The Death-Wake | Page 3

poet married a Miss Muir of Anniston, the family called cousins (on which side of the blanket I know not) with Robert II. of Scotland, and, by another line, were as near as in the sixth degree of James III.
As a schoolboy, Mr. Stoddart was always rhyming of goblin, ghost, fairy, and all Sir Walter's themes. At Edinburgh University he was a pupil of Christopher North (John Wilson), who pooh-poohed _The Death-Wake_ in Blackwood. He also knew Aytoun, Professor Ferrier, De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, and Hogg, and was one of the first guests of Tibbie Sheils, on the spit of land between St. Mary's and the Loch of the Lowes. In verses of this period (1827) Miss Stoddart detects traces of Keats and Byron, but the lines quoted are much better in technique than Byron usually wrote.
The summer of 1830 Mr. Stoddart passed in Hogg's company on Yarrow, and early in 1831 he published The Death-Wake. There is no trace of James Hogg in the poem, which, to my mind, is perfectly original. Wilson places it "between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of Barry Cornwall." It is really nothing but a breath of the spirit of romance, touching an instrument not wholly out of tune, but never to be touched again.
It is unnecessary to follow Mr. Stoddart through a long and happy life of angling and of literary leisure. He only blossomed once. His poem was plagiarised and inserted in Graham's Magazine, by a person named Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro (vol. xx.). Mr. Ingram, the biographer of Edgar Poe, observes that Poe praised the piece while he was exposing Tasistro's "barefaced robbery."
The copy of The Death-Wake from which this edition is printed was once the property of Mr. Aytoun, author of _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, and, I presume, of Ta Phairshon. Mr. Aytoun has written a prefatory sonnet which will be found in its proper place, a set of rhymes on the flyleaf at the end, and various cheerful but unfeeling notes. After some hesitation I do not print these frivolities.
The copy was most generously presented to me by Professor Knight of St. Andrews, and I have only seen one other example, which I in turn contributed to fill the vacant place in the shelves of Mr. Knight. His example, however, is far the more curious of the twain, by virtue of Aytoun's annotations.
I had been wanting to see The Death-Wake ever since, as a boy, I read the unkind review of it in an ancient volume of _Blackwood's Magazine_. In its "pure purple mantle" of glazed cloth, with paper label, it is an unaffectedly neat and well-printed little volume.
It would be unbecoming and impertinent to point out to any one who has an ear for verse, the charm of such lines as--
"A murmur far and far, of those that stirred?Within the great encampment of the sea."
Or--
"A love-winged seraph glides in glory by,?Striking the tent of its mortality."
(An idea anticipated by the as yet unknown Omar Khayyam).
Or--
"Dost thou, in thy vigil, hail?Arcturus in his chariot pale,?Leading him with a fiery flight?Over the hollow hill of night?"
These are wonderful verses for a lad of twenty-one, living among anglers, undergraduates, and, if with some society of the lettered, apparently with none which could appreciate or applaud him.
For the matter of the poem, the wild voyage of the mad monkish lover with the dead Bride of Heaven, it strikes, of course, on the common reef of the Romantic--the ridiculous. But the recurring contrasts of a pure, clear peace in sea and sky, are of rare and atoning beauty. Such a passage is--
"And the great ocean, like a holy hall,?Where slept a seraph host maritimal,?Was gorgeous with wings of diamond."
Once more, when the mad monk tells the sea-waves
"That ye have power and passion, and a sound?As of the flying of an angel round,?The mighty world, that ye are one with Time,"
we recognise genuine imagination.
A sympathetic reader of The Death-Wake would perhaps have expected the leprosies and lunacies to drop off, and the genius, purged of its accidents, to move into a pure transparency. The abnormal, the monstrous, the boyish elements should have been burned away in the fire of the genius of poetry. But the Muses did not so will it, and the mystic wind of the spirit of song became of less moment to Mr. Stoddart than the breeze on the loch that stirs the trout to feed. Perhaps his life was none the less happy and fortunate. Of the many brilliant men whom he knew intimately--Wilson, Aytoun, Ferrier, Glassford Bell, and others--perhaps none, not even Hogg, recognised the grace of the Muse which (in my poor opinion) Mr. Stoddart possessed. His character was not in the least degree soured by neglect or fretted by banter. Not to over-estimate oneself is