Or the next stanza but one:
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Great Destiny, the commissary of God,That hast mark’d out a path and periodFor every thing! Who, where we offspring took,Our ways and ends see’st at one instant: thouKnot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless browNe’er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,And shew my story in thy eternal book,” etc. As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours ofunaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, orthe startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which bursts onthe unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms.Such are the Odes to jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion, and the like, inDodsley’s collection and the magazines of that day, which seldom failto remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the two SUTTONS, commencingwith “Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!” It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poetsof true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theorydeluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once readto a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory periodof Cowley’s preface to his “Pindaric Odes,” written in imitation ofthe style and manner of the odes of Pindar. “If,” (says Cowley), “a manshould undertake to translate Pindar, word for word, it would be thoughtthat one madman had translated another as may appear, when he, thatunderstands not the original, reads the verbal traduction of him intoLatin prose, than which nothing seems more raving.” I then proceededwith his own free version of the second Olympic, composed for thecharitable purpose of rationalizing the Theban Eagle. “Queen of all harmonious things,Dancing words and speaking strings,What god, what hero, wilt thou sing?What happy man to equal glories bring?Begin, begin thy noble choice,And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice.Pisa does to Jove belong,Jove and Pisa claim thy song.The fair first-fruits of war, th’ Olympic games,Alcides, offer’d up to Jove;Alcides, too, thy strings may move,But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove?Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;Theron the next honour claims;Theron to no man gives place,Is first in Pisa’s and in Virtue’s race;Theron there, and he alone,Ev’n his own swift forefathers has outgone.” One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, thatif the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad. I thentranslated the ode from the Greek, and as nearly as possible, wordfor word; and the impression was, that in the general movement of theperiods, in the form of the connections and transitions, and in thesober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach morenearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our Bible,in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as a specimen: “Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!What God? what Hero?What Man shall we celebrate?Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,The first-fruits of the spoils of war.But Theron for the four-horsed car,That bore victory to him,It behoves us now to voice aloud:The Just, the Hospitable,The Bulwark of Agrigentum,Of renowned fathersThe Flower, even himWho preserves his native city erect and safe.” But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviationfrom the language of real life? and are they by no other means to beprecluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose andverse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insightinto the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient toprove, that such language and such combinations are the native productneither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operationconsists in the excitement of surprise by the juxta-position andapparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. Aswhen, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of avoice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, thatthis compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation ofimpressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathywith the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had unitedand inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is thereforea species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a leisure andself-possession both of thought and of feeling, incompatible with thesteady fervour of a mind possessed and filled with the grandeur of itssubject. To sum up the whole in one sentence. When a poem, or a part ofa poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures andcentexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason canbe assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actuallyconverse, then, and not till then, can I hold this theory to be eitherplausible, or practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule,guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, aswell as more naturally, have been deduced in the author’s own mind fromconsiderations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things,confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of one countrynor of one age.
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