OF THE EARLIER ENGLISH MORAL SONGS AND POEMS. No. I. WE regard it as a sacred and sublime truth, that among the various forms in which human energy can influence the minds of others, the poetical faculty contains in itself the best security that it will be nobly and beneficently employed. Bestowed doubtless like every similar gift, not as a play thing or ornament, not as a snare or seduction, but as an instrument for purifying and exalting our spiritual being, it seems distinguished from other powers by a peculiar incapability of being diverted from its proper end, or degraded to an unworthy use. Genius or talent in other shapes may but imperfectly reach the deeperseated sensibilities of the heart and conscience, or may with comparative indifference be exerted for good or evil, for happiness or missery. Music, sculpture, painting-powerful always to confer exterior polish-may fail to affect the internal structure of the mind, and even though not terminating in the outward senses, may yet linger in a superficial region of taste and enjoyment, not directly leading to the inner sanctuaries of the soul. Courage and conduct, whether military or political, oral or written eloquence, philosophical subtilty, all of them agents of mighty force to control the destinies and change the character of mankind, have been severally displayed in their brightest excellence, in subserviency to designs of cruelty, corruption, or falsehood. But the power of poetry in its essence implies a combination of moral and intellectual qualities, that cannot co-exist in perfection with depravity of heart or perversity of pur pose. A facility for uniting melodious numbers to pointed diction or dazzling fancies may be compatible with insensibility to virtue or enslavement to vice and poets even of a high order may be allured to dally too fondly with those affections which, though laudable within their limits, are vicious in excess. But the higher a poet rises in the scale of his art, the more closely must his tendencies and conceptions conform to that standard of human excellence in which the purer and more heavenly faculties attain a rightful ascendency. Virtue and poetry are in this indeed identified, that they both involve the predominance of spirit over sense, of the sympathetic over the selfish emotions. It will not follow that the life of the poet is as moral as his lay, or that his works are unstained by error or blemish; for the man and the writer will still be subject to the law of humanity. But the poet, so far as he is a poet, and in those creations in which he chiefly appears a poet, in direct proportion to his genius, will display the truest susceptibility for those feelings and convictions by which the soul of man is distinguished as a moral spirit. field In obeying the high vocation to which the poet is impelled, it is not necessary that he should prominently put forward the moral purposes which inseparably attend him. In seeking no doubt to excite devout or religious feelings, the very nature of his task, the noblest and most arduous that poetry can attempt, implies that its object should openly appear. But it is otherwise in the general prosecution of that scheme of moral melioration which is next in importance. The poet here has leave to deal with all the feelings of our frame, provided he can so move them as to advance his great design of rendering the hearts of his hearers more obedient to the sway of sympathy and imagination. It is his duty to enlarge and strengthen his influence by choosing a of interest the most wide and attractive that will permit him to labour for the final objects of his art. The largest combination of literary pleasure and moral culture seems an unfailing characteristic of poetry in its most influential form, and therefore, in its highest perfection, as a means of human improvement. The poet, as a pleasing and potent teacher of truth and goodness, will not in this view convey his lessons best by assuming the rod of the schoolmaster, or the gown of the sage. His secret will be to preserve a seeming community of thoughts and passions with the rest of his race: to borrow his themes and topics from objects and events the most alluring to their minds : and in so doing to lead them insensibly to new perceptions and higher emo impressed, In warm imagination's colours dressed, The right, and fair, and good, will better teach Than all that Crantor and Chrysippus preach." The great narrative and dramatic poems which genius has produced, seem to tell the world of nothing but its own business and interests, and yet under every image and incident there lurks an unsuspected lesson in moral advancement more clear and cogent than any that the porch or the cloister could inculcate. The Music is permitted even to assume a garb the most dissimilar to that of the professed instructress, and in the disguise of gaiety and merriment, may still discharge her appointed duties. Not inconsiderable is her praise, when in exercising a mastery over the light and sportive emotions, she moulds them imperceptibly into forms of purity and loveliness. As a religious messenger, intent on conveying peace and truth to a rude people, may outwardly conform to their language and customs, the better to win and change them to his wishes, so may moral wisdom adopt the mask of mirth, and teach the gay to diversify their levities within permitted bounds, and to temper in all things their hilarity with innocence. Yet an honorable and appropriate purpose is also served by poetry of a cast more directly moral and reflective. The danger is, that a formally didactic poem may repel the disciple by continued calls on his attention, and in general it seems true that poems, avowedly moral, in order to please, must be either confined within a short compass, or blended with a large mixture of incident or description. In no country better than in Eng land, has poetry performed her allotted function as a teacher of virtue and wisdom. The names of Chaucer and Spencer, Shakspeare and Milton, Pope and Goldsmith, Thomson and Cow. per, Crabbe and Wordsworth, afford a proud and instantaneous proof of the assertion. In different forms and de grees, and with reference to various modes of society and character, those mighty masters have delivered the precepts of moral government with a truth and energy expressive of that national spirit which they have helped to form, and their noble poems, as the faithful record of what nature is and ought to be, will forever exert a bene ficial sway over the minds of men, even when the language in which they sung may have been numbered with the dead. It were an infinite task to traverse the whole range of usefulness and beauty which would be opened up by a consideration of our great poets in this aspect of their character. But we propose at present to gather from the field of English poetry, and to weave into a very humble wreath, some flowerets of a lowlier kind, which may delight by their hues and fragrance, while they help to reveal the virtues of the generous soil and kindly sky to which they owe their birth. Scattered through our miscellaneous English poetry, especially of an earlier date, there is a number of smaller and chiefly irregular moral poems, of varying merit and popularity, which deserve consideration as a distinct class. We rather think that they have no precise parallel in the literature of other countries, and they eminently reflect some peculiarities of the. English mind. They spring from that serious and sober character, that selfdependent and contemplative disposition, which turns the eye inwards as often as without, and which claims kindred with noble qualities, the love of rural nature and of domestic quiet. The compositions we refer to are often bedewed with sweet sprinklings of fancy, and have almost always a purity of diction which time and change have failed to render obsolete. They are not always distinguished by poetical merit, but they generally present some characteristic feature that gives them an interest. Sometimes they are the effusions of simple minds, grateful for the slender talent of poetry which has been lent them, and pleased to dedicate it to the expression of those earnest thoughts in which they find their sweetest employment. Sometimes they have afforded an occasional refuge to men, who flying from the weariness of business and publicity prove the purity of their heart and taste, by the retired worship of those ideal graces for which in practical life they have longed in vain. Sometimes they speak the language of those who, having wandered from the path of duty, have forgotten the practice though not the love of virtue, but who now, in the intervals of passion, or in the returning of the prodigal to his father's house, lift up a humble and mournful hymn to proclaim from sad experience the blessings of that rectitude from which they have too easily departed. The topics on which those compositions chiefly touch are confined with in a limited and uniform sphere. Life and its vanities, death and its certainty; affliction and its uses, prosperity and its dangers; the emptiness of outward advantages, the felicity of a calm and contemplative spirit; the cares of the court and city, the pleasures of solitude and the country. There is much sameness in these subjects, and when feebly handled they are senseless and insipid. But when they flow sincerely from a sensitive heart, they affect us readily as their authors would have wished, and they tend to preserve in literature a sound and solemn spirit. When tainted by affectation, or defaced by the tame diction and obscure imagery of a more modern mediocrity, they entirely cease to please. We exclude from this examination poems of more considerable dimensions, and those belonging to a more formal class, such as that of the regular sonnet, otherwise so near akin to the moral compositions we have in view. We shall likewise abstain from referring to those lyrics of a mixed character in which moral reflectfons are engrafted on the theme of love, or revelry, or some other predominating subject. We shall also pass over those poems which are properly of a sacred and devotional tone, and of which we may hereafter attempt a separate examination. But in drawing these distinctions, we feel that it is neither easy nor necessary to observe the line of division with scrupulous accuracy. In the task which we now undertake we beg leave to disclaim in ourselves, though by no means to depreciate in others, any pretensions to black-letter precision or minute literary information. We propose to stand in a middle and connecting position between the antiquary and the popular reader, divested if possible of the natural prepossessions and prejudices of both, and endeavouring to promote what is surely an important object, a friendly but discriminating acquaintance with the less familiar literature of our country. We give, as our earliest example of "Now it is, and now it n' is, All we shall die, tho' us like ill."* Passing over a century, we notice two little pieces which have been ascribed, though perhaps groundlessly, to the father of English poetry; to whose great work we owe a debt both of delight and instruction too large in amount to be sensibly affected by the addition or deduction of such trifles. Of the "Good Counsel of Chaucer," which contains some germs of beauty imperfectly expanded, the first and last stanza may be inserted. "Fly from the press,† and dwell with soothfastness: For hoard hath hate, and climbing tickleness, * Ritson's Ancient Songs, 65. + The crowd. Praise hath envy, and weal is blent o'er all. "That thee is sent receive in buxomness: Forth, pilgrim, forth, beast, out of thy stall; The other verses attributed to Chaucer contain a simple and wholesome list of advices for all conditions. "Go forth, king, rule thee by sapience; Be righteous, judge, in saving thy name; Rich, do almons, lest thou lose bliss with shame. "People, obey your king and the law; Age, be ruled by good religion; True servant, be dreadful ** and keep thee under awe; No comparison could be more illustrative and more pleasing than that which has been drawn by Warton, himself a poet as well as the historian of poets, between the premature and solitary rise of Chaucer's genius and the bright and brittle promises of a genial day in an English spring! The truth of the picture cannot be apparent in the limited inquiry which we are now pursuing but even here we are struck by the dreary barrenness that ensues. Our respect for royalty cannot constrain us to admit as an exception the dull verses at ributed to Henry VI, of which the following stanza is much the most tolerable, and if genuine, is at least remarkable for being perfectly modern in its language and cadence. There then sprung up, as Puttenham tells us, "a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains." With these eminent names may be associated that of Thomas Lord Vaux, who at the same period, and probably earlier than Surrey, though in a more simple and vernacular style, contributed something to the refinement of taste and versification in England. The works of this cluster of poets were first published in 1557 in Tottel's Collection, the earliest printed miscellany of poetry in the language, where the poems of Surrey and Wyatt are fol lowed by a number of others of “Uncertain authors," among which are at least two by Lord Vaux. Those poems in this collection, of which the parentage is unknown, seem to extend back somewhat indefinitely in date; for among them is included the "Good Counsel of Chaucer," though under this new title, "To lead a virtuous and honest life." + Counsel. Hazlewood's edition. P. 48. Yieldingness. ** Respectful. Wyat's strength seems to lie in his ethical or satirical epistles, which exceed the compass of our present plan. We borrow from him, however, the following irregular sonnet: THAT PLEASURE IS MIXED WITH EVERY PAIN. "Venomous thorns, that are so sharp and keen, And unto man his health doth oft renew. May hurt and heal; then if that this be true, To Surrey our poetry owes much it. Love, though it may be doubted independently of his having first used in England, in his translation of Virgil, that noble form of versification in which Shakspeare and Milton found free and fit scope for their genius, and which at once stimulates and tests the true poet by the high standard of thought and language, which its simple grandeur requires to sustain if it had much share in Surrey's life, is the prevailing theme of his original compositions. But we extract from them the beginning of a little moral poem which suits our purpose. It is written in a pleasing and favourite metre of that day. The title, as in the other cases likewise, seems to be Mr. Tottel's. HOW NO AGE IS CONTENT WITH HIS OWN ESTATE, AND HOW THE AGE OF CHILDREN IS THE HAPPIEST, IF THEY HAD SKILL TO UNDERSTAND IT. 'Laid in my quiet bed, in study as I were, I saw within my troubled head a heap of thoughts appear, And every thought did show so lovely in mine eyes, That now I sigh'd, and then I smiled as cause of thoughts did rise. I saw the little boy, in thought how oft that he Did wish of God, to scape the rod, a tall young man to be. The young man eke that feels bis bones with pains oppress'd, The rich old man that sees his end draw on so sore. How he would be a boy again to live so much the more. Whereat full oft I smiled to see how all those three, From boy to man, from man to boy, would chop and change degree. That man from wealth to live in woe doth ever seek to change." The compositions attributed to Lord Vaux are of unequal character, but he aimed often at a right mark, though not a high one, and he sometimes hit it. His songs are not unfrequently fortunate in their ideas, neat and natural in their expression, and smooth in their numbers. He seems to have excited the simple wonder of his time by the art of counterfeiting imaginary situations and feelings. His best and most popular piece is entitled by Tottel, "The Aged Lover renounceth Love," a name too limited for its subject, which embraces the more general contemplation of declining years and approaching death. Its dismal imagery supplied Shakspeare with some appropriate fragments of melancholy mirth for his sexton in Hamlet, while engaged in labouring for the dead. The poem has considerable merit. The following verses contain a not unexpressive picture of the encroaching torpor of old age. "My lusts they do me leave, My fancies all be fled. 66 My muse doth not delight My hand and pen are not in plight "For reason me denies This youthly idle rhyme; And day by day to me she cries, Leave off these toys in time. |