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Class _B_£ 4fe3_. 
 Book. {y ;fcS 
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 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
BOOKS BY MR. KENYON 
 
 IN VERSE 
 
 The Fallen, and Other Poems 
 
 Out of the Shadows 
 
 Songs in All Seasons 
 
 In Realms of Gold 
 
 At the Gate of Dreams 
 
 An Oaten Pipe 
 
 A Little Book of Lullabies 
 
 Poems 
 
 IN PROSE 
 
 Loiterings in Old Fields 
 
Loiterings in Old Fields 
 
 LITERARY SKETCHES 
 
 By 
 
 JAMES B. KENYON 
 
 NEW YORK : EATON & MAINS 
 CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & PYE 
 
THE LIBRARY OF 
 
 GGNGRESS, 
 
 Two CuHiEJ 
 
 Received 
 
 NOV. 5 
 
 1901 
 
 Copyright 
 
 ENTRY 
 
 &Ut. 
 
 l^jol 
 
 CLASS CC XXc, No. 
 
 / <t (* 
 
 a. f 
 
 COPY 
 
 \s> 
 
 <*< 
 
 Copyright by 
 
 EATON & MAINS. 
 
 1901. 
 
 Cover Design by- 
 Mae Wallace McCastline. 
 
 • • • * 
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 • • •• • ••••••* 
 
 . ••• •••••• I •! •*• •*• "« /' 
 
 i • • • •••»•• . « « • • 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Tennyson in New Aspects 7 
 
 II. William Morris— Poet, Socialist, 
 
 and Master of Many Crafts... 51 
 
 III. John Keats 85 
 
 IV. George Eliot 115 
 
 V. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His 
 
 Sister Christina 149 
 
 VI. The Correspondence of James 
 
 Russell Lowell 175 
 
 VII. The Letters of Robert Louis 
 
 Stevenson 211 
 
I 
 
 TENNYSON IN NEW ASPECTS 
 
Loiterings in Old Fields 
 
 i 
 
 TENNYSON IN NEW ASPECTS 
 
 Now that the biography of Alfred Ten- 
 nyson has been given by his son to the 
 world, an accurate portrayal of a great and 
 unique personality is made possible to the 
 general reading public. Not that the novel 
 aspects of Lord Tennyson's character and 
 works are new to the elect few who were 
 his tried and intimate friends, but that the 
 misconceptions of the late laureate's life his- 
 tory will finally be removed from the minds 
 of those to whom for half a century his 
 name has been synonymous with the noblest 
 functions of a bard. At length this prince 
 of song takes his place in that clear light of 
 
8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 truth and high renown where to see him 
 is to love him for what he was within him- 
 self, as well as for what he wrought of profit 
 and delight to the world. 
 
 The year 1809 is a memorable one, since 
 it records the nativity of Alfred Tennyson, 
 William E. Gladstone, Charles Darwin, Ol- 
 iver Wendell Holmes, Richard Monckton 
 Milnes (Lord Houghton), Edgar A. Poe, 
 Abraham Lincoln, Frederic Chopin, and 
 Felix Mendelssohn. Few single years in a 
 century are so fruitful in greatness. Of 
 right Tennyson's name takes its place at 
 the head of this list, as he was facile prin- 
 ce ps among his compeers. In him the men- 
 tal restlessness, the earnest gropings toward 
 the solution of moral problems, the almost 
 despairing grasp upon the great, isolated, 
 undemonstrable verities of the spiritual life, 
 the certain yet conservative trend toward 
 democracy — all characteristics of the age 
 in which he lived — found their mysterious 
 junction. He became, more than any other 
 eminent thinker of his day, the representa- 
 tive voice of his generation. He was in- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 9 
 
 tensely conscious of his prophetic calling, 
 being burdened all his life with the sense of 
 a divine gift for the proper employment of 
 which he must render due account. He was 
 wont to say that sometimes the weight of 
 his responsibility in this direction became 
 well-nigh insupportable. But he never pros- 
 tituted his large powers to ignoble ends. 
 It might be written of him, as he himself 
 wrote of Wordsworth, that he "uttered 
 nothing base." 
 
 To preserve unimpaired his poetic talent 
 and freedom Tennyson was willing to en- 
 dure years of neglect and what was little 
 better than poverty. Some of the shifts to 
 which he was put before his general recog- 
 nition as a great poet were of an almost sor- 
 did kind; he rode in third-class passenger 
 coaches, scarcely better than cattle cars, and 
 when he could not afford to ride he walked. 
 He borrowed books because he could not 
 afford to buy them, and on the few trips he 
 was permitted to take he sought the cheaper 
 lodging houses because he could not afford 
 to patronize better ones. He did not wed 
 
io LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 the woman of his choice until many years 
 after he had first met and loved her ; and in 
 the interval of his poetic silence, when for 
 ten years he gave nothing to the public 
 which had scoffed at his muse, the engage- 
 ment between himself and Miss Sellwood 
 was terminated, as there seemed to be no 
 prospect that he would ever be able to pro- 
 vide for a wife. Yet his high spirit was 
 never broken, his manly independence was 
 never compromised. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson was extremely fortu- 
 nate in his friendships. From the begin- 
 ning of his college days to the end of his 
 long life he numbered among his friends 
 some of the rarest spirits of the century. 
 Fine minds gravitated toward him by a kind 
 of natural law. Samuel Rogers, Edward 
 Fitzgerald, James Spedding, W. E. Glad- 
 stone, Frederick D. Maurice, Edward Lear, 
 G. F. Watts, Thomas Woolner, Robert 
 Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Jow- 
 ett, F. T. Palgrave, William Allingham, J. 
 M. Kemble, Henry Taylor, John Tyndall, 
 Richard Monckton Milnes, G. S. Venables, 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS n 
 
 Aubrey de Vere, W. M. Thackeray, John 
 Forster, Henry Hallam, A. H. Clough, Mat- 
 thew Arnold, and the Duke of Argyll — 
 these were among those whom Tennyson 
 knew and loved best. The supreme sorrow 
 of his life was in the death of his most 
 warmly cherished friend, Arthur Hallam. 
 Tennyson's affection for this young man 
 was singularly pure and deep. Hallam was 
 engaged to Tennyson's sister, and was pos- 
 sessed of a subtle and commanding intellect. 
 Among his college friends the consensus of 
 opinion was that he — Hallam — and not 
 Gladstone was the coming great man. When 
 Arthur Hallam's life was suddenly termi- 
 nated Alfred Tennyson was plunged into 
 the profoundest grief. For years he brood- 
 ed upon his sorrow, valiantly meeting the 
 specters of his own mind and subduing 
 them, until out of the stress and anguish of 
 that bitter period came "In Memoriam," 
 the noblest elegiac poem to be found in any 
 language of the world. 
 
 To prepare a just and adequate memoir 
 of any eminent person requires a peculiar 
 
12 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 combination of qualities in the writer there- 
 of — complete sympathy with the subject in 
 hand, entire familiarity with the biographi- 
 cal data accessible, an even and well-bal- 
 anced judgment, and unerring taste in the 
 selection of material to be presented. In 
 Hallam Tennyson's memoir of his illustrious 
 father these qualities are combined in pleas- 
 ing measure. A quiet reserve is manifest, 
 such as characterized the poet himself in 
 his attitude toward the public at large, but 
 this reticence concerns mainly those more 
 private affairs which are sacred to the do- 
 mestic life. Yet even here the curtain is 
 lifted now and again, affording charming 
 glimpses of a great genius off guard and at 
 ease in the serenity of the home circle. It 
 is not the purpose of the present writer to 
 review the two stout octavo volumes in 
 which are gathered by filial duty and affec- 
 tion the memorials of a rich and exalted life. 
 To many who would peruse them with in- 
 terest the price of these books will be pro- 
 hibitive. Hence are set forth in the follow- 
 ing pages such facts as have corrected the 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 13 
 
 writer's own impressions of the late laureate 
 and his environment and shed new light on 
 some phases of his life and work. 
 
 No man more resented the impertinent 
 inquisitiveness of a curiosity-loving public 
 than did Alfred Tennyson. This feeling, 
 experienced early in life, deepened and in- 
 tensified to the end. Its degree may be 
 partially determined by the following indig- 
 nant lines : 
 
 And you have miss'd the irreverent doom 
 Of those that wear the poet's crown ; 
 Hereafter, neither knave nor clown 
 
 Shall hold their orgies at your tomb. 
 
 For now the poet cannot die, 
 Nor leave his music as of old, 
 But round him ere he scarce be cold 
 
 Begins the scandal and the cry ; 
 
 Proclaim the faults he would not show ; 
 
 Break lock and seal ; betray the trust ; 
 
 Keep nothing sacred ; 'tis but just 
 The many-headed beast should know. 
 
 The lion-hunting tourist was abhorrent to 
 
 him. He was very nearsighted, and once 
 
 when walking on the downs with a friend 
 
 he saw some sheep which he mistook for 
 2 
 
14 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 tourists making toward him. He turned 
 and fled incontinently for home. Tennyson 
 desired that his life should be read in his 
 published works. His son says: 
 
 Besides the letters of my father and of his friends 
 there are his poems, and in these we must look for 
 the innermost sanctuary of his being. For my own 
 part I feel strongly that no biographer could so 
 truly give him as he gives himself in his own works. 
 ... He himself disliked the notion of a long, formal 
 biography, for 
 
 None can truly write his single day, 
 
 And none can write it for him upon earth. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson was born in his father's 
 rectory at Somersby in Lincolnshire. The 
 "long gray fields," the fens, the sluices, the 
 wolds about his early home impressed him 
 deeply, and so stimulated his young imagi- 
 nation that he almost "lisped in numbers." 
 Edward Fitzgerald writes: "I used to say 
 Alfred never should have left old Lincoln- 
 shire, where there were not only such good 
 seas, but also such fine Hill and Dale among 
 'the Wolds,' which he was brought up in, 
 as people in general scarce thought on." 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS i5 
 
 Alfred was the fourth of twelve children 
 born to Rev. George Clayton Tennyson and 
 Elizabeth Fytche. There were eight sons 
 and four daughters, most of whom, it is 
 averred, were more or less true poets. Of 
 Alfred's earliest attempt at poetry he says : 
 
 According to the best of my recollection, when I 
 was about eight years old I covered two sides of a 
 slate with Thomsonian blank verse in praise of 
 flowers for my brother Charles, who was a year older 
 than I was, Thomson then being the only poet I 
 knew. Before I could read I was in the habit on a 
 stormy day of spreading my arras to the wind, and 
 crying out, "I hear a voice that's speaking in the 
 wind," and the words "far, far away" had always a 
 strange charm for me. 
 
 The latter statement will be interesting to 
 those who recall the poet's beautiful lines 
 beginning, "What sight so lured him thro' 
 the fields he knew." It was on the lawn 
 of the old rectory that Tennyson made his 
 early song, "A spirit haunts the year's last 
 hours." In his youth the laureate was an 
 intense admirer of Lord Byron, whose in- 
 fluence is unmistakably revealed in the 
 adolescent publication, Poems by Two 
 
16 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Brothers. On hearing of Byron's death — 
 April 19, 1824 — "a day," he says, "when 
 the whole world seemed to be darkened for 
 me," he carved on a rock the words, "Byron 
 is dead." 
 
 Tennyson was well-born. He had the in- 
 estimable advantage of good blood and 
 right breeding. The poet's father was a 
 man of dominating intellect. He was a 
 Hebrew and Syriac scholar, and became 
 proficient in the Greek language that he 
 might teach it to his sons, whom he himself 
 prepared for Cambridge. The rector of 
 Somersby was endowed with a splendid 
 physique, standing six feet two, and was an 
 energetic and powerful man. Alfred in- 
 herited these noble physical proportions. Of 
 the poet's great bodily strength Brookfield 
 remarked, "It is not fair, Alfred, that you 
 should be Hercules as well as Apollo." In 
 proof of his notable muscular power it is 
 related that when showing to some friends 
 a little pet pony on the lawn at Somersby, 
 one day, he surprised the spectators by tak- 
 ing it up and carrying it. Fitzgerald said, 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 17 
 
 "Alfred could hurl the crowbar further than 
 any of the neighboring clowns, whose hu- 
 mors, as well as those of their betters, 
 knight, squire, landlord, and lieutenant, he 
 took quiet note of, like Chaucer himself." 
 Of the tender-heartedness of the poet's 
 mother it is recorded that the boys of a 
 neighboring village used to bring their dogs 
 to Mrs. Tennyson's windows and beat them, 
 in order to be bribed to leave off, or to in- 
 duce her to buy them. One source of 
 amusement at the rectory was "the writing 
 of tales in letter form to be placed under 
 the vegetable dishes at dinner, and read 
 aloud when it was over." It is stated that 
 the future laureate's tales "were very vari- 
 ous in theme, some of them humorous and 
 some savagely dramatic," and that his broth- 
 ers and sisters "looked to him as their most 
 thrilling story-teller." 
 
 Though much ill-advised criticism was 
 passed upon Tennyson at the time of his 
 elevation to the peerage, the poet was a 
 Tory by right of birth. His views of de- 
 mocracy were always of a conservative na- 
 
i8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 ture. This conservatism is well illustrated 
 by his oft-repeated praises of the restrictive 
 character of the fifth article of the Ameri- 
 can Constitution. Regard for the rights 
 and duties of birth beat in the laureate's 
 blood. Tennyson's mother was Elizabeth 
 Fytche. ''The Fytches were a county fam- 
 ily of old descent. The first name on the 
 Fytche pedigree is John Fitch of Fitch 
 castle in the North, who died in the twenty- 
 fifth year of Edward I. His descendant, 
 Thomas Fitch, was knighted by Charles II, 
 1679, served the office of high sheriff in 
 Kent, and was created baronet September 
 7, 1688." 
 
 Probably no poet's muse ever brought 
 him more substantial returns than did that 
 of Alfred Tennyson, though the amount 
 which he received per annum for his literary 
 work has been much overrated. His in- 
 come from his published works was never 
 more than six thousand pounds a year, and 
 during the latter years of his life was much 
 less than that. The first money which he 
 earned by his compositions was when, at 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 19 
 
 his grandfather's desire, he wrote a poem 
 on the death of his grandmother. The old 
 gentleman presented him a half guinea with 
 the remark, "Here is a half guinea for you, 
 the first you have ever earned by poetry, 
 and take my word for it, the last." 
 
 Alfred Tennyson matriculated at Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, February 20, 1828. 
 There his brother, Frederick Tennyson, was 
 already a distinguished scholar. Alfred's 
 friends and intimates at college were Sped- 
 ding, author of the life of Bacon; Milnes 
 (Lord Houghton), Trench (afterward 
 Archbishop of London), Alford (afterward 
 Dean of Canterbury), Brookfield, Blakes- 
 ley (afterward Dean of Lincoln), Thomp- 
 son, S. S. Rice, Merivale (afterward Dean 
 of Ely), J. M. Kemble, Heath (senior 
 wrangler 1832), Charles Buller, Monteith, 
 Tennant, and A. H. Hallam. Here Tenny- 
 son moved as a highly esteemed equal 
 among the brainiest of his associates. His 
 personal peculiarities were respected, and 
 the development of his genius was hailed 
 with delight. The poet says, "I kept a tame 
 
20 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 snake in my rooms. I liked to watch his 
 wonderful sinuosities on the carpet." The 
 following verses on "The Moon," written at 
 this period, show that the unique Tennyson 
 style had even then been formed: 
 
 Deep glens I found, and sunless gulfs, 
 Set round with many a toppling spire, 
 
 And monstrous rocks from craggy mounts, 
 Disploding globes of roaring fire. 
 
 Large as a human eye the sun 
 
 Drew down the West his feeble lights ; 
 
 And then a night, all moons, confused 
 The shadows from the icy heights. 
 
 Of the society of the "Apostles," an associa- 
 tion of kindred spirits, Tennyson was an 
 early member. "On stated evenings," says 
 Carlyle, "was much logic, and other spirit- 
 ual fencing, and ingenuous collision — prob- 
 ably of a really superior quality in that 
 kind ; for not a few of the then disputants 
 have since proved themselves men of parts, 
 and attained distinction in the intellectual 
 walks of life." In this society of the 
 "Apostles" were discussed such questions 
 as the following : "Have Shelley's poems an 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 21 
 
 immoral tendency?" Tennyson votes ''No." 
 "Is an intelligible First Cause deducibl'e 
 from the phenomena of the universe?" Ten- 
 nyson votes "No." "Is there any rule of 
 moral action beyond general expediency?" 
 Tennyson votes "Aye." Tennant writing 
 to Tennyson says : 
 
 Last Saturday we had an Apostolic dinner, when 
 we had the honor among other things of drinking 
 your health. Edmund Lushington and I went away 
 tolerably early, but most of them stayed till past two. 
 John Heath volunteered a song ; Kemble got into a 
 passion about nothing, but quickly jumped out 
 again ; Blakesley was afraid the proctor might come 
 in ; and Thompson poured large quantities of salt 
 upon Douglas Heath's head, because he talked non- 
 sense. 
 
 While yet in college Tennyson seems to 
 have anticipated in effect the theory of evo- 
 lution, which in later years was generally 
 associated with the name of Charles Dar- 
 win. Tennyson says that "the development 
 of the human body might possibly be traced 
 from the radiated, vermicular, molluscous, 
 and vertebrate organisms." 
 
 In 1830 the volume, Poems, Chiefly Lyr- 
 
22 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 ical, was greeted with the appreciative ap- 
 plause of a small chorus of admiring 
 friends. They prophesied the author's com- 
 ing eminence, but the great world was in- 
 different. The previous year Arthur Hallam 
 had written to W. E. Gladstone, "I con- 
 sider Tennyson as promising fair to be the 
 greatest poet of our generation.'' In 183 1, 
 after the death of Tennyson's father, when 
 it appeared that the family were about to 
 remove from Somersby, Arthur Hallam in 
 a spirit of prophecy wrote to Emily Ten- 
 nyson, to whom he had been attached for 
 about two years : 
 
 Many years, perhaps, or shall I say many ages, 
 after we all have been laid in dust, young lovers of 
 the beautiful and the true may seek in faithful pil- 
 grimage the spot where Alfred's mind was molded in 
 silent sympathy with the everlasting forms of na- 
 ture* Legends will perhaps be attached to the places 
 that are near it Some Mariana, it will be said, 
 lived wretched and alone in a dreary house on the 
 top of the opposite hill. Some Isabel may with more 
 truth be sought nearer yet. The belfry in which the 
 white owl sat "warming his five wits" will be shown 
 for sixpence to such travelers as have lost their 
 own. Critic after critic will track the wanderings 
 of the brook, or mark groupings of elm and poplar, 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 23 
 
 in order to verify the "Ode to Memory," in its mi- 
 nutest particulars. 
 
 At this time Tennyson's simple and abound- 
 ing gladness merely to be alive is well ex- 
 pressed in a certain sonnet entitled "Life." 
 
 Why suffers human life so soon eclipse? 
 For I could burst into a psalm of praise, 
 Seeing the heart so wondrous in her ways, 
 E'en scorn looks beautiful on human lips! 
 "Would I could pile fresh life on life, and dull 
 The sharp desire of knowledge still with knowing ! 
 Art, science, nature, everything is full, 
 As my own soul is full, to overflowing — 
 Millions of forms, and hues, and shades, that give 
 The difference of all things to the sense, 
 And all the likeness in the difference. 
 I thank thee, God, that thou hast made me live : 
 I reck not for the sorrow or the strife : 
 One only joy I know, the joy of life. 
 
 At Cambridge the "Palace of Art" was 
 passed about in manuscript among an elect 
 few, who admired it according to its deserts. 
 In 1832 Tennyson gave to the world an- 
 other volume of poems which, despite the 
 high expectations of his friends, was but 
 coldly received by the general public. The 
 Quarterly Revieiv was very savage in its 
 
24 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 onslaught upon the poet. In vain his friends 
 endeavored to cheer him by telling him 
 that "his very creative originality and un- 
 likeness to any poet, his uncommon power 
 over varied meters and rare harmonies of 
 sound and sense, needed the creation of a 
 taste for his work before he could be appre- 
 ciated." An old Lincolnshire squire, how- 
 ever, expressed the estimation in which the 
 Quarterly was generally held when he said 
 to Tennyson that the Quarterly "was the 
 next book to God's Bible." After the publi- 
 cation of the 1832 volume ten years elapsed 
 before the poet again addressed the reading 
 world. Tennyson was deeply discouraged. 
 He fancied that England was an uncon- 
 genial atmosphere, and began to think of 
 living abroad in Jersey, in the south of 
 France, or in Italy. "He was so far per- 
 suaded that the English people would never 
 care for his poetry that, had it not been for 
 the intervention of friends, he declared it 
 not unlikely that after the death of Hallam 
 he would not have continued to write." 
 The last letter which Tennyson received 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 25 
 
 from his friend Hallam contained these 
 manuscript lines : 
 
 I do but mock me with the questionings. 
 
 Dark, dark, irrecoverably dark 
 
 Is the soul's eye ; yet how it strives and battles 
 
 Through the impenetrable gloom to fix 
 
 That master light, the secret truth of things, 
 
 Which is the body of the Infinite God. 
 
 Arthur Hallam died at Vienna, September 
 J 5> ^SS- When his father returned from 
 his usual daily walk he saw Arthur asleep, 
 as he supposed, upon the couch. A blood 
 vessel near the brain had suddenly burst ; 
 the young man was not asleep, but dead. 
 The germ of that great threnody, "In Me- 
 moriam" — the one adequate and matchless 
 elegy in any language — appears in the fol- 
 lowing fragment: 
 
 Where is the voice I loved? ah, where 
 Is that dear hand that I would press? 
 
 Lo ! the broad heavens, cold and bare, 
 The stars that know not my distress ! 
 
 The vapor labors up the sky, 
 
 Uncertain forms are darkly moved ! 
 
 Larger than human passes by 
 The shadow of the man I loved, 
 
 And clasps his hands, as one that prays ! 
 
26 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Under the shadow of this great loss and 
 sorrow was begun the poem entitled "The 
 Two Voices." The poet was most exacting 
 as to his art. It is said that "The Brook" 
 was actually rescued from the waste-paper 
 heap. His fine sense of proportion caused 
 him to elide from "The Two Voices" so 
 excellent a stanza as this : 
 
 From when his baby pulses beat 
 To when his hands in their last heat 
 Pick at the death-mote in the sheet. 
 
 To adverse criticism Tennyson was sensi- 
 tive in an extreme degree ; not, he declared, 
 so far as his art was concerned, but because 
 of the petty personal spites and wretched 
 meannesses disclosed. On the other hand, 
 intelligent praise instantly gave him encour- 
 agement, and a favorable review from far- 
 off Calcutta could so brace the poet's spirits 
 as to make him warm to his work. We are 
 told that the localities of Tennyson's sub- 
 ject poems are wholly imaginary. He him- 
 self says of "The Miller's Daughter," which 
 was much altered and enlarged from the 
 edition of 1832, "The mill was no particular 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 27 
 
 mill ; if I thought at all of any mill, it was 
 that of Trumpington near Cambridge." 
 
 The grandfather desired to make parsons 
 of all the Tennyson brothers, but only one — 
 Charles — fulfilled this pious wish. Charles 
 and Alfred married sisters, daughters of 
 Henry Sellwood, Esq. Arthur Hallam, who 
 was visiting at Somersby rectory, asked 
 Emily Sellwood to walk with him in the 
 Fairy Wood. At a turn of the path they 
 came upon Alfred Tennyson, "who, at the 
 sight of the slender, beautiful girl of seven- 
 teen in her simple gray dress, moving 'like 
 a light across the woodland ways,' suddenly 
 said to her, 'Are you a dryad or an oread 
 wandering here?' " The long-dreaded sep- 
 aration from Somersby took place in 1837. 
 After this the Tennysons flitted several 
 times, first to High Beech in Epping Forest, 
 then to Tunbridge Wells, thence to Boxley 
 near Maidstone. In 1839 the poet wrote to 
 Emily Sellwood, his future wife: "Perhaps 
 I am coming to the Lincolnshire coast, but 
 I scarcely know. The journey is so expen- 
 sive and I am so poor." Again, "I shall 
 
28 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 never see the Eternal City, nor that dome, 
 the wonder of the world; I do not think I 
 would live there if I could, and I have no 
 money for touring." After 1840 all corre- 
 spondence between Alfred Tennyson and 
 Emily Sellwood was forbidden, since there 
 seemed to be no prospect of their ever being 
 married, owing to a perpetual want of 
 funds. The poet was forty-one years old 
 when he at length found it possible to wed 
 the woman of his choice. Not until that 
 time did his poems bring him even a limited 
 competency. His courtship was a long ro- 
 mance of hope, and patience, and trust. In 
 after years he said of his bride, ''The peace 
 of God came into my life before the altar 
 when I wedded her." She was the poet's 
 earliest and latest critic, to whose judg- 
 ment he always deferred. Their domestic 
 life was supremely happy, and of the wife 
 some of her friends were wont to say, "She 
 is as great as Alfred." As an illustration 
 of her character Jowett was told by Tenny- 
 son that his wife once said, "When I pray 
 I see the face of God smiling upon me." 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 29 
 
 Tennyson's memory of his mother, whose 
 portrait he has so beautifully drawn in "The 
 Princess," and the poet's gentle and lovely 
 wife increased, if possible, his natural chiv- 
 alry toward women. Before his marriage 
 lie thus writes to Miss Sellwood: "A good 
 woman is a wondrous creature, cleaving to 
 the right and the good in all change, lovely 
 in her youthful comeliness, lovely all her 
 life long in comeliness of heart." To a 
 friend he said, "I would pluck my hand 
 from a man, even if he were my greatest 
 hero, or dearest friend, if he wronged a 
 woman, or told her a lie." 
 
 We learn that it was in the latter part of 
 1837, or the beginning of 1838, that Tenny- 
 son appears to have first become known in 
 America. About that time Ralph Waldo 
 Emerson somehow made acquaintance with 
 the 1830 and 1832 volumes, and delighted 
 in lending them to his friends. In Novem- 
 ber, 1850, after the death of Wordsworth, 
 Alfred Tennyson was appointed poet- 
 laureate. The appointment was owing 
 chiefly to Prince Albert's admiration for 
 
30 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 "In Memoriam." From this time onward 
 more prosperous days began to dawn upon 
 him. Previously, because of straitened cir- 
 cumstances, he had ridden in third-class 
 railway carriages, and had complained that 
 it was "expensive being at an inn." Six 
 years later, upon the publication of "Maud," 
 of which thirty thousand copies were sold 
 immediately, he was enabled to purchase 
 with the proceeds of the sale of that poem 
 the beautiful home at "Farringford" in the 
 Isle of Wight. What other poet, of this or 
 any former century, was possessed of two 
 such homes as "Farringford" and "Aid- 
 worth"? 
 
 Perhaps we may again advert to the sense- 
 less outcry which was raised when Tenny- 
 son accepted a place in the House of Lords. 
 In reply to a letter from Gladstone upon the 
 subject the poet wrote : 
 
 I speak frankly to you when T say that I had 
 rather we should remain plain "Mr." and "Mrs." 
 and that, if it were possible, the title should first be 
 assumed by our son at any age it may be thought 
 right to fix upon ; but, like enough, this is against 
 all precedent, and could not be managed ; and on no 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 31 
 
 account would I have suggested it were there the 
 least chance of the queen's construing it into a slight 
 of the proffered honor. I hope that I have too much 
 of the old-world loyalty left in me not to wear my 
 lady's favors against all comers, should you think 
 that it would be more agreeable to her majesty that 
 I should do so. 
 
 It was with reluctance that Tennyson final- 
 ly accepted a barony, after a baronetcy had 
 been three times previously urged upon him. 
 He makes his own position sufficiently clear 
 in the following lines to a friend : 
 
 Why should I be selfish and not suffer an honor — 
 as Gladstone says — to be done to literature in my 
 name? For myself I felt, especially in the dark 
 days that may be coming on, that a peerage might 
 possibly be more of a disadvantage than an advantage 
 to my sons ; I cannot tell. I have been worried be- 
 cause, being of a nervous, sensitive nature, I wished 
 as soon as possible to get over the disagreeable re- 
 sults, and the newspaper comments and abuse. 
 
 Tennyson's political utterances are among 
 the wisest of his time. He was deeply in- 
 terested in the politics of the world, partic- 
 ularly whatever affected his own country. 
 Speaking of England and Ireland, he said : 
 
 The Celtic race does not easily amalgamate with 
 other races, as those of Scandinavian origin do, as 
 
32 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 for instance Saxon and Norman, which have fused 
 perfectly. The Teuton has no poetry in his nature 
 like the Celt, and this makes the Celt much more 
 dangerous in politics, for he yields more to his im- 
 agination than his common sense. Yet his imag- 
 ination does not allow of his realizing the sufferings 
 of poor dumb beasts. The Irish are difficult for us 
 to deal with. For one thing the English do not un- 
 derstand their innate love of fighting, words and 
 blows. If on cither side of an Irishman's road to 
 paradise shillalahs grew, which automatically hit 
 him on the head, yet he would not be satisfied. Sup- 
 pose that we allowed Ireland to separate from us ; 
 owing to its factions she would soon fall a prey to 
 some foreign power. She has absolute freedom now, 
 and a more than full share in the government of one 
 of the mightiest empires in the world. Whatever she 
 may. say, she is not only feudal, but oriental, and 
 loves those in authority over her to have the iron 
 hand in the silken glove. Let the demagogues re- 
 member, "Liberty forgetful of others is license, and 
 nothing better than treason." ... It was the mob 
 who smashed the Duke of Wellington's windows on 
 the anniversary of Waterloo. As Goethe says, "The 
 worst thing in the world is ignorance in motion." 
 
 He thus writes to Walt Whitman regarding 
 the American Constitution : 
 
 The coming year should give new life to every 
 American who has breathed a breath of that soul 
 which inspired the great founders of the American 
 Constitution, whose work you are to celebrate. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 33 
 
 Truly, the mother country, pondering on this, may 
 feel that how much soever the daughter owes to her 
 she, the mother, has nevertheless something to learn 
 from the daughter. Especially I would note the 
 care taken to guard a noble Constitution from rash 
 and unwise innovators. . . . Every agitator should 
 be made to prove his means of livelihood. 
 
 Once more: 
 
 We ought not to show our arsenals and dockyards 
 to the world, as we do. Want of confidence is hate- 
 ful among members of a family, but want of confi- 
 dence is necessary among nations. 
 
 The earliest memorandum for the King 
 Arthur epics is extremely interesting. In 
 it the poet says: "Two Guineveres. Y e 
 first prim. Christianity. 2 d Roman Cathol- 
 icism. Y e first is put away and dwells apart. 
 2 d Guinevere flies. Arthur takes to the first 
 again, but finds her changed by lapse of 
 time." For thirty years Tennyson medi- 
 tated the Arthurian poems. Like Milton 
 before him, he had early been impressed by 
 the legend of King Arthur, and intended to 
 weave it into a new form. In viaw of the 
 various interpretations which have been put 
 upon the "Idylls of the King" the poet's 
 
34 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 own explanation of them is of value. "The 
 whole/' he said, "is the dream of man com- 
 ing into practical life and ruined by one sin. 
 Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery, 
 and in the midst lies the table-land of life 
 and its struggles and performances. It is 
 not the history of one man or of one govern- 
 ment, but of a whole cycle of generations." 
 Alfred Tennyson was always reverent 
 toward revealed religion and respectful 
 toward its ministers. He said of the Bible 
 that it "ought to be read, were it only for 
 the sake of the grand English in which it is 
 written, an education in itself." Once in a 
 serious illness he said of the Book of Job 
 that he thought it "one of the greatest of 
 books," and asked to have read to him the 
 "little children, love one another" passage 
 from St. John, and also the Sermon on the 
 Mount, for which he possessed a measure- 
 less admiration. His attitude toward Christ 
 was that of an old saint or mystic. It was 
 his opinion that "The Son of Man" was 
 "the most tremendous title possible;" and 
 that the "most pathetic utterance in all his- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 35 
 
 tory was that of Christ on the cross, 'It is 
 finished/ after that passionate cry, 'My 
 God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
 me?" : Said he, "Indeed, what matters it 
 how much man knows and does, if he keeps 
 not a reverential looking upward? He is 
 only the subtlest beast in the field." It was 
 thus he regarded prayer : "Prayer is, to take 
 a mundane simile, like opening a sluice be- 
 tween the great ocean and our little chan- 
 nels when the great sea gathers itself to- 
 gether and flows in at full tide. . . . Prayer 
 on our part is the highest aspiration of the 
 soul." He discoursed much with his friends 
 on religious questions, and of Christianity 
 observed, "It is tugging at my heart." He 
 further said : 
 
 Almost the finest summing up of religion is to do 
 justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. 
 . . . Take away the sense of individual responsi- 
 bility, and men sink into pessimism and madness. 
 . . . Man's free will is but a bird in the cage ; he can 
 stop at the lower perch, or he can mount to a higher. 
 Then that which is and knows will enlarge his cage, 
 give him a higher and higher perch, and at last break 
 off the top of his cage, and let him out to be one 
 with the free will of the universe. ... It is motive, 
 
36 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 it is the great purpose, which consecrates life. The 
 real test of a man is not what he knows, but what he 
 is in himself and in his relation to others. For in- 
 stance, can he battle against his own bad inherited 
 instincts, or brave public opinion in the cause of 
 truth? The love of God is the true basis of duty, 
 truth, reverence, loyalty, love, virtue, and work. I 
 believe in these, although I feel the emptiness and 
 hollowness of much of life. "Be ye perfect as your 
 Father in heaven is perfect." . . . Evil must come 
 upon us headlong, if morality tries to get on without 
 religion. . . . Beware of breaking up the soil of any 
 faith when you have no better seed to sow. ... I 
 dread the losing hold of forms. I have expressed 
 this in my "Akbar." There must be forms, yet I 
 hate the need for so many sects and separate services. 
 
 His faith in a divine Personality was abso- 
 lute, as many rememberable utterances 
 testify : 
 
 I should infinitely rather feel myself the most mis- 
 erable wretch on the face of the earth with a God 
 above than the highest type of a man standing alone. 
 . . . The soul seems to me one with God. I can 
 sympathize with God in my poor little way. ... It 
 is hard to believe in God ; but it is harder not to be- 
 lieve. I believe in God, not from what I see in na- 
 ture, but from what I find in man. . . . Love is the 
 highest we feel, therefore we must believe that "God 
 is love." We cannot but believe that the creation is 
 infinite, if God is infinite. ... I believe that God 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 37 
 
 reveals himself in every individual soul ; and my idea 
 of heaven is perpetual ministry of one soul to an- 
 other. 
 
 In April, 1886, the poet was called upon 
 to enter the deep waters of an overwhelm- 
 ing sorrow in the death of his son Lionel, 
 who passed away on shipboard as he was 
 returning from India, and was buried in 
 the Red Sea. It is written of this son that 
 from his "earliest childhood his had always 
 been an affectionate and beautiful nature. " 
 The faith which the laureate had so long 
 cherished in the immortality of the soul now 
 afforded him supreme solace. His utter- 
 ances touching this great subject are as 
 trenchant as they are wise. He came much 
 into contact with the agnosticism of the day, 
 but never for a moment loosed his grasp of 
 the eternal hope. He declared the after- 
 life to be the cardinal part of Christ's teach- 
 ing. When Tyndall once said to him, "God 
 and spirit I know, and matter I know; and 
 I believe in both," remarking further, "we 
 may all be absorbed into the Godhead," 
 Tennyson replied, "Suppose that he is the 
 
38 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 real person, and we are only relatively per- 
 sonal." He was interested to learn that 
 Tyndall was convinced that life could not 
 originate without life. In a manuscript note 
 upon his poem "Vastness" he has recorded 
 the following: "What matters anything in 
 this world without full faith in the immor- 
 tality of the soul and of love?" In a letter 
 to the queen he writes: "As to the suffer- 
 ings of this momentary life, we can but trust 
 that in some after state, when we see 
 clearer, we shall thank the Supreme Power 
 for having made us, through these, higher 
 and greater beings." A lady whose friend 
 he had been from her childhood he thus 
 consoles upon the loss of her son : 
 
 The son whom you so loved is not really what we 
 call dead, but more actually living than when alive 
 here. You cannot catch the voice, or feel the hands, 
 or kiss the cheeks, that is all ; a separation for an 
 hour, not an eternal farewell. If it were not so that 
 which made us would seem too cruel a power to be 
 worshiped, and could not be loved. 
 
 He addresses the following words to Lord 
 Houghton on the death of the latter's wife : 
 "I may say that I think I can see, as far as 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 39 
 
 anyone can see in this twilight, that the 
 nobler nature does not pass from its indi- 
 viduality when it passes out of this one life." 
 As a dramatic writer Tennyson will be 
 esteemed more highly with the lapse of time. 
 When his plays first appeared almost with- 
 out exception they were decried by all ex- 
 cept a few special friends. The "general," 
 to whom "Harold," "May," and "Becket" 
 were "caviare," seemed to resent his put- 
 ting aside his character as a lyric and epic 
 poet to become a dramatist. Yet his dramas 
 were admired by such rare judges of lit- 
 erary excellence as James Spedding, George 
 H. Lewes, and George Eliot. Tennyson 
 knew when his work was good and was 
 willing that it should wait for the ratifica- 
 tion of time. Said he: "Thank God, the 
 time is past for the press to make or mar a 
 poem, play, or artist. Few original things 
 are well received at first. People must grow 
 accustomed to what is out of the common 
 before adopting it." From bitter moods of 
 despondency the poet was preserved by a 
 quiet and sometimes grim sense of humor 
 
40 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 and of the dramatic aspect of things. He 
 used to tell with delight of Aubrey de 
 Vere's view of eternal punishment: "Of 
 course it will be listening to Huxley and 
 Tyndall disputing eternally on the nonexist- 
 ence of God." 
 
 Throughout his life the laureate was an 
 idealist of the noblest type. He dwelt ha- 
 bitually in the region of rare and beautiful 
 fancies, yet his outlook upon life was ever 
 sane and just. He never for a moment 
 failed to discern the unity of the highest art 
 and the highest morality. Said he: 
 
 "I agree with Wordsworth that art is selection. 
 Look at Zola, for instance : he shows the evils of the 
 world without the ideal. His art becomes mon- 
 strous therefore, because he does not practice selec- 
 tion. In the noblest genius there is need of self- 
 restraint." "The moral higher imagination enslaved 
 to sense is like an eagle caught by the feet in a snare, 
 baited with carrion, so that it cannot use its wings to 
 soar." 
 
 His final views concerning woman and her 
 relation to the world did not differ from 
 those so luminously set forth in "The 
 Princess." One of his latest dicta was: 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 41 
 
 "Especially do I want people to recognize 
 that the women of our western hemisphere 
 represent the highest type of women, great- 
 ly owing to the respect and honor paid to 
 them by men, but that the moment the honor 
 and respect are diminished the high type of 
 woman will vanish." That the loftiest in- 
 spirations belong to the ideal world he de- 
 clared when he said, "Poetry is truer than 
 fact." We are told that with passionate 
 earnestness he once spoke: "Yes, it is true 
 that there are moments when the flesh is 
 nothing to me, when I feel and know the 
 flesh to be the vision, God and the spiritual 
 the only real and true. Depend upon it, the 
 spiritual is the real ; it belongs to one more 
 than the hand and the foot." 
 
 Tennyson was an incessant reader in all 
 directions — travels, astronomy, natural 
 science, philosophy, and theology. His lit- 
 erary taste was of a most catholic nature, 
 He kept abreast of the literary development 
 of his time, and read Stevenson, George 
 Meredith, Walter Besant, Black, Hardy, 
 Henry James, Marion Crawford, Anstey, 
 
42 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Barrie, Blackmore, Conan Doyle, Miss Brad- 
 don, Miss Lawless, Ouida, Miss Broughton, 
 Lady Margaret Majendie, Edna Lyall, Mrs. 
 Oliphant, Hall Caine, and J. H. Shorthouse. 
 His observations concerning men and books 
 were as trenchant as they were true : 
 
 "Keats is not a master of blank verse." He "prom- 
 ised securely more than any other English poet since 
 Milton." "Byron's merits are on the surface. This 
 is not the case with Wordsworth. You must love 
 Wordsworth ere he will seem worthy of your love." 
 "Browning never greatly cares about the glory of 
 words or beauty of form. . . . He has plenty of mu- 
 sic in him, but he cannot get it out." 
 
 Of George Eliot's novels he liked best Adam 
 Bede, Scenes of Clerical Life, and Silas 
 Marner. Romola he thought somewhat out 
 of her depth. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson was characterized by 
 the utmost simplicity of life. He loved Na- 
 ture in her every mood, and she took him 
 to her inmost heart. It is recorded of him 
 that "throughout the winter he fed the 
 thrushes and other birds as usual out of 
 his window." Nor was he a recluse, but on 
 the contrary an extremely hospitable man. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 43 
 
 He generally urged a parting guest's return 
 with the words, "Come whenever you like." 
 Though relentlessly pursued by curiosity 
 hunters, and apparently sometimes abrupt 
 and brusque, he was really a patient and 
 tolerant man. One day an American sud- 
 denly appeared at Aldworth, saying that he 
 had worked his way across the Atlantic in 
 a cattle ship in order to recite "Maud" to 
 the author thereof. The poet pitied the 
 man, listened to the recitation, and paid the 
 reciter's passage back to America. 
 
 Tennyson was an artificer in words. The 
 glory and the value of language afforded 
 him perpetual satisfaction. It was his cus- 
 tom to express in a line or two awe-in- 
 spiring and beautiful phases of natural phe- 
 nomena ; these lines were written down in 
 notebooks and afterward duly and fittingly 
 incorporated in poems now familiar to the 
 world. It has been well said that "The 
 Talking Oak" is an example of Tennyson's 
 unusual power of humanizing external na- 
 ture and of investing it with the feelings 
 and attributes of human kind. It is inter- 
 
44 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 esting to know' on the authority of the 
 laureate himself, that the lines, 
 
 I held it truth with him who sings 
 To one clear harp in divers tones, 
 
 have reference to Goethe, for whom Ten- 
 nyson entertained an abiding admiration. 
 
 Though the poet was excessively shy in 
 the presence of strangers, when the strange- 
 ness had worn away his companionship was 
 delightful. One of his friends speaks of his 
 "gay, boyish humor, the sunny sweetness, 
 the delight in life that never failed." Jow- 
 ett says: 
 
 His repertory of stories was perfectly inexhaust- 
 ible ; they were often about slight matters that would 
 scarcely bear repetition, but were told with such life- 
 like reality that they convulsed his hearers with 
 laughter. Like most story-tellers, he often repeated 
 his favorites ; but, like children, his audience liked 
 hearing them again and again, and he enjoyed telling 
 them. It might be said of him that he told more 
 stories than anyone, but was by no means the reg- 
 ular story-teller. In the commonest conversation he 
 showed himself a man of genius. 
 
 Tennyson's conversation was of so rich and 
 varied a kind and the choiceness of his Ian- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 45 
 
 guage was such that Fitzgerald once de- 
 clared, "I wish I had been A. T.'s Boswell." 
 In his domestic life the poet was happy be- 
 yond measure. He greeted his friends with- 
 in the portals of his home with a cordiality 
 and unaffected courtesy possible only to a 
 great nature. There, upon request, to rapt 
 listeners he would read his poems in that 
 full organ-voice of which Carlyle once re- 
 marked, "It is like the sound of a pine- 
 wood." Edmund Lushington also speaks 
 of "the deep melodious thunder" of the 
 laureate's voice. His reading of "Guine- 
 vere" once made George Eliot weep. Ten- 
 nyson's heart was ever tender and kind, and 
 moved by the most precious instincts of the 
 race. Of vivisection he said : 
 
 Without anaesthetics no animal should be cut open 
 for the sake of science. I have been reading of the 
 horrible and brutal experiments in Italy and France, 
 and my whole heart goes out to a certain writer in 
 the Spectator, who declared he had yet to find out 
 mankind was worth the cruel torture of a single 
 dumb animal. 
 
 He writes to Mary Howitt concerning the 
 
 household affections : "I wish that we Eng- 
 4 
 
46 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 landers dealt more in such symbols, that we 
 dressed our affections up in a little more 
 poetical costume; real warmth of heart 
 would lose nothing, rather gain by it. As 
 it is, our manners are as cold as the walls 
 of our churches." 
 
 Lord Tennyson was a man of wide learn- 
 ing. He was familiar with the Greek, Lat- 
 in, Hebrew, German, and Italian languages, 
 and had some acquaintance with the Persian. 
 He was young in heart to the very last, as 
 all great genius has ever been. One of his 
 favorite sayings was, "Make the lives of 
 children as beautiful and as happy as possi- 
 ble." His was an ingenuous and confiding 
 nature, unworldly in the sense that in 
 thought he abode in pure regions above the 
 sordid things of life. At least one of his 
 friends has said that his entire trustfulness 
 was sometimes almost pathetic. His per- 
 sonal appearance was such as to command 
 attention wherever he might be. The fol- 
 lowing is Carlyle's portrait of the poet : 
 
 Some weeks ago, one night, the poet Tennyson and 
 Matthew Allen were discovered here smoking in the 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 47 
 
 garden. Tennyson had been here before, but was 
 still new to Jane, who was alone for the first hour or 
 two of it. A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze- 
 colored, shaggy-headed man is Alfred ; dusty, smoky, 
 free and easy ; who swims outwardly and inwardly, 
 with great composure in an articulate element as of 
 tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke ; great now and 
 then when he does emerge ; a most restful, brotherly, 
 solid-hearted man. 
 
 Mrs. Carlyle's portrait of the poet is equally 
 vivid and characteristic: 
 
 Get his [Tennyson's] poems if you can, and read 
 the "Ulysses," "Dora," the "Vision of Sin," and you 
 will find that we do not overrate him. Besides, he 
 is a very handsome man, and a noble-hearted one, 
 with something of the gypsy in his appearance, which 
 for me is perfectly charming. Babbie never saw 
 him, unfortunately, or perhaps I should say fortu- 
 nately, for she must have fallen in love with him on 
 the spot, unless she be made absolutely of ice ; and 
 then men of genius have never anything to keep 
 wives upon. 
 
 A delineation by still another hand affords 
 us an additional impression of the poet's 
 uniqueness and individuality : 
 
 I saw a tall, large figure, cloak and large black 
 wide-awake. He had no beard or mustache. I rec- 
 ollect being impressed with the beauty and power 
 
4 8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 of his mouth and chin. His face is full of power 
 and thought ; a deep furrow runs from nose to chin 
 on either side, and gives a peculiar expression to the 
 face ; a lofty forehead adds to this. I remember the 
 splendor of his eyes. 
 
 A great personality is always, in an ap- 
 preciable degree, an accurate embodiment 
 of the age in which he lives. Thus Tenny- 
 son gave voice to the unrest, the forebod- 
 ings, the conquests, the questionings, and 
 the aspirations of this transitional century. 
 Though he heard "the sullen Lethe rolling 
 doom" on all things here, the world will not 
 permit his name to perish while manhood, 
 faith, and duty, and the love of the good, 
 the beautiful, and the true, are cherished 
 among our kind. As Froude has said, the 
 world will not soon see such another, for 
 the modern unquiet, impatient Zeitgeist is 
 against the production of any such great 
 meditative spirit. In the Pantheon of Eng- 
 land's glory and renown, "where the huge 
 minster's shadowy arches soar," there rests 
 no more sacred dust than that of Alfred 
 Tennyson. 
 
II 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS— POET, 
 
 SOCIALIST, AND MASTER 
 
 OF MANY CRAFTS 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 5i 
 
 II 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS— POET, SOCIALIST, 
 AND MASTER OF MANY CRAFTS 
 
 Could that blithe old singer of the 
 "breathing morn/' from his pleasant "lodge 
 within a park," come stepping briskly along 
 our noisy nineteenth-century ways, bring- 
 ing with him the scent of English fields, 
 and notes of mavis and of merle — could 
 Geoffrey Chaucer with ruddy cheeks, kind- 
 ly eyes, and pointed beard, his flowing locks 
 surmounted by a sheepskin cap, appear sud- 
 denly to our weary eyes with all the buoy- 
 ancy of his own fresh day — even outward- 
 ly he might not differ greatly from that 
 virile and sturdy figure which, to the pres- 
 ent generation, has been known as William 
 Morris. As story-tellers Geoffrey Chaucer 
 and William Morris are akin. Ancient 
 Woodstock and modern Kelmscott meet 
 where these minstrels chant. Although in 
 art Chaucer and Morris are closely related, 
 
52 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 in the products of their pens they are no- 
 tably dissimilar. 
 
 William Morris was of Welsh extraction. 
 He was the eldest son of his parents, and 
 was born in the village of Walthamstow, 
 Essex, on March 24, 1834. He himself says 
 in News from Nowhere: "I was born and 
 bred on the edge of Epping Forest, Wal- 
 thamstow and Woodford, to wit. ... A 
 pretty place, too, a very jolly place, now 
 that the trees have had time to grow again 
 since the great clearing of houses in 1855." 
 In the same work he speaks of the lovely 
 river Lee, "where old Izaak Walton used to 
 fish about the places called Stratford and 
 Old Ford." In a letter to The Daily Chron- 
 icle he says of Epping Forest: "When I 
 was a boy and young man I knew it yard 
 by yard from Wanstead to the Theydons, 
 and from Hale End to Fairlop Oak. In 
 those days it had no worse foes than the 
 gravel stealer and the robbing fence-maker, 
 and was always interesting and often very 
 beautiful." 
 
 Morris's artistic sense developed early. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 53 
 
 It is recorded that as a boy of nine years, 
 with a pony of his own, he rode half Essex 
 over in search of old churches. So deep 
 an impression did the results of these re- 
 searches make upon his mind that, after an 
 interval of many years, he could remember 
 the details of a building which he had not 
 seen since his boyhood. It was from Sir 
 Walter Scott that Morris imbibed his first 
 taste for art and romance. At the early 
 age of seven he had read nearly, if not quite, 
 all of Scott's works ; and it was the "Wizard 
 of the North" who taught him the love of 
 Gothic architecture. He says : 
 
 How well I remember as a boy my first acquaint- 
 ance with a room hung with faded greenery at Queen 
 Elizabeth's Lodge, by Chingford Hatch, in Epping 
 Forest, and the impression of romance it made upon 
 me ! A feeling that always comes back to me when 
 I read, as I often do, Sir Walter Scott's Antiquary, 
 and come to the description of the green room at 
 Monkbarns, amongst which the novelist has with 
 such exquisite cunning of art imbedded the fresh and 
 glittering verses of the summer poet Chaucer. 
 
 Morris was educated at Marlborough un- 
 der clerical masters, against whom, he re- 
 
54 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 marks, he naturally rebelled. The loose 
 discipline of the place allowed him full 
 scope for the cultivation of his individual 
 tastes and pursuits. He was not more than 
 fourteen years of age when the first general 
 appearance took place, before the public, 
 of the Preraphaelites, the radical doctrine 
 of whom was naturalism as distinguished 
 from realism. But the time was not yet 
 ripe for Morris to come under their influ- 
 ence, nor was he ever formally enrolled in 
 their ranks. Says Aymer Vallance : 
 
 It is, therefore, a supreme achievement of William 
 Morris to have brought art, through the medium of 
 the handicrafts, within reach of thousands who 
 could never hope to obtain but a transitory view of 
 Preraphaelite pictures ; his distinction, by decorating 
 the less pretending, but not less necessary, articles of 
 household furnishing, to have done more than any 
 other man in the present century to beautify the 
 plain, everyday home life of the people. 
 
 On the second of June, 1852, Morris 
 matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford. 
 This was an event of first-rate importance 
 in his life. Edward Burne- Jones matricu- 
 lated on the same day at the same college. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 55 
 
 The two freshmen were drawn together by 
 ties of sympathy and friendship that re- 
 mained unbroken until the day of Morris's 
 death. At this time Morris began to be 
 conscious of the poise and strength of his 
 own life, and to become intensely interested 
 in the origin and characteristics of mediaeval 
 art. Now, also, began to grow up within 
 his soul that uncompromising protest 
 against the vulgar and tasteless commer- 
 cialism ruling the present century. He thus 
 expresses himself: 
 
 It is a grievous thing to have to say, but say it I 
 must, that the one most beautiful city in England, 
 the city of Oxford, has been ravaged for many years 
 past, not only by ignorant tradesmen, but by the uni- 
 versity and college authorities. Those whose special 
 business it is to direct the culture of the nation have 
 treated the beauty of Oxford as if it were a matter 
 of no moment, as if their commercial interests might 
 thrust it aside without consideration. 
 
 While still an undergraduate at Oxford he 
 "first saw the city of Rouen, then still in its 
 outward aspect a piece of the Middle Ages : 
 no words can tell you how its mingled 
 beauty, history, and romance took hold on 
 
56 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 me." And he further adds : "I can only say 
 that, looking back on my past life, I find it 
 was the greatest pleasure I have ever had ; 
 and now it is a pleasure which no one can 
 ever have again ; it is lost to the world for- 
 ever;" that is, because of the injurious and 
 ignorant restoration. Morris had come to 
 Oxford with a warm admiration for the 
 writings of Mrs. Browning. While in col- 
 lege he became acquainted, not only with 
 the works of Browning and Tennyson, but 
 also with certain older writers, with the 
 Chronicles of Froissart, and with a book 
 destined to exercise a far-reaching influence 
 upon him and his circle, the Mortc d' Arthur 
 of Sir Thomas Malory. About the time of 
 Christmas, 1855, Burne-Jones relinquished 
 his intention of entering the ministry, and 
 proceeded to find Rossetti in London with 
 the purpose of becoming his pupil. Ere 
 long he presented his friend Morris to his 
 chosen master, whom he then regarded as 
 the greatest man in Europe. Without wait- 
 ing to take his degree Burne-Jones began 
 at once the systematic study and practice of 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 57 
 
 painting. Morris, on the contrary, pre- 
 ferred to complete his university course, 
 which he did, taking his degree of B.A. in 
 1856. 
 
 The first step in William Morris's artistic 
 career was when he articled himself to 
 George Edmund Street, then located in the 
 university town as an architect to the dio- 
 cese of Oxford. As fundamental to all art 
 he elected an architect's training. He says 
 of this pursuit: 
 
 I have spoken of the popular arts, but they might 
 all be summed up in that one word "architecture ;" 
 they are all parts of that great whole, and the art of 
 house-building begins it all. If we did not know 
 how to dye or to weave ; if we had neither gold, nor 
 silver, nor silk, and no pigments to paint with, but 
 half a dozen ochers and umbers, we might yet frame 
 a worthy art that would lead to everything, if we had 
 but timber, stone, and lime, and a few cunning 
 tools to make these common things not only shelter 
 us from wind and weather, but also express the 
 thoughts and aspirations that stir in us. Architec- 
 ture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with 
 earlier men ; but if we despise it and take no note of 
 how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard 
 time of it indeed. 
 
 Morris was possessed of a remarkable fac- 
 
5 8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 ulty of concentration, being able to wreak 
 his whole soul without distraction upon the 
 subject in hand, so that he mastered easily 
 and quickly the things learned by others 
 with difficulty or not at all. In 1856 Mr. 
 Morris settled in lodgings with his friend 
 Burne- Jones, at 17 Red Lion Square, where 
 they shared a studio in common. In this 
 same year appeared The Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge Magazine, which continued exactly 
 twelve months. Among such contributors 
 as Vernon Lushington, Jex-Blake, Burne- 
 Jones, and D. G. Rossetti, Morris was not 
 the least figure, being, indeed, the largest 
 contributor, and causing his friends to 
 prophesy for him a brilliant future in the 
 world of letters. Rossetti introduced Mor- 
 ris to Ruskin and other noted artists and 
 literary men. Early in 1857 Rossetti thus 
 writes to Bell Scott : 
 
 Two young men, projectors of The Oxford and 
 Cambridge Magazine, have recently come to town 
 from Oxford, and are now very intimate friends of 
 mine. Their names are Morris and Jones. They 
 have turned artists, instead of taking up any other 
 career to which the university generally leads, and 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 59 
 
 both are men of real genius. Jones's designs are 
 marvels of finish and imaginative detail, unequaled 
 by anything unless, perhaps, Albert Durer's finest 
 works ; and Morris, though without practice as yet, 
 has no less power, I fancy. He has written some 
 really wonderful poetry, too. 
 
 In 1858 Morris published his first volume 
 of poems, The Defense of Guinevere. It 
 was a remarkable work for a young man 
 twenty-four years of age. At that time Ten- 
 nyson's Idylls of the King had not yet ap- 
 peared ; nor had the published poems of 
 Rossetti been other than a few occasional 
 pieces contributed to periodicals. Mr. Ar- 
 thur Symons writes thus of Morris's De- 
 fense of Guinevere: "His first book — which 
 invented a new movement, doing easily, 
 with a certain appropriate quaintness, what 
 Tennyson all his life had been trying to do 
 — has all the exquisite trouble of his first 
 awakening to the love of romance." 
 
 Burne-Jones delighted to portray upon 
 canvas the identical subjects which Morris 
 chose for his poems ; these breathe a me- 
 diaeval atmosphere, and are full of archaisms 
 and quaintnesses which might easily have 
 
60 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 declined into mannerisms and as easily lent 
 themselves to parody. To illustrate : 
 
 Across the empty garden beds, 
 When the Sword went out to sea, 
 
 I scarcely saw my sisters' heads 
 Eowed each beside a tree. 
 
 I could not see the castle leads, 
 When the Szvord went out to sea. 
 
 O, russet brown and scarlet bright, 
 When the Szvord zvent out to sea, 
 
 My sisters wore ; I wore but white : 
 Red, brown, and white, are three ; 
 
 Three damozels ; each had a knight 
 When the Szvord went out to sea. 
 
 A golden gilliflower to-day 
 I wore upon my helm away, 
 And won the prize of this tourney. 
 Hah! hah! la belle jaune giroflee. 
 
 No one goes there now : 
 
 For what is left to fetch away 
 From the desolate battlements all arow, 
 
 And the lead roof heavy and gray? 
 "Therefore," said fair Yoland of the flowers, 
 "This is the tune of Seven Towers." 
 
 There was a lady lived in a hall, 
 Large in the eyes, and slim and tall ; 
 And ever she sung from noon to noon, 
 Tzvo red roses across the moon. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 61 
 
 Yet The Defense of Guinevere was a no- 
 table production, and lovers of true poetry 
 found in this volume much to impress and 
 delight them. Anent the poems contained 
 in this first venture Algernon Charles Swin- 
 burne says: 
 
 The figures here given have the blood and breath, 
 the shape and step, of life ; they can move and suffer ; 
 their repentance is as real as their desire ; their 
 shame lies as deep as their love. They are at once 
 remorseful for their sin and regretful of the pleasure 
 that is past. The retrospective vision of Lancelot 
 and Guinevere is as passionate and profound as life. 
 . . . Such verses are not forgettable. They are not, 
 indeed — as the Idylls of the King — the work of a 
 dextrous craftsman in full practice. Little beyond 
 dexterity, a rare eloquence, and a laborious patience 
 of hand has been given to the one or denied to the 
 other. These are good gifts and great; but it is 
 better to want clothes than limbs. 
 
 Despite this favorable judgment it is said 
 that the general reception of his first work 
 was so discouraging to the young author 
 that he had little heart to continue writing, 
 and so turned his hand to other and more 
 grateful occupations. Not until repeated 
 volumes had attracted public favor did a 
 
62 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 demand arise for Morris's earliest volume, 
 and it then had to be reprinted, the stock 
 of "the original impression having been re- 
 turned to the paper mill." 
 
 In the autumn of 1857, during a tempo- 
 rary residence at Oxford, William Morris 
 was introduced to the lady who afterward 
 became his wife. She it was whose features 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti delighted to portray 
 upon canvas, and whom the artist has im- 
 mortalized in numerous drawings and paint- 
 ings. The marriage rendered it necessary 
 that Morris should provide a suitable home 
 for the young bride, and so was begun the 
 erection of the "Red House," a structure 
 after the bridegroom's own design, and 
 which was mainly responsible for the re- 
 vival of that style of architecture termed 
 "Queen Anne." The firm of "Morris & 
 Co., Decorators," is closely connected with 
 the development of artistic house furnish- 
 ings and decorations during the past twenty 
 years and more in England. In the furnish- 
 ing of the "Red House," at Bexley Heath, 
 Morris had exercised his ingenuity in em- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 63 
 
 broidery design, in ceiling and mural orna- 
 mentation, and in numerous other ways had 
 become possessed of practical experience in 
 various branches of domestic art. It is re- 
 corded that neither "love nor money could 
 procure beautiful objects of contemporary 
 manufacture for any purpose of household 
 furnishing or adornment when William 
 Morris undertook the herculean and seem- 
 ingly hopeless task of decorative reform and 
 wrought and brought deliverance from the 
 thraldom of the ugly, which oppressed all 
 the so-called arts" of this century. That 
 branch of the ceramic art which is repre- 
 sented by the decoration of tiles owes its 
 rescue from vulgarity and degradation to 
 William Morris. "All nations, however 
 barbarous," said he in his lecture on "The 
 Lesser Arts of Life," "have made pottery ; 
 but none have ever failed to make it on 
 true principles, none have ever made shapes 
 ugly or base till quite modern times. . . . 
 As to the surface decoration on pottery, it 
 is clear it must never be printed." When, 
 at the beginning of 1862, tiles were required 
 
64 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 for the "Red House," there were no hand- 
 painted tiles in England, so Morris found 
 it necessary to begin at the foundation. 
 Plain white tiles were imported from Hol- 
 land, and after various experiments with 
 glazes and enamels the desired results were 
 obtained. 
 
 Of the many industries related to the 
 skill of William Morris none has wider 
 celebrity than that of wall paper hangings. 
 It was he who lifted this branch of domes- 
 tic ornamentation above the level of a mere 
 crude expedient into a sphere of genuine 
 art. His wall paper designs were models 
 of beauty and simplicity, and in this par- 
 ticular field he was little short of a creator. 
 Two or three years after the establishment 
 of the firm of "Morris, Marshall, Faulkner 
 & Co." Morris conceived the purpose of 
 adding weaving to their other enterprises. 
 Concerning this art Morris says : 
 
 As the designing of woven stuffs fell into degra- 
 dation in the latter days, the designers got fidgeting 
 after trivial novelties — change for the sake of 
 change ; they must needs strive to make their woven 
 flowers look as if they were painted with a brush, 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 65 
 
 or even sometimes as if they were drawn by the en- 
 graver's burin. This gave them plenty of trouble 
 and exercised their ingenuity in the tormenting of 
 their web with spots and stripes and ribs and the rest 
 of it, but quite destroyed the seriousness of the work 
 and even its raison d'etre. 
 
 It is averred that the attention of Morris 
 was drawn to the industry of weaving by 
 observing a man in the street selling toy 
 models of weaving machines, when it oc- 
 curred to him to purchase one and practice 
 upon it for himself. After a series of ex- 
 periments he endeavored to secure a full- 
 size old-style hand loom, with hand shuttle, 
 but it was not until well on toward the 
 eighties that a Jacquard loom was erected 
 in Ormond Yard, when Morris was enabled 
 systematically to carry on weaving as a part 
 of the work of his firm. 
 
 About 1875 Morris happened to need 
 some special shades of silk for embroidery. 
 Unable to procure what he desired, he de- 
 termined to undertake dyeing on his own 
 account. Morris began by dyeing skeins of 
 silk for embroidery, and then proceeded to 
 dye wool for tapestry and carpets. Morris 
 
66 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 was strongly of the opinion that certain re- 
 sults effected by chemical sicence had proved 
 extremely injurious to the art of dyeing. 
 He says : 
 
 No change at all befell the art either in the East 
 or the North till after the discovery of America ; this 
 gave the dyers one new material in itself good, and 
 one that was doubtful or bad. The good one was 
 the new insect dye, cochineal, which at first was used 
 only for dyeing crimson. . . . The bad new material 
 was logwood, so fugitive a dye as to be quite worth- 
 less as a color by itself (as it was first used) and to 
 my mind of very little use otherwise. No other 
 new dyestuff of importance was found in America, 
 although the discoverers came across such abundance 
 of red-dyeing wood growing there that a huge coun- 
 try of South America has thence taken its name of 
 "Brazil." 
 
 Among the domestic arts taken up by this 
 versatile man were printing on textile fab- 
 rics, embroidery, dyeing, carpet and arras 
 weaving, glass painting, and cabinet mak- 
 ing. 
 
 After the volume, Defense of Guinevere, 
 the poems of Morris dealt no more with the 
 Arthurian legends. This first book was fol- 
 lowed by The Life and Death of Jason, one 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 67 
 
 of the longest narrative poems in the lan- 
 guage. The plot of the story differs little 
 from the classical one, though the setting 
 and elaboration are the poet's own. "It was 
 all more or less exquisite," says Mr. Saints- 
 bury, "it was all more or less novel." Here 
 we come upon such rememberable lines as 
 
 Dusk grows the world, and day is weary-faced. 
 
 The slim-leaved, thorny pomegranate 
 That flung its unstrung rubies on the grass. 
 
 Darksome night is well-nigh done, 
 And earth is waiting silent for the sun. 
 
 And so began short love and long decay, 
 Sorrow that bides, and joy that fleets away. 
 
 And one hour 
 Ripened the deadly fruit of that fell flower. 
 
 Concerning this book Swinburne says, "In 
 all the noble roll of our poets there has been 
 since Chaucer no second teller of tales, no 
 second rhapsode comparable to the first, till 
 the advent of this one." And he adds to 
 this word of eulogy : "No higher school has 
 brought forth rarer poets than this. . . . 
 
68 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Here is a poem sown of itself, sprung 
 from no alien seed, cut after no alien model, 
 fresh as wind, bright as light, full of the 
 spring and the sun." 
 
 Ten years intervened between the appear- 
 ance of The Defense of Guinevere and the 
 first part of The Earthly Paradise. The 
 latter work reveals a complete departure 
 from his earlier manner and methods. It 
 is one of the richest and sweetest produc- 
 tions in any language. It is a recital of old 
 legends and traditions from many sources, 
 but all so molded and interfused with the 
 poet's own genius and personality as to ren- 
 der them in all essential respects quite origi- 
 nal. The prevailing tone of the work is one 
 of gentle sadness at the omnipresence and 
 inevitability of death, but there is nowhere 
 anything weak or maundering. The amaz- 
 ing fecundity of the poet is well illustrated 
 by presenting the bare titles of the tales con- 
 tained in The Earthly Paradise. They are 
 as follows: "Atalanta's Race," "The Man 
 Born to be King/' "The Doom of King 
 Acrisius," "The Proud King," "The Story 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 69 
 
 of Cupid and Psyche," "The Writing on 
 the Image," "The Love of Alcestis," "The 
 Lady of the Land," "The Son of Crcesus," 
 "The Watching of the Falcon," "Pygmalion 
 and the Image," "Ogier the Dane," "The 
 Death of Paris," "The Land East of the 
 Sun and West of the Moon," "The Story of 
 Accontius and Cydippe," "The Man Who 
 Never Laughed Again," "The Story of 
 Rhodope," "The Lovers of Gudrun," "The 
 Golden Apples," "The Fostering of As- 
 laug," "Bellerophon at Argos," "The Ring 
 Given to Venus," "Bellerophon in Lycia," 
 "The Hill of Venus." It is almost impos- 
 sible to adequately represent the work of 
 Morris by any selections from these tales, 
 so interwoven with the context are his most 
 beautiful lines. However, here is a song 
 under the title month "July:" 
 
 Fair was the morn to-day, the blossom's scent 
 Floated across the fresh grass, and the bees 
 With low vexed song from rose to lily went, 
 A gentle wind was in the heavy trees, 
 And thine eyes shone with joyous memories; 
 Fair was the early morn, and fair wert thou. 
 And I was happy — Ah, be happy now ! 
 
70 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Peace and content without us, love within, 
 That hour there was, now thunder and wild rain 
 Have wrapped the cowering world, and foolish sin 
 And nameless pride have made us wise in vain ; 
 Ah, love ! although the morn shall come again, 
 And on new rosebuds the new sun shall smile, 
 Can we regain what we have lost meanwhile ? 
 
 E'en now the west grows clear of storm and threat, 
 
 But midst the lightning did the fair sun die — 
 
 Ah ! he shall rise again for ages yet, 
 
 He cannot waste his life — but thou and I — 
 
 Who knows if next morn this felicity 
 
 My lips may feel, or if thou still shalt live 
 
 This seal of love renewed once more to give? 
 
 The poet's skill in portraying scenes of 
 nature is well indicated by these lines from 
 "Pygmalion and the Image:" 
 
 Fair was the day, the honeyed beanfield's scent 
 The west wind bore unto him ; o'er the way 
 The glittering noisy poplar leaves did play. 
 
 All things were moving ; as his hurried feet 
 
 Passed by, within the flowery swath he heard 
 
 The sweeping of the scythe, the swallow fleet 
 
 Rose over him, the sitting partridge stirred 
 
 On the field's edge ; the brown bee by him whirred, 
 
 Or murmured in the clover flowers below, 
 
 But he with bowed-down head failed not to go. 
 
 Mr. John Morley has written thus of the 
 poetical art of William Morris: 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 71 
 
 Mr. Morris's central quality is a vigorous and 
 healthy objectivity; people who talk conventional 
 cant talk about word-painting should turn to a page 
 of Jason or The Earthly Paradise and watch how the 
 most delicious pictures are produced by the simplest 
 and directest means. Mr. Morris's descriptions, con- 
 densed, simple, absolutely free from all that is 
 strained and all that is artificial, enter the reader's 
 mind with the direct and vivid force of impressions 
 coming straight from the painter's canvas. There is 
 no English poet of this time, nor perhaps of any 
 other, who has possessed this excellent gift of look- 
 ing freshly and simply on eternal nature in all her 
 many colors, and of reproducing what he sees with 
 such effective precision and truthfulness. 
 
 The following lines from "Love is Enough" 
 emphasize at least a part of what Mr. Mor- 
 ley has so finely said : 
 
 And what do ye say then? that spring long departed 
 Has brought forth no child to the softness and show- 
 ers; 
 That we slept and we dreamed through the summer 
 
 of flowers ; 
 We dreamed of the winter, and waking dead-hearted 
 Found winter upon vis and waste of dull hours. 
 
 In the year 1871 William Morris and D. 
 G. Rossetti entered into the joint occupa- 
 tion of Kelmscott Manor, a name which for 
 five and twenty years thereafter was asso- 
 
?2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 dated with some of Morris's most remark- 
 able work. Prior to this time Morris had 
 become an enthusiastic student of Icelandic 
 literature, his studies in this field resulting 
 in the translation of The Saga of Gunnlaug 
 the Worm-tongue and Rafn the Skald, a 
 volume entitled The Story of Grettir the 
 Strong, and the Volsung Saga. Of this 
 latter work Buxton Forman says: "Here 
 the reader will find sentiment enough and 
 romance enough — flashes of a weird mag- 
 nificence that all the hills of the Land of Ice 
 have not been able to overreach with their 
 long dusk shadows, and that all the 'cold 
 gray sea' that rings the Island of Thule has 
 not washed free of its color and heat." 
 "The Story of Frithiof the Bold," 'The 
 Story of Viglund the Fair," "The Tale of 
 Hogni and Hedinn," "The Tale of Roi the 
 Fool," "The Tale of Thorstein Staffsmit- 
 ten," "The Story of Howard the Halt," 
 "The Story of the Banded Men," "The 
 Story of Hen Thorir," "The Story of the 
 Ere Dwellers," and "The Story of the 
 Heath Slayings" followed. That many of 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 73 
 
 these works were in collaboration with Mr. 
 Eirikr Magnusson does not detract from the 
 immense industry and fertility of Morris'. 
 His translations, The Aeneid of Virgil and 
 The Odyssey of Homer, must also be re- 
 garded as triumphs of literary workmanship. 
 In 1877 Morris published his colossal 
 work, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, 
 and the Fall of the Niblungs. This extend- 
 ed poem is written in anapestic rhyming 
 couplets. The following quotation will con- 
 vey but a slight impression of this noble 
 and splendid poem : 
 
 All hail, O Day and thy Sons, and thy kin of the 
 
 colored things ! 
 Hail, following Night and thy Daughter that leadeth 
 
 thy wavering wings ! 
 Look down with unangry eyes on us to-day alive, 
 And give us the hearts victorious, and the gain for 
 
 which we strive ! 
 All hail, ye lords of God-home, and Queens of the 
 
 House of Gold ! 
 Hail, thou dear earth that bearest, and thou Wealth 
 
 of field and fold ! 
 Give us, your noble children, the glory of wisdom 
 
 and speech, 
 And the hearts and the hands of healing, and the 
 
 mouths and the hands that teach ! 
 
74 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 In 189 1 appeared Poems by the Way, a 
 collection of the poet's fugitive verse. Dur- 
 ing the last eight years of his life, that is, 
 from 1888 to 1896, Morris produced little 
 poetry. But during this interval he was 
 intensely alive to the world of humankind 
 and to the great questions which are every- 
 where clamoring for solution. He seemed 
 to feel that there could be nothing in com- 
 mon between modern social conditions and 
 the spirit of poesy. 
 
 Morris's revolt against so much that is 
 unlovely and grossly utilitarian in our pres- 
 ent "unexampled progress" is revealed in 
 the following lines from The Earthly Para- 
 dise : 
 
 Forget six counties overhung with smoke, 
 Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, 
 Forget the spreading of the hideous town ; 
 Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, 
 And dream of London, small, and white, and clean, 
 The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green. 
 
 The root of Morris's socialism is to be 
 found in the "terrible contrast presented by 
 the life of the workmen of the past and the 
 life of the workmen of to-day ;" hence "the 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 75 
 
 more profound grew his sense of dissatis- 
 faction with the present conditions of so- 
 ciety." His yearning for the better time 
 was thus expressed: 
 
 Ah ! good and ill, 
 When will your strife the fated measure fill ? 
 When will the tangled veil be drawn away 
 To show us all that unimagined day? 
 
 The poet was constantly moved by his 
 overmastering devotion to art and his clear 
 perception that, if labor and art are again 
 to go hand in hand, man must love his la- 
 bor; he saw, further, that in the midst of 
 modern social conditions man will not and 
 cannot love his work. The distinct propo- 
 sition which Morris formulated was this: 
 "It is right and necessary that all men 
 should have work to do which shall be 
 worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to 
 do, and which should be done under such 
 conditions as would make it neither over- 
 wearisome nor overanxious." He says 
 again : 
 
 What I mean by socialism is a condition of society 
 in which there should be neither rich nor poor, 
 
76 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 neither master nor master's man, neither idle nor 
 overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers nor 
 heart-sick hand workers — in a word, in which all 
 men would be living in equality of condition, and 
 would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with 
 the full consciousness that harm to one would mean 
 harm to all — the realization at last of the meaning of 
 the word "Commonwealth." 
 
 In further explanation of his position he 
 said that he was compelled 
 
 Once to hope that the ugly disgraces of civilization 
 might be got rid of by the conscious will of intelli- 
 gent persons ; yet, as I strove to stir up people to 
 this reform, I found that the vulgarities of civiliza- 
 tion lay deeper than I had thought, and little by lit- 
 tle I was driven to the conclusion that all these 
 uglinesses are but the outward expression of the in- 
 nate moral baseness into which we are forced by our 
 present form of society, and that it is futile to at- 
 tempt to deal with them from the outside. 
 
 The unhappy condition of the modern 
 workingman, as compared with the work- 
 ingman of the past, was a theme to which 
 Morris returned again and again. He says : 
 
 Now, they work consciously for a livelihood and 
 blindly for a mere abstraction of a world-market 
 which they do not know of, but with no thought of 
 the work passing through their hands. Then, they 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 77 
 
 worked to produce wares and to earn their liveli- 
 hood by means of them ; and their only market they 
 had close at hand, and they knew it well. Now, the 
 result of their work passes through the hands of half 
 a dozen middlemen. Then, they worked directly for 
 their neighbors, understanding their wants, and with 
 no one coming between them. Huckstering which 
 was then illegal, has now become the main business 
 of life, and of course those who practice it most suc- 
 cessfully are better rewarded than anyone else in the 
 community. Now, people work under the direction 
 of an absolute master whose power is restrained by 
 a trade's union, in absolute hostility to that master. 
 Then, they worked under the direction of their own 
 collective wills by means of trade guilds. Now, the 
 factory hand, the townsman is a different animal 
 from the countryman. Then, every man was inter- 
 ested in agriculture, and lived with the green fields 
 coming close to his own doors. In short, the differ- 
 ence between the two may be told very much in these 
 words : "In those days daily life as a whole was 
 pleasant, although its accidents might be rough and 
 tragic. Now, daily life is dreary, stupid, wooden, 
 and the only pleasure is in excitement, even if that 
 pleasure should be more or less painful or terrible." 
 
 In his Utopian romance, 'News from No- 
 where, Morris presents us with a condition 
 of human society in which there are no laws 
 nor lawyers, no judges, no government. 
 He aims at escaping wholly from the com- 
 
78 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 plex relations of modern life, and seeks to 
 enter into a state of primal, untrammeled 
 simplicity. According to Mr. Lionel John- 
 son, he shows a "loving and personal regard 
 for the very earth itself, . . . that sense of 
 the motherhood of the earth which makes a 
 man love the smell of the fields after rain, 
 or the look of running water." The leading 
 thoughts which the author seeks to impress 
 upon the reader are that "pleasure in work 
 is the secret of art and content," and that 
 "delight in physical life upon the earth is 
 the natural state of man." 
 
 The year 1888 saw the beginning of that 
 cycle of prose romances upon which Morris 
 continued to work until the end of his life. 
 A Tale of the House of the W citings ap- 
 peared in December, 1888. In 1890 was 
 published The Roots of the Mountains. In 
 this year, also, The Story of the Glittering 
 Plain was printed as a serial in Macmillan's 
 English Illustrated Magazine. Then fol- 
 lowed News from Nowhere, which in turn 
 was followed by The Wood Beyond the 
 World. In 1895 appeared the volume en- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 79 
 
 titled Of Child Christopher and Goldilind 
 the Fair, which was succeeded, in 1896, by 
 The Well at the World's End, the last work 
 which Mr. Morris published before his 
 death. The Water of the Wondrous Isles 
 and The Sundering Flood are posthumous 
 works, in character not unlike their prede- 
 cessors. 
 
 Morris took up the work of printing and 
 book decoration in the same spirit in which 
 he engaged in other arts. All the volumes 
 which have come from the Kelmscott press 
 are models of beauty and design, and show 
 a return to the earlier styles of printing 
 and binding when thought and individu- 
 ality went into the making of each book. 
 Superadded to this is an originality of de- 
 tail and execution which set the Kelmscott 
 publications quite apart from the usual mod- 
 ern products of the press. 
 
 In the month of February, 1896, Morris's 
 health gave way, and his friends began to 
 entertain for him serious alarm. Afterward 
 he seemed to rally a little. But on the third 
 of October, 1896, the end came, and he tran- 
 
8o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 quilly passed away at Kelmscott House, 
 Hammersmith. The funeral was unosten- 
 tatious, as he would have desired. At Lech- 
 lade station the remains were placed on a 
 harvest cart, instead of a hearse. The body 
 of this cart was painted yellow, the wheels 
 red, and the framework had been festooned 
 with vines, willow branches, flowers, and 
 berries. "The roan mare in the shafts had 
 vine leaves in its blinkers, and strings of 
 vines were festooned across the top of the 
 wain. The bottom of the cart was lined 
 with moss." Thus the body of William 
 Morris was conveyed to the churchyard of 
 his beloved Kelmscott. The grave lies shad- 
 owed by tall trees and buried in long grass, 
 close to the wall of the little churchyard 
 where it is skirted by the country road — a 
 remote and quiet resting place for one who, 
 throughout his busy and strenuous days, 
 dreamed of that happy bourne "where be- 
 yond these voices there is peace.' , 
 
 Says a certain writer of the benefits which 
 resulted for the age from his artistic 
 service : 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 81 
 
 His whole life was a vivid and in many respects a 
 successful protest against the squalor of modern in- 
 dustrialism. To him, more than to any other man, 
 we owe our emancipation from the hideous vulgarity 
 of middle- Victorian house decoration and upholstery. 
 Others preached, but William Morris, in whom a 
 keen artistic sense was happily allied to skilled 
 workmanship, was able to supplement precept by 
 practice and visibly demonstrate the superiority of 
 his methods. ... He warred with brilliant success 
 against the tyranny of ugliness . . . surely no 
 mean achievement in a mechanical and utilitarian 
 age. 
 
Ill 
 
 JOHN KEATS 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 85 
 
 III 
 
 JOHN KEATS 
 
 No other name, perhaps, in the entire 
 range of English literature is so significant 
 of precocious genius, vivid and beautiful 
 imagination, and unexampled word-paint- 
 ing. That a man dying in the twenty-sixth 
 year of his age, after a comparatively brief 
 season of literary activity, should leave be- 
 hind him such an artistic and satisfying 
 body of verse, is sufficiently remarkable ; 
 but when the fact is also noted that this 
 young writer was the founder of a new 
 school in the art of poetry — a school which 
 to-day is most popular and flourishing — the 
 circumstance becomes historical in its value. 
 Despite his limited career, so rapid was the 
 maturity of his intellectual energies that the 
 works which John Keats has left to the 
 world will continue to be read, wherever 
 the English language is spoken, with re- 
 newed astonishment and delight. 
 
86 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Not infrequently, in these passing days, 
 sundry defenses of poetry are written for 
 the encouragement of the faithful. It is 
 ominous that poetry should at any time be 
 regarded as needing defense ; for if it bears 
 not within itself its own justification, if it 
 no longer makes an appeal to the heart of 
 man, then should the discredited bard hang 
 his harp upon the willows and possess his 
 soul in silence. But who will venture to 
 affirm that poetry has lost its power to stir 
 the human heart, when such a poet as Keats 
 owns an ever-widening circle of apprecia- 
 tive readers among the finest spirits of the 
 world ? 
 
 To read the poems of Keats is not unlike 
 indulging in a draught of rare old vintage ; 
 he makes his reader drunk with music; he 
 fairly intoxicates with the richness of his 
 song. It is impossible steadfastly to peruse 
 such poetry ; it cloys with too much melody. 
 His finest verses are exquisitely sweet and 
 tender, and possess a native birdlike quality 
 that goes straight to the heart. Keats lived 
 in a world of the past. He moved amid a 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 87 
 
 troop of fantastic shadows half human, half 
 divine, god and goddess, faun and satyr, 
 nymph and hamadryad, until to him the un- 
 real became the real, and "the thing that 
 was not as the thing that was." He was 
 bewildered in the mazes of his own imagin- 
 ings; there he ranged like an uncurbed 
 steed ; yet nothing passed from under his 
 hand that did not bear the magic impress 
 which sealed it "a joy forever." It was a 
 favorite idea of Goethe that what once has 
 gladdened us can never afterward be wholly 
 lost out of our life ; so the spirit of beauty, 
 unconsciously imbibed by Keats, grew with 
 his growth until it found expression in other 
 beauty, and "blossomed in delight." 
 
 His history is a melancholy one, and as a 
 victim of literary assassination through po- 
 litical and personal malice it is small won- 
 der that he was spoken of in his own day 
 as "poor Keats." That the poet was un- 
 favorably affected by the virulent attacks 
 which were made upon his verse has been 
 denied, as impeaching the robustness of his 
 character. Yet it can scarcely be doubted 
 
88 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 that such was the mental and physical con- 
 dition of the poet that the germs of disease, 
 already latent in his constitution, were rap- 
 idly developed into activity by the suffering 
 and disappointment he must have experi- 
 enced through the injustice done to his 
 work, as well as through his unhappy love. 
 Shelley believed that this was so, and he cer- 
 tainly could not have been ignorant of the 
 facts in the case. Taking place in litera- 
 ture beside those earlier and incomparable 
 masters of song, Chaucer and Spenser, 
 Keats in some respects seems as remote 
 from the present time as they ; yet it is little 
 more than an old man's lifetime since, an 
 awkward, bashful youth, he sought the en- 
 trance to Hazlitt's lecture room or made his 
 memorable journey to Scotland, Devon- 
 shire, and the Isle of Wight. 
 
 Of humble parentage, John Keats first 
 saw the light of the natural day in London, 
 October 29, or 31 (it is not determined 
 which), 1795, at the house of his grand- 
 father, who kept a large livery stable on 
 the Pavement in Moor fields. The boy's 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 89 
 
 health was always fragile, for he had been 
 a seven-months' child, and his birth is said 
 to have been prematurely hastened by his 
 mother's intense love of pleasure, though 
 in his earlier years his constitution present- 
 ed but little indication of the peculiar de- 
 bility attendant upon such cases. He was 
 one of five children, Edward dying in in- 
 fancy, and during his boyhood, which was 
 spent at a good, second-class school, seems 
 to have been notable chiefly for his warm 
 attachment to fistic encounters. He pos- 
 sessed, however, an extreme facility in get- 
 ting through the daily tasks of school, which 
 seemed to make no great demand upon his 
 attention, yet in which he never lagged 
 behind the others. His easy skill in all 
 manly exercises, and the complete ingenu- 
 ousness of his disposition, rendered him very 
 popular. 
 
 After remaining some time at school his 
 intellectual ambition seemed suddenly to de- 
 velop. He had been a leader in athletic 
 sports; he now determined to capture the 
 first prize in literature, and in this he was 
 
9 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 successful. The son of his tutor, a Mr. 
 Clarke, of Enfield, discovered and encour- 
 aged the poetical faculty in the young poet, 
 whom he introduced to Leigh Hunt. Hunt 
 was ever after the warm friend of Keats, 
 whom the elder poet undoubtedly brought 
 to the notice of the public. Indeed, Hunt 
 was to Keats what Schiller was to Korner. 
 Our poet left school "with little Latin and 
 less Greek." The twelve books of the 
 "iEneid" probably constituted the limits of 
 his Latin excursions. His acquaintance 
 with the Greek mythology, which he after- 
 ward employed to such splendid purpose, 
 was derived mainly from Lempriere's Dic- 
 tionary, a volume which has not yet been 
 superseded by some modern works of a 
 more pretentious kind. The parents of 
 Keats both died while he was young. His 
 portion of the property left by them amount- 
 ed to nearly two thousand pounds. It would 
 seem that this should have sufficed to pre- 
 serve the poet from financial difficulties for 
 some time ; yet we learn of his having been 
 obliged to secure pecuniary aid almost im- 
 
iLOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 91 
 
 mediately after attaining his majority. But 
 it ought to be noted here that Keats was 
 of a generous nature, and his purse was 
 ever open to his friends, some of whom did 
 not scruple to avail themselves of his free- 
 handedness. 
 
 Just after leaving school, without his 
 wishes having been consulted in the matter, 
 he was apprenticed by his guardian to a 
 surgeon at Edmonton, where Mr. Cowden 
 Clark became his neighbor and friend. Mr. 
 Clark introduced him to the poet, Hon. 
 William Robert Spencer, whose writings 
 at once exerted a most powerful and last- 
 ing effect on the plastic mind of the younger 
 man. Chaucer was his next passion, and 
 for a brief period he seems to have taken 
 not a little pleasure in the stormy and lurid 
 lines of Lord Byron. But Edmund Spen- 
 ser opened to Keats a new poetic world, and 
 he went racing through "The Faerie 
 Queene" like a colt newly turned to pasture. 
 Indeed, an early — if not quite the earliest 
 — attempt of Keats at verse-making was an 
 imitation of Spenser in the peculiar stanzaic 
 
92 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 form which was the invention of the latter 
 poet, and to which his name has been given. 
 In 1817 Keats, having just then come of 
 age, published his first volume of poems, 
 which exhibited unmistakable signs of 
 promise and, to the unprejudiced reader, 
 some actual performance. His most valu- 
 able acquisition in consequence of this ven- 
 ture was the acquaintance and friendship 
 of Shelley, Haydon, Godwin, Basil Mon- 
 tagu, Hazlitt, and a few others of literary 
 reputation and eminence. His political 
 views were manly and independent, and 
 Leigh Hunt was known to be his friend. 
 These were sins which never could be for- 
 given by the Quarterly Review. In that 
 partisan publication literary judgment and 
 preferment were invariably meted out ac- 
 cording to political congeniality of senti- 
 ments. Its writers were both servile and 
 scurrilous, and with them a new author like 
 Keats was but a foil for their bigotry and 
 literary charlatanism. He was comparative- 
 ly friendless and unknown, and even had 
 he appealed to the public he could hardly 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 93 
 
 have attracted notice, since he was yet but 
 an obscure maker of verses not at all in the 
 prevailing vogue. Hence, Gifford, the edi- 
 tor of the Quarterly, vented his spleen upon 
 his inoffensive victim, conscious of immuni- 
 ty amid it all, since the object of his attack 
 could no more than turn upon him as the 
 worm turns beneath the foot that crushes 
 it. A scion of the nobility, infected with 
 cacoethes scribendi, might have scribbled 
 the veriest nonsense and been certain of 
 flattery and applause; but a singular 
 genius, brilliant as singular, springing up 
 of its own vitality in an out-of-the-way 
 corner, was by all means to be extinguished. 
 Gifford had formerly been a cobbler, and 
 the son of the livery stable keeper was not 
 worthy his critical sufferance. Thus it is 
 ever with those narrow-minded persons 
 who, by the power or caprice of accident, 
 rise from a vulgar obscurity into the public 
 view; they never can tolerate a brother in 
 good fortune, much less superior force or 
 talents in that brother. 
 
 On the publication of Keats's next work, 
 7 
 
94 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 "Endymion," Gifford attacked it with all 
 the bitterness of which his pen was capable, 
 and did not hesitate, before he saw the 
 poem, to announce to the publisher his fell 
 intention. Keats had endeavored, as much 
 as was consistent with honesty and inde- 
 pendence, to conciliate the critics at large, 
 as may be observed in the brief preface to 
 "Endymion." It seems almost incredible, 
 at the present stage of literary progress, 
 that such a swashbuckling style of criti- 
 cism as that indulged in by Blackzvood's 
 and the Quarterly Review should have 
 passed current with any respectable portion 
 of an enlightened public ; and to their credit 
 be it said that here and there generous 
 voices were raised, the kindly utterances of 
 which must have been as balm to the hurts 
 of the young poet's soul. He merited to be 
 treated with lenity, not wounded with the 
 envenomed shafts of political animosity for 
 errors of literary taste which time was cer- 
 tain to correct. Of intense sentitiveness, 
 and his frame already touched by a mortal 
 distemper, he felt that his hopes were 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 95 
 
 blighted and his attempts to obtain honora- 
 ble public notice frustrated. Some years 
 ago an article appeared in the North British 
 Review in which the writer sought to prove 
 that the critiques in the Quarterly had ex- 
 erted no influence whatever in inducing the 
 fatal disease by which Keats 's earthly ca- 
 reer was so early terminated. In more re- 
 cent articles from various pens, celebrating 
 the centennial of the birth of Keats, the 
 same views have been advanced. But 
 Chambers, alluding to the "Endymion," 
 says: 
 
 The poem was criticised in a strain of contemp- 
 tuous severity by the Quarterly Review; and such 
 was the sensitiveness of the young poet panting for 
 distinction, and flattered by a few private friends, 
 that the critique embittered his existence and in- 
 duced a fatal disease. 
 
 And this is the testimony of Shelley in the 
 days long before the present log-rolling set 
 of London would have rendered such wit- 
 ness unnecessary, if not impossible: 
 
 The first effects are described to me to have re- 
 sembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching 
 that he was restrained from effecting purposes of 
 
9 6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 suicide. The agony of his sufferings at length pro- 
 duced the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs, and 
 the usual process of consumption appears to have 
 begun. 
 
 Shelley's fearful arraignment of GifTord 
 in the prefatory note to "Adonais" lends 
 additional emphasis to the foregoing words. 
 Lord Byron, alluding to Keats in the 
 eleventh canto of "Don Juan," says : 
 
 Poor fellow ! his was an untoward fate : 
 "lis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, 
 Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article. 
 
 Keats's book abounded with passages of 
 rarest beauty and truest poetry, and it is 
 difficult to decide whether the cowardice or 
 the cruelty of the attack most deserves ex- 
 ecration. The following lines, taken from 
 the poem almost at random, represent En- 
 dymion as wandering in semi-madness 
 through the underworld, and there coming 
 unexpectedly upon the sleeping Adonis: 
 
 After a thousand mazes overgone, 
 At last, with sudden step, he came upon 
 A chamber, myrtle-walled, embower'd high, 
 Full of light, incense, tender minstrelsy, 
 And more of beautiful and strange beside: 
 For on a silken couch of rosy pride, 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 97 
 
 In midst of all, there lay a sleeping youth 
 
 Of fondest beauty ; fonder, in fair sooth, 
 
 Than sighs could fathom, or contentment reach ; 
 
 And coverlids gold-tinted like the peach, 
 
 Or ripe October's faded marigolds, 
 
 Fell sleek about him in a thousand folds — 
 
 Not hiding up an Apollonian curve 
 
 Of neck and shoulder, nor the tenting swerve 
 
 Of knee from knee, nor ankles pointing light ; 
 
 But rather giving them to the fill'd sight 
 
 Officiously. Sideway his face reposed 
 
 On one white arm, and tenderly unclosed, 
 
 By tenderest pressure, a faint damask mouth 
 
 To slumbering pout ; just as the morning south 
 
 Disparts a dew-lipp'd rose. . . . Hard by 
 
 Stood serene cupids watching silently. 
 
 One, kneeling to a lyre, touched the strings, 
 
 Muffling to death the pathos with his wings, 
 
 And, ever and anon, uprose to look 
 
 At the youth's slumber ; while another took 
 
 A willow bough, distilling odorous dew, 
 
 And shook it on his hair ; another flew 
 
 In through the woven roof, and fluttering-wise 
 
 Rain'd violets upon his sleeping eyes. 
 
 The following stanzas from "The Eve of 
 St. Agnes" are distinctly in advance of the 
 previous quotation, both in manner and 
 power of expression. Keats progressed in 
 his art to the very period of his "taking 
 off." 
 
98 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Out went the taper as she hurried in ; 
 Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine died : 
 She closed the door, she panted all akin 
 To spirits of the air, and visions wide : 
 No uttered syllable, or, woe betide ! 
 But to her heart, her heart was voluble, 
 Paining with eloquence her balmy side ; 
 As though a tongueless nightingale should swell 
 Her throat in vain, and die, heart stifled, in her 
 dell. 
 
 A casement high and triple-arch'd there was, 
 All garlanded with carven 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. 
 
 One of Keats's latest essays in poetry 
 was the stately but incomplete "Hyperion." 
 For powerful word - painting, gloomy 
 grandeur of conception, and the self-poised, 
 almost weird, skill with which the entire 
 picture is produced stroke by stroke, it 
 would be difficult to match the selection 
 which follows: 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 99 
 
 Deep in the shady sadness of a vale, 
 
 Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, 
 
 Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, 
 
 Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone, 
 
 Still as the silence round about his lair; 
 
 Forest on forest hung about his head 
 
 Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, 
 
 Not so much life as on a summer's day 
 
 Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, 
 
 But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. 
 
 A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more 
 
 By reason of his fallen divinity 
 
 Spreading a shade : the naiad, 'mid her reeds, 
 
 Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips. 
 
 Along the margin-sand large footmarks went, 
 
 No further than to where his feet had stray'd, 
 
 And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground 
 
 His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, 
 
 Unsceptered ; and his realmless eyes were closed ; 
 
 While his bow'd head seemed list'ning to the earth, 
 
 His ancient mother, for some comfort yet. 
 
 Lord Byron, who justly regarded the 
 death of Keats as a loss to English litera- 
 ture, said of the poem from which the fore- 
 going lines are taken: "His fragment of 
 'Hyperion' seems actually inspired by the 
 Titans, and is as sublime as iEschylus." 
 Amid the world's sweetest songs will ever 
 be cherished the subtly beautiful "Ode to 
 
 [Lore. 
 
ioo LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 the Nightingale." The intense sympathy 
 with the great deep which seemed to pos- 
 sess the young poet has probably been ex- 
 perienced in equal degree by but one other 
 "builder of lofty rhyme" — namely, Swin- 
 burne. This sonnet stands in evidence of 
 the manner in which Keats could write of 
 the sea: 
 
 It keeps eternal whisperings around 
 
 Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell 
 Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell 
 
 Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. 
 
 Often 'tis in such gentle temper found 
 That scarcely will the very smallest shell 
 Be moved for days from where it sometime fell 
 
 When last the winds of heaven were unbound. 
 
 O, ye who have your eyeballs vexed and tired, 
 Feast them upon the wideness of the sea ; 
 
 O, ye whose ears are dimmed with uproar rude, 
 Or fed too much with cloying melody, 
 
 Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth and brood 
 Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired. 
 
 Perhaps no other poet, save Goethe, has 
 ever obtained such immediate entrance into 
 the lovely and precious arcana of nature. 
 To the eye of Keats nature unveiled her 
 most secret charm. Let it not for a mo- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 101 
 
 merit be believed that his extraordinary gift 
 was but the result of an abnormal and mor- 
 bid habit of sensation. Genius, whatever 
 the forms it may assume, not seldom reaches 
 its rarest perfection where common life is 
 most dreary and inane. Read the riddle, 
 ye who can. It has been said that Keats's 
 friendships were always founded on a slight 
 and unsubstantial basis, that his own nature 
 was so preeminently selfish and his every 
 aspiration so self-involved, that every 
 friendship was rendered precarious which 
 he ever formed. Schiller, in a letter to 
 Korner, said, "O how beautiful and divine 
 is the union of two souls which meet on 
 their way to the Godhead !" The whole 
 story of Keats's life determines that he felt 
 no less the potency of a genuine friendship ; 
 otherwise it were passing strange that he 
 should have been able to knit to himself 
 with bands stronger than steel such a man 
 as Severn, who, through all that prolonged 
 tragedy of the poet's final sufferings, proved 
 the ultimate possibilities of human devo- 
 tion. In a letter to a friend Keats says : 
 
102 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 We cannot expect to give away many hours to 
 pleasure; circumstances are like clouds, continually 
 gathering and bursting while we are laughing. The 
 seed of trouble is put into the wide arable land of 
 events; while we are laughing at sprouts it grows, 
 and suddenly bears a poisonous fruit, which we must 
 pluck. Even so we have leisure to reason on the 
 misfortunes of our friends ; our own touch us too 
 nearly for words. 
 
 Here appear those rigid habits of intro- 
 spection practiced by every great mind, but 
 not that self-centering of the impulses of 
 love so destructive of every gracious emo- 
 tion. The poet well knew the value of a 
 human soul: 
 
 That man is more than half of nature's treasure, 
 
 Of that fair beauty which no eye can see, 
 
 Of that sweet music which no ear can measure. 
 
 About two years before the death of 
 Keats the one great event of his life began 
 — his love affair. A new phase is now dis- 
 covered in the character of the poet, flatly 
 contradicting those who have denied that 
 he was capable of intense passion, thereby 
 depriving all future works he might have 
 produced, had he lived, of the force and 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 103 
 
 substance which the works he has left us 
 do not possess. In his letters, edited by 
 Milnes, and published many years ago, we 
 obtain a few distinct and vivid glimpses of 
 the object of his desires. He writes to his 
 sister : 
 
 She is not a Cleopatra, but at least a Charmian ; 
 she has a rich Eastern look, she has fine eyes and 
 manners. When she comes into the room she makes 
 the same impression as the beauty of a leopardess ; 
 she is too fine and conscious of herself to repulse any 
 man that may address her ; from habit she thinks 
 that nothing particular: I always find myself more 
 at ease with such a woman. 
 
 She is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way, for 
 there are two distinct tempers of mind in which we 
 judge of things — the worldly, theatrical, pantomim- 
 ical, and the unearthly, spiritual, and ethereal. In 
 the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron, and the Char- 
 mian hold the first place in our minds ; in the latter, 
 John Howard, Bishop Hooker, rocking his child's 
 cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the conquering 
 feelings. As a man of the world I love the rich talk 
 of a Charmian ; as an eternal being I love the 
 thought of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I 
 should like you to save me. 
 
 This concluding sentence, though sound- 
 ing very much like nonsense, is nevertheless 
 not unimportant. It is obvious that when 
 
104 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Keats wrote it the first alternative would 
 have seemed preferable to the second. In- 
 deed, his subsequent story shows beyond 
 question that the "worldly, theatrical, pan- 
 tomimicar' decidedly outweighed, in the 
 poet's practical estimation, the "unearthly, 
 spiritual, and ethereal." This "Charmian," 
 whatever the fair qualities of mind and 
 heart of which she may have been possessed, 
 soon brought into captivity the profoundest 
 impulses of her lover's nature, simply by 
 the peculiar character of her personal at- 
 tractions. Nor does it appear that Fanny 
 Brawne scorned the advances of the ardent 
 poet, though she seems to have been far 
 from experiencing toward him an equal 
 fervor of devotion. She was not inconsola- 
 ble at his loss, and after his pitiful death 
 duly settled down to the duties of a com- 
 monplace English housewife. It is almost 
 a sarcasm of destiny that she has been pre- 
 served from oblivion alone by her associa- 
 tion with the hectic, passionate, and queru- 
 lous young man whose memory she evidently 
 held in slight regard. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 105 
 
 It may not be uninteresting to here set 
 in juxtaposition marriage views so entirely 
 dissimilar as those of Schiller and Keats. 
 In a letter to a friend Schiller said : 
 
 I must marry — that is settled. All my induce- 
 ments to life and activity are worn out ; this is the 
 only one which I have not tried. I must have a 
 being near me which belongs to me, which I can and 
 must make happy. You know how desolate is my 
 spirit, how melancholy my ideas. If I cannot weave 
 hope into my existence — hope which has almost de- 
 serted me — if I cannot wind up anew the run-down 
 machinery of my thoughts and feelings, it will soon 
 be all over with me. 
 
 Keats, whose sentiments at one time were 
 the direct antitheses of Schiller's, wrote to 
 a newly married brother in America: • 
 
 Notwithstanding your happiness and your recom- 
 mendations, I hope I shall never marry. Though 
 the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at 
 the end of a journey or walk, though the carpet were 
 made of silk and the curtain of the morning clouds, 
 the chairs and sofas stuffed with cygnet's down, the 
 food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window 
 opening on Windemere, I should not feel, or rather 
 my happiness should not be so fine ; and my solitude 
 is sublime. Then, instead of what I have described, 
 there is a sublimity to welcome me home ; the roar- 
 ing of the wind is my wife, the stars through my 
 
106 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 window-panes are my children. The mighty abstract 
 idea of beauty in all things I have stifles the more 
 divided and minute domestic happiness. An ami- 
 able wife and sweet children I contemplate as parts 
 of that beauty, but I must have a thousand of those 
 beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more 
 and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, 
 that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thou- 
 sand worlds. . . . Those things, combined with the 
 opinion I have formed of the quality of women, who 
 appear to me as children, to whom I would rather 
 give a sugarplum than my time, form a barrier 
 against matrimony which I rejoice in. 
 
 That Keats completely revised his judg- 
 ments in the particulars of which this letter 
 treats, the quotations previously presented 
 abundantly prove. The following lines, ad- 
 dressed to Mr. J. K. Reynolds before the 
 time the "Charmian" fever overtook him, 
 and when his health was already failing, 
 also denote that Keats's views of the subject 
 had undergone a change: 
 
 One of the first pleasures I look to is your happy 
 marriage, the more so since I have felt the pleasure 
 of loving a sister-in-law. I did not think it possible 
 to become so much attached in so short a time ; 
 things like these, and they are real, have made me 
 resolve to have a care of my health. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 107 
 
 Of the religious sentiments of the poet 
 not much needs to be written. In one of his 
 letters he thus meditates : 
 
 Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be 
 hated, the energies displayed in it are fine ; the com- 
 monest man shows a grace in his quarrel. By a 
 superior being our reasonings may take the same 
 tone ; though erroneous, they may be fine. 
 
 On one occasion he falls into the vulgar 
 impiety of juxtaposing our Saviour and 
 Socrates. That the mind of Keats was in 
 a transitional state is evident. Through all 
 his spiritual mutations appear an earnest- 
 ness of purpose and an unbaffled groping 
 after a high and fleeting ideal, lovely 
 glimpses of which have been flashed upon 
 his inner vision. In another letter he says : 
 
 I have, of late, been molting — not for fresh 
 feathers and wings ; they are gone, and in their stead 
 I hope to have a pair of sublunary legs. I have al- 
 tered — not from a chrysalis into a butterfly, but the 
 contrary. ... A year ago I could not understand 
 in the slightest degree Raphael's cartoons ; now I 
 begin to read them a little. . . . Some think I have 
 lost that poetic fire and ardor I once had ; the fact 
 is, I perhaps have, but instead of that I hope I shall 
 substitute a more thoughtful and quiet power. 
 
108 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Though the poetry of Keats is mainly 
 objective in its character, and as such ex- 
 hibits the most minute and careful observa- 
 tion, he did not lack those prolonged and 
 profound inward searchings which prove 
 to the serious and inquiring mind of how 
 much greater interest is the esoteric than 
 the exoteric world. The sonnet here pre- 
 sented reveals the undaunted and undefeat- 
 ed self-examinations of a courageous spirit : 
 
 Why did I laugh to-night? no voice will tell, 
 
 No God, no demon of severe response 
 Deigns to reply from heaven or from hell ; 
 
 Then to my human heart I turn at once — 
 Heart ! thou and I are here, sad and alone ; 
 
 I say, wherefore did I laugh ? — O mortal pain ! 
 O ! darkness ! darkness ! ever must I moan 
 
 To question heaven and hell and heart in vain — 
 Why did I laugh ? I know this being's lease 
 
 My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads, 
 Yet could I on this very midnight cease, 
 
 And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds ; 
 Verse, fame, and beauty are intense indeed, 
 But death intenser, death is life's high meed. 
 
 The following extract from still another 
 letter will illustrate the passionate, almost 
 rapturous, pleasure he experienced in the 
 composition of his works. He says : 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 109 
 
 This morning poetry has conquered. I have re- 
 lapsed into those abstractions which are my only 
 life. I feel escaped from a new and threatening sor- 
 row ; and am thankful for it. There is an awful 
 warmth about my heart like a load of immortality. 
 
 Of the poetical character he observes : 
 
 It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an 
 Imogene. What shocks the virtuous philosopher 
 delights the chameleon poet. ... A poet is the most 
 unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has 
 no identity ; he is continually in for and rilling some 
 other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men 
 and women, who are creatures of an impulse, are 
 poetical, and have about them an unchangeable at- 
 tribute ; the poet has none ; no identity ; he is cer- 
 tainly the most unpoetical of all God's creatures. 
 
 That Keats was not a finished writer 
 must, perhaps, be conceded; but that, like 
 Korner, the poet-hero of Germany, he gave 
 rich promise of a glorious fruitage will be 
 granted. And they must indeed be poor 
 judges of literature who are not delighted 
 with what he has left. 
 
 A few words as to the temperament and 
 personal appearance of the poet. His tem- 
 per, until just before his death, always was 
 of the gentlest description. It has already 
 8 
 
no LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 been remarked that he was a person of 
 strong and irritable sensibilities, and so 
 extreme was his sensitiveness that he would 
 betray emotion even to tears on hearing of 
 a noble action, or at the expression of a 
 glowing thought or one of pathetic tender- 
 ness ; yet both his moral and physical cour- 
 age were above suspicion. The physiog- 
 nomy of the poet was indicative of his char- 
 acter. Sensibility was predominant, but 
 there was no lack of power in the somewhat 
 pugnacious nose and mouth. His features 
 were clearly defined, and delicately suscep- 
 tible of every impression. His eyes were 
 large and shadowy, his cheeks hollow and 
 sunken, and his face pallid in repose. His 
 hair was brown in color, and curled natural- 
 ly. His head was small, and set upon 
 broad, high shoulders, his body was long 
 and abnormally large in proportion to his 
 lower limbs, which, however, were not un- 
 shapely. His stature was low; and "his 
 hands," says Leigh Hunt, "were faded, hav- 
 ing prominent veins, which he would look 
 upon and pronounce to belong to one who 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS in 
 
 had seen fifty years." "There is death in 
 that hand," said Coleridge, after having 
 clasped the hand of Keats. 
 
 For several years before his demise the 
 poet had felt disease creeping upon him, and 
 knew that death was already busy in a sys- 
 tem too imperfectly organized. He had im- 
 prudently neglected his own health to at- 
 tend a dying brother, when he should have 
 remembered it was also necessary to take 
 care of himself. He was combating the 
 keenness of his sorrow consequent upon his 
 bereavement by the decease of his brother, 
 when the Zoilus of the Quarterly attacked 
 him, adding new pain to his already over- 
 wrought spirit, so that he told a friend one 
 day, with tears, that "his heart was break- 
 ing." He was at length induced to try the 
 climate of Italy. Thither he went to die. 
 He was accompanied in his weakness by 
 Severn, his valuable and attached friend 
 and an artist of considerable talent. They 
 first went to Naples, thence journeying to 
 Rome, where Keats closed his eyes on this 
 world February 24, 182 1, being a little more 
 
ii2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 than twenty-five years of age. He eagerly 
 wished for death, and shortly before he died 
 he said he "felt the daisies growing over 
 him." "He suffered so much in his linger- 
 ing," says Leigh Hunt, "that he used to 
 watch the countenance of his physician for 
 the favorable and fatal sentence, and ex- 
 press regret when he found it delayed." 
 His remains were deposited in the cemetery 
 of the Protestants at Rome, at the foot of 
 the pyramid of Caius Cestius, near the Porta 
 San Paolo. "It might make one in love 
 with death," wrote Shelley, "to think that 
 one should be buried in so sweet a place." 
 A white marble tombstone, bearing a lyre, 
 in basso relievo, and the following inscrip- 
 tion — the closing words of which were his 
 own — has been erected to his memory : 
 
 This grave contains all that was mortal of a Young 
 English Poet, who on his deathbed, in the bitterness 
 of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, 
 desired these words to be engraved on his tombstone : 
 "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." 
 Feb. 24th, 1 82 1. 
 
IV 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 115 
 
 IV 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 Few, if any, luminaries in the bright 
 galaxy of modern English novelists outshine 
 that peculiar and vivid orb the splendor of 
 which still burns steadily across "the dark 
 background and abysm of time," though 
 the glory of Trollope, Lytton, Kingsley, 
 Reade, Scott, and even Dickens and Thack- 
 eray seems to wane through the passing dec- 
 ades which have quenched so many lesser 
 lights. On the night of December 22, 1880, 
 George Eliot conquered "the fever called 
 living," and entered into her rest, only a 
 few months after the literary Grundies were 
 convulsed with astonishment at the an- 
 nouncement of the marriage of this eminent 
 woman with Mr. J. W. Cross, a London 
 banker, formerly resident in New York. It 
 has been stated that Mary Ann (or Marian) 
 Evans was the daughter of a poor clergy- 
 man who at one time was attached to the 
 
Ii6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Church of England, but eventually became 
 a Presbyterian minister. It has been de- 
 clared, also, that she was adopted in early 
 life by another clergyman of considerable 
 wealth, who afforded her opportunities for 
 securing a first-class education. These state- 
 ments are entirely inaccurate. The facts 
 of her early life are little known, and she 
 herself was characterized by the reticence 
 of genius concerning her own biographical 
 data. 
 
 Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury 
 Farm, in Warwickshire, England, Novem- 
 ber 22, 1819. She remained in the parental 
 home, first at Griff, on the same estate, and 
 afterward at Coventry, until 1849. ^ er 
 father, Robert Evans, was a land agent and 
 surveyor, and served for many years as 
 agent for the estates of more than one old 
 Warwickshire family. In the Midlands he 
 is still held in kind remembrance as a man 
 of sterling probity and uprightness of con- 
 duct. Undoubtedly this father was the 
 prototype of more than one admirable char- 
 acter in the stories of his gifted daughter. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 117 
 
 George Eliot's early years were passed in 
 the regions haunted by the memories of 
 Shakespeare. Though it is not clear just 
 how or where her education was obtained, 
 she seems to have received very careful and 
 adequate mental training. Leaving home, 
 she came to London while yet a young 
 woman, and devoted herself to serious liter- 
 ature. She became associated with John 
 Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, George Henry 
 Lewes, John Chapman, and other writers 
 in the Westminster Review, and in time 
 came to sustain an editorial connection with 
 that publication. In her twenty-sixth year 
 she published a translation of Strauss 's fa- 
 mous Life of Jesus, her first important 
 work. Eight years later appeared her trans- 
 lation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christian- 
 ity. The dialectic nature of the products of 
 her pen introduced her to the philosophic 
 society of that period, of which she soon 
 became a leading member. It is a question 
 whether the abstruse studies in which she 
 engaged were of any great advantage to 
 her in her equipment as a novelist, though 
 
n8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 doubtless in mental poise and accuracy in 
 the use of language she was steadied and 
 guided by the discipline which she received 
 in her philosophic researches. 
 
 Such a genius as Miss Evans possessed 
 could not long remain in the thralls of pure 
 didacticism, and at the suggestion of Her- 
 bert Spencer she entered the field of the 
 novelist. The nom de plume "George Eliot" 
 she employed for the first time when her 
 initial work of fiction was sent to Black- 
 wood's Magazine. The manuscript of this 
 book, Scenes of Clerical Life, was dis- 
 patched anonymously to the editor of Black- 
 wood's, who at once accepted it, believing 
 that he discovered in it the first fruits of an 
 unusual and superior ability. George Henry 
 Lewes acted as Miss Evans's agent and ad- 
 viser in this transaction, and about the same 
 time began that intimate association and 
 literary companionship which was to termi- 
 nate only with the death of Lewes, in 1878. 
 Even at this day it is difficult to believe that 
 the circumstances and events of a peculiar 
 professional life, depicted with such rare 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 119 
 
 skill, pathos, and fidelity, were not at some 
 time included in the writer's personal ex- 
 perience. This earliest book of stories re- 
 vealed in George Eliot the possession of 
 that loftiest attribute of genius, the power 
 of self-effacement and the projection of the 
 author's mind with intensest sympathy into 
 her own imaginative creations, until they 
 become as real and vital as their antitypes 
 of flesh and blood. This gift is sometimes 
 called the dramatic instinct, and is disclosed 
 in its perfection by Shakespeare, and in a 
 scarcely less degree, though in an almost 
 wholly subjective relation, by Browning, 
 and, notwithstanding the eccentric manner 
 of its presentation, in another realm by 
 George Meredith. Of the work of an au- 
 thor endowed with the dramatic instinct in 
 its highest form the delighted reader might 
 say, as Emerson remarked of Montaigne's 
 essays, "Cut these words, and they would 
 bleed/' It is hardly possible to illustrate 
 our meaning by any passage w r renched from 
 its connection, unless it be one which, with 
 its context, is familiar to the reader and in 
 
120 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 his thought receives emphasis from its set- 
 ting in the completed story. However, we 
 will venture the following excerpt from 
 Middlemarch. It is a portion of that chap- 
 ter descriptive of the scene between Will 
 Ladislaw and Rosamond Lydgate after they 
 have been surprised by Dorothea Casaubon 
 in a confidential interview : 
 
 It would have been safe for Will, in the first in- 
 stance, to have taken up his hat and gone away ; but 
 he had felt no impulse to do this ; on the contrary, 
 he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter 
 Rosamond with his anger. It seemed as impossible 
 to bear the fatality she had drawn down on him 
 without venting his fury as it would be to a panther 
 to bear the javelin wound without springing and 
 biting. And yet — how could he tell a woman that he 
 was ready to curse her? He was fuming under a 
 repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge. 
 He was dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice 
 now brought the decisive vibration. In flutelike 
 tones of sarcasm she said : 
 
 "You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and ex- 
 plain your preference." 
 
 "Go after her !" he burst out, with a sharp edge in 
 his voice. "Do you think she would turn to look at 
 me, or value any word I ever uttered to her again as 
 more than a dirty feather? Explain! How can a 
 man explain at the expense of a woman ?" 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 121 
 
 "You can tell her what you please," said Rosa- 
 mond, with more tremor. 
 
 "Do you suppose she would like me better for sac- 
 rificing you? She is not a woman to be flattered 
 because I made myself despicable — to believe that I 
 must be true to her because I was a dastard to you." 
 
 He began to move about with the restlessness of a 
 wild animal that sees prey but cannot reach it. Pres- 
 ently he burst out again : 
 
 "I had no hope before — not much — of anything 
 better to come. But I had one certainty — that she 
 believed in me. Whatever people had said or done 
 about me, she believed in me. That's gone ! She'll 
 never again think me anything but a paltry pretense 
 — too nice to take heaven except upon flattering con- 
 ditions, and yet selling myself for any devil's change 
 by the sly. She'll think of me as an incarnate insult 
 to her, from the first moment we — " 
 
 Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping 
 something that must not be thrown and shattered. 
 He found another vent for his rage by snatching up 
 Rosamond's words again, as if they were reptiles to 
 be throttled and flung off. 
 
 "Explain ! Tell a man to explain how he dropped 
 into hell ! Explain my preference ! I never had a 
 preference for her, any more than I have a preference 
 for breathing. No other woman exists by the side 
 of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were 
 dead than I would touch any other woman's living." 
 
 Not a little has been said regarding 
 George Eliot's tendency to moralize, again 
 
122 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 and again interrupting the course of her 
 narrative to deliver a homily more or less 
 obvious even to the casual reader. This 
 may or may not be true ; in the opinion of 
 at least one of her readers George Eliot's 
 preachments are of a kind that we could 
 illy spare in a world which is not too easily 
 impressed with the value of moral excel- 
 lence and the things "pure," "lovely," and 
 "of good report." To return to Scenes of 
 Clerical Life, who that traverses "Mr. 
 GilfiTs Love Story" would be content to 
 omit from it such reflections, mingled with 
 glimpses of natural phenomena, as follows? 
 
 The inexorable ticking of the clock is like the 
 throb of pain to sensations made keen by a sickening 
 fear. And so it is with the great clockwork of na- 
 ture. Daisies and buttercups give way to the brown 
 waving grasses, tinged with the warm red sorrel ; the 
 waving grasses are swept away, and the meadows lie 
 like emeralds set in the bushy hedgerows ; the 
 tawny-tipped corn begins to bow with the weight of 
 the full ear ; the reapers are bending amongst it, and 
 it soon stands in sheaves ; then, presently, the patches 
 of yellow stubble lie side by side with streaks of 
 dark-red earth, which the plow is turning up in 
 preparation for the new-threshed seed. And this 
 passage from beauty to beauty, which to the happy is 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 123 
 
 like the flow of a melody, measures for many a hu- 
 man heart the approach of foreseen anguish — seems 
 hurrying on the moment when the shadow of dread 
 will be followed up by the reality of despair. . . . 
 
 While this poor little heart was being bruised with 
 a weight too heavy for it nature was holding on her 
 calm, inexorable way, in unmoved and terrible 
 beauty. The stars were rushing in their eternal 
 courses ; the tides swelled to the level of the last ex- 
 pectant weed ; the sun was making brilliant day to 
 busy nations on the other side of the swift earth. 
 The stream of human thought and deed was hurry- 
 ing and broadening onward. The astronomer was 
 at his telescope ; the great ships were laboring over 
 the waves ; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the 
 fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in brief 
 rest ; and sleepless statesmen were dreading the pos- 
 sible crisis of the morrow. What were our little 
 Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent, rushing 
 from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than 
 the smallest center of quivering life in the water 
 drop, hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish 
 in the breast of the tiniest bird that has fluttered 
 down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has 
 found the nest torn and empty. 
 
 The three stones, "The Sad Fortunes of 
 the Reverend Amos Barton," "Mr. GilfiFs 
 Love Story," and "Janet's Repentance," 
 which constitute Scenes of Clerical Life, 
 scarcely betray the hand of the novice. So 
 
124 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 well managed and easy is the dialogue, so 
 smooth are the transitions of the narrative, 
 so finely balanced and adjusted are all the 
 elements of the characters portrayed, that 
 Miss Evans seems to have appeared com- 
 pletely equipped in the literary arena, as 
 Minerva is said to have emerged full-armed 
 from the brow of Jupiter. Though, at this 
 day, it would seem that anyone possessed of 
 literary perception must have discovered in 
 these tales of provincial life evidences of 
 the remarkable imaginative fertility and in- 
 tellectual richness of the author's mind, it 
 was not until the publication of her next 
 story, Adam Bede, in 1857, that her reputa- 
 tion was assured as a fresh and cogent per- 
 sonality in the field of letters. Upon the 
 appearance of this new book George Eliot 
 sprang at a single bound into the very van 
 of modern British novelists. Adam Bede 
 has been criticised on at least two grounds : 
 first, it is alleged that the story presents a 
 false and distorted portrayal of "the people 
 called Methodists ;" and, second, that in cer- 
 tain portions of the book subjects tabooed 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 125 
 
 in polite circles are treated with indelicacy. 
 As to the first objection, anyone familiar 
 with the history of early Methodism in Eng- 
 land will exonerate the author of Adam 
 Bede from the charge of inaccuracy or a 
 willful perversion of facts. It cannot be 
 denied that, amid the varying phases, the 
 stirring scenes, and the intense agitation of 
 rude but earnest human nature, early Meth- 
 odism produced strange and diverse devel- 
 opments both of piety and conduct. The 
 second charge would scarcely be insisted on 
 in these days by any person at all familiar 
 with the products of some recent writers of 
 fiction — though the signs of a healthful re- 
 action against the pruriency of much recent 
 so-called literature, and the demand for 
 Stevenson's, Weyman's, Doyle's, Hope's, 
 and Crockett's romances of derring-do and 
 chivalrous adventure, indicate a return to 
 good old Sir Walter's knightly tales, and 
 the generous and sweetly human pages of 
 Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, Reade, 
 Trollope, and Kingsley. 
 
 With what strength and delicacy George 
 9 
 
126 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Eliot can treat these subjects which are 
 generally tabooed the ensuing passage from 
 Adam Bede attests : 
 
 It was about ten o'clock when Hetty set off, and 
 the slight hoarfrost that had whitened the hedges in 
 the early morning had disappeared as the sun 
 mounted the cloudless sky. Bright February days 
 have a stronger charm of hope about them than any 
 other days in the year. One likes to pause in the 
 mild rays of the sun and look over the gate at the 
 patient plow horses turning at the end of the furrow, 
 and think that the beautiful year is all before one. 
 The birds seem to feel just the same; their notes 
 are as clear as the clear air. There are no leaves on 
 the trees and hedgerows, but how green all the 
 grassy fields are ! and the dark purplish brown of 
 the plowed earth and the bare branches is beautiful, 
 too. What a glad world this looks as one drives or 
 rides along the valleys and over the hills ! I have 
 often thought so when, in foreign countries, where 
 the fields and woods have looked to me like our Eng- 
 lish Loamshire — the rich land tilled with just as 
 much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes 
 to the green meadows — I have come on something 
 by the roadside which has reminded me that I am 
 not in Loamshire : an image of a great agony — the 
 agony of the cross. It has stood, perhaps, by the 
 clustering apple blossoms, or in the broad sunshine 
 by the cornfield, or at a turning by the wood where a 
 clear brook was gurgling below ; and surely, if there 
 came a traveler to this world who knew nothing of 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 127 
 
 the story of man's life upon it, this image of agony 
 would seem to him strangely out of place in the 
 midst of this joyous nature. He would not know 
 that, hidden behind the apple blossoms, or among the 
 golden corn, or under the shrouding boughs of the 
 wood, there might be a human heart beating heavily 
 with anguish — perhaps a young blooming girl, not 
 knowing where to turn for refuge from swift-ad- 
 vancing shame ; understanding no more of this life 
 of ours than a foolish lost lamb wandering farther 
 and farther in the nightfall on the lonely heath, yet 
 tasting the bitterest of life's bitterness. 
 
 Such things are sometimes hidden among the sunny 
 fields and behind the blossoming orchards ; and the 
 sound of the gurgling brook, if you came close to 
 one spot behind a small bush, would be mingled for 
 your ear with a despairing human sob. No wonder 
 man's religion has much sorrow in it ; no wonder he 
 needs a suffering God. 
 
 Hetty, in her red cloak and warm bonnet, with her 
 basket in her hand, is turning toward a gate by the 
 side of the Treddleston road, but not that she may 
 have a more lingering enjoyment of the sunshine and 
 think hope of the long unfolding year. She hardly 
 knows that the sun is shining ; and for weeks now, 
 when she has hoped at all, it has been for something 
 at which she herself trembles and shudders. She 
 only wants to be out of the high road, that she may 
 walk slowly, and not care how her face looks 
 as she dwells on wretched thoughts ; and through 
 this gate she can get into a field path behind the 
 wide, thick hedgerows. Her great dark eyes wander 
 
128 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 blankly over the fields like the eyes of one who is 
 desolate, homeless, unloved, not the promised bride 
 of a brave, tender man. But there are no tears in 
 them ; her tears were all wept away in the weary 
 night before she went to sleep. 
 
 After the publication of Adam Bede, in 
 rapid succession followed The Mill on the 
 Floss, Silas Mamer, Romola, Felix Holt, 
 the Radical; Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, 
 and Theophrastus Such. In the Mill on the 
 Floss is presented, with all the skill of com- 
 position, nicest choice of incident, and the 
 abounding resources of genius, the love of 
 a brother and sister who in their death were 
 not divided. But it is a moot point whether 
 in Middlemarch or Romola the splendid lit- 
 erary ability of George Eliot reached its 
 highest level. Perhaps the honors are about 
 equally divided between the two volumes. 
 In Romola the figure of Savonarola, the Do- 
 minican monk — imposing, dark, mysterious 
 — stalks amid the lurid and stormy scenes 
 which in Florence made tragic the closing 
 years of the corrupt century in which he 
 lived. It is with a loving hand that the 
 writer has painted, stroke by stroke, the 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 129 
 
 portrait of the great preacher and reformer; 
 impressing upon her readers, in a manner 
 never to be forgotten, the Frate's fiery elo- 
 quence, his consuming earnestness, his un- 
 compromising boldness, his refinement and 
 mysticism. The strong resemblance which 
 the countenance of George Eliot bore to 
 that of Savonarola has frequently been re- 
 marked, and it may have been the uncon- 
 scious sympathy thus engendered within 
 her that enabled her to produce so vital and 
 memorable a portrayal of the Florentine 
 prophet. One of the most artistically 
 wrought, as well as realistic, incidents of 
 modern fiction is that wherein Tito Melema 
 escapes death by drowning in the stream 
 only to meet it in the long grass on the river 
 bank at the hands of his injured and fren- 
 zied father. This passage will also serve 
 as an adequate example of the method by 
 which George Eliot produces, word by word 
 and sentence by sentence, the culminating 
 and abiding impression: 
 
 Tito knew him, but he did not know whether it 
 was life or death that had brought him into the pres- 
 
i 3 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 ence of his injured father. It might be death — and 
 death might mean this chill gloom, with the face of 
 the hideous past hanging over him forever. 
 
 But now Baldassarre's only dread was lest the 
 young limbs should escape him. He pressed his 
 knuckles against the round throat and knelt upon 
 the chest with all the force of his aged frame. Let 
 death come now. 
 
 Again he kept watch on the face. And when the 
 eyes were rigid again he dared not trust them. He 
 would never lose his hold till some one came and 
 found them. Justice would send some witness, and 
 then he, Baldassarre, would declare that he had killed 
 this traitor, to whom he had once been a father. 
 They would, perhaps, believe him now, and then he 
 would be content with struggle of justice on earth — 
 then he would desire to die with his hold on this 
 body, and follow the traitor to hell that he might 
 clutch him there. 
 
 And so he knelt, and so he pressed his knuckles 
 against the round throat, without trusting to the 
 seeming death, till the light got strong, and he could 
 kneel no longer. Then he sat on the body, still 
 clutching the neck of the tunic. But the hours went 
 on, and no witness came. No eyes descried, afar 
 off, the two human bodies among the tall grass by 
 the riverside. Florence was busy with greater af- 
 fairs and the preparation of a deeper tragedy. 
 
 Not long after these two bodies were lying in the 
 grass Savonarola was being tortured, and crying out 
 in his agony, "I will confess." 
 
 It was not until the sun was westward that a 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 131 
 
 wagon, drawn by a mild gray ox, came to the edge 
 of the grassy margin, and as the man who led it 
 was leaning to gather up the round stones that lay 
 heaped in readiness to be carried away he detected 
 some startling object in the grass. The aged man 
 had fallen forward, and his dead clutch was on the 
 garment of the other. It was not possible to separate 
 them — nay, it was better to put them into the wagon 
 and carry them as they were into the great Piazza, 
 that notice might be given to the Eight. 
 
 Romola is not George Eliot's most popu- 
 lar novel, but, as illustrating her vast con- 
 structive skill, the polemical bias of her 
 mind, the singular ability with which she 
 could turn current traditions and historical 
 events to the novelist's account, her wide 
 acquaintance with ancient and mediaeval lit- 
 erature, and her power of absorbing the 
 peculiar aura of an ardent nationality, this 
 book will always be considered among her 
 best. The virile quality of this great 
 woman's writings is indicated by the fact 
 that for years the pseudonym under which 
 she wrote was accepted as the genuine name 
 of a man of extraordinary genius and 
 knowledge. We know of but one other 
 such instance of equal interest on record, 
 
i 3 2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 and that is of a notable French woman who 
 for many years sent forth her writings to 
 the world under the fictitious name of 
 George Sand. 
 
 The private life of George Eliot has been 
 made the subject of much unfair and igno- 
 rant discussion. The paucity of details re- 
 garding her domestic affairs renders it not 
 altogether safe to pronounce judgment upon 
 what may, superficially, perhaps, appear to 
 be a violation of the sanctity of the mar- 
 riage bond. It has already been stated that 
 the manuscript of Scenes of Clerical Life 
 was sent to the publishers of Blackwood's 
 Magazine by George Henry Lewes. Mr. 
 Lewes was a student of philosophy, the au- 
 thor of a few philosophical treatises, and 
 the writer of a Life of Goethe, by which 
 work he is best known. He had a wife who 
 had abandoned him two or three times ; aft- 
 er having condoned her offenses on former 
 occasions, he at last refused to countenance 
 longer her vagaries of passion, and so made 
 their separation final. He met Mary Ann 
 Evans, being attracted to her both by her 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 133 
 
 philosophical writings and admiration for 
 her superior intellectual attainments, and, 
 though Miss Evans was reticent to an ex- 
 treme degree, she was finally persuaded to 
 share with him his home. It seems to have 
 been a case of purely mental affinity. They 
 lived together in London, and henceforth 
 to her intimate friends George Eliot be- 
 came known as Mrs. Lewes. Lewes be- 
 came her literary agent and adviser, jeal- 
 ously guarding her every interest, and so 
 protecting and fostering her intellectual life 
 that she was enabled to develop it under 
 the most favorable conditions. This inti- 
 mate association and close literary friend- 
 ship terminated only with the death of Mr. 
 Lewes, in 1878. Mr. Lewes having been 
 unable to obtain a divorce from his first, 
 erring wife, the union between the philos- 
 opher and the authoress could not be ren- 
 dered legal by either Church or State, 
 though it was sanctioned by the approval 
 and good wishes of a large circle of refined 
 and intelligent personal friends. Not a few 
 persons are disposed to regard with a 
 
134 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 lenient eye the moral vagaries of the pos- 
 sessors of genius. It has been said that 
 "the being who is gifted with genius does 
 not possess it ; it possesses him, and he and 
 we have to pay the penalty." But nature is 
 a stern Nemesis, and every false position 
 into which we may be betrayed involves its 
 own sorrow and loss. In his volume en- 
 titled My Confidences Frederick Locker- 
 Lampson says: 
 
 I am sure that she [George Eliot] was very sensi- 
 tive, and must have had many a painful half hour 
 as the helpmate of Mr. Lewes. By accepting the po- 
 sition she had placed herself in opposition to the 
 moral instincts of most of those whom she held most 
 dear. Though intellectually self-contained, I believe 
 she was singularly dependent on the emotional side 
 of her nature. With her, as with nearly all women, 
 she needed a something to lean upon. Though her 
 conduct was socially indefensible, it would have been 
 cruel, it would be stupid, to judge her exactly as one 
 would judge an ordinary offender. What a genius 
 she must have had to have been able to draw so many 
 high-minded people to her ! I have an impression 
 that she felt her position acutely, and was unhappy. 
 George Eliot was much to be pitied. 
 
 And elsewhere he says of the relation of 
 George Eliot and Mr. Lewes, "He was ever 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 135 
 
 on the alert to shield her from worries and 
 annoyance, and keen to get her good terms 
 from the publishers, but somehow it seemed 
 an incongruous partnership." 
 
 George Eliot was a passionate admirer of 
 personal beauty in either man or woman, as 
 witness her descriptions of Hetty Sorrel 
 and Tito Melema. Probably this was the 
 result of intense consciousness of her own 
 deficiencies in respect to physical comeli- 
 ness. Locker-Lampson again writes: 
 
 Nature had disguised George Eliot's apparently 
 stoical yet really vehement and sensitive spirit, and 
 her soaring genius, in a homely and insignificant 
 form. Her countenance was equine — she was rather 
 like a horse, and her head had been intended for a 
 much larger body ; she was not a tall woman. She 
 wore her hair in not pleasing, out-of-fashion loops, 
 coming down on either side of her face, so hiding her 
 ears ; her garments concealed her outline — they gave 
 her a waist like a milestone. You will see her at her 
 very best in the portrait by Sir Frederick Burton. 
 To my mind George Eliot was a plain woman. 
 
 Of her habits of conversation the same 
 writer observes : 
 
 She had a measured way of conversing, restrained 
 but impressive. When I happened to call she was 
 
136 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 nearly always seated in the chimney corner on a low 
 chair, and she bent forward when she spoke. As 
 she often discussed abstract subjects, she might have 
 been thought pedantic, especially as her language 
 was sprinkled with a scientific terminology ; but I 
 do not think she was a bit of a pedant. Then, 
 though she had a very gentle voice and manner, there 
 was every now and then just a suspicion of meek 
 satire in her talk. Her sentences unwound them- 
 selves very neatly and completely, leaving the im- 
 pression of past reflection and present readiness ; 
 she spoke exceedingly well, but not with all the sim- 
 plicity and verve, the happy abandon of certain prac- 
 ticed women of the world ; however, it was in a way 
 that was far more interesting. I have been told that 
 she was most agreeable en tete-a-tete ; that when sur- 
 rounded by admirers she was apt to become orator- 
 ical — a different woman. She did not strike me as 
 witty or markedly humorous ; she was too much in 
 earnest. She spoke as if with a sense of responsi- 
 bility, and one cannot be exactly captivating when 
 one's doing that. 
 
 Of the poetry of George Eliot not much 
 needs to be written, though curiously 
 enough she herself preferred it to her nov- 
 els. It is pale and colorless, as compared 
 with the iridescent splendors of her prose 
 compositions. Her natural mode of ex- 
 pression was not in verse. While much of 
 her prose is essentially poetical, her large 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 137 
 
 powers evidently chafed under the restraints 
 and limitations imposed by metrical laws 
 and the exigencies of rhyme. While her 
 patience as an artist was long and deep, she 
 lacked that subtler gift or instinct which 
 makes the poet the seer, and whereby his 
 utterances are forged from the central fires 
 of his life. "The Legend of Jubal," "How 
 Lisa Loved the King," and "The Spanish 
 Gypsy" are the most notable of her poetical 
 writings. The didactic habit of her mind 
 quenched the singer's sibylline rage. The 
 following stanzas embody her nearest ap- 
 proach to lyric fire : 
 
 Sweet evenings come and go, love, 
 
 They came and went of yore ; 
 This evening of our life, love, 
 Shall go and come no more. 
 
 When we have passed away, love, 
 All things will keep their name; 
 
 But yet no life on earth, love, 
 With ours will be the same. 
 
 The daisies will be there, love, 
 The stars in heaven will shine; 
 
 I shall not feel thy wish, love, 
 Nor thou my hands in thine. 
 
138 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 A better time will come, love, 
 
 And better souls be born ; 
 I would not be the best, love, 
 
 To leave thee now forlorn. 
 
 If the fame of George Eliot rested upon 
 her poetry alone that fame to-day would be 
 a vanishing quantity. It is an interesting 
 psychological question, or perhaps a ques- 
 tion in mental pathology, why so many 
 great writers, unsatisfied with their noble 
 conquests in the commoner field of prose, 
 like good Captain Wegg, "drop into poetry." 
 The examples of Macaulay, Carlyle, Rus- 
 kin, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Lamb, 
 Thackeray, and, more recently, Mr. Glad- 
 stone in his translations from Horace, and 
 Meredith and Hardy, occur at once as cases 
 in point. Probably others could be recalled 
 with a little effort of the memory. But there 
 is one brief poem from the pen of George 
 Eliot which is a beautiful and dignified com- 
 position, worthy the inspired muse of the 
 most gifted of the tuneful ilk. These lines 
 have been quoted frequently, but they may 
 be introduced here as constituting the best 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 139 
 
 specimen of George Eliot's now all-but- 
 forgotten verse: 
 
 Oh may I join the choir invisible 
 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 
 In minds made better by their presence : live 
 
 In pulses stirred to generosity, 
 
 In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
 
 For miserable aims that end with self, 
 
 In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
 
 And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
 
 To vaster issues. 
 
 So to live is heaven : 
 To make undying music in the world, 
 Breathing as beauteous order that controls 
 With growing sway the growing life of man. 
 So we inherit that sweet purity 
 For which we struggled, failed, and agonized 
 With widening retrospect that bred despair. 
 Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, 
 A vicious parent shaming still its child 
 Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved ; 
 Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies, 
 Die in the large and charitable air. 
 And all our rarer, better, truer self, 
 That sobbed religiously in yearning song, 
 That watched to ease the burden of the world, 
 Laboriously tracing what must be, 
 And what may yet be better — saw within 
 A worthier image for the sanctuary, 
 And shaped it forth before the multitude 
 Divinely human, raising worship so 
 
i 4 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 To higher reverence more mixed with love — 
 That better self shall live till human Time 
 Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky 
 Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb 
 Unread forever. 
 
 This is the life to come, 
 Which martyred men have made more glorious 
 For us who strive to follow. May I reach 
 That purest heaven, be to other souls 
 The cup of strength in some great agony, 
 Enkindle generous ardor, feel pure love, 
 Beget the smiles that have no cruelty — 
 Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, 
 And in diffusion ever more intense. 
 So shall I join the choir invisible 
 Whose music is the gladness of the world. 
 
 The later works of George Eliot were 
 extremely successful in a pecuniary way. 
 She received but fifteen hundred dollars 
 for Scenes of Clerical Life. But Middle- 
 march brought her forty thousand dollars, 
 and Daniel Deronda nearly as much more. 
 Only one other female author has rivaled 
 George Eliot as regards financial rewards 
 of her work — Mrs. Humphry Ward. 
 
 Upon the death of Mr. Lewes, after a 
 year and a half of virtual widowhood, 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 141 
 
 George Eliot was married May 6, 1880, at 
 St. George's, Hanover Square, London, to 
 Mr. John Walter Cross. Mr. Cross was 
 much younger than his bride, and had long 
 been a valued and esteemed friend of both 
 herself and Mr. Lewes. Says Locker- 
 Lampson of the new union : 
 
 George Eliot's more transcendental friends never 
 forgave her for marrying. In a morally immoral 
 manner they washed their virtuous hands of her. I 
 could not help thinking it was the most natural thing 
 for the poor woman to do. She was a heavily laden 
 but interesting derelict, tossing among the breakers, 
 without oars or rudder, and all at once the brave 
 Cross arrives, throws her a rope, and gallantly tows 
 her into harbor. 
 
 A little more than seven months after 
 
 her marriage with Air. Cross, George Eliot 
 
 passed into that realm where Time himself 
 
 "shall furl his wings and cease to be." The 
 
 funeral of Air. Lewes had been held in the 
 
 mortuary chapel in Highgate Cemetery, 
 
 and there the funeral of George Eliot was 
 
 also held. It was a day of snow and slush, 
 
 and a bitter w r ind was blowing, "but still," 
 
 avers an eyewitness, "there was a remark- 
 10 
 
142 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 able gathering from all parts of England." 
 Of her burial place a writer in the London 
 Chronicle says: 
 
 When you get to the top of Swain's Lane you see 
 two gates ; take the one on the right and, entering, 
 keep to the left. The path sweeps round a little hil- 
 lock, and in a few steps you see in front of you a great 
 block of buildings. This is St. Pancras Infirmary. 
 You keep straight on until you come to the last turn- 
 ing to the left; take that, and after ten yards you 
 come on a plain gray granite obelisk and pedestal, 
 together not more than ten feet high. Without your 
 attention being called to this quiet memorial, amid so 
 many elaborate commemorations of sorrow, you 
 would pass it unnoted. But stop a moment and 
 read. This is what you see : 
 
 "Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In minds made better by their presence." 
 
 Here lies the Body of 
 "George Eliot," 
 Mary Ann Cross, 
 Born 22 November, 1819 ; 
 Died 22 December, 1880. 
 That is the simple yet eloquent inscription cut on 
 the granite pedestal in severely plain letters of gold. 
 The Spartan brevity and simplicity of it is in keep- 
 ing with the great writer's life and philosophy. 
 And the inevitableness of the "common lot" is un- 
 consciously emphasized by the fact that on her right 
 is a monument more ornate than her own, chron- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 143 
 
 icling the death of an unknown family. Here, fac- 
 ing the east and the rising sun, lie the ashes of one 
 who bore a proud name in the brilliant roll of Eng- 
 lish literature, resting after a busy life of earnest 
 purpose and much great work accomplished. Many 
 may regret that a more conspicuous, a more elaborate 
 monument does not mark the Friedensheim of the 
 author of Middlcmarch, Felix Holt, Adam Bede, and 
 Romola. These have to be reminded that George 
 Eliot's most "enduring brass' is to be found in her 
 works and the memory of her life. 
 
 There are not a few reviewers and self- 
 appointed critics who persistently talk of 
 some one's writing the great American 
 novel, as though it must be a product dif- 
 fering in kind and in art from the great 
 novels of other lands. It might be inter- 
 esting to know just what these persons 
 mean by the terms they employ — provided 
 the conception is clear in their own minds. 
 Where is the distinctively great English, 
 French, or Russian novel? Neither Tom 
 Jones, nor Les Miserables, nor Peace 
 and War fulfill the requirments, for these 
 are not and could not be sufficiently inclu- 
 sive to portray every phase of the life and 
 nationality which the author represented. 
 
144 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 So if George Eliot has not produced a work 
 of fiction which at its points of contact 
 touch every side of English civilization, 
 within her own field she has displayed a 
 potentiality rivalled only by the master 
 novelists of the world. 
 
 The attainments of George Eliot were 
 remarkably extensive. She was a classical 
 scholar, and to her familiarity with the 
 principal modern languages she added an 
 acquaintance with Russian and modern 
 Greek. She was widely learned in the 
 physical sciences, the arts and philosophies, 
 and was a profound student in the history 
 of human thought and investigation. The 
 peculiar characteristics of her mind were 
 acute analysis, unerring perception of fit- 
 ness and relation, a luxuriant but chastened 
 fancy, and a rare and delightful energy of 
 expression. Her style is a compound of 
 classicism and didacticism, of scientific tech- 
 nicality and broad colloquialism. Not one 
 of her countrywomen of this or any former 
 period, excepting Mrs. Browning, can com- 
 pare with her in expressive ability, keen- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 145 
 
 ness of discrimination, and forceful and 
 elegant English. Among female writers 
 what Mrs. Browning is in poetry George 
 Eliot is in prose. Though not so much 
 given to the use of the incisive and vig- 
 orous Saxon words with which our lan- 
 guage abounds as Mrs. Browning was, yet 
 she fully equaled her in knowledge of the 
 delicate shades of difference in nearly 
 synonymous terms, while she easily sur- 
 passed her in methods of technical utter- 
 ance and the fullness of her vocabulary. 
 The mantle of the high-priestess of British 
 novelists, the peeress of Dickens and Thack- 
 eray, and the greatest of that trio of great 
 female story writers, Jane Austen, Char- 
 lotte Bronte, and George Eliot, lies where 
 she dropped it. Who shall be worthy to 
 wear it after her? 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 
 
 AND HIS SISTER 
 
 CHRISTINA 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 149 
 
 V 
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AND HIS 
 SISTER CHRISTINA 
 
 'To one who believes that there is in a 
 name some mysterious power influencing 
 the destiny of a human being, the painter- 
 poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, affords an ex- 
 ample in evidence. Rossetti himself seems 
 never to have forgotten the fact that he 
 bore the name of Italy's greatest bard. The 
 man upon whom devolves the burden of an 
 illustrious name, if he be not borne down 
 by it into listless despair, may be aroused 
 to supreme endeavors to live up to the ex- 
 pectations of the friends who in addressing 
 him involuntarily recall his glorious proto- 
 type. 
 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a remarkable 
 member of a remarkable family. Such a 
 group of children as Dante Gabriel, Wil- 
 liam Michael, and Christina G. Rossetti are 
 seldom found in the same household. Even 
 
150 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 the quiet, claustral spirit of the elder sister, 
 Maria, was a shrine whence the clear-point- 
 ed flame of genius burned heavenward, 
 though it was not for the world's curious 
 gaze. Rossetti's father, Gabriele Rossetti, 
 was a Neapolitan political refugee resident 
 in London, and one of the most highly es- 
 teemed of Italy's recent patriotic poets. 
 He was a profound and lifelong student of 
 Dante, concerning whose works he cher- 
 ished theories peculiarly his own. The 
 mother of Dante Rossetti was of mixed 
 English and Italian parentage, so that in 
 the veins of the artist there was more Ital- 
 ian than English blood. 
 
 Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, known 
 to the world as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was 
 born May 12, 1828, in London. He was 
 the second of four children, Christina, his 
 sister, being the youngest. In the charac- 
 teristics which distinguished Dante Ros- 
 setti, and Christina as well, were included 
 some of the rarest qualities of the two na- 
 tionalities which in these notable lives came 
 to their confluence. Dante and Christina 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 151 
 
 were both scribblers in their childhood, 
 writing stories and verses successively, the 
 example being set them in their home by 
 their tireless father, from whose pen flowed 
 poems and other compositions innumerable. 
 Dante's schooling was not of the broadest 
 kind, though when he left King's College 
 in the summer of 1842 he was reasonably 
 well acquainted with Sallust, Ovid, and 
 Vergil, knew the rudiments of Greek, and 
 could read easily in French. 
 
 With Rossetti's peculiarities and skill in 
 the art of painting we have little to do here, 
 except as he illustrated the Preraphaelite 
 theories of art by his brush as well as by 
 his verse. Rossetti is better known as a 
 writer than as a painter, since, throughout 
 his entire life, he was averse to placing his 
 canvases on public exhibition. His regular 
 preparation for the profession of painting 
 was of brief duration. After a period of 
 study at Cary's drawing academy he was 
 admitted as a student in the Antique School 
 of the Royal Academy. He did not com- 
 plete his course in this school, finding it 
 
i 5 2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 irksome to subject himself to methods pre- 
 scribed by others, and liking always to do 
 things in his own way. As the head of the 
 Preraphaelite Brotherhood he displayed a 
 power and originality in his art work which 
 compelled the attention of connoisseurs to 
 the fact that a new intellectual force had 
 made its advent among them. Ruskin early 
 became one of Rossetti's patrons, so that 
 the singular endowments of the young art- 
 ist are beyond question. Notwithstanding 
 the present tendency to belittle the so-called 
 Preraphaelite movement — and Rossetti him- 
 self ere his death seemed to think lightly 
 of it — the ability of such men as Rossetti, 
 Millais, Holman Hunt, Woolner, Col- 
 linson, and Stephens exerted an influence 
 which is felt at this very day in the world 
 of art. 
 
 On the side of letters, also, it is no slight 
 proof of poetic puissance to make one's 
 voice heard and imitated amid the babel 
 of minor singers ever challenging the pub- 
 lic ear. Dante Rossetti early and easily 
 rose above the mass of bardlings whose par- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 153 
 
 rotlike repetitions of the master's manner 
 might, mauger their maddening wearisome- 
 ness, be regarded as the sincerest form of 
 flattery. When "The Blessed Damozel'' 
 appeared, written at the time Rossetti was 
 in his nineteenth year, he who ran might 
 read that a new luminary, brilliant and 
 unique, had risen in our poetical skies. The 
 extraordinary symbolism employed by this 
 writer, the earthly passion projected into 
 spiritual experiences, the human longing 
 surviving amid celestial environments, the 
 sensuous, almost sensual, beauty breathing 
 through the entire poem, set its author 
 apart as a real and distinct energy in the 
 literature of his generation. This poem 
 was avowedly written to be the counter- 
 part of Poe's "Raven." As the latter poem 
 depicts from the earthly viewpoint the 
 yearnings of bereaved affection, so "The 
 Blessed Damozel" portrays the same emo- 
 tions from the celestial side. Scattered 
 through this poem there are successive lines 
 and stanzas as unforgetable as anything 
 that has ever been written: 
 
154 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 The blessed damozel leaned out 
 From the gold bar of heaven ; 
 
 Her eyes were deeper than the depth 
 Of waters stilled at even ; 
 
 She had three lilies in her hand, 
 
 And the stars in her hair were seven. 
 
 Her hair that lay along her back 
 Was yellow like ripe corn. 
 
 Beneath, the tides of day and night 
 With flame and darkness ridge 
 
 The void, as low as where this earth 
 Spins like a fretful midge. 
 
 And the souls mounting up to God 
 Went by her like thin flames. 
 
 And still she bowed herself and stooped 
 Out of the circling charm ; 
 
 Until her bosom must have made 
 The bar she leaned on warm, 
 
 And the lilies lay as if asleep 
 Along her bended arm. 
 
 The sun was gone now ; the curled moon 
 
 Was like a little feather 
 Fluttering far down the gulf. 
 
 I'll take his hand and go with him 
 To the deep wells of light ; 
 
 As unto a stream we will step down, 
 And bathe there in God's sight. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 155 
 
 We two will stand beside that shrine, 
 
 Occult, withheld, untrod, 
 Whose lamps are stirred continually 
 
 With prayer sent up to God ; 
 And see our old prayers, granted, melt 
 
 Each like a little cloud. 
 
 Given a compound of Poe and Shelley 
 and Keats and Baudelaire and Vaughan, 
 with an added element of a completely novel 
 personality interfused through the whole, 
 and you have a Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 
 his employment of parentheses and refrains 
 Rossetti, like William Morris, sometimes 
 irritates his readers by what seem to be 
 mere affectations and mannerisms. To not 
 a few, also, Rossetti's mysticism is far from 
 pleasant, though this, be it said, is the weird 
 moonlight flower whose roots struck into 
 those shadowy deeps where lay united, not 
 to be dissevered, the genius and the life of 
 the man. Rossetti, with his mysticism elim- 
 inated, would have been another and, to 
 one reader at least, a less pleasing Rossetti 
 than the poet whom we know and have 
 learned to love. 
 
 Let it not for a moment be supposed that 
 
156 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Rossetti's mystical tendencies froze within 
 his bosom the kindly stream of human in- 
 terest and fellowship. His heart ever beat 
 in tune with the pulsations that stirred the 
 common heart of the world. He was an 
 admirer and defender of Robert Browning 
 while as yet that great poet was generally 
 unknown or was mentioned only in terms 
 of ridicule and jest. He was characterized 
 by a quick and generous appreciation of 
 ability in others, and always stood ready in 
 every possible manner to encourage strug- 
 gling talent. Philip Bourke Marston, the 
 blind poet, Oliver Madox Brown, our own 
 Walt Whitman, and others shared the help- 
 ful interest which he manifested in his fel- 
 lows of the pen and the palette. Rossetti 
 preserved not a little of his boyish relish 
 for fun nearly to the close of his life. In 
 1874 he writes to his brother William : "At 
 present I am going about with a black patch 
 over my nose. Last night Jenny Ulle and 
 I agreed to shriek at the same moment, one 
 'Crupy' and the other 'Crawly,' in Dizzy's 
 [the dog's] two ears, while May beat a 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 157 
 
 tattoo on the top of his head. The instant 
 result was that he turned round howling 
 and bit me — fortunately not Jenny — across 
 the nose, at which I am not surprised." A 
 warm, full-blooded, abundant humanita- 
 rianism flows through many of Rossetti's 
 lines, notably the poem entitled "Jenny," 
 written before the poet had attained his 
 majority, than which no more simple, nat- 
 ural, broadly philosophic production in 
 verse, and none more fully embodying the 
 spirit of the thirteenth chapter of First Cor- 
 inthians, has been published within the pres- 
 ent century. This poem enters into the dis- 
 cussion of a subject which few writers of 
 prose or poetry would dare or care to un- 
 dertake, namely, a courtesan who receives 
 the visit of a man by night and who falls 
 asleep upon his knee, thus arousing within 
 him through "dead, unhappy hours" of 
 watching reflections painful and pitiful to 
 the last degree. The delicacy, the strength, 
 the certainty of touch, the exquisite loveli- 
 ness of this poem are beyond praise. Here, 
 
 too, are memorable couplets, the grace, per- 
 il 
 
158 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 fume, and unexpectedness of which are like 
 early violets in the young grass: 
 
 Poor handful of bright spring water 
 Flung in the whirlpool's shrieking face. 
 
 But must your roses die, and those 
 Their purpled buds that should unclose? 
 Even so ; the leaves are curled apart, 
 Still red as from the broken heart, 
 And here's the naked stem of thorns. 
 
 The cold lamps at the pavement's edge 
 Wind on together and apart, 
 A fiery serpent for your heart. 
 
 Like a toad within a stone 
 
 Seated while time crumbles on ; 
 
 Which sits there since the earth was cursed 
 
 For man's transgression at the first; 
 
 Which, living through all centuries, 
 
 Not once has seen the sun arise; 
 
 Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, 
 
 The earth's whole summers have not warmed ; 
 
 Which always — whitherso the stone 
 
 Be flung — sits there, deaf, blind, alone ; — 
 
 Aye, and shall not be driven out 
 
 Till that which shuts him round about 
 
 Break at the very Master's stroke, 
 
 And the dust thereof vanish as smoke, 
 
 And the seed of man vanish as dust — 
 
 Even so within the world is lust. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 159 
 
 As a writer of sonnets Dante Rossetti is 
 well-nigh unequaled. Some of his sonnets 
 written for pictures are nearly unapproach- 
 able in excellence, while the sonnet-se- 
 quence entitled "The House of Life" sur- 
 passes in richness, variety, and abounding 
 vitality any other sonnet-sequence whatso- 
 ever, not excepting the ''Sonnets from the 
 Portuguese." Like a cleft pomegranate, 
 this red-veined fruit of a fertile life, opened 
 anywhere, shows the crimson heart within 
 as the heart of a man. What treasures were 
 buried from mortal delight in the poems in- 
 terred in the same grave with the poet's 
 dead wife, and afterward exhumed, these 
 sonnets of "The House of Life" may reveal. 
 Here is one, under the caption "Broken 
 Music :" 
 
 The mother will not turn, who thinks she hears 
 Her nursling's speech first grow articulate ; 
 But breathless, with averted eyes elate, 
 She sits, with open lips, and open ears, 
 That it may call her twice. 'Mid doubts and fears 
 Thus oft my soul has hearkened ; till the song, 
 A central moan for days, at length found tongue, 
 And the sweet music welled and the sweet tears. 
 
i6o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 But now, whatever while the soul is fain 
 
 To list that wonted murmur, as it were 
 
 The speech-bound seashell's low, importunate 
 
 strains — 
 No breath of song, thy voice alone is there, 
 O bitterly beloved ! and all her gain 
 Is but the pang of unpermitted prayer. 
 
 The manner in which Dante Rossetti 
 formed the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth 
 Eleanor Sidclal, the lady who afterward 
 became his wife, is sufficiently romantic. 
 Walter Howell Deverell, a young painter 
 much liked, though not a member of the 
 Preraphaelite Brotherhood, one day accom- 
 panied his mother to a bonnet shop in Cran- 
 borne Alley, and among the shop assistants 
 saw a young woman handing down a band- 
 box. She was very beautiful, tall, finely 
 molded, with a lofty neck and a wealth of 
 coppery, golden hair. Deverell obtained 
 the privilege of sittings from this lovely 
 model, whom Rossetti soon after saw, ad- 
 mired, loved, and to whom he became en- 
 gaged to be married. Miss Siddal herself 
 developed artistic talents of no mean order. 
 Of her Rossetti said : "Her fecundity of in- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 161 
 
 vention and facility are quite wonderful — 
 much greater than mine." The single pub- 
 lished specimen of her verses is very far 
 from discreditable to her skill in this direc- 
 tion. "Guggum," "Guggums," and "Gug" 
 seem to have been the whimsical, and not 
 very euphonious, pet names which Rossetti 
 applied to his fair one. Miss Siddal's health 
 was extremely delicate, and she died of an 
 overdose of laudanum in less than two years 
 after her marriage with Rossetti in i860. 
 
 It appears to be a well-established fact 
 that from the year 1872 until the close of 
 his life, in 1882, Rossetti was mentally un- 
 balanced. The excessive use of chloral and 
 whisky was probably contributory to, if it 
 did not produce, this deplorable result. In 
 the Contemporary Review for October, 
 1871, an article was published under the 
 caption "The Fleshly School of Poetry — 
 Mr. D. G. Rossetti." The article was signed 
 by one Thomas Maitland. Not long there- 
 after it came to the knowledge of Rossetti 
 that Thomas Maitland was none other than 
 Mr. Robert Buchanan, the English poet, 
 
162 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 novelist, and essayist. The critique was 
 unduly severe, and to Rossetti probably un- 
 just. Mr. Buchanan has since retracted 
 the strictures contained in the article, and 
 in a manly way has expressed his high ap- 
 preciation of Rossetti's work. But such was 
 the mental and physical distemper of the 
 unhappy artist that, upon the publication 
 of Mr. Buchanan's criticism, his mental 
 equilibrium was upset, and it was never 
 again wholly restored. For years he was 
 subject to delusions of the most painful 
 character. Old friends were regarded as 
 united in a conspiracy against him, and 
 even strangers were accused of intentionally 
 insulting him. When Mr. Browning's 
 "Fifine at the Fair" was published Rossetti 
 at once seized upon certain lines toward the 
 close of the poem as containing a covert, 
 but spiteful, attack upon himself. Mr. 
 Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) wrote a nonsen- 
 sical poem entitled "The Hunting of the 
 Snark." This Rossetti also declared to be 
 a pasquinade directed against his fair fame. 
 Again, while at Broadlands, a friend's seat 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 163 
 
 in Hampshire, Rossetti one day became 
 greatly excited at a thrush singing in a 
 neighboring garden, fancying that the bird 
 had been trained by the enemies of his 
 peace to ''ejaculate something insulting to 
 him." On still another occasion he sud- 
 denly left Kelmscott, where he had been 
 sojourning for a season, having plunged 
 into a quarrel with some anglers by the 
 river, conceiving them to have uttered 
 something derogatory to him. Yet through 
 all this dark period he continued to paint 
 and write with even more than his former 
 skill and industry. 
 
 Rossetti's home for many years was at 
 Tudor House, Chelsea. Here dwelt with 
 him at one time Swinburne and George 
 Meredith, and at a later date Hall Caine. 
 Here, also, Rossetti gathered about him 
 much old furniture and crockery, inaugu- 
 rating the fashion of collecting bric-a-brac 
 which so generally prevailed a few years 
 ago. One charming trait of Rossetti's 
 character appears in the tender and thought- 
 ful affection which he ever cherished toward 
 
164 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 his mother. In his beautifully filial letters 
 to her he again and again addresses her as 
 "My Dearest Mother," and sometimes by 
 the absurdly affectionate titles of "Teaksi- 
 cunculum" and ''Darling Teaksicum." He 
 closes one epistle to his mother thus : "Take 
 care of your dear, funny old self, and be- 
 lieve me your most loving son." 
 
 Rossetti's grave is at Birchington-on- 
 Sea, where he closed his eyes on this world 
 April 9, 1882. The tombstone, which is an 
 Irish cross, was designed by Madox Brown. 
 The inscription, written by William Michael 
 Rossetti, is as follows: 
 
 Here sleeps Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, hon- 
 ored, under the name of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
 among painters as a painter, and among poets as a 
 poet. Born in London, of parentage mainly Italian, 
 12 May, 1828. Died at Birchington, 9 April, 1882. 
 This cruciform monument, bespoken by Dante Ros- 
 setti's mother, was designed by his lifelong friend 
 Ford Madox Brown, executed by J. and H. Patte- 
 son, and erected by his brother William and sister 
 Christina. 
 
 The world, so tardy to recognize, so slow 
 to remember, its flame-winged ministers of 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 165 
 
 song, will not consent to forget Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti. His clayey form has 
 melted from human sight like a mist-born 
 vision of the morning, but the breath of his 
 genius still lingers to awaken music in rare 
 and sensitive souls, as the wind murmurs 
 through an iEolian harp. His memory 
 shall not be as his own dissolving image, 
 of which he sang in "Love's Nocturn:" 
 
 Like a vapor wan and mute, 
 
 Like a flame, so let it pass ; 
 One low sigh across her lute, 
 
 One dull breath against her glass ; 
 
 And to my sad soul, alas ! 
 One salute 
 
 Cold as when death's foot shall pass. 
 
 No student of letters will need to be 
 warned that popularity is not a test of ex- 
 cellence in the literary realm. Whatever 
 may be said to the contrary, and however 
 impotent we may be to define it in authen- 
 tic terms, there is a recognized and perma- 
 nent standard of taste and of ethics. To it 
 is always made an unconscious appeal, for 
 it is the product of genius striving to attain 
 
166 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 the ultimate ideals. Few or none who write 
 for the applause of the current hour are 
 likely to achieve this standard. Perhaps 
 it is not too much to say that in their own 
 day the books which become classics sel- 
 dom challenge the attention of the multi- 
 tudes. 
 
 In the poetry of Christina G. Rossetti 
 may be clearly traced the austere beauty 
 of a chaste and nun-like spirit. The poems 
 of the brother and of the sister have very 
 little in common except an underlying seri- 
 ousness of purpose and an almost fastidious 
 sense of melody. Christina's verse may be 
 said to uniformly express the conflicts, the 
 longings, and the aspirations of a deeply 
 religious mind. Her treatment of pietistic 
 themes is all her own, and it is astonishing 
 what a varied music she is able to produce 
 upon a single string. It cannot be doubted 
 that, upon the whole, the sister's outlook 
 upon life was saner than that of the brother, 
 whose latter years were so sadly clouded by 
 mental infirmity. 
 
 When, a few years ago, the voice of Chris- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 167. 
 
 tina Rossetti sank into the hush of death, 
 England lost her sweetest songstress since 
 Mrs. Browning sent up her swan-notes be- 
 neath Italian skies. Undoubtedly the con- 
 tact into which Christina was brought with 
 the clever young men who were the asso- 
 ciates of her brothers,, as recorded in the 
 two goodly volumes containing the memoir 
 and family letters of Dante Rossetti, aided 
 her not a little in the development of her 
 intellectual life. She seemed easily to com- 
 mand all the melodious resources of which 
 our language is capable. "Goblin Market" 
 is a bizarre fantasy wrought out with ut- 
 most adroitness, the lesson of which seems 
 to be contained in the closing lines : 
 
 For there is no friend like a sister, 
 In calm or stormy weather, 
 To cheer one on the tedious way, 
 To fetch one if one goes astray, 
 To lift one if one totters down, 
 To strengthen whilst one stands. 
 
 But it is in her lyrics that she is pre- 
 eminent. The dewy freshness and simplici- 
 ty of such a song as that beginning, 
 
168 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 My heart is like a singing bird 
 Whose nest is in a watered shoot, 
 
 well illustrate the lark-like quality of Miss 
 Rossetti's notes. "Another Spring," and 
 the song "When I Am Dead, My Dearest," 
 are all but flawless in their way. How sweet 
 and graceful are her strains the last men- 
 tioned lyric well attests: 
 
 When I am dead, my dearest, 
 
 Sing no sad song for me ; 
 Plant thou no roses at my head, 
 
 Nor shady cypress tree : 
 Be the green grass above me 
 
 With showers and dewdrops wet ; 
 And if thou wilt, remember, 
 
 And if thou wilt, forget. 
 
 I shall not see the shadows, 
 
 I shall not feel the rain ; 
 I shall not hear the nightingale 
 
 Sing on, as if in pain : 
 And, dreaming through the twilight 
 
 That doth not rise nor set, 
 Haply I may remember, 
 
 And haply may forget. 
 
 Miss Rossetti's devotional pieces are shot 
 through and through with the lovely fancies 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 169 
 
 and exalted symbolisms of the genuine poet. 
 Unlike most religious verse, hers is lifted 
 far above the dreariness and commonplaces 
 of mediocrity. Her own intense individu- 
 ality informs every stanza, almost every 
 line. Here is a brief poem entitled "Weary 
 in Well-doing:" 
 
 I would have gone ; God bade me stay : 
 I would have worked ; God bade me rest. 
 
 He broke my will from day to day, 
 He read my yearnings unexpressed, 
 And said them nay. 
 
 Now I would stay ; God bids me go : 
 Now I would rest; God bids me work. 
 
 He breaks my heart tossed to and fro, 
 My soul is wrung with doubts that lurk 
 And vex it so. 
 
 I go, Lord, where thou sendest me ; 
 
 Day after day I plod and moil : 
 But, Christ my God, when will it be 
 
 That I may let alone my toil, 
 And rest with thee? 
 
 In the Preface to the recent volume, New 
 Poems by Christina Rossetti, her brother, 
 William Michael Rossetti, has recorded the 
 curious fact that, notwithstanding the inti- 
 
170 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 macy of their home life and the large 
 amount of verse which Christina has left 
 to the world, he never saw his sister in the 
 act of composition. 
 
 These observations concerning this song- 
 ful twain may not be further prolonged. 
 They lived and sang through their allotted 
 years, and their songs are yet with us. Let 
 us be grateful for them. Now that the 
 singers are beyond the reach of human 
 blame or blessing, hands are not lacking to 
 weave chaplets of praise wherewith to 
 adorn their tombs. Slow, too slow, is this 
 old world to learn the oft-repeated lesson 
 that the words of panegyric uttered above 
 unconscious dust are as idle and ineffectual 
 as the wind that bears them away. If the 
 dead could be reached by the joys or sor- 
 rows of the living, many a heart misjudged 
 and broken, which, despairing, has ceased 
 to beat, would, amid its solemn shadows, 
 be rilled with gladness and perpetual peace. 
 Let us hope that the following sonnet, one 
 of Miss Rossetti's best, may not be alto- 
 gether wide of a precious possibility: 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 171 
 
 The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept 
 And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may 
 Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay, 
 
 Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept. 
 
 He leaned above me, thinking that I slept 
 
 And could not hear him ; but I heard him say, 
 "Poor child, poor child !" and as he turned away 
 
 Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept. 
 
 He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold 
 That hid my face, or take my hand in his, 
 Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head : 
 He did not love me living ; but once dead 
 He pitied me ; and very sweet it is 
 
 To know he still is warm, though I am cold. 
 
VI 
 
 THE CORRESPONDENCE OF 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 12 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 17s 
 
 VI 
 
 THE CORRESPONDENCE OF JAMES 
 RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 It has been said that the days of the art 
 of letter writing are forever past; that the 
 telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, 
 and the modern newspaper have reduced 
 the epistles that pass between friends to 
 the exchange of the merest conventional 
 civilities. In these strenuous and rushing 
 years little opportunity is found to enjoy 
 the pleasant and gossipy leisureliness of the 
 old-time letter writers. The letters of Cow- 
 per, of Dean Swift, of Keats, of Landor, of 
 Carlyle, and his brilliant wife, of Emerson, 
 of the two Brownings, and, we might add, 
 of R. L. Stevenson will never be duplicated, 
 because temp or a mutantur, et nos mutamur 
 in Mis. And yet, down to the very year of 
 his death, the letters of Lowell were the 
 same delightful, lucid, and witty expres- 
 sions of a charming personality. In them 
 
i/6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 are quaint bits of observation, wise and in- 
 cisive comments upon men and things, sud- 
 den revelations of a heart overflowing with 
 love, passages as bright with humor as any- 
 thing that appears in the Moosehcad Jour- 
 nal, erudite allusions, and quotations from 
 the most diverse sources, until it would 
 seem that the advent of one of these letters 
 must have been marked as an important 
 event in the experience of the recipient. 
 
 James Russell Lowell first opened his 
 eyes to the light of the natural sun in Cam- 
 bridge, Mass., on February 22, 18 19, a day 
 noted in the calendar of American patriot- 
 ism as the one made memorable by the 
 nativity of the immortal Washington. Low- 
 ell was most fortunate in his antecedents. 
 His father was a cultured clergyman, a 
 lover of books and of the benign and beau- 
 tiful things of life. The poet's mother was 
 of an ancient Orkney family, and through 
 her were filtered into the blood of the son 
 the solitude and romantic mystery of those 
 northern islands. Lowell's early home was 
 such as would foster the poetic instincts of 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 177 
 
 a child. Elmwood, a product of colonial 
 times, stood in the midst of lawn and gar- 
 den, orchard and English elms. It was a 
 roomy old-fashioned house, rising amid its 
 rural surroundings, with an air of quiet 
 respectability all its own. There were five 
 other children in the Lowell household, 
 three brothers and two sisters, all older 
 than the poet. He was an ardent little fel- 
 low, loving boyish pastimes, and was happy 
 and healthy in affections and temperament 
 as a boy should be. We may obtain a 
 glimpse of his joyous childhood from the 
 following letter to his brother Robert, writ- 
 ten seventy-one years ago: 
 
 My Dear Brother, — I am now going to tell you 
 melancholy news. I have got the ague together 
 with a gumbile. I presume you know that September 
 has got a lame leg, but he grows better every day and 
 now is very well but still limps a little. We have a 
 new scholar from round hill, his name is Hooper 
 and we expect another named Penn who I believe 
 also comes from there. The boys are all very well 
 except Nemaise, who has got another piece of glass 
 in his leg and is waiting for the doctor to take it 
 out, and Samuel Storrow is also sick. I am going to 
 have a new suit of blue broadcloth clothes to wear 
 
i;8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 every day and to play in. Mother tells me that I 
 may have any sort of buttons I choose. I have not 
 done anything to the hut but if you wish I will. I 
 am now very happy ; but I should be more so if you 
 were there. I hope you will answer my letter if 
 you do not I shall write you no more letters, when 
 you write my letters you must direct them all to me 
 and not write half to mother as generally do. Moth- 
 er has given me three volumes of tales of a grand- 
 father. 
 
 farewell Yours truly 
 
 James R. Lowell. 
 
 You must excuse me for making so many mistakes. 
 You must keep what I have told you about my new 
 clothes a secret if you dont I shall not divulge any 
 more secrets to you. I have got quite a library. 
 The Master has not taken his rattan out since the 
 vacation. Your little kitten is as well and as playful 
 as ever and I hope you are to for I am sure I love 
 you as well as ever. Why is grass like a mouse you 
 cant guess that he he he ho ho ho ha ha ha hum hum 
 hum. 
 
 Lowell matriculated at Harvard as a 
 freshman, when he was fifteen years of age. 
 Although somewhat diffident, he made 
 friends among his classmates, and found 
 much enjoyment in his college days. In 
 a letter written to W. H. Shackford, in 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 179 
 
 1836, the critical habit of Lowell's mind 
 already begins to appear. He says : 
 
 I am reading the life of Milton, and find it very 
 interesting ; his first taste (as well as Cowley's) for 
 poetry was formed by reading Spenser. I am glad 
 to have such good examples, for Spenser was al- 
 ways my favorite poet. I like the meter of the 
 "Faerie Queene;" Beattie's "Minstrel" is in the 
 same. Apropos of poetry, I myself (you need not 
 turn up your nose and grin) — yes, I myself have cul- 
 tivated the muses, and have translated one or two 
 odes from Horace, your favorite Horace. I like 
 Horace much, but prefer Virgil's "Bucolics" to his 
 "Odes," most of them. If you have your Horace by 
 you, turn to the IXth Satire, 1st Book, and read it, 
 and see if you don't like it (in an expurgated edi- 
 tion). 
 
 In a letter to G. B. Loring, written in 
 the same year as the foregoing, we have an- 
 other allusion to the fact that he has begun 
 the writing of poetry: 
 
 Here I am, alone in Bob's room with a blazing fire, 
 in an atmosphere of "poesy" and soft-coal smoke. 
 Hope, Dante, a few of the older English poets, By- 
 ron, and last, not least, some of my own composi- 
 tions, lie around me. Mark my modesty. I don't 
 put myself in the same line with the rest, you see. 
 
i8o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Writing to W. H. Shackford the follow- 
 ing year, he gives apparently the first inti- 
 mation of what his pursuit in life shall be : 
 "I thought your brother Charles was study- 
 ing law. I intend to study that myself, and 
 probably shall be Chief Justice of the 
 United States." 
 
 That dominant love for the home of his 
 birth and childhood, which made Lowell 
 cling to Elmwood to the closing day of his 
 life, he expresses in another letter to Lor- 
 ing, penned April 5, 1837: 
 
 To revisit the home of one's childhood has much 
 of joy, but it is a joy mingled with sadness. To 
 think how soon those flowers that have bloomed, 
 those fields that have smiled, and those trees that 
 have so often arrayed themselves in "summer's garb" 
 for you, may bloom and smile and array themselves 
 for another ! You may think me a fool to talk in 
 such a moralizing strain, but, George, I have lately 
 talked less and thought more. I mean to read next 
 term, if possible, a chapter in my Bible every night. 
 
 The increasingly studious habits of his 
 mind and that bonhomie which were charac- 
 teristic of Lowell throughout his later life 
 are now (1837) well defined. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 181 
 
 I am busy as a bee — almost. I study and read and 
 write all the time. I have laid my hands on a very 
 pretty edition of Cowper, which I intend to keep. 
 In two volumes I have also "pinned" some letters 
 relating to myself in my early childhood, by which 
 it seems I was a miracle of a boy for sweetness of 
 temper. "Credite posterl!" I believe I was, al- 
 though perhaps you would not think it now. 
 
 Already, in this same year, he begins to 
 find himself able to express his intense love 
 of nature: 
 
 You can't imagine how delightful it is out here. 
 The greatest multitude of birds of every description 
 that I ever recollect to have seen. The grass is fast 
 growing green under the kind sun of spring — that is, 
 in southerly aspects. Every day that the sun shines 
 I take my book and go out to a bank in our garden, 
 and lie and read. 'Tis almost as pleasant as 
 
 To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell. 
 . . . The birds now sing loudest, and the fowling 
 piece breaks "the quiet of the scene" less often than 
 at any other time. Besides, 'tis beautiful to watch 
 the different steps of nature's toilet, as she arrays 
 herself in the flowery dress of Spring. It almost 
 seems as if one could see the grass grow green. 
 Then, too, the sky is so clear. 
 
 Years after this expression of his love 
 for nature, Lowell wrote in the same spirit 
 as follows: 
 
182 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 The older I grow the more I am convinced that 
 there are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent 
 as our sympathies with outward nature. I have not 
 said just what I meant, for we are thrilled even more 
 by any spectacle of human heroism. But the others 
 seem to bind our lives together by a more visible and 
 unbroken chain of purifying and softening emotion. 
 In this way the flowering of the buttercups is always 
 a great, and I may truly say religious, event in my 
 year. . . . There never was such a season, if one only 
 did not have to lecture and write articles. There 
 never is such a season, and that shows what a poet 
 God is. He says the same thing over to us so often, 
 and always new. Here I've been reading the same 
 poem for nearly half a century, and never had a no- 
 tion what the buttercups in the third stanza meant 
 before. But I won't tell. 
 
 In one of his early letters, written while 
 he is rusticating in Concord for having 
 neglected certain studies of the college cur- 
 riculum, he thus mentions Thoreau : "I met 
 Thoreau last night, and it is exquisitely 
 amusing to see how he imitates Emerson's 
 tone and manner. With my eyes shut, I 
 shouldn't know them apart." 
 
 The decidedly poetical bias of Lowell's 
 nature is now clearly apparent. "I have 
 been reading the first volume of Carlyle's 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 183 
 
 Miscellanies/' he writes. "One article, that 
 on Burns, is worth all the rest to me. I 
 like, too, the one on German playwrights. 
 There are fine passages in all." About this 
 time there was some thought upon the part 
 of the poet of entering a divinity school, 
 that he might prepare himself for the min- 
 istry. He seems to have been possessed of 
 very distinct notions with regard to a 
 clergyman's condition as related to his 
 work, and reached the conclusion that he 
 was not adapted to the minister's vocation. 
 He says: 
 
 No man ought to be a minister who has not a 
 special calling that way. I don't mean an old-fash- 
 ioned special calling, with winged angels and fat- 
 bottomed cherubs, but an inward one. In fact, I 
 think that no man ought to be a minister who has 
 not money enough to support him besides his salary. 
 For the minister of God should not be thinking of 
 his own and children's bread, when dispensing the 
 bread of life. I have been led to reflect seriously on 
 the subject since I have thought of going into the 
 divinity school. Some men were made for peace- 
 makers and others for shoemakers, and if each man 
 follow his nose we shall come out right at last. If 
 I did not think that I should some day make a great 
 fool of myself and marry (not that I would call all 
 
184 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 men fools who marry), I would enter the school to- 
 morrow. Certain am I that it is not pleasant to 
 work for a living anyway, but "we youth" must live, 
 and verily this "money" is a very good thing, though 
 on that account we need not fall down and worship 
 it. The very cent on which my eye now rests may 
 have done a great deal of good in its day ; perhaps it 
 has made glad the heart of the widow, and put a 
 morsel of bread in the famishing mouths of her chil- 
 dren ; and perhaps it has created much misery ; per- 
 haps some now determined gambler began his career 
 of sin by playing chuck-farthing with that very piece 
 of stamped copper. 
 
 In this same letter his burning love of 
 liberty, which seemed to intensify with pass- 
 ing years, obtains a tentative utterance that 
 came to its culmination long afterward in 
 the noble "Commemoration Ode:" 
 
 A plan has been running in my head, for some 
 time, of writing a sort of dramatic poem on the sub- 
 ject of Cromwell. Those old Roundheads have never 
 had justice done them. They have only been held up 
 as canting, psalm-singing, hypocritical rascals ; as a 
 sort of a foil for the open-hearted Cavalier. But it 
 were a strange thing indeed if there were not some- 
 what in such men as Milton, Sidney, Hampden, 
 Selden and Pym. It always struck me that there 
 was more true poetry in those old fiery-eyed, buff- 
 belted warriors — with their deep, holy enthusiasm 
 for liberty and democracy, political and religious; 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 185 
 
 with their glorious trust in the arm of the Lord in 
 battle — than in the dashing, ranting Cavaliers, who 
 wished to restore their king that they might give vent 
 to their passions, and go to sleep again in the laps of 
 their mistresses, deaf to the cries of the poor and the 
 oppressed. 
 
 After the final relinquishment of his nas- 
 cent purpose of entering the ministry Low- 
 ell turned his attention to the study of law, 
 but only at intervals and in a desultory and 
 half-hearted manner. He says : 
 
 I am reading Blackstone with as good a grace and 
 as few wry faces as I may. ... A very great change 
 has come o'er the spirit of my dream of life, I 
 have renounced the law. I am going to settle down 
 into a business man at last, after all I have said to 
 the contrary. Farewell ! a long farewell, to all my 
 greatness ! I find that I cannot bring myself to like 
 the law, and I am now looking out for a place "in a 
 store." You may imagine that all this has not come 
 to pass without a struggle. ... I have been thinking 
 seriously of the ministry, but then — I have also 
 thought of medicine, but then — still worse ! ... On 
 Monday last I went into town to look out for a place, 
 and was induced en passant to step into the United 
 States Court, where there was a case pending in 
 which Webster was one of the counsel retained. I 
 had not been there an hour before I determined to 
 continue in my profession and study as well as I 
 could. 
 
186 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 The vacillation of Lowell's mind at this 
 period with regard to his life pursuit is well 
 portrayed by the foregoing quotations. The 
 poet's interest in matters of public concern 
 had already been kindled, although he was 
 still ineligible to vote, not yet having come 
 of age. In view of the Biglow Papers and 
 their influence upon their time, and also 
 of Lowell's brilliant career as the repre- 
 sentative of his country at the Spanish court 
 and at the Court of St. James, some of the 
 lines in a letter written November 15, 1838, 
 seem to be almost prophetic: 
 
 I shouldn't wonder if the peaceable young gentle- 
 man whom you know in college flared up into a great 
 political luminary. I am fast becoming ultra-demo- 
 cratic, and when I come to see you, which I trust 
 will be very soon, I intend to inoculate you with the 
 (I won't call it by the technical term of "virus," be- 
 cause that's too hard a word, but with the) principle. 
 ... By the very last accounts from England, im- 
 mense meetings have been held in all parts of Eng- 
 land to petition Parliament for an equal representa- 
 tion. . . . There is a great and pregnant change, 
 ominous of much. It almost brings tears into my 
 eyes when I think of this vast multitude starved, 
 trampled upon, meeting to petition the government 
 which oppressed them, and which they supported by 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 187 
 
 taxes wrung out of the very children's lifeblood. 
 Verily, some enthusiasts have even ventured to as- 
 sert that there are hearts, aye, even warm ones, under 
 frieze jerkins. 
 
 Again Lowell swings toward the law, 
 with the pathetic tergiversation character- 
 istic of so many young men groping toward 
 their lifework. In these days of large prices 
 for famous names and commonplace per- 
 formances, it is rather wholesome to note 
 the highest fees to which Lowell aspired 
 in payment for a lecture : 
 
 The more I think of business, the more really un- 
 happy do I feel and think more and more of study- 
 ing law. In your letter you speak of my lecturing in 
 Andover, about which I forgot to speak to you. Do 
 they pay expenses? They gave me four dollars in 
 Concord. I wish they'd take it into their heads to 
 ask me at Cambridge, where they pay fifteen dollars, 
 or in Lowell, where they pay twenty-five dollars ! 
 What to do with myself I don't know. 
 
 Lowell had been accused of indolence by 
 his friends. The accusation seems to have 
 had a basis of fact, and the poet himself 
 recognized it. Yet it has ever been so with 
 those possessed of poetical genius ; it comes 
 
i88 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 to its best only in that atmosphere of leis- 
 
 ureliness and contentment wherein indeed 
 
 the „ . . ,. 
 
 . . . Spirit lies 
 
 Under the walls of Paradise. 
 
 Here is the young writer's confession: "I 
 am lazy enough and dilatory enough, heaven 
 knows, but not half so much so as some of 
 my friends suppose. At all events, I was 
 never made for a merchant, and I even be- 
 gin to doubt whether I was made for any- 
 thing in particular but to loiter through 
 life." 
 
 In view of the eagerness with which pub- 
 lishers afterward sought the work of Low- 
 ell's pen, the desire expressed to publish a 
 volume of his poems is curiously striking: 
 
 If I could get any bookseller to do it for me, I 
 would publish a volume of poems. Of late a fancy 
 has seized me for so doing. If it met with any com- 
 mendation I could get paid for contributions to peri- 
 odicals. I tried last night to write a little rhyme — 
 but must wait for the moving of the waters. The 
 nine goddess virgins who dance with tender feet 
 round the violet-hued fountain of Hippocrene, and 
 whose immortal voices drop sweetly from their lips, 
 will not come to me. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 189 
 
 Apropos of his relation to the law he writes 
 again, in 1839 : 
 
 If I live, I don't believe I shall ever (between you 
 and me) practice law. I intend, however, to study it 
 and prepare myself for practicing. But a blind pre- 
 sentiment of becoming independent in some other 
 way is always hovering round me. Above all things 
 should I love to be able to sit down and do something 
 literary for the rest of my natural life. 
 
 The first mention of Miss Maria White, 
 afterward Mrs. Lowell, we find in a letter 
 addressed by Lowell to G. B. Loring, and 
 bearing date December 2, 1839: 
 
 I went up to Watertown on Saturday with W. A. 
 White and spent the Sabbath with him. You ought 
 to see his father. The most perfect specimen of a 
 bluff, honest, hospitable country squire you can pos- 
 sibly imagine. His mother, too, is a very pleasant 
 woman — a sister of Mrs. Gilman. His sister is a 
 very pleasant and pleasing young lady, and knows 
 more poetry than anyone I am acquainted with. I 
 mean she is able to repeat more. She is more fa- 
 miliar, however, with modern poets than with the 
 pure wellsprings of English poesy. 
 
 Lowell completed his studies at the Har- 
 vard Law School in 1840, receiving the de- 
 gree of Bachelor of Laws. His father had 
 13 
 
i 9 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 suffered financial reverses, and the poet 
 now found himself confronted with the ne- 
 cessity of earning his own livelihood. In 
 these straits, as other good men have done 
 in all ages, Lowell became engaged to be 
 married. Miss Maria White was a woman 
 of uncommon personal attractiveness, and 
 her mental endowments were of a high or- 
 der. She, too, wrote poetry, and thus was 
 peculiarly fitted to sympathize with the 
 tastes and aspirations of her gifted husband. 
 About this time Lowell concluded to col- 
 lect his poems for publication, which he did 
 under the title of A Year's Life. The little 
 book at once gave its author an assured 
 place among his younger poetical compeers. 
 Lowell published his second volume of verse 
 in 1843, and this second venture afforded 
 indubitable evidence of maturing power. 
 In 1844 Lowell published a volume of prose 
 consisting of Conversations on Some of the 
 Old Poets. The critical and analytical bent 
 of his mind was now well determined, and 
 the work in this book already showed ele- 
 ments of future power. At the close of 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 191 
 
 this year Lowell married, despite his very 
 limited and precarious income. He began 
 to write for antislavery organs, and, being 
 deeply moved by the noblest humanitarian 
 instincts, he gave utterance week after week 
 to sentiments that stirred like a bugle blast. 
 Thus the Biglow Papers began to appear, 
 and were at once received with an expres- 
 sion of popular favor which has never 
 changed. In 1848 they were issued in a 
 volume, and in the same year the Fable for 
 Critics and the Vision of Sir Launfal were 
 written and published. 
 
 The fugitive ideal — we have sought to 
 capture it, but it has still eluded our utter- 
 most cunning. We have caught a fleeting 
 glimpse of its loveliness — a splendor flashed 
 for an instant upon our eyes — and our 
 hearts forever after have known a vague 
 unrest. Sometimes we have turned our 
 weary eyes toward a smiling height, and 
 have seen a shadowy hand beckoning us 
 thither. Our lives may have been empty of 
 some longed-for satisfactions, but we, too, 
 have had our starry moments — our preg- 
 
i 9 2 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 nant intimations of at least one glorious 
 possibility whose whispers we have heard. 
 It was so with our poet. The growing 
 temper of his mind is well illustrated by the 
 following lines which appear in letters writ- 
 ten in 1841 : 
 
 I know that God has given me powers such as are 
 not given to all, and I will not "hide my talent in 
 mean clay." I do not care what others may think of 
 me or of my book, because if I am worth anything I 
 shall one day show it. I do not fear criticism so 
 much as I love truth. Nay, I do not fear it at all. 
 In short, I am happy. Maria fills my ideal, and I 
 satisfy hers. And I mean to live as one beloved by 
 such a woman should live. She is every way noble. 
 People have called "Irene" a beautiful piece of po- 
 etry. And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her. . . . 
 I have just finished something which I ought to have 
 done long ago. I have copied off a ballad of mine 
 for a publisher of the name of D. H. Williams, who 
 is getting out an annual. He will pay me five dollars 
 per page, and more if the book sells well. Haw- 
 thorne, Emerson, and Longfellow are writing for it, 
 and Bryant and Halleck have promised to — so I 
 shall be in good company, which will be pleasing to 
 groundlings. 
 
 At times Lowell bubbled over with fun 
 and animal spirits ; he would then pour out 
 sufficient original wit and humor to have 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 193 
 
 supplied a professional humorist with a 
 working capital for several years: 
 
 The next day I was up before sunrise, and got into 
 a habit of early rising that lasted me all that day. 
 ... I have nothing else in the way of novelty, ex- 
 cept an expedient I hit upon for my hens who were 
 backward with their eggs. On rainy days I set Wil- 
 liam to reading aloud to them the Lay Sermons of 
 Coleridge, and the effect was magical. Whether 
 their consciences were touched or they wished to 
 escape the preaching, I know not. ... I take great 
 comfort in God. I think he is considerably amused 
 with us sometimes, but that he likes us, on the whole, 
 and would not let us get at the match box so care- 
 lessly as he does unless he knew that the frame of 
 his universe was fireproof. ... As usual I haven't 
 left myself time to correct my proofs. What a 
 pleasant life I shall have of it when I have all eter- 
 nity on deposit. Then the printers will say, "If you 
 can with convenience return proofs before end of 
 next century, you would oblige ; but there is no 
 hurry." 'Tis an invincible argument for immortality 
 that we never have time enough here — except for 
 doing other things. 
 
 Again and again Lowell reveals the ex- 
 treme affectionateness of his nature: 
 
 You say that life seems to be a struggle after noth- 
 ing in particular. But you are wrong. It is a strug- 
 gle after the peaceful home of the soul in a natural 
 
194 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 and loving state of life. Men are mostly uncon- 
 scious of the object of their struggle, but it is al- 
 ways connected in some way with this. If they gain 
 wealth and power or glory, it is all to make up for 
 this want, which they feel, but scarce know what it 
 is. But nothing will ever supply the place of this, 
 any more than their softest carpets will give their 
 old age the spring and ease which arose from the pli- 
 ant muscles of youth. ... It is always my happiest 
 thought that with all the drawbacks of temperament 
 (of which no one is more keenly conscious than my- 
 self) I have never lost a friend. For I would rather 
 be loved than anything else in the world. I always 
 thirst after affection, and depend more on the ex- 
 pression of it than is altogether wise. 
 
 The strongly altruistic tendencies of 
 Lowell's mind are observable in the views 
 which he expressed upon the question of 
 slavery : 
 
 If men will not set their faces against this mon- 
 strous sin, this choragus of all other enormities, they, 
 at least, need not smile upon it, much less write in its 
 favor. What, in the name of God, are all these pal- 
 try parties, which lead men by the nose against all 
 that is best and holiest, to the freedom of five mil- 
 lions of men? The horror of slavery can only be 
 appreciated by one who has felt it himself, or who 
 has imagination enough to put himself in the place of 
 the slave and fancy himself not only virtually im- 
 prisoned, but forced to toil ; and all this for no crime 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 195 
 
 and for no reason except that it would be incon- 
 venient to free them. 
 
 That Lowell was possessed of a deeply 
 spiritual nature none who are well acquaint- 
 ed with his writings will be disposed to 
 deny. He seemed to be always conscious 
 of the divine Immanence, and undoubtedly 
 the sense of God's presence and overruling 
 providence lent grandeur and dignity to his 
 thought and life. He says: 
 
 I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at 
 Mary's, and happening to say something of the pres- 
 ence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly 
 aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with 
 me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the 
 whole system rose up before me like a vague destiny 
 looming from the abyss. I never before so clearly 
 felt the spirit of God in me and around me. The 
 whole room seemed to me full of God. The air 
 seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of 
 something, I knew not what. I spoke with the calm- 
 ness and clearness of a prophet. 
 
 Ill his young manhood Lowell was filled 
 with the fine and brave enthusiasms of 
 youth. His wings were light and strong, 
 and to him no height seemed beyond his 
 reach. His buoyant spirits responded 
 
ig6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 swiftly to every change for the better in the 
 material circumstances of his life. He 
 looked upon his conquest of the world as 
 already assured, and the event proved the 
 justice of his judgment: 
 
 I have set about making myself ambitious. It is 
 the only way to climb well. Men yield more readily 
 to an ambitious man, provided he can bear it out by 
 deeds. Just as much as we claim the world gives 
 us, and posterity has enough to do in nailing the 
 base coin to the counter. But I only mean to use 
 my ambition as a staff to my love of freedom and 
 man. I will have power, and there's the end of it. 
 I have a right to it, too, and you see I have put the 
 crown on already. 
 
 To the bereaved friend the poet, who 
 himself had lost a darling child, and who 
 was again to pass through the swelling of 
 the great waters, thus addresses himself 
 concerning death and sorrow: 
 
 I agree entirely with what you have said of death 
 in your last letter ; but at the same time I know well 
 that the first touch of his hand is cold, and that he 
 comes to us, as the rest of God's angels do, in dis- 
 guise. But we are enabled to see his face fully at 
 last, and it is that of a seraph. So it is with all. 
 Disease, poverty, death, sorrow all come to us with 
 unbcnign countenances ; but from one after another 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 197 
 
 the mask falls off, and we behold faces which re- 
 tain the glory and the calm of having looked in the 
 face of God. To me, at least, your bereavement has 
 come with the softest step and the most hallowed 
 features, for it has opened a new channel for my love 
 to flow toward you in. . . . It is therefore no idle 
 form when I tell you to lean on God. I know that 
 it is needless to say this to you, but I know also that 
 it is always sweet and consoling to have our impulses 
 seconded by the sympathy of our friends. 
 
 We all are tall enough to reach God's hand, 
 The angels are no taller. 
 
 I could not restrain my tears when I read what you 
 say of the living things all around the cast mantle of 
 your child. It is strange, almost awful, that, when 
 this great miracle has been performed for us, nature 
 gives no sign. Not a bee stints his hum, the sun 
 shines, the leaves glisten, the cock crow comes from 
 the distance, the flies buzz into the room, and yet 
 perhaps a minute before the most immediate presence 
 of God of which we can conceive was filling the 
 whole chamber, and opening its arms to "suffer the 
 little ones to come unto him." 
 
 The filial love and reverence that a child 
 owes to a worthy parent Lowell has ex- 
 pressed in lines which fairly throb with 
 warm and deep affection. His portrait of 
 his father is as unstudied as it is delightful. 
 The manner in which scholars gather knowl- 
 
ip8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 edge by processes of accretion Lowell has 
 indicated with his accustomed freshness 
 and originality: 
 
 If you had cast about for a hard question to ask 
 me, you could not have been more successful than in 
 desiring my advice as to a course of reading. I 
 suppose that very few men who are bred scholars 
 ever think of such a thing as a course of reading 
 after their Freshman year in college. Their situa- 
 tion throws books constantly in their way, and they 
 select by a kind of instinct the food which will suit 
 their mental digestion, acquiring knowledge insen- 
 sibly, as the earth gathers soil. This was wholly the 
 case with myself. 
 
 Having been taken to task for entertain- 
 ing the principles of an abolitionist, and in 
 like manner having been accused of one- 
 sidedness, Lowell thus proceeds to defend 
 himself : 
 
 There is one abolitionist, at least, who seldom lets 
 slip any opportunity against any institution which 
 seems to him to stand in the way of freedom. Ab- 
 solute freedom is what I want — for the body first, 
 and then for the mind. For the body first, because it 
 is easier to make men conscious of the wrong of 
 that grosser and more outward oppression, and, 
 after seeing that, they will perceive more readily the 
 less palpable chains and gags of tyranny. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 199 
 
 That erratic, irresponsible, iconoclastic 
 free lance of letters, Edgar Allan Poe, who 
 ran atilt at most of his fellow-writers in his 
 own day, did not permit Lowell to escape. 
 In common with Longfellow and others 
 already eminent in literature, Poe accused 
 Lowell of plagiarism. Lowell thus repels 
 the charge : 
 
 Poe, I am afraid, is wholly lacking in that ele- 
 ment of manhood which, for want of a better name, 
 we call "character." It is something quite distinct 
 from genius — though all great geniuses are endowed 
 with it. ... As I prognosticated, I have made Poe 
 my enemy by doing him a service. Poe wishes to 
 kick down the ladder by which he rose. He is wel- 
 come. But he does not attack me at a weak point. 
 He probably cannot conceive of anybody's writing for 
 anything but a newspaper reputation, or for post- 
 humous fame, which is but the same thing magnified 
 by distance. I have quite other aims. 
 
 In this same letter, from which the fore- 
 going quotation is made, Lowell permits us 
 to look for a moment into the depths of his 
 heart, where he reveals his intense longing 
 for sympathy and love. Could we gaze be- 
 low the cold exterior of many a person 
 whose pathway for an instant crosses our 
 
200 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 own, we doubtless would be astonished to 
 learn how, in the largest and purest na- 
 tures, this yearning for human fellowship 
 rises into a very passion. Lowell's concep- 
 tion of the office of a poet was a lofty one. 
 His charming and beautiful prose did not 
 possess in his own eyes a hundredth part 
 of the value of his poetry. His desire was 
 to live and be remembered by what he had 
 done in the poetic field. He was conscious 
 of his high calling, and attained to rare mo- 
 ments of prophetic power and vicarious suf- 
 fering : 
 
 My calling is clear to me. I am never lifted up to 
 any peak of vision — and moments of almost fearful 
 inward illumination I have sometimes — but that, 
 when I look down in hope to see some valley of the 
 Beautiful Mountains, I behold nothing but blackened 
 ruins ; and the moans of the downtrodden the world 
 over — but chiefly here in our own land — come up to 
 my ear, instead of the happy songs of the husband- 
 men reaping and binding the sheaves of light ; yet 
 these, too, I hear not seldom. Then I feel how great 
 is the office of poet, could I but even dare to hope to 
 fill it. 
 
 The mutual helpfulness which lies at the 
 foundation of all true democracy is not al- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 201 
 
 ways recognized, particularly by those who, 
 because of birth, training, and education, 
 should be first to embody in their own lives 
 the fact that noblesse oblige. But with 
 Lowell democracy in its widest and truest 
 sense was almost a religion. All great 
 genius has been allied with a youthful tem- 
 perament that never aged. In fact, genius 
 itself, as a subtle prophylactic against time, 
 is a preservative of the simple beliefs, elas- 
 ticity, and fire of youth, to which the vision 
 of the world is ever fair and bright. What- 
 ever epigraphs time may score upon the 
 brow, or howsoever upon hollow temples 
 he may dust his rime, genius permits no 
 wrinkles to come upon the heart. The self- 
 same hopefulness and high-heartedness of 
 early years are borne lightly onward to the 
 very end of life. It was so with Lowell. 
 
 How much a matter of conscience Low- 
 ell's antislavery sentiments were may be 
 discovered from the fact that he was re- 
 luctant to receive money for the articles 
 which he produced in behalf of the cause so 
 dear to his heart. Whatever the acknowl- 
 
202 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 edged charms of Lowell the author — and 
 they are many — they were eclipsed by the 
 charming personality of Lowell the man. 
 It should ever be thus. The writer who is 
 not greater than his writings is a kind of 
 impostor, for he creates in the minds of 
 others a false conception of himself. That 
 Lowell never lost a friend who really knew 
 him need not be regarded as surprising. "If 
 I did not think that I were better than my 
 books," he says, "I should never dream of 
 writing another." He cherished a perpet- 
 ual and consuming desire to fulfill the ex- 
 pectations of his friends. He knew that 
 they anticipated great things for him, and 
 he set about to realize these anticipations. 
 At the same time he felt that his poetical 
 power and skill were increasing, and he 
 looked into the future with the resilience of 
 hope based upon praiseworthy performance. 
 His never-failing kindliness of heart and 
 invincible good humor helped him over not 
 a few of the rough places of life. He was 
 able to see the humorous side of almost 
 every situation, so that difficulties which 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 203 
 
 would have dismayed many another man 
 were for him minified to the vanishing 
 point. Nor was he afraid of dealing with 
 some of the most perplexing of the ethical 
 problems of the world. He looked upon 
 human nature with a clear and tolerant eye, 
 and he never despaired of the ultimate 
 elevation of humanity. His attitude 
 toward the Author of the Christian faith 
 was one of deepest reverence and unchang- 
 ing love. 
 
 Death was not idle in the poet's life. His 
 dear children were taken from him, one by 
 one — with the exception of his daughter 
 Mabel — and all too soon his beautiful and 
 beloved wife. In the loss of the latter Low- 
 ell drank of the bitterest cup that can be 
 pressed to the lips of man. She was a frag- 
 ile creature of fire and dew, and the end ap- 
 proached so insidiously under cover of a 
 constitutional delicacy of health that it took 
 the poet by a heartbreaking surprise. This 
 great sorrow wore him down, but his faith 
 and resignation rose triumphant above the 
 affliction. 
 
204 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 In the opening months of 1855 he was 
 elected to a professorship in Harvard Col- 
 lege — a chair which had previously been 
 occupied by Ticknor and Longfellow. 
 Lowell entered upon the duties of his new 
 position on his return from Europe, in 1856. 
 He continued in this relation for twenty 
 years. In 1857 ne a ^ so became editor of the 
 Atlantic Monthly, "sitting in the seat of the 
 scorner," as he expressed it, for four con- 
 secutive years. At the end of this period 
 he became associated with Charles Eliot 
 Norton in the joint editorship of the North 
 American Review. During the soul-trying 
 years of our civil war his was a puissant 
 voice lifted in defense of the Union. The 
 mounting fire and passion of his patriotism 
 culminated in the splendid "Commemoration 
 Ode," which seems to have been written 
 with his very heart's blood. Lowell was al- 
 ways pleased at any recognition of his work 
 as a poet. He felt that he had in him all 
 the elements of the highest poetical achieve- 
 ments, and in consequence looked with a 
 certain dissatisfaction upon his best pro- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 205 
 
 ductions as falling far below his own ideal 
 of excellence and of possibility. He was 
 always conscious, also, notwithstanding the 
 general buoyancy of his nature, that upon 
 him, as upon all great sensitive souls, 
 pressed the inescapable weltschmerz which 
 haunts these years of time. 
 
 Many of Lowell's utterances might pass 
 current as proverbs, so trenchant are they 
 and bite with such power into the memory : 
 
 He cannot be a wise man who never says a fool- 
 ish thing, and, indeed, I go further, and affirm that 
 it takes a wise man to say a foolish thing. . . . We 
 never find out on how many insignificant points we 
 have fastened the subtile threads of association — 
 which is almost love with sanguine temperaments — 
 till we are forced to break them. . . . We shall 
 never feather our nests from the eagles we have let 
 fly. ... It is splendid, as girls say, to dream back- 
 ward so. One feels as if he were a poet, and one's 
 own Odyssey sings itself in one's blood as he walks. 
 . . . What a web a man can spin out of his life, if 
 a man be only a genius. ... I have discovered that 
 it is almost impossible to learn all about anything 
 unless indeed it be some piece of ill-luck, and then 
 one has the help of one's friends. . . . But let us 
 have a cheerful confidence that we are worth damn- 
 ing, for that implies a chance also of something bet- 
 ter. ... I believe it one of the most happy things 
 14 
 
206 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 in the world, as we grow older, to have as many ties 
 as possible with whatever is best in our own past, 
 and to be pledged as deeply as may be to our own 
 youth. . . . That friendship should be able to endure 
 silence without suspicion is the surest touchstone of 
 its sufficiency. ... I have always believed that a 
 man's fate is born with him, and that he cannot 
 escape from it nor greatly modify it — and that con- 
 sequently everyone gets in the long run exactly what 
 he deserves, neither more nor less. ... If a man 
 does anything good, the world always finds it out, 
 sooner or later, and if he doesn't, why, the world 
 finds that out, too — and ought to. . . . Women need 
 social stimulus more than we [men]. They con- 
 tribute to it more, and their magnetism, unless drawn 
 off by the natural conductors, turns inward and irri- 
 tates. ... I look upon a belief as none the worse, 
 but rather the better, for being hereditary, prizing as 
 I do whatever helps to give continuity to the being 
 and doing of man and an accumulated force to his 
 character. . . . They go about to prove to me from 
 a lot of nasty savages that conscience is a purely 
 artificial product, as if that wasn't the very wonder 
 of it. What odds whether it is the thing or the apti- 
 tude that is innate? What race of beasts ever got 
 one up in all their leisurely aons? ... I don't care 
 where the notion of immortality came from. If it 
 sprang out of a controlling necessity of our nature, 
 some instinct of self-protection and preservation, like 
 the color of some of Darwin's butterflies, at any rate 
 it is there and as real as that, and I mean to hold 
 it fast. 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 20^ 
 
 The unfolding of a commanding intellect 
 always presents a fascinating study, and 
 hence the writer of these lines has purposely 
 lingered over the earlier portion of Lowell's 
 life as we find it expressed in his letters. 
 His high place as a poet is so widely recog- 
 nized that no words in emphasis of that 
 fact are needed now. As a critic he brought 
 to bear upon his task a kindly disposition, a 
 culture broad and exact, and a catholicity 
 of taste equaled only by the acumen of his 
 mind. His perception of high qualities 
 seemed to be instinctive. The slashing, 
 swashbuckling style of criticism which pre- 
 vailed about the middle of the present cen- 
 tury Lowell wholly eschewed, and perhaps 
 for the first time on this side of the Atlantic 
 there was apparent an earnest and pains- 
 taking effort to ascertain the real content of 
 a piece of literary art. Over all his writing, 
 likewise, in whatever kind, there played an 
 ever various and subtle humor like irides- 
 cent light. 
 
VII 
 
 THE LETTERS OF ROBERT 
 LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 211 
 
 VII 
 
 THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS 
 STEVENSON 
 
 We have fallen upon an age of notes and 
 notelets. The old leisureliness requisite for 
 the cultivation of the epistolary art is ours 
 no longer. The demon of haste lurks at 
 our elbow, and we no longer take time to 
 observe the amenities of friendship. In 
 days that are past a letter was at once a 
 news-sheet, a record of mental taste and de- 
 light, and a flashing mirror of the heart. 
 Every word exhaled an aroma of personali- 
 ty. Now we receive a few type-written 
 lines of colorless language, and we must 
 accept them forsooth as a letter. Yet these 
 latter years have not been wholly devoid of 
 the kindly instincts of the genuine letter- 
 writer; and when we turn to the corre- 
 spondence of Lowell, the Brownings, Dante 
 Rossetti, and Robert Louis Stevenson it is 
 like breathing again the atmosphere in 
 
212 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 which Keats, Cowper, Schiller, and Lamb 
 indited letters with a pen dipped in their 
 own hearts. 
 
 It is posterity that pronounces final judg- 
 ment upon a writer. He may fill a large 
 and unique place among his contemporaries, 
 and seem to the eyes that look upon his own 
 day as destined to a seat among the im- 
 mortals, but it is those who come after him 
 to whom is committed the ultimate adjudi- 
 cation of his claims to remembrance. The 
 writer who lacks vitality and a fecund and 
 fertilizing power over others will, imme- 
 diately that death has vindicated his univer- 
 sal sway, quietly slip into the limbo of for- 
 getfulness. But he in whose veins life 
 warms and riots, who makes his pages 
 breathe with a full and healthy scope, who 
 appeals to the fundamental instincts and 
 loves of humankind, may falter for a little 
 while in his march toward the Pantheon of 
 perpetual renown, but sooner or later he 
 assuredly arrives. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson was an artist, 
 curious and delightful, dealing with his sub- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 213 
 
 jects in the fresh, joyous, and zestful man- 
 ner in which an active-minded boy inspects 
 each new object that comes within the ra- 
 dius of his experience. In fact, as a writer, 
 Stevenson's brave and sunny juvenescence 
 is one of his most charming traits. In his 
 works he shines forth in many characters ; 
 he is a moralist — sometimes of the grave- 
 digger type — a poet, a humorist, a Bohe- 
 mian, an adventurer, a buccaneer, a prince, 
 a beggar, a historian, a traveler, a chron- 
 icler of everyday events, a hater of false- 
 hoods and shams. He has a clear and forth- 
 right way of telling a story, though in him 
 the dreamer is strangely united with the 
 man of action. A singular intimacy broods 
 over his pages, so that he takes at once into 
 his confidence those who will listen, how- 
 ever briefly, to his words. He loved to 
 deal with the elemental passions and qual- 
 ities of humankind, as witness Herrick's 
 struggle against moral decadence, and Da- 
 vis's redemption to righteousness, in The 
 Ebb Tide, or the conflict arising in the dual 
 nature of every man as portrayed in The 
 
214 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 
 He did not tamely accept all that modern 
 society imposes on its devotees. Inwardly 
 he chafed, and outwardly was always some- 
 thing of a rebel, against the repressive and 
 mechanical social conventions which rule 
 the present time. In a high degree he was 
 impressible to all the experiences of life, 
 remembering moods and emotions both sub- 
 tle and elusive. His Child's Garden of 
 Verses is the chronicle of a childhood pecul- 
 iar in its unforgotten imaginative products. 
 The aura of a period and a world filled with 
 shapes and sounds, too vivid to seem un- 
 real, lingered in his memory through all the 
 years of his mature manhood. So deeply 
 had the scenes and impressions of his early 
 life bitten into his mind that his most living 
 thoughts were of those days which, to most 
 of us, are soon forgotten. 
 
 Stevenson loved those writers of whom 
 he said that they had been "eavesdropping 
 at the door of his heart." He himself was 
 like them. Again and again he draws back 
 to his pages those readers whom he attracts 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 215 
 
 ac all, and each time the old charm is re- 
 newed with fresh relish and enjoyment. 
 This undoubtedly is the test of a writer's 
 permanence — the possession of that magic 
 whereby a former spell is caused to operate 
 upon a reader's heart, he knows not how 
 and he cares not why; once drawn within 
 the mystic influence of the wizard's circle, 
 he surrenders to the power which is upon 
 him and takes his intoxication with joy. 
 First of all, Stevenson was an artist. He 
 knew the value of words. He studied their 
 shades and sounds. He understood how to 
 make his narratives and descriptions cumu- 
 lative in effect. For instance, what can sur- 
 pass in beauty and potency the account in 
 Prince Otto of Seraphina's spiritual rebap- 
 tism in the forest at night? 
 
 At last she began to be aware of a wonderful revo- 
 lution, compared to which the fire of Mittwalden 
 Palace was but the crack and flash of a percussion 
 cap. The countenance with which the pines re- 
 garded her began insensibly to change ; the grass, too, 
 short as it was, and the whole winding staircase of 
 the brook's course, began to wear a solemn fresh- 
 ness of appearance. And this slow transfiguration 
 
2i6 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 reached her heart, and played upon it, and trans- 
 pierced it with a serious thrill. She looked all 
 about; the whole face of nature looked back, brim- 
 ful of meaning, finger on lip, leaking its glad secret. 
 She looked up. Heaven was almost emptied of stars. 
 Such as still lingered shone with a changed and wan- 
 ing brightness, and began to faint in their stations. 
 And the color of the sky itself was the most wonder- 
 ful ; for the rich blue of the night had now melted 
 and softened and brightened ; and there had suc- 
 ceeded in its place a hue that has no name, and that 
 is never seen but as the herald of morning. "O !" 
 she cried, joy catching at her voice, "O ! it is the 
 dawn !" In a breath she passed over the brook, and 
 looped up her skirts and fairly ran in the dim alleys. 
 As she ran her ears were aware of many pipings, 
 more beatitiful than music ; in the small dish-shaped 
 houses in the fork of giant arms, where they had lain 
 all night, lover by lover, warmly pressed, the bright- 
 eyed, big-hearted singers began to awake for the day. 
 Her heart melted and flowed forth to them in kind- 
 ness. And they, from their small and high perches 
 in the clerestories of the wood cathedral, peered 
 down sidelong at the ragged princess as she flitted 
 below them on the carpet of the moss and tassel. 
 
 To this artistic quality of Stevenson valu- 
 able testimony is borne by Sidney Colvin 
 in the following word of reminiscence: 
 
 I remember the late Sir John Millais, a shrewd 
 and very independent judge of books, calling across 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 217 
 
 to me at a dinner-table, "You know Stevenson, don't 
 you?" and then going on, "Well, I wish you would 
 tell him from me, if he cares to know, that to my 
 mind he is the very first of living artists. I don't 
 mean writers merely, but painters and all of us ; no- 
 body living can see with such an eye as that fellow, 
 and nobody is such a master of his tools." 
 
 Stevenson's vocabulary was particularly 
 rich and noble. To him words were much 
 like living things. He loved them not only 
 for what they expressed, but for an intrinsic 
 value which he was keen to discover. His 
 choice of the beautiful and colorful was in- 
 tuitive. Some have accused him of em- 
 ploying a style which was imitative, or at 
 best but a compound of many others. "By 
 the way, I have tried to read the Spectator, 
 which they all say I imitate, and — it's very 
 wrong of me, I know — but I can't. It's all 
 very fine, you know, and all that, but it's 
 vapid." He was an ardent and sincere stu- 
 dent of the world's best literature; but all 
 that he received from whatsoever source 
 went into the alembic of his own mind, was 
 fused in the heat of his own thought, and 
 came out Stevenson. He was a maker of 
 
2i8 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 memorable phrases as well as a sane com- 
 mentator upon life and conduct: 
 
 "Acts may be forgiven, not even God can forgive 
 the hanger-back." "Choose the best if you can; or 
 choose the worst; that which hangs in the wind 
 dangles from a gibbet." "A fault known is a fault 
 cured to the strong; but to the weak it is a fetter 
 riveted." "The mean man doubts, the great-hearted 
 is deceived." "Shame had a fine bed, but where 
 was slumber? Once he was in jail he 'slept.'" 
 "Disappointment, except with one's self, is not a very 
 capital affair ; and the sham beatitude, 'Blessed is he 
 that expecteth little,' one of the truest and, in a 
 sense, the most Christlike things in literature." "It 
 is much more important to do right than not to do 
 wrong ; further, the one is possible, the other has 
 always been and will ever be impossible ; and the 
 faithful designer to do right is accepted by God ; 
 that seems to me to be the Gospel, and that was how 
 Christ delivered us from the law." "Ugliness is only 
 the prose of horror." "O, if I knew how to omit, I 
 would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew 
 how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper." 
 "To fume and fret is undignified, suicidally foolish, 
 and theologically unpardonable ; we are here not to 
 make, but to tread predestined pathways ; we are the 
 foam of a wave, and to preserve a proper equanimity 
 is not merely the first part of submission to God, 
 but the chief of possible kindnesses to those about 
 us." "The great double danger of taking life too 
 easily, and taking it too hard, how difficult it is to 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 219 
 
 balance that !" "The Bible, in most parts, is a cheer- 
 ful book ; it is our little piping theologies, tracts, and 
 sermons that are dull and dowie." 
 
 Stevenson was a brilliant and entertain- 
 ing conversationalist among his friends. 
 "He radiates talk," says W. E. Henley, "as 
 the sun does light and heat; and after an 
 evening — or a week — with him, you come 
 forth with a sense of satisfaction in your 
 own capacity which somehow proves superi- 
 or even to the inevitable conclusion that your 
 brilliance was but the reflection of his own, 
 and that all the while you were only play- 
 ing the part of Rubinstein's piano or Sara- 
 sate's violin. " His humanity was so large 
 that his friendships were not confined alone 
 to those who cultivated the literary life, but 
 he bound to him with enduring ties of af- 
 fection those who won his regard in various 
 fields of activity. He never posed as a 
 valetudinarian, nor played on the sympa- 
 thies of the public, though he was upon 
 perpetual flittings in search of health — now 
 in Switzerland, now in the Adirondack 
 Mountains, and now in the ends of the 
 
220 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 earth. "To me," he says, "the medicine bot- 
 tles on my chimney and the blood on my 
 handkerchief are accidents ; they do not 
 color my view of life; and I should think 
 myself a trifler and in bad taste if I intro- 
 duced the world to these unimportant 
 privacies." 
 
 Stevenson came of good stock on both 
 his father's and mother's side. His pater- 
 nal grandfather was a civil engineer and 
 built the Bell Rock lighthouse. The father 
 of Robert Louis Stevenson was Thomas, 
 the youngest son of Robert Stevenson. Rob- 
 ert Louis's mother, from whom he inher- 
 ited his delicate constitution, was Margaret 
 Isabella Balfour, youngest daughter of Rev. 
 Lewis Balfour, minister of the parish of 
 Colinton, in Midlothian. Robert Lewis 
 Balfour Stevenson, as our novelist was 
 christened, was born in Edinburgh, Novem- 
 ber 13, 1850. He was an only child, always 
 feeble, and subject to extreme nervous ex- 
 citement. An eager listener to tales of ad- 
 venture and deeds of derring-do, he began 
 early to try his hand at composition of his 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 221 
 
 own. He failed to receive much regular 
 schooling because of his infirm health. In 
 his childhood he was characterized by the 
 same power to charm that he so impressed 
 upon others in his maturer years. The 
 blood of the gypsy seemed to be potent in 
 his veins, and he was a wanderer almost to 
 the close of his life. It was hoped that he, 
 too, would enter the family profession of 
 civil engineer. He was entered as a stu- 
 dent at Edinburgh University, and attended 
 classes there as his health and inclination 
 permitted. He was not a hard student at 
 college; but in his own desultory way he 
 was an ardent devourer of books, and at 
 the same time kept his eyes wide open upon 
 humankind. His reading ranged the entire 
 field of English letters, and he was no stran- 
 ger to the literature of other tongues. 
 
 In 1871, though he had manifested a de- 
 gree of aptitude for the profession of civil 
 engineer, it was concluded that neither his 
 physical ability nor personal tastes would 
 admit of his following the pursuit of his 
 
 forbears, and he began to study law. He 
 15 
 
222 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 was admitted to the bar in 1875, but he was 
 never to follow a lawyer's vocation. Stev- 
 enson's parents were of a religious tempera- 
 ment, but the novelist early revolted against 
 the stern and forbidding aspects of the creed 
 which was dominant in his father's house. 
 He regarded all dogmatic formulation of 
 theological opinions as an expression of the 
 universal human need of something divine 
 in the presence of the inscrutable mysteries 
 which forever infold us here. Thus he soon 
 found himself at variance with his father 
 upon questions of faith. The father was a 
 strictly orthodox, deeply religious Scotch- 
 man, with all that the terms imply. The 
 son, early imbibing the spirit of freedom 
 and toleration, chafed within the narrow 
 bounds of the paternal belief, and at length 
 broke away altogether, with what heart 
 pangs between father and son few can know 
 or understand, for they dearly loved each 
 other and had been boon companions. Louis 
 writes : 
 
 The thunderbolt has fallen with a vengeance now. 
 On Friday night, after leaving you, in the course of 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 22$ 
 
 conversation, my father put me one or two questions 
 as to beliefs, which I candidly answered. I really 
 hate all lying so much now — a new-found honesty 
 that has somehow come out of my late illness — that 
 I could not so much as hesitate at the time ; but, if I 
 had foreseen the real hell of everything since, I 
 think I should have lied, as I have done so often be- 
 fore. I so far thought of my father, but I had for- 
 gotten my mother. And now ! they are both ill, both 
 silent, both as down in the mouth as if — I can find 
 no simile. You may fancy how happy it is for me. 
 If it were not too late, I think I could almost find it 
 in my heart to retract, but it is too late ; and, again, 
 am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of 
 course it is rougher than hell upon my father, but 
 can I help it? They don't see, either, that my game 
 is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not — as 
 they call me — a careless infidel. I believe as much 
 as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio ; I am, 
 I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I 
 have not come hastily to my views. I reserve — as I 
 told them — many points until I acquire fuller infor- 
 mation, and do not think I am thus justly to be 
 called "horrible atheist." . . . Here is a good heavy 
 cross with a vengeance, and all rough with rusty 
 nails that tear your fingers, only it is not I that have 
 to carry it alone ; I hold the light end, but the heavy 
 burden falls on these two. 
 
 He seems to recur to this unhappy period 
 in his life in his portraiture of Weir of 
 Hermistojij when he says: 
 
224 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Sympathy is not due to these steadfast iron na- 
 tures. If he [the old judge] failed to gain his son's 
 friendship, or even his son's toleration, on he went 
 up the great bare staircase of his duty, uncheered 
 and undepressed. There might have been more 
 pleasure in his relations with Archie, so much he 
 may have recognized at moments ; but pleasure was 
 a by-product of the singular chemistry of life, which 
 only fools expected. 
 
 As an example of his early power of de- 
 scription and his growing habit of observa- 
 tion, the following, written at eighteen, is 
 an adequate specimen. In a letter to his 
 mother he says: 
 
 To the south, however, is as fine a piece of coast 
 scenery as I ever saw. Great black chasms, huge 
 black cliffs, rugged and overhung gullies, natural 
 arches, and deep green pools below them, almost too 
 deep to let you see the gleam of sand among the 
 darker weed ; there are deep caves, too. In one of 
 these lives a tribe of gypsies. The men are always 
 drunk, simply and truthfully always. From morning 
 to evening the great villainous-looking fellows are 
 either sleeping off the last debauch or hulking about 
 the cave "in the horrors." The cave is deep, high, 
 and airy, and might be made comfortable enough. 
 But they just live among heaped bowlders, damp with 
 continual droppings from above, with no more fur- 
 niture than two or three tin pans, a truss of rotten 
 Straw, and a few ragged cloaks. In winter the surf 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 225 
 
 bursts into the mouth and often forces them to aban- 
 don it. 
 
 Already his was a deft hand at character- 
 ization, as evidenced in the following ex- 
 tract from his pen : 
 
 Seven p. m. found me at Breadalbane Terrace, clad 
 in spotless blacks, white tie, shirt, et cetera, and fin- 
 ished off below with a pair of navvies' boots. How 
 true that the devil is betrayed by his feet ! A mes- 
 sage to Cummy at last. Why, O treacherous woman, 
 were my dress boots withheld? Dramatis persona ; 
 pere R., amusing, long-winded, in many points like 
 papa ; mere R., nice, delicate, likes hymns, knew Aunt 
 Margaret (t' ould man knew Uncle Alan) ; tille R., 
 nominee "Sara" (no h), rather nice, lights up well, 
 good voice, interested face ; Miss L., nice also, 
 washed out a little, and, I think, a trifle sentimental ; 
 fils R., in a Leith office, smart, full of happy epithet, 
 amusing. They are very nice and very kind — asked 
 me to come back — "any night you feel dull ; and any 
 night doesn't mean no night : we'll be so glad to see 
 you." C'est la mere qui parle. 
 
 In the same letter there are intimations of 
 his later and mature style: "As my senses 
 slowly flooded, I heard the whistling and 
 the roaring of wind, and the lashing of 
 gust-blown and uncertain flaws of rain. I 
 got up, dressed, and went out. The mizzled 
 
226 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 sky and rain blinded you. ... I stood a 
 long while on the cope watching the sea be- 
 low me ; I hear its dull, monotonous roar at 
 this moment below the shrieking of the 
 wind." 
 
 The prevision of his early death is re- 
 corded again and again; not in any mawk- 
 ish or sentimental manner, but as a thing 
 already understood and accepted. The 
 mingled gayety and melancholy which un- 
 derlay his nature break forth quite spon- 
 taneously in the early letters which he in- 
 dited to interested and affectionate friends: 
 "When I am a very old and very respectable 
 citizen, with white hair and bland manners 
 and a gold watch, I shall hear crows cawing 
 in my heart, as I heard them this morning. 
 I vote for old age and eighty years of retro- 
 spect. Yet, after all, I dare say, a short 
 shrift and a nice green grave are about as 
 desirable." 
 
 In 1873 Stevenson's health quite broke 
 down, and upon the advice of physicians he 
 journeyed to the southern part of France. 
 From this experience emanated his essay 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 227 
 
 "Ordered South," which was his first con- 
 tribution to Macmillan's Magazine. At 
 twenty-three years of age the future essay- 
 ist and noveliest is already foreshadowed: 
 
 I must tell you a thing I saw to-day. I was going 
 down to Portobello in the train, when there came 
 into the next compartment (third class) an artisan, 
 strongly marked with smallpox, and with sunken, 
 heavy eyes — a face hard and unkind, and without 
 anything lovely. There was a woman on the plat- 
 form seeing him off. At first sight, with her one 
 eye blind and the whole cast of her features strongly 
 plebeian, and even vicious, she seemed as unpleasant 
 as the man ; but there was something beautifully soft, 
 a sort of light of tenderness, as on some Dutch Ma- 
 donna, that came over her face when she looked at 
 the man. They talked for a while together through 
 the window ; the man seemed to have been asking 
 money. "Ye ken the last time," she said, "I gave 
 ye two shillin's for your ludgin', and ye said — 
 it died off into whisper. Plainly, Falstaff and 
 Dame Quickly over again. The man laughed un- 
 pleasantly, even cruelly, and said something ; and the 
 woman turned her back on the carriage and stood a 
 long while so, and, do what I might, I could catch no 
 glimpse of her expression, although I thought I saw 
 the heave of a sob in her shoulders. At last, after 
 the train was already in motion, she turned round 
 and put two shillings into his hand. I saw her stand 
 and look after us with a perfect heaven of love on 
 her face — this poor one-eyed Madonna — until the 
 
228 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 train was out of sight; but the man, sordidly happy 
 with his gain, did not put himself to the inconveni- 
 ence of one glance to thank her for her ill-deserved 
 kindness. 
 
 Here is another side of life which Steven- 
 son portrays, and which reveals him in the 
 character he always preserved as a clean 
 man: 
 
 I shall tell you a story. Last Friday I went down 
 to Portobello, in the heavy rain, with an uneasy wind 
 blowing par rafales off the sea — or, "en rafales," 
 should it be? or what? As I got down near the 
 beach a poor woman, oldish, and seemingly, lately at 
 least, respectable, followed me and made signs. She 
 was drenched to the skin, and looked wretched below 
 wretchedness. You know, I did not like to look 
 back at her ; it seemed as if she might misunderstand 
 and be terribly hurt and slighted ; so I stood at the 
 end of the street — there was no one else within sight 
 in the wet — and lifted up my hand very high with 
 some money in it. I heard her steps draw heavily 
 near behind me, and, when she was near enough 
 to see, I let the money fall in the mud and went off 
 at my best walk without ever turning round. There 
 is nothing in the story ; and yet you will understand 
 how much there is, if one chose to set it forth. You 
 see, she was so ugly ; and you know there is some- 
 thing terribly, miserably pathetic in a certain smile, 
 a certain sodden aspect of invitation on such faces. 
 It is so terrible, that it is in a way sacred ; it means 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 229 
 
 the outside of degradation and — what is worst of all 
 in life — false position. I hope you understand me 
 rightly. 
 
 Stevenson's first meeting with Mr. W. E. 
 Henley was in circumstances unusual and 
 pathetic, the latter lying ill in a hospital 
 from which he did not emerge for many 
 weary days. The friendship thus formed 
 continued until the end of the novelist's 
 life. In this connection it is interesting to 
 recall Mr. Henley's unique and satisfying 
 series of poems entitled In Hospital, which 
 could have been written only by one who 
 had suffered the extremes of pain and lan- 
 guor and had passed through the scenes so 
 vividly and adequately represented. Stev- 
 enson writes: 
 
 Yesterday, Leslie Stephen, who was down here to 
 lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poor 
 fellow, a poet who writes for him, and who has been 
 eighteen months in our infirmary, and may be, for 
 all I know, eighteen months more. It was very sad 
 to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and 
 a couple of sick children in the other bed. A girl 
 came in to visit the children, and played dominoes 
 on the counterpane with them ; the gas flared and 
 crackled, and the fire burned in a dull economical 
 
230 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and 
 the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and 
 beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he 
 had been in a king's palace or the great King's pal- 
 ace of the blue air. He has taught himself two lan- 
 guages since he has been lying there. I shall try to 
 be of use to him. 
 
 Stevenson's earliest thought of the South 
 Sea islands as a sort of "earthly paradise" 
 for the sick, wayworn, and weary is thus 
 awakened, to be cherished in silence for 
 more than fifteen years : 
 
 Awfully nice man here to-night. Public servant — 
 New Zealand. Telling us all about the South Sea 
 islands till I was sick with desire to go there ; beau- 
 tiful places, green forever ; perfect climate ; perfect 
 shapes of men and women, with red flowers in their 
 hair ; and nothing to do but to study oratory and eti- 
 quette, sit in the sun, and pick up the fruits as they 
 fall. Navigator's Island is the place ; absolute balm 
 for the weary. 
 
 Our author triumphantly passed his ex- 
 amination for the bar at Edinburgh, but for 
 him had been ordained something better 
 than the law. In 1876, in company with 
 Sir Walter Simpson, Stevenson undertook 
 the canoe trip which resulted in the volume, 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 231 
 
 An Inland Voyage. The open air, the de- 
 lightful and various scenery, together with 
 companionship of an agreeable nature, in- 
 duced an almost boyish happiness and peace 
 of mind. In 1878 occurred the autumnal 
 tramp through the Cevennes chronicled so 
 charmingly in Travels with a Donkey. Dur- 
 ing all this time he was more or less ailing, 
 and occasionally he fell into black moods 
 of despondency; but from these he quickly 
 rallied, continuing his activities without 
 pause, accomplishing the maximum of work 
 despite his enfeebled physical condition, 
 and so finally entering with assurance upon 
 his chosen career of letters. 
 
 Stevenson first met in France the lady — 
 Mrs. Osborne — who was afterward to be- 
 come his wife. She had been unhappy in 
 her domestic circumstances, and returning 
 to her home in California, she determined 
 to seek a divorce from her husband. Stev- 
 enson, hearing of Mrs. Osborne's intention, 
 started for America, resolved to risk all in 
 his attempt to support himself, and pos- 
 sibly a family, by literature alone. In San 
 
232 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 Francisco, while waiting for affairs to un- 
 ravel themselves with regard to his pro- 
 jected matrimonial adventure, he knew the 
 pinch of real want. For a brief and unsuc- 
 cessful period he was a reporter upon a 
 San Francisco daily paper; often he was 
 fairly in want of food ; sick and all but pen- 
 niless, a stranger in a strange land — -this 
 episode was the most distressing of his life. 
 He himself thus recalls it : "I have to drop 
 from a fifty cent to a twenty-five cent din- 
 ner; to-day begins my fall. That brings 
 down my outlay in food and drink to forty- 
 five cents, or is. 10J/2 d. per day. How are 
 the mighty fallen ! Luckily this is such a 
 cheap place for food." He was united in 
 wedlock with the woman of his choice in 
 May, 1880. Of his marriage he writes : "It 
 was not my bliss that I was interested in 
 when I was married ; it was a sort of mar- 
 riage in extremis; and if I am where I am, 
 it is thanks to the care of that lady who 
 married me when I was a mere complica- 
 tion of cough and bones, much fitter for an 
 emblem of mortality than a bridegroom." 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 233 
 
 Stevenson arrived at his judgments by 
 the way of his own modes of thinking and 
 observing. His eyes as well as his mind 
 were wide open, nor was his outlook upon 
 the world that of the confirmed valetudina- 
 rian. He loved nature for its own sake, 
 while his' devotion to his kind was no less 
 complete and intense. His spirits drooped 
 low at times, as his fluctuating health 
 dragged down the frayed and feeble body, 
 but returning strength would restore his 
 old vein of gayety. His sympathy and ten- 
 derness are shown again and again. On 
 his emigrant trip across the plains he takes 
 care of a babe for hours, that the weary 
 mother may enjoy a rest. In San Fran- 
 cisco his heart is torn at the dying of a little 
 child: 
 
 My landlord's and landlady's little four-year-old 
 child is dying in the house ; and O, what he has suf- 
 fered ! It has really affected my health. O never, 
 never, any family for me ! I am cured of that. . . . 
 Excuse this scratch ; for the child weighs on me, dear 
 Colvin. I did all I could to help ; but all seems lit- 
 tle, to the point of crime, when one of these poor in- 
 nocents lies in such misery. 
 
234 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 His literary likings were prompted by 
 his delight in the craft which was dear to 
 him as life itself. Thus he says: 
 
 An art is a fine fortune, a palace in a park, a band 
 of music, health, and physical beauty ; all but love to 
 any worthy practicer. I sleep upon my art for a pil- 
 low ; I waken in my art ; I am unready for death, 
 because I hate to leave it. I love my wife. I do not 
 know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her ; 
 but, while I can conceive of being widowed, I refuse 
 the offering of life without my art. I am not but in 
 my art ; it is me ; I am the body if it merely. 
 
 He was an austere critic of himself, not 
 even his best work satisfying his exacting 
 requirements or fulfilling his lofty ideal. 
 No critic could point out to him any failure 
 in his work of which he himself was not 
 first aware. He was a stylist, it is true — 
 what man is not who loves and studies the 
 exquisite art of composition. Now and 
 then he declares against style in favor of 
 something else, but he gave unremitting 
 attention not only to what he had to say, 
 but how he said it; and, like every other 
 artist, he knew well when he had done a 
 good piece of work, and was filled accord- 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 235 
 
 ingly with a generous glow and satisfac- 
 tion. Few, perhaps none others, could 
 have achieved what he did under disad- 
 vantages so great and continuous. He was 
 wont to regard himself as a slow artificer 
 in letters, but his slowness was rather in in- 
 vention than in composition. He says: "I 
 am still 'a slow study,' and sit a long while 
 silent on my eggs. Unconscious thought, 
 there is the only method; macerate your 
 subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid 
 off and look in — and there your stuff is, 
 good or bad." Though he loved his tools, 
 and wrought like a lover with them, he was 
 occasionally haunted by the thought that 
 his art might sometimes be too palpable. In 
 his ordinary correspondence with his inti- 
 mate friends there was scarcely a letter in 
 which did not appear some striking allusion 
 to books or bookmen, or to those who had 
 labored before, or were laboring with him, 
 in his chosen field. In every instance, the 
 obiter dicta could have come only from an 
 earnest student of life and letters. 
 
 Stevenson returned to England and Scot- 
 
236 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 land in August, 1880, taking his new wife 
 with him ; thence he went to spend the win- 
 ter in Switzerland. Returning to Scotland 
 the following summer, he made an ineffect- 
 ual attempt to secure the chair of history 
 and constitutional law in the University of 
 Edinburgh. Repairing to Switzerland in 
 the autumn of 1881, he finished Treas- 
 ure Island, The Silverado Squatters, and 
 some of his most fortunate essays for the 
 magazines. It is not possible here to fol- 
 low in detail the endless journeyings of 
 this frail man of letters in search of health. 
 There is something pathetic but immeasur- 
 ably courageous in this invalid author la- 
 boring always under difficulties, at times 
 and for weeks together so feeble that he was 
 forbidden even to speak lest the dreadful 
 hemorrhages of the lungs should recur, in- 
 domitably gay, sweet, and debonair, pray- 
 ing only for strength that he might work 
 and earn his daily bread. Stevenson's fa- 
 ther bought for him a house at Bourne- 
 mouth, England, which the novelist named 
 Skerryvore, from one of the sea towns of 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 237 
 
 the Hebrides, and in commemoration of 
 one of his father's most notable engineer- 
 ing achievements. Here, though constant- 
 ly in a precarious physical condition, he 
 produced between the years 1884 and 1887 
 some of his best and most characteristic 
 work. 
 
 In January, 1886, appeared The Strange 
 Case of. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which at 
 once attracted wide attention; in the same 
 year appeared Kidnapped, which repeated 
 the success of the earlier production, and 
 which Stevenson himself was wont to re- 
 gard as the high-water mark of his crea- 
 tions. In August, 1887, his uncertain 
 health made it necessary to try again a 
 change of climate; accordingly, with his 
 family, he came to the United States and 
 spent seven months at Saranac Lake, in 
 the Adirondack Mountains. In America, 
 for the first time, he tasted the full sweets 
 of a not unwelcome popularity, yet no 
 man was ever more unspoiled by success 
 than he. 
 
 Like most men of genius, Stevenson pro- 
 
 16 
 
238 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 jected many works, few of which were actu- 
 ally accomplished, his delicate health and 
 teeming brain interrupting and diverting 
 his labors. Whatever he touched sprang 
 into life. He had in him the power to put 
 a warm, red, pulsing heart beneath the ribs 
 of death. He was devoid of any petty jeal- 
 ousy toward men of his own profession. 
 He recognized and rejoiced in all good 
 work, from whatever source, with a fine 
 and generous relish. In him there was a 
 deep-lying vein of religious feeling, not of 
 the cant kind, but healthful, manly, and re- 
 served. Occasionally he seems to speak as 
 an unbeliever, but at the core of him the 
 essentials of the rugged faith of his native 
 land were really vital and dominant. His 
 distinction between the religious man and 
 the pious man is finely drawn, but like him- 
 self in the originality of the point of view. 
 His constant migrations and his oft-re- 
 curring and dangerous illness brought him 
 to look upon death with no terror, but with 
 the equanimity of a Christian and a philoso- 
 pher ; and when he expresses resignation it 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 239 
 
 is not the resignation of either apathy or 
 despair. 
 
 In his own way Stevenson was interested 
 in questions of politics, and all matters of 
 public concern received his intelligent and 
 critical attention. Like many other men of 
 genius he was not a model in the conduct of 
 business affairs. He was generous to his 
 friends, and his purse was ever open to 
 unfortunate men of the pen or the press. 
 His bete noire was the wind, probably be- 
 cause of the weakness of his lungs. It is 
 interesting to observe how, again and again, 
 in his correspondence as well as in his sto- 
 ries and essays, he speaks of the wind, and 
 almost always with disfavor, though for 
 the various scenes and nearly all the moods 
 of nature he cherished an abiding affection. 
 He was possessed of an old and rooted be- 
 lief that he should die by drowning ; which 
 is but another instance of the fact that even 
 ancient and persistent impressions are not 
 to be relied upon, and may finally partake 
 of the character of superstitions. He never 
 outgrew some phases of his childhood, and 
 
2 4 o LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 the heart in his bosom was susceptible to 
 youthful pastimes and enthusiasms to the 
 very last: 
 
 When a man seemingly sane tells me he has "fallen 
 in love with stagnation," I can only say to him, 
 "You will never be a pirate!" This may not cause 
 any regret to Mrs. Monkhouse ; but in your own soul 
 it will clang hollow — think of it ! Never ! After 
 all boyhood's aspirations and youth's immortal day- 
 dreams, you are condemned to sit down, grossly draw 
 in your chair to the fat board, and be a beastly bur- 
 gess till you die. Can it be? Is there not some 
 escape, some furlough from the moral law, some holi- 
 day jaunt contrivable into a better land? Shall we 
 never shed blood ? This prospect is too gray. 
 
 The idea of yachting had brooded long- 
 in Stevenson's mind, and at length culmi- 
 nated in an extended cruise in the schooner 
 Casco among the South Sea islands. He 
 had determined to invest ten thousand dol- 
 lars in this sailing trip, from which he was 
 destined never to return to the shores of 
 England or America. It was on June 28, 
 1888, that he started from the harbor of 
 San Francisco. After cruising about for 
 several months he arrived, near Christmas 
 time, at Honolulu, where he remained for 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 241 
 
 six months. During this period he visited 
 the leper colony at Molokai. His fine 
 thoughtfulness and quick sympathy are 
 beautifully shown in a letter to his wife : 
 
 Presently we came up with the leper promontory — 
 lowland, quite bare and bleak and harsh, a little town 
 of wooden houses, two churches, a landing stair, all 
 unsightly, sour, northerly, lying athwart the sunrise, 
 with the great wall of the pali cutting the world out 
 on the south. Our lepers were sent on the first boat, 
 about a dozen, one poor child very horrid, one white 
 man, leaving a large grown family behind him in 
 Honolulu, and then into the second stepped the sis- 
 ters and myself. I do not know how it would have 
 been with me had the sisters not been there. My 
 horror of the horrible is about my weakest point ; 
 but the moral loveliness at my elbow blotted all else 
 out ; and when I found that one of them was crying, 
 poor soul, quietly under her veil, I cried a little my- 
 self ; then I felt as right as a trivet, only a little 
 crushed to be there so uselessly. I thought it was 
 a sin and a shame she should feel unhappy ; I turned 
 round to her and said something like this : "Ladies, 
 God himself is here to give you welcome. I'm sure 
 it is good for me to be beside you ; I hope it will be 
 blessed to me ; I thank you for myself and the good 
 you do me." It seemed to cheer her up ; but indeed 
 I had scarce said it when ,ve were at the landing 
 stairs, and there was a great crowd, hundreds of 
 (God save us!) pantomime masks in poor human 
 flesh, waiting to receive the sisters and the new 
 patients. 
 
242 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 His pen picture of Father Damien is in- 
 deed most striking: 
 
 Of old Damien, of whose weaknesses and worse 
 perhaps I heard fully, I think only the more. It was 
 a European peasant — dirty, bigoted, untruthful, un- 
 wise, tricky, but superb with generosity, residual 
 candor and fundamental good humor : convince him 
 he had done wrong — it might take hours of insult — 
 and he would undo what he had done and like his 
 corrector better. A man with all the grime and 
 paltriness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the 
 more for that. 
 
 Determined to renew his yachting expe- 
 ence, in June, 1889, he left Honolulu, in the 
 schooner Equator, bound to the Gilberts, in 
 the western Pacific. Toward Christmas of 
 the same year he reached Samoa. Here he 
 bought the future Vailima on the mountain 
 side, above Apia. He departed for Sydney, 
 from which place, after a serious illness, he 
 entered upon a devious voyage, in the trad- 
 ing steamer Janet Nicoll, among various 
 remote islands. He finally returned to his 
 Samoan property, where work had been 
 going forward during his absence. He 
 lived at Vailima from 1890 until the time of 
 
LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 243 
 
 his death, four years later. His days there 
 were passed with great zest in multiplied 
 occupation. The natives knew him by the 
 musical name of Tusitala, "teller of tales." 
 In the year 1892 his health again broke 
 sadly. Trips to Sydney and to Honolulu 
 failed to benefit him, and his energies be- 
 gan to flag. His annual income during the 
 last few years of his life was between $20,- 
 000 and $25,000, but his generosity was 
 boundless, and he saved little. In the few 
 months previous to the close of his life he 
 seemed to be filled with a great weariness 
 and to experience premonitions of his early 
 decease. 
 
 The end came suddenly on the 3d of De- 
 cember, 1894. Stevenson had been work- 
 ing on Weir of Hermiston at the height of 
 his powers. All the morning he had 
 wrought in a glow of satisfaction which 
 only the true artist can feel. At evening, 
 while he was in the most buoyant spirits, 
 he was struck down. His loved ones stood 
 about him, watching the ebbing away of 
 the life so dear to all — drinking the deep 
 
244 LOITERINGS IN OLD FIELDS 
 
 bitterness of that hour when human impo- 
 tency is most sharply felt in the presence 
 of the dissolution of nature's fondest ties. 
 "He died at ten minutes past eight on Mon- 
 day evening, the 3d of December, in the for- 
 ty-fifth year of his age." The burial took 
 place in the afternoon of the succeeding 
 day. His dust lies on the summit of a 
 mountain of his well-loved Samoa until the 
 dawning of that morning when God shall 
 summon all earth's sleepers to awake. 
 
 At his death Stevenson left two incom- 
 plete stories, St. Ives and Weir of Hermis- 
 ton, both of these among the best products 
 of his pen. His art ripened and improved 
 to the very last. St. Ives was completed by 
 Mr. A. T. Quiller-Couch, and Weir of Her- 
 miston by Mr. Sidney Colvin, the latter 
 adding one or two brief notes to the un- 
 finished story. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abolitionist, 198. 
 
 "Accontius and Cydippe, The 
 
 Story of," 69. 
 "Adam Bede, 42, 124, 125, 126, 
 
 128, 143. 
 Adirondack Mountains, 219, 237. 
 "Adonais," 96. 
 Adonis, 96. 
 
 "yEneid of Virgil, 73, 90. 
 "./Eschylus," 99. 
 Aldworth, 30, 43. 
 Alford, Dean, 19. 
 Allingham, William, 10. 
 American Constitution, 18, 32. 
 Andover, 187. _ 
 "Another Spring," 168. 
 Anstey, 41. 
 
 "Antiquary, The," 53. 
 Apia, 242. 
 
 Apostles, Society of, 20. 
 Arbury Farm, 116. 
 Argyll, Duke of, 11. 
 Arnold, Matthew, n. 
 "Arts of Life, The Lesser," 63. 
 Atalanta's Race, 68. 
 Atlantic Monthly, 204. 
 Austen, Jane, 145. 
 
 Bacon, 19. 
 Baldasarre, 130. 
 Balfour, Rev. Lewis, 220. 
 Balfour, Margaret Isabella, 220. 
 "Banded Men, The Story of 
 
 the," 72. 
 Barrie, J. M., 42. 
 Baudelaire, 155. 
 Beattie, 179. 
 " Becket," 39. 
 
 " Bellerophon at Argos," 69. 
 " Bellerophon in Lysia," 69. 
 Bell Rock Lighthouse, 220. 
 Besant, Walter, 41. 
 Bexley Heath, 62. 
 Bible, The, 180, 219. 
 " Biglow Papers," 186, 191. 
 Birchington-on-Sea, 164. 
 
 Black, William, 41. 
 Blackmore, R. D., 42. 
 Blackstone, 185. 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 94, 118, 
 
 132. 
 Blakesley, Dean, 19, 21. 
 " Blessed Damozel, The," 153. 
 Bonaparte, 103. 
 Boswell, 45. 
 Bournemouth, 236. 
 Boxley, 27. 
 Braddon, Miss, 42. 
 Brawne, Fanny, 104. 
 Brazil, 66. 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 138, 145. 
 Brookfield, 16, 19. 
 Broughton, Miss, 42. 
 Brown, Oliver Madox, 156, 164. 
 Browning, Mrs., 56, 144, 145, 167, 
 
 175, 211. 
 Browning, Robert, 10, 42, 56, 119, 
 
 156, 162, 175, 211. 
 Bryant, 192. 
 
 Buchanan, Robert, 161, 162. 
 "Bucolics," Virgil's, 179. 
 Buller, Charles, 19. 
 Burne-Jones, Edward, 54, 56, 
 
 58, 59- 
 Burns, 183. 
 
 Burton, Sir Frederick, 135. 
 Byron, Lord, 15, 16, 42, 91, 96, 
 
 99, i°3, 179- 
 
 Caine, Hall, 42, 163. 
 
 Caius Cestius, 112. 
 
 California, 231. 
 
 Cambridge, 187. 
 
 Carlyle, Mrs. 47. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 10, 20, 45, 46, 
 
 138, 175, 182. 
 Carroll, Lewis, 162. 
 Casaubon, Dorothea, 120. 
 Casco, schooner, 240. 
 Cavaliers, 184, 185. 
 Celtic race, 31. 
 Cevennes, 231. 
 245 
 
246 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Chambers, 95. 
 
 Chapman, George, 117. 
 
 Charmian, 103, 104, 106. 
 
 Chaucer, 17, 51, 53, 67, 88, 91. 
 
 "Child Christopher and Goldi- 
 lind, Of," 79. 
 
 "Child's Garden of Verses, A, v 
 214. 
 
 Chingford Hatch, 53. 
 
 Chopin, Frederic, 8. 
 
 Christ, 34, 35, 37, 107, 218. 
 
 Christianity, 33, 35. 
 
 ''Christianity, Essence of," 117 
 
 Clark, Cowden, 91. 
 
 Clarke, 90. 
 
 Cleopatra, 103. 
 
 Clough, A. H., 11. 
 
 Coleridge, 11 1, 193. 
 
 Colinton, 220. 
 
 Collinson, 152. 
 
 Colvin, Sidney, 216, 244. 
 
 " Commemoration Ode," Low- 
 ell's, 184, 204. 
 
 Concord, 182, 187. 
 
 Contemporary Review, 161. 
 
 Court of St. James, 186. 
 
 Coventry, 116. 
 
 Cowley, 179. 
 
 Cowper, 175, 181, 212. 
 
 Crawford, Marion, 41. 
 
 Crockett, 125. 
 
 Cromwell, 184. 
 
 Cross, J. W., ii<;, 140. 
 
 "Cupid and Psyche, The Story 
 of," 69. 
 
 Damien, Father, 242. 
 
 " Daniel Deronda,' 128, 140. 
 
 Dante, 179. 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 8, 21, 206. 
 
 " Death of Paris, The," 69. 
 
 De Vere, Aubrey, 11, 40. 
 
 Deverell, Walter Howell, 160. 
 
 Dickens, 115, 125, 145. 
 
 Divine Personality, 36. 
 
 Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), 162. 
 
 " Don Juan," 96. 
 
 " Doom of King Acrisius, The, 
 
 68. 
 "Dora," 47. 
 Doyle, Conan, 42, 125, 
 Durer, Albert, 59. 
 
 " Ebb Tide, The," 213. 
 
 Edinburgh, 220, 230. 
 
 Eliot, George, 39, 42, 45, 115 et 
 
 seq. 
 Elmwood, 177, 180. 
 Ely, Dean of, 19. 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29, 119, 
 
 175, 182, 192. 
 1 Endymion," 94, 95, 96. 
 English Illustrated Magazine, 
 
 Macmillan's, 78, 227. 
 Epping Forest, 27, 52, 53. 
 Equator, schooner, 242. 
 
 Ere Dwellers, The Story of 
 
 the," 72. 
 Essex, 53. 
 Evans, Mary Ann (George Eliot), 
 
 115- 
 Evans, Robert, 116. 
 "Eve of St. Agnes, The," 97. 
 Exeter College, 54. 
 
 " Fable for Critics," 191. 
 
 " Faerie Queene, The," 179. 
 
 Fairlop Oak, 52. 
 
 Falstaff, 227. 
 
 Farringford, 30. 
 
 " Felix Holt/' 128, 143. 
 
 Feuerbach, 117. 
 
 " Fifine at the Fair," 162. 
 
 Fitzgerald, Edward, 10, 14, 17,45. 
 
 " Fleshly School of Poetry, The, ' 
 
 161. 
 Florence, 128, 130. 
 Forman, Buxton, 72. 
 Forster, John, 11. 
 " Fostering of Aslaug, The," 69. 
 "Frithiof the Bold, The Stoiy 
 
 of," 72. 
 Froissart, Chronicles of, 56. 
 Froude, 48. 
 Fytche, Elizabeth, 15, 17, 18. 
 
 Gifford, 93, 94, 96. 
 
 Gilberts (islands), 242. 
 
 "Gilfil's Love Story, Mr.," 122, 
 
 123. 
 Gilman, Mrs., 189. 
 Gladstone, W. E., 8, 10, 22, 30, 
 
 138. 
 " Glittering Plain, The Story of 
 
 the," 78. 
 " Goblin Market," 167. 
 Godwin, 92. 
 Goethe, 31, 44, 87, 100. 
 
INDEX 
 
 247 
 
 "Goethe, Life of," 132. 
 
 " Golden Apples, The," 69. 
 
 Gothic Architecture, 53. 
 
 Greek Mythology, 90. 
 
 " Grettir the Strong, The Story 
 
 of," 72. 
 Griff, 116. 
 "Guggum," 161. 
 "Guinevere," 33, 45^ 
 "Guinevere, The Defense of," 
 
 59, 61, 66, 68. 
 
 Hale End, 52. 
 
 Hallam, Arthur, 11, 19, 22, 25, 27. 
 
 Hallam, Henry, 11. 
 
 Halleck, 192. 
 
 Hampden, 184. 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 41, 138. 
 
 " Harold," 39. 
 
 Harvard, 178, 204. 
 
 Harvard Law School, 189. 
 
 Hawthorne, 125, 192. 
 
 Haydon, 92. 
 
 Hazlitt, 88, 92. 
 
 Heath, Douglas, 19, 21. 
 
 " Heath Slayings, The Story of 
 
 the," 72. 
 Hebrides, The, 237. 
 Henley, W. E., 219, 229. 
 " Hen Thorir, The Story of," 72. 
 High Beech, 27. 
 Highgate Cemetery, 141. 
 " Hill of Venus, The," 69. 
 Hippocrene, Fountain of, 188. 
 " Hogni and Hedinn, The Tale 
 
 of," 72. 
 Holmes, O. W., 8. 
 Honolulu, 240, 242, 243. 
 Hooker, Bishop, 103. 
 Hope, Anthony, 125. 
 Hope (poet), 179. 
 Horace, 138, 179. 
 Houghton, Lord. (See Milnes, 
 
 Richard Moncton.) 
 " House of Life, The," 159. 
 "House of the Wolfings, A Tale 
 
 of the," 78. 
 "Howard the Halt, The Story 
 
 of," 72. 
 Howard, John, 103. 
 Howitt, Mary, 45. 
 "How Lisa Loved the King," 137. 
 Hunt, Holman, 152. 
 Hunt, Leigh, 90, 92, no, 112. 
 
 " Hunting of the Snark, The," 
 
 162. 
 Huxley, 40. 
 "Hyperion," 99. 
 
 " Idylls of the King," 33, 59, 61. 
 
 " Inland Voyage, An, 231. 
 
 " In Hospital, 229. 
 
 " In Memoriam," n, 30. 
 
 " Irene," 192. 
 
 James, Henry, 41. 
 Janet Nicoll, schooner, 242. 
 "Janet's Repentance," 123. 
 "Jason, The Life and Death of," 
 
 66, 71. 
 ;;jenny"i57 
 
 Jesus, Life of," 117. 
 Jex-Blake, 58. 
 Job, Book of, 34. 
 Johnson, Lionel, 78. 
 Jowett. Benjamin, 10, 28, 44. 
 "July/' 69. 
 
 Keats, John, 42, 85 et seq., 155, 
 
 175, 212. 
 Kelmscott, 51, 71, 80, 163. 
 Kemble, J. M., 10, 19, 21. 
 " Kidnapped," 237. 
 King Arthur, 33. 
 King's College, 151. 
 Kingsley, 115, 125. 
 Korner, 90, 101, 109. 
 
 Ladislaw, Will, 120. 
 
 " Lady of the Land, The," 69. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 138, 212. 
 
 M Land East of the Sun," etc., 69. 
 
 Landor, 175. 
 
 Lawless, Miss, 42. 
 
 " Lay Sermons," Coleridge's, 193. 
 
 Lear, Edward, 10. 
 
 " Legend of Jubal, The," 137. 
 
 Lempriere's Dictionary, 90. 
 
 " Les Miserables," 143. 
 
 Lewes, George H., 39, 117, 118, 
 
 .13^ J 33i, J 34, MO1 141- 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 8. 
 Lincoln, Blakesley, Dean of, 19. 
 Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 134, 
 
 135. 141. 
 London Chronicle, The, 142. 
 London, Trench, Archbishop of, 
 
 19. 
 
248 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Longfellow, 192, 109, 204. 
 
 Loring, G. B., 179, 189. 
 
 " Love is Enough, 71. 
 
 " Love of Alcestis, The," 69. 
 
 " Lovers of Gudrun, The," 69. 
 
 " Love's Nocturn," 165. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, 175 et 
 
 seq., 211. 
 Lowell, Mabel, 203. 
 Lowell, Robert, 177. 
 Lushington, Edmund, 21, 45. 
 Lushington, Vernon, 58. 
 Lyall, Edna, 42. 
 Lydgate, Rosamond, 120. 
 Lytton, 115. 
 
 Macaulay, 138. 
 
 Maitland, Thomas (Robert Buch- 
 anan), 161. 
 
 Majendie, Lady Margaret, 42. 
 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, 56. 
 
 "Man Born to be King, The," 68. 
 
 " Man Who Never Laughed 
 Again, The," 69. 
 
 Marlborough, 53. 
 
 Marston Philip Bourke, 156. 
 
 " Maud, ' 30, 43. 
 
 Maurice, Frederick D., 10. 
 
 Melema, Tito, 129, 135. 
 
 Mendelssohn, Felix, 8. 
 
 Meredith, George, 41, 119, 138, 
 163. 
 
 Merivale, Dean of Ely, 19. 
 
 Methodism in England, 125. 
 
 Methodists, 124. 
 
 Middle Ages, 55. 
 
 " Middlemarch," 120, 128, 140, 
 143. 
 
 Midlothian, 220. 
 
 Millais, 152, 216. 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 117. 
 
 " Mill on the Floss, The," 128. 
 
 Milnes, Richard Moncton, 8, 10, 
 19, 38, 103. 
 
 Muton, 33, 42, 179, 184. 
 
 Minerva, 124. 
 
 11 Minstrel, The," 179. 
 
 " Miscellanies," Carlyle's, 183. 
 
 Molokai, 241. 
 
 Monkbarns, 53. 
 
 Montagu, Basil, 92. 
 
 Montaigne, 119. 
 
 Monteith, 19. 
 
 *' Moosehead Journal," 176. 
 
 Morley, John, 70. 
 
 Morris and Co., Decorators, 62. 
 
 Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and 
 
 Co., 64. 
 Morris, William, 51 et seq., 155. 
 "Morte d'Arthur," 56. 
 ''My Confidences," 134. 
 
 Navigator's Island, 230. 
 
 New Poems by Christina G. 
 
 Rossetti, 169. 
 New Zealand, 230. 
 " News from Nowhere," 52, 77, 
 
 78. 
 North American Review, 204. 
 North British Review, 95. 
 Norton, Charles Eliot, 204. 
 
 " Ode to the Nightingale," 100. 
 
 Odyssey of Homer, 73. 
 
 " Ogier the Dane," 69. 
 
 " Old Poets, Conversations on 
 Some of the," 190. 
 
 Oliphant, Mrs., 42. 
 
 " Ordered South," 227. 
 
 Ormond Yard, 65. 
 
 Osborne, Mrs. Fanny, 231. 
 
 Ouida, 42. 
 
 Ovid, 151. 
 
 Oxford, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62. 
 
 Oxford and Cambridge Maga- 
 zine, 58. 
 
 " Palace of Art," 23. 
 Palgrave, F. T., 10. 
 "Paradise, The Earthly," 68, 
 
 7 1 ' 74* 
 Parliament (English), 186. 
 11 Peace and War, 1 ' 143. 
 Poe, Edgar A., 8, 153, 155, 199. 
 " Poems by the Way," 74. 
 " Poems by Two Brothers," 15. 
 "Poems, Chiefly Lyrical," 21. 
 Portobello, 227, 228. 
 Prayer, 35. 
 
 Preraphaehtes, 54, 151, 152, 160. 
 Prince Albert, 20. 
 " Princess, The, ' 29, 40. 
 " Prince Otto," 215. 
 " Promise of May, ' 39. 
 "Proud King, The," 68. 
 "Pygmalion and the Image," 
 
 69, 70. 
 Pym, 184. 
 
INDEX 
 
 249 
 
 Quarterly Review, 23, 24, 92, 93, 
 
 94,95, in. 
 " Queen Anne Architecture, 62. 
 Queen Elizabeth's Lodge, 53. 
 " Queene, The Faerie," 91. 
 Quickly, Dame, 227. 
 Quiller-Couch, A. T., 244. 
 
 Raphael, 107. 
 
 " Raven, The," 153. 
 
 Reade, 115, 125. 
 
 Red House, The, 62, 64. 
 
 Reynolds, J. K., 106. 
 
 Rice, S. S., 19. 
 
 14 Ring Given to Venus, The," 69. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 10. 
 
 " Roi the Fool, The Tale of," 72. 
 
 Roman Catholicism, 33. 
 
 "Romola," 42, 128, 131, 143. 
 
 " Roots of the Mountains, The," 
 
 7 S - 
 Rossetti, Christina G., 149, 150, 
 
 164, 166 et seq. 
 Rossetti, Dante G., 56, 58, 62, 71, 
 
 149 et seq., 211. 
 Rossetti, Gabriele, 150. 
 Rossetti, Maria, 150. 
 Rossetti, William Michael, 149, 
 
 156, 164, 169. 
 Rouen, 55. 
 Roundheads, 184. 
 Rubinstein, 219. 
 Ruskin, John, 58, 138, 152. 
 
 " Sad Fortunes of Rev. Amos 
 
 Barton, The," 123. 
 "Saga of Gunnlaug," etc., 72. 
 Saintsbury, Mr., 67. 
 Sallust, 151. 
 Samoa, 242, 244. 
 San Francisco, 232, 240. 
 Sand, George, 132. 
 Saranac Lake, 237. 
 Sarasate, 219. 
 Savonarola, 128, 129. 
 "Scenes of Clerical Life," 42, 
 
 118, 122, 123, 132, 140. 
 Schiller, 90, 101, 105, 212. 
 Scott, Bell, 58. 
 Scott, Walter, 53, 115, 125. 
 Selden, 184. 
 
 Sellwood, Emily, 10, 27, 28, 29. 
 Sermon on the Mount, 34. 
 Severn, 101, 111. 
 
 Shackford, W. H., 178, 180. 
 Shakespeare, 117, 119. 
 Shelley, 88, 92, 95, 96, 112, 155. 
 Shelley's poems, 20. 
 Shorthouse, J. H., 42. 
 Siddal, Elizabeth Eleanor, 160, 
 
 161. 
 Sidney, 184. 
 "Sigurd the Volsung, The Story 
 
 . °?," 73- 
 
 ' Silas Marner, 42, 128. 
 " Silverado Squatters, The," 236. 
 Simpson, Sir Walter, 230. 
 Skerryvore, 236. 
 Socialism of Morris, 74. 
 Socrates, 107. 
 " Son of Croesus, The," 69. 
 Son of Man, 34. 
 " Sonnets from the Portuguese," 
 
 _ 159- 
 
 Sorrel, Hetty, 135. 
 
 South Sea Islands, 230, 240. 
 
 " Spanish Gypsy, The," 137. 
 
 Spectator, 10, 45, 217. 
 
 Spedding, James, 10, 19, 39. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 117, 118. 
 
 Spencer, Hon. W. R., 91. 
 
 Spenser, 88, 91, 179. 
 
 " St. Ives," 244. 
 
 St. John, 34. 
 
 Stephen, Leslie, 229, 230. 
 
 Stephens, 152. 
 
 Stevenson, Robert, 220. 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 41, 125, 
 
 175, 211 et seq. 
 Stevenson, Thomas, 220. 
 "Story of Rhodope, The," 69. 
 " Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and 
 
 Mr. Hyde, The," 237. 
 Strauss, 117. 
 
 "Sundering Flood, The," 79. 
 Swift, Dean, 175. 
 Swinburne, Algernon C, 61, 67, 
 
 163. 
 Switzerland, 219, 236. 
 Sydney, 242, 243. 
 Symons, Arthur, 59. 
 
 " Talking Oak, The," 43. 
 Taylor, Henry, 10. 
 Tennant, 19, 21. 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 7 et seq., 56, 
 Tennyson, Charles, 27. 
 Tennyson, Emily, 22. 
 
250 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Tennyson, Rev. George Clay 
 
 ton, 15. 
 Tennyson, Hallam, 12. 
 Tennyson, Lionel, 37. 
 Thackeray, W. M., 11, 115, 125 
 
 138, 145. 
 " Theophrastus Such," 128. 
 Theydons, 52. 
 Thomson, 19, 21. 
 Thoreau, 182. 
 "Thorstein Staffsmitten, The 
 
 Tale of," 72. 
 Ticknor, 204. 
 Tom Jones," 143. 
 " Travels with a Donkey," 231. 
 " Treasure Island," 236. 
 Trench, Archbishop of London, 
 
 19. 
 Trinity College, 19. 
 Trollope, 115, 125. 
 Tudor House, 163. 
 Tunbridge Wells, 27. 
 Tusitala, 243. 
 " Two Voices, The," 26. 
 Tyndall, John, 10, 37, 38, 40. 
 
 *' Ulysses," 47. 
 
 University of Edinburgh, 236. 
 
 Vailima, 242. 
 
 Vallance, Aymer, 54. 
 
 " Vastness, poem, 38. 
 
 Vaughan, 155. 
 
 Venables, G. S., 10. 
 
 Vergil, 151, 179. 
 
 "Viglund the Fair, The Story 
 
 of," 72. 
 *' Vision of Sin, The," 47. 
 " Vision of Sir Launfal, 191. 
 Vivisection, 45. 
 " Volsung Saga," 72. 
 
 Walthamstow, 52. 
 
 Walton, Izaak, 52. 
 
 Wansted, 52. 
 
 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 140. 
 
 Washington, 176. 
 
 "Watching of the Falcon, The," 
 
 69. 
 "Water of the Wondrous Isles, 
 
 The," 79. 
 Watertown, 189. 
 Watts, G. F., 10. 
 
 Weary in Well Doing," 169. 
 Webster, 185. 
 Wegg, Captain, 138. 
 
 Weir of Hermiston," 220, 243, 
 
 244. 
 " Well at the World's End, The," 
 
 Wellington, Duke of, 32. 
 
 Westminster Review, 117. 
 
 Weyman, S. J., 125. 
 
 "When I am Dead, My Dear- 
 est," poem, 168. 
 
 White, Maria, 189, 190, 192. 
 
 White, W. A., 189. 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 32, 156. 
 
 Williams, D. H., 192. 
 
 Windermere, 105. 
 
 "Wood Beyond the World, 
 The," 78. 
 
 Woodford, 52. 
 
 Woodstock, 51. 
 
 Woolner, Thomas, 10, 152. 
 
 Wordsworth, 9, 29, 40, 42. 
 
 "Writing on the Image, The," 
 69. 
 
 '' Year's Life, A," 190. 
 
 Zoilus, in. 
 Zola, 40. 
 
mov e kcj 
 
NOV 5 1901 
 
; 
 
 013 137 714 9