Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/62

 42 NOTES AND QUERIES. [9th s. iv. JULY is, m Nor has the black remembrance left their Breast, How our 5' Harry to their Paris prest, Whilst France wept blood for their hot Dauphin's jest. Wee forc'd their Cavalry, their foot t'orerun, As Tides withstood bear their own billows down. Such was the virtue of our Ancestors, And such on just resentment shall be ours, Our temperd Valor just pretence requires. As flints are struck, before they shew their fires. C. H. FIRTH. COLERIDGE AND THE POET YOUNG. AMONGST the relics of Coleridge in the British Museum is a note-book (Add. MS. 27,901), consisting mostly of loose snatches of verse and prose thrown off at odd times and harvested for future use in poem or essay. Out of this volume, the contents of which belong to the years 1795-8, Prof. Alois Brandl (' Coleridge and the English Romantic School,' translated by Eastlake, 1887, pp. 105,145) has cited one or two critical aphorisms (infra 1, 2); and these have also, along with a few other jottings from the same source (infra 3, 4), been printed as original Coleridgiana by the poets grandson, Mr. E. H. Coleridge ('Anima Poetse,' pp. 4, 6):— 1. " [The ode should be] peculiar, not far-fetched; natural, but not obvious; delicate, not affected; dignified, not swelling; fiery, but not mad ; rich in imagery, but not loaded with it—in short, a union of harmony and good sense, of perspicuity and con- ciseness. Thought is the body of such an ode, enthusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery." 2. " Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, may be cowed into dulness." 3. "Snails of intellect, who see only by their feelers." See also 'Table Talk and Omniana,' Bohn, 1884, art. 'Magnanimity,' p. 368. 4. " Pygmy minds, measuring others by their own standard, cry, What a monster, when they view a man 1" These fragments are not, however, Cole- ridge's at all. They are what the sorry punster himself would have called Juvenilia, i.e., plums picked out of a very lively and pregnant 'Discourse on Lyric Poetry' which that robustious rhymster Dr. Edward Young published in 1728 by way of preface to a furiously inflated panegyric of George II., entitled ' Ocean : an Ode, concluding with a Wish.' In December, 1796, while employed with his ' Ode on the Departing Year, Cole- ridge seems to have projected an introductory essay on the lyric style ; and it was, no doubt, with this end in view that he transcribed, or, more properly, rewrote, these extracts from Young s ' Discourse.' But illness, anxiety, and discomfort intervened, and the ode ultimately appeared without any other pre- face than the pathetic dedicatory letter to Poole, reprinted by Mr. Dykes Campbell (' Poetical Works,' 1893, p. 586). The passages recast by Coleridge run as follows in the original (' Works' of Young, ed. Doran, 1854, vol. i. p. 414) :— 1. "The ode should be peculiar, but not strained; moral, but not flat; natural, but not obvious; de- licate, but not affected ; noble, but not ambitious ; full, but not obscure; fiery, but not mad; thick, but not loaded in its numbers, which should be most harmonious, without the least sacrifice of expression or of sense Thought is the body, enthusiasm the soul, picture the robe of Poetry." 2. " A poem, like a criminal, undar too severe correction, may lose all its spirit and expire." 4. "Dwarf understandings, measuring others by their own standard, are apt to think they see a monster, when they see a man." No. 3 (supra) seems to have been suggested by the first of the two following sentences:— " Men of cold complexions are very apt to mis- take a want of vigour in their imaginations for a delicacy of taste; and, like persons of a tender sight, they look on bright objects in their natural lustre as too glaring—what is delightful to a stronger eye is painful to them. Thus Pindar, who has as much logic at the bottom as Aristotle or Euclid, to some critics has appeared as mad; and must appear so to all who enjoy no portion of his own divine spirit." This last sentence Coleridge, mm-e suo, amplifies in a letter to W. Sotheby, 10 Sept., 1802 ('Letters of S. T. C.,' 1895, vol. i. p. 404): " Young, somewhere in one of his prose works, observes that there is as profound a logic in the most daring and dithyrambic parts of Pindar as in the ' Organou' of Aristotle. The remark is a valu- able one." The thought reappears in 'Biographia Literaria,' chap. i.:— "I learnt from him [Rev. James Boyer] that poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly wildest odes, had a logic of its own as severe as that of science." Of Edward Young, the singer, no less than of Dr. Young, the eminent divine and Court chaplain, it must be said that his principles were sounder than his practice. That the author of the shrewd maxims of the 'Dis- course' should have been found capable of the sheer bluster of ' Ocean : an Ode,' must ever remain a psychological puzzle. For, as a lyrist, Young is comparable only to Nick Bottom, the weaver. Take a specimen of Nick's lyre :— The raging rocks And shivering shocks Shall break the locks of prison-gates; And Phibbus' car Shall shine from far, And make and mar the foolish Fates. Now let his reverence take up the strain (amant alterna Camenas):—