His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bow and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark
Glimmers and dies the fire-fly's spark Like starry twinkles that momently break
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest rack.
There is Ideality in these lines- but except in the case of the [second and the fourteenth lines]- it is Ideality not of a high order. We have, it is true, a collection of natural objects, each individually of great beauty, and, if actually seen as in nature, capable of exciting in any mind, through the means of the Poetic Sentiment more or less inherent in all, a certain sense of the beautiful. But to view such natural objects as they exist, and to behold them through the medium of words, are different things. Let us pursue the idea that such a collection as we have here will produce, of necessity, the Poetic Sentiment, and we may as well make up our minds to believe that a catalogue of such expressions as moon, sky, trees, rivers, mountains, amp;c., shall be capable of exciting it,- it is merely an extension of the principle. But in the line "the earth is dark, but the heavens are bright" besides the simple mention of the "dark earth" "and the bright heaven," we have, directly, the moral sentiment of the brightness of the sky compensating for the darkness of the earth- and thus, indirectly, of the happiness of a future state compensating for the miseries of the present. All this is effected by the simple introduction of the word but between the "dark earth" and the "bright heaven"- this introduction, however, was prompted by the Poetic Sentiment, and by the Poetic Sentiment alone. The case is analogous in the expression "glimmers and dies," where the imagination is exalted by the moral sentiment of beauty heightened in dissolution.
In one or two shorter passages of the Culprit Fay the poet will recognize the purely ideal, and be able at a glance to distinguish it from that baser alloy upon which we have descanted. We give them without farther comment.
The winds are whist, and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katydid;
And the plaint of the wailing whippoorwill
Who mourns unseen, and ceaseless sings
Ever a note of wail and wo Up to the vaulted firmament
His path the fire-fly courser bent,
And at every gallop on the wind
He flung a glittering spark behind.
He blessed the force of the charmed line
And he banned the water-goblins' spite,
For he saw around in the sweet moonshine,
Their little wee faces above the brine,
Grinning and laughing with all their might
At the piteous hap of the Fairy wight.
The poem "To a Friend" consists of fourteen Spenserian stanzas. They are fine spirited verses, and probably were not supposed by their author to be more. Stanza the fourth, although beginning nobly, concludes with that very common exemplification of the bathos, the illustrating natural objects of beauty or grandeur by references to the tinsel of artificiality.
Oh! for a seat on Appalachia's brow,
That I might scan the glorious prospects round,
Wild waving woods, and rolling floods below,
Smooth level glades and fields with grain embrowned,
High heaving hills, with tufted forests crowned,
Rearing their tall tops to the heaven's blue dome,
And emerald isles, like banners green un-wound,
Floating along the take, while round them roam
Bright helms of billowy blue, and plumes of dancing foam.
In the Extracts from Leon are passages not often surpassed in vigor of passionate thought and expression- and which induce us to believe not only that their author would have succeeded better in prose romance than in poetry, but that his attention would have naturally fallen into the former direction, had the Destroyer only spared him a little longer.
This poem contains also lines of far greater poetic power than any to be found in the Culprit Fay. For example The stars have lit in heaven their lamps of gold,
The viewless dew falls lightly on the world;
The gentle air that softly sweeps the leaves
A strain of faint unearthly music weaves:
As when the harp of heaven remotely plays,
Or sygnets wail- or song of sorrowing fays
That float amid the moonshine glimmerings pale,
On wings of woven air in some enchanted vale.*
* The expression "woven air," much insisted upon by the friends of Drake, seems to be accredited to him as original. It is to be found in many English writers- and can be traced back to Apuleius, who calls fine drapery ventum textilem.
Niagara is objectionable in many respects, and in none more so than in its frequent inversions of language, and the artificial character of its versification. The invocation,
Roar, raging torrent! and thou, mighty river,
Pour thy white foam on the valley below!
Frown ye dark mountains, amp;c. is ludicrous- and nothing more. In general, all such invocations have an air of the burlesque. In the present instance we may fancy the majestic Niagara replying, "Most assuredly I will roar, whether, worm! thou tellest me or not."
The American Flag commences with a collection of those bald conceits, which we have already shown to have no dependence whatever upon the Poetic Power- springing altogether from Comparison.
When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night
And set the stars of glory there.
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
The milky baldric of the skies,
And striped its pure celestrial white
With streakings of the morning light;
Then from his mansion in the sun
She called her eagle bearer down
And gave into his mighty hand
The symbol of her chosen land.
Let us reduce all this to plain English, and we have- what? Why, a flag, consisting of the "azure robe of night," "set with stars of glory," interspersed with "streaks of morning light," relieved with a few pieces of "milky way," and the whole carried by an "eagle bearer," that is to say, an eagle ensign, who bears aloft this "symbol of our chosen land" in his "mighty hand," by which we are to understand his claw. In the second stanza, "the thunder-drum of Heaven" is bathetic and grotesque in the highest degree- a commingling of the most sublime music of Heaven with the most utterly contemptible and common-place of Earth. The two concluding verses are in a better spirit, and might almost be supposed to be from a different hand. The images contained in the lines
When Death careering on the gale
Sweeps darkly round the bellied sail,
And frighted waves rush wildly back,
Before the broadsides reeling rack, are of the highest order of Ideality. The deficiencies of the whole poem may be best estimated by reading it in connection with "Scots wha hae," with the "Mariners of England," or with "Hohenlinden." It is indebted for its high and most undeserved reputation to our patriotism- not to our judgment.
The remaining poems in Mr. Dearborn's edition of Drake, are three Songs; Lines in an Album; Lines to a Lady; Lines on leaving New Rochelle; Hope; A Fragment; To-; To Eva; To a Lady; To Sarah; and Bronx. These are all poems of little compass, and with the exception of Bronx and a portion of the Fragment, they have no character distinctive from the mass of our current poetical literature. Bronx, however, is in our opinion, not only the best of the writings of Drake, but altogether a lofty and beautiful poem, upon which his admirers would do better to found a hope of the writer's ultimate reputation than upon the niaiseries of the Culprit Fay. In the Fragment is to be found the finest individual passage in the volume before us, and we quote it as a proper finale to our review.
Yes! thou art lovelier now than ever,
How sweet't would be when all the air
In moonlight swims, along thy river