FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 REV. LOUIS FITZGERALD BENSON, D. D 
 
 BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO 
 
 THE LIBRARY OF 
 
 PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 BMstoM SCB 
 
 Section / */? S3 
 
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 Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2013 
 
 http://archive.org/details/greekpoOObrow 
 
THE 
 
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 1932 
 
 
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 GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS 
 
 ENGLISH POETS. 
 
 yy 
 
 ELIZABETH BAEEETT BEOWNING. 
 
 LONDON : 
 CHAPMAN & HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1863. 
 
pkintkd by 
 
 john edwakd taylor, little queb.y street, 
 
 Lincoln's inn fields. 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 The following pieces, first printed in 1842 by 
 the 'Athenaeum/ are now reprinted with the 
 liberal permission of that Journal. 
 
 It was intended by its Writer, that the 
 account of the Greek Christian Poets should 
 receive corrections, or certainly additions : a 
 project which new objects of interest came to 
 delay. The glancing series of notes upon the 
 English Poets seems suggested by, as well as 
 consequent upon, the account; unless it arose 
 from the publication of Wordsworth's ' Poems of 
 early and late years, including The Borderers/ 
 — in the form of a review of which, the latter 
 part of the paper originally appeared : the for- 
 
IV ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 mer was occasioned by ( The Book of the Poets/ 
 a compilation of the day. 
 
 Both performances, laid away long ago, and 
 only lately unfolded for the first time, were per- 
 haps almost forgotten by their Author ; but on 
 the whole, in all likelihood, some way or other 
 reproduction was desired : and this is effected 
 accordingly. 
 
 A name, which occurs unworthily enough to- 
 ward the close, should be withdrawn were it 
 found possible : its presence may be pardoned 
 as serving at least to mark more dates than 
 one. 
 
 London, February, 1863. 
 
SOME ACCOUNT OP THE GREEK 
 CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 The Greek language was a strong intellectual 
 life, stronger than any similar one which has 
 lived in the breath of "articulately speaking 
 men," and survived it. No other language has 
 lived so long and died so hard, — pang by pang, 
 each with a dolphin colour — yielding reluctantly 
 to that doom of death and silence which must 
 come at last to the speaker and the speech. 
 Wonderful it is to look back fathoms down the 
 great Past, thousands of years away — where 
 whole generations lie unmade to dust — where 
 the sounding of their trumpets, and the rushing 
 of their scythed chariots, and that great shout 
 which brought down the birds stone dead from 
 beside the sun, are more silent than the dog 
 breathing at our feet, or the fly's paces on our 
 
 B 
 
Z THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 window-pane ; and yet, from the heart of which 
 silence, to feel words rise up like a smoke — 
 words of men, even words of women, uttered 
 at first, perhaps, in " excellent low voices," but 
 audible and distinct to our times, through " the 
 dreadful pother" of life and death, the hissing 
 of the steam-engine and the cracking of the 
 cerement ! It is wonderful to look back and 
 listen. Blind Homer spoke this Greek after 
 blind Demodocus, with a quenchless light about 
 his brows, which he felt through his blindness. 
 Pindar rolled his chariots in it, prolonging the 
 clamour of the games. Sappho's heart beat 
 through it, and heaved up the world's. JEs- 
 chylus strained it to the stature of his high 
 thoughts. Plato crowned it with his divine per- 
 adventures. Aristophanes made it drunk with 
 the wine of his fantastic merriment. The later 
 Platonists wove their souls away in it, out of sight 
 of other souls. The first Christians heard in it 
 God's new revelation, and confessed their Christ 
 in it from the suppliant's knee, and presently 
 from the bishop's throne. To all times, and their 
 transitions, the language lent itself. Through 
 the long summer ol above two thousand years, 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 3 
 
 from the grasshopper Homer sang of, to that 
 grasshopper of Manuel Phile, which might in- 
 deed have been " a burden/' we can in nowise 
 mistake the chirping of the bloodless, deathless, 
 wondrous, creature. It chirps on in Greek 
 still. At the close of that long summer, though 
 Greece lay withered to her root, her academic 
 groves and philosophic gardens all leafless and 
 bare, still from the depth of the desolation rose 
 up the voice — 
 
 cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, 
 Or but a wandering voice ? 
 
 which did not grow hoarse, like other cuckoos, 
 but sang not unsweetly, if more faintly than 
 before. Strangely vital was this Greek lan- 
 guage- 
 Some straggling spirits were behind, to be 
 Laid out with most thrift on its memory. 
 
 It seemed as if nature could not part with so 
 lovely a tune, as if she felt it ringing on still in 
 her head — or as if she hummed it to herself, as 
 the watchman used to do, with "night wander- 
 ing round " him, when he watched wearily on 
 the palace roof of the doomed house of Atreus. 
 
4 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 But, although it is impossible to touch with a 
 thought the last estate of Greek poetical litera- 
 ture without the wonder occurring of its being 
 still Greek, still poetry, — though we are startled 
 by the phenomenon of life-like sounds coming 
 up from the ashes of a mighty people — at the 
 aspect of an Alcestis returned from the dead, 
 veiled but identical, — we are forced to admit, 
 after the first pause of admiration, that a change 
 has passed upon the great thing we recognize, a 
 change proportionate to the greatness, and in- 
 volving a caducity. Therefore, in adventuring 
 some imperfect account of the Greek ecclesi- 
 astical poets, it is right to premise it with the 
 full and frank admission, that they are not ac- 
 complished poets, — that they do not, in fact, 
 reach with their highest lifted hand, the lowest 
 foot of those whom the world has honoured as 
 Greek poets, but who have honoured the world 
 more by their poetry. The instrument of the 
 Greek tongue was, at the Christian era, an an- 
 tique instrument, somewhat worn, somewhat 
 stiff in the playing, somewhat deficient in notes 
 which it had once, somewhat feeble and uncer- 
 tain in such as it retained. The subtlety of the 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. O 
 
 ancient music, the variety of its cadences, the 
 intersections of sweetness in the rise and fall of 
 melodies, rounded and contained in the unity 
 of its harmony, are as utterly lost to this later 
 period as the digamma was to an earlier one. 
 We must not seek for them ; we shall not find 
 them ; their place knows them no more. Not 
 only was there a lack in the instrument, — there 
 was also a deficiency in the players. Thrown 
 aside, after the old flute-story, by a goddess, it 
 was taken up by a mortal hand — by the hand of 
 men gifted and noble in their generation, but 
 belonging to it intellectually, even by their gifts 
 and their nobleness. Another immortal, a true 
 genius, might, nay, would, have asserted him- 
 self, and wrung a poem of almost the ancient 
 force from the infirm instrument. It is easy 
 to fancy, and to wish that it had been so — that 
 some martyr or bishop, when bishops were 
 martyrs, and the earth was still warm with the 
 Sacrificial blood, had been called to the utterance 
 of his soul's devotion, with the emphasis of a 
 great poet's power. No one, however, was so 
 called. Of all the names which shall presently 
 be reckoned, and of which it is the object of 
 
6 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 this sketch to give some account, beseeching its 
 readers to hold several in honourable remem- 
 brance, not one can be crowned with a steady 
 hand as a true complete poet's name. Such a 
 crown is a sacred dignity, and, as it should not 
 be touched idly, it must not be used here. A 
 born Warwick could find, here, no head for a 
 crown. 
 
 Yet we shall reckon names " for remembrance/' 
 and speak of things not ignoble — of meek heroic 
 Christians, and heavenward faces washed serene 
 by tears — strong knees bending humbly for the 
 very strength's sake — bright intellects burning 
 often to the winds in fantastic shapes, but oftener 
 still with an honest inward heat, vehement on 
 heart and brain — most eloquent fallible lips that 
 convince us less than they persuade — a divine 
 loquacity of human falsities — poetical souls, that 
 are not souls of poets ! Surely not ignoble things ! 
 And the reader will perceive at once that the 
 writer's heart is not laid beneath the wheels of 
 a cumbrous ecclesiastical antiquity — that its in- 
 tent is to love what is loveable, to honour what is 
 honourable, and to kiss both through the dust 
 of centuries, but by no means to recognize a 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. / 
 
 hierarchy, whether in the church or in litera- 
 ture. 
 
 If, indeed, an opinion on the former relation 
 might be regarded here, it would be well to 
 suggest, that to these " Fathers," as we call 
 them filially, with heads turned away, we owe 
 more reverence for the greyness of their beards 
 than theologic gratitude for the outstretching of 
 their hands. Devoted and disinterested as many 
 among them were, they, themselves, were at 
 most times evidently and consciously surer of 
 their love, in a theologic sense, than of their 
 knowledge in any. It is no place for a reference 
 to religious controversy; and if it were, we are 
 about to consider them simply as poets, without 
 trenching on the very wide ground of their prose 
 works and ecclesiastical opinions. Still one 
 passing remark may be admissible, since the 
 fact is so remarkable — how any body of Chris- 
 tian men can profess to derive their opinions 
 from "the opinions of the Fathers," when all 
 bodies might do so equally. These fatherh 
 opinions are, in truth, multiform, and multi- 
 tudinous as the fatherly " sublime grey hairs.-" 
 There is not only a father apiece for every 
 
O THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 child , but, not to speak it unfilially, a piece of 
 every father for every child. Justin Martyr 
 would, of himself, set up a wilderness of sects, 
 besides " something over " for the future rami- 
 fications of each several one. What then should 
 be done with our ' l Fathers " ? Leave them to 
 perish by the time-Ganges, as old men innocent 
 and decrepit, and worthy of no use or honour ? 
 Surely not. We may learn of them, if God will 
 let us, love, and love is much — we may learn 
 devotedness of them and warm our hearts by 
 theirs ; and this, although we rather distrust 
 them as commentators, and utterly refuse them 
 the reverence of our souls, in the capacity of 
 theological oracles. 
 
 Their place in literature, which we have to do 
 with to-day, may be found, perhaps, by a like 
 moderation. That place is not, it has been ad- 
 mitted, of the highest j and that it is not of the 
 lowest the proof will presently be attempted. 
 There is a mid-air kingdom of the birds called 
 Nephelococcygia, of which Aristophanes tells us 
 something; and we might stand there a moment 
 so as to measure the local adaptitude, putting 
 up the Promethean umbrella to hide us from 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 9 
 
 the " Gods," if it were not for the " men and 
 columns" lower clown. But as it is, the very 
 suggestion, if persisted in, would sink all the 
 ecclesiastical antiquity it is desirable to find 
 favour for, to all eternity, in the estimation of 
 the kindest reader. Xo ! the mid-air kingdom 
 of the birds will not serve the wished-for pur- 
 pose even illustratively, and by grace of the 
 nightingale. " May the sweet saints pardon us" 
 for wronging them by an approach to such a 
 sense, which, if attained and determined, would 
 have consigned them so certainly to what St. 
 Augustine called — when he was moderate too — 
 " mitissima damnatio" a very mild species of 
 damnation. 
 
 It would be, in fact, a rank injustice to the 
 beauty we are here to recognize, to place these 
 writers in the rank of mediocrities, supposing 
 the harsh sense. They may be called mediocri- 
 ties as poets among poets, but not so as no poets 
 at all. Some of them may sing before gods and 
 men, and in front of any column, from Trajan's 
 to that projected one in Trafalgar Square, to 
 which is promised the miraculous distinction of 
 making the National Gallery sink lower than we 
 
10 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 see it now. They may, as a body, sing exult- 
 ingly, holding the relation of column to gallery, 
 in front of the whole " corpus " of Latin ec- 
 clesiastical poetry, and claim the world's ear 
 and the poet's palm. That the modern Latin 
 poets have been more read by scholars, and are 
 better known by reputation to the general read- 
 er, is unhappily true : but the truth involves 
 no good reason why it should be so, nor much 
 marvel that it is so. Besides the greater acces- 
 sibility of Latin literature, the vicissitude of 
 life is extended to posthumous fame, and Time, 
 who is Justice to the poet, is sometimes too 
 busy in pulverizing bones to give the clue weight 
 to memories. The modern Latin poets, " ele- 
 gant," — which is the critic's word to spend upon 
 them, — elegant as they are occasionally, polished 
 and accurate as they are comparatively, stand 
 cold and lifeless, with statue-eyes, near these 
 good, fervid, faulty Greeks of ours — and we do 
 not care to look again. Our Greeks do, in 
 their degree, claim their ancestral advantage, 
 not the mere advantage of language, — nay, least 
 the advantage of language — a comparative ele- 
 gance and accuracy of expression being ceded to 
 
THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 11 
 
 the Latins — but that higher distinction inherent 
 in brain and breast, of vivid thought and quick 
 sensibility. "What if we swamp for a moment 
 the Tertullians and Prudentiuses, and touch, by 
 a permitted anachronism, with one hand, Yida, 
 with the other, Gregory Naziaxzex, what then? 
 What though the Italian poet be smooth as the 
 Italian Canova — working like him out of stone 
 — smooth and cold, disdaining to ruffle his dac- 
 tyls with the beating of his pulses — what then ? 
 Would we change for him our sensitive Gregory, 
 with all his defects in the glorious "scientia 
 metriea" ? We would not — perhaps we should 
 not, even if those defects were not attributable, 
 as Mr. Boyd, in the preface to his work on the 
 Fathers, most justly intimates, to the changes 
 incident to a declining language. 
 
 It is, too, as religious poets, that we are 
 called upon to estimate these neglected Greeks 
 — as religious poets, of whom the universal 
 church and the world's literature would gladly 
 embrace more names than can be counted to 
 either. For it is strange that, although Wil- 
 helm Meister's uplooking and downlooking as- 
 pects, the reverence to things above and things 
 
12 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 below, the religious all-clasping spirit, be, and 
 must be, in degree and measure, the grand ne- 
 cessity of every true poet's soul, — of religious 
 poets, strictly so called, the earth is very bare. 
 Religious " parcel-poets " we have, indeed, more 
 than enough; writers of hymns, translators of 
 scripture into prose, or of prose generally into 
 rhymes, of whose heart- devotion a higher faculty 
 were worthy. Also there have been poets, not 
 a few, singing as if earth were still Eden ; and 
 poets, many, singing as if in the first hour of 
 exile, when the echo of the curse was louder 
 than the whisper of the promise. But the right 
 "genius of Christianism" has done little up to 
 this moment, even for Chateaubriand. YTe 
 want the touch of Christ's hand upon our litera- 
 ture, as it touched other dead things — we want 
 the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon 
 the souls of our poets, that it may cry through 
 them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the 
 Sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into 
 renovation. Something of this has been per- 
 ceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. 
 Something of a yearning after this may be seen 
 among the Greek Christian poets, something 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 13 
 
 which would have been much with a stronger 
 faculty. It will not harm us in any case, as 
 lovers of literature and honest judges, if we 
 breathe away, or peradventure besom away, the 
 thick dust which lies upon their heavy folios, 
 aud besom away, or peradventure breathe away, 
 the inward intellectual dust, which must be con- 
 fessed to lie thickly, too, upon the heavy poems, 
 and make our way softly and meekly into the 
 heart of such hidden beauties (hidden and scat- 
 tered) as our good luck, or good patience, or, 
 to speak more reverently, the intrinsic good- 
 ness of the Fathers of Christian Poetry, shall 
 permit us to discover, May gentle readers fa- 
 vour the endeavour, with " gentle airs," if any ! 
 readers not too proud to sleep, were it only 
 for Homer's sake; nor too passionate, at their 
 worst displeasure, to do worse than growl in 
 their sleeves, after the manner of " most deli- 
 cate monsters." It is not intended to crush 
 this forbearing class with folios, nor even with a 
 folio; only to set down briefly in their sight 
 what shall appear to the writer the character- 
 istics of each poet, and to illustrate the opinion 
 by the translation of a few detached passages, 
 
14 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 or, in certain possible cases, of short entire 
 poems. And so much has been premised, simply 
 that too much be not expected. 
 
 It has the look of an incongruity, to begin an 
 account of the Greek Christian poets with a 
 Jew ; and Ezekiel is a Jew in his very name, 
 and a "poet of the Jews" by profession. More- 
 over he is wrapt in such a mystery of chro- 
 nology, that nobody can be quite sure of his 
 not having lived before the Christian era — and 
 one whole whisper establishes him as an unit 
 of the famous seventy or seventy-two, under 
 Ptolemy Philadelphus. Let us waive the chro- 
 nology in favour of the mystery. He is brought 
 out into light by Clemens Alexandrinus ; and 
 being associated with Greek poets, and a writer 
 himself of Greek verses, we may receive him in 
 virtue of the TOTOTOTOTororoToroTLy^, with little 
 fear, in his case, of implying an injustice in that 
 middle bird-locality of Xephelococcygia. The 
 reader must beware of confounding him with 
 the prophet ; and the circumstance of the latter's 
 inspiration is sufficiently distinguishing. Our 
 Greek Ezekiel is, indeed, whatever his chronology 
 may be, no vat is in the ancient sense. A Greek 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 15 
 
 tragedy, (and some fragments of a tragedy are 
 all that we hold of him,) by a Jew, and on a 
 Jewish subject, ' The Exodus from Egypt/ may 
 startle the most serene of us into curiosity — 
 with which curiosity begins and ends the only 
 strong feeling we can bring to bear upon the 
 work ; since, if the execution of it is somewhat 
 curious too, there is a gentle collateral dulness 
 which effectually secures us from feverish ex- 
 citement. Moses prologizes after the worst 
 manner of Euripides (worse than the worse), 
 compendiously relating his adventures among 
 the bulrushes and in Pharaoh's household, con- 
 cluded by his slaying an Egyptian, because 
 nobody was looking. So saith the poet. Then 
 follows an interview between the Israelite and 
 Zipporah, and her companions, wherein he puts 
 to her certain geographical questions, and she 
 (as far as we can make out through fragmentary 
 cracks) rather brusquely proposes their mutual 
 marriage : on which subject he does not ven- 
 ture an opinion ; but we find him next confiding 
 his dreams in a family fashion to her father, 
 who considers them satisfactory. Here occurs a 
 broad crack down the tragedy — and we are 
 
16 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 suddenly called to the revelation from the bush 
 by an extraordinarily ordinary dialogue, between 
 Deity and Moses. It is a surprising speci- 
 men of the kind of composition adverted to 
 some lines ago, as the translation of Scripture 
 into prose; and the sublime simplicity of the 
 scriptural narrative being thus done (away) into 
 Greek for a certain time, the following recipro- 
 cation, — to which our old moralities can scarcely 
 do more, or less, than furnish a parallel — prays 
 for an English — exposure. The Divine Being 
 is supposed to address Moses : — 
 
 But what is this thou holdest in thine hand ? — 
 Let thy reply be sudden. 
 
 Moses. 'Tis my rod — 
 
 I chasten with it quadrupeds and men. 
 
 Voice from the Bush. Cast it upon the ground — 
 and straight recoil ; 
 For it shall be, to move thy wonderment, 
 A terrible serpent. 
 
 Moses. It is cast. But Thou, 
 
 Be gracious to me, Lord. How terrible ! 
 How monstrous ! Oh, be pitiful to me ! 
 I shudder to behold it, my limbs shake. 
 
 The reader is already consoled for the destiny 
 which mutilated the tragedy, without requiring 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 17 
 
 the last words of the analysis. Happily charac- 
 teristic of the " meekest of men/' is Moses's 
 naive admission of the uses of his rod — to beat 
 men and animals withal — of course " when no- 
 body is looking." 
 
 Clemens Alexandrinus, to whom we owe 
 whatever gratitude is due for our fragmentary 
 Ezekiel, was originally an Athenian philosopher, 
 afterwards a converted Christian, a Presbyter of 
 the Church at Alexandria, and preceptor of the 
 famous Origcn. Clemens flourished at the close 
 of the second century. As a prose writer — and 
 '■ we have no prose writings of his, except such as 
 l were produced subsequently to his conversion — 
 ; he is learned and various. His c Pedagogue ' is 
 a wanderer, to universal intents and purposes ; 
 j and his f Tapestry/ if the 'Stromata' maybe 
 called so, is embroidered in all cross-stitches of 
 philosophy, with not much scruple as to the 
 shading of colours. In the midst of all is some- 
 thing, ycleped a dithyrambic ode, addressed to 
 the Saviour, composite of fantastic epithets in 
 the mode of the old litanies, and almost as bald 
 , of merit as the Jew-Greek drama, though Cle- 
 mens himself (worthier in worthier places) be 
 
 its' 
 
18 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 the poet. Here is the opening, which is less 
 fanciful than what follows it : — 
 
 Curb for wild horses, 
 Wing for bird-courses 
 Never yet flown ! 
 Helm, safe for weak ones, 
 Shepherd, bespeak once, 
 The young lambs thine own. 
 House up the youth, 
 Shepherd and feeder, 
 So let them bless thee, 
 Praise and confess thee, — 
 Pure words on pure mouth, — 
 Christ, the child-leader ! 
 0, the saints' Lord, 
 All-dominant word ! 
 Holding, by Christ doin, 
 God's highest wisdom ! 
 Column in place 
 When sorrows seize us, — 
 Endless in grace 
 Unto man's race, 
 Saving one, Jesus ! 
 Pastor and ploughman, 
 Helm, curb, together, — 
 Pinion that now can 
 (Heavenly of feather) 
 Raise and release us ! 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 19 
 
 Fisher who catcheth 
 
 Those whom he wateheth . . . 
 
 It goes on ; but we need not do so. " By 
 the pricking of our thumbs," Ave know that the 
 reader has had enough of it. 
 
 Passing rapidly into the fourth century, we 
 would offer our earliest homage to Gregory Na- 
 zianzen, 
 
 " That name must ever be to us a friend," 
 when the two Apolinarii cross our path and 
 intercept the " all hail." Apolinarius the gram- 
 marian, formerly of Alexandria, held the office 
 of presbyter in the church of Laodicsea, and his 
 son Apolinarius, an accomplished rhetorician, 
 that of reader, an ancient ecclesiastical office, 
 in the same church. This younger Apolinarius 
 was a man of indomitable energies and most 
 practical inferences ; and when the edict of Ju- 
 lian forbade to the Christians the study of Gre- 
 cian letters, he, assisted perhaps by his father's 
 hope and hand, stood strong in the gap, not in 
 the attitude of supplication, not with the gesture 
 of consolation, but in power and sufficiency to 
 fill up the void and baffle the tyrant. Both 
 father and son were in the work, by some tes- 
 
20 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 timony ; the younger Apolinarius standing out, 
 by all, as the chief worker, and only one in any 
 extensive sense. "Does Julian deny us Homer?" 
 said the brave man in his armed soul — " I am 
 Homer !" and straightway he turned the whole 
 Biblical history, down to Saul's accession, into 
 Homeric hexameters, — dividing the work, so as 
 to clench the identity of first and second Homers, 
 into twenty-four books, each superscribed by a 
 letter of the alphabet, and the whole acceptable, 
 according to the expression of Sozomen, avrc 
 TT)<; f O/i7]pov it oir) crews, in the place of Homer's 
 poetry. "Does Julian deny us Euripides?" 
 said Apolinarius again — " I am Euripides !" and 
 up he sprang, — as good an Euripides (who can 
 doubt it ?) as he ever was a Homer. " Does Ju- 
 lian forbid us Menander? — Pindar? — Plato? — 
 I am Menander ! — I am Pindar ! — I am Plato!" 
 And comedies, lyrics, philosophies, flowed fast 
 at the word ; and the gospels and epistles adapted 
 themselves naturally to the rules of Socratic 
 disputation. A brave man, forsooth, was our 
 Apolinarius of Laodicsea, and literally a man of 
 men — for, observe, says Sozomen, with a venc- 
 able innocence, at which the gravest may smile 
 
THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 21 
 
 gravely, — as at a doublet worn awry at the Council 
 of Nice, — that the old authors did each man his 
 own work, whereas this Apolinarius did every 
 man's work in addition to his own — and so ad- 
 mirably, — intimates the ecclesiastical critic, — 
 that if it were not for the common prejudice in 
 favour of antiquity, no ancient could be missed in 
 the all-comprehensive representativeness of the 
 Laodiceean writer. So excellent was his ability, 
 to "outbrave the stars in several kinds of light," 
 besides the Caesar ! Whether Julian, naturally 
 mortified to witness this germination of illus- 
 trious heads under the very iron of his searing, 
 vowed vengeance against the Hydra-spirit, by 
 the sacred memory of the animation of his own 
 beard, we do not exactly know. To embitter the 
 wrong, Apolinarius sent him a treatise upon 
 truth — a confutation of the pagan doctrine, 
 apart from the scriptural argument, — the Em- 
 peror's notice of which is both worthy of his 
 Csesarship, and a good model-notice for all sorts 
 of critical dignities. Aveyvwv eyvcov Kareyvcov, 
 is the Greek of it ; so that, turning from the 
 letter to catch something of the point, we may 
 write it down — " I have perused, I have mused, 
 
22 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 I have abused" : which provoked as imperious a 
 retort — " Thou rnayest have perused, but thou 
 hast not mused ; for hadst thou mused, thou 
 wouldst not have abused." Brave Laoclicsean ! 
 Apolinarius's laudable double of Greek lite- 
 rature has perished, the reader will be concerned 
 to hear, from the face of the earth, being, like 
 other lusus, or marvels, or monsters, brief of 
 days. One only tragedy remains, with which 
 the memory of Gregory Nazianzen has been 
 right tragically affronted, and which Gregory, — 
 €i Tt? aLcrOrjcris, as he said of Constantine, — 
 would cast off with the scorn and anger befitting 
 an Apolinarian heresy. For Apolinarius, besides 
 being an epoist, dramatist, lyrist, philosopher, 
 and rhetorician, was, we are sorry to add, in the 
 eternal bustle of his soul, a heretic, — possibly for 
 the advantage of something additional to do. 
 He not only intruded into the churches hymns 
 which were not authorized, being his own com- 
 position — so that reverend brows grew dark to 
 hear women with musical voices sing them softly 
 to the turning of their distaff, — but he fell into 
 the heresy of denying a human soul to the per- 
 fect man, and of leaving the Divinity in bare 
 
THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 23 
 
 combination with the Adamic dust. Xo won- 
 der that a head so beset with many thoughts 
 and individualities should at last turn round ! — 
 that eyes rolling in fifty fine phrenzies of twenty- 
 five fine poets should at last turn blind !— that 
 a determination to rival all geniuses should be 
 fodowed by a disposition more baleful in its 
 exercise, to understand " all mysteries" ! No- 
 th.ng can be plainer than the step after step, 
 whereby, through excess of vain- glory and mor- 
 bid mental activity, Apolinarius, the vice-poet 
 of Greece, subsided into Apolinarius the chief 
 heretic of Christendom. 
 
 To go back sighingly to the tragedy, where we 
 shall have to sigh again — the only tragedy left 
 to us of all the tragic works of Apolinarius (but 
 we do not sigh for that !) — let no voice evermore 
 attribute it to Gregory Nazianzen. How could 
 Mr. Alford do so, however hesitatingly, in his 
 " Chapters," attaching to it, without the hesi- 
 tation, a charge upon the writer, whether Gre- 
 gory or another man, that he, whoever he was, 
 had of his own free will and choice, destroyed 
 the old Greek originals out of which his tragedy 
 was constructed, and left it a monument of their 
 
24 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 sacrifice as of the blood on his barbarian hand ? 
 The charge passes, not only before a breath, but 
 before its own breath. The tragedy is, in face, 
 a specimen of centoism, which is the adaptation 
 of the phraseology of one work to the construc- 
 tion of another ; and we have only to glance at 
 it to perceive the Medsea of Euripides, dislocated 
 into the Christus Patiens. Instead of the 
 ancient opening — 
 
 Oh, would ship Argo had not sailed away 
 To Cbolclios by the rough Symplegades ! 
 Nor ever had been felled in Pelion's grove 
 The pine, hewn for her side ! . . . . 
 
 So she, my queen 
 Medsea, had not touched this fatal shore, 
 Soul-struck by love of Jason ! 
 
 Apolinarius opens it thus — 
 
 Oh, would the serpent had not glode along 
 
 To Eden's garden-land, — nor ever had 
 
 The crafty dragon planted in that grove 
 
 A slimy snare ! So she, rib-born of man, 
 
 The wretched misled mother of our race, 
 
 Had dared not to dare on beyond worst daring, 
 
 Soul-struck by love of — apples ! 
 
 "Let us alone for keeping our countenance" 
 . — and at any rate we are bound to ask gravely of 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 20 
 
 Mr. Alford, is the Medcea destroyed? — and if not, 
 did the author of the ' Christus Patiens' destroy 
 his originals? and if not, may we not say of 
 Mr. Alford's charge against that author, " Oh, 
 would he had not made it !" So far from Apo- 
 linarius being guilty of destroying his originals, 
 it was his reverence for them which struggled 
 with the edict of the persecutor, and accom- 
 plished this dramatic adventure; — and this ad- 
 venture, the only remaining specimen of his ad- 
 venturousness, may help us to the secret of his 
 wonderful fertility and omnirepresentativeness, 
 which is probably this — that the great majority 
 of his works, tragic, comic, lyric, and philo- 
 sophic, consisted simply of centos. Yet we pray 
 for justice to Apolinarius : we pray for honour 
 to his motives and energies. Without pausing 
 to inquire whether it had been better and wiser 
 to let poetry and literature depart at once be- 
 fore the tyranny of the edict, than to drag them 
 back by the hair into attitudes grotesquely ridi- 
 culous — better and wiser for the Greek Christian 
 schools to let them forego altogether the poems 
 of their Euripides, than adapt to the meek sor- 
 rows of the tender Virgin-mother, the bold, 
 
26 THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 bad, cruel phrenzy of Medsea, in such verses 
 as these — 
 
 She howls out ancient oaths, invokes the faith 
 Of pledged right hands, and calls for witness, God ! 
 — we pray straightforwardly for justice and ho- 
 nour to the motives and energies of Apolinarius. 
 " Oh, would that" many lived now as appre- 
 ciative of the influences of poetry on our schools 
 and country, as impatient of tbeir contraction, 
 as self-devoted in the great work of extending 
 them ! There remains of his poetical labours, 
 besides the tragedy, a translation of David's 
 Psalms into " heroic verse," which the writer 
 of these remarks has not seen, — and of which 
 those critics, who desire to deal gently with 
 Apolinarius, seem to begin their indulgence by 
 doubting the authenticity. 
 
 It is pleasant to turn shortly round, and find 
 ourselves face to face, not with the author of 
 ' Christus Patiens/ but with one antagonistical 
 both to his poetry and his heresy, Gregory 
 Nazianzen. A noble and tender man was 
 this Gregory, and so tender, because so noble ; 
 a man to lose no cubit of his stature for being 
 looked at steadfastly, or struck at reproachfully. 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. _ / 
 
 " You may cast me down," he said, " from my 
 bishop's throne, but you cannot banish me from 
 before God's." And bishop as he was, his 
 saintly crown stood higher than his tiara, and 
 his lovinsr martvr-smile, the crown of a nature 
 more benign than his fortune, shone up toward 
 both. Son of the bishop of Xazianzen, and 
 holder of the diocese which was his birthplace, 
 previous to his elevation to the level of the 
 storm in the bishopric of Constantinople, little 
 did he care for bishoprics or high places of any 
 kind, — the desire of his soul being for solitude, 
 quietude, and that silent religion, which should 
 " rather be than seem." But his father's head 
 bent whitely before him, even in the chamber of 
 his brother's death, — and Basil, his beloved 
 friend, the " half of his soul," pressed on him 
 with the weight of love ; and Gregory feeling 
 their tears upon his cheeks, did not count his 
 own, but took up the priestly office. Poor Gre- 
 gory ! not merely as a priest, but as a man, he 
 had a sighing life of it. His student days at 
 Athens, where he and Basil read together poems 
 and philosophies, and holier things, or talked 
 low and misopogonistically of their fellow- 
 
28 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 student Julian's bearded boding smile, were his 
 happiest days. He says of himself, 
 
 As many stones 
 Were thrown at me, as other men had flowers. 
 
 Nor was persecution the worst evil ; for friend 
 after friend, beloved after beloved, passed away 
 from before his face, and the voice which charmed 
 them living, spoke brokenly beside their graves, 
 — his funeral orations marked severally the 
 wounds of his heart, — and his genius served, as 
 genius often does, to lay an emphasis on his 
 grief. The passage we shall venture to translate, 
 is rather a cry than a song — 
 
 Where are my winged words ? Dissolved in air. 
 Where is my flower of youth ? All withered. Where 
 My glory ? Vanished. Where the strength I knew 
 From comely limbs? Disease hath changed it too, 
 And bent them. Where the riches and the lands ? 
 God hath them ! Yea, and sinners' snatching hands 
 Have grudged the rest. Where is my father, mother, 
 And where my blessed sister, my sweet brother ? 
 Gone to the grave ! — There did remain for me 
 Alone my fatherland, till destiny, 
 Malignly stirring a black tempest, drove 
 My foot from that last rest, And now I rove 
 Estranged and desolate a foreign shore, 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 29 
 
 And drag my mournful life and age all hoar 
 Throneless and cityless, and childless save 
 This father-care for children, which I have, 
 Living from day to day on wandering feet. 
 Where shall I cast this body ? What will greet 
 My sorrows with an end ? What gentle ground 
 And hospitable grave will wrap me round ? 
 Who last my dying eyelids stoop to close — 
 Some saint, the Saviour's friend ? or one of those 
 Who do not know him ? The air interpose, 
 And scatter these words too ! 
 
 The return upon the first thought is highly 
 pathetic ; and there is a restlessness of anguish 
 about the whole passage, which consecrates it 
 with the cross of nature. His happy Athenian 
 associations gave a colour, unwashed out by- 
 tears, to his mind and works. Half apostolical 
 he was, and half scholastical ; and while he 
 mused, on his bishop's throne, upon the mystic 
 tree of twelve fruits, and the shining of the 
 I river of life, he carried, as Milton did, with a 
 gentle and not ungraceful distraction, both hands 
 full of green trailing branches from the banks 
 of the Cephissus, nay, from the \ery plane-tree 
 which Socrates sat under with Phsedrus, when 
 they two talked about beauty to the rising and 
 
30 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 falling of its leaves. As an orator, he was 
 greater, all must feel if some do not think, than 
 his contemporaries ; and the " golden mouth " 
 might confess it meekly. Erasmus compares 
 him to Isocrates, but the unlikeness is obvious : 
 Gregory was not excellent at an artful blowing 
 of the pipes. He spoke grandly, as the wind 
 does, in gusts; and, as in a mighty wind, which 
 combines unequal noises, the creaking of trees 
 and rude swinging of doors as well as the sub- 
 lime sovereign rush along the valleys, we gather 
 the idea, from his eloquence, less of music than 
 of power. Not that he is cold as the wind is — 
 the metaphor goes no further : Gregory cannot 
 be cold, even by disfavour of his antithetic points. 
 He is various in his oratory, full and rapid in 
 allusion, briefly graphic in metaphor, equally 
 sufficient for indignation or pathos, and gifted 
 perad venture with a keener dagger of sarcasm 
 than should hang in a saint's girdle. His ora- 
 tions against Julian have all these characteristics, 
 but they are not poetry, and we must pass down 
 lower, and quite over his beautiful letters, to 
 Gregory the poet. 
 
 He wrote thirty thousand verses, among which 
 
THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 31 
 
 are several long poems, severally defective in a 
 defect common but not necessary to short occa- 
 sional poems, and lamentable anywhere, a want 
 of unity and completeness. The excellencies of 
 his prose are transcribed, with whatever faint- 
 ness, in his poetry*— the exaltation, the devotion, 
 the sweetness, the pathos, even to the playing 
 of satirical power about the graver meanings. 
 But although noble thoughts break up the dul- 
 ness of the groundwork, — although, with the 
 instinct of greater poets, he bares his heart in 
 his poetry, and the heart is worth baring, still 
 monotony of construction without unity of in- 
 tention is the most wearisome of monotonies, 
 and, except in the case of a few short poems, 
 we find it everywhere in Gregory. The lack 
 of variety is extended to the cadences, and the 
 pauses fall stiffly " come corpo morto cade." 
 Melodious lines we have often : harmonious pas- 
 sages scarcely ever — the music turning heavily 
 on its own axle, as inadequate to living evolu- 
 tion. The poem on his own life ( f De Vita 
 sua ; ) is, in many places, interesting and affect- 
 ing, yet faulty with all these faults. The poem 
 on Celibacy, which state is commended by 
 
32 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Gregory as becometh a bishop, has occasionally 
 graphic touches, but is dull enough generally to 
 suit the fairest spinster's view of that melan- 
 choly subject. If Hercules could have read it, 
 he must have rested in the middle — from which 
 the reader is entreated to forbear the inference 
 that the poem has not been read through by the 
 writer of the present remarks, seeing that that 
 writer marked the grand concluding moment 
 with a white stone, and laid up the memory 
 of it among the chief triumphs, to say nothing 
 of the fortunate deliverances, vitce sum. In 
 Gregory's elegiac poems, our ears, at least, are 
 better contented, because the sequence of penta- 
 meter to hexameter necessarily excludes the va- 
 rious cadence which they yearn for under other 
 circumstances. His anacreontics are sometimes 
 nobly written, with a certain brave reckless- 
 ness, as if the thoughts despised the measure 
 — and we select from this class a specimen 
 of his poetry, both because three of his hymns 
 have already appeared in the ' Athenaeum/ and 
 because the anacreontic in question includes to 
 a remarkable extent, the various qualities we 
 have attributed to Gregory, not omitting that 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 play of satirical humour with which he delights 
 to ripple the abundant flow of his thoughts. 
 The writer, though also a translator, feels less 
 misgiving than usual in offering to the reader, 
 in such English as is possible, this spirited and 
 beautiful poem. 
 
 SOUL AND BODY. 
 
 What wilt thou possess or he ? 
 
 my soul, I ask of thee. 
 What of great, or what of small, 
 Counted precious therewithal ? 
 Be it only rare, and want it, 
 
 1 am ready, soul, to grant it. 
 Wilt thou choose to have and hold 
 Lydiaii Gyges' charm of old, 
 
 So to rule us with a rii _. 
 
 Turning round the jewelled thing, 
 
 Hidden by its face concealed, 
 
 And revealed by it's revealed ? 
 
 Or preferrest Midas' fate — 
 
 He who died in golden state, 
 
 All things being changed to gold ? 
 
 Of a golden hunger dying, 
 
 Through a surfeit of " would I"-ing ! 
 
 Wilt have jewels brightly cold, 
 
 Or may fertile acres pli 
 
34 THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Or the sheep of many a fold, 
 Camels, oxen, for the wold ? 
 Nay ! I will not give thee these ! 
 These to take thou hast not will, 
 These to give I have not skill ; 
 Since I cast earth's cares abroad, 
 That day when T turned to God. 
 
 Wouldst a throne, a crown sublime, 
 Bubble blown upon the time? 
 So thou mayest sit to-morrow 
 Looking downward in meek sorrow, 
 Some one walking by thee scorning, 
 Who adored thee yester morning, 
 Some malign one ? Wilt be bound 
 Fast in marriage (joy unsound !) 
 And be turned round and round 
 As the time turns ? Wilt thou catch it, 
 That sweet sickness ? and to match it 
 Have babies by the hearth, bewildering ? 
 And if I tell thee the best children 
 Are none — what answer ? 
 
 Wilt thou thunder 
 Thy rhetoricks, move the people under? 
 Covetest to sell the laws 
 With no justice in thy cause, 
 And bear on, or else be borne, 
 Before tribunals worthy scorn ? 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Wilt thou shake a javelin rather 
 Breathing war? or wilt thou gather 
 Garlands from the wrestler's ring ? 
 Or kill beasts for glorying ? 
 Covetest the city's shout, 
 And to be in brass struck out ? 
 Cravest thou that shade of dreaming, 
 Passing air of shifting seeming, 
 Hushing of a printless arrow, 
 Clapping echo of a hand ? 
 What to those who understand 
 Are to-day's enjoyments narrow. 
 Which to-morrow go again, 
 Which are shared with evil men, 
 And of which no man in his dying 
 Taketh aught for softer lying ? 
 What then wouldst thou, if thy mood 
 Choose not these ? what wilt thou be. 
 O my soul ? a deity ? 
 A God before the face of God. 
 Standing glorious in His glories, 
 Choral in His angels' chorus ? 
 
 Go ! upon thy wing arise, 
 Plumed by quick energies, 
 Mount in circles up the skies : 
 And I will bless thy winged passion. 
 Help with words thine exaltation, 
 
36 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 And,, like a bird of rapid feather, 
 Outlaimch thee, Soul, upon the aether. 
 
 But thou, fleshly nature, say, 
 
 Thou with odours from the clay, 
 
 Since thy presence I must have 
 
 As a lady with a slave, 
 
 "What wouldst thou possess or be, 
 
 That thy breath may stay with thee? 
 
 Nay ! I owe thee nought beside, 
 
 Though thine hands be open wide, 
 
 Would a table suit thy wishes, 
 
 Fragrant with sweet oils and dishes 
 
 Wrought to subtle niceness ? where 
 
 Stringed music strokes the air, 
 
 And blithe hand-clappings, and the smooth 
 
 Fine postures of the tender youth 
 
 And virgins wheeling through the dance 
 
 With an unveiled countenance, — 
 
 Joys for drinkers, who love shame, 
 
 And the maddening wine-cup's flame. 
 
 Wilt thou such, howe'er decried ? 
 
 Take them, — and a rope beside ! 
 
 Nay ! this boon I give instead 
 Unto friend insatiated, — 
 May some rocky house receive thee, 
 Self-roofed, to conceal thee chiefly ; 
 Or if labour there must lurk. 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Be it by a short day's work ! 
 
 And for garment, camel's hair, 
 
 As the righteous clothed were, 
 
 Clothe thee ! or the bestial skin, 
 
 Adam's bareness hid within, — 
 
 Or some green thing from the way, 
 
 Leaf of herb, or branch of vine, 
 
 Swelling, purpling as it may, 
 
 Fearless to be drunk for wine ! 
 
 Spread a table there beneath thee, 
 
 Which a sweetness shall up-breathe thee, 
 
 And which the dearest earth is giving, 
 
 Simple present to all living ! 
 
 When that we have placed thee near it, 
 
 We will feed thee with glad spirit. 
 
 Wilt thou eat ? soft, take the bread, 
 
 Oaten cake, if that bested ; 
 
 Salt will season all aright, 
 
 And thine own good appetite, 
 
 Which we measure not, nor fetter : 
 
 Tis an uncooked condiment, 
 
 Famine's self the only better. 
 
 Wilt thou drink ? why, here doth bubble 
 
 Water from a cup unspent, 
 
 Followed by no tipsy trouble, 
 
 Pleasure sacred from the grape ! 
 
 Wilt thou have it in some shape 
 
 More like luxury ? we are 
 
 No grudgers of wine-vinegar ! 
 
: '~ THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 But if all will not suffice thee, 
 
 And thou covetest to draw 
 
 In that pitcher with a flaw, 
 
 Brimful pleasures heaven denies thee ! 
 
 Go, and seek out, by that sign, 
 
 Other help than this of mine ! 
 
 For me, I have not leisure so 
 
 To warm thee, Sweet, my household foe, 
 
 Until, like a serpent frozen, 
 
 New-maddened with the heat, thou loosen 
 
 Thy rescued fang within mine heart ! 
 
 Wilt have measureless delights 
 Of gold-roofed palaces, and sights 
 From pictured or from sculptured art, 
 With motion near their life ; and splendour 
 Of bas-relief, with tracery tender, 
 And varied and contrasted hues ? 
 Wilt thou have, as nobles use, 
 Broidered robes to How about thee ? 
 Jewelled fingers ? Need we doubt thee ? 
 Gauds for which the wise will flout thee ? 
 I most, who, of all beauty, know 
 It must be inward, to be so ! 
 
 And thus I speak to mortals low, 
 Living for the hour, and o'er 
 Its shadow, seeing nothing more: 
 But for those of nobler bearing, 
 Who live more worthily of wearing 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 39 
 
 A portion of the heavenly nature — 
 To low estate of clayey creature, 
 See, I bring the beggar's meed, 
 Nutriment beyond the need ! 
 0, beholder of the Lord, 
 Prove on me the flaming sword ! 
 Be mine husbandman, to nourish 
 Holy plants, that words may flourish 
 Of which mine enemy would spoil me, 
 Using pleasurehood to foil me ! 
 Lead me closer to the tree 
 Of all life's eternity ; 
 Which, as I have pondered, is 
 The knowledge of God's greatnesses : 
 Light of One, and shine of Three, 
 Unto whom all things that be 
 Flow and tend ! 
 
 In such a guise, 
 Whoever on the earth is wise 
 Wilt speak unto himself : and who 
 Such inner converse would eschew, — 
 We say perforce, of that poor wight, 
 " He lived in vain !" and if aright. 
 It is not the worst word we might. 
 
 Amphilochius, Bishop of Iconium, was be- 
 loved and much appreciated by Gregory, and 
 often mentioned in his writings. Few of the 
 works of Amphilochius are extant, and of these 
 
M) THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 only one is a poem. It is a didactic epistle to 
 Seleucus, ' On the Right Direction of his Studies 
 and Life/ and has been attributed to Gregory 
 Xazianzen by some writers upon very inadequate 
 evidence, — that adduced (the similar phraseology 
 which conveys, in this poem and a poem of Gre- 
 gory's, the catalogue of canonical scriptures), 
 being as easily explained by the imitation of one 
 poet, as by the identity of two. They differ, 
 moreover, upon ground more important than 
 phraseology : Amphilochius appearing to reject, 
 or at least to receive doubtfully, Jude ; s epistle, 
 and the Second of Peter. And there is a harsh 
 force in the whole poem, which does not remind 
 us of our Nazianzen, while it becomes, in the 
 course of dissuading Seleucus from the amuse- 
 ments of the amphitheatre, graphic and effective. 
 We hear, through the description, the grinding 
 of the tigers' teeth, the sympathy of the people 
 with the tigers showing still more savage. 
 
 They sit unknowing of these agonies, 
 Spectators at a show. When a man flies 
 From a beast's jaw, they groan, as if at least 
 They missed the ravenous pleasure, like the beast, 
 And sat there vainly. When, in the next spring, 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 41 
 
 The victim is attained, and, uttering 
 
 The deep roar or quick shriek between the fangs, 
 
 Beots on the dust the passion of his pangs, 
 
 All pity dieth in that glaring look ; 
 
 They clap to see the blood run like a brook ; 
 
 They stare with hungry eyes, which tears should fill, 
 
 And cheer the beasts on with their soul's good will ; 
 
 And wish more victims to their maw, and urge 
 
 And lash their fury, as they shared the surge, 
 
 Gnashing their teeth, like beasts, on flesh of men. 
 
 There is an appalling reality in this picture. 
 The epistle consists of 333 lines,, which we men- 
 tion specifically, because the poet takes advan- 
 tage of the circumstance to illustrate or enforce 
 an important theological doctrine : — 
 
 Three hundred lines, three decads, monads three, 
 Comprise my poem. Love the Trinity. 
 
 It would be almost a pain, and quite a regret, 
 to pass from this fourth century, without speak- 
 ing a word which belongs to it — a word which 
 rises to our lips, a word worthy of honour — 
 Heliodorus. Though a bishop and an imagi- 
 native writer, his ' JEthiopica ' has no claim on 
 our attention, either by right of Christianity or 
 poetry; and yet we maybe pardoned on our 
 part for love's sake, and on account of the false 
 
42 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 position into which, by negligence of readers or 
 insufficiency of translators, his beautiful ro- 
 mance has fallen, if we praise it heartily and 
 faithfully even here. Our tears praised it long 
 ago, our recollection does so now, and its own 
 pathetic eloquence and picturesque descriptive- 
 ness are ripe for any praise. It has, besides, a 
 vivid Arabian Night charm, almost as charming 
 as Scheherazade herself, suggestive of an Ara- 
 bian Night story drawn out " in many a wind- 
 ing bout," and not merely on the ground of ex- 
 temporaneous loving and methodical (must we 
 say it ?) lying. In good sooth — no, not in good 
 sooth, but in evil leasing — every hero and he- 
 roine of them all, from Abou Hassan to " the 
 divine Charielsea/' does lie most vehemently 
 and abundantly by gift of nature and choice of 
 author, whether bishop or sultana. " It is," as 
 Pepys observes philosophically of the compara- 
 tive destruction of gin-shops and churches in 
 the Great Fire of Loudon, "pretty to observe" 
 how they all lie. And although the dearest of 
 story-tellers, our own Chaucer, has told us that 
 " some leasing is, of which there cometh none 
 advauntage to no wight," even that species is 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 43 
 
 used by them magnanimously in its turn, for 
 the bare glory's sake, and without caring for 
 the " advauntage." "With equal liberality, but 
 more truth, we write down the bishop of Tricca's 
 romance charming, and wish the charm of it 
 (however we may be out of place in naming 
 him among poets,) upon any poet who has not 
 yet felt it, and whose eyes, giving honour, may 
 wander over these Remarks. The poor bishop 
 thought as well of his book as we do, perhaps 
 better; for when commanded, under ecclesias- 
 tical censure, to burn it or give up his bishopric, 
 he gave up the bishopric. And who blames 
 Heliodorus ? He thought well of his romance ; 
 he was angry with those who did not ; he was 
 weak with the love of it. Let whosoever blames, 
 speak low. Romance- writers are not educated 
 for martyrs, and the exacted martyrdom was 
 very very hard. Think of that English bishop 
 who burnt his hand by an act of volition — only 
 his hand, and which was sure to be burnt after- 
 wards ; and how he was praised for it ! Helio- 
 dorus had to do with a dearer thing — hand- 
 writing, not hands. Authors will pardon him, 
 if bishops do not. 
 
44 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Nonnus of Panopolis, the poet of the c Dio- 
 nysiaca/ a work of some twenty-two thousand 
 verses, on some twenty-two thousand subjects 
 shaken together, nourished, as people say of 
 many a dry-rooted soul, at the commencement 
 of the fifth century. He was converted from 
 paganism, but we are sorry to make the melan- 
 choly addition, that he never was converted 
 from the ' Dionysiaca/ The only Christian 
 poem we owe to him — a paraphrase, in hexa- 
 meters, of the apostle John's gospel — does all 
 that a bald verbosity and an obscure tautology 
 can do or undo, to quench the divinity of that 
 divine narrative. The two well-known words, 
 bearing on their brief vibration the whole pas- 
 sion of a world saved though pain from pain, 
 are thus traduced : — 
 
 They answered him, 
 " Come and behold." Then Jesus himself groaned 
 Dropping strange tears from eyes unused to weep. 
 
 " Unused to weep !" Was it so of the man 
 of sorrows ? Oh, obtuse poet ! We had trans- 
 lated the opening passage of the Paraphrase, 
 and laid it by for transcription, but are repelled. 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. I -" 
 
 Enough is said. Xonnus was never converted 
 from the Dionysiaca. 
 
 Syxesius, of Cyrene, learnt Plato's philo- 
 sophy so well of Hypatia of Alexandria at the 
 commencement of the fifth century, or rather 
 before, that, to the obvious honour of that fair 
 and learned teacher, he never, as bishop of 
 Ptolemais, could attain to unlearning it. He 
 did not wish to be bishop of Ptolemais ; he had 
 divers objections to the throne and the domi- 
 nation. He loved his dogs, he loved his wife; 
 he loved Hypatia and Plato as well as he loved 
 truth; and he loved beyond all things, under 
 the womanly instruction of the former, to have 
 his own way. He was a poet, too; the chief 
 poet, we do not hesitate to record our opinion, — 
 the chief, for true and natural gifts, of all our 
 Greek Christian poets ; and it was his choice to 
 pray lyrically between the dew and the cloud 
 rather than preach dogmatically between the 
 doxies. If Gregory shrank from the episcopal 
 office through a meek self-distrust and a yearn- 
 ing for solitude, Synesius repulsed the invita- 
 tion to it through an impatience of control 
 over heart and life, and for the earnest joy's 
 
46 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 sake of thinking out his own thought in the 
 hunting-grounds, with no deacon or disciple 
 astuter than his dog to watch the thought in 
 his face, and trace it backward or forward, as 
 the case might be, into something more or less 
 than what was orthodox. Therefore he, a man 
 of many and wandering thoughts, refused the 
 bishopric, — not weepingly, indeed, as Gregory 
 did, nor feigning madness with another of the 
 " nolentes episcopari " of that earnest period, — 
 but with a sturdy enunciation of resolve, more 
 likely to be effectual, of keeping his wife by his 
 side as long as he lived, and of doubting as long 
 as he pleased to doubt upon the resurrection of 
 the body. But Synesius was a man of genius, 
 and of all such true energies as are taken for 
 granted in the name; and the very sullenness 
 of his "nay" being expressive to grave judges 
 of the faithfulness of his "yea and amen," he 
 was considered too noble a man not to be made 
 a bishop of in his own despite, and on his own 
 terms. The fact proves the latitude of disci- 
 pline, and even of doctrine, permitted to the 
 churches of that age; and it does not appear 
 that the church at Ptolemais suffered any wrong 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 47 
 
 as its result, seeing that Synesius, recovering 
 from the shock militant of his ordination, in the 
 course of which his ecclesiastical friends had 
 "laid hands upon him" in the roughest sense 
 of the word, performed his new duties willingly ; 
 was no sporting bishop otherwise than as a 
 " fisher of men " — sent his bow to the dogs, and 
 his dogs to Jericho, that nearest Coventry to 
 Ptolemais, silencing his " staunch hound's au- 
 thentic voice " as soon as ever any importance 
 became attached to the authenticity of his own. 
 And if, according to the bond, he retained his 
 wife and his Platonisms, we may honour him 
 by the inference, that he did so for conscience' 
 sake still more than love's, since the love was 
 inoperative in other matters. For spiritual 
 fervour and exaltation, he has honour among 
 men and angels ; and however intent upon 
 spiritualizing away the most glorified material 
 body from " the heaven of his invention," he held 
 fast and earnestly, as any body's clenched hand 
 could an horn of the altar, the Homoousion 
 doctrine of the Christian heaven, and other 
 chief doctrines emphasizing the divine sacrifice. 
 But this poet has a higher place among poets 
 
48 THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 than this bishop among bishops; the highest, 
 we must repeat our conviction, of all yet named 
 or to be named by us as " Greek Christian 
 poets. " Little, indeed, of his poetry has reached 
 us, but this little is great in a nobler sense than 
 of quantity ; and when of his odes, Anacreontic, 
 for the most part, we cannot say praisefully that 
 "they smell of Anacreon," it is because their 
 fragrance is holier and more abiding ; it is be- 
 cause the human soul burning in the censer, 
 effaces from our spiritual perceptions the attar 
 of a thousand rose-trees whose roots are in 
 Teos. These odes have, in fact, a wonderful 
 rapture and ecstasy. And if we find in them 
 the phraseology of Plato or Plotinus, for he 
 leant lovingly to the later Platonists, — nay, if 
 we find in them oblique references to the out- 
 worn mythology of paganism, even so have we 
 beheld the mixed multitude of unconnected 
 motes wheeling, rising in a great sunshine, as 
 the sunshine were a motive energy, — and even 
 so the burning, adoring poet-spirit sweeps up- 
 ward the motes of world-fancies (as if, being in 
 the world, their tendency was Godward) upward 
 in a strong stream of sunny light, while she 
 
THE GEEEK CHEISTIAN POETS. 49 
 
 rushes into the presence of u The Alone." We 
 say the spirit significantly in speaking of this 
 poet's aspiration. His is an ecstasy of abstract 
 intellect, of pure spirit, cold though impetuous ; 
 the heart does not beat in it, nor is the human 
 voice heard ; the poet is true to the heresy of 
 the ecclesiastic, and there is no resurrection of 
 the body. We shall attempt a translation of 
 the ninth ode, closer if less graceful and polished 
 than Mr. Boyd's, helping our hand to courage 
 by the persuasion that the genius of its poetry 
 must look through the thickest blanket of our 
 dark. 
 
 Well -beloved and glory -laden, 
 Born of Solyma's pure maiden ! 
 I would hymn Thee, blessed Warden, 
 Driving from Thy Father's garden 
 Blinking* serpent's crafty lust, 
 With his bruised head in the dust ! 
 Down Thou earnest, low as earth, 
 Bound to those of mortal birth ; 
 Down Thou earnest, low as hell, 
 Where shepherd-Death did tend and keep 
 A thousand nations like to sheep, 
 While weak with age old Hades fell 
 Shivering through his dark to view Thee, 
 
50 
 
 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 And the Dog did backward yell 
 
 With jaws all gory to let through Thee ! 
 
 So, redeeming from their pain 
 
 Choirs of disembodied ones, 
 
 Thou didst lead whom Thou didst gather, 
 
 Upward in ascent again, 
 
 With a great hymn to the Father, 
 
 Upward to the pure Avhite thrones ! 
 
 King, the daemon tribes of air 
 
 Shuddered back to feel Thee there ! 
 
 And the holy stars stood breathless, 
 
 Trembling in their chorus deathless ; 
 
 A low laughter filled aether — 
 
 Harmony's most subtle sire 
 
 "From the seven strings of his lyre, 
 
 Stroked a measured music hither — 
 
 Io paean ! victory ! 
 
 Smiled the star of morning — he 
 
 Who smileth to foreshow the day ! 
 
 Smiled Hesperus the golden, 
 
 Who smileth soft for Yenus gay ! 
 
 While that homed glory holden 
 
 Brimful from the fount of fire, 
 
 The white moon, was leading higher 
 
 In a gentle pastoral wise 
 
 All the nightly deities ! 
 
 Yea, and Titan threw abroad 
 
 The far shining of his hair 
 
 'Neath Thy footsteps holy-fair. 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 51 
 
 Owning Thee the Son of God ; 
 The Mind artificer of all, 
 And his own fire's original ! 
 
 And Thou upon Thy wing of will 
 
 Mounting. — Thy God-foot uptill 
 
 The neck of the "blue firmament, — 
 
 Soaring, didst alight content 
 
 Where the spirit -spheres were singing, 
 
 And the fount of good was springing. 
 
 In the silent heaven ! 
 
 "Where Time is not with his tide 
 
 Ever running, never weary. 
 
 Drawing earth-born things aside 
 
 Against the rocks ; nor yet are given 
 
 The plagues death-bold that ride the dreary 
 
 Tost matter-depths. Eternity 
 
 Assumes the places which they yield ! 
 
 Not aged, howsoe'er she held 
 
 Her crown from everlastingly — 
 
 At once of youth, at once of eld, 
 
 While in that mansion which is her-. 
 
 To God and gods she ministers ! 
 
 How the poet rises in his " singing clothes ,; 
 embroidered all over with the mythos and the 
 philosophy ! Yet his eye is to the Throne : and 
 we must not call him half a heathen bv reason 
 
b'L THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 of a Platonic idiosyncrasy, seeing that the eso- 
 teric of the most suspicious turnings of his 
 phraseology, is u Glory to the true God." For 
 another ode, Paris should be here to choose it — 
 we are puzzled among the beautiful. Here is 
 one with a thought in it from Gregory's prose, 
 which belongs to Synesius by right of con- 
 quest : — 
 
 O my deathless, O my blessed, 
 Maid-born, glorious son confessed, 
 
 my Christ of Solyma ! 
 
 1 who earliest learnt to play 
 
 This measure for Thee, fain would bring 
 Its new sweet tune to citern-string — 
 Be propitious, my King ! 
 Take this music which is mine 
 Anthem' d from the songs divine ! 
 
 We will sing thee deathless One, 
 
 God himself and God's great Son — 
 
 Of sire of endless generations, 
 
 Son of manifold creations ! 
 
 Nature mutually endued, 
 
 Wisdom in infinitude ! 
 
 God, before the angels binning — 
 
 Corpse, among the mortals mourning ! 
 
 What time Thou wast poured mild 
 
 From an earthy vase defiled, 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 53 
 
 .Magi with fair arts besprent, 
 At Thy new star's orient, 
 Trembled inly, wondered wild, 
 Questioned with their thoughts abroad — 
 " What then is the new-born child? 
 Who the hidden God ? 
 God, or corpse, or king ? 
 Bring your gifts, oh hither bring 
 Myrrh for rite — for tribute, gold — 
 Frankincense for sacrifice ! 
 God ! Thine incense take and hold ! 
 King ! I bring thee gold of price ! 
 Myrrh with tomb will harmonize ! 
 
 For Thou, entombed, hast purified 
 Earthly ground and roiling tide, 
 And the path of daemon nations, 
 And the free air's fluctuations, 
 And the depth below the deep ! 
 Thou God, helper of the dead, 
 Low as Hades didst Thou tread ! 
 Thou King, gracious aspect keep, 
 Take this music which is mine, 
 Anthem'd from the songs divine. 
 
 Eudocia — in the twenty-first year of the fifth 
 century — wife of Theodosms, and empress of the 
 world, thought good to extend her sceptre — 
 
54 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 (Hac claritate gemina 
 
 gloriosa foemina !) 
 
 over Homer's poems, and cento-ize them into 
 an epic on the Saviour's life. She was the third 
 fair woman accused of sacrificing the world for 
 an apple, having moved her husband to wrath, 
 by giving away his imperial gift of a large 
 one to her own philosophic friend Paulinus ; 
 and being unhappily more learned than her two 
 predecessors in the sin, in the course of her 
 exile to Jerusalem, she took ghostly comfort, 
 by separating Homer's ei&cokov from his cfrpeves. 
 There she sat among the ruins of the holy 
 city, addressing herself most unholily, with 
 whatever good intentions and delicate fingers, 
 to pulling Homer's gold to pieces bit by bit, 
 even as the ladies of France devoted what re- 
 mained to them of virtuous energy " pour parfi- 
 ler" under the benignant gaze of Louis Quinze. 
 She, too, who had no right of the purple to lite- 
 rary ineptitude — she, born no empress of Rome, 
 but daughter of< Leontius the Athenian, what 
 had she to do with Homer, "parfilant"? Was it 
 not enough for Homer that he was turned once 
 like her own cast imperial mantle, by Apolina- 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 00 
 
 rius into a Jewish epic, but that he must be un- 
 pickecl again by Eudocia for a Christian epic? 
 The reader, who has heard enough of centos, 
 will not care to hear how she did it. That she 
 did it was too much; and the deed recoiled. 
 For mark the poetical justice of her destiny ; 
 let all readers mark it, and all writers, espe- 
 cially female writers, who may be half as 
 learned, and not half as fair, — that although 
 she wrote many poems, one u On the Persian 
 War/ 3 whose title and merit are recorded, not 
 one, except this cento, has survived. The obli- 
 terative sponge, we hear of in iEschylus, has 
 washed out every verse except this cento's 
 " damned spot." This remains. This is called 
 Eudocia ! this stands for the daughter of Leon- 
 tius, and this only in the world ! O fair mis- 
 chief! she is punished by her hand. 
 
 And yet, are we born critics any more than 
 she was born an empress, that we should not 
 have a heart? and is our heart stone, that it 
 should not wax soft within us while the vision 
 is stirred u between our eyelids and our eyes," 
 of this beautiful Athcnais, baptized once by 
 Christian waters, and once by human tears, into 
 
56 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Eudocia, the imperial mourner? — this learned 
 pupil of a learned father, crowned once by her 
 golden hair, and once by her golden crown, yet 
 praised more for poetry and learning than for 
 beauty and greatness by such grave writers as 
 Socrates and Evagrius, the ecclesiastical histo- 
 rians ? — this world's empress, pale with the 
 purple of her palaces, an exile even on the throne 
 from her Athens, and soon twice an exile, from 
 father's grave and husband's bosom ? "We re- 
 lent before such a vision. And what if, relent- 
 ingly, we declare her innocent of the Homeric 
 cento ? — what if we find her " a whipping boy " 
 to take the blame ? — what if we write down a 
 certain Proba " improba," and bid her bear it ? 
 For Eudocia having been once a mark to slan- 
 der, may have been so again; and Falconia 
 Proba, having committed centoism upon Virgil, 
 must have been capable of anything. The Ho- 
 meric cento has been actually attributed to her 
 by certain critics, with whom we would join in 
 all earnestness our most sour voices, gladly, for 
 Eudocia' s sake, who is closely dear to us, and 
 not malignly for Proba's, who was " improba" 
 without our help. So shall wc impute evil to 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 0/ 
 
 only one woman, and she not an Athenian ; 
 while our worst wish, even to her, assumes this 
 innoxious shape, that she had used a distaff ra- 
 ther than a stylus, though herself and the yet 
 more " Sleeping Beauty" had owned one horo- 
 scope between them ! Amen to our wish ! A 
 busy distaff and a sound sleep to Proba ! 
 
 And now, that golden-haired, golden-crowned 
 daughter of Leoutius, for whom neither the 
 much learning nor the much sorrow drove Hes- 
 perus from her sovran eyes — let her pass on 
 unblenched. Be it said of her, softly as she 
 goes, by all gentle readers — " She is innocent, 
 whether for centos or for apples ! She wrote 
 only such Christian Greek poems as Christians 
 and poets might rejoice to read, but which pe- 
 rished with her beauty, as being of one seed 
 with it." 
 
 Midway in the sixth century we encounter 
 Paul Silextiarius, called so in virtue of the 
 office held by him in the court of Justinian, and 
 chiefly esteemed for his descriptive poem on the 
 Byzantine church of St. Sophia, which, after the 
 Arian conflagration, was rebuilt gorgeously by 
 the emperor. This church was not dedicated to 
 
58 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 a female saint, according to the supposition of 
 many persons, but to the second person of the 
 Trinity, the dyca ao(f)ia — holy wisdom; while 
 the poem being recited in the imperial presence, 
 and the poet's gaze often forgetting to rise 
 higher than the imperial smile, Paul Silentia- 
 rius dwelt less on the divine dedication and the 
 spiritual uses of the place, than on the glory of 
 the dedicator and the beauty of the structure. 
 We hesitate, moreover, to grant to his poem 
 the praise which has been freely granted to it 
 by more capable critics, of its power to realize 
 this beauty of structure to the eyes of the reader. 
 It is highly elaborate and artistic ; but the ela- 
 boration and art appear to us architectural 
 far more than picturesque. There is no se- 
 quency, no congruity, no keeping, no light and 
 shade. The description has reference to the 
 working as well as to the work, to the mate- 
 rials as well as to the working. The eyes of 
 the reader are suffered, to approach the whole 
 only in analysis, or rather in analysis analysed. 
 Every part, part by part, is recounted to him 
 excellently well — is brought close till he may 
 touch it with his eyelashes; but when he seeks 
 
THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 59 
 
 for the general effect, it is in pieces— there is 
 none of it. Byron shows him more in the 
 passing words — 
 
 I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell 
 Their glittering mass i' the sun — 
 
 than Silentiarius in all his poem. Yet the poem 
 has abundant merit in diction and harmony ; 
 and, besides higher noblenesses, the pauses are 
 modulated with an artfulness not commonly at- 
 tained by these later Greeks, and the ear exults 
 in an unaccustomed rhythmetic pomp which the 
 inward critical sense is inclined to murmur at, 
 as an expletive verbosity. 
 
 Whoever looketh with a mortal eye 
 To heaven's emblazoned forms, not steadfastly 
 With unreverted neck can bear to measure 
 That meadow-round of star-apparelled pleasure, 
 But drops his eyelids to the verdant hill, 
 Yearning to see the river run at will, 
 With flowers on each side, — and the ripening corn, 
 And grove thick set with trees, and flocks at morn 
 Leaping against the clews, — and olives twined, 
 And green vine-branches trailingly inclined, — 
 And the blue calmness skimmed by dripping oar 
 Along the Golden Horn. 
 
)0 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 But if he bring 
 His foot across this threshold, never more 
 Would he withdraw it ; fain, with wandering 
 Moist eyes, and ever-turning head, to stay, 
 Since all satiety is driven away 
 Beyond the noble structure. Such a fane 
 Of blameless beauty hath our Caesar raised 
 By God's perfective grace, and not in vain ! 
 emperor, these labours we have praised, 
 Draw down the glorious Christ's perpetual smile : 
 For thou, the high-peaked Ossa didst not pile 
 Upon Olympus' head, nor Pelion throw 
 Upon the neck of Ossa, opening so 
 The aether to the steps of mortals ! no ! 
 Having achieved a work more high than hope, 
 Thou dost not need these mountains as a slope 
 Whereby to scale the heaven ! Wings take thee thither 
 From purest piety to highest aether. 
 
 The following passage, from the same 'De- 
 scription/ is hard to turn into English, through 
 the accumulative riches of the epithets. Greek 
 words atone for their vain-glorious redundancy 
 by their beauty, but we cannot think so of these 
 our own pebbles : — 
 
 Who will unclose me Homer's sounding lips, 
 And sing the marble mead that over-sweeps 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 61 
 
 The mighty walls and pavements spread around, 
 
 Of this tall temple, which the sun has crowned ? 
 
 The hammer with its iron tooth was loosed 
 
 Into Carystus' summit green, and bruised 
 
 The Phrygian shoulder of the daedal stone ; — 
 
 This marble, coloured after roses fused 
 
 In a white air, and that, with flowers thereon 
 
 Both purple and silver, shining tenderly ! 
 
 And that which in the broad fair Nile sank low 
 
 The barges to their edge, the porphyry's glow 
 
 Sown thick with little stars ! and thou may'st see 
 
 The green stone of Laconia glitter free ! 
 
 And all the Carian hill's deep bosom brings, 
 
 Streaked bow-wise, with a livid white and red, — 
 
 And all the Lydian chasm keeps covered, 
 
 A hueless blossom with a ruddier one 
 
 Soft mingled ! all besides, the Libyan sun 
 
 Warms with his golden splendour, till he make 
 
 A golden yellow glory for his sake, 
 
 Along the roots of the Maurusian height ! 
 
 And all the Celtic mountains give to sight 
 
 From crystal clefts : black marbles dappled fair 
 
 With milky distillations here and there ! 
 
 And all the onyx yields in metal-shine 
 
 Of precious greenness ! — all that land of thine, 
 
 xEtolia, hath on even plains engendered 
 
 But not on mountain-tops, — a marble rendered 
 
 Here nigh to green, of tints which emeralds use 
 
 Here with a sombre purple in the hues ! 
 
62 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Some marbles are like new dropt snow, and some 
 Alight with blackness ! — Beauty's rays have come. 
 So congregate, beneath this holy dome ! 
 
 And thus the poet takes us away from the 
 church and dashes our senses and admirations 
 down these marble quarries ! Yet it is right 
 for us to admit the miracle of a poem made 
 out of stones ! and when he spoke of unclosing 
 Homer's lips on such a subject, he was proba- 
 bly thinking of Homer's ships, and meant to 
 intimate that one catalogue was as good for him 
 as another. 
 
 John Geometra arose in no propitious orient 
 probably with, the seventh century, although the 
 time of his "elevation" appears to be uncertain 
 within a hundred years. 
 
 He riseth slowly, as his sullen car 
 
 Had all the weights of sleep and death hung on it. 
 
 Plato, refusing his divine fellowship to any 
 one who was not a geometrician or who was a 
 poet, might have kissed our Johannes, who was 
 not divine, upon both cheeks, in virtue of his 
 other name and in vice of his verses. He was 
 the author of certain hymns to the Virgin Mary, 
 
THE GREEK CHEISTIAH POETS. 63 
 
 as accumulative of epithets aud admirations as 
 ten of her litanies, inclusive of a pious compli- 
 ment^ which, however geometrically exact in its 
 proportions, sounds strangely. 
 
 health to thee ! new living car of the sky 
 Afire on the wheels of four virtues at once ! 
 
 O health to thee ! Seat, than the cherubs more high, 
 More pure than the seraphs, more broad than the 
 
 thrones ! 
 
 Toward the close of the last hymn, the ex- 
 hausted poet empties back something of the 
 ascription into his own lap, by a remarkable 
 "mihi quoque." 
 
 health to me, royal one ! if there belong 
 
 Any grace to my singing, that grace is from thee. 
 
 health to me. royal one ! if in my song 
 
 Thou hast pleasure, oh, thine is the grace of the glee ! 
 
 We may mark the time of George Pisida, 
 about thirty years deep in the seventh century. 
 He has been confounded with the rhetorical 
 archbishop of Xicomedia, but held the office of 
 scsevophylax, only lower than the highest, in the 
 metropolitan church of St. Sophia, and was a 
 poet, singing half in the church and half in 
 the court, and considerably nearer to the feet 
 
64 THE GREEK CHEISTIAU POETS. 
 
 of the Emperor Heraclius than can please us 
 in any measure. Hoping all things, however, 
 in our poetical charity, we are willing to hope 
 even this, — that the man whom Heraclius car- 
 ried about with him as a singing-man when he 
 went to fight the Persians, and who sang and 
 recited accordingly, and provided notes of ad- 
 miration for all the imperial notes of interroga- 
 tion, and gave his admiring poems the appro- 
 priate and suggestive name of acr oases — auscul- 
 tations, things intended to be heard, — might 
 nevertheless love Heraclius the fighting-man, 
 not slave-wise or flatterer-wise, but man-wise 
 or dog-wise, in good truth, and up to the brim 
 of his praise; and so hoping, we do not dash 
 the praise down as a libation to the infernal 
 task -masters. Still it is an impotent conclusion 
 to a free-hearted poet's musing on the " Six 
 Days' Work," to wish God's creation under the 
 sceptre of his particular friend ! It looks as if 
 the particular friend had an ear like Dionysius, 
 and the poet — ah, the poet ! — a mark as of a 
 chain upon his brow in the shadow of his court 
 laurel. 
 
 We shall not revive the question agitated 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. DO 
 
 among his contemporaries, whether Euripides or 
 George Pisida wrote the best iambics ; but that 
 our George knew the secret of beauty, and that, 
 having noble thoughts, he couid utter them 
 nobly, is clear, despite of Heraclius. That he 
 is, besides, unequal ; often coldly perplexed when 
 he means to be ingenious, only violent when he 
 seeks to be inspired; that he premeditates ec- 
 stasies, and is inclined to the attitudes of the 
 orators ; in brief, that he " not only " (and not 
 seldom) " sleeps but snores " — are facts as true 
 of him as the praise is. His Hexaemeron, to 
 which we referred as his chief work, is rather 
 a meditation or rhythmetical speech upon the 
 finished creation, than a retrospection of the six 
 days ; and also there is more of Plato in it than 
 of Moses. It has many fine things, and whole 
 passages of no ordinary eloquence, though dim- 
 cult to separate and select. 
 
 Whatever eyes seek God to view His Light, 
 
 As far as they behold Him close in night ! 
 
 Whoever searcheth with insatiate balls 
 
 Th' abysmal glare, or gazeth on Heaven's walls 
 
 Against the fire-disk of the sun, the same 
 
 According to the vision he may claim, 
 
 Is dazzled from his sense. What soul of flame 
 
66 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Is called sufficient to view onward thus 
 
 The way whereby the sun's light came to us ? 
 
 O distant Presence in fixed motion ! Known 
 
 To all men, and inscrutable to one : 
 
 Perceived — uncomprehended ! unexplained 
 
 To all the spirits, yet by each attained, 
 
 Because its God-sight is Thy work ! Presence, 
 
 Whatever holy greatness of Thine essence 
 
 Lie virtue-hidden, Thou hast given our eyes 
 
 The vision of Thy plastic energies — 
 
 Not shown in angels only (those create 
 
 All fiery-hearted, in a mystic state 
 
 Of bodiless body) but, if order be 
 
 Of natures more sublime than they or we, 
 
 In highest Heaven, or mediate aether, or 
 
 This world now seen, or one that came before 
 
 Or one to come, — quick in Thy purpose, — there ! 
 
 "Working in tire and water, earth and air — 
 
 In every tuneful star, and tree, and bird — 
 
 In all the swimming, creeping life unheard, 
 
 In all green herbs, and chief of all, in man. 
 
 There are other poems of inferior length, 
 ' On the Persian War/ in three books, or, alas, 
 "auscultations/' — ' The Heracliad,' again on 
 the Persian war, and in two (of course) aus- 
 cultations again, — ' Against Severus,' ' On the 
 Vanity of Life,' ' The War of the Huns,' and 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 67 
 
 others. From the ' Vanity of Life/ which has 
 much beauty and force, we shall take a last 
 specimen : — 
 
 Some yearn to rule the state, to sit above, 
 
 And touch the cares of hate as near as love ; 
 
 Some their own reason for tribunal take, 
 
 And for all thrones the humblest prayers they make ; 
 
 Some love the orator's vain-glorious art, — 
 
 The wise love silence and the hush of heart, — 
 
 Some to ambition's spirit-curse are fain, 
 
 That golden apple with a bloody stain ; 
 
 While some do battle in her face (more rife 
 
 Of noble ends) and conquer strife with strife : 
 
 And while your groaning tables gladden these, 
 
 Satiety's quick chariot to disease, 
 
 Hunger the wise man helps, to water, bread, 
 
 And light wings to the dreams about his head. 
 
 The truth becomes presently obvious, that — 
 
 The sage o'er all the world his sceptre waves, 
 And earth is common ground to thrones and graves. 
 
 John Damascenus, to whom we should not 
 give by any private impulse of admiration the 
 title of Chrysorrhoas, accorded to him by his 
 times, lived at Damascus, his native city, early 
 in the eighth century, holding an unsheathed 
 
68 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 sword of controversy until the point drew down 
 the lightning. He retired before the affront 
 rather than the injury ; and in company with 
 his beloved friend and fellow poet, Cosmas of 
 Jerusalem (whose poetical remains the writer of 
 these remarks has vainly sought the sight of, 
 and therefore can only, as by hearsay, ascribe 
 some value to them,) hid the remnant of his 
 life in the monastery of Saba, where Phocas of 
 the twelfth century looked upon the tomb of 
 either poet. John Damascenus wrote several 
 acrostics on the chief festivals of the churches, 
 which are not much better, although very much 
 longer, than acrostics need be. When he writes 
 out of his heart, without looking to the first 
 letters of his verses, — as, indeed, in his Anacre- 
 ontic his eyes are too dim for iota-hunting, — 
 he is another man, and almost a strong man; 
 for the heart being sufficient to speak, we want 
 no Delphic oracle — " Pan is not dead/' In our 
 selection from the Anacreontic hymn, the tears 
 seem to trickle audibly ; we welcome them as a 
 Castalia, or, rather, " as Siloa's brook, " flow- 
 ing by an oracle more divine than any Grecian 
 one : — 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 69 
 
 From my lips in their defilement, 
 From my heart in its beguilement, 
 From my tongue which speaks not fair, 
 From my soul stained everywhere, 
 O my Jesus, take my prayer ! 
 
 Spurn me not for all it says, 
 Not for words and not for ways, 
 Not for shamelessness endued ! 
 Make me brave to speak my mood, 
 
 my Jesus, as I would ! 
 
 Or teach me, which I rather seek, 
 What to do and what to speak. 
 
 1 have sinned more than she, 
 
 Who learning where to meet with Thee, 
 And bringing myrrh, the highest-priced, 
 Anointed bravely, from her knee, 
 Thy blessed feet accordingly, 
 My God, my Lord, my Christ ! 
 As Thou saidest not " Depart," 
 To that suppliant from her heart, 
 Scorn me not, Word, that art 
 The gentlest one of all words said ! 
 But give Thy feet to me instead, 
 That tenderly I may them ki>s 
 And clasp them close, and never miss 
 With over-dropping tears as free 
 And precious as that myrrh could be, 
 T' anoint them bravely from my knee! 
 
70 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Wash me with my tears : draw nigh me, 
 That their salt may purify me. 
 Thou remit my sins who knowest 
 All the sinning to the lowest — 
 Knowest all my wounds, and seest 
 All the stripes Thyself decreest ; 
 Yea, but knowest all my faith, 
 Seest all my force to death, 
 Hearest all my waitings low, 
 That mine evil should be so ! 
 Nothing hidden but appears 
 In Thy knowledge, Divine, 
 Creator, Saviour mine — 
 Not a drop of falling tears, 
 Not a breath of inward moan, 
 Not a heart-beat — which is gone ! 
 
 After this deep pathos of Christianity, we dare 
 not say a word ; we dare not even praise it as 
 poetry: our heart is stirred, and not "idly." 
 The only sound which can fitly succeed the cry 
 of the contrite soul, is that of Divine condona- 
 tion or of angelic rejoicing. Let us who are 
 sorrowful still, be silent too. 
 
 Although doubts, as broad as four hundred 
 years, separate the earliest and latest period talked 
 of as the age of Simeon Metaphrastes by those 
 
THE GREEK CHEISTIAX POETS. 71 
 
 " viri illustrissimi " the classical critics, we may 
 set him down, without much peril to himself or 
 us, at the close of the tenth century, or very 
 early in the eleventh. He is chiefly known for 
 his ' Lives of the Saints/ which have been lifted 
 up as a mark both for honour and dishonour ; 
 which Psellus hints at as a favourite literature 
 of the angels, which Leo Allatius exalts as 
 chafing the temper of the heretics, and respect- 
 ing which we, in an exemplary serenity, shall 
 straightway accede to one-half of the opinion 
 of Bellarmine — that the work speaketh not as 
 things actually happened, but as they might 
 have happened — " non ut res gestce fuerant, sed 
 ut geri potuerant" Our half of this weighty 
 opinion is the first clause — we demur upon " ut 
 geri potuerant," — and we need not go further 
 than the former to win a light of commentary for 
 the term " metaphrases," applied to the saintly 
 biographies in otherwise a doubtful sense, and 
 worn obliquely upon the sleeve of the biographer 
 Metaphrastes, in no doubtful token of his skill 
 in metamorphosing things as they were into 
 things as they might have been. And Simeon 
 having received from Constantinople the honour 
 
rl THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 of his birth within her walls, and returning to 
 her the better honour of the distinctions and 
 usefulness of his life, — so writeth Psellus, his 
 encomiast, with a graceful turn of thought, — 
 expired in an " odour of sanctity " befitting the 
 biographer of all the saints, — breathing out from 
 his breathless remains such an incense of ce- 
 lestial sweetness, that if it had not been for the 
 maladroitness of certain unfragrant persons 
 whose desecration of the next tomb acted in- 
 stantly as a stopper, the whole earth might at 
 this day be metaphrased to our nostrils, as 
 steeped in an attar- gul of Eden or Ede ! — we 
 might be dwelling in a phoenix-nest at this day. 
 Through the maladroitness, however, in ques- 
 tion, there is lost to us every sweeter influence 
 from the life and death of Simeon Metaphrasies 
 than may result from the lives and deaths of 
 his saints, and from other works of his, whether 
 commentaries, orations, or poems ; and we can- 
 not add that the aroma from his writings bears 
 any proportion in value to the fragrance from his 
 sepulchre. Little of his poetry has reached us, 
 and we are satisfied with the limit. There were 
 three Simeons, who did precede our Simeon, as 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. /o 
 
 the world knoweth, and whose titles were Stylitse 
 or Columnariij because it pleased them in their 
 saintly volition to take the highest place and live 
 out their natural lives supernaturally, each upon 
 the top of a column. Perad venture the columns 
 which our Simeon refused to live upon, conspired 
 against his poetry : peradventure it is on their 
 account that we find ourselves between two 
 alphabetic acrostics, written solemnly by his 
 hand, and take up one wherein every alternate 
 line begins with a letter of the alphabet ; its 
 companion in the couplet being left to run be- 
 hind it, out of livery and sometimes out of 
 breath. Will the public care to look upon such 
 a curiosity ? Will our verse writers care to un- 
 derstand what harm may be done by a conspi- 
 ration of columns — gods and men quite on one 
 side ? And will candid readers care to confess 
 at last, that there is an earnestness in the poem, 
 acrostic as it is, — a leaning to beauty's side, — 
 which is above the acrosticism ? Let us try : — 
 
 Ah, tears upon mine eyelids, sorrow on mine heart, 
 I bring- Thee soul-repentance, Creator as Thou art ! 
 
 Bounding joyous actions, deep as arrows go ; 
 Pleasures self-revolving, issue into woe ! 
 
74 THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Creatures of our mortal, headlong rush to sin : 
 
 I have seen them ; of them — ah me, — I have been ! 
 Duly pitying Spirits, from your spirit-frame, 
 
 Bring your cloud of weeping, — worthy of the same ! 
 Else I would be bolder ; if that light of Thine, 
 
 Jesus, quell the evil, let it on me shine ! 
 Fail me truth, is living, less than death forlorn, " 
 
 When the sinner readeth — " better be unborn"? 
 God, I raise toward Thee both eyes of my heart, 
 
 With a sharp cry — " Help me ! " — while mine hopes 
 depart. 
 Help me ! Death is bitter, all hearts comprehend ; 
 
 But I fear beyond it — end beyond the end ! 
 Inwardly behold me, how my soul is black : 
 
 Sympathize in gazing, do not spurn me back ! 
 Knowing that Thy pleasure is not to destroy, 
 
 That Thou fain wouldst save me — this is all my joy. 
 Lo, the lion, hunting spirits in their deep, 
 
 (Stand beside me!) roareth — (help me!) nears to leap! 
 May' st Thou help me, Master : Thou art pure alone, 
 
 Thou alone art sinless, one Christ on a throne. 
 Nightly deeds I loved them, hated day's instead ; 
 
 Hence this soul-involving darkness on mine head. 
 O Word, who constrainest things estranged and curst, 
 
 If Thy hand can save me, that work were the tirst ! 
 Pensive o'er my sinning, counting all its ways, 
 
 Terrors shake me, waiting adequate dismays. 
 Quenchless glories many, hast Thou— many a rod — 
 
 Thou, too, hast Thy measures. Can I bear Thee, 
 God? 
 
THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. < ■) 
 
 Rend away my counting from my soul's decline, 
 
 Show me of the portion of those saved of Thine ! 
 Slow drops of my weeping to Thy mercy run : 
 
 Let its rivers wash me, by that mercy w T on ! 
 Tell me what is worthy, in our dreary now, 
 
 As the future glory ? (madness !) what, as Thou ? 
 Union, oh, vouchsafe me to Thy fold beneath, 
 
 Lest the wolf across me gnash his gory teeth ! 
 View me, judge me gently ! spare me, Master bland, 
 
 Brightly lift Thine eyelids, kindly stretch Thine hand • 
 Winged and choral angels ! 'twixt my spirit lone, 
 
 And all deathly visions, interpose your own ! 
 Yea, my Soul, remember death and woe inwrought — 
 
 After-death affliction, wringing earth's to nought ! 
 Zone me, Lord, with graces ! Be foundations built 
 
 Underneath me ; save me ! as Thou know'st and wilt ! 
 
 The omission of our X, (in any case too sullen 
 a letter to be employed in the service of an acros- 
 tic,) has permitted us to write line for line with 
 the Greek ; and we are able to infer, to the ho- 
 nour of the Greek poet, that, although he did 
 not live upon a column, he was not far below 
 one, in the virtue of self- mortification. We are 
 tempted to accord him some more gracious and 
 serious justice, by breaking away a passage from 
 his f Planctus Marise/ the lament of Mary on 
 
76 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 embracing the Lord's body ; and giving a mo- 
 ment's insight into a remarkable composition, 
 which, however deprived of its poetical right of 
 measure, is, in fact, nearer to a poem, both in 
 purpose and achievement, than any versified mat- 
 ter we have looked upon from this metaphrastic 
 hand : — 
 
 " O, uncovered corse, yet Word of the Living 
 One ! self-doomed to be uplifted on the cross for 
 the drawing of all men unto Thee, — what mem- 
 ber of Thine hath no wound ? O, my blessed 
 brows, embraced by the thorn- wreath which is 
 pricking at my heart ! O beautiful and priestly 
 One, who hadst not where to lay Thine head and 
 rest, and now wilt lay it only in the tomb, rest- 
 ing there ; sleeping, as Jacob said, a lion's sleep ! 
 O cheeks turned to the smiter ! O lips, new hive 
 for bees, yet fresh from the sharpness of vinegar 
 and bitterness of gall ! O mouth, wherein was 
 no guile, yet betrayed by the traitor's kiss ! O 
 hand, creative of man, yet nailed to the cross, 
 and since, stretched out unto Hades, with help 
 for the first transgressor ! O feet, once walking 
 on the deep to hallow the waters of nature ! O 
 me, my son ! . . . Where is Thy chorus of sick 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. t / 
 
 ones ? — those whom Thou didst cure of their dis- 
 eases, and bring back from the dead ? Is none 
 here, but only X icodemus, to draw the nails from 
 those hands and feet? — none here but only 
 Nicodemus, to lift Thee from the cross, hea- 
 vily, heavily, and lay Thee in these mother-arms, 
 which bore Thee long ago, in thy babyhood, and 
 were glad then ? These hands, which swaddled 
 Thee then, let them bind Thy grave-clothes now. 
 
 And yet, — O, bitter funerals ! O, Giver of 
 
 life from the dead, liest Thou dead before mine 
 eyes ? Must /, who said ( hush ' beside Thy 
 cradle, wail this passion upon Thy grave ? /, 
 who washed Thee in Thy first bath, must I drop 
 on Thee these hotter tears ? I, who raised Thee 
 high in my maternal arms, — but then Thou 
 leapedst, — then Thou springedst up in Thy 
 child-play I" 
 
 It is better to write so than to stand upon a 
 column. And, although the passage docs, both 
 generally and specifically, in certain of its ideas, 
 recall the antithetic eloquence of that Gregory 
 Nazianzen before whom this Simeon must be 
 dumb, we have touched his " oration," so called, 
 nearer than our subject could permit us to do 
 
78 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 any of Gregory's, because the 'Planctus' in- 
 volves an imagined situation, is poetical in its 
 design. Moreover, we must prepare to look 
 downwards ; the poets were descending from the 
 gorgeous majesty of the hexameter and the se- 
 vere simplicity of iambics, down through the 
 mediate " versus politici," a loose metre, adapted 
 to the popular ear, to the lowest deep of a 
 "measured prose," — which has been likened, 
 but which we will not liken, to the blank verse 
 of our times. Presently, we may offer an ex- 
 ample from Psellus of a prose acrostic — the 
 reader being delighted with the prospect ! " A 
 whole silver threepence, mistress." 
 
 Michael Psellus lived midway in the 
 eleventh century, and appears to have been a man 
 of much aspiration toward the higher places of 
 the earth. A senator of no ordinary influence, 
 preceptor of the emperor Michael previous to that 
 accession, he is supposed to have included in his 
 instructions the advantages of sovereignty, and in 
 his precepts the most subtle means of securing 
 them. We were about to add, that his acquire- 
 ments as a scholar w r ere scarcely less imperial 
 than those of his pupil as a prince: but the expres- 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 79 
 
 sion might have been inappropriate. There are 
 cases not infrequent, not entirely opposite to the 
 present case, and worthy always of all meditation 
 by such intelligent men as affect extensive ac- 
 quisition, — when acquirements are not ruled by 
 the man, but rule him. Whatever originates 
 from the mind cannot obstruct her individual 
 faculty; nay, whatever she receives inwardly 
 and marks her power over by creating out of it 
 a tertium quid, according to the law of the per- 
 petual generation of spiritual verities, is not ob- 
 structive but impulsive to the evolution of faculty; 
 but the erudition, whether it be erudition as the 
 world showed it formerly, or miscellaneous lite- 
 rature, as the world shows it now, the accumu- 
 lated acquirement of whatever character, which 
 remains extraneous to the mind, is and must be 
 in the same degree an obstruction and deformity. 
 How many are there from Psellus to Bayle, 
 bound hand and foot intellectually with the rolls 
 of their own papyrus — men whose erudition lias 
 grown stronger than their souls ! How many 
 whom we would gladly see washed in the clean 
 waters of a little ignorance, and take our own 
 part in their refreshment ! Not that knowledge 
 
80 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 is bad, but that wisdom is better; and that it is 
 better and wiser in the sight of the angels of 
 knowledge to think out one true thought with 
 a thrush's song and a green light for all lexicon 
 (or to think it without the light and without 
 the song — because truth is beautiful, where 
 they are not seen or heard) — than to mummy 
 our benumbed souls with the circumvolutions 
 of twenty thousand books. And so Michael 
 Psellus was a learned rnau. 
 
 We have sought earnestly, yet in vain, — and 
 the fact may account for our ill-humour, — a 
 sight of certain iambics upon vices and virtues, 
 and Tantalus and Sphinx, which are attributed 
 to this writer, and cannot be in the moon after 
 all : — earnestly, yet with no fairer encourage- 
 ment to our desire than what befalls it from his 
 poems ( On the Councils/ the first of which, 
 and only the first, through the softness of our 
 charities, we bring to confront the reader : — 
 
 Know the holy councils, King, to their utmost number. 
 Such as roused the impious ones from their world-wide 
 
 slumber ! 
 Seven in all those councils were : Nice the first con- 
 taining, 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 81 
 
 When the godly master-soul Constantine was reigning, 
 What time at Byzantium, hallowed with the hyssop. 
 In heart and word, Metrophanes presided as archbishop! 
 It cut away Arius' tongue's maniacal delusion, 
 "Which cut off from the Trinity the blessed Homoousion — 
 Blasphemed (O miserable man !) the maker of the crea- 
 ture, 
 And low beneath the Father cast the equal Filial na- 
 ture. 
 
 The prose acrostic, contained in an office 
 written by Psellus to the honour of Simeon, is 
 elaborated on the words " I sing thee who didst 
 write the metaphrases;" every sentence being 
 insulated, and beginning with a charmed letter. 
 
 " Say in a dance how we shall go, 
 Who never could a measure know ?" 
 
 why, thus — (and yet Psellus, who did know 
 everything, wrote a synopsis of the metres !) — 
 why, thus : 
 
 " Inspire me, Word of God, with a rliyth- 
 metic chant, for I am borne onward to praise 
 Simeon Metaphrastes and Logothetes, as he is 
 fitly called, the man worthy of admiration ! 
 
 " Solemnly from the heavenly heights did the 
 Blessed Ghost descend on thee, wise one, and 
 
 G 
 
82 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 finding thine heart pure, rested there, there 
 verily in the body ! " 
 
 Surely we need not write any more. But 
 Michael Psellus was a very learned man. 
 
 JoHx\ of Euchaita (or Euchania, or Theodo- 
 ropolis, — the three names do appear through the 
 twilight to belong to one city) was a bishop, 
 probably contemporary with Psellus — is only a 
 poet now : we turn to see the voice which speaks 
 to ns. It is a voice with a soul in it, clear and 
 sweet and living ; and we who have walked long 
 in the desert, leap np to its sound as to the dim 
 flowing of a stream, and would take a deep 
 breath by its side both for the weariness which 
 is gone and the repose which is coming. But 
 it is a rarer thing than a stream in the desert : 
 it is a voice in the desert — the only voice of a 
 city. The city may have three names, as we have 
 said, or the three names may more fitly apper- 
 tain to three cities — scholars knit their brows 
 and wax doubtful as they talk ; but a city de- 
 nuded of its multitudes it surely is, ruined 
 even of its ruins it surely is : no exhalation 
 arises from its tombs, the foxes have lost their 
 way to it, the bittern's cry is as dumb as the 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 83 
 
 vanished population — only the Voice remains. 
 John Mauropus, of Euchaita, Euchania, Theodo- 
 ropolis — one living man among many dead, as 
 the Arabian tale goes of the city of enchant- 
 ment — one speecliful voice among the silent, 
 sole survivor of the breath which maketh words, 
 effluence of the soul replacing the bittern's cry 
 — speak to us ! And thou shalt be to us as a 
 poet ; we will salute thee by that high name. 
 For have we not stood face to face with Michael 
 Psellus and him of the metaphrases? Surely 
 as a poet may we salute thee ! 
 
 His poetry has, as if in contrast to the scenery 
 of circumstances in which we find it, or to the 
 fatality of circumstances in which it has not been 
 found, (and even Mr. Clarke in his learned work 
 upon Sacred Literature, which is, however, in- 
 communicative generally upon sacred poetry, 
 appears unconscious of his being and his bishop- 
 ric) — his poetry has a character singularly 
 vital, fresh, and serene. There is nothing in it 
 of the rapture of inspiration, little of the ope- 
 rativeness of art — nothing of imagination in a 
 high sense, or of ear-service in any : he is not, 
 he says, of those — 
 
84 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Who rain hard with redundancies of words, 
 And thunder and lighten out of eloquence. 
 
 His Greek being opposed to that of the Silen- 
 tiarii and the Pisidse by a peculiar simplicity 
 and ease of collocation which the reader feels 
 lightly in a moment, the thoughts move through 
 its transparency with a certain calm nobleness 
 and sweet living earnestness, with holy upturned 
 eyes and human tears beneath the lids, till the 
 reader feels lovingly too. "We startle him from 
 his reverie with an octave note on a favourite 
 literary fashion of the liviug London, drawn from 
 the voice of the lost city ; discovering by that 
 sound the first serial illustrator of pictures by 
 poems, in the person of our Johannes. Here 
 is a specimen from an annual of Euchaita, 
 or Euchania, or Theodoropolis — we may say 
 " annual " although the pictures were certainly 
 not in a book, but were probably ornaments of 
 the beautiful temple in the midst of the city, 
 concerning which there is a tradition. Here 
 is a specimen selected for love's sake, because 
 it " illustrates " a portrait of Gregory Nazian- 
 zen : — 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 85 
 
 "What meditates thy thoughtful gaze, my father ? 
 To tell me some new truth ? Thou canst not so ! 
 For all that mortal hands are weak to gather, 
 Thy blessed books unfolded long ago. 
 
 These are striking verses, upon the Blessed 
 among women, weeping : — 
 
 Lady of the passion, dost thou weep ? 
 "What help can we then through our tears survey, 
 If such as thou a cause for wailing keep ? 
 'What help, what hope, for us, sweet Lady, say ? 
 " Good man, it doth befit thine heart to lay 
 More courage next it, having seen me so. 
 All other hearts find other balm to-day — 
 The whole world's consolation is my woe ! " 
 
 \Vould any hear what can be said of a Trans- 
 figuration before Raffael's : — 
 
 Tremble, spectator, at the vision won thee ! 
 
 Stand afar off, look downward from the height. 
 
 Lest Christ too nearly seen should lighten on thee, 
 
 And from thy fleshly eyeballs strike the sight, 
 
 As Paul fell ruined by that glory white ! 
 
 Lo, the disciples prostrate, each apart, 
 
 Each impotent to bear the lamping light ! 
 
 And all that Moses and Elias might, 
 
 The darkness caught the grace upon her heart 
 
 And gave them strength for ! Thou, if evermore 
 
 A God-voice pierce thy dark, — rejoice, adore ! 
 
86 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Our poet was as unwilling a bishop as the 
 most sturdy of the " nolentes "; and there are 
 poems written both in depreciation of, and in 
 retrospective regret for, the ordaining dignity, 
 marked by noble and holy beauties which we are 
 unwilling to pass without extraction. Still we 
 are constrained for space, and must come at last 
 to his chief individual characteristic — to the 
 gentle humanities which, strange to say, pre- 
 ponderate in the solitary voice— to the familiar 
 smiles and sighs which go up and down in it to 
 our ear. We will take the poem " To his old 
 house," and see how the house survives by his 
 good help, when the sun shines no more on the 
 golden statue of Constantine : — 
 
 Oh, be not angry with me, gentle house, 
 
 That I have left thee empty and deserted ! 
 
 Since thou thyself that evil didst aronse, 
 
 In being to thy masters so false-hearted, 
 
 In loving none of those who did possess thee, 
 
 In minist'ring to no one to an end, 
 
 In no one's service caring to confess thee, 
 
 But loving still the change of friend for friend, 
 
 And sending the last, plague-wise 3 to the door ! 
 
 And so, or ere thou canst betray and leave me, 
 
 I, a wise lord, dismis? thee, servitor, 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 87 
 
 And antedate the wrong thou may'st achieve me 
 Against my will, by what my will allows ; 
 Yet not without some sorrow, gentle house ! 
 
 For oh, beloved house ! what time I render 
 
 My last look back on thee I grow more tender ! 
 
 Pleasant possession, hearth for father's age, 
 
 Dear gift of buried hands, sole heritage ! 
 
 My blood is stirred; and love, that learnt its play 
 
 From all sweet customs, moves mine heart thy way ! 
 
 For thou wast all my nurse and helpful creature, 
 
 For thou wast all my tutor and my teacher ; 
 
 In thee through lengthening toils I struggled deep. 
 
 In thee I watched all night without its sleep, 
 
 In thee I worked the wearier daytime out, 
 
 Exalting truth, or trying by a doubt. 
 
 And oh, my father's roof! the memory leaves 
 Such pangs as break mine heart, beloved eaves ; 
 But God's word conquers all ! . . . 
 
 He is forced to a strange land, reverting with 
 this benediction to the " dearest house" : — 
 
 Farewell, farewell, mine own familiar one, 
 Estranged for evermore from this day's sun, 
 Fare-thee-well so ! Farewell, second mother, 
 O nurse and help, — remains there not another ! 
 My bringer-up to some sublimer measure 
 
s 8 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Of holy childhood and perfected pleasure ! 
 
 Now other spirits must thou tend and teach, 
 
 And minister thy quiet unto each, 
 
 For reasoning uses, if they love such use, 
 
 But nevermore to me ! God keep thee, house, 
 
 God keep thee, faithful corner, where I drew 
 
 So calm a breath of life ! And God keep you, 
 
 Kind neighbours ! Though I leave you by His grace, 
 
 Let no grief bring a shadow to your face ; 
 
 Because whate'er He willeth to be done 
 
 His will makes easy, makes the distant — one, 
 
 And soon brings all embraced before His throne ! 
 
 We pass Philip Solitarius, who lived at the 
 close of this eleventh century, even as we have 
 passed one or two besides of his fellow-poets : 
 because they, having hidden themselves beyond 
 the reach of our eyes and the endeavour of our 
 hands, and we being careful to speak by know- 
 ledge rather than by testimony, nothing remains 
 to us but this same silent passing— this regret- 
 ful one, as our care to do better must testify — 
 albeit our fancy will not, by any means, account 
 them, with all their advantages of absence, " the 
 best part of the solemnity." 
 
 Early in the twelfth century we are called 
 to the recognition of Theodore Prodromus, 
 
THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 89 
 
 theologian, philosopher, and poet. His poems are 
 unequal, consisting principally of a series of 
 tetrastichs (Greek epigrams for lack of point, 
 French epigrams for lack of poetry) upon the 
 Old and New Testaments, and the Life of 
 Chrysostom, — all nearly as bare of the rags of 
 literary merit as might be expected from the 
 design ■ and three didactic poems upon Love, 
 Providence, and against Bareus the heretic, into 
 which the poet has cast the recollected life of 
 his soul. The soul deports herself as a soul 
 should, with a vivacity and energy which work 
 outward and upward into eloquence. The sen- 
 timents are lofty, the expression free ; there is 
 an instinct to a middle and an end. Music we 
 miss, even to the elementary melody : the poet 
 thinks his thoughts, and speaks them ; not in- 
 deed what all poets, so called, do esteem a ne- 
 cessary effort, and indeed what we should thank 
 him for doing; but he sings them in nowise, 
 and they are not of that divine order which are 
 crowned by right of their divinity with an inse- 
 parable aureole of sweet sound. His poem upon 
 Love, — <j)t\La says the Greek word, but friend- 
 ship does not answer to it, — is a dialogue be- 
 
90 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 tween the personification and a stranger. It 
 opens thus dramatically _, the stranger speaking : 
 Love ! Lady diademed with honour, whence 
 And whither goest thou ? Thy look presents 
 Tears to the lid, thy mien is vext and low, 
 Thy locks fall wildly from thy drooping brow, 
 
 Thy blushes are all pale, thy garb is fit 
 For mourning in, and shoon and zone are loose ! 
 So changed thou art to sadness every whit, 
 And all that pomp and purple thou didst use, 
 That seemly sweet, that new rose on the mouth, 
 Those fair-smoothed tresses, and that graceful zone, 
 Bright sandals, and the rest thou haddest on, 
 Are all departed, gone to nought together ! 
 And now thou walkest mournful in the train 
 Of mourning women ! — where and whence, again ? 
 
 Love. From earth to God my Father. 
 
 Stranger. Dost thou say 
 
 That earth of Love is desolated ? 
 
 Love. Yea ! 
 
 It so much scorned me. 
 
 Stranger. Scorned ? 
 
 Love. And east me out 
 
 From its door. 
 
 Stranger. From its door ? 
 
 Love. As if without 
 
 I had my lot to die ! 
 
 Love consents to give her confidence to the 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 91 
 
 wondering stranger; whereupon, as they sit in 
 the shadow of a tall pine, she tells a Platonic 
 story of all the good she had done in heaven be- 
 fore the stars, and the angels, and the throned 
 Triad, and of all her subsequent sufferings on 
 the melancholy and ungrateful earth. The 
 poem, which includes much beauty, ends with 
 a quaint sweetness in the troth-plighting of the 
 stranger and the lady. May'st thou have been 
 faithful to that oath, O Theodore Prodromus ! 
 but thou didst swear "too much to be believed 
 — so much" 
 
 The poems ' On Providence ' and ' Against 
 Bareus ' exceed the ' Love/ perhaps, in power 
 and eloquence to the full measure of the de- 
 gree in which they fall short of the interest of 
 the latter's design. Whereupon we dedicate 
 the following selection from the ' Providence ' 
 to Mr. Carlyle's " gigmen " and all " respectable 
 persons" : — 
 
 Ah me ! what tears mine eyes are welling forth, 
 To witness in this synagogue of earth 
 Wise men speak wisely while the scoffers sing, 
 And rich men folly, for much honouring ! 
 Melitus trifles, — Socrates decrees 
 
92 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Our further knowledge ! Death to Socrates, 
 And long life to Melitus ! . . . 
 
 Chiefdom of evil, gold ! blind child of clay, 
 Gnawing with fixed tooth earth's heart away ! 
 Go ! perish from us ! objurgation vain 
 To soulless nature, powerless to contain 
 One ill unthrust upon it ! Rather perish 
 That turpitude of crowds, by which they cherish 
 Bad men for their good fortune, or condemn, 
 Because of evil fortune, virtuous men ! 
 
 Oh, for a trumpet- mouth ! an iron tongue 
 
 Sufficient for all speech ! foundations hung 
 
 High on Parnassus' top to bear my feet ! 
 
 So from that watch-tower, words which shall be meet, 
 
 I may out-thunder to the nations near me — 
 
 " Ye worshippers of gold, poor rich men, hear me ! 
 
 Where do ye wander? — for what object stand ? 
 
 That gold is earth's ye carry in your hand, 
 
 And floweth earthward ! bad men have its curse 
 
 The most profusely ! would yourselves be worse 
 
 So to be richer? — better in your purse? 
 
 Your royal purple — 'twas a dog that found it ! 
 
 Your pearl of price — a sickened oyster owned it ! 
 
 Your glittering gems are pebbles, dust-astray ; 
 
 Your palace pomp was wrought of wood and clay, 
 
THE GEEEK CHE1STIAN POETS. 93 
 
 Smoothed rock and moulded plinth. ! earth's clay, 
 
 earth's wood, 
 Earth's common-hearted stones ! Is this your mood, 
 To honour earth, to worship earth, nor blush ?" 
 What dost thou murmur, savage mouth? Hush, hush ! 
 Thy wrath is vainly breathed. The depth to tread 
 Of God's deep judgments, was not Paul's, he said. 
 
 The " savage mouth " speaks in power, with 
 whatever harshness : and we are tempted to 
 contrast with this vehement utterance another 
 short poem by the same poet, a little quaint 
 withal, but light, soft, almost tuneful, — as 
 written for a ' Book of Beauty/ and that not of 
 Euchaita ! The subject is " Life." 
 
 Oh, take me, thou mortal, — thy Life for thy praiser ! 
 Thou hast met, found and seized me, and know'st what 
 
 my ways are. 
 Nor leave me for slackness, nor yield me for pleasure, 
 Nor look up too saintly, nor muse beyond measure ! 
 There 's the veil from my head — see the worst of my 
 
 mourning ! 
 There are wheels to my feet — have a dread of their 
 
 turning ! 
 There are wiugs round my waist — I may flatter and flee 
 
 thee ! 
 There are yokes on my hands — fear the chains I decree 
 
 thee ! 
 
94 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Hold me ! hold a shadow, the winds as they quiver ; 
 Hold me ! hold a dream, smoke, a track on the river. 
 Oh, take me thou mortal, — thy Life for thy praiser, 
 Thou hast met not and seized not, nor know'st what 
 
 my ways are ! 
 Nay, frown not, and shrink not, nor call me an aspen ; 
 There 's the veil from my head ! I have dropped from 
 
 thy clasping ! 
 A fall-back within it T soon may afford thee ; 
 There are wheels to my feet — I may roll back toward 
 
 tbee! 
 There are wings round my waist — I may flee back and 
 
 clip thee ! 
 There are yQkes on my hands — I may soon cease to whip 
 
 thee! 
 Take courage ! I rather would hearten than hip thee ! 
 
 John Tzetza divides the twelfth century 
 with his name, wdiich is not a great one. In ad- 
 dition to an iambic fragment upon education, he 
 has written indefatigably in the metre politicus, 
 what must be read, if read at all, with a corre- 
 sponding energy, — thirteen " chiliads," of "varise 
 historiae," so called after ./Elian's, — .Elian's 
 without the " lionev-toiiime," — vcrv various his- 
 tories indeed, about crocodiles and flies, and 
 Plato's philosophy and Cleopatra's nails, and 
 Samson and Phidias, and the resurrection from 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 95 
 
 the dead, and the Calydonian boar, — " every- 
 thing under the sun " being, in fact, their im- 
 perfect epitome. The omission is simply Poetry ! 
 there is no apparent consciousness of her entity 
 in the mind of this versifier ; no aspiration to- 
 wards her presence, not so much as a sigh upon 
 her absence. We do not, indeed, become aware, 
 in the whole course of this laborious work, of 
 much unfolding of faculty — take it lower than 
 the poetical ; of nothing much beyond an occa- 
 sional dry, sly, somewhat boorish humour, which 
 being good humour besides, would not be a bad 
 thing were its traces only more extended. But 
 the general level of the work is a dull talkative- 
 ness, a pros}^ adversity, who is no " Daughter 
 of Jove," and a slumberousness without a dream. 
 We adjudge to our reader the instructive his- 
 tory of the Phoenix. 
 
 A phoenix is a single bird and synchronous with nature, 
 The peacock cannot equal him in beauty or in stature ! 
 In radiance he outshines the gold ; the world in wonder 
 
 yieldeth ; 
 His nest he fixeth in the trees, and all of spices build eth. 
 And when he dies, a little worm, from out his body 
 
 twining, 
 Doth generate him back again whene'er the sun is 
 
 shining. 
 
96 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 He lives in .Egypt, and he dies in /Ethiopia only, as 
 Asserts Philostratus, who wrote the Life of Apollonius. 
 And, as the wise .Egyptian scribe, the holy scribe 
 
 Chceremon, 
 Hath entered on these Institutes, all centre their esteem 
 
 on, 
 Seven thousand years and six of age, this phoenix of 
 
 the story, 
 Expireth from tlie fair Nile side, whereby he had his 
 
 glory ! 
 
 In the early part of the fourteenth century, 
 Manuel Phile, pricked emulously to the heart 
 by the successful labours of Tzetza, embraced 
 into identity with himself the remaining half of 
 zElian, and developed in his poetical treatise 
 1 On the Properties of Animals/ to which Isa- 
 chimus Camerarius provided a conclusion — the 
 Natural History of that industrious and amusing 
 Greek-Roman. The Natural History is trans- 
 lated into verse, but by no means glorified ; and 
 yet the poet of animals, Phile, has carried away 
 far more of the /Elian honey clinging to the 
 edges of his patera, than the poet of the Chiliads 
 did ever wot of. What we find in him is not 
 beauty, what we hear in him is not music, but 
 there is an open feeling for the beautiful which 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. V/ 
 
 stirs at a word, and we have a scarcely con- 
 fessed contentment in hearkening to those 
 twice-told stories of birds and beasts and fishes, 
 measured out to us in the low monotony of his 
 chanting voice. Our selections shall say no- 
 thing of the live grasshopper, called, with the 
 first breath of this paper, an emblem of the 
 vital Greek tongue ; because the space left to 
 us closes within our sight, and the science of 
 the age does not thirst to receive, through our 
 hands, the history of grasshoppers, according to 
 iElian or Phile either. Everybody knows what 
 Phile tells us here, that grasshoppers live upon 
 morning dew, and cannot sing when it is dry. 
 Everybody knows that the lady grasshopper 
 sings not at all. And if the moral, drawn by 
 Phile from this latter fact, of the advantage 
 of silence in the female sex generally, be true 
 and important, it is also too obvious to exact 
 our enforcement of it. Therefore we pass by 
 the grasshopper, and the nightingale too, for all 
 her fantastic song ; and hasten to introduce to 
 European naturalists a Philhellenic species of 
 heron, which has escaped the researches of 
 Cuvier, and the peculiarities of which may ac • 
 
 ii 
 
98 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 count to the philosophic reader for that instinct 
 of the " wisdom of our forefathers," which esta- 
 blished an English university in approximation 
 with the Fens. It is earnestly to be hoped that 
 the nice ear in question for the Attic dialect, 
 may still be preserved among the herons of 
 Cambridgeshire : — 
 
 A Grecian island nourisheth to bless 
 
 A race of herons in all nobleness. 
 
 If some barbarian bark approach the shore, 
 
 They hate, they flee, — no eagle can outsoar ! 
 
 But if by chance an Attic voice be wist. 
 
 They grow softhearted straight, philhellenist ; 
 
 Press on in earnest flocks along the strand, 
 
 And stretch their wings out to the comer's hand. 
 
 Perhaps he nears them with a gentle mind, — 
 
 They love his love, though foreign to their kind ! 
 
 For so the island giveth winged teachers, 
 
 In true love lessons, to all wingless creatures. 
 
 He has written, besides, ' A Dialogue between 
 Mind and Phile/ and other poems ; and we 
 cannot part without taking from him a more so- 
 lemn tone, which may sound as an "Amen " 
 to the good we have said of him. The follow- 
 ing address to the Holy Spirit is concentrated 
 in expression : — 
 
THE GBEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 living Spirit, falling of God-dew, 
 
 O Grace which dost console us and renew, 
 
 vital light. breath of angelhood, 
 
 O generous ministration of things good, 
 
 Creator of the visible, and best 
 
 Upholder of the great unmanifest ! 
 
 Power infinitely wise, new boon sublime 
 
 Of science and of art, constraining might, 
 
 In whom I breathe, live, speak, rejoice, and write, — 
 
 Be with us in all places, for all time ! 
 
 " And now/' saith the patientest reader of all, 
 Ct you have done. Now we have watched out 
 the whole night of the world with you, by no 
 better light than these poetical rushlights, and 
 the wicks fail, and the clock of the universal 
 hour is near upon the stroke of the seventeenth 
 century, and you have surely done \" Surely 
 not, we answer; for we see a hand which the 
 reader sees not, which beckons us over to Crete, 
 and clasps within its shadowy fingers a roll of 
 hymns Anacreontical, written by Maximus 
 Margunius ! and not for the last of our readers 
 would we lose this last of the Greeks, owing 
 him salutation. Yet the hymns have, for the 
 true Anacreontic fragrance, a musty odour, and 
 we have scant praise for them in our nostrils. 
 
100 THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 Their inspiration is from Gregory Nazianzen, 
 whose " Soul and Body" are renewed in them 
 by a double species of transmigration ; and al- 
 though we kiss the feet of Gregory's high excel- 
 lencies, we cannot admit any one of them to be 
 a safe conductor of poetical inspiration. And 
 in union with Margunius's plagiaristic tenden- 
 cies, there is a wearisome lengthiness, harder to 
 bear. He will knit you to the whole length 
 of an " Honi soit qui mal y pense," till you 
 fall asleep to the humming of the stitches, what 
 time you should be reading the " moral." AVe 
 ourselves once dropped into a " distraction," 
 as the French say, — for nothing could be more 
 different from what the English say, than our 
 serene state of self-abnegation, — at the begin- 
 ning of a house-building by this Maximus Mar- 
 gunius : when, reading on some hundred lines 
 with our bare bodily eyes, and our soul start- 
 ing up on a sudden to demand a measure of the 
 progress, behold, he was building it still, with 
 a trowel in the same hand : it was not forwarder 
 by a brick. The swallows had time to hatch 
 two nestfulls in a chimney while he finished 
 the chimney-pot ! Nevertheless he has mo- 
 
THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 101 
 
 ments of earnestness, and they leave beauties 
 in their trace. Let us listen to this extract 
 from his fifth hymn : — 
 
 Take me as a hermit lone 
 With a desert life and moan ; 
 Only Thou anear to mete 
 Slow or quick my pulse's beat ; 
 Only Thou, the night to chase, 
 With the sunlight in Thy face ! 
 Pleasure to the eyes may come 
 From a glory seen afar, 
 But if life concentre gloom 
 Scattered by no little star, 
 Then, how feeble, God, we are ! 
 Nay, whatever bird there be, 
 (.Ether by his flying stirred,) 
 He, in this thing, must be free — 
 And I, Saviour, am Thy bird, 
 Pricking with an open beak 
 At the words that Thou dost speak ! 
 Leave a breath upon my wings, 
 That above these nether things 
 I may rise to where Thou art, 
 I may flutter next Thine heart ! 
 For if a light within me burn, 
 It must be darkness in an urn, 
 Unless within its crvstalline, 
 
102 THE GEEEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 
 
 That unbeginning light of Thine 
 Shine ! — oh, Saviour, let it shine ! 
 
 He is the last of our Greeks. The light from 
 Troy city, with which all Greek glory began, 
 " threw three-times six/' said iEschylus, that 
 man with a soul, — beacon after beacon, into the 
 heart of Greece. " Three-times six," too, threw 
 the light from Greece, when her own heart- 
 light had gone out like Troy's, onward along 
 the ridges of time. Three-times six — but what 
 faint beacons are the last ! — sometimes only a 
 red brand; sometimes only a small trembling 
 flame ; sometimes only a white glimmer as of 
 ashes breathed on by the wind ; faint beacons 
 and far ! How far ! We have watched them 
 along the cloudy tops of the great centuries, 
 through the ages dark but for them, — and now 
 stand looking with eyes of farewell upon the 
 last pale sign on the last mist-bound hill. But 
 it is the sixteenth century. Beyond the ashes 
 on the hill a red light is gathering ; above the 
 falling of the dews a great sun is rising : there 
 is a rushing of life and song upward — let it still 
 be upward ! Shakespeare is in the world ! And 
 the Genius of English Poetry, she who only of 
 
THE GREEK CHRISTIAN POETS. 103 
 
 all the earth is worthy, (Goethe's spirit may 
 hear us say so, and smile,) stooping, with a 
 royal gesture, to kiss the dead lips of the 
 Genius of Greece, stands up her successor in 
 the universe, by virtue of that chrism, and in 
 right of her own crown. 
 
105 
 
 THE BOOK OF THE POETS, 
 
 The voice of the turtle is heard in the land. 
 The green book of the earth is open, and the 
 four winds are turning the leaves : while Na- 
 ture, chief secretary to the creative Word, sits 
 busy at her inditing of many a lovely poem, — 
 her f Flower and the Leaf on this side, her 
 ' Cuckoo and the Nightingale' on that, her 
 ' Paradise of Dainty Devices ' in and out among 
 the valleys, her ' Polyolbion' away across the 
 hills, her ' Britannia's Pastorals' on the home 
 meadows, her sonnets of tufted primroses, her 
 lyrical outgushings of May blossoming, her epi- 
 cal and didactic solemnities of light and shadow, 
 and many an illustrative picture to garnish the 
 universal annual. "What book shall we open 
 side by side with Nature's? First, the book of 
 
106 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 God. l The Book of the Poets' may well come 
 next — even this book, if it deserve indeed the 
 nobility of its name. 
 
 But this book, which is not Campbell's Selec- 
 tion from the British Poets, nor Southey's, nor 
 different from either by being better, resembles 
 many others of the nobly named, whether 
 princes or hereditary legislators, in bearing a 
 name too noble for its desert. This book, con- 
 sisting of short extracts from the books of the 
 poets, beginning with Chaucer, ending with 
 Beattie, and missing sundry by the way, — we 
 call it indefinitely c A book of the poets/ and 
 leave it thankful. The extracts from Chaucer 
 are topsy-turvy — one from the Canterbury Tales, 
 prologue thrown in between two from the 
 Knight's Tale; while Cower may blame "his 
 fortune" — 
 
 (And some men hold opinion 
 That it is constellation,) 
 
 for the dry specimen crumbled off from his man- 
 mountainism. Of Lydgate there is scarcely a 
 page ; of Occleve, Ilawcs, and Skelton — the two 
 last especially interesting in poetical history, — 
 of Sackvillc, and the whole generation of dra- 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 107 
 
 inatists, not a word. " The table is not full," 
 and the ringing on it of Phillips's ' Splendid 
 Shilling/ will not bribe us to endurance. What ! 
 place for Pomfret's platitudes, and no place for 
 Shakespeare's divine sonnets? and no place for 
 Jonson's and Fletcher's lyrics ? Do lyrics and 
 sonnets perish out of place whenever their poets 
 make tragedies too, quenched by the entity of 
 tragedy? TVe suggest that Shakespeare has 
 nearly as much claim to place in any possible 
 book of the poets (though also a book of the 
 poetasters) as ever can have John Hughes, who 
 " as a poet, is chiefly known," saith the critical 
 editor, "by his tragedy of the ' Siege of Damas- 
 cus.' " Let this book therefore accept our boon, 
 and remain a book of the poets, thankfully if 
 not gloriously, — while we, on our own side, may 
 be thankful too, that in the present days of the 
 millennium of Jeremy Bentham, a more lite- 
 rally golden age than the laureates of Saturnus 
 dreamed withal, — any memory of the poets 
 should linger with the booksellers, and " come 
 up this way" with the spring. The thing is 
 good, in that it is at all. Send a little child 
 into a garden, and he will be sure to bring you 
 
108 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 a nosegay worth having, though the red weed 
 in it should " side the lily," and sundry of the 
 prettiest flowers be held stalk upwards. Flowers 
 are flowers and poets are poets, and ' A book 
 of the poets' must be right welcome at every 
 hour of the clock. 
 
 For the preliminary essay, which is very mo- 
 derately well done, we embrace it, with our 
 fingers at least, in taking up the volume. It 
 pleases us better on the solitary point of the de- 
 votional poets than Mr. Campbell's beautiful 
 treatise, doing, as it seems to us, more frank 
 justice to the Withers' s, the Quarles's, and the 
 Crashaws. Otherwise the criticism and philo- 
 sophy to be found in it are scarcely of the hap- 
 piest, — although even the first astonishing para- 
 graph which justifies the utility of poetry on the 
 ground of its being an attractive variety of lan- 
 guage, a persuasive medium for abstract ideas, 
 (as reasonable were the justification of a seraph's 
 essence deduced from the cloud beneath his 
 foot !) — shall not provoke us back to discontent 
 from the vision of the poets of England, sug- 
 gested by the title of this ' Book/ and stretching 
 along gloriously to our survey. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 109 
 
 Our poetry has an heroic genealogy. It arose 
 where the sun rises, in the far East. It came 
 out from Arabia, and was tilted on the lance- 
 heads of the Saracens into the heart of Europe, 
 Armorica catching it in rebound from Spain, 
 and England from Armorica. It issued in its 
 first breath from Georgia, wrapt in the gather- 
 ing-cry of Persian Odin : and passing from the 
 orient of the sun to the antagonistic snows of 
 Iceland, and oversweeping the black pines of 
 Germany and the jutting shores of Scandinavia, 
 and embodying in itself all way-side sounds, 
 even to the rude shouts of the brazen-throated 
 Cimbri, — so modified, multiplied, resonant in a 
 thousand Runic echoes, it rushed abroad like a 
 blast into Britain. In Britain, the Arabic Sa- 
 racenic x\rmoricau, and the Georgian Gothic 
 Scandinavian mixed sound at last ; and the 
 dying suspirations of the Grecian and Latin 
 literatures, the last low stir of the e Gesta 
 Ro manor uin/ with the apocryphal personations 
 of lost authentic voices, breathed up together 
 through the fissures of the rent universe, to 
 help the new intonation and accomplish the 
 cadence. Genius was thrust onward to a new 
 
110 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 slope of the world. And soon, when simpler 
 minstrels had sat there long enough to tune 
 the ear of the time, — when Layamon and his 
 successors had hummed long enough, like wild 
 bees, upon the lips of our infant poetry predes- 
 tined to eloquence, — then Robert Langlande, 
 the monk, walking for cloister "by a wode's 
 syde/' on the Malvern Hills, took counsel with 
 his holy " Plowman/' and sang of other visions 
 than their highest ridge can show. While we 
 write, the woods upon those beautiful hills are 
 obsolete, even as Langlaude's verses; scarcely a 
 shrub grows upon the hills ! but it is well for 
 the thinkers of England to remember reverently, 
 while, taking thought of her poetry, they stand 
 among the gorse, — that if we may boast now of 
 more honoured localities,of Shakespeare's " rocky 
 Avon," and Spenser's " soft-streaming Thames," 
 and Wordsworth's " Rydal Mere," still our first 
 holy poet-ground is there. 
 
 But it is in Chaucer we touch the true height, 
 and look abroad into the kingdoms and glories 
 of our poetical literature, — it is with Chaucer 
 that we begin our { Books of the Poets/ our col- 
 lections and selections, our pride of place and 
 
THE BOOK OF THE FOETS. Ill 
 
 name. And the genius of the poet shares the 
 character of his position ; he was made for an 
 early poet, and the metaphors of dawn and 
 spring doubly become him. A morning-star, a 
 lark's exaltation, cannot usher in a glory better. 
 The " cheerful morning nice," " the breezy call 
 of incense-breathing morn," you recognize in 
 his countenance and voice : it is a voice full of 
 promise and prophecy. He is the good omen 
 of our poetry, the " good bird," according to the 
 Romans, " the best good angel of the spring," 
 the nightingale, according to his own creed of 
 good luck, heard before the cuckoo. 
 
 Up rose the sunne, and uprose Emilie. 
 and uprose her poet, the first of a line of kings, 
 conscious of futurity in his smile. He is a king 
 and inherits the earth, and expands his great 
 soul smilingly to embrace his great heritage. 
 Nothing is too high for him to touch with a 
 thought, nothing too low to dower with an af- 
 fection. As a complete creature cognate of life 
 and death, he cries upon' God, — as a sympathetic 
 creature he singles out a daisy from the universe 
 (" si douce est la marguerite/') to lie down by 
 half a summer's day and bless it for fellowship. 
 
112 THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 
 
 His senses are open and delicate, like a young 
 child's — his sensibilities capacious of supersen- 
 sual relations, like an experienced thinker's. 
 Child-like, too, his tears and smiles lie at the 
 edge of his eyes, and he is one proof more among 
 the many, that the deepest pathos and the 
 quickest gaieties hide together in the same na- 
 ture. He is too wakeful and curious to lose the 
 stirring of a leaf, yet not too wide awake to see 
 visions of green and white ladies between the 
 branches ; and a fair house of fame and a noble 
 court of love are built and holden iu the wink- 
 ing of his eyelash. x\nd because his imagina- 
 tion is neither too " high fantastical " to refuse 
 proudly the gravitation of the earth, nor too 
 "light of love" to lose it carelessly, he can 
 create as well as dream, and work with clay as 
 well as cloud ; and when his men and women 
 stand close by the actual ones, your stop-watch 
 shall reckon no difference in the beating of their 
 hearts. He knew the secret of nature and art, 
 — that truth is beauty, — and saying "I will 
 make ' A Wife of Bath' as well as Emilie, and 
 you shall remember her as long," we do remem- 
 ber her as long. And he sent us a train of pil- 1 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 11 
 
 grims, each with a distinct individuality apart 
 from the pilgrimage, all the way from South- 
 wark and the Tabard Inn, to Canterbury and 
 Becket's shrine : and their laughter comes never 
 to an end, and their talk goes on with the stars, 
 and all the railroads which may intersect the 
 spoilt earth for ever, cannot hush the "tramp, 
 tramp" of their horses' feet. 
 
 Controversy is provocative. We cannot help 
 observing, because certain critics observe other- 
 wise, that Chaucer utters as true music as ever 
 came from poet or musician ; that some of the 
 sweetest cadences in all our English are extant 
 in his — " swete upon his tongue" in completest 
 modulation. Let " Denham's strength and 
 Waller's sweetness join" the Io paean of a later 
 age, the " eurekamen" of Pope and his genera- 
 tion. Not one of the " Queen Anne's men," 
 measuring out tuneful breath upon their fingers, 
 like ribbons for topknots, did know the art of 
 versification as the old rude Chaucer knew it. 
 Call him rude for the picturesqueness of the 
 epithet ; but his verse has, at least, as much re- 
 gularity in the sense of true art, and more ma- 
 nifestly in proportion to our increasing acquaint- 
 
 i 
 
114 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 ance with his dialect and pronunciation, as can 
 be discovered or dreamed in the French school. 
 Critics indeed have set up a system based upon 
 the crushed atoms of first principles, maintaining 
 that poor Chaucer wrote by accent only ! Grant 
 to them that he counted no verses on his fingers ; 
 grant that he never disciplined his highest 
 thoughts to walk up and down in a paddock — 
 ten paces and a turn ; grant that his singing is 
 not after the likeness of their singsong : but 
 there end your admissions. It is our ineffaceable 
 impression, in fact, that the whole theory of ac- 
 cent and quantity held in relation to ancient 
 and modern poetry stands upon a fallacy, totters 
 rather than stands; and that when considered in 
 connection with such old moderns as our Chaucer, 
 the fallaciousness is especially apparent. Chau- 
 cer wrote by quantity, just as Homer did before 
 him, just as Goethe did after him, just as all 
 poets must. Rules differ, principles are identi- 
 cal. All rhythm presupposes quantity. Organ- 
 pipe or harp, the musician plays by time. Greek 
 or English, Chaucer or Pope, the poet sings by 
 time. TVkat is this accent but a stroke, an em- 
 phasis, with a successive pause to make complete 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 115 
 
 the time? And what is the difference between 
 this accent and quantity but the difference be- 
 tween a harp-note and an organ-note? otherwise, 
 quantity expressed in different ways? It is as 
 easy for matter to subsist out of space, as music 
 out of time. 
 
 Side by side with Chaucer comes Gower, who 
 is ungratefully disregarded too often, because 
 side by side with Chaucer. He who rides in 
 the king's chariot will miss the people's "hie 
 est." Could Gower be considered apart, there 
 might be found signs in him of an independent 
 royalty, however his fate may seem to lie in 
 waiting for ever in his brother's ante- chamber, 
 like Napoleon's tame kings. To speak our mind, 
 he has been much undervalued. He is nailed 
 to a comparative degree ; and everybody seems 
 to make it a condition of speaking of him, that 
 something be called inferior within him, and 
 something superior, out of him. He is laid 
 down flat, as a dark background for " throwing 
 out" Chaucer's lights ; he is used as a irov arco 
 for leaping up into the empyrean of Chaucer's 
 praise. This is not just nor worthy. His prin- 
 cipal poem, the l Confessio A mantis/ preceded 
 
116 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 the f Canterbury Tales/ and proves an abundant 
 fancy, a full head and full heart, and neither 
 ineloquent. \Te do not praise its design, — in 
 which the father-confessor is set up as a story- 
 teller, like the bishop of Tricca, " avec Tame," 
 like the cardinal de Retz, " le moins ecclesias- 
 tique du monde," — while we admit that he tells 
 his stories as if born to the manner of it, and 
 that they are not much the graver, nor, perad- 
 venture, the holier either, for the circumstance 
 of the confessorship. They are indeed told 
 gracefuDy and pleasantly enough, and if with 
 no superfluous life and gesture, with an active 
 sense of beauty in some sort, and as flowing a 
 rhythm as may bear comparison with many oc- 
 tosyllabics of our day ; Chaucer himself having 
 done more honour to their worth as stories 
 than we can do in our praise, by adopting and 
 crowning several of their number for king's sons 
 within his own palaces. And this recalls that, 
 at the opening of one glorious felony, the Man 
 of Lawe's tale, he has written, a little unlaw- 
 fully and ungratefully considering the connec- 
 tion, some lines of harsh significance upon poor 
 Gower, — whence has been conjectured by the 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 117 
 
 grey gossips of criticism, a literary jealousy, an 
 unholy enmity, nothing less than a soul-chasm 
 between the contemporary poets. We believe 
 nothing of it ; no, nor of the Shakespeare and 
 Jonson feud after it : 
 
 To alle such cursed stories we saie fy. 
 
 That Chaucer wrote in irritation is clear: that 
 he was angry seriously and lastingly, or beyond 
 the pastime of passion spent in a verse as pro- 
 voked by a verse, there appears to us no reason 
 for crediting. But our idea of the nature of the 
 irritation will expound itself in our idea of the 
 offence, which is here in Dan Gower's proper 
 words, as extracted from the Ladie Venus's 
 speech in the ' Confessio Amautis/ 
 
 And grete well Chaucer whan ye mete, 
 As my disciple and poete ! — 
 
 Forthy now in his daies old, 
 Thou shalt him telle this message, 
 That he upon his latter age, 
 To sette an tmde of alle his werke 
 As he who is mine owne' clerke, 
 Do make his testament of love.'"' 
 
 We would not slander Chaucer's temper, — 
 
118 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 we believe, on the contrary, that he had the 
 sweetest temper in the world, — and still it is our 
 conviction, none the weaker, that he was far 
 from being entirely pleased by this "message." 
 We are sure he did not like the message, and not 
 many poets would. His " elvish countenance " 
 might well grow dark, and " his sugred mouth " 
 speak somewhat sourly, in response to such a 
 message. Decidedly, in our own opinion, it was 
 an impertinent message, a provocative message, 
 a most inexcusable and odious message ! "Wax- 
 ing hotter ourselves the longer we think of it, 
 there is the more excuse for Chaucer. For, con- 
 sider, gentle reader ! this indecorous message 
 preceded the appearance of the Canterbury 
 Tales, and proceeded from a rival poet in the 
 act of completing his principal work, — its plain 
 significance being " I have done my poem, and 
 you cannot do yours because you are super- 
 annuated." And this, while the great poet 
 addressed was looking forward farther than the 
 visible horizon, his eyes dilated with a mighty 
 purpose. And to be counselled by this, to shut 
 them forsooth, and take his crook and dog and 
 place in the valleys like a grey shepherd of the 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 119 
 
 Pyrenees — he, who felt his foot strong upon the 
 heights ! he, with no wrinkle on his forehead 
 deep enough to touch the outermost of inward 
 smooth dreams — he, in the divine youtS of his 
 healthy soul, in the quenchless love of his em- 
 bracing sympathies, in the untired working of his 
 perpetual energies, — to u make an ende of alle 
 his werke " and be old, as if he were not a poet ! 
 " Go to, O vain man," — we do not reckon the 
 a*e of the poet's soul by the shadow on the dial ! 
 Enough that it falls upon his grave. 
 
 Occleve and Lydgate both breathed the air of 
 the world while Chaucer breathed it, although 
 surviving him so long as rather to take standing 
 as his successors than contemporaries. Both 
 called him " master" with a faithful reverting 
 tenderness, and, however we are bound to dis- 
 tinguish Lydgate as the higher poet of the two, 
 Occleve's l Alas' may become the other's lips — 
 
 Alas, that thou thine excellent prudence 
 In thy bed mortell mightest not bequeath ! 
 
 For alas ! it was not bequeathed. Lydgate's 
 Thebaid, attached by its introduction to the 
 ' Canterbury Tales/ gives or enforces the occa- 
 
120 THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 
 
 sion for sighing comparisons with the master's 
 picturesque vivacity, while equally in delicacy 
 and intenseness we admit no progress in the 
 disciple. He does, in fact, appear to us so much 
 overrated by the critics, that we are tempted to 
 extend to his poetry his own admission on his 
 monkish dress, — 
 
 I wear a habit of perfection 
 
 Although my life agree not with that same, 
 
 and to opine concerning the praise and poetry 
 taken together, that the latter agrees not with 
 that same. An elegant poet — "poeta elegans" — 
 w T as he called by the courteous Pits, — a ques- 
 tionable compliment in most cases, while the 
 application in the particular one agrees not with 
 that same. An improver of the language he is 
 granted to be by all ; and a voluminous writer 
 of respectable faculties, in his position, could 
 scarcely help being so : he has flashes of genius, 
 but they are not prolonged to the point of 
 warming the soul, — can strike a bold note, but 
 fails to hold it on, — attains to moments of 
 power and pathos, but wears, for working days, 
 no habit of perfection. 
 
THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 121 
 
 These are our thoughts of Lydgate ; and yet 
 when he ceased his singing, none sang better ; 
 there was silence in the land. In Scotland, 
 indeed, poet-tongues were not all mute ; the 
 air across the borders " gave delight and hurt 
 not/' Here in the South it was otherwise : and 
 unless we embrace in our desolation such poems 
 as the rhyming chronicles of Harding and Fa- 
 bian, we must hearken for music to the clashing 
 of " Bilboa blades/' and be content that the 
 wars of the red and white roses should silence 
 the warbling of the nightingales. That figure 
 dropped to our pen's point, and the reader may 
 accept it as a figure — as no more. To illustrate 
 by figures the times and the seasons of poetical 
 manifestation and decay, is at once easier and 
 more reasonable than to attempt to account for 
 them by causes. We do not believe that poets 
 multiply in peace-time like sheep and sheaves, 
 nor that they fly, like partridges, at the first 
 beating of the drum ; and we do believe, having 
 a previous faith in the pneumatic character of 
 their gift, that the period of its bestowment is 
 not subject to the calculations of our philosophy. 
 Let, therefore, the long silence from Chaucer 
 
122 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 and his disciples down to the sixteenth century, 
 be left standing as a fact undisturbed by any 
 good reasons for its existence, or by any other 
 company than some harmless metaphor — harm- 
 less and ineffectual as a glow-worm's glitter at 
 the foot of a colossal statue of Harpocrates. 
 Call it, if you please, as TTarton does, " a nip- 
 ping frost succeeding a premature spring ; " or 
 call it, because we would not think our Chaucer 
 premature, or the silence cruel — the trance of 
 English Poetry : her breath, once emitted crea- 
 tively, indrawn and retained, — herself sinking 
 into deep sleep, like the mother of Apollonius 
 before the glory of a vision, to awaken, to leap 
 up (e^edope says Philostratus, the narrator) in 
 a flowery meadow, at the clapping of the white 
 wings of a chorus of encircling swans. We 
 shall endeavour to realize this awaking. 
 
 Is Hawes a swan ? a black (letter) swan? Cer- 
 tain voices will " say nay, say nay ;" and already, 
 and without our provocation, he seems to us un- 
 justly depreciated. W r arton was called " the in- 
 dulgent historian of our poetry," for being so kind 
 as to discover u one fine line " in him ! "What 
 name must the over-kind have, in whose sus- 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 123 
 
 ceptible memories whole passages stand up erect, 
 claiming the epithet or the like of the epithet, — 
 and that, less as the largess of the indulgent 
 than the debt of the just? Yet Langlande's 'Piers 
 Plowman/ and Chaucer's e House of Fame/ and 
 Lydgate's ' Temple of Glasse/ and the ' Pastyme 
 of Plesure/ by Stephen Hawes, are the four 
 columnar marbles, the four allegorical poems, 
 on whose foundation is exalted into light the 
 great allegorical poem of the world, Spenser's 
 ' Faery Queen/ There was a force of suggestion 
 which preceded Sackville's, and Hawes uttered 
 it. His work is very grave for a pastime, being 
 a course of instruction upon the seven sciences, 
 the trivium and quadrivium of the schools ; 
 whereby Grand Amour, scholar and hero, woo- 
 ing and winning Belle Pucelle, marries her 
 according to the " lex ecclesia," is happy " all 
 the rest of his life " by the lex of all matrimo- 
 nial romances, — and at leisure and in old age, 
 dies by the lex natures. He tells his own story 
 quite to an end, including the particulars of his 
 funeral and epitaph ; and is considerate enough 
 to leave the reader in full assurance of his post- 
 humous reputation. And now let those who 
 
124 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 smile at the design dismiss their levity before 
 the poet's utterance : — 
 
 O mortall folke, you may beholde and see 
 Howe I lye here, sometime a mighty knight. 
 The ende of joye and all prosperitie 
 Is death at last thorough his course and might. 
 After the day there cometh the dark night, 
 f For though the day appear ever so long, 
 At lad the bell ringeth to even song. 
 
 — it " ringeth " in our ear with a soft and solemn 
 music to which the soul is prodigal of echoes. 
 We may answer for the poetic faculty of its 
 " maker." He is, in fact, not merely ingenious 
 and fanciful, but abounds — the word, with an 
 allowance for the unhappiness of his subject, is 
 scarcely too strong, — with passages of thought- 
 ful sweetness and cheerful tenderness, at which 
 we are constrained to smile and sigh, and both 
 for " pastyme." 
 
 Was never payne but it had joye at last 
 In the fayre morrow. 
 
 There is a lovely cadence ! And then Amour's 
 courtship of his " swete ladie " — a " cynosure " 
 before Milton's ! — conducted as simply, yet 
 
THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 125 
 
 touchingly, as if he were innocent of the seven 
 deadly sciences, and knew no more of " the 
 Ladye Grammere " than miglit become a trou- 
 badour : — 
 
 O swete ladie, the true and perfect star 
 Of my true heart ! Oh, take ye now pitie ! 
 Think on my payne which am tofore you here, — 
 With your swete eyes behold you me, and see 
 How thought and woe by great extremitie 
 Hath changed my colour into pale and wan ! 
 It was not so when I to love began. 
 
 The date assigned to this c Pastyme of Plesure' 
 is 1506, some fifty years before the birth of 
 Spenser. "Whether it was written in vain for 
 Spenser, judge ye ! To the present generation 
 it is covered deep with the dust of more than 
 three centuries, and few tongues ask above the 
 place, — " what lies here ? " 
 
 Barclay is our next swan j and verily might 
 be mistaken, in any sort taken, by naturalists, 
 for a crow. He is our first writer of eclogues, 
 the translator of the e Ship of Fools/ and a 
 thinker of his own thoughts with sufficient in- 
 trepidity . 
 
 Skelton " floats double, swan and shadow/' as 
 
126 THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 
 
 poet laureate of the University of Oxford, and 
 " royal orator " of Henry VII. He presents a 
 strange specimen of a court-poet, and if, as 
 Erasmus says, " Britannicarum literarum lu~ 
 men 9i at the same time, — the light is a pitchy 
 torchlight, wild and rough. Yet we do not 
 despise Skelton : despise him ? it were easier to 
 hate. The man is very strong ; he triumphs, 
 foams, is rabid, in the sense of strength ; he 
 mesmerizes our souls with the sense of strength 
 — it is as easy to despise a wild beast in a forest, 
 as John Skelton, poet laureate. He is as like 
 a wild beast, as a poet laureate can be. In his 
 wonderful dominion over language, he tears it, 
 as with teeth and paws, ravenously, savagely : de- 
 vastating rather than creating, dominant rather 
 for liberty than for dignity. It is the very 
 sans-culottism of eloquence ; the oratory of a 
 Silenus drunk with anger only. Mark him as 
 the satyr of poets ! fear him as the Juvenal of 
 satyrs ! and watch him with his rugged, rapid, 
 picturesque savageness, his t( breathless rhymes," 
 to use the fit phrase of the satirist Hall, or — 
 
 His rhymes all ragged, 
 Tattered, and jagged, 
 
THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 127 
 
 to use his own, — climbing the high trees of 
 Delphi, and pelting from thence his victim 
 underneath, whether priest or cardinal, with 
 rough -rinded apples ! And then ask, could he 
 write otherwise than so? The answer is this 
 opening to his poem of the ' Bouge of Court/ 
 and the impression inevitable, of the serious 
 sense of beauty and harmony to which it gives 
 evidence. 
 
 In autumn when the sun in virgine 
 
 By radiant heat enripened hath our corne, 
 
 When Luna, full of mutabilitie, 
 
 As emperess, the diadem hath worne 
 
 Of our pole Arctic, smiling as in scorn 
 
 At our folie and our unstedfastnesse — 
 
 but our last word of Skelton must be, that we 
 do not doubt his influence for good upon our 
 language. He was a writer singularly fitted for 
 beating out the knots of the cordage, and strain- 
 ing the lengths to extension ; a rough worker at 
 rough work. Strong, rough Skelton ! We can 
 no more deride him than my good lord cardinal 
 could. If our critical eyebrows must motion 
 contempt at somebody of the period, we choose 
 Tusser, and his five hundred points of good 
 
128 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 husbandry and housewifery. Whatever we say 
 of Tusser, no fear of harming a poet, — 
 
 Make ready a bin 
 For chaff to lie in, 
 
 and there may be room therein, in compliment 
 to the author of the proposition, for his own 
 verses. 
 
 Lord Surrey passes as the tuner of our En- 
 glish nearly up to its present pitch of delicacy 
 and smoothness ; and we admit that he had a 
 melody in his thoughts which they dared not 
 disobey. That he is, as has been alleged by a 
 chief critic, " our first metrical writer," lies not 
 in our creed ; and even Turbervilie's more 
 measured praise, — 
 
 Our mother tongue by him hath got such lyglit, 
 That ruder speche thereby is banisht qwyht, — 
 
 we have difficulty in accepting. "We venture to 
 be of opinion that he did not belong to that 
 order of master-minds, with whom transitions 
 originate, although qualified, by the quickness 
 of a yielding grace, to assist effectually a transi- 
 tional movement. There are names which catch 
 the proverbs of praise as a hedge-thorn catches 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 129 
 
 sheep's wool, by position and approximation 
 rather than adaptitude : and this name is of 
 them. Yet it is a high name. His poetry 
 makes the ear lean to it, it is so sweet and low ; 
 the English he made it of, being ready to be 
 sweet, and falling ripe in sweetness into other 
 hands than his. For the poems of his friend, 
 Sir Thomas Wyatt, have more thought, free- 
 dom and variety, more general earnestness, 
 more of the attributes of masterdom, than Lord 
 Surrey's ; while it were vain to reproach for 
 lack of melody the writer of that loveliest lyric, 
 " My lute, be still." And Wyatt is various in 
 metres, and the first song-writer (that praise we 
 must secure to him) of his generation. For the 
 rest, there is an inequality in the structure of 
 his verses which is very striking and observable 
 in Surrey himself: as if the language, con- 
 sciously insecure in her position, were balancing 
 her accentual being and the forms of her pro- 
 nunciation, half giddily, on the very turning 
 point of transition. Take from Wyatt such a 
 stanza as this, for instance, — 
 
 The long love that in my thoughts I harbour, 
 And in my heart doth keep his residence, 
 
 K 
 
130 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 Into my face presseth with bold pretence, 
 And there campeth, displaying his banner. 
 
 and oppose to it the next example, polished as 
 Pope, — 
 
 But I am here in Kent and Christendom, 
 Among the Muses where T read and rhyme ; 
 Where, if thou list, mine own John Poins, to come, 
 Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time. 
 
 It is well to mark Wyatt as a leader in the 
 art of didactic poetic composition nnder the 
 epistolary form, " sternly milde " (as Surrey 
 said of his countenance) in the leaning toward 
 satire. It is very well to mark many of his 
 songs as of exceeding beauty, and as preserving 
 clear their touching simplicity from that plague 
 of over-curious conceits which infest his writings 
 generally. That was the plague of Italian lite- 
 rature transmitted by contagion, together with 
 better things — together with the love of lovc- 
 lore, and the sonnet structure, the summer- 
 bower for one fair thought, delighted in and 
 naturalized in England by Wyatt and Surrey. 
 For the latter, — 
 
 From Tuscane came his ladye's worthy race : 
 and his Muse as well as his Gcraldinc. Drops 
 
THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 131 
 
 from Plato's cup, passing through Petrarch's, 
 not merely perfumed arid coloured but diluted 
 by the medium, we find in Surrey's cup also. 
 We must not underpraise Surrey to balance the 
 overpraise we murmur at. Denying him su- 
 premacy as a reformer, the denial of his poetic 
 nobleness is far from us. We attribute to him 
 ths chivalry of the light ages ; we call him a 
 scholastic troubadour. The longest and most 
 beautiful of his poems (" describing the lover's 
 whole state") was a memory in the mind of 
 Milton when he wrote his Allegro. He has 
 that measure of pathos whose expression is no 
 gesture of passion, but the skilful fingering on 
 a well-tuned lute. He affects us at worst not 
 painfully, and 
 
 With easie sighs such as folks draw in love. 
 
 He wrote the first English blank verse, in his 
 translation of two books of the iEneid. He 
 leads, in seeming, to the ear of the world, and 
 by predestination of " popular breath," that 
 little choral swan-chant which, swelled by 
 Wyatt, Yaux, Bryan, and others, brake the 
 common air in the days of the eighth Henry. 
 
132 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 And he fulfilled in sorrow his awarded fate as 
 a poet, his sun going down at noon — and the 
 cleft head, with its fair youthful curls, testifying 
 like that fabled head of Orpheus, to the music 
 of the living tongue. 
 
 Sackville, Lord Dorset, takes up the new 
 blank verse from the lips of Surrey, and turns it 
 to its right use of tragedy. We cannot say that 
 he does for it much more. His c Gorboduc/ with 
 some twenty years between it and Shakespeare, 
 is farther from the true drama in versification 
 and all the rest, than ' Gammer Gurton } is from 
 'Gorboduc' Sackville's blank verse, like Lord 
 Surrey's before him, is only heroic verse with- 
 out rhyme : and we must say so in relation to 
 Gascoigne, who wrote the second blank verse 
 tragedy, the ' Jocasta/ and the first blank verse 
 original poem, ' The Stele Glass/ The secret 
 of the blank verse of Shakespeare, and Fletcher, 
 and Milton, did not dwell with them : the arched 
 cadence, with its artistic key-stone and under- 
 flood of broad continuous sound, was never 
 achieved nor attempted by its first builders. 
 We sometimes whisper in our silence that Mar- 
 lowe's " brave sublunary " instincts should have 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 133 
 
 groped that way. But no ! Chaucer had more 
 sense of music in the pause than Marlowe had. 
 Marlowe's rhythm is not, indeed, hard and 
 stiff and uniform, like the sentences of ' Gor- 
 boduc,' as if the pattern-one had been cut in 
 boxwood : there is a difference between unifor- 
 mity and monotony, and he found it ; his ca- 
 dence revolves like a wheel, progressively if 
 slowly and heavily, and with an orbicular 
 grandeur of unbroken and unvaried music. 
 
 It remains to us to speak of the work by 
 which Sackville is better known than by ( Gor- 
 boduc/ — the f Mirror for Magistrates/ The 
 design of it has been strangely praised, seeing 
 that whatever that peculiar merit were, Lyd- 
 gate's 'Fall of Princes' certainly cast the shadow 
 before. But Sackville' s commencement of the 
 execution proved the master's hand; and that 
 the great canvas fell abandoned to the blurring 
 brushes of inadequate disciples, was an ill-for- 
 tune compensated adequately by the honour 
 attributed to the Induction — of inducing a no- 
 bler genius than his own, even Spenser's, to a 
 nobler labour. We cannot doubt the influence 
 of that Induction. Its colossal figures, in high 
 
134 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 allegorical relief, were exactly adapted to impress 
 the outspread fancy of the most sensitive of 
 poets. A yew-tree cannot stand at noon in an 
 open pleasaunce without throwing the outline 
 01 its branches on the broad and sunny grass. 
 Still, admitting the suggestion in its fulness, no- 
 thing can differ more than the allegorical re- 
 sults of the several geniuses of Lord Dorset and 
 Spenser. Tear-drop and dew-drop, respond 
 more similarly to analysis ; or morbid grief and 
 ideal joy. Sackville stands close wrapt in the 
 " blanket of his dark," and will not drop his 
 mantle for the sun. Spenser's business is with 
 the lights of the world, and the lights beyond 
 the world. 
 
 But this Sackville, this Earl of Dorset, (" Oh, 
 a fair earl was he!") stands too low for ad- 
 measurement with Spenser : and we must look 
 back, if covetous of comparisons, to some one 
 of a loftier and more kingly stature. We must 
 look back far, and stop at Chaucer. Spenser 
 and Chaucer do naturally remind us of each 
 other, they two being the most cheerful-hearted 
 of the poets — with whom cheerfulness, as an 
 attribute of poetry, is scarcely a common gift. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 135 
 
 But the world will be upon us ! The world 
 moralizes of late and in its fashion, upon the 
 immorality of mournful poems, upon the crimi- 
 nality of " melodious tears/' upon the morbid- 
 ness of the sorrows of poets, — because Lord 
 Byron was morbidly sorrowful, and because a 
 crowd of his ephemeral imitators hung their 
 heads all on one side and were insincerely sor- 
 rowful. The fact, however, has been, apart 
 from Lord Byron and his disciples, that the " at 
 at" of Apollo's flower is vocally sad in the pre- 
 vailing majority of poetical compositions. The 
 philosophy is, perhaps, that the poetic tempera- 
 ment, halfway between the light of the ideal 
 and the darkness of the real, and rendered by 
 each mjre sensitive to the other, and unable, 
 without a struggle, to pass out clear and calm 
 into either, bears the impress of the necessary 
 conflict in dust and blood. The philosophy 
 may be, that only the stronger spirits do accom- 
 plish this victory, having lordship over their 
 own genius ; whether they accomplish it by 
 looking bravely to the good ends of evil things, 
 which is the practical ideal, and possible to all 
 men in a measure — or by abstracting the inward 
 
136 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 sense from sensual things and their influences, 
 which is subjectivity perfected — or by glorify- 
 ing sensual things with the inward sense, which 
 is objectivity transfigured — or by attaining to 
 the highest vision of the idealist, which is sub- 
 jectivity turned outward into an actual objec- 
 tivity. 
 
 To the last triumph, Shakespeare attained ; 
 but Chaucer and Spenser fulfilled their destiny 
 and grew to their mutual likeness as cheerful 
 poets, by certain of the former processes. They 
 two are alike in their cheerfulness, yet are their 
 cheerfulnesses most unlike. Each poet laughs : 
 yet their laughters ring with as far a difference 
 as the sheep-bell on the hill aud the joy-bell in 
 the city. Each is earnest in his gladness : each 
 active in persuading you of it. You are per- 
 suaded, and hold each for a cheerful man. The 
 whole difference is, that Chaucer has a cheerful 
 humanity : Spenser, a cheerful ideality. One, 
 rejoices walking on the sunny side of the street : 
 the other, walking out of the street in a way of 
 his own, kept green by a blessed vision. One, 
 uses the adroitness of his fancy by distilling out 
 of the visible universe her occult smiles : the 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 137 
 
 other, by fleeing beyond the possible frown, the 
 occasions of natural ills, to that " cave of cloud" 
 where he may smile safely to himself. One, 
 holds festival with men — seldom so coarse and 
 loud indeed, as to startle the deer from their 
 green covert at Woodstock — or with homely 
 Nature and her " douce Marguerite " low in 
 the grasses : the other adopts, for his playfellows, 
 imaginary or spiritual existences, and will not 
 say a word to Nature herself, unless it please 
 her to dress for his masque and speak daintily 
 sweet and rare like a spirit. The human heart 
 of one utters oracles ; the imagination of the 
 other speaks for his heart, and we miss no pro- 
 phecy. For music, we praised Chaucer's, and 
 not only as Dryden did, for " a Scotch tune." 
 But never issued there from lip or instrument, 
 or the tuned causes of nature, more lovely sound 
 than we slather from our Spenser's Art. His 
 mouth is vowed away from the very possibilities 
 of harshness. Right leans to wrong in its ex- 
 cess. His rhythm is the continuity of melody, 
 not harmony, because too smooth for modula- 
 tion — because " by his vow " he dares not touch 
 a discord for the sake of consummating a liar- 
 
138 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 mony. It is the singing of an angel in a dream : 
 it has not enough of contrary for waking music. 
 Of his great poem we may say, that we miss no 
 humanity in it, because we make a new hu- 
 manity out of it and are satisfied in our human 
 hearts — a new humanity vivified by the poet's 
 life, moving in happy measure to the chanting 
 of his thoughts, and upon ground supernaturally 
 beautified by his sense of the beautiful. As an 
 allegory, it enchants us away from its own pur- 
 poses. Una is Una to us; and Sans Foy is a 
 traitor, and Errour is " an ugly monster/' with 
 a " tayle;" and we thank nobody in the world, 
 not even Spenser, for trying to prove it other- 
 wise. Do we dispraise an allegorical poem by 
 throwing off its allegory ? we trow not. Pro- 
 bably, certainly to our impression, the highest 
 triumph of an allegory, from this of the ( Faery 
 Queen ' down to the c Pilgrim's Progress,' is the 
 abnegation of itself. 
 
 Oh those days of Elizabeth ! AVe call them 
 the days of Elizabeth, but the glory fell over the 
 ridge, in illumination of the half-century beyond: 
 those days of Elizabeth ! Full were they of poets 
 as the summer-days are of birds, — 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 139 
 
 Xo branch on which a fine bird did riot sit, 
 Xo bird but bis sweet song did shrilly sing-, 
 Xo song but did coutayne a lovely dit. 
 
 We hear of the dramatists, and shall speak of 
 them presently j but the lyric singers were yet 
 more numerous, — there were singers in every 
 class. Never since the first nightingale brake 
 voice in Eden, arose such a jubilee-concert : 
 never before nor since has such a crowd of true 
 poets uttered true poetic speech in one day. 
 Not in England evermore ! Not in Greece, 
 that we know. Xot in Rome, by what we know. 
 Talk of their Augustan era — we will not talk of 
 it, lest we desecrate our own of Elizabeth. The 
 latter was rightly pre-figured by our figure of 
 the chorus of swans. It was besides the milky 
 way of poetry : it was the miracle-age of poetical 
 history. "We may fancy that the master-souls 
 of Shakespeare and Spenser, breathing, stirring 
 in divine emotion, shot vibratory life through 
 other souls in electric association : we may hear 
 in fancy, one wind moving every leaf in a forest 
 — one voice responded to by a thousand rock- 
 echoes. Why, a common man walking through 
 the earth in those clays, grew a poet by position 
 
140 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 — even as a child's shadow cast upon a moun- 
 tain slope is dilated to the aspect of a giant's. 
 
 If we, for our own parts, did enact a Briareus, 
 we might count these poets on the fingers of our 
 hundred hands, after the fashion of the poets 
 of Queen Anne's time, counting their syllables. 
 We do not ralk of them as " faultless monsters," 
 however wonderful in the multitude and verity 
 of their gifts : their faults were numerous, too. 
 Many poets of an excellent sweetness, thinking 
 of poetry that, like love, 
 
 It was to be all made of fantasy, — 
 
 fell poetry-sick, as they might fall love-sick, and 
 knotted associations, far and free enough to 
 girdle the earth withal, into true love-knots of 
 quaintest devices. Many poets affected novelty 
 rather than truth ; and many attained to novelty 
 rather by attitude than altitude, whether of 
 thought or word. Worst of all, many were in- 
 competent to Sir Philip Sidney's ordeal — the 
 translation of their verses into prose — and would 
 have perished utterly by that hot ploughshare. 
 Still, the natural healthy eye turns toward the 
 light, and the true calling of criticism remains 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 141 
 
 the distinguishing of beauty. Love and honour 
 to the poets of Elizabeth — honour and love to 
 them all ! Honour even to the fellow- workers 
 with Saekville in the f Mirror for ^Magistrates/ 
 to Ferrers, Churchyard and others, who had 
 their hand upon the ore if they did not clasp it ! 
 and to Warner, the poet of Albion's England, 
 singing snatches of ballad-pathos, while he 
 worked for the most part heavily, too, with a 
 oowed back as at a stiff soil — and to Gascoigne, 
 reflecting beauty and light from his 'Stele Glass/ 
 though his 'Fruites of War' are scarcely fruits 
 from Parnassus — and to Daniel, tender and no- 
 ble, and teaching, in his ' Musophilus/ the chi- 
 valry of poets, though in his ' Civil Wars/ some- 
 what too historical,, as Drayton has written of 
 him — and to Drayton, generous in the l Polyol- 
 bion' of his poet-blessing on every hill and river 
 through this fair England, and not ineloquent in 
 his Heroical Epistles, though somewhat tame 
 and level in his ' Barons' Wars' — and to the two 
 brother Fletchers, Giles and Phineas, authors of 
 ' Christ's Victory' and ' The Purple Island/ for 
 whom the Muse's kiss followed close upon the 
 mother's, gifting their lips with no vulgar music 
 
142 THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 
 
 and their house with that noble kinsman, 
 Fletcher the dramatist ! Honour, too, to Davies, 
 who "reasoned in verse" with a strong mind 
 and strong enunciation, though he wrote one 
 poem on the Soul and another on Dancing, and 
 concentrated the diverging rays of intellect and 
 folly in his sonnets on the reigning Astrsea — 
 and to Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who had 
 deep thoughts enough to accomplish ten poets 
 of these degenerate days, though because of 
 some obscurity in their expression you would 
 find some twenty critics "fall of oaths" by the 
 pyramids, that they all meant nought — and to 
 Chamberlayne, picturesque, imaginative, ear- 
 nest (by no means dramatic) in his poetic ro- 
 mance of ' Pharonnida/ though accumulative 
 to excess of figures, and pedantic in such verbal 
 learning as " entheon charms," the " catagraph" 
 of a picture, the " exagitations and congestions 
 of elements," et sic omnia ! — to Chalkhill, wrapt, 
 even bound, " in soft Lydian airs," till himself, 
 as well as his Clearchus and Thealma, fall asleep 
 in involutions of harmony — and to Browne, 
 something languid in his ' Britannia's Pastorals,' 
 by sitting in the sun with Guarini and Marini, 
 
THE E00K OF THE POETS. 143 
 
 and " perplext in the extreme " by a thousand 
 
 images and sounds of beauty calling him across 
 the dewy fields — and to Wither^ author of the 
 ' Shepherd's Hunting/ and how much else ? 
 Wither, who wrote of poetry like a poet, and 
 in return has been dishonoured and misprised 
 by some of his own kind — a true sincere poet 
 of blessed oracles ! Honour, love and praise to 
 him and all ! May pardon come to us from the 
 unnamed. 
 
 Honour also to the translators of poems — to 
 such as Chapman and Sylvester — great hearts, 
 interpreters of great hearts, and afterwards 
 worthily thanked by the Miltons, and Popes, 
 and Keats' s, for their gift of greatness to the 
 language of their England. 
 
 Honour to the satirists ! to Marston, who 
 struck boldly and coarsely at an offence from 
 the same level with the offender — to Hall, pre- 
 serving his own elevation, and flashing down- 
 wardly those thick lightnings in which we smell 
 the sulphur — and to Donne, whose instinct to 
 beauty overcame the resolution of his satiric 
 humour. 
 
 Honour, again, to the singers of brief poems, 
 
144 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 to the lyrists and sonnetteers ! O Shakespeare, 
 let thy name rest gently among them, perfuming 
 the place. We " swear " that these sonnets and 
 songs do verily breathe, " not of themselves, but 
 thee ;" and we recognize and bless them as short 
 sighs from thy large poetic heart, burdened with 
 diviner inspiration ! O rare Ben Jonson, let us 
 have thy songs, rounded each with a spherical 
 thought, and the lyrics from thy masques alive 
 with learned fantasy, and thine epigrams keen 
 and quaint, and thy noble epitaphs, under which 
 the dead seem stirring ! Fletcher, thou shalt be 
 with us — prophet of Comus and Penseroso ! 
 giddy with inhalation from the fount of the 
 beautiful, speaking out wildly thought upon 
 thought, measure upon measure, as the bird 
 sings, because his own voice is lovely to him. 
 Sidney, true knight and fantastic poet, whose 
 soul did too curiously inquire the fashion of the 
 beautiful — the fashion rather than the secret, — 
 but left us in one line, the completest ' Ars 
 Poeiica' extant, — 
 
 " Foole, sayde my Muse to mee, looke in thine heart, 
 and write, — " 
 
 thv name be famous in all England and Area- 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 1 15 
 
 dia ! And Raleigh, tender and strong, of voice 
 sweet enough to answer that { Passionate Shep- 
 herd/ vet trumpet- shrill to speak the " Soul's 
 errand" thrilling the depths of our own ! having 
 honour and suffering as became a poet, from 
 the foot of the Lady of England light upon his 
 cloak, to the cloak of his executioner wrapping 
 redly his breathless corpse. Marlowe, — we must 
 not forget his c Shepherd ' in his tragedies : and 
 c Come live with me' sounds passionately still 
 through the dead cold centuries. And Drum- 
 mond, the over-praised and under-praised, — a 
 passive poet, if we may use the phraseology — 
 who was not careful to achieve greatness, but 
 whose natural pulses beat music, and with whom 
 the consciousness of life was the sentiment of 
 beauty. And Lyly, shriven from the sins of 
 his Euphues, with a quaint grace in his songs ; 
 and Donne, who takes his place naturally in 
 this new class, having a dumb angel, and know- 
 ing more noble poetry than he articulates. II er- 
 rick, the Ariel of poets, sucking " where the bee 
 sucks" from the rose-heart of nature, and re- 
 producing the fragrance idealized ; and Carow, 
 using all such fragrance as a courtly essence, 
 
 L 
 
146 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 with less of self-abandonment and more of arti- 
 ficial application ; and Herbert, with his face as 
 the face of a spirit, dimly bright ; and fantastic 
 Quarles, in rude and graphic gesticulation, ex- 
 pounding verity and glory; and Breton, and 
 Turberville, and Lodge, and Hall (not the sati- 
 rist), and all the hundred swans, nameless or 
 too numerous to be named, of that Cayster of 
 the rolling time. 
 
 Then, high in the miraculous climax, come 
 the dramatists — from whose sinews was knit the 
 overcoming strength of our literature over all 
 the nations of the world. " The drama is the 
 executive of literature," said De Stael : and the 
 Greek's " action, action, action," we shall not 
 miss in our drama. Honour to the dramatists, 
 as honour from them ! 
 
 We must take a few steps backward for posi- 
 tion's sake, and then be satisfied with a rapid 
 glance at the Drama. From the days of Nor- 
 man William, the representations called Mys- 
 teries and Moralities had come and gone without 
 a visible poet ; and Skelton appears before us 
 almost the first English claimant of a dramatic 
 reputation, with the authorship of the interludes 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. J 4/ 
 
 of ' Magnificence ' and the ' Nigromansir/ The 
 latter is chiefly famous for Warton's affirmation 
 of having held it in his hands, giving courteous 
 occasion to llitson's denial of its existence : and 
 our own palms having never been crossed by the 
 silver of either, we cannot prophesy on the de- 
 gree of individual honour involved in the literary 
 claim. Bale, one of the eighth Henry's bishops, 
 was an active composer of Moralities ; and John 
 Hey wood, his royal jester and ''author of that 
 very merry interlude" called The Four P's, 
 united in his merriment that caustic sense with 
 that lively ease, which have not been too common 
 since in his accomplished dramatic posterity. 
 Yet those who in the bewilderment of their ad- 
 mirations (or senses) attribute to John IT eywood 
 the ' Pinner of Wakefield/ are more obviously 
 — we are sorely tempted to add more ridicu- 
 lously — wrong, than those who attribute it to 
 Shakespeare. The Canon of Windsor's ' Ralph 
 Royster Doyster/ and the Bishop of Bath and 
 TTeuVs ' Gammer Gurton/ followed each other 
 close into light, the earliest modern comedies, 
 by the force of the " clnie ecclesiastique" A 
 little after came Ferrys, memorialized by Putten- 
 
148 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 liam as "the principal! man of his profession" 
 (of poetry), and "of no lesse myrtlie and felicitie 
 than John Hey wood, but of much more skille 
 and magnificence in his meter." But seeing 
 that even Oblivion forgot Ferrys, leaving his 
 name and Puttenham's praise when she defaced 
 his works, and seeing, too, the broad farcedom 
 of the earlier, however episcopal writers, we find 
 ourselves in an unwilling posture of recognition 
 before Edwards, as the first extant regular dra- 
 matist of England. It is a pitiful beginning. 
 The Four P's would be a more welcome A to 
 us. They express more power with their inar- 
 ticulate roughness, than does this Damon and 
 Pythias, with its rhymed, loitering frigidity, or 
 even than this Palamon and Arcite, in which 
 the sound of the hunting horn cast into ecstasy 
 the too gracious soul of Queen Elizabeth. But 
 Sir John Davies's divine Astraea was, at that 
 prey dawn of her day, ignorant of greater poets; 
 and we ("happy in this") go on toward them. 
 After Edwards, behold Sackville with that ' Gor- 
 boduc' we have named, the first blank verse 
 tragedy we can name, praised by Sidney for its 
 exemplary preservation of the unities and for 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 149 
 
 " climbing to the height of Seneca his stile/' — 
 tight-fitting praise, considering that the compo- 
 sition is high enough to account for its snow, 
 and cold enough to emulate the Roman's. And 
 after Sackville, behold the first dramatic ge- 
 niuses, in juxtaposition with the first dramatists 
 — Peele, and Kyd, mad as his own Hieronimo, 
 (we will grant it to such critics as are too ut- 
 terly in their senses), only — 
 
 When he is mad, 
 Then, methinks, he is a brave fellow ! 
 
 and then, methinks, and by such madness, the 
 possibility of a Shakespeare was revealed. Kyd's 
 blank verse is probably the first breaking of 
 the true soil ; and certainly far better and more 
 dramatic than Marlowe's is, — crowned poet as 
 the latter stands before us — poet of the English 
 Faustus, which we will not talk of against the 
 German, nor set up its grand, luxurious, melan- 
 choly devil against Goethe's subtle, biting, Vol- 
 tairish devil, each being devil after its kind, — 
 the poet of the Jew which Shakespeare drew 
 (not), yet a true Jew " with a bcrde," — and the 
 poet of the first historical drama, — since the 
 ' Gorboduc' scarcely can be called one. Mar- 
 
150 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 lowe was more essentially a poet than a drama- 
 tist ; and if the remark appear self-evident and 
 universally applicable, we will take its reverse 
 in Kyd, who was more essentially, with all his 
 dramatic faults, a dramatist than a poet. Pass- 
 ing from the sound of the elemental monotonies 
 of the rhythm of Marlowe, we cannot pause 
 before Nash and Greene to distinguish their 
 characteristics. It is enough to name these 
 names of gifted dramatists, who lived, or at least 
 wrote, rather before Shakespeare than with him, 
 and helped to make him credible. Through 
 them, like a lens, Ave behold his light. Of them 
 we conjecture — these are the blind elements 
 working before the earthquake, — before the 
 great " Shakescene/' as Greene said when he 
 was cross. And we may say when we are fan- 
 ciful, these are the experiments of Nature, made 
 in her solution of the problem of how much 
 deathless poetry will agree with how much mor- 
 tal clay — these are the potsherd vessels half 
 filled, and failing at last, — until up to the edge 
 of one, the liquid inspiration rose and bubbled in 
 hot beads to quench the thirsty lips of the world. 
 It is hard to speak of Shakespeare; these 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 151 
 
 measures of the statures of common poets fall 
 from our hands when we seek to measure him : 
 it is harder to praise him. Like the tall plane- 
 tree which Xerxes found standing in the midst 
 of an open country, and honoured inappropri- 
 ately with his "barbaric pomp," with bracelets 
 and chains and rings suspended on its branches, 
 so Las it been with Shakespeare. A thousand 
 critics have commended him with praises as un- 
 suitable as a gold ring to a plane-tree. A thou- 
 sanl hearts have gone out to him, carrying 
 necklaces. Some have discovered that he indi- 
 vidualized, and some that he generalized, and 
 some that he subtilized — almost /ra/zs-transcen- 
 dentally. Some would have it that he was a 
 vild genius, sowing wild oats and stealing deer 
 to the end, with no more judgment forsooth 
 than "youth the hare;" and some, that his very 
 pulses beat by that critical law of art in which 
 he was blameless : — some, that all his study was 
 in his horn-book, and not much of that; and 
 some, that he was as learned a polyglott as ever 
 had been dull but for Babel : — some, that his 
 own ideal burned steadfastly within his own fixed 
 contemplations, unstirred by breath from with- 
 
152 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 out ; and some, that he wrote for the gold on 
 his palm and the " rank popular breath ;; in his 
 nostrils, apart from consciousness of greatness 
 and desire of remembrance. If the opinions 
 prove nothing, their contradictions prove the 
 exaltation of the object; their contradictions 
 are praise. For men differ about things above 
 their reach, not within it ; — about the moun- 
 tains in the moon, not Primrose Hill : and more 
 than seven cities of men have differed in tleir 
 talk about Homer also. Homer, also, was con- 
 victed of indiscreet nodding; and Homer, aho, 
 had no manner of judgment, and the Ars 
 Poetica people could not abide his bad tast?. 
 And we find another analogy. \Ye, who have 
 no leaning to the popular cant of Romanticism 
 and Classicism, and believe the old Greek 
 beauty to be both new and old, and as alive 
 and not more grey in "Webster's ' Duchess of 
 Malfy* than in iEschylus's 'Eumeuides/ do re- 
 verence this Homer and this Shakespeare as the 
 colossal borderers of the two intellectual de- 
 partments of the world's age, — do behold from 
 their feet the antique and modern literatures 
 sweep outwardly away, and conclude, that 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 153 
 
 whereas the Greek bore in his depth the seed 
 and prophecy of all the Hellenic and Roman 
 poets, so did Shakespeare " whose seed was in 
 himself" also, those of a later generation. 
 
 For the rest we must speak briefly of Shake- 
 speare, and very weakly too, except for love. 
 That he was a great natural genius nobody, we 
 believe, has doubted — the fact has passed with 
 the cheer of mankind ; but that he was a great 
 artist the majority has doubted. Yet Nature 
 and Art cannot be reasoned apart into antago- 
 nistic principles. Nature is God's art — the ac- 
 complishment of a spiritual significance hidden 
 in a sensible symbol. Poetic art (man's) looks 
 past the symbol with a divine guess and reach 
 of soul into the mystery of the significance, — 
 disclosing from the analysis of the visible things, 
 the synthesis or unity of the ideal,— and ex- 
 pounds like symbol and like significance out of 
 the infinite of God's doing into the finite of 
 man's comprehending. Art lives by Nature. 
 and not the bare mimetic life generally attri- 
 buted to Art : she docs not imitate, she ex- 
 pounds. Interpres natures — is the poet-artist ; 
 and the poet wisest in nature is the most artistic 
 
154 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 poet : and thus our Shakespeare passes to the 
 presidency unquestioned, as the greatest artist 
 in the world. We believe in his judgment as 
 in his genius. We believe in his learning, both 
 of books and men, and hills and valleys : in his 
 grammars and dictionaries we do not believe. 
 In his philosophy of language we believe ab- 
 solutely : in his Babel-learning, not at all. We 
 believe reverently in the miracle of his variety ; 
 and it is observable that we become aware of 
 it less by the numerousness of his persons and 
 their positions, than by the depth of the least of 
 either, — by the sense of visibility beyond what 
 we see, as in nature. Our creed goes on to de- 
 clare him most passionate and most rational — 
 of an emotion which casts us into thought, of a 
 reason which leaves us open to emotion : most 
 grave and most gay — while we scarcely can guess 
 that the man Shakespeare is grave or gay, because 
 he interposes between ourselves and his person- 
 ality the whole breadth and length of his ideality. 
 His associative faculty, — the wit's faculty be- 
 sides the poet's — for him who was both wit and 
 poet, shed sparks like an electric wire. He was 
 wise in the world, having studied it in his heart j 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 155 
 
 what is called " the knowledge of the world " 
 being just the knowledge of one heart, and cer- 
 tain exterior symbols. What else ? What other- 
 wise could he, the young transgressor of Sir 
 Thomas Lucy's fences, new from Stratford and 
 the Avon, close in theatric London, have seen 
 or touched or handled of the Hamlets and 
 Lears and Othellos, that he should draw them ? 
 " How can I take portraits/' said Marmontel, 
 in a similar inexperience, " before I have beheld 
 faces?" Voltaire embraced him, in reply. Well 
 applauded, Voltaire ! It was a mot for Mar- 
 montel's utterance, and Voltaire's praise — for 
 Marmontel, not for Shakespeare. Every being 
 is his own centre to the universe, and in himself 
 must one foot of the compasses be fixed to at- 
 tain to any measurement : nay, every being is 
 his own mirror to the universe. Shakespeare 
 wrote from within — the beautiful ; and we re- 
 cognize from within — the true. He is universal, 
 because he is individual. And without any pre- 
 judice of admiration, we may go on to account 
 his faults to be the proofs of his power ; the 
 cloud of dust cast up by the multitude of the 
 chariots. The activitv of his associative faculty 
 
156 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 is occasionally morbid : in the abundance of his 
 winged thoughts, the locust flies with the bee, 
 and the ground is dark with the shadow of them. 
 Take faults, take excellences, it is impossible to 
 characterize this Shakespeare by an epithet : 
 have we heard the remark before, that it should 
 sound so obvious ? We say of Corncille, the 
 noble ; of Racine, the tender ; of iEschylus, the 
 terrible ; of Sophocles, the perfect ; but not one 
 of these words, not one appropriately descriptive 
 epithet, can we attach to Shakespeare without a 
 conscious recoil. Shakespeare ! the name is the 
 description. 
 
 He is the most wonderful artist in blank verse 
 of all in England, and almost the earliest. We 
 do not say that he first broke the enchaining 
 monotony, of which the Sackvilles and the Mar- 
 lowes left us complaining ; because the versifica- 
 tion of ' Hieronimo' ran at its own strong will, 
 and the ' Pinner of Wakefield ' may have pre- 
 ceded his first plays. We do not even say what 
 we might, that his hand first proved the com- 
 pass and infinite modulation of the new instru- 
 ment; but we do say, that it never answered 
 another hand as it answered his. We do say, 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 157 
 
 this fingering was never learned of himself by 
 another. From Massinger's more resonant ma- 
 jesty, from even Fletcher's more numerous and 
 artful cadences, we turn back to his artlessness 
 of art, to his singular and supreme estate as a 
 versificator. Often when he is at the sweetest, 
 his words are poor monosyllables, his pauses 
 frequent to brokenness, and the structure of the 
 . several lines less varied than was taught after 
 Fletcher's mastcrdom ; but the whole results in 
 an ineffable charming of the ear which we ac- 
 quiesce in without seeking its cause, a happy 
 mystery of music. 
 
 This is little for Shakespeare ; yet so much for 
 the place, that we are forced into brevities for 
 our observations which succeed. We chronicle 
 only the names of Chapman, Dekker, Webster, 
 Tourneur, Randolph, Middleton, and Thomas 
 Fleywood, although great names, and worthy, it 
 is not too much to add, of Shakespeare's brother- 
 hood. Many besides lean from our memory to 
 the paper, but we put them away reverently. It 
 was the age of the dramatists — the age of strong 
 passionate men, scattering on every side their 
 good and evil oracles of vehement humanity, 
 
158 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 and extenuating no thought in its word : and 
 in that age, " to write like a man/' was a deed 
 accomplished by many besides him of whom it 
 was spoken, Jonson's " son Cartwright." 
 
 At Jonson's name we stop perforce, and do 
 salutation in the dust to the impress of that 
 " learned sock." He was a learned man, as 
 everybody knows ; and as everybody does not 
 believe, not the worse for his learning. His 
 material, brought laboriously from East and 
 West, is wrapt in a flame of his own. If the 
 elasticity and abandonment of Shakespeare and 
 of certain of Shakespeare's brothers, are not 
 found in his writings, the reason of the defects 
 need not be sought out in his readings. His 
 genius, high and verdant as it grew, yet belonged 
 to the hard woods : it was lance- wood rather 
 than bow-wood — a genius rather noble than 
 graceful — eloquent, with a certain severity and 
 emphasis of enunciation. It would have been 
 the same if he, too, had known " little Latin 
 and lesse Greek." There was a dash of the 
 rhetorical in his dramatic. Not that we deny 
 him empire over the passions : his heart had 
 rhetoric as well as his understanding, and he 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 150 
 
 wrote us a c Sad Shepherd/ as well as a ' Cati- 
 line/ His versification heaves heavily with 
 thought. For his comic powers, let ' Yolpone' 
 and f The Alchymist ' attest them with that un- 
 extinguishable laughter which is the laughter of 
 gods or poets still more than of the wits' coffee- 
 house. "Was it "clone at the Mermaid," was 
 it ever fancied there, that " rare Ben Jonson " 
 should be called a pedantic poet ? Nay, but 
 only a scholastic one. 
 
 And Beaumont and Fletcher, the Castor and 
 Pollux of this starry poetic sphere, [lucida 
 sidera,) our silence shall not cover them; nor 
 will we put asunder, in our speech, the names 
 which friendship and poetry joined together, 
 nor distinguish, by a laboured analysis, the viva- 
 city of one from the solidity of the other ; see- 
 ing that men who, according to tradition, lived 
 in one house, and wore one cloak, and wrote on 
 one page, may well, by the sanctity of that one 
 grave they have also in common, maintain for 
 ever beyond it the unity they coveted. The 
 characteristics of these writers stand out in a 
 softened light from the deep tragic background 
 of the times. We may liken them to Shakespeare 
 
160 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 in one mood of his mind, because there are few 
 classes of beauty, the type or likeness of which 
 is not discoverable in Shakespeare. From the 
 rest, they stand out contrastingly, as the Apollo 
 of the later Greek sculpture-school, — too grace- 
 ful for divinity and too vivacious for marble, — 
 placed in a company of the antiquer statues 
 with their grand blind look of the almightiness 
 of repose. AVe cannot say of these poets as of 
 the rest, " they write all like men;" we cannot 
 think they, write like women either: perhaps 
 they write a little like centaurs. "We are of 
 opinion in any way, that the grace is more ob- 
 vious than the strength ; and there may be 
 something centauresque and of twofold nature 
 in their rushing mutabilities, and changes on 
 passion and weakness. Clearest of all is that 
 they wrote like poets, and in a versification most 
 surpassingly musical though liberal, as if music 
 served them for love's sake, unbound ! They 
 had an excellent genius, but not a strong enough 
 invention to include judgment; judgment being 
 the consistency of invention, and consistency 
 always, whether in morals or literature, depend- 
 ing upon strength. We do not, in fact, find 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 161 
 
 in them any perfect and covenanted whole — we 
 do not find it in character, or in plot, or in com- 
 position; and lamenting the defect on many 
 grounds we do so on this chief one, that their 
 good is just good, their evil just evil, unredeemed 
 into good like Shakespeare's and Nature's evil 
 by unity of design, but lying apart, a willingly 
 chosen, through and through evil — and " by this 
 time it stinketh." If other results are less la- 
 mentable they are no less fatal. The mirror 
 which these poets held up to us is vexed with 
 a thousand cracks, and everything visible is in 
 fragments. Their conceptions all tremble on 
 a peradventure — " perad venture they shall do 
 well :" there is no royal absolute will that they 
 should do well : the poets are less kings than 
 workmen. And being workmen they are weak 
 — the moulds fall from their hands — are clutched 
 with a spasm or fall with a faintness. After 
 which querulousness, we shall leave the question 
 as to whether their tragic or comic powers be 
 put to more exquisite use, — not for solution, 
 nor for doubt (since we hold fast an opinion), 
 but for praise the most rarely appropriate or 
 possible. 
 
162 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 One passing word of Ford, the pathetic — 
 for he may wear on his sleeve the epithet of 
 Euripides, and no daw peck there. Most tender 
 is he, yet not to feebleness — most mournful, yet 
 not to languor ; yet we like to hear the war- 
 horse leaps of Dekker on the same tragic ground 
 with him, producing at once contrast and com- 
 pleteness. Ungrateful thought ! — the ( Witch of 
 Edmonton' bewitched us to it. Ford can fill 
 the ear and soul singly, with the trumpet-note 
 of his pathos ; and in its pauses you shall hear 
 the murmuring voices of nature, — such a night- 
 ingale, for instance, as never sang on a common 
 night. Then that death scene in the f Broken 
 Heart ! ' who has equalled that ? It is single 
 in the drama, — the tragic of tragedy, and the 
 sublime of grief. A word, too, of Massinger, 
 who writes all like a giant — a dry- eyed giant. 
 He is too ostentatiously strong for flexibility, 
 and too heavy for rapidity, and monotonous 
 through his perpetual final trochee ; his gesture 
 and enunciation are slow and majestic. And 
 another word of Shirley, an inferior writer, 
 though touched, to our fancy, with something 
 of a finer ray, and closing, in worthy purple, the 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. L63 
 
 procession of the Elizabethan men. Shirley is 
 the last dramatist. Valete et plaudite, o posteri. 
 Standing in his traces, and looking backward 
 and before, we become aware of the distinct 
 demarcations of five eras of English poetry : the 
 first, the Chaucerian, although we might call 
 it Chaucer ; the second, the Elizabethan ; the 
 third, which culminates in Cowley ] the fourth, 
 in Dryden and the Erench school ; the fifth, the 
 return to nature in Cowper and his successors 
 of our day. These five rings mark the age of 
 the fair and stingless serpent we are impelled, 
 like the ancient mariner, to bless — but not 
 " unaware." " Ah benedicite ! " we bless her 
 so, out of our Chaucer's rubric, softly, but with 
 a plaintiveness of pleasure. For when the last 
 echo of the Elizabethan harmonies had died 
 away with Shirley's footsteps, in the twilight of 
 that golden day; when Habington and Lovelace, 
 and every last bird before nightfall was dumb, 
 and Crashaw's fine rapture, holy as a summer 
 sense of silence, left us to the stars — the first 
 voices startling the thinker from his reverting 
 thoughts, are verily of another spirit. The voices 
 are eloquent enough, thoughtful enough, fanci- 
 
164 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 ful enough; but something is defective. Can 
 any one suffer, as an experimental reader, the 
 transition between the second and third periods, 
 without feeling that something is defective ? 
 What is so? And who dares to guess that it 
 may be inspiration ? 
 
 " Poetry is of too spiritual a nature," Mr. 
 Campbell has observed, " to admit of its authors 
 being exactly grouped by a Linnsean system of 
 classification." Nevertheless, from those subtle 
 influences which poets render and receive, and 
 from other causes less obvious but no less opera- 
 tive, it has resulted even to ourselves in this 
 slight survey of the poets of our country, that 
 the signs used by us simply as signs of histori- 
 cal demarcation, have naturally fallen or risen 
 into signs of poetical classification. The five 
 eras we spoke of just now, have indeed each 
 a characteristic as clear in poetry as in chro- 
 nology ; and a deeper gulf than an Anno Domini 
 yawns betwixt an Elizabethan man and a man 
 of that third era upon which we are entering. 
 The change of the poetical characteristic was 
 not, indeed, without gradation. The hands of 
 the clock had been moving silently for a whole 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 165 
 
 hour before the new one struck ; and even in 
 Davies, even in Drayton, we felt the cold fore- 
 shadow of a change. The word " sweetness/' 
 which presses into our sentences against' the 
 will of our rhetoric whenever we speak of 
 Shakespeare ("sweetest Shakespeare") or his 
 kin, we lose the taste of in the later waters ; 
 they are brackish with another age. 
 
 In what did the change consist ? Practically 
 and partially in the idol-worship of rhyme. 
 Among the elder poets, the rhyme was only a 
 felicitous adjunct, a musical accompaniment, 
 the tinkling of a cymbal through the choral 
 harmonies. You heard it across the changes of 
 the pause, as an undertone of the chant, mark- 
 ing the time with an audible indistinctness, and 
 catching occasionally and reflecting the full 
 light of the emphasis of the sense in mutual 
 elucidation. But the new practice endeavoured 
 to identify in all possible cases the rhyme and 
 what may be called the sentimental emphasis ; 
 securing the latter to the tenth rhyming syllable, 
 and so dishonouring the emphasis of the senti- 
 ment into the base use of the marking of the 
 time. And not only by this unnatural provi- 
 
166 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 sion did the emphasis minister to the rhyme,, 
 but the pause did it also. "Away with all 
 pauses/' — said the reformers, — "except the 
 legitimate pause at the tenth rhyming syllable. 
 O rhyme, live for ever ! Rhyme alone take 
 the incense from our altars, — tinkling cymbal 
 alone be our music ! " — And so arose, in dread 
 insignificance, the Heart-and-impart men. 
 
 Moreover, the corruption of the versification 
 was but a type of the change in the poetry it- 
 self, and sufficiently expressive. The accession 
 to the throne of the poets, of the ivits in the 
 new current sense of the term, or of the beaux 
 esprits — a term to be used the more readily be- 
 cause descriptive of the actual pestilential influ- 
 ence of French literature — was accompanied by 
 the substitution of elegant thoughts for poetic 
 conceptions ("elegant " alas ! beginning to be 
 the critical pass-word) of adroit illustrations for 
 beautiful images, of ingenuity for genius. Yet 
 this third era is only the preparation for the 
 fourth consummating one — the hesitation before 
 the crime : we smell the blood through it in the 
 bath-room. And our fancy grows hysterical, 
 like poor Octavia, while the dismal extent of 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 167 
 
 the " quantum mutatus " developes itself in 
 detail. 
 
 " Waller's sweetness ! " it is a needy anti- 
 thesis to Denhanr's strength, — and, if anything 
 beside, a sweetness as far removed from that 
 which we have lately recognized, as the saccha- 
 rine of the palate from the melodious of the 
 ear. Will Saccharissa frown at our comparison 
 from the high sphere of his verse ? or will she, 
 a happy "lady who can sleep when she pleases," 
 please to oversleep our offence? It is certain 
 that we but walk in her footsteps in our disdain 
 of her poet, even if we disdain him — and most 
 seriously we disown any such partaking of her 
 " crueltie." Escaping from the first astonish- 
 ment of an unhappy transition, and from what 
 is still more vexing, those " base, common, and 
 popular" critical voices, which, in and out of 
 various " arts of poetry," have been pleased to 
 fix upon this same transitional epoch as the 
 genesis of excellence to our language and versi- 
 fication, we do not, we hope it of ourselves, 
 undervalue Waller. There is a certain grace 
 " beyond the reach of art," or rather beyond 
 the destructive reach of his ideas of art, to 
 
168 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 which, we opine, if he had not been a courtier 
 and a renegade, the Lady Dorothea might have 
 bent her courtly head unabashed, even as the 
 Penshurst beeches did. We gladly acknow- 
 ledge in him, as in Denham and other poets of 
 the transition, an occasional remorseful recur- 
 rence by half lines and whole lines, or even 
 a few lines together, to the poetic Past. We 
 will do anything but agree with Mr. Hallam, 
 who, in his excellent and learned work on the 
 Literature of Europe, has passed some singular 
 judgments upon the poets, and none more 
 startling than his comparison of Waller to 
 Milton, on the ground of the sustenance of 
 power. The crying truth is louder than Mr. 
 Hallam, and cries, in spite of Fame, with whom 
 poor Waller was an "enfant trouve," an heir 
 by chance, rather than merit, — that he is feeble 
 poetically quite as surely as morally and politi- 
 cally, and that, so far from being an equal and 
 sustained poet, he has not strength for unity 
 even in his images, nor for continuity in his 
 thoughts, nor for adequacy in his expression, nor 
 for harmony in his versification. This is at 
 least our strong and sustained impression of 
 Edmund Waller. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 169 
 
 With a less natural gift of poetry than 
 Waller, Denham lias not only more strength of 
 purpose and language (an easy superiority), but 
 some strength in the abstract : he puts forth 
 rather a sinewy hand to the new structure of 
 English versification. It is true, indeed, that 
 in his only poem which survives to any compe- 
 tent popularity — his ' Cooper's Hill ; — we may 
 find him again and again, by an instinct to 
 a better principle, receding to the old habit of 
 the medial pause, instead of the would-be suffi- 
 ciency of the final one. But, generally, he is 
 true to his modern sect of the Pharisees ; and 
 he helps their prosperity otherwise by adopting 
 that pharisaic fashion of setting forth, vain- 
 gloriously, a little virtue of thought and poetry 
 in pointed and antithetic expression, which all 
 the wits delighted in, from himself, a chief 
 originator, to Pope, the perfecter. The famous 
 lines, inheriting by entail a thousand critical 
 admirations — 
 
 ; ' Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full," 
 
 and as Sydney Smith might put it, " a great many 
 other things without a great many other things," 
 
170 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 contain the germ and prophecy of the whole 
 Queen Anne's generation. For the rest, we will 
 be brief in our melancholy, and say no more of 
 Denham than that he was a Dry den in small. 
 
 The genius of the new school was its anomaly, 
 even Abraham Cowley. We have said nothing 
 of " the metaphysical poets " because we dis- 
 claim the classification, and believe with Mr. 
 Leigh Hunt, that every poet, inasmuch as he 
 is a poet, is a metaphysician. In taking note, 
 therefore, of this Cowley, who stands on the 
 very vibratory soil of the transition, and stretches 
 his faltering and protesting hands on either side 
 to the old and to the new, let no one brand him 
 for " metaphysics." He was a true poet, both 
 by natural constitution and cultivation, but 
 without the poet's heart. His admirers have 
 compared him to Pindar ; and, taking Pindar 
 out of his rapture, they may do so still : he was 
 a Pindar writing by metier rather than by verve. 
 In rapidity and subtlety of the associate faculty, 
 which, however, with him, moved circularly ra- 
 ther than onward, he was sufficiently Pindaric : 
 but, as it is a fault in the Greek lyrist to leave 
 his buoyancy to the tumultous rush of his asso- 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 171 
 
 ciations too unmisgivingly and entirely for the 
 right reverence of Unity in Beauty, — so is it 
 the crime of the English poet to commit coldly 
 what the other permitted passively, and with a 
 conscious volition, quick yet calm, calm when 
 quickest, to command from the ends of the uni- 
 verse the associations of material sciences and 
 spiritual philosophies. Quickness of the associa- 
 tive or suggestive faculty is common, we have 
 had occasion to observe, to the wit (in the mo- 
 dern sense) and the poet ; its application only, 
 being of a reverse difference. Cowley confounded 
 the application, and became a witty poet. The 
 Elizabethan writers were inclined to a too curi- 
 ous illuminating of thought, by imagery. Cow- 
 ley was coarsely curious: he went to the sham- 
 bles for his chambers of imagery, and very often 
 through the mud. All which faults appear to 
 us attributable to his coldness of temperament, 
 and his defectiveness in the instinct towards 
 Beauty ; to having the intellect only of a great 
 poet, not the sensibility. His ( Davideis/ our 
 first epic in point of time, has fine things in it. 
 His translations, or rather paraphrases of Ana- 
 creon, are absolutely the most perfect of any 
 
1 72 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 English composition of their order. His other 
 poems contain profuse material, in image and 
 reflection, for the accomplishment of three poets, 
 each greater than himself. He approached the 
 beautiful and the true as closely as mere Fancy 
 could; but that very same Fancy, unfixed by 
 feeling, too often, in the next breath, approxi- 
 mated him to the hideous and the false. Noble 
 thoughts are in Cowley — we say noble, and we 
 might say sublime ; but, while we speak, he falls 
 below the first praise. Yet his influence was 
 for good rather than for evil, by inciting to a 
 struggle backward, a delay in the revolution- 
 ary movement : and this, although a wide gulf 
 yawned between him and the former age, and 
 his heart's impulse was not strong enough to 
 cast him across it. For his actual influence, he 
 lifts us up and casts us down — charms, and goes 
 nigh to disgust us — does all but make us love 
 and weep. 
 
 And then came " glorious John," with the 
 whole fourth era in his arms; — and eloquent 
 above the sons of men, to talk down, thunder 
 down poetry as if it were an exhalation. Do 
 we speak as if he were not a poet ? nay, but we 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 173 
 
 speak of the character of his influences ; nay, 
 but he was a poet — an excellent poet — in mar- 
 ble : and Phidias, with the sculpturesque ideal 
 separated from his working tool, might have 
 carved him. He was a poet without passion, 
 just as Cowley was : but, then, Cowley lived by 
 fancy, and that would have been poor living for 
 John Dry den. Unlike Cowley, too, he had an 
 earnestness which of itself was influential. He 
 was inspired in his understanding and his senses 
 only; but to the point of disenchanting the 
 world most marvellously. He had a large soul 
 for a man, containing sundry Queen Anne's 
 men, one within another, like quartetto tables ; 
 but it was not a large soul for a poet, and it 
 entertained the universe by potato-patches. 
 He established finally the reign of the lite- 
 rati for the reign of the poets — and the critics 
 clapped their hands. He established finally the 
 despotism of the final emphasis — and no one 
 dared, in affecting criticism, to speak any more 
 at all against a tinkling cymbal. And so, in 
 distinctive succession to poetry and inspiration, 
 began the new system of harmony " as by law 
 established;" and so he translated Virgil not 
 
174 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 only into English but into Dryden ; and so lie 
 was kind enough to translate Chaucer too, as an 
 example, — made him a much finer speaker, and 
 not, according to our doxy, so good a versifier — 
 and cured the readers of the old " Knight's tale" 
 of sundry of their tears ; and so he reasoned 
 powerfully in verse — and threw into verse be- 
 sides, the whole force of his strong sensual be- 
 ing ; and so he wrote what has been called from 
 generation to generation, down to the threshold 
 of our days, " the best ode in the English lan- 
 guage." To complete which successes, he thrust 
 out nature with a fork; and for a long time, 
 and in spite of Horace's prophecy, she never 
 came back again. Do we deny our gratitude 
 and his glory to glorious John because we speak 
 thus ? In nowise would we do it. He was a 
 man greatly endowed; and our language and 
 our literature remain, in certain respects, the 
 greater for his greatness — more practical, more 
 rapid, and with an air of mixed freedom and 
 adroitness which we welcome as an addition to 
 the various powers of either. With regard to 
 his influence — and he was most influential upon 
 poetry — we have spoken; and have the whole 
 of the opening era from which to prove. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 7 75 
 
 While we return upon our steps for a breath- 
 ing moment, and pause before Milton, — the 
 consideration occurs to us that a person of his- 
 torical ignorance in respect to this divine poet, 
 would hesitate and be at a loss to which era of 
 our poetry to attach him through the internal 
 evidence of his works. He has not the tread of 
 a contemporary of Dryden; and Rochester's 
 nothingness is a strange accompaniment to the 
 voice of his greatness. Neither can it be quite 
 predicated of him that he walks an Elizabethan 
 man; there is a certain fine bloom or farina, 
 rather felt than seen, upon the old poems, un- 
 recognized upon his. But the love of his genius 
 leant backward to those olden oracles ; and it is 
 pleasant to think that he was actually born be- 
 fore Shakespeare's death ; that they too looked 
 upwardly to the same daylight and stars j and 
 that he might have stretched his baby arms 
 ('•animosus infans") to the faint hazel eyes of 
 the poet of poets. Let us think in anywise that 
 he drew in some living subtle Shakespearian be- 
 nediction, providing for greatness. 
 
 The Italian poets had " rained influence-" on 
 the Elizabethan e: field of the cloth of gold ; " 
 
176 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 and from the Italian poets as well as the classical 
 sources and the elder English ones, did Miltori 
 accomplish his soul. Yet the poet Milton was 
 not made by what he received ; not even by 
 what he loved. High above the current of poe- 
 tical influences he held his own grand person- 
 ality ; and there never lived poet in any age 
 (unless we assume ignorantly of Homer) more 
 isolated in the contemporaneous world than he. 
 He was not worked upon from out of it, nor did 
 he work outwardly upon it. As Cromwell's 
 secretary and Salniasius's antagonist, he had 
 indeed an audience ; but as a poet, a scant one ; 
 his music, like the spherical tune, being inau- 
 dible because too fine and high. It is almost 
 awful to think of him issuing from the arena of 
 controversy victorious and blind, — putting away 
 from his dark brows the bloody laurel, left 
 alone after the heat of the day by those for whom 
 he had combated : and originating in that en- 
 forced dark quietude his epic vision for the in- 
 ward sight of the unborn ; so to avenge himself 
 on the world's neglect by exacting from it an 
 eternal future of reminiscence. The circum- 
 stances of the production of his great work are 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 177 
 
 worthy in majesty of the poem itself; and the 
 writer is the ideal to us of the majestic person- 
 ality of a poet. He is the student, the deep 
 thinker, the patriot, the believer, the thorough 
 brave man, — breathing freely for truth and free- 
 dom under the leaden weights of his adversities, 
 never reproaching God for his griefs by his 
 despair, working in the chain, praying with- 
 out ceasing in the serenity of his sightless eyes ; 
 and, because the whole visible universe was 
 swept away from betwixt them and the Creator, 
 contemplating more intently the invisible infi- 
 nite, and shaping all his thoughts to it in grander 
 proportion. O noble Christian poet ! TUiich 
 is hardest ? self-renunciation, and the sackcloth 
 and the cave — or grief-renunciation, and the 
 working on, on, under the stripe ? He did 
 what was hardest. He was Agonistes building 
 up, instead of pulling down ; and his high re- 
 ligious fortitude gave a character to his works. 
 He stood in the midst of those whom we are 
 forced to consider the corrupt versificators of 
 his day, an iconoclast of their idol rhyme, and 
 protesting practically against the sequestration 
 of pauses. His lyrical poems, move they ever 
 
 N 
 
178 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 so softly, step loftily, and with something of an 
 epic air. His sonnets are the first sonnets of a 
 free rhythm — and this although Shakspeare and 
 Spenser were sonnetteers. His ' Comus/ and 
 1 Samson/ and f Lycidas/ — how are we to praise 
 them ? His epic is the second to Homer's, and 
 the first in sublime effects — a sense as of divine 
 benediction flowing through it from end to end. 
 Xot that we compare, for a moment, Milton's 
 genius with Homer's ; but that Christianity 
 is in the poem besides Milton. If we hazard a 
 remark which is not admiration, it shall be this 
 — that with all his heights and breadths (which 
 we may measure geometrically if we please from 
 the 'Davideis' of Cowley) — with all his rapt 
 devotions and exaltations towards the highest 
 of all, we do miss something (we, at least, who 
 are writing, miss something) of what may be 
 called, but rather metaphysically than theolo- 
 gically, spirituality. His spiritual personages 
 are vast enough, but not rarified enough. They 
 are humanities, enlarged, uplifted, transfigured 
 — but no more. In the most spiritual of his 
 spirits, there is a conscious, obvious, even pon- 
 derous, materialism. And hence comes the 
 
THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 1 / 9 
 
 celestial gunpowder, and hence the clashing with 
 swords, and hence the more continuous evil 
 which we feel better than we describe, the thick 
 atmosphere clouding the heights of the subject. 
 And if anybody should retort, that complain- 
 ing so we complain of Milton's humanity — we 
 shake our heads. For Shakespeare also was a 
 man ; and our creed is, that the l Midsummer 
 Night's Dream ' displays more of the fairyhood 
 of fairies, than the c Paradise Lost ' does of the 
 angelhood of angels. The example may serve 
 the purpose of explaining our objection; both 
 leaving us room for the one remark more — that 
 Ben Jonson and John Milton, the most scho- 
 lastic of our poets, brought out of their scholar- 
 ship different gifts to our language ; that Jonson 
 brought more Greek, and Milton more Latin : 
 while the influences of the latter and greater 
 poet were at once more slowly and more exten- 
 sively effectual. 
 
 Butler was the contemporary of Milton : we 
 confess a sort of continuous " innocent surprise" 
 in the thought of it, however the craziness of 
 our imagination may be in fault. We have 
 stood by as witnesses while the great poet sane- 
 
180 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 tified the visible earth with the oracle of his 
 blindness ; and are startled that a profane voice 
 should be hardy enough to break the echo, and 
 jest in the new consecrated temple. But this 
 is rather a roundheaded than a longheaded way 
 of adverting to poor Butler; who, for all his 
 gross injustice to the purer religionists, in the 
 course of " flattering the vices and daubing the 
 iniquities" of King Charles's court, does scarcely 
 deserve at our hands either to be treated as a 
 poet or punished for being a contemporary of 
 the poet Milton. Butler's business was the 
 business of desecration, the exact reverse of a 
 poet's ; and by the admission of all the world 
 his business is well done. His learning is vari- 
 ous and extensive, and his fancy communicates 
 to it its mobility. His wit has a gesture of au- 
 thority, as if it might, if it pleased, be wisdom. 
 His power over language, " tattered and ragged" 
 like Skelton's, is as wonderful as his power over 
 images. And if nobody can commend the de- 
 sign of his ' Hudibras,' which is the English 
 counterpart of Don Quixote, — a more objection 
 able servility than an adaptation from a serious 
 composition, in which case that humorous cf- 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 181 
 
 feet would have been increased by the travestic, 
 which is actually injured and precisely in an in- 
 verse ratio, by the burlesque copy of the bur- 
 lesque, — everybody must admit the force of the 
 execution. When Prior attempted afterwards 
 the same line of composition with his peculiar 
 grace and airinessof diction, — when Swift ground 
 society into jests with a rougher turning of the 
 wheel, — still, then and since, has this Butler 
 stood alone. He is the genius of his class ; a 
 natural enemy to poetry under the form of a 
 poet : not a great man, but a powerful man. 
 
 "We return to the generation of Dryden and 
 to Pope his inheritor — Pope, the perfecter, as 
 we have already taken occasion to call him — 
 who stood in the presence of his father Dryden, 
 before that energetic soul, weary with- its long- 
 literary work which was not always clean and 
 noble, had uttered its last wisdom or foolishness 
 through the organs of the body. Unfortunately, 
 Pope had his advisers apart from his muses ; and 
 their counsel was " be correct." To be correct, 
 therefore, to be great through correctness, was 
 the end of his ambition, an aspiration scarcely 
 more calculated for the production of noble 
 
182 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 poems than the philosophy of utilitarianism is 
 for that of lofty virtues. Yet correctness seemed 
 a virtue rare in the land ; Dr. Johnson having 
 crowned Lord Roscommon over Shakespeare's 
 head, " the only correct writer before Addison." 
 The same critic predicated of Milton, that he 
 could not cut figures upon cherrystones. Pope 
 glorified correctness, and dedicated himself to 
 cherrystones from first to last. A cherrystone 
 was the apple of his eye. 
 
 Now we are not about to take up any popular 
 cry against Pope ; he has been overpraised and 
 is underpraised ; and, in the silence of our poeti- 
 cal experience, ourselves may confess personally 
 to the guiltiness of either extremity. He was 
 not a great poet ; he meant to be a correct poet, 
 and he was what he meant to be, according to 
 his construction of the thing meant : there are 
 few amongst us who fulfil so literally their am- 
 bitions. Moreover we will admit to our reader 
 in the confessional, that, however convinced in 
 our innermost opinion of the superiority of 
 Dryden's genius, we have more pleasure in 
 reading Pope than we ever could enjoy or ima- 
 gine under Pope's master. We incline to be- 
 
THE BOOK OP THE POETS. J bo 
 
 lieve that Dryden being the greatest poet-power, 
 Pope is the best poet-manual ; and that what- 
 ever Dryden has done — we do not say con- 
 ceived, we do not say suggested, but done — 
 Pope has done that thing better. For transla- 
 tions, we hold up Pope's Homer against Dry- 
 den's Virgil and the world. Both translations 
 are utterly and equally contrary to the antique, 
 both bad with the same sort of excellence ; but 
 Pope's faults are Dryden's faults, while Dry- 
 den's are not Pope's. We say the like of the 
 poems from Chaucer; we say the like of the 
 philosophic and satirical poems : the art of rea- 
 soning in verse is admirably attained by either 
 poet, but practised with more grace and point 
 by the later one. To be sure, there is the 
 'Alexander's Feast' ode, called until people 
 half believed what they said, the greatest ode in 
 the language ! But here is, to make the scales 
 even again, the 'Eloisa' with tears on it, — 
 faulty but tender — of a sensibility which glo- 
 rious John was not born with a heart for. To 
 be sure, it was not necessary that John Dryden 
 should keep a Bolingbroke to think for him : 
 but to be sure again, it is something to be born 
 
184 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 with a heart, particularly for a poet. We re- 
 cognise besides in Pope, a delicate fineness of 
 tact, of which the precise contrary is unplea- 
 santly obvious in his great master; Horace 
 Walpole's description of Selwyn, an bete inspire, 
 with a restriction of bete to the animal sense, 
 fitting glorious John like his crown. Now 
 there is nothing of this coarseness of the senses 
 about Pope ; the little pale Queen Anne's vale- 
 tudinarian had a nature fine enough to stand 
 erect upon the point of a needle like a school- 
 man's angel; and whatever he wrote coarsely, 
 he did not write from inward impulse, but from 
 external conventionality, from a bad social Swift- 
 sympathy. For the rest, he carries out his mas- 
 ter's principles into most excellent and delicate 
 perfection : he is rich in his degree. And there 
 is, indeed, something charming even to an ene- 
 my's ear in this exquisite balancing of sounds 
 and phrases, these " shining rows" of opposi- 
 tions and appositions, this glorifying of com- 
 monplaces by antithetic processes, this catching, 
 in the rebound, of emphasis upon rhyme and 
 rhyme; all, in short, of this Indian jugglery 
 and Indian carving upon — cherrystones ! " and 
 she herself" (that is, poetrv) — 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 185 
 
 And she herself one fair Antithesis. 
 
 When Voltaire threw his ' Henriade' into the 
 fire and Henault rescued it, " Souvenez-vous," 
 said the president to the poet, " that I burnt 
 ray lace ruffles for the sake of your epic." It 
 was about as much as the epic was worth. For 
 our own part, we would sacrifice not only our 
 point, but the prosperity of our very fingers, to 
 save, from a similar catastrophe, these works of 
 Pope ; and this, although the most perfect and 
 original of all of them, ' The Rape of the Lock/ 
 had its fortune in a fire-safe. They are the 
 works of a master. A great poet ? oh no ! A 
 true poet? — perhaps not. Yet a man, be it 
 remembered, of such mixed gracefulness and 
 power, that Lady Mary Wortley deigned to co- 
 quet with him, and Dennis shook before him in 
 his shoes. 
 
 Nature, as we have observed, had been ex- 
 pelled by a fork, under the hand of Pope's pro- 
 genitors ; and if in him and around him we see 
 no sign of her return, we do not blame Pope for 
 what is, both in spirit and in form, the sin of 
 his school. Still less would we " play at bowles" 
 with Byron, and praise his right use of the right 
 
186 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 poetry of Art. Our views of Nature and of 
 Art have been sufficiently explained to leave 
 our opinion obvious of the controversy in ques- 
 tion, in which, as in a domestic broil, " there 
 were faults on both sides." Let a poet never 
 write the words " tree/' " hill," " river/' and he 
 may still be true to nature. Most untrue, on 
 the other hand, most narrow, is the poetical sec- 
 tarianism, and essentially most un poetical, which 
 stands among the woods and fields announcing 
 with didactic phlegm, " Here only is nature." 
 Nature is where God is. Poetry is where God 
 is. Can you go up or down or around and not 
 find Him ? In the loudest hum of your ma- 
 chinery, in the dunnest volume of your steam, 
 in the foulest street of your city, — there, as 
 surely as in the Brocken pinewoods, and the 
 watery thunders of Niagara, — there, as surely as 
 He is above all, lie Nature and Poetry in full 
 life. Speak, and they will answer ! Nature is 
 a large meaning : let us make room for it in 
 the comprehension of our love ! — for the coral 
 rock built up by the iusect and the marble co- 
 lumn erected by the man. 
 
 In this age of England, however, pet-named 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 187 
 
 tlie Augustan, there was no room either for 
 Nature or Art : Art and Nature (for we will not 
 separate their names) were at least maimed and 
 dejected and sickening day by day — 
 Quoth she, I grieve to see your leg 
 Stuck in a hole here, like a peg ; 
 
 and even so, or like the peg of a top humming 
 drowsily, our poetry stood still. There was an 
 abundance of " correct writers," yes, and of 
 " elegant writers:" there was Parnell, for in- 
 stance, who would be called besides, a pleasing 
 writer by any pleasing critic ; and Addison, a 
 proverb for the " virtuousest, discreetest, best" 
 with all the world. Or if, after the Scotch 
 mode of Monkbarns, we call our poets by their 
 possessions, not so wronging their character- 
 istics, there was ' The Dispensary,' the ( Art of 
 Preserving Health/ the c Art of Cookery/ — and 
 1 Trivia/ or the ' Fan/ — take Gay by either of 
 those names ! and ' Cider/ or the ' Splendid 
 Shilling' — take Phillips, Milton's imitator, by 
 either of these ! and there was Pomfret, not our 
 " choice," the concentrate essence of namby- 
 pamby ism ; and Prior, a brother spirit of the 
 French Gresset, — a half-brother, of an inferior 
 
188 THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 
 
 race, yet to be praised by us for one instinct ob- 
 vious in him, a blind stretching of the hand to a 
 sweeter order of versification than was current. 
 Of Young we could write much : he was the very 
 genius of antithesis ; a genius breaking from 
 " the system/' with its broken chain upon his 
 limbs, and frowning darkly through the grey 
 monotony ; a grander writer by spasms than by 
 volitions. Blair was of his class, but rougher ; 
 a brawny contemplative Orson. And how many 
 of our readers may be unaware of the under- 
 ground existence of another Excursion than the 
 deathless one of our days, and in blank verse, 
 too, and in several cantos; and how nobody 
 will thank us for digging at these fossil remains! 
 It is better to remember Mallet by his touching 
 ballad of the ' "William and Margaret/ a word 
 taken from diviner lips to becoming purpose; 
 only we must not be thrown back upon the 
 ' Ballads/ lest we wish to live with them for 
 ever. Our literature is rich in ballads, a form 
 epitomical of the epic and dramatic, and often 
 vocal when no other music is astir ; and to give 
 a particular account of which would take us far 
 across our borders. 
 
THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 189 
 
 As it is, we are across them ; we are benighted 
 in our wandering and straitened for room. We 
 glance back vainly to the lights of the later 
 drama, and see Dryden, who had the heart to 
 write rhymed plays after Shakespeare, and but 
 little heart for anything else, — and Congreve, 
 and Lillo, and Southerne, and Rowe, all gifted 
 writers, and Otway, master of tears, who starved 
 in our streets for his last tragedy — a poet most 
 effective in broad touches } rather moving, as it 
 appears to us, by scenes than by words. 
 
 Returning to the general poets, we meet 
 with bent faces toward hill-side Nature, Thom- 
 son and Dyer; in writing which names together, 
 we do not depreciate Thomson's, however we 
 may a little exalt Dyer's. We praise neither 
 of these writers for being descriptive poets ; but 
 for that faithful transcript of their own impres- 
 sions, which is a common subject of praise in 
 botli : Dyer being more distinct, perhaps, in 
 his images, and Thomson more impressive in his 
 general effect. Both are faulty in their blank 
 verse diction ; the latter too florid and verbose, 
 the former (although ' Grongar Hill ' is simple 
 almost to baldness) too pedantic and constructive 
 
190 THE BOOK OF THE POET-. 
 
 — far too " saponaceous" and " pomaceous." We 
 offer pastoral salutation also to Shenstone and 
 Hammond; pairing them like Polyphemus's 
 sheep ; fain to be courteous if Ave could : and 
 we could if we were ' Phillida/ Surely it is an 
 accomplishment to utter a pretty thought so 
 simply that the world is forced to remember it ; 
 and that gift was Shenstone's, and he the most 
 poetical of country gentlemen. May every shrub 
 on the lawn of Leasowes be evergreen to his 
 brow ! And next, oh most patient reader, — 
 pressed to a conclusion and in a pairing humour, 
 we come to Gray and Akenside together, yes, 
 together ! because if Gray had written a phi- 
 losophic poem he would have written it like 
 the ' Pleasures of Imagination/ and because 
 Akenside would have written odes like Gray, 
 if he could have commanded a rapture. Gray, 
 studious and sitting in the cold, learnt the 
 secret of a simulated and innocent fire (the 
 Greek fire he might have called it), which 
 burns beautifully to the eye, but never would 
 have harmed M. Henault's ruffles. Collins had 
 twenty times the lyric genius of Gray; we feel 
 his fire in our cheeks. But Gray, but Akenside 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 191 
 
 • — both with a volition towards enthusiasm — 
 have an under-constitution of most scholastic 
 coldness : " Si vis me flere," you must weep ; but 
 they only take out their pocket-handkerchiefs. 
 We confess humbly, before gods and men, that 
 we never read to the end of Akenside's ' Plea- 
 sures/ albeit we have read Plato : some plea- 
 sures, say the moralists, are more trying than 
 pains. Let us turn for refreshment to Gold- 
 smith — that amiable genius, upon whose diadem 
 we feel our hands laid ever and anon in familiar 
 love, — to Goldsmith, half emerged from " the 
 system," his forehead touched with the red ray 
 of the morning ; a cordial singer. Even John- 
 son, the ponderous critic of the system, who 
 would hang a dog if he read c Lycidas * twice, 
 who wrote the lives of the poets and left out the 
 poets, even he loved Goldsmith ! and Johnson 
 was Dryden's critical bear, a rough bear, and with 
 points of noble beardom. But while he growled 
 the leaves of the greenwood fell; and oh, how 
 sick to faintness grew the poetry of England ! 
 Anna Seward " by'r lady," was the te muse" of 
 those days, and Mr, Hayley " the bard," and 
 Hannah More wrote our dramas, and Helen 
 
192 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 Williams our odes, and Rosa Matilda our ele- 
 giacs, — and Blacklock, blind from his birth, our 
 descriptive poems, and Mr. Whalley our " do- 
 mestic epics," and Darwin our poetical philo- 
 sophy, and Lady Millar encouraged literature 
 at Bath, with red taffeta and " the vase." But 
 the immortal are threatened vainly. It was 
 the sickness of renewal rather than of death; 
 St. Leon had his fainting hand on the elixir: 
 the new era was alive in Cowper. We do not 
 speak of him as the master of a transition, 
 only as a hinge on which it slowly turned ; 
 only as an earnest tender writer, and true poet 
 enough to be true to himself. Cowper sang in 
 England, and Thomas Warton also, — of a weaker 
 voice but in tune : and Beattie, for whom we 
 have too much love to analyse it, seeing that we 
 drew our childhood's first poetic pleasure from 
 his ' Minstrel/ And Burns walked in glory on 
 the Scottish mountain's side : and everywhere 
 Dr. Percy's collected ballads were sowing the 
 great hearts of some still living for praise, with 
 impulses of greatness. It was the revival of 
 poetry, the opening of the fifth era, the put- 
 ting down of the Dry den dynasty, the breaking 
 
1 9 3 
 
 of the serf bondage, the wrenching of the iron 
 from the soul. And Nature and Poetry did 
 embrace one an. ad all men who were 
 
 lovers oi either and of our beloved England, 
 were enabled to i he pride of their con- 
 
 sciousness, a . i i 1 the world say 
 
 gently, yet gladly, ''-'Our Poets." 
 
 TV hen Mr. Wordsworth gave his first poems 
 to the public, it was not well with poetry in 
 England. The •'•'system" riveted upon the mo- 
 tions of poetry by Dryden and his dynasty 
 had gradually a hied to the restraint ca shivery. 
 its weakness and emasculation. The 
 from poetry to rh ther 
 
 ices of rhetoric. We 
 no longer to complain of Po] 's antithetic 
 glories: there was ■• a vile antithesis' 3 : 
 also. The followers were not as the master ; 
 and the very facility with which the 
 acoustical mechanics was caught up by the for- 
 mer — admitting of " singing for the I 
 
 ten fingers each for natural endowm 
 and the ability to count tin :. — 
 
 made wider and more apparent I 
 dignity between the Popes and the Pope Joa is 
 
 o 
 
194 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 Little by little, by slow and desolate degrees, 
 Thought had perished out of the way of the ap- 
 pointed and most beaten rhythm; and we had 
 the beaten rhythm, without the living footstep — 
 we had the monotony of the military movement, 
 without the heroic impulse — the cross of the 
 Legion of Honour, hung, as it once was, in a 
 paroxysm of converted Eourbonism, at a horse's 
 tail; and the "fork," which expelled nature, 
 dropped feebly downward, blunted of its point. 
 And oh ! to see who sat then in England, in 
 the seats of the elders ! The Elizabethan men 
 would have gnashed their teeth at such a sight ; 
 the Queen Anne's men would have multiplied 
 Dunciads. Of the third George's men (A^ailSe? 
 ov/c er A^aioc) Hayley, too good a scholar to 
 bear to be so bad a poet, was a chief hope, — 
 and Darwin, mistaker of the optic nerve for the 
 poetical sense, an inventive genius. 
 
 Eut Cowper had a great name, and Burns 
 a greater ; and the reveille of Dr. Percy's ' E.e- 
 liques of English Poetry ' was echoed presently 
 by the e Scottish Minstrelsy.' There was a 
 change, a revival, an awakening, a turning, at 
 least upon the pillow, of some who slept on in 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 195 
 
 mediocrity, as if they felt the daylight on their 
 shut eyelids : there was even a group of noble 
 hearts (Coleridge, the idealist, poet among poets, 
 in their midst), foreseeing the sun. Nature, the 
 long banished, re-dawned like the morning : Na- 
 ture, the true mother, cried afar off to her chil- 
 dren, " Children, I am here ! come to me." It 
 was a hard act to come, and involved the learn- 
 ing and the leaving of much. Conventionalities 
 of phrase and rhythm, conventional dialects set 
 apart for poets, conventional words, attitudes, 
 and manners, consecrated by " wits," — all such 
 Nessian trappings were to be wrenched off, even 
 to the cuticle into which they had urged their 
 poison. But it was an act not too hard for the 
 doing. There was a visible movement towards 
 nature; the majority moving of course with re- 
 servation, but individuals with decision; some 
 rending downward their garments of pestilent 
 embroidery, and casting themselves at her feet. 
 As the chief of the movement, the Xenophon of 
 the return, we are bound to acknowledge this 
 great Wordsworth, and to admire how, in a 
 bravery bravest of all because born of love, in a 
 passionate unreservedness spruug of genius, and 
 
196 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 to the actual scandal of the world which stared 
 at the filial familiarity, he threw himself not at 
 the feet of Nature, but straightway and right 
 tenderly upon her bosom. And so, trustfully 
 as child before mother, self-renouncingly as 
 child after sin, absorbed away from the consi- 
 deration of publics and critics as child at play- 
 hours, with a simplicity startling to the blase 
 critical ear as inventiveness, with an innocent 
 utterance felt by the competent thinker to be 
 wisdom, and with a faithfulness to natural im- 
 pressions acknowledged since by all to be the 
 highest art, — this William Wordsworth did sing 
 his ' Lyrical Ballads ' where the ' Art of criti- 
 cism' had been sung before, and "the world 
 would not let them die." 
 
 The voice of nature has a sweetness which 
 few of us, when sufficiently tried, can gainsay ; 
 it penetrates our artificial "tastes," and over- 
 comes us ; and our ignorance seldom proves 
 strong, in proportion to our instincts. We re- 
 cognize, like Ulysses' dog, with feeble joyous 
 gesture the master's voice : and the sound is 
 nearly always pleasant to us, however we may 
 want strength to follow after it. But, while at 
 
THE BOOK OF THR POETS. 197 
 
 the period we refer to, the recognition and gra- 
 t illation were true and deep, the old convention- 
 alities and prejudices hung heavily in bondage 
 and repression. The great body of readers 
 would recoil to the Drydenic rhythm, to the 
 Queen Anne's poetical cant, to anti-Saxonisms 
 whether in Latin or French ; or exacted as a 
 condition of a poet's faithfulness to nature, such 
 an effervescence of his emotions, as had rendered 
 Pope natural in the Eloisa. " Let us all forsooth 
 be Eloisa and so natural/' — the want was an ex- 
 cuse for loving nature ; and the opinion went, 
 that the daily heart-beat was more obnoxious 
 in poetry than the incidental palpitation. Poor 
 Byron (true miserable genius, soul-blind great 
 poet !) ministered to this singular need, identi- 
 fying poetry and passion. Poetry ought to be 
 the revelation of the complete man — and Byron's 
 manhood having no completion nor entirety, 
 consisting on the contrary of a one-sided pas- 
 sionateness, his poems discovered not a heart, 
 but the wound of a heart ; not humanity, but 
 disease ; not life, but a crisis. It was not so — 
 it was not in the projection of a passionate 
 emotion, that William "Wordsworth committed 
 
198 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 himself to nature, but in full resolution and 
 determinate purpose. He is scarcely, perhaps, 
 of a passionate temperament, although still less 
 is he cold ; rather quiet in his love, as the stock- 
 dove, and brooding over it as constantly, and 
 with as soft an inward song lapsing outwardly — 
 serene through deepness — saying himself of his 
 thoughts, that they " do often lie too deep for 
 tears ;" which does not mean that their pain- 
 fulness will not suffer them to be wept for, but 
 that their closeness to the supreme Truth hal- 
 lows them, like the cheek of an archangel, from 
 tears. Call him the very opposite of Byron, 
 who, with narrower sympathies for the crowd, 
 yet stood nearer to the crowd, because every- 
 body understands passion. Byron was a poet 
 through pain. Wordsworth is a feeling man, 
 because he is a thoughtful man ; he knows grief 
 itself by a reflex emotion ; by sympathy, rather 
 than by suffering. He is eminently and humanly 
 expansive; and, spreading his infinite egotism 
 over all the objects of his contemplation, reiter- 
 ates the love, life, and poetry of his peculiar 
 being in transcribing and chanting the material 
 universe, and so sinks a broad gulf between his 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 199 
 
 descriptive poetry and that of the Darwinian 
 painter-poet school. Darwin was, as we have 
 intimated, all optic nerve. "Words worth's eye 
 is his soul. He does not see that which he 
 does not intellectually discern, and he beholds 
 his own cloud-capped Helvellyn under the same 
 conditions with which he would contemplate a 
 grand spiritual abstraction. In his view of the 
 exterior world, — as in a human Spinozism, — 
 mountains and men's hearts share in a sublime 
 unity of humanity ; yet his Spinozism does in 
 nowise affront God, for he is eminently a reli- 
 gious poet, if not, indeed, altogether as generous 
 and capacious in his Christianity as in his poetry ; 
 and, being a true Christian poet, he is scarcely 
 least so when he is not writing directly upon the 
 subject of religion ; just as we learn sometimes 
 without looking up, and, by the mere colour of 
 the grass, that the sky is cloudless. But what 
 is most remarkable in this great writer is, his 
 poetical consistency. There is a wonderful unity 
 in these multiform poems of one man; they are 
 " bound each to each in natural piety/' even as 
 his days are : and why ? because they are \\\< 
 davs — all his days, work days and Sabbath days 
 
200 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 — his life, in fact, and not the unconnected works 
 of his life, as vulgar men do opine of poetry and 
 do rightly opine of vulgar poems, but the sign, 
 seal, and representation of his life — nay, the 
 actual audible breathing of his inward spirit's 
 life. When Milton said that a poet's life should 
 be a poem, he spoke a high moral truth ; if he had 
 added a reversion of the saying, that a poet's 
 poetry should be his life, — he would have spoken 
 a critical truth, not low. 
 
 " Foole, saide my muse to mee, looke in thine 
 hearte and write," — and not only, we must re- 
 peat, at feast times, fast times, or curfew times 
 — not only at times of crisis and emotion, but 
 at all hours of the clock ; for that which God 
 thought good enough to write, or permit the 
 writing of on His book, the heart, is not too 
 common, let us be sure, to write again in the 
 best of our poems. William Wordsworth wrote 
 these common things of nature, and by no means 
 in a phraseology nor in a style. He was daring 
 in his commonness as any of your Tamerlanes 
 may be daring when far fetching an alien image 
 from an outermost world ; and, notwithstanding 
 the ribald cry of that "vox populi" which has, 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 201 
 
 in the criticism of poems, so little the character 
 of divinity, and which loudly and mockingly, at 
 his first utterance, denied the sanctity of his 
 simplicities, — the Nature he was faithful to 
 " betrayed not the heart which loved her," but, 
 finally, justifying herself and him, " did ;; — 
 without the ' Edinburgh Review/ 
 
 " Hero-worshippers," as we are, and sitting 
 for all the critical pretence — in right or wrong 
 of which we speak at all — at the feet of Mr. 
 Wordsworth, — recognizing him, as we do, as 
 poet-hero of a movement essential to the better 
 being of poetry, as poet-prophet of utterances 
 greater than those who first listened could com- 
 prehend, and of influences most vital and expan- 
 sive — we are yet honest to confess that certain 
 things in the ' Lyrical Ballads ' which most pro- 
 voked the ignorant innocent hootings of the 
 mob, do not seem to us all heroic. Love, like 
 ambition, may overvault itself; and Betty Foys 
 of the Lake school (so called) may be as sub- 
 ject to conventionalities as Pope's Lady Bettys. 
 And, perhaps, our great poet might, through 
 the very vehemence and nobleness of his hero 
 and prophet- work for nature, confound, for some 
 
202 THE BOOK Of THE POETS. 
 
 blind moment, and,, by an association easily 
 traced and excused, nature with rusticity, the 
 simple with the bald ; and even fall into a 
 vulgar conventionality in the act of spurning a 
 graceful one. If a trace of such confounding 
 may occasionally be perceived in Mr. Words- 
 worth's earlier poetry, few critics are mad 
 enough, to-day, to catch at the loose straws 
 of the full golden sheaf and deck out withal 
 their own arrogant fronts, in the course of 
 mouthing mocks at the poet. The veriest critic 
 of straw knoweth well, at this hour of the day, 
 that if Mr. Wordsworth was ever over-rustic, it 
 was not through incapacity to be right royal ; 
 that of all poets, indeed, who have been kings in 
 England, not one has swept the purple with more 
 majesty than this poet, when it hath pleased 
 him to be majestic. Vlvat rex, — and here is a 
 new volume of his reign. Let us rejoice, for the 
 sake of literature and the age, in the popularity 
 which is ready for it, and in the singular happi- 
 ness of a great poet living long enough to re- 
 bound from the "fell swoop " of his poetical 
 destiny, survive the ignorance of his public, and 
 convict the prejudices of his reviewers. It is a 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 203 
 
 literal " poetical justice," and one rarest of all, 
 that a great poet should stand in a permitted 
 sovereignty, without doing so, like poor Inez de 
 Castro, by right of death. It is almost wonder- 
 ful that his country should clap her hands in 
 praise of him, before he has ceased to hear : the 
 applause resembles an anachronism. Is Air. 
 Wordsworth startled at receiving from his con- 
 temporaries what he expected only from poste- 
 rity ? — is he asking himself, " Have I done any- 
 thing wrong ? " Probably not : it is at least 
 with his usual air of calm and advised dignity 
 that he addresses his new volume in its Envoy : 
 
 Go single, — yet aspiring to he joined 
 With thy forerunners, that through many a year 
 Have faithfully prepared each other's way — 
 Go forth upon a mission best fulfilled 
 When and wherever, in this changeful world, 
 Power hath been given to please for higher ends 
 Thaii pleasure only ; gladdening to prepare 
 For wholesome sadness, troubling to refine, 
 Calming to raise. 
 
 — words of the poet, which form a nobler de- 
 scription of the character and uses of his poetry, 
 than could be given in any words of a critic. 
 
204 THE BOOK OP THE POETS. 
 
 We do not say that the finest of Mr. Words- 
 worth's productions are to be found or should 
 be looked for in the present volume ; but the 
 volume is worthy of its forerunners, consistent 
 in noble earnestness and serene philosophy; true 
 poet's work, — the hand trembling not a jot for 
 years or weariness, — the full face of the soul 
 turned hopefully and stilly as ever towards the 
 True, and catching across its ridge the ideal- 
 ized sunlight of the Beautiful. And yet if we 
 were recording angel, instead of only recording 
 reviewer, we should drop a tear — another — and 
 end by weeping out that series of sonnets in 
 favour of capital punishments, — moved that a 
 hand which has traced Zi/i?- warrants so long for 
 the literature of England, should thus sign a 
 misplaced " Benedicite " over the hangman and 
 his victim. We turn away from them to other 
 sonnets — to forget aught in Mr. Wordsworth's 
 poetry we must turn to his poetry : — and how- 
 ever the greatest poets of our country, — the 
 Shakespeares, Spensers, Miltons, — worked upon 
 high sonnet-ground, not one opened over it such 
 broad and pouring sluices of various thought, ima- 
 gery, and emphatic eloquence as he has done. 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 205 
 
 The tender Palinodia is beyond Petrarch : — 
 
 Though I beheld at first with blank surprise 
 
 This work, I now have gazed on it so long, 
 
 I see its truth with unreluctant eyes ; 
 
 0, my beloved ! I have done thee wrong, 
 
 Conscious of blessedness, but. whence it springs 
 
 Ever too heedless, as I now perceive : 
 
 Mom into noon did pass, noon into eve, 
 
 And the old day was welcome as the young, 
 
 A? welcome and as beautiful— in sooth 
 
 More beautiful, as being a thing more holy ; 
 
 Thanks to thy virtues, to the eternal youth 
 
 Of all thy goodness, never melancholy ; 
 
 To thy large heart and humble mind, that cast 
 
 Into one vision, future, present, past ! 
 
 That "more beautiful" is most beautiful : all 
 human love's cunning is in it, besides the full 
 glorifying smile of Christian love. 
 
 Last in the volume is the tragedy of ' The 
 Borderers/ which having lain for some fifty 
 years " unregarded " among its author's papers. 
 — a singular destiny for these printing clays when 
 our very morning-talk seems to fall naturally 
 into pica type, — caused, in its announcement 
 from afar, the most faithful disciples to tremble 
 for the possible failure of their master. Perhaps 
 
206 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 they trembled with cause. The master, indeed, 
 was a prophet of humanity ; but he was wiser 
 in love than terror, in admiration than pity, and 
 rather intensely than actively human j capacious 
 to embrace within himself the whole nature of 
 things and beings, but not going out of himself 
 to embrace anything ; a poet of one large suffi- 
 cient soul, but not polypsychical like a drama- 
 tist. Therefore his disciples trembled : and we 
 will not say that the tragedy, taken as a whole, 
 does not justify the fear. There is something 
 grand and Greek in the intention which hinges 
 it, showing how crime makes crime in cursed ge- 
 neration, and how black hearts, like whiter ones 
 (Topaze or Ebene), do cry out and struggle for 
 sympathy and brotherhood ; granting that black 
 heart (Oswald) may stand something too much 
 on the extreme of evil to represent humanity 
 broadly enough for a drama to turn upon. The 
 action, too, although it does not, as might have 
 been apprehended, lose itself in contemplation, 
 has no unhesitating firm dramatic march — per- 
 haps it " potters " a little, to take a word from 
 Mrs. Butler; — and when all is done we look 
 vainly within us for an impression, the response 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 207 
 
 to the unity of the whole. But again, when all 
 is done, the work is Mr. "Wordsworth's, and the 
 conceptions and utterances living and voiceful in 
 it, bear no rare witness to the master. The old 
 blind man, left to the ordeal of the desert — the 
 daughter in agony hangiug upon the murderer 
 for consolation — knock against the heart, and 
 take back answers ; and ever and anon there are 
 sweet gushings of such words as this poet only 
 knows, showing how, in a "late remorse of 
 love," he relapses into pastoral dreams, notwith- 
 standing his new vocation, and within the very 
 sight of the theatric thymele : — 
 
 A grove of darker and more lofty shade 
 
 I never saw. The music of the birds 
 
 Drops deadened from a roof so thick with leaves. 
 
 Who can overpass the image of the old inno- 
 cent man praying ? — 
 
 The name of daughter on his lips, he prays ! 
 With nerves so steady, that the very flies 
 Sit unmolested on his staflF. 
 
 But we come hastily to the moral of our story, 
 — seeing that Mr. Wordsworth's life does present 
 a high moral to his generation, to forget which 
 
208 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 in his poetry would be an unworthy compliment 
 to the latter. It is advantageous for us all, 
 whether poets or poetasters, or talkers about 
 either, to know what a true poet is, what his 
 work is, and what his patience and successes 
 must be, so as to raise the popular idea of these 
 things, and either strengthen or put down the 
 individual aspiration. " Art," it was said long 
 ago, "requires the whole man," and "Nobody," 
 it was said later, " can be a poet who is anything 
 else ;" but the present idea of Art requires the 
 segment of a man, and everybody who is any- 
 thing at all, is a poet in a parenthesis. And our 
 shelves groan with little books over which their 
 readers groan less metaphorically ; there is a 
 plague of poems in the land apart from poetry ; 
 and many poets who live and are true, do not 
 live by their truth, but hold back their full 
 strength from Art because they do not reverence 
 it fully ; and all booksellers cry aloud and do 
 not spare, that poetry will not sell ; and certain 
 critics utter melancholy frenzies, that poetry is 
 worn out for ever — as if the morning-star was 
 worn out from heaven, or " the yellow primrose " 
 from the grass ; and Mr. D'Israeli the younger, 
 
THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 209 
 
 like Bildad comforting Job, suggests that we 
 may content ourselves for the future with a 
 rhythmetic prose, printed like prose for decency, 
 and supplied, for comfort, with a parish allow- 
 ance of two or three rhymes to a paragraph. 
 Should there be any whom such a ' New Poor 
 Law ' would content, we are far from wishing to 
 disturb the virtue of their serenity: let them 
 continue, like the hypochondriac, to be very 
 sure that they have lost their souls, inclusive of 
 their poetic instincts. In the meantime the 
 hopeful and believing will hope, — trust on ; and, 
 better still, the Tennysons and the Brownings, 
 and other high-gifted spirits, will work, wait on, 
 until, as Mr. Home has said — 
 
 Strong deeds awake, 
 And clamouring, throng the portals of the hour. 
 
 It is well for them and all to count the cost 
 of this life of a master in poetry, and learn from 
 it what a true poet's crown is worth ; to recall 
 both the long life's work for its sake — the work 
 of observation, of meditation, of reaching past 
 models into nature, of reaching past nature unto 
 God ; and the early life's loss for its sake — the 
 
 p 
 
210 THE BOOK OF THE POETS. 
 
 loss of the popular cheer, of the critical assent, 
 and of the " money in the purse." It is well 
 and full of exultation to remember now what a 
 silent, blameless, heroic life of poetic duty, this 
 man has lived ; — how he never cried rudely 
 against the world because he was excluded for a 
 time from the parsley garlands of its popularity ; 
 nor sinned morally because he was sinned against 
 intellectually; nor, being tempted and threatened 
 by paymaster and reviewer, swerved from the 
 righteousness and high aims of his inexorable 
 genius. And it cannot be ill to conclude by en- 
 forcing a high example by some noble precepts 
 which, taken from the ' Musophilus ' of old 
 Daniel, do contain, to our mind, the very code 
 of chivalry for poets : — 
 
 Be it that my unseasonable song 
 
 Come out of Time, that fault is in the Time ; 
 And I must not do virtue so much wrong 
 
 As love her aught the worse for other's crime. 
 
 And for my part, if only one allow 
 
 The cart' my labouring spirits take in this, 
 
 He is to me a theatre large enow, 
 And his applause only sufficient is — 
 
THE BOOK OF THE I 21 1 
 
 All my respect is bent but to his brow ; 
 
 That is my all. and all I amis his. 
 And if some worthy spirits - too, 
 
 It shall i. ifort breed, but not more will. 
 
 But what if none - It cannot 
 
 I U: 
 
 ' that I w 
 Th - I I 
 
 THE END. 
 
 JOE- 
 
W ORKS 
 
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 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
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