life’s pelting ills;But, like a tree with leaves of feeble stem,
If the clouds lasted, and a sudden breeze
Ruffled the boughs, they on my head at once
Dropp’d the collected shower; and some most false,
False and fair foliaged as the Manchineel,
Have tempted me to slumber in their shade
E’en mid the storm; then breathing subtlest damps,
Mix’d their own venom with the rain from Heaven,
That I woke poison’d! But, all praise to Him
Who gives us all things, more have yielded me
Permanent shelter; and beside one friend,
Beneath the impervious covert of one oak,
I’ve raised a lowly shed, and know the names
Of husband and of father; not unhearing
Of that divine and nightly-whispering voice,
Which from my childhood to maturer years
Spake to me of predestinated wreaths,
Bright with no fading colours!”
These beautiful and affecting lines to his brother are dated May 26th, 1797, Nether Stowey, Somerset. In his will, dated Highgate, July 2nd, 1830, he again refers to this friend, and directs his executor to present a plain gold mourning ring to Thomas Poole, Esq., of Nether Stowey.
“The Dedicatory Poem to my ‘Juvenile Poems,’ and my ‘Fears in Solitude,’ render it unnecessary to say more than what I then, in my early manhood, thought and felt, I now, a gray-headed man, still think and feel.”
In this volume, dedicated to his brother, are to be found several poems in early youth and upwards, none of later date than 1796.
The “Ode,” he says, “on the Departing Year, was written on the 24th, 25th, and 26th of December, 1796, and published separately on the last day of that year. ‘The Religious Musings’ were written as early as Christmas 1794.”
He then was about to enter his 23rd year. The preface to this volume is a key to his opinions and feelings at that time, and which the foregoing part of this memoir is also intended to illustrate.
“Compositions resembling those of the present volume are not unfrequently condemned for their querulous egotism. But egotism is to be condemned only when it offends against time and place, as in a history or epic poem. To censure it in a monody or sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round. Why then write sonnets or monodies? Because they give me pleasure when, perhaps, nothing else could. After the more violent emotions of sorrow, the mind demands amusement, and can find it in employment alone; but full of its late sufferings, it can endure no employment not in some measure connected with them. Forcibly to turn away our attention to general subjects is a painful and most often an unavailing effort.
’But O! how grateful to a wounded heart
The tale of misery to impart
From others’ eyes bid artless sorrows flow,
And raise esteem upon the base of woe.’
(Shaw.)
The communicativeness of our nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavour to describe them, intellectual activity is exerted; and from intellectual activity there results a pleasure, which is gradually associated, and mingles as a corrective, with the painful subject of the description. ‘True,’ (it may be answered) ‘but how are the PUBLIC interested in your sorrows or your description’?’ We are for ever attributing personal unities to imaginary aggregates. — What is the PUBLIC, but a term for a number of scattered individuals? Of whom as many will be interested in these sorrows, as have experienced the same or similar.
’Holy be the lay
Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way.’
If I could judge of others by myself, I should not hesitate to affirm, that the most interesting passages in our most interesting poems are those in which the author developes his own feelings. The sweet voice of Cona never sounds so sweetly, as when it speaks of itself; and I should almost suspect that man of an unkindly heart, who could read the opening of the third book of ‘Paradise Lost’ without peculiar emotion. By a law of nature, he, who labours under a strong feeling, is impelled to seek for sympathy; but a poet’s feelings are all strong. — Quicquid amat valde amat. — Akenside therefore speaks with philosophical accuracy when he classes love and poetry as producing the same effects:
’Love and the wish of poets when their tongue
Would teach to others’ bosoms, what so charms
Their own.’
‘Pleasures of Imagination’.
There is one species of egotism which is truly disgusting; not that which leads to communicate our feelings to others, but that which would reduce the feelings of others; to an identity with our own.
The atheist who exclaims ‘pshaw,’ when he glances his eye on the praises of Deity, is an egotist; an old man, when he speaks contemptuously of love verses is an egotist; and the sleek favourites of fortune are egotists when they condemn all ‘melancholy discontented’ verses. Surely it would be candid not merely to ask whether the poem pleases ourselves, but to consider whether or no there may not be others, to whom it is well calculated to give an innocent pleasure.
I shall only add, that each of my readers will, I hope, remember, that these poems on various subjects, which, he reads at one time and under the influence of one set of feelings, were written at different times and prompted by very different feelings; and, therefore, that, the supposed inferiority of one poem to another may sometimes be owing to the temper of mind in which he happens to peruse it.”
In the second edition (the second edition was published in conjunction with his friends Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb) is added the following:
“My poems have been rightly charged with a profusion of double-epithets, and a general turgidness. I have pruned the double-epithets with no sparing hand; and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction. This latter fault, however, had insinuated itself into my Religious Musings with such intricacy of union, that sometimes I have omitted to disentangle the weed from the fear of snapping the flower. A third and heavier accusation has been brought against me, that of obscurity; but not, I think, with equal justice. An author is obscure, when his conceptions are dim and imperfect, and his language incorrect, or inappropriate, or involved. A poem that abounds in allusions, like the ‘Bard’ of Gray, or one that impersonates high and abstract truths, like Collins’s ‘Ode on the Poetical Character,’ claims not to be popular, but should be acquitted of obscurity. The deficiency is in the reader; but this is a charge which every poet, whose imagination is warm and rapid, must expect from his ‘contemporaries’. Milton did not escape it; and it was adduced with virulence against Gray and Collins. We now hear no more of it, not that their poems are better understood at present, than they were at their first publication; but their fame is established; and a critic would accuse him self of frigidity or, inattention,
