“Oh! there is sweetness in the mountain’s air,
Which bloated ease can never hope to share.”
He was probably among the hills of Portugal at the time, and, doubtless, felt what he wrote. I never realized the force of the thought as I did one summer morning, while seated in a piazza, a half mile or so from the North Mountain, in my native Virginia, with a beautiful, green and flowery meadow intervening. Just as I came to the stanza of “Childe Harold,” from which I have quoted, a delightful mountain-breeze swept over the plain. As it tossed my locks to and fro, and gamboled with the leaves of the volume before me, I felt indeed, that there was “sweetness in the mountain air.” Nothing could set forth that uncertainty of appreciation I have been dwelling upon, more clearly than such an incident. It is probable that the greatest city admirer of his lordship’s poetry, never noticed the full force of the idea which thus arrested my attention, but passed it unappreciated, in admiration of some sentiment, in the very same stanza, whose full import he could comprehend, while he entered into the feelings of the poetic traveller.
But the greatest difficulty with the “occasional” as well as shorter pieces of a volume of poems, is the difference between the circumstances under which they were severally penned, and those under which they are perused. One reads, in the self-same hour, the diversified productions of years. How, then, can a writer anticipate the appreciation of his sentiments? He has ceased to enter into his own peculiar, circumstance-generated emotions. How, therefore, may others take his views? To suppose an ability on the part of the critic, to do justice, then, to the earlier and less-studied morceaux, (or, as I have styled them above, the egotistical pieces of an author,) would be to suppose an utter impossibility—a sort of critical ubiquity. Coleridge felt the truth of what I have advanced,—as any one may learn from the preface of his “Juvenile Poems.” He therein expresses his apprehensions in the following language:—“I shall only add, that each of my readers will, I hope, remember that these poems, on various subjects, which he reads at one time, and under the influence of one set of feelings, were written at different times, and prompted by very different feelings; and, therefore, the inferiority of one poem to another, may, sometimes, be owing to the temper of mind in which he happens to peruse it.”
What shall we say, then? Shall an author abstain from publishing his shorter and occasional pieces, on account of the facts alluded to by Coleridge? By no means, I would say, though a consideration thereof may well deter the judicious writer from admitting into his volume every thing he may have penned. As to the dimensions of pieces, it may be more advisable, in some cases, to republish the shortest sonnets, and the like, relating to one’s own personal feelings and relations, than longer productions—at least they are likely to be more pleasing to the general reader. They are unquestionably useful, as throwing light upon points of a man’s private history with a force of illumination which no biographer could use, were he to attempt it—a something, by-the-bye, which seldom happens; indicating the probability, that we seldom read the man’s real biography, but merely a man’s—often an ideal man only.
As to the effect of fugitive and earlier poems, when republished, upon an author’s reputation—let them be appreciated or not, it matters little. His fame does not hang upon such “slender threads.” It is to his more elaborate productions that the public will look for evidences of genius. It is a fact that a poet’s reputation, generally speaking, depends upon the appreciation of some particular production. It is true, readers may differ in their assignment of merit—but the fact of non-agreement, as to the question of comparative merit, does not alter the principle. If each one comes to the conclusion that the poet has penned one poem of prime excellence, his name is safe—the residue are set down not as evidences of a want of genius, but of the neglect of a right and careful use of it. The conclusion is, in other words, that he could have written the others better, if he had made proper use of the talents with which he was endowed. Were an example needed, I might refer to Milton. When we think of him we never associate with his name any of his productions but “Paradise Lost.” He might have published in the same volume thousands of fugitive pieces, no better than those he did suffer to see the light, (and they are with few exceptions, poor enough, as the emanations of such a mind,) and yet his fame not suffer in the smallest degree—the names of Milton, and of that great poem, would still have descended as one and inseparable.
| [5] | Omnia vincit amor.—Virg. Bucol. |