Puslapio vaizdai
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HE frequent occurrence of monosyllables is unfavourable to hexameters in our language. The omission of the e in the imperfect and participle, the contraction of the genitive, these also by shortening words increase the difficulty.

The Saxon genitive, then, must be restored; the pronoun genitive also, "his," and even "her." The latter innovation or renovation will remove one hissing sound.

The English hexameter will be much longer to the eye than either the Greek or Latin, but so many of our letters are useless, that I do not think it can be longer to the ear. We often express a single sound by two characters, as in all letters with the h compounded.

A trochee may be used for a spondee, perhaps an iambic, but the iambic must never follow a trochee.

Like blank verse, hexameters may run into each other, but the sentence must not, I think, close with a hemistich.

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Perhaps the Saxon plural in en may be advantageously restored.

The fewest possible syllables in a line are thirteen, the most seventeen. The first four feet vary from eight to twelve. I conceive that any arrangement between these will be sufficient if they satisfy the ear.

We have in our language twelve feet; the Greeks and Romans had twenty-eight. Spondee. Iambic Trochee

Egypt

Děpārt

Languid

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The Adonic line, the Dactylic, the Anacreontic, the Sapphic.

The sentence must not too often close on

a long syllable. The trochaic line of eight is the only double ending. This may be palliated by running the lines into the decimal one. And the anapæstic of nine will bear a redundant syllable at the end. There may also be occasionally introduced the trochaic of six, and the Adonic, perhaps the Sapphic or Phaleucian line.

Thus are there thirteen usable lines. The more complicate ones can, however, only be inserted in polishing; composition will not pause for them.

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NOAH.

Or all subjects this is the most magnificent.

This is the work with which I would attempt to introduce hexameters into our language. A scattered party of fifty or a hundred do nothing; but if I march a regular army of some thousands into the country, well disciplined, and on a good plan, they will effect their establishment.

My plan should be sketched before I have read Bodmer's poem; then, if his work be not above mediocrity, it may be melted at my convenience into mine.

For the philosophy, Burnett's Theory is the finest possible; for machinery the Rabbis must give it me, and the Talmuds are in requisition.

The feelings must be interested for some of those who perished in the waters. A maiden withheld from the ark by maternal love, and her betrothed self-sacrificed with her. tude may be deeply affecting. In the desTheir deaths and consequent beatipotism that has degraded the world, and made it fit only for destruction, there is room for strong painting. The Anakim have once already destroyed mankind!

March 26, 1800.

I HAVE read the Noachid of Bodmer; it is a bad poem. In one point only does it deserve to be followed, in adopting the system of Whiston, and destroying the world by the approximation of a comet. This may be ingrafted upon Burnett's Theory.

June 29, 1801.

Iris unfortunate that Shem and Ham cannot be christened.

Japhet, the European inheritor, must be the prominent personage, and brimful of patriotism he should be. Some visit, perhaps, to Enoch in paradise. The death of

one of the just may tell well. A father of | humanity in only destroying half,—when one of the wives; his son should be the love Noah threatens all with extermination.

victim. A martyrdom also;—some hero, burnt offering to the god-tyrant,-a rank Romish priesthood. Why not an Atheist

friend of Noah? one who reasons from the wickedness of the world, a good man, but not stiff-necked, who has never swallowed the poker of principle, nor laced on the strait waistcoat of conscience, an incenseburner to the idols whom he derides.

Anguish of Noah when the sentence of the world is past. The spirit of Adam might announce it, on his own grave. The chief tyrant? some beef-headed booby brute.

The universal iniquity will be difficultly made conceivable. There must be an universal monarchy to account for it, and focus it.

How to heighten the crimes? to bring about the crisis of guilt? all must be bad, even those who see the evil must seek to remedy it by evil means; some United Irish

violence.

The burnt offering the outstanding figure; a young man full of all good hopes and arrogance, who would revolutionize the world; his error, the working with evil means, and his ruin. The final wickedness; his death, after an Abbe Barruel-Bartholo

mew-massacre.

Is language equal to describe the great

crash? one line of comfort must be the ter

minating one-lo, yonder the ark on the

waters.

The great temple-palace should be some Tower of Babel building, made in despite of prophecy, and mockery of God's vengeance. It should resist the water weight, and overlive all things, till the vault of the earth bursts.

Arbathan the self-confident hero. Some act of solitary goodness seen by Japhet should win his affections, which the darkness of conspiracy had shocked. Arbathan would act like Omniscience. He would dare do ill

for the good event. Thus, too, he should argue, and assume to himself the praise of

At length-the doom voice was uttered,― and the Lord God Almighty turned from mankind the eyes of his mercy.

The statue omen. They should fear Noah, and attempt to destroy him so; but the blow harms not the statue's head, it shivers the mallet, and palsies the arm that struck.

The peace-virtues of the holy family, violet virtues more sweet than showy. The young hopes and heat of Japhet may force him into a livelier interest; he should be for isocratizing.

The general embarkation must be kept out of sight; it savours too much of the ridiculous.

MANGO CAPAC.1

I HAVE completely failed in attempting to identify Madoc with Mango Capac. He goes indeed to Peru, but this is all-The historical circumstances totally differ, but he has a fleet of companions, and assumes no divine authority; therefore will I remove the Welsh adventurers to Florida, and celebrate the Peruvian legislation in another poem.

From whence was Mango Capac? he could not have grown up in Peru, nor indeed in any part of America. There is no instance, no possibility of any such character growing up among savages; it is a miracle more unbelievable than his inspiration; but whence or how came he to Peru. Europe was too barbarous to furnish a civilizer for America; and from Europe he must have taken the impossible way up the Maragnon, where I had led Madoc. But a European would have been a Christian. From the

East his opinions might have proceeded; but the voyage from Persia! its impassable

1 The reader is referred to the Commentarios Reales, escritos por el Ynca Garcilasso de la Vega. The copy before me was SOUTHEY'S. Lisboa, Año de M.DCIX.-J. W. W.

length-and New Holland and all those islands just in the course! This could not have been; the way from China is more practicable-but how could Mango Capac conceive such designs in that country? inspiration seems the solution most easy to credit as well as to adopt.

Reasoning as a necessarian, and so I must reason, all effects proceed from the first cause. The belief of inspiration is as much produced by that first cause, as what is acknowledged to be real; where then is the difference; or does it result that he who

believes himself inspired, is so? Crede quod habeas et habes? this rather puzzles than satisfies me.

But in another light why should inspiration be confined to Judea? Mohammed has produced evil assuredly; but Zoroaster, but Confucius, above all Mango Capac? he at least produced extensive good; there is therefore a cause for divine revelation; or if it be deemed undeserving of such agency, intermediate beings may have produced the same effect. Their existence is every way probable, perhaps even their interposition.

About A.D. 1150 Mango Capac and Mama Oella, his sister-wife, appeared by the Lake Titiaca. At that time the Mohammedan superstition had triumphed in the East; and the few followers of Zoroaster were persecuted, or safe only in obscurity. Here then the poem roots itself well. The father of these children is a Guebre, rather a Sabean, one driven into mountain seclusion; the children necessarily become enthusiasts; if they see other human beings they at least find none who can feel as they feel or comprehend them-hence they love each other. The spirit of the sun, whom they adore, may drop them where he pleases. The rest is I doubt more philosophical than poetical -the influence of intellect over docile and awed ignorance.—Anno, 1799.

See libro iii. de los Commentarios Reales, c. xxv. tom. i. f. 80.-J. W. W.

Images.

AFTER a battle-the bank weeds of the stream bloody.

Tameness of the birds where gunpowder is unknown.

The sound of a running brook like distant voices.

There is a sort of vegetable that grows in the water like a green mist or fog.

Christ Church, Oct. 8, 1799. I crossed the bridge at night; the church and the ruins were before me, the marshes flooded, the sky was stormy and wild, the moon rolling among clouds, and the rush of the waters now mingling with the wind, now heard alone, in the pauses of the storm.

Perfect calmness-a spot so sheltered that the broad banana-leaf was not broken by the wind.

Bubbles in rain-a watry dome.
Gilt weathercock-bright in the twilight.
Holly—its white bark.

Beech in autumn-its upmost branches stript first and all pointed upwards. Moss on the cot thatch the greenest ob

ject.

Redness of the hawthorn with its berries. Water, like polished steel, dark, or splendid.

Ice-sheets hanging from the banks above the level of the water, which had been frozen at flood.

Willows early leaved, and their young leaves green.

The distant hill always appears steep. As we were sailing out of Falmouth the ships and the shore seemed to dance-like a dream.

At sea I saw a hen eating the egg she had just laid!

An old sailor described a marvellously fine snow-storm to Tom.1 The sun rising remarkably red, a heavy gale from the op

This is the late CAPTAIN THOMAS SOUTHEY, R.N. He was an acute observer of nature, and many references are made to his letters. J. W. W.

posite point of the horizon driving the large flakes, which, tinged by the sun, looked like falling fire—so strikingly so that the men remarked it, and thought it ominous.

May 14, 1800. A singular and striking evening sky. The horizon is perfectly clear and blue; just in the west runs a ridge of black clouds, heavy, and their outline as strongly defined as a line of rock-a low ridge—the sky behind has the green tinge, the last green light. I well remember when a six years' boy drawing such uncouth shapes, making blotches of ink in the same jagged formlessness, and fancying them into the precipices and desert rocks of faery romance.

The trunk of the palm seems made by the ruins of the leaves.

The inside of the banana leaf feels like satten.

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rising to the surface. Trees, like men, grow stiff with age; their brittle boughs break in the storm-a light breeze moves only their leaves.

Glitter of water at the bottom of reeds.

Storm from the south-east at the Cape. The appearance of the heavenly bodies, as observed by the Abbé de la Caille, is strange and terrible, "The stars look larger and seem to dance; the moon has an undulating tremor; and the planets have a sort of beard like comets."-BARROW.

Where the ship breaks its way, the white dust of the water sinks at first, with a hissing noise, and mingles with the dark blue; soon they rise again in air-sparkles.

Sound of a river-a blind man would have loved the lovely spot.1

Waterfall, its wind and its shower, and its rainbow, where the shade and the sun

A gentle wind waving only the summit shine met, and its echo from the rock, in

of the cypress.

At the bull fight I saw the sweat of death darken the dun hide of the animal! The cypress trunk is usually fluted. July 1. The chesnut tree, now beginning to push out its catkin, and in full leaf; has a radiant foliage. Whiter than other trees from its young catkin, and perfectly starry in shape.

The Indian corn flowers only at the top; the seed is in a sheath below, near the root; from the point of the sheath hangs out a lock of brown filaments, like hair, green in its earlier stage. The flower is of light brown, somewhat inclined to purple.

A thunder-storm burst over Cintra. Koster saw the eagles flying about their nest, scared by the lightning from entering to their young, and screaming with terror.

From the Peniña I saw the sea so dappled with clouds and slips of intermediate light, as not to be distinguishable from the sky.

View from above of a wooded glen, after describing the visible objects—the billowy wood that hides all-below is the sound that tells of water, &c.

Water, only varied by the air bubble

creasing the inseparable sound.

Insects moving upon smooth water like rain.

The wind sweeping the stream showers up sparkles of light.

The mountains and the mountain-stream had a grey tinge, somewhat blue, like the last evening light.

At Mafra, the sound of the organ when it ceased-like thunder; the rise of the congregation-like the sea.

Finland. "The only noise the traveller hears in this forest is the bursting of the bark of the trees, from the effect of the frost, which has a loud but dull sound."Acerbi.

Trees seen from an eminence lie grouped below in masses, like the swell of heavy clouds.

Flags. I saw the colours in a bright sky flowing like streams of colour with dazzling vividness.

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