And proudly hear the dreadful notes complain
That man is not the whirlwind, but the leaf,
Torn from the tree, to soar and disappear.
Grand is our weakness, and sublime our grief.
Lo! on this rock I shake off hope and fear,
And stand released from clay!—yet am I here,
And at my side are blindness, age, and woe."
Would any one imagine, after reading the poetry of Ebenezer Elliott, that that poetry could ever have found difficulty in struggling to the light of day? With our host of acute and infallible critics, would one think it possible that this noble poetry should not have been immediately discovered, and made universal in its acceptation? But what was the fact? For twenty years the poet went on writing and publishing, but in vain. Volume after volume, his productions fell dead from the press, or were treated with a passing sneer, or were "damned with faint praise." But living consciousness of genius was not to be extinguished, the undaunted spirit of Elliott was not to be frozen out by neglect. He wrote, he appealed to sense and justice—it was in vain. He became furious, and hurled a flaming satire at Lord Byron in the height of his popularity, in the hope that the noble poet would give him a returning blow, and thus draw attention upon him. It was in vain, neither lord nor public would deign him a look, and the case seemed desperate. But it was not so. Chance did what merit itself could not do. Chance led Dr. Bowring to Sheffield, and there some one put into his hands The Corn-Law Rhymes, and The Ranter. At once Bowring, a poet himself, recognized the singular merit of the compositions, printed as they were in four pamphlet sheets, on very ordinary paper. With his usual zeal, he began to talk everywhere of the wonderful poet of Sheffield, not Montgomery, but a new name. He talked thus at my house, and I instantly procured them. Wordsworth happened to be my guest at the time. He was as much struck with the wonderful power of these compositions as ourselves, and I begged him to convey them at once to Southey. He did so, and the laureate immediately gave a notice of them in the Quarterly, in an article on what he called Uneducated Poets. But, in the mean time, Dr. Bowring went on to London, and there continued talking of the Corn-Law Rhymer, till, falling in with Bulwer at a party, he showed those long neglected poems to him, and the thing was done. Bulwer wrote an out-speaking article in the New Monthly Magazine, which told like the match put to the long laid train. Wordsworth, on his way home, had made the poems known to Miss Jewsbury, at Manchester, and she gave a nearly simultaneous notice in the Athenæum. At such decided and generous verdicts in such quarters, the scales fell from the eyes of the whole critic tribe—all cuckoo-land was loud with one note; and the poet, who had been thundering at every critical door in the kingdom in vain, now saw the gates of the land of glory at once expand, and was led in by a hundred officious hands, as if he were a new-born bard, and not of twenty years' growth.
Such a history awakes involuntarily some curious reflections. If Elliott had chanced to die before Bowring had chanced to visit Sheffield—what then? Where would now be the fame of the Corn-Law Rhymer? I know that there is a very favorite doctrine in many mouths, that true genius is sure, sooner or later, to find its way—that it can not be destroyed, and is never lost. This may be very consolatory doctrine for those who have wielded a merciless pen, and are visited by compunctions of remorse; but it is just as true as that untimely frosts never cut down buds and flowers, or that swords and cannons will not kill honest men, or that a really beautiful scene may not be ravaged and laid waste by bears or swine. If there be one thing that murders early genius, it is the bludgeon of critical unkindness; if there be one thing that gives life and spirit, it is encouragement. Kindness! encouragement! they are the sunshine of the mind, as necessary as the sunshine of Heaven for the unfolding of earth's flowers and the ripening of earth's fruits. How many a bright soul has sunk in the frosty valleys of neglect; how many have shrunk hopelessly from the vile sneer of scorn; how many that have survived have reached only a partial development of their strength and beauty; being crippled in their youth by the blows of private malice, or enfeebled by the want of the cordial aliment of acknowledged merit. Honor, then, to the few sturdy souls that contempt has not been able to subdue! To those who have returned kick for kick to the insolent opposers of their progress; who have been able to keep alive self-respect in their souls, through a long, dark career of frowns, and jeers, and cuffs, as the due award of a spiritual pauperism. Honor to those brave souls—they are the few victorious survivors in the great battle of fame, where thousands have fallen by butcher hands. The endurance of harsh treatment is no proof of genius—it is only a proof of a certain amount of power of resistance; but it is a lucky thing for the world that genius and endurance sometimes lodge in the same bosom. Byron knocked down his deriders on the spot; Elliott, like Wellington at Waterloo, stood out a whole long day of pitiless contest, and triumphed at the last.
And it was not a single fight only that he had to maintain. He waged a double contest against fortune—for life as well as for fame; and in both, with desperate odds against him, he came off victorious. Ebenezer Elliott is certainly one of the greatest "Curiosities of Literature." He has not only proved himself a poet, in spite of twenty years of most dogged deafness to his claims, but a poet that has set fortune as well as the critics at defiance, and has at once won fame and wealth. I believe that on his settling in Sheffield he possessed nothing but a wife and three or four children, but he has managed to retire from trade with some eight or ten children, and a good round sum of thousands of pounds. He has bravely scorned all