The Sun.
London, England, 1860-05-16 00:00:00

DR. MACKAIW NEW POEM.

A Man's Heart. A Poem in Seven Cantos. By
Charles Mackay, LL.D. Smith, Elder, and
Company.
It is as refreshing as " sunshine in a shady
place" to come upon a love-story in blank verse, in
this noble but arid and noisy age of ours, which, if
it is essentially anything, is beyond all manner of
doubt or contradiction essentially utilitarian, If
we remember rightly, the last time we listened to
the voice of Charles Mackay, as a song-writer, he
sang to us, as poet should, " Under Green Leaves."
Since then his path has trended in the direction of
that huge, busy, worldly republic on the other side
of the Atlantic, where one of our later humourists
has declared that he always pictured to himself
the people of the U-nited States bowing to us across
a long counter, extending due north and south,
along the whole range of their seaboard. From
this transatlantic voyagin g Dr Mackay brought back
with him two pleasant volumes of prose, in which he
afforded all the "Gentlemen of England who stay at
home at ease," some delightful glimpses of " Life
and Liberty in America." Scarcely have those
two ♦olumes run into their second edition, when
the author of " Egeria," and of we don't know how
many more volumes of melodious poetry, vindicates
anew his right to the title of a true songster, not
of your mere verse-maker, of which there are many,
but of apoeta naseitur, of which there are but few.
Charles Mackay's rank and position as a song-writer
—as one of those potent ballad-makers of the people
that Fletcher of Saltoun sighed to be—have certainly
not now-a-days to be indicated. He has long since
taken each—the rank and the position are now both
of them assured to him, and are widely recognised. As
Longfellow's " Excelsior" has sounded like a clarion
of encouragement far and wide through this genera-
tion, so also have many of the inspiriting ditties of
Mackay reverberated through the hearts- of the
million either as incentives or as consolations. Many
stanzas that he first syllabled have long ago come to be
" familiar in our mouths as household word"—part
and parcel of our everyday vernacular. There are
lines of his—there are whole songs of his, that have
become at last so hackneyed as to be almost unquot-
able. " The Good Time Coming," for example, with
its refrain of "Wait a Little Longer." Thousands
of emigrants have gone forth from the Old 'World
to the New heartened by his " Cheer, Boys, Cheer"
—to the sound of which choral song, too, regiments
have marched to battle in the Crimea and in Hin-
dostan. Enough, however, in these few words in
regard to Dr. Mackay's past metrical achievements.
What we have now briefly to do with, more parti-
cularly, is this, the latest of his now numerous con-
tributions to our poetic literature. A Man's
Heart is sung in it—and sings. The poem is
written, as we have said, in blank verse, and is a
love story. The love story, itself simple enough
and easily told, not in any way intricate or ela-
borated. A tale so simple in itself that one might
speak of it as one reads in the immortal CAROL, of
that old familiar tune played by Scrooge's neice
upon a famous Christmas evening—" a simple little
air—a mere nothing : you might learn to whistle
it in two minutes." So here of the love story related
in " A Man's Heart," it is the old, old story—
a story as old as. Life itself or Death--and yet
one, old and familiar though it is, that ever somas
home freshly to A Man's Heart or to a woman's
either, and is always welcome there to the ♦ery
last. We are not going to enumerate here in
heartless prose the incidents of this little love story
sung as it is for any one's listening to, in the fluent
and harmonious blank verse of Dr. Mackay. It
will be sufficient to mention merely that the tale
of Love like that of Life has " seven stages"—de
picted here in as many cantos. That here too love
opens as life does (in childhood) " Among the
Flowers." That the love passes on as the life does
(in youth) " Under the Trees." That in the third
canto it is borne " Far Away"—in the fourth is
plunged into " Sorrow"—in the fifth rises into
"Hope"--in the Sixth higher, into " Happiness"—
in the seventh, and last, soaring away etherialized
and beatified (through death) into " Love Eternal."
Whether Dr. Mackay meant the allegory or not as
here indicated—it is there—in this volume of his
sonorous and richly modulated blank verse recount-
ing the loves and griefs, the lives and deaths, of
Arthur Westwood and—Edith Bellenden ! We
have hesitated thus, or rather loitered over the
utterance of the name of Dr. Mackay's poetic
heroine because it comes to us distinctly, (but we
believe quite inadvertently) as the echo of the very
name of Sir Walter's heroine of romance in " Old
Mortality." Inadvertently though the name is
here echoed, the readers of " A Man's
Heart" will only have reason to thank
Dr. Mackay henceforth for the additional
charms he has thrown over the now doubly wel-
come and familiar grace of Edith Bellenden.
Turning, however, from the plot of this little love
story and its leading charaoters to the mere
manner in which the former is related and the
latter celebrated, let us say at once in a few words
that Dr. Mackay's blank verse is singularly varied
in the rhythmic alternations of its harmonious
flow. Occasionally, perhaps, there appears to a
fastidious ear too great a partiality for what
ought to be indulged in but seldom in metrical
compositions, what might be termed in so many syl-
lables an ellipsis of articulation. It is by an admitted
poetic license, however, that this ellipsis is allowable
in prosody. It is only when indulged in overmuch
that it can at all be objected to as in any way
reprehensible. Here, however, is a delicious
morsel from the second canto of this charm-
ing love poem, a fragment presented by us to our
readers by way of appetising quotation. A glimpse
has just been caught of the levers in early youth
in all the freshness of their sweet pure love " Under
the Trees"—when their celebrant breaks forth into
the ejaculation :

" Dream on, poor children I—dream, and never wake I
In all your raptures—come they thick as flowers
That April tosses to the lap of May,
You'll never find a rapture like to this I
Dream on, poor children I dream, and fear to wake—
When sorrow looms, the memory of this hour
Shall shine like Hesper through the gathering dark,
And you shall say--' Once in the days of youth
We had a vision and a glimpse of Heaven I
Once in the morning of our cloudy day
There gushed upon us overpowering joy,
Keen as rao lightning flash, and lost as soon
Lot us be grateful—we have lived and loved,
Tasted ambrosia, feasted with the gods I
Was it a dream ?—What more is Cresar's throne,
Or groat Napoleon's, when the end is come?—
Was it a dream ?—Could we such dream renew,
And brush away from our enchanted land
h o dust and cobwebs of reality,
We'd sleep once more, and never ask to wake.' "
There are separate lines, too, in the poem that
cling to our remembrance—as that one depicting
the smile of Arthur's father—
" The silvery radiance of a mind at ease."
The " very age and body of the time," also, are
casually reflected here and there from the page of

Dr. Mackay—as where, with an eye askance (one
might fancy it), now to the Rifle Corps movement,
now (almost—one could oddly conjecture) to the
struggle for the championship, we read—
" The ancient land's astir with noble life,
And all the great athlette of the time,
Gird on their armour."
Exquisite, surely, in its every touch, is this inciden-
tal sketch of an Exquisite, as humorously limned
as any one of the adroitest pencillings by Leech—
" And a smooth cousin of the Earl deceased,
A captain in the Guards, with whiskers huge,
Who could not speak without a burst of slang,
And smoked from morn's first dawn till evening's close,
And seemed to have no aim or end of life
But to consume tobacco—thought one day,
Between two whiffs—while shaving—that he'd make
Great sacrifice, and give himself away.
That Edith would accept him, could he doubt ?
But she refused him, and he answered Haw r
And smoked no longer for a round half•hour.
And then recovering consciousness and peace,
He smoked again as briskly as before,
And thought, betwixt two other long-drawn whiffs,
What an escape he'd had from slavery
To apron-strings ; and then said ' Haw I' again,
Half vexed, half satisfied, and sore perplexed ;
But still in confidence to his sweet self."
Immediately before this we have read of Edith in
her musings about her erstwhile lover (Arthur) in
the cottage of the Westwoods

" Here she often went
And sat upon the chairs where he had sat,
And saw his name inscribed upon the wall,
Entwined in hers, with true-love knots between.
From the same window out of which he'd gazed
Upon the lovely landscape spread below
She looked, and found a pleasure in the sight.
And when the blackbird in the hawthorn grove
Sang joyous, said she to herself, That song
Pleased him in other days, and pleases me.'
Amid the ivy clustering to the roof
Darted the swallows ; he had watched their flight
In melancholy noons, and so would she.
To the green sward beneath the window-sill
A frequent visitor, for charity,
Came the bold robin; and she gave the dole
To the blithe beggar with the glittering eye,
Because he gave it—steward of his alms.
She trimmed the rose-trees in the garden-walk,
Because he trimmed them in the happy days
When he believed in her, and in himself.
She nurtured sorrow by a thousand arts,
And fed it with a thousand sympathies,
And was repaid, because she thought of him."
It is a tender, graceful record of most tender and
most graceful recollections. One of the two dainty
songs given by Charles Mackay to the sound of his
familiar lyre—in two momentary pauses in the
organ-chaunt of his blank verse—we must give by
way of a concluding quotation. And it is the
daintier of the two (to our mind) that we have
selected, Edith's companion Rose being the singer :
How could I tell that death was there ?
I shot mine arrow in the air,
And knew not of the bonnie bird
Singing aloft, unseen, unheard,
Oh, idle aim
Oh, sorrow and shame !
0 a'rrow, that did my heart the wrong !
It slew the bird, it hushed the song

How could I tell its fatal power ?
I breathed a word in Beauty's Bower,
And knew not, most unhappy boy,
What charm was in it to destroy;
Oh, idle breath I
Oh, shaft of death !
Oh, fatal word which I deplore,
It slew my peace for evermore
It is a little plaintive lore song—this—deserving
the fate doubtless destined for it, that of being sung
by many a fair songstress (besides Dr. Mackay's
" Rose in the rose-bud garden of girls") to the
harmonising chords of a piano accompaniment. The
book itself, too, from which it is our latest extract,
will also doubtless in its turn (happy destiny for a
poet's volume) be not unfrequently a gage d'amour
from lover to lover, in token, of course, that A
Man's Heart has within it mucatent music, among
its fibrous labyrinths many heart-strings trembling
to the touch melodiously.