Now, in the Task, the Hearth is the heart of the poem, just as it is of a happy house. No other poem is so full of domestic happinesshumble and high; none is so breathed over by the spirit of the Christian religion. only respectable, but sacred. "There lived in Gothic days, as legends tel!, in a rude age, from the first dawning of reason and fancy, till that period at which he may be supposed capable of appearing in the world as a Scottish Minstrel; that is, as an itinerant poet and musician-a character which, accordPoetry, which, though not dead, had longing to the notions of our forefathers, was noʻ been sleeping in Scotland, was restored to waking life by THOMSON. His genius was national; and so, too, was the subject of his first and greatest song. By saying that his genius was national, we mean that its temperament was enthusiastic and passionate, and that, though highly imaginative, the sources of its power lay in the heart. The Castle of Indolence is distinguished by purer taste and finer fancy; but with all its exquisite beauties, that poem is but the vision of a dream. The Seasons are glorious realities; and the charm of the strain that sings the "rolling year" is its truth. But what mean we by saying that the Seasons are a national subject ?-do we assert that they are solely Scottish? That would be too bold, even for us; but we scruple not to assert, that Thomson has made them so, as far as might be without insult, injury, or injustice, to the rest of the globe. His suns rise and set in Scottish heavens; his "deep-fermenting tempests are brewed in grim evening" Scottish skies; Scottish is his thunder of cloud and cataract; his "vapours, and snows, and storms" are Scottish; and, strange as the assertion would have sounded in the ears of Samuel Johnson, Scottish are his woods, their sugh, and their roar; nor less their stillness, more awful amidst the vast multitude of steady stems, than when all the sullen pine-tops are swinging to the hurricane. A dread love of his native land was in his heart when he cried in the solitude "Hail, kindred glooms! congenial horrors hail!" The genius of HOME was national-and so, too, was the subject of his justly famous Tragedy of Douglas. He had studied the old Ballads; their simplicities were sweet to him as wall-flowers on ruins. On the story of Gill Morice, who was an Earl's son, he founded the Tragedy, which surely no Scottish eyes ever witnessed without tears. Are not these most Scottish lines? "Ye woods and wilds, whose melancholy gloom Accords with my soul's sadness!" And these even more so "Red came the river down, and loud and oft The angry Spirit of the water shriek'd!" The Scottish Tragedian in an evil hour crossed the Tweed, riding on horseback all the way to London. His genius got Anglified, took a consumption, and perished in the prime of life. But nearly half a century afterwards, on seeing the Siddons in Lady Randolph, and hearing her low, deep, wild, wo-begone voice exclaim, "My beautiful! my brave" "the aged harper's soul awoke," and his dim eyes were again lighted up for a moment with the fires of genius say rather for a moment bedewed with the tears of sensibility re-awakened from decay and dotage. The genius of Beattie was national, and so was the subject of his charming song-The Minstrel. For what is its design? He tells us, o trace the progress of a poetical genius, horn "The shepherd swain, of whom I mention made, The milky dams supplied his board, and lent Did patriotism ever inspire genius with senti- "Lo! where the stripling wrapt in wonder roves Beattie chants there like a man who had been The genius of Grahame was national, and So too was the subject of his first and best poem -The Sabbath. "How still the morning of the hallow'd day!" "Oh, the great goodness of the Saints of Old !" Caught doubtfully at times the breeze-borne note. Of night, save when the wintry storm raved fierce, of Time," for so young a man, was a vast achievement. The book he loved best was the Bible, and his style is often scriptural. Of our poets, he had studied, we believe, but Milton, Young, and Byron. He had much learn in composition; and, had he lived, he would have looked almost with humiliation on much that is at present eulogized by his devoted admirers. But the soul of poetry is there, though often dimly developed, and many passages there are, and long ones too, that heave, and hurry, and glow along in a divine enthusiasm. "His ears he closed, to listen to the strains Not a few other sweet singers or strong, naThat Sion's bards did consecrate of old, tive to this nook of our isle, might we now in And fix'd his Pindus upon Lebanon." these humble pages lovingly commemorate; and Let us fly again to England, and leaving for "four shall we mention, dearer than the rest," another hour Shelley and Hunt and Keates, for sake of that virtue, among many virtues, and Croly and Milman and Heber, and Sterwhich we have been lauding all along, their na-ling and Milnes and Tennyson, with some tionality;-These are AIRD and MOTHERWELL, (of whom another hour,) Moin and POLLOK. Of Moir, our own "delightful Delta," as we love to call him-and the epithet now by right appertains to his name-we shall now say simply this, that he has produced many original pieces which will possess a permanent place in the poetry of Scotland. Delicacy and grace characterize his happiest compositions; some of them are beautiful in a cheerful spirit that has only to look on nature to be happy; and others breathe the simplest and purest pathos. His scenery, whether sea-coast or inland, is always truly Scottish; and at times his pen drops touches of light on minute objects, that till then had slumbered in the shade, but now "shine well where they stand" or lie, as component and characteristic parts of our lowland landscapes. Let others labour away at long poems, and for their pains get neglect or oblivion; Moir is seen as he is in many short ones, which the Scottish Muses may "not willingly let die." And that must be a pleasant thought when it touches the heart of the mildest and most modest of men, as he sits by his family-fire, beside those most dear to him, after a day past in smoothing, by his skill, the bed and the brow of pain, in restoring sickness to health, in alleviating sufferings that cannot be cured, or in mitigating the pangs of death. Pollok had great original genius, strong in a sacred sense of religion. Such of his short compositions as we have seen, written in early youth, were but mere copies of verses, and gave little or no promise of power. But his soul was working in the green moorland solitudes round about his father's house, in the wild and beautiful parishes of Eaglesham and Mearns, separated by thee, O Yearn! sweetest of pastoral streams, that murmur through the west, as under those broomy and birken banks and trees, where the gray-linties sing, is formed the clear junction of the rills, issuing, the one from the hill-spring above the Black-waterfall, and the other from the Brother-loch. The poet in prime of youth (he died in his twentyseventh year) embarked on a high and adventurous emprise, and voyaged the illimitable Deep. His spirit expanded its wings, and in a holy pride felt them to be broad, as they hovered over the dark abyss. The "Course younger aspirants of our own day; and Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, and lesser stars of that constellation, let us alight on the verge of that famous era when the throne was occupied by Dryden, and then by Pope-searching still for a Great Poem. Did either of them ever write one? No-never. Sir Walter says finely of glorious John, "And Dryden in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But why, we ask, did Dryden suffer a ribald king and court to debase and degrade him, and strangle his immortal strain? Because he was poor. But could he not have died of cold, thirst, and hunger-of starvation? Have not millions of men and women done so, rather than sacrifice their conscience! And shall we grant to a great poet that indulgence which many an humble hind would have flung with scorn in our teeth, and rather than hav availed himself of it, faced the fagot, or the halter, or the stake set within the sea-flood? But it is satisfactory to know that Dryden, though still glorious John, was not a Great Poet. He was seldom visited by the pathetic or the sublime-else had his genius held fast its integrity-been ribald to no ribald—and indignantly kicked to the devil both court and king. But what a master of reasoning in verse! And of verse what a volume of fire! "The long-resounding march and ener gy divine." Pope, again, with the common frailties of humanity, was an ethereal creature -and played on his own harp with finest taste, and wonderful execution. We doubt, indeed, if such a finished style has ever been heard since from any one of the King Apollo's mu sicians. His versification may be monoto nous, but without a sweet and potent charm only to ears of leather. That his poetry has no passion is the creed of critics "of Cambyses' vein;" Heloise and the Unfortunate Lady have made the world's heart to throb. As for Imagination, we shall continue till such time as that faculty has been distinguished from Fancy, to see it shining in the Rape of the Lock, with a lambent lustre; if high intel. lect be not dominant in his Epistles and his Essay on Man, you will look for it in vain in the nineteenth century; all other Satires seem complimentary to their victims when read after the Dunciad-and could a man, whose heart was not heroic, have given us another Iliad, which, all unlike as it is to the Greek, may be read with transport, even after Homer's? done for the least deformed of the tragedies o. the Old English Drama that humanity could do, enlightened by the Christian religion; but Nature has risen up to vindicate herself against such misrepresentations as they afford; and sometimes finds it all she can do to stomach Shakspeare. But the monstrosities we have mentioned are We have not yet, it would seem, found the not the worst to be found in the Old English objects of our search-a Great Poem. Let us Drama. Others there are that, till civilized extend our quest into the Elizabethan age. We Christendom fall back into barbarous Heathenare at once sucked into the theatre. With the dom, must for ever be unendurable to human whole drama of that age we are conversant ears, whether long or short-we mean the oband familiar; but whether we understand it or scenities. That sin is banished for ever from not, is another question. It aspires to give our literature. The poet who might dare to representations of Human Life in all its in- commit it, would be immediately hooted out of finite varieties, and inconsistencies, and con- society, and sent to roost in barns among the flicts, and turmoils produced by the Passions. owls. But the Old English Drama is stuffed Time and space are not suffered to interpose with ineffable pollutions; and full of passages their unities between the Poet and his vast that the street-walker would be ashamed to design, who, provided he can satisfy the spec- read in the stews. We have not seen that tators by the pageant of their own passions volume of the Family Dramatists which contains moving across the stage, may exhibit there Massinger. But if made fit for female readwhatever he wills from life, death, or the grave. ing, his plays must be mutilated and mangled "Tis a sublime conception-and sometimes out of all likeness to the original wholes. has given rise to sublime performance; but To free them even from the grossest impurihas been crowned with full success in no hands ties, without destroying their very life, is imbut those of Shakspeare. Great as was the possible; and it would be far better to make a genius of many of the dramatists of that age, selection of fine passages, after the manner of not one of them has produced a Great Tragedy. Lamb's Specimens-but with a severer eyeGreat Tragedy indeed! What! without harmo- than to attempt in vain to preserve their chany or proportion in the plan-with all puzzling racter as plays, and at the same time to expunge perplexities and inextricable entanglements in all that is too disgusting, perhaps, to be dangerthe plot, and with disgust and horror in the catas-ous to boys and virgins. Full-grown men may trophe! As for the characters, male and female read what they choose-perhaps without suf-saw ye ever such a set of swaggerers and ran- fering from it; but the modesty of the young tipoles as they often are in one act-Methodist clear eye must not be profaned-and we canpreachers and demure young women at a love-not, for our own part, imagine a Family Old feast in another-absolute heroes and heroines English Dramatist. of high calibre in a third-and so on, changing and shifting name and nature, according to the laws of the Romantic Drama forsooth-but in hideous violation of the laws of nature-till the curtain falls over a heap of bodies huddled together, without regard to age or sex, as if they had been overtaken in liquor! We admit that there is gross exaggeration in the picture; but there is always truth in a tolerable caricature -and this is one of a tragedy of Webster, Ford, or Massinger. It is satisfactory to know that the good sense, and good feeling, and good taste of the people of England, will not submit to be belaboured by editors and critics into unqualified admiration of such enormities. The Old English Drama lies buried in the dust with all its tragedies. Never more will they move across the stage. Scholars read them, and often with delight, admiration, and wonder; for genius is a strange spirit, and has begotten strange children on the body of the Tragic Muse. In the closet it is pleasant to peruse the countenances, at once divine, human, and brutal, of the incomprehensible monsters-to scan their forms, powerful though misshapen-to watch their movements, vigorous though distorted-and to hold up one's hands in amazement on hearing them not seldom discourse most excellent music. But we should shudder to see them on the stage enacting the parts of men and women-and call for the manager. All has been And here again bursts upon us the glory of the Greek Drama. The Athenians were as wicked, as licentious, as polluted, and much more so, we hope, than ever were the English; but they debased not with their gross vices their glorious tragedies. Nature in her higher moods alone, and most majestic aspects, trod their stage. Buffoons, and ribalds, and zanies, and "rude indecent clowns," were confined to comedies; and even there they too were idealized, and resembled not the obscene samples that so often sicken us in the midst of "the acting of a dreadful thing" in our old theatre. They knew that "with other ministrations, thou, O Nature!" teachest thy handmaid Art to soothe the souls of thy congregated children— congregated to behold her noble goings-on, and to rise up and depart elevated by the transcendent pageant. The Tragic muse was in those days a Priestess-tragedies were religious ceremonies; for all the ancestral stories they celebrated were under consecration-the spirit of the ages of heroes and demigods descended over the vast amphitheatre; and thus were Eschylus, and Sophocles, and Euripides, the guardians of the national character, which we all know, was, in spite of all it suffered under for ever passionately enamoured of all the forms of greatness. Forgive us-spirit of Shakspeare! that seem'st to animate that high-brow'd bust-if indeed we have offered any show of irrevo rence to thy name and nature; for now, in the | fire was a fortunate cae in which so many noiselessness of midnight, to our awed but books of it were burnt. If no such fortunate loving hearts do both appear divine! Forgive fire ever took place, then let us trust that the us-we beseech thee-that on going to bed-moths drillingly devoured the manuscript--and which we are just about to do—we may be able that 'tis all safe. Purgatorial pains-unless to compose ourselves to sleep-and dream of indeed they should prove eternal-are insuffi. Miranda and Imogen, and Desdemona and Cor- cient punishment for the impious man who Helia. Father revered of that holy family! by invented Allegory. If you have got any thing the strong light in the eyes of Innocence we to say, sir, out with it-in one or other of the beseech thee to forgive us!-Ha! what old ghost many forms of speech employed naturally by art thou-clothed in the weeds of more than creatures to whom God has given the gift of mortal misery-mad, mad, mad-come and "discourse of reason." But beware of misgone-was it Lear? spending your life in perversely attempting to We have found then, it seems-at last-the make shadow substance, and substance shadow. object of our search-a Great Poem-ay-four Wonderful analogies there are among all Great Poems-Lear-Hamlet--Othello-Mac- created things, material and immaterial-and beth. And was the revealer of those high millions so fine that Poets alone discern themmysteries in his youth a deer-stealer in the and sometimes succeed in showing them in parks of Warwickshire, a linkboy in London words. Most spiritual region of poetry-and streets? And died he before his grand climac- to be visited at rare times and seasons-nor all teric in a dimmish sort of a middle-sized tene- life-long ought bard there to abide. For a while ment in Stratford-on-Avon, of a surfeit from let the veil of Allegory be drawn before the an over-dose of home-brewed humming ale? face of Truth, that the light of its beauty may Such is the tradition. shine through it with a softened charm-dim and drear-like the moon gradually obscuring in its own halo on a dewy night. Such airwoven veil of Allegory is no human invention. The soul brought it with her when Had we a daughter-an only daughter--we should wish her to be like "Trailing clouds of glory she did come "Heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb." In that one line has Wordsworth done an unappreciable service to Spenser. He has improved upon a picture in the Fairy Queenmaking "the beauty still more beauteous," by Sometimes, now and then, in moods strange a single touch of a pencil dipped in moonlight, and high-obey the bidding of the soul-and or in sunlight tender as Luna's smiles. Through allegorize; but live not all life-long in an Alle. Spenser's many nine-lined stanzas the lovely gory-even as Spenser did-Spenser the di lady glides along her own world-and our eyes vine; for with all his heavenly genius-and follow in delight the sinless wanderer. In brighter visions never met mortal eyes than Wordsworth's one single celestial line we be-his-what is he but a "dreamer among men," hold her neither in time nor space-an im- and what may save that wondrous poem from mortal omnipresent idea at one gaze occupying the doom of oblivion ? the soul. And is not the Fairy Queen a Great Poem? Like the Excursion, it is at all events a long one "slow to begin, and never ending." That To this conclusion must we come at lastthat in the English language there is but one Great Poem. What! Not Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth? PARADISE LOST. INCH-CRUIN. or castle, encompassed with the umbrage cı undying oaks. On! for the plumes and pinions of the poised Eagle, that we might now hang over Loch Lomond and all her is.es! From what point of the We should as soon think of penning a critique compass would we come on our rushing vans? on Milton's Paradise Lost as on Loch Lomond Up from Leven-banks, or down from Glenfal- People there are in the world, doubtless, who loch, or over the hill of Luss, or down to Row-think them both too long; but to our minds, ardennan; and then up and away, as the chance currents in the sky might lead, with the Glory of Scotland, blue, bright, and breaking into foam, thousands on thousands of feet below, with every island distinct in the peculiar beauty of its own youthful or ancient woods? For remember, that with the eagle's wing we must also have the eagle's eye; and all the while our own soul to look with such lens and such iris, and with its own endless visions to invest the pinnacles of all the far-down ruins of church neither the one nor the other exceeds the due measure by a leaf or a league. You may, if it so pleaseth you, think it, in a mist, a Mediterranean sea. For then you behold many miles of tumbling waves, with no land beyond; and were a ship to rise up in full sail, she would seem voyaging on to some distant shore. Or you may look on it as a great arm only of the ocean, stretched out into the mountainous mainland. Or say, rather, some river of the first order, that shows to the sun Islands never ceasing to adorn his course for a thousand | waves, towards the melancholy shores of Inchleagues, in another day about to be lost in the Cruin, the Island of the Afflicted. Beautifu dominion of the sea. Or rather look on it as is it by nature, with its bays, and fields, and it is, as Loch Lomond, the Loch of a hundred woods, as any isle that sees its shadow in the Isles of shores laden with all kinds of beauty, deeps; but human sorrows have steeped it in throughout the infinite succession of bays and eternal gloom, and terribly is it haunted to our harbours-huts and houses sprinkled over the imagination. Here no woodman's hut peeps sides of its green hills, that ever and anon send from the glade-here are not seen the branchup a wider smoke from villages clustering ing antlers of the deer moving among the round the church-tower beneath the wooded boughs that stir not-no place of peace is this rocks-halls half-hidden in groves, for centu- where the world-wearied hermit sits penitent ries the residence of families proud of their in his cell, and prepares his soul for Heaven. Gaelic blood-forests that, however wide be the Its inhabitants are a woful people, and all its fall beneath the axe when their hour is come, various charms are hidden from their eyes, or yet, far as the eye can reach, go circling round seen in ghastly transfiguration; for here, bethe mountain's base, inhabited by the roe and neath the yew-tree's shade, sit moping, or the red-deer;-but we have got into a sentence roam about with rueful lamentation, the soulthat threatens to be without end-a dim, dreary, distracted and the insane! Ay-these sweet sentence, in the middle of which the very writer and pleasant murmurs break round a Lunatic himself gets afraid of ghosts, and fervently Asylum! And the shadows that are now and prays for the period when he shall be again then seen among the umbrage are laughing chatting with the reader on a shady seat, under or weeping in the eclipse of reason, and may his own paragraph and his own pear-tree. never know again aught of the real character of this world, to which, exiled as they are from it, they are yet bound by the ties of a common nature that, though sorely deranged, are not wholly broken, and still separate them by an awful depth of darkness from the beasts that perish. Oh! for our admirable friend Mr. Smith of Jordanhill's matchless cutter, to glide through among the glittering archipelago! But we must be contented with a somewhat clumsy four-oared barge, wide and deep enough for a cattle ferry-boat. This morning's sunrise found us at the mouth of the Goblin's Cave on Loch Thither, love, yielding reluctantly at last to Katrine, and among Lomond's lovely isles shall despair, has consented that the object on which sunset leave us among the last glimmer of the all its wise solicitudes had for years been unsoftened gold. To which of all those lovely availably bestowed both night and day, should isles shall we drift before the wind on the small | be rowed over, perhaps at midnight, and when heaving and breaking waves? To Inch-Murrin, asleep, and left there with beings like itself, where the fallow-deer repose-or to the yew-all dimly conscious of their doom. To many shaded Inch-Caillach, the cemetery of Clan-such the change may often bring little or no Alpin-the Holy Isle of Nuns? One hushing heed-for outward things may have ceased to afternoon hour may yet be ours on the waters-impress, and they may be living in their own another of the slowly-walking twilight-that rueful world, different from all that we hear or time which the gazing spirit is too wrapt to behold. To some it may seem that they have measure, while "sinks the Day-star in the been spirited away to another state of exist ocean's bed"-and so on to midnight, the reign ence-beautiful, indeed, and fair to see, with of silence and shadow, the resplendent Diana all those lovely trees and shadows of trees; with her hair-halo, and all her star-nymphs, but still a miserable, a most miserable place, rejoicing round their Queen. Let the names without one face they ever saw before, and of all objects be forgotten-and imagination haunted by glaring eyes that shoot forth fear, roam over the works of nature, as if they lay suspicion, and hatred. Others, again, there in their primeval majesty, without one trace of are, who know well the misty head of Benman's dominion. Slow-sailing Heron, that Lomond, which, with joyful pleasure-parties cloud-like seekest thy nest on yonder lofty mass set free from the city, they had in other years of pines-to us thy flight seems the very symbol exultingly scaled, and looked down, perhaps, of a long lone life of peace. As thou foldest in a solemn pause of their youthful ecstasy, thy wide wings on the topmost bough, beneath on the far-off and melancholy Inch-Cruin! thee tower the unregarded Ruins, where many Thankful are they for such a haven at lastgenerations sleep. Onwards thou floatest like for they are remote from the disturbance of the a dream, nor changest thy gradually descend-incomprehensible life that bewildered them, ing course for the Eagle, that, far above thy and from the pity of familiar faces that was line of travel, comes rushing unwearied from more than could be borne. his prey in distant Isles of the sea. The Osprey! off-off-to Inch-Loning-or the dark cliffs of Glenfalloch, many leagues away, which he will reach almost like a thought! Close your eyes but for a moment-and when you look again, where is the Cloud-Cleaver now? | Gone in the sunshine, and haply seated in his living remains of a friend. How profound the eyrie on Ben-Lomond's head. So let us float upon our oars behind the shadow of this rock, nor approach nearer the sacred retreat of misery. Let us not gaze too intently into the glades, for we might see some figure there who wished to be seen nevermore, and recognise in the hurrying shadow the hush! No sigh-no groan-no shriek-no But amidst all this splendour and magnifi-voice-no tossing of arms-no restless chaf cence, our eyes are drawn against our will, and by a sort of sad fascination which we cannot resist, along the glittering and dancing ing of feet! God in mercy has for a while calmed the congregation of the afflicted, and the Isle is overspread with a sweet Sabbath. |