From the regions of ministers and misers we may descend to the equally disputed realms of the muses. Horace terms it "the peevish and inhuman muse," which those who drink of Aganippe's fountain woo; whilst others are apt to equal their Castalian spring and Parnassus with the height of the empyreal, regarding with pity the toilers on the land and deep. But herein, as in aught else, it is the mind, and not the outward circumstances, which makes the happiness suited to its strength and position; for it must be confessed it is from the weak in bodily frame, the lame, and the blind, that we draw our poets: and when we find a rare bodily exception to the rule, we find too often a mind insatiate of applause, and pining for more appreciation of their productions. The votaries of the muse cannot be set down as so happy and contented as many a ploughman, nor does the smoothness of the lines gratify the eye more than the smoothness of the furrow. But these rhymes of Gay hardly aspire to the height of poesy, nor do they possess the banter and raciness, such as we find in Butler's 'Hudibras':—
"When oyster-women lock their fish up,
And trudge away to bawl, 'No bishop!'"
Neither has it the deep pathos of the Spenserian stanza, which perhaps strives at the deepest vein of poetry. Take two of Thomson's, for example:—
"O mortal man, who livest here by toil,
Do not complain of this thy hard estate;
That like an emmet thou must ever moil,
Is a hard sentence of an ancient date:
And, certes, there is for it reason great;
For though sometimes it makes thee weep and wail,
And curse thy star, and early drudge and late,
Withouten that would come a heavier bale,—
Loose life, unruly passions, and diseases pale."
And another stanza runs thus:—
"I care not, Fortune, what you me deny:
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace;
You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face;
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns by living stream at eve.
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave;
Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave."
Such is the stanza in which are written Spenser's 'Faërie Queen,' Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence,' and Byron's 'Childe Harold,' and it is the highest flight of poetry: after which comes the heroic verse, in which we lap the heavy poems we call epic—their Latin appellation; of these the Iliads of Homer and the Æneids of Virgil are the ever recurring aspirations of poets doomed to fall untimely. The charm of Homer is that it is not only a poem, but it instructs us in the history—all that we know of it—of those prehistoric days. It is full of ballads, which are the ground-work by which we trace the manners and the tenets of the pagan tribes. The truth involved in 'Homer' is the charm of his epic poem, while the falsehood involved in the 'Henriade' of Voltaire is amply sufficient to condemn it utterly. For a specimen let us take Pope's 'Homer,' where Hector answers Andromache's appeal to stay and guard the walls of Troy:—
"The chief replied, 'That post shall be my care;
Nor that alone, but all the works of war;
Still foremost let me stand to guard the throne,
To save my father's honours and my own:
Yet come it will, the day decreed by Fates—
How my heart trembles whilst my tongue relates—
That day when thou, imperial Troy, must bend,
Must see thy warriors fall, thy glories end.
And yet no presage dire so wounds my mind—
My mother's death, the ruin of my kind—
As thine, Andromache, thy griefs I dread.
I see thee weeping, trembling, captive led.
In Argive looms our battles to design,
Woes—of which woes so large a part was thine;
To bear the victor's hard commands, or bring
The waters from the Hypereian spring.
There, whilst you groan beneath the load of life,
They cry "Behold the Trojan Hector's wife!"
Some Argive, who shall live thy griefs to see,
Embitters thy great woe by naming me:
The thoughts of glory past and present shame,
A thousand griefs, shall waken at the name.
May I lie cold before that dreadful day,
Pressed by a load of monumental clay
Thy Hector, wrapped in everlasting sleep,
Shall neither hear thee sigh nor see thee weep.'"
Next in pathos is the mournful elegy; of which none can surpass Gray's elegy:—
"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Alike await the inevitable hour;
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.