Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, With short shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn, As oft he rises midst the twilight path, Now teach me, maid composed, To breathe some softened strain, Whose numbers stealing through thy darkening vale, Thy genial loved return! For when thy folding-star arising shows The fragrant hours, and elves Who slept in flowers the day, And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge Then lead, calm votaress, where some sheety lake Reflect its last cool gleam. But when chill blustering winds, or driving rain, That from the mountain's side And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires; While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont, While Summer loves to sport While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves, So long, sure found beneath the sylvan shed, Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipped Health, Thy gentlest influence own, The Passions, an Ode for Music. When Music, heavenly maid, was young, While yet in early Greece she sung, The Passions oft, to hear her shell, Thronged around her magic cell; Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting, Possessed beyond the muse's painting; By turns they felt the glowing mind Disturbed, delighted, raised, refined; Till once, 'tis said, when all were fired, Filled with fury, rapt, inspired, From the supporting myrtles round, They snatched her instruments of sound; And as they oft had heard apart Sweet lessons of her forceful art, Each (for madness ruled the hour) Would prove his own expressive power. First Fear his hand, its skill to try, Amid the chords, bewildered laid; And back recoiled, he knew not why, Even at the sound himself had made. Next Anger rushed, his eyes on fire In lightnings owned his secret stings; In one rude clash he struck the lyre, And swept with hurried hand the strings. With woful measures wan Despair, Low, sullen, sounds his grief beguiled; But thou, O Hope, with eyes so fair, And longer had she sung, but with a frown He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down, The war-denouncing trumpet took, And blew a blast so loud and dread, Were ne'er prophetic sounds so full of woe; And ever and anon he beat The doubling drum with furious heat; And though sometimes, each dreary pause between, Dejected Pity at his side Her soul-subduing voice applied, Yet still he kept his wild unaltered mien, [his head. While each strained ball of sight seemed bursting from Thy numbers, Jealousy, to naught were fixed; Of different themes the veering song was mixed, And now it courted Love, now raving called on Hate. With eyes upraised, as one inspired, Pale Melancholy sat retired; In notes by distance made more sweet, Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul; Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole: But O! how altered was its sprightlier tone, The hunter's call, to Faun and Dryad known; The oak-crowned sisters, and their chaste-eyed queen, Peeping from forth their alleys green; And Sport leaped up, and seized his beechen spear. Last came Joy's ecstatic trial: To some unwearied minstrel dancing: As if he would the charming air repay, O Music! sphere-descended maid, Than all which charms this laggard age; Dirge in Cymbeline, sung by Guiderius and Arviragus. To fair Fidele's grassy tomb Soft maids and village hinds shall bring No wailing ghost shall dare appear And melting virgins own their love. No withered witch shall here be seen, The red-breast oft, at evening hours, When howling winds, and beating rain, The tender thought on thee shall dwell. Each lonely scene shall thee restore, For thee the tear be duly shed; Beloved till life can charm no more; And mourned till Pity's self be dead. Ode on the Death of Mr Thomson. [The scene is on the Thames, near Richmond.] In yonder grave a Druid lies, Where slowly winds the stealing wave; In yon deep bed of whispering reeds May love through life the soothing shade. The maids and youths shall linger here, To hear the woodland pilgrim's knell. Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, When Thames in summer wreaths is drest; And oft suspend the dashing oar, To bid his gentle spirit rest. And oft, as Ease and Health retire The friend shall view yon whitening spire, And 'mid the varied landscape weep. But thou, who own'st that earthy bed, That mourn beneath the gliding sail? Yet lives there one whose heedless eye Shall scorn thy pale shrine glimmering near? With him, sweet bard, may fancy die, And joy desert the blooming year. But thou, lorn stream, whose sullen tide No sedge-crowned sisters now attend, Now waft me from the green hill's side, Whose cold turf hides the buried friend. And see, the fairy valleys fade, Dun night has veiled the solemn view. Yet once again, dear parted shade, Meek nature's child, again adieu ! The genial meads, assigned to bless Thy life, shall mourn thy early doom; Long, long thy stone and pointed clay In the Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands, according to Mr Lowell, the whole Romantic School is foreshadowed;' while Mr Gosse has said that it contains passages which are 'unrivalled for rich melancholy fullness' between Milton and Keats. But it deals only very lightly, and in about half of its thirteen stanzas, with specific superstitions; about half are compliment to Home and praise of Scotland generally. One stanza puts the will-o'-the-wisp at the service of the kelpie; two stanzas are devoted to the melancholy fate of the swain who becomes the victim, and the distress of his bereaved widow and children. Then follow these stanzas: Unbounded is thy range; with varied skill Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, To that hoar pile, which still its ruin shows: In whose small vaults a pigmy-folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground! Or thither, where, beneath the showery west, The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid; Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest, No slaves revere them, and no wars invade: The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold, But, oh, o'er all, forget not Kilda's race, On whose bleak rocks, which brave the wasting tides, Fair nature's daughter, virtue, yet abides. Go! just, as they, their blameless manners trace! Then to my ear transmit some gentle song, Of those whose lives are yet sincere and plain, Their bounded walks the rugged cliffs along, And all their prospect but the wintry main. With sparing temperance, at the needful time, They drain the scented spring; or, hunger-prest, Along the Atlantic rock, undreading climb, And of its eggs despoil the solan's nest. Thus, blest in primal innocence, they live Sufficed, and happy with that frugal fare Which tasteful toil and hourly danger give. Hard is their shallow soil, and bleak and bare ; Nor ever vernal bee was heard to murmur there! See the memoir of Collins by Dyce in his edition of the Works (1827); and that prefixed by W. Moy Thomas to the Aldine edition (1858; new ed. 1892). Mark Akenside (1721-70), author of The Pleasures of Imagination, was the son of a respectable butcher at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and in boyhood the fall of one of his father's cleavers on his foot rendered him lame for life. At the Newcastle schools he showed precocity and promise, and was already writing verse. The Society of Dissenters advanced a sum to educate him for the ministry, but after a session of theology at Edinburgh he changed his views, and, returning the money, entered himself as a student of medicine. His (far from brilliant) Hymn to Science was apparently written about this time. He took his degree of M.D. at Leyden in 1744, and in the same year he had issued anonymously his Pleasures of Imagination. The price demanded for the copyright was £120; and Pope advised Dodsley not to make a niggardly offer,' for this is no every day writer.' The success of the work justified poet, critic, and publisherthough Gray dissented and Warburton condemned. The same year, after having in a poetical epistle attacked Pulteney under the name of Curio, Akenside commenced physician at Northampton, but did not succeed. He then (1746) engaged to contribute to Dodsley's Museum, began to practise in London as a physician, and published several medical treatises. At Edinburgh and at Leyden he had formed an intimacy with a young Englishman of fortune, Jeremiah Dyson, which ripened into an enthusiastic friendship; and Mr Dyson-afterwards Clerk of the House of Commons and a Lord of the Treasury was free-handed enough to allow his poet-friend £300 a year. After writing a few Odes and attempting a reconstruction of his great poem, Akenside made no further efforts in literature, save a few occasional poems and some medical works. In 1757 appeared the expanded and altered form of the First Book of what was now called, by way of distinction, The Pleasures of the Imagination; of the Second Book in 1765; and a fragment of an intended Fourth Book was published after his death. He became distinguished as a physician; his society was courted for his taste, knowledge, and eloquence; but his solemn sententiousness of manner, his romantic ideas of liberty, and his unbounded admiration of the ancients exposed him occasionally to ridicule. The physician in Peregrine Pickle, who gives a feast in the manner of the ancients, was universally understood to be a caricature of Akenside. He irritated the Whigs by becoming a Tory after he was appointed queen's physician; and as doctor to one of the London hospitals obtained an unpleasant repute for carelessness towards poor patients. In his later days Akenside reverted with delight to his native landscape on the banks of the Tyne. In his fragment of a Fourth Book of his Imagination, written in the last year of his life, there is one striking passage: O ye dales Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where Those studies which possessed me in the dawn Of honourable fame, of truth divine The Pleasures of Imagination is a didactic poem in three books of blank verse. Gray censured the mixture in it of philosophy-from Hutcheson and Shaftesbury; Plato, Lucretius, and even the papers by Addison in the Spectator were also laid under contribution by the imaginer. The pleasures his poem professes to treat 'proceed,' he says, 'either from natural objects, as from a flourishing grove, a clear and murmuring fountain, a calm sea by moonlight, or from works of art, such as a noble edifice, a musical tune, a statue, a picture, a poem.' But in reality Akenside dealt chiefly with abstract subjects, and rarely succeeded in grafting upon them human or poetic interest. The work is an uninspired but dignified and graceful melange of reflection and illustration, reason and imagination, deism, optimism, and commonplace eighteenth-century philosophising. There is too much exposition, too much rhetoric, and, on the other hand, sometimes too much ornament. The constant admiration of virtue and lofty ideals, though probably sincere, is not stimulating. And many long passages are less alluring than sections of an abridged handbook of psychology and æsthetics: Suffice it to have said Where'er the power of ridicule displays But his highest flights have variety and energy. For him, familiarity with physical science enhanced the charms of nature. Unlike Campbell, who repudiated these 'cold material laws,' he viewed the rainbow with new pleasure after he had studied the Newtonian theory of light and colours : Nor ever yet The melting rainbow's vernal tinctured hues In which the sunbeams gleaming from the west The diffuse and florid descriptions of the Imagination are the natural outcome of Akenside's youthful exuberance. He was afterwards conscious of the defects of his poem, and saw that there was too much leaf for the fruit; but in cutting off these luxuriances he sacrificed some of the finest And through the mists of passion and of sense, That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul [shade, Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing The fated rounds of Time. Thence far effused, Of Nature, and looks back on all the stars, Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view, True Beauty. Thus doth beauty dwell There most conspicuous, even in outward shape Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand Look, then, abroad through nature, to the range When guilt brings down the thunder, called aloud For lo! the tyrant prostrate on the dust, The Sense for Beauty. This, nor gems nor stores of gold, He, mighty Parent! wise and just in all, The sunshine gleaming, as through amber clouds, O blest of heaven! whom not the languid songs Of luxury, the siren! not the bribes Of sordid wealth, nor all the gaudy spoils Of pageant honour, can seduce to leave Those ever-blooming sweets, which from the store |