INTRODUCTION TO HENRY KING.
Reading edition
Tell me no more how fair she is—
There must have been many readers who, like the present writer long enough ago, have felt a sensation of mingled amazement and chagrin on buying Dr. Hannah's book and not finding 'Tell me no more' in it. For that poem, though in certain 'strange and high' qualities it is the inferior of the best jets of the Caroline genius, is one of the most faultless and perfect things in this or indeed in any period of English poetry, and may be said to impart the Caroline essence in a form that can be (in the medical sense) 'borne' by all who have any feeling for poetry at all, as hardly anything else does. It enlists, with unerring art, the peculiar virtue of the metre—that of expressing settled but not violent hopelessness—which Cowper afterwards utilized, more terribly but hardly more skilfully, in 'The Castaway'. It has the 'metaphysical' fancifulness of thought and diction, tempered to a reasonable but not an excessive degree 'below proof' and so fit for general consumption. No one who possesses literary 'curiosity'—in the good old sense, not the degenerate modern one—can be indifferent to seeing what else the author of this could do.
It may be frankly and at once admitted that he has nothing exactly to match it. The once even more famous—and still perhaps not much less famous—Sic Vita, is not certainly his; and, though a fine thing, is very distinctly open to the metaphysical reproach of playing with its subject too much—of that almost wilfully mechanical and factory-like conceit-mongering which reaches its extreme in Cleveland. If it is King's, 'The Dirge' is a sort of extended handling of it—less epigrammatic but more poetical, and brought down again to that via media of metaphysicality which is King's special path. He is, in fact, a sort of Longfellow of this particular style and school of poetry—from the other side; a sort of Donne in usum vulgi. 'The Exequy' and 'The Elegy', 'Silence' and 'Brave Flowers', are all in this middle way; and perhaps his treading of it may be a reason why he has been comparatively neglected—the great vulgar not being grateful for poetry which never can fully please it, and the small wanting something more concentrated and 'above proof'. But even if he had not lacked complete presentment so long, such a collection as this would be manifestly incomplete without him. It has not, however, been thought necessary to include his verse translations of the Psalms, which form a separate volume, not much more successful than most of the attempts at that impossible task. With the admirable English of the Authorized or the Prayer-Book Versions at choice, and the admirable Latin of the Vulgate to fall back upon, nobody can want stuff like
Earth is the Lord's with her increase,
And all that there have place:
He founded it upon the Seas,