LOVE AND DEATH. By Mrs Hemans. By thy birth, so oft renew'd MIGHTY Ones, Love and Death! Ye are the strong in this world of ours, Ye meet at the banquets, ye strive midst the flow'r- Thou art the victor, Love! Thou art the peerless, the crown'd, the free- Thou hast look'd on death and smiled! Thou hast buoy'd up the fragile and reed-like form Thou hast stood on the scaffold alone: Thou hast watch'd by the wheel through the torturer's hour, And girt thy soul with a martyr's power, Till the conflict hath been won. No-thou art the victor, Death! Thou comest-and where is that which spoke Thou comest-and what is left Silence is where thou art! Silently thou must kindred meet; No glance to cheer, and no voice to greet; Boast not thy victory, Death! It is but as the cloud's o'er the sunbeam's power→ It is but as a tyrant's reign O'er the look and the voice, which he bids be still: They shall soar his might above! And so with the root whence affection springs, Thou art the victor, Love! VOL. XXVII. NO. CLXI. H THE AGE-A POEM*—IN EIGht books. THE author of the Age is about as like a poet as a bubbleyjock is to a peacock. Down wings, and up tail, goes bubbley, with intermittent snort from his long, red, dangling nostril, and a bold boom from his whole body, as if he were sending tidings of his magnificent existence in thunder to the uttermost parts of the earth; whereas, the fact is, that the cook has issued orders to the scullion for his immediate execution for the benefit of clergy; and that ministress of fate is even then making a sally from the back kitchen against the unsuspecting sultaun who, ere the bell toll for the servants' dinner, will stoop his anointed head, with all its comb and wattles, between her inexorable knees-his neck becoming precisely as long as her arm-while the neighbourhood shall continue in a state of great and just alarm for an hour after his last unearthly gobble. Now, we are far from denying that a bubbley is an imposing bird, after his own fashion; but he is in a mistake about his tail, which is not the constellation he fondly believes it to be, while he upholds it to the airs and sunshine of heaven. The world is not, as he imagines, lost in speechless admiration of his planetary system. No idea hath he of the utter absurdity of the exposure behind, consequent on the hoisting of his imperial standard -an utter absurdity, in no way relieved by the rotatory motion in which he keeps prancing on feet that may not venture, without imminent danger of the retort courteous, to laugh at the legs that employ them as pedestals. From the hauteur of his most adventurous aspect, you could not doubt, while he is thus treading ground in a circle of eighteen inches diameter, that he considers himself a Columbus or a Cook, engaged either in effecting the discovery of America, or the circumnavigation of the globe. But it is wrong to be personal; so we beg pardon of the author of the Age for mentioning him in the same sentence with a bubbleyjock. Let us, if possible, be less ornithological, and call both men and things by their proper names. Well, then-to speak truth and shame the devil-the author of the Age, a Poem, is, we have been credibly informed,-nay, faint not, gentle reader,-a Tailor. We should like to purchase from him few pairs of ready-made breeches compiled on the principle of his blank verse. They could not miss sitting easy upon us, nor we upon them, whatever the material, casimir, plush, corduroy, or buckskin. Breeches, in our eyes, can have but one inexcusable and unendurable vice, to be expiated neither in this world nor the next-videlicet, tightness. Be they but wide enough, and we are happy. A man should never know, except from a composite feeling of warmth and decorum, that he has any breeches on or off. The moment his attention is attracted to the fact of their existence, by pinch or pressure, on any part of his lower man, he feels assured that they are not the production of a great master. We are far from asserting that breeches ought to be of one breadth from waistband to knee-button--but still the part of the human frame on which we kneel, when with clasped hands we beseech our mistress to take pity upon her slave, should be as free and unencumbered as that part on which we sit, when we insert a sonnet to her eyebrow in her album. The beauideal of all mortal breeches is seen in a palpable shape in the pictures of Teniers. Looking on his Boors and on their breeches, we mentally exclaim, " O fortunati nimium! sua si bona norint !" Our author, though a Briton, is at the head of the Dutch school. Will the Master-tailor of the Age please to have the goodness to transmit to us a pair in our next monthly parcel of other prime articles from the Strand? In them we shall outwrite the Quarterly, the Edinburgh, the Westminster, and all the Montlilies! Beside us other editors will all look hidebound. We, Christopher North, in our irresistibles, will display an elegant ease, a graceful facility, forming a charming contrast to the constraint and awkwardness attending every movement of a Lockhart, a Napier, a Bowring, a Camp Hurst, Chance, & Co. 1829. bell, and other guides of public opinion, less happy in their respective tailors. Maga herself must have a pair of silks or satins-and make a present of her petticoats to Lady Morgan. is Our poet's blank verse it is from which we augur so happily of our tailor's breeches. So free and easy-so flowing and unconstrained! Though made secundum artem-yet of him it may indeed be said, in both capacities, "ars est celare artem." We defy all the world to discover the secret principle of his versification, What pauses! No matter on what part of a line he wishes us for a moment to stop short. If it be even on the very first syllable, the pedes trian walking through his poem willing to rest as on a milestone. You are never at a loss for something to sit down upon, that you may take breath before pursuing your journey Often about the middle of a long steep sentence, stretching away up before you in formidable perspective, like a mile of Macadam, you come unexpectedly upon a wooden bench in a stone-niche, and may, if you choose, indulge in a nap, or a piece of bread and butter, with cheese. Occasionally, the weary reader is relieved by a line of eight syllables, when he had every reason to fear ten; while at other times, the refreshed reader boldly faces a sudden Alexandrine, and vanquishes him with all the ease in the world. Every now and then, too, in travelling along the Age, you perceive yourself to be up to the knees in prose-but prose as soft as new-fallen snow, and no impediment to the pedestrian; on the contrary, a relief, for it brings into play a different set of muscles. Then all at once the snow melts, or, in other words, the prose disappears; and your footsteps glide along the flowers of poetry. The alternation is delightful; and ere you reach the middle of your journey, your mind is bewildered between two worlds, the one as human and as homely as the road between Portobello and Musselburgh, the other as celestial and imaginative as that nocturnal phenomenon we call Noah's Ark. We step out of " the Safety" or "Fair Trader," and take the next stage in a balloon. Tailors are, in general, a cheerful set of people. Though sedentary, they are subjected to regular exercise, in ascending and descending the path between earth and heaven. They breathe empyreal air— "Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call earth." How can he do otherwise than choose to be cheerful, who lives in the clouds. of heaven, and on the cabbages of the earth? A vegetable diet devoured in ether! Hence the soaring soul of Snip-and all his motions brisk as those of the briskest of all animals. He chirps like a cricket-he jumps like a grasshopper-or even like unto a flea. But one solitary instance of suicide among the Tailors is on record, and even that is apocryphal. Certain suspicious circumstances there were attending his demise; but the result of the coroner's inquest was far from giving universal satisfaction, and was, we recollect, attributed to party-spirit, then running mountains high in London. The poor fellow was known to be a Whig and a Dung-and the Tories and Flints returned a "Felo de se." Our Tailor, however, is an exception to the character of his clan. He is of a melancholy temperament. Witness the opening invocation to his own soul, "Awake, awake my soul, rouse all thy From lethargy ignoble, nor permit fine. Nothing brighter than this in the whole Swatch-book. Yet is it liable to criticism. As, for example: When a Master-tailor, or Poet, calls upon his own soul to awake, in what relation to himself does he sit or stand? Would it be thought rational conduct in any individual to ring the bell for a servant to shake him by the shoulder till he awoke? It might be so for here there is an application of foreign or rather domestic force. But if a soul be asleep in ignoble lethargy, like that of our tailor's at the commencement of the Age, slumbering in the arms of fascinating melancholy, and wasting its youthful vigour on an enchanted bed, how can it expect that it will pay the least attention to any call made by itself on itself? Such expectation would be most unreasonable. Secondly, who is HE in this passage so frequently called HIM? The Tailor's soul?-or the Tailor? We fear that in either case alike violence is here offered to the English language.Thirdly, What is there conceivable more than the pristine energy" of a Tailor? Fourthly, What authority has HE for asserting that the tree whose fruit gives discernment of good and evil, is a vine and not an apple-tree? Fifthly, Though the golden pippin deserve that epithet, who ever saw golden grapes ? And, sixth. ly, Who ever saw a Tailor bathing in the deep waters of the fount of holy contemplation, arraying himself in the garments light and soft of Love, collecting in the paths of Virtue the fairest flowers of cultivated fancy to adorn his temples, satisfy his craving appetite on golden fruit from the vine of Truth, and then beautified and freshened-who ever heard a Tailor singing a tributary song, not all unworthy of his heavenly birth? We have seen the Tailor riding to Brentford-and, considering the freaks of his filly, he seemed to ride with no common tenacity, and to exhibit a large organ of adhesiveness. have likewise seen a Tailor bathing in a pond-putting on his shirt, breeches, et cetera-chewing a " chitterin piece," of gingerbread-going into the Shears House of Call, and after a swig of heavy wet, we have heard him singing, "Rule, rule, Britannia, Britannia rule the waves," &c., then off like lightning to take his We To strike a higher key, or,—if my breast Much wounded, glow with indignation's fire, Should need thy loudest, most exalted tones Here then we have him-awakeand harp in hand, ready to begin. He has invocated his soul and his instrument. Why won't he fiddle? You shall hear. "Jehovah! Lord of truth, who art alone Mighty and wise, my Father and my God, Hear thou my prayer. With wisdom fill my soul, And truth and knowledge; open thou mine eyes My God, my Father, nor thy presence blest Withdraw. Hear thou in heav'n, thy dwelling place, And when thou hearest, answer and forgive, And do; defer not, Omy God, my trust." We began this little foolish article in the most perfect good humour; but a few words of a different spirit respecting this quotation. The blockhead is blasphemous. Most impious is the dunce. Steeped in stupidity to the very lips, the poor creature,when about to put into ink the drivellings of the narrowest and most shallow understanding, with the view of getting himself, if possible, into print, by means of some publisher anxious to get rid of him at the expense of some ten or twenty pounds for his trashy manuscript,-fears not, in his shocking ignorance of his own intellectual worthlessness, to implore the Almighty to inspire his miserable doggrel! There is, unfortunately, not one symptom of insanity through all the 6000 lines. He is neither a madman, nor-in the strictest sense-an idiot; yet how coolly and unconsciously he blasphemes! Let the petty and paltry versifier-for poetaster is for him far too high a name-invoke his soul, or his harp, or his muse, for they are all nonentities. "But the Lord will not hold him guiltless who taketh his name in vain!" Ignorance, impudence, self-conceit, vanity, and an habitual presumption of the most shocking nature, must be all combined in the character of the person who would dare on such an occasion to indite such a prayer! Poor blind worm, indeed, to speak of his voice being miraculously made" ravishing and sweet as ever flowed from harps of angels!" Does he think his prayer was heard-because Messrs Hurst, Chance and Co., St Paul's Churchyard, have charitably, but foolishly, attempted, at his entreaties, to publish this dilution of trashiness? Let him shew the passage to any one human being he chooses-nay, even to a Cockney-and the shrug and the shudder will convince him, that he has been most familiar with-most impudent to-his Maker., "But fools rush in where angels fear to tread!" "Should my little poem assist the righteous cause," he says in his Preface, "I shall be well content." The righteous cause! Is it thus that the creature should address the Creator? Is there no difference between the harp of angels, and the Scotch fiddle? Is itch on the fingers the same thing as inspiration in the soul? Now, reader! don't accuse us of being too severe. Think on the nature of the offence. Look at the quotation again and do you not cheerfully acknowledge, that the knout is well applied to the bare back of such a sanctified and presumptuous sinner? We do. A Our Tailor says, "I like not the charge of plagiarism." Nevertheless, he cabbages. The whole Book, though he denies it, is an absurd imitation of the leading idea of the plan of Pollok's Course of Time. young woman, whom he calls Theresa, dies of consumption, at the age of twenty, and goes to heaven. Fifty years afterwards, she is joined "in the grove" by her brother Lucius, whom she thus addresses: "But tell me, Lucius,-for on earth thine age Number'd threescore and ten, mine,twenty suns,' Both were now blooming in immortal youth, What changes time hath wrought be low,-on earth What has befallen through these fifty years. Or rather, tell the grand result, the end, |