CHAPTER VI.

PERTAINING TO POETRY.

"Fountain of Harmony! Thou Spirit blest,
By whom the troubled waves of earthly sound
Are gathered into order, such as best

Some high-souled bard in his enchanted round

May compass, Power divine! O spread thy wing,
Thy dove-like wing that makes confusion fly,
Over my dark, void spirit, summoning

New worlds of music, strains that may not die."

IN the verses above quoted from the dedication to Keble's Christian Year, is concealed one of the best definitions of poetry. It is a poet's "confession of faith," and it fits in with our own belief that poetry is something which is sung, and which should contain 'new worlds of music. We must first of all have the poet-the maker-who is gifted with a clearer vision than most of us, a vision which comprehends nature, and the good-or God-in nature, and the rule-which also is God-in nature, and the life and its purpose which make up nature. Then he must make for us new songs: all which songs must be

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either of new truths, with keen-edged, arrow-like motion and measure, to sink deep into our inmost consciousness and move our whole being; or of old truths which have failed to strike us before, dressed up anew and decked with all the grace he can command from his great poetic soul, in order that now they may reach us. Carlyle says, "All old poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically songs. would say, in strictness, that all right poems are:" and then he adds, in his candid, out-spoken manner, "that whatsoever is not sung is properly no poem, but a piece of prose cramped into jingling lines,—to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part !"

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The poet, then, is a Singer, Revealer, Teacher, all combined in one harmonious whole. Whoso rhymes without teaching is no poet; whoso gives us mere verses without a new truth or new beauty of an old truth to form the marrow of them is no poet; but he who sings to us in harmonious measure-now smooth, perchance; now rushing like a tumultuous flood with the mighty force of passion-words which teach us new truth and new beauties of truth, he is a poet, such work of his is poetry. It is subject to such conditions that we claim the title of poet for Oliver Wendell Holmes, and it will be found that his poetical work is able to bear the test of all that we have asserted poetry should be.

Take here

one example. Looking at the shell of a Nautilus, which to less gifted natures would be but a shell ;— pretty, perhaps, nothing more-he with his poetic vision sees a song therein, which he has entitled, "The Chambered Nautilus." After describing how the occupant of the little shell-according to the wont of his species-built each year a new spiral of his coiling home, which was larger than the last year's spiral and how he went on year by year building in a widening spiral, and each year living in the enlarged home, and giving up the smaller one of last year, he-the poet-hears a voice-the voice of his poetic nature-which sings :

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine out-grown shell by life's unresting sea!"

He, however, is more modest for himself than we are for him, and whilst he recognises the high ideal of poetry we have endeavoured to indicate, he thinks it beyond his reach. Thus in one of his early poems we find the following beautiful expression of a poetic truth that had flashed upon him, which shows at once his clear comprehension of what song should be:

"If to embody in a breathing word
Tones that the spirit trembled when it heard ;
To fix the image all unveiled and warm,
And carve in language its ethereal form,
So pure, so perfect, that the lines express
No meagre shrinking, no unlaced excess;
To feel that art, in living truth, has taught
Ourselves, reflected in the sculptured thought ;-
If this alone bestow the right to claim

The deathless garland and the sacred name;
Then none are poets, save the saints on high,
Whose harps can murmur all that words deny."

Comment upon this is needless. The thought is simply sublime. In this example, and in many others which might be given, the poet is brimming over with sacred truth, for which he feels words cannot be found. It reveals to us a nature so deep, so extensive, that language is insufficient to utter all its longings: and in which there is much left to be expressed in that blissful time when the harp shall murmur what words now deny.

But, as we have already remarked, Dr. Holmes is practical as well as poetical: practical in his poetry, and he is not ashamed to own it. When asked, 'at the Breakfast-Table,' whether he would not confess at least to using a rhyming dictionary, he replied :

"I would as lief use that as any other dictionary,

but I don't want it. When a word comes up fit to end a line with, I can feel all the rhymes in the language that are fit to go with it, without naming them. I know all the polygamous words, and all the monogamous ones, and all the unmarrying ones,—the whole lot that have no mates, as soon as I hear their names called. Sometimes I run over a string of rhymes, but, generally speaking, it is strange what a short list it is of those that are good for anything. That is the pitiful side of all rhymed verse. Take two such words as home and world. What can you do with chrome or loam or gnome or tome? You have dome, foam, and roam, and not much more to use in your pome,* as some of our fellow-countrymen call it. As for world, you know that in all human probability somebody or something will be hurled into or out of it its clouds may be furled or its grass impearled: possibly something may be whirled or curled, or even swirled,-one of Leigh Hunt's words, which with lush, one of Keat's, is an important part of the stock in trade of some dealers in rhyme."

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In another place he says also:

"Poets, like painters, their machinery claim,

And verse bestows the varnish and the frame." Still, he is careful in maintaining, what the best

* 'Pome' is a name given in America to a baked cake of maize or Indian meal, about the size of an apple, but seems to be used here in another sense.