on the true Greek manner Congreve recommended. Then the tide of slovenly Pindarism swept them both away. Twenty years later Edward Young made an attempt to reform the English ode, which was as grotesque as Congreve's had been scholarly. The author of the "Night Thoughts," in a ridiculous "Discourse on Ode," recommended the substitution of a fixed stanza for the irregular strophes of Cowley, and himself employed this new form in a series of odes. His reform was received with peals of laughter, and it may even now be amusing to review what so solemn a writer considered would be the best way of enshrining sublime thought in majestic harmony: Our Monarch, there, Should tempests rise, disdains to bend; Derides the stroke; His blooming honours far extend! Beneath them lies, With lifted eyes, Fair Albion, like an amorous maid; Bold foreign kings To fly, like eagles, to his shade: At his proud foot The sea poured out, Immortal nourishment supplies; Thence wealth, and state, And power, and fate, Which Europe reads in George's eyes. The reform which Congreve had vainly attempted was set in motion forty years later by a forgotten writer, Gilbert West, son of the editor of Pindar, who in 1749 brought out a translation of the odes of the great Theban, divided into strophes, though with much more internal irregularity of form than Pindar, or even Congreve, had permitted. This version reaching the hands of Gray, who had already composed a number of mellifluous odes in the Horatian manner, fired him with the design of reproducing these forms in original English verse; and to this circumstance, no doubt, we owe "The Progress of Poesy," 1754, and "The Bard," 1756, the only Pindaric odes of Gray, but these the most famous in our language. As early as 1747, Collins had published that slender collection which represents the Æolian harmony as characteristically as Gray's odes do the Dorian; and to our own day these two poets are held in some sort sponsors to this enthusiastic species of composition, which, but for them, would hardly have been permitted to hold rank in our poetry. The irregularities of Gray had surpassed the laxity permitted by Gilbert West, and in the hands of such disciples as Mason, the ode began to return to the chaos in which Cowley left it. The austere poet of "The Pleasures of the Imagination" restored it to order, and produced a series of odes which came nearer to the Greek model in form than any that had been or have since been composed. Unfortunately the correctness of Akenside did not insure his inspiration. That delicate sculpturesque grace which adorns his unrhymed pieces gives place in most of these odes to a chilly, constrained, and painful rhetoric. The ode as Collins, Gray, and Akenside had severally conceived it, became a very popular form of verse until the close of the eighteenth century, and proved a great snare to all persons of a pompous and bombastic habit. Twice at least, by Sir C. Hanbury Williams and by Dr. Wolcot, it was used in burlesque as a trenchant weapon of offensive satire. With the romantic revival, the serious ode became a less elaborate and sedate instrument in the hands of a warmer generation of poets. All attempt to restrain it within the exact bounds of Greek tradition was abandoned, and the odes of Wordsworth and Coleridge are as absolutely irregular as Cowley's own. When Shelley came to write his "Ode to Naples," the very meaning of the terminology had been so far forgotten, that he commenced with two epodes, passed on to two strophes, and then indulged in four successive antistrophes! Keats resolved the ode into a group of stanzas, each exactly following the preceding, and each more or less like one movement of an ode of Pindar, but without any attempt to reproduce the choral interchanges. In our own day, little has been attempted in this enthusiastic style, except by three poets. Mr. Tennyson, besides a fantastic piece of melody in his rich early manner, has produced in his maturity one noble ode, a poem that stirs all English pulses like a trumpet. Mr. Coventry Patmore has published a volume of odes, full of austere feeling and fine imagination, although, as it appears to me, constructed rather upon a musical than a metrical system. Mr. Swinburne is marked out by his fiery and transcendental temperament to excel in the fuller Dorian numbers. His best choral writing, however, is to be found in his unequalled drama of “Erechtheus,” and is therefore placed outside the range of this discussion. But the glowing stanzas addressed to Victor Hugo in exile, are amply sufficient to close with dignity the diapason of English odes, a music like that of which Thompson speaks, A broad majestic stream, and rolling on EDMUND W. Gosse. |