No More Learning

-- COLLINS.




165.

Life! I know not what thou art,
But know that thou and I must part;
And when, or how, or where we met
I own to me's a secret yet.

Life! we've been long together
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear--
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;
--Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not Good Night,--but in some brighter clime
Bid me Good Morning.

A L. BARBAULD.





FOURTH BOOK.


SUMMARY.


It proves sufficiently the lavish wealth of our own age in Poetry, that
the pieces which, without conscious departure from the standard of
Excellence, render this Book by far the longest, were with very few
exceptions composed during the first thirty years the nineteenth
century. Exhaustive reasons can hardly be given for the strangely sudden
appearance of individual genius: but none, in the Editor's judgment, can
be less adequate than that which assigns the splendid national
achievements of our recent poetry, to an impulse from the frantic
follies and criminal wars that at the time disgraced the least
essentially civilised of our foreign neighbours. The first French
Revolution was rather, in his opinion, one result, and in itself by no
means the most important, of that far wider and greater spirit which
through enquiry and doubt, through pain and triumph, sweeps mankind
round the circles of its gradual development: and it is to this that we
must trace the literature of modern Europe. But, without more detailed
discussion on the motive causes of Scott, Wordsworth, Campbell, Keats,
and Shelley, we may observe that these Poets, with others, carried to
further perfection the later tendencies of the Century preceding, in
simplicity of narrative, reverence for human Passion and Character in
every sphere, and impassioned love of Nature:--that, whilst maintaining
on the whole the advances in art made since the Restoration, they
renewed the half-forgotten melody and depth of tone which marked the
best Elizabethan writers:--that, lastly, to what was thus inherited they
added a richness in language and a variety in metre, a force and fire in
narrative, a tenderness and bloom in feeling, an insight into the finer
passages of the Soul and the inner meanings of the landscape, a larger
and wiser Humanity,--hitherto hardly attained, and perhaps unattainable
even by predecessors of not inferior individual genius. In a word, the
Nation which, after the Greeks in their glory, has been the most gifted
of all nations for Poetry, expressed in these men the highest strength
and prodigality of its nature.
They interpreted the age to itself--hence
the many phases of thought and style they present:--to sympathise with
each, fervently and impartially, without fear and without fancifulness,
is no doubtful step in the higher education of the Soul. For, as with
the Affections and the Conscience, Purity in Taste is absolutely
proportionate to Strength:--and when once the mind has raised itself to
grasp and to delight in Excellence, those who love most will be found to
love most wisely.





166. ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

--Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

J. KEATS.




167. ODE ON THE POETS.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Have ye souls in heaven too,
Doubled-lived in regions new?
--Yes, and those of heaven commune
With the spheres of sun and moon;
With the noise of fountains wonderous
And the parle of voices thunderous;
With the whisper of heaven's trees
And one another, in soft ease
Seated on Elysian lawns
Browsed by none but Dian's fawns;
Underneath large blue-bells tented,
Where the daisies are rose-scented,
And the rose herself has got
Perfume which on earth is not;
Where the nightingale doth sing
Not a senseless, tranced thing,
But divine melodious truth;
Philosophic numbers smooth;
Tales and golden histories
Of heaven and its mysteries.

Thus ye live on high, and then
On the earth ye live again;
And the souls ye left behind you
Teach us, here, the way to find you
Where your other souls are joying,
Never slumber'd, never cloying.
Here, your earth-born souls still speak
To mortals, of their little week;
Of their sorrows and delights;
Of their passions and their spites;
Of their glory and their shame;
What doth strengthen and what maim:--
Thus ye teach us, every day,
Wisdom, though fled far away.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth
Ye have left your souls on earth!