PREFACE

TO POEMS PUBLISHED IN 1796.

POEMS on various subjects written at different times and prompted by very different feelings; but which will be read at one time and under the influence of one set of feelings—this is a heavy disadvantage : for we love or admire a poet in proportion as he develops our own sentiments and emotions, or reminds us of our own knowledge.

Compositions resembling those of the present volume are not unfrequently condemned for their querulous egotism. But egotism is to be condemned then only when it offends against time and place, as in a history or an epic poem. To censure it in a monody or sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round. Why then write Sonnets or Monodies? Because they give me pleasure when perhaps nothing else could. After the more violent emotions of sorrow the mind demands amusement and can find it in employment alone; but full of its late sufferings, it can endure no employment not in some measure connected with them. Forcibly to turn away our attention to general subjects is a painful and most often an unavailing effort.

"But O! how grateful to a wounded heart,

The tale of misery to impart

From others' eyes bid artless sorrows flow,

And raise esteem upon the base of woe! "

SHAW.

The communicativeness of our nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavour to describe them, intellectual activity is exerted; and from intellectual activity there results a pleasure, which is gradually associated, and mingles as a corrective, with the painful subject of the description. "True!" (it may be answered) "but how is the Public interested in your sorrows or your description ?" We are for ever attributing personal unities to imaginary aggregates. What is the Public but a term for a number of scattered individuals? of whom as many will be interested in these sorrows, as have experienced the same or similar.

"Holy be the lay

Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way." If I could judge of others by myself, I should not hesitate to affirm, that the most interesting passages in all writings are those in which the author develops his own feelings. The sweet voice of Cona* never sounds so sweetly as when it speaks of itself; and I should almost suspect that man of an unkindly heart, who could read the opening of the third book of the Paradise Lost without peculiar emotion. By a law of our nature, he who labours under a strong feeling is impelled to seek for sympathy; but a poet's feelings are all strong. Quicquid amet valde amat. Akenside therefore speaks with philosophical accuracy when he classes Love and Poetry, as producing the same effects:

"Love and the wish of Poets when their tongue

Would teach to others' bosoms what so charms
PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION.

Their own."

* Ossian.

There is one species of egotism which is truly disgusting; not that which leads us to communicate our feelings to others, but that which would reduce the feelings of others to an identity with our own. The atheist, who exclaims, "pshaw !" when he glances his eye on the praises of Deity, is an egotist: an old man, when he speaks contemptuously of Love-verses, is an egotist: and the sleek favourites of fortune are egotists, when they condemn all "melancholy, discontented” verses. Surely it would be candid not merely to ask whether the poem pleases ourselves, but to consider whether or no there may not be others to whom it is well calculated to give an innocent pleasure. With what anxiety every fashionable author avoids the word I!-now he transforms himself into a third person; "the present writer" now multiplies himself and swells into "we"; and all this is the watchfulness of guilt. Conscious that this said I is perpetually intruding on his mind and that it monopolizes his heart, he is prudishly solicitous that it may not escape from his lips.

This disinterestedness of phrase is in general commensurate with selfishness of feeling: men old and hackneyed in the ways of the world are scrupulous avoiders of egotism.

Of the following Poems a considerable number are styled "Effusions,"* in defiance of Churchill's line

"Effusion on effusion pour away."

I could recollect no title more descriptive of the manner and matter of the Poems-I might indeed

* In the later editions, however, the word "Sonnet " was substituted.-ED.

have called the majority of them Sonnets-but they do not possess that oneness of thought which I deem indispensable in a Sonnet-and (not a very honourable motive perhaps) I was fearful that the title "Sonnet " might have reminded my reader of the Poems of the Rev. W. L. Bowles-a comparison with whom would have sunk me below that mediocrity on the surface of which I am at present enabled to float.

Some of the verses allude to an intended emigration to America on the scheme of an abandonment of individual property.

I shall only add that each of my readers will, I hope, remember that these poems on various subjects, which he reads at one time and under the influence of one set of feelings, were written at different times and prompted by very different feelings; and therefore that the supposed inferiority of one poem to another may sometimes be owing to the temper of mind in which he happens to peruse it.