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account fully for the neglect in its excess. There are reasons on the surface. To begin, I must admit a want of quality, a certain coarseness of fabric, except in Kehama. Again, the bulk is a deterrent, as is the extent of a strange lake to an angler. He may be sure that it contains fish, without being able to tell where they lie. Similarly these vast epics hide valuable ideas, only to be chanced by a reader out of an overwhelming flood of truisms. The interest for others many is alien and remote. From the first it required to be bolstered up by Oriental learning, much of it, in these times of deeper research, musty and rusty. But, in the face of works, some earlier, and more later, which have conquered public favour notwithstanding analogous drawbacks every whit as prejudicial, the poet's spirit might well argue that such attempts at an explanation are insufficient. I do not flatter myself that he would be at all better inclined to accept mine, that the cause is his failure throughout to forge from the furnace within himself a chain of sympathy with his readers. That, however, I believe to be the true one. He seldom seems to touch their and his common human nature. Note how rarely, if ever, his verse makes tears to start to the eyelids. The chill from this absence of mutual glow is positive, palpable, and fatal. Never will the emotions of a poet's readers, charm he never so wisely, take fire unless from the kindling of fuel in the singer's own breast. Southey's Muse was devoid of the passion of sympathy; and his renown suffers in consequence.

He possessed many of the endowments by which admirers are attracted. He was without that which holds them bound. It could not well have been otherwise with a writer who resorted to poetry as a recreation, for rest from the toils of his literary treadmill. He understood

the art of it, and could call on it, when he chose, to do his bidding. It was his handmaid when it should have been his mistress. A thousand pities! He missed the dearest object of his ambition; and we have lost what might have been, from that richly furnished nature, some inspired strains. As it was, he could not be a great poet; but he had a lofty soul; and he was a great man of letters.

The Poetical Works of Robert Southey. Complete in one volume. New edition. Longmans, 1853.

1 The Well of St. Keyne (Ballads and Metrical Tales), p. 448.

2 St. Romuald (Ballads, &c.), p. 437.

3 The King of the Crocodiles (Ballads, &c.), pp. 437-8.

The Battle of Blenheim (Ballads, &c.), pp. 449-50.

'The Ballad of St. Antidius, the Pope, and the Devil (Ballads, &c.), pp. 451-2.

• Roprecht the Robber (Ballads, &c.), pp. 470-3.

'The Devil's Walk, p. 166-9.

• God's Judgement on a Wicked Bishop (Ballads, &c.), p. 429. The Old Woman of Berkeley (Ballads, &c.), p. 456.

10 The Curse of Kehama, Part II, xiv, p. 555.

11 Mary, the Maid of the Inn (Ballads, &c.), pp. 417–18.

12 Written on the First of December (Lyric Poems), pp. 120–1.

13 Hannah (English Eclogues), p. 152.

14 The Traveller's Return (Lyric Poems), p. 124.

15 The Old Mansion-House (English Eclogues), pp. 149-50.

16 For a Column at Truxillo (Inscriptions), p. 172.

17 My Days among the Dead (Occasional Pieces), xviii, p. 143.

18 The Curse of Kehama, p. 583.

19 The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo. Proem, st. 21, p. 729. 20 The Cataract of Lodore (Nondescripts, VII), pp. 164–5.

SIR WALTER SCOTT

1771-1832

SCOTT was the least jealous of poets; else, he might have been jealous of himself. His genius dawned upon the world in poetry. As a poet he was recognized before Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Time went on, leaving him at each of its stages more and more eminent and popular. At each his fame in the specific department of poetry manifestly receded. The individuality of the author counts for more in poetry than in any other branch of literature. Never was writer more interesting for himself than Scott. His personal renown practically transferred the Court of Letters from London to Edinburgh. There he reigned, and in his own right always. The particular kind of literature on which the throne rested differed at different periods. It had been romance in metre. It became romance in prose. But the occupant always was King Walter. The poetry survived, though royal no longer. The poems have a hundredfold more readers than when they stirred the envy of the obscure bard of Hours of Idleness. Their claims as poetry have seldom been denied. Yet I am afraid that in general they are valued much less on their own account than on that of the man, and on account of him not so much as a poet as a storyteller.

For romantic fiction on the confines of history, he is indeed no less a master in verse than in prose. In one special department of poetical narration he is supreme.

I could not lay it down as an absolute condition of excellence in description that the theme shall be one in which the writer has always delighted. But undoubtedly it is added virtue in a poet otherwise well qualified that he loves and has loved it. Scott would have liked to be a soldier. He rejoiced in everything connected with fighting. Never has British poet, except Campbell on more contracted canvases, made the reader equally to feel, as in the Iliad, on a battlefield itself with its turmoil, its frenzy, its ecstasy. He was conscious of his gift, and freely used it.

There is the impress of genuineness on the picture of Bannockburn. Read, for instance, of the final and disastrous English charge over the pit-pitted plain :

Rushing, ten thousand horsemen came,
With spears in rest, and hearts on flame,
That panted for the shock!

With blazing crests and banners spread,
And trumpet-clang and clamour dread,
The wide plain thunder'd to their tread,
As far as Stirling rock.

Down! Down! in headlong overthrow,
Horsemen and horse, the foremost go,
Wild floundering on the field!
The first are in destruction's gorge,
Their followers wildly o'er them urge :-
The knightly helm and shield,

The mail, the acton, and the spear,

Strong hand, high heart, are useless here!

Loud from the mass confused the cry

Of dying warriors swells on high,
And steeds that shriek in agony !

They came like mountain-torrent red,

That thunders o'er its rocky bed;

They broke like that same torrent's wave,
When swallowed by a darksome cave,

Billows on billows burst and boil,
Maintaining still the stern turmoil,
And to their wild and tortured groan
Each adds new terrors of his own! 1

Lifelike, again, is the glimpse of a later battle-Flodden -as fitfully descried by Marmion's Squires from a neighbouring hill-top:

They close, in clouds of smoke and dust,
With sword-sway, and with lance's thrust:
And such a yell was there,

Of sudden and portentous birth,
As if men fought upon the earth,
And fiends in upper air;

O life and death were in the shout,
Recoil and rally, charge and rout,
And triumph and despair.

At length the freshening western blast
Aside the shroud of battle cast;
And, first, the ridge of mingled spears
Above the brightening cloud appears;
And in the smoke the pennons flew,
As in the storm the white seamew;
Then mark'd they, dashing broad and far,
The broken billows of the war,

And plumèd crests of chieftains brave,
Floating like foam upon the wave;

But nought distinct they see;
Wide raged the battle on the plain;

Spears shook, and falchions flash'd amain;

Fell England's arrow-flight like rain;

Crests rose, and stoop'd, and rose again,
Wild and disorderly.2

All the incidents of warfare inflamed his Muse; if not a clash of battalions, an armed and perilous ambush. The blood stirs at the sudden apparition from heather and bracken of 'Clan Alpine's warriors true ':

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