Hope keeping Love, Love Hope, alive, Those sparkling colours, once his boast, Thin and hueless as a ghost, Poor fancy on her sick-bed lay; Where was it then, the sociable sprite That crowned the poet's cup and decked his dish! But that it intercepted reason's light; It dimmed his eye, it darkened on his brow: O bliss of blissful hours! The boon of heaven's decreeing, While yet in Eden's bowers Dwelt the first husband and his sinless mate! The one sweet plant, which, piteous heaven agreeing, Of life's gay summer tide the sovran rose ! Late autumn's amaranth, that more fragrant blows If this were ever his in outward being, Or but his own true love's projected shade, Now that at length by certain proof he knows That, whether real or a magic show, Whate'er it was, it is no longer so; Though heart be lonesome, hope laid low, Yet, lady, deem him not unblest; The certainty that struck hope dead Hath left contentment in her stead: And that is next to best! And still more perfect and altogether exquisite, we think, than anything we have yet given, is the following, entitled Love, Hope, and Patience, in Education:- O'er wayward childhood would'st thou hold firm rule, Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces, Do these upbear the little world below But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive And the soft murmurs of the mother dove, Woos back the fleeting spirit, and half supplies :— Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Love. Yet haply there will come a weary day, When overtasked at length Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way. SOUTHEY. Coleridge died in 1834; his friend Southey, born three years later, survived to 1843. If Coleridge wrote too little poetry, Southey may be said to have written too much and too rapidly. Southey, as well as Coleridge, has been popularly reckoned one of the Lake poets; but it is difficult to assign any meaning to that name which should entitle it to comprehend either the one or the other. Southey, indeed, was, in the commencement of his career, the associate of Wordsworth and Coleridge; a portion of his first poem, his Joan of Arc, published in 1796, was written by Coleridge; and he afterwards took up his residence, as well as Wordsworth, among the lakes of Westmoreland. But, although in his first volume of minor poems, published in 1797, there was something of the same simplicity or plainness of style, and choice of subjects from humble life, by which Wordsworth sought to distinguish himself about the same time, the manner of the one writer bore only a very superficial resemblance to that of the other; whatever it was, whether something quite original, or only, in the main, an inspiration caught from the Germans, that gave its peculiar character to Wordsworth's poetry, it was wanting in Southey's; he was evidently, with all his ingenuity and fertility, and notwithstanding an ambition of originality which led him to be continually seeking after strange models, from Arabian and Hindoo mythologies to Latin hexameters, of a genius radically imitative, and not qualified to put forth its strength except while moving in a beaten track and under the guidance of long-established rules. Southey was by nature a conservative in literature as well as in politics, and the eccentricity of his Thalabas and Kehamas was as merely spasmodic as the Jacobinism of his Wat Tyler. But even Thalaba and Kehama, whatever they may be, are surely not poems of the Lake school. And in most of his other poems, especially in his latest epic, Roderick, the Last of the Goths, Southey is in verse what he always was in prose, one of the most thoroughly and unaffectedly English of our modern writers. The verse, however, is too like prose to be poetry of a very high order; it is flowing and eloquent, but has little of the distinctive life or lustre of poetical composition. There is much splendour and beauty, however, in the Curse of Kehama, the most elaborate of his long poems. As a specimen we will transcribe from the beginning of the Seventh Book or Canto the description of the voyage of the heroine, the lovely and virtuous Kailyal, through the air to the Swerga, or lowest heaven, with her preserver the Glendoveer, or pure spirit, Ereenia : Then in the ship of heaven Ereenia laid The waking, wondering maid; The ship of heaven, instinct with thought, displayed Its living sail, and glides along the sky. On either side, in wavy tide, The clouds of morn along its path divide; That bark, in shape, was like the furrowed shell The sail, from end to end displayed, Smooth as the swan when not a breeze at even How swift she feels not, though the swiftest wind For sure she deemed her mortal part was o'er, Daughter of earth! therein thou deem'st aright; Rise on the raptured poet's inward eye. The immortal youth of heaven who floated by, In those blest stages of our onward race, Low thought, nor base desire, nor wasting care, The wings of eagle or of cherubim Had seemed unworthy him; Angelic power, and dignity and grace Were in his glorious pennons; from the neck Down to the ankle reached their swelling web, Richer than robes of Tyrian dye, that deck Imperial majesty: Their colour like the winter's moonless sky, When all the stars of midnight's canopy Shine forth; or like the azure steep at noon, Reflecting back to heaven a brighter blue. Such was their tint when closed; but, when outspread, Shed through their substance thin a varying hue; Beauteous as fragrant, gives to scent and sight Or ruby, when with deepest red it glows; Kindles as it receives the rising ray, Proclaims the presence of the Power divine. Thus glorious were the wings Of that celestial spirit, as he went Disporting through his native element. Nor there alone The gorgeous beauties that they gave to view; Through the broad membrane branched a pliant bone; Spreading like fibres from their parent stem, Its veins like interwoven silver shone; Or as the chaster hue Of pearls that grace some Sultan's diadem. On motionless wing expanded, shoot along. Through air and sunshine sails the ship of heaven; The gross and heavy atmosphere of earth; The maid of mortal birth At every breath a new delight inhales. He furled his azure wings, which round him fold |