A classic inheritance from the entombed past. The living poet who carried his first production with a trembling hand to Dr. Johnson’s house in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, and could not find heart to wait for an answer to his summons when he had knocked at the door; who listened with delight and instruction to the lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds; and who still remembers and relates how, when his father took him to see Garrick act, he himself punished his boyish impatience by closing his eyes for a moment, as the great actor was coming on to the stage. It is nearly seventy years since Samuel Rogers published his first poem, and he was then a man. He is the Addison of verse. Grace, elegance, delicacy, softness, are the characteristics of his poetry. He does not astonish by power, nor thrill by burning passion; but he soothes, gratifies, and charms all who are susceptible of consolation and pleasure from polished and complete works of art. His taste is refined and classical, and all his works have the finish which such taste will require of the artist possessing it. The rhythm of his poetry partakes of the character of the sentiment: all is chaste, smooth, refined, and clear. The descriptions in “Italy” of Italian life and scenery are very beautiful, and his reflections are at all times pure and elevating. For so long a life, Mr. Rogers has written very little; but his works are gems, and have been heightened and improved by labour until scrupulous thought can do for them nothing more. All poets since the century began have acknowledged Rogers for a master; and his conscientiousness, purity, and refinement, fit him for a teacher. He has outlived not only his illustrious contemporaries, but the great poets who were unborn when he had reached his prime. The patriarch, in his long protracted nightfall, still gladdens his memory with the visions of the past, looking with placid hope towards his all but present future.
[By W. Behnes.]
412. William Wordsworth. Poet.
[Born at Cockermouth, 1770. Died at Rydal Mount, 1850. Aged 80.]
The most original of the poetical thinkers whom his day gave to his country. Her verse, notwithstanding one or two better voices uplifted, had too long and too patiently worn the character of an imitative literature. He undertook the championship of a conflict, which was to reseat legitimate powers on the throne. Born and bred in the northern, mountain region of England, his first study of men was amongst the simple-minded, vigorous, independent, and intelligent peasantry of the dales. The earth, which his young feet explored, lay embosoming its lakes, rearing crag and steep, as though yet freshly robed in loveliness, or charged with power, by the Creator’s hand. His instinct already drew him, even unconsciously, to gather, in that contemplation of Man and of Nature, and not in books, the materials of his appointed Art. Solitary, self-communing, self-sufficing, he soon stood in presence with an educated world, the prophet of a new poetical revelation. He found, at the first encounter, a prophet’s reward—belief in the few: from the multitude, mockery and persecution. He lived long enough to be understood; to see health and strength of his infusing reanimate the too languid veins of our English poesy. An extreme trust in the worth inhering in every phase of humanity may have sometimes descended too low, in the choice of the theme; an excessive zeal of simplicity may occasionally have stripped the style a little too bare. But his writings remain distinguished, amongst the lays of his own just elapsed age, as the most soothing and instructive to the heart of the reader; and for the generations of poets, rising and to rise, the most warning and oracular. His strains have been remarkably various in length and weight, in manner and style. As a portrayer of human nature, he ranks amongst those who have the most deeply and critically explored the workings of our mysterious heart and intellectual being. His especial vocation amongst poets was, in his own view, the disclosure of the affinities which attract, by feeling, the human soul to the natural world: It supplying intellectual forms, and We, passion—an intercourse, blending, if it may be so said, two lives into one. He entered upon his work of reforming our poetical spirit, in two volumes of Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, in the years 1798 and 1807. His life was one long day of brooding calm—his sunset, lucid and serene.
[Presented to the Crystal Palace by the sculptor, F. Thrupp, and modelled by him from a cast after death by Chantrey.]
413. Sir Walter Scott. Poet and Novelist.
[Born in Edinburgh, 1771. Died at Abbotsford, 1832. Aged 61.]
The great magician of the north, under whose fascinating spell millions in all lands have been entranced and strengthened. His boyish eye fed on the wild scenes of his native land, and on the mouldering wrecks—here and there sadly gracing those scenes—of her former sterner, yet greater day. His boyish heart was cradled in the music of her old wild songs, then living, and in the rough and bold traditions of her strange and romantic Past. The joy and the passion which were life to the boy, became power to the man. With a wondrous dominion suddenly begun, yet prolonged whilst he lived, he swayed and swept back the spirits of his generation on a torrent of delight and desire, into forgotten times, alien to our manner of thinking and of being. But the poet finds one heart of Man under all the shapes of human existence: one universal spirit of human life. Transported by the poet, we find ourselves everywhere with our kind. Reanimated by him, the worn-out and the antiquated rise new-born and of our time. And Scott, in verse or in prose, was a poet. The electric telegraph of the press carried his writings, as they left his desk, over the globe. The excellent French historian, Augustin Thierry, says that the romances of Scott, by their vivid and vital representations of the past, have reformed the style and study of history on the continent, urging and guiding the historian, instead of chronicling dry facts, to throw himself with a thirsty inspiration into the bosom of the mighty departed time. A Scottish traveller in Spanish California told, that a Spanish monk had there shown him his copy of “Ivanhoe,” and said “Next after my Bible.” We remember with pain that Scott, to whom the world stands so largely indebted for some of its purest delights, fell into trouble and difficulty, and snapped his brain in his noble and manly struggle for escape. The spot of Scotland which the toil of his genius had won him, for rooting his family on, when torn from both him and them by a blast of ill-fortune, was redeemed to them by the reverent affection of his country—-made theirs by a public act which tied even every “book of his curious learning” to its place on his shelves, in perpetuity. There his favourite daughter’s daughter and her children now prolong, if not his illustrious name, his honoured line.
[By F. Chantrey.]