Mosses from an old manse
upon our globe. There is no surer method of annihilating the magic
influence of a great renown than by exhibiting the possessor of it in
the decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers,—buried
beneath his own mortality,—and lacking even the qualities of sense that
enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the eye of
the world. This is the state to which disease, aggravated by long
endurance of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age,—for he is now
above seventy,—has reduced Bonaparte. The British government has acted
shrewdly in retransporting him from St. Helena to England. They should
now restore him to Paris, and there let him once again review the
relics of his armies. His eye is dull and rheumy; his nether lip hung
down upon his chin. While I was observing him there chanced to be a
little extra bustle in the street; and he, the brother of Caesar and
Hannibal,—the great captain who had veiled the world in battle-smoke
and tracked it round with bloody footsteps,—was seized with a nervous
trembling, and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked
and dolorous cry. The fellows winked at one another, laughed aside,
and, patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and led him away.
Death and fury! Ha, villain, how came you hither? Avaunt! or I fling my
inkstand at your head. Tush, tusk; it is all a mistake. Pray, my dear
friend, pardon this little outbreak. The fact is, the mention of those
two policemen, and their custody of Bonaparte, had called up the idea
of that odious wretch—you remember him well—who was pleased to take
such gratuitous and impertinent care of my person before I quitted New
England. Forthwith up rose before my mind’s eye that same little
whitewashed room, with the iron-grated window,—strange that it should
have been iron-grated!—where, in too easy compliance with the absurd
wishes of my relatives, I have wasted several good years of my life.
Positively it seemed to me that I was still sitting there, and that the
keeper—not that he ever was my keeper neither, but only a kind of
intrusive devil of a body-servant—had just peeped in at the door. The
rascal! I owe him an old grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet.
Fie! fie! The mere thought of him has exceedingly discomposed me. Even
now that hateful chamber—the iron-grated window, which blasted the
blessed sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes and made it poison
to my soul-looks more distinct to my view than does this my comfortable
apartment in the heart of London. The reality—that which I know to be
such—hangs like remnants of tattered scenery over the intolerably
prominent illusion. Let us think of it no more.
You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not say, what is known
to all the world, that this celebrated poet has for many years past
been reconciled to the Church of England. In his more recent works he
has applied his fine powers to the vindication of the Christian faith,
with an especial view to that particular development. Latterly, as you
may not have heard, he has taken orders, and been inducted to a small
country living in the gift of the Lord Chancellor. Just now, luckily
for me, he has come to the metropolis to superintend the publication of
a volume of discourses treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of
Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles. On my first
introduction I felt no little embarrassment as to the manner of
combining what I had to say to the author of _Queen Mali_, the _Revolt
of Islam_, and _Prometheus Unbound_ with such acknowledgments as might
be acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the
Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my ease. Standing
where he now does, and reviewing all his successive productions from a
higher point, he assures me that there is a harmony, an order, a
regular procession, which enables him to lay his hand upon any one of
the earlier poems and say, “This is my work,” with precisely the same
complacency of conscience wherewithal he contemplates the volume of
discourses above mentioned. They are like the successive steps of a
staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential
to the support of the whole as the highest and final one resting upon
the threshold of the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask him what
would have been his fate had he perished on the lower steps of his
staircase, instead of building his way aloft into the celestial
brightness.
How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor greatly care,
so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has, from a lower
region to a loftier one. Without touching upon their religious merits,
I consider the productions of his maturity superior, as poems, to those
of his youth. They are warmer with human love, which has served as an
interpreter between his mind and the multitude. The author has learned
to dip his pen oftener into his heart, and has thereby avoided the
faults into which a too exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont
to betray him. Formerly his page was often little other than a concrete
arrangement of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they
were brilliant. Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a
heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character Shelley
can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate than his
friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous night when
he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense, again,—sheer nonsense!
What, am I babbling about? I was thinking of that old figment of his
being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and washed ashore near Via Reggio,
and burned to ashes on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and
frankincense; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld a flame of
marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the dead poet’s heart, and that
his fire-purified relics were finally buried near his child in Roman
earth. If all this happened three-and-twenty years ago, how could I
have met the drowned and burned and buried man here in London only
yesterday?
Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald Heber,
heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to a see in
England, called on Shelley while I was with him. They appeared to be on
terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint poem in
contemplation. What a strange, incongruous dream is the life of man!
Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel. It will be
issued entire by old John Murray in the course of the present
publishing season. The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser stop,
to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from his
lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his accumulation of
ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth died only a week or
two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and grant that he may not have completed
_The Excursion_! Methinks I am sick of everything he wrote, except his
_Laodamia_. It is very sad, this inconstancy of the mind to the poets
whom it once worshipped. Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with
his usual diligence. Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of
age, and with most pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow
intellect the Devil had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such a
man the privilege of growing old and infirm. It takes away our
speculative license of kicking him.
Keats? No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with
coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and divers
other sensual obstructions intervening betwixt his small and slender
figure and my eager glance. I would fain have met him on the sea-shore,
or beneath a natural arch of forest trees, or the Gothic arch of an old
cathedral, or among Grecian ruins, or at a glimmering fireside on the
verge of evening, or at the twilight entrance of a cave, into the
dreamy depths of which he would have led me by the hand; anywhere, in
short, save at Temple Bar, where his presence was blotted out by the
porter-swollen bulks of these gross Englishmen. I stood and watched him
fading away, fading away along the pavement, and could hardly tell
whether he were an actual man or a thought that had slipped out of my
mind and clothed itself in human form and habiliments merely to beguile
me. At one moment he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it,
I am almost certain, stained with blood. You never saw anything so
fragile as his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life felt the
effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs caused by the article on
his Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so nearly brought him
to the grave. Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost,
sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but
never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly
think him a great poet. The burden of a mighty genius would never have
been imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so
infirmly sensitive. Great poets should have iron sinews.
Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to the world,
is understood to have devoted himself to the composition of an epic
poem. Some passages of it have been communicated to the inner circle of
his admirers, and impressed them as the loftiest strains that have been
audible on earth since Milton’s days. If I can obtain copies of these
specimens, I will ask you to present them to James Russell Lowell, who
seems to be one of the poet’s most fervent and worthiest worshippers.
The information took me by surprise. I had supposed that all Keats’s
poetic incense, without being embodied in human language, floated up to
heaven and mingled with the songs of the immortal choristers, who
perhaps were conscious of an unknown voice among them, and thought
their melody the sweeter for it. But it is not so; he has positively
written a poem on the subject of _Paradise Regained_, though in another
sense than that which presented itself to the mind of Milton. In
compliance, it may be imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend
that all epic possibilities in the past history of the world are
exhausted, Keats has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely
remote futurity. He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances of
the time-long warfare between good and evil. Our race is on the eve of
its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of perfection; Woman,
redeemed from the thraldom against which our sibyl uplifts so powerful
and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his side or communes for
herself with angels; the Earth, sympathizing with her children’s
happier state, has clothed herself in such luxuriant and loving beauty
as no eye ever witnessed since our first parents saw the sun rise over
dewy Eden. Nor then indeed; for this is the fulfilment of what was then
but a golden promise. But the picture has its shadows. There remains to
mankind another peril,—a last encounter with the evil principle. Should
the battle go against us, we sink back into the slime and misery of
ages. If we triumph—But it demands a poet’s eye to contemplate the
splendor of such a consummation and not to be dazzled.
To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender a
spirit of humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm interest of
a village tale no less than the grandeur which befits so high a theme.
Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation of his friends;
for I have not read or heard even a single line of the performance in
question. Keats, I am told, withholds it from the press, under an idea
that the age has not enough of spiritual insight to receive it