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Chapter One: Zoey
Wrong place, wrong time. As usual. Chrissy couldn’t help the thought or the sob that accompanied it. She stumbled and staggered through the darkness, her hands outstretched in case she hit a wall. She smashed her shin into what felt like a metal block and fell hard to the ground.
Pain radiated through her leg, and she clutched it, unable to help the new tears that squeezed from her eyes. She barely contained a cry of pain. If she screamed, they might find her, the three men whose own journey through the dark house sounded as painful as her own, if their shouts were any indication. Her leg hurt so badly, she didn’t think she could stand.
“Flashlights, candles, anything!” one of them shouted.
She heard him rummaging far too close to her.
“Find that fucking girl! We’ve already lost two safe houses this fucking week!” Another shouted from the direction she had come.
She pushed herself to her feet. Her shin throbbed. Limping, Chrissy continued in her search for a window or a door or some way to escape. She had never been any place so dark before; she saw nothing. The carpet beneath her bare feet silenced her footsteps. Her favorite dress was ruined – torn by her pursuers in their attempt to rape her – and her expensive high heels lost somewhere within the two-story house.
If someone told her that her entire life could change in the course of a few minutes, she never would’ve believed it. A mere twenty minutes before, she had entered the house in search of a party. It wasn’t the first time she wandered into a frat house on a Friday night. It looked like a typical college fraternity from the outside: a boxy, restored, early twenty-first century two-story home with Greek letters hung on the façade. While located farther away from campus than normal, it wasn’t so far as to cause suspicion. She arrived late to the party – just fifteen minutes earlier, although it felt like a lifetime – to find the front door unlocked.
Somewhere in the house, a girl had been screaming. Already buzzing from too much alcohol, Chrissy hadn’t stopped to wonder why and entered, searching for the partygoers. From there, things went horribly wrong. Hearing the screaming girl was one thing; seeing why she screamed was another. There were a dozen collegeaged men in the house, and two had been holding her down while a third did unspeakable things to her.
Chrissy had backed away, her alcoholic high plummeting with the adrenaline that filled her. She tried to run, but three of them caught her. She fought them; it was useless. They ripped her clothes off and forced her to the ground.
And then, the lights went off. The entire house turned dark. Somehow, she broke away and ran. Disoriented, she hoped she was headed to the front door, but she never imagined it was so far away.
Resting against a wall, Chrissy listened for the sounds of her pursuers. The screaming stopped soon after the lights went out. Her breathing was so loud, she thought for sure those after her would hear it. Aware of how close one of them was, she began inching away in a painful limp, through the doorway into what she hoped was the living room she crossed through earlier.
The light from street lamps outlined the front door, and her hope surged. She smacked the coffee table, and this time, she did cry out.
“Found her!” one of them called.
Chrissy bolted to the door as fast as she could on her damaged shin. A few feet before she reached it, someone tackled her. She gave a frustrated yell and clawed at him, desperate to reach the door a few feet away.
“I don’t need light to fuck you,” the man on top of her snarled then shouted to the others, “Living room!”
He pinned her hands above her head and tore off her underwear. She began to cry, unable to shake him.
“You do need your head, though,” a female’s voice answered him from the darkness. “Lights, Ginny.”
The next few seconds passed as if she were in a dream – or a nightmare. The sudden flood of lights blinded her. Someone dressed
like a shadow moved with inhuman speed across the room. A flash of steel, the sound of a knife slicing through meat, a gurgle.
Her eyes adjusted just as the man on top of her slumped to the side. Warmth covered her arm. She looked down, disoriented, then clambered out from under the rest of his body. Her attacker’s body was on one side of her, his head on the other.
“Stay right here,” the woman in black told her.
Too shocked to register much more than the dead man who had tried to rape her seconds before, Chrissy sat in a daze, unable to move if she wanted. Her rescuer wore a black, military-style uniform with night-vision goggles perched on her forehead. She was of average height, toned and shapely, her bronze curls in a bun on top of her head and her blue eyes sparkling. She was armed with two long knives and a smile that made her round face appear cherubic, sweet. She saluted with one of the knives and darted further into the house.
Covered in her attacker’s blood with a shin that was surely broken, Chrissy just stared after her, shaking.
Zoey left the young woman and darted towards the sounds of fighting, where her best friend Vikki was probably lopping off heads. She almost smashed into another of the men as she barreled through the kitchen. This one had blood on his hands, which meant there was at least one more victim in the house. The second victim was probably a college-aged girl like the one Zoey rescued. Although the woman in the living room had been stripped naked, she was otherwise unhurt, aside from a limp.
She got off lucky.
“I’ve got five!” Vikki’s breathless voice came across the communications piece in Zoey’s ear. “Ten bucks says I finish them off before you get here!”
One of the two other members of her team – Team R – present for the raid, Vikki was Zoey’s main competition every time they went out. The third member, Ginny, monitored the operation from the van parked across the street.
“You’re on. Be there in a few.” Zoey answered. She blocked a strike from her opponent. “That the best you can do, asshole?”
Zoey felt the sex magic in the air that the creature before her was trying to use to manipulate her. It made her blood move faster, and she drew it into herself. Instead of influencing her, it was like a drug, one that left her intoxicated – and able to use as a weapon against him.
He had a kitchen knife in one hand and lunged at her. She pushed him back with his own magic then slashed twice with her pewter daggers. He slid to the floor without a sound.
Her phone vibrated. She glanced down and saw the phone number of her boyfriend flash across the screen. She hesitated. He tried calling twice before their op tonight; maybe something was wrong. She answered and continued through the house, seeking out more of the rapist bastards – known as Cambions. Born to human mothers and Incubus fathers, Cambions existed for one purpose: to gather sex magic by any means necessary. Sex energy was a drug to them, one that made them frenzied with the need to collect it.
“Hey, Eric,” she said.
“Hi. I’m guessing you forgot the list?”
Zoey paused mid-step, wracking her brain for what list she was supposed to remember.
“You said you were going grocery shopping after studying. Kinda hard without the list,” he said, laughing.
“Oh. Um, I, uh got caught up with stuff.” Shit! Where had she told him she was studying this night?
Zoey heard sounds from the basement. The door was open, the lights on. She smelled something … bad. Familiar. Something that told her they were going to need more body bags than she had in the van.
“Basement,” she said into the microphone.
“Got it,” Vikki responded via the earpiece in her right ear – the one connected to their communications devices for the operation.
“You got caught up in the basement?” Eric’s voice came through the other earpiece.
“Oh, no. I mean, we, uh, found something intriguing in the basement of the library, and I was in such a hurry to get here, I forgot the list,” she managed.
Before she was able to charge down the stairs, an armed Cambion leapt out of the doorway. Zoey ducked a blow.
“You sound out of breath.” Eric sounded both puzzled and frustrated. “Is studying at the library a full contact sport now?”
“Sometimes -”
Block
“- when you’re reading -”
Jab
“- about the Mayans.”
Slash.
The Cambion dropped. Able to overhear what Zoey said through her microphone, the two other members of Team R were laughing into one ear, almost drowning out Eric’s words.
“I thought the library closed at seven.”
Zoey glanced at her watch. It was nine.
“Well, not when Vikki is sleeping with the night watchman.”
“That girl gets around.”
“Yeah.” She bent over to make sure the Cambion was dead.
“So the Mayans took precedence over groceries,” he said then waited for her to laugh at the corny joke, like she usually did.
“Hmmm,” she replied, attention elsewhere.
“Anyway, I’m at the store now,” Eric continued. “I can’t read your writing about ice cream. I want to get it right.”
Zoey felt like shit every time she lied to him about what she was doing, especially when he was sweet enough to call before buying the wrong kind of ice cream. She sighed then straightened and trotted down the stairwell to the basement.
“I’m sorry I forgot, Eric. I just got a little…oh, Jesus this is bad.” Even knowing what she was going to find, she still almost gagged at the scent of decomposing bodies. She covered her mouth with her hand.
“What?” he asked, confusion in his voice.
“I gotta go.”
“Just real quick – tell me what flavor.”
“French vanilla.” She hung up.
Eric was not happy. But at the moment Zoey was more concerned about the mess in front of her. It looked like the Cambions were using this safe house for weeks; the bodies of almost two dozen women were decaying in the basement. Some were buried under mounds of dirt, others stacked like old newspapers.
Near vomiting from the scent, Zoey couldn’t help the sorrow that descended over her. Cambions targeted girls her age – around twenty-one. Unlike her, each one of the girls in the basement probably had a family that missed them and a boyfriend they didn’t have to lie to every day about who they were.
“Why do you always say I’m the one sleeping around?” Vikki complained over their radio.
“Because you always do,” Zoey retorted. “We’re gonna need about twenty more body bags than planned and a morgue crew.”
“Mayans, Z, really?” Ginny asked, amused. “I’ll put in the order.”
“That means the bosses will find out,” Vikki grumbled. “We’re in enough trouble as it is going on unauthorized missions.”
“We saved someone from the fucking Cambions,” Zoey said. Unable to stand the smell, she returned to the main floor. “You’d think Heidi would be more concerned about that instead of not scheduling two missions at once.”
“Two girls,” Vikki said. “Though this one needs a doctor fast.”
“Got it,” Ginny said. Stationed in the van to monitor things in case all hell broke loose, Ginny was also in charge of contacting their headquarters, the police or providing back-up support as needed.
“What’s a Cambion?”
Zoey spun. She’d forgotten the girl in the living room. Her gaze swept over her. The girl managed to wrap herself in a blanket, probably the one from the couch. Her right shin was swollen and black.
“You’re gonna need some ice for that.” Zoey went to the fridge and opened it. There was nothing but beer in the fridge. She yanked open the freezer to find frozen bags of vegetables.
“Rally at the van,” Ginny directed.
“Roger,” Zoey said into the microphone. She grabbed two bags of vegetables. “Anyway, Cambions are, um, these beastly halfhuman males born to human mothers and Incubus fathers,” Zoey explained. “They kill girls our age to collect sex energy to sustain themselves and then give the extra to their evil Incubus overlords. If you ever have a chance to cut open a Cambion, you’ll find these little things that look like batteries, where the extra energy is stored.”
The girl stared at her for a long moment. “Oh.”
“My job is to track and kill them, before they rape girls like you and then shove you in the basement to rot,” Zoey finished.
The girl’s gaze went to the open door of the basement. She grew even paler.
“That sounds good,” she said. She was weaving on her feet, a sign she was about to pass out.
“You should sit down,” Zoey advised. “We’re almost done here, then we’ll call an ambulance for you. We’ll ice your shin in the meantime.” She lifted the bags.
The young woman nodded. Limping bad, she returned to the living room and sat down on the couch, clearly in shock by her dazed expression. Zoey trailed her in and lifted her injured leg to the coffee table. Placing a bag of frozen vegetables on the swollen shin, Zoey set the other within reach.
“Just in case it takes the EMTs more than a few minutes to get here, okay?”
“Okay,” the woman repeated.
“Were you invited here or just decided to drop by?” Zoey asked, interested in discovering where the Cambions might be recruiting their victims.
“I’m not sure,” the woman replied. “I mean, I wasn’t invited. I was at a party down the street and walking to my car. Something just…pulled me.”
“That feeling was the Cambions using their sex magic to lure you in. If you ever, ever, ever feel that again, you run the other way fast,” Zoey said. “You got that?”
The woman nodded, tears in her eyes again. “I don’t want to lose more shoes.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of a minor issue,” Zoey said, unable to stop her laugh at the shocked woman’s words. “I mean, I normally find these bastards at clubs. If you want to talk about being upset over shoes – try kicking someone in the chest with a four-inch heel. The heel snaps off every freakin’ time. I go through like, two pairs of shoes a week. I buy in bulk now.”
The woman didn’t seem to know what to do and then smiled. Zoey’s gaze lingered. She shook her head and rose, feeling bad for her, but happy she was alive.
Wiping off her weapons, Zoey’s thoughts went to Eric. She was going to need a really, really good plan to make this up to him. It was so hard leading a double life; she almost understood why she was the only one she knew who tried. She may have been born a Halfling in a society that consisted of evil and death, but she chose to try to be normal.
“Z, you owe me ten!” Vikki said cheerfully. “You never win bets.”
“Dammit! I’ll keep trying, though!” Zoey said. “How many did you kill?”
“Seven. You?”
“Ugh. Two. So I’m only what? Four ahead of you for the year?”
“You’ve never been ahead!” Vikki snapped.
“The hell I haven’t!”
“Uh, oh. I just got a super angry message from Heidi to return like, now. So, if you’re done killing Cambions, come back to the van,” Ginny interrupted. “She’s blaming Zoey, as usual.”
“Why do I always get blamed?” Zoey complained. With a glance around to make sure no more Cambions were lingering, she trotted through the bottom floor of the house to double-check, before returning to the living room.
“Because you’re short. You stick out.” Vikki laughed.
Zoey rolled her eyes. She was the only half-Succubus – known as a Halfling – that didn’t share the typical Succubus body type: six feet tall, slender and willowy with a gentle shape and a face that was able to stop traffic.
No, Zoey was…cute and sexy. Average height, above average prettiness with an hourglass shape rendered firm by hours of training a day. The other members of Team R, like Vikki and Ginny, were flawlessly beautiful killers.
“Stay here. The paramedics will be here soon,” she said to the traumatized young woman on the couch.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Just be careful. There are a few places around here like this one. Okay?”
The young woman nodded.
Zoey started out the front door, listening to Vikki and Ginny talk, when the girl called out to her.
“Wait!”
Zoey paused, hand on the hilt of a knife, in case there was another attacker.
“I, um, feel like I need to send you…flowers. Or a thank you letter.” The young woman tried to get to her feet, failed and sagged back on the couch.
“It’s okay. I do this for a living,” Zoey replied, not unkindly. “Killing those things is all the reward I need.”
“Can you tell me your name at least?” the young woman asked.
Zoey hesitated then took pity on her. “Zoey.” She reached down to snag the frozen vegetables that had fallen off the girl’s leg and replaced the bag.
“It’s a pretty name.”
“It’s awful. I’m the last one called for everything,” Zoey replied.
The young woman smiled faintly. “I’m Chrissy.” The woman was around Zoey’s age, tall, with cocoa skin and an exotic tilt to her eyes. She was pretty enough to be a Halfling or Succubus, without the glow of sex energy.
“Nice to meet you. I have to go, but be careful from here on out.” Zoey left. She trotted down the front steps and jogged across the street to the waiting van. Vikki stood outside the open side door, stripping out of her bloodied clothes, unconcerned with anyone who might see her flawless body.
“How mad is Heidi?” Zoey asked with a grimace. She climbed into the passenger seat. Ginny was on the driver’s side, dressed similarly in all black.
“Totally pissed. No, epically pissed,” Ginny said. “I don’t know. She’s always a bitch anyways.”
“Vikki! Come on!” Zoey called over her shoulder. “Eric isn’t happy. Need to get home!”
“Whatever,” Vikki replied. “You shouldn’t be dating a human anyways.”
“You said I wouldn’t last a month and it’s a year later,” Zoey pointed out.
“When he gets sick of you ditching him for the Mayans, you’re gonna have a meltdown.”
Zoey said nothing, suspecting her friend was right. But she wasn’t going to deal with that tonight; no, she’d rescued someone from the horrible Cambions. She was going to give herself the small victory, before Heidi - the Internal Affairs Bureau’s operations chief who managed their team’s missions – kicked her ass.
Vikki climbed into the back of the van and slammed the door shut. Ginny drove across Washington DC, from the Maryland side to the Virginia side, where their campus was located.
As Zoey calmed, the sex magic caged within her made her edgy. There was no real relief from the magic. She could absorb incredible amounts of it, but if she didn’t get rid of it fighting, her head felt like it would explode and her body felt feverish. Fighting and sex were the only two known cures.
Sex with Eric, however, barely took the edge off. She’d been considering this as well over the past few weeks. At first, Eric was enough for her to remain functional. Lately, however, nothing seemed to work, but she loved the fact he was normal. She was almost able to pretend she was normal, too, when they were together and not some sex-magic obsessed warrior.
Her phone vibrated. She glanced down, expecting a note from Eric. Instead, it was from her guardian, the Professor. Every Halfling was assigned a guardian to try to help them manage the sex magic.
Her guardian was one of five Incubuses who remained within the Succubus society, after a bloody war tore the two societies apart. Atthelibraryagain?
She could almost hear him laughing at her. The good-natured Incubus had aged, because he was no longer allowed to collect sex magic to sustain himself. He was still handsome, his charisma remaining despite his age, like the seasoned charm of Harrison Ford or Daniel Craig in twenty years.
“You’re so not funny, Professor,” she growled. She hadn’t told him, either, that she was going out to kill Cambions. Their mission would’ve remained secret, if they hadn’t found the bodies in the basement.
Nice quiet night studying. She replied. He would know; they were bound in a way that allowed him to stabilize her sex energy. So he would feel the sudden increase when she soaked up that of the Cambions. The bond provided guardians with numerous gifts they bestowed upon their Halflings. They could balance their absorbed sex magic, block Halflings’ minds from being read by their Incubatti enemies, and heal the Halfling when they became injured, which considering the job, was frequent.
Your room is always ready. His response made her smile. Her guardian was the only person she knew who never got angry when hearing of her wild ways. Unfortunately, even his efforts to help her were no longer enough.
“Hey, it’s Saturday. The new girl told me about a party,” Vikki said. “You guys in?”
“Sure,” Ginny said.
Zoey thought for a minute. “Pretty sure, but Eric is pissed at me.”
“All the more reason to come drinking with us. Tell him we’re going out,” Vikki insisted.
Glancing down at the screen of her smart phone, Zoey considered. It was going to be a miserable night anyway, if she went home.
“Maybe,” she said.
She put her phone away as they reached the headquarters for the Succubae’s campus located in Annandale, on the Virginia side of the DC Metro area. Disguised as an elite girls’ school, it housed the headquarters, training grounds and cultural and operations centers for the Succubus society, known as the Sucubatti. They passed through the tall, wrought-iron gate surrounding the compound and continued to the multi-storied parking garage, beneath which was the operations center and the armory.
Heidi was waiting for them. A sizzling blonde, full-blooded Succubus with blue eyes and curly hair tamed by a clip, she didn’t look happy. There was a frown on her face and her arms were crossed. She had the reputation of despising Halfings anyway. If she was acknowledging their existences instead of buried in her smart phone or tablet computer, she was super-pissed.
Vikki groaned. “Rock, paper, scissors for who takes the blame this time?”
“I got chewed out last time,” Ginny said quickly. “It’s between you two.”
Ginny pulled the van to a halt, and Zoey twisted to face Vikki. They both held out their fists.
“One,” she started.
“Two,” Vikki said.
“Three!”
Zoey’s hand was flat, the sign of paper. Vikki made the sign for scissors.
“Dammit!” Zoey snapped.
“You always lose!” Vikki giggled.
The van’s side door whipped open, and they all looked at Heidi, startled.
“If you’re done fucking around, get out,” the operations officer said.
Zoey and Vikki hurried out of the van. It was supposed to be forbidden for Halflings to defy or talk back to the full-blooded Succubae. Heidi waited for all three of them to line up in front of her. Her cold eyes were a reminder of her other role in the IAB – that of
eliminating issues and those who caused them. A cold assassin, she was one of the two most feared members of the Sucubatti.
“You have three seconds,” she said coldly.
“It’s all my fault,” Zoey started with a glare at Vikki.
“You lose a bet?”
“No, it’s really my fault.”
Heidi studied her. After a moment, she nodded her head to the side. Ginny and Vikki darted off. Vikki gave Zoey the peace sign as she trotted towards the gates. The dorms that housed the Halflings were located outside the gate while full-blooded Succubae were afforded the dorms behind the protection of the wrought iron fencing, guards, and state-of-the-art alarm system.
“Another entry for your ever-growing disciplinary file?” Heidi asked.
“Yes, ma’am.” Zoey said.
“Misuse of official Sucubatti property, failure to obey orders, and did you steal intelligence from our databases?”
“If you know a bad guy is there, why not go get him? We saved two girls tonight, Heidi!” Zoey said.
“There’s a bigger picture here, Zoey, one which a Halfling like yourself is too stupid to understand.”
Zoey sighed. The lecture she expected ensued. Lack of discipline, failure to think strategically… She waited for Heidi to finish, mind on the time. If she didn’t get home soon, Eric was going to kick her out. She’d end up on the Professor’s porch swing, the way she did every once in awhile when she got too drunk on a mission.
“… recklessness.” Heidi paused. “Olivia wants to see you again tonight.”
“Again?”
“It’s the second time she’s called you in this month. I can’t imagine she’s happy. She’s in her office. You know where to go.”
Zoey opened her mouth to ask why. Accustomed to Heidi’s lectures, Zoey was usually dismissed after them. She had never been sent to see Olivia and definitely hadn’t seen the IAB chief earlier this month.
The look on Heidi’s face discouraged her from asking anything. Zoey walked away instead, into the central building located next to the parking garage. She knew where Olivia’s office was, but had never been there before. Assuming Heidi was confusing her with someone else, she went down the hallway to Olivia’s office.
The door was closed. Zoey’s heart quickened as she read the title engraved in brass on the door in front of her.
Chief,InternalAffairsBureau
She was really in trouble this time, if Olivia requested to see her. Zoey knocked.
“Come in,” came the muffled voice from within.
Drawing a deep breath, Zoey entered. Olivia sat at a small table near a window, her long, lean legs crossed as she sat reviewing a file. With porcelain skin and blue eyes, Olivia was in her prime, radiating the seductive power of a Succubus. She glanced up.
“Another wild night, Zoey?”
Zoey said nothing, surprised the chief of the IAB had any idea who she was, let alone her activities. Of course, Heidi was her right hand. Maybe Zoey really had exacerbated the operations officer to the point she brought it up to Olivia.
“Have an energy drink. I’ll be done in a moment.”
That’snotagoodsign.
The Sucubatti developed their own energy drinks. The can was the size of Zoey’s thumb. There would be a tray of them on the corner of Olivia’s desk. Much about Olivia’s office – including the layout and scent of vanilla in the air – was familiar, even though Zoey didn’t recall being there before. The sense she had stood in this very spot not long ago was strong, even though she didn’t recall ever setting foot in Olivia’s office.
Zoey turned, surprised at finding her hunch about the energy drinks correct.
She picked up one of the small cans and popped off the top. It smelled bitter and made her nose wrinkle, but she tossed it back, hoping she would soon be excused.
After a few minutes, Zoey began to grow drowsy. She glanced at Olivia, wishing the energy drink would kick in faster. She grabbed
another one and drank it. Her head started to spin. Feeling nauseous, Zoey sat down in one of the chairs in front of Olivia’s desk. She leaned forward to put her head between her knees. Seconds later, she slid to the ground, unconscious.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Zoey
Chapter Two: Zoey Drugged
Chapter Three: Zoey Troubled
Chapter Four: Declan
Chapter Five: Zoey Endangered
Chapter Six: Declan Decided
Chapter Seven: Zoey Cornered
Chapter Eight: Zoey and Declan
Chapter Nine: Strike One
Chapter Ten: Zoey Doomed
Chapter Eleven: Declan Unveiled
Chapter Twelve: Declan Troubled
Chapter Thirteen: Zoey Trapped
Chapter Fourteen: Zoey Alone
Chapter Fifteen: Strike Two
Chapter Sixteen: Zoey Embattled
Chapter Seventeen: Zoey Unleashed
Chapter Eighteen: Strike Three
Chapter Nineteen: Declan Tricked
Chapter Twenty: Zoey Betrayed
Chapter Twenty One: Declan Betrayed
Chapter Twenty Two: Zoey Rogue
Chapter Two: Zoey Drugged
A few hours later, north of Washington DC, an Incubus entered his favorite, private club in wealthy Chevy Chase. The exclusive, beauty-filled venue was hopping. He made his way through the crowd, well-aware of the effect he had on every woman within a few feet of him. Though one of the least powerful of his kind, he was still able to draw in any human he wanted, which was all that mattered to him tonight.
He went to the bar and motioned the bartender over. A few seconds later, his regular drink sat before him. He sipped it as he leaned back against the counter, his eyes roaming over the women. He saw several familiar faces he knew to be call girls on the arms of wealthy men and a handful of college-aged girls who probably stumbled upon an invitation to the exclusive club because of their looks.
They had the arrogance and innocence of youth that made them sweetly saucy, combined with supple bodies, ripe for the picking. He watched the group of eight girls, scouring their features and bodies for the one he wanted. His selection made, he set his drink on the bar and stepped away. With an Incubus’ power over women and a Cambion’s philosophy that sex was his for the taking, he was relentless in his pursuit of getting what he wanted. He never struck out. Ever.
Sex energy tugged at him. He didn’t notice it enter his senses, until it was too late to resist. The Incubus froze in place, unable to identify the source of magic. He knew Succubus magic; he’d bedded his fair share of them. It wasn’t that of a Succubus, whose telltale magic was cool, like a fan turning on over his head. This magic was warm and charged.
“Buy me a drink?” the female voice carried a husky note, one that grazed his skin and made him shudder.
He turned, not expecting the woman before him. Succubae were all six feet tall and slender, with bodies and features that made
men stop in their tracks. This woman was not a Succubus, but she radiated a Succubus’ power; she could only be a Halfling, a halfSuccubus. The Halfling seated at the bar was not quite five and a half feet, with a sweet face and blue gaze. Judging by her toned, shapely body, she was a Hunter, a Halfling charged with killing Cambions. Though far from plain, she was just as far from the stunning beauty of a full-blooded Succubus.
“Of course,” he said finally.
Whatever hold she had on him increased when he approached the bar. He found himself gazing at her with longing, his eyes caressing the golden skin of her décolletage. Her breasts were large and straining against the tight dress, and he almost drooled at the idea of suckling them.
“I’m Julius,” he said and sidled next to her, close enough for their bodies to brush.
“Nice to meet you, Julius.” She tilted her head back with a smile. There was something … odd about her gaze. It was almost empty of emotion.
This isn’t right. He shook his head, unable to clear the magic enough for his own instincts to warn him.
“And you are?” he prompted.
“Zoey.”
“You are a Hunter,” he said, intrigued. “I know your name well. You’ve slaughtered a great deal of my Cambions.” His interest increased tenfold; there was a price on her head, a reward for the Cambion or Incubus who captured or killed a member of the Sucubatti’s top hit squad, Team R.
“You create them, I kill them,” she said with a shrug. “Doesn’t mean you and I can’t enjoy a night together.”
Another warning bell sounded in his mind. Hunters had one mission: to kill. The instinct caught no traction as more of her sex energy overwhelmed his senses, disarming any objection he had. Julius needed to be closer to her. He rested his hands on her arms and let them travel downwards, breathing in the scent of her hair. She twisted on the barstool to face him, her knees parting for him to lean between them. He traced a finger down the side of her face
and between her breasts, gaze going to the tightness of her dress around her hips and thighs. His mind was already there, between her legs.
“It’s forbidden by both of our ruling Councils for full-bloods and half-breeds to fuck,” he whispered, the words sending a thrill through him.
“Then walk away,” she replied. She stood and kissed him, while one hand went to the ridge in his pants. She stroked his erection, and Julius’s arms circled her, pulling her against him hard. She tasted of something unfamiliar, not the alcohol she’d been drinking, but something bitter.
One of his hands went to her breast, and he stopped himself, ready to strip her and fuck her in the middle of the club. She withdrew and took his hand with a grin.
“Come with me!” she exclaimed in the husky voice that drove his desire up a notch.
No part of him was going to resist, especially not with a woman who contained so much sex energy. He’d feed off her for days then turn her over to the Cambions. No one would miss a Hunter, and especially not this one, whose name was muttered with grudging respect among the Cambions she routinely slaughtered. That he, one of the weakest Incubuses in their society, was going to be the one to capture her made him overlook the route they went.
The door she led him through didn’t go anywhere he was expecting. It opened to an empty, cement garage that smelled of oil and metal. There was nowhere for them to lay down, aside from the dirty cement. Before he was able to question her odd venue for sex, he felt the hand she thrust down his pants. Sex energy swam through his senses. Nothing but achieving his release mattered.
Julius didn’t hesitate. He pressed her against the wall and freed her breasts while she stroked his penis in a way that drove him mad.
“How do you want me to please you?” she whispered.
“On your knees, with your mouth,” he ordered gruffly and pushed her to her knees. She looked up at him with a smile that didn’t reach her blank eyes.
Julius tore the zipper of his slacks in his hurry to get rid of his pants and closed his eyes. She flicked the bulging head of his dick with her tongue, and he groaned.
Succumbing to the influence of her sex magic, he didn’t see his death coming. Pewter knives appeared in the hands of the Hunter. She stood, the blades arcing to claim his life. It only took one coordinated strike of the two knives to slice through the throat of the Incubus.
Within seconds, Julius lay dead on the floor of the garage, his blood mixing with the oil on the floor.
The assassin mechanically straightened her clothing. She cleaned her knives as she walked away from the slain Incubus and exited onto the dark street. She examined the surroundings expertly, as she scoured the busy intersection nearby. A form emerged from an alley across the street, signaling her.
She crossed the road at a trot and ducked into the alley, where two people waited for her. Instincts made her draw a knife at the sight of the man with one brown eye and one blue one. He was a Cambion – her natural enemy.
The second person was a beautiful woman with dark hair, held up a manicured hand. Tall and willowy, she was dressed in tight leggings, a sweater and high heels that pushed her height close to six and a half feet.
“No, Zoey.” The full-blood Succubus spoke in a low voice with an elegant British accent that drew the undivided attention of the man. “This is one Cambion you can’t kill.”
The assassin’s grip on her knives eased.
“Yet,” the Succubus added with a sultry smile. The demure flutter of her long eyelashes would have tricked any other man, but the one in the alley with her knew what she was capable of.
“You’re certain the Halfling is unaware of us?” he asked.
“She’s completely oblivious,” the Succubus assured him. “We were able to modify the initial batch of sex energy you gave us.
We’re still working on perfecting the formula, but in the stage Zoey is in now, she won’t remember anything in the morning.”
“Incredible. As of tonight, I consider us allies, Olivia,” the man replied. “How can this little half-breed be your best fighter?” Fascinated, he motioned to the assassin, who stood silently, awaiting orders.
“She killed a full-blooded Incubus, didn’t she?”
He circled the Halfling Hunter. Shapely, but small, she appeared innocent and unassuming, aside from the sex energy she radiated. It compelled him closer and made his blood race. She looked nothing like the other Hunters, who resembled the gorgeous, tall Succubus beside him.
“Your Hunters keep getting stronger,” he said. “A few of them have bounties on their heads.”
“I’d like to think Hunters like Zoey have the right genetic tweaks,” Olivia said. “She can track and feed off the sex energy of Cambions, Incubuses and Succubae. Instead of storing it, as your kind does, she uses it as a weapon.”
“Intriguing.”
“Unfortunately, Hunters are difficult to stabilize. The life expectancy for a Hunter is barely above twenty,” the Succubus continued.
“If I don’t kill them,” he added.
“Paul, even you can’t keep up with Zoey.” The haughty note in her voice made him frown.
“Maybe not, but you need my help to make them more effective,” he pointed out. “I’m aware of your massive recruitment efforts, just like I know you’re losing more than you’re recruiting. You don’t stand a chance against the Incubatti Enforcers, without greater numbers.”
“We chose to weaponize them, but it came with an unexpected price,” the Succubus admitted. “The girls short out much younger than before and we permanently remove them from the line of duty.”
Paul crossed his arms, his gaze lingering on the silent assassin. The Halfling was like a zombie; still, silent, staring. Whatever Olivia’s scientists did to the sex energy, it seemed to work. Stuck in close
proximity between a Succubus trying to manipulate him and a Hunter with no control over the magic flowing off her, he was finding it very hard to think straight.
“Now that you see what we can do when we combine my Hunters and the sex energy your kind steals, I think it’s time to pay up,” She gracefully held out a hand with maroon nails, whose hue resembled that of blood in the dim light of the alley.
The Cambion paused in his visual inspection of the assassin. Creating super-human Hunters was a good idea. In theory. He knew better than to trust the woman before him. He came armed with only three vials of the stuff she wanted, knowing she was able to overpower him in the way of a Succubus.
“We do have a deal,” he said thoughtfully. “I want to add to it.” As he spoke, he withdrew the vials of concentrated sex energy and placed them in her outstretched palm. “I want to take her home with me.”
The Succubus considered him for a full minute.
“When this is over, you can have her,” she said at last. “Not tonight. I can’t have anything going wrong.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re having cold feet.” Did he sense unease in the Succubus?
“Why settle for a Halfling when you can have a full-blooded Succubus?” she purred. A flare of sex energy filled the air around him.
Bred to collect the energy, the Cambion’s eyes lit up. He moved towards her, unable to control his response to the magic consuming his senses. The Succubus laughed softly and motioned him closer.
“Zoey,” she said to the assassin. “Go home.”
The assassin turned away and strode onto the street once more. Unaffected by the cold drizzle, she walked the five miles back home alone.
Chapter Three: Zoey Troubled
“Zoey! Where were you last night?”
Zoey closed her locker enough to see the approach of her best friend, Vikki. Vikki’s arms and upper body were covered in colorful tattoos, one for every ten Cambions she killed over the past four years. A particularly brutal sparring match left Zoey’s headache worse than when she woke this morning. She had no patience for anything Sucubatti-related.
“I don’t know what happened last night,” Zoey said. Not for the first time today, she puzzled over the missing memory. “I woke up this morning on the Professor’s porch swing. He told me I drank too much again, and I just went with it. Thank god he called Eric.”
“Eric?” the young woman with Vikki asked. “You’re not … you know. Dating an Incubus, are you?” Her eyes widened. Zoey thought she heard earlier that the new girl’s name was Lydia.
“Worse. Zoey’s dating a human.” Vikki grinned.
“Damn right I am,” Zoey said firmly. “You got any aspirin, V?”
“Always.” Vikki reached into the locker beside Zoey’s and retrieved a bottle of painkillers, tossing it to her. “We went to a party last night after our secret mission that ended up not so secret. You were supposed to show. What the hell happened?”
“I dunno,” Zoey muttered. “I woke up with a horrible headache and blood on my lucky knife.”
Vikki eyed her. “You went out without me.”
“Not on purpose. I can’t remember shit.”
“This is what you have to look forward to,” Vikki said to Lydia. “A teammate who runs out on you to kill Cambions on her own.”
“I didn’t run out on the team.” Zoey sighed. “My head hurts and I’m running late.” She placed her workout gear into her locker and closed it. “Besides, she won’t be on our team long anyway.”
“Why not?” Lydia asked.
Zoey and Vikki exchanged a knowing look.
“Our team is for the Hunters no one wants to deal with,” Vikki replied. “Disciplinary nightmares. They can’t get rid of us, though,
because we have the highest kill rates. And you’re blonde. None of us are.”
Lydia glanced past them to the rest of the girls. Zoey followed her gaze. The rest of the locker room looked like it was overrun by cheerleading squads or wannabe models: the normal girls who transferred into the elite Cambion-killing corps – known as Hunters –were chosen for their looks and were almost all blonde. Zoey was one of a small handful of brunettes and Vikki the only redhead. The third member of their team, Ginny, was half African American with dark hair and the fourth, Tiff, half-Korean with blue-black hair.
If Lydia stayed on Team R, she’d be the first and only blonde.
Zoey tugged a strand of hair free from her ponytail and curled it around her finger to make sure she’d put in enough hair product to make it stay. The curl remained, and she tucked it behind her ear.
“I don’t want to be a misfit, and I’m definitely not a disciplinary problem. Why did they put me on Team R?” Lydia’s voice showed how overwhelmed she was.
“Geez, thanks,” Zoey said dryly. “Like we have the plague.”
“We do,” Vikki said. “But we’re happy that way, and everyone knows we’re the best. You’ve reached the pinnacle, Lydia. Olivia is the only one who can appoint people to our team, and no one is allowed to transfer us or punish us the way they probably want to.”
“That’s what I heard,” Lydia said. “Team R has the highest kill rates and most successful missions. I heard the waiting list was over two hundred Hunters long.”
“So why did they put you on our team?” Zoey asked. “Didn’t you just transfer in from school?”
“Yeah.” Lydia shrugged. “Heidi said I placed the highest on the agility and strength exams since you, Zoey.”
“I hated those tests,” Zoey murmured, recalling the week-long trial that every Hunter went through. The better the Hunter, the farther down the alphabet they were assigned, in terms of teams. Team R was the most elite and smallest of them all. Teams A through Q consisted of at least ten Halflings each. There was no other team assigned a letter of the alphabet beyond R. Every Hunter was tested and placed upon entering the Hunter corps under the
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The “Essay on Man” has been praised and admired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops and freethinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a question: that Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever he found a thought, no matter what, he would express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of versification, as to give it an everlasting currency. Hobbes’s unwieldy “Leviathan,” left stranded on the shore of the last age and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness—from this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his philosophy, lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive doctrine in the poem is the selfishness of Hobbes set to music, and the pantheism of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas taught in the “Essay on Man.”
The accuracy on which Pope prided himself, and for which he is commended, was not accuracy of thought so much as of expression. But the supposition is that in the “Essay on Man” Pope did not know what he was writing himself. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of Bolingbroke—a fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or if he did know, we can account for the contradictions by supposing that he threw in some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope’s having been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not hold. But this is hardly probable when we consider the relations between them. It is giving Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose that he did not understand the principles of his intimate friend.
Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism from the “Essay on Man.” He would have found it harder to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation would not overthrow the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the Bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit—clearness.
If we did not, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the difficulty is that Pope’s precision of thought was not equal to his polish of style.
But it is in his “Moral Essays” and part of his “Satires” that Pope deserves the praise which he himself desired—
Happily to steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe. Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, Intent to reason, or polite to please.
Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style of his own, in which he is without a rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at every page.
In his epistle on the characters of woman, no one who has ever known a noble woman will find much to please him. The climax of his praise rather degrades than elevates:
O blest in temper, whose unclouded ray Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day, She who can love a sister’s charms, or hear Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear, She who ne’er answers till a husband cools, Or if she rules him, never shows she rules, Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, Yet has her humor most when she obeys; Let fops or fortune fly which way they will, Disdains all loss of tickets, or codille, Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all; And mistress of herself though china fall.
The last line is very witty and pointed; but consider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must have had who praises his heroine for not being jealous of her daughter.
It is very possible that the women of Pope’s time were as bad as they could be, but if God made poets for anything it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the influence of the age, but there is a sense in which the poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, will never be an outcast and a wanderer while there is a poet-nature left; will never fail of the tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a sense of the nice rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted in the blemish more than in the charm.
Personally, we know more about Pope than about any of our poets. He kept no secret about himself. If he did not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived to give her tail a pinch so that we might know she was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his disposition seems to have been a truly amiable one, and his character as an author was as purely fictitious as his style. I think that there was very little real malice in him.
A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in which he lived, and not a little, I think, for the influence of Swift. In his own province he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be the greatest satirist of individual men rather than of human nature; if to be the highest expression which the life of court and the ball-room has ever found in verse; if to have added more phrases to our language than any other but Shakspeare; if to have charmed four generations makes a man a great poet, then he is one. He was the chief founder of an artificial style of writing which in his hand was living and powerful because he used it to express artificial modes of thinking and an artificial state of society. Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivaled.
To what fatuities his theory of correctness led in the next generation, when practised upon by men who had not his genius, I shall endeavor to show in my next lecture.
LECTURE X POETIC DICTION
(Friday Evening, February 9, 1855) X
No one who has read any early poems, of whatever nation, can have failed to notice a freshness in the language—a sort of game flavor, as it were—that gradually wastes out of it when poetry becomes domesticated, so to speak, and has grown to be a mere means of amusement both to writers and readers, instead of answering a deeper necessity in their natures. Our Northern ancestors symbolized the eternal newness of song by calling it the Present, and its delight by calling it the drink of Odin.
There was then a fierce democracy of words; no grades had then been established, and no favored ones advanced to the Upper House of Poetry. Men had a meaning, and so their words had to have one, too. They were not representatives of value, but value itself. They say that Valhalla was roofed with golden shields; that was what they believed, and in their songs they called them golden shingles. We should think shields the more poetical word of the two; but to them the poetry was in the thing, and the thought of it and the phrase took its life and meaning from them.
It is one result of the admixture of foreign words in our language that we use a great many phrases without knowing the force of them. There is a metaphoric vitality hidden in almost all of them, and we talk poetry as Molière’s citizen did prose, without ever suspecting it. Formerly men named things; now we merely label them to know them apart. The Vikings called their ships sea-horses, just as the
Arabs called their camels ships of the desert. Capes they called seanoses, without thinking it an undignified term which the land would resent. And still, where mountains and headlands have the luck to be baptized by uncultivated persons, Fancy stands godmother. Old Greylock, up in Berkshire, got his surname before we had State geologists or distinguished statesmen. So did Great Haystack and Saddle-Mountain. Sailors give good names, if they have no dictionary aboard, and along our coasts, here and there, the word and the thing agree, and therefore are poetical. Meaning and poetry still cling to some of our common phrases, and the crow-foot, mouse-ear, goat’s-beard, day’s-eye, heart’s-ease, snow-drop, and many more of their vulgar little fellow-citizens of the wood and roadsides are as happy as if Linnæus had never been born. Such names have a significance even to one who has never seen the things they stand for, but whose fancy would not be touched about a pelargonium unless he had an acquired sympathy with it. Our “cumulus” language, heaped together from all quarters, is like the clouds at sunset, and every man finds something different in a sentence, according to his associations. Indeed, every language that has become a literary one may be compared to a waning moon, out of which the light of beauty fades more and more. Only to poets and lovers does it repair itself from its luminous fountains.
The poetical quality of diction depends on the force and intensity of meaning with which it is employed. We are all of us full of latent significance, and let a poet have but the power to touch us, we forthwith enrich his word with ourselves, pouring into his verse our own lives, all our own experience, and take back again, without knowing it, the vitality which we had given away out of ourselves. Put passion enough into a word, and no matter what it is it becomes poetical; it is no longer what it was, but is a messenger from original man to original man, an ambassador from royal Thee to royal Me, and speaks to us from a level of equality. Pope, who did not scruple to employ the thoughts of Billingsgate, is very fastidious about the dress they come in, and claps a tawdry livery-coat on them, that they may be fit for the service of so fine a gentleman. He did not mind being coarse in idea, but it would have been torture to him to be
thought commonplace. The sin of composition which he dreaded was,
Lest ten low words should creep in one dull line.
But there is no more startling proof of the genius of Shakspeare than that he always lifts the language up to himself, and never thinks to raise himself atop of it. If he has need of the service of what is called a low word, he takes it, and it is remarkable how many of his images are borrowed out of the street and the workshop. His pen ennobled them all, and we feel as if they had been knighted for good service in the field. Shakspeare, as we all know (for does not Mr. Voltaire say so?), was a vulgar kind of fellow, but somehow or other his genius will carry the humblest things up into the air of heaven as easily as Jove’s eagle bore Ganymede.
Whatever is used with a great meaning, and conveys that meaning to others in its full intensity, is no longer common and ordinary. It is this which gives their poetic force to symbols, no matter how low their origin. The blacksmith’s apron, once made the royal standard of Persia, can fill armies with enthusiasm and is as good as the oriflamme of France. A broom is no very noble thing in itself, but at the mast-head of a brave old De Ruyter, or in the hands of that awful shape which Dion the Syracusan saw, it becomes poetical. And so the emblems of the tradesmen of Antwerp, which they bore upon their standards, pass entirely out of the prosaic and mechanical by being associated with feelings and deeds that were great and momentous.
Mr. Lowell here read a poem by Dr. Donne entitled “The Separation.”
As respects Diction, that becomes formal and technical when poetry has come to be considered an artifice rather than an art, and when its sole object is to revive certain pleasurable feelings already conventional, instead of originating new sources of delight. Then it is truly earth to earth; dead language used to bury dead emotion in. This kind of thing was carried so far by the later Scandinavian poets that they compiled a dictionary of the metaphors used by the elder Skalds (whose songs were the utterance of that within them which would be spoken), and satisfied themselves with a new arrangement of them Inspiration was taught, as we see French advertised to be, in six lessons.
In narrative and descriptive poetry we feel that proper keeping demands a certain choice and luxury of words. The question of propriety becomes one of prime importance here. Certain terms have an acquired imaginative value from the associations they awake in us. Certain words are more musical than others. Some rhymes are displeasing; some measures wearisome. Moreover, there are words which have become indissolubly entangled with ludicrous or mean ideas. Hence it follows that there is such a thing as Poetic Diction, and it was this that Milton was thinking of when he spoke of making our English “search her coffers round.”
I will illustrate this. Longfellow’s “Evangeline” opens with a noble solemnity:
This is the forest primeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like the Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
There is true feeling here, and the sigh of the pines is heard in the verses. I can find only one epithet to hang a criticism on, and that is the “wail of the forest” in the last line, which is not in keeping with the
general murmur Now I do not suppose that the poet turned over any vocabulary to find the words he wanted, but followed his own poetic instinct altogether in the affair. But suppose for a moment, that instead of being a true poet, he had been only a gentleman versifying; suppose he had written, “This is the primitive forest.” The prose meaning is the same, but the poetical meaning, the music, and the cadence would be gone out of it, and gone forever. Or suppose that, instead of “garments green,” he had said “dresses green”; the idea is identical, but the phrase would have come down from its appropriate remoteness to the milliner’s counter But not to take such extreme instances, only substitute instead of “harpers hoar,” the words “harpers gray,” and you lose not only the alliteration, but the fine hoarse sigh of the original epithet, which blends with it the general feeling of the passage. So if you put “sandy beaches” in the place of “rocky caverns,” you will not mar the absolute truth to nature, but you will have forfeited the relative truth to keeping.
When Bryant says so exquisitely,
Painted moths
Have wandered the blue sky and died again,
we ruin the poetry, the sunny spaciousness of the image, without altering the prose sense, by substituting
Have flown through the clear air.
But the words “poetic diction” have acquired a double meaning, or perhaps I should say there are two kinds of poetic diction, the one true and the other false, the one real and vital, the other mechanical and artificial. Wordsworth for a time confounded the two together in one wrathful condemnation, and preached a crusade against them both. He wrote, at one time, on the theory that the language of ordinary life was the true dialect of poetry, and that one word was as
good as another He seemed even to go farther and to adopt the Irishman’s notion of popular equality, that “one man is as good as another, and a dale better, too.” He preferred, now and then, prosaic words and images to poetical ones. But he was not long in finding his mistake and correcting it. One of his most tender and pathetic poems, “We are Seven,” began thus in the first edition:
A simple child, dear brother Jim.
All England laughed, and in the third edition Wordsworth gave in and left the last half of the line blank, as it has been ever since. If the poem had been a translation from the Turkish and had begun,
A simple child, dear Ibrahim,
there would have been nothing unpoetical in it; but the “dear brother Jim,” which would seem natural enough at the beginning of a familiar letter, is felt to be ludicrously incongruous at the opening of a poem.
To express a profound emotion, the simpler the language and the less removed from the ordinary course of life the better. There is a very striking example of this in Webster’s tragedy of “The Duchess of Malfy.” The brother of the Duchess has procured her murder, and when he comes in and sees the body he merely says:
“Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.”
Horror could not be better expressed than in these few words, and Webster has even taken care to break up the verse in such a way that a too entire consciousness of the metre may not thrust itself between us and the bare emotion he intends to convey.
In illustration, Mr Lowell quoted from Shakspeare (“Henry V”), Marlowe, Chapman, Dunbar, Beaumont and Fletcher, Waller, Young, and Cawthorn.
These men [the poets of the eighteenth century] were perfectly conscious of the fact that poetry is not produced under an ordinary condition of the mind, and accordingly, when they begin to grind their barrel-organs, they go through the ceremony of invoking the Muse, talk in the blandest way of divine rages and sacred flames, and one thing or another, and ask for holy fire to heat their little tea-urns with as coolly as one would borrow a lucifer. They appeal ceremoniously to the “sacred Nine,” when the only thing really necessary to them was the ability to count as high as the sacred ten syllables that constituted their verse. If the Muse had once granted their prayer, if she had once unveiled her awful front to the poor fellows, they would have hidden under their beds, every man John of them.
The eighteenth century produced some true poets, but almost all, even of them, were infected by the prevailing style. I cannot find any name that expresses it better than the “Dick Swiveller style.” As Dick always called wine the “rosy,” sleep the “balmy,” and so forth, so did these perfectly correct gentlemen always employ either a fluent epithet or a diffuse paraphrasis to express the commonest emotions or ideas. If they wished to say tea they would have done it thus:
Of China’s herb the infusion hot and mild.
Coffee would be
The fragrant juice of Mocha’s kernel gray, or brown or black, as the rhyme demanded. A boot is dignified into
The shining leather that the leg encased.
Wine is
The purple honor of th’ ambrosial vine.
All women are “nymphs,” carriages are “harnessed pomps,” houses are sumptuous or humble “piles,” as the case may be, and everything is purely technical. Of nature there seems to have been hardly a tradition.
But instead of attempting to describe in prose the diluent diction which passed for poetic under the artificial system—which the influence of Wordsworth did more than anything else to abolish and destroy—I will do it by a few verses in the same style. Any subject will do—a Lapland sketch, we will say:
Where far-off suns their fainter splendors throw O’er Lapland’s wastes of uncongenial snow, Where giant icebergs lift their horrent spires And the blank scene a gelid fear expires, Where oft the aurora of the northern night
Cheats with pale beams of ineffectual light, Where icy Winter broods o’er hill and plain, And Summer never comes, or comes in vain; Yet here, e’en here, kind Nature grants to man
A boon congenial with her general plan. Though no fair blooms to vernal gales expand, And smiling Ceres shuns th’ unyielding land, Behold, even here, cast up a monstrous spoil, The sea’s vast monarch yields nutritious oil, Escaped, perchance, from where the unfeeling crews Dart the swift steel, and hempen coils unloose, He whirls impetuous through the crimson tide, Nor heeds the death that quivers in his side; Northward he rushes with impulsive fin,
Where shores of crystal groan with ocean’s din, Shores that will melt with pity’s glow more soon Than the hard heart that launched the fierce harpoon. In vain! he dies! yet not without avail
The blubbery bulk between his nose and tail. Soon shall that bulk, in liquid amber stored, Shed smiling plenty round some Lapland board. Dream not, ye nymphs that flutter round the tray When suns declining shut the door of day, While China’s herb, infused with art, ye sip, And toast and scandal share the eager lip. Dream not to you alone that Life is kind, Nor Hyson’s charms alone can soothe the mind; If you are blest, ah, how more blest is he By kinder fate shut far from tears and tea, Who marks, replenished by his duteous hand, Dark faces oleaginously expand; And while you faint to see the scalding doom Invade with stains the pride of Persia’s loom, Happier in skins than you in silks perhaps, Deals the bright train-oil to his little Lap’s.
LECTURE XI WORDSWORTH
(Tuesday Evening, February 13, 1855)
A few remarks upon two of the more distinguished poets of the eighteenth century will be a fitting introduction to Wordsworth, and, indeed, a kind of commentary on his poetry. Of two of these poets we find very evident traces in him—Thomson and Cowper—of the one in an indiscriminating love of nature, of the other in a kind of domestic purity, and of both in the habit of treating subjects essentially prosaic, in verse; whence a somewhat swelling wordiness is inevitable.
Thomson had the good luck to be born in Scotland, and to be brought up by parents remarkable for simplicity and piety of life. Living in the country till he was nearly twenty, he learned to love natural beauty, and must have been an attentive student of scenery. That he had true instincts in poetry is proved by his making Milton and Spenser his models. He was a man of force and originality, and English poetry owes him a large debt as the first who stood out both in precept and practice against the vicious artificial style which then reigned, and led the way back to purer tastes and deeper principles. He was a man perfectly pure in life; the associate of eminent and titled personages, without being ashamed of the little milliner’s shop of his sisters in Edinburgh; a lover of freedom, and a poet who never lost a friend, nor ever wrote a line of which he could repent. The
licentiousness of the age could not stain him. His poem of “Winter” was published a year before the appearance of the “Dunciad.”
Thomson’s style is not equal to his conceptions. It is generally lumbering and diffuse, and rather stilted than lofty. It is very likely that his Scotch birth had something to do with this, and that he could not write English with that unconsciousness without which elegance is out of the question—for there can be no true elegance without freedom. Burns’s English letters and poems are examples of this.
But there are passages in Thomson’s poems full of the truest feelings for nature, and gleams of pure imagination.
Mr. Lowell here read a passage from “Summer,” which, he said, illustrated better than almost any other his excellences and defects. It is a description of a storm, beginning:
At
first heard solemn o’er the verge of Heaven
The
tempest growls.
This is fustian patched with cloth of gold. The picture, fine as it is in parts, is too much frittered with particulars. The poet’s imagination does not seem powerful enough to control the language. There is no autocratic energy, but the sentences are like unruly barons, each doing what he likes in his own province. Many of them are prosaic and thoroughly unpicturesque, and come under the fatal condemnation of being flat. Yet throughout the passage,
The unconquerable genius struggles through half-suffocated in a cloud of words.
But the metre is hitchy and broken, and seems to have no law but that of five feet to the verse. There is no Pegasean soar, but the unwieldy gallop of an ox. The imagination, which Thomson
undoubtedly had, contrasted oddly with the lumbering vehicle of his diction. He takes a bushel-basket to bring home an egg in. In him poetry and prose entered into partnership, and poetry was the sleeping partner who comes down now and then to see how the business is getting on. But he had the soul of a poet, and that is the main thing.
Of Gray and Collins there is no occasion to speak at length in this place. Both of them showed true poetic imagination. In Gray it was thwarted by an intellectual timidity that looked round continually for precedent; and Collins did not live long enough to discharge his mind thoroughly of classic pedantry; but both of them broke away from the reigning style of decorous frigidity. Collins’s “Ode to Evening” is enough to show that he had a sincere love of nature—but generally the scenery of both is borrowed from books.
In Cowper we find the same over-minuteness in describing which makes Thomson wearisome, but relieved by a constant vivacity of fancy which in Thomson was entirely wanting. But Cowper more distinctly preluded Wordsworth in his delight in simple things, in finding themes for his song in the little incidents of his own fireside life, or his daily walks, and especially in his desire to make poetry a means of conveying moral truth. The influence of Cowper may be traced clearly in some of Wordsworth’s minor poems of pure fancy, and there is one poem of his—that on “Yardly Oak”—which is almost perfectly Wordsworthian. But Cowper rarely rises above the region of fancy, and he often applied verse to themes that would not sing. His poetry is never more than agreeable, and never reaches down to the deeper sources of delight. Cowper was one of those men who, wanting a vigorous understanding to steady the emotional part of his nature, may be called peculiar rather than original. Great poetry can never be made out of a morbid temperament, and great wits are commonly the farthest removed from madness. But Cowper had at least the power of believing that his own thoughts and pleasures were as good, and as fit for poetry, as those of any man, no matter how long he had enjoyed the merit of being dead.
The closing years of the eighteenth century have something in common with those of the sixteenth. The air was sparkling with moral and intellectual stimulus. The tremble of the French Revolution ran through all Europe, and probably England, since the time of the great Puritan revolt, had never felt such a thrill of national and indigenous sentiment as during the Napoleonic wars. It was a time fitted to give birth to something original in literature. If from the collision of minds sparks of wit and fancy fly out, the shock and jostle of great events, of world-shaping ideas, and of nations who do their work without knowing it, strike forth a fire that kindles heart and brain and tongue to more inspired conceptions and utterances.
It was fortunate for Wordsworth that he had his breeding in the country, and not only so, but among the grandest scenery of England. His earliest associates were the mountains, lakes, and streams of his native district, and the scenery with which his mind was stored during its most impressionable period was noble and pure. The people, also, among whom he grew up were a simple and hardy race, who kept alive the traditions and many of the habits of a more picturesque time. There was also a general equality of condition which kept life from becoming conventional and trite, and which cherished friendly human sympathies. When death knocked at any door of the hamlet, there was an echo from every fireside; and a wedding dropped an orange blossom at every door. There was not a grave in the little churchyard but had its story; not a crag or glen or aged tree without its legend. The occupations of the people, who were mostly small farmers and shepherds, were such as fostered independence and originality of character. And where everybody knew everybody, and everybody’s father had known everybody’s father, and so on immemorially, the interest of man in man was not likely to become a matter of cold hearsay and distant report. It was here that Wordsworth learned not only to love the simplicity of nature, but likewise that homely and earnest manliness which gives such depth and sincerity to his poems. Travel, intercourse with society, scholarly culture, nothing could cover up or obliterate those early impressions. They widened with the range of his knowledge and added to his power of expression, but they never blunted that
fine instinct in him which enables him always to speak directly to men and to gentleman, or scholar, or citizen. It was this that enabled his poetry afterwards to conquer all the reviews of England. The great art of being a man, the sublime mystery of being yourself, is something to which one must be apprenticed early.
Mr. Lowell here gave an outline of Wordsworth’s personal history and character.
As a man we fancy him just in the least degree uninteresting—if the horrid word must come out—why, a little bit of a bore. One must regard him as a prophet in order to have the right kind of feeling toward him; and prophets are excellent for certain moods of mind, but perhaps are creatures
Too bright and good For human nature’s daily food.
I fancy from what I have heard from those who knew him that he had a tremendous prose-power, and that, with his singing-robes off, he was dry and stiff as a figure-head. He had a purity of mind approaching almost to prudery, and a pupil of Dr. Arnold told me he had heard him say once at dinner that he thought the first line of Keats’s ode to a “Grecian Urn” indecorous. The boys considered him rather slow. There was something rocky and unyielding in his mind; something that, if we found it in a man we did not feel grateful to and respect, we should call hard. Even his fancy sometimes is glittering and stiff, like crystallizations in granite. But at other times how tender and delicate and dewy from very contrast, like harebells growing in a crag-cleft!
There seem to have been two distinct natures in him—Wordsworth the poet, and Wordsworth the man who used to talk about Wordsworth the poet. One played a kind of Baruch to the other’s Jeremiah, and thought a great deal of his master the prophet. Baruch was terrifically uninspired, and was in the habit of repeating
Jeremiah’s poems at rather more length than was desired, selecting commonly the parts which pleased him, Baruch, the best. Baruch Wordsworth used to praise Jeremiah Wordsworth, and used to tell entertaining anecdotes of him,—how he one day saw an old woman and the next did not, and so came home and dictated some verses on this remarkable phenomenon; and how another day he saw a cow.
But in reading Wordsworth we must skip all the Baruch interpolations, and cleave wholly to Jeremiah, who is truly inspired and noble—more so than any modern. We are too near him, perhaps, to be able wholly to separate the personal from the poetical. I acknowledge that I reverence the noble old man both for his grand life and his poems, that are worthy expressions of it. But a lecturer is under bonds to speak what he believes to be the truth. While I think that Wordsworth’s poetry is a thing by itself, both in its heights and depths, something sacred and apart, I cannot but acknowledge that his prosing is sometimes a gift as peculiar to himself. Like old Ben Jonson, he apparently wished that a great deal of what he wrote should be called “works.” Especially is this true of his larger poems, like the “Excursion” and the “Prelude.” However small, however commonplace the thought, the ponderous machine of his verse runs on like a railway train that must start at a certain hour though the only passenger be the boy that cries lozenges. He seems to have thought that inspiration was something that could be turned on like steam. Walter Savage Landor told me that he once said to Wordsworth: “Mr. Wordsworth, a man may mix as much poetry with prose as he likes, and it will make it the better; but the moment he mixes a bit of prose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole.” Wordsworth, he added, never forgave him.
There was a great deal in Wordsworth’s character that reminds us of Milton; the same self-reliance, the same purity and loftiness of purpose, and, I suspect, the same personal dryness of temperament and seclusion of self. He seems to have had a profounder imagination than Milton, but infinitely less music, less poetical faculty. I am not entirely satisfied of the truth of the modern philosophy which, if a man knocks another on the head, transfers all the guilt to
some peccant bump on his own occiput or sinciput; but if we measure Wordsworth in this way, I feel as if he had plenty of forehead, but that he wanted hind-head, and would have been more entirely satisfactory if he had had one of the philo-something-orother.
It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the poetical mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and commonplace. It is in the Understanding (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imagination are embedded. He wrote too much to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity. He sets tasks to the divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make Jove’s eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout the “Prelude” and the “Excursion,” he seems striving to bind the wizard imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particulars adhere. There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome; yet with what splendors of mountain-sunsets are we not rewarded! What golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching heavenward, with angels ascending and descending! What haunting melodies hover around us, deep and eternal, like the undying barytone of the sea! And if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert wilderness, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as we might wait for in vain in any other poet.
Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow, and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humor, no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless quality that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own mind. His finest passages are always monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of his poems
which remind us of local histories in the undue importance given to trivial matter. He was the historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of particularization (for it is as truly a power as generalization) is what gives such vigor and greatness to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or word. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. His mind had not that reach and elemental movement of Milton’s which, like the tradewinds, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some, deep with silks and spicery, come brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse. It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the trumpet’s ardors, or the slim delicacy of the flute; and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which Apollo breathed through tending the flocks of Admetus, that which Pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe, the same in which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her dual nature, so that ever and anon, amid notes of human joy and sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.
Of no other poet, except Shakspeare, have so many phrases become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentler ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the
