This grandiose character pervades his wit
and his imagination. We have never had anything in literature so
like earthquakes, as the laughter of Carlyle. He "shakes with his
mountain mirth." It is like the laughter of the genii in the horizon.
These jokes shake down Parliament-house and Windsor Castle, Temple,
and Tower, and the future shall echo the dangerous peals. The other
particular of magnificence is in his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who
is altogether too burly in his frame and habit to submit to the
limits of metre. Yet he is full of rhythm not only in the perpetual
melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, and grand
returns of his sense and music. Whatever thought or motto has once
appeared to him fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him
henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper tones and weightier
import, now as promise, now as threat, now as confirmation, in
gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next
ages returned the sound.
_Antislavery Poems._
By JOHN PIERPONT. Boston: Oliver Johnson. 1843.
These poems are much the most readable of all the metrical
pieces we have met with on the subject; indeed, it is strange how
little poetry this old outrage of negro slavery has produced.
Pages:
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256