Bradford reporter. [volume] (Towanda, Pa.) 1844-1884, 1855-02-24

with satire or panegyric He it was who first
made Public Opinion a power in the State by
condensing it into song. The invention of
printing, by weakening the faculty of memory,
and by transferring the address of language
from the ear to the eve, has lessened the imme-
diate power of the poet. A newspaper may be
suppressed, an editor may be silenced every
copy Of an obnoxious book NAV be DESTROYED,
but in those old days when the minstrels were
a power, a verse could wander safely from heart
to heart to heart and from hamlet to hamlet
as unassaiable as the memories on which it was
imprinted. Its force was in its impersonalitv,
for Public Opinion is disenchanted the moment
it is indivdualized and is terrible only so long
as it is the opinion of no one in partcular.-
Find its author, and the huge shadow which
but now darkened half the heaven, shrinks like
genius of the Arabian Story into the compass
of leaden casket which one can hold in his
hand Nowadays, one knows the editor per-
haps, and so is on friendly terms with public
opinion. You may have dined with it yester-
day, rubbed shoulders with it in the omni-
bus today-nay, carried it in your pocket
embodied in the letter Of the special CORES
pondent
Spencer in his prose tract upon Ireland has
left perhaps the best description possible of the
primitive poet, as he was everywhere when the
copies OF poem were so many living men, and
all publication was to the accompaniment of
music He says there is amongst the Irish
certain kind Of people called bards which are
to them instead of poets, whose profession is to
set forth the praises or dispraises Of men in
their poems or rhythms: the which are held in
such high regard or esteem amongst them that
none dare dispease them for fear of running
into reproach through this offence, and to be
made infamous in the mouths of all men," Nor
was the sphere of the bards confined to the pre-
sent alone. They were also the embodied
memory of the people. It was on wings of
verse that that the names of ancestral heroes
could float down securely lover broad tracts Of
desert time, and across the gulfs of oblivion
And poets were sometimes made use of by sa-
gaciouS rulers to make legends serve political
purpose. The Persian poet Firdusi is a remar-
kable instance of this. Virgil attempted also
to braid together the travelled ends of Roman
and Greek tradition and it is not impossible
that the minstrels Of the Norman metrical ro-
mances were guided by an instinct somewhat
similar
But the position of the inhabitants of Eng
land was a peculiar one The SaNons by their
conversion to Christianity, and the Normans
still more by their conversion and change of
language, were almost wholly cut off from the
past. The few fragments of the Celtic race
were the only natives of Britain who had an
antiquity. The English properly so-calIed were
people who hardly knew their own grandfathers.
they no longer spoke the language, believed in
the religion, or were dominated by the ideas of
their ancestors
English writer's demand Of Us a national lit
eraturc But where, for thirteen centuries was
their own? Our ancestors brought past with
them to Plymouth; they claimed descent from
a great race; the language they spoke had been
ennObled by recording the triumphs of ancestral
daring and genius; it had gone up to Heaven,
waited on the red wings of martyr-fires: moth
ers hushed their newborn babes, and priests
scattered the farewell earth upon the colin-lid
with words made sweet or sacred by ilnmemo-
rial association. But the NOrmans when they
landed in England were q new race of armed
men almost as much cut off from the influences
Of the past as those which sprang out of the
ground at the sowing of the dragons teeth
They found there Il Saxon encampment occu-
pying a country strange to them also. Forwe
must remember that though Britain was hStOri-
caly old, England was not, and it was as i'm
possible to piece the histories of the two to-
gether to make national record OF, as it would
be for us to persuade ourselves into feeling of
continental antiquity by adopting the Mexican
annals
The ballads are the first truly national poe
try in our language, and national poetry is not
that either of the draWing-roOm OF the kitchen.
1t is the common mOthcr-carth of the universal
sentiment that the foot of the poet must touch,
through which shall steal up to heart and brain
that fine virtue which puts him in sympathy,
not with his class, but with his kind.
Fortunately for the ballad-makcrs they were
not cncumbered with any useless information.
They had not wit enough to lose their way
1t is only the greatest brains and the most in
tense imagination that can fuse learning into
one substance with their own thought and feel
ing, and so interpenetrate it with MemSGters that
the acquired is as much thcy as the native
The ballad-makers had not far to seek for ma
| terial Thc shipwreck, the runaway match,
the unhappy marriage, the village ghost, the
achievement of the border outlaW-in short
what we read every day under the head OF
Items in the newspapers, were the inspiration
of their song. And they sang well because
thev thought and felt and believed just as their
! hearers did, and because they never thought
ANYTHING about it, The ballads are pathetic
because the poet did not try to make them so,
and they are models of nervous and simple die
ton, because the business Of the poet was to
tell his story, and not to adorn it, and accord
ngly he went earnestly and straightiorwardly
to work, and let the rapid thoughts snatch the
word as it ran, feeling quite sure of its getting
the right one. The only art of expressions to
have something to express We feel as wide
difference between what is manufactured and
what is spontaneous, as between the sparkles
of an electrical machine, which a sufficiently
muscular professor can grind out by the doz-
en-. and the wId-lire of God that writes meme,
mere on the crumbling paace-walls OF midnight
| cloud.