Half-way between the frozen zones,
Where Winter reigns in sullen mirth,
The Summer binds a golden belt
About the middle of the Earth,
The sky is soft, and blue, and bright,
With purple dyes at morn and night:
And bright and blue the seas which lie
In perfect rest, and glass the sky;
And sunny bays with inland curves
Round all along the quiet shore;
And stately palms, in pillared ranks
Grow down the borders of the banks,
And juts of land where billows roar;
The spicy woods are full of birds,
And golden fruits, and crimson flowers;
With wreathéd vines on every bough,
That shed their grapes in purple showers;
The emerald meadows roll their waves,
And bask in soft and mellow light;
The vales are full of silver mist,
And all the folded hills are bright;
But far along the welkin's rim
The purple crags and peaks are dim;
And dim the gulfs, and gorges blue,
With all the wooded passes deep;
All steeped in haze, and washed in dew,
And bathed in atmospheres of Sleep!
Stoddard, page 14.
Passages like these say more for their authors than could any commendation from the critic. Observe how soon mere description is abandoned by Mr. Taylor, and he begins to put life and feeling into his scene. The deep is "enamored," the island is "in a charméd sleep," the palms are "imperial," and "crowd the hills," and "out the headlands go to watch the lazy brine," &c. All nature is alive. On the other hand, Mr. Stoddard loves nature for its beauty alone, without desiring in it any imaginable animation. The man who can read Mr. Taylor's "Kubla," without feeling the blood dance in his veins, should never confess it, for he is hardening into something beyond the reach of sympathy. In "The Soldier and the Pard," a poem of curious originality, Mr. Taylor pushes his belief in the all-pervading existence of moral nature to its last extreme. It closes with the following emphatic lines:
"And if a man
Deny this truth she [the Pard] taught me, to his face
I say he lies: a beast may have a soul!"
Without drawing too much on the tables of contents, we could not enumerate the many note-worthy pieces in these volumes; and it would much exceed our limits to give them even a passing word of comment. Among Mr. Stoddard's unmentioned poems, the "Hymn to Flora," an "Ode" of delicious melancholy, full of exquisite taste and finely-wrought fancies, "Spring," "Autumn," a "Hymn to the Beautiful," "The Broken Goblet," and "Triumphant Music," give the reader a clear insight into his peculiar characteristics, and open a vision of ideal beauty that no poet has exhibited in such Grecian perfection since the death of Keats. A poem, on page 115, is one that awakens peculiar emotions; it describes a state of half consciousness, when the senses are morbidly alive, and the perceptive faculties are fettered with dreams, or inspired by a strange memory that bears within it things not of this world, and hints at a previous and different existence.
"The yellow moon looks slantly down,
Through seaward mists, upon the town;
And like a mist the moonshine falls
Between the dim and shadowy walls.
I see a crowd in every street,
But cannot hear their falling feet;
They float like clouds through shade and light,
And seem a portion of the night.
The ships have lain, for ages fled,
Along the waters, dark and dead;
The dying waters wash no more
The long black line of spectral shore.
There is no life on land or sea,
Save in the quiet moon and me;
Nor ours is true, but only seems,
Within some dead old world of dreams!"
Stoddard, page 115.