'We are slumberous poppies, Lords of Lethe downs, Some awake and some asleep, Sleeping in our crowns. What perchance our dreams may know, Let our serious beauty show.' And the prose says, 'They look as if they held a mystery at their hearts, like sleeping kings of Lethe,' and comes nearer to poetry. From the epigram to the sonnet there is but one step, and Leigh Hunt's finest and most famous line, "The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands,' is found in a sonnet on the Nile, written impromptu in rivalry with Keats and Shelley, and more successful, within its limits, than its competitors. And the sonnet, written against Keats, on the subject of 'The Grasshopper and the Cricket,' would be good as well as characteristic if it were not flawed by words like 'feel' and 'class' and 'nick,' used to give the pleasant charm of talk, but resulting only in a degradation of refined and dignified speech. Three sonnets called 'The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit,' which might easily have been no more than one of Hunt's clever burlesques, seem to me for once to touch and seize and communicate a strange, cold, inhuman imagination, as if the very element of water entered into chill communion with the mind. Lamb might have shared the feeling, the epithets are like the best comic Greek compounds; the poetry, which begins with a strange familiarity, ends with a strangeness wholly of elemental wonder: 'Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt love and graves, There, at least, Leigh Hunt speaks the language of poetry, and with a personal accent. ALLAN CUNNINGHAM has been praised, with and without discrimination, by many more famous persons, from Scott, who christened him 'honest Allan,' to Southey, who called him 'Allan, true child of Scotland'; but he has never been better characterised than by a Mr. McDiarmid, at a banquet given in his honour at Dumfries: 'As a poet he leans to the ballad style of composition, and many of his lyrics are eminently sweet, graceful, and touching.' So much may be said in his favour, though it is difficult to be very precise in dealing with one who had so little sense of the difference between what was his and what came from others. He began by inventing a series of Scotch 'remains' for the inveterate Cromek, who rewarded him with 'a bound copy' of a book not even published under his name. There is generally in his verse, which is equally telling in a Scotch ballad in the manner of Burns, such as 'My Nannie O,' or an English sea-ballad in the manner of Dibdin, such as 'A wet sheet and a flowing sea,' some sort of imitation, something not wholly individual, and at his best he does not go beyond a pleasant spontaneity in which there is no really lasting quality. His kindest critic, Scott, who called him a man of genius, noted in his diary that he 'required the tact of knowing when and where to stop'; and in a letter to him he said candidly: 'Here and there I would pluck a flower from your posy to give what remains an effect of greater simplicity.' The same luxuriance renders his prose vague, as his facts are, in the 'Lives of British Painters,' meant to be instructive, and in their way really sympathetic. He had many lively and attractive qualities, as a man and as a writer; and received at least his due measure of fame during his lifetime. 1 (1) Songs, Chiefly in the Rural Dialect of Scotland, 1813. (2) Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, 1820. (3) Sir Marmaduke Maxwell, 1822, (4) The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern, 1825. (5) The Maid of Elwar, 1833. 1 REV. CHARLES STRONG (1785-1864) 1 CHARLES STRONG is remembered only by two sonnets, his best, which are to be seen in anthologies, the one beginning 'Time, I rejoice, amid the ruin wide,' and another beginning 'My window's open to the evening sky. The greater number of the other sonnets in his single book of original verse are worked up a little consciously towards a final effect in the last line, and are somewhat obvious in the meditations over foreign sites which make up much of their substance. Occasionally we meet with a good separate line or two, such as: 'On the blue waste a pyramid of sails'; or as this: 'And, on the true vine grafted, there remain A living branch, until the vintage bears.' A more carefully cultivated sonority distinguishes the translated verse in the 'Specimens of Sonnets from the Most Celebrated Italian Poets,' a chill and literal rendering of Italian sonnets from Dante to Metastasio. They take no new growth in English soil, but retain that formal eloquence which in so much of Italian verse takes the place of poetry. Could Fracastoro have desired a translator more after his heart than the writer who follows him, slow-pacing, with: 'Whether it be Achilles' high disdain Or wise Ulysses' toilsome pilgrimage'? HENRY KIRKE WHITE (1785-1806) 2 THE discovery of Kirke White was one of the unlucky discoveries of Southey, who tells us that, but for him, 'his papers 1 (1) Specimens of Sonnets from the Most Celebrated Italian Poets; with Translations, 1827. (2) Sonnets, 1835. 2 (1) Clifton Grove, 1804. (2) Life and Remains, edited by Southey 2 vols., 1810. would probably have remained in oblivion, and his name, in a few years, have been forgotten.' 'Unhappy White,' as Byron called him in a passage which has been remembered for its imagery, died in his twenty-second year, and his papers were handed over to Southey, who tells us 'Mr. Coleridge was present when I opened them, and was, as well as myself, equally affected and astonished at the proofs of industry which they displayed.' He adds: 'I have inspected all the existing manuscripts of Chatterton, and they excited less wonder than these.' 'He surely ranks next to Chatterton,' said Byron, when Southey published the 'Remains' with a memoir and some five and thirty pages of memorial verses by various hands. Kirke White had published a small volume at the age of eighteen, and a judicious critic in the 'Monthly Review' had said of the writer: "We commend his exertions, and his laudable endeavours to excel; but we cannot compliment him with having learned the difficult art of writing good poetry.' This opinion, which seemed to Southey a 'cruelty,' a 'wicked injustice,' requires no revision. 'It is not possible,' says Southey, 'to conceive a human being more amiable in all the relations of life,' and he assumes that the reader 'will take some interest in all those remains because they are his; he who shall feel none must have a blind heart, and therefore a blind understanding.' There is, indeed, no other reason for interest in these generally unaffected but always conventional verses than because they are the expression, tinged with reluctant resignation, of one who is, as he says, about to 'compose his decent head, and breathe his last.' What Byron called his 'bigotry is a genuine but not very individual sense of piety, and all his verse is an amiable echo of such literature as most appealed to one who found 'a nervous strength of diction and a wild freedom of versification, combined with an euphonious melody and consonant cadence, unequalled in the English language? in the sonnets of Bowles, and said of Milton's sonnets that 'those to the Nightingale and to Mr. Lawrence are, I think, alone entitled to the praise of mediocrity.' Nothing can be more inoffensive than the mild fancies and plaintive pieties of a young writer who has often been wrongly characterised as immature. The crop was ripe enough, but it was a thin crop. They are alone, I think, entitled to the praise of mediocrity. THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK (1785-1866) 1 1 PEACOCK's novels are unique in English, and are among the most scholarly, original, and entertaining prose writings of the century. 'A strain too learned for a shallow age, Shelley defined it, and added prophetically: 'let his page Which charms the chosen spirits of the time Of years to come, and find its recompense His learned wit, his satire upon the vulgarity of progress, are more continuously present in his prose than in his verse; but the novels are filled with cheerful scraps of rhyming, winesongs, love-songs, songs of mockery, and nonsense jingles, some of which are no more than the scholar's idle diversions, but others of a singular excellence. They are like no other verse; they are startling, grotesque, full of hearty extravagances, at times thrilling with unexpected beauty. The masterpiece, perhaps, of the comically heroic section of these poems is 'The War-Song of Dinas Vawr,' which is, as the author says in due commendation of it, 'the quintessence of all war-songs that ever were written, and the sum and sub 1 (1) Palmyra, 1806. (2) The Genius of the Thames, 1810. (3) Rhododaphne, 1818. (4) Paper Money Lyrics, privately printed, 1825. |