Nothing indeed is more wonderful in the Rowley poems than the masterly style of versification which they frequently display. Few more exquisite specimens of this kind can be found in our language than the Minstrel's song in Aella, beginning,
O sing unto my roundelay.
A young poet may be expected to describe warmly and energetically whatever interests his fancy or his heart; but a command of numbers would seem to be an art capable of being perfected only by long-continued and diligent endeavours. It must be recollected, however, that much might be done in the time which was at Chatterton's disposal, when that time was undivided by the study of any other language but his own. We see, in the instance of Milton's juvenile poems in Latin, not to mention others, to what excellence this species of skill may be brought, even in boyhood, where the organs are finely disposed for the perception of musical delight; and if examples of the same early perfection be rarer in our own tongue, it may be because so much labour is seldom or ever exacted, at that age, in the use of it.
Tyrwhitt, whose critical acumen had enabled him to detect a supposititious passage in a tragedy of Euripides, was at first a dupe to the imposture of Chatterton, and treated the poems as so decidedly genuine, that he cited them for the elucidation of Chaucer; but seeing good grounds for changing his opinion, as Mr. Nichols[1] informs us, he cancelled several leaves before his volume was published. Walpole was equally deceived; though his vanity afterwards would not suffer him to own that he had been so. Mr. Tyson, in a letter to Dr. Glynn,[2] well observed, that he could as soon believe that Hogarth painted the cartoons, as that Chatterton wrote Rowley's poems: yet (he adds) they are as unlike any thing ancient, as Sir Joshua's flowing contour is unlike the squares and angles of Albert Durer.
The poems that were written after his arrival in London, when his mind was agitated by wild speculations, and thrown off its balance by noise and bustle, were, as might be expected, very unequal to those which he had produced in the retirement of his native place. Yet there is much poignancy in the satires. The three African eclogues have a tumid grandeur. Heccar and Gaira is the best of them.
The following verses are strong and impassioned:
The children of the wave, whose pallid race
Views the faint sun display a languid face,
From the red fury of thy justice fled,
Swifter than torrents from their rocky bed.
Fear with a sicken'd silver tinged their hue,
The guilty fear where vengeance is their due.
Many of the pieces, confessedly his own, furnish descriptions of natural objects, equally happy with those so much admired in the Rowleian poems.
When golden Autumn, wreath'd in ripen'd corn,
From purple clusters pour'd the foamy wine,
Thy genius did his sallow brows adorn,
And made the beauties of the season thine.
With rustling sound the yellow foliage flies,
And wantons with the wind in rapid whirls,
The gurgling rivulet to the vallies hies,
Whilst on its bank the spangled serpent curls.
* * * * *
Pale rugged Winter bending o'er his tread;
His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew;
His eyes a dusky light congeal'd and dead,
His robe a tinge of bright ethereal blue.
His train a motley'd, sanguine, sable cloud,
He limps along the russet dreary moor,
Whilst rising whirlwinds, blasting keen and loud,
Roll the white surges to the sounding shore.