nest of demons, where despair, in vain, sits brooding over the putrid eggs of hope; where agony wooes the embrace of death; where patience, beside the bottomless pool of despondency, sits angling for impossibilities:—yet even here to behold her, to embrace her-yes, Matilda, whether in this dark abode, amidst toads and spiders, or in a royal palace, amidst the more loathsome reptiles of a Court, would be indifferent to me. Angels would shower down their hymns of gratulation upon our heads-while fiends would envy the eternity of suffering love. . . . . . . Soft, what air was that? it seemed a sound of more than human warblings. Again [listens attentively for some minutes]. Only the wind. It is well, however-it reminds me of that melancholy air, which has so often solaced the hours of my captivity. Let me see whether the damps of this dungeon have not yet injured my guitar. [Takes his guitar, tunes it, and begins the following air, with a full accompaniment of violins from the orchestra:— [Air, Lanterna Magica.] SONG, BY ROGERO. 1. Whene'er with haggard eyes I view I think of those companions true Who studied with me at the U -niversity of Gottingen-niversity of Gottingen. [Weeps, and pulls out a blue kerchief, with which he wipes his eyes; gazing tenderly at it, he proceeds II. Sweet kerchief, check'd with heavenly blue, At least I thought so at the U— ---niversity of Gottingen- [At the repetition of this line, Rogero clanks his III. Barbs! barbs! alas! how swift you flew, Her neat post-wagon trotting in! Ye bore Matilda from my view; -niversity of Gottingen- IV. This faded form! this pallid hue! This blood my veins is clotting in, My years are many-they were few When first I enter'd at the U-niversity of Gottingen--niversity of Gottingen. V. There first for thee my passion grew, Sweet! sweet Matilda Pottingen! Thou wast the daughter of my Tu-tor, Law Professor at the U— -niversity of Gottingen-niversity of Gottingen. VI. Sun, moon, and thou, vain world, adieu, That kings and priests are plotting in: Here doom'd to starve on water gru-el, never shall I see the U -niversity of Gottingen-niversity of Gottingen. [During the last stanza, Rogero dashes his head repeatedly against the walls of his prison; and, finally, so hard as to produce a visible contusion. He then throws himself on the floor in an agony. The curtain drops, the music still continuing to play, till it is wholly fallen.] But the young English writers, who delighted in wild German imaginings, and, among other things, dealt much like Matthew Gregory Lewis, in "Tales of Terror," and "Tales of Wonder," could jest at their own fancies as cheerfully as any satirist. M. G. Lewis's "Tales of Terror," in 1799, fascinated Walter Scott, and caused him to make his first venture with original song as a contributor to the succeeding "Tales of Wonder." But thus its editor played with his own legend of the "Cloud King,” as Southey parodied his own ballad of the “Old Woman of Berkeley:" "Then cold as a cucumber Nancy she grew, Her proud stomach came down, and she blared, and she cried, 'Oh, tell me, dear Grim, does that spectre speak true, And will you not save from his clutches your bride?' "Vain your grief, silly maid, when the matin bells ring, The bond becomes due, which long since did I sign; For she, who at night weds the grizzly Ghost King, Next morn must be dress'd for his subjects to dine.' "In silks and in satins for you I'll be dress'd, My soft tender limbs let their fangs never crunch.''Fair Nancy, yon ghosts, should I grant your request, Instead of at dinner, would eat you at lunch ! '— "But vain, ghostly King, is your cunning and guile, That bond must be void which you never can pay; Lo! I ne'er will be yours, till, to purchase my smile, My two first commands (as you swore) you obey.' "Well say'st thou, fair Nancy, thy wishes impart, But think not to puzzle Grim, King of the Ghosts.' Straight she turns o'er each difficult task in her heart, And I've found out a poser,' exultingly boasts. "You vow'd that no butcher should call me his bride, That this vow you fulfil my first asking shall be ; And since so many maids in your clutches have died, Than yourself show a [butcher more] butcher,' said she. "Then shrill scream the spectres; the charnel-house gloom Swift lightnings disperse, and the palace destroy; Again Nancy stood in the little back room, And again at her knee knelt the young butcher's boy! "I'll have done with dead husbands,' she Brisket bespeaks, 'I'll now take a live one, so fetch me a ring!' And when press'd to her lips were his red beefin cheeks, She loved him much more than the shrivell'd Ghost King. "No longer his steaks and his cutlets she spurns, No longer he fears his grim rival's pale band; Yet still when the famed first of April returns, The sprites rise in squadrons, and Nancy demand. "This informs you, Tom Tap, why to-night I remove, For I dread the approach of the shroud-cover'd hosts! Who tell, with loud shriek, that resentment and love Still nip the cold heart of Grim, King of the Ghosts!" CHAPTER XVIII. FIRST QUARTER OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.WORDSWORTH, SCOTT, BYRON, SHELLEY, KEATS, AND OTHERS.-A.D. 1800 TO A.D. 1825. THE deaths of Keats in 1821, Shelley in 1822, and Byron in 1824, bring to a natural close the first quarter of the nineteenth century. This was one of the great periods of English poetry, and it owed its grandeur to a stirring of the depths of life. Whenever the condition of society brings men to feel deeply and to think habitually and intently upon questions that touch it to the quick, the soul of a nation rises to the highest utterance, in action and in song. The eighteenth century closed with a noble aspiration. Its voice was in young Thomas Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," the master poem of a youth of two-and-twenty, published in the last year of the last century. Such hope as was there painted was our century's inheritance; and how to realise it became the first problem of our time. During the first quarter of this century, while Byron's passionate genius came to express much of the new tumult of thought; full of defiance of old forms, full also of impulsive sympathies and generous impatience for the freedom of nations; and while Shelley arose to give shapes of beauty and sometimes of grandeur to vague yearning for all that was high and pure in the first dream of the Revolution, William Wordsworth quietly passed with the same ideal from the world of dreams into the world of fact, and already in 1805 had set down in his then unpublished poem, "The Prelude," the conviction on which all his after-work was based. He gathered from the failure of the French Revolution not despair, but faith. By the daily influences to which his heart was open, he was taught trust in the great processes of nature, in the providence of God. "What man has made of man" did not become to him a less present evil; but he learnt, and made it his life's work as a poet to lead others into, the one way towards the ideal that was still before him, on which his mind was fixed more calmly, but only the more intently, the day of "the crowning race when, human degradation seen no more at every turn of life, all shall become what only a few now can be. It is not for us by violent and sudden change in constitution of the State that this end is to be achieved; the way to it is by looking to each Individual, each atom in the mass. Let every child be taught; let the worth of a man be felt, and, as far as may be, every help given to those who are low to rise; take away hindrances; secure as far as possible that every mind in the social mass shall become sounder and larger. In that way, and in that way only-having once obtained enough of civil liberty to lay such a way open-can we show the nations "To what end The powers of civil polity are given." Thus Wordsworth, while the revolutionary stir was still about him, and few heeded his quiet voice, marked out the lines along which in the England of to-day action and thought are alike travelling. Such movements of thought will be most readily observed in the volume of this Library that illustrates the substance of our larger works; for upon Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," upon Wordsworth's "Prelude" and "Excursion," upon Byron's 66 'Childe Harold," upon Shelley's "Prometheus Bound," and upon other poems of like range, this is not the place to dwell. Success of his "Pleasures of Hope" brought Thomas Campbell to London, and in June, 1800, twenty-three years old, he started on a trip to Germany, where he saw scenes of war that painfully recurred to him in after years when he was fevered and ill. He sent from Germany some strains of patriotic song to the Morning Chronicle. One of them, written at Altona, in the winter of 1800, was signed "Amator Patriæ," and entitled "Alteration of the Old Ballad Ye Gentlemen of England,' composed on the Prospect of a Russian War:" YE MARINERS OF ENGLAND. Ye mariners of England! Whose flag has braved, a thousand years, Your glorious standard launch again Wordsworth produced his first sonnets in 1801, after hearing sonnets of Milton read to him by his sister Dorothy. One of them was on Napoleon. In 1797 Bonaparte had said, "What the French want is Glory, and to have their vanity gratified. As to Liberty, they don't know what to do with it." In 1800 he made himself First Consul for ten years with two shadows, a second and third Consul with consultative powers, Cambacérès and Lebrun. Thus Wordsworth wrote of him in 1801:: NAPOLEON. I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain And an unthinking grief! The tenderest mood 10 In 1802, the year of his marriage with Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth, after the Peace of Amiens, visited France. That peace was signed on the 27th of March, 1802. On the 2nd of August, it was declared by three and a half millions of votes that France had chosen Napoleon Bonaparte Consul for life. Whereon Wordsworth wrote, at Calais, AUGUST 15, 1802. Festivals have I seen that were not names: To the sea-coast, noting that each man frames SONNETS WRITTEN IN 1802. O Friend! I know not which way I must look For comfort, being, as I am, opprest, To think that now our life is only drest For show; mean handywork of craftsman, cook, Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour: 10 On the 13th of May, 1803, strife was resumed between England and France. Then began the war against Napoleon which ended with the battle of Waterloo, and with which Wordsworth was in patriotic sympathy. In May, 1804, France was declared an empire. On the 2nd of the following December, Napoleon was crowned Emperor. In May, 1805, he was crowned King of Italy in Milan. On the 14th of October, 1806, followed the battle of Jena, after which Napoleon entered Berlin in triumph. From Berlin he issued, on the 21st of November, his famous decrees against England. To these last events Wordsworth referred in the sonnet dated In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay. Great men have been among us; hands that penned In splendour: what strength was that would not bend But equally a want of books and men! It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British Freedom, which, to the open sea Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood," That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands 10 In April of the year 1802-the year -Wordsworth wrote his poem of "The Daffodils.” That poem gives words to a feeling expressed by his sister Dorothy, and the two best lines in it— "They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude," were contributed by Mary Hutchinson, then about to become the poet's wife, herself the subject of the lines beginning "She was a phantom of delight," of the lines written in 1824, "Oh, dearer far than light and life are dear," and of the lines "To a Painter." written after six-and-thirty years of marriage. SHE WAS A PHANTOM OF DELIGHT. She was a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight; A lovely apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; |