was, Captain Ogle was so indolent a man, that without a flapper, the matter might have slept in his hands till the Greek kalends. Such was Mr. Coleridge's kind recognition of my father's exertions, that he had the infinite goodness and condescension to look over the proof-sheets of two girlish efforts, "Christina" and Blanch," and to encourage the young writer by gentle strictures and stimulating praise. Ah! I wish she had better deserved this honoring notice ! I add one of his sublimest poems. HYMN BEFORE SUNRISE IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI. Hast thou a charm to stay the Morning Star In his steep course? So long he seems to pause On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc ! The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful form! Thy habitation from eternity! O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee Till thou, still present to the bodily sense Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshiped the Invisible alone. Yet like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet we know not we are listening to it, Thou the meanwhile wast blending with my thought, Yea with my life, and life's most secret joy; As in her natural form swelled vast to Heaven! Awake, my soul! not only passive praise Thou first and chief, sole sovran of the vale! Companion of the Morning Star at dawn, And you, ye five wild torrents, fiercely glad! Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy, And who commanded (and the silence came), Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Ye living flowers, that skirt the eternal frost! Once more, hoar mount, with thy sky-painting peaks, In adoration, upward from thy base Slow traveling with dim eyes, suffused with tears, To rise before me-Rise, ever rise; Rise like a cloud of incense from the earth! Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God! One can not look too often upon Mr. Wordsworth's charming female portrait: ་་ She was a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight: A lovely apparition sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like twilight, too, her dusky hair; From May-time and the cheerful dawn; To haunt, to startle, and waylay. I saw her upon nearer view A spirit, yet a woman too! Her household motions light and free, A countenance in which did meet And now I see with eye serene I would add "Laodamia," if it were not too long, and the Yew-trees," if I had not a misgiving that I have somewhere planted those deathless trunks before. In how many ways is a great poet glorious! I met with a few lines taken from that noble poem the other day in the "Modern Painters," cited for the landscape: "Huge trunks, and each particular trunk a growth Upcoiling and inveterately convolved! . Beneath whose shade With sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged and so forth. Mr. Ruskin cited this fine passage for the picture, I for the personifications: "Ghostly shapes May meet at noontide, Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight, Death the skeleton, And Time the shadow!" Both quoted the lines for different excellences, and both were right. XXXI. AMERICAN POETS. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. AMONG the strange events of these strange days of ours, when revolutions and counter-revolutions, constitutions changed one week and rechanged the next, seem to crowd into a fortnight the work of a century, annihilating time, just as railways and electric telegraphs annihilate space,-in these days of curious novelty, nothing has taken me more pleasantly by surprise than the school of true and original poetry that has sprung up among our blood relations (I had well nigh called them our fellow-countrymen) across the Atlantic; they who speak the same tongue and inherit the same literature. And of all this flight of genuine poets, I hardly know any one so original as Dr. Holmes. For him we can find no living prototype; to track his footsteps, we must travel back as far as Pope or Dryden; and to my mind it would be well if some of our own bards would take the same journey -provided always, it produced the same result. Lofty, poignant, graceful, grand, high of thought, and clear of word, we could. fancy ourselves reading some pungent page of "Absalom and Achitophel," or of the "Moral Epistles," if it were not for the pervading nationality, which, excepting Whittier, American poets have generally wanted, and for that true reflection of the manners and the follies of the age, without which satire would fail alike of its purpose and its name. The work of which I am about to offer a sample, all too brief, is a little book much too brief itself; a little book of less than forty pages, described in the title-page as "Astræa—a Poem, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, August, 1850, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and printed at the request of the Society." |