The Sun.
London, England, 1836-06-17 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

MOUNTAIN DECAMERON-3 VoLs.
Bentley . London, 1836.

The author of these volumes, a gentleman by name
Downes, has, in treating of Welch scenery, manners,
customs, legends, tk..e6, broken neatly, if not quite, un-
ttollen ground. nefice his " INiotintain Decameron" is
full of life and no'reity i mid will come on the experi-
enced tYcQhrettder quite like a surprise. The stirring
legends, and stern, domestic tragedies of homely
Welch life, which form the staple of his volumes,
would seem to have been penned on the spot, while
the feelings which they called forth were yet fresh in
the author's mind—so vivid are the colourings in
which he has pourtrayed them, and so impassioned
and truth-like their character. Another recommenda-
tron of the "Decameron” is its utter absence of anything
like literary tact or mechanism. Mr. Downes has
nothing of the practised book-maker about him ; he
does not wire-draw his incidents ; or indulge in melo-
dramatic surprises ; but trusts to nature for effect,
who—as she always does to those who place a lively
faith in her impulses—carries him handsomely through.
Our impressio❑ on reading these volumes, is that the
author is a man of a vigorous and imaginative turn of
mind,who thinks for himself, and writes from the prompt-
ings of his own heart. But though he possesses much
of the poetical temperament, yet strange to say, he
makes sad work with his poetry, mistaking mysticism
for sublimity, quaintness for fancy, and affectation for
feeling. Out of some ten or a dozen poems which are
scattered throughout the " Decameron," we have been
able only to discover four good lines, which occur in
some stanzas on the Ocean. In justice to Mr. Downes

we subjoin them :
" What knells for broken hearts these waves have tolled !
Eternal partings sob in this low roar !
Some hope of hearts which but that one consoled,
Thy every night.storm blasts on every shore !"
The lines marked in italics appear to us eminently
beautiful. But if our author's poetry be indifferent,
his prose is quite the reverse. It is bold, rough, and
racy, and remarkable for the felicity of its epithets
and metaphors. Thus, speaking of a wife who was
constantly miserable because her bed was barren, Mr.
Downes says of her, that she fancied her husband's
eye " turned coldly on her, and her unoccupied bosom."
A young, enthusiastic scholar in love with an artless
Welch girl of good family is described as " feeding in
solitude on the white beauty of her idea ;" and a sea-
storm is thus graphically painted :—" The echoes of the
tremendous falls of the broad sea's sweep, lashing the
rock beach on the seaward side of the Great Orme,
were like thunderclaps run into one another ; and the
real thunder of the sky, shut up by clouds as by mighty
folding doors hung with mourning, already came groan-
ing from the distance." In sketching scenery, our
author evidently takes Crabbe for his model ; as the
following extract which has all his force and literalness
will show :

"On each side, a marbled expanse of the finest sand
stretches away yellowing in the gold light of a summer morn-
ing. No horrid depth of black mud (half smothering you in
imagination with its mere look) here scowls on the retrocession
of the sea. As we stand on the edge of the sea-river, a crowd
of mountain tops is in lofty distance before us, rolled up yet in a
night of their own, but grimly yielding to the broad morning
laugh of the whole sea firmament, of June blue. Close beside
us, all is home-felt beauty. The little ferry-house, the patter.
ing of a sea at play with real green banks ; all that a quiet
eye can desire, to transmit a sympathetic quietude to the heart,
in the way of scenery, is here. Meadows, a little marsh ground,
wild wood, and green sward heights, lowing cows, bleating
lambs, singing bare-foot girls among them all, and that smiling,
heaving, half sea, half river, are all that meet eye or ear."
The introduction of the " singing, barefoot girls"
greatly assists the life and animation of this glowing
landscape. But Mr. Downes has loftier qualities than
those of a picturesque landscape painter. He is a man
of deep and, at times, even original powers of thought,
to which he gives fit utterance in eloquent and impas-
sioned language. The subjoined apostrophe is put
into the mouth of a philosophical Recluse, grey in years
and disappointed in hopes, who is musing at night by
a sea-coast abounding in ruins :
" If man be a worm, a grain of these sands, a nothing in the
universe, man's woes also are nothing. Does my heart bleed
or quake for the coming ills of my country ? I know, I see,
where will be its place presently in this dumb, eternal revolution
of the kingdoms of the creation—with Balbec in the desert ?
Is my blood boiling with some wrong inflicted on me by my
brother worm ? I come to this eloquent wilderness of waves
as to a solemn wood for meditation, and it tells me that I have
only tofold my arms, smile at the injurious wretch, and wait;
for he is already dying Time is bringing up my enemy to
judgment. Mortality has already on his ghastly head the
sable coif, the token of his death-doom being about to be
read, and while I cry Revenge,' behold, I am crying against
ashes—a shadow—a nothing ! Why should I gnaw my own
heart because I do not obtain the distinction which I fancy due
to my gifts among men ? I think what man is ; I handle a dead
bone, firm and unperished yet, and learn that even these brittle
cancelli of its marrow-cells, have survived all the generations
of mankind not born ; that the primeval giant-beast its owner,
was in his living strength, while man was yet in Lis clod ; was
breathing before that clay was breathed into by the spirit of his
Maker ; ere it caught the fearful privilege to he ; and started
up—it heart I—a hand !—a tongue I—a brain !—to throb, to
agonize ; to work good or evil ; to pour a burning eloquence ;
to think through all God's universe, and almost to pry around
his throne. And then, ah then ! and soon, through clammy
sweats and agony, to return whence it started ; to be mastered
by a vile worm ; to lie mute as this half-animated polypus at
my feet ; to swell the festering masses that crowd this grave
I stand on."

This i. 3 finely felt and finely expressed, though we fear
the thought is of too elevated and abstract a character
to please the watering-place readers of fiction. It is
simply calculated to perplex them. Far more intelli-
gible to such readers, and equally beautiful in expres-
sions, are these reflections, which proceed from the
same thoughtful Recluse, of whom we have just made
mention. He is describing the duties which he owes
to himself in the grey evening of his existence :
"My brother-men, good night. With you, and for you, I
have lived, but now the evening of my life is stealing on me,
with its cool, its damp, its shadows; I would fain now live a
little to myself, awhile to nature, as, perhaps, soon to live to
God, and in his presence. It is better to be prepared; to
listen for the calling voice in the stillness of woods, than to be
astonished with it, as by a thunder-clap, in the forgetful revels
of cities. As on this Ystwith side, in this sweet valley, I ob-
serve preparations for the night ; the sounds of the day grow-
ing few, those fen', faint and drowsy; the harmless man just
finished folding hi• sheep, and no more to do ere he lie down,
than look awhile at that beautiful sky, and listen the first owl's
voice ; his wife heard in-doors, singing their child to sleep,
where father, mother, and child will be presently sleeping to-
gether, under that wild flowered roof—so let MC too look in-
doors. It is time to compose my agitated bosom after the stir
of life's day, to let contentious thoughts cease, and all fierce
wishes be lullabied to quiet, to deep sleep. Oh, it is well—it
is needful, this gentle, melancholy twilight to man's life!
This breathing, resting !space between two worlds—this soft
break of the transition front the world of sun to the world of
night—the grave."

There are numerous other passages in the " De-
cameron" nearly, if not quite, equal to those we have
quoted above—passages which show a deep insight
into the workings of the human heart ; which abound
in pure, healthy sensibility ; and convince us that the
author is one who, even in his most abstract specula-
tions, turns a trembling, ever watchful ear to " the
still, sad music of humanity." As regards the tales,
they are, for the most part, of a stern, tragic cast,
and occasionally repulsive in their incidents, like the
fictions of Banim—and for this reason, that Mr.
Downes, like the Irish novelist, does not draw on his
own invention, but from the domestic annals of a
semi-barbarous peasantry ; for such, in truth, were the
Welch Indigetes up to the close of the last century.
The best tale in the " Decameron" is, " The Tragical
History of Marmaduke Paull," which is throughout
worked up with uncommon power. The description
of the lone, impassioned lover's feelings, when he dis-
covers that he has formed an attachment to his own
daughter ; of the fearful struggle in his mind
when he makes the strange discovery ; of his re-
solution to commit suicide ; and of the mode in which
he sets about it —namely, by waiting the approach of
a raging sea, into .a cavern half-way up the lofty
Llandudno rocks ;—these Portions of the romance,