Indeed, it is the divine attribute of the imagination, that it isirrepressible, unconfinable; that when the real world is shut out,it can create a world for itself, and with a necromantic power, canconjure up glorious shapes and forms, and brilliant visions, to makesolitude populous, and irradiate the gloom of the dungeon. Such wasthe world of pomp and pageant that lived round Tasso in his dismalcell at Ferrara, when he conceived the splendid scenes of hisJerusalem; and we may consider the "King's Quair," composed byJames, during his captivity at Windsor, as another of thosebeautiful breakings-forth of the soul from the restraint and gloomof the prison house.
The subject of the poem is his love for the Lady Jane Beaufort,daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and a princess of the blood royal ofEngland, of whom he became enamored in the course of his captivity.
What gives it a peculiar value, is that it may be considered atranscript of the royal bard's true feelings, and the story of hisreal loves and fortunes. It is not often that sovereigns write poetry,or that poets deal in fact. It is gratifying to the pride of acommon man, to find a monarch thus suing, as it were, for admissioninto his closet, and seeking to win his favor by administering tohis pleasures. It is a proof of the honest equality of intellectualcompetition, which strips off all the trappings of factitious dignity,brings the candidate down to a level with his fellow-men, andobliges him to depend on his own native powers for distinction. Itis curious, too, to get at the history of a monarch's heart, and tofind the simple affections of human nature throbbing under the ermine.
But James had learnt to be a poet before he was a king: he wasschooled in adversity, and reared in the company of his ownthoughts. Monarchs have seldom time to parley with their hearts, or tomeditate their minds into poetry; and had James been brought up amidstthe adulation and gayety of a court, we should never, in allprobability, have had such a poem as the Quair.
I have been particularly interested by those parts of the poem whichbreathe his immediate thoughts concerning his situation, or whichare connected with the apartment in the tower. They have thus apersonal and local charm, and are given with such circumstantialtruth, as to make the reader present with the captive in his prison,and the companion of his meditations.
Such is the account which he gives of his weariness of spirit, andof the incident which first suggested the idea of writing the poem. Itwas the still midwatch of a clear moonlight night; the stars, he says,were twinkling as fire in the high vault of heaven: and "Cynthiarinsing her golden locks in Aquarius." He lay in bed wakeful andrestless, and took a book to beguile the tedious hours. The book hechose was Boetius' Consolations of Philosophy, a work popular amongthe writers of that day, and which had been translated by his greatprototype Chaucer. From the high eulogium in which he indulges, itis evident this was one of his favorite volumes while in prison: andindeed it is an admirable text-book for meditation under adversity. Itis the legacy of a noble and enduring spirit, purified by sorrow andsuffering, bequeathing to its successors in calamity the maxims ofsweet morality, and the trains of eloquent but simple reasoning, bywhich it was enabled to bear up against the various ills of life. Itis a talisman, which the unfortunate may treasure up in his bosom, or,like the good King James, lay upon his nightly pillow.
After closing the volume, he turns its contents over in his mind,and gradually falls into a fit of musing on the fickleness of fortune,the vicissitudes of his own life, and the evils that had overtaken himeven in his tender youth. Suddenly he hears the bell ringing tomatins; but its sound, chiming in with his melancholy fancies, seemsto him like a voice exhorting him to write his story. In the spirit ofpoetic errantry he determines to comply with this intimation: hetherefore takes pen in hand, makes with it a sign of the cross toimplore a benediction, and sallies forth into the fairy land ofpoetry. There is something extremely fanciful in all this, and it isinteresting as furnishing a striking and beautiful instance of thesimple manner in which whole trains of poetical thought aresometimes awakened, and literary enterprises suggested to the mind.
In the course of his poem he more than once bewails the peculiarhardness of his fate; thus doomed to lonely and inactive life, andshut up from the freedom and pleasure of the world, in which themeanest animal indulges unrestrained. There is a sweetness, however,in his very complaints; they are the lamentations of an amiable andsocial spirit at being denied the indulgence of its kind andgenerous propensities; there is nothing in them harsh nor exaggerated;they flow with a natural and touching pathos, and are perhaps renderedmore touching by their simple brevity. They contrast finely with thoseelaborate and iterated repinings, which we sometimes meet with inpoetry;- the effusions of morbid minds sickening under miseries oftheir own creating, and venting their bitterness upon an unoffendingworld. James speaks of his privations with acute sensibility, buthaving mentioned them passes on, as if his manly mind disdained tobrood over unavoidable calamities. When such a spirit breaks forthinto complaint, however brief, we are aware how great must be thesuffering that extorts the murmur. We sympathize with James, aromantic, active, and accomplished prince, cut off in the lustihood ofyouth from all the enterprise, the noble uses, and vigorous delightsof life; as we do with Milton, alive to all the beauties of nature andglories of art, when he breathes forth brief, but deep-tonedlamentations over his perpetual blindness.
