Wordsworth has been satisfied with giving us fresh combinations of thought, and with reasserting the dignity and worth of the poet's calling. As far as metre is concerned, he is the least original of writers. He has imitated all our masters in turn. In his sonnets, he has sometimes emulated successfully the condensed gravity of Milton; but his blank verse seldom rises to the majestic level of his great precursor. He oftener reminds us of Cowper, who introduced a new and more conversational manner. Milton's verse suggests nothing meaner than the ocean; Cowper's has that easy dignity which does not become trivial, even when it describes the simmering of the tea-kettle. I think that Keats saw deeper into the mystery of this noble metre than any modern poet. Tennyson has, perhaps, added another grace to it. JOHN. You attribute a greater state and importance not only to the poet's art, but even to the mere mechanical details of it, than I should be willing to allow. You sometimes remind me of that sect of sonneteers, whom Charles Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, humorously describes as attributing a mystical importance to a capital O. You have, however, the great mass of the critics with you, who usually pay more heed to the material than to the idea which it conveys, and who do not scruple to break off the nose from a statue, and present it to you as a proof of the excellence of the marble. Beauty of form, correctness of outline, and aptness for use (which last, indeed, demands the other two) seem to be of no account with them. Is it mahogany or veneering? is the question with them, and they settle the matter by a slash with their penknives. PHILIP. The zest with which you ran down your last metaphor persuades me that you agree with me at heart. The great poets, it is true, have not usually at first received the imprimatur of the critics; for it demands more labor and more faith than they have to spare, to get at the secret of anything that is greatly worth. We must wrestle with these messengers of heaven, as Jacob did, ere we obtain their blessing; and then they sometimes make a slave of our judgment, so that we halt for it ever after. Richter has lamed Carlyle a little. JOHN. All great ideas come to us, at first, like the gods of Homer, enveloped in a blinding mist; but to him whom their descent to earth concerns, to him who stands most in need of their help, the cloud becomes luminous and fragrant, and betrays the divinity behind it. At present, these old poets of yours are in the cloudy state to me. Perhaps you can show me that I also am included in the benefit of their errand. Perhaps you can justify to me, out of their mouths, what now seems to me your extravagant estimate of the rank which belongs to poetry. PHILIP. Before attempting it, let me add something which occurs to me on the subject of a metrical disposition of our words. Whether it be an argument in its favor or not, I shall not take upon myself to say. At least, the reflection has been forced upon me many times, and not without some touch of painfulness. Even in my slight commerce with society, I have been obliged to notice a certain bashfulness which seems to clog men in the utterance of a noble or generous thought. We have become such ephemerides, such hangers-on of King To-day, that we seem hasty to smother, with a judicious cough, any allusion to our dethroned monarch, God. A harmless kind of dinner-table loyalty, like that of the old Jacobites, may be winked at ; but thorough piety, which is the element wherein all good thought and action can alone subsist, is quite out of fashion. Now verse seems to furnish men with a sufficient apology for giving way to their holy enthusiasm. It is the politician's vocation to give us only homoeopathic doses of truth, a grain of the medicine to a whole Niagara of water and froth. The priest is fashioned by his hearers, and is too often rather the pillow of down for their consciences, than the conductor of the arrowy light nings of God's wrath. He values Christ's words at more than his heart, and will denounce what he, but not what his doctrines, condemned. He remembers his meekness, and takes care to forget the whip of small cords. But the poet can echo the eternal harmonies in the very face of the prodigal world, without winking or stammering. The tar is always hot and the feather-bed ready unripped for him who utters his conscience in plain prose ; but there is a charm in verse, which saves scathless the preacher of those most ancient doctrines which are termed new whenever they are revived. George Herbert says, "A verse may find him who a sermon flies, And turn delight into a sacrifice." JOHN. Your notion is a fanciful one. It is only because the poet is nearer to a state of nature in spiritual things than other men, and because his natural instinct for truth is keener, that he is the master of a more inspired utterance. We stupidly call the life of savages a state of nature, as if Nature loved our bestial qualities better than our divine ones. The condition of the poet may be more truly named so, in whom the highest refinement of civilization consists with the utmost simplicity of the unblunted spiritual instincts. He is weatherwise in the signs of Providence. The dense, hot air, which foretells the coming earthquake of a revolution in the moral world, grows painful to his lungs, while other men can yet breathe freely in it. Trifles, which other natures pass by unheeded, are to him unerring finger-posts. He can trace God's footsteps by a broken twig or a misplaced leaf. But, after all, it is only the music of the verse, and not, the mere form of verse itself, that makes the poet's truths more welcome. Music understands all languages, and she interprets between him and his hearers. You see I have been tearing a leaf out of your own book. The truth is, that the world cares very little about the matter. It has become a mercantile world, and, if some murmur of the poet's song creep into the counting-room, it thinks of the Insane Asylum and runs up another column of figures. But when a rude fellow pushes in, and becomes downright abusive in every-day speech, and gives the respectable world the lie without scruple, why then, if the constable be not at hand, a writ of trespass is sued out in Judge Lynch's court! So, too, of the preacher. The world goes to church to be quiet, and takes it amiss to be interrupted in a calculation of the price of cotton by a personal reference to any of its own bosom sins. The world has engaged the preacher to abuse the Scribes and Pharisees, and not to be looking too nicely after its own conscience. The world believes firmly that the whole race of Scribes and Pharisees was dead and buried two thousand years ago, and sees no |