The Poetical Works of Anna Seward With Extracts from her Literary Correspondence. Edited by Walter Scott ... In Three Volumes |
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 | The Poetical Works of Anna Seward |  |
SONNET, to the Rev. RICHARD POLWHELE,
ON HIS POEM UPON THE INFLUENCE OF LOCAE ATTACHMENT.
Of poesy and philosophic art,
Traces the sweetest impulse of the heart,
Scorn, for thy Muse, the envy-sharpen'd spear,
In darkness thrown, when shielded by desert
She seeks the lyric fane. To virtue dear
Thy verse esteeming, feeling minds impart
Their vital smile, their consecrating tear.
Fancy and judgment view with gracious eyes
Its kindred tints, that paint the silent power
Of local objects, deeds of high emprize
To prompt; while their delightful spells restore
The precious vanish'd days of former joys,
By Love, or Fame, enwreath'd with many a flower.
That ingenious and learned gentleman had seen his charming Poem absurdly and arrogantly criticised by one of the periodical Censors. Amidst other utterly groundless objections, he accused the poet of unlicensed and affected verbalism, instancing particularly the words slumberous, and memorize. For both, Johnson shews the high authority of Shakespear, Milton, and Pope; and for the latter, a prose sentence of eminent beauty by Wotton, thus:—“Let their lives, which were bravely lost, be memorized on the full tablets of time.” After accusing Mr Polwhele of affectation in using them, the critic proceeds to assert that such expressions have the effect of a November fog, in completely annihilating every thing like sense and beauty in a composition. Now, it is evident, that were they as unhappily, as, in fact, they are happily used, their mal-influence could extend only to the sentence in which they are found; and since he cannot deny that they are clearly intelligible, at least, it is impossible they can have the obscuring effect of a fog, even upon that single sentence. The critic who could use such an inapplicable metaphor in prose, is miserably incompetent to sit in judgment upon poetry, and under the proud name too of the British Critic. By the same decider was the author of these poems accused of rendering several of her passages nonsense by the use of the word thrill: The following were some of the lines instanced. Speaking of Roubilliac's glorious monument in Wrexham Church, she says,
“The sainted maid, amid the bursting tomb,“Hears the last trumpet thrill its silent gloom.”
And also,
“Marks the soft tear from thrill'd remembrance sprung.”Also,
“What strains Eolian thrill the dusk expanse.”This critic must be poorly read in Milton, Pope, and Gray, and indeed, in all our best poets, since in them he might repeatedly find the word thrill used in the same sense. Johnson thus defines it as a verb active, “to thrill, to pass with a shuddering sensation.” Our hearts, or our memory may certainly be thrilled either by pleasure, pain, surprise, or terror, and so, in the language of poetry, may the tomb, the air, and other things, which are literally inanimate.—Milton says, in his hymn on the nativity,
“Nature, that heard such sound“Beneath the hollow round
“Of Cynthia's seat the airy region thrilling.”
And Addison,
“Ran thro' each nerve, and thrill'd in every vein.”And Prior,
“His killing pleasure, his extatic smart,“And heavenly poison thrilling thro' thy heart.”
But of similar use of the word thrill, the instances are endless.
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