Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/186

172 the Cæsarean operation; but actual and tangible horrors do not belong to poetry. We do not exhibit George Barnwell upon the ladder to affect the gallery now, as was originally done; and the best picture of Apollo flaying Marsyas, or of the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, would be regarded as more disgusting than one of a slaughter-house or of a dissecting-room." Yet who has read the "City of the Plague," and felt aught of this disgust? or has not, indeed, rather felt that the poet was almost unwisely chary of the effects within his command? It is neither objective nor subjective enough. It wants the movement and action and circumstance which Byron or Scott would have given it; and, on the other hand, it is unredeemed by that pervading reflective element, that moral emphasis, that philosophy at once divine and humane, with which Wordsworth would, or might, have consecrated such a theme.

Of the Professor's other poems, "Unimore," and "An Evening in Furness Abbey," are the most admired. The "Lays from Fairyland" are attuned to the dreamy music which had such a charm for him; echo strains of which he"The Angler's Tent" may be well pitched, but it must strike before the prose advent of Christopher under Canvass. Among the minor poems, the most effective, perhaps, is the "Address to a Wild Deer," in which the minstrel shows himself fit laureate to that "king of the wild and the beautiful," whose throne is piled high and lone "o'er the black silent forest," and whose "bold antlers call on the hunter afar with a haughty defiance," and whose feet, that leave the laggardly gaze-hound toiling behind, "draw power from the touch of the heath," as they touch it and no more.

That in any one instance Professor Wilson produced a poem such as it was in his power to write, one may reasonably doubt. He seems never to have screwed his energy to the sticking-point—else (surely else) he'd not fail. But in all his compositions he would appear to have been very much the creature of impulse, and perhaps loved and was proud to have it so. Years that matured the philosophic mind, and disciplined his intellectual and moral being, might have altered the case; but 'tis now futile to discuss this potential mood. He said of himself when at his prime, "We love to do our work by fits and starts. We hate to keep fiddling away, an hour or two at a time, at one article for weeks. So, off with our coat, and at it like a blacksmith. When we once get the way of it, hand over hip, we laugh at Vulcan and all his Cyclops. From nine of the morning till nine at night, we keep hammering away at the metal, iron or gold, till we produce a most beautiful article. A biscuit and a glass of Madeira, twice or thrice at the most,—and then to a well-won dinner. In three days, gentle reader, have We, Christopher North, often produced a whole Magazine—a most splendid Number. For the next three weeks we were as idle as a desert, and as vast as an antre—and thus on we go, alternately labouring like an ant, and relaxing, in the sunny air, like a dragon-fly, enamoured of extremes,"—nor does he omit in the same breath a rattling outbreak against "your regular people," smug and smooth "wretches," who go out and come in to a minute, and are well to do in the world, and get "Maga" from a circulating library when she is a