Critical Notices [pp. 326-340]

SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER.
of the whole poem may be best estimated by reading
it in connection with "Scots wha hae," with the "Mariners of England," or with "Hohenlinden." It is
indebted for its high and most undeserved reputation to
our patriotism-not to our judgment.
The remaining poems in Mr. Dearborn's edition of
Drake, are three Songs; Lines in an Album; Lines to
a Lady; Lines on leaving New Rochelle; Hope; A
Fragment; To; Lines; To Eva; To a Lady;
To Sarah; and Bronx. These are all poems of little
compass, and with the exception of Bronx and a portion
of the Fragment, they have no character distinctive from
themassofourcurrentpoeticalliterature. Bronx, however, is in our opinion, not only the best of the writings
of Drake, but altogether a lofty and beautiful poem, upon
which his admirers would do better to found a hope of
the writer's ultimate reputation than upon the niaiiseries
of the Culprit Fay. In the Fragment is to be found the
finest individual passage in the volume before us, and
we quote it as a proper finale to our Review.
Yes! thou art lovelier now than ever;
How sweet'twould be when all the air
In moonlight sim,ns, along thy river
To couch upon the grass, and hear
Niagara's everlasting voice
Far in the deep blue west away
That dreamy and poetic noise
We mark not in the glare of day,
Oh! how unlike its torrent-cry,
When o'er the brink the tide is driven,
,qs if the vast and sheeted sky
In thunderfellfroin Heaven.
Halleck's poetical powers appear to us essentially
inferior, upon the whole, to those of his friend Drake.
He has written nothing at all comparable to Bronx.
By the hackneyed phrase, sportive elegance, we might
possibly designate at once the general character of his
writings and the very loftiest praise to which he is
justly entitled.
Rlnwick Castle is an irregular poem of one hundred
and twenty-eight lines-was written, as we are informed, in October 1822 —and is descriptive of a seat of
the Duke of Northumberland, in Nortthumberlandshire,
England. The effect of the first stanza is materially
impaired by a defect in its grammatical arrangement.
The fine lines,
Home of the Percy's high-born race,
Homne of their beautiful and brave,
Alike their birth and burial place,
Their cradle and their grave!
are of the nature of an invocation, and thus require a
continuation of the address to the " Home, &c." We
are consequently disappointed when the stanza proceeds with Still sternly o'er the castle gate
Their house's Lion stands in state
As in his proud departed hours;
And warriors frown in stone on high,
And feudal banners "flout the sky"
Above his princely towers.
The objects of allusion here vary, in an awkward manner, friom the castle to the Lion, and from the Lion to
the towers. By writing the verses thus the difficulty
would be remedied.
Still sternly o'er the castle gate
Thy house's Lion stands in state,
As in his proud departed hours;
And warriors frown in stone on high,
And feudal banners "flout the sky"
Above thy princely towers.
The second stanza, without evincing in any measure
the loftier powers of a poet, has that quiet air of grace,
both in thought and expression, which seems to be the
prevailing feature of the Muse of Halleck.
A gentle hill its side inclines,
Lovely in England's fadeless green,
To meet the quiet stream which winds
Through this romantic scene
As silently and sweetly still,
As when, at evening, on that hill,
While suymmer's wind blew soft and low,
Seated by gallant Hotspur's side
His Katherine was a happy bride
A thousand years ago.
There are one or two brief passages in the poem
evincing a degree of rich imagination not elsewhere
perceptible throughout the book. For example Gaze on the Abbey's ruined pile:
Does not the succoring Ivy keeping,
Her watch around it seem to smile
As o'er a lov'd one sleeping?
and
One solitary turret gray
Still tells in melancholy glory
The legend of the Cheviot day.
The commencement of the fourth stanza is of the
highest order of Poetry, and partakes, in a happy
manner, of that quaintness of expression so effective an
adjunct to Ideality, when employed by the Shelleys,
the Coleridges and the Tennysons, but so frequently
debased, and rendered ridiculous, by the herd of brainless imitators.
Wild roses by the Abbey towers
Are gay in their young bud and bloom:
They were born of a race of funeralflotvers,
That garlanded in long-gone hours,
A Templar's knightly tomb.
The tone employed in the concluding portions of
Alnwick Castle, is, we sincerely think, reprehensible,
and unworthy of Halleck. No true poet can unite in
any manner the low burlesque with the ideal, and not
be conscious of incongruity and of a profanation. Such
verses as
Men in the coal and cattle line
From Teviot's bard and hero land,
From royal Berwick's beach of sand,
From Wooller, Morpeth, Hexham, and
Newcastle upon Tyne,
may lay claim to oddity-but no more. These things
are the defects and not the beauties of Don Juan. They
are totally out of keeping with the graceful and delicate
manner of the initial portions of.lnwick Castle, and
serve no better purpose than to deprive the entire poem
of all unity of effect. If a poet must be farcical, let
him be just that, and nothing else. To be drolly sentimental is bad enough, as we have just seen in certain
passages of the Culprit Fay, but to be sentimentally
droll is a thing intolerable to men, and Gods, and columns.
.Afarco Bozzaris appears to have niuch lyrical without
any high order of ideal beauty. Force is its prevailing
character-a force, however, consisting more in a well
ordered and sonorous arrangement of the metre, and a
f
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