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66

THE BOTANIC GARDEN."

-rural sights and sounds continuing to exert those imaginative influences in the days of Thomson, Cowper, and Grahame, which they did in the patriarchal ages, alike when Isaac went forth to meditate at eventide, and when Ruth gleaned in the fields of Boaz; and which they will never, can never cease to exert, while human nature preserves its present constitution. Almost any subject may be invested with a poetical interest, although that interest is not prominently inherent in the thing itself, nor even in the associations immediately connecting themselves with it. Garth's "Dispensary," and Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health," for instance, as well as the "Eclogues of Sannizarius" and "The Nurse of Tansillo," are essentially and intrinsically prosaic. That these writers have sprinkled a poetical garnish over them, alters not the case. Darwin had no faith in simplicity and nature; and he spoiled all his delineations "by gilding refined gold, and painting the lily;" while the faults and failures of Wordsworth and his followers, on the other hand, originated in equally vain attempts, either to dignify the intrinsically mean, or to decorate the hopelessly worthless.

For utilitarianism, as strictly applied to poetry, I have no liking. What possible end could be gained by describing the machinery of a cotton-mill, or the improvements on the steam-engine, in verse, that could not be better attained in prose? If Dr Darwin intended to excite pleasurable feelings in his readers, he might have unquestionably chosen a more appropriate subject; if instruction was his aim, verse ought not to have been his vehicle. We are told, indeed, that it is the design of "The Botanic Garden" "to enlist imagination under the banners of science, and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies that dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones which form the ratiocinations of philosophy." But the great end of poetry is here forgotten.

OVID'S METAMORPHOSES.

15

We look on, and are dazzled ; but we have none of those emotions which either "entrance the soul and lap it in Elysium;" or that awaken " thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." "The Loves of the Plants" are wholly different from "The Metamorphoses" of Ovid ; because, in the latter, the transmutation is merely a secondary object, both in the eyes of the poet and in the estimation of the reader. As the hero or heroine falls off from all intellectual grandeur, and thereby ceases utterly to excite aught of moral sympathy, we are wholly indifferent, since the absurdity of transformation must take place, into what it may be-an animal, or a stone, or a flower. Swift and Prior have admirably travestied some of these stories; and in the "Baucis and Philemon," the former has with great naïveté adapted the classic fable to rural English manners, and turned his hospitable domestic pair into yew trees, which long remained objects of wonder :

"Till once a Parson of our town,

To mend his barn, cut Baucis down;
At which 'tis hard to be believed
How much the other tree was grieved,
Grew scrubby, died a-top, was stunted;
So the next Parson stubbed and brunt it."

Ovid, indeed, tells us that, when Ajax stabbed himself, his blood was turned into the violet. But this is only the supernatural winding up of a scene of human passion, full of nature, feeling, and heroic action. He has previously introduced us to the two great leaders who plead their claims before the assembled Grecian chiefs for the armour of Achilles. We are taught to listen to the applausive shouts of the soldiery, and to have our hearts touched with the eloquence of the champions, as either in turn recounts the services he has rendered to his country, and "his hair-breadth 'scapes by flood and

16

DARWIN'S SIMILES.

field." Of Darwin in his purest form take the following short specimen :—

"Nymphs! you disjoin, unite, condense, expand,

And give new wonders to the Chemist's hand;
On tepid clouds of rising steam aspire,
And fix in sulphur all its solid fire;
With boundless string elastic airs unfold,
Or fill the fine vacuities of gold;

With sudden flash vitrescent sparks reveal,
By fierce collision from the flint and steel;
Or mark with shining letters Kunkel's name
In the pale Phospor's self-consuming flame.
So the chaste heart of some enchanted maid
Shines with insidious light by love betrayed.
Round her pale bosom plays the young desire,
And slow she wastes with self-consuming fire."

Here is science united to poetry with a vengeance! Now, we maintain that the passage has no title whatever to the latter appellation, save for the simile so strangely conveyed in the last four lines, which carries us back from dry art to images of natural beauty.

The parts of Darwin's writings worthy of admiration (and the finer portions are well worthy of it) are, without an exception that strikes me, only those passages which are subsidiary to the main objects of his poetry, and introduced by way of apostrophe or illustration. We do not think of the Digitalis purpurea, but of philanthropy and Howard; we do not think of the embryo seeds, but of Herschel and the starry firmament; not of the Carline thistle, but of the ascent of Montgolfier; not of the Orchis, but of Eliza and the battle of Minden; not of the vegetable poisons, but of the desolation of Palmyra. Incongruity, instead of being disclaimed by, seems a favourite axiom of Darwin and his school-subjects hopelessly prosaic being artificially stilted into eminence, and loaded with epithet and embellishment. If a beggar were to be introduced, it would be in a tattered lace

THE SUPERNATURAL SCHOOL.

17

coat, and he would ride to the lower regions-down the "facilis descensus Averni”—on a broken-kneed horse; and, if a "slaughterer of horned cattle," he would, after stalking through the shambles like a dancing-master, apostrophise his slain bullock in the fashion of Mark Anthony over Cæsar. As, with persons technically termed fine singers, sense is sacrificed to sound, so there is with the Darwinians no solicitude about the sentiment, provided you have the tones; and intrinsic beauty is unhesitatingly buried beneath the gorgeous glitter of external drapery. When a Grecian matron is brought before you, instead of the robes of snowy white and the elegance of simplicity, you have her cheeks bedaubed with rouge, her ringlets filleted with embroidered ribbon, a tinselled cincture about her waist, and a scarf of purple thrown over her shoulders. In fact, you are invited to a mere scenic exhibition—a panorama of picturesque and fanciful objects-where you have the soft and the rugged, the Bay of Naples and Loch Lomond by moonlight, alternating with the Devil's Bridge and the whirlpool of Corryvreckan. It is never thus with the really great poet. In him, fancy and feeling are found combined; and, although all the varieties of actual life, and all—

"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley he has viewed,
Yet impulses of deeper birth

Have come to him in solitude."

He looks, indeed, on the beauties of the external world, on all the aspects of nature, with a gifted and a gladdened eye; but this does not prevent him from making the springs of action, the secrets of the inner man, all that elevates or depresses the human heart, "the haunt and the main region of his song."

To the artistic artificial school of Darwin, Seward, Hayley, and the Della Cruscans, may be said to have succeeded the purely romantic one-of which Matthew

B

Gregory Lewis ought to be set down as the leader, and John Leyden, Walter Scott, Coleridge, Southey, James Hogg, Mrs Radcliffe, Anna Maria Porter, and Anne Bannerman, as the chief disciples. The germ of their tenets must be traced back to the North, rather than to the ballads and romances of Percy, Ritson, and Ellis; and their demonology throughout savours much more of the Teutonic than either the Saxon or Celtic. The unsettling of men's minds by the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau, among the French-and the new order of things created by the dangerous philosophising of the Academicians, and by Kant, Schelling, and the German transcendentalists-combined to bring about a new era, in which were rekindled all the magical and mystic reminiscences of the dark ages. Horace Walpole had written his "Castle of Otranto merely as a burlesque; but, hitting the tone of the day, it had been read and relished as an admirable transcript of feudal times and Gothic manners; and his success taught Mrs Radcliffe and others to harp-and far from unpleasantly -on the same string. "Clarissa Harlowe" and "Pamela," quietly located on the book-shelves, had for a while their "virtue unrewarded," even by a reading; and nothing went down but "Udolphos" and "Romances of the Forest," "Sicilian Bravos," and "Legends of the Hartz Mountains;" corridors and daggers, moonlight and murdering, ruined castles and sheeted spectres, gauntleted knights and imprisoned damsels.

Three men of peculiar, two of them, indeed, of great imaginative strength, at this time started up-Godwin, Coleridge, and Lewis; but it is with the last of them only that I have at present to do. As a man of truly original powers, M. G. Lewis was far behind either Godwin or Coleridge, and stood much on the level of his successor Maturin; but what his imagination lacked in grandeur was made up by energy: he was a highpriest of the intense school. Monstrous and absurd in