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FIVE CENTURIES OF
ENGLISH VERSE
IMPRESSIONS

WILLIAM STEBBING
HON. FELLOW OF WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD
AUTHOR OF SIR WALTER RALEGH A BIOGRAPHY
' :

'truths or truisms', PARTS I AND II

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II: WORDSWORTH TO TENNYSON
REVISKI) EDITION
OK
'THE POETS: CHAUCER T(J TENNYSON
IMPRESSIONS'

HENRY FROWDE
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, GLASGOW
NEW YORK, TORONTO, MELBOURNE, BOMBAY
 n 13

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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Contents The Dead Hand — Necessary Nuisances — How to

:

Quarrel — Counsels of Perfection — Eccentrics — Great — Freedom

—Doing ^^ilhout— Clerical Errors — Courtesy—Self-deception
The Marriage Lottery — A New Law of Libel — Temper — De
Jure De Facto — The Elder Sister — How to Make the Most of
V.

Life —^Memory — August 29, 1905 — Putting the Brain into Com-
mission — Through Whose Glasses — Cupboards — Insincerities ?

—Popularity.
TRUTHS OR TRUISMS (Part II). 8vo. 45. net;
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Contents : Vices we could spare — Our great Prose Poem

Pauperizing — Concerning War —Atoms
— Dinner-table Talk
'
With one Consent they made — The Shadow of Crime
FIxcuse '

—June 22,
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to to

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Anticipated — A new Circulating Library.
 VOL. II

TABLE OF CONTENTS

>\'iLLiAM
JSa^iuel
Wordsworth
Taylor Coleridge
.....
.
PAGES
5-20
21-38
Robert .Southey . 39-48
Walter Scott 49-59
James Hoco G0-G9
Walter .Savace Lanuok 70-78
Thomas Moore
Leigh Hunt
Lord Byron
....
....
79-85
80-91
92-105

John Keats
Charles Wolfe
....
Percy- Bysshe Shelley 106-118
119-131
132-137
Henry Hart Milman 138-145
John Kerle 146-151
John Henry Newman . 152-160
Thomas Hood 161-169
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 170-178
Charles Kingsley 179-189
Ralph Waldo Emerson 190-199
Edgar Allan Poe 200-208
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . 209-220
James Russell Lowell 221-230
Edward FitzGerald 231-241
4 CONTENTS

Coventry Patmore .... .

PAGES
242-253

William Morris .....

Dante Gabriel Rossetti .

.
254-2G7
268-279

Arthur Hugh Clough ....

Algernon Charles Swinburne

....
.

.
280-287
288-296
Matthew Arnold
Robert Browning
Alfred Tennyson
....
....
.

.
297-310
311-327
328-344

Unclassed
Conclusions
......
i . . . . .
.

.
345-401
402-414

Index of First Words .... . 415-431

BIRTHS AND DEATHS . 435-440

 •

FIVE CEXTURTES OF ENGLISH VERSE

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
1770—1850
An Evangelist among the heathen for thirty j^ears.
Supreme Pontiff for twenty. What is he now ?
No student of literature can doubt what he was. In
the history of learning Crusades are no novelties. The
close of the eighteenthand earlier part of the nineteenth
centurieshad a monopoly of crusading in poetry. Goethe
and Schiller in Germany de Musset, Victor Hugo, with
;

the Romanticists, in France Wordsworth, at the head of

;

the Lake School, in England, sang and fought, sang to

fight. Elizabethan poets waged no wars they were dis- ;

coverers without being, in the realm of fancy, buccaneers,

as some of them were on the Spanish Main. These others
were invaders of established kingdoms, as were the Israel-
ites of Canaan. Of all the combatant poets W^ordsworth
had set himself the hardest task, and won the most signal
victory. His hand was against every man. In the rude
battle he did not shun to wound a natural all}' a forerunner, —
like Cowper, in the onslaught upon poetic diction, an
observer of rural life, like Thomson ! A fanatic doubtless —
at once of wide views, and narrow
but it was he who,
;

though panoply of a Captain, fighting for the most

in the
part alone, taught how to replace poetic phrases and
commonplaces by poetic ideas clolhod in plain, |)uro
KiiLrlisb, with liivtliin lo niadh. Ahovc all, it is \n liiin
6 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
mainly that literature owes the solemn inauguration of the
worship of Nature.
He threw down, and he l)uilt up. Though undoubtedly
heralded by Cowper, he substantially opened the new age
of English verse, which closes for us with Tennyson. His
famous brethren in song, more or less unconsciously, even
mocking B\Ton, underwent his influence, while they vaunted
their independence. The later poetry of the nineteenth
century has been, as a whole, though with an addition of
melody, of his house and lineage. He accomplished a grand
work in virtue of splendid poetic gifts, extraordinary philo-
sophic insight, and obstinate, indomitable courage. As
necessary a property for him, I fear, was, as for many great
poets, an absolute, and, in his case, innocent, incajDacitj'"
for recognizing the existence of singers besides himself.
Is it an intelligible contradiction in terms to say that,
while he was addicted to warm moral indignation, and
admiration, he had a cold heart ? An absence of the
sense of humour was a part of his equipment which was,
perhaps, essential. If it blinded him to absurdities in the
exaggeration of his critical principles, it also steeled him
against ignorant ridicule. Gallantly he flung down before
adversaries, whom his inspiration bewildered and enraged
no less than his eccentricities, the gauntlet of his Peter Bell,
weathercockless Kilve, Childless Timothy, Expostulation
and Repl}', with divers more as strange Then, when the !

poet ceased to sing unless to an inner circle, what wisdom

still, M'hat understanding of the soul of things The priest !

remained, with the inherent sanctity which had justified his

original investiture with the poet's mantle. We feel him
ready to go on prophesying should the commission be
renewed ; blissfully unconscious of the probable Never.
Literary history shows few more pathetic figures than the
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 7

old man, when visible within the diminished circle of his

disciples a righteous witness and zealot, eager to defend

;

the cause of poetical truth as in youth with no foes to ;

mock and persecute him none for him to

;
ban and burn :

clad in sacerdotal robes above his armour seeming to ;

a careless, ungrateful world to be sacrificing cold-dead

victims on a cold-dead altar.
I cannot but recognize that the mass of his verse has
ceased to please. That is the common fate of poetry in
bulk. must be conceded that the rule applies especi-
It
ally here. Ordinary readers even with a taste for poetry
are satisfied with a fraction of his. As it happens, the few
favourites are generally the fruit of earlier years. But
comparisons of age may well be of interest for students of
literature they do not affect the question of absolute
;

merit. When I am choosing pieces to make my own, and

love, I do not consider dates. Similarly I do not concern
myself with Wordsworth's philosophy, unless so far as it was
the motive for a poem, and colours it. As it happened, the
philosophy was of a kind to bear a very intimate relation
to the poetry. The scheme of it was the pre-existence of
spirit in nn angelic state, and its new birth into a new
order of Nature prepared for it by the Divine Architect.

The fal)ric, appointed centre and lord, was designed

with its

to Ik" admirably fair and hajjjjy. In all its constituents, from

man to beast, to the Mowers of the lield, mountain and
valley, winds and waters, it was meant to devclo)) by the
law of its being into l)cauty, mutually grateful loving-kind-
symmetry, and harmony.
ness, synijjathy,
As a thinker he seems to have fashioned for himself
some sueh system as this for our globe. Being a poet
born he was in the habit of summoning inspiration to
minister to the iilea. I ean understand the faseination to
8 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
his elect disciples of watching the relation in his verse of
the two powers, the two characters. A distinct chapter
in psycholog}^ might be devoted to the manner in which
the theory now and again subdues imagination to its
service now and again, though more in youth than age,
;

while answering the summons, snatches up the Philosojiher,

and carries him, not where he, but whei'e the Poet, would.
It is not our province here to inquire whether he were
primarily Poet because Philosopher, or Philosopher because
Poet. For our purpose it is enough to appreciate his
doctrine that Nature loves to clothe all her works with
beauty ; that she wishes her principal creature, man, to
see it, enjoy it, complete it to imitate her in love and
;

goodness to all ; that he ought to learn from the

excellence — of Divine origin —in her and hers, how closely
he is We need not, to discover the Poet
linked to Heaven.
in him,endeavour to piece together a complete system out
of his verse. Let us delight ourselves with its charm,
—
wherever we find it not quarrelling with the sweetness
because the honeycomb may be hidden among the bones
of a dead lion of thought.
To take Wordsworth because the philosopher
offence at
in him is, must be acknowledged, never very far off,
it

would be to banish ourselves from his kingdom of poetry

altogether. Ideas, vast and lofty, are constantly discernible,
willing to hold aloof or approach, as the reader will. Where
any of them insist upon associating themselves with the
melody, welcome them for the claim proves them and
;

the inspiration to be one. Throughout ample spaces of

garden-land where he reigns, thought, even for those who
do not delve and mine in it, adds atmosphere and a sense
of mystery. Who can account it ill in a poet that to his
eyes Nature is always longing to demonstrate herself to
 —

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 9

be both delightful and beneficent In a legion of instances

!

he could not have done better poetically had he been

.searching for beaut}' with as little heed to a lesson from
it as an Elizabethan minstrel of love. He could have
produced no more spontaneous apparitions of metrical
sweetness !

Lucy is not the less IjTically lovely that she impersonates

Nature's ideal workmanship :

The floating clouds their state shall lend

To her for her the willow bend
; ;

Xor shall she fail to sec

Even in the motions of the Storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her and she shall lean her ear
;

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.^

Doom to an early death has not the less pathos in it

that it may exemplify Nature's composure in

serene
bringing forth flowers not the less exquisite that they will
fade :

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love ;

A violetby a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye !

Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and f<w (uiild know

When Lucy ceased to bo ;

But shc) is in hor grave, and, oil,

-
'ilic (lifferenco to nic !
 ; ; ; ;

10 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Here is an analysis of the stages of perfect womanhood :

She was a Phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight
A lovely Ai)pavition, sent
To l)e a moment's ornament
Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair ;

Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair ;

But all things else about her drawn

From IVIay-time and the cheerful Dawn ;

• A dancing Shape, an Image gay,

To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine
A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
A Traveller between life and death ;

The reason firm, the temperate will.

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill

A perfect Woman, nobly planned.

To warn, to comfort, and command ;

And yet a Spirit still, and bright

With something of angelic light.^
With its wealth of insight, it stands on a level, neither
higher nor lower, in poetical enchantment since both are —
in that supreme —
with the vision of the unknown High-
land Reaper :

Behold her, single in the field,

Yon solitary High hind lass !

Reai)ing and singing by herself ;

Stop here, or gently ])ass !

Alone she cuts and binds the grain.

And sings a melancholy strain ;

() listen ! for the Vale profound

Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands ;
 — — ; ;

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 11

A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard

In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Amongst the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings ?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things.
And battles long ago ;

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of to-day ?
Some natural sorrow, loss or pain,
That has been, and may be again ?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang

As if her song could liave no ending ;

I saw her singing at lier work.

And o'er the sickle bending ;

I listened, motionless and still ;

And, as I mounted up the hill,

The music in my heart I bore.
Long after it was heard no more.*

The full orchestra provided for the poet by his winged

neighbours in his native dales has a world of various
meaning for him. Yet how simply, and unsj^stematically,
sweet, is each several carol ! The Nightingale plays at
stirring the restless blood, wliidi the stork-dove would
sf)()the :

Nightingale ! thou surely art

A creature of a '
liery heart ' ;

These notes of thine —they pierce and pierce

Tumultuous harmony and fierce !

Thou siiig'st as if the fJod of wino

Had helped thee to a Valentino ;

A song in mockery and despite
Of shades, and dews, and silent night
And steady liliss, and all the loves
Now Bleeping in linir peaceful groves.'^
 ; ; !

12 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

The Skylark teaches that love may both aspire and stoop :

Ethereal minstrel ! pilgrim of the sky !

Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound !

Or, wliilo the wings aspire, are heart and eye

Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground ?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will.
Those quivering wings composed, that music still
Leave to the nightingale her shady wood ;

A privacy of glorious light is thine ;

Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine ;
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam ;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home I
^

The Linnet seems to preach not at all, but has his lesson
too —that Nature commands to be glad :

One have I marked, the happiest guest

In all this covert of the blest
Hail to thee, far above the rest
In joy of voice and pinion !

Thou, Linnet in thy green array,

!

Presiding Spirit here to-day.

Dost lead the revels of the May ;

And this is thy dominion.

While birds and butterflies, and flowers,
Make all one band of jiaramours,
Thou, ranging up and down the bowers.
Art sole in thy employinent
A Life, a Presence like the Air,
Scattering thy gladness without care,
Too blest with any one to pair ;

Thyself thy own enjoyment.''

Fit companion is he in his airy pulpit for the joyous

wild flowers that the poet surj)rised, revelling too, one
spring on the shores of Grasmere :

A host, of golden daffodils.

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
 ;;

^A^LLIA:M WORDSWORTH 13

Continuous as the stars that shine.

And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending hne
Along the margin of a bay ;

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance,

The waves beside them danced ; but they

Outdid the sparkUng waves in glee ;

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company.^

Uuiversal nature, in his creed, was designed to rejoice, and

insistson rejoicing but no investiture with a prophet's
;

mantle is required to qualify lovers of inspired verse to

feel the magic, the exulting happiness, of the strains in
which the Poet of Nature proclaims his faith and glory in
her beauty and tenderness.
Commonly it is possible to be thus sensible of the simple
singer, apart from the seer, in Wordsworth —not always.
I cannot pretend to press an indiscriminate resort to him for
the amusement of an idle hour. He has strains of a grandeur,
a beauty of sublimity, A\'hich it seems profane to rehearse
unless as anthems chanted by worshippers with bare feet
before an altar. From how far away seems to echo the
soliloquy :

Earth has not anything to show more fair

Dull would ho be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty ;

This City now doth, Uke a garment, wear

The beauty of tho morning silent, bare,
;

iShifis, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky ;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill
 ; !; ; ;

14 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so dcej)
The river glideth at his own sweet will ;

Dear Cod the very houses seem asloej)

!

And all that miglity lieart is h^ng still !

"

Again, his is a Voice in the wilderness which, not affecting

to be able to cure the disease, protests against personal
contamination by the prevailing rebellion of flesh against
spirit, of Earth against Heaven :

The world is too mnch with us late and soon,

;

(Jetting and spending, we lay waste our ^lowers ;

Little we see in Nature that is ours ;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon !

This Hea that bares her bosom to the moon ;

The winds that will be howling at all hours.
And arc up-gathered now like sleeping flowers
For this, for everything, wc are out of tune ;

It moves us not. —Great Cod I'd rather be

!

A I'iigan suckled in a crcetl outworn

iSo might I, standing on tiiis pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn i" !

Listen finally to the two emulous spiritual rivals for

control of Wordsworth's soul —Thought the profoundest,
Imagination at its loveliest — coalescing, as in the mighty
Ode, into a long-resounding peal of music, realizing the
Miltonic vision of Philosophy, celestially harmonious :

The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose ;

The Moon doth with delight

Look round her when tlie heavens are bare ;

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair ;

The sunshine is a glorious birth ;

But yet I know, where'er I go.

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
 ; ; ;

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 15

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting :

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting.
And Cometh from afar ;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness.
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who our Homeis ;

Heaven lies about us in our infancy !

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Ui)on the growing Boy,
But he beholds the hght, anil whence it Hows,
He sees it in his joy ;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended
At length the Man perceives it die away.
And fade into the light of common day.

O joy that in our embers

!

Is something that doth live.

That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive !

The thought mc doth breed

of our past years in
Perpetual benediction not indeed
;

For that which is most worthy to be blest

Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest
But for those first atl'ections,
Those shadowy recollections.
Which, be they what they may.
Arc yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing !

Hence in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
 ;

IG FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

And upon the shore,
seo the Children sport
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

And 0, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,

Forebode not any severing of our loves !

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might

I only have relinquished one deUght
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
Thanks to the human heart by which wo live.
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears.
To mo the meanest flower that blows can givo
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.^^

A consecration of music, as in this marvel, to the evolu-

tion of abstract thought must in the nature of things be
exceptional. Yet the pursuers after melody may find
their reward in exploring even the cold, dry i^laces in the
Master's philosophy. Grace and fire frequently will reveal
themselves in unexpected spots. They light up now and
again a dogmatic defiance of the intolerant literary canons
of his youth, like Peter Bell —the butt of Byron :

In vain, through every changeful year.

Did Nature lead him as before ;
A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him.
And it was nothing more.

At noon, when by the forest's edge

He lay beneath the branches high.
The sky did never melt
soft blue
Into his heart; he never felt
^^
The witchery of the soft blue sky !

An aspiring reflection will without warning break into

gentle song :

The bees that soar for bloom.

High as the highest peak of Furness Fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells.
 ;

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 17

Into a treatise, as Unbelievers might deem it, on Religious

Faith, suddenly steps
from the blazing chariot of the sua
A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute.
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye
Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart
Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed
That timely Ught, to share his joyous sport
And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs,
Across the lawn and through the darksome grove.
Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes
By echo multiplied from rock or cave.
Swept in the storm of chase as moon and stars ;

Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven,

When winds are blowing strong.^^
From the dreary, flinty groundwork of poor Simon Lee's
infirmitiesis struck out a swift, illuminating spark of

emotion, as tears speak his astonished thankfulness for

a petty kindness :

I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning ;

Alaa ! the gratitude of men

Hath oftener left me mourning.^''

Sirach, the Son of Consolation, might have learnt much

from Margaret's complaint of the neighbourly attempts at
comfort to her in her bereavement :

They pity me, and not my grief !

"'

Thoy who neglect their Wordsworth do not know how

inuch they lose in a multitude of ways. The least study
will convince of the folly of the description of the philosophy
itself as '
wordy, drowzy, frowzy '. It is, on the contrary,
a body of thought exalting and rejoicing —often in a setting
as artistically satisfying as it is touchingly natural. The
l)oet had studied man ; and while ho sees cause to lament
VOL. 11 B
18 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
What man has made of man ;

he recognizes with delight that, nevertheless,

Wo have all of us one human heart.

He is grateful to Nature, and to Nature's source, that, in

improving earth's surface into infinite loveliness, they have
not neglected the development of man also. There is
many a one who,
doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train !

Turns his necessity to glorious gain.^"

He thanks Heaven for Milton, Avhose

^'
soul was like a Star, and dwelt ajiart ;

for Burns, who

showed my youth
How Verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth ;
^'^

for the plough-boy's merry ^hoop ; and for the stately

Beggar-woman :

a creature
Beautiful to see —a weed of glorious feature !
^^

for the proofs of humanity's ability to rise superior to

fortune, afforded alike by the Royal Swede, and by the
leech-gatherer, motionless as a cloud, on the lonely moor :

I could have laughed myself to scorn to find

In that decrepit Man so firm a mind ; ^°

for Spring's bestowal of a train of flowers :

a mighty band,
Singing at my heart's command ;

for the spirit breathed for him in the woods, which made
the sounding cataract
Haunt him fike a passion ;
and had justified his prayer and hope, as he meditates
gratefully on the choir of Poets :
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 19

who on earth have made us heii's

Of truth and jnire delight b}^ heavenly lays !

Oh might my name bo numbered among tlieirs,

!

Then gladly would I end my mortal days.-^

There are poets whose works are each a body of litera-

ture ill itself and Wordsworth is of them. Though I have
;

dared to touch various keys in his mighty organ, I have

refrained from a hundred more. With many a grieving
look back, I have passed the Yarrows by, the vision of
the Girl of Inversne5'de, the Sonnet's sonnet, the over-
flowing music of Brougham Castle's welcome to its Shep-
herd Lord, the high-minded farewell to the '
wondrous
Potentate '
of Eildon's triple height, the dramatic force
and generous appeal of Hart-leap Well, the pathos of the
improvised requiem on departed fellows in song, the grace
and the passion of Laodamia, \\ild-flower Ruth, and the
golden Duddon chain, with numberless things of beauty
and wisdom besides. Single pieces, like the great Ode, are
matter for entire volumes. Together they reflect the whole
poetry of life and as it ought to be lived. In
as lived,
that unison I find in effect an explanation of the common
indifTcrence to Wordsworth's later verse. He mixed so
much of his self-communings, the conviction of his obliga-
tion to rebuke, reform, and teach, that the Poet often was
lost to view in the Preacher. Is it too nmch to assume
that to it also, to the absolute identity of the man and
his inspiration, the indefinable magic of the earlier poetry
must be traced ! Nowhere in the English Helicon is it harder
to track homo the fascination, by so much as it is always
harder to analyse an author than his book. When, iiow-
ever,it can be done, and is done, when, as in the morning

oflife, the poet j)oured his whole soul into his verse, when

he followed after every aspiration with the ardour of a

B 2
20 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
lover as wrll as the patience of a teacher, \\\wn he arraye<.l
each in diclioii as lovely as it is simple, J do not wonder
that the best of the nation's youth rallied to his bugle
call. Even from
the far distance, believe me, its echoes
enchant. Let any submit themselves honestly to the spell,
and they will understand.

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edward Moxon, 1847.

' Three Years she Grew in Sun and Shower (Poems of the Imagination,
X).
- Lucy (Poems of the Affections, VIII).
^ She was a Phantom of Delight (Poems of the Imagination, VIII).
* The Solitary Reaper (Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, IX),
' To a Nightingale (Poems of the Imagination, IX).
« To a Skylark (ibid., XXX).
' The Green Linnet (Poems of the Fancy, IX).
' Daffodils (Poems of the Imagination, XII).
* Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802 (Miscellaneous
Sonnets, Part II, xxxvi).
" Sonnet (Miscellaneous Sonnets, Part I, xxxiii).
" Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.
Ode, stanzas 2, o, 9, and IL
'^ Peter Bell, Part I, stanzas 12 and 15 (Poems of the Imagination).

" The Excursion, Book IV.

'* Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman, st. 12 (Poems of Sentiment and
Reflection, VI).
The
^'^
Affliction of Margaret, st. 11 (Poems founded on the Affections,
XXIV).
'' Character of the Happy Warrior (Poems of Sentiment and Reflection,
XX).
"' London, 1802 (Poems dedicated to National Independence, XIV).
" At the Grave of Burns, 1803, st. 6 (Memorials of a Tour in Scot-
land, II).
** Written in March, and Beggars (Poems of the Imagination, XVI
and XVI li;.
-'°
Resolution and Independence, st.20 (ibid., XXII).
-' Personal Talk, at. 4 (Poems of Sentiment and Reflection, XIII).
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLEKIDGE
1772—1834

What a poet but for the iiietaphj^sician !

A poet feels a metaphysician reasons. The one leaps;

; the
other digs. Without imagination, the one cannot breathe ;

and the other cannot guess at the direction of a vein of

thought. But for the poet, it is life for the metaphysician,
;

a stimulant. In the same mind the two tendencies conllict,

[Link] one consent to serve. To his friends and the High-
gate circle Coleridge was the more signal marvel because
he united both. For posterity he would have been a pro-
founder philosopher had he been less of a poet. Had he
concerned himself less with the solution of mental problems,
he must have fdled a wider, not a more exalted, space in
the history of poetry.
His positive poetical career was brief. The quantity of
his work in the period is moderate. Virtually the whole
Ix-'ars an unnn'stakablo stamp of high intelligence tuid

noble feeling. Jieligious Musings abound in giand images

and reflections as, for instance, on flic tnjly of hatred
;

wifliin onr HcaNciily I'';i1 lici'"s vast human t'aniily :

No Cain
Injures uninjiirorl— in lior host aim'd blow
Viftorious nnirdcr a hlind suicido ;

with tho fonverse, in lli(> lines immediately preceding,

which Lamb declared to be without a rival in the whole
'

compass of my poetical reading '

:
 ! ! — —

22 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

There one Mind, one omnipresent Mind,
is

Omni fie. His most lioly name is Love.

Truth of subliming import with the which !

Who feeds and saturates his constant soul,

He from his small particular orbit flies
With blest outstarting From himself he flies.
!

Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze

Views all creation and he loves it all,
;

And blesses it, and calls it very good !

This is indeed to dwell with the Most High !

Cherubs and rapturc-trerabhng Seraphim

Can press no nearer to the Almighty's Throne ^ :

and The Eolian Harp, in its author's belief, '

the most
perfect poem he ever wrote '
:

Such a soft floating witchery of sound

As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve
Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-land !

O the one life within us and abroad,

Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in hght,
^
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere 1

No subtlety, the most intricate, daunts his Muse, when

the theme crosses her path ; not even David Hartley's
Aether, with its

fluids, impacts, essences.

Self-working tools, uncaused effects, and all
Those bUnd omniscients, those almighty slaveSj
Untenanting creation of its God.^

A reader stands amazed at the more than equal courage of

the Ne Plus Ultra :

Sole Positive of Night

Antipathist of Light
Fate's only essence primal scorpion rod
!

The one permitted opposite of God !

 ——— — — ; —

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 23

Condensed blackness and abj'smal storm

Compacted to one sceptre
Arms the Grasp enorm
The Intercept«r-r-
The Substance that still casts the shadoAV Death !

The Dragon foul and fell

The unrevealable,
And hidden one, whose breath
Gives s\4nd and fuel to the fires of Hell !

Ah ! sole despair
Of both th' eternities in Heaven !

Sole interdict of all-bedewing prayer,

The all-compassionate !

Save to the Lampads Seven

Reveal'd to none of all th' Angelic State,
Save to the Lampads Seven,
That watch the throne of Heaven !
*

Notwithstanding the encroaching waves even here of

wrangling politics, the Ode to the Departing Year is a relief

to the brain, with its invocation :

O Albion ! O my mother Isle !

Thy Eden's bowers,

valleys, fair as
Glitter green with sunny showers ;
Thy grassy uplands' gentle swells
Echo to the bleat of flocks
Those grassy hills, those glittering dells
Proudly ramparted with rocks
And Ocean mid his uproar wild
S[>eak3 safety to his island-child.
Hence for many a fearless ago
Has social Quiet loved thy shore
Nor over proud invader's rage
Or sack'd thy towers, or stain'd thy fields with gore.''

Often too .sensitive an imaf^'inadoii sconis to 1)0 seeking

refuge in any casual topic from thoughts, like Fears in

Solitude, too troubling. The theme may be simple landscape-
painting ; moor and farmland :
 —— •

24 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

The fruit-liko pcrfuiuo i)f the golden furze ;
This burst of iirospect, here tlic shadowy main,
Dim-tinted, there the mighty majesty
Of that huge amphitheatre of rich
And ehny fields ;
®

forest-scenery, where

with dun-red bark

The and the unfrcquent slender oak,
fir-trees,

Forth from this tangle wild of bush and brake

Soar up, and form a melancholy vault
High o'er me, murmuring like a distant sea ; '

an effect of frost at midnight, with its quiet which may be

felt:

'Tis calm indeed ! so calm, that it disturbs

And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood.
This populous village sea, and hill, and wood,
!

With all the numberless goings-on of life.

^
Inaudible as dreams !

a Knight's Tomb, conjured up with the elegance of a Greek

epigram, on a Westmoreland hill-side :

Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn ?

Where may the grave of that good man be ?

By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn,

Under the twigs of a young birch tree !

The oak that in summer was sweet to hear,

And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year.
And whistled and roar'd in the winter alone.
Is gone—and the birch in its stead is grown.
The Knight's bones are dust, and his good sword rust : —
'
His soul is with the saints, I trust ;

a picture of a mother with a new-born babe :

 ; ;

SMIUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 25

She listened to tlie tale divine,

And closer still the Babe she prest
And while she cried, the Babe is mine !

The milk rush'd faster to her breast :

Joy rose vrithin her, like a summer's morn ;

i"
Peace, Peace on Earth ! the Prince of Peace is born ;

ideal vers de societe, such as :

I ask'd my fair one happy day,

What I should call her in my lay ;

By what sweet name from Rome or Greece ;

Lalage, Xeaera, Chloris,

Sappho, Lesbia, or Doris,
Arethusa, or Lucrece

'
Ah !
'
reiilied my gentle fair,
'
Beloved, what are names but air ?
Choose thou whatever suits the line ;

Call me Sappho, call me Chloris,

Call me Lalage or Doris,
Only, only call me thine ;
' ^^

epigrams in swarms, political, social, merry, malicious,

raging sometimes, as the terrible scream at Pitt in Fire,
Famine, and Slaughter ;
^^ even sonorous sonnets, for
example, on Schiller's ^^ Robbers, and on Kosciuszko :

O what a loud and fearful shriek was there,

As though a thousand souls one death-groan iiour'd !

Ah me the}' saw beneath a hireling's sword

!

Tli»-ir Kosciusko fall

" !

Q'lien tlierc is a sketch, the Three CJravcs, which its aiit Imr

had not the heart to complete a thing shorn of all coiiicli- ;

ness squalidly tragic and cruel

;
AMnidci-ful in its harsh ;

force :

'
() (Uk], fdrgive nio,' he cxclaini'd ;

'
1 have torn out her heart !
' '''
 ; — ;

26 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

but a nightmare, which we are ghid to forget in the
sunshine of
An Idyll with Boccaccio's spirit warm.^"

Imagination has transported the Georgian poet four long

centuries back to a fate-defying *
Garden and its faery '

to
The brightness of the world, O thou once free,

And always fair, rare land of courtesy !

O Florence ! with the Tuscan fields and hills,

And famous Arno, fed with all their rills ;

Thou brightest star of star-bright Italy I

Rich, ornate, populous, all treasures thine,

The golden corn, the olive, and the vine.
Fair cities, gallant mansions, castles old.
And forests, where beside his leafy hold
The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn.
And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn ;

Palladian palace with its storied halls

Fountains, where Love hes listening to their falls ;

Gardens, where flings the bridge its airy span,

And Nature makes her happy home with man ;

Where many a gorgeous flower is duly fed

With its own rill, on its own spangled bed.
Thine all delights, and every muse is thine ;

And, more than all, the embrace and intertwine

Of all with all in gay and twinkhng dance !

INIid gods of Greece and warriors of romance,

See Boccace sits, unfolding on his knees

!

The new-found roll of old Maeonides ;

But from his mantle's fold, and near the heart,

Peers Ovid's holy book of Love's sweet smart.^'

tale of Coleridge's achievements in verse is, however,

The
farfrom told j'ct. He could do anything with verse. If
he did not compose an epic, we may be sure it was not
because he could not. If his few songs are not perfect music,
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 27

it is that he would not sing without thinking. He produced

plays, which are poems also ideal translations, the
;

Piccolomini and the Death of Wallenstein and besides ; —

prodigies which I am holding over in reserve three great —
Odes.
That to France,
a solemn music of the wind,

is a proud declaration of the superiority of his loyal faith

in Freedom to disenchantment by the greediness of rene-
gades seduced, as had been Frenchmen,
To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway,
Yell in the hunt, and share the murderous prey.^^

No dithyramb on the overwhelming glory of Alpine

peaks has ever surpassed in splendour of diction his Hymn
to Mont Blanc. It is immaterial that he was indebted for
an outline of the poem to an obscure German poetess.
That he had never seen the mountain or valley gave
additional freedom to his enthusiasm. As it is, the con-
ception moves apart on a high level from which it never
descends :

Sole sovran of the Vale !

O struggling witli the darkness all the night,

And visited all night by troops of stars.
Or when they cliinb the sky or when they sink :

Companion of the morning-star at dawn.

Thyself Eartli's rosy star, and of the dawn
Co-herald ; wake, O wake, and utter praise !

Who sank thy sunless pilhirs deep in Earth '!

Who fiird thy countenance witl» rosy liglit ?

Who made thee parent of perpetual streams ?

Andyou, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad !

Who cail'd you forth from night and utter death,

From dark and icy caverns caitd you forth,
Down those i)recipitous, black, jagged llocks,
For ever shattcr'd and the same for ever ?
 • —

28 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Ye ice-falls Ye that fi-om the inountaiir.s brow
!

Adown enormous ravines slope amain —

Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stojip'd at once amid their maddest plunge !

Motionless torrents ! silent cataracts !

Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven

Beneath the keen full moon ? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows ? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet ?
God ! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
^*
Answer ! and let the ice-plains echo, God !

The perfection of stateliness, though pitched too entirely

in one key ! Yet not comparable, either for harmony or
for thought, to the Ode to Dejection. Can that be given
higher praise than that it is Avorthy to rank beside the
Intimations of Immortality in the forefront of philosophical
verse ! If the scope is necessarily far less large, and as
necessarily the prospect is darker, the narrower plan is as
exactly balanced ; any propensity to rhetoric is as well
restrained. The melody, of which alone I can in a frag-
ment give an idea, is always admirable :

What a scream
Of agony by torture lengthened out
That lute sent forth Thou Wind, that ravest without.
!

Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree,

Or pine grove whither woodman never clomb.
Or lonely house, long held the witches' home,
Methinks were fitter instruments for thee.
Mad Lutanist ! who in this month of showers.
Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers,
Mak'st Devils' Yule, with worse than wintry song.
The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among.
Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds !

Thou mighty Poet, even to frenzy bold !

What tell'st thou now about ?

'Tis of the rushing of a host in rout.
 — —

SA^RTEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 20

With groaus of trampled men, with .smarting wounds

At once they groan with pain, and sliudder with the cold !

But hush there is a pause of deepest silence

! !

And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd.

With groans and tremulous shudderings — all is over
It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud !

A tale of less affright,

And temjier'd with delight.
As Otway's self had framed the tender la}',

'Tis of a little child

Upon
a lonesome wild,
Not from home, but she hath lost her way ;
far
And now moans low in bitter grief and fear.
And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.-"
I recognize the touch of greatness everywhere the :

abounding flood of majestic thought and imagery, which

enraptured friends, and bewildered them no less than foes.
It is possible to dissect piece after piece, and demonstrate
the grandeur, the beauty. But the common reader of
poetry who, like myself, reads poems to find out which of
them he can love, is not drawi irresistibly back. These
noble Odes, Hynms, Musings, Sonnets, even Epigrams, and
jeu.x d'esprit are not in general of the poetry with which
we care to live. And why ?

Defects are visible on the surface of man}'. Often it is

preaching instead of singing. Extraneous currents of
thought are permitted to encroach. Indignation, in itself
righteous, may be inopportune. It roars with a noisiness
which fatigues. The fault is as in penmanship, when the
upstroke and downstroke are equally dark. A suspicion
is excited, as in the Chamouni Pindaric, that the eagle is

flapping his wings to gain imjietus for the flight heaven-

wards. Imagination itself effloresces into a confusing
— —
exuberance fancy U])on fancy reflection upon reflection.
The congeries is rather material for poetry than poetry
 —

30 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

itself. Poems by other writei's have, it is true, maintained
their jjlace in popiihir estimation in the face of drawbacks
as considerable. But in Coleridge I cannot but suppose
that they grew out of an essential misconception by him
of the rights of verse over the versifier. Poetry demands
the choicest of a man's powers ; if great powers, the greatest,
and all of them. He should have a will, and the will to
mass the whole, and throw it into the lap of his theme.
Coleridge had no sufficient sincerity in his vocation, no
full conviction of the supreme obligations of the poet's
mantle. Nature had bestowed the gift of verse upon him
as his proper mode of expression and he used it as lightly
;

as he came by it. Apparently he was not conscious that

there is agony as well as rapture in the due utterance of
such a voice. A reader like myself is liable to the dis-
tasteful feeling that he has had offered to him a series of
exercises instead of inspired messages ; that they represent
the obedience of a marvellous assemblage of human energies
to their lord and master, and not the empire of his poetic
spirit over himself.
The surprise is to turn a page, and be in a new world.
Suddenly, with no audible herald to announce the advent,
English literature found enshrined in it The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, Christabel, though delayed in publication.
The Tale of the Dark Ladie, The Nightingale, and
belated like Christabel —
Kubla-Khan. Each differs in feel-
ing, thought, tone,rhythm, from the rest and all agree in ;

being great, sweet, and satisfying. The Ancient Mariner

is remarkable for more than its intrinsic merits it is ;

phenomenal as being from Coleridge. Never was there

poet or thinker with a fondness like his for vagueness,
ragged ends. Nothing of that is here not one incident,
;

nor one emotion, out of season and place and the tempta- ;
 ; :

SAIVRTEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 31

tions to wanderiug ! Aii iiifiiiite variety of scene, character,

impulses, terror, horror, romance, awe, remorse, repentance,
hoi)e,disappointment, the blissful eahn of Heaven's pardon ;

and throughout the A\hole a ca^jtivating simplicity !

I know of no poem A\ith more of the divine endowment

of never gro^\ing out of date none which possesses more
;

of charm alike for age and youth. The melody of the

dirge simg by seraphs in token of forgiveness for the fate
of the Marmer's two hundred shipmates, haunts and en-
chants. It is like balm on an aching womid :

'Twas not those souls that tied in pain,

Wliicli to their corses came again,
But a troop of spirits blest

For when it —
they drojjp'd their arms.
dawn'cl
And round the mast
cluster'd
Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths,
And from their bodies pass'd.
Around, around, flew each sweet sound,
Then darted to the Sun ;

Slowly the sounds came back again.

Now mix'd, now one by one.
Sometimes a-dropptng from the sky
I heard the skylark sing ;

Sometimes all httle birds that are,

How they seem'd to fill tlie sea and air
With their sweet jargoning !

And now 'twas hke all instrumenis,

Now hke a lonely flute ;

And now it is an angel's song,

That makes the heavens be mute.

It ccas'd ;
yet still tlie sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.^'
 ——

32 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Had Ur- r»iuic stood alone it imist have inniiorializied
its writer ; same year or two wliieh produced it
but the
brought to light the earlier and more important portion
of Christabel, That is a poem for poets. Yet The Ancient
Mariner, which might have been supposed made to compel
popular admiration, lay practically stillborn until the
twin inspiration, printed nineteen j^ears later, called it
into acknowledged life. The tw^o resemble one another in
nothing except loveliness. The variety which distinguishes
Christabel has no affinity to that of its coeval in birth.
Every diverse current in The Ancient Mariner
sets towards
one inevitable end. no necessity to
In Christabel there is

work in any given direction Never had a rich and capricious

.

fancy more liberty. Never did apparent trust in chance

better justify its independence. Fancy rules ; as irrespon-
swajdng of a leafy bough. The result is harmony,
sible as the
nevertheless perfection in thought, images, new and
;

fascinating flexibility of rhythm.

It might almost be supposed that the poet was impro-
vising, and as uncertain as his audience of each next
musical effect till it came :

It moan'd as near as near can be,

But what it is she cannot tell.
On the other side it seems to be
Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree.

The night the forest bare ;

is chill ;

Is it the wind that moaneth bleak ?

There is not wind enougli in tlie air
To move away the ringlet curl
From the lovely lady's cheek
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.
 — '

SAMITEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 33

Hush, beating heart of Christaliel !

Jesu, Maria ! shield her well !

She folded her arms beneath her cloak,

And stole to the other side of the oak.
What sees she there ?

There she sees a damsel bright,

Drest in a silken robe of white,
That shadowy in the moonlight shone ;

The neck that made that white robe wan,

Her stately neck and arms were bare ;

Her blue- veined feet unsandal'd were,

And wildly glitter'd here and there
The gems entangled in her hair.
I guess, 'twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she
--
Beautiful exceedingly !

And again the wonderful, changeful melody :

"
In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell.
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel !

Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow.

This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow ;

But vainly thou warrest.

For this is alone in
Thy power to declare.
That in the dim forest
Thou heard'st a low moaning,
And found'st a bright lady surpassingly fair ;

Anil didst bring her home with thee in love and in ehnrity.
-''
To shield lu>r and shelter her from tin* damj) air."

Christabel and The Ancient Mariner have their .several

statioriH ; fixed stars in the heaven of letters. One is

a masterpiece of art, wliich foils all attempts to detect

the secret of its workmanshi]). The other is so entrancing
in its unison of heart and hniin, that its captives are never
free to inrjnirc wliethcr there he a secret at all. If ]»roof

VOL. 11 c

\
 ;

:U FTVK rKXTURTES OK K\([Link] VERSE

he slill waitlinn- of the pcrfVct ion of Ohristabel, it is that

true criticism has never regretted its incompleteness. Well
that it remains a torso incomparable !

have classed with them three other poems and they all
I ;

deserve their eminence. First must stand the wondrous

—
Vision like Cliristabel, a fragment. Execrable, unpardon-
able, the business person from Porlock ', who stifled two
'

hundred or more golden dream-lines of Kubla-Khan A !

great master of fiction, and a poet too, as we walked up

the hill at the foot of which, alas he no longer dwells, !

once told me that he ranked Kubla-Khan highest among

Coleridge's poems. It was a paradox, though so far literally
true that the dreamer of such a dream is demonstrated
thereby to have had poetry in his very blood !

The melody bubbles, dances, revels, laments, and

threatens :

But oh ! that deej) romantic' chasm which slanted

Down hill athwart a cedarn cover
the green !

A savage place as holy and enchanted

!

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover !

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething.

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced ;

Amid whose swift lialf-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's tiail

And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

If flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reach'd the caverns measureless to man,
And sank tumult to a lifeless ocean
in ;

And 'mid tumult Kubla lieard from far

this
Ancestral voices prophesying war -^ !
 —

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 35

By turns it falls, and, again, rises into an Abyssinian

maid's song of Mount Abora, with palaces built of sun-
shine, over caverns of ice, and yielding delights ineffably
seductive and perilous.
A dizzy singing trance ! Yet hardly less of common
daylight texture than the exquisite Conversational Poem,
with its rivalries of many nightingales amid tangled wild
woods, interpreted in blank verse honey-sweet :

Far and near,

IIIwoud and thicket, over the wide grove,
They answer and provoke each other's songs,
With skirmish and capricious passagings.
And nuinnurs musical and swift jug jug,
And one low piping sound more sweet than all

.Stirring the air with such an harmony.

That should you close your eyes, you might almost
Forget it was not day On moonlight bushes.
!

Whose dewy leafits are but lialf-disclosed,

You may perchance behold them on the twigs.
Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full,

Cdistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade

Lights up her love-torch.
A most gentle Maid,
Who dwelleth in her hospitable home
Hard by the [Link], and knows all their notes.
What tiiiic the moon was lost behind ii cloud,
Hath heard a pause of sihjnce till the moon ;

Kmerging, hath awaken'd earth and sky

With one sensation, and those wakeful birds
Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy,
Ah if some sudden gale had swept at once
A hundred airy harps ! And she hath wafcliM
.Vfany a nightingale perch giddily
On bhwmy twig still swinging from (h(» breeze.
And to that motion tune bis wanton song,
Like tipsy joy that reels with tossing head."'
C 2
 — ;

•M\ FIVK ([Link] OF KXOLISH VERSE

As worthy, still oneo more, of a plaeo in the hierarchy

of song, is the Introduction to the Jiallad of The Dark
Ladie. The ballad, like Christabel, is a fragment ; but
the prelude, on the variety of ministers that Love can
—even a
enlist and doleful
'
soft an old and moving air,

story — as complete
'
is l)cauty and colour as a rose
in :

All impulses of soul and sense

Had thrill' d my guileless Genevieve ;

The music and the doleful tale,

The rich and balmy eve

And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,

An undistinguishable throng,
And gentle wishes long subdued.
Subdued and cherish'd long !

She wept with pity and delight,

She blusli'd with love, and virgin shame ;

And, like the murmur of a dream,

I heard her breathe my name.

—
Her bosom heav'd she stcpp'd aside,.
As conscious of my look she steppVl
Then suddenly, with timorous eye,
She fled to me and wept.

She half inclosed me with her arms,

She press'd me with a meek embrace ;

And bending back her head, look'd uji.

And gazed upon my face.
"Twas partly love, and partly fear.

And partly 'twas a bashful art,

That I might rather feel than see
The sweUing of her heart.^*

Coleridge's career as a writer of poetry terminated by

the time he was thirty. Tlie body of his poetical work
is comprised within three to five years. Had he died in
 SAJVIUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 37

1802, after the composition of the Ode to Dejectit>n, he

would have left the world of poetry as rich as when he
finally departed. As a thinker he survived, and reigned,
for thirty-two years more. Inspiration ceases for most in
middle Few, once inspired, cease, while they breathe,
life.

from versifjing. They versify because verse was wont to

be their highest mental medium and instrument. Cole-
ridge, when no longer minded to write Ancient Mariners
and Christabels, had an alternative. He remained an
intellectual autocrat, and proceeded to utilize his other
gift, as a suggester of problems, a setter of texts. If

literature cannot be said to have benefited by the solilo-

i^uies at Highgate, at least it has gained negatively by the

escape through that safety-valve for imagination from the

danger of a dilution of poetic greatness. Having tasted
of Coleridge's best, we should all of us have been grievous
sufferers had we been obliged to put up with aught lower.
Better nothing if no more of Christabel, or her peers !

The Poetical and Dramatic Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Four

vola. B. M. Pickering, 1877.
'
Religious Musings, vol. i, pp. 93 4 ; and Lamb to Coleridge,
Dec. 10, 1790. Memorials of Charles Lamb, by Talfourd. Moxon,
18.-)0. p 59.
' The Kolian Harp.
' Tho Destiny of Nations.
Nc Plus Ultra (Sibylline Leaves).
* Ode to the Departing Year. ' Fears in Solitude.
'
The Picture. * Frost at Midnight.
• Tho Knight's Tomb (Sibylline Leaves).
'• A Christmas Carol (Sibylline Leaves), st. 3,

" Names (Siliyilini; Leaves).

" Fire, Famine, iin<l Slaughter.
'»
To the Author of the llobbers. " [Link], Sonnets, V.
'•'
Tho Three (Graves (Sil)yllinf Leaves).
" The (jardcn of Boccaccio. " ibid
3S FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
'" Franco : an Ode stanzas 1,4.
" Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni (Sibylline Leaves)
" Dejection an Ode (Sibylline Leaves).
:

-' The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part v.

" Christabel, Part i. " Ibid.
-' Kubla Khan or, a Vision in a Dream.
;

" The Nightingale a Conversational Poem.

:

" The Ballad of the Dark Ladio, Introduction.

 ROBERT SOUTHEY
1774—1843

I WAS brought up Southey as the peer of

to regard
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats not ;

necessarily their equal in degree, but wholly worthy

to be ranked among thcni. As a schoolboy, and as an
undergraduate, 1 read hiui with respect, in some sort with
admiration. When 1 became entitled to choose College
prizes, a collection of his poems was in my list. My
contemporaries would not have selected him they did ;

not think me eccentric for my preference. 1 have sur-

vived to find him utterly out of date, scarcely placed on

an upper shelf with the Georgian classics. Even I myself
had ceased to read him since my University days, unless
when I wished to amuse my children with one of his ballads.
Ghosts of old associations seemed to rustle down about
me, like last year's leaves from a wind-tossed beech-tree
in early spring, as more recently I turned over the many
pages to try to discover why his verse was current once,
and no longer passes.
The tide of neglect even has ivached, if not to the full
extent, the area of his verse in which he is indisputably
a inaster. Few TOuglish pods arc iiis ccjuals. very few his
superiors, in humour. Hiiinour various and siugulai' at once.
Never mere fun, l»orn willi a laiiuli. and cxjjiring in a yawn.
I'oetry also, though witli scntinicnl not mdu'c^omiiigly
obtrusive. Above all. an inlinilc capacity for inventing
occasions for itself, thoULdi lioni .snl)irct niattcc the most
uiiliUrlv. To •j\\'(' instances out of nian\' as icniaikahlc,
40 FIVE CKXTIKIKS OF EN(;L1SH VERSE

the i)i)i>ortuiiity may he siii)i)lic'cl l»y a heni)eckcd Cornish-

man, whose bride had unfairly taken to the ehureh a bottle
of the donunion-ensuring water, which he raced from the
altar to be first to drink at the Well of 8t. Keyne.i It may
be the natural anxiety of pious countrymen to secure for
by timely preliminaries such as a deathbed
their village, —
—to lieatification. the relics of a Saint-designate, whom
neiglibours might otherwise coax away in life.^ A mother's
frenzy of anguish for her child devoured by a crocodile
suggests a scene of revenge in kind, as equitable as it is
irresistibly comic .^ A flower of smiling satire springs under
the poefs pen from the field of Blenheim, watered with
the l)lood of murdered myriads :

'

Wliy. twa?, a very wicked thing !

Said little Williclininc.

Nay, nay. my little girl,' quoth he,

*
It was a laniuuii victory !
'

The theme may be a Pope's untokl mortal sin, with a

.Saint's gallop on Satan's own unwilling back to confess
and absolve,^ or a robber's release from and restoration
to his lawful gibbet.^ Each is made to yield the best of
diversion. Half a century ago everybody revelled in the
wit of The Devil's There were few who had not
Walk !
'

]>oth shuddered and laughed over Archbishop Hatto and

his rats,^ and the gallant, futile fight with her registered
[Link], the Arch-Ficnd, of The Old Woman of Berkeley
in her iron -.scaled and chained coffin, hymned and hallowed
In- fifty Choristers and fifty Priests, with, for sentinels, her

fcon a monk, and licr daughter a nun :

In he came with eyes of flame

'J'hc l)cvil to fetth the dead,
And all the Chureh with hi.s |)[Link] glow'd,
Like a lierv furnace red.
 ROBERT SOUTHEY 41

He laid his hand on the iron chaiu^s,

And Uke flax they moulder'd asunder,
And the coffin Hd, which was barr'd so tirui,
He burst with liis voice of thunder.
And he bade the Old Woman of Berkeley rise.

And come wth her master away :

A cold sweat started on that cold corpse,

At the voice she was forced to obey.

She rose on her feet in her winding-sheet,

Her dead flesh quiver'd with fear,
And a groan like that which the Old Woman gave
Never did mortal hear.
She follow'd her Master to the church door,
There stood a black horse there ;

His bi'cath was red like furnace smoke.

His eyes like a meteor's glare.

The Devil he flung her on the horse,

And he leapt up before,
And away like the hghtning's speed they went,
And she was seen no more.
They saw her no more, but her cries
For four miles round they could hear.
And children at rest at their mother's breast
Started, and scream'd with fear.*

As I now re-read, I do not know which to applaud

more, the jester, the story-teller, or the Minstrel. The
humour sometimes reminds a little too much of a skulls
grin ; the art with which it is extracted never fails ; we
always feel the fine sense of perspective with which the
materials are marshalled to yield the desired effect.
]iut the indifference, which in its course has ]>artially
visited the Jiallads and Metrical Tales, seems
to have
washed away, like Lethe, all rciiieiiihiaiicc of the sei'if)US
poems. The tlegree of obli\itm 1 cannot hut lliiiik unjust.
IL' K1\K CKN'I'l i:iKS OF [Link] VEHSP:
and prrliaps iiii<.'ra(cfiil. Tlic mass of Southey.s work (lis-

Itlays ([uulitics whicli wcmv appreciated once, and may plead

for some recognition still. In the first place his workman-
ship is excellent ; with e.\ce])tions, naturally ; especially,
of the purveyance of Court 1}' or patriotic adulation ; such
as A Vision of Judgment, or the intolerably dreary Pil-
grimage to Waterloo. Joan of Arc is a spacious chapter
of history, with the rightful ])roi)ortion, observed with
a true instinct, of romance to fact. In the two Madocs,
in Wales, and in Aztlan, he had to trust entirely to his
fancy, for the general scheme, as well as for details. The
whole harmoniously probable. Roderick, the Last of
is

the Cloths, again, is, like Joan, an atlniirable specimen of

historical joinery by a romancer with a conscience. Almost
everything alleged to have happened had happened, or
might have ha])pened. Though liberties are taken with
events, and their order, the properties are invariably cor-
rect, as is the scenery. It is impossible to live in th^
several narratives with their characters, and the sentiments
attributed to them, without being the better for the society.
Then, study the couple of Asiatic epics ; and admire
the intrepidity vnth which the poet plunges into a new
world. Throughout they are picturesque, and gorgeously
coloured. Really it is hard to understand the present
coldness towards Arabian Nights Entertainments such as
these. Thalaba himself, it may be objected, lacks interest.
In that he only reseml)les many another hero and the ;

vivacity of his adventures atones. At all events, the crime

cannot Im? imputed to the story of Kehama.
It was no ordinary imaginalion which though guided —
I>erhaps by the 'Rape of Lucrccc extracted satisfaction '
—
of implacable rcvengefulness out of a (."ain-like i)rain[ of
security for its abhorred object from c\cry peril to life :
 ROBERT 80UTHEY 43

I charm thy Hfe

From the ^veapons of strife,
From stone and from wood,
From fire and from flood.
From the seri^ent's tooth.
And the beasts of blood :

From Sickness I charm thee,

And Time shall not harm thee :

But Earth which is mine,

Its fruits shall deny thee ;

And Water shall hear me,

And know thee and fly thee ;

And the Winds shall not touch thee

When they pass by thee,
Aiid the Dews shall not wet thee.
When they fall nigh thee ;

And thou shalt seek Death

To release thee, in vain ;

UMiou shalt live in thy pain

While Kchama shall reign.
With a fire in thy heart.
And a fire in thy brain ;

And Sleep shall obey me.

And visit thee never.
And the Curse shall be on thee
For ever and ever.^"

The entire texture may not reach the same high standard.
But all the actors move in an atmosphere of poetic ])assi()n.
It invests the King of the World, and hi.s victims also. It
circulates about the ghastly figure of his dead brutish son.
Everything on a grand scale
is ; from the insatiable am-
bition of the mighty Rajah ; the ])ursiiil of innocent
Kailyal by the honil)l(! Spectre, carnal though a ghost,
of slain Arvalan ; the hall of Royal Death in the ])eerless
palace and gardens,

Where lialy lirld nf old lii^ awful rcigii ;

 — ;

II KIVK ClONTriUKS OK ENGLISH VERSE

to tiio i-liinax, the sloniiiiig of Hi'll [Link] by the Man-God,

the Man- Almighty, his cliiof and fatal conquest.
Other keys besides tlic heroic arc touched by Southcy ;

tiie marvellous and the sordidly criminal, as in the once

;

fanunis Mary, the Maid of the Inn a haunting horror. ^^ —

1 fail to recognize the magical reserve, the pensive charm,
of ("olliiis's Evening in The First of December :

When Nature shrouds lierself, entranced

In deep tranquillity.^^

Haimairs jfiave, however, where none

Who trod ui)on tlio senseless turf would think
Oi wiuit a \vt)rld of woes lay buried there,^^

vies with The Parish llegister and The Borough in the

power to elicit an acrid fragrance from the grime of sin
and its sorrow. With a sweet simplicity he welcomes the
return of travellers to their home and children. ^^ He
ineceded Tennyson in the discovery of the domestic idyll,
as The Old Mansion-House testifies. ^^ If only his best
suggested examples had been given to the world, he might
have won celebrity for Inscriptions free, all, from the —
Ijesetting sin of promiscuous adulation like that imagined —
for a moTiumont to ruthless Pizarro :

A greater name
The list of Glory boasts not.
Thank the God
Who made thee, that thou art not such as he.^*
When in the Paradise of his books, it will not be dis-
puted that at least the shadow of insi)iration falls upon him :

My days among the Dead are past

^Vround mo T behold,
Where'er these casual eyes arc cast.
The mighty minds of old ;

My never-failing friends are they,

With whom 1 convt r.-ic day by day.
 ;

ROBERT SOUTHEY 45

With them I take delight in weal,

And seek rehef in woe ;

And while I understand and feel

How much to them I owe,
My cheeks have often been bedew'd
With tears of thoughtful gratitude.
My thoughts are with the Dead, with them
I live in long-past years,
Their virtues love, their faults condemn.
Partake their hopes and fears.
And from their lessons seek and find
Instruction with an humble mind.

My hopes are with the Dead, anon

My place with them will be.
And I with them shall travel on
Through all Futurity
Yet leaving here a name, I trust.
That will not perish in the dust.^'

So, too, when he lifts his Muse into pnrer air, and lulls

the terrors of Kehama's victims by reminding of the im-

mortalit}' of Love ; of its perfecting in Heaven :

They sin who tell us Love can die.

With life all other passions fly.

All others are but vanity.

In Heaven Ambition cannot dwell.
Nor Avarice in the vaults of Hell ;

Earthly these passions of the Earth,

They |)erish where they have their birth :

But Love is indestructible.

Its holy flame for ever burneth,
From Heaven it came, to Heaven rctnrnoth ;

Too oft on Earth a troubled gueat,

At times deceived, at times opprest,
It liero is tried and purified,
Then hath in Heaven its perfect rest;
It Howeth here witli toil and caro
[Link] the harvest titiic of Love is there."*
U\ FIVK CKXTl'iaKS OF K\(!L[SH VRRSK

If his right — whioli I havo mysplf not very

;im afraid \

cnlluisiastiiiilly uphold — to oxallod poetical rank

is not at

pri'srnt gciU'rally ackiiowleclKed. the faihirc arises from no

faint-heartediiess, or excess of modesty, in him. He has
claimed it by work, and even by word. He delighted in
the composition of poetry, whether grave or gay, lyrie or
epic, recondite, or simple, even commonplace. Versifying
was his recreation, and his solace. His dearest friends
were poets. Illustrious members of the brotherhood hailed
him as of it. BjTon himself, while he jeered, did not
deny him a place in the company. Among all his vocations
that was the one by which he meant to be recollected ;

if in that.
but self-ai)provcd, to jiraise or blame
IndifTerent, while I toil for lasting fame.^^

He had won honours in niany. fields of literature ; but

the title of poet was the chief distinction he challenged ;

and how refuse it to the generous, kindly, indefatigable,

brave, and honourable man, to the student and scholar,
to the creator of Thalaba and Kehama? Clearly we can-
not. The fact nevertheless remains that the poems by
\\hi(h he expected to be immortalized are neither read nor
honoured. He might have been amused by the knowledge
that lines from the Devil's Walk have been incorporated
into the language that every school-girl can rehearse in
;

a cataract of rhymes the way in which

the water comes down at Lodore ;

'^°

I do not suppose he would have accepted the compliment

as comp<'nsation. or been at all better able to explain to
himself why posterity is oblivious of Pvoderick, Madoc, and
A Tale of Paraguay.
As I have already intimated, it is indeed difficult to
 ROBERT SOl^THEY 47

account fully for the neglect in its excess. There are

reasons on the surface. To begin, I must admit a want
of qualitj', a certain coarseness of fabric. Again, the bulk
is a discouragement, as is the extent of a strange lake to
an angler. He may be sure that it contains fish, without
being able to tell where they lie. Similarly these vast
epics'hide valuable ideas, only to be chanced by a reader
out of an overwhelming flood of tVuisms. The interest
in others is and remote. From the first it required
alien
to be up by Oriental learning, much of it,
bolstered
in these times of deeper research, musty and rusty. But,
in the face of works, some earlier, and more later, which
have conquered public favour notwithstanding analogous
drawbacks every whit as prejudicial, the poet might well
argue that such attempts at an explanation are insuflficient.
I do not flatter myself that he would be at all better inclined
to accept mine —
that the cause is his failure throughout to
;

forge from the furnace within himself a chain of sympathy

with his readers. That, however, I believe to be the true
one. He seldom seems to connect their and his common
human nature. Note how rarely, if ever, his verse makes
tears to .start to the eyelids. The chill from this absence of
mutual glow is positive, palpable, and fatal. Never will
the emotions of a poet's readers, charm ho never so wisely,
take fire unless from the kindling of fuel in the singer's
own breast. Houthey's Muse was devoid of the passion of
sympathy ; and his renown suffers in consequence.
He [Link] many of the endowments by which admirers
are attracted. He was without that which holds thcin
bouiul. It could not well have been otherwise with a
writer who resorted to pcjctry as a recreation, for rest
from the toils of his literary treadmill. He understood
the art of it, and could call f)ii it, when he chose, to do
4s FIVE CFATrniKS OK ENOLTSH VERSE

his l)i<l(lin<i. It wiis his haiulniaid when it should have

hoen his mistress. A thousand ])ities ! He missed the
dearest objeet of his an\l)ition ; and we have lost what
have been, from that richly furnished nature, some
niiu'lit

inspired strains. As it was, he could not be a great poet ;

but he had a lofty soul and he was a great man of letters.

;

The Poetical Works of llobcrt Southoy. Complete in one volume

Now edition. Longmans, 1853.
> The Well of St. Kcync (Ballads and Metrical Tales).
» St Romuald (Hallads, &c.).
' The King of the Crocodiles (Ballads, &c.)

The Battle of Blenheim (Ballads, &c.).

» True Ballad of St. Antidius, the Pope, and the Devil (Ballads, &c.)
• Roprecht the Robber (Ballads, &c.).

' The Devirs Walk.

" God's Judgement on a Wicked Bishop (Ballads, itc.)

» The Old Woman of Berkeley (Ballads, &c.).

" The Curse of Kehama, Part II, xiv.

" Mary, the Maid of the Inn (Ballads, «&c.).
" Written on the First of December (Lyric Poems)
" Hannah (English Eclogues)
" The Traveller's Return (Lyric Poems).
" The Old Mausion-House (English Eclogues).
'* For a Column at Truxillo (Inscriptions, xiii)

" My Days among the Dead (Occasional Pieces, xviii).

'*The Curse of Kehama.
'*The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo. Proem, st 21.
" The Cataract of Lodore (Nondescripts, \]\).
 SIR WALTER SCOTT
1771—1832

tScoTT was the least jealous of poets else, he iiiighl

;

have been jealous of himself. His genius dawned upon

the world in poetry. As a poet he was reeognized before
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats. Time went
on, leaving him at each of its stages more and more eminent
and popular. At each his fame in the specific department
of poetry manifestly receded. The individuality of the
author counts for more in poetry than in any other branch
of literature. Never was writer more interesting for him-
self than Scott. His personal renown practically trans-
ferred the Court of Letters from London to Edinburgh.
Thej'c he reigned, and in his own right always. The
particular kind of literature on which the throne rested
differed at different periods. It had been romance in
metre. It became romance in [Link]. But the occupant
always was King Walter. The poetry sur\ived, though
royal no longer. The poems have a hundredfold more
readers than when they stin'cd the envy of the obscure
bard of Hours of Idleness. Their claims as poetry have
seldom been denied. Yet 1 am afraid, that in general they
are valued much lesson their own account than on that
of the man, uikI on account of him not so much as a poet
as a storyteller.
For romantic liclion on the conlines of history, he is

indeed no less a maHlcr in verse than in jn-osc. In one

sijccial department of |)(»cti(al nairation he is supicnic.
VOL. II U
 —

r.(i Kl\ K CKNTI KIKS nV [Link] [Link]

1 rnuhl lint l;iy it ditwii as an alKsolulc condition of excel-
leufc in description that the theine shall be one in which
the writer ha.s always delighted. But undoubtedly it is
added virtue in a poet otherwise well qualified, that he
loves and has loved it. Scott would have liked to be
a soldier. He rejoiced in everything connected with
lighting. Never has British Poet, except Campbell on
more contracted canvases, made the reader equall}'^ to feel,

as in the Iliad, on a battle-iield itself with its turmoil, its

frenzy, its ecstasy. He was conscious of his gift, and
freely used it.

There is the impress of genuineness on the picture of

Jianii(»ekl)urii. Read, for instance, of the final and disas-
trous English charge over the pit-pitted plain :

Rushing, ten thouisand horsemen came,

Witii f<i)ears in rest, and hearts on flame,
Tfiat panted for the shock !

and bamiers spread,

Witli blazing crests
And trumpet-clang and clamour dread,
The wide plain thundcr'd to their tread.
As far as Stirling rock.
Down ! Down ! in headlong overthrow,
Horsemen and horse, the foremost go.
Wild fioundering on the Held !

The lirst are in destruction's gorge.

Their followers wildly o'er them urge :

The knightly helm and shield,

The mail, the acton, and the sjjcar,
Strong hand, high heart, are useless here !

I>f)ud from the [Link] [Link] the cry

Of dying warriors swells on high,
And steeds that shriek in agony !

They came mountain-torrent red.

like
That thunders o'er its rocky bed ;
They broke like that same toriciifs wave.
When ttwullowcd bv a darksome cave.
 ; ; :

SIR WALTER SCOTT 51

Billows on billows^ burst and boil,

Maintaining still the stern turmoil,
And to theii- wild and tortured groan
Each adds new terrors of his own !
^

Lifelike, again, is the glimpse of a later battle —i'luddeii

—as titfuUy descried by Marmion's Squires from a neigh-
bouring hill-top :

They close, in clouds of smoke and dust,

With sword-sway, and with lance's thrust
And such a yell was there,
Of sudden and portentous birth.
As if men fought upon the earth.
And fiends in upper air ;

O life and death were in the shout,

Recoil and rally, charge and rout,
And triumph and despair.
At length the freshening western blast
Aside the shroud of battle cast
And, first, the ridge of mingled spears
Above the brightening cloud appears
And in the smoke the pennons flew.
As in the storm the white seamew ;

Then mark'd they, dashing broad and far.

The broken billows of the war,
^^id i)lumed crests of chieftains brave,
Floating like foam upon the wave ;
But nought distinct they see.
Wide raged the battle on the plain ;

iSpears shook, and falchions liash'd amain ;

Fell England's arrow-Higlit like rain ;

Crests rose, and stoop'd, and rose again.

Wild and disorderly.''

All the iiicideuts of warfare inflamed his Muse if not ;

a clash of battalions, an armed and perilous ambush. The

blood stirH at the sudden apparilitm from lieather and
bracken of Clan Alpine's warriors true
' '
;

D 2
r.i' I'MNK ('KNTl'iai<:s OF ENCILLSH VEllSb:

>\il(l ua the scream dI the curlew,

From crag to crag the .signal flew.

Instant, tliroiigh copsoand heath, arose

Bonnets and spears and bonded bows ;

On right, on left, above, below,

.Sprung up at once the lurking too ;

From shingles gray their lances start,

The bracken bush sends forth the dart,
The rushes and the wjllow-wand
Arc bristling into axe and brand,
And every tuft of broom gives life
To plaided warrior arm'd for strife.
That whistle garrison'd tho glen
At once with full five hundred mon.
Watching their leader's beck and will,
All silent there they stood, and still.''

He \s as ail equally glad interpreter of the pibroch of Donald

Dhu, and of the proscribed and hunted Macgregors' owl's
hoot :

Our signal for tight, that from monarchs we drew,

To be heard but by night in our vengeful haloo.*
In his case direct and long personal sympathy, not
merely with the subject in general, but with its particular
cxcmpliHcatioiis, was virtually indispensable. Art for him
did not sup])ly its place in the least. Without it ho is diffuse
and dull. The spectacle, or expectation, of an exchange
of hard blows had an aptitude for exciting his inspiration;
but he had to be personally interested before even a pitched
battle made a poem. Everything else story-telling itself —
— an accident in his ])oetry, except the personal emotion
is ;

and that resi)oiidcd fortunately to other themes besides

arras. Touch the key, in his rich memory, of an ancient
legend, an historic edifice and lovely music pours forth.
;

Nowhere has minster, from the glory of its prime to

cltxjuciit decay, revealed [Link] t<t an iiisij,dit more delicate
 ;

STR WALTER SCOTT 53

and sympathetic than Meli'ose to his fancy briflgino;, as

^\^th a rainbow, four hundred years :

If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,

Go by the pale moonlight
visit it
For the gay beams of lightsome day
Gild, but to flout, the ruins gray.
When the broken arches are black in night.
And each shafted oriel glimmers white ;

When the cold light's uncertain shower

Streams on the ruin'd central tower ;

When and buttress, alternately,

buttress
Seemed framed of ebon and ivory ;

When silver edges the imagery,

And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die ;

When distant Tweed

heard to rave.
is

And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave.

—
Then go l)ut go alone the while —
Then view St. David's ruin'd pile ;

And, home returning, soothly swear,

Was never scene so sad and fair !
^'

His mind was a treasure-house of tradition and romance

from whicli a poet's magic conjured up memorial funeral
rites for drowne<l Rosabelle in the ancestral mausoleum :

O'er lloslin all that dreary night

A wondrous blaze was seen to gleam ;

'Twas hroader llian the watch-find's light.

And redder than the bright moon-iieain.

It glared on iloslin's ca,stled ro(;k,

Tt ruddied all the copse-wood glen,

'Twas seen from Dryden's groves of oak.
And seen from (•av<wir<l Ifawtliornden.
SftfimM all on fire that, (Oia|)cl |)roiid,

Wlicre KoHJin's chiefs uncofliiid lie.

\v,\(]\ liaron, for a salde HJiroud,

Sheathed in his iron i)aiio|ily.
 — —

-,4 I'lVK ( KNTriMKS OK KNCLTSH VERSE

SooniM nil on fire, witliin, around,
Deep sacristy, nnd altar's pale,
Shono ev«M-v ])illar foliage-bound.
And glininier'd all the dead men's mail.
Blazed battlement and pinnet high,
Blazed eveiy rose-earved buttress fair

So still thej' blaze, when fate is nigh

The lordly line of high St. Clair.
There are twenty of Roslin's barons bold -

Lie buried w ithin that proud chapelle :

Each one tlie holy vault doth hold

But the sea holds lovely Rosabelle * !

And was a poet's tyrant imagination in the grasp of

it

tlu' iiast which was needed to steel his heart for that tale

of horror, the accurst monastic conclave in the murder-den

of Holy Island, which makes one cry out upftn the Fiend
for not spnrintr porjurcd Marmion
but a day.
For wasting fire, and dj^ing groan,
And priests slain on tlie altar-stone. '^

T have to the last that which might at once, and

loft

by have estahlishcd the Border Minstrel's title to

itself,

a poet's laurel. Surely in the front rank of requiems

stands that over Pitt and Fox. The tw^o Titanic figures
had filled the entire horizon of Scott's youth and early
manhood and the passion of his verse testifies to the
;

impress on his nature. Yet never, like many of its class,

does it foam into rhetoric, or rave into hysterics. It rises
and falls like tidal waves. As the thought dwells on the
broken health, and broken heart, of the mighty Minister,
the melody is .solemn and sad :

Had'st thou but liv'd, though stripji'd r)f jiower,

A watcliman on the lonelj* tower,
Thy thrilling tniniji had roused the hind.
When fniuil or danger were ni h.-ind :
 — ; —

STK WALTER SCOTT 55

By thee, as liy the beacon-hght.

Our pilots had kept course ariglit
As some proud column, though alone,
Thj' strength had propp'd the tottering throne ;

Now is the stately column broke,

The beacon-light is quench'd in smoke.
The trumpet's silver sound is still,
®
The warder silent on the hill !

The dirge grows rejoicingly triumphal as it unites him and

his rival in a common bond of renown and patriotism :

With more than mortal powers endow'd.

How liigh they soar'd above the crowd !

Theirs was no common party race,

Josthng by dark intrigue for place ;

Like fabled gods, their mighty war

Shook realms and nations in its jar ;

Beneath each banner proud to stand.

Looked up the noblest of the land.
Till through the British world were known
The names of Pitt and Fox alone.
Spells of such force no wizard grave
E'er framed in dark Thessalian cave.
These spells are spent, and, spent with these.
The wine of on the lees
life is ;

Cienius, and and talent gone,

taste,
For ever tomb'd beneath the stone.
—
Where taming thought to human pride !

The mighty chiefs sleep side by side.

Droj) upon Fox's grave the tear,
'Twill trifkle to his rival's i)ier ;

(Yvv Pitt's the mournful requiem sound,

.•\nd Fox's sliall the notes rebound.

The solemn echo seeins to cry

"
Here let their discord with them die.
Speak not for these a separate dodiii.
Whom Fate made Brothers in the loinb ;

But search tlfb land of living men.

"
Where wilt (Imu find their like .'^it-n ?
'
.->(? 1-TVK ("KNTl'ItlKS OK FATiLTSH VKRSE

Throu<ilu)\il Sootl's poonis l)loiiiislios and dofocts alxnind

witliont cloiulinf? his titlr to a poet's honours. He dilutes

his descriptions often, and is careless in diction. Very

seldom did lie use i)ruMiii^f hook or Hie. No poet could
he nun-e slipshod. Much in the longer compositions may
be fair story-telling, and is sure to be archaeologically
instructive. It may even reach the level of a popular
ballad. Assuredly it is not poetry. The facility, pro-
verbially fatal, of the octosyllabic metre lured him into
[Link]. Wide reading in many directions, and a memory

for particular subjects practically boundless, contributed to

tempt him to improvise. As he freely admitted, he was
without the faculty of self-criticism. It is an invaluable
inca]iacity during the process of poetical production a ;

very dangerous one in the subsequent period of reflection

and revision. A'n^ng the results was that he accepted
\nisus]iiciously whatever subject happened to present itself.
For any, and especially for a metrical, story it is essential

that the plot should possess enough intrinsic and glowing

interest to stimulate reader and writer alike. With three
he was fortunate. As mere tales The Lay of the Last
Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake, fascinate.
Bannockburn is not intimately enough connected with
Bruce 's wanderings ajnong the Isles to lend adventures
among them retrospective animation. Very few of the
present generation have patience to trace the maze of
Rokeby. In consecpience a fine piece of character-drawing
in Bertram, with his audacious escapes and death, has
been [Link]. The Bridal of Triermain, a bright garden
of fancies, with its Arthurian atmosphere, is no more than
a name, if that. Merlin would have to come to life again
to revive it and equally entombed, in spite of the sweep
;

of grand flowing verse, is Harold the Dauntless.

 SIR WALTER SCOTT 57

Happily the finest three Epic-Ballnds. or Ballnd-Epics,

in the language have outlived the discoverer, or rediscoverer,
of the type, with no symptom about them of impending
torpor or trance. To bear them company they maintain
a body-guard of intimate preludes, and isolated bursts of
music. Glenfinlas, The Eve of St. John, re-incarnations
of Border IVIinstrelsy, re-inspired imitations of mystic
German, and a spray of IjtIcs and dramatic fragments, are
of the number. Scott, at his best, that is, when the subject
has its source in his heart, soars upwards his whole nature
;

is led captive b}^ the poetic spirit all his powers are
;

evidently its tributaries or ministers. The sagacity,

humour, painstaking, wisdom, in which, while treading
earth, he excelled, add substance to the rush of the winged
mood of ins])iration. Like his poetic felloAvs he had the
instinct which, when itself captivated, pounces instanth*
upon the precise details required, upon the one virgin
plot of earth fit for the imagination to cultivate. No
Lowlander or Borderer before him had discovered romance
in a Highland cateran. Who does not, even to excess,
recognize it now ? Every great poet is a pioneer. Words-
worth was one and such, in archaic soil, was Scott. In
;

the quality, and the energy to exercise it, he resembled

his kind the specific line he followed was peculiarly his
;

own, as were the weapons he employed.

He is an open-air poet, a poet of morning, not of night.
In his most vehement dithyrambs he says oud-ight what
he means. Trickery he disdained. Tfe never hunted after
conceits. easy to understand liow Itnskin. not Ixung
It is
wholly free from them himself, should have loved to aerate
his disciples' souls and his <»wn with poetry like Scott's,
where there are few or none. Some jioetry is itself essence,
n flistillation of thought, of coiic-Iusions, finm tin- writer's
oa FTVK rEXTnUKS OF KXCLTRH VERSE
mind. TIktc is n sort, and Scoll's is of it. in which tho
reader has to distil for himself. The born poet has collected,
selected the materials ; has himself been enraptured by
the feelin<r, ratiier than ('x])ression, of their essence. It is

the fault of his public if it cannot be so likewise. The

inclination of the present age is towards having introspec-

tion and intellectual analysis done for it, and by its poets.
To poetry it looks for problems, if not, necessarily, for the
solutions. Scott does not deal in enigmas. In him it

would have been affectation ; and he is never affected. As

he never poses as a Sphinx, so he pretends neither to be
a child of nature, like Burns, nor a nature-worshipper, like
Wordsworth. Yet his scenes are all, in their changeful
diversity, constantly true and real. He does not attempt to
hide his debt to libraries for very much in his narratives.
He makes no parade of the equal truth that he has charmed
the heart out of them ; that in his verse it beats as it

rarely beat before.

No golden haze Hoats over the poems of Scott. They
apply no form of spiritual or sensuous intoxication. Only,
when the imagination is elsewhere cloyed with sweetness,
or has wearied of tying knots in the brain, when it longs
for dancing breezes and fire, like the Homeric, it turns
with relief to the Last Minstrel's Lay, to Marmion, to The
Lady of the Lake. They re-enter into their rightful in-
heritance (jf hearthside favour. When they are duly
understood, it will be seen also that they can reclaim
something of worth as high ; that is, property in the
author himself. Scott the man is a possession that any
province of literature may be proud to appropriate as
primarily its own. Nobody can be surprised that the title
to such a prize has at times been disputed. Those splendid
gifts, the manliness, the magnanimity, the incapability of
 SIR WALTER SCOTT 59

envy, jenlousy. Jiieanness. nnkiiulness. the froshness. the

genius which extracted gold from everything, and trans-
muted lead into gold, the large presence in letters and in
life, —
which ennobled both were the}' the poet's or the
story-teller's more legitimate attributes ? Studj- the poems ;

and you will find the basis of all there.

Never in wTiter w'as there less of egotism yet never ;

poet was more assured that poetry was his vocation. He

continued in the full practice of the art as long as inspira-

tion, with the rarest exceptions, denied by many to be

exceptions, is wont to descend. For its sake he had
sacrificed professional ambition he had curbed the aspira-
;

tions of romance, and bidden it take second place. There

it Avaited, a modest understudy, rmtil poetry voluntarily
M'ithdrew, when it came forward to play the character pro
tanto. But the poetic spirit dwelt apart it had not died. ;

It is felt, feeding, guiding, lending warmth and grace to

fiction, always prepared to step forth from its retirement
at need ; —
like Achilles, behind the borrowed shield of
Ajax, scaring with his battle-cry the wolves of Troy from
Iho body of Patroclus.

The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, cd. J. (i. Lockhart. 12 vols.
Edinburgh 1833-4. :

The Lord of the Isles, Canto vi st 24.

>

Marmion, Canto vi, stanzas 2r>-2().

-

' The I..a<ly of the Lake, Canto v, st. !(.

* Macgrogor'fl Gathering.
' The Lay of the Last [Link] Canto ii, nt ]

• Canto vi, st. 23.

Ibid.,
' Marmion, Canto vi, st. 31.
' Ibid ; Introdiiftinn to Canin i

» Ibid.
 JAMES HOGG
1770—1835

A POET, a born poet, and nothing but a poet ; a poet

all over,who thought in poetry with whom all he saw
;

turned to poetry who wrote niueh verse, read formerly,

;

and still, if at all, with pleasure who had the aspirations

;

of a great poet, perhaps, the belief that he was one who ;

yet was never recognized as more than a minor poet ; and

never, with a single exception, wrote other than minor
])oetrv.
Not that his copious poetical repertory is without abun-
dant testiniony to a rich and ready fancy. He is at home
in Fairyland. The Haunted filen, in which the Elves are
to meet to crown for King a mortal man refined into their
nature by seven years of penance, is full of delicate imagin-
ings. The monarch-elect re-names his attendant sprites,
as in its model, A Midsummer Night's Dream, where a
grosser creature discharges the same function. So dainty
here is the texture that, in fear of coming upon coarser
threads, we have a sense of relief when the fabric is left

incomplete with a dismissal of the little beings to their

several duties. Still more musical, as voiced in Ettrick

dialect, the appeal to the fairies to watch over a new-

is

l)om babe. Humour everywhere in Hogg bubbles up

freely,though nowhere more delightfully than in the tragi-
fomedy of The Gude Oreye Katt. No fe(Oing heart can
help compassionating the sad ]ilight of the great Byschope
of Blain, who for toying with the beauteous witch ho had
 JAMES HOGG 61

been invited to unmask and ban, finds himself suddenly

in JNIistress Pussy's elaws taking aghast
his jante
Up throu the milkye wayc.^

There is store as well of humour's sister, real pathos ;

from the elegy on the nameless child, \\hose

Uttle feet across the lawn
Scarce from the primrose pressed the dew ;

1 thought the spirit of the dawn

Before me to the greenwood flew ;
^

to Poor Little Jessie's lament :

It 's laiig sin' my father and mother,

I lost baith
I'm simple an' i)oor, an' forlorn on the way :

1 had ane that 1 hkit, an only dear brother,

—
My Wilhe but he 's lying cauld i' the clay."*
Even the 'old house", deserted by the thriving, aged
farmer, has its tribute of pretty pity ;

Thy roof will fa', thy rafters start,

How damp an' cauld thy hearth will be
Ah, sac soon ilk honest heart,
will
That erst was bUthe an' bauld in thee.
Fareweel my house an' burnie clear,
^ly bourtrec bush an' bowzy tree,
The wee while 1 maun sojourn here
I'll never find a hame like thee.'

And he can sing too. Burns-like, jusl lor singing's sake,

as of I'eggie,
the fairest iloucr
The hracs o" Kttrick ever saw,**

and of the blissful hour,

When the little wee bit heart

Rises high in the breast,
An' the littler woe bii starn
Rises red in the cast.
(ii! FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
O tlioro 's a joy sac dear,
That the heart can hardly frame,
Wi' a bonnie, bonnie lassie,
When the kye comes hame,
When the kye comes hame,
'Tween the gloaming and the mirk.
When the kye comes hame.^

Tlic possibilities of charm in all real poetry are iniinite.

Whenever look close at verse by a genuine poet, of high

\vc

or low degree, a temptation, as here, to exaggerate merit

naturally arises. Standing a little farther off, I see defects
pervading the entire body of Hogg's verse. Not merely
do they affect windy effusions, like Mary Lee of Carelha,

the tiresome imitations of contemporary writers in The

Poetic Mirror, the echoes, not confessed imitations —as is

Busaco, of —
Hohenlinden the glib, false sentiment of Cary
0' Kean, and the mediocrity of the Sacred Melodies ;

they are not absent even from the pieces I have selected
to show the poet at his best. It is not only, or mainly,
a rawness both of material and of workmanship, a dearth
of mellowness and finish. The quality which I chiefly
miss is poetic rapture, with the consequent glow of sym-
pathy between reader and author, A poem with those
proi)erties will leave behind in the reader's soul something
of itself, which draws him back to it with ropes, whether
of silk or of steel. Here he admires, thinks how clever it
all is, how beautiful some parts —and retains nothing. The
has swept over the surface of the mind, and is gone.
ti(jod

I fear I can make no large exception, none in favour

even of The Gude Greye Katt. My objection applies to the
bulk of The Queen's Wake itself, on which, as a whole, the
.survival of the Shepherd's reputation principally depends.
The preambles to its various tales generally are excellent ;
 — ;

JAMES HOGG 63

fur ill thcin he forgets to be aught but himself, the bard,

who
on Ettrick's mountain gxeen
In nature's bosom nursed had been.''

Two or three beautiful songs are interspersed ; in particular,

The Spectre's pathetic Cradle Song :

Hush, my bomiy babe ! —hush, and be still !

Thy mother's arms shall shield thee from ill

Far have I borne thee in sorrow and pain,

To drink the breeze of the world again.
The dew shall moisten thy brow so meek,
And the breeze of midnight fan thy cheek ;

And soon shall we rest in the bow of the hill

Hush, my bonny babe —
hush, and be still
!
!
*

In the tales themselves, with one delightful exception,

I do not rate the quality above Hogg's usual standard.
All suffer from his common weakness of too easy content-
ment with his work ; of excessive and unpruned metrical
facility. For instance, consider the preposterous length of
the fourteenth bard's ballad, otherwise captivating, of
Mary Scott Such productions are to the higher poetry
!

something such as Memoircs pour servir are to history.

They suggest a poet in the making rather than made.
Only once does Hogg appear to me to have undergone
a tit, no mere transient spasm, of the rapture which com-
municates itself to a poet's public. In Kilmeny, if nowhere
else, he is inspired. That is among the jxKMns which,
having been once actually taken into the mind, remain
possessions, and in possession. It has growth in it, and
atmosphere. If (here is sonielhing also of glorious un-

reason ill (he choi(;c of sweet Kilmeny for a semi-earthly,

senii-ethcieal iiiimortaiity, the extravagance is without
offence.
 ; ;

(>4 FIVK CKNTIIMKS OF ENOLLSH VERSE

As \\c ivad oi' lior hoaulitul childhood, her vanishing,

her loving reap pea raiu'c in that whieh was felt to be no

longer her a in eonntrye, how she sojourned brietiy among

her kinsfolk, a waking dream, and finally dissolved again
into a celestial memory, we are sensible of no violence ;

we ai-e in the poet's hands, and are content to be there :

Bonnie Kilmeny gaed up the glen ;

But it wasna to meet Duneira's men

It wa-s only to hear the yoi'lin sing,
And pu' tlio cress-flower round the spring ;

For Kihiieny was pure as pure could be.

But lang may her minny look o'er the wa',
And lang may she seek i' the green-wood sifaw ;

Lang tlie laird o' Duneira blame,

And lang, lang greet or Kilmeny come hanie !

When many lang day had come and fled,

When grief grew calm', and hope was dead,
Wlicn mess for Kilmeny's soul had been sung.
When the bedesman had prayd, and the dead bell rung ;

Late, late in a gloamin' when all was still,

\\'hen the fringe was red on the westlin hill.

The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane,

The reek o' the cot hung over the plain,
Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane
When the ingle lowed wi' an eiry leme,
Late, late in the gloamin' Kilmeny came hame !

Kilmeny, Kilmeny, where have you been V

Lang hae we sought baith holt and dean.'

Kilmeny look'd up with a lovely grace,
But nae smile was seen on Kilmeny's face ;

As still was her look, and as still was her ee,

As the stillness that lay on the emerant lea ;
Or the mist that sleejis on a waveless sea.
For Kilmeny had been she ken'd not where,
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare ;

Kilmeny had been wiiere the cock never crew,

Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew,
 ; ;

JMIES HOGG ,
65

But it seem'd as the harp of the sky had rung,

And the airs of heaven play'd round her tongue,
WTien she spake of the lovely forms she had seen,
And a land where sin had never been,
A land of love and a land of Mght,
Withouten sun, or moon, or night
Where the river swa'd a living stream.
And the light a pure and cloudless beam ;

A land of vision it would seem,

A still, an everlasting dream.
In yon green-wood there is a walk.
And in that walk there is a wene.
In that green wene Kilmeny \a,y.
Her bosom happ'd wi' flowerets gay
But the air was soft and the silence deej).
And bonny Kilmeny fell sound asleep.
She kenn'd nae mair, nor open'd her ee.
Till waked by the hymns of a far countrye.

She woke on a couch of the silk sae slim,

AH striped in the bars of the rainbow's rim ;

And lovely beings round were rife.

Who erst had travell'd mortal life.

They [Link] her waist and her hands sac fair,

They [Link]"d her cheek and they kerned her hair,

And round came many a blooming fere,
Saying, "
Bonnie Kilmeny, yc're welcome here !

Now shall the land of the spirits see,

Now shall it ken what a woman may be.
Many lang year, in sorrow and pain.
Many lang year through the world we've gane,
[Link]'d to watch fair womankind,
For it 's they who nurice lli' immortal mind.
O, sweet to Heaven the maiden's i)rayer.
And the sigh that heaves a bosom sac fair !

And dear to Heaven the words of truth.

And (he praise of virfne frae bcautys nmuth I

VOL. II i:
 ; ' ;

CO FIVE {'ENTl^RTP:S OF ENCJLISH VER8E

() homiy KiliiuMiv ! froo frae stain,
Ifever y»>u seek the world again.
That world of sin, of sorrow, and fear,
tell of (lie joys that are waiting here.'

They lifted Kilniejiy. they led her away.

And she walk'd in the light of a sunless day ;

Tlie sky was a dome of crystal bright,

The fountain of vision, and fountain of light
The enierant fields were of dazzling glow.
And the flowers of everlasting blow.
Then deep in the stream her body they laid.
That her youth and beauty never might fade ;

And she heard a song, she heard it sung,

She kend not where but sae sweetly it rung,
;

It fell on the ear like a dream of the morn ;

'
O blest be the day Kilmeny was born !

Now shall the land of the spirits see.

Now shall it ken what a woman may be !

They bore her away, she wist not how.

For she felt not arm nor rest below ;

But so swift they wained her through the light,

'Twas motion of sound or sight
like the
Unnumbered groves below them grew.
They came, they pass'd, and backward flew,
Like floods of blossoms gliding on,
A moment seen, in a moment gone.

But to sing the sights Kilmeny saw,

So far surpassing nature's law.
The singer's voice wad sink away,
-And the string of his harp wad cease to play.
But she saw till the sorrows of man were by,
.\rid all was love and harmony ;

Till the stars of heaven fell calmly away,

Like the flakes of snaw on a winter day.

Then Kilmeny begged again to .see

The friends she had left in her ain countrye ;
 JAMES HOGG 67

To tell of the place where she had been,

And the glories that lay in the land unseen ;

To warn the Uving maidens fair,

The loved of Heaven, the spirits' care.
That allwhose minds unmeled remain
Shall bloom in beauty when time is gane.

With distant music, soft and deep.

They lull'd Kilmeny sound asleep ;

And when she awaken'd, she lay her lane.

All happ'd with flowers, in the green-wood wene.
When seven lang years had come and fled.

When was calm, and hope was dead

grief ;

When scarce was remembered Kilmeny's name,

Late, late in a gloamin' Kilmeny came hame !

When a month and a day had come and gane,

Kilmeny sought the green-wood wene ;

There laid her down on the leaves sae green,

And Kilmeny on earth was never mair seen.
But 0, the words that fell from her mouth
Were words of wonder and words of truth !

But all the land were in fear and dread,

For they kendna whether she was living or dead.
It wasna her hame, and she couldna remain ;

She left this world of sorrow and j)ain,

And returned to tiie land of thought again !
'•'

Never was Fairyland made to appear nearer to us, or

suffused with lovelier colours. Aware of such a poten-
tiality within him, if seldom elsewhere developed to equal
perfection, Hogg himself may be forgiven for some soreness
f)f hoart at the wounding wisdom of worldly experience,

which led his patron 8cott to recommend him to confine

versifying to legends of Ettrick Glen, and the like, while
keeping to shoep-farming for his life's vocation :

Blest bo his generous heart for aye

Ho tokl ino where the relic lay :

E 2
 ; —

OS FIVK CKNTURIES OF ENCILISH VERSE

Tointod my way with ready will,
Afar on Ett rick's wildest hill :

Watch'd my first notes with curious eye,

And wondcrd at my minstrelsy ;

Ho weend a parent's tongue

little

Such strains had o'er my cradle sung.

]Jut when to native feelings true,
I struck upon a chord was new
When by myself I 'gan to play.
He tried to wile my harp away.
O could the bard I loved so long,
Eeprove mj' fond aspiring song ?
Or could his tongue of candour say,
That I should throw my harp away ?
Just when her notes began with skill.
To sound beneath the southern hill.
And twine around my bosom's core.
How could we part for evermore ?
—
'Twas kindness all I cannot blame
For bootless is the minstrel flame :

But sure a bard might well have known

Another's feelings by his own ^° !

It was natural for him to fancy that in happier circuni-

Ktanccs, with more sympathy from without, he had it in
him to rank with his many illustrious contemporaries.
Yet I am afraid that, if Kilmeny, though certainly no
accident, stands alone among his works, the default was
rather in himself than in others ; that, if his soul held
the germs of new Kilmenj^s, the will was wanting to endure
in patience the pangs of bringing them forth, equipped to
soar and sing.

Poems and Life of the Ettrick Shepherd. New Edition. By the

Rev. Thomas Thomson. London Blackic, 1865. Also The Poetical
:

Works of James Hogg. Four vols. Edinburgh: Arch. Constable, 1822.

The Gude Groye Katt (The Poetic Mirror), st. 7.
•

' Elegy, St. 43 (Poems Descriptive and Sentimental).

 JAMES HOGG 69

3 Poor Little Jessie (Miscellaneous Songs), st. 4.

* The Auld Man's Fareweel to hia Wee House (Poems Descriptive
and Sentimental), stanzas 9 and 11.
' Blithe an' Cheerie (Love Songs), st. 1.
" When the Kye comes Hamc (Miscellaneous Songs), st. G.

' Tenth Bard's Preamble (The Queen's Wake).

« Ibid., The Spectre's Cradle Song (The Queen's Wake), st. 1.

» —
Thirteenth Bard's Song Kihiieny (The Queen's Wake).
'" Ibid., The Queen's Wake —Conclusion.
 AV ALTER SAVACip: LANDOll
1775—1864

A roET with greatue^ss in him ; who has written un-

forgettable things. lUustrious in prose as in verse ; but
always a poet. As and a failure.
a poet, a success
To l)egin with a theme by which he would himself have
[Link] to be judged —
in his metempsychosis as a Greek
poet he works miracles. Study Enaleos and Cymodameia,
Pan and Pitj's, Cupid and Pan, Europa and her Mother,
Chrysaor, The Altar of Modesty. The outlines are ex-
quisitely clear, never out of drawing ; the grace, if some-

times marble-cold, is finely statuesque. Now and again

the warm, living, modern blood asserts itself in him and
;

the figures are suffused with [Link] then, if not

Greek, neither are they crudely Gothic. The blend is
beautifully tempered in The Hamadi-yad in Peleus and ;

Thetis ; in the first part of Corythos ; in the coquetting

with her peasant wooer of the sweet wood-nymph, who, as
any human maid, knew that
to play at love.
Stopping its breathings when it breathes most soft.
Is sweeter than to play on any pipe ^ ;

and in that masterpiece, Iphigeneia and Agamemnon, with

the iuial heroic tenderness of the victim :

An aged man now enter'd, and without

One word, stcpt slowly on, and took the wrist
Of the pale maiden. She lookt up, and saw
The fillet of the priest and calm cold eyes.
Then turn'd she where her parent stood, and cried
'
O father grieve no more the ships can sail.' ^
!
;
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 71

In another as admirable, The Espousals of Polyxena, the

melancholy deepens into remorseless tragedy all is frankly ;

Hellenic. It is not often that, with Landor, insular fancy

runs insolently wild, as in Achilles and Helena on Ida. For
the most j)art the self-restraint is as admirable as the
vivacity. It distinguishes itself particularly in the brave
repulse of temptations to measiu'e ancient virtue by modern
canons. Landor 's sense of consistency is incorruptible by
sentiment. He dismisses the ghost of Achilles with a legacy
of vindictivencss against the House of Priam, without
a word of pity for its child, his affianced, most iimocent
bride, whom none
Heeded, tho' sinking as if into death.^

The same fidelity to artistic duty pervades the Acts and

Scenes from Roman and modern history.
Occasionally, it may be admitted, he somewhat abuses
his liberty when he is given or assumes a free hand, as in
the tyramiicidal scene bet\\'eeu Tyrrel and Rufus, and in
the thrilling description of Beatrice Cenci's execution :

*
Men have been bravo, but women have been braver !

In general he keeps his footing firmly over medieval and

classical quagmires. He does not pretend to set history
right when, as if with intention, it has wrapt in darkness

characters like those of Count Julian and Queen (Jiovamia.

Readers might sometimes wish that he had indulged a little

at times in anachronistic sentimentality. We feel a shock,

as in the presence of a cruel action, at the brutish exulta-
tion of King Henry, as he hears on Richmond Chase Anne
Boleyn's '
knell from Paul's '
:

'
How sweetly that bell warbled o'er the water !
' *

It nmst have required all even of his courage to print the

72 IM\ i: CKNTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
sii'iiohflwien young Caesarioii and the murderous hireling,
Sc-dpas. High cb-aniatic skill in the analysis of emotions
Imt just renders it endurable and all the admiration
;

students must feel for a consunnnate artist is needed to

earn his pardon for the tortm-e he inflicts upon them.
Cienius owes it to itself, to the world, to show the utmost
it can do, to set itself difficult tasks, to climb high peaks
w hich lead nowhere, for the attainment of ends apparently
l)rolitless. Rightly it is accounted an unworthy thing to
Ije content with easy, dazzling effects. Trusting to its

untried capabilities, it often leaps without measuring width

or depth. Sometimes it attempts the impracticable. I
have no doubt but that Landor, who acted loyally up to
the obligations his great powers laid upon him, reckoned
the Hellenics, and Acts and Scenes, his foremost achieve-
ments in poetry. He judged aright, I believe, of the
former, if not of the latter. Unhappily, the public of fair
intelligence scarcely agreed with the author in his lifetime,
and agrees yet less now\ Its error, as I consider the neglect,
has contributed to a second and costlier one. It has in-
volved a multitude of pieces possessed of every title to
pcjpularity, except the fact.
Lundor tells a story as few poets can. Witness the
charming tale of the hapless love of Guidone and Lucia.
Never was there a more righteous critic yet with what ;

charm in [Link] and excusing faults in those whom,

like Catullu.s, he loves :

Yes, in Thalia's son

Such stains there are —
as when a Grace
Sprinkles another's laughing face
With nectar, and runs on !
*

Never was there one of his fiery nature more delicately

more signally without malignity or jealousy
discriminating, ;
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 73

for it seemed to him an act of obligatory literary justice to

condemn Yomig :

^
Thou dreariest droll of puflEy short-breath'd writers !

But first and foremost of his gifts is that he can sing. In

the collection of 1846 there is a A\Teath of songs which it

would be hard to match. Add to them from later volumes ;

and we shall still discover fresh and fresh irresistible

candidates for admittance to the sisterhood.

Whenever 1 recommence turning over the pages, I come
upon another, and yet another, that cannot be denied.
They represent among them all kinds of qualities. A lover
of poetry must be ditiicult to please who does not find an
example anj^vhere to suit his taste, though the poet's own
favourite hTical mood, which personally he belied, is an
appealing melancholy. Observe the feathery touch, the
variety, the piquancyand guess they are not too
; — intri-

cate — the sweet conundrums set in delicious music :

Here, ever since you went abroad,

If there be change, no change I see,
I only walk our wonted road,
The road is only walkt by lue.
Yes ; I forgot ; a change there is ;

Was it of that you bade nie tell "/

1 catch at times, at times 1 miss

The sight, the tone, I know so well.

Only two months since you stood here !

Two shortest months then tell me why !

Voices are harsher than they wer«s

And tears are longer ore they dry.**

Twenty years hence my ey(!H may giow

If not quite dim, yet rather .so,
Still yours from otliers they shall know

Twenty years henee.

 ' ;

Fi\K cEXTi'inKs OF i^:ncli8h verse

I'wi^iity years heiicp, tlio' it may hap
That 1 1)0 call'tl to tako a nap
In a cool cell where thundor-clap
Was never heard,

Tliere, breatlie but o'er my arch of grass

A not too sadly sigh'd Alas ' !

And I shall catch, ere you can pass.

That winged word."

Loved, when my love from all but thee had flown.

Come near me ; seat thee on this level stone ;

And, ere thou lookest o'er the churchyard wall.

To catch, as once we did, yon waterfall.
Look a brief moment on the turf between.
And see a tomb thou never yet hast seen.
My spirit will be sooth' d to hear once more
'
Uood-bye as gently spoken as before.^"
'

Tlicre are sweet flowers that 'only blow by night,

And sweet tears are there that avoid the light
No mortal sees them after day is born,
They, like the dew, drop trembhng from their thorn,^^

Very true, the linnets sing

Sweetest in the leaves of spring ;

You have found in all these leaves

That which changes and deceives.
And, to pine by sun or star.
Left them, false ones as they are.
But there be who walk beside
Autumn's till they all have died,
iVud who lend a patient ear
To low notes from branches sere.^*

Ah what avails the sceptred race.

Ah what the form divine !

What every virtue, every grace !

Rose Aylmer. all were thine.

 ; ! ;;; ;

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 75

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.^^

The leaves are falling so am I ;

The few late flowers have moisture in the eye ;

So have I too.
Scarcely on any bough is heard
Joyous, or even unjoyous, bird
The whole wood through.
Winter may come he brings but nigher
;

His circle (yearly narrowing) to the fire

Where old friends meet
Let him now heaven is over-cast,
;

And spring and summer both are past,

And all things sweet."

Mother, I cannot mind my wheel

My fingers ache ; my lips are dry ;

Oh, if you felt the pain I feel

But oh, who ever felt as I !

No longer could I doubt him true ;

All otlier men may use deceit

He always said my ejcs were blue.
And often swore my lips were sweet.*^

Aiwl, lastly
Is it no dream that 1 am ho
Whom one awake ail night
Rose ere the earliest birds to see,
And met by dawn's red light

Who, when the wintry lamps were .spent.

And all was drear and dark,

Against the rugged pear-tree leant
While ice craekt oU the bark ;

Wiio little and blast,

heeded sleet
Uut much the falling snow ;

Those in few liours would sure be past,

His traces that might show ;
7G FIVE CEXTL'RIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
Between whoso knees, unseen, unheard,
Tlio honest mastiff came,
Nor fear'd ho ; no, nor was ho fear'd ;

Tell me, am I the same ?

O como the same dull stars we'll

! see.

The same o'erclouded moon.

come and tell me am I he ?
!

tell me, tell me soon.^"

One and all, Yet these nine are only specimens

magical !

of a host, including, perhaps, others for many minds

lovelier still. Indeed, the labour of trymg to account by
examples for the homage I have rendered to the singer
doubtless has been superfluous, when, I dare say, it could
have been justified as adequately by a couple of lines :

1 loved him not ; and yet now he is gone,

1 feel I am alone.
Strange, that a multitude of the" like should not be house-
hold words I What irony of literary fate that the poet's
name should be inscribed among the highly honoured in
English literature, and his poems remain, unless for a small
minority, virtually a sealed book !

Ho has met with a doom

analogous to that designed by
St. Romuald's votaries, according to Southey's ballad,
for their holy to\vnsnian. He has been sanctified by
a premature death. While he ought to be still living and
read, he has been elevated into the dignified repose of
a classic. Contrasted qualities in him are equally respon-
.sible. He suffers both from diffuseness and from com-
pression. Gebir is a thicket of grand poetical properties.
Sonorous gusts of fitful, shadowy ideas blow about it.
They constantly elude any ordinary mental grasp. The
trilogy, having for its centre miserable Queen Giovanna, is
a labyrinth of a hundred and forty pages, in which history
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 77

and romance go astray, mimicking one another's voice.

Sometimes, on the other hand, as in Coresus and Callirhoe,
and in many of the lyrics, he is so precipitately brief that
the climax is an affront. Then in the longer pieces, based
on history, he is apt after an evil and favourite habit of
the British Legislature, to proceed by reference'
That '.

is,he assumes that the real events are knoAni, or will be

looked up. Not less offensive to popular taste is the want
of sifting. Merc exercises, like the trial of Aeschylus, the
bandying of indifferent compliments between him and
Sophocles, the slaughter of Corj^thos by his father, and
the rescue of Alcestis b}^ Hercules, elbow scenes of absolute'
loveliness, such as The Hamadryad, Tphigeneia, the first

part of C!orji;hos, Peleus and Thetis, and Polyxena. A

similar want of assortment doubtless has helped to spoil

even the garden which will not be

of hTics for a public
at the pains to distinguish between flowers and weeds.
The same when it is a question of economy
public, docile
of brain-worry, has been satisfied to take it on trust from
the initiated that Landor is a poet who sits on the dais.
It does not trouble to scrutinize his right. Were it to
inquire, it would learn that he had the poet's gift of im-
parting to his verse, over and above all else, a feeling as
if of a spirit having hovered near. The attribute is to be
prized beyond all others, when apprehended for it is the ;

readers' then as much as the writer's and every \vriter

;

rejoices to share the delight with them. Landor, it is to

be feared, had little of that pleasure. But the popular

coldness, which ordinary experience, cannot have
was his

deprived him of the rapture of feeling the descent of in-

spiration. I road a [Link] at least of this supreme joy in
his own review of a career which impressed his contem-
[Link] .IS Ii;iras8cd — —
however noorllossly cross-grained,
 ;

7S Kl\H CKXTrniKS iW ENGLISH VERSE

ineffectual, and imliapiiy. With spiritual visitations such

as favouivd him, ho cannot have wholly mocked himself
in the fan-well, which, wliilc it charms, brings somehow an
ache to admii-iim hearts :

I strove with nono ; for none was worth my strife.

Nature loved, and, next to Nature, Art

I

I warin'd both hands before the fire of life ;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.^^

Tho Works and Life of Walter Savage Lander. Eight vols. Chapman
and Hail, 1876. Vol. vii, Gebir ; Acts and Scones Hellenics. Vol, viii.
;

Miscellaneous Poems.
'
The Hamadrj'ad (Hellenics).
* Iphigencia and Agamemnon (Hellenics).

' Tho Espousals of Polyxona (Hellenics).

* Beatrice Cenci (I^ialogues in Verso).

• Henry tho Eighth and Anne Boleyn (Dialogues in Verse).
• On Catullus (Tho Last Fruit off an Old Trco, Epigrams, vi).
' Young (Last Fruit, &c,, Ibid., C3).
' Miscellaneous Poems, Collection of 1846, No. 63.
» Ibid., No. 58. " Ibid., No. 200.
" Additional Poems, No. 96.
" Miscellaneous Poems, Collection of 1846, No. 152.
» Ibid., No. 102. »* Ibid., No. 213.

>' Ibid., No. 93. >» Ibid., No. 61.

*' Prefixed to volume The Last Fruit off an Old Tree.

: E. Moxon,
1853.
 THOMAS MOORE
1779—1852

Courage is required to praise Moore even moderately.

Admiration of him is likely to be taken as evidence of
a preference of sound to sense, and of a propensity to the
heinous crime of cheap sensibility. Notwithstanding lia-
bility to these terrible charges, I will not without a struggle
be parted from old favourites in his life's work. Now as
formerly I find in it a power of affording to particular moods
the satisfaction they have been craving. Not merely are
there special poems which I could not consent to abandon ;

there even is a spirit in the whole which asserts for it

a right to lodge within the recognized poetic domain.
Much of Moore's published work, I willingly allow, has
long been out of date. The smoothness of his Anacreon
isnot Hellenic enough to content modern scholarship.
The vivacity of his political and social satire evaporated
as it hit its mark. The Twopenny Post-bag, The Inter-
cepted Letters, and The Fudge Family in Paris, with a
legion of political epigrams, are forgotten and it is useless
;

to complain. Tiuir humour and wit, sometimes riotous,

oftcner caustic, always gay and audacious, require too
much reading-in, between the lines, of scandals connected
with Clarlton House —no longer a Whig centre —and its

unwieldy master. For very difforoftt reasons Lalla llookh

is similarly neglected. There also I e(|ually recognize
the usolossnesH of quarrelling with [lublic taste. The
diffuseness, especially in Tlu- {'"ire Worshippers, and a want
 : ; —

so FTVr<] C'ENTrRTES OF ENGLISH VERSE

of reasonableness, towards which FacUadeen really was

over-tolerant, in the entire scheme of the tale of The
Veiled ProjOiet, might have been excused. The treatment
of the general theme as if it were a huge operatic libretto,
a medley of musical spectacles, was fatal.
Moore had
learnt so perfectly the art of writing words to an air that
he composed a poem of the dimensions of an epic on the
same lines. The crowd of imagery in a work on that scale
is bewildering. The covering plot is smothered in roses ;

it is dro\Mied in a butt of sweet malmsey. The whole

produces the effect not so much of poetry pure and simple
as of poetry in solution.
All that remains positively extant out of a prolonged
and industrious career's achievement is an accumulation of
lyrics. Naturally they dififer widelj^ in degrees of merit.
A few deserve to survive by virtue of their saucy insolence ;

for example —
juvenile exercise though it was :

When I lov'd you, I can't but allow

I had many an oxquisitc minute
But the scorn that I feel for you now
Hath even more luxury in it.
Thus, whether we're on or we're off,
Some witchery seems to await you ;

To love you was pleasant enough.

And oh 'tis delicious to hate you
! !
'

The clashing melody will rescue one at least of the Sacred

Songs
Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea !

Jehovah has triumph'd —his people arc free.

Sing —
for the pride of the tyrant is broken.
His chariots, his [Link], all splendid and brave
How vain was their boast, for the Lord hath but spoken.
And chariots and horsemen are sunk in the wave.
Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea ;

—
Jehovah has triumphed his people are frce.^
 —

THOMAS MOORE 81

A Canadian boat-song is music :

Faintly as tolls the evening chime

Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time.
Soon as the woods on shore look dim,
We'll sing at St. Anne's our parting hymn.
Row, brothers, row, the streanr runs fast.
The Rapids are near, and the daylight 's past.

Why should we yet our sail unfurl ?

There is not a breath the blue wave to curl.

But, when the ^\^nd blows off the shore,
Oh sweetly we'll rest our weary oar.
!

Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast,

^
The Rapids are near, and the daylight 's past ;

and that, with something more, is :

Oft in the stilly night,

Ere Slumber's chain has bound me.
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.*

But the Irish Melodies are the real sheet-anchor of

Moore's fame. Modern critics have often assured them
they are dead. Some have accepted the judgement against
themselves of an exaggerated sentimentality, and rest in
their graves. Others, a fair number, are obstinately in-
credulous, and insist upon going on breathing. I should
be sorry for myself if I ceased to find loinatice in :

The harp that once through Tara's halls

The soul of beauty shod,
Now hangs as muto on Tara's walls.
As if that soul wore flod.
So sleeps the pride of former days.
So glory's thrill is o'er.
And hearts that once beat high for praise,
Now feel that [Link] no more.
VOJ,. II F
 '

H'2 l'l\ K CKNTimiES OF [Link] VERSE

No more to chiefs and ladies bright
The harp of Tara swells ;

Tiio ehord alone, that breaks at night,

Its tale of ruin tells.
Thus Freedom now so seltlom wakes,
The only throb she gives,
Is when some heart indignant breaks.
To show that still she lives ^ ;

tu- tragic pathos in :

Oh ! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,

Where cold and imhonour'd his relics are laid :

Sad, silent, and dark, be the tears that we shod.

As the night-dew that falls on the grass o'er his head.

But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,

Shall brighten with verduie the grave where he sleeps ;

And tiie tear thatwe shed, though in secret it rolls.

Shall long keep his memory green in our souls ;

*

All exhale a gallant assurance that time has no power,

unless we abet it, to grind our souls to dust between its
remorseless mill-stones that, if we choose, we can go on
;

sunning ourselves in the smiles of the young and fair ;

tliat there is no such thing as decrepit, care-worn age :

It is not while beauty and youth are thine own.

And
thy cheeks unprofan'd by a tear.
That the fervour and faith of a soul can be known,
To which time will but make thee more dear ;

Xo. the heart that has truly lov'd never forgets.

But as truly loves on to the close.
As the sun-flower turns on her god when he sets,
The same look which she turn'd when he rose ;

tliat joy is immortal for the faithful and brave :

Let Fate do her worst, there are relics of joy,

Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy ;
 ; —

THOMAS MOORE 83

Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care,

And bring back the features that joy used to wear.
Long, long be my heart ^¥^th such memories fill'd !

Like the vase in which roses have once been distill' d

You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will.
*
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still ;

that was the Irishman's duty to pray for the prosperity

it

of his country,and exult should it come, but that his love

was hers now on accoimt of her adversity :

Remember thee ? Yes, while there 's life in this heart,

It shall never forget thee,
all lorn as thou art

More dear thy sorrow, thy gloom, and thy showers.

in
Than the rest of the world in their suimiest hours.

Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free,
First flower of the earth, and lirst gem of the sea,
I might hail thee with prouder, with happier brow,
But oh ! could I love thee more deeply than now ? *

If I do not quote from the Last Rose of Summer, it is not

because it is hackneyed. It is that I suppose there is no
English song which dwells more habitually on the lips of
memory.
Tlierc sh(juld be no difficulty at any rate in admitting
the such verse to entrance within the lyrical hierarchy.
title of

In the century preceding his birth, isolated English songs

here and there may be found to be set against his. Though
Scotland twenty years earlier had produced Burns, the
rest of theUnited Kingdom can show no body of lyrics
to match themsince Herrick's. He had a right to do more
than boast that, as his own island's minstrel, lie was (lie
first of his line :

Dear Harp of ray Country ! in darkness I found thee,

The cold chain of silence hud luing o'er thee long.
When, proudly, my own Island Harp, I unlxiund tlicc,
And gave all thy chords to light, freedom, and .sung !
'"

V 2
 ——

84 Fl\ K CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Sdutli of the T\\(v(l lie could claiiu the same precedence.
His, as singing poetry —tlrawing-rooni singing, perhaps
occupies a place by itself. Opinions may diflfer on the
exact rank of the whole department in literature. At all
e\ents, he would be a bold critic who should attempt to
warn the class off the slopes of Parnassus. In no case
could he make out good warrant for begimiing the ostra-
cism with Moore.
From another point of view he can assert an exceptional
claim to regard. The meeting of poetry and music in his
verse, natm'al as it may seem, is phenomenal. The two
are sister arts which by no means necessarily agi'ee. Often,
especially of late, they have been in deadly antagonism.
It is impossible not to rejoice when their union is spon-
taneous, as in the Muse of Moore. He has himself declared
that he considered his songs '
a sort of compound creations,
in which the music formed no less essential a part than the
verses '. He lamented that he had to print editions in
which they were separated from the airs.^^ Lyrics without
a musical setting appeared to him to be a contradiction
in terms. As we read his, we may almost hear him warbling
them as they flow. Music perpetually has been, and is
being, made a cover for execrable verse. No one with
justice can say this of the Melodies. They always are
sweet, if occasionally to excess, and with a feeling genuine
so far as it goes. Had indeed his raptures been wholly
artificial, or his indignation ever false, an intelligence keen

as his, and a spirit as upright, would have banned them

long Ixjfore his censors detected the shortcomings. A
generous and kindly heart constantly is playing, and, as
evidently, a sagacious brain is conducting the orchestra.
In the face oi divers fine poetic qualities engaged in
unison, it is disappointing for me as a juror — ^not a judge
 THOMAS MOORE 85

while I grant the claims of an entire class of the verse, to

have to return an adverse general verdict in the Court
of poetic art against its author. Gladly I qualify it by
extenuating circumstances— I admire the man I love ;

many condemn the poet. The decision is

of the poems ; I
painful, but unavoidable. A poet must be pronomiced a
failure when he has no power of sowing in his readers the
germs of future thoughts or impulses. How long did ever
emotion last which was stirred by the pitifulness of Paradise
and the Peri, or the sadness of The Minstrel Boy? The
fault is radical, I fear. Results are proportionate to their
causes and song, to live and be fruitful, must have been
;

bom Nature was unkindly kind to Moore, as

in travail.
to Herrick, in endowing hini with an ear too instinctively
true, too miscellaneous a s\nnpathy, and a wit too docile
and dexterous. His gifts seduced him into disregarding
his own axiom —
which agrees with Herrick's too that —
'
labour to the \\Titer is a condition of any great pleasure
' '

to the reader '}^ Otherwise, it is inconceivable that most

of the produce of an imagination fertile like his, after
having been worshipped by contemporaries, should be lost
and forgotten, except for its casual and half contemptuous
preservation in aiiliciuated piano scores.

The Poetiral Works of 'Iliomas Mooro. Collected ]>y Himself. Ten

vols. Longmans, 1853. ' T (.luvenilo INjc ins).

' Miriam's Song, st. I (Sacred Songs), vol. iv.

' A Canadian Hoat Song. Written on the Tiiver St. Tyawn nee (Poems
relating to America), stanzas 1, 2.
•

'
Scotch Air (National Airs).
Oh Breathe Not
!

Farewell (ihid.), st. :{.

!
—([Link].). st. 2.
° 1'he Ifarp (Irish Melodies).
' Believe mo (ibid.).

• Remember Thee 7 (ibid.), stanzas 1, 2.

"• Dear Harp (ibid.), st. 1. " Preface — Poetical WorkM.
" A Mclologno upon National Music — Advertisement, vol. v, p. 1 1!>.
 JAMES HENRY EEIGIl HUNT
1784;— 1859

A Statesman, in dedicating a memorial to Leigh Hunt,

confessed to knowledge
little The same
of his wTitings.
admission, as to hut
all one short poem, might he made
hy a majority of educated Englishmen. I should like to
1)6 able to treat the neglect as reflecting honour on the

national genius for having produced authors of such

merit, and in such plenty, as to have rendered him super-
fluous. At all events, any who take up a volume by
Leigh Hunt for the first time will be surprised at its rare
distinction of style. But they ought to be hurt, if not by
regret for a pleasure they have hitherto denied themselves,
by some sense of ingratitude to the kindly spirit which
devoted itself during long years to the endeavour to enter-
tain a careless public.
Grace is a special quality. It is not the highest. Beings
of a lofty nature may be destitute of it. An addition of
an excellence will sometimes mar it, or obscure the im-
])ression of its presence. Though very far from being
a definition of genuine poetry, the Nothing-too-much com-
monly is part of one. Without claiming for Leigh Hunt
that he never offends against the canon, I believe his
instinct for it to be generally true. Whatever else his
poetry is not, almost invariably it is in perfect taste. I
never begin The Story of Rimini Avithout a prejudice
against its existence. When Dante had done it all in
six dozen inimitable lines, it is sacrilege to pretend to
 3 ;

JAMES HEXRY LEIGH HUNT 87

interpret and develop. Leigh Hunt's own exquisite

rendering of the original ^ is itself a sufficient rebuke of
his attempt at explaining. Yet I always end by acknow-
ledging to myself that, if it were to be done, the decline
or rise from innocent boy-and-girl friendship to passionate
love could not have been more delicately shadowed.
The same praise can be bestowed, and without fear here
of Dante's a^-ful fro\\ii, on the rejuvenescence conferred
upon the tragedy of Hero and Leander, an old tale,
and yet as j^oung
And warm ^v^th life as ever minstrel sung ;

a chronicle as

of two that died last night,

So might they now have liv'd, and so have died ;

The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side.^

Grace, again, carriesaway any suggestion of coarseness in

The Gentle Armour, if it cannot, any more than in a better
known later poem on the same subject, veil the mediaeval
brutalism of the Godiva myth itself. Elsewhere, when an
idea of Leigh Hunt's is in itself noble, it resists the tempta-
tion to overgrow itself. [Link] and lilies, violets, sweet-
brier, and poppies in his nineteenth-century garden might
have l)een gathered by .\ri«'l in his roamings from Prospero's
Atlantis.
The kindly instinct does not desert his pen even when
the satirist and victim of the elderly royal Adonis turns
volunteer Laureate, and sings the prettiest of lullabies over
the cradle of ;i (^nccn's babe :

\Vf!lr;onie, bud beside the rcso.

On whose stem our safety grow.s ;

Welcome, little Saxon fJuelph ;

Welcome, for thine own small nrM

8S FIVE CKXTrrJES OF FXCTJSTT VERSE
Nouplit the news we sing
t)f (ill

Dost tliou know, sweet ignorant thing ;

Nought of planet's love, nor people's ;

Nor dost hear the giddy steeples

Carolling of thee and thine,
As if heav'n had rain'd them wine.
E'en thy father's loving hand
Nowise dost thou understand,
When he makes thee feebly grasp
His fingers with a tiny clasp ;

Nor dost know thy very mother's

Balmy bosom from another's,
Nor the eyes that, while they fold thee,
Never can enough behold thee.
Mother true and good has she.
Little strong one, been to thee.
She has done her strenuous duty
To thy brain and to thy beauty,
Till thou cam'st a blossom bright.
Worth the kiss of air and light.*
He has deeper .strains at his command. Lines simple
enough, the doom of universal humanity, he has combined
into a grisly portrait of the King of Terrors. No common
minor poet's brain could have conceived and draAATi it.
A grand touch in Mahmoud is the Sultan's acceptance of
grief as a subject's indefeasible title to an instant audience :

'
Sorrow,' said Mahmoud, a reverend thing
'
is ;

I recognize its right, as King with King.' ^

Brilliant rays pierce through the somewhat bewildering

haze of the controversy between Captain Sword and
Captain Pen :

O God let me breathe, and look up at the sky

! !

Good is as hundreds, evil as one ;

Round about gooth the golden sun.®

As for Abou Bon Adhcm, it has always been admitted
to be a pearl of great price :
 — ——

JAMES HEXRY LEIGH HL^NT 89

—
Abou Ben Adhem may his tribe increase
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw within the moonhght in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom.

An angel writing in a book of gold :

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the presence in the room he said,
What writest thou ?
'
'
—
The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answer'd, The names of those who love the Lord.'
'

And is mine one ? said Abou, Nay, not so,'

' ' '

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low.

But cheerly still ; and said, '
I pray thee then.
Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.'
The angel wrote, and vanish'd. The next night
Itcame again with a great wakening light.
And show'd the names whom love of God had bless'd.

And lo Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.''

!

An Angel in the House comes not far behind :

How sweet without feeble fright,

it were, if

Or dying beauteous sight.

of the dreadful
An angel came to us, and wo could bear
To see him issue from the silent air
At evening in our room, and bend on ours
His divine eyes, and bring us from his bowers
New.s of dear friends, and children who have never
Been dead indeed —as we shall know for ever.
Alas ! think not what we daily see
wc
—
About our hearths, angels that arc to be,
Or may be, if thny will, and we prepare
Their .souls aiul ours to meet in liappj- air,

A child, a friend, a wife [Link] soft lieart sings

In [Link] with o\irs, breciding its future! wings."

Thr- [Link] aiul ihc Cricket arc liyniiie(i in lines

whifh ini^hf )»• a version of a (Jreek e[»i^iani it llicy wore

nf)tan ori^Mtial I'jiglish sonnet :
 -

00 KIVK rKXTlTvTES OF RXCTJSTT VERSE

GrcoM little vaultcr in tho sunny grass.
Catching your heart up at tho feel of June,
Solo voice that 's hoard amidst the lazy noon,
WTicn even the boos lag at the summoning brass ;

And warm littlo housekeeper, who elass

you,
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving tho fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass.

Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong.

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine ; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts and both seem given to earth
;

To ring in thoughtful cars this natural song —

Indoors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.^

When Leigh Hunt pleases he is as saucy as Villon, Avithout

it ever pleasing him to raise a blush. But whatever the
other attractions of his Muse, grace remains the peculiar
and distinguishing property.
In his career, and for his posthumous fame, it was and
is a double-edged endowment. I suppose that it was
connected in him as a poet with an exceptional capacity
for absorbing his entire personal being into certain qualities
of his subject. His nature Avas able to identify itself

with whatever was artistically dainty and emotionally

beautiful. Hence his elegance as a writer, and probably
also his weakness both as wTiter and as man. No writer
was ever less self-centred. He was fashioned to flutter
a})out flowers of fanc)^ and art ; sucking, rarely in the
depths, their honey
successful in discovering, not in
;

storing it. not strange that in his early days

It is

hard measure should have been dealt out to such a

nature. At his dawn partisanship flayed him with the
bitter tf)ngue oi Christopher North, as well as providing
him, more materially, with a lodging in Horsemonger Lane
 :

JA3IES HENRY LEIGH HI'XT 91

jail. Even at his sunset his owti familiar friend, un-

intentionally, we may be
siu-e, was the cause of the fastening

upon him an odious character in fiction.

of A delightful
A^Titer both in prose and verse, he never was visited b}^

a gleam of prosperity. The public cared little for one who

had no message of his own to deliver, not even an agreeable
rancour to \\Teak. Had he, like the proverbial worm, been
given to turning, he might at least have excited interest,
if not compassion. As it was, he simply went on with his
singing, not admiringly remarked in life, and scarcely at
all since.

He was and is, I dare say, one of the poets the world
can do Avithout, though I think it a pity it should. In
any case it may be hoped and believed that to him, singing
as a bird sings, because it must, so pleasure came from
his song, as it comes to a bird, because to the singer of
a sweet song pleasure must.

The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt. E. Moxon, 1844. (Stories in Verse

by Leigh Hunt. G. Routledgc & Co., 1855.)
' Paulo and Francesca (Stories in Verse).
* Hero and I^ander, Canto i (The Poetical Works),
pp 1-35.
* Chorus of the Flowers (ibid.).

* To the Infant Princess Royal (ibid.).

* Mahmoud (ibid.).
* Captain Swf)rd and ('aplain Pen (ibid.).
' Abou Ben Adheni and the Angel (ibid.).
" An Angel in the House (ibid).
* To the Grasshopper and the Criekel (ibid.).
 geok(;e gordox, [Link] byron
1788—1824

What of this torrent of verse, in^Trh and gall, poured

forth in some fifteen years —
is it a living stream, or
untiltered siu'f ace -water? Is it the cursing epitaph on
Timon's toml) by the wild sea-waves, or the shower of gold
accompanj^ing imprecations on his age and fellow men,
as the misanthrope stands, a prophet of evil, at the mouth
of his forlorn cave ?
If a voice from the grave, it is at any rate a mighty

voice, as of a Titan buried alive under Etna. Such modern

criticism as is prone to deny pi'esent active existence to
Byron, will not dispute that he lived once, and issued royal
proclamations. He stood for force, movement, perturba-
tion. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats were
more radical revolutionists in poetry. B"\Ton never ceased
to profess himself a disciple of Dryden and Pope. But the
most fervent admirers of the first four would not pretend
to compare the contemporary innovating influence of the
whole of them in literature with BjTon's. He did as much
towards extending the sway of England as the victories of
Nelson and Wellington, or the despotic will of Pitt. The
personality, in its weaknesses as in its strength, fascinated.
His pilgrimage of passion and remorse marked its course
as with red-hot lava on the heart of Europe.
Now, when the rush of molten matter has cooled and
stiffened, it is easy to analyse its aberrations and impurities.
Its extravagances are monstrous. Whatever the crimes of
 —

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 93

Castlereagh against freedom, the cause of libertj'^ is polluted

by sneers at the '
tinkering slave-maker ', by insults to
his corpse :

He has cut his throat at last ! He ! Who ?

The man who cut his country's long ago.

So with the scream at the Poet-Laureate, as

shuffling Southey, that incarnate lie ;

and at Wordsworth's principal work, as :

A drowsy frowzy poem, call'd the '

Excursion ',

Writ in a manner which is my aversion.

The egotism passes all bounds. The quality is a foible dear

to the poetic —
temperament to the highest, and the lowest
to any but Shakespeare's as a dramatist and he takes his —
revenge in the Sonnets. The temptation to indulgence in it
is so eager, that, according to a subtle poet-critic in the
early nineteenth centmy, sensitive bards, conscious, and
ashamed, of its power over them, have chosen themes
alien to their taste to be able, under cover of them, to
stray, as if by accident, into scenes enshrining themselves.

That was not B^Ton's way. He makes no disguise of his

intention never to be oil the stage. The result is that his
favourite mooda, cynicism in Don Juan, satiety in Cliilde
Harold, have an air of cheaijuess. Sceptical readers expe-
rience a general impression of insincerity. They suspect
a want of spontaneity everywhere, in the pathos, as in
the disgust. The texture they see often is threadbare, as
it could not but be, with a heart dried up b}' sensual licence,

and obliged to trust frequently to the brain to do the creative

work of both.
He rcliclled against law and ordci- because lie liad not
set tliciii in motion not, as his companion Sljcllcy, from
;
 —

ill FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

a generous rage against a narrow-minded despotism. No-
body now believes in the genuineness of his indignation
against tyrainiy. A Lord, with the self-indulgence of the
Prince Regent, preaching Socialism is a ridiculous figure
to the present generation. The admiration he gained for
his errors has itself ruined his posthumous renown. He is

punished by the taunts of the new age for having hypnotized

its predecessor into adoring his follies. With all the mimicry,

all the flattery, all the absurdity, it is the more wonderful

that a real poet, a seer of visions, should remain recognizable

beneath. We may pass by much that he wrote. A majority
of the occasional pieces would probably have been smothered
by himself had he foreseen the celebrity of Childe Harold
and Don Juan. Satire, though vigorous and scathing as in
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, The Vision of Judge-
ment, and The Curse of Minerva, naturally is short-lived.
The Plays are too poetical for dramas, too dramatic for
poems. As the eye glances over the titles of many of the
pul)lishe(l works, scarcely even an emotion of curiosity stirs.

Others there are on which we pause for a moment, and

with delight, whenever accident recalls them. We cannot
help recognizing power, for instance, in The Destruction
of Sennacherib :

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen ;
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay wither' d and strown ; ^

and in the contrast, in the Ode to Napoleon, between his

submissive abdication and Sulla's :

The Roman, when his burning heart

Was slaked with blood of Rome,
Threw —
down the dagger dared depart,
In savage grandeur, home
 !

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 95

He dared depart in utter scorn

Of men that such a yoke had borne,
Yet left him such a doom !

His only glory was that hour

Of self-upheld abandon'd power.-

A inist of blood and tears mitigates the hectic hues of

The Dream.3 There is music for us still in :

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies ;

And all that 's best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes * ;

and :

Oh —
could I feel as I have felt, or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept o'er many a vanish'd scene ;

As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
80, midst the wither'd waste of life, those tears would flow to me.^

We admire : we do not s])()iitaneously reopen the volume.

It is the same with compositions of ancient renown, like
The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The
Prisoner of Chillon, Parisina, The Siege of Corinth. Echoes
[Link], andon rising, from them.
insist The gloA\ing west
continually reminds how.

Slow sinks more lovely ere his race be run.

Along Morea's hills, llic setting sun ;

Not, as in Nortlujrn climes, obscurely bright,

But one unclouded blaze of living light
On old Aegina's rock and Idra's isle,
The god of gladness sheds his parting smile ;

O'er his own regions lingering, loves to shine,

Thougli there his altars are no more divine.
iJescending fast the mountain sliadows kiss
Thy glorious gulf, uncon(|uer'd Salarais !

Their azure arches through the long expanse

More deej)ly j»ui|il((l iiiect his mellowing glance,
 — ; —

•.»(» FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

And tenderest tints, alung their summits driven,
Mark his gay course, and own the hues of heaven ;

darkly shaded from the land and deep.

Till,

Behind his Delphian cliff ho sinks to sleep."

A new age has forgotten, not merely the Giaour, but
the Philhellenic fire its author played a foremost part in

kindling ; it cannot have forgotten:

He who hath bent him o'er the dead
Ere the day of death is fled.
first

The first dark day of nothingness,

The last of danger and distress
Before Decay's effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers
And mark'd the mild angeUc air,
The rapture of repose that 's there.
The fix'd yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the placid cheek.
And —but for that sad shrouded eye.
That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now.
And but for that chill, changeless brow,
Where cold Obstruction's apathy
Appals the gazing mourner's heart.
As if to him it could impart
The doom he dreads yet dwells ui)on ;

Yes, but for these and these alone,

iSome moments, ay, one treacherous hour.
He still might doubt the tyrant's power
So fair, so calm, so softly seal'd.
The first, last look by death reveal' d !

Such is the aspect of this shore ;

'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more !

So coldly sweet, so deadly fair.

We start, for soul is wanting there.'
Though few read the once fascinating Tale it introduces,
fewer forget the ])relude to one of its cantos :

The winds are high on Helle's wave,

As on that night of stormy water,
 ;

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 97

When Love, who sent, forgot to save

The young, the beautiful, the brave,
The lonely hope of Sestos' daughter.
Oh when alone along the sky
!

Her turret torch was blazing high,

Though rising gale and breaking foam,
And shrieking sea-birds warn'd him home
And clouds aloft and tides below.
With and sounds, forbade to go.
signs
He could not see, he would not hear.
Or sound or sign foreboding fear ;

His eye but saw that Ught of love,

The only star it hail'd above ;
His ear but rang with Hero's song,
'
Ye waves, divide not lovers long !
' ^

How beautiful the lines, and how sad to know, as

well as impossible to deny, that the courts of the fairy
palaces of fancy whence the romantic strains issued are
now grassgrown, like the streets of lordly Ferrara ! Sic
transit gloria —but not always ; —whatever the elevation or
caprices of taste, I will never believe that the world can
neglect Childe Harold, or passages in Don Juan which are
not mere screams of despairing mockery.
Nearly a century has run out since Europe, astonished
and spell-bound, tracked as strange a pilgrim as even
Peter the Hermit ever enlisted in his devious wanderings
over Europe. It hung upon the wanderer's every note,
whether he sang a bull fight, or of murderous war when —
Death upon the sulphury Siroc,
rides
Red Battle stamps his foot, and nations feel the shock — *

to its climax in the death struggle at Waterloo, with the

final fallthere of an Empire all but universal, and its
Earth-God. It thrilled to his appeal to Greeks, and for
Greece above all, to his revelation of the magic of Italy
;
;

and a wider world thrills as before.

VOL. II o
 ; ;

98 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Not a traveller crosses the Rialto without the melody
at his heart :

In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,

And silent rows the songlcss gondolier
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear ;

—
Those days are gone but Beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade— but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
^°
Tlie revel of the earth, the masque of Italy !

No stranger paces the Tuscan Westminster Abbey without

repeating the reproach for the absence of the ashes, as if
the two spirits Mere hovering by to hear :

Ungrateful Florence Dante sleeps afar.

!

Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore ;

Thy factions, in their worse than civil war.

Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore
Their children's children would in vain adore
With the remorse of ages and the crown;

Which Petrarch's laureate brow supremely wore.

Upon a far and foreign soil had grown,
His his fame, his grave, though rifled
life, not thine own. —
And Santa Croco wants their mighty dust
Yet for this want more noted, as of yore
The Caesar's pageant shorn of Brutus' bust.
Did but of Rome's best Son remind her more.^^

Beside yellow Tiber, flowing through a marble wilderness,

lone mother of dead empires, the Niobe of nations, though
no longer, as for Byron,
Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe,^^

his voice remains audible and eloquent. The

sanctuary and home
Of art and piety —Pantheon — pride of Rome,^^
is his monument as much as Raffaelle's and Victor Em-
manuel's. I have never visited the Forum, transformed
 —

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 99

as it now is from its aspect to him, without viewing it

first through his eyes, with its then single manifest break
in the all-conceaHng level :

Tully was not so eloquent as thou,

^*
Thou nameless column with the buried base !

In simple fealty still to Childe Harold, on my first juvenile

visit, I, like many another tourist, began by hunting out,
not without difficulty, the apocryphal, and now discarded
statue of Pompey :

And thou, dread statue ! yet existent in

The austerest form of naked majesty,
Thou who beheldest, 'mid the assassins' din,
At thy bathed base the bloody Caesar lie,
Folding his robe in dying dignity,
An
offering to thine altar from the queen
Of gods and men, great Nemesis did he die. !

And thou, too, perish, Pompey ? have ye been

^^
Victors of countless kings, or puppets of a scene ?

Archaeology may ridicule enthusiasm over the wrong relics.

It will never lay bare on the Appian Way aught to interest
as, at its entrance :

a stern round tower of other days,

Fair as a fortress, with its fence of stone,
Such as an army's baffled strength delays,
Standing with lialf its battlomonts alone.
And with two thousand years of ivy grown
The garland of eternity, where wave
The green leaves over all by time o'ertlirown ;

What was this tower of strength ? Within its cavo

What treasure lay so lork'd, sf) hifl ? - A woman's grave.^"

It is f'litrancemoiit —romance, history, miracles of art

and nature, letters, halo and love — the whole an ever-
changing, ever-lovely dif)raina, contrived ik< a framework
o 2
 —

10(1 FI\1<: CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

for man's, oiu" man's, emotions and ambitions In this !

irlorilic'd guide- hook, whet her it lead us amidst tempests,

in whieh
every mountain now luitli found a tongue,
And Jura answers, tlirough her misty sliroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud ^^ 1

along streams dyed, by day and night contending,

^^
The odorous purple of a new-born rose ;

through wrecks of realms strewing dread and lonely ocean's

shores; past peaks of Alps throning eternity by arrowy, ;

storied rivers, beside battlefields infamous for martial cut- '

throats ', or famed for stainless victories, like Morat and

Morgarten ; by homes of
^'
The self -torturing sophist, wild Rousseau ;

(if \'oltaire :

Historian, bard, philosopher, combined,

Who multiplied himself among mankind ;

The Proteus -"

of their talents ;

of Gibbon
Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer,
^^
The lord of irony ;

and of
^^
The starry GaUleo, with his woes ;

or tombS; as of Laura's lover in rustic Arqua

Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground }

Again, Don Juan ! Faded, tawdry ;often, as De Quincey

justly calls allusions to Southey's and Coleridge's marriages,
ignoble ? Alas ! yes. And the cruel waste ! Righteous
anger, grief, generosity, magnanimity, thought, shot out
upon a dustheap Whatever in Childe Harold was paltry,
!

absurd, unbecoming, contemptible in contemptuousness,

i.s here expanded and exaggerated. The whole is flavoured
to nausea with the topsy-turvy theory of morals the —
redeemability of malpractices by remorse, or by the insult
 —

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 101

of pity, while the fruit of iniquity and cruelty is actually

between the teeth. C3Tiicism is made welcome to float away
on a flood of self-satisfied tears. Guilt seems to expect to
be fondled like a lost sheep, however many times it may
have chosen to repeat its wanderings in the wilderness.
I scarcely know whether it be an extenuation, or an
aggravation, that Don Juan has another side. Suddenly
it breaks into episodes of rare grandeur. The description
of the shipwTeck has seldom, if ever, been equalled :

Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell

Then shnek'd the timid, and stood still the brave
Then some leap'd overboard with dreadful yell,
As eager to anticipate their grave ;

And the sea yawn'd around her like a hell,

And down she suck'd with her the whirling wave,
Like one who grapples with his enemy,
And strives to strangle him before ho die.
And first one universal shriek there rush'd,
Louder than the loud ocean, like a crash
Of echoing thunder and then all was hush'd,
;

Save the wild wind and the remorseless dash

Of billows but at intervals there gush'd.
;

Accompanied with a convulsive splash,

A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry
Of some strong swimmer in his agony .^

Five-and-twenty stanzas suffice for the maritime disaster.

Suwarrow and his Russians need five times the number to
make
an end of Ismail hapless town!
Fair flaah'd her burning towers o'er Danube's stream.
And redly ran his blushing waters tlown.
The horrid war-whoop and tlio shriller scream
Rose stillbut fainter were thd thunders gmwn
; ;

Of forty thousand who had mann'd thi; wall,

Some hundreds breatli'd— the rest were silent all •'* !
 — —
; ;

10l> inVK CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Eacli enough to have founded a reputation

scene is

and, Avith transcendent grandeur, the two do not

all their

stand alone. All the sixteen Cantos are studded with wit,
and even wisdom. Often it is hard to say whether it be
one or the other, or both. What of the bitter after-taste
of vice ?

^^
There is no sterner moralist tliaii Pleasure !

What of the suicide's motive ?

Less from disgust of life than dread of death.^^

Wliat of the great line, at once anthem to genius, and dirge

over a nation ?

Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away."

What, finally, of

Great Socrates ? —And thou. Diviner still,

Whose lot it is by man to be mistaken,

And thy pure creed made sanction of all ill ?

Redeeming worlds to be by bigots shaken,

How was thy toil rewarded ? ^a
Then, too, it harbours the noble Ij^ric :

The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece !

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung !

Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all, except their sun, is set.

The mountains look on Marathon

And Marathon looks on the sea
And musing there an hour alone,
drcam'd that Greece might still be
I free ;

For standing on the Persians' grave,

I could not deem myself a slave !
^o

And the gleams of tenderness ! Poetry offers few more

 —;

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 103

delightful portraits among its mjTiacl of girlhood than that

of the daughter of
the mildest manner'd man
That ever scuttled ship, or cut a throat

innocently guilty Haidee :

Round her she made an atmosphere of life.

The very air seem'd lighter from her eyes,
They were so soft and beautiful, and rife
With all we can imagine of the skies,
And pure as Psyche ere she grew a wife
Too pure even for the purest human ties ;

Her overpowering presence made you feel

It would not be idolatry to kneel.^"

The chant of the Ave Maria ! sighs about the figures of

the boy and girl lovers, as if to condone the irregularity
in their wooing, while

not a breath crept through the rosy air,

And yet the forest-leaves seem'd stirr'd with prayer."''^

Pathos is a scarce quality in Don Juan, It is to be

prized in proportion where it is perceptible, as in the
invocation of the Evening Star :

Whato'er our household gods protect of dear.

Are gathcr'd round us by thy look of rest
Thou bring' st the child, too, to the mother's breast ;'*

and again in a classical allusion :

When Nero pcrish'd by the justest doom,

Amidst the roar of liberated Home,
iSomo hands unseen strew'd flowers upon his tomb.-'^

Is it pathos, or merely an epigram ?

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,

!
'"
'Tis that I may not weej)

In the present day it is easy to tlecry Rerun's reflections,

101 VWK CEXTURTES OF ENGLISH VERSE
his sentiment, as siipciiicial and second-hand. Were they
of tlie present date they might l)e. When he wrote he
was a discoverer, a leader, a teacher. The fire which he
kindled had inflamed liimself first. His character, or what

he cliose should be accepted as it, may be read in every

verse he printed. Every tale of his, every scene, every
thought, breathes, and has life ^breath of his life in it. — —
There is a splendour, a gaiety. His egotism may be ridi-
culous ; he is not. With all the perversity, vanity, pre-
tence, a feeling even of open air, offrank directness, mingles.
Shades of a mighty company of real mourners, Avho attended

yearly, daily.

The pageant of his bleeding heart,

still l)rood over his memory. Human nature loves to

recognize a master and it recognized him. Still, after
;

three quarters of a century, he continues to reign, if

within narrowed frontiers, a king by right divine.

The Poetical Works of Lord Byron (Oxford Edition). Henry Frowde :

London, 1904.
' The Destruction of Sennacherib (Hebrew Melodies),^ st. 2.
* Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (Occasional Pieces), st. 7.
» The Dream, July, 181G (ibid.).
* She Walks in Beauty (Hebrew Melodies), st. 1.
' Stanzas for Music, March, 1815 (Occasional Pieces), st. 5.
• The Corsair, Canto iii, st. 1.
' The Giaour. * The Bride of Abydos, Canto ii, st. 1.

• Childc Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto i, st. 38.

>• Ibid., Canto iv, st. 3.
" Ibid., Canto iv, stanzas 57 and 50.
" Ibid., Canto iv. st. 79. '' Ibid., Canto iv, st. 146,
'« Ibid., Canto iv, st. 110. " Ibid., Canto iv, st. 87
>* H)id., Canto iv, st. 99.
" Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto iii, st. 92.
'» Ibid., Canto iv, st. 28. " Ibid., Canto iii, st. 77.
'• Ibid., Canto iii. st. 100. " Ibid., Canto iii, at. 107.
" Ibid., Canto iv, st. 54.
 GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON 105

-' Don Juan, Canto ii, stanzas 52-3.

2' Ibid., Canto viii, st. 127. " Ibid., Canto iii, st. 65.
-^ Ibid., Canto xiv, st. 4. " Ibid., Canto xiii, st. 11.

^' Ibid., Canto xv, st. 18.

=" Ibid., Canto iii, st. 86, Hymn, stanzas 1, 3.
'» Ibid., Canto iii, st. 74. " Ibid., Canto iii. st. 102.
^' Ibid., Canto
»- Ibid., Canto iii, st. 107. iii, st. 109.
^* Ibid., Canto iv, st. 4.
 rEUCV BYSSHE SHELLEY
1792—1822

The first and foremost impression of Shelley is of a spirit

< if unrest —though something besides restlessness—brooding
— nt), hovering, swooping— over ever fresh plans for ever
fresh Creations, which it is to engineer. We are conscious of
a continual search by him for new elements whence to
construct new Heavens and a new earth. It is the French
Revolution, exhausted, crushed by main force for the
moment below the surface, panting, protesting, fermenting,
in a haughty English, aristocratic nature. Visibly and
audibly it is rebellious and scornful. It has idealized
passion, erecting it into a divine law. Hither and thither
it rushes, raising an altar wherever fancy has alighted for
the instant. Never without an idol, it tramples on what-
ever no longer for it adorable. All must acknowledge
is

the fascination of each fresh conception, if only it were

I)ermitted to stay long enough for a day-dream to repose
in it. There is a longing to inform with a body each
exhalation as it rises to condense the rainbow-hued
;

vapour. Alas the pageant of fairy castles which dissolve

!

into air as we wind the horn at their gates at length

disappoints and tires. We begin to doubt M'hether they be
more than gossamers of an intellect uncertain of itself.
.Shelley was a born poet, whom nature in a freak bent,
and warped, perhaps, also enriched, by the circumstances
of his time, parentage, and domicile. Being what thus he
was, ho could not have been other than a poet professed,
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 107

and nothing else. He Avas endowed with faculties in

abundance besides poetic imagination. His prose is de-
lightful. He might have won fame as a novelist, a meta-
physician, a religious teacher, a politician. As it was,
from boj'hood he chose, or, as doubtless he thought, was
forced into, a social isolation which denied to his great
intelligence any other fixed form of expression than poetry.
Made for friendship, to admire, and be admired, to be
a disciple, and have disciples, he did not take excommuni-
cation kindly. He threw the blame upon existing institu-
tions, a feudal aristocracy, religion degenerated into
formalism and priestcraft, statesmen, Courts, and Kings,
Heaven [Link]. Refused an audience otherwise, he uttered
his rage and contempt in verse. The narrow circle he
joined in default of a larger was debarred by its own
isolationfrom unprejudiced criticism, at once sympathetic
and frank. He himself had too much to say, and felt
too ardently, to care to stop and meditate. Often his
rank exuberance is owing to the chase of a succession of
fugitive fancies. No sooner has he started one than a
second has got up, and set his brain coursing in a fresh
direction.
His besetting fault as a poet is excess. Denunciation is

pursued to scunility. I)escri])tions of natural loveliness

lengthen into tedious langour. Vital jjroblems are discussed,
at once with too much subtlety, and too little depth.
Redundancy damps the fire of Alastor, The ]{evolt of
Islam, Rosalind and Helen, Epipsychidion, The \Vitch
of Atlas, The Masque of Anarchy, Julian and Maddalo, It

draws a film over The Sensitive ]'lant,and even the beauty

of Adonais. Indignation raves in the greenness of Queen
Mab, with its 'uncultured Hebrews' exult in-!; in «>ld '

Salem's shameful glf)ries ', and '

hdwlin^f hideous ]»raises
 ;

lOS K1VI<: CKXTriMES OF F>N(!L1SH VERSE

to tlitir Demon-Ciod '
! 11 blunts the edge of the more
mature satires, Swellfoot the Tyrant, Castlcreagh, and the
rest. When, as frequently, the resentment is righteous
in its origin, its virtue still, as Byron's, is marred by
vituperation. The fury of the flame turns the water
into steam. However much there is to say, however
suggestive the text to be expounded, the inability to know
when to stop stifles the effect.
The blemishes are not surprising in the circumstances.
There were from home and family,
his self-banishment
social ostracism, exalted views of duty to Humanity, not
invariably carried into practice, a fervent belief in the
existence of a conspiracy of Tories and critics to suppress
him, and a combination of intellectual and spiritual, per-
haps even social, pride with physical and moral shjnriess.
Add the gifts, in such a medley insidiously and peculiarly
dangerous, of an infallible sense of harmony in words, and
a vast mine of fancy. Take the whole together and we ;

have a clue to the flaws of Alastor and its successors, and

to their as extraordinary beauties also. The entire realm
of poetry can show nothing so phenomenal. It was a strange
universe, paradoxically monstrous, as paradoxically ideal,
which spread before the poet's eyes. Turned back upon
himself, hehad fed upon, and held incessant communion
with, his own imagination. He could paint the most
realistic of landscapes ; scenes we see with our eyes shut ;

as of the Pisan pine forest, where

the multitudinous
Billows murmurat our feet
And the earth and ocean meet ;^

or of the Euganean Hills, in

the noon of autumn's glow ;2

but a fancy like his was independent of actual observation.

 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 109

He could at will be in the Tropics, faimed

With the hreeze murmuring in the musical woods,
or iu an Aegean isle,

Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise.

In a few moments he had passed in fancj- from beauty to
horror, from a June garden's
fresh odour, sent
From the turf, like the voice and the instrument,

to its decay, weeds and toad-stools rotting,

flake by flake.
Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer's stake.
Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high,
Infecting the winds that wander' by.^

It is not nature ; it is a reflection of a picture discerned

within, with some help from books, and projected into
verse. So with the characters moving over the mirror his
poems present. The reader sees nothing, none, that he
has ever beheld, or that he supposes had ever been beheld.
He feels that the narrator has chosen to imprison himself
within his own spacious but tortuous being, and there and
thence has spun a whole universe. Hell and Heaven, and
chiefly Hell.
The voluminous works upon which, within a term not
much prolonged beyond that of Adonais, he spent the
uttermost of his extraordinary powers, demonstrate their
own weight and compass. Consider, for instance, the Pro-
metheus Unbound and the Cenci. The Prometheus raises
tremendous problems, and solves none of them. The hero
of the drama is himself a problem unanswered. It is un-
intelligible why, if peace was to be made on the conditions
hazily indicated, the conflict between him and Zeus need
ever have arisen. Yet the Play, unsatisfactory as it
essentially is, satisfies us sufficient ly f)f its author's genius.
11(» FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
111 the conception it is as much a torso as an actual,
confessed fragment, like the Hyjierion of Keats. But it is

cok)ssal. In its wa^'s of thought and style it is, moreover,

an exact type of its author's common manner. The Cenci
belongs to a different class altogether. It is a triumph,
in the coldness of its lioiTors, over the temiitatio)i to its

creator, being what he was, to burst all the barriers of tragic

art. The spirit is not Aeschylean not Shakespearean.
;

There is some analogy to Marlowe, only with more depth and

tineness of thought. Alas for the ugliness of the theme

! !

The phenomenon is that, while it and the Prometheus

are curiously unlike, both are absolutely and equally
representative of their author in one essential respect.
Independent as many poets are, determined to follow
their o-wii bias,even insolent to the reading world, they have
an eye to it nevertheless they evidently have weighed
;

how they can most certainly render themselves audible to

it. It would be difficult to match Shelley in the singleness
of his regard to himself alone as he \\Tites. Doubtless he
would have liked to be popular. He never endeavoured to
attain that end by consulting public tastes. He has general
sympathies ; not the sympathy which is at pains to com-
prehend a different point of view from one's own. Paradox
as it seems, it is one of the explanations of the peculiar
Shelley cult. Never was there a body of ^vritings which
to the initiated is a surer index of the author's mind, which
admits reverent students, enamoured even of defects, to
more intimate communion with it, for the very reason that
it never appears to be looking to opinion outside. Had
Shelley cared for external favour, he might have corrected
diffuseness in diction and obscurity in ideas he would have ;

had a larger public, and fewer worshippers.

The serene unconsciousness that his readers have their
 ;

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 111

likes and dislikes, which he might at least try to under-

stand though without deferring to them, applies to all his
work. He takes accomit so far of society about him as
to lecture it on its shortcomings. He never learned that
pity teaches how to cure. The apartness is the more
instead of the less palpable that his inspiration constantly
uses his fellow men for a text, yet accepts no light from
them. Unless for adoration, of which we are not all

capable, we cannot come close to his spirit.

Fortunately for lovers of celestial melody, as well as for
had united with the metaphysical, mystical,
his fame, nature
iconoclastic egotist the sweetest of instinctive singers.
Suddenly there would issue a gush of music, absolutely
pure, ethereal, j-et with warm blood coursing through. His
songs among them represent all the beauties possible for
the expression of regretful longing, bitter-sweet ; the
sharp-cut neatness and elegance of a Greek epigram ;

mystery, pathos, upbraiding, self-upbraiding. There are

passionateness, self-restraint. Movement commonly is

there ; sometimes, if very rarel}^ dancing joy, with

cascades of breezy, glowing images. Unison of words and
rhythm never fails. Here are a few flowers, plucked as
they came to my hand. I have not attempted to arrange
them. They could not jar or clash, any more than colours
in a bed of roses.
He has imagined an liidian lover serenading his mistress :

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night.
When the winds are hreatliing low.
And the stars are shining bright
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
—
Hath Iff! me who knows liow ?
To thy chamber-window, Sweet!
 ! ! —
-

llL^ I'lVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

The wandoiing airs they faint
On tho dark, the silent stream
And the Champak's odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream ;

The nightingale's complaint,

It dies upon her heart ;—
As I must on thine,
O beloved as thou art
!

lift me from the grass !

1 die! I faint! I fail

Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas !

My heart beats loud and fast — ;

Oh ! press it to tliine own again,

Where it will break at last.*

Here is wreckage from the ail-but forgotten experiment of

a drama on Charles the First :

A widow bird sate mourning for her love

Upon a wintry bough ;

The frozen wind crept on above,

The freezing stream below.
There was no leaf upon the forest bare.
No flower upon the ground.
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-wheel's sound.^
What a spell —from old Hellas— is in Pan's piping !

from the forests and highlands

We
come, we come ;

From the river-girt islands,

Where loud waves are dumb
Listening to my sweet pipings.
The wind in the reeds and the rushes.
The bees on the bells of thyme.
The birds on the myrtle bushes.
The cicale above in the lime.
 — ' —
•

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 113

And the lizards below in the grass,

Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was.
Listening to my sweet pipings.
Liquid Peneus was flowing,
And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion's shadow, outgrowing
The light of the dying day,
Speeded by my sweet pipings.
The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fawns,
And the Nymphs of the woods and waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawiis.
And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend and follow
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,
With envy of my sweet pipings.
I sang of the dancing stars,
I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven — and the giant wars.
And Love, and Death, and Birth, —
And then I changed my pipings,
Singing how down the vale of Mcnalus
I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed ;

CJods and men, we are all deluded thus !

It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed

All wept, as I think botli ye now would.
If envy or age had not frozen your blood.

At the sorrow of my sweet pipings."

His favourite strain is sorrowing sometimes softened by

recolIccti(^ns of past happiness :

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory
Odours, when sweet violets sicken.
Live within the sense they (juickcn.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the Ijclovcd's bed ;
And HO thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Lovo itself shall slumber on ;
—
VOL. 11 H
 !! ;;

Ill FIVE C4:NTUKIES of ENGLISH VERSE

more generally abetted, and embittered, by the image of

joys past recalling :

R&rcly, rarely comest thou,

Spirit of Delight
Wherefore has thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
'Tis since thou art tied away.

How shall ever one like me

Win thee back again ?
With the joyous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false ! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.

I love all that thou lovest,

Spirit of Delight
The fresh Earth in new leaves drest,
And the starry night
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.

I love snow, and all the forms

Of the radiant frost
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

I love Love —though he has wings,

And like light can flee,

But above all other things.

Spirit, I love thee—
Thou art love and life come. !

Make once more my heart thy home.*

Not, forsooth, that its return to a dying world, to his worse

than dying self, is possible, or, perhaps, to be desired !
 ;

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 115

Oh, world ! oh, life ! oh, time !

On whose last steps I climb

Trembling at that where I had stood before ;

When will return the glory of your prime ?

No more — 0, never more !

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar.
Move my faint heart wth grief, but with delight
—
No more O, never more ^ !

The power even to love is lost to him and the one ;

hope he has is that his need of pity may be accepted by the

object of his supplication as a substitute :

One word is too often profaned

For me to profane it,

One feeling too falsely disdained

For thee to disdain it.

One hope is too like despair

For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love.

But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above.
And the Heavens reject not,
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the .sphere of our sorrow ?
'"

Though what right to e.\j)ect anytliiiig in haihi' jnr a

[Link] heart !

When tlic lamp i.s .shattered

The light in the dust lies dead.
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow's glory is shcjl.

F£ 2
 —
;

no FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

When the lute is broken,
Sweet tunes are renienibered not
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents arc soon forgot.

As music and splendour

Survive not the lamp and the lute,
Tlie heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute :

No song but sad dirges.

Like the wind through a ruined cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell."

The mere diction has enchantment in it ; and in that

respect tlie si)ccimens I have offered are very far from
monopolizing the charms of their class. Many others are
their equals. Some, which are too long to be set out at all
fully, as well as too familiarly known to need recalling,
are their superiors. Mark the dazzling series of glowing,
glorious images dedicated to the Skylark. The whole
is a golden staircase up which the song winds, step by
step, heavcn\\ards.^2 As overwhelmingly from the wings
of its sister The Cloud, itself '
nursling of the sky ', are :

shaken the dews that waken

The sweet buds every one.
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.^^

Whatever the minstrel's temper of the moment, the music

never fails. The wild west wind, dirge of the dj'ing year ',i^
*

at his 'incantation ', becomes an organ to voice his gloom.

When the fit shifts, river goddesses dance and carol in
symjiathy with his instant of gaiety :

(Hiding and springing

She wont, ever singing,
 '

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 117

In murmurs as soft as sleep ;

The Earth seemed to love her,

And Heaven smiled above her
As she lingered towards the deep.^^

As for the poet himself, I do not suppose that he would

even have understood the bestowal of praise for form and
symmetry. In hymning Pan or Alpheus he was no more
stri\'ing consciously to attract by the grace of rhythm
than in the grandly intolerant Ode to Liberty.^^ Search
him through and through for depth, for essence, of thought;
you will find nothing to beat the biting irony of the boast
of Oz3'mandias and where among his \\ords for music is
;

melody more sufficing than in that perfect sonnet ?

I met a from an antique land
traveller
Who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone
:

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand.

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose fro%vn,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its scupltor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed :

And on the pedestal these words appear :

'
My name is Oxymandias, King of Kings :

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair !

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Simply his impulse, the cuiMcnt of his s|)iiit, liapiicmd

in a song tf) use the same channel as common human
feeling. Ho desired to express an emotion or conception ;

and by chance it was definite enough not to need to stretch

and strain his native instinct of ear. The uiiiiiiliaied,
who profit by the coincidence, ought not to (latfcr hcmsclvcs f

that the fanatic of ideas meant to sacrilif I •

tln' l<;is( of (Ikih
lis FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
for (litMi- pleasure. From first to last he has been seeking
to embody, to interpret,It hasa vision, a mystery.
mattered notliing to him whether the text were a flaw in the
Universe, or a eloud in the West the snapping of a lute's ;

ehords, or the death of Adonais ;

^^ an ode to the lark, or
a ])salm on Intellectual Beauty —not the less profound that

it is as lovely also as
music by tlic night-wind sent
Thro' strings of some still instrument,
^^
Or moonlight on a midnight stream !

Mere ordinary lovers of poetry must accept Shelley

for that he is ; be content that he sings for himself, not
for them. Happily for them they cannot be inhibited
from listening. Though they have not bought the privilege
by discovering wisdom in Julian and Maddalo, or by entering
into the inner meaning of Epipsychidion, at least they will
understand the possibilities of English verse from the pen
of a master they A\ill be sensible of a rapture of melody.
;

And there may be more great minds and Shelley's, with ;

—
all its freaks, was great —
have much to tell even to those
who are not their disciples.

The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Harry Buxton

Fornian. Four vols. Beeves and Turner, 187G.
' To Jane, Invitation to the Pine Forest, vv. 65-7.
' Lines, Written among the Euganean Hills, vv 286-93.
' The Sensitive Plant, Part I, vv. 15-16 and Part III, vv. 66-9 ;

* The Indian Serenade. ^ Charles the First, Sc. 5.

• Hymn of Pan. ' To .

' Song, stanzas 1, 2, 5, 6, 8. •A Lament.

'" To " Lines, stanzas 1-2.
.

" To a Skylark. » The Cloud, vv. 6-8.

'« Ode to the West Wind. J^ Arcthusa,
st. 1.
" Ode to Liberty. " Ozymandias.
" Adonais (Elegy on the Death of John Keats).
" Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, st. 3.
 JOHN KEATS
1795—1821
Endymion surprised and shocked the lingering ortho-
doxy of late Georgian critics. Its author provoked as
much animosity as Wordsworth, -and more than Bjrron.
Wordsworth bore no relation to the idols of their youth,
Dryden and Pope. BjTon, and Scott also, affected to
revere both, Re\iewers simply did not understand Shelley.
Endymion was the worst of rebels. It had borrowed and
travestied m}i;hs of the Greek Classics, and the metre of
English Masters. Many real faults indeed may be found
in it. The plot wanders, and perpetually loses itself. The
and tedious.
narrative, often the descriptions, are prolix
The diction is troubled with strange words and phrases.
The rhyme tends to lead the sense. Not rarely the ideas
are thin in comparison with the parade of the circum-
stances meant to wait upon them. Occasionally the prosaic
will obtrude cotton-backing showing under velvet
itself ;

pile. But then the golden autumnal haze, the delicious

uncertainty what visions of romance will next come and
go from and into happy Dreamland The age was one of
!

muddy perturbation — strifes of peoples against kings, and

kings against peoples, of mortal struggles l)etween agrari-
anism and feu'lalisin, lal)f)ur and capital, political economy
and an outworn F.-rith. Imagine, for tiio few helaled
Eli/alK'thans, the joy in this pageant of Olympian goddesses
haiuiting (he happy pastures of Ar<;adiaii hills !

It is in truth an Elizabethan poet's woild. The l']li/,a-

bethan idea of poetry breathes throughout. Laws of
120 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
physical nature arc suspended. Men ride on eagles' wings,
walk the sea, and sojourn in ocean caves. No whisper of
wranglings of statesmen, discontents, and hunger of the
seething masses, stirs the serene solitude. Fields and wood-
lands are governed by no human law, and need none.
The cares are not of a kind to be inflamed or lulled by
the lyre of a Tyrtaeus. The author of Endymion had
drunk deep from the fountains of Sidney, Spenser, and
\\'illiam Browne ; of Shakespeare —the singer of Venus and
Adonis, of Lucrece, and the Sonnets. He had learnt to
move in an upper own, as they in theirs. Where,
air of his
in his models, a tincture of a purpose had intervened,
he stopped short. He would have abhorred to enlist, like
his beloved Spenser, the Muse in the service of a moral
allegory. For him poetry was no minister to duty, as
understood outside. No painful recpiisition of self-denial
was imposed upon it by the laws of its being. Endymion,
without a sting of the conscience remoulded for poetic use
on Hellenic lines, even might wave back to the skies his
dream-mistress. He is not liable to a shadow of reproach for
wooing and winning, before he was properly off with the
old love, a dusky and more tangible mate :

No more ofdreaming. Now, —

Where shall our dwelling be ? ^
For poets in general the one inspiring motto is :

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever ;

^

for the universe, the eternal law.

That first in beauty should be first in might ;
^

and for himself :

Beauty is truth, truth beauty —that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.*

The whole is immature. Had Keats lived, not impossibly
 —

JOHN KEATS 121

he might have washed to suppress it as a crude and juvenile

experiment :

A young bird's flutter from a wood.

A couple of years from its publication ;
and the singer
reappeared before the world with the Eve of St. Agnes,
Hyperion, Lamia, Isabella, and a galaxy of lovely odes !

In the brief interval he had achieved perfection!

Not the faintest symptom of youthful extravagance
forcible —
weakness is to be traced. The orderliness and
harmony of treatment are unimpeachable. To warmth is
added a refined delicacy. There is sensuousness still, but
never in excess. Between Endymion and its immediate
successors, whatever the dates of their composition, the
contrast is extraordinar3^ Yet, when I refer it and them
to their common author, I doubt much that the later
wonders could ever have come into visible, recognized
existence without the prior partial failure !

Endj-mion is a miscellany —a nursery garden of imagina-

tion. It provided a seed-bed for the blooms to follow, several
even now germinating. But it did much more. The differ-
ence in years between its poet and the poet of the Eve of
St. Agnes is little. In respect of the conception of the two,
it is nothing. As between them in the completed form,
it means an absolute transformation of the creative spirit.

Moving and breathing, Endymion laid bare to its author

allthe snares and perils of his cxulxjrant fancy. While it
demonstrated his powers to hijuself, and spurred his ])ri(lc, it

warned, threatened, and shamed. With its grotcsquenesscs,

the more apparent for the beauties, full before his eyes, his
fastidiously sensitive self was secured against re])oaling

offences rank eflloresccnce of imagery, confusion of

of
thought, rawness of colour and tone. If never in the history
of verse has fancy Ik-cii afconlcd inoic libcily, ;iii<I has
 ; ;

\-2-2 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

abused it less, than in Kcats's later work, the main credit
I believe to be due to the poet's shock at being confronted
by his own creation flaunting in the broad day of type
its dishevelled and unabashed charms. It may almost
be said that in no famous English poem is want of method,
measure, proportion, more flagrant than in Endymion.
'
Post ', and, in my opinion, propter Endymion, on the
' '

other hand, no quality in the AVTiter

is more conspicuous

than completeness of workmanship. That stands out from

the multitude of admirable properties in the gallery of
his masterpieces. Atmosphere, lights, shades, perspective,
are all in their right places. Imagination always satisfies,
and never cloys.
The temple of his poet-being, thus re-edified, he dedicated
to the goddess Beauty, with Melancholy for her chief
ministress —dainty Melancholy :

—
She dwells with Beauty Beauty that must die
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu and aching Pleasure nigh,
;

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips

Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Vcil'd Melancholj'^ has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine ;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.^
We have no right to be astonished at his inclination to
the pensiveness, the remoteness, the solitariness of soul,
which he intends by Melancholy '. Intellectually, even
'

apart from disease, he was framed to take little interest

in the world into which he was born. He thought and felt
himself into another, two centuries earlier. In that world
itselfhe troubled his fancy with none of the active cares and
struggles. Its very books he did not read as an antiquary
 JOHN KEATS 123

or student. The which be breathed he had distilled

air of it
for his individual use. gardens which he paced he had
Its
himself enclosed and planted. Over the Avhole he drew
an atmosphere, a veil, of slumberous calm not from Spring, —
but from more companionable Autumn :

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness !

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun ;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run ;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store ?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad maj' find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind ;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
iSpares the next swath and all its twined flowers ;

And sometime like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook ;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchcst the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where arc the songs of Spring ? Ay, where are they ?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the s(vibl)lc-plaiiis with rosy hue ;

Then in a wailful choir tlie small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies ;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn ;

Hedge-crickets sing and now with treble soft

;

Th(! red-breast whistles from a garden-croft.

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.®

If mirth over feigns to inspire him, it is not easily

from sadness. At
distingui8ha1)lc all events, it is thai of
the bygone past an echo from
;
 ;

124 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Souls of poets dead and gone,'
reposing
on Elysian lawns
Browsed by none but Dian's fawns ;

Underneath large blue- bells tented,

Where the daisies are rose-scented ;

Where the nightingale doth sing

Not a senseless, tranced thing,
But divine melodious truth ;

Philosophic numbers smooth ;

Talcs and golden histories

®
Of heaven and its mysteries ;

yet still at times sighing to one another :

What Elysium have we known,

Happy field or mossy cavern,
'
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern ?

Or it may be monumental gaiety ; imprisoned in sculp-

tured stone, amid mjTrh-scentec;! funeral ashes :

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both.
In Tempe, or the dales of Arcady ?

What men or gods are these ? What maidens loath ?

What mad pursuit ? What struggle to escape ?

What pipes and timbrels ? What wild ecstasy ?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter therefore, ye soft pipes, play on
;
;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare ;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss.
Though winning near the goal —
yet, do not grieve ;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss.

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair !

Who arc these coming to the sacrifice ?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest.

 —

JOHN KEATS 125

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest ?

What little towni by river or sea-shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
emptied of its folk, this pious morn
Is ?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be and not a soul to tell
;

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.^"

Melanchol}-, after all, with its frozen revelry ; though

not so lingering!}', hauntingly saddening as the full life of

the Nightingale song :

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk;
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot.
But being too happy in thy happiness,
Tliat thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees.
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Darkling I listen and for many a time

;

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Cali'd him soft names in many a nuised rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath ;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
While tliou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy !

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

To thy high requiem become a soil.

Thou wast not born for dcatli, iiiinioital l'>ii(l !

No hungry generations tn-ad tlice down ;

The voice I hear tliis j)assing night was heard

In ancient days by eni|)<ror and elowti :
 —

{2i\ FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn ;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn 1 the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self !

Adieu the fancy cannot cheat so well

!

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu adieu thy plaintive anthem fades
! !

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side and now 'tis buried deep
;

In the next valley-glades :

Was it a vision, or a waking dream ?

Fled is that music : —
do I wake or sleep ?
^^

Melancholy, and Beauty, hand in hand—very marvels !

But I must add another marvel this an example of con- —

—
summate art the Chapman-Homer sonnet :

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen :

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow' d Homer ruled as his demesne :

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene,

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold :

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken :
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific —and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.^^

written no more than such a sonnet and such

Had Keats
odes, he must have ranked among the highest in song.
He found time, however, in his brief and sorely tried span
of life to work on larger canvases, and never without a
 ; ;

JOHN KEATS 127

triumph. The Eve of St. Agues, Isabella, Lamia, Hj-perion,

breathe, all four, of the same creative soul. Each is

radiantly distinct. Among their many brilliant qualities

not the least amazing is, for the proximity in the dates of
their birth, this absolute variety.
Exquisiteness of detail, alwaj^s harmonious, characterizes
the first. Many a painter could testify, not without a pang,
how provocative is the poet's challenge to work up to the
glowing frame in which he has set his sweet Madeline, and
how unequal the competition I
—
A casement high and triple-aich'd there was,
All garlanded wth earven imageries
Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes.
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings ;

And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,

And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,
A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.
Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast.
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon ;

Rose- bloom fell on her liands, together prest,

And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory, like a saint
She sccm'd a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven —
Porphyro grew faint
:

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplex'd she lay.
Until tlie poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away ;

Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day ;

[Link] liavcn'd both from joy and pain ;

Clasj/d like a missal where swart I'aynims pray
Winded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.'"
 !

1L\S FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Another, and wholly different, note
is struck, with very

dissimilar, but as delicately suitable accompaniments, in

the piteous story of Isabella. Not that aught is allowed to
obscure the central figure, almost the peer of Chaucer's
Griselda she bows to the storm of fraternal vengeance on
;

her humble lover ; forlorn, tender, unvindictive, and

patient, except for the one heart-piercing cry :

'
for cruel 'tis,' said she,
'
To steal my Basil-pot away from me.' ^*

In Lamia, on the other hand, it is the plot, rather than

the circumstances, or the figures, on which attention is

concentrated. On the tale moves to its catastrophe,

mysterious, yet foreseen, inevitable, austere, stately, like
a great mediaeval noble, in velvet and lace, on his way
to Tower Hill.i^

And finally, the palace door .of Keats's splendid fancy

flies open for the god —^Hyperion —to pass within :

He but he cntcr'd full of wrath

enter'd, ;

His flaming robes stream'd out beyond his heels,

And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scared away the meek ethereal Hours
And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared,
From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault,
Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathed light,
And diamond-paved lustrous long arcades,
Until he reach'd the great main cupola ;

Theie, standing tierce beneath, he stampt his foot,

And from the basements deep to the high towers
Jarr'd his own golden region and before ;

The quavering thunder thereupon had ceased,

His voice leapt out, despite of godlike curb,
To tliis result O dreams of day and night
: '

() monstrous forms O effigies of pain

! !

O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom !

O lank-ear'd Phantoms of black-weeded pools !

 —

JOHN KEATS 129

Why do I know ye ? why have I seen ye ? why

Ismy eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new ?

Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall ?

Fall !
—
Xo, by Tellus and her briny robes !

Over the fiery frontier of my realms

I will advance a terrible right arm
Shall scare that infant thunderer, rebel Jove,
And bid old Saturn take his throne again.' ^^

Standing forth from the rest with their dainty finish

as of a butterfly fresh from the chrysalis, perfect to the
least —
plume of down the poem confronts us a torso, ;

almost a gallery of torsos, which could never have been

anything else, as, like its own Sun-God, it enthroned itself
Upon the gold clouds metropolitan

of its creator's brain ;

yet the grandest, most majestic,
conception of all the four !

Loath as I am to emphasize in a master poet quick-

ness of execution any more than youth, I cannot but
remember that from t\\'o to three years comprise the whole
fruitful season of Keats's career. Endymion excepted, in
tales, odes, songs, sonnets, ballads, so much unmixed poetic
excellence in matter and form has seldom, if ever, been
collected within the same compass, with less that the
severest critic would dare, or care, to wish away. Never
has either happy chance, or unsparing brainwork, done
more in an equal term for English poetry. An artist in
every line ; and to die l)clicviMg himself a failure at
twenty-six !

I should be sorry, I confess, if the waters rising in

England's Helicon were such alone as Keats drew up.
Temples dedicated to the exclusive worship of the (JoddcsH
Beauty are apt to be served by sordid ministers, as well as
VOL. II I
 ;

130 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Pi'iests of Melancholy. Fanes of the Muses ought to be veri-
table Pantheons, Avith room for shrines of all the Graces
and Virtues. Tenderness, Lovingkindness, Heroism, Faith,
and innocent Joy have a right to make their home there
and a Chai)el should be consecrated to Sorrow. Not all in
Keats's ideal loveliness is real. The sturdy frequenters
of the Mermaid might have mocked at some of the classic
forms rising from his pen. Something in the landscape is
scene-i)ainting. Rude botanists woidd scoff at the fairy
forests and garden-land of the exiled Titans. No lark
carols here with the freshness of the Ayrshire ploughman's.
The Muse is bidden to keep company with sculptured
funeral urns and the dust therein, instead of kindling
living hearts.
But I repent. Let me be forgiven for having been
tempted to dwell on a sombre truism, which, after all, is
only a half-truth. Side by side Avith it stands, as I gladly
acknowledge, another, that genius has manifold phases.
One poet now and then may be spared from the dull
haunts of men to roam, enchanted and enchanting, through
moonlit forest glades. It is good to be reminded from
time to time that the duty of poetry is not to sew and
spin that its first obligation, to be fulfilled on pain of being
;

not poetry at all, is to be beautiful as a lily of the field.

Keats was born in an age of brute military force. Humanity
had been vulgarized by political panic or ambition. Ideas
with no money or physical power in them were despised.
His nature revolted in disgust. In defiance he set up the
image of Beauty to be worshipped. At least the service
carried men outside their own poor selves it fascinated,
;

and refined. Who, old or young, can recall the first

revelation tohim of The Eve of St. Agnes, the Nightingale
Ode, Hj'perion, without feeling how, while he read, an
 JOHN KEATS 131

ocean seemed to roll before his eyes, as the Iliad, a new

planet, swam into the ken of John Keats !

The Poetical Works of John Keats with a Memoir by Richard:

Monckton Milnes. New Edition. E. Moxon, 1854.

' Endymion, Book IV. 2 jbid.. Book
I.
' Hyperion. * Ode on a Grecian Urn, st. 5.
* Ode on Melancholy. * To Autumn.

' Lines on the Mermaid Tavern. ' Ode.

" Lines on the Mermaid Tavern.

" (Jde on a Grecian Urn, stanzas I, 2, 4.
" Ode to a Nightingale, stanzas 1, 6, 7, 8.
'^ On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.
' The Eve of St. Agnes, stanzas 24, 2.5, 27.
'* Isabella ; or. The Tot of Basil, st. 62.
'* Lamia. ''•
Hyperion, Book I.

1 2
 CHAllLES WOLFE
1701—1823

I HAD doubted whether to assign a place to Wolfe's

poems rather than to him. Finally, I decided that his

nature was too much of a poem for his work not to be
classed by his personality. In his schoolboy days at
Winchester he was a poet. His lines on the raising of
Lazarus show distinct poetic insight. Their note is the
feeling of Jesus '
for others' grief '
:

He knew what pains must pierce a sister's heart.^

It is the same with his prize poem on the Death of Abel :

Nor could his lips a deep-drawn sigh restrain,

Not for himself he sigh'd —he sigh'd for Cain.^
Throughout a brilliant career at Trinity, Dublin, it was as
a poet that he was particularly recognized. An old air
could not sound in his ears without hastening to embody
itself in melodious verse. His few songs, the poem itself

by which he is immortalized, were emotions translated

instantly into language. His biographer, who cannot be
accused of poetical enthusiasm, describes the effect of music
upon his imagination he felt all its poetry
:
'
it trans- ;

])orted him.' The same friend recollects how, captivated

by a national Spanish air, Viva el Rey Fernando, he com- '

menced singing it over and over again, until he produced

an English song admirably suited to the tune '.^ He had
music in his heart.
There, after the close of his College career, it stayed,
 CHARLES WOLFE 133

mute, but a sweetening influence. It would be romantic

to laj' down purity in act as a necessary condition of
poetic power. LTnfortunatelj' a high sensibiUtj' constantly
tends to lead astray. Not the less true is it that delicacy
of feeling, shrinking from grossness of everj' sort, generosity,
and an ideal capacity for friendsiiip, make the jioetry of
life. They had always been the essence of Wolfe's, while
he still sang. Self-sacrifice caused him to abandon, from
fear of paining his mother, early thoughts of the Ai'uiy.
Later, religious devotion led him to abjure versifying.
When he cast himself outside his academic circle of wor-
shippers, his passion of charity sustained him in the squalid
solitude of a curacy in Tyrone. There it won him the
equal adoration of three mutuall}' hostile types of so-called
Christianity, agreeiiig only in common hatred of a fourth,
the one he was bound to represent. The good Archdeacon,
to whom we owe the sketch of his career, portrays the
beautiful modesty, simplicity, piety, sympathy, courage, of
the youth with all gentle, well-bred tastes and habits, in
his new home, a peasant's cabin. Poetizing, the '
mere
inspiration of the Muse ', the Archdeacon treats as '
the
less important, the phase of his character.
less serious '

In truth Wolfe was doubtless as essential!}' a i)()ct in the

wilds of Tyrone and Donoughmoro as in his Scholar's
rooms in Triiiitx'. The s|)l<'nd()ur of fancy •.'lorirKMl his
ruinous, mouldy cottage, and inspired the consolation ho
carried to many a typhus-stricken hut.
His was a noble spirit, entirely consistent with a ])oet's,
yet not in itself necessarily implying it. When, therefore,
I number liirn with poets by profession, \ cainiot justify

it on the ground of virtues hii])|)ily not a monopoly of any

.special vocation. I have (o rely on his poetical inspiration ;

and his fits of thai, I am aware, an', as evi<lcncci| in print,

134 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
to be measured less by years, than by months or weeks,
days and hours. The actual bulk of his entire
])('rha]is l)y

jjoetieal ])roduetion is scanty indeed. Apart from school

and college exercises, it consists of half a dozen songs.
Several are pretty and graceful. Yet, on their own merits,
I could not claim that they would have survived even

their author's brief existence. What then remains ? Why,

beside, rather than among, the meagre rest, just two of
the loveliest flowers in the garden of English verse !

The entire Anglo-Saxon world is familiar with the poem

on the Burial of Sir John Moore. If I give it here in full,
it chiefly is for convenience of comparison with another

piece by Wolfe as admirable in a different way :

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note

As his corse to the rampart we hurried ;

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot

O'er the grave where our hero we buried.

We buried him darkly at dead of night,

The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light
And the lantern dimly burning.

No useless coffin enclosed his breast.

Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him ;

But he lay like a warrior taking his rest

With his martial cloak around him.

Few and short were the prayers we said.

And we spoke not a word of sorrow ;

But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,

And we bitterly thought of the morrow.
We thought as we hollow'd liis narrow bod
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head.
And we far away on the billow !
 —

CHARLES WOLFE 135

Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that 's gone,

And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him —
But little he'll reck if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.

But half of our heavy task was done

When the clock struck the hour for retiring
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,

From the field of his fame fresh and gory ;

We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone

*
But we left him alone with his glory !

The whole had flashed out of a casual glance at a flinty

paragraph in a superannuated number of the Edinburgh
Annual Register. BjTon, whose sympathetic eyes it first
caught, through no self-advertising by the author, accounted
it
'
little inferior to the best which the present prolific age

had brought forth '.^ The third stanza —in particular, the
—
second couplet di"ew from him the exclamation, Perfect ' !
*

The unpremeditated art itself is excellent. Observe, for

example, how the seventh stanza labours in instinctive
.sympathy with the burden. In absoluteness of iMctorial
effect the poem has few equals in its kind, no superior.
The precise o()rr('si)ondeiice of the details with the prose
narrative, whicli lias ))een urged in depreciation, in fac-t.
greatly enhances the merit. Wolfe's version is iiU-iUical
with its source, except that a soul has been added.
Ill To Mary the process is, after a manner,
the lines
reversed. Wolfe found an air of melancholy beauty,
Gramachree, deformed by alien, commonplace words. Ho
gave it back its proper signilicance. In tone and cliaracter
the song, while matching tli(! Burial of Sir John .Moore in
loveliness, is, it will, I tliink, be recognized, .so generally
 — —

13G FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

distinct iis to indicate that, in Wolfe's poetical career, the
phenomenon, the accident, is not his authorship of a couple
of paragons of melody, but his omission to add a score of
equal marvels :

If I had tliuughl thou couldst have died,

might not weep for thee
I ;

But I forgot, when at thy side.

That thou couldst mortal be ;

It never through my mind had past

The time would e'er be o'er.
And I on thee should look my last,
And thou shouldst smile no more.

And still upon that face I look.

And think 'twill smile again ;

And still the thought I will not brook,

That I must look in vain !

But when I speak^thou dost not say,

What thou ne'er left'st unsaid ;

And now I feel, as well I may,

Sweet Mary ! thou art dead.

If thou wouldst stay, e'en as thou art,

All cold and all serene
I still might press thy silent heart.
And where thy smiles have been !

While e'en thy chill, bleak corse I have.

Thou seemest still mine own ;

But there —I lay thee in thy grave,

And I am now alone !

I do not think, where'er thou art,

Thou hast forgotten me ;

And I, perhaps, may soothe this heart

In thinking, too, of thee ;
Yet, there was round thee such a dawn
Of light ne'er seen before,
As fancy never could have drawn,
And never can restore !
^
 CHARLES WOLFE 137

In its origin this was at once as spontaneous, and as

compulsory, as the other. And j^et the unconscious art
with which, in the second half of the final stanza, the
thought starts, and gleams Wolfe told an acquaintance
!

that it no
referred to real being or incident. Simply he
had, as with the Viva el Rey, sung the air over and over,
tillhe burst into a flood of tears, and in that mood wrote.
Both
there, and in the genealogy of the Dirge, we have
the man a composite of elements, loftiness, tenderness,
;

—
sympathy, instinct the whole a poet. That he was to
the end, when, after two years of wasting consumption, he
whispered to the affectionate watcher of his death-bed with
what almost seems pathetic humour Close this eye, the
:
'

other is closed already and, now, farewell

; !
'

Remains Rev. Charles Wolfe, A.B., Curate of Donoughmore,

of the late
Diocese of Armagh
with a brief memoir of his life, by the Rpv. John
:

Russell, M.A., Archdeacon of C'logher Seventh edition. London :

Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1838.

' Jesus Raising Lazarus. ^ Qn the Death of Abel.
' Memoir (Remains), pp. 28-9. * Remains, pp. 23-4.
' Medwin's Conversations of Lord Hjron, 1821-2. New edition,
1H24, pp. 1.33-5.
' Remains.
 HENRY HART MILMAN
1791—1868
I REMEMBER to liave heard from persons old when even
I was young, that the sensation stirred by Mihnan's sacred
dramas was comparable with that which attended the
appearance of a new poem by Byron. He was hailed as
a living proof of the compatibility of poetic genius with
religion by the orthodox who were soon to ban him as
a schismatic. The enthusiasm subsided sooner than the
hostility. It, perhaps they, had a solid foundation in the
fact of the great brain and brave heart of their object. He
never \\Tote, whether verse, or history, without the
promptings of deep thought and- a strong dramatic instinct.
From youth upwards he possessed and displayed taste,
fancy, a fine ear, thirst for knowledge, and a resolute com-
bativeness.
He leapt into fame with his Newdigate prize for the
Apollo Belvidere. Some of the lines arc never likely to
be forgotten ; for instance :

Heard ye the arrow hurtle in the sky ?

Heard ye the dragon monster's deathful cry ?

In settled majesty of fierce disdain,

Proud of liis might, yet scornful of the slain,
—
The hcavnly Archer stands no human birth,
Xo perishable denizen of earth ;

Youth blooms immortal in his beardless face,

A God in strength, with more than godlike grace ;

All, all divine —no struggling muscle glows.

Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows,
But animate with deity alone,
In deathless glory lives the breathing stone.
 HENRY HART MILMAN 139

Beauteous as vision seen in dreamy sleep

By holy maid on Delphi's haunted steep,
Mid the dim t'n'ilight of the laurel grove,
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.^
But the whole brief poem, excepting the conclusion with its
sickly sentimentality, is almost faultless. The Judicium
Regale, composed in anticipation of the visit of the Allied
Sovereigns to England, followed. Its rhetoric approaches
grandeur, notwithstanding that it also has its flaw in an
ungenerous vindictiveness towards a fallen foe. Already
he virtually had completed Samor, Lord of the Bright
City, commenced when he was a lad at Eton. The epic
abounds in vivid dramatic situations, for example, the
sonorous narrative of King Argantyr's surrender to Samor.
Its weakness is a juvenile inclination to rioting in horrors.
An by no means exceptional, is the sacrifice by
instance,
Caswallon's savage ambition to the Gods of Valhalla of
his only daughter. He had left her to grow up as a wild
flower by Derwent's blue lake :

Like a forgotten lute, play'd on alone

By chance-caressing airs.'^

The grotesque extravagances themselves, however, testify

to power. The wiiole, in its juodigal ('xj)cnditurc of effects,

lurid splashes of colour on acres of canvas, and audacious

defiances of history, might well have been material for the
growth of a mighty poet.
From the same source issued, in fact, besides a careful,
but little read, translation from the [Link], two secular
and three religious plays; ;iinl then, in ])lace of the
y)oet, a ])iiilosophic historian. Of the plays, Fazio is a jtiece
for the stage ; and acc(»[Link] act<ns have ackiiowlcdged
its The sacred pieces, thougli in (hjiniatic
merits as such.
form, are essentially poems, and as such lo he jinlged.
 ;

UO FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Tlu'v have undergone the proper refining from the noisiness,

the violence, the absurdities of the boyish epic. Half
a century ago the reading public admired the awe, the pity,
of Titus meditating, at the head of his army, over doomed
Jerusalom :

How boldly doth it front us how majestically

! !

Like a luxurious vineyard, the hill-side

Is luing with marble fabrics, line o'er line ;
While over all hangs the rich purple eve,
As conscious of its being her last farewell
Of light and glory to that fated city.
And, as our clouds of battle dust and smoke
Are melted into air, behold the Temple,
In undisturb'd and lone serenity
Finding itself a solemn sanctuary
In the profound of heaven ! . . .

By Hercules the sight might almost win

!

The offended majesty of Rome to mercy.' ^

It —
was moved by the prayer a demand of defiant Hebrew —
maidens to Jehovah to repeat against insolent Rome His
judgement upon Egypt and her furious King :

The Lord from out His cloud,

The Lord look'd down upon the proud ;

And the host drave heavily

Down the deep bosom of the sea.

With a quick and sudden swell

Prone the liquid ramparts fell
Over horse, and over car,
Over every man of war,
Over Pharaoh's crown of gold,
The loud thundering billows roll'd.
As the level waters spread,
Down they sank, they sank like lead,
Down without a cry or groan.
And the morning sun that shone
 HENRY HART MILMAN 141

On myriads bright-armed men,

of
Its meridian radiance then
Cast on a wide sea, heaving, as of yore,
Against a silent, sohtary shore.*

The contrast of Christian Miriam's aj)peal to a merciful

Redeemer equally charmed :

For thou wert born of woman thou didst come,

'
!

Oh Holiest to this world of sin and gloom,

!

Not in thy dread omnipotent array ;

And not by thunders strew'd

Was thy tempestuous road ;

Nor indignation burnt before thee on thy way.

But thee, a soft and naked child,
Thy mother undehlcd,
In the rude manger laid to rest
From off her virgin breast.
The heavens were not commanded to prepare
A gorgeous canopy of golden air ;

Nor stoop'd their lamps th" enthroned lires on high :

A single silent star

Came wandering from afar.
Gliding uncheck'd and calm along tlic lifjuid sky.' ^

If the Fall of Jerusalem was not obsolete in boyhood, my

much less had the MartjT powers of
of Antioch lost its
fascination. Readers of poetry would have been ashamed
to confess ignorance of the converted priestess's vision of
Heaven opened :

'What means yon blaze on high ?

The empyrean sky

Like the rich veil of some pmiid fiiiic is niidiiig.
I see the star-paved land
Where all the angels stand,
Even to the highest height in burning rows ascending.

Beyond ah, who is there

!

With the white snowy hair ?

 ——

142 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

'Tis He — 'tis Ho, tlie Son of Man appearing !

At the riglit Imnd of One

The darkness of whoso throne
Tlmt sun-eyed seraph Host behold with awe and fearing.
O'er him the rainbow springs,
And spreads its emerald wings,
Down to the glassy sea his loftiest seat o'erarching.
—
Hark thunders from his throne, like steel-clad armies marching
The Christ the Christ connnands us to his home
!
!

"
Jesus, Redeemer, Lord, we come, we come, we come !
'

It w as recognized as a touch of genius when the beauteous

martyr, in the very ecstasy of visible acceptance within the
celestial halls, manoeuvres to spare her aged heathen father
the agony of seeing his daughter's blood :

A
quick and sudden cry
Of Callias, and a parting in the throng
Froclaim'd her father's coming. Forth she sprang
And clasp'd the frowning headsman's knees, and said
'
I do beseech thee, slay me first and quickly ;

'Tis that my father may not see my death !

'
'

Inspiration, indeed, I for one still feel animates the

entire substance of the pair of tragedies which have fur-
nished me with my examples. A public satisfied to know
Milman from an occasional fragment used as a hymn, like
the famous funeral anthem :

Brother, thou art gone before us, and thy saintly soul is flown
Where tears are wiped from every eye, and sorrow is unknown — ^

misses a large part of the enjoyment incident to such verse

itself, when considered amidst its proper circumstances, as
a plant in its native soil.

If the third drama, Belshazzar, is less fine in texture, and

the melody, the pathos, are more of stage properties, and
less evidently spontaneous, I attribute the decline mainly
to the subject. The centre, the pivot, of the poem was
 HENRY HART MILMAN 143

necessarily the ^^Titing on the Palace-wall and with that

;

the romance of the Jewish maiden, Benina, has no direct

connexion. They move along different lines, which only
casually intersect. Nothing could be more manifestly
forced than the final grouping of the monarch, his mother,
and the Hebrew family. When the Prophet deciphers the
blazoned sentence, how glaring again the descent of the
poem below the level of the Biblical narrative ! Yet here
too the authorship is internally capable of identification
with that of the earlier dramas. The Jewish girl's soUloquy
on the sunnnit of the tower of Bel is full of melancholy
harmony. Belshazzar's accompHshmcnt of his i)ledge to
the herald of his doom is marked by a splendid mag-

nanimity :

Cio —
lead the Hebrew forth, array'd
In the proud robe, let all the city hail
The honoured of Bclsliazzar.^

We catch the true royal ring both in that and in the fallen
monarch's farewell to empire and life.
Some element, I am conscious, is wanting to lift Milman's
verse back to the rank which much in it still challenges.
The whole glows, but like the sun in a mist. We miss the
rays which should glaiue hither and thither the sponta- ;

neous reflections back from the minds of the readers, and

from within the poetry itself. The writer's themes are in

themselves [Link] noble. He was equipped l)y nature

and education to develop their lofty qualities. Out of his
materials he constructed, in two cases at least, beautiful
edifices. Yet we are sensible throughout of a radical want.
Hero and there it is supjjHed but in general we do not
;

feel that to the skilful builder's art, and to a eerlaiii liery

appreciation of the qualities of the situation, flu- .luthor

was in the habit of adding something of his own soul, ilo

Ui FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
does not, like the great singers, produce upon me at all
events the impression of having j)assed the constituents of
his poetry through his inner nature, and having set them in
their places breathing of it. A perceptible monotony in his
strains tells the same tale. He strikes a single key con-
tinually, though one of dignity and power. A predestined
poet may prefer a particular note he will; give signs that
he has many at his disposal. With all their
feebleness, The
Hours more promise than the magni-
of Idleness indicated
ficent Lord of the Bright City. Nevertheless, it might
have been anticipated that, whatever the shortcomings of
Samor, at any rate the sacred dramas would practically
oblige their author to be a poet still. The poetic void
after them, unless for a few hymns and translations,
during two-thirds of a lifetime inflicts a shock as at
a sudden darkness. I can only surmise a mental re-
volution.
A similar spiritual change dried up, or sealed, the foun-
tains of song in two other modern singers, a senior and
a junior, far more subtle, and of wider compass, if not of a
stronger intelligence. Both, early in middle life, turned
from construction to analysis. The critical faculty in
Coleridge took the shape of theological metaphysics. In
Matthew Arnold it was a rage for the clearance of rubbish ;

for the business, to be understood in a highly compli-

mentary sense, of a moral and literary dust-destructor.
It became in Milman inquiry into the bases of ecclesiastical
history. Throughout this second stage of his intellectual
development he did good, even great, work. There was
creation as mcII as demolition. He pulled down that he
might build up. Yet some will regret with me, for the sake
both of poetry, and of his fame, that the mortar of the
foundations he renewed had to be mixed with the life-blood
 HENRY HART MILMAN 145

and Martyrs of Antioch.

of possible fresh Sieges of Jerusalem
As the fabric of Latin Christianity slowly rose, I used at
Oxford to hear cternit}' predicted for it. I suspect it will
be a phenomenon in the history of Histories if the fruits of
the great Dean's imagination do not outlive those of his
research.

The Poetical Works of the Rev. H. H. Milman. Three vols. John

Murray, 1839. (Also Tlie Fall of Jerusalem, 1825, New edition. The
:

MartjT of Antioch, 1823, New Edition. Belshazzar, 1822. John Murraj-.)

The Belvidere Apollo. ^ Samor, Lord of the Bright Cit}-.

^ The Fall of Jerusalem A Dramatic Poem

:

Ibid. ' Ibid.

" The Martyr of Antioch : A Dramatic Poem,
' Ibid. » Ibid.
• Belshazzar : A Dramatic Poem.

VOL. n
 —

JOHN KEBLE
1792— 186C
Canon Ainger, an admirable critic, once commented
to me on the claim of the writer of a popular hymn to
resj^ect as a poet :
'
You know, the standard of poetic
merit in hymns is not high.' Is it necessary to plead for
saintly Keble's poetic title, as it were, in forma pauperis ?

He ^^Tote, indeed, other verse, some of it of worth ; for

example, a delightful aj)peal of wild flowers to the lord of
the manor to spare from his high farming :

Shady spots and nooks, where we

Yet may flourish, safe and free.^
But, as a whole, it is inconsiderable and by his hymns he ;

must virtually be judged. Without going, therefore, outside

The Christian Year and Lyra Innocentium, I am glad for
my own sake to be able ff om them to answer my question
limited, as it is —in the negative. I find genuine poetic
Tender-
sensibility in a fair proportion of their contents.
ness, sympathy, judgement, and delicacy, aspirations after
the noble and sublime, are there. Everywhere I observe
a feeling for beauty, a sincere longing to understand and
interpret Nature.
Every one has felt the sweetness of some five or six stanzas
of the Evening Hymn in The Christian Year. Occasional
Thoughts on children's troubles in the Lyra Innocentium
almost match them.^ With equal intuition and affection-
ateness Keble draws happy lessons from sickness, the
heart's self-doubtings, mourning, and death. At times, not
 JOHN KEBLE 147

often, he iiear.s sublimity ; as when lie imagines Christ's

Passion in the Garden of Gethsemane ;
^ when he follows
the S2)irit of the Crucified

At large among the dead ;

^

or, as by the Saviour's side, muses on the lone upland above

the waters of Gennesaret.
He is home where he habitually
nevertheless more at
dwelt ; amid scenes of natural grace and beauty.
that is,

They make for him fitting framework for every word of

Prophet and Evangelist. He had sat at Wordsworth's
feet, and learnt to register each

soft touch invisible,^

by which Nature, newly born at every successive sunrise,

works her wonders. He could have written a monograph on
the soft green willow springing
Where the waters gently pass,
Every way her free arms flinging
O'er the moist and reedy grass "
;

and volumes on the flowers of the lield :

Sweet nurslings of the vernal skies,

Bath'd in soft airs, and fed with dew ;

What more than magic in you lies,

To till the heart's f(jnd view '!

llelics ye are of Eden's l)owcrs.

As pure, as fragrant, and as fair.
Ah when yo crown'd the sunshine h<iurs
()i haj)py wanderers thi-re.'

Mountains, in particular, he lu\c(l fdi- their peculiar

companionship, as he deeincil, with llcavcii :

Where is thy favour'd haunt, ctiriial X'oice,

The region of Thy choice,
K 2
 —— ; ——

14S FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Where, undisturb'd by sin and earth, the soul
Owns Thy entire control ?

"lis on the mountain's summit dark and high.

When storms arc hurrying by ;

'Tis 'mid the strong foundations of the earth,

Where torrents have their birth.

No sounds of worldly toil ascending there.

Mar the full burst of prayer ;

Lone Nature feels that she may freely breathe,

And round us and beneath
Are heard her sacred tones the fitful sweep
:

Of winds across the steep.

—
Through wither'd bents romantic note and clear,
Meet for a hermit's ear,
The wheeling kite's wild solitary cry.
And, scarcely heard so high.
The dashing waters when the air is still
From many a torrent rill
That winds unseen beneath the shaggy fell,
Track'd by the blue mist well
Such sounds as make deep silence in the heart
For Thought to do her part.^

For him each day marshals a triumphal pageant, from

dawn, with its every dewy spark jewelling leaf and blossom,
to the glory of the clouds about the setting sun. To a
—
certain extent though, in general, it must be confessed,
he does violence to his own sweet nature in dogmatizing to
—
the young he even consents to view the flush of springtide,
the garlands of May, through a child's eyes.^
Now and then, for moments, he actually seems, though
in a hymnal, to forget hymnology, and to be unconscious
of all but Nature's and Music's magic :

'Tis misty all, both sight and sound

I only know 'tis fair and sweet
'Tis wandering on enchanted ground
With dizzy brow and tottering feet.^"
 —

JOHN KEBLE 149

Almost it might be a bard of Love who sang, if he had ended

there :

Who ever saw the earliest rose

First open her sweet breast ?

Or, when the summer sun goes down,

The first soft star in evening's crown
Light up her gleaming crest ?

But there 's a sweeter flower than e'er

Blush'd on the rosy spray

A brighter star, a richer bloom
Than e'er did western heaven illume
At close of summer day.
'TiaLove, the last blest gift of Heaven ;

Love, gentle, holy, pure ;

But tenderer than a dove's soft eye.

The searching sun, the open sky,
She never could cndure.^^

Having said so much in Keble's favour, can I stop

short of pronouncing hini not only a writer of poetrj',
but a poet inspired ? I can, and must, though, in the
opinion of many, I condemn mj^self as a critic. One
quality of higli though there are approaches
poetry,
towards it now and then, I do not discover in him and, ;

unfortunately, it happens to be of the essence. The defect is

not that he is fafilc and difTusc for that weakness he shares
;

with some of the highest. It is not that his tendency,

although he can be daintily simple, is to bo artificial, in-
genious, and cliil)orato. (Iroatncss may be (here tot). TIm^
capital fault I lind, sensible as [ am
an apparent paji'ado.x,
of
is that the piety, which is the one motive of his verse, is
wanting in passir>n. Passion is a condition of all nuisterly
achievement, prol)al)ly in all lifciaiurc, ccrlainly in poetry.
It bums beneath Dryden's Coinl. |)olifi(s, Swift's misan-
thropy, Burns's defiant humour, Byron's cynicism. Above
150 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
all, for r(>ligi()U.s verso, as Herbert's, Crashaw's, Vaughan's,
Jlcrrick's, it is the breath of life. In Keble's it is never
more than an accident. He, the devoutest of men, the
most emotional, the least worldly, a Nathaniel without
guile, only })y fits and starts blazes into flame from his
own sovereign theme.
I feel him, while he diversifies and polishes his rhythm,
drills his topics, verifies his allusions, corrects his punctua-
tion, to be always on the watch against himself. He is
guarding against explosions of enthusiasm, which would
liave swept away his excess of elaboration, and the pro-
lixity fatal to many a fine thought. In modesty and
shyness like to Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, he was, unlike
thc!n, not of those who invite or suffer the world to count
their heart-beats. He has sung :

And well it is for us our God should feel

Alone our secret throbbihgs so our prayer ;

May readier spring to Heaven, nor spend its zeal

On cloud-born idols of this lower air.^^

The rule is true for worshippers ; not for the poet who
\\Tites of them and himself. It is from those deep throb-
bings, secret except for verse, that essential poetry is

distilled. Poetry demands the .sacrifice of the privacy of

souls. A poet, to aspire to the peaks, must be incapable
of withholding the best and dearest in his nature. Keble,
if so made as to have dared thus to suffer his spirit to take
lire, at all events did not let it. Always he reserved some-
thing from the furnace. He constantly was pointing out
how Christians, he with the rest, ought to think of Earth
and Heaven, rather than how he himself in fact thought.
Not having fastened his soul to the stake, he is not of the
inner circle in poetry. Whether, had he submitted himself,
he would have been, who can tell ?
 JOHN KEBLE 151

The Christian Year. Thoughts in Verso for the Suiida3-s and Holidays
throughout the Year. Forty-third ed. Oxford John Henry Parker,
:

1853. Lyra Innocentium. Oxford :John Henry Parker, 1846.

Miscellaneous Poems, by the Rev. John Keble. Oxford and London :

James Parker & Co., 1869.

1 Petition to the Lord of the Manor of Merdon of Anemone, Orchis,
Violet, Daffodil, Cowslip, and Primula (Miscellaneous Poems).
* A Sister, and Fire (Lyra Innocentium, Children's Troubles).

' Monday before Easter, st. 8 (Christian Year).

* Easter Eve, St. 2 (ibid.).
^ Morning, st. 1 (ibid.).
* First Sunday After Epiphany, st. 4 (ibid.).
' Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity, stanzas 1-2 (ibid.).
' Twentieth Sunday After Trinity, stanzas 1-3 (ibid.).
» May
Garlands (Lyra Innocentium, Children's Sports).
^^ Fourth Sunday in Advent, st. 5 (Christian Year).
>' Fourth Sunday in Lent, stanzas 2, 4, 5 (ibid).
" Twenty-fourth Sunday After Trinity, st. 3. (ibid.).
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
1801—1890

Oxford logic and metaphysics, and English Church

lethargy cost literature a great poet, and gained for it
a great poem. Dr. Newman's earlier productions showed
more of promise than performance. The first in the collec-
tion of 1868 is separated from The Dream of Gerontius,
dated January 1865, which closes the volume, by a space
of forty years. Naturally the contents might be expected
to differ widely in character. As naturally it might be
svi])posed that the earlier would have more of fancy and
enthusiasm. On the contrary, the writer is more self-

restrained, less manifestly full of original ideas, at the

commencement of his poetical career than at its end.
While as yet uncertain of his theological position, doubting
his old views, alarmed by the fascinations of the new, he
curbed his imagination. When he had found peace at last,
if not Nirvana, satisfaction at the sense of finality burst
into an amazing, an amazed ecstasy, which transmuted
a lake of fire into a bed of roses.

Not that the hundred and forty-three poems which

precede the Dream are without distinct charms of their
o\\n. They are devout, with a modesty and good taste
which hymnology often lacks. Frequently their spirit
rises so high that the reader of them feels a shock when
suddenly it seems to droop and sink. Their fault is a
repression, rather than an incapability, of passionateness ;

a determination to make poetry a property of religion, and

not religion subject-matter of poetry. Compare them with
 —

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 153

the hymns in Milman's MartjT of Antioch or Siege of

Jerusalem, and the contrast is violent. Poetry is a jealous
mistress. Service it may lend it will not endure to be
;

treated as a handmaid. It insists upon choosing its times

and seasons upon enjoying whatever society it prefers.
;

Self-abnegation, the bowing of its will to a predetermined

among its virtues. On the requisition, even
object, are not
by a John Henry Newman, of sacrifices of its independence,
it may continue the loan of form and rhythm inspiration ;

ceases. The poetic instinct was always in the man, ready

to operate, if allowed its liberty. He on his part was as
resolved to keep its action subservient to an obligation he
regarded as sovereign. Treated as a drudge the Muse turns
sullen and mute. Thus the reader may have prepared
for a poem as well as hymn, when fancy is seen to with-
draw abruptly from the brink of a noble l;yTic. How easily,
for example, might The Scars of Sin, Desolation, For the
Dead, have been caressed into music !

Sometimes a thought is so fine that it is hard to explain

the general neglect ; as in Transfiguration :

I saw thee once, and nought disccrn'd

For stranger to admire ;

A seriouH aspect, but it burn'd

With no unearthly fire.

Again I saw, and I confcss'd

Thy speech was rare and high ;

i\nd yet it vcx'd my ])urdcnVl lircast,

And scared, I knew not why.
I saw once more, and awe-struck gazed
On face, and form, and air ;

(Jod's living glory round thee blazed

A Snintr— a Saint was there !
^

1 douljt if many oven of Newman's admirers kiu)w of

 —— —
! ! !

154 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

his tender Birthday Offering on the grave of his young
sister !

Loveliest, meekest, bliiliest, kindest

Lead wo seek the homo thou findest
!

Though thy name to us most dear,

C!o wo would not have thee here.
!

Lead, a guiding beacon bright

To travellers on the Eve of Light.
Welcome aye thy Star before us,
]?ring it grief or gladness o'er us ;

Keen and tearful yearning.

regret
Whiles unfclt, and whiles returning :

Or more gracious thoughts abiding,

Fever-quelling, sorrow-chiding :

Or, when day-light blessings fail

Transport fresh as spice-fraught gale.

Sparks from thee wliich oft have lighted
Weary heart and hope benighted.
1 this monument would raise,

J)istantfrom the public gaze.

Few will see it ;
—
few e'er knew thee ;

But their beating hearts pursue thee,

And their eyes fond thoughts betoken,
Though thy name be seldom spoken.
Pass on, stranger, and despise it
These will read, and these will prize it.^

The merits of such charming things have, I can but

suppose, been smothered under the neighbouring pile of
verse pressed into service as a vehicle of religious musings,
often momentous, yet not poetry. In other cases the
infusion of militant dogma may have denied popular
acceptance to pieces otherwise fully entitled to it. Mark,
for example, the light touch in the Month of Mary :

The green green grass, the glittering grove,

The heaven's majestic dome,
They image forth a tenderer bower,
A more refulgent home ;
 ;

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 155

They tell us of that Paradise

Of everlasting rest,

And that high Tree, all flowers and fruit,

The sweetest, yet the best.
O Mary, pure and beautiful,
Thou art the Queen of May ;

Our garlands wear about thy hair.

And they will ne'er decay .^

As bright, if more combative, is the Pilgrim Queen :

There sat a Lady all on the ground,

Rays of the morning circled her round.
— Save thee and hail to thee, Gracious and Fair,
In the chill twilight what wouldst thou there ?
'
Here I sit desolate,' sweetly said she,
'Though I'm a queen, and my name is Marie ;

Robbers have rifled my garden and store.

Foes they have stolen my heir from my bower.
They said they could keep Him far better than I,
In a palace all His, planted deep and raised high.
'Twas a palace of ice, hard and cold as were they,
And when summer came, it all melted away.
Next would they barter Him, Him the Supreme,
For the spice of the desert, and gold of the stream ;

And me they bid w-ander in weeds and alone.

In this green merry land which once was my own.
A moment,' she said, '
and the dead shall revive ;

The giants arc failing, the Saints are alive ;

I am coming to rescue my home and my reign,

*
And Peter and Philip are close in my" train.'

AikI he had indicated a gift for loftier strains, still

controversial ; for instance, in Kefrigerium :

They are at rest

The has eaten out all blot and stain,
fire

And, convalescent, they enjoy a blest

Refreshment after pain ;

Thus, to the End, in Kden's grots they lie,

And hear the fourfold rivir, as it hurries bv.
 —

156 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

They hear it sweep
In distance clown the dark and savage glen ;

Safe from its rocky bed, and current deep,

And eddying pools, till then ;

They hear, and meekly muse, as fain to know

How long untired, unspent, that giant stream shall flow.

And soothing sounds

Blend with the neighbouring waters as they glide ;
Posted along the haunted garden's bounds
Angelic forms abide,
Echoing, as words of watch, o'er lawn and grove.
The verses of that hymn which Seraphs chant above.^
Yet again and there is the immortal Pillar of the Cloud
—
;

better known by its first ^with which he

three words
might have been thought to reach his high-Avater mark as
a poet. In hymnology, indeed, he never exceeded that
sweet sad cry from heart to hearts for light to lead amid
the gloom for, as a hymn, it is unsurpassable.
; From the
first line to the last, when
the night is gone ;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile — "

it might, unless for what was to follow, have been held to

be as poetically lovely as verse can be without ceasing to
be prayer.
But thirty years later he accomplished results in poetry
which the Pillar of the Cloud itself cannot pretend to rival.
Consider the absorption of passion into piety, the extortion
of the consent of an intellect as searching as Voltaire's to
an abjuration of all spiritual freedom, the renunciation
of joy, pity, beauty. Watch the erection, on foundations
thus remorselessly laid, of a pile of sublimest fancy. Then
say how, when, and where literature has on like lines ever
matched the Dream of Gerontius ! In it Newman conjures
 — !

JOHN HENRY NE^VMAN 157

more deftly with the reason of his readers than the most
dexterous Indian wonder-worker Avith the eyes of spectators.
He arranges more dazzUng combinations than the most
ingenious pyrotechnist. He is a magician in his manipula-
tion of thought and feeling. He makes us accept for
natural what is most unreal, for fair what is ugly, for
beneficent what is barbarous, for celestial what is earthy.
I can recall nothing in English literature to equal the
dialectic skill Avith which probability, intelligibilitj^ are
breathed into the djdng Saint's horror at the death he might
—
be expected to welcome horror lest the vice-laden body
should sweep with itself the soul, though now purified,
down the gulf of null chaos :

'TisDeath —
loving friends, j^our prayers I
— 'tis he
As though my very being had given way,
As though I was no more a substance now,
And could fall back on nought to be my stay, —
Help, loving Lord Thou my sole Refuge, Thou
!

And turn no whither, but must needs decay

And drop from out the universal frame
Into that shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss.
That utter nothingness, of which I came.

iSanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus,

De profundis oro te,
Miserere, Judex mens.
Mortis in discrimine.'

Speeding to the Judgement in the arms of his Guardian

Angel, his Soul, but half disembodied, is conscious that
it remains liable, though itself sinless now, for its mated
Body's old impurities ; that it cannot enter into the
communion, for which it longs, with the perfection of God
made Man, until the gross shadow upon it of its guilty
flesh bo purged away. But fear has ceased, and weariness,
and pain :
 ; ; — ;;

158 FIVE CENTURIES OF [Link] VERSE

I wtiit to sleop ; aiul now I am refresh'd,
A strange [Link] for I feel in me :

An inexpressive lightness, and a sense

Of freedom, as I were at lengtli myself.
And ne'er had been befoie. How still it is !

Am I alive or dead ? I am not dead,

But in the body still ; for I possess
A sort of confidence,which clings to me,
That each particular organ holds its place
As heretofore, combining with the rest
Into one symmetry, that wraps me round,
And makes me man and surely I could move,
;

Did I but will it, every part of me.

Or I or it is rushing on the wings
Of light or lightning on an onward course,
And we e'en now are million miles apart.
Yet — peremptory severance
is this
Wrought out in lengthening measurements of space,
Which grow and multiply by speed and time ?
Or am I traversing infinity
By endless subdivision, hurrying back
From finite towards infinitesimal,
Thus dying out of the expanded world ?
*

Throughout his journeying he hears voices ; his convoying

angel's :

Oh, what a heart-subduing melody !

Then, the sullen howl of demons outside the Judgement

Court, swarming,
Hungry and wild, to claim their property,
And gather souls for hell
and, again, the song of
tender beings angelical,
Least and most childlike of the sons of God ;
like the rushing of the wind
—
The summer wind among the lofty pines
Swelling and dying, echoing round about.
Now here, now distant, wild and beautiful
While, scatter'd from the branches it has stirr'd.
Descend ecstatic odours
 — : —

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 159

with, all the time, but thin and low, and fainter and more
faint :

the voice of friends aiouii<.l the bed,

Who say the '
Subvenite '
with the priest."

Absolute rest, delight, emancipation ;

yet the whole
thrilled \A'ith a longing for agony of pain ; to be fitted by
fire to abide hereafter in the Divine Presence — ^if but,

ere I plunged amid the avenging flame,

I had one sight of Him to strengthen me.

And in a moment, and for a moment, his wish granted

—at the cost of lying before the Throne, scorched and
shrivelled by
the keen sanctity.
Which, with its effluence, Hke a glory, clothes
And circles round the Crucified ^° !

It is a gain of measureless content, so only that his ordeal

be completed, as he prays, to the full

Take me away, and deep

in the lowest
There let me be.
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep,
Told out for me.
There, motionless and happy in my pain,
Lone, not forlorn,
There will I sing my sad perpetual strain.
Until the morn.
There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne'er can cease
To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest
Of its .Sole Peace.
There will I sing my absent Lord and Love :

Take me away,
That sooner I may rise, and go above,
And SCO Him in the truth of everlasting day."
The whcjle high, strange argument, for its metaphysical
100 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
dexterity and depth, is worthy of Lucretius holding a very
diffcrcMit brief. But, most of all, let us be grateful for
a grand dithyramb, \\orthy also of the great Roman,
which authorizes an inscription on the roll of British
poets of the illustrious name of John Henry Newman, as
much to their honour in the comiDanionship as to his !

Verses on Various Occasions (J. H. N.). London : Burns, Oates

& Co., 18G8.
1 Transfiguration, No. 51,
- Epipliany Eve :A Birthday Offering, No. 14
^ The Month of Mary, No. 150.
* The Pilgrim Queen, No, 149.
^ Refrigerium, No. 111.
° The Pillar of the Cloud (Lead, Kindly Light), No. 81, June 16, 1833
' The Dream of Gerontius, January 18G5, No. 166.
« Ibid. « Ibid.
'» Ibid " Ibid,
 —

THOMAS HOOD
1799—1845
One of the uncrowned kings the Heir bred, like Victor
;

Hugo's L' Homme qui Rit, to suppose that he was a clown !

If only he had kno^^'n that his work in life was pure poetry
that he was a poet born Till he died he never took rank
!

as a poet. Scarcely would he have recognized himself as

one. Although throughout his life he wrote poems, most
of them received with favour, some with applause, they
came as separate phenomena. His profession continued
to be that of wit and humorist. The productions them-
selves, many as they were, did not muster together, and
acclaim him for their chief and captain. Not until he had
passed away, after a life of grinding care and poverty,
were his graver poems, which in general reflect his adversi-
ties in their gloom, given to the world in a collected form.
The utmost their editor hoped for them then was, that
'
in any future recital of the names of writers who have
contributed to the Stock of genuine English poetry, Thomas
Hood might find honourable mention '.
The commendation is altogether too apologetic. It is

pitched in a key far too low to satisfy Hood's sincere

admirers. Poets and poems are divisible into two primary
classes. There are those that the kingdom of poetry, though
it is willing to admit them, could do without, and those that

it could not. W'luitever Hood's particuhir rank in the

indispensable order,it is to this that he belongs. As I
glance over the two volumes which comprise the body of
his verse, serious and humorous, I am constantly lighting
VOL. II L
 ! ! —! ; ——

1G2 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

upon piofC's whith it woulil Ix" impossible to omit without
tho cToatiou of a painful, visiljlc gap in literature.

The Song of the Shirt is in possession of a niche which

could not otherwise be filled :

•
Oh but to breathe the breath
!

Of the cowshp and primrose sweet

With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet.

For only one short hour

To feel as I used to feel,
Before I knew the woes of want
And the walk that eosts a meal
Oh ! but for one short hour !

A respitehowever brief !

No blessed leisure for Love or Hope,

But only time for Grief
A little weeping woukl ease my heart,
But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
^
Hinders needle and thread !
'

A second would stand painfully empty without, to occupy

it, the Dream of Eugene Aram ; —the whole, down to the

abrupt shuddering close :

That very night, while gentle sleep

The urchin eye-lids kiss'd,
Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn,
Through the cold and heavy mist
And Eugene Aram walk'd between.
With gyves upon his wrist.^

Yet another place he has permanently appropriated by

his haunting Haunted House murder-haunted ^with its —
rusty stains,
Obscurely spotted to the door, and thence
With mazy doubles to the grated casement
Oh what a tale they told of fear intense,
Of horror and amazement
 — — ——
! ;

THOMAS HOOD 163

What humau creature iii the dead of night

Had coursed hke hunted hare that cruel distance ?

Had sought the door, the wiudoAV, in his flight,

Striving for dear existence ^
?

I do not claim on his behalf a monopoly of capacity for

measming against one another the powers of Earth and
Hell ;but I know of none but Burns who equals him in
the reconciliation, for the purpose, of the tragic and the
comic. Mark the trooping of monsters to avenge the attack
of the Brocken forgemen upon Hell's lord :

Awful coveys of terrible things.

With forked tongues and venomous stings,
On hagweed, broomsticks, and leathern wings,
Are hovering round the Hut
Shapes, that within the focus bright
Of the Forge, are like shadows and blots
But, farther otf, in the shades of night.
Clothed with their own phosphoric light.
Are seen in the darkest spots.
Sounds that fill the air with noises,
!

Strange and indescribable voices.

From Hags, in a dialjolical clatter
Cats that spit curses, and apes that chatter
Scraps of cabalistical matter
Owls that screech, and dogs that yell
Skeleton hounds that will never be fatter
All the domestic tribes of Hell,
Shrieking for flesh to tear and tatter.
Bones to shatter.
And limbs to scatter.
And who that must furnish the latter
it is

Thosir blue-looking men know well * !

An I know of few things in poetry more grotesquely terrible

than the burning of Satan to a cinder, so I feel the singularity
of Hood's gift f(;r eliciting the poetry of everyday life. How
dainty is the pathos employed on a coiiuikju death lu'd !

L 2
 —— —

lot FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Wr wakli'd lui l)[Link] thro" the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in licr breast tlic wavo of life

Kept heaving to and fro.

So silently we seem'd to speak,

So slowly moved about.
As we had lent her half our powers
To eke her living out.

Our very hopes belied our fears,

Our fears our hopes belied
We thought her dying when she slept.
And sleeping when she died.
For when the morn came dim and sad,
And chill with early showers.
Her quiet eyelids closed —she had
Another morn than ours.^

Perfect everj'^ line. We owe more gratitude for this investi-

ture of simple death —such as not beyond the least of
it is

us to aspire to —with a quiet beauty, than for dithyrambs

over a Conqueror's bier. That indeed is among Hood's
merits, which he shares with the princes of song, that,
though he can rise to the heights, he sees the beauty of
plain things. A child's embrace of its mother is as ordinary
as dying ; and see how much it too suggests to him !

Love thy mother, little one !

Kiss and clasp her neck again ;

Hereafter she may have a son

Will kiss and clasp her neck in vain.
Love thy mother, little one !

Gaze upon her living eyes,

And mirror back her love for thee ;

Hereafter thou may'st shudder sighs

To meet them when they cannot see.
Gaze upon her living eyes !
 ! ! ——

THOMAS HOOD 165

Press her lips the while they glow

With love that they have often told ;

Hereafter thou mayst press in woe,

And kiss them till thine own are cold.
Press her lips the while they glow ^
!

Really there is it might be thought, in his

nothing,
recollections of boyhood, with which it was worth
his
troubling the world perhaps, even himself
; and yet the ;

sweetness for us all !

I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born.
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn ;

He never came a wink too soon.

Nor brought too long a day.
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away !

I remember, remember, I
The roses, red and white.
The violets, and the lily-cups.
Those flowers made of light
The lilacs where the robin built.
And whore my br(jther set
The laburnum on his birthday',
The tree is living yet

I remember, I remember,
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rusli as fresh
To swallows on the wing ;

My spirit flew in feathers then,

That is so heavy now.
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow !

I remember, I reincmbor.
The fir-trees dark and nigh ;

Iused to think their slender to])s

Were close against the sky ;
 ; — —

\m FIVE CENTURIES OF ENCILTSH VER8E

It. was a chiklisli ignorance,
But now 'tis little joy
know I'm farther off from hcav'n
'J\)

Tlian when I was a boy.'

Already I have instanced enough admirable verse to

make a reputation and how much I have omitted
;
But, !

at all events, I must not pass by Ruth, as she stands

breast high amid the coin.
Clasp' d by the golden light of morn.
Like the sweetheart of the sun.
Who many a glowing kiss had won ;
*

or fair Incs, who has

gone into the West,
To dazzle when the sun is down.
And rob the world of rest
(She took our daylight with her,
The smiles that we loye best,
With morning blushes on her cheek
And pearls»upon her breast ;
'

or the all-sufficient love-song :

I love thee — I love thee !

'Tis all that I can say :

my vision in the night,

It is
My dreaming in the day :

The very echo of my heart,

The blessing when I pray :

I love thecal love thee !

Is all that I can say.^'^

Everywhere still, throughout the two sister volumes,

the reader is come upon lines, phrases, which will
sure to
not consent to be forgotten. Even in that ugliest of poems
with greatness in them. The Last Man, which fascinates
without delighting, there is a redeeming spark of pathos
the confession of loneliness by the survivor of human kind,
 — '

THOMAS HOOD 167

a hangman, who, to be sole heir of the earth, had just

strung up hi>s solitary companion, a beggar man :

If the veriest cur would lick my hand,

^^
I could love it like a child !

So, again, the humour of the tale of Miss Kilmansegg

leaves space for a grim individual pitifulness :

Gold, still gold ! hard, yellow, and cold

For gold she had lived, and she died for gold !
^-

At any instant a figure suddenly will start forth, with an

appeal to the heart, at once entirely natural and entirely
original the outcast, on the river bank, in glaring London,
;

with its clothed, fed, and sheltered millions, as

She stood, '

with amazement ',
^^
Houseless by night ;

the swarm waiting for the Casual Ward to open ; semp-

stress, artisan, whole families ;

Father, mother, and '

careful child ',

'*
Looking as if it had never smiled ;

Lycus, the centaur that had been man, when the unsus-
pecting boy insults his shame at his bestial shape Avith
a handful of grass, and, in anger at its rejection, pelts him
with stones :

I felt not, whose fate

^^
Was to meet more distress in his h)ve than his hate ;

the fisherman in his storm-tost boat on the lee-shore :

Oil, (jiod ! to think Man ever

Comes too near his Home '* !

and the luird-tricd poet himself, with his birthday wish for
his daughter, of

all the l)liss that life endears,

Not without smiles, nor yet from '
tears
Too strictly k(!pt."
168 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
None has ever more entirely possessed the secret of
sudden ascents sudden heart-kindlings. In some sort all
;

the Serious Poems

are examples but we never can tell ;

^^ hen Hood may not move to tears in a piece where the

moment before he had been jesting :

There is no music in the life

That sounds with idiot laughter solely ;

There 's not a string attuned to mirth,

But has its chord in Melancholy .^^

Doubtless, in compensation, after the manner of poets,

with rare exceptions, such as Keats and Gray, he sinks
now and again is eccentric without being original, tedious
;

without being solemn. He can wear a sentiment thread-

bare, as in The Lady's Dream, and The Lay of the Labourer.
His endless fancies can cloy, though in such a garden of
dainty devices as The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies.
He can be, though very seldom, merely dull, as in The
Two Peacocks of Bedfont. He can smother Hellenic roses,
as in Hero and Leander, in a thicket, however fragrant,
of mediaeval embellishments. He can call a pamphlet an
Ode, as his epistle to Rae Wilson, and spoil a charming
sonnet Avith a poor pun. But measure the good against
the ill ; and the failures are nowhere. As a boy I heard
nothing of Hood as a poet, much of him as a humorist.
The Song of the Shirt surprised my little world without
persuading it that it had to worship a poet the more.
During my
undergraduate days I first learnt to appreciate
his poetry and I have read and admired it ever since.
;

Not the less, when recently I surveyed it as a whole, I stood

amazed. The melody, the tenderness, and sympathy, the
fancy, I find inexhaustible. Above all, is the unexpected-
ness. When I have believed I had explored all the singer's
 THOMAS HOOD 169

resources, he has touched a fresh cell in brain or heart, and

music, echoing from the far distance, has set it thrilling.

I can conjecture no explanation of Hood's absence

from the first class of British poetr}'', unless that he himself
never clearly made up his mind to demand entrance.
He preferred to hover outside, and sing as he listed. I do
not dare to pretend to overrule his choice for himself,
accepted, as apparently it has been, by the common
arbiters of public opinion. In any case, whatever the view
of his own place, it is impossible to question the rank of
a numerous chorus of bright creatures of his imagination.

Poems (Serious), by Thomas Hood. Fourth edition. E. Moxon, 1851.

Poems of Wit and Humour, by Thomas Hood. Fifth edition. E. Moxon,
18.53,
'
The Song of the Shirt (Serious Poems), stanzas 9-10.
^ The Dream of Eugene Aram, st. 3G (ibid.).
= The Haunted House, Part III, stanzas 27-8 (ibid.).

* The Forge A Romance of the Iron Age, Part II, stanzas 12-13
:

(Poems of Wit and Humour).

* The Death-bed (Serious Poems).

* To a Child, Embracing His Mother, stanzas 1-3 (ibid.).

' I Remember, I Remember (ibid.).

" Ruth, St. 1 (ibid.). » Fair Ines, st. 1 (ibid.).
"> To St. 1 (ibid.).
,

" The Last Man, st. 35 (Poonis of Wit and Huinour).

'=Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg —
Her Death, st. 16 (Serious
Poemn).
" 'I'he Bridge of Sighs, s(. 11 (iliid.).
" The WorkhouHc (.'lock Ati Allegory : (ibid.).
' Lycus the Cenfaur (ibid.).
'" The Ivee-shore, st. (i (ibid.).
" To my Daughter on her Birthday, st. 3 (iMd.).
'• Ode to .Melancholy (ibid.).
 —

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

1806—1861

Of the kind the foremost writer of English poetry — ^but

a poetess. Or changing one word, say and a
shall I, —
poetess ? For, with beauty everywhere, and womanliness
as ubiquitous, I do not presume to decide on the inde-
pendence one of the other. Women -writers now and then,
like George Sand and George Eliot, if not Currer Bell,
have dissembled their sex. Either they have disdained
allowances for it ; or they have distrusted the superiority
of the other to prejudice. Mrs. Browning had none of that
affectation, or apprehension. On the contrary, she may
be said to have gloried in being a woman.
In any case her verse would have proclaimed the fact.
None but a woman —or perhaps a Avoman immured for
a large part of her life in two rooms —could have imagined
the repulse of a lover beloved, as in Insufficiency,^ and the
martyr's cry of Denial !

I love thee not, I dare not love thee ! go

In silence ; drop my hand.
If th(ju seek roses, seek them where they blow
In garden-alleys, not in desert sand.
Can life and death agree,
That thou shouldst stoop thy song to my complaint ?
I cannot love thee. If the word is faint,
Look in my face and see.^
The splendid unreason of Duchess May, the self-devotion to
death of the Crusader's bride-page, and the sweet absurdities,
not to be read by any male person without a blush, of
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWT^ING 171

Lady Geraldine, are all feminine. So is the conflict, with

its result, between the egotism of Isobel's maternal love,
and her sick child's craving for his home with
the Angels.
The grief of the dead blind boy's mother, that she can be
no more his sun and moon, and his slave, betrays the same
authorship. Pathos, a common gift of poets, is for her
steeped in her femininity. Into the dumb affection of her
dog this reads the instinct, the impulse, to share his mistress's
distress, without requiring to comprehend or justify it :

And if one or two quick tears

Dropped upon his glossy cars,
Or a sigh came double,
Up he sprang in eager haste,
Fawning, fondling, breathing fast,
In a tender trouble.'

In Wine of Cyprus, noblest, to me, of all her verse, I feel

it equally in the affectionate endeavour to balance, as it

were, by her own wasting sickness the earlier and different

calamity of her aged tutor in Greek. Fondly, as she
thanks him for his gift of Hellenic wine, she recalls their
studies together in Attic tragedy :

And I think of tliosc long mornings

Which niv thf)nght goes far to seek,
Wlien, betwixt tlic folio's turnings.
Solemn flowed the rhytliniie (!reek:
Past the ])ane the mo(Uitaiii spreading.
Swept the sheej/s bell's tinkling noise,
While a girlish voice was reading,
Somewhat low for ais and ois,

Tlwn, what goldiii hours were for us !

While we sate tog(^thcr tliere.

How the white vests of <he chorus
Seemed to wave uji a live air !
 ! —

172 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

How the cothurns trod majestic
Down the deep iambic lines,
And the rolling anapaestic
Cnrlcd like vapour over shrines !

Oh, our Aeschylus, the thunderous,

How he drove the bolted breath
Through the cloud, to wedge it ponderous
In the gnarled oak beneath !

Oh, our (Sophocles, the royal,

Who was born to monarch's place.
And who made the whole world loyal.
Less by kingly power than grace !

Our Euripides, the human.

With his droppings of warm tears.
And his touches of things common,
Till they rose to touch the spheres I

Our Theocritus, our Bion,

And our Pindar's shining goals !

These were cup-bearers undying.

Of the wine that 's meant for souls.

And my Plato, the divine one.

If men know the gods aright
By their motions as they shine on
With a glorious trail of light
And your noble Christian bishops.
Who mouthed grandly the last Greek !

Though the sponges on their hyssops

—
Were distent with wine too weak.

For therest —
a mystic moaning
Kept Cassandra at the gate.
With wild eyes the vision shone in,
And wide nostrils scenting fate.
And Prometheus, bound in passion
By brute Force to the blind stone.
Showed us looks of invocation
Turned to ocean and the sun.
 ———

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 173

And Medea we suav burning

At her nature" s planted stake ;

And proud Oedipus fate-scorning

While the cloud came on to break
While the cloud came on slow, slower.
Till he stood discrowned, resigned !

But the reader's voice dropped lower

When the poet called him Blind.

And now —teacher and pupil, were they not equals in fate ?

Alas!
For me, I am not worthy
After gods and Greeks to drink,
And my lips are pale and earthy
To go bathing from this brink :

Since you heard them speak the last time.

They have faded from their blooms,
And the laughter of my pastime
Has learnt silence at the toinbs.''

On account of sex —in spite of —^without it relation to

it —whichever yf)u will —her work captivates. Its defects
are many. The exuberance of words is exasperating.
The Lost Bower, for exaiui)le, delights for a dozen stanzas,
and distresses long before the seventy-fourth. The habit
of hunting for an occasion of tenderness everywhere is apt
to degenerate into spurious sentimentality. The Poet's
Vow, and A Child Asleep are flagrant offenders. Poetry
has no more business with specific '
poetic '
feeling than with
'
poetic '
diction. A dearth of common sense, and of what
1 am afraid must call manliness, is uncomfortably
I

discernible. But the want is compensated by a feminine

insight as subtle as it is affectionate. We feel this inspiring
the angelic fancy of a nightingale in Paradise pursuing the
human exiles thence with a regretful atlicu :

I am the nearest nightingale

That singeth in Kflcti after you ;
 — ; : ——

174 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Aiid 1 am and true,
siuging loud
And sweet, —
do not fail.
1
I sit upon a cypress bough

Close to the gate, and I fling my song

Over the gate and thiDUgh the mail
Of the warilen angels marshalled strong,
Over the gate and after you !

And the warden angels let it pass,

Because the poor brown bird, alas.
Sings in the garden, sweet and true.
And I built my song of high pure notes.
Note after note, height over height.
Till I strike the arch of the Inlinite,
And I bridge abysmal agonies
With strong, clear calms of harmonies,
And something abides, and something floats,

In the song which I sing after you.

Fare ye well, farewell ^ !

It supplies ethereal tints to a Portrait

I will paint her as I see her.

Ten times have the lilies blown,
Since she looked upon the sun.
And her face is lily-clear,
Lily-shaped, and dropped in duty
To the law of its own beauty.
Oval cheeks encoloured famtly.
Which a trail of golden hair
Keeps from fading off to air

And a forehead fair and saintly.

Which two blue eyes undcrshine.
Like meek prayers before a shrine.
Face and figure of a child,
Thought too calm, you think, and tender.
For the childhood you would lend hei*.
Yet, child-simple, undefiled,
Frank, obedient, waiting still
On the turnings of your will.
 — — — : — —

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 175

Ai\d if any poet knew her,

He would sing of her with falls
Used in lovely madrigals.

And if any painter drew her,

He would paint her unaware
With a halo round the hair.*^

It gathers, flowering from the grave of Cowper, a recanta-

tion of his despair :

Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother while she blesses
And drops upon his burning brow the coolness of her kisses,
—
That turns his fevered eyes around 'My mother! where 's my
mother ! '

As if such tender words and deeds could come from any other !

The fever gone, vnth leaps of heart he sees her bending o'er him,
Her face all pale from watchful love, theunweary love she bore
him !

Thus woke the poet from the dream his life's long fever gave him,
Beneath those deep pathetic Eyes which closed in death to save him.'
Happilj' the light of the tomb was not needed to reveal to
herself that joy may be neighbour to affliction :

I thought once how Theocritus had sung

Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years.
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young :

And as I mused it in his antique tongue,

I saw in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had Hung
A shadow across me. Straightway 1 was 'ware,
So weeping, iiow a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward l)y the hair
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,
'
Ouess now who holds thee ? Death,' I said. But,
' ' tliere.

The silver answer rang, —

Not Death, but Love.' "
'

If she ever wearied of life, it was rest to the body that she
craved, not to the soul :
 !

17(1 I'lWE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Friends, ck-ar frieuds, wlieii it .shall be
That low breath is gone from me.
this
And round my bior yo come to weop,
Let One, most loving of you all.

Say, Not a tear must o'er her fall

'

" He giveth His beloved, sleep " !

' »

Not, after all, that repose and acquiescence of any sort

were the qualities of her predilection. On the contrary,
her favourite mental attitude is one of something she
feigns to be rebellious wrath. She is incensed with her
fatherland for its treatment of the Captive Napoleon, who,
trusting to his noblest foes,
When earth was all too grey for chivalry,
^^
Died of their mercies 'mid the desert sea ;

with the world for its acceptance of the phrase, '

Loved
Once,' as if it \yere possible to have loved, and cease to
love :

Love strikes but one hour —Love ! Those never loved

Who dream that they loved Once ;
^^

with the mad folly, as well as guilt, of sinners of her own

sex, in expecting from their partners in evil —commonly
tempters —the least fidelity to the love they have tainted.
'
Go !
'
she cries to the poor wretch she is confessing :

Thou hast chosen the Human, and left the Divine

'
!

Then, at least, have the Human shared with thee their wild berry-
wine ?
Have they loved back thy love, and when strangers approached
thee with blame,
Have they covered thy fault with their kisses, and loved thee the
'
same ?

But she shrunk and said,

God, over my head,
'

Must sweep in the wrath of His judgement- seas,

If He shall deal with me sinning, but only indeed the same
And no gentler than these.' ^^
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 177

Poetry would not be the admirable thing it is, were it

not in its essence different from all else. Masters of the
while recognizing this, mix, like Assayers
art, in general,
of the Mint, a goodly proportion of rougher and more
ordinary metal -sAith their poetic bulUon. A minority,
like Shelley and Keats, compact their edifices out of sun-
beams, and rainbows, and driving mists. Mrs. Browning
also, in the fabrics she builds, trusts to fancy. If the
im^jression her heroes and heroines
produce is often
repellent, it is that she has endeavoured to lodge beings
of flesh and blood in her very unsubstantial structures.
Shelley and Keats created inhabitants to occupy, Avithout
overweighting, the tenements. Should an explanation
of that radical error which led to her failures as con-
trasted with their successes be required, I am compelled
to seek it in the simple facts that she was a woman, and
a recluse who had spent most of her life in the clouds.
She imagined that she could settle her corporeal creatures
on them as conveniently. In Aurora Leigh, which has
always, I confess, left on my mental
a bitter taste
accumulated and
palate, all her literary idiosyncrasies are
exaggerated. The circumstances, there especially, were too
many, too modern, and too actual. But even when else-
where she indulges in analogous, though less trying, experi-
ments, the effect is to me similarly unpleasant.
Fortunately her characters and incidents frequently are
fitted to the habitations she has provided for them. The effect
then is delightful. In its highest form her verse positively
sings. How it lifts the heart in Wine of Cyprus, rocks
to rest in Sleep and Cowper's Grave, sets on fire in Confes-
sions, gathers a whole nosegay of love in Sonnets from
the Portuguese, illuminates Parnassus in A Vision of Poets,
and heralded a risen Italy while Austria seemed to bo
VOL. II M
178 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
sealing her tomb ! An aerial concert and not the less
;

fascinating for readers with a taste for strains purely

spiritual that they are as little bound to satisfy the popular
male ear as when, an undergraduate of Oxford, I heard one
destined to rule it rouse the Union to frantic applause
by jeering at the loveliest of the lovely whole.

Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Three vols. Chapman and

Hall, 18G4."
J
Insufficiencj'. ^ A Denial, nt. 2.
3 To Flush, my Dog, st. 2.
* Wine of Cyprus, stanzas !), 10, 11. 12, U, 14, 15, 4.
* A Drama of Exile.
® A Portrait, stanzas 1-6 and Kl 14.
' Cowper's Grave, stanzas 9 10.
' Sonnets from the Portuguese, Sonnet L
» The Sleep, st. 9.
>" Crowned and Buried, st. 13.
" Loved Once, st. 8.
*^ Confessions, st. 9.
 CHARLES KINGSLEY
1819—1875

Another example, among many, of the conflict for

Nature
existence of faculties fitted for analogous pursuits.
equipped Charles Kingslcy \\ith the raw material, in
varying proportions, of the forces which make a poet^
a novelist, a social reformer, a student of science, a theolo-
gian, a historian. From the first they competed for posses-
sion of him. With the powerful aid of youth poetry seized
on the leadership. Later on, with its own consent, monarchy
was abolished. A commonwealth, in Avhicli each did what
seemed good in its own eyes, took its place. The man
being such as he was, and his poetical gift what it was,
I do not suppose that literature, even poetry itself, has

lost greatly by the revolution. His character was that of

a combatant. He had a certain number of songs in him
to sing ; so many arrows of verse in his quiver. Forth
he shot, hitting the mark now and again. When the archer
found his quiver empty, he drew sword or dagger romance, —
essay, lecture, sermon —and battled as manfully as ever,
I see no ground for belief that, like some, he ceased versify-

ing by compulsion of a more masterful passion of his soul,

or out of indolence, satiety, or incapacity, mental or moral.
Sim[)ly the one special weapon had done its work and ho ;

exchanged it for another. I am grateful in the circum-

stances for the fact. He does not call up in me an idea
of incalculable possibilities of poetical ins])iration. It is

well that he should not have deluded himself into imagining

descents of the spirit when there were none.
M 2
180 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
The outset of his poetical career was at once disappointing
and ]H'oinisin<i;. His Saint's Tragedy is strong in the wrong
places. I myself ain sensible of anger rather than sympathy,
I keep wondering how much more of passionate reason-
ableness Robert Browning, for instance, might not have
instilled into the hapless slave of her own and her teacher's
fanaticism. It is a failure, if a brilliant one. Such too,
I must, on the same ground of a neglect of proportion,

judge Andromeda to be. The picture of the girl, when her

—
mother leaves her on the rock as no mother conceivably
—
could have left a child makes the heart ache, as the poet
intended it should :

Watching the pulse of the oars die down, as her own died with them,
Tearless, dumb with amaze she stood, . . .

heljiless and hopeless,

Wide-eyed, downward gazing in vain at the black blank darkness.^

But she almost disappears in an assemblage of fine scenes

described in rolling, musical hexameters. The background
is too engrossing for the action and the characters. The
accessories, dawn-lit highlands, gambolling sea-nymphs,
the charms of the golden-haired, ivory-limbed Deliverer,
Athene's gracious wisdom, are fully and melodiously set
forth ; only the fateful combat itself, with the rescue, is

dismissed in three casual lines. As an osprey on a dolphin :

Thus fell the boy on the beast ; thus rolled up the beast in his horror,

Once, as the dead eyes glared into his then his sides, death-
;

sharpened,
iStififened and stood, brown rock, in the wash of the wandering
water.2

Neither of the two works was the fruit of raw youth.

They
are their author's only poemsand neither has
of length ;

life in it. At the same time each has abundance of thought

and fancy and each gives token of something better.
;
 —

CHARLES KINGSLEY 181

In due time the promise was fulfilled by a succession

of short poems ; many of them superior to the longer.
They are superior, in that, while being things of beauty,
as those were, if inanimate, things of beautj^ these are of
a beauty which breathes and moves. Thus in Margaret's

cry to Dolcino, we seem to feel the pulsation of mingled

pride and suffering :

Ask if I love thee ? Oh, smiles cannot tell

Plainer what tears are now shoAving too well.

Had I not loved thee, my
sky had been clear ;

Had I not loved thee, had not been here,

I
Weeping by thee.
Ask if I love thee ? How else could I borrow
Pride from man's slander, and strength from my sorrow ?

Laugh when they sneer at the fanatic's bride,

Knowing no bliss, save to toil and abide
*
Weeping by thee !

A living well, if of bitterness, overflows in the complaint

of the Ugly Princess :

My parents bow, and lead them forth.

For all the crowd to sec

Ah well the people might not care

!

To cheer a dwarf like me.

They little know liow I could love.

How 1 could plan and toil,

Ti) swell those drudge <' scanty gains.

Their mites of rye and oil.

Tlicy little know what dreams have been

My playmates, night and day ;

01 equal kindness, helpful care,

A mother's perfect sway.
Now earth to earth in convent walls.
To earth in oluirchynrd sod ;
I was not gixxl enough fur man,
And so uni given Id (iod.'
 : —

182 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Kingsley's readers are never without a consciousness of
a call to arms ; of the stir of a stormy emotion which has
set imagination at work. It vibrates in the Outlaw's
defiance of laws forbidding him to

hunt God's cattle upon God's ain hills ;

in his contempt for the certainty of a noose in the end ;

and in his prayer to his mother to steal his body from the
gibbet
And when I am taen and hangit, mither, a brittling o' my deer,
Ye'llno leave your bairn to the corbie craws, to dangle in the air ;

But ye'll send up my twa douce brethren, and ye'll steal me frae the
tree,
And bury me up on the brown brown muirs, where I aye looed to be.'*

It inspired A Christmas Carol, with its gleams and shadows

alike ;

I went sighing past the Church across the moorland dreary

'
Oh never sin and want and woe this earth will leave.
!

And the bells but mock the wailing round, they sing so cheery.'
Then arose a joyous clamour from the wild fowl on the mere.
Beneath the stars, across the snow, like clear bells ringing,
And a voice within cried Listen
—
Christmas carols even here
' ! !

Though thou be dumb, yet o'er thi-ir work (he stars and snows are
*^
singing.'

Even the despair of Airly Beacon has a fresh movement

as (tf liill-top air about it ;

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon

Oh the pleasant sight to see
Shires and towns from Airly Beacon,
While my love climbed uj) to me !

Airly Beacon, Aiily Beacon ;

Oh the happy liours we lay

Deep in fern on Airly Beacon,
Courting through the summer's day !
 ; '

CHARLES KINGSLEY 183

Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon ;

Oh
the weary haunt for me,
All alone on Airly Beacon,
With his baby on my knee !

must add, though of a gusty freedom too rebellious

I
against law and order to be acknowledged later on by a
Church dignitary, the tale of the Swan-neck's recognition
— —
hopeless even for a mother of the body of King Harold,
stripped, and gashed, and featureless :

Up and spake the Swan-neck high,

'
Go ! to aU your thanes let cry
How I loved him best of all,
I whom men leman callhis
Better knew
body fair
his
Than the mother which him bare.'

Rousing erne and sallow glede.

Rousing grey wolf off his feed,
Over franklin, earl, and thane.
Heaps of mother-naked slain,
Round the red field tracing slow.
Stooped that Swan-neck white as snow ;

Never blushed nor turned away,

Till she found him where he lay ;

CHpt him in lier anncs fair,

Wrapt him in her yellow hair.
Bore him from the battle-stead.
Saw him laid in pall of lead,
Took her to a minster high,
For Earl Harcjld's soul to cry."

The merit itself of these pieces, and of others their

equals, or all but equals, a kind to suggest that
is of
the writer had reached the limits of his powers. He might
have been expected to produce more of corresponding, but
scarcely liigher, rank. A phenomenon, as in certain otlior
|M)etical careers, is that from the same pen, within brief,
if uiiy [)ositive, intervals, we IIihI issuing three poems, ideal.
 —

184 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

perfect. Except for the varieties of sadness/or suffering, they
are wholly different ;
yet each is complete, consummate.
Read a hundred times The Sands of Dee and there ;

isnever a sense of triteness. The whole is one long-drawn

musical, not sob, but sigh :

'
O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
call the cattle home
And
Across the Sands of Dee.'
The western wind was wild and dank with foam,
And all alone went she.
The western tide crept up along the sand,
And o'er and o'er the sand,
And round and round the sand,
As far as eye could see.
The rolling mist came down and hid the land ;

And never home came she.

'
Oh ! is it weed, or fish, or floating hair
A tress of golden hair,
A drowned maiden's hair
Above the nets at sea ?
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
Among the stakes on Dee.'
They rowed her in across tlic rolling foam.
The cruel crawling foam.
The cruel hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea ;

But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
Across the Sands of Dee.*

cannot pretend that the second, The Three Fishers,

I
vies with that in absolute beauty. It does not carry
about it the same d^tmosphere, the same sensation of
undefined possibilities, the same absence of any intention
in the ])Oct to ]ioint a moral, to do more than tell a story.
 ' !

CHARLES KINGSLEY 185

The outlines are clear cut. The sorrowfulness itself is

natural and limited. It is all in life's hard bargain :

For men must work, and women must weep.

And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep;
And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.'"

—
But the prospect beyond if hard that too and grey, what
strangeness, what infinitude, in its ordinance of the accept-
ance by men of lines as they are laid for them of resigna- ;

tion to what might seem to be despair of tribulation's ;

—
certainty of cessation if not repose in death The song— !

moves within narrow bounds but beats them all and it looks ;

out upon a wide landscape beyond. And the melody besides

Then for Santa Maura the least popularly known of
;

the trio; and the loftiest. 'If my poetry lives', wrote

Kingsley himself to his publisher, it will be by Santa '

Maura, and a song or two.' Spiritual chemistry has turned

a woman's love, a woman's trust, into a service of angelic
adoration, which offends neither as extravagant, nor as
profane. We shall search in vain the Dictionary of Christian
Biography for the agonies and heroism of this three-months'
bride of the blinded, tortured evangelist. Only by the poet's
fancy have they been witnessed and l)y that they are
;

here faithfully recorded in letters of ))l()()d and lire. The

})eauteou8 victim had been tempted, and half consented,
to buy at the cost of the acknowledgement of Diocletian's
divinity, and a sprinkling of incense upon the Em])eror's
altar, freedom for her liusl)iui<l—fr('('(l(im in iinknouii lands
to preach and pray '

'Bend, wave whole nations ! would no! thai lUoiic

For one Hhort word ?
He had scornfully thrown liack in her face sucii life and
liberty and remorsefully seeing her
; sin, she had bidden
the I'locoiisiil to do liis WDist.
 ' ' — ' —

186 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Stripped and scourged, she ejaculates, in horror and
shame at the recollection, to her husband :

'
And yet no earthquake came to swallow me ;

While all the court around, and walls, and roofs.

And all the earth and air were full of eyes,

Eyes, eyes, which scorched my limbs like burning flame,
Until my brain seemed bursting from my brow ;
And yet no earthquake came And then I knew !

This body was not yours alone, but God's

—
His loan He needed it ; and after that
The worst was come, and any torture more
A change—a lightening
—
even crucifixion itself — ^for that was by her bridegroom's
side ;

'
I crawled to you.
And kissed your bleeding feet, and called aloud
You heard me You know all I am at peace.
! !

Peace, peace, as still and bright as is the moon

Upon your limbs, came on me at your smile.
And kept me happy, when they dragged me back
From that last kiss, and spread me on the cross.
And bound my wrists and ancles Do not sigh — ;

I prayed, and bore it and since they raised me up.

;

My eyes have never left your face, my own, my own,

Nor will, till death comes !

Her one desire, her prayer to God, is, that strehgth may
be spared the gibbeted preacher to cry from the very
cross :

'
Words which may wake the dead !

In ages to come, she predicts, they would know his worth :

'
And ciKwn him martyr ; and his name will ring

Through all the shores of earth, and all the stars

Whose eyes are spaikliiig tlnough their tears to see
His triumph —Preacher! Martyr! —Ah —and me?
 CHARLES KINGSLEY 187

If they must couple my poor name with his,

—
Let them tell all the truth say how I loved him.
And tried to damn him by that love ! Oh Lord !

Returning good for evil ! and was this

The payment I deserved for such a sin ?
To hang here on my cross, and look at him,
Until we kneel before Thy throne in heaven !
^^

English poetr}^ from Chaucer to Tennyson, has been

rich in examples of wifely, womanly patience, devotion,
self-sacrifice. But, many and noble as they are, I think
Santa Maura ought to rank among the best. I value the
rhapsod}^ not the less highly for the human element of
hero-worship blended with the more purely celestial exalta-
tion. I only hope that the austere preacher of the Gospel,
even as imagined by Kingsley, merited it all.
I had thought, and have not dared, to set beside the
Three the Ode, admirable in itself, to the North-East
Wind. As simple singing, in its exultant, generous inso-
lence, it deserves all honour ;

What 's the soft South- Wester ?

'Tis the ladies' breeze,

Bringing homo their true-loves
Out uf all the seas :

But the black North-Eastcr,

Through the snow-storm hurled,
])rivc.s our English hearts of oak
Seaward round tlie world.

Come, as came our fathers,

Heralded by thco,
(Jonquering from the eastward,
Lords by land and sea.
Come and strong within us
;

Stir till- Vikings' blood ;

liracing brain and sinew ;

'-
Blow, tliou \siii(l oi ( iod !
188 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENCILISH VERSE
I feel, however, a spiritual want in the brave, blustering
breeze, which shuts against it the region of immortal grief

or bliss, where those other strains are entitled to have their

dwelling.
The Three are lovely conceptions ; and we should have to
ransack a library of poetry before discovering superiors in
their own class. I do not suppose, nevertheless, that great-
ness could justlj^ be attributed to their writer as a poet.
For that a man's best poetical work ought to suggest that
it is supreme in quality because it flows from a fountain of
inspiration in himself which is perennially full and deep.
It is impossible to question Kingsley's inspiration any
more than his genius. It is permissible to believe that
he held it at the general service of the wide circle of his
life's work. His romances, his histories and essays are
coloured by it even his sermons
; and it elevates them
;

all. Never was there a nature, an intelligence, more

generously cultivated, more sympathetic, more pervious to
all the informing influences, to the entire spirit, of its race,

rank, and age, throughout which more constantly breathed

an independent element, the poetic. But inspiration to
constitute distinctively a poet, and not a mere occasional
singer, insists upon exclusiveness in the vocation. It
punishes disobedience by relegating the offender to a mixed
grade and disoljcdience was thus ])unished here. How-
;

beit, of this at least I have no doubt —whatever Kingsley's

personal status among poets —that, however jealous the
principle on which a poetical anthology may be framed,
verses of his are sure to be numbered in it.

Andromeda and Other Poems, by Charles Kingsley, Rector of

Eversley. London: John W. Parker & Son, 1858. Also Collected
Edition. Macmillan, 1872.
'
Andromeda, vv. l()(i 11. ^ Jhid., vv. :Wl-.3.
 CHARLES KINGSLEY 189

' Margaret to Dolcino. • The Uglj-

Princess.
' The Outlaw, stanzas 7 and 10.
' A Christmas Carol, vv. 2-4, 9-12.

' Airly Beacon. « The Swan-neck, vy. 25-30, 35-48.

» The Sands of Dee. '" The Three Fishers, vv. 19-21.

" Santa Maura, a.d. 304, vv. 58-9, 129-38, 194-204, 225, 232-42.
Life of Alexander Macmillan, by M. G. Graves, 1910.
1- Ode to the North-East
Wind, vv. 53-68.
 [Link] WALDO EMERSON
1803—1882

Emerson in the opinion of his own generation ranked

next to Carlyle as a thinker. As a thinker he still is held,
and justly, to be profound. The larger part in bulk of
his literary life Avas devoted to the composition of essays
and lectures. To a great number even of his admirers he
is unknown as a poet. Yet I should be much surprised to
learn that he did not value himself as a poet chiefly. If
so, fallible as are authors on the proportionate value of
their works, I would in his preference have
believe he
judged Avisel}^ He
might be, probably has already been,
replaced as a philosopher he could scarcely be as a poet.
;

Literature would less easily do without Woodnotes, Fore-

runners, Bacchus, Saadi, Monadnoc, than historical and
critical science without Representative Men or Nature.
Deliberately he vowed himself to poetry, with a full
sense of the obligations, even the divinity, of the calling.
He became a voice with a message from the higher Powers.
The poet must be mute until they unseal his mouth they ;

had opened, and had shut they must reopen

; :

Ye taught my lips a single speech,

And a thousand silences.^
He need not sail the seas, or search humanity for sages
to instruct him. At the destined moment a Teacher is

at hand :

Behold he watches at the door !

Behold his shadow on the floor !

Seek not beyond thy cottage wall

Redeemers that can yield thee all
 —
; •

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 191

While thou sittest at thy door

On the desert's yellow floor,
Listening to the gray-haired crones,
Foolish gossips, ancient drones,
Saadi, see ! they rise in stature
To the height of mighty Nature,
And the secret stands revealed
Fraudulent Time in vain concealed, —
That blessed gods in servile masks
Plied for thee thy household tasks.^

Let him dwell alone, not minding the reproach of sloth for
folding his arms beside the woodland brook :

There was never mystery

But 'tis figured in the flowers ;

Was never secret history

But birds tell it in the bowers.^
The pine-tree sings to him :

'
Speak not thy .speech my boughs among ;

Put off thy years, wash in the breeze ;

My hours are peaceful centuries.

Talk no more with feeble tongue ;

No more the fool of space and time,

Come weave with me a nobler rhyme.
Only thy Americans
Can road thy line, can meet thy glance,
But the runes that I rehearse
Understands the universe
The least breath my boughs which tossed
Brings again the Pentecost,
To every soul resounding clear
In a voice of solemn cheer,
'
Am I not thine ? Are not these thine ?
'

And they reply, Forever mine

'
!
'

Come learn with mo tho fatal song

Wliioli knits tlu- world in music strong,
Corno lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes,
Of things with things, of times with times,
 —— — ; ;

1!»2 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Primeval chimes of sun and shade,
Of sound and echo, man and maid,
The land reflected in the flood,
Body with shadow still pursued.
For Nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune ;

Whether she work in land or sea,

Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air.
Or dip thy paddle in the lake I

But it carves the bow of beauty there,

And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
The wood is wiser far than thou ;

The wood and wave each other know.

Not unrelated, imaffied.
But to each thought and thing allied,
Is perfect Nature's every part,
*
Rooted in the mighty Heart.'

Spirit voices, though whence he never discovers, are

him on his way
continually sounding in his ear, to direct :

Long I followed happy guides,

I could never reach their sides ;

Their step is forth, and, ere the day,

Breaks up their leaguer, and away.
—
Flowers they strew, I catch the scent
Or tone of silver instrument
Leaves on the wind melodious trace ;

Yet I could never see their face.

I met many travellers,
Who the road had surely kept
They saw not my fine revellers,
These had crossed them while they slept.
Sometimes their strong speed they slacken.
Though they are not overtaken ;
In sleep their jubilant troop is near,
I tuneful voices overhear ;
It may be in wood or waste,
At unawares 'tis come and past.
 — —

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 193

Their near camp my spirit knows

By signs gracious as rainbows.
I thenceforward, and long after.
Listen for their harp-like laughter.
And carry in my heart, for days,
Peace that hallows rudest ways.^
The pursuit afterbeauty and truth, though it has its
solaces, is long, and never more than partially successful.
The end is not, though the God will refresh him awhile with
the cup of
Wine which Music is,

That I, drinking this.

Shall hear far Chaos talk with me ;

Kings unborn walk with me

shall ;

And the poor grass shall plot and plan

What it will do when it is man.
Quickened so, will I unlock
Every crypt of every rock.®
Still, will darkness and dumbness be ; although there are
open hours.
When the God's will sallies free,
And the dull idiot might see
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years ;

Sudden, at unawares.
Self-moved, fly-to the doors.
Nor sword of angels could reveal
Wl)at thoy conceal.''

The poet should learn to rule, and, as a Sovereign, he

proclaims his royal edicts :

The kingly l)anl

MuHt smite the chords rudely and liard,
As with hammer or with mace ;

That they may render back

Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of the supcrsolar blaze."
Like the Supreme Pontiff, he is servus servornni also, and
VOL. II N
 —

194 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

must learn to obey ; mindful always that he is but a
minister executing Another's behest. It is the lot of all

great souls :

The hand that rounded Peter's dome,

And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity ;
Himself from God he could not free ;
He builded better than he knew ;

The conscious stone to beauty grew.

The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned ;

And the same power that reared the shrine

Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.
Ever the fiery Pentecost
Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting choirs.
And through the priest the mind inspires.^

Not that to him, chosen though he be, more than half-

truths are disclosed. Existence constantly is asking riddles
bej^ond human power of guessing. The Sphinx, interrogated,
refers man to himself :

Thou art the unanswered question ;

Couldst sec thy proper eye,

Always it askcth, asketh ;
'
And each answer is a lie.^°
In the inevitable darkness he will seek inspiration from
Love from the Love Celestial, above all but also from
;
;

—
Daemonic that, not blind, but :

radiant, sharpest-sighted god.

Whose eyes pierce
The Universe,
Path-finder, road-builder.
Mediator, royal-giver."

Even he may venture among the shadows and uncertainty

of common '
Initial Love ', not complaining overmuch of
 —

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 195

rebuffs ; for he can comfort liimself with the sure trust

that :

When half-gods go,

The gods arrive.^'^

But the guiding star of his career is service to the tiniverse

— to the perfect whole :

All are needed by each one ;

Nothing is fair or good alone.

I thought the sparrow's note from lieaven,
Sitting at dawn on the alder bough ;

I brought him home, in his nest, at even ;

He sings the song, but it cheers not now,

For I did not bring home the river and skj- ;

—
He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.^*
The supreme business of the Poet-Soul thus is to strive to
comprehend the working of the World-Soul. He must not
be shocked at what may seem to be the deity's pitilessness :

He serveth the servant.

The brave he loves amain ;

Ho kills the cripple and the sick,

And straight begins again ;

For gods delight in gody.

And thrust the weak aside ;

To him who scorns their charities.

Their arms fly open wide.'*

He will neither (juarrcl with his distriliution of ])overty to

one and wealth to another doomed soon to l)e added

to his land, a lump of mould the more ;
'''

nor forget his bounty in

Spreading .Mays l<;aflcHS blooms in a damp nook.
To plt-ase th(! desert and the shiggisli hniok '" ;

in cndowinti witii warmth and brightness, and honeyed

shruljs and vines, the buily hinnhie-bee :

N 2
 ;;

U)G FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Insect lover of the sun,
Joy of thy dominion !

Sailor of the atmosphere ;

Swimmer through the waves of air

Voyager of light and noon :

Epicurean of June ^' ;

in commissioning, to glorify all this earth of ours, the

beneficent Spirit of Beauty :

Guest of million painted forms,

Which in turn thy glorj' warms !

The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,

The acorn's cup, the rainbow's arc,
The swinging spider's silver line,
The ruby of the drop of wine,
The shining pebble of the pond,
Thou inscribest with a bond.
In thy momentary play.
Would bankrupt nature to repay .^^

Happy, here and there, a man who has learnt to enjoy

the feast prepared for him :

And such I knew, a forest seer,

A minstrel of the natural year,
A lover true, who knew by heart
Each joy the mountain dales impart
It seemed that nature could not raise
A plant in any secret place.
In quaking bog, on snowy hill.
Beneath the grass that shades the rill,
But he would come in the very hour
It opened in its virgin bower,
As if a sunbeam showed the place,
And tell its long-descended race.
What others did at distance hear,
And guessed within tlie thicket's gloom,
Was showed to this philosopher.
And at his bidding seemed to come.^®
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON 197

I am not concerned to expound the philosophy, which,

generous, self-denjdng, reverent, as, in itsown way, it is,

produces a prevailing impression, less of open day, than of

a gorgeous sunset. As little do I care to defend the habit

of trimming verse to fit the thought, instead of harmonizing
both. But, whatever the differences in form and diction
between Emerson and better-recognized poets, at all events
in one respect he can meet them on equal terms. With
the greatest he shares the quality of passionate earnestness.
Passion is an essential \!haracteristic of pure poetr5\
A necessity of verse meant to move is that it shall have
moved its author first. He must have been a little mad
before his readers will feel the hurrjdng fire Avithin them-
selves. Philosophy embodied in verse usually is heedless
of this condition. Hence the disfavour with lovers of poetry
under which commonly it labours. With Emerson thought
of the profoundcst acknowledges no ser\ile obligation to
be temperate and tame. That was not his nature.
The lovely dirge in which he laments his dead brothers
amid the scenes they loved, itself glows throughout with
a warm, clinging tenderness :

In the long sunny afternoon,

The plain was full of ghosts ;

I wandered up, I wandered down,

Beset by pensive hosts.

The winding Concord gleamed below,

Pouring as wide a flood
As when my brothers, long ago.
Came with me to the wood.

But they are gone — the holy ones

Who trod with me this lovely vale ;

The strong, star- bright companions

Are silent, low, and^'pale.
 ; —— ; —

lOS FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

They coloured the horizon round ;

Stars flamed and faded as they bade

All echoes hoarkoned for their sound,
They made the woodlands glad or mad.
I touch this flower of silken leaf,
Which once our childhood kncAv ;

Its soft leaves wound me with a grief

Whose balsam never grew.
Hearken to yon pine-warbler
Singing aloft in the tree !

Hearest thou, O traveller,

What he singcth to me ?
'
Go, lonely man,' it saith ;

'
They loved thee fi'om their birth ;

Their hands were pure, and pure their faith,

There are no such hearts on earth.
You cannot unlock your heart,
Tlie key isgone with theni
Tlie silent organ loudest chants
The master's -"
requiem.'

But the fire and flame of fancy he reserved for explora-

tions of the Incomprehensible. In the majestic hymn, or
treatise, in which he seems determined to prove by explain-
ing it, that Godhead, as imagined in his scheme of Being,
is inexplicable, he falls into an ecstasy :

This vault which glows immense with light

Is the inn where he lodges for a night.
What recks such Traveller if the bowers
Which bloom and fade like meadow flowers
A bunch of fragrant lilies be,
Or the stars of eternity ?

Alike to him the better, the worse,

The glowing angel, the outcast corse.
Thou metest him by centuries,
And lo he passes like the breeze
!
;

Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,

He hides in pure transparency ;
 —

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 199

Thou askest in fountains and in fires,

He is the essence that inquires.
He is the axis of the star,
He is the sparkle of the spar,
He is the heart of every creature,
He is the meaning of each feature ;

And his mind is the sky,

Than all it holds more deep, more high.-^

Thought, as it flows from him, turns into red-hot steam.

The heat no occasional accident
is it is an inherent ;

propertj'. Philosophy in such guise may well claim for

itself the prerogatives and honours of poetic inspiration ;

and none who study Emerson's verse will refuse them to

it and him.

The Works Ralph Waldo Emerson. Five vols. (vol. iv Letters,

of :

Social Aims, Poems).Boston Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1882. Also

:

The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Two vols. (vol. i,

The Poems). London G. Bell & Sons, 1879.:

1 Merops, vol. 471 (1879 ed.).

i, p.
' Saadi, vol. iv, p. 39 (1882 ed.).

' The Apology, vol. i, p. 466 (1879 ed.).

• Woodnotes, vol. iv,

pp. 134-5 (1882 ed.).
^ Forerunners, vol. iv, pp. G8-9 (i})i(l.).
• Bacchus, vol. iv, p. 118 (ibid.).

' Merlin, vol. iv, ]). 116 (ibid.).

" Ibid., vol. iv,
p. 114 (ibid.).
• The Problem, vol. iv,
pp. 14-1.5 (ibid.).
'"
The Sphinx, vol. iv, p. 11 (ibid.).
" Initial, Dsenionic, and Celestial Love, vol. iv. jjp. 101-5 (ibi(l.\
" Give all to Love, vol. iv, p. 451 (ibid.).
" Each and All. vol. iv, p. 12 (ibid.).
'• The World-Soul, j). 27 (ibid.).
" The llamatreya, i)p. 70-1 (iliitl.).
" The Khodora, p. 58 (ibid.).
" The Hiimble-b<-e, p. 59 (ibi<l.).
'" Ode to I'.eatity,
[>!>. KO-1 (ibid.).

'• WoodnotcH. iv, i.|). 127-8 (ibid.).

" Dirge, 188-9 (1882 ed.).
]).

>' Woodiiot.H, ii, I). t(» (ibid.).

1
 EDGAR ALLAN POE
1811—1849

They are all dreams, if manufactured dreams ^The —

Raven, Lenore, The Bells, Annabel Lee, Eulalie, Ulalume,
Dreamland, The City in the Sea, A Dream within a Dream,
For Annie, Bridal Ballad, Israfel, To Helen. We see
things happening, being done, being suffered. We hear
words. We speak them. Though we are there only because
we are subject or object, we know we have nothing in
reality todo with the whole. We are conscious that it is
an from which we are sure to wake up, if once we
illusion
can shake ourselves. Throughout the entire range of poetry
nothing like it is tg be found not Christabel
;
Kubla :

Khan may compare, though chiefly by way of contrast of

the sjiontaneity in it with the artifice in Poe. In prose
some of De Quincey's visions might stand in the same line,

were they not pervaded by a palpable reasonableness.

Poe's in a sense have neither thought nor feeling and in ;

a sense they are nothing else. Somewhere, several years

ago, a writer supposed Man to possess, or be possessed by,
two souls one immortal, a heavenly spark the other at
; ;

any rate not heavenly, and certainly mortal, capable of

djing vriih the flesh. That is the sort of soul which animates
Poe's verse, if not himself.
The grace and melody of most of his few poems are
indisputable, and all but impossible to analyse and define.
The charm is as inscrutable. In The Raven wave after
wave of solemn mystery keeps rolling up. There is the
opening scene :
 —

EDGAR ALLAN POE 201

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary.

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore ;

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

—
As of some one gently rapping rapping at my chamber door.
'
'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, tapping at my chamber door
'
;

Only this, and nothing more.'

Something seems about to happen, as, on the discovery

that the sound is at the window lattice :

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he not a minute stopped or stayed he
; ;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door-

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

'
Nothing more '
in fact ; for :

the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door ;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming.
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted —nevermore !
^

Yet, withal, a sentiment is produced that things of import

are, and have been, happening, and will happen that the ;

atmosphere teems with them; and that the key to the

secret is by the Raven.
held
Then there is the sister conundrum, Lenorc :

Come, let the burial rite be read, the funeral song be sung ;

An anthem for the qucenlicst dead that ever died so young, —

A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so young.-

Evcr we seem to be clutching hold of the fringe of an idea,

which, the moment we draw it nearer, breaks between our
fingers :
 —— —

202 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Wretches ! yc loved her for lier wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health ye blessed her, that she died !

How shall the ritual, then, be read —the requiem how be sung,
— —
By you by yours, the evil eye by yours, the slanderous tongue.
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young ? ^ '

Not that either is otherwise than clear and simple by

the side of Ulalume ! A maze of fantastic, intentionally
dishevelled romance that ;
yet of an absurd, preposterous
beauty, smelling strong of the lamp by the light of which
doubtless it was conjured up, on the
night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year ;

when,
through an alley Titanic
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul,
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriae rivers that roU,^
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole,- -

That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek

*
In the realms of the boreal pole !

Relatively the lay of The Bells is simple and sane, as

they sound their appeals of triumph, dismay, anger, and
lamentation, till we feel, as it were, the tower rocking under
our feet. But even there the reader is puzzled by the
gratuitous cruelty of the ringers of the chimes that —
—
The people ah, the people
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone.
Tolling, tolling, tolling.
In that muffled monotone.
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone.^
 ; —

EDGAR ALLAN POE 203

Annabel Lee itself, which, besides being bewitchingly

sweet, is rational, still contains an enigma, if one needing
no Daniel for its solution :

Itwas many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee ;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me.
I child, and she was a child,
was a
In this kingdom by the sea ;

But we loved with a love that was more than love,

I and my Annabel Lee ;

With a love that the \\dnged seraphs of lieaven

Coveted her and me.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven.

Wont envying her and me ;

Yes ! that was the reason —

as all men know.
In this kingdom by the sea^
Tiiat the wind came out of the cloud by night
Chilling and killing' my Annabel Lee."

And fiom least, For Ainiie

last, far On the face of it !

a riddle —orwould not be Edgar Allan Poe's it is, like

it —
Annabel Lee, soon guessed only, the answer is as difficult
;

as the question. But the theme is grandly audacious,

almost subliine; just an ecstasy of life's unexplained,
perhaps inexplicable, perhaps unreal, unreasonable despair,
become, if not bliss, a tran<|iiil trance, through the embrace
of Death by Love :

Thank Heaven the crisis.

The danger is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last
And the fever called '
living '

Ih eitiHiucrcd at last.
 — —— —
;

204 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

And I rest so composedly
Now in my bed,
That any beholder
Might fancy me dead
Might start at beholding me,
Thinking me dead.

And, of all tortures

!

That torture the worst

—
Has abated the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river
Of Passion accurst
I have drunk of a water
That quenches all thirst :

And, ah ! let it never

Be foolishly said
That my room it is gloomy
And narrow my bed ;

For man never slept

In a different bed
•And, to sleep, you must slumber
In just such a bed.

And so I lie happily,

Bathing in many
A dream of the truth
And the beauty of Annie
Drowned in a bath
Of the tresses of Annie.

She tenderly kissed mo.

She fondly caressed,
And then I fell gently
To sleep on her breast
Deeply to sleep
From the heaven of her breast.
 ————

EDGAR ALLAN POE 205

When the light was extinguished

She covered me warm,
And she prayed to the angels
To keep me from harm
To the queen of the angels
To shield me from harm.

And I lie so composedly

Now in my bed,
Knowing her love,
That you fancy me dead ;

And I rest so contentedly

Now in my bed.
With her love at my breast,
That you fancy me dead
That 3'ou shudder to look at me.
Thinking me dead.

But my heart it is brighter

Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,
For
it sparkles with Annie

Itglows with the light

Of the love of my Annie
With the thought of the light
Of the eyes of my Annie.''

After all the great poem.s I have been studying, I cannot

read thi.s without fresh surprise at the potentialities of
poetry. Its death-warnicd passion is overpowering. I am
inclined to rank it highest in Poe's poetic work. Nothing
surpasses it in soaring fancy, or equals it in ideas and
spiritual power.
At the same time, in method of workmanship I see
little difference between it and the rest of this minute
body of verse. In it, as elsewhere, I observe the deliberate
laying of snares to surprise ; the same habit of recurrence
20G FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
to one theine. I find between it and, for instance, The

Raven, a j^et more intimate analogy a relationship of

;

one to the other as its converse. Thus, in The Raven, the

reader is continually led on to expect an event of import
which never happens in For Annie, the very ordinary
;

idea which we supposed we were contemplating develops

into a monstrosity of fancy at once spectral, material, and
beautiful. Contrasted as are the results, I believe the art
to be virtually identical. The effect Poe desired to compass
by a poem would seem to have been that of a single long
pulsating shock, starting one does not know whence. It
was a point of pride with him, both that he should be able
to tell himself hehad accomplished his object in conformity
with rigid rules, and that his readers should never guess
them.
He himself paraded in print the absence of spontaneous
inspiration from his composition of The Raven. It was, he
has told the world, the product of a mechanical operation
he had CMnningly devised. He who had boasted that with
him '
poetry was not a purpose, but a passion ', details
elaborately how and why he introduced beauty, with its
highest expression, sadness, and death ; a refrain, with
a bird —by choice a raven —to repeat it, in unconscious
unison with the throbbings of despair in dead Lenore's
lover and, beneath all, a suggestive undercurrent of
;

further meaning ; —deliberately confining the whole within

a few more than one hundred Unes.^
The explanation at the time tasked the capacity of
popular belief more even than he weirdness of the poem
hypnotized common understandings. A natural conjecture
was that Poe either deceived himself into measuring back
step by step ground his fancy had already taken in its
stride, or simply was diverting himself with an experiment
 EDGAR ALLAN POE 207

on public credulity. Really, however, what would have

been an altogether unlikely mystification if imputed to
another poet, ceases to be wholly incredible with respect to
him. The iron rigour with which in The Raven the thread
—chain rather — of the central idea is stretched stiff and
taut favours indeed the suggestion of artifice rather
than an unpremeditated flight of imagination. At all
events no poet but himself could have tried to persuade
his readers to think they smelt in his inspiration the saw-
dust and oil of the workshop.
Although no critic, not even Poe himself, has attempted
to apply the extreme mechanical theory to others of his
poems, it cannot be denied that in general they are liable
to the charge of an excess of art. None breathe of simple
nature. Even the elegance of the lines to Helen with her
'
Naiad airs ', which bring admirers
home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome,®
is but dumb sculpture, though of ivory and gold. Though
— —
a spontaneous spark a lurid one from the soul kindles
the dead man's appeal to his love For Annie, its rush of
fire in constrained it has had to flame along a line ruled
;

for, not by, it. Never was verse of such apparent, and so
httle real, freedom as all of Poe's or, consequently, so
;

artistic, which is less satisfying so pure of loose taint

;

with less of wholesome freshness. No healthful breeze

blows from off its Dead Sea surface. No singing birds fly
over it though itself, in its ebb and flow, makes song,
;

harmony, fairy music. Whatever he wrote, from his

precocious and libertine, not idle, youth to the delirious
end in the Baltimore hospital, possesses the same qualities
of unfailing grace an<l tone. But the whole is like a reverie
208 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
between sleep and waking, alwaj'^s fascinating, never
with an atmosphere about it as of a sepulchral
restful,
vault.

Works Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. H. Ingram. Four vols. 1874-5. Also
of
Poetical Works, ed. James Hannay. London Charles Grffiin, 1852.
:

' The Raven, stanzas 1, 7, 18. - Lcnorc, st. 1.

» Ibid., St. 2. * Ulalumc, st. 2.

' The Bells, st. 4. * Annabel Lee, stanzas 1, 2, 4,

' For Annie, stanzas 1, 3, G, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
' Philosophy of Composition (Works), vol. ii, pp. 2G2-70.
* To Helen (Poems written m Youth), st. 2.
HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW
1807—1882

The poetry of echoes, of shadows, of wandering clouds,

which have caught sunset purples. Literature numbers
poets without forefathers or descendants. Such were
Homer, the Attic dramatists, Chaucer, the EHzabethans,
Chatterton, Burns. There have been poets, great poets,
with ancestry and successors, hke Pope. Others, real too
there have been foster children suckled on milk of strangers,
;

and in an atmosphere not their own. In default of examples

and models from without, they might never have sung.
8uch is Longfellow. If inspiration ever were traceable,
it would be seen that his library had inspired him. Diction
and manner he seldom borrows impulses, emotions,
;

constantly. The limitations observable in his work are

the inevitable consequences. No is to bo
Pindaric strain
expected no soaring to the heights. Momentum thus
;

adventitious is exhausted too soon to supply impetus for

a free career. It is an admirable supplement to native
sweetness, intelligence, tenderness, sense of picturesqueness.
A hundred delicate chords must have been thrilling through
Longfellow's temperament, as the vil)rati()ns of extraneous,
scarcely alien, minstrelsy touched them into music. To
many natures the counter-note is actually more delightful,
more awakening, than the unsoftencd, full princi|)al.
Certainly the reflected character of the melody is the secret
of the charm of a lovely ghost of medievalism like the
Golden Legend.
Never was poet humbler toward his elders in the
VOL. 11 O
210 FIVE CENTITRTES OF ENGLISH VERSE
vocation more modest and reverential yet in a sense also
; ;

more exacting. His nature incorporated as much as it

could of other poetic souls. Something was extracted here,
something there. Every constituent in the new creation
was genuine, with characteristics of its own, but compressed
to meet the demands of the rest. Each was kept malleable
to receive a stamp from the borrowing self. That self was
thoughtful without being a thinker ;
given to learning, not
to research ; sympathetically inquisitive, not philosophic ;

accustomed to look to a printed page to put fancy in

.

motion. From the vast store of his reading Longfellow

selected instinctively whatever he could assimilate and feel.

In his poems we have the fruit of his studies and their ;

essence has become his. There the explanation is of the

anger, the bitter contempt, which his successive earlier
volumes stirred in divers critics at the times of their
appearance. They were irritated by catching and losing
hold continually of clues to sources from which he had
drawn. They raged at the self-complacency, as ' they
regarded it,which he propounded discoveries by
-wdth
illustrious predecessors as novelties of his own. They did
not care to understand that his poetry came finally from
his heart, whencesoever its elements might have been
derived ; that what to them were truisms were for him
very truths. For his public they were truths too, and
living truths. He was absolutely sincere when he preached
venerable moralities, like the Psalm of Life and Excelsior,
as a new Gospel. The imdoubting confidence with which
he proclaimed it, if it raised up scoffers by the dozen,
brought him disciples by the ten thousand.
The jeers, coming from the intellectual class in the Old
Country, must, I am afraid, have caused aches beyond the
power of applause by the multitude to heal. All his work
 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW 211

indicates a delicate, sensitive organism. It was an accident

that his early popularity was largely due to some sounding
platitudes. Platitudes are not necessarily criminal. Litera-
ture is paved them. Often they have been with our
^\ith
greatest the nursing-mothers of royal sublimities. In
Longfellow's verse they are naive and graceful but it ;

was his misfortune that they won him admiration, which,

for poets to be allowed to bear it in comfort, ought to fall,
a halo, from above, and not steam rankly up from below. He
endured the consequent obloquy, however wounding, with
uncomplaining dignitJ^ He did not, like famous English
contemporaries, turn upon his assailants and rend them.
The excellence of some of his work was never denied,
and is indisputable. His translations, especially from the
German and Spanish, are full of beauty. That of Coplas
de Manrique's Ode on his father Rodrigo's death is grave
and noble. Others from Miiller, Uhland, Salis, enhance the
merits of the originals. Take, for examples. Whither ? the
Statue over the Cathedral Door, the legend of the Crossbill,
and the lovely Song of the Silent Land :

Into the Silent Land !

Ah 1 who shall lead us thither ?

Clouds in the evening sky more -darkly gather,

And shattered wrecks lie thicker on the strand.
Who leads us with a gentle hand
Thither, O thither,
Into the iSilent Land ?

Into the Silent Land ?

To you, ye boundless regions
Of all perfection Tender morning-visions
!

Of beauteous souls The Future's pledge and band

! !

W'lio in Life's battlt; firm doth stand.

Shall bear Hope's teii'ler bhjssoms
Into the Silent Land !

O 2
 • ; ;

•2\-2 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

O Land ! O Land !

For all the broken-hearted

The mildest herald by our fate allotted,
Jieckons, and with inverted torch doth stand
To lead lis with a gentle hand
Lite the land of the great Departed,
^
Into the Silent Land !

Gradually the sneering even at his original verse went

out of fashion, as volume after volume demonstrated an
unmistakable poet. Evangeline had been a revelation to
many and surely fancy rarely has created a sweeter
;

maiden, equal ahke to joy and tears :

Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers

—
But a celestial brightness a more ethereal beauty^ —
Shone on her face and encircled her form, when, after confession,
Homeward serenely she walked with God's benediction upon her.
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.''
Purists could bring no graver reproach than the hexa-
meters. HiaAvatha, notwithstanding its hendecasyllables,
converted others. Mark Pattison, who objected to Long-
fellow for his indulgence in truisms, was obliged to praise
the comparison of the advent of jostling human disasters
to the gathering of a swarm of vultures :

Never stoops the soaring vulture

On his quarry in the desert,
On the sick or wounded bison,
But another vulture, watching
From his high aerial look-out.
Sees the downward plunge, and follows
And a third pursues the second.
Coming from the invisible ether,
First a speck, and then a vulture.
Till the air is dark with pinions.^

The wonder to me is, as I recall the fight on the poet's

behalf, how any oppo-sition should have survived the still
 ;

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 213

earlier publication of a romance so enchanting as The

Golden Legend.
At present controversy is over and Longfellow's place
;

is assured. For many, whom Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats,

Bro\TOing, only dazzle, tire, or bcAvilder, poetry neverthe-
less is a necessity of existence. On their natures Long-
fellow's serene imaginings shed an effluence comforting
and tranquillizing. They are not offended by a lack of
originality and profundity, as in Footsteps of Angels, when
in the firelit dusk,

the forms of the departed

Enter at the open door
The beloved, the true-hearted,
Come to visit me once more ;
*

in the reminiscence of a walk to church

with thee,
gentlest of my friends !

Thy dress was like the lilies,

And thy heart as pure as they ;

One of (jod's holy messengers

Did walk witli mo that day.

I saw tlic branches of the trees

Bend down thy touch to meet,
The clover- [Link] in the grass
llisc up to kiss thy feet ^ ;

in The Bridge, witli its

long procession
and fro,
Still i)assing to

The young heart hot and restless.

And tho old suljdiicd and slow ;
"

in tho laudation of tho n-d I'lanct Mars :

 ; ;

214 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

The star of tho unconquered will,
He rises in my breast,
Serene, and resolute, and still.

And calm, and self-possessed ;

'

in The Reaper and tho Flowers ;

'
Lord has need of these flowerets
JNIy gay,'
The Reaper said, and smiled ;

'
Dear tokens of the earth are they,
Where he was once a child.
They shall all bloom in fields of light,
Transplanted by my care.
And saints upongarments white,
their
^
These sacred blossoms wear ; '

or in Blind Bartimeus's importunate petition, with its

musical Greek.^ They only know, and are content to know,

that such strains calm troubled nerves, and touch the heart.
Even persons who habitually require of poetry that
it shall stimulate and inflame, have occasional moods
inclining them to listen to gentler music :

Not from the grand old masters,

Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.
For, like strains of martial music.
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavoiu'
And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet,

Whose songs gushed from his heart.
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from tlie eyelids start
And the night shall be filled with music.
And the cares that infest the day.
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.^"
 ;: ;

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 215

Nowhere may the thought, the feeUng itself, rise from

unknown depths ; but the singer had been in spiritual com-

panionship with great minds of the past and the present
and a consciousness, dim, suspicious, and hesitating at
first, came at length to pervade each side of the Atlantic

that his lesser instrument beats time in unison with theirs.

Never, indeed, was there a more grateful, a more enthusi-
astic sympathy than his. He rejoiced to dwell upon grand
deeds as well as upon grand thoughts. His fancy haunted
the scenes of memorable actions, and the homes of their
doers. For manj^ of us it is impossible to visit cities where
he has been without tracing his footsteps by a gracious
lightthey have left behind them. We find him in Nurem-
berg attenduig upon the illustrious in song and art

Here, when Art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart,
Lived and laboured Albrecht Durer, the EvangeHst of Art
Hence in silence and in sorrow, toiling still with busy hand,
Like an emigrant ho wandered, seeking for the Better Land.
'
Emigravit is the mscription on the tombstone where he lies
' ;

Dead he is not — —
but departed for the artist never dies.
Fairer seems the ancient city, and the sunshine seems more fair.
That he once has trod its pavement, that ho once has breathed its

air !
"

Hi.s verse beautifies Wiirtzburg's minster towers with the

memory of Walter von der Vogclweid the Minnesinger,
and his bequest to his teachers in tiie art of song :

Thus the bard of love departed ;

And, fulfilling Iiis desire,

On ilia tomb tlio birds wore feasted

By the children of the choir.
There they sang their merry carols.
Sang their lauds on every side ;

And the name their voices uttered

Was the name of Vogelweid.
 ; :

21 f) FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Time lias long effaced the inscriptions
On the cloister's funeral stones,
And tradition only tells us
Where repose the poet's bones.

But around the vast Cathedral,

By sweet echoes multiplied,
Still the birds repeat the legend,
And the name of Vogelweid,^^

If I were ever, as doubtless I shall never be, in the Palace

of Palermo, modern as it is, I should expect
through the open window, loud and clear,
To hear the monks chant in the Chapel near.
Above the stir and tumult of the street
'
He has put down the mighty from their seat.
And has exalted them of low degree ^^ !
'

For thousands of travellers since Longfellow, have.

As the evening shades descended,

Low and loud and sweetly blended.
Low at times and loud at times.
And changing like a poet's rhymes,
Rung the beautiful wild chimes
From the belfry in the market
Of the ancient town of Bruges.

They still have heard, blending with their dreams,

those magic numbers.
As they loud proclaimed the flight
And stolen marches of the night
Till theirchimes in sweet collision
Mingled with each wandering vision.
Mingled with the fortune-tcUing
Clipsy-bands of dreams and fancies.
Which amid the waste expanses
Of the silent land of trances
Have their solitary dwelling.^'

Peculiar, and exotic, as, for twentieth-century Europe,

 HENRY WADS WORTH LONGFELLOW . 217

remains the capital of Bohemia, the American student-

poet's track ^nll be discernible there too by an added
touch of eeriness through his

legend strange and vague,

That a midnight host of spectres pale
Beleaguered the walls of Prague.

Beside the Moldau's rushing stream,

With the wan moon overhead.
There stood, as in an awful dream.
The army of the dead.

White as a sea-fog, landward bound.

The spectral camp was seen.
And, with a sorrowful, deep sound,
The river flowed between.^^

The its spell upon Longfellow's

old world early laid
fancy ; andwas never taken off. We see in the story,
it

truly Golden, of Elsie and Prince Henry of Hoheneck,

how potent and lasting was the impress. Scholars might
discover errors and misconceptions in that delightful
Mystery. Few, I think, will care to deny its fidelity to
the spirit. At all events the charm of its scenes, almost
l)ewildcring in their variety, is irresistible. There is a lino
humour in the portraiture of the glorious Cellarer of the
Black Forest monastery, as he samples, to begin, Iho
precious wine of the Holy Ghost :

Ah how the streamlet laughs and sings

! !

Wliat a delicious fragrance springs

From the deep ilagoii, while it lilis,
As of hyacinths and dalYodils !

Between this cask and the Abl)ot's lips

Many have been the sips and slips.
() cordial delicious ! U soother of pain !

It tioiihcii like sunshine into my brain !

 : ; ;

218 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

And now a flagon for such as may ask
A draught from the noblo Bacharach cask,
And I will be gone, though I know full well
The cellar 's a choerfuUer place than the cell.^*'

The devotion to his art of the Friar in the Scriptorium, as

he closes work at dusk, and gazes from his window, makes
a delightful contrast

How sweet the air is How fair the scene

! !

I wish I had as lovely a green

To paint my landscapes and my leaves !

How the swallows twitter under the eaves !

There, now, there is one in her nest

I can just catch a glimpse of her head and breast,
And will sketch her thus in her quiet nook.
For the margin of my Gospel book.^^

And, lastly, the ecstasy of —

Monk Felix taught, by the
lapse of a hundred years in as many moments of a bird's
song, that notliing with God is impossible — is something
to dream of :

One morning, all alone,

Out of his convent of gray stone,
Into the forest, older, darker, grayer.
His lips moving as if in prayer,
His head sunken upon his breast,
As in a dream of rest,
Walked the Monk FeUx. All about
'j'hc broad, sweet sunshine lay without,
Filling the summer air
And within the woodlands as he trod,
The twilight was like the Truce of God
With worldly woe and care ;
Under him lay the golden moss ;

And above him the boughs of hemlock- trees

Waved, and made the sign of the Cross,
And whispered their Benedicites.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 219

He heeded not, but pondered

On the volume in his hand,
A vohnne of Saint Augustine,
Wherein he read of the unseen
Splendours of God's great town
In the unknown land.
And, with his eyes cast down
In humility, he said :

'
I believe, O God,
What herein I have read.
'
But, alas I do not understand
! !

And lo he heard
!

The sudden singing of a bird,

A snow-white bird that, from a cloud
Dropped down.
And among tlie branches brown
8at singing
So sweet, and clear, and loud,
It seemed a thousand harpstrings ringing.
And the Monk Felix closed his book.
And long, long,
With rapturous look.
He listened to the song,
And hardly breathed or stirred,
Until he saw, as in a vision,
Tiie land Elysian,
And in the heavenly city heard
Angelic feet
Fall on the golden flagging of the street.
And ho would fain
Have caught the wondrous bird,
But strove in vain ;

For it flew away, away,

Far over hill and dell.
And instead of its sweet singing
He heard the Convent bell
Suddenly in the silence ringing
For the service of noonday.
And ho retraced
His patliway homeward sndiy and in haste."
220 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
If the many productions of Longfellow's later years did
not often rise to the level of this, yet things of beauty were
interspersed ; and already he had permanently triumphed
over prejudice and fastidiousness. Had he been one to
boast, he might have claimed that English literature could
more contempo-
easily dispense with several of his brilliant
raries —
than with him. Nevertheless I cannot but suspect,
cannot but fear, that the singer of the woful and sweet
tragedy of Grand-Pre, of the Indian Edda as various as —
it is harmonious —
of the frankness of the bright Puritan
maiden, of the Golden Legend itself, may sometimes have
sighed to himself, as his brush laid-on his silvery moon-
light, or evening afterglow —
may have been tempted to
envy the stormy passionateness of members of his craft
both in the New World and the Old may have complained—
of his Muse that she was placidly content to reflect the
radiance of other luminaries instead of bvirning with fire
of her own.

The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Complete

Edition. London George Rontledge & Sons, 1865.
:

^ Song of the Silent Land. From the German of Sails.

* Evangeline, Part I.
3 The Song of Hiawatha, XIX, The Ghosts.
* Footsteps of Angels. ^ A Gleam of Sunshine.
* The Bridge. ' The Light of Stars.
' The Reaper and the Flowers.
' Blind Bartimeus.
10 The Day is Done, stanzas 5, G, 7, 10, 11.
" Nuremberg. '- Walter von Vogclweid.
" King Robert of Sicily. '* The Belfry of Bruges : Carillon
'^ The Beleaguered City. '" The Golden Legend, iv.
" Ibid. " Ibid., ii.
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
1819—1891

Lowell might be forgiven if in later life he had grown

jealous of Hosea Biglow. The Biglow Papers shone with

a brilliancy which, in the ej'es of the ordinary reader, put
out the flame of a lifetime of serious versifying. B}' many
admirers of the Papers it seems almost to be forgotten

even now that their author was a poet by profession.

Certainly very few act as if they were aware that his poetry
is of a kind particularly requiring quiet, intelligent, and,

I may say, continuous, study. Not that his crusade of

satire against slavery was a casual adventure, or tour de
force, outside of his regular course. On the contrary, it

was a natural stage in his career, and ought to be reckoned

as one of its milestones. He did not belong to the old order
of poets. They were by profession, as it might happen,
soldiers and sailors, courtiers, diplomatists, politicians,
churchmen, mystics, dramatists, men of letters, first. By
(•f)in])ulsi()ii f)f imagination, or by accident, they were poets
afterwards. As he to l)e classed among those who
little is

in these latter days have fenced round for themselves

a life apart, as a shrine for their chosen Muse. It could
not have occurred to him to appropriate his age, with its
joys, troubles, and interests, as mere material and incentive
for inspiration. He never dissembled either his occupation
of poet, or that as poet he was citizen also, and lighter, and
preacher. Wherever the battle of humanity was hottest,
there was he to be found, with his lyre. In the intervals
222 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
he mounted the pulpit. His poems, the serious as much
as the burlesque and satirical, the Ghost-Seer, and Hunger
and Cold, equally Avith the Biglow Papers, are part of the
history of the period and its thought. Justly to appreciate
either sort, his reader must in memory, or in fancy, descend
into the field,and imagine himself a combatant.
A necessary resultis some risk of confusing in the poetry

matter and spirit. The ethereal is apt to get chained to

an incident antiquated or dead. When the subject-matter
is philosophy, it is philosophy blown red-hot with disputa-

tion. The song, which at the time it was sung was itself
the comment, now itself wants commentaries. Not every-
body is able, and comparatively few are at pains, to read
between the Unes. Then too the poet's impetuous fluency
adds to the turmoil. His fancy exulting in the chances of
a fiery conflict, whether to end in a victory or a rout,
would burst into a rush of verse. On it sped, disdaining
to be stayed while there was a public still passionate
enough to supply readers. As I turn page after page, it
is tantalizing to feel that a living idea, a burning thought,

is gasping for breath beneath a cinder-pile of newspaper

wranglings, or of free-fights in Congress, To its lovers

poetry is self-sufficing, a being with a complete life of its

own, neither a conflagration, nor a scaffolding. They are

no better pleased when the bard abandons party strife,
and takes, as his legitimate and normal vocation, to
philosophy. Readers of Lowell are generally between
Scylla and Charybdis. They are offered their choice of
vital social and metaphysical problems to guess, one more
intricatethan another. He never sat down to write a line
without a driving sense of a message to deliver, now down
upon earth, and now aloft among the stars. His public
is expected to follow and decipher the whole. Wisdom,
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 223

generous indignation, phosphoric wit, criticism, constructive

as well as destructive, lightnings opening Heaven as they
strike the earth, are all there. The pity is that too often
either the thinker has overlaid the poet, or the inspiration
is playing about a dead theme. It is as when a canvas has
rotted under a masterpiece of art.
The poet, however, is there always, though, it may be,
in the background ; it is the readers, I am afraid, who are
likely to be in [Link] general pubHc neither interests
itself bygone partisanships, nor has spare intelligence
in
for dialectics. Even an enthusiast for poetry does not
expect to have to keep the fire on his hearth alight with
the ashes of yesterday, or steam coal. None could perceive
more clearly how he missed popularity for his graver verse,
or bear the loss more cheerfully, than Lowell himself :

who 's striving Parnassus to climb

With a whole bale of '
isms '
tied together with rhyme ;
^

and, visiting Chartres,

to feed my eye,
And give to Fancy one clear holiday,
Scarce saw the minster for the thoughts it stirred ;—
The painted windows, freaking gloom with glow,
Dusking the sunshine which thoy seem to cheer,
Meet symbol of the senses and the soul.
And the whole pile, grim with the Northman's thought
Of life and death, and doom, life's equal fec.-

When the poet in him has clear possession of tiic licld,

the sadder and more pensive phases of human experience
still an; those to which ho turns by preference. He movirus
the death of an infant son :

A cherub who had lost his way

And wandered hither, so his stay
 — ; ; ;

224 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

With us was short, and 'twas most meet
That he should be no delvcr in earth's clod,
Nor need to pause and cleanse his feet
To stand before his God :

Oh, blest word —Evermore !

^

Tlic contrast between universal laughing, busy nature and

the sudden pause and muteness of death surprises, and
bewilders him :

The bee hums on ; around the blossomed vine

Whirs the light humming-bird the cricket chirps; ;

The locust's shrill alarum stings the ear ;

Hard by, the cock shouts lustily from farm to farm. ;

His cheery brothers, telling of the sun.

Answer, till far away the joyance dies :

We never knew before how God had filled

The summer air with happy living sounds ;

All round us seems an overplus of life.

And yet the one dear heart lies cold and still.*
He gazes down, while he shudders, at the abyss, yet deeper
than the grave, which separates the nearest and dearest
from the darkened mind :

There thou sittest ; now and then thou meanest

Thou dost talk with what we cannot see,
Lookest at us with an eye so doubtful,
It doth put us very far from thee ;

There thou sittest we would fain be nigh thee,

;

But we know that it can never be.

Strange it is that, in this open brightness,

Thou shouldst sit insuch a narrow cell
Strange it is that thou shouldest be so lonesome
Where those are who love thee all so well
Not so much of thee is left among us
As the hum outliving the hushed bell.^
—
Akin to the attraction with more still in it of the
—
which draws him to the contera-
attraction of repulsion
 — —

JA^IES RUSSELL LOWELL 225

platioii of the mj'stery of death, is the impulse to picture

the contrast of luxurj^ and want. Amid scenes of careless,
wasteful revelry, he ever is seeing how at the gay dancers
two grim Sisters, with

Wolves' eyes, through the windows peer ;

Little dream they you are near,

Hunger and Cold !

Scatter ashes on thy head,

Tears of burning sorrow shed.
Earth ! and be by Pity led
To Love's fold ;

Ere they block the very door

With lean corpses of the poor.
And will hush for naught but gore,
Hunger and Cold ^ !

It is like him that he allows a farewell glow of light and

happiness to cheer sheer forlornness, however originating :

The sharp storm cuts her forehead bare,

And piercing through her garments thin,
Beats on her shrunken breast, and there
Makes colder the cold heart within.
where a ruddy glow
!Shc lingers
Streams outward through an open shutter.
Adding more bitterness to woe.
More lonencss to desertion utter.

She a woman's voice within,

licars
Singing sweet words her childhood knew.
And years of misery and sin
Furl off, and leave her heaven bhic.

Enhaloed by a mild, warm glow,

From man's humanity apart,
She hears old footsteps wandering slow
Through the lone chambera of the heart.
VOL. II P
 —

226 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Next morning something licavily
Against the opening door did weigh,
And there, fron\ sin and sorrow free,
A woman on the threshold lay.
For, whom the heart of man shuts out,
Sometimes the heart of (!od takes in,
And fences them all round about
With silence 'mid the world's loud din.'

But for soulless greed, for the irredeemably lost bondsiiicu

of gold, whom he meets in the noisy City's streets, his creed
spares not a glimmer :

They pass me by like shadows, crowds on crowds.

Dim ghosts of men, that hover to and fro.
Hugging their bodies round them, like thin shrouds
Wherein their souls were buried long ago.

Lo how they wander round the world,

! their grave,
Whose ever gaping maw by such is fed,
Gibbering at living men, and idly rave,
'
We, only, truly live, but ye are dead.'
Alas poor fools, the anointed eye may trace
!

A dead soul's epitaph in every face ^ !

Happily he possessed, and from time to time used, the

gift of simple sweetness, as well as those of preacher and
judge. Readers, if they please, may sun themselves in pure
charm, seeking nothing further. The deafness to divine
singing, until the minstrel has departed back to his native
Heaven, was never more prettily moralized than in the
ballad of the exile of Phoebus Apollo from Olympus to the
sheep-folds of King Admetus :

Men granted that his speech was wise,

But, when a glance they caught
Of his slim grace and woman's eyes.
They laughed, and called him good-for-naught.
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 227

Yet after he was dead and gone,

And c"cn his memory dim,
Earth seemed more sweet to live upon,
More full of love, because of him.
And day by day more holy grew
Each spot where he had trod,
Till after- poets only knew
Their first-born brother as a god.^
As his pen w auders about the glades, the forest becomes
a woodland enchanted !

The great August noonlight,

Through myriad rifts slanted.
Leaf and bole thickly sprinkles
With flickering gold ;

There in warm August gloaming.

With quick, silent brightenings,
From meadow-lands roaming.
The fire-fly twinkles
His fitful heat-lightnings.
The little fount twinkles
Its silver saints'-bells,
That no sprite ill-boding
May make his abode in
Those innocent dells.'"
He dreams bright dreams, as he watches the despised
dandelion fringing, in blithesome May, the dusty road -with
harmless gold :

Then think I of deep shadows on the grass,

Of meadows where in sun the cattle graze,
Where, as the breezes pass,
The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways ;

Of leaves that slumber in a cloudy mass,

Or whiten in the wind of waters hhw
;

That from the distance sj)arkle through

Some woodland gaj), and of a sky abovf.
Where one white cloud, like a stray laml), ilotli move."
Heaven anrl earth seem to meet in his (ah- of tlie Christ-
!• 2
 — —

228 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

like Yiissouf's dealing with the outcast, whom he was
helping with horse and money to flee the avengers of
blood :

'
Sheik, I cannot k'avo thee so ;

I will repay thee ; thou hast done

all this

Unto that Ibrahim who slew thy son

'
!

'
Take thrice the gold,' said Yussouf, for with thcc '

Into the desert, never to return.

My one black thought shall ride away from me ;
First-born, for whom by day and night I yearn,
Balanced and just are all of God's deci-ees ;

Thou art avenged, my first-born sleep in peace

; !
' ^^

will be haunted by the picture of the

Reader, like poet,
maiden attended home from a dance, and left at her door
holding a candle to light her cavalier, as he drives away
(lo^^'n the rainy, dark avenue :

The vision of scarce a moinent.

And hardly marked at the time.
It comes unbidden to haunt me.
Like a scrap of ballad- rhyme.
Had she beauty ? Well, not what they call so ;

You may find a thousand as fair ;

And yet there 's her face in my memory

With no special claim to be there.
As I sit sometimes in the twilight,
And call back to life in the coals
Old faces and hopes and fancies
—
Long buried good rest to their souls !

Her face shines out in the embers ;

I see her holding the light,

And hear the crunch of the gravel,
And the sweep of the rain that night.
'Tis a face that can never grow older.
That never can part with its gleam,
'Tis a gracious possession forever
For is it not all a dream ? ^^
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 229

Melody scarcely ever fails him. Often it is so captivating

as to tempt us to forget a fine thought in the sweet rhji^hm,
as In the Twilight, where he likens the ghost from Dream-
land :

Of a life lived somewhere, 1 know not

In what diviner sphere,

Of memories that stay not and go not,

to the legend of the orgin of the vioUn's music in the

instrument's regrets for old forest voices :

The secrets of the wind it sings ;

It hears the April-loosened springs ;

And mixes with mood its

All it dreamed when it stood
In the murmurous pine-wood
Long ago !

The magical moonlight then

Steeped every bough and cone ;

The roar of the brook in the glen

Came dim from tiie distance blown ;

The wind through its glooms sang low,

And it swayed to and fro
With delight as it stood
In the wonderful wood,
Long ago " !

I do not pretend that all, or nearly all, Lowell's verse

rises to the lieights of inspiration. Too often it is prolix.
Much of it again is to be regarded, as I have intimated,
less as poetry than, if not skirmishings in a tournament of
wit, as a species of journalism in cxcelsis, or metrical
exercises in piiilosopliy. Tlic residuum, however, is un-
doubted poetry, and of a high order. Born of a rich nature,
a passionate soul, it makes hearts to glow, brains to grow
ideas. 1 cainujt read it without a slioek at the thought
that nine out of ten iMiglishinen well re;ul in the IJjl'Iow
•2'M) VWV: (!ENTITRTES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Papers, for wliom LoiiglVllow is as a compatriot, who even

arc familiar with the names of VVhittier and Bryant, would
be amazed to hear of James llusscll Lowell as among the
world's poets. — Yet he is.

The roctical Works of Jaines Russell Lowell. Household Edition.

Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1882.
'
A Fa bio for Critics. - The (Cathedral.
^ Threnodia (Earlier Poems).
* On the Death of a Friend's Child (Miscellaneous Poems).
^ The Darkened Mind (Under the Willows).
" Hunger and Cold (Miscellaneous Poems).
' The Forlorn (Earlier Poems).
* The Street (Sonnets).
'The Shepherd of King Admetus (Miscellaneous Poems).
>" The Fountain of Youth (Under the Willows).

" To the Dandelion (MLscellaneous Poems).

'- Yussouf (Under the Willows).
" An Ember Picture (ibid.).
>• In the Twilight (ibid.).
 EDWARD FITZGERALD
1809—1883

It is at once easy and hard to account for the FitzGerald-

Cult. The fervour of many behevers in the gospel pro-
pounded, '
according to Edward FitzGerald,' by the Persian
astronomer-poet, is inteUigible enough. The faith is that of
Epicurus without the incubus of a philosoi^hical system.
None could be simpler, or more cheerfully practised Live :
'

your life on earth as if earth, not you, were eternal ; as if

there were neither Heaven nor Hell. Live for the day,
without concern for the morrow or, if there be a morrow,
;

any more for that than for yesterday. Play, if you can
find no better diversion, ^ith whatever theories or dogmas,
religious or otherwise, you please. Never, at all events,
allow them to colour or cloud your fleeting moments. Your
active business is to take advantage of the pleasures of
the body, while you have a body. Especially, enjoy music
and drinking if in a garden of roses, with a fair companion,
;

so much the better. Therein lies all your duty, which is only
Never was a more unethcreally agreeable creed
to yourself.'
preached. But tnany of Kit/XJerald's readers who abhor
Omar Khayyam's philosophyenthusiastically appreciate the
verse and it is much less difficult to explain acceptance of
:

the one thanwhy the other satisfies to the point of rapture.

FitzGerald inter])()hited into the laborious indolence he
loved a bare modicum of poetical work. Of the pieces
directly original the most imi)ortantis Jiredfield Hall. The
description of the home of successive squires of his race ia
deliciously simple :
232 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
Lo, an English mansion founded
In tlie elder James's reign,
Quaint and stately, and surrounded
Witli a pastoral domain.

With well-timber'd lawn and gardens,

And with many a pleasant mead.
Skirted by the lofty coverts
Where the hare and pheasant feed.

Flank'd it is with goodly stables,

Shelter'd by coeval trees ;

So honest gables
it lifts its

Toward the distant German seas ;

Where it once discern'd the smoke

Of old sea-battles far away ;
Saw victorious Nelson's topmasts
Anchoring in HoUesley Bay.
But whatever storm might riot,
Cannon roar, and trumpet ring.
Still amid these meadows quiet
Did the yearly violet spring ;

Heaven's starry hand suspended

Still
That light balance of the dew,
That each night on earth descended,
And each morning rose anew ;

And the ancient house stood rearing

Undisturb'd her chimneys high.
And her gilded vanes still veering
Toward each quarter of the sky :

wave to wave succeeding

Wiiile like
Through the world of joy and strife,
Household after household speeding
Handed on the torch of life.
Here they lived, and here they greeted,
Maids and matrons, sons and sires,
Wandering in its walks, or seated
Round its hospitable fires ;
 ! ;

EDWARD FITZGERALD 233

Till the Bell that not in vain

Had summon'd them to weekly prayer,
Call'd them one by one again
—
To the church and left them there !

They, with all their loves and passions,

Compliment, and song, and jest.
and sports, and fashions.
Politics,
Merged in everlasting rest
—
So they pass while thou, old Mansion,
Markest ^vith unalter'd face
How like the foliage of thy summers
Race of man succeeds to race.

To most thou stand'st a record sad.

But all the sunshine of the year
Could not make thy aspect glad
To one whose youth is buried here.
Tn thine ancient rooms and gardens
—
Buried and his own no more
Than the youth of those old owners,
])ead two centuries before.

Unto him the fields around tiice

Darken with the days gone by ;

O'er the solemn woods that bound thee

Ancient sunsets seem to die.
Sighs the selfsame breeze of morning
TInough the cypress, as of old ;

lOvcr at the Spring's returning

One same crocus breaks the mould.

Yet the secret worm ne'er ceases.

Nor the mouse bciiind the wall
Heart of oak will come to pieces,
And farewell to Jircdfield Hall !
'

Jn general he preferred to track and develop other

iniagination.s, in the way of 'Translation, Paraphrase, or
Metaphrase '. Tims lie ]iiiii1*'d versions of six of dddcron's
 :

234 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

plays, and of three Creek tragedies, Oedipus, at Thebes,
and in Attica, and Againennion. He added one of Virgil's
garden, and renderings of Omar Khaj^yani's ilubaiyat, and
Jaimi's Salaman and Abjal. All testify to unsparing pains
and an extraordinary gift in him for imagining himself into
his author. At times we might almost say that he was the
author as in the tale by the Argive Chorus in the Agamem-
:

non, taken from Aeschylus,' of the use by Fate of the

'

passions of Gods and Men to accomplish its dread decrees.

That magnificent Ode laid a spell upon me when long ago
I came upon it and the charm works still
:

Soon or late sardonic Fate

With Man against himself conspires ;

Puts on the mask of his desires :

Up the steps of Time elate

Leads him blinded with his pride,
And gathering as he goes along
The fuel of his suicide :

Until having topt the pyre

Which Destiny permits no higher,
Ambition sets himself on tire ;

In contlagration like the crime

Conspicuous through the world and time,
Down amidst his brazen walls
The accumulated Idol falls
To shapeless ashesDemigod
;

Under the vulgar hoof down- trod

Whose neck he trod on not an eye ;

To weep his fall, nor lip to sigh

For him a prayer ; or, if there were,
No God to listen, or reply.

The children have to pay for the sin of the father, and sire
for the guilt of son :

Thus with old Priam, with his royal line,

Kindred and people ; yea, the very towers
They crouch'd in, built by masonry divine.^
 ;;

EDWARD FITZGERALD 235

Then, at the thought of the home desolated by Helen's

the stately approval of the fateful doom upon crime
flight,

and its abettors liecomes a flood of sorrowing sjanpathy

with the injured :

Like a dream through sleep she glided

Through the silent city gate,
By a guilty Hermes guided
On the feather'd feet of Theft
Leaving between those she left
And those she fled to lighted discord,
Unextinguishable Hate ;

Leaving him whom least she should,

Menelaus brave and good.
Scarce believing in the mutter'd
Rumour, in the worse than utter'd
Omen of the wailing maidens.
Of the shaken hoary head :

Of deserted board and bed.

For the phantom of the lost one
Haunts him in the wonted places ;
Hall and Chamber, which he paces
Hither, Thither, listening, looking.
Phantom-like himself alone
Tillhe comes to loathe the faces
Of the marble mute Colossi,
Cod-like Forms, and half-divine,
Founders of the Royal line,
Who with all unaller'd quiet
Witness all and make no sign.
But the silence of the chambers.
And the shaken hoary head,
And the voices of the mourning
Women, and of ocean wailing.
Over which with unavailing
Arms h(^ reaches, as to hail
The ])hantom of a flying sail-
All but answer, Klcd ! lied ! ilcd !

False! dishonoin'd ! wcjrsc tlian ilrad !

236 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
Night at last ; he dreams ; and She
Oiicc more in more than bridal beauty stands ;

But, ever as he reaches forth his hands.

Slips from them back into the viewless deep.
On those soft silent wings that walk the ways of sleep.^
The Rubaiyat, however, is that by which FitzGerald lives,
and will live. It we have to search in order to discover the
secret of the poet's fame. The first feeling, when readers have
leisure to review impressions, is of surprise at the indiffer-
ence to the question of the translator's fidelity. It is
a matter of complete unimportance to us whether it be
a translation at all. At the same time all of us, however
absolutely ignorant of Persian, are confident that, if it be,
it is perfect in spirit, '
divinely done,' '
a planet equal to
the sun which cast it,' as Tennyson, much too flatteringly
atany rate to Omar, sums it up.* We are too entirely
dominated by a consciousness of force, comprehensiveness,
will, sufficiency, to be disposed to question FitzGerald's
right to deal as with his own.
The mere language, in its elastic strength as of steel,
seems to have been created to make a weapon of an agnos-
ticism indistinguishable from dogmatism. Every fresh
article in the indictment against one or another of the
seventy-two emulous religions of the world cuts with the
keenness of Sultan Saladin's sword. FitzGerald, though
no follower in his own most simple regimen of Omar
Khayyam's philosophy of the senses, was resolved to do his
tenets justice. He is scrupulous to marshal them in all
their heterodoxical effrontery, with a challenge to orthodoxy
in any positive form to do better. The vigour with which
the gauntlet is tremendous and the defiance
hurled is :

is set off with the utmost charms of rhythm. The texture

is a model of poetic joinerJ^ Everywhere, in every detail,
 EDWARD FITZGERALD 237

the reader is aware of exact, infallible workmanship. The

combination of measured uniformkj^ in melody A\ith an
efifect of continual variety is amazing. There is no stale-
ness, no monotony. At the close of each stanza we are
impatient for the next we are wondering what new tone
:

is to burst from the cell of the last. The ear listens eagerly
for ebb and flow, which, scarcely expecting, it expects,
craves, and rejoices to welcome back. As the Argument
unwinds itself, the rhythm constantly envelops, adapts
itself to, each successive evolution and convolution.

For the all but matchless stanzas, the seventeenth to

the twentieth, the metre becomes as musically melancholy
as if it had been devised for the mourning of Thammuz :

Whether at Naishapiir or Babylon,

Whether the cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say ;

Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday ?

And this first Summer month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.

Then
Think, in this battered Caravanserai,
WhoHo Portals are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Ab<Kle his destined Hour, and wont his way.
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried antl drank deep
—
And Bahnim, that great Hunter the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, but cannot break his Sloop.
1 sometimes think that ncv(ir blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled ;

That every Hyacinth the (larden wears

Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.
 — :

238 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Herb whose tender green
Aiul this reviving
Fledges tlic we lean
River- Jjip on which
All lean upon it lightly
! for who knows !

From what once lovely Lip it springs xinseon !

Ah, my Belovdd, fill the Cup that clears

To-Day of past Regrets and Future Fears
To-morrow Why, To-morrow I may bo
!

Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n thousand Years.

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his Vintage rolling Time hath prest.
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.
And now make merry in the Room
we, that
They and Summer dresses in new bloom,
left,

Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth

—
Descend ourselves to make a Couch for whom — ?
*

The Sage declares he had struggled against the conviction

of the mortality of everything earthly :

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument
About it and about ; but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.

With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,

And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow ;

And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd—

'
I came like Water, and like Wind I go.' ^

He had asked for evidence, whether of the senses, or sijiritual,

against the tragic conclusion ; and in v^ain :

Strange, is it not ? that of the myriads who

Befoi'e us pass'd the door of Darkness through.
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.''
We are nothing, he concludes at last, but Shapes of Clay,
and reason as would they in their Pottery, if endowed with
speech :
 • —

EDWARD FITZGERALD 239

Said one among them

—
Surely not in vain
'

My substance of the common Earth was ta'en

And to this Figure moulded, to be broke.
Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again.'

Then said a Second

—
Ne'er a peevish Boy
'

Would break the Bowl from which he drank in jt)y ;

f And He that with His hand the Vessel made

Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.'

After a momentary silence spake

Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make ;

'
They sneer at me for leaning all awry :

What did the Hand then of the Potter shake

! ?
'

Whereat some one of the loquacious Lot

I think a Siifi pipkin —waxing hot—
'
All this of Pot and Potter—Tell me then,
Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot ? ' *

The breadtli and grasp of thought, the Protean grace of

the harmony, have their several shares in the fascination
the handful of verse exerts. But such merits do not
solve the problem of its astonishing degree, though the full
answer will include their co-operation as agents. It is the
];)er8onality of the Man, a real Man, which explains the
extraordinary rank the poem has asserted for itself in
litrraturc, and, niifortunatcly, though, 1 am ]icrsuadcd, with-
out FitzGcrald's intention, partly in society itself. A poet's
own character is always a main condition of the place to
be assigned to him : and liere we find a goiuiine Edward
except on the title-page.
Fit/Xierald everywhere, It is
a manly, adequate presence always. Real as were the
versifiers we signify under the name of Omar Khayyam,
they do not equal Fit/,(Jerald in reaIiu>ssfor us. He is not
the less real to us that in his lifetime the one quality Ik;
240 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
managed for the most part to hide was his intellectual
ascendancy. He moved in the narrowest of orbits, not
disdaining intimacy with his posthumous father-in-law, the
Quaker, banker, and hymn-writer, worthy Bernard Barton.
Always he cared less for admiration than for affection,
which he prized, while he seemed to slight. Few even of
his familiars,perhaps not Tennyson himself, notwithstand-
ing the dedication, could have guessed that he was secure
of immortality on Parnassus. He never fretted at the
non- recognition of his genius.
For the world no man of letters could have been more
obscure. Of the bulk remains
of his doings in literature it
serenely unconscious His anonymous version of
still.

Omar's reputed musings itself, it refused to take at his

own final valuation of a penny piece. A quarter of a century
after the original publication in 1859, the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, in a list of editions of the Rubaiyat, refers to
his as just a portion of the same rendered in English verse
'

by E. Fitzgerald '.^ The coldness of literary opinion, while

he lived, struck his sense of humour rather than of resent-
ment. It never occurred to him to complain. His interest
\\as in his work for the time being —
as much in a plodding
verification of the Field of Naseby, as in the inspired
interpretation of a golden Eastern lay '.^° So long as he
'

felt he had done his part thoroughly, and to the best of his
powers, he was sovereignly content.
So lived Old Fitz
'
and so he died
'
: to have the
:

minutest, half-legendary, scrapings of his character lit up

in the grave with a blaze of renown. Nor without reason,
as I sincerely think though I have been exposing myself,
;

I know, to condemnation, alike, for exaggerated praise

of the verse, by persons never touched with the rapture of
the Englished Rubaiyat as mere harmony, and by votaries
 EDWARD FITZGERALD 241

of the doctrines, for having minimized their merits out of

theological or moral bigotry.

Rubaiyiit of Omar Khayj'iim, the Astronomer —

Poet of Persia. Ren-
dered into English Verse. Macmillan & Co., 1900.
Agamemnon —A Tragedy Taken from Aeschylus. Bernard Quaritch,
:

1876.
Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald, ed. W. A. Wright.
Macmillan & Co., 1889.
' Bredfield Hall (Letters and Literary Remains).
^ Agamemnon, Chorus 4-5. ^ Ibid., Chorus 6-7-.

* To E. Fitzgerald (Tiresias and Other Poems, 1885).

' Rubaiyat, stanzas 8-9 and 17-23.
» Ibid., stanzas 27-8. ' Ibid., st. 64,
* Ibid., stanzas 84-7.
* Encyc. Brit., ed. ix, vol. xviii, 1884. Art. Omar Khayyiim (H.E.).
'" Vide supra, Tennyson to Fitzgerald (Tiresias, &c.).

VOL. II
 COVENTRY PATMORE
1823—1896

As I read Coventry Patmore, I wonder if there be not

a secret religion among educated women. Man would have
no right to be surprised if they kept in their boudoirs, their
schoolroom desks, their wardrobes, along with Jane Eyre
and The Christian Year, copies of The Angel in the House,
and Victories of Love. Before they go down in the morning,
while they dress for dinner, after or before their evening
prayer, they might well find time for a few verses, if not
for a book. May there not be ladies' clubs at which he is
regularly studied, Girton Extension lectures at which he
is expounded? When men praise their Milton, Words-
worth, Browning, Tennyson, do they never hear Patmore's
name whispered by feminine lips ? True that he is seldom
mentioned openly, and now less often than thirty years
ago. It may merely be another proof of the adage that half
of us know nothing of the way in which the other half live.
I find it hard to credit that the one real poet who proclaimed
the right divine of women to be adored no less after than
before marriage, and more so as wives and mothers than as
brides, has ceased to be habitually revered by their sex.
Poetesses do not count, besides that they rarely are genuine
woman-lovers. Until Coventry Patmore poets had been
wont to end their worship as soon as the Altar steps were
reached. As he boasts, it was reserved for him, last of all,
to sing the first of themes.
 ^

COVENTPvY PATMORE 243

He traces it in a series of soft-sweet idj^lls, very fully

from the wooing to the wedding-ring, and thence, in outUne,
rather shadowy, through happj^ years of nuptial and
parental love. The husband-lover j)rays to be inspired as
chronicler :

Thou, Primal Love, who grantesfc wings

And voices to the woodland birds,
Grant me the power of saying things
Too simple and too sweet for words.^

His verse sufficiently proves that his petition was granted.

With charming delicacy he describes the discovery, in
Honoria Churchill —playing
The Wedding March of Mendelssohn —
of the girl whom he had known as a child six years before ;

the revelation to himself of his passion through a passing

tremor at the thought of a possible rival ; and its elevating
effect :

Whatever in her sight I'd seem

I'd really be ; I'd never blend
With my delight in her a dream
'Twoidd change her check to comprehend.^

Were his affectit)n to be unreturned, he would bo ])roiul

of it still :

If fate Love's dear ambition mar,

And load his breast with hopeless pain.
And seem to blot out sun and star,
Love, lost or won, is countless gain ;

His sorrow boasts a secret bliss

Which sorrow of itself beguiles,
And Lovo in tears too noblo is
For pity, save of Love in smiles.*

For him it envelops the universe : spreading, in the oyca

ci 2
244 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
of the sleepless watcher, uncertain as jet of the issue of his
suit, a grim pallor at dawn over
The laiulscapc, all made sharp and clear
By stillness, as a face by death.''

A little later : the blessed answer has been given ;

and the
same landscape is transfigured :

'Twas when the spousal time of May

Hangs all the hedge with bridal wreaths,
And air 's so sweet the bosom gay
Gives thanks for every breath it breathes ;

That I, in whom the sweet time wrought,

Lay stretch'd within a lonely glade,
Abandon'd to delicious thought
Beneath the softly t%vinkling shade.
The leaves, all stirring, mimick'd well
A neighbouring rush of rivers cold,
And, as the sun or shadow fell.
So these were green and those were gold ;

In dim recesses hyacinths droop'd.

And breadths of primrose lit the air.
Which, wandering through the woodland, stoop'd
And gather'd perfumes here and there ;

Upon the spray the squirrel swung,

And careless songsters, six or seven,
Sang lofty songs the leaves among.
Fit for their only listener. Heaven."

If there could be a drawback to the wooer's own ecstasy,

it was caused by its completeness :

She answering, own'd that she lov'd too.

The avowal overwhelmed the victor with compassion, even

shame, at his lady paramount's abdication of her throne :

By that consenting scared and shock'd.

Such change came o'er her mien and mood
That I felt startled and half mock'd
At winning what I had not woo'd.
 COVENTRY PATMORE 245

My queen was crouching at my side,

By love unscepter'd and brought low,
Her awful garb of maiden pride
All melted into tears like snow.
Her soul, which late I loved to invest
With pity for my poor desert,
Buried its face within my breast.
Like a pet fawn by hunters hurt.''

My extracts will, I am afraid, have produced an iniprcs-

siou that Coventry Patniore, like other minstrels of love,
found, not^^'ithstanding his protestations, a readier subject
in the wooing than in Avifehood. Whatever his design,
that is true in fact of The Angel in theHouse though ;

even there lovely rays play over the

Sweet stranger, whom I called my wife ;

showing
How light the touches arc that kiss
The music from the chords of life.^

But the recorder would have been false to his own ])lan
and principle had he closed his history with the wedding,
or even the honeymoon. Naturally he should have con-
tinucfl it to and within the poet-bridegroom's pleasant house
of The Hurst. He chose instead —
more the pity to assign —
the leading matrimonial parts in Victories of Love to a
cousin, and undeclared adorer, of the heroine of the earlier
— —
volume Frederick Graham and his wife Jane, whom ho
had married to deaden a tormenting memory and regret.
Though the second poem shares the general fate of

sequels as a whole, it has virtues of its own, and at all

events was, in default of Honoria for sole heroine, a

necessity. In The Angel in the [Link] the wife was a god-
dess born. She remains, if in llie baekgroinid, a goddess
in Victories of I^iove, with her husband for vowcmI and loyal
worshipper. The other, with none siicli in her train, least
 ! —

24() FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

of all, her bridegroom, first becomes beautified for him by
maternity, as with penitent astonishment he avows :

When the ncw-madc Mother smiled,

She seemed herself a little child,
Dwelling at large beyond the law
By which, till then, I judged and saw,
And that fond glow, which she felt stir
For it, suffused my heart for her ;

To whom, from the weak babe, and thence

To me, an influent innocence,
Happy, reparative of life.
Came, and she was indeed my wife,
As there, lovely with love, she lay.^

It is a further stage when he discovers Jane, in the com-

panionship of Honoria —the object of his earlj^ idolatry
transformed into a Divinity herself. One still onward
step ;

and wife's, mother's, goddess's love, that had never tired

or fainted, turns back the current of time, devotion, and
passion, to the steps of the marriage Altar itself ; and, in
the dead woman's written legacy of triumph,
Death, which takes me from his side,
Shows me, in very deed, his bride ^^ !

Alas, fond wretch

We pass from gentle fluency in Victories of Love to
the strangest of wild labyrinths of fancy ministering to
thcologj', in The Unknown Eros. Patmore's entreaty was
far from granted if he were serious in beseeching Urania
to inspire him with
Chants as of a lonely thrush'ts throat
At latest eve,
That does in each calm note
Both joy and grieve ;

Notes few and strong and fine.

Gilt with sweet day's decline,
And sad with promise of a different sun.''
 COVENTRY PATMORE 247

But, in compensation, the whole is full of grand spasms

of tragicemotion possibly, of allegories as elaborate as in

;

The Purple Island certainly, of enigmas, which I could

;

not wish to be a thought, a throb, plainer. I am content

with the beauty, if fevered, which is indisputable.
What a cry of protesting, unavailing anguish is the
Departure !

It was not like your great and gracious ways !

Do you, that have nought other to lament,

Never, my Love, repent
Of how, that July afternoon,
You went,
With sudden, unintelligible phrase,
And frighten'd eye.
Upon your journey of so many days,
Without a a goodbye ?
single kiss, or
I knew indeed that you were parting soon ;

And so we sate, within the low sun's rays,

You whispering to me, for your voice was weak,
Your harromng praise.
Well, was well,
it

To hear you such things speak.

And I could tell
What made your eyes a growing gloom of love,
As a warm South-wind sombres a March grove.
And it was like your great and gracious ways
To turn your talk on daily things, my Dear,
Lifting the luminous, pathetic lash
To let the laughter Hash,
Whilst I drew near.
Because you spoke so low (hat I could scarcely hear.
IJut all at once to leave me at the last.
More at the wonder than the; loss aghast.
With huddled, unintelligible phrase.
And frighten'd eye,
And go your journey of all days
With not one a goodbye.
kiss, or
And the only loveless look the lo(jk with whieli you pass'd ;

'Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways.'-

 '

248 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

If aught could be as pathetically, affectionately cruel as
what —though it may have an inner and metaphysically
theological meaning —
reads like a wife's plot to spare her
husband the agony of a farewell on the brink of an open
grave, it is his charge that the mercy had been treason to
love. His wakeful nights are harassed by recollections of
his Love's presentiments by the bitter thought that he
;

ought to have recognized in them a warning, however

useless, of the impending blow :

'
If I were dead,' you'd sometimes say, 'Poor Child !

The dear lips quiver'd as they spake.

And the tears brake
From eyes which, not to grieve me, brightly smiled.
And did you think, when you so cried and smiled,
How I, in lonely nights, should lie awake.
And words your
of those full avengers make ?
'
Poor Child, poor Child !
' " '

Then, when he falls asleep, comes, to heighten, blacken,

the grief of bereavement, a recurrent nightmare, in which :

I thee, in mortal sorrow, still pursue

Thro' sordid streets and lanes
And houses brown and bare
And many a haggard stair
Ochrous with ancient stains ;

But ever, at the last, my way I win

To where, with perfectly sad patience nurst
By sorry comfort of assured worst,
Ingrain'd in fretted cheek and lips that pine,
On pallet poor
Thou lyest, stricken sick,
Beyond love's cure.
By all the world's neglect, but chiefly mine.^*

—
And yet another dream dream on dream by the open —
window, outside which climbed an odorous azalea :
 —

COVENTRY PATMORE 249

Last night the delicate crests of saffron bloom

Were just at point to burst.
At dawn I dream'd, O God, that she was dead,
And groaned aloud upon nay wretched bed.
And waked, ah, God, and did not waken her.
But lay, with eyes still closed.
Perfectly bless' d in the delicious sphere
By which I knew so well that she was near.
My heart to speechless thankfulness composed.
Till 'gan to stir
A dizzy somewhat in my troubled head
Itwas the azalea's breath, and she was deatl !

The warm night liad the lingering buds disclosed.

And I had fall'n asleep with to my breast
A chance-found letter press'd
In which she said,
* '
So till to-morrow eve, my Own, adieu !

Parting 's well paid with soon again to meet.

Soon in your arms to feel so small and sweet.
Sweet to myself that am so sweet to you ^^
!
'

With a fine instinct the half -orphaned, more than half-

orphaned, because motherless, child is introduced, to point
the desolation of the home. The lonely boy's self -com-
fortingis as painful as, in The Departure, Eurydice, and

The Azalea, the husband's heart-void ;

My little Son, who look'd from tlioughtful eyes

And moved and spoke in (juiet grown-up wise.
Having my law the seventh time disobcy'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkias'd.
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief slioiild hinder slcc]).

I visited his l)ed,

Hut found liini Hliuiibering deep.
With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet
From liis late soliljing wet.
And I, with moan.
Kissing away his t(!ars, left others of my own ;
250 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within liis reach,
A box of counters, and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass, abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art.
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept, and said :

Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,

Not vexing thee in death.
And Thou rememberest of what toj^s
We made our joys.
How weakly understood.
Thy great commanded good.
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy w^rath, and say,
'
"I ^vill be sorry for their childishness." ' ^*

The succession of the entire vohime to The Angel in the

House, with its quiet, limpid grace, almost gaiety, and to
the almost tameness of Victories of Love, is among the
curiosities of poetical literature. I can discover no literary
affinitybetween this and either of the earlier works. Did
not the history of poetry furnish many examples of exotic
growths in established reputations, it would be hard to
understand the phenomenon. A bright reasonableness,
amusing itself with passion, is the distinctive note of
Coventry Patmore's previous love-dramas. His type of
womanhood never loses her balance — ^is such,

even at its brightest play.

That her mirth was like thesunshine in the closing of the day.^^

In grief and adversity her emotions ^\'ould have been as

discreetly ordered ; and in weal and woe the hero must
 COVENTRY PATMORE 251

have matched her. Not to speak of Jane and Frederick,

no beings could be imagined less likely than Honoria and
Felix Vaughan to toss to and fro the thunderbolts of Eros.
Obviously it is vain to attempt to link the two sets of
stories and their characters. Any clues seeming to lead in
that direction soon break in the hand. The utmost which
can be asserted is the existence of a pair of situations,
or, rather, trains of feeling,mth a relation between them,
more of opposition than resemblance. The Angel in the
House is a picture of human love, of the purest that earth
can offer. Being of earth it is mortal and The Unknown ;

Eros maj' exhibit the end of such in disease and death, in

conjugal despair, and an orphan's desolation. By the side
is a second picture of another love
: widowed, orphaned ;

too ; as passionate, j^et immortal, and triumphant in the

midst of sorrow and abasement a persecuted Church. ;

An analogy is traceable, if barely, between the wreck of

love in Tennyson's Maud, raving into madness, healed by
a Berserker fit, and Patmore's idolatry of home, flaming
in its ruins into a rapture of CathoUc mysticism. At all
events. The Unknown Eros marks such a revolution in the
poet. There \\as, as he does not deny, a struggle before he
wandered far from his old
Crystal-flowing source.'*

For an instant indeed there may have been an impulse to

turn back. Amelia,'® in its lodging within the precincts of
the furnace of Eros, is a breath of jjioiis, simple tenderness ;

as too is the exquisite picture of the Virgin-Mother adoring

at once Deity and Infanc^y :

All Mothers worHliij) little feet,

And kisH tli(5 v(!iy ground tlicy've trod ;

l'>iit, thy little J3aby sweet

all,

Who was indeed thy (iod ^" !

 ;

252 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

But the attraction of the light which

Shone from the soUtary peak at Edgbaston,^^

was too strong. Patmore's Muse learnt to speak

A language dead.^^

Instead of putting words to a Wedding March of Mendelssohn,

she sang henceforth of Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore ^3 and
Auras of Delight. 2*
Hearth and home lost their most sympathetic minstrel
poetry, I think, has gained. Patmore's earlier verse is
clear and sparkling. has charm. Where it is
Often it

lacking is in strength, impetus. He discovered that he had

a gospel to preach, a message to deliver and the belief ;

transformed him. The advent of a new faith Avas as if

—
a fountain of inspiration bitter waters and sweet had —
suddenly welled up within. The flood is perturbed and
angry ; carries away. Any who desire to know what
but it

power, Patmore had in him, must study not so much

fire,

The Angel in the House as The UnknowTi Eros.

Poems by Coventry Patmore : vol. iii, Victories of Love ; vol. iv, The
Unknown Eros. George Bell & Sons (no date).
The Unknown Eros, by Coventry Patmore. Third Edition. G. Bell
& Sons, 1890.
1 The Angel in the House : Preludes, 5, The Impossibility.
- Ibid., Cathedral Close, 2.
' Ibid., The Morning Call, 3. * Ibid., Preludes, 2.
* Ibid., Going to Church, 1. " Ibid., The Revulsion, 1.
' Ibid., The Abdication, 4, 5. ' Ibid., Husband and Wife, 1,
• Victories of Love, From Frederick.
" Ibid., From Jane to Mrs. Graham.
" The Unknown Eros, Proem.
'- Ibid., 8, Departure. '^ Ibid., 14, '
If I were Dead.'
' Ibid., 9, Eurydice. '' Ibid., 7, The Azalea.
" Ibid., 10, The Toys.
 COVENTRY PATMORE 253

1' The Portrait (p. 139, Florilegium Amantis, ed. Rich. Ganiett.
G. Bell, 1879).
" The Unknown Eros, Proem.
" Ibid., Amelia.
" Ibid., Regina C'wli, p. 19-4 (Third Edition, 1890, one vol. G. Bell
& Sons).
» Ibid., Book II, 4, The Standards.
-- Ibid., Book II, 18, Dead Language.
^^ Ibid., XXVIII, Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore.
-* Ibid., XLI, Auras of Delight.
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTl
1828—1882

There are readers who like their poets unmixed — ^poets

only, not philanthropists or misanthropists, theologians

or sceptics, metaphysicians or biologists, wits, satirists,
humorists, as well. Rossetti was made to suit thera.
Just and noble sentiments adorn his verse. Its scenery
could have been represented only by a painter of genius,
a thoughtful observer of nature. Allusions continually
testify to the student both of men and of books. The
things are, however, where they are solely to serve the
demands of the poet's art. He is poet in every line, every
turn of a phrase, in the modelling of every cadence. In
a piece of a hundred and eighty stanzas I find but one
which is prosaic. He might have seemed of a nature too
finely constituted, too subtle, too exclusive, for a ballad
WTiter. Whatever instinct, perhaps weariness of the sole
companionship of his own emotions, the craving for an
appeal to wider sympathies, turned his Muse in that direc-
tion, as poet he accepted freely its obligations. Being the
thorough artist he was, the most fastidious of writers
became plain, rough, and brusque the faultlessly metrical
;

versifier stumbled in half rhymes. It can plainly be

discerned that the uncouthness, the irregularities, are as
intentional as they are popularly effective. I believe that
the White Ship, the King's Tragedy, weird Rose Mary
itself —Beryl Songs and —^would at a Penny Reading be
all

sure of cheers and tears, even of comprehension, if partial,

from the humblest audience. The Three rank among the
 : —

DAXTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 255

foremost of their frankly popular class in English verse and ;

they are the work of one of the most aesthetic of poets.

Take the first ; and trace how, under cover of a story
a peasant, a mechanic, a cliild, as fine
fitted to captivate
a web of thought and feeling is worked as could have been
spun for a study in brain-work. Lawless licence is duly
chastised in Knight and damsel, but as the climax of a
most intricate game of cross purposes. Out of a mother's
beautiful pride in a daughter's imagined purity :

Mary mine that art Mary's rose,

is hammered an engine at once to pierce the guilty heart,

and to slay its betrayer. The lover Avho would have lived
if loyal, dies for his faithlessness. The Beryl-stone itself,
in all its brilliancy, perishes for its perfidious complicity
with devils.
The magical jewel reflected the future in its gleaming
depths, but to none but a pure maid. It had been read by
the girl in her childhood. 8he was to read it now, at her
mother's dictate, to learn on which road an ambush might
be laid to take the life of her affianced lover. Sir James of
Heronhaye, as he rode to be shriven at Holy Cross. She
dared not tell her mother that she fulfilled the fated
condition no longer :

I'ale Rose Mary .sank to the Hoor

'
'
The night will come if the day is o'er !

'
Nay, heaven takes counsel, star with star,
And help shall reach your heart from afar :

A bride you'll be, as a maid you are.'

The lady unbound her jewelled zone
And drew from her r(jbo the IJeryl-stone.
Shaped it was to a shadowy sphere,
VV^orld of our world, the sun's compeer,
That bears and buries the toiling year.
 — — ' : :

25G FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

With shuddering light 'twas stirred and strewn,
Like the cloud-nest of the wading moon ;

Freaked it was as the bubble's ball,

Rainbow-hued through a misty pall,
Like the middle light of the waterfall.
The lady upheld the wondrous thing : —
'
111 fare,' with a fiend's-fairing
she said, '
;

But Moslem blood poured forth like wine

Can hallow Hell 'neath the Sacred Sign ;

And my lord brought this from Palestine.

Spirits who fear the Blessed Rood
Drove forth the accursed multitude
That heathen worship housed herein,
Never again such home to win.
Save only by a Christian's sin.'
Low spake maiden Rose Mary :

'
O
mother mine, if I should not see !

'
Nay, daughter, cover your face no more,
But bend love's heart to the hidden lore,
And you shall see now as heretofore.' ^
She gazes, and perceives by the broken water-gate armed
men, as watching for their prej^, with the Warden of Holy-
cleugh, Sir James's sworn foe, at their head. All elsewhere
is clear except that, of seven hill-clefts on the road to
;

Holycleugh's castle-steep, the seventh is '

brimmed with
mist '. The mother ceases to fear :

'
Small hope, my girl, for a helm to hide
In mists that cling to a wild moorside
Soon they melt with the wind and sun,
And scarce would wait such deeds to be done
God send their snares be the worst to shun.' ^
The vision had passed ; and as the Lady, content, wraps
the stone close in her silken robe,
a music rained through the room :

Low it splashed like a sweet star-spray,

And sobbed like tears at the heart of May,
And died as laughter dies away.^
 —

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 257

The knight was warned, and shiuined the road by the

water-gate — ^et he died !
—
'
Daughter, daughter, remember jou
That cloud in the hills by Holycleugh ?
'Twas a Hell-screen hiding truth away :

There, not i' ambush lay.

the vale, the
•
And thence was the dead borne home to-day.'

The perjured wooer Secretly pledged to the Warden's

!

sister of Holj'cleugh,he had been on his way to concert

his near marriage with her, when her wrathful brother
waylaid him in the misty neighbouring hollow, and avenged
both himself and Rose Mary The whole is an example,
!

worked out with extraordinary subtlety, of poetical, w'hich

happens to be coincident with moral, justice.
The White Ship, again, at first sight simply a tale for
wandering minstrels, has for Rossetti its especial motive,
an inner core of pathos. Without the two spiritual incidents
of the Prince's affection, and the Pilot's refusal of life, I do
not suppose it would have had him for chronicler :

A Song, — nay, a shriek that rent the skj^.

That leaped o'er the deep —

the grievous cry
!

Of three hundred living that now must die.

An instant shriek that sprang to the shock

As the ship's keel felt the sunken rock.

A moment the pilot's senses spin,

The next he snatched the Prince 'mid tiio din.
Cut tlio boat loose, and the youth leaped in.

Out of the churn of the choking ship,

Which the gulf grapples and the waves strip.
They struck with the strained oars' Hash and dip.

'Twas then o'er the splitting bulwarks' brim

The Prince's sister screamed to him.
VOL. II R
 : ' ' '

258 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

lie knew her face, and he heard lier cry,
And he said, '
Put back ! she must not die !

And back with the current's force they reel

Like a leaf that 's drawn to a water-wheel.

Low the poor ship leaned on the tide :

O'er the naked keel as she best might glide,

The sister toiled to the brother's side.
He reached an oar to her from below,
And stiffened his arms to clutch her so.
But now from the ship some spied the boat,
And Saved
'
was the cry from many a throat.
!
'

And down to the boat they leaped and fell

It turned as a bucket turns in a well.

And nothing was there but the surge and swell.

The Prince that was and the King to come,

There in an instant gone- to his doom.

He was a Prince of lust and pride ;

He showed no grace till the hour he died.

When he should be king, he oft would vow,

He'd yoke the peasant to his own plough.
O'er him the ships score their furrows now.

God only knows where his soul did wake,

But 1 saw him die for his sister's sake.^

To the raainyard, rent from the mast, two, Berold, the

butcher's son of Rouen, and Godefroy de I'Aigle, were
clinging, when
lo ! a third man rose o'er the wave.
And we said, '
Thank God ! us three may He save !

He clutched to the yard with panting stare.

And we looked and knew Fitz-Stephen there.
He clung, and What '
of the Prince ? '
quoth he.
'
Lost, lost !
'
we cried. He cried, '
Woe on me !

And loosed his hold, and sank through the sea.^

 — ^

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 259

I do not ventui'e to requu'e, as a right, of The King's

Tragedy any explanation of its choice other than the

fascination of the prolonged horror itself. We feel the
awe of the suspense, before the assassins had returned for
a further search after the king's hiding-place to the room
tenanted now only by heroic Catherine Douglas, helpless
from the torture of her shattered arm :

Through the opeia door

The night- wind wailed round the empty room.
And the rushes shook on the floor.
And the bed drooped low in the dark recess
Whence the arras was rent away ;

And the firelight still shone over the space

Where our hidden secret lay.

And the rain had ceased,and the moonbeams lit

The window high in the wall,

Bright beams tliat on the plank tliat I knew
Through the painted pane did fall.
And gleamed with the splendour of Scotlaiurs crown
And shield armorial.

But then a great wind swept up the skies,

And the climbing jnooii fell l)ack ;

And the royal blazon lied from the lloor,

And nought remained on its track ;

And high in the darkened window-pane

The shield and the crown were black.

Tlie [Link] is (icpiclcd with llic nieicik'ss tidclity

of an artist's eye. l^vcii in bloodier-red glares the iclciil-

loHsness of sweet (^iiccii -lane to the assassins of licr iin-

buried husband :

The month of March wore on apace ;

And now fresh ctiuriers fared

Still from the country of the Wild Scots
Willi news of the traitors snared.
K 2
 ' ' •

200 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

And everuiorc as I brought her word,
iShe bent to her dead king James,
And in the cold ear with tire-drawn breath
Site .spoke the traitors' names.

But when the name of Sir Robert Graeme

Was the one she had to give,
I ran to hold her up from the floor ;

For the froth was on her lips, and sore

I feared that she could not live.

And now of their dooms dread tidings came,

And of torments fierce and dire ;

—
And nought she spake, she had ceased to speak,—
But her eyes Avere a soul on lire.

But when I told lier tlie bitter end

Of the stern and just award,
She leaned o'er the bier, and thrice three times
She kissed the lips of her lord.

And then she said, —

My King, they are dead
'
!

And she knelt on the chapel floor.

And whispered low with a strange proud smile, —
*
'
James, James, they suffered more !
'

It was the joy of vengeance and the poet seems to ;

share it. Yet I suspect that he had been thinking more

of the singer of the King's Quair than of the crowned
reformer of wrong, the administrator of even justice
to high and low ; less of the Avenger of treason against
her royal consort than of her who from the time when
first she was wedded, oft would sigh :

'
To be born a king !

And oft along the way

When she saw the homely lovers pass,
She has said, '
alack the day ! '
— '

whose farewell cr^^ over her slain husband-lover was :

 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 261

'
Alas for tho woeful thing,
That a poet true and a friend of man,
In desperate days of bale and ban,
^°
Should needs bo born a king !
'

Meanwhile, alike here, and in Rose Mary and The

White Ship, far apart as may be the theme's secret attrac-
tion for the writer, all the time on has swung the action,
bleak, and bold, and bare, to the inevitable catastrophe !

Rossetti, being an artist in words, as he was in colours,

hav-ing set himself to write ballads, observed the law of
their composition. He made the framework simple and
strong. Within the bold outline, being also a connoisseur
of mental problems, he searched for and found occasion
for inserting a delicate tracery of spiritual suggestion.
The sonnet was a much more natural vehicle for the play
of his imagination and he needed no excuses there. It
;

is no point of honour of a sonnet to be popular and his ;

arc not. A sonnet-wTiter commonly does not ^vrite under

a sudden impulse. He docs not sing because he must.
Deliberately, almost in cold blood, he sits down to his
mosaic-work. His productions are addressed to a limited
circle ; often in appearance, though less often in fact, to
an individual ; seldom, if over, to the public. tSome
spiritual force, doubtless, though not opera! ing directly,
will have worked upon him to versify after this kind. To
wing it, necessarily, inspiration is wanted no less than art.
Imperative as are the laws of Ihe scnmet, it needs, in order
to be tolerable, and perha[)s more urgently than other
departments of poetry, real poetic fire. Nothing is more
odiously dreary than a soiuict jx-rfcct in form which is not
a poem in spirit. The glory of liossetti's sonnets is that
allhave the glow of feeling in them, and that, in several, it
is the essence.
262 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
Sonnet -l)uil(liii<r was in his hlood. The rapture of Dante-
\\orsliip eonstituted it his profession. From his models
in the Vita Nuova, and the cycle of the Master's harbingers
and companions, he learnt how to extract the utmost
music from the jangling of the curious under-vesture of
shackles. His inimitable translations show his skill. Particu-
larly admirable in his original work is the series he entitled
The House of Life. In it, with a hand comparatively free,
he constructs, brick by brick, to be overlaid with a marble
coating, a temple of Love. I confess the marvel of the
masonry in each segment the interdependence at once,
;

and independence, with final unity. Over and above all

blows an air of refreshing spontaneity. They to whom the
rigours of the metre, especially in a chain with a hundred
links, are distasteful, may find a pleasant surprise in The
House of Life. They will, I think, acknowledge that it
has proved it possible, if by no means a thing of course,
for a sonnet to be a poem also.
Unfair as it always is to tear away members of a series,
I am compelled by the laws of space to offer specimens only :

On bank your head thrice sweet and dear

this sweet
and spread your hair on either side,
I lay,
And see the newborn wood floweis bashful-eyed
Look through tlic golden tresses here and there.
On these debateabh; borders of the year
Spring's foot lialf falters scarce she yet may know
;

The blackthorn blossom from the snow

leafless ;

And through her bowers the wind's way still is clear.

But April's sun strikes down the glades to-day ;

So shut your eyes upturned, and feel my kiss

Creep, as the Spring now thrills through every spray,
Up your warm throat to your warm lips for this ;

Is even the hour of Love's sworn suit-service,

With whom cold hearts are counted cast-away .^^
 — — —

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 263

Add, for the contrast of a more serious note :

The lost daj's of my life until to-day,

What were they, could I see them on the street
Lie as they fell ? Would they be ears of wheat
Sown once for food but trodden into clay ?

Or golden coins squandered and still to pay ?

Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet ?
Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat
The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway ?

I do not see them here ; but after death

God knows know
the faces I shall see,
I
Each one a murdered self, with low last breath :

'
I am —what hast thou done to me
thyself, ?
'

'
And I —and I— — each one
thyself,' lo ! saith,
^^
'
And thou thyself to all eternity !
'

The volume of Ballads and JSoimcts contains little or

nothing imperfect. The rest of the general collection of
poems is not liable to that somewhat invidious praise.
Among its contents are pieces beautiful only to a few
of whom I myself am not one and there are pieces which —
must, Ishould suppose, be beautifid to all for example, ;

the lines, Sudden Light, on that phase of second sight

which shadows the past from the present :

] lifivc been Ihtc before.

wh<n or how I cannot tell
I')iif ;

1 know the grass bc^yond the door.

The sweet keen smell,
The sighing souixl, the lights around the shore.

N'dii have been mine before,

How long ago may not know
I ;

Jiiit just when at tliat swallow's soar

Your nock turned so,
.Some veil did fall, —
I knew it all of yore.
 — —

264 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Has this ])oen thus before ?

And shall not thus time's eddying flight

Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
'^
And day and night yield one delight once more ?

Lovelier still is The Portrait :

This is her portrait as she was :

Itseems a thing to wonder on,

As though mine image in the glass
Should tarry when myself am gone.
I gaze until she seems to stir,
Until mine eyes almost aver
That now, even now, the sweet lips part
To breathe the words of the sweet heart :

And yet the earth is over her.

In painting her I shrined her face

'Mid mystic trees, where light falls in
Hardly at all a covert place
;

Where you might think to find a din

Of doubtful talk, and a live flame
Wandering, and many a shape whose name
Not itself knoweth, and old dew,
And your own footsteps meeting you,
And all things going as they came,

A deep dim wood ; and there she stands

As wood that day for so
in that :

Was the still movement of her hands

And such the pure line's gracious flow.
And passing fair the type must seem.
Unknown the presence and the dream.
'Tis she though of herself, alas
: !

* Less than her shadow on the grass,

i)i than her image in the stream.
 : — ; —

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 265

Next day the memories of these things,

Like leaves through which a bird has flown,
Still vibrated with Love's warm wings ;

Till I must make them all my own

And paint this picture. So, 'twixt ease
Of talk and sweet long silences.

She stood among the plants in bloom

At windows of a summer room.
To feign the shadow of the trees.

Last night at last I could have slept.

And yet delayed my sleep till dawn,
Still wandering. Then it was I wept
For unawares I came upon
Those glades where once she walked with me ;

And as I stood there suddenly.

All wan wth traversing the night.
Upon the desolate verge of light
Yearned loud the iron-bosomed sea.

Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears

The beating heart of Love's own breast,
Where round the secret of all spheres
All angels lay their wings to rest,
H(nv shall my soul stand rapt and awed,
Wlien, by the; new birth borne abroad
Throughout the music of the suns,
It c-iitcrs in her soul at once,
And knows the silencci there for (!od !

Here with hi-r face dnlli iiirmory sit

Meanwhile, and waits tiic day's dctlinf.

Till other eyes sliall look from it,

Eyes of the spirit's Palestine,

Even than the old ga/c; tenderer
While hopes and aims long lost with her
Stand round her image side by side.
Like tonilts of pilgrims that have died
.\l)out the Holy Scpulfhrc'*
2G6 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
licsidcs beauty, liere there is teiiclcrncss
; and so far the
piece is, for Rossetti, unique. The prevailing want of that
property is a natural consequence of the empire over him

of one canon and gospel connecting all his many character-

istics. From old memories I indicated it when I started. Now

that I close the re\aew of my more recent impressions of his

poems I find my belief confirmed. More than with Shelley
— who was a priest of humanity as well as singer more —
—
even than with Keats in whom a distinct current of youth's
warm blood, unchilled by the shadow of death, is perceptible
—the is to obey no other master and
rule with Rossetti
end than While he recognizes the existence of other
art.
—
impulses, aims, and conditions while he makes use of them
—
himself he never forgets, or pretends to forget, that for
him their object is to serve as poetic material. He shrinks
from no sadness, sourness, ugliness, which will widen the
compass of his lyre. I do not suppose I am libelling the
general educated public if I find in that imperious eclec-
ticism, or aestheticism, a key to his lack at all times of
common popular favour. I cannot affect to be surprised
when I recollect some of his beautiful monstrosities. After
all, it is not an unwholesome instinct which demands of

poetry that it shall be life's consecrated minister, sanctify-

and sweetening. Rossetti the poet recognized
ing, purifying,
no such obligation any more than Rossetti the painter.
Accordingly, the poet, like the painter, probably will
continue to be worshipped by a sect, and not by a
nation.
However, poetry an independent Kingdom with its
is

own laws. nor desires, to be exclusive.

It neither is obliged,
Its borders are wide. They have made room for Dryden as
for Milton, for Burns as for Cowpcr, for Byron as for
Wordsworth. Well can they contain Rossetti also. Poems
 DANTE GABRIEL R0S8ETTI 267

too have a being as well as the poet ; and, so long as the

language lasts, there are many of his wliich deserve always-
to be read, and some which Mill be.

The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, cd. bj- W. M. Rossetti.

One vol. EUis & Elvey, 1891.
(Ballads and Sonnets, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Fourth Edition.
Ellis& White, 1882.)
(The Early Italian Poets, a. d. 1100-1200-1300. Together with
Dante's Vita Nuova, translated by D. G. Rossetti.)
' Rose Mary, Part I, * Ibid. * Ibid.

« Ibid., Part 11. ^ The White Ship.

• Ibid. ' The King's Tragedy.
8 Ibid. »ll)id. '» Ibid.
" Youth's Spring Trilnilc (The House of Life a Sonnet Sequence), —
No. 14.
" Lost Days (ibid.), No. 80. " Sudden Light
'« The Portrait, stanzas 1, 3, 4, 7, 10, 1 1, 12.
 WILLIAM JMORllIS
1834—1896

Take from the shelf a book by William Morris, new or

old to you ; read or re-read in it ; and you will bo very
unwilling to put it down. The field is wide. The volume
may be the wondrous quest of the Golden Fleece the ;

narrative enchants as if Orpheus again were the musician.

A saga of the Volsungs may have furnished the theme ; and
you find charm in a riot of perfidy and slaughter. Or it
may be a story from the mj^thology of Greece ; of Perseus,
Psyche, Alcestis, Pygmalion, Bellerophon. Yet another
volume and you are arbitrating between fallen Guinevere
;

and her accuser. Sir Gauwaine sitting with Launcelot, and

;

his remorse, beside King Arthur's tomb or watching with

;

pure Sir Galahad for the Sangreal. Valiant deeds are

described, and shameful or heroic dooms, of Gascon knights
and Gascon thieves torturing options between some
;

sudden end to gay, glorious life, and its continuance with

dishonour. The whole area of fancy, history, fable, Morris
claims for his own, wherever his genius divines a possi-
bility of foothold. Any^vhere on the world-wide heath he
roofs-in a house, lighting a fire on the hearth to prove his
title. EveryAvhere you too have been at home with him.
You pass out, and forget his existence. It is a riddle very
hard to guess why the reader who has gladly warmed his
hands by the blaze, so rarely comes back why, after ;

having given apparently so much of himself to the poet,

he carries little or nothing of the poet away.
 WILLIAM MORRIS 269

This i.s not tlic uiamier in whii-li we treat, not merely

leaders of the choir of poets, .Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden,
Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Browning,
Tennyson, but any with a real commission. They are
always with us. We have not to limit for them. They come
to meet us they seek for us. The reason is that they were
;

born winged, and fly. Morris's stories and ballads, though

not wingless, sta}' b\^ the nest. They cannot live without
their native air and earth about them. The special message
which he, like other poets, ordained prophets and preachers,
had to deliver, was not itself, like many of theirs, of a nature
to circulate, vibrating and echoing. His was a gospel of
beauty, as was Keats's only, Keats cared to dwell, almost
;

to look, on nothing which was not in itself a thing of beauty.

Morris saw beauty in everj^thing, and Avas chained to that
he saw by its A massacre of Volsungs by Goths,
very bulk.
for the Titanic magnitude of the treachery, rejoiced his
Muse hardly less than the cruel daring which avenged it.
The adultery of a hero's consort and his friend, treason,
contrition, ecstasies of piety itself, and abiding heat of
love purpled b}' the crime, painted his canvas with colours
as precious to him as the virgin moonlight of Galahad's
pilgrimage.
Mark how he revels in the rich medley of the guilty
Queen's remorse and longing, as she kneels before the
Blessed Rood :

'
UnlcHH you pardon, what shall I do. Lord,
But f^o to hell ? and there seeday l)y day
Foul deed on deed, liear foulest word on word,
For ever and ever, sueh as on tho way
To Camelot I hoard onco from a cliurl
That eurled me up upon my jcnn(^t's neck
With hitter shame how then, Lord, should
; [ curl
For ages and for agca ? doat thou reek
 — ; — ;

270 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

That, i am beautiful, Loril, cvoii as you
And your dear inotlR-r '!
wliy did I furget
Y(tu wc'ie so beautiful, and good, and true,
That you lovetl me so, (Juenevere V O yet
If even I eannot eliooso
go to hell, 1

But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep

From loving Launcelot O Christ must I lose ; !

My own heart's love ? see, though I cannot weep,

Yet am I very sorry for my sin ;

Moreover, Christ, I cannot bear that hell

I am most fain to love you, and to win
A place in heaven some time I cannot tell —
Speak to me, Clu'ist ! I kiss, kiss, kiss your feet
Ah ! now I weep !
'

The maid said, By the tomb

'

He waiteth for you, lady,' coming fleet,

Not knowing what woe filled up all the room }

He found food for sympathy and delight alike in the

dauntless adventurousness of the Argonauts, in Medea's
fratricide and lies, and in Jason's ungrateful infidelity.
Opportunities were waiting everywhere to reward his
insight and industry, whether in reconstructions of a savage
feudalism, or in visions of democratic Gardens of Eden to
be dotted about the happy wilds of re-aflforested, repentant
Bloomsbury. Nay, his romance upholstered straight-
legged chairs scattered here and there beside pomegranate
wall-papers. All appealed to his instinct for picturesque
and monotony. He stamped
variety, his horror of earthiness
and distastes, visibly and tangibly, on
himself, his tastes
cottages and palaces by the thousand or ten thousand.
Spiritually he was audible in volume after volume of
admirable verse and prose. Unlike his poet-peers, he did
not absorb his subject into himself rather, he sought to ;

incorporate himself into His aim was to suffuse history

it.

and life with the atmosphere of lovely possibilities he

 WILLIAM MORRIS 271

discovered in them. He desired to inspire and invigorate

by describing both saw them. Strangely enough,
as he
the result not the robust jDicture of actual tilings which he
is

may be presumed to have contemplated. Each successive

scene floats in a haze of di-eamy sunshine, through which
the uproar and storm of human passion sound as melodiously
unreal to the reader as the echo of past labours to the
lotus-eating sailors. Ever in vain the poet raises his

protesting battle-cry of the tale he has

to tell,

Of the wonderful days a-coining, when all

Shall be better than well.'-

Never was Muse readier to re-settle Past, Present, and

Future. A chief bar to her success in attracting colonists is

the requisition she makes upon them of abmidant leisure

and patience. There are tricks of style which become
with repetition trying in the extreme. Such are the habit
of inveterate refrains, and a pervading varnish of melan-
choly which an invariable sweetness does anything but
relieve. But, above all, diffusencss is carried to an extent
which pays no regard to the brevity of human life. It
is the more vexatious that Morris occasionally indicates
how he can present a scene" in a way to make one catch
one's breath. His besetting vice in another shape causes
him to steep legends of i)rehistoric Creece, Norman Sicily,

Scandinavian folklore, in one same ointment, fragrant and

delightful in itself, but almost icpiilsivc when Iniinii to hr

neither individual, nor native.

Yet even no — what a force the age lost when Ik- died !

How utterances of his with ;ill their faults d\sell (tn any
memory which has once taken hold of them ! It may be
a mere exercise in rhythm, like Two Red Roses across the
Moon. I read the crazy ballad the other day ;
and the
 ; ; —

272 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

IVc'liiig with wliicli I had heard it. recited by an Oxford
friend, shortly after its publication, at once came back.
The jingle of it had stayed with me unforgotten for fifty
years, and iniforgct table :

There was a lady lived in a hall,

Large her eyes, and slim and tall
And ever she sung from noon to noon,
'
Two red roses across the moon.'
There was a Knight came riding by
In early spring, when the roads were dry ;

And he heard that lady sing at the noon,

'
Two red roses across the moon.'
Yet none the more he stopp'd at all,
But he rode a-gallop past the hall
And left that lady singing at noon,
'
Two red roses across the moon.'

Because, forsooth, the battle was set.

And the scarlet and blue had got to be met,
He rode on the spur till the next warm noon ;

'
Two red roses across the moon.'

That was the battle-cry he raised and before it and his

;

gold armour down went the scarlet and blue. Returning

as victor, this time he halts at the hall and the lady :

Under the may she stoop'd to the crown,

All was gold, there was nothing of brown ;

And the horns blew up in the hall at noon,

'
Two red roses across the moon.' ^

In higher sorts there is, for example, the resolve of

Volsung Signy to die Queen, still, of the abhorred Goths,
in the flames of racial vengeance upon them, which she had
herself caused to be kindled in her Goth Consort's palace.
The strange evidence of fidelity to the letter of the bond
she was betraying must not be permitted to founder
 WILLIAM MORRIS 273

along with its grand but water-logged epic. She had

planned the destruction, and had come forth to exult with
her brother Sigmund and her son Sinfiotli, in its complete-
ness, but insisted on returning :

'
My youth was happy but this hour behke is best
;

Of all the days of my life-tide, that soon shall have an end.

I have come to greet thee, Sigmund, then back again must I wend,
For his bed the Goth-King dighteth I have lain therein, time was.' ;

And indeed as the word she uttereth, high up the red flames flare
To the nether floor of the heavens and yet men sec them there, ;

The golden roofs of Siggeir, the hall of the silver door

That the Goths and the Gods had builded to last for ever more.
She said : ' Farewell, my brother, for the earls my candles light,
And must wend me bedward, lest I lose the flower of night.'
I
And soft and sweet she kissed him, ere she turned about again,
And a little while was Signy beheld of the eyes of men ;

And as she crossed the threshold, day brightened at her back,

Nor once did she turn her earthward from the reek and the whirling
rack,
But Queens passed on to the heart of the hall.
fair in the fashion of
And then King Siggeir's roof-tree upheaved for its utmost fall,
And its huge walls clashed together, and its mean and lowly things

The fire of death confounded with the tokens of the Kings.*

Morris delights, like other poets, in setting riddles ;
and
many of his are worth guessing, as, for example, A Garden
by the Sea :

1 know a little ganlcn-closc,

Set thick with lily and red rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy morn till dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.
And tho\igh witliiii it no birds sing,
And thoiigli no pillaicd liouse is there,
And tlif)\igh the ai)pic -boughs are bare
(Jf fruit and blossom, would to God

Her ffi't upon the green grass trod,

Aii'l I t. I'll' III them as before.
VOL. II 8
 !

274 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

There comes a murmur from the shore,
And in the close two fair streams are,
Drawn from tlie purple hills afar.
Drawn clown into the restless sea ;

Dark liills whose heath-bloom feeds no bee,

Dark shore no ship has ever seen.
Tormented by the billows green
Whoso murmur comes unceasingly
Unto the place for which I cry.
Eor which I cry both day and night,
For which I let slip all delight,
Whereby I grow both deaf and blind.
Careless to win, unskilled to find.
And quick to lose what all men seek.

Yet tottering as I am and weak,

Still have I left a little breath
To seek within the jaws of death
An entrance to that happy place.
To seek the unforgotten face.
Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me
Anigh the murmuring of the sea.''

He has, with the poet's gift of mystery, the poet's secret

of charm. Both are present in Gunnar's Howe above the
House at Both, with a deep thought too,
Lithend.^
underlie, in Mother and Son, a woman's confidences to her
infant ; spoken that he may imbibe in his spirit what she
yearns that he should know, but would blush to tell him
when old enough to understand, and, after all, leaves unsaid
—perhaps, has not courage to say aloud to herself :

Now sleeps the land of houses,

And dead night holds the street.
And there thou liest my baby '
'

And sleepest soft and sweet.

Lo amidst London I lift thee.
And how little and light thou art,
And thou without hope or fear.
Thou fear and hope of my heart
 WILLIAM MORRIS 275

Lo here thy body beginning,

and thy soul and thy life
son, ;

But how will it be if thou livest.

And enterest into the strife,
And in love we dwell together
When the man is grown in thee,
When thy sweet speech I shall hearken
And yet 'twixt thee and me
(Shall rise that wall of distance.
That round each one doth grow,
And maketh it hard and bitter,
Each other's thought to know.
Now, therefore, while yet thou art little
And hast no thought of thine own,
thee a word of the world
1 will tell ;

Uf the hope whence thou hast grown ;

Of the love that once begat thee,

Uf the sorrow that hath made
Thy little heart of hunger,
And thy hands on bosom laid.
jny
Then niayst thou remember liercafter,
As whiles wlion people say
All this hath happened before
In the life of another day ;

So mayst thou dimly remember

This tale of thy mother's voice,
As oft in the calm of dawning
I have heard the birds rejoice.
As oft I have heard the storm-wind
(Jo moaning througli the wood :

And I knew that earth was speaking,

And the mother's voice was good.''
Full of grace, again, in the [Link] of My Lmly, which

the shy lover, like the Mother, dares n((cr only <o <lic iiir :

'
My lady sooms of ivory
Forehr-ad, straight nose, and cheeks that be
Ilollow'fl a httie mournfully.
Beata moa Domina !

S 2
 —

276 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Her forehead, over-shadow'd much
By bows of hair, has a wave such
As God was good to make for me.
Not greatly long my lady's hair,
Nor yet with yellow colour fair.
But thick and crisped wonderfully.
Beneath her brows the lids fall slow,
shadow throw
Tlic lashes a clear
Where I would wish my lips to bo.
1 wonder if the lashes long
Are those that do her bright eyes wrong,
For always half tears seem to be
Lurking below the underlid.
Darkening the place where they lie hid
If they should rise and flow for me !

Her full lips being made- to kiss,

Curl'd up and pensive each one is ;

This makes me faint to stand and sec.

Nay, hold thy peace for who can

! tell ?

But this at least I know full well,

Her lips are parted longingly,

So passionate and swift to move,

To pluck at any flying love,
That I grow faint to stand and see.
Yea ! there beneath them is her chin,
So fine and round, it were a sin
To feel no weaker when I see

God's dealings for with so much care

;

And troublous, faint lines wrought in there,

He finishes her face for me.

All men that see her any time,

I chargeyou straightly in this rhyme.
What, and wherever you may be.
 —

WILLIAM MORRIS 277

To kneel before her as for me,

;

I choke and grow quite faint to see

My lad}' moving graciously,
Beata mea Domina !
' ^

But is that of a story-

Morris's distinctive strength
[Link] a succession of massive volumes the Life and —
Death of Jason, and The Earthly Paradise he revealed —
even to scholars the wealth of romance embedded in Greek
myths and traditions. With a success as surprising he
assimilated the .Scandinavian spirit for the purpose of
dealing with Scandinavian lore. The Defence of Guene-
vere, and, yet more. King Arthur's Tomb, need not shun
comparison with Tennyson's treatment of the Arthurian
legend. In isolated ballads on the borderland of history
he stands in the first rank among his contemporaries.
As a minstrel he has two mamiers of relating a tale,
and is a master in each. Of set purpose he spins a web
for the entanglement of wits in the story of Rapunzel.
After the same method the stir and rush of the Haystack
much to be guessed as is told. Was
in the Floods leave as
this to ]ie the end of the dreary flight, from the Chatelet,

of Jehane the brown, the beautiful, tiie reputed witch,

attended by her knightly lover: with her otlier lover,
accuser, and witch-catcher, in liol |tmsiii( ?

Had .she conic all tin- way for tliis.

To part at last witliuiit a kiss '.'

Yea, hail slic l)C)rnc tlic dirt and rain

That her own eyes might sec him slain
^
Hfsido the haystack in tin- IIikhIs ?

Or, following his larger way, lie will, now, in liun<li(<is ol

pages tell the tale of the (Jolden Fleece, or. now. in halt
a <lo/,en, foncerning the King of Di lunark's Sons, rccoinit
how it all came alxtut :
278 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENC^[Link] VERSE
And Harald reigned and went his way,
'
So fair upriseth the rise of the sun.'
And still is the story told to-day,
'
So grey is the sea when day is done.' ^*

Histories, legends, songs, philosophies, moralities —they

constitute together a vast total, with an astonishing even-
ness of merit. The several components are, one and all,

interesting, and, not seldom, fascinating. Where then is

their place in English poetry ? My object throughout my

rapid review of our Poets has been to determine which
of them are among the Immortals have — left us heirs of
possessions we cannot do without. Poems of such sort are
at onc6 necessaries and treasures
and I have coveted the ;

multiplication of them. began my sketch of

When I
William MoiTis, I intimated a fear that his work was not
of the kind and this continues to be my impression.
;

Much in it charms me whenever it places itseK under my

eyes. I do not long to return to it. A divine spark is
wanting. It is not that a star has been hidden in a cellar,
as an old and great poet imagined. Such as it is, it has
been visible enough. has been half a century of
Its orbit
energetic modern life. Somehow, I suppose, Morris had to
choose between the exercise of a single power, and divers ;

and he preferred many to much.

Guencvcrc and Otlier Poems, by William Morris.

'Hie iJefcnce of
Ellis &
White, 1858. Reprint Longmans, 1890.:

The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, and the Fall of the Nihhnigs, hy
William Morris. Ellis & White, 1877.
Poems by the Way, by William Morris. Reeves & Turner, 1891.
King Arthur's Tomb (Defence of CJuenevere, Sec), stanzas 41-0.
'

^ The Day is Coming (Poems by the Way), st. 1.

" Two Red Roses across the Moon (Defence of Cuenevere), stanzas
1, 2, 3, 4, 9.
* Sigurd the Volsung, Rook I.
 WILLIAM MORRIS 279

^ A Garden by the Sea (Poems by the Way).

° C4unnar'sHowe above the House at Lithend (ibid.).
' Mother and Son (ibid.).
* My Lady (Defence of Guenevere).
Praise of
* The Haj'stack in the Floods (ibid.), stanzas 1-5.
'" The King of Denmark's Sons (Poems by the Way).
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
1837—1909

In 1897, when this book first appeared, Swinburne was

living. By the plan of the work I had debarred myself,
therefore, from including him. On the issue of the present
edition I could not have passed him over. But it was
impossible to pretend to depose Alfred Tennyson from his
place as crowning the succession of British poets. I have
compromised by disregarding the accidents of birth and
death, and seating the newcomer beside William Morris,
and Rossetti, his companion, and in some sort his master.
Poets of the first rank never are duplicates. It is
impossible to bracket Swinburne with any among his
nineteenth-century contemporaries or predecessors. He
reminds of Rossetti in sensuousness he had a far hotter
;

faith in a poet's duty to concern himself with the world

and society. With Shelley he may compare in bitter dis-
content with Earth as it is, with Heaven as it is commonly
understood to be but both for good and ill he was for
;

Shelley too realistic and material. For himself he was

entirely devoid of literary jealousy of coevals or seniors.
Landor he revered as
Father and friend.

He extolled and bewailed Robert Browning, owner of

The clearest eyes in all the world.

Victor Hugo he hymned both in English and French as

a king of men as well as bards. All singers, native and
foreign, ancient and modern, were equally of his fellowship.
He had the courage to render his homage to Catullus in
 :

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 281

Etonian Latin. Ha\ing finished the Arcadia in a garden

one evening, he offers a noble vesper hjinn to Sidney in
thankfulness for its grace :

The sunken
flowers of the sun that is

Hang heavy head

of heart as of ;

The bees that have eaten and drunken

The soul of their sweetness are fled ;

But a sunflower of song, on whose honey

My spirit has fed as a bee,
Makes sunnier than morning was sunny
The twilight for me.^

He had learnt from ever}- one ; he borrowed from none ;

not even melody. Read Itylus once, and you will seem to
catch an occasional echo of Keats. Re-read, and the sweep,
the rush of the rhji^hm, if less Elizabethan than his, are

felt to have too much passion in them for any but himself

Sister, my sister, fleet sweet swallow,

Thy way is long to the sun and the south ;

But I, fulfilled of my heart's desire,

Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow,
From tawny body and sweet small mouth
Feed the heart of the night with fire.

I the nightingale all spring (luougli,

() swallow, sister, O changing swallow,
All spring through
till the spring be doni\

Clothed with the light of the niglit on llie dew.

Sing while the hours and the wild l)ir(ls fnllow,
Tak(! flight and fnllow and lind tlii' sun.

Sister, my sist«'r, O soft light swallow.

Though all things feast in flu' spring's gucst-cliJiniliir.
How hast thou heart to hi- glad thereof y<'t ?

I'or where thou liiest I shall not. follow,

'I'ill life forget, and death lenieinber.
Till thou remeniher and 1 forget.'*
282 FIVE CENTURIES OF EN(JLI8H VERSE
The full, rich sweetness of The YearRose encourages
of the
the same inclination to trace a tone, a to Keats
thrill, ;

we are left with the same final conviction of an essential

difference in the music in consequence of an essential
distinction in poetic feeling :

In the red-rose land not a mile

Of the meadows from stile to stile,
Of the valleys from stream to stream,
But the air was a long sweet dream
And the earth was a sweet wide smile
Red-mouthed of a goddess, returned
From the sea which had borne her and burned,
That with one sweet smile of her mouth
Looked full on the north as it yearned.
And the north was more than the south.^
Then, again, for qualities going deeper than form consider ,

— —
Swinburne 's choice all his own of themes the temper with
;

which he contemplates humanity, its place in the universe,

how circumstances affect it, how it weighs and accepts, or
shapes them. He began by viewing life habitually as children
observe an eclipse of the sun through smoked glass. In time
he outgrew the sheer insolence, as it is, notwithstanding the
much of grandeur, in a piece like A Litany. The gloom which
distinguished the first series of Poems and Ballads survived,
and constantly recurs. There it had been cynical. In the
Ballad of Life bodily joys are accumulated to break-in a
bondsman in the Ballad of Death for the conqueror :

Seek out Death's face ere the light altereth,

And say My master tliat was thrall to Love
'

Is become thrall to Death'. *

Not satisfied to conduct all the riot of sense into the grave,
he fashions from it a nightmare to harass the last sleep :

The four boards of the coffin lid

Heard all the dead man did.^
 ; ; :

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 283

He compels Nature to serve Man's desolation by laying

waste a garden planted for pui'poses of human delight :

Not a flower to be prest of the foot that falls not

As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry ;

From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not,

CJould she call, there were never a rose to reply.^ .

Affection itself is for his Muse as ephemeral as a blossom

The old year's dead hands are full of their dead flowers,
The old days are full of dead old loves of ours,
Born as a rose, and briefer born tlian she
Couldst tliou not watch with me ?
'

With advancing years the darkness deepens instead of

dispersing. The climax is in the third series of Poems
and Ballads, The Weary Wedding. For piling up horror,
step by step, that might pair with the Scottish ballad of
'
Edward Edward «
!
!
'

Melancholy, dainty, sweet, and lovely melancholy, has

always been a privilege of poets, from Fletcher to Keats.
It bears little resemblance to Swinburne's. His dirges and
Litanies are war-cries. With the heart-broken bride's sobs,
and the taunts to the rich bridegroom :

*
O_fool, will ye marry the worm for a wife ?
'
() fool, will ye marry the dust of death ?

miiigh's the iiiaii's 1 rindijjhant iiisislonce to Ihc <i;irl :

'
Nay, ye an- iniiK; wliilu 1 lioid my lift-.

Nay, yo arc miiic, uhilc I have my breath.' "

Swinburne exults in ])assion, and lln- |tiicc ]i;iid lor il ;

in death which is life, tind life uliicli is dcalli. lli- cxnlls

in llic rnin <tf the Armada in :

tho fierce .July when llcota were scattered as fdiun,'"

 !

284 FIVE CENTURIES OE ENGLISH VERSE

and England :

Laughed loud to the wind as it gave to her keeping the glories of

(Spain and Rome.

His verse becomes a trumpet's blast as it magnifies and

warns :

A more than the sunlight, an air that is l)righter than

light that is
morning's breath,
Clothes England about as the strong sea clasps her, and answers
the word that it saith ;

The word that assures her of life if she change not, and choose not
the ways of death.^"^

He exults in the grace of his type of gleaming Italian hill-

towns, which
far to the fair south-westward lightens,
Girdled and sandalled and plumed with flowers,
At sunset over the love-lit lands,
The where the ^vild hill brightens,
hill-side's crow^n
Saint Fina's town of the Beautiful Towers,
Hailing the sun with a hundred hands.^'^

Eager, audacious, defiant he always was, when in 1866,

was flinging wild music in the
at the age of twenty-nine, he
face of English decorum which he despised as insular
prudery when, not without pride in the reprobation he
;

had brought down upon himself, he sat himself apart, and

uttered his cries against a universe of dust and ashes.
Let him, however, for a moment forget, as he could, all but
an immensity of sunshine and full broad billows and how
;

radiant, and soars, singing

jubilant a nature emerges,
Read the hymn to the south-west wind :

Wind beloved of earth and sky and sea beyond all winds that blow.
Wind whose might in iight was England's on her mightiest warrior
day.
South-west wind, whose breath for her was life, and fire to scourge
her foe,
Steel to smite and death to drive him down an uiueturning way.
 —

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 285

Well-beloved and welcome, sounding all the clarions of the sky,

Rollingall the marshalled waters towards the charge that storms the

shore,
We receive, acclaim, salute thee, we who live and dream and die,
As the mightiest mouth song that ever spake acclaimed of yore.
of
We that live as they that perish praise thee, lord of cloud and wave,
Wind of winds, clothed on with darkness whence as lightning light
comes forth,
We that know thee strong to guard and smite, to scatter and to save.
We to whom the south-west wind is dear as Athens held the north.
He for her waged war as thou for us against all powers defiant.
Fleets full-frauglit with storm from Persia, laden deep with death
from Spain ;

Thee the giant (!od of song and battle hailed as Cod and giant,
Yet not his but ours the land is whence tliy jiraise should ring and
rain ;

Rain as rapture shed from song, and ring as trumpets blown for battle,
Sound and sing before thee, loud and glad as leaps and sinks the sea ;
Yea, the sea's white steeds arc curbed and spurred of thee, and pent
as cattle,
Yet they laugh with love and pride to live, subdued not save of thee.
Ears that hear thee hear in heaven the sound of widening wings
gigantic,
Eyes that see the cloud-lift westward see thy darkening brows divine ;

Wings whose measure is the limit of the limitless Atlantic,

Brows that bend, and bid the sovereign sea submit her soul to thine.^^
Vehemence, pjissioii, arc distinctive notes of his genius.
He iinagiiK-s, aiul iiistaiitly ac-copfs, a challenge. On the
least pretext he throws down liis gauntlet. To find a
parallel for the continuity of llanic, we must go back
jnst lialting at Shelley — to Maiiowc :

a star too sovereign, too superl),

To fa<lc when heaven took lire from Shakespeare's liglit,

A soul that knew but song's triumphal curb

Anfl love's triumphant bondage, holds of right
His pri'le of place, who (irst in |)laee and lime
Made P^ngland's voice a.s England's heart sublime.'*
286 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
The tragedies, though least of all, the earliest —Atalanta
ill —
Calydon with the relief of its lovely choruses labour —
under the same excess of emotions, and of one in particular.
It mars them as dramas, which cannot live without variety,
light and shade. They are clogged by mere bulk. Fleets
of charming fancies drift helplessly about volumes from
two hundred and nineteen to five hundred and thirty-two
pages long. But their abiding enemy is monotony of
emphasis. From that they arc the worst, not the only,
sufiEerers. In no form does the poet's verse escape it. The
habit is the more to be regretted that when, as occasionally
elsewhere, the chronic tempestuousness abates, the gift of
melody remains not the less surpassing that it becomes gentle
and reposeful. As, lulled by breeze and waves, he floats :

I lean my
cheek to the cold grey pillow,
The deep broad billow.
soft swell of the' full
And close my eyes for delight past measure.
And wish the wheel of the world would stand.^^
And it stands for him, by no means in joy, though not in
sorrow altogether, as he watches beside the cradle of a baby
dead :

The little hands that never sought

Earth's prizes, worthless all as sands,
What gift has death, God's servant, brought
The little hands ?

We ask ; but love's self silent stands,

Love, that lends eyes and wings to thought
To search where death's dim heaven expands.

Ere this, perchance, though love know nought,

Flowers fill them, grown in lovelier lands,
Where hands of guiding angels caught
The little hands.^^

He has proved that he could write with no less tenderness,

 !

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 287

and more gaiety, about living bal)yhoocI. And how he

—
adores heroism and genius contemporary as mcU as past
The more the pity that he has not sung sometimes of
everj'day hfe, of ordinary manhood and womanhood in

a like temper Amidst the loftiness, the intoxication, the

!

splendour of his paneg}Tics and maledictions, the intensity

of his landscape-dra^ving, even the grand thoughts which he
lavished, I often pine, to my shame, for a cup of cold water,
a little sober calm, a ray of common human household
kindliness. But, T know, it was not his way, unless for an
interlude. Whether in much masterly prose, or in over-
whelming verse, a horn lighter, he must rank as such ;

though a generous combatant, as well as a fiery one !

Mr. Swinburne's Poems, referred to below, arc iiublishcd by Messrs.

C'haUo & Windus.
'
Sidney's Arcadia (Astrophel), st. 2.
= Itylus(Poems and Ballads, Ist Ser.), stanzas 3, 4, 5,
^ The Year of the Rose (Poems and Ballads, 2nd Ser.), st. 3.

* A Ballad of Death (Poems and Ballads, Ist Ser.), st. 11.

' After Death (ibid.), st. 1.
'
A Forsaken Garden (Poems and Ballads, 2nd Ser.), st. 4.
' A Wasted Vigil (ibid.), st. 8.
• See p. 361, and Percy's Reliques.
» Tho Weary Wedding (Poems and BalladH, 3rd Ser.), last three
stanzas.
'• The Armada (ibid.). 11, st. 2.
" England an Ode (Astrophel), st. 20.
:

'- Four Songs of Four Seasons: Spring in Tuscany (Poems and

Ballads, 2nd Ser), st 9.
" An Autumn Vision (Astrophel), 11.
" Inscriptions (ibid.). II.
'^ A Swimmer's Dream (ibi<l.), V, st. J.
'• A Baby's Death (A Century of HouikI'Is), III.
 ARTHUR HUGH [Link]
1819—1861

Poets in general love to preach,and to a congregation.

W'lien they soliloquize they choose a market-place. For
a very few the primary, if not the final, forum is themselves.
Afterwards they may be persuaded to admit the public to
their confidence. At the moment of singing they had been
honestly unaware of its existence. They resorted to poetry
simply because they knew of no better instrument with
which to hammer out thoughts vital to their own souls.
If the resulting ideas fail to touch other hearts or ears they
do not mind. Their disregard of miscellaneous sympathy,
the occasional crudity of form, have no common origin with
the roughness of a writer who, having studied his art as
a violinist studies his, challenges criticism to disentangle
the beauty from the excrescences concealing it. These
solitariesdo not concern themselves with the artistic require-
ments of the medium of expression they have adopted.
They harbour no intention, unless to mould and develop
for their own use a conception or an aspiration.
To this limited class of poets who, first and last, are
thinkers, Arthur Hugh Clough belongs. Nature, however,
endo^^ed him with poetical gifts more or less independent
of that specific characteristic. Thus, a peculiarly delicate
sense of rhythm distinguished him from the commencement
of his career. A River Pool, written when he was twenty-
one, has
a dreamy sound
Of ripples lightly flung.^
 — : —

ARTHUR HIT;H CLOUGH 289

Religious poets of the early seventeenth century would not

have disdained the harmony of The Music of the World and
of the Soul, another product of dough's early manhood.
A felicity, almost a mysterj^ of tone lifts above the common-
place Songs in Absence, twelve years later in date :

The billows whiten and the deep seas heave ;

Fly once again, sweet words, to her I leave.

With winds that blow return, and seas that swell.
Farewell, farewell, say once again, farewell.^

It lends an additional charm to his song of Endymion on

Latmos, which shows also a rare quality with hira
warmth, as of a lover :

Can it and can it be ?

be,
Upon Eartli, and here below,
In the woodland at my side
Thou art with me, thou art here.
'Twas the vapour of the perfume
Of the presence that should be.
That enwrapt me !

That enwraps us,

O my Goddess, my Queen !

And 1 turn
At thy feet to fall before thee ;

.Vnd tliou wilt not

At thy feet to kneel and reach and ki-^s thy finger-tips ;

And thou wilt nol ;

And I feel thine arms (hat stay me.

And I feel
mine own, mine own, mine own.
1 am thine, and thoii art mine; !
'

Dipsychus's accompaniment to the gliding of the gondola

—not to speak of the graver Kignificaiico of flic iihnufasy —
is the jKH'try of motion — very Venice :

How light we go, how soft we skim !

And all in moonlight. Hceni to swim.

VOL. II r
 — — —— —

200 FIVE rENTURIES OF ENCLTSH VERSE

In moonliglit is it now. or shade ?

In planes of sure division made,

By angles sharp of palace walls
The clear light and the shadow falls ;

O sight of glory, sight of wonder !

(Seen, a pictorial portent, under,

O great Rialto, the vast round
Of thy thrice-solid arch profound !

How light we go, how softly Ah, !

Life should be as the gondola * !

Something even more, from the suggestion of aching regret,

is the musical flow of the herd-girl's hastening cry to
her cows :

The skies have sunk, and hid the upper snow

Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie
The rainy clouds are falling fast below.
And wet will be the path, and wet shall we
Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie !

Ah dear, and where is he, a year agone.

Who stepped beside and cheered us on and on ?

My sweetheart wanders far away from me.

In foreign land, or on a foreign sea
Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie !
"*

He had other qualities besides, marking a poet ;

and at
the opening of life he won the rank at a stroke, with The
Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich. There could be no more vivid
description of a typical Highland scene than that of the
students' bathing-place :

There is a stream
Springing far oflf from a loch unexplored in the folds of great moun-
tains.
Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped
Then for four more in a forest of pine, where broad and ample
Spreads, to convey it, the glen with heathery slopes on both sides ;
 ;

ARTHITR HUGH CLOUGH 291

Broad and fair tlie stream, with occasional falls and narrows ;

But, where the glen of its course approaches the vale of the river,
Met and blocked by a huge interposing mass of granite,
Scarce by a channel deep-cut, raging up, and raging onward,
Forces its flood through a passage so narrow a lady would step it.
There, across the great rocky wharves, a wooden bridge goes,
Carrjang a path to the forest below, three hundred yards, say,
;

Lower in level some twenty-five feet, through flats of shingle.

Stepping-stones and a cart-track cross in the open valley.
But in the interval here the boiling pent-up water
Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a basin,
Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury
<3ccupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror
Beautiful there for the colour derived from green rocks under ;

Beautiful, most of all, where beads of foam uprising

Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness,
over cliff for its sides, Avith rowan and pendent birch boughs.
Cliff

Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway,

more enclosed from below by wood and rocky projection.

Still
You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water.
Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing.''
A Long Vacation party's humours were never bettor
touched-off. Wo hear the learned Tutor's grave disserta-
tions ; for instance, on nature's objections to equality :

Star not equal to star, nor blossom the same as l)lossom

is ;

There is a glory of riaisios, a glory again of carnations ;

Were the carnation wise, in gay parterre by green-house.

Should it deriino to accept this nurture the gardener gives it.
Should it refuse to expaml to sun anil genial summer,
Simply because the field-daisy that grows in the grass-plat l)esido it,

Cannot, for some cause or otiier, develop and bo a carnation ?

Would not the daisy itself petition its scrupulous neighbour ?
'
Up, grow, bloom, and f(jrget me bo beautiful oven to proudness,
;

E'en for the sake of myself, and other poor daisies like mo.' ^

wore able, and amused, to follow the gay

C!onteniporario.s
among themselves, not extraordinarily
banter of his pupils
witty, any nioro than their sago instniotor's philosophy
T -2
292 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
is particularly convincing, hut curiously diverting ; the
playing at reading and at love-making ; the hospitalities of
cliief tains and local noblemen, when Oxford undergraduates
were still The whole carried the
novelties in the North,
public tasteby storm. Hope of Hay, Lindsay the Piper,
Poet and Chartist Hewson, Arthur Audley, and the great
' '

Hobbes,
Contemplative, corpulent, witty,

became household words. Even the metre, odious from

other pens, was accepted smilingly from Clough —hexa-
meters in deshabille.
There he and his world were in entire unison. That his
Muse possessed more than ordinary gifts, had he chosen to
use them, for continuing to draw it in her train, is evident
from Peschiera, and the apiilausC' which greeted it :

You say, '

Since so good-bye
it is, —
Sweet life, but whatsoe'er
high hope ;

May be, or must, no tongue shall dare

To tell, " The Lombard feared to die !
" '

Ah ! not for idle hatred, not

For honour, fame, nor self-applause,
But for the glory of the cause.
You did, what will not be forgot.
And though the stranger stand, 'tis true,
By force and fortune's right ho stands ;

By fortune which is in God's hands,

And strength, which yet shall spring in you.

This voice did on my spirit fall,

Peschiera, when thy bridge I crost,
'
'Tis better to have fought and lost,
Than never to have fought at all * !
'

It and the sister lyric, carrying a step onward the same

heroic thought, that brave and bloodj^ failures in a holy
 :

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 293

cause cire never wasted, fell from the first on no deaf ears.
They were a real contribution to the ultimate renovation of
a nationality
Say not, the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars ;

It may be, in you smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain.
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only.
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly.
But westward, look, the land is bright.^

A and nobly catching fu-c, an eye for scenic

spirit easily
picturcsqueness, and character-sketching, and an ear for
melody, go far towards making a poet by vocation. He
had those faculties, and more in the same direction. In
some of his latest verso he acknowledged the sort of obliga-
tion such properties seem t<j inii)ose. Had a constant
supply of fuel, in a crusade as righteous, been avaihxble,
it is conceivable that literature might have been enriched
with many more '
Peschierus '
from his jx'ii. fu i\\v iiaturo
of things the condition was not likely to In- iuilillcd. The
competition of other yearnings of his inmost soul must
in any case have been ceaseless and distracting. From
the beginning the mere singing instinct in him had to
light a mortal, a losing battle against the claiin of
doubt, moral, religious, intellectual, (o Iiis spirit's ai).solate
 — ——— —

294 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

service . His youth was cast in a time of mental and spiritual
questionings, active especially among pupils of Arnold,
Perilously as they disturbed the great teacher's own son,
singing kept on the whole with him its independence. His
friend, his Thyrsis, had a less imperious imagination or
a more restlessly and unselfishly logical conscience. From
an early period the poetic instinct in him became primarily
an instrument for embodying, fixing, if only for a time,
his shadowings of existence, present, past, and future, of
the government of the Universe, of Infinity. Verse became
his means for expressing the conflict in his soul between
scepticism and mysticism.
At moments the songster in him \\'ould rise and carol.
It was only as it were by an accident. Really he was more
his proper self even in unsatisfying Easter Day' Odes
'
Christ not Risen ', j'^et Risen ' —
The Questioning Spirit '

—
' '

' Bethesda ' ^" —than in the music of the Swiss girl's

cattle-call. Most of all was he himself in a moving, if

unhopeful, cry, such as Parting :

O tell me, friends, while yet ye hear,

May it not be, some coming year,
These ancient paths that here divide
Shall yet again run side by side,
And you from there, and I from here,
All on a sudden reappear ?
O tell mc, friends, while yet ye hear !

tell me, friends, ye hardly hear,

And if indeed ye did, I fear
Ye would not say, ye would not speak,
Are you so strong, am I so weak,
And yet, huw much soe'er I yearn,
Can 1 not follow, nor you turn V
tell mc, friends, ye hardly hear !
^^
 ARTHri'v HUGH CLOUCH 295

or ill the soleuui chant of an appeal agamst doginatiziti<r

on the Unknowable ?

Thou, in that mysterious shrine

Enthroned, as I must say, divine !

1 will not frame one thought of what

Thou maj'est either be or not.
not prate of thus and so ',
I will ' ' '

And be profane with yes and no ',

' ' '

Enough that in our soul and heart

Thou, whatsoe'er Thou may'st be, art.
Unseen, secure in that high shrine
Acknowledged present and divine,
I will not ask some upper air,
Some future day to place Thee there ;

Nor say, nor yet deny, such men

And women saw Thee thus and then :

Thy name was such, and there or hero

To him or her Thou didst appear.
Do only Thou in that dim shrine,
Unknown or known, remain, divine ;

There, or if not, at least in eyes

That scan the fact that round them lies,
The hand to sway, the judgment guide.
In sight and sense. Thyself divide :

—
Be Thou but there, in soul and heart,
I will not ask to feci Thou art."-

Whcther at all, or h<j\v far, he succeeded in discovering

a cluo to the problems he handles whether he might not,—
by passing them by, have had a brighter career, and been
happier personally, is a question no stranger can answer
with assurance. To me he never appears to have felt that
out of all his self-interrogatings he had pioneered a via

media. Certainly the gosyx-l ho preached to himself made

few converts outside. WiOi Ihe exceptions of The IJothie
and Peschiera with its companion, his poems were as little
heeded in his lifetime. They are, witli t In- same excei)tions,
 ;

29(5 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

less read now. He himself did not mind, and would not
mind. He did not seek for the fame either of poet or of
prophet. Never could it have occurred to him to be dis-
appointed that it did not, and has not, come. The English
public takes small pleasure in i^hilosophical poetry, unless
an extraordinary harmony be inspired by an earthy self-love
like Omar Khayyam's and Arthur Clough's melody and
;

philosophy are not thus inspired. Meanwhile, he wanders

about Victorian literature like a phantom. Sometimes,
however, phantoms become as much forces as are substances
and hereafter it maj' happen to be so Avith him. It is in
truth dit'ticulb to believe that a spmt so gracious, so eager
to icani as Avell as teach, so original, so reverent, so open-
minded, so penetrating in its insight, with a personality so
interesting, so star-like, so generously hot against injustice
and tyranny —and against them alone —can actually be as
faint in its influence as the deadness of popular attention
to the Avorks it permeates Avould seem to prove.

Poems by Arthur Hugh Clougli. With a Mcmoh-. Sixth Edition,

Macmillan & Co., 1878.
'
A River Pool (Early Poems).
''
Hongs in Absence, st.4.
=•
i-nl AaTficv (Early Poems).

* Dipsychus (pubUshcd after Clough's death), Part II, Sc. 2.

' Ite domum saturae (Miscellaneous Poems), stanzas 1-2.

« The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, 3.

' Ibid., 2. ' Pcschiera (Miscellaneous Poems), stanzas 8, 9, 10.
» Say Not (ibid.).
"> Easter Day (Naples, 1849) (Religious Poems). Easter Day, II.
The Questioning Spirit (Poems' on Life and Duty). Bethesda, a Sequel
(ibid.).
" Partmg (Early Poems), stanzas .3-4.
^ i/f.i OS au/ifoj (Religious Poems), stanzas 3-5.
 MATTHEW ARNOLD
1822—1888

I HAVE no ghoulish taste for visiting charnel-houses ; but

the whole Eseuiial is more of a tomb than a palace. There
it seemed natural to descend into the royal vaults. Not
among the Monarchs, where her Consort was to lie, but in
an ante-chamber was the cofl&n of his loved and lost yoimg
MontiJensier Queen and Bride. Not for her to rest with
Sovereigns for she had left no child to reign. Matthew
;

Arnold established no djoiasty, amiexed no province of

poetry so, I dare say, he must repose for the present not
;

with, though beside, the Kings of ISong.

Gladly 1 believe that he will be crowned in his grave by
posterity for 1 myself account him worthy. As it is, he
;

is a king de jure rather than de facto. I camiot deny that

the reading public has not yet pronounced for his enthrone-
ment. If 1 may modify the metaphor as to dignities, I
would say that he has been Beatified, not for the present
Sanctified. His poetry is not of a kind to be s])ontaneously
popular. It is a scholar's poetry, with the drawback of
being not so much over-leamed as over-educational. It
is from eccentricity, grotesqueness, rhetoric
free and its ;

freedom has operated in its disfavour. It makes no effort

to amuse with story-telling, history, or burles(pie. The
singer kej)t an abundant store of humour, if full of gall,
for his brilliant prosi;. None diversifies his poetry, unless it

be discoverable in the ten-years' ineffectual wooing of lijuc-

eyed, pale, and angolically grave Mar^uriifc liy the '

gleam-
298 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
lighted lake ', and on the Terrace at Berne. Though the
sin of monotony cannot be charged against his verse, not
many ke^'^s Such as sound are all
are touched. solemn
and Then, no Matthew- Arnold-Cult has arisen.
austere.
No congregation, however minute, of reverent disciples
gathers together in his name. Persons of refinement
admire. They nurse the emotion in their oAvn breasts.
They fear to vulgarize it by publishing it abroad. The
controversial fame which he acquired in the concluding
.stages of his career has itself in a way acted adversely.
The sentiment of his essays was, though in the bitter
without the sweet, akin to that of his verse. In latter days
his poetry often appeared to be regarded as an appendage
to his essays rather than they to it.
Of the limitations, in fact, to his popularity there can
be no question. They were necessary results of his whole
habit of mind. He had an excessive tendency towards
considering the poet a preacher, towards chanting homilies
on the low aims and pursuits of modern society, its tinsel,
its earthiness. He laid himself open to the reproach of
parading as a discoverer of the hollo wness of life. He was
proud of being, through his honesty, a homeless wanderer
forlorn from the hearth of orthodoxy. Sometimes he
l)hilosophized when he ought to have been singing. Often
his thoughts pressed forward so eagerly as to threaten to
stifle one another. Not merely are his poems unrelieved
by a single flash of gaiety they are not lighted by a sparkle
;

of joy. Lastty, and most detrimentally, he insisted upon,

perhaps could not help, mixing the work of the critical with
that of the creative faculty. He would sit in judgement
upon the purity of his own inspiration ;upon the quantity
of candle-power of the tongues of fire as they alighted upon
him. One and all are heavy fetters upon fancy and as
;
 : —

MATTHEW ARNOLD 299

such the general, even the instructed, public has alwa5^s

feltthem.
For an intimate circle they enhance respect for the
powers which can bm'st through such obstacles. The
drawbacks are for it the exalting defects of his Muse's
quahties. Had he not deviated into preaching, we should,
it will urge, have lost the heroic dirge of Rugby Chapel. No
appeal, in Christ's name, would have been raised in Progress
for sympathy with whatever Faith regenerates. Had he
not been apt to confound philosophizing and singing, wc
might have been spared the cross-grained meditations of
Empedocles, but should have missed tlic lovely interludes
on the harp of Callicles. Three-fourths of The Buried Life
arc psychology rather than poetry ; but without them wo
had lost the music of the close — ^the sudden pause in life's
distracted turmoil

When our world-dcafen'd ear

Is of a lov'd voice caress' d
by the tones
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of fcehng stirs again,
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, wc say, and what we would wo know I

A man becomes aware of his life's How,

And lii-ars its winding murmur, and ho sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the brce/.c,
.Vnd tliere arrives a lull in the hot race
Wiicrein lie doth f<jr ever chase
That Hying and chisive sliadow, rest.
An air of eoolness plays upon liis face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he tliinks lie knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goos.^

The iJacchanaliu, withitul thr laiiiblin- |>r<hidc, would

 — ——

300 FIVE CENTTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

not have danced from the silence of death into the silence
of living light :

And o'er the plain, where the dead age

Did its now silent warfare wage
O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom,
Where many a splendour finds its tomb,
Many spent flames and fallen nights
The one or two immortal lights
Rise slowly up into the sky
To shine there everlastingly,
Like stars over the bounding hill.

The epoch ends, the world is still."

Without the vain effort in the Epilogue to Lessing's

Laocoon to marshal the arts in their respective ranks, v,g
should have lost the noble tribute to Music :

'
Miserere, Domine !
'

The words are utter'd, and they flee.

Deep is their penitential moan,
Mighty their pathos, but 'tis gone !

Beethoven takes them then those two —

Poor, bounded words and makes them new
!
— ;

Infinite makes them, makes them young ;

Transplants them to another tongue.

Where they can now, without constraint.
Pour all the soul of their complaint,
And roll adown a channel large
The wealth divine they have in charge.
Page after page of music turn.
And still they live and still they burn.
Perennial, passion-fraught, and free
'
Miserere, Domine !
' •'

Even when we feel him straining after an idea which

evades his gi'asp, as in The Strayed Reveller, the tendrils
of floating fancy cling to a hundred entrancing scenes.
Egotistical is he ? If any one is a licensed egotist, is not
a poet V Weary, worn-out, blase too, if he please, so long
 — !

MATTHEW ARNOLD 301

as the mood gives us melody delightfully acrid, like the

final answer to the question, What is it to grow old ?
It is — last stage of all
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man * ;

like a hail-storm of sadness, as The Last Word :

Creep into thy narrow bed,

Creep, and let nomore be said.
Vain thy onset all stands fast
!

Thou thyself must break at last.

Let the long contention cease !

Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

Let them have it how they will !

Thou art tired best be still.

:

They out-talked thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee ?

Better men fared thus before thee !

Fired their ringing shot, and pass'd,

Hotly charged —and broke at last.

(Jharge once more, then, and be dumb !

Ijct the victors, wlien they come.

When the forts of folly fall,
^
Kind thy body by tl)c wall !

like the exquisite glimpse of Kensi)igt(»M (iardeiis. caughl

through the afternoon sunshine of u serene despair :

Jiird.s htirc make Bong, each bird lias his,

[Link] the girdling city's hum ;

How green under the boughs it is !

How thick the tremulous shcep-crics come !

"

or the contrast imaged in The Palladium —stately, cold

marble, with a flush as from a deity within —between the
calm of the soul and the discords of extcnifil cxistenc<' :
 ! ;!

:ny2 FIVE CF^NTURTES OF ENGLISH VERSE

It stood, and sun and nioonsliino rain'd their light
On the pure columns of its glen-built hall.
Backward and forward roU'd the waves of fight
Round Troy but while this stood, Troy could not
; fall.

So, in its lovely moonlight, lives the soul

Mountains surround it, and sweet virgin air ;

Cold plashing, past it, crystal waters roll

We visit it by moments, ah, too rare !

Still doth the soul,from its lone fastness high,

Upon our life a ruling effluence send ;
And, when it fails, fight as we will, we die,
And while it lasts, we cannot wholly end.'

The drama of man's inner life, as seen by Arnold, is

a tragedy in many acts, with many actors. It commences
with a struggle often the player cast for a leading part
;

never sees the end often it has no end

; when there is ;

any, always it is grievous. The bitterness of it all taints

Heine's grave in trim Montmartre :

Hark ! through the alley resounds

Mocking laughter ! A film
Creeps o'er the sunshine ; a breeze
Ruffles the warm afternoon,
Saddens my soul with its chill
Gibing of spirits in scorn
Mars the benignant repose
Of this amiable home of the dead.*

It had robbed him living of the source of the one supreme

gift as a poet that he missed :

Charm, the glory which makes

Song of the poet divine ^ ;

The play's climax may be the catastrophe of a moment,

such as froze into eternal despair
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 303

that Lord Arundel,

Who struck, in heat, his child he loved so well
And his child's reason flicker'd, and did die.
Painted —he will'd —in the gallery
it

They hang ; the picture doth the story tell.^'^

Or it may be an unceasing ache, like the never stilled, old

^^•orld sorrowing of tawny-throated Philomela :

Eternal passion !

^^
• Eternal pain !

Vainly man seeks to riot himself into forgetfulness of the

hollo^vness of existence, as in the drear ja'evelry of Mycerinus,
whose
sometimes wondering soul
From the loud joj^ul laughter of his lips
Might shrink half startled, like a guilty man
Who wrestles with his drcam.*-

Equally to no purpose will he plot to circumvent his doom

of nothingness, by condemning himself to the grinding
weariness of a living death— the Carthusians'

gloom profound.
Ye solemn wats of holy pain !
'•'

The battle always is lost before it was fought.

A time was when humanity secmod af last In have
grasped triuin])haiitly a saving l-'aitli :

Oil, had 1 lived in that groat day,

How had its glory new
Fill'd earth and heaven, and caught awny
My ravish'd spirit too I

No thought-S that to tin; world lidoiig

Had stood against the wave
Of love which net ho deep and strong
From Christ'H th<Mi open t;r;ivr.
 ' —

n04 V\YE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

No lonely life had pass'd too slow
When I could hourty see
That wan, nail'd Form, with licad droop'd low,
Upon the bitter tree ;

Could see the Mother with the Child

Whose tender winning arts
Have to his little arms beguiled
So many wounded hearts !

While we believed, on earth he went,

And open stood his grave ;

Men call'd from chamber, church, and tent,

And Christ was by to save.^*
That untenanted grave, with the vision of Him, who had
once lain therein, ascending to his Heaven to prepare it
for )nen, turned many a convulsion of despair, as in the
adorable story of the Church of Brou, and its widowed
Foimdress, into angelic resignation a resignation out- —
lasting life :

So O maible pair
sleep, for ever sleep, !

Or, ye wake, let it be then, when fair

if

On the carved western front a flood of light

Streams from the setting sun, and colours bright
Prophets, transfigured Saints, and Martyrs brave
In tlie vast western window of the nave ;

And on tlie pavement round the tomb there glints

A chequer- work of glowing sapphire tints,
—
And amethyst, and ruby then unclose
Your eyelids on the stone where ye repose,
And from your broider'd pillows lift your heads,
And raise you on your cold white marble beds,
And looking down on the warm rosy tints
Which chequer, at your feet, the illumined flints,
Say ;What is this ? We are in bliss—forgiven
'

Behold the pavement of the courts of Heaven !

Or let it be on autumn nights, when rain

Doth ruKtlingly above your heads complain
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 305

On the smooth leaden roof, and on the walls

Shedding her pensive light at intervals
Tlie moon through the clere-story windows shines,
And the wind washes 'mid the mountain pines ;

Then, gazing up through the dim pillars high.

The foliaged marble forest where ye lie
'
Hush '
—
yo will say
—
it is eternity
' !
;

This is the glimmering verge of Heaven, and these

'
The columns of the heavenly palaces !

And in the sweeping of the wind your ear

The passage of the angels' ^vings will hoar,
And on the lichen-crusted leads above
The rustle of the eternal rain of love.^'

And then —and then—alas for the world and the atoning
blood of the Christ of Nazareth !

Now he is dead Far hence he lies,

!

In the lorn Syrian town.

And on his grave, with shining eyes,.
The Syrian stars look down.^"

The struggle is over, and a profound quiet succeeds but ;

scarcely even Balder's peace V' where there was hope's

*

glimmer, its pale ghost. Rather, the soul-suicide of the

silent Alpine monastery, with its frost-bitten Belief, which
is, for the world,
u dead time's exploded dream ;

rather, the stilhiess of the tented licld, with the opposed

Persian and Tartar hosts in unconcerned animal repose,
while, Ixitwcen thcin, in tiie hushed chill darkness, 8ohrab,
slain by his father's unknowing spear,
lay dead,
And the groat llustum diow liis horseman's cloak
Down o'er his face, and sate by his dead son."*

Matthew AinoM (.•(Mistaii) ly ilwdls on oik- imlc For the

V<JL. 11 "
 — ;

300 nVE CENTUiUES OF ENGLISH VERSE

close we always can imagine we hear a delivery of judgement
of decay and death. In varying cadences of mournfulncss,
sobs of protest, recognized by the victim as unavailing,
are raised agamst the inevitable blankness. They are
succeeded at best by acquiescence in woe beyond compare,
^\•hich leaves no more to suffer. What though, throughout
the whole, we are sensible of some affectation in the guilty
of grief which does not grieve — of some positive, prepos-
terous pride in the remarkable elevation of soul which has
elected him to be a remorseful exile from the Kingdom of
Faith instead of a common comfortable believer ! At all

events, artistic values in the picture are intuitively observed

and the painter moreover had actually passed through the
sjoiritual experiences he portrays.
He had interrogated human nature particularly', his ;

own. He had ransacked libraries always for his own

;

mind's sake to discipline, and enrich it

;
to learn what
;

manner of being he might lia\'e been and was not, or was.

For him the one thing Avorth understanding was the complex
organism of man's heart and intellect. To know it he used
himself as subject, scalpel, and lecturer. His habit of
identifying \artually the functions of MTiter and critic was
a necessity of the position he assumed. We can contem-
jDlate him dissecting his inner personalit}', noting how his
soul, A\hich originally had glowed with devotion, exulted
in the discovery of its liberty —then
Wandering between two worlds, one dead.
The other powerless to be born,^^
*
waited forlorn ' in the discord of contrar}^ enthusiasms,
harassed by rival claims to allegiance, scared, distracted,
seared, benumbed ; and, linally, when the company, lost
in the storm,
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 307

at aightfall, at last
Comes to the end of its way,
To the lonely inn 'mid the rocks ;

Where the gaunt and taciturn host

Stands on the threshold, the wind
Shaking his thin white hairs-
Holds his lantern to scan
The storm- beat figures, and asks :

Whom in our party wo bring '!

Whom wo have left in the snow V

' -'^

was content to let the doubt remain unresolved even by

himself, v/hether he will be of the remnant to whom the
question is put. When now and again susf)icion arises, as
I have said, of a want of genuineness in the anguish, it
can be admitted without too much offence to the honour
of the sufferer. He is operator, though on himself, and
his primary duty was to apply the knife. To hnd fault
\vdth his assumption of the double character is to strike
at the basis of his intimate poetiy ; and with that we
cannot afford to quarrel.
—
Take him as he is body al once and anatomist, poet and
critic —
and study of his work will both inform and delight.
Whether he vivisect his own soul, or another's, he himself
I'emaina the principal object of interest. The Scholar-
Gipsy is a picturesque vision of the legendary being who
had doffed the trainnielliug gown, yet could not tear liimself
out of hearing of Oxford's sweet jangling lx;lls, among

the warm, grooo-muQied Cumnor hills.^'

So is departed Thyrsis, in the sister idyll redolent of tiie

fragrant Ijcauty alike of Lycidas, and the Ode to a Grecian
Urn, yet distinct from both. Jiut the tinal cause of each is

to echo Matthew AruoM, and each wo search for and

in
discover him arifl his moods, liyron himself does n<»t loom
U 2
 —

308 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

more largely in every poem he wrote than Arnold in his.
The more impressive the poet and his verse, the more we feel
the critic, the psychologist, analysing, characterizing every
tissue, every nerve-centre ; and we admire and sympathize
with both the more.
He was born a i)oet and he had trained himself to be
;

a consummate artist in words. Milton in the choruses of

Samson Agonistes has not equalled the flexible harmony
of the blank verse of Rugby Chapel and Heine's Grave.
Tennyson in the Swan's death-song scarcely surpasses
Dover Beach in the music of the ebb, and
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.'^-

I am afraid to x^raise, lest I be accused of exaggeration, the

perfect accord of harmony and complaint in the Forsaken
Merman's cry of mild hopelessness :

Children, at midnight,
When soft the winds blow,
When clear falls the moonlight,
When spring-tides are low ;

When sweet airs come seaward

From heaths starr'd \vith broom,
And high rocks throw mildly
On the blanch' d sands a gloom ;

Up the still, glistening beaches.

Up the creeks we will hie.
Over banks of bright sea-weed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze, from the sand-hills,
At the white, sleeping town ;

At the church on the hill-side

And then come back down ;

Singing : ' There dwells a loved one,

But cruel is she !

IShe left lonely for ever.

**
The kings of the sea.'
 MATTHEW AEXC^LD 309

As I read and upon passages

re-read, I perpetually light
which, like would do honour to any genius, however
this,
exalted. I can well understand how such a master might
have expected to attain to something of the width of
celebrity which fell to an illustrious contemporar^^ But,
as constantly, I note personal characteristics which explain
at once the disappointment of his hope of common popu-
larity, and the peculiarity of the recognition he won.
His Avas natural inspiration of the highest, which had
happened to be exposed to the contradictory influences
of Thomas Arnold's Rugby, with its cheerful, radiant '

vigour and Newman's dissatisfied, self-troubled Oxford.

',

None can tell whether without the blend, or strife, literature

would have gained or lost. It might have counted better-
matured Sohrab and Rustums. It must have gone without
the Grande Chartreuse, the Obermann, Heine, and the
Chapel. As it is, the poet has failed of general favour.
and has secured an audience all his own. Never lias the
educated, that is, the Academically educated, section of the
community been enveloped in a cloud of incense like this !

A poet, an inspired poet, and Nothing in him

all for it !

of the obscurity of Sordello, which a mere student from

London, Manchester, anywhere, is free to penetrate. All
clear as the day to glasses burnt on the banks of Isis or
Cam. The elor-t of Oxfonl and Cambridge can nev(^r read
a line of Matthew Arnold without a (ionsciousncss of his
eyes upon tlicin. No woiidfr that his followers, travel-
stained like himself, fellow wanchirers, fellow exiles, from
the Promised Land, are fit and select but few. —
Poems l»y Matt how Arnold. Two vola. MucmillunH, ISd'.). (Also
Poetical Works, one vol., ISOrt.)
'
The Biiriod Life.
* Bacchanalia ; or, The Now Ago.
310 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
" Epilogue to Lessing'fi Laocoon. * Crowing Old.
s
The Last Word.
" Linos Written in Kensington Gardens
' PaUadium, stanzas 2, 3, 6. ' Heine's Grave.
» Ibid. '" A Picture at Newstead.
» Philomela. •' Mycerinus.
" Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.
'* Obcrmann Once More.

'« The Church of Brou, 3, Tiic Tomb.

" Obermann Once More.

" Balder Dead. '^ Sohrab and Rustum.
" Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, st. 15.
•0 Rugby Chapel. ''
The Scholar-Gipsy.
'--
Dover Beach. -^ The Forsaken Merman
 ROBERT BROWXIXG
1812—1880

Literary history furnishes many examples of prosc-

uTiters who have employed their wits and pens in decipher-
ing their owai thoughts and emotions. Some among man}'
are Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Montaigne,
Pascal, Roasseau, Sterne, perhaps Cervantes. Wehave to
.search before finding clear parallels in poetry. I do not
mean that poets do not habitually light up their own minds
for the delight and instruction of the public. That is of
the essence of poetry. But they start by looking ahead, by
trying to penetrate into other minds, and telling them w hat
they, without knowing it, think. Their discoveries outside
they carry within. At their leisure they take their spoil to
pieces, repair, add, embellish, reconstruct, and give forth
transformed.
Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning are prominent
among the CJreat in English verse for beginning and ending
on their own ground. Like all they were ready to gather
suggestions from elsewhere. They valued them as mere
material for their personal ase and enlightenment. So far
the two are alike ; and yet none could more in the
differ
manner of their self-revealing. The one is something
between historian and advocate, the other an inspired
diarist. The one passionately [Link] and connnents.
passionately apologizes, pleads, and defends. Tiic other
remembers, compares, foresees, soliloquizes, and is at once
wholly [xjrsonal, and as absolutely imi)crsonal. A coinph-io
:U-2 VWK CRNTURTES (W KXCTJSH VERSE
diagram of the working of Browning's mind might Ik-

drawn from his many successive volumes. Poets in general

regard themselves as apostles commissioned to go out and
teach. Being distinctively a poet, with a poet's idiosyn-
crasies, he did not refuse to let his voice be heard. He
would not have denied that he rather preferred it as it
sounded to an audience. But for the purpose disciples had
to be at home with him. They had to listen, as, with
entire dispassionateness, he conversed with himself aloud.
His primary object was to tell himself what from day to
day he thought. not follow, he
If readers in general did
might regret it or not. The accident did not load him to
change the form of his memoranda.
With this conception anybody who is sincerely anxious
to profit by him has His way was to be for ever
to begin.
chasing, overtaking, catching at, the shadow of an idea
Hitting around ; might be by choice, Avithin.
outside, it :

Having grasped he would order, frequently torture, it

it,

to declare its substance. When the thing, unaccustomed

to be thus rudely catechized, stood mute, he set to work
imagining all possible beings it might be. One by one he
held them up before it, to see whether they recognized
kinsmanship. Often he was left clasping still an inveter-
ately unsubstantial shadow. He had to clothe it with
flesh and blood from his own large, warm, breathing, very
human soul.
For the public, when at a long last it came to be inquisi-
tive about him, for students and disciples from the first
and always, that was the sum of the whole. The very
diverse classes of his ultimate readers were content, if at
times bewildered, that it should be so. They wandered
in the gardens of his spacious nature, survejang it through
what were bars for most of them, after the 'manner of
 ROBERT BROW^^ING 313

visitors to the flowers and beasts in Regent's Park. Thov

were interested to Avatch him whether at play or in earnest.
I do not suppose that it was in the least his own point of
view. The shadows were all palpable realities to him. If
I maj' change the metaphor, he would not be aware that
he had never removed the scaffolding from the buildings
he had erected. It might be a complicated human fabric
he had constructed out of casuistry, sensuality, love of
imposture for its owni sake as an art, the bases of the career
oi a charlatan like Paracelsus. Not a single prop or strut
could be removed with safety. In tracking the strange
fortunes of an Italian troubadour, warrior, master and
victim of statecraft and lovecraft, such as the mysterious
half mythological Sordello, of the Purgatorio, he had to
retain as tight hold of every clue to the labji-inth as a
medieval schoolman. The problems that he kept setting
himself, at brief intervals, for upwards of half a centurj^ !

How deviously he wandered to find fresh enigmas ; as, for

instance, Which was the true Christopher Smart ? ^ The
solutions with which he attempted, sometimes successfully,
sometimes not, to satisfy himself The knots deliberately
!

tied to Ixj triumphantly, and as deliberately, loosened !

Poetry in his cyos was the science of life and life;

mainly the life of a mind. That was life's essence without

the accidents. The one prf)por instrument for operating
upon it was introspection of, and by, tiio ojicrator as ;

Matthew Arnold also found, though from a dissimilar point

of view, and with recourse to very dissimilar processes.
Melody, orthodox melody, Browning allowed, might servo
as an auxiliary ; its help was not so important that it

was worth purchasing by sacrifices. Above all, nothing in

an idea, a thought, a feeling, must Ix^ resigned in its favour.
Poets are alleged (<> havr pared dciwn a thought for the
814 FIVE CENTURIES OF EXriTJSTT VERSE
sake of a rhyme or rliythni. They have been said to be
capable of letting a rhyme introduce a thought. Browning
would have scorned to give up the least particle of an idea
at the demand of diction. He never scrupled to manu-
facture terms and phrases as clothes for an idea. Rather
than suffer rhjTne to lead thought, he coined rhymes also.
He may seem to be prolix. Again, it is thought which is
to blame some idea will have had to disentangle itself
;

])ainfully from encumbering matter or it is growing, and

;

needs additional raiment in the shape of speech. Its parent

never dreamt of refusing so natural, necessary, even
laudable and decent, a demand.
The Ring and the Book reports in four volumes a criminal
[Link] is the poem's outward guise. The reality is
a microscopic analysis of the life-beats of a group of hearts.
not by the crime, not by the
jNIeasure its right to the space
hearts, but by the pulsations of the reporter's brain and ;

there not a page too many. Voluminous, if not diffuse,

is

rugged and harsh, not careful to render the ideas he

—
supremely prized intelligible much less, palatable to the —
ordinary Englishman, he stands, in the mass of his work,
altogether apart both from his contemporaries and his
predecessors. With all their variances and contrarieties,
the several schools of poetry may be said at least to have
agreed as a rule upon a measure of complimentary respect
for the imderstanding of their public. Foremost among
the few dissidents stands the author of Sordello, Caliban
\ipon Setebos, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton
Night -cap Country, Fifine at the Fair, The Inn Album,
Jocoseria, Parleyings with Certain People, La Saisiaz, the
two Poets of Croisie, and Asolando. No charge can be
lodged against him of having pandered to the popular
taste, or ignorance.
 ROBERT BROWNING 315

The complacency with which he launched upon literatiure

this rapid succession ofconundrums enraged the contempo-
raries of two-thirds of his career. He never appeared to
be aware of the shocks he was administering. His general
uncouthness seemed the more audacious in the face of
a store of most tuneful occasional poems with which he
interspersed his habitual experiments upon the endurance
of readers. At will he shoAvcd that, when he chose, none
euuld be more melodious than he. B}' turns he was gentle
and lierj', able to unseal the fountain of laughter and
the fountain of tears. He was majestic, terrible, simple,
tender —even to imposture, if hungry —content, with a
profound thought beneath, to be just graceful. With the
sense upon us of the works by which apparently he meant
his name to live, we ask, not so much why usually he
clashes the harji-strings, as why the psychologist, the meta-
physician has suddenly strayed into absolute singing. Was
he moved by compassion for the bewildered and dazed
critic ? Was he himself weary of untunefulness ? May
it not have been that the music always underlay the
philosophy, that the philosophy was alwaj^s ready, in
favouring (-in^umstances, to break into song that life's —
'
.scowl of cloud '
hides behind it
-
splendid, a star V

have been glancing Ihrough the lyi'ics scattered over

I
many volumes. It wouUl be harfl to say where else can be
found a more absolute; comlnnation of thought, sentiment,
—
rhythm or where more variety.
In The Ijont Jjoadcr I reacl rei>roa(h. aiiia/.cinciit . rcvcjil,

admiration, hope that lie, the renegade, in lighting the

followers he has desert<d, will keep all the prowess which
hn(] won thfir worship- that he will rcjwnt in death — ])e

theirs unco iinire in Heaven — for they love him :

run FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
Let him novor conio back to us !

There would bo doubt, hesitation, and pain,

—
Forced praise on our part the ghmmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again !

Best fight on well, for we taught him strike gallantly, —

Menace our heart ere we master his o^vn ;

Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us.
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne ^ !

Bitter humour in The Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister blasts

under a cowl. The soliloquy is a micro-
li3rpoerisy hiding
cosm. It is an which sums up the passions of
entire play,
universal humanity, raving in a petty monastery, inside
a pettier breast. The joy of setting a trap to catch saintly
Brother LawTence !

There 's a great text in Galatians

Once you
trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations.
One sure if another fails ;

Tf I triphim just a-dying.

Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round, and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee * !

In another spirit, weariness of the yoke of liberty becomes

a hymn to a Guardian Angel to bend me low ', like '

Guercino's pictured child at Fano :

and lay, like his, my hands together,

And lift them up to pray, and gently tether
Me, as Thy lamb there, with thy garment's spread.^
Or defiance is hurled at Death :

Fear death ? —to feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face.
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm.
The post of the foe ;

Where ho stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,

Yet the strong man must go :
 ! ——

ROBERT BRO^\^ING 317

For the journey is done and the summit attained,

And the barriers fall,

Though a battle 's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,

The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so one tight more,—
The best and the last
Iwould hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore.
And bade me creep past.
No let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
!

The heroes of old.

Bear tlie brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave.
The black minute 's at end.
And the elements' rage, the fiend- voices that rave.
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain.

Then a light, then thy breast,

O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again.
And with God be the rest !
^

And the love-sougs ! To tit every phase

Passion, hidden, the lover may believe, from all but the
bud the loved one has named :

This flower she stopped at, finger on lip,

Stooped over, in doubt, as settling its claim ;

Till she gave me, with pride to make no slip.

Its soft meandering Spauisli name :

What a name Was it love or praise V

!

Speech half-asleep, or song half-awuko '.'

1 must learn Spanish one of tliese days.

Only for that slow sweet name's sake
Flower, you SpanianI, look that you grow nnt,
Stay as you are and bo loved for over I

Bud, if I kiss you, 'tis that you blow not,

]yiind, the shut pink mouth opens never !

For wliilij it pouts, her lingers wrestle,

Twinkling tlie auducious loaves between.
Till round tiny turn and down they nestle
^
Is not the dear mark sliU to be soon ?
 —— — ——

318 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

A husband's glad choice —when bid fix his own reward
for the rescue of France's sole sui'viving fleet — of one day's
company of his Avifc as suthcient guerdon :

A beam of fun outbroko

On mouth that spoke,
tho bearded
As the honest heart hiughed through
Those frank eyes of Breton blue ;

'
Since I needs must say my say,
Since on board tlie duty 's done.
And from Malo Roads to Croisic Point, what is it but a run ?

Since ask and have, I may

'tis

Since the others go ashore

Come A good whole holiday
! !

Leave to go, and see my wife, whom I call the Belle Aurorc !
'

—
That ho asked, and that he got, nothing more.®

A Parting, with seas to divide —and, perhaps, for ever !

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,

And the sun looked over the mountain's lim ;

And straight was a path of gold for him.

And the need of a world of men for nie.^

A protest, in the presence of death, against a measure-

ment of the right to love by Time's jealous milestones !

I loved you, Evelyn, aU the while !

My heart seemed full as could hold

it
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.
So, hush, —
I wiU give you this leaf to keep :

See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand !

—
There, that is our secret go to sleep !

You will wake, and remember, and understand.^"

And, a lovely psalm of mamage — By the Fireside

lastly,
—where passion and tenderness blend into one, and trans-
mute the still aching agony of uncertainty in tho wooing :
 ; .

IIOBERT BROWNING 319

Oh, the little more, and how much it is !

Aud the little less, aud what worlds away '.

How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,

Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this -^^ !
—
into happy pride
To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that, b}' its side,
Youth seems the waste instead.^-
Every l\Tic, every idyll, has its problem, though merged
in an midercurrent of melody so bewitching that none are
obliged to explore below. Abt Vogler, of musical renown,
defies poet and painter, only human workers, noble as are
their arts, to rival his, where
is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,

Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are !

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a stai

Consider it well each tone of our scale in itself is nought

:

It is everywhere in the world —

loud, soft, and all is said :

Give it to me to use I mix it with two in my thought

!

And, there Ye have heard and seen consider and bow tin- hcml
! : !

And at the height of iiis exultation :

It is gone, the palace of nmsic i reared !

Well, earth with me

it is silence resumes her reign
;
:

1 will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.

( live me the keys. I feel for the common chord again.
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor, yes. —
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground.
Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep ,

Which, hark, 1 iiavc dared and done, for my resting i)la(T is fDund,
The C Major of this life : wj, now I will try to sleep.'-'

To the glory of his life Ihe [Link] wees an cikI ;

while death, three centuries ciirlicr, leads the lriiiiiii)li of

the (Jraniniariaii. Uiiow few I |m>( ins in \\lii<Ii (!).• [Link]

 : ; —

320 FIVE CENTLTRIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

can be more present with the poet in the access of inspira-
tion. We feel his successive thrills of joy, as he climbs step
by step with the adoring scholars up through the dust of
buried learning into the pure ether of reborn Hellenism :

Let us begin and cany up this corpse,

.Singing together.
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop ;

Seek we sepulture
On a tall mountain, citicd to the top,
Crowded with culture !

All the peaks soar, but one the I'est excels ;

Clouds overcome it
No, yonder sparkle is the citadel's
Circling its summit.
Thither our path lies wind we up the heights
; ;

Wait ye the warning ?

Our low life was the level's and the night's ;

He 's for the morning.

Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,
'Ware the beholders !

This is our master, famous calm and dead.

Borne on our shoulders.
He was a man born with thy face and throat.
Lyric Apollo !

Long he lived nameless how should spring take note

:

Winter would follow ?

Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone !

Cramped and diminished,

Moaned he, '
New measures, other feet anon.
My dance is finished '!
'

No, that's the world's way (keep the mountain-side,

Make for the city !)
He knew the signal, and stepped on with pride
Over men's pity ;

Left play for work, and grappled with the workl

Bent on escaping
'
What 's in the scroll,' quoth he, '
thou kecpest furled '!

Show mc their shaping,

 ' '! — —

ROBERT BROWNING 321

Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage,

Give ! '
—So, he gowned him,
Straight got by heart that book toits last page ;

Learned, we found him.

Yea, but wc found him bald too, eyes like lead.
Accents uncertain ;

'
Time to taste another would have said,
life,'
'
Up with the curtain !
'

This man said rather, '

Actual life comes next ?

Patience a moment
Grant have mastered learning's crabbed text,
I
Still there 's the comment.'
Oh, such a life as he resolved to live.
When he had learned it.
When he had gathered all books had to give !

Sooner, he spurned it.

Others mistrust and say, But time escapes '
;

Live now or never !

He said, What 's time ? Leave Now for dogs and apes
'
!

Man has Forever !

Back to his studies, fresher than at lirst.

Fierce as a dragon
He —soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst
Sucked at the flagon.
So, witli the throttling hands of deatli at strife,
(irouiid he at grammar ;

Still, tliio' the rattle, parts of speech were rife ;

Whihr he could stamincr

He settled '
Hoti's '
business — let it be !

Properly based Oun

'
'

Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic '

dc ',

Dead from the waist down.

Here 's the top-peak ; the multifurlc bcjdw
Live, for they can, there ;

This man dr-cirlcd not to Live l)Ut Know

Bury tills man there ?
Here — hero's his place, where meteors slioof, clouds form.
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go Let joy break with ! tlir Htuini,

Peace let the dew send !

VOL. II X
 : ! —

322 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Lofty designs must close in like effects :

Loftily lying,
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects.
Living and dying.^*

Whole libraries of the results of German research

patient as the Grammarian's own —could not reflect the
ecstasy of the Renaissance, the magic of Golden Ages,
Periclean, Augustan, come back to an amazed, rough-hewn
Gothic world —could not represent that world's debt to the
early martrys of learning, the Scaligers, Casaubons, who
immolated lyric youth, gowned manhood, bald, hydroptic
old age, dead from the waist down, battling with the
expiring rattle over a due settlement of the enclitic de ', '

a tenth part as intelligibly as the hundred and fifty trumpet-

ing lines of this funeral chant
An idea is somewhere, in everything Browning
alwaj^s,
A^Tote. The variety
of frankness, or the reverse, with
which it reveals, or dissembles, itself is incalculable. Some-
times, as in a Lost Leader, Abt Vogler, a Grammarian's
Funeral, he, more or less fully, unfolds it. Frequently the
explanation is at hand, a little below the surface just ;

below, as the accumulation to Martin Relph's remorse for

his dastardly treachery, that the secret of his crime — ^with
its price — is safe, a torturing Hell in his own bosom :

'
You were taken
aback, poor boy,' they urge, no time to regain '

your wits
Besides it had maybe cost you life.' Ay, there is the cap that
fits;"

just below, as the comfort to Hoseyn for the loss of his

innncible mare, Muleykeh, that he alone holds the clue
to her last victory that none but himself understands
;

how pride in her peerlessness could leave her the robber's

rather than keep her shamed :
 —

ROBERT BROWNING 323

And they jeered him one and all :

'
Poor Hoseyn is crazed past hope !

How else had he wrought himself his ruin, in fortune's spite ?

To have simply held the tongue were a task for a boy or girl,
And here were Mulej'keh again, the eyed like an antelope,
!
The child of his heart by day, the wife of his breast by night '

'
And the beaten in speed wept Hoseyn ! You never have loved
'
: '

my Pearl.' ^"^

Equally often we are left to grope about for an answer, as

in Clive.^' We can but imagine possibilities with a self-
tormenting temperament, like his. Here he was, after
thirty years of glory, brooding still with a shudder on
disgrace which might have, but had not, befallen him in
obscure boyhood. Such a natui'e would fuid the prospect
of oblivion less intolerable than an old age of case and
a throng of that and other as rankhng memories. I believe
that the gallop from Ghent to Aix never had any specific
historical foundation that it is a parable of the essential
;

grandeur of human effort, human sacrifice, without regard

to the object ; endurance is
of the truth that unsparing
never wasted, though, there be no good news, no news at
all to be good or bad.

Whether Browning indulged nr baulked lh<' curiosity of

his admirers over a puzzle had aotliing to do with their
convenience. It depended wholly upon his own. A com-
pensation is that ho regarded them so little as to have no
shyness in thinking in public. He would have minded as
little had he known that, taking the same liberty with his

work, they presumed to complete an unfinished ))icture ;

to imagine, for exam})Ie, the J'icd F'ipcr, kindly to the

children as ho had l)een vengeful fo their sharp-dealing
elders, playing ctf-rnMl, wondeifnl nnisie (o (he 1n»op in
gardens of Fairyland :

W'horo waters gUHhcd and fruit-trees grow.

.And flowers put forth a fairer hue,
.And everything was wt range and new.'"
X 2
324 F1\E CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

It is the same throughout. Browning, while he might

be supposed to intend nothing but a song, was thinking,
and often profoundly. In return, when meditating, he
stillsang. It would be idle for me to assert that in his
Avork, outside his idylls and lyrics, melody is the primary
attribute which a reader observes. Neither is it sentiment.
The ear does not in Sordello, in Paracelsus, give, by
drinking-in the music, the signal for the heart to glow.
But whatever he wrote was poetry. None could ever
mistake a dozen lines of his for prose. I would even go
so far as to say, if a comparison had to be attempted, that
A\hen he is not making experiments in metre, or on the for-
bearance of his admirers, his verse, for instance, in Christmas
Ev^e and Easter Day, La Saisiaz, or Parleyings, could be
sho\m to be more absolutely distinguishable rhythmically
from prose than In a Year, or Home Thoughts from Abroad,
and From the Sea. How various the blank verse is, and
how strong How it seems to have sprung, ripe and full,
!

from the brain of power The thought stands out from

!

it as the muscles in a statueby Michel Angelo. Into

a sentence it can condense more than could be expressed
in a page of prose. It can take a sentence of prose, and
draw from it a hundredfold the meaning.
Singular merits and as singular defects
; the defects ;

of the writer's qualities and with greatness in both. The

;

self-connnuning in particular, which lies at the basis of

all his work, has its drawbacks. He would have rejoiced
csjiecially to shine as a dramatist. There the habit of
dialogue unceasing might have been expected to be pecu-
liarly valuable and there, on the contrary, it mars the
;

effect of his most promising enterprises. It renders them

full of interest as poems it pushes fatally into the back-
;

ground the action which is essential to a play's success.

 ROBERT BROWNING 325

Action in drama ought constantly to be visible and various.

In Strafford, and the rest, with the possible exception of
noble Luria, the real perfonnance is of thought, not deeds.
The interchange of thoughts themselves proceeds, not
between two or more persons, but bet\\een successive
mental emotions or moods of one. Each of the pair affect-
ing to converse might ordinarily to all effects and purposes
be alone on the stage. The propensity to looking exclu-
sivelj' within is no less answerable for tiie connnon kindred

evil elsewhere of carelessness, if not contempt, of public

opinion. No English poet has ever equally affronted his
readers with spasmodic diction, with a tangle, by no means
always significant, of ragged rhythm and random rhjnnes.
There — I have discharged my critical conscience ; and
if there be any other shortcoming of Browning's, let it
be massed with the rest. At all events we may be sure
that the total indictment will not counterbalance the
depth —not less in Caliban than in Christmas Eve and
Easter Day — the thoroughness, the grandeur of purpose
even when he .seems to be revelling in horror as in the —
Inn Album, Ivan Ivanovitch, Forgiveness the precision, —
the eloquence, the scorn of meamiess, the generosity, the
something neither wit exactly, nor exactly wisdom, which
is 'Mr. Sludge, the Medium'. Ibiw, from a crahhcd,
jagged stanza, the ])icture of

a [Link], preoipicc-eiK lulcd,

III ji gash of the wiiid-gricvccl Aponiiinc,"'

leaps forth, as if illuminated l»y a Hash of lightning, to

subside back the next momcnl inlo darkness ! How he
can suffuse a sombre reverie, like La Saisia/,, with a halo
of [)athoM I How abrupfly, yet naturally, in his narrativ<'s

beauty and deformity, guilt and innocence, iw\ni\' and

poverty, interlace, as a I'ippa passcH, wilii licr lia|i|iy
3l'() 1'1\ E centuries OF ENGLISH VERSE

lark-like songs —not the less hapjiy for her rags — by the
villawhich harbours squalid adultery atul }iuirder, with
remorse as squalid !

Nowhere in the society of his verse is room for

there
tedium. We feel his meditations to be better company
than talk. One whose friendship I have prized for more
than forty years, as I hojDe and believe he has mine, long
since observed to me that reading Browning is like dram-
'

drinking '. It enslaves ; and I am willing to believe that

it might scarcely be for the good either of poets or of their
readers that many sources of similar intoxicants should be
set running. Whether
fortunatel}^ or not, however, the
danger of temptation at any rate is remote. Such a poet-
soul as BroAming's is reared not often or easily. We may
well apjily to himself his own account of a poet's birth :

Rock 's the song- soil rather, surface hard and bare ;

Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
—
Vainly both expend, few flowers awaken there
—
Quiet in its cleft broods ^what the after-age
;

Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage.^"

The Poetical Works

Browning. Six vols. Smith, Elder
of llobcrt
& Co., 1868: —Balaustion's
Adventure, 1871. Prince Hohcnstiel-
Schwangau, 1871. Fifinc at the Fair, 1872. Red Cotton Night-cap
("ountry, 1873. The Inn Album, 1875. Aristophanes' Apology, 1875.
Pacchiarotto, &c., 1876. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, 1877. La
Saisiaz, 1878. The Two Poets of Croisic, 1878. ])ramatic Idyls, 1879.
Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 1880. Jocoseria, 1883. Ferishtah's
Fancies, 1884. Parlcyings with Certain People, 1887. Asolando, 1890.
' Parlcyings with Certain People, iii. With Christopher Smart, pp.
79-95.
» The Two Poets of Croisic, Prelude.
' The Lost Leader (Dramatic Lj-rics), Poet. Works.
* Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, ibid, st. 7.
' The Guardian AngeLs ; a Picture at Fano, ibid.
•^
I'rospicc, Poet. Works.
 ROBERT BROWNING 327

' The Flower's Name, stanzas 3 and 5 (Garden Fancies, Dramatic

Lyrics), Poet. Works.
» Hcrve Ricl (Pacchiarotto, &c.), st. 10.
" Parting at Morning (Dramatic Lyrics), Poet. Works.
'" Evelyn Hope, st. 7 (Dramatic Lyrics), ibid.

" By st. 39 (Dramatic Lyrics), ibid.

the Fireside,
'2 25 (Dramatic Lyrics), ibid.
Ibid., st.
'^
Abt Vogler (After he has been playing upon the Instrument of hi,s
Invention), stanzas 7, 8, and 12 (Dramatis Personae), Poet. Works.
' A Grammarian's Funeral, Shortly after the Revival of Learning
in Europe (Dramatic Romances), Poet. Works.
'5 Martin Relph (Dramatic Idyls, 1879).
"> Muleykch (Dramatic Idyls, Second Series, 1880).

" Clive (ibid.).

>« The Pied Piper of Hamclin, st. 13 (Dramatic Romances), Poet.
Works.
'• Dc Gustibus, st. 2 (Dramatic Lyrics), Poet Works.
-" Dramatic IdyLs, Second Series, Epilogue.
 ALFRED TENNYSON
1809—1892

The poets —not only the great, but all the true — how
each stands alone Search the whole Calendar of Inspira-
!

tion ; no pair will be found for him with whom the register
for the nmeteenth century closes ; no real fellow for
Alfred Tennyson ! The character of his genius was so
unexpected that the general public took long to appreciate
it. The delay was a tribute to its originality. To a few
elect it was certain and heavenly. I envy their joyous and
surprised recognition. Mighty Wordsworth, in the opinion
had declined to prosing, however
of a 3'ounger generation,
wisely. Hellenic Landor ra^ed.
Rogers was antediluvian ;

and poor Leigh Hunt had never counted. The giants of the
past were buried in their past, when a chant as exquisite
as theirs, and at least as new and strange, rose into the
dead air. To a brilliant, youthful brotherhood it must
have been as when Christabel or Childe Harold soared
above the stagnant mists half a century earlier.
The initiated were enraptured with all. The present
generation discriminates. To a certain extent it has lost
touch with much of the philosophy of The Two Voices,
The Palace of Art, The Vision of Sin. It has outgrown the
gladness, the sweet limpid sorrow, of the May Queen and
its sequels, the Early Victorian elegance of the Miller's
and Gardener's Daughters even Locksley Hall the First,
;

with its play of panoramic heart-fiutterings. Though

scarcely one discarded favourite but has lines, words, to
 ALFRED TEXXYSOX 329

set even this twentieth-century pulse beating faster, the

Lilians, Isabels, Madelines, Adelines, Margarets, and
Eleanores, Mermen and Mermaidens, Orianas, Lords of
Burleigh, and Ladies Clare and Clara, elicit smiles now
instead of emotion. A large part, however, is fully as
fresh as when first it danced into daj'light. Custom cannot
stale the radiant humours of Recollections of the Arabian
Nights :

When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free

In the silken sail of infancy.
The tide of time flow'd back with me,
The forward-flowing tide of time ;

And many a sheeny summer-morn,

Adown the Tigris I was borne,
By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold,
High-walled gardens green and old ;

True Mussulman was I and sworn,

For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun xUraschid.^

The wild swan's death-hymn may be music only ; but such

music !

At first to the ear

The warble was low, and full, and clear ;

And floating about the undcr-sky,

J'rcvailing in wcukiK-ss, the coronach stole
Somctinu's afar, and sometimes anear ;
Jiut anon her awful jubilant vcjice.
With a music strange and manifold.
Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold ;

Ah when a mighty people rejoice

With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold,
And the tumult of their acclaim is roll'd

Thro' the op<-n gates of the city afar,

To the shepherd wh< watcheth the evening star.
And the creeping mosst-s and clambering weeds,
And (h(! willow brnnehes hoar and dank.
Ami the waw swr-ll of the .soughing ncds.
 ;

330 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.^

The land of the Lotos-eaters basks still in abiding mellow

afternoon sunshine :

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,

With half- shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream !

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light.

Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height
To hear each other's whisper' d speech ;

Eating the Lotos day by day.

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spiay ;

To lend our hearts and spirits wholly

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy ;

To muse and brood and live again in memory,

With those old faces of our infancy
Heap'd over with a mound of grass,
Two handf uls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass !
^

We have not ceased to wander around the spell-bound

sleeping palace —
spell-bound ourselves and its gardens — :

Where rests the sap within the leaf.

Where stays the blood along the veins.
Faint shadows, vapours lightly curl'd.
Faint murmurs from the meadows come,
Like hints and echoes of the world
To spirits folded in the womb ;

waiting till the fairy prince has kissed back to life his
destined bride :

And o'er the hills, and far away

Beyond their utmost purple rim.
Beyond the night, across the day.
Thro' all the world she follow'd him.*
 —

ALFRED TENNYSON 331

The ancient wood has not lost for us its company of storied
women :

A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,

And most divinely fair

for ^^llose beauty manj' drew swords and died ;

A Queen with swarthy cheeks and bold black C5'es,

Brow-bound y^ith burning gold ;

who b}' Mark Antony's side '

sat as god bj' god "
; murdered
Iphigenia, and Rosamond, '
whom men call fair '
; the
light of ancient France ; and her who, to a cry of indignant
pity for the victim of the Gileadite's wild oath,
render' d answer high :

'
Not so,nor once alone a thousand times
;

I would be born and die.

My God, my land, my father —these did move

Mc from my Nature gave,
bliss of life, that
Lower'd softly with a threefold cord of love
Down to a silent grave.

It comforts me in this one thought to dwell,

That I subdued mc to my father's will ;

Because the kiss he gave me, ere I fell,

Sweetens the spirit still.

Moreover it is written that my race

Hew'd Ammon, hip and thigh, from Arocr
On Arnon until Minncth.' }\<\i- Ii.i fare
(Jlow'd, as I looked at her.

She lock'd her lips ; she left mc where I .stood ;

'
filory to dod,' she .sung, and [mst afar,
Thriilding the .munl>rc Ijosknge of th(! worul,
Towards the morning star.

I^fsing her carol Htood pensively^

I

As one that from a cas<'mcnt leans his hoa«l,

When nndiiight bells ceaso ringing suddenly,
AihI the old vear in dead.'^'
332 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
Tennyson's imagination found its themes anywhere and
everywhere. Soiuetimcs history supplied them, as in
the Dream of Fair Women sometimes legend and tradi-
;

tion. Scenes, incidents, men and women, touched by him,

have become his, and real because his. We see them as he
saw them, and almost forget that they have had other and
earlier owners. Through him, and for him, the Lady of
Shalott is an actual being, ^\•ho, wistfully impatient, fearful
of she knows not what,
still in her web delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights,
For often thro' the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, went to Camelot."

It is in his voice that pure Sir Galahad tells how :

'
Sometimes on lonely mountain-meres
I find a magic bark ;
I leap on board no helmsman steers
; ;

I float till all is dark.

A gentle sound, an awful light !

Three angels bear the Holy Clrail ;

With folded feet, in stoles of white,

On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision blood of God! !

My spirit beats her mortal bars,

As down dark tides the glory slides,
And starlike mingles with the stars !
' '

In a kindred ecstasy, the cloistered maiden of his inspired

creation keeps her vigil, beside even Keats's, on St. Agnes'
Eve. The Lamb
'
lifts me to the golden doors ;

The flashes come and go ;

All heaven bursts her starry floors,

And strows her lights below,
And de(!pens on and up ! the gates
Roll back, and far within
 —

ALFRED TENNYSON 333

For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits,

To make me pure of sin.
The sabbaths of Eternity,
One sabbath deep and wide
A Hght upon the shining sea —
The Bridegroom with liis bride !
' ^

Few of us can tliink of the rivalry of the Three 01yiH2)iau

goddesses without i)ictunng to ourselves, in that
vale in Ida, lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills,

the forlorn figure of Tennyson's Oenone ; ^\itll()ut hearing

her passionate appeal to many-fountained Ida, her Mother,
and to Earth :

I will not die alone.

Lest their happy laughter come to nic
shrill
Walking the cold and starless road of Death
Uncomforted, leaving my ancient love
With the (ireek woman !
"

Even the desolation of forsaken Mariana in her moated

grange is no longer Shakespeare's alone, but is shared w ith
Tennyson :

With one black shadow at its feet,

The house tiiro' all the level shin&s
(losc-iiitticed to the brooding heat.
And silent in its dusty vines ;

A faint-l^lue ridgf; upf)n tlx^ right,

An empty river-bed before.
And shallows on a distant shore,
In glaring sand and inlets bright.
But '
Ave Mary ', made nhr. mdun.
And Ave Mary night and morn,
' ',

And Ah she. sang, to be all alon<',

' ', '

'"
Ti> live forgollen, anri love forlorn.'

[Link] and iiis1;in1;mc()usly .'ire wli;it<v< i iii;if< ri;ds

he borrows his own — children of his fjincy that it is

334 FIVE CENTURIES OF EN0LT8H VERSE
(lillicult to sui)pose that even he himself can have hiboured
upon them. Each piece seems to have floated impulsively
forth in the shape it keeps for us, although we know that

in fact every one has been laboriously filed and burnished.

When a theme is manifestly of a nature to demand a
severe expenditure of thought, j^et at his touch it seems

unable to resist bursting suddenly into melody and simple

sweetness. Against the counsels of despair in The Two
Voices bursts the protest :

'
Tho' I sliould die, I know
That all about the tliorn will blow
^^
In tufts of rosy- tinted snow ; '

Over against the lurid pomp of The Palace of Art rises :

An English home —gray twilight pour'd

On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep— all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace ;

Or the maid-mother by a Crucifix,

In tracts of pasture sunny-warm.
Beneath branch-work of costly sardonyx.
Sits smiling, babe in arm.^^

From beyond the sardonic harshness of The A'ision of Sin

a divine glory becomes visible :

Every morning, far withdrawn

Beyond the darkness and the cataract,
God made himself an awful rose of dawn.''

Often there is no text, no motive, except an irrepressible

impulse to sing :

Break, break, break.

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea !

And I would that my

tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
 !

ALFRED TENNYSON 335

well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts Adth his sister at play !

well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the baj' !

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill ;

But for the touch of a vanish'd hand.

And the sound of a voice that is still

Break, break, break.

At the foot of thy crags, Sea !

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.^*

Tennyson had done a life's work bj' the time he was

thirty. For another half-century he went on %mting.
Scarcely did he cease singing before in extreme age he
ceased to breathe. He even continued to exercise, as in
the two Northern Farmers, the gift of humour, which he
had early manifested in the gay Monologue of the Cock,
and, more grimly, in St. Simeon's tliirstily meek acceptance
of blasphemous idolatr}'. It is dangerous to oppose a critic
of the intuition of '
Old Fitz ', who deprecated his college-
friend's persistent poetic diligence. I must, however,
disagree. If the later serious poems miss the delicate
fragrance, the real or apparent spontaneity, the audacity,
of their youthfid predecessors, the want is no sullicicnl
ground for impatience at the continuance on the stage ol
the doer of great things in the past. Had the subsequent
volumes by the creatf)r of Oenone nnd The Dream l)een
failures all, I should not myself have ventured to (juarrel
with him for pursuing his vocation any more than willi

a last season's blackbird ff)r warbling as soon as he feels

the Spring in his throat. I>uf in trnlli literature would
itself have suffered a grievous loss had 'reiiiiyson rested on
his gathered laurels. For the Plays ;i|oiie say nolliiii^r. 1
330 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
Diversions, I will hope, to the writer, theyhad no business
to survive him. Let them be decently buried not in his —
grave though some late violets may bloom even from
;

their unmonumental mounds.

Elsewhere we should have lost wealth of fancy had he
been frightened, living, into silence by the shadow of his
own fame. He would never have sung in the Carden at
Swainston :

Nightingales warbled without,

Within was weeping for thee :

Shadows of three dead men

Walk'd in the walks with me,
Shadows of three dead men and thou wast one of the throe.

Nightingales sang in his woods :

The Master was far away :

Nightingales warbled and sang

Of a passion that lasts but a day ;

Still in the house in his coffin the Prmcc of courtesy lay.

Two dead men have I known

In courtesy like to thee :

Two dead men have I loved

With a love that ever will be :

Three dead men have I loved and thou art last of tlie three.^^

He would not have wrought that incomparable conceit,

The Princess, or been tempted to inlay it with undying
lyrics. We should have been orphaned of the music in
O haik, O hear ! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going !

O
sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing !

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying :

Blow, bugle answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying
; ;

and
Home they brought her Avarrior dead ;
 ALFRED TENNYSON 337

with its exquisite tenderness :

'Sweet my child, I live for thee.' ^®

We should not have learnt how blank verse can be more

lyrical than a Ijric, from,
'
Tears, idle tears,' I know not what they mean ;

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.^'
Criticism natural!}' was apt to detect fallings-off in
a career so prolonged. .Such doubtless there were ; but
how vast the balance of net gain to English literature !

If Maud is freakish, and its politics, sometimes its ethics,

all astraj^, well might a complaint that it had never received
justice be uttered liy the creator of beauty, a profusion
of beauty, like :

A voice by the cedar tree.

In the meadow under the Hall !

She is singing an air that is known to mo,

A passionate ballad gallant and gay,
A martial song like a trumpet's call !

Singing alone in morning of life, tiic

In the happy morning of life; and of May,

Singing ofmen that in battle array.
Ready in heart and ready in hand,
March with banner and bugle and life
To the death, for their native land.
Silence, beautiful voice !

Bo still, for you only trouble the mind

With a j(jy in which I cannot rejoice,
A glory I shall not iind.
Still hear you no more,
! I will

For your sweetness hardly leaves mo a choice

Jiut to move to the meadow and fall bcforo
Her foot on tho meadow grass, and adore.
Not her, who is neither courtly nor kind,
Not her, not her, but a voice."*
VOL. II
'
Y
 . —

;i38 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Sometimes I have myself felt inclined to condemn the
Idjils of the King for unreality and prolixity ; as if one
had a right to require tales of chivalry to be rational, terse,
sententious, pithy ! When in a juster mood, I admit that
he must be a fortunate student of romance who is con-
versant with any more fascinating than Geraint and Enid,
Launcelot and Elaine, the Last Tournament, for all their
diffuseness with aught more divine than Guinevere
;

A\'here Tennyson found at length a worthy match for the

else jDcerless creature of his youthful imaginings, kingly
Morte d'Arthur.
What streamlet, again, in a dell of Parnassus ever
laughed more gaily than the Brook, escaped from its
encumbering frame ? Where is there a more happily
inspired Prothalamion than the Welcome to Alexandra,
^^
Bride of the heir of the kings of the sea ?

Where a battle-song to beat the Charge of the Six Hundred

20
Into the valley of Death ?

Where a more triumphant funeral hymn than that on the

Great Duke, with the grand break —the cry of the mighty
Seaman from his tomb :

Who is he that cometh, like an honour'd guest,

With banner and with music, with soldier and with priest,
With a nation weeping, and breaking on my rest ? ^^
If impatience be felt at the resuscitation, on the grave's
brink, of Locksley Hall, let it be remembered that three
years later the worn brain demonstrated its victory over

age in *
Crossing the Bar '

Long indeed before that, yet many years after FitzGerald

would have silenced his friend, the singer had tried trium-
phantly a new strain. I well recollect the depth of the
impression produced by the appearance of In Memoriam.
 : :

ALFRED TENNY80X 339

No finer tribute, it was acknowledged, had ever been offered

by Shelle}-. High as already
to the dead, even b}' Milton, or
was Tennyson's rank among poets, there had been doubters
still. In Meinoriain silenced them. It has never relaxed
its hold on popular s3'uipathy. Like his illustrious pre-
decessor's Intimations of Immortalitj% it was felt —
and
with a more attaching melody —to combine Inquiry and
Poetry, to be of the rare class of verse where
All the breeze of Fancy blows,
And every thought breaks out a rose.'--

Lines in it have become part of ourselves. For man}'

it is a manual of Faith :

What am I '!

An infant crying in tlie night

An infant crying for the light
And with no language but a cry.

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling witii my weight of cares
Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That .slope thro' darkness up to Cod,
I stretch lame liands of faith, and grope.
And gatlier [Link] and chatT, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly [Link] the largf-r liope.^
Ff)r as many it is evidence for the Cointnunion of Smils :

When Huriimcr's iKturly-iiicllowiMg change

May luf-athc, with many roses .sweirt,
rpon the thuiisand waves of wheat.
That ripple round tlu; lonely grange ;

Come : not in watches of the night,

IJut where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
(.'ome, beauteous in thine after form.
And like a finer li|<ht in li({ht.

V 2
340 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
not see thee. Dare I say
I shall
No ever brake the band
spirit
That stays him from the native land,
Where first he walk'd when claspt in clay ?

No visual shade of some one lost,

But he, the Spirit himself, may come
Where all the nerve of sense is numb :

Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.

therefore from thy siglitless range

With gods in miconjectured bliss,
0, from the distance of the abj'ss
Of tenfold- complicated change,

Descend, and touch, and enter hear ;

The wish too strong for words to name ;

That in this blindness of the frame

My ghost may feel that thine is near.^*
Nature had endowed Tennyson with certain qualities
which defied the tendency of years to paralyse, or dull.
His ear preserved its almost inimitable refinement, and
instinct of harmony. His heart kept fire to kindle The
Revenge, and The Victim. Brain and it maintained their
alliance. In every line he still painted a jiicture. He
never described without having made himself see the
scene ;and he makes the reader see it through his mind's
ej^e. With these inestimable gifts was conjoined, in an
increasing rather than a diminishing degree, by experience,
a judgement which waited, before intervening, for inspira-
tion to play its primary part. Finally, born of unfailing
self-respect first, and due regard for his public next, there
was genius's infinite capacity for taking trouble. What
a stern, Draconian critic he was of his own work, is mani-
festfrom a glance in the Life at the pieces he laid aside.
Think of the exuberance of fancy which could afford to
 ; —

ALFRED TENNYSON 341

reject the Mother's —

Ghost on account, perhaps, of some
want of finish, Mhich in fact enhances the intensity !

Not a whisper stirs the gloom.

It will be the dawiiing soon.
We may glide from room to room,
In the glimmer of the moon ;

Every heart is lain to rest,

All the house is fast in sleep,
Were I not a spirit blest,
Sisters, I could almost weep !

In that cradle sleeps my child.

She whose birth brought on my bliss
On her forehead undefiled
an airy kiss
I will print ;

See, she dreameth happy dreams.

Her hands are folded quietly,
Like to one of us she seems.
One of us my child will be.'^'

Of the capacities, bestowed and acquired, the crowning

all

resultwas a poet, and nothing but a ])oot, with no ambition

but that. The aspiration was lofty, as was Temiyson's
whole concei^tion of a poet's rank and duties. While
unknown to the world, he had magnified his vocation. It
wa.s the poet's inhciitaiice, he boasted, to 'see through life

and death, through good and ill', nay, 'through his own
soul' to be Wisdom's chosen
;
inler]iretor :

.No sword
Of wrath her riglit arm whirl'd,
Hut one poor poet's Hrrolj, and with His word
Slic ahook the world.-"

His practice, within the limits of liiiniim strength, was

in accordance. He desired io embody modern society's
network f)f doubts in a marshalled legion of living and
lived riddles, with the -olnfjons, or attempts at lliem,
342 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
appended. He could not pass a contemporary problem by
without adventuring an answer. More than one coeval at
home, and across the Atlantic, had, as I have shown, the
same craving. His special advantage was the possession,
over and above gifts he shared with others, of the secret
of irresistible melody. When once the strangeness of his
method was surmounted, that acted like a spell upon
Anglo-Saxon intelligence. Long before the end he had
steeped the realm of English verse in an atmosphere all

his own. Except from within one tent in the wilderness,

no lyre sounded which had not been tuned or retuned in
unison with his. Under the stress of the unchallenged
absoluteness of his ultimate supremacy, an effort is needed
to recall that he had to fight for his throne that he himself ;

had often despaired, complaining that

Once in a golden houi-
I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
The people said, a weed.-"
Have I overpraised ? I do not mean, in view of the
very possible hint that I ought first to have considered
what my eulogies were worth. To that taunt I know
I have been exposing myself throughout my sevcnty-tAvo
comments. But, without regard to my title to an opinion
at all, is the panegyric here out of just j)roj)ortion to the
claims of other poets ? At any rate I have never concealed
from mj'self my theme's deficiencies. I perceive that the
liquid sweetness is too invariable. The ear pines for a little
harshness, a sense of open air ; for an occasional uninten-
tionally broken-backed line. The mellifluous style temjits
to [Link], particularly in the Idylls ; in the rest, as
well as those of The King, where, indeed, it is more excus-
able. At times it laboriously embalms a fly in amber. Too
 ALFRED TEXXYSOX 343

many knotty questions are lightly propounded. There is

a propensity to mistake sitting upon the puzzles of existence

for their investigation, not for their settlement. Not
if

rarely the art bj^ which Gray in the Elegy produced

the effect of entire .simplicity fails Tennyson. Though
very seldom, even his taste is now and then at fault.
In brief, his theology, moral philosophy, science, and
skill inthe construction of a plot, are those of a poet,
not of a Bishop Butler, a Darwin, or a Wilkie Collins.
He .sings darkling, not soaring. There is the feminine
note in his music. He is not quite the magician or
prophet some of his disciples proclaimed him. Scrutinized
closely his art betrays flaws which the delicate finish
had covered — and his Muse is the more adorable for
them all I

Within its proper boundaries his sovereignty is in no

hostile rivalry with that of his reigning predecessors. On
the contrary, loyal admirers may freely admit that the
ancient enthronements were a condition of his. Without
Chaucer, [Link], Milton, Wordsworth aiul Coleridge,
Shelley and Keats, without Drydon and Pope too, Cowper,
and Byron, he wf)uld not have l)e('n that he was. From
them all he learnt to choose the good, and, as ])r<)(itably,
to [Link] the evil. His poetic soul, could its elements hi\

[Link], would render glad account of the bountiful

proportion of their essence it owes to its forerunners. Yet
he remains himself a distinct and gracious Ix-ing. Tiie
lyrics in The Princess and in Maud, with all their Eliza-
bethan daintiness, arc as seif-cvidcntly his in tlicir liiv and
feeling as are the wit and wisdom of his Xttrtlicrn l''armers'
proverbial philosophy. It was, as I have already intimated,
a glory and a blessing ft»r the nineteenth ccntiu'v that, just
when the peal tif in'^pir;if ion wliidi strnck np ;it its opening,
344 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
seemed to have rung all conceivable changes of poetic
thought and feeling, he arose to demonstrate that, given
the man, the possible variations had in nowise been
exhausted.
—
So may it be so will it be—in the future as in the past,
though, had the sun of great British singers actually been
extinguished with Alfred. Tennyson, its setting would not
have dishonoured its daA^m !

The Works Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate. Collected

of Alfred,
Edition, Macmillan, 1884. Also, Works Six vols. H. S. King. 1877
:

' Recollections of the Arabian Nights, st. 1.

- The Dying Swan.
^ The Lotos-Eaters, Choric Song, st. 5.
* The Sleeping Palace, st. 1, and The Departure.
^ A Dream of Fair Women, stanzas 22, 32, 51-62.
« The Lady of Shalott, Part II, st. 4.
' Sir Galahad, st. 4.
« Agnes' Eve, st 3.
St.
" Oenone.

»' Mariana in the South, st. 1.

" The Two Voices, stanzas 20, 24.

« The Palace of Art, stanzas 22, 24.
" The Vision of Sin, st. 3.
" Break, break, break.
1* In the Garden at Swainston.
" The Princess A Medley, 0.
: Song, Prelude to Bk. IV st. 2 ; and
Song, Prelude to Bk. VI, stanzas 1, 4.
" Ibid., 4, vv. 21-5.
*' Maud A Monodrama. V,
: stanzas 1 and 3.
>' A Welcome to Alexandra.
*•The Charge of the Light Brigade.
*»Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, st. 6.
" In Memoriam, 122, st. 5.
" Ibid., 54, St. 5, and 55, stanzas 4-5.
** Ibid., 91, stanzas 1-4, and 93, stanzas 1-4.
'' Life of Lord Tennyson by his Son, vol. i, pp. 124-5.
" The Poet, st. 14.
" The Flower (The Princess and Other Poems).
 UXCLASSED
Inspiration always is unexpected in verse ; a surprise,
I should suppose, to the writer, as it is to his readers. The
unexpectedness, as he and they suddenly find themselves
on wings borne aloft into the enipjTean of fancy, is a chief
virtue of the entire department of literature. At the same
time, we have a positive right to look for it somewhere in
accepted j^oets, in the elect. Inspiration is a necessary
for them, as it is treasure-trove for their public. In casual
reading of unclassed verse the element of chance comes
in. The possibilitj' of inspiration belongs to all *
unclassed
'

verse, ancient and modern, but rather specially, I should

say, to English. When we open a volume with which, old
or new, we have had no previous acquaintance, we never
can be sure that we shall not light upon, not indeed an
inspired poet, but an inspired poem. Inspiration is like
the wind it bloweth where it listeth.
;

A Church truth, it has been laid down, [Link] Ik; able to

[Link] for itself that it is quod semper, quod ab onmibus,
'

quod ubique, creditum est '. Much the same in the way of
inspiration is required of a candidate for the title of jMjet.

He is not obliged to prove that all he has written has been

inspired. Very few, if any, could abide sucli a test cer- ;

tainly not Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron not Shake- ;

speare himself. The necessity is that the singer from time

to time has lx;en. For work [Link], or by the unclassed,
the condition is reversed. Its readers have to feel that,
however it may have been with the jnu't, it)spira1ion is in
the poctr}'. That strange quality which separates true
poetry from all else has to be, and is, in it. We cannot
define it we can only explain it by its cflects. It has, we
;
346 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
know, at moved, perhaps transformed, the author.
its birth,

We moment, it has transformed us. No

feel that, for the
credentials are wanted, no illustrious name. Suddenly the
words catch fire, and our souls with them.
The sense of mastery, of transport, of a kind of magic,
is always the same. The occasion, the circumstances, the
paternity and affinities of the visitant, when we try to
account for its presence, differ as widely as Spenser's
inspiration from Pope's, or Wordsworth's from Byron's.
Sometimes the poet had constantly been within the
author of such verse, but asleep, torpid. A shock had
awakened him it spent its force and he sank back into
; ;

lethargy or repose. Sometimes the '-piece represents the

spring-tide of modest powers, a spasm of concentration of
their essence, unintelligible to their owner. The writer's
dominant impulse may have been other altogether than
that of fancy. It may have been worldly ambition,
indignation at t;yTanny or cruelty, wonder, love, the
enthusiasm of piety. A lever has been sought to accom-
plish the craving of the ruling passion, and for the instru-
ment verse has been requisitioned. Pure imagination's
rival, rhetoric itself, will ever and anon force open in its
flood a sprhig of pathos, rapture. Straightway we feel
ourselves rapt from chill admiration into glowing sym-
pathy. Sometimes it is all an accident. A vision, a
ghost, has stuml)led upon a stranger lodged in the haunted
room. Sometimes it simply is that inspiration has been
wandering after its manner in search of a home. Looking
about for rest to the soles of its feet, it has taken refuge
with no better than a versifier.
Poetry, from the time of its Elizabethan revival for some
three-quarters of a century onwards, was in the British air.
A larger life had opened for our islanders, freedom of soul,
 -

UXCLASSED 347

new ambitions, an expanse of art, learning, luxmy. They

had grown into lords to govern a larger world. A language
for such a periodwas wanting and man}', scarcely compre-
;

hending the change in their utterance, found themselves

poets. They sang because they could not help it, and were
inclined to be ashamed of the impulse. It seldom occurred

to them to claim property in their strains. Never, though

they might court popular favour from the stage, did it

enter their minds to adopt minstrels}' as their vocation.

In such a period one who, had he chosen to abandon
other pursuits, could conceivably have qualified for future
generations, as a poet professed, might write Occasional
Verse comparable with that by recognized masters of
the craft. The Lie, commonly, though not universally,
attributed to Ralegh, is a succession of lightning flashes :

Say to tlic Court, it gluws

And shines like rotten wood ;

Say to the Church, it sliows

What's good, and doth no good ;

If (!liui(h and Court reply.

Tlien give them Itoth the he.'

No contem]X)rarv eulogy du Sidney surpasses his cpitajtli :

What hath he h)st that such great graee hath won ?

Young yeans for endless years, and hojM' unsure

(Jf fortune's gifts for wealth that still shall dure ;

(J happy race, with so frreat praises run

!

HiH Honnet,
Me thought I saw tln' grave where [Link] lay.

wortliily introduced the Kaerie Quccnc His ajipciil in llie

Pilgrimage from liis i)crsocut<)rs to Heaven is iiispiicd. if

ever verse was :

I'looil nnist lie my iimiy's Kalmer;

No other halm will there lie given ;

Whilst my soul, like «|uie( palmer,

'I'ravellcth towarfls tli' hmd of li<aveu ;
 ; ;

348 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Over the silver mountains,
Where spring the nectar fountains ;

There will I kiss

The bowl of bliss ;

And drink mine everlasting 611

Upon every milken hill.

Then by that happy blissful day,
More peaceful pilgrims I shall sec,
That have cast off their rags of clay,
And walk apparelled fresh like me,
I'll take them first

To quench their thirst

At those clear wells
Where sweetness dwells.
From thence to heaven's bribcless hall
Where no corrupted voices brawl
No conscience molten into gold.
No forged accuser bought or sold,
No cause deferred, no vain-spent journey,
For there Christ is the king's Attorney,
Wlio pleads for all without degrees,
And He hath angels, but no fees.
And when the grand twelve-million jury
Of our sins, with direful fury.
Against our souls black verdicts give,
Christ pleads his death, and then we live.'
For sweet courtliness, if not for astronomical accuracy,
almost as much might be said of Wotton's address to the
hapless Winter Queen :

You meaner beauties of the night.

That poorly satisfy our eyes
More by your number than your light,
You common people of the skies
What are you when the moon shall rise ?

You violets that first appear.

By your pure purple mantles known
Like the proud virgins of the year.
As if the spring were all your own ;

What are you when tlie rose is blown ?

 ; ;

UNCLASSED 349

So, when mj- mistress shall be seen

In form and beauty of her mind,
By virtue first, then choiee, a Queen,
Tell me if she were not designed
The eclipse and glory of her kind ? ^
How rich in vagi'ant nielodj' an age must have been
which could toss abroad, for Nicholas Breton, the singer of
—
gay Phillida and Coridon for anybody for nobody to — —
claim, the pathos of a song like that on a love-child !

Thou little thinkst and lessc dost knowe

The cause of this thy mothers moane
Thou wantst the wit to waile her woe,
And I my selfo am all alone ;
Why dost thou weepe ? why dost thou waile ?

And knowcst not j'et what thou dost ayle.

And dost thou smile ? Oh thy sweete face !

Would (Jod himselfe he might thee see !

No doubt thou wouldst soon purchace grace,

I know right well, for thee and mec ;

But come to mother, babe, and play,

For father false is fled away.*

A great statesman, lawyer, philosopher, \\()ul(l al times

sicken of ambition, even of wisdom ; and out of the
shadows, without any intention or desire to Ix) known
—
thereby for a poet and jilso not without reminiscences of
—
Greek epigrams may have flowed to and from l^acon's
pen this bitter paraljle :

Tho World 'h a bubble, and tlir Life nf Man

Ix;h8 than a span ;

In his concc^ption wrctclicd, from tiic wdinli,

iSo to the torn I)
Curat from his crudh-, and brought up to years
With rarcH iiufl frarH.
Who tlifii to frail mortality Hliall IruHt,
liut iiiiwis on water, or but writes in duHt.
 : : ! : ! —

^50 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Yet whil'st witli sorrow here we live opprest,
What life is best ?

Courts are but only superficial schools

To dandle fools
The rural part is turn'd into a den
Of savage men ;

And when 's a city from foul vice so free,

But may be term'd the worst of all the three ?

Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed,

Or pain his head :

Those that live single take it for a curse,

Or do things worse ;

These would have children those that have them none,:

Or wish them gone :

What is it, then, to have, or have no wife,

But single thraldom, or a double strife ?

Our own affections still at home to please

Is a disease
To cross the seas to any foreign soil.
Peril and toil

Wars with their noise affright us ; when they cease,

We are worse in peace ;

What then remains, but that we still should cry

For being born, and being born, to die !
'^

The origin of a large body of lyric verse to be found in

the Elizabethan and early Stuart drama is not very differ-
ent. Wits who trusted for money and fame to their
development of character on the stage, survive by rhymes
they flung-in to employ some boy's tuneful voice. Thomas
Dekker, who yet had dramatic genius, is sure of surviving
through the simple grace of :

Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers ?

sweet content
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplexed ?
O punishment
 ! ! ; — !

UNCLASSED 351

Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vexed

To add to golden numbers golden numbers ?

O sweet content ! sweet, sweet content !

Canst drink the waters of the crisped spring V

O sweet content
Swimm'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears ?

O punishment
Then he that patiently want's burden bears
Xo burden bears, but is a king, a king !

sweet content O sweet, sweet content

!

Work apace, apace, apace, apace ;

Honest labour bears a lovely face ^ !

The same casual quality cannot indeed be assigned to

the great song, which chills as with the damp of death, in
Webster's Duchess of Malf3\ Into that the whole soul
of the terrible play is condensed :

Hark, now everything is still.

The screech-owl, and the whistler shrill.

Callupon our dame aloud,

And bid her quickly don her shroud !

'
Much you had of land and rent
Your length in clay \s now conipetcnl ;

A long war disturbed your mind ;

Here your perfect peace is signetl.

Of what is't fools make such vain keeping ?

Sin their conception, their birth weeping.

Their life a general mist of error.
Their death, a hideous storm of terror.
(Strew your hair witli powders sweet,
J^on clean linen, bathe your feet,
And — the more to cheek
foul iicnd
A cnieilix your neck
let bless ;

'Tis now full-tide 'tween night and day ;

lOiid your groan, and couio away."

I>ut the nik'of tlu'HicndcrncHs of thccoiiiicxioii bclwccua

drama and songs holds true of the twin lyrics of Shirley's,
its

who, tliongh horn late, is, as a singer, Elizabctliaii. l!o(li.

 ;; :

352 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGILISH VERSE

as full of awe —with nothing of the horror— as Webster's,
might have been composed without relation to the masque
and the entertainment the}^ once glorified. Cupid and Death
has ceased for centuries to lay any claim to the Ode :

Victorious men of earth, no more

Proclaim how wide your empires are ;

Though you bind in every shore,

And your triumphs reach as far
As night or day.
Yet you, proud monarchs, must obey,
And mingle with forgotten ashes, when
Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.

Devouring Famine, Plague, and War,

Each able to undo mankind.
Death's servile emissaries are ;

Nor to these alone confined,

He hath at will
More quaint and subtle ways to kill
A smile or kiss, as he will use the art.
Shall have the cunning skill to break a heart.''

Even more independent, if possible, must the sister hymn

have always been of its obscure semi -dramatic attendant
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things
There is no armour against fate ;

Death lays his icy hand on kings ;

Sceptre and crown must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
The garlands wither on your brow ;

Then boast no more your mighty deeds ;

Upon Death's purple altar now

See, where the victor- victim bleeds ;

Your heads must come

To the cold tomb ;

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust.^"
 ; ; ;

UNCLASSED 353

In general, whether m the form of broadcast tributes

to beauty, or of appendages to a tragedy, a coined}^
a masque, whether soleimi or gay, so long as the Elizabethan
impetus lasted, English Ijo-ic literature has a constant
note of spontaneity. We feel as we read that our concern
is simply with the song. Its surroundings are not material
nor is the affix to it of a name. The author has not been
singing for fame, or because he has the part of poet to
support, but from mere spring of heart and wit Ljdy !

forgets his Euphuism, even in Cupid and Campaspe's game

at cards for kisses, and yet more in his bird-song :

What bird so sings, yet so does wail ?

O 'tis the ravished nightingale.

'
Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu,' she cries,
And still her woes at midnight rise.
Brave prick song who is't now we hear ?
!

None but the lark so shrill and clear

Now at heaven's gates she claps her wings,
The morn not waking till she sings.
Hark, hark, with what a pretty throat
Poor robin-redbreast tunes his note !

Hark how the jolly cuckoos sing,

'
(Juckoo to welcome in the spring
!
'
!

'
Cuckoo to welcome in the spring "
!
'
!

The impulse is one ; the variety is endless. Tlionms

Lodge's fancy is equally fresh for an inventory of his fair
Rosaline's beauties :

Hci^li Im, uduld slic were iiiiiir !

and for j)lca(ling against a mischievous godling on behalf

of equally fair ivosalynde :

Love in my bosom like a beo

lk)ih suck his sweet
Now with his wings he plays with me,
XdW with his feet.
VOL. II Z
 ; ; ;

354 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Within mine eyes he makes his nest,
His bed amidst my tender breast
My kisses arc liis daily least,
And yet he robs me of my rest
Ah wanton, will ye ?
!

And if I sleep, then percheth he

With pretty flight.
And makes his pillow of my knee
The lifelong night.
Strike I my lute, he tunes the string
He musie plays if so I sing ;

He lends me every lovely thing.

Yet eruel he my heart doth sting ;

Whist, wanton, still ye !

Else I with roses every day

Will whip you lience,
And bind you, when [Link] long to play,
For your offence.
I'll shut my eyes to keep you in ;

I'll make you your sin

fast it for ;

I'll count your power not worth a pin.

— Alas what hereby shall I win
!

If he gainsay me ?

What beat the wanton boy

if I
With many a rod ?
He will repay me with annoy.
Because a god.
Then sit thou safely on my knee ;

Then let thy bower my bosom be ;

Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee ;

O Cupid, so thou pity me.

^-
Spare not, but play tliee !

If Love's music is the most audible in the Occasional

sixteenth-seventeenth-century verse, that was to be
expected ; and, as naturally, it is in all keys. It is
embodied daintiness in Carew's moralizing :
 —

UXCLASSED 355

He that loves a rosy cheek,

Or a coral lip admires.
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires ;

As old Time makes these decay,

So his flames must waste away.^^

To grace it adds a sunny glow, in Ford's :

Can you paint a thought ? or number

Every fancy in a slumber ?
Can you count soft minutes roving
From a dial's point by moving V
Can you grasp a sigh ? or, lastly,
Rob a virgin's honour chastely ?
No, oh no yet you may
!

•Sooner do both that and this,

This and that, and never miss.
Than by any praise display
Beauty's lieauty ; such a glory.
As beyond all fato, all story.

All arms, all arts.

All loves, all hearts,
(ireater than those, or they.
'*
Do, shall, and iiuist obey ;

and in that pretty foundling — if not Tlioinas Campion's

There is a ganh-n in her face

Where roH<'s and whitv lilies i)lo\v ;

A lieuviTily |)aradise is that place,

Wlieri-in all j)leasant fruits <l<) grow ;

There cherries grow thai none may buy.

Till Cherry- Ripe theniHelves (i<i cry.''"

It grows lunulhions
t in another stray. Love t he Ail\ tiit iir<r :

^'<)ll iiuiy [Link] liiiii

A child for his might ;

Or you may deem him

A coward for his flight ;

' Z -2
 ; — :

350 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

But if she whoui love doth honour
Be coiiccard from the day,
Set a thousand guards upon her,
Love will find out the way.^"

It uses and idealizes Davenant's Aubade, a delightful, if

mannered, extravagance —worth all his leaden Gondibert
Thelark now leaves his wat'ry nest,
And climbing shakes his dewy wings.
He takes this window for the East,
And to implore your light he sings
Awake, awake ! the morn will never rise
Till she can dress her beauty at your eyes.^^

It is at once defiant and tender in George Wither's :

Great, or good, or kind, or fair,

I will ne'er the more despair
If slie love me, this believe,
I will die ere she shall grieve ;

If she slight me when Iwoo,

I can scorn, and let her go ;

For, if she be not for me.

What care I for whom she be !
^*

When it knows itself safe, it will threaten, hector —and

adore :

Like Alexander I will reign.

And I will reign alone ;

My thoughts did evermore disdain

A rival on my throne.
He either fears his fate too much.
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch.
To gain or lose it all.
But if thou wilt prove faithful then,
And constant of thy word,
I'll make thee glorious by my pen,
And famous by my sword ;
 '

UNCLASSED 357

I'll serve thee in sueh noble ways

Was never heard before ;

I'll cro\\Ti and deck thee all with bays,

And love thee more and niore.^^

Our Tudor-to-Stuart poetry would not liavo been alto-

gether shamed had been able to support its title to
it

share in Parnassus by none other than such chance blossoms

as I have culled. It has the right to call in aid another
contingent. There are European literatures in which folk-
lore plays an important part. That it scarcely has held
in English, though I do not know why it should not have.
There are noble exceptions. A high spirit of romance
breathes through the patchwork, yet wholly chivalrous,
Syr Cauline.^" The elder Chevy Chase,^^ the true subject
of Sidney's qualified eulogium in his Defence of Poesy ', *

deserves all that, and more. In general, I cannot in candour

claim much for strictly English ballads. Those collected
by Bishop Percy delighted our forefathers centuries ago.
They continue, I hope, to be the delight of youth, as they
were of mine. The Robin Hood series, the Nut-brown
Maid, the Tanner of Tainworth, the Heir of Linne. the
Beggar's Daughter of Jk'dnall-(jlreen, Mary Aml)ree, ]irave
Lord WilloughI)y, the Miller of Mansfield, and the like, arc

brave reading ; they an^ not ixx-lry.

The impetus of the Elizabetiian renaissance ddiiltt less
was felt north of the Tweed, as appears in the learned and
ingenious elegance of Drummonfl's song, Phoebus arise *
!
!

This is the morn Hliould bring unto this grovo

My I>ovc, to hear and rccomponHO my lovo.
Fair king, who all prc8f!rvc«,

I'.iit hIiow fliy bliiHhi;ig bcamH,

v\nd tlioti two Hwect^r cyvH
Shalt HOC than those which by I'l iuuh' utrcams
Did onco thy heart surpriHo."
358 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
But for native Scottish imagination of the highest we must
look to the wild-garden of Border Minstrelsy. That, while
singularly unlike, atits best, to the coarseness of English

broadsheet verse, and the polish of Elizabethan dramatic

lyrics, matches the latter in fire of inspiration. Thus the
English version offers no counterpart to the haunting
dream of Earl Douglas in the Scottish tale of the Battle
of Otterbourne :

I have dreamed a dreary dream,

Beyond the Isle of Sky ;
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.^^
Everybody, again, must have felt both the woe and the
dignity of the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. Note
the Captain's knowledge that he was being sent to his doom,
and his simple obedience the instinct with which the
;

few maritime details have been so chosen as to add as

impressive reality to the impending disaster «,s the many
in the famous shipwreck in Don Juan the narrator's ;

splendid indifference to the fate of

The King's daughter o' Noroway,
in comparison with the loss of gude
Sir Patrick Spens, the best sailor
-*
That ever sailed the seas ;

Then the lament for Willie Drowned in Yarrow —how

touchingly, wanderingly wistful !

Doun in yon garden sweet and gay,

Where bonnie grows the lilic,
I heard a fair maid, sighing, say
'
My wish be wi' sweet Willie.
O Willie's rare, and Willie 's fair.

And Willie's wondrous bonny;

And Willie hecht to marry me.
Gin e'er he married ony.
 ;

UNCLASSED 359

Oh. gentle wind, that bloweth south,

From where my love repaireth,
Convey a kiss frae his dear mouth.
And tell me how he fareth !

But Willie 's gone, whom I thought on,

And does not hear me weeping ;

Draws many a tear frae true love's e'e,

When other maids are sleeping.

O came ye by yon water- side ?

Pou'd you the rose or lilie ?
Or cam' ye by yon meadow green ?

Or saw ye my sweet Willie ? '

She sought him up, she sought him doun.

She sought the braid and narrow
Syne, in the cleaving o' a craig.
She found him drowned in Yarrow.'-^

It and the Dowie Houms of Yarrow are in their acceptance

of bereavement and dcsolatencss as admirable as the
concert of great later melodies to which they have given
birth. In the second the final acquiescence, if rchutant,
and pride of the girl in the obligation u])on her bride-
groom to face the certainty of death at the hands
of hor jealous bn-fhrcu add ;i iiiic touch. He has been
challenged, and kncjws— and she kuous— he may not
hold back :

Kor I maun gac, tli<»' I m-'cr return

Frae the Dnwic^ hankH <»' Yarrow.
Sh(^ kiHH'd his clH-fk, shi- kaitn'd his hair.
Ah she ha<l donf Itcforr, () ;

She belted him with his nobjr [Link].

Ad' he 'h awa In ^'arr(^w.'''

She was as brave in letting liiin go, ;is Hi l< n n{ Kin nniiell

in interposing l>etwcen the fatal shot ami tlir lover she left
desimiring :
 —

360 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

O Helen fair, beyond compare !

I'll make a garland o' thy hair,

Shall bind my heart for evermair,
Until the day I die !

Helen fair O Helen chaste! !

If I were with thee I were blest.

Where thou lies low and takes thy rest,
'
On fair Kirconnell lea.

1 wish I were where Helen lies !

Night and day on me she cries ;

And I am weary of the skies,

For her sake that died for me.^'

The lamentation for burd Helen is pure tenderness.

' '

More commonly in these Border stories the sense of help-

lessness deepens to despair. In Clerk Saunders, for
example, as in Keats's Pot of Basil, the affection of the
bereaved bride is agony, not grief. The lover's personal
innocence does not alleviate his misery in the tragedy
of the forlorn repulsed Lass of Lochroyan. Where remorse
and pathos go hand hand, guilt frequently forbids even
in
the solace of a tear, as in the longing of fair Lady Anne
to clasp to her bosom the '
snaw-white '
dream-boy. It is
her babe grown-up in Paradise, whom she had murdered
to save her honour :

'
'Tis I wad dead thee in silk and gowd,
And nourice thee on my knee.'
'
O mither mither when I was thine,
! 1

Sic kindness I couldna see.' ^^

Gloom is the favourite hue, as was congenial perhaps in

an age and land of Douglas Tragedies, Bonnie Earls o'
Murray, and Johnie Armstrangs, where every man carried
his owTi life, and his over-the -Border neighbour's, in his
hand. Though seldom without gleams of finer fancy,
the favourite subjects are criminal wantonness, as in Earl
 ;

UNCLASSED 361

Richard ^^ and the grand ballad of the Daemon Lover '",

sheer savagery, as in pitiless and unpitied Jellon Grame ^^,
and jealous vindictiveness. The the motive in
last is

Young Benjie ^-, and the wild tale/ Biiniorie, O Binnorie '^ !

The same in The Queen's Marie is coupled with the victim's

stupor at the abrupt vision of death, for the small ofifence,

as she accounts mere womanly levit}'. The insane

it, of
merriment is more painful than the weeping :

When she came to the Netherbow port

She laugh'd loud laughters three.
But when she came to the gallows' foot
The tears blinded her ce.^
Sometimes, as in Edward, Edward ', even the least throb
'

of pathos is wanting. It is all a darkness which can be felt.

What an imagination it must have been that let loose upon
the moorlands a vision of sardonic horror like this !

'
Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude,
Edward, Edward ?

Why does your brand sac drop wi' bludo.

'

And why sac sad gang ye ?

'
O, I hac killed my hawk sae gude,
.Mithcr, mither ;
O, Ihac killed my hawk sac gudc,
And I had nac mair but he.'
*
Yonr hawk's blude was never sac rrd,
Kdwaiil, Edward ;

YiMir hawk's bhidc was never sac red,

My dear son, I (ell tlicc'
'
( ), I liac kill<<l my n'<l-r()an steed,

Mithcr, mithcr
O, I hac killed my red-roan steed.
That erst was sac fair and free.'

'
Your was anld, an<l ye hae gat mair,
steed
Edward, Edward ;

Your stct^l was auld, an<l yc hae gat mair ;

iSomc other dulc yo dree.'

 ' ;;

362 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

'
O, I hac killed my father dear,
Mither, inithcr
'
O, I hae killed my father dear,
Alas, and wae is mc !

'
And whatten penance will ye dree for that,
Edward, Edward ?
And whatten penance will ye dree for that.
My dear son, now tell me ? '

'
I'll set my yonder boat,
feet in
Mither, mither
I'll set my feet in yonder boat,
And I'll fare over the sea.'
'
And what will ye do wi' your tow'rs and your ha',
Edward, Edward ? *
And what will ye do wi' your tow'rs and your ha'.
'
That were sae fair to see ?
'
them stand till they doun
I'll let fa',

Mither, mither ;

I'll let them stand till they doun fa'.

For here never mair maun I be.'
'
And what
will ye leave to your bairns and your wife,
Edward, Edward ?
And what will ye leave to your bairns and your wife.
When ye gang ovir the sea ? '

'
The warld's room let them beg throw life, ;

Mither, mither ;

The waild's room let them beg throw ; life ;

For them never mair will I see.'

'
And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
Edward, Edward ?
And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear,
My dear son, now tell me.'
'
The curse of hell frae mc sail ye bear ;

Mither, mither ;

The curse of hell frae me sail ye bear ;

Sic counsels ye gave to me !

'
^*

Mark the shuddering ghost, all along, of the mother's

 — ;

UNCLASSED 363

knowledge that the parricide was inspired by her the ;

compulsion upon her soul to force her son to confess it ;

his reluctance to damn her with the avowal and the ;

curse upon herself whitli she extorts from his unlocked

lips and heart !

We are sensible almost of relief when freezing cjmicism,

as it seems, rather than remorse, is voiced, not by man,
but by rivers :

Tweed said to Till

'
'
What gars yc rin sac still ?

Till said to Tweed—

'
Though yc rin wi' speed
And I rin slaw,
Yet where ye drown ac man
^®
I drown twa ; '

or by the hoarse accents of caiTion birds :

As I was walking all alane

I heard twa corbies making a mane
The tane unto the t'other say.
'
'
Where sail we gang and dine to-day ?

'
In behint yon auld fail dyke.
I wot there lies a new-slain knight :

And naebody kens that he lies there.

But his hawk, his liound, and lady fair.

His hoinid is to the hunting gane.

His hawk, to fetch tin- wildfowl liarne,
His lady s ta'en anolhrr mate.
So we may uuik oin dinner HWi«et
Ye'll sit on his white hausc-bane.
And I'll pick out his bonny i)Iue eni ;

Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair

We'll theek our nest when it grows liare.

Mony a one for him nuikes mane.

Hut nane sail l<<ii when- lie is gane ;

O'er his while biun-s when they are Hare,

•"
Th<; wind sail blaw f<ir cvermair."
364 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
No witty, airy minstrelsy this of the Scottish heaths,
when at its highest. So clour it is as to suggest that the
unknown ])arcls needed a murder, or a broken heart, to
tune their harp-strings. But the inspiration is unmistak-
able. And remember :
—I have been able to give but
shreds of a vast floating cloud of song, with never a poet
to claim for his own the genius, and the glory ! The
people's poetry —the ballads — in nine-tenths of England,
by the end of the sixteenth century, which revised and
vulgarized Chevy Chase, had native glamour,
lost all
independent Meanwhile, in Scotland, at least on
vitality.
the frontier, the whole survived and matured. The
English Border, though, as may well be hoped and believed,
it partook in the enjoyment, contributed little, except,

possibly, the dialogue between the Tweed and the Till.

For some three hundred years, more or less, the popular
on the northern side was verse. All was handed
literature
down from memory to memory, with a recognized right in
the interpreters at each stage to modify, and, Avithin
narrow limits, modernize. How these wanderers told a
tale, and with a variety how rich How made to suit all
!

tastes and classes The musician might be earning food

!

and shelter in a rustic inn, or sjnnpathy and largess in the

halls of high Buccleuch. Like the silly blind Lochmaben
'

harper ',^^ he had store of tales, tragical and pathetic, as

well as gross and grisly. The merit was as diverse. From
a low depth it rose to points of sublimity, horror, tenderness,
self-sacrifice, which educated inspiration may match, but
rarely has excelled.
In England, if doubtless mainly for the educated classes,
an afterglow of the cultured Elizabethan splendour endured
to and throughout the period of the Restoration. It may
be a mere coincidence but it faded away with the advent
;
 ,

UNCLASSED 365

of reason, rights of citizeiisliip, and full conslitutioualism.

English Poetry thenceforth consented to be conducted

along regular professional chaimels. Its practice became
a vocation, with its prizes in the book-market, and a tariff
for the use and instruction of patrons. No longer did
it lodge where the whim took it. The emanation of
anonymous Occasional Verse of high merit ceased, with
the rarest exceptions. A
few pieces of distinction, not
the work of wTiters already enrolled in my list of acknow-
ledged poets, are by men known in other depart-
better
ments of literature. Addison's Campaign is a rhetorical

Whig monument to the Chief, who taught the doubtful

battle where to rage ; and his Ode :

The spacious tirmament on high,^"

beats a stately march but their author is in symi^athy

;

with inspiration rather than himself inspired.

Paniell, the author of the unangelically Angelic Herinif
I cannot exalt as a poet. Yet a song of his is so daintily
neat as to suggest a doubt whether it may not be sonu'thing
higher :

When thy beauty appears

In its graces and airs,
All bright as an angel new dropt from the .sky,
At distance I gaze,and am aw'd by my fears,
iSo strangely you dazzle my eye !

I'lUt wIkii witliout art.

Your kind tliought you impart.
When your love runs in blushes thioiigli every vein ;

When it darts from your eyes, when it punts in your lieail,

Then I know you 're a woman again.

Th(!re 's a passion and pride

In our sex, she reply'd.

And thus, might 1 gratify Itotli, 1 wouhl do
Still an angel appear to each lover beside,
But still be a woman to you.*"
 —

366 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

111 Isaac Watts's Cradle Hymn 1 recognize traces of
native inspiration, but inspiration jiressed into doing suit
and service to religious enthusiasm :

Hush ! my dear, lie still and slumber,

Holy angels guard thy bed !

Heavenly blessings without number

Gently falling on thy head.

How much better thou'rt attended

Tlian the Son of God could be.
When from heaven he descended
And became a child like thee !

Was there nothing but a manger

Cursed sinners could afford,
To receive the heavenly stranger ?
Did they thus affront their Lord ?

Soft, my child ; I did not chide thee,

Though my song might sound too hard ;

mother
'Tis thy sits beside thee.
And her arms shall be thy guard.

Yet to read the shameful story.

How the Jews abus'd their King,
How they serv'd the Lord of Glory,
Makes me angry while I sing.

See the lovely babe a-dressing ;

Lovely infant, how he smil'd !

When he wept, the mother's blessing

Sooth'd and hush'd the holy child.

Lo, he slumbers in his manger,

Wliere the horned oxen fed
Peace, my darling here 's no danger,
;

Here 's no ox a-near thy bed.

May'st thou live to know and fear him,
Trust and love him all thy days ;

Then go dwell for ever near him,

See his face, and sing his praise " !
 UNCLASSED mi
Sketches in black and white by Shenstuiie in Tlie .Scliuul-

[Link].s appeal to our sense of the picturesque. Four

lines in his so-called '
Levities '
plumb depths of human
sickness at humanity :

Whoe'er has travel'd life's dull round,

Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
His warmest welcome, at an inn.^-
Now and then a gust of pity or self-pity blows rhetoric
aside —rhetoric
still, though of a noble sort, as in London

and The Vanity of Human Wishes. For an instant some-

thing truer takes its place, and Johnson marks with tears,
instead of antitheses,
what ills the scholar's life assail,

Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol ;

"

or, mourning, with affectionate simplicity, almost with

and coarsely kind practiser
kinrlly envy, the obscurely wise, *

in physic ', he sees

Levet to the grave descend,
OHicious, innocent, sincere,
Of every friendless name the friend.^*

Pieces like these are interesting as jialliativi-s of a

prevailing sterility in respect of Occasional insi)ira(ioii

for some huixlred years. Others, like Mickle's ("iniinor

Hall, are endeared by habit and Iraditidii more [Link] l)y

intrinsic merit. Hut fur a ((iilury ;iftii' tlic clo^c of the

English ])oe1ical rcnaissarxc. the disl incl ion have drawn I

l)etween poetry and writer's of poetry has little practical

application. During this tedious intcrreginMu, su<li verse
as deserves the name
of poetry was the work of its poets.
Very seldom did the plienomenon occur of a spark of
genuine inspiration lighting ujxiii ;i [Link]-. of ;i divine
emotion visiting uneonsecrated lips, ami insisting on
 ;

368 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

becoming vocal. For positive poetical [Link] 1 do nut
know that 1 coukl instance more than a trio of lyrics thus
qualified. Ambrose Philips for once carolled, as a songster
of the grove for its nestlings, to his

Little gossip, blithe and hale,

Tattling many a broken tale,
Singing many a tuneless song,
Lavish of a heecUess tongue,
Simple maiden void of art,
Babbling out the very heart.
Sleeping, waking, still at ease,
Pleasing without skill to please.
- Yet abandon'd to thy will.
Yet imagining no ill.
Yet too innocent to blush ;

Like the linnet in the busli,

To the mother- linnet's note
Moduling her slender throat
Chirping forth thy petty joys,
Wanton in the change of toys ;

Like the linnet green in May

Flitting to each bloomy spray ;

Wearied then, and glad of rest,

Like the linnet in the nest.'"'

Then there is Henry Carey's Sally :

Of all the girls that are so smart

There 's none like pretty Sally ;

She is the darling of my heart,

And she lives in our alley.
Tliere is no lady in the land
Is half so sweet as Sally :

She is the darling of my heart.

And she lives in our alley.
Of all the days that 's in the week
I dearly love but one day ;

And that 's the day that comes betwixt

A Saturday and Monday ;
 UNCLASSED 369

For then I'm drest all in my best

To walk abroad with Sally ;

She is the darling of my heart.

And she lives in our alley."'

In gaiety, flow and feeling at once sweet and wholesome,

Sally, like Philips's verses on baby Charlotte Pultenej^
transports us to an elder world. There is all the pride of
youth, and the pathos of that pride besides.
And, thirdly, we have Christopher Smart's ode to David :

A song where tiute-ljreath silvers trnmpot-elang ?

Dare I that more than Unhert IJiou iiiiig has

say of
said already Born in a mad-house, whether does it prove
'!

that its author had there first strayed from reason into
inspiration, or that, by means of inspiration, he had at
last recovered for a moment his genuine self ? I confess
to finding feeling in the song cramped by conformity to
stiff and artificial canons. A Browning's imagination is

needcfl for much reading l)etwoen the lines before allinity

may plausibly be claimed for it :

on either hand
With Mihori and with Keats.

But I admire sincerely its frequent grandeur, as in the

series of flashes revealing how :

The world, the clustering spiieres. He nuide ;

The glorious light, the soothing Hha<le,

Dale, ehanipaign, grove anrl hill.

The nndtitudinouH abyss,

WhiTe Se<reey remains in blins,
*^
.Anrl \Visdi)m liiiles her skill.

Above all. I a])]»r((iatc fully llic wmidcr of the coiilrasl —

be it ascent, or fall. Such a lliglit— fnmi eraziness to
VOL. II A a
370 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
inspiration —then—years of sanitj', but uninspired — not to
'
die, but live ', even sing, or feign to sing !

*
How came it you resume the void and null,
? *^
Subside to insignificance '

Conventionalism had all but stifled the life of Occasional

Verse, and was threatening the main current of national
poetic sensibility, when a temper of rebelliousness mani-
fested [Link] malcontents looked at once back and
forwards. Thomas Warton, and, still more practically,
Bishop Percy, had the courage to remind of the old popular
minstrelsy. They challenged continuing life a twilight —
life, perhaps —for it in renovations of divers fine fragments.
Collins, Gray, and Cowper threw down the gauntlet to
the school of Pope. Much more revolutionary elements
were soon to be at work. A fresh literary renaissance gave
Scotland Burns. In England it was preparing for the
advent of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley,
and Keats. Poetry, when thus it roused itself from its
torpor towards the opening of the nineteenth century,
woke into a new world. Movement was in it, with a sense
of abundance of air. The poetic atmosphere, long since
burnt up, was felt to have been renewed, for readers as
well as authors. On both sides of the Tweed one charac-
teristic of the revival was the same as had distinguished
the Elizabethan. True and delightful poetry would now
and again flow from the pens of writers hardly to be
described as poets. The fact in Scotland is less surprising.
There the poetic spirit, with or without poets, had never
ceased to stir, if intermittently, in the indigenous minstrelsy
which reminded Burns that he too might be inspired.
Now, no longer with the original grim and tragic accent,
though sometimes with the old simple carelessness of fame,
 UNCLASSED 371

many a sudden melody will be found to have sprung up,

like a rare flower in the waste.
Verse there was, though of real merit, with no distinctly
indigenous properties such as Logan's welcome to the
;

Cuckoo, which ^\'armed the heart of Edmund Burke :

Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove !

Thou messenger of spring !

Now heaven repairs thy rural seat,

And woods thy welcome sing.

.Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green ;

Thy sky is ever clear.

Thuu liast no sorrow in thy song ;

Xo winter in thy year !

•''

But in other, somewhat later, lyrics uf the eighteenth-

nineteenth century, the spirit of the old nu'nstrclsy, in its
sad, if softened and mure tender tones, is clearly audible.
It breathes in the lament for Floddcn :

WoTl hear nae mair lilting at our ewe milking.

Women and i>airns are heartless and wac ;

Sighing and moaning on ilka green loaning.

Tho Flowers of the Forest aro a' wedo awao ;
"^

in musical wails of longing regret for IViiu-e Charlie and ;

in rustic melancholy, as of Auld Kobin Cray ^^ passing, ;

now, into an interjection of protest against man's lot on

earth :

Wlia'ji buy my culli-i licriiu' 't

Ve may ca' them vulgar fairin' !

Wives and mithtTM, maist despuiriu',

CV thrm lives mm <>' •/"'^

now into a farewell to Ivirtli nuTging in a vision of

Heaven :

I'm wiaiing awa', .Fcan,

Like Hnaw-wreatliH in thaw, .ban,
A a 2
 — —— —

372 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

I'm wearing awa'
To the land o' the leal.

There 'snae sorrow there, Jean,

There 's neither caukl nor care, Jean.

The clay is aye fair

In tlie land o' the leal.^^

Although not the equal of such strains, another plaintive,

Scottish Occasional lay —a cry of exiles in Canada for their
old loved home —appears to nie not altogether unworthy of
association with them :

Listen to me, as when you heard our father

Sing long ago the song of other shores
Listen to me, and then in chorus gather
All your deep voices, as you pull your oars !

From the lone shieling of the misty island

Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides !

We ne'er shall tread the fancy-haunted valley.

Where 'tween the dark hills creeps the small clear stream,
In arms around the patriarchal banner rally,
Nor see the moon on royal tombstones gleam.
When the bold kindred in the time long vanished
Conquered the soil, and fortified the keep,

No seer foretold the children would be banished,

That a degenerate lord might boast his sheep.
Come foreign —
rage let Discord burst in slaughter !

O then for clansmen true, and stern claymore

The hearts that would have given their blood like water.
Beat heavily beyond the Atlantic roar.

Fair these broad meads, these hoary woods are grand ;

But we are exiles from our fathers' land.'^*

English writers, who, if born twenty years earlier, might

never have affected to be poets, similarly yielded —fortu-
 —

UXCLASSED 373

nately for us —to the rising influence. Charles Lamb, for

example, was scarcely aware he could versify before he tried
to turn his sister from tragic reveries by joining with her
in the production of a little volume of Poetry for Children.
It is the ideal of books for the entertainment of the young
by is Louis Stevenson's Child's Garden the
their elders, as
idealwhich might have been \\Titten by a child inspired —
for the entertainment of seniors. For the most part,
charming as are things like The Magpie's Nest, Poetry
for Children does not aspire to actual poetical honours.
Yet the [Link] taught Lamb, as in Nursing, wiiicli
must be his, and in Hester, which he acknowledged, that,
on occasion, he could sing.
How positiv^e was the gift he has demonstrated in his
farewell to the infant dying as soon as born :

Mothers prattle, mother's kiss,

Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss.
Kites, whieh custoni does impose,
Silver bells, and baby clothes;
Coral redder than those lips
Which pale death did late eclipse ;

•Music framed for infants' glee,

Whistle never tuned for thee ;

Though thou want'st not. thou shalt have tlu-m.

Ivoving hearts were they which gave them.
1^1 not one be missing nurse,
;

See them laid upon the hearse

Of infant slain by dixmi perverse.
Why should Kings and nobles have
I'ictured trophies to their grave.
And we, churls, to thco deny
Thy i»retty toys wilh thi-e to lie ?
'•''

His fricixl Wordsworth coiild not with a finer instind have

analysed tlu'moods of dcicirted Heslcr, '
traineil in

Nature's school "

; hcf joy uliich wa-- [iiiili-, .iiid her |iri<le
 — — —

374 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

which was joy. I am onlj' afraid he would have missed
the tender humour in the sorrow :

My sprightly neighbour ! gone before

To tliat unknown and silent shore,
Shall we not meet, as heretofore,
Some summer morning.
When from thy cheerful eyes a ray
Hath struck a bliss upon the day,
A bliss that would not go away.
A sweet forewarning ? ^^

Again, how the air quivers with ghostly sighs as we read :

I have had playmates, I have had companions,

In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

1 liavebeen laughing, I have been carousing,

Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a love once, fairest among women :

Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man :

Like an ingrate I left my friend abruptly ;

Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces,

Ghostlike I paced round the haunts of my childhood.

Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse.
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
Friend of m^' bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wcrt not thou born in my father's dwelling ?

So might we talk of the old familiar faces

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me ; all are depaited ;

All, all are gone, tlie old familiar faces."

J'loximity Id vci'se like this ]»rovokes dangerous com-

parisons foi' any one. (Jertainly James Montgomery —whose
 UNCLASSED 375

World Before the Flood, Greenland, and Pelican Island,

I read in bojhood, I confess, with admiration — cannot often
stand it. Yet Lamb himself would not have scorned the
melancholj' grace of a Falling Leaf :

Were I a trembling leaf

On yonder stately tree.
After a season gaj' and brief,
Condemned to fade and flee ;

I should be loth to fall

Beside the common way.
Weltering in mire, and spurn'd by all,

Till trodden down to clay.

Nor would I like to spread

My and withered face
thin
In hortus siccus, pale and dead,
A mummy of my race.

No —on the wings of air

Might I be left to fly,

I know not and I heed not where,

A waif of earth and sky !

Who that hath ever been,

Could liear to be no more ?

Yet wh(t would tread again the srone

He trod through lifi; l)efore '!

On, with int< use desire,

Man's spirit will ukjvc on ;

It HceniH to die, yet, like lieavtn'M lire,

It is not cpienelied, but gone."*

Still less W(»ul(l Klia have disdained [Link]) with

an [Link], if a hund>kr, JiiiruH. J am almost afraid to
praiue juHtly tho DorHctHhire poet's 'V\\r Wife a lost lest ,

it hIkhiM 1m' the broad sweet Doric \\lii(li lias rocked (hr

critical fa( ulty asleep :

 ; '

376 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

(Since I noo niwore do zee your feiice,

Upsteairs, or down below,

I'll zit me in the Iwonesome pleace,
Where flat-bougird beech do grow ;

Below the beeches' bough, my love,

Where you did never come,
An' I don't look to meet ye now.
As I do look at hwome.
Since you noo mwore be at my zide,
In walks in summer het,
I'll goo alwone where mist do ride,

Drough trees a-drippen wet

Below the rain- wet bough, my love.
Where you did never come,
An' I don't grieve to miss ye now,
As I do grieve at hwome.

Since I do miss your vaice an' feace

In prayer at eventide,
I'll pray in woone sad vaice vor greace,
To goo where you do bide ;

Above the tree an' bough, my love.

Where you be gone avore,
An' be a-waiten vor me now.
To come vor evermwore.^^

I have hesitated whether to leave among the Unclassed '

Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Happily for the credit of hterature

the thinker of Death's Jest-Book has alwa_ys been appre-
ciated, though there is irony in the admiration, confined as
it is to a minute circle of students. Readers in general still
are not likely to try to solve a series of problems there set,
and commonly much knottier even than that grand and
profound Dirge :

To-day is a thought, a fear is to-morrow.

And yesterday is our sin and our sorrow ;
 — — —

UNCLASSED 377

And life is a death,

Where the body 's the tomb.
And the pale sweet breath
Is buried alive in its hideous gloom.
Then waste no tear.
For we are the dead, the living are hero.
In the stealing earth, and the heavy bier.
Death lives but an instant, and is but a sigh.
And his son is unnamed immortality.
Whose being is thine. Dear ghost, so to die
Is to live, — and life is a worthless lie

Then we weep for ourselves, and wish thee goodbj'C.*'

The same difficulty has met me in tlic ease of Sydney

Dobell. The longer poems, The Roman and Balder, abound
in fine passages. I find no false tone in the shorter. Yet
I doubt ; and I know not exactly why. But I am sure that
Haider's song, Laus Deo, on a loving widow's incapability
after '
seven long days and seven long nights '
beside the
open coffin — of measuring the wonder of bereavement b}-

time :

'
On your lives !' she shrickM and cried, "
he is liul newly dead 1"°'

deserves to })c, and that Kcitli of Pvavelston, with its

charm of reserve, of half-lights, of mystery, already is,

among the liiiinortiils :

Till- iiiuiiiiui of till- iiioiii iiiiig ^host

'j'hat k<(|t.H I lie shiiddwy kinc,
'
Oh, Keitli (if liavclsfon.
'
Tlir Horrows (if thy line !

Kavi'lHtdii, l'iiv(lsl<in.
Tin- merry padi that !en«lH

Down the ^(lideii iiKiriiiii); liill.

And Ihm' the silver nieadn ;
 —

378 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Ravelston, Ravelston,
The stile beneath the tree,
Tlie maid that kept her mother's kine,
The song that sang she !

She sang her song, she kept her kine,

She sat beneath the thorn
When Andrew Keith of Ravelston
Rode thro' the Monday morn,

His henchmen sing, his hawk-bells ring.

His belted jewels shine !

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line !

Year after year, where Andrew came.

Comes evening down the glade.
And still there sits a moonshine ghost
Where sat the sunshine maid.

Her misty hair is faint and fair.

She keeps the shadowy kine ;

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line !

I laymy hand upon the stile,

The stile is lone and cold,
The burnic that goes ))abbling by
Says nought that can be told.

Yet, stranger here, from year to year.

!

She keeps her shadowj' kine ;

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line !

Step out three steps, where Andrew stood

Why blanch thy cheeks for fear ?
The ancient stile is not alone,
'Tis not the buiii I hear !
 ;

UNCLASSED 379

She makes her immemorial moan,

She keeps her shadow^' kine ;

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line !
"-

By this time, almost unconsciously,

I have advanced far
into the nineteenth centuiy. have passed over many But I
distinguished names some in their day even famous, and
;

a few still. The roll would be lengthy were it confined

strictly to the century and it has to comprise half a dozen
:

or more born in the previous one. I note Charles Dibdin,

author of Tom Bowling, and much of marine renown be-
sides ;Reginald Heber, of Palestine, and one immortal
hymn Joanna Baillie, of dramas once illustrious Kirke
; ;

White, for his fame, happy in an early death John ;

Wilson, of the Isle of Palms, and arbiter of hteraturo

as '
Christopher North Robert Pollok, with the severe
'
;

and serious Course of Time ; John Clare, with Poems of

Rural Life, and Robert Bloomfield, of tlic Farmer's Boy,
twin victims of a poetic germ never matured Bryan
Waller Procter
—
Barry Cornwall ' best remenil)ered for '
—
;

breezy songs Alaric Watts, with Lyrics of the Heart

;

John Moultrie, of My Brother's Crave and Codiva Sir ;

Thomas Noon Talfonid, of Joii Charles Wells, whoso ;

drama, J()sej)li and liis lirethreii, was discovered three ' '

years before his death by Swiiiliuiiie W. J^. Bowles, ;

whose Sonnets (JoU^ridge, in liis scliooldays, as he

could not nfTotd to buy, copied uiit ;
All;iii CiMmiiij^liam,
singer of

A \v<t .sliict and a llowinj^ Hvn ;

hapless '
\j. K. L.', the adniiied of drawing-rootuH for The
[iiiprovisatrice ; Mrs. Barliaiild, whose Life it was thouglit
must ever be remembered :
 ;

380 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Life ! we've been long together.
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear ;

Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear ;

Then
steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time.
Say not Good-night', but in some brighter clime
'

Bid me Good-morning '®^

'
;

Felicia Hemans, whose Homes of England and Graves of

a Household, notwithstanding all their honeyed sweetness,
will not be forgotten ; Henry Stebbing, with poetry, as in
Jesus and A
Long Railway Journey, characterized, if a son
may testify, by melody and high thought ^* Archbishop ;

Trench, of a rich fancy, as displayed in verse like Justin

Martj-r and the ballad of Harmosan Emily Bronte one ; —
of an extraordinary trio of sisters on whose verse inspira- —
—
tion seems as in The Visionary always to be waiting to —
descend Aytoun, chronicling with picturesque solemnity
;

the Burial March of Dundee and the Execution of Montrose ;

Lord Lytton, though dramatist rather than poet, and his

son, Earl of Lj^tton, author of Fables in Song and King
Poppy ; Mrs. Norton, scarcely less brilliant with her pen-
as in The Lady of La Garaye than socially the two — ;

de Veres, Sir Aubrey and Aubrey Thomas, both romantic

spirits, content to have been born too late, or too early ;

Home, an uni'cgarding public Robert

flinging his Orion at ;

JJiichanan, whose London Poems and Jialder the Beautiful

show poetic insight Philip James Bailey, with Festus,
;

a powerful conception suffocated by stillborn accretions ;

Alexander Smith, with popularity of the Jonah-gourd

kind the brothers, Frederick Tennyson, of Days and
;

Hours, and Charles Tennyson Turner, of the Sonnets, each

recognized, but not as yet justly appreciated William ;

Allingham, possessed of a delicate touch for a ballad or story,

 — —

UNCLASSED 381

and a most tuneful ear Charles ]\Iaokay, a fluent song and

;

progress writer Gerald Massey, with his tender and sweet

;

Ballad of Babe Christabel Philip Stanhope Worsley, cut;

offfrom literature by sickness and prematm-e death, whose

Spenserian translation of the Odyssey, if not of its com-
panion, the Iliad, has rendered all other metrical versions
superfluous ; T. E. Brown, a born poet, and a Manx
patriot, who chose to block by a dialect the neigiibouring
islanders' enjoyuuut. in Fo'c's'le Varns,''^ of a pathos never
exaggerated, adiHiral)le character-drawing and scene-paint-
ing ui words ; and — finally, for the nineteenth century
Frederick Locker-Lampson, whose London Lyrics continue,
I hope, to set the chimes from scores of dingy steeples
ringing ; as for My Charming Neighbour Rose :

The bells arc ringing. As is meet,

White favours fascinate the street,
Sweet faces greet nie, rueful-sweet
'[Link] tears and laughter ;

They crowd the door to sec her go,

The bliss of one brings many woe ;

O, [Link] the bride, and I will throw

The old shoe after.*®

Whenever — as three centuries back, and, again, two

later — the sun has disjK-rscd the clouds about IJie ])eaks
of Parnassus, if shines, if fitfully, uj)on a curiously mixed
crowd gathered af tlic fool. I'aiticularly, in the courHC of,
and consequent upon, last century's jioetic revival, it haw

been a bewildering assemblage, by virtue of its merits as

much as of its defects. Education, reading, and a culti-
vated habit f)f good taste have so raised the level of average
versifying as to l)lur the boundary lines befween genius
and a respectable mediocrity. My task of discriminaf ion
has l>cen lightened by Francis Turner I'algruvc's Golden
 ;

382 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Treasury of Songs, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford
—
Book of English Verse each admirable. Sometimes the
volumes have brought one or another lyric for the first time
to my notice. Often they have recalled excellence to my
recollection, and reflection.
All students, both past and present, of poetry will agree
that the right to the title of poet and poetry depends
'
'
' '

on the possession by the candidates of inspiration. Only,

the standard for that ? Naturally it is a property which
easily evades ordinary analysis for general use. In the
iirst place, it is wonderful how good may be verse with-
out being inspired ; how sincerely one generation may, and
another fail to, recognize its presence. A writer nuiy him-
self conscientiously believe in its descent upon his soul,
yet be unable to infuse it into his lines. Among the
various circumstances, or accidents, may be found an
explanation of a common literary phenomenon. It is the
frequent heading of chapters with Imes not in the least
poetry, and their importation into the text of intelligent
prose. Beyond doubt it is one of the reasons why true
poets make bad judges of the merits of their own work.
Also, from this, on the other hand, and from analogous
causes, a denial of inspiration to i^articular pieces is open
almost to as much questioning. A later generation may
possibly rehabilitate as '
poets '
not a few dead nineteenth-
century celebrities. Meanwhile, I rejoice to think, '
poems ',

at all events, in fair numbers have survived the last century,

and survive still.
Thus, though the permanent place of Christina Rossetti
— —
Dante Gabriel's sister is not yet decided, listen to Echo ;

and we may be sure it will be honourable :

Come to me in the silence of the night

Come in the speaking silence of a dream ;
 UNCLASSED 383

Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright

As sunlight on a stream ;

Come back in tears,

O memory, hope, love of finished years."

Ponder the cold, calm bitter-sweet of

.When I am dead, my dearest.
Sing no sad songs for me ;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree.
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrop.s wet ;

,\jid if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not sec the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain ;
I shallnot hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain ;
And dreaming tlirough the twilight
That iloth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.'*

Read further; and an inclination to fix foilhwitli the

writer's rank will have ^rown :

Does the road wind upliill all the way ?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day's journey take the wliolc long day ?

From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place ?

A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face ?

You cannot misH that inn.

ShallI meet other wayfarers at night ?

Those who have gnne before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight T
They will not keej) you standing nt (hat door.
 — ' —

384 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

comfort, tiavcl-sore and weak
Sliall I find ?

Of labour you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek ?

Yea, beds for all who come.®^

Pathos perhaps ; and pathos is msidious. Yet there is

pathos which is just the bloom upon strength a pathos —
other than Letitia Barliaidd's, though she wrote Life ; than
Felicia Hcmans's,though she wrote Graves of a Household,
a pathos akin to Wordsworth's, when he sang of Lucy
Is this Christina Rossetti's?
Sometimes, when the inspiration is far from the rule, we
\\ why it waited on this or that particular piece how,
onder ;

from the pile of Whittier's Mcll-intentioned, tuneful, star-

less verse leaps forth John Bright's favourite, Skipper
Ireson's awaking to remorse for the desertion of his
brother fishermen in a tempest !

'
Hear me, neighbours !
' at last he cried,
'
What to me is this noisy ride ?
What is the shame that clothes the skin
To the nameless horror that lives within 'i

Waking or sleeping, I see a wreck.

And hear a cry from a reeling deck !

—
Hate me and curse me, I only dread
The hand of God and the face of the dead !

Said Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt,

Torr'd an' futherr'[Link]' corr'd in a corrt
By the women o' Morble 'ead '" !

The ode, again, to a Waterfowl —was it born in Bryant's

capable soul, or did it float to his jicn from the air around,
as, far on high, the bird to his sight '!

Whither, 'midst falling dew

While glow tlie heavens with the last steps of day,
Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way ?
 — —

UNCLASSED 385

Vainly tlio fuwior's eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As darkly seen against the crimson sky
Thy figure floats along.
Seek'st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide.
Or where the roeking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean-side ?

There is a Power whose care

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast
The desert and illimitable air
Lone wandering, but not lost.
All day thy wings have fanned.
At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere,
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land.
Though the dark night is near.
And soon that toil shall end,
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest.
And scream among thy felhnvs reeds shall bend ;

Soon o'er thy .Hheltered nest."'

How niytjtically, strangely sweet, from niiiid the boafs,

]>atriotic, rather than ethereal, of the Coin-htw Ithyiner's
(Jnini, rings the inusie :

Dark, deep, and cold the current liuw s

Unto the sea where no wind blows,

iSccking the land which no one knows.

Why Hhrieks for help yon wretch, who goes

With millionH, from a world of woch,
Unto the land which no one knowH ?

Though myriadH go with him who gcca,

Alone he goes no wind blowH,
wlicri;
Unto tho land which no one knowu.

For all muHt jro where no win<l blown,

And none can go for him who gocH ;

X'uic, n<in«! r< turn wlirruc no one known.

VOL. II I'. I)
38C FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
Yet why sliould ho who shrieking goes
With millions, from a world of woes,
Reunion seek with it or those ?
Alone with Ciod, where no wind blows,
—
And Deatli, his shadow doom'd, he goes ;

That God is there the shadow shows.

Oh, shoreless Deep, where no wind blows !

And thou, oh, Land which no one knows !

That Cod is All, His sliadow shows.'^

Every reader of The Lays of Ancient Rome must feel

that Macauhiy longed to be a poet. Yet those rushing
chronicles of his, while they possess a host of other merits,
have not the one he coveted most. It is the more gracious
of the Muse to have once pitied and rewarded the worship,
learning, and yearning with a change of water into wine,
of sonorous rhetoric into haunting poetry. That character
cannot be denied to the picture of false Sextus at the' '

Battle of Lake Regillus :

Men saw strange visions

said he
Which none beside might see.
And that strange sounds were in his ears,
Which none might hear but he.
A woman fair and stately.
But pale as are the dead.
Oft tlirough the watches of the niglit
Sate spinning by his bed.

And as she plied the distaff,

In a sweet voice and low.
She sang of great old houses,
''
And fights fought long ago.

So spun she, and so sang she.

Until the east was gray,
Then pointed to her bleeding breast,
And shiieked, and fled away.'^
 UNCLAS8ED 387

English literary history contaiiiis a few cases in which

a considerable mind has l)cconie inspired, and been content
with the single effort. So it was with Spanish Blanco White
ill the address to Night, a thmg of true, pensive dignity,
though overpraised by no less than, m his maturitj', Cole-
ridge as the finest and most gi-andly conceived somiet in
'

our language '

:

Mysterious Niglit ! when our iirst parent knew

Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did ho not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of liglit and blue ?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew.
Bathed in the rays of the great setting tiame,
•
Hesperus with the host of Heaven came ;
And lo Creation widened in man's view
! !

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed

Within thy beams, O .Sun or wlio rould find. !

Whilst tl}', and leaf, and insect stood reveal'd,

Tiiat to such countless Orbs tluni madst us blind ?

Wliy do we, then, shun Death with anxious strife ?

'*
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life ?

A more ordinary experience is for a subject of inspiration

to relax the spiritual tension which produced it than to
stop versifying'. I'laed's fancy conceived in the lied

Fisherman nuich more than a happy jeu d'chprit. It is

a fine strain, in which Satan is described as angling with

bait of State intrigues for a saintly Churchman. The
brilliant writer of vers dc societc might have developed
into a true poet had the next twelvr years of his
short life not been wasted upon rarlianirnt Though .

he versified still, h(! carried the hook (.f iioHiics to his

grave :

There was turniug of ki-ys, and creaking of lockn,

Ah he stalked away with Win iron l><)X.

B b 2
388 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
'
Olio ! (^lio !

The cock doth crow ;

It is time for the Fisher to rise and go.

Fair luck to the Abbot, fair luck to the shrine !

He liath gnawed in twain my choicest line ;

Let him swim to the north, let him swim to the south,
The Abbot will carry my hook in his mouth ''^
!
'

Hartley Coleridge, with a true poetic instinct, had also,

as it were, a mortgaged inheritance to redeem. But for
lack of will, he had ear and imagination to become what
metaphysical theology had induced his marvellous father
to cease to be. As it is, it may be hoped that he will bo
remembered for more t ban one or two charming songs :

She is notoutward view

fair to
As many maidens be.
Her loveliness I never knew
Until she smil'd on me ;
Oh then I saw her eye was bright,
!

A well of love, a spring of light.

But now her looks are coy and cold.
To mine they ne'er reply,
And yet I cease not to behold
The love-light in her eye ;

Her very frowns are fairer far.

Than smiles of other maidens are.'^

I should grieve to think that nothing else is left from

the Avork of the generous soul of Monckton-Milnes ; but
a shadow must remain :

They seemed to those who saw them meet

The worldly friends of every day ;

Her smile was undisturbed and sweet,

His courtesy was free and gay.
But yet if one the other's name
In some unguarded moment heard.
The heart j'ou thought so calm and tame,
Would struggle like a captive bird ;
 ; — ;

UXCLASSED 389

And letters of mere formal phrase

Were blistered mth repeated tears,
And was not the work of days,
this
'"'
But had gone on for years and years !

If the reading world discards much of Jean Ingclow's

verse there cannot but survive the great ballad — to fit

rank beside The Sands of Dee —The High Tide on the Coast
of Lincohishire ; with the d]•o^^^ling in raging Lindis, as
lamented by the old father-ui-law, of '
my soimis wife,
Elizabeth '
:

'
I shall never hear her more
By
the reedy Lindis shore,
" Cusha Cusha Cusha " calling,
! ! !

Ere the early dews be falling ;

I shall never hear her song.

" Cusha ! Cusha " ! all along
Where the sunny Lindis floweth,
Goeth, floweth ;

From the meads where raelick growetli,

Wiicre the water winding down
Onward floweth to the town.

I shall never see her more

Where the reeds and rushes quiver.
Shiver, (juiver
Stand beside tlie sobbing river,

Sobbing, throbbing, in its falling

To the sandy, loncsomo shore ;
I shall never hear her calling,
" Leave your meadow grasses mellow,
Mellow, mellow ;

(^uityour eowHiips, [Link] yellow ;

Come uppo WliiUfuot, come uppe Lightfoot

Quit your pipes of parsley hollow.
Hollow, hollow ;

Como uppo Lightfoot, rise and follow ;

Lightfoot, Whitcfoot,
 :

390 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

From your clovers lift the head ;

Come uppo Jetty, follow, follow,

'^
Jetty, to the milking shed." '

Pocliy is not always serious. It can play. During the

nineteenth century, as earlier, it was used for political satire

and pastime —frequently by writers of distinction in other

fields. Early examples arc '
Classic '
Canning's Friend of
Humanity, which once any schoolboy would have been
ashamed to be unable to repeat
Needy knife-grinder 1 whither are you going ?

the Rejected Addresses, the no less famous Ingoldsby

Legends, Hood's verse, as humorist, and, later, a wreath
of ballads, from the heroic one on Little Billee to the
description of a Mediterranean gale — April laughter, not
without a tear here and there — by Thackeray :

And when, its force expended,

The harmless storm was ended,
And, as the sunrise splendid
Came blushing o'er the sea ;

I thought, as day was breaking,

My little girls were A/aking,
And smiling, and making
A prayer at home for me.'"*

Others are by Shirley Brooks, Punch's poet-laureate of

Wit and Humour by Charles Stuart Calverley, the bril-
;

liant flashes of a subtle wit which he styled Verses and '

Translations and ; by Lew^is Carroll

'
in the fantasia, 'The '

Hunting of the Snark.' About midway in the number

of writers, both in birth and death, comes Dean Mansel
with that prodigy of biting satire, scholarly virulence, and
melody too, Piirontisterion. Here is its Hymn t<> the
Infinite bv the full Chorus of Cloudy Professors :
 UNCLASSED 391

The voice of yore,

Which the breezes bore
Waihng aloud from Paxo's shore,
Is changed to a gladder and livelier strain,
For great God Pan is alive again,
He lives, and he reigns once more.
With deep intuition and mystic rite
We worship the Absolute-Infinite,
—
The Universe Ego, the Plenary Void, —
The subject-Object identified.
The great Nothing-Something, the Being-Thouglit,
That mouldeth the mass of Chaotic Nought,
Whose beginning unended and end unbegun
Is the One that is All and the All that is One.
Hail Liglit with Darkness joined I

Thou Potent Impotence !

Thou Quantitative Point

Of all Indifference !

Oreat Non-Existence, passing into Being,

Thou two-fold Pole of the Electric One,
Thou Lawless Law, thou Seer all Unseeing,
Thou Process, ever doing, never done !

Thou Positive Negation !

Negative Affirmation !

Thou great Totality of every thing

That never is, but ever doth become,

Thee do we sing
The Pantheists' King,
Witli ceaseless bug, bug, bug, and endless hum,
llUIII, llUlll.^"

A wonderful tour dc force l)y a tliiukcr, not an habitual

verse-writer overpowering and tomahawking. Let me
;

temper it with a delightful flow of fancy by one who, like

a eontemporary, another great master in romance, might,
iiad he HO elected, have been renowned chiefly as a poet :

W In II at hoiiK! alone I Hit

And am vi-ry tired itf it.
 ; —— ; —

3<)2 FIVE CENTURIES OE ENGLISH VERSE

I have just to shut my eyes
To go sailing through the skies
To go saihng far away
To the pleasant Land of Play,
To the fairyland afar
Where the Little People are ;

Where the clover-tops are trees,

And the rain-pools are the seas,
And the leaves like little ships
about on tiny trips
Sail ;

And above the daisy tree

Through the grasses,
High o'erhead the Bumble Bee
Hums and passes.
Through that forest I can pass
Till, as in a looking-glass,
Humming fly and daisy tree
And my tiny self I see,
Painted very clear and neat
On the rain- pool at my feet.
Should a leaflet come to land
Drifting near to where I stand.
Straight I'll board that tiny boat
Round the rain-pool sea to float.

Little thoughtful creatures sit

On the grassy coasts of it

Little things with lovely eyes

See me sailing with surprise.
Some are clad in armour green
These have sure to battle been
Some arc pied with ev'ry hue.
Black and crimson, gold and blue ;

Some have wi ngs and swift are gone ;

But they all look kindly on.

When my eyes I once again
Open and see all tilings plain ;

High bare walls, gioat bare floor

tireat big knobs on drawer and door ;
 : — —

[Link] 393

Gicat big people perched on chairs,

Stitching tucks and mending tears,
Each a hill that I could climb,
And talking nonsense all the time

O dear me.
That I could be
A sailor on the rain-pool sea,
A climber in the clover-tree,
And just come back, a sleepy head.
Late at night to go to bed.^^

Add a whole concert of melodies, Unclassed ', of which

'

I have been giving samples, to those of a rank which I

venture to treat as established. The result is to prove the
title of British verse in the nineteenth centmy to a large

space in the \\orld's poetical literature. No Englishman

would grudge Ireland her share also. Much of Irish
minstrelsy naturally is devoted to national Avrongs. There
are the partisan songs of Lillibulero, the Boyric, and No
Surrender, and anti-English street ballads, like The Croppy
Boy, and The Shan Van Vocht
O the French are in the bay.
They'll be here by break of day.
And the Orange will decay,
Says the Shan Van Vocht.

But not rarely (he music does not allow itself to be drowned
in the trumpet blasts :

She's the most distressful^country

That ever yet was seen ;

They arc lianging men and women

For wearing of the green !

O wearing of Uin green !

i) wearing of the green !

.My native laud 1 cannot stand,

l''or Wfjuing nf tlic^ green !
 ! ; — —

394 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

And—
Wlio fears to speak of '
Ninety-eight ' ?

Who blushes at the name ?

When cowards mock the patriot's fate,

Wlio hangs his head for sliame ?
He's all a knave, or haK a slave.
Who slights his country thus ;

But a True man, like you, man,

Will fill your glass with us !

At least as often in the pauses of fire and ire is heard a note

sometimes of pathos, as from
The bells of Shandon
That sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the river Lee ;

sometimes of gay casuistry by a lover arguing that

'Twould save us so much bother when we'd both be one another
So listen now to reason, Molly Brierley.
I'm not myself at all

or a rapturous description of the Groves of Blarney, where

There 's statues gracing this noble place in
All heathen gods and nymphs so fair
Bold Neptune, Plutarch, and Nicodemus,
^^
All standing naked in the open air !

It has been a melancholy duty, if inevitable, to pass in

review work by a company of singers, when their turns
arrive only after death. At least there is some satisfac-

tion ill the lapse of a sufficient interval to be entitled to

conclude that some part of the total outlives a grave.
Of writers who have departed in the few years of the
present century no more can with right be stated than
the effect their successive volumes produced as they
ai)|K-arcd. All that Henley's and Lang's verse ever seemed
 UNCLASSED 395

to require was the creation of a sufficient public educated

to read between the Imes. The publication of Lang's
XXII Ballades in Blue China was, I remember, an event
for academical circles. They are not forgotten now.
Henley's poems had a similar success; and not a few of
them also —for England
instance, My England and ! !

Margaritas Sorori —are

remembered. Their defect was in
inability to penetrate and hold average intelligences,
as, in general, and for permanence of impression, poetry
—
nmst. Yet Edwin Arnold with The Ught of Asia and —
—
Lewis Morris with .Songs of Two Worlds and The Epic
of Hades — if failure can be named in comiexion with
—
myriads of admirers missed the more refined and select
appreciation each coveted most. Gilbert won both classes
\\'ith his Bab Ballads, and his evergreen dramas. Alas for
the spark of genius in Davidson, Avith his Fleet Street
Eclogues, and Ballads and Songs, which might have been
famied into a flame had it not been almost literally starved.
As for Alfred Lyall, the splendid administrator, the saga-
cious comisellor, the emment biographer, nothing might be
thought to be wanting to his career but for a confession
by himself. Read a piece which is inspired and it seems
to suggest an intellectual regret Too Late
—
perhaps, '
;

'

—
for songs unsung —
even deeper than at sequestration in
the Far East for the best part of a lifetime from English
society, air, ambitions, and cares :

What far-reacliing Neuicais .stiiicd him

From hia liomo by the cool of the sea ?
When he left the fair country that reared him,
When he left her, his mother, for thee.
That restlcHS, diHCoiisoIate worker
Who Htrains now in vain iit tliy nets,
() .soml)re and .sultiy Novcrca !

<) Land (.f llegret.s!

 '

390 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

Has he learnt how thy honours are rated ?
Has he cast his accounts in thy school ?
With the sweets of authority sated,
Would he give up his throne to be cool ?

Doth he curse oriental romancing,

And wish he had toiled all his day.
At the Bar, or the Banks, or financing,
And got damned in a commonplace way ?
^'

But let me hasten to close the necrology of the Unclassed '

—already overcrowded—with a name illustrious, as many

in my survey, in another department of letters. George
Meredith for the world at large, when it discovered him
after two -thirds of an energetic career, as teacher and
preacher, was a novelist, not understood, but prized.
Before he died it had been barely aware that he \vrote
verse. It treated the little it read as an eccentric diver-
sion of his leisure. Even now to most of his public it is

a surprise that he has left behind him a collection of

poems. Yet any student of his prose writings, though
without knowledge of his biography, must feel he con-
sidered it his soul's vocation to be a poet's. He is not
to be judged by pieces like that outburst, 'Jump to
Glory, Jane !
' They were accidents of sudden impulse.
Really he a poet- thinker of Nature, at once her student,
is

priest, and prophet. He was ever watching lovingly her

movements, and those of her wild children, with keener eyes
even than those he bent on Man for the purposes of fiction.
It might be the lark at dawn, begmning to round, and
dropping
The silver chain of sound.
Of many links without a break,
la chirrup, whistle, slur and shake ^ ;

or, after sunset :

the curves uf the white owl sweeping

Wavy in tlie dusk lit by one large star ;
^
 —

UNCLASSED 397

while
Lone on the fir-branch, liis rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.*"

Woods he haunted, marking how

A wind sways the pines,
And below
*^
Not a breath of Avild air ;

awed, yet fascinated, by a sense, in deep night, of their

wakefuhiess how ;

Thousand eyeballs under hoods

Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods.
You who dare ** !

Continually was he appealing from sophisticated Humanity,

which might be supposed to have been absorbing all his
life, and caressing in
thought, to Earth, nourishing us in
death :

green bounteous Earth !

Bacchante Motlier ! stern to those

Who live not in tliy heart of mirth ;

Death, shall I shrink from loving thoe 1

Into the breast that gives the rose,

Shall I with shuddering fall ? *"*

My purpose —perhaps not always fulfilled —has been to

abstain from predictions of the title of certaui froui among
the multitude of aspirants since Teiuiyson to count as
classics inAnglo-Saxon poetry, and the final condemnation
of the remainder as poetasters. iSuch dogmas are as futile
as they are presimii)tuous. J'osterity not We, but Ours —
will settle the point for themselves. But it is entirely lawful
to consider rules for our own guidance as readers meanwhile.
Form and mdody nrv (jiiiilitics of vfrse wliic li it has becoiiu!
 !

398 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE

possible toborrow as vehicles for mere counterfeits of poetic
sensibilityand insight. Tests by which such trappings may
be distmguished from real flesh and blood, and soul, ought
to be welcome. Two, I believe, few pretenders can pass
successfully and the application of the pair is not so difficult
;

as might be supposed. The first is that the work itself

be required to answer whether it have insisted on being
written. This may appear to be an attempt to extort
evidence of guilt by torture. It might be if verse resembled
speech in other collocations. Really it is as hard to compel
words to simulate inspiration as to have it. The second
requisition should be simple enough, though, to judge by
ordinary criticism, the impediments to compliance with it
are enormous. For proof of poetical merit regard the highest
and best in a waiter's achievement. We advance not one
step towards knowledge whether a man have poetry within
him b}^ dAvelling on his failures, follies, or dullnesses. His
average performance itself demonstrates little or nothing.
Only the extreme reach of his thought, ideas, and fire tells
us aught. Find verse to have produced on competent
readers a feeling that thought and emotion have enforced
ventilation of themselves in words that they are resolved
;

to breathe, to be sung ; also, that, among any amount of

inferior matter, there is an inspired joarticle ; —and dare to
denj' that in the author there is the making of a poet

•
Ralegh, The Lie, st. 2. Works, Oxford, 1820. (Poems) vol. viii.
2 Id., An Epitaph upon Sir Philip Sidney, st. H. Ibid.
' Id., The Pilgrimage. Ibid.
• Wotton, To His Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia. Stanzas I, 3, 4.
Reliquiae Wottonianae, 1G85.
' Nicholas Breton (A Sweet LuUabie), stanzas 2, 4, Arbor of Amorous

Devices. Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, 1879.

• Bacon, The Bubble. Reliquiae Wottonianae,
 '

UNCLASSED 399

' and W. Haughton, The Pleasant (^medj- of

T. Dckkcr, H. Chettle,
Patient Grissil. Shakespeare Society, 1841.
' The Duchess of Malfy, Bosola's Song, Act iv, So. 2. Works of John
Webster, ed. Alex. Dyce.
' Cupid and Death, Masque. Ode, 1653. James Shirley, Dramatic
AVorks and Poems, ed. W. Gifford and A. Dyer.
" The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses. Dramatic Entertainment,
Song. James Shirley, ibid.
" Alexander and Campaspe. John Lyly, Dramatic Works, ed. F. W.
Fairholt.
" RosaI}-nde, Euphues Golden Legacie. Thomas Lodge.
" Disdain Returned, st. 1. The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Artluir
\'incent. (The Muses' Library.)
'* The Broken Heart. Song, Beyond the reach of Art. John Ford,
Works, ed. W. Gifford and A. Dyer.
** Thomas Campion, st. 1. Fourth Book of Airs, 1G17. Richard
Alison, or Allison. An Howre'j Recreation in Musike, 1606. (Anon.,
The Golden Treasury, F. T. Palgravc, No. 91.)
"=
(? Comedy by T. B.) st. 3, Anon.
" Sir William Davenant, Aubade.
" G. Wither, st. 5, Select Lyric Poems.
'• An Excellent New Ballad —
to the tune of 'I'll never love thee more !

by James Marquis of Montrose. Memoirs of Montrose, by Mark Napier.

^''
S3T Caulino, Ser. I, Book i, 4. Reliques of Ancient EnglLsh Poetry,
by Bishop (Tiiomas) Percy.
" The Ancient Ballad of Chevy Chase. Ibid., Ser. I, Book i, 1.
" William Dninimond of Hawthoriukn. Song II. Pnonis. Ed.
W. C. Ward. (Tlie Muses' Library.)
" The Battle of Otterbourno (The Scottish Vereion), st. 10. Walter
Scott'b Minstnky of the Scottish Border.
" Sir Patrick Spens. Ibid.
*' Willie'sDrowned in Yarrow, stanzas 1, 2, 3, H, 10, 11, ])p. 25-7.
Scottish Song, ed. Mary Carlyle Aitken.
"The Dowio Houms of Yarrow. Scott's Bonier Miiistrels}',
Btanzas 3-4.
" Fair Helen. Ibid., stanzas fi, S, 10.
" Lady Anno, st. 8. Ibid.
" Earl llichard. Ibid.
" The Daemon Lover. Ibid.
" Jellon CJrame. Ibid. " Young Beiijje. Ibid.
" The Cruel Siatcr (Binnorie, O [Link] !). Ibid.
400 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
" Tlic Queen's Mario. 8cott's Bonlor MiiiRtrc]«y, st. 18.

" Edward, Edward. '

A Scottish FJallad. From a MS. copy trans-
mitted from Scotland.' Ser. T, Book i, 5, Percy's Rcliqucs. (I have
somewhat anglicized the si)clling in Percy's copy.)
" Anon. Scottish Rivers, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder.
" The Twa Corbies. (Scott's Border Minstrelsy.) W. Motherwell's
version, Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, varies.
"* The Lochmaben Harper. (Scott's Border Minstrelsy.)
^' Joseph Addison. (Johnson's Poets, vol. xxx.)
" Dr. Thomas Parnell, Song. (Johnson's Poets, vol. xxvii.)
<i
A Cradle Hymn, Dr. Isaac Watts. Moral Songs. (Johnson's
Poets, vol. Ivi, stanzas 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13.)
** Written at an Inn at Henley, st. 5. Shenstone, Levities (Johnson's
Poets).
«'The Vanity of Human Wishes.
**On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet, a Practiser in Physic, st. 2.

—
" Ambrose Philips To Miss Charlotte Pultenej', in her Mother's
Arms, May 1, 1724. (Johnson's Poets.)
" 1 and 4.
Sally in our Alley, stanzas Henry Carey, Poems.
" Christopher Smart. A Song to David, st. 5. Works and Life, 1791.
" R. Browning. Parleyings with Certain People. (Christopher
Smart), 3, vi.
*» John Logan. Ode to the Cuckoo, stanzas ], Scottish Song, ed. (i.

Mary Carlyle Aitkon.

50 The Flowers of the Forest. Jane EUiot (Scott's Border Minstrelsy).
^^
Auld Robin Gray. Lady Anne Barnard (Lindsay), Lives of the
Lindsays, vol. ii.

'-
Caller Herrin'. Lady Naime. Poems,, with Memoir, ed. Charles
Rogers, 1869. " The Land o' the Leal. Ibid.
" Canadian Boat Song from G. M. Eraser, Times Literary
(see letter
Supplement, Dec. 23, 1904, where it is mentioned that the song has been
attributed variously to Professor Wilson, Lockhart, John Gait, and Lord
Eglinton).
" On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born. Charles Lamb. Poet.
Works. Bohn, 1841.
" Hester. Ibid. " The Old Familiar Faces. Ibid.
" The Falling Leaf. The PoeticalWorks of James Montgomery.
^^ The Wife a -lost, stanzas 1, 2, 4. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset —
Dialect —
by William Barnes. Second collection.
«• A Dirge. Thomaa Lovcll Beddoes. Poetical Works. Ed. Edmund
G0.SS0. 1890.
 UNCLASSED 401

" Balder (Song sc. xxv-iii.), vol. ii. Poetical Works of Sydney Uobcll.
"-
A Nuptial Evo (Keith of Ravelston). Ibid.
^ Anna Letitia Aikin. Works. Ed. Lucy Aikiii, 1825.
'* Jesus, and A Long Railway Journey. Rev. Henry Stabbing, 1).D.
1851.
" Fo'c's'le Yarns. Rev. Thomas Edward Brown.
" London Lyrics. Frederick Locker-Lampson.
" Echo, St. 1, Christina Rossetti. GobUn Market and Other Poems.
'«
Song. Ibid. "»
Up-hill. Ibid.
'"
Skipper Ireson's Ride. John Grecnlcaf Wliittier, st, 8.
' To a Waterfowl, stanzas 1-6. W^illiam CuUen Bryant.
- Plaint. Ebenezer Elliott. More Verse and Prose by the Corn-law
Rhymer.
" Lays of Ancient Rome (Battle of Lake Rcgillus). Thomas Babington
Macaulay.
'* Night and Death. Joseph Blanco ^\'hitc. Life, by himself.
'^ The Red Fisherman. WiUiam Mackworth Pracd.
" A Song. Hartley Coleridge. Poems.
" Shadows. Poems. Richard Monckton-Milncs (Lord Houghton).
' Poems. Jean Ingelow.
'* William Makepeace Thackeray.
Poems.
'" The Phrontisterion. Letters, &c. Very Rev. Henry Longucville
Mansol, D.D.
" The Little Land. A Child's Garden of Verses. Robert Louis
Stevenson.
•- The Shan Van Vocht. The Wearing of the
The Croppy Boy.
Green. Anon. Tlio Memory of the Dead. John Kells Ingram, D.D.
The Bella of Shandon. Rev. Francis Mahony (' Father Prout '). I'm
not Myself at all. Samuel Lover. The Groves of Biarne}-. R. A.
Milliken. Irish Minstrelsy, II. llalliday Sj)arling. 1888.
'* Verses Written in India. Sir Alfred Lyall. Kegan Paul, Troiicli,
4, Co., 1893.
•* The Lark Ascending. George Mcreditli's Works. Mcnidrial
Edition. Constable & Co.
•* Lfjvo in the Valley. ""
Ibid. Ibid.
" Dirge in Woods. Ibid.
" The Woods of Westcrmain. Ibid.
'» Odr I.. Ilic' S|.irit f.f
[Link] in Autumn. Ihi.l.

VOL. ri c c
 CONCLUSIONS ?
From my lii-st to luy latest Avords on verse which is

jDoetry, though, it may be, without a poet, I have had in my

mind two Consciously or unconsciously I have
questions.
been asking myself: 'What, then, is Poetry?' and What '

makes a Poet ? I am unable to answer them yet to my

'

own entire satisfaction.

I can enumerate the qualities which, single or several,
never all together, unless perhaps in one superhuman case,
I myself find in English verse. Fancy and Imagination,
Form —or Style — , Stateliness, Passion, Charm, Mystery,
Pathos, Atmosphere, and Spontaneity share among them
whatever poetry is, in my judgement, entitled to be called
great. Imagination and Fancy stand foremost Imagina- ;

tion, conducting the processes of reconstructing, anticipat-

ing, prophesying setting Fancy in motion Fancy, whether
; ;

independently, or, after Imagination has done its work, and

sometimes before, seeing things under a changed aspect, the
old as if they were new.
The absence of Form is more rcadil}^ noted than its
presence. When the distinguishing characteristic, as of
Ben Jonson as poet, of Herrick, Waller, Suckling, and
Lovelace, almost identical with Style. It implies Self-
it is

restraint, and Reserve. Frequently it has the happiness

to be associated with too much of grandeur for it to be
singled out as the writer's badge. Yet a poet may be
illustrious without
it for Wordsworth is.
;

and Passion, necessities sometimes, are often

Stateliness
out of place. We A\ant no finer example of the former
than I'aiadise Lost, and no worse than Night Thoughts.
 CONCLUSIONS ? 403

For Passion take Shelley, Swinbui-ne. At their best they

exempUfy to perfection the self-abandonment, the ecstasy,
which is the triumph of poetic art.
Charm in poetry every one feels, none can explain. It
alters its hues to each reader's eyes. Analyse it, and the
hand grasps air. It comes at nobody's beck and call not ;

even IVIilton's or Shelley's. Commonly, by no means always,

it turns its back upon Wordsworth. It will not be parted
from Herrick and Keats.
Mystery is a rare visitant, and welcome only when rare.
It is among the distinctions of Chiistabel. It is the glory
of Webster's weird execution-dirge ; of Scottish '
Edward,
Edward of Sydney Dobell's Keith of Ravelston.
'
; It is
Edgar AUan Poe's prime engine, and his Evil Genius.
None can speak of Pathos as any longer shy and retiring.
Of old it was Httle used. Not unknown among the
Ehzabcthans, it was with them far from habitual. In later
days it is its absence which would be remarkable. Both
Avriter and critic are apt to find it a dangerous snare.
They are liable to be bribed by it to accept their own
heart- beats for music of the spheres. I hojjc I have
already sufficiently warned my readers that they are free
to discount my praises of verse whenever they themselves
are inclined to shed a tear over it. In a poet to aim at
pathos, scheme for it, is criminal. When it comes it
should come as an incident, not as the motive, or calculated
result. In great pf)etry, as Wordswoi-th's, it steala forth
ahnost, as it were, against the poet's will.
I have left to the end a couple of qualities which are not
HO much separate ])io2)ertieK of poetry as conditions or
states of it. Each I regard as exceedingly precious. When
we are not sure that we have learnt from a poem all which
is to be iearut, that we Jiave felt all which is to l»e felt,

C! c 2
404 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
when wo suspect that it holds in reserve for us delightful
possibihties, that it has entered into us, and that we arc
in spiritual unison with it —then and there I recognize
Atmosphere. It is not a beginning or basis, but a result.
When the feast is over a box of spikenard is broken and
;

a fragrant vapoui- envelops all. Blake's verse floats in

Atmosphere. So does Keats's Eve of St. Agnes. So
Christabel. There is Atmosphere in Hogg's Kilmeny.
I find none in Campbell, and little in Scott's own verse,
though abundance in his Border MinstreLsy.
Akin to it, I suppose, though the state is as hard to
describe as Atmosphere, is every supreme poet's and
l^oem's strange j)0wer suddenly to open fresh sources in
brain and heart. Forthwith issues a flood- of feeling as
magically sweet to reader as to writer. A mere versifier
may go up and down, sinking wells everywhere. He tor-
tures the depths of the soil. The entire region remains for
him a desert, a Sahara. The poet comes with his willow
bough and springs gush from the solid rock to meet the
;

divining rod as it bends. It is a real gift, like the spell,

the touch on human eyes, which used to reveal the co-
existence with this earthy world of ours of actual Fairy-
land. I have named the condition for want of a better
word, Spontaneity for its effects have no manifest cause.
;

Really spontaneous generation is as unknown in poetry as

in physics. Fancy sows the germs, and forgets where.
They, when sprung-up, remember, and, after wandering
away, return, as birds to their nesting-places. Nobody
can tell the precise nature of the agent, whether it be
a thing, or a power, a mode of action, an aspect of some-
thing cLsc. It [Link] the realm of poetry, lending
itself out to this or that se^jarate quaUty. Pomp at its
touch becomes majesty. Charm rises everywhere, like
 ;

CONCLUSIONS V 405

a floweret of the soil. Chimes from invisible belfries peal

through the midnight air. The long dull story of poor
Simon Lee is transfigured into an anthem of Humanity.
I have often thought what a surprise to the poet himself
must be this investiture of the children of his brain with
trailing clouds of glory, whence voyaging he knows not
the apparition among the creations for which his imagina-
tion had sorely laboured, of angelic beings as strange to
him as thecompanion of the three Hebrews in the fiery
furnace to the Chaldean King. Lispiration works no gi-eater
miracles than with, its Spontaneity, and its Atmosphere.
Other qualities besides all those I have mentioned doubt-
less might be valuable in verse, if present. For example,
there is Unself consciousness, a real virtue only, I do not ;

happen to have met with it in English poetry, outside

Shakespeare's Plaj-s. There is Surprise, which —not very
rarc'l}- —does occur, as in the tln-illing transition in Herrick's
Daffodils from pity for the fleeting beauty of a flower to
a call of universal mortality to prayer :

Stay, stay
Until the wasting day
Has run
But to the evensong ;

And having prayed togetlior, wo

Will go with you along.

The properties I have been describing distinguish poems

when composed. Before they came to their birth the poet
must have undergone the influence of his period. Few
besides Milton in his chief work, if ho entirely, and Keats
in all of his, have csfapcd a close relation to their age and
its [Link] characteristics. The rule is for poetry to
belong to its time. Its propensity is to express ideas,
capablf of (rue expression mily in ))<»''( ry, which have been
40G FIVE CENTUETEvS OV ENGLISH VERSE
born of that time. The taste and fashion of the period
may have changed and been forgotten. The spirit, if ever
it were real and sincere, will, though tinged with the colours

of its age, continue to live in literature. It may even burst

anew into flame. If the period as a whole, or any distinct
stratum in it, accepted as its voice a poet it had formed,
he M'ill remain a voice, though echoing from a wilderness.
In anj' event he and the public which once listened to his
music will have had to a large extent a community of soul.
Bacon has been argumentatively fabled to be the actual
Shakespeare. The fancy would have been more plausible,
if he had been described as a collaborator. Then there
would be truth in it, but onlj' a fraction of the truth. He
must share the fellowship with Ralegh and Drake, Essex,
the Cecils, the wits of the Mermaid, Sidney, Spenser, the
—
buccaneer-mariners of Devon with the entire awakened
nation. All were together joint authors with Shakespeare
of the Plays, and of many a famous poem for a half -century
besides. Every author more or less, a poet most of all,
represents his environings. The character of poetry always
depends largeh' upon the personal element, on the natures
of the readers, as well as on that of the poet. Warmed by
the same sunshine, and buffeted by the same storms as
they, he gives back to them their own in song. When we
admire the antique without being able to give a reason for
our admiration, it often is that insensibly we have lived
back into another age by virtue of communion with one of
its creatures and creators. The ])lond of a distant era is
stirring in us.
It is not always direct sympathy with a period which
sets natures poetically endowed singing to their genera-
tion. Sometimes it is an analogous emotion in a contrasted
—
guise a temper of revolt, the attraction of antipathy.
 CONCLUSIONS ? 407

A minority has persuaded itself that the scene ought to be

shifted. Herbert and Vaughan were inspired to protest
against the manners of their time on behalf of Heaven.
Later on, from the same disgust at the present, Cowley
augured triumphs for science still unborn, but m the air.
Samuel Butler mocked despotic Puritan Major-Generals.
Dryden championed reaction, political and theological.
Swift was jaundiced against a world as petty as Lilliput,
and as coarse as Brobdingnag. Pope's spitfire, cjaiical
indififerentism inspired itself with the social miasma it

affected to loathe. Burns's Muse wavered between jo}^ in

Arcadian and an uneasy, a remorseful, rebellious-

simplicitj'
ness against Kirk Sessions —
perhaps, against family Satur-
day Nights themselves. Byron's defiance of his fellow men,
Browning's disquisitions to society on the meaning it
had forgotten of its own vagaries, and Tennyson's efforts to
tempt it into becoming the ideal of its distorted, distracted
self, are all alike steeped in the time's circumstances.
—
Their public recognized itself denounced, compassionated,
—
moralized, ethereahzed as their theme. Each i:>opu-
lar singer in turn has believed himself a leader and a
prophet. So he has been but a leader, because most
;

obediently representative of his followers, a prophet, because

best translating the inclinations of his discii)les by his own.
Elizabethan giandeur and spaciousness reticct themselves
in the giants of contemporary poetical literature. It is
the same with the earthiness, the intellectual and spiritual
poverty, of three-fourths oi the eighteenth [Link]
period craves to have itself though
poetically interpreted,
the lyie rasps and creaks. When it is without Jonsons
and Herberts, and cannot commission enough Grays and
Goldsmiths, it innst ])erfr)rce ])ut ui) with Youngs and
Akensides. In any case it longs t(» feel akin to the
408 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
minstrelsy. A poet bows to the same instinct. His song,
whether in defiance, or response, was nursed in, and would
return to, the hearts to which he sings.
Great poetry has cliaracteristics, its very own. No less
itindicates the special circumstances of its origin. The
authors disguise themselves as little. Some verse exerts
—
a distinctive power amounting to compulsion of refer- —
rmg itself back to the writer's personality. We cannot
read Clough without curiosity as to the motive, the light
which a piece throws upon the mental stage the poet had
reached, the nearness to the goal. Evident^ he wrote to
tell himself. Here I am not alluding to such deliberate
introspection. I am thinking of the sun -portraits inspira-
tion takes ; how it brings a whole being, with its respective
tendencies and energies of all sorts, to mirror itself. Strongly
marked and vigorous in the main features, usually with
failings as self-evident, that being is bound to be. The
Muse does not anoint her kings at random. In the
elect we have a right to expect the sense of a natural
title to the crowns placed on their heads. The assurance
is superior to silence, to neglect. Though posterity may
have forgotten, their royalty is indefeasible. The sub-
stance, material and spiritual, adopted by the poetic spark
for its lodging, or home, ought to be self-sufficing. It
should be able to entertain the guest, and survive with
dignity its departure. Survey the dynasty of sovereign
British poets to whom successive generations have paid
homage. Beyond dispute nine-tenths will be admitted to
have been not less remarkable as men than as poets :

to remain remarkable when they have ceased to sing.

Genial Chaucer rises at my invocation, soldier, ambassa-
dor, and courtier, cheerfully careless of prelate's or friar's
scowls. I see Spejiser with the key to Fairyland, a states-
 —

CONCLUSIONS •.'
409

man also,almost single in appreciation of the national need

to unearth and cut at the root of the Irish problem, though
the ruthlessness of his poUcy for the purpose shocks and
repels me. I see Shakespeare shrewd in affairs to a degree
supposed to be incompatible vriih an angelic fancy. Milton
stands forth, the unrivalled controversialist, when, for his
period, aged unsubdued by blindness and persecution.
;

Dryden, though speaking very terrestrial thoughts, succeeds

to the throne as by right divine. Pope, ever on the brink of
the grave, with the vigour of immortal youth, and of insati-
ate rage against fate, drives his battle-car over ranks of
venomous, prostrate poetasters. Cowper, combating the
melancholy madness in his blood, is humorist, fighter, and
seer, as well as martjT. Burns was a man, if with a full
share of man's weaknesses nobly planned by nature, lord
;

of his company, whatever the company might be. Know

Scott in his home, and you Imow Scott the poet great in ;

prosperity, greater in adversity. Wordsworth as poet had

simply to translate into song his ideal of human duty. Cole-
ridge, had he never written a line of verse, would have
equally fascinated his Court. BjTon, while making, alas !

the music, had at all events the courage to face it. What a
glorious instrument was Shelley, had his own generation
but learnt how to j)lay npon it An apparent exception
!

to the rule, Keats himself, we know now, was no mere

dreamer not at all of the kind to bo snuffed out by
;

a peevish reviewer, had physical vigour ])ut matched

imagination. And wliat, lastly, of the latest lords of
Parnassus, Tennyson and Browning ? Vast native intelli-
gences, cast in different moulds, but equally from youth
vowed to poetrj^ — botii given to labours en<jugh to break
a ploughman's back — pitted against one another by emulous
partisans, yet never l)y a word accepting antagonism
410 KIVF. rENTUIMKS OK ENGLTSH VVAXHK
never, to all seeming or guessing, susceptible of a jealous
suspicion !

Nature would have been cruel had she not equipped with
manifold sturdiness those selected to hand the torch of
inspiration from one generation to another. The poetic
spirit is well advised in preferrmg to house in a big nature.
The vocation of poet is among the most uncertain, the
thorniest. With some verse, it is true, we find it difficult

to associate the thought of toil. The writer might have

lisped in numbers, and the numbers came.

We do not know how Lamb's spirit, which loved to fiow,

like the Mole, underground, distilled his few and lovely
strains. In general, however, the arduous character of
the pursuit is indisputable. Never could fancy apparently
have been more spontaneous than Goldsmith's and he ;

worked on a poem for years. The start for any writer

may have been easy, a supply of imagination and fancy
being presupposed. Very soon basking in the sun has to
turn mto delving and diggmg. The raw materials with
which the poet deals, often are waiting in readiness for
him ;but he has to manufacture them. The thoughts
and feelings he has to express are common to human
nature ; they are inarticulate until he has educated
language, without external evidence of compulsion, to
discover unknown capacities m itself for constituting it

their voice. During the process, and as a condition of its

success, all his energies are in a state of effervescence.
Meanwhile, he has to look for the spirit to descend, and
call a soul into being. For long probably there is no result.

At length, not apparently out of the steam and bubbling,

a shape becomes visible. A peculiarity of any poetry
worthy of the name doubtless is that the work, as the
 !

CONCLUSIONS? 411

reader, perhaps as the worker, sees it, shall bear upon

its face no evidence of the pains it has cost. Not the
less is it the fruit of a protracted and vehement course of
spiritual gymnastics ; frequently of agony.
Courage, curiosity, patience, obstinacy, egotism, self-

reliance,perhaps a spice too of self-conceit, aU are wanted

for the struggle against adversaries at home and abroad.
The poet must have a will. He must insist on being blind
and deaf to the claims of rival faculties of his own, when
;

inspiration is on him. They must even let themselves be

harnessed to its chariot. Lack of doggedness in breaking-
in counter intellectual and spiritual impulses, in obliging
them to serve, has often smothered the poet under the
philosoi:>her or critic. A trial yet more afflicting is the duty
of being master in his own house, to the self-torturing
extent of setting bounds to the flights of his Queen — his
Genius, his Lisi^iration itself ; of imposing silence, of
seating reason above ecstasy. All the time the world
outside may act as though resentful of his mere existence.
Having suffered his Muse, Medea-like, to toss him into the
boiling cauldron, he issues forth, beheving himself adorable.
He salhcs out in the cold, rain, storm, and darkness to \\'Oo

the public with guitar and serenade, as if it were a loving

mistress. He finds himself a butt for insolent ridicule,
when, absorbed in his ideas, carried away by a prophetic
rapture, he dances, like David, before the Ark. He must
steel himself to bear persecution because he is honest, chill
Hurj)rise when he is sublime, contemi^t when he amiounces
to his ago novelties which will be truisms for the next
In the long and [Link] line scarcely a single member
has not had to grope his way to renown through stifling
fogs of inejudice. Nature seldom models any for poets
without adding extreme HensitivencHs lo outside opinion.
41i> FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
Thej' have to pretond not to care. Some stumble outright
on the course. There have been

mighty Poets in their misery dead.

The immediate prizes at best are few, Avith hundreds to

compete. Many are the early failures of ultimate winners.
Almost more disheartening are the half -successes, like the fall
of the fringe of a rain-cloud in a drought. Moore may have
felt the ache when he found that his Melodies were not the
forerunners of a great poem. Absolute triumphs them-
selves have their drawbacks in misapprehensions by popular
enthusiasm of the real point and motive. Verily, as I take
a bird's-eye view of the poetical hierarchy, with its perils
and temptations, I am not surprised at the general coinci-
dence of toughness, physical and mental, with inspiration
in the few of its members who, in any age, stay out tlio
race to the end.
A general ', not universal, coincidence, I repeat and
'
—
the same quahfication must be introduced whenever an
attempt is made and poets inside an
to imprison poetry
absolute definition. have tried the experiment with an
I
enumeration of essential properties, as they might seem,
belonging to whatever poetry is genuine. It has always
failed, even down to the specification of metre itself as
indispensable. None will deny that Ruskin constantly
sings in prose, and De Quincey frequently. SheUey could
be as musical in an essay as with his Skylark. I know
of a sentence which is poetry in Hallam, an author as
habitually unpicturesque as his own Wimpole Street.
I have my doubts about a piece of Plantagenet portraiture
in tough Bishop Stubbs. Though I cling to the belief that
imagination and fancy are, one or both, necessary to true
poetry, I should not care to dogmatize on it. Charm, I am
 CONCLUSIONS ? 413

sure, ought to be ; and is not. With the splendour of the

Ode on the Passions confronting me, I can lay down no law
of an inevitable relationship of sentiment in great poetrj^
to its period and comitry. While I am fully persuaded
of the especial convenience of the union of moral and
physical strength with the poetical temperament, I shrink
from going further. Were I to pronounce the marriage
indissoluble, I might expose myself to an immediate dilemma
of hav^mg to choose between eating my words and the
rejection of a masterpiece.
The utmost of certainty I possess is that, as I have man}''
times intimated, the soul has moods, emotions, ideas, which,
were there no such thing as poetry, would probably never
have come into active, visible existence. As there is, they
exist, and operate, yet, in default of poetry, would remain,
for most of us, as if they were not. Poetry, whatever in its
origin and essence it may be^ proves its being by furnishing
expression for them. For the purpose, it takes ordinary
speech. Having by some strange, untraceable process of
spiritual chemLstry, which we call Inspiration, fused with
it the mute spiritual germs, it introduces the amalgam into
the common mind. Thereupon emotions, ideas, moods
cease to be dumb and language;
swells into the diapason
of an organ.
Without the poets innuineral>Ic phases of the soul, many
of them among the highest, would never have come to life,
completely, if at all. Eteriuil gratitude is their due, and, on
the whole, is, I dare say, ad((juately rendeied to the acknow-
ledged pruices of s(jng. Candidates struggling upwards to
th(! light receive hard measure. It appears to be considered
that the ignominy of defeat in poetry ought to be pro-
portionate to the possible, the rare, gloiy. Failures in
prose are liable usually, as 1 know, to no more condign
414 FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH VERSE
penalty than neglect. Poets, unless they be crowned, are
never safe from the pillory. They enter the lists at the
peril of the doom threatened to law reformers in the old
Greek State. In equity they well might plead that their
critics ought equally to abide the risk. For myself I am
fully conscious how fair the claim would be, and sincerely
trust that I have behaved as if I Avere. Throughout I can
assert that, in venturing to assume the critical character,
I have had a constant sense of a cord round my own neck
instead of the poet's. I have even felt a lively apprehension
that the noose might be tightened by the thick fingers of
some Georgian poet's ghost. For their own sakes, no less
than for that of the public, members of the obnoxious pro-
fession, in which for my present j)urpose I have enrolled
myself, are bound, I believe, to be always on the watch
that they do not bar entrance withii^ the temple of the
Muses to angels unawares. Continually they should be
reminding themselves that aspirants vainly seeking ad-
mittance in the despised guise of Minor Poets have been
discovered ere this to be meditating poetry which is
Great.
 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS
PAGE
A beam of fuu outbroke 318
Abou Ben Adhem —may hib tribe inciease 89
A casement high and triple-arch'd there was 127
A castle, precipice-encurled 325
A cherub who had lost his way . 223
A creature Beautiful to see 18
A daughter of the gods, divinely tall 331
A dead time's exploded dream
A dreamy sound ....
A drowzy frowzy poem, call'd the Excursio '
305
288
93
A greater name The list of Glory boasts not 44
Ah ! how the streamlet laughs and sings ! 217
A host, of golden daffodils 12
Ah what avails the sceptred race 74
Airly Beacon, Airly Beacon
A language dead
Alas for the woeful thing
.... .
182
252
261
A light that is more than the suiiiiglit, au a tiia t is br ightei

than morning's breath 284

All are needed l)y each one 195
All impulses of soul and sense 3(5

All Mothers worship little feet 251

All the bliss that life endears 167
All the brcf;/.e of
A mighty band
A music rained through
....
Fancy blows

tiic nxim
:53!i

18
256
An aged man now cnter'd . 71
And crown him martyr and lub name ; Mill i IS()

And llarald reigned and wont his way . 278

Ami if I laii^li at any iiiorlal thin;/ l(»3
 ! .

416 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS

Ami if one or two quick tears

And I think of those long mornings
And lay, like his, my hands together .

And o'er the hills, and far away

And o'er the plain, where the dead age
And such I knew, a forest seer
And they jeered him one and all Poor Hosey : '
crazed
past hope . . . .

And thou, dread statue yet existent in

!

And well it is for us our God should feel

deer ......
And when I am taen and hangit, niithcr, a

And when, its force expended

brittliug my

And yet as young And warm with life

And yet no earthquake came to swallow mc .

—
An end of Ismail hapless town !

An English home —gray twilight pour'd

An Idyll with Boccaccio's spirit warm
A Queen with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes
A quick and sudden cry ....
As I was walking all alane
Ask if I love thee ? Oh, smiles cannot
....
Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers

tell .
V

A solemn music of the wind

A song, —nay, a shriek that rent the sky
A song where flute-breath silvers trumpet-clang ?

A star too sovereign, too superb .

A stern round tower of other days

As the evening shades descended
At first to the car
A thing of beauty is a joy for eve
At large among the dead
At nightfall, at last .

A voice by the cedar tree

A wet sheet and a flowing sea
Awful coveys of terrible things
 INDEX OF FIRST WOFvDS 417
PAGE
A widow bird sate mourning for her love
A wind sways the pines
A woodland enchanted !
....
. . . .
112
397
227
A young bird's flutter from a wood 121

Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise 109

Beauty is truth, truth beauty that is all — 120
Behold her, single in the field 10
Behold he watches at the door ! 190
Bend, save whole nations would not that atone
! 185
Birds here make song, each bird has his 301
Blest be his generous heart for aye ! 67
Blood must be my body's balmer 347
Bonnie Kilmeny gaed up the glen
Break, break, break
Breast high amid the corn
.... 64
334
166
Bride of the heir of the kings of the sea 338
Brother, thou art gone before us, and thy saintly soul is flown 142
But a day, For wasting fire, and dying groan 54
But oh that deep romantic chasm which slanted
! 34
But self- approved, to praise or blame . 46
By that consenting scared and shock'd 244

Can it be, and can it be ? . 289

Can you paint a thought ? number or 355
Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away 102
Chants as of a lonely [Link]'s throat . 246
Charm, the glory which makes . 302

Children, at midnight ....

Childless and crownlcss in her voiceless woe

Come, let the burial rite be read, the funeral song be sung
. 98
:{(»s

201
Come to me in the silence of the night . 382
Contemplative, corpulent, witty 292
Creep into thy narrow bed
Crystal- flowing source .... 301
251

I)ark, deep, and cold the current flows 385

VOL. II D d
 '

418 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS

Daughter, daugliter, rcnieniber you

Dear Harp of my Country in darkness
! I found thee
Death rides upon the sulphury Siroc
Death, which takes me from his side .

Does the road wind uphill all the way ?

Doomed to go in company with Pain .

Doun in yon garden sweet and gay

Eartli has not anything to show more fair

Ere plunged amid the avenging flame
I
Eternal passion ! . . . .

Ethereal minstrel pilgrim of the sky

! !

Even at its brightest play .

Every morning, far withdrawn .

Every mountain now hath found a tongue

Faintly as tolls the evening chime

Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers
Far and near, In wood and thicket

Father and friend ....

Far to the fair south-westward lightens

Father, mother, and careful child

'

—
Flake by flake
Fluids, impacts, essences
....
Fear death ? to feel the fog in my throat

'
For cruel 'tis,' said she
For me, I am not worthy .

For I maun gae, tho' I ne'er return

For men must work, and women must weep
For thou wert born of woman
Fresh odour, sent
Friends, dear friends,
....
thou didst c

when it
!

shall be
From the blazing chariot of the sun
From the forests and highlands .

Ciliding and springing 116

 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS 410

Gloom profound
Gold, still gold !
.....
hard, yellow, and cold
PAGE
303
167
—lead the Hebrew forth, array'd
Go
Gone into the West
Great, or good, or kind, or fair
..... 143
166
356
—And thou, Diviner
Great Socrates
Green bounteous Earth
?

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass

.... still 102
397
90
Guest of million painted forms . 196

Had she come all the way for this 277

Had'st thou but liv'd, though stripp'd of power 54
Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove . 371
Hark, now everything is still 351
Hark through the alley resounds
! 302
Heard ye the arrow hurtle in the sky ? 138
'
Hear me, neighbours !
' at last he cried 384
Heeded, tho' sinking as if into death 71
He enter'd, but he cnter'd full of wrath 128
He has cut his tlu'oat at last He Wlio ! ! ? 93
Heigh would slic were mine
ho, ! 353
He knew what pains must pierce a sister's heart 133
Here, ever .since you went abroad 73

heart
He serveth tlie servant
......
Here, when Art was still religion, witli a simple, rcveren

.... 215
195
He that loves a rosy cheek 35a
He wlio hath bent him o'er the dead 90
His jante Up throu the niilkye waye ()]

Historian, bard, philosopher, combined 1(H)

Home they brought her warrior dead 330

Home To tlu^ glory that was Jreece ( 207
How boldly doth it front us liow majestically ! I 10
'
How <:ame it you resume tlie void and mill . 370
How light the touches arc that kiss 245
How light we go, how soft we skim ! 289
1> (I 2
420 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream

How sweet it were, if without feeble fright .

How sweetly that bell warbled o'er the water !

How sweet the air is How fair the scene

! !

Hungry and wild, to claim their property

Hunt God's cattle upon God's ain hills
Hush, my bonny babe hush, and be still
! — !

Hush my dear, lie still and slumber

! .

I am the nearest nightingale

I arise from dreams of thee
I ask'd
I charm thy
my fair one happy day
life .....
I could
I crawled to j'ou
I felt not, whose fate
.....
have laughed myself to scorn to find

. .

If fate Love's dear ambition mar " .

If I had thought thou couldst have died

If I were dead,' you'd sometimes say, Poor Child
' '
!

If the veriest cur would lick my hand .

If

I
I
thou would' st view
have been here before
have dreamed a dreary dream
fair
....
Melrose aright

I have had playmates, I have had companions

I know a little garden-close
I lean my cheek to the cold grey pillow
I loved him not ; and yet now he is gone
I loved you, Evelyn,
I love thee
I
—I love thee
all

love thee not, I dare not love thee

the while
! ... !

! go
I met a from an antique land
traveller
I'm wearing awa', Jean
In he came with eyes of flame
Insect lover of the sun
In the long sunny afternoon
In the red- rose land not a mile .
 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS 421

PAGE
In the touch
Into the Silent Land
bosom

Into the valley of Death

of this
!..... there worketh a spell .
33
211
338
In vain, through every changeful year . 16
In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more
I remember, I remember ..... .
98
165
I saw thee once, and nought disccrn'd
I shall never hear her more
Is it no dream that I am he
....
....
. 153
389
75
Is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can 319
I strove with none ; for none was worth my strife 78
I, thee, in mortal sorrow, still pursue . 248
I thought once how Theocritus had sung 175
It is gone, the palace of music I reared ! 319
It is —last stage of all 301
own
It

It
not while beauty and youth arc thine
is

It raoan'd as near as near can be

's lang sin' I lost baith my father and
... mother .
82
32
61
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar 308
It stood, and sun and moonshine rain'd their light 302
It was many and many a year ago 203
It was not like your great and gracious ways ! 247
I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds 17
I went sighing past the Church across the moorland dreary- 182
I went to sleep
I will not die alone
;

I will paint her as I see her

......
and now I am rcfresh'd

....
158
333
174

Last night the delicate cresls of salTron bloom 249

of S|).'iin .....
Laughed loud to the wind as it gave to her keeping the glori
and Rome 284
Lay dead, And the great Ilustum drew
Legend strange and vague
Less from disgust of life than dread of death
.... his honseman'se loak 305
217
102
Ijct Fat<; do her worst, there arc relies of joy

Ij«;t him iievcir eoiiic l).uk (o us ! ... 82

316
422 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS
PAGE
Let us begin and cany up this corpse 320
Levet to the grave descend 367
Life we've been long together
! . 380
Lifts me to the golden doors 332
Like a dream through sleep she glided 235
Like a forgotten lute, play'd on alone 139
Like Alexander I will reign 356

....
Like a sick child that knoweth not his mother while she
blesses
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green
Lisped in numbers, and the numbers came .

Listen to me, as when you heard our father .

Little feet across the lawn

Little gossip, blithe and hale
Lo, an English mansion founded
Lo !a third man rose o'er the wave
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried
Long I followed happy guides
Long procession Still passing to and fro
Loved, when my love from all but thee had tlown
Love in my l)Osoin like a bee
Loveliest, meekest, blithest, kindest
... I .

Love strikes but one hour Love — ! Those never loved

Love thy mnthf^r. little one !

Mary mine that art Mary's rose

Men granted that his speech was wise
Men have been brave, but women have been brave
Men said he saw strange visions
Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay
Mighty poets in their misery dead
'
'
Miserere, Domine !

Mother, I cannot mind my wheel

Mother's prattle, mother's kiss .

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold .

Music by the night-wind sent

 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS 423
PAGE
Music, when soft voices die 113
My days among the Dead are past 44
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My lady seems of ivory
My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
.... 125
275
249
'
My Lord has need of these flowerets gay '
. 214
My parents bow, and lead them forth , 181
Myself when young did eagerly frequent 238
My sprightly neighbour ! gone before . 374
Mysterious Night when our first parent knew
! 387
My youth was happy but this hour belike is best
; 273

'
Nay, ye are mine while I liold my life 283
Needy knife-grinder ! whither are you going 390
Never stoops the soaring vulture 212
Nightingales warbled without 336
Night in the lonesome October 202
No Cain Injures uninjured — 21
No more of dreaming 120
Nor could his lips a deep-drawn sigh restrain 133
No sword Of wrath lu-r right arm whirl'd 341
Not a breath crej)t tiuough the rosy air 103
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note 134
Not a flower to bo prest of the foot that fall.s not 283
Not a whisper stirs the gloom 341
Not f rojji the grand old masters . 214
Now he is dead Far hence he lies
! 305
Now Bleeps the land of houses 274

() Alliion ! O my mother Isle ! . 23

'
O fool, will ye marry the worm for a wife ? 283
'
O (!od, forgive me,' he exclaini'd 25
O Ood ! let me and look u|) at the sky
breatlie, ! 88
() hark, O hear lunv lliin and clear
! 330
O Helen fair, beyond comitaK- ! 300
O Marv. (.'o and call [Link] liomi- J 84
 424 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS

O Nightingale thou surely art !

O Sheik, I eannot leave thee so .

O tell me, friends, while yet yc hear

the French are in the bay
Thou, in that mysterious shrine
O what a loud and fearful shriek was there
Obscurely spotted to the door, and thence
O'er Roslin all that dreary night
Of a life lived somewhere, I know not .

Of all the girls that are so smart

Oft in the stilly night
Of two that died last night
Oh breathe not his name, let it sleep
! in the shade
Oh but to breathe the breath
! .

Oh could I feel as I have felt

Oh, God to think Man ever
!

Oh, had I lived in that great day

Oh, the little more, and how much it is !

Oh, what a heart-subduing melody !

Oh, world oh, life oh, time

! ! !

Once in a golden hour

Once more in more than bridal beauty stands

weary
One have I marked, the happiest guest
......
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered , weak and

On either hand With Milton and with Keats

On Elysian lawns
One morning, all
.....
....
alone
On Ettrick's mountain green
One word is too often profaned .

On this sweet bank your head thrice sweet and de

'
On your lives she shriek'd and cried, he
!
'
'
: but newly
dead !
'

Open here

Our
flutter
signal for fight that
......
I flung the shutter, when, with

from raonarchs we drew

many a Hi •t and
 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS 425

Pale Rose Mary sank to the floor

Pride To think how little I dreamed
..... it led . . . .319
PAGE
255

Radiant, sharpest-sighted god

Rarely, rarely comest thou .
...... . . . . .114
194

Remember
Render'd answer high
thee ?

.......
Yes, while there 's life in this heart . . 83
331

Round her she made an atmosphere of life ....

Rock 's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare . . 326
103
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea
Rushing, ten thousand horsemen came .... . . . .318
50

Said one among them

— ....
.....
Surely not in vain
' 239
Sanctuary and home Of art and piety
Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer ....
.....
98
100
Say not, the struggle nought availeth
Say to the Court, it glows .......
....
293
347
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
....
....
Seek out Death's face ere the light altereth
Shady spots and nooks, where we .
123
282
146
Shaken the dews that waken
She answering, own'd that she lov'd too
—
.... . . . . .116
244
She dwells with Beauty Beauty that must
She dwelt among the untrodden ways ....
......
die . . .122
9
She is not fair to outward view
She listen'd to the talc divine ......
......
388
25
She stood, with aniazciiient'
'

She 's the most distressful country .....

.....
167
393
She walks in beauty, like the night
She was a Phantom of delight ......
....
95
10
Shone from the solitary peak at Edgbastoii
Showed my youth How Verso may build ....
.....
252
18
Shuffling Southey, that incarnate
Since I noo mwore do zee your .....
feiice
lie

.....
93
376
Sir Patrick Spcns, the best sailor
Sister, my sister, f) fleet sweet swallow .... 358
281
 !

426 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS

Slow sinks more lovely ere his race be run .

Soft touch invisible

Sole Positive of Night
.....
Small hope, my girl, for a helm to hide

...
Sole sovran of the Vale ! .

Sometimes on lonely mountain-mcres

Sometimes wondering soul
Soon or late saixlonic Fate
'
Sorrow,' said Mahmoud, '
is a reverend thing
So sleep, for ever sleep, O marble pair !

Souls of poets dead and gone

Soul was like a star, and dwelt apart .

Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea !

Splendid, a star
Spreading May's
?.....
Speak not thy speech my boughs among

leafless blooms in a damp nook

Star is

Stay, stay
Still in her web
......
not equal to star, nor blossom the same as blossom

....
delights
Strange is it
? that of tlie myriads who
not .

Such a soft floating witchery of sound .

Sweet my child, I live for thee

Sweet nurslings of the vernal skies
Sweet stranger, whom I called my wife

Take me away, and in the lowest deep

'
Tears, idle tears,' I
Tender beings angelical
Thank Heaven the crisis
....
know not what they mean

....
That first in beauty should be first in might .

That Lord Arundel

That very night, while gentle sleep
The bee hums on around the blossomed vine
;

The bees that soar for bloom

The l)e]]s are ringing. As is meet
The liclls of Shandon ....
 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS 427
PAGE
The billows whiten and the deep seas heave . 289
The brightness of the world, O thou once free 26
The clearest eyes in all the world 280
The curves of the white owl sweeping . 396
The fairest flower The braes o' Ettrick ever saw 61
The fierce July when fleets were scattered as foam 283
The floating clouds tlieir state sliall lend 9
The flowers of the sun that is sunken . 281
The forms of the departed 213
The four boards of the coffin lid . 282
The fruit-like pci-funic of the golden furze 24
The glories of our blood and state 352
The green, green grass, the glittering grove 154
The hand that rounded Peter's dome . 194
The harp that once through Tara's halls 81

The keen sanctity

The kingly bard
....
The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece

....
! 102
159
193
The King's daughter o' Xoroway 358
The [Link], all made sharp and clear 244
The lark now leaves his wat'ry nest 356
Tlic leaves arc falling ; so am I 75
The little hands that never souglit 286
The Lrfjrd from out His cloud 140
The [Link] days of my life until to-day 263
The mildest mainicrd man 103
The month of March wore on apace 259
The multitudinous Billows 108

The night is gone

The noon of autumn's glow
....
The murmur of the mourning ghost 377
156
KIS
Then rose from sea to sky the wilil farewell 101

Then think I of deep shadows on the grass 227

The odorous pur|)le of a new-born rose 100
The old year's dead hands are full of their (lend ll( 283
The pagean< of his bleeding' it
lie.'i 101
 428 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS

—
The people all, the people
The llainbow eomes and goes
TiicRaven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
There are sweet flowers that only blow by night
There is a garden in her face
There is a stream. Springing far off
There is no music in the life
There is no sterner moralist than Pleasure ! .

There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind

There 's a great text in Galatians
There sat a Lady all on the ground
There's statues gracing this noble place in .

There thou sittest ; now and then thou moanest

There
There
There
was a lady lived in a hall
was never mystery .... .

was turning of keys, and creaking of locks

The Roman, when his burning heart .

The secrets of the wind it sings .

The self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau

The silver chain of sound ....

The sharp storm cuts her forehead bare

The .skies have sunk, and hid the upper snow

The soft green willow springing .

The sounding cataract

The spacious firmament on high
The star of the unconquered will
The starry Galileo, with his woes
The vision of .scarce a moment .

The voice of friends around the bed

The voice of yore
The warm, green-muffled Cumnor hills
The water comes down at Lodore
The Wedding March of Mendelssohn
The winds are liigh on Helle's wave
The world is too much with us late and soon
;

The World 's a bubble, and the Life of Man .

 !

INDEX OF FIRST WORDS 420

The world, the clustering spheres, He made

They are at rest
....
........
PAGE
369
155
They close, in clouds of smoke and dust . .
•
. .51
They pass me by like shadows, crowds on crowds . . 226
.17
They pity me, and not my grief
They seemed to those who saw them meet ....
.....
. . .

388
They sin who tell us Love can die
Think in this battered Caravanserai .....
....
45
237
This flower she stopped at, finger on
This is her portrait as she was ......
lip 317
264
This is the morn should bring unto this grove

This vault which glows immense with light ....

.......
. . . 357
198
Tho' I should die,
Those magic numbers
I

Thou art the [Link] question

know
....... . . . . .194
334
216

Thou dreariest droll of puffy short-brcath'd writers ! . .73

Thou hast chosen the Human, and left the Divine
Thou little thinkst and [Link] dost knowe ....
....
! . . 176
349
Thou, Primal Love, who grantest wings
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Through an alley Titanic
...... 243
397
202
Through the open door The iiiglit-wind wailed
Through the open window, loud and clear
Thus fell the boy on the beast thus rolled up the ;
.... . .

l)cast in
. 259
21(3

his horror
Thus the bard of love departed
. .

......
....
. .180
215
Thus with old J'riarn, with his royal
.....
line 234

—....
Thy roof will fa', tliy rafters start 61
'Tis calm indeed ho calm, that it disturbs
! 24
—
'Ti 8 Death O loving friends, your prayers
'Tis I wad clecwl thee in silk and gowd
'Tis misty all, both sight and .sound
....
.....
! 'tis he! .157
.360
148
'
To be born a king !
'

....
........
To-day is a thought, a fear is to-morrow
260
376
To
To
food my
his land, a
eye
lump of luould the.... more
223
195
430 TXDF.X (W FIRST WORDS

To play at love ....

To mix with Kings in tho low lust of sway

To tell, Of the wonderful days a-coming

Trusting to his noblest foes
Tully was not so eloquent as thou
'Twas not those souls that fled in pain .

Tweed said to Till ....

'Twas when the spousal time of May

Twenty years hence my eyes may grow

.

'Twould save us so much bother when we'd both be one another

Under the may she stoop'd to the crown

Ungrateful Florence Dante sleeps afar
!

Unless you pardon, what shall I do, Lord

Up and spake the Swan-neck high
Upon the gold clouds metropolitan

Vale in Ida, lovelier

Very true, the linnets sing
Victorious men of earth, no more

Wandering between two worlds, one dead

with them .......

Watching the pulse of the oars die down, as her own died

....
.....
We have all of us one human heart
Welcome, bud beside the rose

Were I a trembling leaf ......

We'll hear uae mair lilting at our ewe-milking

We watch'd her breathing thro' the night

Wha'll buy ray caUer herrin' ? .

What am I ?
What a scream Of agony
What bird so sings, yet so
......
...
does wail ?

Whate'or our [Link] gods protect

What Elysium have we known
Whatever iu her sight I'd seem
.....
.....
of dear
 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS 431
PAGE
What far-reaching Nemesis stirred him 395
What hath he lost that such great grace hath won ? 347
What ills the scholar's life assail 367
What leaf -fringed legend haunts about thy shape 124
What man has made of man 18
What means yon blaze on high ? Ul
What 's the soft South-Wester ? 187
When at home alone I sit . 391
When half-gods go . 195
When I am dead, my dearest 383
When I lov'd you, I can't but allow 80
When Nature shrouds herself, entranced 44
When Nero perish'd by the justest doom 103
When our world-deafen'd ear 299
When she came to the Netherbow port 361
When summer's hourly- mellowing change 339
When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free 329
When the God's will sallies free . 193
When the lamp is shattered 115
When the little wee bit heart 61
When the new-made Mother smiled 246
VV'hen thy beauty appears . 365
Where Baly held of old his awful reign 43
Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground I 100
Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn '!
24
Where is thy favour'd haunt, eternal N'oicc V 147
Where rests the sap within the leaf 330
Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew 323
Whether at Naishapur or JJabylon 237
Whither, 'midst falling dew 384
Whoe'er has travel'd life's dull round . Mil
Who ever saw the earliest tuhc
Who fears to speak of Ninety-eight ?
' '
394
Who is he that eonieth, like an Imnour'd guest V 338
Who on earth have made us heirs 19
Who 's striving Parnassus to climl) 223
 '

432 INDEX OF FIRST WORDS

PAGE
Who trod upon the senseless turf would think 44
'
Why does your brand sae drop wi' blude 361
Why, 'twas a very wicked thing ! 40
Wild as the scream of the curlew 52
Wind beloved of
blow
Wine whicli Music is
......
earth and sky and sea beyond aJl winds that

.... 284
193
With dun-red bark The fir-trees 24
With more than mortal powers endow'd 55
With one black shadow at its feet 333
With the breeze murmuring in the musical woods . 109
With thee, gentlest of my friends ! . 213
Wolves' eyes, through the windows peer 225
Words which may wake the dead ! 186
Wretches ye loved her for her wealth and hated
! d her for her
pride . . . . . 202

Ye
Yes, in Thalia's son
You may esteem him
.....
taught my lips a single speech

....
.

.
. 190
72
355
You meaner beauties of the night 348
You say, Since so it is, good-bye
'
— 292
'
You were taken aback, poor boy,' they urge, '
no time to
regain your wits . . . . 322
 Many exquisite lines quoted in the preceding pages are
from poems comparatively recent and I have pleasure
;

in expressing my sense of the courtesy of the copyright-

owners which has enal)led me to include them. I am thus
indebted to Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., in respect of
verses by Cardinal Newman ; to Messrs. Macmillan, for
Lord Tennyson, E(h\ard FitzGerald, Arthur Hugh Clough,
and Matthew Arnold to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., for
;

Robert Browning to Messrs. Ellis, for Dante Gabriel

;

[Link] to Mr. Aldis Wright, FitzGerald's executor, and

;

to William Morris's and Ro])ert Louis Stevenson's trustees ;

to Mrs. Coventry Patmore, for The Unknown Eros, and

to Messrs. George Bell & .Sons, its publishers to Messrs. ;

Houghton, Mifflin & Co., for James Russell Lowell and ;

to Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, in respect of Algernon

Charles Swinburne.
With relation to the work in general of Lowell, J'Jmerson,
Poe, Longfellow, Bryant, and Whittier, 1 must ask pardon
of our American kinsmen, with whom we share the heritage
of verse, for having yielded to the temptation of numbering
all writers of inspired English poetry as members of one
In'otherhood. To Jiritish leaders 1 neetl make no excuse.

VOL. II E e
 INDEX OF POETS
WITH DATES OF BIRTH AND DEATH
Addison, Joseph (1672-1719).
Akenside, ]\[Link], M.D. (1721-1770).
Alltngham, William (1824-1889).
Arnold, Edwin, Sir (1832-1904).
Arnold, AIatthew (1822-1888).
Aytoun, William Edmonstoune, Professor (1813-1865).

Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans (1561-1626).

Bailey, Philip Jasies (1816-1902).
Baillie,Joanna (1762-1851).
BIrbauld (Aikin), Anna Letitia, Mrs. (1743-1825).
Barham, Richard Harris, Rev. (1788-1845).
Barnard (Lindsay), Anne, Lady (1750-1825).
Barnes, William, Rev. (1801-1886).
Beattie, James, LL.D. (1735-1803).
Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616).
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803-1849).
Blake, William (1757-1827).
[Link], Robert (1766-1823).
Bowles, William Lisle, Rov. (1762-1850).
Breton, Nicholas (1545 ?-1626 ?).
Bronte, Emily Jane (1818 1848).
Brooks, Charles William Siurley (1816-1874).
Brown, Thomas Edward, Rev. (1830-1897),
Browne, William (1591, or 1590-164.3, or 1645 ?).
Brownin*;, Emzaukth Bauuktt, Mrs. (1806-1861).
Brownino, Rouert (1812 1889).
Bryant, William (Jullen (1794-1878).
Buchanan, Rouert (1841-H)01).
Burns, Robert (1759-1796).
Butler, Samuel (1612, or 1600 1680).
Byron, Georoe Gordon Noel, Lord (1788-1824).
436 INDEX OF POETS
[Link], Charles Stuart (1831-188'!).
Campbell, Thomas (1777-1844).
(Umpion, Thomas (1567 ?-1619, or 1623). M
Canning, (Seorue, Right Hon. (1770-1827). '
Carew, Thomas (1595 ?, 1598 ?-1639 ?).
Carey, Henry (1696 ?-1743).
Chatterton, Tjiomas (1752-1770).
Chaucer, Ceoffrey (1340 V-1400).
Churchill, Charles, Rev. (17311764).
Clare, John (1793-1864).
Clough, Arthur Hugh (1810 1861).
Coleridge, Hartley (1796-1849).
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834).
Collins, William (1721-1759).
Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667).
CowpER, William (1731-1800).
Crabbe, George, Rev. (1764-1832),
Crashaw, Richard, Canon of Loretto (1613 ?-1649, or 1650).
CuNNiNGHAJVi, Allan (1784-1842).

Davenant (or D'Avenant), William, Sir (1606-1668).

Davidson, John (1857-1909).
Dekker, Thomas (1570 ?-1641 ?).
Denham, John, Sir (1615-1668).
DiBDiN, Charles (174.5-1814).
DoBELL, Sydney Thompson (1824-1874).
DoDGsoN, Charles Lutwidge, Rev. ('Lewis Carroll')
(1832-1898).
Donne, John,Dr., Dean of St. Paul's (1573-1631).
Drummond, William, of Hawtliornden (1585-1649).
Dryden, John (1631-1700).

Elliott, Ebenezer ('The Corn-Law Rhymer') (1781-1849).

Elliott, Jane (Jean) (1727-1805).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882).

FitzGerald, Edward (1809-1883).

 INDEX OF POETS 437

Fletcher, John (1579-1625).

Ford, Johx (1586(baptized)-1639 ?).

Gay, John- (1685-1732).

Gilbert, William Schwenok, Sir (1836-1912),
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-1774).
Gray, Thomas (1716-1771).

Heber, Reginald, Bishop (1783-1826).

Hemans, Felicia Dorothea, Mrs. (1793-1835).
Henley, William Ernest (1849-1903).
Herbert, George, Rev. (1593-1633).
Herrick, Robert, Rev. (1.591-1674).
Hogg, James (1770, or 1772-1835).
Hood, Thomas (1799, or 1798-1845).
Horne, Richard Henry (or Hengist) (1803-1884).
Hunt, James Henry Leigh (1784-1859).

Ingelow, Jean (1820-1897).

Ingram, John Kells, LL.i). (1823-1907).

Johnson, Samuel, LL.D. (1709-1784).

JoNSON, Benjamin (1572, or 1573-1637).

Keats, John (1795-1821).

Keble, John, lie v. (1792 1866).
KiNQSLEY, Charles, Rev. (1819-1875).

[Link],Charles (1775-1834).
Landon, Lktitia Elizaiicth (.Mrs. MArLEAN)— ' L. E. L.' (1802-

1838).
Landor, Waltkr Savagk (1775 1864).
Lano, Andrew (1844-1912).
Locker-Lampson, Frederick (1821-1895).
Lodge, Thomas (1.558 ?-1625).
LooAN, John, Rev. (1748-1788).
Longfellow, Henry Wadswortii (1807-1882).
438 INDEX OF POETS
Lovelace, Richard, Colonel (1618-1658).
Lover, Samuel (1797-1868).
Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891).
Lyall, Alfred, Sir (1835-1911). '
Lyly (Lilly, Lylie), John (1554 ?-1606).
Lytton, Edward George Earle Lytton-Bulwer (Lord Lytton)
(1803-1873).
Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer (Earl Lytton) (1831-1891).

Macaulay, Thomas Babinqton, Lord (1800-1859).

IIackay, Charles (1814-1889).
JVIahony, Francis Sylvester (' Father Prout ') (1804-1866).
]\Iansel, Henry Longueville, D.D., Dean (1820-1871).
Marvell, Andrew (1621-1678).
RLvssEY, Gerald (1828-1907).
Meredith, George (1828-1909).
]\IiCKLE, William Julius (1735-1788).
MlLLIKEN, or ]\IlLLIKIN, RiCHARD ALFRED (1767-1815).
Milman, Henry Hart, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's (1791-1868).
MiLNEs, Richard Monckton, Lord Houghton (1809-1885).
Milton, John (1608-1674).
Montgomery, James (1771-1854).
Montrose, James Graham, Marquis of (1612-1650).
Moore, Thomas (1779-1852).
Morris, Lewis, Sir (1833-1907).
Morris, William (1834-1896).
Moultrie, John, Rev. (1799-1874).

Newman, John Henry, D,D., Cardinal (1801-1890).

Norton, Caroline Elizabeth Sarah, Hon. (1808-1877),

Parnell, Thomas, D.D., Ai-chdeacon (1679-1718).

Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton (1823-1896).
Percy, Thomas, Bishop (1729, or 1728-1811).
Philips,Ambrose (1671, or 1675 ?-1749).
PoE, Edgar Allan (1811-1849).
Pope, Alexander (1688-1744).
 IXDEX OF POETS 439

Praed, Wi>'thkop :\Iackworth (1802-1839).

Peiob, I\L4tthew (1664-1721).
Procter, Bryan Waller (' Barry Cornwall ') (1787-1874).

Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855).

RossETTi, Christina Georgina (1830-1894).
RossETTi, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882).

Scott, Walter, Sir (1771-1832).

Shakespeare, Willia^i (1564-1616).
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822).
Shenstone, William (1714-1763).
Shirley, James (1596-1666).
Sidney, Philip, Sir (1554-1586).
Smart, Christopher (1722-1771).
SmTH, Alexander (1830-1867).
Smith, Horatio (Horace) (1779-1849).
Sjhth, James (1775-1839).
SouTHEY, Robert, D.C.L. (1774-1843).
Spenser, Edmund (1552, or 1551-1599).
Stebbino, Henry, Rev., D.D. (1799-1883).
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894).
Suckling, John, Sir (1609-1642).
Swift, Jonathan, Dean of St. Patrick's (1667-1745).
Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837-1909).

Talfoued, Thomas Noon, Sir (1795-1854).

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-1892).
Tennyson, P'redebick (1807-1898).
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863).
Thomson, James (17^)1748).
Trench, Richard Chenevix, D.D., Archbishop (1807-1886).
Turner, Charles Tennyson (1808-1879).

Vauohan, Henry (1622-1695).

Verb, Aubrey de, Sir (1788-1846).
Vebe, Aubrey Thomas de (1814-1902).
440 INDEX OF POETS
Wallee, Edmund (1606-1687).
Warton, Tuomas (1728-1790),
Watts, Alaric Alexander (1797-1864).
Watts, Isaac, D.D. (1674-1748).
Webster, John (1580 ?-1625 ?).
AV'ells, Cuarles Jeremiah (1799 V-1879).
White, Henrv Kirke (1785-1806).
White, Joseph Blanco (1775-1841).
Wilson, John, Professor ('Christopher North') (1785-1854).
Wither (or Withers), Ceorge (1588-1667).
Wolfe, Charles, Rev. (1791-1823).
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850).
WoRSLEY, Philip Stanhope (1835-1866).
Wotton, Henry, Sir (1568-1639).

Young, Edward, Rev., D.C.L. (1683, or 1681-1765).

END OE VOL. II

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