The goddess gasped for breath, with bosom swelling:
Her lips unclosed, while her large, luminous eyes
Blazing like Stygian skies,
With passion, on the audacious youth were dwelling:
She raised her angry hand, that seemed to clasp
Jove's thunder in its grasp.
And then she stood in silence, fixed and breathless;
But presently the threatening arm slid down;
The fierce, destroying frown
Departed from her eyes, which took a deathless
Expression of despair, like Niobe's—
Her dead ones at her knees.
Slowly her agony passed, and an Elysian,
Majestic fervor lit her lofty eyes,
Now dwelling on the skies:
Meanwhile, Endymion stood, cheek, brow and vision,
Radiant with resignation, stern and cold,
In conscious virtue bold,
In conclusion, we cannot but congratulate Mr. Hirst on his success in producing a poem conceived with so much force and refinement of imagination, and finished with such consummate art, as the present. It is a valuable addition to the permanent poetical literature of the country.
Memoir of William Ellery Channing. With Extracts from His Correspondence and Manuscripts. Boston: Crosby & Nichols. 3 vols. 12mo.
This long expected work has at last been published, and we think it will realize the high expectations raised by its announcement two or three years ago. It is mostly composed of extracts from the letters, journals, and unpublished sermons of Dr. Channing, and is edited by his nephew, Wm. H. Channing, who has also supplied a memoir. It conveys a full view of Dr. Channing's interior life from childhood to old age, and apart from its great value and interest, contains, in the exhibition of the steps of his intellectual and spiritual growth, as perfect a specimen of psychological autobiography as we have in literature. Such a work subjects its author to the severest tests which can be applied to a human mind in this life, and we have risen from its perusal with a new idea of the humility, sincerity, and saintliness of Dr. Channing's character. In him self-distrust was admirably blended with a sublime conception of the capacity of man, and a sublime confidence in human nature. He was not an egotist, as passages in his writings may seem to indicate, for he was more severe upon himself than upon others, and numberless remarks in the present volumes show how sharp was the scrutiny to which he subjected the most elusive appearances of pride and vanity. But with his high and living sense of the source and destiny of every human mind, and his almost morbid consciousness of the deformity of moral evil, he reverenced in himself and in others the presence of a spirit which connected humanity with its Maker, and by unfolding the greatness of the spiritual capacities of men, he hoped to elevate them above the degradation of sensuality and sin. He was not a teacher of spiritual pride, conceit and self-worship, but of those vital principles of love and reverence which elevate man only by directing his aspirations to God.
The present volumes give a full length portrait of Dr. Channing in all the relations of life, and some of the minor details regarding his opinions and idiosyncrasies are among the most interesting portions of the book. We are glad to perceive that he early appreciated Wordsworth. The Excursion he eagerly read on its first appearance, and while so many of the Pharisees of taste were scoffing at it, he manfully expressed his sense of its excellence. This poem he recurred to oftener than to any other, and next to Shakspeare, Wordsworth seems to have been the poet he read with the most thoughtful delight. When he went to Europe, in 1822, he had an interview with Wordsworth, and of the impression he himself made on the poet there can be no more pertinent illustration, than the fact that, twenty years afterward, Wordsworth mentioned to an American gentleman that one observation of Channing, respecting the connection of Christianity with progress, had stamped itself ineffaceably upon his mind. Coleridge he appears to have profoundly impressed. In a letter to Washington Allston, Coleridge says of him—"His affection for the good as the good, and his earnestness for the true as the true—with that harmonious subordination of the latter to the former, without encroachment on the absolute worth of either—present in him a character which in my heart's heart I believe to be the very rarest on earth. . . . . Mr. Channing is a philosopher in both the possible renderings of the word. He has the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love. . . . . I am confident that the few differences of opinion between him and myself not only are, but would by him be found to be apparent, not real—the same truth seen in different relations. Perhaps I have been more absorbed in the depth of the mystery of the spiritual life, he more engrossed by the loveliness of its manifestations."
In nothing is Dr. Channing's humility better seen than in his relations to literature. He became an author almost unconsciously. All his intellectual convictions were so indissolubly woven into the texture of his life, so vitalized by his heart and imagination, that writing with him was never an end but a means. Literary fame followed him; he did not follow it. When, however, he found that his reputation not only rung through his own country but was reverberated from Europe, he appears to have feared that it might corrupt his motives for composition. He studiously avoided reading all eulogistic notices of his works or character, though they were interesting to him as indications of the influence his cherished opinions were exerting. The article in the Westminster Review, which exceeded all others in praise, he never read. Dr. Dewey's criticism in the Christian Examiner he only knew as far as related to its objections, and his only disappointment was in finding them so few. Brougham's criticism on his style provoked in him no retort. Hazlitt's coarse attack on him in the Edinburgh Review he considered as an offset to the undue praise he had received from other quarters. "The author of the article," he says, in one of his letters, "is now dead; and as I did not feel a moment's anger toward him during his life, I have no reproach for him now. He was a man of fine powers, and wanted nothing but pure and fixed principles to make him one of the lights of the age."
It would be impossible in our limits to convey an adequate impression of the beauty, value, or interest of the present volumes. They are full of matter. The letters are admirable specimens of epistolary composition, considered as the spontaneous expression of a grave, high and warm nature, to the friends of his heart and mind. They are exceedingly original of their kind, and while they bear no resemblance to those of Cowper, Burns, Byron, or Mackintosh, they are on that very account a positive addition to the literature of epistolary composition. Few biographies have been published within a century calculated to make so deep an impression as this of Dr. Channing, and few could have admitted the reader to so close a communion with the subject, without sacrificing that delicacy in the treatment of frailties due to the character of the departed.