ject or another. Did not the cast-away shell of a tortoise become Apollo's lute? JOHN. Yes, but it was the shell of a large one; a mudturtle's would not have served his turn as well. Time and place are of no consequence to a poet; but his eye should be as poetical in choosing a subject, as afterwards in detecting its nice relations and its happy aspects. He should avoid awakening a predisposed sense of the ludicrous in his readers. No man admires the "Excursion" more than I; to none has it given a truer comfort t; yet I never think of its hero as a pedler. Costume is not to be despised. Heroines, you know, according to Mr. Puff, cannot go safely mad but in white satin. PHILIP. We should only think of the pedler as a man, without regard to the petty accidents of outward circumstance. The heart is the same in all; else were the poet's power of enchantment gone forever. The soul is indifferent what garment she wears, or of what color and texture; the true king is not unkinged by being discrowned. JOHN. Rather made more truly so. But Wordsworth's pedler, with the soul he had, would have been Wordsworth, and an act of parliament could not have made a pedler of him. As the pedler-element is not predominant in him, there was no necessity for making him one; for it is exactly in proportion as any element of character is predominant that it is poetical. Shakspeare's Autolycus is a true pedler; yet his character is as ideal as that of Hamlet, only not in the same kind. The manufacturer's heart becomes poetical when he looks upon Niagara as a mill-privilege. The whole drama of the factory, with the strange hum of its inanimate engines and the stranger silence of its living ones, the unresting toil of its Titan wheels, that turn with gigantic sluggishness to their task in the gloomy prisons below, is acted over in his mind. The manufacturing nature in him is what makes him a poet, and it is in this light that he presents a poetic phase. Wordsworth's syllogism is logically defective. It does not follow, because the poetical faculty or sense is independent of circumstances, that a pedler must be a poet. It would be as reasonable to say that a poet must be a pedler. True, a pedler must be a poet to a certain degree; every man must; but it is only to the degree of having the poetic sense. When he possesses the faculty, he will be pedler no longer. PHILIP. Perhaps you are right in an artistic point of view; but I will not quarrel with my ambrosia be cause it comes to me in an earthen vessel; its fragrance and its gift of immortalizing are the same as if it were sent in Jove's own beaker. It is possible that Wordsworth might have illustrated his noble theory more logically, if he had made his hero rise out of his low estate to the higher one of a poet; if, as Willis has exquisitely expressed it in one of his dramas, (perhaps the best in their kind since Fletcher,) he had made him "By force of heart, And eagerness for light, grow tall and fair." But why need we consider the pedler in "The Excursion" as anything more than the mouthpiece of Wordsworth himself? He might, as you admit, have possessed the poetic sense as well, being a pedler, as in any other condition of life; and Wordsworth has only put himself in his place, and endowed his dumb images with his own poetic faculty of speech. The mind that flies high enough cannot see the pigmy distinctions which we make between different professions; from a true elevation all look of equal height. Milton was a schoolmaster, and might have been a cobbler, like Jacob Behmen, without derogation to his dignity. JOHN. Not till he had ceased to be Milton. Behmen mended shoes, and Bunyan soldered pans, only so long as they were not yet waited upon by troops of winged visions. If Milton had stitched and patched as well as he built immortal rhyme, he would have deserved equal honor for his fidelity in that humbler duty; but such honor had been husks and chaff to him, if he must meanwhile refuse to bear the heavenly message which had been intrusted to him. The lark rises from a lowly clod of earth, but he bears it not with him to the eaves of heaven. Whatever a man's inward calling is, that will have undivided possession of him, or no share at all in him. If a thought or wish stray from its entire fealty and surrenderment to that divine presence in him, his vision of it becomes straightway clouded; its oracles become indistinct to his ear; and his utterance of them unintelligible, or but faint reminiscence, instead of obedient and literal report. A virtue goes away from him, whenever any other desire touches but the hem of his mantle. That alone must be the Egeria of the restless fountain of his heart, to which he turns, in solitude and silence, for wisdom and for consolement. True it is that any worldly avocation that may further him in the service of this miraculous intelligence, which has condescended to make him its slave, becomes not only tolerable, but holy. If Milton must get bread to keep the spirit in him till it have uttered itself, would not every poor crust, though earned by the meanest employment, have a flavor and fragrance of Eden in it? "His humblest duties that hath clad with wings." If this Wordsworthian pedler had been the man his speech betrays him for, we should not have first heard of him from under the laurels of Rydal Mount. After once becoming aware of those strong wings of his, after once balancing himself upon them in the illimitable air of song, he would never have borne pack and measured tape again. As soon might you entice the butterfly back into his old hovel in the dingy grub, after he had tasted all those nectarous delights which Spenser so lusciously describes in his "Muiopotmos." If he had looked on nature with a pedler's eye, the character would have been well enough; but he was all poet. We have talked about this longer than was necessary. We do not agree, nor should we be pleasant companions if we did. This would be a dull world indeed, if all our opinions must bevel to one standard; when all our hearts do, we shall see blue sky, and not sooner. PHILIP. A part, certainly, of what you have said jumps with my opinions precisely. It is true that every man has his infallible and inexorable monitor within, a conscience that forewarns, as well as one that reproves; and it were hard to tell which wields the sharper lash. Nature throws the tools of whatever art she destines a select soul for invitingly in his way. The burnt stick from the hearth must be the pencil, and the wall the canvass, for the future painter. There must be a linkboy wanted at "the Globe," when the young Shakspeare runs away to London. Somehow or other, there chances |