The Poems of Felicia Hemans

Talia dicta dabat; sed viribus ensis adactus Transabiit costas.’ “However conspicuous such a passage may be in an ancient poet, it would not, we believe, be regarded with great admiration in a modern. “In one of Miss Edgeworth’s little stories for children, which are far better worth reading than most books for grown people, she says of the cottage of some poor woman that _it was as clean as misery could make it_. There is a pathos in these few words, not unusual in her writings, but such as we can find in but a scanty number of writers before our own age. It has not been well understood, that the indirect expressions of suffering are far more powerful than the direct, and that we are much more affected by suppressed, than by unrestrained emotion. In but little of the poetry of past times is there any trace of quickness or delicacy of perception in regard to the modes or expressions of human feeling and passion; for man himself had not become sufficiently refined for the exercise of such observation. Plato objects to Homer, and the tragic poets of Greece, that they degraded men’s minds by representing their heroes, when suffering, as pouring forth long lamentations, singing their sorrows, and beating their breasts. So far as they did so, there was nothing pathetic in their writings. Who, indeed, in modern times, was ever able to imagine himself affected by the sorrows of Achilles for the death of Patroclus, or those of his mother, Thetis, in consequence? “From the want of sentiment and of moral associations, the descriptive language of the ancient poets is, in general, scanty and poor. It is for the most part drawn immediately from the perceptions of the senses, and has little to do with the invisible feelings and images, of which outward things become the symbols to a reflecting mind. It rarely gives them a moral being; its epithets are seldom imaginative; it paints to the eye; it calls up recollections of bodily rest and pleasure; but it does not often address the heart. “Horace begins one of his odes thus:-- ‘Vides, ut ulta stet nive candidum Soracte; nec jam sustineant onus Sylvæ laborantes, geluque Flumina constiterint acuto?’ “The epithets _white_ mountain, _deep_ snow, _sharp_ frost, are all taken without addition immediately from the perception of the senses; nor, considering the common prosaic use of _laboro_, in a similar sense, is the epithet _labouring_ much more poetical; yet the passage is as striking of its kind as most that may be found in Latin poetry. The lines are thus rendered by Dryden,-- ‘Behold yon mountain’s hoary height Made higher with new mounts of snow; Again behold the winter’s weight Oppress the labouring woods below; And streams, with icy fetters bound, Benumb’d and cramp’d to solid ground.’ “Dryden was not eminent for his love of nature, or power of describing its beauties; and a poet of livelier perceptions would hardly have changed the name of Soracte for the faint generalisation, ‘yon mountain;’ yet something of the difference which we wish to point out between ancient and modern poetry is here perceptible. Let us take from Mrs Hemans an example of the richly imaginative character of that of later times. We will give the beginning of the verses in which she describes herself as reading, in an arbour, ‘The Talisman’ of Scott. A particular interest attaches to them from the circumstance that, in the best portrait of her, she is represented in this real or imaginary situation. ‘There were thick leaves above me and around,’ etc. “Every subject becomes rich in proportion to the wealth of the mind by which it is contemplated. The intellectual light that shines upon it gives it its colours. Deficient as the ancient poets were in so many sources of thought and feeling that exist in modern times, they discover as imperfect a sensibility to most of the other pleasures of a refined taste, as to those derived from the objects of nature. There is to be found, for instance, in their works, scarcely a single passage, perhaps not one, in which the power of music, as blending in intimate union sensible and intellectual pleasures, is described with strong expression; yet what a treasury of glowing images and solemn thoughts this subject has opened to modern poets. We need not quote for illustration Mrs Hemans’s ‘Triumphant Music.’ “Through our strong sympathy with our fellow-men, we are deeply interested in the remains of antiquity, in the ruins that recall it to our thoughts, and in the histories which have come down to us--or rather in those histories as fashioned anew by our imagination, effacing and softening, filling up the rude outline, and colouring and embellishing at pleasure. In proportion as we have a more vivid conception of the virtues and excellences of which man is capable, so man, as such, becomes more an object of our regard. In looking back through the obscurity of time, the depravity that would have shocked us, if forced upon our observation, is partially lost in the darkness, and the bright traits of character shine out more distinctly. The dead of past ages are regarded with something of the same tenderness that we feel toward the dead whom we have known: at least we consent for a time to sacrifice our philosophy to an illusion, and, instead of the Richard Cœur-de-Lion of history, whose only marked characteristics were bodily strength and brutal hardihood, with those few gleams of goodness which nothing but the grossest sensuality can utterly extinguish, we consent for a time to take the Richard of Scott’s _Ivanhoe_; or, in fancying the Augustan age, are willing to forget that it took its name from ‘him who murder’d Tully, That cold villain, Octavius’ “Conformably to the laws of our better nature, our imagination is most readily attracted by what is most excellent in man. While viewing a beautiful tract of country with which we are not familiar, we can hardly refrain from idealising its supposed inhabitants, and giving them somewhat of a poetical character, or, in other words, a character agreeable to our best feelings. So it is in casting our view over past ages. Our sympathies are excited for the hopes, and fears, and the virtues, such as they were, of those who have lost all power to injure; and we may even fashion dim images of what they now are, as existing somewhere in the creation of God, divested, perhaps, of the evil that clung to them on earth. The idea of that moral purification and development, which, we believe, is continually going on in the universe, may thus mingle with the contemplation of the past. It is in transferring us into a world in which grateful imaginations are blended with truth, and the harshness of present reality is shut out, that the poetic interest of antiquity principally consists. “Of this, modern poetry and fiction have abundantly availed themselves. But though a shadowy antiquity lay as a background to Greek and Roman civilisation, yet it was rarely resorted to by the ancient poets as a source of pleasing or solemn emotions. To them the remoter ages were little more than a desert abounding with monstrous fictions, with licentious and savage divinities, half-brutal demigods, and heroes, and chiefs hardly human, whose fabulous deeds and sufferings present nothing to recommend them to our sense of beauty. In the period following, history assumed at least an air of truth, and men appeared on the stage with human feelings, passions, and virtues. But, in looking back upon their earlier history, the ancients seem to have felt but slightly those peculiar sentiments and trains of feeling, which the contemplation of antiquity now awakens in our breasts. In no ancient poet is there a celebration of a hero of his country to be compared with Mrs Hemans’ lines on the Scottish patriot, Wallace, beginning ‘Rest with the brave, whose names belong To the high sanctity of song.’ There is no appeal to the deeds of their fathers equal to her Spanish war-song-- ‘Fling forth the proud banner of Leon again; Let the high word “Castile” go resounding through Spain.’ No poetic conception of antiquity is to be found resembling the introduction of her ‘Cathedral Hymn’-- ‘A dim and mighty minster of old time, A temple, shadowy with remembrances Of the majestic past!’ And above all, there is nothing so morally ennobling, so adapted to raise the character of a people, as the verses by which she has conferred a great obligation on our country--her ‘Pilgrim Fathers.’ “But, beside the advantages afforded to a modern poet by the religious and moral improvement of our race, which it has been principally our object to point out, there are others at which we may glance. He may look back over many ages, and around upon all countries, and acquaint himself with man, as he has existed and exists under circumstances the most dissimilar. He may possess himself of all that knowledge of human nature, which has been gathered from long experience, and wide observation, and multiplied opportunities of comparison. He may, like Southey, construct poems, as wild and wondrous, and as morally beautiful, as ‘Thalaba,’ or as rich with barbaric splendour as ‘The Curse of Kehama,’ from the rude materials of Arabian fiction or Hindoo mythology. The treasures of learning and science, so poor in ancient times, have, through succeeding ages, been accumulating to furnish him with thoughts, illustrations, and images. Our conceptions are enlarged, our views raised, the physical as well as the moral universe has been continually opening to the view of man, and knowledge unfolding her ever-lengthening scroll, of which the ancients had scarcely read the first lines. It was a dream, ridiculed by Plato,[456] of the extravagant admirers of Homer, that all human and divine learning was to be found in his writings. “In the nature of things, art is progressive; its theory and practice are gradually better understood, errors are discovered and corrected, new objects of attainment proposed, and visions of higher excellence revealed to the mind; and thus we may believe, that the character, principles, purposes, and means of poetry are now comprehended more justly than they were in former times. “But it may be said that, in perfection of language at least, the poets of Greece and Rome must remain unsurpassed. It may be doubted, however, whether we are qualified to pronounce this judgment in their favour. The harmonious flow of articulate sounds in the Greek and Latin languages, particularly in the Latin, is not to be readily attained in some of the principal languages of literary Europe. But if we speak of poetical beauty of expression and harmony of thought, we must recollect that it is necessary to be acquainted with the train of shadowy associations which follow the direct meaning of a poetical word, before we can determine that word to be well chosen. But such acquaintance implies an intimate knowledge of the use of language and of the state of mind in those addressed, which, as regards the poetry of the ancients, it is very difficult to acquire, and, in many particulars, impossible, yet without which we are liable to fall into great mistakes, and may often be left in much uncertainty. Take, for example, the line-- ‘Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.’ It has been admired from the consonance of the sound with the sense. We understand the epithet _putris_ to mean _dusty_, the dusty plain; but this epithet is elsewhere applied to a rich, mellow soil, easily broken up, or to a sandy plain. According to either of these uses, it is apparently an epithet unsuitable, from its associations, to be given