The Angel World, and Other Poems. By Philip James Bailey, author of “Festus.” Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 16mo.
“Festus,” a monstrous agglomeration of irreconcilable opinions, lit up with fancy, and seasoned with warm sensations, was Mr. Bailey’s first bantling —
“Got while his soul did huddled notions try,
And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.”
“The Angel World” is his second product, the result of the slow gestation of many years, with fewer faults and fewer merits than “Festus”. Many persons who would hesitate in calling “Festus” a poem, discerned in it a chaos of poetical matter; and they supposed that the author’s unquestioned fertility would be forced into form when his powers matured. In “The Angel World” we find an approach to form with a decay of fertility. This seems to prove that anarchy is not so much the precursor of art as the destroyer of vitality, and that Bailey’s mind found in anarchy its fittest expression. There is not enough greatness in the man to make a great poem. Coleridge, in his remarks on Love’s Labor Lost, says that “true genius begins in generalizing and condensing; it ends in realizing and expanding. It first collects the seeds.” Bailey’s process is the reverse of this; he first expands, then condenses—and his expansion accordingly lacks substance, and his condensation richness. But though “The Angel World” is inferior to “Festus,” it still exhibits sufficient wealth of imagery to give it prominence among contemporary poems, and to exact the attention of all poetical readers. A poem which contains numerous thoughts as fine as the following cannot be justly condemned:
In one
A soul of lofty clearness, like a night
Of stars, wherein the memory of the day
Seems trembling through the meditative air.
The “other poems” which follow “The Angel World” are of various degrees of merit, indicating that the author is a man of moods, and is rapt or muddled, according as his sensibility rises or falls. A few of the poems are almost ecstatic, and equal the most striking passages in “Festus.”