Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/237

Rh own prosaic uses—can employ on the roads, and drive in a dray, the horse whose neck is clothed with thunder, the glory of whose nostrils is terrible, whose home is among the trumpets, at which he saith, Ha, ha, while scenting afar off the battle, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting. Teachers and moralists the world cannot do without; but it can do without them in metre and rhyme—it can do better without them there. Morals are better than metre, it is true; and reason is higher than rhyme; but the metre is not apt to improve by junction with the morals, as their dogmatic medium; nor are the rhymes built up in loftier proportions by being pressed into the service of austere reason. True, again, that the ancients sang what they had to teach—sang a system of politics, of cosmology, of husbandry; but equally true, surely, that their poetry in such instances was poetical in spite of being didactic, not in virtue of it. Virgil, with his "Georgics," is a standing case in point—and so in later times, we have "poets" (by courtesy) who have chanted the process of making cider, and the art of preserving health.

Oar living songsters of "Progress" may wear their rue with a difference. They profess to counsel and teach; but, it is to be allowed, they profess to do so by appeals to the heart of man, to the sensitive, the poetical aide of his nature. Nevertheless, they do manage, very frequently, to overlook the distinction as aforesaid "'twixt singing and preaching"—and to adopt for their singing-robes a black gown, cassock, and bands. If Mr. Lowell affects such drapery a little too often, he is certainly less boring in his "improvement of the subject" than most of the "Missionary" college, as he is certainly their superior, for the most part, in thought, culture, and voice. And then he is anything but restricted to this line of things; he is not tongue-tied, but rather enlivened and inspired anew, if you take him out of his pulpit, and set him on the greensward, or clap him in the critic's arm-chair: whereas the of "Progress" aspirants to a degree are exclusively intent on making out the Q. E. D. of their one proposition, and are infallibly plucked to a man if you "set them on" anywhere else. Earnest and energetic in his higher moods, Mr. Lowell is sometimes whimsical and trifling even to flippancy; and can indulge in prolonged passages of persiflage, hard to be reconciled with good taste, and often calculated (though by no design on his part) to needlessly offend good feeling. His impatience of whatever appears to him narrow in creed and false in life, impels him to an instant denunciation of it in scorn that uses the first words that come—in scorn that will bate no jot or tittle of its first unchastened impulses. His sympathy with the "Progress" people who oppose capital punishment, while it at one time finds grave (and rather heavy) expression in a series of sonnets, whose strain is meant to be a counterblast to Wordsworth's, at another time sings about folk beginningand wonders how the "saints" who anathematise waltz and quadrille as Satan's own fee-simple, can suppose that He "whose judgments are stored