Part 40

"Then with clasped hands, and fervent hearts dismayed, That she might live for him, both mutely prayed. But o'er their silence burst the heavy blast; And, wrapped in darkness, the sky-torrent passed, And down the giants of the forest dashed; And pale as day the night with lightning flashed; And through awed heaven, a peal that might have been The funeral dirge of suns and systems crashed. More dread, more near, the bright-blue blaze was seen, Peal following peal, with direr pause between. On the wild light she turned her wilder eye, And grasped his hands in dying agony, Fast and still faster as the flash rushed by. 'Spare me!' she cried, 'oh, thou destroying rod! Hark! 'tis the voice of unforgiving God! A mother murdered, and a sire in woe! Alfred, the deed was mine! for thee, for thee, I broke her heart, and turned his locks to snow. Hark! 'tis the roaring of the mighty sea! Lo! how the mountain billows fall and rise! And while their rage, beneath the howling night, Lifts my boy's tresses to the wild moonlight, Yet doth the wretch, the unwedded mother live, Who for those poor unvalued locks would give All save her hope to kiss them in the skies! But see! he rises from his watery bed, And at his guilty mother shakes his head! There, dost thou see him, blue and shivering, stand, And lift at thee his little, threatening hand? Oh, dreadful!--Hold me!--Catch me!--Die with me!-- Alas! that must not, and it should not be. No--pray that both our sins may be forgiven; Then come--and heaven will, will, indeed be heaven!'"

Among the largest and best poems of Ebenezer Elliott, perhaps the Village Patriarch, the Splendid Village, and the Ranter, will always be the greatest favorites; not because they possess more passion or poetry than the vigorous drama, of Bothwell and Kerhonah, but because they depict England as it has become in our day, and awaken our love for both country and people, while they make us weep for the desolation which aristocratic legislation has everywhere diffused. The Splendid Village, unlike the Deserted Village of Goldsmith, has not become released of its inhabitants by the change of times, but has become the scene of heartless wealth, of fine houses, where humble cottages stood, and of purse-proud cits and lawyers, who leave the work-house, or the jail, as the only refuges of the once happy poor. The surly "Constable, publican and warrener," "Broad Jim the poacher," and in the Village Patriarch, the poor old Hannah Wray, whose cottage is unroofed by Mr. Ezra White, the farmer, and who is hanged for killing the savage with a stone, in the act, though it was really done by her half-sharp daughter, are sketches too sadly full of that lamentable life which has, of late years, distorted the fair rural face of England. They are things which can not be too well pondered on by every man who desires the return of better days to this country. But we turn for the present to the more attractive society of blind Enoch Wray.

In Enoch Wray, blind, and one hundred years old, Elliott has drawn one of those venerable village patriarchs, that every one can remember something of in his younger days. Men of hale and well developed powers, who, in a calm life, not devoid of its cares, yet leaving leisure for thought, have cherished the love of nature and the spirit of a pure wisdom in them, worthy of man's highest estate. Such men, who that has spent his youth in the country, has not known, and has not loved? Enoch Wray is one of these, old and blind, yet with a heart full as that of a child of the tenderness for nature, and the spirit of heaven. The author describes his strolls with him into the hills; and we will take our last extracts from these, because they are fine specimens of landscape painting, and show what a fresh charm the poet confers on his compositions, by the very names of the places he introduces. In this there is a striking difference between him and James Montgomery, Sheffield's other eminent poet, whose writings, beautiful as they are, and full as they are of the love of nature, might have been written anywhere. They do not localize themselves.

"Come, father of the hamlet! grasp again Thy stern ash plant, cut when the woods were young; Come, let us leave the plough-subjected plain, And rise with freshened hearts and nerves restrung, Into the azure dome, that proudly hung O'er thoughtful power, ere suffering had begun.

"Flowers peep, trees bud, boughs tremble, rivers run: The redwing saith it is a glorious morn. Blue are thy heavens, thou Highest! And thy sun Shines without cloud, all fire. How sweetly borne On wings of morning, o'er the leafless thorn, The tiny wren's small twitter warbles near! How swiftly flashes in the stream the trout! Woodbine! our father's ever watchful ear Knows by thy rustle that thy leaves are out. The trailing bramble hath not yet a sprout; Yet harshly to the wind the wanton prates, Not with thy smooth lips, woodbine of the fields! Thou future treasure of the bee that waits Gladly on thee, spring's harbinger! when yields All bounteous earth her odorous flowers, and builds The nightingale in beauty's fairest land."

The poet then enumerates the "five rivers, like the fingers of a hand," which so remarkably convene at Sheffield, and then gives one of the most characteristic features of Sheffield scenery, and a graphic notice of that extraordinary body of men, the Sheffield grinders, who perish early from the effects of their trade, yet pursue it with the most hardy indifference.

"Beautiful rivers of the desert! ye Bring food for labor from the fordless waste. Pleased stops the wanderer on his way to see The frequent weir oppose your heedless haste, Where toils the mill by ancient woods embraced. Hark, how the cold steel screams in hissing fire! But Enoch sees the grinder's wheel no more. Couched beneath rocks and forests, that admire Their beauty in the waters, ere they roar Dashed in white foam, the swift circumference o'er, There draws the grinder his laborious breath; There, coughing, at his deadly trade he bends; Born to die young, he fears nor man nor death; Scorning the future, what he earns he spends: Debauch and riot are his bosom friends. He plays the Tory sultan-like and well: Woe to the traitor that dares disobey The Dey of Straps! as ratanned tools shall tell. Full many a lawless freak by night, by day, Illustrates gloriously his lawless sway. Behold his failings! hath he virtues too? He is no pauper, blackguard though he be. Full well he knows what minds combined can do, Full well maintains his birthright--he is free! And, power for power, outstares monopoly! Yet Abraham and Elliott, both in vain, Bid science on his cheek prolong the bloom; He _will_ not live! he seems in haste to gain The undisturbed asylum of the tomb, And old at two-and-thirty, meets his doom! Man of a hundred years, how unlike thee!"

The Abraham and Elliott mentioned here were inventors of the Grinder's Preservative, which the grinders will not use! But of these strange men more anon.

"The moors--all hail! ye changeless, ye sublime, That seldom hear a voice save that of Heaven! Scorners of chance, and fate, and death, and time, But not of Him, whose viewless hand hath riven The chasm through which the mountain stream is driven! How like a prostrate giant--not in sleep, But listening to his beating heart--ye lie! With winds and clouds dread harmony ye keep, Ye seem alone beneath the boundless sky: Ye speak, are mute, and there is no reply. Here all is sapphire light, and gloomy land, Blue, brilliant sky, above a sable sea Of hills like chaos, ere the first command, 'Let there be light!' bade light and beauty be.

* * * * * * *

Father! we stand upon the mountain stern, That can not feel our lightness, and disdains Reptiles that sting and perish in their turn, That hiss and die--and lo! no trace remains Of all their joys, their triumphs, and their pains! Yet to stand here might well exalt the mind; These are not common moments nor is this A common scene. Hark, how the coming wind Booms like the funeral dirge of woe, and bliss, And life, and form, and mind, and all that is! How like the wafture of a world-wide wing It sounds and sinks, and all is hushed again! But are our spirits humbled? No; we string The lyre of death with mystery and pain, And proudly hear the dreadful notes complain That man is not the whirlwind, but the leaf, Torn from the tree, to soar and disappear. Grand is our weakness, and sublime our grief. Lo! on this rock I shake off hope and fear, And stand released from clay!--yet am I here, And at my side are blindness, age, and woe."

Would any one imagine, after reading the poetry of Ebenezer Elliott, that that poetry could ever have found difficulty in struggling to the light of day? With our host of acute and infallible critics, would one think it possible that this noble poetry should not have been immediately discovered, and made universal in its acceptation? But what was the fact? For twenty years the poet went on writing and publishing, but in vain. Volume after volume, his productions fell dead from the press, or were treated with a passing sneer, or were "damned with faint praise." But living consciousness of genius was not to be extinguished, the undaunted spirit of Elliott was not to be frozen out by neglect. He wrote, he appealed to sense and justice--it was in vain. He became furious, and hurled a flaming satire at Lord Byron in the height of his popularity, in the hope that the noble poet would give him a returning blow, and thus draw attention upon him. It was in vain, neither lord nor public would deign him a look, and the case seemed desperate. But it was not so. Chance did what merit itself could not do. Chance led Dr. Bowring to Sheffield, and there some one put into his hands The Corn-Law Rhymes, and The Ranter. At once Bowring, a poet himself, recognized the singular merit of the compositions, printed as they were in four pamphlet sheets, on very ordinary paper. With his usual zeal, he began to talk everywhere of the wonderful poet of Sheffield, not Montgomery, but a new name. He talked thus at my house, and I instantly procured them. Wordsworth happened to be my guest at the time. He was as much struck with the wonderful power of these compositions as ourselves, and I begged him to convey them at once to Southey. He did so, and the laureate immediately gave a notice of them in the Quarterly, in an article on what he called Uneducated Poets. But, in the mean time, Dr. Bowring went on to London, and there continued talking of the Corn-Law Rhymer, till, falling in with Bulwer at a party, he showed those long neglected poems to him, and the thing was done. Bulwer wrote an out-speaking article in the New Monthly Magazine, which told like the match put to the long laid train. Wordsworth, on his way home, had made the poems known to Miss Jewsbury, at Manchester, and she gave a nearly simultaneous notice in the Athenæum. At such decided and generous verdicts in such quarters, the scales fell from the eyes of the whole critic tribe--all cuckoo-land was loud with one note; and the poet, who had been thundering at every critical door in the kingdom in vain, now saw the gates of the land of glory at once expand, and was led in by a hundred officious hands, as if he were a new-born bard, and not of twenty years' growth.

Such a history awakes involuntarily some curious reflections. If Elliott had chanced to die before Bowring had chanced to visit Sheffield--what then? Where would now be the fame of the Corn-Law Rhymer? I know that there is a very favorite doctrine in many mouths, that true genius is sure, sooner or later, to find its way--that it can not be destroyed, and is never lost. This may be very consolatory doctrine for those who have wielded a merciless pen, and are visited by compunctions of remorse; but it is just as true as that untimely frosts never cut down buds and flowers, or that swords and cannons will not kill honest men, or that a really beautiful scene may not be ravaged and laid waste by bears or swine. If there be one thing that murders early genius, it is the bludgeon of critical unkindness; if there be one thing that gives life and spirit, it is encouragement. Kindness! encouragement! they are the sunshine of the mind, as necessary as the sunshine of Heaven for the unfolding of earth's flowers and the ripening of earth's fruits. How many a bright soul has sunk in the frosty valleys of neglect; how many have shrunk hopelessly from the vile sneer of scorn; how many that have survived have reached only a partial development of their strength and beauty; being crippled in their youth by the blows of private malice, or enfeebled by the want of the cordial aliment of acknowledged merit. Honor, then, to the few sturdy souls that contempt has not been able to subdue! To those who have returned kick for kick to the insolent opposers of their progress; who have been able to keep alive self-respect in their souls, through a long, dark career of frowns, and jeers, and cuffs, as the due award of a spiritual pauperism. Honor to those brave souls--they are the few victorious survivors in the great battle of fame, where thousands have fallen by butcher hands. The endurance of harsh treatment is no proof of genius--it is only a proof of a certain amount of power of resistance; but it is a lucky thing for the world that genius and endurance sometimes lodge in the same bosom. Byron knocked down his deriders on the spot; Elliott, like Wellington at Waterloo, stood out a whole long day of pitiless contest, and triumphed at the last.

And it was not a single fight only that he had to maintain. He waged a double contest against fortune--for life as well as for fame; and in both, with desperate odds against him, he came off victorious. Ebenezer Elliott is certainly one of the greatest "Curiosities of Literature." He has not only proved himself a poet, in spite of twenty years of most dogged deafness to his claims, but a poet that has set fortune as well as the critics at defiance, and has at once won fame and wealth. I believe that on his settling in Sheffield he possessed nothing but a wife and three or four children, but he has managed to retire from trade with some eight or ten children, and a good round sum of thousands of pounds. He has bravely scorned all

"The perils that environ The man who meddles with cold iron;"

and has set a glorious example to future genius--to rely on its own intimations, and not on reviews; to assert the rights of mind, and yet not to neglect business. In him stands a living proof that poetry and worldly prosperity can go hand in hand.

By his own statement to me, it appears that he was born the 17th of March, 1781, being one of eight children. His father was a commercial clerk in the iron-works at Masborough, near Rotherham, with a salary of £70 a-year, "and consequently," says he, "a rich man in those days."

There is no complete biography of Mr. Elliott published, nor ever written. There is one in manuscript, written by himself, but only up to a certain period. Beyond that he has not been able to proceed, and has expressed doubts whether he ever shall. It no doubt relates to some crisis in his life, that from his desperate conflict with circumstances is recollected only with a horror that disables his pen; the bottom of that Jordan of affliction through which he passed, that he might become the interpreter of the sons of suffering. At the very memory of this stern baptism, that Herculean resolution which bore him through it falters; it is to be hoped, for the sake of posterity, one day, however, to collect itself again into a great effort, and to add another autobiography full of life's great lessons to those of Franklin and William Hutton. From a notice in a periodical some years ago, and which I believe, from good authority, to be correct, I extract the few particulars that are related of his early life.

"Ebenezer Elliott, in childhood, boyhood, and youth, was remarkable for good-nature, as it is called, and a sensitiveness, exceeded only by his extreme dullness and inability to learn any thing that required the least application or intellect. His good-nature made him rather a favorite in his childhood with servant girls, nurses, and old women. One of the latter was a particular favorite with him--Nanny Farr, who kept the York Keelman public-house, near the foundry at Masborough, where he was born. She was a walking magazine of old English prejudices and superstitions;--to her he owes his fondness for ghost stories. When he was about ten years old, he fell in love with a young girl, now Mrs. Woodcock of Munsber, near Greasborough, to whom he never to this day spoke one word. She then lived with her father, Mr. Ridgeway, a butcher and publican, close to the bridge on the Masborough side of the river Don. Such was his sensitiveness, that if he happened to see her as she passed, and especially if she happened to look at him--which he now believes she never did,--he was suddenly deprived almost of the power of moving.

"His unconquerable dullness was improved into absolute stupidity by the help he received from an uncommonly clever boy, called John Ross, who did him his sums. He got into the rule-of-three without having learned numeration, addition, subtraction, and division. Old Joseph Ramsbotham seemed quite convinced, gave him up in despair, and at rule-of-three the bard jumped all at once to decimals, where he stuck. At this time he was examined by his father, who discovered that the boy scarcely knew that two and one are three. He was then put to work in the foundry on trial, whether hard labor would not induce him to learn his 'counting,' as arithmetic is called in Yorkshire. Now it happened that nature, in her vagaries, had given him a brother called Giles, of whom it will be said by any person who knew him, that never was there a young person of quicker or brighter talents; there was nothing that he could not learn, but the praise he received ruined him in the end. His superiority produced no envy in Ebenezer, who almost worshiped him. The only effect it produced on him was, a sad sense of humiliation, and confirmed conviction that himself was an incurable dunce. The sense of his deficiencies oppressed him, and in private he wept bitterly. When he saw Giles seated in the counting-house, writing invoices, or posting the ledger; or when he came dirty out of the foundry, and saw him showing his drawings, or reading aloud to the circle, whose plaudits seemed to have no end, his resource was solitude, of which from his infancy he was fond. He would go and fly his kite, always alone, and he was the best kite-maker of the place; or he would saunter along the canal bank, swimming his ships, or anchoring them before his fortresses--and he was a good ship-builder.

"His sadness increased;--he could not post books--he could not write invoices--he could not learn to do what almost every body could learn, namely, to do a single sum in single division; yet by this time he had discovered that he could do 'men's work,' for he could make a frying-pan. It ought to be observed here, that the assistance he received from John Ross accompanied him, like his double, to every school to which his parents, in their despair, had sent him; and they sent him to two, beside Mr. Ramsbotham's. When it was found that he could not do decimals, he was put back to the rule-of-three, and then pronounced incurable. Labor, however, and the honor paid to his brother, at length made him try one effort more. He had an aunt at Masborough, one of whose sons was studying botany. He was buying, in monthly numbers, a book called Sowerby's English Botany, with beautifully colored plates. They filled him with delight; and she showed him that by holding the plates before a pane of glass, he might take exact sketches of them. Dunce though he was, he found he could draw, and with such ease, that he almost thought he was a magician. He became a botanist, or rather a hunter of flowers; but, like his cousin Ben, though not Greek-learned like him, he too had his Hortus Siccus. He does not remember having ever read, or liked, or thought of poetry until he heard his brother recite that passage in Thomson's Spring, which describes the polyanthus and auricula. His first attempt at poetry was an imitation in rhyme of Thomson's Thunder Storm, in which he described a certain flock of sheep running away after they were killed by lightning. Now this came to pass because the rhyme would have it so. His critic, cousin Ben the learned, though the bard most imploringly told him how the miracle happened, nevertheless exercised the critic's privilege, and ridiculed him without mercy. Never will he forget that infliction. His second favorite author was Shenstone, whose translations of passages from the classics, prefixed to his elegies, produced an effect on his mind and heart which death only can obliterate. His next favorite was Milton, who slowly gave way to Shakspeare. He can trace all his literary propensities to physical causes. His mind, he says, is altogether the mind of his own eyes. A primrose is to him a primrose, and nothing more; for Solomon in his glory was not more delicately arrayed. There is not a good passage in his writings, which he can not trace to some real occurrence, or to some object actually before his eyes, or to some passage in some other author. He has the power, he says, of making the thoughts of other men breed; and he is fond of pointing out four or five passages in his poems, all stolen from one passage in Cowper's Homer. We will give the original, and one of the imitations. He made the thought his own, he says, by substituting the word 'hymn' for the word 'trumpet;' and the imitation will show his power of making other men's thoughts breed; they describe poetically and philosophically the reflection of light from the heavenly bodies:

'The earth beneath them trembled, and the heavens Sung them together with a trumpet's voice.'

_Cowper's Iliad._

Thus imitated--

'Oh, Light, that cheer'st all worlds, from sky to sky, As with a hymn to which the stars reply.'