Part 11 (1/2)
[Sidenote: Shenstone.]
Shenstone[4] is a name not very much known--not very much worth knowing: he was a big, somewhat scholarly, fastidious, indolent, rhyme-haunted man, who had studied at Oxford, and who, when the muses were buzzing about his ears, came into possession of a pretty farm in that bit of Shrops.h.i.+re which (by queer English fas.h.i.+on) is planted within the northern borders of Worcesters.h.i.+re; and it was there that he wrote--what is typical of all that he ever wrote, and what has his current and favorite sing-song in it:--
”Since Phyllis vouchsafed me a look I never once dreamt of my vine.
May I lose both my pipe and my crook If I knew of a kid that was mine!
I prized every hour that went by Beyond all that had pleased me before; But now they are past, and I sigh; And I grieve that I prized them no more.”
And again--
”When forced the fair nymph to forego What anguish I felt at my heart!
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Yet I thought--but it might not be so-- 'Twas with pain that she saw me depart.
She gazed as I slowly withdrew.
My path I could hardly discern; So sweetly she bade me Adieu I thought that she bade me return!”
What should we think of that if we encountered it fresh in a corner of one of our Sunday newspapers? We should hardly reckon its author among our boasted treasures; yet Burns says ”his elegies do honor to our language,” and a great deal of the same guileless tintinnabulum did have its admirers all over England a century ago; and some of Shenstone's pretty wares have come drifting down on the wings of alb.u.ms and anthologies fairly into our day.
Yet I should rather have encountered him in his fields, than in his garret; for he made those fields very beautiful. He was a bad farmer, to be sure; and sacrificed turnips to marigolds; and wheat to primroses and daisies, fast as the season went round; but his home at Leasowes was a place worth visiting for its charming graces of every rural sort; even our staid John Adams, when he was in England in those days, looking after American {160} colonial interests--must needs coach it in company with Jefferson from Cirencester to Leasowes, for a sight of this charming homestead. Goldsmith too gave its beauties the embalmment of his language; and Dr. Johnson sat down upon it, with the weight of his ponderous sentences. One echo more we will have of him, as it comes fresh from his pet paradise of that corner of Shrops.h.i.+re--and certainly carrying a honeyed rhythmic flow:--
”My banks they are furnished with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep; My grottoes are shaded with trees, And my hills are white over with sheep.
I seldom have met with a loss, Such health do my fountains bestow; My fountains all bordered with moss Where the hare-bells and violets grow.”
[Sidenote: William Collins.]
William Collins[5] was a man of a totally different stamp--better worth your knowing--yet maybe with the general public not so well known.
{161} There is the c.h.i.n.k of true and rare poetic metal in his verse, and it is fused by an imagination capable of intense heat and wonderful flame. He was only a hatter's boy from Chichester, in the South of England; was at Oxford for a while, and left there in a huff--though securing a degree, 1743; afterward went to London; wrote and printed some odes, which he knew were better than most current poetry, but which n.o.body bought or read. He sulked under that neglect, and his rage ran--sometimes to verse--sometimes to drink; he had known Thomson and Johnson, and both befriended him; but the world did not; indeed he never met the world half way; the poetic phrenzy in him so fined his sensibilities that he could not and would not put out a feeling hand for promiscuous greetings. Poverty, too, came in the wake of his poetic cultures, to aggravate his mental inapt.i.tudes and his moral distractions--all ending at last in a mad-house. He was not, to be sure, continuously under restraint--such terrific restraints as belonged to treatment of the insane in that day; but for a half dozen or more years of the latter part of his life--wandering all awry--saying {162} weak and pointless things, in place of the odes which had coruscated under his fine fancy; lingering about his childhood's home; stealing under the cathedral vaults of Chichester (where his body rests now), and lifting up a vacant and wild treble of sound in dreary sing-song to mingle with the music from the choir.
There are accomplished critics who insist that the odes of Collins carry in them the finest and the loftiest strains which go to marry the music of the nineteenth century poets to the music of the days of Elizabeth. Certain it is, that he loomed far above the ding-dong of such as Shenstone--that he scorned the cla.s.sic trammels of the empire of Pope--certain that there were fires in him which were lighted by poets who lived before the time of the Stuarts, and which gave foretaste and promise of the freedom and the graces that s.h.i.+ne to-day.[6]
I cannot quote better to show his quality than {163} from that ”Ode to Evening” which is so often cited:--
”For when thy folding star arising, shows His paly circlet at his warning lamp, The fragrant hours and elves Who slept in flowers the day,
”And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with And sheds the freshning dew, and, lovelier still, The pensive pleasures sweet, Prepare thy shadowy car.
”Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time hallowed pile, Or upland fallows gray Reflect its last cool gleam.
”But when chill, bl.u.s.tering winds or driving rain Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut That from the mountain's side, Views wilds and swelling floods,
”And hamlets brown and dim discovered spires, And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil.”
This is poetry that goes without help of rhyme; even its halts are big with invitations to the ”upland fallows gray,” and to the ”pensive pleasures sweet.” Swinburne says, with piquancy and truth, {164} ”Corot, on canvas, might have signed the 'Ode to Evening.'”
Dr. Johnson, who was a strong friend of Collins, tells us, in his _Lives of the Poets_, that he died in 1756; and that story is repeated by most early biographies; the truth is, however, that after that date he was living--only a sort of death in life, under the care of his sister at Chichester; and it was not until 1759, when--his moral and physical wreck complete--the end came.
_Miss Burney._