COLLOQUIES, DESULTORY AND DIVERSE, BUT CHIEFLY UPON POETRY AND POETS. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. "There is Poetry that is not written. As I here use it, it is delicate perception; something which is in the nature, enabling one man to detect harmony, and know forms of beauty better than another. It is like a peculiar gift of vision, making the world we live in more visible. The poet hears music in common sounds, and sees loveliness by the wayside. sky, nor a sweet human voice, which does not bring him pleasure. He sees all the light and hears all the music about him—and this is POETRY." There is not a change in the MANY thanks, O charming MARY RUSSELL MITFORD! for a short and satisfactory definition of a theme, which, when certain of our Poets essay to elucidate, dilates delectably for perusal, but fills with despair the seeker after a summary signification. Look, for instance, at that masterly and stirring reply to What is Poetry? in an Appeal for Poets from the pen of Barton; a glorious whole, which it were gothic to garble by quotation. A marvellous creature, by the way, that Bernard Barton-worthy of love and honor! Hath Quakerism foregone its frigidness, or how came he in the cold cradle of his caste? and not he alone, but others, whom that same "frozen bosom" hath strangely quickened with poetic breath, and sent forth in poetic guise, lovely as " yellow cowslip and pale primrose from flowery lap of May." The Howitts among these, and especially Saint MARY!-where is verse more suffused by Innocency than hers,-more guileless and gladsome,―more redolent with the air of the Garden anterior to the great Mother's misdeed? How easy-were the Law one whit less inexorable— how easy to conceive a mental reservation, made in Mary's favor, by Eve, before the Fall! Among the multifarious subjects which, in our days, our fathers', and, perhaps, in annals yet more remote, have attracted, instructed, or diverted the public mind, what singular or individual subject has retained a potency so perennial as that of POETRY? Chronologers who descend to the minutiae of modern times, will, in all conscience, have need of flexible pens to pourtray faithfully the fluctuations of feeling and of general opinion which have characterised the age; -its web has indeed been of "a mingled yarn, good and ill together;"—and whether, in the judgment of posterity, glory or shame shall be deemed to predominate in their review of the past proximate, the historian, if metrically inclined, may thus impartially usher in his lucubrations: "Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep, and mourn,— But, (let us hope that the symptom be not necessarily vicious!) the mind created "upright," has of late approved itself so fecund with "inventions,"*-has so diversely disported with fantasy, fanaticism, and folly, -that few of the swarming " topics of the day” can be dignified by the record or expected at the hands of the chronologer. The age has developed lineaments which, however, are British, or, in other words, are bold, vigorous, and philanthropic, and these will find an "habitation and a name" in the imperishable page; -as to the host of bubbles, over whose birth trumpets were blown, sometimes by fools, at others, by knaves-they have evaporated, as was inevitable, before the breath of "Time's old daughter, Truth." These, if they deserve the mention of their paternity, * "God made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions."-Ecclesiastes. 4 were chiefly the offspring of Politics in a phrenzy ; but the "fitful fever" of the parent has subsided, and its morbid progeny sleep well. The mild genius of Poetry will probably experience in times future, as it has experienced recently, the strongest check to its diffusiveness and, consequently, to its dominion, in the jealousy and turbulence of that spirit,-just now subdued, but "scotched, not killed," which smoulders in the body politic:-a restless spirit whose element is contention, troubled in its very repose, and swiftly, with a fancied right or fancied wrong, making "all Europe ring, from side to side." Freest of all lands from monster-violences of Faction, yet not without her peccadillos is this saucy, sea-girt Albion-and could her white cliffs blush, as deep a pink as dyes the brier-rose might tinge her oceanaspect in contrition for occasional foibles. But Britain now is growing less Babel-like, and, politically speaking, we English people are becoming more" of one language and of one speech:" for notwithstanding that (in perilous identification of the vox populi with The vox Dei,) the old and solid carved-work of our good ship, "The State," has been threatened by utilitarian axe and hammer, the proud bark rears her head again flauntingly, as conscious of invulnerable bulwarks and of skilful pilotage. Be it as 't may, the manly* Mariner at the helm-who believes her buoyancy to be a property infinite-will by no means risk her stranding; though the ship's superseded company predict foul weather, and say the subsidized sea will be found surgy in many places and tempestuous. "In your modern books for the most part," said Coleridge," the sentences in a page have much the same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag—they touch without adhering:" in the actual perpetration of irrelevancy how just appears the observation! yet art thou, gentle Reader, forewarned, that in these pages many a swerving from strict connectedness may be expected; and therefore pray we that Nature, in thy apportionment of attributes, may have endowed thee with a less austere regard for "unities" and "oneness" than that developed by Mr. Curdle, in his profound disquisitions upon the essentialities of the legitimate Drama. But on a scribe who cannot "wander at his own sweet will" without having to travel back again, his * For the propriety of this appellative vide the Premier's speeches in propounding and defending the Income-Tax Act. |