FullReads

He is more sublime and simple than Job–more royally witty and wise, more to the quick and the point than Solomon–more picturesque, more intense, more pathetic than Dante–more Miltonic (we have no other word) than Milton–more dreadful, more curiously blasphemous, more sonorous than Marlowe–more worldly-wise and clever, and intellectually svelt than Goethe. More passionate, more eloquent, more impudent than Byron–more orthodox, more edifying, more precocious than Pollok–more absorptive and inveterate than Godwin; and more hearty and tender, more of love and manhood all compact than Burns–more gay than Moore–more {myrianous} than Shakspeare.

It may be so. We have made repeated and resolute incursions in various directions into his torrid zone, but have always come out greatly scorched and stunned and affronted. Never before did we come across such an amount of energetic and tremendous words, going “sounding on their dim and perilous way,” like a cataract at midnight–not flowing like a stream, nor leaping like a clear waterfall, but always among breakers–roaring and tearing and tempesting with a sort of transcendental din; and then what power of energizing and speaking, and philosophizing and preaching, and laughing and joking and love-making, in vacuo! As far as we can judge, and as far as we can keep our senses in such a region, it seems to us not a poem at all, hardly even poetical–but rather the materials for a poem, made up of science, religion, and love, the (very raw) materials of a structure–as if the bricks and mortar, and lath and plaster, and furniture, and fire and fuel and meat and drink, and inhabitants male and female, of a house were all mixed “through other” in one enormous imbroglio. It is a sort of fire-mist, out of which poetry, like a star, might by curdling, condensation, crystallization, have been developed, after much purging, refining, and cooling, much time and pains. Mr. Bailey is, we believe, still a young man full of energy–full, we doubt not, of great and good aims; let him read over a passage, we dare say he knows it well, in the second book of Milton on Church Government, he will there, among many other things worthy of his regard, find that “the wily subtleties and refluxes of man’s thoughts from within,” which is the haunt and main region of his song, may be “painted out and described” with “a solid and treatable smoothness.” If he paint out and describe after this manner, he may yet more than make up for this sin of his youth; and let him take our word for it and fling away nine tenths of his adjectives, and in the words of Old Shirley–

“Compose his poem clean without ’em.
A row of stately SUBSTANTIVES would march
Like Switzers, and bear all the fields before ’em;
Carry their weight; show fair, like Deeds enroll’d;
Not Writs, that are first made and after filed.
Thence first came up the title of Blank Verse;–
You know, sir, what Blank signifies;–when the sense,
First framed, is tied with adjectives like points,
Hang ‘t, ’tis pedantic vulgar poetry.
Let children, when they versify, stick here
And there, these piddling words for want of matter.
Poets write masculine numbers.”

Here are some of “V.’s” Roses–

THE GRAVE.

“I stood within the grave’s o’ershadowing vault;
Gloomy and damp it stretch’d its vast domain;
Shades were its boundary; for my strain’d eye sought
For other limit to its width in vain.

“Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray,
And distant sound of living men and things;
This, in th’ encountering darkness pass’d away,
That, took the tone in which a mourner sings.

“I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp,
Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom;
And feebly burning ‘gainst the rolling damp,
I bore it through the regions of the tomb.