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First Series
by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
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To F.D.L.
Love comes and goes with music in his feet,
And tunes young pulses to his roundelays;
Love brings thee this: will it persuade thee, Sweet,
That he turns proser when he comes and stays?
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Benvenuto Cellini tells us that when, in his boyhood, he saw a salamandercome out of the fire, his grandfather forthwith gave him a sound beating,that he might the better remember so unique a prodigy. Though perhaps inthis case the rod had another application than the autobiographer choosesto disclose, and was intended to fix in the pupil's mind a lesson ofveracity rather than of science, the testimony to its mnemonic virtueremains. Nay, so universally was it once believed that the senses, andthrough them the faculties of observation and retention, were quickenedby an irritation of the cuticle, that in France it was customary to whipthe children annually at the boundaries of the parish, lest the trueplace of them might ever be lost through neglect of so inexpensive amordant for the memory. From this practice the older school of criticswould seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the limits of goodtaste, and what was somewhat vaguely called classical English. To markthese limits in poetry, they set up as Hermae the images they had made tothem of Dryden, of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnlycastigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn performed the samefunction for the next generation, thus helping to keep always sacred andimmovable the ne plus ultra alike of inspiration and of the vocabulary.Though no two natures were ever much more unlike than those of Dryden andPope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, and no two styles, except in suchexternals as could be easily caught and copied, yet it was the fashion,down even to the last generation, to advise young writers to formthemselves, as it was called, on these excellent models. Wordsworthhimself began in this school; and though there were glimpses, here andthere, of a direct study of nature, yet most of the epithets in hisearlier pieces were of the traditional kind so fatal to poetry duringgreat part of the last century; and he indulged in that alphabeticpersonification which enlivens all such words as Hunger, Solitude,Freedom, by the easy magic of an initial capital.
"Where the green apple shrivels on the spray,
And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray,
Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign
With Independence, child of high Disdain.
Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies,
Shy as the jealous chamois, Freedom flies,
And often grasps her sword, and often eyes."
Here we have every characteristic of the artificial method, even to thetriplet, which Swift hated so heartily as "a vicious way of rhymingwherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, imitated by all the bad versifiers of