Thomas De Quincey.

“SentPeter Bellto Chas. Lamb. To my surprise, he does not like it. He complains of the slowness of the narrative—as if that were not theartof the poet. He says Wordsworth has great thoughts, but has left them out here. [And then continues in his own person.] In the perplexity arising from the diverse judgments of those to whom Iam accustomed to look up, I have no resource but in the determination to disregard all opinions, and trust to the simple impression made on my own mind. When Lady Mackintosh was once stating to Coleridge her disregard of the beauties of nature, which men commonly affect to admire, he said his friend Wordsworth had described her feeling, and quoted three lines from ‘Peter Bell:’‘A primrose by a river brim‘A yellow primrose was to him,‘And it was nothing more.’“‘Yes,’ said Lady Mackintosh—‘that is precisely my case.’”

‘A primrose by a river brim‘A yellow primrose was to him,‘And it was nothing more.’

‘A primrose by a river brim

‘A yellow primrose was to him,

‘And it was nothing more.’

“‘Yes,’ said Lady Mackintosh—‘that is precisely my case.’”

On the same page of thatDiary—where I go to verify this quotation—is this entry:

“At four o’clock dined in the [Temple] Hall with De Quincey,[9]who was very civil to me, and cordially invited me to visit his cottage in Cumberland. Like myself, he is an enthusiast for Wordsworth. His person is small, his complexion fair, and his air and manner are those of a sickly and enfeebled man.”[10]

Some twenty-seven years before the date of this encounter, the sickly looking man was born near to Manchester, his father being a well-to-do merchant there—whose affairs took him often to Portugal and Madeira, and whose invalidism kept him there so much that the son scarce knew him;—remembers only how his father came home one day to his great country house—pale, and propped up with pillows in the back of his carriage—came to die. His mother, left with wealth enough for herself and children, was of a stern Calvinistic sort; which fact gives a streak of unpleasant color here and there to the son’s reminiscences. He is presently at odds with her about the Bath school—where he is taught—she having moved into Somersetshire, whereabout she knows Mistress Hannah More; the boy comes to know this lady too, with much reverence. The son is at odds with his mother again about Eton (where, though never a scholar, he has glimpses of George III.—gets a little grunted talk even, from the old king)—and is again at odds with the mother about the Manchester Grammar School: so much at odds here, that he takes the bitfairly in his mouth, and runs away withEuripidesin his pocket. Then he goes wandering in Wales—gypsy-like—and from there strikes across country blindly to London, where he becomes gypsy indeed. He bargains with Jews to advance money on his expectations: and with this money for “sinker,” he sounds a depth of sin and misery which we may guess at, by what we know, but which in their fulness, even his galloping pen never told. Into some of those depths his friends traced him, and patched up a truce, which landed him in Oxford.

Quiet and studious here at first—he is represented as a rare talker, a little given to wine—writing admiring letters to Wordsworth and others, who were his gods in those days; falling somehow into taste for that drug which for so many years held him in its grip, body and soul. The Oxford career being finished after a sort, there are saunterings through London streets again—evenings with the Lambs, with Godwin, and excursions to Somersetshire and the Lake country, where he encounters and gives nearer worship to the poetic gods of his idolatry. Alwaysshy, but earnest; most interesting to strangers—with his pale face, high brow and lightning glances; talking too with a winning flow and an exuberance of epithet that somewhiles amounts to brilliancy: no wonder he was tenderly entreated by good Miss Wordsworth; no wonder the poet of the “Doe of Rylstone” enjoyed the titillation of such fresh, bright praises!

So De Quincey at twenty-four became householder near to Grasmere—in the cottage I spoke of in the opening of the chapter—once occupied by Wordsworth, and later by Hartley Coleridge. There, on that pretty shelf of the hills—scarce lifted above Rydal-water, he gathers his books—studies the mountains—provokes the gossip of all the pretty Dalesmen’s daughters—lives there a bachelor, eight years or more—ranging round and round in bright autumnal days with the sturdy John Wilson (of theNoctes Ambrosianæ)—cultivating intimacy with poor crazy Lloyd (who lived nearby)—studying all anomalous characters with curious intensity, and finding anomalies where others found none. Meantime and through all, his sensibilities are kept wroughtto fever heat by the opiate drinks—always flanking him at his table; and he, so dreadfully wonted to those devilish drafts, that—on some occasions—he actually consumes within the twenty-four hours the equivalent of seven full wine-glasses of laudanum! No wonder the quiet Dales-people looked dubiously at the light burning in those cottage windows far into the gray of morning, and counted the pale-faced, big-headed man for something uncanny.

In these days comes about that strange episode of his mad attachment to the little elfin child—Catharine Wordsworth—of whom the poet-father wrote:—

“Solitude to herWas blithe society, who filled the airWith gladness and involuntary songs.Light were her sallies, as the tripping fawn’s,Forth startled from the form where she lay couched;Unthought of, unexpected, as the stirOf the soft breeze ruffling the meadow flowers.”

“Solitude to her

Was blithe society, who filled the air

With gladness and involuntary songs.

Light were her sallies, as the tripping fawn’s,

Forth startled from the form where she lay couched;

Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir

Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow flowers.”

Yet De Quincey, arrogantly interpreting the deep-seated affections of that father’s heart, says, “She was no favorite with Wordsworth;” but he “himself was blindly, doatingly, fascinated” bythis child of three. And of her death, before she is four, when De Quincey is on a visit in London, he says, with crazy exaggeration:

“Never, perhaps, from the foundations of those mighty hills was there so fierce a convulsion of grief as mastered my faculties on receiving that heart-shattering news.… I had always viewed her as an impersonation of the dawn and the spirit of infancy.… I returned hastily to Grasmere; stretched myself every night, for more than two months running, upon her grave; in fact often passed the night upon her grave … in mere intensity of sick, frantic yearning after neighborhood to the darling of my heart.”[11]

This is a type of his ways of feeling, and of his living, and of his speech—tending easily to all manner of extravagance: black and white are too tame for his nerve-exaltation; if a friend looks sharply, “his eye glares;” if disturbed, he has a “tumult of the brain;” if he doubles his fist, his gestures are the wildest; and a well-built son and daughter of a neighbor Dalesman are the images of “Coriolanus and Valeria.”

At thirty-one, or thereabout, De Quincey married the honest daughter of an honest yeoman of the neighborhood. She was sensible (except her marriage invalidate the term), was kindly, was long-suffering, and yet was very human. I suspect the interior of that cottage was not always like the islands of the blessed. Mr. Froude would perhaps have enjoyed lifting the roof from such a house. Many children were born to that strangely coupled pair,—some of them still living and most worthy.

It happens by and by to this impractical man, from whose disorderly and always open hand inherited moneys have slipped away; it happens—I say—that he must earn his bread by his own toil; so he projects great works of philosophy, of political economy, which are to revolutionize opinions; but they topple over into opium dreams before they are realized. He tries editing a county paper, but it is nought. At last he utilizes even his vices, and a chapter of theConfessions of an Opium Eater, in theLondon Magazine, drawsswift attention to one whose language is as vivid as a flame; and he lays bare, without qualm, his own quivering sensibilities. This spurt of work, or some new craze, takes him to London, away from his family. And so on a sudden, that idyl of life among the Lakes becomes for many years a tattered and blurred page to him. He is once more a denizen of the great city, living a shy, hermit existence there; long time in a dim back-room of the publisher Bohn’s, in Bedford Street, near to Covent Garden. He sees Proctor and Hazlitt odd-whiles, and Hood, and still more of the Lambs; but he is peevish and distant, and finds largest company in the jug of laudanum which brings swift succeeding dreams and stupefaction.

We will have a taste of some of his wild writing of those days. He is speaking of a dream.

“The dream commenced with a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march; of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day, a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and laboring in somedread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where—somehow, I knew not how—by some beings, I knew not whom—a battle, a strife, an agony was conducting, was evolving like a great drama or a piece of music.… I had the power, and yet had not the power to decide it … for the weight of twenty Atlantes was upon me as the oppression of inexpiable guilt. Deeper than ever plummet sounded, I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened; there came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro, trepidations of innumerable fugitives, I know not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands and heart-breaking partings, and then everlasting farewells! and with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated—everlasting farewells!”

Some years later he drifts again to Grasmere, but only to pluck up root and branch that home with wife and children,—so wonted now to the pleasant sounds and sights of the Lake waters and the mountains—and to transport them to Edinboro’, where, through Professor Wilson, he has promise of work which had begun to fail him in London.

There,—though he has the introduction whicha place at the tavern table of Father Ambrose gives—he is a lonely man; pacing solitary, sometimes in the shadow of the Castle Rock, sometimes in the shadow of the old houses of the Canongate; always preoccupied, close-lipped, brooding, and never without that wretched opium-comforter at his home. It was inBlackwood(1827) he first published the well known essay on “Murder as a Fine Art,”—perhaps the best known of all he wrote; there, too, he committed to paper, in the stress of his necessities, those sketchyReminiscencesof his Lake life; loose, disjointed, ill-considered, often sent to press without any revision and full of strange coined words. I note at random, such asnovel-ish erector(for builder),lambencies,apricating,aculeated; using words not rarely, etymologically, and for some recondite sense attaching. Worse than this, there is dreary tittle-tattle and a pulling away of decent domestic drapery from the lives of those he had professed to love and honor; tedious expatiation, too, upon the scandal-mongering of servant-maids, with illustrations by page on page; and yet, for the matter of gossip, he is himself as fertile as a seamstress or amonthly nurse, and as overflowing and brazen as any newspaper you may name.

But here and there, even amid his dreariest pages, you see, quivering—some gleams of his old strange power—a thrust of keen thought that bewilders you by its penetration—a glowing fancy that translates one to wondrous heights of poetic vision; and oftener yet, and over and over, shows that mastery of the finesse of language by which he commands the most attenuated reaches of his thought, and whips them into place with a snap and a sting.

Yet, when all is said, I think we must count the best that he wrote only amongst the curiosities of literature, rather than with the manna that fell for fainting souls in the wilderness.

De Quincey died in Edinburgh, in 1859, aged seventy-four.

In our last chapter we took a breezy morning walk amid the Lake scenery of England—more particularly that portion of it which lies between the old homes of Wordsworth and of Southey; we found it a thirteen-mile stretch of road, coiling along narrow meadows and over gray heights—beside mountains and mountain tarns—with Helvellyn lifting mid-way and Skiddaw towering at the end. We had our talk of Dr. Southey—so brave at his work—so generous in his home charities—so stiff in his Churchism and latter-day Toryism—with a very keen eye for beauty; yet writing poems—stately and masterful—which long ago went to the top-shelves, and stay there.

We had our rough and ready interviews with that first of “War Correspondents”—HenryCrabb Robinson—who knew all the prominent men of this epoch, and has given us such entertaining chit-chat about them, as we all listen to, and straightway forget. Afterwards we had a look at that strange, intellectual, disorderly creature De Quincey—he living a long while in the Lake Country—and in his more inspired moments seeming to carry us by his swift words, into that mystical region lying beyond the borders of what we know and see. He swayed men; but he rarely taught them, or fed them.

We still linger about those charmingest of country places; and by a wooden gateway—adjoining the approach to Windermere Hotel—upon the “Elleray woods,” amid which lived—eighty years ago—that stalwart friend of De Quincey’s, whose acquaintance he made among the Lakes, and who, like himself, was a devoted admirer of Wordsworth. Indeed, I think it was at the home of the latter that De Quincey first encountered the tall, lusty John Wilson—brimful of enthusiasm and all country ardors; brimful,too, of gush, and all poetic undulations of speech. He[12]was a native of Paisley—his father having been a rich manufacturer there—and had come to spend his abundant enthusiasms and his equally abundant moneys between Wordsworth and the mountains and Windermere. He has his fleet of yachts and barges upon the lake; he knows every pool where any trout lurk—every height that gives far-off views. He is a pugilist, a swimmer, an oarsman—making the hills echo with his jollity, and dashing off through the springy heather with that slight, seemingly frail De Quincey in his wake—who only reaches to his shoulder, but who is all compact of nerve and muscle. For Greek they are fairly mated, both by love and learning; and they can and do chant together the choral songs of heathen tragedies.

This yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant, John Wilson—notso well-known now as he was sixty years ago—we collegians greatly admired in that far-off day. He had written theIsle of Palms, and was responsible for much of the wit and dash and merriment which sparkled over the early pages ofBlackwood’s Magazine—in the chapters of theNoctes Ambrosianæand in many a paper besides:—he had his first university training at Glasgow; had a brief love-episode there also, which makes a prettily coy appearance on the pleasant pages of the biography of Wilson which a daughter (Mrs. Gordon) has compiled. After Glasgow came Oxford; and a characteristic bit of his later writing, which I cite, will show you how Oxford impressed him:—

“Having bidden farewell to our sweet native Scotland, and kissed ere we parted, the grass and the flowers with a show of filial tears—having bidden farewell to all her glens, now a-glimmer in the blended light of imagination and memory, with their cairns and kirks, their low-chimneyed huts, and their high-turreted halls, their free-flowing rivers, and lochs dashing like seas—we were all at once buried not in the Cimmerian gloom, but the Cerulean glitter of Oxford’s Ancient Academic groves. The genius of the place fell upon us. Yes! we hear now, in the renewed delight of the awe of our youthful spirit, the pealing organ in that Chapel calledthe Beautiful; we see the Saints on the stained windows; at the Altar the picture of One up Calvary meekly ascending. It seemed then that our hearts had no need even of the kindness of kindred—of the country where we were born, and that had received the continued blessings of our enlarging love! Yet away went, even then, sometimes, our thoughts to Scotland, like carrier-pigeons wafting love messages beneath their unwearied wings.”[13]

We should count this, and justly, rather over-fine writing nowadays. Yet it is throughout stamped with the peculiarities of Christopher North; he cannot help his delightfully wanton play with language and sentiment; and into whatever sea of topics he plunged—early or late in life—he always came up glittering with the beads and sparkles of a highly charged rhetoric. Close after Oxford comes that idyllic life[14]in Windermereto which I have referred. Four or more years pass there; his trees grow there; his new roads—hewn through the forests—wind there; he plots a new house there; he climbs the mountains; he is busy with his boats. Somewhat later he marries; he does not lose his old love for the poets of the Greek anthology; he has children born to him; he breeds game fowls, and looks after them as closely as a New England farmer’s wife after her poultry; but with him poetry and poultry go together. There are old diaries of his—into which his daughter gives us a peep—that show such entries as this:—“The small Paisley hen set herself 6th of July, with no fewer than nine eggs;” and again—“Red pullet in Josie’s barn was set with eight eggs on Thursday;” and square against such memoranda, and in script as careful, will appear some bit of verse like this:—

“Oh, fairy child! what can I wish for thee?Like a perennial flowret may’st thou be,That spends its life in beauty and in bliss;Soft on thee fall the breath of time,And still retain in heavenly climeThe bloom that charms in this.”

“Oh, fairy child! what can I wish for thee?

Like a perennial flowret may’st thou be,

That spends its life in beauty and in bliss;

Soft on thee fall the breath of time,

And still retain in heavenly clime

The bloom that charms in this.”

He wrote, too, while living there above Windermere, his poem of theIsle of Palms; having a fair success in the early quarter of this century, but which was quickly put out of sight and hearing by the brisker, martial music of Scott, and by the later and more vigorous and resonant verse of Byron.

Indeed, Wilson’s poetry was not such as we would have looked for from one who was a “varra bad un to lick” at a wrestling bout, and who made the splinters fly when his bludgeon went thwacking into a page of controversial prose. His verse is tender; it is graceful; it is delicate; it is full of languors too; and it is tiresome—a gentle girlish treble of sound it has, that you can hardly associate with this brawny mass of manhood.

But all that delightful life amidst the woods of Elleray—with its game-cocks, and boats, andmountain rambles, and shouted chorus of Prometheus—comes to a sharp end. The inherited fortune of the poet, by some criminal carelessness or knavery of a relative, goes in a day; and our fine stalwart wrestler must go to Edinboro’ to wrestle with the fates. There he coquets for a time with law; but presently falls into pleasant affiliation with old Mr. Blackwood (who was a remarkable man in his way) in the conduct of his magazine. And then came the trumpet blasts of mingled wit, bravado, and tenderness, which broke into those pages, and which made young college men in England or Scotland or America, fling up their hats for Christopher North. Not altogether a safe guide, I think, as a rhetorician; too much bounce in him; too little self-restraint; too much of glitter and iridescence; but, on the other hand—bating some blackguardism—he is brimful of life and heartiness and merriment—lighted up with scholarly hues of color.

There was associated with Wilson in those days, in work uponBlackwood, a young man—whom we may possibly not have occasion to speak ofagain, and yet who is worthy of mention. I mean J. G. Lockhart,[15]who afterwards became son-in-law and the biographer of Walter Scott—a slight young fellow in that day, very erect and prim; wearing his hat well forward on his heavy brows, and so shading a face that was thin, clean cut, handsome, and which had almost the darkness of a Spaniard’s. He put his rapier-like thrusts into a good many papers which the two wrought at together. All his life he loved literary digs with his stiletto—which was very sharp—and when he left Edinboro’ to edit theQuarterly Reviewin London (as he did in after days) he took his stiletto with him. There are scenes in that unevenly written Lockhart story ofAdam Blair—hardly known now—which for thrilling passion, blazing out of clear sufficiencies of occasion, would compare well with kindred scenes of Scott’s own, and which score deeper coloringsof human woe and loves and remorse than belong to most modern stories; not lighted, indeed, with humor; not entertaining with anecdote; not embroidered with archæologic knowledge; not rattling with coruscating social fireworks, but—subtle, psychologic, touching the very marrow of our common manhood with a pen both sharp and fine. We remember him, however, most gratefully as the charming biographer of Scott, and as the accomplished translator of certain Spanish ballads into which he has put—under flowing English verse—all the clashing of Cordovan castanets, and all the jingle of the war stirrups of the Moors.

We return now to Professor Wilson and propose to tell you how he came by that title. It was after only a few years of work in connection withBlackwoodthat the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinboro’ University—which had been held by Dugald Stewart, and later by Dr. Thomas Brown—fell vacant; and at once the name of Wilson was pressed by his friends for the position. It was not a little odd that a man best known by two delicate poems, and by a bold swashbuckler sort of magazine writing should be put forward—insuch a staid city as Edinboro’, and against such a candidate as Sir William Hamilton—for a Chair which had been held by Dugald Stewart! But hewasso put forward, and successfully; Walter Scott and the Government coming to his aid. Upon this, he went resolutely to study in the new line marked out for him; his rods and guns were, for the time, hung upon the wall; his wrestling frolics and bouts at quarter-staff, and suppers at the Ambrose tavern, were laid under limitations. He put a conscience and a pertinacity into his labor that he had never put to any intellectual work before.[16]But there were verymany people in Edinboro’ who had been aggrieved by the appointment—largely, too, among those from whom his pupils would come. There was, naturally, great anxiety among his friends respecting the opening of the first session. An eye-witness says:—

“I went prepared to join in a cabal which was formed to put him down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a collection of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their knob-sticks, I never saw. The Professor entered with a bold step, amid profound silence. Every one expected some deprecatory, or propitiatory introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to decide against him, reason or no reason; but he began with a voice of thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept up—unflinchingly and unhesitatingly, without a pause—a flow of rhetoric such as Dugald Stewart or Dr. Brown, his predecessors, never delivered in the same place. Not a word—not a murmur escaped his captivated audience; and at the end they gave him a right-down unanimous burst of applause.”[17]

From that time forth, for thirty years or more, John Wilson held the place, and won a popularitywith his annual relays of pupils that was unexampled and unshaken. Better lectures in his province may very possibly have been written by others elsewhere—more close, more compact, more thoroughly thought out, more methodic. His were not patterned after Reid and Stewart; indeed, not patterned at all; not wrought into a burnished system, with the pivots and cranks of the old school-men all in their places. But they made up a series—continuous, and lapping each into each, by easy confluence of topic—of discourses on moral duties and on moral relations, with full and brilliant illustrative talk—sometimes in his heated moments taking on the gush and exuberance of a poem; other times bristling with reminiscences; yet full of suggestiveness, and telling as much, I think, on the minds of his eager and receptive students as if the rhetorical brilliancies had all been plucked away, and some master of a duller craft had reduced his words to a stiff, logical paradigm.

From this time forward Professor Wilson lived a quiet, domestic, yet fully occupied life. He wrote enormously for the magazine with whichhis name had become identified; there is scarce a break in his thirty years’ teachings in the university; there are sometimes brief interludes of travel; journeys to London; flights to the Highlands; there are breaks in his domestic circle, breaks in the larger circle of his friends; there are twinges of the gout and there come wrinkles of age; but he is braver to resist than most; and for years on years everybody knew that great gaunt figure, with blue eyes and hair flying wild, striding along Edinboro’ streets.

His poems have indeed almost gone down under the literary horizon of to-day; but one who has knownBlackwoodof old, can hardly wander anywhere amongst the Highlands of Scotland without pleasant recollections of Christopher North and of the musical bravuras of his speech.

Another Scotsman, who is worthy of our attention for a little time, is one of a different order; he is stiff, he is prim, he is almost priggish; he is so in his young days and he keeps so to the very last.

A verse or two from one of the little poems he wrote will bring him to your memory:

“On Linden when the sun was low,All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,And dark as winter was the flow,Of Iser, rolling rapidly.”

“On Linden when the sun was low,

All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,

And dark as winter was the flow,

Of Iser, rolling rapidly.”

And again:

“Then shook the hills with thunder riven,Then rushed the steed to battle driven,And louder than the bolts of heaven,Far flashed the red artillery.”

“Then shook the hills with thunder riven,

Then rushed the steed to battle driven,

And louder than the bolts of heaven,

Far flashed the red artillery.”

If Thomas Campbell[18]had never written anything more than that page-long story of the “Battle of Hohenlinden,” his name would have gone into all the anthologies, and his verse into all those school-books where boys for seventy years now have pounded at his martial metre in furies of declamation. And yet this bit of martial verse, so full of the breath of battle, was, at the date of its writing, rejected by the editor of a small provincialjournal in Scotland—as not coming up to the true poetic standard![19]

I have spoken of Campbell as a Scotsman; though after only a short stay in Scotland—following his university career at Glasgow—and a starveling tour upon the Continent (out of which flashed “Hohenlinden”)—he went to London; and there or thereabout spent the greater part of the residue of a long life. He had affiliations of a certain sort with America, out of which may possibly have grown hisGertrude of Wyoming; his father was for much time a merchant in Falmouth, Virginia, about 1770; being however a strong loyalist, he returned in 1776. A brother and an uncle of the poet became established in this country, and an American Campbell of this stock was connected by marriage with the family of Patrick Henry.

The firstcoupby which Campbell won his literary spurs, was a bright, polished poem—with its couplets all in martinet-like order—called thePleasures of Hope. We all know it, if for nothingmore, by reason of the sympathetic allusion to the woes of Poland:

“Ah, bloodiest picture in the book of time!Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime;Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe,Strength in her arms nor mercy in her woe!Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear,Closed her bright eye and curbed her high career,Hope for a season bade the world farewell,And freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!”

“Ah, bloodiest picture in the book of time!

Sarmatia fell, unwept, without a crime;

Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe,

Strength in her arms nor mercy in her woe!

Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear,

Closed her bright eye and curbed her high career,

Hope for a season bade the world farewell,

And freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!”

Even at so late a date as the death of Campbell (1844), when they buried him in Westminster Abbey, close upon the tomb of Sheridan, some grateful Pole secured a handful of earth from the grave of Kosciusko to throw upon the coffin of the poet.

But in addition to its glow of liberalism, this first poem of Campbell was, measured by all the old canons of verse, thoroughly artistic. Its pauses, its rhymes, its longs and shorts were of the best prize order; even its errors in matters of fact have an academic tinge—as, for instance,—

“On Erie’s banks, where tigers steal along!”

The truth is, Mr. Campbell was never strong in his natural history; he does not scruple to put flamingoes and palm trees into the valley of Wyoming.Another reason why the first poem of Campbell’s, written when he was only twenty-one, came to such success, was the comparatively clear field it had. The date of publication was at the end of the century. Byron was in his boyhood; Scott had not published hisLay of the Last Minstrel(1805); Southey had printed only hisJoan of Arc(1796), which few people read; the same may be said of Landor’sGebir, (1797); Cowper was an old story; Rogers’sPleasures of Memory(1792), and Moore’s translation ofAnacreon(1799-1800), were the more current things with which people who loved fresh poetry could regale themselves. TheLyrical Balladsof Wordsworth and Coleridge had indeed been printed, perhaps a year or two before, down in Bristol; but scarce any one readthese; few bought them;[20]and yet—in that copy of theLyrical Balladswas lyingperdu—almost unknown and uncared for—the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Gertrude of Wyoming, a poem, written at Sydenham, near London, about 1807, and which, sixty years ago, every good American who was collecting books thought it necessary to place upon his shelves, I rarely find there now. It has not the rhetorical elaboration of Campbell’s first poem; never won its success; there are bits of war in it, and of massacre, that are gorgeously encrimsoned, and which are laced through and through with sounds of fife and warwhoop; but the landscape is a disorderly exaggeration (I have already hinted at its palm trees) and its love-tale has only the ardors of a stage scene in it; we know where the tragedy is coming in, and gather up our wraps so as to be ready when the curtain falls.

He was a born actor—in need (for his best work) of the foot-lights, the on-lookers, the trombone, the bass-drum. He never glided into victories of the pen by natural inevitable movement of brain or heart; he stopped always and everywhere to consider hispose.

There is little of interest in Campbell’s personal history; he married a cousin; lived, as I said, mostly in London, or its immediate neighborhood.He had two sons—one dying young, and the other of weak mind—lingering many years—a great grief and source of anxiety to his father, who had the reputation of being exacting and stern in his family. He edited for a long time theNew Monthly Magazine, and wrote much for it, but is represented to have been, in its conduct, careless, hypercritical, and dilatory. He lectured, too, before the Royal Institute on poetry; read oratorically and showily—his subject matter being semi-philosophical, with a great air of learning and academically dry; there was excellent system in his discourses, and careful thinking on themes remote from most people’s thought. He wrote some historical works which are not printed nowadays; his life of Mrs. Siddons is bad; his life of Petrarch is but little better; some poems he published late in life are quite unworthy of him and are never read. Nevertheless, this prim, captious gentleman wrote many things which have the ring of truest poetry and which will be dear to the heart of England as long as English ships sail forth to battle.

Yet another Scotsman whose name will not be forgotten—whether British ships go to battle, or idle at the docks—is Walter Scott.[21]I scarce know how to begin to speak of him. We all know him so well—thanks to the biography of his son-in-law, Lockhart, which is almost Boswellian in its minuteness, and has dignity besides. We know—as we know about a neighbor’s child—of his first struggles with illness, wrapped in a fresh sheepskin, upon the heathery hills by Smailholme Tower; we know of the strong, alert boyhood that succeeded; he following, with a firm seat and free rein—amongst other game—the old wives’ tales and border ballads which, thrumming in his receptive ears, put the Edinboro law studies into large confusion. Swift after this comes the hurry-scurry of a boyish love-chase—beginning in Grey Friar’s church-yard;she, however, who sprung the race—presently doubles upon him, and is seen no more; and he goes lumbering forward to another fate. It was close upon these experiences that some friends of his printed privately his ballad ofWilliam and Helen, founded on the German Lenore:—

“Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode!Splash, splash! along the sea!The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,The flashing pebbles flee!”

“Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode!

Splash, splash! along the sea!

The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,

The flashing pebbles flee!”

And the spirit and dash of those four lines were quickly recognized as marking a new power in Scotch letters; and an echo of them, or of their spirit, in some shape or other, may be found, I think, in all his succeeding poems and in all the tumults and struggles of his life. The elder Scott does not like this philandering with rhyme; it will spoil the law, and a solid profession, he thinks; and true enough it does. For theBorder Minstrelsycomes spinning its delightfully musical and tender stories shortly after Lenore; and a little later appears his first long poem—theLay of the Last Minstrel—which waked all Scotland and England to the melody of the new master.He was thirty-four then; ripening later than Campbell, who at twenty-one had published hisPleasures of Hope. There was no kinship in the methods of the two poets; Campbell all precision, and nice balance, delicate adjustment of language—stepping from point to point in his progress with all grammatic precautions and with well-poised poetic steps and demi-volts, as studied as a dancing master’s; while Scott dashed to his purpose with a seeming abandonment of care, and a swift pace that made the “pebbles fly.” Just as unlike, too, was this racing freedom of Scott’s—which dragged the mists away from the Highlands, and splashed his colors of gray, and of the purple of blooming heather over the moors—from that other strain of verse, with its introspections and deeper folded charms, which in the hands of Wordsworth was beginning to declare itself humbly and coyly, but as yet with only the rarest applause. I cannot make this distinction clearer than by quoting a little landscape picture—let us say fromMarmion—and contrasting with it another from Wordsworth, which was composed six years or more beforeMarmionwas published.First, then, from Scott—and nothing prettier and quieter of rural sort belongs to him,—

“November’s sky is chill and drear,November’s leaf is red and sear;Late gazing down the steepy linnThat hems our little garden in.”

“November’s sky is chill and drear,

November’s leaf is red and sear;

Late gazing down the steepy linn

That hems our little garden in.”

(I may remark, in passing, that this is an actual description of Scott’s home surroundings at Ashestiel.)

“Low in its dark and narrow glenYou scarce the rivulet might ken,So thick the tangled greenwood grew,So feeble trilled the streamlet through;Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seenThrough brush and briar, no longer green,An angry brook it sweeps the glade,Breaks over rock and wild cascade,And foaming brown with double speedMarries its waters to the Tweed.”

“Low in its dark and narrow glen

You scarce the rivulet might ken,

So thick the tangled greenwood grew,

So feeble trilled the streamlet through;

Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen

Through brush and briar, no longer green,

An angry brook it sweeps the glade,

Breaks over rock and wild cascade,

And foaming brown with double speed

Marries its waters to the Tweed.”

There it is—a completed picture; do what you will with it! Reading it, is like a swift, glad stepping along the borders of the brook.

Now listen for a little to Wordsworth; it is a scrap from Tintern Abbey:—

“Once again I seeThese hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little linesOf sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,Green to the very door; and wreaths of smokeSent up in silence, from among the trees!With some uncertain notice, as might seemOf vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fireThe hermit sits alone.”

“Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,

Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire

The hermit sits alone.”

(Here is more than the tangible picture; the smoke wreaths have put unseen dwellers there); and again:—

“O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,How often has my spirit turned to thee!I have learnedTo look on Nature, not as in the hourOf thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimesThe still, sad music of humanity!Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample powerTo chasten and subdue. And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting sunsAnd the round ocean and the living airAnd the blue sky, and in the mind of menA motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woodsAnd mountains.”

“O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,How often has my spirit turned to thee!

“O Sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!

I have learnedTo look on Nature, not as in the hourOf thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimesThe still, sad music of humanity!Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample powerTo chasten and subdue. And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting sunsAnd the round ocean and the living airAnd the blue sky, and in the mind of menA motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woodsAnd mountains.”

I have learned

To look on Nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity!

Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns

And the round ocean and the living air

And the blue sky, and in the mind of men

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains.”

This will emphasize the distinction, to which I would call attention, in the treatment of landscape by the two poets: Wordsworth puttinghisall on a simmer with humanities and far-reaching meditative hopes and languors; and Scott throwing windows wide open to the sky, and saying only—look—and be glad!

In those days Wordsworth had one reader where Scott had a hundred; and the one reader was apologetic and shy, and the hundred were loud and gushing. I think the number of their respective readers is more evenly balanced nowadays; and it is the readers of Scott who are beginning to be apologetic. Indeed I have a half consciousness of putting myself on this page in that category:—As if the Homeric toss and life and play, and large sweep of rivers, and of battalions and winnowed love-notes, and clang of trumpets, and moaning of the sea, which rise and fall in the pages of theMinstreland ofMarmion—needed apology! Apology or no, I think Scott’s poems will be readfor a good many years to come. The guide books and Highland travellers—and high-thoughted travellers—will keep them alive—if the critics do not; and I think you will find no better fore-reading for a trip along the Tweed or through the Trosachs thanMarmion, and theLady of the Lake.

Meantime, our author has married—a marriage, Goldwin Smith says, of “intellectual disparagement”; which I suppose means that Mrs. Scott was not learned and bookish—as she certainly was not; but she was honest, true-hearted, and domestic. Mr. Redding profanely says that she was used to plead, “Walter, my dear, you must write a new book, for I want another silk dress.” I think this is apocryphal; and there is good reason to believe that she gave a little hearty home huzza at each one of Mr. Scott’s quick succeeding triumphs.

Our author has also changed his home; first from the pretty little village of Lasswade, which is down by Dalkeith, to Ashestiel by the Yarrow;and thence again to a farm-house, near to that unfortunate pile of Abbotsford, which stands on the Tweed bank, shadowed by the trees he planted, and shadowed yet more heavily by the story of his misfortunes. I notice a disposition in some recent writers to disparage this notable country home as pseudo-Gothic and flimsy. This gives a false impression of a structure which, though it lack that singleness of expression and subordination of details which satisfy a professional critic, does yet embody in a singularly interesting way, and with solid construction, all the aspirations, tastes, clannish vanities and archæologic whims of the great novelist. The castellated tower is there to carry the Scottish standard, and the cloister to keep alive reverent memory of old religious houses; and the miniature Court gate, with its warder’s horn; and the Oriole windows, whose details are, maybe, snatched from Kenilworth; the mass, too, is impressive and smacks all over of Scott’s personality and of the traditions he cherished.

I am tempted to introduce here some notes of a visit made to this locality very many years ago. Ihad set off on a foot-pilgrimage from the old border town of Berwick-on-Tweed; had kept close along the banks of the river, seeing men drawing nets for salmon, whose silvery scales flashed in the morning sun. All around swept those charming fields of Tweed-side, green with the richest June growth; here and there were shepherds at their sheep washing; old Norham Castle presently lifted its gray buttresses into view; then came the long Coldstream bridge, with its arches shimmering in the flood below; and after this the palace of the Duke of Roxburgh. In thus following up leisurely the Tweed banks from Berwick, I had slept the first night at Kelso; had studied the great fine bit of ruin which is there, and had caught glimpses of Teviot-dale and of the Eildon Hills; had wandered out of my way for a sight of Smailholme tower, and of Sandy Knowe—both associated with Scott’s childhood; I passed Dryburgh, where he lies buried, and at last on an evening of early June, 1845, a stout oarsman ferried me across the Tweed and landed me in Melrose.

I slept at the George Inn—dreaming (as manya young wayfarer in those lands has since done), of Ivanhoe and Rebecca, and border wars andOld Mortality. Next morning, after a breakfast upon trout taken from some near stream (very likely the Yarrow or the Gala-water), I strolled two miles or so along the road which followed the Tweed bank upon the southern side, and by a green foot-gate entered the Abbotsford grounds. The forest trees—not over high at that time—were those which the master had planted. From his favorite outdoor seat, sheltered by a thicket of arbor-vitæ, could be caught a glimpse of the rippled surface of the Tweed and of the turrets of the house.

It was all very quiet—quiet in the wood-walks; quiet as you approached the court-yard; the master dead; the family gone; I think there was a yelp from some young hound in an out-building, and a twitter from some birds I did not know; there was the unceasing murmur of the river. Besides these sounds, the silence was unbroken; and when I rang the bell at the entrance door, the jangle of it was very startling; startling a little terrier, too, whose quick, sharp bark rang noisily through the outer court.

Only an old house-keeper was in charge, who had fallen into that dreadful parrot-like way of telling visitors what things were best worth seeing—which frets one terribly. What should you or I care (fresh fromGuy ManneringorKenilworth) whether a bit of carving came from Jedburgh or Kelso? or about the jets in the chandelier, or the way in which a Russian Grand Duke wrote his name in the visitors’ book?

But when we catch sight of the desk at which the master wrote, or of the chair in which he sat, and of his shoes and coat and cane—looking as if they might have been worn yesterday—these seem to bring us nearer to the man who has written so much to cheer and to charm the world. There was, too, a little box in the corridor, simple and iron-bound, with the line written below it, “Post will close at two.” It was as if we had heard the master of the house say it. Perhaps the notice was in his handwriting (he had been active there in 1831-2—just thirteen years before)—perhaps not; but—somehow—more than the library, or the portrait bust, or the chatter of the well-meaning house-keeper, it brought back thehalting old gentleman in his shooting-coat, and with ivory-headed cane—hobbling with a vigorous step along the corridor, to post in that iron-bound box a packet—maybe a chapter ofWoodstock.

I have spoken of the vacant house—family gone: The young Sir Walter Scott, of the British army, and heir to the estate—was at that date (1845) absent in the Indies; and only two years thereafter died at sea on his voyage home. Charles Scott, the only brother of the younger Sir Walter, died in 1841.[22]Miss Anne Scott, the only unmarried daughter of the author ofWaverley, died—worn-out with tenderest care of mother and father, and broken-hearted—in 1833. Her only sister, Mrs. (Sophia Scott) Lockhart, died in 1837. Her oldest son—John Hugh, familiarly known as “Hugh Little John”—the crippled boy, for whom had been written theTales of a Grandfather,and the darling of the two households upon Tweed-side—died in 1831. I cannot forbear quoting here a charming little memorial of him, which, within the present year, has appeared in Mr. Lang’sLife of Lockhart.

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