The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [989]
At page 123, we have these lines:
My sweet girl is lying still
In her lovely atmosphere;
The gentle hopes her blue veins fill
With pure silver warm and clear.
O see her hair, O mark her breast!
Would it not, O! comfort thee,
If thou couldst nightly go to rest
By that virgin chastity?
Yes; we think, upon the whole, it would. The eight lines are entitled a “Song,” and we should like very much to hear Mr. Channing sing it.
Pages 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, and 41, are filled with short “Thoughts” in what Mr. C. supposes to be the manner of Jean Paul. One of them runs thus:
How shall I live? In earnestness.
What shall I do? Work earnestly.
What shall I give? A willingness.
What shall I gain? Tranquillity.
But do you mean a quietness
In which I act and no man bless?
Flash out in action infinite and free,
Action conjoined with deep tranquillity,
Resting upon the soul’s true utterance,
And life shall flow as merry as a dance.
All our readers will be happy to hear, we are sure, that Mr. C. is going “to flash out.” Elsewhere, at page 97, he expresses very similar sentiments:
My empire is myself and I dyfy [[defy]]
The external; yes, I rule the whole or die!
It will be observed here, that Mr. Channing’s empire is himself, (a small kingdom, however,) that he intends to defy “the external,” whatever that is — perhaps he means the infernals — and that, in short, he is going to rule the whole or die; all which is very proper, indeed, and nothing more than we have to expect from Mr. C.
Again, at page 146, he is rather fierce than otherwise. He says:
We surely were not meant to ride the sea,
Skimming the wave in that so prisoned small,
Reposing our infinite faculties utterly.
Boom like a roaring sunlit waterfall.
Humming to infinite abysms: speak loud, speak free!
Here Mr. Channing not only intends to “speak loud and free” himself, but advises every body else to do likewise. For his own part, he says, he is going to “boom “ — “to hum and to boom” — to “hum like a roaring waterfall,” and “boom to an infinite abysm.” What, in the name of Belzebub,is to become of us all?
At page 39, while indulging in similar bursts of fervor and of indignation, he says:
Thou meetest a common man
With a delusive show of can,
and this passage we quote by way of instancing what we consider the only misprint in the book. Mr. Channing could never have meant to say:
Thou meetest a common man
With a delusive show of can;
for whatis a delusive show ofcan? No doubt it should have been,
Thou meetest a little pup
With a delusive show of tin-cup.
A can, we believe, is a tin-cup, and the cup must have been tied to the tail of the pup. Boyswill do such tricks, and there is no earthly way of preventing them, we believe, short of cutting off their heads — or the tails of the pups.
And this remarkable little volume is, after all, by William Ellery Channing. A great name it has been said, is, in many cases, a great misfortune. We hear daily complaints from the George Washington Dixons, the Socrates Smiths, and the Napoleon Buonaparte Joneses, about the inconsiderate ambition of their parents and sponsors. By inducing invidious comparison, theseprænomina get their bearers (so they say) into every variety of scrape. If George Washington Dixon, for example, does not think proper, upon compulsion, to distinguish himself as a patriot, he is considered a very singular man; and Socrates Smith is never brought up before his honor the Mayor without receiving a double allowance of thirty days; while his honor the Mayor can assign no sounder reason for his severity, than that better things than getting toddied are to be expected of Socrates. Napoleon Buonaparte Jones, on the other hand, to say nothing of being called Nota Bene Jones by all his acquaintance,