The Project Gutenberg eBook, English Lands Letters and Kings: The Later Georges to Victoria, by Donald Grant Mitchell

ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS
AND KINGS

The Later Georges to Victoria

ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS

By Donald G. Mitchell

Each 1 vol., 12mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50

AMERICAN LANDS AND LETTERS

From the Mayflower to Rip Van Winkle

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ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS
AND KINGS

The Later Georges to Victoria

BY
Donald G. Mitchell

NEW YORK
Charles Scribner’s Sons
MDCCCXCVII

Copyright, 1897, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

FORECAST.

The printers ask if there is to be prefatory matter.

There shall be no excuses, nor any defensive explanations: and I shall only give here such forecast of this little book as may serve as a reminder, and appetizer, for the kindly acquaintances I meet once more; and further serve as an illustrative menu, for the benefit of those newer and more critical friends who browse tentatively at the tables of the booksellers.

This volume—the fourth in its series of English Lands and Letters—opens upon that always delightful country of hills and waters, which is known as the Lake District of England;—where we found Wordsworth, stalking over the fells—and where we now find the maker of those heavy poems of Thalaba and Madoc, and of the charming little biography of Nelson. There, too, we find that strange creature, De Quincey, full of a tumult of thoughts and language—out of which comes ever and anon some penetrating utterance, whose barb of words fixes it in the mind, and makes it rankle. Professor Wilson is his fellow, among the hills by Elleray—as strenuous, and weightier with his great bulk of Scottish manhood; the Isle of Palms is forgotten; but not “Christopher in his Shooting Jacket”—stained, and bespattered with Highland libations.

A Londoner we encounter—Crabb Robinson, full of gossip and conventionalities; and also that cautious, yet sometimes impassioned Scottish bard who sang of Hohenlinden, and of Gertrude of Wyoming. Next, we have asked readers to share our regalement, in wandering along the Tweed banks, and in rekindling the memories of the verse, the home, and the chivalric stories of the benign master of Abbotsford, for whom—whatever newer literary fashions may now claim allegiance and whatever historic quid-nuncs may say in derogation—I think there are great multitudes who will keep a warm place in their hearts and easily pardon a kindred warmth in our words.

After Dryburgh, and its pall, we have in these pages found our way to Edinboro’, and have sketched the beginners, and the beginnings of that great northern quarterly, which so long dominated the realm of British book-craft, and which rallied to its ranks such men as Jeffrey and the witty Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh and the pervasive and petulant Brougham—full of power and of pyrotechnics. These great names and their quarterly organ call up comparison with that other, southern and distinctive Quarterly of Albemarle Street, which was dressed for literary battle by writers like Gifford, Croker, Southey, and Lockhart.

The Prince Regent puts in an appearance in startling waistcoats and finery—vibrating between Windsor and London; so does the bluff Sailor-King William IV. Next, Walter Savage Landor leads the drifting paragraphs of our story—a great, strong man; master of classicism, and master of language; now tender, and now virulent; never quite master of himself.

Of Leigh Hunt, and of his graceful, light-weighted, gossipy literary utterance, there is indulgent mention, with some delightful passages of verse foregathered from his many books. Of Thomas Moore, too, there is respectful and grateful—if not over-exultant—talk; yet in these swift days there be few who are tempted to tarry long in the “rosy bowers by Bendemeer.”

From Moore and the brilliant fopperies of “The First Gentleman of Europe,” we slip to the disorderly, but pungent and vivid essays of Hazlitt—to the orderly and stately historic labors of Hallam, closing up our chapter with the gay company who used to frequent the brilliant salon of the Lady Blessington—first in Seamore Place, and later at Gore House. There we find Bulwer, Disraeli (in his flamboyant youth-time), the elegant Count d’Orsay, and others of that train-band.

Following quickly upon these, we have asked our readers to fare with us along the old and vivid memories of Newstead Abbey—to track the master-poet of his time, through his early days of romance and marriage—through his journeyings athwart Europe, from the orange groves of Lisbon to the olives of Thessaly—from his friendship with Shelley, and life at Meillerie with its loud joys and stains—through his wild revels of Venice—his masterly verse-making—his quietudes of Ravenna (where the Guiccioli shone)—through his passionate zeal for Greece, and his last days at Missolonghi, with one brief glimpse of his final resting-place, beside his passionate Gordon mother, under the grim, old tower of Hucknall-Torkard. So long indeed do we dwell upon this Byronic episode, as to make of it the virtual pièce de résistance in the literary menu of these pages.

After the brusque and noisy King William there trails royally into view that Sovereign Victoria, over whose blanched head—in these very June days in which I write—the bells are all ringing a joyous Jubilee for her sixtieth year of reign. But to our eye, and to these pages, she comes as a girl in her teens—modest, yet resolute and calm; and among her advisers we see the suave and courtly Melbourne; and among those who make parliamentary battle, in the Queen’s young years, that famed historian who has pictured the lives of her kinsfolk—William and Mary—in a way which will make them familiar in the ages to come.

We have a glimpse, too, of the jolly Captain Marryat cracking his for’castle jokes, and of the somewhat tedious, though kindly, G. P. R. James, lifting his chivalric notes about men-at-arms and knightly adventures—a belated hunter in the fields of ancient feudal gramarye.

And with this pennant of the old times of tourney flung to the sharp winds of these days, and shivering in the rude blasts—where anarchic threats lurk and murmur—we close our preface, and bid our readers all welcome to the spread of—what our old friend Dugald Dalgetty would call—the Vivers.

D. G. M.

Edgewood, June 24, 1897.

CONTENTS.

ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS.

CHAPTER I.

The reader will, perhaps, remember that we brought our last year’s ramble amongst British Lands and Letters to an end—in the charming Lake District of England. There, we found Coleridge, before he was yet besotted by his opium-hunger; there, too, we had Church-interview with the stately, silver-haired poet of Rydal Mount—making ready for his last Excursion into the deepest of Nature’s mysteries.

The reader will recall, further, how this poet and seer, signalized some of the later years of his life by indignant protests against the schemes—which were then afoot—for pushing railways among the rural serenities of Westmoreland.

The Lake Country.

It is no wonder; for those Lake counties are very beautiful,—as if, some day, all the tamer features of English landscape had been sifted out, and the residue of picturesqueness and salient objects of flood and mountain had been bunched together in those twin regions of the Derwent and of Windermere. Every American traveller is familiar, of course, with the charming glimpses of Lake Saltonstall from the Shore-line high-road between New York and Boston; let them imagine these multiplied by a score, at frequently recurring intervals of walk or drive; not bald duplications; for sometimes the waters have longer stretch, and the hills have higher reach, and fields have richer culture and more abounding verdure; moreover, occasional gray church towers lift above the trees, and specks of villages whiten spots in the valleys; and the smoothest and hardest of roads run along the margin of the lakes; and masses of ivy cover walls, and go rioting all over the fronts of wayside inns. Then, mountains as high as Graylock, in Berkshire, pile suddenly out of the quieter undulations of surface, with high-lying ponds in their gulches; there are deep swales of heather, and bald rocks, and gray stone cairns that mark the site of ancient Cumbrian battles.

No wonder that a man loving nature and loving solitude, as Wordsworth did love them, should have demurred to the project of railways, and have shuddered—as does Ruskin now—at the whistling of the demon of civilization among those hills. But it has come there, notwithstanding, and come to stay; and from the station beyond Bowness, upon the charmingest bit of Windermere, there lies now only an early morning’s walk to the old home of Wordsworth at Rydal. Immediately thereabout, it is true, the levels are a little more puzzling to the engineers, so that the thirteen miles of charming country road which stretch thence—twirling hither and yon, and up and down—in a northwesterly direction to the town of Keswick and the Derwent valley, remain now in very much the same condition as when I walked over them, in leisurely way, fifty odd years ago this coming spring. The road in passing out from Rydal village goes near the cottage where poor Hartley Coleridge lived, and earlier, that strange creature De Quincey (of whom we shall have presently more to say); it skirts the very margin of Grasmere Lake; this latter being at your left, while upon the right you can almost see among the near hills the famous “Wishing Gate;” farther on is Grasmere village, and Grasmere church-yard—in a corner of which is the grave of the old poet, and a modest stone at its head on which is graven only the name, William Wordsworth,—as if anything more were needed! A mile or two beyond, one passes the “Swan Inn,” and would like to lodge there, and maybe clamber up Helvellyn, which here shows its great hulk on the right—no miniature mountain, but one which would hold its own (3,000 feet) among the lesser ones which shoulder up the horizon at “Crawford’s,” in the White Mountains.

Twirling and winding along the flank of Helvellyn, the road comes presently upon the long Dunmail Rise, where a Cumbrian battle was fought, and where, some six hundred feet above the level of Rydal water, one plunges into mountain savagery. All the while Helvellyn is rising like a giant on the right, and on the left is the lake of Thirlmere, with its shores of precipice. An hour more of easy walking brings one to another crest of hill from which the slope is northward and westward, and from this point you catch sight of the great mass of Skiddaw; while a little hitherward is the white speckle of Keswick town; and stretching away from it to your left lies all the valley of Derwent Water—with a cleft in the hills at its head, down which the brooklet of Lodore comes—“splashing and flashing.”

Robert Southey.

I have taken the reader upon this stroll through a bit of the Lake country of England that we might find the poet Dr. Southey[1] in his old home at Keswick. It is not properly in the town, but just across the Greta River, which runs southward of the town. There, the modest but good-sized house has been standing for these many years upon a grassy knoll, in its little patch of quiet lawn, with scattered show of trees—but never so many as to forbid full view up the long stretch of Derwent Water. His own hexameters shall tell us something of this view:

“I stood at the window beholding

Mountain and lake and vale; the valley disrobed of its verdure;

Derwent, retaining yet from eve a glassy reflection

Where his expanded breast, then still and smooth as a mirror,

Under the woods reposed; the hills that calm and majestic

Lifted their heads into the silent sky, from far Glaramara,

Bleacrag, and Maidenmawr to Grisedal and westernmost Wython,

Dark and distinct they rose. The clouds had gathered above them

High in the middle air, huge purple pillowy masses,

While in the West beyond was the last pale tint of the twilight,

Green as the stream in the glen, whose pure and chrysolite waters

Flow o’er a schistous bed.”

This may be very true picturing; but it has not the abounding flow of an absorbing rural enthusiasm; there is too sharp a search in it for the assonance, the spondees and the alliteration—to say nothing of the mineralogy. Indeed, though Southey loved those country ways and heights, of which I have given you a glimpse, and loved his daily walks round about Keswick and the Derwent, and loved the bracing air of the mountains—I think he loved these things as the feeders and comforters of his physical rather than of his spiritual nature. We rarely happen, in his verse, upon such transcripts of out-of-door scenes as are inthralling, and captivate our finer senses; nor does he make the boughs and blossoms tell such stories as filtered through the wood-craft of Chaucer.

Notwithstanding this, it is to that home of Southey, in the beautiful Lake country, that we must go for our most satisfying knowledge of the man. He was so wedded to it; he so loved the murmur of the Greta; so loved his walks; so loved the country freedom; so loved his workaday clothes and cap and his old shoes;[2] so loved his books—double-deep in his library, and running over into hall and parlor and corridors; loved, too, the children’s voices that were around him there—not his own only, but those always next, and almost his own—those of the young Coleridges. These were stranded there, with their mother (sister of Mrs. Southey), owing to the rueful neglect of their father—the bard and metaphysician. I do not think this neglect was due wholly to indifference. Coleridge sidled away from his wife and left her at Keswick in that old home of his own,—where he knew care was good—afraid to encounter her clear, honest, discerning—though unsympathetic—eyes, while he was putting all resources and all subterfuges to the feeding of that opiate craze which had fastened its wolfish fangs upon his very soul.

And Southey had most tender and beautiful care for those half-discarded children of the “Ancient Mariner.” He writes in this playful vein to young Hartley (then aged eleven), who is away on a short visit:

“Mr. Jackson has bought a cow, but he has had no calf since you left him. Edith [his own daughter] grows like a young giantess, and has a disposition to bite her arm, which you know is a very foolish trick. Your [puppy] friend Dapper, who is, I believe, your God-dog, is in good health, though he grows every summer graver than the last. I am desired to send you as much love as can be enclosed in a letter. I hope it will not be charged double on that account at the post-office. But there is Mrs. Wilson’s love, Mr. Jackson’s, your Aunt Southey’s, your Aunt Lovell’s and Edith’s; with a purr from Bona Marietta [the cat], an open-mouthed kiss from Herbert [the baby], and three wags of the tail from Dapper. I trust they will all arrive safe. Yr. dutiful uncle.”

And the same playful humor, and disposition to evoke open-eyed wonderment, runs up and down the lines of that old story of Bishop Hatto and the rats; and that other smart slap at the barbarities of war—which young people know, or ought to know, as the “Battle of Blenheim”—wherein old Kaspar says,—

“it was a shocking sight

After the field was won;

For many thousand bodies here

Lay rotting in the sun.

But things like that, you know, must be,

After a famous Victory.

Great praise the Duke of Marlboro’ won

And our good Prince Eugene;

‘Why, ’twas a very wicked thing!’

Said little Wilhelmine.

‘Nay—nay—my little girl,’ quoth he,

‘It was a famous Victory.’”

Almost everybody has encountered these Southeyan verses, and that other, about Mary the “Maid of the Inn,” in some one or other of the many “collections” of drifting poetry. There are very few, too, who have not, some day, read that most engaging little biography of Admiral Nelson, which tells, in most straightforward and simple and natural way, the romantic story of a life full of heroism, and scored with stains. I do not know, but—with most people—a surer and more lasting memory of Southey would be cherished by reason of those unpretending writings already named, and by knowledge of his quiet, orderly, idyllic home-life among the Lakes of Cumberland—tenderly and wisely provident of the mixed household committed to his care—than by the more ambitious things he did, or by the louder life he lived in the controversialism and politics of the day.

His Early Life.

To judge him more nearly we must give a slight trace of his history. Born down in Bristol (in whose neighborhood we found, you will remember, Chatterton, Mistress More, Coleridge, and others)—he was the son of a broken down linen-draper, who could help him little; but a great aunt—a starched woman of the Betsey Trotwood stamp—could and did befriend him, until it came to her knowledge, on a sudden, that he was plotting emigration to the Susquehanna, and plotting marriage with a dowerless girl of Bristol; then she dropped him, and the guardian aunt appears nevermore.

An uncle, however, who is a chaplain in the British service, helps him to Oxford—would have had him take orders—in which case we should have had, of a certainty, some day, Bishop Southey; and probably a very good one. But he has some scruples about the Creed, being over-weighted, perhaps, by intercourse with young Coleridge on the side of Unitarianism: “Every atom of grass,” he says, “is worth all the Fathers.”[3] He, however, accompanies the uncle to Portugal; dreams dreams and has poetic visions there in the orange-groves of Cintra; projects, too, a History of Portugal—which project unfortunately never comes to fulfilment. He falls in with the United States Minister, General Humphreys, who brings to his notice Dwight’s “Conquest of Canaan,” which Southey is good enough to think “has some merit.”

Thereafter he comes back to his young wife; is much in London and thereabout; coming to know Charles Lamb, Rogers, and Moore, with other such. He is described at that day as tall—a most presentable man—with dark hair and eyes, wonderful arched brows; “head of a poet,” Byron said; looking up and off, with proud foretaste of the victories he will win; he has, too, very early, made bold literary thrust at that old story of Joan of Arc: a good topic, of large human interest, but not over successfully dealt with by him. After this came that extraordinary poem of Thalaba, the first of a triad of poems which excited great literary wonderment (the others being the Curse of Kehama and Madoc). They are rarely heard of now and scarcely known. Beyond that fragment from Kehama, beginning

“They sin who tell us Love can die,”

hardly a page from either has drifted from the high sea of letters into those sheltered bays where the makers of anthologies ply their trade. Yet no weak man could have written either one of these almost forgotten poems of Southey; recondite learning makes its pulse felt in them; bright fancies blaze almost blindingly here and there; old myths of Arabia and Welsh fables are galvanized and brought to life, and set off with special knowledge and cumbrous aids of stilted and redundant prosody; but all is utterly remote from human sympathies, and all as cold—however it may attract by its glitter—as the dead hand

“Shrivelled, and dry, and black,”

which holds the magic taper in the Dom Daniel cavern of Thalaba.

A fourth long poem—written much later in life—Roderick the Goth, has a more substantial basis of human story, and so makes larger appeal to popular interest; but it had never a marked success.

Meantime, Southey has not kept closely by London; there have been peregrinations, and huntings for a home—for children and books must have a settlement. Through friends of influence he had come to a fairly good political appointment in Ireland, but has no love for the bulls and blunderbusses which adorn life there; nor will he tutor his patron’s boys—which also comes into the scale of his duties—so gives up that chance of a livelihood. There is, too, a new trip to Portugal with his wife; and a new reverent and dreamy listening to the rustle of the shining leaves of the orange-trees of Cintra. I do not think those murmurous tales of the trees of Portugal, burdened with old monastic flavors, ever went out of his ears wholly till he died. But finally the poet does come to settlement, somewhere about 1803—in that Keswick home, where we found him at the opening of our chapter.

Greta Hall.

Coleridge is for awhile a fellow-tenant with him there, then blunders away to Grasmere—to London, to Highgate, and into that over-strained, disorderly life of which we know so much and yet not enough. But Southey does not lack self-possession, or lack poise: he has not indeed so much brain to keep on balance; but he thinks excellently well of his own parts; he is disgusted when people look up to him after his Irish appointment—“as if,” he said, “the author of Joan of Arc, and of Thalaba, were made a great man by scribing for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

Yet for that poem of Thalaba, in a twelve-month after issue, he had only received as his share of profits a matter of £3 15s. Indeed, Southey would have fared hardly money-wise in those times, if he had not won the favor of a great many good and highly placed friends; and it was only four years after his establishment at Keswick, when these friends succeeded in securing to him an annual Government pension of £200. Landor had possibly aided him before this time; he certainly had admired greatly his poems and given praise that would have been worth more, if he had not spoiled it by rating Southey as a poet so much above Byron, Scott, and Coleridge.[4]

In addition to these aids the Quarterly Review was set afoot in those days in London—of which sturdy defender of Church and State, Southey soon became a virtual pensioner. Moreover, with his tastes, small moneys went a long way; he was methodical to the last degree; he loved his old coats and habits; he loved his marches and countermarches among the hills that flank Skiddaw better than he loved horses, or dogs, or guns; a quiet evening in his library with his books, was always more relished than ever so good a place at Drury Lane. New friends and old brighten that retirement for him. He has his vacation runs to Edinboro’—to London—to Bristol; the children are growing (though there is death of one little one—away from home); the books are piling up in his halls in bigger and always broader ranks. He writes of Brazil, of Spanish matters, of new poetry, of Nelson, of Society—showing touches of his early radicalism, and of a Utopian humor, which age and the heavy harness of conventionalism he has learned to wear, do not wholly destroy. He writes of Wesley and of the Church—settled in those maturer years into a comfortable routine-ordered Churchism, which does not let too airy a conscience prick him into unrest. A good, safe monarchist, too, who comes presently, and rightly enough—through a suggestion of George IV., then Regent in place of crazy George III.[5]—by his position as Poet Laureate; and in that capacity writes a few dismally stiff odes, which are his worst work. Even Wordsworth, who walks over those Cumberland hills with reverence, and with a pious fondness traces the “star-shaped shadows on the naked stones”—cannot warm to Southey’s new gush over royalty in his New Year’s Odes. Coleridge chafes; and Landor, we may be sure, sniffs, and swears, with a great roar of voice, at what looks so like to sycophancy.

To this time belongs that ode whose vengeful lines, after the fall of Napoleon, whip round the Emperor’s misdeeds in a fury of Tory Anglicanism, and call on France to avenge her wrongs:—

“By the lives which he hath shed,

By the ruin he hath spread,

By the prayers which rise for curses on his head—

Redeem, O France, thine ancient fame!

Revenge thy sufferings and thy shame!

Open thine eyes! Too long hast thou been blind!

Take vengeance for thyself and for mankind!”

This seems to me only the outcry of a tempestuous British scold; and yet a late eulogist has the effrontery to name it in connection with the great prayerful burst of Milton upon the massacre of the Waldenses:—

“Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.”

No, no; Southey was no Milton—does not reach to the height of an echo of Milton.

Yet he was a rare and accomplished man of books—of books rather than genius, I think. An excellent type of the very clever and well-trained professional writer, working honestly and steadily in the service to which he has put himself. Very politic, too, in his personal relations. Even Carlyle—for a wonder—speaks of him without lacerating him.

In a certain sense he was not insincere; yet he had none of that out-spoken exuberant sincerity which breaks forth in declaratory speech, before the public time-pieces have told us how to pitch our voices. Landor had this: so had Coleridge. Southey never would have run away from his wife—never; he might dislike her; but Society’s great harness (if nothing more) would hold him in check; there were conditions under which Coleridge might and did. Southey would never over-drink or over-tipple; there were conditions (not rare) under which Coleridge might and did. Yet, for all this, I can imagine a something finer in the poet of the Ancient Mariner—that felt moral chafings far more cruelly; and for real poetic unction you might put Thalaba, and Kehama, and Madoc all in one scale, and only Christabel in the other—and the Southey poems would be bounced out of sight. But how many poets of the century can put a touch to verse like the touch in Christabel?

The Doctor and Last Shadows.

I cannot forbear allusion to that curious book—little read now—which was published by Southey anonymously, called The Doctor:[6] a book showing vast accumulation of out-of-the-way bits of learning—full of quips, and conceits, and oddities; there are traces of Sterne in it and of Rabelais; but there is little trenchant humor of its own. It is a literary jungle; and all its wit sparkles like marsh fire-flies that lead no whither. You may wonder at its erudition; wonder at its spurts of meditative wisdom; wonder at its touches of scholastic cleverness, and its want of any effective coherence, but you wonder more at its waste of power. Yet he had great pride in this book; believed it would be read admiringly long after him; enjoyed vastly a boyish dalliance—if not a lying by-play—with the secret of its authorship; but he was, I think, greatly aggrieved by its want of the brilliant success he had hoped for.

But sorrows of a more grievous sort were dawning on him. On the very year before the publication of the first volumes of The Doctor, he writes to his old friend, Bedford: “I have been parted from my wife by something worse than death. Forty years she has been the life of my life; and I have left her this day in a lunatic asylum.”

But she comes back within a year—quiet, but all beclouded; looking vacantly upon the faces of the household, saddened, and much thinned now. For the oldest boy Herbert is dead years since; and the daughter, Isabel, “the most radiant creature (he says) that I ever beheld, or shall behold”—dead too; his favorite niece, Sara Coleridge, married and gone; his daughter Edith, married and gone; and now that other Edith—his wife—looking with an idle stare around the almost empty house. It was at this juncture, when all but courage seemed taken from him, that Sir Robert Peel wrote, offering the poet a Baronetcy; but he was beyond taking heart from any such toy as this. He must have felt a grim complacency—now that his hair was white and his shoulders bowed by weight of years and toil, and his home so nearly desolate—in refusing the empty bauble which Royalty offered, and in staying—plain Robert Southey.

Presently thereafter his wife died; and he, whose life had been such a domestic one, strayed round the house purposeless, like a wheel spinning blindly—off from its axle. Friends, however, took him away with them to Paris; among these friends—that always buoyant and companionable Crabb Robinson, whose diary is so rich in reminiscences of the literary men of these times. Southey’s son Cuthbert went with him, and the poet made a good mock of enjoying the new scenes; plotted great work again—did labor heartily on his return, and two years thereafter committed the indiscretion of marrying again: the loneliness at Keswick was so great. The new mistress he had long known and esteemed; and she (Miss Caroline Bowles) was an excellent, kindly, judicious woman—although a poetess.

But it was never a festive house again. All the high lights in that home picture which was set between Skiddaw and the Derwent-water were blurred. Wordsworth, striding across the hills by Dunmail Rise, on one of his rare visits, reports that Southey is all distraught; can talk of nothing but his books; and presently—counting only by months—it appears that he will not even talk of these—will talk of nothing. His handwriting, which had been neat—of which he had been proud—went all awry in a great scrawl obliquely athwart the page. For a year or two he is in this lost trail; mumbling, but not talking; seeing things—yet as one who sees not; clinging to those loved books of his—fondling them; passing up and down the library to find this or the other volume that had been carefully cherished—taking them from their shelves; putting his lips to them—then replacing them;—a year or more of this automatic life—the light in him all quenched.

He died in 1843, and was buried in the pretty church-yard of Crosthwaite, a short mile away from his old home. Within the church is a beautiful recumbent figure of the poet, which every traveller should see.

Crabb Robinson.

I had occasion to name Crabb Robinson[7] as one of the party accompanying Southey on his last visit to the Continent. Robinson was a man whom it is well to know something of, by reason of his Boswellian Reminiscences, and because—though of comparatively humble origin—he grew to be an excellent type of the well-bred, well-read club-man of his day—knowing everybody who was worth knowing, from Mrs. Siddons to Walter Scott, and talking about everybody who was worth talking of, from Louis Phillippe to Mrs. Barbauld.

He was quick, of keen perception—always making the most of his opportunities; had fair schooling; gets launched somehow upon an attorney’s career, to which he never took with great enthusiasm. He was an apt French scholar—passed four or five years, too, studying in Germany; his assurance and intelligence, aptitude, and good-nature bringing him to know almost everybody of consequence. He is familiar with Madame de Staël—hob-nobs with many of the great German writers of the early part of this century—is for a time correspondent of the Times from the Baltic and Stockholm; and from Spain also, in the days when Bonaparte is raging over the Continent. He returns to London, revives old acquaintances, and makes new ones; knows Landor and Dyer and Campbell; is hail fellow—as would seem—with Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, and Lady Blessington; falls into some helpful legacies; keeps lazily by his legal practice; husbands his resources, but never marries; pounces upon every new lion of the day; hears Coleridge lecture; hears Hazlitt lecture; hears Erskine plead, and goes to play whist and drink punch with the Lambs. He was full of anecdote, and could talk by the hour. Rogers once said to his guests who were prompt at breakfast: “If you’ve anything to say, you’d better say it; Crabb Robinson is coming.” He talked on all subjects with average acuteness, and more than average command of language, and little graceful subtleties of social speech—but with no special or penetrative analysis of his subject-matter. The very type of a current, popular, well-received man of the town—good at cards—good at a club dinner—good at supper—good in travel—good for a picnic—good for a lady’s tea-fight.

He must have written reams on reams of letters. The big books of his Diary and Reminiscences[8] which I commend to you for their amusing and most entertaining gossip, contained only a most inconsiderable part of his written leavings.

He took admirable care of himself; did not permit exposure to draughts—to indigestions, or to bad company of any sort. Withal he was charitable—was particular and fastidious; always knew the best rulings of society about ceremony, and always obeyed; never wore a dress-coat counter to good form. He was an excellent listener—especially to people of title; was a judicious flatterer—a good friend and a good fellow; dining out five days in the week, and living thus till ninety: and if he had lived till now, I think he would have died—dining out.

Mr. Robinson was not very strong in literary criticism. I quote a bit from his Diary, that will show, perhaps as well as any, his method and range. It is dated June 6, 1812:

“Sent Peter Bell to Chas. Lamb. To my surprise, he does not like it. He complains of the slowness of the narrative—as if that were not the art of the poet. He says Wordsworth has great thoughts, but has left them out here. [And then continues in his own person.] In the perplexity arising from the diverse judgments of those to whom I am accustomed to look up, I have no resource but in the determination to disregard all opinions, and trust to the simple impression made on my own mind. When Lady Mackintosh was once stating to Coleridge her disregard of the beauties of nature, which men commonly affect to admire, he said his friend Wordsworth had described her feeling, and quoted three lines from ‘Peter Bell:’

‘A primrose by a river brim

‘A yellow primrose was to him,

‘And it was nothing more.’

“‘Yes,’ said Lady Mackintosh—‘that is precisely my case.’”

Thomas De Quincey.

On the same page of that Diary—where I go to verify this quotation—is this entry:

“At four o’clock dined in the [Temple] Hall with De Quincey,[9] who was very civil to me, and cordially invited me to visit his cottage in Cumberland. Like myself, he is an enthusiast for Wordsworth. His person is small, his complexion fair, and his air and manner are those of a sickly and enfeebled man.”[10]

Some twenty-seven years before the date of this encounter, the sickly looking man was born near to Manchester, his father being a well-to-do merchant there—whose affairs took him often to Portugal and Madeira, and whose invalidism kept him there so much that the son scarce knew him;—remembers only how his father came home one day to his great country house—pale, and propped up with pillows in the back of his carriage—came to die. His mother, left with wealth enough for herself and children, was of a stern Calvinistic sort; which fact gives a streak of unpleasant color here and there to the son’s reminiscences. He is presently at odds with her about the Bath school—where he is taught—she having moved into Somersetshire, whereabout she knows Mistress Hannah More; the boy comes to know this lady too, with much reverence. The son is at odds with his mother again about Eton (where, though never a scholar, he has glimpses of George III.—gets a little grunted talk even, from the old king)—and is again at odds with the mother about the Manchester Grammar School: so much at odds here, that he takes the bit fairly in his mouth, and runs away with Euripides in his pocket. Then he goes wandering in Wales—gypsy-like—and from there strikes across country blindly to London, where he becomes gypsy indeed. He bargains with Jews to advance money on his expectations: and with this money for “sinker,” he sounds a depth of sin and misery which we may guess at, by what we know, but which in their fulness, even his galloping pen never told. Into some of those depths his friends traced him, and patched up a truce, which landed him in Oxford.

Quiet and studious here at first—he is represented as a rare talker, a little given to wine—writing admiring letters to Wordsworth and others, who were his gods in those days; falling somehow into taste for that drug which for so many years held him in its grip, body and soul. The Oxford career being finished after a sort, there are saunterings through London streets again—evenings with the Lambs, with Godwin, and excursions to Somersetshire and the Lake country, where he encounters and gives nearer worship to the poetic gods of his idolatry. Always shy, but earnest; most interesting to strangers—with his pale face, high brow and lightning glances; talking too with a winning flow and an exuberance of epithet that somewhiles amounts to brilliancy: no wonder he was tenderly entreated by good Miss Wordsworth; no wonder the poet of the “Doe of Rylstone” enjoyed the titillation of such fresh, bright praises!

So De Quincey at twenty-four became householder near to Grasmere—in the cottage I spoke of in the opening of the chapter—once occupied by Wordsworth, and later by Hartley Coleridge. There, on that pretty shelf of the hills—scarce lifted above Rydal-water, he gathers his books—studies the mountains—provokes the gossip of all the pretty Dalesmen’s daughters—lives there a bachelor, eight years or more—ranging round and round in bright autumnal days with the sturdy John Wilson (of the Noctes Ambrosianæ)—cultivating intimacy with poor crazy Lloyd (who lived nearby)—studying all anomalous characters with curious intensity, and finding anomalies where others found none. Meantime and through all, his sensibilities are kept wrought to fever heat by the opiate drinks—always flanking him at his table; and he, so dreadfully wonted to those devilish drafts, that—on some occasions—he actually consumes within the twenty-four hours the equivalent of seven full wine-glasses of laudanum! No wonder the quiet Dales-people looked dubiously at the light burning in those cottage windows far into the gray of morning, and counted the pale-faced, big-headed man for something uncanny.

In these days comes about that strange episode of his mad attachment to the little elfin child—Catharine Wordsworth—of whom the poet-father wrote:—

“Solitude to her

Was blithe society, who filled the air

With gladness and involuntary songs.

Light were her sallies, as the tripping fawn’s,

Forth startled from the form where she lay couched;

Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir

Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow flowers.”

Yet De Quincey, arrogantly interpreting the deep-seated affections of that father’s heart, says, “She was no favorite with Wordsworth;” but he “himself was blindly, doatingly, fascinated” by this child of three. And of her death, before she is four, when De Quincey is on a visit in London, he says, with crazy exaggeration:

“Never, perhaps, from the foundations of those mighty hills was there so fierce a convulsion of grief as mastered my faculties on receiving that heart-shattering news.… I had always viewed her as an impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of infancy.… I returned hastily to Grasmere; stretched myself every night, for more than two months running, upon her grave; in fact often passed the night upon her grave … in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning after neighborhood to the darling of my heart.”[11]

This is a type of his ways of feeling, and of his living, and of his speech—tending easily to all manner of extravagance: black and white are too tame for his nerve-exaltation; if a friend looks sharply, “his eye glares;” if disturbed, he has a “tumult of the brain;” if he doubles his fist, his gestures are the wildest; and a well-built son and daughter of a neighbor Dalesman are the images of “Coriolanus and Valeria.”

Marriage and other Flights.

At thirty-one, or thereabout, De Quincey married the honest daughter of an honest yeoman of the neighborhood. She was sensible (except her marriage invalidate the term), was kindly, was long-suffering, and yet was very human. I suspect the interior of that cottage was not always like the islands of the blessed. Mr. Froude would perhaps have enjoyed lifting the roof from such a house. Many children were born to that strangely coupled pair,—some of them still living and most worthy.

It happens by and by to this impractical man, from whose disorderly and always open hand inherited moneys have slipped away; it happens—I say—that he must earn his bread by his own toil; so he projects great works of philosophy, of political economy, which are to revolutionize opinions; but they topple over into opium dreams before they are realized. He tries editing a county paper, but it is nought. At last he utilizes even his vices, and a chapter of the Confessions of an Opium Eater, in the London Magazine, draws swift attention to one whose language is as vivid as a flame; and he lays bare, without qualm, his own quivering sensibilities. This spurt of work, or some new craze, takes him to London, away from his family. And so on a sudden, that idyl of life among the Lakes becomes for many years a tattered and blurred page to him. He is once more a denizen of the great city, living a shy, hermit existence there; long time in a dim back-room of the publisher Bohn’s, in Bedford Street, near to Covent Garden. He sees Proctor and Hazlitt odd-whiles, and Hood, and still more of the Lambs; but he is peevish and distant, and finds largest company in the jug of laudanum which brings swift succeeding dreams and stupefaction.

We will have a taste of some of his wild writing of those days. He is speaking of a dream.

“The dream commenced with a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march; of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day, a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where—somehow, I knew not how—by some beings, I knew not whom—a battle, a strife, an agony was conducting, was evolving like a great drama or a piece of music.… I had the power, and yet had not the power to decide it … for the weight of twenty Atlantes was upon me as the oppression of inexpiable guilt. Deeper than ever plummet sounded, I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened; there came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I know not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands and heart-breaking partings, and then everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!”

Some years later he drifts again to Grasmere, but only to pluck up root and branch that home with wife and children,—so wonted now to the pleasant sounds and sights of the Lake waters and the mountains—and to transport them to Edinboro’, where, through Professor Wilson, he has promise of work which had begun to fail him in London.

There,—though he has the introduction which a place at the tavern table of Father Ambrose gives—he is a lonely man; pacing solitary, sometimes in the shadow of the Castle Rock, sometimes in the shadow of the old houses of the Canongate; always preoccupied, close-lipped, brooding, and never without that wretched opium-comforter at his home. It was in Blackwood (1827) he first published the well known essay on “Murder as a Fine Art,”—perhaps the best known of all he wrote; there, too, he committed to paper, in the stress of his necessities, those sketchy Reminiscences of his Lake life; loose, disjointed, ill-considered, often sent to press without any revision and full of strange coined words. I note at random, such as novel-ish erector (for builder), lambencies, apricating, aculeated; using words not rarely, etymologically, and for some recondite sense attaching. Worse than this, there is dreary tittle-tattle and a pulling away of decent domestic drapery from the lives of those he had professed to love and honor; tedious expatiation, too, upon the scandal-mongering of servant-maids, with illustrations by page on page; and yet, for the matter of gossip, he is himself as fertile as a seamstress or a monthly nurse, and as overflowing and brazen as any newspaper you may name.

But here and there, even amid his dreariest pages, you see, quivering—some gleams of his old strange power—a thrust of keen thought that bewilders you by its penetration—a glowing fancy that translates one to wondrous heights of poetic vision; and oftener yet, and over and over, shows that mastery of the finesse of language by which he commands the most attenuated reaches of his thought, and whips them into place with a snap and a sting.

Yet, when all is said, I think we must count the best that he wrote only amongst the curiosities of literature, rather than with the manna that fell for fainting souls in the wilderness.

De Quincey died in Edinburgh, in 1859, aged seventy-four.

CHAPTER II.

In our last chapter we took a breezy morning walk amid the Lake scenery of England—more particularly that portion of it which lies between the old homes of Wordsworth and of Southey; we found it a thirteen-mile stretch of road, coiling along narrow meadows and over gray heights—beside mountains and mountain tarns—with Helvellyn lifting mid-way and Skiddaw towering at the end. We had our talk of Dr. Southey—so brave at his work—so generous in his home charities—so stiff in his Churchism and latter-day Toryism—with a very keen eye for beauty; yet writing poems—stately and masterful—which long ago went to the top-shelves, and stay there.

We had our rough and ready interviews with that first of “War Correspondents”—Henry Crabb Robinson—who knew all the prominent men of this epoch, and has given us such entertaining chit-chat about them, as we all listen to, and straightway forget. Afterwards we had a look at that strange, intellectual, disorderly creature De Quincey—he living a long while in the Lake Country—and in his more inspired moments seeming to carry us by his swift words, into that mystical region lying beyond the borders of what we know and see. He swayed men; but he rarely taught them, or fed them.

Christopher North.

We still linger about those charmingest of country places; and by a wooden gateway—adjoining the approach to Windermere Hotel—upon the “Elleray woods,” amid which lived—eighty years ago—that stalwart friend of De Quincey’s, whose acquaintance he made among the Lakes, and who, like himself, was a devoted admirer of Wordsworth. Indeed, I think it was at the home of the latter that De Quincey first encountered the tall, lusty John Wilson—brimful of enthusiasm and all country ardors; brimful, too, of gush, and all poetic undulations of speech. He[12] was a native of Paisley—his father having been a rich manufacturer there—and had come to spend his abundant enthusiasms and his equally abundant moneys between Wordsworth and the mountains and Windermere. He has his fleet of yachts and barges upon the lake; he knows every pool where any trout lurk—every height that gives far-off views. He is a pugilist, a swimmer, an oarsman—making the hills echo with his jollity, and dashing off through the springy heather with that slight, seemingly frail De Quincey in his wake—who only reaches to his shoulder, but who is all compact of nerve and muscle. For Greek they are fairly mated, both by love and learning; and they can and do chant together the choral songs of heathen tragedies.

This yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant, John Wilson—not so well-known now as he was sixty years ago—we collegians greatly admired in that far-off day. He had written the Isle of Palms, and was responsible for much of the wit and dash and merriment which sparkled over the early pages of Blackwood’s Magazine—in the chapters of the Noctes Ambrosianæ and in many a paper besides:—he had his first university training at Glasgow; had a brief love-episode there also, which makes a prettily coy appearance on the pleasant pages of the biography of Wilson which a daughter (Mrs. Gordon) has compiled. After Glasgow came Oxford; and a characteristic bit of his later writing, which I cite, will show you how Oxford impressed him:—

“Having bidden farewell to our sweet native Scotland, and kissed ere we parted, the grass and the flowers with a show of filial tears—having bidden farewell to all her glens, now a-glimmer in the blended light of imagination and memory, with their cairns and kirks, their low-chimneyed huts, and their high-turreted halls, their free-flowing rivers, and lochs dashing like seas—we were all at once buried not in the Cimmerian gloom, but the Cerulean glitter of Oxford’s Ancient Academic groves. The genius of the place fell upon us. Yes! we hear now, in the renewed delight of the awe of our youthful spirit, the pealing organ in that Chapel called the Beautiful; we see the Saints on the stained windows; at the Altar the picture of One up Calvary meekly ascending. It seemed then that our hearts had no need even of the kindness of kindred—of the country where we were born, and that had received the continued blessings of our enlarging love! Yet away went, even then, sometimes, our thoughts to Scotland, like carrier-pigeons wafting love messages beneath their unwearied wings.”[13]

We should count this, and justly, rather over-fine writing nowadays. Yet it is throughout stamped with the peculiarities of Christopher North; he cannot help his delightfully wanton play with language and sentiment; and into whatever sea of topics he plunged—early or late in life—he always came up glittering with the beads and sparkles of a highly charged rhetoric. Close after Oxford comes that idyllic life[14] in Windermere to which I have referred. Four or more years pass there; his trees grow there; his new roads—hewn through the forests—wind there; he plots a new house there; he climbs the mountains; he is busy with his boats. Somewhat later he marries; he does not lose his old love for the poets of the Greek anthology; he has children born to him; he breeds game fowls, and looks after them as closely as a New England farmer’s wife after her poultry; but with him poetry and poultry go together. There are old diaries of his—into which his daughter gives us a peep—that show such entries as this:—“The small Paisley hen set herself 6th of July, with no fewer than nine eggs;” and again—“Red pullet in Josie’s barn was set with eight eggs on Thursday;” and square against such memoranda, and in script as careful, will appear some bit of verse like this:—

“Oh, fairy child! what can I wish for thee?

Like a perennial flowret may’st thou be,

That spends its life in beauty and in bliss;

Soft on thee fall the breath of time,

And still retain in heavenly clime

The bloom that charms in this.”

He wrote, too, while living there above Windermere, his poem of the Isle of Palms; having a fair success in the early quarter of this century, but which was quickly put out of sight and hearing by the brisker, martial music of Scott, and by the later and more vigorous and resonant verse of Byron.

Indeed, Wilson’s poetry was not such as we would have looked for from one who was a “varra bad un to lick” at a wrestling bout, and who made the splinters fly when his bludgeon went thwacking into a page of controversial prose. His verse is tender; it is graceful; it is delicate; it is full of languors too; and it is tiresome—a gentle girlish treble of sound it has, that you can hardly associate with this brawny mass of manhood.

Wilson in Scotland.

But all that delightful life amidst the woods of Elleray—with its game-cocks, and boats, and mountain rambles, and shouted chorus of Prometheus—comes to a sharp end. The inherited fortune of the poet, by some criminal carelessness or knavery of a relative, goes in a day; and our fine stalwart wrestler must go to Edinboro’ to wrestle with the fates. There he coquets for a time with law; but presently falls into pleasant affiliation with old Mr. Blackwood (who was a remarkable man in his way) in the conduct of his magazine. And then came the trumpet blasts of mingled wit, bravado, and tenderness, which broke into those pages, and which made young college men in England or Scotland or America, fling up their hats for Christopher North. Not altogether a safe guide, I think, as a rhetorician; too much bounce in him; too little self-restraint; too much of glitter and iridescence; but, on the other hand—bating some blackguardism—he is brimful of life and heartiness and merriment—lighted up with scholarly hues of color.

There was associated with Wilson in those days, in work upon Blackwood, a young man—whom we may possibly not have occasion to speak of again, and yet who is worthy of mention. I mean J. G. Lockhart,[15] who afterwards became son-in-law and the biographer of Walter Scott—a slight young fellow in that day, very erect and prim; wearing his hat well forward on his heavy brows, and so shading a face that was thin, clean cut, handsome, and which had almost the darkness of a Spaniard’s. He put his rapier-like thrusts into a good many papers which the two wrought at together. All his life he loved literary digs with his stiletto—which was very sharp—and when he left Edinboro’ to edit the Quarterly Review in London (as he did in after days) he took his stiletto with him. There are scenes in that unevenly written Lockhart story of Adam Blair—hardly known now—which for thrilling passion, blazing out of clear sufficiencies of occasion, would compare well with kindred scenes of Scott’s own, and which score deeper colorings of human woe and loves and remorse than belong to most modern stories; not lighted, indeed, with humor; not entertaining with anecdote; not embroidered with archæologic knowledge; not rattling with coruscating social fireworks, but—subtle, psychologic, touching the very marrow of our common manhood with a pen both sharp and fine. We remember him, however, most gratefully as the charming biographer of Scott, and as the accomplished translator of certain Spanish ballads into which he has put—under flowing English verse—all the clashing of Cordovan castanets, and all the jingle of the war stirrups of the Moors.

We return now to Professor Wilson and propose to tell you how he came by that title. It was after only a few years of work in connection with Blackwood that the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinboro’ University—which had been held by Dugald Stewart, and later by Dr. Thomas Brown—fell vacant; and at once the name of Wilson was pressed by his friends for the position. It was not a little odd that a man best known by two delicate poems, and by a bold swashbuckler sort of magazine writing should be put forward—in such a staid city as Edinboro’, and against such a candidate as Sir William Hamilton—for a Chair which had been held by Dugald Stewart! But he was so put forward, and successfully; Walter Scott and the Government coming to his aid. Upon this, he went resolutely to study in the new line marked out for him; his rods and guns were, for the time, hung upon the wall; his wrestling frolics and bouts at quarter-staff, and suppers at the Ambrose tavern, were laid under limitations. He put a conscience and a pertinacity into his labor that he had never put to any intellectual work before.[16] But there were very many people in Edinboro’ who had been aggrieved by the appointment—largely, too, among those from whom his pupils would come. There was, naturally, great anxiety among his friends respecting the opening of the first session. An eye-witness says:—

“I went prepared to join in a cabal which was formed to put him down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a collection of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their knob-sticks, I never saw. The Professor entered with a bold step, amid profound silence. Every one expected some deprecatory, or propitiatory introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to decide against him, reason or no reason; but he began with a voice of thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept up—unflinchingly and unhesitatingly, without a pause—a flow of rhetoric such as Dugald Stewart or Dr. Brown, his predecessors, never delivered in the same place. Not a word—not a murmur escaped his captivated audience; and at the end they gave him a right-down unanimous burst of applause.”[17]

From that time forth, for thirty years or more, John Wilson held the place, and won a popularity with his annual relays of pupils that was unexampled and unshaken. Better lectures in his province may very possibly have been written by others elsewhere—more close, more compact, more thoroughly thought out, more methodic. His were not patterned after Reid and Stewart; indeed, not patterned at all; not wrought into a burnished system, with the pivots and cranks of the old school-men all in their places. But they made up a series—continuous, and lapping each into each, by easy confluence of topic—of discourses on moral duties and on moral relations, with full and brilliant illustrative talk—sometimes in his heated moments taking on the gush and exuberance of a poem; other times bristling with reminiscences; yet full of suggestiveness, and telling as much, I think, on the minds of his eager and receptive students as if the rhetorical brilliancies had all been plucked away, and some master of a duller craft had reduced his words to a stiff, logical paradigm.

From this time forward Professor Wilson lived a quiet, domestic, yet fully occupied life. He wrote enormously for the magazine with which his name had become identified; there is scarce a break in his thirty years’ teachings in the university; there are sometimes brief interludes of travel; journeys to London; flights to the Highlands; there are breaks in his domestic circle, breaks in the larger circle of his friends; there are twinges of the gout and there come wrinkles of age; but he is braver to resist than most; and for years on years everybody knew that great gaunt figure, with blue eyes and hair flying wild, striding along Edinboro’ streets.

His poems have indeed almost gone down under the literary horizon of to-day; but one who has known Blackwood of old, can hardly wander anywhere amongst the Highlands of Scotland without pleasant recollections of Christopher North and of the musical bravuras of his speech.

Thomas Campbell.

Another Scotsman, who is worthy of our attention for a little time, is one of a different order; he is stiff, he is prim, he is almost priggish; he is so in his young days and he keeps so to the very last.

A verse or two from one of the little poems he wrote will bring him to your memory:

“On Linden when the sun was low,

All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,

And dark as winter was the flow,

Of Iser, rolling rapidly.”

And again:

“Then shook the hills with thunder riven,

Then rushed the steed to battle driven,

And louder than the bolts of heaven,

Far flashed the red artillery.”

If Thomas Campbell[18] had never written anything more than that page-long story of the “Battle of Hohenlinden,” his name would have gone into all the anthologies, and his verse into all those school-books where boys for seventy years now have pounded at his martial metre in furies of declamation. And yet this bit of martial verse, so full of the breath of battle, was, at the date of its writing, rejected by the editor of a small provincial journal in Scotland—as not coming up to the true poetic standard![19]

I have spoken of Campbell as a Scotsman; though after only a short stay in Scotland—following his university career at Glasgow—and a starveling tour upon the Continent (out of which flashed “Hohenlinden”)—he went to London; and there or thereabout spent the greater part of the residue of a long life. He had affiliations of a certain sort with America, out of which may possibly have grown his Gertrude of Wyoming; his father was for much time a merchant in Falmouth, Virginia, about 1770; being however a strong loyalist, he returned in 1776. A brother and an uncle of the poet became established in this country, and an American Campbell of this stock was connected by marriage with the family of Patrick Henry.

The first coup by which Campbell won his literary spurs, was a bright, polished poem—with its couplets all in martinet-like order—called the Pleasures of Hope. We all know it, if for nothing more, by reason of the sympathetic allusion to the woes of Poland:

“Ah, bloodiest picture in the book of time!

Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime;

Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe,

Strength in her arms nor mercy in her woe!

Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear,

Closed her bright eye and curbed her high career,

Hope for a season bade the world farewell,

And freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!”

Even at so late a date as the death of Campbell (1844), when they buried him in Westminster Abbey, close upon the tomb of Sheridan, some grateful Pole secured a handful of earth from the grave of Kosciusko to throw upon the coffin of the poet.

But in addition to its glow of liberalism, this first poem of Campbell was, measured by all the old canons of verse, thoroughly artistic. Its pauses, its rhymes, its longs and shorts were of the best prize order; even its errors in matters of fact have an academic tinge—as, for instance,—

“On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along!”

The truth is, Mr. Campbell was never strong in his natural history; he does not scruple to put flamingoes and palm trees into the valley of Wyoming. Another reason why the first poem of Campbell’s, written when he was only twenty-one, came to such success, was the comparatively clear field it had. The date of publication was at the end of the century. Byron was in his boyhood; Scott had not published his Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805); Southey had printed only his Joan of Arc (1796), which few people read; the same may be said of Landor’s Gebir, (1797); Cowper was an old story; Rogers’s Pleasures of Memory (1792), and Moore’s translation of Anacreon (1799-1800), were the more current things with which people who loved fresh poetry could regale themselves. The Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge had indeed been printed, perhaps a year or two before, down in Bristol; but scarce any one read these; few bought them;[20] and yet—in that copy of the Lyrical Ballads was lying perdu—almost unknown and uncared for—the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Gertrude of Wyoming, a poem, written at Sydenham, near London, about 1807, and which, sixty years ago, every good American who was collecting books thought it necessary to place upon his shelves, I rarely find there now. It has not the rhetorical elaboration of Campbell’s first poem; never won its success; there are bits of war in it, and of massacre, that are gorgeously encrimsoned, and which are laced through and through with sounds of fife and warwhoop; but the landscape is a disorderly exaggeration (I have already hinted at its palm trees) and its love-tale has only the ardors of a stage scene in it; we know where the tragedy is coming in, and gather up our wraps so as to be ready when the curtain falls.

He was a born actor—in need (for his best work) of the foot-lights, the on-lookers, the trombone, the bass-drum. He never glided into victories of the pen by natural inevitable movement of brain or heart; he stopped always and everywhere to consider his pose.

There is little of interest in Campbell’s personal history; he married a cousin; lived, as I said, mostly in London, or its immediate neighborhood. He had two sons—one dying young, and the other of weak mind—lingering many years—a great grief and source of anxiety to his father, who had the reputation of being exacting and stern in his family. He edited for a long time the New Monthly Magazine, and wrote much for it, but is represented to have been, in its conduct, careless, hypercritical, and dilatory. He lectured, too, before the Royal Institute on poetry; read oratorically and showily—his subject matter being semi-philosophical, with a great air of learning and academically dry; there was excellent system in his discourses, and careful thinking on themes remote from most people’s thought. He wrote some historical works which are not printed nowadays; his life of Mrs. Siddons is bad; his life of Petrarch is but little better; some poems he published late in life are quite unworthy of him and are never read. Nevertheless, this prim, captious gentleman wrote many things which have the ring of truest poetry and which will be dear to the heart of England as long as English ships sail forth to battle.

A Minstrel of the Border.

Yet another Scotsman whose name will not be forgotten—whether British ships go to battle, or idle at the docks—is Walter Scott.[21] I scarce know how to begin to speak of him. We all know him so well—thanks to the biography of his son-in-law, Lockhart, which is almost Boswellian in its minuteness, and has dignity besides. We know—as we know about a neighbor’s child—of his first struggles with illness, wrapped in a fresh sheepskin, upon the heathery hills by Smailholme Tower; we know of the strong, alert boyhood that succeeded; he following, with a firm seat and free rein—amongst other game—the old wives’ tales and border ballads which, thrumming in his receptive ears, put the Edinboro law studies into large confusion. Swift after this comes the hurry-scurry of a boyish love-chase—beginning in Grey Friar’s church-yard; she, however, who sprung the race—presently doubles upon him, and is seen no more; and he goes lumbering forward to another fate. It was close upon these experiences that some friends of his printed privately his ballad of William and Helen, founded on the German Lenore:—

“Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode!

Splash, splash! along the sea!

The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,

The flashing pebbles flee!”

And the spirit and dash of those four lines were quickly recognized as marking a new power in Scotch letters; and an echo of them, or of their spirit, in some shape or other, may be found, I think, in all his succeeding poems and in all the tumults and struggles of his life. The elder Scott does not like this philandering with rhyme; it will spoil the law, and a solid profession, he thinks; and true enough it does. For the Border Minstrelsy comes spinning its delightfully musical and tender stories shortly after Lenore; and a little later appears his first long poem—the Lay of the Last Minstrel—which waked all Scotland and England to the melody of the new master. He was thirty-four then; ripening later than Campbell, who at twenty-one had published his Pleasures of Hope. There was no kinship in the methods of the two poets; Campbell all precision, and nice balance, delicate adjustment of language—stepping from point to point in his progress with all grammatic precautions and with well-poised poetic steps and demi-volts, as studied as a dancing master’s; while Scott dashed to his purpose with a seeming abandonment of care, and a swift pace that made the “pebbles fly.” Just as unlike, too, was this racing freedom of Scott’s—which dragged the mists away from the Highlands, and splashed his colors of gray, and of the purple of blooming heather over the moors—from that other strain of verse, with its introspections and deeper folded charms, which in the hands of Wordsworth was beginning to declare itself humbly and coyly, but as yet with only the rarest applause. I cannot make this distinction clearer than by quoting a little landscape picture—let us say from Marmion—and contrasting with it another from Wordsworth, which was composed six years or more before Marmion was published. First, then, from Scott—and nothing prettier and quieter of rural sort belongs to him,—

“November’s sky is chill and drear,

November’s leaf is red and sear;

Late gazing down the steepy linn

That hems our little garden in.”

(I may remark, in passing, that this is an actual description of Scott’s home surroundings at Ashestiel.)

“Low in its dark and narrow glen

You scarce the rivulet might ken,

So thick the tangled greenwood grew,

So feeble trilled the streamlet through;

Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen

Through brush and briar, no longer green,

An angry brook it sweeps the glade,

Breaks over rock and wild cascade,

And foaming brown with double speed

Marries its waters to the Tweed.”

There it is—a completed picture; do what you will with it! Reading it, is like a swift, glad stepping along the borders of the brook.

Now listen for a little to Wordsworth; it is a scrap from Tintern Abbey:—

“Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,

Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire

The hermit sits alone.”

(Here is more than the tangible picture; the smoke wreaths have put unseen dwellers there); and again:—

“O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

I have learned

To look on Nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity!

Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns

And the round ocean and the living air

And the blue sky, and in the mind of men

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains.”

This will emphasize the distinction, to which I would call attention, in the treatment of landscape by the two poets: Wordsworth putting his all on a simmer with humanities and far-reaching meditative hopes and languors; and Scott throwing windows wide open to the sky, and saying only—look—and be glad!

In those days Wordsworth had one reader where Scott had a hundred; and the one reader was apologetic and shy, and the hundred were loud and gushing. I think the number of their respective readers is more evenly balanced nowadays; and it is the readers of Scott who are beginning to be apologetic. Indeed I have a half consciousness of putting myself on this page in that category:—As if the Homeric toss and life and play, and large sweep of rivers, and of battalions and winnowed love-notes, and clang of trumpets, and moaning of the sea, which rise and fall in the pages of the Minstrel and of Marmion—needed apology! Apology or no, I think Scott’s poems will be read for a good many years to come. The guide books and Highland travellers—and high-thoughted travellers—will keep them alive—if the critics do not; and I think you will find no better fore-reading for a trip along the Tweed or through the Trosachs than Marmion, and the Lady of the Lake.

The Waverley Dispensation.

Meantime, our author has married—a marriage, Goldwin Smith says, of “intellectual disparagement”; which I suppose means that Mrs. Scott was not learned and bookish—as she certainly was not; but she was honest, true-hearted, and domestic. Mr. Redding profanely says that she was used to plead, “Walter, my dear, you must write a new book, for I want another silk dress.” I think this is apocryphal; and there is good reason to believe that she gave a little hearty home huzza at each one of Mr. Scott’s quick succeeding triumphs.

Our author has also changed his home; first from the pretty little village of Lasswade, which is down by Dalkeith, to Ashestiel by the Yarrow; and thence again to a farm-house, near to that unfortunate pile of Abbotsford, which stands on the Tweed bank, shadowed by the trees he planted, and shadowed yet more heavily by the story of his misfortunes. I notice a disposition in some recent writers to disparage this notable country home as pseudo-Gothic and flimsy. This gives a false impression of a structure which, though it lack that singleness of expression and subordination of details which satisfy a professional critic, does yet embody in a singularly interesting way, and with solid construction, all the aspirations, tastes, clannish vanities and archæologic whims of the great novelist. The castellated tower is there to carry the Scottish standard, and the cloister to keep alive reverent memory of old religious houses; and the miniature Court gate, with its warder’s horn; and the Oriole windows, whose details are, maybe, snatched from Kenilworth; the mass, too, is impressive and smacks all over of Scott’s personality and of the traditions he cherished.

I am tempted to introduce here some notes of a visit made to this locality very many years ago. I had set off on a foot-pilgrimage from the old border town of Berwick-on-Tweed; had kept close along the banks of the river, seeing men drawing nets for salmon, whose silvery scales flashed in the morning sun. All around swept those charming fields of Tweed-side, green with the richest June growth; here and there were shepherds at their sheep washing; old Norham Castle presently lifted its gray buttresses into view; then came the long Coldstream bridge, with its arches shimmering in the flood below; and after this the palace of the Duke of Roxburgh. In thus following up leisurely the Tweed banks from Berwick, I had slept the first night at Kelso; had studied the great fine bit of ruin which is there, and had caught glimpses of Teviot-dale and of the Eildon Hills; had wandered out of my way for a sight of Smailholme tower, and of Sandy Knowe—both associated with Scott’s childhood; I passed Dryburgh, where he lies buried, and at last on an evening of early June, 1845, a stout oarsman ferried me across the Tweed and landed me in Melrose.

I slept at the George Inn—dreaming (as many a young wayfarer in those lands has since done), of Ivanhoe and Rebecca, and border wars and Old Mortality. Next morning, after a breakfast upon trout taken from some near stream (very likely the Yarrow or the Gala-water), I strolled two miles or so along the road which followed the Tweed bank upon the southern side, and by a green foot-gate entered the Abbotsford grounds. The forest trees—not over high at that time—were those which the master had planted. From his favorite outdoor seat, sheltered by a thicket of arbor-vitæ, could be caught a glimpse of the rippled surface of the Tweed and of the turrets of the house.

It was all very quiet—quiet in the wood-walks; quiet as you approached the court-yard; the master dead; the family gone; I think there was a yelp from some young hound in an out-building, and a twitter from some birds I did not know; there was the unceasing murmur of the river. Besides these sounds, the silence was unbroken; and when I rang the bell at the entrance door, the jangle of it was very startling; startling a little terrier, too, whose quick, sharp bark rang noisily through the outer court.

Only an old house-keeper was in charge, who had fallen into that dreadful parrot-like way of telling visitors what things were best worth seeing—which frets one terribly. What should you or I care (fresh from Guy Mannering or Kenilworth) whether a bit of carving came from Jedburgh or Kelso? or about the jets in the chandelier, or the way in which a Russian Grand Duke wrote his name in the visitors’ book?

But when we catch sight of the desk at which the master wrote, or of the chair in which he sat, and of his shoes and coat and cane—looking as if they might have been worn yesterday—these seem to bring us nearer to the man who has written so much to cheer and to charm the world. There was, too, a little box in the corridor, simple and iron-bound, with the line written below it, “Post will close at two.” It was as if we had heard the master of the house say it. Perhaps the notice was in his handwriting (he had been active there in 1831-2—just thirteen years before)—perhaps not; but—somehow—more than the library, or the portrait bust, or the chatter of the well-meaning house-keeper, it brought back the halting old gentleman in his shooting-coat, and with ivory-headed cane—hobbling with a vigorous step along the corridor, to post in that iron-bound box a packet—maybe a chapter of Woodstock.

I have spoken of the vacant house—family gone: The young Sir Walter Scott, of the British army, and heir to the estate—was at that date (1845) absent in the Indies; and only two years thereafter died at sea on his voyage home. Charles Scott, the only brother of the younger Sir Walter, died in 1841.[22] Miss Anne Scott, the only unmarried daughter of the author of Waverley, died—worn-out with tenderest care of mother and father, and broken-hearted—in 1833. Her only sister, Mrs. (Sophia Scott) Lockhart, died in 1837. Her oldest son—John Hugh, familiarly known as “Hugh Little John”—the crippled boy, for whom had been written the Tales of a Grandfather, and the darling of the two households upon Tweed-side—died in 1831. I cannot forbear quoting here a charming little memorial of him, which, within the present year, has appeared in Mr. Lang’s Life of Lockhart.

“A figure as of one of Charles Lamb’s dream-children haunts the little beck at Chiefswood, and on that haugh at Abbotsford, where Lockhart read the manuscript of the Fortunes of Nigel, fancy may see ‘Hugh Little John,’ ‘throwing stones into the burn,’ for so he called the Tweed. While children study the Tales of a Grandfather, he does not want friends in this world to remember and envy the boy who had Sir Walter to tell him stories.”—P. 75, vol. ii.

A younger son of Lockhart, Walter Scott by name, became, at the death of the younger Walter Scott, inheritor of all equities in the landed estate upon Tweed-side, and the proper Laird of Abbotsford. His story is a short and a sad one; he was utterly unworthy, and died almost unbefriended at Versailles in January, 1853.

His father, J. G. Lockhart, acknowledging a picture of this son, under date of 1843, in a letter addressed to his daughter Charlotte—(later Mrs. Hope-Scott,[23] and mother of the present proprietress of Abbotsford), writes with a grief he could not cover:—

“I am not sorry to have it by me, though it breaks my heart to recall the date. It is of the sweet, innocent, happy boy, home for Sunday from Cowies [his school].… Oh, God! how soon that day became clouded, and how dark its early close! Well, I suppose there is another world; if not, sure this is a blunder.”

I have not spoken—because there seemed no need to speak—of the way in which those marvellous romantic fictions of Sir Walter came pouring from the pen, under a cloud of mystery, and of how the great burden of his business embarrassments—due largely to the recklessness of his jolly, easy-going friends, the Ballantynes—overwhelmed him at last. Indeed, in all I have ventured to say of Scott, I have a feeling of its impertinence—as if I were telling you about your next-door neighbor: we all know that swift, brilliant, clouded career so well! But are those novels of his to live, and to delight coming generations, as they have the past? I do not know what the very latest critics may have to say; but, for my own part, I have strong belief that a century or two more will be sure to pass over before people of discernment, and large humanities, and of literary appreciation, will cease to read and to enjoy such stories as that of the Talisman of Kenilworth and of Old Mortality. I know ’tis objected, and with much reason, that he wrote hastily, carelessly—that his stories are in fact (what Carlyle called them) extemporaneous stories. Yet, if they had been written under other conditions, could we have counted upon the heat and the glow which gives them illumination?

No, no—we do not go to him for word-craft; men of shorter imaginative range, and whose judgments wait on conventional rule, must guide us in such direction, and pose as our modellers of style. Goldsmith and Swift both may train in that company. But this master we are now considering wrote so swiftly and dashed so strongly into the current of what he had to say, that he was indifferent to methods and words, except what went to engage the reader and keep him always cognizant of his purpose. But do you say that this is the best aim of all writing? Most surely it is wise for a writer to hold attention by what arts he can: failing of this, he fails of the best half of his intent; but if he gains this by simple means, by directness, by limpid language, and no more of it than the thought calls for, and by such rhythmic and beguiling use of it as tempts the reader to follow, he is a safer exemplar than one who by force of genius can accomplish his aims by loose expressions and redundance of words.