MELLIN DE SAINT GELAIS. MELLIN de Saint Gelais is commended by Joachim du Bellay, in that poet's address to the reader prefixed to his own works, for having been the first who distinguished himself as a writer of sonnets in the French language. He left only seventeen of them. At least, I find no more in the collection of his poems, published soon after his decease. But it was a prolific race, and in a short time multiplied exceedingly. Two out of these seventeen will, I dare say, satisfy the reader as to quantity. And for the quality, I can assure him they are not the worst of the batch. Il n'est point tant de barques à Venise, D'opinions en une Republique, Ne de pardons à Romme aux jours de feste, Ne d'argumens en une Sorbonique, Que m' amie a de lunes en la teste. Oeuvres Poëtiques de Mellin de S. Gelais. Lyon. Par Antoine de So many barks are not for Venice bound; Nor oysters, Bourg can show; or calves, Bretagne ; Or Savoy, bears; or leverets, Champagne; Or Thamis, silver swans, his shores around: Nor minds so various a republic bred, Vous que second la noble France honore, Dont les chapeaux si haut lieu congnoissans, Ceinte de liz la blanche Galathee Ses fruits vous garde en deux paniers couverts, Ainsi chantoit des Nymphes escoutee La belle Eglé dont Pan oyant le son, Du grand Henry l'appella la chanson. (P. 87.) Thou, who art second in our noble France, For thee the rose-bush doth his top advance, For thee in panniers twain her fruits doth screen, The Sonnet was not the only form of composition adopted by Saint Gelais from the Italian tongue. He borrowed from it the Ottava Rima also. In the Chant Villanesque (p. 235) he has counterfeited the charm of a rustic simplicity with much skill. Mellin was supposed to be the natural son of Octavien de Saint Gelais, Sieur de Lunsac, and Bishop of Angoulême, and was born in 1491. The father, besides his own original works, among which the Vergier d'Honneur was one, was the Author of Translations into French verse of the Eneid, several books of the Odyssey, and the Epistles and Ars Amandi of Ovid. His profession did not restrain him from much freedom both in his life and writings. He is said to have bestowed great pains on his son's education, who profited as well as could be hoped under such a guide and tutor; for he learnt to write verses better than his father, but with a sufficient portion of ribaldry in them. Mellin had a high reputation in the courts of Francis I. and Henry II. He was abbot of Recluz, and royal almoner and librarian. A copy of verses directed to Clement Marot (p. 176) when they were both in ill health, shows his regard for that poet. It begins, Gloire et regret des Poetes de France, Comme ravi de tes doux chants et lais, &c. Glory and regret of the poets of France, Clement Marot; thy friend Saint Gelais, who is as much grieved by thy long suffering, as he is charmed by thy songs, and lays, &c. Both he and Clement celebrated the restoration of Laura's tomb, at Avignon, by Francis I. He addresses also Hugues Salel, of whom we shall soon hear more; though they had not yet made an acquaintance with each other. His conduct towards Ronsard was somewhat ungenerous; but that poet, with his characteristic generosity, forgave more than once the ill offices which Saint Gelais was supposed to have done him at court. His talent for epigrammatic satire was so much dreaded, that "Gare à la tenaille de Saint Gelais;" "'Ware of Saint Gelais pincers," became a proverbial saying. He was celebrated for his skill in Latin poetry, and composed the following verses, when near his end. Barbite, qui varios lenisti pectoris æstus, Certe ego te faciam, superas evectus ad auras, Insignem ad Cytharæ sidus habere locum. Harp, that didst soothe my cares, when opening life With love and fortune waged alternate strife, Fulfil thy task: allay the fervid rage Of fever preying on my feeble age; So, when I reach the skies, a place shall be, Near the celestial lyre, allotted thee. He died at Paris, in 1559. His works were re-edited, with additions, in that city, in 1719; as I find in De Bure's Bibliographie. HYMN TO SPRING. THOU virgin bliss the seasons bring, I long to hail thee, gentle Spring, That rose-bud cheek, that sunlit eye, Which zephyrs wave each minute by Oh! how I wait thy reign begun, When, threaten'd with a warmer sun, When songs are sung from every tree, When plains a carpet spread for thee, Ah! I do long that day to see To look upon those eyes of blue I long to press that glowing breast, As pillow for an angel's rest, And, oh! I wait those smiles to see, To me, to nature, given; Smiles stol'n from joy's eternity, Whence mortals taste of heaven. Oh! urge the surly Winter by, Whose suns creep shyly down the sky Oh! bring thy suns, and brighter days, To hasten on their morning ways, Oh! hasten on, thou lovely Spring; Bid Winter frown in vain: Thy mantle o'er thy shoulders bring, And choose an early reign. Thy herald flower, in many a place, The daisy, joins with me; While chill winds nip his crimpled face, He smiles in hopes of thee. Then come; and while my heart is warm, To sing thy pleasures new, Led onward by thy lovely arm I'll hie me through the dew; Or meet thy noon-day's sober wind Thy rearing flowers to see, And weave a wreath, of those I find, JOHN CLARE. 44 Leisure Hours. LEISURE HOURS. No. V. Introductory to a Translation from the Homeric Hymns. ON THE ENGLISH STANDARD HEROIC: I REMEMBER a little book, aiming Semotique prius tarda necessitas, Lethi corripuit gradum. contending that if the dactylic harmony of corripuit gradum be expressive, the harmony of tarda necessitas must be misplaced, and by consequence faulty. It is not easy to answer this: and it appears certain that the Greeks and Latins by leaving four feet out of the six optional, felt the difficulty, and were more attentive to the time than the foot; to the rhythm than the metre. The object of the writer is to prove that the mere sound of the words, syllables, or even letters, and the greater or less distinctness of the cadences,* produce equivalent results in modern versification, (as for instance, in the concert between the sound and the object of thought) to those effected by the quantities of the ancient metres. It is well observed by Batteux that, " languages are not made by system, and since they have their source in human nature itself, they must in a variety of points resemble It follows that there each other." will seldom be found a deficiency in any language without a compensa- Jeunes et tendres fleurs, par le sort agitées. Rolls o'er Elysian flowers its amber stream, the English ear is soothed with a as satisfying and real as was persensible smoothness of melody, quite ceived by the ear of a Roman in the line of Virgil, Floreat, irriguumque bibant violaria fon tem. It follows that were it practicable to amalgamate the laws of one language with those of another, or to ingraft the Latin harmony of quantities, by a sort of factitious assimilation and associative effort of the memory, upon the harmony which results from emphatic accentuation merely, (in addition, be it understood, to the rhythmical proportion of syllabical arrangement) the work would be one of supererogation. The attempt is, in my judgment, hopeless, as to any purpose of real melody at least, even if we allow Notwithstanding the unemphatic character of the French language, and the appa rent equable stress on the syllables which make up their complement of twelve times, to a French ear some cadences are more sensible than others. that the general effect of harmony can be made perceptible to the ear. We have indeed syllables naturally long and others naturally short; and some will slide easily enough into a dactylic combination; as in the verse of the "Vision of Judgment," Green ǎs ǎ stream in the glen whose pure and chrysolite wātērs: but if a few of our weak syllables are thus complying, others are no less intractable: and the dactyls, in numerous lines of the poem, can only be analysed by dint of somewhat desperate scanning and proving. It is not always easy to detect which are the dactyls and which are the spondees; and the same syllables, the weak vowels for instance, are forced to do double duty: they are both long and short, alternately, according to the sic volo, sic jubeo, of the poet. It is plain, that to the popular eye and ear, such measures can contain no more distinguishable properties of symmetrical sound than Lowth's version of Isaiah; which is only not prose because it is distributed into verse-like lines: while to the learned, accustomed to the copiously diversified metre of Virgil (who, by the bye did not begin every line with a jumping dactyl) the impression conveyed must be that of a systematic violation of every principle of true harmony. The attempt is like the "yoking of foxes." If" the Vision of Judgment" had not offered as striking a contrast as is well conceivable, in all other respects besides rhythm, to the "Joan of Arc," the weight of its lame feet were fully sufficient to prevent it from soaring: corpus onustum Hexametris vitiis animam quoque prægra vat unà. Batteux was clearly right in insisting that the modern language possessed equivalents to the advantages of the ancient, and in avoiding to recommend a direct and mechanical imitation of their measures; which is substituting the mimickry of the mocking bird for musical passion. We may demonstrate the same truth by examples drawn from our own poets, as he has done by instances from his: our heroic alexandrine (of which more by and bye) may compete with the Homeric hexameter in copiousness of harmony; the metre of Collins in the "the Ode to Evening" supplies us with an adequate English alcaic; and the adonic of Sappho is rallels in the lyrical poetry of Burns. equalled in its effect by repeated pa What Mr. Southey perhaps felt was a dissatisfaction at the confined compass and homotonous character of the English standard heroic. It has little of extent in scale, or body in sound; and is too slender to represent adequately the epic verse of the ancients. It seems to rank in dignity little above the Phaedrian iambics. The old writers of rhymed couplets, and the best writers of blank verse in succeeding eras, (by which I mean the versifiers on the model of Milton and Akenside) imitate with success the ancient involution of period by prolonging the pause in the sense and shifting it through alternate lines; but the single verses are deficient in grandiloquence of harcontinuous and comprehensive line is mony: and the advantage of a more possessed by our neighbours, though we persist in voting it anapæstic, in the teeth of the prolonged and measured recitation of the French actors. It must be admitted that our bre vity of measure is in some degree compensated by our affluence, if such it may be called, in monosyllabic words. We are thus enabled to condense more matter; but something at the expense of rhythmical richness and sonorous harmony. Sweetness and force, indeed, are often attained by verses wholly consisting in monosyllables. I shall offer some examples of this from a writer, who, from his having employed a similar structure of versification to that of Pope, is often inconsiderately ranked with him as an unfaithful and inefficient translator; but who, on the contrary, even when most paraphrastical, has seized with singular happiness and power the sort of pathos and declamatory energy which characterize his original. The following verses, collected Pope stigmatizes them as necessarily nerveless and mean: yet one of the best. couplets he ever wrote is made up of little else: |