The Press. — London, England, 1855-05-19 00:00:00

476 verses from one of the most successful. The sentiment, at all events, is unimpeachable : Like a stern old friend, War grimly comes To ths temple of peaceful life ; With the well-known nod of his beckoning plumes, He hurries us into the strife ! And we meet once more, in the fields of fate, With our Chivalrous Enemy, Who knows, by the grip of our hands in hate, What the strength of our love may be. 0! the Lilies of France and Old England's Red Rose Are twined in a coronal now ; And at War's bloody bridal it glitters and glows On Liberty's beautiful brow. We have dashed together like waves and rocks! We have fought till our shirts grew red! We have met in the shuddering battle shocks, Where none but the freed soul fled! Now side by side, in the fields of fate, And shoulder to shoulder are we; And we know, by the grip of our hands in hate, What the strength of our love may be. 0! the Lilies of France &o. There is a peculiarity in this song which may be observed, more or less, throughout the whole of these pieces—the monosyllabic struc ture of the verse. Of the lines we have quoted, eight consist exclusively of words of one syllable, and the remainder present only slight deviations from this, probably unconscious, standard. As we shall have occasion before we close this series of papers to speak more at large of Mr. Massey's poetry, we shall content ourselves for the present with merely pointing out a singularity which has the effect of ma terially impeding the impulse of the verse. Mr. Massey is not always happy in his choice of a refrain. In a song called " Down in Australia," we have the following rhymes running in the same form through every verse : Quaff a cup, and send a cheer up for the Old Land ! We have heard the Reapers shout For the Harvest going out, With the smoke of battle closing round the bold Land : And our message shall be hurled Up the ringing sides o' the world, — There are true hearts beating for you in the Gold Land. The measure is fantastical, and by no means ineffective for festive purposes ; but its spirit is clogged by the infelicitous repetition of " old land " and " bold land," which reverbe rate upon the tympanum until it becomes in sensible to all other sounds. Mr. Massey seems to have a passion for this kind of double beat, indifferent to the means by which it is obtained. Here is another refrain of a similar form:— Sing, 0 but a jubilant carouse Awaits us in our far land, When we shall thrust up conquering brows, And take our Country's Garland. To give due importance to the closing rhyme, the last word must be accented girlind, a dis tortion of the accent which the ear instinc tively rejects. Mr. Massey's measures, which seem to be generally adopted on account of their eccentricity, we reserve for another opportunity. Echoes of the War (4), by Mr. Henry Sewell Stokes, recal something of the spirit of the old ballad, 'heavily laden with verbiage. We have here the swing of the ancient verse, but not the elasticity ; the pleasant tune, but not the silver voice. Like most of the other poets, Mr. Stokes takes up the topics of the cam paign one by one, and, consequently, we have the Alma and Inkermann, the siege and Ba laklava, over again. The difficulty is to find something new to say about these exhausted themes ; and we are bound to say that this is a difficulty Mr Stokes has not been able to overcome. The only novelty in his poems is to be tracod to their manner, which is light and jaunty, with reminiscences perpetually floating through it such as an opera-goer with a reten tive memory is plagued by when he is doomed to listen to a piece of felonious music. The opening of the " Battle of the Alma" will illus trate some of Mr. Stokes's specialities : me No drum was heard, no shrill reveil, But dark woods rustling in the gale, That freshened as the stars grew pale, cTSA , cheerful warning ; heather springing lithe , sr to his scythe, the lark sings blithe harvest morning. othergoents. By Henry Sewell Gave them a cheer I TT 1. F :-, 1 ,,.. itqfib from the heath 4 .-, v.; - . , And gay as mower to Whek in the sky the On ipme clear herr , . .., (4) Echoes qA the War, and e n ,;, , ~ Stokes. Loud": Longman,. Vc - • li-: 4 ","_.'; aciVrl7- , .. ; THE PRESS. From sea and shore there came a sound Like thunder rolling underground, 'Till light with golden radiance crowned The Eastern mountains hoary ; And then was seen the grand array Of legions, stretching far away, Whose steel out•flashed the beam of day, Shedding a dreadful glory. Wolfe and Campbell tread the mazes of the verse in shadowy indistinctness ; and it is clear at a glance that the Alma is not the foun tain from whence Mr. Stokes drew his inspira tion. The actual meaning of the first stanza we confess our inability to penetrate, but we apprehend it might be thus converted into prose :—No military music was heard, yet, not withstanding the general silence, the woods, which became fresh as morning advanced, gave them a lively warning ; who they were does not signify to the reader; it is enough for him to know that every one of them sprang from the heather as gaily as a mower springs to his scythe when the lark is singing in the sky. There is no harm in all this. The muse, if she be an unmeaning muse, is very gentle and low-voiced; and it must be admitted that if she has nothing to say, she says it in a tone appropriate to its value. Mr. Stokes depends so much on the tune, and so little on the sense, that we should do him an injustice if we did not make room for another specimen of his music without ideas. Here are some snatches of a lyric on the Nurses O'er the sea a rumour came That our men neglected die; And stern voices murmured—shame And would know the reason why: Then a lady of the land Meekly said, I'll go and see, I will help with my weak hand, And a soldier's nurse 111 he." This is Miss Nightingale. Other maidens " kindly" join her, and the " lovely tram" take their departure : So they went, and with them took All the blessings of the land, And each held a little book, For protection, in her hand : Robed in stainless innocence Went that gentle embassy ; And they met with no offence Who would soldiers' nurses be. As on the former occasion Wolfe and Campbell supplied the key-note, so here it is struck by Moore. Mr. Stokes, however, appears to be utterly oblivious of his obligations, and sings a voluntary upon other composers' melodies without being apparently conscious of its origin. This curious psychological hallucina tion, under which the mind supposes itself to be thinking and creating when it is only giving vent to echoes, bears a close analogy to the wonderful things that are done in dreams by people who, in their waking senses, would be utterly incapable even of conceiving them. Mr. James Hain Friswell augments the stream of patriotic verse by a number of little rills which he has discovered running in the columns of the newspapers. His collection is called Songs of the War (5); and he tells us in his preface that it consists for the better part of " a rechauffi of those songs which have ap " peared in, or have been going the round of " the press." A. rechauffti is generally under stood to be something warmed up to be eaten; and in offering up his little anthology for that purpose Mr. Friswell, we presume, is specu lating upon a famine. But we are not come to such a terrible extremity yet as to be com pelled to dine upon our books. Should such a dire necessity arise, it will then be time enough to enter upon an examination of these songs, considered as a condiment. In the meanwhile, regarding them in their less interesting aspect as food for the mind, we may observe that they are derived principally from Punch and the Morning Chronicle, and that the editor has en- riched the collection by adding, here and there, short explanatory notes or introductions. As may be inferred from the specimen we have given of the preface, the notes form the most amusing part of the whole. The titlepage assures us that the songs are written by the " best " writers ;" but it appears from the editorial observations that Mr. Friswell is not at all sure of the authorship. One song we are told is " most probably from the pen of Tom Tay. (5) Songs of the War. By the Best Writers. Edited, with Original Songs , by James Hain Eriewell. London : W ar d an d Lock. SATURDAY, " lor, Esq.;" of another, says Mr. Friswell, t. we " know not whether we be light in our conjeo. " jecture, but we believe that the following " beautiful verses are from the pen of Thacke " ray;" and a third is " probably," as before' from the pen of Professor Tom Taylor. Another is said to be from the pen of the Rev. Chenevix French, a blunder which may be consigned to the same limbo with the imagi nary professorship conferred on Tom Taylor, who has long ceased to rejoice in academic titles. The " pen " is a strong point with Mr. Friswell. " Surely'," he exclaims, " the pre " sent is a war of the sword and pen;" and h e claims for the heroes who have rushed into print " on the occasion" statues and columns side by side with the heroes of the Crimea. " Surely," he reiterates, " the literary men of " this country who have come so nobly for " ward in her cause, are worthy of as much " honour as the soldiers who have fought he " roically, belonging to a profession which, if " it gains not so much of the applause of the " world, is exposed to so patent and great " danger, yet to be pursued nobly requires the " patience of the martyr, and the courage of " the hero." What the patent dangers may be to which Mr. Friswell alludes we are entirely ignorant of, but we apprehend that, in refer ence to the grand qualities with which he winds up the eulogium, he has not kept in view the • admonition of the proverb, " A " cheque saint sa chandelle," or, as we should say in the vernacular, he has not put the saddle on the right horse. Surely, to adopt his own form of adjuration, the poets of the war are not the persons who have exhibited the " patience of the martyr and the courage " of the hero ;" these fine elements of en durance awl resolution are the rightful pro perty of their readers. We cannot better llustrate and enforce the truth of this position than by an extract from a song written by Mr. Friswell himself, entitled " Here and There," with the minor title of " England and the " Crimea ": Where the stormy Black Sea billows Forwards, backwards, hoarsely swing; By the side of Alma's river, Waiting for the icy spring— Where the bleak north•east brows, freezing Limb and body stark and stare, Perils every day increasing— England's sons are waiting there. Here! hurrah, who dares to threaten Albion's white and sacred shore. Here, peace reigns all joys begetting] E'en though winter chill and hoar Comes, he bringeth Christmas with him, Gladness, mirth, and jolly cheer. Roar the fires up the chimnies,— Oh ! how different here and there. We need not pursue the parallel between " here' and " there " carried on thtough half a dozen stanzas. This sample will be sufficient to determine whether it is the poet or the reader who is better entitled to lay claim to the " patience of the martyr and the courage of " the hero." Peace (6), a poem dedicated by permission to Lord Palmerston, and occupying about seven pages, printed with great liberality of space between the lines, implies on the part of the Minister as indifferent a judgment in poetry as in statesmanship. The principal merit of this work is its brevity ; and for that we are thankful. It is written in Alexandrines with rhymes, which are cast so far asunder by the length of the measure that the harmonica) succession of sounds which Mr. Stirling has been at much pains to produce is hardly per ceptible. The echo of the last line fairly dies out of the ear before we have arrived at the end of the next. Former poets who have used this measure, aware of the difficulty presented by the long interval between the rhymes, con trived to sustain the melody of the verse so as to keep up the vibration to the close. But Mr. Stirling does not construct his versifica tion on this principle. Having procured the proper number of syllables, he considers he has discharged his responsibility. The rhyth mical disposition of them never enters into his calculations. He places his syli►bles in much the same order as chessmen are placed on the board, and his rows of words succeed each other with the same mechanical regu- (6) Peace. A Poem. Dedicated, by permission, to the Right Hon. Viscount Palmerston. By Thomas Henry Stirling, Eaci., Barrister•at•Law. London : Hall, Virtue, and Co.