Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 28, 2025
But he wrote some polished and pleasant verse, which was vigorous by the side of Hayley and "correct" by the side of Keats. In literature he has very little interest; in literary history he has some.
Passing from the ethereal music of the Scottish ploughman and the English painter, from Cowper's noble or gentle thought and his accomplished versification, from Crabbe's manly vigour and his Rembrandt touch, we find nothing, unless it be the ingenious but not strictly poetical burlesque of the Wolcots and the Lawrences, till we come to the drivel of Hayley and the drought of Darwin.
Nor is it difficult to imagine that the bland and trivial Hayley, perpetually kind, patronizing, and obvious, should, without any definite provocation, become presently insufferable to such a man as Blake. Returned to London, he resumed the production of his oracular works, "prophetic books," he called them.
"Yes, I suppose he will." And then the two ladies, looking at one another, smiled one of those funny little smiles which may mean a great deal, or nothing at all. James Hayley, the son of one of Mrs. Otway's first cousins, was in the Foreign Office; and if he had an inordinate opinion of himself and of his value to his country, he was still a very good, steady fellow.
He writes sonnets to Miss Seward, and Mr. Hayley; enough to stamp him 'blockhead. Carlisle and I, instead of our neighbours' 'Revolutionary Tribunal, mean to erect a physiognomical one, and as transportation is to be the punishment, instead of guillotining, we shall put the whole navy in requisition to carry off all ill-looking fellows, and then we may walk London streets without being jostled.
Hayley was become fond of seeing occasional visitors, and that Earl and Countess Paulett, and Lady Mary Paulett, as well as Lord and Lady Mayo, and Mr. and Mrs. T. Smith, were frequent callers on him that year. The Miss Godfreys were also his guests and with them I occasionally paid visits, but for the most part our life was as unvaried as it was in 1814 and 1815.
You may see the same law showing itself in the brief periods of glory which make the names of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with reflected splendors; in the painters, the sculptors, the scholars of "Leo's golden days"; in the authors of the Elizabethan time; in the poets of the first part of this century following that dreary period, suffering alike from the silence of Cowper and the song of Hayley.
floating with the utmost self-complacence down the smooth current of his time; and Blake, sensitive, unique, protestant, impracticable, aggressive: it was a rare freak of Fate that brought about such companionship; yet so true courtesy was there that for four years they lived and wrought harmoniously together, Hayley pouring out his harmless wish-wash, and Blake touching it with his fiery gleam.
'I walked from one cottage to the other on an autumn evening when the vagrant birds, whose habit of assembling there for their annual departure, gives, I suppose, its name of Swallowfield to the village, were circling over my head, and I repeated to myself the pathetic lines of Hayley as he saw those same birds gathering upon his roof during his last illness:
Mason the poet commemorated Lady Coventry's death in a long elegy, which had some repute in those days, when even Hayley was called a poet. They are dawdling and dulcified to a deplorable degree.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking