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38
[July
ci ^3
Shelley
as a
Lyric Poet.1
OO many biographies, records, comments, criticisms, of Shelley
0 have lately appeared that I take for granted that all who hear
me have some general acquaintance with the facts of his life.
Of the biographies none, perhaps, is more interesting than the
short work by Mr. J. A. Symonds, which has lately been published
as one of the series edited by Mr. Morley, ‘ English Men of Letters.’
That work has all the charm which intense admiration of its subject,
set forth in a glowing style, can lend it. Those who in the main
hold with Mr. Symonds, and are at one with him in his funda
mental estimate ot things, will no doubt find his work highly attrac
tive. Those, on the other hand, who see in Shelley’s character
many things which they cannot admire, and in the theories that
moulded it much which is deeply repulsive, will find Mr. Symonds’s
work a less satisfactory guide than they could have wished. Of
the many comments and criticisms on Shelley’s character and poetry
two of the most substantial and rational are, the essay by Mr. R. H.
Hutton, and that by the late Mr. Walter Bagehot. To these two
friends Shelley, it would appear, had been one of the attractions of
their youth, and in their riper years each has given his mature
estimate of Shelley’s poetry in its whole substance and tendency.
We all admire that which we agree with; and nowhere have I found
on this subject thoughts which seem tome so adequate and so helpful
as those contained in these two essays, none which give such insight
into Shelley's abnormal character and into the secret springs of his
inspiration. Of the benefit of these thoughts I have freely availed
myself, whenever they seemed to throw light on the subject of this
lecture.
The effort to enter into the meaning of Shelley’s poetry is not
altogether a painless one. Some may ask, Why should it be painful ?
Cannot you enjoy his poems merely in an aesthetic way, take the
marvel of their aerial movement and the magic of their melody,
without scrutinising too closely their meaning or moral import?
This, I suppose, most of my hearers could do for themselves, without
any comment of mine. Such a mere surface, dilettante way of
treating the subject would be useless in itself, and altogether un
worthy of this place. All true literature, all genuine poetry, is the
direct outcome, the condensed essence, of actual life and thought.
Lyric poetry for the most part is—Shelley's especially was—the
vivid expression of personal experience.
It is only as poetry
is founded on reality that it has any solid value ; otherwise it is
1 A Lecture delivered in the theatre of the Museum, Oxford.
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
39
worthless. Before, then, attempting to understand Shelley's lyrics I
must ask what was the reality out of which they came—that is, what
manner of man Shelley was, what were his ruling views of life, along
what lines did his thoughts move ?
Those who knew Shelley best speak of the sweetness and refine
ment of his nature, of his lofty disinterestedness, his unworldliness.
They even speak of something like heroic self-forgetfulness. These
things we can in sort believe, for there are in his writings many
traits that look like those qualities. And yet one receives with some
decided reserve the high eulogies of his friends ; for we feel that
these were not generally men whose moral estimates of things we
would entirely accept, and his life contained things that seem
strangely at variance with such qualities as they attribute to him.
When Byron speaks of his purity of mind we cannot but doubt whether
Byron was a good judge of purity. We must, moreover, on the evidence
'of Shelley’s own works demur; for there runs through his poems
a painful taint of supersubtilised impurity, of aweless shamelessness,
which we never can believe came from a mind truly pure. A pene
trating taint it is, which has evilly affected many of the higher minds
who admire him, in a way which Byron's own more commonplace
licentiousness never could have done.
One of his biographers has said that in no man was the moral
sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley, in none was
the perception of right and wrong more acute. I rather think that
the late Mr. Bagehot was nearer the mark when he asserted that in
Shelley the conscience never had been revealed—that he was almost
entirely without conscience. Moral susceptibilities and impulses,
keen and refined, he had. He was inspired with an enthusiasm of
humanity after a kind; hated to see pain in others, and would
willingly relieve it; hated oppression, and stormed against it, but
then he regarded all rule and authority as oppression. He felt for
the poor and the suffering, and tried to help them, and willingly
would have shared with all men the vision of good which he sought
for himself. But these passionate impulses are something very dif
ferent from conscience. Conscience first reveals itself when we become
aware of the strife between a lower and a higher nature within us—
a law of the flesh warring against the law of the mind. And it is out
of this experience that moral religion is born, the higher law rather
leading up and linking us to One whom that law represents. As
Canon Mozely has said, ‘ it is an introspection on which all religion
is built—man going into himself and seeing the struggle within
him ; and thence getting self-knowledge, and thence the knowledge
of God.’ Of this double nature, this inward strife between flesh and
spirit, Shelley knew nothing. He was altogether a child of impulse
—of impulse, one, total, all-absorbing. And the impulse that came
to him he followed whithersoever it went, without questioning either
himself or it. He was pre-eminently roZs ttu6c<tlv aKoXovOyriKos,
and you know that Aristotle tells us that such an one is no fit judge
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Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[j^y
of moral truth. But this peculiarity, which made him so little fitted
to guide either his own life or that of others, tended, on the other
hand, very powerfully to make him pre-eminently a lyric poet. How
it fitted him for this we shall presently see. But abandonment to
impulse, however much it may contribute to lyrical inspiration, is a
poor guide to conduct; and a poet s conduct in life, of whatever kind
it be, quickly reacts on his poetry. It was so with Shelley.
It is painful to recall the unhappy incidents, but? we cannot
understand his poetry if we forget them. ‘ Strongly moralised,’ Mr.
Symonds tells us, his boyhood was ; but of a strange—I might say,
an unhuman—type the morality must have been which allowed
some of the chief acts of his life. His father was no doubt a com
monplace and worldly-minded squire, wholly unsympathetic with his
dreamy son; but this cannot justify the son’s unfilial and irreverent
conduct towards his parent, going so far as to curse him for the
amusement of coarse Eton companions. Nobility of nature he may
have had, but it was such nobility as allowed him, in order to hurl
defiance at authority, to start atheist at Eton, and to do the same
more boldly at Oxford, with what result you know. It allowed him
to engage the heart of a simple and artless girl, who entrusted her
life in his keeping, and then after two or three years to abandon
her and her child—for no better reason, it would seem, than that
she cared too little for her baby, and had an unpleasant sister, who
was an offence to Shelley. It allowed him first to insult the religious
sense of his fellow men by preaching the wildest atheism, then in the
poem ‘ Laon and Cythna,’ which he intended to be his gospel for the
world, to outrage the deepest instincts of our nature by introducing a
most horrible and unnatural incident. A moral taint there is in this,
which has left its trail in many of his after poems. The furies of
the sad tragedy of Harriet Westbrook haunted him till the close,
and drew forth some strains of weird agony; but even in these
there is no manly repentance, no self-reproach that is true and
human-hearted.
After his second marriage he never repeated the former offence,
but many a strain in his later poems, as in ‘ Epipsychidion,’ and in
his latest lyrics, proves that constancy of affection was not in him, nor
reckoned by him among the virtues. Idolators of Shelley will, I know,
reply, ‘Tou judge Shelley by the conventional morality of the present
day, and, judging him by this standard, of course you harshly con
demn him. But it was against these very conventions which you call
morality that Shelley s whole life was a protest. He was the prophet
of something truer or better than this.’ To this I answer that
Shelley’s revolt was not against the conventional morality of his own
time, but against the fundamental morality of all time. Had he
merely cried out against the stifling political atmosphere and the
dry, dead orthodoxy of the Regency and the reign of George IV., and
longed for some ampler air, freer and more life-giving, one could well
have understood him, even sympathised with him. But he rebelled
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
41
not against the limitations and corruptions of his own day, but
against the moral verities which two thousand years have made good,
and which have been tested and approved not only by eighteen
Christian centuries, but no less by the wisdom of Virgil and Cicero, of
Aristotle and Sophocles. Shelley may be the prophet of a new morality,
but it is one which never can be realised till moral law has been ob
literated from the universe and conscience from the heart of man.
A nature which was capable of the things I have alluded to,
whatever other traits of nobility it may have had, must have been
traversed by some strange deep flaw, marred by some radical inward
defect. In some of his gifts and impulses he was more,—in other
things essential to goodness, he was far less,—than other men ; a
fully developed man he certainly was not. I am inclined to believe
that, for all his noble impulses and aims, he was in some way defi
cient in rational and moral sanity. Alanv of you will remember
Hazlitt’s somewhat cynical description of him. Yet, to judge by
his writings, it looks like truth. He had ‘ a fire in his eye, a fever
in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech,
which mark out the philosophic fanatic.
He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced.’ This is just the outward appearance
we could fancy for his inward temperament. What was that tem
perament ?
He was entirely a child of impulse, lived and longed for highstrung, intense emotion—simple, all-absorbing, all-penetrating emo
tion, going straight on in one direction to its object, hating and
resenting whatever opposed its progress thitherward. The object
which he longed for was some abstract intellectualised spirit of beauty
and loveliness, which should thrill his spirit continually with delicious
shocks of emotion.
Ibis yearning, panting desire is expressed by him in a thousand
forms and figures throughout his poetry. Again and again the
refrain recurs—
I pant for the music which is Divine,
My heart in its thirst is a dying flower;
Pour forth the sound like enchanted wine,
Loosen the notes in a silver shower;
Like a herbless plain for the gentle rain
I gasp, I faint, till they wake again.
Let me drink the spirit of that sweet sound ;
More, 0 more ! I am thirsting yet;
It loosens the serpent which care has bound
Upon my heart, to stifle it;
The dissolving strain, through every vein,
Passes into my heart and brain.
He sought not mere sensuous enjoyment, like Keats, but keen
intellectual and emotional delight—the mental thrill, the glow of
soul, the ‘ tingling of the nerves,’ that accompany transcendental
�42
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[July
rapture. His hungry craving was for intellectual beauty, and the
delight it yields ; if not that, then for horror, anything to thrill the
nerves, though it should curdle the blood and make the flesh creep.
Sometimes for a moment this perfect abstract loveliness would seem
to have embodied itself in some creature of flesh and blood ; but only
for a moment would the sight soothe him—the sympathy would cease,
the glow of heart would die down—and he would pass on in the hot,
insatiable pursuit of new rapture. ‘ There is no rest for us,’ says the
great preacher, 4 save in quietness, confidence, and affection.’ This
was not what Shelley sought, but something very different from this.
The pursuit of abstract ideal beauty was one form which his
hungry, insatiable desire took. Another passion that possessed him
was the longing to pierce to the very heart the mystery of existence.
It has been said that before an insoluble mystery, clearly seen to be
insoluble, the soul bows down and is at rest, as before an ascertained
truth. Shelley knew nothing of this. Before nothing would his soul
bow down. Every veil, however sacred, he would rend, pierce the
inner shrine of being, and force it to give up its secret. There is in
him a profane audacity, an utter awelessness. Intellectual AZSws
was to him unknown. Beverence was to him another word for hated
superstition. Nothing was to him inviolate. All the natural reserves
he would break down. Heavenward, he would pierce to the heart of
the universe and lay it bare; manward, he would annihilate all the
precincts of personality. Every soul should be free to mingle with
any other, as so many raindrops do. In his own words,
The fountains of our deepest life shall be
Confused in passion’s golden purity.
However fine the language in which such feelings may clothe theme
selves, in truth they are wholly vile ; there is no horror of shameless
ness which they may not generate. Yet this is what comes of the
unbridled desire for ‘ tingling pulses,’ quivering, panting, fainting
sensibility, which Shelley everywhere makes the supreme happiness.
It issues in awelessness, irreverence, and what some one has called
4 moral nudity.’
These two impulses, both combined with another passion, he had
—the passion for reforming the world. He had a real, benevolent
desire to impart to all men the peculiar good he sought for himself
—a life of free, unimpeded impulse, of passionate, unobstructed
desire. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—these of course; but some
thing far beyond these—absolute Perfection, as he conceived it, he
believed to be within every man’s reach. Attainable, if only all the
growths of history could be swept away, all authority and govern
ment, all religion, all law, custom, nationality, everything that
limits and restrains, and if every man were left open to the uncon
trolled expansion of himself and his impulses. The end of this
process of making a clean sweep of all that is, and beginning afresh,
would be that family, social ranks, government, worship, would dis
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
43
appear, and then man would be king over himself, and wise, gentle,
just, and good. Such was his temperament, the original emotional
basis of Shelley s nature ; such, too, some of the chief aims towards
which this temperament impelled him. And certainly these aims do
make one think of the ‘ maggot in his brain.’ But a temperament of
this kind, whatever aims it turned to, was eminently and essentially
lyrical. Those thrills of soul, those tingling nerves, those rapturous glows
of feeling, are the very substance out of which high lyrics are woven.
The insatiable craving to pierce the mystery, of course, drove
Shelley to philosophy for instruments to pierce it with. During his
brief life he was a follower of three distinct schools of thought. At
first he began with the philosophy of the senses, was a materialist,
adopting Lucretius as his master and holding that atoms are the
only realities, with perhaps a pervading life of nature to mould
them—that from atoms all things come, to atoms return. Yet even
over this dreary creed, without spirit, immortality, or God, he shouted
a jubilant ‘ Eureka,' as though it were some new glad tidings.
hrom this he passed into the school of Hume—got rid of matter,
the dull clods of earth, denied both matter and mind, and held that
these were nothing but impressions, with no substance behind them.
This was liker Shelley’s cast of mind than materialism. Not only
dull clods of matter, but personality, the ‘ I ’ and the ‘ thou,’ were by
this creed eliminated, and that exactly suited Shelley’s way of
thought. It gave him a phantom world.
brom Hume he went on to Plato, and in him found still more
congenial nutriment. The solid, fixed entities—matter and mind —
he could still deny, while he was led on to believe in eternal arche
types behind all phenomena, as the only realities. These Platonic
ideas attracted his abstract intellect and imagination, and are often
alluded to in his later poems, as in ‘ Adonais.’ Out of this philosophy
it is probable that he got the only object of worship which he ever
acknowledged, the Spirit of Beauty. Plato’s idea of beauty changed into
a spirit, but without will, without morality, in his own words :—
That Light whose smile kindles the universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Bums bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst.
To the moral and religious truths which are the backbone of
Plato’s thought lie never attained. Shelley’s thought never had any
backbone. Each of these successively adopted philosophies entered
into and coloured the successive stages of Shelley’s poetry; but
through them all his intellect and imagination remained unchanged.
W hat was the nature of that intellect ? It was wholly akin and
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Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
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adapted to the temperament I have described as his. Imnatient of
solid substances, inaccessible to many kinds of truth, inappreciative of
solid, concrete facts, it was quick and subtle to seize the evanescent
hues of things, the delicate aromas which are too fine for ordinary
perceptions. His intellect waited on his temperament, and, so to
speak, did its will—caught up one by one the warm emotions as they
were flung off, and worked them up into the most exquisite abstrac
tions. The rush of throbbing pulsations supplied the materials for
his keen-edged thought to work on, and these it did mould into the
rarest, most beautiful shapes. This his mind was busv doing all his
life long. The real world, existence as it is to other minds, he re
coiled from—shrank from the dull, gross earth which we see around
us—nor less from the unseen world of Righteous Law and Will
which we apprehend above us. The solid earth he did not care for.
Heaven—a moral heaven—there was that in him which would not
believe in. So, as Mr. Hutton has said, his mind made for itself a
dwelling-place midway between the two, equally remote from both.
some interstellar region, some cold, clear place—
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane—
which he peopled with ideal shapes and abstractions, wonderful or weird,
beautiful or fantastic, all woven out of his own dreaming phantasy.
This was the world in which he was at home; he was not at home
with any reality known to other men. No real human characters
appear in his poetry; his own pulsations, desires, aspirations, sup
plied the place of these. Hardly any actual human feeling is in
them; only some phase of evanescent emotion, or the shadow of it, is
seized—not even the flower of human feeling, but the bloom of the
flower or the dream of the bloom. A real landscape he has seldom
described, only his own impression of it, or some momentarv gleam,
some tender light, that has fleeted vanishingly over earth and sea he
has caught. Nature he used mainly to cull from it some of its most
delicate tints, some faint hues of the dawn or the sunset clouds, to
weave in and colour the web of his abstract dream. So entirely at
home is he in this abstract shadowv world of his own making, that
when he would describe common visible things he does so bv likening
them to those phantoms of the brain, as though with these last alone
he was familiar. A irgil likens the ghosts bv the banks of Styx to
falling leaves—
Quani mulxa in silvis auciumni frigore prime
Lapsa cadunx folia.
Shelley likens falling leaves to ghosts.
leaves, he says—
Before the wind the dead
Are driven. like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.
Others have compared thought to a breeze. With Shelley the
breeze is like thought; the pilot spirit of the blast, he savs—
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Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
45
Wakens the leaves and waves, ere it hath past,
To such brief unison as on the brain
One tone which never can recur has cast
One accent, never to return again.
We see thus that nature as it actually exists has little place in
Shelley’s poetry. And man, as he really is, may be said to have no
place at all.
Neither is the world of moral or spiritual truth there—not the
living laws by which the world is governed—no presence of a Sove
reign Will, no all-wise Personality, behind the fleeting shows of
time. The abstract world which his imagination dwelt in is a cold,
weird, unearthly, inhuman place, peopled with shapes which we may
wonder at, but cannot love. When we first encounter these we are
fain to exclaim, Earth we know, and Heaven we know, but who and
what are ye ? Ye belong neither to things human nor to things
divine. After a very brief sojourn in Shelley’s ideal world, with its
pale abstractions, most men are ready to say with another poet, after
a voyage among the stars—
Then back to earth, the dear green earth;
Whole ages though I here should roam,
The world for my remarks and me
Would not a whit the better be :
I’ve left my heart at home.
In that dear green earth, and the men who have lived or still
live on it, in their human hopes and fears, in their faiths and aspi
rations, lies the truest field for the highest imagination to work
in. That I believe to be the haunt and main region for the songs
of the greatest poets. The real is the true world for a great poet,
but it was not Shelley’s world.
Yet Shelley, while the imaginative mood was on him, felt this
ideal world of his as real as most men feel the solid earth, and
through the pallid lips of its phantom people and dim abstractions he
pours as warm a flood of emotion as ever poet did through the
rosiest lips and brightest eyes of earth-born creatures. Not more real
to Burns were his bonny Jean and his Highland Mary, than to
Shelley were the visions of Asia and Panthea, and the Lady of the Sen
sitive Plant, while he gazed on them. And when his affections did
light, not on these abstractions, but on creatures of flesh and blood,
yet so penetrated was his thought with his own idealism, that he
lifted them up from earth into that rarefied atmosphere, and de
scribed them in the same style of imagery and language as that with
which he clothes the phantasms of his mind. Thus it will be seen
that it was a narrow and limited tract over which Shelley’s imagina
tion ranged—that it took little or no note of reality, and that bound
less as was its fertility and power of resource within its own chosen
circle, yet the widest realm of mere brain creation must be thin and
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Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[juiy
small compared with existing reality both in the seen and the
unseen worlds.
We can now see the reason why Shelley’s long poems are such
absolute failures, his short lyrics so strangely succeed. Mere thrills
of soul were weak as connecting bonds for long poems.
Dis
tilled essences and personified qualities were poor material out of
which to build up great works. These things could give neither
unity, nor motive power, • nor human interest to long poems.
Hence the incoherence which all but a few devoted admirers find
in Shelley’s long poems, -despite their grand passages and their splen
did imagery. In fact, if the long poems were to be broken up and
thrown into a heap, and the lyric portions riddled out of them and
preserved, the world would lose nothing, and would get rid of not a
little offensive stuff. An exception to this judgment is generally
made in favour of the ‘ Cenci ’; but that tragedy turns on an
incident so repulsive that, notwithstanding its acknowedged power,
it can hardly give pleasure to any healthy mind.
On the other hand, single thrills of rapture, which are such in
sufficient stuff to make long poems out of, supply the very inspiration
for the true lyric. It is this predominance of emotion, so unhappy to
himself, which made Shelley the lyrist that he was. When he sings
his lyric strains, whatever is most unpleasant in him is softened
down, if it does not wholly disappear. Whatever is most unique and
excellent in him comes out at its best—his eye for abstract beauty,
the subtlety of his thought, the rush of bis eager pursuing de
sire, the splendour of his imagery, the delicate rhythm, the
matchless music. These lyrics are gales of melody blown from a
far-off region, that looks fair in the distance. Perhaps those enjoy
them most who do not inquire too closely what is the nature of that
land, or know too exactly the theories and views of life of which
these songs are the effluence; for if we come too near we might
find that there was poison in the air. Many a one has read those
lyrics and felt their fascination without thought of the unhappy
experience out of which they have come. They understood ‘ a
beauty in the words, but not the words.’ I doubt whether any one
after very early youth, any one who has known the realities of life,
can continue to take Shelley’s best songs to heart, as he can those of
Shakespeare or the best of Burns. For, however we may continue to
wonder at the genius that is in them, no healthy mind will find in
them the expression of its truest and best thoughts. Other lyric
poets, it has been said, sing of what they feel. Shelley in his lyrics
sings of what he wants to feel. The thrills of desire, the gushes of
emotion, are all straining after something seen afar but unat
tained, something distant or future ; or they are passionate despair,
utter despondency for something hopelessly gone. Yet it must be
owned that those bursts of passionate desire after ideal beauty set
our pulses a-throbbing with a strange vibration even when we do
not really sympathise with them. Even his desolate wails make
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Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
4.7
those seem for a moment to share his despair who do not really
share it. Such is the charm of his impassioned eloquence and the
witchery of his music.
Let us turn now to look at some of his lyrics in detail.
The earliest of them, those of 1814, were written while Shelley
was under the depressing spell of materialistic belief, and at the time
when he was abandoning’ poor Harriet Wbstbrook. For a time he
lived under the spell of that ghastly faith, hugging it, yet hating it;
and its progeny are seen in the lyrics of that time, such as ‘ Death,’
e Mutability,’ ‘ Lines in a Country Churchyard.’ These have a cold,
clammy feel. They are full of ‘ wormy horrors,’ as though the poet
were one
who had made his bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black Death
Keeps record of the trophies •won from Life,
as though by dwelling amid these things he had hoped to force some
lone ghost
to render up the tale
Of what we are.
And what does it all come to ?—what is the lesson he reads there ?__
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call life. . . . Behind lurk Fear
And Hope, twin destinies, who ever weave
Their shadows o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
That is all that the belief in mere matter taught Shelley, or ever
will teach anyone.
As he passed on, the clayey, clammy sensation is less present.
Even Hume’s impressions are better than mere dust, and the Platonic
ideas are better than Hume’s impressions. When he came under
the influence of Plato his doctrine of ideas, as eternal existences
and the only realities, exercised over Shelley the charm it always
has had for imaginative minds; and it furnished him with a form
under which he figured to himself his favourite belief in the Spirit
of Love and Beauty as the animating spirit of the universe—that
for which the human soul pants. It is the passion for this ideal
which leads Alastor through his long wanderings to die at last in the
Caucasian wilderness without attaining it. It is this which he apos
trophises in the ‘ Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ as the power which
consecrates all it shines on, as the awful loveliness to which he looks
to free this world from its dark slavery. It is this vision which
reappears in its highest form in ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ the greatest
and most attractive of all Shelley’s longer poems. That drama is
from beginning to end a great lyrical poem, or I should rather
say a congeries of lyrics, in which perhaps more than anywhere
else Shelley’s lyrical power has reached its highest flight. The
whole poem is exalted by a grand pervading idea, one which in
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Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[July
its truest and deepest form is the grandest we can conceive—the
idea of the ultimate renovation of man and the world. And although
the powers and processes and personified abstractions which Shelley
invoked to effect this end are ludicrously inadequate, as irrational as
it would be to try to build a solid house out of shadows and moon
beams, yet the end in view does impart to the poem something of
its own elevation. Prometheus, the representative of suffering and
struggling humanity, is to be redeemed and perfected by union with
Asia, who is the ideal of beauty, the light of life, the spirit of love.
To this spirit Shelley looked to rid the world of all its evil and
bring in the diviner day. The lyric poetry, which is exquisite
throughout, perhaps culminates in the well-known exquisite song in
which Panthea, one of the nymphs, hails her sister Asia, as
Life of Life ! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them;
And thy smiles, before they dwindle,
Make the cold air fire ; then screen them
In those looks, where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.
Child of Light! thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide them;
As the radiant lines of morning
Through the clouds, ere they divide them ;
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee wheresoe’er thou shinest.
Lamp of Earth 1 where’er thou movest
The dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing.
The reply of Asia to this song is hardly less exquisite. Everyone
here will remember it:—
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing ;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside the helm, conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing ;
It seems to float ever, for ever,
Upon the many-winding river,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses !
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the ocean, I float down, around
Into a sea profound of ever-spreading sound.
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
49
Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions
In music’s most serene dominions,
Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar
Without a course, without a star,
But, by the instinct of sweet music driven;
Till through Elysian garden islets
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace glided,
The boat of my desire is guided :
Realms where the air we breathe is love,
Which in the winds on the waves doth move,
Harmonising this earth with what we feel above.
In these two lyrics you have Shelley at his highest perfection.
Exquisitely beautiful as they are, they are, however, beautiful as the
mirage is beautiful, and as unsubstantial. There is nothing in the
reality of things answering to Asia. She is not human, she is not
divine. There is nothing moral in her—no will, no power to subdue
evil; only an exquisite essence, a melting loveliness. There is in
her no law, no righteousness ; something to enervate, nothing to
brace the sold. After her you long for one bracing look on the
stern, severe countenance of Duty, of whom another poet sang—
Stern lawgiver I yet thou dost wear
The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
Nor know I anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face;
Flowers laugh before thee in their beds,
And fragrance in thy footing treads;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong.
Perfect as is the workmanship of those lyrics in 4 Prometheus ’
and many another, their excellence is lessened by the material out of
which they are woven being fantastic, not substantial, truth. Few
of them lay hold of real sentiments which are catholic to humanity.
They do not deal with permanent emotions which belong to all men
and are for all time, but appeal rather to minds in a particular stage
of culture, and that not a healthy stage. They are not of such stuff
as life is made of. They will not interest all healthy and truthful
minds in all stages of culture and in all ages. To do this, however,
is, I believe, a note of the highest style of lyric poem.
Another thing to be observed is, that while the imagery of Shelley’s
lyrics is so splendid and the music of their language so magical, both
of these are at that point of over-bloom which is on the verge of decay.
The imagery, for all its splendour, is too ornate, too redundant, too
much overlays the thought, which has not strength enough to uphold
such a weight. Then, as to the music of the words, wonderful as it is,
all but exclusive admirers of Shelley must have felt at times as if the
sound runs away with the sense. In some of the 4 Prometheus’ lyrics
No. 595 (no. cxv.
n. s.)
E
�50
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
[Juiy
the poet, according to Mr. Symonds, seems to have ‘realised the miracle
of making words, detached from meaning, the substance of a new
ethereal music.’ This is, to say the least, a dangerous miracle to
practise. Even Shelley, overbome by the power of melodious words,
would at times seem to approach perilously near the borders of the
unintelligible, not to say the nonsensical. What it comes to, when
adopted as a style, has been seen plainly enough in some of Shelley’s
chief followers in our own day. Cloyed with overloaded imagery, and
satiated almost to sickening with alliterative music, we turn for re
invigoration to poetry that is severe even to baldness.
The ‘ Prometheus Unbound ’ was written in Italy, and during his
four Italian years Shelley’s lyric stream flowed on unremittingly, and
enriched England’s poetry with many lyrics unrivalled in their kind,
and evoked from its language a new power. These lyrics are on the
whole his best poetic work. To go over them in detail would be im
possible, besides being needless. Perhaps his year most prolific in
lyrics was 1820, just two years before his death. Among the products
of this year were, the ‘ Sensitive Plant,’ more than half lyrical, the
‘ Cloud,’ the ‘ Skylark,’ ‘ Love’s Philosophy,’ ‘ Arethusa,’ 4 Hymns
of Pan and Apollo,’ all in his best manner, with many besides these.
About the lyrics of this time two things are noticeable : more of them
are about things of nature than heretofore, and there are several on
Greek subjects.
Of all modem attempts to reinstate Greek subjects I know nothing
equal to these, except perhaps one or two of the Laureate’s happiest
efforts. They take the Greek forms and mythologies, and fill them
with modem thought and spirit. And perhaps this is the only way
to make Greek subjects real and interesting to us; for if we want
the very Greek spirit we had better go to the originals and not to
any reproductions.
You remember how he makes Pan sing—
From the forests and highlands
We come, we come ;
From the river-girt islands,
Where loud waves are dumb,
Listening to my sweet pipings.
*
*
*
*
Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing
The light of the dying day,
Speeded with my sweet pipings.
The Sileni, and SyIvans, and Fauns,
And the nymphs of the woods and waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawns,
And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend or follow,
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,
With envy of my sweet pipings.
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
5i
I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven, and the giant wars,
And Love, and Death, and Birth,
And then I changed my pipings—
Singing how down the vale of Menalus
I pursued a maiden and clasped a weed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus !
It breaks in our bosom, and then we bleed :
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.
Of the lyrics on natural objects the two supreme ones are the
4 Ode on the West Wind ’ and the 4 Skylark.’ Of this last nothing
need be said. Artistically and poetically it is unique, has a place of
its own in poetry; yet may I be allowed to express a misgiving
about it which I have long felt, and others may feel too ? For all its
beauty,, perhaps one would rather not recall it when hearing the
skylark’s song in the fields on a bright spring morning. The poem is
not in tune with the bird’s song and the feelings it does and ought to
awaken. The rapture with which the strain springs up at first dies
down before the close into Shelley’s ever-haunting morbidity. Who
wishes, when hearing the real skylark, to be told that
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught ?
If personal feeling is to be inwrought into the living powers of
nature, let it be such feeling as is in keeping with the object, ap
propriate to the theme in hand.
Such is that personal invocation with which Shelley closes his
grand 4 Ode to the West Wind,’ written the previous year, 1819—
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is :
What if my leaves are fallen like its own !
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit I be thou me, impetuous one !
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth ;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind !
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy ! 0 Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
e
2
�Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
52
[July
This ode ends with some vigour, some hope ; but that is not
usual with Shelley. Everyone must have noticed how almost
habitually his intensest lyrics—those which have started with the
fullest swing of rapture—die down before they close into a wail
of despair. It is as though, when the strong gush of emotion had
spent itself, there was no more behind, nothing to fall back upon, but
blank emptiness and desolation. It is this that makes Shelley’s poetry
so unspeakably sad—sad with a hopeless sorrow that is like none
other. You feel as though he were a wanderer who has lost his way
hopelessly in the wilderness of a blank universe. His cry is, as Mr.
Carlyle long since said, like ‘ the infinite inarticulate wailing of for
saken infants.’ In the wail of his desolation there are many tones—
some wild and weird, some defiant, some full of despondent pathos.
The lines written in ‘ Dejection,’ on the Bay of Naples, in 1818,
are perhaps the most touching of all his wails : the words are so
sweet they seem, by their very sweetness, to lighten the load of heart
loneliness :—
I see the Deep’s untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown :
I sit upon the sands alone ;
The lightning of the noon-tide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion.
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
Alas ! I have nor hope, nor health,
Nor peace within, nor calm around,
Nor that content, surpassing wealth,
The sage in meditation found.
*
*
*
*
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are ;
I would lie down like a tired child,
And weep away this life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and heai’ the sea
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.
Who that reads these sighing lines but must feel for the heart
that breathed them ! Yet how can we be surprised that he should
have felt so desolate ? Every heart needs some real stay. And a
heart so sensitive, a spirit so finely touched, as Shelley’s needs, far
more than unsympathetic and narrow natures, a refuge amid the
storms of life. But he knew of none. His universe was a home
less one, had no centre of repose. His universal essence of love,
�1879]
Shelley as a Lyric Poet.
53
diffused throughout it, contained nothing substantial—no will that
could control and support his own. While a soul owns no law, is
without awe, lives wholly by impulse, what rest, what central peace,
is possible for it ? When the ardours of emotion have died down,
what remains for it but weakness, exhaustion, despair ? The feeling
of his weakness woke in Shelley no contriteness or brokenness of spirit,
no self-abasement, no reverence. Nature was to him really the whole,
and he saw in it nothing but ‘ a revelation of death, a sepulchral
picture, generation after generation disappearing and being heard of
and seen no more.’ He rejected utterly that other ‘ consolatory
revelation which tells us that we are spiritual beings, and have a
spiritual source of life,’ and strength, above and beyond the material
system. Such a belief, or rather no belief, as his can engender
only infinite sadness, infinite despair. And this is the deep under
tone of all Shelley’s poetry.
I have dwelt on his lyrics because they contain little of the offen
sive and nothing of the revolting which here and there obtrudes
itself in the longer poems. And one may speak of these lyrics without
agitating too deeply questions which at present I would rather avoid.
Yet even the lyrics bear some impress of the source whence they
come. Beautiful though they be, they are like those fine pearls
which, we are told, are the products of disease in the parent shell.
All Shelley’s poetry is, as it were, a gale blown from a richly
gifted but unwholesome land ; and the taint, though not so percep
tible in the lyrics, still hangs more or less over many of the finest.
Besides this defect, they are very limited in their range of influ
ence. They cannot reach the hearts of all men. They fascinate only
some of the educated, and that probably only while they are young.
The time comes when these pass out of that peculiar sphere of
thought and find little interest in such poetry. Probably the rare
exquisiteness of their workmanship will always preserve Shelley’s
lyrics, even after the world has lost, as we may hope it will lose,
sympathy with their substance. But better, stronger, more vital
far are those lyrics which lay hold on the permanent, unchanging
emotions of man—those emotions which all healthy natures have felt
and always will feel, and which no new stage of thought or civilisa
tion can ever bury out of sight.
J. C. Shairp.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Shelley as a lyric poet
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Shairp, J.C.
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: p. 38-53 ; 22 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Fraser's Magazine 20 (July 1879). Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country was a general and literary journal published in London from 1830 to 1882, which initially took a strong Tory line in politics.
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[s.n.]
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1879
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CT43
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Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Shelley as a lyric poet), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry in English
Romantic Poetry
-
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PDF Text
Text
65
lUIIab.
Why is it so with me, false Love,
Why is it so with me ?
Mine enemies might thus have dealt;
I fear’d it not of thee.
Thou wast the thought of all my thoughts,
Nor other hope had I:
My life was laid upon thy love;
Then how could’st let me die ?
The flower is loyal to the bud,
The greenwood to the spring,
The soldier to his banner bright,
The noble to his king :
The bee is constant to the hive,
The ringdove to the tree,
The martin to the cottage-eaves;
Thou only not to me.
Yet if again, false Love, thy feet
To tread the pathway burn
That once they trod so well and oft,
Return, false Love, return;
And stand beside thy maiden’s bier,
And thou wilt surely see,
That I have been as true to love
As thou wert false to me.
F. T. Palgrave.
4—5
�
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Title
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Ballad
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Palgrave, Francis Turner
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 1 page (p.65) ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From the Cornhill Magazine 30 (July, 1874). Attribution from Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900.
Publisher
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[Smith, Elder & Co.]
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[1874]
Identifier
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G5347
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Poetry
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
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724808c137b725610f48fa5ca6edb3aa
PDF Text
Text
850
Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
worships his kind are bounded, as we have said, by the limita
tions which he knows are incident to humanity; idealize as he
may, he can never free himself of the belief that no perfect man
or woman has ever trod this planet. How, then, is it possible
that any one but the ignorant and unreflective can ever feel the
glow of genuine devotion when he bows himself to a being whose
nature he knows to have been but a fragmentary representative of
the ideal of man, or when he worships his best conception of this
ideal itself knowing it to be an idol of his own creation ? These
fatal weaknesses of Positivism have no application to the Theist:
the fervour of his adoration is deadened by no secret conscious
ness that the object of his worship is marred with imperfection;
for however great and glorious may be the attributes he ascribes
to it, he feels assured that they are infinitely surpassed by the
Reality itself.
Art. II.—Recollections
of
Shelley
and
Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron.
Trelawny. London: Edward Moxon. 1858.
Byron.
By E. J.
R. TRELAWNY has done well in giving this manly and
carelessly written little volume to the world: it will at least
revive the personal memory of two Englishmen who, though long
dead, can never be altogether of the past. Without telling much
of either with which we were not previously acquainted, the infor
mation communicated is the result of intimate personal know
ledge, and, gathered during the intervals of a familiar acquaint
ance, comes out with such freshness and vigour, that it possesses
nearly all the merit of novelty; and the striking features of cha
racter are brought forward in much stronger relief, than in the
tame and wearisome biography of whioh one at least was the
victim. It is the least enviable appanage of genius that it perpe
tuates by its own lustre those faults and weaknesses which repose
in the graves of meaner men; the biographer, even though a
friend, cannot ignore these; and while he avoids giving them
undue prominence, cannot forget that truth has its claims, as well
as genius.
We recognise Shelley in these sketches as he appeared in his
works—the gentle, guileless, noble soul who persisted in putting
himself wrong with the world, and who rashly and fearlessly
launched his indignant sarcasm at the cant and bigotry and sei-
M
�Shelley's Personal Appearance.
351
fishness of society, without indicating any rational plan for its
regeneration. Had he possessed a friend sufficiently influential
and judicious to have delayed the publication of “ Queen Mab”
for ten years, Shelley’s lot might have been far different. How
could he reasonably expect forbearance from a society whose
creed, by a portion of it sincerely venerated, he so recklessly out
raged ? The wisest man feels himself to be an infant if he at
tempts to understand the doctrine of Original Sin ; and yet it was
this problem that the youthful and inexperienced Shelley dared to
grapple in his poem, in a spirit of unparalleled rashness and pre
sumption.
Mr. Trelawny was for some time, as is well known, the compa
nion of Byron and Shelley during their voluntary exile in Italy.
Too manly and too honest to believe in the justice of the tremendous
calumnies which drove Shelley from England, and deprived him
of his children, he was yet, like all who ever came to personal
knowledge of Shelley, astonished to find what manner of man
was this of whom all who did not know him spoke so ill. We
see him as Mr. Trelawny saw him, more than thirty years since,
in the following scene:—
“ Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall thin stripling held out
both his hands; and although I could hardly believe, as I looked at his
flushed, feminine, and artless face, that it could be the poet, I re
turned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and cour
tesies, he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment; was
it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable mon
ster at war with all the world ?—excommunicated by the fathers of
the Church, deprived of his civil rights by a grim Lord Chancellor,
discarded by every member of his family, and denounced by the rival
sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school ? I could
not believe it; it must be a hoax. He was habited like a boy, in black
jacket and trousers, which he seemed to have outgrown, or his tailor,
as is the custom, had shamefully stinted him in his 1 sizings.’ ”
His wife’s personal appearance, nee Godwin, the authoress of
“Frankenstein,”is sketched on the same occasion:—
“ The most striking feature in her face was her calm, grey eyes.
She was rather under the English standard of woman’s height, very
fair and fight-haired, witty, social and animated in the society of
friends, though mournful in solitude; like Shelley, though in a minor
degree, she had the power of expressing her thoughts in varied and
appropriate words, derived from familiarity with the works of our
vigorous old writers. Neither of them used obsolete or foreign
words.”
The artless and natural character of Shelley endeared him to
the few who had the privilege of personal knowledge; and,
as appears from these sketches, contrasted very favourably with
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
the artificial manner and undisguised egotism of Byron—but, in
truth, the latter was only himself when in the stillness of night
he was engaged in composition, and absorbed into forgetfulness
of his physical deficiences and his chronic starvation.
Mr. Trelawny gives a more minute and circumstantial detail
than has previously appeared, of the miserable circumstances at
tending the deaths of Shelley and his companion Mr. Williams.
The letter which the latter had despatched to his wife on the pre
vious day, informing her and Mrs. Shelley of their proposed return
to the home in the Gulf of Spezzia, where both ladies were
anxiously expecting their husbands, who had been unexpectedly
detained in Leghorn, is surely, breathing as it does the warmest
affection, destined to be so sadly quenched, the most touching
document ever preserved from oblivion. The condition of the two
bodies, when thrown ashore after many days, was such as to make
incremation the most eligible means of disposing of the remains ;
and this proceeding was conducted in both cases—for they were
not burned together—with great care by Mr. Trelawny, in an iron
furnace constructed on purpose. Lord Byron may have given way
to some apparent levity on the occasion; but it was but to conceal
an emotion he deeply felt, but which he lacked the moral courage
to evince publicly. Shelley’s toy skiff, the Don Juan, in which
they embarked with inauspicious omens on that melancholy even
ing, does not appear to have been capsized during the gale, not
withstanding the ominous remark of the Genoese mate of the
Bolivar about the superfluous gaff-topsail; but from her damaged
condition, when afterwards weighed by the exertions of Captain
Roberts, was probably run down by some Italian speronare
scudding before the gale.
Shelley stands far higher in the opinions of his country
men now than when his gentle spirit and ardent love of truth
were quenched for ever in the waves of the Mediterranean. It is
not necessary to vindicate his character from calumnies which are
long forgotten; but if there are any who, not knowing, yet care to
know, how gentle, how generous, how accomplished, and how
unselfish he was, it is written in this late testimony of one who
knew him well, and knowing him well in life, had the hard task
assigned him of communicating his premature death to the de
spairing widow.
Shelley formed a correct and candid estimate of his own writ
ings when he said, “ They are little else than visions which im
personate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and just—they
are dreams of what ought to be, or may be.” He read too much,
was altogether too much imbued with the ideas of others. His
were the azure and vermilion clouds that float in insubstantial
beauty through the atmosphere of an Alpine sunrise, rather than
�Byrons Movements after Shelley’s Death.
353
the enduring creation of grandeur, strength, and beauty which we
recognise in a great poem.
After Shelley’s death, Byron moved from Pisa to Albaro, near
Genoa, where he occupied the Casa Saluzzi; but the loss of one
whom he must have looked on as a friend, and respected for the
nobleness of his nature, together with the failure of the Liberal,
which could hardly succeed undei* the auspices of two such
editors as Hunt and himself, made him dissatisfied with an inac
tive existence, and he looked round for some field, not of enter
prise, but excitement. He was quite unfit constitutionally to en
counter real fatigue or privation; he had courage, no doubt;
contempt of life, and tameless pride, but neither possessed the
physical or mental robustness to see in well-planned, and longsustained action a career of distinction or usefulness. After much
wavering, he determined to revisit Greece, and bought a vessel to
convey himself and his lares to the land which was to witness
his own dissolution, and thus to derive from him another of its
many claims to classic interest. The choice of his vessel seems
to have been decided more by motives of economy than from any
regard to its nautical capabilities, and when its defects were indi
cated by a more critical judgment than his own, he was consoled
by the reflection that he had got it a bargain.
It was on the 13th of July, 1823, that lie sailed in the Hercules
from Genoa with Mr. Trelawny, Count Gamba, and an Italian
crew ; slowly they stood eastward up the Mediterranean, and so
wretched were the sailing qualities of the vessel, that even with
a fair wind the average progress was but twenty miles a day.
They put into Leghorn, which they quitted for Cephalonia, on the
23rd of July.
“ On coming near Lonza, a small islet converted into one of its
many prisons by the Neapolitan government, I said to Byron, ‘ There
is a sight that would curdle the blood of a poet laureate.’ ‘ If
Southey were here,’ he answered, ‘ he would sing hosannahs to the
Bourbons. Here kings and governors are only the jailors and hangmen
of the detestable Austrian barbarians. What dolts and drivellers the
people are to submit to such universal despotism. I should like to see
from this our ark, the world, submerged, and all the rascals drowning on
it like rats.’ I put a pencil and paper into his hand, saying, ‘ Perpe
tuate your curses on tyranny,’ &c. He readily took the paper and set
to work. I walked the deck, and prevented his being disturbed. . . .
After a long spell he said, ‘ You think it is as easy to write poetry as
to smoke a cigar—look, it’s only doggrel. Extemporising verse is non
sense ; Poetry is a distinct faculty—it wont come when called. You
may as well whistle for a wind; a Pythoness was primed when put
into the tripod. I must chew the cud before I write. I have
thought over most of my subjects for years before writing a line.’ . . .
‘ Give me time—I can’t forget the theme ; but for this Greek business
[Vol. LXIX. No. CXXXVI.]—New Sekies, Vol. XIII. No. II. A A
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
I should have been at Naples writing a fifth canto of ‘ Childe Harold,’
expressly to give vent to my detestation of the Austrian tyranny in
Italy.’ ”
But his own earlier lines might well have recurred both to the
poet and to his biographer, for surely none could be more appli
cable to the scene before their eyes then, as before ours now, when
we look on Naples :—
“ It is as though the fiends prevailed
Against the seraphs they assailed,
And fixed on heavenly thrones should dwell
The freed inheritors of hell—
So fair the scene, so formed for joy,
So cursed the tyrants that destroy.”
“ The poet had an antipathy to everything scientific; maps and
charts offended him............ Buildings the most ancient or modern he
was as indifferent to as he was to painting, sculpture, or music. But
dll natural objects, or changes in the elements, he was generally the
first to point out, and the last to lose sight of.” p. 187. [The italics
are our own.]
Mr. Trelawny echoes an old remark of Baron Macaulay’s
(Warren Hastings), which every one’s experience will confirm,
as to the effect of a sea voyage in testing temper and character,
and says—“ I never was on shipboard with a better companion
than Byron : he was generally cheerful, gave no trouble, assumed
no authority, uttered no complaints, and did not interfere with
the working of the ship; when appealed to, he always answered,
‘Do as you like.’” There was much enjoyment of life on board
this dull sailer, the Hercules; and the voyage, if protracted, was
under clear, warm skies, and in smooth water. One scene nar
rated has a grimly comic element: apropos to some remark,
Byron exclaimed, “ Women, you should say; if we had a woman
kind on board, she would set us all at loggerheads, and make a
mutiny; would she not, captain?” “I wish my old woman were
here,” replied the skipper; “ she would make you as comfortable
in my cabin at sea as your own wife would in her parlour on
shore.” Byron started, and looked savage. The skipper went
on unconscious, &c. &c.
Byron had written an autobiography, it seems, conceived in
manly, straightforward fashion,—in a vigorous, fearless style, and
was apparently truthful as regarded himself. It was subse
quently entrusted to Mr. Moore, as literary executor, and by him
suppressed, following the advice of others, it would seem. “ I
told Murray Lady Byron was to read the manuscript if she
wished it, and requested she would add, omit, or make any com
ments she pleased, now, or when it was going through the press.”
(p. 197.) They reached Zante and Cephaloniaat last; and after
�. Byron’s second Visit to Greece.
355
an absence of eleven years, Lord Byron again saw the Morea,
which he loved so well—
“ The sun, the sky, but not the slave the same.”
The reckless greediness of the Suliote refugees at Cephalonia
disgusted him; and the intelligence he received about the pros
pects of liberty in Greece, or the probability of assistance from
the Western Powers, so long withheld, being far from encourag
ing, he determined to remain some time at Cephalonia, but pre
ferred living on board to accepting the warmly-proffered hospi
tality of Colonel Charles Napier, or of the other residents in the
island.
•“ One day, after a bathe, he held out his right leg to me, saying—
‘ I hope this accursed limb will be knocked off in the war.’ ‘ It wont
improve your swimming,’ I answered; ‘ I will exchange legs, if you
will give me a portion of your brains.’ £ You would repent your bar
gain,’ he said, &e. &c.” (p. 20.)
The Greeks, it appears, very rationally desired a strong cen
tralized authority to suppress the hordes of robbers—much more
numerous than usual, since the outbreak of the war with Turkey
■—and talked, at least a portion of them did, of offering the
crown to Byron; he might have bought it, perhaps, afterwards
at Salona, and the Greeks would have had a king for three
months, if he had not abdicated before, worthy of their classical
renown certainly, but not quite the man to disentangle, or divide
the political and social complications in which they were en
tangled. The beauty of Ithaca, visited at this time, seems to
have justified the persevering partiality of Ulysses for his island
kingdom; but there is an inexcusable piece of rudeness to the
abbot of a Greek convent on that island, recorded against Byron.
The poor man had received him with all the honour in his power
or knowledge, but proceeded, unluckily, to inflict an harangue of
such length and solemnity, that Lord Byron, who had missed
the indispensable siesta, broke into ungovernable wrath, and
abused his entertainer with much more emphasis than euphony,
from which his character, and wish to please, should certainly
have protected the abbot. No wonder that the astounded abbot
could find no better excuse for the conduct of the English peer
and poet than madness—“ Ecolo e matto poveretto.”
Mr. Trelawny left Lord Byron at Cephalonia, for he was long
in moving when once settled, and never saw him again in life.
Anxious to know something of the state of matters in the Morea,
the former passed over, accompanied by Mr. Hamilton Browne.
They found only confusion, intrigue, and embezzlement; and after
transacting a little business, his companion, Mr. Browne, went
to London, accompanying certain Greek deputies, who were comAA2
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
missioned to raise a loan there, which, wonderful to relate, they
succeeded in doing ; though the worthy stockbrokers could hardly
have been moved to liberality, or rather credulity, by their
classical sympathies; while Mr. Trelawny, quitting the Morea,
made for Athens, and joined a celebrated robber chief, who had
assumed political functions in the disturbed and anarchic state
of the country, and bore the classical name of Odysseus. In
January, 1824, Mr. Trelawny heard that Byron had gone to
Missolonghi, and then, that he was dead; worn out with fatigue,
anxiety, and disgust, his frame, already shattered by repeated
attacks of remittent fever, acquired during former residence in
the marsh-girt cities of Ravenna and Venice, succumbed in the
prime of life to the miasma which in greater or less intensity,
according to the season, constitutes the atmosphere of Misso
longhi. Mr. Trelawny was at Salona, but left for Missolonghi
directly, which he entered on the third day from his departure,
and found it “ situated on the verge of the most dismal swamp I
had ever seen.”
“ No one was in the house but Fletcher, who withdrew the black
pall and the white shroud, and there lay the embalmed body of the
Pilgrim—more beautiful even in death than in life. The contraction
of the skin and muscles had effaced every line traced by time or
passion; few marble busts could have matched its stainless white, the
harmony of its proportions, and its perfect finish. Yet he had been
dissatisfied with that body, and longed to cast its slough. How often
have I heard him curse it. I asked Fletcher to bring me a glass of
water; and on his leaving the room, to confirm or remove my doubts
as to the cause of his lameness, I uncovered the Pilgrim’s feet, and
was answered—both his feet were clubbed, and the legs withered to
the knee: the form and face of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a
.sylvan satyr.”
The remaining chapters are exclusively autobiographical, and
are not without interest, for Mr. Trelawny’s name has become
historical in Gordon’s “ History of the Greek Revolution.” His
adventures are not commonplace; and his intimate connexion
with the family and fortunes of Odysseus afforded an opportunity
of seeing and knowing more of the wilder and worthier elements
of Romaic character than has fallen to the lot of any other edu
cated Englishman. For some time he held watch and ward in
the fortified, inaccessible cave on Mount Parnassus, where Odys
seus had placed his family and property, with a garrison of a few
men, and his brother-in-law, Mr. Trelawny, in command. He
was at last desperately wounded in a very treacherous manner,
by a Scotchman named Fenton, whom he had unduly trusted,
but who had been bribed to act as a spy on Odysseus and him
self, He tells his story, regardless of criticism, in a frank and
�Byron’s early Poetry.
357
candid manner; and it must be a captious critic indeed, who can
object to the consciousness of that superior physical strength and
vigour, which sustained with ease exertions that exhausted the
more delicate powers of the two celebrated companions, whose
names lend so much interest to his book, and to whose intel
lectual pre-eminence he renders respectful and affectionate
homage.
We have so recently recorded our opinions on Shelley’s
*
writings, that we shall now offer a few remarks on some portion
of Lord Byron’s poetry, which, with all its popularity, has not,
it appears to us, been always rightly estimated. He unaffectedly
repudiated the opinion so generally entertained, that he was the
hero of his own compositions—that the monotonous protagonists
of his early and brilliantly successful Eastern tales, no less than
the blase and reflective “ Childe,” or the fortunate and brilliant
“Don Juan,” were drawn from the inspiration of a too partial
egotism. We are inclined to believe in the sincerity of his pro
test, and to attribute to dramatic poverty the uniformity of his
characters, and to his own physical imperfection the bodily
strength and activity by which his heroes are so generally distin
guished. In those short pieces which were the fruits of his early
travels, and which at once attracted the attention of every reader
by the unequalled brilliancy of the language, we perceive the
immature judgment and the vehement sensation of his character;
the verse flows onward in a torrent of splendour, and a false lustre
is given to the passion whose fruit is ashes; beauty of form, and
the easy and over-valued achievements of physical courage, are
the artless and ordinary attractions of his actors; there is no
depth or refinement of character, no difficult invention; the
poems are but pictures of ordinary merit, in splendid frames.
But a deeper knowledge dawned upon him—a larger experience
of his own heart, though little of the actual world from which he
shrunk; and if he, as most men have done, regretted the delu
sions of the master-passion, and wished that the deception had
lasted for ever, or had never existed, yet his later strains, in their
deeper tone and wider sympathies, evince that better self-know
ledge, without which no man has successfully mapped even the
narrowest province of the human heart; for that knowledge is itself
but the evidence and the record of sufferings which the conflicts
of reason with passion must ever produce.
In the crude though not inharmonious products of his youth,
we see how little he had felt his strength, and how he was fettered
by the rules which had been the guide of his model and antithesis
Pope; nowhere does he dare to be original, and the spirit which
* Vide Number for January of this year.
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
dictated his first and weakest satire, was but the natural resent
ment of an Englishman who had no mind to he bullied: the mere
mechanical versification gives small promise of the matchless
powers which produced “ Don Juan ” and “ Beppo;” and in the
matter, there is nothing to warn us of that contemplative and
deeply poetical thought which is so apparent in the “Prophecy of
Dante,” and in the two later cantos of “ Childe Harold.” Even
those unequalled satiric powers which culminated in the “ Irish
Avatar,” are but shadowed, not developed, and the commonplace
abuse and half-affected contempt of his first satire are calculated
to produce a very different effect from the withering ridicule and
careless contempt which overwhelmed those who provoked the
displeasure of his later years.
The German critics, with a severity of taste that does them
honour, place the three great poets, whose names at once occur
to us—Homer, Shakspeare, and Goethe—so far above all rivalry,
as to accord to these alone that supremacy and universality of
intellect which we call poetic genius; and this may be just, but
the human mind is so constituted in its appreciation of poetry,
as sometimes to derive superior pleasure from strains which have
emanated from minds of far inferior order. We like best that
poetry which addresses most strongly and directly the prevailing
sentiments of our own characters; and hence thousands in whom
the finest of Homer’s rhapsodies, Shakspeare’s “ Tempest,” or
Goethe’s “ Iphigenia,” would awake no other sentiment than cool
admiration, would be moved to tears or to enthusiasm by Pindar,
Campbell, or Gray. It is no less certain that men of even the
keenest intellect merely, are not unfrequently deficient in poetic
taste and judgment. We know, for example, that Napoleon pre
ferred Ossian, and Robert Hall Virgil to Homer; and that
Lord Byron himself, utterly wanting in dramatic power, but little
appreciated the true strength of Shakspeare.
Poetry, indeed,
especially of the first order, must be felt in the heart as well as
judged by the head, and the greatest merit is least apparent to a
superficial glance; long study, contemplation, and comparison
are required to comprehend the consummate excellence of a
masterpiece, whether it be from the hand of Shakspeare or the
pencil of Raphael.
But if the very few of the first order of poets completely satisfy
all the requirements of the most refined and matured intellect,
the poetry of Lord Byron will always appeal strongly to those,
and they are not a few, whose passions, at some period of their
lives, have proved too strong for the control of reason, and where
regret, if not remorse, has followed the fruitless contest—a contest
which has left the mind vacant for want of strong excitement,
�Characteristics of Byron’s Poetry.
359
and wearied with a scene which offers no sufficient substitute for
what has been lost. Flashes of the melancholy wisdom which
follows on such experience are frequent in his later works, and
their deep, and perhaps not barren truth, may sink with some
thing of a healing and enlightening influence into hearts whose
scars are not yet callous.
There is, too, a strong and ardent reverence for the nobleness
of intellect, ever felt most strongly by those most highly endowed;
that reverence which, rightly considered, is the only true religion,
and a scorn, as strongly expressed, for the vulgar or tinsel idols
of mob idolatry.
His spirit had wrestled with itself in vain; the vehement and
unwise desire for something denied to mere mortality was his;
the self-condemnation of performance so grievously inadequate to
the lofty resolution, which more or less dwells in every heart,
rebelling against the sway of low desires, was strong upon him;
so that he hated life, and sought at first wildly, but afterwards
more calmly, to give that feeling utterance : but the “ voiceless
thought” could not so be spoken, and he, the most eloquent,
went to his grave without succeeding in the vain effort to
unburden his full heart. Not by words, however eloquent, can
man satisfy himself, or vindicate liis life to others. Consistent
action alone can satisfy the conscience, or justify us to our own
hearts; and when action is denied or unsought, we strive for the
relief, however inadequate, that words can furnish. Thus Chaucer:
“ For when we may not do, then will we speken,
And in our ashen colde, is fire yreken.”
Had any suitable career of action been open to him, or had he
lived in feudal times, he might have surpassed Bertrand de Born
in thirst for irregular warlike achievement, and in the strains that
celebrated it; the monotony of a modern.military career, and the
subordination which can recognise no superiority but professional
rank, where the opportunity of achievement is an accident, and
routine the rule of life, was utterly unsuited to his character and
his physical constitution. No better career offered to him than that
miserable one of Missolonghi, and here he gave evidence of a
moderation and self-command little to have been expected from
a man whose vanity and egotism were not less conspicuous than
his genius; this desire for an active career is translated into his
eastern stories, and his heroes are rather models of what he
wished to be, than what he was.
His forte, however, as he knew, was vivid description, varied
and illuminated by flashes of earnest thought, and the results of
a melancholy, if a short experience.
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Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
In sustained diamatic, or epic power, he was deficient; but
this is an imperial endowment, and, in his own language,
“ Not Hellas could unrol
From her Olympiads two such names.”
His “Manfred,” despite Mr. Moore’s crude criticism, is a dramatic
failure ; and when he calls this creation of Lord Byron’s “ loftier
and worse ” than Milton’s Satan, the critic shows how little of
the dramatic or epic element he must have himself possessed.
“ Manfred ” is not a great creation—he is but a dreamer, who,
finding no pleasure in an earthly pursuit, itself a morbid and
unhealthy feeling, strives to o’erpass the limits of mortality, and
to coerce the Spirits whom the elements obey. Such a desire, as
common as it was vain, before men had emerged from the super
stitious element of the middle ages, evinces no elevation or great
ness of character, and if with dauntless courage he defies the
spirits whom he had evoked by his spells, and provoked by his
contempt of their power, he does so as one who knows they
cannot injure him, and who seeks death rather than shuns it.
The great blot of the piece, however, is the doubt that encom
passes the fate of Astarte; the imagination can conceive no adequate
cause for the terrible implacability which could reign in the bosom
of a beatified spirit, and deny to a despairing brother one word
of consolation in his awful abandonment. If she could condemn
him, how can he be forgiven ?
Such a subject, however attractive to a writer of strong imagi
nation, and however promising in appearance, proves much more
difficult to treat adequately, if, indeed, it can ever be so treated
at all, than scenes and characters of a more earthly nature, where
strictly human agents appeal to a kindred reason and sympathy.
The communion of the supernatural with the natural has been
a favourite theme, and a certain stumbling-block, to the greatest
poets. Homei' succeeded best, because he invented little, taking
the materials within his reach—and his gods and goddesses are
but human beings, with a loftier physical and mental stature; it
was easy to introduce them implementing the inferior powers of
their favourite heroes, but we feel that, in all that should distin
guish the supernatural Being above the human nature, the greatest
of all, the tyrant Zeus, was inferior. Like some vulgar earthly
ruler, he uses his power but to gratify passions unworthy of
a God------ and the charm of divine beauty and celestial grace
which hovers for ever round the name of Aphrodite, is insufficient
to overcome the disgust with which we regard her threat to
Helena, when the latter indignantly refuses to return to her van
quished and fugitive paramour.
And when, in the “ Tempest,” Shakspeare introduces Ariel to-
�The Supernatural as an Element of Poetry.
361
delude and torment a set of drunken menials, or frighten a brutal
and ignorant drudge, he scarcely redeems the character of that
“ dainty” creation by his services in reconstructing the shattered
ship, or even in deceiving the wretches who were plotting the
death of the Duke. An inspired genius may walk through pro
prieties at will, as he so constantly does, but even Shakspeare
might have remembered in the “Tempest,” “NecDeus intersit,” &c.
When Goethe, following the popular superstition, introduces
the Devil, thinly disguised, as the companion and mentor of
Faust, he goes easily enough with the pair through the tempta
tions and the punishment of his neophyte and of Margaret—an
episode too common in daily life to require the Devil as its agent
—and Faust, when on the blasted heath he upbraids Mephisto
with the cruel fate of her he should have protected from all harm,
and curses himself as the dupe of a pitiless fiend, does but vent
the reproaches many a man has heaped on himself, shuddering, if he
had a conscience, at the cruel treachery which has rent a heart that
beat only for him. But when the great German leaves the popular
guide to invent a sphere of supernatural action, when Faust
appears in scenes where the author has no guide from tradition,
and subject to temptations of a less human character, we see how
little mere mortal wit can observe any semblance of probability,
or appearance of cohesion, in attempting that for which there is
no actual precedent in human experience. There is but one
Magician, and he has long laid aside all pretensions above morta
lity. Patient and sagacious interrogation of nature, in disclosing
the hidden properties of matter, has evoked powers which the
genii of the lamp might have envied, and wealth, which would
have satisfied the avarice of the alchemists.
The greatest can but draw the supernatural from knowledge of
the natural, and we have but human nature exaggerated in the
majority of instances; Shakspeare’s Ariel, and the spirits in
“Manfred” are nearly the only exceptions. Homer is greatest
where he describes the actions of men, and the submissive grace
and tenderness of women. Shakspeare stirs the heart, and
awakens our admiration most strongly when he depicts the
loving constancy of the gentler sex, and the masculine heroism of
Coriolanus or of Henry the Fifth. Goethe has an easy task when
he echoes the sarcastic mockery, or paints the demon heart of
Mephisto; but the master-hand is seen in the calm and natural
beauty of the “ Iphigenia,” and above all in his unequalled delinea
tion of the female nature; he who could draw such characters
as Gretchen, Clara, Mignon, and Adelheid von Weislingen, has
surpassed all others, Shakspeare himself, in this the most inte
resting province of observation and invention.
And Lord Byron, though he has clothed his demons with
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Recollections of Shelley ancl Byron.
majesty and power, though he has avoided the vulgar error of
too easily vanquishing evil by good, Satan by Abdiel, yet hardly
introduces these for purposes worthy their supernatural powers,
unless it be to justify the magnificent “ Hymn of the Spirits” in
worship round the throne of Ahrimanes.
In the first two cantos of “ Childe Harold,” the objective
element is strongly ascendant, written as they were at a period of
life when the world was still fresh, and the essential identity of
human nature, under all its phases, hardly appreciated. The
boundless command of his own language, and the liveliest sus
ceptibility to the beauty or grandeur of nature, produced a poem
which riveted immediately the attention of contemporaries, partly,
indeed, due to a comparative novelty of style, and the want of
sustained originality, in the poetry which immediately preceded
its publication; something too may have been owing to the lesser
preoccupation of the public by the floods of ephemeral and
amusing literature which dissipate the intellectual tastes of the
readers of our day. It is in the two latter cantos, and especially
the last, in which wTe find his powers completely matured, whether
reflective or descriptive. In these cantos he has carried those
important elements of poetry to their highest excellence, though
of invention, the test of the highest genius, we find no traces.
There is throughout a want of cohesion, if we consider “ Childe
Harold ” as an attempt at poetic creation, for the “ Childe” is a
voice, not a living pilgrim; but if we recognise Lord Byron him
self under an alias, narrating what he saw, and expressing in
just and vivid language what he felt, we have a poem, the various
merit of which it is difficult to over-estimate.
The vigour of description therein displayed is indeed without a
parallel; who has equalled, or even approached, the power displayed_ in stanzas 27, 28, 29 of the fourth canto ; in them we
see actually brought before us by the magical force of his lan
guage, the exquisite and fugitive beauties of an Italian sunset,
which would have mocked the pictorial art of Claude or Turner
to transfer to canvas. Mere words are made to appeal to the
mind more effectively than the consummate skill of the masters of
painting could appeal to the sense of vision. Even Homer is
here surpassed for a moment, for nowhere does he bring before
us so striking and so difficult a phase of nature’s ever-varying
countenance; not even in the familiar passage in the eighth
Rhapsody—
S’ or ev ovpavu aarpa (]>aeivi)v apuju (teXt]vt]v
<baivErai apLirpe7TEa. k. t. X.
though it well deserves the homage Byron pays it in the fourth
canto of the “ Prophecy of Dante”—
�Childe Harold.
363
a The kindled marble’s bust may wear
More poesy upon its speaking brow
Than aught less than the Homeric page may bear.”
In stanza 102, canto 3, we even seem to hear and see the
busy summer forest life of birds and insects in the woods of
Clarens, the rustle of the leaves in the early summer breath of
June, and the very plash of Alpine waterfalls; the beautiful
living solitude, unspoilt by the intrusion of man, comes before
us as if in spirit, or in a dream we were transported to the Swiss
wilderness ; it is transferred to paper as delicately and with truer
colouring than could have been effected by the calotype: but these
scenes in their quiet loveliness yet suggest reminiscences of the
world which the author and the reader have for a moment for
gotten, and the vigorous sketches of Gibbon and Voltaire, who
had long lived within sight of that beautiful scenery, come like
a cloud over the mind which had just been revelling in the
laughing sunshine of a Swiss landscape. Applied to graver
scenes, the same matchless power nearly rivals the merit of inven
tion, and when by the lake of Thrasymene (c. iv., w. 62, 63, 64),
he recals the strife that made Rome to reel on her seven-hilled
throne, and strove with inexorable fate to reverse her stern de
cree, the ancient battle comes before us as by a lightning-flash
darted into the abysses of the past; as the soldiers of Carthage
and of Rome pass before us in their deadly struggle.
Nothing can be more exquisite than the various harmony of
the stanzas from 86 to 104 of canto iii.: in these every variety of
emotion and of feeling is characterized; of admiration, reverence,
love, awe; and in the apostrophe to “ Clarens, sweet Clarens,”
that passion which he felt with so much of its earthly alloy is
exalted to a refinement almost unearthly, and to a dignity which
truly belongs to it, as in its purity the least selfish of human
desires.
Was there ever a tribute to the Divinity of Love so exquisite
as that contained in stanza 100 of canto iii.?—
“ O’er the flower
His eye is sparkling, and his breath hath blown
His soft and summer breath, whose tender power
Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate hour.”
Such language may fairly excite a rapturous admiration, resem
bling that which he professes, and only professes to have felt,
when beholding the marble loveliness of the Medicean Venus.
But in a different mood, and with feelings disappointed or
blunted, he afterwards recurs to this, the dream of youth, and the
disenchantment of maturity; and as a warning against the in
dulgence of that passionate and eager credulity, what homily or
�350
Recollections of Shelley and Byron.
worships his kind are hounded, as we have said, by the limita
tions which he knows are incident to humanity; idealize as he
may, he can never free himself of the belief that no perfect man
or woman has ever trod this planet. How, then, is it possible
that any one but the ignorant and unreflective can ever feel the
glow of genuine devotion when he bows himself to a being whose
nature he knows to have been but a fragmentary representative of
the ideal of man, or when he worships his best conception of this
ideal itself knowing it to be an idol of his own creation? These
fatal weaknesses of Positivism have no application to the Theist:
the fervour of his adoration is deadened by no secret conscious
ness that the object of his worship is marred with imperfection;
for however great and glorious may be the attributes he ascribes
to it, he feels assured that they are infinitely surpassed by the
Reality itself.
——
C7I
Art. II.—Recollections of Shelley
and
Recollections of the Last Lays of Shelley and Byron.
Trelawny. London: Edward Moxon. 1858.
Byron.
By E. J.
R. TRELAWNY has done well in giving this manly and
carelessly written little volume to the world: it will at least
revive the personal memory of two Englishmen who, though long
dead, can never be altogether of the past. Without telling much
of either with which we were not previously acquainted, the infor
mation communicated is the result of intimate personal know
ledge, and, gathered during the intervals of a familiar acquaint
ance, comes out with such freshness and vigour, that it possesses
nearly all the merit of novelty; and the striking features of cha
racter are brought forward in much stronger relief, than in the
tame and wearisome biography of which one at least was the
victim. It is the least enviable appanage of genius that it perpe
tuates by its own lustre those faults and weaknesses which repose
in the graves of meaner men; the biographer, even though a
friend, cannot ignore these; and while he avoids giving them
undue prominence, cannot forget that truth has its claims, as well
as genius.
We recognise Shelley in these sketches as he appeared in his
works—the gentle, guileless, noble soul who persisted in putting
himself wrong with the world, and who rashly and fearlessly
launched his indignant sarcasm at the cant and bigotry and sei-
M
�
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Recollections of Shelley and Byron
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: p. 350-368 ; 22 cm.
Notes: Review essay of "Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron" by Edward John Trelawny. London: Edward Moxon, 1858. Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From Westminster Review 13 (April 1858).
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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1858
Identifier
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CT42
Creator
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[Unknown]
Subject
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Book reviews
Poetry
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Recollections of Shelley and Byron), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Book Reviews
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
George Gordon Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry in English
Romantic Poetry
-
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6a050d37757e59481c9eb939537c03da
PDF Text
Text
FATED OTHERWISE,
A POEM,
BY
BLANCHE
AUTHORESS
“IN
MORTIMER,
OF THE POEM
OTHER LANDS,”
&c, &c.
FERMOY :
PRINTED BY JOHN LINDSEY, KING STREET,
1871.
�*
-
�Fated
Otherwise.
It is customary, now, to acknowledge the source from
whence our Plays and Poesies are inspired, hence, become
identified in Madame de Valerie at her meeting with Ernest
Maltravers.
Lord Lytton’s Romance.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Visions sweetly fair shone before me in array;
A beauteous form in white,
So maidenly and slight,
With rosy cheeks so bright,
Like a fay,
Like a fay,
As I lay a-dreaming, she skipped o’er heath and spray.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Gazing in a boudoir soft sounds swept by my ear:
“Bright-eyed Canary, tell to me
“Whether One could ever see,
“ How One’s lot in life would be,
“ It isn’t clear
“It isn’t clear.”
As I lay a-dreaming, her bird she asked in fear.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Shaking all his plumes he merrily chirped away:
“ Now can I look so sage,
“ When confined within my cage
“ I do not know the Age,
“Life’s not play,
“ Life’s not play:”
As I lay a-drcaming, he chirped “ we turn to clay.”
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
A Parrot from her perch screamed “ Closely watch the Page,
“ Scratch poll, I’m Pol, Polly knows,
“Mark the vane when it blows,
“Darling is her Papa’s rose,
“ Love’s the rage,
“Love’s the rage.”
As I lay a-dreaming, screeched “ Remain sixteen in age.”
�4
FATED OTHERWISE.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Charming was the ball room presented to my view,
Those bosoms heaving there,
With diamonds as a snare,
Like serpents in their lair,
Folly too,
Folly too,
As I lay a-dreaming, thought Satan must have you.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Hidden in an alcove two lovers fondly coo’d;
“ Darling, lavest thou me,
“ My wife, Sweet, wilt thou be ?“ Say yes, for I love thee,”
Oh, love’s mood,
Oh, love’s mood.
As I lay a-xlreaming, ’twas thus he won and woo’d..
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
His hand she gently pressed and blushing answered soon,
“ There’s one more query yet,
“ Papa must free his pet,
“He would not see her fret.”
‘ A honeymoon !
‘ A honeymoon ! ’
As I lay a-dreaming, she mused ‘ ’tviixt lip, and spoon.’
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
“ Quite early yet to marry,” said the Earl in hauteur;;
“ No, no, my noble boy,
“ Thou must not make a toy
“Of her’ nay fondest joy.”
‘ Lose my daughter !
‘ Lose my daughter
As 1 lay a-dreaming, thought could he not thwart her,
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Thus spake her Sire again, a vivid whim to strike,
“ Go, England’s Flag to wave,
“ To dwell amidst the brave
“ A great name boy to pave,
“ Cutlass and pike !
“ Cutlass and pike 1”
As I lay a-dreaming, mused he, this ruse I like.
�FATED
OTHERWISE.
5.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Sadly sobbed the Earl with his face between his hancfe:•
“ Acquired in every art,
“ So fashioned to my heart,
“I could not with her part,
“Brief are life’s sands,
“ Brief are life’s sands.”
As I lay a-dreaming, willed, “ she bends to my commands.”
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
So. fondly a letter she has clasped to her breast;
“Lina, Pet, I am well,
“ Hugh writes from sea to tell
“Love to his own Blue belle.
“ Eears at rest,
“ Fears at rest.
As I lay a-dreaming, cried, P.S. ? No ! Which I detest.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Lina and her Aunt were embarked in fierce contest:
“ His talents are so great,
“ Likewise that huge estate,
“ While there’s a marquisate,
“ Which is no jest,
“ Which is no jest.
As I lay a-dreaming, ended, “ wealth'grasped is best.”
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Our heroine replies, in simple earnest tone :
“ Golden fetters, ehains they are,
“Happiness at best is far,
“Spring and Winter more than jar,
“ My love is flown,
“ My love is flown.”
As I lay a-dreaming.. breathed, no throne would I own.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
“ Heart-rending loss,” read the Earl from his Court Review
“ A cyclone it is said,
“ Caught “ Canute,” and o’erspread
“ All lives in their last bed.’’
“ Poor dear Hugh,
“ Poor dear Hugh.”
As I lay a-dreaming, She sobbed and breathed A Djev.
�6
FATED OTHERWISE.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
I wondered how quickly faces from memory fade,
When from dying friends we’re torn,
Nature yields our grief a bourn,
Then virgins sigh, widows mourn.
Born, soon decayed,
Born, soon decayed.
As [ lay a-dreaming, mused, How should I be laid
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
At the Altar stood a Marquis with his young bride :
Her eyes glistened with tears,
Her heart panted with fears,
Those cheers jarred on her ears,
“For life tied,
“ For life tied.”
As I lay a-dreaming sighed, “ wreath thou dost deride.”
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
From the Church-porch issued the joyous wedding throng,
Silver coins pleased the crowd,
Children strewed flowers and bowed,
Harridans grinned aloud:
“ May you live long!
“ May you live long!”
As I lay a-dreaming, the bells pealed out So-Wrong.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Lina strolled around the scenes of her childish glee :
“ ’Twas here he stood that day,
“Here kissed that frown away...
“ That coming form! Oh stay !
“ Alive and free,
“ Alive and free,’’
As I lay a-dreaming, shrieked, “ yes! to torture me.”
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Hugh bounding o’ei' a rivulet has reached her seat.
‘ His kiss gives my eyes a gleam,
‘ Do I wake as from a dream,
‘Madness, but ecstacy supreme,’
“Art sad to meet?
“ Art sad to meet ?”
As I lay a-dreaming, Hugh cried, “ Speak, I entreat.!”
�FATED
OTIIjE RAVI SE.
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Hugh rattled gaily on as there she sat tongue-tied:
“Nine jumped in an open boat,
“Providence kept us afloat,
“ Till ta’en to a Port remote.
“ What! a Bride !
“Thou! a Bride.”
As I lay a-dreaming, moaned, “ Thou my life, my guide.”
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
Starting to her feet she wildly cried “leave me not,
“ I will fly, if you dare;
“ Spurn me not, if you share
“ One wish for my wellfare,
“ Pity my lot,
“ Pity my lot.”
As I lay a-dreaming, urged, “ help me tear that knot.”
As I lay a-dreaming, a-dreaming, a-dreaming,
He said, “ Darling, Civilization leads astray,
“ Yet scorn her she wields hate,
“Women map the maiden’s fate
“ As Fiends hate, of love in hate,
“ Hard to obey,
“ Hard to obey.”
As I lay a-dreaming, cried, “ Fortune does betray.”
As I shook in dreaming, in dreaming, in dreaming—
Sweetest Lutestring, another word then I am gone,
“Try thy sad lot to bear, dear,
“ Sorrows are not given here,
“ Without some cause rests quite clear,
“ But each May morn,
“ But each May morn.
“If I fall in dream-land I’ll muse for my lovelorn.’’
BLANCHE MOBTIMEB.
7
��
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Fated otherwise, a poem
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mortimer, Blanche
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Fermoy
Collation: 7 p. ; 21 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Printed by John Lindsey
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1871
Identifier
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G5313
Subject
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Poetry
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Fated otherwise, a poem), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
-
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438e3d1bc1f5144ee814659edd9da78a
PDF Text
Text
A WINTRY WALK
AMONG THE MOUNTAINS
WITH SINCEREST APOLOGIES TO THE SHADE OF HIAWATHA.
LONDON:
F. B. KITTO, 5, BISHOPSGATE STREET WITHOUT.
1867.
�EXPLANATORY.
The following lines contain an accurate account of what befel
the writer during a ramble, on May 13th, 1867, over the summit
of Glyder-fach and down by Llyn Bochlwyd to Llyn Idwal,
returning by Twll-du and over Glyder-fawr, to Pen-y-gwryd.
Weather, densely overcast and strong gale from E. ; reached
the clouds and newly-fallen snow at about 2,000 feet above sea
level, and had the company of both to the summit, a further
height of 1,200 feet. The air temperature in the valley had fallen
twenty-five degrees since the evening of the 11th.
From several aneroid readings, the writer suspects Glyderfach, the Lesser Glyder, to be at least equal in height to Glyderfawr, i. e. to rise 3,275 feet or more above sea level; and from
Snowdon the former looks considerably the higher.
H. B. BIDEN.
Witton, Birmingham, '
June, 1867.
�A WINTRY WALK AMONG THE MOUNTAINS.
Scene—The Heart of Snowdonia.
MAY 13th, 1861.
Reader, let a rambler tell you,—
One who oft, the storm defying,
Converse lone has held with Nature
In her grandest, sternest aspect,
'Mid the crags of wild Snowdonia,
Or, with pleasantest companions,
Scaled her lofty peaks and ridges
Oft by roughest, untried circuit,
One incurably afflicted
With ^-oaetyetkes scandendiP'caccreiZu’s —
Though he ne’er beheld the wonders
Of the far-famed Alpine ranges
How, this day, alone, he wandered
O’er the newly snow-crowned mountains—
"Winter’s snows had gone in April*
Spite of Post, Gazette, or Record.
Senseless work, would say the Guide Books,—
Sapient, cockney-followed Guide Books,—
Yet most useful to the novice,
Thus “ without a guide ” (!) to wander,
Courting well deserved destruction !
How he scampered o’er the quagmires,
How he floundered through the Gwryd,
�4
More correctly called the Mymbyr,
Slipping off the treacherous boulders ;
Scrambled up the Lesser Glyder
Spite of clouds, of snow, and easter.
Wind beloved (?) and sung by Kingsley ;
Would that he could thus have felt it
Freezing his poor toes and fingers.
Reached the drifting, level, cloud-roof,
Plunged behind its dim grey curtain
Darkly stretched o’er lakes and valleys,
Blotting out all higher regions,
Hiding every well known landmark;
Reached the eighteen-inch-deep heather
Water-logged with snow half melted,
Half way up the lofty mountain ;
Onward, upward, floundering, scrambling,
Through the fog and furious east wind,
Steering now by faith and compass,
Reached unmitigated winter;
Clambered up by blocks and ledges
O’er the frozen cliffs and boulders ;
Gained a loftier, colder region,
Where the gale made wildest music
Howling o’er the crested ridges,
Through the obelisks and turrets,
Serried battlements and cannons,
Dimly seen through drifting mist wreath,
Outworks of the storm-rent summit:
Wondrous handiwork of Nature,
Nought like this is seen on Snowdon,
Though each scene alike be snowed on !
Reached Castell-y-gwynt, whose crags were
Pointed, edged with fairest frostwork ;
Frozen mist, on blocks and ledges—
Silvery plumage, icy feathers,
Pointed bristling to the tempest;
Hung with icicles of crystal
Glittering bright in rows and clusters
From each point and “ coign of vantage.”
Reached the lofty rock-strewn platform,
Where the snow lay thick around him,
Where the great Stonehenge-like ruins,
Ruins of no human structure,
■
'
�5
Lichen-marbled, sno w-besprinkJed,
Looming spectral through the cloud-rack
In their ever changing groupings,
Stood or leaned in solemn grandeur.
Porphyritic trap their structure ;
Trap indeed the writer found it
Once, too far the crags descending
Northward from the lofty summit
Recking not of cliffs beneath him ;—Novice then at mountaineering,
Yet compelled by his position
Down that wall of rock to scramble
To Cwm Bochlwyd’s deep recesses,—
Down, by clefts and narrowing ledges
Through the haunts of kite and raven.
Reached the pointed sharp-edged cap stone,
Bright with snow and silvery frostwork,
Thickly fringed with icy pendants,
Gleaming through the mist like daggers.
Crossed the rugged pile of “ ruins,”
Summit of the lofty mountain ;
Reached the rocky steep o’erlooking
Tryfan’s cone of blocks and pillars,—
Deep Cwm Bochlwyd’s wild recesses,
All concealed in clouds beneath him :
Whence the ravens’ dismal croaking
Echoed from the crags of Tryfan
O’er the hidden deep abysses
Reached his ear, in sudden chorus
Piercing through the eddying vapour,
IMwf loud in expectation,
Scenting, may be, feast most welcome,
Should the wanderer’s ice-numbed fingers'
Losing hold on crags or boulders,
Send him headlong down among them.
Corresponding members doubtless,
Of that “ Red-tarn Club,” so famous
Once, as holding nightly revel
In the wilds of far Helvellyn,
(Till disturbed by “Mister Wudswuth”)
O’er the bruised and mangled body
Of the luckless Obadiah !
(See Chris. North his “ Recreations.”)
�6
'fc
'fc
5|c
How, his purpose now accomplished,*
O’er the mountain crest returning,
Feet and fingers numbed and senseless
Struggling with the furious easter
And its six degrees of freezing,
Underneath his chin he carried
(Load unwonted for the season,
On this thirteenth day of fifth month)
Frozen mist, an icy burden
Hanging to his draggled whiskers,
Till each patriarchal “ Billy ”
In the depths of lone Cwm Bochlwyd,
In that rugged grey-goat valley,
Might have owned him as a brother ;
But, alas, the goats have vanished !
Passed again the “ Tempest’s Castle,”
Where on high, in snowy mantle,
Fringed and edged with frosted lace work
Stood the “ Sentinel ” gigantic,
Lonely ward and vigil keeping
Through the heats and frosts of ages
By the rugged block-strewn glacis
O’er the lofty Col du Gribin.
Floundered down the narrow couloir,
Waging cool war with the snow drift
By the eastern flank of Gribin,
Whose arête of stony columns,
Though by Ordnance-map constructors
Hardly indicated, rises
Rough with crest of spiny fretwork
(If the fog would let one see it ! )
Gained the scree, so loose and shelving,
Down the rugged steep descending.
Reached Llyn Boehlwyd’s sparkling fountain,
Dripping well of clearest water
Where the crystal streamlets trickle
From the high-ranged porph’ry columns,
From the cliff so grim and barren
Northwest face of Lesser Glyder
Down the screen of richest verdure ;
Golden rod and scented rose root,
Mountain rue, and kidney sorrel,
* Fixing a minimum thermometer among the rocks.
�7
Ladies’ mantle, starry cresses,
&®Men saxifrage, and mosses,
Glancing bright in silvery ripples.
Welcome sight when heats of summer
Parch with thirst the mountain climber ;
Beauteous now witli fairest frost-work
AM enframed in purest snow-wreath ;
Forty-two degrees its waters
Now, as in the heats of August.
Lost at length the whitened snow-field,
Left behind the realm of Winter,
Lost awhile the piercing east wind
In the lee of rugged Tryfan ;
Left above, the drifting vapour ;—
Saw the snow-crowned Carnedd Dafydd
Clear awhile from gloom and tempest;
Saw Llyn Ogwen’s rippling waters
Fifteen hundred feet beneath him ;
Saw the lengthening vale of Francon
Bask awhile in pleasant sunshine ;
Hastened down to ice-ground Bocblwyd
(See Professor Ramsay’s “ Glaciers : ”—
No connexion here writh Murray;
Safe in print the writer had it
In the “ Brum. Gazette ” of August—
Of the twenty-fifth of eighth month—
Eighteen hundred four and sixtyJ
Reached Llyn Bochlwyd’s sheet of silver ;
Stood beside its lonely margin
Sometimes reached by roving angler,
Scarcely known to guide-book maker,
Scene but rarely seen by artist;
Stood awhile, the view surveying.
Wild and gloomy frowned the valley,'
Dark beneath its roof of vapour
Stretched across from peaks to ridges,
From sharp Tryfan’s headless shoulders
To decapitated G ribin ;
While the crags of Lesser Glyder,
Seamed with lines of white, descending
Glacier-like from cloud-hid snow fields,
Closed the darksome rugged picture.
Glorious are these lofty mountains
�8
Scarred with precipice and cavern
In the full revealing sunshine
Of the pleasant days of summer ;
(All untrod by highway tourist
Only bent to “do” the country)
Yet most glorious, when the sunset
Breaking through departing tempest
Floods with sudden, radiant splendour
( Golden lights and ebon shadows )
“ Castle ” pinnacle and “ turret ”
On the lofty crested ridges ;
While the lazy snake-like cloud-wreaths,
Rank by rank in long procession,
Stained throughout with evening’s purple
Crawl athwart their lofty shoulders,
O’er the dim retiring valleys
Grey with cliff-entangled mist beds.
“ Scene of sternest desolation ; ”
Yet, amid its barren grandeur,
Gems of loveliest tint or verd ure
“ Waste on desert air their sweetness.”-—(Reader, please forgive this rendering
Of a somewhat well-worn passage.)
Oft they smile in welcome beauty
On the mountain rambler’s footsteps :—
Parsley fern in ell-broad masses,
Dots the screes with tufted clusters ;
Mountain thrift, the sea-green rose-root,
Gnarly rooted, golden blossomed,
Star, and mossy saxifrages,
Bladder fern in brittle lace-work,
Alchemilla, mountain shield fern,
Oak and beech ferns, stemless catchfly,
Golden rod, the pale green-spleenwort,
Fringe with green the rocks and ledges,
Line the mossy caves and crannies ;
While the bristling, bright fir club moss,
Sturdy little mountain climber,
Though it not disdains the valleys,
Dots with life the loftiest ridges ;
Or its grey-green Alpine cousin
Struggles through the close cropp’d herbage ;
Or vivip’rous Alpine grasses
Wave in air their tufted offspring
�9
Held aloft on wiry foot-stalk ;
Or, in damp and sheltered corners,
Golden saxifrage encases
Rocks and stones with richest carpet:—
“ Common ” plant, but yet how lovely
Glimmering blue-green in the darkness
Deep within some dripping cavern,
Roofed with darker olive fringes
Of the filmy fern of Wilson ;
Chiefly found in wild luxuriance,
In the darksome damp recesses
Of the huge and loose-heaped fragments,
Relics of moraines, dissected
By the hidden, tinkling streamlets ;
Or in more illumined aspect,
Spangled with the snowy blossoms,
Gold besprinkled, emerald tufted,
Of saxífraga stellaris.
(Ending now this long digression,)
On again the rambler started,—
Scrambled down to well known Idwal,
(See Smith’s, Brown’s, or Jones’s guide-books;)
Many a hundred feet descending
To Llyn Idwal’s southern angle ;
Thence by the moraine so rugged
Up the centre of the valley
Tow’rds the distant “ Devil’s Kitchen,”
Gaping high in air before him ;
Onward, upward, climbing, scrambling,
Round or o’er the ice borne fragments.
*
*
*
*
Hark, what sudden, sharp crack-crackling,
Like the sound of rifle volley
Or the snap of closest thunder,
Swelling now to noise “uproarious,”
Echoes round the rock-walled valley ?
Is His Sable Highness cooking
In the gloomy cleft up yonder ?
Has his kitchen Inter busted ?
Whence can come such startling clamour ?
See, from out yon crown of vapour
Resting on the lofty mountain,
�10
Lines of dust, with seeming slowness,
( Strange effect of height and distance,)
Creeping down that steep escarpment,
Glyder-fawr’s north-western angle ;
Gleaming now with sudden radiance
In the level sheet of sunshine
Streaming ’neath the drifting cloud roof,
From Elidyr’s lofty shoulder
O’er the twilight darkening valley ;
See, from out the lowering columns
Right and left, the glancing fragments
Leaping, crashing o’ei’ the ledges,
Hurling down the loosened boulders,
Now with headlong speed descending,
Score the cliff with lines of ruin :
Nearer, sharper, grows the tumult,
Louder, grander, roar the echoes,
Till the rushing, stony torrent
Clattering down by screes and gullies,
Spent and worn, has found its level
All its noisy life departed.
On again the rambler struggled,
Reached at last Twll-du’s dark fissure,
Tempting spot to plant collector-;
(See the trusty “ Guides ” aforesaid.)
Yet one little floral beauty
Well deserves a passing notice ;—
Purple saxifrage ; its blossoms,
Soon as winter’s snows have left it
Rosy-tinting rocks aud boulders
On the old volcanic ash beds;
Loveliest little Alpine creeper,
With its slender thyme-like branches
Threading all the rocks with crimson.
Looked into the “ Devil’s Kitchen,”
Too much water, now, to enter,
Though the writer oft has clambered
Up the fallen blocks and ledges
Ad sanctissimum sanctorum,
Underneath the fallen boulder ;
Whence, on looking back, the landscape,
Lake and mountain, bright in sunshine,
Seen along the darksome crevice,
�11
Framed between its gloomy portals,
Startles with its golden radiance ;
Like the light of moon or planets
Yellow in the midnight darkness.
—Climbed to Llyn-y-cwn’s morasses,
—Saw the dim grey sea horizon
Faintly gleaming o’er Carnarvon,—
O’er the tower of Penrhyn Castle
Down Nant Francon’s long perspective ;
Saw in faintest ghostly outline
Moel Eilio’s grassy summit
O’er the lakes of deep Llanberis ;
All things else in mist were shrouded.
Scrambled on by screes and ledges,
Near a thousand feet ascending
Up the slope of Esgair-felen
To the brow of the Great Glyder.
Reached again the drifting cloud roof,
Reached once more the reign of Winter,
Faced again the piercing easter
With its six degrees of freezing ;
Crunched again the frozen snow sheets,
Half a foot in depth, new-fallen ;
Hastened on again by compass
Through the all-encircling mist wreaths,
(Centre of a faint horizon
Scarce a hundred yards in compass),
Through the gathering shades of evening,
O’er the lofty rock strewn platform ;
O’er a mile of stony desert,
Sharp edged shingle, “ snow-denuded.”
Now, a howling wintry desert,
Tempest-ridden, fog enfolded ;
Yet, in brighter, clearer weather,
Scarce you’ll find a nobler station
Whence to view the lofty Snowdon :
Whence to see the mountain monarch,
Whence to watch the changing colours
On his peaks and winding ridges
In some clear north western sunset
Of the longer days of summer;
Whoa Crib-goch in fiery radiance
Glows along each stony saw crest,
�12
Down each scree, with streams of orange;
While Cwm-glas in deepening shadow
Veiled -with haze of grey and purple
Dimly shews its tiny lakelets
Dark with rock-reflecting shadows
O’er the gorge of deep Llanberis :
And Y Wyddfa, “ the conspicuous,”
Towering high, in gilded outline,
O’er Crib-ddysgyll’s darkening ridges,
Crowns the scene of mountain glory.
Lost in distance man’s “improvements,”
All unseen, those huts unsightly,
Yet most welcome to the climber,
Faint or thirsty with his scramble
Up some rugged mountain buttress :—
Up Cwm-dyli’s “ rush of waters,’*
By the knife-edged crest of Lliwedd,
Up the cliff from Bwlch-y-saethau :—
Up the screes, from Cwm-y-clogwyn,
Up from Cwm-y-llan’s recesses,
To the “ Saddleback’s ” dread (!) shoulder,
Scene of regulation terrors !—
O’er Crib-goch’s spiky ridges,
O’er its wearying screes unstable,
Each loose stone a “ friction-roller”
Set with knives of flinty sharpness,
Roughest peak in all Snowdonia ;
From Cwm-glas’ deep recesses
By the spiny crest of Ddysgyl.
(Routes most dangerous ! most improper ! !
For the guideless mountain rambler.)
Why deform a spot so glorious
As the crested cone of Snowdon
With excrescences so hideous ?
Wooden shanties, roofs of patchwork,
Rusty funnels, empty bottles ;
Why not build in style substantial
Honest stonework, plain yet sightly,
In some neighbouring sheltered hollow ?
Leaving free the narrow summit
For the crowds who come to study
(When the drifting mists allow them)
Scenes of oft recorded beauty.
�13
While (to Glyder fawr returning)
Snowdon’s lengthening three-forked shadow
Leaps Llyn Gwynant’s silvery mirror,
Stalks across the wood crowned valley,
Climbs the slopes of Cerig Cochion.
And the Glyders’ gloomy profiles
Slowly creep up sunlit Siabod.
Stain his golden-glowing shoulders
With their deep embrasured outline.
While the Lesser Glyder’s ridges
Cut the sky with crested ruins.
Wondrous mountain architecture
Shining bright in level sunlight.
Or, perchance, in broken -weather,
-Scenes below, in fitful fragments,
Lake and streamlet, rock and woodland,
Here and there by turns emerging
Lom the snowy, rolling vapour
Shine revealed in sudden clearness :
While the sea-horizon, gleaming
Far and wide in radiant silver
Floods the distant scene with beauty,
Mottled o’er with flying shadows,
Saowy cloudlets, floating islands,
Gliding o’er its shining level.
While, around, the parting mist-wreaths, Lingering yet, in playful wanderings
Race along the rocky desert,
Round its pinnacles and turrets.
Or some sudden pelting shower
Sweeping o’er the lofty ridges
Gilds the scene with new-born lustre
Flashing in the fitful sunshine ;—
Floats away o’er sharp-coned Tryfan—
Wreaths his head with sudden glories,
Radiant circles, full orbed rainbows,
Ro mere lowland “ arch triumphant,”
Each concentric ring, completed
In the yawning depths of Bochlwyd,
Standing forth in fairest colours
From the dark, retreating nimbus.
While old Snowdon’s western shoulder
Ploughing up the sea borne currents
�14
Into higher, colder regions
Forms a train of sweeping cloudlets
Visibly increasing, growing
Out of evening’s purest ether ;
Till the long cascade of vapour
Streaming o’er his pointed summit,
Gliding down Cwm-dyli’s hollow,
Floats across the vale of Gwynant ;
Vainly struggles, hither, thither,
Stands in heaps o’er Pen-y-gwryd,
Tangled in the threefold eddy
Streaming up, from deep Nant Peris,
Round from Gwynant’s curving valley,
O’er the slopes of Gallt-y-wenallt.
Sight of snowy sunlit beauty
To the rambler far above it ;—
Source of discontented grumbling
To the helpless “walking tourist”
Buried ’neath its surging billows,
Coffee room imprisoned, fearful
Of the mountain mist or tempest ;
Weatlier-bound, the silly fellow,
Ignorant of scenes so glorious
On the lofty crests above him.
Thus in plaintive doleful numbers
Pouring forth his lamentation.
�15
LAY OF THE IMPRISONED TOURIST,
AS HE LAY “ USED UP” ON THE SOFA,
Stranger, who by love for mountains
E’er shouldst chance to be allured
To this den of dreary horrors,
Soon your weakness will be cured:
All the skies in cloud extinguished,
All the earth by mist obscured,
Imps cerulean, dismal vapours,
Reign supreme at Pen-y-gwryd !
Here the heavens are ever pouring
Drenching streams from fog-bank lurid :
Tears of sympathy incessant
Angels high in ether pure hid
Weep for us, poor luckless captives,
In this wretched place immured.
Traveller, that’s the reason why it
Always rains at Pen-y-gwryd !
Walker! Mr. Walking-tourist,
Fudge and nonsense, cease your growling ;
Off with those eternal slippers ;
Out, and scramble up the mountains ;
Burn that fossil, last week’s paper,
Last resource of mind most wretched,
Come, and soon will soul and body
Rise superior to the vapours.
Come, and see what glorious pictures
Nature shews, in ceaseless beauty,
To the thoughtful, loving student
Of her ever-changing features,—
Not forgetting Nature’s Author,
’Mid such tokens of His power,
(With all reverence be it spoken),
In whose hands are earth’s deep places,—
Whose, the strength of hills and mountains,—-
�16
Whose the sea is, for He made it,—
Who the outspread land created :—
Whose, are Earth and all her fulness,
Hail and lightning, snow and vapour,
Wind and storm, His word fulfilling,—
Ministers that do His pleasure.
*
*
*
*
4:
Yet what strange ironic contrast
To all sunny recollections
Was the scene, this wintry evening,
On the crest of lofty Glyder !
Howling tempest, whirling vapour,
Piercing frost, and crunching snow-wreath.
Reached at length his eastern shoulder,
Hastened down once more from cloudland ;
Saw the face of Llyn-cwm-ffynnon
Shine like silver far beneath him—
Welcome landmark through the twilight.
Passed the darkened cliff of greenstone,
Reached the doubly ice-grooved platform,
Witness strange, of two-fold glaciers;
Hastened down by roches moutonnees,
’Mid blocs perches by the hundred ;
Passed the spring-fed Llyn-cwm-ffynnon,
Where of late the char have flourished;
Hurried on, well nigh belated,
Scrambled down, in almost darkness,
Gained the road at lone Gorphwysfa,
Pen-y-pass, of late its title ;
Pen-y-“ pass ! ” a mongrel nickname
Cymru should be all ashamed of.
Nothing loth, reached Pen-y-gwryd,
Ever welcome Pen-y-gwryd!
Thus did end an eight hours’ ramble
All alone, across the mountains ;
(No one else wrould face the weather)—
High-away-there ! o’er the Glyders.
WHITE AND PIKE, PRINTERS, BIRMINGHAM.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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A wintry walk among the mountains
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Biden, H.E. [1832-1907]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 16 p. ; 21 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. "With sincerest apologies to the shade of Hiawatha" [Title page]. "The following lines contain an accurate account of what befell the writer during a ramble on May 18th,1867, over the summit of Glyder-fach and down by Lyn Bochlwyd to LlynIdwal ..." [Author's note].
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F.B. Kitto
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1867
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G5312
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Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A wintry walk among the mountains), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
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Sacerdotalism
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305
J3f\OWNING
AS
P^eachei^
A
SECOND PAPER.
'The first part of this essay was occupied with an attempt to define
some aspects of Mr. Browning’s position amongst contemporary poets;
¡and the tone and temper in which his poetry enters upon one of its
functions—preaching—(this word I used advisedly as better befitting
poetry than the term teaching}. His art and his preaching are, indeed,
inextricably interwoven in all his writings; and the result of an en•deavour to abstract either one or other from the whole, must of course
be unsatisfactory; nevertheless, in some measure I must aim at tracing
•one or two of his characteristics as preacher, to their expression in
some of his sermons. Within a space so limited, I can only allude
to a very few poems : a thorough analysis of any, would be, one need
hardly say, useless to attempt. ‘ Easter-day ’ is perhaps of all others,
the most strikingly illustrative of the Browning peculiarities, the one
which least of all could have been the work of any other man. Viewed
.side by side with his £ Christmas-eve,’ it is, one feels, the more
difficult of apprehension : it seems more complex in meaning, and
full of subtle transitions of thought and mood. It is possible to a cer
tain extent to content ourselves with an interpretation of ‘Christmas-eve,’
but the other poem seems to grow with each successive reading; and
by newly perceived connections of thought or feeling, to modify our old
exegeses. One feels that one is admitted more immediately in this,
into the mysterious presence of a human mind. The impression one
.gets from comparison of the two poems is that the whole of the vivid
artist and man-consciousness of which the £ Easter-day ’ is a product, is
not brought into action in the formation of the poem of ‘ Christmas-eve
and in this latter there is less absolute demand than in the other, that
his readers should have some degree of intellectual and moral affinity
■with the writer.
Granting that there is this difference in the poems, we may perhaps
VOL. II.---- NO. IX.
Q
�306
BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
discern a reason for it in the difference of the subjects which occupy
them; the subject dealt with in £ Christmas-eve,’ belonging to the region
of matters practical—-that of ‘ Easter-day’ extending into the speculative.
Vigorous and clear-sighted though Browning is in his dealings with
these former, it is in a speculative region only that the full force of hisnature seems to develope itself in that passionate pressing on after
substantial reality of some sort or other—whether good or evil, at least
truth—which is the ultimate attitude of all his intellectual and emotional
action.
1 Christmas-eve’ starts from beliefs, which it takes for granted con
cerning the relations of humanity to an unseen spiritual world. It
belongs to the world of intercourse with our fellow men, a region where'
our beliefs are certainties, or as good as certainties. The question it treatsof is one within the Christian Church. The lesson it gives is a practical
one of broad charity and tolerance, a tolerance which, resulting out of the*
love to be learned by contemplation of the Human-Divine love, is to be
able to overcome all intellectual variances and fastidious repugnances of
taste. There is wrought out in the poem the grand feeling of a brother
hood, including witbin its comprehensive hold the manifold varieties of
human lives. Browning by his deep digging into humanity, finds
essential root-union, where Matthew Arnold with his languid scratching
at the surface, finds only dissimilarities forbidding sympathy. He unites
himself and us with the men and women of the Zion Chapel meeting,,
whose portraits he places before his readers in terms so grotesquely
graphic,—omitting no offensive detail to render them thoroughly life
like; and effectually preventing any mere aesthetic sentiment from being
the basis of our Christian charity. The absence of sweetness and light,
and the presence of certan repulsive characteristics (there is a vein off
humour akin to Dickens’s, in the way in which these are individualized),,
in the 1 preaching-man,’ alike, and in the flock that sat under the ‘ pig-oflead-like pressure,’ of his ‘ immense stupidity,’ are things that Browning:
insists on our realising to the full. Then, over the disgust awakened,
in us, he gains and makes us gain, as the poem proceeds, a victory
sublime, both as ethics and as art. (I said in the earlier pages of this,
essay, that Browning had no pathos—no sense of grand incongruities;.
I retract:—this is what one might call an inverted pathos. The un
looked-for discovery that the reality is nobler than the appearance, is.
the pathos belonging to Browning, and, to Christianity; just as the
finding truth to be smaller and meaner than illusion, had been the
pathos of Paganism). ‘Christmas-eve’ unites us, also, with the crowd
of ignorant worshippers in Rome at the ‘ raree show of Peter’s suc
cessor,’ who (typical of a multitude in all sections of the Church).,
remain in the days when the ‘world’s eyes are open’
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
307
Peevish as ever to be suckled,
Lulled by the same old baby prattle,
With intermixture of the rattle ;
and with the Gottingen professor who, with an inconsistency nobler than
his logic, retains the feeling of faith in and love for what his reason has
reduced to a myth. (Were it not that this paper must abstain from
viewing Browning as an artist, I would notice as a specimen of his
power as a portrait painter, the way in which with a few vigorous touches
he sets before us the whole ‘personnel ’ outer and inner, of this ‘ virginminded studious martyr to mild enthusiasm.’) The poem has its cul
minating idea in the grand trust that can say—
‘— Subsisteth. ever
God’s care above, and I exult
That God, by God’s own ways occult
May—doth. I will believe—bring back
All wanderers to a single track.’
Browning lets us see clearly what the nature of this feeling of brother
hood is j and guards jealously against any possibility of confounding it
with ‘ mild indifferentism’ or ‘lazy glow of benevolence over the various
modes of man’s beliefs.’ He makes no attempt to harmonize the different
creeds and tempers of religious feeling, by the modern method of elimi
nating the peculiarities of each as non-essentials. He, on the contrary,
insists that what constitutes each man’s earthly care, is to ‘ strive—to
find some one chief way of worship, and contrive ’ that his fellows ‘ take
their share.’ His tolerance is only the result of his confidence that here
where man’s care ends, ‘ God’s, which is above it and distinct,’ begins.
He cannot take the philosophical bird’s-eye view of the different creeds,
which is possible to men who are sufficiently impersonal to themselves to
contemplate at their ease, and compare impartially, the various religious
systems and cults spread out before them. All conclusions taking as
their premises only the aspects of men in masses, are unsatisfactory to
him. All problems of life, social or ecclesiastical, are unintelligible to
him until he have gained a solvent for them through the solution of the
problem of the life individual. The unit from which his reasonings
start is neither Humanity, nor the portion of it included within a church,
but the ego (the only ego he knows as a basis for argument being his
own). And it is only through his individual realisings, attained through
the toil and struggle of personal faith, that he gets his hope for the des
tinies of other men : it is only because of what he has himself discerned,
that he is enabled to reach—by a leap, not by a logical process—to the
trust that the discerning» of his fellows, though varying from his own,
are not illusory. The ratio of his power of sympathy and tolerance is
exactly that of the strength of his own dogmatic beliefs.
Q 2
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
It is in tlie 1 Easter day ’ that we have to look for the record of how
an earnest human soul attains to that faith in the unseen, which in
‘ Christmas eve ’ is assumed all along as the basis of the argument. The
poem concerns itself with no questions of the ecclesiastical life, but of
the individual Christian life, which includes within itself the idea of the
objectively-including ecclesiastical life. Here Browning’s especial faculty
■—the strong venturing of faith—finds exercise. There are men (and
many amongst the highest orders of men) whose motions of thought and
feeling gain in firmness and freedom by the consciousness of belonging
to and acting with an ecclesiastical organisation or great public move
ment of opinion. But Browning’s mind has no place amongst minds of
this class : it is equally unfitted to move in an army organised under a
definite church system, or in an irregular force banded together by 1 the
spirit of an age;’ its victories must be won in single combat, if won
at all.
Here, parenthetically, we may notice this isolated working of Brown
ing’s thought, as the source of two characteristic imperfections—or,
more properly, limitations—in it. 1st, owing to this, his conception of
Christianity lacks the solidarity that arises out of the corporate feeling
and consciousness of historic permanence. It has never the broad firm
grandeur of the mood of the Ambrosian hymns, for instance, or the ‘ Te
Deum.’ According to his view, each generation of men have just the
same sort of work to do which they would have to do were all the
work of their ancestors to be blotted out, and leave no vestige of itself or
its effects. The objective creed is not placed by him ever in any secure
independence of our subjective hold upon it. 2ndly, though from this
mental aloneness comes the chief glory of his work as truthseeker,—his
way of getting face to face with his beliefs, and seeing whatever he sees,
directly and through no medium of languidly accepted traditions,—-yet
from the same source there comes one characteristic, which limits the
range of his helpfulness, and makes his teaching incapable of influencing
more than one class of minds. His own view of the immeasurable ex
panse of truth makes him, indeed, profoundly tolerant of the views of
other men whose standpoints are not his : but is he wholly free from
exclusiveness in his notions as to what should be accounted the lawful
organ in human nature for truth-discerning 1 Does he not seem to make
his very peculiar self the measure of other men, and become sometimes
intolerant of varieties of ways in which variously constituted men arrive
at and hold their beliefs ? In himself two natures are met in rare com
bination ; each of these natures being of heroic size and vigour. There
is the union of intellectual strength and subtlety, with a vividly imagin
ative and emotional temperament. He is at once a hard thinker and a
passionate feeler—a logician and a poet; and is, for his own part, able
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30 9
to work in whatever engages him, with the faculties that belong to this
two-fold nature, and choose to which set of faculties he will entrust the
work he cares most about. His poems portray or suggest mental pro
cesses in ■which progress into scepticism and out of it takes place usually
thus:—the keen dialectic intellect first takes up the question in hand,
and works at it until it has made visible all the difficulties that are to
be found in it;—then, at the point where all objections have been fairly
brought into notice, the ego does not set the part of its nature—the in
tellect—which began operations with them, to the further task of at
tempting either to find explanation and answer to them, or to relegate
them beyond the province of things explicable ; but with a sudden
change of mood, the consciousness (leaving all these as and where they
are) flings itself with a passionate leap away from them, into the emo
tional part of human nature, and seeks its faith in a refuge from, rather
than in an encounter with, intellectual difficulty.
Whatever imperfections there are in Mr. Browning’s power of sym
pathy, are to be found on the side that is turned towards the class of
thinkers incapable, from mental constitution, of reaching faith by such
methods. His Christianity seems to exclude men born to belong to
what Mr. R. H. Hutton (in a somewhat ‘hard’-mooded essay—out of tune
with the others in his two recently-published volumes,) styles the ‘ Hard
Church.’ From these,—the men feebler in imagination and emotion,
than in intellectual power,—men whose feelings flow only as after-conse
quences from beliefs which they in no way helped to form—men who
for doubts of reason must find either satisfaction by reason, or find by it
good cause for the impossibility of such satisfaction—from such men
Browning holds aloof. His preaching rejects with somewhat of contempt
the evidences which are their faith’s all. He casts impatiently aside the
evidence, e.g., of the 1 greater probability ’—which to many a man must
be the sole ground of his belief in Christianity, and a ground which
would seem to melt from under him, if emotion or desire intruded upon
a mood dispassionately judicial. Browning’s mind, itself able instinc
tively to feel out the ‘ mightiness of love inextricably curled about ’ all
‘power and beauty in the world;’ and able to transcend, in the strength
of these intuitive perceptions, the chasm intervening between Nature
and the Christian Tale ; refuses to recognise the existence of any logical
footway of historical evidence, whereby alone a mind such as, <?.</., Arch
bishop Whately’s could arrive at belief in the truth of the story.
The failing to behold ‘lover’ written ‘on the foreheads’of the men who
must lovelessly know before they can love, is the imperfection discernible
in the great fraternal-hearted poet-thinker.
It happens often that men far more rigidly exclusive as to the ‘ what ’
of other people’s beliefs, are less so than Mr. Browning with regard to the
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BROWNING ÀS A PREACHER.
‘ how.’ This sort of tolerance results from their accepting the creed of
a church as handed down, ¿Ind not making religious truth a matter of
individual investigation. The creed of a church represents the aggre
gate action of varieties of minds it is the centre of agreement where
Opinions meet, irrespective of how they have travelled. Whoever, there
fore, takes this already-arrived-at creed as his own starting-point of
thought or feeling, acquiesces thereby in the lawfulness of roads (be these
what they may) which have brought other men to it. Keble, for in
stance, though a man immeasurably narrower in inherent sympathies
than Browning, has in some ways a larger toleration for minds of a dif
ferent order from his own, and holds in honour modes of thought such
as Bishop Butler’s. This is made possible to him (though for his own
part his faith would rest upon feeling only), by his having at the outset
abstained from individual truth-seeking, and merged his own life in the
catholic life of a church.
In Browning’s teaching there is in many respects a repetition alike of
the perfections and imperfections of Coleridge’s. In both of these men
the same intense inwardness and vivid self-concentrated thought which
fits them to accomplish—as their own peculiar work—the maintaining of
the subjective evidences for religious truth, inclines them to the same
sort of impatience towards all others, who, not able to trust the instinc
tive voices from within, have to seek faith through investigation and
comparison of what is without.
‘ Easter Day ’ is all throughout illustrative of Browning’s tendency
to exclusive reliance upon the subjective evidence of the human instincts.
The problem of the poem is the how
‘To joint
This flexile, finite life once tight
Into the fixed and infinite.’
•—the how to find, first, a ‘ fixed and infinite.’ And for the problem’s
solution, his mind refuses to avail itself of all aids which the intellect,
judging from things external, can offer. Meeting each answer of the
interlocutor with freshly occurring objections, he gets down deeper into
the difficulty, seeing ever more and more ‘ how very hard it is to be a
Christian.’ Then there comes to him, out of his great poet-heart, a
means of escape from the throng of surrounding perplexities, in that
strange, terribly vivid vision-dream, which brings in succession all earthly
things accounted good—earth’s exquisite treasures of wonder and delight
■—the waving of her woods, and flowing of her rivers, and all her vast
exhaustless beauty, and endless change—art in its most perfect ancient
and modern forms—knowledge, and the power to range Faust-like
‘through all circling sciences, philosophies, and histories’—brings all
these to the test of the human soul’s hunger for satisfaction; until it
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
311
feels that none of them is sufficient to stay its cravings; and that its one
final desire (to attain which it would let all else go in exchange) is for
love. And then there comes the mighty leap up of the human instincts,
regardless of intervening intellectual obstacles, towards the love of God
as told of in the Christian story,
£ "What doubt in thee, could countervail
Belief in it— ?’
and in ‘ it ’ he feels that he has found the substance of the gleams
that, blending with all the displays of power and beauty on the earth,
have been the essence of the brightness and good in her, which men have
rejoiced in. The scene which the dream tells of is placed in the after
judgment state; the whole poem, however, is in its scope not illustra
tive of a belief in a spiritual world, and of man’s probation for it, but
tentative of the grounds for such belief; and taking the judgment sen
tences of condemnation, merely as hypotheses in order to have in them,
the most searching tests to apply to human instincts.
Characteristically, too, in his £ Saul,’ Browning makes the Messianic
prophecy evolve itself to David from his instincts introspectively per
ceived. The £ Caliban upon Setebos’ gives us his views (strikingly unPaleyan) of the utmost that natural theology would amount to, argued
out without the aid of the intuitions of human love. These he illus
trates in this (which is one of his most powerfully executed poems), by
showing how Caliban, the loveless creature, who is either devoid of human
affections, or in whom they have not been called into activity by fellow
ship with men, can bring no key from within to unlock the meanings of
the universe; and therefore all that he can find in it, everywhere, all
around, by those shrewd bitterly ironical reasonings which his intellect
alone gathers from external things, is only merciless power, and capri
ciously used strength. And the horrible loathsomeness of this idea is
drawn out with a minute perfection curiously fascinating.
Preference for internal evidence is shown, too, in the whole tenor of
Pope Innocent’s monologue in the £ Ring and the Book.’ Here, though
truth is sought not through the mere instincts of the heart, but with
long patient reasonings of the head, it is still the introspective glance
into the human mind which supplies the starting point of the whole
.argument by which the old Pope, finding therein ideas' of strength, inrtelligence and goodness, larger in conception than in human fulfilment,
;and finding in the natural order of the world, actual fulfilment corre
sponding to two only of these ideas, arrives (by the necessity of finding
some instance of the third) at belief in the Christian story of limitless
Jove and sacrifice.
Brom -within, too, Innocent gets his very beautiful answer to the doubt
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
that inevitably suggested itself to a man living in days when the earth
had become very evil, and lust and cruelty such as Guido’s ‘ had their
way i’ the world where God should rule,’ lest haply Christianity’s visible
failure should disprove its truth. The query,
‘ And is this little all that was to be;
Where is the glorious decisive change ?
The immeasurable metamorphosis
Of human clay to divine gold, we looked
Should in some poor sort justify the price ?
.*
«
*
*
*
*
Well, is the thing we see salvation ? ’
is answered by the guess which is supplied by his own heart instincts,,
that this very weakness and failure may be, after all,
‘ But repetition of the miracle,
The Divine instance of self-sacrifice
That never ends, and aye begins for man.’
and are characteristics necessary in a religion corresponding to the re
quirements of our truest humanity.
‘ How can man love but what he yearns to help ?
What but the weakness in a faith supplies
The incentive to humanity, no strength
Absolute, irresistible, comports ? ’
Thoroughly Browning-like is the Pope’s mood, when in his forecast of
the age succeeding his own, his hopes of world-regeneration are placed
in his expectation that it will ‘ shake the torpor of assurance from men’s
creed,’ and compel them, when they shall have grown to disbelieve re
port, to look inwards for truth, and
‘ Correct the portrait by the living face ;
Man’s God, by God’s God in the mind of man.’
A noticeable exception to Browning’s usual attitude of thought occurs,
in the closing pages of the ‘Paracelsus.’ The speech of the dying
knowledge-seeker contains a passage (too long to quote, and whose im
measurable poetic beauty must not here be spoken of), where the argu
ment extends over the whole known aspect of our world, viewing man
objectively in his chronological place in Nature, as an appearance illus
trative by its ‘ supplementary reflux of light’ of all foregoing appearances:
as the counterpai-t of anterior creations, a mirror consciously reflectant
of the whole.
Mr. Browning is an optimist: and all throughout his poetry his opti
mism is as the life-blood, circulating through and giving colour to every
part of it. Some notion of this element in his creed must be defined in
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
all criticism of him, either as teachei’ or artist. The features distinguish
ing his optimistic theory, are, I think, first, his never at any time ceas
ing to behold evil as evil, and to hate it as such : and secondly, his seeming
not to feel the oppression of its mystery that has lain as a burden so
heavily on the minds of generations of thinkers.
Moral evil he beholds as a thing in no way resolvable into mere imper
fection. Where he finds it in the human world it retains for him its old
meaning of sin, and is viewed as something wholly distinct from a stunting
of the beautiful development of men’s natures: by unfavourable outward
circumstances, such as the absence of knowledge and culture. His own
favourite theory of the position of human impulse, and the homage due
to it, never leads him into letting that homage be of a blind indiscrimina
ting sort. He recognises that there is a principle working internally,
and sending forth impulses which must not be mistaken for those which
are men’s lawful guides. With him holiness and healthiness are not
quite convertible terms. Caponsacchi and Guido have both acted
according to the promptings of impulse, obeying laws which were part of
the nature of each : yet between them a difference is set. Rejoicing
praise is bestowed by the Pope, in the 1 Ring and the Book,’ on the
obedience yielded to instincts by one of these men ;
‘ Well done !
Be glad thou hast let light into the world
Through that irregular breach in the boundary,—see
The same upon thy path, and march assured,
Learning anew the use of soldiership,
Self-abnegation, freedom from all fear ;
Loyalty to the life’s end.’
And on the other—Guido—whom he images to himself as pleading in
self-justification that his course of action has been only the same as that
commended, inasmuch as he too has guided his steps according to the
tune of impulse, the old man’s righteous anger smites the blow of the
sentence of temporal death. Wherein does Pope Innocent account this
difference just ? In this—that there has been a probation for both ;
each of them having within him a something to follow, and a some
thing to resist. Count Guido he beholds as
‘ Furnished forth for his career,
On starting for his life-chance in our world,
With nearly all we count sufficient help.
Body and mind in balance—a sound frame,
A solid intellect; the wit to seek,
Wisdom to choose, and courage wherewithal
To deal with whatsoever circumstance
Should minister to man—make life succeed.’
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
■and fortified in his surroundings with 1 great birth, good breeding, and
the Church for guide.’ He accounts that such a man’s trial lies in the
having within, evil impulses balanced more evenly against the good than
they are in the man less favourably circumstanced for resistance to evil.
He condemns (justly, he feels) him who, if he had so willed, might have
made the good outweigh the evil,—might have used stumbling-block as
stepping-stone; but -who has chosen rather to love and believe in—
‘ Just the vile of life,
Low instinct—base pretension.’
Caponsacchi, too, Innocent views as having undergone trial by urgings
of two kinds of impulse ; and as having followed the noble and resisted
the base,—as having, while yielding to instincts of ‘healthy rage’
against cruelty and oppression, retained self-government, and kept
himself pure in thought, and word, and deed. In his praise there is
involved the idea that evil has been present as—
‘ Temptation . . . for man to meet
And master, and make crouch beneath his feet,
And so be pedestailed in triumph.’
.So, too, in the 1 Easter Day’ (as elsewhere) we find the same doctrine of
.a probation for all human life by instincts good and evil. To each
¿human soul has been shown—
‘ The earthly mixed
With heavenly, it must choose betwixt.
The earthly joys lay palpable,—
A taint in each, distinct as well
The heavenly flitted faint and rare
Above them.’
Far on, indeed, in the hereafter, Browning looks on to there being no
longer this two-fold and contrary working of impulse. His expectation
is that human nature will take its perfection in a grand one-ness. When
it shall—
‘ reach the ultimate, angel’s law
Indulging every instinct of the soul,
There where law, Hfe, joy, impulse are one thing.’
-—‘ A Death in the Desert.’
But he does not confound his hope for the future with his teaching for
.the needs of the present.
An optimist Browning is not in the sense of rejecting or explaining
•away the dogma that humanity has inherent tendencies to moral evil
dark and foul; or proclaiming a freedom to all impulses from any bar
save that of physical or social inexpediency; yet an optimist he is—and
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315
that not falteringly, but with the conviction of his whole heart—in the
¡sense of being able, all the while he sees the evil which he will not dis
guise by any other name, to look steadily into its dark hateful face, assured
that its ultimate significance is good. He does not conceive that it has
come as some unlucky accident to spoil a harmony of order in a world
which but for it had been perfect; he holds, rather, that it is through
it that a higher perfection is attainable. Feeling this, he does not need
that shuffle into a real though unacknowledged Manichceism, which is
the refuge of so many men from the perplexities and contradictions of a
creed of mingled pessimism and optimism. He believes that the antagon
ism between principles does not extend beyond the world of finite being;
and ventures to refer to the same source the placing in this world of ours
the two contrary principles which we call good and evil. Here is some
of his doctrine, spoken by the Pope in the ‘ Ring and the Book.’
He says (having reached the point of acknowledgment that the
Christian story is true, and that therein ‘ God shows complete’):—
‘ I can believe this dread machinery
Of sin and sorrow, would confound me else
Devised,-—all pain, at most expenditure
Of pain by Who devised pain,—to evolve
By new machinery in counterpart
The moral qualities of man—how else ?
To make him love in turn and be beloved,
Creating and self-sacrificing too—
And thus eventually, God-like (ay
■“I have said ye are Gods”—shall it be said for nought ?)
Enable man to wring from out all pain
All pleasure for a common heritage.
******
The moral sense grows but by exercise,
’Tis even as man grew, probatively
Initiated in Godship, set to make
A fairer moral world than this he finds.
******
Life is probation, and this earth no goal,
But starting-point for man, compel him strive,
Which means in man as good as reach the goal.’
Evil he beholds as the immediate bringer to humanity of our chief and
peculiar glory—progress, as a messenger sent to institute a race for men,
from less to more, from lower to higher. The one thing of which he
feels a shrinking horror is ‘ ghastly smooth life ’ in which man should be
left ‘dead at heart;’ and his whole spirit leaps up to behold purposes of
goodness in the appearance of anything as a deliverer from that.
Browning’s is a creed including within it the hope that where during
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
the earthly probation, men’s moral wills have been too feeble to enable
them to use temptations by evil as ‘ points that prove advantage for who
vaults from low to high;’ the work neglected or failed in here, may yet
elsewhere, though under harder conditions, be ultimately done. Even
Guido Franceschini, the abominable, he will not allow to depart from
our sight unfollowed by words of hope. In the forgivingness of Pompilia,
the victim of the murderer in her life and death, there is a gospel of a
far-off healing and restoration for him even, albeit by God’s shadow instead
of the light of His face. And the Pope, Guido’s judge, thinks of the
criminal on whom he pronounces sentence of temporal death, as going,
forth—
‘ Into that sad, obscui’e, sequestered state,
Where God unmakes but to remake a soul
He else had made in vain ; which must not be.’
And the same hope comes out, in vaguer expression, in that last phrase-,
of ‘Easter Day’ (without adding which, the human heart of the poet will
not suffer him to let go his vision of the close of the earthly probation):—
‘ Mercy, every way,
Is infinite—and who can say 1 ’
Very faint, by comparison with Browning’s, is Tennyson’s trust in the
‘larger hope;’ though lie, too, seeks to hold the creed that ‘somehow
good will be the final goal of ill.’ All that Tennyson attains to is an
infant’s blind crying after it—a groping for it, with ‘lame hands of faith.’
He looks for his theory of optimism in a direction whither Browning, an
idealist in his metaphysics, does not turn in his quests of objective
realities. And looking for it all throughout the material world and her
analogies, he finds nothing to be a reliable guide to it; and can only fall
in the darkness upon that ‘great world’s altar-stairs;’ not feeling assured
as to what ultimate law and purpose he should find above them, could he
see up their heights.
However, in speaking of the Tennyson and Browning optimisms, it is
not fail’ to make the quality of vigour the point of comparison—nor,
indeed, any other quality either. The aim of the two poets, in their
search, is essentially different. Tennyson’s colder and more symmetrical
mind looks to find truth as harmony and proportion; and is alwayssuspicious of the parts unless it can see the whole. What Browning;
seeks is truth absolute, not relative ; and if he thinks he has got hold of
the minutest particle of that, it is to him as a thing indestructible by
any mass of contradictions; and it suffices to him as a sure earnest of
the rest. His own heart’s instinctive conviction of a law of Lave is out
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
317
of the reach of whatever ‘evil dreams ’ Nature may lend, and does not
need to concern itself with analogies of her waste and destruction—with
appearances such as that ‘of fifty seeds, she often brings but one to bear?
The optimistic creed of Tennyson is the result of an effort, very noble, to
comprehend: that of Browning is an effort to apprehend. The one seeks
a superhuman solution to the problem, and fails : the other, grasping
with a human passion, succeeds in finding satisfaction.
At this part of Browning’s creed there is one of the many doors of
entrance, from the question of his work as a truth-seeker, into the question
of his Art. Into this we may not now’ trespass, further than to observe
that the character of his work, as poet of external Nature, seems to be
determined by the negative influence of his optimism, and his method of
.attaining thereto. His seeking and finding his satisfaction as to the
world’s purport, in another quarter than in the material world, leaves
him free to derive from that world, art of a peculiar and very valuable
kind. Browning’s poetry of external Nature has some characteristics so
rare, that (though in quantity it is much less than what most other great
poets have produced) its loss would leave a gap in our literature. It is
nowhere mystical, like Wordsworth’s, nor eesthetico-scientific, like Tenny
son’s Nature-poetry ; but it is simply full of a noble sensuousness. It is
not the product of moods of intellectual and moral tension. It is glad
acceptance of the physical influences of external Nature—not truth.seeking in and through her mysteries. The contact of the phenomena
which we term material, in ourselves, with the so-called material phe
nomena outside us, is rested in, for the time being, without endeavour to
pursue a further significance. Beautiful art, as well as teaching not a
little wholesome, is given to us in Mr. Browning’s poems of Nature; of
which the speciality is theii’ being sensuous, yet restrained by a manly
■dignity from ever becoming a voluptuous self-abandoning to enslavement
by her beauty. We have the same sort of thing only from one other
modern English poet—A. H. Clough. (See ‘The Bothie.’) There is a cer
tain amount of positivism in both Clough’s and Browning’s acceptance of
the material -world, which results, in both cases, in a similar sort of purely
physical enjoyment of it (the latter’s poetical expression of this being,
however, by far the superior in varied richness). Their positivisms are,
of course, alike in their effects only, and are essentially different. Clough’s
is the positivism of a strong mind, sternly setting aside truth-seeking in
this direction as bootless, and -with a resolute temperate cheerfulness,
accepting whatever certain good it can find. Browning’s is the positivism
of childlike trust—so confident in the truth which it has found elsewhere,
that it can afford to pause here from restless searching, and take the
-earth’s beauty as beauty—joys of sense as joy. For illustration of Mr.
JBrowning’s poetical feeling for external Nature, we might refer to his
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BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
‘ Pippa Passes,’ to his ‘ Saul ’ (specially to the passage in it beginning1 Oh, our manhood’s prime vigour’), to parts of the ‘Paracelsus,’ and to
other passages, which cannot here be enumerated. Though none otherof our poets is so perpetually on the watch to discern transcendental
significance, translucent through the facts of mind, yet he, more than,
most others, is content to behold the facts of matter as (so to speak)‘ opaque] and to describe his impressions from them, directly and unsymbolically. To Wordsworth it would be impossible to tell simply of.
‘the sense of the yellow mountain flowers.’
This paper must hasten to conclude, leaving with only a passing
mention, one of the aspects of Mr. Browning’s preaching—its stern moral
lessons, and its peculiar downrightness of enforcing them. As poet of
the Will, he has words of unsparing condemnation to bestow on such sins
as failure ‘ through weak endeavour.’ There is an earnest severity in
‘The Statue and the Bust,’ and in his ‘Sordello’—terriblest of tragedies,
inasmuch as it depicts the deterioration of a soul. The miserable life
failure, of which this latter is the history, is looked on by him as resulting
from the man’s irresoluteness to overcome and banish his probation
spectre (Do not many of us know something akin to it ?); of his hauntingdouble consciousness—fourfold consciousness, rather; of, at the same
time, an ego divided by impulses diverging towards two ways of utterance
—Art and action; and of another two-fold spectral ego—reflexion of the
actual ego—contemplating, as if from some view-point in nowhere, it and.
its work, in their place in the All-of-things. The real self and its re
flexion keep on, like opposite mirrors, reflecting each other backwards
and forwards, ad infinitum; each becoming alternately subject and
object, until there is produced in Sordello, as the result, a wretched
paralysis of all working-power, either artistic or practical. And all for
lack of the vigorous effort of whole-hearted obedience to either impulse, ,
by which his will could have freed him from the thing that wrought the
ruin of his life. Sternest of sermons this I on the text, difip Si^vyos,.
aKaTaoraTos,’ &c., &c. (St. James i., 8.)
Need one say anything with reference to one charge which we some
times heai* brought against Mr. Browning—of being, in ‘ The Ring and.
the Book,’ too open—offensively coarse, even, of speech 1 I—a woman—
feel that he needs no apology in this matter. Those of his readers who
are capable of, and willing to take the trouble of entering into the spirit
of his poetry, do not fail to find in it, moral saltness enough to keep its
purity untainted by the ugly words which his grave truthfulness some
times uses in indicating ugly things : and to mere criticism from without
—from those who neither learn from or sympathise with him—I imagine
that Mr. Browning does not greatly care to commend himself and his.
poems.
�BROWNING AS A PREACHER.
319'
Wholly unsatisfied by what these two papers have been able to say as
to some of the characteristics noticeable on one side of the most manysided of contemporary poets, I gladly cease from the attempt to write
little definitions of the poetry which I would rather feel indefinitely, and
grow into increasingly.
E. Dickinson West.
Mr. Browning’s latest work, ‘ Balanstione Adventure,’ lets us see, in its whole tenorand purport, the same characteristics of his preaching. There is no slight significance
in his choosing for his theme, a Greek play not ranked by critics amongst the finest;
but having peculiar attractions for the poet of the will, on account of its being the
story of the victory of a will—a half-7iw?iara will—over death and fate.
For nothing human or divine, does Browning recognise an iron law of necesssity.
He cares not for the grand Greek lifeless virtue of endurance of the inevitable ; and
would find his own poetical feeling wholly unsuited- to reproduce utterances such as
the hEschylean :
Tijv 7re7rpwp,ev7jv 8e ypiy
aT<rav (f>epeLV ws pacna, yiyva><TK.ov3’ on
’Avay/<7js ecrr’ aBrjpLTOV cr^evos
to ttjs
of Prometheus in his majestic passiveness.
There seems to be a curiously personal sympathy in Mr. Browning for Herakles, the
labour and effort God, whose strength is a thoroughly human strength of conscious
toil. Browning’s enlargement of Euripides’ portraiture of the hero, has been criti
cized as exaggerating the idea of joyous helpful strength ; and making him too much
of a ‘muscular Christian.’ I think that this objection to it fades out of sight, when
we view the poem as tinged and explained by the luminous Browning conscious
ness that indefinitely appears all throughout it. Struggle—and joy and hope in
struggle, and all things that he holds to be the portion best suited for the spiritual
part of our human life, are connected by him in a deep dim suggestiveness, with his
representation of Herakles. It is a spiritual truth—and not mere admiration of
thews and muscles, and good use of them, that he preaches to us.
In Browning’s suggested new version of the story, ‘ New Admetos new Alkestis,’
we may notice his characteristic way of penetrating through all surface appearances.
Deep underneath these, he finds a connection between human and infinite truths, and
sees there a beautiful ‘ how,’ by which Admetos might worthily let his wife die that
he might live. In harmony with all his other teaching, too, is Browning’s idea of
making the undyingness of Alkestis come to her, not as a mere salvation given from
without, but as worked out from wii7wn. The principle of life which cannot be holden
of death, is viewed by him always as a thing given to be in humanity.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Pamphlet
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Title
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Browning as a preacher. Part 2
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West, Elizabeth Dickinson
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 305-319 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2 (November, 1871). Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
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[s.n.]
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[1871]
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G5337
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Poetry
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Browning as a preacher. Part 2), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
Robert Browning
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/13f9c10df44c59ff8057c6971276d06a.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=mZJZFGW--a7lPP9E0jg%7Epl-AT7R2KmhCklMVhNUlJCKo7Xu-4J6sJdUB9pSpRTtIWqzVORxs9TxDxPXEx-WwGGRQCVvpP3TdM%7Em2A4nNg0GjPLAi9XaF5WLVxzAz1trSJYMQcgmI08ZBHFfm2FjzWr9oC%7EKCm5aXs8NWT2GGm1AuuxU2d%7Em9oEFuS4Wjs2GIOzRAzKVA4tfH9XlfZI-H6A4yAu9WF5-03Vrbm1R7YfA1tMAysAwZCl-D-p0wz82i29GnmKbXaXGWeLTJIo16v3CaP-%7E6noS%7Eg0Cn3e9LNwqN%7ElbwLbjAFc1ZFwlSjjeow0mitX0yXYSrEIfWVShreg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
f0bf5629051e7a851f564a46172d8269
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Text
HE praise of Venus has been often sung, but never in any existing verse
of high order with the unhesitating frankness and untempered fervor
which distinguish Mr. Swinburne’s last volume of poems* Disdaining apol
ogy or subterfuge, he lifts up his voice, and with unfaltering tongue and un
ambiguous phrase he tells in the rich music of his verse the joys of Aphrodite.
Of his capacity and his inclination to treat this theme in this manner every
attentive reader of his last two poems “ Atalanta in Calydon ” and “ Chastelard ” must be well aware. Both those poems were distinguished by a large
simplicity and directness of utterance which showed that the poet had risen
far above the plane of timid conventionality ; and the latter showed a ten
dency toward an open recognition of the power of sexual love and an intense,
if not an ideal, expression of its working. The promise of those two dramatic
poems in this regard has been amply, but somewhat hastily fulfilled in the
present volume, which, as Mr. Swinburne of course expected, is loudly con
demned by all that class of critics who are content to “ dwell in decencies for
ever.” We have heard of editors who have refused to notice the book even
by way of condemnation, lest they should thus contribute to its notoriety.
A weak, unwise, shortsighted policy. Poets of Mr. Swinburne’s grade are
not to be crushed by condemnation or extinguished by neglect; least of all
when they find their inspiration in a passion which has stirred and swayed
the world ever since it became the habitation of two sexes. If they do wrong,
if they soil their plumes by too close a contact with unmitigated human
nature, let them be convicted and condemned; but let us not fondly sup
pose, when one of them gives voice to the delight of men in the beauty of
. women and of women in the manliness of men that we can stop the world’s
ears by pretending that we don’t hear him. No, Mr. Swinburne’s book, like
all books that, whether good or bad, are bold and able and high-toned, must
be taken up and discussed and its place in literature decided by the general
judgment of men, aided through, not controlled by, the decisions of criticism.
The very fact that a Jftrge edition of the book was bought up here in three or
four days, and that it is the subject of conversation among cultivated and
thoughtful people should of itself show critics that it is not to be ignored.
We have called these poems high-toned; and this epithet against which
some of Mr. Swinburne's censors would most loudly protest, is the one of all
at our command which we regard as most particularly expressive of their dis
tinctive character. Their subject we have stated in plain terms ; and they
present that subject unveiled, simply, without mitigation, as bare of conceal
ment as a naked, un-fig-leaved statue. Yet, in the very essence of their
thought they are high-toned. They are filled full of the utterance of that joy
T
* “Laus Veneris, and other Poems and Ballads.” By Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Author’s Edition. New York: Carleton. London : Moxon & Co.
�666
MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
which to gross souls is gross, but which to all others is mysteriously no les3
imaginative than Bensuous; but there is in them not one .passage that is
vulgar, or coarse, or even immodest. There is in Pope’s “ Rape of the Lock,”
a poem which is within the reach of any girl who desires to read it, a line of
more immodesty than could be made of all Charles Swinburne’s poems concen
trated within the same compass. And by calling Mr. Swinburne’s lyrics
high-toned we do not mean merely that they are the product of genius.
They are that indeed ; but so is “ Don Juan,” a poem open to objection of the
same kind as those which are urged against “ Laus Veneris; ” but “ Don
Juan,” work of genius although it be, is as low in tone, as light and as frivo
lous as “ Laus Veneris” is high and impressive and serious. “ Don Juan ”
was written to furnish amusement by the prurient treatment of forbidden
subjects; “ Laus Veneris ” is the presentation in the naked ideal of an over
powering passion. It is not immodest but, like other things that are also not
immodest, under certain circumstances it is indecent. The line above alluded
to in the “ Rape of the Lock ” is immodest and under all circumstances inde
cent, because it belittles, and degrades, and treats with gross familiarity, and
sets up for jeers and laughter one of the most masterful of human passions,
and one which more than any other sways, through soul and sense, the whole
being of every perfect human creature. Mr. Swinburne writes with no such
motive. He shows us the figure of Love stripped bare, but never grovelling.
Yet, as we have said, his book is, or rather it becomes indecent under certain
circumstances. The man who would read in mixed society, at this day, or
read to a young woman, or, for that matter, to an old one, such a poem as Mr.
Swinburne’s sonnet, rf Love and Sleep ” would commit an act so indecent as to
merit the immediate ejection from the house, which he would, probably re
ceive. But so would he be indecent if he offered the woman a caress, which,
under other circumstances, she would both desire and expect. So would he
be if he read many passages in the “ Song of Solomon,” which are in every
respect as plain-spoken and as fervid as anything that Mr. Swinburne has
written, and certain others in the fourth and the eighth books of “ Paradise
Lost.” And yet, the woman who cannot read any of these herself without harm,
is already long past mental contamination. The question is plainly this, Is
sexual love in itself impure ? or is it in itself entirely without moral charac
ter, and under certain circumstances as rightful as it is joyful, and under
others criminal, and in the end full of bitterness ? Will men who have wives
and mothers, and women who hope to be wives and mothers decide for the
former ? And if it is not impure, filling, as it does, so large a place and hav
ing so important a function in man’s life, shall it be excluded from the domain
of art, of high art ? No, but let it be draped, is th^ reply that will come
from some quarters. Surely, let it be draped, except he comes who shows
that he has the right to lift its veil. He will show his right by the way in
which he exercises it. We do not go about unclothed. We do not put any
undraped picture upon our walls, because there are few painters who have
the right to paint nude figures for pure-minded people. But when one of
those who have the right paints such a picture, then it hangs before our eyes
and we see that it is naked, and are not ashamed. What genius and high
mental tone are in art love as well as in real life—so our poet says ;
Behold my Venus, my soul’s body, lies
With my love laid upon her garment-wise.
This is the key note of his song.
To a woman who loves, the love of the
�MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
667
man she loves is as a garment. A modest woman never lays aside her mod
esty ; but as to shame, one of the greatest of moralists tells us that that may be
< taken off and put on like her petticoat. It is from this moral plane, and through
this moral medium that Mr. Swinburne contemplates his subject. We have
said that his lyrics, under certain circumstances, would be indecent: more, to
many people, they will be blasphemous. Take this passage as an example
curiously framed to elicit both those epithets :
Lo she was thus when her clear limbs enticed
All lips that now grow sad with kissing Christ,
Stained with the blood fallen from the feet of God,
The feet and hands where at our souls were priced.
Alas, Lord, surely thoH art great and fair.
But lo her wonderfully woven hair !
And thou didst heal us with thy piteous kiss;
But see now, Lord ; her mouth is lovelier.
She is right fair; what hath she done to thee ?
Nay, fair Lord Christ, lift up thine eyes and see;
Had now thy mother such a lip—like this ?
Thou knowest how sweet a thing it is to me.
Could the ingenuity of genius, taxed for the sole purpose, contrive to bring
together within twelve lines anything more shocking to the ascetic religionist
than this ? Let every man who can see in this passage only blasphemy and
impurity, let every man who measures a woman’s innocence by her physio
logical ignorance and her bodily torpidity, exclude this book from his house
and the houses of all those in whom he takes an interest, as he would keep
poison from his table; for it swells to bursting with such venom. There will
be others who, perceiving at once the dramatic spirit through the lyric form
of these poems, will find in them neither blasphemy nor the intention of
blasphemy, and who, breathing the same moral atmosphere as the poet, will
find in his song impurity neither of word nor thought. To all such readers
they will not only be harmless, but full of deep and strong delight. Their
beauty, and the joy they give, is heroic, and will consume small souls It is
like the beauty of the poet's “ Dolores,” to whom he says •
Thou wert fair in the fearless old fashion,
And thy limbs are as melodies yet.
His whole book is an expression of beauty and of passion in this fearless
old fashion: naked, free and strong. Naked not for the sake of nakedness,
but for the sake of freedom, strength and beauty. In this as in the dramatic
motive of these lyrics, and also in his way of not beginning at the beginning,
but, as it were, in the middle, and implying what has gone before, Mr. Swin
burne is very like the greatest dramatic poet the world has seen for two cen
turies—Robert Browning. A failure to perceive the purely dramatic charac
ter of almost all the erotic poems in this volume must lead to a very errone
ous and unjust judgment of the poet. Thus, in “Before Dawn" the sup
posed speaker says, that amid the fierce joys to which he has abandoned him
self, he is ready,
**’’. •
To say of shame—what is it ?
Of virtue—we can miss it;
Of sin—we can but kiss it
And it’s no longer sin.
�668
MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
And of a beautiful woman it is said elsewhere,
All her body was more virtuous
Than souls of women fashioned otherwise.
These passages cause sentence to be pronounced upon him in various quarters
for the crime of asserting that delight purges sin of wrong and that beauty
makes vice virtue. But the poet is not preaching, he is painting. And the
spirit, if not the very thought of both these passages is expressed by Brown
ing in one of his finest poems, “ Pippa Passes.” Lucca’s wife Ottima is with
her paramour Sebald, to whom she says,
Sebald, as we lay
Rising and falling only with our pants
Who said, Let death come now—'tis right to die !
Right to be punished—naught completes such bliss
But woe ?
. . . Bind it [her hair] thrice about my brow
Crown me your queen, your spirit’s arbitress,
Magnificent in sin.
True, Browning makes the voice of Pippa singing “ God is in his heaven ”
rouse Sebald from his guilty trance, to loathe his paramour. But so Swin
burne closes his poem thus :
Lest all who love and choose him
See Love and so refuse him ;
For all who find him lose him,
But all have found him fair.
Whoever will read this scene of Browning’s—poet without reproach—will find
in it an expression of delight in physical beauty and of abandonment to pas
sion which it would almost seem that Mr. Swinburne had imitated and not
surpassed. And in Browning’s “ Dramatic Lyrics ” and in his “ Men and
Women” are other passages that glow with all the amorous fire that burns in
Mr. Swinburne’s pages. There is this great difference, however, among others,
between the poets, that Browning has not published a volume devoted to the
celebration of sexual love and fleshly beauty. But that Mr. Swinburne fias
done so is at once his sin and his salvation, as a poet writing for the general
public. Whoever takes up this volume knows beforehand exactly the en
tertainment to which he is bidden; no reader finds himself 'betrayed into
reading erotic poetry. For one of the poems in this book we can, however,
find no excuse, even in its marvellous beauty, because its subject is without
the pale of nature. True, it is purely dramatic ; but why the poet should
choose such a subject as that incomprehensible, monstrous passion known as
“ Sapphic love,” and name his poem by the Greek word “ Anactoria,” i. e.,
sovereignty, we cannot conjecture. Had he exhausted nature and the love
of man and woman for each other? Yet, in this poem, as we have already
intimated, are some of the finest passages that he has written, some of the
very finest in all modern poetry. We do not refer only or chiefly to such ex
quisite expressions of love as,
The fervent under lid, and that above
Lifted with laughter or abashed with love,
Thine amorous girdle, full of thee and fair,
And leavings of the lilies in thine hair.
The poem passes beyond these limits, and deals not reverentially with sub-
�MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
669
jeets higher and vaster than mere human passion. In a passage of this kind
are the following lines, of strange power and awful beauty :
For who shall change with prayers and thanksgivings
The mystery of the cruelty of things ?
Or say what God above all gods and years
With offering and blood and sacrifice of tears,
With lamentation from strange lands, from graves
Where the snake pastures, from scarred mouths of slaves,
From prison, and from plunging prows of ships
Through flame-like foam of the sea’s closing lips—
With thwarting of strange signs, and wind-blown hair
Of comets, desolating the dim air,
When darkness is made fast with seals and bars
And fierce reluctance of disastrous stars,
Eclipse, and sound of shaken hills, and wings
Darkening, and blind inexplicable things—
With sorrow of laboring moons, and altering light
And travail of the planets of the night,
And weeping of the weary Pleiad’s seven,
Feeds the mute, melancholy lust of heaven
This may be frightfully impious, even when put into the mouth of the
heathen Sappho ; but it is not, therefore, one whit less grand. Has there
lived more than one other poet who could think such thoughts and use lan
guage with such supreme mastery ? We do not remember in all poetical
literature a passage which expresses with such sustained power the vague
terror and mysterious woe of the whole universe. It is in his daring use of
language and his ability to justify his daring that half Mr. Swinburne’s power
resides. In the above passage this power is very striking. The very phrase
“ disastrous stars,” against which the etymological criticism might be brought
that it is tautological—“ disastrous ” having come to mean fraught with
calamity because it first meant ill-starred—is yet evidence of the poet’s right
ful consciousness of a power which places him above all such pedagogic con
siderations in his choice of words. A scholar himself, he can yet leave his
scholarship out of sight and out of mind, while yet with the trained skill of
an intellectual athlete he does feats of language which to mere scholars would
be impossible. He is the master, not the servant of words, and uses them
for the service that they can do to-day, not for that which they could do in days
gone by. Yet that he can use them thus, as if he had been born four hun
dred years ago, he shows in “ The Masque of Queen Bersabe ” and “ St.
Dorothy.” And the name of the latter poem reminds us to mention it as one
that for its spirit might have been written by a saintly nun. It is a poetic
exaltation of the legend of the Christian virgin who died in Rome by the axe
rather than enter the service of Venus, as that service was in the decadence
of the Empire. There are other poems of like spirit in the volume. Such are
“Itylus,” one of the sweetest and tenderest, as well as most musical lyric
poems in the language, “ A Lamentation ” and “ Amina Ancepsand
although such as these are rare, those are frequent which tell terribly of
the woes that wrongful love may bring. There is not a sadder, more
remorseful poem to be read than “ The Triumph of Time.” But magazines
have limits, and we must stay our hand. Mr. Swinburne’s poems are
not without faults, but these are trifling indeed compared with the strange,
fresh beauty of the pages that they spot. One blemish of frequent occur
�670
MR. SWINBURNE’S POEMS.
rence we have noticed—the more because it should not have appeared in the
work of a poet who is so fertile .of fancy, so rich in language, and who has
such a remarkable gift of rhyme. The kisses that, whether implied or named
must needs be plentifully scattered over the pages of an erotic poet, are too
often used for sound as well as sense by Mr. Swinburne—who ought to be
above making "kiss” rhyme to “bliss”—and, moreover, are incessantly repre
sented as stings or wounds. The lips that give and take them are described
as flecked with blood and very often with salt foam ; so often, indeed, that it
provokes the thought that Mr. Swinburne gets his lovers into a very sad
pickle. This blemish is one symptom of the general evil of these poems—
that they are overwrought and have too little of the repose which is a neces
sary condition of all high art. The turbulence is grand, the passion is real
as well as fervid; but we do not li_a to live in a tempest. We cannot refrain
from remarking that Mr. Swinburne has the high distinction of being the first
poet since Shakespeare who has written lines that Shakespeare might have
written. We do not mean to liken him to Shakespeare; and we refer not to
his thoughts but to his turn of phrase, which is sometimes like Shakespeare’s
in his sonnets. We can only quote as example these lines from the beautiful
poem upon the myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis :
Where between sleep and life some brief space is
With love like gold bound round about the head,
Sex to sweet sex with lips and limbs is wed,
Turning the fruitful feud of hers and his
To the waste wedlock of a sterile kiss.
That last line Mr. Swinburne might have recovered from some lost sonnet
of Shakespeare’s; so might he this whole passage.
To what strange end hath some strange god made fair
The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?
Hid love in all the folds of all thy hair
Fed thee on Summers, watered thee with showers
Given all the gold that all the seasons wear
To thee that art a thing of barren hours ?
But wide as are the bounds of our admiration, our expression of it must
be compressed within narrow limits. Let no one misunderstand us. These
poems are of the flesh fleshly. They are not of the kind that “ will not bring
a blush to the cheek of innocence,” and they should be shunned and execrated
by all people who believe that a blush of awakened consciousness is the first
warning of the flight of purity. Nor would those who do not so believe, and
who think that these dramatic lyrics have their place in poetry, and that no
mean one, be pleased to see any friend, young or old, male or female, choose
them for frequent perusal. They are not written virginibus puerisque. Yet
the spirit that animates them is not that of Aretino ; the pictures that they
present do not bring up those that Giulio Romano drew. The men and
women who speak through them are such as Raphael painted -after he had
touched the lips of the Fornarina. Let every man avert his eyes who be
lieves that there is sin in passion or pollution in beauty.
Richard Grant White.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Mr Swinburne's poems
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
White, Richard Grant [1832-1907.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: [665]-670 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Review of 'Laus Veneris, and other Poems and Ballads' by Swinburne. Author's edition. New York: Carleton; London: Moxon & Co. From Galaxy 2. Attribution: Virginia Clark catalogue.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[n.d.]
Identifier
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G5315
Subject
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Poetry
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Mr Swinburne's poems), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English
-
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Text
167
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^TERNITY
By Arthur W. E. O’Shaughnessy.
My body was part of the sun and the dew,
Not a trace of my death to me clave;
There was scarce a man left on the earth whom I knew,
And another was laid in my grave ;—
I was changed and in heaven; the great sea of blue
Had long washed my soul pure in its wave.
My sorrow was turned to a beautiful dress;
Very fair for my weeping was I,
Arid my heart was renewed, but it bore, none the less,
The great wound that had brought me to die—
The deep wound that She gave who wrought all my distress
Ah, my heart loved her still in the sky !
I wandered alone where the stars’ tracks were bright;
I was beauteous and holy and sad;
I was thinking of her who of old had the might
To have blest me and made my death glad;
I remembered how faithless she was, and how light,
Yea, and how little pity she had.
The love that I bore her was now more sublime,
It could, never be shared now or known ;
And her wound in my heart was a pledge in love’s clime,
Eor her sake I was ever alone,
Till the spirit of God in the fulness of time
Should make perfect all love in his own.
My soul had forgiven each separate tear
She had bitterly wrung from my eyes ;
But I thought of her lightness—ah, sore was my fear
She would fall somewhere never to rise,
And that no one would love her to bring her soul near
To the heaven where love never dies.
�168
IN love’s eternity.
She had drawn me with feigning, and held me a day;
She had taken the passionate price
That my heart gave for love—with no doubt or delay—
For I thought that her smile would suffice ;
She had played with, and wasted, and then cast away
The true heart that could never love twice.
And false must she be; she had followed the cheat
That ends loveless and hopeless below ;
I remembered her words’ cruel worldly deceit
When she bade me forget her and go.
She could ne’er have believed after death we might meet,
Or she would not have let me die so !
I thought and was sad ; the blue fathomless seas
Bore the white clouds in luminous throng,
And the souls that had love were in each one of these ;
They passed by with a great upward song :
They were going to wander beneath the fair trees
In high Eden—their joy would be long.
An age it is since : the great passionate bloom
Of eternity burns more intense ;
The whole heaven draws near to its beautiful doom
With a deeper, a holier sense ;
It feels ready to fall on His bosom in whom
Is each love and each love’s recompense.
How sweet to look back to that desolate space
When the heaven scarce my heaven seemed !
She came suddenly, swiftly, a great healing grace
Filled her features and forth from her streamed !
With a cry our lips met, and a long close embrace
Made the past like a thing I had dreamed.
‘ Ah, love,’ she began, ‘ when I found you were dead
I was changed and the world was changed too ;
On a sudden I felt that the sunshine had fled,
And the flowers and summer gone too ;
Life but mocked me ; I found there was nothing instead
But to turn back and weep all in you.
When you were not there to fall down at my feet,
And pour out the whole passionate store
Of the heart that was made to make my heart complete,
In true words that my memory bore,
Then I found that those words were the only words sweet,
And I knew I should hear them no more.
*
�in love’s eternity.
‘ I found that my life was grown empty again ;
Day and year now I had but to learn
How my heaven had come to me—sought me in vain,
And was gone from me ne’er to return :
Too earthly and winterly now seemed the plain
Of dull life where the heart ceased to burn !
‘ And soon with a gathering halo was seen,
O’er a dim waste that fell into night,
Your coming, your going—as though it had been
The fair track of an angel of light;
And my dream showed you changed in a spirit’s full sheen
Fleeing from me in far lonely flight.
‘ My Angel! ’twas then with a soul’s perfect stake '
You came wooing me, day after day,
With soft eyes that shed tears for my sake and the sake
Of intense thoughts your lips would not say ;
’Twas a love, then, like this my heart cared not to take !
’Twas a heart like this I cast away !
‘ Ah yes !—but your love was a fair magic toy
That you gave to a child who scarce deigned
To receive it—forsook it for some passing joy,
Never guessing the charm it contained :
But you gave it and left it, and none could destroy
The fair talisman where it remained.
‘And, surely, no child—but a woman at last
Found your gift where the child let it lie,
Understood the whole secret it held, sweet and vast,
The fair treasure a world could not buy;
And believed not the meaning could ever have past,
Any more than the giver could die.
‘ And then did that woman’s whole life, with a start,
Own its lover, its saviour, its lord ;
He had come, he had wooed her,—and lo, her dull heart
Had not hailed him with one stricken chord
Of whole passion—had suffered him e’en to depart
Without hope of a lover’s reward !
‘ But, surely, there failed not at length his least look,
His least pleading, his most secret tear
Quite to win her and save her; her heart truly took
A fond record of all: very dear,
Very gracious he seemed; and for him she forsook
The drear ruin her soul had come near.
169
�170
IN love’s ETERNITY.
‘ For him she made perfect her life, till she laved
Her soul pure in the infinite blue :
O thou Lover, who once, for a love deathless ci'aved
A brief heaven of years frail and few,
Take the child whom you loved and the woman you saved
In the Angel who now blesses you ! ’
She ceased. To my soul’s deepest sources the sense
Of her words with a full healing crept,
And my heart was delivered with rapture intense
From the wound and the void it had kept;
Then I saw that her heart was a heaven—immense
As my love ! And together we wept.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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In love's eternity
Creator
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O'Shaughnessy, Arthur William Edgar
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 167-170 p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. From The Dark Blue 2. Attribution of journal title and date: Virginia Clark catalogue. The Dark Blue was a London-based literary magazine published monthly from 1871 to 1873.
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Date
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[1871]
Identifier
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G5316
Subject
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Poetry
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (In love's eternity), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Conway Tracts
English Poetry
Poetry in English