the result of intense motion. PHILIP. The same indomitable spirit shows itself in all Chap- man's characters. Even their humility is a kind of 180 THIRD CONVERSATION. repressed and concentrated pride. He makes the Duke de Byron say : " To fear a vio!ent good abuseth goodness ; 'T is immortality to die aspiring, As if a man were taken quick to heaven. What will not hold perfection, let it burst : What force hath any cannon, not being charged, Or being not discharged ? To have stufi' and form, And to lie idle, fearful, and unused. Nor form nor stuff shows. Happy Semele, That died, compressed with glory ! Happiness Denies comparison of less or more, And, not at most, is nothing. — Like the shaft, Shot at the sun by angry Hercules, And into shivers by the thunder broken, Will I be, if 1 burst; and in my heart This shall bewntten : ' Yet 't was high and right!' " JOHX. Chapman's pride has at least all the grandeur in it that pride can ever have ; but, at best, pride and weak- ness are Siamese twins, knit together by an indissol- uble hyphen. — What a gloriously exulting comparison is that of the shaft of Hercules ! The metre also seems to my ear very full and majestic. PHILIP. Even his devils are still Chapman. The Evil Spirit says to D'Ambois : " Why call'dst tliou me to this accursed light For these light purposes ? I am empei-or Of that inscrutable darkness where are hid All deepest truths and secrets never seen, CHAPMAN. 181 All which I know, and command legions Of knowing spirits can do more than these. Any of this mt/ guard that circle me In these blue Jives, from out of whose dim fumes Vast murmurs use to break; and, from these sounds, Articidar voices, can do ten parts more Than open such slight truths as you require." I know nothing in Marlow's mighty line grander han this. Ford's description of hell, though striking, eems too much like a bill of particulars, (if I remember t rightly,) and has a kind of ditto-ditto air, which ooks quite ordinary beside the mysterious and half- iidden grandeur of these verses. This is such a pict- ire as Fuseli would have painted.— Here is something n a softer key : " A man that only would uphold Man in his native noble.ss, from whose fall All our dissensions rise ; that in himself (Without these outivard badges of our frailty, Riches and honor) knows he comprehends Worth with the greatest. King had never borne Such boundless empire over other men, Had all maintained the spirit and state of D'Ambois; IS'or had the full, impartial hand of Nature, That all things gave in their original, Without these defuiite terms of mine and thine, Been turned unjustly to the hand of Fortune, Had all preserved her in her prime like D'Ambois; No envy, no disjunction, had dissolved Or plucked one stick out of the golden fagot In ii'hich the world of Saturn bound our lives, Had all been held together by the nerves, The genius, and the ingenious soul of D'Ambois." You have by this time got a very good idea of Chap- man's more prominent and worthy characteristics. 182 THIRD CONVERSATION. His comedies show hira to have been not altosrether devoid of hnmor, thongh he does not possess the faculty in that exuberance without which it has too much appar- ent machination to be interesting. Monsieur D'Olive is an amusing character, but his fun is chiefly traditional. There is one interesting point in Chapman's comedies, and that is, a trace, discernible here and there, of his admiration for Shakespeare, showing itself in a word or turn of expression suggested by him. There are several examples in his tragedies, too, some of which are remarkable. I confess I love Chapman the better for it. — I must give you one more example of his fine poetic instinct. Just before a ghost appears to D'Am- bois, he says : " What violent heat is this? Methinks the fire Of twenty lives doth, on a sudden, flash Through all my Jacxdties : the air goes high In this close chamber, and the frighted earth Trembles and shrinks beneath me." This is excellent. — It would be unfair not to show you the enthusiastic love which Chapman felt for our native language, hallowed, as it has been, by the use of the noblest poets that ever dignified the earth. In his address to the reader, prefatory to his translation of the Iliad, he says : " And for our tongue, that still is .ly, be ranked side by side with tliat of a Pawnee brave, which should rush whooping in with its ccpially civilized recommendations in the shape of a string of scalps? It is lucky that we are not taxed to believe the stories which epitaphs tell us, or we should be in despair of the world, thinking that all the good and great had gone out of it. But whither have I wan- dered in the grave-yard? PHILIP. We have not got Chapman's hero thither yet. Let us hear the last : " O frail condition of strength, valor, virtue, In me (like -warning-fire upon the top Of some steep beacon on a steeper hill) Made to express it ! like a falling star. Silently glanced, that, like a thunderbolt. Looked to have struck and shook the firmament ! " We see that the " equal thought " which he imag- ined that he bore of life or death, in the moment of inspiring exultation at the idea of dying more impe- rially than an emperor, breaks under him as the earth crumbles away beneath his feet. This must neces- sarilv be the case with all greatness whose sustenance is drawn from the things of this world. It is but a poor weed, which may grow up, in that loose, rich soil, in a single night, to wilt and wither as soon. After all, the great secret is, to learn how little the world is, while we are yet living in it. It is no hard lesson after we are removed from it, and it looks but like a grain 188 THIRD CONVERSATION. of dim gold-dust in the infinite distance. Every day of our lives we jostle carelessly by a thousand human souls, each one of which is greater and more substantial than this tiny cockleshell of a planet, in which we cruise so securely through the shoreless ocean of space, one larger ripple of which would sink it for ever. And yet we build monuments and scratch inscriptions upon its thin deck, and garner stores in its slender-ribbed hold, as for an eternal voyage ; and shout our nothings into the tired ear of the great Silence round about us, as if our jackstraw controversies were worth breaking its august slumbers with. /' JOHN. A morality whose strict application would put an end to our conversations for the future. But I am not so easily silenced. — To all men the moment of death is one of inspiration ; a feeling of sublimity must enlarge the heart and deepen the utterance of the meanest, as earth swims away from under, and leaves him alone, on his new-born wings, in the great void infinite. It were harder, I imagine, to talk basely than nobly, when the soul is waitins; but for her orreen and callow pinions to toughen, and already forecasts her majestic flight. There are souls whose chrysalides seem to have burst and their wings to have expanded in this life, so that they can at any time lift themselves to that clear- aired point of vantage to which death only raises the vulgar ; souls, whose flesh seems to have been given them but to make them capable of action while they are the ministers of God's providence to their brothers upon earth. CHAPMAN. 189 PHILIP. But Chapman does uot seeiu to have been one of these " world's high-priests who do present The sacrifice for all," as George Herbert calls them. He was one of those impulsive natures, the fruit of whose age is nowise answerable to the abundant blossoming of their youth ; who expend, in a few dazzling flashes, that electricity, which, if equally dispersed and circulated, might have made part of the world's healthful atmosphere. Such men must feel, in dying, that their lives have been incomplete, and must taste the overwhelming bitter- ness of knowing that might have been can bear but a moment's semblance of was, from which it dif- fers as much as the silent streak of a meteor from the perfect circling and fulfilment of a peaceful star. He knew not how, in the words of his brother dramatist, Ford, "to glorify his greatness with humility" ; a plant, which, lowly and despised of men, roots itself in eternity, and grows to be the lofty and unrivable trunk of secure self-sustain ment ; while pride can never spring in any soil less gross than that of earth. Yet Chapman was cast in a huge mould ; there was stuff enough in him to have made some half a dozen mod- ern poets, and the parings might have been kneaded into a novelist or two. JOHN. That is not like you. It is a mean and fugitive 190 THIRD CONVERSATION. philosopliy, that would hush its conscience by pretend- ing to believe that only the scum and lees of time are left to us. Is not AVordsworth a modern poet ? Put such a brain as Chapman's inside of Wordsworth's skull, and it would have as much room as a mouse in the cave of Kentucky ; it would be awed alike by the brooding silence and the gigantic whispers, and would creep into a dark corner to hide itself. Chapman's rude and angry hand would have shivered the tiiou- sand delicate strings of that wondrous lyre of Rydal, — ■ so sensitive, that even the light fingers of the sunshine can make it tremble ; and which has a string to answer all sounds in nature, from the murmur of the breeze and the brook, up to the confused moan of humanity, with melody or pathos more ravishing than their own. No ; the strength of our old poets lay in their uncon- scious independence. Now, most volumes of poems have a clipped and suppressed look ; and if there be any freedom about them, it has a deprecatory and beseeching air, as if it would say, like one of our gov- ernor's proclamations, " With the advice and consent of the Council." Or if they assume an independent bearing, there seems to be a consciousness and determi- nation about it, which robs it of its dignity and de- grades it into a swaggering strut. I dare not say that Wordsworth has not sometimes been guihy of this ; that he has not sometimes preferred an unconsciousness (if I may speak so contradictorily) of his own contriv- ing, to that entire unconditional surrender of himself which the INIuse demands. The oracular voices of the deep shun him who follows them for the mere sake of being the depositary and organ of their secrets ; as he CHAPMAN. 191 pursues, they fly before him, and leave hira to be de- ceived by mocking intelligences which he mistakes for theirs ; — but they throng around him whose only prayer has been for a humble, self-forgetting heart; him who has wrestled in tearful, mad agony with the deceitful pride of intellect, and attained at last to that serene heio;ht of humbleness whence all the kino^doms of this world maybe seen and rejected, and which give all the glory to God. ]\ly heart is sick, when I behold the gallant vessels and richdaden argosies which have left port with confident cheers and hopes of the multitude, to make shipwreck at last, and strew their wasted freight upon the bleak strand of Ambition ! PHILIP. I believe you are right, when you say that the fault of our modern poets lies in their want of independence and unconsciousness. But how can this be otherwise, when criticism has become so personal a matter, — when the critic writes always as a friend or enemy, not of the book or its principles, but of the author ? How can Poesy look or feel unconcerned, when Criticism is con- tinually opening the door of her dressing-closet, or at least keeping her sedulous eye at the key-hole ? But, surely, the modern Engllsli dramatists are the least unconscious of mortals. They own certain qualities of mind among them in common, like stage-properties. Their whole life as authors seems to consist in playing off a farce in Avhich all the Elizabethan dramatists are pereonated in turn. Each selects his character, and is thereafter recognized by the rest only in that assumed garb. Mr. Jenkins has all the tenderness of Ford, 192 THIRD CONVERSATION. Mr. Tompkins has more than the imagination of Web- ster, and Mr. Simpkins unites the fire of Marlowe with the sound sense of Massinger. This is all very fine, and affords the world matter for a laugh ; but it is quite idle for them to try to drive life into their dead forms by touching them to the bones of those old buried prophets. There are men among them who would write better plays than Ford or Massinger, if they could only forget for a day or two that Ford and Massinger ever lived. If Shakespeare had striven only to emulate " Gorboduc," we should never have heard of him. What free motion can we expect to see in a man who carries about with him, wherever he goes, a pair of funeral urns, one upon each arm ? If I want an old dramatist, I have only to turn to my shelves and invite myself to be of his company, sure of an honest welcome ; but I do not like to find him stand- ing, scrimped up as small as possible in order to escape notice, behind the side-scenes in a modern play, where I must stumble over his toes at every turn. There are characters in the British drama, which seem to possess the longevity of the Wandering Jew, and the pertina- cious vitality of the clown in a pantomime. After beholding them, not without secret satisfaction, killed in the massacre of the innocents at the end of one tra- gedy, they suddenly revive in tlie middle of another, looking as indifferent as if nothing special had hap- pened ; and, to increase the wonder, they commonly appear, like the posthumous heroes of a wax-collection, in the identical clothes they had on when they were mur- dered. Practice lias made them perfect in this strange accomplishment; they have died so often as to make CHAPMAX. 193 nothing of it. I have asked my legal friends if some process might not be sued out to keep them dead ; but the weak point in the case seems to lie in the want of evidence of any contract on their part to that eifect. Hermippus might have learned of them the cheapest method of prolonging life. Jones, who mimics the crowing of a cock so well, suspected a trick. From a certain tenuity in their discourse, he surmised that they were not really living characters, but only the ghosts of such ; and accordingly, on an evening when he knew that one of them was to appear, stationed himself in the gallery, where zoological imitations and improvisa- tions are allowed, to try the effect of the ancient spe- cific for putting such vermin to flight. As soon as the thing appeared upon the stage, our friend crowed, as he avers, with even more than his usual precision ; but it remained entirely unmoved, and was soon after run through the heart, — to arise again, doubtless, at the nex^ blast of the scene-shifter's whistle. Jones con- siders this as conclusive for the bodily-existence theoiy ; but without any impugnment of his extraordinary powers of imitation, it may be conjectured that the phenomenon (if a ghost) understood the hoax and despised it. I think a real chanticleer should be tried, as that would leave no reasonable doubt. JOHX. You have had a long chase after your butterfly. Have you nothing more to read me from Chapman? PHILIP. I will only take leave of him in his own noble words : 13 194 THIRD CONVERSATION. " Farewell, brave relics of a complete man ! Look up and see thy spirit made a star, . . . gnd, when thou sett'st Thy radiant forehead in the firmament. Make the vast crystal crack witli thy receipt ; Spread to a world of fire, and the aged sky Cheer with new sparks of old Humanity I" \ FOURTH CONVERSATION. THE OLD DRAMATISTS. JOHN. I HAVE always thought that our own history sup- plied many fine plots for tragedy. Hawthorne and Wliittier have both drawn upon the persecutions of the early Quakers in New England for subjects. The Salem witch-mania would afford many striking situ- ations. Our good Pilgrim ancestors thought that religion could not see to pick her steps without light now and then from a bonfire of heretics. Perhaps our dramatists may find their account in it. King Philip, and Tecumseh, and Osceola would make good heroes ; so would the martyr Lovejoy. The institu- tion of slavery, too, horrible as it is, might give us some materials. But I suppose our refined democracy would not allow another Othello upon the stage. The rudeness of the age in which Shakespeare lived will excuse his want of delicacy ; but in an American, and in the nineteenth century, it would be atrocious not to believe in the cutaneous aristocracy of the feelings. PHILIP. No doubt, our poets may find proper subjects, without going out of their own geographical terri- 195 196 FOURTH CONVERSATIOX. tories; but I would not imprison tliem within those. What has poetry to do with space and time? Past and future are to her but arcs of one horizon, whose centre is the living heart. Yet how much cant do we hear about a national literature ! Let a man make a Pequod or a Cherokee bemoan himself through some dozen or more stanzas in such a style as neither of them ever dreamed of; let him invent a new rhyme for Huron, or a new epithet for Niagara, and he has done something national. "What have we to do with a dance of savages more than with one of dervishes, or that of the planets which Pythagoras fancied? Our notion of an Indian is about as true as that which the Europeans have of us. In all the situations which are proper to poetry one man will feel precisely like another; and to the poet it is quite indiiferent whether his scene be in Congo or Massachusetts, unless, indeed, he be not strong enough to walk firmly without the external support of old associations or magnificent ones. Au Indian, whose child dies, mourns the loss of one who would have been a great brave and an expert hunter; a tradesman in the same case laments that of a lineal successor behind the counter. Where is the difference in the feeling? Yet, in writing about the first, one would be bolstered lip with rocks, woods, rivers, lakes, wigwams, scalping- parties, and the whole machinery of savage life, — things merely extraneous and cumbrous, and not at all belonging to the bare feeling one is trying to repro- duce. It is merely because of our arbitrary and un- natural associations with different callings or modes of life, — associations unworthy of men, much more, then, \ THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 197 unworthy of poets, — that avg esteem the savngo more picturesque (or whatever you choose to call it) than the tradesman. In all the feelings with which Poesy concerns herself, the latter may be, and ought to be, superior. The savage has had, it is true, the limbs of the oak-tree for his cradle ; the primeval forest and the lonely prairie have been his playmates and nurses; the sky, the waterfall, the thunder, the stars, the legends of his forefathers, these have been his letters and his poetry. But the other, if he has not been dandled by the forest Titan, has had the nobler tutelage of a mother's arms ; nature denies herself to him no more than to his savage brother ; the stars, and the forest, and the waterfall have their secrets for him as well ; and in books he can converse with yet higher company, the ever-living spirits of the brave and wise. Methinks the account between the two is well balanced, or, if not, that the debit is on the side of him whom we idly call the child of nature, as if we dwellers in cities were but her foster-sons. — A man is neither moi'e nor less a poet because he chooses one subject or another. Did not the cast-away shell of a tortoise become Apollo's lute? .JOHX. Yes, but it was the shell of a large one; a mud- turtle's Avould not have served his turn as well. Time and place are of no consequence to a poet ; but his eye should be as poetical in choosing a subject, as after- wards in detecting its nice relations and its happy aspects. He shoilld avoid awakening a predisposed sense of the ludicrous in his readers. No man admires 198 FOURTH CONVERSATION. " The Excursion " more than I ; to none has it givfen a truer comfort ; yet I never think of its hero as a pedler. Costume is not to be despised. Heroines, you know, according to Mr. PufF, cannot go safely mad but in white satin. PHILIP. We should only think of the pedler as a man, with- out regard to the petty accidents of outward circum- stance. The heart is the same in all ; else were the poet's power of enchantment gone for ever. The soul is indifferent what garment she wears, or of what color and texture ; the true king is not unkinged by being discrowned. JOHN. Rather made more truly so. But Wordsworth's pedler, with the soul he had, would have been Words- worth, and an act of parliament could not have made a pedler of him. As the pedler-element is not pre- dominant in him, there was no necessity for making liim one ; for it is exactly in proportion as any element of character is predominant that it is poetical. Shakes- peare's Autolycus is a true pedler; yet his character is as ideal as that of Hamlet, only not in the same kind. The manufacturer's heart becomes poetical, when he looks upon Niagara as a mill-privilege. The whole drama of the factory, with the strange hum of its inanimate engines and the stranger silence of its living ones, the unresting toil of its Titan wheels, that turn with gigantic sluggishness to their task in the gloomy prisons below, is acted over in his mind. The mauufacturinc; nature in liim is what makes him a THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 199 poet, and it is in this light that he presents a poetic pliase. AV'oi'dsworth's syllogism is logically defective. It does not follow, because the poetical faculty or sense is independent of circumstances, that a pcdlcr must be a poet. It would be as reasonable to say that a poet must be a pcdler. True, a pedler must be a poet to a certain degree; every man must; but it is only to the degree of having the poetic sense. When he possesses the faculty^ he will be pedler no longer. PHILIP. Perhaps you are right in an artistic point of view ; but I will not quarrel with my ambrosia because it comes to me in an earthen vessel ; its fragrance and its gift of immortalizing are the same as if it were sent in Jove's own beaker. It is possible that Words- worth might have illustrated his noble theory more logically, if he had made his hero rise out of his low estate to the higher one of a poet; if, as Willis has exquisitely expressed it in one of his dramas, (perhaps the best in their kind since Fletcher,) he had made him " By force, of heart, And eagerness for light, grow tall and fair." But why need we consider the pedler in " The Ex- cursion " as anything more than the mouthpiece of Wordsworth himself? He might, as you admit, have possessed the poetic sense as well, being a pedler, as in any other condition of life ; and Wordsworth has only put himself in his place, and endowed his dumb images with his own poetic faculty of speech. The mind that flies high enough cannot see the pigmy dis- 200 FOURTH CONVERSATION. tinctions which we make between different professions ; from a true elevation all look of equal height. Milton was a schoolmaster, and might have been a cobbler, like Jacob Behmen, without derogation to his dignity. JOHN. Not till he had ceased to be Milton. Behmen mended shoes, and Bunyan soldered pans, only so long as they were not yet waited upon by troops of winged visions. If Milton had stitched and patched as Avell as he built immortal rhyme, he would have deserved equal honor for his fidelity in that humbler duty ; but such honor had been husks and chaff to him, if he must meanwhile refuse to bear the heavenly message which had been intrusted to him. The lark rises from a lowly clod of earth, but he bears it not with him to the eaves of heaven. Whatever a man's in- ward calling is, that will have undivided possession of him, or no share at all in him. If a thought or -wish stray from its entire fealty and surrenderment to that divine presence in him, his vision of it becomes straightway clouded; its oracles become indistinct to his ear; and his utterance of them unintelligible, or but faint reminiscence, instead of obedient and literal report. A virtue goes away from him, whenever any other desire touches but the hem of his mantle. That alone must be the Egeria of the restless fountain of his heart, to which he turns, in solitude and silence, for wisdom and for consolement. True it is that any worldly avocation that may further him in the service , of this miraculous intelligence, whicli has conde- scended to make him its slave, becomes not only THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 201 tolerable, but holy. If Milton must get bread to keep the spirit in him till it have uttered itself, would not every poor crust, though earned by the meanest employment, have a flavor and fragrance of Eden in it? "His humblest duties that hath clad with wings." If this Wordsworthian pedler had been the man his speech betrays him for. Me should not have first heard of him from under the laurels of Royal Mount. After once becoming 'aware of those strong wings of his, after once balancing himself upon them in the illimitable air of song, he would never have borne pack and measured tape again. As soon might you entice the butterfly back into his old hovel in the dingy grub, after he had tasted all those nectarous delights which Spenser so lusciously describes in his " Muiopot- mos." If he had looked on nature with a pedler's eye, the character would have been well enough ; but he was all poet. — We have talked about this longer than was necessary. Vsq do not agree, nor should we be pleasant companions if we did. This would be a dull world indeed, if all our opinions must bevel to one standard ; when all our hearts do, we shall see blue sky, and not sooner. PHILIP. A part, certainly, of what you have said jumps with my opinions precisely. It is true that every man has his infallible and inexorable monitor within, — a conscience that forewarns, as well as one that reproves ; and it were hard to tell which wields the sharper lash. 202 FOURTH CONVERSATION. Nature throws the tools of whatever art she destines a select soul for invitingly in his way. The burnt stick from the hearth must be the pencil, and the wall the canvas, for the future painter. There must be a linkboy wanted at " the Globe," when the young Shakespeare runs away to London. Somehow or other, there chances to be a clay-pit or a pottery near the birthplace of the young sculptor ; and wherever a poet or a musician is born, there will be an odd volume of Spenser, or a cracked spinnet, in the house. There is something more than a mere predisposition in the soul of a great genius, (if, without offence, we may guess at these cryptic mysteries,) which compels him into the path lie must tread. If he deny and frustrate it, the whole face of nature looks at him sor- rowfully and with a tender yet half-contemptuous reproach. He cannot cast away from him this badge of the friendship of the supernal powers ; if he try, it is brought back to him next day, like the ring of Polycrates. " Here stand I : I cannot help it" says stout Martin Luther, almost regretfully, exiled from his quiet convent-cell by this superior wall. Is not this the meaning of having a genius, — an expression of a truth which has had all its sharp edges worn off and has become a mere phrase, in coming down to us from the simpler and more inseeing day wdien it was invented ? — The supernatural calling carries a pain with it, too. The ancients were wont to say that he who saw a god must die. Perhaps this only meant that he who has gazed deepest into the vast mysteries of being, and held closest converse with the Eternal Love, is overpowered by the yearning and necessity to THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 203 speak that which can never be wholly spoken, and wliich yet seems ever hovering in fiery words upon the tongue. The music of the mighty universe crowds through the slender reed, and shatters it with the very excess of quivering melody. JOHN. Certain it is, that without this law of genius, which compels it to utter itself as it best may, very few great words have been spoken or great deeds done. Every great man is more or less tinged with what the world calls fanaticism. Fanaticism, in its ill sense, is that which makes a man blind to perceive the falseness of an error ; the fanaticism of genius will not let him be persuaded that there is any lie in truth. The disbe- lief of the whole world cannot shake his faith that he is God's messenger, which upbears him as upon the Rock of Ages. He knows that the whole power of God is behind him, as the drop of water in the little creek feels that it is moved onward by the whole weight of the rising ocean. Unsupported by any of earth's customs or conventions, he learns to lean wholly on the Infinite. The seal of God's commission is set within, and has no ribbons about it to make it respect- able in the eyes of the many. Most men are fearful of visitings from the other world, and, set on by those whose interest lies mainly in this, they look with dis- trust, and often with ignorant hate, on him who con- verses with spirits. PHILIP. Yes, men always deny the messenger of God at 204 FOURTH CONVERSATION. first. The spiritual eye, like that of the body, until taught by experience, sees objects reversed, and makes that seemingly come from hell, which has in truth but just descended, warm and fragrant, from the heart of God. But Time can never put Eternity off more than a day ; swift and strong comes the fair to-morrow, and with it that clearer perception of the beautiful, which sets another fixed star in the bright coronet of Truth. JOHN. But when the world is at last forced to believe the message, it despitefully entreats the bearer of it. In most cases men do not recognize him, till the disguise of flesh has fallen off, and the white wings of the angel are seen glancing in the full sunshine of that peace, back into whose welcoming bosom their flight is turned. If they recognize him earlier, it is with a scurvy grace. Knowing that hunger is the best taskmaster for the body, and always using to measure spirit by the laws of matter, they conclude that it must be the sharpest spur for the soul also. They hold up a morsel of bread, as boys do to their dogs, and tell the prophet to speak for it. They know that he has a secret to tell them, and think they can starve it out of him, as if .it were an evil demon. PHILIP. It is true enough that hunger is the best urger of the soul ; but it is the hunger, not of the body, but of the soul, — which is love. A state of rest and quietude in the body is the most conformable to the happiness and serenity, and so to the undisturbed utterance, of THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 205 the soul. Love, which is its appetite, quickcus tlie soul of tlie seer, " And then, even of itself, it high doth climb ; What erst was dark becomes all eye, all sight," as Dr. Henry More i)hrases it. The distracting cares and dunnings of want are not the best nurses of genius; it has self-dependence enough without their prompting. It may take other sorrows and thank God for them, for sorrow alone can unlock the dwelling of the deeper heavenly instincts; but there is bitter enough in its cup, always, without the world's squeezing its spare drops of rue in. JOHN. Perhaps actual want may be inconsistent with that serenity of mind which is needful to the highest and noblest exercise of the creative power ; but I am not ready to allow that poverty is so. Few can dignify it like our so admirable prose-poet, whose tales are an honor even to the illustrious language they are written in ; few can draw such rich revenues of wise humble- ness from it as our beloved R. C. ; few can win a smile from it by his Lambish humor, and that generous courtesy which transmutes his four-pence into a bank- note in the beggar's eyes, like S. ; but there is none for whom it has not some kind lesson. Poverty is a rare mistress for the poet. She alone can teach him what a cheap thing delight is; to be had of every man, woman, and child he meets ; to be gathered from every tree, shrub, and flower ; nay, to be bought of the surly northwestern wind himself, by the easily-paid instal- 206 FOURTH CONVERSATION. ments of a cheerful, unhaggling spirit. Who knows the true taste of buus, but the boy who receives the annual godsend of one with Election-day? Who ever really went to the theatre, but Kit Nubbles? Who feels what a fireside is, but the little desolate bare- footed Euths, who glean the broken laths and waste splinters after the carpenters have had a full harvest ? Who believes that his cup is overflowing, but he who has rarely seen anything but the dry bottom of it ? Poverty is the only seasoner of felicity. Except she be the cook, the bread is sour and heavy, and the joint tough or overdone. As brisk exercise is the cheapest and warmest overcoat for the body, so is poverty for the heart. But it must be independent, and not of Panurge's mind, — that to owe is a heroic virtue. Debt is like an ingenious mechanical executioner I have read of somewhere, which presented the image of a fair woman standing upon a pedestal of three steps. When the victim mounted the first, she opened her arms ; at the second, she began to close them slowly around him ; and at the third, she locked him in her iron embrace for ever. On the other hand, however, poverty has its bad side. Poverty in one hour's time shall transport a man from the warm and fruitful climate of sworn brotherhood with the world into the bare, bleak, desert, and polar ice-field of distant country-cousinship ; and the world's whole duty of man towards him becomes on a sudden the necessity of staving off asking him to dinner. Then, for the first time, he gets an insight into the efficacy of buttons, and discovers, to his great surprise, that the world has one at each pocket. THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 207 This gives liini au excellent hint for a sonnet to a bnt- ton, comparing- it to the dragon of the Hesperides, in wliich he gets no farther than tlie cud of the second quatrain, finding it impossible (o think of any body or anything analogous to Hercules in his victory over the monster. Besides, he now learns that there are no golden apples to be guarded, the world assuring him on its honor that it has enormous sums to ])ay and not a cent to meet them with. lu a fit of inspired despair he writes an elegy, for the first two stanzas of which (having learned economy) he uses up the two quatrains already adjusted for his sonnet. By employing the extremely simple process of deduction invented by the modern expounders of old myths, he finds that Her- cules and O'jTc^ are identical, and that the same word in the Syro-Phoenician language imports a dragon and a button. The rest of the elegy is made easy by merely assuming the other steps of the proposition, as every expounder of old myths has a clear right to do, by a rule of logic founded on the usage of the best writers in that department. He therefore considers the heart in the poetical light of a pocket or garden of Hesper- ides, buttoned'up tight against all intruders. As Scrip- ture is always popular, he ends by comparing it also to that box Avhich Jehoiada set at the gate of the Temple, which had a hole in the top ample enough to admit the largest coins, though you might shake till you were tired without getting the smallest one out of it. Having now commenced author, we may as w'ell leave him ; for, at that lowest ebb of fortune, the bare, muddy fiats of poverty lie exposed, and the tide must soon turn again. 208 FOVRTH CONVERSATIOX. PHILIP. That poverty may be of use to the poet, as you have said, may be granted, without allowing that it must come to the actual pinch and gripe of want with him. The man of genius surely needs it not as a spur, for his calling haunts him from childhood up. He knows that he has that to say that will make the great heart of the universe beat with a more joyous peacefulness and an evener motion. As he grows to man's estate, the sense of a duty imposed on him by nature, and of a necessary obedience to heavenly mes- sengers, which the world neither sees nor acknow- ledges, grows stronger and stronger. Tlie exceeding brio-htness of his countenance weaves a crown around his head out of the thick air of earth; but earthlings cannot see it. He tells his errand, and the world turns its hard ftice upon him and says, " Thou art a drone in my busy hive; why doest thou not some- thing?" Alas! when the winter season comes, the world will find that he had been storing honey for it from heavenly flowers, for the famishing heart to feed upon. He must elbow through the dust and throng of the market, when he should be listening to the still, small voice of God ; he must blaspheme his high nature, and harden his heart to a touchstone to ring- gold upon, when it is bursting M'ith the unutterable agony of a heavenly errand neglected, — that bittei'est feeling of having " once had wings." Tlie world has at last acknowledged his sovereignty, and crowned him with a crown of thorns. Thomson, in one of his letters, says : THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 209 "The great fat doctor of Bath told me that poets should be kept poor, tlie more to animate their genius. This is like the cruel custom of patting a bird's eyes out, that it may sing the sweeter." The world plays the great fat doctor very well. Milton tells us that "Fame is the spur whieh the clear spirit doth raise To scorn delights and live laborious days ;" but the greater part of mankind, having more sym- pathy with the body than with its heavenly tenant, seem to derive the word fame from the I^atin fames. They would have the alleged temperate habits of the chameleon held up to poets, as that of the busy bee is to good little Jaekies and Tommies. But it may well be doubted whether a forced Pythagoreanism would lead to the same happy results as a willing one. The system has, moreover, been often exaggerated into the lameutablest fanaticism. A contempt of the body has been gradually engendered in the soul, whieh has sometimes overpersuaded her to break her M-ay out, as in Chatterton, — or to carry her zeal to the extent of not eating at all, and so forcing the spirit by slowly •wasting away the flesh, as in Otway and others. This species of devotion, moreover, seems to meet with the hearty approbation of the reading public, who usually commemorate such by the rather incongruous ceremony of placing a huge monument to mark the resting-place of that very body whose entire subjection by sudden conquest or gradual overthrow they had regarded with so much satisfaction. In England, men of this pro- fession seem to be erected into a distinct caste or sruild, 14 210 FOURTH CONVERSATION. and the practice of its mysteries is restrained by statute to geniuses and operatives ; for an unprincipled vagrant named Cavanagh was sentenced, a few years ago, to tlie treadmill, for pretending to live without eating, he having no license so to do. JOHN. Mr. Putnam, in his late oration, made himself merry over the complainings of genius ] and the com- fortable audience laughed pleasantly as he told genius to take its lazy hands out of its pockets and go to work. " Do the duty that lies nearest thee," said he, enlisting Goethe's brave word for the occasion, but forcing it to a new service. Nothing is so apt to lead men astray as their sense of the ludicrous ; no kindly feeling is so apt to make them say harsh things. To judge by the fine face of the orator, none would have been readier than he to have dropped a quiet drachma into the hat of the blind old Maeonides, or to have thought a song of his too ample payment for a week's lodging. It has not been the men of genius who. have whined and whimpered ; it has been those 'who have mistaken their own vague longings and pitiful ambitions for the summonses of the true voice,. Genius locks its sorrows in its own invincible heart; from those awful deeps a moan may sometimes wander, but no complaint ; the voice may become sadder and the face more care-worn, but that noble pity is not for jtself ; — it is because of the adder-deafness which seals the ears of the world against the entrance of the eternal melodies of which it believes itself the instru- ment ; its lips are ever THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 211 " As Cumjie's cavern close, Its cheeks with fast and sorrow thin, Its rigid front almost morose, But for the patient hope within." * PHILIP. Mr. Putnam forgot that the duty which lies nearest a man of genius is to be a man of genius ; and it is a duty which no one else can perform for him. That is the first duty ; after tliat is well done, he may think of other subordinate ones. God did not lay it upon him that it might starve or isolate him. Wliatev^er idiosyncrasies he endows his creatures w'ith, he intends them as the tools for them to earn their bread. The same wings on which the bobolink hangs vibrating, rapturous with song, bear it also in search of the grub and the rice-field ; the same structure Avhicli gives tlie swan his frigate-like majesty upon the water enables it also to pursue and secure its food. The world owes all created beings a living, not in return for any per- formance it has laid upon them, but for doing what they are intended and foreordained to do. The man of genius has an injunction laid upon him to fulfil a cer- tain destiny ; if he neglect it, bread will not quench his hunger nor water his thirst; he is wholly cut off from the great catholic communion of nature ; if he obey it, there seems to be no such thing as starving *From a fine poem "On the Bust of Dante," (its metre as severe, and its images as stern and siiarp-cnt, as the lines in the bust it commemorates,) prefixed by T. W. Parsons, one of our most truly classic and delightful poets, to his translation of the first ten cantos of the " Inferno." It is to be hoped, for the honor of our literature, that the translator may be encouraged to proceed in his excellent undertaking." 212 FOURTH CONVERSATION. him till it be accomplished. The poet will and must sing, in spite of want or any other misery ; but we know not how much sweeter and clearer liis voice would have been but for these. The infinite beauty and harmony Avhich he sees and heai-s force him to give vent to the glorious agony which swells his breast : "The sweetness liatli his heart ynierced so, He cannot stint of singing by tlie way." He has no choice in the matter; the crown will find out David while he tends his flocks; the javelin hurled at him will quiver harmless in the wall. There is such a thing as peculiarity of temperament, and you shall not find one of the thousand crafts in which men are employed but has one of its own. How came Mr. Putnaiu to be delivering that very oration ? JOHN. I will propose to you another question equally easy of solution. How comes it that Italians have a patent-right to suffer by convulsions of nature? Yet such is the fact. Let there be an eruption of Cotopaxi or Hecla, let the cartii turn in its sleep and shake itself in the Society Islands, and in less than a week an Italian shall thrust into your hand a certificate, properly authenticated, that he has lost his all by one of them. How does it chance, also, that these true pensioners of nature (for they undoubtedly get a living that way, benevolence serving as a kind of in- surance-policy) have always large families of children ? You speak of nature's j)rovidence in her endowment THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 213 of the bobolink and llic swan ; bnt what is it In com- parison with the forcthouglit she oni[)Ioys to the iiir- iiishnient of these? An ernption is a year's snp|)()rt to them; an carlhqnakc more destructive than common is a life-annuity. Whenever she is about to toucii a match to one of her underground magazines, she sets them down just over it ; she saves them from the destructive wrath of the explosion, and then supplies them with some means of locomotion to the abodes of the charitable which transcends any swiftness of man's device. Before the news of the catastrophe, they are at our doors. This peculiar gift of that nation may pcrhai)s be yet turned to account in the forwarding of despatciies. It is worth considering, at least. — Again, how comes it to pass that none but destitute Irislimen arc ever desirous of obtaining the means of reacliinsr equally destitute wives and children at Halifax, and that they are sometitnes years in performing that deso- late and pious pilgrimage, being inexplicably detained for months in any village where there are believing ears and generous hearts? Some philosophers will have it that the tools of every animal and vegetable are the forced productions of self-preserving instinct ; — that the grapevine was set to climb the tree till its despair had escaped in prehensile tendrils; that the duck was tossed Into the sea to drown, till its fears had found a vent and a remedy in webbing its feet. Was it some such instinct which j)rovIded the emigrant Switzcr Avith that natural cxcrcsencc of his tyran- nous, indefatigable, tax-gathering barrel-organ?' 214 FOURTH CONVERSATION. PHILIP. I see that you are weary of our discussion. Let me put in two more pieces of evidence before the case goes to the jury. They are the depositions of Ed- mund Spenser and James Thomson. The first testifies to this effect : " O, what avails it of immortal seed To bin ybred, and' never born to die ? Far better I it deem to die with speed, Than waste in woe and wailful misery ! " He gives the same testimony more at full in his "Mother Hubbard's Tale." Nor is the other less explicit : " To every labor its award accrues, And they are sure of bread who swink and moil ; But while the laws not guard that noblest toil, Ne for the Muses other meed decree, They praised are alone, and starve right merrily." JOHN. Now let us open Ford's Plays, which, I see, is the volume in your hand. m PHILIP. / Ford's dramatic abilities have, I think, been rated too highly. He has a great deal of tragic excitability and enthusiasm, and a good knowledge of stage-effect ; but these are the predominant qualities of his nature. In the strong mind they are always subservient. Ford can see the proprieties and beauties of a fine situation ; FORD. 215 but he has not that dignity in him which can create them out of its own substance. His poetic faculty- leans upon the tragic element in his stories for support, instead of being the foundation of it. Tender and graceful he always is, almost to excess; never great and daring. He does not seem to me to deserve the higli praise which, if I remember rightly. Lamb be- stows uj)on him, and which other less judicious critics have repeated. -^ JOHX. The sweet lovingness of Lamb's nature fitted him for a good critic; but there were knotty quirks in the grain of his mind, which seemed, indeed, when polished by refined studies, little less than beauties, and which we cannot help loving, but which led him to the worship of strange gods, and with the more scrupulous punctuality that the mass were of another persuasion. No field is so small or so barren but there will be grazing enough in it to keep a hobby in ex- cellent case. Lamb's love was of too rambling and wide-spreading a kind to be limited by the narrow trellises whicli satisfy a common nature. It stretched out its feelers and twined them around everything M'ithin its reach, clipping with its tender and delicate green the fair tree and unsightly stump alike. Every- thing that he loved was, for the time, his ideal of loveliness. Even tobacco, when he was taking leave of it, became the very " crown of perfumes," and he affirmed " Roses and violets but toys For the greener sort of boys Or for greener damsels meant." 216 FOURTH CONVERSATION. PHILIP. In this, and in the finer glimpses of his humor, and in the antique richness of his style in the best parts, he reminds me of Emerson ; but he had not the divine eye of our American poet, nor his deep transparency and majestic simpleness of language, full of images J that seem like remembrance-flowers dropped from bet^A'een the pages of Bacon, or Montaigne, or Browne, or Herbert ; reminding us of all felicitous seasons in our own lives, and yet infused with a congenial virtue from the magic leaves between which they had been stored. John Ford, though he cannot rank with the first order of minds, yet claims an instinctive deference, as one of that glorious brotherhood who so illustrated and dignified our English tongue at the beginning of the seventeenth century. vSet beside almost any of our moderm dramatists, there is certainly something grand and free about him ; and though he has not that " large utterance " which belonged to Shakespeare, and perhaps one or two others of his contemporaries, he sometimes rises into a fiery earnestness which falls little short of sublimity, and proves that he had in him, as Drayton said of jNIarlowe, "Those brave translunarv things That our first poets had." It is this abandoned earnestness and willingness and simplicity which so much elevate the writers of that age above nearly all succeeding ones. In their companionship, a certain pardoning and compromising FORD. 217 restraint, which hampers iis in the society of less unconscious writers, seems to be tlu'own off tlie mind. Here, at hist, we find frankness, contempt of conse- quences, dignity that finds graceful sustenance in the smallest and most ordinary events of to-day, as well as in the greatest, or in prophecies of a nobler to- morrow. They laid the deep-set bases of their works and thoughts in the cheap but eternal rock of nature, not idly writing their names upon the shifting and unstable sands of a taste or a prejudice, to be washed out by the next wave, or blurred and overdrifted by the first stronger breeze. Pegasus is the most unsafe of hobby-horses. The poet whose pen is governed by any self-built theory (even if he persuade men to believe in it) will be read only so long as that theory is not driven out by another. JOHN. Yet a creed or theory may sometimes be of good service iu the cause of truth. It may concentrate the will and energy of a strong mind upon one point, and so lead to the discovery of such facts as intersect at that point in their revolutions ; as the wells of the old astronomers, by shutting out all light from around, enabled them to see the else invisible stars. PHILIP. But the credit should rather be given to the concen- trated resolution than to the creed or theory. Resolu- tion is the youngest and dearest daughter of Destiny, and may win from her fond mother almost any favor she chooses to ask, though in very wantonness. The ' UNIVEESITl 218 FOURTH coy VERSA TlOy. great spirits of that day were of no school, except that iu which their own soul was mistress. The door to the temple of any creed was too low to admit men of their godlike stature without stooping, and that they could not do. They scorned those eifeminate conventionalities Avliich, half a century later, decked our ruddy English Muse in the last Paris mode, bound up and powdered her free golden hair, and so ])inched her robust waist that she has scarce borne a healthy child since. Poesy, with them, was not an artifice in the easy reach of any whose ear could detect the jingle of two words, and who had arithmetic enough to count as high as ten on their finger-ends. They believed that Poesy demanded the enthralling and ennobling toil of a whole life, the heart, soul, will, life, everything, of those who professed her ser- vice. Thev esteemed her the most homelike and gentle of spirits, and would not suffer her to travel abroad to bring home licentiousne.-s veiled under a greater precision of manner, at the expense of all freedom and grace. The innocent artlessness of her face looked sweetest to them in the warm fire-light upon the hearth at home. Tiiey knew that all the outward forms of poetry are changeable as those of a cloud. These fall away like the petals of a flower, but they leave the soul, the plain sober seed-vessel which most men pass by unregarded. Parnassus is now shrunk to a modern mountain; .Hippocrene has dwindled to a scant rill, which the feet of a single ox can make muddy through its whole course ; but while the heart remains, the poet's fountain bubbles up as clear and fresh as ever. FORD. 219 JOHN. Only that pcirt of a form Avhicli is foundctl in nature can survive ; the worth of the statue of Meninon as an oracle died with the wise priest who spoke through it, but, after three thousand years, it still recognizes its ancient god, and grows musical under the golden fin- gers of sunrise. — I confess I can hardly shake off the influence of early education in favor of the French school of poets. I admire the others M'itli a kind of reverence, as grand, natural, un])runed spirits ; but I find my entertainment, too, in these, as in the society of elegant gentlemen with whom artificiality has been carried well-nigh to the unconscious ease of nature. Dryden PHILIP. But I will not grant him for one of them. He could not smother his sturdy English spirit. His Gal- licism is ridiculous, as in his plays. It is not ingrained. I will give you an example of what English-French must be, by quoting a specimen of French-English. Here is a French translation of Gray's Odes, published at Paris, in the sixth year of the Republic. JOHN. "Without allowing it to be an argument, I can con- ceive that it must be a great curiosity. Let me hear some of it. PHILIP. You will not be disappointed. It is in prose, and the translator avows that his sole object has been to be literally exact. Fidelity first, then elegance, is his 220 FOURTH CONVERSATION. motto ; but you will see that lie has not forgotten the lessons of the posture-master. He tells us in his pref- ace that he undertook the enterprise, "autant pour faciliter I'intelligence de la langue Anglaise, que pour faire connoitre en France un digne rival d'Ossian, de Di-yden, et de Milton. Exactitude rigoureuse a la lettre et au sens, voila la systerae qu'on a cru devoir adopter. Mais en s'attachant a rendre litteralement les pensees, les expressions, les images, et les figures de I'auteur Anglais, on n'en a pas moins senti la necessite d'ecrire avec purete, Elegance, et precision." In the First Ode, the line, " Disclose the long-expecting flowers," is rendered, '" "Elles ouvrent le bouton des fleurs impatientes." " Some show their gayly-gilded trim, Quick glancing in the sun," " D'autres, dans leurs jeux vifs et legers, font etinceler au soleil I'or de leur elegante parure." In the " Ode on a Distant View of Eton College," " Father Thames " is translated '' fleuve pateniel; " and the lines, " This racks the joints, this fires the veins, That every laboring sinew strains," are thus given : " L'une torture les articulations, I'autre allume le sang, celle-ci tiraille douloureusement tous les nerfs." In the Fourth Ode, " Stern, rugged nurse ! thy rigid lore, With patience many a year she bore," FORD. 221 is rendered, " Austere et rude institutrice, c'est sous ta discipline severe qu'elle apprit a exercer sa patience pendant nombre d'antiees." In the Fifth Ode, " To brisk notes in cadence beating, Glance tbeir many twinkling feet," " Rapides comtne le din-d'cEil, leur jueds brillans r^pondent en cadence a la vivacite des airs ; " " With arms sublime that float upon the air, In gliding state she wins her easy way," " Les bras Aleves et flottans dans les airs, elle savance avee wne noble aisance et ylisse lajhrement vers la terre; " " She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat In loose numbers, wildly sweet," "Elle ne dedaigne pas d'ecouter les metres incorrects des jeunes sauvages qui chantent en refrains grossierement cadences ; " " Yet shall he mount and keep his distant way Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, Beneath the good how far, — but far above the great," "Cependant il s'^levera, et il a marque sa place a une grande distance des homes dun destin vulgaire, trop peut-etre audessous des bons po(ites, mais bien au densm des grands " ! I have spared you the trial of the Scandinavian Odes; but hardly think you will desire more. Those from which I have quoted are the most French of Gray's odes. I only wish the translator had attempted them in verse. JOHN. At the worst, it is a pleasure to have one's old asso- ciations revived by the line or two here and there 222 FOURTH CONVERSATION. which you have quoted from tlie original poems. Tlie anuotators may couviuce us that Gray uever used a thought, image, or word, of his own, in all his verses; we should like him still as a delicate worker in mosaic, and skip all the accusatory notes at the bottom of the page. So much originality is there always in grace ! Gray is the Barrington of poets ; but who shall get him convicted and transported? And what place is good enough to be a Botany Bay for him ? Nihil surripuit quod non ornavit. PHILIP. Gray came when the British Muse was in a deJi- quium; and while she was lying as if in articido mortis, the critics rushed in and took possession of the house as sole legatees. They locked up everything and put their seals upon it; nothing must be used, without a written order from them ; not a meal must be served up, except it be a hash of yesterday's leav- ings. Things must take a new turn now ; they had no notion of seeing their soon-to-be- sainted kins- woman's substance wasted as it had been, especially when one Shakespeare was major-domo ; tliey would soon have order among the servants in the house, or somebody would smart for it ; everything had been too long at sixes and sevens. But, in the midst of their predacious technicalities, in stalks the undoubted eldest son, not a very polished personage, and with hands hardened by coarse familiarity with ISIossgiel ploughtails, but the true heir nevertheless. He slaps the powdered wigs of the technical gentlemen in their eyes, and they vanish, like Aubrey's ghost_, " with a FORD. 223 melodious twang," vowing to take the law of him. It was a great mercy that he did not serve them as Ulysses did the waiting-maids. JOHN. To open a volume of Burns, after diluting the mind with the stale insipidities of the mob of rhymers who preceded him, reminds me of a rural adventure I had last summer. Skirting, in one of my walks, a rocky upland which hemmed in the low salt-marsh I had been plashing over, I came, at a sudden turning, upon a clump of wild red-lilies, that burned fiercely in a kind of natural fire-place, shaped out for them by an inward bend of the rock. How they seemed to usurp to themselves all the blazing July sunshine to comfort their tropical hearts withal ! How cheap and colorless looked the little bunch of blossomed weeds I had been gathering with so much care ! How that one prodigal clump seemed to have drunk suddenly dry the whole overrunning beaker of summer, to' keep their fiery madness at its height ! PHILIP. The poets had been afraid that the light of the natural sun would put their fires out, and kept the shutters fast barred accordingly. Burns, with one lusty spurn of his foot, got rid of all the old clumsy machinery, JNIen began to fall in love with being natural, and to grow unaifected to the extreme point of affectation. But there is such a thing as being too natural ; we must remember that it was with a twig of green mistletoe that Baldur, the Scaudiuaviau 224 FOURTH CONVERSATION. Apollo, was slain. Delighted to see Burns whistling and singing after his plough, and wearing his clouted shoon into the Edinburgh drawing-rooms, some inge- nious gentlemen, resolved to possess themselves of his secret, whistled and sang louder than he, wore thicker soles, and dragged a plough after them wherever they went. The old poets lived in too sincere an age, and were too truly independent, to think independence a virtue. To try to be independent is to acknowledge our slavery. It was not from ignorance of rules and unities that the old dramatists committed anachron- isms, made islands of countries set in the heart of continents, and put English oaths into the mouths of Roman mobs ; they broke through such critical cob- webs, for they were never spun to catch eagles in. The laws of poetry, as they are called, are only deduc- tions drawn by certain mathematical minds from the works of established authors; let a new genius come, and these are incompetent to measure him. There is a most delicate, yet most unbending conscience, in the heart of every true poet, from whose approval or rejection of all pre-established laws he feels that there is no appeal. If he prefer the verdict of the world to that of this instinctive voice, it is all over with him ; thenceforth he is but an echo, and his immortality as frail as that. What cared our old dramatists for Aristotle's Poetics; They laid their scenes in the un- changeable heart of man, and so, like Doniie's fancy, " Made one little room an everywhere." They scorned to bow the knee to any authority whose feet were of clay. They knew that he who strives to FORD. 225 keeji an act of fealty to slavery secret, defies his own consciousness. Some strange ])rovidencc always makes it public and open as the prostration of King Ottocar. The homage that a man does in his secretest soul is visible to all time; there will be a cringe and stoop in his shoulders, in spite of him. The galling mark of the fetter will never out ; men read it in every line he writes, hear it in every word he speaks, and see it ia every look he looks. Though he be no longer the slave of a coward deference to the opinion of the many, merely because they are the many, he is still the bondman of Memory, who can make him crouch at her bidding. You may think that the writers of that day had no daws to peck at them ; but hear the admired Sir John Plarringtou, who, in his "Apology for Poesy," says: " We live in such a time in which nothing can escape the envious tooth and backbiting tongue of an impure mouth ; and wlierein every corner hath a squint-eyed Zoilus tliat can looli aright on no man's doings." Even King James, whose authorship was most likely as secure from such rubs as any, prefixes this quotation to his " Rules for Scottish Verse : " "To ignorants obdurde, where wilful error lies, Nor yet to carping folks, whose malice may deject thee, Nor to such folks as think them only wise, But to the docile bairns of knowledge I direct thee." I have quoted these royal rhymes from memory, and may not have done them full justice; but I am sure I have given them with enough exactness. 15 22G FOURTH CONVERSATION. But a subject on ^vhich I love to talk has led me astray ,\^let us return to Ford. His dramatic power consists mainly in the choice of his plots. His cha- racters, as is often the case with those of retired students, are rather certain turns of mind or eccentrici- ties put into a body, than real men and women.J JOHN. He does not carry matters quite so far as some later writers, w^ho go to the expense of a whole human frame for the mere sake of bringing a single humorous phrase upon the stage, — the sole use of the legs being to carry about the body, that of the body to sustain the head, and that of the head to utter the said humor- ous phrase at proper intervals. Friar Bacon's head, or one of those " airy tongues " which ]\Iilton bor- rowed of Marco Polo, would save these gentry a great waste of flesh and bone, if it could be induced to go upon the stage. PHILIP. No; Ford is not quite so spendthrift in human beings as that. Guardians should be appointed for such authors, as for those who cannot take care of their estates.— fHis plots raise him and carry him along with them whither they please, and it is generally only at their culminating points that he shows much strength ; and then it is the strength of passion, not of reason. Indeed, I do not know but it should rather be called M^eakness. He puts his characters in situ- ations where the heart that has a drop of hot blood in it finds it easier to be strons: than weak. His heroes FORD. 227 show that fitful strength whicli grows out of intense excitement, rather than healthy muscular action ; it does not rise with the difficulty or danger they are in, and, looking down on it, assert calmly the unusurpable sovereignty of the soul, even after the flesh is over- come, but springs forward iu an exulting gush of glorious despair to grapple with death and fate. In a truly noble bravery of soul, the interest is wholly the fruit of immortality ; here, it is the Sodom-apple of mortality. In the one case, we exult to see the infinite overshadow and dwarf the finite; in the other, Ave cannot restrain a kind of romantic enthusiasm and admiration at seeing the weak clay so gallantly defy the overwhelming power which it well knows must crush it. High genius may be fiery and impetuous, but it can never bully and look big ; it does not defi/ death and futurity, for a doubt of its monarchy over them never overflushed its serene countenance. JOHN. Shakespeare's characters seem to modify his plots as much as they are modified by them in turn. This may be the result of his unapproachable art; for art in him is- but the tracing of nature to her primordial laws, — is but nature precipitated, as it were, by the infallible test of philosophy. In his plays, as in life, there is a perpetual seesaw of character and circum- stance, now one uppermost, now the other. Nature is never afraid to reason in a circle; we must let her assume her premises, and make our deductions logical accordingly. The actors in Sliakespeare's dramas are only overcome by so much as they fall below their 228 FOURTH CONVERSATION. ideal and are wanting in some attribute of true man- hood. Wherever we go with him, the absence of a virtue always suggests its presence, the want of any nobleness makes us feel its beauty the more keenly. PHILIP. But Ford's heroes are strong only in tlieir imperfec- tions, and it is to these that whatever admiration we yield them is paid. They interest us only so far as they can make us forget our quiet, calm ideal. This is the very stamp of weakness. We should be sur- prised if we saw them show any natural greatness. They are morbid and unhealthy ; for, in truth, what we call greatness and nobleness is but entire health ; to those only who are denaturalized themselves do they seem wonderful ; to the natural man they are as cus- tomary and unconscious as the beating of his heart or the motion of his lungs, and as necessary. Therefore it is that praise always surprises and humbles true genius ; the shadow of eartli comes then between it and its starry ideal with a cold and dark eclipse. In Ford's characters, the sublimity, if there be any, is that of a defiant despair. JOHN. The great genius may fail, but it is never thus. In him the spirit often overbalances the body, and sets its ideal too far beyond the actual. Unable to reach that, lie seems to do less than many a one of less power ; for the performance of anything lower than what he has marked out for himself carries with it a feeling almost of degradation, that dispirits him. His wings FORD. 229 may be too weak to bear liliii to that infiuite height; but, if he fail, he is an angel still, and falls not so low as the proudest pitch of talent. His failures are suc- cessful, compared with the successes of others. But not to himself do they seem so; though, at his earth- dwindling height, he show like a star to the eyes of the world, what is it to him, while he beholds the gulden gates of his aspiration above him still, fost shut and barred imraitigably? Yet high genius has that in it which makes that its longings can never be wholly fruitless; its utmost imperfection has some touch of the perfect in it. PHILIP. The slavery of the character to the incident in Ford's plays has often reminded me of that story of the travellers who lost their way in the mummy-pits, and who were all forced to pass through the same narrow orifice, which gave ready way to the slender, but through which the stout were obliged to wriggle and squeeze with a desperate forgetfulness of bulk. It may be foolish for a philosopher, but it is wisdom in a dramatist, to follow the example of nature, who always takes care to make large holes for her large cats and small holes for her small ones. — Ford, per- haps, more than any of his contemporaries deserves the name of sentimental. He has not the stately gravity and antique majesty of Chapman, the wild imagination or even the tenderness of Webster, the precise sense of Jonson, the homeliness of Heywood, nor the delicate apprehension and silver tongue of Fletcher ; but he has more sentiment than all of them 230 FOURTH CONVERSATION. put together. The names of his plays show the bent of his mind ; " Love's Sacrifice," " The Lover's Melan- choly," and " The Broken Heart," are the names of three of the best ; and there is another in which the doctrine of the elective affinities is laid down broadly enough to have shocked even Goethe. His personal appearance seems to have answered well enough to what I have surmised of his character. A contem- porary thus graphically describes him : " Deep in a dump John Ford was alone gat, AVith folded arms and melancholy hat." A couplet which brings up the central figure on the title-page to the old edition of the "Anatomy of Mel- ancholy " very vividly before our eyes. (^ His depend- ence on things out of himself is shown also in his his- torical play of " Perkin Warbeck," in M'hich, having no very exciting j)lot to sustain him, he is very gentle- manly and very dulL/ He does not furnish so many isolated passages which are complete in themselves, — a quality remarkable in the old dramatists, among whom only Shakspeare united perfectness of the parts with strict adaptation and harmony of the whole. A play of Shakspeare's seems like one of those basaltic palaces whose roof is supported by innumerable pillai*s, each formed of many crystals perfect in themselves. To give you a fair idea of Ford, I will sketch out the plot of his most famous tragedy, Avith a few extracts. The plot of " The Broken Heart " is simply this. Ithoclcs, the favorite of Amyclas, king of Laconia, instigated by an ancient feud with Orgilus, the be- trothed of his sister Penthea, has forced her to break FORD. 231 the match and many Bassancs. Orgilus, full of an intent to revenge himself at the first chance, pretends a reconcilement with Ithocles, who, meanwhile, has repented of the wrong he luid done, and moreover loves and is beloved by Calantha, the king's daughter. Penthea dies mad. Orgihis murders Ithocles on the eve of his marriage with Calantha, Avho dies of a broken heart, after naming Nearchus, a former suitor, her successor to the throne. The following scene has great purity and beauty, and withal much sentimen- talism in it. Orgilus, in the disguise of a scholar (a disguise as common now as then), has gained speech of Penthea. I read only the last part of the scene : " Org. All pleasures are but mere imagination, Feeding the hungry appetite with steam And sight of banquet, whilst the body pines, Not relishing the real taste of food : Such is the leanness of a heart divided From intercourse of troth-contracted loves ; No horror should deface that precious figure Sealed with the lively stamp of equal souls. " Pen. Away ! some fury hath bewitched thy tongue: The breath of ignorance that flics from thence Kipens a knowledge in me of alllictions Above all sufferance. Thing of talk, begone, — Begone without reply ! " Org. Be just, Penthea, In thy commands ; when thou send'st forth a doom Of banishment, know first on whom it lights. Thus I take off the shroud in v.hich my cares Are folded up from view of common eyes. [ Throws off his scholar's dress. What is thy sentence next? " Pen. R:ish man ! thou lay'st A blemish on mine honor, with the hazard 232 FOURTH CONVERSATION. Of thy too desperate life ; yet I profess, By all tlie laws of ceremonious Avedlock, I have not given admittance to one thought Of female cJiange, since cruelty enforced Divorce betwixt my body and my heart. Why would you fall from goodness thus ? " Org. O, rather Examine me, how I could live to say I have been much, much wronged ! 'T is for thy sake I put on this imposture ; dear Penthea, If thy soft bosom be not turned to marble, Thou 'It pity our calamities; my interest Confirms me, thou art mine still. " Pen. Lend your hand ; With both of mine I clasp it thus, thus kiss it. Thus kneel before ye. [Penthea kneek. " Org. You instruct my duty. [Orgilus hieeh. '^Pen. We may stand up. [They rise.} Have you aught else to urge Of new demand ? as for the old, forget it ; 'T is buried in an everlasting silence, And shall be, shall be ever : what more would you ? " Org. I would possess my wife ; the equity Of very reason bids me. " Pen. Is that all ? " Org. Why, 't is the all of me, myself. " Pen. Remove Your steps some distance from me ; at this pace A fevf words I dare change ; but first put on Your borrowed shape. " Org. You are obeyed ; 't is done. [He resumes his disguise. "Pen. How, Orgilus, by promise, 1 was thine. The heavens do witness ; they can witness, too, A rape done on my truth : how I do love thee Yet, Orgilus, and yet, must best appear In tendering thy freedom ; for I find I FORD. 233 The constant preservation of thy merit, By thy not daring to attempt my fame Wiih injury of any loose conceit, Which might give deeper wounds to discontents. Continue this fair race; then, though I cannot Add to thy comfort, yet I shall more often Remember from what fortune I am fallen. And pity mine own ruin. Live, live happy, Happy in thy next choice, that thou may"st people This barren age with virtues in thy issue I And, 0, when thou art married, think on me "With mercy, not contempt I I hope thy wife, Hearing my story, will not scorn my fall. — Now let us part. " Org. Part ? yet advise thee better : Penthea is the wife to Orgilus, And ever shall be. " Pen. Xever shall, nor will. " Org. How ! " Pen. Hear me ; in a word I "11 tell thee why. The virgin-dowry which my birth bestowed Is ravished by another ; my true love Abhors to think that Orgilus deserved No better favors than a second bed. " Org. I must not take this reason. " Pen. To confirm it, — Should I outlive my bondage, let me meet Another worse than this, and less desired, If, of all men alive, thou shouldst but touch My lip or hand again ! " Org. Penthea, now I tell you, you grow wanton in my sufferance ; Come, sweet, thou art mine. " Pen. Uncivil Sir, forbear. Or I can turn affection into vengeance : Your reputation, if you value any, Lies bleeding at my feet. Unworthy man. If ever henceforth thou appear in language, Message, or letter, to betray my frailty, 234 FOURTH CONVERSATION. I 'II call thy former protestations lust, And curse my stars for forfeit of my judgment. Go thou, fit only for disguise and walks To hide thy shame; this once I spare thy life. I laugh at mine own confidence ; my sorrows By thee are made inferior to my fortunes : If ever thou didst harbor worthy love. Dare not to answer. My good genius guide me, That I may never see thee more ! — Go from me ! " Org. I '11 tear my veil of politic French off, And stand up like a man resolved to do : Action, not words, shall show me. — O Panthea ! \_ExiL " Pen. He sighed my name, sure, as he parted from me ; I fear I was too rough. Alas, poor gentleman ! He looked not like the ruins of his youth. But like the ruins of those ruins. Honor, How much we fight with weakness to preserve thee ! [ Walks aside." To ray mind, Panthea's la.st speech is the best part of the scene. In the first part, she shows an appar- ently Roman virtue ; but there seems to be in it a savor of prudery, and a suspicion of its own strength, which a truly courageous honor and chastity would be the last to entertain. None of our dramatists but Shakespeare have been able to paint madness. Most of their attempts that way are failures ; they grow silly and mopingly senti- mental ; they utter a great deal of such stuff as nobody in his senses would utter, and as nobody out of them could have the ingenious leisure to invent. Here is a specimen of Ford's mania : " Pen. Sure, if we were all sirens, we would sing pitifully ; And 't were a comely music, when in parts FORD. 235 One sung another's knell : the turtle sighs \Vhen he hath lost his mate ; and yet some say He must be dead first. 'T is a fine deceit To pass away in a dream ! indeed, I 've slept With mine eyes open a great while. No falsehood Equals a broken faith ; there 's not a hair * Sticks on my head but, like a leaden plummet, It sinks me to the grave: I must creep thither; The journey is not long. " Pen. Spare your hand ; Believe me, I '11 not hurt it. " Org. My heart too. " Pen. Complain not, though I wring it hard ; I '11 kiss it: O, 't is a fine, soft palm !— Hark, in thine ear ; Like whom do I look, prithee ?— nay, no whispering. Goodness ! we had been happy ; too much happiness Will make folk proud, tliey say,— but that is he,— [Pohiling to Ithocles. And yet he paid for 't home; alas ! his heart Is crept into the cabinet of the princess : We shall have points and bride-laces. Remember, When we last gathered roses in the garden, I found my wits ; but truly you lost yours. That 's he, and still 't is he. [Again pointing to Ithocles." Now let us turn to the catastrophe. Calantha, after settling the succession of the kingdom, turns to the body of Ithocles. " Cal. Forgive me : — now I turn to thee, thou shadow Of my contracted lord ! Bear witness all, I put my mother's wedding-ring upon His finger ; 't was my father's last bequest. > [Places a ring on the finger of IthocleS. I Thus I new-marry him whose wife I am ; Death shall not separate us. O my Lords, I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture, I 236 FOURTH CONVERSATION. When one news straight came huddling on another, Of death ! and death ! and death ! still I danced forward • But it struck home, and here, and in an instant. Be such mere women, who with shrieks and outcries Can vow a present end to all their sorrows. Yet live to [court] new pleasures, and outlive them : They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings ; Let me die smiling. "Near. 'T is a truth too ominous. " Cal. One kiss on these cold lijjs, my last! — [A75ses Itho- CLES.] — crack, crack, — Argos now 's Sparta's king. Command the voices Which wait at th' altar now to sing the song I fitted for my end." Lamb speaks of this death-scene as " eanyiug us back to Calvary and the cross " (or uses words to that effect) ; but tliis, it seems to me, is attributing too much importance to the mere pliysical fact of dying. JOHN. What one dies for, not his dying, glorifies him. The comparison is an irreverent one, as that must need be which matches a selfish love with a universal. Love's nobility is shown in this, that it strengthens us to make sacrifices for others, and not for the object of our love alone. All the good we do is a service done to that, but that is not the sole recipient. Our love for one is only therefore made pre-eminent, that it may show us the beauty and holiness of that love whose arms are wide enough for all. It is easy enough to die for one we love so fiercely ; but it is a harder and nobler martyrdom to live for others. Love is only then perfected, when it can bear to outlast the body, FORD. 237 which was but its outward expression and a prop for its infant steps, and can feel its union with the beloved spirit in a mild serenity, and an inward prompting to a thousand little unrewarded acts of every -day brother- hood. The love of one is a mean, not an end. PHILIP. Another objection which I should feel inclined to bring against this scene is, that the breaking of Calan- tha's heart seems to be made too palpable and anatom- ical an event. It is too much like the mere bursting of a blood-vessel, which Smith or Brown might accomplish, though wholly incapable of rendering themselves tragically available by the breaking of their hearts. It is like that stanza of the old ballad, " She turned her back unto the wall, And her face unto the rock ; And there, before her mother's eyes, Her very heart it broke.'' In the ballad, however, there is more propriety ; the heroine's heart gives way suddenly, under a sudden blow. But Calantha saves up her heart-break, as it were, until it can come in with proper effect at the end of the tragedy. Ford sometimes reminds one of the picturesque luxuriance of Fletcher./ The following exquisite pas- sage is very like Fletcher, and is a good specimen of Ford's lighter powers. When we read it, we almost wish we had written masques or pastorals, rather than plays. The story is an old one, and was paraphrased by Crashawe, in a poem which, for I 238 FOURTH CONVERSATION. exquisite rhythm and diction, can hardly be paralleled in the language. Ford brings it in in his " Lover's Melancholy." " One morning early, This accident encountered me : I heard The sweetest and most ravishing contention That art and nature ever were at strife in. A sound of music touched mine ears, or rather. Indeed, entranced my soul. As I stole nearer. Invited by the melody, I saw This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute, With strains of strange variety and harmony. Proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge To the clear choristers of the woods, the birds. That, as they flocked about him, all stood silent, Wondering at what they heard : I wondered too. A nightingale, Nature's best-skilled musician, undertakes The challenge, and, for every several strain The well shaped youth could touch, she sang her own ; He could not run division with more art Upon his quaking instrument, than she, The nightingale, did with her various notes Reply to ; for a voice and for a sound, Amethus, 'tis much easier to believe That such they were, than hope to hear again. Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last Into a pretty anger, that a bird. Whom art had never taught clefs, moods, and notes, Should vie with him for mastery, whose study Had busied many hours to perfect practice : To end the controversy, in a rapture Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly, So many voluntaries and so quick. That there was curiosity and cunning. Concord and discord, lines of diflering method, Meeting in one full centre of deliglit. The bird, ordained to be I I FORD. 239 Music's first martyr, strove to imitate These several sounds; which wlien her warbling throat Failed in, for grief, down dropped she on his lute And brake her heart ! " I must givo you a short passage from Crashavve's poem, which I cannot help thinking the best music in words I ever read. Crashawe was himself an exquisite musician. After the lutauist has played a strain, the ni";htingale answers. " She measures every measure, everywhere Meets art wifli art; sometimes, as if in doubt Not perfect yet, and fearing to be out, Waih her plain ditty in one long-spun note, Tlirowjh the sleek passage of her open throat, A clear, unwrinkled song ; then doth she point it With tender accents, and severely joint it By short diminutives, that, being reared In controverting warbles evenly shared, With her sweet self she wrangles " Her supple breast thrills out Sharp airs, and staggers in a warbling doubt Of dallying sweetness, hovers o'er her skill, And folds in waved notes, with a trembling bill, The pliant series of her slippery song : Then starts she suddenly into a throng Of short, thick sobs, ..... Tliat roll themselves over her lubric throat In panting murmurs 'stilled out of her breast. That ever-bubbling spring, the sugared nest Of her delicious soul, that there doth lie, Bathing in streams of liquid melody ; Music's best seed-plot, where in ripened airs A golden-headed harvest fairly rears Its honey -dropping tops, ploughed by her breath." 240 FOURTH CONVERSATION. JOHX. May we neither of us ever hear a nightingale ! — No, I recall so rash a prayer ; but, after this, we should surely think his music harsh. Even the extravagant metaphor with which your extract ended is forced upon us as natural and easy by the foregoing enthusi- asm. PHILIP. Now that the nightingale has enticed us out of doors, you will like to hear Ford's praise of Spring. Raybright asks Spring, " What dowry can you bring me ? " Sprimj. Dowry ? Is 't come to this? am I held poor and base? A girdle make, whose buckles, stretched their length, Shall reach from the Arctic to the Antarctic pole? What ground soe'er thou canst with that inclose I'll give thee freely. Not a lark that culls The morning up shall build on any turf But he shall be thy tenant, call thee lord, And for his rent pay thee in change of songs." The Sun^s Darling. And again : "O my dear love, the Spring, I'm cheated of thee! Thou hadst a body, the four elements Dwelt never in a fairer ; a mind princely ; Thy language, like thy singers, musical. How cool wast thou in anger ! In thy diet How temperate and yet sumptuous ! thou'd^t not waste The weight of a sad violet in excesf:, Yet still thy board had dishes numberless. Dumb beasts, even, loved thee ; once a young lark Sat on thy hand, and, gazing on thine eyes, Mounted and sang, thinking them moving skies." Ibid. FORD. 241 Now I will gather you a hamlful of flowers from the rest of the plays aud close the volume. Here is a pretty illustration of the doctrine of sympathies : " The constant loadstone and the steel are found In several mines; yet there is such a league Between these minerals, as if one vein Of earth had nourished both. The gentle myrtle Is not engraft upon the olive's stock ; Yet nature hath between them locked a secret Of sympathy, that, being planted near, They will, both in their branches and their roots, Embrace each other ; twines of ivy round The well-grown oak ; the vine doth court the elm ; Yet these are different plants.'' The Lovei-'s Mdancholy. The end of a wasted life is thus touchingly set ) forth : " Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands, As by an hour-glass; the span of time Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it ; An age of pleasures revelled out comes home At last and ends in sorrow ; but the life, Weary of riot, numbers every sand. Wailing in sighs until the last drop do\vn So to conclude calamity in rest." Knd. JOHN. The rhythm of these lines is finely managed ; there is a sadness and weariness in the flow of the verse, which sinks gradually into the quiet of the exquisitely modulated last line. ^ PHILIP. I will read a few more fragments without remark. "Busy opinion is an idle fool, That, as a school-rod, keeps a child in awe, Frights the inexperienced temper of the mind." Ibid. 16 242 FOURTH CONVERSATION. "Let upstarts exercise unmanly roughness; Clear spirits to the humble will be humble." Ladys Tried. " The sweetest freedom is an honest heart" Ibid. You will relish this itemed account of a poor man's revenues : " What lands soe'er the world's surveyor, the sun, Can measure in a day, I dare call mine; All kingdoms I have right to ; I am free Of every country ; in the four elements I have as deep share as an emperor ; All beasts which the earth bears are to serve me, All birds to sing to me ; and_ean you catch me AVith a tempting golden apple ? " The Sun's Darling. This thought is noble : " He cannot fear, Who builds on noble grounds ; sickness or pain Is the deserver's exercise." The Broken Heart. And, with this good speech on his lips, John Ford makes his exit from the stage of our little private theatre. JOHN. I have spent a pleasant evening ; and, if I do not yet admire your old favorites as much as you do, it is because I do not know them so well. It has been my happy experience in life to find some lovable quality in every human being I have known, and to find more with more knowledge; may it be so with the Old Dramatists. THE PLAYS OF THOMAS MIDDLETON. "A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight, and after one person and one age liave exhausted all of its divine etHuence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and unconceived delight." Shelly's Defense of Poetry. Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world. Driven, by their fine nature, to search into and reverently contemplate the universal laws of soul, they find some fragment of the broken tables of God's law, and interpret it, half conscious of its mighty import. While philosophers are wrang- ling, and politicians playing at snapdragon with the destinies of millions, the poet, in the silent deeps of liis soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one central heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the universe, and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but which become religion to posterity. Not unwisely ordered is that eternal destiny which renders the seer despised of men, since thereby he is but the more surely taught to lay his head meekly upon the mother-breast of Nature, and hearken to the musical soft beating of her bounteous heart. 243 244 THE PLAYS OF That Poesy, save as she can soar nearer to the bliss- ful throne of the Supreme Beauty, is of no more use than all other beautiful things are, we are fain to grant. That she does not add to the outward wealth of the body, and that she is only so much more excel- lent than any bodily gift, as spirit is more excellent than matter, we must also yield. But, inasmuch as all beautiful things are direct messages and revelations of himself, given us by our Father, and as Poesy is the searcher out and interpreter of all these, tracing by her inborn sympathy the invisible nerves which bind them harmoniously together, she is to be revered and cherished. The poet has a fresher memory of Eden, and of the path leading back thereto, than other men ; so that we might almost deem him to have been con- ceived, at least, if not born and nursed, beneath the ambrosial shadow of those dimly remembered bowers, and to have had his infmt ears filled with the divine converse of angels, who then talked face to face with his sires, as with beloved younger brethren, and of whose golden Words only the music remained to him, vibrating for ever in his soul, and making him yearn to have all sounds of earth harmonize therewith. In the poet's lofty heart Truth hangs her aery, and there Love flowers, scattering thence her winged seeds over all the earth with every wind of heaven. In all ages the poet's fiery words have goaded men to remember and regain their ancient freedom, and, when they had regained it, have tempered it with a love of beauty, so as that it should accord with the freedom of Nature, and be as unmovably eternal as that. The dreams of poets are morning-dreams, coming to them in the early THOMAS MIDDLETON. 245 dawn and day-l)reaking of great truths, and are surely fulfilled at last. They repeat them, as children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too busy with quar- relling about the meaning of creeds, which have no meaning at all, listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying incredulity ; for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and infallible saints in the next. We love to go back to the writings of our old poete, for we find in them the tender germs of many a thought which now stands like a huge oak in the inward world, an ornament and a shelter. We cannot help reading with awful interest what has been written or rudely scrawled upon the walls of this our earthly prison-house, by former dwellers therein. From that which centuries have established, too, we may draw true principles. of judgment for the poetry of our own day. A right knowledge and apprelien- sion of the past teaches humbleness and self-sustain- ment to the present. Showing us what has been, it also reveals w^hat can be done. Progress is Janus- faced, looking to the bygone as well as to the coming; and Radicalism should not so much busy itself with lopping off the dead or seeming dead limbs, as with clearing away that poisonous rottenness around the roots, from which the tree has drawn the principle of death into its sap. A love of the beautiful and -har- monious, which must be the guide and forerunner to every onward movement of humanity, is created and . cherished more surely by pointing out what beauty dwells in anything, even the most deformed, (for there is something in that, also, else it could not even be,) 246 TEE PLAYS OF than by searching out and railing at all tlie foiihiesses in nature. Not till we have patiently studied beauty can we safely venture to look at defects, for not till then can we do it in that spirit of earnest love, which gives more than it takes away. Exultingly as we hail all signs of progress, we venerate the past also. The tendrils of the heart, like those of ivy, cling but the more closely to what they have clung to long, and even when that which they entwine crumbles beneath them, they still run greenly over the ruin, and beautify those defects which they cannot hide. The past, as well as the present, moulds the future, and the features of some remote progenitor will revive again freshly in the latest offspring of the womb of time. Our earth liangs well-nigh silent now, amid the chorus of her sister orbs, and not till past and present move har- moniously together will music once more vibrate on this long silent chord in the symphony of the uni- verse. Of Thomas Middleton little is known. Indeed, it seems to be the destiny of poets that men should not be familiar with their personal history — a destiny which to the thoughtful has a true and beautiful meaning. For it seems meant to chide men for their too ready preference of names and persons to things, by showing them the perishableness of the one and the immortality of the other, and to give to those divine teachings of theirs which remain to us somethhig of a mysterious and oracular majesty, as if they were not truly the words of men, but only more distinct utter- ances of those far-heard voices wdiich, in the too fleeting moments of a higher and clearer being, come THOMAS MIDDLETON. 247 to us from the infinite deep with a feeling of some- thing heard in childhood, but long ago drowned in the din of life. It is a lesson, also, for those who would be teachers of men that theirs must be rather the humbly obedient voice than the unconquerable will, and that he speaks best who has listened longest. And yet there is something beautiful, too, in the universal longing which men feel to see the bodily face of that soul whose "\\'ords have strengthened or refreshed them. It is, perhaps, the result of an unconscious remem- brance of a perished faith in the power of spirit over matter, whereby the beautiful soul builds for itself out of clay a dwelling worthy and typical of its majesty. Let Orpheus, then, be a shadow, Homer a name, and our divine Shakespeare a mystery ; — we might despise the ambrosia if we saw too plainly the earthen dish in which it was offered to us. Their spirits are a part of the air we breathe. Nothing that was truly theirs has perished, or ever can perish. If a sparrow fall not to the o-round without His knowledo;e, shall a word of truth be of less esteem in His eyes than a sparrow ? No, buffeted and borne about as it may be, by the shifting winds of prejudice, that deathless seed always takes root in the w^arm busom of the earth at last : — buried for centuries haply in the dark and dreary cata- combs of superstition, the life is yet new and strong within it, and in God's good time it springs up and blossoms, in an age to which it was more needful than to that in which it w^as entombed. It is of Middleton's tragedies chiefly that we shall sjjeak, both because they are very fine ones, and because from them we can more safely draw an esti- 248 THE PLAYS OF mate of his character. A good tragedy is, perhaps, the hardest thing to write. Nothing is easier than to draw tears from the reader; nothing surely is more rare than the power of drawing tliem rightly, or of touching that deepest string of our being which God, that he might give us the most meaning lesson of uni- versal brotherhood, has ordained should never quiver at the touch of our private sorrows, how soul-piercing soever. There are a thousand who can write patheti- cally, for one who has in any measure of fulness the tragic faculty. Many may touch the heart, but none save a master can bring up for us the snowy pearls which sleep in the deep abysses and caverns of the soul. That our tears are so ready has a beautiful significance, — for they are the birthright of angelic natures, while it is the curse of utterly fallen spirits that none of this sweet dew should ever shed its cool- ness upon their parched and burning cheeks. Viewed rightly, every fact of our being enfolds a clear recog- nition of the divinity of our nature. In childhood we see this more readily, though unwittingly ; — every flower which we pluck at random in the pure morning of life, and cast from us with a prodigality of beauty which we grow charier of in more thoughtful years, circles in its fragrant heart the dew-drop which, small as it is, mirrors the universe. In childhood, too, and in women, (who never wander far thence,) the source of this never turbid fountain of our tears is nearer the surface. The drifting sands of a life which our own selfishness makes a desert slowly choke it as we grow older, till at last that which was once a gentle outlet of the crowded heart becomes in itself a more THOMAS MIDDLETON. 249 bitter agony. Beautiful, therefore, and blessed is the power of calling forth these pledges of a teiidercst purity which lingers life-long, fluttering anear its scat- tered nest, and will not be seared away. How more beautiful and blessed it is so to summon them as that they shall give back to us, though only for a moment, those holy impulses and gracious instincts of which they were once both the proof and the fulfilment. And this last belongs wholly to tragedy, — wherein we weep rather for the universal than the particular, — for the blight which we sometimes in madness think to fall always on the purest aspiration and the teuderst faith, — for that blindness and Aveakness which we find also in our own hearts, ready at any moment to mislead us into unconscious sin, or to give way, (for in our greatest strength we are readiest to lean upon reeds,) and to plunge us headlong and dizzy into the same dreary void with those imaginary woes which so move us. But the wounds which Nature gives us are always to free us from some morbid humor; and tragedy, in proving to us the weakness of humanity, shows us at the same time its glorious strength, and that if lower, we are but a little lower than the anirels. — a majestic height, where we may poise serenely, if we clog not our silver plumes with clay. In tragedy, moreover. Destiny always hangs like a thunder-cloud, vague and huge, upon the horizon, with an awful grandeur, and we hear afar its ominous mutterings, and see its lightning reflected on the blue craggy mass which it reveals to us, hanging dimly over our own heads. Shapes float around us, and voices are heard from another life, and we are awed into an r.nwillino- 250 THE FLAYS OF consciousness of the workings of an unseen and in- scrutable power. But in writings strictly pathetic our sympathies are moved either for the individual suiFer- ino-, or against the power (always a definite one) which inflicts it unjustly. Pathos deals with unnatural causes; tragedy with those mysterious exceptions to the laws of nature which are no less natural than those laws themselves with which they make such seeming discord. Pathos is wholly the more outward of the two ; it may be founded on the elegancies or conventionalities of life, on the vices and wrongs of a wholly artificial system of society. But tragedy can only take root in the deepest and most earnest realities of a nature common to us all, the same CEdipus and Othello. The master of pathos must be minute and circumstantial, he must tell us all he knows, and depend on a cumulative effect ; while for the higher tragic there are many things too real and common- place ; — the naked skeleton, which leaves the imagina- tion free to work, is more effective and apalling, — the undefinable shadow, whose presence we feel, but toward which we dare not turn our heads. Pathos clings close to the body, and death is one of its favorite and most moving themes. The interest of tragedy is one with life, and touches us through our sense of immortality. Tragedy has to do with the deepest and holiest part of our nature, and breathes over strings which echo dimly far away in the infinite and eternal. It lifts us above the pent-up horizon of the body, and unfolds to us wider and more spiritual relations, so that we wonder not when Prometheus calls upon the sea for sympathy, or when Lear finds a THOMAS MIDDLETON. 251 luimauity in the elements, and in tliat gray heaven which, like himself, was I'ull of years. Disease, poverty, death, "which tears away from us the body of those whom we had loved, — that body round which our spirits had twined themselves, hiding it with their luxuriant leaves and tendrils, till we believed that it could not but partake somewhat of that deathless essence, — these and many more woes is our frail humanity incident to ; but there are anguishes of our immortal nature deeper than life and death ; — Laocoon struggles with the entwining folds of destiny, doubts that hurry to and fro in bewildered hopelessness, — loss of faith in good, and seemingly forced belief in an overruling evil, when Truth shows but as a painted mask over the stony face of Falsehood, when a damp mist of despair swathes the beautiful in its icy shroud, and Love, which we had deemed unchangeable, hides its eyes from us, — and these belong to Tragedy, which always shows us that the finite can never be an inde- pendent existence, but is ever overruled by the infinite, to which it is knit by unseen but never-to-be-sundered bands. To write a good tragedy, therefore, demands, if not the greatest of poets, certainly some of the highest elements of one. The i)l()t of " The Changeling," the most powerful of Middleton's tragedies, is briefly this. DeFlores, a deformed and ugly villain, loves Beatrice, the heroine of the })lay, who has an unconquerable loathing of him. She has been betrothed by Yermandero, her father, to Alonzo de Piracquo, a noble gentleman, but whom she cannot love, having already given all her heart to Alsemero. DeFlores first tempts her to the 252 THE PLAYS OF murder of Piracquo, and then offers himself as the instrument of that liideous guilt. The murder is suc- cessfully accomplished without the knoM'ledge of Alsemero, and Beatrice, no obstacle now remaining, is married to him. On the day of her wedding she deems it high time to get DeFlores out of the way, but he refuses any other reward than the satiation of his hellish passion for Beatrice, to the gratification of which he compels her by a threat of disclosing all to her husband. Alsemero at length is led to suspect his wife, the whole ghastly story is laid bare, and De Flores, after slaying his unwilling paramour, prevents the revenging steel of Tomaso, Piracquo's brother, by stabbing himself to the heart. The tragedy takes its name from the chief character in an under-plot, which, as is usually the case in the old drama, has nothing whatever to do with the action of the piece. In the opening of the play, Beatrice thus strongly expresses her aversion to DeFlores : " 'Tis my infirmity ; Nor can I other reason render you Than his or hers of some particular thing They must abandon as a deadly pt>ison, "Which to a thousand other tastes were wholesome ; Such to mine eyes is that same fellow there, The same that report speaks of the basilisk." It was a fine thought in our author thus to give a dim foreshadowing of that bloody eclipse of her better nature which Beatrice was to suffer from DeFlores. It is always an unacknowledged sense of our own W'eaknesses that gives birth to those vague feelings and presentiments which warn us of an approaching THOMAS MIDDLETOX. 253 calamity, ami wlien tlie blow has fallen, we poothe our wountled self-respect by calling it Fate. We cheat our sterner reason into a belief that some higher power has interfered to bring about that blight in us whose steady growth always circles outward from some hid- den meanness in our own souls. Our woes are our own offspring, and we feed our hungry brood, as was once fabled of the pelican, with our best heart's blood ; — alas ! they never become fledged, like hers, and Hy away from us, but raven till the troubled fountain runs dry ! The shafts of destiny never rend through buckler and breast-plate, but reach our hearts with an awful and deadly certainty, through any chink in our armor which has been left unbraced by our own sin or recklessness. Beatrice would make us believe that she has a natural antipathy to DeFlores. But antip- athies are only so many proofs of something wanting in ourselves, whereby we are hindered of that perfect sympathy with all things, for which we were created, and without which that life, which should be as liar- monious as the soft consent of love, becomes harsh and jarring. The thought of DeFlores is to Beatrice what the air-drawn dagger was to Macbeth ; she fore- sees in her om'u heart the crime yet uncommitted, and trembles at the weapon even while she stretches her quivering hand to grasp it. A terrible fascination seems to draw us on to the doing of ill deeds, the fore- consciousness whereof, graciously implanted in our natures by God as a safeguard, we misconstrue into the promptings of our evil demon. We brood over the gloomy thought in an agony of fierce enjoyment. Infidels to our own holy impulses, Ave blaspheme the 254 THE PLAYS OF eternal benignity -which broods for ever on its chosen uest in the soul of man, giving life to all beauty and all strength. We go apart from the society of men that we may hold converse with our self-iuvoked and self-created tempter. Always at our backs it dogs us, looming every hour higher and higher, till the damp gloom of its shadow hems us wholly in. We feel it behind us like the fearful presence of a huge hand stretched forth to gripe us and force us to its wither- ing will. One by one the dark, vague fingers close around us, and at last we render ourselves to its fancied bidding in a gush of wild despair which vibrates in us with a horrid delight.'^ We sign our deeds of sale to the fiend with a feather self-torn from our own wings. It is the curse of Adam in us that we can no longer interpret the tongue of angels, and too often mistake the tender fore- thought of our good spirit concerning us, for the foul promptings of an evil demon which we would fain believe is permitted to have dominion over us. In another place Beatrice says of DeFlores: ^^ T never see this fellow but I think Of some harm towards me ; danger s in my mind still; I scarce leave trembling for an hour after." Here we have a still clearer omen of what is to follow. * We need only refer to the masterly illustration of tliis thought in Mr. Dana's " Paul Felton," a tale of wonderful depth and power. The spiritual meaning of the witches in Macbeth is doubtless this tampering of a soul with its warnings against, which it mistakes for ominous suggestions to, evil. THOMAS MIDDLETON. 255 Our poet drops a few " lilies in the mouth of his Tartarus," but there is ever a dark sprig of night- shade auioiig them. lu the scene we next quote, the bloody dawning of the thought of Piracquo's murder in the soul of Beatrice blots out luridly the tender morning-star of love which still trembles there, making us feel yet more thrillingly the swiftly near- ing horrors which it betokens. The scene is between Beatrice and Alsemero. " Beat. I have within mine eyes all my desires : Eequests, tha^ holy prayers asc-end heaven for, And bring tliein down to furnish our defects, Come not more sweet to our necessities Than thou unto my wishes. " Ah. We are so like In our expressions, lady, that unless I borrow The same words, I shall never find their equals. "■^ Beat. How happy were this meeting, this embrace, If it were free from envy ! this poor kiss. It has an enemy, a hateful one, That wishes poison to it : how well were I now, If there were none such name known as Piracquo, Nor no such tie as the command of parents ! I should be too much blessed. " Ah. One good service Woidd strike olfboth your fears, and I'll go near it, too, Since you are so distressed, remove the cause. The command ceases ; so tliere's two fears blown out With one and the same blast. " Bexd. Pray, let me find you, sir : What might that service be, so strangely happy? " Ah. The honorablest piece about man, valor; I'll send a challenge to Piracquo instantly." 256 THE PLAYS OF With what exquisite naturalness is this drawn! The heart of Beatrice, afraid of itself, M'ould fain cheat itself into the belief that Alsemero gave it that dark hint wliich its own guilty wishes had already forestalled. To return — "Beat. How? call you that extinguishing of fear, When 'tis the only way to keep it flaming ? Are not you ventured in the action, That's all my joys and comforts? pray, no more, sir : " Though she seemingly rejects the offer, yet she goes on weighing the risk in her own mind, "Say you're prevailed, you're danger's and not mine then; The law would claim you from me, or obscurity Be made the grave to bury you alive. I'm glad these thoughts come forth; oh, keep not one Of this condition, sir ! here was a course Found to bring sorrow on her way to death ; The tears would ne'er had dried till dust had choked them. Blood-guiltiness becomes a fouler visage ; — '' ' Thus she works herself up to a pitch of horror at the foncied guilt of Alsemero, and with half-conscious cunning renders her own plot, (which she now for the first time acknowledges to herself,) less full of loath- someness. She continues (aside) : " And now 1 think on one ; I was to blame, I've marred so good a market with my scorn ; It had been done, questionless : the ugliest creature Creation framed for some use ; yet to see I could not mark so much where it should be ! " How full of doubt and trembling hesitation is the broken structure of the verse, too, and how true to THOMAS MIDDLETON. 257 nature tlic lie in the last line and a half, which she will persist in telling herself. 'M/s. Lady—" But she does not hear him ; she is too fearfully- intent with watching a murder even now adoing in lier own heart. " Bcni. (aside) Whj', men of art make much of poison, Keep one to expel anotlier; where wius my art '!" The scene which follows, between Beatrice and De Flores, is a very powerful one. Not powerful in the same degree with Lear and Othello, but yet in the same kind, for as much power is needful to the making of a violet as of an oak. It is too Ioup- for us to copy the whole of it. She tries to persuade her- self that DeFlores is not so hideous to her after all, like a child talking aloud in the dark to relieve its terrors. " When we are used To a hard face it is not so impleasing; It mends still in opinion, hourly mends, I see it by experience Hardness becomes the visage of a man well ; It argues service, resolution, manhood, If cause were of employment." DeFlores is led on gradually to the desired end, and when he has sworn to devote himself to whatever ser- vice she may lay upon him, she exclaims, not daring to hear the name of " her murdered man " on her lips till emboldened by slow degrees : 17 258 THE PLAYS OF " Then take him to thy fury ! " JDeF. I thirst for him ! " Beat. Alonzo de Piracquo ! " DeFlores murders Piracquo, and brings one of his fingers, with a ring upon it, as a token of the deed to Beatrice. She is startled at sight of him. " Beat. DeFlores I " DeF. Lady.? " She will not trust her tongue with anything more than an allusion to what she so eagerly longed for. " Beat. Thy looks promise cheerfully. " DeF, All things are answerable, time, circumstance, Your wishes, and my service. " Beat. Is IT done, then ? " DeF. Piracquo is no more. " Beat. My joys start at mine eyes ; our sweefst delights Are evei-more born weeping. " DeF. I have a token for you. " Beat. For me ? " DeF. But it was sent somewhat unwillingly : I could not get the ring without the finger. " Beat. Bless me, what hast thou done ! " Exclaims the horror-stricken Beatrice, the woman reviving again in her. She had hardened herself to the abstract idea of murder, but revolts at this dread- ful material token of it. "DeF. Why, is that more Than killing the whole man ? I cut his heart-strings." How finely is the contemptuous coolness of De Flores, the villain by calculation, set off by the shrinking dread of Beatrice, whose guilt is the child TH02IAS MIDDLETON. 259 of a ravished intercourse between her passions and her affections. The sight of the ring carries her and us back to the sweet days of her iunocency, and the picture is complete. " 'Tis the first token my father made me send him." She sighs, remembering the calm purity from which she has fallen, and yet, at the same time, with the true cunning of a guiltiness which only half repents, strives to palliate the sin of whose terrible consciousness she must evermore be the cringing bondslave, by thinking of her father's tyranny. The horror Avhich a mur- derer feels of the physical fact of murder and the dread Avhich creeps over him from the cold corpse of his victim, exemplified by Beatrice in the above quota- tion, seem, at first thought, strange phenomena in nature. But are they not in truth unwitting recogni- tions of the immortality of the soul, as if the wrong done were wholly to the body and had no terrors for the spiritual part of our being? This feeling may be well called bodily remorse, being clearly of a grosser and more outward nature than that strong agony which shakes us inwardly when we have done a murder upon the soul of our brother, and have been marked on our foreheads as spiritual Cains, by in- gratitude, hypocrisy, mistrust, want of faith, or any other lie against God.* The remainder of this scene between DeFIores and * This bodily feeling is painted with a terrible truth and dis- tinctness of coloring in Hood's " Dream of Eugene Aram," and ■with no less strength by the powerful imagination of Mr. Poe, in his storv of the " Tell-tale Heart." 2G0 THE PLAYS OF Beatrice is all of it striking, but we have not room to quote it all. DeFlores tells her the loathsome price at which she has bought Piracquo's death and she ex- claims: " Why 't is impossible thou canst be so wicked, Or shelter such a cunning cruelty, To make his death the murderer of my honor ! Thy language is so bold and vicious, I cannot see which way 1 can forgive it With any modesty." No guilt can ever sear out of a woman's soul the essential tenderness and purity of its nature. Dese- crated as its dwelling may be by infamy and shame, with meek and silent forgiveness it comes home again to its ruined cell, and gently effaces, as far as it can, tlie ruthless traces of the destroyer. Alas ! where the celestial whiteness of woman's nature is most be- dimmed, she stands most in need of the uplifting sympathy of her sisters, who only give her scorn or a distant pity, which makes her but the more an outcast. How more ennobling and worthy of us it is to seek out and cherish the soiled remnant of an angelic nature in the lepers of sin against whom the hard world has shut its iron doors, than to worship it (which we are not over-ready to do) where it shines unclouded in the noble and the wise. This modesty of Beatrice is one of the most touch- ingly natural traits in her character. DeFlores spurned it as he would a worthless flower. " Pish ! you forget yourself ; A woman dipped in blood and talk of modesty ! " Beat. O, misery of sin ! would I'd been bound THOMAS MIDDLETON. 261 Perpetually unto my living hale In tliat Piracquo than to licar these words ! Think hut upon the distance that creation Set 'twixt tliy hlood and mine, and keep thee there." She shriuks behind her pride, but the next speech of DeFlores drives her forth from her flimsy shelter. The speech is a very vigorous one and full of moral truth. " DeF. Look but into your conscience, read me there, 'T is a true book ; you'll find me there your equal: Pish ! fly not to your birth, but settle you In ivhnt (he act /ta,s made you, you're no more now ; You must forget your parentage to me ; You are the deed's creature; by that name You lost your first condition, and I challenge you, As peace and innocency have turned you out^ And made you one icith me. " Beat. With thee, foul villain ? "DeF. Yes, my fair murderess, do you urge me?" Yes, there are no bounds of caste, no grades of rank, in sin. If we may be born again in virtue, so also may we be in sin, and we bear some trace of the hideous features of our second mother to our grave. A very striking and forcible line is put into the mouth of DeFlores when he first meets Tomaso, Piracquo's brother, after the murder. "I'd fain get off, this man's not for my company, I smell his brother's blood when I come near him. " Tom. Come hither, kind and true one ; I remember My brother loved thee well. " DeF. O, purely, dear sir ! Methinks I'm now again akilling him, He brings it so fresh to me. lAside.'] " 262 THE PLAYS OF In another scene between Beatrice and DeFlores she is made to say something which is full of touching patlios. She suspects her maid of having betrayed her to her husband. DeFlores asks, " Who would trust a waiting-woman ? " Beat. 1 must trust smnebody." How truly is here expressed the wilderness of bleak loneliness into which guilt drives those it possesses, forcing them, when that sweet spring of peacefulness, which bubbles up so freshly in the open confidingness of joy, is cut 0% to seek a sympathy in their degrada- tion, and in the bewildering darkness of doubt and suspicion, to trust some one, even though it be only with the story of their shame. In its lowest and most fallen estate, the spirit of man cannot shake off its inborn feeling of brotherhood, which whispers to it to seek that for sympathy which in happier days it was perhaps too slow to grant. It is sorrow which teaches us most nearly how full of sustainment and help we may be to our fellows, and how much we in our turn stand in need of them ; and that when once selfishness has rusted apart that chain which binds us so closely to man, it has also broken the supporting tie which links us with uplifting trustfulness to the all-enfolding sympathy'of God. In the last act Beatrice confesses her crime to her husband, and he cries bitterly : " O, thou art all deformed ! " Beat. Forget not, sir, It for your sake was done ; shall greater dangers Make thee less welcome ? THOMAS MIDDLETON. 263 " Ah. 0, thou shoul(rst have gone A thousand leagues about to have avoided This dangerous bridge of blood ! here we are lost ! " There is a sternly truthful naturalness in these words of Alsemcro. To a soul highly wrought up, language resolves itself into its original elements, and the relations and resemblances of things present them- selves to it rather than the things themselves, so that the language of passion, in which conventionality is overwhelmed by the bursting forth of the original savage nature is always metaphoriciil."'^ The tragic depth of the climax of this drama can only be thoroughly felt in a perusal of the whole. We can only quote a few sentences. There is much pathos in what the broken-hearted Beatrice says to her father, as she is dying. " O, come not near me, sir, I shall defile you ! I am that of your blood was taken from you For your better health ; look no more upon it, But cast it to the ground regardlessly, Let the common sewer take it from distinction. Beneath the stars, upon yon meteor Ever hung my fate, 'mongst things corruptible ; {Poinfing to DeFlores.] I ne'er could pluck it from him ; my loathing Was prophet to the rest, but ne'er believed : Mine honor fell with him, and now my life." The concluding words of the play which Alsemero * Coleridge's eloquent reasoning in opposition to this theory never seemed to us at all satisfactory, and the very instances he adduces are, to our mind, against him. See his "Apologetic Pre- face," which, however unconvincing, is certainly a magnificent siTecimen of acute and thorough analysis. 264 THE PLAYS OF addresses to his bereaved father-in-law are fragrant with beautiful and sincere humanity. " Sir, you have yet a son's duty living, Please you, accept it ; let that your sorrow, As it goes from your eye, go from your heart ; Man and his sorrow at the grave must part. All we can do to comfort one another, To stay a brother's sorrow for a brother, To dry a child from the kind father's eyes, It is to no purpose, it rather multiplies : Your only smiles have power to cause re-live The dead again, or in their rooms to give Brother a new brother, father a child ; If these appear, all griefs are reconciled." Tlie dramatic power of Middleton is rather of the suggestive kind than of that elaborately minute and finished order, which can trust wholly to its own com- pleteness for effect. Only Shakespeare can so " on horror's head horrors accumulate " as to make the o'er- charged heart stand aghast and turn back with trerabliug haste from the drear abyss in which it was groping bewildered. Middleton has shown his deep knowledge of art and nature by that strict apprecia- tion of his own weakness, which is the hardest wisdom to gain, and Avhich can only be the fruit of an earnest, willing, and humble study in his own heart, of those primitive laws of spirit which lie at the bottom of all hearts. It is much easier to feel our own strength than our Avant of it ; indeed, a feeling of the one blinds us to the other. Middleton is wise in choosing rather to give mysterious hints which the mind may follow out, than to strive to lead the imagination, which is most powerful in conjuring up images of THOMAS MIDDLETON. 265 horror, beyond where he could guide it with bold and unwavering certainty. With electric sympathy we feel the bewilderment of our guide's mind through the hand with which he leads us, and refuse to go further, when, if left to ourselves, our very doubt would have enticed us onward. To show our author's more graceful and delicate powers, we copy the following from another tragedy : " How near am I now to a hapi>iness The earth exceeds not ! not another like it ; The treasures of the deep are not so precious ' As the concealed comforts of man Locked up in woman's love. I scent the air Of blessings when I come but near the house : What a delicious breath marriage sends forth 1 The violet-bed's not sweeter. Honest wedlock Is like a banqueting house built in a garden On which the spring's chaste flowers take delight To cast tlieir modest odors ; when base lust "With all her powders, paintings, and best pride, Is but a fair house built by a ditch side. 2s"ow for a welcome Able to draw men's envies upon man ; A kiss now that shall hang upon my lip As sweet as morning dew upon a rose, And full as long." Another from the same play : "O, hast thou left me, then, Bianca, utterly? Bianca, now I miss thee ! O, return And save the faith of woman ! I ne'er felt The loss of thee till now ; 'tis an affliction Of greater weight than youth was made to bear; As if a punishment of after-life Were fallen upon man here, so new it is To flesh and blood so strange, so insupportable 1 o . . . . Can'st thou forget UKIVEESIIT 266 THE PLAYS OF The dear pains my love took ? how it has watched Whole nights together, in all weathers, for thee, Yet stood in heart more merry than the tempest That sung about mine ears ? " We shall copy a few scattered passages and con- clude : THE SINS OF GREAT MEN. " Every sin thou commit'st shows like a flame Upon a mountain ; 'tis seen far about, And, with a big wind made of popular breath, The sparkles fly through cities ; here one takes, Another catches there, and in short time. Waste all to cinders." Our author's aptness in comparison is striking. He says of the shameful deed of a great man : " Great men are never sound men after it, // leaves some ache or other m their names slill, Which their posterity feels at every weather." CHARITY. " You should love those you are not tied to love ; That's the right trial of a woman's charity." HONOR. "The fame that a man wins himself is best; That he may call his own. Honors put to him Make him no more a man than his clothes do, And are as soon ta'en off." WANT OF NOBLENESS. "O, what vile prisons Make we our bodies to our immortal souls ! " SENSE OF GUILT. " Still my adulterous guilt hovers aloft. And with her black wings beats down all my prayers Ere they be half-way up." THOMAS MIDDLETON. 267 PRUDENCE. " Wisely to fear is to be free from fear." PATIENCE. " Patience, my lord : why, 'tis the soul of peace ; Of all the virtues 'tis nearest kin to heaven ; It makes men look like gods. The best of men That e'er wore earth about him ivas a sufferer A soft, meek, patient , humble, tranquil spirit, The first true (jentleman that ever breathed. The stock of patience tlien cannot be poor. All it desires it has ; what monarch more ? 'Tis the perpetual prisoner's liberty. His walks and orchards ; 'tis the bond-slave's freedom, And makes him seem proud of each iron chain As though he wore it more for state than pain ; It is the beggar's music, and thus sings. Although our bodies beg, onr soids are kings .' O, my dread liege, it is the sap of bliss, Rears us aloft, makes men and angels kiss." A HAPPY MAN. "He that in his cofRn is richer than before. He that counts youth his sword and age his staff, He whose right hand carves his own epitaph." Here is the sweetest description of the passage of time, expressed by an outward reference, that we recol- lect ever to have seen. " The moon hath through her bow scarce drawn to the head, Like to' twelve silver arrows, all the months, Since,—" TWILIGHT. " I come, dear love. To take my last fiirewell, fitting this hour, AVhich nor bright day Avill claim, nor pitchy night. An hour fit to part conjoined souls." 268 THE PLAYS OF THE WORLD. " Stoop thou to the world, 't will on thy bosom tread ; It stoops to thee if thou advance thy head." The following is a revelation of the spiritual world, full of truth and beauty. Men whose material part predominates in them are afraid of spirits ; but a body walkinof the earth after its heavenly tenant has left it is a more awful sight to spiritual minds. " My son was dead ; whoe'er outlives his virtues Is a dead man ; for when you hear of spirits That walk in real bodies, to the amaze And cold astonishment of such as meet them, those are men of vicesf "Who nothing have but what is visible, And so, by consequence, they have no souls." THE BODY. " There's but this wall betwixt you and destruction, When you are at strongest, and but poor thin clay." OVER-CUNNING. " Grow not too cunning for your soul, good brother." There is a simplicity and manly directness in our old writers of tragedy, which comes to us with the more freshness in a time so conventional as our own. In their day, if tlie barrier between castes was more marked than it is now, that between hearts was less so. They were seers, indeed, using reverently that rare gift of inward sight which God had blessed them with, and not daring to blaspheme the divinity of Beauty by writing of Avhat they had not seen and truly felt in their own hearts and lives. It is one of the refinements of a more modern school which teaches THOMAS MIDDLETON. 269 artists to open f.Jicir mouths and shut their eyes, as chil- dren are playfully told to, and wait for some myste- rious jiower to mcike them icise. They wrote from warm, beating hearts, not from a pitiful, dry pericar- dium of fashion or taste, "formed after the purest models." They became worthy to lead, by having too much faith in nature to follow any but her. We find in them le&sons for to-day, as fresh as when they were spoken, showing us that poetry is true for ever; that the spiritual presences which haunted their lonely hours with images of beauty and precious inward promptings to truth and love still walk the earth, seeking communion with all who are free enough and pure enough to behold them. In our day the accursed hunger after gold, and the no less accursed repletion of it, which brings with it a stagnation of life, and ends in an ossification of the whole heart, have rendered us less fit for the reception and proper cherishing of the wondrous gifts of song. But that the day of poetry has gone by is no more true than that the day of the soul has gone by, for they were born, and must live and die, together. The soul mounts higher and higher, and its horizon widens from age to age. Poesy also grows wiser as she grows older. Poetry can never be all written. There is more in the heart of man than any the wisest poet has ever seen there, — more in the soul than any has ever guessed. Our age may have no great poets, for there are some who have but just now gone forth into the silence, some who yet linger on the doubtful brink, and there are successions in poesy as in nature; pines spring up where oaks are cut down, — the lyrical 270 THE PLA YS OF THOMAS MIDDLETON. follows the epic. But of whatever kind or degree, there will ever yet be some poets. They are needed as historians of wonderful facts which, but for them, would be unrecorded, — facts high above the grasp of the diligent recorders of outward events ; and materials of history will never be wanting to them, since there is nothing so beautiful but has in it the promise of a higher beauty, nothing so true but enfolds the elements of a wider and more universal truth. SONG-WRITING. From this to that, from that to this he flies, Feels music's pulse in all her arteries. With flash of high-born fancies, here and there Dancing in lofty measures, and anon Creeps on the soft touch of a tender tone. Whose trembling murmurs, melting in wild airs, Run to and fro complaining their sweet cares; Because those precious mysteries that dwell In music's ravished soul he dare not tell, But whisper to the world. Crashawe {from Strada). The songs of a nation are like wild flowers pressed, as it were, by chance between the blood-stained pages of history. As if man's heart had paused for a moment in its dusty march, and looked back with a flutter of the pulse and a tearful smile upon the simple peacefulness of happier and purer days, gathering some wayside blossom to remind it of childhood and home, amid the crash of battle or the din of the market. Listening to these strains of pastoral music, m'c are lured away from the records of patriotic frauds, of a cannibal policy which devours whole nations with the refined appetite of a converted and polished Polyphe- mus who has learned to eat with a silver fork, and never to put his knife iu his mouth, — we forget the 272 SONG-WRITING. wars and the false standards of honor which have cheated men into wearing the fratricidal brand of Cain, as if it were but the glorious trace of a dignifying wreath, and hear the rustle of the leaves and the inno- cent bleat of lambs, and the low murmur of lovers beneath the moon of Arcady, or the long twilight of the north. The earth grows green again, and flowers spring up in the scorching footprints of Alaric, but where love hath but only smiled, some gentle trace of it remains freshly for ever. The infinite sends its messages to us by untutored spirits, and the lips of little children, and the unboastful beauty of simple nature ; not with the sound of trumpet, and the tramp of mail-clad hosts. Simplicity and commonness are the proofs of Beauty's divinity. Earnestly and beau- tifully touching is this eternity of simj)le feeling from age to age, — this trustfulness with which the heart flings forth to the wind its sybilline leaves to be gathered and cherished as oracles for ever. The un- wieldv current of life whirls and writhes and struico-les muddily onward, and there in midcurrent the snow- white lilies blow in unstained safety, generation after generation. The cloud-capt monuments of mighty kings and captains crumble into dust and mingle with the nameless ashes of those who reared them ; but we know perhaps the name and even the color of the hair and eyes of some humble shepherd's mistress who brushed through the dew to meet her lover's kiss, when the rising sun glittered on the golden images that crowned the palace-roof of Semiramis. Fleets and navies are overwhelmed and forgotten, but some tiny love-freighted argosy, launched (like those of the SONG-WRITING. 273 Hindoo maidens) upon tlie stream of time in days now behind the horizon, floats down to us with its frail lamp yet burning. Theories for which great philosophers wore their hearts out, histories over which the eyes of wise men ached for weary years, creeds for which hundreds underwent an exultiuir martyrdom, poems wliich had once quickened the beating of the world's great heart, and the certainty of whose deathlessness had made death sweet to the poet, — all these have mouldered to nothing; but some word of love, some outvent of a sorrow wliich haply filled only one pair of eyes with tears, these seem to have become a part of earth's very life-blood. They live because those who wrote never thought whether they would live or not. Because they were the chil- dren of human nature, human nature has tenderly fostered them, while children only begot to perpetuate the foolish vanity of their father's name must trust for their support to such inheritance of livelihood as their father left them. There are no pensions and no retired lists in the pure democracy of nature and truth. A good song is as if the poet had pressed his heart against the paper, and that could have conveyed its hot, tumultuous throbbiugs to the reader. The low, musical rustle of the Avind amono; the leaves is sontr- like, but the slow unfolding of the leaves and blos- soms, and under them the conception and ripening of the golden fruit through long summer days of sun- shine and of rain, are like the grander, but not more beautiful or eternal offspring of poesv. The song- writer must take his jslace somewhere between the 13 274 SOXG-WEITING. poet and the musician, and must form a distinct class bv himself. The faculty of writing songs is certainly a peculiar one, and as perfect in its kind as that of writing epics. They can only be written by true poets; like the mistletoe, they are slender and delicate, but they only grow in oaks. Burns is as ^vholly a poet, but not as great a poet, as Milton. Songs relate to us the experience and hoarded learning of the feelings, greater poems detail that of the mind. One is the result of tliat wisdom whicli the heart keeps by remaining young, the other of that which it gains by growing old. Songs are like inspired nursery-rhymes, which make the soul childlike agrain. The best sono;s have always some tinge of a mysterious sadness in them. They seem written in the night-watches of the heart, and reflect the spiritual moonlight, or the shift- ing flaslies of the northern-light, or the trembling lustre of the stai-s, rather than the broad and cheerful benediction of the sunny day. Often they are the merest breaths, vague snatches of half-heard music which fell dreamily on the ear of the poet while he was listening for grander melodies, and whicli he hummed over afterwaixl to himself, not knowing how or where he learned them. A true song touches no feeling or prejudice of edu- cation, but only the simple, original elements of our common nature. And perhaps the mission of the song-writer may herein be deemed loftier and diviner than any other, since he sheds delight over more hearts, and opens more rude natures to the advances of civilization, refinement, and a softened humanity, by revealing to them a beauty in their own simple SONG-WRITING. 275 thoughts and feelings which wins them unconsciously to a dignified reverence for their own noble capabilities as men. He who aspires to the highest triumphs of the muse, must look at first for appreciation and sym- pathy only from a few, and must wait till the progress of education shall have enlarged the number and quickened the sensibility and apprehension of his readers. But the song- writer finds his ready welcome in those homespun, untutored artistic perceptions which are the birthright of every human soul, and which are the sure pledges of the coming greatness and ennoblement of the race. He makes men's hearts ) ready to receive the teachings of his nobler brother. He is not positively, but only relatively, a greater blessing to his kind, since, in God's good season, by the sure advance of freedom, all men shall be able to enjoy what is now the privilege of the few, and Shakespeare and Milton shall be as dear to the heart of the cottager and the craftsman as Burns or Beranger. Full of grandeur, then, and yet fuller of awful responsibility, is the calling of the song-writer. It is no wild fancy to deem that he may shape the destiny of coming ages. Like an electric spark, his musical thought flits glittering from heart to heart and from lip to lip through the land. Luther's noble hymns made more and truer protestants than ever did his sermons or liis tracts. The song hummed by some toiling mother to beguile the long monotony of the spinning-wheel may have turned the current of her child's thoughts as he played about her knee, and given the world a hero or apostle. We know not when or in what soil God may plant the seeds of our 276 SONG-WBITING. spiritual enlightenment and regeneration, but we may be sure that it will be in some piece of clay common to all mankind, some heart whose simple feelings call the M'hole world kin. Not from mighty poet or deep-seeking philosopher will come the word which all men long to hear, but in the lowly Nazareth of some unlearned soul, in the rough manger of rudest, humblest sympathies, shall the true ISIessiah be born and cradled. In the inspired heart, not in the philo- sophic intellect, all true reforms originate, and it is over this that the song-writer has unbridled sway. He concentrates the inarticulate murmur and longing of a trampled people into the lightning-flash of a fiery verse, and, ere the guilty heart of the oppressor has ceased to flutter, follows the deafening thunderclap of revolution. He gives vent to his love of a flower or a maiden, and adds so much to the store of e very-day romance in the heart of the world, refining men's crude perceptions of beauty and dignifying their sweet natural affections. Once it was the fashion to write pastorals, but he teaches us that it is not nature to make all men talk like rustics, but rather to show that one heart beats under homespun and broadcloth, and that it alone is truly classical, and gives eternity to verse. Songs are scarcely amenable to the common laws of criticism. If anything were needed to prove, the utter foolishness of the assertion that that only is good poetry which can be reduced to good prose, we migiit summon as witnesses the most perfect songs in our language. The best part of a song lies often not at all in the words, but in the metre, perhaps, or the SONG-WRITING. 277 structure of the verse, in the wonderful melody which arose of itself from the feeling of the writer, and which unawares throws the heart into the same frame of thought. Ben Jonson was used to write his poems first in prose, and then translate or distil them into verse, and had we not known the fiict, we might have almost guessed it from reading some of his lyrics, the mechanical structure of whose verse is as different from the spontaneous growth of a true song (which must be written one way or not at all) as a paper flower is from a violet. In a good song the words seem to have given birth to the melody, and the melody to the words. The strain of music seems to have wandered into the poet's heart, and to have been the thread round which his thoughts have crystallized. There is always something of personal interest in songs. They are the true diary of the poet's spiritual life, the table-talk of his heart. There is nothing egoistical in them, for the inward history of a poet is never a commonplace one, and egoism can only be a trait of little minds, its disagreeable quality lying wholly in this, that it constantly thrusts in our faces the egoist's individuality, w^hich is really the least noticeable thing about him. We love to hear wonder- ful men talk of themselves, because they are better wortli hearing about than anything else, and because what we learn of them is not so much a history of self as a history of nature, and a statement of facts therein which are so many fingerposts to set us right in our search after true spiritual knowledge. Songs are translations from the language of the spiritual into that of the natural world. 278 SONG-WRITIXG. As love is the highest and holiest of all feelings, so those songs are best in which love is the essence. All poetry must rest on love for a foundation, or it will only last so long as the bad passions it appeals to, and which it is the end of true poesy to root out. If there be not in it a love of man, there must at least be a love of nature, which lies next below it, and which, as is the nature of all beauty, will lead its convert upward to that nobler and wider sympathy. True poetry is but the perfect reflex of true knowledge, and true knowledge is spiritual knowledge, which comes only of love, and which, when it has solved the mystery of one, even the smallest effluence of the eternal beauty, which surrounds us like an atmosphere, becomes a clue leading to the heart of the seeming labyrinth. All our sympathies lie in such close neighborhood, that when music is drawn from one string, all the rest vibrate in sweet accord. As in the womb the brain of the child changes, with a steady rise, through a like- ness to that of one animal and another, till it is per- fected in that of man, the highest animal, so in this life, which is but as a Avomb wherein we are shaping to be born in the next, we are led upw\ard from love to love till we ai-rive at the love of God, which is the highest love. Many things unseal the springs of tenderness in us ere the full glory of our nature gushes forth to the one benign spirit which interprets for us all mystery, and is the key to unlock all the most secret shrines of beauty. Woman was given us to love chiefly to this end, that the serencuess and strength which the soul wins from that full sympathy with one, might teach it the more divine excellence SONG- WRITING. 279 of a sympathy witli all, and that it was man's heart only which God shaped in his own image, which it can only rightly emblem in an all-surrounding love. Therefore, we put first those songs which tell of love, since we see in them not an outpouring of selfish and solitary passion, but an indication of that beautiful instinct which prompts the heart of every man to turn toward its fellows with a smile, and to recognize its master even in the disguise of olay ; and we confess that the sight of the rudest and simplest love-verses in the corner of a village newspaper oftener bring tears of delight into our eyes than awaken a sense of the ludicrous. In fancy we see the rustic lovers wan- dering hand in hand, a sweet fashion not yet extinct in our quiet New England villages, and crowding all the past and future with the blithe sunshine of the present. The modest loveliness of Dorcas has revealed to the delio-hted heart of Reuben countless other beau- ties, of which, but for her, he had been careless. Pure and delicate sympathies have overgrown protectingly the most exposed part of his nature, as the moss covers the north side of the tree. The perception and reverence of her beauty has become a new and more sensitive conscience to him, which, like the won- derful ring in the fairy tale, warns him against every danger that may assail his innocent self-respect. For the first time he begins to see something more in the sunset than an omen of to-morrow's weather. The flowers, too, have grown tenderly dear to him of a sudden, and, as he plucks a sprig of blue succory from the roadside to deck her hair M'ith, he is as truly a poet as Burns, when he embalmed the " mountain 280 SONG-WRITING. daisy " in deathless rhyme. Dorcas thrills at sight of quivering Hesperus as keenly as ever Sappho did, and, as it brings back to her, she knows not how, the memory of all happy times in one, she clasps closer the brown, toil-hardened hand which she holds in hers, and which the heart that Avarms it makes as soft as down to her. She is sure that the next Sabbath evening will be as cloudless and happy as this. She feels no jealousy of Reuben's love of the flowers, for she knows that only the pure in heart can see God in them, and that they will but teach him to love better the wild-flower-like beauties in herself, and give him impulses of kindliness and brotherhood to all. Love is the truest radicalism, lifting all to the same clear- aired level of humble, thankful humanity. Dorcas begins to think that her childish dream has come true, and that she is really an enchanted princess, and her milk-pans are forthwith changed to a service of gold plate, with the family arms engraved on the bottom of each, the device being a great heart, and the legend, God gives, man only takes away. Her taste in dress has grown M'onderfully more refined since her be- trothal, though she never heard of the Paris ftishions, and never had more than one silk gown in her life, that one being her mother's wedding dress made over again. Reuben has grown so tender-hearted that he thought there might be some good even in "Tran- scendentalism," a terrible dragon of straw, against which he had seen a lecturer at the village lyceum valorously enact the St. George,— nay, he goes so far as to think that the slave women (black though they be, and therefore not deserving so much happiness) soya- WETTING. 28 1 cannot be quite so well off as his sister in the factory, and would sympathize with them if the constitution did not enjoin all good citizens not to do so. But we are wandering — farewell Reuben and Dorcas! remem- ber that you can only fulfil your vow of being true to each other by being true to all, and be sure that death can but unclasp your bodily hands that your spiritual ones may be joined the more closely. The songs of our great poets are unspeakably precious. In them find vent those irrepressible utter- ances of homely fireside humanity, inconsistent with the loftier aim and self-forgetting enthusiasm of a great poem, which preserve the finer and purer sensi- bilities from wilting and Avithering under the black frost of ambition. The faint records of flitting im- pulses, we light upon them sometimes imbedded round the bases of the basaltic columns of the epic or the drama, like heedless insects or tender ferns which had fallen in while those gigantic crystals were slowly shaping themselves in the molten entrails of the soul all aglow with the hidden fires of inspiration, or like tlie tracks of birds from far-off climes, which had lighted upon the ductile mass ere it had hardened into eternal rock. They make the lives of the masters of the lyre encouragements and helps to us, by teaching us humbly to appreciate and sympathize with, as men, those Avhom we should else almost have wor- shipped as beings of a higher order. In Shakespeare's dramas we watch with awe the struggles and triumphs and defeats, which seem almost triumphs, of his un- matched soul ; — in his songs we can yet feel the beat- ing of a simple, warm heart, the mate of which can 282 SONG- WRITING. be found imder the first homespun frock you meet on the high road. He who, instead of carefully pluck- ing the fruit from the tree of knowledge, as others are fain to, shook down whole showers of leaves and twigs and fruit at once ; who tossed down systems of morality and philosophy by the handful ; who wooed nature as a superior, and who carpeted the very earth beneath the delicate feet of his fancy with such flowers of poesy as bloom but once in a hundred years, — this vast and divine genius in his songs and his unequalled sonnets, (which are but epic songs, songs written, as it were, for an organ or rather ocean accompaniment,) shows all the humbleness, and wavering, and self- distrust, with which the weakness of the flesh tempers souls of the boldest aspiration and most nnshaken self-help, as if to remind them gently of that brother- hood to assert and dignify whose claims they were sent forth as apostles. We mean to copy a few of the best songs, chiefly selecting from those of English poets. To some of our readers many of our extracts will be new, and those who are familiar with them will thank us, per- haps, for threading so many pearls upon one string. We shall begin our specimens by copying the first verse of an old English song, the composition of which Warton assions to the beginning of the thir- teenth century. There seems to us to be a very beautiful and pure animal feeling of uatui'e in it, and altogether a freshness and breeziness which is delight- ful, after sifting over the curiosse tnfelicitates of most of the later poets. We shall alter the spelling enough to make it intelligible at a glance, and change the SONG- WRITING. 283 tense of one of the words to give it the metrical har- mony of the original. Summer is acoming in, Loudly sing cuckoo ! Groweth seed, And bloweth mead, And springeth the wood anew : Sing cuckoo ! cuckoo! There is something in this song to us like the smell of a violet, which has a felicity of association to bring hack the May-day delights of childhood in all their innocent simpleuess, and cool the feverish brow of the present by wreathing around it the dewy flowers of the past. There is a straightforward plainness in this little verse, which is one of the rarest, as it is also one of the most needful, gifts of a poet, who must have a man's head and a child's heart. Chaucer furnishes us with no specimen of a song, which we cannot but lament, since there are verses of his, in the " Cuckoo and the Nightingale " and the " Flower and the Leaf" especially, which run over with sweetness both of sentiment and melody, and have all that delightful wiintentlonalness (if we may use the word) which is the charm and essence of a true song, in which the heart, as it were, speaks un- consciously aloud, and, like Wordsworth's stock dove, " broods over its own sweet voice." He is like one of those plants which, though they do not blossom, sprinkle their leaves with the hues which had been prepared in the sap to furnish forth the flowers. Although Shakespeare's songs are so familiar, yet we cannot resist copying one of them, since we can 284 SONG-WRITING. nowhere find such examples as in him, who, like nature herself, is as minutely perfect in his least as in his greatest work. His songs ai*e delicate sea-mosses cast up by chance from the deeps of that ocean-like heart in whose struggling abysses it seems a wonder that such fragile perfeetness could have grown up in safety. " Hark ! hark ! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phcebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies ; And winking marybiids begin To ope their golden eyes, i With everything that pretty bin ; My lady sweet, arise, Arise, arise !" There are some beautiful songs scattered about among Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, of which we copy one from " The Maid's Tragedy." There is a humble plaiutiveness in it which is touching. " Lay a garland on my hearse Of the dismal yew ; Maidens, willow-branches bear, iSay I died true : My love was false, but T was firm From my hour of birth : Upon my buried bosom lie Lightly, gentle earth." Ben Jonson was scarcely of fine organization enough to write songs of the first order. A vein of prosaic common-sense runs quite through him, and he seems never to have wholly forgotten his old profession of SONG-WRITING. 285 bricklaying, generally putting his thoughts together with as much squareness and regularity as so many bricks. It is only a blissful ignorance which presumes that poetic souls want common-sense. In truth, men are poets not in proportion to their want of any faculty whatsoever, but inasmuch as they are gifted with a very iHicommon sense, which enables them always to see things purely in their relations to spirit, and not matter. Rare Ben did not wander musingly up Parnassus, lured onward by winding paths and flowery nooks of green stillness,^ and half-glimpses of divine shapes, the oreads of that enchanted hill, but, having resolved to climb, he struggled manfully up, little heeding what flowers he might crush with his stout pedestrian shoes. We copy two verses from the " Masque of the For- tunate Isles," — merely alluding to his sweet song " To Celia," as too well known to need quotation. " Look forth, thou shepherd of the seas, And of the ports that keep'st the keys, And to your Neptune tell, Macaria, prince of all the isles, Wherein there nothing grows but smiles, Doth here put in to dwell. " The windes are sweet, and gently blow, But Zephyrus, no breath they know, The father of the flowers : By him the virgin violets live, And every plant doth odors give As new as are the bowers." From William Browne, a pastoral poet of great sweetness and delicacy, w^e glean the following stanzas. They are somewhat similar to those of Jonson, copied 286 SONG-WRITING. above, but are more purely songlike, and more poetical in expression. Milton, perhaps, remembered the two lines that we have italicized, when he was writing his exquisite song in Comus, a part of which we shall presently quote. The verses are from the fifth song in the second book of " Brittania's Pastorals." " Swell then, gently swell, ye floods, As proud of what ye bear, And nymphs that in low coral woods String pearls upon your hair, • Ascend, and tell if ere this day A fairer prize was seen at sea. " Blow, but gently blow, fair wind, From the forsaken shore. And be as to the halcyon kind Till we have ferried o'er. So may'st thou still have leave to blow And fan the way where she shall go." From Davenant, whose '^ Gondibert " deserves to be better known, if it were only for the excellence of its stately preface, we copy the following. It is not a very good song, but there is a pleasant exaggeration of fancy in it, which is one of the prerogatives of knightly lovers, and we can pardon much to a man who prevented a dissolute tyrant from " lifting his spear against the muse's bower" of the blind old republican, who Mas even then meditating Paradise Lost. "The lark now leaves his watery nest, And climbing, shakes his dewy wings; He takes this window for the East, And to implore your light he sings : 'Awake, awake, the morn will never rise Till she can dress her beauty at your eyes. SONG-WRITING. 287 "'The merchant bows unto the seaman's star, The ploughman from the sun his season takes, But still the lover wonders what they are. Who look for day before his mistress wakes; Awake, awake ! break through your veils of lawn, Then draw your curtains and begin the dawn ! ' " Immediately after the old dramatists come a swarm of soug-writers, of whom Herrick is perhaps the best and most unconscious. With great delicacy of senti- ment, he often writes with a graceful ease of versifica- tion, and a happiness of accent unusual in his time. Very aptly did he name his poems " Hesperides," for a huge dragon of grossness and obscenity crawls loath- somely among the forest of golden apples. AVe extract his well-known " Night-piece " to Julia, as a good specimen of his powers. Many detached fragments of his other poems would make beautiful and complete songs by themselves. " Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee, The shooting stars attend thee, And the elves also, Whose little eyes glow Like sparks of fire, befriend thee. "No will-o'-the-wisp mislight thee. Nor snake nor slow-worm bite thee ; But on, on thy way, Not making a stay. Since ghosts there's none to affright thee ! " Let not the dark thee cumber ; What though the moon does slumber, The stars of the night Will lend thee their light Like tapers clear without number I 288 SONG-WRITING. " Tlien, Julia, let me woo thee Thus, thus to come unto me ; And, when I shall meet Thy silvery feet. My soul I'll pour unto thee ! " "William Habiugton would deserve a place here, if it were ouly for the tender purity of all his poems. They were addressed to the womau who afterward became his wife, and are worthy of a chaste aud dig- nified love. His poems are scarcely any of them good songs, aud the one we quote is more remarkable for a delicate sympathy with outward nature, which is one of the rewards of pure love, thau for melody. It is " upon Castara's departure." " Vows are vain. No suppliant breath Stays the speed of swift-heeled death ; Life with her is gone, and I Learn but a new way to die. See, the flowers condole, and all Wither in my funeral : The bright lily, as if day Parted from her, fades away ; Violets hang their heads, lose All their beauty ; that the rose A sad part in sorrow bears, Witness all these dewy tears, Which as pearls or diamond like, Swell upon her blushing cheek. All things mourn, but oh, behold How the withered marigold Closeth up, now she is gone, Judging her the setting sun." From Carew's poems we have plucked one little flower, fragrant with spring-time and fanciful love. It is "The Primrose." SONG-WRITING. 289 " Ask me why I send you here This firstling of the infant year, — Ask me why I send to you This primrose all bepearled with dew, — I straight will whisper in your ears, The sweets of love are washed with tears: Ask me why this flov.-er doth show So yellow, green and sickly, too, — Ask me why the stalk is weak And bending, yet it doth not break, I must tell you these discover What doubts and fears are in a lover." Lovelace is well known for his devoted loyalty as well as for the felicity of expression, and occasional loftiness of feeling which distinguishes his verses. The first stanza of his address to a grasshopper is wonder- fully summer-like and full of airy grace. " Oh, thou tliat swingest in the waving hair Of some well-tilled oaten beard, Drunk every niglit with a delicious tear Dropt thee from heaven — ' ' We copy his admired poem, " To Lucasta on going to the wars." " Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind. That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I fly. " True, a new mistress now I chase The first foe in the field, And with a stronger fiiith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield. "Yet this inconstancy is such, As you too fhall adore ; 19 290 SONG-WBITING. I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more." Cowley's " Grasshopper," founded on, rather than translated from, Anacreon, has all the spontaneous merit of an original song. We should quote it had we room. Waller, whose fame as a poet far exc;els his general merit, wrote two exquisite songs — " On a Rose," and "On a Girdle." This last we extract. The closing lines of the song are in the happiest vein of extravagant sentiment. " That which her slender waist confined, Shall now my joyful temples bind : No monarch but would give his crown. His arms might do what this has done. " It was my heaven's extremest sphere, The pale which held that lovely deer: My joy, my grief, my hope, my love, Did all within this circle move! " A narrow compass ! and yet there Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair ; Give me but what this riband bound. Take all the rest the sun goes round ! " Milton's songs are worthy of him. They are all admirable, and we can only wonder how the same spirit which revelled in the fierce invective of the " Defence against Salmasius" could have been at the same time so tenderly sensitive. The lines which we copy can scarce be paralleled in any language. " Sabrina fair. Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting SONG-WRITING. 291 The loose train of thine amher-dropping hair ; Listen, for dear honor's sake, Goddess of the silver lake, Listen and save ! " The true way of judging the value of any one of the arts is by measuring its aptness and power to advance the refinement and sustain the natural dignity of mankind. Men may show rare genius in amusing or satirizing their fellow-beings, or in raising their wonder, or in giving them excuses for all manner of weakness by making them believe that, although their nature prompts them to be angels, they are truly no better than worms, — but only to him will death come as a timely guide to a higher and more glorious sphere of action and duty, who has done somewhat, however little, to reveal to its soiil its beauty, and to awaken in it an aspiration toward what only our degradation forces us to call an ideal life. It is but a half know- ledge which sneers at utilitarianism, as if that word may not have a spiritual as well as a material signif- icance. He is indeed a traitor to his better nature who would persuade men that the use of anything is proportioned to the benefit it confers upon their animal part. If the spirit's hunger be not satisfied, the body will not be at ease, though it slumber in Sybaris and feast with Apicius. It is the soul that makes men rich or poor, and he who has given a nation a truer conception of beauty, which is the body of truth, as love is its spirit, has done more for its happiness and to secure its freedom than if he had doubled its defences or its revenue. He who has taught a man to look kindly on a flower or an insect, has thereby made 292 SONG-WRITING. him sensible of the beauty of tenderness toward men, and rendered charity and loving kindness so much the more easy, and so much the more necessary to him. To make life more reverend in the eyes of the refined and educated may be a noble am- bition in the scholar or the poet, but to reveal to the poor and ignorant and degraded those divine arms of the eternal beauty which encircle them lovingly by day and night, to teach them that they also are children of one Father, and the nearer haply to his heart for the very want and wretchedness which half-persuaded them they were orphan and forgotten, this, truly, is the task of one who is greater than the poet or the scholar, namely, a true man, — and this belongs to the song- writer. The poet, as he wove his simple rhymes of love, or the humble delights of the poor, dreamed not how many toil-worn eyes brightened and how many tyrant hearts softened with reviving memories of childhood and innocence. That which alone can make men truly happy and exalted in nature is freedom ; and freedom of spirit, without which mere bodily liberty is but vilest slavery, can only be achieved by cultivating men's sympathy with the beautiful. The heart that makes free only is free, and the tyrant always is truly the bondman of his slaves. The longing of every soul is for freedom, which it gains only by helping other souls to theirs. The power of the song-writer is exalted above others in this, that his words bring solace to the lowest ranks of men, loosing their spirits from thraldom by cher- ishing to life again their numbed and deadened sym- pathies, and bringing them forth to expand and purify SONG-WBITING. 293 in the uucloudecl, impartial sunshine of humanity. Here, truly, is a work worthy of angels, whose bright- ness is but the more clearly visible when they are ministering in the dark and benighted hovels of life, and whose wings grow to a surer and more radiant strength, while they are folded to enter these humblest tenements of clay, than when they are outspread proudly for the loftiest and most exulting flight. The divinity of man is indeed wonderful and glorious in the mighty and rare soul, but how much more so is it in the humble and common one, and how far greater a thing is it to discern and reverence it there ! We hear men often enough speak of seeing God in the stars and the flowers, but they will never be truly religious till they learn to behold him in each other also, where he is most easily yet most rarely discovered. But to have become blessed enough to find him iu anything is a sure pledge of finding him in all ; and many times, perhaps, some snatch of artless melody floating over the land, as if under the random tutelage of the breeze, may have given the hint of its high calling to many a soul which else had lain torpid and imbruted. Great principles work out their fulfilment with the slightest and least regarded tools, and destiny may chance to speak to us in the smell of a buttercup or the music of the commonest air. After beginning this article, we soon found that the limits of a single number were far too narrow to bring down our specimens to the neighborhood of the pres- ent day. Many of the modern songs are the best that have been written, and will better sustain our high estimate than those which we have been obliged to 294 SONG-WEITING. quote in order to give our remarks some slight show of completeness throughout. We have perhaps spoken rather according to our idea of what songs should be, than to a strict estimate of what they are. We shall resume the subject at some future day, and give some- thing toward a more complete analysis of the subject than our time has allowed us in this essay. THE END. /■i- 5?'« ^■.,. -A ^y Cli:ttJ^,aa^m\ttni^^'^^ r-' ' 5^52^Z- J UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY ^U m W^: V' we*?**!: -Wit -Jl- yyfc Sl