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Untitled Article
his young nerves thrilled at a story of the Silent People . His native district abounded in traditions of love and war , in ballads and fairy tales . These formed a curious combination in the mind of the young shepherd . The big ha' Bible , ' read with reverence on the Sabbath , was succeeded , during the remainder of the week , by snatches of c legendary lore , ' by fragments of ancient minstrelsy , by tales of elfin land , arid dreams on the
haunted brwe . With all this was blended that passionate love of Nature , which is an instinct and attribute of the poetical character . His * manner fc > f life , from his youth up , ' favoured the impression of all these influences upon his mind . He was neither fisherman , husbandman , nor mechanic—but a shepherd of the hills . Whatever impression he received in his home , or from his associates , was forced upon him by the self-communion of solitude , and blended with the influences of Nature in all her moods of
terror and of glory . All these , indeed , cannot make a poet ; but they can make a pGet of him who was born one . Our youthful herdsman was of that number ; and in the circumstances which have been noticed , we shall find the causes which gave impulse and colouring to an ardent and imaginative character , and produced those works in which they are so variously developed , and in which what is beautiful at all , is stamped with a beauty so characteristic and peculiar .
Those who should be guided only by the title of the work , would be lamentably disappointed on opening what Mr . Hogg has thought proper to call his Hebrew Melodies . ' The great natural endowments of this poet have been cabin'd , cribb'd , confined , * by the besetting sin of imitation . He has shown his powers of intentional imitation in a work which we think superior
to the Rejected Addresses themselves—the Poetic Mirror . The former are frequently little or nothing more than graceful , refined , and exquisite caricatures- ; while , in the latter , the poet has often succeeded ( whether designedly or not ) in producing passages in the very spirit of his masters . What can be more beautiful than the comparison occurring in one of his introductions of Wordsworth , of , the moulds of butter in a market-woman ' s basket ,
covered with their snow-white napkins , and heaving through it' lake graves of infants , covered o'er with snow' ? In such a shape imitation is welcome and delightful ; but not so in works which profess to be original . * Madoc of the Moor * is Mr . Hogg ' s version of ' the Lady of Lake ;* but we must say we prefer the strain itself to the echo . Lord Byron published
his « Hebrew Melodies / and Mr . Hogg must have his Hebrew Melodies ' a , lso > But he , who looks among them for any thing peculiarly stimulative of his moral or devotional sensibilities , will search them , we fear , to very little purpose , and find that they as little resemble the pulsationfc of a prophetic harp , as they do the breathings of the pnstorfil reed , rerhaps tottr readers will
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. On the Connexion between Poetry and Religion . 614 )
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1832, page 619, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1820/page/43/
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