Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/132

126 literature of the day, and doubt that it is not the want of poetic subjects, but only the rarity of the minds fitted to treat those subjects poetically which limits our poetry; nor, again, that there have been few periods, — except those rare periods of poetical productiveness, when nations have seemed to discover in themselves a new energy and freedom and a new gift of speech for translating it into words, — when there have been, even relatively to the increasing number of the inarticulate masses, so many endowed with some poetic gifts, and able so to sing, that men delight to hear them, and live more genuinely for hearing them.

Here, for instance, lies before us a new illustration of the adaptation of the present age for poetry, whenever it can produce a living interpreter of its wants and feelings and perceptions. We refer to a little volume of poems by Edward Dowden, which has just appeared, and which, we venture to say, no true critic will read through without discovering in it, in greater or less degree, according to the measure of his own faculty, the criteria of true poetry, nor yet without acknowledging that it is poetry which has sprung straight out of the very surface of modern thoughts and emotions. Mr. Dowden is, we believe, himself a fine critic. At all events, he is deeply saturated with all the currents of thought most familiar to our modern critics. Poetically, we should speak of him as formed in the school of Wordsworth, amongst whose very finest sonnets some of Mr. Dowden's might well be classed, without the separate origin of the authorship being discovered by any one who judged by internal evidence only. But this is not surprising, for Wordsworth has entered thus vitally into all the more thoughtful minds of our day. His mode of appreciating nature has educated modern England, till it has become almost a mark of alien culture not merely not to understand his poems, but not to speak his peculiar language. Again, Mr. Dowden has entered deeply into all the speculative questions which are of far later origin than the Wordsworthian age. "Darwinism" haunts him in his poetic reverie; he has sounded the weakness of democracy, and yet has a secret admiration for the naked power of the people's will; he studies the attitudes of Eastern fanaticism with the same kind of deep speculative interest with which he describes the gambols of the swallows; with the true modern eye for what is characteristic whether of spiritual or natural states, he paints with equal care the spinning dervish and the prim fledgings of the swallow's nest; again, from the intensity of that deep and dreamy devotion which is natural to a metaphysical age, he carries us into the strait and frigid conventionalism of the modern young lady's savoir-faire; and last, though not least, with the delight of the present day of complex interests in the large and simple subjects of ancient legend, he treats a certain number of the great classical themes in the mode most natural to a modern who appreciates perfectly the antique point of view, but reflects it with all the special emphasis of one who at heart contrasts it with a very different modern view, of which the ancient world knew nothing. In all these various regions Mr, Dowden shows a true poetic touch, which we do not say will win him a permanent place in English literature, — for that he must do more and loom larger on the mind of the present distracted generation than this little volume would accomplish for him, — but which we do venture to say is of the kind to win him such a place, if he can produce more volumes as pure and rare and delicate in flavor as this is. Take, for instance, this delicate sonnet on "Ascetic Nature," suggested by a most characteristic Irish scene: —    No one not a true poet could have written that line, "The abashed yet lit expectance of the whole." It is a line condensing a whole world of observation and emotion into one exquisite phrase. How true, too, is the appreciation of the most perfect phase of Irish scenery in this sonnet, — that subdued and pale, not to say pallid lustre, which seems to borrow something from "the melancholy ocean," but much