Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 2 (of 2)Howitt, William
General
Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Howitt, William
Literary landmarks -- Great Britain; Poets, English -- Homes and haunts
These works have steadily extended his fame; and amid the truest
enjoyment of that fame, Mr. Rogers has lived a long and honored, and,
singularly for a poet, fortunate life. His wealth and position in
society, not less than his wealth and position in the world of mind,
have drawn around him all the distinguished characters of his time;
and his house, filled from top to bottom with evidences of his taste,
and of his means of indulging it, has been the resort of most of those
who have given its intellectual stamp to the age. Amid the great
struggles and events of that period, the wars, the revolutions, and
the social contests which have communicated their fiery elements to
the spirit of genius, and produced works of a like extreme character,
the mind of Rogers, calm and self-balanced, has pursued its course,
apparently uninfluenced by all that moved around him. With human
nature, and human life in general, he sympathized; but the love of the
true and beautiful in it has prevailed over the contagion of the vast
and violent: he has dealt rather with the pure and touching incidents
of existence, than with the passionate and the tragic. Many, on this
account, have been disposed to attribute to him a want of power and
greatness, forgetting that the predominating character of his taste
has inevitably decided the character of his subjects, and that to
these subjects he has given all the power and beauty which they were
capable of. Mr. Rogers is a great master in his own department. In him
taste lives as strongly as genius. He is a poetic artist. The
beautiful and the refined mingle themselves with the structure as
inseparably as with the material of his compositions. He knows that
there is greatness in the broad champagne, with its woods and towns,
as well as in the huge and splendid mountain; in the lofty but pure
and placid sky, as well as in the stormy ocean. It is not the creator
only of the Laocoon in all his agonies, that is a great artist--the
Apollo Belvedere, and the Venus de Medicis, and the Mourning Psyche,
calm in most perfect repose, or depressed with grief, equally
demonstrate the hand of a master. There is often the most consummate
display of genius in the stillest statue. Poussin or Claude are not
the less admirable because they do not affect the robust horrors of
Rubens, or the wildness of Salvator. In Rogers, the true, the
pathetic, all those feelings, and sentiments, and associations, that
are dear to us as life itself, are evolved with a skill that is
unrivaled; and the language is elaborated to a perfection that
resembles the finish of a beautiful picture, or the music to
inimitable words. If we need the excitement of impetuous emotions, we
would turn to Byron; if the influence of calm, and soothing, and
harmonizing ones, we would sit down to Rogers. Each is eminent in his
own department, each will exercise the supremacy of his genius upon
us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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