We shall conclude with another little section, in which our author makes as much of a Statue, as Ginevra has shewn us he can make of a Picture. These two passages, come what will of the rest of the volume, must survive. DON GARZIA. Among the awful forms that stand assembled In the great square of Florence, may be seen That Cosmo, not the father of his country, Not he so styled, but he who play'd the Tyrant, Clad in rich armour like a Paladin, But with his helmet off--in kingly state, A Chamber at Grosseto, that, if walls Could speak and tell of what is done within, Would turn your admiration into pity. Half of what passed died with him; but the rest, All he discovered when the fit was on, All that, by those who listen'd, could be glean'd From broken sentences and starts in sleep, Is told, and by an honest chronicler. Two of his sons, Giovanni and Garzia, (The eldest had not seen his sixteenth summer) Went to the chase; but one of them, Giovanni, His best beloved, the glory of his House, Return'd not; and at close of day was found Bathed in his innocent blood. Too well, alas, The trembling Cosmo guess'd the deed, the doer ; And, having caused the body to be borne In secret to that Chamber-at an hour When all slept sound, save the disconsolate Mother, Who little thought of what was yet to What!' he exclaimed, when, shuddering at the sight, The father fixed his eyes upon the son, And closely question'd him. No change betray'd The boy breathed out, I stood but on my guard.' Dar'st thou then blacken one who never wrong'd thee, Who would not set his foot upon a worm ? Yes, thou must die, lest others fall by thee, Or guilt or fear. Then Cosmo lifted up office. And thou shouldst be the slayer of us all.' Together, as of two in bonds of love, One in a Cardinal's habit, one in black, Well might he heave a sigh mess, His wife, another, not his Eleanora, The author may perhaps think we have quoted too much from so small a volume; but the fact is, that except it be written by Lord Byron, the reading public will have very little to say, just at present, to any volume of verses, be it large or small. Scotland, for example, is a country full of readers, and talkers too; yet we venture to say, three copies of this book will not have been sold in Scotland, up to the day this number of The Magazine issues forth to fill Auld Reekie with her monthly dream of delight. We trust several copies more may be disposed of the day after; indeed we should not wonder if we were to be the means of selling two or three dozens of them here, and perhaps half a dozen into the bargain throughout Glasgow and the Gorbals, and other rural districts of our ancient kingdom. The author, who has probably been in the habit of abusing Blackwood, will, the moment he sees himself commended by us, begin to talk very smoothly about that great national work, in his own little circle; and, as every body has some influence, his talk will certainly sell, if it were but among his aunts and cousins, an additional bundle of Number LXII. and, perhaps, among the kindred, they may order a set or two from the beginning. Thus shall there be great gain on both sides, in consequence of this little_article; and, as to the booksellers, Lord! what a hugging there will be the next time Ebony sports his figure in the Row, or our worthy friend Mr Rees glad dens green Albyn, with the rumbling of his gig. N.B. We wish such authors as this would not neglect sending us presentation copies of their works. But for the purely accidental circumstance of our observing a little extract from this volume, in Mr Samuel Hunter's Herald of last week, we should never have purchased it; and our readers (at least 999 to 1000 of them) would never have heard of it. And when the author is informed, which he now is, that (always excepting JOHN BULL) we never read newspapers at all, now-a-days, he will bless his stars to see how narrowly he has shaved the corner of oblivion. "Never read any paper but John Bull?" we think we hear (to speak cockneyishly) some God-bless-mysoul-good-sort-of-body say to himself "No, certainly, and why should we? would ye have us to read Joseph Hume's speeches, or anybody's speeches, when we can read John Bull's summaries, and sing John Bull's songs ?" There is but one newspaper in the world, and the name thereof is JOHN BULL. But "'Ware digression" is our motto; and most assuredly we do not suspect John Bull of having written "Italy, a Poem," THE WIDOW'S TALE AND OTHER POEMS. It is worth notice, that scarcely any one of the poets of our days who has received the guerdon of popularity, has neglected the study of rural nature. It seems now to be an established canon, that the poet shall have his eyes and ears open and alert wherever the beauties or the sublimities of the country are perceptible, taking the term in an ample signification, as embracing earth, and ocean, and sky. It is expected of him who puts his hand upon the strings of the lyre, that "his fine spirit be touched to fine issues," by the glory of the sun and moon-by the countless combinations, either of calm or storm, into which the winds, the clouds, and the waves are wrought-by the effects of dews, mists, rains, and frosts-by the savage grandeur of rocks and mountains, of forests and wilds, of heaths and shores, of inaccessible precipices The Widow's Tale, and other poems; by the author of Ellen Fitzarthur.— Longman and Co. London. 12mo. 6s. 6d. great poets, to say that he is a writer of the same kind as Milton and Shakespeare, is absurd: verse is common to them, and verse is all which they have in common." He is the poet of the town and of the schools-exquisite in satire and ethics, in mock-heroics and vers de societé, in a prologue or a reflective epistle, in an epitaph or an epigram which the highest order of poets naturally cast their ore. Baser materials than "thoughts that breathe and words that burn" will do to be so worked up; and in Pope's poetical temperament he had no such pulses as must have throbbed along every vein of him who clothed passion with all the magnificence of imagination in Lear, and wantoned with the many-twinkling wings of fancy in the Midsummer-Night's Dream and the Tempest. Wits we can expect none of those impalpable gossamer-links, which are too fine for the touch of reason, but which wave visibly before the eye of fancy, and form perceptible connections between remote ideas-we seek in them, for none of that iridescent colouring of truth, for which the eye must be properly stationed to bring out its beauty -they deal in none of those imagina--but these are not the moulds into tive comparisons, resemblances, sympathies, antipathies, relations, dissonances, and indemonstrable attributives, with which the inner sense is to accord, and in which the mind is to have faith, as long as the world of fiction is the region we tread in, but which we are not found to carry into actual life and expose to the work-day world's coarse and churlish rubs-they knew nothing of that glamour which hallows things of every-day's growth, and of even-beaten pathway occurrences,which makes us love the moonlight for better reasons than that of its allowing us to dispense with a lantern, which shews us more in Stonehenge than a great many large stones and a great deal of greensward,-which sees something beyond much valuable timber, while we rove in mid-day darkness beneath the "extravagant arms" of the Norman Conqueror's forest, and which can exalt a daisy or a primrose into a potent talisman, having command over the treasures in the cells of memory or of affection, while to the true prosaic man, "a primrose by a river's brim, A yellow primrose is to him, And it is nothing more." Undoubtedly Pope is the greatest of all those of our writers of verse, who owe scarce any part of their fame to their accurate pencilling after nature, or to the rich visions conjured up amid the halo-light of imagination. Nevertheless, he is never undeserving of attention, for, independently of his skill in versification, there is, as Southey says in his Preface to Specimens of the later English Poets,'-that hasty but clever coup-d'œil of this depart ment of our literature,-"a bottom of sound sense in him." In the AngloGallican school, (such it merits to be called, for our palates were then spoilt for the racy taste of our ancestors, by a foolish deference to France,) Pope must be allowed to be the very first in excellence," but to class him with "It is remarkable," says Wordsworth, "that excepting a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, and some delightful pictures in the poems of Lady Winchelsea, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the Paradise Lost and the Seasons, does not contain a single new image of external nature, and scarcely presents a familiar one, from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the genuine spirit of imagination." We cannot complain of any such omission now, in the general spirit of the poetry of the age. We have returned to drink at the old cisterns, and have found the springs as copious and as fresh as they were in the olden time. The author before us, putting forth no pretensions to be ranked among the greater lights of the poetic sky, is, notwithstanding, fully participant in what Southey calls the great revival of our days. Her talent of observation has not been idle, nor has that of imagination been suffered to rust. We speak of the writer of the book as a female; for however the delicacy, the purity, the enthusiasm for home and homeborn happiness, so apparent in every page of "Ellen Fitzarthur," may have convinced us of it, yet here, in the "Conte à mon Chien," we have the explicit avowal. We were prepared to expect something good from the pen which produced the work we spoke of, and are not disappointed. The execu tion of " Ellen Fitzarthur" was beautiful; it was indeed far beyond the merits of the mere story itself. Like the doors of the Temple of the Sun in Ovid, the skill of the artificer was greater than the intrinsic worth of the metal on which the workman displayed it. The ground-work of the story was defective in novelty. This is by no means the case in many of the poems of the present little book; and the same tasteful eye for the picturesque, and the same command of the vivid language of poetry, are happily exerted on less pre-occupied subjects. The longest composition in it is the first, and it gives the name to the book. It is a pathetic narrative, in which the Tale which the Widow tells is only a part. We select the following as a specimen of the sort of sketching which the hand of this tasteful artist so freely produces. The effect of the eveninglight of summer in a rocky glen is de scribed in the outset, and the scene of the story is thus laid: “Half down one rifted side was seen Lichens of every tint and hue The wall-flower and far-fragrant stock Tall rockets bloomed, and borage blue, "Close by the open door is placed To those who shall deliver themselves up to the pathos of the story, we announce that there is a turning point of consolation in it. Although there is much sowing in tears, yet the poor widow is allowed to reap some little harvest in joy. We leave the three interlocutors in this cheerful state. "A blackbird in that sunny nook And forth they come, the happy three, The son leads on, with cautious pace, But who can silence at command "The April Day," even without the Of life or living creature: I could have half believed I heard The rain's continuous sound, Earth's naked breast to skreen, Have swell'd to double growth; that thorn Methinks their sweets are stealing: The very earth, the steamy air, And grace and beauty every where Down, down they come-those fruitful Those earth-rejoicing drops! A momentary deluge pours, Then thins, decreases, stops. Have circled out of sight, But yet behold-abrupt and loud, effects of the sudden sunshine on the "wind into the stream of light The shepherd saunters last—but why Ranged o'er those pastures wide It was a new-born thing-the rain Was drench'd and cold. Morn came again, To shield, with sleepless tenderness, It lay before her stiff and cold--- All would not do, when all was tried--- So quietly by its dead side, She laid her down again."---Pp.75-78. The rest of the volume is occupied by the Sea of Life-William and Jean, a most touching narrative-Conte à mon Chien, of which the half-sportive, half-serious introduction is admirable; it is addressed to her old spaniel, with whom she is in the habit of holding a colloquy : "Ay, let them laugh who understand No utterance, save of human speech--- They cannot feel, we cannot teach. With sense than words more eloquent, Are flexibly intelligent."---P. 126. |
