If Coleridge said this in the haste and vivacity of conversation, it was great in justice to his memory to record and print it. "Not twenty lines!"—"relation to nothing!" Why, there are scores of lines in his earliest poem alone, which will ring long in the ears of men, for they have relation to the simple unalterable, universal feelings of mankind.
"Oh, said he that his heart was cold!"
We will not believe it. We are tempted to answer with a torrent of quotation; but this is not the place.
"To one who has read," continues Mrs Fuller, "Scott's novels first, and looks in his poems for the same dramatic interest, the rich humour, the tragic force, the highly wrought, yet flowing dialogue, and the countless minutiæ in the finish of character, they must bring disappointment." He who looks for all and exactly the same things in the poems which he had found in the novels, will assuredly, like other foolish seekers, be disappointed. Sir Walter Scott did not put his Bailie Nicol Jarvie nor his Andrew Fairservice into rhyme; nor does a lay of border chivalry embrace all that variety of character, or of dialogue, which finds ample room in the historical romance.
Amongst a certain class of critics, it has been long a prevailing humour to decry one Alexander Pope. Mrs Margaret Fuller is resolved that if not first in the field against this notorious pretender, no one shall show greater hardihood than herself in the attack upon him. It is one of those occasions when, though surrounded by a goodly company of friends, she yet finds opportunity for an individual act of heroism. They are but a few words she utters—but match them if you can! We do not flinch, we Amazonian warriors. It is a-propos of Lord Byron that she takes occasion to point a shaft, or rather to throw her battle-axe, at the head of this flagrant impostor. The whole passage must be quoted:
"It is worthy of remark that Byron's moral perversion never paralysed or obscured his intellectual powers, though it might lower their aims.
With regard to the plan and style of his works, he showed strong good sense and clear judgment. The man who indulged such narrowing egotism, such irrational scorn, would prime and polish without mercy the stanzas in which he uttered them." (Wonderful! that an egotist and a misanthrope should have been kept from defacing his own verses. Then follows our terrible bye-blow.) "And this bewildered idealist was a very bigot in behoof of the common-sensical satirist, the almost peevish realist—Pope!" (P. 76.)
With what consummate disdain does she condescend to give the coup-de-grace to the unhappy lingering author of the "Epistle to Arbuthnot," and "The Rape of the Lock!" These poems of the "peevish realist," shall have no place, since Mrs Margaret Fuller so determines it, in the new literature of America. We will keep them here in England—in a casket of gold, if we ever possess one.
One other specimen of the lady's eloquence and critical discrimination must suffice. She is characterising Southey.
"The muse of Southey is a beautiful statue of crystal, in whose bosom burns an immortal flame. We hardly admire as they deserve, the perfection of the finish, and the elegance of the contours, because our attention is so fixed on the radiance which glows through them."—(P. 82.)