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A VISION OF DECAY."

329

ultimate universal salvation, as also the law of universal necessity. I do not know that I can find any passage more impressed with the mingled grandeur and grotesqueness of his manner than the following: it is part of the dream that Elissa relates to her lover Lucifer :

"Methought that I was happy, because dead.

All hurried to and fro, and many cried

To each other-' Can I do thee any good?'
But no one heeded; nothing could avail :
The world was one great grave. I looked and saw
Time on his two great wings-one night-one day-
Fly moth-like right into the flickering sun,

So that the sun went out, and they both perished.
And one gat up and spoke-a holy man-
Exhorting them; but each and all cried out-
'Go to-it helps not-means not: we are dead.'

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'Bring out your hearts before me. Give your limbs
To whom ye list or love. My son Decay

Will take them : give them him. I want your hearts,
That I may take them up to God.' There came
These words amongst us, but we knew not whence.
It was as if the air spake. And there rose
Out of the earth a giant thing, all earth-
His eye was earthy, and his arm was earthy;

He had no heart. He but said, 'I am Decay ;'
And as he spake he crumbled into earth,
And there was nothing of him. But we all

Lifted our faces up at the word God,

And spied a dark star high above in the midst
Of others, numberless as are the dead,
And all plucked out their hearts, and held them in
Their right hands. Many tried to pick out specks
And stains, but could not; each gave up his heart.
And something-all things-nothing-it was Death,
Said, as before, from air- Let us to God!'
And straight we rose, leaving behind the raw
Worms and dead gods; all of us-soared and soared

330

POETRY, AND ITS UTTERANCES.

Right upwards, till the star I told thee of

Looked like a moon-the moon became a sun;
The sun-there came a hand between the sun and us,
And its five fingers made five nights in air.
God tore the glory from the sun's broad brow,
And flung the flaming scalp off flat to Hell:

I saw him do it; and it passed close by us."

Here we have the wild extravagance and the magnificent imagination blent. We do not know whether more to admire or shudder; yet we acknowledge the vital presence and power which makes the vision terrible, even after Clarence's dream.

Passing at a tangent from the tame, the artificial, the conventional school of Hayley, and the hyperbolical extra-mundane one of Lewis, I am willing to admit that the poetry of Joanna Baillie and William Wordsworth may have rested too exclusively on mere simplicity or naturalness of sentiment and emotion; that Scott, on the other hand, may have too unreservedly hinged on action and description; and that the Italianisms of Hunt, Keats, and Cornwall, no doubt occasionally merged into affectation. But it was scarcely to be expected, even ere Campbell had passed away from among us, and who had given us such admirable illustrations of the classical and romantic combinedthat he was to see the rise, and shudder over the progress of a school-as I know he did-which was to rejoice in poetical conception without poetical execution -which was to substitute the mere accumulation of the raw materials for the triumph of art in their arrangement;-in short, to displace the Parthenon by a Stonehenge. Such, however, has been the case, and such the course of events, to whatever cause the anomaly is to be traced,-whether to the wearing out, or case-hardening of the soil by the great masters, who have illuminated our age; or to the main current of the national mind having been diverted into quite another channel

THE QUACKERY OF MYSTICISM.

331

-that of physical science-leaving poetry to harp to the winds or to an audience sparse and select.

It would almost seem that there is some shadow of truth in this latter hypothesis; but instead of poetry having adapted itself to this sobered tone of public feeling, and having become more matter-of-fact, more repressed in its enthusiasm, and more graceful in its expositions of philosophical thought, more genuinely passionate, and more in accordance with what all know and feel to be true and tender, or beautiful or sublime, it has rebelliously kicked up its heels in derision-crying, "A fico for general sympathy and common sense. The man in the moon for ever!" Thus sowing, it

must reap.

Simple utterance of feeling-with a mystical commentary on such utterance-is all that the purest disciples of this newest of our schools aspire to. Fine images, allegorical symbols-hieroglyphic meaningsspeculative thought, we have in superfluity, but no apparent aim, and seldom any attempt at composition. Tares and wheat are allowed to grow up together to one unweeded harvest, and often the bugloss and the poppy, scattered plentifully throughout the field, look very like flowers in their respective blue and scarlet jackets. But who would term this either agriculture or gardening? Even this utterance of thought seems to be designedly left vague and imperfect, to help out the adage omne ignotum pro magnifico; and although some, nay, occasionally a superabundance, of the materials for poetry, may be observed floating about, it is of as uncertain destination as the drift-wood on an autumn-flood. Mysticism in law is quibbling; mysticism in religion is the jugglery of priestcraft; mysticism in medicine is quackery-and these often serve their crooked purposes well. But mysticism in poetry can have no attainable triumph. The sole purpose of poetry is to delight and instruct, and no one can be either pleased or profited by

332

OBSCURITY AND EXAGGERATION.

what is unintelligible. It would be as just to call stones and mortar, slates and timber, a mansion, or to call colours and canvass a picture, as to call mystical effervescences poetry. Poems are poetical materials artistically elaborated; and if so, the productions of this school, from Emerson to Browning, cannot be allowed to rank higher than rhapsodical effusions. It is necessary for a poet to think, to feel, and to fancy; but it is also necessary for him to assimilate and combine-processes which the pupils of this transcendental academy seem indeed to wish understood either that they totally overlook, or affect to undervalue as worthless. Results-products- conclusions-not ratiocinations, are expected from the poet. "His heart leaps up when he beholds a rainbow in the sky;" but the laws of refraction producing this emotion he leaves to be dealt with as a fit subject for science. It is the province of the poet to describe the western sunset sky “dying like a dolphin" in its changeful hues, not the optical why and wherefore of twilight. In short, his business is with enunciations, not with syllogisms. The poet springs to conclusions not by the logic of science, but by intuition; and whosoever, as a poet, acts either the chemist, the naturalist, or the metaphysician, mistakes the object of his specific mission. Philosophy and poetry may, in most things, not be incompatible; but they are essentially distinct. Metaphysical analyses cannot be accepted as substitutes either for apostrophes to the beautiful, or for utterances of passion. I hold them to be as different from these as principles are from products, or as causes from effects.

I have only two or three words more to add to this, regarding another set of new poetical aspirants, who will not look upon nature with their own unassisted eyes, but are constantly interposing some favourite medium-probably a distorting medium. They see motes between them and the sun, have a horror of foul

THE BANES OF OUR RECENT POETRY.

333

air, and filter the living crystal of the fountain in their repugnance to animalcule-which they are yet restless until they discover. When they sneeze, instead of blessing themselves, according to ancient and innocent custom, they search out a physiological reason; and when they encounter a child crying, they have no sympathetic desire to pat it on the head, but would fain analyse its tears. They are either making monstrous growths out of the green grass on the lap of mother earth, or making new stars from the nebulous fire-mist in the blue abysses of space above their heads. They turn from the obvious and unmistakable, and are off like "wild huntsmen" of imagination, in search of spectral essences; for they flatter themselves with the belief that their reveries are realities; and dreaming that whatever is not, is; and that whatever is, is not, their "series of melting views" is christened transcendental philosophy: poetry thus resolving itself into a negation of judgment—into a mere "fancy in nubibus," an entire absorption of intellect in imagination-sunshine playing on morning mists—soon to dislimn in nothingness.

Bailey and Sterling stand, with relation to Tennyson and Mrs Browning, very much as Shelley did with Keats. Their ambition was to sail " with ample pinion," not only "through the azure fields of air,' " but also through all the mists and clouds that came in their way, instead of dealing with the ways and works of men, with the passions and associations of humanity. It is thus that their aspirations, although lofty, are ever indefinite; that their reasonings seem always in a circle, and with no apparent goal. They would fain "dally with the sun, and scorn the breeze;" but they get bewildered, and are drifted away amid the Himmalayas of cloudland. One grand object of the school to which they belong seems to be-if it indeed have any one distinct and leading principle-to regard the species and

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