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WASHINGTON

IN

SWEDEN.

AT a dinner given by Mr. HUGHES, the former minister to the Court of Sweden, in Stockholm, on GEORGE WASHINGTON's birth-day, a toast was proposed for the Father of his Country, accompanied by the following verses, composed by Bishop WALLIN, one of Sweden's greatest divines and poets, and who was one of the guests at this entertainment. They are distinguished in the original for their beautiful and manly spirit, so different from the empty flatteries with which the poetry of the present day, on such occasions, abounds. I say 'in the original, for if the meaning be sometimes obscure, and the rhyme imperfect, all faults must be attributed to the translator, not to the writer. The translator would not have attempted to clothe these lines, so beautiful in the Swedish, in an English garb, had they not shown that the Swedes are acquainted with and appreciate our beloved WASHINGTON's character; and such a testimony is too pleasing to an American in a far country, to allow them to remain untranslated.

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THE poetry of the last century naturally resolves itself into three grand divisions, each occupying a particular epoch namely, the Classical, the Pastoral, and the Natural.

The Classical does not properly belong to the eighteenth century, but was continued, or, so to speak, carried over, from the ages preceding. Those were the times when the tongues of Greece and of Rome were the vernacular languages of the schools; when men of learning wrote familiar letters to each other, and even conversed, in Greek and Latin; when no work on science or literature was considered worthy of notice unless it appeared in a Roman dress; and when no poet could lay claim to public favor until he had first written a quantity of Latin verse, or translated Homer, or Virgil, or Horace, or Juvenal, or Ovid.

Although this fondness for the classics was certainly carried to a ridiculous excess, it was not wholly without its advantages. It linked the learned men of different countries more closely together, and enabled them to hold agreeable intercourse, although they might be ignorant of each others' language. It likewise empowered the man of learning, whatever might be his nation, to hold professorships in any college, whether in Germany, Italy, France,

Clavers: idle nonsense.

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or England. In the year 1570, Edmund Hay, a Scottish Jesuit, was a professor of theology in the university of Paris; not to mention any other instance.

By degrees, however, the classical fever died away. Learning, as it was diffused over a wider surface, gradually became less profound. The vernacular languages of the different nations began to be more extensively cultivated, and, as a natural consequence, greatly improved. Translations from the ancients went out of fashion, and original composition resumed its legitimate station.

And then it was that the age of pastoral poetry began in England. It is true, many poets, since the days of Spenser and Sir Philip Sydney, had occasionally employed their powers on this kind of composition. We see some glimpses of it in Shakspeare's Winter's Tale' and 'As You Like It,' but with a world of more naturalness than properly belongs to the pastoral style. Fletcher wrote a pastoral drama, called the 'Faithful Shepherdess;' Milton's Lycidas' is a pastoral;* and many other poets of less note amused themselves by portraying scenes of pastoral simplicity and perfect innocence, in which the sole business of life was keeping sheep and making love. But it was not until the period of which we speak, that is, in the early part of the eighteenth century, that the reign of pastoral poetry began in good earnest.

Whether it was owing to the fine translations of Virgil's Eclogues and Theocritus' Idylls, which had lately been made into the Eng lish language, or whether it proceeded from some other cause, I know not; but on a sudden, the whole literary world, in England, (as well as in some other countries,) became infected with a strange desire to write pastoral poetry. For more than the third part of a century, nothing was to be heard but the sound of purling brooks and rustic pipes: nothing to be seen but shepherds and shepherdesses, lying upon banks of flowers and dying of love in all directions; while such vast numbers of flocks of sheep sprung up on every side, as must have increased the growth of British wools to a prodigious extent. Every wit became a Theocritus; every lady a Pastorella. The exquisite 'young man upon town,' who would have turned up his delicate nose at sight of a real shepherd, and saluted him with the euphonious epithets of clod-pool,' or 'country bumpkin,' yet scrupled not to call himself a rustic swain, and babbled of green fields,' and of flowers, and crooks, and little dogs, and lovely shepherdesses. The elegant lady of fashion, in her stiff hoop-petticoat and yard-high head-dress, sat in her bourdoir, surrounded with every luxury, singing of the joys of rustic life, weaving imaginary garlands to deck ideal crooks, and prattling soft nonsense to the little lambs' that were feeding around her, probably on the huge boquets of nondescript flowers that adorned the rich carpet of her apartment.

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LYCIDAS,' as is well known, is a monody on the death of Milton's friend and college-companion, Edward King; and it is not a little ludicrous, amid the sadness of the subject, and the pathetic beauty of the poetry, to hear the grave and studious scholar telling how he and his friend drove their flocks afield,' and tended them in company, battening them with the fresh dews of night,' when they were students together at Cambridge!

Had the mania been confined to such as these, it would not have been of much consequence; but there were many poets — real poets who suffered themselves to be drawn away by it; or, perhaps, we should rather say, who were themselves the originators of it. Thomson, the delightful poet of the Seasons, seduced by the prevailing fashion, wrote pastorals.* Lord Lyttleton, the generous and amiable friend of Thomson, wrote pastorals. Pope, (though 't was, it is true, at the age of sixteen,) wrote pastorals. Collins, Gay, Warton, wrote pastorals. And Shenstone, of whom it was said, in the Marquis of Ermenonville's famous epitaph:

'BENEATH this plain stone

Lies WILLIAM SHENSTONE;
A poet rural

Who wrote of things natüral,'

too often veiled his things natüral under such a mass of artificial (i. e. pastoral) imagery, as almost entirely to destroy their charm.

As if this was not enough, Hannah More, the sensible, the strong-minded, the energetic Hannah More, made her first appearance, in 1762, at the age of seventeen, as the author of a pastoral drama. Yet even at this early age, the benevolent disposition of this admirable woman was visible; for The Search After Happiness,' was written to supply the place of those plays, and portions of plays, too often of a licentious character, wont to be performed by young ladies in boarding-schools. That she did not succeed in her design, was owing to the fact that Hannah More, though born to be the benefactress of her race, was not born a poet.' Her poetry is of the same dull, cold, stately, pompous school as that of her friend and literary admirer, Dr. Johnson. It is deficient in the true elements of poetry. It wants fire, energy, imagination, passion. Had she written nothing but verse, she would long ago have been forgotten; but fortunately for the world, she discovered, before it was too late, that prose was her forte. It is in prose that she excels, and on her prose that her fame is built, with a solidity which will withstand the shock of ages.

But what has all this to do with pastoral poetry? we are digressing. Revenons à nos moutons.

One of the most absurd things connected with this species of writing, was the high-flown and ridiculous nomenclature adopted in it. Oh! how our soul loathes the Damons, and Strephons, and Corydons, the Flavias, and Delias, and Sylvias, and Chloes, and Phillises, with which it abounded. In reading any of the poetry of this period, we always look ahead with a jealous eye; and if we spy any of these idiotical names disfiguring the page, we incontinently turn to the next one. The strange incongruity of introducing such names into descriptions of English pastoral life, in conjunction with those of Windsor, Grantham, Thames, &c., does not seem to have struck any one.

*I AM aware that, strictly speaking, the 'Seasons' themselves, as well as SHENSTONE's Village School-Mistress,' are Idylls or Pastorals; but they do not belong to the class of which I am speaking. They are natural delineations of Nature: hence their never-ending, still-beginning' charm.

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The plan of the English pastoral was always much the same, and the theme invariably love. Shepherds lying by the sides of rivers, playing on oaten pipes, or singing in courtly strains, the praises of their mistresses, lamenting or rejoicing, according as hope or despair prevailed; beautiful nymphs, bathing in limpid waters, or reclining under verdant trees; crooks garlanded with flowers, streams standing still to sympathize with human sorrow, skies ever pure and radiant, smiling with perpetual summer; these were the themes, forced and unnatural, cold and heartless, which for so long a time occupied the places which true feeling, genuine passion, and lofty sentiment ought to have held.

Gay alone, of all the poets of that period, seems to have had a proper idea of what an English pastoral ought to be. His characters are real rustics; and his 'Shepherd's Week,' though originally written to ridicule the pastorals of a contemporary, is still prized for its correct though somewhat coarse pictures of low country life. He tells us himself, in his address to the reader, that we will not find his shepherdesses idly piping on oaten reeds, but milking the kine; or, if the hogs are astray, driving them to their styes. My shepherd,' he continues, gathereth no nosegays but what are the growth of our own fields; he sleepeth not under myrtle shades, but under a hedge; nor doth he vigilantly defend his flock from wolves, because there are none." His picture of the country-ballad singer is, we think, excellent. Bowzybeus, a tipsy ballad-singer, who, we are told,

'could sweetly sing,

Or with the rosined bow torment the string,'

is found asleep by a troop of country lads and lasses, laughing and romping, as lads and lasses wont to do. With much noise and merriment they call on him to awake and give them a song. One frolicsome damsel steps forward, and

kisses with smacking lips the snoring lout;

another tickles his nose with a straw; and after a while, he awakes, and sings them a succession of songs, well calculated to please such tastes as theirs. The conclusion of this scene is admirably hit off.

'His carols ceased; the listening maids and swains

Seem still to hear some imperfect strains.

Sudden he rose, and as he reels along,

Swears kisses sweet should well reward his song.

The damsels laughing fly: the giddy clown

Again upon a wheat-sheaf sinks adown;

The power that guards the drunk his sleep attends,
Till ruddy, like his face, the sun descends."

Very different from this, however, were the Pastorals of Gay's contemporaries.

Pope wrote four, descriptive of the four seasons. And certainly, when we consider them as the work of a boy of sixteen, we are bound to admire them; but we cannot help exclaiming: Pity he did not choose a better theme.' In the first Pastoral, two shepherds, Daphnis and Strephon, after leading out their flocks on Windsor's

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