William Howitt

“ There speaks the man of this moving age. There speaks the spirit baptized into the great spirit of progress. In the silence of his meditative retreat the poet sees the world rolling before him, and is struck with the majesty of its mind subduing its physical mass to its uses, and trampling on time, space, and the far greater evils—prejudice, false patriotism, and falser ideas of glory. Brotherhood, peace, and comfort advance out of the school and the shop, and happiness sits securely beneath the guardianship of
"The parliament of man, the federation of the world." ”

“ He had got an idea of writing a poem, called The Brook, tracing a stream which he had found, from its source, in the hills, among the yellow-red moss, and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break, or fall, where its drops become audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf barn, itself built of the same dark masses as it sheltered; to the sheepfold; to the first cultivated spot of ground; to the lonely cottage, and its bleak garden won from the heath; to the hamlets, the market-towns, the manufactories, and the sea-port. ”

“ It is human life from the cradle to the tomb, with all its pleasures, aspirations, trials, and triumphs. Every thing which clings round the spirit of man as precious, every thing which wins us onward, and sustains us in sorrow, and soothes us under the infliction of wrong—the glory of public good, and the hallowed charm of domestic affection, is thrown into this poem, with the art of a master and the great soul of a sanctified experience. ”

“ It is a circumstance that redeems the age, that when despotism was making its most hardy attempts in England, when too many of our literary men were disposed to flatter and follow in its train, and when such a man as Southey was the loudest to hymn the follies and crimes of the despots, Lord Byron, the very man who was accused of corrupting the public morals, should still have been the man to denounce, with all the powers of poetry, wit, and withering sarcasm, the nefarious attempt. What a fall was that of Southey, from the poet of liberty to the laudator of crime, tyranny, and carnage! ”

“ There is one instance of Ebenezer Elliott's taste that meets you everywhere, and marks most expressively the peculiar, delicate, and poetic affection of his feelings. It is his preeminent love for spring, and its flowers and imagery. The primrose, the snow-drop, "the woe-marked cowslips," the blossom of the hawthorn and the elm, how constantly do they recur. In what favorite scene has he not introduced the wind-flower? Thus, in this admirable picture of a mechanic's garden—
"Still nature, still he loves thy uplands brown—
The rock that o'er his father's freehold towers! ”

“ Advancing beyond the castle you come again to the river, which sweeps round the ruins in a fine curve. Here every charm of scenery, the great river in its channel, its lofty and well wooded banks, the picturesque views of Blantyre Priory opposite, the slopes and swells of most luxurious green, and splendid lime-trees hanging their verdurous boughs to the ground, mingle the noble and the beautiful into an enchanting whole. A gravel walk leads you down past the front of the castle, and presents you with a new and still more impressive view of it. ”

“ Who cares a button for the ancestors of Byron, of Milton, of Shakspeare, of Goëthe, or of Schiller? These men start out to our eyes in the blaze of their own genius, which darkens all around them. They are creations of God, and not of man. They are sent forth into the world, and not born into it. Their ancestors are not the ancestors of their genius. They are the progenitors of the earthy caterpillar,—the butterfly, the Psyche of genius, is born of itself. ”

“ It is they who can shape and bend as they please. It is they—as the young beings advance into the world of life, as passions kindle, as eager desires seize them one after another, as they are alive with ardor, and a thirst for knowledge and experience of the great scene of existence into which they are thrown—it is they who can guide, warn, inspire with the upward or the downward tendency, and cast through them on the future ages the blessings or the curses of good or evil. They are the gods and prophets of childhood. ”

“ Stowey, like all other places where remarkable men have lived, even but a few years ago, impresses us with a melancholy sense of rapid change, of the swift flight of human life. There is the little town, there ascend beyond it the green slopes and airy range of the Quantock hills, scattered with masses of woodland, which give a feeling of deep solitude. But where is the poet, who used here to live, and there to wander and think? ”

“ We can imagine the delighted brother and sister marching on, over the beautiful hills, the dark heaths, and down the enchanting vales of the Highlands, conversing eagerly of the scenes they had seen, and the incidents they had heard, till the glowing thoughts had formed themselves, in the poet's mind, into almost instant song. These poems have all the character of having been cast, hot from the furnace of inspiration, into their present mold. There is a life, an original freshness, and a native music about them. ”

“ Ebenezer Elliott is one of the gentlest, most tender-hearted of men; and, however strange it may seem, it is this very character, this compassion for the unhappy, this lively and soft sympathy for human suffering, that has roused him to his loftiest pitch of anger, and put into his mouth his most terrible words. It is the noble and feeling soul, which creates the patriot, the savior, and champion of men. ”

“ Over all the faculties, the ranks, the influences of human life, poetry maintains a suggestive and immortal supremacy, for it becomes the more aspiring spirit of the age in the school and the closet ere it comes forth upon the world. It mingles itself with whatever is generous, ambitious, perceptive of greatness and of virtue, and often speaks in the man in power by a deed of glorious beneficence that falls like a blessing from heaven on the heart of afflicted genius. ”

“ The manufacturing town, as well as the country, has found its Burns. As Burns grew and lived amid the open fields, inhaling their free winds, catching views of the majestic mountains as he trod the furrowed field, and making acquaintance with the lowliest flower and the lowliest creatures of the earth, as he toiled on in solitude; so Elliott grew and lived amid the noisy wilderness of dingy houses, inhaling smoke from a thousand furnaces, forges, and engine chimneys, and making acquaintance with misery in its humblest shapes, as he toiled on in the solitude of neglect. ”

“ Campbell, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and others, were sending forth new strains of poetry, such as had not been heard since Shakspeare, and Spenser, and Milton had lived. But Walter Scott was to become something more than a poet. His destiny was to become the great romance writer of his age; to gather up and mold into a new form the life and spirit of the past many-colored ages of his country, and to leave them as a legacy of delight to the world forever. ”

“ At the gate of these pleasant gardens I take my present adieu of James Montgomery, the most genuinely religious poet of the age. With a wisdom, founded not on calculation, but on a sacred sense of duty, he had made even his ambition subservient to his aspirations as a Christian, and he has thus reared for himself a pedestal in the poetic Walhalla of England peculiarly his own. The longer his fame endures, and the wider it spreads, the better it will be for virtue and for man. ”

“ Below the house lies a sunny flower-garden, and, behind, the ascending lawn is enriched by finely disposed masses of trees; among them some enormous old oaks, and elms of noblest growth. There are two elms, growing close together, of remarkable size and height, beneath which a seat is placed, commanding a view of the park and sea; and just below it a fine, well grown larch, which used to be a very favorite tree of the poet. Under these trees he used to sit, and read and compose; and no man could have coveted a more congenial study. ”

“ If you ascend the park, you find yourself, after a good, stout climb, on the open hills. One summit after another, covered with clumps of Scotch firs, allures you to ascend, till at length you find yourself far from any abode, on the high moorland hills, amid a profound, but a glorious solitude. Fine glens, with glittering streams, and here and there a lonely cottage sending up its quiet smoke, run among these hills, and extensive tracts of woodland offer you all the charms of forest seclusion. ”

“ Whichever way the poet pleases to advance from his house, it must be into scenery of that beauty for mountain, stream, wood, and lake, which has made Cumberland so famous over all England. He may steal away up backward from his gate, and ascend into the solitary hills, or diverging into the grounds of Lady Mary Fleming, his near neighbor, may traverse the deep shades of the woodland, wander along the banks of the rocky rivulet, and finally stand before the well known water-fall there. If he descend into the highway, objects of beauty still present themselves. ”

“ Yet what greater pleasure, could one command it, than a week with such a man—far from the tone and spirit of coteries, in the heart of fresh and pure nature, with books, and woods, and flowery fields fanned by the purest breezes, to wander through, and compare the impressions of men and things, of great thoughts, great deeds, and great projects for the good of society, as they come before you unbiased and uncolored by the world as it shows its protean shapes in cities—in the refined sneer, the jealous thought, the weary indifference of overstimulated tastes? ”

“ As you approach Ambleside from Kendal, you pass, as you begin to descend the hill toward Lowood, a gate leading into a gentleman's grounds. The gateway is, on either side, hung with masses of the Ayrshire rose. There is a poetical look about the place; and that place is the country retreat of John Wilson. A carriage-road, winding almost in a perfect circle, soon introduces you to a fine lawn, surrounded by plantations, and before you, on a swelling knoll, you discern the cottage. It is hung with ivy and Ayrshire roses; and commands a splendid view over the lake, and all the mountains round. ”

“ Perhaps no man's spirit and presence are so entirely the spirit and presence of his poetry. Unlike many who could be named, who, drilled from youth into the spirit and tone of the gay circles that they frequent, present that spirit and tone there, and reserve the spirit and tone of the poet for the closet—men of two worlds, in the world of the world, in the closet of the world of mind—Ebenezer Elliott has conversed too much with nature, and with men in their rough, unsophisticated nature, to have merged one jot of his earnestness into conventionalism of tone or manner. ”

“ Below you, the town of Sheffield on one hand, partly stretching along the valley of the Don, partly stretching upward toward the Mount; its various churches, and its multitude of tall engine-chimneys, rearing themselves above the mass of houses, as poplars ascend above the rest of the wood; and from these chimneys, and from innumerable shops and forges, volumes of smoke and steam poured forth in clouds over the whole wilderness of brick, and with the distant sound of forge hammers, and roar of the forge-bellows and fires, give you a lively feeling of the stir of industry. ”

“ We have no misgivings, as we read Tennyson, whether any thing be poetry or not; we have no feeling of a want in the phraseology. Thought, language, imagery, all flow together from one source; that of a genius creative in all the attributes of life, or in the life itself—in color, taste, motion, grace, and sentiment. Whatever is produced, lives. It is no dead form; it is no half-sentient form; it is perfect in spirit, in beauty, and in abode. ”

“ Perhaps this perfected spirit, this divine patience, this God-pervaded soul of man, gentle, loving, yet stronger than death or evil, never were more beautifully expressed than by the repentant and dying Quaker, James Naylor.
"There is a spirit which I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong; but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. ”

“ Scott as I went in, and I was requested to join them. His large, well fed person, and large, handsome face, seemed actually to glow and radiate with the fullness of this world's joyousness and prosperity. His head of rich, bushy, black hair, and his smooth, black suit, both cut in town fashion, marked him as belonging to a more thronged and bustling region than these tawny, treeless, solitary hills. The moment I mentioned Hogg, and my object in visiting Altrive and Ettrick, the stranger's countenance lit up with a thorough, high-flowing tide of rosy animation. ”

“ The West Indies was a heroic poem, on one of the most heroic acts which ever did honor to the decrees of a great nation—the abolition of the slave-trade. But it was a work not merely of triumph over what was done, but of incentive to what yet remained to do—to the abolition of slavery itself. Time has shown what a stupendous mustering of national powers that achievement has demanded. ”

“ Where every minute falls numbered and weighed from the hand of time, and a great sentiment of weary existence and waiting is gradually let down upon you with the pressure of a nightmare. Or again, where the scenery and loves of rural life are, as in the Miller's Daughter, sketched with the pleasing and buoyant heart of Nature herself, and we are made to feel what brooks of love and happiness, bankful, flow through many a lowly place. ”