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LINES ON MARTIN'S PAINTINGS.
Upon these wonder-breathing scrolls I gaze,Lost in their boundlessness of gloom and blaze!
Depth within depth of night, o'erpowering night—
Sphere beyond sphere of light, transcending light—
Within their span, concentered and combined,
Bewilder and intoxicate the mind!
Here multitudinous cities are uplifted
From the dim dust—they that were earthquakerifted,
Or deluged by the rampant ocean's waves—
Or left the site of immemorial graves!
The hundred-gated capitals of old!
They blaze once more—rich with barbaric gold!
There bright, bright fields glow with undying bloom,
Undarkened by the shadows of the tomb.
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And lift the soul above the wrecks of time!
These scenes with immortality are crowned,
And own, in their imperial sway, no bound
Save that of uttermost magnificence!—
The excess—the height—the super-eminence
Of mightiest grandeur in its mightiest hour!
O! marvellous is thy privilege and power,
Great Painter! thy unfaltering, fearless hand
Hath sovereign mastery o'er the vast and grand!
Thine eye hath traversed—measured—overcome—
The heights, the abysses of all light and gloom!
Hath flashed along the immeasurable void,
As some winged comet, on its journeyings wide,
Flashes from space to space! and we behold
The banners of thy triumph's hour unrolled.
Hast thou thy hand, untrembling, undismayed,
Upon the Future's shadowy mane victorious laid;
Or struck the dark rock of th' impassive Past,
Till forth the fountains gushed! full, deep, and fast?
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Have in its depths amassed—compressed—enshrined
These boundless treasures, those rich stores of light,
Which have no name, no price, no end? Proud freight!
O! what have been the wands, the lightning rods,
Wherewith thou'st pierced the innumerous abodes
Of slumbering mystery? What the Ithuriel spear,
Which makes to thee in Truth's bright guise appear
Things which to eyes ungifted shine not clear?
How have those visions on thy soul descended?
Yet, wherefore ask?—O'erpoweringly splendid!—
Each glorified—immortalized—enriched—
Now o'er thy canvass dazzlingly outstretched,—
Burns—inextinguishably wonderful!—
With hues e'en Time shall teach not to grow dull.
O! wherefore ask?—Still be it ours to admire—
To catch some sparks of thy Promethean fire!
Still in unquestioning ecstasy to allay
Our spirit-thirst with draughts of heavenly day!
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And break through all the intense, the gorgeous gloom,
Which streams like midnight's jewelled mantle round
Thy dream of worlds)—still, still from the profound
And teeming depths thou hast unveiled, to reap
Gatherings of priceless knowledge, pure and deep,
Thine must have been—O! wherefore, wherefore ask?—
Thine was an unparticipated task!
The prophet-impulse of thine own winged thought—
The sole proud agency and aid thou hast sought!
By thy unsuccoured strength hast thou achieved
Thy kingly victories, and the crown received!
That burning crown, that orbed and laurelled wreath,
Which beams defiance to the shafts of Death!
O! rich must be thy haunted solitude—
Thy mind's creative, star-rejoining mood!
What unimaginable apparitions—
(Startling with dream-like, shadowy recognitions
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Hath lingering memories of its native clime!)
What shapes of Glory—Terror—Wonder—Power,
Must throng that incommunicable hour!—
With aspects like the sun, or star-strewn sky!
Beautiful!—beautiful incomprehensibly!
Though they be there whose foreheads, thunder-splintered,
Shew where the ruinous bolts of wrath had entered!
Behold them! rank o'er rank and grade o'er grade,
The realmless lords! the discrowned chiefs! arrayed
In mockery of the illustrious state they've lost!
By thee evoked—that myriad-legioned host!
Behold him on his shadowing mountain-throne
Amidst those vassal-myriads—yet alone!
How awfully alone!—meet monarch there!
Sovereign—in unapproachable despair!—
He who, midst sceptered hierarchies divine,
Did with insufferable refulgence shine!
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Leader of ruined immortalities!
But thou hast loftier, nobler, happier themes
For the fine passion of thy mounting dreams!
Pure heavenward hopes and crowned imaginations
Incarnate seem midst thy more bright creations,
Where angel-throngs, with wreath, and harp, and wing,
O'er pictured Edens smiles of radiance fling.
How must those glorious groups—those realms Elysian—
Crowd in dread pomp upon thy aching vision!
Still, still surpassed by others still appearing,
While, like Heaven's meteors dazzlingly careering,
In long, interminably long, processions—
In swift, precipitately swift, successions—
They sweep through the endless area of thy thought,
As by the wings of triumphing morning brought,
Till, too intensely exquisite to stay,
Those splendours melt, like sunset's clouds, away!
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Through all the avenues of the universe—
The universe of spirit and of mind—
All indestructible, though undefined!
But still innumerable gleams and rays
Remain and crowd upon thy raptured gaze!
Shadows and scarce-glimpsed splendours flit and pass,
As o'er the surface of some magic glass;
And thou art skilled to embody and to blend
Those ever-shifting phantasms without end!
Thy whirlwind-stroke hath fixed them and enchained,
And unto bright development constrained!
And still adventurously hast thou essayed
More wond'rous things!—more wond'rously portrayed!
And still undaunted and undazzled, still
Thou'st climbed, and soared, and vanquished at thy will,
And half-withdrawn the invulnerable veil,
And almost stood within the extremest pale!—
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And glimpsed the blazing shadows of its Throne!
Till e'en the Heaven of Heavens the Empyreums seem
In the stupendous mystery of thy dream,
Won from their dread inexorable height!
Lo! thou'st drawn tribute from reluctant night,
Amerced the lightnings on their arrowy flight,
And prisoned them—and sentenced them—to flee,
And burn, and dazzle—everlastingly!
In that suspended impulse of their power
More terrible than in their chartered hour!
Thou hast arrested even the ocean's surge,
When stung to fury by the whirlwind's scourge!
Seized the fierce tempest in its midmost rage,
And dashed its sweeping terrors on thy page!
Thou'st glassed the earthquake's desolating strife,
When maddening, agonising into life—
Then levelled hills, and disembowelled plains,
The earth and the elements appear! in chains—
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The toppling crags! in mid-o'erwhelming hung!—
In mid-o'erwhelming!—in the impending rush—
The threatening of the exterminating crush!
Thou'st dreamed the ruin of the affrighted world;
The heavens seem rent! the judgment-thunders hurled!
Thou'st loosed the fountains of the eternal deeps,
And forth the annihilating Deluge sweeps!
Genius! thou day-star of the human mind!
Which in its flight leaves systemed worlds behind—
Which streams through conquered universes, fraught
With themes for the immortality of thought—
Thou'rt not to earth's inglorious span contracted,
Nor incommunicatively abstracted!—
From world to world thou tak'st thy trackless way,
—World after world to unveil, and to display!
Genius! thou'st bound all in thy kingly thrall—
Transpierced— constrained—defined—unravelled all!
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Majesty is thy garment—Power thy shade!
All Grandeur—Beauty—Majesty—and Power,
Are thy supreme, inalienable dower!
The Past is refluent to thy mastering glance!
—Contemporaneous in thy breathless trance
Art thou with all that hath been or shall be—
The Past—the Future—and the Eternity!
And, interpenetrated streams thy thought
With all that e'er was to existence wrought—
The incomprehensible, unmeasured Whole
Seems compassed by thy circumambient soul!
And glorified—illumined—changed—inspired,
Where'er thou hast awakeningly respired!
Thy breath is power—life—victory—realization!
Thy touch—thy lightning-touch—transfiguration!
Thy presence—an apotheosis, even!
Flooding the earth with sunburst hues of Heaven!
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