AN HOUR OF ROMANCE.
‘There were thick leaves above me and around,
And low sweet sighs, like those of childhood’s sleep,
Amidst their dimness, and a fitful sound
As of soft showers on water,’ etc. etc.
“The poetry is here as beautiful as the scene described is quiet and pleasing. It forms an amiable picture of the occupations of a contemplative mind. The language, versification, and imagery, are of great merit, the beauties of nature described by a careful observer; the English scene is placed in happy contrast with the Eastern, and the dream of romance pleasantly disturbed by the cheerfulness of life. But we make but sorry work at commenting on what the reader must feel.
“It has been said that religion can never be made a subject of interest in poetry. The position is a false one, refuted by the close alliance between poetic inspiration and sacred enthusiasm. Irreligion has certainly no place in poetry. There may have been Atheist philosophers; an Atheist poet is an impossibility. The poet may doubt and reason like Hamlet, but the moment he acquiesces in unbelief, there is an end to the magic of poetry. Imagination can no longer throw lively hues over the creation: the forests cease to be haunted; the sea, and the air, and the heavens, to teem with life. The highest interest, we think, attaches to Mrs Hemans’s writings, from the spirit of Christianity which pervades them.
“The poetry of our author is tranquillising in its character, calm and serene. We beg pardon of the lovers of excitement, but we are seriously led to take notice of this quality as of a high merit. A great deal has been said of the sublimity of directing the passions; we hold it a much more difficult and a much more elevated task, to restrain them. It may be sublime to ride on the whirlwind, and direct the storm; but it seems to us still more sublime to appease the storm, and still the whirlwind. Virgil, no mean authority, was of this opinion. The French are reported to be particularly fond of effect and display; but we remember to have read that, even in the splendid days of Napoleon, the simplicity of vocal music surpassed in effect the magnificence of a numerous band. It was when Napoleon was crowned Emperor in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The Parisians, wishing to distinguish the occasion by some novel exhibition, and to produce a great effect, filled the orchestra with eighty harps, which were all struck together with unequalled skill. The fashionable world was in raptures. Presently the Pope entered, and some thirty of his singers, who came with him from Rome, received him with the powerful Tu es Petrus of the old-fashioned Scarlatti; and the simple majesty of the air, assisted by no instruments, annihilated in a moment the whole effect of the preceding fanfaronade. And in literature the public taste seems to us already weary of those productions which aim at astonishing and producing a great effect, and there is now an opportunity of pleasing by the serenity of contemplative excellence.
“It is the high praise of Mrs Hemans’s poetry that it is feminine. The sex may well be pleased with her productions, for they could hardly have a better representative in the career of letters. All her works seem to come from the heart, to be natural and true. The poet can give us nothing but the form under which the objects he describes present themselves to his own mind. That form must be noble, or it is not worthy of our consideration; it must be consistent, or it will fail to be true. Now, in the writings of Mrs Hemans, we are shown how life and its concerns appear to woman, and hear a mother intrusting to verse her experience and observation. So, in ‘The Hebrew Mother,’ ‘the spring-tide of nature’ swells high as she parts from her son, on devoting him to the service of the Temple:—
‘Alas, my boy! thy gentle grasp is on me,
The bright tears quiver in thy pleading eyes;
And now fond thoughts arise,
And silver cords again to earth have won me,
And like a vine thou claspest my full heart—
How shall I hence depart?
‘And oh! the home whence thy bright smile hath parted,
Will it not seem as if the sunny day
Turn’d from its door away?
While through its chambers wandering, weary-hearted,
I languish for thy voice, which past me still
Went like a singing rill?
‘I give thee to thy God—the God that gave thee,
A well-spring of deep gladness to my heart!
And, precious as thou art,
And pure as dew of Hermon, He shall have thee,
My own, my beautiful, my undefiled!
And thou shalt be His child.
‘Therefore, farewell! I go—my soul may fail me,
As the hart panteth for the water-brooks,
Yearning for thy sweet looks.
But thou, my first-born! droop not, nor bewail me;
Thou in the Shadow of the Rock shalt dwell,
The Rock of Strength.—Farewell!’
“The same high feeling of maternal duty and love inspires the little poem, ‘The Wreck,’ which every one has read. ‘The Lady of the Castle,’ ‘The Grave of Körner,’ ‘The Graves of a Household,’ are all on domestic subjects. But why do we allude to poems which are in every one’s hands? The mother’s voice breaks out again in the piece entitled ‘Elysium.’ Children, according to the heathen mythology, were banished to the infernal regions, and religious faith had no consolation for a mourning parent.
‘Calm, on its leaf-strewn bier,
Unlike a gift of Nature to Decay,
Too roselike still, too beautiful, too dear,
The child at rest before its mother lay;
E’en so to pass away,
With its bright smile! Elysium! what wert thou
To her who wept o’er that young slumberer’s brow?
‘Thou hadst no home, green land!
For the fair creature from her bosom gone,
With life’s fresh flowers just opening in its hand,
And all the lovely thoughts and dreams unknown,
Which in its clear eye shone
Like spring’s first wakening! But that light was past—
—Where went the dewdrop swept before the blast?
‘Not where thy soft winds play’d,
Not where thy waters lay in glassy sleep!—
Fade with thy bowers, thou land of visions! fade!
From thee no voice came o’er the gloomy deep,
And bade man cease to weep!
Fade, with the amaranth plain, the myrtle grove,
Which could not yield one hope to sorrowing love!
‘For the most loved are they
Of whom Fame speaks not with her clarion voice
In regal halls! The shades o’erhang their way;
The vale, with its deep fountains, is their choice,
And gentle hearts rejoice
Around their steps; till silently they die,
As a stream shrinks from summer’s burning eye.
‘And the world knows not then—
Not then, nor ever, what pure thoughts are fled!
Yet these are they, who on the souls of men
Come back, when night her folding veil hath spread,
The long-remember’d dead!
But not with thee might aught save glory dwell—
Fade, fade away, thou shore of asphodel!’
“And the same feelings of a woman and mother dictated ‘The Evening Prayer at a Girls’ School,’—a poem which merits to be considered in connexion with Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.’
‘O joyous creatures! that will sink to rest,
Lightly, when those pure orisons are done,” etc.
“Of other spirited, and lively, and pathetic short poems of Mrs Hemans, which form some of the brightest ornaments of the lyric poetry of the language, we take no particular notice—for in what part of the United States are they not known? So general has been the attention to those of her pieces adapted to the purposes of a newspaper, we hardly fear to assert that, throughout a great part of this country, there is not a family of the middling class in which some of them have not been read. The praise which was not sparingly bestowed upon her, when her shorter first productions became generally known among us, has been often repeated on a careful examination of her works; and could we hope that our remarks might one day fall under her eye, we should hope she would not be indifferent to the good wishes which are offered her from America, but feel herself cheered and encouraged in her efforts, by the prospect of an enlarged and almost unlimited field of useful influence, opened to her among the descendants of her country in an independent land. The ocean divides us from the fashions as well as the commotions of Europe. The voice of America, deciding on the literature of England, resembles the voice of posterity more nearly than any thing else, that is contemporaneous, can do. We believe that the general attention which has been given to Mrs Hemans’s works among us, may be regarded as a pledge that they will not be received with indifference by posterity.”—North American Review.
[At the conclusion of “The Records” we gave the opinions of one of our most celebrated Cisatlantic critics regarding the poetry of Mrs Hemans, and we think it but right to show now (as has just been done) the general estimate in which her genius is held in America, as evidenced by the North American Review, the best-known and most widely-circulated of the Transatlantic periodicals.
Judging from the state of feeling in America—from the ideas of practical philosophy entertained there—and from the pervading utilitarian bias of its prose literature, we must confess that, had we been asked to name any votary of the British muse more likely than another to be appreciated in that country, we should have had very little hesitation in fixing upon Crabbe. And why? Because his poetry is characterised by a stern adherence to the realities of life, as contradistinguished from romance, and because his characters and situations are taken from existing aspects of society, appreciable by all. In this theory it appears we are wrong; and Professor Norton has here done his best to account for it. We are most given to admire what is least attainable; and therefore it is that the spiritual glow which Mrs Hemans has blent with human sentiment—the imaginative beauty with which she has clothed “the shows of earth and heaven,”—and the leaven of romance which she has infused into the communications of daily life, have, as lucus a non lucendo, been elements of, and not the impediments to, her American popularity.]