THE POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN WILSON, THE domains of Poetry in Britain have been vexed of late years by a season of anarchy and invasion, whereby her true adherents have been disheartened, and her dignity has suffered great damage. Since the departure or abdication of the sovereign minds that presided over her several provinces, there have appeared a legion of small and assiduous pretenders; each wearing, throughout his brief existence, the device of some one of the mighty departed, and claiming the succession to his honours. Such a blowing of brazen trumpets, and such a buzz of puny voices, have never before perplexed the public ear. It has been a season of no small peril and detriment to poetry. The modern reader of verse has lived, like a voyager in the streets of Toledo, confused by the tolling of innumerable bells, and stopped at every moment to uncover and kneel to some lying pageant or spurious relic. On all sides he is wearied by the loud vociferation of rival impostures, or solicited for alms by mendicants in the disguise of the priesthood. Beneath this display of devotion, he will not be long in discovering the ignorance, the lax morals, the worldly aims of its professors; so that his faith must be strong, and his love more than conventional, if he do not learn to doubt and to detest, amidst the insufferable worthlessness and falsehood that he is compelled to witness. From such an apostacy they are protected, in whose hearts the voices of nature and truth have left an echo of their music, which meaner accents cannot utterly drown. These voices may for a while have been overborne by the tumult; but when weariness, succeeding to curiosity, is tempted to exclaim, "All is false and barren!" they will again be heard with great consolation and reproof, silencing the promptings of unbelief, and proclaiming the living power of the Eternal, in all its strength and exceeding loveliness. Nor are they destitute of oral testimonies and ministers. There are not a few whose exhortations and ex.. ample have constantly asserted these truths. Above all, there are not wanting poets who, in defiance of neglect or ridicule, have remained devoted to their celebration; and who, refusing to deviate from the unnoticed path, have continued pointing to those pure sources, whence the soul, fevered by the glare and tumult of imposture, may recover health and refreshment. To these it is the especial and pleasant duty of all who are enlisted in the good cause, to invite attention and regard. The undisputed chief of the band to which we allude, (Is it necessary expressly to name Wordsworth?) is now beginning to receive, from the admiration of his countrymen, a late amends for the contumely with which-especially, to their shame be it spoken, from Northern criticshis works were formerly assailed. The pure spirit of his poetry has found its noiseless way to a multitude of bosoms; and many whom the impetuous glory of Byron's genius (quenched, alas! ere it had arisen to its destined sphere of poetic creation) had taught to contemn the beauty of a more placid song, have now returned to visit it with love and reverence. And while undiminished honour is paid to that genius which, for a time, rendered its admirers blindly unjust to all others, an affectionate feeling is each day more and more closely approaching those poets whose hymns have been devoted to the still worship of nature, and to the calm charities of domestic life. The present, therefore, appears to be no unfavourable time to undertake an examination of the VOL. II.-NO. XII. 3 B productions of one of this school, who posesses, moreover, from local and national associations, a peculiar claim to our notice. The poems of Wilson have now been so long before the public, that we need not minutely analyze the separate merits of each. We shall attempt to describe, as far as we have succeeded in apprehending, the general features of his poetical character, illustrated by such specimens as may serve to display them; and this with a desire to discover beauties rather than to reprove faults. The latter is an easy, but ungracious exercise of the critical functions, and only to be called forth in defence of the interests of good taste, and for the vindication of true excellence from incompetent pretension. And since we are persuaded at heart that Wilson is a true poet, we think it a far more important duty to point out wherein he excels, than to peer curiously into his defects. We remember the unwillingness of a great master of our mystery, paucis offendi maculis, and are not ambitious of the post of bourreau de Parnasse, an office needful at times, but not therefore the less disgusting and opprobrious. We had rather be employed in adorning the brows of those who have deserved well of the Republic, than in "wielding the knout;"an odious charge, which, strange as it may appear, is nevertheless openly and complacently professed by some of our critical brethren. Imagination is the intellectual, and love the moral spring of Wilson's genius; an imagination pure, delicate, and utterly impatient of restraint ; far-soaring, and incapable of being tied or tired: a love of outward nature, deepening into passion; and of living beings, in which passion appears almost extinguished by reverence or contemplation: a love, in tenderness resembling that of woman, for all that is placid and beautiful and unspotted. His mind is ever on the wing amidst the cloud-land of phantasy; if it touch upon realities, it is in order to invest them with a veil of airy conceptions, beneath which their peculiar outlines disappear; and, in descending to human themes, his imagination invokes in their place shadows of sinless and angelic loveliness, too exquisite and visionary for the atmosphere of earth. He views every thing through a medium tinged with hues and shades, which conceal whatever of mean or common might offend his sensitive perception; it is a prism through which the object is beheld, changed, indeed, from its proper shape, but dyed with the fairest colours of the rainbow. His companions are an ever-varying phantasmagoria of distant pictures; every scene he visits, every sound he perceives, suggests to his mind some mysterious type of the far-off world in which his mind rejoices to dwell; and, by a singular property of this endowment, while, to his eye, inanimate objects become gifted with life, he looks upon living man as upon the shadow of a stately representation, beautiful, Guidesque, and vapoury. To this latter peculiarity we shall have occasion hereafter to advert. As an example of his gift of impersonating an insensitive thing, and endowing it with a spiritual life, we select the ensuing lines :— "And lo! upon the murmuring waves A glorious shape appearing, A broad-wing'd vessel, through the shower Of glimmering lustre steering! As if the beauteous ship enjoyed The beauty of the sea, She lifteth up her stately head, And saileth joyfully. A lovely path before her lies, A lovely path behind; She sails amid the loveliness Fit pilgrim, through a scene so fair, A glorious phantom of the deep, The moon bids her tenderest radiance fall On her wavy streamer and show-white wings; And the quiet voice of the rocking sea To cheer the gliding vision sings. Oh! ne'er did sky and water blend In such a holy sleep, Or bathe in brighter quietude A roamer of the deep. So far the peaceful soul of Heaven It seems as if this weight of calm O world of waters! the steadfast earth Ne'er lay entranced like thee!" Isle of Palms, Canto I. The scene, the object described in these lines, it may be said, naturally seem to call for this mode of representation; they did so, and therefore were chosen by the poet, at whose will lay the events he should depict :— And was ever anything more vision-like and airy? But let us turn to a subject of a different kind;-the visit of a rustic company to certain anglers who had pitched their tent, for a Sabbath day's rest, at the edge of a retired mountain lake. Peasants, old and young, have assembled from all the neighbouring hills to gaze upon the unwonted spectacle of strangers,-by whom they are welcomed and entertained. A pleasant group! which many a skilful hand would have described with the quaint and truthful pencil of a Berghem or a Watteau. But our poet touches it with his wand,-the rude outlines disappear, and lo! the scene is changed to Arcady. These are no peasant girls : "Well did the roses blooming on their cheek, To hide the sudden throb that beat within her breast. Oh! not in vain have purest poets told, In elegies and hymns that ne'er shall die, With all most beautiful in heart and frame; Where, without guile, swains wooed their happy maids, And Love was Friendship with a gentler name. Such songs in truth and nature had their birth: Their source was lofty, and their aim was pure ; And still, in many a favoured spot of earth, Nor e'er may lawless foot thy sanctity profane ! A mystic joy seemed stirring at her heart, A yearning fondness, and a silent prayer! Nor did such gentle maiden long refuse To cheer our spirits with some favourite strain, Of one who died for love, or, led by gain, Sailed, in a mighty ship, to lands beyond the main." As another instance of this lovely art of transmutation, this alchymy taught by Fancy and Love, we would refer to a delightful poem, the "Children's Dance." Remember, they are mountain and village children, assembled at a rustic dancing-master's ball; a theme which, from our own opportunities of observation, we should have pronounced unyielding to a poet of less quick-winged fancy. But read the poem, (we can only extract two beautiful verses, forming a fair picture,) and you are no tonger in the hamlet of a Cumberland dale, but in the very court of Titania herself : "Like sunbeams glancing o'er a meadow field, Their blent locks fluttering through the space between. Like angels sent by Spring to usher in the year?" The Children's Dance. Throughout the greater part of the "Isle of Palms," this wild and floating imagination presides over the tale, and has guided the descriptions no less than the incidents. The ship in which the lovers are embarked goes down at sea. A poet of sterner temper would have dwelt upon this grand and moving incident, so as to gather a more profound human interest around the personages of the narrative. Thus did Wieland in his unrivalled Oberon; thus did Byron in Don Juan :—Wilson passess over the calamity with a few remote expressions; intent upon wafting the two rescued voyagers across a bright and waveless sea, to their Ocean Elysium, where his fancy may roam at will, and assemble around them the groves and flowers of a land fairer than the gardens of the Hesperides. You feel that the shipwreck is no calamity. The reader is already in the land of the genii, and only entertains a gracious curiosity to know whether the voyagers are to be borne through air, or over sea, on wing, or in golden pinnace, "fairy-fraught," to the haven of their bliss. As for the perished vessel and her crew,-were they not brave fictions of a dream? The whole is the Tale of visions, lulling and peopled with fair shadows, and sung to a far-off music, which is strange and sweet; but its events are independent of space and time, and the other conditions of actual being. With its personages we can neither weep nor rejoice. They are denizens of cloud-land, to which human passions cannot ascend. To this capricious sovereignty of his imagination we are indebted for Wilson's exquisite poem on the old tradition of " Bessy Bell and Mary' Grey," which is perhaps the most perfect of all his compositions. It is a strain as wild, yet soothing, as the music of an Eolian harp; and, like it, is doubtful and mysterious, beneath a seeming tone of simplicity. The visionary character of the theme was just suited to arouse his sensitive fancy; and he has embodied it with a mingled solemnity and lightness which remind us of Hogg's "Kilmeny." It is impossible to recur to the joys or mourning of Earth while listening to this strain; it breathes throughout a spiritual calm, which seems borrowed from some mysterious land unto which laughter and tears are equally unknown. And in what a fine dim close the song faints into silence! "As on the orphans hold their way, Each bearing, in its lovely hand, Some small memorial of the land Where they, like common human frames, And called by gentle Christian names, Full long had been sojourning! Some little fair insensate thing, Relic of that wild visiting! Bird, that beneath a brighter spring Of its own vanished earth will sing; Those harmless creatures that will glide Now, with a wild and mournful song, Up, up, the gentle slope they wind, In passing from these imaginative conceptions or moods of observation, to comment upon Wilson's remarkable and characteristic devotion to the |