We believe the North American Review has remarked of the work before us, that its definitions are in some measure too scanty, and not sufficiently compact. This defect, which cannot altogether be denied, and which is, to say the truth, of more importance to the mass of readers than to the philologist, will be found, upon examination, a defect inseparable from the plan originally proposed, and which insists upon an arrangement of derivatives under primitives. We are not tempted, however, to wish any modification of the principal design, for the sake of a partial, and not very important amendment.
We conclude in heartily recommending the work of Mr. Richardson to the attention of our readers. It embraces we think, every desideratum in an English Dictionary, and has moreover a thousand negative virtues. Messrs. Mayo and Davis are the agents in Richmond.
BOOK OF GEMS.
The Book of Gems. The Poets and Artists of Great Britain. Edited by S. C. Hall. London and New York: Saunders and Otley.
This work combines the rich embellishments of the very best of the race of Annuals, with a far higher claim to notice than any of them in its strictly literary department. If we regard this volume as the only one to appear, the title will convey no idea of the design—but we are promised a continuation. The whole, if we comprehend, will contain specimens of all the principal poets and artists of Great Britain. In the present instance we have the poets as far as Prior, including a period of about four hundred years, with extracts from Chaucer, Lydgate, James I, Hawes, Carew, Quarles, Shirley, Habington, Lovelace, Wyatt, Surrey, Sackville, Vere, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Spenser, Sidney, Brooke, Southwell, Daniel, Drayton, Shakspeare, Walton, Davies, Donne, Jonson, Corbet, Phineas Fletcher, Giles Fletcher, Drummond, Wither, Carew, Browne, Herrick, Quarles, Herbert, Davenant, Waller, Milton, Suckling, Butler, Crashaw, Denham, Cowley, Marvell, Dryden, Roscommon, Dorset, Sedley, Rochester, Sheffield, and Prior. Of these, all the autographs have been obtained and are published collectively at the end of the book, with the exception of the nine first mentioned. The work is illustrated by fifty-three engravings, each by different artists. A sea-side group by Harding, and L'Allegro and Il Penseroso by Parris, are particularly good—but all are excellent.
We had prepared some observations in regard to the book itself, (over which we have been poring for many days with intense delight) and in regard more especially to the character and justice of that deep feeling with which most men, having claim to taste, are wont to look, even through a veil of exceedingly troublesome obscurity and antiquity, upon the writings of the elder poets and dramatists of Great Britain. But we have been so nearly anticipated in our design by a paper in the American Monthly Magazine for July, that what we should now say, and say con amore, would be looked upon as little better than a rifacimento of the article we mention. At the same time it would be an ill deed to remodel our thoughts, and proceed to think falsely, for the mere purpose of proving that we can think originally. In this dilemma then, we will merely express our general accordance in the opinions of the Northern Magazine, copy, of its critique, a portion which seems to embody, in little compass, much of what we have said less forcibly and more diffusely, and add some few additional observations which have lately suggested themselves.
“Among the early English poets, so called,” says the American Monthly, “there is combined with marked individuality, a sort of general resemblance, not easily defined, but readily perceived by a discriminating reader. They lived in an age of invention, and wrote from a pleasurable impulse which they could not resist. They did not borrow from one another, or from those who had gone before them, nor pass their time in pouring from one vessel into another. Thus, however different their styles, however various their subjects, whether the flight of their genius be high or low, there is the same aspect of truth and naturalness in the poetry of them all; as we can trace a common likeness in all faces which have an open, ingenuous expression, however little resemblance there may be in the several features. Most of them were well acquainted with books, and many of them were deeply learned; and an air of ripe scholarship sometimes degenerating into pedantry, pervades every thing they wrote. As a class too, they are remarkable for a healthy, intellectual tone, defaced neither by moody misanthropy, nor mawkish sentimentality. The manly Saxon character beams out from every line; and that vigorous good sense, so characteristic of the English stock, every where leaves its impress. Another trait which, with a few exceptions, honorably distinguishes them, is the purity of their sentiments, and their high moral feeling, especially in all that touches the relation of the sexes. We shall find many coarse expressions, such as a man would not read aloud to his family; but very rarely any thing bordering upon heartless profligacy, or studied licentiousness, or any intimation of a want of respect for the great principles of the moral law. Due reverence is always shown for those high personal qualities which constitute the best security for the greatness and prosperity of a people. Homage is always paid to honor in man, and chastity in woman. The passion of love, in its multitudinous forms and aspects, supplies a large proportion of their themes, and it is treated with equal delicacy and beauty. In the amatory strains of the old English poets, we perceive a romantic self-forgetfulness, an idealization of the beloved object, a tenderness and respectfulness of feeling, in which the passion is almost wholly swallowed up in the sentiment, and a wooing with the best treasures of the intellect as well as the heart, such as can be found in no other class of poets.”
Notwithstanding the direct truth of what has been here so well advanced, it cannot, we think, be a matter of doubt with any reflecting mind, that at least one-third of the reverence, or of the affection, with which we regard the elder poets of Great Britain, should be credited to what is, in itself, a thing apart from poetry—we mean to the simple love of the antique—and that again a third of even the proper poetic sentiment inspired by these writings should be ascribed to a fact which, while it has a strict connection with poetry in the abstract, and also with the particular poems in question, must not be looked upon as a merit appertaining to the writers of the poems. Almost every devout reader of the old English bards, if demanded his opinion of their productions, would mention vaguely, yet with perfect sincerity, a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, undefinable delight. Upon being required to point out the source of this so shadowy pleasure, he would be apt to speak of the quaint in phraseology and of the grotesque in rhythm. And this quaintness and grotesqueness are, as we have elsewhere endeavored to show, very powerful, and if well managed, very admissible adjuncts to Ideality. But in the present instance they arise independently of the author's will, and are matters altogether apart from his intention. The American Monthly has forcibly painted the general character of the old English Muse. She was a maid, frank, guileless, and perfectly sincere, and although very learned at times, still very learned without art. No general error evinces a more thorough confusion of ideas than the error of supposing Donne and Cowley metaphysical in the sense wherein Wordsworth and Coleridge are so. With the two former ethics were the end—with the two latter the means. The poet of the Creation wished, by highly artificial verse, to inculcate what he considered moral truth—he of the Auncient Mariner to infuse the Poetic Sentiment through channels suggested by mental analysis. The one finished by complete failure what he commenced in the grossest misconception—the other, by a path which could not possibly lead him astray, arrived at a certainty and intensity of triumph which is not the less brilliant and glorious because concentrated among the very few who have the power to perceive it. It will now be seen that even the “metaphysical verse” of Cowley is no more than evidence of the straight-forward simplicity and single-heartedness of the man. And he was in all this but a type of his school—for we may as well designate in this way the entire class of writers whose poems are bound up in the volume before us, and throughout all of whom runs a very perceptible general character. They used but little art in composition. Their writings sprang immediately from the soul—and partook intensely of the nature of that soul. It is not difficult to perceive the tendency of this glorious abandon. To elevate immeasurably all the energies of mind—but again—so to mingle the greatest possible fire, force, delicacy, and all good things, with the lowest possible bathos, baldness, and utter imbecility, as to render it not a matter of doubt, but of certainty, that the average results of mind in such a school, will be found inferior to those results in one (ceteris paribus) more artificial. Such, we think, is the view of the older English Poetry, in which a very calm examination will bear us out. The quaintness in manner of which we were just speaking, is an adventitious advantage. It formed no portion of the poet's intention. Words and their rhythm have varied. Verses which affect us to day with a vivid delight, and which delight in some instances, may be traced to this one source of grotesqueness and to none other, must have worn in the days of their construction an air of a very common-place nature. This is no argument, it will be said, against the poems now. Certainly not—we mean it for the poets then. The notion of power, of excessive power, in the English antique writers should be put in its proper light. This is all we desire to see done.