Ex Libris GEORGE STAGEY ALBRIGHT IMAGINATION AND FANCY; OR, SELECTIONS FROM THE ENGLISH POETS. » XH. B.. ,.«3«.3, C«„c.. .o„„r ZJZIT''"'"' "WHAT IS POETKYr- BY LEIGH HUNT. -< NEW EDIT/ON LOUDON- \ " 1891. Tin: i.ir.RAUY UNIVEliSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBAKA PKEFACE. This book is intended for all lovers of poetry and the sister arts, but more especially for those of the most poetical sort, and most especially for the youngest and the oldest : for as the former may incline to it for information's sake, the latter will perhaps not refuse it their good-will for the sake of old favourites. The Editor has often wished for such a book himself; and as nobody will make it for him, he has made it for others. It was suggested by the approbation which the readers of a periodical work bestowed on some extracts from the poets, commented, and marked tvith italics, on a 'principle of co-perusal, as though the Editor were reading the passages in their company. Those readers wished to have more such extracts ; and here, if they are still in the mind, they now possess them. The remarks on one of the poems that formed a portion of the extracts {The Eve of Saint Agnes) are repeated in the present volume. All a— 2 IV PREFACE. the rest of the matter contributed by him is new. He does not expect, of course, that every reader will agree with the preferences of particular lines or passages, intimated by the italics. Some will think them too numerous ; some perhaps too few ; many who chance to take up the book, may wish there had been none at all ; but these will have the goodness to recollect what has just been stated, — that the plan was suggested by others who desired them. The Editor, at any rate, begs to be con- sidered as having marked the passages in no spirit of dictation to any one, much less of disparagement to all the admirable passages not marked. If he assumed any- thing at all (beyond what is implied in the fact of imparting experience), it was the probable mutual pleasure of the reader his companion ; just as in reading out loud, one instinctively increases one's emphasis here and there, and implies a certain accordance of enjoyment on the part of the hearers. In short, all poetic readers are expected to have a more than ordinary portion of sympathy, especially with those who take pains to please them ; and the Editor desires no larger amount of it than he grate- fully gives to any friend who is good enough to read out similar passages to himself. The object of the book is threefold ; — to present the public with some of the finest passages in English PREFACE. V poetry, so marked and commented — to fiiniisli such an account, in an Essay, of the nature and requirements of poetry, as may enable readers in general to give an ansicet on tliose x>oints to themselves and others; — and to show, throughout the greater part of the volume, what sort of poetrj' is to he considered as i)oetry of the most iioetlced hind, or such as exhibits the imagination and fancy in a state of predominance, undisputed by interests of another sort. Poetry, therefore, is not here in its compound state, great or otherwise (except incidentally in the Essay), but in its element, like an essence distilled. All the greatest poetry includes that essence, hut the essence does not present itself in exclusiA'e combination with the greatest form of poetiy. It varies in that respect from the most tremendous to the most playful efiusions, and from imagination to fancy through all their degrees ; — from Homer and Dante, to Coleridge and Keats ; from Shak- speare in King Lear, to Shakspeare himself in the Mid- summer NighVs Dream ; from Spenser's Fairy Queen to the Castle of Indolence ; nay, from Ariel in the Tempest, to his somewhat presumptuous namesake in the Bape of the Lock. And passages, both from Thomson's delight- ful allegory, and Pope's paragon of mock-heroics, would have been found in this volume, but for that intentional, artificial imitation, even in the former, which removes a 3 VI PREFACE. tliem at too great a distance from tlie liiglicst sources of inspiration. With the great poet of the Fa'mj Queen the Editor has taken special pains to make readers in general better ncq^uainted ; and in furtherance of this purpose he has exhibited many of his best passages in remarkable relation to the art of the Painter. For obvious reasons no living writer is included ; and some, lately deceased, do not come within the plan. The omission will not be thought invidious in an Editor, who has said more of his contemporaries than most men ; and who would gladly give specimens of the latter poets in future volumes. One of the objects indeed of this preface is to state that should the public evince a willingness to have more such books, the Editor would propose to give them, in succession, corresponding volumes of the Poetry of Action and Passion (Narrative and Dramatic Poetry), from Chaucer to Campbell (here mentioned because he is the latest deceased poet) ; — the Poetry of Contemplation, from Surrey to Campbell ; — the Poetry of Wit and Humour, from Chaucer to Byron ; and the Poetry of Song, or Lyrical Poetry, from Chaucer again (sec in his Works his admirable and only song, beginning Hide, Absalom, tliy gilded tresses clearX PREFACE. VU to Campbell again, and Burns, and O'Keefe. These volumes, if he is not mistaken, would present the Public with the only selection, hitherto made, of none hut genuine poetry ; and he would take care, that it should be un- objectionable in every other respect. * Kius'uKjton, Sejit. 10, 1844. * Wliile closing tlie Essay on Poetry, a fiiencl lent me Cole- ridge's BiograpMa Literaria, which I had not seen for many j-ears, and which I mention, partly to notice a coincidence at page 38 of the Essay, not otherwise worth observation ; and partly to do what I can towards extending the acquaintance of the public with a book containing masterly expositions of tlie art of poetry. Note. — It is much to be regretted that tlie Author's ill-hcaltli prevented him fi-om completing his design; Wit and Humour beiiig tlie only other volume of the intended series. CONTENTS. PAOB AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION " WHAT IS POETRY?" ._ 1 SELECTIONS FROM SPENSER, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE 62 ARCHIMAGO'S HERMITAGE AND THE HOUSE OF MORPHEUS 68 THE CAVE OF MAMMON AND GARDEN OF PROSERPINE 78 A GALLERY OF PICTURES FROM SPENSER 91 (Spenser considered as the Poet of the Painters.) CHARISSA ; OR CHARITY 97 HOPE 98 CUPIB USURPING THE THRONE OF JUPITER 99 MARRIAGE PROCESSION OF THE THAMES AND MEDWAY 99 SIR GUYON BINDING FUROR 100 UNA (or FAITH IN DISTRESS) 101 JUPITER AND MAIA 104 NIGHT AND THE WITCH DUESSA 104 VENUS IN SEARCH OF CUPID, COMING TO DIANA ^ 106 MAY 108 AN ANGEL WITH A PILGRIM AND A FAINTING KNIGHT 109 AURORA AND TITHONUS Ill THE BRIDE AT THE ALTAR Ill A NYMPH BATHING 112 THE CAVE OF DESPAIR 113 A KNIGHT IN BRIGHT ARMOUR LOOKING INTO A CAVE 114 MALBECCO SEES HELLENORE DANCING WITH THE SATYRS 115 X CONTENTS. PAG> LANDSCAPE, WITH DAJISELS CONVEYING A WOUNDED SQUIBE ON HI3 UORSE 1 16 THE NYMPHS AND GRACES DANCING TO A SHEPHEED'S PIPE ; OB, APOTHEOSIS OF A POET'S MISTRESS 116 A PLUME OF FEATHERS AND AN ALMOND-TREE 118 ENCHANTED MUSIC _ 119 SELECTIONS FKOM MAKLOWE, WITH CEITICAL NOTICE 121 THE JEW OF MALTA'S IDEA OF WEALTH 126 A VISION OP HELEN 128 MYTHOLOGY AND COURT AMUSEMENTS 129 BEAUTY BEYOND EXPRESSION 129 THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE 130 SELECTIONS FROM SHAKSPEARE, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE 132 WHOLE STORY OF THE TEMPEST 135 MACBETH AND THE WITCHES 144 THE QUARREL OF OBERON AND TITANIA 150 THE BRIDAL HOUSE BLESSED BY THE FAIRIES 160 LOVERS AND MUSIC 162 ANTONY AND THE CLOUDS 169 YOUNG WARRIORS 169 IMOGEN IN BED 171 SELECTIONS FROM BEN JONSON, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE 173 TO CYNTHIA; — THE MOON 175 THE LOVE-MAKING OF LUXURY 176 TOWERING SENSUALITY 177 THE WITCH - 179 A MEETING OF WITCHES 180 A CATCH OF SATYRS 183 SELECTIONS FROM BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE 184 MELANCHOLY 186 CONTENTS. XI PAGE A SATYR PRESENTS A BASKET OF FRUIT TO THE FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS 183 A SPOT FOR LOVE-TALES 190 MORNING I'Jl THE POWER OF LOVE 19 1 INVOCATION TO SLEEP 193 SELECTIONS FROM MIDDLETON, DECKER, AND WEBSTER, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE 195 FLIGHT OF WITCHES 200 THE CHRISTIAN LADY AND THE ANGEL 203 LADIES DANCING 205 APRIL AND women's TEARS 206 DEATH 206 PATIENCE 206 A WICKED DREAM 208 NATURAL DEATH 209 FITNERAL DIRGE 209 DISSIMULATION 2 1 BEAUTEOUS MORAL EXAMPLE 210 UNLOVELINESS OF FROWNING 2l0 SELECTIONS FROM MILTON, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE 211 Satan's recovery from his downfall 214 THE fallen angels GATHERED AGAIN TO WAR 215 VULCAN 218 THE FALLEN ANGELS HEARD RISING FROM COUNCIL 218 SATAN ON THE WING FOR EARTH 218 THE MEETING OF SATAN AND DEATH 219 l'allegro 221 IL PENSER0SO-. 229 LYCIDAS 236 COMUS THE SORCERER „ 243 Xll CONTENTS. PAGE SELECTIONS FROM COLERIDGE, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE 249 LOVE ; OR, GENEVIEVE 256 KUBLA KHAN 259 TODTH AND AGE 262 THE HEATHEN DIVINITIES MERGED INTO ASTROLOGY 263 WORK WITHOUT HOPE 264 SELECTIONS FROM SHELLEY, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE 265 TO A SKYLARK 269 A GARISH DAT 276 CONTEMPLATION OF VIOLENCE 276 A ROCK AND A CHASM 277 LOVELINESS INEXPRESSIBLE 277 EXISTENCE IN SPACE 278 DEVOTEDNESS UNREQDIRING 278 TO A LADY WITH A GUITAR 279 MUSIC, SIEMORT, AND LOVE 282 SELECTIONS FROM KEATS, WITH CRITICAL NOTICE 283 THE EVE OF ST. AGNES 288 LONELY SOUNDS 308 ORION 308 CIRCE AND HER VICTIMS 308 A BETTER ENCHANTRESS IMPRISONED IN THE SHAPE OF A SERPENT 309 SATURN DETHRONED 309 THE VOICE OF A MELANCHOLY GODDESS SPEAKING TO SATURN. 310 A FALLEN GOD 310 OTHER TITANS FALLEN 311 ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE 311 SONNET ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER >.. 314 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION WHAT IS POETRY? INCLUDING REMARKS ON VERSIFICATION, Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that is to say, considered not merely as poetic feeling, which is more or less shared by all the world, but as the operation of that feeling, such as we see it in the poet's book, is the utter- ance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity .7 Its means are whatever the universe contains ; and its ends, pleasure and exaltation. Poetry stands between nature and convention,! keeping alive among ua the enjoyment of the external and the spiritual worlclj: it has constituted the most enduring fame of nations ; and, next to Love and Beauty, which are its parents, is the greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found in all things, and of the probable riches of infinitude. 1 ^ AN ANS^VER TO THE QUESTION Poetry is a passion," because it seeks the deepest impressions ; antl because it must undergo, in order to convey them. It is a passion for truth, because without truth the impression would be false or defective. It is a passion for beauty, because its office is to exalt and refine by means of pleasure, and because beauty is nothing but the loveliest form of pleasure. It is a passion for power, because power is impression triumphant, whether over the poet, as desired by himself, or over the reader, as affected by the poet. rit embodies and illustrates its impressions by imagina- tion, or images of the objects of which it treats, and other images brought in to throw light on those objects, in order that it may enjoy and impart the feeling of their truth in its utmost conviction and affluence. \ It illustrates them by fancy, which is a lighter play of imagination, or the feeling of analogy coming short of seriousness, in order that it may laugh with what it loves, and show how it can decorate it with fairy ornament. It modulates what it utters, because in running the whole round of beauty it must needs include beauty of sound ; and because, in the height of its enjoyment, it must show the perfection of its triumph, and make diffi- culty itself become part of its facility and joy. And lastly, Poetry shapes this modulation into uni- formity for its outline, and variety for its parts, because it ♦ Passio, sufferiug in a good sense, — ai'dont Bubjection of one's- eelf to emotion. WHAT IS POETRY ? 3 thus realizes the last idea of beauty itself, which includes the charm of diversity within the flowing round of habit and ease. Poetiy is imaginative passion. The quickest and subtlest test of the possession of its essence is in expres- sion ; the variety of things to be expressed shows the amount of its resources ; and the continuity of the song completes the evidence of its strength and greatness. He who has thought, feeling, expression, imagination, action, character, and continuity, all in the largest amount and highest degree, is the greatest poet. Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be made visible to the mind's eye, and whatsoever of music can bo conveyed by sound and proportion without singing or instrumentation. But it far surpasses those divine arts in suggestiveness, range, and intellectual wealth ; — the first, in expression of thought, combination of images, and the triumph over space and time ; the second, in all that can be done by speech, apart from the tones and modulations of pure sound. Painting and music, however, include all those portions of the gift of poetry that can be expressed and heightened by the visible and melodious. Painting, in a certain apparent manner, is things them- selves ; music, in a certain audible manner, is their very emotion and grace. Music and painting are proud to be related to poetry, and poetry loves and is proud of them. Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science ceases to be merely such^ and to exhibit a further truth ; that is to say, tho connexion it has ^ith tbo world of emotion, 4 AN ANSWEE TO THE QUESTION and its power to produce imaginative pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, for instance, what flower it is wo see yonder, he answers, " A lily." This is matter of fact. The botanist pronounces it to he of the order of " Hexandria monogynia." This is matter of science. It is tho " lady " of L'.ie garden, says Spenser ; and here we begin to have a poetical sense of its fairness and grace. It is The plant aud flower of lifjht, says Ben Jonson ; and poetry then shows us the beauty of the flower in all its mystery aud splendour. If it be asked, how we know perceptions like these to be true, the answer is, by the fact of their existence, — by the consent and delight of poetic readers. And as feeling is the earliebt teacher, and perception the only final proof of things the most demonstrable by science, so the remotest imaginations of the poets may often be found to have the closest connexion with matter of fact ; perhaps might always be so, if the subtlety of our perceptions were a match for the causes of them. Consider this image of Ben Jonson's — of a lily being the flower of light. Light, undecomposed, is white ; and as the lily is white, and light is white, and whiteness itself is nothing hut light, the two things, so far, are not merely similar, but identical. A poet might add, by an analogy drawn from the con- nexion of light and colour, that there is a " golden dawn " issuing out of the white lily, in the rich yellow of the stamens. I have no desire to push this similarity farther than it may be worth. Enough has been stated to show that, in poetical as in other analogies, " the same feet of WHAT IS POETRY? 5 Nature," as Bacon says, may be seen " treading in different paths ; " and that the most scornful, that h to say, dullest disciple of ftict, should be cautious how he betrays the shallowness of his philosophy by discerning no poetry in its depths. But the poet is far from dealing only with these subtle and analogical truths. Truth of every kind belongs to him, provided it can bud into any kind of beauty, or is capable of being illustrated and impressed by the poetic faculty. Nay, the simplest truth is often so beautiful and impressive of itself, that one of the greatest proofs of his genius consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illus- trated by nothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, its own wonder, might, or playfulness. Hence the com- plete effect of many a simple passage in our old English ballads and romances, and of the passionate sincerity in general of the greatest early poets, such as Homer and Chaucer, who flourished before the existence of a "literary world," and were not perplexed by a heap of notions and opinions, or by doubts how emotion ought to be expressed. The greatest of their successors never write equally to the purpose, except when they can dismiss everything from their minds but the like simple truth. In the beautiful poem of Sir Egcr, Sir Graham, and Sir Gray-Steel (see it in Ellis's Specimens, or Laing's Early Metrical Tales), a knight thinks himself disgraced in the eyes of his mistress: — Sir Eger said, " If it be so, Then wot I well I must forego Love-liking, and manhood, all clean?" The water rush'd out of his eeii ! 6 AN AN S WEE TO THE QUESTION Sir Gray- Steel is killed : — Gray- Steel into liis death tlius thraws (throes ?) He waiters (welters, — throws himself about) and the grass up draws ; * * ;;•- ;!: * A little while then lay he still (Friends that him saw, liked full ill) And bled into his armour bright. The abode of Chaucer's Bece, or Steward, in the Canterbury Tales, is painted in two lines which nobody ever wished longer : — His wonning (dwelling) was full fair upon an heath, With greeny trees yshadowed wa.s Ids place. Every one knows the words of Lear, "most matter-of- fact, most melancholy : " Pray do not mock me : I am a very foohsh fond old mau, Fom-score and upward : Not an hoiu' more, nor less ; and, to deal plainly, I fear, I am not iu my perfect mind. It is thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and the implied power of writing with exuberance, if need be, that beauty and truth become identical iu poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, a balm in our tears, is drawn out of pain. It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely imagin- ation, when the poet can write a commentary, as it were, of his own, on such sufficing passages of nature, and be thanked for the addition. There is an instance of this kind in Warner, an old Elizabethan poet, than which I know nothing sweeter in the world. He is speaking WHAT IS POETEY? 7 of Fair Rosamond, and of a blow given her by Queen Eleanor : With that she dash'd her ou the lips, So (li/ed double red : Hard was the heart that gave the Mow, Soft were those lij^s that hied. There arc diftercnt kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as follows : — First, that which presents to the mind any object or circumstance in every- day life ; as when Ave imagine a man holding a sword, or looking out of a window; — Second, that which presents real, but not every-day circumstances ; as King Alfred tending the loaves, or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier ; — Third, that which combines character and events directly imitated from real life, with imitative realities of its own invention ; as the probable parts of the histories of Prlaiii and Macbeth, or what may be called natural fiction as distinguished from super- natural ; — Fourth, that which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature ; as Homer's gods, and Shakspeare's witches, enchanted horses and spears, Ariosto's hippogrifif, &c. ; — Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate or aggravate one image, introduces another : sometimes in simile, as when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the coming of night-time ; sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a word, as in Milton's " motes that people the sun- beams ; " sometimes in concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing, past or even future. 8 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION as in the " starry Galileo " of Byron, and that ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet " murdered " applied to the yet living victim in Keats's story from Boccaccio, — So the two brothers and their murder d man Rode towards fair Florence ; — sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which makes one circumstance stand for others ; as in Milton's grey-fly winding its " sultry horn," which epithet contains the heat of a summer's day ; — Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a variety of cir- cumstances take colour from one, like nature seen with jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine ; as when in Lycidas, or the Greek pastoral poets, the flowers and the flocks are made to sympathize with a man's death; or, in the Itahan poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking of love — Parea che 1' erba le fiorisse intorno, E d' amor ragionasse quella riva ! — — Orlando Innamorato, canto iii. or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very light in the chamber and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself; or in the " witch element " of the tragedy of Macbeth and the May-day night of Faust ; — Seventh, and last, that Avhich by a single expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but sur- passes in its effect the extremest force of the most particular description ; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge's Christahel, where the unsuspecting object of the witch's malignity is bidden to go to bed ; — WHAT IS rOETRY? 9 Quoth Cliristabel, So let it be ! And as the ludy bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress. And lay down in her loveliness ; — a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. Tlic very smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter Vs. I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into accessories, superior to those I harv'e alluded to. Of the class of comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into the Fi'iar of Orders Grey, out of Beaumont and Fletcher : — Weep no more, lady, weep no more, Thy son-ow is in vain ; For violets pluck'd the stveetest showers Will ne'er make grow again. And Shakspeare and Milton abound in the very grandest ; such as Antony's likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack ; Lear's appeal to the old age of the heavens ; Satan's appearance in the horizon, like a fleet "hanging in t^e clouds ; " and the comparisons of him w^ith the comet and the eclipse. Nor unworthy of this glorious company, for its extraordinary combination of delicacy and vastness, is that enchanting one of Shelley's in the Adonais : — Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity. lO AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION I multiply these particulars iu order to impress upon the reader's mind the great importance of imagination in all its phases, as a constituent part of the highest poetif. faculty'. The happiest instance I remember of imaginatiye metaphor is Shakspeare's moonlight " sleeping " on a bank ; but half his poetry may be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of discourse. Of imaginary creatures none, out of the pale of mythology and the East, are equal, perhaps, iu point of invention, to Shakspeare's Ariel and Caliban ; though poetry may grudge to prose the discovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described by her inventor in the story of Peter Wilklns ; and in point of treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of Spenser, some of the monsters in Dante, particularly his Nimrod, his inter- changements of creatures into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's Cltristahel, may rank even with the creations of Shakspeare. It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakspeare had bile and nightmare enough in him to have thought of such detest- able horrors as those of the interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge, half-blockish enormity of Nimrod, — in Scripture, the " mighty hunter " and builder of the tower of Babel, — in Dante, a tower of a man in his own person, standing with some of his brother giants up to the middle in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunder-clap is a whisper, and hallooing after Dante and his guide in the jargon of a lost tongue ! The "WHAT IS POETRY? 11 transformations are too odious to quote ; but of the tower- ing giant we cannot refuse ourselves the *' fearful joy " of a specimen. It was twilight, Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil were silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions of hell, when the sound of a tremendous horn made him turn all his attention to the spot from which it came. He there discovered, through the dusk, what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are no towers, said his guide ; they are giants, standing up to the middle in one of these circular pits : Come quando la nebbia si dissipa, Lo sguardo a poco a poco raffigura Cio die cela il vapor, che 1' aere stipa ; Cosi foraudo 1' aiu-a grossa e scura, Piu e i)iu appressaudo in ver la sponda, Fuggemi errore, e giimgemi pam-a: Perocche come in su la cerchia tonda Montereggion di torri si corona ; Cosi la proda, die U pozzo circonda, Torreggiavan di mezza la persona GU orribili giganti, cui miiiaccia Giove del cielo ancora, quando tuona : Ed io scorgeva gia d' alcim la faccia, Le spalle, e il petto, e del ventre gran parte, E i^er le coste giii ambo le braccia. * * •;< * La faccia sua mi parea lunga c grossa, Come la p)ina di San Pietro a Roma : E a sua proporzione cran le altr' ossa. * =;: :;: * " Rafel mai amecli zabi abiii ! " Comincio a gridar la fiera bocca, Cui non si convenicn piii dolci salmi. E il Duca mio ver lui : " ^Vnima sciocca 1 Tienti col corno, e con quel ti disfoga, Quand' ii"a o altra passion ti tocca. 12 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION Cercati al collo, e troverai la soga Che il tieu legato, o auima confusa, E vedi lui che il gran petto ti doga." Poi disse a me : " Egli stesso s' accusa : Quest! e Nembrotto, per lo cui mal coto Pure un Linguaggio nel mondo non s' usa. Lasciamlo stare, e non parUamo a voto : Che cosi e a lui ciascim linguaggio. Come il suo ad altrui, ch' a nuUo e noto." — luferno, canto xxxi. ver. 34 et sjq. I looked again : and as the eye makes out By little and little, what tlie mist conceal'd. In which, till clearmg up, the sky was steep'd ; So, looming through the gross and darksome au% As we drew nigh, those mightj^ bulks grew plain, And error quitted me, and terror join'd : For in hke manner as all round its height Montereggione crowns itself with towers. So tower'd above the circuit of that pit, Though but half out of it, and half within. The horrible giants that fought Jove, and stiU Are threaten'd when he thunders. As we near'd The foremost, I discern'd Ids mighty face. His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk, With both the arms down hanging by the sides. His face appear'd to me, in length and breadth, Huge as St. Peter's pinnacle at Home, And of a Hke proportion all his bones. He open'd, as we went, his dreadful mouth, Fit for no sweeter psalmody : and shouted After us, in the words of some strange tongue, " Rafel ma-ee araech zabce almee ! — " " Dull wretch ! " my leader cried, " keep to thine hora. And so vent better whatsoever rage Or other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throat And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion ! Lo ! what a hoop is clench'd about thy gorge." Then turning to myself, he said, " His howl Is its own mockery. Tliis is Niini'od, ho WHAT IS POETRY ? 13 Through wlioso ill thought it was tliat humankind Wcro tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say nouglit : For as he speaketh language known of none, So none can speak save jargon to himself." Assuredly it could not have been easy to find a fiction so uucouthly terrible as this in the hypochondria of Hamlet. Even his father had evidently seen no such ghost in the other world. All his phantoms were in the world he had left. Timon, Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero, iNIacbeth himself, none of Shakspeare's men had, in fact, any thought but of the earth they lived on, whatever super- natural fancy crossed them. The thing fancied was still a thing of this world, " in its habit as it lived," or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy. Its lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the stage. Caliban himself is a cross-breed between a witch and a clown. No offence to Shakspeare : who was not bound to be the greatest of healthy poets, and to have every morbid inspiration besides. What he might have done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante, I know not : all I know is, that in the infernal line he did nothing like him ; and it is not to be wished he had. It is far better that, as a higher, more universal, and more bene- ficent variety of the genus Poet, he should have been the happier man he was, and left us the plump cheeks on his monument, instead of the carking visage of the great, but over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Florentine. Even the imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a " nervous gentleman " compared with Shakspeare, was visited with no such dreams as Dante. Or, if it was, 14 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION he did not choose to make himself thinner (as Dante says he did) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions of nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus. Chaucer, for all he was " a man of this world " as well as the poets' world, and as great, perhaps a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides being one of the pro- foundest masters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart to conclude the story of the famished father and his children, as finished by the inexorable anti-Pisan. But enough of Dante in this place. Hobbes, in order to daunt the reader from objecting to his friend Davenant's want of invention, says of these fabulous creations in general, in his letter prefixed to the poem of Gondihcrt, that "impe- netrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, are easily feigned by them that dare." These are girds at Spenser and Ariosto. But, with leave of Hobbes (who translated Homer as if on purpose to show Avhat execrable verses could be written by a philosopher), enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily feigned, as Ariosto and Spenser feigned them ; and that just makes all the difler- ence. For proof, see the accounts of Spenser's enchanted castle in Book the Third, Canto Twelfth, of the Fairy Queen ; and let the reader of Italian open the Orlando Furioso at its first introduction of the Ilippogriff (Canto iv. st. 3), where Bradamante, coming to an inn, hears a great noise, and sees all the people looking up at something in the air ; upon which, looking up herself, she sees a knight in shining armour riding towards the sunset upon a creature with variegated wings, and then dipping WHAT IS rOETRY ? 15 and disappearing among tlio liills. Chaucer's steed of brass, that was So liorsly and so quick of eye, is copied from the life. You might pat him and feel his brazen muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to what he thought childish, made a childish mistake. His criticism is just such as a boy might pique himself upon, who was educated on mechanical principles, and thought he had outgrown his Goody Two-shoes. With a wonderful dimness of dis- cernment in poetic matters, considering his acuteness in others, he fancies he has settled the question by pro- nouncing such creations " impossible ! " To the brazier they are impossible, no doubt ; but not to the poet. Their possibility, if the poet wills it, is to be conceded ; the pro- blem is, the creature being given, how to square its actions with probability, according to the nature assumed of it. Hobbes did not see that the skill and beauty of these fictions lay in bringing them within those very regions of truth and likelihood in which he thought they could not exist. Hence the serpent Python of Chaucer, Sleeping against the sun npon a day, when Apollo slev/ him. Hence the chariot-drawing dol- phins of Spenser, softly swimming along the shore lest they should hurt themselves against the stones and gravel. Hence Shakspeare's Ariel, living under blossoms, and riding at evening on the bat ; and his domestic namesake in tho Rajie of the Loch (the imagination of the drawing-room) saving a lady's petticoat from the coffee with his plumes, and directing atoms of snuff into a coxcomb's nose. In 16 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION the Orlando Furioso (Canto xv. st. 65) is a wild story of a cannibal necromancer, who laughs at being cut to pieces, coming together again like quicksilver, and picking up his head when it is cut off, sometimes by the hair, some- times by the nose ! This, which would be purely childish and ridiculous in the hands of an inferior poet, becomes interesting, nay grand, in Ai-iosto's, from the beauties of his style, and its conditional truth to nature. The monster has a fated hair on his head, — a single hair, — which must be taken from it before he can be killed. Decapitation itself is of no consequence, without that proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has fought this phenomenon on horseback, and succeeded in getting the head and gal- loping oft' with it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at. How is he to discover such a needle in such a bottle of hay ? The trunk is spurring after him to recover it, and he seeks for some evidence of the hair in vain. At length he bethinks him of scalping the head. He does so ; and the moment the operation arrives at the place of the hair, the face of the head becomes pale, the eyes tarn in their sockets, and the lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse : Si fece il viso allor palliJo e brutto, Travolse gli occlii, e diraostro all' occaso Per manifesti segui esser condutto : ]<} '1 busto clie segiiia troncato al coUo, Di sella caddc, e die 1' ultimo ci'ollo. Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet , The eyes turii'd in their sockets, drearily ; And all things show'd tlie villain's sun was set. His trunk that was in chace, fell from its liorse, And giving the last shudder, was a corse. WHAT IS POETRY ? 17 It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his companion wherever he goes, even in the most supernatural region, that the poet, in the words of a very instructive phrase, takes the world along with him. It is true, he must not (as the Platonists would say) humanize w'eakly or mis- takenly in that region ; otherwise he runs the chance of forgetting to be true to the supernatural itself, and so betraying a want of imagination from that quarter. His nymphs will have no taste of their woods and waters ; his gods and goddesses be only so many fair or frowning ladies and gentlemen, such as we see in ordinary paintings ; he will be in no danger of having his angels likened to a sort of wild-fowl, as Kembrandt has made them in his "Jacob's Dream." His Bacehuses will never remind us, like Titian's, of the force and fury, as well as of the graces of wine. His Jupiter will reduce no females to ashes ; his fairies be nothing fantastical ; his gnomes not " of the earth, earthy." And this again wdll be wanting to Nature ; for it will be wanting to the supernatural, as Nature would have made it, working in a supernatural direction. Never- theless, the poet, even for imagination's sake, must not become a bigot to imaginative truth, dragging it down into the region of the mechanical and the limited, and losing sight of its paramount privilege, which is to make beauty, in a human sense, the lady and queen of the universe. He would gain nothing by making his ocean-nymphs mere fishy creatures, upon the plea that such only could live in the water : his wood-nymphs with faces of knotted oak ; his angels without breath and song, because no Imigs could exist between the earth's atmosphere and the empyrean. The U 18 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION Grecian tendency in this respect is safer than the Gothic ; nay, more imaginative ; for it enables us to imagine beyond imagination, and to bring all things healthily round to their only present final ground of sympathy, — the human. When we go to heaven, we may idealize in a superhuman mode, and have altogether different notions of the beau- tiful ; but till then we must be content with the loveliest capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of Greece were still beautiful Avomen, though they lived in the water. The gills and fins of the ocean's natural inhabitants were confined to their lowest semi-human attendants ; or if Triton himself was not quite human, it was because ho represented the fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they did the fairer. To conclude this part of my subject, I will quote from the greatest of all narrative writers two passages ; — one exemplifying the imagination which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly, without confounding them ; the other, that which paints events and circumstances after real life. The first is where Achilles, who has long absented himself from the conflict between his country- men and the Trojans, has had a message from heaven bidding him reappear in the enemy's sight, standing outside the camp-wall upon the trench, but doing nothing more ; that is to say, taking no part in the fight. He is simply to be seen. The two armies down by the sea-side are contending which shall possess the body of Patroclus ; and the mere sight of the dreadful Grecian chief — super- naturally indeed impressed upon them, in order that nothing may be wanting to tho full effect of his courage WHAT IS POETRY ? 19 and conduct upon courageous men — is to determine the question. We are to imagine a slope of ground towards the sea, in order to elevate the trench ; the camp is soli- tary ; the hattle (" a dreadful roar of men," as Homer calls it) is raging on the sea-shore ; and the goddess Iris Las just delivered her message and disappeared. — Airdp 'AxiWtvg wpro, Au 0i'Aoe" o/f^i S' 'A9))vr] "Qfjioig i(pdij-ioi(n (3d\' aijiSa Qvaaavoeaaav' Afi(pi Ss oi Kt(pa\y vs(pOQ tOTf^E diet Otawv Xpvatov, Ik 5' avTOv Sale (pXoya Tra/Kjxii'inoffnv. 12f S' oTt KairvoQ lujv iK affrfof aiOi()' 'iKijrai T»;\o(?ti/ tic vi'jaov, Tt)v cijioi cif.t^iiiaxoi'rai, O'ire TTai'Tjuipici aTvyt(i(i> Kpivovrai dpij'i 'Affrfof tic G(pirtpov. upa S' i)e\iiij Karaovvri Wvpaoi T€ ifKiykQovaiv iTrliTpt/ioi, vxpocrs S' auyt) Viyverai ataaovaa, irepiKTiovtaaiv IceaOai, A'iKtv TTWQ avv vrjvcrlv c'tpiMQ fiX/cr/'/pff 'i/cuivraf "Qq air ' A\i\\)\OQ KtipaXFig aeXag aid'tp' 'iicave. 2r^ 6' tiri rd^pov iujv airb reix^OQ' viid' ig 'Axaiovg Miayiro' fiTjTpui; yap irvKivtjv ajTri^tr tferfiiiv. "EvBa ardg ■ijiia'- dndTepOe Se IlaWdg 'AOi'iv)} ^Oky^ar' drdp Tpweamv iv dainrov ujpat KvSoifior. 'Qg o' or dpi^i)\i] (pwvi), ots t' taxs adXTny^ 'AdTV TripnrXop.kviov Stjtwv viro Gv^opa'iareojv' "Qg TOT dpt^yX?) ^wvi) yivtr' AiaKiSao. Oi §' u)g oiiv d'iov ona xoiXKtov AiaiciSao, TIaaiv op'ivQi] Qvpog' drdp KaXXirpixig 'ittttoi Alp oxia rpoTTiov oaaovro yap dXysa Qvfu^. 'Rvioxoi <3' tKTrXrjyiv, iTTtl 'iSop dKapiarov Trvp Auvbv vTTip Ki(paXfjg /ityaGv/iov HyXeiiovog Aaiofitvov TO o' tdaii 6td yXavKunrig 'AOt'ivt]. Tpig fikv virtp rd (Jt kcjt' av9i XiTrev 6 Si /J-ifivev ipvKtxiV "Itcttovq I'lfituvovQ rf y'lpuv 6' IQvt; Kiev o'Ikov, Ty p 'Ax'XtvQ 'l^eaKE, Aii ^iXog' iv Ss fiiv avriv Etip', 'irapoi 5' dnai'tvOe KaOtiaro' Tt^ ck Si)' o'luj "Hpwg Avrojjsdiov re, Kai 'AX/ct,uoc o^og "Aprjog, Jloiirvvov iraptovTV {vkov O drriXTjysv iSioorjg, "Eff9u)V Kat mviov, 'in Kai TrapiKiiro TpdiviZ,a') Tovg d' tXaO' ehtXOiov Upiafiog fdyag, dyxi 5' upa (Jtuq, Xepalv 'Axt-XXfjog \«/3£ yoiivara, koI Kvat xtipag Aeivdg, dvSpo(p6vovc, a'i o'l TroXtag Krdi'ov vlag. 'Qg B' orav uvcp' dri] TrvKivt] XdjSjj, oar', u'l Trdrpg ^wra KaraKTtivag, uXXov t^iKSTO oi)iiov, 'AvCphg kg d^vEiov, Qdn^og S' i'xft tiaopoiovrag' "Qg 'Axi-Xivg 6dfi[i7](jej', iSujv ITpirtjuov OtositiUf Qdf.tjiiiaai' ce Kai dXXoi, tg dXXiiXovg St 'iSovro. Tbv Kul XiaaSfievog IJpiafiog irpbg fivOov ttnrf Mi'/'jcrat irarpog (Jtto, Oeolg tTrniKtX' 'Ax^XXtv, TtjXiKOV, waTTtp tyojv, oXo(^ tTrl yt'ipaog ovSif. Kai nkv TTOV Ktivov iripiva'iiTai dfi(>ng iovrig Tiipova, ovSk Tig iffr'ii'., dp))}/ Kai Xoiyuv dfxvycu'' 22 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION AXX' ijToi KiXvoQ yi, aiQir Zioovrog uKoviov, Xaipsi T tv Qvfiiii, £7ri r tXTrerai ijixara iravra 'OipEffOai (p'tXov v't!)}', awb Tpoirj9tv lovra' Avrap tyoj Trai'airoTjxoQ, tirel t'ekov vlag apiarovg Tpoiy iv tvQi'uj, tSjv S' ovnva (prjju XiKil(pBai. JIsvrljKOi'rd ftoi iicrav, or' i'/XvOov vUg 'Axaiiov' 'FjVviaKaiSeKa n'w fiOL liiQ tic I'rjSvog ijcrav, TovQ d' ('iXXovg ^oi 'iriKTOv tvi fityapoici yvvaiKtg. Taiv fitv TToXXtiiv Qovpog 'Apijg vtto yovvar iXvatv" "Og Sb }Loi olog ir\v, t'lpvTO Se aarv Kal avrovg, Tvv av Trpwrji' KTth'ag, duvvofievov Trtpi iraTprjg, "EKTopa" Tov vuv I'lvtx iKciru) vijag 'Axaidjv, Avtjofuvog TTopu Clio, (pkpLO S' cnrfpeiai aTTOira. 'AXX' aiStio Qiovg, 'AxiXiv, aurov r tXkr}, ''ErXjjj/ d\ oV ouTTw rtg iinxQoviog fSpOTug dXXog, 'AvSpbg 7raiSo(puvoio ttotI crrofia x^^p' opiytaBai. "Qg (pdro' t(^ h' dpa Tzarpog vf' 'ifupov wpae yooio, ^Aipann'og S' dpa xfipoc, aTrwcraro j//ca ykpovra. T(jj St ixvi^aajiEvw, 6 fi'iv BKTopog di'Spo(p6i'oio, KXai' dSivd, TTpoTTapoiQt ttoSwv 'AxiXtjog tXvuOeig' Avrdp 'AxtXXtvg KXdliv kov ■Kar'ip\ dXXoTS S' avrt UdrpoKXov rwv Sk arovax)) Kara daJfiar' opwpti. AvTap, tTTtl pa yooto TtrdpTTiTO Slog 'AxiXXivg, Kai oi aTTo TcpaiT'iSiov yX9' 'ifiipog, 7]S' utto yviwv, AynV aTTo Qpovov wpro, ytpovra Sk Xftpof dviarr], OiKTiipwv TToXiuv rt Kdpt], TToXiov re yeveiov. —Iliad, lib. xxiv. vv. 4GS— 510. So saying. Mercury vanislicd up to heaven ; And Priam then aliglitod IVom his cliariot, Leaving Idteus with it, wlio remaiu'd Holding the mules and horses ; and the old man Went straight indoors, where the belov'd of Jove AchiUes sat, and found liira. In the room Were others, but apart ; and two alone, The hero Automedon, and Alciraus, A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been At meals, and had not yet remov'd the boai'd. Great Priam came, without their seeing him, And kneeling down, he dasp'd Achilles' knees, WHAT IS POETRY ? 23 And kiss'd those terril)le, homicidal hands. Wliich liad deprived liim of so many sons. And as a man who is press'd heavily For having slain another, ihes away To foreign lands, and comes into the house Of some great man, and is beheld with wonder, So did AchUles wonder to see Priam ; And the rest wouder'd, looking at each other. But Priam, praj-iug to him, spoke these words : — *' God-like Achilles, think of thine own father ! To the same age have we both come, the same Weak pass; and though tlie neighbouiing chiefs may vex Hini also, and his borders find no help, Yet when he hears that thou art still aUve, He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes To see liis dear son coming back from Troy. But I, bereav'd old Priam ! I had once Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say That one is left me. Fifty children had I, AVhen the Greeks came, nineteen were of one womb ; The rest my women bore me in my house. The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen'd ; And he who had no peer, Troy's prop and theirs, Him hast thou kill'd now, fighting for his country, Hector ; and for his sake am I come here To ransom hun, bringing a countless ransom. Exit thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and tliink Of thine own father, and have mercy on me : For I am much more wretched, and have borne What never mortal bore, I think, on earth, To lift iinto my lips the hand of him Who slew my boys." He ceased ; and there arose Sharp longing in Achilles for his father ; And taking Priam by the hand, he gently Put him away ; for both shed tears to thmk Of other times ; the one, most bitter ones For Hector, and mtli wilful wretchedness Lay right before Achilles : and the other, 24 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION For his own father now, and now his friend ; And the whole house might hear them as they moan'd. But when divine Achilles liad refresh'd His soul ■ndth tears, and sharp desh-e had left His heart and hmbs, he got up from his throne, And rais'd the old man by the hand, and took Pity on his grey head and his grey chin. lovely and immortal privilege of genius ! that can stretch its hand out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written, if he had thought of it. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact. They, and they only, see what is proper to he told, and what to he kept back ; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction ; without imagination there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their Idnd, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative would have given us too many remarks ; the over-lyrical, a style too much carried away ; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes ; the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those. We should have been told nothing of the "grey chin," of the house hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man aside ; much less of that yearning for his father, which made the hero tremble in every limb. Writers without the greatest passion and power do not feel in this way, nor are capable of expressing WHAT IS POETRY ? 25 the feeling ; thougli there is enough sensibility and imagi- nation all over the world to enable mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth into their hearts. The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure absence of ideas, in commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional metaphor, or such images and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse and writing. Addison's Co to is full of them : Passion unpitied and successless love Plant chujgers in my hreaH. I've sounded my Numidians, man by man, And find them ripe for a revolt. The virtuous Mavcia towers above her sex. Of the same kind is his "courting the yoke" — "distract- ing my very heart " — " calling up all " one's " father " in one's soul — "working every nerve" — "copying a bright example ; " in short, the whole play, relieved now and then with a smart sentence or turn of words. The fol- lowing is a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another tragedy of Addison's time, — the Mariamne of Fenton : — Mariamne, ivith superior charms. Triumphs o'er reason ; in her look she hears A paradise of ever-blooming sweets ; Fair as the first idea beauty ^>rj« ^6- In the young lover's soul ; a winning grace Guides every gesture, and obsequious love Attends on aU her steps. "Triumphing o'er reason" is an old acquaintance of everybody's. "Paradise in her look" is from the Italian 26 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION poets through Dryden. " Fair as the first idea," &c. is from Milton, spoilt; — "winning grace" and "steps" from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt : just as when a great writer borrows, he improves. To come now to Fancy, — she is a younger sister of Imagination, without the other's weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely so called, is all feeling ; the feeling of the subtlest and most affectiug analogies ; the perception of sympathies in the natures of things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with theu' resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical creations. — — Rouse j-oiirseK ; and the weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane, Be shook to air. — Troilus and Cressida, Act iii. sc. 8. That is imagination; — the strong mind sympathizing vdth the strong beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop. Oh ! — and I forsooth In love ! I that have been love's whip ! A very beadle to a humorous sujh ; A domineering pedant o'er the boy ; This ^\'impled, whining, pm*bUnd, wayward hoy ; This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid, Uccjent oflove-rlnpnes, lord of folded arms. The anointed sovereijn of sighs and (jroans, &c. — Loves Labour s Lost, Act iii. sc. 1. That is fancy; — a combination of images not in their nature connected, or brought together by the feeling, but WHAT IS POETRY ? 27 by the will and pleasure; and having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its smiling subjector. Silent icicles QuicLly shining to tlie quiet moon. — Coleridge's Frost at Midnight. That, again, is imagination ; — analogical sympathy ; and exquisite of its kind it is. You are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion ; where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman s heard, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt. —Twelfth Night, Act iii. sc. 2. And that is fancy; — one image capriciously suggested by another, and but half connected with the subject of dis- course ; nay, half opposed to it ; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal spirits, the "Dutchman's beard" is made to represent the lady ! Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse ; Fancy to the comic. Macbeth, Lear, Paradise Lost, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination : the Midsmnmer Niglit's Dream and the Rape of the Lock, of fancy : Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest, the Fairy Queen, and the Orlando Furioso, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such ; and neither is the best that might be found. The term Imagination is too confined : often too material. It presents too invariably the idea of a solid body; — of "images" in the sense of the plaster- cast ciy about the streets. Fancy, on the other hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition {((tavTacTuaj appearance, phantom), has rarely that freedom 28 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION from visibility -wliicli is one of the higliest privileges of imagination. Viola, in Twelfth Night, speaking of some beautiful music, says : — It gives a very echo to the seat, Where Love is throned. In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are com- bined ; yet the fancy, the assumption of Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a solid body ; while the imagina- tion, the sense of sympathy between the passion of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at all. Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sym- pathies of what is called Imagination. One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy ; and like Melancholy, as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe. Fancy turns her sister's wizard instruments into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her fore- head, and sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of fashions ; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and capricious ; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the images of wit ; and delights as much to people nature with smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together, and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her company ; always, in the case of the greatest poets ; often in that of less, though with them WHAT IS POKTRY ? 29 she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great imagina- tiou and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also, the very greatest, but with imagination predominant ; Chaucer, the strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare, and in comic painting inferior to none ; Pope has hardly any imagina- tion, but he has a great deal of fancy; Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakspeare alone, of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing will be found in the present volume. See also his famous description of Queen Mab and her equipage, in Borneo and Juliet : — Her waggon-spokes made of long- spinners' legs ; The cover, of the wings of gi'asshoppers : The traces of the smallest spider's web ; The collars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c. That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace from Drayton's Nymjyhidia : — This palace standeth in the air, By necromancy placed there. That it no tempest needs to fear, "Which way soe'er it blow it : And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon, Whence lies a way up to the moon, And thence the Fairy can as soon Pass to the earth below it. The walls of spiders' legs are made, Well mortised and finely laid ; Ho was the master of his trade. It curiously that builded ; 30- AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION Tlie windous of the eyes of eats : (because they see best at night,) And for the roof instead of slats Is cover'd with the skins of bats With moonshine that are gilded. Here also is a fairy bed, very dehcate, from the same poet's Mule's Elysium : Of leaves of roses, white and red. Shall be the covering of the bed ; The curtains, vallens, tester all Shall be the flower imperial ; And for the fringe it all along With azure hare-bells shall he hung. Of lilies shall the pillows he With down stuft of the hutterfiy. Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John Suckling, in his Ballad on a Wedding, has given some of the most playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed : Her feet beneath her petticoat Like little mice stole in and out, As if they fear d the light : But oh ! she dances such a way i No sun upon an Easter day Is half so fine a sight. It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur, to compare a lady's dancing with the sun. But as the sun has it all to himself in the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is imagination fairly displacing fancy. The following has enchanted every- body : — WHAT IS POETRY ? 31 Her lips were red, and one was tldn Compared uith that was next her chin, Some bee Jiad stiuxj it newly. Every reader lias stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave. With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by which verse ought to be modulated, and one-ness of impression diversely produced, it has been contended by some, that Poetry need not be written in verse at all ; that prose is as good a medium, provided poetry be conveyed through it ; and that to think otherwise is to confound letter with spirit, or form wdth essence. But the opinion is a prosaical mistake. Fitness and unfitness for song, or metrical excitement, just make all the difference between a poetical and prosaical subject ; and the reason why verso is necessary to the form of poetry is, that the perfection of poetical spirit demands it ; — that the circle of its enthu- siasm, beauty, and power, is incomplete without it. I do not mean to say that a poet can never show himself a poet in prose ; but that, being one, his desire and necessity will bo to write in verse ; and that, if he were unable to do so, he would not, and could not, deserve his title. Verse to the -true poet is no clog. It is idly called a trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their satisfaction and eft'ect. Verse is no more a clog than the condition of rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the roundness and order of the globe we live on is a clog to the freedom and variety that abound within its sphere. Verse is no dominator over the poet, except inasmuch as the bond is reciprocal, and the poet 32 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION dominates over the verse. They are lovers, playfully cliallenging each other's rule, and delighted equally to rule and to obey. Verse is the final proof to the poet that his mastery over his art is complete. It is the shutting up of his powers in " vicasiircful content;" the answer of form to his spirit ; of strength and ease to his guidance. It is the willing action, the proud and fiery happiness, of the winged steed on whose hack he has vaulted, To witcli the world with woudrous horsemanship. Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, and "tuneful planetting " of the poet's creations, which is produced of necessity by the smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and the harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the beautiful. Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must, of necessity, leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over its forms, unmanifested ; and verse flows as inevitably from this condition of its integrity, as other laws of pro- portion do from any other kind of embodiment of beauty (say that of the human figure), however free and various the movements may be that play within their limits. What great poet ever wrote his poems in prose ? or where is a good prose poem, of any length, to be found ? The poetry of the Bible is understood to be in verse, in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a good word for those prose enlargements of some fine old song, which are known by the name of Ossian ; and in passages they deserve what he said ; but he judiciously abstained from saying anything about the form. Is Gesncr's Death of WHAT IS POETRY? 33 Ahcl a poem? or Kcvyefs Meditations ? The Pilgrinis Progress has been called one ; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and one of no mean order : and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as was compatible with so lofty an affinity; and this is the reason why it stopped where it did. He had a craving after the beautiful, but not enough of it in himself to echo to its music. On the other hand, the possession of the beautiful will not be sufficient without force to utter it. The author of Telemachus had a soul full of beauty and tenderness. He was not a man who, if he had had a wife and children, would have run away from them, as Bunyan's hero did, to get a place by himself in heaven. He was "a little lower than the angels," like our own Bishop Jewells and Bcrkeleys ; and yet he was no poet. He was too delicately, not to say feebly, ab- sorbed in his devotions to join in the energies of the seraphic choir. Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one ; and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of strength, sweetness, straightforward- ness, unsuperfluousness, variety, and onc-?iess;— one-ness, that is to say, consistency, in the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. Strength is the muscle of verse, and shows itself in the number and force of the marked syllables ; as. Sonorous metal blowing mirtial souuds.— ParaJise Lost. Beliemotli, biggest born of earth, uphoav'd His vustness. — Id. 34 AN ANSWER TO THE Q-UESTION Blow, wmd, and crack your cheeks ! rage ! blow ! You cataracts, and hurricanoes, spout Till j'ou have drench'd oiu- steeples, dvown'd the cccke 1 You sulphiirous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head ! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thicli rotundity o' the world ! — Lear. Unexpected locations of tlie accent double this force, and render it characteristic of passion and abruptness. And here comes into play the reader's corresponding fine- ness of ear, and his retardations and accelerations in accordance with those of the poet : — Then in the keyhole turns The intricate wards, and every bolt and bar Unfastens. — On a sudden open fly With iinpetiious recoil and jarring sound The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate Harsh thimder. — Par. Lost, Book II. Abominable — unutterable — and worse Than fables yet have feigned. — /(/. Wallowing iinwieldy — enormous in then- gait. — Id. Of unusual passionate accent, there is an exquisite specimen in the Fairy Queen, where Una is lamenting her desertion by the Red-Cross Knight : — But lie, my Hon, and my noble lord, How does he find in cruel Iieart to hate Her that him lov'd, and ever most ador'd As the god of my life ? Why hath he me abhorr'd? See the whole stanza, with a note upon it, in the present volume. The abuse of strength is harshness and heaviness ; the WHAT IS POETRY ? 35 reverse of it is weakness. There is a noble sentiment, — it appears both in Daniel's and Sir John Beaumont's works, but is most probably the latter's, — which is a perfect outrage of strength in the sound of the words : — Only the firmest and the constant' st hearts God sets to act the stout'st and hardest parts. Stoutest and constant''st for " stoutest " and " most con- stant ! " It is as bad as the intentional crabbedness or the line in Hudihras : He that hangs or heats out's hrains, The devil's in him if he feigns. Beats out's brains, for " beats out his brains." Of heavi- ness, Davenant's Gondihert is a formidable specimen, almost throughout : — With silence (order's helj), and mark of care) They chide that noise which heedless youth affect ; Still course for use, for health they cleanness wear, And save in well-fix'd arms, all niceness check'd. They thought, those that, unarm'd, expos'd frail life, But naked nature valiantly bctray'd ; Who was, though naked, safe, till pride made strife, But made defence must use, now danger's made. And so he goes digging and lumbering on, like a heavy preacher thumping the pulpit in italics, and spoiling many ingenious reflections. Weakness in versification is want of accent and emphasis. It generally accompanies prosaicalness, and is the consequence of weak thoughts, and of the affectation of a certain well-bred enthusiasm. The writings of the late Mr. Hayley were remarkable for it; and it abounds 36 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION among the lyrical imitators of Cowley, and the whole of what is called our French school of poetry, when it aspired above its wit and *' sense." It sometimes breaks down in a horrible, hopeless manner, as if giving way at the first step. The following ludicrous passage in Congreve, intended to be particularly fine, contains an instance : — And lo ! Silence himself is here ; Mcthinks I see the midnight god appear. In all his downy pomp array'd, Behold the reverend shade. An ancient sigh he sits upon ! I ! Whose memory of sonnd is long since gone, And jnirposeli/ annihilated for his throne! ! ! — Ode on the simjing of Mrs. Arabella Hunt. See also the would-be enthusiasm of Addison about music : — For ever consecrate the dag To music and Cecilia ; Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have helow, Music can noble hints impart ! ! ! It is observable that the uupoetic masters of ridicule are apt to make the most ridiculous mistakes, when they come to affect a strain higher than the one they are accus- tomed to. But no wonder. Their habits neutralize the enthusiasm it requires. Sweetness, though not identical with smoothness, any more than feeling is with sound, always includes it ; and smoothness is a thing so little to be regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worthless in poetry, but for some taste of sweetness, that I have not thought necessary to mention WHAT IS POETRY ? 37 it by itself; though such an all-in-all in versification was it regarded not a hundred j'cars back, that Thomas "NVarton, himself an idolator of Spenser, ventured to wish the following line in the Fairy Queen, And was admired mucli of fools, tibmen, and boys — altered to And was admired nincli of women, fools, and boys — thus destroying the fine scornful emphasis on the first syllable of " women ! " (an ungallant intimation, by the way, against the fair sex, very startling in this no less woman-loving than great poet). Any poetaster can be smooth. Smoothness abounds in all small poets, as sweet- ness does in the greater. Sweetness is the smoothness of grace and delicacy, — of the sympathy with the pleasing and lovely. Spenser is full of it, — Shakspeare — Beaumont and Fletcher — Coleridge. Of Spenser's and Coleridge's versification it is the prevailing characteristic. Its main secrets are a smooth progression between variety and sameness, and a voluptuous sense of the continuous, — *' linked sweetness long drawn out." Observe the first and last lines of the stanza in the Fairy Queen, describing a shepherd brushing away the gnats ; — the open and the close e's in the one. As gentle shepherd in sweet eventide — and the repetition of the word oft, and the fall from the vowel a into the two w's in the other, — She brusheth oft, and oft doth mar theii- murmurings. $8 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION So in his description of two substances in tlic handling, both equally smooth ; — Each smoother seems than each, and each than each seems smoother. An abundance of examples from his poetry will be found in the volume before us. His beauty revolves on itself with conscious loveliness. And Coleridge is worthy to be named with him, as the reader will see also, and has seen already. Let him take a sample meanwhile from the poem called the Day-Dream ! Observe both the variety and sameness of the vowels, and the repetition of the soft consonants : — My eyes make pictures when they're shut : — I see a fountain, large and fair, A ^^'illow and a ruin'd hut, And thee and me and Mary there. Mary ! make thy gentle lap our pillow , Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow. By Straightforwardness is meant the flow of words in their natural order, free alike from mere prose, and from those inversions to which bad poets recur in order to escape the charge of prose, but chiefly to accommodate their rhymes. In Shadwell's play of Psyche, Venus gives the sisters of the heroine an answer, of which the following is the entire substance, literally, in so many words. The author had nothing better for her to say : — I receive your prayers with kindness, and will give success to j-our hopes. I liave seen, with anger, manlcind adore your sister's beauty and deplore her scoi'n : which they shall do no more. For I'll so resent their idolatry, as shall content your wishes to the full. Now in default of all imagination, fancy, and expres- WHAT IS POETRY? 39 sion, bow was the writer to turn these words into poetry or rhyme ? Simply by diverting them from their natural order, and twisting the halves of the sentences each before the other. With kindness I yom* prayers receive, Aiicl to your hopes success will give. I have, with anger, seen mankind adore Your sister's beauty and her scorn deploi'e ; Which tliey shall do no more. For tlieir idolatry I'll so resent, As shall your wishes to the full content ! ! This is just as if a man were to allow that there was no poetry in the words, "How do you find yourself?" " Very well, I thank you ; " but to hold them inspired, if altered into Yourself how do you find ? Very well, you I thank. It is true, the best writers in Shadwell's age were addicted to these inversions, partly for their own reasons, as far as rhyme was concerned, and partly because they held it to be wi-iting in the classical and Virgilian manner. What has since been called Artificial Poetry was then flourishing, in contradistinction to Natural ; or Poetry seen chiefly through art and books, and not in its first sources. But when the artificial poet partook of the natural, or, in other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear Shad- well's antagonist Dry den. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what is used for the sake of emphasis in com- 40 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION men discourse, and this oul}' in one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal character of the Duke of Buckingham : — A man so various, that lie seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome : Stiff in opinions, alicaijs in the wrong, Wds everything by starts, and nothing long , But in the course of one revolving moon Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon : Tlien all for women, rhyming, dancing, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. Blest viadrnan ! who could everj' hour employ With something new to nish or to enjoy ! Railing and praising were his usual themes , And both, to show his judgment, in extremes: So over-violent, or over-civil, That every man imth him uas god or devil. In squandering wealth was his peculiar art ; A^othing went unrewarded, but desert. Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late, He had his jest, and they had his estate. Inversion itself was often turned into a grace in these poets, and may be in others, by the power of being supe- rior to it ; using it only with a classical air, and as a help lying next to them, instead of a salvation which they are obliged to seek. In jesting passages also it sometimes gave the rhyme a turn agreeably wilful, or an appearance of choosing what lay in its way ; as if a man should jiick up a stone to throw at another's head, where a less con- lident foot would have stumbled over it. Such is Dryden's use of the word might — the mere sign of a tense — in his pretended ridicule of the monkish practice of rising to sing psalms in the night. "WHAT IS POETRY? 41 And much tliey griev'd to sco so nigh their liall Tlio hird that warn'd St. Peter of his fall ; That he should raise his mitred crest on high, And clap his wings and call his family To sacred rites ; and vex th' ethereal powers With midnight matins at uncivil hoiu's ; Nay more, his quiet neighhours should molest Just in the sweet ness of their morning rest. (What a line full of " another doze " is that !) Beast of a hird! supinely, when he might Lie snug and sleep, to rise before the light ! What if his dull forefathers nsed that crj ? Could he not let a bad examj^le die ? I 'the more gladly quote instances like thos.e of Dryden, to illustrate the points in question, because they are specimens of the very highest kind of writing in the heroic couplet upon subjects not heroical. As to prosaicalness in general, it is sometimes indulged in by young writers on the plea of its being natural ; but this is a mere confu- sion of triviality with propriety, and is usually the result of indolence. Unsuperfluousness is rather a matter of style in general, than of the sound and order of words : and yet versification is so much strengthened by it, and so much weakened by its opposite, that it could not but come within the cate- gory of its requisites. When superfluousness of words is not occasioned by overflowing animal spirits, as in Beau- mont and Fletcher, or by the very genius of luxury, as in Spenser (in which cases it is enrichment as well as over- flow), there is no worse sign for a poet altogether, except pure barrenness. Every word that could be taken away from a poem, unreferablo to eitlicr of the above reasons for 42 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION it, is a damage ; and many sucli are death ; for there is nothing that posterity seems so determined to resent as this want of respect for its time and trouhle. The world is too rich in hooks to endure it. Even true poets have died of this Writer's Evih Trifling ones have survived, with scarcely any pretensions but the terseness of their trifles. What hope can remain for wordy medioci/ty ? Let the discerning reader take up any poem, pen in hand, for the purpose of discovering how many words he can strike out of it that give him no requisite ideas, no relevant ones that he cares for, and no reasons for the rhyme beyond its necessity, and he will see what blot and havoc he will make in many an admired production of its day, — what marks of its inevitable fate. Bulky authors in particular, however safe they may think themselves, would do well to consider what parts of their cargo they might dispense with in their proposed voyage down the gulfs of time ; for many a gallant vessel, thought indestructible in its age, has perished: — many 'a load of words, expected to be in eternal demand, gone to join the wrecks of self- love, or rotted in the warehouses of change and vicissitude. I have said the more on this point, because in an age when the true inspiration has undoubtedly been re-awakened by Coleridge and his fellows, and we have so many new poets coming forward, it may be as well to give a general warning against that tendency to an accumulation and ostentation of tJiouc/Jits, which is meant to be a refu- tation in full of the pretensions of all poetry less cogita- bund, whatever may be the requirements of its class. Young writers should bear in mind, that even some of WHAT IS rOETRY ? 43 the very best materials for poetry are not poetry built ; and that the smallest marble shrine, of exquisite workmanship, outvalues all that architect ever chipped away. Whatever can be so dispensed with is rubbish. Variety in versification consists in whatsoever can be done for the prevention of monotony, by diversity of stops and cadences, distribution of emphasis, and retarda- tion and acceleration of time ; for the whole real secret of versification is a musical secret, and is not attainable to any vital efiect save by the ear of genius. All the mere knowledge of feet and numbers, of accent and quantity, will no more impart it, than a knowledge of the Guide to Music will make a Beethoven or a Paisiello. It is a matter of sensibility and imagination ; of the beautiful in poetical passion, accompanied by musical ; of the impera- tive necessity for a pause here, and a cadence there, and a quicker or slower utterance in this or that place, created by analogies of sound with sense, by the fluctuations of feeling, by the demands of the gods and graces that visit the poet's harp, as the winds visit that of ^olus. The same time and quantity which are occasioned by the spiritual part of this secret, thus become its formal ones, — not feet and syllables, long and short, iambics or trochees ; which are the reduction of it to its less than dry bones. You might get, for instance, not only ten and eleven, but thirteen or fourteen syllables into a rhyming, as well as blank, heroical verse, if time and the feeling permitted ; and in irregular measure this is often done ; just as musicians put twenty notes in a bar instead of two, quavers instead of minims, according as the feeling they 44 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION are expressing impels them to fill up tlic time Avith short and hurried notes, or with long ; or as the choristers in & cathedral retard or precipitate the words of the chaiint, according as the quantity of its notes, and the colon which divides the verse of the psalm, conspire to demand it. Had the moderns home this principle in mind when they settled the prevailing systems of verse, instead of learning them, as they appear to have done, from the first drawling and one-syllabled notation of the church hymns, we should have retained all the advantages of the more numerous versification of the ancients, without being compelled to fancy that there was no alternative for us between our syllabical uniformity and the hexameters or other special forms unsuited to our tongues. But to leave this ques- tion alone, we will present the reader with a few sufficing specimens of the difference between monotony and variety in versification, first from Pope, Drydcn, and Milton, and next from Gay and Coleridge. The following is the boasted melody of the nevertheless exquisite poet of the Eape of the Loch, — exquisite in his wit and fancy, though not in his numbers. The reader will observe that it is literally see-saw, like the rising and falling of a plank, v,-itli a light person at one end who is jerked up in the briefer time, and a heavier one who is set down more leisurely at the other. It is in the otherwise charming dcscj'iption of the heroine of that poem : — On her white breast — a sparkling cross she wore, AVhich Jews miglit kiss — and iniidels adore ; ITcr lively looks — a sprightly mind disclose, Quick as her eyes — and as unfix'd as those "WHAT IS POETRY ? 45 Favours to none — to all she smiles extends, Oft she rejects — but never once offends ; Briglit as the sun — her eyes the gazers strike, And like the sun — they shine on all alike ; Yet graceful ease — and sweetness void of pride, j\Iight hide her faults — if belles had faults to hide ; If to licr share — some female errors fall. Look on her face — and you'll forget them all. Compare with this the description of Iphigenia in one of Dryden's stories from Boccaccio : - — It happen'd — on a summer's holiday. That to the greenwood shade — he took his way, For Cj'uion shunn'd the church — and used not much to pray : His quarter-staff — which he could ne'er forsake. Hung half before — and half beliind his back : He trudg'd along — not knowing what he sought, And whistled as he went — for want of thought. By chance conducted — or by thirst constraiu'd. The deep recesses of a grove he gain'd : — Where-^in a plain defended by a wood, Crept through the matted grass — a crystal flood, By wliicli — an alabaster fountain stood ; And on the margeut of the fount was laid — Attended by her slaves — a sleeping maid ; Like Dian and her nymphs — when, tir'd with sport, To rest by cool Eurotas they resort. — The dame herself — the goddess well express'd. Not more distinguished by lier purple vest — Than by the charming features of the face — And e'en in slumber — a superior gi'ace : Her comely hmbs — compos'd with decent care, \ Her body shaded — by a light cymarr, I Her bosom to the view — was only bare ; } Where two beginning paps were scarcely spied — For yet their places were but signified. — The fanning wind upon her bosom blows — \ To meet the fanning wind — the bosom rose , [ The fanning wind — and purlhig stream— continue lier repose. J 16 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION For a further variety take, from the same author's Theodore and Honoria, a passage in which the couplets are ruu one into the other, and all of it modulated, like the former, according to the feeling demanded by the occasion : — Whilst listeninf* to the murmuring leaves he stood — More than a mile immers'd within the wood — At once the wind was laid. I — The whispering sound Was dumb. I — A rising earthquake rock'd the ground. With deeper brown the gi-ove was overspread — \ A sudden horror seiz'd his giddy head — y And his ears tinkled — and his colour fled. j Nature was in alarm. — Some danger nigh Seeni'd threaten'd — though unseen to mortal eye. Unus'd to fear — he summon'd all his soul, And stood collected in himself — and whole : Not long. — But for a crowning specimen of variety of pause and accent, apart from emotion, nothing can surpass the account, in Paradise Lost, of the Devil's search for an accomplice : — There was a place, Now not — though Sin — not Time — first wrought the change, Where Tigris — at the foot of Paradise, Into a gulf — shot under gi-ound — till part Rose up a fountain by the Tree of Life. In with the river sunk — and icitli it ruse Satan — involv'd in rising mist — then sought Where to lie hid. — Sea he had search'd — and land From Eden over Pontus — and the pool "Moeotis — up beyond the river Oh ; Downward as far antarctic ; — and in length West from Orontes — to the ocean barr'd At Dariiin — thence to the land where flows Ganges, and Indus. — Tluis the orb he roam'd WHAT IS POETRY ? 47 With narrow search ; — and witli inspection deep Consider'd every creature — which of all Most opportune might serve his wiles — and found The serpent — subtlest beast of all the field. If the reader cast Lis eye again over this passage, he will not find a verse in it which is not varied and har- monized in the most remarkable manner. Let him notice in jmrticular that curious balancing of the lines in the sixth and tenth verses : — In with the river sunk, &c. and Up beyond the river Ob. It might, indeed, be objected to the versification of Milton, that it exhibits too constant a perfection of this kind. It sometimes forces upon us too great a sense of consciousness on the part of the composer. We miss the first sprightly runnings of verse, — the ease and sweetness of spontaneity. Milton, I think, also too often condenses weight into heaviness. Thus much concerning the chief of our two most popular measures. The other, called octosyllabic, or the measure of eight syllables, offered such facilities for namhij- jjamby, that it had become a jest as early as the time of Shakspeare, who makes Touchstone call it the " butter- woman's rate to market," and the " very false gallop of verses." It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and pithy gentle- man. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So ftu- from 48 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION compressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dryden compare Gay, even in the strength of Gay, — The wind was liigli, the window shakes ; With sudden start the miser wakes ; Along the silent room he stalks, (A miser never "stalks; " but a rhyme was desired for " walks ") Looks back, and trembles as he walks : Each lock and every bolt he tries, In every creek and corner pries ; Then opes the chest with treasure stor'd, And stands in rapture o'er his hoard ; ("Hoard" and "treasure stor'd" are just made for one another,) But now, with sudden qualms possess'd, He wrings his hands, he beats his breast ; By conscience stung, he wildly stares, And thus his guilty soul declares. And so he denounces his gold, as miser never denounced it ; and sighs because Virtue resides on earth no more ! Coleridge saw the mistake which had been made with regard to this measure, and restored it to the beautiful freedom of which it Avas capable, by calling to mind the liberties allowed its old musical professors the minstrels, and dividing it by time instead of syllables ; — by the heat of four, into which you might get as many syllables as you could, instead of allotting eight syllables to the poor time, whatever it might have to say. He varied it further with What 19 poethy? 49 alternate rhymes and stanzas, with rests and omissions precisely analogous to those in music, and rendered it altogether worthy to utter the manifold thoughts and feelings of himself and his lady Christabel. He even ventures, with an exquisite sense of solemn strangeness and licence (for there is witchcraft going forward), to introduce a couplet of blank verse, itself as mystically and beautifully modulated as anything in the music of Gluck or Weber. — 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awahen'd the crowing cock Tu-whit !— Tu-whoo ! And hark, again ! the crowing cock, How droivsily he crew. Sir Leoline, the baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch ; From her kennel beneath the rock She niaketh answer to tlie clock, Fuurfor the quarters and twelve fur t1>c hoar , Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud : Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. Is the iright cliilhj and dark ? The night is chilly, hut nut dark. The thin grej' cloud is spread on high, It covers, but not hides, the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full, And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is cliilly, the cloud is gi-ey ; (These are not superfluities, but mysterious returns of importunate feeling) 'Tis a month before the month of May, And the spring conies slowly up this way. The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well, 50 AN ANSWEE TO THE QUESTION Wliat makes her iu the wood so hitc, A furlong from the castle-gate ? She had dreams all yesternight Of her own betrothed knight ; And she in the midnight wood will pr;iy For the weal of her lover that's far away. She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heav'd were soft and low, JnA nought was green upon the oak, But moss and rarest mistletoe ; She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, ylnd in silence praj-eth she. The lady s^jrang up suddenly, The lovely lady, Christabel ! It moan'd as near as near can be, But wdiat it is, she cannot tell. On the other side it seems to be Of the huge, broad breasted, old oak tree. The night is chill, the forest bare ; Is it the wind tliat moaneth bleak ? (This " bleak moaning " is a "witch's) There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet ciu-1 From the lovely ladj'^s cheek — There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the hist of its dan, Tliat dances as often as dance it can. Hanging so light and hdnghig so higli. On the topmost tiag that loohs up at the sky. Hush, beating heart of Christabel ! Jesu Maria, shield her well ! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak. What sees she there ? WHAT IS POETRY? 61 There she set's a damsel bright, Drest in a robe of sillion white. That shadowy in the moonlight shone : The neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck and arms were bare : Her bluc-vein'd feet unsandaU'd were ; And \nldly glitter'd, here and there, The gems entangled in her hair. I guess 'twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she — Beautiful exceedingly. The principle of Variety in Uniformity is here worked out in a style '* beyond the reach of art." Everything is diversified according to the demand of the moment, of the sounds, the sights, the emotions ; the very uniformity of the outline is gently varied ; and yet we feel that the icliole is one and of the same character, the single and sweet uncon- sciousness of the heroine making all the rest seem more conscious, and ghastly, and expectant. It is thus that versification itself becomes i^art of the sentiment of a poem, and vindicates the pains that have been taken to show its importance. I know of no very fine versification unac- companied with fine poetry ; no poetry of a mean order accompanied with verse of the highest. As to Rhyme, which might be thought too insignificant to mention, it is not at all so. The universal consent of modern Europe, and of the East in all ages, has made it one of the musical beauties of verse for all poetry but epic and dramatic, and even for the former with Southern Europe,— a sustainment for the enthusiasm, and a demand to enjoy. The mastery of it consists in never writing it for its own sake, or at least never appearing to do so ; iu 62 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION knowing liow to vary it, to give it novclt}-, to rencler it more or less strong, to divide it (when not in couplets) at the proper intervals, to repeat it many times wliere luxury or animal spirits demand it (see an instance in Titania's speech to the Fairies), to impress an affecting or startling remark with it, and to make it, in comic poetry, a new and surprising addition to the jest. Large was his boimty and liis soul sincere, Heav'n did a reconipence as largely send ; He gave to miser}^ all he had, a tear ; He gain'd from heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend. — Gray's Elegy. The fops are proud of scandal ; for they cry At every lewd, low character, " That's /." — Dryden's Prolofjue to lite Pihjriir.. What makes all doctrines plain and clear '': Ahout tiio huiidred jyouiuh a year. And that which was proved true before, Prove false again? Two hundred more. — Hudihras Compound for sins they are inclind to, By damning those they have no mind to. — Id. Stor'd with deletery med' vines, Which whosoever took is dead since. — Id. Sometimes it is a grace in a master like Butler to force his rhyme, thus showing a laughing wilful power over the most stubborn materials : — Win The women, and make tliem di-aw in The men, as Indians with & female Tame elephant inveigle the male. — Jd. WHAT IS POETRY? 53 He made au instrument to know If the moon sliincs at full or no ; Tliat would, as soon as e'er she shone, straifjht Whether 'twere day or night demonstrate ; Tell what her diameter to an inch is. And prove that she's not made oi green cheese. — Iludibras. Pronounce it, by all means, grinches, to make the joke more wilful. The happiest triple rhyme, perhaps, that ever was written, is in Don Juan : — But oh ! ye lords of ladies intellectual, Inform us truly, — haven't they hen-peck' d you all ? The swecpingness of the assumption completes the flowing breadth of cftect. Dryden confessed that a rhyme often gave him a thought. Probably the happy word " sprung " in the following passage from Ben Jonson was suggested by it ; but then the poet must have had the feeling in him : — Let our trumpets sound. And cleave both air and ground With beating of our drums. Let every lyre be strung, Harp, lute, theorbo, sprunrj With touch of diiintii thumbs. Boileau's trick for appearing to rhyme naturally was to compose the second line of his couplet first ! -which gives one the crowning idea of the " artificial school of poetry." Perhaps the most perfect master of rhyme, the easiest and most abundant, was the greatest writer of comedy that the world has seen,- — Moliere. If a young reader should ask, after all, What is the quickest way of knowing bad poets from good, the best 54 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION poets from the next best, and so on ? the answer is, the only and twofold way : first, the perusal of the best poets with the greatest attention ; and, second, the cultivation of that love of truth and beauty which made them what they are. Every true reader of poetry partakes a more than ordinary portion of the poetic nature ; and no one can be completely such, who does not love, or take an interest in, everything that interests the poet, from the firmament to the daisy, — from the highest heart of man to the most pitiable of the low. It is a good practice to read with pen in hand, marking what is liked or doubted. It rivets the attention, realizes the greatest amount of enjoy- ment, and facilitates reference. It enables the reader also, from time to time, to see what progress he makes with his own mind, and how it grows up towards the stature of its exalter. If the same person should ask, What class of poetry is the highest ? I should say, undoubtedly, the Epic ; for it includes the drama, with narration besides ; or the speaking and action of the characters, with the speaking of the poet himself, whose utmost address is taxed to relate all Avell for so long a time, particularly in the passages least sustained by enthusiasm. Whether this class has included the greatest poet, is another question still under trial ; for Shakspeare perplexes all such verdicts, even when the claimant is Homer ; though, if a judgment may be drawn from his early narratives {Venus and Adonis, and the llape of Lucre ce), it is to be doubted whether even Shakspeare could have told a story like Homer, owing to that incessant activity and superfostation of thought, a WHAT IS POETRY ? 55 little less of which might be occasionally desired even in his plays; — if it were possible, once possessing anything of his, to wish it away. Next to Homer and Shakspeare come such narrators as the less universal, but still intenser Dante ; Milton, with his dignified imagination ; the uni- versal, profoundly simple Chaucer ; and luxuriant, remote Spenser — immortal child in poetry's most poetic solitudes : then the great second-rate dramatists ; unless those who are better acquainted with Greek tragedy than I am, demand a place for them before Chaucer : then the airy yet robust universality of Ariosto ; the hearty, out-of-door nature of Theocritus, also a universalist ; the finest lyrical poets (who onl}^ take short flights, compared with the narrators) ; the purely contemplative poets who have more thought than feeling ; the descriptive, satirical, didactic, epigrammatic. It is to be borne in mind, however, that the first poet of an inferior class may be superior to fol- lowers in the train of a higher one, though the superiority is by no means to be taken for granted ; otherwise Pope w'ould be superior to Fletcher, and Butler to Pope. Imagi- nation, teeming with action and character, maizes the greatest poets ; feeling and thought the next ; fancy (by itself) the next ; w'it the last. Thought by itself makes no poet at all ; for the mere conclusions of the under- standing can at best be only so many intellectual matters of fact. Feeling, even destitute of conscious thought, stands a far better poetical chance ; feeling being a sort of thought without the process of thinking, — a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And what is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes the blunders that thought does. An 5G AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION idle Jistinctiou lias been made between taste and judg- ment. Taste is the very maker of judgment. Put an artificial fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the difference between judging from taste or tact, and judging from the abstract figment called judgment. The latter does but throw you into guesses and doubts. Hence the conceits that astonish us in the gravest, and even subtlest thinkers, whose taste is not pro- portionate to their mental perceptions : men like Donne, for instance ; who, apart from accidental personal impres- sions, seem to look at nothing as it really is, but only as to what may be thought of it. Hence, on the other hand, the delightfulness of those poets who never violate truth of feeling, whether in things real or imaginary ; who are always consistent with their object and its requirements ; and who run the great round of nature, not to perplex and be perplexed, but to make themselves and us happy. And luckily, delightfulness is not incompatible with greatness, willing soever as men may be in their present imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above the power to please. Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing. This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with a constant detail of thought and feeling like Dante, are justly considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself by the same truth of nature, and sustained power, though in a different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty ; their sphere has more territories less fertile ; but it has enchant- ments of its own, which excess of thought would spoil, — luxuries, laughing graces, animal spirits ; and not to WHAT IS POETRY? 57 recognize the beauty aud greatness of these, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defective in sympathy. Every planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and another of the north, and others uniting both. The reader who is too thoughtless or too sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too thoughtful or too dull to like anything but the greatest possible stimulus of reflection or passion, are equally wanting in complexional fitness for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasionally says as fine things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakspeare ; but the business of both is to enjoy ; and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the particular, must bo aware that there are different songs of the spheres, some fuller of notes, aud others of a sustained delight ; and as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or passion, so from the latter you receive a constant har- monious sense of truth aud beauty, more agreeable per- haps on the whole, though less exciting. Ariosto, for instance, does not tell a story with the brevity and concen- trated passion of Dante ; every sentence is not so full of matter, nor the style so removed from the indifference of prose ; yet you are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally characteristic of the writer, equally drawn from nature and substituting a healthy sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. Exclusiveness of liking for this or that mode of truth, only shows, either that a reader's percep- tions are limited, or that he would sacrifice truth itself to his favourite form of it. Sir "Walter Raleigh, who was as 58 AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION trencliant with his pen as his sword, hailed the Faerie Qiiecne of his friend Spenser in verses in which he said that Petrarch was thenceforward to be no more heard of ; and that in all English poetry there was nothing he counted " of any price " hut the effusions of the new author. Yet Petrarch is still living ; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter ; and Shakspeare is thought some- what valuable. A botanist might as well have said, that myrtles and oaks were to disappear, because acacias had come up. It is with the poet's creations, as with Nature's, great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their- amount, can be worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, there poetry is to be found ; whether in productions grand and beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets ; whether in Homer's epic or Gray's Elegy, in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the Schoolmistress of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself, who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who calls upon us to admire all her productions ; not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but with no I'efusal of it, except to defect. I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three memorable words of Milton ; who has said, that poetry, in comparison with science, is " simple, sen- suous, and passionate." By simple, he means unperi^lexed and self-evident ; by sensuous, genial and full of imagery ; WHAT IS POETRY? 59 by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that different constructions have been put on some of theso words ; but the context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however, not from the original, but from an extract in the Remarks on Paradise Lost by Richardson. What the poet has to cultivate above all things is lovf» and truth ; — what he has to avoid, like poison, is tho fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be "in earnest at the moment." His earnestness must be innate and habitual ; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. " I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings," says Coleridge, in the Preface to his Poems ; " and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its ' own exceeding great reivard ; ' it has soothed my afflictions ; it has multiplied and refined my enjojanents ; it has endeared solitude ; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me." — Pickering^s edition, p. 10. " Poetry," says Shelley, " lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects he as if they icere not familiar. It reproduces all that it represents ; and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once con- templated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists. The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identifica- tion of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, 60 AN ANS'NTOR TO THE QUESTION action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively ; lie must put himself in the place of another, and of many others : the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination ; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause." — Essays and Letters, vol. i. p. 16. I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these ; but as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is termed useful knowledge, it may be as well to add, that if the poet may be allowed to pique himself on any one thing more than another, compared with those who undervalue him, it is on that power of undervaluing nobody, and no attainments different from his own, which is given him by the very faculty of imagina- tion they despise. The greater includes the less. They do not see that their inability to comprehend him argues the smaller capacity. No man recognizes the worth of utility more than the poet : he only desires that the meaning of the term may not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance, with the faci- lities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad, as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as the greatest two-idea'd man who varies that single idea with hugging himself on his " buttons " or his good dinnei. But he sees also the beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along WHAT IS POETRY? 61 like a magic horse, of the aflections that are carrying, perhaps, half the passengers on their journey, na,j, of those of the great two-idea'd man ; and, heyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which this won- derful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe, perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the difl'usion of millions of enjoyments. " And a button-maker, after all, invented it ! " cries our friend. Pardon me — it was a nobleman. A button -maker may be a very excellent, and a very poetical man too, and yet not have been the first man visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical bit of science. It was a nobleman who first thought of it, — a captain who first tried it, — and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who put the nobleman on such thoughts, was the great philosopher. Bacon, who said that poetry had " something divine in it," and was neces- sary to the satisfaction of the human mind- SPENSER. TORN, PROBABLY ABOUT THE YEAR 155B- DIED, 1598. Three things must be conceded to the objectors against this divine poet : first, that he wrote a good deal of allegory ; second, that he has a great many superfluous words ; third, that he was very fond of alliteration. He is accused also (by little boys) of obsolete words and spelling ; and it must be added, that he often forces his rhymes ; nay, spells them in an arbitrary manner on purpose to make them fit. In short, he has a variety of faults, real or supposed, that would be intolerable in writers in general. This is true. The answer is, that his genius not only makes amends for all, but overlays them, and makes them beautiful, with " riches fincless." When acquaintance with him is once began, he repels none but the anti-poetical. Others may not be able to read him continuously ; but more or less, and as an enchanted stream " to dip into," they will read him always. In Spenser's time, orthography was unsettled. Pro- nunciation is always so. The great poet, therefore, some- SPENSER. 63 times spells his words, whether rhymed or otherwise, in a manner apparently arbitrary, for the purpose of inducing the reader to give them the sound fittest for the sense. Alliteration, which, as a ground of melody, had been a principle in Anglo-Saxon verse, continued such a favourite with old English poets whom Spenser loved, that, as lato as the reign of Edward III., it stood in the place of rhyme itself. Our author turns it to beautiful account. Superfluousness, though eschewed with a line instinct by Chaucer in some of his latest works, where the narrative was fullest of action and character, abounded in his others ; and, in spite of the classics, it had not been recog- nized as a fault in Spenser's time, when books were still rare, and a writer thought himself bound to pour out all he felt and knew. It accorded also with his genius ; and in him is not an excess of weakness, but of will and luxury. And as to allegory, it was not only the taste of the day, originating in gorgeous pageants of church and state, but in Spenser's hands it became such an embodiment of poetry itself, that its objectors really deserve no better answer than has been given them by Mr. Hazlitt, who asks, if they thought the allegory would " bite them." The passage will be found a little further on. Spenser's great characteristic is poetic luxury. If you go to him for a story, you will be disappointed ; if for a style, classical or concise, the jjoint against him is conceded ; if for pathos, you must weep for person- ages half-real and too beautiful ; if for mirth, you must laugh out of good breeding, and because it pleaseth the great, sequestered man to be facetious. But if you lovo 64 SPENSEit. poeti^y well enough to enjoy it for its own sake, let no evil reiDorts of his " allegory " deter you from his acquaintance, for great will be your loss. His allegory itself is but one part allegory, and nine parts beauty and enjoyment ; some- times an excess of flesh and blood. His forced rhymes, and his sentences written to fill up, which in a less poet would be intolerable, are accompanied with such endless grace and dreaming pleasure, fit to ]\Iake lieaven drowsy with the harmony, that although it is to be no more expected of anybody to read him through at once, than to wander days and nights in a forest, thinking of nothing else, yet any true lover of poetry, when he comes to know him, would as soon quarrel with repose on the summer grass. You may get up and go away, but will return next day at noon to listen to his waterfalls, and to see, " with half- shut eye," his visions ©f laiights and nymphs, his gods and goddesses, whom he brought down again to earth in immortal beauty. Spenser, in some respects, is more southern than the Bouth itself. Dante, but for the covered heat which occa- sionally concentrates the utmost sweetness as well as venom, would be quite northern compared with him. He is more luxurious than Ariosto or Tasso, more haunted with the presence of beauty. His wholesale poetical belief, mixing up all creeds and mythologies, but with less violence, resembles that of Dante and Boccaccio ; and it gives the compound the better warrant in the more agree- able impression. Then his versification is almost perpetual honey. SPENSER. 66 Spenser is the farthest removed from tlie ordinary cares and haunts of the world of all the poets that ever wrote, except perhaps Ovid ; and this, which is the reason why mere men of business and the world do not like him, constitutes his most bewitching charm with the poetical. He is not so great a poet as Shakspeare or Dante ; — he has less imagination, though more fancy, than Milton. He does not see things so purely in their elements as Dante ; neither can he combine their elements like Shak- speare, nor bring such frequent intensities of words, or of wholesale imaginative sympathy, to bear upon his subject as any one of them ; though he has given noble diffuser instances of the latter in his Una, and his Mammon, and his accounts of Jealousy and Despair. But when you are " over-informed " with thought and passion in Shakspeare, when Milton's mighty grandeurs oppress you, or are found mixed with painful absurdities, or when the world is vexatious and tiresome, and you have had enough of your own vanities or struggles in it, or when " house and land " themselves are ** gone and spent," and your riches must lie in the regions of the " unknown," then Spenser is " most excellent." His remoteness from everyday life is the reason perhaps why Somers and Chatham admired him ; and his possession of every kind of imaginary wealth completes his charm with his brother poets. Take him in short for what he is, whether greater or less than his fellows, the poetical faculty is so abundantly and beautifully predominant in him above every other, though he had passion, and thought, and plenty of ethics, and w^as as learned a man 5 66 SPENSER. as Ben Jonsou, perhaps as Milton himself, that he has always heen felt by his countrymen to he what Charles Lamb called him, the " Poet's Poet." He has had more idolatry and imitation from his brethren than all the rest put together. The old undramatic poets, Drayton, Browne, Drummond, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, were as full of him as the dramatic were of Shakspeare. Milton studied and used him, calling him the " sage and serious Spenser; " and adding, that he " dared be known to think him a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." Cowley said that he became a poet by reading him. Dryden claimed him for a master. Pope said he read him with as much pleasure when he was old, as young. Collins and Gray loved him ; Thomson, Shenstone, and a host of inferior writers, expressly imitated him ; Burns, Byron, Shelley, and Keats made use of his stanza ; Coleridge eulogized him ; and he is as dear to the best living poets as he was to their prede- cessors. Spenser has stood all the changes in critical opinion ; all the logical and formal conclusions of the understanding, as opposed to imagination and lasting sym- pathy. Hobbes in vain attempted to depose him in favour of Davenant's Gondihcrt. Locke and his friend Molyneux to no purpose preferred Blackmore ! Hume, acute and encroaching philosopher as he was, but not so universal in his philosophy as great poets, hurt Spenser's reputation with none but the French (who did not know him) ; and, by way of involuntary amends for the endeavour, he set up for poets such men as Wilkie and Blacklock ! In vain, in vain. " In spite of philosophy and fashion," says a better critic of that day (Bishop Kurd), " Faerie Spenser still SPENSER. 67 ranks highest amongst the poets ; I mean with all those who are either of that house, or have any kindness for it. Earth-born critics may blaspheme ; But all the rjods are ravish'd with delight Of his celestial soug and musick's wondrous might." — Remarhs on the Plan and Conduct of the Faerie Queens {in Todd's edition of Spenser, vol. ii. p. 18;3j. "In reading Spenser," says Warton, "if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported." — {Id. p. 65.) " Spenser," observes Coleridge, "has the wit of tho southern, with the deeper inwardness of the northern genius. Take especial note of the marvellous independ- ence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Faerie Queenc. It is in the domains neither of history nor geography : it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles ; it is truly in land of Faerie, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep : and you neither wish nor have the power to inquire, where you are, or how you got there." — Literary Hemains, vol. i. p. 94. "In reading the Faerie Queene," says Hazlitt, "you see a little withered old man by a wood-side opening a wicket, a giant, and a dwarf lagging far behind, a damsel in a boat upon an enchanted lake, wood-nymphs and satyrs ; and all of a sudden you are transported into a lofty palace, with tapers burning, amidst knights and ladies, with dance and revelry, and song, ' and mask and antique pageantiy.' — But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but they cannot understand it on account of tho allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they 68 SPENSER. thought it would bite them ; they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think that it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle "with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pike-staff. It might as well be pretended, that we cannot see Poussin's pictures for the allegory, as that the allegory prevents us from understanding Spenser." — Lectures on the English Poets (Templemau's edition, 12mo p. G7). ARCHIMAGO'S HERMITAGE. AND THE HOUSE OF MORPHEUS. Ai'cliimago, a hypocritical magiciau, hires Una and the Red-cross Knight into his ahode ; and while they are asleep, sends to Morpheus, the god of sleep, for a false dream to produce discord between them. A little lowly liermitage it was, Down in a dale, hard by a forest's side, Far from resort ofj)eople that did jmss In travel to and fro : a little wide There was a holy chapel edifyde, Wherein the hermit duly wont to say His holy things each morn and eventide : Thereby a crystal stream did gently play, Wliich fi'om a sacred fountain welled forth alway. (') Arrived there, the little house they fill, (') Nor look for entertainment where none was ; (^ Rest is theii- feast, and all tilings at theii- v/ill i The noblest mind the best contentment has. (*) SPENSER. 69 With fair discoiu'se the eveniag so they pass. For that old man of pleasing words had store, And well could file his tongue as smooth as glass : He told of saints and popes, and evermore He stroivd an Ave-Mary after and before. The drooping night thus creei^cth on them fast ; And the sad humour, loading their eye-lids, As messenger of Morpheus, on them cast Sweet slumhering dew ; the which to sleep them bids. Unto their lodgings then liis guests he rids ; "Where, when all drown'd in deadly sleep lie finds. He to his study goes ; and there amids His magic books, and arts of sundry kinds, He seeks out mighty charms to trouble sleepy minds. Then choosuig out few words most horrible (Let none them read!) (*) thereof did ver.scs frame; With wliich, and other spells lilie terrible, He bade awake black Pluto's grisly dame ; And cursed Heaven ; and spake reproachful shame Of liighest God, the Lord of life and hght : A bold bad man ! that dar'd to call by name Great Gorgon, (^) prince of darkness and dead night , At which Cocytus quakes, and Styx is put to fhght. And forth he call'd out of deep darkness dread Legions of sprites, the which, like little flies, C) Fluttering about Ids ever-damned head. Await whereto their service he applies ; To aid Iris friends, or fray his enemies ; Of those he chose out two, the falsest two, And fittest for to forge true-seeming lies ; The one of them he gave a message to. The other by himself stay'd other work to do. He, making speedy way through spersed air, And through the world of waters ivide and deep, (*) To Morpheus' house dotli hastily repair. (^) Amid the bowels of the earth full steep 70 SPENSER. And low, wliere dawning day doth never peep. His dwelling is ; there Tethijs his wet led Doth ever uash, and Cyntliia still doth steep In silver dew his ever-drooping head, "While sad Night over him her mantle black doth spread. Whose double gates he findetli locked fast ; The one fair fram'd of bm-nish'd ivory. The other all with silver overcast ; And wakeful dogs before ihem far do lie, Watching to banish Care their enemy. Who oft is wont to trouble gentle Sleep. By them the sprite doth j)ass in quietly, And unto Morpheus comes, whom drowned deep In drowsy fit he finds : of nothing he takes keep. And more to lull him in his slumber soft, A trickling stream from high rock tumbling doivn And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft, Mix'd tvith a murmuring wind, much like the soun' Of swarming bees, did cast him in a stvoun : No other noise, nor people s troublous cries. As still are wont to annoy the walled town. Might there be heard ; but careless Quiet lies Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies. ('") The messenger approaching to him spake ; But his waste words retiu-n'd to him in vain : So sound he slept, that nought might him awake. Then rudely he him thrust, and push'd with pain. Whereat he gan to stretch : but he again Shook him so hard, that forced him to speak. As one then in a dream, whose drier brain Is tost with troubled sights and fancies weak, Ho mumbled soft, but would not all his silence break. The sprite then gan more boldly him to wake, And threaten'd unto him the dreaded narafe Of Hecate : whereat he gan to quake, And lifting up his lumpish head, with blame SPENSEE. 71 Half angiy askotl liim, for what lie came. " Hither," quoth he, " me Avcliimngo sent ; He that the stubborn sprites can wisely tame ; He bids thee to him send for his intent A fit false dream, that can delude the sleei)er's sent." (") The god obey'd ; and calling forth straightway A diverse Dream (") out of his prison dark, Deliver'd it to him, and down did lay His heavy head, devoid of careful cark ; Whose senses all were straight benumb'd and stark. He, back returning by the ivory door, Remounted up as light as cheerful lark ; And on his little wings the Dream he bore In haste imto his lord, where he liim left afore. Q) Welled forth alway. The modulation of this charming stanza is exquisite. Let us divide it into its pauses, and see what we have been hearing : — A little lowly hermitage it was, | Down in a dale, | hard by a forest's side, | Far from resort of people | that did pass In travel to and fro : | a little wide | There was a holy chapel edifyde, | Wherein the hermit duly wont to say His holy things | each morn and eventide : ] Thereby a crystal stream did gently play, | Which from a sacred fountain welled forth alway. Mark the variety of the pauses, of the accentuation of the syllables, and of the intonation of the vowels ; all closing in that exquisite last line, as soft and continuous as the water it describes. The repetition of the words little and h'^ly add to the sacred snugness of the abode. iZ SPENSER. "We are to fancy the little tenement on tlie skirts of a forest, that is to say, within, hut not deeply within, the trees ; the chapel is near it, hut not close to it, more emhowered; and the rivulet may he supposed to circuit hoth chapel and hermitage, running partly under the trees between mossy and flowery hanks, for hermits were great cullers of simples ; and though Ai-chimago was a false hermit, we are to suppose him living in a true hermitage. It is one of those pictures which remain for ever in the memory ; and the succeeding stanza is worthy of it. Arrived tliere, the little house they Jill. Not literally the lioiise, hut the apartment as a speci- men of the house ; for we see by what follows that the hermitage must have contained at least four rooms : one in which the knight and the lady were introduced, two more for their bed-chambers, and a fourth for the magi- cian's study. (') Nor look for entertainment where none was. " Entertainment " is here used in the restricted sense of treatment as regards food and accommodation ; accord- ing to the old inscription over inn-doors — " Entertainment for man and horse." (*) The nohlest mind the best contentment has. This is one of Spenser's many noble sentiments expressed in as noble single lines, as if made to be recorded in the copy-books of full-grown memories. As, for example, one which he is fond of repeating :— SPENSER. 73 No service loathsome to a gentle mind. Entire aflfection scorneth nicer hands. True love loathes disdainful nicety. And that fine Alexandrine, — Weak body well is chang'd for mind's redoubled force. And another, which Milton has imitated in Comus — Virtue gives herself light in darkness for to wade, (') {Let none them read !) As if we could ! And yet while we smile at the impossihility, we delight in this solemn injunction of the Poet's, so child-like, and full of the imaginative sense of the truth of what he is saying. (^ A bold bad man ! that dard to call by name Great Gorgon. This is the ineffahle personage whom Milton, with a propriety equally classical and poetical, designates as .... The dreaded name Of Demogorgon. — Par. Lost, book ii. v. 965. Ancient believers apprehended such dreadful conse- quences from the mention of him, that his worst and most potent invokers are represented as fearful of it ; nor am I aware that any poet, Greek or Latin, has done it, though learned commentators on Spenser imply otherwise. In the passages they allude to, in Lucan and Statins, there is no name uttered. The adjuration is always made by a periphrasis. This circumstance is noticed by Boccaccio, who has given by far the best, and indeed, I believe, the only account of this very rare god, excopt what is 74 SPENSER. abridged from bis pages in a modern Italian mytbology, and furnisbed by bis own autborities, Lactantius and Tbcodantiis, tbe latter an autbor now lost. Ben Jonson calls bim "Boccaccio's Demogorgon." Tbe passage is in tbe first book of bis Genealogie Deorum, a work of prodi- gious erudition for tbat age, and full of tbe gusto of a man of genius. According to Boccaccio, Demogorgon {Spirit Earthworker) was tbe great deity of tbe rustical Arcadians, and tbe creator of all tbings out of brute matter. He describes bim as a pale and sordid-looking wretcb, inbabit- ing tbe centre of tbe eartb, all over moss and dirt, squa- lidly wet, and emitting an eartby smell ; and be laugbs at tbe credulity of tbe ancients in tbinking to make a god of sucb a fellow. He is very glad, bowever, to talk about bim ; and doubtless bad a lurking respect for bim, inasmuch as mud and dirt are among tbe elements of tbings material, and therefore partake of a certain mystery and divineness. Legions ofsjyrites, the uldch, like little flies. Flies are old embodiments of evil spirits ; — Anacreon forbids us to call tbcm incarnations, in reminding us tbat insects are flesbless and bloodless, avaiixoaa^Ka. Beelze- bub signifies tbe Lord of Flies. (*) The world of waters uide and deep. How complete a sense of tbe ocean under one of its aspects ! Spenser bad often been at sea, and bis pictures of it, or in connexion with it, are frequent and fine accord- ingly, superior pcrbaps to those of any other English poet, Milton certainly, except in tbat one famous imagina- SPENSER. 75 tive passage in which he describes a fleet at a distance as seeming to " hang in the clouds." And Shakspeare throws himself wonderfully into a storm at sea, as if he had been in the thick of it ; though it is not known that he ever quitted the land. But nobody talks so much about the sea, or its inhabitants, or its voyagers, as Spenser. He was well acquainted with the Irish Channel. Coleridge observes (ut sup.), that " one of Spenser's arts is that of alliteration, which he uses with great effect in doubling the impression of an image." The verse above noticed is a beautiful example. (') To Morpheus' house doth hastily repair, &c. Spenser's earth is not the Homeric earth, a circular flat, or disc, studded with mountains, and encompassed wdth the " ocean stream." Neither is it in all cases a globe. "We must take his cosmography as we find it, and as he wants it; that is to say, poetically, and according to the feeling required by the matter in hand. In the present instance, we are to suppose a precipitous country striking gloomily and far downwards to a cavernous sea- shore, in which the bed of Morpheus is placed, the ends of its curtains dipping and fluctuating in the water, which reaches it from underground. The door is towards a flat on the land-side, with dogs lying ** far before it ; " and the moonbeams reach it, though the sun never does. The passage is imitated from Ovid (lib. ii. ver. 592), but with wonderful concentration, and superior home appeal to the imagination. Ovid will have no do2,"s, nor any sound at all but that of Lethe rippling over its pebbles. Spenser 76 SPENSER. has dogs, "but afar off, and a lulling sound overhead of wind and rain. These are the sounds that men delight to hear in the intervals of their own sleep. ('") Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies. The modulation of this most heautiful stanza (perfect, except for the word tumbling) is equal to that of the one describing the hermitage, and not the less so for being less varied hoth in pauses and in vowels, the subject demanding a greater monotonj^ A poetical reader need hardly he told, that he should humour such verses with a corresponding tone in the recital. Indeed it is difficult to read them without lowering or deepening the voice, as though we were going to hed ourselves, or thinking of the rainy night that has lulled us. A long rest at the happy pause in the last line, and then a strong accent on the word far, put us in possession of all the remoteness of the scene ; — and it is improved, if we make a similar pause at heard : — No other noise, or people's troublous cries, As still are wont to annoy the walled town. Might there be heard ; — but careless Quiet lies Wrapt in eternal silence, — far from enemies. Upton, one of Spenser's commentators, in reference to the trickling stream, has quoted in his note on this passage some fine lines from Chaucer, in which, describing the " dark valley" of Sleep, the poet says there was nothing whatsoever in the place, save that .... A few wells Came running fro the clyffes adowne, That made a deadly sleeping sowno. SPENSER. 77 Sowne (iu the old spelling) is also Spenser's word. In the text of the present volume it is written souii', to show that it is the same as the word sound without the d ; — like the French and Italian, son, suono. " 'Tis hardly possible," says Upton, " for a more picturesque description to come from a poet or a painter than this whole magical scene."— See Todd's Variorum Spenser, vol. ii. p. 38. Meantime, the magician has been moulding a shape of air to represent the virtuous mistress of the knight ; and when the Dream arrives, he sends them both to deceive him, the one sitting by his head and abusing " the organs of his fancy " (as Milton says of the devil with Eve), and the other behaving in a manner very unlike her prototype. The delusion succeeds for a time. (") A Jit false dream, that can delude the sleeper s sent. Scent, sensation, perception. Skinner says that sent, which we falsely write scent, is derived a sentiendo. The word is thus frequently spelt by Spenser. — Todd. C) A diverse Dream. " A dream," says Upton, " that would occasion diversity or distraction ; or a frightful, hideous dream, from the Italian, sogno diversoy — Dante, Inferno, canto vi. Cerbero, fiera crudele e divcrsa. (Cerberus, the fierce beast, cruel and diverse.) Berni, Orlando Jnnamorato, lib. i. canto 4, stanza QQ. Un giido orribile e diverso. (There rose a crj^ horrible and diverse), &c. — See Todd's Edition, as above, p. 42- 78 SPENSER. The obvious sense, however, as in the case of Daute's Cerberus, I take to be monstrously varied, — inconsistent with itself. The dream is to make the knight's mistress contradict her natural character. THE CAVE OF MAMMON AND GARDEN OF PROSERPINE. Sii Guyon, crossing a desert, finds Mammon sitting amidst liis gold in a gloomy valley. Mammon, taking liim down into his cave, tempts him with the treasm^es there, and also with those in the Garden of Proserpine, " Spenser's strength," says Hazlitt, " is not strength of will or action, of bone and muscle, nor is it coarse and palpable ; but it assumes a character of vastness and sublimity seen through the same visionary medium " (he has ju3t been alluding to one), "and blended with the appalling associations of preternatural agency. We need only turn in proof of this to the Cave of Despair, or the Cave of Mammon, or to the account of the change of Malbecco into Jealousy." — Lectures, p. 77. That house's fonn within was rude and strong. (") Like a huge cave hewn out of rocky clift, From 7vho.se rough vault the ragged breaches hung Emhossd uith massy gold of glorious gift, And with rich metal loaded every rift. That heavy ruin they did seem to threat , And over them Arachne high did lift Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net, En\\Tapped in foul smoke and clouds more black than jet. SPENSER. 79 Both roof, and floor, and walls, u'ere all of gold, But overr/rown ivith dust and old decay. And liid in darkness, that none could behold The hue thereof; for view of cheerful day- Did never in that house itself display ; But a faint shadow of uncertain lujht. Such as a lamp whose life does fade nuay , Or as the moon, clothed with cloudy ntyht, Does show to him that ualks in fear and sad affright. In all that room was notliing to be seen But huge great iron chests, and coflers strong. All barr'd with double bends, that none could ween Them to enforce by violence or wrong ; On every side they placed were along. But all the ground with skulls was scattered, And dead men's bones, which round about were flung ; Whose lives, it seemed, whilorae there were shed, And their vile carcases now left unbuiied. They forward pass, nor Guyon yet spake word, Till that they came unto an iron door, Which to them opened of its own accord, And show'd of riches such exceeding store As eye of man did never see before. Nor ever could within one j)lace be found, Though all the wealth wliich is, or was of yore. Could gathered he through all the world around. And that above were added to that under ground. The charge thereof unto a covetous sprite Commanded was, who thereby did attend, And wai-ily awaited, day and niglit. From other covetous fiends it to defend, Who it to rub and ransack did intend. Then Mammon, turnmg to that warrior, said : " Lo here the worlde's bliss ! lo here the end, To which, all men do aim, rich to be made ! Such grace now to be happy is before thee laid." 80 sPENSEn. " Certes," said lie, " I n'ill thine offered grace, (**) Nor to be made so liajipy do intend. Another bliss before mine eyes I place, Another happiness, another end :» To them that list, these base regards I lend ; But I in arms, and in achievements brave, Do rather choose my fitting hours to spend, And to be lord of those that riches have. Than them to have myself, and be their servile slave." * * * * The Kniglit is led further on, and shown more Irea' sures, and afterwards taken into the palace of Ambition ; but all in vain. Mammon emnioved was with inward wrath ; Yet forcing it to fain, him forth thence led, Through griesly shadows, by a beaten path, Into a garden goodly garnished With herbs and fruits, whose kinds must not be read *. Not such as earth out of her fruitful womb ('*) Throws forth to men, sweet and well savoured, But direful ileadly Hack, both leaf and bloom, Fit to adorn the dead and deck the dreary tomb. Tliere mournful cypress grew in greatest store ; ('*) And trees of bitter gall ; and heben sad ; Dead sleeping poppy ; and black hellebore ; Cold coloquintida ; and tetra 7nad; Mortal samnitis ; and cicuta bad, Witli wliich the unjust Athenians made to die "Wise Socrates, who tliereof quaffing glad, Poiu-'d out his life and last jMlosophy To the fair Critias, liis dearest belamy ! The garden of Proserpina this hight ; ('*) And in the midst thereof a silver seat. With a thick arbour fjoodhj over-di