Music's golden tongue Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor. The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 3. The silver snarling trumpets 'gan to chide. Asleep in lap of legends old. Stanza 4. Stanza 15. Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose, Stanza 16. A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing. Stanza 18. As though a rose should shut and be a bud again. Stanza 27. And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon. Stanza 30. He play'd an ancient ditty long since mute, That large utterance of the early gods! Stanza 33. Hyperion. Book i. Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Dance and Provençal song and sunburnt mirth! Ibid. Book ii. Ode to a Nightingale Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home The same that ofttimes hath Charm'd magic casements,. opening on the foam Ibid. Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time. Ode on a Grecian Urn. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Thou, silent form, doth tease us out of thought Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. In a drear-nighted December, Thy branches ne'er remember Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings? Addressed to Haydon. Sonnet Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, On first looking into Chapman's Homer E'en like the passage of an angel's tear To One who has been long in City pent. The poetry of earth is never dead. On the Grasshopper and Cricket. Here lies one whose name was writ in water.1 THOMAS NOON TALFOURD. So his life has flowed 1795-1854. From its mysterious urn a sacred stream, "T is a little thing Ion. Act i. Sc. 1. To give a cup of water; yet its draught Sc. 2. Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying, imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics, "Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of the Richter. Edinburgh Review, 1827. air!" Literary men are . . . a perpetual priesthood. 1 See Chapman, page 37. State of German Literature Ibid. Among the many things he has requested of me to-night, this is the principal, that on his gravestone shall be this inscription. RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES: Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Letter to Severn, vol. ii. p. 91. Clever men are good, but they are not the best. Goethe. Edinburgh Review, 1828. We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad. Ibid. How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they? Burns. Ibid. A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility. Ibid. His religion at best is an anxious wish,-like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps. Ibid. We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftes bury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."1 Voltaire. Foreign Review, 1829. We must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration. Ibid. There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed. Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838. 1 How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule ? SHAFTESBURY: Charac teristics. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, sect. 2. Truth, 't is supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed in order to a thorough recognition is ridicule itself. SHAFTESBURY: Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, sect. 1. 'T was the saying of an ancient sage (Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle's "Rhetoric," ," lib. iii. c. 18), that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspi cious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit. Ibid. sect 5. Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time. Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838. - the To the very last, he [Napoleon] had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents, tools to him that can handle them.1 Ibid. Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, selfdestructive one! Ibid. The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others. Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls. Ibid. Ibid. It can be said of him, when he departed he took a Man's life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time. Ibid. The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing." Varnhagen Von Ense's Memoirs. lbid. Happy the people whose annals are blank in historybooks.2 Life of Frederick the Great. Book xvi. Chap. i. As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden,-"Speech is silvern, Silence is golden;" or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity. Sartor Resartus. Book iii. Chap. iii. The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious Heroes and Hero- Worship. The Hero as a Prophet. of none.3 1 Carlyle in his essay on Mirabeau, 1837, quotes this from a "New England book." 2 MONTESQUIEU: Aphorism. His only fault is that he has none. - PLINY THE YOUNGER: Book ix Letter xxvi. |