Festus
By Philip James Bailey.
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Dedication
My father! unto thee to whom I owe
All that I am, all that I have and can;
Who madest me in thyself the sum of man
In all his generous aims and powers to know,
These first-fruits bring I; nor do thou forego
Marking when I the boyish feat began,
Which numbers now near three years from its plan,
Not twenty summers had imbrowned my brow.
Life is at blood-heat every page doth prove.
Bear with it. Nature means Necessity.
If here be aught which thou canst love, it springs
Out of the hope that I may earn that love
More unto me than immortality;
Or to have strang my harp with golden strings.
Preface to the American Edition
We here present to the American public a book which has produced no little sensation in England, and which has been, for some time, known to many in this country. But although the first edition was issued six years since, it has had but a limited circulation among us; and it is believed that in republishing Festus, we not only perform a work which its merits demand, but open, for the first time, to many who will appreciate it, a great and original poem. The peculiar value of the second English edition, from which this is printed, consists in the “Proem,” which was not attached to the first. Having placed at the end of the volume some of the highest literary opinions in England, we will not intrude any analysis of our own. But a word upon one point With many minds, it will be difficult to acquit the author from the charge of irreverence. For this purpose, we refer to his vindication in the “Proem” and in the body of the work; by which the reader will perceive that he is free from irreverence in spirit, whatever question there may be as to the propriety of certain forms of expression. As to the extravagances, which all will discover, they are the extravagances of deep and eloquent passion—the luxuriant overgrowth of a profoundly rich soil. With all its faults, Festus is a great poem—a mine of thought and imagery. It is perfectly safe to pronounce it one of the most powerful and splendid productions of the age.
Festus
Proem
Without all fear, without presumption, he
Who wrote this work would speak respecting it
A few brief words, and face his friend the world;
Revising, not reversing, what hath been.
Poetry is itself a thing of God;
He made His prophets poets; and the more
We feel of poesie do we become
Like God in love and power—under-makers.
All great lays, equals to the minds of men,
Deal more or less with the Divine, and have
For end some good of mind or soul of man.
The mind is this world’s, but the soul is God’s;
The wise man joins them here all in his power.
The high and holy works, amid lesser lays,
Stand up like churches among village cots;
And it is joy to think that in every age,
However much the world was wrong therein,
The greatest works of mind or hand have been
Done unto God. So may they ever be!
It shows the strength of wish we have to be great,
And the sublime humility of might.
True fiction hath in it a higher end
Than fact; it is the possible compared
With what is merely positive, and gives
To the conceptive soul an inner world,
A higher, ampler, Heaven than that wherein
The nations sun themselves. In that bright state
Are met the mental creatures of the men
Whose names are writ highest on the rounded crown
Of Fame’s triumphal arch; the shining shapes
Which star the skies of that invisible land,
Which, whosoe’er would enter, let him learn;—
’Tis not enough to draw forms fair and lively,
Their conduct likewise must be beautiful;
A hearty holiness must crown the work,
As a gold cross the minster-dome, and show,
Like that instonement of divinity,
That the whole building doth belong to God.
And for the book before us, though it were,
What it is not, supremely little, like
The needled angle of a high church spire,
Its sole end points to God the Father’s glory,
From all eternity seen; making clear
His might and love in saving sinful man.
One bard shows God as He deals with states and kings;
Another,
