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قراءة كتاب Notes and Queries, Vol. IV, Number 111, December 13, 1851 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.
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Notes and Queries, Vol. IV, Number 111, December 13, 1851 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc.
my earnest sympathies with him during the very unequal contest, I will console him with "proprieties," "congruities," "consistencies of figure," and "material images," enough.
"The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel,
Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel."
Or better for this purpose still:
"Swords, daggers, bodkins, bearded arrows, spears,
Nails, pincers, crosses, gibbets, hurdles, ropes,
Tallons of griffins, paws and teeth of bears,
Tigre's and lyon's mouths, not iron hoops,
Racks, wheels, and trappados, brazen cauldrons which
Boiled with oil, huge tuns which flam'd with pitch."
"Torturing hour" is used by Campbell in his Pleasures of Hope, Part I.:
"The martyr smiled beneath avenging power,
And braved the tyrant in his torturing hour."
And, indeed, "sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child," had used it before any of them:
"Is there no play, to ease the anguish of a torturing hour."
Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V. Sc. 1.
Again, Gray writes in his truly sublime ode, "The Bard:"
"On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes the poet stood,
(Loose his beard, and hoary hair
Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air),
And with a master's hand, and prophet's fire,
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre."
Ordinary readers would have innocently supposed the above "pictured" passage beyond all praise or criticism. "At non infelix" Wakefield:
"A falcon, tow'ring in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and kill'd."
I must give his note as it stands, for I question whether the whole range of verbal criticism could produce anything more ludicrous:
"I wish Mr. Gray could have introduced a more poetical expression, than the inactive term stood, into this fine passage: as Shakspeare has, for instance, in his description of Dover cliff:
'Half way down
Hangs one, that gathers samphire; dreadful trade!'
"Which is the same happy picture as that of Virgil:
"'Dumosa pendere procul de rupe videbo.'
He might, when his hand was in, have adduced other passages also from Virgil, e.g.:
"Imminet in rivi præstantis imaginis undam."
However, with all due respect for Mr. Wakefield's "happy pictures," I do not see anything left, but his eyebrows, for the luckless bard to hang by! He could not have hung by his hair, which "stream'd like a meteor to the troubled air;" nor yet by his hands, which "swept the deep sorrows of his lyre." Besides, there can scarcely be more opposite pictures than that of a man gathering samphire, or kids browsing, amongst beetling rocks; and the commanding and awe-inspiring position in which Gray ingeniously places his bard. The expressions chosen by Virgil, Shakspeare, and Gray were each peculiarly suitable to the particular objects in view. If Gray was thinking of Milton, as I intimated in a former letter, he may have still kept him in mind:
"Incens'd with indignation, Satan stood
Unterrify'd, and like a comet burn'd,
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In the Arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war."
Or again:
"On th' other side, Satan, alarm'd,
Collecting all his might dilated stood,
Like Teneriff or Atlas unremov'd:
His stature reach'd the sky, and on his crest
Sat Horror plum'd; nor wanted in his grasp
What seem'd both spear and shield."
It would be easy to adduce similar instances from the ancient sources, but I will only mention From Milton an illustration of the συστρεψας of Demosthenes, and of the passionate abruptness with which Gray commences "The Bard:"
"As when of old some orator renown'd
In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence
Flourish'd, since mute, to some great cause addressed
Stood in himself collected, while each part,
Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue,
Sometimes in height began, as no delay
Of preface brooking through his zeal of right."
Wakefield's hypercritical fastidiousness would have completely defeated the intentions of Gray. His "Bard" had a mission to fulfil which could not have been fulfilled by one suspended like king Solomon, in the ancient Jewish traditions, or like Mahomet's coffin, mid-way between heaven and earth. His cry was δος που στω, and the poet heard him. And thus, from his majestic position, was not—
"Every burning word he spoke
Full of rage and full of grief?"
In the full blaze of poetic phrensy, he flashes out at once with the awfully grand and terrible exordium:
"Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!
Confusion on thy banners wait!
Tho' fann'd by conquest's crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state.
Helm, nor hauberk's twisted mail,
Nor e'en thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail
To save thy secret soul from nightly fears,
From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears."
Collins thus describes the passion of anger:
"Next Anger rush'd;—his eyes on fire,
In lightnings own'd his secret stings:
In one rude clash he struck the lyre,
And swept with flurried hand the strings."
Word-painting can go no farther. When, however, he comes to melancholy, in lines which contain more suggestive beauty, as well as more poetic inspiration, than perhaps any others of the same length in the English language, how does he sing?
"With eyes upraised, as one inspired,
Pale Melancholy sate retired;
And, from her wild sequester'd seat,
In notes, by distance made more sweet,
Pour'd thro' the mellow horn her pensive soul:
And, dashing soft from rocks around,
Bubbling runnels join'd the sound;
Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole,
Or o'er some haunted stream with fond delay,
Round a holy calm diffusing,
Love of peace, and lonely musing,
In hollow murmurs died away."
This is the concentrated essence of poetry. Surely Gray had forgotten Collins when he penned the beautiful lines:
"But not to one in this benighted age,
Is that