The Press. — London, England, 1857-02-07 00:00:00

136 Farnham, and for eleven years subsequently held military command in the lonian Islands. His quarrel with the Lord High Commissioner, Sir F. Adam, at last grew so high, that he returned to England.' When the Chartists grew dangerous, in 1839, he was, despite his radicalism, or perhaps in consequence of it, appointed to the command of the Northern District, and, though professing the strongest sympathy with the political opinions and grievances of the Chartists, engaged with his usual energy in preparations to give them a thorough pounding should they attempt to give effect to their doctrines. Passages like the following curiously jumble each other :- 27th April [lB39].—Would that I had gone to Australia and thus been saved this work, produced by Tory injua• tice and Whig imbecility. May '2nl.--With some dragoons and infantry this neigh bourhood can be kept in check, but both arms are neces sary ; dragoons alarm, and slash without killing, and if they are too roughly handled, the infantry will soon end the business; rockets also are good bullets, and do not kill. It is difficult on reading his journal to say which was strongest, his grumbling desire for the Charter, or his wish to have a good fight with the Chartists : 1839, May s.—One good thrashing will cool their courage; even the Devizes affair was a damper, and if they deal with me, it will be far worse, for the blow must be as decisive as musket and ba3onet can make it. May 2.s.—The Government should be prepared to con sider the Charter in Parliament, and cuitivato the good will of the people. The radical and the soldier continually alternate in the journal : The people should have universal suffrage, it is their right ; the ballot also, it is their security and their will, and therefore their right also ; and the new poor•law should be reformed. Poor people! They will suffer ! They have set all England against them and their physical force : fools! We have the physical force, not they. They talk of their hundred thousands of men. Who is to move them, when 1 am dancing round then► with cavalry and pelting them with cannot•shot? What would their 100,000 men do with my 100 rockets wriggling their fiery tails among them, roaring, scorching, teasing, smashing, all they come near? And when in desperation they broke to fly, how would they bear five regiments of cavalry careering through them ? Poor men ! poor men I How little they know of physical force. Evidently our Chartist General was ready for his work. Let one extract more from this unpleas.int portion of the book suffice. The radical speaks : If Government means to defend the Throne, it must make preparation by giving the people their rights What is to be done? Why feed the people, and give them votes, short Parliaments, ballot ; give them their rights. Then the soldier has a word to say : Cavalry are only useful to bully a mob, and save the lives of those who compose it by dropping them a little, instead of destroying them by firearms. I have been long preaching to the Government to unite both arms, but they will not, though they give me no refusal. During his command he was at loggerheads with the Government on the subject of his pay. He might have been in the right ; though it is certain that he could not exist without a grievance. In 1841 he was offered an ap pointment on the Indian staff, which he gladly accepted, and, thenceforward, a new career was opened to him. The second volume conducts us to his conquest of Scinde, in 1843. He was exactly the man to stand no nonsense, and he made short work of the task set before him. His subsequent career is reserved for two other volumes. We wish the work had been more comrressed. Much of Sir Charles's writing is tedious, and, from the excessive turbulence of spirit it displays, the reverse of agreeable reading. That " sane idea of madness," of which he speaks himself, unpleasantly colours much of his composition. He was an exceptional character, possessed, 'without doubt, of great military genius, but totally wanting in that serene tranquillity and modest depth, commonly characteristic of the highest and most estimable order of minds. RECENT POETRY. Iv a man drinks half a dozen glasses of good wino and half a dozen glasses of bad alter nately, he ceases to know which is which. Within certain limits, this is true of poetry. Were compositions equal to Tennyson's or Byron's placed before us, among any amount of trash, we hope we should still be able to recognise and admire them. But, after the THE PRESS: study of fourteen or fifteen volumes like those before us, we must confess we grow less reliant on our power of distinguishing minor shades of difference. However, we must do our best. The poems of Mr. Capern, the postman of Bideford (1), are evidently the production done with an innate admiration for the beauties of Nature, and the faculty of expressing what is felt in verse with case and promptitude. There is evidence that metre is to him a spon taneous form of utterance—qued tentat dicere, versus est. There is nothing which strikes us as forced or artificial in his writings. Opinions may differ about the quality of the fruit, but it is at least natural, and grows with healthy abundance. Another favourable feature is that lie has almost entirely confined himself to those subjects upon which he may fairly be considered as good a judge as his more educated brethren. There can, indeed, be no doubt that it would be wrong to consider the author of these poems as an uneducated man in the ordinary sense of the term. His taste must have been developed by books, though he may have had no opportunities of deep study. We mean, therefore, that he has had the good sense to steer clear of religious or political topics, and has satisfied himself with the native outpourings of his own genius —the praises of woods, rivers, and flowers—the various beauties of the seasons—the songs of birds—and all the many sights and sounds of rural life, which he describes with a fresh ness, with an unaffected sympathy, and with a carefulness of observation which remind us sometimes of Wordsworth, but oftener of something between Gilbert White and the Ettrick Shepherd. Tho calm sadness of the first, the naturalist propensities of the second, and the loud joyousness of the third, are all visible in his writings ; and it is diff►- cult to say in which phase he is most agree able. As specimens of each we would recom mend to our readers " Affection's Argument" (p. 10), " Christmas Tears " (p. 11), " The Fall of the Brave" (p. 180), " The Old Gray Thrush " (p 97), " Woodlands " (p. 180), and " The Song of the Hop-pickers " (p. 192). It is pleasant to think of the existence of such a man as Mr. Capern, for we aro not called upon to question the accuracy of the impression conveyed to us by his poetry. And we cordially agree with the writer of the preface in hoping that no future indigence will be permitted to mar the cheap and simple happiness which he now enjoys at home and abroad, both with his own family and among the woods and lanes of his favourite Devonshire. " England in Timo of War" (2) is a poem which demands a much more careful examina tion, and will receive at our hands a much more mingled verdict. If we admit that it contains passages of originality and vigour to which the poet of Bideford has no pretensions, it is also overlaid with affectation and frippery from which he is totally exempt. If Mr. Sydney Dobell improves, if he takes a good turn, and his genius succeeds in throwing off the malady which oppresses it, we think it possible he may attain a high rank among English poets. But then wo are bound to confess that his disease seems to have so firm a hold of him, that we fear such a result is highly improbable. Wo are rather late in our notice of his poems, and our readers will probably have seen most of his leading pecu liarities noticed elsewhere. Of these the vice of repetition is the most conspicuous, and reaches to such an extent as to remind us rather of a barrister hammering something into tho minds of a country jury, than of a poet addressing the only sort of audience among which Mr. Dobell can hope to gain ad mirers. It. is useless to quote any instances of this—the whole volume is one in itself ; and tho effect is really so singular that we hardly know how to speak of it. Like other meretricious arts, it is not always displeasing, though our judgment cannot approve it. The following passage, front one of Mr. Do bell's most beautiful poems, entitled " home, Wounded," is certainly an example of this. The wounded man, apparently a cripple, is (1) c,,pern's Poem. I.owlnn : Bogue. (2) Enlond in Time qf War. By Sydney DobeU. London: Smith and Elder. SATURDAY, talking to his brother, who is wheeling him about in a chair on a fine April day : Blare the trumpet and boom the gun, But oh, to sit here thus in the sun, To sit here, feeling my work is done, While the sands of life so golden run, And I watch the childrens' posies, And my idle heart is whispering, " Bring whatever the years may bring, The flowers will blossom, the birds will sing, And there'll always bo primroses." Looking before me here in the sun, I see the Aprils one after one, Primrosed Aprils one by one, Primrosed Aprils on and on, Till the floating prospect closes In golden glimmers that rise and rise, And perhaps are gleams of Paradise, And perhaps—too far for mortal eyes— New years of fresh primroses, Years of earth's primroses, Springs to be, and springs for me t if distant dim primroses. My soul lies out like a tasking hound, A hound that dreams and dozes ; Along my life my length I lay, 1 fill to•morrow and yesterday, I am warm with the suns that have long since set, I am warm with the summers that are not yet, And like one who dreams and dozes Softly afloat on a sunny sea, Two worlds are whispering over me, And there blows a wind of roses From the backward shore to the shore before, From the shore before to the backward shore, And like two clouds that meet and pour Each thro' each, till core in core A single self reposes, The nevermore with the evermore Above me mingles and closes ; As my soul lies out like the basking hound, And wherever it lies seems happy ground, And when, awakened by some sweet sound, A dreamy eye uncloses, I see a blooming world around, And I lie amid primroses— Years of sweet primroses, Springs of fresh primroses, Springs to be, and springs for me Of distant dim primroses. There is the hand of a true poet in this ; even its blemishes are not without a certain charm. Exception may, indeed, be taken to the simile with which the third paragraph opens. The one point of resemblance, in itself farfetched, is not sufficient to justify the use of so grotesque au image. But the two succeeding similes are singularly beautiful—perhaps equal, if not superior, to anything within the range of this school of poetry. The repetitions are not unpleasant to the ear, however faulty upon other grounds. But we strongly advise the author to prune and chasten his style with an unsparing hand. There are many of his poems so disfigured by this and other pecu liarities as to be wholly unreadable. And unless he shall exercise a more than ordinary amount of self-denial and modesty, we fear he will only add another to the list of last year's failures. The above arc the only two volumes in our list which can pretend to any independent merit. The author of " Gethsemane " (3) has chosen a noble subject. Let us sec how he has treated it : Quick rallying from their late alarm, The soldiers seized him by the arm, And with unmeet yet trembling haste Their footsteps city-ward retraced. The eight, who all this time had slept, Forth from their hiding•places crept, And joined the cavalcade, to know Whereto this tragedy would grow. But some with rashness spake the word, " Lord, would'st thou have us use the sword ?" When Peter suddenly revealed liis weapon hitherto concealed, And struck at one a deadly blow, Which might have cleaved his head in two, But Malchus, with instinctive fear, Drew back and only lost an ear. Which seems to have been added to Mr. Hor ton's own. " Felix " and the " Hebrew Melo dies" are of' the same stamp. Mr. Shirley, author of " The Old Bridge, and Other Poems " (4), writes very fair verses, and has sense enough to avoid bathos. His trans lations are better than his original poems. Those from Aristophancs, especially some of the choruses, are clever. Among the German wo should single out " The Vengeance of the Flowers " as the prettiest and most musical. (:;) Gethsemane, and Other l'"enti. By I. U. Iturton. Lundou : Judd and 6 ha (1) The Old Bridge, and Oiler Poems. Dy G. E. Shirley. Rochester: Macaulay.