... His countenance is plain but expressive; so very animated, especially in speaking or singing, that it is far more interesting than the finest features could have made it." Of Scott's intercourse with Sir Humphrey Davy,- himself a thorough poet in nature, Lockhart relates an amusing anecdote: "Scott, Davy, the biographer, and a rough Scotch friend of Sir Walter's named Laidlaw, were together in Abbotsford in 1820; the two latter being silent and admiring listeners during the splendid colloquies of the poet and the philosopher. At last Laidlaw broke out with, Gude preserve us! this is a very superior occasion. Eh, sirs! I wonder if Shakspeare and Bacon ever met to screw ilk other up!"" In 1826 occurred the crash of Scott's fortunes, through the failure of the houses of Constable and Ballantyne. With the Ballantynes, who were printers, Scott had been in partnership since 1805, though even his dearest friends were ignorant of the fact. How bravely he bore himself in the midst of the utter ruin which came upon him, how strenuously he applied his wonderful powers of thought and work to the task of retrieving his position, how he struggled on till health, faculties, and life itself gave way these are matters which belong to the story of the man, rather than the author. The novels and other works composed between 1826 and his death in 1832, though they fill very many volumes, manifest a progressive decline of power. "Woodstock" was in preparation at the time when the stroke came; but there is no falling-off in the concluding portion, such as might tell of the agonies of mind through which the writer was passing. To "Woodstock," however, succeeded "Anne of Geierstein," the "Fair Maid of Perth," "Count Robert of Paris," and "Castle Dangerous," all of which, or at any rate the last two, betoken a gradual obscuration. and failure of the powers of imagination and invention. In 1827 he published a "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte.” A work on "Demonology and Witchcraft," and "The Tales of a Grandfather," nearly complete the list. In the summer of 1832 he visited Italy in a frigate which the Government placed at his disposal, to recruit, if that were possible, the vital energies of a frame, which, massive and muscular as was the mould in which nature had cast it, was now undermined and worn out by care and excessive toil. But it was too late; and, feeling that the end was near, Scott hurried homewards to breathe his last in his beloved native land. After gradually sinking for two months, he expired at Abbotsford, in the midst of his children, on the afternoon of a calm September day in 1832. We proceed to name the principal works of the other poets, mentioning them in the order of their deaths. Keats in his short life contributed many noble compositions to English poetry. His soul thirsted for beauty; his creed, the substance of his religion, was,— "That first in beauty should be first in might." 1 But he was poor, of mean origin, weak in health, scantily befriended. He could not always shut out the external world with its hard, unlovely realities. Like Mulciber, who "Dropt from the zenith like a falling star he was sometimes driven out of the heaven of imagination; and then he fell at once into the depths of dejection. He died in his twenty-seventh year, and wished his epitaph to be, "Here lies one whose name was writ 1 From Hyperion. 66 in water." His first work, "Endymion," and his last, Hyperion," may be regarded, the former as an expansion, the latter as an interpretation, of portions of the mythology of Greece. "Hyperion" is a fragment; in it the sublimity of the colossal shapes of the Titans, contrasted with the glorious beauty of the younger gods, bespeaks an imagination worthy of Dante. The "Eve of St. Agnes" belongs to a different vein of ideas; the legends and superstitions of the middle age furnish its subject and its coloring. Percy Bysshe Shelley, born in 1792, embraced with fervor, even from his schoolboy days, both the destructive and the constructive ideas of the revolutionary school. He was enthusiastically convinced that the great majority of mankind was, and with trifling exceptions had always been, enslaved by custom, by low material thoughts, by tyranny, and by superstition; and he no less fervently believed in the perfectibility of the individual and of society, as the result of the bursting of these bonds, and of a philosophical and philanthropic system of education. "Queen Mab," written when he was eighteen, but never published with his consent, represents the revolutionary fever when at its utmost heat. The court, the camp, the state, the Church, all are incurably corrupt. Faith is the clinging curse which poisons the cup of human happiness: when that is torn up by the roots, and all institutions now in being have been abolished, then earth may become the reality of heaven;" there will then be free scope for the dominion of love, and reason and passion will desist from their long combat. The metre is rhymeless and irregular; but there are bursts of eloquent rushing verse, which for soul-fraught music cannot be surpassed. "The Revolt of Islam" (1817), a poem in twelve cantos, in the Spenserian stanza, though it has 66 66 most beautiful passages, fails to rivet the interest through insufficiency of plot. It, too, has for its general drift the utter corruption and rottenness of all that is, involving the necessity, for a nation that desired truly to live, of breaking the chains of faith and custom by which it was held. "Peter Bell the Third" (1819) is a satirical attack upon Wordsworth, who had grown, in Shelley's opinion, far too conservative. To a mind like Shelley's it may be conceived how great was the attraction of the story of Prometheus, the great Titan who rebelled against the gods. To this attraction we owe the drama of "Prometheus Unbound." His tragedy of "The Cenci," written at Rome in 1820, shows great dramatic power; but the nature of the story renders it impossible that it should be represented on the stage. The lyrical drama of "Hellas," written in 1821, was suggested by the efforts which the insurgent Greeks were then making to shake off the yoke of their Turkish tyrants.1 "Adonais" is a wonderfully beautiful elegy on his friend Keats. The "Masque of Anarchy (1819) was written upon the news reaching him of what has been called the "Manchester Massacre." Epipsychidion" (1821) is very lovely, but obscure. These are nearly all the longer poems. It is by his shorter pieces that Shelley is best known,—“The Cloud," "To a Skylark," "The Sensitive Plant, "Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples," and many others; in which that quality of ethereal and all-transmuting imagination, which especially distinguishes him from other poets, is most conspicuous. Having lived the last four years of his life in Italy, Shelley met with a premature death by drowning, in the Gulf of Spezzia, in the year 1822. Byron represents the universal re-action of the nine 1 See p. 436. teenth century against the ideas of the eighteenth. We have seen the literary re-action exemplified in Scott; but the protest of Byron was more comprehensive, and reached to deeper regions of thought. Moody and misanthropical, he rejected the whole manner of thought of his predecessors; and the scepticism of the eighteenth century suited him as little as its popular belief. Unbelievers of the class of Hume and Gibbon did not suffer on account of being without faith: their turn of mind was Epicurean; the world of sense and intelligence furnished them with as much of enjoyment as they required; and they had no quarrel with the social order which secured to them the tranquil possession of their daily pleasures. But Byron had a mind of that daring and impetuous temper which, while it rushes into the path of doubt suggested by cooler heads, presently recoils from the consequences of its own act, and shudders at the moral desolation which scepticism spreads over its life. He proclaimed to the world his misery and despair; and everywhere his words seemed to touch a sympathetic chord throughout the cultivated society of Europe. In "Childe Harold" - a poem of reflection and sentiment, of which the first two cantos were published in 1812 and also in the dramas of "Manfred" and "Cain," the peculiar characteristics of Byron's genius are most forcibly represented. In these poems, and also in those mentioned on a former page,1 — besides the splendor of the diction, the beauty of the versification, the richness of the unaccustomed imagery, and in some cases the interest of the narrative, a personal element mingled, which must be noticed as having much to do with the hold they obtained upon readers of all nations. Byron was generally supposed to be "Himself the great sublime he drew." |