The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Part 29

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,

_Scott_

Our author's language, in this place, is very defective in correctness.

After mentioning the general privation of the "bloomy flush of life,"

the exceptionary "all but" includes, as part of that "bloomy flush," an aged decrepit matron; that is to say, in plain prose, "the bloomy flush of life is all fled but one old woman."