There is Ideality in these lines—but except in the case of the words italicized—it is Ideality not of a high order. We have it is true, a collection of natural objects, each individually of great beauty, and, if actually seen as in nature, capable of exciting in any mind, through the means of the Poetic Sentiment more or less inherent in all, a certain sense of the beautiful. But to view such natural objects as they exist, and to behold them through the medium of words, are different things. Let us pursue the idea that such a collection as we have here will produce, of necessity, the Poetic Sentiment, and we may as well make up our minds to believe that a catalogue of such expressions as moon, sky, trees, rivers, mountains &c., shall be capable of exciting it,—it is merely an extension of the principle. But in the line "the earth is dark, but the heavens are bright" besides the simple mention of the "dark earth" and the "bright heaven," we have, directly, the moral sentiment of the brightness of the sky compensating for the darkness of the earth—and thus, indirectly, of the happiness of a future state compensating for the miseries of a present. All this is effected by the simple introduction of the word but between the "dark heaven" and the "bright earth"—this introduction, however, was prompted by the Poetic Sentiment, and by the Poetic Sentiment alone. The case is analogous in the expression "glimmers and dies," where the imagination is exalted by the moral sentiment of beauty heightened in dissolution.
In one or two shorter passages of the Culprit Fay the poet will recognize the purely ideal, and be able at a glance to distinguish it from that baser alloy upon which we have descanted. We give them without farther comment.
| The winds are whist, and the owl is still The bat in the shelvy rock is hid And naught is heard on the lonely hill But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill Of the gauze-winged katy-did; And the plaint of the wailing whippoorwill Who mourns unseen, and ceaseless sings Ever a note of wail and wo— Up to the vaulted firmament His path the fire-fly courser bent, And at every gallop on the wind He flung a glittering spark behind. He blessed the force of the charmed line, And he banned the water-goblins' spite, For he saw around in the sweet moonshine, Their little wee faces above the brine, Giggling and laughing with all their might At the piteous hap of the Fairy wight. |
The poem "To a Friend" consists of fourteen Spenserian stanzas. They are fine spirited verses, and probably were not supposed by their author to be more. Stanza the fourth, although beginning nobly, concludes with that very common exemplification of the bathos, the illustrating natural objects of beauty or grandeur by reference to the tinsel of artificiality.
| Oh! for a seat on Appalachia's brow, That I might scan the glorious prospects round, Wild waving woods, and rolling floods below, Smooth level glades and fields with grain embrowned, High heaving hills, with tufted forests crowned, Rearing their tall tops to the heaven's blue dome, And emerald isles, like banners green unwound, Floating along the lake, while round them roam Bright helms of billowy blue, and plumes of dancing foam. |
In the Extracts from Leon, are passages not often surpassed in vigor of passionate thought and expression—and which induce us to believe not only that their author would have succeeded better in prose romance than in poetry, but that his attention would have naturally fallen into the former direction, had the Destroyer only spared him a little longer.
This poem contains also lines of far greater poetic power than any to be found in the Culprit Fay. For example—
| The stars have lit in heaven their lamps of gold, The viewless dew falls lightly on the world; The gentle air that softly sweeps the leaves A strain of faint unearthly music weaves: As when the harp of heaven remotely plays, Or cygnets wail—or song of sorrowing fays That float amid the moonshine glimmerings pale, On wings of woven air in some enchanted vale.10 |
10 The expression "woven air," much insisted upon by the friends of Drake, seems to be accredited to him as original. It is to be found in many English writers—and can be traced back to Apuleius who calls fine drapery ventum textilem.
Niagara is objectionable in many respects, and in none more so than in its frequent inversions of language, and the artificial character of its versification. The invocation,