generally in which thought is presented. Where shall we find more magnificent passages than these? I First queenly Asia, from the fallen thrones Of twice three thousand years, Came with the woe a grieving Goddess owns The dust of ruin to her mantle clung And dimmed her crown of gold, From Tyre to Indus rolled. Mourn with me, sisters, in my realm of woc From its lost childhood like the Arctic glow In the red desert moulders Babylon Then from her seat, amid the palms embowered That shade the Lion-land, Swart Africa in dusky aspect towered, The fetters on her hand. Backward she saw, from out the drear eclipse, The mighty Theban years, And the deep anguish of her mournful lips ques copy these passages first, because the critic in tion has copied them, without the slightest appreciation of their grandeur-for they are grand; and secondly, to put the question of "rhetoric at rest. No artist who reads them will deny that they are the perfection ' of skill in their way. But thirdly, I wish to call attention to the glowing imagination evinced in the lines italicized. My very soul revolts at such efforts, (as the one I refer to,) to depreciate such poems as Mr. Taylor's. Is there no honor - no chivalry left in the land? Are our most deserving writers to be forever 66 sneered down, or hooted down, or damned down with faint praise, by a set of men who possess little other ability than that which assures temporary success to them, in common with Swaim's Panacea or Morrison's Pills? The fact is, some person should write, at once, a Magazine paper exposing- ruthlessly exposing, the dessous de cartes of our literary affairs. He should show how and why it is that the ubiquitous quack in letters can always succeed," while genius, (which implies self-respect, with a scorn of creeping and crawling,) must inevitably succumb. He should point out the easy arts" by which any one, base enough to do it, can get himself placed at the very head of American Letters by an article in that magnanimous journal, "The Review." He should explain, too, how readily the same work can be induced (in the case of Simms,) to vilify, and vilify personally, any one not a Northerner, for a trifling" consideration." In fact, our criticism needs a thorough regeneration, and must have it. 1 66 XII. [Text: Southern Literary Messenger, May, 1849.] If ever mortal "wreaked his thoughts upon expression," it was Shelley. If ever poet sang sings - earnestly earnestly impulsively as a bird impulsively — with utter abandonment to himselt solely and for the mere joy of his own song that poet was the author of "The Sensitive Plant.' Of Art - beyond that which is instinctive with Genius - he either had little or disdained all. He really disdained that Rule which is an emanation from Law, because his own soul was Law in itself. His rhapsodies are but the rough notes the stenographic memoranda of poems — memoranda 1 Printed by Griswold as a separate paper. — ED. which, because they were all-sufficient for his own intelligence, he cared not to be at the trouble of writing out in full for mankind. In all his works we find no conception thoroughly wrought. For this reason he is the most fatiguing of poets. Yet he wearies in saying too little rather than too much. What, in him, seems the diffuseness of one idea, is the conglomerate concision of many and this species of concision it is, which renders him obscure. With such a man, to imitate was out of the question. It would have served no purpose; for he spoke to his own spirit alone, which would have comprehended no alien tongue. Thus he was profoundly original. His quaintness arose from intuitive perception of that truth to which Bacon alone has given distinct utterance: There is no ex quisite Beauty which has not some strangeness in its proportions. But whether obscure, original, or quaint, Shelley had no affectations. He was at all times sincere. a From his ruins, there sprang into existence, affronting the Heavens, a tottering and fantastic pagoda, in which the salient angles, tipped with mad jangling bells, were the idiosyncratic faults of the original faults which cannot be considered such in view of his purposes, but which are monstrous when we regard his works as addressed to mankind. A "school" arose if that absurd term must still be employed school a system of rules - upon the basis of the Shelley who had none. Young men innumerable, dazzled with the glare and bewildered by the bizarrerie of the lightning that flickered through the clouds of "Alastor," had no trouble whatever in heaping up imitative vapors, but, for the lightning, were forced to be content with its spectrum, in which the bizarrerie appeared without the fire. Nor were mature minds unimpressed by the contemplation of a greater and more mature; and thus, gradually, into this school of all Lawlessness, or obscurity, quaintness and exaggeration were interwoven the out-of-place didacticism of Wordsworth, and the more anomalous metaphysicianism of Coleridge. Matters were now fast verging to their worst; and at length, in Tennyson poetic inconsistency attained its extreme. But it was precisely this extreme (for the greatest truth and the greatest error are scarcely two points in a circle) which, following the law of all extremes, wrought in him (Tennyson) a natural and inevitable revulsion; leading him first to contemn, and secondly to investigate, his early manner, and finally to winnow, from its magnificent elements, the truest and purest of all poetical styles. But not even yet is the process complete; and for this reason in part, but chiefly on account of the mere fortuitousness of that mental and moral combination which shall unite in one person (if ever it shall) the Shelleyan abandon and the Tennysonian poetic sense, with the most profound Art (based both in Instinct and Analysis) and the sternest Will properly to blend and rigorously to control all chiefly, I say, because such combination of seeming antagonisms will be only a "happy chance" the world has never yet seen the noblest poem which, possibly, can be composed. In my ballad called "Lenore" I have these lines : Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days. Mr. William W. Lord, author of "Niagara," &c., has it thus: — They, albeit with inward pain, Who thought to sing thy dirge, must sing thy Paean. The commencement of my "Haunted Palace" is as This is a thin pamphlet of thirty-two pages; each containing about a hundred and forty words. The hero, Alla-Ad-Deen, is the son of Alladdin of wonderful lamp memory; and the story is in the Vision of Mirza" or "Rasselas" way. The design is to reconcile us with evil on the ground that, compara 1 The Dream of Alla-Ad-Deen, from the Romance of "Anastasia by Charles Erskine White, D.D. "Charles Erskine White" is Laughton Osborn, author of "The Vision of Rubeta, "Confessions of a Poet, "Adventures of Jeremy among which I must not Levis, and several other works forget "Arthur Carryl.” |