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leaning upon a piece of shaven wood; to such a mind as the Poet's in such a place, he would seem the very incarnation of the genius of desolation; our Poet made up to him and spoke, and found him quiet and courteous, not without that stateliness of speech, such as religion gives to all, even to the poorest and most ignorant of mankind; and gradually he unfolded that he was a Leech Gatherer, that he roamed from moor to moor, from pond to pond, and he found them less common than in days of old, but still he persevered; travelled, stirring the waters of the ponds about with his feet, still labouring on by the good help of God. In the Poem itself we can indeed see the man, there he is, no doubt allowed to settle on the clear lake of his calm spirit; in that desolation, hearing him speak thus, his shape seemed to Wordsworth like that of a messenger sent to him from some far region, with human strength, he was troubled by the old man's shape in that lone and solitary spot; and pacing to and fro he made the devout and unquestioning reliance upon the goodness of the great all father, he became instantly invested with high and sublime attributes in that solemn wood, covered with its gorgeous but prairie-like vesture of gorse, the infinite blue sky overhead, the waste of mountains all around, and the solitary tarn, and this man so utterly deserted there, and yet with his quiet deep heart of faith. The Poet laughed himself to scorn to find in this poor crippled wanderer so deep and fervid a trust that the emotion of his mind was answered, strength and resolution, and independence, were born

ÆSTHETIC VIEWS OF SUFFERING.

131

out of the gloom of heart and desolation of spirit through which he had passed. We have heard this piece ridiculed, but in truth, unadorned as it is, it has ever appeared to us most sublime, the piece is ragged, frowning, moor-like in its character, and that old man wandering to and fro, like a solitary bird over the heath, deriving consolation from the roar and wail of winds and waters there is something Hebraic, and in the grandeur of the Poem we are carried instantly to Elijah in his cave of the deep wilderness fed with ravens, yet relying unfaltering on him who met him by the brook of Cherith.

When it is affirmed that suffering is the gate by which we enter nature, and by which nature enters us; we only reiterate the lesson Schiller was so fond of inculcating, that feeling is all; or as Schlegel has with great eloquence affirmed, that it is the centre of unity in the mind, and he must be the greatest Poet and the highest teacher, who is able to lay the largest range of faculties under contribution, to bring their varying testimonies in the most perfect balance. There is a poetry of suffering which rends our heart to witness, so intense, so prolonged and passionate is the agony, but we give to this the name of madness, because that suffering becomes in itself a centre, creating a rebellion in the mind, and does not bow in vassalage to a superior judgment, and to a higher and unitizing law. In the Retreat in York, some three or four years since, a man

ordinarily peaceful, and gentle, but labouring under severe mental hallucinations, one day seized two watches, dashed them on the pavement, and of course broke them into innumerable shivers. The secretary of the Retreat on going round to the various wards called on him in the room where he was confined, and enquired of him why he had done so foolish a thing, and then he burst into tears, and in a wail of deep emotion, said, "Oh I could not bear to hear them, I did not want to destroy them, but it was too much, it was dreadful to hear them tick, tick, tick, it seemed as if every misery I had ever known or felt all my life were concentrated into every single tick, and I could not bear it any longer, indeed I could not, and I dashed them to pieces." Was not that suffering? Now if that intense agony, instead of venting itself and seeking a valve through destruction had been regarded through the cold æsthetic prism of genius, what colours, what hues, what soul shapes, and spiritual phantasms might have been given to the eye. Instead of a broken watch, we might have had a Hamlet. In North Wales a year or two since, some pedestrian wanderers turned on one side to visit a Welch Bard, a bard indeed, not a mere poetastic versemonger, but a man whose poor thin clay tabernacle of heart contained in it terrific wild live lightnings. They found him in a cottage, a poor hovel in a miserable garden, at the feet of some of Cymri's most awful mountains, the garden was a picture of desolation, covered with weeds and nettles, his cottage empty of every thing but two or three books, and a harp on

SCHILLER, ART, AND AGONY.

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which he woke his lightnings, and shivered, and fractured his words in curses and imprecations. How are you, said our friend? calling him by his bardic name. How are you? I see you are not well, are you in pain? "Pain," said he, speaking rapidly without a break, “Pain, if every nerve in my body were a devil, and every devil mad, I could not be in more pain, if all the dead in the church yard yonder were alive in their coffins, and all in pain, they could not suffer what I do. Look you, if you were to take all my pains and make a hole in Snowden and bury them, there, they would split him." And the poor fellow felt all these awful words. In frantic agony he would sweep his fingers over his harp and find in sound and song the solace for sorrow; but a greater than he would make those pains obedient to the commanding and superior will. The reader will not possibly, fail to remember the L'Envoi to Festus, he

says,

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The course of study he

Went thro' was of the soul rack. The degree
He took was high: it was wise wretchedness.
He suffered perfectly, and gained no less

A prize than in his own torn heart to see
A few bright seeds."-

This is great. But that wonderful Poem would have been still more wonderful if the emotions had been purified and strained through time; in other words, if passion and suffering had been rectified by thought. We do not demand of a Poet that he should suffer less, but that in proportion to his suffering he should think the Festus is like the wail of a spirit on the rack,

more.

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uttered in tones more or less deep or piercing, and varying as the objects vary, transitorily arresting its attention, but it is the wail of a spirit in which the impurities of suffering and passion mingle together. Suffering sublimes character, no man has sufficiently graduated to become a Teacher until he has suffered. But then we require that the routine of suffering should flow without turbidity and impurity; the waves of suffering should throw up to the eye the pearls of the deep not its sea weeds, and until the waves have become purified we cannot see the rocks, the caves round the dread sea monsters down below. Wordsworth does not exhibit to the eye traces of much suffering, unlike Schiller whose words scathe, and flash, and burn along his page. Schiller is pre-eminently the Poet of earnestness; and in no other do the tides of verse set in on the shores of humanity with so heavy a swell, and yet with so pure a purpose and transparent a power. Wordsworth and Schiller both, in their feeling held the central and controlling force of their genius, but the feeling of the Englishman is an emotion of complacency and benevolent sensibility; that of the German is of exalted and impassioned pain. Wordsworth soliloquises over his pictures or his woes; but Schiller will be heard by others; we feel while he speaks, and he is only heard when speaking to myriads-that he has only chained down the terrible hell dog Pain; he has his hand on the lion ready to spring upon him if once he removes his finger. But differing in the mode of their enunciation; and in the subjects of their enunciation no two

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