The smile of your heroic cheer may float On the vast background of his wings Arose his image! and he flings, Purification being the joy of pain ! From each plumed arc, pale glitterings The Vision of Poets is the second Or less, the angel-heart!) before, And fiery flakes (as beateth more elaborate poem in the collection. Its And round him, upon roof and floor, design is to show the mystery of the poetical character, by which genius is at Edging with fire the shining fumes, war with society, and with itself; by While at his side; 'twixt light and glooms, which it pines in sorrow and neglect and The phantasm of an organ booms. suffering, both self-imposed and from In a deep pool, nurtured by one of the without, while the rest of the world ap- eddies at the foot of Niagara, and shroudparently lives on in joy and carelessness. ed forever by the clouds of mist, hid in a Its object is the noblest that can employ basin of rock aside from the steps of the the pens of poets, to “vindicate the ways careless traveller, a rainbow is literally of God to man,” to teach reconciliation burnt in with deep metallic dyes, an arc and submission, to calm rebellion, to cre of gold and purple, fixed and immoveable ate smiles of happiness out of very un as steel, and surrounded by half-illuminhappiness itself in the wounded breasted spray, fragile as air. Miss Barrett's of man. Miss Barrett may take for her Wall of the Poets, with its massiveness shield the poet's motto, “We learn in suf- and "air-drawn” grandeur, has recalled fering what we teach in song.” In truth, to us this image, showing that even this verse of divinest bards is no child's in the poet's cloud-land Nature has her play of the faculties, no elegant amuse omniscient prototypes, and that the ment of the boudoir penned on satin pa. highest invention cannot get beyond the per with crowquill for the adıniration of actual. taste and fashion, no accidental thing to Among the portraits hung up in these be picked up by a man as he goes along “chambers of imagery” we see Shakthe world, played with for a while and speare and Dante, Goethe and Schiller, laid aside. It is the soul's experience, wrung from the very depths of a noble Electric Pindar, quick as fear, nature, and of the noble nature only ;- With race-dust on his cheeks and the whole life-childhood, youth *** with its shadows, manhood with calm And Virgil ! shade of Mantuan beech day-light-the son, the lover, the father Did help the shade of bay to reach -must form its completeness. And curl around his forehead high ! A poet in whom the inward light pre. For his gods wore less majesty vented sleep, goes forth into a wood, like Than his brown bees hummed deathlessly. early Chaucer when he saw the wonders of the Flower and Leaf, and there meets And Chaucer, with his infantine with a lady on a snow-white palfrey, who Familiar clasp of things divine leads him over the moor, where he is That mark upon his lip is wine. bade to drink of three separate pools, Here Milton's eyes strike piercing-dim! which represent the poet's dower, and The shapes of suns and stars did swim tastes successively of the world's use, a Like clouds from them, and granted him bitter draught; the world's love bitter too, and of the world's cruelty ; upon God for sole vision ! Cowley, there, which he swoons, and being purified by Whose active fancy debonnaire this earthly purgation, is admitted to the Drew straws to amber-foul to fair. vision of poets, held in some vast hall of And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Benthe imagination in dream-land, where a Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows, when Hebrew angel, clad in Miltonic strength The world was worthy of such men. and splendor, ministers at an altar, sur- Before these good and great spirits a rounded by the great bards of time. worldly crowd of those who take upon themselves unworthily the name of poets Then first, the poet was aware enter, and plead their cunning, their friOf a chief angel standing there Before that altar, in the glare. volity, their earthly-mindedness in their disguisesHis eyes were dreadful, for you saw But all the foreheads of those born That they saw God-his lips and jaw, And dead true poets flashed with scorn Grand-made and strong, as Sinai's law. Betwixt the bay.leaves round them worn From the gloaming of the oak wood, For Pan is dead. Pan, Pan is dead. Ay, jetted such brave fire, that they, The last expression is altogether Dantean. To give the reader an idea of the variety of the poetical powers displayed in these volumes, we should have to follow in this way every separate poem, for each, with a fine under-current of the original mind of the authoress, is a new creation. These poems deserve to be studied as we study the minor poems of Goethe and Schiller. With the flexibility of language of the one, they have much of the moral significance of the other. The “Cry of the Children” is in the high lyrical German strain, beyond song-writing. A Rhapsody of Life's Progress recalls to us the philosopher of Weimar. In The Dead Pan, Miss Barrett has written a reply, call it rather a supplement, to Schiller's Gods of Greece. In felicity of language, in historical enthusiasm, in picturesque beauty, it is as certainly equal to Schiller's poem, as in its Christian morality it is superior. In a certain massiveness of thought and expression no woman may equal his manliness. Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas, Pan, Pan is dead. Pan, Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead. O twelve gods of Plato's vision, Now Pan is dead. Pan, Pan is dead. Neptune lies beside his trident, Now Pan is dead. Pan, Pan is dead. And the Loves we used to know from One another,--huddled lie, Frore as taken in a snow-storm, Close beside her tenderly, As if each had weakly iried Once to kiss her as he died. Pan, Pan is dead. Do ye leave your rivers flowing In the fiery-hearted centre For Pan is dead. For Pan is dead. aye. Gods bereaved, gods belated, With your purples rent asunder! Gods discrown'd and desecrated, O brave poets, keep back nothing ; Disinherited of thunder ! Nor mix falsehood with the whole ! Now, the goats may climb and crop Look up Godward ! speak the truth in The soft grass on Ida's top Worthy song from carnest soul ! Hold, in high poetic duty, Truest Truth the fairest Beauty! Calm at eve the bark went onward, Pan, Pan is dead. When a cry more loud than wind, Rose up, deepen'd, and swept sunward, In the poem on Victoria “Crowned From the pilèd Dark behind : and Wedded,” there is a passage worthy And the sun shrank and grew pale, of a chant in old Westminster Abbey : Breathed against by the great wailPan, Pan is dead. And so the DEAD—who lie in rows beneath the minster floor, And the rowers from the benches There, verily an awful state maintaining Fell,-each shuddering on his face evermore While departing influences The statesman, whose clean palm will kiss Struck a cold back through the place: no bribe whate'er it beAnd the shadow of the ship The courtier, who for no sair queen will rise Reeld along the passive deep up to his kneePan, Pan is dead. The court-dame, who for no court-tire will leave her shroud behind And that dismal cry rose slowly, The laureate, who no courtlier rhyme than And sank slowly through the air ; “ dust to dust" can find Full of spirit's melancholy And eternity's despair! The kings and queens who having made that yow and worn that crown, And they heard the words it said, Descended unto lower thrones and darker PAN IS DEAD_Great PAN IS DEAD deep adown! Pan, Pan is DEAD. The Lost Bower is a happy piece of 'Twas the hour when One in Sion ruralizing, founded upon the recollections Hung for love's sake ou the cross- from days of childhood of a woodland When his brow was chill with dying, bower, which is very beautifully and delAnd His soul was faint with loss: When his priestly blood dropp'd down- Claude, vanishing away on the burden of icately painted with the softness of a ward, And his kingly eyes look'd throneward : sweet lines into airy distance. She had Then, Pan was dead. seen the bower once, but could not find it again. Time passed on, and many joys By the love He stood alone in, of the outer world and from humankind His sole Godhead stood complete : were lost to the poetess, who, reclining And the false gods fell down moaning, on her couch of illness, sees through the Each from off his golden seat fingers which press upon her eyelids this All the false gods with a cry vision of the trees, and grass, and the Render'd up their deity birds of old. Is it not found again in the Pan, Pan was dead. verse beyond any concealment or disas ter—in verse simple, natural, fluent and affluent ? Truth is fair: should we forego it ? The Rhyme of the Duchess May is a Can we sigh right for a wrong? most musical ballad of the olden song, God himself is the best Poet, And the Real is His song. related by a bell-ringer in a church tower ringing for the dead, with the burden in Sing His truth out fair and full, And secure His beautiful. every verse, “ Toll slowly !" Let Pan be dead. But we must pause somewhere. Miss Barrett's book is now before the Ameri can reader, and we confidently appeal to What is true and just and honest, the mind of the country, recommending What is lovely, what is pure its cordial reception as a book that is All of praise that hath admonish'd, pure, genuine, honest, a book of sustained All of virtue, shall endure, power, well suited no less by its high These are themes for poet's uses, Christian sentiment, than as an example Stirring nobler than the Muses, of genius without artifice, to be profitable Ere Pan was dead. to the intellect of the country. |