If his right which I am afraid I have myself not very enthusiastically upheld-to exalted poetical rank is not at present generally acknowledged, the failure arises from no faint-heartedness, or excess of modesty, in him. He has claimed it by work, and even by word. He delighted in the composition of poetry, whether grave or gay, lyric or epic, recondite, or simple, even commonplace. Versifying was his recreation, and his solace. His dearest friends were poets. Illustrious members of the brotherhood hailed him as of it. Byron himself, while he jeered, did not deny him a place in the company. Among all his vocations that was the one by which he meant to be recollected; if in that, but self-approved, to praise or blame Indifferent, while I toil for lasting fame.19 He had won honours in many fields of literature; but the title of poet was the chief distinction he challenged ; and how refuse it to the generous, kindly, indefatigable, brave, and honourable man, to the student and scholar, to the creator of Thalaba and Kehama? Clearly we cannot. The fact nevertheless remains that the poems by which he expected to be immortalized are neither read nor honoured. He might have been amused by the knowledge that lines from the Devil's Walk have been incorporated into the language; that every school-girl can rehearse in a cataract of rhymes the way in which the water comes down at Lodore; 20 I do not suppose he would have accepted the compliment as compensation, or been at all better able to explain to himself why posterity is oblivious of Roderick, Madoc, and A Tale of Paraguay. As I have already intimated, it is indeed difficult to account fully for the neglect in its excess. There are reasons on the surface. To begin, I must admit a want of quality, a certain coarseness of fabric. Again, the bulk is a discouragement, as is the extent of a strange lake to an angler. He may be sure that it contains fish, without being able to tell where they lie. Similarly these vast epics hide valuable ideas, only to be chanced by a reader out of an overwhelming flood of truisms. The interest in others is alien and remote. From the first it required to be bolstered up by Oriental learning, much of it, in these times of deeper research, musty and rusty. But, in the face of works, some earlier, and more later, which have conquered public favour notwithstanding analogous drawbacks every whit as prejudicial, the poet might well argue that such attempts at an explanation are insufficient. I do not flatter myself that he would be at all better inclined to accept mine ;-that the cause is his failure throughout to forge from the furnace within himself a chain of sympathy with his readers. That, however, I believe to be the true He seldom seems to connect their and his common human nature. Note how rarely, if ever, his verse makes tears to start to the eyelids. The chill from this absence of mutual glow is positive, palpable, and fatal. Never will the emotions of a poet's readers, charm he never so wisely, take fire unless from the kindling of fuel in the singer's own breast. Southey's Muse was devoid of the passion of sympathy; and his renown suffers in consequence. one. He possessed many of the endowments by which admirers are attracted. He was without that which holds them bound. It could not well have been otherwise with a writer who resorted to poetry as a recreation, for rest from the toils of his literary treadmill. He understood the art of it, and could call on it, when he chose, to do his bidding. It was his handmaid when it should have been his mistress. A thousand pities! A thousand pities! He missed the dearest object of his ambition; and we have lost what might have been, from that richly furnished nature, some inspired strains. As it was, he could not be a great poet; but he had a lofty soul; and he was a great man of letters. The Poetical Works of Robert Southey. Complete in one volume New edition. Longmans, 1853. 1 The Well of St. Keyne (Ballads and Metrical Tales). 2 St. Romuald (Ballads, &c.). 3 The King of the Crocodiles (Ballads, &c.) The Battle of Blenheim (Ballads, &c.). 5 True Ballad of St. Antidius, the Pope, and the Devil (Ballads, &c.) Roprecht the Robber (Ballads, &c.). 6 The Devil's Walk. 8 God's Judgement on a Wicked Bishop (Ballads, &c.) 9 The Old Woman of Berkeley (Ballads, &c.). 10 The Curse of Kehama, Part II, xiv. 11 Mary, the Maid of the Inn (Ballads, &c.). 12 Written on the First of December (Lyric Poems) 13 Hannah (English Eclogues). 14 The Traveller's Return (Lyric Poems). 15 The Old Mansion-House (English Eclogues). 16 For a Column at Truxillo (Inscriptions, xiii) 17 My Days among the Dead (Occasional Pieces, xviii). 18 The Curse of Kehama. 19 The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo. Proem, st. 21. 20 The Cataract of Lodore (Nondescripts, VII). SIR WALTER SCOTT 1771-1832 SCOTT was the least jealous of poets; else, he might have been jealous of himself. His genius dawned upon the world in poetry. As a poet he was recognized before Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Time went on, leaving him at each of its stages more and more eminent and popular. At each his fame in the specific department of poetry manifestly receded. The individuality of the author counts for more in poetry than in any other branch of literature. Never was writer more interesting for himself than Scott. His personal renown practically transferred the Court of Letters from London to Edinburgh. There he reigned, and in his own right always. The particular kind of literature on which the throne rested differed at different periods. It had been romance in metre. It became romance in prose. But the occupant always was King Walter. The poetry survived, though royal no longer. The poems have a hundredfold more readers than when they stirred the envy of the obscure bard of Hours of Idleness. Their claims as poetry have seldom been denied. Yet I am afraid that in general they are valued much less on their own account than on that of the man, and on account of him not so much as a poet as a storyteller. For romantic fiction on the confines of history, he is indeed no less a master in verse than in prose. In one special department of poetical narration he is supreme. I could not lay it down as an absolute condition of excellence in description that the theme shall be one in which the writer has always delighted. But undoubtedly it is added virtue in a poet otherwise well qualified, that he loves and has loved it. Scott would have liked to be a soldier. He rejoiced in everything connected with fighting. Never has British Poet, except Campbell on more contracted canvases, made the reader equally to feel, as in the Iliad, on a battle-field itself with its turmoil, its frenzy, its ecstasy. He was conscious of his gift, and freely used it. There is the impress of genuineness on the picture of Bannockburn. Read, for instance, of the final and disastrous English charge over the pit-pitted plain : Rushing, ten thousand horsemen came, With blazing crests and banners spread, Down! Down! in headlong overthrow, The mail, the acton, and the spear, Of dying warriors swells on high, They came like mountain-torrent red, They broke like that same torrent's wave, |