Ere her wide wings are gone.-Here let me rest. Whose smooth trunks high and white might bring

Spirit of love and life,

I feel, yea know, that joy is no sole boon

Of breathing things, for Thou art everywhere.

Of this book we may truly quote the old remark, that what is good is not new, and what is new is not good. That is, the good in it consists of va

That stirring wild flower drinks the breeze, me-rious quotations, which every reader of poetry

thinks,

With gust no less than human infancy

Of new life hath. Hills swelling to the skies,
Do ye not love to breathe Eve's rosy air,

knows by heart. The new in it is composed of his own trifling editions, and sundry excerpts, only not already known, because not worth knowing. But, to begin with the beginning, we must first Essay in answer to the

66

And bathe in Heaven? Gnarled monarchs of the consider his introductory
wood,
question, 'What is Poetry?"

A-tip-toe on your foothold difficult,

One o'er the other, can ye look sheer down
In this ravine profound and tingle not
With a sense like sublimity?

When the clouds

Of deep, portentous red, curled round these cliffs,
Shall spread a canopy of storm ere morning,
Mountains, will ye not to the jarring thunder
Thrill in your hearts of stone, with gladness fierce,
Of warrior sort, as ye by flash-light see
Each other leaping out of darkness, and
Your forests tossing their Briarean arms?

J. S. A.

IMAGINATION AND FANCY;

BY LEIGH HUNT.*

Perhaps no point has been more often discussed, or with less satisfactory result, than the essential attributes of poetry. Each man who has taken it up, has arrived at a different conclusion, and has We succeeded in convincing no one but himself. have not self-sufficiency enough to enter on a question which involves so much speculation, and which presents itself in so many thousand aspects. He who shall form a definition of poetry, which shall embrace it in its infinite variety and vastness, and yet be applicable to its numberless minute points, will be worthy of all honor. Perhaps Shelley, in his unrivalled "Defence of Poetry," has succeeded better than any of his predecessors. Like a true poet, he has taken hold of the question in its most catholic aspect, and considers it, not as tied down by the bonds of mere pen and ink, but as it exists in the world, influencing man unconsciously, and manifesting itself in the beautiful and sublime, whether produced by human or natural agency. It rises spontaneously and is seen everywhere; and This is emphatically an age of book-making. No he whose spirit is most alive to its power, whether one can look at the stream of volumes so uninterruptedly pouring from the press, without being struck at the very few which display thought or originality, or which will survive the lapse of twenty years. Of the prevailing art of book-manufacturing, now so thoroughly understood, and so extensively practised, the book before us is an excellent specimen. Our friend, Leigh Hunt, is an old and experienced journeyman at the trade; a man of all Poetry, strictly and artistically so called, that work, ready to turn his hand to any job promising which is more or less shared by all the world, but is to say, considered not merely as poetic feeling, adequate remuneration. He has served a long and as the operation of that feeling, such as we see it faithful apprenticeship to it, passing through all the in the poet's book, is the utterance of a passion for gradations, and now, after forty-five years of as-truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrasiduous authorship, we have the pleasure of meet-ting its illustrations by imagination and fancy, and ing him again with all his jauntiness, spruceness, modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity." egotism, and cockneyism almost as rampant and conspicuous on the verge of sixty as at sixteen. If he lives, we predict that his will be a "green old age," in more senses of the word than were dreamed of in the philosophy of old Adam, for he seems to retain his juvenile freshness and blue-coat boyishness, in a manner quite remarkable to a spec

tator.

* Imagination and Fancy; or, Selections from the English Poets, illustrative of those first requisites of their Art. With markings of the best passages, critical Notices of the Writers, and an Essay in answer to the Question, "What is Poetry?" By Leigh Hunt.

VOL. XI--93

in man or the meanest flower, is a poet. But this
broad and comprehensive view of the subject has
escaped the puny grasp of Leigh Hunt, and he has
restricted it to its most limited sense.
We quote
the opening sentence of his essay as embodying his
opinions, and as a specimen of his inartistic and
slip-shod prose :—

He thus not only restricts poetry to the expression of a sense of the beautiful on paper, but limits that to cases where it is in verse. Thus, on page 24, he proceeds:

"With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity, by which verse ought to be modulated, and one-ness of impression diversely produced, (what does this mean?) it has been contended by some, that Poetry need not be written in verse at all; that prose is as good a medium, provided poetry be conveyed through it; and that to think otherwise, is to confound letter with spirit, or form with essence.

But the opinion is a prosaical mistake. Fitness not Fuller's "Holy Wars" a poem ? To descend and unfitness for song, or metrical excitement, just to more modern instances, is there no poetry in Eumake all the difference between a poetical and gene Aram, or Zanoni, though Bulwer has never prosaical subject; and the reason why verse is ne- been able to write decent verse? We have said cessary to the form of poetry, is, that the perfection of poetical spirit demands it; that the circle of ennothing of the grandest of all poetry—that of the thusiasm, beauty, and power, is incomplete with- Scriptures, though Hunt endeavors to get round it, out it. I do not mean to say that a poet can never feeling the untenability of his position, by saying, show himself a poet in prose; but that, being one, that in the original it is written in verse. If so, his desire and necessity will be to write in verse translation without metre, should have evaporated and that, if he were enabled to do so, he would not, all its poetry. But to take a broader ground, are and could not, deserve his title. Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet, an excellent one; they alone poets who write? When we listen to a and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest spirit-stirring or melting piece of music, do we not amount of strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, feel that its creator was a poet. When we gaze unsuperfluousness, variety, and one-ness."

The distinction our author draws between poetical and prosaical subjects, is much more apparent than real. Every different individual will have a different scale for such admeasurement; and the higher faculty a poet possesses, the more subjects he will subdue beneath his power. Look at the universal grasp of Shakespeare, and observe how many things he has rendered redolent of beauty, which a meaner mind would have cast aside as ut

terly unfit for " song or metrical excitement." It varies, too, with every age; and what is regarded as the end and aim of poetry by one generation, is scouted at and held up to ridicule by the succeeding. Pope is now regarded to have made a grand mistake in all the subjects selected by him as worthy his Muse, and our friend Hunt, himself, never lets slip an opportunity of ridiculing him; yet he was the Magnus Apollo of the eighteenth century, and his themes were long considered the only ones suitable for poetry. When the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" appeared, the Edinburg Reviewers, while according to Scott a full meed of praise, entreated him to abandon such subjects, and take up some

thing more worthy of him; and not long afterwards, Byron, in his " English Bards," reproached him for wasting his genius over a series of "black letter ballads."

Mr. Hunt is even less happy in his assertion, that they alone are poets who can wield the pen, and “build the lofty verse," and that poetry is not to be

A genu

found outside of the confines of verse.
ine poet, whose chief fault is that he has left
few evidences of his genius, has said

so

on one of Huntingdon's pictures, where the artist has transferred the visions of his glowing soul to canvass, do we not read therein an unsung poem, and confess him a poet who conceived it? Is it not the same with sculpture, though the unmalleability of the materials renders its manifestations less visible, and its full projection more uncertain? And, after feeling and experiencing all this, shall we agree with one who comes, like Hunt, and tells us that "No good can come out of Nazareth," no poetry can come except from pen, ink and paper? Another of Mr. Hunt's texts may perhaps be worth commenting on—

"Verse is to the true poet no clog. It is idly called a trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their satisfaction dition of rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than and effect. Verse is no more a clog than the conthe roundness and order of the globe we live on, is a clog to the freedom and variety that abound within its sphere."

It will here be seen that Mr. Hunt regards verse as the natural consequent of poetry, without which it cannot exist. If this is the case, we may ask

what system of versification is it which springs naturally from poetry? Is the old Hebraic the true one, or the stately classical metre, or the complex and involved Norse and Icelandic, the rough and

abrupt Saxon, or the modern flowing and rhyming stanzas? Surely some one of these must be the genuine one, for they cannot all be as necessary to poetry as spericity to the globe, or rising upwards to flame. But it is not worth while to trouble ourselves much to fathom Mr. Hunt's meaning, since he contradicts himself within a few pages. Speaking of the octosyllabic measure, the most pleasing in the language when properly managed, he says:

"Sum sangis ar writt bot nevir sung." And much poetry is there which can never be sung, and yet which makes its way to the heart with an appeal that cannot be mistaken. Is not the old "It has been advocated, in opposition to the heclassical mythology in itself poetical, even depri-roic measure, on the ground that ten syllables lead ved of the strength of Homer, or the sweetness of a man into epithets and other superfluities, while Ovid? Is not Plato a poet, ay! a lofty one, though eight syllables convert him into a sensible and pithy he scarce wrote fifty lines in verse? Is not Livy's gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs at it. history a poem, a prose epic? Can we read any So far from compressing, it converts one line into of Bacon's writings, or hear of his walking bare-two, and sacrifices everything to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme." headed in the rain, in order that he "might feel the universe," without confessing him a poet? Is

This is a singularly candid confession of the utter

fallacy of his previous assertion, that verse so far | Looks on himself as the most unresponded to and from being a clog, was a help to the poet.

unaccountably ill-used bad temper in Tuscany; rages at every word and look she gives another; and fills the house with miseries, which, because they ease himself, and his vile spleen, he thinks her bound to suffer."

It must not be thought that we put this to a test too severe. The ancient MSS. were written with even the words run together, and yet they are poetry still; and no one could for a moment bewilder himself among the Miltonic cadences. Are we, then, to listen to a man lecturing gravely and critiically on the most delicate and minute points of poetry and versification, who will present to the world, as good sense, lines so filled with elisions, redundancies. inversions, and inelegant expressions, and, with all this, so rough and unmelodious?

After speaking thus at length on the essence and attributes of poetry, our author proceeds to give us his opinions on the requisites of versification. If our readers know anything of Leigh Hunt, they are no doubt aware that these are somewhat peculiar: and he here advocates them, with all his vigor, for the twentieth time. His principal canon is an utter contempt for smoothness, or attention to the metre. A line that runs evenly on, with the accents falling in, and chiming with the longs and shorts, he seems to consider unworthy of a poet. It must have two or three redundant syllables or misaccentuations to render it palatable. "Smoothness," says he, "is a thing so little to be regarded for its own sake, and indeed so worthless in poetry, but for some taste of sweetness, that I have not thought it necessary to mention it by itself." But, discarding rhyme, which is unnecessary, smoothness is the principal and distinguishing difference between verse and prose, the essential of versification, for prose can have melody and sweetness almost to as great a degree as verse. According to our author, however, versification is the essential of poetry. There- Leaving this subject, Mr. Hunt proceeds to speak fore, by discarding smoothness, he proves satisfac- at length on sweetness, accent, harmony, and other torily that prose and poetry are the same thing. accessories of poetry. Some of his remarks, To do him justice, he acts up to his precepts; he though not novel, are good, though he is far too practises as he preaches, and his writings, if taken apt to over-refine, which is not singular, seeing at the standard at present accorded them, bear him that he has been writing on these subjects for thirty out in the conclusion that verse and prose are iden-years, and naturally pushes them too far. In his tical. Unfortunately, we have near us at the mo- admiration of his favorites, especially Coleridge, ment no volume of his poetry to quote from, but he is determined to see no fault in them, and finds we extract the first passage given in Griswold's beauties in their very lapses of thought and ex"Poets of England." It is one of the choice por-pression.

“And, shall we own such judgment? no!-as soon
Seek roses in December,- ice in June,
Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff,
Believe a woman, or an epitaph,
Or any other thing that's false."

tions of the Legend of Florence," Hunt's best He then goes on to advise and counsel the young production, and regarded by his admirers as a work and timid reader, who wishes to ascertain "What for immortality, κτῆμά τε ἐς ἀεὶ. We write the lines as prose, premising that in the original they are given as blank verse-blank enough Heaven knows; and we defy any one to break it up into its original verses. It is a labored description of one of the principal characters.

is the quickest way of knowing bad poets from good, the best poets from the next best, and so on?” The only plan, he gravely answers, is to read and study attentively the various poets, and then see what are liked. The unfortunate questioner here finds himself placed, by his quizzical preceptor, in the position of the learned Monsieur Jourdan, who had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it.

Having now discoursed at considerable length on the preliminary essay, we will proceed to examine the body of the work.

"In all, except a heart, and a black shade of superstition, he is man enough! Has a bold blood, large brain, and liberal hand, as far as the purse goes; albeit he likes the going abroad to be blown about with trumpets. Nay, I won't swear that he does not love his wife, as well as a man of no sort of affection, nor any domestic tenderness can do The general idea of the book is good. It was a He highly approves her virtues, talents, beau- happy thought to present to the reader the passaty; thinks her the sweetest woman in all Florence, partly, because she is,-partly, because she is his ges in England's poets, most remarkable for fancy own, and glorifies his choice; and therefore he and imagination; but it was attended with difficuldoes her the honor of making her the representa- ties as to the bounds to be made, very few extracts tive and epitome of all he values,-public reputa- could be selected displaying imagination unmixed tion, private obedience, delighted fondness, grate- with other faculties, and, where once other claims ful return for his unamiableness, love without

so.

bounds,-in short, for his self love; and as she finds to admiration are admitted, it would be difficult to it difficult, poor soul! to pay such reasonable de- say "thus far shalt thou go."

Mr. Hunt has not

mands at sight with the whole treasure of her heart always been fortunate in his selection. We also and smiles, the gentleman takes pity on-himself!' object to the plan of marking and italicising the