And dust is as it should be, shall I not Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm? "Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part Is not the love of these deep in my heart Such feelings for the hard and worldly phlegm Of those whose eyes are only turn'd below, Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which dare not glow !" Has not the tongue of fame proclaimed these, and others such as these, to be glorious verses flowing from the fount of inspiration? Yet satisfied have they not our soul here breathing undisturbedly on the mountain-top. The first stanza, methinks, is of little worth. What says it? That 'tis better to "love earth only for its earthly sake,” “than join the crushing crowd, doom'd to inflict or bear." Is that a revelation from a great poet's heart? truism unadorned with one grace of speech. "Is it not better, then, to be alone" "Is it not better thus our lives to wear." A stale "Repetitions wearisome of sense" are these "most tolerable and not to be endured." The image of the lake as a nursing mother, and of the Rhone as a froward infant, is irreconcilable with nature, dead or alive-and is neither more nor less than absolute nonsense. Then how feeble throughout the expression!" A mother who doth make a fair but froward infant her own care!!” "Kissing its cries away as these awake!!!" Poor expletives, not permissible even in the wet-nurse school of prose. Then how childish for his lordship, in the very stanza in which, with affected passion, which is always inconsistent, he exclaims, "Is it not better, then, to be alone, And love earth only for its earthly sake?" How childish in his lordship to illustrate the sincerity and depth of that love, by such maudlin drivel about another love, which he was desirous to show he despised, or regarded with disgust? The second stanza is a mere hubbub of words. He says "I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me Bah! If you become a portion of that around you, you become a portion of the high mountains-and thus incorporated with them, how can they be to you a feeling? "But the hum of human cities torture" is here impertinent-except to prove that as that hum is outward to you, so are those high mountains, and therefore the “feeling" as much caused by them as the "torture" by the human cities. But you would make simpletons believe that you were “portion of that around you”—of the very cause of the effect-that you are at once a cause and an effect-in good truth, prating, like Polonius, "how this effect defective comes by cause." You say, "I can see nothing to loathe in nature!" and that the very moment you have been telling us that, through intensity of love, you have "become portion of that around you." Imagine a lover in his mistress's arms in a paroxysm of passion, gaspingly reaching at last this climax of bliss-expressive speech, I can see nothing to loathe in thee!" "Save to be a link reluctant in a fleshly chain" loses more and more of the little meaning it seems to have at first the longer you look at it. "Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee," is worse than nonsense-it is folly; for are not they to whom it is here said to flee " creatures" the sky, the peak, the sea, and the stars? "Mingle, and not in vain," concludes the big-mouthed bluster with an infant's cry. In the next stanza the poet begins with repeating himself "And thus I am absorbed, and this is life." The immediate effect of this absorption is the vivid remembrance of all his past human life! Had he been absorbed, there would have been everlasting oblivion of that troubled dream. But to be absorbed is one thing, and to say you are is another; and worse still, he speaks in poor repetition of "remounting at last with a fresh pinion," ," "and a delighted wing," an image by no means new, and destructive of the thought of absorption. In the third stanza there is nothing about either absorption or wings, but after some ugly raving, we are presented with that very intelligible line, "When elements to elements conform," in which conformation the poet asks, "Shall I not Feel all I see less dazzling but more warm?" We shall not presume to say how that may be but on the first blush of the matter we do not see why the spirit's perception and emotion, "when elements to elements conform," should be "less dazzling but more warm" than during its mortal life. "The bodiless thought, the spirit of each spot," is a poor line-very; and the Alexandrine "goes not forth conquering and to conquer." In the fourth stanza he returns to the pet fancy that he and his soul are a part of the mountains, waves, and skies, and they of him and his soul. "Elements to elements conform." If so, what more would he have? "Is not the love of these deep in my heart is surely an unnecessary question-ill-worded-after all the preceding talk about blending, and mingling, and absorption, and so forth. "If compared with these" is dull, heavy, and formal; "rather than forego such feel ings" even more so; and to forego such feelings "for the hard and worldly phlegm" of people "Gazing upon the ground with thoughts which dare not glow,” would, indeed, argue shameful timidity in the heart of a man-mountain. The truth is, and we will speak it, that Byron, with all his abuse of Wordsworth, knew that he was a great poet, and felt that in all the poetry in which he speaks of nature "He was attired With sudden brightness, like a man inspired;" that he touched the forms of inanimate nature with Promethean fire, not stolen from, but bestowed by heaven, and that 'twas among the rights, privileges, and duties of his vocation "To create a soul Under the ribs of death." Some people have said that Wordsworth is or was a Pantheist, and lines from his "River Wye" have been quoted, supposed by them to shadow forth this creed. Such people should not read poetry at all, but occupy themselves in overlooking their accounts. Byron-we speak of him as a poet-was a Theist, or a Pantheist, or a Deist, as he happened to be in the mood-or as this nobelief or that seemed best suited for a series of stanzas to astonish the natives. We have seen what he made by trying to "mingle with the universe." In one of the most admired passages in the third book of the Childe, throughout the whole of which he is haunted by Wordsworth, whom he would, all in vain, hate and imitatewhile declaring that he has delivered himself up, soul and body, to the feeling of the infinite, the supersentual, and the spiritual, sympathizes with the early Persian in making "His altar the high places, and the peak and exclaims, "Come and compare Columns and idol-dwellings, Goth or Greek, even in that very mood of ecstasy, rapt and inspired beyond this "visible diurnal sphere" by the more glorious aspects itself assumes, he destroys our delusion, and lets us into the secret of his own-or rather into that of his deception-by a single blow that jars all the nerves in our body "Oh! night, And storm and darkness, yet are wondrous strong, Of a dark eye in woman!!!" There are some fine and noble things in these same stanzas, but mixed with baser matter, and that, too, at the very moment when the soul in its emotion of grandeur was desiring nothing but the truth. "Far along, From peak to peak, the rattling crags among, is glorious; but, alas! how could the same man who said that say "And now the glee Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth, As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth !!" Now turn to Wordsworth-not on account of any similarity of style, for there is none, between him and Byron-nor yet on account of such similarity between the objects dealt with, for there is little, except that they are in both cases objects of nature-but on account of the manifest but unsuccessful straining, in the stanzas we have been reading, after the spirit of the communion which Wordsworth holds in his poetry with all outward things. |