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LETTERS FROM THE NORTH — No. 23.
EAST HAVEN, Sept. 2, 1851.
Dear Doctor: — The London Examiner contains extracts from a New Play, recently published in England, entitled the Fool's Tragedy, supposed to be the production of the Author of the Bride's Tragedy, Mr. Thomas Lovell Beddoes. 1 have read the extracts, and find that they possess all the strength of Mr. Dai ly's Festus without his rudeness of expression. In fact, I should have attributed the play to the author of Festus, had it not been asserted by the Examiner that it was the production of another person — not precisely beceause [[because]] Mr. Baily could have written the Play at all, but becaurse [[because]] no other Englishman could write in just the same style. It is the rough marble of Festus chiseled down into the charming and seductive graces of Polite Art. I shall not attempt to give an outline of the plot, as I have not the Play before me, but merely notice some of the most prominent passages.
The following passage is the Soliloquy wherein a certain Duke meditates the murder of his friend — the naturalness of which consists in the superstitious language which the author puts into his mouth — the offspring of these very thoughts which ever did and ever will haunt the soul of one who acts under the same motives:
‘Oft the faltering spirit
O’ereome by the fascinating Fiend,
Gives her eternal heritage of life
For one caress, for one triumphant crime.’
Shall I dream my soul is bathing
In his reviving blood, yet lose my right,
My only health, my sole delight on earth,
For fear of shadows on a Chapel Wall,
In some pale painted Hell?’
The following passage is quite Festusian:
‘lt is this infinite invisible
Which we must learn to know, and yet to scorn,
And from the scorn of that, regard the world
As from the edge of a far star.’
The critic of Peterson's Magazine says that Baily's blank verse is the best of any writer of this day; but it is far inferior to that of this Play.
The following are two beautiful lines:
‘To that divinest hope, which none can know of,
Who hare not laid their dearest in the grave.”
The following Dialogue between Wolfram and Sybilla is very beautiful:
WOLFRAM.
‘Will you with me to the place where sighs are
A shore of blessings, which disease doth beat,
Sea-like, and dashes those whom he would wreck
Into the arms of peace?’
SYBILLA.
‘Thou art come to fetch me?
It is, indeed, a proof of boundless love,
That thou hadst need of me even in thy bliss.
I go with thee.’
The following is the beautiful description which tlub Duke gives of Sybilla :
‘Whom first I met her in the Egyptian Prison,
She was the rosy morning of a woman;
Beauty was rising but the starry grace
Of a calm childhood might be seen in her.’
In another place he calls Amalia a
‘Joyous creature,
Whose life's first leaf is hardly yet uncurled,
Bridism says to Amalia:
‘Take this flower from me,
(A white rose fitting for a bridal gift,)
And lay it on your pillow’. Pray to live
So fair and innocently; pray to die,
LEAF AFTER LEAF, SO SILENTLY.
This is perfect. There is nothing either in Tennyson or Baily to be compared with it.
The follow language which the author puts into the mouth of Isbrand is truly sublime:
‘Isbrand! thou tragic fool!
Cheer up! Art thou alone? Why, so should be CREATORS AND DESTROYERS!’
God was alone in the creation of the Universe.
He will be alone in its destruction.’
Upon the whole, these extracts cannot be equaled, in ideal beauty and natural passionate expression, by any writer since the days of Shelley.
Mr. Poe on the Poetic Principle, as may be seen in Rufus W. Griswold's third Volume of his works, has the following very beautiful passage:
‘He recognizes the ambrosia, which nourishes ms soul, in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven — in the waving of the green fields — in the blue distance of mountains — in the grouping of clouds — in the twinkling of the half-hidden brooks — in the glowing of silver rivers — in the repose of sequestered lakes — in tiro star mirroring depths of lonely wells: He perceives it in the songs of birds — in the sighing of the winds — in the fresh breath of the woods.’
Unfortunately for that most remarkably erratic gentleman, the whole of the above was stolen, or, surreptiously [[surreptitiously]] taken, from the following part of one of my own Lectures on the ‘Beauties of Poetry,’ published years before: ‘There is Poetry in music of the birds — in the Diamond-radiance of Star — in the suntinged whiteness of the fleecy clouds — in the open frankness of the verdant fields — in the soft retiring mystery of the Vales — in the cloud-sustaining grandeur of tho many folded hills — in the revolutions of the spheres — in the roll of rivers — and the run of rills.’
‘Look on this picture, and on that.’
In his reply to Outis, he says that his Haven is octameter acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic, repeated in the Refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic. This is precisely the same as my Poem ‘To Allegra Florence in Heaven,’ with the exception of the Refrain, from which the style of his Poem was stolen. But how can he call the Retrain ‘Of never — never more,’ tetrameter catalectic, when it is tetrameter acatalectic?
T. H. C.
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Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - GC, 1851] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - A Poe Bookshelf - Letters from the North (Thomas Holley Chivers, 1851)