James Thomson

“ Very little of his poetry can be expected to survive our century. Burns will live with the language; but it must be remembered that his poetry is not blossom and promise; it is consummate fruition, it points to the past more than to the future; it is the genial life, the heroism, the history, the song of his whole people for ages, gathered up and sublimated in and by one supreme man. ”

“ Many years afterwards, in 1789, when Blake was thirty-two, the Songs of Innocence appeared; and we learn from them the strange fact that he who was mature in his childhood and youth became in his manhood a little child. A little child, pure in soul as the serenest light of the morning, happy and innocent as a lamb leaping in the meadows, singing all its joy in the sweetest voice with that exquisite infantine lisp which thrills the adult heart with yearning tenderness. ”

“ We English are surely a strange people. Pictures beyond price are bequeathed to us, and our first step towards disposing of them satisfactorily is to bury them away where they cannot be seen. A Song is chanted for us which should thrill and swell every native heart with patriotic pride, a Song great with the grandeur of our national life and history for three millenniums of legends and annals and journals, a Song heroic as Cressy, sublime as Trafalgar ”

“ Briefly, in almost every couplet of this poem, Blake has attempted what all profound poets and thinkers have ever most earnestly attempted; to seize a rude but striking image of some sovereign truth, and to stamp it with roughest vigour on the commonest metal for universal circulation. To such attempts we owe all the best proverbs in the world; the abounding small currency of our intellectual commerce, more invaluably essential to our ordinary daily business than nuggets of gold, than rubies, and pearls, and diamonds. ”

“ I have none of Shelley's letters by me, save those which are included in Mrs. Shelley's edition of his prose writings. But a man's letters do not always afford the best evidence concerning his opinions upon the most important questions put to us by life. In friendly letters one permits himself to give the reins to his mood, to throw off rough and ready sketches with little care as to the accurate shading, to be capricious and paradoxical,—in short, to speak not as one who is delivering testimony on oath. ”

“ Whose marshalled myriads through its silence roll
With life and light and music; while the years,
Heavy with anguish, blind with blood and tears,
Pant after them, exhausted one by one
Till the last heir of Time shall sink foredone.
Upon his central field of burning gold
Great Raphael stood; and there with meek head bowed
And drooping wings and suppliant hands, behold,
The Seraph knelt, whom still the sullen cloud
Of mortal life enveloped like a shroud,
Through which his native glorious beauty shone
Star-sad, star-pure, star-tremulous, star-wan. ”

“ Now, I do not expect that Shelley—any more than piety and lofty thought and heroic action—will ever be extensively popular; I admit that to himself more than to most poets are his own grand words applicable,—"the jury that sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanneled by time from the selectest of the wise of many generations." ”

“ The rushing of the storm's stern harmony,
The subtlest whispers of the summer breeze,
The notes of singing birds, the hum of bees,
All sounds of nature, sweet and wild and strong
Commingled in the flowing of the song;
Which flowing mirrored all the Universe,—
With sunsets flushing down the golden lines,
And mountains towering in the lofty verse,
And landscapes with their olives and their vines
Spread out beneath a sun which ever shines,
With moonlit seas and pure star-spangled skies,
The World a Poem, and Earth Paradise. ”

“ Nevertheless, believing that the essence of poetry and philosophy is communication with the Infinite and the Eternal, I venture to conclude that to be strongly inclined to such communication is to be gifted with the first requisite for a poet and a philosopher. The valiant heart may prove victorious without the strong arm, but the strong arm without the valiant heart must be beaten ignominiously for ever. ”

“ Indeed, I doubt whether it would be an exaggeration to assert that, for a very large majority of those who are accounted educated and intelligent people, poetry in itself is essentially an unknown tongue. They admire and remember a verse or a passage for its wit, its cleverness, its wisdom, its clear and brief statement of some fact, its sentiment, its applicability to some circumstance of their own life, its mention of some classic name, its allusion to some historical event ”

“ And there, amidst the wheeling constellations,
Upon the central disc of burning gold
That throbbed harmonious with their palpitations,
He stood with Raphael glorious to behold. . . . .
Then all the Vision from my brain was rolled;
For that broad disc of palpitating fire,
Consuming far through heaven the dead night's pyre,
And bridging the deep bay with golden splendour,
Was our own Sun . . . The sky was clear and calm,
The morning air most fragrant, fresh and tender ”

“ These young Greeks could not live to old age. The gloom and chill of our English clime, physical and moral and intellectual, could not but be fatal to these children of the sun. England and France are so proudly in the van of civilisation that it is impossible for a great poet to live greatly to old age in either of them. ”

“ As Scott was the poet of the past, and Goethe of the present, so was Shelley of the future; the thought of whose developed triumphs always kindles him into rapture. However dissident, we cannot but reverence so sublime and unselfish an enthusiasm: perchance, were we more like him in goodness, we would be more like him in faith. Expand the stage from our earth to the universe, the time from one life to an infinite succession of lives, let the dramatis personæ be not men only but all living souls ”

“ SHELLEY.
"WHEREFORE I say unto you, all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh a word against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him; neither in this world, neither in the world to come." Which glorious scripture we may surely understand to mean, that a man may believe or disbelieve in any book, any historical or legendary personage, any dogmatic formula, and yet be in a state of salvation ”

“ The experience is that of a sensitive and thoughtful boy, troubled by the first perceptions of evil where he has believed all good, thinking the whole world cruel and false since some playmate-friend has turned unkind, seeing life all desolate and blank since some coveted object has disappointed in the possession; in short, through very lack of experience, generalising one untoward event into a theory of life that seems more bitterly hopeless than grey-haired cynical pessimism. ”

“ Feeling not at all contented with such treatment of Shelley and yourself, I was anxious to show that your too off-hand critic was nevertheless a genuine lover of the poet to whom you have devoted so much worthy labour, and a serious student of poetry. To clear up your doubt permit me to state that no living writer can have much less reputation than myself, who am simply known to some readers of the National Reformer as B. V. the author of many pieces and scraps in prose and verse which have appeared in that periodical during the last seven years or so. ”

“ Yet assuredly there are still men in England with an infallible sense for poetry, however disguised and however far removed from ordinary associations; men who know Shakespeare in despite of the commentators, and understand Browning in contempt of the critics, and laugh quietly at the current censures and raptures of the Reviews: and these men would scarcely consider it a waste of time to search into the meaning of the darkest oracles of William Blake. ”

“ It is Titanic, and it cleaves to its Mother Earth like a Titan, like a mountain, like a broad oak-tree; and the grandeur of its strength is the grandeur of a gnarled oak whose vigorous life bursts through all conventional symmetries, the grandeur of a mountain which the central fires have heaved into lines enormous and savagely irregular. ”

“ This great truth has been enounced or implied by all true philosophers; though sadly abused by uninspired poetasters, and as obviously obnoxious as the Berkeleyan Idealism to stupid and unavailing sneers. Shelley himself, in that "Defence of Poetry" which is one of the most beautiful prose-pieces in the language, and which in serene elevation of tone, and expanse and subtlety of thought is worthy of Plato or Emerson, repeatedly and throughout insists upon it as the essential law of poetic creation.
The only true, or inspired poetry, is always from within, not from without. ”

“ Year by year even now some person may die, some document perish, from whom or which a precious ray of light might have been cast on some obscure point in the life or works of our Poet; and moreover, year by year the literary atmosphere is becoming in many important respects more and more unlike that which he inhaled and exhaled. ”

“ The essence of this poetry is mysticism, and the essence of this mysticism is simplicity. The two meanings in which this last word is commonly used—the one reverential, the other kindly contemptuous—are severally appropriate to the most wise and the least wise manifestations of this spirit of mysticism. It sees, and is continually rapturous with seeing, everywhere correspondence, kindred, identity, not only in the things and creatures of earth, but in all things and creatures and beings of hell and earth and heaven, up to the one father (or interiorly to the one soul) of all. ”

“ Kneeling wert circled with the martyr's crown.
"Music is sweet, whatever madmen's ears
Be startled and tormented by the strain;
Sunshine is glorious, whatever spheres
Cloud themselves from it in dark storm and rain:
Your spirit is as pure from worldly stain
As is a moonbeam on a shore of slime;
You sank not your Eternity in Time.
"O wretched Earth! God sends thee age by age,
In pity of thy wild perpetual moan,
The saint, the bard, the hero, and the sage:
But still the lofty life is led alone,
The singer sings as in a tongue unknown,
The sage's wisdom lamps his single urn ”

“ Like Swedenborg, he always relates things heard and seen; more purely a mystic than Swedenborg, he does not condescend to dialectics and scholastic divinity. Those who fancy that a dozen stony syllogisms seal up the perennial fountain of our deepest questionings, will affirm that Blake's belief was an illusion. But an illusion constant and self-consistent and harmonious with the world throughout the whole of man's life, wherein does this differ from a reality? ”

“ Poor man, on the contrary, with soul, and reason, and virtue, and all sorts of fine pretences, is very weak and much given to roguery; with all the cardinal virtues to help him, he is quite overruled in the conclave by the more numerous and strong-willed and cardinal vices. Our palace is so grand and we are such pigmies: let us fall down and worship this brave palace, though merely built for us to dwell in as kings! ”

“ Through all the lustrum till the chained Chief died
That glorious Voice the air beatified.
A voice of right amidst a world gone wrong,
A voice of hope amidst a world's despair,
A voice instinct with such melodious song
As hardly until then had thrilled the air
Of this gross underworld wherein we fare
With heavenly inspirations, too divine
For souls besotted with earth's sensual wine. ”

“ Blake was always poor in world's wealth, always rich in spiritual wealth, happy and contented and assured, living with God. As to his soul's salvation, I do not believe that he ever gave it a thought; any more than a child thinks of the question whether its loving parents will continue to feed and clothe and cherish it. ”

“ Ten small apples may be worth more than one large; but not any number of small thoughts can equal one great: ten weak arms may be stronger than one stalwart; but what number of weak minds can equal one that is powerful?
(III.) What moral emotion, pure or impure, noble or mean, generous or selfish, does Shelley effuse through his works? The question has been partly answered already; for in a poet, whose theme is concrete with man and abstract with destiny, the spirit refuses to be analysed into thought and passion, being the identity of the two. ”

“ Idaho, which its boldly prophetic inhabitants call the Saratoga of the West, and which is just now full of visitors, lies comfortably at large on the level floor of a broad and long valley. The houses are of wood, shingle-roofed, most of them neat, many of them pretty. The hills around rise to the height of a thousand feet; and as little mining has been attempted on them, they are delightfully green, and their timber has not been felled. ”

“ But when we have allowed that a man is pre-eminently a singer, the question naturally follows, what is the matter of his song? Does his royal robe of verse envelop a real king of men, or one who is intrinsically a slave? ”