Read Possession for Free Online Page A

of
Gods, Men and Heroes
, which Crabb Robinson, indefatigable, had read and commented on.
    JUNE 4 Read several dramatic poems from Randolph Ash’s new book. I noted particularly those purporting to be spoken by Augustine of Hippo, the ninth-century Saxon monk, Gotteschalk, and “Neighbour Pliable” from
Pilgrim’s Progress
. Also a singular evocation of Franz Mesmer and the young Mozart playing their glass harmonica at the court of the Archduke in Vienna, full of sounds and strange airs, excellently conceived and embodied. This Gotteschalk, a precursor of Luther, even to renouncing his Vows, might be thought in his intransigent predestinarian vision to figure some of the later Evangelicals of our day, and Neighbour Pliable perhaps a satire upon those like myself, whobelieve that Christianity does not consist in the idolatrous presence of the Deity in a piece of bread, nor yet in the five points of metaphysic faith. As is his wont, Ash treats Pliable, with whom he might be supposed to sympathise, with more apparent spleen than he directs towards his monstrous monk whose ravings have a certain real sublimity. It is difficult to know where to
have
Randolph Ash. I fear he will never become a popular poet. His evocation of the Black Forest in “Gotteschalk” is very fine, but how many of the public are prepared to endure his theological strictures to come to it? He convolutes and wreathes his melodies with such a forcing of rhyme and such a thicket of peculiar and ill-founded analogies, that his meaning is hard to discern. When I read Ash, I think of the younger Coleridge, reciting with gusto his epigram upon Donne:
    With Donne whose muse on dromedary trots
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots.     
    This passage was already well known to Ash scholars and had been extensively quoted. Roland liked Crabb Robinson, a man of indefatigable good will, intellectual curiosity, delight in literature and learning, and yet full of self-deprecation.
    “I early found that I had not the literary ability to give me such a place among English authors as I should have desired; but I thought that I had an opportunity of gaining a knowledge of many of the distinguished men of the age, and that I might do some good by keeping a record of my interviews with them.” He had known them all, two whole generations, Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, Lamb; Mme de Staël, Goethe, Schiller; Carlyle, G.H. Lewes, Tennyson, Clough, Bagehot. Roland read through 1857 and embarked on 1858. In the February of that year Robinson wrote:
    Were this my last hour (and that of an octogenarian cannot be far off) I would thank God for permitting me to behold so much of the excellence conferred on individuals. Of women, I saw the type of her heroic greatness in Mrs Siddons; of her fascinations, in Mrs Jordan and Mlle Mars; I listened with rapture to thedreamy monologues of Coleridge—“that old man eloquent”; I travelled with Wordsworth, the greatest of our lyrico-philosophical poets; I relished the wit and pathos of Charles Lamb; I conversed freely with Goethe at his own table, beyond all competition the supreme genius of his age and country. He acknowledges his obligations only to Shakespeare, Spinoza and Linnaeus, as Wordsworth, when he resolved to be a poet, feared competition only with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton.
    In June, Roland found what he had been looking for.
    My breakfast party went off very well indeed, as far as talk was concerned. I had with me Bagehot, Ash, Mrs Jameson, Professor Spear, Miss LaMotte and her friend Miss Glover, the last somewhat taciturn. Ash had never met Miss LaMotte, who indeed came out exceptionally to please me and to speak to her dear Father, whose
Mythologies
I have had some hand in bringing before the English public. Discussion of poetry was animated, especially of Dante’s incomparable genius, but also of the genius of Shakespeare in his poems, especially the playfulness of his young works, which Ash