Thomas Tod Stoddart

“ To love the world and its wild laughter too,
As he had known before; and wish'd again
To join the very mirth he hated then!
He durst not break the vow—he durst not be
The one he would—and his heart's harmony
Became a tide of sorrow. Even so,
He felt hope die,—in madness and in woe!
But there came one—and a most lovely one
[26] As ever to the warm light of the sun
Threw back her tresses,—a fair sister girl,
With a brow changing between snow and pearl,
And the blue eyes of sadness, fill'd with dew
Of tears,—like Heaven's own melancholy blue,—
So beautiful, so tender ”

“ Sorrow and mirthful Lunacy! that be
Together link'd for time, I deem of ye
That ye are worshipp'd as none others are,—
One as a lonely shadow, one a star!
Is Julio glad, that bendeth, even now,
To his wild purpose, to his holy vow?
He seeth only in his ladye-bride
The image of the laughing girl, that died
[92] A moon before—The same, the very same—
The Agathè that lisp'd her lover's name,
To him and to her heart: that azure eye,
That shone through sunny tresses, waving by;
The brow, the cheek, that blush'd of fire and snow,
Both blending into one ethereal glow ”

“ With health, that, like a crimson flower, lies blushing in the snow;
And thy tresses falling over, like the amber on the pearl—
Oh! true it is a lightsome thing, to love thee living, girl!
But when the brow is blighted, like a star of morning tide,
And faded is the crimson blush upon the cheek beside;
It is to love, as seldom love, the brightest and the best,
When our love lies like a dew upon the one that is at rest. ”

“ A snow-crown rising on their brows, in royalty they stood,
As if they vice-reign'd on a throne of winter solitude;
Those hills that rose far upward, till in majesty they bent
Their world's great eye-orb on her own immortal lineament!
[119]
The howl, the long deep howl was heard, the rushing like a wave
Of the wolf train from their forest haunt, in some old mountain cave;
Like a sea-wave, when the wind is horsed behind its foamy crest,
And it lifts upon the shell-built shore, its azure-spotted breast. ”

“ And from the sand he took a silver shell,
[43] That had been wasted by the fall and swell
Of many a moon-borne tide into a ring—
A rude, rude ring; it was a snow-white thing,
Where a lone hermit limpet slept and died,
In ages far away. "Thou art a bride,
Sweet Agathè! Wake up; we must not linger." ”

“ Stoddart than the breeze on the loch that stirs the trout to feed. Perhaps his life was none the less happy and fortunate. Of the many brilliant men whom he knew intimately—Wilson, Aytoun, Ferrier, Glassford Bell, and others—perhaps none, not even Hogg, recognised the grace of the Muse which (in my poor opinion) Mr. Stoddart possessed. His character was not in the least degree soured by neglect or fretted by banter. Not to over-estimate oneself is a virtue very rare among poets, and certainly does not lead to public triumphs. ”

“ The warrior world was lifting to the bent
Of his eternal brow magnificent,
The fiery moon, that in her blazonry
Shone eastward, like a shield. The throbbing sea
Felt fever on his azure arteries,
That shadow'd them with crimson, while the breeze
Fell faster on the solitary sail. ”

“ The lonely sea, to hear the silver tide
Rolling in gleesome music to the shore:
The more he heard, he loved to hear the more.
And there he is, his hoary beard adrift
To the night winds, that sportingly do lift
Its snow-white tresses; and he leaneth on
A rugged staff, all weakly and alone,
A childless, friendless man! ”

“ Her pearly brow grew pale:
It felt the sinful fire,
And from her queenly tiar
She drew the veil.
The sun-wing'd steeds her sacred car
Wheel'd to her throne of star.
[110]
TO A SPIRIT
Spirit! in deathless halo zoned,
A chain of stars with wings of diamond,—
Is music blended into thee
With holy light and immortality?
For, as thy shape of glory swept
Through seas of darkness, magic breathings fell
Around it, like the notes that slept
In the wild caverns of a silver shell.
Thou camest, as a lightning spring
Through chasms of horrid cloud, on scathless wing ”

“ Of gentle hills. I would not fling a wreath
Of jewels on that brow, to flash beneath
Those queenly tresses; for itself is more
Than sea-born pearl of some Elysian shore!
Such, with a heart like woman! I would cast
Life at her foot, and, as she glided past,
[115] Would bid her trample on the slavish thing—
Tell her, I'd rather feel me withering
Under her step, than be unknown for aye:
And, when her pride had crush'd me, she might see
A love-wing'd spirit glide in glory by
Striking the tent of its mortality!
[116]
TO A STORM-STAID BIRD
Trembler! ”

“ Between 1830 and 1840 he wrote a few beautiful angling songs, and then all the poetry of his character merged itself in an ardent love of Nature: of hill, loch and stream—above all, of Tweed, the fairest of waters, which he lived to see a sink of pollution. After 1831 we have no more romanticism from Mr. Stoddart. ”

“ In the golden haze of morn!
My heart was just as thou, as light—
As loving of the breeze,
That kiss'd thee in its elfin flight,
Through the green acacia trees.
And now the winter snow-flakes lie
All on thy widow'd wing;
Trembler! methinks I hear thee sigh
For the silver days of spring.
[117]
But shake thy plume—the world is free
Before thee—warbler, fly!
Blest by a sunbeam and by me,
Bird of my heart! good-bye!
[118]
THE WOLF-DROVE
No night-star in the welkin blue! ”

“ A sympathetic reader of The Death-Wake would perhaps have expected the leprosies and lunacies to drop off, and the genius, purged of its accidents, to move into a pure transparency. The abnormal, the monstrous, the boyish elements should have been burned away in the fire of the genius of poetry. ”

“ Of some dark secret shadowing his breast.
And yet, to see him, with his silver hair
Adrift and floating in the sea-borne air,
[99] And features chasten'd in the tears of woe,
In sooth 'twas merely sad to see him so!
A wreck of nature, floating far and fast,
Upon the stream of Time—to sink at last!
And he is wandering by the shore again,
Hard leaning on his staff; the azure main
Lies sleeping far before him, with his seas
Fast folded in the bosom of the breeze,
That like the angel Peace hath dropt his wings
Around the warring waters. ”

“ Their accents are fresh and strange, their imaginations dwell in untrodden regions. Untouched by the French romantic poets, they yet unconsciously reply to their notes, as if some influence in the mental air were at work on both sides of the Channel, on both sides of the Atlantic. ”

“ Stoddart passed in Hogg's company on Yarrow, and early in 1831 he published The Death-Wake. There is no trace of James Hogg in the poem, which, to my mind, is perfectly original. Wilson places it "between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of Barry Cornwall." It is really nothing but a breath of the spirit of romance, touching an instrument not wholly out of tune, but never to be touched again.
It is unnecessary to follow Mr. Stoddart through a long and happy life of angling and of literary leisure. He only blossomed once. ”

“ His mood is that of Scott when Scott was young, and was so anxious to possess a death's head and cross-bones. The malady is "most incident" to youth, but Mr. Stoddart wears his rue with a difference. The mad monkish lover of the dead nun Agathé has hit on precisely the sort of fantasy which was about to inspire Théophile Gautier's Comédie de la Mort, or the later author of Gaspard de la Nuit, or Edgar Poe. There is here no "criticism of life;" ”

“ Modesty [16] is apt to accompany the sense of humour which alleviates life, while it is an almost insuperable bar to success.
Mr. Stoddart died on November 22nd, 1880. His last walk was to Kelso Bridge "to look at the Tweed," which now murmurs by his grave the self-same song that it sings beside Sir Walter's tomb in Dryburgh Abbey. We leave his poem to the judgment of students of poetry, and to him we say his own farewell ”

“ These are wonderful verses for a lad of twenty-one, living among anglers, [14] undergraduates, and, if with some society of the lettered, apparently with none which could appreciate or applaud him.
For the matter of the poem, the wild voyage of the mad monkish lover with the dead Bride of Heaven, it strikes, of course, on the common reef of the Romantic—the ridiculous. But the recurring contrasts of a pure, clear peace in sea and sky, are of rare and atoning beauty. ”

“ Now the official poetry of our country was untouched by and ignorant of the virtues and excesses of 1830. Wordsworth's bolt was practically shot; Sir Walter was ending his glorious career; Shelley and Byron and Keats were dead, and the annus mirabilis of Coleridge was long gone by. Three young poets of the English-speaking race were producing their volumes, destined at first to temporary neglect. The year 1830 was the year of Mr. Tennyson's Poems, chiefly Lyrical, his first book, not counting Poems by Two Brothers. It was also the year of Mr. Browning's Pauline (rarer even than The Death-Wake) ”

“ Ruskin says about Coleridge, but, in its bizarre way, it may be beautiful.
The author, by a curious analogy with Théophile Gautier, was, in these days, a [7] humourist as well as a poet. In the midst of his mad fancies and rare melodies he is laughing at himself, as Théophile mocked at Les Jeunes France. The psychological position is, therefore, one of the rarest. Mr. Stoddart was, first of all and before all, a hardy and enthusiastic angler. ”

“ The Death-Wake is the work of a lad who certainly had read Keats, Coleridge and Shelley, but who is no imitator of these great poets. He has, in a few passages, and at his best, an accent original, distinct, strangely musical, and really replete with promise. He has a fresh unborrowed melody and mastery of words, the first indispensable sign of a true poet. His rhymed heroic verse is no more the rhymed heroic verse of [6] Endymion, than it is that of Mr. ”

“ As a schoolboy, Mr. Stoddart was always rhyming of goblin, ghost, fairy, and all Sir Walter's themes. At Edinburgh University he was a pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson) , who pooh-poohed The Death-Wake in Blackwood. He also knew Aytoun, Professor Ferrier, De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, and Hogg, and was one of the first guests of Tibbie Sheils, on the spit of land between St. Mary's and the Loch of the Lowes. In verses of this period (1827) [11] Miss Stoddart detects traces of Keats and Byron, but the lines quoted are much better in technique than Byron usually wrote. ”

“ Valentine's Day 1810, in Argyll Square, Edinburgh, nearly on the site of the Kirk of Field, where Darnley was murdered. He came of an old Border family. Miss Stoddart tells a painful tale of an aged Miss Helen who burned family papers because she [9] thought she was bewitched by the seals and decorated initials. Similar follies are reported of a living old lady, on whose hearth, after a night of destruction, was once found the impression of a seal of Mary of Modena. ”

“ Beyond 1500 the family memories rely on tradition. The ancestors owned lands in the Forest of Ettrick, and Williamhope, on the Tweed hard by Ashestiel. On the Glenkinnon burn, celebrated by Scott, they hid the prophets of the Covenant "by fifties in a cave." One Williamhope is said to have been out at Drumclog, or, perhaps, Bothwell Brig. This laird, of enormous strength, was called the Beetle of Yarrow, and was a friend of Murray of Philiphaugh. His son, in the Fifteen, was out on the Hanoverian side, which was not in favour with the author of The Death-Wake. ”

“ The Muse, which was undeniably with him for an hour, abandoned him, or he deserted her, being content to whip the waters of Tweed, and Meggat, and Yarrow. Perhaps unfavourable and unappreciative criticism, acting on a healthy and contented nature, drove him back into the common paths of men. Whatever the cause, the Death-Wake alone (save for a few angling songs) remains to give assurance of a poet "who died young." It is needless to rewrite the biography, excellently done, in Angling Songs, by Miss Stoddart, the poet's daughter (Blackwoods, Edinburgh, 1889) . Mr. Stoddart was born on St. ”

“ Like Scott, within the sound of Tweed.
A. L.
[3]
INTRODUCTION
The extreme rarity of The Death-Wake is a reason for its republication, which may or may not be approved of by collectors. Of the original edition the Author says that more than seventy copies were sold in the first week of publication, but thereafter the publisher failed in business. Mr. Stoddart recovered the sheets of his poem, and his cook gradually, and perhaps not injudiciously, expended them for domestic purposes.
Apart from its rarity, The Death-Wake has an interest of its own for curious amateurs of poetry. ”