The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume I Part 29

DENHAM'S COOPER'S HILL

The stream is so transparent, pure, and clear, That, had the self-enamour'd youth gaz'd here, So fatally deceived he had not been, While he the bottom, not his face had seen.

_Scott_

The last two lines have more music than Denham's can possibly boast.

_Ritson_

May I have leave to conjecture, that in the very last line of all, the word "the" has erroneously crept in? I am persuaded that the poet wrote "his." To my mind, at least, this reading, in a surprising degree, heightens the idea of the extreme clearness and transparency of the stream, where a man might see _more than his face_ (as it were) in it.

COLLINS'S ORIENTAL ECLOGUES

_Scott_

The second of these little pieces, called Ha.s.san, or the Camel Driver, is of superior character. This poem contradicts history in one princ.i.p.al instance; the merchants of the east travel in numerous caravans, but Ha.s.san is introduced travelling alone in the desart. But this circ.u.mstance detracts little from our author's merit; adherence to historical fact is _seldom_ required in poetry.

_Ritson_

It is _always_, where the poet unnecessarily transports you to the ends of the world. If he must plague you with exotic scenery, you have a right to exact strict local imagery and costume. Why must I learn Arabic, to read nothing after all but Gay's Fables in another language?

_Scott_

Abra is introduced in a grove, wreathing a flowery chaplet for her hair.

Shakspeare himself could not have devised a more natural and pleasing incident, than that of the monarch's attention being attracted by her song:

Great Abbas chanced that fated morn to stray, By love conducted from the chace away.

Among the vocal vales he heard her song----

_Ritson_

Ch--t?

O stay thee, Agib, for my feet deny, No longer friendly to my life, to fly----

_Scott_

From the pen of Cowley, such an observation as Secander's, "that his feet were no longer friendly to his life," might have been expected; but Collins rarely committed such violations of simplicity.

_Ritson_

Pen of Cowley! impudent goose-quill, how darest thou guess what Cowley would have written?

GRAY'S CHURCH-YARD ELEGY

Save where the beetle wheels----

_Scott_

The beetle was introduced in poetry by Shakspeare * * *. Shakspeare has made the most of his description; indeed, far too much, considering the occasion:

----to black Hecate's summons The shard-born beetle with his drowsy hum Hath rung night's yawning peal.----

The imagination must be indeed fertile, which could produce this ill-placed exuberance of imagery. The poet, when composing this pa.s.sage, must have had in his mind all the remote ideas of Hecate, a heathen G.o.ddess, of a beetle, of night, of a peal of bells, and of that action of the muscles, commonly called a gape or yawn.

_Ritson_

Numbscull! that would limit an infinite head by the square contents of thy own numbscull.

_Scott_

The great merit of a poet is not, like Cowley, Donne, and Denham, to say what no man but himself has thought, but what every man besides himself has thought; but no man expressed, or, at least, expressed so well.

_Ritson_

In other words, all _that_ is poetry, which Mr. Scott has thought, as well as the poet; but _that_ cannot be poetry, which was not obvious to Mr. Scott, as well as to Cowley, Donne, and Denham.

_Scott_

Mr. Mason observes of the language in this part [the Epitaph], that it has a Doric delicacy. It has, indeed, what I should rather term a _happy rusticity_.

_Ritson_

Come, see Rural felicity.

GOLDSMITH'S DESERTED VILLAGE

No busy steps the gra.s.s-grown footway tread, But all the bloomy flush of life is fled-- All but yon widow'd solitary thing, That feebly bends beside the plashy spring; She, wretched matron, forced, in age, for bread, To strip the brook with mantling cresses spread,