THE LADIES REPOSITORY. JANUARY, 1855. IF THE INSPIRED MAN. BY J. D. BELL. you had lived a mariner's life, you could speak of having many times gazed out, long and rapturously, upon the broad sea, when the soft sunbeams were sporting with her raven locks, and the wild and boisterous winds were all slumbering in the distant islands. Then you might tell us of having been suddenly startled from your calm and peaceful reverie by a deep voice from the heavens, calling up the Titan forces of the tempest. Soon your ear was stunned by the loud wail of the blast, and, as you looked out, you saw the white sweat, foaming on the face of the toiling waters. Once more you stretched your giddy eyes over the great deep, and the thundering of the billows, the darkness, and the lightning, told you that old Ocean had grown eloquent. I have fancied that this sublime scene might be considered a fit illustration of that grand process by which the great and divinely gifted man becomes inspired. There are times when we see the human soul entering into a freer, mightier, and more intense life-a life that seems to gush with red and terrible action! The whole being seems to be shocked through and through with currents of divine galvanism. The ordinary infirmities of human nature seem to have melted all away under the mysterious heat of an awakened, inspired, eloquent soul. The reason has assumed a strange clearness; the imagination is all alive with bold and beautiful imagery; and the eye darts forth a wild and weird electricity. To act mightily, in that hour, seems as easy as for the storm to shake the giant trees, or toss the ironribbed ship. The great deep of the soul has been broken up. Every look, every gesture, every smile, and every frown beams, and burns, and overflows with fervid power. And the glo VOL. XV.-1 rious words that come sparkling, and leaping, and gleaming, and thundering forth-then, O, who can describe them! "They seize upon the mind, arrest, and search, That quaver in the current-turn us cold, One of the peculiar features of this lofty inspiration is its naturalness. It is always interpreted by the occasion from which it originates. You can not mistake it. No buffoon can pass off an inflated for an inspired soul. The mimic orator will always be betrayed by his speechless eyes; and gin-inspired poetry will always smell of gin. True eloquence can no more be mimicked than an elephant could be housed in a soap-bubble. The inspired man will always present you his credentials, and you will acknowledge them, and give him welcome to your soul; for you must. As his day, so will his strength be. In the hour of insignificant emergency, his voice will be sweet and playful; and when great interests are at stake, his appropriate utterances will also come forth; and you will understand them then, just as, when you hear a rolling among the clouds, you know it is the thunder. There are three great moods of human eloquence or inspiration. One of these is that state of sublime abstraction in which the soul of the gifted poet is sometimes found absorbed away and lost. The inspiration of the poet is the most ethereal of any of which man is susceptible. We see men sometimes that remind us at once of Deity himself. They possess such power, that, with almost a single word, they might hush the clamor of rebellion, or take the spunk out of great armies. Such is not the poet's power. He partakes more of the angel than of the God. He seems to be the heavenliest being in the world. Milton and Paradise are twin words. How disgusted we are with the epic that runs down into sensualism and worldliness-with the Muse that pollutes its seraphic wing in the dust! You read a few leaves of Hudibras, and, in spite of all his admirers, your heart whispers, "This is not divine!" The true poet makes us heavenlier, not earthlier. I think there is, at best, but little divine inspiration in satires. When did you like Horace most, my friend? Was it when, with his great pinions dragging along the very ground, he led you through the dull routine of his journey from Rome to Brundusium? or was it when, almost a Horace yourself, you drank into your very being the beautiful fire of his Odes and Epodes? When did Byron catch hold of your spirit, and soar up out of sight with it in the ether of heaven? Was it when you read his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" and "Don Juan ?* or was it when you saw and heard him, like some royal angel, soliloquizing in the "Prophecy of Dante" and "Childe Harold?" If you fathom the hearts of men, you will find that the universal sentiment is, that the true mission of the poet is to exalt the mind, to gather supernal light from the far-distant slopes and summits of truth, and to scatter it over the world. And hence it was that when we found Byron and Burns in a debauch, and read Alexander Pope's lampoon on London, the very best lines of these poets began, from that time, to smack too much of the flesh. I confess that I have never admired Lalla Rookh so much since I read of Tom Moore's duel. Inspiration is always understood to mean a state of exalted fervor a divine afflatus. It can not be the fire of rotten wood. Milton and Homer both understood this; and, hence, though blind, they constantly gaze into our souls from their great works, with eyes like stars. You know how it was, too, with the divine Ossian. In that hour when his gorgeous words flew around your spirit, like cinders struck from a blazing diamond, you could not believe him a poor, blind man, pining for the light. His humanity was lost in his angelhood. And just so the true poet is always struggling upward from the human to the divine. It seems to be his fate to be constantly subduing and sublimating that which is material and earthly, whether of himself or of the world around him. He makes that look beautiful which is deformed. He puts sweet odor into the withered rose, and dilates upon the majestic "His fantasy Breathes spirit-life ecstatic o'er dead rhyme; But another great mood of human inspiration The orator seems to be an embodiment of all the forces as well as the charms of nature. When inspired, he represents the storm, flapping its wild wings over the great deep; and his words, then, are even Like supernatural thunders, far yet near, Sowing their fiery echoes through the hills!" Again, he has all the gentleness and beauty of a But now he suddenly assumes a new attitude. The readers of the Repository don't read Byron's billowy snow drifting over the frozen ground. "Don Juan."-ED. One word more, and we find ourselves, it may |