Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/579

 12 s. vii. DEC. ii, i92o.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

479

Campbell owns that he had the more part of his particulars from Paul Calton, Esq., of Milton, near Abingdon, Berks, who married a daughter of the Vice-Admiral. May I ask your correspondent if he has authority for his statement as to Benbow's share of the prize-money ?

W. P. H. POLLOCK.

AUTHOR OF QUOTATION WANTED. (12 S. vii. 170.)

3. LEXICON does not quote the lines quite cor- rectly. Taking them from the " Riverside Edition '' (London, 1886) of the works of H. VV. Longfellow, vol. vii. pp. 35-6, I transcribe them thus :

The things that have been and shall be no more, The things that are, and that hereafter shall be, The things that might have been, and yet are not, The fading twilight of great joys departed, The daybreak of great truths as yet unrisen, The intuition and the expectation Of something, which, when come, is not the same, But only like its forecast in men's dreams, The longing, the delay, and the delight Sweeter for the delay ; youth, hope, love, death, And disappointment, which is also death, All these make up the sum of human life.

For anyone who has not access to Longfellow's works in this edition, I may add that the passage is the opening of Manahem's soliloquy in ' Chrisbus : a Mystery: The Divine Tragedy: The First Passover : III. The Marriage in Cana.'

JOHN B. WAINEWRIOHT.

0tt

John Clare : Poems chiefly from Manuscript. Selected arid Edited by Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter. (Cobden Sanderson, 10s. Qd. net).

THIS work has been expected with no small degree of interest, and lovers of poetry will find that it fulfils their expectation. Mr. Blunden relates, with a certain sober < harm of style, the already oft-told story of John Clare's life. The sentimentality of the nineteenth century had invested it with "a melancholy somewhat too dark and heroic. Martin's book, in particular, is so highly coloured that it produces the effect of fiction. Mr. Blunden, after conscientiously working over considerable masses of material, reduces the un- deniable sorrowfulness of Clare's lot to something which moves witlnn the bounds of ordinary ex- perience and is less discreditable to his family and acquaintance. He does not, however, brirg out what to us seems the most poignant feature of Clare's unhappiness, the misery of being half-helped. He made many friends, many of whom helped him a little : but the sum of their aid, which must neces- sarily spur him to continue his poetry, its cause and object, and at the same time lay him under chafing obligation, was never sufficient to give him freedom from the lowliest and most elementary cares. He would not have been a poet, he would scarcely have

been human, if these few pounds a year, dropped as bounty upon him, had not seemed to him an earnest of something better, an illustration of the means and opportunities of more fortunate men. The half- helped are indeed Tantalus : justly the objects of a special compassion.

There is every reason to believe that the autho- rities of the asylum where he spent so many years dealt kindl> with him, and that his insanity itself was in general a mild disorder : and, this bekig so, we may plausibly enough conjecture that what appeared confinement was, in effect, a deliverance and a mercy. His full power as a poet could not be retrieved ; but much of it survived and dis- played itself in modes often curiously graceful ; and at any rate the burden of life had rolled from his shoulders.

We are told that over two thousand poems by Clare were considered and compared in making the selection for the present volume. Ninety are here printed for the first time, and they, together with what is fresh in the introductory life form ar> important addition to our knowledge of the poet. The poems will be found to reinforce previous judgments of Clare's work and the more accurate Life to explain these more fully.

John Clare had a superb poetical gift. He saw things as a poet sees them : and he could put forth what he saw with a force and facility and exactness characteristic of really great pdetry. His sense for life and reality was acute : what his mind once- seized it seized in its entirety and possessed by an extraordinarily vivid visualisation. His verse has melody, music, as well as colour. There is a story, not mentioned by Mr. Blunder), that he first came to love poetry as a mere babe by hearing some lines out of a child's book read aloud to him by his father ; the rhyme and the fall of the verse exciting him with pleasure. Readers of Martin's book will remember that the father, Parker Clare, was the son of a village girl by a rather mysterious stranger whose character and life, if we knew more of them, might further explain John Clare.

Clare's rustic vocabulary is sweet and exceedingly rich. His rustic detail brings all the movement and all the people and animals and vegetation of the countryside before one. What he gives us, that is to say, is t he knowledge, observation, memory of a country- boy. The poet's faculty great enough, as we believe, in itself for any theme and any achievement never stayed its working. But bodily fatigue, crushing and continual, mal- nutrition, the pressure of domestic anxieties, made it impossible for it to wrestle with any new subject, or express any deep-going thought. Echoes from his reading play abundantly in and out of his verse, but otherwise all he has strength to use would seem to be that country knowledge which was imbibed so well in his earliest years that it is present to him without an effort.

A certain poverty of intellectual content, a lack of any sufficient ulterior reference, deprive John Clare's poetry of the claim to greatness. It is not to be Vielieved that, in this respect, it represents his full mind; on the contrary, there is reason to attribute to him both high intellectual capacity and a certain intellectual cultivation. The pathos of his lot is that, through bodily hardship, he could but seldom force his deepest insight into