The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851   By: Various

Of Literature, Art, and Science.

Vol. II. NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 1, 1851. No. III

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article.

THOMAS CHATTERTON.

[Illustration]

In the history of English literature there is no name that inspires a profounder melancholy than that of the "marvellous boy" Chatterton, of whom it must be said that in genius he surpassed any one who ever died so young, and that in suffering he had larger experience than almost any one who has lived to old age. Shelley says of him:

"'Mid others of less note came one frail form, A phantom among men; companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm, Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess, Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, Aclæon like, and now he fled astray, With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, And his own thoughts along that rugged way Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey."

And Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Southey, Scott, Kirke White, Landor, Montgomery, and others, have laid immortal flowers upon his tomb, to make the heart ache that we did not live in time to save the "sleepless soul" from "perishing in his pride."

Of the genius of poor Chatterton, Campbell says, "I would rather lean to the utmost enthusiasm of his admirers, than to the cold opinion of those who are afraid of being blinded to the defects of the poems attributed to Rowley, by the veil of obsolete phraseology which is thrown over them. If we look to the ballad of Sir Charles Bawdin, and translate it into modern English, we shall find its strength and interest to have no dependence on obsolete words. The inequality of his various productions may be compared to the disproportions of the ungrown giant. His works had nothing of the definite neatness of that precocious talent which stops short in early maturity. His thirst for knowledge was that of a being taught by instinct to lay up materials for the exercise of great and undeveloped powers. Even in his favorite maxim, that a man by abstinence and perseverance might accomplish whatever he pleased, may be traced the indications of a genius which nature had meant to achieve immortality. Tasso alone can be compared to him as a juvenile prodigy."

Mrs. S. C. HALL gives us, in her "Pilgrimages to English Shrines," in the Art Journal , the following interesting sketches of scenes connected with his history:

THOMAS CHATTERTON.

CHATTERTON poor Chatterton! We had been brooding sadly over his fragment of a life, ending at seventeen when ordinary lives begin and turning page after page of Horace Walpole's literary fooleries, to find his explanations and apologies for want of feeling and sympathy, which his flippant style, and heartless commentaries, illustrate to perfection; and we closed, with an aching heart, the volumes of both the parasite of genius, and him who was its mightiest creation and most miserable victim:

"The marvellous boy who perished in his pride."

It was only natural for us to recall the many instances we have ourselves known, during the past twenty years, or more, of sorrow and distress among those who sought distinction in the thorny labyrinths of literature; those who

"waged with Fortune an eternal war, Checked by the scoff of Pride, by Envy's frown, And Poverty's unconquerable bar;"

and those who, after a brief struggle with untoward fate, left the battle field, to die, "unpitied and unknown!"