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"The graceful willow, weaving to the breeze,
A green Narcissus of surrounding trees.'

He longs for 'such a scene of lusciousness and rest' (Keatslike), and in a naïve footnote declares: 'I know no one so fit to inhabit this Eden of Imagination as Mr. Wordsworth.' Finally there comes 'The Naiad,' a bright pastoral, with some songs of a quaint youthfulness, recording the time when 'his breast was young Maria's shrine.' Later on, the influence of Keats absorbed all others, and some of Reynolds' own impulses seem to have communicated themselves back to Keats. It was in answer to two pleasant, Hunt-like sonnets on Robin Hood that Keats wrote his ballad-song of 'Robin Hood.' It was with Reynolds that he was to have collaborated in a book of rhymed tales after Boccaccio; 'Isabella' was probably written to go with 'The Garden of Florence' and 'The Ladye of Provence' in the book published by Reynolds in 1821. The best of Keats' epistles was one written to Reynolds, and we see its wild fantasies, about the 'Lapland Witch turned maudlin Nun,' and the rest, reflecting, as in a mirror, something of the irresponsible insobriety of the writer of 'Peter Bell' and 'The Fancy.'

It was in 'The Fancy' that Reynolds was perhaps most himself; for that book, 'strictly familiar but by no means vulgar,' full of gusto, the record of a single gay corner of a period, suggests the man 'good with both hands,' with his 'gamecock-looking head,' as Hood described him. The prose, perhaps better than the verse, of it, but both rattling well together, combine in a nonsense book as taking and irrelevant an impromptu as his life.

DAVID HARTLEY COLERIDGE (1796-1849) 1

HARTLEY COLERIDGE impressed the people who met him hardly less than his father; he seemed to them a person of 1 (1) Poems, 1833. (2) Poems, edited by his brother, 2 vols., 1851.

equally essential genius. But behind his wonderful talk, in the depths of his sensitive and perturbed nature, there was a vast inertia; and the one, like the other, was an inheritance. Wrecked nerves, hauntings in sleep, absent-mindedness amounting almost to hallucination, an 'impotence of will,' together with 'melancholy recklessness,' a sense of what he called 'triste augurium, uneasy melancholy,' 'the feeling or fantasy of an adverse destiny,' buried somewhere in his mind: how could he, with all these legacies, do much to turn to effect that other fainter legacy, an instinct almost of genius? He spoke of himself as 'one of the small poets,' and he was right; his verse is just such poetry as can be improvised by genuinely poetical natures in which the soil is thin. His was always 'a young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks,' as it was said by Wordsworth, to whom he owed so much as a poet and as a man. And, as he said of himself, in one of his best sonnets:

'I lived like one not born to die,

A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears.'

'For I have lost the race I never ran,' he tells us, and he seems really never to have started on that race as more than a comforting diversion. There are splendid single lines and passages in his sonnets, sometimes as tenderly fanciful as this:

'But when I see thee by thy father's side,

Old times unqueen thee and old loves endear thee';

sometimes as full of significant and pungent imagery as here:

'Or being bad, yet murmurs at the curse

And incapacity of being worse,

That makes my hungry passion still keep Lent

In keen expectance of a Carnival.'

The first two lines might occur in 'The Unknown Eros,' the two latter in 'Modern Love.' The sonnets are full of poetical thought, and are as pleasant for their substance as for their

easy, gracious form. Besides the sonnets, which are of many kinds, there are a few lyrics, some, like the lullaby, 'When on my Mother's Arm I lay,' Elizabethan in colour, as are some of the sonnet endings, not without charm of cadence. We feel everywhere, even in the blank verse, really good of its kind, an accomplished master of language and versification. An attractive temperament is seen through them all. What is it, then, that is not in a work which remains ineffectual in the end? Is salt the ingredient that is lacking?

WILLIAM MOTHERWELL (1797-1835) 1

1

WILLIAM MOTHERWELL was the son of an ironmonger; he was born at Glasgow, October 13, 1797, and died there of softening of the brain, November 1, 1835. He was a lawyer's clerk and a journalist, and he published in 1827 an important collection of Scottish ballads, under the title of 'Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern.' In 1832 he collected the original poems which he had printed at intervals in the newspapers, and was engaged on a life of Tannahill, and with Hogg, on an edition of Burns, at the time of his death. A collected edition of his poems, with unpublished or uncollected pieces, was brought out in 1846.

Motherwell was an adventurer or a trespasser on many provinces, and one has to turn continually to his exact date to find out whether he is anticipating or echoing something with which we are already familiar. He imitates old English poetry more in the spelling than in the spirit; his Scottish writing is naturally more like the real thing, as in the famous 'Jeanie Morrison,' and in the better 'Willie' song, which, if they do not 'strike a few bold knocks at the door of the heart,' as John Wilson said of his ballads, have at least a suggestion of sincerity in their speech. His Norse war-songs and sword

1 (1) Renfrewshire Characters and Scenery, 1824. (2) Poems, Narrative and Lyrical, 1832. (3) Poetical Works, 1846.

songs, his Turkish battle-songs and all the other exotic compositions into which and into the 'Cavalier' songs he put most of his force, have the fine ringing clink of what is not after all sure steel. Starting from Gray he points the way to the versifying Macaulay. Some of his light jingles he apparently caught from Moore, while in others, more languid in flow, he seems to anticipate some of Tennyson's early cadences. But there is, among his various attempts at ghastliness (one of which, 'The Madman's Love,' would be striking if it had less rhetoric and came to an end sooner), a poem called 'The Demon Lady,' which is either a clever but extravagant imitation of Poe, or else, as it more likely was (for Poe knew his work and quotes a poem of his), one of the obscure and almost accidental origins of Poe's elaborate method of repeated effects. Motherwell wrote with vigour, but his work is a series of experiments, all detached, and akin only in their general aim at giving striking expression to striking subjects. He was an artificer rather than an artist.

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SAMUEL LOVER is best known to English readers as the writer of a wild drollery called 'Handy Andy,' which they are too easily inclined to take as a pattern of Irish life. He wrote better things in prose, and the poetical feeling which disguises itself in them is to be felt, speaking through athletic rhythms, in such uproarious ballads as 'Widow Machree' and such dainty ballads as 'The Whistling Thief,' which is as good as many similar things of Heine, and in some ways better. They are not quite like anything else, even in Irish work done before and after them, like 'The Groves of Blarney' of Richard Alfred Milliken, who wrote that irresistible solemn nonsense ode,

1 (1) Songs and Ballads, 1839. (2) Irish Lyrics, 1858. (3) Rival Rhymes, 1859. (4) Volunteer Songs, 1859.

which Peacock would have envied. There is little of Lover's verse to be interested in, but the best things give one a queer kind of pleasure.

ROBERT POLLOK (1798–1827) 1

THE final criticism of Pollok's 'Course of Time' was written by Frere on the fly-leaf of that strictly prose production.

'Robert Pollok, A. M.! this work of yours

Is meant, I do not doubt, extremely well,
And the design I deem most laudable;
But since I find the book laid on my table,
I shall presume (with the fair owner's leave)
To note a single slight deficiency:

I mean, in short (since it is called a poem),
That in the course of ten successive books

If something in the shape of poetry

Were to be met with, we should like it better;
But nothing of the kind is to be found,
Nothing, alas! but words of the olden time,
Quaint and uncouth, contorted phrase and queer,
With the familiar language that befits
Tea-drinking parties most unmeetly matched.'

DAVID MACBETH MOIR (1798-1851) 2

FOR a short time Moir obtained a sympathetic public in response to a series of 'Domestic Verses' inscribed to the memory of three small children. They express a natural grief with sincerity, but it is the utterance of a man who mistakes feeling for poetry. The many people who once wept over 'Casa Wappy' were so sorry for the father that they hesitated to put his verse to any test but the easy one of pathos. When he writes a festival ode to Burns there is the same genuine

The Course of Time, 2 vols., 1827.

2 (1) The Legend of Guenevere, 1824. (2) Domestic Verses, 1843. (3) Poetical Works, 2 vols., 1852.

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