comforts even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which answers to posting in England. These north German post-chaises are uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a chef-d'œuvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses!—a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin. Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to the objects in search of which I left you: namely, the literati and literature of Germany. Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as W and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother, the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate. It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses (for so they looked) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with several roads. Whatever beauty (thought I) may be before the poet's eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We waited a few minutes in a neat little parlor, ornamented with the figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were from Klopstock's odes.' The poet entered. I was much dis 1 ["There is a rhetorical amplitude and brilliancy in the Messias," says Mr. Carlyle, which elicits in our critic (Mr. Taylor) an instinct truer than his philosophy is. Neither has the still purer spirit of Klopstock's odes escaped him. Perhaps there is no writing in our language that offers so correct an emblem of him as this analysis." I remember thinking Taylor's" clear outline" of the Messias the most satisfying account of a poem I ever read it. fills the mind with a vision of pomp and magnificence, which it is pleasanter to contemplate, as it were, from afar, massed together in that general survey, than to examine part by part. Mr. Taylor and Mr. Carlyle agree in exalting that ode of Klopstock's, in which he appointed in his countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was no comprehension in the forehead, ne weight over the eye-brows, no expression of peculiarity, moral of intellectual, on the eyes, no massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled, so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W nor myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert. Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief in Nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits. Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity. He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse superior to Milton's. and myself W represents the Muse of Britain and the Muse of Germany running a race. The piece seems to me more rhetorical than strictly poetical; and if the younger Muse's power of keeping up the race depends on productions of this sort, I would not give a penny for a chance, at least if the contest relates to pure poetry. Klopstock's Herman (mentioned afterwards) consists of three chorus dramas, as Mr. Taylor calls them: The Battle of Herman, Herman and the Princes, and The Death of Herman. Hermar is the Arminius of the Roman historians. S. C.] 2 [Leonidas, an epic poem, by R. Glover, first appeared in May, 1737: ir expressed our surprise and my friend gave his definition au·l notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted (the English iambic blank verse above all) in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs, the fifth edition, published in 1770, it was corrected and extended from nine books to twelve. Glover was the author of Boadicea and Medea, tragedies, which had some success on the stage. I believe that Leonidas has more merit in the conduct of the design, and in the delineation of character, than as poetry. "He write an epic poem," said Thomson," who never saw a mountain!" Glover had seen the sun and moon, yet he seems to have looked for their poetical aspects in Homer and Milton, rather than in the sky. "There is not a single simile in Leonidas," says Lyttleton, "that is borrowed from any of the ancients, and yet there is hardly any poem that has such a variety of beautiful comparisons." The similes of Milton come so flat and dry out of Glover's mangle, that they are indeed quite another thing from what they appear in the poems of that Immortal: ex. gr. Like wintry clouds, which, opening for a time, Tinge their black folds with gleams of scattered light : Is not this Milton's "silver lining" stretched and mangled? The Queen of Night Gleam'd from the centre of th' etherial vault, And o'er the raven plumes of darkness shed This is flattened from the well-known passage in Comus. Soon will savage Mars Deform the lovely ringlets of thy shrubs. A genteel improvement upon Milton's "bush with frizzled hair implicit." Then we have spoiled from - delicious to the sight Soft dales meand'ring show their flowery laps the flowery lap Of some irriguous valley spread its store. Thus does this poet shatter and dissolve the blooming sprays of another -"with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out," and not even in the flow, much less in the prominence or antithetic vigor, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose. Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's superiority to single lines. He told us that he had man's plantation, instead of pushing through them some new shoots of his own to crown them with fresh blossoms. Milton himself borrowed as much as Glover. Aye, ten times more; yet every passage in his poetry is Miltonic-more that than anything else. On the other hand, his imitators Miltonize, yet produce nothing worthy of Milton, the important characteristic of whose writings my father well expressed, when he said, "The reader of Milton must be always on his duty: he is surrounded with sense." A man must have his sense to imitate him. worthily. How we look through his words at the Deluge, as he floods it upon us in Book xi., l. 738-53!--The Attic bees produce honey so flavored with the thyme of Hymettus that it is scarcely eatable, though to smell the herb itself in a breezy walk upon that celebrated Mount would be an exceeding pleasure; thus certain epic poems are overpoweringly flavored with herbs of Milton, while yet the fragrant balm and fresh breeze of his poetry is not to be found in them. S. C.] 3 [The" abrupt and laconic structure" of Glover's periods appears at the very commencement of Leonidas, which has something military in its movement, but rather the stiff gait of the drilled soldier than the proud march of the martial hero. The virtuous Spartan who resign'd his life Of Grecian council. Orpheus thence returns Glover's best passages are of a soft character. This is a pleasing Homerism: Lycis dies, For boist'rous war ill-chosen. He was skill'd To tune the lulling flute, and melt the heart: W— He read Milton, in a prose translation, when he was fourteen.' I Or with his pipe's awak'ning strains allure And here is a pleasing expansion of Pindar, Olymp. ii., 109: Placid were his days, Which flow'd through blessings. As a river pure, Meets in his course a subterranean void; There dips his silver head, again to rise, Bk. viii. And, rising, glide through flow'rs and meadows new: Where never tempests roar, nor humid clouds S. C.] Where never gloom of trouble shades the mind, Nor gust of passion heaves the quiet breast, Nor dews of grief are sprinkled. Bk. x. 4 This was accidentally confirmed to me by an old German gentleman at Helmstadt, who had been Klopstock's school and bed-fellow. Among other boyish anecdotes, he related that the young poet set a particular value on a translation of the PARADISE LOST, and always slept with it under his pillow. |
