 | Mosses from an old manse |  |
P.'S CORRESPONDENCE.
My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by
the interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason.
The past and present are jumbled together in his mind, in a manner
often productive of curious results; and which will be better
understood after the perusal of the following letter, than from any
description that I could give. The poor fellow, without once
stirring from the little white-washed, iron-grated room, to which
he alludes in his first paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller.
and meets, in his wanderings, a variety of personages, who have
long ceased to be visible to any eye save his own. In my opinion,
all this is not so much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly
involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his disease has
imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral
scenes and characters with no less distinctness than a play upon
the stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence. Many
of his letters are in my possession, some based upon the same
vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit
short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence,
which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from
what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious
pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering
after literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful
effort to achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after
missing his object while seeking it by the light of reason, he
beyond the limits of sanity.
London,February 25, 1845.
My dear friend:
Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing tenacity.
Daily custom grows up about us like a stone-wall, and consolidates
itself into almost as material an entity as mankind's strongest
architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me,
whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed
with all the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do, at this
moment, in my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over
which hangs a print of Queen Victoria—listening to the muffled
roar of the world's metropolis, and with a window at but five
paces distant, through which, whenever I please, I can gaze out
on actual London—with all this positive certainty as to my
whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you think, is just now perplexing
my brain? Why—would you believe it?—that, all this
time, I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little chamber,—
that white-washed little chamber,—that little chamber with its one
small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of
taste or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars—
that same little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so
often brought you to visit me! Will no length of time, or breadth
of space, enfranchise me from that unlovely abode? I travel, but
it seems to be like the snail, with my house upon my head. Ah,
well! I am verging, I suppose, on that period of life when present
scenes and events make but feeble impressions, in comparison
with those of yore; so that I must reconcile myself to be more
and more the prisoner of memory, who merely lets me hop about
a little, with her chain around my leg.
My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service,
enabling me to make the acquaintance of several distinguished
sphere of my personal intercourse as the wits of Queen Anne's
time, or Ben Jonson's compotators at the Mermaid. One of the
first of which I availed myself, was the letter to Lord Byron. I
found his lordship looking much older than I had anticipated;
although—considering his former irregularities of life, and the
various wear and tear of his constitution—not older than a man on
the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his
earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet's spiritual immortality.
He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and
extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is
concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having
increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat; so fat as to give
the impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and
without sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the
great mass of corporeal substance, which weighs upon him so
cruelly. You gaze at the mortal heap; and, while it fills your
eye with what purports to be Byron, you murmur within yourself
—“For Heaven's sake, where is he?” Were I disposed to be
cautic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the symbol,
in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices
which unspiritualize man's nature, and clog up his avenues of
communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh;
and besides, Lord Byron's morals have been improving, while his
outward man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference.
Would that he were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to
present his hand, yet it was so puffed out with alien substance,
that I could not feel as if I had touched the hand that wrote
Childe Harold.
On my entrance, his lordship had apologised for not rising to
receive me, on the sufficient plea that the gout, for several years
past, had taken up its constant residence in his right foot; which,
accordingly, was swathed in many rolls of flannel, and deposited
chair. Do you recollect whether Byron's right or left foot was
the deformed one?
The noble poet's reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as
you are aware, of ten years' standing; nor does it exhibit, I am
assured, any symptom of breach or fracture. They are said to
be, if not a happy, at least a contented, or, at all events, a quiet
couple, descending the slope of life with that tolerable degree of
mutual support, which will enable them to come easily and comfortably
to the bottom. It is pleasant to reflect how entirely the
poet has redeemed his youthful errors, in this particular. Her
ladyship's influence, it rejoices me to add, has been productive of
the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a religious point of view.
He now combines the most rigid tenets of methodism with the
ultra doctrines of the Puseyites: the former being perhaps due to
the convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble consort;
while the latter are the embroidery and picturesque illumination,
demanded by his imaginative character. Much of whatever
expenditure his increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him,
is bestowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of worship;
and this nobleman, whose name was once considered a synonym
of the foul fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in many pulpits
of the metropolis and elsewhere. In politics, Lord Byron is
an uncompromising conservative, and loses no opportunity, whether
in the House of Lords or in private circles, of denouncing
and repudiating the mischievous and anarchical notions of his
earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit similar sins, in other people,
with the sincerest vengeance which his somewhat blunted pen is
capable of inflicting. Southey and he are on the most intimate
terms. You are aware that some little time before the death of
Moore, Byron caused that brilliant but reprehensible man to be
ejected from his house. Moore took the insult so much to heart,
that it is said to have been one great cause of the fit of illness
died in a very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sacred
melodies, and expressing his belief that it would be heard within
the gate of paradise, and gain him instant and honorable admittance.
I wish he may have found it so.
I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation
with Lord Byron, to pay the meed of homage due to a mighty
poet, by allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred,
and Don Juan, which have made so large a portion of the music
of my life. My words, whether apt or otherwise, were at
least warm with the enthusiasm of one worthy to discourse of
immortal poesy. It was evident, however, that they did not go
precisely to the right spot. I could perceive that there was
some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with myself,
and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my
own heart to the gifted author's ear, the echo of those strains
that have resounded throughout the world. But, by and by,
the secret peeped quietly out. Byron—I have the information
from his own lips, so that you need not hesitate to repeat it in
literary circles—Byron is preparing a new edition of his complete
works, carefully corrected, expurgated and amended, in
accordance with his present creed of taste, morals, politics and
religion. It so happened, that the very passages of highest
inspiration, to which I had alluded, were among the condemned
and rejected rubbish, which it is his purpose to cast into the
gulf of oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me
that his passions having burnt out, the extinction of their vivid
and riotous flame has deprived Lord Byron of the illumination
by which he not merely wrote, but was enabled to feel and comprehend
what he had written. Positively, he no longer understands
his own poetry.
This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to
read a few specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version.
mysteries of our faith—whatever morbidly melancholic, or splenetically
sportive—whatever assails settled constitutions of government,
or systems of society—whatever could wound the sensibility
of any mortal, except a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter—has
been unrelentingly blotted out, and its place supplied
by unexceptionable verses, in his lordship's later style.
You may judge how much of the poem remains as hitherto
published. The result is not so good as might be wished; in
plain terms, it is a very sad affair indeed; for though the torches
kindled in Tophet have been extinguished, they leave an abominably
ill odor, and are succeeded by no glimpses of hallowed
fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that this attempt, on Lord
Byron's part, to atone for his youthful errors, will at length
induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is
concerned, to allow Thorwaldsen's statue of the poet its due
niche in the grand old Abbey. His bones, you know, when
brought from Greece, were denied sepulture among those of
his tuneful brethren there.
What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to
talk about burying the bones of Byron, whom I have just seen
alive, and encased in a big, round bulk of flesh! But, to say the
truth, a prodigiously fat man always impresses me as a kind of
hobgoblin; in the very extravagance of his mortal system, I
find something akin to the immateriality of a ghost. And then
that ridiculous old story darted into my mind, how that Byron
died of fever at Missolonghi, above twenty years ago. More and
more I recognize that we dwell in a world of shadows; and, for
my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to attempt a distinction
between shadows in the mind and shadows out of it. If
there be any difference, the former are rather the more substantial.
Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert
to be making a visit to London, as if on purpose to afford
me an opportunity of grasping him by the hand. For upwards
of twenty years past he has hardly left his quiet cottage in
Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn hither now
by the irresistible persuasions of all the distinguished men in
England. They wish to celebrate the patriarch's birthday by a
festival. It will be the greatest literary triumph on record.
Pray Heaven the little spirit of life within the aged bard's bosom
may not be extinguished in the lustre of that hour! I have already
had the honor of an introduction to him, at the British Museum,
where he was examining a collection of his own unpublished
letters, interspersed with songs, which have escaped the notice of
all his biographers.
Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of! How should
Burns have been embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty
old man!
The figure of the bard is tall, and in the highest degree reverend;
nor the less so, that it is much bent by the burthen of
time. His white hair floats like a snow-drift around his face,
in which are seen the furrows of intellect and passion, like the
channels of headlong torrents that have foamed themselves away.
The old gentleman is in excellent preservation, considering his
time of life. He has that cricketty sort of liveliness—I mean
the cricket's humor of chirping for any cause or none—which
is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme old
age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although
we perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of others.
I was surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent
heart and brilliant imagination had both burnt down to the last
embers, leaving only a little flickering flame in one corner,
which keeps dancing upward and laughing all by itself. He
is no longer capable of pathos. At the request of Allan Cunningham,
but it was evident that the feeling of those verses, so profoundly
true, and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the scope of
his present sensibilities; and when a touch of it did partially
awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his eyes, and his
voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly
knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah! he must not think again
of Mary in Heaven, until he shake off the dull impediment of
time, and ascend to meet her there.
Burns then began to repeat Tam O'Shanter, but was so tickled
with its wit and humor—of which, however, I did suspect he had
but a traditionary sense—that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping
laughter, succeeded by a cough, which brought this not very
agreeable exhibition to a close. On the whole, I would rather
not have witnessed it. It is a satisfactory idea, however, that the
last forty years of the peasant-poet's life have been passed in
competence and perfect comfort. Having been cured of his
bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as attentive
to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is
now considered to be quite well off, as to pecuniary circumstances.
This, I suppose, is worth having lived so long for.
I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns
in regard to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am
sorry to say, remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of
a hopeless paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler
attributes of which the body is the instrument. And thus
he vegetates from day to day, and from year to year, at that
splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which grew out of his brain, and
became a symbol of the great romancer's tastes, feelings, studies,
prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether in verse, prose, or
architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in
infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in his library,
and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating tales
deemed worth any one's trouble, now, to take down what flows
from that once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly
worth gold, and capable of being coined. Yet, Cunningham,
who has lately seen him, assures me that there is now and
then a touch of the genius; a striking combination of incident,
or a picturesque trait of character, such as no other man alive
could have hit off; a glimmer from that ruined mind, as if the
sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom of
an ancient hall. But the plots of these romances become inextricably
confused; the characters melt into one another; and the
tale loses itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy
and marshy ground.
For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had
lost his consciousness of outward things, before his works went
out of vogue. It was good that he should forget his fame, rather
than that fame should first have forgotten him. Were he still a
writer, and as brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain
anything like the same position in literature. The world,
now-a-days, requires a more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and
a closer and homelier truth, than he was qualified to supply it
with. Yet who can be, to the present generation, even what Scott
has been to the past? Bulwer nauseates me; he is the very
pimple of the age's humbug. There is no hope of the public, so
long as he retains an admirer, a reader, or a publisher. I had
expectations from a young man—one Dickens—who published a
few magazine articles, very rich in humor, and not without symptoms
of genuine pathos; but the poor fellow died, shortly after
commencing an odd series of sketches, entitled, I think, the Pickwick
Papers. Not impossibly, the world has lost more than it
dreams of, by the untimely death of this Mr. Dickens.
Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall, the other day? You
would not hit it in ten guesses. Why, no less a man than Napoleon
the skin, bones, and corporeal substance, little cocked hat, green
coat, white breeches and small sword, which are still known by
his redoubtable name. He was attended only by two policemen,
who walked quietly behind the phantasm of the old ex-Emperor,
appearing to have no duty in regard to him, except to see that
none of the light-fingered gentry should possess themselves of the
star of the Legion of Honor. Nobody, save myself, so much as
turned to look after him; nor, it grieves me to confess, could even
I contrive to muster up any tolerable interest, even by all that the
warlike spirit, formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape,
had wrought upon our globe. There is no surer method of annihilating
the magic influence of a great renown, than by exhibiting
the possessor of it in the decline, the overthrow, the utter
degradation of his powers—buried beneath his own mortality—
and lacking even the qualities of sense, that enable the most ordinary
men to bear themselves decently in the eye of the world.
This is the state to which disease, aggravated by long endurance
of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age—for he is now above
seventy—has reduced Bonaparte. The British government has
acted shrewdly, in re-transporting him from St. Helena to England.
They should now restore him to Paris, and there let him once
again review the relics of his armies. His eye is dull and
rheumy; his nether lip hung down upon his chin. While I was
observing him, there chanced to be a little extra bustle in the
street; and he, the brother of Cæsar and Hannibal—the Great
Captain, who had veiled the world in battle smoke, and tracked
it round with bloody footsteps—was seized with a nervous trembling,
and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked
and dolorous cry. The fellows winked at one another, laughed
aside, and patting Napoleon on the back, took each an arm and
led him away.
Death and fury! Ha, villain, how came you hither? Avaunt!
mistake. Pray, my dear friend, pardon this little outbreak. The
fact is, the mention of those two policemen, and their custody of
Bonaparte, had called up the idea of that odious wretch—you
remember him well—who was pleased to take such gratuitous and
impertinent care of my person, before I quitted New England.
Forthwith, uprose before my mind's eye that same little whitewashed
room, with the iron-grated window—strange, that it should
have been iron-grated—where, in too easy compliance with the
absurd wishes of my relatives, I have wasted several good years
of my life. Positively, it seemed to me that I was still sitting
there, and that the keeper—not that he ever was my keeper neither,
but only a kind of intrusive devil of a body-servant—had just
peeped in at the door. The rascal! I owe him an old grudge,
and will find a time to pay it yet! Fie, fie! The mere thought
of him has exceedingly discomposed me. Even now, that hateful
chamber—that iron-grated window, which blasted the blessed
sunshine as it fell through the dusty panes, and made it poison to
my soul—looks more distinct to my view than does this, my comfortable
apartment in the heart of London. The reality—that
which I know to be such—hangs like remnants of tattered scenery
over the intolerably prominent illusion. Let us think of it no
more.
You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not say, what
is known to all the world, that this celebrated poet has, for many
years past, been reconciled to the Church of England. In his
more recent works, he has applied his fine powers to the vindication
of the Christian faith, with an especial view to that particular
development. Latterly—as you may not have heard—he has
taken orders, and been inducted to a small country living, in the
gift of the Lord Chancellor. Just now, luckily for me, he has
come to the metropolis to superintend the publication of a volume
of discourses, treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of Christianity,
introduction, I felt no little embarrassment as to the mode of combining
what I had to say to the author of Queen Mab, the Revolt
of Islam, and Prometheus Unbound, with such acknowledgments
as might be acceptable to a Christian minister, and zealous upholder
of the Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my
ease. Standing where he now does, and reviewing all his successive
productions from a higher point, he assures me that there
is a harmony, an order, a regular procession, which enables
him to lay his hand upon any one of the earlier poems, and say,
“This is my work!” with precisely the same complacency
of conscience, wherewithal he contemplates the volume of discourses
above-mentioned. They are like the successive steps of
a staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential
to the support of the whole, as the highest and final one, resting
upon the threshold of the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask
him, what would have been his fate, had he perished on the lower
steps of his staircase, instead of building his way aloft into the
celestial brightness.
How all this may be, I neither pretend to understand nor greatly
care, so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has,
from a lower region to a loftier one. Without touching upon their
religious merits, I consider the productions of his maturity superior,
as poems, to those of his youth. They are warmer with
human love, which has served as an interpreter between his mind
and the multitude. The author has learned to dip his pen oftener
into his heart, and has thereby avoided the faults into which a too
exclusive use of fancy and intellect are wont to betray him.
Formerly, his page was often little other than a concrete arrangement
of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as they were
brilliant. Now, you take it to your heart, and are conscious of
a heart-warmth responsive to your own. In his private character,
Shelley can hardly have grown more gentle, kind and affectionate
night when he was drowned in the Mediterranean. Nonsense,
again!—sheer nonsense! What am I babbling about? I was
thinking of that old figment of his being lost in the Bay of Spezia,
and washed ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes on a
funeral pyre, with wine and spices and frankincense; while Byron
stood on the beach, and beheld a flame of marvellous beauty rise
heavenward from the dead poet's heart; and that his fire-purified
relics were finally buried near his child, in Roman earth. If all
this happened three-and-twenty years ago, how could I have met
the drowned, and burned, and buried man, here in London, only
yesterday?
Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald
Heber, heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but recently translated to
a see in England, called on Shelley while I was with him. They
appeared to be on terms of very cordial intimacy, and are said to
have a joint poem in contemplation. What a strange, incongruous
dream is the life of man!
Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel; it will
be issued entire by old John Murray, in the course of the present
publishing season. The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome
affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser
stop, to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from
his lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his accumulation
of ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth
died only a week or two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and
grant that he may not have completed the Excursion! Methinks I
am sick of everything he wrote, except his Laodamia. It is very sad
—this inconstancy of the mind to the poets whom it once worshipped.
Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with his usual
diligence. Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of age,
and with most pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow
intellect the devil had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such
our speculative license of kicking him.
Keats? No; I have not seen him, except across a crowded
street, with coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers,
and divers other sensual obstructions, intervening betwixt
his small and slender figure and my eager glance. I would fain
have met him on the sea-shore—or beneath a natural arch of
forest trees—or the Gothic arch of an old cathedral—or among
Grecian ruins—or at a glimmering fireside on the verge of evening—or
at the twilight entrance of a cave, into the dreamy
depths of which he would have led me by the hand; anywhere,
in short, save at Temple Bar, where his presence was blotted
out by the porter-swollen bulks of these gross Englishmen. I
stood and watched him, fading away, fading away, along the
pavement, and could hardly tell whether he were an actual man,
or a thought that had slipped out of my own mind, and clothed
itself in human form and habiliments, merely to beguile me. At
one moment he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it,
I am almost certain, stained with blood. You never saw anything
so fragile as his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life felt
the effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs, caused by the
article on his Endymion, in the Quarterly Review, and which so
nearly brought him to the grave. Ever since, he has glided
about the world like a ghost, sighing a melancholy tone in the ear
of here and there a friend, but never sending forth his voice to
greet the multitude. I can hardly think him a great poet. The
burthen of a mighty genius would not have been imposed upon
shoulders so physically frail, and a spirit so infirmly sensitive.
Great poets should have iron sinews.
Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to
the world, is understood to have devoted himself to the composition
of an epic poem. Some passages of it have been communicated
to the inner circle of his admirers, and impressed them as
days. If I can obtain copies of these specimens, I will ask you
to present them to James Russell Lowell, who seems to be one of
the poet's most fervent and worthiest worshippers. The information
took me by surprise. I had supposed that all Keats's
poetic incense, without being embodied in human language,
floated up to heaven, and mingled with the songs of the immortal
choristers, who perhaps were conscious of an unknown voice
among them, and thought their melody the sweeter for it. But
it is not so; he has positively written a poem on the subject of
Paradise Regained, though in another sense than that which presented
itself to the mind of Milton. In compliance, it may be
imagined, with the dogma of those who pretend that all epic possibilities,
in the past history of the world, are exhausted, Keats
has thrown his poem forward into an indefinitely remote futurity.
He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances of the time-long
warfare between Good and Evil. Our race is on the eve of
its final triumph. Man is within the last stride of perfection;
Woman, redeemed from the thraldom against which our Sybil
uplifts so powerful and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his
side, or communes for herself with angels; the Earth, sympathizing
with her children's happier state, has clothed herself in
such luxuriant and loving beauty as no eye ever witnessed since
our first parents saw the sunrise over dewy Eden. Nor then,
indeed; for this is the fulfilment of what was then but a golden
promise. But the picture has its shadows. There remains to
mankind another peril; a last encounter with the Evil Principle.
Should the battle go against us, we sink back into the slime and
misery of ages. If we triumph!—but it demands a poet's eye to
contemplate the splendor of such a consummation, and not to be
dazzled.
To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and
tender a spirit of humanity, that the poem has all the sweet and
befits so high a theme. Such, at least, is the perhaps partial
representation of his friends; for I have not read or heard even a
single line of the performance in question. Keats, I am told,
withholds it from the press, under an idea that the age has not
enough of spiritual insight to receive it worthily. I do not like
this distrust; it makes me distrust the poet. The Universe is
waiting to respond to the highest word that the best child of time
and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is because he
mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and
foreign to the purpose.
I visited the House of Lords, the other day, to hear Canning,
who, you know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed
me. Time blunts both point and edge, and does great
mischief to men of his order of intellect. Then I stept into the
Lower House, and listened to a few words from Cobbett, who
looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or, rather, as if he had lain
a dozen years beneath the clods. The men, whom I meet now-a-days,
often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are
not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the
long grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones
of people who made noise enough in their day, but now can only
clatter, clatter, clatter, when the sexton's spade disturbs them.
Were it only possible to find out who are alive, and who dead, it
would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind. Every day of
my life, somebody comes and stares me in the face, whom I had
quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted never
more to be pestered with the sight or sound of him. For instance,
going to Drury-Lane Theatre, a few evenings since, up rose before
me, in the ghost of Hamlet's father, the bodily presence of
the elder Kean, who did die or ought to have died, in some
drunken fit or other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary
ghost of himself than the ghost of the Danish king.
In the stage box sat several elderly and decrepit people, and
among them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with
a profile—for I did not see her front face—that stamped itself into
my brain, as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture
with which she took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs.
Siddons. Her brother, John Kemble, sat behind, a broken-down
figure, but still with a kingly majesty about him. In lieu of all
former achievements, nature enables him to look the part of Lear
far better than in the meridian of his genius. Charles Matthews
was likewise there; but a paralytic affection has distorted his
once mobile countenance into a most disagreeable one-sidedness,
from which he could no more wrench it into proper form than he
could re-arrange the face of the great globe itself. It looks as if,
for the joke's sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an
expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could
contrive; and at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself
so hideous, an avenging providence had seen fit to petrify
him. Since it is out of his own power, I would gladly assist him
to change countenance; for his ugly visage haunts me both at
noontide and night-time. Some other players of the past generation
were present, but none that greatly interested me. It behoves
actors, more than all other men of publicity, to vanish from
the scene betimes. Being, at best, but painted shadows flickering
on the wall, and empty sounds that echo another's thought, it is a
sad disenchantment when the colors begin to fade, and the voice
to croak with age.
What is there new, in the literary way, on your side of the
water? Nothing of the kind has come under my inspection, except
a volume of poems, published above a year ago, by Dr. Channing.
I did not before know that this eminent writer is a poet;
nor does the volume alluded to exhibit any of the characteristics
some of the poems have a richness that is not merely of the surface,
but glows still the brighter, the deeper and more faithfully
you look into them. They seem carelessly wrought, however,
like those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude,
native manufacture, which are found among the gold dust from
Africa. I doubt whether the American public will accept them;
it looks less to the assay of metal than to the neat and cunning
manufacture. How slowly our literature grows up! Most of
our writers of promise have come to untimely ends. There was
that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish brain
with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else he never
could keep himself so quiet. Bryant has gone to his last sleep,
with the Thanatopsis gleaming over him like a sculptured marble
sepulchre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer
verses in the newspapers, and published a Don Juanic poem
called Fanny, is defunct as a poet, though averred to be exemplifying
the metempsychosis as a man of business. Somewhat
later there was Whittier, a fiery Quaker youth, to whom the
muse had perversely assigned a battle-trumpet, and who got himself
lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I remember,
too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by name, who scattered
some delicate verses to the winds, and went to Germany, and
perished, I think, of intense application, at the University of Gottingen.
Willis—what a pity!—was lost, if I recollect rightly,
in 1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was going, to give
us sketches of the world's sunny face. If these had lived, they
might, one or all of them, have grown to be famous men.
And yet there is no telling—it may be as well that they have
died. I was myself a young man of promise. Oh, shattered
brain!—oh! broken spirit!—where is the fulfilment of that promise?
The sad truth is, that when fate would gently disappoint
the world, it takes away the hopefullest mortals in their youth;—
Let me die upon this apophthegm, for I shall never make a
truer one!
What a strange substance is the human brain! Oh rather—
for there is no need of generalizing the remark—what an odd
brain is mine! Would you believe it? Daily and nightly there
come scraps of poetry humming in my intellectual ear—some as
airy as bird-notes, and some as delicately neat as parlor-music,
and a few as grand as organ-peals—that seem just such verses as
those departed poets would have written, had not an inexorable
destiny snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in
spirit, perhaps desiring to engage my services as the amanuensis
of their posthumous productions, and thus secure the endless renown
that they have forfeited by going hence too early. But I
have my own business to attend to; and, besides, a medical gentleman,
who interests himself in some little ailment; of mine,
advises me not to make too free use of pen and ink. There are
clerks enough out of employment who would be glad of such
a job.
Good bye! are you alive or dead? And what are you about?
Still scribbling for the Democratic? And do those internal compositors
and proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions
as vilely as ever? It is too bad. Let every man manufacture
his own nonsense, say I! Expect me home soon, and—to whisper
you a secret—in company with the poet Campbell, who purposes
to visit Wyoming, and enjoy the shadow of the laurels that
he planted there. Campbell is now an old man. He calls himself
well, better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale, and
so shadow-like, that one might almost poke a finger through his
densest material. I tell him, by way of joke, that he is as dim
and forlorn as Memory, though as unsubstantial as Hope.
Your true friend, P.
P.S. Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable
learn that a complete edition of his works, in a double columned
octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press, at Philadelphia.
Tell him that no American writer enjoys a more classic reputation
on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow yet alive?
Unconscionable man! Why, he must have nearly fulfilled his
century! And does he meditate an epic on the war between
Mexico and Texas, with machinery contrived on the principle of
the steam-engine, as being the nearest to celestial agency that our
epoch can boast? How can he expect ever to rise again, if,
while just sinking into his grave, he persists in burthening himself
with such a ponderosity of leaden verses?
| Mosses from an old manse | |