THE GRASSHOPPER.
There is the grasshopper, my summer friend—
The minute sound of many a sunny hour
Passed on a thymy hill, when I could send
My soul in search thereof by bank and bower,
Till lured far from it by a foxglove flower,
Nodding too dangerously above the crag,
Not to excite the passion and the power
To climb the steep, and down the blossom drag;
Then the marsh-crocus joined, and yellow water-flag.
Shrill sings the drowsy wassailer in his dome,
Yon grassy wilderness, where curls the fern,
And creeps the ivy; with the wish to roam,
He spreads his sails, and bright is his sojourn,
'Mid chalices with dews in every urn;
All flying things alike delight have found—
Where’er I gaze, to what new region turn,
Ten thousand insects in the air abound,
Flitting on glancing wings that yield a summer’s sound.
Jeremiah Holme Wiffin, 1792–1836.
XV.
The Streams.
A volume of general selections from English rural verse would be incomplete without some passage from Denham’s poem of “Cooper’s Hill”—a poem so highly lauded by past generations, and which we still read to-day with admiration. Sir John Denham is one of those poets who have met with very opposite treatment from critics of different generations; after receiving the highest commendations from Dryden, from Johnson, from Pope, from Somerville, his bays have been very severely handled in our own time. But allowing him to have been over-praised at one period, shall we for that reason refuse ourselves the pleasure he is assuredly capable of affording us? Is not “Cooper’s Hill” a fine old poem of the second class, which the nineteenth century does well to read once in a while? The celebrated lines, quoted a thousand times,
“Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage; without o’erflowing, full,”
were amusingly parodied some fifty years ago by Mr. Soame Jenyns, in his satire upon an unfledged, ignorant memberling of Parliament:
“Without experience, honesty, or sense,
Unknowing in her interests, trade, or laws,
He vainly undertakes his country’s cause;
Forth from his lips, prepared at all to rail,
Torrents of nonsense flow like bottled ale;
Though shallow, muddy; brisk, though mighty dull;
Fierce without strength; o’erflowing, though not full.”