ALGERNON SIDNEY In my judgement Bolingbroke's style is not in any respect equal to that of Cowley or Dryden. Read Algernon Sidney: his style reminds you as little of books as of blackguards. What a gentleman he was! T. T. July 12, 1827. LANDOR What is it that Mr. Landor wants, to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. The truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highest form-that of stamping il più nell' uno. Hence his poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness. Besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, how to write simple and lucid English. T. T. Jan. 1, 1834. LORD BYRON It seems, to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron's verses. Is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual power with utter depravity? Does such a combination often really exist in rerum natura ? T. T. Dec. 29, 1822. How lamentably the art of versification is neglected by the poets of the present day!-by Lord Byron, as it strikes me, in particular, among those of eminence for other qualities. Upon the whole, I think the part of Don Juan in which Lambro's return to his home, and Lambro himself, are described, is the best, that is, the most individual, thing in all I know of Lord Byron's works. The festal abandonment puts one in mind of Nicholas Poussin's pictures. T. T. June 7, 1824. [LAMB] Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those which move his affections. T. T. Sept. 22, 1830, TENNYSON I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,— indeed without it he can never be a poet in act,-is to write in the next two or three years in none but one or two well known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octosyllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely T. T. April 24, 1833. scan some of his verses. SCOTCHMEN A whimsical friend of mine, of more genius than discretion, characterizes the Scotchman of literature (confining his remark, however, to the period since the Union) as a dull Frenchman and a superficial German. But when I recollect the splendid exceptions of Hume, Robertson, Smollett, Reid, Thomson (if this last instance be not objected to as savouring of geographical pedantry, that truly amiable man and genuine poet having been born but a few furlongs from the English border), Dugald Stewart, Burns, Walter Scott, Hogg, and Campbell-not to mention the very numerous physicians and prominent dissenting ministers born and bred beyond the Tweed-I hesitate in recording so wild an opinion, which derives its plausibility chiefly from the circumstance, so honourable to our northern sister, that Scotchmen generally have more, and a more learned, education than the same ranks in other countries, below the first class; but in part likewise, from the common mistake of confounding the general character of an emigrant, whose objects are in one place and his best affections in another, with the particular character of a Scotchman: to which we may add, perhaps, the clannish spirit of provincial litera ture, fostered undoubtedly by the peculiar relations of Scotland, and of which therefore its metropolis may be a striking, but is far from being a solitary, instance. The Friend, Section II, Essay I. SCOTT Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites in this;-that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations,-just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees;-whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in Herodotus, as any one can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay on a man who lived in past time:-I thought of adding another to it on one who lived not in time at all, past, present, or future, --but beside or collaterally. T. T. Aug. 10, 1833. 'UNDINE' Undine is a most exquisite work. It shows the general want of any sense for the fine and the subtle in the public taste, that this romance made no deeper impression. Undine's character, before she receives a soul, is marvellously beautiful. T. T. May 31, 1830. SCHILLER Schiller has the material Sublime; to produce an effect, he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower. But Shakespeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow. T. T. Dec. 29, 1822. Schiller's blank verse is bad. He moves in it as a fly in a glue-bottle. His thoughts have their connexion and variety, it is true, but there is no sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. How different from Shakespeare's endless rhythms! There is a nimiety-a too-muchness-in all Germans. It is the national fault. Lessing had the best notion of blank verse. The trochaic termination of German words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable. We have it in our dramatic hendecasyllable; but then we have a power of interweaving the iambic close ad libitum. T. T. June 2, 1834. GOETHE Goethe's small lyrics are delightful. He showed good taste in not attempting to imitate Shakespeare's Witches, which are threefold-Fates, Furies, and earthly Hags o' the caldron. HESIOD T. T. May 18, 1833. I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say. T. T. Aug. 11, 1832. |