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They do not clutch hold of the memory with
the drowning pertinacity of Watts; neither have they the interest of
his occasional simple, lucky beauty. Bums having fortunately been
rescued by his humble station from the contaminating society of the
"Best models," wrote well and naturally from the first. Had he been
unfortunate enough to have had an educated taste, we should have had
a series of poems from which, as from his letters, we could sift here
and there a kernel from the mass of chaff. Coleridge's youthful
efforts give no promise whatever of that poetical genius which
produced at once the wildest, tenderest, most original and most
purely imaginative poems of modem times. Byron's "Hours of Idleness"
would never find a reader except from an intrepid and indefatigable
curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is but a dim
foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early poems, a
safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient
investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied
explorer of the beauties of predecessors, but they give no assurances
of a man who should add aught to stock of household words, or to the
rarer and more sacred delights of the fireside or the arbor. The
earliest specimens of Shelley's poetic mind already, also, give
tokens of that ethereal sublimation in which the spirit seems to soar
above the regions of words, but leaves its body, the verse, to be
entombed, without hope of resurrection, in a mass of them. Cowley is
generally instanced as a wonder of precocity. But his early
insipidities show only a capacity for rhyming and for the metrical
arrangement of certain conventional combinations of words, a capacity
wholly dependent on a delicate physical organization, and an unhappy
memory. An early poem is only remarkable when it displays an effort
of reason, and the rudest verses in which we can trace some
conception of the ends of poetry, are worth all the miracles of
smooth juvenile versification. A school-boy, one would say, might
acquire the regular see-saw of Pope merely by an association with the
motion of the play-ground tilt.
Mr. Poe's early productions show that he could see through the verse to the spirit beneath, and that he already had a feeling that all the life and grace of the one must depend on and be modulated by the will of the other. We call them the most remarkable boyish poems that we have ever read. We know of none that can compare with them for maturity of purpose, and a nice understanding of the effects of language and metre. Such pieces are only valuable when they display what we can only express by the contradictory phrase of innate experience. We copy one of the shorter poems, written when the author was only fourteen. There is a little dimness in the filling up, but the grace and symmetry of the outline are such as few poets ever attain. There is a smack of ambrosia about it. TO HELEN
It is the tendency of the young poet that impresses us. Here is no "withering scorn," no heart "blighted" ere it has safely got into its teens, none of the drawing-room sansculottism which Byron had brought into vogue. All is limpid and serene, with a pleasant dash of the Greek Helicon in it. The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable. It is not of that kind which can be demonstrated arithmetically upon the tips of the fingers. It is of that finer sort which the inner ear alone can estimate. It seems simple, like a Greek column, because of its perfection. In a poem named "Ligeia," under which title he intended to personify the music of nature,, our boy-poet gives us the following exquisite picture:
John Neal, himself a man of genius, and whose lyre has been too long capriciously silent, appreciated the high merit of these and similar passages, and drew a proud horoscope for their author.
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