How a ring-dove Let fall a sprig of yew-tree in his path; And how he died: and then, that love doth scathe No good poetry can be written where language is violated. It is the crying fault of the mannerist of the present days to coin new words. The language of the people of England is not like the Duke of Newcastle's tenantry. We cannot do what we choose with it, simply because it is our own. If we create new words, we must coin-not forge them. The words milky and earthy are good; the word nervy (in Keats) is bad. The reason of this is, that nervy is a hybrid is a hybrid or bastard word; the termination y being of Saxon, the noun nerve of Latin origin. If twenty words be coined, nineteen of them shall (as things go) be hybrid. Similarly, we may say penetrable, because the termination ilis and the verb penetro are both Latin. Graspable, however, we cannot say, because grasp is Saxon. Yet Keats writes half-graspable. Language.-Simplicity is not the sole element of poetical lanA thought may be essentially vulgar. The language expressive of it may be the same. Of sins in the way of vulgarity, Keats has not a few—e.g. guage. Are not our lowing heifers sleeker than That linger'd in the air like dying rolls Of abrupt thunder, when Ionian shoals Of dolphins bob their noses through the brine. So that a whispering blade Of grass, a wailful gnat, a bee bustling Down in the blue-bells, or a wren light rustling Our taintless rills Seem'd sooty, and o'erspread with upturn'd gills Occasionally there is, what the Greeks would call, Oxymoron, and the English, Nonsense: occasionally there is circumlocution combined with harshness,-e.g. When a word has not only a common but a technical sense, it is unpoetical to use it in the latter,-it is dangerous to use it with the former. Such are by their very nature excluded from the poet's vocabulary. Why is it that we can talk of the sweet bean, but not of the sweet pea,-of the sweet acacia, but not of the sweet almond? The reason is because the latter phrases raise in our minds ideas, not of fragrance and odour, but of horticulture and perfumery, of nurserymen and pomatum-sellers. Yet Keats wrote, Ere yet the bees Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas. They danced to weariness, And then in quiet circles did they press The hillock turf, and caught the latter end And soon it lightly dipt, and rose, and sank, And dipt again with the young couple's weight. Does not this savour of a wedding in a newspaper, rather than of the walk of a brother and sister in a poem? Speaking of the Sun, Do we not almost involuntarily add—in hand? Such We state again, that all the quotations above are from a single part of a single poem-the first part of the Endymion. were the demerits of Keats' Poems, Volume II. a Now, upon the story of Endymion, others besides John Keats have written. Read we the Monastery of Sir Walter Scott, and therein the speeches of Percie Shafton. The language of these speeches is peculiar, high-flown, metaphorical, and (pace Shaftoni dixerim) absurd. Such as it was, it was called Euphuism. Now, John Lily, a poet of the age of Queen Elizabeth, was the inventor of Euphuism. The inventor of Euphuism was dramatist. Amongst his dramas is the drama of Endymion, or the Man in the Moon, written, not like the work of Keats, in verse, but in plain homely (though not unpoetical) prose. The man that reads Lily's Endymion shall be gratified. In Hazlitt's Lectures on the Literature of Queen Elizabeth's reign are to be found copious extracts from it: in the Old British Drama is to be found the play itself. The first of the poems of the third and last volume of his Works is Lamia. The story is taken from an extract in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, from the Life of the Sophist Apollonius, by Philostratus. The facts were as follows:-A young man of the name of Lycius found a fair gentlewoman between Čenchreas and Corinth. With the fair gentlewoman he became enamoured. At last he made her his wife. As she had no friends of her own to invite to the wedding, she thought that she might beg for the exclusion of one of Lycius's, viz. the philosopher Apollonius. Apollonius, however, came uninvited and unwished for. He stared her out of countenance. She begged him to turn aside his eye. The more she begged, the stronger he stared. At length it turned out, not that she was (as the reader may possibly expect) a naughty woman, but a horrible serpent, a Lamia. Seeing herself descried, she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant. Many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece.” * 66 There is something in the poem of Lamia that recalls to our recollection Mr. Coleridge's Christabel: there is something, also, in the opening of it, reminding us of Shelley's Witch of Atlas. In Lamia, the poet waxes practical. His remarks savour of common sense and common life. e. g. Love in a hut, with water and a crust, Is-Love, forgive us!-cinders, ashes, dust; More grievous torment than a hermit's fast. Speaking of the supernatural charms of his serpentine heroine, he writes Let the mad poets say whate'er they please From Pyrrha's pebbles or old Adam's seed. Byron thought the same, flesh and blood being compared not with spirit and air, but with chiselled stone: I've seen much finer women, ripe and real, Than all your beauties of the stone ideal. DON JUAN. The versification is evidently improved: it has gained in vigour. Her eyes in torture fix'd, and anguish drear, Hot, glazed, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear, Flash'd phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear." Replace the prettyism lid-lashes by the plain word eye-lashes, and you have lines that Dryden might have written. too, might have written the following: No more the stately music breathes; The myrtle sickened in a thousand wreaths. By faint degrees, voice, lute, and pleasure ceased; A deadly silence step by step increased ; Until it seemed a horrid presence there, Dryden, The Pot of Basil is from Boccaccio, a short tale, in the eightline stanza of Don Juan: simplex munditiis. The Eve of St. Agnes is Spenserian,—at least in the matter of metre. Madeline is the heroine, Porphyro the hero of the tale, son and daughter, respectively, (like Romeo and Juliet,) of * Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Part III. sect. 2. hereditary foemen. Now, the retainers of the father of the lady are no tea-totallers; so that Porphyro, taking advantage of this, fills them with Rhenish, and carries off the lady. For the merits or demerits of Hyperion, the publisher (not the poet) is responsible. The work was given to the world at their particular request, and against the wishes of the author. Originally intended to be of the same length with Endymion (i. e. of four cantos), it was left unfinished, the two first books, and the opening of the third, being all that the author accomplished. Hyperion is a Titan, the last of the race, that wars against Jupiter; and this he does with the bitterness of spirit, and the strength of arm, of a ruined archangel. He is the Satan of the Earth-born. The merits of Hyperion are greater than the merits of Endymion: the metre (blank verse) is less lax, though not Miltonic, and the language more uniformly poetical. Take we now, from the first volume of his Poems, the following extract: STANZAS. In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity: The north cannot undo them, With a sleety whistle through them; Nor frozen thawings glue them From budding at the prime. In a drear-nighted December, But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time. Ah! would 't were so with many But were there ever any To know the change and feel it, From Vol. II. OPENING OF ENDYMION. Therefore, 't is with full happiness that I Now while the early budders are just new, Be all about me when I make an end. Endymion, Book I. Heart's lightness from the merriment of May?— A lover would not tread A cowslip on the head, Though he should dance from eve till peep of day— Nor any drooping flower Held sacred for thy bower, Wherever he may sport himself and play. |