FROM THE SAME. Council of officers-Albert's directions to prepare for the last extremities. AGAIN the chief th' instructive draught extends, And o'er the figured plane attentive bends! To him the motion of each orb was known, That wheels around the sun's refulgent throne; But here, alas, his science nought avails! Art droops unequal, and experience fails. The different traverses since twilight made, He on the hydrographic circle laid; Then the broad angle of lee-way explored, As swept across the graduated chord. Her place discover'd by the rules of art, Unusual terrors shook the master's heart; When Falconera's rugged isle he found Within her drift, with shelves, and breakers bound; For if on those destructive shallows tost, The helpless bark with all her crew are lost: As fatal still appears, that danger o'er, The steep St. George, and rocky Gardalor. With him the pilots of their hopeless state In mournful consultation now debate. Not more perplexing doubts her chiefs appal When some proud city verges to her fall; While ruin glares around, and pale affright Convenes her councils in the dead of night— No blazon'd trophies o'er their concave spread, Nor storied pillars raised aloft the head: But here the queen of shade around them threw Her dragon-wing, disastrous to the view! Dire was the scene, with whirlwind, hail, and Black melancholy ruled the fearful hour! [shower; Beneath tremendous roll'd the flashing tide, Where fate on every billow seem'd to rideInclosed with ills, by peril unsubdued, Great in distress the master-seaman stood : Skill'd to command, deliberate to advise; Expert in action, and in council wise ; Thus to his partners, by the crew unheard, The dictates of his soul the chief referr'd: Ye faithful mates, who all my troubles share, Approved companions of your master's care! To you, alas! 'twere fruitless now to tell Our sad distress, already known too well! This morn with favouring gales the port we left, Though now of every flattering hope bereft: No skill nor long experience could forecast Th' unseen approach of this destructive blast. These seas, where storms at various seasons blow, No reigning winds nor certain omens know, The hour, th' occasion, all your skill demands; A leaky ship embay'd by dangerous lands, Our bark no transient jeopardy surrounds; Groaning she lies beneath unnumber'd wounds, 'Tis ours the doubtful remedy to find; To shun the fury of the seas and wind. For in this hollow swell, with labour sore, Her flank can bear the bursting floods no more; Yet this or other ills she must endure; A dire disease, and desperate is the cure! Thus two expedients offer'd to your choice, Too true the perils of the present hour, The crew, though harass'd long with toils severe, Thus while he spoke, around from man to man In Neptune's school the wandering stripling taught, But haply Falconera we may shun; He said :-Palemon saw, with grief of heart, Not twice nine summers yet matured his thought. And, chill'd with horror, heard the songs of hell. His mind still shunning care with secret hate, Arion saw, with secret anguish moved, For consolation oft, with healing art, The dreadful purpose Albert thus directs: Unhappy partners in a wayward fate ! Or, shelter'd by some rock, at anchor ride, But if, determined by the will of Heaven, And first let all our axes be secured, Our brave companions through the swelling tide, I know among you some full oft have view'd, Meanwhile the master's voice again they heard, Whom, as with filial duty, all revered. No more remains-but now a trusty band Must ever at the pump industrious stand; And while with us the rest attend to wear, Two skilful seamen to the helm repair !-O Source of life! our refuge and our stay! Whose voice the warring elements obey, On thy supreme assistance we rely; Thy mercy supplicate, if doom'd to die! Perhaps this storm is sent, with healing breath, From neighbouring shores to scourge disease and death! 'Tis ours on thine unerring laws to trust: With thee, great Lord!" whatever is, is just." FROM THE SAME. The vessel going to pieces-death of Albert. AND now, lash'd on by destiny severe, With horror fraught the dreadful scene drew near! The ship hangs hovering on the verge of death, Hell yawns, rocks rise, and breakers roar beneath! In vain, alas! the sacred shades of yore Would arm the mind with philosophic lore; In vain they'd teach us, at the latest breath, To smile serene amid the pangs of death. Even Zeno's self, and Epictetus old, This fell abyss had shudder'd to behold. Had Socrates, for godlike virtue famed, And wisest of the sons of men proclaim'd, Beheld this scene of frenzy and distress, His soul had trembled to its last recess !O yet confirm my heart, ye powers above, This last tremendous shock of fate to prove ; The tottering frame of reason yet sustain ! Nor let this total ruin whirl my brain! In vain the cords and axes were prepared, For now th' audacious seas insult the yard; High o'er the ship they throw a horrid shade, And o'er her burst, in terrible cascade. Uplifted on the surge, to heaven she flies, Her shatter'd top half-buried in the skies, Then headlong plunging thunders on the ground, Earth groans! air trembles! and the deeps resound! Her giant bulk the dread concussion feels, And quivering with the wound, in torment, reels. So reels, convulsed with agonising throes, The bleeding bull beneath the murd'rer's blows.Again she plunges! hark! a second shock Tears her strong bottom on the marble rock! Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries, The fated victims shuddering roll their eyes In wild despair, while yet another stroke, With deep convulsion, rends the solid oak: Till like the mine, in whose infernal cell The lurking demons of destruction dwell, At length asunder torn her frame divides, And crashing spreads in ruin o'er the tides. As o'er the surge the stooping main-mast hung, Till one, who seems in agony to strive, While he, severest sorrow doom'd to feel, MARK AKENSIDE. [Born, 1721. Died, 1770.] Ir may be easy to point out in Akenside a superfluous pomp of expression; yet the character which Pope bestowed on him, "that he was not an every day writer*," is certainly apparent in the decided tone of his moral sentiments, and in his spirited maintenance of great principles. His verse has a sweep of harmony that seems to accord with an emphatic mind. He encountered in his principal poem the more than ordinary difficulties of a didactic subject. "To paint the finest features of the mind, And to most subtle and mysterious things Give colour, strength, and motion."-Book i. The object of his work was to trace the various pleasures which we receive from nature and art to their respective principles in the human imagination, and to show the connexion of those principles with the moral dignity of man, and the final purposes of his creation. His leading speculative ideas are derived from Plato, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Hutchinson. To Addison he has been accused of being indebted for more than he acknowledged; but surely in plagiarisms from the Spectator it might be taken for granted, that no man could have counted on concealment; and [* While he was yet unknown.] there are only three passages (I think) in his poem where his obligations to that source are worthy of noticet. Independent of these, it is true that he adopted Addison's threefold division of the sources of the pleasures of the imagination; but in doing so he properly followed a theory which had the advantage of being familiar to the reader; and when he afterwards substituted another, in recasting his poem, he profited nothing by the change. In the purely ethical and didactic parts of his subject he displays a high zeal of classical feeling, and a graceful development of the philosophy of taste. Though his metaphysics may not be always invulnerable, his general ideas of moral truth are lofty and prepossessing. He is peculiarly eloquent in those passages in which Viz., in his comparison of the Votary of Imagination to a Knight Errant in some enchanted paradise, Pleasures of Imagination, book iii. 1. 507; in his sketch of the village matron, book i. I. 255; and in a passage of book iii. at line 379, beginning "But were not na.ure thus endowed at large." His idea of the final cause of our delight in the vast and illimitable, is the same with one expressed in the Spectator, No. 413 But Addison and he borrowed it in common from the sublime theology of Plato. The leading hint of his well known passage, Say why was man so eminently raised," &c., is avowedly taken from Longinus. he describes the final causes of our emotions of taste he is equally skilful in delineating the processes of memory and association; and he gives an animated view of Genius collecting her stores for works of excellence. All his readers must recollect with what a happy brilliancy he comes out in the simile of art and nature, dividing our admiration when he compares them to the double appearance of the sun distracting his Persian worshipper. But "non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto." The sweetness which we miss in Akenside is that which should arise from the direct representations of life, and its warm realities and affections. We seem to pass in his poem through a gallery of pictured abstractions rather than of pictured things. He reminds us of odours which we enjoy artificially extracted from the flower instead of inhaling them from its natural blossom. It is true that his object was to teach and explain the nature of mind, and that his subject led him necessarily into abstract ideas, but it admitted also of copious scenes, full of solid human interest, to illustrate the philosophy which he taught. Poetry, whatever be its title, should not make us merely contemplate existence, but feel it over again. That descriptive skill which expounds to us the nature of our own emotions, is rather a sedative than a stimulant to enthusiasm. The true poet renovates our emotions, and is not content with explaining them. Even in a philosophical poem on the Imagination, Akenside might have given historical tablets of the power which he delineated; but his illustrations for the most part only consist in general ideas fleetingly personified. There is but one pathetic passage (I think) in the whole poem, namely, that in which he describes the lover embracing the urn of his deceased mistress. On the subject of the passions, in book ii., when our attention evidently expects to be disengaged from abstraction, by spirited draughts illustrative of their influence, how much are we disappointed by the cold and tedious episode of Harmodius's vision, an allegory which is the more intolerable, because it professes to teach us resignation to the will of Heaven, by a fiction which neither imposes on the fancy nor communicates a moral to the understanding. Under the head of "Beauty" he only personifies Beauty herself, and her image leaves upon the mind but a vague impression of a beautiful woman, who might have been anybody. He introduces indeed some illustrations under the topic of ridicule, but in these his solemn manner overlaying the levity of his subjects unhappily produces a contrast which approaches itself to the ridiculous. In treating of novelty he is rather more descriptive; we have the youth breaking from domestic endearments in quest of knowledge, the sage over his midnight lamp, the virgin at her romance, and the village matron relating her stories of witchcraft. Short and compressed as those sketches are, they are still beautiful glimpses of reality, and it is expressly from observing the relief which they afford to his didactic and declamatory passages, that we are led to wish that he had appealed more frequently to examples from nature. It is disagreeable to add, that unsatisfactory as he is in illustrating the several parts of his theory, he ushers them in with great promises, and closes them with selfcongratulation. He says, "Thus with a faithful aim have we presumed Adventurous to delineate nature's form:" when, in fact, he has delineated very little of it. He raises triumphal arches for the entrance and exit of his subject, and then sends beneath them a procession of a few individual ideas. He altered the poem in maturer life, but with no accession to its powers of entertainment. Harmodius was indeed dismissed, as well as the philosophy of ridicule; but the episode of Solon was left unfinished, and the whole work made rather more dry and scholastic; and he had even the bad taste, I believe, to mutilate some of those fine passages, which, in their primitive state, are still deservedly admired and popular. FROM "THE PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION." BOOK I. The subject proposed-Difficulty of treating it poetically -The ideas of the Divine mind the origin of every quality pleasing to the imagination-Variety of mental constitutions-The idea of a fine imagination, and the state of the mind in the enjoyment of those pleasures it affords. WITH what attractive charms this goodly frame Thou, smiling queen of every tuneful breast, [* Akenside holds a high place among British Poets. He had all the qualities natural and acquired of a great poet. His mind was imbued with classic lore-with lofty conceptions, and that love and knowledge of nature which no book can communicate. His ear was correct, and his blank verse deserves to be studied by all who would excel in this truly English measure. Of his smaller poems the Hymn to the Naiads stands pre-eminent, breathing as it does the very spirit of Callimachus and antiquity. His inscriptions are among the best in our language, and Southey and Wordsworth have profited largely by them. His Odes are tame productions; that to the Earl of Huntingdon has found the most admirers: it is good, but it is not excellent.] |