assault, perpetrated in a drunken night brawl. which stimulated his horrible purpose-his reckFrom subsequent inquiries I learnt that the money less conduct-his heartless levity of tongue, when he received had been lavished in riotous in- he should rather have been overwhelmed with temperance and excess of every sort, during shame and sorrow-and the vacant, misplaced, which his eccentricities, freaks, and outrages, combined with his incoherent language and wild looks, had procured for him from his fellow-revellers the name of 'Crazy George.' Struck by the vacant expression of his features, and the rambling silliness of his language, I saw at once that he was in a state of mental alienation, brought on, as I conjectured, by his recent wildness of life; under which impression, having procured his discharge from prison, I took him to a physician, who has very extensive practice in the treatment of similar cases, and who has now seen him seven or eight times. offensive laugh by which I had so often been revolted-all had now received a solution which showed them to have sprung from latent insanity, not from premeditated and conscious wickedness, not from the frivolty and defiance of an utterly callous heart, not from the deliberate suggestions of an abandoned nature. From an object of unavoidable disgust and hatred, my unfortunate boy was converted into a claimant for the profoundest pity and compassion. It was something to feel that I still had a son, even though he might be little better than a filial statue. Although Hodges, the foreman, had strict mora} justice been awarded him, deserved punishment rather than reward, I had made him a promise which I held myself sacredly bound to perform. Removing him, accordingly, from a neighborhood where he might have been tempted to a renewal of his unhallowed practices, I purchased for him in a provincial town a long-established and respectable business, by attention to which he cannot fail to realize a moderate independence. "His deliberate opinion, I am much distressed to state, is exceedingly unfavorable. Though the disorder of the faculties may have been more rapidly developed by recent occurrences, he does not consider it a temporary one, but arising from organic derangement, and therefore of a permanent and incurable character. He pronounces it to be a softening of the brain, a defect which gradually undermines the reasoning powers, and usually terminates in imbecility and idiocy. On my hinting that his patient was by no means a More than a year has elapsed since the occurharmless simpleton, but had recently been harbor-rence of the events stated in the preceding narraing heinous designs, he replied that a combination tive; and though I have no further marvellous of cunning and contrivance with great wickedness frequently characterized the incipient stages of this peculiar lunacy; and that, from the present condition of your son, he had no hesitation in declaring he must have been in an unsound state of mind for several months. Depend upon it,' such were the physician's own words, that this unfortunate young man, though he may have been competent to the ordinary purposes of life, has long been utterly defective in the moral sense; has ceased to know the difference between right and wrong, and cannot, therefore, during this period of morbid mental action, be fairly deemed an accountable being.' "I have placed poor George for the present in a private lunatic asylum, and await your orders as to his ultimate disposal." CHAPTER XV. adventures to record, the interval has not been altogether uneventful. Godfrey Thorpe, after having run through his own fine fortune by every species of wanton extravagance, lived for some time upon the fortunes of others by running in debt, when, being unable to protract any longer the smash I had anticipated, he absconded from the seat of his ancestors, and is at present settled with his family at Boulogne. Oakfield Hall, with its wide and fair domains, is now mine, and I am writing in the library of that Elizabethan mansion of which I had so long coveted the possession. Many of my fond and foolish yearnings have been chastised by my temporary consignment to the jaws of death; but this ambition, perhaps the vainest of my earthly vanities, has survived my apparent decease and real entombment, and I feel a daily and increasing pleasure as I wander over my broad acres. Nor are my rides less gratifying because I take them on my favorite white cob, whose back I never again expected to bestride when I caught a glimpse of him as the undertakers were depositing me in my coffin. Sad and afflicting as it was, I have said that this letter was not without mitigating suggestions. It is a great, a deplorable, a heart-rending calamity to be the father of an incurable idiot; but it is infinitely more terrible to have a son who could My daughter's marriage was solemnized a year contemplate, while in possession of his reason, the ago, and I am already blessed with a little granddiabolical crime of parricide. From this horror son, who bears my name, and who will become and disgrace I was relieved. My heart was my heir. Mr. Mason, for whom I have purchased enabled to throw off the incubus that had dark- the advowson of the living, and who, conjointly ened and crushed it. All was now cleared up, with his wife, does the honors of Oakfield Hall, everything was now intelligible, and my misfor- where they are permanently established, devotes tune, though still a heavy one, was not tainted by himself with an exemplary zeal to the discharge the unutterably hateful associations with which I of his pastoral duties, and is beloved by the whole had been previously haunted. My son's dabblings neighborhood. Their union promises to be more with the poisonous mixture-the monomania than usually blessed; a prospect which affords me the purest and most exquisite of all pleasures-the | I may give a better account of my stewardship contemplation of that happiness which we have than I could have done at an earlier period. been instrumental in conferring upon others. An eminent cutler of the Strand, one of whose My poor son, whom I regularly see, though he relations had been buried alive, left a legacy of no longer recognizes me, is in a private asylum for ten guineas to be given to any surgeon who should lunatics, where he receives every succor and pass a stiletto through his heart before his body consolation that his unfortunate state allows. was committed to the grave; to facilitate the perAll hopes of his recovery have long been aban-formance of which operation, the weapon was tied doned. Though my constitution will never cease to feel the effects of the trying shocks it has sustained, I am still enabled, thank God! to participate in most of my customary enjoyments; nor am I without a hope that my moral health has been benefited by the ordeals through which I have passed, and that when I am finally called away, THE DEAD CHILD. LET in the light of the fair sun, And leave me here alone; Thy bier waits in the silent street, Through the bare trees the autumn wind And this is death;-these heavy eyes, These limbs, whose chiselled marble lines Seal up the fountains of mine eyes, That mock my hopes and fears. The bright intelligence that gleamed But this is death! beneath whose touch, Take up the bier, and bear it hence The measured journey to the grave to the will. This example I have followed. Vain and even ridiculous as the precaution may be deemed, I have too vivid, too harrowing a recollection of my past sufferings, to incur the possibility of their recurrence. I have no wish to writeand, probably, my readers would have as little inclination to peruse-a second "Posthumous Memoir of Myself." BY HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. WITLAF, a king of the Saxons, That whenever they sat at their revels And breathe a prayer for his soul. So sat they once at Christmas, They drank to the soul of Witlaf, And Saint Basil's homilies! Till the great bells of the convent, Proclaimed the midnight hour. And the yule-log cracked in the chimney, And the flamelets flapped and flickered, Yet still in his pallid fingers He clutched the golden bowl, But not for this their revels From the Boston Post. merged are the external and internal of poesy, that The Poetical and Prose Writings of Charles it requires the most lofty and vigorous, the most tender and burning efforts of whatever divinity there may be within. And in truth, what have YEAR after year are the generations coming up, been rashly termed the outward and mechanical and it is fitting that the works of one whom the parts of verse, including, of course, all ornamental fathers delighted to honor should be accessible to epithets as well as melody, fitness and terseness of the children. The present edition of Sprague expression, and everything, in fine, but its inner contains a few pieces never before presented with idea and conception, really constitute, generally their brethren, but is especially welcome at this speaking, a large proportion of what is universally time, from the entire disappearance from our book-recognized as poetry, and that, too, of a high and stores, of Francis & Co.'s elegant volume. even the highest order. The simple thought of Prospero of the utter dissolution of the world, with all its "cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces," and his mental grasp of the sublimity, as if he held the great globe in the hollow of his hand, are the really poetical cores of the glorious passage. But were they not, are they not, comparatively speaking, common thoughts; is not the merit of the passage in its expression? Who has sung like Shakspeare? and yet he sang by the scale. his tones were sweeter, fuller, and more sublime. Who cannot perceive, at any rate, that thought and expression are here so intimately blended, that the former all alone would be but a preacher's moral, while the latter without the thought could never have been attained? 66 66 And here we might stay our pen. For is there need, at this late day, of calling attention to "Curiosity," ‚""Art," the "Centennial," and the Shakspeare Ode," to say nothing of those many tender, affectionate, pathetic stanzas which even now are circling through the American press, and like the poet's own winged worshippers," are "blessed wanderers o'er lakes and lands?" In one view no further word need be uttered. The welcome which Sprague has always received, and now receives from the public, proves that, in some measure, at least, he is appreciated. His writings might be safely left to themselves-true taste yet thrives in many a quiet nook. True poetry in good English, with thoughts sublime, imaginative, beautiful or philosophical, expressed clearly, strongly and completely, in melodious verse, is not yet thrown aside as worthless, at the advent of new schools and new styles, with their crudities, spasms and thoughts too big for the utterance of the thinker, and so thrust upon the world in clothing, picked up, blindfold, in a Brattle street of words. But in another view, our subject should not yet be dismissed. For in late years, as it seems to us, there have grown up in our midst, a class of people, who are ever "like Paul's Athenians, seeking something new," to the forgetfulness of what is good in the old. And, in fine, there are many, now-a-days, whose approval is really valuable, who are fast tending to the opposite extreme to that wherein men wandered in the days of "good Queen Anne," who, it may be added, literally sat in the sun," but had no brightness of her own. 66 But So, too, in Byron. The naked comparison of fallen Greece to the beautiful dead, is unquestionably poetical, but the great charm of the passage is the truthful, graceful and thrilling elaboration of its dress. Coming to single lines, everybody knows that the drum is a noisy and barbaric instrument. There would seem to be nothing very poetical in the idea, at any rate; but Campbell says And hears thy stormy music in the drum. And let him who dare, deny the line to be true and even lofty poetry. And the author under notice, in his "Centennial Ode," while speaking of the Indian, says— Cold with the beast he slew, he sleeps. In dust the sacred statue slept, And wisdom cowled his head. In Pope's time, the dress of thought was more regarded, perhaps, than thought itself-now-a-days, there is a growing disposition to disregard the dress altogether. And we would attempt a few sentences in defence of the happy medium. Good, plain, correct English alone, however apt, terse or expressive, is neither thought nor poetry; but we do maintain that it is the only proper garb, coloring and outside of both, whether in verse or prose. And though in the main but the mechanical part of verse, it is almost as indispensable as the mental portion; and though a fair production of this outside may not call for the poetical faculty, yet in its perfect production, is displayed a very high degree of that faculty. At all times, it requires taste, experience, ear, knowledge of the language, power But we are no insane idolater of what may be of condensation, perspicuity and distinctness of regarded as, more or less, the externals of verse. idea; at some time, so completely mixed and inter- And still less are we special pleaders for the ex Is not this a vast but perfectly finished picture? and yet the charm of the whole is "wound up" by the verb in the last line. What other word in the language could have so comprised the whole story of the retreat of wisdom to the monks of the middle ages? Does it require nothing but the practice of a blockhead, or even of a shrewd and persevering brain, to obtain such expressions as these? ternal grace, strength and correctness of the author under notice. He has all these, but he has the "heart of hearts" of poetry, in addition. Moreover, in some of his most admired and most exquisite pieces, few writers could be less indebted than he to poetical expression. In some of them, the idea, whether pathetic or philosophical, is al-born to grow." In the words of Ben Jonsonmost the only charm-the expression being noticeable chiefly for its clearness and harmony with the idea. patience and practice, or those higher beauties, ranging from external elegances to the real spirit of poetry, which cannot be learned, but may be, nay, must be cultivated. "A poet is born, not made," says the ancient critic. He should have added, “ A poet is born, but For though the poet's matter nature be, Upon the muse's anvil; turn the same But we do say that no man can be a poet without a proper knowledge of both the coarser and finer mechanism of verse, from its construction, which may, to some degree, be learned by a persevering dunce, to its choicest epithets, depending for their Our present purpose is chiefly to show our author merit on natural gifts and careful cultivation. No as an artist, to express our opinion of his writings man can be a painter without skill, and the great-as works of art, to prove that his poetry is no less est, in brushes, canvas and pigments, whatever be because his art is more than that of most living the ardor of his conceptions. If he could, dear writers, nay, of any living poet; for some people reader, you or we might sometimes stand with seem to believe that nothing which is finished can Raphael or Buonarotti. And the poet is the paint- be great or sublime-forgetting that the very er in words. His canvas is under his hand, but mountains are piled, the glaciers spread, and the on its narrow woof are shown the mote in the chasms rent, not by chance, but according to etersunbeam, the "violet 'neath a mossy stone," the real glories of creation, the fabled terrors of the last day. As Shakespeare, in the chorus of Henry V., exclaims :— nal laws. 66 Curiosity" is undoubtedly the best known and the most general favorite of all Sprague's longer poems. We shall therefore say little about it. Everybody knows what an occasional poem is "bound" to be a thing of "shreds and patches," a shot at a given, not a chosen mark. Until the appearance of Holmes' " 'Urania," Curiosity" was the only poem of its class which seemed destined to fill a permanent place in our literature. It has now survived more than twenty years, has passed through a number of editions, and has been No man, therefore, can be a poet who does not have all the requisites for writing verse properly. He may have large conceptions, a novel turn of thought, and even, when the fit is on him, may ac-published as the work of an Englishman, and cidentally throw forth a gem of poesy to shine amid the muck which is around, and astonish the world by its contrasted brilliancy. With great luck, he may produce these jewels often enough to make the whole heap a second Golconda; but instances of this fortuitous excellence are rare. A man, to be a poet, must have not only the fire from heaven within him, but he must be able to breathe it skilfully, to play with it, to blast with it, to melt with it, according to the changing of his mood and his subject. Obscurity and inappropriateness of expression involve clumsiness, carelessness, indolence and presumption. And if here reminded that we have wandered from our subject, we should reply that all the foregoing is really a tribute to our author; for he, of all American poets, is most remarkable for beauties of language, whether elegant, terse or simply correct, and for an union of these external beauties with the inner essence, whether it expand into a thought as vast as space itself, or creep into a single epithet, like Ariel into the cowslip's bell. To repeat, then, our opening remark, these paragraphs are written for the special consideration of those who are beginning or have begun to neglect the dress of poetry, whether this dress be that mere construction and that use of sensible words, a knowledge of which may be acquired by mere praised accordingly, both in Calcutta and London. "Ura But to leave comparison, " Curiosity," as a specimen of mastery over the heroic measure, stands alone in American literature. It does not contain a single weak line, or meaningless epithet, thrown in to eke out a foot or for the sake of a rhyme. It has but two or three lines which one would like to alter, and we defy the amateurs of the new school to scan it more closely and severely than we have done. The whole work is a model of execution, and a pleasant essay might be written on its individual verses and particular expressions. We do not claim for it the highest honors of poetry, but do aver, that while it is surpassed by few productions of the kind, even in matter-in not easily matched both "for poetry of idea and manner it stands before them all. felicity of expression." Passages will endure as long as the Indian is remembered; and as the red man passes away, and the evil memories of him are effaced, Sprague's glowing and sympathetic pictures may be even more highly regarded than at present. The Indian's -heraldry is but a broken bow, His history but a tale of wrong and woe, And one day, romance will pour upon his grave But we must pass on. The elegiac effusions of Sprague are as well known as household words. Our prime favorite is "I see thee still;" a composition on which verbal criticism is absolutely at fault. Everything is as clear as truth, as tender as love. That there is true poesy in all these pathetic pieces we have never heard disputed. Is there less, than if they were written crudely, obscurely, carelessly-with ill-chosen words, with harsh expressions? Who will deny that a deal of their pathos even, flows from the perfect harmony and delicacy of their apparel. The whole poetical idea of "I see thee still," for instance, is obvious in the title-all the rest proceeds either from the power or the carefulness of expression. Finally we come to the "Shakspeare Ode," After the elegiac pieces come "The Winged having left it to the last; as we consider it the Worshippers" and "To my Cigar," two genial greatest work of its author. Much of it, we bits of moralizing raised into poetry by the art of know, is but a paraphrase of Shakspeare, and the poet. Preceding these are the series of these portions we dismiss at once. But enough "Prize Prologues," which were so successful, in "remains behind." In this poem Sprague has various cities and among stranger judges, from essayed his most daring flight, and proved himself twenty to thirty years ago. These, too, are poems as capable of soaring into the imaginative as of of "occasion," and in them the author was flitting about among the realities of human life, necessarily even more "cabined, cribbed, confined," with its joys and sorrows. With little fancy, in than in "Curiosity" or the other long poems. the Lalla Rookh sense of the term, his imaginaAt the present day, it may be said of these pro- tion is strong and his descriptions vivid and ductions, that they are, essentially, but tasteful, vigorous. We have heretofore noticed the comelegant, well-turned lines. The address for the prehensive picture given in the opening stanzas. Park Theatre in 1821 is the best, upon the whole-On the next page the birth of Shakspeare is thus the others are necessarily, in some measure, redescribed :echoings of the same strain. But in the second are the following beautiful thoughts : Poor maniac beauty brings her cypress wreath, There, on its bank, beneath the mulberry's shade, Round some cold grave she comes, sweet flowers to strew, On his lips, thy spirit fell, And bade him wake and warm the world! But again Is not this poetry? Could it be better expressed? Comment on these lines is needless. These are the questions which the critic should we ask, would they have been better, if worse ask of himself. The subject may not suit him, expressed? We should think so, to judge from perhaps, but the subject given, could the execution the stuff which finds admirers, now-a-days. But be improved? Setting aside the first few lines the truth is, that what men think, or ought to of Johnson's celebrated address at the opening of think, however high, spiritual or poetical, can be Drury Lane in 1747, we do not hesitate to aver put into words in such fashion as to be clear to that Sprague's theatrical prologues are superior other men-that is, it can be so put, with time, to the best of the most noted British efforts. We care, skill, patience, and ability. The passage in have now before us the addresses of Pope, Rogers, the "Ode" on "Mirth, his face with sunbeams Sheridan, Byron, and Scott, and we know that those of the American are not only more sensible, poetical and elegant, but that, as mere verse, his lines are decidedly superior. The poem on "Art" next demands attention. John Quincy Adams once said of this, that in forty lines was comprised an encyclopædia of description. The idea is poetical, and the expression is worthy the idea. It is, in mere execution, the most happy of all Sprague's productions, and it may be commended to versifiers as a model of correct, condensed, melodious language. "The Centennial Ode" was never our favorite, in spite of occasional fine passages and strong lines; and yet were our present task to end here, we could quote from the "Requiem of the Indian," stanzas lit"—is a find specimen of the blending of sound For him the vulture sits on yonder misty peak, |
