have lingered in all "the circle of the summer hills;" and your scorn, your satire, your narrative verse, would have been unwritten or unknown. To the world what a loss! and what a gain to you! We should have possessed but a few of your lyrics, as When o'er the hill the eastern star How noble that is, how natural, how uncon- sciously Greek! Mrs. Barbauld, the merits of the Tenth Muse: In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives But how unconsciously you remind us both of Sappho and of Homer in these strains about the Evening Star and the hour when the Day μετενίσσετο βουλυτόνδε? Had you lived and died the pastoral poet of some silent glen, such lyrics could not but have survived; free, too, of all that in your songs reminds us of the Poet's Corner in the "Kirkcudbright Advertiser." We should not have read how Phoebus, gilding the brow o' morning, Still we might keep a love-poem unexcelled by Catullus Had we never loved sae kindly, We had ne'er been broken-hearted. But the letters to Clarinda would have been unwritten, and the thrush would have been untaught in "the style of the Bird of Paradise." A quiet life of song, fallentis semita vita, was not to be yours. Fate otherwise decreed it. The touch of a lettered society, the strife with the Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride, neglect and success, were needed to make your Genius what it was, and to endow the world with "Tam o' Shanter," the " "Jolly Beggars," and "Holy Willie's Prayer." Who can praise them too highly-who admire in them too much the humour, the scorn, the wisdom, the unsurpassed energy and courage? So powerful, so commanding, is the movement of that Beggars' Chorus, that, methinks, it unconsciously echoed in the brain of our greatest living poet when he conceived the "Vision of Sin." You shall judge for yourseif, Recall→→ Here's to budgets, bags, and wallets! A fig for those by law protected! Then read this: Drink to lofty hopes that cool Visions of a perfect state: Frantic love and frantic hate. Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance, Drink to heavy Ignorance, Hob and nob with brother Death! Is not the movement the same, though the modern speaks a wilder recklessness? So in the best company we leave you, who were the life and soul of so much company, good and bad. No poet, since the Psalmist of Israel, ever gave the world more assurance of a man; none lived a life more strenuous, engaged in an eternal conflict of the passions, and by them overcome-" mighty and mightily fallen." When we think of you, Byron seems, as Plato would have said, remote by one degree from actual truth, and Musset by a degree more remote than Byron. (Do you remember how Leigh Hunt Enraged you once by writing My dear Byron ?) Books have their fates,-as mortals have who punt, And yours have entered on an age of iron. Critics there be who think your satire blunt, Your pathos, fudge; such perils must environ Poets who in their time were quite the rage, Though now there's not a soul to turn their page. Yes, there is much dispute about your worth, And much is said which you might like to know By modern poets here upon the earth, Where poets live, and love each other so; And, in Elysium, it may move your mirth To hear of bards that pitch your praises low, Though there be some that for your credit stickle, As Glorious Mat, and not inglorious Nichol. (This kind of writing is my pet aversion, I hate the slang, I hate the personalities, I loathe the aimless, reckless, loose dispersion, Of every rhyme that in the singer's wallet is, I hate it as you hated the Excursion, But, while no man a hero to his valet is, The hero's still the model; I indite The kind of rhymes that Byron oft would write.) There's a Swiss critic whom I cannot rhyme to, One Scherer, dry as sawdust, grim and prim. Of him there's much to say, if I had time to Concern myself in any wise with him. He seems to hate the heights he cannot climb to, He thinks your poetry a coxcomb's whim, A good deal of his sawdust he has spilt on Shakespeare, and Molière, and you, and Milton. |