dangers of all excess. They should learn enough of the structure of their own body, and the influences of external nature which act upon it, to be led to perceive, in after years, when they come to reflect, the infinite consonance between the commandments which have been revealed to them, and the laws of the world which has been made for them; that they may not be left to doubt whether either the one or the other are fortuitous or fantastical, the offspring of a blind chance or of an unfeeling necessity." pp. 42, 43. The report on the Writing Schools is also an able and important document; but we have no space for any further comment. ART. X. Poems. By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. Second Series. Cambridge: George Nichols. 1848. 12mo. Pp. 184. IF poets are often misjudged, or have tardy and imperfect justice done to their merits, it is too frequently their own fault. They are usually the spoilt children of the world, in turn petted and humored with lavish fondness, till they become wayward and quarrelsome, and are then whipped and shut up in a dark closet till they can learn more discretion and better manners. They are often self-willed and perverse; they offend the tastes and shock the prejudices of the age in which they live, and then complain that the age does not appreciate them, and that genius does not receive its due. They have a standing quarrel with their contemporaries, whom they accuse of plotting against their fame, and of entering into a conspiracy to neglect them. The injudicious admiration of a few blind followers consoles them for this fancied injustice; they learn from these to affect a lofty contempt for the verdict of the present age, though a little while ago they were coveting it, or protesting with great energy against its unfairness, and they now, with dignified composure, look for their meed to posterity. But the appeal is not always successful; posterity is not often at leisure to build the tombs of the prophets, or to write flattering epitaphs upon them, as it has to sit in judgment upon the obtrusive claims of those of its own generation. If the poet is not listened to in his own times, he has but a small chance of finding an audience among those who come after him. If he will take counsel of discretion, will abate something of his wilfulness and cease to strain after impossibilities, if he will not hector people when he is hankering after their applause, or obtrude too eagerly his wrongs and sufferings upon their notice, there is no fear but that his contemporaries will do him justice. A poetical temperament, it is true, does not often lead its unfortunate possessor into these vagaries of passion and opinion. In many cases, it is controlled by solid good-sense and great manliness of feeling. Crabbe and Rogers, Scott and Southey, Campbell and Moore, we purposely select those names only which belong to the present century, - did not quarrel with the world, nor the world with them. Each of them, with the exception perhaps of Rogers, who was never married, and was always fortune's curled darling, had his own trials and sorrows to bear; their lots were crossed by all the ills that poetic flesh is heir to, by pecuniary troubles, harsh critics, domestic bereavements, personal squabbles, and political grievances. But they neither scolded nor whimpered about it; they considered, rightly, that the public had nothing to do with their private griefs, and that their office was to sing, and not to grumble. Affliction loses half of its claims to sympathy and respect when it denudes itself of privacy, when it is bared to the public eye, and decked out with flowers and sentiment to excite the wonder and compassion of the vulgar. Anger is still more unlovely and undignified; the quarrels of authors form the darkest page in their history, and if they chronicle them with their own hands, or enshrine them in bitter and stinging verses, they commit literary suicide. The poets we have just mentioned were something more than mere poets; they were sensible, highminded, whole-hearted men; and they thought well enough of our common humanity to accept this as the highest personal compliment which could be paid to them. The robust and healthy tone of their poetry is the perfect reflection of their characters and lives. Far different was it with their contemporaries, with Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and even Wordsworth, not to mention a crowd of coxcombs who have imitated them. Each of these has apparently been quite as anxious to make the public acquainted with himself as with his works; they have all displayed, though in a greater or less degree, both egotism and spleen. "The vision and the faculty divine" have given them a clearer perception of their own merits and grievances, and they have confidentially imparted their personal sorrows and animosities to all the world. We cannot sympathize with these theatrical exposures of private feeling; we have no more respect for a discontented poet than for that monstrous creation of the French romantic school, the femme incomprise. There is no good reason to believe that the bard is more luckless or aggrieved than his unpoetical fellowmortals; the sorest grievance, the bitterest persecution, which he has to dread, is indifference and neglect. He can only learn, at the worst, that the public does not care a fig about him or his poetry either. And do not let him be too hasty to attribute this neglect, if unhappily he should experience it, to any sinister influences or unfair dealing. There is no conspiracy in the case; people are not leagued and banded together in a secret association for the sole purpose of burying him and his works in oblivion. Even the malice of the critics, those gorgons and chimeras dire, whose only function is to worry and affright unhappy authors, can never harm him. A man is never written down except by himself. Criticism has no force whatever, except so far as it is a reflection of public opinion, an embodiment of public taste; if it be prejudiced or unfair, it is for that very reason innocuous, the public perceiving its untrustworthy character quite as soon as the intended victim. error. The egotistical and self-exaggerating spirit, which leads to these indiscreet disclosures of one's private concerns, has been fostered, if not created, by a common, but unfounded, belief respecting the nature and functions of a poet. That lying old proverb, poeta nascitur, is the great source of the The popular notion is, that poets are a distinct race, a peculiar species, not yet described in works of natural history, though they have nothing in common with ordinary mortals except a double portion of their sorrows. They are always born out of due time, and always fall on evil tongues and evil days. They sit apart, wear long robes, play on the harp or the lyre, and continually invoke nine allegorical maiden ladies. Cassandra-like, they are for ever uttering true prophecies, which nobody listens to Their favorite haunts are the tops of Mount Helicon and Parnassus; they drink nothing but water, which must be drawn either from Aganippe or the Castalian fount; and they never ride abroad except on a fiery winged horse, which will allow nobody but a poet to mount him. Now this is all fabulous, and is in truth so monstrous a fiction, that it would never have gained any credence, even with the unlearned, if the poets had not been constantly repeating it for the last three thousand years. They have told the story so often, that they have apparently come to believe it themselves. There is hardly one of the number who does not even now prate about his special inspiration, and declare that he has a "mission" to perform, a message to deliver to an unbelieving generation. How well fitted they are to teach others appears from the notorious fact, that they have not common sense enough for the management of their own concerns, or for the regulation of their own households. They are a shabby race, usually out at the elbows, who quarrel with their wives, neglect their children, and never pay their landladies. It would be a kindness to the greater part of the fraternity to have them put under guardianship. The only gleam of common sense which poor Coleridge ever showed was in asking Mr. Cottle to find a retreat for him in some private madhouse. Burns certainly would have lived longer in a hospital for incurables than he did as an exciseman, and it would have argued a kinder and more judicious appreciation of his case to place him there than to sentence him to gauge ale-firkins. "Great wits to madness sure are near allied," is the frank confession of one who was a poet himself, though he showed more sagacity and shrewdness than any of his brethren. This belief in special inspiration, in a sort of divine afflatus which poets inhale instead of ordinary atmospheric air, and which privileges them to write bad verses, and to commit all manner of foolish and disreputable actions in private life, without criticism, restraint, or punishment, ought to be exploded altogether. The world is quite sick of the eccentricities of genius, whether they are displayed in rhyme or conduct. The nineteenth century is too shrewd and practical, too fond of order and economy, to tolerate such enormities any longer. It has empowered critics and constables to take care of mad poets, it has provided houses of correction and insane hospitals for their reception. A jury of reviewers is appointed to sit upon each case, and if they bring in a verdict of non compos, the luckless bard must compose his future Tristia, not by the shores of the distant Euxine, inter Sauromatas Getasque, but within the walls of Bedlam : "Perdiderint cum me duo crimina, carmen et error." He may write over the door of his cell the inscription which the unhappy Ovid prepared for his own tombstone, while expecting to die in exile : "Hic ego qui jaceo, tenerorum lusor amorum, The world is fast coming round to the opinion, that a poet does not differ from any other mortal except by some accident, which, at an early period, turned his attention to making verses instead of cobbling shoes. Hans Sachs united the two occupations with great applause, and the influences of the lapstone correcting those of the Muses, he remained sane all his life. "True genius," said the gruff old moralist, "is a mind of large general powers accidentally determined in a particular direction." One is no more born a poet than a punster. The same natural gifts, which some trifling event in his early days had induced him to consecrate to poetry, might have made him a great orator, a great statesman, or even a great general. Cæsar, Alfred, and Napoleon achieved the mingled honors of the pen and the sword. If Shakspeare had been caught young, we doubt not that he would have made a better Lord Chancellor than Sir Christopher Hatton. The grandest and most fertile imagination that was ever lost to poetry was that of Lord Bacon; the author of the Novum Organon and the Advancement of Learning, if circumstances had made him a runaway boy and a dependent upon the theatres, might have written Hamlet and Macbeth. Milton and Jeremy Taylor might have bartered their respective vocations without loss to the world, if they had been changed in their cradles; the former might have enacted Pym or Hampden, if stern fortune had not made him a blind schoolmaster, just as cruel men put out the eyes of a bulfinch, to teach it to sing. "Mute, inglorious Miltons" rest in every churchyard. We do not say that every bantling is a possible Burns, or |