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Gray single work   poetry   "The loud, apt epithet, applying sure;"
Is part of Being Leaves from Charles Harpur's Wild Bee of Australia Charles Harpur , 1851 series - author poetry Poetical Studies or Rhymed Criticisms Charles Harpur , 1984 sequence poetry
  • Author:agent Charles Harpur http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/harpur-charles
First known date: 1847 Issue Details: First known date: 1847... 1847 Gray
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Alternative title: Critical Rhymes on Grey [sic]
Notes:

Author's note: Previous to making the present copy of these lines, I re-read Grey [sic], with the view of finally testing their justice-and saw no reason for altering a word in them. Beyond an exquisite finish, - exquisite to fastidiousness,-and a sculpture-like art of personification, I cannot see the vaunted wonderfulness of his poetry. Nay, with all the figurative life of poetry, he seems to me to have been deficient, like Pope, of its diviner breath:- that something which we cannot describe, nor always readily apprehend; but which, if faithful to our poetical faculty, we can always miss, where it is not.

Still Grey’s [sic] productions will always be held in high scholarly esteem-and deservedly so. Their classical completeness, regarded simply as compositions, will forever secure to them a standard rank in English literature.

I speak in the text of the style of the elder English poets in comparison with that of the modern songsters of the order of Grey [sic]-and express, by implication, my preference of the former. Oh, those glorious old penmen of the Muses! Who amongst the so-called classical minors of the 'after days,' has written anything of a like kind and compass, which is at all comparable with the following epitaph by Browne, the author of Britannia's Pastorals, (though long attributed to Ben Johnson)? In every thought, in every line of it, there is all the dreamy earnestness-all the ideal abandonment of the right poetic faith; with all the simple, unforecasted, and yet sufficing harmony of real poetic passion.

Notes:
Underneath this sable hearse/ Lies the subject of all verse-/ Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother:/ Death, ere thou hast slain another/ Fair and good and learned as she,/ Time shall throw a dart at thee.// Marble piles let no man raise/ To her name for after days:/ Some good woman, born as she,/ Reading this, like Niobe/ Shall turn to marble, and become/ Both her mourner and her tomb.
Notes:
That is genuinely olden. And the olden English School of Poetry is as preferable to any of our modern peculiarities, as the old English annual rose is to every other kind or varisty: robuster in form, healthier at heart, more simple and natively rosy in hue, more strongly and yet more pleasantly fragrant.
Notes:
Number 5, part I in the author series Being Leaves from Charles Harpur's Wild Bee of Australia.
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur Charles Harpur , Elizabeth Perkins (editor), Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1984 Z459555 1984 selected work poetry satire 'This collection represents one version of almost every poem written by Charles Harpur, with the omission of some translations and paraphrases. The verse drama, "Stalwart the Bushranger", and the fragments of the dramatic poem "King Saul" are not included. ... The collection is edited from Harpur's manuscript poems held in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and from printed copies in colonial newspapers when no manuscript version existed.' (Preface) Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1984 pg. 805
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon An Anthology of Australian Poetry to 1920 John Kinsella (editor), Nedlands : University of Western Australia Library , 2007 Z1908582 2007 anthology poetry column prose Nedlands : University of Western Australia Library , 2007 pg. 134-135
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