The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair and Falconer | Page 7

of the sun, and smitten here and there into reluctant splendour by his beams, and think of all the gorgeous descriptions of sunset and its momentary miracles to be found in Scott, Byron, Wilson, Croly, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; or he can from some mighty Ben look abroad over a country--Scotland, and the sea below, the blue heaven above, till, in his enthusiasm, he might deem that he could lay his one hand on the mane of the ocean, and his other on the tresses of the sun, and feels for the first time the force of Beattie's own fine words--
"All the dread magnificence of Heaven."
Again, scenery will help sometimes to settle a question with a young mind, whose intellectual and imaginative faculties are nearly equal, whether it shall turn permanently to philosophy or to poetry. Such dilemmas or Hercules choices are not uncommon; and there is a period in life when the sight of a mountain, or a sunset, or an autumn river, amid its yellow woods, can have more power than even a book, or the influence of an older mind, or a young love-passion, in deciding them. Again, early intimacy with fine scenery furnishes the poetic mind with an exhaustless supply of images. These being sown in youth, sown broadcast, and without any effort of the mind to receive or retain them, bear fruit for ever. It is a shower of morning manna, which no after fervours of noon, or chills of evening, are able to melt or freeze. Or, shall we say the mind of the young, especially if gifted, is a daguerreotype plate of the finest construction, and when surrounded by romantic or lovely scenes, it receives and preserves them to the last, and can reproduce them, too, in ever-varying forms, and perpetual succession? And hence, in fine, it follows, that the greatest poets have either been brought up in the country, or have early come in contact with a beautiful nature, as the names of Homer, Virgil, Shakspeare, Milton, Thomson, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Wilson, and Thomas Aird, abundantly prove.
Beattie employs the greater part of his first Canto of the "Minstrel" in showing the influence of Nature on the dawning mind of a poet. And there can be little doubt that it is the scenery of his own native region, and the progress of his own mind, that he has described. "The long, long vale withdrawn," is the Howe of the Mearns--the "uplands" whence he views it, are the hills of Garvock--the "mountain grey," is the Grampian ridge to the north-west--the "blue main" is the German Ocean, expanding eastward--and the "vale" where the hermit is overheard pouring out his plaint, may not inaptly be figured by that portion of Glen Esk, which meets the all-beautiful Burn, and where "rocks on rocks are piled by magic spell," and where, then as now,
"Southward a mountain rose with easy swell,?Whose long, long groves eternal murmur made."
And, besides, there is his famous piece of cloud scenery, beginning,
"And oft the craggy cliff he loved to climb,"
the truth of which any one may attest by walking up, in the cloudy and dark day, the Cairn-a-Mount, a lofty knoll, across which a road leads to Deeside, to the north of the poet's birthplace, and watching the sea of vapour boiling, shifting, sinking, rising, tumultuating at his feet.
Gray used to contend that, the stanza beginning, "O how canst thou renounce the boundless store?" was absolute inspiration, but objected, we think erroneously, to one word in it as French--"the garniture of fields," to which Cary very properly produces, in reply, the words from our common version of the Bible--"The Lord garnished the heavens." We have noticed a stronger objection to a line in this otherwise perfect stanza. It is this--
"All that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields."
Here is unquestionably a tautology, since to shield and to shelter convey precisely the same idea.
The charm of the "Minstrel" greatly lies in its blending of the moral elements with the material imagery of the poem. The mind, the growth of which he describes, is not forced into activity, or hatched prematurely by electric heat; it developes sweetly, gradually, and in finest harmony with the beautiful and the great around it--like a fir amidst the plantations of Woodmyre, or a planetree on the far-seen heights of Esslie. The second canto has beautiful passages, but is, on the whole, more vague and fantastic than the first. We regret exceedingly that Beattie never found leisure for writing a third canto, and leading Edwin, whom he had brought to the threshold, within the sanctuary of song, and consecrating him the "High Priest of the Nine," by baptizing him into the Christian faith. The poem is a dream as well as a fragment--no poetic mind was perhaps ever so thoroughly insulated