Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 046.djvu/167

1839.] may say with truth and beauty that his hope 'lights its torch at nature's funeral pile,' inasmuch as the prior conflagration of the earth is a necessary condition of his felicity. But the poet is not speaking here of the grounds of a present hope—he is celebrating the duration of the sentiment itself—and in doing this he has converted the hope of immortality into an immortal hope. The expectation of an eternal life cannot surely be said to survive when that eternal life has itself commenced. The hope of immortality passes away with that terrestrial scene which it cheered and illuminated; it does fade, for it is lost in fruition; and, instead of lighting 'her torch at nature's funeral pile,' Hope might with more accuracy have been represented as throwing her now useless torch upon that pile, to be consumed with the rest of the world to which it belonged."

There is something, but very little, in the remark on, "when soul to soul, and dust to dust return"—so let it pass—not without due commendation of the critic's acuteness; but we cannot allow to pass the elaborate attempt to demolish the glorious close of the poem. It is a complete failure, as a few words will show. The poet has not "converted the hope of immortality into an immortal hope." The critic has blindly fallen into several mistakes—and, in the first place, he has attached to the word "eternal" a meaning which, in this passage, it does not bear. Hope is rightly said by Campbell to be "eternal," because it began with the music of the spheres, and continued amid their ruins. All poetry is full of such passionate exaggerations—and we could cite a thousand instances where this very word "eternal" is applied to transitory objects at the very moment of their extinction. Let one suffice: Young, when describing the Last Day, says,

Further and emphatically—"The expectation of an eternal life cannot surely be said to survive when that eternal life has itself commenced." But it has not commenced—"Nature's funeral pile" is a-blaze, but it is not yet consumed; if it were, Hope could not light her torch in the dead ashes. Time still is—and the material universe; and "Heaven's last thunder shakes the world below." Hope, undismayed amid the "wrack of matter and the crash of worlds," smiles serenely as Faith. But she is not yet lost in fruition—

and Hope is Hope, though on the verge of heaven.

Expunged, therefore, be these words—"Hope might with more accuracy have been represented as throwing her now useless torch upon that pile, to be consumed with the rest of the world to which it belonged." The refutation of all that the critic has been saying, lies in these his own words—"to be consumed." While there is life there is Hope. Hope is Hope as long as she has a hand to hold a torch—or a torch to be held;—to fling it into the fire would have been the act of—Despair.

A word with John A. Heraud, Esq., author of "The Oration on Coleridge," &c. &c. In a "Lecture on Poetic Genius as a Moral Power," delivered at the " Institution," occurs this portentous paragraph:

"We have now to do with the poets who exercise activity. Being, we have said, must act—in the neuter and passive, we have detected its eternal operation. But it operates in Time also, and is diligent in reference to sensible ultimates. It is here that the third class of poets are active. and  and  are anxious only for the sensuous form—the channel of expression, in which their thoughts shall flow. They prefer Act in its lowest spheres to Being in any. Unconscious of the neuter, and despising the passive, they interpose a set form of speech, and, to do them justice, never dream of publishing themselves for men inspired. If they approach the purlieus of the Eternal and the Ideal, they are sure to blunder. Hence Campbell, at the conclusion of his poem, lights the torch of Hope at nature's funeral pyre—an error of which any theologian might have admonished him. False and injurious predicator of a State when Faith shall be lost in sight, and in which Hope can have no part; since Hope requires Time for its condition, and has no place in Eternity! Such poets as these, are the votaries