A HALF-POET AND A PSEUDO-POET.*

NEITHER of these books indicates any very conspicuous merit. The latter of them is, as Lord John Russell says, conspicuous by its ab- sence, nay, conspicuous by the presence of demerit. Mr. A.she's poems contain much pleasant verse with a poetic flavour, Mr. Maunsell's much disagreeable rhyme with a prosaic twang. We place them to- gether and make them the subjects of a joint review, rather because the comparison of them may help to make clear the finer shades by which poetry rises above, and counterfeit verse sinks below, prose, than because they are in themselves likely to demand or receive any very elaborate commentary.

It has often been observed that a poet's nature has, to some extent, necessarily a certain weakness and impressionability of con- stitution without which it would scarcely be a poet's nature at all. The exceptions to the rule are a few great and lonely minds like Wordsworth's, self-sufficient, or else easily satisfied as regards all human sympathy, whose poetry expresses their own character and solitary meditation instead of reflecting the living world around them. Hardy and masculine poetry such as theirs is fed solely on the ori- ginality of their own natures, but poetry of this kind is exceed- ingly rare. In general, all true poetry shows a marked feminine as well as masculine element, and has for its groundwork and substance that world of undefined and vague impressions which gives the colour and tone to life, though it does not shape our destiny for us. This feminine impressionability, when endowed with voice and conscious- ness, is what we usually call the poetic temperament, notwithstand- ing the fact that there are some powerful and solitary-minded poets who find a noble framework for their thoughts without any aid from the soft and susceptible temperament which usually furnishes out the scenery and the setting of the poet's thoughts. This is what the most masculine and hardy of poets meant when he described the typical poet as essentially " weak"—

" But he is weak—both man and boy

Math been an idler in the land, Contented if he might enjoy

The things which others understand"—

and usually the poetic temperament must be thus far weak, that it must retain far more decisive and deeply marked traces of passing influences than would be consistent with the highest amount of mascu- line strength and capacity. Moving power cannot generally afford to be susceptible; and great susceptibility is usually otherwise exhausted before it can pass into the masculine phase of mental vigour. Hence the groundwork of a poet's mind is usually in some sense feminine, consisting of a more vivid and conscious apprehension of those thin and glimmering impressions and emotions which flit through the background of our minds with little express notice, but with the most profound effect upon what we may call the moral atmosphere of life. But this mere poetic temperament is what a crowd of men and women, especially in youth, can boast in greater or less degree. It is only those who pass some electric spark of masculine fire and force through this chaos of impressions, so as to give it a new order and unity, who can be called poets. Tennyson- describes the access of poetic inspiration with his usual felicity, when he says :

" Old wishes, ghosts of broken plans, And phantom hopes assemble ;

And that child's heart within the man's

Begins to move and tremble."

For true poetry there must be the receptive mind within the origi- nating and masculine mind ; the fine and subtle vibrations of the one must be strictly subordinated to the grasp of a stronger purpose and the march of a freer thought. In almost all true poems there arc undertones of a sensitive and plastic nature, but the measure and the melody is stamped with a clear and comprehensive unity. And this is the distinction between mere poetic temperament anti a true poet —that the former only provides the chaotic raw material of poetry without the creative power, which, breathing over it, turns that which was before "without form and void" into the distinct beauty of earth and sea, evening and morning, man and God.

Of that formless poetry which seems to be instinct with a 'certain plastic delicacy, taking off vaguely but truthfully, so far as it goes, the changing images of passing phenomena, the first volume we have named is a very fair specimen. The verses of Mr. Ashe are, as we have said, uniformly tinged with a certain poetic flavour, carry with them an atmosphere that is deeper, subtler, and softer than the ordi- nary thoughts of ordinary men. If atmosphere alone would make poetry, these verses would be poems. The delicate and softening tints which only the eye of the poet in us can see, are seldom altogether wanting ; but this is all. There is that gentle rippling-of sentiment and thought about the common objects of life which Tennyson speaks of as the tremblings of the child's heart " within the man's," but nothing of the commanding grasp and fire of a • Drpope, and other Poems. By Thomas Ashe. Bell and Daddy.—Powns. iy the Rev. George Edmond MaunselL Smith and Elder. masculine master-tone. The following verses are a fair specimen of what we mean :

" NORTHEN.

" By the water-mills of Northen, Along the willow-walk, In the hubbub of the river-weir, We held pleasant talk.

" It was a sunny afternoon.

It was in the summer weather.

We came a merry party gay ; And we two stroll'd together.

" 0 we two stroll'd together ! And many a word had we To speak at ease light-heartedly, By the mills where none could see.

" The merry party follow'd close. We thought they would discover. So an honest man, the ferryman, Kind-hearted row'd us over.

" We took a boat. She ateer'd the helm.

We two alone went rowing: With easy mind, and a summer wind, And the river slowly flowing: " Running into creeks to get The yellow iris in the reeds ; And paddling round green rushy isles, Where many a moor-hen feeds.

" And dabbling o'er the old boat-side, And singing soft a summer tune, With poet's love, in a little cove, We watch'd the rising harvest moon.

" The moon grew bright. The even fell. Far off we heard the waters fall.

And in the distance now and then We heard our baffled sisters call.

" And with the stream we floated back To the willow walk with little rowing: And sang a quiet evensong As we were homeward going.

" 0 Northen mills! 0 happy mills! 0 the pleasant meeting then! That summer, it will come no more!

We shall not meet again !"

The only passage in which we have discovered something more

than this atmosphere of warm impressionability, is one in which Mr. Ashe gives an impersonation of the Angel of the Plague. His con- ception is vivid and original, for instead of making it a mere demon according to the common notion, he gives us the stern, sad minister of Providence, in the following striking lines. The vision is told by some half-insane dweller in the plague-stricken city.

"As he was skulking by San Stefano's, He seem'd caught up in a wind. He kept his feet: And, turning sudden, slipp'd inside the porch. He did not say what led him lurking there At that late hour; but it was nigh midnight. And muffling up his eyes for fear at first, And squeezing close behind the arch, lie heard A mighty noise of wheels dash round the square. Then, eager to find out the cause, lie aired His valour up, and peeping round a saint, Saw all the space lit up, he says, with wild, Sick, lurid glare, such as you see sometimes Across a cloud, when half a villa bursts In flame at night, conceal'd behind some hill.

Then came a muffled, wailing undersound: And right athwart the steps a chariot Flash'd like an arrow. All the wheels shot fire About the axles. They were black as death: The chariot black. And four white horses whirl'd The wonder ; flying, as he says, with wings That flared like torches, winnowing all the air, And driving it against his face like flame.

And in the chariot, more than human size, Gigantic, stood erect it seem'd a king; Ay, more. And round him flow'd a mystic cloak, Flame-blue, lit up with yellow, sickly spots That glared like eyes: and on his head a crown Of gold rose solemn over long white hair About his shoulders. All his face was dark, But noble, with a terror of resolve Around the eyes, beneath a broad great brow, Half hidden in the crown. He look'd right on, Eager and stern ; and thick beside his car Ran black, swift slaves. It flash'd so full on him, The madman tells, he fell down in the porch ; And when his sense came back the night was still."

Turning to Mr. MaunselPs volume, the only difficulty is to under- stand in his, as in so many other similar cases, whence the impulse to this sort of rhyme can be derived. Usually, the metrical form arises from the desire to express the hidden sense of harmony and unity which every subject of a poet's thought must contain in itself. It corresponds in the temperament of the poet to the solemn order of the universe, the natural music in which divine purpose and law breaks upon the sensitive ear. But in mere rhymers like Mr. Mann- sell, the rhyme is a fresh jar—the screaming bagpipes of a deaf and obtuse mind drowning the little harmony which his themes might occasionally convey to the reader. There are some people who seem to have a barrel-organ nature, which excludes the external harmonies of the universe by its perpetual sing-song grinding of a limited set of tunes. For example, take the following lines. Can any one who has rested under an aged yew-tree in a country churchyard avoid feeling that, instead of expressing the natural thoughts and sentiments to which it gives rise, the Rev. George Edmond Maunsell drives away all the peace and solemnity of the scene with his jingle of shallow commonplaces Y- " THE YEW.

" Old, funereal yew ! How thick thy branches spread Upon their grass-grown graves, The long forgotten dead!

Like to a worn pall waving, And flapping in the wind.

" Old, funereal yew! Thy glories are departed With those thou bendest o'er, The true, the English hearted; Like oars in water laving, That leave no trace behind.

" Old, funereal yew ! Thou still with death find'st grace, Not on the foughten field, But in a bumbler place. O'er time-gnawed bones low bending, And iron scraps rusting red.

" Old, funereal yew Thy spoilers are laid low, Death bath lopped off thy loppers, The bowman feeds the bow And thou, thy wrongs amending Art battening on the dead."

Now, what can be the impulse to write this kind of thing!' and the book before us is full of them. We believe there is in every one of us a false egotistic temper at times, which produces, not perhaps counterfeit poetry of this sort, but the mood in which such counterfeit poetry is produced ; the mood in which we persuade ourselves that the little mill-wheels turning in our brain measure the divine harmonies of the universe of God. Now, the true poet can- not believe this. He knows that the only mood in which he can write poetry, is the mood in which his mind opens into something far wider than himself—in which he takes up a thousand threads of connexion with a world beyond and above him, to which in ordinary moods he is nearly insensible. But the pseudo-poet is perfectly satis- fied, nay, delighted, with the little world within him. The sub- stitute for the poetic stirring of the feminine imagination is in him a rustling of loquacious vanity,—the bubbling desire which we all feel at times to say something of our own on a popular subject. And no substitute is needed for the masculine grasp which in a true poet determines the unity and master-chord of the theme. For the only unity which any mere rhymer can give is the impress of his own narrow apprehension. We all of us must know—if we know ourselves at all—moods, in which the mere stirrings of self-importance lead us to deal with a subject on which we have nothing to say, and necessarily lead us therefore to stamp that subject with the stamp of our own littleness. This is the source of much, we will not say all, poor rhyming,—a fermenting personal egotism :—and the result of it is that we take the measure not of the themes we deal with, but of ourselves. We fear that the Rev. George Edmond Maunsell, who affixes with mild conceit the date to each of his effusions (as though it would in times to come interest his biographers and the world to know when he composed these rhymes), is of the latter class. At least we can find nothing in his volume but the poorest and most turgid common-place. Take the following as one more instance that we are not moved by any impulse of critical ill-nature :

" BLOOD-BLACK WINE.

" Whatever was made, was made for good,

In heaven, in earth, in fire, or flood;

All tumeth to use, or surely should, So, too, doth wine!

Oh I what dost thou say to this word of mine?

Great are the boons of mighty wine, Trickling out from flask or can She maketh glad the heart of man Doth blood-black wine " Is thy ladie kind? Fill up! Love's eye Shineth brighter when wine is nigh: Is she cruel? Fill more! Love's sigh Dies, drowned in wine!

Oh, what dust thou say to this word of mine? Wassail to him who grows the vine! Throwing her ray on friendship's page, She is the friend of every age, Is blood-black winel " Hest thou a friend ? and wouldst thou tell What lies hid in his bosom's cell? • Fill ! truth lurketh not in a well, But in the wine!

Oh, what dost thou say to this word of mine? Truly, true are these words of thine, Wine is a varnish wondrous clear, She maketh all things transparent here, Doth blood-black wine !"

We can only say to this "word" of the Rev. George Edmond Maunsell's, that it is exceedingly idle and foolish, and instead of being, as asserted, transparent, is sadly muddy. We have no pleasure in such criticism, but it is a part of the duty of a newspaper in this loquacious age to point out the vanity and inanity,—though it is a much higher and more important duty to appreciate the beauty and the truth,—of modern literature.