The Death-Wake | Page 3

married a daughter of Veitch of
The Glen, now the property of Sir Charles Tennant. In the next
generation but one, the Stoddarts sold their lands and took to commerce,
while the poet's father won great distinction in the Navy. The
great-great-grandfather of the 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