or I pricked them into paper with a pin, occurring side by side with others most musical and suggestive, such as and Children not thine have trod my nursery floor, Time has but half succeeded in his theft- 70. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage must also be ranked with poems of sentiment and reflection; for though in form it resembles a descriptive poem, that which gives it its peculiar character is not the description of any external scenes, but the minute analysis and exhibition of the writer's feelings, reflections, and states of mind. The third canto, for instance, is in a great measure a piece of autobiography. Written in 1816, just after he had been separated from his wife and child, and, amidst a storm of obloquy, had passed into voluntary exile, this canto paints the revolt of Byron's tortured spirit against the world's opinion, to which, while he scorned it, he was to the last a slave. The moral of all the earlier portion is scarcely caricatured by the parody in the Rejected Addresses :— Woe's me! the brightest wreaths [Joy] ever gave, Are but as flowers that decorate a tomb. Man's heart, the mournful urn o'er which they wave, Many lines current in general conversation, but often quoted in ignorance of the source whence they come, occur in Childe Harold. Few have not heard of those magnificent equivalents by which the skull is described as― The dome of thought, the palace of the Soul! Again, O'Connell's favourite quotation at the Repeal meetings of 1844 is found in the second canto; it is an invocation to the modern Greeks : Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not, Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow? At the ball given in Brussels on the night before the advance on Waterloo, we read that all went merry as a marriage bell. And it is said of the young French general, Marceau, that he had kept The whiteness of his soul, and so men o'er him wept. In this dream-land of sentiment, where the dry light of the intellect is variously coloured and modified by the play of the emotions, the magnificent shadowy ideas of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality find their appropriate home.1 71. (3) Imagination and fancy are both intellectual faculties, and the main function of both is to detect and exhibit the resemblances which exist among objects of sense or intelligence. The difference between them, according to the doctrine of Coleridge, may be generally stated thus that whereas fancy exhibits only external resemblances, imagination loves to disclose the internal and essential relations which bind together things apparently unlike Drayton's Nymphidia is the creation of a fancy the liveliest and most inventive, but shows little or no imaginative power. On the other hand, Shakspere's Venus and Adonis, Milton's L'Allegro, and the most perfect among Shelley's poems, are works of imagination. If we analyse the series of comparisons of which Shelley makes his Skylark the subject, we shall find that in every case the likeness indicated lies deeper than the surface, and calls into play higher faculties than the mere intellectual reproduction of the impressions of sense: Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not Like a high-born maiden In a palace tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower: Like a glow-worm golden In a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden Its aërial hue Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view: Like a rose embowered In its own green leaves, By warm winds deflowered, Till the scent it gives Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves. Sound of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain-awakened flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass. 1 See p. 434. In the Cloud, by the same poet, the imagery is partly fantastic, partly imaginative, as may be seen in the following extract : That orbed maiden, with white fire laden, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor, And wherever the beat of her unseen feet, May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof, And I laugh to see them whirl and flee, Like a swarm of golden bees, When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent, Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high, I am the daughter of earth and water, And the nursling of the sky: I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain, when with never a stain, The pavilion of heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams, Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, 72. (4) The philosophical is distinguished from the didactic poem by the absence of a set moral purpose. In the Essay on Man, Pope starts with the design of 'vindicating the ways of God'; and whatever may be thought of the mode of vindication, this design is adhered to throughout. Nor, again, does the philosophical poem, like the narrative or epic, embody a definite story, with beginning, middle, and end. Its parts may indeed be connected, as in the case of the Excursion, by a slight narrative thread; but its characteristic excellence does not depend upon this, but upon the mode in which the different subjects and personages introduced are philosophically handled, and, it may perhaps be said, on the soundness of the philosophy itself. How far the pursuit of these objects is consistent with the full production of that kind of pleasure which it is the business of poetry to excite, is a question difficult of decision. 557 CHAPTER II. PROSE WRITINGS. 1. A ROUGH general classification and description of the subjectmatter, with a few critical sketches of particular works, or groups of works, is all that we shall attempt in the present volume. The prose writings of our literature may be arranged under the following six heads : 1. Works of fiction. 2. Works of satire, wit, and humour. 3. Oratory; (with the connected departments of Journalwriting and Pamphleteering). 4. History; (including, besides history proper, biography, and narrative works of all kinds, as subsidiary branches). 5. Theology. 6. Philosophy; (including, besides philosophy proper, essays and political treatises, and all works of thought and theory, e.g., æsthetics and literary criticism). 1. Prose Fiction. 2. By a work of fiction a narrative work is always understood. A fiction which describes, not imaginary actions, but an imaginary state of things, such as More's Utopia, must be considered as a work of thought and theory, and will fall under our sixth head. Works of fiction, then, or fictitious narratives, are of two kinds-those in which the agencies are natural, and those in which they are not. In the latter case they are called romances, in the former, stories of common life. Romances are either mock or serious ;-and mock romances may be either satirical, humorous, or comic. Stories of common life are divided into tales of adventure and novels; the novel being, in its highest and purest form, the correlative in prose of the epic poem in poetry, and, like it, treating of one great complex action, in a lofty style, and with fulness of detail.' What 1 See § 3 in the preceding chapter. ever be its form, the novel must possess unity of plan, and is thereby distinguishable from the mere tale of adventure or travel, in which this unity is not required. Novels, again, may either refer to the past, in which case they are called historical novels, or to the present. If the latter, they admit of a further sub-division, according to the social level at which the leading characters move, into novels of high life-of middle life-and of low life. Further, there is a cross division applicable to the whole class of novels, into those of the artistic and those of the didactic kind. The following table exhibits the above classification of works of fiction at a glance :— 3. (1) The word 'romance' is here used in a sense which implies that, in works so named, some preternatural or supernatural agency is instrumental in working out the plot. We have not many serious romances in English; the Grand Cyrus, and other delectable productions of Scudéry and Calprenède, were read, admired, and translated amongst us in their day, but do not appear to have been imitated, at least in prose. St. Leon, by Godwin, Frankenstein or The Ghost-seer, by his daughter, Mrs. Shelley, and the Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, are among the principal performances in this kind. The Phantom Ship, by Captain Marryat, is a remarkable and beautiful story, founded on the grand old legend of the Flying Dutchman. One of the Waverley Novels, the Monastery, in which the apparitions of the White Lady of Avenel have an important influence on the development of the story, falls accordingly within the scope of our definition. The most notable |