Wild roses by the abbey towers
Are gay in their young bud and bloom:
They were born of a race of funeral flowers,
That garlanded in long-gone hours,
A Templar's knightly tomb.
The tone employed in the concluding portions of Alnwick Castle,
is, we sincerely think, reprehensible, and unworthy of Halleck. No
true poet can unite in any manner the low burlesque with the ideal,
and not be conscious of incongruity and of a profanation. Such
verses as
Men in the coal and cattle line
From Tevoit's bard and hero land,
From royal Berwick's beach of sand,
From Wooler, Morpeth, Hexham, and
Newcastle upon Tyne.
may lay claim to oddity- but no more. These things are the defects and
not the beauties of Don Juan. They are totally out of keeping with the
graceful and delicate manner of the initial portions of Alnwick
Castle, and serve no better purpose than to deprive the entire poem of
all unity of effect. If a poet must be farcical, let him be just that,
and nothing else. To be drolly sentimental is bad enough, as we have
just seen in certain passages of the Culprit Fay, but to be
sentimentally droll is a thing intolerable to men, and Gods, and
columns.
Marco Bozzaris appears to have much lyrical without any high order
of ideal beauty.
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