The brands were flat, the brands were dying, Amid their own white ashes lying; But when the lady passed, there came A tongue of light, a fit of flame; Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare, They steal their way from stair to stair, And now have reached her chamber door; The moon shines dim in the open air, Is fastened to an angel's feet. The silver lamp burns dead and dim; But Christabel the lamp will trim. She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright, The Nightingale. (Part I., 1798.) No cloud, no relique of the sunken day My Friend, and thou, our Sister! we have learnt And I know a grove Of large extent, hard by a castle huge, Which the great lord inhabits not; and so So many nightingales; and far and near, In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, And murmurs musical and swift jug jug, And one low piping sound more sweet than all- That should you close your eyes, you might almost Farewell, O Warbler! till to-morrow eve, (A Conversation Poem,' April 1798) Frost at Midnight. Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, Fill up the interspersed vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought! (To Hartley Coleridge, 1798.) From 'Dejection: an Ode.' My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west : I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. O Lady! we receive but what we give, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth And from the soul itself must there be sent O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud- And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, There was a time when, though my path was rough, Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness : Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, For not to think of what I needs must feel, From my own nature all the natural man- Youth and Age. Verse, a Breeze 'mid blossoms straying, Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee-Both were mine! Life went a-maying (1802.) With Nature, Hope, and Poesy, Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; O the Joys, that came down shower-like, It is recorded in the shuddering hearts of Christians that . . . every Bishop but one voted for the continuance of the war [with France]. They deemed the fate of their Religion to be involved in the contest!-- Not the Religion of Peace, my Brethren; not the Religion of the meek and lowly Jesus, which forbids to his Disciples all alliance with the powers of this Worldbut the Religion of Mitres and Mysteries, the Religion of Pluralities and Persecution, the Eighteen-ThousandPound-a-Year Religion of Episcopacy. Alas! what room would there be for Bishops or for Priests in a Religion where Deity is the only object of Reverence, and our Immortality the only article of Faith-Immortality made probable to us by the Light of Nature, and proved to us by the Resurrection of Jesus. Him the High Priests crucified, but he has left us a Religion, which shall prove fatal to every High Priest-a Religion, of which every true Christian is the Priest, his own Heart the Altar, the Universe its Temple, and Errors and Vices its only Sacrifices. Ride on, mighty Jesus! because of thy words of Truth, of Love, and Equality! The age of Priesthood will soon be no more-that of Philosophers and Christians will succeed, and the torch of Superstition be extinguished for ever. Conciones ad Populum,' of 1795, in Essays on His Own Times, 1850.) (From The Union with Ireland. On the general policy of this measure [the Act of Union of Great Britain with Ireland] we have never ventured an opinion: though the means which have been adopted to carry it into effect have received from us all the abhorrence which we could express! (For no safe expression could convey all which we felt and still feel.) The vindictive turbulence of a wild and barbarous race, brutalised by the oppression of centuries, was to be coerced; and no better expedient suggested itself than to permit, or at best to connive at, a system of retaliation! To give an example of horrors, under the pretext that they were only following one; by the vices of a government, to occasion the vices of popular rage, and by retaliations, to inflame that rage into madness; to iron and strait-waistcoat the whole country by military law, and then gravely entreat the inhabitants to exercise their free will and unbiassed judgments; these were the measures intended to smooth and prepare the way to a great national union, founded in assent and cemented by affection! However wise and benignant the plan might have been in itself, it certainly becomes questionable whether it may not be unsafe and impolitic at present, in consequence of the agitation produced by the mad and sanguinary precurrences. This consideration has doubtless influenced many in their opposition to it; while others have found their national pride attacked and stabbed in the vitals by the idea that their country was to lose its individual being and character, and without heart or lungs of its own, to be fed, like a wen, by the circuitous circulation of a nobler body. Yet still, when we contemplate the materials of which the Orange Confederacy is composed, we experience some degree of surprise at the strength and obstinacy of their opposition. A virtuous opposition it cannot be ! We know that faction too well. With them public depravity is not softened down even by the hopeful vice of hypocrisy general sympathy in corruption supersedes the necessity of a vizard. Jobbers, place-hunters, unconditional hirelings, whatever their immediate conduct may be, they will gain no credit from honest men for their motives. Desperate state-harpies, they are now opening against ministers the ravenous mouths, that had been even now devouring ministerial bounties; and to presume fight for their country with talons impeded by their country's spoils, polluted by their country's blood! Timeo Danaos vel dona ferentes. These men recall to our mind the fable of the magician, who, having ordered his ministering imps to destroy the infernal abodes, was himself torn in pieces by them, and carried off in a whirlwind. (Contributed 15th January 1800 to the Morning Post; reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, 1850.) Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit. There are truths so self-evident, or so immediately and palpably deduced from those that are, or are acknowledged for such, that they are at once intelligible to all men who possess the common advantages of the social state; although by sophistry, by evil habits, by the neglect, false persuasions, and impostures of an anti-Christian priesthood joined in one conspiracy with the violence of tyrannical governors, the understandings of men may become so darkened and their consciences so lethargic that a necessity will arise for the republication of these truths, and this too with a voice of loud alarm and impassioned warning. Such were the doctrines proclaimed by the first Christians to the Pagan world; such were the lightnings flashed by Wickliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, Latimer, and others across the Papal darkness; and such in our own times the agitating truths with which Thomas Clarkson and his excellent confederates, the Quakers, fought and con quered the legalised banditti of men-stealers, the numerous and powerful perpetrators and advocates of rapine, murder, and (of blacker guilt than either) slavery. Truths of this kind being indispensable to man, considered as a moral being, are above all expedience, all accidental consequences; for as sure as God is holy, and man immortal, there can be no evil so great as the ignorance or disregard of them. It is the very madness of mock prudence to oppose the removal of a poisoned dish on account of the pleasant sauces or nutritious viands which would be lost with it! . . . The sole condition, therefore, imposed on us by the law of conscience in these cases is, that we employ no unworthy and heterogeneous means to realise the necessary end,-that we entrust the event wholly to the full and adequate promulga tion of the truth, and to those generous affections which the constitution of our moral nature has linked to the full perception of it. Yet evil may, nay it will, be occasioned. Weak men may take offence, and wicked men avail themselves of it; though we must not attribute to the promulgation, or to the truth promulgated, all the evil of which wicked men —predetermined, like the wolf in the fable, to create some occasion-may choose to make it the pretext. But that there ever was, or ever can be, a preponderance of evil, I defy either the historian to instance or the philosopher to prove. 'Let it fly away, all that chaff of light faith that can fly off at any breath of temptation; the cleaner will the true grain be stored up in the granary of the Lord,' we are entitled to say with Tertullian; and to exclaim with heroic Luther, 'Scandal and offence! Talk not to me of scandal and offence. Need breaks through stone walls, and recks not of scandal. It is my duty to spare weak consciencès as far as it may be done without hazard of my soul. Where not, I must take counsel for my soul, though half or the whole world should be scandalised thereby.' The Luther felt and preached and wrote and acted as beseemed a Luther to feel and utter and act. truths which had been outraged he re-proclaimed in the spirit of outraged truth, at the behest of his conscience and in the service of the God of truth. He did his duty, come good, come evil! and made no question on which side the preponderance would be. In the one scale there was gold, and impressed thereon the image and superscription of the universal Sovereign. In all the wide and ever-widening commerce of mind with mind throughout the world, it is treason to refuse it. Can this have a counter weight? The other scale indeed might have seemed full up to the very balance-yard; but of what worth and substance were its contents? ... The gain reaches all good men, belongs to all that love light and desire an increase of light to all and of all times, who thank Heaven for. the gracious dawn, and expect the noonday; who welcome the first gleams of spring, and sow their fields in confident faith of the ripening summer and the rewarding harvest-tide! But the loss is confined to the unenlightened and the prejudiced-say rather, to the weak and prejudiced of a single generation. The prejudices of one age are condemned even by the prejudiced of the succeeding ages; for endless are the modes of folly, and the fool joins with the wise in passing sentence on all modes but his own. Who cried out with greater horror against the murderers of the Prophets than those who likewise cried out, Crucify him! Crucify him!-Prophet and Saviour, and Lord of life, Crucify him! Crucify him!-The truth-haters of every future generation will call the truth-haters of the preceding age by their true names: for even these the stream of time carries onward. In fine, truth considered in itself, and in the effects natural to it, may be conceived as a gentle spring or water-source, warm from the genial earth, and breathing up into the snow-drift that is piled over and around its outlet. It turns the obstacle into its own form and character, and as it makes its way increases its stream. And should it be arrested in its course by a chilling season, it suffers delay, not loss, and waits only for a change in the wind to awaken and again roll onwards. (From The Friend, No. 4, Sept. 7, 1803-slightly altered in 1818; in Essay' viii. of The Friend as published in 1850.) Ariel and Caliban. If a doubt could ever be entertained whether Shakespeare was a great poet, acting upon laws arising out of his own nature, and not without law, as has sometimes been idly asserted, that doubt must be removed by the character of Ariel. The very first words uttered by this being introduce the spirit, not as an angel, above man; not a gnome, or a fiend, below man; but while the poet gives him the faculties and the advantages of reason, he divests him of all mortal character, not positively, it is true, but negatively. In air he lives, from air he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or at sunset: hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. His answers to Prospero are directly to the question, and nothing beyond; or where he expatiates, which is not unfrequently, it is to himself and upon his own delights, or upon the unnatural situation in which he is placed, though under a kindly power and to good ends. Is there anything in nature from which Shakespeare caught the idea of this delicate and delightful being, with such child-like simplicity, yet with such preternatural powers? He is neither born of heaven, nor of earth; but, as it were, between both, like a Mayblossom kept suspended in air by the fanning breeze, which prevents it from falling to the ground, and only finally, and by compulsion, touching earth. This reluctance of the Sylph to be under the command even of Prospero is kept up through the whole play, and in the exercise of his admirable judgment Shakespeare has availed himself of it, in order to give Ariel an interest in the event, looking forward to that moment when he was to gain his last and only reward-simple and eternal liberty. Another instance of admirable judgment and excellent preparation is to be found in the creature contrasted with Ariel-Caliban; who is described in such a manner by Prospero as to lead us to expect the appearance of a foul, unnatural monster. He is not seen at once: his voice is heard; this is the preparation: he was too offensive to be seen first in all his deformity, and in nature we do not receive so much disgust from sound as from sight. After we have heard Caliban's voice he does not enter, until Ariel has entered like a waternymph. All the strength of contrast is thus acquired without any of the shock of abruptness, or of that unpleasant sensation which we experience when the object presented is in any way hateful to our vision. The character of Caliban is wonderfully conceived: he is a sort of creature of the earth, as Ariel is a sort of creature of the air. He partakes of the qualities of the brute, but is distinguished from brutes in two ways: -by having mere understanding without moral reason; and by not possessing the instincts which pertain to absolute animals. Still, Caliban is in some respects a noble being the poet has raised him far above contempt: he is a man in the sense of the imagination: all the images he uses are drawn from nature, and are highly poetical; they fit in with the images of Ariel. Caliban gives us images from the earth, Ariel images from the air. Caliban talks of the difficulty of finding fresh water, of the situation of morasses, and of other circumstances which even brute instinct, without reason, could comprehend. No mean figure is employed, no mean passion displayed, beyond animal passion and repugnance to command. (From Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare.) Hamlet. The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakespeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the common fundamental laws of our nature may be assumed from the fact that Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds. Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect ;for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakespeare, thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses and our meditation on the workings of our minds-an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakespeare places in circumstances under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment :-Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of Macbeth; the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity. (From Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare.) The Defects of Wordsworth's Poetry. The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity-(at all events striking and original)to a style not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that style which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species: first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. . . The second defect I can generalise with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to establish the proba bility of a statement in real life, where nothing is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. Third, an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils results. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most culti vated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathise. In this class I comprise occasional pro lixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression of thought. Fifth and last, thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal; for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale. (From the Biographia Literaria, Chap. ix.) The Excellences of Wordsworth's Poetry. First, an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. The second characteristic excellence of Mr Wordsworth's works is a correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments, won, not from books, but from the poet's own meditative observation. They are fresh, and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element, 'Makes audible a linked lay of truth, Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay, Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!' Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection. . . Third, the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs: a frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens. . . This beauty, and as eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire. Fourth, the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects, but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. Fifth, a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate (Spectator, haud particeps), but of a contemplator from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature, no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. Here the man and the poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. Such as he is: so he writes. (From the Biographia Literaria, Chap. ix.) |