Speak on." "A fiend has got into my house," he left And laugh'd me down the street because I vow'd I'd bring the prince himself to lay him in his shroud. And, O thou Sultan Mahmoud, God cries out for thee!” The Sultan comforted the man, and said, "Go home, and I will send thee wine and bread" (For he was poor), "and other comforts. Go: And should the wretch return, let Sultan Mahmoud know." In three days' time, with haggard eyes and beard, And said, "He's come." Mahmoud said not a word, And went with the vex'd man. They reach the place, And hear a voice, and see a female face, The man went in. There was a cry, and hark! And chop the shrieking wretch, and drink his bloody life. "Now light the light!" the Sultan cried aloud. In reverent silence the spectators wait, The man amazed, all mildness now, and tears, The Sultan said, with much humanity, I could not rid me of a dread that one Whose work I had perform'd through pain and fear; And then I rose, and was refresh'd with food, The first time since thou cam'st, and marr'dst my solitude." THE POET'S MISSION. It is with the poet's creations, as with Nature's, great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets; whether in Homer's epic or Gray's Elegy, in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the Schoolmistress of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself, who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who calls upon us to admire all her productions,—not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect. Milton has said that poetry, in comparison with science, is "simple, sensuous, and passionate." By simple, he means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am aware that different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the context seems to me to necessitate those before us. What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth; what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be "in earnest at the moment." His earnestness must be innate and habitual,—born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. "I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings," says Coleridge, in the Preface to his Poems; "and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward;' it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me." As to UTILITY, no man recognizes the worth of it more than the poet he only desires that the meaning of the term may not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance, with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as the greatest two-idead man who varies that single idea with hugging himself on his "buttons" or his good dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idead man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe, perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the diffusion of millions of enjoyments. "And a button-maker, after all, invented it!" cries our friend. Pardon me; it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent and a very poetical man, too, and yet not have been the first man visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical bit of science; it was a nobleman who first thought of it, a captain who first tried it, and a buttonmaker who perfected it. And he who put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher Bacon, who said that poetry had "something divine in it," and was necessary to the satisfaction of the human mind. THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1785-1859. THOMAS DE QUINCEY was the son of a Manchester merchant, and was born on the 15th of August, 1785. His father died when he was quite young; but he received a liberal education, first at the Manchester Grammar School, and afterwards at Oxford, where he resided from his eighteenth to his twenty-third year. How he spent his time there he has given us no account; but, from his extensive acquirements, it must have been profitably spent, for he was remarkable, even then, for his rare conversational powers, and for his extraordinary stock of information upon every subject that was started. At an early age he adopted the baneful practice of opium-eating, to which may doubtless be attributed the fact that, despite his vast learning and his brilliant style, he has exerted so little influence upon the reading world; for his writings, being the emanations of a mind not truly in a normal or sane state, have not touched or reached the common sympathies of mankind.2 1 He left to his widow an income of about search in vain for a writer who, with equal ten thousand dollars a year. "The position of De Quincey in the literature of the present day is remarkable. We might powers, has made an equally slight impression upon the general public. His style is superb; his powers of reasoning unsurpassed; his In 1809 he became acquainted with Wordsworth, Lamb, and Coleridge, and took up his abode at "the Lakes," where he resided ten or eleven years, devoting his time to Grecian, Roman, and, indeed, universal literature; but he did not turn his attention to literature, except as an amusement, until 1821, when pecuniary embarrassments compelled him to become a contributor to the London Magazine, in which he published, in numbers, that remarkable work, which created quite a sensation at the time,-The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. From that time he labored with great but fitful industry on a variety of publications, and showed talents that might have produced something far more valuable than mere contributions to periodicals, had their possessor been less of a dreamer and more of a man.3 Besides the London Magazine, he wrote for most of the leading magazines of the day, and that, too, so anonymously that it was said of him that he "was buried and scattered in the British periodical literature of his generation."4 De Quincey has classified his own works under three heads:-first, papers whose chief purpose is to interest and amuse, such as autobiographical sketches, reminiscences of distinguished cotemporaries, biographical memoirs, whimsical narratives, and such-like; secondly, essays of a speculative, eritical, didactic character; and, thirdly, papers belonging to the order of what may be called "prose-poetry," or the imaginative. Under any one of these three aspects he takes a very high rank among British prose-writers, 10 imagination is warm and brilliant; and his humor both masculine and delicate. Yet, with this singular combination of gifts, he is comparatively little known outside of that small circle of men who love literature for its own sake."-Quarterly Review, July, 1861. 1He took a lease of Wordsworth's cottage, wedded a gentle and affectionate wife, and, amidst the pleasure derived from lake scenery, a good library, and his beloved drug, led the life of a scholar, a dreamer, and a voluptuary." -London Athenæum, December, 1859. 2 These Confessions were written in a little room at the back of the premises of the subsequently distinguished publisher, H. G. Bohn, No. 4 York Street, Covent Garden, where De Quincey resided for several years in comparative seclusion. "Of all his writings," says the Athenæum,-"and all are steeped in egotism, the Confessions are the most characteristic. In their elegance of diction, playfulness of style, subdued pedantry, and utter shamelessness, the entire man is made known to the reader." "Deleterious seclusion from society, continued indulgence in opium, and the scarcely less hurtful practice of unceasingly speculating on his own emotions, deprived his heart and intellect of their best qualities."-London Athenæum. 4 He also wrote for the Encyclopædia Britannica two admirable biographical sketches, of Shakspeare and Pope. In Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual, as edited by Bohn, is a list of one hundred and six articles which have been ascertained to be De Quincey's, in the various periodical literature of the day! Many of these are not in the London edition of his works, and some not even in the American edition (which is the best), in twenty volumes, published by Tickuor & Fields, of Boston. 5 Such as Confessions of an Opium-Eater, &c. Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Foster, Hazlitt, Landor, Sir James Mackintosh, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, &c. &c. 7 Shakspeare, Pope, Goldsmith, &c. &c. 8 Homer and the Homerida, The Casars, Cicero, Plato's Republic, Philosophy of Herodo tus, &c. &c. Suspiria de Profundis, &c. 10 Metaphysical discussion, philosophical criticism, and biography are the classes of subjects in which Mr. De Quincey excels; though at times he exhibits such extravagances of opinion as we should think he could not be guilty of, unless under the influence of his early and long-cherished friend,-" opium." Witness his essay on Pope, in which he most unjustly depreciates that great poet; and his remarks on Wordsworth, so extravagantly, if not absurdly, eulogistic. For instance, he says, “Meditative poetry is perhaps that which will finally maintain most power upon generations more thoughtful; and in this department, at least, there is little competition to be apprehended by Wordsworth from any thing that has appeared since the death of Shakspeare!" Such extravagant, if not absurd, eulogy of a poet defeats its own end. As if Milton-shade of the world's great bard, pardon the profane IF!-as if Milton, Young, Cowper, Collins, Akenside, Gray, Pollok, Coleridge, and a host of others, had written no "meditative poetry"! Besides, De Quincey goes upon the certainly false assumption that the time will come when meditative poetry will take the highest rank. This never will, never can be, till the nature of man is changed. Man is not all "meditation." He loves, indeed, at times to "meditate;" but he also loves to be moved. He has a soul as well as a mind. He has a heart to feel, sympathies to and will always command the admiration of literary men. He died on the 8th of December, 1859.2 A DREAM OF THE OPIUM-EATER. The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams, a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing of, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day,-a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse and laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where,somehow, I knew not how,-by some beings, I knew not whom,— a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, was evolving like a great drama or piece of music; with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives-I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed, and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then-everlasting farewells! and, be excited, admiration to be aroused, tears to shed. His fancy is to be warmed, his imagination to be kindled by the magic touch of the poet's pen. Man, too, has taste; has a sense of the beautiful, the tender, the grand; and that poet who takes the deepest and strongest hold upon the HEART, who excites the feelings of pity, of love, or of admiration, who inspires the soul with the feeling of the grand, the terrific, the sublime, who shows the power of the true poet (the MAKER), giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name."-he it is who will be most read and loved and admired while the world lasts. 1 "A great master of English composition, a critic of uncommon delicacy,-an honest and unflinching investigator of received opinions, -a philosophic inquirer, second only to his first and sole hero,-De Quincey has departed from us, full of years, and left no successor to his rank. The exquisite finish of his style, with the scholastic vigor of his logic, form a "Besides his rare scholarship, his very ex tensive reading, and his singular familiarity with German literature, Mr. De Quincey's genius appears to be distinguished chiefly by his rich and strange humor; his great analytic power and subtlety of understanding: his extraordinary, almost unequalled, imagina tive eloquence; and a mastery over language, both in regard to precision and magnificence, which has no parallel at all among his con temporaries."-Gentleman's Magazine, August, 1857. 2 He left five children,-three daughters and two sons: of these, one was a captain in the army, and the other a physician in Brazil. |