An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; but Love says,
resist not evil; love your enemies; bless them that curse
you; do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that
despitefully use you and persecute you. But the law is a
schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, who is the end of
the law. It is therefore of great importance that we understand
this law, and to this end we commend the work of
Jouffroy that we have been reviewing as one of the best
helps that can be found.
W.
IF you have imagined what a divine work is spread out
for the poet, and approach this author too, in the hope of
finding the field at length fairly entered on, you will hardly
dissent from the words of the prologue,
"Ipse semipaganus
Ad sacra Vatum carmen affero nostrum ."
Here is none of the interior dignity of Virgil, nor the
elegance and fire of Horace, nor will any Sibyl be needed
to remind you, that from those older Greek poets, there is
a sad descent to Persius . Scarcely can you distinguish
one harmonious sound, amid this unmusical bickering with
the follies of men.
One sees how music has its place in thought, but hardly
as yet in language. When the Muse arrives, we wait for
her to remould language, and impart to it her own rhythm.
Hitherto the verse groans and labors with its load, but goes
not forward blithely, singing by the way.
The best ode
may be parodied, indeed is itself a parody, and has a poor
and trivial sound, like a man stepping on the rounds of a
ladder.
Homer, and Shakspeare, and Milton, and Marvel,
and Wordsworth, are but the rustling of leaves and crackling
of twigs in the forest, and not yet the sound of any
bird.
The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.
Most of all satire will not be sung.
A Juvenal or Persius
do not marry music to their verse, but are measured faultfinders
at best ; stand but just outside the faults they condemn, and so are concerned rather about the monster
they have escaped, than the fair prospect before
them. Let them live on an age, not a secular one, and
they will have travelled out of his shadow and harm's way,
and found other objects to ponder.
As long as there is nature, the poet is, as it were, Itarticeps
crimints . One sees not but he had best let bad
take care of itself, and have to do only with what is beyond
suspicion . If you light on the least vestige of truth,
and it is the weight of the whole body still which stamps
the faintest trace, an eternity will not suffice to extol it,
while no evil is so huge, but you grudge to bestow on it a
moment of hate.
Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood;
her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.
Horace would not have written satire so well, if he had
not been inspired by it, as by a passion, and fondly cherished
his vein.
In his odes, the love always exceeds the
hate, so that the severest satire still sings itself, and the
poet is satisfied, though the folly be not corrected .
A sort of necessary order in the development of Genius
is, first, Complaint ; second, Plaint ; third, Love.
