On, on by whistling spheres of light Where darkness might be bottled up And what would happen to the land, And how would look the sea, If in the bearded devil's path Our earth should chance to be? Full hot and high the sea would boil, Full red the forests gleam; Methought I saw and heard it all In a dyspeptic dream! I saw a tutor take his tube The Comet's course to spy; I heard a scream,-the gathered rays Had stewed the tutor's eye; 10 20 30 I saw a fort,-the soldiers all I saw a poet dip a scroll Each moment in a tub, I read upon the warping back, It 1 This Academic Poem presents the simple and partial views of a young person trained after the schools of classical English verse as represented by Pope, Goldsmith, and Campbell, with whose lines his memory was early stocked. will be observed that it deals chiefly with the constructive side of the poet's function. That which makes him a poet is not the power of writing melodious rhymes, it is not the possession of ordinary human sensibilities nor even of both these qualities in connection with each other. I should rather say, if I were now called upon to define it, it is the power of transfiguring the experiences and shows of life into an aspect which comes from his imagination and kindles that of others. Emotion is its stimulus and language furnishes its expression; but these are not all, as some might infer was the doctrine of the poem before the reader. A common mistake made by young persons who suppose themselves to have poetical gift is that their own spiritual exaltation finds a true expression in the conventional phrases which are borrowed from the voices of the singers whose inspiration they think they share. Looking at this poem as an expression of some aspects of the ars poetica, with some passages which I can read even at this mature period of life without blushing for them, it may stand as the most serious representation of my early ef forts. Intended as it was for public delivery, many of its paragraphs may betray the fact by their somewhat rhetorical and sonorous character. (Author's Note.) If these on all some transient hours bestow Of rapture tingling with its hectic glow, Then all are poets; and if earth had rolled Her myriad centuries, and her doom were told, Fits like mosaic in the lines that gird Fast in its place each many-angled word; From Saxon lips Anacreon's numbers glide, As once they melted on the Teian tide, And, fresh transfused, the Iliad thrills again From Albion's cliffs as o'er Achaia's plain! The proud heroic, with its pulse-like beat, Rings like the cymbals clashing as they meet; The sweet Spenserian, gathering as it flows, Sweeps gently onward to its dying close, 80 Where waves on waves in long succession pour, Till the ninth billow melts along the shore; The lonely spirit of the mournful lay, In sable plumage slowly drifts along, Born with mankind, with man's expanded range And varying fates the poet's numbers change; Thus in his history may we hope to find Some clearer epochs of the poet's mind, As from the cradle of its birth we trace, Slow wandering forth, the patriarchal "Qui vive?" The sentry's musket rings, Pale in the moonlight beams; "Qui vive?" How oft the midnight air That startling cry has borne! How oft the evening breeze has fanned 10 |