The “Canadian Boat Song,” composed on the St. Lawrence, is the most popular of the songs written at the earlier period of life—indeed, at any period of his life. It is more frequently heard in society than any thing else he has composed—the finest of the Melodies not excepted. As regards these last, it has been said they are not Irish. It is, indeed, true that Moore modified the native airs a good deal—retrenched most of the wild cadences and free modulations which indigenously belong to them. This, however, may not be such a very great loss after all, seeing that, if some of the melodies, with his arrangement, would not be intimately recognized at wakes and cow-milkings, etc., they were all the better liked, for the curtailment and polish, in the dining-rooms and drawing-rooms. Certainly no modern festive song-writer has produced the effects which usually accompanied the singing of Tom Moore’s lyrics. He was eminently the poet of the saloons. Burns was the lyrist of Love and the lowly hearts and homes of the people. But Moore’s songs were sung in the most splendid halls of English-speaking land, where he himself, of all guests or sojourners in lordly dwellings, was ever the most welcome and caressed. And when we consider the low birth, Irishism and uncompromised Catholicity of the man, we cannot possibly over-estimate those talents of graceful conviviality, good-humor and brilliant wit which could secure for him such social honors and triumphs through life. Well might Byron have called him “the poet of all circles and the idol of his own.” Moore had an exquisite musical taste, and sung some of his own melodies in the most delightful manner. His voice was rather low, and without compass, but it had great softness, and the expression with which he half-chaunted, half-recited, while accompanying himself at the piano, in “Go Where Glory Waits Thee,” “Fly Not Yet,” and others, was a thing to be enjoyed and remembered. On some occasions when he has gone to the piano, the servants of the house—Devonshire House, we believe—have been permitted to come and stand at the doors to listen, along with the delighted crowd of noble listeners. Moore’s performance was considered one of the best treats of the evening at such gay reunions; and Mr. N. P. Willis speaks of the little bard’s appearance, at Lady Blessington’s piano—for a singing-while—as if his singing in this way were an expected gratification which he was too well-bred or too good-natured to refuse to his friends. A touching instance of the effect he could produce on these occasions is given in a fact to which he himself alludes. The beautiful young daughter of Colonel Bainbridge, who was married at Ashbourne Church, in Derbyshire, in 1815, died, a few weeks afterward, of fever. During the delirium that accompanied her illness she sung several hymns from Moore’s collection of “Sacred Songs” which she had heard the poet himself sing in the course of the preceding summer. Alluding to her, he says, in the song “Weep not for Those”—
Mourn not for her, the young bride of the vale,
Our gayest and loveliest, lost to us now,
Ere life’s early lustre had time to grow pale,
And the garland of love was yet fresh on her brow.
Lalla Rookh is a splendid and elaborate romance. Hazlitt said Moore should not have written it for three thousand guineas. This was Moore’s own affair, not Hazlitt’s; and we question if the latter would have refused such a sum, under such circumstances. Nevertheless, Lalla Rookh seems below the pretensions of the poet of the Melodies. Its themes and characters are oriental and the interest they excite is feeble. There is a forced and exotic air over the whole performance which fails to win our sympathies; and, in spite of the beauty of the imagery and all the sparkling artifice of the versification, no one, we believe, was every cordially disposed to read this romance a second time. The rythmus of the “Veiled Prophet” is eloquently rhetorical, but loosely constructed, and it offends our sense of what the heroic couplet is, in the hands of Dryden, Shelley, Goldsmith and Byron. Moore’s metre, in this grave mode, is a continuous outrage against the cæsural canons, and reads with a certain prosaic effect—eloquent enough, to be sure; but prosaic, nevertheless: “The Fire-Worshipers” has been considered the best portion of Lalla Rookh. It contains a great deal of impassioned eloquence and shows great mastery and music of versification; but the impression it leaves is vague and uncongenial, and the catastrophe is painful, merely—like that of the “Veiled Prophet”—both with a melodramatic and impossible air about them. “Paradise and the Peri” has the merit of a more attractive human interest—though almost overlaid by ornament and orientalism. We think the “Light of the Harem” the most agreeable of all. It is perfectly in character—a picture of Eastern luxury from beginning to end—a feast of roses and a flow of fountains, in which we look for nothing but sighs and perfumes—and we find them in all customary Mooreish prodigality. The verse of this little poem is woven music. The portrait of Nourmahal is a piece of lyric gracefulness which aptly exemplifies the art of Moore’s sensuous and harmonic genius:
There’s a beauty, for ever unchangingly bright,
Like the long sunny lapse of a summer day’s light,
Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender,
Till Love falls asleep in its sameness of splendor.