Page:The Californian volume 1,issue 2.djvu/67

 of a surface-writer—a trickster; and we hesitate before admitting the charge of over-expres- sion. In his charming lines, “The Prevalence of Poetry,” Percival declares decidedly to the contrary. Speaking of the charms of nature over his youth, he uses this language:

"These I saw And felt to madness; but my full heart gave No utterance to the ineffable within. Words were too weak—they were unknown; but still The feeling was most poignant: it has gone; And all the deepest flow of sounds that e’er Pour'd in a torrent-fullness from the tongue Rich with the wealth of ancient bards, and stored With all the patriarchs of British song, Hallow'd and rendered glorious, can not tell Those feelings which have died to live no more.”

If any of our poets are to go free of the im- plication of sentimentalism, vapidity, and trink- et-music, we think the one under consideration should be among the first. The exuberance of his imagination and the fineness of his feeling, which amounted at times to frenzy, set forth in marvelously skilled though often intricate lan- guage, has been the means of so much misun- derstanding of poor Percival. A writer for whom we have respect treats him merely as the champion of fancy: “His imagination, con- sidered as a shaping faculty, is not so great as Dana’s, Longfellow’s, and perhaps Bryant’s; but in fancy he excels them all.”

“Centre of light and energy! Thy way Is through the unknown void: thou hast thy throne Morning and evening and at noon of day, Far in the blue, untended and alone: Ere the first wakened airs of earth had blown, Or thou didst march, triumphant in thy light; Then thou didst send thy glance, which still hath flown Wide through the never-ending worlds of night. And yet thy full orb burns with flash as keen and bright.”

Who remembers this characteristic poem will think last of such a little word as fancy.

Percival is not the poet of the many; he wrote as he lived, aloof from the things that

men know best. Poetry was a world in itself to him, and he traveled it with the free tread of the philosopher. We can not do better than to quote from his preface to “Clio”:

“Poetry should be a sacred thing, not to be thrown away on the dull and low realities of life. It should live only with those feelings and imaginations which are above this world, and are the anticipation of a brighter and better being. It should be the creator of a sublimity undebased by anything earthly, and the embodier of a beauty that mocks at all defilement and de- cay. It should be, in fine, the historian of human nature in its fullest possible perfection, and the painter of all those lines and touches in earth and heaven which nothing but taste can see and feel. There can be but one extrava- gance in poetry: it is to clothe, feeble concep- tions in mighty language.”

Then follows a sentence that epitomizes our own ideas upon this point:

’ “But if the mind can keep pace with the pen, if the fancy can fill and dilate the words it sum- mons to array its images, ”o matter how high its flights, how seemingly wild it reaches, the soul that can rise will follow with pleasure, and find in the harmony of its own emotions with the high creations around it the surest evidence that such things are not distempered ravings, and that in the society of beings so pure and exalted it is good to be present.”

We are well aware that Percival revised too little, but no more assured of it than he was himself:

“It is altogether impossible for me to gain anything from my poems, nor is it my wish to do so; for I really do not wish things that were thrown off so hastily to be republished, however much of unformed and unfashioned genius they may contain. In all the mass of poetry that I have printed, there is not a single article that was not written hastily and published without anything like a careful revision—some of them almost exactly word for word as they were first conceived.”

Nevertheless, as we read his poems, we often recall the writer's answer, at another time, con- cerning his lack of care: “Minerva sprang from the brain of Jupiter a finished goddess at her birth.”

We apprehend that the grand difficulty with Percival, after all, is, that he sees too much po- etry. The dullest reality turns a shining side to his ever-open eyes: and where the object lacks in beauty, he throws over it the splendid coloring of his imagination. His very gaze is a creation; and the longer he holds his dreamy eye upon the place, the wider and more magnifi- cent the vision becomes, until language exhausts itself in the attempt to follow. Sentences find no end, and the reader is lost in a blazing whirl of words. But he would have been equally con- fused had he seen the vision himself; the diffi- culty lies not in the portrayal. The poet gives you the key to his mystery:

‘‘The world is full of poetry—the air Is living with its spirit; and the waves Dance to the music of its melodies, And sparkle in its brightness. Earth is veiled, And mantled with its beauty; and the walls That close the universe with crystal in