The Sun.
London, England, 1850-07-08 00:00:00

LITERATURE

THE SOLITARY, and OTHER POEMS. By

Charles Whitehead.
In dedicating his volume of vrrses to the Lord
Francis Lsveson Gower, Mr. Whitehead has evinced
a laudable discrimination, seeing that among all his
contemporaries scarcely any is more peculiarly quali-
fied by the due admixture of taste and scholarship to es-
timate the value of any such literary performance. W.th
many inequalities, the style ofour author is on the whole
agreeable andsatibfac tory ; and the tendency of his muse
to the mournful by why of preference to the gay,
might be conjectured scarcely less from the selection
of subject indicated by the title of his principal poem,
than the quotation from Lard Bacon affixed as a
motto to his title-page I— J. Yet, even if you listen to
David's harp, you shall hear as many hearselike airs
as carols." o:her tokens of this predilection may be
observed also among the themes of his miscellaneous
productions, in the " Dirge of Ophelia," for
example, or in the "Riddle of Life," or in the
lines commemorative of the " Death of Chattsrton."
In the last-mentioned he has had to compete, and that
not altogether unsuccessfully, with the comparisons
provoked by the famous ode of Coleridge. The first
production in the volume, " The Solitary," is penned
in the most gorgeous, but also the most artificial of all
stanzas, the Spenserian. Among the more prominent
expressions scattered through the poem, some are very
fine and others very fantastic. What, for instance,
but sheer absurdity can be detected in that line (p. 5)—
"The moon glides o'er the heaven with printless tread t"
On the contrary, the phrase is very nobly introduced
where the writer calls Chaos (p. 8.)—" Time's yes-
terday." As a fair specimen of Mr. Whitehead's
powers of scenic painting, we may transcribe the
following (p. 12):
" Laid at the foot of some old tree, whose boughs
Leafladen, bent, their soften'd shadows wed
In the clear water, on whole surface ploughs
His venturous way the midge, with trailing thread:
The dusky-spotted moth, his wiogs halt:spread,

Goes flagging drowsily across the mere,
The Druid echo slumbers overhead;
A shrunk leaf wavers down untimely sere;
No sound that silence hears but the rapt senses hear."
While the first poem in the volume is thus exclu-
sively contemplative, " The Story of Jasper
BrookP," in a different metre, wanders off directly
afterwards, and rather delightfully into the narrative.
Besides these, the readers of Mr. Whitehead will be
variously entertained by the " Ode to a River," (p.
153), reminding one of Coleridge's famous scheme of
a poem, Called " The Brook," a singular chimera in
rhyme entitled " Ippolito," and a play, in three acts,
containing some of the best things in the volume,
called " The Cavalier." The book altogether is in-
teresting as the rhythmical effusion of Charles White-
head, the romantic biographer of Richard Savage.

CAPTAIN SWORD and CAPTAIN PEN.
A Poem. By Leigh Hunt.
Our allusion to the present republication is pro-
voked principally by our estimate of the Arbitration
Movement. A third edition of any satire so popular
as this satire upon war and warriors is, by no means,
reason for surprise;; our only amazement being
that the honours of such a reprint were not long
since accorded to one of the most humane, and not
the least infelicitous of the poetical productions of
Leigh Hunt. Upon Leigh Hunt we can never
cease to look as upon one of the most genial
and delightful writers in the whole range of
has long
our modern
soiunrcelitgeariaiti
gained him
imHai sge"nSutionreyreopuf
teßaimmoinngv,
poets, as his "Feast of the Poets" had already done
among our satirists. It was natural, therefore, that
" Captain Sword and Captain Pen" should at once
have been welcomed by a multitude who regarded his
name as one fraught with the pleasantest associations—
especially seeing that, with all our hubbub about Wa-
terloo, and our illuminations about the Peninsula,
we English are not infatuated worshippers
of military glory or entirely deafened by the voice of
fame to the gentler dictates of humanity. Hence
this poetic satire was certain to acquire instant popu-
larity, celebrating as it did the peaceful triumphs of
journalism over the warlike conquests of generalship.
Tne work itself, in its details and in its completeness,
has now for several years been familiar to the popula-
tion ; consequently any critical analysis of its
peculiarities would be merely idle and sups-
rerogatory. Neither so idle or so supererogatory,
however, is the very simple remark that
these agitators of arbitration are very sad and blun-
dering plagiarists—taking to themselves a vast
amount of credit for carrying out upon a wrong
scheme altogether an idea broached many summers
back by the poetic and sagacious hand of Leigh
Hunt. To him is due the praise monopolised by
these political adventurers who, like the Knight of La
Mancha, are mistaking Quixotism for Chivalry.
Leigh Hunt, with the intuitive keenness
of a poet, recognised how it was that
war might best be done away with—not by
preposterous schemes for the premature disband-
tnent of armies, but by exciting a horror against the
atrocities of battle, and by tearing the mask of pomp
from the hideous front of carnage. It was from his
judicious recognition of this necessity that Mr. Hunt
penned this vigorous fiction of death and glory, where
Captain Sword gains his last victory, while
" Sneereth the trumpet and stampeth the drum."
As a wholesome corrective to a merely fantastic
and bootless agitation, we are gratified to welcome
the third edition of a powerful and persuasive satire.

Translated

HERMAN AND DOROTHEA.
from the German of Goethe.
A charming version of this very exquisite poem is
here before us—the German hexameters being dex-
terously and melodiously rendered by the translator
into English hexameters. Any thing further than an
incidental comment on the faithfulness with which
this masterpiece of the genius of Goethe has been " done"
into our mother tongue, were a preposterous deprecia-
tion of the popularity acquired in this country by the
great poet of Germany. " Herman and Dorothea,"
dedicated in nine books to the nine muses—the first
book to Calliope, the second to Terpsichore, and so
on to Thalia, Euterpe, Polyhymnia, Clio, Erato,
Melpomene, and Urania, presents to the imagination
one of the loveliest pictures of domestic life, and
household affection, and pastoral courtship, ever
painted by the hand of a great master. Who that
has once read it, can ever forget mine host
of the Golden Lion, or his thrifty house-
wife, or the selfish surgeon, or the good-
natured pastor? Who can ever lose a recollection of
Herman himself, or of his glorious Dorothea? The
scene between Herman and his mother under the
pear tree (no wonder Goethe could never read it for
weeping !)—the description of the vineyard and the
garden surrounding the tavern—the account of the
procession of fugitive exiles—the encounter at last of
the long-talked-of Dorothea in person—her approach
at night, with Herman, to the house where his family
are waiting for him—their preliminary contention
and ultimate reconcilement are all sketched
with the warm and glowing colours belonging
only to the very highest order of ge-
nius. How felicitously the translator has caught
the spirit of the original may be perceived from the
manner in which he has rendered that celebrated
passage opening book the seventh :
"As the wandering traveller, shortly before the sun's
setting,
Gazes upon the full orb, too soon from his eight disap-
pearing,
Until his eye the bright image retains and constantly
sees it,
Or in the gloom of the thicket, or on the face of the
mountain.
Dancing before him and glancing and waving in
glorious colours;
Se, to the fancy of Herman, the magical form of the
Maiden
Sweetly appeared, and it seem'd the path of the corn-
field to f Mow.
Bat from the startling dream he awoke, and unto the
yet did his wanderin
village
S I •
f)
Onceaw
nl
as ior
e
wended
picture
be-
fore him. her;—this time it was no
illusion,
It was herself, and she bai in her hand a large and a
upon
Steadfastly gazed be
small crock; thef° Maiden°tstP Ps'•g
standing in beauty
Holding each by the handle, she busily went to the
fountain."
Here too is the famous description of her appearance
able to single her out from all
" ReVily will you be
others, to find one like her in figure.
For %arum a difficult task .
(Ant out something to guide
as given by Herman in book the fifth:—
Yet of her neat attire I'll p
you:—
figure,
Pi
And ettily laced,
b oad reddice stomachercolse
fitting, within which rises in
her fair round throat
a small plaits, black
adornin.
ad and the shape a delicate
Free mad bright is Ler he ,
Linen of purest whitene3s,

oval;
Manifold braids of her hair are twined round the bod-
kins of silv, r ;
Ample and blue are her skirts from the stomacher
gracefully falling,
Pkying around her footsteps, and shapely ancles die-
closing."
Earnestly do we hope that the translator may be in •
s
duced to carry out the intention hinted at, at the
close of his very interesting and intelligent " Intro-
ductiong
submittingn
i ,Luie to
thae pssuobrk-
wi
l i
ah
e :
" as
is a w
i
ma morotheally suggested
Giihe—ththe
idea of " Herman and D
at
idea having been perfected in its present form under
9i l n
r versione
ell
the encouraging gaze of Schiller. To the anonymous
kthatn c
%,v f
ii : ;s i
f Vossi
translator of this very delicious poem the English
public are as much indebted for their introduction
1 to Dorothea, as they were already to Mr. Carlyle
for their acquaintance with the angelic illignos the

sprightly Philina, the sombre Aurelia, the beautiful
Amazon, the bewitching Countess, and that most
loveable but capricious of the female creations of
Goethe, the actreis Marianna.

ONE HUNDRED SONNETS.
Frank Lott.
The genuine affection for poetry which is evidenced
by the mere publication of this little volume, of
itself propitiates us strongly in its favour. Some of
the fragments contained in it may perhaps be recog-
nized as having already appeared in our columns ; and
hence we cannot but have some interest in the
sonnets, although personally, in every way,
total strangers to the sonnetteer. Mr. Lott
must, one would opine, be fully qualified
to appreciate the renown of Petrarch, seeing that he
has dedicated his powers solely to that peculiar form
of reflective and erotic poetry in the cultivation of
which the bard of Laura acquired his literary immor-
tality. Yet it must not be imagined by any means
that the author of these one hundred sonnets is an
imitator in all things. In his manner he has followed
Petrarch, but whatever his thoughts are, they
are his own, and sometimes fine thoughts they
are too, and truly poetic. Nor has he
blundered in selecting the sonnet as the
mode in which those ideas should be conveyed ; for
assuredly the sonnet cannot be regarded as a style of
composition inappropriate to the language, seeing
that the English tongue has been adorned by the
sonnets of Milton, and, in our own time, by those of
`Wordsworth. As a token of the revival of a poetic
taste among the masses, we hail the appearance of
these sonnets by Henry Frank Lott, even though they
number up one hundred.

By henry

POEMS ORIGINAL AND TRANSLATED.
By W. G. T. Barter.
We take Mr. Barter to be a sort of poetic wag—
fond of perpetrating literary eccentricities. Other-
wise never should we have seen this volume of metri-
cal effusions, preceded by a pert little preface, avow-
ing in its first line that "Poetry is a drug, and a
Preface a bore." Among the translated pieces we
find the first book of Homer's Iliad—so bald, so lean,
so literal, that such a translator would infallibly
have tingled under the birch rather than
the bays in the " good old times " of
scholastic flaggellation. Among the original
compositions we observe one entitled " Aberrations of
Genius," and should be disposed to attribute the pre-
sent book to one of those same aberrations, but that we
cannot in any one of these leaves detect the
smallest modicum of that same genius. The subject
of the first poem in the volume is a sort of scrambling
ode "To a Cricket ;" it only serves to remind us,
however, that we are anything but as merry as a
cricket by the time we arrive at the conclusion.

THE MYSTERY OF TIME.
Fancy a small duodecimo pamphlet stitched up in
a fly cover of crimson paper, consisting altogether of
sixty-eight pager, and purporting to be a poem un-
der the above appalling title, in four cantos Fancy,
all this in blank verse, very blank verse indeed, be-
ginning with a conjunction, ending with a sudden
" pull up," split into divisions with little clusters of
asterisks, and preceded by the subjoined announce-
ment :—" Notice to the reader ! The reader is re-
quested to observe, that wherever asterisks occur an
indefinite period of time is supposed to have elapsed."
Fancy all this, and you may have some idea of the
" Mystery of Time." We know very well that not
only did Milton write a poem on " Paradise Lost,"
but that Blackinore wrote one also on the " Creation ;"
and we remember, too, that Dr. Johnson preferred
the " Creation "to " Paradise Lost." That was
going far enough in all conscience ; yet we wonder
if any Johnson of our generation will prefer the
author of the " Mystery of Time" to Blackmorel