Two poets cannot walk or sit together easily while they have any poetry about them: they must turn it out upon the table or the grass or the rock or the roadside. I shall call on you presently; take all I have in the mean while. Afar behind is gusty March! The birds, that fear'd grim winter, fly: Light feet, more light with frolic song, Say, who is that of leaf so rank, With hearted spearhead glossy-green? The fennel waves her tender plume; Oh never say it, if perchance Thou crown the cup or join the dance, For Pleasure then would pass me by, Love frown, and drive me from his court. Brooke. Considering the chances and changes of humanity, I wish I were as certain that Pleasure will never pass you by, as I am that the Graces will never look on you ungraciously. Sidney. So little am I ashamed of the hours I spend in poetry, even a consciousness that the poetry itself is bad never leads me to think the occupation is. Foliage, herbage, pebbles, may put in motion the finer parts of the mind; and although the first things it throws off be verses, and indifferent ones, we are not to despise the cultivator of them, but to consider him as possessing the garden of innocence, at which the great body of mankind looks only through the gate. In the corner formed by the court-wall, sheltered and sunny, I found, earlier in the season than usual, a little rose-bud; which perhaps owed its existence to my cutting the plant in summer, when it began to intrude on the path, and had wetted the legs of the ladies with the rain it held. None but trifling poetry could be made out of this, yet other than trifling pleasure was. Brooke. Philip, I can give you only spoiled flowers for unspoiled and unopened ones will you accept them? Sidney. Gladly. Brooke. On what occasion and for whom my verses were composed, you may at once discover. Deem it enough for me to premise in elucidation, that women have no favor nor mercy for the silence their charms impose on us. Little are they aware of the devotion we are offering to them in that state whereinto the true lover is ever prone to fall, and which appears to them inattention, indifference, or moroseness. We must chirp before them eternally, or they will not moisten our beaks in our cages. They like praise best, we thanksgiving. Sidney. Unfold the paper. What are you smiling at? Brooke. The names of the speakers. I call one Poet," the other "Lady." How questionably the former! how truly the latter! But judge. Poet. Thus do you sit and break the flow'rs My youth and me, Shows me the petals idly shed, Shows me my hopes as early dead, In vain, in vain admonished By all I see. Lady. And thus you while the noon away, Apparel, just put on for May, And soon laid by! Cannot you teach me one or two Fine phrases? If you can, pray do, Poet. Lady, I come not here to teach, Are happier strains. Sidney. Let me hope that here is only A volant shadow, just enough to break Brooke. When a woman hath ceased to be quite the same to us, it matters little how different she becomes. Sidney. Hush! I will hear from you no sentiment but your own, and this can never be yours. Variations there are of temperature in the finest season; and the truest heart has not always the same pulsations. If we had nothing to pardon or to be pardoned, we might appear to be more perfect than we are, but we should in fact be less so. Self-love is ungenerous and unforgiving; love grieves and forgives. Whatever there may be lying hid under those leaves and blossoms shall rest there until our evening walk; we having always chosen the calmest hours of the most beautiful days for our discourses on love and religion. Something of emotion, I cannot doubt, arose in your breast as you were writing these simple lines; yet I am certain it was sweet and solacing. Imagination should always be the confidant, for she is always the calmer, of Passion, where Wisdom and Virtue have an equally free admittance. Let us now dismiss until evening comes (which is much the best time for them) all these disquisitions, and let us talk about absent friends. Brooke. We must sit up late, if I am to tell you of all yours. Sidney. While the weather is so temperate and genial, and while I can be out-of-doors, I care not how late I tarry among Night airs that make tree-shadows walk, and sheep Our last excess of this nature was nearer the sea, where, when our conversation paused awhile in the stillness of midnight, we heard the distant waves break heavily. Their sound, you remarked, was such as you could imagine the sound of a giant might be, who, coming back from travel unto some smooth and level and still and solitary place, with all his armor and all his spoils about him, casts himself slumberously down to rest. II. SOUTHEY AND PORSON. Porson. I suspect, Mr. Southey, you are angry with me for the freedom with which I have spoken of your poetry and Wordsworth's. Southey. What could have induced you to imagine it, Mr. Professor? You have indeed bent your eyes upon me, since we have been together, with somewhat of fierceness and defiance: I presume you fancied me to be a commentator. You wrong me, in your belief that any opinion on my poetical works hath molested me; but you afford me more than compensation in supposing me acutely sensible of injustice done to Wordsworth. If we must converse on these topics, we will converse on him. What man ever existed who spent a more inoffensive life, or adorned it with nobler studies? Porson. None; and they who attack him with virulence are men of as little morality as reflection. I have demonstrated that one of them, he who wrote the Pursuits of Literature, could not construe a Greek sentence or scan a verse; and I have fallen on the very Index from which he drew out his forlorn hope on the parade. This is incomparably the most impudent fellow I have met with in the course of my reading, which has lain, you know, in a province where impudencé is no rarity. I am sorry to say that we critics who write for the learned have sometimes set a bad example to our younger brothers, the critics who write for the public: but if they were considerate and prudent, they would find out that a deficiency in weight and authority might in some measure be compensated by deference and decorum. Not to mention the refuse of the literary world, the sweeping of booksellers' shops, the dust thrown up by them in a corner to blow by pinches on new publications; not to tread upon or disturb this filth, the greatest of our critics now living are only great comparatively. They betray their inconsiderateness when they look disdainfully on the humbler in acquirements and intellect. A little wit, or, as that is not always at hand, a little impudence instead of it, throws its rampant brier over dry lacunes; a drop of oil, sweet or rancid, covers a great quantity of poor broth. Instead of any thing in this way, I would seriously recommend to the employer of our critics, young and old, that he oblige them to pursue a course of study such as this: that under the superintendence of some respectable student from the university, they first read and examine the contents of the book, a thing greatly more useful in criticism than is generally thought; secondly, that they carefully write them down, number them, and range them under their several heads; thirdly, that they mark every beautiful, every faulty, every ambiguous, every uncommon expression. Which being completed, that they inquire what author, ancient or modern, has treated the same subject; that they compare them, first in smaller, afterward in larger portions, noting every defect in precision and its causes, every excellence and its nature; that they graduate these, fixing plus and minus, and designating them more accurately and discriminately by means of colors, stronger or paler. For instance, purple might express grandeur and majesty of thought; scarlet, vigor of expression; pink, liveliness; green, elegant and equable composition these however and others, as might best attract their notice and serve their memory. The same process may be used where authors have not written on the same subject, when those who have are wanting, or have touched it but incidentally. Thus Addison and Fontenelle, not very like, may be compared in the graces of style, in the number and degree of just thoughts and lively fancies; thus the dialogues of Cicero with those of Plato, his ethics with those of Aristoteles, his orations with those of Demosthenes. It matters not if one be found superior to the other in this thing, and inferior in that: the exercise is taken; the qualities of two authors are explored and understood, and their distances laid down, as geographers speak, from accurate survey. The plus and minus of good and bad and ordinary will have something of a scale to rest upon; and after a time the degrees of the higher parts in intellectual dynamics may be more nearly attained, though never quite exactly. Southey. Nothing is easier than to mark and number the striking parts of Homer: it is little more difficult to demonstrate why they are so. The same thing may then be done in Milton: these pieces in each poet may afterward be collated and summed up. Every man will be capable or incapable of it in proportion as his mind is poetical; few, indeed, will ever |