"Hope, by the ancients, was drawn in the form of a sweet and beautiful child, standing upon tiptoes, and a trefoil or three-leaved grass in her hand."
Citation from old Peacham in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary.
Three names, clustered together in more than one marked association, have a pleasant fragrance in English literature. A triple-leaved clover in a field thickly studded with floral beauties, the modest merits of Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw
"Smell sweet and blossom in the dust"—
endeared to us not merely by the claim of intellect, but by the warmer appeal to the heart, of kindred sympathy and suffering. True poets, they have placed in their spiritual alembic the common woes and sorrows of life, and extracted from them "by force of their so potent art," a cordial for the race.
Has it ever occurred to the reader to reflect how much the world owes to the poets in the alleviation of sorrow? It is much to hear the simple voice of sympathy in its plainest utterances from the companions around us; it is something to listen to the same burden from the good of former generations, as the universal experience of humanity; but we owe the greatest debt to those who by the graces of intellect and the pains of a profounder passion, have triumphed over affliction, and given eloquence to sorrow.
There is a common phrase, which some poet must first have invented—"the luxury of woe." Poets certainly have found their most constant themes in suffering. When the late Edgar Poe, who prided himself on reducing literature to an art, sat down to write a poem which should attain the height of popularity, he said sorrow must be its theme, and wrote "The Raven." Tragedy will always have a deeper hold upon the public than comedy; it appeals to deeper principles, stirs more powerful emotions, imparts an assured sense of strength, is more intimate with our nature, or certainly it would not be tolerated. There is no delight in the exhibition of misery as such, it is only painful and repulsive; we discard all vulgar horrors utterly, and keep no place for them in the mind. Let, however, a poet touch the string, and there is another response when he brings before us pictures of regal grief, and gives grandeur to humiliation and penalty. Nor is it only in the higher walks of tragedy, with its pomp and circumstances of action, that the poet here serves us. His humbler minstrelsy has soothed many an English heart from the tale of "Lycidas" to the elegiac verse of Tennyson. George Herbert still speaks to this generation as two centuries ago he spoke to his own. His quaint verses gather new beauties from time as they come to us redolent with the prayers and aspirations of many successions of the wives, mothers and daughters of England and America; bedewed with the tears of orphans and parents; an incitement to youth, a solace to age, a consolation for humanity to all time.
These have been costly gifts to our benefactors. "I honor," says Vaughan, "that temper which can lay by the garland when he might keep it on; which can pass by a rosebud and bid it grow when he is invited to crop it." This is the spirit of self-devotion in every worthy action, and especially of the pains and penalties by which poets have enriched our daily life. We are indebted to the poets, too, for something more than the alleviation of sorrow. Perhaps it is, upon the whole, a rarer gift to improve prosperity. Joy, commonly, is less of a positive feeling than grief, and is more apt to slip by us unconsciously. Few people, says the proverb, know when they are well off. It is the poet's vocation to teach the world this—
—"to be possess'd with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet."
The poet lifts our eyes to the beauties of external nature, educates us to a keener participation in the sweet joys of affection, to the loveliness and grace of woman, to the honor and strength of manhood. His ideal world thus becomes an actual one, as the creations of imagination first borrowed from sense, alight from the book, the picture or the statue once again to live and walk among us.