Imágenes de páginas
PDF
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors]

PR EFACE.

The Poem which I now present to the world, is an attempt from which I scarcely dare to expect success, and in which a writer of established fame might fail without disgrace. It is an experiment on the temper of the public mind, as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live. I have sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language, the etherial combinations of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of human passion, all those elements which essentially compose a Poen, in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality; and in the view of kindling within the bosoms of my readers, a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something tood, which neither violence, nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, can ever totally extinguish among mankind. For this purpose I have chosen a story of human passion in its most universal character, diversified with moving and romantic adventures, and appealing, in contempt of all artificial opinions or institutions, to the common sympathies of every human breast. I have made no attempt to recommend the motives which I would substitute for those at present governing mankind by methodical and systematic argument. I would only awaken the feelings so that the reader should see the beauty of true virtue, and be incited to those inquiries which have led to my moral and political creed, and that of some of the sublinest intellects in the world. The Poem therefore (with the exception of the first Canto, which is purely introductory), is narrative, not didactic. It is a succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind; its influence in refining and making pure the most daring and uncommon impulses of the imagination, the understanding, and the senses; its impatience at - all the oppressions which are done under the sun; its tendency to awaken public hope and to enlighten and

improve mankind; the rapid effects of the application of that tendency; the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom ; the bloodless dethronement of their oppressors, and the unveiling of the religious frauds by which they had been deluded into submission; the tranquillity of successful patriotism, and the universal toleration and benevolence of true philanthropy; the treachery and barbarity of hired soldiers; vice not the object of punishment and hatred, but kindness and pity; the faithlessness of tyrants; the confederacy of the Rulers of the World, and the restoration of the expelled Dynasty by foreign arms; the massacre and extermination of the Patriots, and the victory of established power; the consequences of legitimate despotism, civil war, famine, plague, superstition, and an utter extinction of the domestic affections; the judicial murder of the advocates of Liberty; the temporary triumph of oppression, that secure earnest of its final and inevitable fall; the transient nature of ignorance and error, and the eternity of genius and virtue. Such is the series of delineations of which the Poem consists. And if the lofty passions with which it has been my scope to distinguish this story, shall not excite in the reader a generous impulse, an ardent thirst for excellence, an interest profound and strong, such as belongs to no meaner desires—let not the failure be imputed to a natural unfitness for human sympathy in these sublime and animating themes. It is the business of the poet to communicate to others the pleasure and the enthusiasm arising out of those images and feelings, in the vivid presence of which within his own mind, consists at once his inspiration and his reward.

The panic which, like an epidemic transport, seized upon all classes of men during the excesses consequent upon the French Revolution, is gradually giving place to sanity. It has ceased to be believed, that whole generations of mankind ought to consign themselves to a hopeless inheritance of ignorance and misery, because a nation of men who had been dupes and slaves for centuries, were incapable of conducting themselves with the wisdom and tranquillity of freemen so soon as some of their festers were partially loosened. That their con

[graphic]
[graphic]

duct could not have been marked by any other charac- 'kind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works ters than ferocity and thoughtlessness, is the historical of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the fact from which liberty derives all its recommendations, same infectious gloom. But mankind appear to me to and falsehood the worst features of its deformity. There be emerging from their trance. I am aware, methinks, is a retinv in the tide of human things which bears the of a slow, gradual, silent change. In that belief l have shipwrecked hopes of men into a secure haven, after the composed the following Poem. storms are past. Methinks, those who now live have I do not presume to enter into competition with our survived an age of despair. greatest contemporary Poets. Yet I am unwilling to The French Revolution may be considered as one of tread in the footsteps of any who have preceded me. I those manifestations of a general state of feeling among have sought to avoid the imitation of any style of lancivilized mankind, produced by a defect of corres- guage or versification peculiar to the original minds of pondence between the knowledge existing in society and which it is the character, designing that even if what I the improvement, or gradual abolition of political in-, have produced be worthless, it should still be property stitutions. The vear 1788 may be assumed as the epoch my own. Nor have 1 permitted any system relating to of one of the most important crises produced by this mere words, to divert the attention of the reader from feeling. The sympathies connected with that event ex- whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to tended to every bosom. The most generous and amiable my own ingenuity in contriving to disgust them accordnatures were those which participated the most exten-ing to the rules of criticism. I have simply clothed my sively in these sympathies. But such a degree of un- thoughts in what appeared to me the most obvious and mingled good was expected, as it was impossible to appropriate language. A person familiar with nature, and realize. If the Revolution had been in every respect with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, prosperous, then misrule and superstition would lose can scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect

half their claims to our abhorrence, as fetters which the captive can unlock with the slightest motion of his fin

gers, and which do not eat with poisonous rust into the

soul. The revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the demagogues and the re-establishment of successive tyrannies in France was terrible, and felt in the remotest corner of the civilized world. Could they listen to the plea of reason who had groaned under the calamitics of a social state, according to the provisions of which, one man riots in luxury whilst another famishes for want of bread? Can he who the day before was a trampled slave, suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent? This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and longsuffering and long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue. Such is the lesson which experience teaches now. But on the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleapt the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result. Thus many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers of public good, have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored, appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This intluence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics," and inquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those = of Mr Malthus, calculated to lull the oppressors of man

" I ought to except Sir W. Drummond's - Academical Muestions :a volume of very acute and powerful metaphysical criticism.

* It is remarkable, as a symptom of the revival of public hope, that Mr Maltbus has assigned, in the later editions of his work, an indefinite dominion to moral restraint over the principle of population. This cencession answers all the inferences from his doctrine unsavourable to human improvement, and reduces the . Essay ox *** ***** to a commentary illustrative of the unanswerableness of - Political Jrstice.

to selection of language, produced by that familiarity. There is an education peculiarly fitted for a Poet, without which, genius and sensibility can hardly fill the

circle of their capacities. No education indeed can en| title to this appellation a dull and unobservant mind, or one, though neither dull nor unobservant, in which the channels of communication between thought and expression have been obstructed or closed. How far it is my fortune to belong to either of the latter classes, I cannot know. I aspire to be something better. The circumstances of my accidental education have been favourable to this ambition. I have been familiar from - boyhood with mountains and lakes, and the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of | Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. ! I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds. I have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the imagery of my Poem have been drawn. I have considered Poetry in its most comprehensive sense, and have read the Poets and the Historians, and the Metaphysicians' whose writings have been accessible to me, and have looked upon the beautiful and majestic scenery of the earth as common sources of those elements which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine. Yet the experience and the feelings to which I refer, do not in themselves constitute men t

' in this sense there may be such a thing as perse initity in works of fiction, worwithstanding the concession often made by the advocates of human improvement, that perfectibility is a term applicable only to science.

[graphic]

Poets, but only prepares them to be the auditors of those who are. How far I shall be found to possess that more essential attribute of Poetry, the power of awakenint; in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom, is that which, to speak sincerely, I know not; and which, with an acquiescent and contented spirit, I expect to be taught by the effect which I shall produce upon those whom I now address. I have avoided, as I have said before, the imitation of any contemporary style. But there must be a resemblance which does not depend upon their own will, between all the writers of any particular age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the times in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded. Thus, the tragic Poets of the age of Pericles; the Italian revivers of ancient learning; those mighty intellects of our own country that succeeded the Reformation, the translators of the Bible, Shakspeare, Spenser, the Dramatists of the reign of Elizabeth, and Lord Bacon; the colder spirits of the interval that succeeded ;-all, resemble each other, and differ from every other in their several classes. In this view of things, Ford can no more be called the imitator of Shakspeare, than Shakspeare the imitator of Ford. There were perhaps few other points of resemblance between these two men, than that which the universal and inevitable influence of their age produced. And this is an influence which neithcr the meanest scribbler, nor the sublimest genius of any aera can escape; and which I have not attempted to escape. I have adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony than the blank verse of Shakspeare and Milton, but because in the latter there is no shelter for mediocrity: you must either succeed or fail. This perhaps an aspiring spirit should desire. But I was enticed, also, by the brilliancy and magnificence of sound which a mind that has been nourished upon musical thoughts, can produce by a just and harmonious arrangement of the pauses of this measure. Yet there will be found some instances where I have completely failed in this attempt, and one, which I here request the reader to consider as an erratum, where there is left most inadvertently an alexandrine in the middle of a stanza. But in this, as in cvery other respect, I have written fearlessly. It is the misfortune of this age, that its Writers, too thoughtless of immortality, are exquisitely sensible to temporary praise or blame. They write with the sear of Reviews before their eyes. This system of criticism sprang up in that torpid interval when Poetry was not. Poetry, and the art which professes to regulate and limit its powers, cannot subsist together. Longinus could not have been the contemporary of Ilomer, nor Boileau of Horace. Yet this species of criticism never presumed to assert an understanding of its own : it has always, unlike true science, followed, not preceded the opinion of mankind, and would even now bribe with worthless adulation some of our greatest Poets to impose gratuitous fetters on their own imaginations, and become unconscious accomplices in the daily murder of all genius either not so aspiring or not so

* Milton stands alone in the age which he illumined.

fortunate as their own. I have sought therefore to write, as I believe that Homer, Shakspeare, and Milton wrote, with an utter disregard of anonymous censure. I am certain that calumny and misrepresentation, though it may move me to compassion, cannot disturb my peace. I shall understand the expressive silence of those sagacious enemies who dare not trust themselves to speak. I shall endeavour to extract from the midst of insult, and contempt, and maledictions, those admonitions which may tend to correct whatever imper

fections such censurers may discover in this my first

serious appeal to the Public. If certain Critics were as clear-sighted as they are malignant, how great would be the benefit to be derived from their virulent writings! As it is, I fear I shall be malicious enough to be amused with their paltry tricks and lame invectives. Should the Public judge that my composition is worthless, I shall indeed bow before the tribunal from which Milton received his crown of immortality, and shall seek to gather, if I live, strength from that defeat, which may nerve me to some new enterprise of thought which may not be worthless. I cannot conceive that Lucretius, when he meditated that poem whose doctrines are yet the bases of our metaphysical knowledge, and whose eloquence has been the wonder of mankind, wrote in awe of such censure as the hired sophists of the impure and superstitious noblemen of Rome might affix to what he should produce. It was at the period when Greece was led captive, and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian captives, bigotted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to plead, with a superficial but plausible set of sophisms, in favour of that contempt for virtue which is the portion of slaves, and that faith in portents, the most fatal substitute for benevolence in the imaginations of men, which arising from the enslaved communities of the East, then first began to overwhelm the western nations in its stream. Were these the kind of men whose disapprobation the wise and lofty-minded Lucretius should have regarded with a salutary awe ? The latest and perhaps the meanest of those who follow in his footsteps, would disdain to hold life on such conditions. The Poem now presented to the Public occupied little more than six months in the composition. That period has been devoted to the task with unremitting ardour and enthusiasm. I have exercised a watchful and earnest criticism on my work as it grew under my hands. I would willingly have sent it forth to the world witHothat perfection which long labour and revision is said to bestow. But I found that if I should gain something in exactness by this method, I might lose much of the newness and energy of imagery and language as it flowed fresh from my mind. And although the mere composition occupied no more than six months, the thoughts thus arranged were slowly gathered in as many years. I trust that the reader will carefully distinguish between those opinions which have a dramatic propriety in reference to the characters which they are designed to elucidate, and such as are properly my own. The erroneous and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being, for instance, is spoken against, but

not the Supreme Being itself. The belief which some superstitious persons whom I have brought upon the stage entertain of the Deity, as injurious to the character of his benevolence, is widely different from my own. In recommending also a great and important change in the spirit which animates the social institutions of mankind, I have avoided all tattery to those violent and malignant passions of our nature, which are ever on the watch to mingle with and to alloy the most beneficial innovations. There is no quarter given to Revenge, or Envy, or Prejudice. Love is celebrated every where as the sole law which should govern the moral world.

DEDICATION.

There is uo danger to a man, that knows what life and death is: there's not any law

Hvceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.
Cuaraax.
TO MARY —— — ———
1.

So now my summer-task is ended, Mary, And I return to thee, mine own heart's home; As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faery, Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome; Northou disdain, that ere my fame become A star among the stars of mortal night, If it indeed may cleave its natal gloom, Its doubtful promise thus I would unite With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light.

-. The toil which stole from thee so many an hour, Is ended,—and the fruit is at thy feet! No longer where the woods to frame a bower With interlaced branches mix and meet, Or where with sound like many voices sweet, Water-falls leap among wild islands green, Which framed for my lone boat a lone retreat Of moss-grown trees and weeds, shall I be seen: But beside thee, where still my heart has ever been.

3. Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. I do remember well the hour which burst My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was, When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, And wept, I knew not why; until there rose From the near school-room, voices, that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes— The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

4. And then I clasp'd my hands and look'd around— —But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, Which pour'd their warm drops on the sunny ground— So without shame, I spake:-. I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power, for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannise Without reproach or check... I then controll'd

My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.

5.

And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn, but from that secret store
Wrought linked armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war among mankind;
Thus power and hope were strengthen'd more and

in ore
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.

6. Alas, that love should be a blight and snare To those who seek all sympathies in one!— Such once I sought in vain; then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone:– Yet never found I one not false to me, Hard hearts, and cold, like weights of icy stone Which crushed and withered mine, that could not be Aught but a lifeless clog, until revived by thee.

7. Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart Fell, like bright Spring upon some herbless plain; How beautiful and calm and free thou wert In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain Of Custom thou didst burst and rend in twain, And walked as free as light the clouds among, Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long.

8. No more alone through the world's wilderness, Although I trod the paths of high intent, I journey'd now: no more companioniess, Where solitude is like despair, I went.— There is the wisdom of a stern content When Poverty can blight the just and good, When Infamy dares inock the innocent, And cherish'd friends turn with the multitude To trample: this was ours, and we unshaken stood!

9. Now has descended a serener hour, And with inconstant fortune, friends return; Though suffering leaves the knowledge and the power Which says:–Let scorn be not repaid with scorn. And from thy side two gentle babes are born To fill our home with smiles, and thus are we Most fortunate beneath life's beaming morn; And these delights, and thou have been to me The parents of the Song I consecrate to thee.

no. Is it, that now my inexperienced fingers But strike the prelude of a loftier strain Or, must the lyre on which my spirit lingers Soon pause in silence, ne'er to sound again, Though it might shake the Anarch Custom's reign, And charm the minds of men to Truth's own sway Holier than was Amphion's I would fain Reply in hope—but I am worn away,

And Death and Love are yet contending for their prey.

« AnteriorContinuar »