31 Or struggling with the darkness all the night, 40 Solemnly seemest, like a vapory cloud, Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky, 1802 THE KNIGHT'S TOMB 1802 Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?---By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, 1 Under the twigs of a young birch tree! 1 a mountain in Cumberland 10 When I was young?-Ah, woeful When! Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; Oh! the joys, that came down shower-like, Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, 21 A first rough draft of this poem was called "Area Spontanea," and the whole still reads like a musical improvisation. Ere I was old! Ere I was old? Ah, woeful Ere, 30 40 1834 All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair The bees are stirring-birds are on the wing- Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll. And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live. 1825 1828 2 the mournful Ay de mi (alas!) of a man confronted by age and sickness, and looking back over a life of defeated hopes and wasted opportunities SIR WALTER SCOTT 1771-1832 The death of Scott is often taken to mark the end of the early nineteenth century romantic period, as the publication of the Lyrical Ballads marks its beginning. Born and reared in the society of Edinburgh, and with two years at the university, Scott had a taste for literature; as a youth he had spent much time riding and walking through the border land, and had collected ballads and songs from the old singers, which he afterwards published. Until 1815 he was chiefly a poet, producing The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1805; Marmion, 1808; The Lady of the Lake, 1810. Then Waverley opened a new vein. The immediate and vast popularity of his novels, and his personal ambition to found a family and to be known to posterity as "Scott of Abbotsford," tempted him into a publishing enterprise that failed and left him, six years before his death, with a debt of £120,000. This he resolutely set himself to write off. Before the stroke that preceded his death at Abbotsford he had actually earned one third of this amount and fifteen years later, the last penny was paid by royalties. The spirit of romance gained from his background and experiences pervades Scott's work, and is seen to great advantage in his poems. In these his imagination seems stimulated rather than restrained by their historical setting. Vigorous, headlong narrative is his forte. He follows his theme with the spirit of a Roosevelt, and leaves with the reader the sense of abundant resources untouched. The possession of tireless energy is the first and last impression given by Scott's narratives. His lyric poetry, though full of grace and tenderness, is quite different from Burns's, for Scott is impersonal, almost objective. Scott's inborn romanticism was greatly stimulated by his antiquarian pursuits, which confirmed in him an attitude of mind that looked toward the past. His Tory sympathies also led him to magnify the virtues of a social order that had faded away. The stirring life of the Scotch border from medieval days down to those of his immediate ancestors first filled his imagination and then became the subject of his serious study. All this enabled him, when Byron's more passionate narrative poetry eclipsed his own, to take up the writing of prose fiction and reach eminent success in the historical romance, a practically new field in his day. Biography: Lockhart, Scott's son-in-law, in his Memoirs of Scott, 2 vols. 1837-8, produced one of the famous literary biographies of the century; Hutton (EML); Yonge (GW). Criticism: Carlyle, a little unsympathetic; Hazlitt; Saintsbury; Stephen; Lang; Woodberry, Swinburne; Jenks, In the Days of Scott. Interesting recent comment: V. Rendall's "Scott and the Waverley Novels," 19th Cent. 96:531-6; T. Seccombe's "Scott: Waverley," Liv. Age 282:485-91; B. Croce, "Walter Scott: an Italian Estimate," Liv. Age 317:99-103, and Dial 75:325-31. |