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as a poet, however freely and fully I may dis- | sent from his critical estimate of the genius of Pope. Mr. Bowles, in forming this estimate, lays great stress upon the argument, that Pope's images are drawn from art more than from nature. That Pope was neither so insensible to the beauties of nature, nor so indistinct in describing them as to forfeit the character of a genuine poet, is what I mean to urge, without exaggerating his picturesqueness. But before speaking of that quality in his writings, I would beg leave to observe, in the first place, that the faculty by which a poet luminously describes objects of art is essentially the same faculty which enables him to be a faithful describer of simple nature; in the second place, that nature and art are to a greater degree relative terms in poetical description than is generally recollected; and, thirdly, that artificial objects and manners are of so much importance in fiction, as to make the exquisite description of them no less characteristic of genius than the description of simple physical appearances. The poet is "creation's heir." He deepens our social interest in existence. It is surely by the liveliness of the interest which he excites in existence, and not by the class of subjects which he chooses, that we most fairly appreciate the genius or the life of life which is in him. It is no irreverence to the external charms of nature to say, that they are not more important to a poet's study, than the manners and affections of his species. Nature is the poet's goddess; but by nature, no one rightly understands her mere inanimate face- however charming it may be or the simple landscape painting of trees, clouds, precipices, and flowers. Why then try Pope, or any other poet, exclusively by his powers of describing inanimate phenomena? Nature, in the wide and proper sense of the word, means life in all its circumstances-nature moral as well as external. As the subject of inspired fiction, nature includes artificial forms and manners. Richardson is no less a painter of nature than Homer. Homer himself is a minute describer of works of art*; and Milton is full of imagery derived from it. Satan's spear is compared to the pine that

[* But are his descriptions of works of art more poetical than his descriptions of the great feelings of nature?BowLES's Invariable Principles, p. 15.]

makes “the mast of some great ammiral,” and his shield is like the moon, but like the moon artificially seen through the glass of the Tuscan artist. The “spirit-stirring drum, the earpiercing fife, the royal banner, and all quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war‡," are all artificial images. When Shakspeare groups into one view the most sublime objects of the universe, he fixes first on "the cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples§." Those who have ever witHis ponderous shield, Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round, Behind him cast; the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders, like the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening, from the top of Fesolé, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers, or mountains, on her spotty globe. His spear, to equal which the tallest pines, Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast Of some great ammiral, were but a wand. Par. Lost, b. 1.

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It is evident that Satan's spear is not compared to the mast of some great ammiral, though his shield is to the moon as seen through the glass of Galileo. Milton's original (Cowley), whose images from art are of constant occurrence, draws his description of Goliah's spear from Norwegian hills:

His spear the trunk was of a lofty tree

Which Nature meant some tall ship's mast should be.

The poetry of the whole passage in Milton is in the images and names from nature, not from art-" It is Fesolé and Valdarno that are poetical," says Mr. Bowles, "not the telescope." There is a spell, let us add, in the very names of Fesolé and Valdarno.

Milton's object in likening the shield of Satan to the moon, as seen through the glass of the Tuscan artist, was to give the clearest possible impression of the thing alluded to. "It is by no means necessary," says Cowper, “ that a simile should be more magnificent than the subject; it is enough that it gives us a clearer and more distinct perception of it than we could have had without it. Were it the indispensable duty of a simile to elevate as well as to illustrate, what must be done with many of Homer's? When he compares the Grecian troops, pouring themselves forth from camp and fleet in the plain of Troy, to bees issuing from a hollow rock-or the body of Patroclus in dispute between the two armies to an ox-hide larded and stretched by the currier-we must condemn him utterly as guilty of degrading his subject when he should exalt it. But the exaltation of his subject was no part of Homer's concern on these occasions; he intended nothing more than the clearest possible impression of it on the minds of his hearers."— Works, by Southey, vol. xv. p. 321.

When Johnson, in his Life of Gray, laid it down as a rule that an epithet or metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art, an epithet or metaphor drawn from Art degrades Nature, he had forgotten Homer, and the custom of all our poets.]

[ Othello, Act iii. Scene 3.]

[§ The Tempest, Act. iv. Scene 1. One of the finest passages in Shakspeare is where he describes Fortune as a wheelwright would:

Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you gods,

nessed the spectacle of the launching of a ship of the line, will perhaps forgive me for adding this to the examples of the sublime objects of artificial life. Of that spectacle I can never forget the impression, and of having witnessed it reflected from the faces of ten thousand spectators. They seem yet before me--I sympathise with their deep and silent expectation, and with their final burst of enthusiasm. It was not a vulgar joy, but an affecting national solemnity. When the vast bulwark sprang from her cradle, the calm water on which she swung majestically round gave the imagination a contrast of the stormy element on which she was soon to ride. All the days of battle and the nights of danger which she had to encounter, all the ends of the earth which she had to visit, and all that she had to do and to suffer for her country, rose in awful presentiment before the mind; and when the heart gave her a benediction, it was like one pronounced on a living being*.

In general synod, take away her power;
Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven,
As low as to the fiends.—Hamlet, Act ii. Scene 2.]

[* In the controversy which these Specimens gave rise to, Mr. Bowles contended for this-" Whether poetry be more immediately indebted to what is sublime or beautiful in the works of Nature or the works of Art?" and taking Nature to himself, he argued that Mr. Campbell's ship had greater obligations to nature than to art for its poetic excellencies. "It was indebted to Nature," he writes, "for the winds that filled the sails; for the sunshine that touched them with light; for the waves on which it so triumphantly rode; for the associated ideas of the distant regions of the earth it was to visit; the tempests it was to encounter; and for being, as it were, endued with existence-a thing of life."

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"Mr. Bowles asserts," says Lord Byron, "that Campbell's Ship of the Line' derives all its poetry not from art but from nature. Take away the waves, the winds, the sun, &c. &c., one will become a stripe of blue bunting, and the other a piece of coarse canvas on three tall poles.' Very true; take away the waves, the winds, and there will be no ship at all, not only for poetical, but for any other purpose; and take away the sun, and we must read Mr. Fowles' pamphlet by candle-light. But the poetry of the Ship does not depend on the waves, &c.; on the contrary, the Ship of the Line confers its own poetry upon the waters, and heightens theirs. What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the poetical calm water at Wapping, or in the London Dock, or in the Paddington Canal, or in a horse-pond, or in a slop-basin, or in any other vase! Mr. Bowles eontends," Lord Byron goes on to say, "that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical because of the 'association with boundless deserts,' and that a pyramid of the same dimensions' would not be sublime in Lincoln's Inn Fields: not so poetical certainly; but take away the pyramids,' and what is the desert? Take away Stone-henge from Salis

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Pope, while he is a great moral writer, though not elaborately picturesque, is by no means deficient as a painter of interesting external objects. No one will say that he peruses Eloisa's Epistle without a solemn impression of the pomp of catholic superstition. In familiar description, nothing can be more distinct and agreeable than his lines on the Man of Ross, when he asks,

Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows?
Whose seats the weary traveller repose?
Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise?
The Man of Ross, each lisping babe replies.
Behold the market-place with poor o'erspread-
The Man of Ross divides the weekly bread:
He feeds yon almshouse, neat, but void of state,
Where Age and Want sit smiling at the gate:
Him portion'd maids, apprenticed orphans blest,
The young who labour, and the old who rest.
Nor is he without observations of animal
nature, in which every epithet is a decisive
touch, as,

From the green myriads in the peopled grass,
What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme,
The mole's dim curtain, and the lynx's beam;
Of smell, the headlong lioness between,
And hound sagacious, on the tainted green;
Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood,
To that which warbles through the vernal wood;
The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine,
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.

His picture of the dying pheasant is in every one's memory+, and possibly the lines of his bury Plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath, or any other uninclosed down.

"There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect," he continues, "than the city of Venice. Does this depend upon the sea or the canal?

The dirt and sea-weed whence proud Venice rose. Is it the canal which runs between the palace and the prison, or the Bridge of Sighs, which connects them, that render it poetical? There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington, were it not for its artificial adjuncts."

But why should Nature and Art be made divisible by these controversialists? in poetry they are not so:Οὔτε φύσις ἱκανὴ γίνεται τέχνης ἄτερ, οὔτε πᾶν τέχνη un púow kekтnuévŋ. Without Art Nature can never be perfect, and without Nature Art can claim no being. In a poet no kind of knowledge is to be overlooked-to a poet nothing can be useless.]

[t Ah! what avail his glossy varying dyes,
His purple crest, and scarlet-circled eyes
The vivid green his shining plumes unfold,
His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold?
Windsor Forest.

This is like Whitbread's Phonix, which Sheridan averred that he had described "like a poulterer; it was green and yellow, and red and blue: he did not let us off for a single feather."-Byron's Works, vol. vi. p. 372.

When Pope epithelises the Kennet, the Loddon, the Mole, and the Wey, he is very happy; and he is equally so when he poetizes the fish.]

winter piece may by this time [1819] have crossed the recollection of some of our brave adventurers in the polar enterprise.

So Zembla's rocks, the beatueous work of frost,
Rise white in air, and glitter o'er the coast;
Pale suns, unfelt at distance, roll away,
And on the impassive ice the lightnings play;
Eternal snows the growing mass supply,

Till the bright mountains prop th' incumbent sky;
As Atlas fix'd, each hoary pile appears,
The gather'd winter of a thousand years.

I am well aware that neither these nor similar instances will come up to Mr. Bowles's idea of that talent for the picturesque which he deems essential to poetry*. “The true

[* It is remarkable that, excepting the Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of the period between the publication of Paradise Lost and The Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature; and scarcely presents a familiar one, from which it can be inferred that

poet," says that writer, "should have an eye attentive to and familiar with every change of season, every variation of light and shade of nature, every rock, every tree, and every leaf in her secret places. He who has not an eye to observe these, and who cannot with a glance distinguish every hue in her variety, must be so far deficient in one of the essential qualities of a poet." Every rock, every leaf, every diversity of hue in nature's variety! Assuredly this botanising perspicacity might be essential to a Dutch flower-painter; but Sophocles displays no such skill, and yet he is a genuine, a great, and affecting poet. Even in describing the desert island of Philoctetes, there is no minute observation of nature's hues in secret places. Throughout the Greek tragedians there is nothing to show them more attentive observers of inanimate objects than other ment.

the eye of the poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, Pope's discrimination lay in the lights and

much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination. To what a low state knowledge of the most obvious and important phenomena had sunk, is evident from the style in which Dryden has executed a description of night in one of his tragedies, and Pope his translation of the celebrated moonlight scene in the Iliad. A blind man, in the habit of attending accurately to descriptions casually dropped from the lips of those around him, might easily depict these appearances with more truth. Dryden's lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless; those of Pope, though he had

Homer to guide him, are throughout false and contradictory. The verses of Dryden, once highly celebrated, are forgotten; those of Pope still retain "their hold upon public estimation,"-nay, there is not a passage of descriptive poetry, which at this day finds so many and such ardent admirers-WORDSWORTH, Supp. to the Pref.

Here is the passage in Dryden Mr. Wordsworth alludes to:

All things are hush'd as Nature's self lay dead;
The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head;
The little birds in dreams their songs repeat,
And sleeping flowers beneath the night-dew sweat :
Even lust and envy sleep'; yet love denies
Rest to my soul, and slumber to my eyes.

The Indian Emperor.

And here the moonlight scene in Homer as rendered by Pope and by Cowper :

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night!
O'er heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light,
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,
And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene;
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole,
O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed
And tip with silver every mountain's head;
Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise,
A flood of glory bursts from all the skies:
The conscious swains rejoicing in the sight,
Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light.-Pope.
As when around the clear bright moon, the stars
Shine in full splendour, and the winds are hush'd,

shades of human manners, which are at least as interesting as those of rocks and leaves. In moral eloquence he is for ever densus et instans sibi. The mind of a poet employed in concentrating such lines as these descriptive of creative power, which

"Builds life on death, on change duration founds,

And bids th' eternal wheels to know their rounds,"

might well be excused for not descending to the minutely picturesque. The vindictive personality of his satire is a fault of the man, and

The groves, the mountain-tops, the headland heights
Stand all apparent, not a vapour streaks
The boundless blue, but ether opened wide
All glitters, and the shepherd's heart is cheer'd.

COWPER.

The scraps of external nature in Lee, Otway, and Garth are no whit better than Dryden's. Swift gave some true touches of artificial nature in his City Shower, and Morning in Town, but it was left to Thomson and Dyer to recal us to country life.

Mr. Southey has given no bad comment on the passage from Pope we have quoted above:-"Here," says Southey, "are the planets rolling round the moon; here is the pole gilt and glowing with stars; here are trees made yellow, and mountains tipt with silver by the moonlight; and here is the whole sky in a flood of glory; appearances not to be found either in Homer or in nature; finally, these gilt and glowing skies, at the very time when they are thus pouring forth a flood of glory, are represented as a blue vault! The astronomy in these lines would not appear more extraordinary to Dr. Herschell than the imagery to every person who has observed a moonlight scene."-Quar. Rev. vol. xii. p. 87.]

[ With Shakspeare it is otherwise: his inanimate nature is unsurpassed for truthfulness and distinct poetical personation. Description in Shakspeare is a shadow received by the ear, and perceived by the eye.]

not of the poet. But his wit his not all his charm. He glows with passion in the Epistle of Eloisa, and displays a lofty feeling, much above that of the satirist and the man of the world, in his Prologue to Cato, and his Epistle to Lord Oxford *. I know not how to designate the possessor of such gifts but by the name of a genuine poet †—

qualem vix repperit unum Millibus in multis hominum consultus Apollo.

AUSONIUS.

[* Mr. Campbell might have added his noble conclusion to The Dunciad, which is written in the highest vein of poetry, and exhibits a genius that wanted direction, opportunity, or inclination, rather than cultivation or increase of strength.]

[t Mr. Bowles' position is this, that Pope saw rural or field nature through what Dryden expressively calls the spectacles of books: that he did not see it for himself, as Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Milton saw it, as it was seen by Thomson and Cowper-that his country nature is by reflection, cold, unwarming, and dead-coloured-that he did not make what Addison calls additions to nature, as every great poet has donethat Dr. Blacklock's descriptive nature is as good, who was blind from his birth-that flocks that graze the tender green in Pope graze audibly in true descriptive writersand that his Paradise had been a succession of alleys, platforms and quincunxes-a Hagley or a Stowe, not an Eden, as Milton has made it. All this is true enough, but its importance has been over-rated. Pope is still a great poet, though he did not dwell long in the mazes of fancy, but stooped, as he expresses it, to truth, and moralised his song-that he made sense, or wit, or intellectuality hold the place of mere description, and gave us peopled pictures rather than landscapes with people. True it is too that imagination (a nobler kind of fancy) is the first great quality of a poet-that when it is found united to all the lesser qualities required, it forms what Cowley calls poetry and sanctity. Mr. Campbell has properly extended the offices of poetry, and written a defence of Pope, which will exist as long as Eloisa's Letter, or any poem of its great writer,

Gray, whose scattered touches of external nature are exquisitely true, has laid it down as a rule that description, the most graceful ornament of poetry as he calls it, should never form the bulk or subject of a poem : Pope, who was not very happy in his strokes from landscape nature that where it forms the body of a poem, it is as absurd as a feast made up of sauces; while Swift, who

Of the poets in succession to Pope I have spoken in their respective biographies.

knew nothing of trees and streams, and lawns and meads, objected to Thomson's philosophical poem that it was all description and nothing was doing, whereas Milton engaged men in actions of the highest importance.

To try poetry by the sister art,-in painting we see that a mere landscape, is of less value than a landscape with figures and a story, that is, where the art of both, in representing nature, is the same. An historical landscape, like the subject of Joshua commanding the sun to stand still, where high acts are performed in alliance with inanimate nature, seems to meet the ideas of Pope, of Swift, and of Gray. "Selection," says Fuseli, falsely," is the invention of a landscape painter."

To diversify and animate his poems, Thomson had recourse to episodes of human interest. The first Shipwreck was devoid of story, it was all description; as Falconer left it, there was an action to heighten and relieve the nature, that made description the secondary object of the

poem.

Had not the notes to this Essay already run to a disproportionate length, we had been tempted to extract what Crabbe says in defence of Pope, and that portion of poetry he himself excelled in; to have quoted Lord Byron's exaggerated praises, and Mr. Southey's depreciatory notice of the same writer. We must find room, however, for Mr. Bowles's short character from his Final Appeal, observing generally on this subject, that in lowering the rank of the poetry that Pope sustains, too much stress has been laid upon Horace's exclusion of himself from the name of a poet on the score of his Epistles and Satires, which was a becoming modesty too literally understood. When a man lowers himself, there are always some ready to take him at his own valuation.

"As a poet," says Mr. Bowles, "I sought not to depreciate, but discriminate, and assign to him his proper rank and station in his art among English poets; below Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, in the highest order of imagination or impassioned poetry; but above Dryden, Lucretius, and Horace, in moral and satirical. Inferior to Dryden in lyric sublimity; equal to him in painting characters from real life (such as are so powerfully delineated in Absalom and Achitophel); but superior to him in passion-for what ever equalled, or ever will approach, in its kind, the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard? In consequence of the exquisite pathos of this epistle, I have assigned Pope a poetical rank far above Ovid. I have placed him above Horace, in consequence of the perfect finish of his satires and moral poems; but in descriptive poetry, such as Windsor Forest, beneath Cowper or Thomson."Final Appeal, 1825, p. 55.]

SPECIMENS

OF

THE BRITISH POETS.

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