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Lecture the Chirty-Eighth.

MARK AKENSIDE-THOMAS BLACKLOCK-FRANCIS FAWKES-JAMES GRANIGER

NATHANIEL COTTON-DR. THOMAS WARTON-JOSEPH WARTON-THOMAS WARTON-CHRISTOPHER SMART-CHRISTOPHER ANSTEY-THOMAS PERCY-OLIVER

GOLDSMITH.

TH

HE year 1721 produced no less than five poets, whose genius has given comparative celebrity to their names. Akenside, the author of The Pleasures of the Imagination, one of the purest and most elegant didactic poems in the English language; Blacklock, who was blind from his birth; Fawkes, the translator of Anacreon, Sappho, Bion, and other classic poets; Grainger, the opening of whose Ode to Solitude Dr. Johnson considered 'very noble;' and Cotton, whose Visions in Verse for children, and whose 'well-known humanity and sweetness of temper' Cowper so warmly commends.

MARK AKENSIDE was the son of a butcher, and was born at Newcastleupon-Tyne, where his father followed his business, on the ninth of November, 1721. His parents were both dissenters, and the Puritan principles imbibed in his early years, seem, as in the case of Milton, to have given a gravity and earnestness to his character, and a love of freedom to his thoughts and imagination, which he preserved through life. He received the early part of his education at the grammar-school of his native place, and was afterward instructed at a private academy, by a Mr. Wilson. At the age of eighteen, the society of Dissenters sent him to Edinburgh university, that he might become qualified for the ministry; but he afterward changed his views, returned the money that he had received, and entered himself as a student of medicine. He was already a poet; and in the fol lowing Hymn to Science, written in Edinburgh, we see at once the forma tion of his classic taste, and the dignity of his personal character:

That last best effort of thy skill,
To form the life and rule the will,
Propitious Power! impart;

Teach me to cool my passion's fires,
Make me the judge of my desires,

The master of my heart.

Raise me above the vulgar's breath,
Pursuit of fortune, fear of death,
And all in life that's mean;
Still true to reason be my plan,

Still let my actions speak the man,

Through every various scene.

After having passed three years at Edinburgh, Akenside removed to Leyden to complete his studies; and in 1744, he obtained his doctor's de gree, returned to England, and commenced the practice of his profession in London. During his residence in Holland he had written, at the early age of twenty-three, his Pleasures of Imagination, which he now offered to Dodsley for publication, demanding for the copyright, one hundred and twenty pounds. The price being large, Dodsley, before he concluded to take it, consulted Pope, who having looked it over, advised the bookseller 'to make no niggardly offer, since this was no every-day writer.' The poem attracted much attention, and was, soon after it appeared in London, translated into French and Italian.

His reputation, by the publication of the 'Pleasures of Imagination,' being very widely extended, Akenside now resolved to establish himself as a physician in some rural district of the country. With this view he selected Northampton as his future abode; but after an unsuccessful trial of eighteen months, he returned to London, where he passed the remainder of his life. At Leyden he had formed an intimacy with Jeremiah Dyson, a young Englishman of fortune, which ripened into a friendship of the closest and most enthusiastic character; and Dyson, who was afterward clerk of the House of Commons, and a lord of the treasury, had the generosity to allow the poet three hundred pounds a year. After writing a few Odes of the most common-place kind, Akenside made no farther attempt at composition. His society was courted for his taste, knowledge, and eloquence; but his solemn sententiousness of manner, his romantic ideas of liberty, and his unbounded admiration of the ancients, frequently exposed him to ridicule. He died suddenly of a putrid sore throat, on the twenty-third of June, 1770, in the forty-ninth year of his age, and was buried in St. James's Church.

In his latter days, Akenside reverted, with melancholy delight, to his native landscape on the banks of the Tyne; and in his fragment of a fourth book of 'The Pleasures of Imagination,' written in the last year of his life, is found the following beautiful passage :

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O ye dales

Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands; where

Oft as the giant flood obliquely strides,
And his banks open and his lawns extend,
Stops short the pleased traveller to view,
Presiding o'er the scene, some rustic tower

Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands.
O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook
The rocky pavement and the mossy falls
Of solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream!
How gladly I recall your well-known seats
Beloved of old, and that delightful time
When all alone, for many a summer's day,
I wandered through your calm recesses, led
In silence by some powerful hand unseen.
Nor will I e'er forget you; nor shall e'er
The graver tasks of manhood, or the advice
Of vulgar wisdom, move me to disclaim
Those studies which possessed me in the dawn
Of life, and fixed the colour of my mind
For every future year whence even now
From sleep I rescue the clear hours of morn,
And, while the world around lies overwhelmed
In idle darkness, am alive to thoughts

Of honourable fame, of truth divine

Or moral, and of minds to virtue won

By the sweet magic of harmonious verse.

The Pleasures of Imagination' is a poem seldom read continuously, though its finer passages, by frequent quotation, particularly in works of criticism and moral philosophy, are well known. The pleasures of which the poem professes to treat 'proceed,' says the author, 'either from natural objects, as from a flourishing grove, a clear and murmuring fountain, a calm sea by moonlight; or from works of art, such as a noble edifice, a musical tune, a statue, a picture, a poem.' These, with the moral and intellectual objects arising from them, furnish abundant topics for illustration; but Akenside dealt chiefly with abstruse subjects, pertaining more to philosophy than to poetry. He did not seek to graft upon them human interests and human passions. In tracing the final cause of our emotions, he could have described their exercise and effects in scenes of ordinary pain or pleasure in the walks of real life. This does not seem, however, to have been the purpose of the poet, and hence his work is deficient in interest.

Akenside's blank verse is free and well modulated, and is peculiarly his own. Though apt to run into too long periods, it is more compact in its structure than that of Thomson, and may, perhaps, be considered superior to it. Its occasional want of perspicuity probably arises from the delicacy of the author's distinctions, and the difficulty attending mental analysis in verse. He might also wish to avoid all vulgar and common expressions, and thus err from excessive refinement. A redundancy of ornament certainly, in some passages, mars the clearness of his conceptions; but his higher flights have a flow and energy of expression, and an appropriateness of imagery, peculiar to the great poet. His style is chaste, yet elevated and musical; and though he blends sweetness with his expression, he never compromises his dignity. We close our notice of this interesting writer with the following brief ex

tracts:

VOL. II.-Z

ASPIRATIONS AFTER THE INFINITE.

Say, why was man so eminently raised
Amid the vast creation; why ordained

Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his frame;
But that the Omnipotent might send him forth
In sight of mortal and immortal powers,

As on a boundless theatre, to run

The great career of justice; to exalt
His generous aim to all diviner deeds;

To chase each partial purpose from his breast;
And through the mists of passion and of sense,
And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,
To hold his course unfaltering, while the voice
Of Truth and Virtue, up the steep. ascent

Of Nature, calls him to his high reward,

The applauding smile of Heaven? Else wherefore burns In mortal bosoms this unquenched hope,

That breathes from day to day sublimer things,

And mocks possession? wherefore darts the mind
With such resistless ardour to embrace

Majestic forms; impatient to be free,
Spurning the gross control of wilful might;
Proud of the strong contention of her toils;
Proud to be daring? who but rather turns

To Heaven's broad fire his unconstrained view,
Than to the glimmering of a waxen flame?

Who that, from Alpine heights, his labouring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave

Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade, And continents of sand, will turn his gaze

To mark the windings of a scanty rill

That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul
Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft
Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens;
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
Sweeps the long tract of day. Then high she soars
The blue profound, and, hovering round the sun,
Beholds him pouring the redundant stream
Of light; beholds his unrelenting sway
Bend the reluctant planets to absolve
The fated rounds of Time. Thence far effused,
She darts her swiftness up the long career
Of devious comets; through its burning signs
Exulting measures the perennial wheel
Of nature, and looks back on all the stars,
Whose blended light, as with a milky zone,
Invest the orient. Now, amazed she views
The empyreal waste, where happy spirits hold,

Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode;
And fields of radiance, whose unfading light
Has travelled the profound six thousand years,
Nor yet arrives in sight of mortal things.
Even on the barriers of the world, untired
She meditates the eternal depth below;

Till half recoiling, down the headlong steep
She plunges; soon o'erwhelmed and swallowed up
In that immense of being. There her hopes
Rest at the fated goal. For from the birth
Of mortal man, the sovereign Maker said,
That not in humble nor in brief delight,
Not in the fading echoes of Renown,

Power's purple robes, nor Pleasure's flowery lap,
The soul should find enjoyment: but from these
Turning disdainful to an equal good,

Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear,
And infinite perfection close the scene.

INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.

Mind, mind alone (bear witness earth and heaven.)

The living fountains in itself contains

Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand
Sit paramount the Graces; here enthroned,
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,
Invites the soul to never-fading joy.

Look, then, abroad through nature, to the range
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres,
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense;
And speak, oh man! does this capacious scene
With half that kindling majesty dilate
Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose
Refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate,
Amid the crowd of patriots; and his arm

Aloft extending, like eternal Jove

When guilt brings down the thunder, called aloud
On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel,

And bade the father of his country, hail!
For lo the tyrant prostrate on the dust,
And Rome again is free! Is aught so fair
In all the dewy landscapes of the spring,
In the bright eye of Hesper, or the morn,
In nature's fairest forms, is aught so fair
As virtuous friendship? as the candid blush
Of him who strives with fortune to be just?
The graceful tear that streams for others' woes,
Or the mild majesty of private life,
Where Peace, with ever-blooming olive, crowns
The gate; where Honour's liberal hands effuse
Unenvied treasures, and the snowy wings
Of Innocence and Love protect the scene?
Once more search, undismayed, the dark profound

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