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[page 376, column 1, continued:]
Editorial Miscellany.
THE BROADWAY JOURNAL may be obtained in the City of New York of the following agents: — Taylor, Astor House; Crosby, Exchange, William street; Graham, Tribune Buildings; Lockwood, Broadway and Grand; and Burgess & Stringer, Ann and Broadway.
A NEW VOLUME of the Broadway Journal, will commence on Saturday, the tenth of January next.
MR. THOMAS H. LANE is the only person (beside ourself) authorized to give receipts or transact business for The Broadway Journal.
ERRATUM. — In speaking, last week, of Mrs. Osgood's Poems, we used the word anapestic, when we intended dactylic.
IN THE “Southern Literary Messenger” for December, we find a review (signed L.) of Leigh Hunt's “Imagination and Fancy.” The critic is severe, and not unjustly so, although there are fifty points, at least, in which we disagree with him. The truth is, Hunt has exposed this weakness in “The Imagination and Fancy” which is a pitiable hook — a mere jumble of crude, contradictory, unformed opinion — the opinion, too, of an ignorant man. We quote a passage or two from the review: — [column 2:]
Hunt has somewhat improved his language since his palmy days, when he wrote the Lingua Cockneyana, and was truculently black-guarded by Christopher North. He still retains, however, a portion of the old leaven, and some of his vulgar smartness and “jauntiness,” may be discerned with no microscopic eye in many of the passages quoted. His old coined words, “sphery,” “prosaicalness,” “unsuperfluousness.” “one-ness,” &c., still occasionally flutter round his pen, and force themselves in, despite his better judgment. He speaks of “Bottom and his brother mechanical:” in Midsummer's Night Dream, and defines Count Cenci, in Shelley's magnificent tragedy, to be a “potent ruffian.” Sometimes, indeed, he ambitiously attempts a higher flight than his ordinary, careless, slip-shod, chatty, rambling style, and then his hippogriff, ascending into unaccustomed regions, becomes so utterly bewildered, that its devious course can scarcely be traced. How lucid is the following final definition of verse. He evidently feels that in it he has exhausted the subject; there is nothing more to be said concerning it, and that from so self-evident a decision there is no appeal.
Verse, in short, is that finishing and rounding, and ‘tuneful planeting’ of the poet's creations, which is produced of necessity by the smooth tendencies of their energy, or inward working, and the harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the beautiful.
Well done! We especially like that idea of the poet's creations skipping it on the light fantastic toe, and many-twinkling feet, round the “orb of the beautiful.” The only regret it leaves with us is, that we have not been there to see it.
Of Leigh Hunt, it may verily be said “nihil quod, teligit non inquinavit.”* He attempts to praise nothing that he does not tend to lower in our estimation. His panegyric on Shelley, in “Byron and his Cotemporaries,” for a while almost gave us a dislike to that noble and nearly blameless character. He has a trifling, childish manner of praising, that frequently disgusts one with the objects of his admiration. How disagreeable are the following remarks concerning Shakspeare, whom he is comparing with Dante!
It is far better, that as a higher, more universal, and more beneficent variety of the genus Poet, he should have been the happier man he was, and left us the plump cheeks on his monument, instead of the carking visage of the great, but over-serious and one-sided Florentine. Even the imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a “nervous gentleman” compared with Shakspeare, was visited with no such dreams as Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose to make himself thinner, (as Dante says he did,) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions of nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus.
[The following footnote appears at the end of this section, page 376, column 2:]
* Mem. This is not our Latin. — Ed. B. J.
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Notes:
This review was attributed as being by Poe by W. D. Hull.
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[S:0 - BJ, 1845] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Criticism - Literary (Poe?, 1845)