Edmund William Gosse

“ Wennerberg was a most remarkable type of the lyrical, ardent Swedish aristocrat, full of the joy of life and the beauty of it. In the long roll of his eighty-four years there was scarcely a crumpled rose-leaf. His poems, to which their musical accompaniment is almost essential, have not ceased, in half a century, to be universally pleasing to Swedish ears; outside Sweden it would be difficult to make their peculiarly local charm intelligible. ”

“ The first impression of an unbiassed reader who dips into the poems of Donne is unfavourable. He is repulsed by the intolerably harsh and crabbed versification, by the recondite choice of theme and expression, and by the oddity of the thought. In time, however, he perceives that behind the fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, an imagination that harbours fire within its cloudy folds, and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. ”

“ The mixture of such opposite elements as the wild genius of Wergeland and the cold critical judgment of Welhaven would seem to have formed a singularly happy basis for the writers of the next generation to build a literature upon. The now-living poets of Norway may hold their own without fear of too severe a rivalry, not merely with those of Denmark and Sweden, whom they easily excel, but with those of the great powers. ”

“ We come into clearer air when we cross the Aegean and reach the Athenian historians: Thucydides, whose priceless story of the Peloponnesian War has most fortunately come down to us; and Xenophon, who continued that chronicle in the spirit and under the influence of Thucydides, and who carried Greek prose to a great height of easy distinction. But it is with the practice of philosophy that prose in ancient Greece rises to its acme of ingenuity, flexibility and variety, proving itself a vehicle for the finest human thought such as no later ingenuity of language has contrived to excel. ”

“ The charm and solemn beauty of the style, however, are irresistible, and we are constrained to listen and revere as if we were the auditors of some fugual music devised in honour of a primal and long-buried deity. The melodies of this earliest Icelandic verse, elaborate in their extreme and severe simplicity, are wholly rhythmical and alliterative, and return upon themselves like a solemn incantation. Hávamál, the Sayings of the High One, or Odin, follows next; this contains proverbs and wise saws, and a series of stories, some of them comical, told by Odin against himself. ”

“ The poetry of Cowley rapidly fell into a neglect as unjust as the earlier popularity had been. As a prose writer, especially as an essayist, he holds, and will not lose, a high position in literature; as a poet it is hardly possible that he can enjoy more than a very partial revival. The want of nature, the obvious and awkward art, the defective melody of his poems, destroy the interest that their ingenuity and occasional majesty would otherwise excite. ”

“ It has always been a favourite with those writers who have something to censure or to impart, but who love to stand outside the pulpit, and to encourage others to pursue a train of thought which the author does not seem to do more than indicate. The dialogue is so spontaneous a mode of expressing and noting down the undulations of human thought that it almost escapes analysis. ”

“ No English poet so great as Collins has left behind him so small a bulk of writings. Not more than 1500 lines of his have been handed down to us, but among these not one is slovenly, and few are poor. His odes are the most sculpturesque and faultless in the language. They lack fire, but in charm and precision of diction, exquisite propriety of form, and lofty poetic suggestion they stand unrivalled. The ode named The Passions is the most popular; that To Evening is the classical example of perfect unrhymed verse. ”

“ As a pastoral lyrist Herrick stands first among English poets. His genius is limited in scope, and comparatively unambitious, but in its own field it is unrivalled. His tiny poems—and of the thirteen hundred that he has left behind him not one is long—are like jewels of various value, heaped together in a casket. ”

“ In the purity and solidity of her finest lyrics, the glow and music in which she robes her moods of melancholy reverie, her extraordinary mixture of austerity with sweetness and of sanctity of tone with sensuousness of colour, Christina Rossetti, in her best pieces, may challenge comparison with the most admirable of our poets. The union of fixed religious faith with a hold upon physical beauty and the richer parts of nature has been pointed to as the most original feature of her poetry. Hers was a cloistered spirit, timid, nun-like, bowed down by suffering and humility ”

“ In other words, the landscape, or architecture, or still life, or whatever may be the object of the poet’s attention, is not used as an accessory, but is itself the centre of interest. It is, in this sense, not correct to call poetry in which description is only the occasional ornament of a poem, and not its central subject, descriptive poetry. The landscape or still life must fill the canvas, or, if human interest is introduced, that must be treated as an accessory. ”

“ It is easier to exclude the dramatic species from lyric than to banish the epic. There are large sections of drama which it is inconceivable should be set to music, or sung, or even given in recitative. The tragedies of Racine, for example, are composed of the purest poetry, but they are essentially non-lyrical, although lyrical portions are here and there attached to them. The intensity of feeling and the melody of verse in Othello does not make that work an example of lyrical poetry, and this is even more acutely true of Le Misanthrope, which is, nevertheless, a poem. ”

“ He respected nothing, he left no institution untouched. Now that it is possible to look back upon Multatuli without passion, we see in him, not what Dutch enthusiasm saw,—“the second writer of Europe in the nineteenth century” (Victor Hugo being presumably the first) ,—but a great man who was a powerful and glowing author, yet hardly an artist, a reckless enthusiast, who was inspired by indignation and a burning sense of justice, who cared little for his means if only he could produce his effect. ”

“ No one knows better than he how to present a gay young gentleman, a Dorimant, “an unconfinable rover after amorous adventures.” His genius is as light as thistle-down; he is frivolous, without force of conviction, without principle; but his wit is very sparkling, and his style pure and singularly picturesque. No one approaches Etheredge in delicate touches of dress, furniture and scene; he makes the fine airs of London gentlemen and ladies live before our eyes even more vividly than Congreve does ”

“ The distance between the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge and that of Byron and Shelley is not less—it is even probably greater—than that which divides Keats from Tennyson, and he is more the last of that great school than the first of any new one. The qualities in which he seems to surpass his immediate predecessors are exactly those which should be the gift of one who sums up the labours of a mighty line of artists. He is remarkable among them for the breadth, the richness, the substantial accomplishment of his touch ”

“ No one did more to free English literature from the shackles of formalism; no one, among his contemporaries, pursued the poetic calling with so sincere and resplendent an allegiance to the claims of absolute and unadulterated poetry. Some English poets have turned preachers; others have been seduced by the attractions of philosophy; but Swinburne always remained an artist absorbed in a lyrical ecstasy, a singer and not a seer. When the history of Victorian poetry comes to be written, it will be found that his personality was, in its due perspective, among the most potent of his time ”

“ For fifty years, and these the most glorious in the annals of Holland, these two streams of influence, one towards beauty and melody, the other towards lively comedy, ran side by side, often in the same channel, and producing a rich harvest of great works. It was in the house of the daughters of Roemer Visscher that the tragedies of Vondel and the comedies of Bredero, the farces of Coster and the odes of Huygens, alike found their first admirers and their best critics. ”