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Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.
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In the summer of 1819 I was at Ouchy, a village on the margin of the lake of Geneva, in the Canton de Vaux. The most intelligent person I could find in the neighbourhood to talk to, was a young bookseller at Lausanne, educated at a German University; he was familiar with the works of many most distinguished writers; his reading was not confined, as it generally is with men of his craft, to catalogues and indexes, for he was an earnest student, and loved literature more than lucre.
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As Lausanne is one of the inland harbours of refuge in which wanderers from
all countries seek shelter, his shelves contained works in all languages; he was a good
linguist, and read the most attractive of them. “The elevation of
minds,” he said, “was more important than the height of mountains (I was
looking at a scale of the latter), and books are the standards to measure them
by.” He used to translate for me passages from the works of Schiller, Kant,
Goëthe, and others, and write comments on
their paradoxical, mystical, and metaphysical theories. One morning I saw my friend sitting
under the acacias on the terrace in front of the house in which Gibbon had lived, and where he wrote the ‘Decline and Fall.’ He said, “I am
trying to sharpen my wits in this pungent air which gave such a keen edge to the great
historian, so that I may fathom this book. Your modern poets, Byron, Scott, and Moore, I can read and understand as I walk along, but
I have got hold of a book by one now that makes me stop to take breath and
think.” It was Shelley’s
‘Queen Mab.’ As I had never
heard that name or title, I asked how he got the volume. “With a lot of new
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“Priests do not,” I answered; “so I, too, must have a bite of the forbidden fruit. What do you think of it?”
“To my taste,” said the bookseller, “the fruit is crude, but well flavoured; it requires a strong stomach to digest it; the writer is an enthusiast, and has the true spirit of a poet; he aims at regenerating, not like Byron and Moore, levelling mankind. They say he is but a boy, and this his first offering: if that be true, we shall hear of him again.”
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Some days after this conversation I walked to Lausanne, to breakfast at the
hotel with an old friend, Captain Daniel Roberts, of
the Navy. He was out, sketching, but presently came in accompanied by two English ladies,
with whom he had made acquaintance whilst drawing, and whom he brought to our hotel. The
husband of one of them soon followed. I saw by their utilitarian garb, as well as by the
blisters and blotches on their cheeks, lips, and noses, that they were pedestrian tourists,
fresh from the snow-covered mountains, the blazing sun and frosty air having acted on their
unseasoned skins, as boiling water does on the lobster, by dyeing his dark coat scarlet.
The man was evidently a denizen of the north, his accent harsh, skin white, of an angular
and bony build, and self-confident and dogmatic in his opinions. The precision and
quaintness of his language, as well as his eccentric remarks on common things, stimulated
my mind. Our icy islanders thaw rapidly when they have drifted into warmer latitudes:
broken loose from its anti-social system, mystic casts, coteries, sets and sects, they lay
aside their purse-proud, tuft-hunting, and toadying ways, and are very apt to
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To return to our breakfast. The travellers, flushed with health, delighted with their excursion, and with appetites earned by bodily and mental activity, were in such high spirits that Roberts and I caught the infection of their mirth; we talked as loud and fast as if under the exhilarating influence of champagne, instead of such a sedative compound as café au lait. I can rescue nothing out of oblivion but a few last words. The stranger expressed his disgust at the introduction of carriages into the mountain districts of Switzerland, and at the old fogies who used them.
“As to the arbitrary, pitiless, Godless wretches,” he
exclaimed, “who have removed nature’s landmarks by cutting roads through
Alps and Apennines, until all things are reduced to the same dead level, they will be
arraigned hereafter with the unjust: they have robbed the best specimens of what men
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The stranger, now hearing a commotion in the street, sprang on his feet, looked out of the window, and rang the bell violently.
“Waiter,” he said, “is that our carriage? Why did you not tell us? Come, lasses, be stirring, the freshness of the day is gone. You may rejoice in not having to walk; there is a chance of saving the remnants of skin the sun has left on our chins and noses,—to-day we shall be stewed instead of barbecued.”
On their leaving the room to get ready for their journey, my friend Roberts told me the strangers were the poet Wordsworth, his wife and sister.
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Who could have divined this? I could see no trace, in the hard features and weather-stained brow of the outer-man, of the divinity within him. In a few minutes the travellers re-appeared; we cordially shook hands, and agreed to meet again at Geneva. Now that I knew that I was talking to one of the veterans of the gentle craft, as there was no time to waste in idle ceremony, I asked him abruptly what he thought of Shelley as a poet?
“Nothing,” he replied, as abruptly.
Seeing my surprise, he added, “A poet who has not produced a good poem before he is twenty-five, we may conclude cannot, and never will do so.”
“The Cenci!” I said eagerly.
“Won’t do,” he replied, shaking his head, as he got into the carriage: a rough-coated Scotch terrier followed him.
“This hairy fellow is, our flea-trap,” he shouted out, as they started off.
When I recovered from the shock of having heard the harsh sentence passed by an elder bard on a younger brother of the Muses, I exclaimed,
After all, poets are but earth. It is the old
story,—Envy—Cain and Abel.
Professions, sects,
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I did not then know that the full-fledged author never reads the writings of his cotemporaries, except to cut them up in a review,—that being a work of love. In after-years, Shelley being dead, Wordsworth confessed this fact; he was then induced to read some of Shelley’s poems, and admitted that Shelley was the greatest master of harmonious verse in our modern literature.
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