Part 39

The house was originally quite a common cottage. This part forms still the end next to the Devizes road, which road, however, is three quarters of a mile distant; but fresh erections have been added, so that now it is not a very large, but a very goodly and commodious dwelling. The old entrance has been left, as well as a new one made in the new part, so that no unnecessary interruption may be occasioned to the family by visitors. The old entrance leads to the little drawing-room, the newer one to the family sitting-room. The poet's study is up stairs. In the garden there is a raised walk running its whole length, bounded by a hedge of laurel. This gives you the view over the fields of Spy-park, and its finely wooded slopes. This is a favorite walk of the poet; and it was, indeed, the fascination of this garden which originally took his fancy, and occasioned him to think of securing it.

At present Thomas Moore is suffering one of the afflictions to which all men are liable, but which press, perhaps, most sensibly on the poetic temperament--the loss of a son, an officer in foreign service. What is worthy of remark, and is an evidence of his independent and unselfish disposition, is that, I believe, with the exception of his Bermuda appointment, which turned out a loss, through the dishonesty of an agent, he has never received any other appointment, or any pension, though he has been so thoroughly identified with, and caressed by the Whigs. He can say, and does say, with a just pride,--What I am, I have made myself--what I have, I have won by my own hand. He has been careful to tell us himself, in his preface to his third volume, the actual amount of _royal_ patronage which he had been said to have received, and unworthily repaid, by quizzing the modern Heliogabalus. It is this, and is worth reading: "Luckily, the list of benefits showered upon me from that high quarter may be dispatched in a few sentences. At the request of the Earl of Moira, one of my earliest and best friends, his royal highness graciously permitted me to dedicate to him my Translation of the Odes of Anacreon. I was twice, I think, admitted to the honor of dining at Carlton-house; and when the prince, on his being made regent, in 1811, gave his memorable fête, I was one of the envied--about fifteen hundred, I believe, in number--who enjoyed the privilege of being his guests on the occasion." The obligation was certainly not overpowering, especially when the country had to pay for it. Moore adds, that history has now pretty well settled the character of this royal patron. The obligation to nobility is not much more onerous. This, to the poet himself, is highly honorable; but to the party, and the noblemen of that party--the Lansdownes, Hollands, and Russells--what is it? The cause of these men the warm and patriotic pen of the Irish poet has essentially served. His wit, in songs and squibs in the morning papers, and through various vehicles, has been to them a sharp and glittering cimiter, lopping off the heads of whole hosts of heavy arguments and accusations. Around their tables he has cast a radiance and a merriment that would else have been sought for in vain. To them he has been a genuine and a daily benefactor. They have had the honor of his countenance, while they probably thought that they were gracing him with theirs. How posterity laughs at all such aristocratic self-delusions! How it reduces things to their real dimensions! What may be the ideas of Thomas Moore, on this subject, I do not know. I speak merely according to the impressions which the contemplation of his peculiar career leaves upon me; and these are, that his aristocratic friends have had a very good friend in him, and he a very indifferent one in them. While, on all occasions, they have been filling their families and ordinary hangers-on with wealth, the ablest man of their party has been rewarded with a shake of the hand and invitations to dinners, because he was too proud to ask for any thing better. If he has dearly loved a lord, it must be confessed that it has been with a very disinterested affection. Lord Byron was the most generous to him of his class; but Lord Byron's friends robbed him of that solitary benefit. And so, at the age of sixty-six, the champion of the Whigs, the poet of the loves, the merry wit, and the pungent satirist, the friend of the richest men in England, still sits at his desk, and works for honest bread. Long may he enjoy it!

EBENEZER ELLIOTT.

The manufacturing town, as well as the country, has found its Burns. As Burns grew and lived amid the open fields, inhaling their free winds, catching views of the majestic mountains as he trod the furrowed field, and making acquaintance with the lowliest flower and the lowliest creatures of the earth, as he toiled on in solitude; so Elliott grew and lived amid the noisy wilderness of dingy houses, inhaling smoke from a thousand furnaces, forges, and engine chimneys, and making acquaintance with misery in its humblest shapes, as he toiled on in the solitude of neglect. The local circumstances were diametrically different, to show that the spirit in both was the same. They were men of the same stamp, and destined for the same great work; and, therefore, however different were their immediate environments, the same operating causes penetrated through them, and stirred within them the spirit of the prophet. They were both of that chosen class who are disciplined in pain, that they may learn that it is a prevailing evil, and are stimulated to free not only themselves, but their whole cotemporary kindred. Of poets, says Shelley:

"They learn in suffering what they teach in song;"

and the names of Milton, Chatterton, Byron, and of Shelley himself, remind us how true as well as melancholy is the assertion. Burns and Elliott were to be great teachers, and they both had their appointed baptisms. The same quick and ardent passions; the same quivering sensibility; the same fiery indignation against tyranny and oppression; the same lofty spirit of independence, and power of flinging their feelings into song, strong, piercing, and yet most melodious, belong to them. They are both of the people--their sworn brethren and champions. For their sakes they defy all favor of the great; they make war to the death on the humbug of aristocratic imposition; to them humanity is alone great, and by that they stand unmoved by menace, unabashed by scorn, unseduced by flatterers. As messengers of God, they honor God in man; and if they show a preference, it is for man in his misery. They are drawn by a divine sympathy to the injured and afflicted. The world knows its own, and they know it, and leave the world to worship according to its worldly instinct. For them the gaudy revel goes on, the chariot of swelling property rolls by, the palace and the castle receive or pour out their glittering throngs, unmarked save by a passing glance of contempt; for they are on their way to the cabins of wretchedness, where they have their Father's work to do. In their eyes, "the whole need not a physician, but those that are sick." They leave the dead to bury their dead, and have enough to do to soothe the agonies of the living; of those who live only to suffer, the martyr mass of mankind who groan in rags, and filth, and destitution, under the second great curse--not that of earning their bread by the sweat of their brow, but of not being able to do it.

England owes a debt of thanks to a good Providence, who, affluent in his gifts of honor and beneficence, has raised up great men in every class and every location on her bosom, where they were most needed. In that magnificent work which England has assuredly to do in the earth--that of spreading freedom, knowledge, arts, and Christianity over every distant land and age, gross errors have been committed, and malignant powers have been developed, like pestilential diseases in her constitution; but these have not been suffered to stop, though they may have retarded her career. New infusions of health have been made, new strength has been manifested; out of the pressure of wretchedness new comfort has sprung; and when hope seemed almost extinct, new voices have been heard above the wailing crowd, that have startled the despairing into courage, and shed dismay into the soul of tyranny. As the population has assumed new forms and acquired new interests, out of the bosom of the multitude have arisen the poets who have borne those forms, and have been made familiar with those interests from their birth. Byron and Shelley, from the regions of aristocracy, denounced, in unsparing terms, its arrogant assumptions; Burns, beholding the progressing work of monopoly and selfishness, uttered his contempt of the spirit that was thrusting down the multitude to the condition of serfs, and haughtily returning glance for glance with pride of rank and pride of purse, exclaimed--

"A man's a man for a' that!"

But the work of evil went on. While war scourged the earth in the defense of the doting despotism of kingship, and monopoly shut out the food of this nation in defense of the domestic despotism of aristocracy, millions and millions of men were born to insufferable misery, to hunger, nakedness, and crime, the result of maddened ignorance; and that in a land teeming with corn and cattle, and the wealth that could purchase them; and in a land, too, that sent out clothing for a world. The work of selfishness had proceeded, but had not prospered; wealth had been accumulated, but poverty had been accumulated too, a thousandfold; rents had been maintained, but ruin looked over the wall; there was universal activity, but its wages were famine; there was a thunder of machinery, and a din of never ceasing hammers; but amid the chaos of sounds there were heard--not songs, but groans. It was then that Elliott was born, and there that he grew, in the very thick of this swarming, busy, laborious, yet miserable generation. He saw with astonishment that all that prodigious industry produced no happiness; there was pomp and pauperism; toil and starvation; Christianity preached to unbelieving ears, because there were no evidences of its operation on hearts that had the power to bless; and thus famine, ignorance, and irritation were converting the crowd into a mass of ravenous and dehumanized monsters. There needed a new orator of the patriot spirit. There needed a Burns of the manufacturing district, and he was there in the shape of Elliott. Had Burns been born again there, and under those circumstances, he would have manifested himself exactly as Elliott has done. He would have attacked manfully this monstrous bread-tax, which had thus disorganized society, disputing the passage of God's blessings to the many, and stamping a horrible character on the few. He would have vindicated the rights of man and his labors, and have sung down with fiery numbers all the crowding bugbears that armed monopoly had gathered round the people to scare them into quiet. Elliott has done that exactly; done that and no less. In the unpresuming character of "A Corn-Law Rhymer," of "The Poet of the Rabble," he sent out, right and left, songs, sarcasms, curses, and battle-cries, among the people. His words, never ceasing, fell like serpents among the multitude deadened by long slavery, and stung them into life. His voice once raised, never faltered, never paused; wherever the multitude met they heard it; wherever they turned they saw it embodied in largest handwriting on the wall. "Up! bread-taxed slave! Up! our bread is taxed--arise!" It was Elliott who sounded from day to day, and month to month, these ominous words in the nation's ears. He took the very form of Burns's patriot song, and instead of "Scots, wha ha' wi' Wallace bled," exclaimed--

"Hands, and hearts, and minds are ours; Shall we bow to bestial powers? Tyrants, vaunt your swords and towers! Reason is our citadel.

"With what arms will ye surprise Knowledge of the million eyes? What is mightier than the wise? Not the might of wickedness.

"Trust in force!--So tyrants trust! Words shall crush ye into dust; Yet we _fight_, if fight we must-- Thou didst, Man of Huntingdon![5]

"Heirs of Pym! can ye be base? Locke! shall Frenchmen scorn a race Born in Hampden's dwelling-place? Blush to write it, Infamy

"What we are our fathers were; What they dared their sons can dare: Vulgar tyrants! hush! beware! Bring not down the avalanche.

"By the death which Hampden died By oppression mind-defied! Despots, we will tame your pride-- Stormily, or tranquilly!"

[5] One Oliver Cromwell, a brewer.

These brave words were not uttered in vain. The Burns of Sheffield did not speak to the dead. The fire which he scattered was electric. It spread rapidly, it kindled in millions of hearts, it became the soul of the sinking multitude. It was slower to seize on the moist and comfortable spirits of the middle classes and master-manufacturers; but the progress of foreign competition soon drove even them into action against the landlord's monopoly. The League arose. The prose-men took up the cry of the poet, and with material and ground prepared by him, went on from year to year advancing, by force of arguments and force of money, the great cause, till at this moment it may be said to be won. The prime minister of England pronounced the doom of the Corn-Law, and fixed the date of its extinction. All honor to every man who fought in the good fight, but what honor should be shown to him who began it? To the man who blew, on the fiery trumpet of a contagious zeal, defiance to the hostile power in the pride of its strength, and called the people together to the great contest? In that contest the very name of Ebenezer Elliott has of late ceased to be heard. Others have prolonged the war-cry, and the voice of him who first raised it seems to be forgotten; but not the less did he raise it. Not the less does that cause owe to him its earliest and amplest thanks. Not the less is it he who dared to clear the field, to defy the enemy, to array the host, to animate them to the combat, and proclaim to them a certain and glorious victory. And when the clamor of triumph shall have ceased, and a grateful people sit down to think, in their hours of evening or of holyday ease, of the past, they will remember the thrilling songs of their poet, and pay him a long and grateful homage.

In comparing Ebenezer Elliott to Robert Burns, I do not mean to say that their poetry is at all points to be compared. On the contrary, in many particulars they are very different, but the great spirit and principles of them are the same. In the felicitous power of throwing a popular sentiment into a popular song, Elliott can not come near Burns; nay, in the lyrical portion of his composition, we do not find the full stature and strength of Elliott; it is in his larger poems that he more completely presents himself, and no one can read them without feeling that he is not only a true but a great poet.

There are many people who have read only his corn-law effusions in newspapers and periodicals, who are at a loss to find the warrant for the high character assigned by others to his writings. These give them an idea of a fierce, savage, and often coarse demagogue. And when they add to the expression of these compositions that of the only portraits hitherto published of him, they are perfectly confirmed in the idea that he is a stern, hard-souled, impetuous, and terrible man of iron. Such are the false judgments derived from a one-sided knowledge, and the cruel calumnies of bad artists! Ebenezer Elliott is one of the gentlest, most tender-hearted of men; and, however strange it may seem, it is this very character, this compassion for the unhappy, this lively and soft sympathy for human suffering, that has roused him to his loftiest pitch of anger, and put into his mouth his most terrible words. It is the noble and feeling soul, which creates the patriot, the savior, and champion of men. It was Christ, who died for the world, and prayed for his enemies, and taught us to pray for ours, that uttered those awful and scarifying denunciations--"Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" It is impossible that it should be otherwise. It is impossible that a feeling soul, endowed with power as well as feeling, should not rise into the battle attitude at the sight of oppression, and with the sledge-hammer of a great indignation demolish the gates of cruelty, when the poor are crying within. But it must never be forgotten, that it is out of the excess of love that springs this excess of zeal. It is this that marks the great distinction between the tyrant and the savior; the one is inspired by cruelty, the other by mercy.

Whoever sees Ebenezer Elliott, having first only seen the portrait prefixed to some of his works--a vile caricature--and having read only his Corn-law Rhymes, will see with wonder a man of gentle manners, and in all his tones, the expression of a tender and compassionate feeling. But those who have read the whole of his poetry, will _not_ be surprised at this. It is what they will expect. Elliott, though born in a manufacturing town, and having lived there most of his life, displays, like Burns, the most passionate attachment to nature, and what is more, a most intimate acquaintance with her. He possesses a singular power of landscape painting; and what he paints, possesses all the beauty of Claude, and the wild magnificence of a Salvator Rosa, with the finest and most subtile touches of a Dutch artist. In his landscapes you are not the more amazed by the sublimity of the tempest on the dark and crag-strewn moorland mountains of the Peak, than you are by the perfect accuracy of his most minute details. In the woodland, on the vernal bank, and in the cottage garden, you find nothing which should not be there; nothing out of place, or out of season; and the simplest plant or flower is exactly what you will find; not nicknamed as the poor children of nature so often are by our writers. There is one instance of Ebenezer Elliott's taste that meets you everywhere, and marks most expressively the peculiar, delicate, and poetic affection of his feelings. It is his preeminent love for spring, and its flowers and imagery. The primrose, the snow-drop, "the woe-marked cowslips," the blossom of the hawthorn and the elm, how constantly do they recur. In what favorite scene has he not introduced the wind-flower? Thus, in this admirable picture of a mechanic's garden--

"Still nature, still he loves thy uplands brown-- The rock that o'er his father's freehold towers! And strangers hurrying through the dingy town May know his workshop by its sweet wild flowers. Cropped on the Sabbath from the hedge-row bowers, The hawthorn blossom in his window droops; Far from the headlong stream and lucid air, The pallid alpine rose to meet him stoops, As if to soothe a brother in despair, Exiled from nature, and her pictures fair. Even winter sends a posy to his jail, Wreathed of the sunny celandine; the brief, Courageous wind-flower, loveliest of the frail; The hazel's crimson star, the woodbine's leaf, The daisy with its half-closed eye of grief; Prophets of fragrance, beauty, joy, and song."--P. 63.

Or in this passage, as remarkable for the sweet music of its versification as for its suggestive power, winging the imagination into the far-off woodland with the plover's cry--

"When daisies blush, and wind-flowers wet with dew; When shady lanes with hyacinths are blue; When the elm blossoms o'er the brooding bird, And wild and wide the plover's wail is heard When melt the mists on mountains far away, Till morn is kindled into brightest day, No more the shouting youngsters shall convene To play at leap-frog on the village green," etc.--P. 87.

These are beautiful; but Elliott can be strong as beautiful, and sublime as strong; and the great charm of all his poetry is, that he makes his description subservient to the display of human life and passion, human joys, and sorrows, and struggles, and wrongs. He deals, as the poet of the people, with the life of the people. The thronged manufacturing town,--thronged with men, and misery, and crime, but not destitute of domestic virtues, nor precious domestic affections,--lives nowhere as it does in Elliott's pages. The village and the cottage, with its gardens, and their inhabitants, all come before us with their beloved characteristics, and also with their tales of trial and death.

Elliott has been said to have copied from Crabbe and Wordsworth, and heaven knows who. Every page of his tells that he has read and loved them, and been deeply impressed with their compositions; but he is no copyist. Like a fine landscape, he is tinted by the colors and harmonies of the sky, the sun, the season, and the hour; but like that, his features and lasting beauties are his own. In his earlier poems, he often reminds you, by the tone and rhythm of his verse, of Campbell and Rogers; but anon, and he has molded his own style into its peculiar and native beauty, and like a river for a while obstructed by rocks and mounds, he at length finds his way into the open plain, and in his full growth and strength goes on his way vigorous, majestic, and with a character all his own. He delights in the heroic measure, varying and alternating the rhymes at his pleasure; and in this versification he exhibits a singular breadth of scope, and pours forth a harmony grand, melancholy, and thrilling. Beautifully as he clothes his themes with the pathos and the hues of poetry, they are yet the stern themes of real and of unhappy life. They are, as he tells us, and as we feel and know from our own experience, all drawn from actual knowledge. He finds his fellow-men oppressed by the false growth of society, and he boldly and vehemently lays bare their calamities. He draws things as they are, and with the pencil of a giant. The misery that springs out of the corn-laws, and other measures of monopoly and unjust legislation, he denounces and deplores with unceasing zeal. He assaults and wrestles with the monster growth of injustice with undying and unappeasable hatred. He limns England as it was, and as it is; and asks the aristocratic and the millocrat if they are not ashamed of their deeds? If they do not blush at their philosophy; if they do not recoil from these scenes of woe, and crime, and ferocity, that they have created?

In every form and disguise, injustice and inhumanity--

"Man's inhumanity to man"

that

"Makes countless thousands mourn,"

are the monster serpents that he seeks to crush beneath his relentless heel, and to fling forth from the dwellings of men. In delineating the consequences of crime, Ebenezer Elliott has few equals for masterly command of language. Byron never recorded the agonies of sin and passion with more awful vigor, nor the woes of parting spirits with more absorbing pathos. In the Exile, where two lovers meet in America--in the days when our settlements there were called the plantations, and they were penal colonies,--the woman as a convict, and that through her lover's errors and desertion, nothing can be more vividly sketched than the mental sufferings of both parties, or finer than the scene where the unhappy woman dies in her lover's arms on a night of awful tempest.