LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 137 



fulfils the true office of poet, by showing them, with the least 

 possible fuss, what it is, Percival was a professor of poetry 

 rather than a poet, and we are not surprised at the number of 

 lectures he reads us when we learn that in early life he was an 

 excellent demonstrator of anatomy, whose subject must be dead 

 before his business with it begins. His interest in poetry was 

 always more or less scientific. He was for ever trying experi 

 ments in matter and form, especially the latter. And these were 

 especially unhappy, because it is plain that he had no musical 

 ear, or at best a very imperfect one. His attempts at classical 

 metres are simply unreadable, whether as verse or prose. He 

 contrives to make even the Sapphic so, which when we read it 

 in Latin moves featly to our modern accentuation. Let anyone 

 who wishes to feel the difference between ear and no ear com 

 pare Percival s specimens with those in the same kind of Cole 

 ridge, who had the finest metrical sense since Milton. We take 

 this very experimenting to be a sufficient proof that Percival s 

 faculty, such as it was and we do not rate it highly was arti 

 ficial, and not innate. The true poet is much rather experi 

 mented upon by life and nature, by joy and sorrow, by beauty 

 and defect, till it be found out whether he have any hidden 

 music in him that can sing them into an accord with the eternal 

 harmony which we call God. 



It is easy to trace the literary influences to which the mind of 

 Percival was in turn subjected. Early in life we find a taint of 

 Byronism, which indeed does not wholly disappear to the last. 

 There is among his poems An Imprecation/ of which a single 

 stanza will suffice as a specimen : 



Wrapped in sheets of gory lightning, 

 While cursed night-hags ring thy knell, 

 May the arm of vengeance bright ning, 

 O er thee wave the sword of hell ! 



If we could fancy Laura Matilda shut up tipsy in the watch- 

 house, we might suppose her capable of this melodious substi 

 tute for swearing. We confess that we cannot read it without 

 laughing, after learning from Mr. Ward that its Salmoneus- 

 thunderbolts were launched at the comfortable little city of 

 Hartford, because the poet fancied that the inhabitants thereof 

 did not like him or his verses so much as he himself did. There 

 is something deliciously ludicrous in the conception of night- 

 hags ringing the orthodox bell of the Second Congregational or 

 First Baptist Meeting-house to summon the parishioners to 

 witness these fatal consequences of not reading Percival s 

 poems. Nothing less than the fear of some such catastrophe 



