84

THE EXAMINER.

LOVE.

BY S. T. COLERIDGE.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, Are all but ministers of love,

And feed his sacred flame.

Oft in my waking dreams do I

Live o’er again that happy hour,

When midway on the mount } lay, Beside the ruined tower.

The moonshine, stealing o’er the scene,

Had blended with the lights of eve ;

And she was there, my hope, my joy, My own dear Genevieve!

She leaned against the armed man,

The statue of the armed night;

She stood and listened to my lay, Amid the lingering light.

Few sorrows hath she of her own,

My hope, my joy, my Genevieve!

She loves me best whene’er I sing The songs that make her grieve.

I played a soft and doleful air,

I sang an old and moving story—

An old rude song that suited well That ruin wild and hoary.

She listened with a flitting blush,

With downcast eyes and modest grace ;

For well she knew I could not choose But gaze upon her face.

I told her of the knight that wore

Upon his shield a burning brand;

And that for ten long years he wooed The lady of the land.

I told her how he pined; and ah!

The deep, the low, the pleading tone

With which I sang another’s love, Interpreted my own.

She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes and modest grace ; And she forgave me that I gazed

Too fondly on her face.

But when I told the cruel scorn

Which crazed this bold and lovely knight,

And that he crossed the mountain-woods, Nor rested day nor night;

But sometimes from the savage den, And sometimes from the darksome shade And sometimes starting up at once,

In green and sunny glade,

There came and looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright ; And that he knew it was a fiend,

This miserable knight!

And that, unknowing what he did,

He leaped amid a murderous band,

And saved from outrage worse than death The lady of the land;

And how she wept and clasped his knees, And how she tended him in vain— And ever strove to expiate

The scorn that crazed his brain.

And that she nursed him in a cave;

And how his madness went away

When on the yellow forest leaves A dying man he lay ;

His dying words—but when J reached

‘That tenderest strain of all the ditty

My faltering voice and pausing harp Disturbed her soul with pity ;

All impulses of soul and sense Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve— The music and the dolefy] tale

The rich and balmy eve; '

And hopes, and fears that kind]

An undistinguishable throne -

And gentle wishes long subdued Subdued and cherished long!

e hope,

She wept with pity and delight

She blushed with love and vitgin shame ;

And like the murmur of a dream I heard her breathe my name.

Her bosom heaved, she stept aside;

As conscious of my look she stept_—

Then suddenly, with timorous eye, She fled to me and wept.

She half enclosed me with her arms,

She pressed me with a meek embrace,

And bending back her head, looked up And gazed upon my face.

’T was partly love, and partly fear,

And partly "twas a bashful art,

That I might rather feel than see The swelling of her heart.

I calmed her fears; and she was calm,

And told her love with virgin pride ;

And so I won my Genevieve, _ My bright and beauteous bride!

THOMAS HOOD.

BY GEORGE GILFILLAN, AUTHOR OF GALLERY OF LITERARY PORTRAITS.

It is the lot of some men of genius to be born as if in the blank space, between Milton’s L’ Allegro and Pense- roso—their proximity to both origina!ly equal, and their adhesion to the one or the other depending upon casual circumstances. While some pendulate perpetually be- tween the grave and the gay, others are carried otf bo- dily as it happens, by the comic or tragic muse, A few there are, who seem to say, of their own deliberate op- tion, “ Mirth, with thee we mean to live ;” deeming it better to go to the house of feasting than to that of mourning,—while the storm of adversity drives others to pursue sad and dreary paths, not at first congenial to their natures. Such men as Shakspeare, Burns, and Byron, continue, all their lives long, to pass, in rapid and perpetual change, from the one province to the other; and this, indeed, is the main source of their boundless ascendancy over the general mind. In Young, of the “ Night thoughts,” the laughter, never very joy- ous, is converted, through the effect of gloomy casuali- ties, into the ghastly grin of the skeleton Death—the pointed satire is exchanged for the solemn sermon. In Cowper, the fine schoolboy glee which inspirits his hu- mour goes down at last, and is quenched like a spark in the wild abyss of his madness—“ John Gilpin” merges in the “Castaway.” Hood, on the other hand, with his strongest tendencies originally to the pathetic and the fantastic-serious, shrinks in timidity from the face of the inner sun of nature—shies the stoop of the descending Pythonic power—and, feeling that if he wept at all, it were floods of burning and terrible tears, laughs, and does little else but laugh, instead.

We look upon this writer as a quaint masquer—-as wearing above a manly and profound nature, a fantastic and deliberate disguise of folly. He reminds us of Brutus, cloaking under pretended idiocy, a stern and se- rious design, which burns his breast, but which he choo- ses in this way only to disclose. Or, he is like Ham- let-—abie to form a magnifident purpose, but from con- stitutional weakness, not able to incarnate it in effective action. A deep message has come to him from the heights of his nature, but, like the ancient prophet, he is forced to cry out, “I cannot speak—I am a child!”

Certainly there was, at the foundation of Hood’s soul, a seriousness, which all his puns and mummeries could but indifferently conceal. Jacquez, in the forest of Ar- den, mused not with a profounder pathos, or in quainter language, upon the sad pageant of humanity, than does he; and yet, like him, his “lungs” are ever ready to “crow like chanticleer” at the sight of its grotesquer absurdities. Verily the goddess of melancholy owes a deep grudge to the mirthful magician, who carried off such a promising votary. It is not every day that one who might have been a great serious poet, will conde- scend to sink into a punster and editor of comic annuals. And, were it not that his original tendencies continued to be manifested to the last, and that he turned his drol- lery to important account, we would be tempted to be angry, as well as to regret, that he chose to play the Fool rather than King Lear in the play.

As a poet, Hood belongs to the school of John Keats and Leigh Hunt, with qualities of his own, and all but entire freedom from their peculiarities of manner and style. What strikes us, in the first place, about him, is his great variety of subject and mode of treatment. His works are in two small duodecimo volumes ; and yet we find in them five or six distinct styles attempted—and attempted with success. There is the classical—there is the fanciful, or, 2s we might almost call it, the “ Mid- summer Night”—there is the homely tragic narrative— there is the wildly grotesque—there is the light—and there is the grave and pathetic—lyric. And, besides there is a style, which we despair of describing by an one single or compound epithet, of which his * Elm Tree” and “Haunted House” are specimens—resem- bling Tennyson’s “ Telking Oak,”—and the secret and power of which, perhaps, lie in the feeling of mystic correspondence between man and inanimate nature—in the Start of momentary Consciousness, with which we sometimes feel that in nature’s company we are not alone, that nature’s silence is not that of death; and are aware, in the highest and grandest sense, that we are

“made of dust,” and that the dust from which we were once taken is still divine. We know few volumes of poetry where we find, in the same compass, so little mannerism, so little self-repetition, such a varied c

cert, along with such unique harmony of sound. re

Through these varied humerous styles, we find two

poems, One is a singular subtlety in the perception of minute analogies. The weakness as well as the strength of his poetry, is derived from this source, His serious verse, as well as his witty prose, is laden and encum- bered with thick coming fancies. Hence some of his finest pieces are tedious, without being long. Little more than ballads in size, they are books in the reader’s feeling. Kvery one knows how resistance adds to the idea of extension, and how roughness impedes progress, Some of Hood's poems, such as “ Lycus,” are rough as the Centaur’s hide; and having difficulty in passing along, you are tempted to pass them by altogether, And though a few, feeling that there is around ther the pow- er and spell of genius, generously cry, there’s true metal here, when we have leizure, we must return to this— yet they never do, In fact, Hood has not been able to infuse human interest into his fairy or mythological cre- ations. He has conceived them in a happy hour; sure- ly on ore of those days when the soul and nature are one—when one calm bond of peace seems to unite al} things—when the “very cattle in the fields appear to have great and tranquil thoughts”—when the sun seems to slumber, and the sky to susile—when the air becomes a wide balm, and the low wind, as it wanders over flow- ers, seems telling some happy tidings in each gorgeous ear, till the rose blushes a deep crimson, and the tulip lifts up a more towering head, and the violet shrinks more modestly away, as at lovers’ whispers—in such a favoured hour—on which the first strain of music might have arisen, or the first stroke of painting been drawn, or the chisel of the first sculptor been heard, or the first verse of poetry been chanted, or man himself, a nobler harmony than lute ever sounded, a finer line than paint- er ever drew, a statelier structure and a diviner song,

arisen from the dust—did the beautiful idea of the “ Plea of the Midsummer Fairies” dawn upon this poet’s mind

—he has conceived them in a happy hour, he has framed them with exquisite skill and a fine eye to poetic pro- portion, but he has not made them alive, he has not made them objects of love; and you care Jess for his Cen- taurs and his Fairies than you do for the moonbeams or the shed leaves of the forest. How different with the Oberon and the Titania of Shakspeare! ‘They are true to the fairy ideal, and yet they are human—their hearts warm With human passions, as fond of gossip, flattery, intrigue, and quarrel, as men or women can be—-and you sigh with or smile at them, precisely as you do at Theseus and Hippolyta. Indeed, we cannot but admire how Shakspeare, like the arc of humanity, always bends in all his characters, into the one centre of man—how his villains, ghosts, demons, witches, fairies, fools, har- lots, heroes, clowns, saints, sensualists, women, and even his kings, are all human disguises, or half-Jengths, or miniatures, never caricatures, nor apoligies for mankind. How full the cup of manhood out of which he could baptise !—now an Iago, and now an Agne-cheek—now a Bottom, and now a Macbeth—now a Dogberry, and now a Caliban—now an Ariel, and now a Timon—into

the one communion of the one family—nay, have a drop or two to spare for Messrs. Cobweb and Mustardseed, who are allowed in too among the number, and who at- tract a share of the tenderness of their benign father. As in Swift, his misanthropy sees the hated object in every thing, blown out in the Brobdignagian, shrunk up in the Lilliputian, flapping in the Laputan, and yelling

with the Yahoo—nay, throws it out into those loathsome

reflections, that he may intensify and multiply his hatred ;

so in the same way operates the opposite fecling in

Shakspeare. His love to the race is so great, that he

would colonise with man, all space, fairyJand, the grave,

hell, and heaven. And not only does he give to super-

human beings a human interest and nature, but he ac-

complishes what Hood has not attempted, and what few

else have attempted with success ; he adjusts the human

to the superhuman actors—they never jostle, you never

wonder at finding them on the same stage, they meet

without a start, they part without a shiver, they obey

one magic; and you feel that not only does one touch

of nature make the whole world kin, but that it can link

the universe in one brotherhood, for the secret of this

adjustment lies entirely in the humanity which is dif-

fused through every part of the drama. Jn it, as in one soft ether, float, or Swim, or play, or dive, or fly, all his

characters.

In connexion with the foregoing defect, we find in Hood’s more elaborate poetical pieces no effective story, none that can bear the weight of his subtle and beauti- ful imagery. The rich blossoms and pods of the pea- flower tree are there, but the strong distinct stick of Support is wanting. This defect is fatal, not only to long poems, but to all save the shortest : it reduces them

y instantly to the rank of rhymed essays; and a rhymed

essay, with most people, is the same thing witha rhap- sody. Even dreams require a nexus, a nisus, a nodus, a point, a purpose. Death is but a tame shadow without the scythe ; and the want of a purpose in any clear, de- finite, impressive form has neutralized the effect of many poems besides Hood’s—some of Tennyson’s, and one entire class of Shelly’s—whose « Triumph of Life” and “Witch of Atlas” rank with “Lycus” and the “ Mid- night Fairies”—being, like them, beautiful, diffuse, vague ; and, like them, perpetually promising to bring

forth solid fruit, but yielding at length leaves and blos- soms only.

Subtle fancy, lively wit, Copious language, and mel-

low versification, are the undoubted qualities of Hood

or three main elements distinctly traceable in al] Hood’s

as a poet. But, besides, there are two or three moral peculiarities about him as delighful as his intellectual ;

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