Page images
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

disasters fall upon her in a nation of gallant men—in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult—but the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex that proud submission that dignified obedience—that subordination of the heart, which keeps alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly spirit and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone - that sensibility of principle—that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound-which inspired courage, while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched; and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

BURKE.

ON MILTON.

FROM this very imperfect view of the qualities of Milton's poetry, we hasten to his great work, Paradise Lost, perhaps the noblest monument of human genius. The two first books, by universal consent, stand pre-eminent in sublimity. Hell and Hell's king have a terrible harmony; and dilate into new grandeur and awfulness, the longer we contemplate them. From one element-"solid and liquid fire "the poet has framed a world of horror and suffering, such as imagination had never traversed. But fiercer flames than those which encompass Satan, burn in his own soul. Revenge, exasperated pride, consuming wrath, ambition though fallen, yet unconquered by the thunders of the Omnipotent, and grasping still at the empire of the universe-these form a picture more sublime and terrible than Hell. Hell yields to the spirit which it imprisons. The intensity of its fires reveals the intenser passions and more vehement will of Satan; and the ruined Archangel gathers into

This

We see

himself the sublimity of the scene which surrounds him. forms the tremendous interest of these wonderful books. mind triumphant over the most terrible powers of nature. We see unutterable agony subdued by energy of soul. We have not indeed in Satan those bursts of passion, which rive the soul, as well as shatter the outward frame of Lear. But we have a depth of passion which only an Archangel could manifest. The all-enduring, all-defying pride of Satan, assuming so majestically Hell's burning throne, and coveting the diadem, which scorched his thunder-blasted brow, is a creation requiring in its author almost the spiritual energy with which he invests the fallen seraph. Some have doubted whether the moral effect of such delineations of the storms and terrible workings of the soul, is good; whether the interest felt in a spirit so transcendently evil as Satan, favors our sympathies with virtue. But our interest fastens in this and like cases, on what is not evil. We gaze on Satan with an awe, not unmixed with mysterious pleasure, as on a miraculous manifestation of the power of mind. What chains us with a resistless spell in such a character, is spiritual might made visible by the racking pains which it overpowers. There is something kindling and enobling in the consciousness, however awakened, of the energy which resides in mind; and many a virtuous man has borrowed new strength from the force, constancy, and dauntless courage of evil agents.

Milton's description of Satan attests, in various ways, the power of his genius. Critics have often observed, that the great difficulty of his work was to reconcile the spiritual properties of his supernatural beings with the human modes of existence, which he was obliged to ascribe to them; and the difficulty is too great for any genius wholly to overcome; and we must acknowledge, that our enthusiasm is, in some parts of the poem, checked by a feeling of incongruity between the spiritual agent, and his sphere and mode of agency. But we are visited with no such chilling doubts and misgivings in the description of Satan in Hell. Imagination has here achieved its highest triumph, in imparting a character of reality and truth to its most daring creations. That world of horrors, though material, is yet so remote from our ordinary nature, that a spiritual

G

being, exiled from heaven, finds there an appropriate home. There is, too, an indefiniteness in the description of Satan's person, which incites, without shocking the imagination, and aids us to combine in our conception of him, the massiveness of a real form, with the vagueness of spiritual existence. To the production of this effect, much depends on the first impression given by the poet; for this is apt to follow us through the whole work; and here we think Milton eminently successful. The first glimpse of Satan is given us in the following lines, which, whilst too indefinite to provoke the scrutiny of the reason, fill the imagination of the reader with a form which can hardly be effaced.

"Thus Satan, talking to his nearest mate,

With head up-lift above the waves, and eyes
That sparkling blazed, with other parts besides
Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood.

*

*

*

Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool
His mighty stature; on each hand the flames,
Driven backward, slope their pointing spires, and roll'd
In billows, leave i' th' midst a horrid vale."

We have more which we should gladly say of the delineation of Satan; especially of the glimpses which are now and then given of his deep anguish and despair, and of the touches of better feelings which are skilfully thrown into the dark picture; both suited and designed to blend with our admiration, dread, and abhorrence, a measure of that sympathy and interest with which every living, thinking being ought to be regarded, and without which all other feelings tend to sin and pain. But there is another topic which we cannot leave untouched. From Hell we flee to Paradise, a region as lovely as Hell is terrible; and which, to those who do not know the universality of true genius, will appear doubly wonderful, when considered as the creation of the same mind which had painted the infernal world.

CHANNING.

ON LORD BYRON'S LINES UPON THE FIELD OF WATERLOO.

[ocr errors]

HERE is the very cunning of the poet - one train of ideas excited to prepare you for receiving, in its full force, the shock of their opposite. The ball-room thrown open to you; beauty and chivalry, in all the splendor that should grace the festive hour, presented to you; the voluptuous swell of music awakened for you; your senses, your imagination, and your affections, environed with scenes and images of sweetness, and grace, and loveliness, and joy to strike you aghast with alarm, to bring trepidation and terror before you in their most appalling shapes and attitudes. The whole scene, as by the waving of an enchanter's wand, changed in a moment! For smiles, tears; for blushes, paleness; for meetings, partings; for the assembly, the muster; for the dance, the march; for the music, the cannon; for the ball-room, the battle field! This is one of the most favourite feats of poetry, and occurs frequently in the works of all great masters. It is a means by which they provoke that agitation and hurry of spirits, which enable them to take possession of their readers; and which consists in bringing contrarieties into sudden collision. The luxuriant valley opens upon the sterile heath; the level plain borders upon the rugged mountain; you walk in imagined security, and find yourself upon the brink of an abyss; you fall asleep with the languor of the calm, and awaken with the fury of the tempest! Campbell soothes the apprehensions of Gertrude-places Albert and his interesting family in their lighted. bower, prolonging the joy of converse-when Ontalissa rushes in to tell, that

"The mammoth comes! the foe! the monster Brandt!
With all his howling-desolating band!"

Thomson avails himself of the serenity of a placid summer's day, and the security and calm of requited, happy, communing love, to introduce the tempest, whose lightning strikes Amelia to the earth,

a blackened corse! Milton works up his infernal hero to the highest pitch of demoniac exultation, to prepare his ear for the dismal, universal hiss, that aptly gratulates his triumph-extends, expands him into the full dimensions of monarchal pride, to throw him down, a reptile, upon the floor of Pandemonium! Shakspere prepares a feast for the reception of the ghost of Banquo―brings the exultation and the agony of triumphant guilt, into immediate contact-exhibits to us, at the same moment, and in the same person, the towering king, and the grovelling murderer! or, in the tragedy of Hamlet, makes the grave-digger's carol, the prelude to the dirge of Ophelia !

KNOWLES.

THE VOYAGE.

I SAID that at sea all is vacancy; I should correct the expression. To one given to day-dreaming, and fond of losing himself in reveries, a sea voyage is full of subjects for meditation; but then they are the wonders of the deep, and of the air, and rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes. I delighted to loll over the quarter railing, or climb to the main-top, of a calm day, and muse for hours together on the tranquil bosom of a summer's sea;—to gaze upon the piles of golden clouds just peering above the horizon, fancy them some fairy realms, and people them with a creation of my own;to watch the gentle undulating billows, rolling their silver volumes, as if to die away on those happy shores.

There was a delicious sensation of mingled security and awe, with which I looked down, from my giddy height, on the monsters of the deep at their uncouth gambols. Shoals of porpoises tumbling about the bow of the ship; the grampus slowly heaving his huge form above the surface; or the ravenous shark, darting, like a spectre, through the blue waters. My imagination would conjure up all that I heard or read of the watery world beneath me; of the finny herds that roam its fathomless valleys; of the shapeless monsters

« PreviousContinue »