"A kind of hobbling prose, Which limps along and tinkles in the close." There goes much more to the composition of even a third-rate poet than rhymesters at first are willing to allow, for to nature, exercise, imitation, study, art must be added to make all these perfectούτε φυσις ικανή γίνεται τεχνης ατέρ ούτε παν τεχνη με quor ExTuern-Without art nature can never be perfect, and without nature art can claim no being, of itself-Scott's novels, Scott's poetry, Scott's | For words are in poetry what colors are in paintMiscellanies, and Scott's Life! Then of the pres-ing, and the music of numbers is not to be matched ent, there are the daily papers, the weekly jour- or done without. Look at Donne. Would not nals, the monthly magazines, the quarterly reviews, Donne's satires, which abound with so much wit, all of which we are expected to have a fair passing appear more charming if he had taken care of his acquaintance with. There is Mr. Dickens' last words and of his numbers? Whereas his verse is book on the table, which I have not as yet had now-if verse it may be calledtime to read, and old Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy by its side, coaxing me to renew a youthful acquaintance with its pages; and there are Tristram Shandy, and Humphrey Clinker, and dear delightful Amelia, which I fain would read again, but cannot, I fear, for want of time. Only observe the dust on that fine Froissart on my shelves, and that noble old copy of Ben Jonson's works in folio, with a mark, I could swear, in the third act of the Alchemist or the Silent Woman. There is no keeping pace with the present while we pay anything like due attention to the past. I pity that man who reads Albert Smith who never read Parthenissa; but perhaps he pities me because I am indifferently up in the writer he admires. How people are cut off from the full literary enjoyments "Johnson told me," he says, "that a Mr. Coxof this life who never read "Munro his Expedi- eter, whom he knew, had gone the greatest length tion," or the Duchess of Newcastle's Life of the towards this, having collected about 500 volumes Duke her husband, or Tom Brown, or Ned Ward, of poets whose works were little known; but that or Roger L'Estrange, or Tom Coryat, or "the works sixty-three in number" of old John Taylor, the sculler on the Thames! We wish for poets who will write when Nature What Richelieu wanted Louis scarce could gain, vain." Your "rich ill poets are without excuse. "Your verses, good sir, are no poems, they 'll not hinder your rising in the state." "Tis ridiculous for a lord to print verses; 't is well enough to make them to please himself, but to make them public is foolish." People affect to think that the same talents and application which raised Lord Mansfield to the highest honor of the gown, would, had they been turned to the study of poetry, have raised him to as high a position in the catalogue of our poets. 'Tis pretty enough when told in verse "How many an Ovid was in Murray lost;" yet we are inclined to think that there is very little in it, and that Wordsworth is nearer the mark, who says of self-communing and unrecorded men"Oh, many are the poets that are sown By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts, The vision and the faculty divine, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse." But this one word "accomplishment" implies a good deal more than mere dexterity and ease-culture and the inspiring aid of books, "Pauses, cadence, and well-vowell'd words, And all the graces a good ear affords." *Lord Roscommon. + Ben Jonson. Selden's Table-Talk. One of Boswell's recorded conversations with the great hero of his admiration was on the subject of a collection being made of all the poems of all the English poets who had published a volume of poems. upon his death Tom Osborne bought them, and they were dispersed, which he thought a pity, as it was curious to see any series complete, and in every volume of poems something good may be found. This was a kindly criticism, uttered in the good nature of an easy moment, hardly applicable to the volumes of verse we see published now. Surely there are many put forth without a redeeming stanza or passage to atone for the dry desert of a thousand lines through which the critic is doomed to wander in quest of beauties which he fain would find. Surely Coxeter's collection contained a very large number of one-idea'd volumes!— shelves to a very fair collection of verse printed We could have helped him from our own before 1747, when this "curious" collector died, full of the most trivial nothingnesses. For a little volume of verse of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, said to be unique, or nearly so, Mr. Miller has been known to give twenty guineas or more, and think himself lucky that he has been let off thus easily. Some of these twenty-guinea volumes we have had the curiosity to look into. Poetry there is none; nothing more, indeed, than the mere similitude of verse. Songs, differing from sonnets because the lines are shorter, and sonnets, only to be recognized as such from the fourteen lines which the writer, in compliance with custom, has prudently confined them to. "Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow It is the rust we value, not the gold." It is curious, however, to see any collec complete; and Mr. Miller is to be praised for unceasing endeavors to make his collection English poetry (literally so called) as comple possible. The poet of the Irish Melodies made an obse tion when at Abbotsford, too curious to be pa over in a paper of this description, when we sider the merit of the remark itself, the rank o poet who made it, and the reputation of the who responded to its truth: 66 'Hardly a magazine is now published," said Moore, "that does not contain verses which, some thirty years ago, would have made a reputation." Scott turned with a look of shrewd humor on his 66 friend, as if chuckling over his own success, and | God, in health and vigor, and as fond of poetry as saidever, he has outlived by the period of an appren"Ecod, we were in the luck of it to come be- ticeship, the three-score years and ten, the Scripfore these fellows!" and added, playfully flourish-tural limitation of the life of man. When Wordsing his stick as he spoke, we have, like Boabdil, worth dies, there will be a new session of the taught them to beat us at our own weapons." poets for the office of poet-laureate. To whom There cannot be a doubt but that the poetry of will the lord-chamberlain assign the laurel, honthe present day is of that mediocre level of descrip-ored and disgraced by a variety of wearers? To tion which neither pleases nor offends; and that whom will the unshorn deity assign it? There much of it, if published sixty years ago, or even may be a difference of opinion between the poet's thirty years ago, would have secured for more than God and the court lord-chamberlain; there have one writer a high reputation at the time, and possi-been differences heretofore, or else Shadwell and bly a place in Chalmers' collected edition of our Tate, Eusden and Cibber, Whitehead and Pye had British Poets. Such a reputation as Miss Seward never succeeded to the laurels of famous Ben Jonachieved, or Hayley, or Oram, or Headley, or son and glorious John Dryden. Who are our Hurdis:young and our rising poets likely to become claimants, and to have their case considered by Phoebus Apollo in the new session he must summon before very long? "Fame then was cheap, and the first comers And they have kept it since by being dead." There was a time when a single poem, nay, a decent epigram, procured a niche for its writer in the temple of our poetry; but these times are gone by, inundated as we now are with verses of one particular level of merit, as flat as the waste of Cumberland, and equally unprofitable; so that the poet, ambitious of a high reputation in our letters, must make it upon something that is completely novel; and there, as Scott remarked, will rest the only chance for an extended reputation. "A session was held the other day, And Apollo himself was at it, they say; Therefore, the wits of the town came thither, How Suckling would put them forward, we Poetry has become an easy art, and people have must leave to the fancy of the reader. We can do been taught to pump for poetry without a Gildon very little more than enumerate the names of canor a Bysshe to aid their labors. Wakely can laugh didates likely to be present on the occasion. We in the house of commons at the poetry of Words- can conceive their entry somewhat after the followworth, and treat the senators who surround him ing manner. A herald, followed by an attendant with a happy imitation of the great poet of his with a tray of epics from Nineveh at twelve shiltime. Verse has become an extempore kind of lings to Orion at a farthing, and the authors art, a thing to be assumed when wanted; and arranged pretty nearly as follows;-Atherstone O'Connell can throw off at a heat a clever parody first (as the favorite poet of Lord Jeffrey's later upon Dryden's famous epigram; as if, like Theo-lucubrations ;) Robert Montgomery, 2; Heraud, 3; dore Hook, he had served an apprenticeship to the happy art of imitation. That the bulk of the socalled poetry of the present day-" nonsense, well tuned and sweet stupidity"-is injurious to a proper estimation of the true-born poets who still exist, there cannot be a doubt; that it is injurious, moreover, to the advancement of poetry among us, is, I think, equally the case. Poetry, in the highest sense of the word, was never better understood, though never, perhaps, less cultivated than it is now. Criticism has taken a high stand; and when the rage for rhyme has fairly exhausted itself, nature will revive among us, and we shall have a new race of poets to uphold, if not to eclipse, the glories of the old. There are many still among us to repeat without any kind of braggart in their blood: Read, 4; Horne, 5; and Ben Disraeli, 6. To the epic portion of the candidates the dramatists will succeed, fresh from Sadler's Wells and the Surrey, and led by Talfourd and Bulwer, and followed by Mr. Marston, Mr. Trowton, Mr. Henry Taylor, Sir Coutts Lindsay, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Spicer; Jerrold representing comedy, without a fellow to rival or support him. Then will follow the ballad-writers; Macaulay by himself, and Smythe and Lord John Manners walking like the Babes in the Wood together. To the trio will succeed Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, Monckton Milnes, Charles Mackay, and Coventry Patmore, followed by a galaxy of ladies for the gallery, led by Mrs. Norton and Miss Barrett; with Camilla Toulmin, with a bunch of flowers; Frances Brown, with a number of the Athenæum ; Eliza Cook, with Mr. Cayley's commendation; Miss Costello with a Persian rose; and Mrs. Ogilvy, with her quarto volume of minstrelsy from the north. We can fancy Apollo's confusion at the number; and should in some measure be inclined to abide by his opinion, should he give the laurel at the end, as Suckling has made him, to When "He openly declared that 't was the best sign There is little reason to suppose that the great poet of the Excursion is likely to remain more than a few years among us; for though, thank Of good store of wit to have good store of coin, One upon another, not a man in the place, But had discontent writ in great in his face." "Only," and how admirable the wit is :"Only the small poets cleared up again, : Out of hope, as 't was thought, of borrowing; "O rare Sir John Suckling!" Is Alfred Tennyson a poet? His merits divide the critics. With some people he is everything, with others he is little or nothing. Betwixt the extremes of admiration and malice, it is hard to judge uprightly of the living. The zeal of his friends is too excessive to be prudent, the indifference of his enemies too studied to be sincere. He is unquestionably a poet, in thought, language, and in numbers. But the New Timon tells us he is not a poet; Peel tells us that he is, and gives him a pension of 2001. a-year to raise him above the exigencies of the world. But the satirist has dropped his condemnation from the third edition of his poem, and the pension still continues to be paid. Is it, therefore, deserved? We think it is, not from what Mr. Tennyson has as yet performed, but what he has shown himself capable of performing. His poems are, in some respects, an accession to our literature. He has the right stuff in him, and he may yet do more; but unless it is better than what he has already done, he had better withhold it. His admirers-and he will never be without "the few"-will always augur well of after-performances (though never realized) from what has gone before, and attribute to indolence and a pension what from fear and inability he was unable to accomplish. His detractors, on the other hand, will have little to lay hold of; they may flatter themselves with having frightened him into silence, but their liking for his verses will warm as they grow older. He has nothing, however, to fear, if he writes nobly from himself, and the muse is willing and consenting. Great works "A work t' outwear Seth's pillars, brick and stone, And (Holy Writ excepted) made to yield to none."-Dr. DONNE. of originality, and not for what it is one of its peculiarities; and, what is more, a very bad peculiarity both in matter and in manner. Coleridge understood the deficiencies of Mr. Tennyson's muse when he uttered the following capital criticism upon him : "I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in that I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metreist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes of success, prescribe to Tennysonindeed, without it he can never be a poet in art— is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly-defined metres; such as the heroic couplet, the octava stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would probably thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan some of his verses."* This is something more than a clever criticism on the muse of Mr. Tennyson? it is a most admirable piece of advice, and deserves to be remembered. Tennyson, and Browning, and Miss Barrett, should act upon it forthwith; they would improve their numbers very materially by such an exercise of their ears. Coleridge's own poetry is of English verse. a lasting exemplification of the rythmical charms He never offends you-he always pleases : "His musical finesse was such, So nice his ear, so delicate his touch," that every verse he wrote will satisfy the ear and satisfy the fingers. A second critic of distinction who has passed judgment on Mr. Tennyson is Mr. Leigh Hunt, always an agreeable and not unfrequently a safe critic to abide by :: แ appear too rarely to raise expectation that this or the school of Keats; that is to say, it is difficult "Alfred Tennyson," writes Mr. Hunt, "is of that person is likely to produce one. It is near not to see that Keats has been a great deal in his 200 years since Milton began to prune his wings thoughts; and that he delights in the same broodffor the great epic of his age and nation; and what ing over his sensations, and the same melodious has our poetry produced since then in any way enjoyment of their expression. In his desire to approaching what Milton accomplished? Much communicate this music he goes so far as to accent that is admirable, and much that will live as long the final syllables in his participles passive; as as Milton himself, but nothing of the same stamp, pleached, crownéd, purple-spikéd, &c.; with visfor though Scott may affect to speak of Manfredible printer's marks, which subjects him but erroas a poem, wherein Byron "matched Milton upon his own ground," yet we all of us pretty well know otherwise; and that the muse of Byron is as inferior to Paradise Lost, as the Farmer's Boy to The Seasons; or any of the great dramatists of the age of Shakspeare to Shakspeare himself. Before Mr. Tennyson tries the temper of the public for a third time, (which we hope he will do, and before very many years go by,) it behoves him to consider the structure of his verse, and the pauses of his numbers a little more maturely than he has hitherto done. It behoves him, moreover, to rub off a few affectations of style, the besetting sin of too many of his verses, and too often mistaken, by the young especially, for one of the marks neously to a charge of pedantry; though it is a nicety not complimentary to the reader, and of which he may as well get rid. Much, however, as he reminds us of Keats, his genius is his own. He would have written poetry, had his precursor written none; and he has also a vein of metaphysical subtlety, in which the other did not indulge, as may be seen by his verses entitled A Charac ter,' those On the Confessions of a Sensitive Mind,' and numerous others. He is also a great lover of a certain home kind of landscape, which he delights to paint with a minuteness that in 'The Moated Grange' becomes affecting; and, in 'The * Table-Talk, p. 222. Miller's Daughter,' would remind us of the Dutch | school, if it were not mixed up with the same deep feeling, varied with a pleasant joviality. Mr. Tennyson has yet given no such evidence of sustained and broad power as that of Hyperion,' nor even of such gentler narrative as the Eve of St. Agnes,' and the poem of Lamia' and 'Isabella,' but the materials of the noblest poetry are abundant in him."* This is criticism in full accordance with the kindlier sympathies of our own nature; but much of the weight and value of it must depend on the rank the reader is willing to assign to Mr. Keats. It is, however, intended as a very high encomium; Mr. Hunt appropriating a place in our poetry to Keats which I am afraid he will find very few willing to concede to him. Our poetry is in a very sorry kind of plight if it has to depend upon Tennyson and Browning for the hereditary honors of its existence. The Examiner will tell us "No!" The Athenæum will do the same; papers remarkable for the vigor of their articles, the excellence of their occasional criticism, and the general asperity of their manner. A page out of every ten in Herrick's "Hesperides" is more certain of a hereafter than any one dramatic romance or lyric in all the "Bells and Pomegranates" of Mr. Browning. Not but what Mr. Browning is a poet. He is unquestionably a poet; but his subject has not unfrequently to bear the weight of sentiments which spring not naturally from it, and his numbers at times are overlaid with affectation, the common conceit of men who affect to tell common things in an uncommon manner. He clogs his verses, moreover, with too many consonants and too many monosyllables, and carries the sense too frequently in a very ungraceful manner from one line to the other. Here is a passage from the seventh number of his "Bells and Pomegranates," which it really is a torture to read : "But to-day not a boat reached Salerno, So back to a man The rain-water slips O'er the heavy blue bloom on each globe This half of a curd-white smooth cheese-ball, Like an onion's each smoother and whiter! From the thin green glass flask, with its stopper, And end with the prickly-pear's red flesh, Hark! the quick pelt of the olives Which, thick in one's track, And how their old twisted trunks shudder! Their hard fruit; the brittle great fig-trees For here comes the whole of the tempest! Back again to my side or my shoulder, This may be poetry, but it is poetry in the raw material; for the numbers are those of a scrannel pipe, and such as Cadmus alone could pronounce when in the state of a serpent. This which follows is the mere twaddle of a cockney at Calais or Cologne: 66 66 HOME-THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD. 'Oh, to be in England, Now that April's there, Came our friends, with whose help in the vine- And who wakes in England yards Grape harvest began; In the vat half-way up in our house-side, Like blood the juice spins, While your brother all bare-legged is dancing Till breathless he grins, Dead-beaten, in effort on effort To keep the grapes under; For still when he seems all but master, From girls who keep coming and going And eyes shut against the rain's driving, And where, on its bed Of the orchard's black mould, the love-apple All the young ones are kneeling and filling Tempted out by the first rainy weather- As to-night will be proved to my sorrow, We shall feast our grape-gleaners -two dozen. * Book of Gems, p. 274. Lest you should think he never could re-capture And though the fields are rough with hoary dew, This is very inferior to Ambrose Philips, who acquired the distinction of Namby Pamby for similar verse, e. g. his " Lines to Cuzzoni," which Charles Lamb had got by heart. Here is something infinitely better, and by a living poet, one of the props our poetry depends on, and a member of parliament withal-Mr. Richard Monckton Milnes: 66 THE VIOLET GIRL. "When fancy will continually rehearse Some painful scene once present to the eye, 'Tis well to mould it into gentle verse, That it may lighter on the spirit lie. Home yestern eve I wearily returned, The reason assigned for the study of English poetry by English ladies, is truly characteristic of Lady Mary and of the female mind. A lady is to read through every volume of verse, and remember what she reads, to see that her lover writes his own valentine. Ye gods, should one swear to the truth of a song! If a woman will marry a poet, Though bright my morning mood and short my she had better go through the course of study way, But sad experience in one moment earned, Can crush the heaped enjoyments of the day. Passing the corner of a populous street, I marked a girl whose wont it was to stand, With pallid cheek, torn gown, and naked feet, And bunches of fresh violets in each hand. There her small commerce in the chill March weather She plied with accents miserably mild; Beauty and pleasure to the sense of man, To me that odorous purple ministers Hope-bearing memories and inspiring glee, While meanest images alone are hers, The sordid wants of base humanity. Think after all this lapse of hungry hours, In the disfurnished chamber of dim cold, Rest on your woodland banks and wither there, The veil that hides our vilest mortal sore." Si sic omnia dixisset! This is poetry in all languages; it is like mercury, never to be lost or killed. There is a passage in one of Lady Mary Wortley Montague's letters to her daughter which still continues to excite a smile on the lips of every reader, Lady Mary recommends. Not that she is safe to secure a poet to herself after a long life of study. How few read Randolph, and yet he is a very fine poet. Lady Mary might have taken a copy of verses from Randolph to every female writer of the day, and passed them off for the production of a young, a handsome, and a rising writer, and no one would have set her right, or detected the imposition that was passed upon her. We are afraid we must recommend the study of our early English poets to English ladies on some other ground than the chance detection of a lover pleading his passion in the poetry of another under pretence of its being his own. Not that we have any particular predilection for "romancical ladies," as the dear old Duchess of Newcastle calls them, or girls with their heads stuffed full of passionate passages; but we should like to see a more prevalent taste for what is good, for poetry that is really excellent ; and this we feel assured is only to be effected by a careful consideration of our elder poets, who have always abundance of meaning in them. It is no use telling young ladies that Mr. Bunn's poetry is not poetry, but only something that looks very like it and reads very unlike it; the words run sweetly to the piano; there is a kind of pretty meaning in what they convey, and the music is pleasing. What more would you want? Why, everything. But then, as we once heard a young lady remark with great good sense and candor, (and her beauty gave an additional relish to what she said,) these unmeaning songs are so much easier to sing. Your fine old songs, so full of poetry and feeling, require a similar feeling in the singer, and young ladies are too frequently only sentimental, and not equal to the task of doing justice to passionate poetry conveyed in music equally passionate, and where they can do justice to it they refuse because it is not fashionable to be passionate, and it really disturbs and disorders one to be so, and in mixed society, "above all." It cannot be concealed that we have never been Only run the eye over Mr. Dyce's octavo volume so well off for lady-poets as we are at present. "The study of English poetry is a more im- of Specimens of British Poetesses, and compare the portant part of a woman's education than it is numerical excellencies of the past with the numergenerally supposed. Many a young damsel has ous productions of the present day! A few specibeen ruined by a fine copy of verses, which she mens of the elder poetesses-such as the "Nocwould have laughed at if she had known it had turnal Reverie," and "The Atheist and the been stolen from Mr. Walter. I remember, when I was a girl, I saved one of my companions from destruction, who communicated to me an epistle she was quite charmed with. As she had naturally a good taste, she observed the lines were not so smooth as Prior's or Pope's, but had more thought and spirit than any of theirs. She was wonderfully delighted with such a demonstration of her lover's sense and passion, and not a little pleased with her own charms that had force enough to inspire such elegancies. In this triumph I showed her that they were taken from Randolph's poems, and the unfortunate transcriber was dismissed with the scorn he deserved."* * Letters by Lord Wharncliffe, 2d edit., iii. 44. Acorn," both by the Countess of Winchelsea, it haps, to equal; but in the general qualifications would be very difficult to surpass, or even, perfor poetry, both natural and acquired, the ladies, since Charlotte Smith, far surpass their female predecessors. Mrs. Norton is said to be the Bymuch of that intense personal passion," says the ron of our modern poetesses. "She has very Quarterly Reviewer, "by which Byron's poetry is communion with man and Nature of Wordsworth. distinguished from the larger grasp and deeper She has also Byron's beautiful intervals of tenderness, his strong, practical thought and his forceful expression." This is high praise. "Let us suggest, however," says the Athenæum, "that, in the present state of critical opinion, the compliment is |