Course of Time
, loves to linger amid the ruins of fallen and lost natures; and finds a savage luxury in the contemplation of the agonies of those whom he represents as damned. He tells us that he loved no scenery so well as that of solitary wastes, where nature was utterly barren and seemed willing to decay—where the dark wings of monotonous gloom and eternal silence met and sullenly embraced over the dreary region; and he seems to have had the same passion for moral as for physical desolations. Blair, on the other hand, never tarries long in such scenes; he does not dwell amidst, and brood over them like an owl, but crosses them with the swift brushing wing of a bird returning to her evening nest. He never goes out of his way to search for them—he sees and shows them merely because they meet him on his path. There is nothing morbid nor much that is melancholy in this poem. He takes the hard fact as it is, and paints it with all his force, but he does not seek to exaggerate or discolour it. He shows "the Grave" in various lights, at morning, night, and noon—not under the uniform weight of a leaden midnight sky, or only by the ghastly illumination of a waning moon. Southey, in his
Life of Cowper
, has fallen into the mistake of supposing Blair one of the imitators of Young. Now, in fact, Blair's poem was
written
before the
Last Day
of Young, or the
Night Thoughts
had appeared. Its originality is indeed one of its greatest merits and charms. The author has copied no style, imitated no manner, and scorned to permit any living man or poet to stand between him and the cold stern reality of death, which he was to reflect in song. He is worthy, thus, of the name so often misapplied, of Poet—
i. e.
Maker. You see an original genius both in the beauties and the faults of the work. Its language, so simply strong and daring in its homeliness, its free and energetic motion, its fresh fearless touch, its fidelity to nature and to life, the quick succession and sharp brief poignancy of its pictures, its absence of elaboration, and carelessness about minute lights and shades—all combine to prove that the author has an eye, an imagination, and a purpose quite peculiar to himself. He treats
the Grave
with as much originality as if he had been contemporary with the earliest sepulchre—as if he had plucked grass from Abel's tomb; and yet, while it has not lost to his eye its first fearful gloss and glory, it has gathered around it the dear or dismal associations of six thousand years; and Adam and the "new-made widow" seem to be leaning side by side over its dust. We could have conceived of him treating the subject more reconditely, imaginatively, and metaphysically, but not of handling it with more direct and masculine power.
That he has done so, is, undoubtedly, one great cause of the poem's popularity. Had he woven any gossamer of reverie or philosophic conjecture over
the Grave
, or even shown much personal interest in it, he might have gained a more peculiar set of admirers, but would not have won his way to the world's heart. As it is, the popularity of
The Grave
has been unbounded. Partly from the subject, partly from the shortness, partly from the signal truth and force of the poem, it rose rapidly to fame. It became
everybody's Grave
. The poem was copied into all school collections. It lay along with
Robinson Crusoe
and Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress
, in the windows of cottages, and on the tables of wayside inns—achieving thus what Coleridge predicated over that well-thumbed copy of
Thomson's Seasons
, in the Welsh ale-house—"true fame!" It pervaded America. It was translated into other languages, and in its own it now transmigrated into a tract, now filled the page of a periodical, and now became a small separate book, telling its solemn tale to those who, though at first reluctant, as was the wedding guest to hear the Anciente Marinere, were at last compelled to listen, if not to learn. Light ballads and other amusing and clever trifles, had before and have since thus "put a girdle round about the globe in forty minutes;" but here was the phenomenon of a sad and serious strain, with little merit or charm but Christian truth and rugged poetry, passing, as if on telegraphic wires, through the whole world in a moment of time. Perhaps we should add a reason, although a very subordinate one, for the popularity of the poem. It was its author's
first
and
last
. He wrote himself at once and easily
up
—he never tried and succeeded in writing himself laboriously
down
.
The only books which should gain permanent reputation are those which supply materials for thought, and are studded with moveable gems of expression. We think we may divide the poems of the past and present into two classes, which we may discriminate into
buildings
and
quarries
. Many works to which you can hardly deny the character of works of genius may be likened to elegant and splendid edifices, the structure of which you cannot but admire, although the secret of their architecture you do not understand, and although from them you neither do nor can extract a single stone. They stand up before the view, dazzling and confounding,—
"Distinct but distant, clear, but ah! how cold."
Other books, less magnificent in aspect and rougher in style, are yet so full of suggestive and germinating thought, that we must liken them to quarries, surrounded it may be by thorns and briars, and precipices, but containing the richest of matter, and communicating with the very depths of the earth. Not to enter on the vexed questions connected with more celebrated poets, we may name Darwin and Dr Thomas Brown as two specimens of the building, and Robert Blair as an admirable example of the quarry. In household words and sententious truths, he yields (taking his space into consideration), not even to Young, or Pope, or Cowper, but to Shakspeare alone. His poem is a tissue of texts; many of his expressions might pass and have passed for bits of
Hamlet
. Take a few:—
"Friendship, mysterious cement of the soul,Sweetener of life, and solder of society.""Son of the morning, whither art thou gone?Where hast thou hid thy many-spangled head,And the majestic menace of thine eyesFelt from afar?""Sorry pre-eminence of high descent!Above the vulgar, born torot in state."
Hence, by the way, Byron's famous lines,—
"It seem'd the mockery of hell to foldTherottennessof eighty years in gold."
The exquisite description of beauty in the grave has been already quoted. That of the strong man dying is quite Shakspearian, and equally so is the picture commencing, "Death's shafts fly quick," particularly the passage about the sexton. How much he has compressed in the few words of the celebrated description!—
"The wind is up; hark! how it howls! methinksTill now I never heard a sound so dreary;Doors creak, and windows clap, and night's foul bird,Rook'd in the spire, screams loud."
Who Blair's favourite authors were, we are not informed, but internal evidence proves him to have frequently and profitably read Shakspeare; and in terseness of description, comprehensiveness of vision, careless grandeur of execution, and short felicitous strokes of genius, he bears to him a considerable resemblance.
Blair's originality is proved by the fact, that many poets since have been either indebted to or inspired by his manly, noble verse. A great original, although he seldom steals himself, is the innocent cause of much theft in others, and his writings tempt, like the unbolted gate of a bank, to plunder. Young, although a truly gifted man, has kindled his night-lamp again and again at the phosphoric flame of
The Grave
. The author of the
Night Thoughts
has written more sustained and sounding passages than Blair; his style is more antithetic, and his general mode of thought more ingenious; his book is a much larger one; he exhibits at times gleams of deeper insight; has occasional bursts of more impassioned earnestness; and his work has a personal interest, like an interrupted story or imperfect plot running through it: but
The Grave
is superior in ease, in nature, in healthy tone, and in those happy touches which light upon even genius only in rare and favoured hours. In some of these points, as well as in a certain power of rough moral anatomy, and vivid hurrying sarcasm (like one in haste lifting, handling, and striking with a red-hot falchion), Blair reminds us rather of Cowper; but the poet of
The Task
teaches a sterner morality, wears around him a mantle of austerer gloom, abounds more in Scriptural reference and in purely theological matter, and exhibits a more thoroughly bardic and prophetic spirit. James Grahame, the author of
The Sabbath
, resembles Blair somewhat in happy pictorial flashes, and in the frequent rudeness of his versification; but is, on the whole, a milder, a more refined, a tenderer, and a weaker writer. It is clear that Pollok found the germ of his noble poem,
The Course of Time
, in
The Grave
. They resemble each other in their want of a plot, a hinge, a "back-bone," both being collections of loosely-strung moral sketches, with no unity but that of spirit, as also in the homely force and boldness of the writing; and if Pollok in aught differ from Blair, it is partly in the length of his poem and its elaboration, and partly in that feverish, hectic heat, and that morbid intensity and fury of temperament, which are the sources of much of Pollok's strength, and of more of his weakness. No poem on any similar subject, in our time, can be named with Blair's, except perhaps Bryant's
Thanatopsis
. The moral tendency, however, and religious tone of the two poems are entirely different.
Thanatopsis
looks at the Grave solely in its physical and poetical aspects. It never mentions either the Resurrection or the Future State. An Indian would have coloured his poem on the sepulchre with finer and fierier lines, like the stamp of autumn on the fallen leaf. The main idea in it (an idea probably suggested by a line in
The Grave
—
"What is this world?What but a spacious burial-place unwall'd?"
is that of the earth as a great sepulchre; and its lesson is to inculcate on the death-devoted dust, which we call man, the duty of dropping into its kindred dust as quietly and gracefully as possible. It is, as a poem, chiefly remarkable for its solemn music, which reminds you of a burial-march, but is far inferior to the Scottish poem in lofty moral, in theological truth, and in illustrative power. Blair, and not Bryant, remains the laureate of the Grave.
It is much to have one's name and fame connected with one of the great centrical truths of the universe, especially when that truth is related to a fact. Suppose a writer to have produced a great poem on Light and the Sun—or on Absolute Being and God—or on Immortal Life and Heaven—how sublime and how enviable were his reputation! It were for ever bound up, in the bundle of life, with these great Ideas and Facts. Now, Blair has sung, in notes as yet unequalled, one of the cardinal, although one of the gloomiest thoughts and actualities in existence, and his name ought to stand proportionally high. He has, in a solemn yet happy hour, turned aside from the highways, and the byeways too, of the world, and gone a-musing and meditating, like Isaac in the evening fields, and found among these a field of the dead, a place of skulls; and, returning home, has recorded that one brief meditation in verse, and made it and himself immortal. Such, precisely, is this Poem, and such the experience of this Poet. As long as "the mourners go about the streets," or assemble in their crowds, blackening the silent
braes
on their way to the country churchyard—as long as the grass of the grave murmurs out its moral in the western wind, and the sunshine seems to sadden as it shines upon the memorials and monuments of the dead—so long shall men read the
The Grave
, and turn with pensive joy and tearful gratitude to the memory of its poet.
Contents