Various

“ The poet glances past this important figure with a calm eye and a far-shining smile. His vocation is beyond and beyond the range of all the sciences. The heart and soul that were in the first home, ere ever even spade and distaff were invented, when two forlorn hopeful creatures, wistfully looking back to the sunset of Eden, wistfully looking forward to the solemn nightfall of the drear world without, with all its starry promises of another morning and a higher heaven, were all the human race—are world and scope enough for the humanest and most divine of arts. ”

“ The petulant passion of a child, the heroisms and exultations and agonies of that fantastical sweet youth, over whose unconscious mockery of our real conflict we graver people smile and weep, are of more import to the poet than all the secrets of the earth, and all the wonders of the sky; and he turns—it is his vocation—from the discovery of a planet, forgetting all about it, to make the whole world ring with joy over a cottage cradle, or weigh down the very wings of the winds with wailing over some uncommemorated grave. ”

“ We have strayed by mistake into a delicate manufactory—an atelier of the beaux arts—and even while we look at the workmen and admire the exquisite manipulation of the precious toys before us, our minds stray away out of doors with a sigh of weariness to the labours of this fighting world of ours and the storms of our own life. There is no charm here to hold us, none to cheat us into a momentary forgetfulness of either our languors or our labours. If it is all poetry, it has lost the first heritage and birthright of the Muse: it speaks to the ear—it does not speak to the heart. ”

“ Education, refinement, taste, and talent, are great things in their way, and men do wonders with them; but we have not fallen yet upon a successful method of bringing down the divine spark into the marble, let us work it ever so curiously. The celestial gift in these new times, as in the old, comes down with divine impartiality, yet seldom into the tenement most specially built and garnished for its reception. We can make critics, connoisseurs, “an enlightened audience,” but, let us labour at it as we will, we cannot make a poet. ”

“ His sorrow is as much of the mind as of the heart; he weeps a companion beloved, yet almost more honoured and esteemed than beloved—a friend, not even a brother, still less a child or a wife;—enough of the primitive passion to claim sympathy from all of us, but not so much that our sympathy loses itself in a woe beyond consolation. Pure friendship is seldom so impassioned; but had it been a commoner tie—a relationship more usual—these gradual revelations of grief in all its successive phases must have been too much at once for the poet and his audience. ”

“ The common conception of a poet, the lofty, narrow, dreamy soul, made higher and more abstract still by the glittering crown of light upon his crested forehead, is entirely extinguished in the broad flood of sunshine wherein stands this Shakespeare, a common man, sublimed and radiant in a very deluge and overflow of genial power. Whether it be true or not that these same marvellous gifts of his would have made as great a statesman or as great a philosopher as they made a poet, it does not lie in our way to discover ”

“ They are Holy Writ, inspired and sacred; yet they are human songs, the lyrics of a struggling and kingly existence—the overflow of the grand primal human emotions to which every living heart resounds. His “heart moved him,” his “soul was stirred within him”—true poet-heart—true soul of inspiration! and not what other men might endure, glassed in the mirror of his own profound poetic spirit, a study of mankind; but of what himself was bearing there and at that moment, the royal singer made his outcry, suddenly, and “in his haste,” to God. ”

“ There is still abundance of life in the streets, but life in unison with the history of the place; and suddenly whirled as one is by the express train from the turmoil of London to the repose of Oxford, with its lines of venerable colleges, and troops of sombre but graceful gowned figures, one experiences a feeling as of having been transported in a trance on the carpet of the Arabian Nights from one place to another. ”

“ But whilst beauty and sublimity still exist as elements of the physical cosmos, and heart and soul of the moral; whilst we know the glorious thoughts and glorious deeds which the study and culture of them has produced through all time, we cannot but think that they will still be, as ever, chief agencies in this great world of ours; we cannot but think that the beautiful and sublime, reflected on heart and soul, should now, as ever, radiate in the warm impulses, pure worship, and warm imaginings of youth, and beam round age in the sunset hues of a summer day. ”

“ Shall there be no gorgeous sunsets, no calm splendour of declining day? Is life to toil and sit henceforth under summer heat, and abide ever in the blaze and glare of noonday, rising only in the glimmer of infancy, and setting in the cold gleam of twilight? Shall the bounding step, the joyous laugh, the free heart, generous thought, and intuitive heroism, be no longer the attributes of our youth? Have these no uses? Do they cast no bright lights on a land, raise no pleasant echoes? Have they no genial influences, no glad inspirations for the working world? ”

“ I need not draw on my imagination for illustrations, especially before an audience which numbers so many men whose painful duty as jurymen it is to sit every sessions, with myself, engaged in the administration of justice. You have seen how often, in a moment of voluntary madness occasioned by drink, a life’s character has been sacrificed, the brand of felon impressed on the brow, and free labour exchanged for that which is profitless, compulsory, and ignominious to the workman, within the walls of your prison! ”

“ He is a poet—everywhere, and in all places, it is the destiny of this unfortunate to reverence himself, to contemplate himself, to expound and study the growth of a poet’s mind, the impulses of a poet’s affections; he is not to be permitted to be unconscious of the sweet stirrings within him of the unspoken song; he is not to be allowed to believe with that sweetest simplicity of genius that every other youthful eye beholds “the light that never was on sea or land,” as well as his own. Unhappy genius! ill-fated poet! ”

“ Yes, that great poetic rebel, Wordsworth, has heavier sins upon his head than Betty Foy and Alice Fell; it is to him we owe it, that the poet in these days is to be regarded as a delicate monster, a creature who lives not life but poetry, a being withdrawn out of the common existence, and seeing its events only in the magic mirror of his own consciousness, as the Lady of Shallott saw the boats upon the river, and the city towers burning in the sun. ”

“ He can descend to us in our working-day cares, but it is not to be expected that many of us can ascend to him in that sublime retirement of his among the visions and the shadows. To take Balder, for instance: marvellously few of us, even at our vainest, think either kings or gods of ourselves; ordinary human nature, spite of its prides and pretensions, is seldom without a consciousness at its heart of its own littleness and poverty; and when we hear a man declaring his sublime superiority, we are puzzled, and pause, and smile, and try to make it out a burlesque or an irony. ”

“ This is what the fast young men of London call brilliant writing. All this meaningless clatter of words, to produce which requires little more skill than to clash the cymbals in the orchestra, there are crowds of young fellows about the theatres who would give a great deal if they had the brains to emulate. It is out of such slender materials that Robson works up his effects, making the glitter pass for gold, the trash for truth, the bad grammar for good sense, and the abortive pun for pointed wit. Give us good puns by all means, if there is nothing better to be had, and we shall laugh at them ”

“ Utilitarianism has waged the war of extermination most ruthlessly against these spots, and the gorse brakes which shone in golden patches betwixt the fallow and grass lands. There are few left now. The fields are spread before us, smooth and bare, and the corn waves on the ground, erewhile cumbered by old trees and brushwood, which were of no use, save to grow berries, give a covert to birds, rabbits, and vermin, and to offer the eye a pleasant spot to rest upon in the landscape. Away with such uselessness! The world is not large enough for such waste. ”

“ Is it not right, therefore, that our youth should not be fed on nursery tales, prurient fancies, fiction, poetry, and high-flown sentiment, but be early imbued with the solid facts, the useful knowledge, the rules of science, and the power of calculation, which will fit it to play its part well and ably in the great battle of utility? And why should old age rest, sink into placid inaction? ”

“ Spite of railroad and factory, there will still be beauty enow in our land—enow for poet and painter. It will not lie so much in our daily paths; it will not be such a constant presence to worker and wayfarer; but it will still be found by its worshippers. Even utilitarianism cannot nullify nature or denude the world of its Edens. Still must the corn wave, the grasses grow, the trees bud. Still will the “stately homes of England” stand beautiful “amid their tall ancestral trees through all the pleasant land,”—the cottage homes peep from their coverts. ”

“ For what do men most love to look into the past? To seek the useful, or the heroic and the beautiful? Do they pore over musty tomes, and delve into buried cities, that they may discover the secret of Tyrian dye and Etruscan pottery, the system of Phœnician commerce and the sources of Egyptian wealth; or that their hearts may burn with the heroism of Marathon or swell with the glories of Alexander, and that the thrilling words of Pindar, the noble thoughts of Sophocles, the beautiful legends of Grecian mythology, the grand truths of Grecian history, may be their own? ”

“ There is no doubt that pieces of antique coin have been frequently carried in the purse or in the pocket as a sort of charm or amulet; but we question whether this notion of their supernatural power has any connection with the supposed sanctity of the legends or symbols with which they are impressed. We should ascribe it rather to the same feeling which induces some old women, and young ones too, to carry a crooked sixpence in their purse—the charm being supposed to reside, not in any device or legend of the coin, but simply in its curvilinear shape. ”

“ The idea of death as annihilation never enters into the fairy tales; all is immortal: murder is but the plucking of a flower that will grow again; the massacre of a village is only a series of dissolving views.
The Olympic is the only theatre without a harlequinade attached to its fairy tale. For tricks of clown and pantaloon one naturally travels to Covent Garden and the adjacent theatres. Who shall describe all the nonsense and merriment that passes current in these temples of the Muse? Puns, puns, nothing but puns—and such rough practical joking as the youth of England delights in! ”

“ It is this perpetual returning, suddenly, involuntarily, and almost unawares, to the closest emotions of the human life, which distinguishes among his fellows the true poet. It is the charm of his art that he startles us in an instant, and when we least expected it, out of mere admiration into tears; but such an effect unfortunately can never be produced by customs, or improvements, or social reforms. The greatest powers of the external world are as inadequate to this as are the vanities of a village; and even a combination of both is a fruitless expedient. ”

“ One after another they come gleaming through the long reverie of grief—one after another, noting well their inconsistencies, their leaps from day to night, from earth to heaven, the poet has set them down. He knows that we think of the lost, in the same instant, as slumbering under the sod and as awaking above the sky; he knows that we realise them here and there, as living and yet as dead ”

“ Very different from our heavy-handed troubles, rough troopers in God’s army of afflictions, are the spectre shapes of this poetic world. True, their happiness is rapture, their misery of the wildest, their remorse the most refined; but the daylight shines through and through these ghostly people, and leaves nothing of them but bits of cloud. Alas, the preaching is vain and without profit! What can the poet do—when he is tired of his Mystic, sick of his Balder, weary of Assyrian bulls and lords with rabbit-mouths? ”

“ It thus appears that even in poetry the early period is remarkable for its realism. The poets do not begin with sublimated fancies in the highest heaven of invention. The ascent of Mont Blanc is quite a modern feat. All that old Provençal minstrelsy—sirvente and chanson—murmurs at the foot of the Alps. And if this be true of poetry, it is much more true of the imitative arts—the drama, painting, and sculpture. If sculpture perished in the realism of Roman portraiture, it began with the realism of Egyptian mummy—inglorious attempt to preserve the real thing. The same law holds in painting. ”

“ On the whole, it appears to me that the function of education, comprising theology, philosophy, science, and belles lettres, is to impress upon the mind images of Beauty and Truth, and to enable the mind which has received these impressions to act in like manner through life. If education cannot make a man’s actions truthful and beautiful, he remains to the end a savage, or rather, I should say, the scion of a vulgar civilisation, even if he knows all the poets by heart, or can discourse with the acumen of an Erasmus or a Crichton. ”

“ Men are now only beginning to live. In former times they merely dosed or daundered, trifled or philandered, brawled or rioted, dreamed or philosophised through life, wasting its golden sands in writing love-songs, and calling that—poetry; in fighting great battles, and calling that—heroism, chivalry; in sitting by the midnight lamp, gathering knowledge, which in after years might ripen into wisdom, and calling that—study; in sitting by hearth or board, quaffing from the wine-cup, drinking toasts, telling old stories, singing old songs, and calling that—conviviality, good-fellowship ”

“ As Hercules could do nothing in wrestling against the giant Antæus, the son of the Earth, as long as he persisted in throwing him, seeing that whenever he fell in his mother’s lap he gained new strength, so is it with myself; the world never throws me,—I never am cast down by circumstances, but a thrill from the warm bosom of Alma Mater, as powerful but more enduring than galvanism, inspires me with a new life, and I rise with fresh courage and fresh heart to the wrestling-match of life. ”