tr

rest; a thing we could recommend to univer- I To us, meanwhile, to all that wander in darkness and seek light, as the one thing needful, be this possession reckoned among our choicest blessings and distinctions. Colite talem virum; learn of him, imitate, emulate him! So did he catch the Music of the Universe, and unfold it into clearness, and in authentic celestial tones bring it home to the hearts of men, from amid that soul-confusing Babylonish hubbub of this our new Tower-ofBabel era! For now, too, as in that old time, had men said to themselves: Come, let us build a tower which shall reach to heaven; and by our steam-engines, and logic-engines, and skilful mechanism and manipulation, vanquish not only Physical Nature, but the divine Spirit of Nature, and scale the empyrean itself. Wherefore they must needs again be stricken with confusion of tongues (or of printingpresses,) and dispersed,—to other work; wherein also let us hope, their hammers and trowels shall better avail them.

sal study, that the spirit of it might be understood by all men, and by all men imitated. Nevertheless it is nowise alone on this revolutionary or progress-of-the-species" side that Goethe has significance; his Life and Work is no painted show but a solid reality, and may be looked at with profit on all sides, from all imaginable points of view. Perennial, as a possession for ever, Goethe's History and Writings abide there; a thousand-voiced "Melody of Wisdom," which he that has ears may hear. What the experience of the most complexly-situated, deep-searching, every way far-experienced man has yielded him of insight, lies written for all men here. He who was of compass to know and feel more than any other man, this is the record of his knowledge and feeling. "The deepest heart, the highest head to scan" was not beyond his faculty; thus, then, did he scan and interpret: let many generations listen, according to their want; let the generation which has no need of listening, and nothing new to learn there, esteem itself a happy one.

Of Goethe, with a feeling such as can be due to no other man, we now take farewell: vixit, vivit.

CORN-LAW RHYMES.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1832.]

SMELFUNGUS REDIVIVUS, throwing down his critical assaying-balance, some years ago, and taking leave of the Belles-Lettres function, expressed himself in this abrupt way: "The end having come, it is fit that we end. Poetry having ceased to be read, or published, or written, how can it continue to be reviewed? With your Lake Schools, and Border-Thief Schools, and Cockney and Satanic Schools, there has been enough to do; and now, all these Schools having burnt or smouldered themselves out, and left nothing but a widespread wreck of ashes, dust, and cinders, or perhaps dying embers, kicked to and fro under the feet of innumerable women and children in the Magazines, and at best blown here and there into transient sputters, with vapour enough, so as to form what you might name a boundless Green-sick, or New-Sentimental, or Sleep-Awake School,-what remains but to adjust ourselves to circumstances? Urge me not," continues the able Editor, suddenly changing his figure, "with considerations that Poetry, as the inward voice of Life, must be perennial, only dead in one form to become alive in another; that this still abundant deluge of Metre, seeing there must needs be fractions of Poetry floating scattered in it, ought still to be net-fished, at all events, surveyed and

taken note of: the survey of English Metre, at this epoch, perhaps transcends the human faculties; to hire out the reading of it, by estimate, at a remunerative rate per page, would, in few Quarters, reduce the cash-box of any extant Review to the verge of insolvency.”

What our distinguished contemporary has said remains said. Far be it from us to censure or counsel any able Editor; to draw aside the Editorial veil, and, officiously prying into his interior mysteries, impugn the laws he walks by! For Editors, as for others, there are times of perplexity, wherein the cunning of the wisest will scantily suffice his own wants, say nothing of his neighbour's.

To us, on our side, meanwhile, it remains clear that Poetry, or were it but Metre, should nowise be altogether neglected. Surely it is the Reviewer's trade to sit watching, not only the tillage, crop-rotation, marketings, and good or evil husbandry of the Economic Earth, but also the weather-symptoms of the Literary Heaven, on which those former so much depend: if any promising or threatening meteoric phenomenon make its appearance, and he proclaim not tidings thereof, it is at his peril. Farther, be it considered how, in this singular poetic epoch, a small matter constitutes a novelty. If the whole welkin hang overcast in drizzly dinginess, the feeblest lightgleam, or speck of blue, cannot pass un

heeded.

The Works of this Corn-Law Rhymer we might liken rather to some little fraction of a rainbow: hues of joy and harmony, painted

out of troublous tears. No round full bow, indeed; gloriously spanning the heavens; shone on by the full sun; and, with sevenstriped, gold-crimson border (as is in some sort the office of Poetry) dividing Black from Brilliant: not such; alas, still far from it! Yet, in very truth, a little prismatic blush, glowing genuine among the wet clouds; which proceeds, if you will, from a sun cloud-hidden, yet indicates that a sun does shine, and above those vapours, a whole azure vault and celestial firmament stretch serene.

Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true, that here we have once more got sight of a Book calling itself Poetry, yet which actually is a kind of Book, and no empty paste-board Case, and simulacrum or "ghost-defunct" of a Book, such as is too often palmed on the world, and handed over Booksellers' counters, with a demand of real money for it, as if it too were a reality. The speaker here is of that singular class, who have something to say; whereby, though delivering himself in verse, and in these days, he does not deliver himself wholly in jargon, but articulately, and with a certain degree of meaning, that has been believed, and therefore is again believable.

that this same aristocratic recognition, which looks down with an obliging smile from its throne, of bound Volumes and gold Ingots, and admits that it is wonderfully well for one of the uneducated classes, may be getting out of place. There are unhappy times in the world's history, when he that is the least educated will chiefly have to say that he is the least perverted; and with the multitude of false eye-glasses, convex, concave, green, even yellow, has not lost the natural use of his eyes. For a generation that reads Cobbett's Prose, and Burns's Poetry, it need be no miracle that here also is a man who can handle both pen and hammer like a man.

Nevertheless, this serene-highness attitude and temper is so frequent, perhaps it were good to turn the tables for a moment, and see what look it has under that reverse aspect. How were it if we surmised, that for a man gifted with natural vigour, with a man's character to be developed in him, more especially if in the way of Literature, as Thinker and Writer, it is actually, in these strange days, no special misfortune to be trained up among the Uneducated classes, and not among the Educated; but rather of two misfortunes the smaller?

To some the wonder and interest will be heightened by another circumstance: that the For all men doubtless obstructions abound; speaker in question is not school-learned, or spiritual growth must be hampered and stunteven furnished with pecuniary capital; is, ed, and has to struggle through with diffiindeed, a quite unmoneyed, russet-coated culty, if it do not wholly stop. We may grant speaker; nothing or little other than a Shef- too that, for a mediocre character, the confield worker in brass and iron, who describes tinual training and tutoring, from languagehimself as "one of the lower, little removed masters, dancing-masters, posture-masters of above the lowest class." Be of what class he all sorts, hired and volunteer, which a high may, the man is provided, as we can perceive, rank in any time and country assures, there with a rational god-created soul; which too will be produced a certain superiority, or at has fashioned itself into some clearness, some worst, air of superiority, over the correspondself-subsistence, and can actually see and ing mediocre character of low rank: thus we know with its own organs; and in rugged sub-perceive the vulgar Do-nothing, as contrasted stantial English, nay, with tones of poetic melody, utter forth what it has seen.

with the vulgar Drudge, is in general a much prettier man; with a wider, perhaps clearer, It used to be said that lions do not paint, that outlook into the distance; in innumerable supoor men do not write; but the case is alter-perficial matters, however it may be when we ing now. Here is a voice coming from the we go deeper, he has a manifest advantage. deep Cyclopean forges, where Labour, in real But with the man of uncommon character, soot and sweat, beats with his thousand ham-again, in whom a germ of irrepressible Force mers "the red son of the furnace;" doing personal battle with Necessity, and her dark brute Powers, to make them reasonable and serviceable; an intelligible voice from the hitherto Mute and Irrational, to tell us at first hand how it is with him, what in very deed is the theorem of the world and of himself, which he, in those dim depths of his, in that wearied head of his, has put together. To which voice, in several respects significant enough, let good ear be given.

Here too, be it premised, that nowise under the category of “Uneducated Poets," or in any fashion of dilettante patronage, can our Sheffield friend be produced. His position is unsuitable for that: so is ours. Genius, which the French lady declared to be of no sex, is much more certainly of no rank; neither when "the spark of Nature's fire" has been imparted, should Education take high airs in her artificial light, which is too often but phosphorescence and putrescence. In fact, it now begins to be suspected here and there,

has been implanted, and will unfold itself into some sort of freedom,-altogether the reverse may hold. For such germs, too, there is undoubtedly enough, a proper soil where they will grow best, and an improper one where they will grow worst. True also, where there is a will, there is a way; where a genius has been given, a possibility, a certainty of its growing is also given. Yet often it seems as if the injudicious gardening and manuring were worse than none at all; and killed what the inclemencies of blind chance would have spared. We find accordingly that few Frederics or Napoleons, indeed none since the great Alexander, who unfortunately drank himself to death too soon for proving what lay in him, were nursed up with an eye to their vocation: mostly with an eye quite the other way, in the midst of isolation and pain, destitution and contradiction. Nay, in our own times, have we not seen two men of genius, a Byron and a Burns; they both, by mandate of Nature, struggle and must strug

:

gle towards clear Manhood, stormfully enough, | ative Phoenix-ashes of the whole Past." All for the space of six-and-thirty years; yet only that men have devised, discovered, done, felt, the gifted Ploughman can partially prevail or imagined, lies recorded in Books; wherein therein the gifted Peer must toil and strive, whoso has learned the mystery of spelling and shoot out in wild efforts, yet die at last in printed letters, may find it, and appropriate it. Boyhood, with the promise of his Manhood Nay, what indeed is all this? As if it were still but announcing itself in the distance. by universities and libraries and lecture-rooms, Truly, as was once written, "it is only the ar- that man's Education, what we can call Edutichoke that will not grow except in gardens; cation, were accomplished: solely, or mainly, the acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the by instilling the dead letter and record of other wilderness, yet on the wild soil it nourishes it- men's Force, that the living Force of a new self, and rises to be an oak." All woodmen, man were to be awakened, enkindled, and pumoreover, will tell you that fat manure is the rified into victorious clearness! Foolish Peruin of your oak; likewise that the thinner dant, that sittest there compassionately desand wilder your soil, the tougher, more iron-canting on the Learning of Shakspeare! textured is your timber, though, unhappily, also, the smaller. So too with the spirits of men: they become pure from their errors, by suffering for them; he who has battled, were it only with poverty and hard toil, will be found stronger, more expert, than he who could stay at home from the battle, concealed among the Provision-wagons, or even not unwatchfully "abiding by the stuff." In which sense, an observer, not without experience of our time, has said: "Had I a man of clearly developed character, (clear, sincere within its limits,) of insight, courage, and real applicable force of head and of heart, to search for; and not a man of luxuriously distorted character, with haughtiness for courage, and for insight and applicable force, speculation and plausible show of force,-it were rather among the lower than the higher classes that I should look for him."

Shakspeare had penetrated into innumerable things; far into Nature with her divine Splendours and infernal Terrors, her Ariel Melodies, and mystic mandragora Moans; far into man's workings with Nature, into man's Art and Artifice; Shakspeare knew (kenned, which in those day's still partially meant can-ned) innumerable things; what men are, and what the world is, and how and what men aim at there, from the Dame Quickly of modern Eastcheap to the Cæsar of ancient Rome, over many countries, over many centuries: of all this he had the clearest understanding and constructive comprehension; all this was his Learning and Insight: what now is thine? Insight into none of those things; perhaps, strictly considered, into no thing whatever: solely into thy own sheepskin diplomas, fat academic honours, into vocables and alphabetic letters, and but a little way into these!The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do : the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

A hard saying, indeed, seems this same: that he whose other wants were all beforehand supplied; to whose capabilities no problem was presented except even this, How to culti- And now, when kenning and can-ning have vate them to best advantage, should attain less become two altogether different words; and real culture than he whose first grand prob- this, the first principle of human culture, the lem and obligation was nowise spiritual cul- foundation-stone of all but false imaginary culture, but hard labour for his daily bread!ture, that men must, before every other thing, Sad enough must the perversion be where pre- be trained to do somewhat, has been, for some parations of such magnitude issue in abor-generations, laid quietly on the shelf, with tion; and a so sumptuous Art with all its appliances can accomplish nothing, not so much as necessitous Nature would of herself have supplied! Nevertheless, so pregnant is Life with evil as with good; to such height in an age rich, plethorically overgrown with means, can means be accumulated in the wrong place, and immeasurably aggravate wrong tendencies, instead of righting them, this sad and strange result may actually turn out to have been realized.

But what, after all, is meant by uneducated, in a time when Books have come into the world; come to the household furniture in every habitation of the civilized world? In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him; wherein still, to this day, for the eye that will look well, the Mystery of Existence reflects itself, if not resolved, yet revealed, and prophetically emblemed; if not to the satisfying of the outward sense, yet to the opening of the inward sense, which is the far grander result. "In Books lie the cre

such result as we see,-consider what advantage those same uneducated Working classes have over the educated Unworking classes, in one particular; herein, namely, that they must work. To work! What incalculable sources of cultivation lie in that process, in that attempt; how it lays hold of the whole man, not of a small theoretical calculating fraction of him, but of the whole practical, doing and daring and enduring man; thereby to awaken dormant faculties, root out old errors, at every step! He that has done nothing has known nothing. Vain is it to sit scheming and plausibly discoursing: up and be doing! If thy knowledge be real, put it forth from thee: grapple with real Nature; try thy theories there, and see how they hold out. Do one thing, for the first time in thy life do a thing: a new light will rise to thee on the doing of all things whatsoever. Truly, a boundless significance lies in work: whereby the humblest craftsman comes to attain much, which is of indispensable use, but which he who is of no craft, were he never so high, runs the risk of miss ing. Once turn to Practice, Error and Truth will no longer consort together: the result of

once more a sweet Singer wearing the likeness of a Man. In humble guise, it is true, and of stature more or less marred in its development; yet not without a genial robustness, strength and valour, built on honesty and love; on the whole, a genuine man, with somewhat of the eye and speech and bearing that beseems a man. To whom all other genuine men, how different soever in subordinate particulars, can gladly hold out the right hand of fellowship.

Error involves you in the square-root of a ne- | brings, and as he brings it? Let us be thankgative quantity; try to extract it, or any earthly | ful, were it only for the day of small things. substance or sustenance from it, if you will! Something it is that we have lived to welcome The honourable Member can discover that "there is a reaction," and believe it, and wearisomely reason on it, in spite of all men, while he so pleases, for still his wine and his oil will not fail him but the sooty Brazier, who discovered that brass was green-cheese, has to act on his discovery; finds, therefore, that, singular as it may seem, brass cannot be masticated for dinner, green-cheese will not beat into fireproof dishes: that such discovery, therefore, has no legs to stand on, and must even be let fall. Now, take this principle of difference through the entire lives of two men, and calculate what it will amount to! Necessity, moreover, which we here see as the mother of Accuracy, is well known as the mother of Invention. He who wants every thing, must know many things, do many things, to procure even a few: different enough with him, whose indispensable knowledge is this only, that a finger will pull

the bell.

The great excellence of our Rhymer, be it understood then, we take to consist even in this, often hinted at already, that he is genuine. Here is an earnest, truth-speaking man; no theorizer, sentimentalizer, but a practical man of work and endeavour, man of sufferance and endurance. The thing that he speaks is not a hearsay, but a thing which he has himself known, and by experience become assured of. He has used his eyes for seeing; uses his So that, for all men who live, we may con- tongue for declaring what he has seen. His clude, this Life of Man is a school, wherein voice, therefore, among the many noises of our the naturally foolish will continue foolish Planet, will deserve its place better than the though you bray him in a mortar, but the natu- most; will be well worth some attention. rally wise will gather wisdom under every dis- Whom else should we attend to but such? advantage. What, meanwhile, must be the The man who speaks with some half shadow condition of an Era, when the highest advan- of a Belief, and supposes, and inclines to tages there become perverted into drawbacks; think; and considers not with undivided soul,. when, if you take two men of genius, and put what is true, but only what is plausible, and the one between the handles of a plough, and will find audience and recompense; do we not mount the other between the painted coronets meet him at every street-turning, on all highof a coach-and-four, and bid them both move ways and byways; is he not stale, unprofitalong, the former shall arrive a Burns, the able, ineffectual, wholly grown a weariness of latter a Byron: two men of talent, and put the the flesh? So rare is his opposite in any rank one into a Printer's chapel, full of lampblack, of Literature, or of Life, so very rare, that tyrannous usage, hard toil, and the other into even in the lowest he is precious. The auOxford universities, with lexicons and libraries; thentic insight and experience of any human and hired expositors and sumptuous endow-soul, were it, but insight and experience in ments, the former shall come out a Dr. Franklin, the latter a Dr. Parr!

J

However, we are not here to write an Essay on Education, or sing misereres over a "world in its dotage;” but simply to say that our CornLaw Rhymer, educated or uneducated as Nature and Art have made him, asks not the smallest patronage or compassion for his rhymes, professes not the smallest contrition for them. Nowise in such attitude does he present himself; not supplicatory, deprecatory, but sturdy, defiant, almost menacing. Wherefore, indeed, should he supplicate or deprecate? It is out of the abundance of the heart that he has spoken; praise or blame cannot make it truer or falser than it already is. By the grace of God this man is sufficient for himself; by his skill in metallurgy, can beat out a toilsome but a manful living, go how it may; has arrived too at that singular audacity of believing what he knows, and acting on it, or writing on it, or thinking on it, without leave asked of any one: there shall he stand, and work, with head and with hand, for himself and the world; blown about by no wind of doctrine; frightened at no Reviewer's shadow; having, in his time, looked substances enough in the face, and remained unfrightened.

What is left, therefore, but to take what he

hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement, how small soever: palabra, again, were it a supreme pontiff's, is wind merely, and nothing, or less than nothing. To a considerable degree, this man, we say, has worked himself loose from cant, and conjectural halfness, idle pretences and hallucinations, into a condition of Sincerity. Wherein, perhaps, as above argued, his hard social environment, and fortune to be "a workman born," which brought so many other retardations with it, may have forwarded and accelerated him.

That a man, Workman, or Idleman, encompassed, as in these days, with persons in a state of willing or unwilling Insincerity, and necessitated, as man is to learn whatever he does traditionally learn by imitating these, should nevertheless shake off Insincerity, and struggle out from that dim pestiferous marshatmosphere, into a clearer and purer height,― betokens in him a certain originality; in which rare gift Force of all kinds is presupposed. To our Rhymer, accordingly, as hinted more than once, vision and determination have not been denied: a rugged, homegrown understanding is in him; whereby, in his own way, he has mastered this and that, and looked into various things, in general honesty and to purpose.

sometimes deeply, piercingly, and with a and with a Seer's eye. Strong thoughts are not wanting, beautiful thoughts; strong and beautiful expressions of thought. As traceable for instance in this new illustration of an old argument, the mischief of Commercial Restrictions:

must do, into Politics; is a Reformer, at least a stern Complainer, Radical to the heart: his poetic melody takes an elegiaco-tragical character: much of him is converted into Hostility, and grim, hardly-suppressed Indignation, such as Right long denied, Hope long deferred, may awaken in the kindliest heart. Not yet as a rebel against any thing does he stand; but as a free man, and the spokesman of free men, not far from rebelling against much; with sorrowful, appealing dew, yet also with incipient lightning, in his eyes; whom it were not desirable to provoke into rebellion. He says in What then? The worms were Vulcanic dialect, his feelings have been ham

"These, O ye quacks, these are your remedies:
Alms for the Rich, a bread-tax for the Poor!
Soul-purchased harvests on the indigent moor!
Thus the winged victor of a hundred fights,
The warrior Ship, bows low her banner'd head,
When through her planks the seaborn reptile bites
Its deadly way;-and sinks in ocean's bed,
Vanquish'd by worms.

fed.

Will not God smite thee black, thou whited wall?
Thy law is lifeless, and thy law a lie,

Or Nature is a dream unnatural:

Look on the clouds, the streams, the earth, the sky;
Lo all is interchange and harmony!

Where is the gorgeous pomp which, yester morn,
Curtained yon Orb, with amber, fold on fold?
Behold it in the blue of Rivelin, borne

To feed the all-feeding sea! the molten gold

Is flowing pale in Loxley's waters cold,

To kindle into beauty tree and flower,

And wake to verdant life hill, vale, and plain.
Cloud trades with river, and exchange is power:
But should the clouds, the streams, the winds disdain
Harmonious intercourse, nor dew nor rain
Would forest-crown the mountains: airless day
Would blast on Kinderscout the heathy glow;
No purply green would meeken into gray
O'er Don at eve; no sound of river's flow
Disturb the Sepulchre of all below."

Nature and the doings of men have not passed by this man unheeded, like the endless cloudrack in dull weather; or lightly heeded, like a theatric phantasmagoria; but earnestly inquired into, like a thing of reality; reverently loved and worshipped, as a thing with divine significance in its reality, glimpses of which divineness he has caught and laid to heart. For his vision, as was said, partakes of the genuinely Poetical: he is not a Rhymer and Speaker only, but, in some genuine sense, something of a Poet.

Farther we must admit him, what indeed is already herein admitted, to be, if clear-sighted, also brave-hearted. A troublous element is his; a Life of painfulness, toil, insecurity, scarcity, yet he fronts it like a man; yields not to it, tames into some subjection, some order; its wild fearful dinning and tumult, as of a devouring Chaos, becomes a sort of wild war-music for him; wherein too are passages of beauty, of melodious melting softness, of lightness and briskness, even of joy. The stout heart is also a warm and kind one; Affection dwells with Danger, all the holier and the lovelier for such stern environment. A working man is this; yet, as we said, a man in his sort, a courageous, much loving, faithfully enduring and endeavouring man.

mered till they are cold-short; so they will no longer bend; "they snap, and fly off,"-in the face of the hammerer. Not unnatural, though lamentable! Nevertheless, under all disguises of the Radical, the Poet is still recognisable : a certain music breathes through all dissonances, as the prophecy and ground-tone of returning harmony; the man, as we said, is of a poetical natúre.

To his Political Philosophy there is perhaps no great importance attachable. He feels, as all men that live must do, the disorganization, and hard-grinding, unequal pressure of the Social Affairs; but sees into it only a very little farther than far inferior men do. The frightful condition of a Time, when public and private Principle, as the word was once understood, having gone out of sight, and Self-interest being left to plot, and struggle, and scramble, as it could and would, Difficulties had accumulated till they were no longer to be borne, and the spirit that should have fronted and conquered them seemed to have forsaken the world;-when the Rich, as the utmost they could resolve on, had ceased to govern, and the Poor, in their fast-accumulating numbers, and ever-widening complexities, had ceased to be able to do without governing; and now the plan of“ Competition” and “Laissez-faire"was, on every side, approaching its consummation; and each bound up in the circle of his own wants and perils, stood grimly distrustful of his neighbour, and the distracted Commonweal was a Common-wo, and to all men it became apparent that the end was drawing, nigh :—all this black aspect of Ruin and Decay, visible enough, experimentally known to our Sheffield friend, he calls by the name of "CornLaw," and expects to be in good part delivered from, were the accursed Bread-tax repealed.

In this system of political Doctrine, even as here so emphatically set forth, there is not much of novelty. Radicals we have many; loud enough on this and other grievances; the removal of which is to be the one thing needful. The deep, wide flood of Bitterness, and Hope becoming hopeless, lies acrid, corrosive in every bosom; and flows fiercely enough What such a one, so gifted and so placed, through any orifice Accident may open: through shall say to a Time like ours; how he will Law Reform, Legislative Reform, Poor Laws, fashion himself into peace, or war, or armed want of Poor Laws, Tithes, Game Laws, or, as neutrality, with the world and his fellow men, we see here, Corn Laws. Whereby indeed only and work out his course in joy and grief, in this becomes clear, that a deep, wide flood of victory and defeat, is a question worth asking: evil does exist and corrode; from which, in which in these three little Volumes partly re- all ways, blindly and seeingly, men seek deceives answer. He has turned, as all thinkersliverance, and cannot rest till they find it; least up to a very high and rare order in these days of all till they know what part and proportion