CHAP. XLIV. DESCRIPTIVE POETRY. To accustom young ladies to select and copy the beautiful passages of favourite authors, is perhaps the most obvious and effectual of all the minor modes of polishing their minds. The old-fashioned practice of taxing them to learn by rote was not half so good, and was, moreover, attended with the disadvantage of sometimes giving them a habit of quoting in conversation; nay, what was far worse, of betraying them into the odious vanity of even leading the conversation, in order that they might obtain opportunities to spout, of course no Bachelor's Wife was ever guilty of such a blue offence. But, as the perfect Egeria was sometimes in the practice of making extracts in the way suggested, we shall look at a few of the sort of things that she considered good. The first we meet with is from a little poem commonly ascribed to the celebrated Earl of Surrey, who, if not the father of English rhythm, was, after Chaucer, the first who properly felt the depth and variety of the harmonies of the language: "The Sun, when he hath spread his rays, The heaven shows lively art and hue, Save I, alas! whom neither sun, Nor aught that God hath wrought and done, The Earl of Surrey was the eldest son of the Duke of Norfolk, in the time of Henry VIII. He was born in 1516, and was early contracted to marry Lady Frances Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. In 1542, he was made a knight of the garter, and appears to have been one of the gayest ornaments of the court; but he fell under the displeasure of the King, and was in consequence beheaded in the flower of life. It is proper, however, to observe, that although he has been regarded as the author of the poem quoted, it is certainly not at all like the ordinary style of his poetry, of which the following descriptive effusion, written during one of his imprisonments in Windsor Castle, is a favourable specimen. With somewhat of the general stiffness of his style, it possesses much of the grace and gallant spirit of his chivalrous character, and affords altogether an advantageous view of his powers and talents as a poet: "So cruel prison how could betide, alas! As proud Windsor, where I in lust and joy, With a king's son my childish years did pass, In greater feast than Priam's sons of Troy. Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour; The large green courts, where we were wont to hove, With eyes cast up unto the maiden's tower, And easy sighs, such as folks draw in love; The stately seats, the ladies bright of hue, With words, and looks, that tigers could but rue, With rains availed, and swift y-breathed horse Give me account, where is my noble fere? Whom in thy walls thou didst each night enclose, Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint. In prison pine with bondage and restraint; And with remembrance of the greater grief To banish the less, I find my chief relief." If the muse of Surrey, the first noble English poet, be imbued with the romantic spirit of his time, perhaps in the more emphatic verse of Byron, the latest and the greatest, we may trace the chartered and fiercer energies that are supposed to have affected the moral temperament of our own time. One of the very finest passages in all his voluminous works is an address to Napoleon, the individual in whom whatever was peculiar, to the revolutionary period that has just passed, may be said to have been embodied. After adverting to the singular combination of magnanimity and meanness, which formed the brightness and the blackness of that extraordinary political phenomenon, the author proceeds: "Yet well thy soul hath brook'd the turning tide When the whole host of hatred stood hard by, To watch and mock thee shrinking, thou hast smiled With a sedate and all-enduring eye ;— When Fortune fled her spoil'd and favourite child, He stood unbowed beneath the ills upon him piled. |