ocean seemed to roll before his eyes, as the Iliad, a new planet, swam into the ken of John Keats! The Poetical Works of John Keats: with a Memoir by Richard Monckton Milnes. New Edition. E. Moxon, 1854. CHARLES WOLFE 1791-1823. I HAD doubted whether to assign a place to Wolfe's poems rather than to him. Finally, I decided that his nature was too much of a poem for his work not to be classed by his personality. In his schoolboy days at Winchester he was a poet. His lines on the raising of Lazarus show distinct poetic insight. Their note is the feeling of Jesus 'for others' grief': He knew what pains must pierce a sister's heart.1 It is the same with his prize poem on the Death of Abel : Nor could his lips a deep-drawn sigh restrain, Not for himself he sigh'd-he sigh'd for Cain.2 Throughout a brilliant career at Trinity, Dublin, it was as a poet that he was particularly recognized. An old air could not sound in his ears without hastening to embody itself in melodious verse. His few songs, the poem itself by which he is immortalized, were emotions translated instantly into language. His biographer, who cannot be accused of poetical enthusiasm, describes the effect of music upon his imagination: he felt all its poetry; it transported him.' The same friend recollects how, captivated by a national Spanish air, Viva el Rey Fernando, he 'commenced singing it over and over again, until he produced an English song admirably suited to the tune'. He had music in his heart. There, after the close of his College career, it stayed, mute, but a sweetening influence. It would be romantic to lay down purity in act as a necessary condition of poetic power. Unfortunately a high sensibility constantly tends to lead astray. Not the less true is it that delicacy of feeling, shrinking from grossness of every sort, generosity, and an ideal capacity for friendship, make the poetry of life. They had always been the essence of Wolfe's, while he still sang. Self-sacrifice caused him to abandon, from fear of paining his mother, early thoughts of the Army. Later, religious devotion led him to abjure versifying. When he cast himself outside his academic circle of worshippers, his passion of charity sustained him in the squalid solitude of a curacy in Tyrone. There it won him the equal adoration of three mutually hostile types of so-called Christianity, agreeing only in common hatred of a fourth, the one he was bound to represent. The good Archdeacon, to whom we owe the sketch of his career, portrays the beautiful modesty, simplicity, piety, sympathy, courage, of the youth with all gentle, well-bred tastes and habits, in his new home, a peasant's cabin. Poetizing, the mere inspiration of the Muse', the Archdeacon treats as the less important, the less serious' phase of his character. In truth Wolfe was doubtless as essentially a poet in the wilds of Tyrone and Donoughmore as in his Scholar's rooms in Trinity. The splendour of fancy glorified his ruinous, mouldy cottage, and inspired the consolation he carried to many a typhus-stricken hut. His was a noble spirit, entirely consistent with a poet's, yet not in itself necessarily implying it. When, therefore, I number him with poets by profession, I cannot justify it on the ground of virtues happily not a monopoly of any special vocation. I have to rely on his poetical inspiration; and his fits of that, I am aware, are, as evidenced in print, to be measured less by years, than by months or weeks, perhaps by days and hours. The actual bulk of his entire poetical production is scanty indeed. Apart from school and college exercises, it consists of half a dozen songs. Several are pretty and graceful. Yet, on their own merits, I could not claim that they would have survived even their author's brief existence. What then remains? Why, beside, rather than among, the meagre rest, just two of the loveliest flowers in the garden of English verse! The entire Anglo-Saxon world is familiar with the poem on the Burial of Sir John Moore. If I give it here in full, it chiefly is for convenience of comparison with another piece by Wolfe as admirable in a different way: Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note As his corse to the rampart we hurried ; We buried him darkly at dead of night, No useless coffin enclosed his breast, Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him; Few and short were the prayers we said, And we spoke not a word of sorrow; But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead, We thought as we hollow'd his narrow bed And smoothed down his lonely pillow, That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head, Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that 's gone, But half of our heavy task was done When the clock struck the hour for retiring Slowly and sadly we laid him down, From the field of his fame fresh and gory; We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone But we left him alone with his glory! 4 The whole had flashed out of a casual glance at a flinty paragraph in a superannuated number of the Edinburgh Annual Register. Byron, whose sympathetic eyes it first caught, through no self-advertising by the author, accounted it little inferior to the best which the present prolific age had brought forth 2.5 The third stanza-in particular, the second couplet-drew from him the exclamation, 'Perfect!' The unpremeditated art itself is excellent. Observe, for example, how the seventh stanza labours in instinctive sympathy with the burden. In absoluteness of pictorial effect the poem has few equals in its kind, no superior. The precise correspondence of the details with the prose narrative, which has been urged in depreciation, in fact greatly enhances the merit. Wolfe's version is identical with its source, except that a soul has been added. In the lines To Mary the process is, after a manner, reversed. Wolfe found an air of melancholy beauty, Gramachree, deformed by alien, commonplace words. He gave it back its proper significance. In tone and character the song, while matching the Burial of Sir John Moore in loveliness, is, it will, I think, be recognized, so generally |