The North British Review (Volume 38) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Nature has set her black seal upon all extremes, which we mortals break at our peril. Wilson had neither power nor patience to be a great poet, but he had sufficient power and patience to be a very good prose writer. In reading his poems, one is always annoyed by their want of substance. There are plenty of fancies, which stud his pages as thickly as partridges stud a field of stubble in autumn, but one rarely comes across a good poetical image. One is always starting what one believes will prove a roebuck; but after giving it chase over the moorish wastes for a full hour, it turns out to be only a silly hare. This is provoking. In his essays, again, this is seldom the case. He seems more at ease himself, and he puts his reader more at ease. And while there is more of the long, thin lambent glister of sheet lightning than of the zig-zag forked thunderbolt about his prose, it is nevertheless light-bearing, and as such possessing an inevitable attraction for his readers. In the 'Noctes,' and ' Christopher in his Sporting Jacket,' one occasionally hears the pawing of the divine steeds which Apollo harnesses, but the reader is hardly ever borne to the zenith on this car of the sun; the mettled coursers take fright at something ere the day has well dawned. Now and then he pipes as sweetly as if Pan himself blew upon the quills, or like Sydney's Arcadian shepherd, who ' piped as though he should never grow old.' It was, in truth, when Wilson drew upon the resources of his actual experience, that he shone most; and every one, we believe, likes his prose much better than his verse, it he takes the trouble of reading both. In his walking and leaping, his boxing and fishing, his boating and cock-fighting, he tugs at the breast of old mother Nature with a vehemence that appals us. But it is ...