Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 2 (of 2)Howitt, William
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Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Howitt, William
Literary landmarks -- Great Britain; Poets, English -- Homes and haunts
"Then is the age of admiration--Then
Gods walk the earth, or beings more than men;
Who breathe the soul of inspiration round,
Whose very shadows consecrate the ground!
Ah! then comes thronging many a wild desire,
And high imagining, and thought of fire!
Then from within, a voice exclaims--'Aspire!'
Phantoms, that upward point, before him pass,
As in the cave athwart the wizard's glass;
They, that on youth a grace, a luster shed,
Of every age, the living and the dead!"
Still this poem of Human Life is but the life of one section of our
fellow-men--that of the gentry. It is curious, that it does not
descend into the midst of the multitude, and give us any of those deep
and somber shades which abound so much in Crabbe. The reason is
obvious. Crabbe had seen it and felt it. He had been born among it,
and had himself to struggle. Rogers has gone on that easy path of life
that is paved with gold, and "the huts where poor men lie," therefore,
probably never for a moment protruded themselves through the charmed
circle of his poetic inspiration. Happily for him his are fully the
Pleasures of Memory. Yet it is not the less true, or less honorable,
that in actual life, there is no man who has remembered the struggling
more sympathetically, nor has held out so generous a hand to the aid
of unfriended merit.
From the Voyage of Columbus the following extract will afford an
example of the beautiful description and rich imaginative power which
abound in that poem:--
THE NEW WORLD.
"Long on the deep the mists of morning lay,
Then rose, revealing, as they rolled away,
Half-circling hills, whose everlasting woods
Sweep with their sable skirts the shadowy floods:
And say,--when all to holy transport given,
Embraced and wept as at the gate of Heaven,
When one and all of us, repentant, ran,
And on our faces, blessed the wondrous man,--
Say, was I thus deceived, or from the skies
Burst on my ear seraphic harmonies?
'Glory to God!' unnumbered voices sung,
'Glory to God!' the vales and mountains rung--
Voices that hailed creation's primal morn,
And to the shepherds sung a Savior born.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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