"DRINKING.
| The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, And drinks and gapes for drink again; The plants suck from the earth, and are With constant drinking fresh and fair; The sea itself, (which one would think, Should have but little need of drink,) Drinks twice ten thousand rivers up, So filled that they o'erflow the cup. The busy sun, (and one would guess By his drunken, fiery face no less,) Drinks up the sea; and when he's done, The moon and stars drink up the sun: They drink and dance by their own light; They drink and revel all the night. Nothing in nature's sober found, But an eternal health goes round; Fill up the bowl, then, fill it high; Fill all the glasses there; for why Should every creature drink but I? Why, man of morals, tell me why?" |
The question in the last line, is easily answered. If in no other way, by the ridiculous death of Polycrates' minion, the immortal Anacreon, who lost his mortality through the agency of an ingrate grape stone.
IX. To praise such men as Shakspeare and Milton, is like praising Hercules. However, I am not one of those who think it idle to cry out "O deare moon, O choyce stars!" when we look upon these in their loveliness. And, leaving this question of the utility or inutility of panegyric, to be discussed elsewhere, I will continue pari passu upon the same track which I have hitherto pursued.—Of,
| "A genius universal as his theme; Astonishing as chaos; as the bloom Of blowing Eden, fair; as heaven, sublime," |
Milton was fully equal to the vast labor, at his daring in undertaking which, his friend old Andrew Marvel so marvelled. Like Amphion, he sung of the wonders of creation; of Gods and immortal essences. His Satan is a magnificent creation; a personification of all gloom and all grandeur. Vast strength, angelic fashioning, revenge that nothing can soothe, endurance that never shrinks, the intellect of heaven and the pride of earth, ambition immeasurably high, and a courage which quails not even before God, go to constitute a creation essentially ideal. Satan is not like Macbeth or Lear, real in himself, literally true, and only lifted into poetry by circumstance: but he is altogether moulded in a dream of the imagination. Heaven, and earth, and hell, are explored for gifts to make him eminent and peerless. He is compounded of all; and at last stands up before us, with the starry grandeur of darkness upon his forehead, but having the passions of clay within his heart, and his home and foundation in the depths below. It is thus gleaning, as it were, from every element, and compounding them all in one grand design, which constitutes the poetry of the character. Perhaps Ariel and Caliban are as purely ideal, as the hero of Milton, and approach as nearly to him as any other fiction; but the latter is incontestably a grander formation, and a mightier agent, and moves through the perplexities of his career, with a power that defies competition. And these are his comrades of Pandemonium: Moloch, who changed the pleasant valley of Hinnom into black Gehenna; Belial, the "manna tongued," than whom "a fairer person lost not heaven;" Azaziel, Chemos, Peor, and the wonderful Astarte;
| "To whose bright image, nightly by the moon, Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs." |
Rimmon, too—he so dreaded by the "men of Abbana and Pharphar;" and the wily Mammon,
| "The least erected spirit that fell From heaven.... ... admiring more, The riches of heaven's pavement, trodden gold, Then aught divine or holy else enjoyed; A vision beatific." |
These, all these, are splendid creations of the human intellect; and how rich and poetic is his account of Mulsiber, who "dropt from the zenith like a falling star." Of this description it has been written, that "music and poetry run clasped together down a stream of divine verse." But it is most in his Satan, that Milton's way becomes the "terribile via" of Michael Angelo, which no one before or since has been able to tread.