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From Blackwood's Magazine.
A TALK ABOUT ODES.*

over the angels who descended at the sound of the "Te lucis ante."

of the many hues which variegated the Florentine's green herbage? But it is Geoffrey. So we three have met again! yet early afternoon, and he visited his Basil. Yes; and not "in thunder, light- glen at nightfall: our trees are yet leafning, or in rain," but on an April morn-less; his waved fresh and tender green ing, when spring looks like herself. We can gaze upwards and feast our eyes on Dante's "dolce color del oriental zaffiro;" or downwards to mark on our beloved lake his "tremolar della marina." Look listen to. Hear how the thrushes and how its waters quiver with tremulous light as the sunbeam smites them; and break forth into that "many-twinkling smile" which Æschylus saluted long be

fore!

Geof. Will you accept this little wood, through which our upward path goes, as a representative of the glade to which Sordello guided Virgil and Dante? If so, our young friend here shall "disfigure or present" the person of the last-named; for I know that he has been reading very hard for his degree, and so conversing more with the dead than the living.

Henry. I have emerged from that under-world "with slow, faint steps and much exceeding pain." Do not remind me of my sufferings; for the hour is fast approaching when I must plunge in again. Geof. Your look is not such as to bespeak compassion. You have not been down to the lower circles. Your stay has been chiefly, I trust, in those "open and luminous spaces where Dante walked among the great Greeks and Romans, the wide plains of philosophy stretched out beneath the empurpled ether of poetry. Bas. from the wood). Come in and admire, instead of talking nonsense outside. This is of a surety that mountain glade where Dante saw the holy kings and princes resting: the white cherryblossom floats overhead, underneath the black-thorn spreads out the white coral of its little branches; the violet and the primrose peep forth from the bright green moss; here and there the celandine paves the floor with gold, and the wood anemone opens its starry petals to their widest, and gems every spot in the grove.

Geof. Not a bad Northern version, is it,

See "A Talk about Sonnets," LIVING AGE, No. 1892, Sept. 18, 1880.

Bas. We, too, have a winged choir, and a better one than we deserve, to

the blackbirds are paying us for the pains with which we fed them through the winter! And if the larch plumelets are all the greenery that we can boast of,

still

Gentle western blasts, with downy wings

Hatching the tender springs,

To the unborn buds with vital whispers say, "Ye living buds, why do ye stay?" The passionate buds break through the bark their way.

One can almost hear them at it.

Hen. English verse sounds pleasant to my ears after hard searchings into the meaning of difficult Greek choruses. Which of our poets are you quoting?

Bas. Cowley: I think, but I am not sure, that those lines are in his "Ode on Life."

Geof. That is the ode which perhaps gave Blake his fine idea of "The Gate of Death," which his old man, bowed down with years, creeps through, to emerge vigorous and youthful on the farther side. I mean the words,

When we by a foolish figure say, "Behold an old man dead!" then they Speak properly, and cry, "Behold a man-child

born!"

Bas. At one time of my life he was; | some dignified cause; whether it swell, and though his odes do not, any one of like the Greek choric song, in praise of them, live in my memory as a whole, yet god or hero, as a complicated chant, with many lines of his still linger there. Some part answering to part, now soft and flutenovels, and some poetry, of the present like, now with a thunderous roll of many day, make me exclaim with him, voices, then at last leaving the ear satis'Tis just fied with a grand final strain; or whether, The author blush there where the reader must, like the odes in which, as we know, Horand long for a critic, with words suffi- ace imitated the lost Greek lyrists, it is content throughout with one style of muciently scathing, to compel him to the unwonted exercise. Cowley's words, too, sic, stanza responding to stanza without rise to my lips at the sight of ambitious any variation. The essential thing, as it pieces of word-painting, where the writer seems to me, is that the theme of an ode should be an elevated one, that its expreshas left nothing without an ornament, sion should be vehement and rapturous, Jewels at nose and lips but ill appear; that its singer, though still capable of Rather than all things wit let none be there. self-control, should be lifted above his And Cowley's echo of Aristophanes rises ordinary self by a strong poetic enthusito my lips when I listen to such a concert asm. As an example of what I mean, of the birds as saluted us a few minutes take Schiller's short dithyramb. You ago in the wood which we are just leav-know it, Basil, in Coleridge's version, ing,where it bears its first title, "The Visit of the Gods." It consists of three strophes,

Now blessings on ye all, ye heroic race!

Who keep your primitive powers and rights so all moulded alike; both the measure and

well,

Though men and angels fell.

Of all material lives the highest place
To you is justly given,

And ways and walks the nearest heaven.

Hen. I see that Cowley did not wholly neglect alliteration.

Geof. What English poet, with any true fire of genius, could? It and rhyme are his two compensations for the loss of the exact quantities of classic verse; and he does not know his business if he does not make the most of them. Alliteration is the older and the more exclusively English resource of the two. From the bard who sang Athelstan's victory at Brunanburh, to the poet who sang Nelson's at the Baltic, we find it rise spontaneously to the lips of him who sings before he writes, which, I take it, is the distinction of the genuine ode-singer from the writer of fine but uninteresting compositions so styled.

Hen. May I ask you two questions about that? First, What is an ode? I mean, when we speak of one, are we to think of Pindar, or of Horace ?

Geof. Of either, or both. At least to me that is an ode which is the outpouring of feeling passionately excited by

the words bespeak the wildest excitement; and although its muse is exotic, yet a true Greek for the moment, you see in Schiller, while he sings it, the rosechapleted poet rising, goblet in hand, from the festive couch in Athens.

So, then, provided the "thoughts that breathe and words that burn are given to us - whether it be with the marshalled order of Pindar's odes in point of structure, or with the irregular movements of his modern imitators; whether they rush forth with Pindar's startling vehemence and abrupt transitions of thought, or move onward more slowly, and more easily apprehended, with the stately majesty of Horace in his "Triumphal Ode," or of Milton in his "Ode on the Nativity," we have in either case an ode: though perfect success in the more complicated and difficult variety being the hardest achievement, ought, I suppose, to win the highest praise.

Now for your second question, Henry, provided you let my first answer pass unopposed.

Hen. You distinguished the ode-singer from the ode-writer. What English author had you chiefly in your mind as a type of this last?

Geof. Poets like Collins, with his "Mu- | close of his ode, to celebrate the peaceful sic, heavenly maid," his nymph "Cheer- triumphs of song on English ground, a fulness," and her companions, "brown poet singing of poets never sung of in Exercise and Sport." Shadowy person- like strains before, he is at once origages like these may be written about in inal and powerful. You may say that he the study, and read of in the drawing- over-praises Dryden — that he describes room; but they cannot rouse a man's only one side of Shakespeare; but how spirit till it pours forth floods of song, faultlessly beautiful is his expression! and sweeps every hearer along rejoicing And when he comes to Milton, what can in its mighty torrent. be grander than his conception of the poet, struck blind, like Saul, by the vision of the exceeding glory?

Bas. Little rills, that trickle clear and tinkling down the hillside, like the one we are just crossing, have their uses. The moss grows green by them, the primrose tuft draws life from them, the song-bird sips them and goes his way happy. A poet who could write an ode like that of Collins to "Evening," must not be spoken of with contempt. There is poetic power, too, in his "Ode to Liberty;" though imperial Rome and mediæval Venice are not fortunate examples of freedom, to which honor he somewhat recklessly exalts them.

Hen. I thought, Geoffrey, that perhaps you were going to give us Gray for your instance. One of my tutors used to speak of him as a "languid conventionalist." Bas. Unjust.

Nor second he, that rode sublime
Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy,
The secrets of the abyss to spy:
He passed the flaming bounds of place and
time;

The living throne, the sapphire blaze
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.

Is there anything "languid" here? or
anything "conventional"?

Hen. Just one thing perhaps, the "wings of Ecstasy." As ecstasy simply means being carried out of one's self, the impersonation sounds strange. But I always thought that a splendid passage.

Geof. Milton has been fortunate in his admiring poet of our own century, as well as of the last. Not that I mean to put Tennyson's Alcaics on a level with that sublime strophe of Gray's.

Bas. I should think not, indeed. As if there could be such a thing as real Alcaics in English!

Geof. No; but lines like that which tells how the plains of heaven

Ring to the roar of an angel onset, and those which speak of

Geof. Severe; but with some, though slender, foundation in fact. Gray calls his two greatest odes "Pindaric." So they are in their abruptness and bold transitions; but Pindar sang of victories which stirred a Greek's heart to its depths, -sang of them when they were fresh, ere the horses had ceased panting after the chariot-race, the sweat dried off the victor's brow, sang while above him floated the awe-inspiring forms of the gods and heroes from whom the conqueror he lauded boasted his descent. How could Gray feel in like manner impassioned by an abstract subject like "The Progress of Poesy"? How could he altogether escape the reproach implied by the word "conventional"? His fairest similes, his noblest thoughts, are, through | Swinburne has recently devoted fifty most of his ode, echoes, more or less con- strophes, each nearly a page long, to celescious, of the great classic poets; only brating the sublime perfections of Walter (for I utterly reject the accusation of Savage Landor. "languid") the strength and sweetness with which they are expressed are his own. However, when he comes, at the

all that bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, live in one's mind for years; and that is no bad test of their excellence.

Hen. That ode to Milton of Tennyson's is at any rate a short one.

Mr.

Bas. Don't talk to me about Swinburne. Let us return to Gray. I am inclined to think there is more of the vivida vis,