[From the Letter from Italy.] For wheresoe'er I turn my ravish'd eyes, Her blooming mountains, and her sunny shores, The redd'ning orange, and the swelling grain: O liberty, thou goddess heavenly bright, In ten degrees of more indulgent skies; Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, Though o'er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine: 'Tis liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. Ode. How are thy servants blest, O Lord! Eternal wisdom is their guide, In foreign realms, and lands remote, Through burning climes I pass'd unhurt, 1 Malone states that this was the first time the phrase classic ground, since so common, was ever used. It was ridiculed by some contemporaries as very quaint and affected. Thy mercy sweeten'd every soil, Think, O my soul! devoutly think, Confusion dwelt on every face, When waves on waves, and gulfs on gulfs, Yet then from all my griefs, O Lord! My soul took hold on thee. For though in dreadful whirls we hung I knew thou wert not slow to hear, The storm was laid, the winds retir'd, The sea that roar'd at thy command, In midst of dangers, fears, and death, I'll praise thee for thy mercies past, My life, if thou preserv'st my life, Thy sacrifice shall be; Ode. The spacious firmament on high, Soon as the evening shades prevail, What, though in solemn silence, all * The earliest composition that I recollect taking any plea sure in was the Vision of Mirza, and a hymn of Addison's, beginning," How are thy servants blest, O Lord!" I particularly remember one half-stanza, which was music to my boy. ish ear: "For though in dreadful whirls we hung Burns-Letter to Dr Moore. [The Battle of Blenheim.] [From The Campaign."] But now the trumpet terrible from far, The fatal day its mighty course began, Behold, in awful march and dread array But O, my muse, what numbers wilt thou find To sing the furious troops in battle join'd! Methinks I hear the drum's tumultuous sound, The victor's shouts and dying groans confound; The dreadful burst of cannon rend the skies, And all the thunder of the battle rise. 'Twas then great Marlbro's mighty soul was prov'd, That, in the shock of charging hosts unmov'd, Amidst confusion, horror, and despair, Examin'd all the dreadful scenes of war; In peaceful thought the field of death survey'd, To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid, Inspir'd repuls'd battalions to engage, And taught the doubtful battle where to rage. So when an angel, by divine command, With rising tempests shakes a guilty land, Such as of late o'er pale Britannia pass'd, Calm and serene he drives the furious blast, And, pleas'd th' Almighty's orders to perform, Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm. [The concluding simile of the angel has been much celebrated, and was so admired by the lord treasurer, that on seeing it, without waiting for the completion of the poem, he rewarded the poet by appointing him, in the place of Mr Locke (who had been promoted), a commissioner of appeals.] [From the Tragedy of Cato.] Act iv.-Scene iv. Re-enter PORTIUS. Hah! what has he done? Portius. Scarce had I left my father, but I met him Borne on the shields of his surviving soldiers, Breathless and pale, and cover'd o'er with wounds. Long at the head of his few faithful friends He stood the shock of a whole host of foes; Till obstinately brave, and bent on death, Opprest with multitudes, he greatly fell. Cato. I'm satisfied. Portius. Nor did he fall before Yonder he lies. I saw the hoary traitor Portius, when I am dead, be sure thou place Portius. Cato. [meeting the corpse.] Welcome, my son! here lay him down, my friends, Full in my sight, that I may view at leisure The bloody corse, and count those glorious wounds. How beautiful is death, when earn'd by virtue! Who would not be that youth? what pity is it That we can die but once to serve our country! Why sits this sadness on your brows, my friends! I should have blushed if Cato's house had stood Secure, and flourished in a civil war. Portius, behold thy brother, and remember Thy life is not thy own when Rome demands it. Juba. Was ever man like this! Alas! my friends, [Ande Cato. Why mourn you thus ? let not a private loss Afflict your hearts. "Tis Rome requires our tears. The mistress of the world, the seat of empire, The nurse of heroes, the delight of gods, That humbled the proud tyrants of the earth, And set the nations free, Rome is no more. O liberty! O virtue ! O my country! Juba. Behold that upright man! Rome fills his [Anide Cato. Whate'er the Roman virtue has subdued, The sun's whole course, the day and year, are Casar's. For him the self-devoted Decii died, The Fabii fell, and the great Scipios conquered: Even Pompey fought for Cæsar. Oh ! my friends! How is the toil of fate the work of ages. The Roman empire fallen! O curst ambition! Fallen into Cæsar's hands! our great forefathers Had left him nought to conquer but his country. Juba. While Cato lives, Caesar will blush to see Mankind enslaved, and be ashamed of empire. Cato. Cæsar ashamed! has not he seen Pharsalis! Lucius. Cato, 'tis time thou save thyself and us. Cato. Lose not a thought on me, I'm out of Heaven will not leave me in the victor's hand. danger. Cæsar shall never say I conquer'd Cato. But oh! my friends, your safety fills my heart With anxious thoughts: a thousand secret terrors Rise in my soul: how shall I save my friends! 'Tis now, O Cæsar, I begin to fear thee! Lucius. Caesar has mercy, if we ask it of him. Cato. Then ask it, I conjure you! let him know Whate'er was done against him, Cato did it. Portius. Misfortune on misfortune! grief on grief! Add, if you please, that I request it of him, The virtue of my friends may pass unpunish'd. If I forsake thee Juba. There live retired; pray for the peace of Rome; When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, Portius. I hope my father does not recommend Cato. Farewell, my friends! if there be any of you In happier climes, and on a safer shore, [Pointing to his dead son. There the brave youth, with love of virtue fired, Who greatly in his country's cause expired, Shall know he conquer'd. The firm patriot there (Who made the welfare of mankind his care), Though still, by faction, vice, and fortune crost, Shall find the generous labour was not lost. Act V.-Scene I. [CATO, alone, sitting in a thoughtful posture: in his hand PLATO's book on the Immortality of the Soul. A drawn sword on the table by him.] It must be so-Plato, thou reason'st well!- Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, I'm weary of conjectures. This must end them. The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds. Jonat: Swift. which he was early familiar, seem to have sunk deep in his haughty soul. Born a posthumous child,' says Sir Walter Scott, and bred up an object of charity, he early adopted the custom of observing his birth-day as a term, not of joy, but of sorrow, and of reading, when it annually recurred, the striking passage of Scripture in which Job laments and execrates the day upon which it was said in his father's house "that a man-child was born."' Swift was sent to Trinity college, Dublin, which he left in his twenty-first year, and was received into the house of Sir William Temple, a distant relation of his mother. Here Swift met King William, and indulged hopes of preferment, which were never realised. In 1692 he repaired to Oxford, for the purpose of taking his degree of M.A., and shortly after obtaining this distinction he resolved to quit the establishment of Temple and take orders in the Irish church. He procured the prebend of Kilroot, in the diocese of Connor, but was soon disgusted with the life of an obscure country clergyman with an income of £100 a-year. He returned to Moorpark, the house of Sir William Temple, and threw up his living at Kilroot. Temple died in 1699, and the poet was glad to accompany Lord Berkeley to Ireland in the capacity of chaplain. From this nobleman he obtained the rectory of Aghar, and the vicarages of Laracor and Rathveggan; to which 35 was afterwards added the prebend of Dunlavin, making his income only about £200 per annum. At Moorpark, Swift had contracted an intimacy with Miss Hester Johnson, daughter of Sir William Temple's steward, and, on his settlement in Ireland, this lady, accompanied by another female of middle age, went to reside in his neighbourhood. Her future life was intimately connected with that of Swift, and he has immortalised her under the name of Stella. In 1701, Swift became a political writer on the side of the Whigs, and on his visits to England, he associated with Addison, Steele, and Arbuthnot. In 1710, conceiving that he was neglected by the ministry, he quarrelled with the Whigs, and united with Harley and the Tory administration. He was received with open arms. I stand with the new people,' he writes to Stella, ten times better than ever I did with the old, and forty times more caressed.' He carried with him shining weapons for party warfare-irresistible and unscrupulous satire, steady hate, and a dauntless spirit. From his new allies, he received, in 1713, the deanery of St Patrick's. During his residence in England, he had engaged the affections of another young lady, Esther Vanhomrigh, who, under the name of Vanessa, rivalled Stella in poetical celebrity, and in personal misfortune. After the death of her father, this young lady and her sister retired to Ireland, where their father had left a small property near Dublin. Human nature has, perhaps, never before or since presented the spectacle of a man of such transcendent powers as Swift involved in such a pitiable labyrinth of the affections. His pride or ambition led him to postpone indefinitely his marriage with Stella, to whom he was early attached. Though, he said, he loved her better than his life a thousand millions of times,' he kept her hanging on in a state of hope deferred, injurious alike to her peace and her reputation. Did he fear the scorn and laughter of the world, if he should marry the obscure daughter of Sir William Temple's steward? He dared not afterwards, with manly sincerity, declare his situation to Vanessa, when this second victim avowed her passion. He was flattered that a girl of eighteen, of beauty and accomplishments, sighed for a gown of forty-four,' and he did not stop to weigh the consequences. The removal of Vanessa to Ireland, as Stella had gone before, to be near the presence of Swift her irrepressible passion, which no coldness or neglect could extinguish-her life of deep seclusion, only chequered by the occasional visits of Swift, each of which she commemorated by planting with her own hand a laurel in the garden where they met her agonizing remonstrances, when all her devotion and her offerings had failed, are touching beyond expression. "The reason I write to you,' she says, 'is because I cannot tell it to you, should I see you. For when I begin to complain, then you are angry; and there is something in your looks so awful, that it strikes me dumb. O! that you may have but so much regard for me left, that this complaint may touch your soul with pity. I say as little as ever I can. Did you but know what I thought, I am sure it would move you to forgive me, and believe that I cannot help telling you this, and live.' To a being thus agitated and engrossed with the strongest passion, how poor, how cruel, must have seemed the return of Swift! Cadenus, common forms apart, In every scene had kept his heart; Had sighed and languished, vowed and writ, For pastime, or to show his wit; But books, and time, and state affairs, Had spoiled his fashionable airs; He now could praise, esteem, approve, But understood not what was love: His conduct might have made him styled A father, and the nymph his child. That innocent delight he took To see the virgin mind her book, Was but the master's secret joy In school to hear the finest boy. The tragedy continued to deepen as it approached the close. Eight years had Vanessa nursed in solitude the hopeless attachment. At length she wrote to Stella, to ascertain the nature of the connexion between her and Swift; the latter obtained the fatal letter, and rode instantly to Marley abbey, the residence of the unhappy Vanessa. As he entered the apartment,' to adopt the picturesque language of Scott in recording the scene, the sternness of his countenance, which was peculiarly formed to express the stronger passions, struck the unfortunate Vanessa with such terror, that she could scarce ask whether he would not sit down. He answered by flinging a letter on the table; and instantly leaving the house, mounted his horse, and returned to Dublin. When Vanessa opened the packet, she only found her own letter to Stella. It was her death-warrant. sunk at once under the disappointment of the delayed yet cherished hopes which had so long sickened her heart, and beneath the unrestrained wrath of him for whose sake she had indulged them. How long she survived this last interview is uncertain, but the time does not seem to have exceeded a few weeks.'* She Even Stella, though ultimately united to Swift, dropped into the grave without any public recognition of the tie; they were married in secrecy in the garden of the deanery, when on her part all but life had faded away. The fair sufferers were deeply avenged. But let us adopt the only charitable perhaps the just-interpretation of Swift's conduct; the malady which at length overwhelmed his reason might then have been lurking in his frame; the heart might have felt its ravages before the intellect. A comparison of dates proves that it was some years before Vanessa's death that the scene occurred which has been related by Young, the author of the Night Thoughts.' Swift was walking with some friends in the neighbourhood of Dublin. Perceiving he did not follow us,' says Young, ‘I The talents of Vanessa may be seen from her letters to Swift. They are further evinced in the following Ode to Spring, in which she alludes to her unhappy attachment — Hail, blushing goddess, beauteous Spring! Yet why should I thy presence hail? went back, and found him fixed as a statue, and earnestly gazing upward at a noble elm, which in its uppermost branches was much decayed. Pointing at it, he said, "I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top." The same presentiment finds expression in his exquisite imitation of Horace (book ii. satire 6.), made in conjunction with Pope: I've often wished that I had clear A terrace-walk, and half a rood Of land, set out to plant a wood. Well, now I have all this and more, I ask not to increase my store; But here a grievance seems to lie, All this is mine but till I die; I can't but think 'twould sound more clever, If I ne'er got or lost a groat By any trick or any fault; As thus, Vouchsafe, oh gracious Maker! Swift was at first disliked in Ireland, but the Drapier's Letters and other works gave him unbounded popularity. His wish to serve Ireland was one of his ruling passions; yet it was something like the instinct of the inferior animals towards their offspring; waywardness, contempt, and abuse were strangely mingled with affectionate attachment and ardent zeal. Kisses and curses were alternately on his lips. Ireland, however, gave Swift her whole heart-he was more than king of the rabble. After various attacks of deafness and giddiness, his temper became ungovernable, and his reason gave way. Truly and beautifully has Scott said, the stage darkened ere the curtain fell.' Swift's almost total silence during the last three years of his life (for the last year he spoke not a word) appals and overawes the imagination. He died on the 19th of October 1745, and was interred in St Patrick's cathedral, amidst the tears and prayers of his countrymen. His fortune, amounting to about £10,000, he left chiefly to found a lunatic asylum in Dublin, which he had long meditated. He gave the little wealth he had Gulliver's Travels and the Tale of a Tub must ever be the chief corner-stones of Swift's fame. The purity of his prose style renders it a model of English composition. He could wither with his irony and invective; excite to mirth with his wit and invention; transport as with wonder at his marvellous powers of grotesque and ludicrous combination, his knowledge of human nature (piercing quite through the deeds of men), and his matchless power of feigning reality, and assuming at pleasure different characters and situations in life. He is often disgustingly coarse and gross in his style and subjects; but his grossness is always repulsive, not seductive. Swift's poetry is perfect, exactly as the old Dutch Tomb of Swift in Dublin cathedral. content to lash the frivolities of the age, and to depict its absurdities. In his too faithful representations, there is much to condemn and much to admire. Who has not felt the truth and humour of his City Shower, and his description of Morning? Or the liveliness of his Grand Question Debated, in which the knight, his lady, and the chambermaid, are so admirably drawn? His most ambitious flight is his Rhapsody on Poetry, and even this is pitched in a pretty low key. Its best lines are easily remembered: Not empire to the rising sun, By valour, conduct, fortune won; Not highest wisdom in debates For framing laws to govern states; Not skill in sciences profound, So large to grasp the circle round, Such heavenly influence require, As how to strike the Muses' lyre. Not beggar's brat on bulk begot, Not bastard of a pedler Scot, Not boy brought up to cleaning shoes, The spawn of Bridewell or the stews, Not infants dropt, the spurious pledges Of gipsies littering under hedges, Are so disqualified by fate To rise in church, or law, or state, As he whom Phoebus in his ire Hath blasted with poetic fire. Swift's verses on his own death are the finest example of his peculiar poetical vein. He predicts what his friends will say of his illness, his death, and his reputation, varying the style and the topics to suit each of the parties. The versification is easy and flowing, with nothing but the most familiar and commonplace expressions. There are some little touches of homely pathos, which are felt like trickling tears, and the effect of the piece altogether is electrical: it carries with it the strongest conviction of its sincerity and truth; and we see and feel |