or these, Far in moors, remote from house or hut... or these from the opening of the poem, 1 Of early bee, the trickling of the dew, More unusual is the picture of the partridge with her young: They cherish'd cow'r amid the purple blooms.2 To the second edition of The Sabbath Grahame added four brief "Sabbath Walks," which suggest Thomson in that there is one for each of the seasons. They are similar to their predecessor and, like it, give evidence not only of sharp eyes and keen ears but of some powers of imagination and expression. The title Sabbath Walks recalls Gisborne's Walks in a Forest, which Grahame presumably had read; yet all his verse is closer to that of Hurdis than to other unrimed descriptions. Grahame's piety, which is apparent in everything he wrote, completely dominates the short accounts of Bible scenes — esthetically of slight value-which he published in 1806 as Biblical Pictures. The same year, however, he took a long step forward in his Birds of Scotland, the most significant and to me the most enjoyable of his poems. It is almost a treatise on ornithology, and as such belongs in a way with the Sugar-Cane and the Hop-Garden. But Grahame's purpose was different from Grainger's and Booker's; for in the preface he explained, "I have studied not so much to convey knowledge, as to please the imagination, and warm the heart," words which mark their author as belonging to the new century. The poem contains a good deal of information regarding the haunts and habits of Scottish birds, their food, the materials, form, and location of their nests, the number and color of their eggs, and so on; but, instead of being the labored, pedantic work that it would probably have proved had it been written thirty years earlier, it is fresh, 1 First American ed. (N. Y., 1805), pp. 17-18, 22. 2 Ib. 18. sincere, and poetic. It takes us away from the gardens where "Philomel pours her plaint," away from the rolling meadows and cultivated fields in which the English "Muse" had so long wandered, to 'the thorny dingle," the "bosky cleugh," "the blooming vetchy ridge," to the "whinny braes . . . garlanded with gold" and the brook "wimpling through hazelly shaw, and broomy glen." 1 For perhaps the first time in English poetry we watch a real lark as he sings his "downward-veering song" to his mate: Slow the descent at first, then, by degrees, In the ideal country-place of which Grahame dreams he wants "no gravelled paths, pared from the smooth-shaved turf," such as Cowper loved, but "the simple unmade road." The temptation to quote extensively from the Birds of Scotland is strong, but one more passage must suffice, one that seems to me to catch something of the dewy freshness of the Scottish wilds: With earliest spring, while yet in mountain cleughs Upon the little heath-encircled patch Of smoothest sward, totter, - the GORCOCK's call Is heard from out the mist, high on the hill; Grahame could never write long without touching on the cruelty of hunting, of robbing nests and imprisoning song-birds, or on the horrors of child-labor, the press-gang, or slavery. His interest in this last evil led him to join with James Montgomery and Elizabeth Benger in a volume of Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1809); 5 1 Birds, etc. (Edin., 1806), pp. 20, 60 (cf. 20), 26, 43, 22. 3 Ib. 60 (cf. The Task, i. 351-2). 2 Ib. 4. 4 Ib. 13-14. The African slave-trade, which was discussed in Parliament from 1788 to 1807, when it was abolished, is the subject of at least four other blank-verse poems of length that I have not seen: Mrs. Ann Yearsley's On the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade (1788); John Jamieson's Sorrows of Slavery, containing a Faithful Statement of Facts respecting the African Slave Trade (1789); the anonymous Address to every Briton on the Slave Trade, being an effectual Plan to abolish this Disgrace to our Country (1791); and "an but his contribution, Africa Delivered, is naturally enough sentimental and unimpressive, since it deals with a subject unsuited to his quiet, descriptive talents and one about which he could have known little at first hand. In his longest poem, British Georgics (1809), he returns to his own heath and to the one subject that inspired him, nature; yet, since his primary object is not to describe the country but to furnish suggestions about agriculture for gentlemen farmers, much of the work belongs with the technical treatises that are to be considered later. The pictures of wild nature in which Grahame excels are rare, but the many incidental descriptions, though disfigured by wretched poetic diction, reveal his keen observation and love of the country, and the best of them have the quiet charm of The Sabbath: No more at dewy dawn, or setting sun, The blackbird's song floats mellow down the dale; With carol briefly trilled, and soon descends.1 The Georgics is in every respect more tame, formal, and unoriginal than the earlier pieces, perhaps because Grahame was here for the first time making use of a conventional literary form and thus was to some extent consciously modelling his work on that of others. For the British Georgics owes not only its name but its purpose and method to the Georgics of Virgil, and probably derives something from English works of the same kind — Cyder, Agriculture, the HopGarden, and the Sugar-Cane. It is also under no small debt, which Grahame did not attempt to conceal,2 to the father of blank-verse descriptive poetry. The influence of The Seasons is shown principally in a greater formality of style and a tendency to grandiose Under Graduate's" Dictates of Indignation (1791). To judge from the reviews, the first is emotional and declamatory, the second is based on the reports of investigators and is free from exaggeration, the third is an enthusiastic, highly-colored invective, and the fourth is romantic, sentimental heroics. The second and fourth are clearly Miltonic, as is the vague, rhetorical, and inflated Wrongs of Africa which William Roscoe (the biographer of Lorenzo de' Medici and the subject of a paper in the Sketch Book) published in 1787-88. 1 Page 129. The poem is divided into twelve parts, one for each month; it treats chiefly of "Scottish husbandry, scenery, and manners" (p. v). * Five of the twelve quotations prefixed to the several "Georgics" he took from The Seasons, and in the preface he wrote: "That I have been preceded by Thomson, is a consideration of a more serious kind. He, no doubt, with a genius and felicity which none of his followers need ever hope to equal, has described many of the most striking appearances of Nature, and many of the most poetical processes, so to speak, of husbandry. But though he has reaped, why may not others be permitted to glean?" Coming so late as 1809, after most of Wordsworth's significant work was done, this remark is an impressive tribute to Thomson's popularity. diction. Expressions like "such flights to hinder, nought conduces more," "hyacinthine rods Enwreathed with azure bells," "each 1 gaudy chaliced bloom," "surpassing far the medicated cup," 1 sound more like 1726 than 1809. It is probably from Thomson, also, that Grahame took the unusual compound epithets which are sprinkled copiously through his last three volumes. Along with such compounds, the absurd periphrases that deface The Seasons find their way not only into the British Georgics but into the genuinely poetic passages of the Birds of Scotland. To the words "powder," "gun," and "shot" Grahame seems to have had a real aversion, using instead "the explosive grain," "the murderous tube," "the two-fold tube, formed for a double death," "the leaden viewless shower, Vollied from flashing tube," and "the leaden bolt, Slung from the mimic lightning's nitrous wing.' 3 The influence of Milton on Grahame's work may be inferred from what has been said of the several pieces. In the nature passages and in the earlier, simpler poems- the Rural Calendar, The Sabbath, and Sabbath Walks- there is little, often nothing, to remind one of Paradise Lost, although The Sabbath does contain such expressions as "in peace they home resort," "be pictur'd bright To latest times,' "had pow'rless struck Th' infatuate monarch"; and the Rural Calendar opens with the lines, Long ere the snow-veiled dawn, the bird of morn His wings quick claps, and sounds his cheering call. The later works, however, which are more formal in manner, recall Milton clearly though never strongly. Even the descriptive parts often show his influence: Long ere the wintry gusts, with chilly sweep, Sigh through the leafless groves, the swallow tribes, Or clustering sit, as if in deep consult What time to launch; but, lingering, they wait, Until the feeble of the latest broods Have gathered strength, the sea-ward path to brave. 1 Pages 133, 134, 135, 141. Similar expressions which recall Thomson and his followers are to be found in the Birds of Scotland and Africa Delivered. In the former, for example, we have "clinging supine, to deal the air-gleaned food" (p. 65), and "single drops, Prelusive of the shower" (p. 66). 2 Here are five that occur within twelve lines, "cassia-perfumed," "deep-logged," "stern-emblazoned," ," "carnage-freighted," "ocean-buried” (Birds of Scotland, p. 80). 3 British Georgics, p. 159; Rural Calendar (September); Birds of Scotland, pp. 12, 40, 84. 4 Pages 15, 17. Amid November's gloom, a morn serene Although the unusual compound epithets, the grandiose diction into which, as we have seen, Grahame occasionally slipped, and the parenthetical expressions of which he is fond were of course derived ultimately from Paradise Lost, he may have adopted them unconsciously from other eighteenth-century poets. For, though he borrowed several of Milton's very phrases, it is doubtful if he was directly influenced by him to any appreciable extent. 2 We have now followed the long blank-verse descriptive poem from its birth in Cyder and The Seasons through the first decade of the nineteenth century. Here, singularly enough, it disappears. No important long poem, rimed or unrimed, the main purpose of which is to describe nature, seems to have been published since 1810. Scattered survivals there undoubtedly are, like the few green leaves that may struggle from the trunk of an old tree; but these do not indicate any real vitality. The type is dead, or rather it has been absorbed into other types and broken up into shorter poems. Wordsworth's verse illustrates the change; for, while it includes many sonnets and other short pieces that picture the out-of-doors, and while 1 Birds of Scotland, p. 67; British Georgics, p. 213. 2 For example, "the . . . plough-boy singing, blythe" (Rural Calendar, March, cf. Allegro, 63-5); "from morn to dewy eve" (Birds of Scotland, p. 65, cf. P. L., i. 742–3); "bloomy sprays" (Sabbath, p. 27, cf. sonnet to the nightingale, line 1). * Five other descriptive pieces that I have seen should be mentioned, although they make little or no attempt to picture the out-of-doors: E. Cooper's Bewdley (1759, a rambling, tedious piece concerned chiefly with "the harmless, charming fair," which borrows several phrases from Milton), Charles Dunster's St. James's Street (1790), Charles Lucas's Old Serpentine Temple of the Druids (1795), R. C. Dallas's Kirkstall Abbey (1797), and William Holloway's Scenes of Youth (1803). There is also consideraable description (usually of obvious beauties expressed in stilted language) in blankverse poems that will be considered in subsequent chapters, for example, in Blair's Grave (1743), J. G. Cooper's Power of Harmony (1745), and James Foot's Penseroso (1771), which are noticed below under Philosophical Poetry. A number of later pieces of some length in Miltonic blank verse I have passed over, because, as they seem to be dull, conventional, and without a strong love of nature, they apparently contributed nothing to the development of descriptive poetry, but knowing them only from reviews I may not do them justice: an anonymous Ride and Walk through Stourhead (1779); "Mr." Robinson's Prize of Venus, or Killarney Lake (1786); William Greenwood's Poem written during a Shooting Excursion on the Moors (1787); the anonymous Address to Loch Lomond (1788, perhaps by James Cririe) and Morning Walk (1792); Thomas Cole's Life of Hubert (1795-7," a narrative, descriptive, and didactic poem"); John Jackson's Gils-land Wells (1797); Brian Broughton's Six Picturesque Views in North Wales (1801); James Cririe's Scottish Scenery (1803). For the reviews in which they are noticed, see Bibliography I, under the several dates. |
