Microsoft Word Byron and Scott 1809-1824
: Quotation unidentified; perhaps a Scott forgery. 129
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128: Quotation unidentified; perhaps a Scott forgery.
129: Quotation unidentified; perhaps another forgery. 130: See DJ II 207, 7. 131: Matthew Prior, Alma, or the Progress of the Mind, Canto III (selections). 132: See DJ XIII, st.37. assumed, it was impossible not to see in the Pilgrim what nature designed him to be, and what, in spite of bad metaphysics and worse politics, he may yet be, a person whose high talents the wise and virtuous may enjoy without a qualifying sigh or frown. Should that day arrive, and if time be granted, it will arrive, we have ventured upon the precarious task of prophecy—we who been censured for not mingling the faults of genius with its talents—we shall claim our hour of heartfelt exultation. He himself, while deprecating censure on the ashes of another great but self-neglected genius, 133 has well pleaded the common cause of those who, placed high above the croud, have their errors and their follies rendered more conspicuous by their elevation. ‘Hard is his fate on whom the public gaze Is fix’d for ever to detract or praise; Repose denies her requiem to his name, And Folly loves the martyrdom of Fame: The secret enemy, whose sleepless eye Stands sentinel, accuser, judge, and spy; Her for the fool, the jealous and the vain, The envious, who but breathe in others’ pain: Behold the host delighting to deprave, Who tracks the steps of Glory to the grave.’ 134 For ourselves, amid the various attendants on the triumph of genius, we would far rather be the soldier who, pacing by the side of his general, mixes, with military frankness, censure amid his songs of praise, than the slave in the chariot to flatter his vanity by low adulation, or exasperate his feelings by virulent invective. In entering our protest therefore against the justice and the moral tendency of that strain of dissatisfaction and despondency, that cold and sceptical philosophy which clouds our prospects on earth, and closes those beyond it, we willingly render to this extraordinary poem [p.221] the full praise that genius in its happiest efforts can demand from us. The plan, if it can be termed so, hovers between that of a descriptive and a philosophical poem. The Pilgrim passes from land to land, alternately describing, musing, meditating, exclaiming, and moralizing; and the reader, partaking of his enthusiasm, becomes almost the partner of his journey. The first and second Cantos were occupied by Spain and Greece—the former, the stage upon which those incidents were then passing which were to decide, in their consequence, the fate of existing Europe; the latter, the country whose sun, so long set, has yet left on the horizon of the world such a blaze of splendour. It is scarcely necessary to say, that in both countries, especially the last, the pilgrim found room for meditation even to madness . 135 The third Canto saw Childe Harold once more upon the main, and traced him from Belgium to Switzerland, through scenes distinguished by natural graces, and rendered memorable by late events. Through this ample field we accompanied the Pilgrim, and the strains which describe the beauties of the Rhine and the magnificence of the Leman lake, are still glowing in our ears. The fourth Canto now appears, and recals us to the immediate object of the present article. The poem opens in Venice, once the mart of the universe— I. ‘I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O’er the far times, when many a subject land Looked to the winged lion’s marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, thron’d on her hundred isles!’ The former greatness of this queen of commerce is described and mingled with the recollections associated with her name, from the immortal works of fiction of which she has formed the scene. Download 1.07 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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