FAME.* airs and sounds, and bright skies, and woodland solitudes, and moonlight bowers, which are the THE PERISHABLE NATURE OF POETICAL material elements of poetry-and that fine sense of their undefinable relation to mental emotion, which is its essence and vivifying soul-and which, in the midst of Shakespeare's most busy and atrocious scenes, falls like gleams of sunshine on rocks and ruins-contrasting with all that is rugged and repulsive, and reminding us of the existence of purer and brighter elementswhich he alone has poured out from the richness of his own mind without effort or restraint, and contrived to intermingle with the play of all the passions, and the vulgar course of this world's affairs, without deserting for an instant the proper business of the scene, or appearing to pause or digress from love of ornament or need of repose; he alone who, when the subject requires it, is always keen, and worldly, and practical, and who yet, without changing his hand, or stopping his course, scatters around him as he goes all sounds and shapes of sweetness, and conjures up landscapes of immortal fragrance and freshness, and peoples them with spirits of glorious aspect and attractive grace, and is a thousand times more full of imagery and splendour than those who, for the sake of such qualities, have shrunk back from the delineation of character or passion, and declined the discussion of human duties and cares. More full of wisdom, and ridicule, and sagacity, than all the moralists and satirists in existence, he is more wild, airy, and inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the poets of all regions and ages of the world; and has all those elements so happily mixed up in him, and bears his high faculties so temperately, that the most severe reader cannot complain of him for want of strength or of reason, nor the most sensitive for defect of ornament or ingenuity. Everything in him is in unmeasured abundance and unequalled perfection; but everything so balanced and kept in subordination as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of another. The most exquisite | poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions, are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as merely to adorn without loading the sense they accompany. Although his sails are purple, and perfumed, and his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage, not less, but more rapidly and directly, than if they had been composed of baser materials. All his excellences, like those of Nature herself, are thrown out together; and instead of interfering with, support and recommend each other. His flowers are not tied up in garlands, nor his fruits crushed into baskets, but spring living from the soil, in all the dew and freshness of youth; while the graceful foliage in which they lurk, and the ample branches, the rough and vigorous stem, and the wide-spreading roots on which they depend, are present along with them, and share, in their places, the equal care of their Creator. Next to the impression of the vast fertility, compass, and beauty of our English poetry, the reflection that recurs most frequently and forcibly to us in accompanying Mr Campbell through his wide survey, is the perishable nature of poetical fame, and the speedy oblivion that has overtaken so many of the promised heirs of immortality. Of near two hundred and fifty authors, whose works are cited in these volumes, by far the greater part of whom were celebrated in their generation, there are not thirty who now enjoy anything that can be called popularity—whose works are to be found in the hands of ordinary readers, in the shops of ordinary booksellers, or in the press for republication. About fifty more may be tolerably familiar to men of taste or literature: the rest slumber on the shelves of collectors, and are partially known to a few antiquaries and scholars. Now, the fame of a poet is popular, or nothing. He does not address himself, like the man of science, to the learned, or those who desire to learn, but to all mankind; and his purpose being to delight and to be praised, necessarily extends to all who can receive pleasure, or join in applause. It is strange, and somewhat humiliating, to see how great a proportion of those who had once fought their way successfully to distinction, and surmounted the rivalry of contemporary envy, have again sunk into neglect. We have great deference for public opinion; and readily admit that nothing but what is good can be permanently popular. But though its vivat be generally oracular, its pereat appears to us to be often sufficiently capricious; and while we would foster all that it bids to live, we would willingly revive much that it leaves to die. The very multiplication of works of amusement necessarily withdraws many from notice that deserve to be kept in remembrance; for we should soon find it labour, and not amusement, if we were obliged to make use of them all, or even to take all upon trial. As the materials of enjoyment and instruction accumulate around us, more and more must thus be daily rejected and left to waste: for while our tasks lengthen, our lives remain as short as ever; and the calls on our time multiply, while our time itself is flying swiftly away. This superfluity and abundance of our treasures, therefore, necessarily renders much of them worthless; and the veriest accidents may, in such a case, determine what part shall be preserved, and what thrown away and neglected. When an army is decimated, the very bravest may fall; and many poets, worthy of eternal remembrance, have been forgotten, merely because there was not room in our memories for all. * From a review of Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets." By such a work as the "Specimens," however, this injustice of fortune may be partly redressed -some small fragments of an immortal strain may still be rescued from oblivion-and a wreck of a name preserved, which time appeared to have swallowed up for ever. There is something pious, we think, and endearing, in the office of thus gathering up the ashes of renown that has passed away; or rather, of calling back the departed life for a transitory glow, and enabling those great spirits which seemed to be laid for ever, still to draw a tear of pity, or a throb of admiration, from the hearts of a forgetful generation. The body of their poetry, probably, can never be revived; but some sparks of its spirit may yet be preserved, in a narrower and feebler frame. When we look back upon the havoc which two hundred years have thus made in the ranks of our immortals-and, above all, when we refer their rapid disappearance to the quick succession of new competitors, and the accumulation of more good works than there is time to perusewe cannot help being dismayed at the prospect which lies before the writers of the present day. There never was an age so prolific of popular poetry as that in which we now live; and as wealth, population, and education extend, the produce is likely to go on increasing. The last ten years have produced, we think, an annual supply of about ten thousand lines of good staple poetry-poetry from the very first hands that we can boast of-that runs quickly to three or four large editions-and is as likely to be permanent as present success can make it. Now, if that goes on for a hundred years longer, what a task will await the poetical readers of 1919 Our living poets will then be nearly as old as Pope and Swift are at present, but there will stand between them and that generation nearly ten times as much fresh and fashionable poetry as is now interposed between us and those writers; and if Scott, and Byron, and Campbell, have already cast Pope and Swift a good deal into the shade, in what form and dimensions are they themselves likely to be presented to the eyes of their great-grandchildren? The thought, we own, is a little appalling; and, we confess, we see nothing better to imagine than that they may find a comfortable place in some new collection of specimens-the centenary of the present publication. There-if the future editor have anything like the indulgence and veneration for antiquity of his predecessor- there shall posterity still hang with rapture on the half of Campbell, and the fourth part of Byron, and the sixth of Scott, and the scattered tithes of Crabbe, and the three per cent. of Southey; while some good-natured critic shall sit in our mouldering chair, and more than half prefer them to those by whom they have been superseded! It is an hyperbole of good-nature, however, we fear, to ascribe to them even those dimensions at the end of a century. After a lapse of two hundred and fifty years, we are afraid to think of the space they may have shrunk into. We have no Shakespeare, alas! to shed a never-setting light on his contemporaries; and if we continue to write and rhyme at the present rate for two hundred years longer, there must be some new art of short-hand reading invented, or all reading must be given up in despair. JOHN WILSON. STREAMS. BORN 1785: DIED 1854. (From Blackwood's Magazine.) How delightful, even to elders like us, to feel Spring breathing once more over air and earth! We have been quite happy and contented with Winter, however severe; nor have we ever felt the slightest inclination to be satirical on that hoary personage. On the contrary, there is not a season of them all whom we love better than hale, honest, old Winter. But when he has migrated from the lengthening days, we think cheerfully on the last time we shook hands with him; and knowing that he is as regular as clockwork, have no doubts of his return as soon as he hears that we have again laid in our November stock of coals and corned beef. Indeed, his son, Spring, has so strong a family resemblance to his father, that were it not for the difference of their complexion, and a totally dissimilar style of dress, we should frequently mistake the one for the other. The likeness, however, wears off as we become better acquainted with the young heir-apparent, and find that, with most of his father's virtues, he possesses many peculiar to himself; while in every point of manners or lesser morals, he bears away both the bell and the palm from his sire. Like the old gentleman, he is occasionally cold to strangers-biting in his remarks-or wrapt up within himself; but his iciness soon thaws-his face becomes animated in the extreme-his language is even flowery-and putting his arm kindly within yours, there is nothing he likes so well as to propose a walk among the pleasant banks and braes, now alive with the new-born lambs, through whose bleating you can but faintly hear the lark returning from heaven. We seldom are exposed to any very strong temptation to leave town till about the second week in April. Up to that time the dinners have complete power over us, and we could not tear ourselves away without acute anguish. Lamb (see last paragraph) has been exquisite for weeks; and when enjoyed at the table of a friend, not expensive. Garden stuffs, too, have purified our blood, and, if that be possible, increased our appetite. Spring has agreeably affected our animal being, without having as yet made any very forcible appeal to our intellectual or moral system. To leave town during such a crisis of private affairs would obviously be inconsistent with our judicious character. Take them on the whole, and the best dinners of a cycle of seven years will be found to fall in the months of March and April. We have verified this fact by tables of observation kept for eightand-twenty years, now in the temporary possession of Dr Kitchener, who has been anxiously collating them with his own private Gastronomical Journal. Yet in spite of such tender ties, by which we are bound to the urbane board well on into April, our poetical imagination is frequently tempting us away into the country. All such temptations we manfully resist; and to strengthen us in the struggle, we never refuse a dinner invitation, except when we have reason to know that we shall be asked to eat patés. Mr Coleridge, meaning to be very severe on Mr Jeffrey for having laughed at some verses of Mr Wordsworth's, about "the child being father of the man," declares somewhere or other, that not willingly would he gaze on a setting sun with a man capable of the enormity of such a criticism. On the same principles precisely, not willingly would we gaze on the setting sun with any man who, in his own house, had ever asked us to begin dinner with a paté. Such a request shows a littleness of soul and stomach that could comprehend the glory neither of a setting sun nor a round of beef-two of the very best things in their own way, in heaven or on earth. But about the "very middle and waist" of April, we order a search through our wardrobe for trousers, striped and spotted waistcoats, jackets, foraging-caps, and thick-soled shoes, called by our housekeeper clampers. Then we venture to open our eyes and look a little abroad over the suburban gardens and nurseries. We had doggedly determined, indeed, not to take any notice of spring symptoms before that time, for fear of pining away for the green fields. Accordingly we wore our greatcoat as faithfully as if it were part of ourselves, even during the soft days that now and then came balmy over the city gardens during the somewhat surly month of March. We rather kept our eyes on the ground in passing by rows of poplars, which we knew from the sweet scent were more than budding in the sunshine. When a bee hummed past us about the suburbs, we pretended not to hear her; and as to the sparrows, why, they twitter all the year through, almost as heartily as if they were inditing valentines, and their chatter never disturbs us. In short, we wish to enjoy the first gentle embrace of spring in some solitary spot, where nothing will impede the mutual flow of our spirits, but where "the world forgetting, by the world forgot," we may wander away together into the ideal lands of the imagination, nor care if we ever more return to this weary and distracted life. How pleasant, on a stated day and hour, to walk into Buchanan Lodge, an expected head of a house! All the domestics delighted to behold their beloved master hobbling towards the porch. Every window so clear, that you know not there is glass-the oilskin on the lobby-floor glancing undimmed-nestlings in a twitter over all the clustering verandas; but all this is subject for a future leading article, whereas the title of the present is-Streams. And first a few words in praise of running streams, and let us panegyrise them in SPATES. Then the rill-pretty pigmy no longer-springs up in an hour to stream's estate. Like a stripling who has been unexpectedly left a fortune by an old uncle, he gives his home, in a hollow of the broomy braes, the slip, and away off, in full cry and gallop, to "poos his fortune" in the world, down in the "laigh kintra." Many a tumble he gets over waterfalls, and often do you hear him shouting before he gets out of the wood. He sings although it be Sunday, and hurries past the kirk during the time of divine service, yet not without joining for a moment in the psalm. As the young lasses are returning from kirk to cottage, he behaves rudely to them, while, high-kilted, they are crossing the fords; and ere their giggle-blended shrieks subside, continues his career, as Dr Jamieson says, in his spirited ballad on the water-kelpie, "loud nechering in a lauch." And now he is all a-foam in his fury, like a chestnut horse. The sheep and lambs stare at him in astonishment; and Mr Wordsworth's Old Ram, who is so poetically described in the "Excursion" as admiring his horns and beard, face and figure, in one of the clear pools of the Brathay, the Pride of Windermere, were he now on a visit to Scotland, would die of disappointed self-love, a heartbroken Narcissus. On he goes the rill-rivulet"neither to haud nor to bin'"-a most uproarious hobbledehoy. He is just at that time of life-say about seventeen-when the passions are at their worst or their best-'tis hard to say which-at their newest certainly, and perhaps at their strongest, and when they listen to no voice but their own, which then seems to fill heaven and earth with music. But what noise is this! Thunder? No-a Corra Linn, or a Stonebyres of a waterfall. Lo! yonder a great river sweeping along the strath. The rillrivulet, with one shiver and shudder-for now 'tis too late to turn back, and onwards he is driven by his own weight, which is only another name for his own destiny-leaps with a sudden plunge into the red roaring spate, and in an instant loses his name and nature, and disappears for ever. Just so it is with the young human prodigal, lost in the swollen river of life thundering over the world's precipices. Turn for a moment to the Grampians. You are all alone-quite by yourself-no object seems alive in existence-for the eagle is mute-the antlers of the red-deer, though near, invisible not one small moorland bird is astir among the brackens-no ground bee is at work on the sullen heather-and the aspect of the earth is grim as that of heaven. Hark! From what airt moans the thunder? "Tis like an earthquake. Now it growls. Yonder cloud, a minute ago deep blue, is now black as pitch. All the mountains seem to have gathered themselves together under it and see-see how it flashes with fire! Ay, that is thunder-one peal split into a hundred-a cannonade worthy the battle of the gods and giants, when the sons of Terra strove to storm the gates of Uranus. Would that Dan Virgil were here-or Lord Byron! O Dr Blair! Dr Blair! why didst thou object to the close of that glorious description-"DENSISSIMUS IMBER?" Jupiter Pluvius has smitten the Grampians with a rod of lightning, and in a moment they are all tumbling with cataracts. Now every great glen has its own glorious river-some red as blood, some white as snow, and some yet blue in their portentous beauty as that one thin slip of sky that, as we are looking, is sucked into the clouds. Each rill, each torrent, each river, has its own peculiar voice; and methinks we distinguish one music from another as we dream ourselves away into the heart of that choral anthem. Woe to the "wee bouracks o' houses" bigged on the holmlands! Bridges! that have felt the iceflaws of a thousand winters rebounding from your abutments, as from cliff to cliff you spanned the racing thunder, this night will be your last! Your keystones shall be loosened, and your arches, as at the springing of a mine, heaved up into the air by the resistless waters. There is no shrieking of kelpies. That was but a passionless superstition. But there is shrieking-of widows and of orphans-and of love strong as death, stifled and strangled in the flood that all night long is sweeping corpses and carcasses to the sea. Well, then, streams! The unpardonable thing about Edinburgh is, that she wants a river. Two great straddling bridges without one drop of water! The stranger looks over the battlements of the one, and in the abyss sees our metropolitan markets-through the iron railing of the other, and lo! carts laden with old furniture, and a blind fiddler and his wife roaring ballads to a group of tatterdemalions. What a glory would it be were a great red river to come sud denly down in flood, and sweep away Mound and Bridge to the sea! Alas! for old Holyrood! What new life would be poured into the Gude Auld Town, thus freshened at its foundations! And how beautiful to see the dwindled ship gliding under cloud of sail by the base of our castled cliff! Oh! for the sweet sea murmur, when torrent retreats before tide, and the birds of ocean come floating into the inland woods! Oh! that, "like Horeb's rock beneath the Prophet's hand," yonder steep would let escape into light the living waters! But this wish is a mere whim of the moment, and therefore it is our delight to escape for a week to the brooks of Peebles, or Innerleithen, or Clovenford, or Kelso. Wherever we go to escape the flitting, a stream or river there must be-our ears are useless with. out its murmurs-eyes we might as well have none without its wimpling glitter. Early in life we fell in love with a naiad whom we beheld in a dream, sitting, with her long dishevelled hair veiling her pearly person, by a waterfall; and her every spring have we in vain been seeking, and still hope to find, although she hide from our embrace in a pool far away among the hills that overshadow the lonely source of the Ettrick, or embowered in the beautiful Beauly, delight in the solitude of the Dreme. Nor Yarrow, the beloved of bards of old, well mayest thou be proud of the author of the "Queen's Wake," and many a little pathetic lilt beside-hymn, elegy, and song hast thou heard breathed by him, along with thy own murmurs, during the pensive gloaming. will thy pastoral sister, the Ettrick, be jealous of your loves. For in spirit all the streams are one that flow through the forest. And you too, Ettrick and Yarrow, gathering them all together, come rushing into each other's arms aboon the haughs o' Selkirk, and then flow, Tweed-blent, to the sea. Our shepherd is dear to all the rills that issue in thousands from their own recesses among the braes, for when a poet walks through regions his genius has sung, all nature does him homage, from cloud to clodfrom blue sky to green earth-all living creatures therein included, from the eagle to the mole. James knows this, and is happy among the hills. But the hospitality of Altrive shall not be dismissed thus in a passing paragraph, but shall have a leading article to itself as surely as we know how to honour worth and genius. We called thee, Yarrow, the beloved of bards of old. Ay! flowing in the brightness of thy own peace along the vale, yet wert thou often invoked by minstrels with a voice of weeping. Blood tinged thy banks, nor could the stain be washed away even by the tears of the sons of song. Thine became a traditionary character, if not of sorrow, yet of sadness, and all that is pensive or pastoral has ever seemed to breathe over thy braes. The wanderer carries thither with him a spirit of imaginative grief-an ear open to the mournful echoes of the ancient elegies of war and death. Thus, let the holms of Yarrow glitter to the sunshine as they will, yet, in the words of the old strain, they are "dowie" holms still, just as we always see something sad even in the smiles of a friend whom we know to have been a man of sorrows, although to happiness he has been long restored. Cheerful chants there are about thy braw lads and bonny lasses; but sit down beside any shepherd on the hillside, anywhere in the whole forest, and wher ever "Yarrow, as he flows along, Bears burden to the minstrel's song," depend you upon it, the tale shall be one of tenderness and tears. Such was the determination of the poets of the days that are gone, and such, too, is the spirit, Wordsworth, of that divine strain thou didst breathe, in thy inspiration, when first thy thoughtful eyes beheld the stream that had so long murmured in the light of song. "Delicious is the lay that sings The path that leads them to the grove, "But thou, that didst appear so fair Dost rival in the light of day The grace of foreign charms decayed And why hast thou, wild singing spirit of the Highland Glenorchy, that cheerest the longwithdrawing vale from Inverouren to Dalmally, and from Dalmally church tower to the old castle of Kilchurn, round whose mouldering towers thou sweepest with more pensive murmur, till thy name and existence is lost in that noble loch-why hast thou never had thy bard? "A hundred bards have I had in bygone ages,' is thy reply; "but the Sassenach understands not the traditionary strains, and the music of the Gaelic poetry is wasted on his ear." Songs of war and of love are yet awakened by the shepherds among these lonely braes, and often when the moon rises over Ben Cruachan, and counts her attendant stars in soft reflection beneath the still waters of that long inland sea, she hears the echoes of harps chiming through the silence of departed years. Tradition tells that on no other banks did the fairies so love to thread the mazes of their mystic dance as on the heathy and bracken and oaken banks of the Orchy, during the long summer nights, when the thick-falling dews almost perceptibly swelled the stream, and lent a livelier tinkle to every waterfall. There it was, on a little river-island, that once, whether sleeping or waking we know not, we saw celebrated a fairy's funeral. First we heard small pipes playing, as if no bigger than hollow rushes that whisper to the night winds; and more piteous than aught that trills from earthly instrument was the scarce audible dirge! It seemed to float over the stream, every foambell emitting a plaintive note, till the airy anthem came floating over my couch, and then alighted without ceasing among the heather. The pattering of little feet was heard, as if living creatures were arranging themselves in order, and then there was nothing but a more ordered hymn. The harmony was like the melting of musical dew-drops, and sung, without words, of sorrow and death. I opened my eyes, or rather sight came to them, when closed, and dream was vision! Hundreds of creatures, no taller than the crest of the lapwing, and all hanging down their veiled heads, stood in a circle on a green plat among the rocks; and in the midst was a bier, framed, as it seemed, of flowers unknown to the Highland hills; and on the bier a fairy, lying with uncovered face, pale as the lily, and motionless as the snow. dirge grew fainter and fainter, and then died quite away; when two of the creatures came from the circle, and took their station, one at the head and the other at the foot of the bier. They sang alternate measures, not louder than the twittering of the awakened wood-lark before it goes up the dewy air, but dolorous and full of the desolation of death. The flower-bier stirred; for the spot on which it lay sank slowly down, and in a few moments the green sward was smooth as ever, the very dews glittering above the buried fairy. A cloud passed over the moon, and, with a choral lament, the funeral troop sailed duskily away, heard afar off, so still was the midnight solitude of the glen. Then the disenthralled Orchy began to rejoice as before, through all her streams and falls; and at the sudden leaping of the waters and outbursting of the moon, I awoke. The Away, then, from the isle of the fairy's grave -away on winged thought, at the rate of a hundred miles in the minute, and lo! the Falls of the Beauly! a pleasure party of ladies and gentlemen from Inverness, as I am an editor--and the band of a militia regiment! Well, the "Duke of York's March" is intelligible music, and it is pleasant to count the bars, after that unscientific and bewildering dirge of the greenrobed people. "God save the King," and "Rule | Britannia," are two tunes of which I should never tire, were they to be dinned till doomsday, These alone can we hum truly, and without putting our foot through the air. Nothing so grand as a cataract-accompaniment to martial music! Say what you will about so! |