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Updated: June 18, 2025
I opened the poems at the enchanting stanzas, "Lonesome woodlands! zunny woodlands!" and was transported. In a moment I realised that for me a new foot was on the earth, a new name come down from Heaven. I read and read, and can still remember how the exquisite rhythm of "Woak Hill" was swept into my mind, to make there an impression which will never be obliterated while life lives in my brain.
Michelet said, "My heart is full of her;" Balzac wrote a drama at her solicitation; Lamartine, taking to himself a published compliment which she had intended for another, replied with twenty beautiful stanzas; Victor Hugo wrote to her, "You are poetry itself;" Mademoiselle Mars, when past the age of public favor, took from her the plain counsel to retire with kindness and actual thanks; Dumas wrote a preface for her; Madame Recamier obtained her pension; the brilliant Sophie Gay, now Madame Émile de Girardin, wrote of her poetry, "How could one depict better the luxury of grief?"
We find here, instead of sympathy with ordinary and universal feelings, warmth for the abstract and unreal, or, when the poet's own unrest prompts, as in the "Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples," a strain of lamentation which sounds like a passionate sigh. Instead of clearness of thinking, we find an indistinctness which sometimes amounts to the unintelligible.
He was anxious to give his rugged compositions the elegance and suavity of academical versification. He wished also to defend his character from the imputation of immorality. Therefore he rearranged the order of stanzas in the longer poems, pieced fragments together, changed whole lines, ideas, images, amplified and mutilated, altered phrases which seemed to him suspicious.
The following simple stanzas, selected from a number written about the time, express, in humble rhymes, the melancholy that preyed upon her spirits: "Farewell to thee, Newstead, thy time-riven towers, Shall meet the fond gaze of the pilgrim no more; No more may she roam through thy walks and thy bowers. Nor muse in thy cloisters at eve's pensive hour.
It was at this point that Maxwell felt himself constrained to give his protege a few words of advice, the city editor having objected to an enforced hearing of the plot of Ivanhoe, and Mollie Merk having admitted that she had climbed six flights of stairs twice a day for a week in preference to hearing the final eighteen stanzas of Paradise Lost.
Bennoch has sent you some stanzas on Ireland, which have more of the very highest qualities of Beranger than I have ever seen in English verse. We who love him shall have to be very proud of dear Mr. Bennoch. Tell me, too, if our solution of the line, "A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind," was the first; and why the new President is at once called General and talked of as a civilian.
In these four lines, taken almost at random from the "Heroic Stanzas," we have an epitome of the thought, the preciseness, and the polish that mark all his literary work. This poem made Dryden well known, and he was in a fair way to become the new poet of Puritanism when the Restoration made a complete change in his methods.
That last entry shows that he felt that the end was near at hand. "Has the time come?" he asks, and then quotes seven stanzas from James Montgomery's "What is Prayer?", adding four stanzas of his own. Just eleven months to a day before the last entry, under date of May 30, 1850, Hone commented on the swiftly changing aspect of the city.
Moved by the remembrance of his friend, and by the sad beauty of his own poetry, his eyes were filled with tears, and when he had done reciting the stanzas he said, in a tone of touching simplicity,'Ditemi il vero, si puo air meglio'? I answered that he alone had the right to believe it impossible.
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