International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science — Volume 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850

The popularity of TENNYSON, in this country as well as in England, is greater than that of any other contemporary who writes verses in our language. We by no means agree to the justness of the common apprehension in this case. We think Bryant is a greater poet, and we might refer to others, at home and abroad, whom it delights us more to read. But it is unquestionable that Tennyson is the favorite of the hour, and every new composition of his will therefore be looked for with the most lively interest. His last work, just reprinted by TICKNOR, REED & FIELDS, of Boston, is thus described in the London Spectator of June 8th:

"Although only these words appear on the title-page of this volume of poetry, it is well known to be from the pen of Alfred Tennyson. It is also known that the inscription

refers to Mr. Arthur Hallam, a son of the historian. It may be gleaned from the book, that the deceased was betrothed to a sister of Tennyson, while the friendship on the poet's part has 'passed the love of women.' Feeling, especially in one whose vocation it is to express sentiments, is not, indeed, always to be measured by composition; since the earnest artist turns everything to account, and when his theme is mournful it is his cue to make it as mournful as he can: but when a thought continually mingles with casual observation, or incident of daily life, or larger event that strikes attention, as though the memory of the past were ever coloring the present, and that over a period of seventeen years, it must be regarded as a singular instance of enduring friendship, as it has shown itself in a very singular literary form. There is nothing like it that we remember, except the sonnets of Petrarch; for books of sportive and ludicrous conceits are not to be received into the same category.

"The volume consists of one hundred and twenty-nine separate poems, numbered but not named, and which in the absence of a more specific designation may be called occasional; for though they generally bear a reference to the leading subject, In Memoriam, yet they are not connected with sufficient closeness to form a continuous piece. There is also an invocatory introduction, and a closing marriage poem, written on the wedding of one of the writer's sisters, which, strange as it may seem, serves again to introduce the memory of the departed. The intervening poems are as various as a miscellaneous collection; but the remembrance of the dead ever mingles with the thought of the living. His birth-day, his death-day, the festive rejoicings of Christmastide and the New Year, recall him; the scenes in which he was a companion, the house where he was a welcome guest, the season when the lawyer's vacation gave him leisure for a long visit, revive him to the mind. The Danube, on whose banks he died—the Severn, by whose banks he appears to have been buried—nay, the points of the compass—are associated with him. Sometimes the association is slighter still; and in a few pieces the allusion is so distant that it would not have been perceived without the clew. Such is the following (one of several poems) on the New Year.

"The following is of more direct bearing on the theme, and is moreover one of those charming pieces of domestic painting in which Tennyson excels.

"The volume is pervaded by a religious feeling, and an ardent aspiration for the advancement of society,—as may be gathered from our first quotation. These two sentiments impart elevation, faith, and resignation; so that memory, thought, and a chastened tenderness, generally predominate over deep grief. The grave character of the theme forbids much indulgence in conceits such as Tennyson sometimes falls into, and the execution is more finished than his volumes always are: there are very few prosaic lines, and few instances of that excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish. The nature of the plan—which, after all, is substantially though not in form a set of sonnets on a single theme—is favorable to those pictures of common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial feeling and a perception of the lurking beautiful, which are the author's distinguishing characteristic. The scheme, too, enables him appropriately to indulge in theological and metaphysical reflections; where he is not quite so excellent. Many of the pieces taken singly are happy examples of Tennyson, though not perhaps the very happiest. As a whole, there is inevitably something of sameness in the work, and the subject is unequal to its long expansion; yet its nature is such, there is so much of looseness in the plan, that it might have been doubled or trebled without incongruity. It is one of those books which depend upon individual will and feeling, rather than upon a broad subject founded in nature and tractable by the largest laws of art. Hence, though not irrespective of laws, such works depend upon instinctive felicity—felicity in the choice of topics and the mode of execution, felicity both in doing and in leaving undone: this high and perfect excellence, perhaps, In Memoriam has not reached, though omission and revision might lead very close to it."

ETHERIZATION.—A writer in the Medical Times says, "The day, perhaps, may not be far off, when we shall be able to suspend the sensibility of the nervous chords, without acting on the center of the nervous system, just as we are enabled to suspend circulation in an artery without acting on the heart."

LEIGH HUNT

One of the most delightful books of the season will be The Autobiography of LEIGH HUNT, which is being reprinted by Harper & Brothers, and will very soon be given to the American public in an edition of suitable elegance. The last great race of poets and literary men, observes a writer in the London Standard, is now rapidly vanishing from the scene: of the splendid constellation, in the midst of which Campbell, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey, Crabbe, and Byron, were conspicuous, how few remain! Moore (rapidly declining), Rogers (upward of eighty), Professor Wilson, Montgomery, and Leigh Hunt, are nearly all. It is fitting that we prize these few, as the remnants of a magnificent group, which cannot be expected very soon to be repeated.

Leigh Hunt has, for nearly half a century, occupied a prominent place in the public eye, as a politician of a peculiarly bold and decided stamp, when boldness was necessary for the utterance of the truth; and as a poet and prose-writer of a singularly-genial and amiable character. As the chief founder and critic of the Examiner, he would doubtless occupy a high place in literary history, but as the author of "Rimini" he is entitled to a more enduring and enviable fame. This will always stand at the head of his works: but his "Indicator," his "London Journal," his "Jar of Honey," and others, abound with the illustrations of a most imaginative and cordial spirit.

We are glad to possess a good autobiography of Leigh Hunt. It is the first we have from a long list of celebrated men; and no one could give us such correct, discerning, and delightful insights into their usual life and true characters. Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and a crowd of others become familiar to us in these pages. It was in the Examiner that the first compositions of Shelley and Keats were introduced to the British public; and the friendship which Mr. Hunt maintained with those poets, till their deaths, casts a sunshine over that portion of his life, which is peculiarly charming.

Perhaps the two points of this Autobiography which will most attract the attention of the reader are the author's imprisonment for a libel on the Prince Regent, and his visit to Italy. In that imprisonment of two years, he was visited by Byron, Moore, Brougham, Bentham, and several other eminent men. In the journey to Italy, which was undertaken in order to coöperate with Byron and Shelley in bringing out of the "Liberal," Hunt had the misfortune to be deprived of Shelley's friendship, by death, immediately on his arrival; and of the friendship of Byron, through incompatibilities of taste, and the jealous officiousness of Byron's friends, amongst whom Moore bore a prominent part. Mr. Hunt published a volume on the subject soon after his return to England, which occasioned him a great deal of ill-will. To this publication he now refers with expressions of much regret, and with the calmness which has been produced by time. But it cannot be denied that he endured most mortifying and irritating provocations, which never could have taken place had Shelley lived. We are glad that he has had an opportunity of leaving a generous and forgiving record of this remarkable portion of his life; and certainly nothing can be more delightful than his present account of it:—

"The greatest comfort I experienced," he says, "in Italy was living in the same neighborhood, and thinking, as I went about, of Boccaccio. Boccaccio's father had a house at Maiano, supposed to have been situated at the Fiesolan extremity of the hamlet. That merry-hearted writer was so fond of the place that he has not only laid the two scenes of the 'Decameron' on each side of it, with the valley which his company resorted to in the middle, but has made the two little streams which embrace Maiano, the Affrico and the Mensola, the hero and the heroine of his 'Nimphale Fiesolano.' The scene of another of his works is on the banks of the Margnone, a river a little distant; and the 'Decameron' is full of the neighboring villages. Out of the windows of one side of our house we saw the turret of the Villa Gherardi, to which, according to his biographers, his 'joyous company' resorted in the first instance. A house belonging to the Macchiavelli was near, a little to the left; and farther to the left, among the blue hills, was the white village, Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born. The house is still in possession of the family. From our windows on the other side we saw, close to us, the Fiesole of antiquity and of Milton, the site of the Boccaccio-house before mentioned; still closer, the Decameron's Valley of Ladies at our feet; and we looked over toward the quarter of the Mignone and of a house of Dante, and in the distance beheld the mountains of Pistria. Lastly, from the terrace in front, Florence lay clear and cathedraled before us, with the scene of Redi's Bacchus rising on the other side of it, and the villa of Arcetri, famous for Galileo. Hazlitt, who came to see me there, beheld the scene around us with the admiration natural to a lover of old folios and great names, and confessed, in the language of Burns, that it was a sight to enrich the eyes.

"My daily walk was to Fiesole, through a path skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the door of the Doccia, and sate on the pretty melancholy platform behind it, reading, or looking down to Florence."

This is all very charming, yet hear what the author says further:—

"Some people, when they return from Italy, say it has no wood, and some a great deal. The fact is, that many parts of it, Tuscany included, has no wood to speak of: it wants larger trees interspersed with the small ones, in the manner of our hedge-row elms. A tree of a reasonable height is a god-send. The olives are low and hazy-looking, like dry sallows. You have plenty of these; but to an Englishman, looking from a height, they appear little better than brushwood. Then there are no meadows, no proper green fields in June; nothing of that luxurious combination of green and russet, of grass, wild flowers, and woods, over which a lover of nature can stroll for hours, with a foot as fresh as the stag's; unmixed with chalk-dust, and an eternal public path, and able to lie down, if he will, and sleep in clover. In short—saving, alas! a finer sky and a drier atmosphere—we have the best part of Italy in books; and this we can enjoy in England. Give me Tuscany in Middlesex or Berkshire, and the Valley of Ladies between Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow.... To me, Italy had a certain hard taste in the mouth: its mountains were too bare, its outlines too sharp, its lanes too stony, its voices too loud, its long summer too dusty. I longed to bathe myself in the grassy balm of my native fields."

As a whole these volumes are full of interest and variety. They introduce us to numerous famous people, and leave us with a most agreeable impression of their author.

THE MORMONS

THOMAS L. KANE, of Philadelphia, distinguished himself very honorably a year or two ago by the vindication of the Mormons against calumnies to which they had been subjected in the Western States, and by appeals for their relief from the sufferings induced by unlooked-for exposure in their exodus to California. We are indebted to him for an interesting discourse upon the subject, delivered before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He concludes this performance with the following observations, which we believe to be altogether just. Mr. KANE is a man of sagacity and integrity, and his opportunities for the formation of a wise opinion upon this subject were such as very few have possessed:

"I have gone over the work I assigned myself when I accepted your Committee's invitation, as fully as I could do without trespassing too largely upon your courteous patience. But I should do wrong to conclude my lecture without declaring in succinct and definite terms, the opinions I have formed and entertain of the Mormon people. The libels, of which they have been made the subject, make this a simple act of justice. Perhaps, too, my opinion, even with those who know me as you do, will better answer its end following after the narrative I have given.

"I have spoken to you of a people; whose industry had made them rich, and gathered around them all the comforts, and not a few of the luxuries of refined life; expelled by lawless force into the wilderness; seeking an untried home far away from the scenes which their previous life had endeared to them; moving onward, destitute, hunger-sickened, and sinking with disease; bearing along with them their wives and children, the aged, and the poor, and the decrepid; renewing daily on their march, the offices of devotion, the ties of family, and friendship, and charity; sharing necessities, and braving dangers together, cheerful in the midst of want and trial, and persevering until they triumphed. I have told, or tried to tell you, of men, who when menaced by famine, and in the midst of pestilence, with every energy taxed by the urgency of the hour, were building roads and bridges, laying out villages, and planting cornfields, for the stranger who might come after them, their kinsman only by a common humanity, and peradventure a common suffering,—of men, who have renewed their prosperity in the homes they have founded in the desert,—and who, in their new built city, walled round by mountains like a fortress, are extending pious hospitalities to the destitute emigrants from our frontier lines,—of men who, far removed from the restraints of law, obeyed it from choice, or found in the recesses of their religion, something not inconsistent with human laws, but far more controlling; and who are now soliciting from the government of the United States, not indemnity,—for the appeal would be hopeless, and they know it—not protection, for they now have no need of it,—but that identity of political institutions and that community of laws with the rest of us, which was confessedly their birthright when they were driven beyond our borders.

"I said I would give you the opinion I formed of the Mormons: you may deduce it for yourselves from these facts. But I will add that I have not yet heard the single charge against them as a community, against their habitual purity of life, their integrity of dealing, their toleration of religious differences in opinion, their regard for the laws, or their devotion to the constitutional government under which we live, that I do not from my own observation, or the testimony of others, know to be unfounded."

THE BRIDE'S REVERIE