The weekly herald. [volume] (Cleveland, Tenn.) 1876-1888, 1877-08-23

lluBtTs surely vi HlUuuldlu anu ulOOl
magical note, as 1t were, Of the last
sounds of Arthur's or of Roland's horn.
To use names Of places so as to bring
out their melody, and blend it with
verse, has been thought the mark of
great poet. One thinks of Milton, and
the melancholy which his muse lends
to the titles of ancient cities, half for
gotten In the distant East, "Memphis
and Babylon, and either Thebes," to
quote a poet who also felt the beauty of
names. In Virgil and Homer, the lake
Benacus, and the stream Cayster, and
the Withdrawn recesses where Niobe
dwells, II woman of stone, and the mys.
teriOus Ogygia, and the mountains alive
with the dances of the Spartan maidens
these and hundred other places are
preserved to all time. Mr.. Matthew
Arnold has lent the same kind of a
charm to even the sands of Central
Asia-to BOkhara, where the king lay
sick in summer; to Oxus, forgetting
the bright speed he had;" and TO the
shining of the stars on the Aral Sea.
Indeed, wherever men may wander the
genius of poetry has been before them,
and has made strange places friendly,
and familiar places, as it were, en-
chanted. Even at Dover, where Lord
Byron only found an extOrtionate inn
keeper; even at Dover, where the tide
rolls the gravel on the beach, the sound
seems to repeat now "SOphOcles long
ago heard it on the Hgean," and to re-
call that chorus, in which the words
ring and reply, like the waves on a
desolate coast. There is no way of
escaping these recollections, and Mr..
Longfellow has only helped our weak
modern memories by collecting the
poetry of places. His volumes are a
kind of new necessity to the
travellers in this country, especially,
perhaps, to the American traveller,
who finds fresh in England hundred
associations of home, which use has
dulled to the inhabitants of the island.
Without stirring from home, too, the
reader can enjoy these "Travels by the
Fireside," which Mr.. LongfellOw has
himself described
Let others traverse sea and land
And toll through various Climes,
turn the world round with my hand,
Reading these poets rhymes.
But that quiet mood is likely to end
with the end of the bad weather which
Mr.. Longfellow beguiled with song,
when "for three days past the cease
less rain had been falling. The fireside
journey is all very well in the wet, and
travellers are luckless who have to keep
moving like Mr.. Tennyson, when a
"plague Of rain beset him on the Lom-
bard plain" But when the sun re-
turns it is natural to leave the fireside,
and follow, if possible, Drayton, and
Scott, and Wordsworth, and Spenser up
and down England.
There is a natural affinity between
the poets in this new collection, and
the places they best loved, and best
liked to write about. The Fens, for
example, were just the contrary foI
Crabbe, and the desolatiOn where the
rushes "bend their brown fowerets,"
where the poor dredger "drains the
remnant of diluted gin," exactly suited
his clear-eyed pedestrian muse. The
Fens have that kind of poetry in their
aspect, and the other poetry, too, of
"wide-winged" sunsets, and of endless
distance and melancholy, which Tenny-
son has found in Lincolnshire. Berk-
hampstead, in much the same way, was
not too retired and simple for COwper;
and, in good gabled house fronting
the street, with garden through which
a rivulet ran, who could be happier or
more in his element than Abraham
COwley?
Here in no sordtd poverty
And no inglorious ease,
He braves the world, an can defy
It's frOwns and batteries.
On the other hand, and by way of eX-
,,ot;n,, 20 thn rn1a ohnnIJ