The Press.
London, England, 1856-08-30 00:00:00

CONTEMPORARY POETRY.

A LARGE collection of poetry we were unable to
notice in detail, has accumulated on our hands for
some months past. We propose, therefore, at this
time, when we have more space at our disposal, to
offer some observations on the character of this spe-
cies of composition, of which we have annually
so large a crop.
When critics assure us that the progress of civili-
sation is fatal to poetry, they usually fail to crnvince,
because th.-y attribute undue weight to the influence
of mechanical inventions. It is true that life is less
pregnant than of old with adventures of a particular
kind—that it is less romantic and less picturesque—
that its virtues, perhaps, are less splendid, while its
vices are more ignoble. It is true that both heroism
and villany are removed a step furthEr back from the
popular gaze, and that the influence they once e 'ter-
cised on the imagination of mankind is weakened by
the intervention of secondary agencies. These are
positions which, perhaps, cannot be impugned, not-
withstanding both the fervour of benevolence and
the audacity of wickedness which individuals among
us have recently displayed. Flora M'Donald will
always be a more poetical character than Florence
Nightingale, though there can be no comparison
between the greatness of their actions ; and Claude
Duval than William Palmer, though in nerve
and skill the latter was probably the superior.
Those persons who endeavour to persuade us into
a conviction of the poetry of a steam engine and a
diving-bell, fall into a graver error than those who
see in these discoveries the sole cause of its decline.

It is not on this account alone, or even primarily,
that civilisation is injurious to poetry. Were this
so, we should at the present day have no poetry at
all. There still are, and will continue to be while
the world lasts, inexhaustible materials for poetry.
External nature, the human passions, and the vicissi-
tudes of fortune, are still the same. But the truth
seems to be that high intellectual cultivation, com-
bined with a general diffusion of material conve-
niences, is not favorable to the formation of a
healthy school of poetry. It stimulates the growth
of sentiment, while it checks the expansion of
energy. Men's minds are turned in upon them-
selves, a process by which few are gainers ; their
own sensations and fancies become magnified in
their own eyes. The perception of poetical beauty
is mistaken for the presence of poetical genius. The
constant study of the subjective writers supplies
them with a copious vocabulary. Their own pleas-
ing " self•communings" are committed to paper.
Friends applaud, and the result is the annual publi-
cation of some thousands of verses, which sometimes
please by their metrical smoothness, but much
oftener weary us by the obscurity or absence of
meaning, by the triteness of their metaphors, and,
worse than all, by the eternal self•importance of the
writer.

Poets of course there are of high and fine genius,
from whom this process of self-analysis has drawn
forth streams of the most exquisite sweetness and
purity. But the small fry of poetasters who copy
them are worse than the copyists of any other
school.

The first volume on our list—Vestigia (1), by One
of the Million—is of a very mixed character. The
author no doubt possesses a considerable share of
that taste for poetry which we have remarked so
often leads a man to mistake himself for a poet.
There is a great deal of good sense in one of his
prose essays, called " Taste and Critique of the
Million," in which he advocates the adoption of a
manly and lucid style in poetry, and comments with
severity on the extravagancies of "Anglo-German
ism." But he can scarcely be said to carry out his
own precepts. Witness the following :

(1) rank*. By One of the Million. Saundeze and Otley.

SATURDAY,

BEAUTY BELOVED BY DEATH.
The young birds are wild with mirth
When the sun is high;
But wilder notes hail the birth
Of the storm from the sky.
The joylighted heart, through glee,
Must share with the eye its light;
But brighter that glance would be,
Were the heart then sunk in night.
Lovely are groves when Spring
Wakes from her sleep ;
But lovelier far when birds take wing,
And the blasts of Autumn sweep.
Deep is the crimson glow
On the brow of yet cradled Day;
But deeper at eve her blushes grow,
Ere in darkness she dies away.
And so on through several more stanzas. Now, the
very title of this poem is a misnomer. If it is any-
thing, the burden of it is Death beloved by Beauty,
and not Beauty by Death. But did anything ever
read more like a parody of Mr. Bunn? The writer
is labouring with some idea of his own which his
mind cannot grasp with distinctness, and which is
accordingly enunciated in these crude and shapeless
words. There cannot, perhaps, be a better test of a
true poet than the clearness of his imagery. The
absence of this is a pretty sure sign that an author
is trying to be what Nature never meant him for;
and that he is entirely wanting in the special ccn-
stitution of a poet.
The Shadow of the Yew (2), and d Summer Day-
dream (3), are both volumes which contain passages
of considerable merit. Yet both, we must add,
belong to the same species of poetry as the last.
The first is rather egotistic, and is, moreover, too
servile an imitation of Mr. Tennyson. Stilt the ines
on Lord Raglan's funeral are pretty, and " Woodland
Reveries " and " Spring Flowers " show some obser-
vation of nature which Mr. Yonge might cultivate to
advantage. " A Summer Day-dream " we like best.
It is thoroughly unws‘uming and unaffected, the
versification is always musical and sometimes vigo-
rous, and the turn of thought and the rhythm occa-
sionally remind us of Mrs. Hennans. The longest
poem in the volume, from which it derives its name,
is not the most favorable example of the author's
powers—it is somewhat obscure ; nor is the moral of
the story striking in proportion to the machinery
employed. But of the shorter pieces, " The Tower
on the Rocks," "The Work of War," and " Wild
Flowers," will be agreeable to all admirers of soft and
fluent rhymes. We quote a portion of the last. After
a pleasant description of the flowers themselves, and
the spot where they grew, the writer continues:—
I wondered why in that lonely place
Those beautiful flowers grew,
Flourishing far from the human race,
And hidden from mortal view,
And I cried, " why bloom ye, flowers fair,
And why do ye smile, oh why?
Why waste your sweets on the desert air,
Unseen by mortal eye?"
And the lily raised her drooping head,
And the wild bird stopt his song;
And the modest woodbine softly said,
" Do flowers to man belong ? "
" What boots it to us, through the forest glade
That never a mortal trod
That ye never come to the greenwood shade,'
To behold the works of God?
We have no time for thoughts of gloom
That oppress the soul of man ;
Our only thought is now to bloom
As sweetly as we can.
For he who gives us all things good,
The rain and the sun to cheer,
Planted us in this lonely wood,
And bade us blossom here I "

Of the Mystic (4) we can only say that we have
tried in vain to understand Mr. Bailey's design, and
experience very little inclination to renew the attempt.
Such an effort would awaken in us sensations very
much akin to those of the charity boy when he bad
got to the end of the alphabet. Who and what is the
Mystic ? God or man ? What is it that he is
represented as doing ? These are questions in
limine, and till they are answered all criticism would
be idle. In the meantime we can only express
our disapprobation of Mr. Bailey's treatment of the
English language, and his employment of such
terms as " godlings," " aselline starlets," " glode,"
" penumbral," " bever," and plenty more, which,
without the context, would be unintelligible. His
imitations of Milton are 80 palpable that we presume
they are intentional. They are exhibitions of
cumbrous pedantry, without the great poet's vigour
which enabled him to walk upright with his burden.
We subjoin some choice specimens from the
" Mystic :"
Alms gave he, as an alchemist, whose gold
Flows inexhaustless, or whose pearly draught
The potable perpetuity of life

(2) The Shadow of the Yew. By Norm►n Yonge. Saunders
and Otley.

(9) A §aostoser Day-dream By Theta. Saunders and Otlev.
(4) The Mystic, and other Poem. By Philip Jamas Bailey,
Author of " Pastas." Chapaim awl

ATIOVST 30, 1856.

Vouched to its proud possessor ; till at last
As man, the errant babe, intent on death,
In orbital aphelion with his sire,
Back to the irresistible bosom of love
Wheels his precipitous foot, and with a smile,
Foreseeing his apotheosis there,
Bounds to embrace the beauty infinite;
So he, divinely rooted in the world,
And lifting into life his facial flower,
Back to the pre-eternals called of God,
Passed, disappearing in the essential heavens.
Again :
Initiate, mystic, perfected, epopt,
Illuminate, adept, transcendent, he
Ivy like, lived, and died, and again lived,
Resnscitant. On high his nest he wove
In the strange tree whereof man first was made,
Whose roots reached down to hell, whose topmost
bough
• Waves its bright leaflets in the airs of heaven,
And com.nuned with the universal life,
Beloved of lightrting for its kindred birth,
That vivifies its veins ; until pos4essed
Of all that could be known, the whole he knew;
Cropped where they grew the flowers of learning,
mused
Tn meadowy beds, and bright with fragrant dew.
Carving with glyphic art immortal runes,
That rule the reluctant spirits of the dead,
On living wood, with primal matter oned,
Which breedeth still betimes celestial fruit,
Ile, arrow-like, launched forth—heaven is a bow

The chord whereof is earth—and charmed his way
Led by prismatic clue through spheres and skies,
Fire, ice, and scalding venom•floods of hell,
To prove all sacred truth within himself;
To test all holy virtues ; and to know
The sovereign Master of the Universe,
Who hallowing, blessed his hemispheral aim.
The following might have found a place among the
Rejected Addresses :
The angels wrought the mountains, bulk by bulk,
And chain by chain, serrated or escarped,
Or coal-red burning from Vulcanian forge ;
Hekla and Mouna Roa and Auvergne;
Tuxtla; and Tongarari, southwards isled ;
By savages beset, who deem when dead,
Their chieftain's eyes translated into stars ;
Andes and Himalaya's heavenly heights ;
Dhawalaghies pinnacle supreme,
And Chuquibamba's cone of roseate snow;
The hill Altaic named the almighty god,
By Tchndic tribelets of the age of mounds;
Higher than lark can soar, or falcon fly,
Cloudlet, or visible vapour scud, it stands;
Oared, and Balkan; Alp, and Alp pennine;
The magnet mountain which directeth earth,
Brainlike, ensconced beneath her snowy crown ;
Lupata's mighty spine; Lamalmon's pass,
O'ertoppling ; Abba Yaret's glittering peak;
Ankobar's, Medra's ranges; all that ring
The desert heart of slave land, or thence stretch
To the Cape of Storms, and lion of the sea ;
And Erebus antarctic, fenced with ice.
There are about eighty pages of this kind of writing.
Mr. Bailey, we presume, lives in a world of his own
—" perfected, epopt, and illuminate," like his own
hero. We cannot sympathise with his raptures—
Which only heads refined from reason know.
But he is doubtless very happy in the centre of his
own creations, and as they seem perfectly innocuous,
perhaps he could not employ himself better.
Mr. Mackay (5), as the world well knows, is a
skilful versifier, and in some of his popular songs
has not fallen far short of the standard of true
poetry. He is by no means obnoxious to the same
charges which in the commencement of this article
we brought against a particular class of minor
writers. We gladly admit that his claims are much
higher than theirs. But we do not think the
" Lump of Gold," or any of the other poems in the
present volume, will add to his reputation. The in-
cidents of the first mentioned are commonplace,
and the language and versification of them all are
polished till the substance is worn away.
The Spirits of the Past (6) is a painstaking
and carefully-elaborated poem, containing sketches
in verse of various celebrated characters, both male
and female, from Cain and Helen down to Napoleon
Buonaparte and Lady Jane Grey. Mr. Mitchell's
style of composition does not provoke criticism. He
certainly does not write poetry, but he is a man of
sense and simplicity, and free from the affectation
and morbid self-consciousness we have felt it our
duty to denounce. Much interesting information
may be gleaned from this volume, without the
reader's taste receiving any offence, or his sense of
the ridiculous any stimulant.
Goethe has said that the prevalence of a subjec-
tive tone in poetry is a symptom of the decline of the
art. Such a tone is certainly the predominant one
at present; and such a tone is ever likely to prevail
where literature has so much artificial aliment, and
manly energy so few opportunities of development.
What may be the future of English poetry we retrain

(5) The Lump of Gold. By Charles Mackay. Routiedge
and Co.
(111) its Qf the Past. By Nicholas Michell William Tegg
and Co.