Part 2 — APPENDIX

CRITICISMS ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

DELTA.

“We cannot allow these verses[444] to adorn, with a sad beauty, the pages of this Magazine—more especially as they are the last composed by their distinguished writer, and that only a few days before her death—without at least a passing tribute of regret for an event which has cast a shadow of gloom through the sunshiny fields of contemporary literature. But two months ago, the beautiful lyric entitled ‘Despondency and Aspiration,’ appeared in these pages, and now the sweet fountain of music from which that prophetic strain gushed has ceased to flow. The highly gifted and accomplished, the patient, the meek, and long-suffering Felicia Hemans, is no more. She died on the night of Saturday, the 16th of May 1835, at Dublin, and met her fate with all the calm resignation of a Christian, conscious that her spirit was winging its flight to another and a better world, where ‘the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’

“Without disparagement of the living, we scarcely hesitate to say, that in Mrs Hemans our female literature has lost perhaps its brightest ornament. To Joanna Baillie she might be inferior, not only in vigour of conception, but in the power of metaphysically analysing those sentiments and feelings which constitute the basis of human actions,—to Mrs Jameson in the critical perception which, from detached fragments of spoken thought, can discriminate the links which bind all into a distinctive character,—to Miss Landon in eloquent facility,—to Caroline Bowles in simple pathos,—and to Mary Mitford in power of thought; but as a female writer, influencing the female mind, she has undoubtedly stood, for some bypast years, the very first in the first rank; and this pre-eminence has been acknowledged, not only in her own land, but wherever the English tongue is spoken, whether on the banks of the eastern Ganges or the western Mississippi. Her path was her own; and shoals of imitators have arisen, alike at home and on the other side of the Atlantic, who, destitute of her animating genius, have mimicked her themes, and parodied her sentiments and language, without being able to reach its height. In her poetry, religious truth and intellectual beauty meet together; and assuredly it is not the less calculated to refine the taste and exalt the imagination, because it addresses itself almost exclusively to the better feelings of our nature alone. Over all her pictures of humanity are spread the glory and the grace reflected from purity of morals, delicacy of perception and conception, sublimity of religious faith, and warmth of patriotism; and, turning from the dark and degraded, whether in subject or sentiment, she seeks out those verdant oases in the desert of human life on which the affections may most pleasantly rest. Her poetry is intensely and entirely feminine—and, in our estimation, this is the highest praise which could be awarded it,—it could have been written by a woman only; for although, in the ‘Records’ of her sex, we have the female character delineated in all the varied phases of baffled passion and of ill-requited affection; of heroical self-denial, and of withering hope deferred; of devotedness tried in the furnace of affliction, and of

yet its energy resembles that of the dove, ‘pecking the hand that hovers o’er its mate,’ and its exaltation of thought is not of the daring kind, which doubts and derides, or even questions, but which clings to the anchor of hope, and looks forward with faith and reverential fear.

“Mrs Hemans has written much, and, as with all authors in like predicament, her strains are of various degrees of excellence. Independently of this, her different works will be differently estimated, as to their relative value, by different minds; but among the lyrics of the English language which can scarcely die, we hesitate not to assign places to ‘The Hebrew Mother’—‘The Treasures of the Deep’—‘The Spirit’s Return’—‘The Homes of England’—‘The Better Land’—‘The Hour of Death’—‘The Trumpet’—and ‘The Graves of a Household.’ In these ‘gems of purest ray serene,’ the peculiar genius of Mrs Hemans breathes, and burns, and shines pre-eminent; for her forte lay in depicting whatever tends to beautify and embellish domestic life—the gentle overflowings of love and friendship—‘homebred delights and heartfelt happiness’—the associations of local attachment—and the influences of religious feelings over the soul, whether arising from the varied circumstances and situations of man, or from the aspects of external nature. We would only here add, by way of remark, that the writings of Mrs Hemans seem to divide themselves into two pretty distinct portions—the first comprehending her ‘Modern Greece,’ ‘Wallace,’ ‘Dartmoor,’ ‘Sceptic,’ ‘Historic Scenes,’ and other productions, up to the publication of ‘The Forest Sanctuary;’ and the latter comprehending that volume, ‘The Records of Woman,’ ‘The Scenes and Hymns of Life,’ and all her subsequent productions. In her earlier works, she follows the classic model, as contradistinguished from the romantic, and they are inferior in that polish of style, and almost gorgeous richness of language, in which her maturer compositions are set. It is evident that new stores of thought were latterly opened up to her, in a more extended acquaintance with the literature of Spain and Germany, as well as by a profounder study of the writings of our great poetical regenerator—Wordsworth.”—Blackwood’s Magazine, July 1835.

MISS LANDON.

“Did we not know this world to be but a place of trial—our bitter probation for another and for a better—how strange in its severity would seem the lot of genius in a woman! The keen feeling—the generous enthusiasm—the lofty aspiration and the delicate perception—are given but to make the possessor unfitted for her actual position. It is well!—such gifts, in their very contrast to the selfishness and the evil with which they are surrounded, inform us of another world—they breathe of their home, which is heaven; the spiritual and the inspired in this life but fit us to believe in that which is to come. With what a sublime faith is this divine reliance expressed in all Mrs Hemans’s later writings! As the clouds towards nightfall melt away on a fine summer evening into the clear amber of the west, leaving a soft and unbroken azure whereon the stars may shine; so the troubles of life, its vain regrets and vainer desires, vanished before the calm close of existence—the hopes of heaven rose steadfast at last—the light shone from the windows of her home, as she approached unto it.

“We have noticed this yearning for affection—unsatisfied, but still unsubdued—as one characteristic of Mrs Hemans’s poetry: the rich picturesque was another. Highly accomplished, the varied stores that she possessed were all subservient to one master science. Mistress both of German and Spanish, the latter country appears to have peculiarly captivated her imagination. At that period when the fancy is peculiarly alive to impression—when girlhood is so new, that the eagerness of childhood is still in its delights—Spain was, of all others, the country on which public attention was fixed—victory after victory carried the British flag from the ocean to the Pyrenees; but, with that craving for the ideal which is so great a feature in her writings, the present was insufficient, and she went back upon the past;—the romantic history of the Moors was like a storehouse, with treasures gorgeous like those of its own Alhambra.

“It is observable in her minor poems, that they turn upon an incident rather than a feeling. Feelings, true and deep, are developed; but one single emotion is never the original subject. Some graceful or touching anecdote or situation catches her attention, and its poetry is developed in a strain of mourning melody, and in a vein of gentle moralising. I always wish, in reading my favourite poets, to know what first suggested my favourite poems. Few things would be more interesting than to know under what circumstances they were composed—how much of individual sentiment there was in each, or how, on some incident seemingly even opposed, they had contrived to ingraft their own associations. What a history of the heart would such annals reveal! Every poem is in itself an impulse.

“Besides the ideal and the picturesque, Mrs Hemans is distinguished by her harmony. I use the word harmony advisedly, in contradistinction to melody. Melody implies something more careless, more simple, than belongs to her style; it is song by snatches; our English ballads are remarkable for it. To quote an instance or two: there is a verse in that of Yarrow Water—

Nothing can exceed the tender sweetness of these lines; but there is no skill. Again, in Faire Rosamonde, the verse that describes the cruelty of Eleanor—

How musical is the alliteration! but it is music which, like that of the singing brook, has sprung up of itself. Now, Mrs Hemans has the most perfect skill in her science; nothing can be more polished than her versification. Every poem is like a piece of music, with its eloquent pauses, its rich combinations, and its swelling chords. Who that has ever heard, can forget the exquisite flow of ‘The Voice of Spring?’—

It is like the finest order of Italian singing—pure, high, and scientific.

“I can never sufficiently regret that it was not my good fortune to know Mrs Hemans personally: it was an honour I should have estimated so highly—a happiness that I should have enjoyed so keenly. I never even met with an acquaintance of hers but once; that once, however, was much. I knew Miss Jewsbury, the late lamented Mrs Fletcher. She delighted in speaking of Mrs Hemans; she spoke of her with the appreciation of one fine mind comprehending another, and with the earnest affection of a woman and a friend. She described her conversation as singularly fascinating—full of poetry, very felicitous in illustration by anecdote—happy, too, in quotation, and very rich in imagery; ‘in short, her own poem on “The Treasures of the Deep” would best describe it.’ She mentioned a very striking simile to which a conversation on Mrs Hemans’s own poem of ‘The Sceptic’ had led;—‘Like Sinbad the sailor, we are often shipwrecked on a strange shore. We despair; but hope comes when least expected. We pass through the gloomy caverns of doubt into the free air and blessed sunshine of conviction and belief.’ I asked her if she thought Mrs Hemans a happy person, and she said, ‘No; her enjoyment is feverish, and she desponds. She is like a lamp whose oil is consumed by the very light which it yields.’ What a cruel thing is the weakness of memory! How little can its utmost efforts recall of conversation that was once an instruction and a delight!

“To the three characteristics of Mrs Hemans’ poetry which have already been mentioned—viz. the ideal, the picturesque, and the harmonious—a fourth must be added,—the moral. Nothing can be more pure, more feminine and exalted, than the spirit which pervades the whole; it is the intuitive sense of right, elevated and strengthened into a principle. It is a glorious and a beautiful memory to bequeath; but she who left it is little to be envied. Open the volumes which she has left, legacies from many various hours, and what a record of wasted feelings and disappointed hopes may be traced in their sad and sweet complainings! Yet Mrs Hemans was spared some of the keenest mortifications of a literary career. She knew nothing of it as a profession which has to make its way through poverty, neglect, and obstacles: she lived apart in a small, affectionate circle of friends. The high-road of life, with its crowds and contention—its heat, its noise, and its dust that rests on all—was for her happily at a distance; yet even in such green nest, the bird could not fold its wings, and sleep to its own music. There came the aspiring, the unrest, the aching sense of being misunderstood, the consciousness that those a thousand times inferior were yet more beloved. Genius places a woman in an unnatural position; notoriety frightens away affection; and superiority has for its attendant fear, not love. Its pleasantest emotions are too vivid to be lasting: hope may sometimes,

but, like the azure glimpses between thunder-showers, the clouds gather more darkly around for the passing sunshine. The heart sinks back on its solitary desolation. In every page of Mrs Hemans’ writings is this sentiment impressed. What is the conclusion of ‘Corinne crowned at the Capitol?’

“What is poetry, and what is a poetical career? The first is to have an organisation of extreme sensibility, which the second exposes bareheaded to the rudest weather. The original impulse is irresistible—all professions are engrossing when once begun; and, acting with perpetual stimulus, nothing takes more complete possession of its follower than literature. But never can success repay its cost. The work appears—it lives in the light of popular applause; but truly might the writer exclaim,—

If this be true even of one sex, how much more true of the other! Ah! Fame to a woman is indeed but a royal mourning in purple for happiness.”—New Monthly Magazine for August 1835.

H. F. CHORLEY.

“Though respect for the memory of the dead, and delicacy towards the living, enjoin us to be brief in alluding to the events of her life, we may speak freely, and at length, of the history of her mind, and the circumstances of her literary career, in the course of which she deserved and acquired a European reputation as the first of our poetesses living, and still before the public. Few have written so much, or written so well, as Mrs Hemans; few have entwined the genuine fresh thoughts and impressions of their own minds so intimately, with their poetical fancies, as she did; few have undergone more arduous and reverential preparation for the service of song—for, from childhood, her thirst for knowledge was extreme, and her reading great and varied. Those who, while admitting the high-toned beauty of her poetry, accused it of monotony of style and subject, (they could not deny to it the praise of originality, seeing that it founded a school of imitators in England, and a yet larger in America,) little knew to what historical research she had applied herself—how far and wide she had sought for food with which to fill her eager mind. It is true that she used only a part of the mass of information which she had collected—(for she never wrote on calculation, but from the strong impulse of the moment; and it was her nature intimately to take home to herself, and appropriate only what was high-hearted, imaginative, and refined;)—but the writer of this notice has seen manuscript collections of extracts made in the course of these youthful studies, sufficient of themselves to justify his assertion, if her poems (like those of every genuine poet) did not contain a still better record of the progress of her mind. Her knowledge of classic literature may be distinctly traced in her ‘Sceptic,’ her ‘Modern Greece,’ and a hundred later lyrics based upon what Bulwer so happily calls ‘the Graceful Superstition.’ Her study and admiration of the works of ancient Greek and Roman art, strengthened into an abiding love of the beautiful, which breathes both in the sentiment and in the structure of every line she wrote, (for there are few of our poets more faultlessly musical in their versification;) and when, subsequently, she opened for herself the treasuries of Spanish and German legend and literature, how thoroughly she had imbued herself with their spirit may be seen in her ‘Siege of Valencia,’ in her glorious and chivalresque ‘Songs of the Cid,’ and in her ‘Lays of Many Lands,’ the idea of which was suggested by Herder’s ‘Stimmen der Völker in Liedern.’

“But though her mind was enriched by her wide acquaintance with the poetical and historical literature of other countries, it possessed a strong and decidedly marked character of its own, which coloured all her productions—a character which, though any thing but feeble or sentimental, was essentially feminine. An eloquent modern critic (Mrs Jameson) has rightly said, ‘that Mrs Hemans’ poems could not have been written by a man;’ their love is without selfishness, their passion without a stain of this world’s coarseness, their high heroism (and to illustrate this assertion we would mention ‘Clotilda,’ ‘the Lady of Provence,’ and the ‘Switzer’s Wife,’) unsullied by any grosser alloy of mean ambition. Her religion, too, is essentially womanly—fervent, clinging to belief, and ‘hoping on, hoping ever,’ in spite of the peculiar trials appointed to her sex, so exquisitely described in the ‘Evening Prayer in a Girls’ School’—

“If such was the mind of her works, the manner in which she wrought out her conceptions was equally individual and excellent. Her imagination was rich, chaste, and glowing: those who saw only its published fruits little guessed at the extent of its variety.

“It is difficult to enumerate the titles of her principal works. Her first childish efforts were published when she was only thirteen, and we can speak of her subsequent poems, ‘Wallace,’ ‘Dartmoor,’ ‘The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy,’ and her ‘Dramatic Scenes,’ only from memory. These were probably written in the happiest period of her life, when her mind was rapidly developing itself, and its progress was aided by judicious and intelligent counsellors, among whom may be mentioned Bishop Heber. A favourable notice of one of these poems will be found in Lord Byron’s letters; and the fame of her opening talent had reached Shelley, who addressed a very singular correspondence to her. With respect to the world in general, her name began to be known by the publication of her ‘Welsh Melodies,’ her ‘Siege of Valencia,’ and the scattered lyrics which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, then under the direction of Campbell. She had previously contributed a series of prose papers, on Foreign Literature, to Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine, which, with little exception, are the only specimens of that style of writing ever attempted by her. To the ‘Siege of Valencia’ succeeded rapidly her ‘Forest Sanctuary,’ her ‘Records of Woman,’ (the most successful of her works,) her ‘Songs of the Affections,’ (containing, perhaps, her finest poem, ‘The Spirit’s Return,’) her ‘National Lyrics and Songs for Music,’ (most of which have been set to music by her sister, and become popular,) and her ‘Scenes and Hymns of Life.’ A few words with respect to the direction of her powers in later days may be worthily extracted from a letter of hers which lies now before us. She had been urged by a friend to undertake a prose work, and a series of ‘Artistic Novels,’ something after the manner of Tieck, and Goethe’s Kunst-Romanen, as likely to be congenial to her own tastes and habits of mind, and to prove most acceptable to the public.

“‘I have now,’ she says, ‘passed through the feverish and somewhat visionary state of mind often connected with the passionate study of art in early life; deep affections and deep sorrows seem to have solemnised my whole being, and I now feel as if bound to higher and holier tasks, which, though I may occasionally lay aside, I could not long wander from without some sense of dereliction. I hope it is no self-delusion, but I cannot help sometimes feeling as if it were my true task to enlarge the sphere of sacred poetry, and extend its influence. When you receive my volume of ‘Scenes and Hymns,’ you will see what I mean by enlarging its sphere, though my plan as yet is very imperfectly developed.’

“Besides the works here enumerated, we should mention her tragedy, ‘The Vespers of Palermo,’ which, though containing many fine thoughts and magnificent bursts of poetry, was hardly fitted for the stage, and the songs which she contributed to Colonel Hodges’ ‘Peninsular Melodies;’ and we cannot but once more call the attention of our readers to her last lyric, ‘Despondency and Aspiration,’ published in Blackwood’s Magazine for May 1835. It is the song of the swan—its sweetest and its last!”[445]—Athenæum, No. 395.

“An elaborate summary of the principal features of Mrs Hemans’ character, or of the general and individual merits of her poems, can hardly be necessary, if the foregoing memorials have fulfilled the design of their editor. The woman and the poetess were in her too inseparably united to admit of their being considered apart from each other. In her private letters, as in her published works, she shows herself high-minded, affectionate, grateful—wayward in her self-neglect, delicate to fastidiousness in her tastes—in her religion fervent without intolerance—eager to acquire knowledge, as eager to impart it to others—earnestly devoted to her art, and in that art to the service of all things beautiful, and noble, and holy. She may have fallen short of some of her predecessors in vigour of mind—of some of her contemporaries in variety of fancy; but she surpassed them all in the use of language, in the employment of a rich, chaste, and glowing imagery, and in the perfect music of her versification. It will be long before the chasm left in our female literature by her death will be worthily filled: she will be long remembered—long spoken of by those who know her works—yet longer by those who knew herself,—

Memorials of Mrs Hemans, p. 354-6.

ECLECTIC REVIEW.

“Mrs Hemans, if not in all respects the most gifted of the female writers who form so bright a constellation in the sphere of our contemporary literature, surpassed them all in those attributes of genius which characterise the lyric poets. Without possessing the dramatic conception of Joanna Baillie or Mary Mitford—the masculine vigour and depth of thought displayed by the late Mrs Fletcher, (better known as Miss Jewsbury,) or the fertile imagination of others of our delightful female prose writers—she outshone them all in her peculiar orbit; and though she wrote too much, and often too carelessly, to sustain, in all her compositions, the high standard of poetic excellence to which she often attained, her best productions, in her own rich and peculiar vein, rival those of the mightiest masters of English song; while their exquisitely feminine character justify the remark, that ‘the poetry of Mrs Hemans could have been written only by a woman.’”—E. R., 1836.

PROFESSOR NORTON.

“We have now received the last of the imperishable gifts of Mrs Hemans’ genius. The period of her spirit’s trials and sufferings, and its glorious course on earth, has been completed. She has left an unclouded fame; and we may say, in her own words:—

“As this, therefore, will be the last time that we shall review any production of Mrs Hemans, we may be permitted to recall, with a melancholy pleasure, the admiration and delight with which we have followed the progress of her genius. The feelings with which her works are now generally regarded have been expressed in no publication earlier, more frequently, or more warmly, than in our own. Without repeating what we have already said, we shall now endeavour to point out some of their features, considered in relation to that moral culture in which alone such writings can exist.

“Mrs Hemans may be considered as the representative of a new school of poetry, or, to speak more precisely, her poetry discovers characteristics of the highest kind, which belong almost exclusively to that of later times, and have been the result of the gradual advancement, and especially the moral progress, of mankind. It is only when man, under the influence of true religion, feels himself connected with whatever is infinite, that his affections and powers are fully developed. The poetry of an immortal being must be of a different character from that of an earthly being. But, in recurring to the classic poets of antiquity, we find that, in their conceptions, the element of religious faith was wanting. Their mythology was to them no object of sober belief; and, had it been so, was adapted not to produce but to annihilate devotion. They had no thought of regarding the universe as created, animated, and ruled by God’s all-powerful and omniscient goodness. To them it was a world of matter,—

never existed except in the imagination of modern poets. The beings intended were the ‘fair humanities’ of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose attributes, derived from the baser parts of our nature, were human passions lawlessly indulged, accompanied with more than mortal power. Gibbon, who was any thing rather than what he affected to be—a philosopher—speaks of ‘the elegant mythology of the Greeks.’ The great fountains of their popular and poetical mythology were Homer and Hesiod. Hesiod does not surpass Homer in the agreeable or moral character of his fictions; and, as regards the elegance of the mythology found in the great epic poet, a single passage, if we had no other means of judging, might settle the question, the address of Jupiter to Juno at the commencement of the Fifteenth Book of the Iliad:—

“It may be incidentally remarked, that these lines illustrate not merely the features of the ancient mythology, but also the condition of woman as treated by the heroes of Homer and by his contemporaries. We happen just to have opened upon another striking example of the elegance of the ancient mythology during the Augustan age. It is a passage of Ovid, almost too indecent and silly to be alluded to, though Addison was not ashamed to translate it, beginning—

“From the passage referred to, we may judge something of the convivial manners of the Romans, and of the habits of intercourse between the sexes.

“It is remarkable that, in all religious and moral conceptions, the noblest materials of poetry, the philosophers were very far in advance of the poets. ‘The Fables of Hesiod and Homer,’ says Plato, ‘are especially to be censured. They have uttered the greatest falsehoods concerning the greatest beings.’ Referring to the loathsome and abominable fables about Cœlus, Saturn, and Jupiter, he says—‘We must not tell our youth that he who commits the greatest iniquity does nothing strange, nor he who inflicts the most cruel punishment upon his father when injured by him; but that he is only doing what was done by the first and greatest of the gods.’ A little after he subjoins:—‘The chaining of Juno by her son, the throwing of Vulcan from heaven by his father, because he attempted to defend his mother from being beaten, and the battles of the gods described by Homer, are not fictions to be allowed in our city, whether explained allegorically or not.’ ‘Though we praise many things in Homer,’ he says, ‘we shall not praise him when he represents Jupiter as sending a lying dream to Agamemnon, nor Æschylus when he makes Thetis complain of having been deceived by Apollo.’ ‘When any one thus speaks of the gods, we are indignant; we grant no permission for such writings, nor shall we suffer teachers to use them in the instruction of youth.’[447]

“The poets of this nation did not, in Plato’s opinion, represent their heroes as more amiable or respectable than their gods. ‘We shall not,’ he says, ‘suffer those of whom we have the charge to believe that Achilles, the son of a goddess, was so full of evil passions as to unite in himself two opposite vices—avaricious meanness, and insolence towards gods and men. Nor shall we allow it to be said that Theseus, the son of Neptune, and Perithöus, the son of Jove, rushed forth to the commission of such abominable robberies, or that any son of a god or any hero committed those abominable and impious acts which are now imputed to them in the fictions of the poets.’ ‘Such fictions are pernicious to those who hear them; for every bad man finds a license for himself, in the belief that those nearly related to the gods do and have done such deeds. They are, then, to be suppressed, lest they produce a strong tendency to wickedness in our youth.’[448]

“Such were the sentiments of the most poetical of Grecian philosophers concerning the religious and moral character of the poets of his nation; and he remarks in addition upon the gloomy fancies of Homer concerning the state of departed souls, as neither true nor useful, but adapted to produce unmanly fears, and therefore not to be listened to by those who, as freemen, should dread slavery more than death. During the period between Homer and Virgil, a misty brightness had spread over the poetic ideas of the future abodes of the blessed; but the Elysium and Tartarus of poetry were but fictions, awakening no serious hopes nor fears, and having no power over the heart. These imaginations of a future life were connected with no just and ennobling conceptions of the purposes of our existence, of the spiritual nature of man, or of that endless progress to which we may look forward. The heroes of Elysium found their delight in the meaner pleasures of this life,—

“Thus the ancient poets were shut out from the whole sphere of religious sentiment; and all those numberless conceptions and feelings that spring from our knowledge of God and the sense of our own immortality, are absent from their writings, while this whole exhaustless domain has been laid open to the poets of later times. A single example may illustrate what has been said. Let us take the concluding verses of Mrs Hemans’s ‘Fountain of Oblivion:’—

“The whole train of emotion and thought in these verses is of a character wholly unknown to the classic days of Greece and Rome. To imagine any thing corresponding to it in the work of an ancient poet, is to bring together conceptions the most incongruous.

“Here it may be worth while, in order to prevent ourselves from being misunderstood, to observe, that we do not mean to depreciate the value of the study of the ancient poets. After those inquiries by which the truths of religion are established, there are none of more interest or importance than such as relate to the mind and heart of man, and open to us a knowledge of what he has been, and what he may be on earth. But, to attain this knowledge, we must acquaint ourselves with the moral and intellectual character of our race, as it has existed, and exists, under influences and forms of society very unlike each other. In this research, no period can be compared in interest with a few centuries in the history of Athens and Rome, which have left traces still so deeply impressed upon the civilised world. Thus, in studying the history of human nature, the Grecian and Roman poets furnish some of our most important materials. We may discover in them a source of sentiments and opinions that still affect men’s minds. Homer carries us back to remote Pagan antiquity, on which his writings shed a light afforded by no other; and, at the same time, having been regarded as the undisputed master-poet by his countrymen, (for this Plato himself does not question,) he shows us what were the topics by which their imaginations were most affected during the period of their greatest civilisation. The dramatic poets of Athens reflect the Athenian character; and in Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, we find the lineaments of the Augustan age. But the value which thus attaches to their works is not to be confounded with the absolute value of those works as poems adapted through their intrinsic beauties to give delight at the present day. In estimating their naked worth, we must likewise separate from them the interest connected with their antiquity, and all those accidental associations that have been gathering round them for many centuries. We must even put out of view the native genius of the writer, if this genius have been exerted under circumstances so unfavourable as to render it ineffectual to produce what may give pleasure to a pure and highly-cultivated mind. Not-withstanding the traditionary enthusiasm that has existed on the subject, it may well be doubted whether their power of giving vivid pleasure merely as poetical compositions, forms a principal recommendation of the study of the ancient poets. They were not acquainted with the richest realms of mind. It is a mistake to address them as ‘bards illustrious, born in happier days.’ But, to return to our immediate subject.

“After the revival of letters, the forms of what was called Christianity, both among Catholics and Protestants, were in many respects so abhorrent to reason, or feeling, or both, that they could combine in no intimate union with our higher nature, however they might operate on men’s passions or fears. Religious truth was, however, sometimes contemplated in greater purity by minds of the better class; and we early begin to find in poetry some expressions of true religious sentiment. But what advance had been actually made even in the seventeenth century, we may learn from the great work of Milton. It is based on a system of mythology more sublime than the Pagan, and less adapted to degrade the moral feelings, but scarcely less offensive to reason, and spreading all but a Manichæan gloom and blight over the creation of God. Putting forth his vast genius, he struggles with it as he can, moulding it into colossal forms that repel our human sympathies, and lavishing upon it gorgeous treasures of imagination; but even his powers yield and sink at times before its intrinsic incongruity and essential falsehood. Whoever rightly apprehends the character of God, or contemplates as he ought the invisible world, will turn to but few pages of the Paradise Lost, with the hope of finding expressions correspondent to his thoughts and emotions. We feel with pain the inappreciable contrast between the genius displayed in the poetical execution of the work, and the absurdity of its prose story. It is the opposition which this story presents to the most ennobling truths, even more than ‘the want of human interest,’ on which Johnson remarks, that gives to the poem the unattractive character of which he speaks, and which we believe is felt by almost all its readers.

“Doubtless pure religious sentiment breaks out in this and in the other poems of Milton. The concluding line of his Sonnet on his Blindness—

and numerous other passages of similar beauty, have, we may believe, found an answering feeling in many hearts. But in speaking of those causes which have given a new character to the poetry of later times, it is not our purpose to trace their influence historically. Going back to the days of Grecian and Roman civilisation, we shall take only a few illustrations that may serve to show more clearly the contrast produced by their absence on one hand, or their operation on the other.

“In proportion as we contemplate the world from the height to which true religion conducts us, we perceive the circle of moral action widening indefinitely. Our duties toward the inferior animals are few and low, compared with those which we lie under to our fellow-men; and our duties toward our fellow-men become far more extensive, and assume a more solemn character, when we regard them not as born to perish upon earth, but as commencing here an unending existence. Our obligations to others correspond to our means of serving them; and we are introduced to a higher class of virtues, as soon as we recognise in those around us beings forming characters for a different mode of existence, to whom the highest service that can be rendered is to assist their progress in virtue, and to whom some influence, good or evil, is continually flowing out from us, and diverging into channels of which we cannot see the termination. All interest in the spiritual and imperishable good of our fellow-men must depend upon our regarding them as spiritual and imperishable. It is only under a sense of our true nature, that man is capable of reaching the sublime thought of assimilating himself to God, by devoting his powers to the moral welfare of his fellow-men.

“But there is more to be considered. The conduct which would be wise and right for man if immortal, would not be wise and right for him if viewed as a perishing animal. It is true that moral good is always good, and moral evil always evil; but with an essential change in our nature and relations, there must likewise be an essential change in what is morally good or evil. If all human hopes were limited to this world, it would be folly for any one to act as if he and others were to exist for ever. The whole plan of life and of its duties formed by a wise man, would be quite different in the one case from what it would be in the other; and the course of life actually pursued by the generality, if destitute of all religious belief, would be still more unlike that of men under its influence.

In the absence of religious faith, this is true philosophy. If this life were the limit of our being, its pleasures and pains would be the only objects of our concern. Nothing would be virtuous which tended not to the attainment and communication of those limited and perishing pleasures we might here partake; nothing morally evil, but what lessened our own capacity for enjoying them, or tended to prevent others from sharing them with us. There would be no sphere for the exercise of those powers, no object for those capacities of happiness, that belong to the imperishable part of our nature. There would be nothing to prompt one to great sacrifices or acts of moral heroism; for these have their source in the consciousness of immortality, in a sense of our connexion with the infinite, our look forward to good for ourselves and others beyond the limits of life. Earthly motives afford no soil in which the nobler virtues can strike their roots. It is true that the ancients, particularly the ancient philosophers, were not without the influence of truly religious conceptions; and, under almost any forms of opinion, the better nature of man will of itself occasionally break out into exhibitions of excellence. But the religious sentiment being so weak and perverted among the ancient poets, we find little in their works that can be regarded as morally noble, and scarcely an indistinct recognition of those deep feelings and unearthly virtues which have their source in our spiritual nature. The same remark is almost equally applicable to a large proportion of the modern poets: for true religion has been little understood or felt by them. Where, in any age preceding our own, may we hope to find such expressions of sentiment as in the following verses from Mrs Hemans’ ‘Vaudois Wife?’[453]

“With this, may be compared the speech of Alcestis in Euripides, when dying in the presence of her husband, under circumstances adapted to call forth all that power of expressing the tender emotions, for which Euripides has been thought to be distinguished.

“Under the influence of religion, we are acted upon by new motives, through the sense created within us, of the worth of our fellow-men. Religion invests them with a new character, strips off the disguise with which the accidents of mortality, imperfections, weaknesses, follies, miseries, and crimes hide their essential nature from our view, and presents them before us with all the interests and capacities of immortal beings. They who are dear to us are worthy of all love and self-devotion, worthy of affections unlimited by death or time. They are members with us of the imperishable family of God, in whose company we are to exist for ever, and with whom our union will become more entire, as we grow purer and more disinterested.

“Thus in later days there has been a growth of sentiments and affections, almost unknown before. Our better feelings toward our fellow-men have acquired far more strength, and assumed new forms. In other times, man has been comparatively an insulated being. Domestic life—that life in which now almost all our joys or sorrows are centred—was scarcely known to the ancients; and it has had but a sickly and artificial existence even in modern ages, through the operation of false notions of domestic government and discipline, and of the mutual relations of husband and wife, parents and children. Religion, by teaching us justly to estimate what is truly excellent in our nature, what is intellectual, moral, and ever-enduring, has given to woman the rank to which she is entitled. It has made her the friend of man; and our feelings are in harmony with the poet when he speaks of—

But man has never regarded woman with respect and true love, except so far as he has regarded her as a spiritual and immortal being. Without this, no conception can exist of that inseparable union which blends all the interests and affections of one being with those of another. The poetry of the ancients that expresses any sentiments toward the female sex is, with rare exceptions, of the grossest kind, sensual, coarse, indecent, brutal. We can pick out only a few passages from the mass, which shadow forth anything like real affection. The same character has continued to cleave to much of our modern poetry, rendering it at once pernicious and disgusting. But wherever the power of true religion has been felt, there woman, more disinterested, more pure, and more moral than man, has exerted a constant influence to raise the character of society. Where it has not been felt, woman has been treated as a mere creature of this earth, an object only of sensual passion, courted, wronged, and insulted; her character has sunk, and the infection of the evil has spread itself every where. It would be difficult, in as few words, to suggest to a reflecting mind a more melancholy picture of the state of society at Athens, than that of which Aristotle affords us a glimpse in a short passage of his ‘Art of Poetry,’ where he remarks, with his usual brevity and dryness, that ‘the manners (character) of a woman or slave may be good; though in general, perhaps, women are rather bad than good, and slaves altogether bad.’[454] Where women are thus estimated, the domestic charities, our best school of virtue, cannot exist; those affections which are at once the gentlest and the strongest have no place; nor will there be any true refinement, nor quick and generous feeling in the intercourse between man and man: the first and strongest link in the chain of human sympathy is wanting.

“When Jesus Christ pronounced these words, ‘What God has joined together, let not man put asunder,’ he laid down the fundamental law of human civilisation. But it would have been impossible to render marriage the most solemn and indissoluble of connexions if his religion had not at the same time restored to woman the character designed for her by nature, and raised her to that place she now holds, wherever the truths he taught have had somewhat of their proper influence.

“When the feelings that give sanctity to marriage are wanting, the parental affections operate but feebly. The new-born child, instead of being regarded as a gift and a trust from God, a new creature with whom we have become for ever connected, and a living bond of common interest to strengthen the union of its parents, is either looked at, on the one hand, as a present incumbrance, or, on the other, as a probable future support. The whole history of the domestic relations of the ancients establishes this truth. What must have been the state of parental affection among those who practised and tolerated the destruction of infants as a common custom? The absence of such affection is not to be estimated by the number of victims to that custom, but by the fact of its being generally viewed without horror or reprobation. It was a shocking trait of barbarity in the character of the elder Cato, that he recommended that worn-out and disabled slaves should be exposed to perish; but an exposure more inhuman, which showed that man had lost even the feelings of the lower animals, was constantly going on, and was enjoined, under certain circumstances, both by Plato and Aristotle, as a law of their imagined republics. There is a famous saying in one of the comedies of Terence, which has been often quoted as a fine expression of philanthropy: Homo sum—humani nihil a me alienum puto.[455] It is put into the mouth of a man whose wife is afterwards represented as in fear before him, because she had not destroyed her female infant as he had commanded, but given it a chance for preservation by causing it to be exposed alive. Maternal love cannot be wholly extinguished; but it is the glow of modern feeling only which pours its beauty over the following lines, to which nothing parallel can be found in the poets of Greece or Rome, though Mrs Hemans apostrophises the Elysium of their imagining:—

“The ancient popular faith was indeed destitute of consolation; but in the absence of those associations which shed a holy light round an infant, such consolation is less needed. Even the fountain of maternal affection flows with but a scanty and interrupted stream.

“Thus religion, by making man of more worth to man, and by strengthening our assurance in each other’s sympathy and virtue, has called forth affections which lay folded up in our nature, or had put forth only a stinted growth. The finer productions of modern poetry are coloured throughout with expressions of their beauty and strength. Moral qualities, good or bad, as they exist in men, unformed directly or indirectly by religion, owe their strength principally to impulse and passion, or depend, like the inconsistent hospitality of the Arab, or the pride of the Roman, on what he thought the glory of his country, upon prejudices which spring partly from generous feelings and partly from selfish regards, and are made strong and binding upon the individual by universal consent. It is only when quickened by religious sentiment, that the human character displays all its complicated variety of feelings. Then affections, which had before seemed almost powerless, become essential elements of our being. Associations, till then unknown, link together their invisible chains; and the feeling with which they thrill us when touched, presents a new phenomenon in our nature. The love of our youthful home may seem to us an universal sentiment, likely to appear in the poetry of all times; yet how little reference to it do we find in any poetry before our own age, and especially how little reference, like the following, to its moral power!

“It is under the continued influence of Christianity, however imperfect that influence may have been, that the human character, which had before manifested itself partially and irregularly in the rudeness and inconsistency of its elementary passions, has begun to struggle toward its full development. It has become alive to feelings, and is putting forth powers, which belong to its immortal nature. We may perceive this unfolding of man in the very structure of language, which, enlarged as it has been with new terms, yet presents so imperfect a means for expressing the different qualities and shades of character, and the modes and combinations of feeling. The study of human nature has thus become a science of far more interest and complexity. Many forms of character now appear, that belong to no period in the progress of the human race preceding that at which we have arrived. To the eye of the poet, man presents himself in new aspects of strength and weakness in multiform relations to the finite and the infinite, and with all the variety of sentiments resulting from the change in his prospects and hopes. He is now ‘a traveller between life and death;’ his highest interests connect him with the boundless, the unearthly, and the mysterious; with all that has most power to affect the imagination, and excite the strongest and deepest feelings. It is only through his relations to God and eternity that man becomes an exhaustless subject of high poetry. When thus viewed, his ruined home may be repeopled with thoughts and images such as these:—

“The recognition of the higher relations of man has given a characteristic to modern poetry, particularly English poetry, through which it has peculiar power over the heart. Expressions and descriptions of human suffering, instead of depressing us with melancholy, become sublime or touching, when that suffering is brought into direct or indirect contrast with man’s nature and hopes as an immortal being, or is represented as calling into exercise those virtues which can exist in such a being alone. There is no pathos in the mere lamentations of an individual over his own particular lot, or over the condition of a race to which he feels it an unhappiness to belong. There is nothing that excites any tender or elevating feeling in such verses as the following from an ancient poet:—

“The sufferings to which we are here exposed cease to be a subject that leads to any grateful or ennobling state of mind, when man regards the pleasures of this life as his only good. Among the ancient poets, the contemplation of its evils, when viewed at a distance, is associated with sentiments simply disheartening, or altogether superficial and trifling. Let us take for example a famous ode of Horace. It begins:—

“It ends:—

“No modern poet would, or rather could, construct verses after this fashion.

“It is in representations of the triumph of our immortal nature over the ills of mortality, of the patience with which they are borne, of the power by which they are overcome—in one word, of the moral qualities which suffering alone brings into action, and in those touches that awaken our best and tenderest affections for the sufferings of others, especially the innocent and helpless, that the sources of the highest pathos are to be found. All that is morally sublime springs upward from our severer trials; and then, only when man feels the nobleness of his nature. Present the calamity nakedly to our view, and its contemplation is merely distressing; picture it in connexion with some effort of virtue, and a glory is spread over the whole. In the Fall of D’Assas by Mrs Hemans, (not one of the most remarkable of her productions,) a young officer, full of the thoughts of his home and the scenes of his earlier years, is represented as surprised and massacred by his enemies. The simple narrative of such a death naturally excites painful emotion, but this emotion is so wholly overborne, as but to give additional strength to the exaltation of feeling produced by the concluding verses:—

“We may compare the poem just quoted with a passage from Virgil, which refers to circumstances somewhat similar, and has been praised as very pathetic, in the episode of Nisus and Euryalus, where Nisus perceives that Euryalus has fallen into the hands of his foes, and is just about to be slain.

“However conspicuous such a passage may be in an ancient poet, it would not, we believe, be regarded with great admiration in a modern.

“In one of Miss Edgeworth’s little stories for children, which are far better worth reading than most books for grown people, she says of the cottage of some poor woman that it was as clean as misery could make it. There is a pathos in these few words, not unusual in her writings, but such as we can find in but a scanty number of writers before our own age. It has not been well understood, that the indirect expressions of suffering are far more powerful than the direct, and that we are much more affected by suppressed, than by unrestrained emotion. In but little of the poetry of past times is there any trace of quickness or delicacy of perception in regard to the modes or expressions of human feeling and passion; for man himself had not become sufficiently refined for the exercise of such observation. Plato objects to Homer, and the tragic poets of Greece, that they degraded men’s minds by representing their heroes, when suffering, as pouring forth long lamentations, singing their sorrows, and beating their breasts. So far as they did so, there was nothing pathetic in their writings. Who, indeed, in modern times, was ever able to imagine himself affected by the sorrows of Achilles for the death of Patroclus, or those of his mother, Thetis, in consequence?

“From the want of sentiment and of moral associations, the descriptive language of the ancient poets is, in general, scanty and poor. It is for the most part drawn immediately from the perceptions of the senses, and has little to do with the invisible feelings and images, of which outward things become the symbols to a reflecting mind. It rarely gives them a moral being; its epithets are seldom imaginative; it paints to the eye; it calls up recollections of bodily rest and pleasure; but it does not often address the heart.

“Horace begins one of his odes thus:—

“The epithets white mountain, deep snow, sharp frost, are all taken without addition immediately from the perception of the senses; nor, considering the common prosaic use of laboro, in a similar sense, is the epithet labouring much more poetical; yet the passage is as striking of its kind as most that may be found in Latin poetry. The lines are thus rendered by Dryden,—

“Dryden was not eminent for his love of nature, or power of describing its beauties; and a poet of livelier perceptions would hardly have changed the name of Soracte for the faint generalisation, ‘yon mountain;’ yet something of the difference which we wish to point out between ancient and modern poetry is here perceptible. Let us take from Mrs Hemans an example of the richly imaginative character of that of later times. We will give the beginning of the verses in which she describes herself as reading, in an arbour, ‘The Talisman’ of Scott. A particular interest attaches to them from the circumstance that, in the best portrait of her, she is represented in this real or imaginary situation.

“Every subject becomes rich in proportion to the wealth of the mind by which it is contemplated. The intellectual light that shines upon it gives it its colours. Deficient as the ancient poets were in so many sources of thought and feeling that exist in modern times, they discover as imperfect a sensibility to most of the other pleasures of a refined taste, as to those derived from the objects of nature. There is to be found, for instance, in their works, scarcely a single passage, perhaps not one, in which the power of music, as blending in intimate union sensible and intellectual pleasures, is described with strong expression; yet what a treasury of glowing images and solemn thoughts this subject has opened to modern poets. We need not quote for illustration Mrs Hemans’s ‘Triumphant Music.’

“Through our strong sympathy with our fellow-men, we are deeply interested in the remains of antiquity, in the ruins that recall it to our thoughts, and in the histories which have come down to us—or rather in those histories as fashioned anew by our imagination, effacing and softening, filling up the rude outline, and colouring and embellishing at pleasure. In proportion as we have a more vivid conception of the virtues and excellences of which man is capable, so man, as such, becomes more an object of our regard. In looking back through the obscurity of time, the depravity that would have shocked us, if forced upon our observation, is partially lost in the darkness, and the bright traits of character shine out more distinctly. The dead of past ages are regarded with something of the same tenderness that we feel toward the dead whom we have known: at least we consent for a time to sacrifice our philosophy to an illusion, and, instead of the Richard Cœur-de-Lion of history, whose only marked characteristics were bodily strength and brutal hardihood, with those few gleams of goodness which nothing but the grossest sensuality can utterly extinguish, we consent for a time to take the Richard of Scott’s Ivanhoe; or, in fancying the Augustan age, are willing to forget that it took its name from

“Conformably to the laws of our better nature, our imagination is most readily attracted by what is most excellent in man. While viewing a beautiful tract of country with which we are not familiar, we can hardly refrain from idealising its supposed inhabitants, and giving them somewhat of a poetical character, or, in other words, a character agreeable to our best feelings. So it is in casting our view over past ages. Our sympathies are excited for the hopes, and fears, and the virtues, such as they were, of those who have lost all power to injure; and we may even fashion dim images of what they now are, as existing somewhere in the creation of God, divested, perhaps, of the evil that clung to them on earth. The idea of that moral purification and development, which, we believe, is continually going on in the universe, may thus mingle with the contemplation of the past. It is in transferring us into a world in which grateful imaginations are blended with truth, and the harshness of present reality is shut out, that the poetic interest of antiquity principally consists.

“Of this, modern poetry and fiction have abundantly availed themselves. But though a shadowy antiquity lay as a background to Greek and Roman civilisation, yet it was rarely resorted to by the ancient poets as a source of pleasing or solemn emotions. To them the remoter ages were little more than a desert abounding with monstrous fictions, with licentious and savage divinities, half-brutal demigods, and heroes, and chiefs hardly human, whose fabulous deeds and sufferings present nothing to recommend them to our sense of beauty. In the period following, history assumed at least an air of truth, and men appeared on the stage with human feelings, passions, and virtues. But, in looking back upon their earlier history, the ancients seem to have felt but slightly those peculiar sentiments and trains of feeling, which the contemplation of antiquity now awakens in our breasts. In no ancient poet is there a celebration of a hero of his country to be compared with Mrs Hemans’ lines on the Scottish patriot, Wallace, beginning

There is no appeal to the deeds of their fathers equal to her Spanish war-song—

No poetic conception of antiquity is to be found resembling the introduction of her ‘Cathedral Hymn’—

And above all, there is nothing so morally ennobling, so adapted to raise the character of a people, as the verses by which she has conferred a great obligation on our country—her ‘Pilgrim Fathers.’

“But, beside the advantages afforded to a modern poet by the religious and moral improvement of our race, which it has been principally our object to point out, there are others at which we may glance. He may look back over many ages, and around upon all countries, and acquaint himself with man, as he has existed and exists under circumstances the most dissimilar. He may possess himself of all that knowledge of human nature, which has been gathered from long experience, and wide observation, and multiplied opportunities of comparison. He may, like Southey, construct poems, as wild and wondrous, and as morally beautiful, as ‘Thalaba,’ or as rich with barbaric splendour as ‘The Curse of Kehama,’ from the rude materials of Arabian fiction or Hindoo mythology. The treasures of learning and science, so poor in ancient times, have, through succeeding ages, been accumulating to furnish him with thoughts, illustrations, and images. Our conceptions are enlarged, our views raised, the physical as well as the moral universe has been continually opening to the view of man, and knowledge unfolding her ever-lengthening scroll, of which the ancients had scarcely read the first lines. It was a dream, ridiculed by Plato,[456] of the extravagant admirers of Homer, that all human and divine learning was to be found in his writings.

“In the nature of things, art is progressive; its theory and practice are gradually better understood, errors are discovered and corrected, new objects of attainment proposed, and visions of higher excellence revealed to the mind; and thus we may believe, that the character, principles, purposes, and means of poetry are now comprehended more justly than they were in former times.

“But it may be said that, in perfection of language at least, the poets of Greece and Rome must remain unsurpassed. It may be doubted, however, whether we are qualified to pronounce this judgment in their favour. The harmonious flow of articulate sounds in the Greek and Latin languages, particularly in the Latin, is not to be readily attained in some of the principal languages of literary Europe. But if we speak of poetical beauty of expression and harmony of thought, we must recollect that it is necessary to be acquainted with the train of shadowy associations which follow the direct meaning of a poetical word, before we can determine that word to be well chosen. But such acquaintance implies an intimate knowledge of the use of language and of the state of mind in those addressed, which, as regards the poetry of the ancients, it is very difficult to acquire, and, in many particulars, impossible, yet without which we are liable to fall into great mistakes, and may often be left in much uncertainty. Take, for example, the line—

‘Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.’

It has been admired from the consonance of the sound with the sense. We understand the epithet putris to mean dusty, the dusty plain; but this epithet is elsewhere applied to a rich, mellow soil, easily broken up, or to a sandy plain. According to either of these uses, it is apparently an epithet unsuitable, from its associations, to be given to a field described as shaken and resounding with the trampling of a body of horse. As respects, likewise, the epithet quadrupedans, we may doubt whether any modern critic can explain why quadrupedante sonitu is more poetical in Virgil than its equivalent, ‘the sound of quadrupeds,’ would be in a modern poet, if used to express the sound of horses.

“Let us take another example:

Why is the word traheret used, which, as employed elsewhere, would imply the taking away of Helen against her will? Does it refer to one version of the story according to which Paris did bear her away by force? Were this the case, one would naturally expect, considering the reproachful and denunciatory character of the ode, to find that idea brought out more distinctly. Is it intended to express the reluctance with which, though yielding to her love for Paris, she left her husband and her home? This conception is too refined for an ancient poet to trust to its being made apparent by so light a touch, if indeed we may suppose it to have entered his mind. Was traheret then intended, by its associations with an act of violence, to denote the rapidity and fear of the flight of Paris? or was it merely employed abusively, to use a technical term—only with reference to a part of its signification, as words are not unfrequently used in poetry, though it is always an imperfection?

“Such cases are very numerous, in which no modern reader can pronounce with just confidence upon the character of the poetical language of the ancients. Instances are frequently occurring in which, if we admire at all, we must admire at second-hand, upon trust. The meaning and effect of words have undergone changes which it is often not easy, and often not possible, to ascertain with precision. Even in our own language this is the case. Shakspeare says—

“Here Johnson understands him as presenting the ludicrous conception of ‘the ministers of vengeance peeping through a blanket;’ and Coleridge, as we see by his Table-Talk, conjectured that instead of ‘blanket,’ ‘blank height’ was perhaps written by Shakspeare. But by ‘Heaven’ we conceive to be meant not the ministers of vengeance, but the lights of heaven; and it is not unpoetical to speak of the moon and stars as peeping through clouds. With the word ‘blanket,’ our associations are trivial and low; but understand it merely as denoting a thick covering of darkness which closely enwraps the lights of heaven, and it suits well to its place. But our associations with the word are accidental: there is nothing intrinsically more mean in a blanket than a sheet, yet none would object to the expression of ‘a sheet of light.’ The fortunes of the words only have been different, and that, in all probability, since the time of Shakspeare, considering his use of this word, and the corresponding use of the word rug by Drayton.[457]

“If such be the character of poetical language, it is clear that, to judge with critical accuracy of that of a distant age or even a foreign Land, requires uncommon knowledge and discrimination, as well as an accurate taste; while unfortunately, profound scholarship and cultivated and elegant habits of mind have very rarely been united in the study of the ancient poets. The supposition of a peculiar felicity of expression in their writings is to be judged of, in most cases, rather by extrinsic probabilities, which do not favour it, than by any direct and clear evidence of it that can be produced. We are very liable in this particular to be biassed by prepossession and authority; our imaginations often deceive us; we create the beauty which we fancy that we find.

“There is perhaps no poet, in whose productions the characteristics of which we have spoken as giving a superiority to the poetry of later times over that which has preceded, appear more strikingly than in those of Mrs Hemans. When, after reading such works as she has written, we turn over the volumes of a collection of English poetry, like that of Chalmers, we cannot but perceive that the greater part of it appears more worthless and distasteful than before. Much is evidently the work of barren and unformed, vulgar and vicious minds, of individuals without any conception of poetry as the glowing expression of what is most noble in our nature, and often with no title to the name of poet, but from having put into metre thoughts too mean for prose. Such writings as those of Mrs Hemans at once afford evidence of the advance of our race, and are among the most important means of its further purification and progress. The minds, which go forth from their privacy to act with strong moral power upon thousands and ten thousands of other minds, are the real agents in advancing the character of man, and improving his condition. They are instruments of the invisible operations of the Spirit of God.”—Christian Examiner, Jan. 1836.