CHAPTER XXII

The characteristic defects of Wordsworth’s poetry, with the principles

from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their

proportion to the beauties--For the greatest part characteristic of his

theory only.

If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his

arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have

adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those

arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. And

still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of the

truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive

attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting him to carry

those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken theory have at

all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed

out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the

influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by starts; whether the

number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great

or trifling compared with the sound portion; and lastly, whether they

are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable.

The result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high

time to announce decisively and aloud, that the supposed characteristics

of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry, whether admired or reprobated; whether they

are simplicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or

wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and under the

least attractive associations; are as little the real characteristics of

his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind.

In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment;

and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet even in these

poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of

the poet’s mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. The

poem entitled FIDELITY is for the greater part written in language,

as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two volumes. Yet take the

following stanza and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same

poem.

“There sometimes doth a leaping fish

Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;

The crags repeat the raven’s croak,

In symphony austere;

Thither the rainbow comes--the cloud--

And mists that spread the flying shroud;

And sun-beams; and the sounding blast,

That, if it could, would hurry past;

But that enormous barrier holds it fast.”

Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former

half.

“Yes, proof was plain that, since the day

On which the Traveller thus had died,

The Dog had watched about the spot,

Or by his Master’s side:

How nourish’d here through such long time

He knows, who gave that love sublime,--

And gave that strength of feeling, great

Above all human estimate!”

Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of

these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet’s

genius? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet

would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress

the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or

other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only

disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having

amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river’s

bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and

sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the

imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the

poet’s theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the art,

generally acknowledged.

I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth’s

works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment,

after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And though,

to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to understand

previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have already expressed

myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that

might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore

commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto

published.

The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear

to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under

this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines

or sentences of peculiar felicity--(at all events striking and

original)--to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He

sinks too often and too abruptly to that style, which I should place

in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species;

first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only

proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. There have

been works, such as Cowley’s Essay on Cromwell, in which prose and verse

are intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetius, or the ARGENIS

of Barclay, by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or

composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing

from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings

dictated. Yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a cultivated

taste. There is something unpleasant in the being thus obliged to

alternate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of

writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation

and previous expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness

is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic

operas; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose

exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be

entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria at the

end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and

impassions the style of the recitative immediately preceding. Even in

real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the

arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse,

with the image and superscription worn out by currency; and those which

convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and

particularize some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward

state of the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of

his peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. So much so indeed, that

in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of

the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the

excitement arising from concentred attention produce a sort of damp

and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of works of

literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the business

of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires unusual

splendour and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints,

that what in a different style would be the commanding colours, are

here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in order to

produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved in a poem,

the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to disappoint

them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings are

alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax.

I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose

from THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY; and then annex, as being in my opinion

instances of this disharmony in style, the two following:

“And one, the rarest, was a shell,

Which he, poor child, had studied well:

The shell of a green turtle, thin

And hollow;--you might sit therein,

It was so wide, and deep.”

“Our Highland Boy oft visited

The house which held this prize; and, led

By choice or chance, did thither come

One day, when no one was at home,

And found the door unbarred.”

Or page 172, vol. I.

“’Tis gone forgotten, let me do

My best. There was a smile or two--

I can remember them, I see

The smiles worth all the world to me.

Dear Baby! I must lay thee down:

Thou troublest me with strange alarms;

Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own;

I cannot keep thee in my arms;

For they confound me: as it is,

I have forgot those smiles of his!”

Or page 269, vol. I.

“Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest

And though little troubled with sloth

Drunken lark! thou would’st be loth

To be such a traveller as I.

Happy, happy liver!

_With a soul as strong as a mountain river

Pouring out praise to th’ Almighty giver,_

Joy and jollity be with us both!

Hearing thee or else some other,

As merry a brother

I on the earth will go plodding on

By myself cheerfully till the day is done.”

The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of the

two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So vol. II.

page 30.

“Close by a Pond, upon the further side,

He stood alone; a minute’s space I guess,

I watch’d him, he continuing motionless

To the Pool’s further margin then I drew;

He being all the while before me full in view.”

Compare this with the repetition of the same image, the next stanza but

two.

“And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,

Beside the little pond or moorish flood

Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood,

That heareth not the loud winds when they call;

And moveth altogether, if it move at all.”

Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both with

the first and the third.

“My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills;

And hope that is unwilling to be fed;

Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;

And mighty Poets in their misery dead.

But now, perplex’d by what the Old Man had said,

My question eagerly did I renew,

‘How is it that you live, and what is it you do?’

“He with a smile did then his words repeat;

And said, that gathering Leeches far and wide

He travell’d; stirring thus about his feet

The waters of the Ponds where they abide.

`Once I could meet with them on every side;

‘But they have dwindled long by slow decay;

‘Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.’

While he was talking thus, the lonely place,

The Old Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me

In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace

About the weary moors continually,

Wandering about alone and silently.”

Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There

is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would

not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat that this

defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the two volumes

of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would amount in the

whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the number of pages.

In THE EXCURSION the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by

the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the sudden

superiority of some other passage forming the context.

The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the

reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should

say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may

be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the

representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the

poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances,

in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their

dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to

establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is

taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where

the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this actidentality

I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle

pronounces to be spoudaiotaton kai philosophotaton genos, the most

intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the

reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The following passage

from Davenant’s prefatory letter to Hobbes well expresses this truth.

“When I considered the actions which I meant to describe; (those

inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather to choose those

of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed, as

might preserve me from their improper examinations, who know not the

requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose, (and even the

pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable), who take away the

liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian.

For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune

by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere

historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were

in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs,

who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But by this I would imply,

that truth, narrative and past, is the idol of historians, (who worship

a dead thing), and truth operative, and by effects continually alive,

is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in

reason.”

For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in

THE EXCURSION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a striking

instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be some strong

motive--(as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the

intelligibility of the tale)--which could induce me to describe in

a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with

incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil,

or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such descriptions too

often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand

his author, a feeling of labour, not very dissimilar to that, with

which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical

proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map

out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then

join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have

been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as

a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and

I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two

faculties. Master-pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound

in the writings of Milton, for example:

“The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown’d,

“But such as at this day, to Indians known,

“In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms

“Branching so broad and long, that in the ground

“The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow

“About the mother tree, a pillar’d shade

“High over-arch’d and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN;

“There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,

“Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds

“At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade.”

This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and

with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the

eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise

understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the

senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical

penny duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of

sound. Thus, “The echoing walks between,” may be almost said to reverse

the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue.

Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of

imagination.

The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to

matter-of-fact in character and Incidents; a biographical attention to

probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. Under this

head I shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my

best reflection on the great point of controversy between Mr.

Wordsworth and his objectors; namely, on the choice of his characters.

I have already declared, and, I trust justified, my utter dissent from

the mode of argument which his critics have hitherto employed. To their

question, “Why did you choose such a character, or a character from

such a rank of life?”--the poet might in my opinion fairly retort: why

with the conception of my character did you make wilful choice of mean

or ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but supplied from your

own sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it, indeed, probable, that

such arguments could have any weight with an author, whose plan, whose

guiding principle, and main object it was to attack and subdue that

state of association, which leads us to place the chief value on those

things on which man differs from man, and to forget or disregard the

high dignities, which belong to Human Nature, the sense and the

feeling, which may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks? The

feelings with which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation

rising or kneeling before their common Maker, Mr. Wordsworth would have

us entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the

excitement of this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he

might hope to have encouraged its continuance in real life. The praise

of good men be his! In real life, and, I trust, even in my imagination,

I honour a virtuous and wise man, without reference to the presence or

absence of artificial advantages. Whether in the person of an armed

baron, a laurelled bard, or of an old Pedlar, or still older

Leech-gatherer, the same qualities of head and heart must claim the

same reverence. And even in poetry I am not conscious, that I have ever

suffered my feelings to be disturbed or offended by any thoughts or

images, which the poet himself has not presented.

But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons. First,

because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the moral

philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately, but in

my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons or moral

essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to destroy the main

fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even

between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth

for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. Now till the blessed time

shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be so

united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in feeling, it will

remain the poet’s office to proceed upon that state of association,

which actually exists as general; instead of attempting first to make

it what it ought to be, and then to let the pleasure follow. But here

is unfortunately a small hysteron-proteron. For the communication of

pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect

to moralize his readers. Secondly: though I were to admit, for a moment,

this argument to be groundless: yet how is the moral effect to be

produced, by merely attaching the name of some low profession to powers

which are least likely, and to qualities which are assuredly not more

likely, to be found in it? The Poet, speaking in his own person, may

at once delight and improve us by sentiments, which teach us the

independence of goodness, of wisdom, and even of genius, on the favours

of fortune. And having made a due reverence before the throne of

Antonine, he may bow with equal awe before Epictetus among his

fellow-slaves

------“and rejoice

In the plain presence of his dignity.”

Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the Poet Wordsworth

himself exclaims,

“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,

Nor having e’er, as life advanced, been led

By circumstance to take unto the height

The measure of themselves, these favoured Beings,

All but a scattered few, live out their time,

Husbanding that which they possess within,

And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds

Are often those of whom the noisy world

Hears least.”

To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do one’s

heart good; though I for my part, have not the fullest faith in the

truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe the instances to

be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection to

introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans

on a lake, in a fancy landscape. When I think how many, and how much

better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or Aeschylus,

could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a country

where almost every man is instructed to read and write; and how

restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and yet find

even in situations the most favourable, according to Mr. Wordsworth, for

the formation of a pure and poetic language; in situations which ensure

familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination; but one Burns,

among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a single poet of humble life

among those of English lakes and mountains; I conclude, that Poetic

Genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant.

But be this as it may, the feelings with which,

“I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,

The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride;

Of Burns, who walk’d in glory and in joy

Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side”--

are widely different from those with which I should read a poem,

where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a

philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a

chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the subject,

had invented an account of his birth, parentage and education, with all

the strange and fortunate accidents which had concurred in making him at

once poet, philosopher, and sweep! Nothing, but biography, can justify

this. If it be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner

of De Foe’s, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of

Fielding’s: In THE LIFE OF MOLL FLANDERS, Or COLONEL JACK, not in a TOM

JONES, or even a JOSEPH ANDREWS. Much less then can it be legitimately

introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest

individualization, must still remain representative. The precepts of

Horace, on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of

the human mind. They are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent.

For in the first place a deviation from them perplexes the reader’s

feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make

such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather

than aid and support it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear,

and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only

knows, that the sentiments and language are the poet’s own, and his

own too in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless

endeavours to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to

forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when

the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in

THE MESSIAH of Klopstock, or in CUMBERLAND’S CALVARY; and not merely

suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion,

contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply

permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either

denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is

rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts

of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic

belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of faith, as

the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines

full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing

fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in

this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in a less degree

brought about in the instances, to which I have been objecting, by the

balked attempts of the author to make him believe.

Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and

of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word,

for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE EXCURSION, characteristic

of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without

the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and

beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of

learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the

rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the

knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary

this information renders the man’s language, feelings, sentiments,

and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes

of anecdote? Finally when this, and this alone, could have induced a

genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects

the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of

fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the

friends of some obscure “ornament of society lately deceased” in some

obscure town,) as

“Among the hills of Athol he was born

There, on a small hereditary Farm,

An unproductive slip of rugged ground,

His Father dwelt; and died in poverty;

While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,

The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,

A little One--unconscious of their loss.

But ere he had outgrown his infant days

His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,

Espoused the teacher of the Village School;

Who on her offspring zealously bestowed

Needful instruction.”

“From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,

In summer tended cattle on the Hills;

But, through the inclement and the perilous days

Of long-continuing winter, he repaired

To his Step-father’s School,”-etc.

For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with

trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far

greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet;

and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a

sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.

Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems,

from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and

diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an

incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and

then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented

as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.

The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former;

but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling

disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,

as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most

cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few

particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this

class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,

instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28, and

62 of the Poems, vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the VIth Book of

THE EXCURSION.

Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This

is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast,

as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a

disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a

disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the

bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the

awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale.

It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and

leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too,

than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become

the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had

accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such

lines, as

“They flash upon that inward eye,

Which is the bliss of solitude!”

in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the

images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that

conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed “the bliss

of solitude?” Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say

burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to--

“And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.” Vol. I. p. 328.

The second instance is from vol. II. page 12, where the poet having gone

out for a day’s tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot

of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together

with their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the

close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place.

“Twelve hours,” says he,

“Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I

Have been a traveller under open sky,

Much witnessing of change and cheer,

Yet as I left I find them here!”

Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny

wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through

road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been

right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole

day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite

as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing

or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a

series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather

above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire

of China improgressive for thirty centuries:

“The weary Sun betook himself to rest:--

--Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,

Outshining, like a visible God,

The glorious path in which he trod.

And now, ascending, after one dark hour,

And one night’s diminution of her power,

Behold the mighty Moon! this way

She looks, as if at them--but they

Regard not her:--oh, better wrong and strife,

Better vain deeds or evil than such life!

The silent Heavens have goings on

The stars have tasks!--but these have none!”

The last instance of this defect,(for I know no other than these already

cited) is from the Ode, page 351, vol. II., where, speaking of a child,

“a six years’ Darling of a pigmy size,” he thus addresses him:

“Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind,--

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find!

Thou, over whom thy Immortality

Broods like the Day, a Master o’er a Slave,

A Present which is not to be put by!”

Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects

the epithets “deaf and silent,” with the apostrophized eye: or (if we

are to refer it to the preceding word, “Philosopher”), the faulty and

equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of

making a “Master brood o’er a Slave,” or “the Day” brood at all; we will

merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that

age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read “the eternal deep?” In

what sense is he declared to be “for ever haunted” by the Supreme Being?

or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Mighty Prophet, a

blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or

by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings

indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to

the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his

inspiration. Children at this age give us no such information of

themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has

produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are many of us

that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting

themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should

float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda

and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into

some unknown abyss.

But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having

been the poet’s meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and

operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is

conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part

of the child’s conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit

within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of

vital operation. For aught I know, it might be employed as a secondary

agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body.

But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my

heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! or that

I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes!

Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists; and

among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI PAN,

who not only taught that God was All, but that this All constituted God.

Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the

whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between

the individual and God, between the Modification, and the one only

Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi indeed

relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of

the Poet, Gleim, (the Tyrtaeus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus,) in

which conversation Lessing had avowed privately to Jacobi his reluctance

to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility

of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting

at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his

regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their

wine in the garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest,

half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, “It is I, perhaps, that

am doing that,” i.e. raining!--and Jacobi answered, “or perhaps I;”

Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for

any explanation.

So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent

attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not

make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or afield of corn: or

even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent

Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally

unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be, that the four lines,

immediately following, are to contain the explanation?

“To whom the grave

Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight

Of day or the warm light,

A place of thought where we in waiting lie;”--

Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a

comment on the little poem, “We are Seven?”--that the whole meaning of

the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the bye

at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian

families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark,

cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought! not the

frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy between death

and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief

possible for children; even had they not been in the habit, as all

Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the

former. But if the child’s belief be only, that “he is not dead, but

sleepeth:” wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother,

or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing’s

becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossible to

all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or

uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words

are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in

contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid

the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must

at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order

to arrive at any sense; and according to their common import, if you are

to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration.

Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth’s poems are so

few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the

reader’s attention toward them; yet I have dwelt on it, and perhaps the

more for this very reason. For being so very few, they cannot sensibly

detract from the reputation of an author, who is even characterized

by the number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand

the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those

passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able,

to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be

mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he cannot

be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For

without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would

want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his

mysticism would become sickly--mere fog, and dimness!

To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional,

I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of

any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part

correspondent) excellencies. First, an austere purity of language both

grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of

the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how

particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been

already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I ground both the

moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict

accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance

with the masterpieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even

a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and

admired: while on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the

widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and

countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious

familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness or of

a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the

arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be, to avoid the

infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art,

which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in

which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and

deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that

ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of

a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same

language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I

include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but

likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed

to convey not the object alone but likewise the character, mood and

intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is

practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations

and misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not

promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with

the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the

poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as

the result and pledge of a watchful good sense of fine and luminous

distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the

honour which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable,

and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food

of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food

and antidote.

In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style

wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere,

from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator

to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment.

Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of

Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of

his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris, and others. They might even

be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are

set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the

writer. Much however may be effected by education. I believe not only

from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself

of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led

from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and

the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old

acquaintance under new names.

On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I

shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and habits

of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision in

the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially

by indistinct watch-words; and to display the advantages which language

alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and

certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing

modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it

were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation

of a second nature. When we reflect, that the cultivation of the

judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can

give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the

motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment

when we consider, that the greater part of our success and comfort in

life depends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is

peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so

as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or

positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical

seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society,

of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same

unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those

by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much warmer

the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and

practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation

are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet,

excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the

earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all the

praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so

important, joined with that which must be claimed for the infrequency of

the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to

Mr. Wordsworth. I am far however from denying that we have poets whose

general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr. Moore, Lord

Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more important works, our

laurel-honouring Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do not

appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in those of Wordsworth.

Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be

left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this

eulogy so applied.

The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth’s work is: a

correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,--won,

not from books; but--from the poet’s own meditative observation. They

are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her

strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element,

Makes audible a linked lay of truth,

Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay,

Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!

Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not

rendered valuable by some just and original reflection.

See page 25, vol. II.: or the two following passages in one of his

humblest compositions.

“O Reader! had you in your mind

Such stores as silent thought can bring,

O gentle Reader! you would find

A tale in every thing;”

and

“I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning;

Alas! the gratitude of men

Has oftener left me mourning;”

or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page 134.

“Thus fares it still in our decay:

And yet the wiser mind

Mourns less for what age takes away

Than what it leaves behind.

The Blackbird in the summer trees,

The Lark upon the hill,

Let loose their carols when they please,

Are quiet when they will.

With Nature never do they wage

A foolish strife; they see

A happy youth, and their old age

Is beautiful and free!

But we are pressed by heavy laws;

And often glad no more,

We wear a face of joy, because

We have been glad of yore.

If there is one, who need bemoan

His kindred laid in earth,

The household hearts that were his own,

It is the man of mirth.

My days, my Friend, are almost gone,

My life has been approved,

And many love me; but by none

Am I enough beloved;”

or the sonnet on Buonaparte, page 202, vol. II. or finally (for a volume

would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances,) the last stanza of the

poem on the withered Celandine, vol. II. p. 312.

“To be a Prodigal’s Favorite--then, worse truth,

A Miser’s Pensioner--behold our lot!

O Man! That from thy fair and shining youth

Age might but take the things Youth needed not.”

Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Wordsworth

strikingly resembles Samuel Daniel, one of the golden writers of our

golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: Samuel Daniel,

whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age which

has been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the

language of the to-day and for ever, as that it is more intelligible to

us, than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. A similar

praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency of perusal can deprive

them of their freshness. For though they are brought into the full

day-light of every reader’s comprehension; yet are they drawn up from

depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which few in

any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr. Wordsworth is

not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average

understanding in all passages of his works, the comparative difficulty

does not arise from the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature

and uses of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure, because it

does not aim to be popular. It is enough, if a work be perspicuous to

those for whom it is written, and

“Fit audience find, though few.”

To the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of

early Childhood” the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante

addresses to one of his own Canzoni--

“Canzone, i’ credo, che saranno radi

Color, che tua ragione intendan bene,

Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto.”

“O lyric song, there will be few, I think,

Who may thy import understand aright:

Thou art for them so arduous and so high!”

But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed

to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times

into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest

in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time

and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed,

save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is

sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr.

Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary

interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever

meant or taught it.

Polla oi ut’ ankonos

okea belae

endon enti pharetras

phonanta synetoisin; es

de to pan hermaeneon

chatizei; sophos o polla

eidos phua;

mathontes de labroi

panglossia, korakes os,

akranta garueton

Dios pros ornicha theion.

Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel) the sinewy strength

and originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosa

felicitas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens,

having anticipated them in a preceding page. This beauty, and as

eminently characteristic of Wordsworth’s poetry, his rudest assailants

have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire.

Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as

taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy

with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the

works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly

transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by

its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a

pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects; but on

the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the

eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had

been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the

dusty high road of custom.

Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. I. page 42 to 47,

especially to the lines

“So through the darkness and the cold we flew,

And not a voice was idle. with the din

Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud;

The leafless trees and every icy crag

Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills

Into the tumult sent an alien sound

Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,

Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west

The orange sky of evening died away.”

Or to the poem on THE GREEN LINNET, vol. I. page 244. What can be more

accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas?

“Upon yon tuft of hazel trees,

That twinkle to the gusty breeze,

Behold him perched in ecstasies,

Yet seeming still to hover;

There! where the flutter of his wings

Upon his back and body flings

Shadows and sunny glimmerings,

That cover him all over.

While thus before my eyes he gleams,

A Brother of the Leaves he seems;

When in a moment forth he teems

His little song in gushes

As if it pleased him to disdain

And mock the Form which he did feign

While he was dancing with the train

Of Leaves among the bushes.”

Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, page

284; or the poem to the cuckoo, page 299; or, lastly, though I might

multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so

completely Wordsworth’s, commencing

“Three years she grew in sun and shower”--

Fifth: a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with

sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a

contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, (spectator, haud

particeps) but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank

conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or

toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The

superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to

him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or

cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves in

each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this

mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer.

Such as he is: so he writes. See vol. I. page 134 to 136, or that most

affecting composition, THE AFFLICTION OF MARGARET ---- OF ----, page 165

to 168, which no mother, and, if I may judge by my own experience, no

parent can read without a tear. Or turn to that genuine lyric, in the

former edition, entitled, THE MAD MOTHER, page 174 to 178, of which I

cannot refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their

pathos, and the former for the fine transition in the two concluding

lines of the stanza, so expressive of that deranged state, in which,

from the increased sensibility, the sufferer’s attention is abruptly

drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by

the one despotic thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing

power of Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been

so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate.

“Suck, little babe, oh suck again!

It cools my blood; it cools my brain;

Thy lips, I feel them, baby! They

Draw from my heart the pain away.

Oh! press me with thy little hand;

It loosens something at my chest

About that tight and deadly band

I feel thy little fingers prest.

The breeze I see is in the tree!

It comes to cool my babe and me.”

“Thy father cares not for my breast,

’Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest;

’Tis all thine own!--and if its hue

Be changed, that was so fair to view,

’Tis fair enough for thee, my dove!

My beauty, little child, is flown,

But thou wilt live with me in love;

And what if my poor cheek be brown?

’Tis well for me, thou canst not see

How pale and wan it else would be.”

Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of

Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the

play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful,

and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or

demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature

of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed

his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy. But

in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to

Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and

his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an

illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects--

“------add the gleam,

The light that never was, on sea or land,

The consecration, and the Poet’s dream.”

I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this

faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis

of Imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to

the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet’s works without

recognising, more or less, the presence and the influences of this

faculty. From the poem on the YEW TREES, vol. I. page 303, 304.

“But worthier still of note

Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,

Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;

Huge trunks!--and each particular trunk a growth

Of intertwisted fibres serpentine

Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved;

Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks

That threaten the profane;--a pillared shade,

Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,

By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged

Perennially--beneath whose sable roof

Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked

With unrejoicing berries--ghostly shapes

May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE,

SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton,

And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate,

As in a natural temple scattered o’er

With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,

United worship; or in mute repose

To lie, and listen to the mountain flood

Murmuring from Glazamara’s inmost caves.”

The effect of the old man’s figure in the poem of RESOLUTION AND

INDEPENDENCE, vol. II. page 33.

“While he was talking thus, the lonely place,

The Old Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me

In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace

About the weary moors continually,

Wandering about alone and silently.”

Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33rd, in the collection of

miscellaneous sonnets--the sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland,

page 210, or the last ode, from which I especially select the two

following stanzas or paragraphs, page 349 to 350.

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy;

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy!

The Youth who daily further from the East

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.”

And page 352 to 354 of the same ode.

“O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benedictions: not indeed

For that which is most worthy to be blest;

Delight and liberty, the simple creed

Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--

Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;

But for those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings;

Blank misgivings of a Creature

Moving about in worlds not realized,

High instincts, before which our mortal Nature

Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised!

But for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake

To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

Nor Man nor Boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence, in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither;

Can in a moment travel thither,--

And see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”

And since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract, which, though

highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature of the thoughts and the

subject, be interesting or perhaps intelligible, to but a limited number

of readers; I will add, from the poet’s last published work, a passage

equally Wordsworthian; of the beauty of which, and of the imaginative

power displayed therein, there can be but one opinion, and one feeling.

See White Doe, page 5.

“Fast the church-yard fills;--anon

Look again and they all are gone;

The cluster round the porch, and the folk

Who sate in the shade of the Prior’s Oak!

And scarcely have they disappeared

Ere the prelusive hymn is heard;--

With one consent the people rejoice,

Filling the church with a lofty voice!

They sing a service which they feel:

For ’tis the sun-rise now of zeal;

And faith and hope are in their prime

In great Eliza’s golden time.”

“A moment ends the fervent din,

And all is hushed, without and within;

For though the priest, more tranquilly,

Recites the holy liturgy,

The only voice which you can hear

Is the river murmuring near.

--When soft!--the dusky trees between,

And down the path through the open green,

Where is no living thing to be seen;

And through yon gateway, where is found,

Beneath the arch with ivy bound,

Free entrance to the church-yard ground--

And right across the verdant sod,

Towards the very house of God;

Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,

Comes gliding in serene and slow,

Soft and silent as a dream.

A solitary Doe!

White she is as lily of June,

And beauteous as the silver moon

When out of sight the clouds are driven

And she is left alone in heaven!

Or like a ship some gentle day

In sunshine sailing far away

A glittering ship that hath the plain

Of ocean for her own domain.”

* * * * * *

“What harmonious pensive changes

Wait upon her as she ranges

Round and through this Pile of state

Overthrown and desolate!

Now a step or two her way

Is through space of open day,

Where the enamoured sunny light

Brightens her that was so bright;

Now doth a delicate shadow fall,

Falls upon her like a breath,

From some lofty arch or wall,

As she passes underneath.”

The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and fantastic,

but in reading Bartram’s Travels I could not help transcribing the

following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor

of Wordsworth’s intellect and genius.--“The soil is a deep, rich, dark

mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of

rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their backs above

the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic, black

oak; magnolia grandi-flora; fraximus excelsior; platane; and a few

stately tulip trees.” What Mr. Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me

to prophesy but I could pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he

is capable of producing. It is the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM.

The preceding criticism will not, I am aware, avail to overcome the

prejudices of those, who have made it a business to attack and ridicule

Mr. Wordsworth’s compositions.

Truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles. The poet may

perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far

within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as “too

petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with

him;----men of palsied imaginations, in whose minds all healthy action

is languid;----who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or with the

many are greedy after vicious provocatives.”

So much for the detractors from Wordsworth’s merits. On the other hand,

much as I might wish for their fuller sympathy, I dare not flatter

myself, that the freedom with which I have declared my opinions

concerning both his theory and his defects, most of which are more

or less connected with his theory, either as cause or effect, will be

satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet’s admirers and advocates.

More indiscriminate than mine their admiration may be: deeper and more

sincere it cannot be. But I have advanced no opinion either for praise

or censure, other than as texts introductory to the reasons which compel

me to form it. Above all, I was fully convinced that such a criticism

was not only wanted; but that, if executed with adequate ability, it

must conduce, in no mean degree, to Mr. Wordsworth’s reputation.

His fame belongs to another age, and can neither be accelerated nor

retarded. How small the proportion of the defects are to the beauties,

I have repeatedly declared; and that no one of them originates in

deficiency of poetic genius. Had they been more and greater, I should

still, as a friend to his literary character in the present age,

consider an analytic display of them as pure gain; if only it removed,

as surely to all reflecting minds even the foregoing analysis must have

removed, the strange mistake, so slightly grounded, yet so widely and

industriously propagated, of Mr. Wordsworth’s turn for simplicity! I

am not half as much irritated by hearing his enemies abuse him for

vulgarity of style, subject, and conception, as I am disgusted with the

gilded side of the same meaning, as displayed by some affected admirers,

with whom he is, forsooth, a “sweet, simple poet!” and so natural, that

little master Charles and his younger sister are so charmed with them,

that they play at “Goody Blake,” or at “Johnny and Betty Foy!”

Were the collection of poems, published with these biographical

sketches, important enough, (which I am not vain enough to believe,)

to deserve such a distinction; even as I have done, so would I be done

unto.

For more than eighteen months have the volume of Poems, entitled

SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volume, up to this page, been printed,

and ready for publication. But, ere I speak of myself in the tones,

which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late years, I

would fain present myself to the Reader as I was in the first dawn of my

literary life:

When Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine,

And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem’d mine!

For this purpose I have selected from the letters, which I wrote home

from Germany, those which appeared likely to be most interesting, and at

the same time most pertinent to the title of this work.

SATYRANE’S LETTERS

LETTER I

On Sunday morning, September 16, 1798, the Hamburg packet set sail from

Yarmouth; and I, for the first time in my life, beheld my native land

retiring from me. At the moment of its disappearance--in all the kirks,

churches, chapels, and meeting-houses, in which the greater number, I

hope, of my countrymen were at that time assembled, I will dare question

whether there was one more ardent prayer offered up to heaven, than

that which I then preferred for my country. “Now then,” (said I to a

gentleman who was standing near me,) “we are out of our country.” “Not

yet, not yet!” he replied, and pointed to the sea; “This, too, is a

Briton’s country.” This bon mot gave a fillip to my spirits, I rose and

looked round on my fellow-passengers, who were all on the deck. We

were eighteen in number, videlicet, five Englishmen, an English lady,

a French gentleman and his servant, an Hanoverian and his servant, a

Prussian, a Swede, two Danes, and a Mulatto boy, a German tailor and his

wife, (the smallest couple I ever beheld,) and a Jew. We were all on the

deck; but in a short time I observed marks of dismay. The lady retired

to the cabin in some confusion, and many of the faces round me assumed a

very doleful and frog-coloured appearance; and within an hour the number

of those on deck was lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick,

and the giddiness soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of

appetite, which I attributed, in great measure, to the saeva Mephitis of

the bilge-water; and it was certainly not decreased by the exportations

from the cabin. However, I was well enough to join the able-bodied

passengers, one of whom observed not inaptly, that Momus might have

discovered an easier way to see a man’s inside, than by placing a

window in his breast. He needed only have taken a saltwater trip in a

packet-boat.

I am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to a

stage-coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the

latter the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the

definitiveness of the period, at which the company will separate, makes

each individual think more of those to whom he is going, than of those

with whom he is going. But at sea, more curiosity is excited, if only

on this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your

companions are of greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how

long you may be obliged to house with them. Besides, if you are

countrymen, that now begins to form a distinction and a bond of

brotherhood; and if of different countries, there are new incitements

of conversation, more to ask and more to communicate. I found that I

had interested the Danes in no common degree. I had crept into the boat

on the deck and fallen asleep; but was awakened by one of them, about

three o’clock in the afternoon, who told me that they had been seeking

me in every hole and corner, and insisted that I should join their

party and drink with them. He talked English with such fluency, as left

me wholly unable to account for the singular and even ludicrous

incorrectness with which he spoke it. I went, and found some excellent

wines and a dessert of grapes with a pine-apple. The Danes had

christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black, with

large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly have passed

very well for a Methodist missionary. However I disclaimed my title.

What then may you be? A man of fortune? No!--A merchant? No!--A

merchant’s traveller? No!--A clerk? No!--Un Philosophe, perhaps? It was

at that time in my life, in which of all possible names and characters

I had the greatest disgust to that of “un Philosophe.” But I was weary

of being questioned, and rather than be nothing, or at best only the

abstract idea of a man, I submitted by a bow, even to the aspersion

implied in the word “un Philosophe.”--The Dane then informed me, that

all in the present party were Philosophers likewise. Certes we were not

of the Stoick school. For we drank and talked and sung, till we talked

and sung all together; and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of

dances, which in one sense of the word at least, were very intelligibly

and appropriately entitled reels. The passengers, who lay in the cabin

below in all the agonies of sea-sickness, must have found our

bacchanalian merriment

------a tune

Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint.

I thought so at the time; and, (by way, I suppose, of supporting my

newly assumed philosophical character,) I thought too, how closely the

greater number of our virtues are connected with the fear of death, and

how little sympathy we bestow on pain, where there is no danger.

The two Danes were brothers. The one was a man with a clear white

complexion, white hair, and white eyebrows; looked silly, and nothing

that he uttered gave the lie to his looks. The other, whom, by way of

eminence I have called the Dane, had likewise white hair, but was much

shorter than his brother, with slender limbs, and a very thin face

slightly pockfretten. This man convinced me of the justice of an old

remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces has been

rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps nonentity. I

had retired to my station in the boat--he came and seated himself by my

side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the conversation in

the most magnific style, and, as a sort of pioneering to his own vanity,

he flattered me with such grossness! The parasites of the old comedy

were modest in the comparison. His language and accentuation were so

exceedingly singular, that I determined for once in my life to take

notes of a conversation. Here it follows, somewhat abridged, indeed, but

in all other respects as accurately as my memory permitted.

THE DANE. Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! and vat eyes!

vat a milk-vite forehead! O my heafen! vy, you’re a Got!

ANSWER. You do me too much honour, Sir.

THE DANE. O me! if you should dink I is flattering you!--No, no, no! I

haf ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand pound

a year! Vel--and vat is dhat? a mere trifle! I ’ouldn’t gif my sincere

heart for ten times dhe money. Yes, you’re a Got! I a mere man! But, my

dear friend! dhink of me, as a man! Is, is--I mean to ask you now, my

dear friend--is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine?

ANSWER. Most admirably! Believe me, Sir! I have seldom heard even a

native talk so fluently.

THE DANE. (Squeezing my hand with great vehemence.) My dear friend! vat

an affection and fidelity ve have for each odher! But tell me, do tell

me,--Is I not, now and den, speak some fault? Is I not in some wrong?

ANSWER. Why, Sir! perhaps it might be observed by nice critics in the

English language, that you occasionally use the word “is” instead of

“am.” In our best companies we generally say I am, and not I is or I’se.

Excuse me, Sir! it is a mere trifle.

THE DANE. O!--is, is, am, am, am. Yes, yes--I know, I know.

ANSWER. I am, thou art, he is, we are, ye are, they are.

THE DANE. Yes, yes,--I know, I know--Am, am, am, is dhe praesens, and is

is dhe perfectum--yes, yes--and are is dhe plusquam perfectum.

ANSWER. And art, Sir! is--?

THE DANE. My dear friend! it is dhe plusquam perfectum, no, no--dhat

is a great lie; are is dhe plusquam perfectum--and art is dhe plasquam

plue-perfectum--(then swinging my hand to and fro, and cocking his

little bright hazel eyes at me, that danced with vanity and wine)--You

see, my dear friend that I too have some lehrning?

ANSWER. Learning, Sir? Who dares suspect it? Who can listen to you for a

minute, who can even look at you, without perceiving the extent of it?

THE DANE. My dear friend!--(then with a would-be humble look, and in a

tone of voice as if he was reasoning) I could not talk so of prawns and

imperfectum, and futurum and plusquamplue perfectum, and all dhat, my

dear friend! without some lehrning?

ANSWER. Sir! a man like you cannot talk on any subject without

discovering the depth of his information.

THE DANE. Dhe grammatic Greek, my friend; ha! ha! Ha! (laughing, and

swinging my hand to and fro--then with a sudden transition to great

solemnity) Now I will tell you, my dear friend! Dhere did happen about

me vat de whole historia of Denmark record no instance about nobody

else. Dhe bishop did ask me all dhe questions about all dhe religion in

dhe Latin grammar.

ANSWER. The grammar, Sir? The language, I presume--

THE DANE. (A little offended.) Grammar is language, and language is

grammar--

ANSWER. Ten thousand pardons!

THE DANE. Vell, and I was only fourteen years--

ANSWER. Only fourteen years old?

THE DANE. No more. I vas fourteen years old--and he asked me all

questions, religion and philosophy, and all in dhe Latin language--and I

answered him all every one, my dear friend! all in dhe Latin language.

ANSWER. A prodigy! an absolute prodigy!

THE DANE. No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent.

ANSWER. Yes! a bishop.

THE DANE. A bishop--not a mere predicant, not a prediger.

ANSWER. My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I said that your

answering in Latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a thing

that is wonderful; that does not often happen.

THE DANE. Often! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole

historia of Denmark.

ANSWER. And since then, Sir--?

THE DANE. I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies--to our Island, and dhere I

had no more to do vid books. No! no! I put my genius anodher way--and

I haf made ten tousand pound a year. Is not dhat ghenius, my dear

friend?--But vat is money?--I dhink dhe poorest man alive my equal.

Yes, my dear friend; my little fortune is pleasant to my generous heart,

because I can do good--no man with so little a fortune ever did so much

generosity--no person--no man person, no woman person ever denies it.

But we are all Got’s children.

Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the Swede, and

the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Englishman who spoke the

German fluently, and interpreted to me many of the Prussian’s jokes. The

Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale

man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories, gesticulations, and

buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who,

while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll

looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter;

and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. The

Hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man, whose father had made a

large fortune in London, as an army-contractor. He seemed to emulate

the manners of young Englishmen of fortune. He was a good-natured

fellow, not without information or literature; but a most egregious

coxcomb. He had been in the habit of attending the House of Commons, and

had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating

society. For this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable

industry: for he was perfect in Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary, and

with an accent, which forcibly reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderic

Random, who professed to teach the English pronunciation, he was

constantly deferring to my superior judgment, whether or no I had

pronounced this or that word with propriety, or “the true delicacy.”

When he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always

rose: for which I could detect no other motive, than his partiality

to that elegant phrase so liberally introduced in the orations of

our British legislators, “While I am on my legs.” The Swede, whom

for reasons that will soon appear, I shall distinguish by the name

of Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-faced man, his complexion

resembling in colour, a red hot poker beginning to cool. He appeared

miserably dependent on the Dane; but was, however, incomparably the

best informed and most rational of the party. Indeed his manners

and conversation discovered him to be both a man of the world and a

gentleman. The Jew was in the hold: the French gentleman was lying on

the deck so ill, that I could observe nothing concerning him, except the

affectionate attentions of his servant to him. The poor fellow was very

sick himself, and every now and then ran to the side of the vessel,

still keeping his eye on his master, but returned in a moment and seated

himself again by him, now supporting his head, now wiping his forehead

and talking to him all the while in the most soothing tones. There

had been a matrimonial squabble of a very ludicrous kind in the cabin,

between the little German tailor and his little wife. He had secured two

beds, one for himself and one for her. This had struck the little woman

as a very cruel action; she insisted upon their having but one, and

assured the mate in the most piteous tones, that she was his lawful

wife. The mate and the cabin boy decided in her favour, abused the

little man for his want of tenderness with much humour, and hoisted

him into the same compartment with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel was

interesting to me, as it procured me a bed, which I otherwise should not

have had.

In the evening, at seven o’clock, the sea rolled higher, and the Dane,

by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had been

swallowing to make room for a great deal more. His favourite potation

was sugar and brandy, i.e. a very little warm water with a large

quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg His servant boy, a black-eyed

Mulatto, had a good-natured round face, exactly the colour of the skin

of the walnut-kernel. The Dane and I were again seated, tete-a-tete,

in the ship’s boat. The conversation, which was now indeed rather an

oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever

heard. He told me that he had made a large fortune in the island of

Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He expatiated

on the style in which he meant to live, and the great undertakings which

he proposed to himself to commence, till, the brandy aiding his vanity,

and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a

madman--entreated me to accompany him to Denmark--there I should see his

influence with the government, and he would introduce me to the king,

etc., etc. Thus he went on dreaming aloud, and then passing with a very

lyrical transition to the subject of general politics, he declaimed,

like a member of the Corresponding Society, about, (not concerning,)

the Rights of Man, and assured me that, notwithstanding his fortune, he

thought the poorest man alive his equal. “All are equal, my dear friend!

all are equal! Ve are all Got’s children. The poorest man haf the same

rights with me. Jack! Jack! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat

fellow now! He is a Mulatto--but he is my equal.--That’s right, Jack!

(taking the sugar and brandy.) Here you Sir! shake hands with dhis

gentleman! Shake hands with me, you dog! Dhere, dhere!--We are all equal

my dear friend! Do I not speak like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato--they

were all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men!--and so

was Homer and Virgil--but they were poets. Yes, yes! I know all about

it!--But what can anybody say more than this? We are all equal, all

Got’s children. I haf ten tousand a year, but I am no more dhan de

meanest man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! I can

say, do! and it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! Now dhere is dhat

gentleman (pointing to Nobility) he is a Swedish baron--you shall see.

Ho! (calling to the Swede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the

cabin. SWEDE.--Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine from

the cabin. DANE. No, no, no! do you go now--you go yourself you go now!

SWEDE. Pah!--DANE. Now go! Go, I pray you.” And the Swede went!!

After this the Dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking

me for un philosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked of

Deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional rants

of that rude blunderer, Mr. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, and

whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrism all Jesus Christ’s business

was. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge themselves

with indulging in persiflage than myself. I should hate it, if it were

only that it is a Frenchman’s vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it,

because our own language is too honest to have a word to express it by.

But in this instance the temptation had been too powerful, and I have

placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles answered one of his

dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case of life and death, to

take an equivocal oath for his preservation: Debeo amicis opitulari, sed

usque ad Deos [75]. Friendship herself must place her last and boldest

step on this side the altar. What Pericles would not do to save a

friend’s life, you may be assured, I would not hazard merely to mill the

chocolate-pot of a drunken fool’s vanity till it frothed over. Assuming

a serious look, I professed myself a believer, and sunk at once an

hundred fathoms in his good graces. He retired to his cabin, and I

wrapped myself up in my great coat, and looked at the water. A beautiful

white cloud of foam at momently intervals coursed by the side of the

vessel with a roar, and little stars of flame danced and sparkled and

went out in it: and every now and then light detachments of this white

cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel’s side, each with its own

small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a

Tartar troop over a wilderness.

It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and I found

reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-caped, respectable

rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part of a night-cap

very passably. In looking up at two or three bright stars, which

oscillated with the motion of the sails, I fell asleep, but was awakened

at one o’clock, Monday morning, by a shower of rain. I found myself

compelled to go down into the cabin, where I slept very soundly, and

awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my nostrils, the most

placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or indeed insensible of the

mephitis.

Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the Swede, who

spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane, whom he described as

a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the Dane respecting

the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the first

instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. From the Dane and

from himself I collected that he was indeed a Swedish nobleman, who had

squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and had made over his

property to the Dane, on whom he was now utterly dependent. He seemed

to suffer very little pain from the Dane’s insolence. He was in a high

degree humane and attentive to the English lady, who suffered most

fearfully, and for whom he performed many little offices with a

tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove real goodness of heart.

Indeed his general manners and conversation were not only pleasing,

but even interesting; and I struggled to believe his insensibility

respecting the Dane philosophical fortitude. For though the Dane was

now quite sober, his character oozed out of him at every pore. And after

dinner, when he was again flushed with wine, every quarter of an hour or

perhaps oftener he would shout out to the Swede, “Ho! Nobility, go--do

such a thing! Mr. Nobility!--tell the gentlemen such a story, and

so forth;” with an insolence which must have excited disgust and

detestation, if his vulgar rants on the sacred rights of equality,

joined to his wild havoc of general grammar no less than of the English

language, had not rendered it so irresistibly laughable.

At four o’clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single

solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing

it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had associated

such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly

disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and

nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images

capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words. In the

evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run foul of the land,

which can be seen only at a small distance. And at four o’clock, on

Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of “land! land!” It was an

ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called Heiligeland, well

known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Hamburg, who have been obliged

by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in weary captivity on it,

stripped of all their money by the exorbitant demands of the wretches

who inhabit it. So at least the sailors informed me.--About nine o’clock

we saw the main land, which seemed scarcely able to hold its head above

water, low, flat, and dreary, with lighthouses and land-marks which

seemed to give a character and language to the dreariness. We entered

the mouth of the Elbe, passing Neu-werk; though as yet the right bank

only of the river was visible to us. On this I saw a church, and thanked

God for my safe voyage, not without affectionate thoughts of those I

had left in England. At eleven o’clock on the same morning we arrived

at Cuxhaven, the ship dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to

carry the Hanoverian and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to

take us, who remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the Dane

contributed so largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea

each. Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. At

Cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we could

now see the right bank only. We passed a multitude of English traders

that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. In a short time both banks

became visible, both flat and evidencing the labour of human hands by

their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church or two in

the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and windmill and

cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and windmill, and neat

single house, and steeple. These were the objects and in the succession.

The shores were very green and planted with trees not inelegantly.

Thirty-five miles from Cuxhaven the night came on us, and, as the

navigation of the Elbe is perilous, we dropped anchor.

Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest

friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the Elbe. Close above the

moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet

crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a ribbon

of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water

and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and obscurely.

We saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably from bed-rooms.

I felt the striking contrast between the silence of this majestic

stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and children, and

flocks and herds--between the silence by night of this peopled river,

and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud agitations of the desolate

solitude of the ocean. The passengers below had all retired to their

beds; and I felt the interest of this quiet scene the more deeply from

the circumstance of having just quitted them. For the Prussian had

during the whole of the evening displayed all his talents to captivate

the Dane, who had admitted him into the train of his dependents. The

young Englishman continued to interpret the Prussian’s jokes to me. They

were all without exception profane and abominable, but some sufficiently

witty, and a few incidents, which he related in his own person, were

valuable as illustrating the manners of the countries in which they had

taken place.

Five o’clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon

obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our

captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared

off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very beautiful

island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the wind continuing slack. This

holm or island is about a mile and a half in length, wedge-shaped,

well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and rendered more

interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. It seemed made for

retirement without solitude--a place that would allure one’s friends,

while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere visitors. The shores of

the Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich meadows and trees running

like a low wall along the river’s edge; and peering over them,

neat houses and, (especially on the right bank,) a profusion of

steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive taste teaches men

to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which,

as they cannot be referred to any other object, point, as with silent

finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes, when they reflect the

brazen light of a rich though rainy sun-set, appear like a pyramid of

flame burning heavenward. I remember once, and once only, to have seen

a spire in a narrow valley of a mountainous country. The effect was

not only mean but ludicrous, and reminded me against my will of an

extinguisher; the close neighbourhood of the high mountain, at the foot

of which it stood, had so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of

all connection with the sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles from

Cuxhaven, and sixteen from Hamburg, the Danish village Veder ornaments

the left bank with its black steeple, and close by it is the wild and

pastoral hamlet of Schulau. Hitherto both the right and left bank, green

to the very brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a

park canal. The trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees

over-topping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising

above the yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once

forty or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular

facade of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued

to present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of

fishing boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the

clamorous rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to

Blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees,

over three hills in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon

the river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their

bare poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic

harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper

than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual

cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard,

and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of

paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is inhabited by fishermen

and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great request through the

whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we saw the spires of Hamburg,

and from hence, as far as Altona, the left bank of the Elbe is

uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of an industrious and

republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that

might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste

which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work

are everywhere scattered along the high and green banks; the boards

of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and

yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the

human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of

nature. Still, however, these are links of connection between town and

country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments

for which men’s habits have disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays

and Sundays with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women

and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a

nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o’clock, we left the vessel, and

passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to

choke the wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the

Boom House, Hamburg.

LETTER II

To a lady.

RATZEBURG.

Meine liebe Freundinn,

See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet

been six weeks in the country!--almost as fluently as English from my

neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as

we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day,

never fails to greet me with--“---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my

dearest Englander! vhee goes it!”--which is certainly a proof of great

generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English.

I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my

proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language,

from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification

and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your

sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than

by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English affix,

ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the Latin, as

actress, directress, etc., or from the French, as mistress, duchess, and

the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate the sex in

every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann’s lady is the Frau

Amtmanninn--the secretary’s wife, (by the bye, the handsomest

woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau

Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel’s lady, die Frau Obristinn or

Colonellinn--and even the parson’s wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am

especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of the

Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I know

it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a friend,

when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a

female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which the objection

will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than

abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their

perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a

sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be

loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.

Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--“This

is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has

blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn

where he is and what he has seen.” Well then! that I am settled at

Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither,

will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has

edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the

Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was

amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once

or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed close with all

people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes

in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies--straight

and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain,

wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver

bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of

the male Hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But

I forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible.--Therefore,

Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion, who, you recollect, speaks

the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of

confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man

of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. He seemed

about fifty or rather more. Whatever is unpleasant in French manners

from excess in the degree, had been softened down by age or affliction;

and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little

attentions, etc., remained, and without bustle, gesticulation,

or disproportionate eagerness. His demeanour exhibited the minute

philanthropy of a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of

the English character disunited from its reserve. There is something

strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the

word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more

easy to feel than to define. It neither includes the possession of high

moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner.

I have now in my mind’s eye a person whose life would scarcely stand

scrutiny even in the court of honour, much less in that of conscience;

and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea

of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed

with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter,

I believe to be this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us,

whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial

not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners

and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to

others in such a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings

an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to

himself. In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling

of Equality acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of

Rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This

description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own

remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning

the causes of the corruption of eloquence. “What perfect gentlemen these

old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I remember, with the

same feeling at the time I was reading a translation of Cicero’s

philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in

Pliny’s Letters I seemed to have a different feeling--he gave me the

notion of a very fine gentleman.” You uttered the words as if you had

felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree

altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero

an aristocratic republican. For this reason the character of gentleman,

in the sense to which I have confined it, is frequent in England, rare

in France, and found, where it is found, in age or the latest period

of manhood; while in Germany the character is almost unknown. But

the proper antipode of a gentleman is to be sought for among the

Anglo-American democrats.

I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman,

and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us

on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour by

the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to him

for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression

of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both

make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased therefore to

find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in

the same house. My friend went with him in search of an hotel, and I to

deliver my letters of recommendation.

I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I

actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time

in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a

liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his

first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I

began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for being

so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella hats

shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of

petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul

with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which

stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled

through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a

stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap

behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses

on the back:

“Their visnomies seem’d like a goodly banner

Spread in defiance of all enemies.”

The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth:

which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too

glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the

laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who with their

clean white stockings and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped

along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from

the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who had always

considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I

had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; to my

English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight

the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the

foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street,

some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say;

but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese

grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows,

so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt’s window

tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young

toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would certainly improve the

appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not

in keeping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding

that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to

associate with a house in a noisy city. But a conflagration would, I

fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural

beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. I moved on and

crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of

water wheels close by them. The water intersects the city everywhere,

and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all

that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. It might have

been the rival of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and

stagnation. The Jungfer Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies’ Walk), to which

my letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk or promenade

planted with treble rows of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and

cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a

square piece of water, with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving

among the swans, shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by

their husbands or lovers.------

(Some paragraphs have been here omitted.)------thus embarrassed by sad

and solemn politeness still more than by broken English, it sounded like

the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant’s servant inquiring

after me. He had come for the purpose of guiding me to our hotel.

Through streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child, and, I

doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes,

amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them, one

behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches;) amused by the

sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are

painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion, (a

useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations;) amused

with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells, the

bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at every

entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the windows,

as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing

cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a painter, that I

might have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. The long pipe

of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole half a yard from his

mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the other gentleman, who

was dealing the cards, and of course had both hands employed, held his

pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between his knees, smoked beside

his ancles. Hogarth himself never drew a more ludicrous distortion both

of attitude and physiognomy, than this effort occasioned nor was there

wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same

Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty

which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as

the central figure, in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figures,

(such is the power of true genius!) neither acts, nor is meant to act

as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group,

a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the

attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this

feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and thus

prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles

or humours of our fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of

contempt or hatred.

Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the

landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that

was at every man’s service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing

to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for

it)--neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest

class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the

market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of St. Nicholas:

a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of which wens

and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the top with a

round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could scarcely be desired.

Long shall I retain the impression made on my mind by the awful echo,

so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock within this

church, which awoke me at two in the morning from a distressful dream,

occasioned, I believe, by the feather bed, which is used here instead

of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my blanket about with me like a wild

Indian, than submit to this abominable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance

was, we found, an intimate friend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle:

and from the large fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had

rescued sufficient not only for independence, but for respectability. He

had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged

with considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and

in consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the

kingdom. I thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no

blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it

against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with rapture,

and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in England, with

all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. A man sent by force

out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and

exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had

rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet

all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish

for domestic affections interrupted--such a man, I think, I could dare

warrant guiltless of espionnage in any service, most of all in that of

the present French Directory. He spoke with ecstasy of Paris under the

Monarchy: and yet the particular facts, which made up his description,

left as deep a conviction on my mind, of French worthlessness, as his

own tale had done of emigrant ingratitude. Since my arrival in

Germany, I have not met a single person, even among those who abhor

the Revolution, that spoke with favour, or even charity of the French

emigrants. Though the belief of their influence in the organization

of this disastrous war (from the horrors of which, North Germany deems

itself only reprieved, not secured,) may have some share in the general

aversion with which they are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded

that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their

treachery and hardheartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or

corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families

of their protectors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled

to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the English patriots, who

sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil

war under the first Charles be paralleled with the French Revolution!

In the former, the character overflowed from excess of principle; in the

latter from the fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war

between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the

latter, between the vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy

shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison.

Sept. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the poet,

who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and lively

man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort to talk

with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge ear-trumpet.

From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (I hope, the

German literati in general may resemble this first specimen), I heard a

tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting anecdote. When Buonaparte was

in Italy, having been irritated by some instance of perfidy, he said in

a loud and vehement tone, in a public company--“’tis a true proverb, gli

Italiani tutti ladroni”--(that is, the Italians all plunderers.) A lady

had the courage to reply, “Non tutti; ma BUONA PARTE,” (not all, but a

good part, or Buonaparte.) This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one

of the many good things that might have been said. The anecdote is more

valuable; for it instances the ways and means of French insinuation.

Hoche had received much information concerning the face of the country

from a map of unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he

heard, resided at Duesseldorf. At the storming of Duesseldorf by the

French army, Hoche previously ordered, that the house and property of

this man should be preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order

to an officer on whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the

man had escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, “HE had

no reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the French

nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children.” You

remember Milton’s sonnet--

“The great Emathian conqueror bid spare

The house of Pindarus when temple and tower

Went to the ground”------

Now though the Duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to

the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on

the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the

tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin

of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as

the madman of Macedon.

From Professor Ebeling’s Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me

to his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a

solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to my

preconceptions of his style and genius.--I saw there, likewise, a very

fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief object of

my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if anything, rather

larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his face and his

nose--O what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility!--There

appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in the forehead.--The

whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of quick and voluptuous

feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute; yet acute not in the

observation of actual life, but in the arrangements and management of

the ideal world, that is, in taste, and in metaphysics. I assure you,

that I wrote these very words in my memorandum-book with the portrait

before my eyes, and when I knew nothing of Lessing but his name, and

that he was a German writer of eminence.

We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d’hote.

“Patience at a German ordinary, smiling at time.” The Germans are the

worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle

of common wine--Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of the

opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the servants

hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin’s they came

in this order. Burgundy--Madeira--Port--Frontiniac--Pacchiaretti--Old

Hock--Mountain--Champagne--Hock again--Bishop, and lastly, Punch. A

tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the ordinary, viz. slices

of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are brought in, cut up, and

first handed round and then set on the table,) with stewed prunes and

other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese and butter, with plates

of apples, reminded me of Shakespeare [76], and Shakespeare put it in my

head to go to the French comedy.

Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act

informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who

had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers

plead in his behalf--in vain! His wife, the Colonel’s sister, pleads

with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! She falls into hysterics and

faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act

sentence of death is passed on the Count--his wife, as frantic and

hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature!) she could

not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic

indeed!--the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually

dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes:

and in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still

frantic, only with joy; that was all!

O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed

by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted

every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer

violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly

I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect

specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual

falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions

of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still,

however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the

offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the

parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own,

though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators to

active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is not

stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our

own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising,

undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the

imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward to

the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his

imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of

Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more

profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with

my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are

ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely

ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such

as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own

heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often

are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest

illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human

thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters,

but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and

clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite,

of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these

class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a

character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the

Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly

that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical

as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not

less essential to dramatic excellence, and, (if I may mention his name

without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle has accordingly required of

the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief

differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself,

which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form

in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the

elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were

considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make

us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of

jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of commonplace morals

in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their

characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the

applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes

of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on

their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than

the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to

affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with

the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to

transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant

the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the

worthless “thing, we are” and of the peculiar state, in which each man

happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them

to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.

Hold!--(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will

listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.)

DEFENDANT. Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the

best Christian morality?

PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which

you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single

sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters you,

sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to

your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep

such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and

generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man’s

face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you

interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite

satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble

it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no Antony,

no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!

D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of

London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old

school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and what

curiosity can we feel----

P. What, Sir, not for the manner?--not for the delightful language

of the poet?--not for the situations, the action and reaction of the

passions?

D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story: and

how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be surprised by

it, when we know how it will turn out?

P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each

other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the

highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you

receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties of

the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings to

the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo’s Sixtine Chapel, and the

Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You know

all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with the

subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the historic

or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your preference of

contemporary writers: for the great men of former times, those at least

who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so little to gratify this

kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have regarded the story in a not

much higher light, than the painter regards his canvass: as that on, not

by, which they were to display their appropriate excellence. No work,

resembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of invention

in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON

QUIXOTE of Cervantes. Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and

re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they

find any eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts

which they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom

we love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most

intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call

this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale of

his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to the

readers of “old romance.” I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who thought

it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its substance should

be previously known. That there had been at least fifty tragedies with

the same title, would be one of the motives which determined Sophocles

and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a subject. But Milton--

D. Aye Milton, indeed!--but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men tell

us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?

P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But why

then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if not

all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are

concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at least, on which they

are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or translations of

contemporary or preceding English writers. Why, I repeat, do you pretend

to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire

him? However, as once for all, you have dismissed the well-known events

and personages of history, or the epic muse, what have you taken in

their stead? Whom has your tragic muse armed with her bowl and dagger?

the sentimental muse I should have said, whom you have seated in the

throne of tragedy? What heroes has she reared on her buskins?

D. O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen,

valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews,

virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental

rat-catchers!--(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous,

tender-hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all

our misanthropes very tender-hearted.)

P. But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can

such men be engaged?

D. They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young

men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat

lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as

Hector!)--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling down

precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies; and some

of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such perfection,

that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in their eye, seldom

fail to make their favourite male character as strong as Samson. And

then they take such prodigious leaps!! And what is done on the stage is

more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a deafening

explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act

after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same

time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness of the scene was

quite astonishing!

P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions that

dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an

interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians? How

can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the power of

destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to elevate the

characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow?

D. O mere fancies! We seek and find on the present stage our own wants

and passions, our own vexations, losses, and embarrassments.

P. It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to

have represented before you?--not human nature in its height and vigour?

But surely you might find the former with all its joys and sorrows, more

conveniently in your own houses and parishes.

D. True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but the poet has

his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is capricious.

He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it. He gratifies

us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom we hate and

wish to despise.

P. (aside.) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your superiors.

D. He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than

their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and

hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and

their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and, (that

no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the last

scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they will

make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a pity,

that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had made them

so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once; and in the

final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made

to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY, AND THAT A LOVELY

WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF!!

P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty,

those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which, especially

if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit

and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give your prudence

credit for the omission. For the whole system of your drama is a moral

and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those

common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your

playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion.

For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the

confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes

and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the

qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour,

(those things rather which pass among you for such), in persons and in

classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and

in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those

criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our

esteem!

And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet without

having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by your own

fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and

then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other good friends have

made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you

will expect that part of my “Travels” will consist of excursions in my

own mind.

LETTER III

RATZEBURG.

No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned

from a child’s hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this

clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves,

and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits

certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the

noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it

on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the poet

Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me with

kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board

and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle,

in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English

stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude

resemblance, that an elephant’s ear does to the human. Its top was

composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been

parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern

curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered

the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I

could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at which

we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like

a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts

through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor

of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes

one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are

commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men,

women, and children, live in amicable community; yet there was an

appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I

measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken

off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small

interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two

where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight

feet in depth. The faces of the cows, etc. were turned towards the room;

indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing

each other’s faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany,

a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely

to entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different

feelings. The woodwork of these buildings on the outside is left

unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and

green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within

three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it,

the country, as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by

woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly

surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of

Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were

nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to

Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred

and twenty-six miles.

The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in

length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a

mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very

unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a

narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense

length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island

the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor’s house or vicarage, together

with the Amtmann’s Amtsschreiber’s, and the church, stands near the

summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little

bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into

the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by

ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to

the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little

Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole the

shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper

effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their

circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the

shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort

of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake,

and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Luebec, at the

distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they

were not three. The only defect in the view is, that Ratzeburg is built

entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the

eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening,

Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful,

and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a

term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a

pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy

clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in

undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the

yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with

single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light,

which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into

harmony.

I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept.

27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned

hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from

Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary

flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but

the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which

you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and

trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and

piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within

the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of

man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the

houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste:

for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious,

money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not

have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind begins to love nature by

imitating human conveniences in nature; but this is a step in intellect,

though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke

of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with

unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the

busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and

catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge

green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the

interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have

nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which

answers to posting in England. These north German post chaises are

uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a

chef d’auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses!--a savage

might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table.

Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye

bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the

horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin.

Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to

the objects in search of which I left you: namely, the literati and

literature of Germany.

Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as

W----and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother,

the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate.

It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they

looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the

windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with

several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet’s

eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We

waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the

figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were

from Klopstock’s odes. The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his

countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was

no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no

expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no

massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below

the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled,

so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W---- nor

myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his

physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his

kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with

difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was

not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The

conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the

surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert.

Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they

had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have

given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief

in Nelson’s victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and

triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement

Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired

in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German

poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little

on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their

elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits.

Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of

this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity.

He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover’s blank verse

superior to Milton’s. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and

my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that

it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt

arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,

“with many a winding bout

Of linked sweetness long drawn out,”

and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic

vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total

effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.

Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover’s

superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in

a prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus

myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock’s French as I had already

construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our

poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose

translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very

bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on pages

not in the original--and half the original was not to be found in the

translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few of his

odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, “I

wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH,

and revenge me of your countryman!”. It was the liveliest thing which he

produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was

fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I

considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man;

as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen;

yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt

as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing

there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his

physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the

bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large

snow-white wig and the colour of an old man’s skin is disgusting, and

wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is

an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of

nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as

when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks.--The author

of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair.--His powder and

periwig were to the eye what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear.

Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language

possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated

parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always

sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I

answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line

in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that

this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than

one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me [78]: and I, who

wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did

not.

We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution

Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary

presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and,

like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he

declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he

sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of

their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough

an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation

of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to

forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence;

and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their

iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock’s house we walked

to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation,

till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the

sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the

distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,)

lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of

the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist

floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro

between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and

brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been

divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions

could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a

fairy scene!--and to increase its romantic character, among the moving

objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a

beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English

child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other

accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before

I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two

longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the

feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see

the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed.

There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two

or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and

his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of

entertainment, theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg,

there seems to be no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the

women. The men seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the

other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more

singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal

church at Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female

servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps

having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold

and silver.

I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which

my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the

interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but

one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely,

that Klopstock’s remarks on the venerable sage of Koenigsburg are to my

own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true,

that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of

Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or

a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and

presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as

to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral

system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. “Klopstock having wished

to see the CALVARY of Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in

England, I went to Remnant’s (the English bookseller) where I procured

the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland’s

CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse

translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he

had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the