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 VICTORIAN POETS.
 
 VICTORIAN 
 POETS 
 
 I REVISED, AND EXTENDED, BY A SUPPLEMENTARY 
 
 CHAPTER, TO THE FIFTIETH YEAR OF THE 
 
 PERIOD UNDER REVIEW 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF " POETS OF AMERICA "' 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
 
 Copyright, 1875, 
 By JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. 
 
 Copyright, 1887, 
 By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Ca 
 
 Copyright, 1903, 
 By EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. 
 
 /<// ri^Ats reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Catnbridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
 Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.
 
 TO 
 
 GEORGE RIPLEY, LL.D., 
 
 WHOSE JUDGMENT, LEARNING, AND PROFESSIONAL DEVOTION 
 HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THE 
 
 ADVANCEMENT OF CRITICISM, 
 
 AND FURNISHED AN ENVIABLE EXAMPLE TO MEN 
 OF LETTERS, 
 
 5^1) ijs 'Soluntc is Injscribcb.
 
 PREFACE TO THE THIRTEENTH EDITION. 
 
 (1887.) 
 
 "^ I ^HE origin of the book now presented in an enlarged 
 -L form is given in the Preface to the edition of 1875. 
 While it was an outgrowth, as stated, of a few essays each 
 relating to a single personage, its main value, from the 
 ultimate point of view, consisted first in the statement of 
 what appear to me the true canons of imaginative art, as 
 applied to the office of the poet ; again, in studies of the 
 creative temperament derived from sympathetic examina- 
 tion of its possessors ; and finally, in a record of the pro- 
 gress of song during a noteworthy period, and of phases 
 reflecting the thought, passion, ideality, of the specified 
 country and age. 
 
 Chapters VII and VIII, in which miscellaneous groups 
 were considered, though written as an afterthought, and 
 not possessing the artistic unity of other chapters, proved 
 especially serviceable in the last-named capacity. My gain 
 in comprehension of the general drift was greater than any 
 fancied loss through deviation from an eclectic literary 
 standard. They completed, moreover, the annals of the 
 period, and gave my book a practical if secondary value as 
 a work of reference.
 
 vi PREFACE TO THE THIRTEENTH EDITION. 
 
 Whether its early welcome at home and abroad, and the 
 favor still vouchsafed to it, have been due to the quality of 
 my argument, or to the need of such a record, or to both 
 together, it is in view of this encouragement, and of the 
 changes incident to the close of the typical Victorian 
 epoch, that I add the supplemental matter which extends 
 our survey to the present year. 
 
 This seems the more expedient, because in a later trea- 
 tise, Poets of America, I have applied the same method of 
 criticism, with similar objects in view, to the poets and 
 poetry of my own land. The rise of true poetry here was 
 singularly coincident with that of the Victorian school in 
 Great Britain, and my home - survey applies to the fifty 
 years now ending with the celebration of Her Majesty's 
 prolonged reign. The Victorian Poets, as enlarged, and its 
 companion-volume thus proffer a general view of the poetry 
 of our English tongue for the last half - century. The 
 supplement itself, beyond that portion devoted to the 
 afterwork of veteran leaders, is necessarily compressed 
 and inclusive : in other words, is written upon the plan of 
 Chapters VII and VIII, to discover current tendencies 
 and the outlook, and to enhance the reference-value of the 
 entire work. 
 
 After a lapse of time which enables me to examine my 
 original chapters almost as if they were the production of 
 another hand, it would be strange if I did not observe cer- 
 tain portions that would be written differently, with later 
 and perhaps riper judgment, if I were to write them now.
 
 PREFACE TO THE THIRTEENTH EDITION. vii 
 
 p ■' ■ ■ " - - ■ — . . ___ ■ . 
 
 I see that frequent attention was paid to matters of art 
 and form. Technical structure is of special interest to the 
 young artist or critic. There was a marked and fascinat- 
 ing advance in rhythmical variety and finish during the 
 early influence of Tennyson. I do not regret its discus- 
 sion, since throughout the book persistent stress is also 
 laid upon the higher offices of art as the expression of the 
 soul, and its barrenness without simplicity, earnestness, na- 
 tive impulse, and imaginative power. The American trea- 
 tise, less occupied with technical criticism, and examining 
 its topic in connection with the formation of national senti- 
 ment, enabled me to finish all I desired to say concerning 
 poetry. These books are hopefully addressed to those who 
 will read the two together, and each of them not in frag- 
 ments but as a whole. 
 
 As to the brief opinions with respect to younger singers, 
 I think that a good deal of what was said has been justi- 
 fied, and in a few cases notably, by their subsequent ca- 
 reers. Examining the more elaborate reviews of other 
 poets, I wish to amend in some degree my early criticism. 
 
 With the comments upon Landor, Hood, Mrs. Browning, 
 Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne, I have no 
 serious disagreement. What is said of the last-named four, 
 m the new text, is in keeping with what was first said, and 
 illustrated by an account of their recent works. 
 
 I confess, however, that the prominence given to Proc- 
 ter seems hardly in accord with the just perspective of 
 a synthetic view. It grew out of the writer's distaste 
 for two characteristics of latter-day verse : on the one
 
 viii PREFACE TO THE THIRTEENTH EDITION. 
 
 hand, the doubt and sadness of that which is the most in- 
 tellectual ; on the other, the artificial tone of that offered 
 by many younger poets, in whom the one thing needful 
 seemed to be the spontaneity so natural to ** Barry Corn- 
 wall." 
 
 While I thought the first of these characteristics too ex- 
 cessive in the poetry of Arnold, the cultured master of his 
 school, I paid full tribute to the majesty of his epic verse. 
 But I was unjust in a scant appreciation of what is after 
 all his most ideal trait, and his surest warrant as a poet. 
 For this fault I now make reparation in the supplement. 
 
 One or two errors of fact have been corrected in the 
 original chapter on Browning, our most suggestive figure 
 at the close of a period which Tennyson dominated in its 
 prime. My feeling with respect to some of this profound 
 writer's idiosyncrasies is still unchanged. Yet in view of 
 my extended recognition of his matchless insight and re- 
 sources, — and conscious of my own respect for the genius 
 and personality of one to whose works I was guided in 
 youth by kindred that knew and honored him, — it is hard 
 for me to understand that even his uncompromising wor- 
 shippers can discover between the lines of my criticism 
 traces of hostility. The chapter, however, is defective in 
 one important respect. Drawing a sharp distinction be- 
 tween the histrionic, objective method of the early dram- 
 atists and that of Browning, I did not at once follow it with 
 an incisive statement of the qualities in which his power 
 and effectiveness consist. A praiseworthy reader — by 
 which, as before, I mean one who accepts an essay in its
 
 PREFACE TO THE THIRTEENTH EDITION. IX 
 
 entirety, and does not hang his approval or disapproval 
 upon a single point — can find these qualities plainly set 
 forth in the comments upon Dramatic Lyrics, Men and 
 Women, Pippa Passes, etc. But that there may be no 
 doubt, and to make up for possible shortcomings, I have 
 referred in the supplement at some length to the specific 
 originality and nature of this poet's dramatic genius. 
 
 Beyond these modifications, I have none with which in 
 this place to trouble the reader, — deprecating, as I do, fin- 
 ical changes in prose or poetry once given to the public, 
 and choosing to let a treatise that has been so leniently 
 judged stand in most respects as it was originally written. 
 
 A revision and extension has been made of dates, etc., in 
 the marginal notes, and some pains taken to insure correct- 
 ness. The new Analytical Index covers both divisions of 
 the book. My thanks are again due to friends, especially 
 to Messrs. R. H. Stoddard, R. W. Gilder, Brander Mat- 
 thews, George R. Bishop, — and to Mr. William T. Peoples, 
 of the N. Y. Mercantile Library, — for the use of various 
 books which were not already upon my shelves, and which 
 my London agents were unable to procure. 
 
 A-*. \^% Oo 
 
 New York, July, 1887.
 
 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 
 
 (I875-) 
 
 THE contents of this volume chiefly relate to the 
 design announced at the beginning of the introduc- 
 tory chapter, but I will prefix a brief statement of its scope, 
 and of the principles that underlie its judgment. 
 
 Although presented as a book of literary and biograph- 
 ical criticism, it also may be termed an historical review 
 of the course of British poetry during the present reign, — 
 if not a minute, at least a compact and logical, survey of 
 the authors and works that mainly demand attention. 
 Having made a study of the poets who rank as leaders of 
 the recent British choir, a sense of proportion induced 
 me to enlarge the result, and to use it as the basis of 
 a guide-book to the metrical literature of the time and 
 country in which those poets have flourished. It seemed 
 to me that, by including a sketch of minor groups and 
 schools, and giving a connection to the whole, I might 
 offer a work that would have practical value for uses of 
 record and reference, in addition to whatever qualities, as 
 an essay in philosophical criticism, it should be found to 
 possess.
 
 XIV PREFACE. 
 
 To this end Chapters VII. and VIII. were written ; side- 
 notes have been affixed throughout the volume, and an 
 analytical index prepared of the whole. There is much 
 dispute among the best authorities with respect to literary 
 and biographical dates, and a few matters of this sort 
 remain open to doubt ; but in many instances, where the^ 
 persons concerned are still living, I have been successful in 
 obtaining the requisite information at first hand. 
 
 A reference to the notes and index will show what seems 
 to my own mind, after the completion of these essays, their 
 most conspicuous feature. So many and various qualities 
 are displayed by the poets under review that, in writing 
 of their works and lives, I have expressed incidentally 
 such ideas concerning the aim and constituents of Poetry 
 as I have gathered during my acquaintance with the his- 
 toric body of English verse. Often, moreover, a leading 
 author affords an illustration of some special phase of the 
 poetic art and life. The case of Browning, for example, 
 at once excites discussion as to the nature of poetic expres- 
 sion ; that of Mrs. Browning involves a study of the poetic 
 temperament, its joys and sorrows, its growth, ripeness, 
 and decline. Hood's life was that of a working man of 
 letters ; in Tennyson's productions we observe every aspect 
 of poetry as an art, and the best average representation of 
 the modern time ; while Landor not only affords another 
 study of temperament, but shows the benefits and dangers 
 of culture, of amateurship, and, of intellectual versatility as 
 opposed to special gift. In Arnold we find a passion of the
 
 PREFACE. XV 
 
 intellect, in Procter the pure lyrical faculty, in Buchanan 
 the force and weakness of transcendentalism, in Swinburne 
 the infinite variety of melodious numbers, and the farthest 
 extreme of rhythm and diction reached at this stage of 
 metrical art. Home, Bailey, Lytton, Morris, and Rossetti 
 are each suggestive of important and varying elements 
 which make up the general quality of recent imaginative 
 song. The different forms of poetry — reflective, idyllic, 
 lyric, and dramatic — successively or in combination pass 
 under review, for the modern era has been no less com- 
 posite than refined. If not so eminent for poetic vigor 
 as the impetuous Georgian revival which preceded it, nor 
 characterized by dramatic greatness like that of the early 
 and renowned Elizabethan age, it is in its own way as 
 remarkable as either of those historic times, and on the 
 score of complex and technical achievement full of real 
 significance to the lyric artist and the connoisseur. 
 
 In pursuing the general subject by an examination of 
 the foremost poets, I have tried to convey a just idea of 
 the career and genius of each, so that any portrait, taken 
 by itself, might seem complete, and distinct from its fellows. 
 In certain cases we are required to observe temperament, — 
 in others, extended lyrical achievements or unusual traits 
 of voice and execution. If my criticism seems more tech- 
 nical than is usual in a work of this kind, it is due, I think, 
 to the fact that the technical refinement of the period has 
 been so marked as to demand full recognition and analysis 
 It is seldom that an earnest reviewer, whether lay or
 
 XVI PREFACE. 
 
 professional, can escape wholly the charge of dogmatism. 
 Doubtless every reader will discover points that neither 
 accord with his judgment, nor seem to him fairly taken ; 
 yet I trust that there will be few who will not elsewhere 
 find reason to consider my work something better than 
 labor thrown away. After all, a critic speaks only for 
 himself, and his opinion must be taken for what it is 
 worth, — as being always open to the broader criticism of 
 those to whom it is submitted. 
 
 The chapter on the relations of Tennyson and Theocritus, 
 though somewhat in the nature of an excursus, relates to 
 a matter which seems to me of more significance than the 
 obligations of the modern idyllist to the ancient, — namely, 
 the singular likeness of the Victorian period to the Alex- 
 andrian, manifest in both external conditions and poetic 
 results. 
 
 Let me now say that this book is not the fulfilment of a 
 deliberate plan, but that a peculiar train of thought and 
 incident has led to its completion. There are times when 
 a writer pauses to consider the work produced by his asso- 
 ciates, and the influences by which this has been enlarged 
 or injured. Reviewing the course of American poetry, 
 since it may be said to have had a pathway of its own, 
 I have tried to note the special restrictions and special 
 advantages by which it has been affected. Our men of 
 true poetic genius, although they have produced charming 
 verse of an emotional, lyrical, or descriptive kind, have 
 seemed indisposed or unable to compose many sustained
 
 PREFACE. XV ii 
 
 and important works. At first I designed to write of the 
 difficulties which they have experienced, consciously or 
 unconsciously, — some of these pertaining to the youth of 
 the country, and to the fact that, as in the growth of a 
 sister-art, landscape-painting usually must precede the rise 
 of a true figure-school. I might touch upon the lack of 
 inspiring theme and historic halo, of dramatic contrast 
 and material, and of a public that can appreciate the 
 structure, no less than the sweetness and quality, of a noble 
 poem. With various exceptions, there has been a want 
 of just criticism ; and even now a defect with many of 
 the poets themselves is a cloudy understanding of their 
 true mission and of what poetry really is. Beyond the 
 charm of freshness, no great success in verse is attainable 
 without that judicial knowledge of the poet's art which 
 is the equivalent of what is indispensable to the painter, 
 the sculptor, and the musician, in their respective depart- 
 ments. 
 
 But with regard to the causes of the success and failure 
 of our own poets I easily perceived that some of the most 
 important were not special, but general : belonging to the 
 period, and equally affecting the verse of the motherland. 
 This led me to make a study of a few British poets : first 
 of one, Landor, whose metrical work did not seem, upon 
 the whole, a full expression of his unusual genius ; then 
 of others, notably Tennyson, who more obviously represent 
 the diverse elements of their time. In order to formulate 
 my own ideas of poetry and criticism, it seemed to me
 
 xviii PREFACE. 
 
 that I could more freely and graciously begin by choosing 
 a foreign paradigm than by entering upon the home-field, 
 and that none could be so good for this purpose as the 
 poetry of Great Britain, — there being none so compre- 
 hensive, and none with which myself and my readers are 
 more familiar. Affection, reverence, national feeling, or 
 some less worthy emotion, may be thought to prevent 
 an American from writing without prejudice of Bryant, 
 Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and the rest ; doubtless there 
 are considerations which sometimes render British journal- 
 ists disinclined to review Tennyson and Browning with 
 that indifferent spirit which characterizes their judgment 
 of eminent American poets. Lastly, upon a survey of the 
 last forty years, I saw that what I term the Victorian 
 period is nearly at an end, and that no consecutive and 
 synthetic examination of its schools and leaders had yet 
 been made. This led me to go on and to complete the 
 present work. 
 
 It follows that these essays are not written upon a 
 theory. The author has no theory of poetry, and no par- 
 ticular school to uphold. I favor a generous eclecticism, 
 or universalism, in Art, enjoying what is good, and believ- 
 ing that, as in Nature, the question is not whether this 
 or that kind be the more excellent, but whether a work 
 is excellent of its kind. Certain qualities, however, distin- 
 guish what is fine and lasting. The principles upon which 
 I rely may be out of fashion just now, and not readily 
 accepted. They are founded, nevertheless, in the Miltonic
 
 PREFACE. xix 
 
 canon of poetry, from which simplicity no more can be 
 excluded than sensuousness and passion. The spirit of 
 criticism is intellectual ; that of poetry (although our curi- 
 ously reasoning generation often has forgotten it) is nor- 
 mally the offspring of emotion, — secondly, it may be, of 
 thought. I find that the qualities upon which I have 
 laid most stress, and which at once have opened the way 
 to commendation, are simplicity and freshness, in work 
 of all kinds ; and, as the basis of persistent growth, and 
 of greatness in a masterpiece, simplicity and spontaneity, 
 refined by art, exalted by imagination, and sustained by 
 intellectual power. Simplicity does not imply poverty of 
 thought, — there is a strong simplicity belonging to an 
 intellectual age ; a clearness of thought and diction, nat- 
 ural to true poets, — whose genius is apt to be in direct 
 ratio with their possession of this faculty, and inversely as 
 their tendency to cloudiness, confusion of imagery, obscu- 
 rity, or " hardness " of style. It may almost be said that 
 everything really great is marked by simplicity. The 
 poet's office is to reveal plainly the most delicate phases 
 of wisdom, passion, and beauty. Even in the world of 
 the ideal we must have clear imagination and language : 
 the more life-like the dream, the longer it will be remem- 
 bered. 
 
 The traits, therefore, which I have deprecated earnestly 
 are in the first place obscurity and hardness, and these 
 either natural, — implying defective voice and insight, or 
 affected, — implying conceit and poor judgment; and sec-
 
 XX PREFACE. 
 
 ondly that excess of elaborate ornament, which places 
 decoration above construction, until the sense of origi- 
 nality is lost — if, indeed, it ever has existed. Both ob- 
 scurity and super-ornamentation are used insensibly to 
 disguise the lack of imagination, just as a weak and 
 florid singer hides with trills and flourishes his inability 
 to strike a simple, pure note, or to change without a slid- 
 ing scale. 
 
 But among true poets of the recent schools some have 
 gone to the other extreme, putting the thought too far 
 above the art, and have neglected melody and finish alto- 
 gether, as if despising accomplishments now so widely 
 diffused. This also is a fault common in an advanced 
 period, especially in one eminent for speculative and meta- 
 physical research. I have not overlooked this heresy, 
 although steadfastly opposing meretricious efforts to attract 
 notice by grotesque, fantastic, and other artificial means. 
 If such methods prevail in an over-ripe country they should 
 not in our own, and I point to them as errors which 
 American poetry, as it gathers strength, should be able 
 easily to avoid. And thus seeing how poorly charlatanism 
 and effrontery can make up for patient, humble endeavor 
 and experience in art, we must discern and revere, on the 
 other hand, those gifts of inspiration which endow the 
 born poet, and without which no amount of toil and learn- 
 ing can insure the favor of the Muses. As to the latter 
 requirements, the instinct of the world, that would not 
 recognize Bulwer and still pays tribute to Burns, is almost
 
 PREFACE. XX i 
 
 unerring ; as to the former, it often is for a while deceived ; 
 so I have found occasion to write of dilettanteism, lack of 
 apprenticeship, and of the assumption of those who would 
 clutch the laurel " with a single bound." Finally, the intel- 
 lectual activity of our time constantly demands a reviewer's 
 notice ; and passion, rare in an idyllic period, must be 
 sought out and welcomed at every visible turn. 
 
 The spirit of the following chapters has now been in- 
 dicated. I have made few quotations, depending on the 
 reader's means of acquaintance with the poetry of his 
 time. In treating the abstract portion of my subject, 
 where some generalization has seemed requisite, I have 
 tried to state my meaning in brief and open terms. Much 
 originality is not claimed for either manner or thought. 
 My effort simply has been to illustrate, through analysis 
 of the careers of various poets, what already is widely 
 understood among philosophical critics. No single sketch 
 has been colored to suit the author's ideas, but each poet 
 has been judged upon his own merits ; yet I think the 
 general effect to be as stated. 
 
 I trust that it may not prove a wholly thankless office, 
 since it certainly is not one frequently undertaken, to write 
 a purely critical volume, exclusively devoted to the litera- 
 ture of another land. Criticism, like science, latterly has 
 found a more interested public than of old. The catholic 
 reviewer will not shut his eyes to the value of new modes, 
 but even that conventional criticism, which holds to ac- 
 cepted canons, has its use as a counterpoise to license
 
 XXli PREFACE. 
 
 and bewilderment. As to the choice of field : — while I 
 would not reassert in behalf of any verdict, least of all in 
 behalf of my own, that " a foreign nation is a kind of con- 
 temporaneous posterity," it yet may be true that from 
 this distance a reviewer can advantageously observe the 
 general aspect of British poetry, whatever minor details 
 may escape his eye. 
 
 In concluding this work, I wish to acknowledge my 
 obligations to friends who have assisted me in its revis- 
 ion : — to Professor Roswell D. Hitchcock, D. D., for val- 
 uable hints concerning recent hymnology ; to Mr. Richard 
 H. Stoddard, for access to his choice collection of English 
 verse ; to Messrs. William J. Linton and George P. Philes, 
 for important data relating to the recent minor poets ; 
 and especially to Mr. Robert U. Johnson, of New York, 
 and Mr. Henry H. Clark, of Cambridge, for careful and 
 unstinted aid, at a time when, from prolonged illness, it 
 was impossible for me to verify the statistical portion of 
 my volume, or even to revise the proof-sheets as they 
 came from the press. 
 
 E. C. S. 
 
 New York, July, 1875.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 -f- 
 
 CHAPTER I. Page 
 
 The Period . . i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Walter Savage Landor 33 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 Thomas Hood. — Matthew Arnold. — Bryan Waller Procter . 72 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 114 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Alfred Tennyson 150 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Tennyson and Theocritus 201 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 The General Choir 234 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 The Subject continued 262
 
 xxiv CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Robert Browning 293 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Latter-Day Singers: 
 
 Robert Buchanan. — Dante Gabriel Rossetti. — William 
 
 Morris 342 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Latter-Day Singers: * 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne 379 
 
 Twelve Years Later: A Supplementary Review . . . 415 
 INDEX ............. 485
 
 VICTORIAN POETS.
 
 VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 THE main purpose of this book is to examine the 
 lives and productions of such British poets as 
 have gained reputation within the last forty years. 
 Incidentally, I hope to derive from the body of their 
 verse, — so various in form and thought, — and from 
 the record of their different experiences, correct ideas 
 in respect to the aim and province of the art of Poetr}', 
 and not a few striking illustrations of the poetic life. 
 
 In reviewing the works and careers of these singers, 
 especially of the large number that may be classed as 
 minor poets, we naturally shall be reminded of a pro- 
 cess to which M. Taine has made emphatic reference 
 in a history of previous English literature, and in his 
 analysis of the one poet selected by him to represent 
 the quality of recent song. This process is the insen- 
 sible moulding of an author's life, genius, manner of 
 expression, by the conditions of race, circumstance, and 
 period, in which he is seen to be involved. 
 
 But on the other hand, and chiefly in our recognition 
 of the few master-spirits whose names, by common and 
 just agreement, hold the first places upon the list under 
 review, we shall observe with equal certainty that great 
 
 I A 
 
 Design of 
 the present 
 ■work. 
 
 Taine' s the- 
 ory : that an 
 aittltor is 
 governed by 
 his period. 
 
 Genius, 
 however, is 
 largely in- 
 dependent oj 
 place or 
 time.
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 Illustration 
 o/tluformer 
 statement ; 
 
 and of the 
 exceptions 
 ■which con- 
 firm afid 
 modify it. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A nter- 
 
 ica " : pp. 
 
 3, 12. 
 
 poets overcome all restrictions, create their own styles, 
 and even may determine the lyrical character of a 
 period, or indicate that of one which is to succeed 
 them. 
 
 Among authors of less repute we therefore shall find 
 more than one rare and attractive poet hampered by 
 lack of fortune and opportunity, or by a failure to har- 
 monize his genius with the spirit of his time. For ex- 
 ample, several persons having the true dramatic feeling 
 arose, but cannot be said to have flourished, during or 
 just before the early portion of the era, and were over- 
 borne by the reflective, idyllic fashion which then began 
 to prevail in English verse. These isolated singers — 
 Taylor, Darley, Beddoes, Home, and others like them 
 — never exhibited the full measure of their natural gifts. 
 The time was out of keeping; and why? Because it 
 followed the lead, and listened to the more courageous 
 voices of still greater poets, who introduced and kept in 
 vogue a mode of feeling and expression to which the 
 dramatic method is wholly antagonistic. These suc- 
 cessful leaders, no less sensitive than their rivals to 
 the feeble and affected mood which poetry then had 
 assumed, and equally familiar with the choicest models 
 of every age and literature, were more wise in select- 
 ing the ground upon which the expression of their 
 own genius and the tendencies of the period could be 
 brought together. They persisted in their art, gathered 
 new audiences, and fulfilled the mission for which they 
 were endowed with voice, imagination, and the poet's 
 creative desire. This surer instinct, this energy and 
 success, this utterance lifted above opposing voices, 
 are what have distinguished poets like Tennyson, the 
 Brownings, Rossetti, Swinburne, from less fortunate 
 aspirants whose memory is cherished tenderly by our
 
 CULTURE AND SPONTANEITY. 
 
 united guild, but who failed to reach the popular heart 
 or to make a significant impression upon the literature 
 of their own time. 
 
 It is an open question, however, whether a poet need 
 be conscious of the existence and bearing of the laws 
 and conditions under which he produces his work. It 
 may be a curb and detriment to his genius that he 
 should trouble himself about them in the least. But 
 this rests upon the character of his intellect and 
 includes a further question of the effects of culture. 
 Just here there is a difference between poetry and the 
 cognate arts of expression, since the former has some- 
 what less to do with material processes and effects. 
 The freedom of the minor sculptor's, painter's, or com- 
 poser's genius is not checked, while its scope and pre- 
 cision are increased, by knowledge of the rules of his 
 calling, and of their application in different regions and 
 times. But in the case of the minor poet, excessive 
 culture, and wide acquaintance with methods and mas- 
 terpieces, often destroy spontaneity. They shut in the 
 voice upon itself, and overpower and bewilder the 
 singer, who forgets to utter his native, characteris- 
 tic melody, awed by the chorus and symphony of the 
 world's great songs. Full-throated, happy minstrels, like 
 Beranger or Burns, need no knowledge of thorough- 
 bass and the historical range of composition. Their 
 expression is the carol of the child, the warble of the 
 skylark scattering music at his own sweet will. Never- 
 theless, there is no strong imagination without vigorous 
 intellect, and to its penetrative and reasoning faculty 
 there comes a time when the laws which it has instinc- 
 tively followed must be apparent ; and, later still, it 
 cannot blind itself to the favoring or adverse in- 
 fluences of period and place. Should these forces be 
 
 Diverse ef- 
 fects of cul- 
 ture upon 
 spontaneity. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A tner- 
 ica " : pp. 
 log, 135. 
 320, 342.
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 The critic'' s 
 province. 
 
 C/. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica'' : pp. 
 26, 223. 
 
 Aspects of 
 the time un- 
 der review. 
 
 restrictive, their baffling effect will teach the jjoet to 
 recognize and deplore them, and to endeavor, though 
 with wind and tide against him, to make his progress 
 noble and enduring. 
 
 In regard to the province of the critic there can, 
 however, be no question. It is at once seen to be 
 twofold. He must recognize and broadly observe the 
 local, temporal, and generic conditions under which 
 poetry is composed, or fail to render adequate judg- 
 ment upon the genius of the composer. Yet there 
 always are ^cases in which poetry fairly rises above the 
 idealism of its day. The philosophical critic, then, in 
 estimating the importance of an epoch, also must pay 
 full consideration to the messages that it has received 
 from poets of the higher rank, and must take into 
 account the sovereign nature of a gift so independent 
 and spontaneous that from ancient times men have 
 united in looking upon it as a form of inspiration. 
 
 As we trace the course of British poetry, — from a 
 point somewhat earlier than the beginning of the pres- 
 ent reign, down to the close of the third quarter of 
 our century, — we observe that at the outset of this 
 period the sentiment of the Byronic school had de- 
 generated into sentimentalism, while for its passion 
 there had been substituted the calm of reverie and in- 
 trospective thought. Two kinds of verse were marked 
 by growing excellence. The first was that of an art- 
 school, taking its models from old English poetry and 
 from the delicate classicism of Landor and Keats ; the 
 second was of a didactic, yet elevated nature, and had ' 
 the imaginative strain of Wordsworth for its loftiest 
 exemplar. We see these two combining in that idyllic 
 method which, upon the whole, has distinguished the 
 recent time, and has maintained an atmosphere un-
 
 SUCCESSIVE POETIC PHASES. 
 
 favorable to the revival of high passion and dramatic 
 power. Nevertheless, and lastly, we observe that a new 
 dramatic and lyric school has arisen under this adverse 
 influence and brought its methods into vogue, obtain- 
 ing the favor of a new generation, and therewith round- 
 ing to completion the poetic cycle which I have under- 
 taken to review. 
 
 The evolution of the art-school, partly from classicism, 
 partly from a renewal of early and natural English feel- 
 ing, may be illustrated by a study of the life and relics 
 of Landor: first, because Landor, while an intellectual 
 poet, was among the most perfect of those who have 
 excelled in the expression of objective beauty ; again, 
 because, although contemporary with Keats, his career 
 was prolonged into the second half of our era, and 
 thus was a portion of its origin, progress, and matu- 
 rity. Throughout this time, as in other eras, various 
 phases of metrical art have been displayed by authors 
 who have maintained their independence of the domi- 
 nant mode. Mrs. Browning wins our attention, as the 
 first of woman-poets, endowed with the rarest order of 
 that subjective faculty which is the special attribute of 
 feminine genius. Hood, Arnold, and Procter may be 
 selected as prominent representatives of the several 
 kinds of feeling and rhythmical utterance that are no- 
 ticeable in their verse. Elsewhere, as we look around, 
 we soon begin to discover the influence of the emi- 
 nent founder and master of the composite school. The 
 method of Tennyson may be termed composite or idyl- 
 lic : the former, as a process that embraces every 
 variety of rhythm and technical effect ; the latter, as 
 essentially descriptive, and resorting to external por- 
 traiture instead of to those means by which characters 
 are made unconsciously to depict themselves. Other- 
 
 N antes 
 •which illus- 
 trate succes- 
 sive poetic 
 phases. 
 
 Outline of a 
 proposed 
 critical sur- 
 vey.
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 The con- 
 ditions of 
 ike period. 
 
 wise, it is suggestive rather than plain-spoken, and 
 greatly relies upon surrounding accessories for the 
 fuller conveyance of its subtle thought. After some 
 comparison of the laureate with the father of Greek 
 idyllic verse, — pointing out, meanwhile, the significant 
 likeness between the Alexandrian and Victorian eras, 
 — I shall give attention to a number of those minor 
 poets, from whose diverse yet blended rays we can 
 most readily derive a general estimate of the time and 
 its poetic tendency. These may be partially assorted 
 in groups depending upon specific feeling or style ; 
 but doubtless many single lights will be found scat- 
 tered between such constellations, and each shining 
 with his separate lustre and position. Finally, in re- 
 counting the growth of the new dramatic and ro- 
 mantic schools, under the leadership of Browning and 
 Rossetti, we shall find their characteristics united in 
 the verse of Swinburne, — in some respects the most 
 notable of the poets who now, in the prime of their 
 creative faculties, strive to maintain the historic beauty 
 and eminence of England's song. 
 
 Before entering upon a citation of the poets them- 
 selves, I wish to make what reference may be needful 
 to the conditions of the period. Let us see wherein it 
 has been marked by transition, how far it has been 
 critical and didactic, to what extent poetical and crea- 
 tive. A moment's reflection will convince us that it 
 has witnessed a change in the conditions bearing upon 
 art, as important and radical as those changes, more 
 quickly recognized, that have affected the whole tone 
 of social order and philosophic thought. Our rhyth- 
 mical expression originated in phenomenal language 
 and imagery, an inheritance from the past ; modern 
 poetry has struggled painfully, even heroically, to cast
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 
 
 this off and adjust itself to a new revelation of the 
 truth of things. The struggle is not yet ended, but con- 
 tinues, — and will continue, until the relations between 
 imagination and knowledge shall be fairly harmonized 
 upon a basis that will inure to the common glory of 
 these twin servitors of every beautiful art. 
 
 II. 
 
 It follows that, in any discussion of the recent era, 
 the scientific movement which has engrossed men's 
 thoughts, and so radically affected their spiritual and 
 material lives, assumes an importance equal to that of 
 all other forces combined. The time has been marked 
 by a stress of scientific iconoclasm. Its bearing upon 
 theology was long since perceived, and the so-called 
 conflict of Science with Religion is now at full height. 
 Its bearing upon poetry, through antagonism to the 
 traditional basis of poetic diction, imagery, and thought, 
 has been less distinctly stated. The stress has been 
 vaguely felt by the poets themselves, but they are not 
 given to formulating their sensations in the polemical 
 manner of those trained logicians, the churchmen, — 
 and the attitude of the latter has so occupied our re- 
 gard that few have paused to consider the real cause 
 of the technical excellence and spiritual barrenness 
 common in the modern arts of letters and design. 
 Yet it is impossible, when we once set about it, to 
 look over the field of late English verse, and not to 
 see a question of the relations between Poetry and 
 Science pressing for consideration at every turn and 
 outpost. 
 
 Scientific iconoclasm is here mentioned simply as an 
 existing force : not as one to be deplored, for I have 
 
 Modern 
 iconoclasm. 
 
 The rela- 
 tions be- 
 tween Poetry 
 and Science.
 
 8 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 No inherent 
 antagonism. 
 
 An early 
 sonnet by 
 E.A. Poe. 
 
 faith that it will in the end lead to new and fairer 
 manifestations of the immortal Muse. However irre- 
 pressible the conflict between accepted theologies and 
 the spirit of investigation, however numerous the tra- 
 ditions of faith that yield to the advances of knowledge, 
 there is no such inherent antagonism between science 
 and poetry. In fact, the new light of truth is no more 
 at war with religious aspiration than with poetic feel- 
 ing, but in either case with the ancient fables and 
 follies of expression which these sentiments respec- 
 tively have cherished. A sense of this hostility has 
 oppressed, I say, the singers clinging to forms of 
 beauty, which long remain the dearest, because loved 
 the first. Their early instinct of resistance is manifest 
 in the following sonnet by a poet who saw only the 
 beginning of the new dispensation : — 
 
 " Science ! true daughter of old Time thou art, 
 
 Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. 
 Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, 
 
 Vulture, whose wings are dull realities ? 
 
 How should he love thee ? or how deem thee wise, 
 Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering 
 
 To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, 
 Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing .■' 
 Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, 
 
 And driven the Hamadryad from the wood 
 To seek a shelter in some happier star ? 
 
 Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, 
 The Elfin from the green grass, and from me 
 The summer dream beneath the tamarind-tree .' " 
 
 Had this youth lived to the present hour, he would 
 begin, I think, to discern that Poetry herself is strug- 
 gling to be free from the old and to enter upon the 
 new, to cast ofif a weight of precedent and phenom- 
 enal imagery and avail herself of the more profound
 
 METHOD OF THE POET. 
 
 suggestion and more resplendent beauty of discovered 
 truth ; and he would not forbid her to light the flames 
 of her imagination at the torch which Science carries 
 with a strong and forward-beckoning hand. 
 
 While, therefore, there can be no irreconcilable war- 
 fare between poetry and science, we discover that a 
 temporary struggle is under way, and has seriously 
 embarrassed the poets of the era. Let us observe the 
 operation of this contest, or, rather, of this enforced 
 transition to the method of the future. 
 
 There are two ways of regarding natural objects : 
 first, as they appear to the bodily eye and to the 
 normal, untutored imagination ; second, as we know 
 they actually are, — having sought out the truth of 
 their phenomena, the laws which underlie their beauty 
 or repulsiveness. The former, purely empirical, hith- 
 erto has been the simple and poetic function of art ; 
 the latter is that of reason, scientifically and radically 
 informed. The one is Homeric, the other Baconian. 
 Up to Coleridge's time, therefore, his definition of 
 poetry, that it is the antithesis of science, though not 
 complete, was true as far as it extended. Let us see 
 how the ideals of an imaginative, primitive race, differ 
 from those of the children of knowledge, who make 
 up our later generations. 
 
 The most familiar example will be found the best. 
 Look at the antique spirit as partially revived by a 
 painter of the seventeenth century. The Aurora fresco 
 in the Rospigliosi palace expresses the manner in 
 which it once was perfectly natural to observe the 
 perpetual, splendid phenomena of breaking day. Sun- 
 rise was the instant presence of joyous, effulgent deity. 
 A pagan saw the morning as Guido has painted it. 
 The Sun-God in very truth was urging on his fiery- 
 I* 
 
 A temporary 
 conjlkt. 
 
 The poetic 
 and rational 
 viethods ex- 
 amined a/id 
 conifared. 
 
 I. The po- 
 etic, or phe- 
 nomenal 
 mode.
 
 lO 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 The antique 
 spirit. 
 
 The medicE- 
 val spirit. 
 
 footed Steeds. The clouds were his pathway ; the 
 early morning Hour was scattering in advance flow- 
 ers of infinite prismatic hues, and her blooming, 
 radiant sisters were floating in air around Apollo's 
 chariot ; the earth was roseate with celestial light ; the 
 blue sea laughed beyond. Swiftly ascending Heaven's 
 archway the retinue swept on ; all was real, exuberant 
 life and gladness ; the gods were thus in waiting upon 
 humanity, and men were the progeny of the gods. The 
 elements of the Hellenic idealism, so often cited, are 
 readily understood. It appeared in the blithesome 
 imagery of a race that felt the pulses of youth, with no 
 dogmas of the past to thicken its current and few ana- 
 lytical speculations to perturb it. Youth, health, and 
 simplicity of life brought men to accept and inform 
 after their own longings the outward phenomena of 
 natural things. Heaven lies about us in our infancy. 
 I refer to the antique feeling (as I might to that of 
 the pastoral Hebraic age), not as to the exponent of 
 a period superior to our own, or comparable with it 
 in knowledge, comfort, grasp of all that enhances the 
 average of human welfare, but as that of a poetical 
 era, charged with what has ever, until now, made the 
 excellence of such times, — an era when gifted poets 
 would find themselves in an atmosphere favoring the 
 production of elevated poetry, and of poetry especially 
 among the forms of art, since this has seemed more 
 independent of aid from material science than the rest. 
 But there are other types of the poetical age. Pass 
 from the simple and harmonious ideals of classicism 
 to the romantic Gothic era, whose genius was con- 
 glomerate of old and new, and the myths of many 
 ages and countries, but still fancy-free, or subject only 
 to a pretended science as crude and wanton as the
 
 REALISM OF THE PRESENT TIME. 
 
 II 
 
 fancy itself ; whose imagination was excited by chival- 
 rous codes of honor, brave achievement, and the recur- 
 rent chances and marvels of new discovery. Such, for 
 example, the Elizabethan period of our own literature ; 
 such the great Italian period from which it drew its 
 forms. There was a certain largeness of mechanical 
 achievement, and a mass of theological inquir}', in the 
 time of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, and in that 
 of Tasso and Ariosto, but all subject to the influence 
 of superstition and romance. The world was only 
 half discovered; men's fancy was constantly on the 
 alert ; nothing commonplace held the mind ; even 
 the lives and ventures of merchants had a wealth of 
 mystery, strangeness, and speculation about them, 
 which might well make an Antonio and a Sebastian 
 the personages of Shakespeare's and Fletcher's plays. 
 Each part of the globe was a phantasmal or fairy land 
 to the inhabitants of other parts. A traveller was a 
 marked man. Somewhere in Asia was the Great Khan ; 
 later, in America, were cities of Manoa paved with 
 gold. Nothing was extraordinary, or, rather, everything 
 was so. The people fed on the material of poetry, 
 and wove laurel-wreaths for those who made their 
 song. 
 
 Our own time, so eminently scientific, so devoted to 
 investigation of universal truth, has found such wonders 
 in the laws of force and matter, that the poetic bearing 
 of their phenomena has seemed of transient worth \ 
 enjoyment and excitation of the intellect through the 
 acquisition of knowledge are valued more and more. 
 Thinkers become unduly impressed with the relative 
 unimportance of man and his conceptions. Our first 
 knowledge of the amazing revelations of astronomy — 
 which I take as a most impressive type of the cognate 
 
 The modern 
 spirit.
 
 12 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 The realis- 
 tic tenden- 
 cies of the 
 f resent time. 
 
 sciences — tends to repress self-assertion, and to make 
 one content with accepting quietly his little share of 
 life and action. In earlier eras of this kind, discov- 
 ery and invention occupied men's minds until, fully 
 satiated, they longed for mental rest and a return to a 
 play of heart and fancy. Too much wisdom seemed 
 folly indeed ; dance and song and pastoral romance 
 resumed their sway ; the harpers harped anew, and 
 from the truer life and knowledge scientifically gained 
 broke forth new blossoms of poetic art. But our own 
 period has no exact protot}qDe. It is advanced in 
 civilization ; but the time of Pericles, though also 
 exhibiting a modern refinement, was one of scientific 
 ignorance. There was, as we have seen, a mediaeval 
 spirit of scientific inquiry, but almost wholly guided 
 by superstition. Even nature's laws were compelled 
 to bow to church fanaticism ; experiments were looked 
 upon with distrust, or conducted in secrecy ; and po- 
 etry, at least in respect to its cherished language and 
 ideals, had no occasion to take alarm. 
 
 But in the nineteenth century, science, freedom of 
 thought, refinement, and material progress have moved 
 along together. The modern student often has been 
 so narrowed by his investigations as to be more unjust 
 to the poet than the latter was of old to the philoso- 
 pher. Art has seemed mere pastime and amusement, 
 as once it seemed the devil's frippery and seduction 
 to the ascetic soul of the Puritan, aglow with the 
 gloomy or rapturous mysteries of his theology. Also 
 by the multitude whom the practical results of science 
 at last have thoroughly won over, — and who now are 
 impelled by more than Roman ambition to girdle the 
 earth with engineering and conquer the elements them- 
 selves, — neither the songsters nor the metaphysicians,
 
 HUXLEY ON EDUCATION. 
 
 13 
 
 but the physical investigators and men of action, are 
 held to be the world's great men. The De Lesseps, 
 Fields, Barings, and Vanderbilts, no less than Lyell, 
 Darwin, and Agassiz, wear the bay-leaves of to-day. 
 Religion and theology, also, are subjected to analysis 
 and the universal tests, and at last the divine and the 
 poet, traditionally at loggerheads, have a common bond 
 of suffering, — a union of toleration or half-disguised 
 contempt. Eating together at the side-tables, neither is 
 adequately consoled by reflecting that the other is no 
 more to be envied than himself. The poet's hold upon 
 the youthful mind and sentimental popular emotion 
 has also measurably relaxed ; for a learned professor, 
 who has spoken of poetic expression as " sensual 
 caterwauling," and possibly regards the gratification of 
 the aesthetic perceptions as of little worth, grossly un- 
 derrated his position when he said that, " at present, 
 education is almost entirely devoted to the cultivation 
 of the power of expression and of the sense of literary 
 beauty." The truth is that our school-girls and spin- 
 sters wander down the lanes with Darwin, Huxley, and 
 Spencer under their arms ; or if they carry Tennyson, 
 Longfellow, and Morris, read them in the light of 
 spectrum analysis, or test them by the economics of 
 Mill and Bain. The very tendency of modern poetry 
 to wreak its thoughts upon expression, of which Huxley 
 so complains, naturally follows the iconoclastic over- 
 throw of its cherished ideals, confining it to skilful 
 utilization of the laws of form and melod}^ Ay, even 
 the poets, with their intensely sympathetic natures, 
 have caught the spirit of the age, and pronounce the 
 verdict against themselves. One of them envies his 
 early comrade, who forsook art to follow learning, 
 and thus in age addresses him : — 
 
 Theology. 
 
 Huxley on 
 '■^Scientific 
 Educaiion^'t 
 " Apfletons^ 
 Journal" 
 Aug. 14, 
 1869.
 
 14 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 Whitiier's 
 dedication of 
 *' Miriam " 
 to President 
 Barnard. 
 
 Surrender 
 of the poets. 
 
 " Alike we loved 
 The muses' haunts, and all our fancies moved 
 To measures of old song. How since that day 
 Our feet have parted from the path that lay 
 So fair before us ! Rich, from life-long search 
 Of truth, within thy Academic porch 
 Thou sittest now, lord of a realm of fact, 
 Thy servitors the sciences exact ; 
 Still listening, with thy hand on Nature's keys, 
 To hear the Samian's spheral harmonies 
 And rhythm of law 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 And if perchance too late I linger where 
 The flowers have ceased to blow, and trees are bare, 
 Thou, wiser in thy choice, will scarcely blame 
 The friend who shields his folly with thy name." 
 
 The more intellectual will confess to you that they 
 weary less of a new essay by Proctor or Tyndall than 
 of the latest admirable poem ; that, overpowered in 
 the brilliant presence of scientific discovery, their own 
 conceptions seem less dazzling. A thirst for more 
 facts grows upon them ; they throw aside their lyres 
 and renew the fascinating study, forgetful that the 
 inspiration of Plato, Shakespeare, and other poets of 
 old, often foreshadowed the glory of these revelations, 
 and neglecting to chant in turn the transcendent pos- 
 sibilities of eras yet to come. Science, the modern 
 Circe, beguiles them from their voyage to the Hesperi- 
 des, and transforms them into her voiceless devotees. 
 
 Every period, however original and creative, has a 
 transitional aspect in its relation to the years before 
 and after. In scientific iconoclasm, then, we have the 
 most important of the symptoms which mark the recent 
 era as a transition period, and presently shall observe 
 features in the structure and composition of its po- 
 etry which justify us in thus ranking it. The Victorian
 
 METHOD OF THE PHILOSOPHER. 
 
 15 
 
 poets have flourished in an equatorial region of com- 
 mon-sense and demonstrable knowledge. Thought has 
 outlived its childhood, yet has not reached a growth 
 from which experience and reason lead to visions 
 more radiant than the early intuitions. The zone of 
 youthful fancy, excited by unquestioning acceptance 
 of outward phenomena, is now well passed ; the zone 
 of cultured imagination is still beyond us. At present, 
 skepticism, analysis, scientific conquest, realism, scorn- 
 ful unrest. Apollo has left the heavens. The modern 
 child knows more than the sage of antiquity. 
 
 To us the Sun is a material, flaming orb, around 
 which revolves this dark, inferior planet, obedient to 
 central and centrifugal forces. We know that no celes- 
 tial flowers bestrew his apparent pathway ; that all this 
 iridescence is but the refraction of white lis:ht through 
 the mists of the upper skies. Let me in advance dis- 
 avow regret for the present, or desire to recall the 
 past : I simply recognize a condition which was in- 
 evitable and in the order of growth to better things. 
 " Much of what we call sublime," said Landor, " is 
 only the residue of infancy, and the worst of it." I 
 cannot disbelieve the words of a latter-day writer, that, 
 " so far from being unfriendly to the poetic imagina- 
 tion, science will breathe into it a higher exaltation." 
 In my chapter on Tennyson I shall have occasion to 
 cite the language of Wordsworth, who, with prophetic 
 vision, depicted an era when the poet and the man 
 of science shall find their missions harmonious and 
 united. But the change is none the less severe, and 
 the period has been indeed trying for the votaries of 
 song. True, that already, in our glimmerings of the 
 source and motion of the " ofi'spring of Heaven first- 
 born," in our partial knowledge of the meaning of 
 
 2. The ra- 
 
 tiojial, or 
 scientific 
 mode. 
 
 WorcU- 
 7vorih's 
 Pre/ace to 
 the second 
 edition 0/ 
 his foems-
 
 1 6 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 Embarrass- 
 
 vicnt of the 
 idealists. 
 
 appearances, we can use this meaning for the lan- 
 guage and basis of poetical works ; but recent poets 
 have had to contend with the fact that, while men 
 are instructed out of the early phenomenal faith, their 
 recognition of scientific truth has not yet become that 
 second nature which can replace it. The poet of to- 
 day, burdened with his new wisdom, represents the 
 contemporary treatment when he says, — 
 
 " There sinks the nebulous star we call the Sun, 
 If that hypothesis of theirs be sound " ; 
 
 but it is by a prosaic effort that he recalls a fact at 
 variance with the impression of his own childhood, sub- 
 duing his fancy to his judgment and to the spirit of the 
 time. Let myths go by, and it still remain^ that every 
 child is a natural Ptolemaist, who must be educated to 
 the Copernican system, and his untutored notions gen- 
 erally are as far from the truth with regard to other 
 physical phenomena. 
 
 The characteristics of the middle portion of the 
 nineteenth century have been so perplexing, that it is 
 but natural the elder generation among us should ex- 
 claim, " Where is it now, the glory and the dream ? " 
 While other arts must change and change, the pure 
 office of poetry is ever to idealize and prophesy of the 
 unknown ; and its lovers, forgetting that Nature is lim- 
 itless in her works and transitions, mourn that — so 
 much having been discovered, robbed of its glamour, 
 and reduced to prosaic fact — the poet's ancient office 
 is at last put by. Let them take fresh Jieart, recalling 
 the Master's avowal that Nature's "book of secrecy" 
 is infinite ; let them note what spiritual and material 
 spheres are yet untrod ; rejoicing over the past rather 
 than hopeless of future achievement, let them examine
 
 THE LAW OF PROGRESS. 
 
 17 
 
 with me the disenchanting process which has made 
 their own time a turbulent, unrestful interval of tran- 
 sition from that which was to that which shall be ; a 
 time when, more than his perpetual wont, the poet 
 looks "before and after, and pines for what is not." 
 
 As in chemical physics, first sublimation, then crys- 
 tallization, then the sure and firm-set earth beneaih 
 our feet; so in human progress, first the ethereal fan- 
 tasy of the poet, then discovery by experience and 
 induction, bringing us to what is deemed scientific, 
 prosaic knowledge of objects and their laws. Thus in 
 the earlier periods, when poets composed empirically, 
 the rarest minds welcomed and honored their produc- 
 tions in the same spirit. But now, if they work in this 
 way, as many are still fain, it must be for the tender 
 heart of women and the delight of youths, since the 
 fitter audience of thinkers, the most elevated and 
 eager spirits, no longer find sustenance in such empty 
 magician's food. With regard to the so il of men and 
 things, they still give rein to fancy and empiricism, 
 for that is still unknown. Hence the new phases of 
 psychical poetry, which formerly repelled the healthy- 
 minded by its morbid cast. But touching' material phe- 
 nomena they no longer accept, even for its beauty, the 
 language of myth and tradition ; they know better ; the 
 glory may remain, but verily tlie dream has passed 
 away. 
 
 A skeptical period may call forth heroic elements of 
 self-devotion ; criticism is endured and even courted, 
 and the vulnerable point of an inherited faith is surely 
 found. Earnest minds sadly but manfully give up their 
 ancestral traditions, and refuse to seek repose in any 
 creed that cannot undergo the extreme test. But an 
 age of distrust, however stoical and brave, rarely has 
 
 Progress, 
 and its law. 
 
 Features of 
 an itivesti- 
 gathtg pe- 
 riod.
 
 i8 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 Skepticism 
 unjriendly 
 to creative 
 art. Cp. 
 "■ Poets of 
 A mer- 
 ica " ; p. 
 128. 
 
 The real 
 and the 
 ideal. 
 
 been favorable to high and creative art. Great pro- 
 ductions usually have been adjusted to the formulas 
 of some national or world-wide faith, and its common 
 atmosphere pervades them. The Iliad is subject to 
 the Hellenic mythology, whose gods and heroes are 
 its projectors and sustainers. The Divine Comedy, 
 Paradise Lost, the most imaginative poems, the great- 
 est dramas, — each, as it comes to mind, seems, like 
 the most renowned and glorious paintings, to have 
 been the product of an age of faith, however sharply 
 minor sects may have contended within the limits of 
 the general belief. The want of such a belief often 
 has led to undue realism, or to inertness on the part 
 of the best intellects, and in many other ways has 
 checked the creative impulse, the joyous ardor of the 
 visionary and poet. 
 
 To make another statement of the old position of 
 art in relation to knowledge, we may say that until a 
 recent date the imagination, paradoxical as it may 
 seem, has been most heightened and sustained by the 
 contemplation of natural objects, rather as they seem to 
 be than as we know they are. For to the pure and 
 absorbed spirit it is the ideal only that seems real ; 
 as a lover adores the image and simulacrum of his 
 mistress, pictured to his inner consciousness, more than 
 the very self and substance of her being. Thus Keats, 
 the English apprentice, surrounded himself with all 
 Olympus's hierarchy, and breathed the freshness of 
 Thessalian forest-winds. But for an instance of per- 
 fect substitution of the seeming for the true, commend 
 me to the passion and rhapsody of Heine, who on the 
 last days of his outdoor life, blind to the loving sym- 
 pathy of the actual men and women around him, falls 
 smitten and helpless at the feet of the Venus of Milo,
 
 AN APPROACHING HARMONY. 
 
 19 
 
 his loved ideal beauty, sees her looking upon him with 
 divine pity and yearning, and hears her words, spoken 
 only for his ear, " Dost thou not see that I have no 
 arms, and therefore cannot help thee ? " The knowl- 
 edge of unreality was present to his reason, but the 
 high poetic soul disdained it, and received such con- 
 solation as only poets know. So also Blake, that 
 sublime visionary, tells us : "I assert for myself that 
 I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me 
 it is hindrance and not action. ' What ! ' it will be 
 questioned, 'when the sun rises, do you not see a 
 
 disk of fire, somewhat like a guinea ? ' ' O no, no ! I 
 see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, 
 crying, " Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty ! " 
 I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I 
 would question a window concerning a sight. I look 
 through it, and not with it.' " 
 
 There are passages in modern poetry that seem to 
 forebode the approaching harmony of Poetry and Sci- 
 ence ; the essays of Tyndall and Spencer are, the 
 question of form left out, poems in themselves ; and 
 there are both philosophers and poets who feel that 
 no absolute antagonism can exist between them. Dr. 
 Adolphe Wurtz, in a paper before the French Associa- 
 tion, declared that the mission of science is to struggle 
 against the unknown, while in letters it is enough to 
 give an expression, and in art a body, to the concep- 
 tions of the mind or the beauties of nature. To this 
 we may add that science kindles the imagination with 
 the new conceptions and new beauties which it has 
 wrested from the unknown, and thus becomes the 
 ally of poetry. The latter, in turn, is often the herald 
 of science, through what is termed the intuition of the 
 poet. Whether by means of some occult revelation, 
 
 Approach- 
 ing har- 
 mony of 
 Poetry and 
 Science. 
 
 A ddress on 
 " The Pro- 
 gress of 
 Chemistry^ 
 at Lille, 
 Aug. 20, 
 1874.
 
 20 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of AtneT' 
 ua": pf. 
 
 •53-I551 
 262. 
 
 Goethe. 
 
 Beddocs. 
 
 or by a feminine process of quick reasoning that ap- 
 proaches instinct, or, again, by his subtile power to 
 " see into the life of things," the poet foretokens the 
 discoveries of the man of science in the material world 
 and concerning the laws of mind and being. A mod- 
 ern philosopher goes back to Lucretius for the basis 
 of the latest theory of matter. Before the general ac- 
 knowledgment of the vibratory transmission of light, 
 and of the doctrine of the correlation of forces, Goethe 
 made Mephistopheles avow that 
 
 " Light, howe'er it weaves, 
 Still, fettered, mito bodies cleaves : 
 It flows from bodies, bodies beautifies ; 
 By bodies is its course impeded." 
 
 In " Death's Jest-Book," that weird tragedy composed 
 by a poet who preceded Darwin, we find the idea of 
 evolution carried to its full extreme : — 
 
 " I have a bit of Fiat in my soul, 
 And can myself create my little world. 
 Had I been born a four-legged child, methinks 
 I might have found the steps from dog to man, 
 And crept into his nature." 
 
 The speaker then hints at the development of mind 
 
 from inert matter, through the crystal, through the 
 
 organic plant, and so on through successive grades 
 
 of animal life culminating with the intellectual man. 
 
 Even then he adds, — 
 
 " Have patience but a little, and keep still, 
 I '11 find means, by and by, of flying higher." 
 
 Beddoes, it is true, was a learned investigator, and so 
 was Goethe. But such poets, observing the merest 
 germs of scientific discovery, foresee their ultimate 
 possibilities, and thus suggest and anticipate the 
 empirical confirmation of their truth. Finally, the
 
 BOTH TRANSITIONAL AND CREATIVE. 
 
 21 
 
 poet must always have a separate and independent 
 province, for the spirit of Nature is best reveeled by 
 an expression of her phenomena and not by analysis of 
 her processes. Visible beauty exalts our emotions far 
 more than a dissection of the wondrous and intricate 
 system beneath it. The sight of a star or of a flower, 
 or the story of a single noble action, touches our 
 humanity more nearly than the greatest discovery or 
 invention, and does the soul more good. 
 
 Poetry will not be able to fully avail herself of the 
 aid of Science, until her votaries shall cease to be 
 dazed by the possession of a new sense. Our horizon 
 is now so extended that a thousand novel and sublime 
 objects confuse us : we still have to become wonted to 
 their aspects, proportions, distances, and relations to 
 one another. We are placed suddenly, as it were, in a 
 foreign world, whose spiritual significance is but dimly 
 understood. At last a clearer vision and riper faith 
 nvIU come to us, and with them a fresh inspiration, 
 expressing itself in new symbols, new imagery and 
 beauty, suggested by the fuller truth. Awaiting this, 
 it is our present office to see in what manner the 
 quality of the intervening period has been impressed 
 upon the living pages of its written song. 
 
 III. 
 
 While in one sense the recent era, and with more 
 point than usual, may be called a transition period, it 
 s found to possess, in no less degree than eras that 
 have witnessed smaller changes, a character and his- 
 tory of its own. Such a period may be negative, or 
 composite, in the value of its art-productions. The 
 dreary interval between the times of Milton and Cow- 
 
 The poet in 
 undisturbed 
 possession of 
 one domain. 
 
 A complete 
 understand- 
 ing not yet 
 possible. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A }ner- 
 ica" : pp. 
 26, 27. 
 
 The recent 
 period both 
 trausitioHiu 
 and crea- 
 tive.
 
 22 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 The period 
 transitional 
 in thought 
 and feeling ; 
 
 creative, 
 chiefly in 
 style and 
 form. Cp. 
 " Foets of 
 Amer- 
 ica " .• pp. 
 459, 460. 
 
 per was of the former non-creative type. An eclipse 
 of imagination prevailed and seemed to chill and be- 
 numb the poets. They tried to plod along in the well- 
 worn paths, but, like men with bandaged eyes, went 
 astray without perceiving it. Substituting pedantry 
 for emotion, and still harping on the old myths, they 
 reduced them to vapid, artificial unreality, not having 
 the faculty of reviving their beauty by new forms of 
 expression. Of the art to conceal art none save a 
 few like Collins and Goldsmith had the slightest in- 
 stinct or control. As for passion, that was completely 
 extinct. At last the soul of a later generation de- 
 manded the return to natural beauty, and the heart 
 clamored for pulsation and utterance : Cowper, Burns, 
 Wordsworth, Byron, and their great contemporaries, 
 arose, and with them a genuine creative literature, of 
 which the poetry strove to express the spirit of nature 
 and the emotions of the heart, — subtile, essential ele- 
 ments, in which no amount of scientific environment 
 could limit the poet's restless explorations. 
 
 Our recent transition period ensued, but, in its com- 
 posite aspect, how different from that to which I have 
 referred ! The change which has been going on during 
 this time pertains to imaginative thought and feeling ; 
 the specific excellence which characterizes its poetry 
 is that of form and structure. In technical finish and 
 variety the period has been so advanced that an ex- 
 amination of it should prove most instructive to lovers; 
 of the arts. For this reason, much of the criticism 
 in the following pages will be more technical than is 
 common in a work of this scope ; nor can it be other- 
 wise, and adequately recognize the distinctive emi- 
 nence of the time. The poets have been generously 
 endowed at birth, and who shall say that they have
 
 JOURNALISM AND PROSE ROMANCE. 
 
 23 
 
 not fulfilled their mission to the attainable extent? 
 When not creative, their genius has been eclectic and 
 refining. Doubtless the time has displayed the inva- 
 riable characteristics of such periods. In fact, there 
 never were more outlets to the imagination, serving 
 to distract public attention from the efforts of the 
 poets, than are afforded in this age of prose-romance 
 and journalism. It has been a learned and scholarly 
 period \ writers have busied themselves with enjoying 
 and annotating the great works of the past; criticism 
 has predominated, — but how exact and catholic ! How 
 searching the tests by which tradition and authority 
 have been tried ; how high the standard of excellence 
 in art ; how intolerant the healthy spirit of the last 
 thirty years toward cant and melodramatic affectation ; 
 how vigorous the crusade against sham ! In all this 
 we discern the remaining features which, though less 
 radical in their importance than the scientific revolu- 
 tion, have marked the Victorian period as one of tran- 
 sition, and as composite in the thought and structure 
 of its poetic art. 
 
 Besides the restrictions to which the poets have been 
 subjected by the triumphs of the journalists and novel- 
 writers, their enthusiasm also is checked by the mod- 
 ern dislike of emotional outgivings and display. This 
 aversion naturally results from the peace, security, and 
 ultra-comfortableness of the English people. It has 
 been a time of repose and luxury, a felicitous Satur- 
 nian era, when all rare things that poets dream of are 
 close at hand. Fulfilment has stilled the voice of 
 prophecy. We see disease averted, life prolonged and 
 increasing in average duration, the masses clothed and 
 housed, vice punished, virtue rewarded, the landscape 
 beautiful with the handiwork of culture and thrift. 
 
 A critical 
 and schol- 
 arly period. 
 
 Other re- 
 strictions to 
 ideality. 
 
 Modern 
 cof'fort and 
 refinement.
 
 24 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 Restraint. 
 
 Breeding. 
 
 Imfiassi- 
 bility. 
 
 Remark by 
 
 Grant 
 
 White. 
 
 Granted : but in most countries advanced to the front 
 of modern refinement, the dominant spirit has been 
 antagonistic to the production of great and lasting 
 poetry, — and of this above other arts. For it is the 
 passion of song that makes it lofty and enduring, and 
 the snows of Hecla have overlaid human passion in 
 English common life during most of the Victorian age. 
 I am not deploring the so-called materialism of our 
 century, for this may be more heroic and beneficial 
 to mankind than the idealism of the past. Neverthe- 
 less, and without magnifying the poet's office, it is fair 
 to assume that, although a poetical era may not be best 
 for the contemporary world, it is well for a poet to be 
 born in such an era, and not ill for literature that he 
 was so born. 
 
 Having thus gone beyond the zone of idealism and 
 the morning halo of impulsive deed and speech, we 
 have reached the noonday of common-sense, breed- 
 ing, facts as they are. Men do not mouth it in the 
 grand manner, for the world has no patience to hear 
 them, and deems them stagey or affected. Human 
 emotions are the same, but modern training tones us 
 down to that impassibility wherein the thoroughbred 
 Christian woman has been said to rival the Indian 
 squa,w ; madmen are not, as of old, thought to be in- 
 spired ; eccentricity bores us ; and poets, who should 
 be prophets, are loath to boldly dare and differ. Men's 
 hearts beat on forever, but Thackeray's Englishmen are 
 ashamed to acknowledge it at their meetings and part- 
 ings. The Platonists taught that the body should be 
 despised ; we quietly ignore the heart and soul. The 
 time is off-hand, chaffy, and must be taken in its mood. 
 A point was very fairly made by " Shakespeare's 
 Scholar," in his essay on "The Play of the Period,"
 
 ADVANCE IN POETRY AS AN ART. 
 
 25 
 
 that the latter days have been unfavorable to strong 
 dramatic verse, the highest form of poetry, and the 
 surest mark of a true poetical era. The modern Eng- 
 lish have not been devoted to intense heroic feeling: 
 whether above or below it, who shall say ? — but cer- 
 tainly not within it. The novel is their drama; true, 
 but chiefly the photographic novel of conventional life ; 
 others have obtained a hearing slowly, by accident, or 
 by sheer force of genius. They subject their tears to 
 analysis, but do not care for tragic rage; avoiding 
 high excitements as carefully as Septimius Felton in 
 his effort to perpetuate life, they distribute their passion 
 in a hundred petty emotions, and rather than be exalted 
 are content with the usufruct of the five external wits. 
 Domestic peace and comfort have resulted in absence 
 of enthusiasm, and the rise and prolongation of an 
 idyllic school in art. Adventure is the English amuse- 
 ment, not a mode of action ; but the converse of this 
 was true in the days of Raleigh, Drake, Sidney, and 
 Richard Grenville. Not that England is wholly utili- 
 tarian, " domestic, student, sensualist," as has been 
 charged, but she has well defined and studied the sci- 
 ence of society. All this the Victorian poets have had 
 to contend with as poets, or adapt themselves to as 
 clever artists, and, above all, as men of their time. 
 
 Lastly, however, we find that the structural, artistic 
 phases of modern English poetry, in scorn of the stilted 
 conventionalism of the eighteenth century, have been 
 of the most composite range, variety, and perfection. 
 Of course the natural forms were long since discovered, 
 but lyrists have learned that combinations are endless, 
 so that new styles, if not new orders, are constantly 
 brought out. In the ultra-critical spirit of the time, 
 they enhance the strength and beauty of their meas- 
 
 The novel. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 0/ A mcr- 
 ka " .• p. 
 463- 
 
 Great ad- 
 vance in 
 poetry as an 
 art.
 
 26 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 Its modern 
 range and 
 perfection. 
 
 ures by every feasible process, and the careful adap- 
 tation of form to theme. This is an excellence not 
 to be underestimated ; for if, as Huxley asserts, " ex- 
 pression is not valuable for its own sake," it is at least 
 the wedded body of inspiration, employing the poet's 
 keenest sensibilities, and lending such value to thought 
 as the cutting of a diamond adds to the rugged stone. 
 Never was the technique of poetry so well understood 
 as since the time of Keats and the rise of Tennyson 
 and his school. The best models are selected by the 
 song-writers, the tale-tellers, the preachers in verse ; 
 and a neophyte of to-day would disdain the triteness 
 and crudeness of the master-workmen of fifty years ago. 
 The greater number, instead of restricting themselves 
 to a specialty, range over and include all departments 
 of their art, and are lyrists, balladists, and idyllists by 
 turn, achieving excellence in every direction except the 
 dramatic, which indeed but few venture upon. Modern 
 poetry, in short, has been as composite as modern 
 architecture ; and if, as in the case of the latter, gro- 
 tesque and tawdry combinations abound, there also are 
 many strong and graceful structures, which excel those 
 of former periods in richness and harmony of adorn- 
 ment. The rhythm of every dainty lyrical inspiration 
 which heralded the morning of English minstrelsy has 
 been caught and adapted by the song-writers, all of 
 whom, from Barry Cornwall and Hood to Kingsley 
 and Jean Ingelow, have new arrangements and effects 
 of their own. The extreme of word-music and word- 
 painting has been attained, together with a peculiar 
 condensation in imagery and thought ; so that, whereas 
 the poets of the last era, for all their strength of wing, 
 occupied whole passages with a single image, their 
 more refined successors discover its essential quality
 
 TO WHAT EXTENT REFLECTED IN ART. 
 
 27 
 
 (somewhat as chemists embody the active principle 
 of a plant in the crystalline salt), and express it by a 
 single adjective or epithet. If " the light that gilds " 
 our recent English poetry be "the light of sunset," 
 it is indeed beautiful with all prismatic hues, and its 
 lustres are often as attractive in themselves as for 
 the truth and beauty which they serve to illumine. 
 
 So far as progress is a change from the simple to the 
 complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, 
 we may hold that an advance is making in English art. 
 But a period of transition is also one of doubt and 
 turbulence ; one whose characteristics it is especially 
 requisite to bear in mind, in order to obtain a true 
 appreciation of the leading poets who represent it. 
 For we must consider an artist's good or ill fortune, 
 his struggles and temptations, his aids and encourage- 
 ments ; remembering that the most important art of 
 any period is that which most nearly illustrates its 
 manners, thoughts, and emotions in imaginative lan- 
 guage or form. Through his sensitive organization the 
 poet is exquisitely affected by the spirit of his time ; 
 and, to render his work of future moment, seeks to 
 reflect that spirit, or confines himself to expression of 
 the spiritual experiences common to all ages and all 
 mankind. Mr. Emerson, in his search for the under- 
 lying principle of things, finds it a defect even in 
 Homer and Milton, that their works are clogged with 
 restrictions of times, personages, and places. Yet these 
 are the world's great names ; it has no greater. The 
 potent allegory of their poems comes nearer to us than 
 the abstract Shastras. Their personages and places 
 are but the media through which the Protean forms 
 of nature are set forth. The statement of unmixed 
 thought and beauty has not been the splendor of the 
 
 Tendency 0/ 
 art to reflect 
 its own titne. 
 
 Emerson : 
 Essay " The 
 Poet."
 
 28 
 
 THE rERIOD. 
 
 Adverse in- 
 jl-uence of 
 the rccetit 
 era -iipoJi the 
 vihior poets. 
 
 Cp.'' Poets 
 vf A }ner- 
 
 ica " ; //. 
 458-461. 
 
 masters. And while it is true that nature and history 
 are the poet's workshop, and all material his property, 
 the studies and reproductions of foreign or antique 
 models, except as practice-work, are of less value than 
 what he can show or say of his own time. 
 
 Hence it is of the highest importance to the poet 
 that he should live in a sympathetic, or co-operative, if 
 not heroic period. In studying the minor poets, we 
 see with especial clearness the adverse influences of a 
 transition era, composite though it be. A likeness of 
 manner and language is common to the Elizabethan 
 writers, various as were their themes and natural gifts. 
 The same is apparent in the Cromwellian period with 
 regard to Marvell, Shirley, and their contemporaries. 
 But now, as if in despair of finding new themes to suit 
 their respective talents, yet driven on to expression, 
 we discern the Victorian poets, — one copying the re- 
 frains and legendary feeling of illuminated missals and 
 black-letter lays ; another recasting the most enchant- 
 ing and famous romances of Christendom in delicious 
 language and measures caught from Chaucer himself ; 
 others adopting the quaint religious manner of Her- 
 bert and Vaughan ; a host essaying new and conscien- 
 tious presentations of the undying beauty of Greek 
 mythologic lore. We see them dallying with sweet 
 sense and sound, until our taste for melody and color 
 is more than surfeited. The language which Henry 
 Taylor applied to the poets of a former generation 
 seems even more appropriate with respect to these 
 artist^. They, too, are characterized " by a profusion 
 of imagery, by force and beauty of language, and by 
 
 a versification peculiarly easy and adroit But 
 
 from this undoubted indulgence in the mere luxuries 
 of poetry, has there not ensued a want of adequate ap-
 
 STRUGGLES OF THE MINOR POETS. 
 
 29 
 
 preciation for its intellectual and immortal part? . . . . 
 They wanted, in the first place, subject-matter. A feel- 
 ing came more easily to them than a reflection, and 
 an image was always at hand when a thought was not 
 forthcoming." It is but just to say that the recent 
 poets are not so wanting in reflection as in themes 
 and essential purpose. These defects many have 
 striven to hide by excessive finish and ornamentation. 
 Conscious of this, a few, with a spasmodic effort to 
 be original, break away in disdain of all art, palming 
 off a " saucy roughness " for strength, and coarseness 
 for vigor ; and even this return to chaos wins the 
 favor of many who, from very sickness of over-refine- 
 ment, pass to the other extreme, and welcome the 
 meaner work for a time because it is a change. The 
 effect of novelty gives every fashion a temporary 
 hold ; but the calmer vision looks above and along 
 the succession of modes, and seeks what is in itself 
 ennobling ; and every disguise of dilettanteism, aris- 
 tocratic or democratic, whether it struts in the rags 
 of Autolycus, or steals the robe of Prospero and apes 
 his majestic mien, must ultimately fall away. In the 
 search for a worthy theme, more than one of the poets 
 to whom I refer has, by a tour de force, allied himself to 
 some heroic mission of the day. On the other hand, 
 honest agitators have been moved, by passionate zeal 
 for their several causes, to outbursts of rhythmical 
 expression. In most cases the lyrics of either class 
 have been rhetorical and eloquent rather than truly 
 poetical. Finally, in the wide diffusion of a partial 
 culture, the Victorian period has been noteworthy for 
 the multitudes of its tolerable poets. It has been a 
 time of English minnesingers, hosts of them chanting 
 " the old eternal song." 
 
 See the 
 Preface to 
 "Philip Van 
 Artevelde" 
 London, 
 1S34. 
 
 Two forms 
 of dilettante
 
 30 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 Triuntfih of 
 the greater 
 foets over 
 their restric- 
 tions. 
 
 Landor. 
 
 Ten7iyson. 
 
 Mrs. Brown- 
 ing. 
 
 Browning. 
 
 But the poets of such a period are like a collection 
 of trout in water that has become stagnant or turbid. 
 The graceful smaller fry, unconscious that the real 
 difficulty is in the atmosphere about them, one after 
 another yield to it and lose their color, flavor, and 
 elastic life. But the few noble masters of the pool 
 adapt themselves to the new condition, or resist it 
 altogether, and abide till the disorder of the waters 
 is assuaged. Reviewing the poetic genius of the clos- 
 ing era, we find one strong spirit maintaining an in- 
 dependent beauty and vigor through successive gen- 
 erations, composing the rarest prose and poetry with 
 slight regard to temporal mode or hearing, — a man 
 neither of nor for an age, — who has but lately passed 
 away. Another, of a different cast, the acknowledged 
 master of the composite school, has reflected his own 
 period by adapting his poems to its landscape, man- 
 ners, and speculation, with such union of strength and 
 varied elegance as even English literature has seldom 
 displayed. We find a woman — an inspired singer, if 
 there ever was one — all fire and air, her song and soul 
 alike devoted to liberty, aspiration, and ethereal love. 
 A poet, her masculine complement, whose name is rich 
 with the added glory of her renown, represents the 
 antiquity of his race by study of mediaeval themes, and 
 exhibits to the modern lover, noble, statesman, thinker, 
 priest, their prototypes in ages long gone by ; he con- 
 stantly exalts passion above reason, while reasoning 
 himself, withal, in the too curious fashion of the 
 present day ; again, he is the exponent of what dra- 
 matic spirit is still left to England, — that of psycho- 
 logical analysis, which turns the human heart inside 
 out, judging it not from outward action, in the manner 
 of the early, simply objective masters of the stage.
 
 RECENT BRITISH TASTE. 
 
 31 
 
 Youngest and latest, we find a phenomenal genius, 
 the extreme product of the time, carrying its artistic 
 and spiritual features to that excess which foretokens 
 exhaustion ; possessed of unprecedented control over 
 the rhythm and assonance of English poetry ; in the 
 purpose and structure of his early verse to be studied 
 as a force of expression carried to its furthest limits, 
 but in his mature, dramatic work exhibiting signs of 
 a reaction or transformation which surely is even now 
 at hand. 
 
 For that the years of transition are near an end, 
 and that, in England and America, a creative poetic 
 literature, adapted to the new order of thought and 
 the new aspirations of humanity, will speedily grow 
 into form, I believe to be evident wherever our com- 
 mon tongue is the language of imaginative expres- 
 sion. The idyllic philosophy in which Wordsworth 
 took refuge from the cant and melodrama of his 
 predecessors has fulfilled its immediate mission ; the 
 art which was born with Keats, and found its perfect 
 work in Tennyson, already seems faultily faultless and 
 over-refined. A craving for more dramatic, sponta- 
 neous utterance is prevalent with the new generation. 
 There is an instinct that to interpret the hearts and 
 souls of men and womeji is the poet's highest func- 
 tion ; a disposition to throw aside precedents, — to 
 study life, dialect, and feeling, as our painters study 
 landscape, out of doors and at first hand. Con- 
 sidered as the floating land-drift of a new possession, 
 even careless and faulty work after this method is 
 eagerly received ; although in England, so surfeited of 
 the past and filled with vague desire, the faculty to 
 discriminate between the richer and poorer fabric 
 seems blunted and sensational ; experimental novel- 
 
 Swinburnt. 
 
 A new dis- 
 
 pemation. 
 
 The 
 
 dramatic 
 instinct 
 revived. 
 
 British taste 
 subordinate 
 to love 0/ 
 novelty.
 
 32 
 
 THE PERIOD. 
 
 The future. 
 
 lies are set above the most admirable compositions 
 in a manner already familiar ; just as an uncouth carv- 
 ing or piece of foreign lacquer-work is more prized 
 than an exquisite specimen of domestic art, because it 
 is strange and breathes some unknown, spicy fragrance 
 of a new-found clime. The transition period, doubt- 
 less, will be prolonged by the ceaseless progress of 
 the scientific revolution, occupying men's imaginations 
 and constantly readjusting the basis of language and 
 illustration. Erelong some new Lucretius may come 
 to reinterpret the nature of things, confirming many 
 of the ancient prophecies, and substituting for the 
 wonder of the remainder the still more wondrous tes- 
 timony of the lens, the laboratory, and the millennial 
 rocks. The old men of the Jewish captivity wept with 
 a loud voice when they saw the foundations of the 
 new temple, because its glory in their eyes, in com- 
 parison with that builded by Solomon, was as nothing; 
 but the prophet assured them that the Desire of all 
 nations should come, and that the glory of the latter 
 house should be greater than of the former. But I do 
 not endeavor to anticipate the future of English song. 
 It may be lowlier or loftier than now, but certainly 
 it will show a change, and my faith in the reality 
 of progress is broad enough to include the field of 
 poetic art.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 LISTENING to the concert of modern song, a 
 critical ear detects the notes of one voice which 
 possesses a distinct quality and is always at its owner's 
 command. Landor was never mastered by his period, 
 though still in harmony with it ; in short, he was not 
 a discordant, but an independent, singer. He was the 
 pioneer of the late English school ; and among recent 
 poets, though far from being the greatest in achieve- 
 ment, was the most self-reliant, the most versatile, and 
 one of the most imaginative. In the enjoyment of 
 his varied writings, we are chiefly impressed by their 
 constant exhibition of mental prowess, and everywhere 
 confronted with an eager and incomparable intellect. 
 
 Last of all to captivate the judgment of the laity, and 
 somewhat lacking, it may be, in sympathetic quality of 
 tone, Landor is, first of all, a poet for poets, of clear 
 vision and assured utterance throughout the Victo- 
 rian Year. His station resembles that of a bulkhead 
 defending the sea-wall of some lasting structure, — a 
 mole or pier, built out from tuneful, grove-shaded Ar- 
 cadian shores. He stretches far into the channel along 
 which the tides of literary fashion have ebbed and 
 flowed. Other poets, leading or following the change- 
 ful current, often appear to leave him behind; but 
 
 Landor a 
 pioneer of 
 the recent 
 school. 
 
 A poetf»r 
 poets. 
 
 Intellectual 
 and self- 
 reliant.
 
 34 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Born in 
 IVar^ivick, 
 Jan. 30, 
 1775- 
 
 His pro- 
 longed 
 career. 
 
 His method 
 Victorian. 
 
 often find themselves again where he looms, unchanged 
 and dauntless, wearing a lighted beacon at his head. 
 
 Why, among Victorian poets, do I first mention this 
 one, — who was born under George III.; who ban- 
 died epithets with Byron, was the life-long friend of 
 Southey, — the contemporary, likewise, in their prime, 
 of Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge ; in whose matu- 
 rity occurred the swift and shining transits of Keats 
 and Shelley, like the flights of shooting-stars ; whose 
 most imposing poem was given to the world at a 
 date earlier than the first consulate of Napoleon ; 
 who lived, from the times of Warton and Pye, to see 
 three successive laureates renew the freshness of Eng- 
 land's faded coronal, while he sang aloof and took 
 no care ? Because, more truly than another declared 
 of himself, he stood among these, but not of them ; 
 greater or less, but different, and with the difference 
 of a time then yet to follow. His style, thought, and 
 versatility were Victorian rather than Georgian ; they 
 are now seen to belong to that school of which Tenny- 
 son is by eminence the representative. So far as his 
 manner was anything save his own, it was that of 
 recent years ; let us say, instead, that the popular 
 method constantly approached Landor's until the epoch 
 of his death, — and he died but even now, when it 
 is on the point of yielding to something, we know not 
 what. He not only lived to see the reflection and 
 naturalism of Wordsworth produce fatigue, but to the 
 borders of a reaction from that finesse and technical 
 perfection which succeeded. His influence scarcely 
 yet has grown to reputation, by communication from 
 the select few to the receptive many, though he has 
 always stood, unwittingly, at the head of a normal 
 school, teaching the teachers. Passages are easily
 
 PROLONGED AND EMINENT CAREER. 
 
 35 
 
 traceable where his art, at least, has been followed by 
 poets who themselves have each a host of imitators. 
 He may not have been the cause of certain phe- 
 nomena ; they may have sprung from the tendency 
 of the age, — if so, he was the first to catch the ten- 
 dency. Despite his appreciation of the antique, his 
 genius found daily excitants in new discovery, action, 
 and thought ; he never reached that senility to which 
 earlier modes and generations seem the better, but 
 was first to welcome progress, and thoroughly up with 
 the times. The larger portion of his work saw print 
 long after Tennyson began to compose, and his epic, 
 tragedies, and miscellaneous poems were not brought 
 together, in a single volume, until 1837, — a date with- 
 in five years of the laureate's first collective edition. 
 Hence, while it is hard to confine him to a single 
 period, he is a tall and reverend landmark of the one 
 under review; and the day has come for measuring 
 him as a poet of that time, whatever he may have 
 been in any other. Nor is he to be observed as an 
 eccentric and curious spectacle, but as a distinguished 
 figure among the best. As an artist he was, like a 
 maple, swift of development, but strong to hold it as 
 an elm or oak ; while many poets have done their 
 best work under thirty, and ten years after have been 
 old or dead, the very noontide of Landor's faculties 
 was later than his fiftieth year. We could not regard 
 him as a tyro, had he died, like Keats, at twenty-five, 
 nor as a jaded old man, dying, as he did, at ninety ; 
 for he was as conservative in youth as he ever grew 
 to be, and as fiery and forward-looking in age as in 
 youth. He attained the summit early, and moved 
 along an elevated plateau, forbearing as he grew older 
 to descend the further side, and at death flung off 
 
 Laftdor's 
 retention of 
 creative 
 power.
 
 36 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Sustained 
 equLility. 
 
 Intellectual 
 range. 
 
 Univer- 
 tality. 
 
 somewhere into the ether, still facing the daybreak 
 and worshipped by many rising stars. 
 
 Were it not for this poet's sustained equality with 
 himself, we should be unable here to write of his ca- 
 reer of seventy years, filled with literary recreations, 
 each the companion of its predecessor, and all his 
 own. Otherwise, in considering his works, we should 
 have to review the history of that period, — as one 
 who writes, for example, the life of Voltaire, must 
 write the history of the eighteenth century. Landor's 
 volumes not only touch upon the whole procession of 
 those seventy years, with keen intuitive treatment of 
 their important events, but go further, and almost 
 cover the range of human action and thought. In this 
 respect I find no such man of our time. A writer 
 of dialogues, he subjects affairs to the scrutiny of a 
 modern journalist; but his newspaper has every age 
 for its date of issue, and the history of the world 
 supplies it with local incident. 
 
 What is there in the air of Warwickshire to breed 
 such men ? For he was born by Shakespeare's stream, 
 and verily inhaled something of the master's spirit at 
 his birth. Once, in the flush of conscious power, he 
 sang of himself, — 
 
 "I drank of Avon too, a dangerous draught, 
 That roused within the feverish thirst of song." 
 
 Lowell has said of him, that, "excepting Shake- 
 speare, no other writer has furnished us with so many 
 delicate aphorisms of human nature " ; and we may 
 add that he is also noticeable for universality of con- 
 templation and the objective treatment of stately 
 J themes. In literature, his range is unequalled by that 
 of Coleridge, who was so opulent and suggestive; in
 
 HIS UNIVERSALITY. 
 
 37 
 
 philosophy, history, and art, Goethe is not wiser or 
 more imaginative, though often more calm and great ; 
 in learning, the department of science excepted, no 
 Avriter since Milton has been more thoroughly equipped. 
 We place Landor, who was greater, even, as a prose- 
 writer, among the foremost poets, because it was the 
 poet within the man that made him great ; his poetry 
 belongs to a high order of that art, while his prose, 
 though strictly prosaic in form, — he was too fine an 
 artist to have it otherwise, — is more imaginative than 
 other men's verses. Radically a poet, he ranks among 
 the best essayists of his time ; and he shares this dis- 
 tinction in common with Milton, Coleridge, Emerson, 
 and other poets, in various eras, who have been intel- 
 lectual students and thinkers. None but sentimental- 
 ists and dilettanti confuse their prose and verse, — 
 tricking out the former with a cheap gloss of rhetoric, 
 or the false and effeminate jingle of a bastard rhythm. 
 
 I have hinted, already, that his works are deficient 
 in that broad human sympathy through which Shake- 
 speare has found his way to the highest and lowest 
 understandings, — just as the cloud seems to one a 
 temple, to another a continent, to the child a fairy- 
 palace, but is dazzling and glorious to all. Landor 
 belonged, in spite of himself, to the Parnassian aris- 
 tocracy ; was, as ha^^ been said, a poet for poets, and 
 one who personally impressed the finest organizations. 
 Consider the names of those who, having met him and 
 known his works, perceived in him something great 
 and worshipful. His nearest friends or admirers were 
 Southey, Wordsworth, Hunt, Milnes, Armitage Brown ; 
 the philosophers, Emerson and Carlyle ; such men of 
 letters as Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Forster, Julius and 
 Francis Hare; the bluff old philologist, Samuel Parr; 
 
 Prose and 
 verse. Cp. 
 "■^ Poets of 
 A mer- 
 
 ica'' : pp. 
 327, 373- 
 
 His work 
 addressed to 
 noble minds.
 
 38 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 The law of 
 
 fympathy. 
 
 the fair and discerning Blessington ; Napier, the sol- 
 dier and historian ; Elizabeth and Robert Browning, 
 the most subtile and extreme of poets, and, in the 
 sunrise of his life, the youngest, Algernon Swinburne ; 
 among the rest, note Dickens, who found so much 
 that was rare and undaunted in the man : — I am 
 almost persuaded to withdraw my reservation ! True, 
 Landor lived long: in seventy years one makes and 
 loses many votaries and friends ; but such an artist, 
 who, whether as poet or man, could win and retain 
 the affection and admiration, despite his thousand 
 caprices, of so many delicate natures, varying among 
 themselves in temperament and opinion, must indeed 
 possess a many-sided greatness. Nor is the definition 
 of sympathetic quality restricted to that which touches 
 the popular heart. There are persons who might 
 read without emotion much of Dickens's sentiment 
 and humor, yet would feel every fibre respond to the 
 exquisite beauty of Landor's "Pericles and Aspasia"; 
 — persons whom only the purest idealism can strongly 
 affect. But this is human also. Shall not the wise, 
 as well as the witless, have their poets? There is an 
 idea current that art is natural only when it appeals to 
 the masses, or awakens the simple, untutored emotions 
 of humble life. In truth, the greater should include 
 the less ; the finer, if need be, the coarse ; the composer 
 of a symphony has, we trust, melody enough at his 
 command. Stage presentation has done much to popu- 
 larize Shakespeare ; his plays, moreover, are relished 
 for their stories, as " Pilgrim's Progress " and " Gulliver's 
 Travels " are devoured by children without a thought of 
 the theology of the one or the measureless satire of 
 the other. Landor's work has no such vantage-ground, 
 and much of it is "caviare to the general"; but he is
 
 HIS JUVENILE POEMS. 
 
 39 
 
 none the less human, in that he is the poet's poet, 
 the artist's artist, the delight of high, heroic souls. 
 
 When nineteen years old, in 1795, he printed his first 
 book, — a rhymed satire upon the Oxford dons, — and 
 his muse never left him till he died in 1864, lacking 
 four months only of his ninetieth birthday. Seventy 
 years of literary life, of which the noteworthy portion 
 may be reckoned from the appearance of "Gebir" in 
 1798, to that of the later series of the "Hellenics" in 
 1847 : since, although compositions dating the v(try year 
 of his death exhibit no falling off, and his faculty was 
 vigorous to the end, he produced no important work 
 subsequent to the one last mentioned. His collections 
 of later poems and essays are of a miscellaneous or 
 fragmentary sort, and, though abounding in beautiful 
 and characteristic material, exhibit many trifles which 
 add nothing to his fame. In reviewing his career, let 
 us first look at his poetry, which contains the key to 
 his genius and aspirations. 
 
 His earliest verses, like those of Shelley and Byron, 
 have a stilted, academic flavor, and, though witty enough, 
 were instigated by youthful conceit and abhorrence of 
 conventional authority. They were followed by a red- 
 hot political satire, in the metre and diction of Pope. 
 Thus far, nothing remarkable for a boy of nineteen : 
 merely an illustration of the law that " nearly all young 
 poets .... write old.'" The great poetic revival had 
 
 ' Not having a copy of Landor's first book, I have taken the 
 description, given in the side-note, from Forster's biography, but 
 am informed by Mr. Swinburne that Poems, English and Latin, is 
 the correct title. My correspondent adds : " It contains a good 
 deal besides satire, though that is perhaps its best part. The 
 Epistle to Lord Stanhope, which I have also, is, I think, some- 
 thing remarkable for a boy of nineteen, — singularly polished and 
 vigorous." 
 
 His first 
 book: "T/ie 
 Poems 0/ 
 IV. S. L ." 
 1795- 
 
 "A Moral 
 Epislle to 
 Earl Stan- 
 hope."
 
 40 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 "Gebir," 
 1798. 
 
 not begun. Burns was still almost unknown ; Cowper 
 very faintly heard ; fledglings tried their wings in the 
 direction of Pope, Warton, and Gray. The art of verse, 
 the creation of beauty for its own sake or for that of 
 imaginative expression, at first took small hold upon 
 Landor. Considering the era, it is wonderful how 
 soon the converse of this was true. Three years to a 
 young man are more than three times three in after- 
 life ; but never was there a swifter stride made than 
 from Landor's prentice-work to Gebir, which dis- 
 played his royal poetic genius in full robes. Where 
 now be his politics and polemics ? Henceforth his 
 verse, for the most part, is wedded to pure beauty, and 
 prose becomes the vehicle of his critical or controver- 
 sial thought. In "Gebir," art, treatment, imagination, 
 are everything ; argument very little ; the story is of a 
 remote, Oriental nature, a cord upon which he strings 
 his extraordinary language, imagery, and versification. 
 The structure is noble in the main, though chargeable, 
 like Tennyson's earlier poetry, with vagueness here and 
 there ; the diction is majestic and sonorous, and its 
 progress is specially marked by sudden, almost ran- 
 dom, outbursts of lofty song. I do not hesitate to say 
 that this epic, as poetry, and as a marvelous produc- 
 tion for the period and for Landor's twenty-two years, 
 stands next to that renowned and unrivaled torso, com- 
 posed so long afterward, the "Hyperion" of John Keats. 
 It was the prototype of our modern formation, cropping 
 out a great distance in advance. To every young poet 
 who has yet his art to learn, I would say — do not 
 overlook "Gebir," this strangely modern poem, which, 
 though seventy-five years old, has so much of Tenny- 
 son's finish, of Arnold's objectivity, and the romance 
 of Morris and Keats. Forster, Landor's biographer,
 
 ■■ GEBIR. 
 
 41 
 
 says that it is now unknown. When was it ever known? 
 The first edition had little sale ; a sumptuous later 
 issue, including the Latin translation "Gebirus," had 
 still less. But the poets found it out ; it was the 
 envy of Byron ; the despair of Southey, who could 
 appreciate, if he could not create ; the bosom-com- 
 panion of Shelley, to the last ; nor can I doubt that, 
 directly and indirectly, it had much to do with the 
 inception and development of the Victorian School. 
 
 In recalling Landor's writings, prose and verse, I 
 make no specific allusion to the minor pieces which 
 he composed from time to time, careless about their 
 reception, easily satisfied with the expression of his 
 latest mood. A catalogue of them, extending from the 
 beginning to the middle of our century, lies before 
 me : The P/iocceans, an unfinished epic ; The Charitable 
 Dowager, a comedy that never saw the light ; various 
 Icelandic poems, all save one of which are wisely 
 omitted from his collected works ; epigrams, letters, 
 critiques, and what not ; often mere Sibylline leaves, 
 — sometimes put forth in obscurest pamphlet-form, 
 sometimes elaborate with revision and costly with the 
 utmost resources of the press ; making little mark at 
 the time, but all idiosyncratic, Landorian, though closer 
 scrutiny of them need not detain us here. His liter- 
 ary life was like the firmament, whose darkest openings 
 are interspersed with scattered stars, but only the 
 luminous, superior constellations herewith invite our 
 regard. His first dramatic effort, made after a stormy 
 and ill-regulated experience of fifteen years, was the 
 gloomy but magnificent tragedy of Count J^ulian. 
 Like Shelley's " Cenci," Byron's " Manfred," and Cole- 
 ridge's adaptation of " Wallenstein," it is a dramatic 
 poem rather than a stage-drama of the available kind. 
 
 Miscellane- 
 ous produc- 
 tions. 
 
 Dramatic 
 work. 
 
 " Count Ju- 
 lian," I Si 2.
 
 42 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 The " Tril- 
 
 ogyr 
 
 iii39-40. 
 
 The "Hel- 
 lenics" 
 1847. 
 
 Compared with kindred productions of the time, how- 
 ever, it stands like the " Prometheus " among classic 
 plays j and as an exposition of dramatic force, a con- 
 ception of the highest manhood in the most heroic 
 and mournful attitude, — as a presentment of impas- 
 sioned language, pathetic sentiment, and stern resolve, 
 — it is an impressive and undying poem. Landor's 
 career must be measured by Olympiads or lustra, not 
 by years ; he was thirty-five when he took this fearless 
 dramatic flight, and then, save for occasional fragmen- 
 tary scenes, his special faculty remained unused until 
 he was nearly sixty-five, in 1839-40, at which date 
 he composed and published his Trilogy. The three 
 plays thus grouped — "Andrea of Hungary," " Gio- 
 vanna of Naples," and " Fra Rupert " — are, except- 
 ing the one previously mentioned, the only extended 
 dramatic poems which he has left us. Though rarely 
 so imaginative and statuesque as " Count Julian," they 
 are better adapted in action, and show no decline of 
 power. Between the one and the others occurred the 
 marvellous prose period of Landor's career, by which 
 he first became generally known and upon which so 
 largely rests his fame. From 1824 to 1837, — these 
 thirteen years embrace the interval during which was 
 written the most comprehensive and delightful prose 
 in the English tongue, upon whose every page is 
 stamped the patent of the author as a sage and poet. 
 One is more nearly drawn to Landor — with the 
 affection which all lovers of beauty, pure and simple, 
 feel for the poet — by the Hellenics than by any 
 other portion of his metrical work. The volume bear- 
 ing that name was written when he was well past the 
 Scriptural limit of life, at the age of seventy-two, and 
 published in 1847. It consisted of translations from
 
 THE 'HELLENICS? 
 
 43 
 
 his own Idyllia Heroica : Latin poems (many of them 
 composed and printed forty years earlier) which were 
 finally collected and revised for publication in a little 
 volume, Poemata et hiscriptiones, which appeared, I 
 think, .in 1846. Of Lander's aptitude and passion for 
 writing in Latin verse I shall speak hereafter. His 
 sin in this respect (if it be a sin),' is amply expiated 
 by the surpassing beauty of " Corythus," the " Last of 
 Ulysses," and other translations from the "Idyllia." 
 Still more exquisite, if possible, are the fifteen idyls, 
 also called Hellenics, which previously had been col- 
 lected in the standard octavo edition of his works, 
 edited by Julius Hare and John Forster, and printed 
 in 1846. During the past thirty years a taste for 
 experimenting with classical themes has seized upon 
 many a British poet, and numberless fine studies have 
 been the result, from the " CEnone " and "Tithonus" 
 of the laureate to more extended pieces, — like the 
 "Andromeda" of Kingsley, and Swinburne's "Ata- 
 lanta in Calydon." But to Landor, from his youth, 
 the antique loveliness was a familiar atmosphere, in 
 which he dwelt and had his being with a contentment 
 so natural that he scarcely perceived it was not com- 
 mon to others, or thought to avail himself of it in 
 the way of metrical art. Finding that people could 
 not, or would not, read the "Idyllia," he was led to 
 translate them into English verse ; and of all the 
 classical pieces in our language, his own, taken as 
 a whole, are the most varied, natural, simple, least 
 affected with foreign forms : — 
 
 " Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan ! 
 Piercing sweet by the river." 
 
 "Poemata 
 et Inscrip- 
 i tones." 
 
 ^ See remarks upon Swinburne's Greek and Latin verse, etc., 
 in Chapter XI. of this book.
 
 44 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Landor a 
 
 faultless 
 and spon- 
 taneous 
 artist. 
 
 Generally they are idyllic, and after the Sicilian 
 school. Now and then some Homeric epithets ap- 
 pear ; as where he speaks of " full fifty slant-browed, 
 kingly-hearted swine," — but such examples are un- 
 common. For the most part the Greek manner and 
 feeling are veritably translated. " The Hamadryad " 
 is universally known, — possessed of delicious melody 
 and pathos which commend it to the multitude : I am 
 not sure that any other ancient story, so tranquilly 
 and beautifully told, is in our treasury of English 
 song. The overture to the first of the " Hellenics " 
 suggests the charm and purpose of them all : — 
 
 " Who will away to Athens with me .'' who 
 Loves choral songs and maidens crowned with flowers, 
 Unenvious .'' mount the pinnace ; hoist the sail." 
 
 That splendid apostrophe to liberty, the fifteenth 
 of the first series, beginning, 
 
 " We are what suns and winds and waters make us ; 
 The mountains are our sponsors, and the rills 
 Fashion and win their nursling with their smiles," 
 
 recalls the Hellenic spirit from its grave, and brings 
 these antique creations within the range of modern 
 thought and sympathy. In fine, it must be acknowl- 
 edged that for tender grace, sunlight, healthfulness, 
 these idyls are fresh beyond comparison, the inspira- 
 tion of immortal youth. Never have withered hands 
 more bravely swept the lyre. 
 
 Landor, as I have said, was noticeable among recent 
 poets as an artist, and the earliest to revive the par- 
 tially forgotten elegance of English verse. Whoever 
 considers the metrical product of our era must con- 
 stantly bear in mind the stress laid upon the technics 
 of the poet's calling. No shiftlessness has been tol-
 
 A FAULTLESS AND PROLIFIC ARTIST. 
 
 45 
 
 erated, and Landor was the first to honor his work 
 with all the finish that a delicate ear and faultless 
 touch could bestow upon it. But in observing the 
 perfection of the " Hellenics," for example, you dis- 
 cern at a glance that it is only what was natural to 
 him and reached by the first intention ; that he falsi- 
 fied the distich with reference to easy writing and 
 hard reading, and composed admirably at first draught. 
 By way of contrast, one sees that much of the famous 
 poetry of the day has been carved with pains, " labo- 
 rious, orient ivory, sphere in sphere." The morning 
 grandeur of " Count Julian " and " Gebir," and the 
 latter-day grace of Landor's idyls and lyrics, came to 
 their author as he went along. A poor workman 
 blames his tools ; but he was so truly an artist and 
 poet, that he took the nearest instrument which sug- 
 gested itself, and wrought out his conceptions to his 
 own satisfaction, — somewhat too careless, it must be 
 owned, whether others relished them or not. At 
 certain times, from the accident of study and early 
 training, his thoughts ran as freely in Latin numbers 
 as in English ; and, without considering the utter 
 uselessness of such labor, he persisted in writing 
 Latin verses, to the alternate amusement and indig- 
 nation of his friends ; always quite at ease in either 
 language, strong, melodious, and full of humor, — 
 "strength's rich superfluity." The famous shell-pas- 
 sage in " Gebir " was written first in Latin, and more 
 musically than its translation. Compare the latter 
 with the counterpart in Wordsworth's "Excursion," 
 and determine, — not which of the two poets had the 
 profounder nature, — but which was Apollo's darling 
 and the more attractively endowed. Landor's blank 
 verse, the test of an English singer, is like nothing 
 
 His ilank 
 verse.
 
 46 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR. 
 
 Lyrical 
 affluence. 
 
 before it ; but that of Tennyson and his followers 
 resembles it, by adoption and development. Like 
 the best pentameter of the present day, it is akin to 
 Milton's ; affected, like his, by classical influence, 
 but rather of the Greek than the Latin ; more closely 
 assimilated to the genius of our tongue and with 
 fewer inversions ; terse, yet fluent, assonant, harmo- 
 nious. Grace and nobility are its prominent char- 
 acteristics. 
 
 Landor's affluence embarrassed him. He had noth- 
 ing costive in his nature, — disdained the tricks of 
 smaller men, and could not spend days upon a son- 
 net ; it must come at once, and perfect, or not at all. 
 He was a Fortunatus, and, because the ten pieces of 
 gold were always by him, delayed to bring together 
 a store of poetry for his own renown. This was one 
 secret of his leaving so few extended compositions ; 
 other reasons will be named hereafter ; meantime it is 
 certain that he never hoarded and fondled his qua- 
 trains, and that there was no waste, the supply being 
 infinite. The minor lyrics, epigrams, fragments, — 
 thrown off during his capricious life, in which every 
 mood was indulged to the full and every lot experi- 
 enced, — are numberless ; sometimes frivolous enough, 
 biting and spleenful, yet bearing the mark of a deli- 
 cate hand ; often, like " Rose Aylmer," possessed of 
 an ethereal pathos, a dying fall, upon which poets 
 have lived for weeks and which haunt the soul for- 
 ever. Ideality belonged to Landor throughout life ; 
 for seventy years he reminds one of the girl in the 
 fairy-tale, who could not speak without dropping 
 pearls and diamonds. A volume might be made of 
 the lyrical gems with which even his prose writings 
 are interspersed. He had an aptitude for the largest
 
 HIS DRAMATIC FACULTY. 
 
 47 
 
 and smallest work, the true Shakespearian range ; and 
 could make anything in poetry, from the posy of a 
 ring to the chronicle of its most heroic wearer. 
 
 While Landor's art is thus varied and original, his 
 strongest hold — the natural bent of his imagination 
 — lay, as I have suggested, in the direction of the 
 drama. This he himself felt and often expressed ; 
 yet his dramatic works are only enough to show what 
 things he might have accomplished, under the favor- 
 able conditions of a sympathetic age. Few modern 
 poets have done much more. Procter, Taylor, Bed- 
 does, Browning, — his dramatic compeers can almost 
 be numbered on the fingers of one hand. I am not 
 speaking of the playwrights. Had he written many 
 dramas, doubtless they would have been of the Eliz- 
 abethan style : objective rather than subjective ; their 
 personages distinct in manner, language, and action, 
 though not brought under the close psychological 
 analysis which is a feature of our modern school. 
 We have substituted the novel for the drama, yet, 
 were Shakespeare now alive, he might write novels — 
 and he might not. Possibly, like Landor, he would 
 be repelled by the mummery of the plot, which in the 
 novel must be so much more minutely developed than 
 in a succession of stage-scenes. Landor might have 
 constructed a grand historical romance, or a respect- 
 able novel, but he never attempted either. Had the 
 stage demanded and recompensed the labor of the 
 best minds, he would have written plays, doing even 
 the " business " well ; for he had the intellect and 
 faculty, and touched nothing without adorning it. As 
 it was, the plot seemed, in his view, given up to char- 
 latans and hacks ; he had small patience with it, 
 because, not writing in regular course for the theatre, 
 
 Dratnaiic 
 faculty.
 
 48 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR. 
 
 His restric- 
 tions. 
 
 The queen's ? 
 
 They stifled her 
 
 Who says that ? 
 
 the framework of a drama did not come from him 
 spontaneously. His tragedies already named, and 
 various fragments, — "Ippolito di Este," " Ines de 
 Castro," "The Cenci," and "Cleopatra," — are to be 
 regarded as dramatic studies, and are replete with 
 evidences of inspiration and tragic power. Some- 
 times a passage like this, from " Fra Rupert," has the 
 strength and fire of Webster, in "The Duchess of 
 Malfi " : — 
 
 " Stephen. Worst of it all 
 
 Is the queen's death. 
 
 Maxitnin. 
 
 Stephen. 
 With her own pillow. 
 
 Maxitnin. 
 
 Stephen. The man 
 
 Runs wild who did it, through the streets, and howls it, 
 Then imitates her voice, and softly sobs, 
 ' Lay me in Santa Chiara.^ " 
 
 We say that Landor was an independent singer, 
 but once more the inevitable law obtains. He was 
 restricted by his period, which afforded him neither 
 poetical themes most suited to his intellect, nor the 
 method of expression in which he could attain a full 
 development. He had little outside stimulus to fre- 
 quent work. In his youth the serial market was 
 limited to The Goitleman' s Magazine and the preten- 
 tious quarterly reviews. His early poems did not sell : 
 they were in advance of the contemporary demand. 
 In poetry, let us confess that he fell short of his own 
 standard, — never so well defined as in " The Pen- 
 tameron " : "Amplitude of dimensions is requisite to 
 constitute the greatness of a poet, besides his sym- 
 metry of form and his richness of decoration. . . .• . 
 We may write little things well, and accumulate one
 
 HIS PROSE WRITINGS. 
 
 49 
 
 upon another ; but never will any justly be called a 
 great poet, unless he has treated a great subject wor- 
 thily A throne is not built of bird's-nests, nor 
 
 do a thousand reeds make a trumpet." The one 
 great want of many a master-mind oppressed him, — 
 lack of theme. Better fitted to study things at a dis- 
 tance, always an idealist and dreaming of some large 
 achievement, Landor, with his imaginative force un- 
 met by any commensurate task, wandered like "blind 
 Orion, hungry for the morn." Or, like that other 
 hapless giant, he groped right and left, but needed 
 a guide to direct his strong arms to the pillars, that 
 he might bow himself indeed and put forth all his 
 powers. 
 
 How great these were the world had never known, 
 were it not for that interlude of prose composition 
 which occupied a portion of the years between his 
 early and later work. From youth his letters, often 
 essays and reviews in themselves, to his selectest 
 intellectual companions, exhibit him as a splendid 
 artist in prose and a learned and accurate thinker. 
 He had been drinking the wine of life, reading, re- 
 flecting, studying " cities of men .... and climates, 
 councils, governments," at Tours, Como, Pisa, Flor- 
 ence, Bath; and, at the age of forty-five or forty-six, 
 with every faculty matured, he became suddenly aware 
 of the fitness of written dialogue as the vehicle of 
 his conceptions, and for the exercise of that dra- 
 matic tendency which had thus far found no practi- 
 cable outlet. Forster has pointed out that this f©rm 
 of literature was suited alike to his strength, dogma- 
 tism, and variety of mood. The idea, once conceived, 
 was realized with his usual impetuosity. It swelled 
 and swelled, drawing up the thought and observation 
 
 Lack of 
 tlieme. 
 
 Greatness as 
 a writer of 
 English 
 prose.
 
 so 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Tlie "Im- 
 aginary 
 Conversa- 
 tions," 1824. 
 
 of a lifetime ; in two years the first and second books 
 of Imaginary Conversations were given to the world, 
 and in four more, six volumes in all had been com- 
 pleted. For the first time the English people were 
 dazzled and alTected by this author's genius ; the 
 books were a success ; and all citizens of the republic 
 of letters discovered, what a few choice spirits had 
 known before, that Landor was their peer and master. 
 
 It is needless to eulogize the series of " Imaginary 
 Conversations," — to which the poet kept adding, as 
 the fancy seized him, until the year of his decease, 
 within the memory of us all. They have passed into 
 literature, and their influence and charm are undying. 
 They are an encyclopsedia, a panoramic museum, a 
 perpetual drama, a changeful world of fancy, char- 
 acter, and action. Their learning covers languages, 
 histories, inventions ; their thought discerns and an- 
 alyzes literature, art, poetry, philosophy, manners, life, 
 government, religion, — everything to which human 
 faculties have applied themselves, which eye has seen, 
 ear has heard, or the heart of man conceived. Their 
 personages are as noble as those of Sophocles, as 
 sage and famous as Plutarch's, as varied as those of 
 Shakespeare himself : comprising poets, wits, orators, 
 soldiers, statesmen, monarchs, fair women and brave 
 men. Through them all, among them all, breathes the 
 spirit of Landor, and above them waves his compel- 
 ling wand. Where his subjectivity becomes apparent, 
 it is in a serene and elevated mood ; for he is trav- 
 ersing the realm of the ideal, his better angel rules the 
 hour, and the man is transfigured in the magician and 
 poet. 
 
 Paulo majora canamns. From the exhaustless re- 
 sources of Landor's imagination, he was furthermore
 
 A TRINITY OF PROSE-POEMS. 
 
 51 
 
 enabled to construct a trinity of prose-poems, not frag- 
 mentary episodes or dialogues, but round and perfect 
 comjDositions, — each of them finished and artistic in 
 the extreme degree. The Citation of Shakespeare, the 
 Fentameron, and Pericles and Aspasia depict England, 
 Italy, and Greece at their renowned and character- 
 istic periods : the greenwood and castle-halls of Eng- 
 land, the villas and cloisters of Italy, the sky and 
 marbles of ancient Greece ; the pedantry and poetry 
 of the first, die mysticism of the second; the deathless 
 grace and passion of Athens at her prime. Of "The 
 Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare, 
 etc., etc.. Touching Deer-Stealing," I can but repeat 
 what Charles Lamb said, and all that need here be 
 said of it, — that only two men could have written 
 it, he who wrote it, and the man it was written on. 
 It can only be judged by reading, for there is nothing 
 resembling it in any tongue. " The Pentameron " (of 
 Boccaccio and Petrarca) was the last in date of 
 these unique conceptions, and the favorite of Hunt, 
 Crabb Robinson, Disraeli ; a mediaeval reproduction, 
 the tone of which — while always in keeping with 
 itself — is so different from that of the " Citation," 
 that one would think it done by another hand, if any 
 other hand were capable of doing it. Even to those 
 who differ with its estimation of Dante, its learning, 
 fidelity, and picturesqueness seem admirable beyond 
 comparison. The highest luxury of a sensitive, cul- 
 tured mind is the perusal of a work like this. Mrs. 
 Browning found some of its pages too delicious to 
 turn over. Yet this study had been preceded by the 
 " Pericles and Aspasia," which, as an exhibition of 
 intellectual beauty, may be termed the masterpiece of 
 Landor's whole career. 
 
 A trinity of 
 prose-poems. 
 
 " Citation 0/ 
 Stiake- 
 speare" 
 1834. 
 
 " The Pen- 
 tameron,^' 
 1837.
 
 52 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 " Pericles 
 and A spa- 
 sia," 1836. 
 
 Critics are not wanting who maintain " Pericles and 
 Aspasia" to be tlie purest creation of sustained art in 
 English prose. It is absolutely devoid of such affec- 
 tations as mark the romances and treatises of Sidney, 
 Browne, and many famous writers of the early and 
 middle periods ; and to " The Vicar of Wakefield," and 
 other classics of a time nearer our own, it bears the 
 relation of a drama to an eclogue, or that of a sym- 
 phony to some sweet and favorite air. What flawless 
 English ! what vivid scenery and movement ! Com- 
 posed without a reference-book, it is accurate in schol- 
 arship, free from inconsistencies as Becker's "Chari- 
 cles " ; nevertheless, the action is modern, as that of 
 every golden era must appear ; the personages, whether 
 indicated lightly or at full length, are living human 
 beings before our eyes. As all sculpture is included 
 in the Apollo Belvedere, so all Greek life, sunshine, 
 air, sentiment, contribute to these eloquent epistles. 
 A rare imagination is required for such a work. While 
 comparable with nothing but itself, it leaves behind it 
 the flavor of some " Midsummer Night's Dream " or 
 " Winter's Tale," maugre the unreality and anachro- 
 nisms. Landor's dainty madrigals are scattered through- 
 out, coming in like bird-songs upon the sprightly or 
 philosophical Athenian converse: here we find "Arte- 
 midora " and " Aglae " ; here, too, is the splendid 
 fragment of " Agamemnon." How vividly Alcibiades, 
 Anaxagoras, Socrates, Pericles, Aspasia, appear before 
 us : the noonday grace and glory, the indoor banquet 
 and intellectual feast ! We exclaim, not only : What 
 rulers! what poets and heroes! but — What children 
 of li<rht! what laurelled heads! what lovers — what 
 passionate hearts! How modern, how intense, how 
 human! what beauty, what delicacy, what fire! We
 
 'PERICLES AND ASP ASIA: 
 
 53 
 
 penetrate the love of high-bred men and women: nobles 
 by nature and rank; — surely finer subjects for realistic 
 treatment than the boor and the drudge. Where both 
 are equally natural, I would rather contemplate a 
 horse or a falcon, than the newt and the toad. Thus 
 far, I am sure, one may carry the law of aristocracy in 
 art. The people of this book are brave, wise, and 
 beautiful, or at least fitly adapted: some unhappy, — 
 others, under whatsoever misfortune, enraptured, be- 
 cause lovins: and beloved. Never were women more 
 tenderly depicted. Aspasia, with all her love of glory, 
 confesses : " You men often talk of glorious death, of 
 death met bravely for your country; I too have been 
 warmed by the bright idea in oratory and poetry : but 
 ah ! my dear Pericles ! I would rather read it on an 
 ancient tomb than a recent one." Again, in the midst 
 of their splendor and luxury, she exclaims: "When 
 the war is over, as surely it must be in another year, 
 let us sail among the islands ^Egean and be as young 
 as ever ! " Just before the death of Pericles by the 
 plague, amid thickening calamities, they write trage- 
 dies and study letters and art. All is heroic and 
 natural : they turn from grand achievements to the 
 delights of intellect and affection. Where is another 
 picture so elevating as this? Fame, power, luxury, are 
 forgotten in the sympathy and glorious communion of 
 kindred souls. Where is one so fitted to reconcile us 
 with death, — the end of all such communings, — the 
 common lot, from which even these beautiful ideals 
 are not exempt ? Ay, their deaths, in the midst of so 
 much that made life peerless and worth living, follow 
 each other in pathetic, yet not inharmonious succes- 
 sion, like the silvery chimings of a timepiece at the 
 close of a summer's day. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A mer- 
 le a " : p. 
 430- 
 
 A ristocrat- 
 ism in art.
 
 54 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Study of 
 Lnndor's 
 persofial his- 
 tory. 
 
 "Pericles and Aspasia" is a Greek temple, with 
 frieze and architrave complete. If it be not Athens, 
 it is what we love to think Athens must have been, 
 in the glory of Pericles' last days. It is a thing of 
 beauty for all places and people ; for the deep-read 
 man of thought and experience, for the dreamy youth 
 or maiden in the farthest Western wilds. The form 
 is that of prose, simple and translucent, yet it is a 
 poem from beginning to end. I would test the fabric 
 of a person's temper by his appreciation of such a 
 book. If only one work of an author were given as 
 a companion, many would select this : not alone for 
 its wisdom, eloquence, and beauty, but for its pathos 
 and affection. You can read it again and again, 
 and ever most delightfully. The "Citation" and the 
 " Pentameron " must be studied with the scholar's 
 anointed eyes, and are sealed to the multitude ; but 
 " Pericles and Aspasia " is clear as noonday, a book 
 for thinkers, — but a book for lovers also, and should 
 be as immortal as the currents which flow between 
 young hearts. 
 
 11. 
 
 There has been much confusion of Landor's per- 
 sonal history with his writings, and an inclination to 
 judge the latter by the former. The benison of Time 
 enables us, after the lapse of years, to discriminate 
 between the two ; while the punishment of a misgov- 
 erned career is that it hinders even the man of genius 
 from being justified during his lifetime. However, 
 before further consideration of Landor's works, — that 
 we may see what bearing the one had on the other, 
 and with this intention solely, — let us observe the 
 man himself.
 
 HIS PERSONAL HISTORY AND CHARACTER. 
 
 55 
 
 We need not rehearse the story of his prolonged, 
 adventurous Hfe. It was what might be expected of 
 such a character, and to speak of the one is to infer 
 the other. Frea's address to her liege, in Arnold's 
 " Balder Dead," occurs to me as I think of the hoary 
 poet. " Odin, thou Whirlwind," he was, forsooth : tem- 
 pestuous, swift of will ; an egotist without vanity, but 
 equally without reason ; impatient of fools and upstarts; 
 so intellectually proud, that he suspected lesser minds 
 of lowering him to their own level, when they honestly 
 admired his works ; scornful, yet credulous ; careless 
 of his enemies, too often suspicious of his friends ; a 
 law unto himself, even to the extreme fulfilment of his 
 most erratic impulse ; enamored of liberty, yet not sel- 
 dom confounding it with license ; loving the beautiful 
 with his whole soul, but satisfied no less with the con- 
 scious power of creating than with its exercise. Such 
 was Landor, though quite transfigured, I say, when 
 absorbed in the process of his art. Every inspired 
 artist has a double existence : his " life is twofold," 
 and the nobler one is that by which he should be 
 judged. 
 
 And yet, our poet's temperament was so extraordi- 
 nary that it is no less a study than his productions. 
 He was wayward, unrestful, full-veined, impetuous to 
 the very end. Nothing but positive inability restrained 
 him from gratifying a single passion or caprice. His 
 nature was so buoyant that, like the Faun, he forgot 
 both pain and pleasure, and had few stings of sorrow 
 or regret to guard him from fresh woes and errors. 
 As he learned nothing from experience, his life was 
 one perpetual series of escapades, — of absurd per- 
 plexities at Rugby, Oxford, Llanthony, and in foreign 
 lands. Even in art he often seemed like a wind-harp, 
 
 ffis para- 
 doxical tent' 
 peranient. 
 
 Extraordi- 
 nary dispo- 
 sition and 
 career.
 
 56 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Physical 
 gifts. 
 
 responding to ever}^ breath that stirred his being : a 
 superb voice executing voluntaries and improvisations, 
 but disinclined to synthetic utterance. He lacked that 
 guiding force which is gained only by the wisest disci- 
 pline, 'the most beneficent influences in youth : — under 
 such influences this grand character might have been 
 strong and perfect, but his fortunes served to lessen 
 the completeness of his genius. The author's tradi- 
 tional restrictions were wanting in Landor's case. He 
 stood first in the entail of a liberal estate, and self- 
 control was never imposed upon him. One great gift 
 denied to him was the suspicion of his own mortality. 
 It has been rightly said that he and his brothers 
 came of a race of giants. His physical health and 
 strength were so absolute, that no fear of the short- 
 ness of life was present to stimulate his ambition. He 
 needed, like the imperator, some faithful slave to whis- 
 per in his ear, Remember that thou too art mortal ! 
 His tendencies never were evil, but in their violence 
 illustrated Fourier's theory of the reverse action of 
 the noblest passions. More than all else, it was this 
 lack of self-restraint that made the infinite difference 
 between himself and the great master to whose univer- 
 sality of genius his own was most akin. 
 
 Had Landor been poor, had he felt some thorn in 
 the flesh — but he was more handicapped at the out- 
 set with wealth and health than Wordsworth with 
 poverty or Hood with want and disease. Born a 
 patrician, his caste was assured, and his actions were 
 of that defiant, democratic kind, upon which snobs 
 and parvenus dare not venture. He scattered his 
 wealth as he chose, and would not let his station 
 restrict him from the experiences of the poor. The 
 audacious conceptions of novelists were realized in
 
 HIS UNCONVENTIONALISM. 
 
 57 
 
 his case. It was impossible to make him a conven- 
 tional respecter of persons and temporal things. If 
 ever a man looked through and through clothes and 
 titles, Landor did ; and as for property, — it seemed 
 to him impedimenta and perishable stuff. Yet he loved 
 luxury, and was uncomfortable when deprived of it. 
 Determined, first of all, to live his life, to enjoy and 
 develop every gift and passion, he touched life at more 
 points than do most men of letters. Possibly he had 
 not the self-denial of those exalted devotees, who eat, 
 marry, and live for art alone. The lust of the flesh, 
 the lust of the eye, and the pride of life were strong 
 within him. Here he resembled Byron and Alfieri, — 
 to whom he was otherwise related, except that his 
 heart was too warm and light for the vulgar misan- 
 thropy of the first, and his blood too clean and health- 
 ful for the grosser passions of either. 
 
 Trouble bore lightly enough upon a man who so 
 readily forgot the actual world, that we find him writ- 
 ing Latin idyls just after his first flight from his wife, 
 or turning an epigram when his estate was ruined 
 forever. Inconstant upon the slightest cause, he yet 
 was faithful to certain life-long friends, and, if one 
 suffered never so little for his sake, was ready to 
 yield life or fortune in return. Such was his feeling 
 toward Robert Landor, Forster, Southey, Browning, 
 and the great novelist who drew that genial caricature 
 by which his likeness is even now most widely known. 
 Dickens, who of all men was least fit to pronounce 
 judgment upon Landor's work, and cared the least to 
 do it, was of all most fit to estimate his strength and 
 weakness, his grim and gentle aspects. In " Boy- 
 thorn " we hear his laugh rising higher, peal on peal ; 
 we almost see his leonine face and lifted brow, the 
 3* 
 
 No respecter 
 of persons. 
 
 Buoyancy of 
 tempera- 
 ment. 
 
 Dickens's 
 portrait of 
 hijn in 
 ''Bleak 
 House:'
 
 58 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 A ntateur- 
 
 ihip to be 
 distrusted. 
 
 Art as a 
 means of 
 subsistence. 
 
 Strong upper lip, the clear gray eye, and ineffably 
 sweet and winsome smile. We listen to his thousand 
 superlatives of affection, compliment, or wrath, and 
 know them to be the safety-valves of a nature over- 
 charged with " the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
 the love of love " ; of a poet and hero in the extreme, 
 who only needed the self-training that with years 
 should bring the philosophic mind. 
 
 His prose writings measurably reflect his tempera- 
 ment, though he is at special pains to disclaim it. 
 His minor epigrams and lyrics go still further in this 
 direction, and were the means of working off his sur- 
 plus energ}' of humor, sympathy, or dislike. The mo- 
 ment he regarded men and things objectively, he was 
 the wisest of his kind ; and some fine instinct mostly 
 kept him objective in his poetry, while his personality 
 expended itself in acts and conversation. If he sel- 
 dom did " a wise thing," he as seldom wrote " a fool- 
 ish one." Entering upon his volumes, we are in the 
 domain of the pure serene ; and his glorious faculties 
 of scholarship and song compensate us for that of 
 which his nature had too little and that of which it 
 wantoned in excess. 
 
 Many texts could be found in Landor's career for 
 an essay upon amateurship in literature or art. As a 
 rule, distrust the quality of that product which is not 
 the result of legitimate professional labor. Art must 
 be followed as a means of subsistence to render its cre- 
 ations worthy, to give them a human element. Poetry 
 is an unsubstantial worldly support ; but true poets 
 have frequently secluded themselves, like Milton, Cow- 
 per, and Wordsworth, so that their simple wants were 
 supplied ; or, plunging into life, have still made labor 
 with the pen — writing for the stage or the press — a
 
 AMATEURSHIP IN ART. 
 
 59 
 
 means of living, enjoying the pleasure which comes 
 from being in harness and from duty squarely per- 
 formed. They plume themselves — et ego Jn Arcadia 
 — upon sharing not only the transports, but the drudg- 
 ery of the literary guild. Generally, I say, distrust 
 writers who come not in by the strait gate, but clamber 
 over the wall of amateurship. Literary men, who have 
 had both genius and a competence, have so felt this 
 that they have insisted upon the uttermost farthing for 
 their work, thus maintaining, though at the expense of 
 a reputation for avarice, the dignity of the profession, 
 and legitimizing their own connection with it. This 
 Landor was never able to do : his writing either was 
 not remunerative, because not open to popular sympa- 
 thy, or unsympathetic because not remunerative ; at all 
 events, the two conditions went together. He began 
 to write for the love of it, and was always, perforce, an 
 amateur rather than a member of the guild. As he 
 grew older, he would have valued a hundred pounds 
 earned by his pen more than a thousand received from 
 his estate ; but although he estimated properly the 
 value of his work, and, thinking others would do the 
 * same, was always appropriating in advance hypotheti- 
 cal earnings to philanthropic ends, he never gained a 
 year's subsistence by literature ; and such of his works 
 as were not printed at his own expense, with the excep- 
 tion of the first two volumes of " Imaginary Conversa- 
 tions," entailed losses upon the firms venturing their 
 publication. 
 
 But amateurship in Landor's case, enforced or 
 chosen, did not become dilettanteism ; on the con- 
 trary, it made him finely independent and original. 
 His own boast was that he was a " creature who imi- 
 tated nobody and whom nobody imitated ; the man 
 
 His work 
 
 unrejnuner- 
 
 ative. 
 
 Landor not 
 a dilettanU
 
 6o 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 His Imie of 
 nature. 
 
 who walked through the crowd of poets and prose- 
 men, and never was touched by any one's skirts." 
 This haughty self-gratulation we cannot allow. No 
 human being ever was independent, in this sense. 
 Landor in his youth imitated Pope, and afterwards 
 made beneficial study of Milton before reaching a 
 manner of his own. Pindar, Theocritus, and Catullus, 
 among the ancients, he read so closely that he could 
 not but feel the influence of their styles. Yet he 
 might justly claim that he had no part in the mere 
 fashion of the day, and that he wrote and thought 
 independent of those with whom he was on the most 
 intimate and coadmiring terms. He often shed tears 
 in the passion of his work, and his finest conceptions 
 were the most spontaneous, — for his instinct with 
 regard to beauty and the canons of literary taste had 
 the precision of law itself. His poetic qualities, like 
 his acquirements, were of the rare and genuine kind. 
 He had a thorough sympathy with nature and a love 
 for outdoor life. His biographer, while careful to de- 
 tail the quarrels and imbroglios into which his temper 
 betrayed him along the course of years, gives us only 
 brief and fitful glimpses of his better and prevailing 
 mood. Happily, Forster avails himself of Lander's 
 letters to fill out his bulky volume, and hence cannot 
 wholly conceal the striking poetic qualities of the man. 
 Landor knew and loved the sky, the woods, and the 
 waters ; a day's journey was but an enjoyable walk 
 for him ; and he passed half his time roaming over 
 the hills, facing the breeze, and composing in the 
 open air. It was only, in fact, when quite alone that 
 he could be silent enough to work. For trees he 
 had a reverential passion. Read his Conversation 
 with Pallavicini ; and examine that episode in his life,
 
 LOVE OF NATURE. 
 
 6l 
 
 when he bought and tried to perfect the Welsh estate, 
 and would have grown a forest of half a million trees, 
 but for his own impracticability and the boorishness 
 of the country churls about him. Unlike many re- 
 flective poets, however, he never permits landscape 
 to distract the attention in his figure-pieces, but with 
 masterly art introduces it sufficiently to relieve and 
 give effect to their dramatic purpose. That he is 
 often tempted to do otherwise he confesses in a letter 
 to Southey, and adds : " I am fortunate, for I never 
 compose a single verse within doors, except in bed 
 sometimes. I do not know what the satirists would 
 say if they knew that most of my verses spring from 
 a gate-post or a mole-hill." Trees, flowers, every 
 growing thing was sacred to him, and informed with 
 happy life. It was his wish and way 
 
 " To let all flowers live freely, and all die, 
 Whene'er their Genius bids their souls depart, 
 Among their kindred in their native place. 
 I never pluck the rose ; the violet's head 
 Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank, 
 And not reproached me ; the ever-sacred cup 
 Of the pure lily hath between my hands 
 Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold." 
 
 His affection for dogs and other dumb creatures, 
 like his understanding of them, is no less instinctive 
 and sincere. Of all the Louis Quatorze rhymesters 
 he tolerates La Fontaine only, " for I never see an 
 animal," he writes, "unless it be a parrot or a mon- 
 key or a pug-dog or a serpent, that I do not converse 
 with it either openly or secretly." 
 
 In the dialogue to which I have referred he pro- 
 tests against the senseless imitation of Grecian archi- 
 tecture in the cold climate of our North, — and this 
 
 Affection 
 for animals.
 
 62 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Classicism. 
 
 Landor 
 thoroughly 
 modern, and 
 a radical 
 thinker. 
 
 reminds me of I.andor's classicism and its relation 
 to the value of his^ work. In Latin composit'on he 
 excelled any contemporary, and was only equalled 
 by Milton and a few others of the past. Latin, as 
 I have shown, was at times the language of his 
 thoughts, and, as he wrote for expression only, he 
 loved to use it for his verse. Greek was less at his 
 command, but he could always recall it by a fort- 
 night's study, and his taste and feeling were rather 
 Athenian than Roman. Undoubtedly, as judicious 
 friends constantly were assuring him, he threw away 
 precious labor in composing Latin epigrams, satires, 
 and idyls ; yet his English style, like that of other 
 famous masters, acquired a peculiar strength and 
 nobleness from the influence of his classical diver- 
 sions. He has not escaped the charge of valuing 
 only what is old, and holding the antique fashion 
 to be more excellent than that of his own period. 
 Americans are sufficiently familiar with this conceit 
 of shallow critics and self-made men ; yet the finest 
 scholars I have known have been the most fervent 
 patriots, the most advanced thinkers, the most vigor- 
 ous lovers and frequenters of our forests, mountains, 
 and lakes. With regard to Landor, never was a prej- 
 udice so misapplied. He was essentially modern and 
 radical, looking to the future rather than to the past, 
 and was among the first to welcome and appreciate 
 Tennyson, the Brownings, Margaret Fuller, Kossuth, 
 and other poets and enthusiasts of the time. He was 
 called an old pagan ; while in truth his boast was 
 just, not only that he " walked up to the ancients 
 and talked with them familiarly," but that he " never 
 took a drop of wine or crust of bread in their 
 houses." There was, to be sure, something of the
 
 HIS KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 63 
 
 Epicurean in tlie zest with which he made the most 
 of Hfe, and his nearness to nature may seem pagan 
 to those whose ideaUsm is that of the desk and closet 
 only. " It is hard," he says of gunning, " to take 
 what we cannot give ; and life is a pleasant thing, at 
 least to birds. No doubt the young ones say tender 
 things one to another, and even the old ones do not 
 dream of death." 
 
 Landor's appetite for knowledge was insatiable, wor- 
 thy of the era, and his acquisitions were immense. He 
 gathered up facts insensibly and retained everything 
 that he observed or read. Of history he was a close 
 and universal student. As he possessed no books of 
 reference, it is not surprising that his memory was 
 occasionally at fault. De Quincey said that his learn- 
 ing was sometimes defective, — but this was high praise 
 from De Quincey, — and of his genius, that he always 
 rose with his subject, and dilated, " like Satan, into 
 Teneriffe or Atlas when he saw before him an an- 
 tagonist worthy of his powers." Landor is not so 
 generous to himself, but affirms, " I am a horrible 
 
 compounder of historical facts I have usually 
 
 one history that I have read, another that I have 
 invented." In his " Imaginary Conversations " the 
 invented history, like that of Shakespeare's, seems to 
 me its own excuse for being. The philosophies of 
 every age are no less at his tongue's end, and sub- 
 ject to his w-ise discrimination. With unsubstantial 
 metaphysics he has small patience, and believes that 
 "we are upon earth to learn what can be learnt upon 
 earth, and not to speculate upon what never can be." 
 Politics he is discussing constantly, but has too broad 
 and social a foothold to satisfy a partisan. What- 
 soever things are just and pure, these he supports ; 
 
 His knowl- 
 edge.
 
 64 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 His republi- 
 canism. 
 
 Critical 
 fowers. 
 
 above all, his love of liberty is intense as Shelley's, 
 Mazzini's, or Garibaldi's, and often as unreasoning. 
 Always on the side of the poor and oppressed, he in- 
 directly approves even regicide, but is so tender of 
 heart that he would not really harm a fly. His indi- 
 viduality was strong throughout, and he was able to 
 maintain no prolonged allegiance to party, church, or 
 state ] nay, not even to obey when he undertook obedi- 
 ence, — for, although he was at munificent expense in a 
 personal attempt to aid the Spanish patriots, and re- 
 ceived an officer's commission from the Junta, he took 
 offence almost at the outset, and threw up his command 
 after a brief skirmishing experience on the frontier. 
 He admired our own country for its form of govern- 
 ment, but seemed to think Washington and Franklin its 
 only heroic characters. If there was an exception to 
 his general knowledge, it was with regard to America : 
 like other Englishmen of his time, he had no ade- 
 quate comprehension of men and things on this side 
 of the Atlantic. Could he have visited us in his 
 wanderings, the clear American skies, the free atmos- 
 phere, and the vitality of our institutions would have 
 rejoiced his spirit, and might have rendered him more 
 tolerant of certain national and individual traits which, 
 although we trust they are but for a season, served at 
 a distance to excite his irritation and disdain. 
 
 For criticism Landor had a determined bent, which 
 displays itself in his essays, talk, and correspondence. 
 The critical and creative natures are rarely united in 
 one person. The greatest poets have left only their 
 own works behind them, too occupied or too indiffer- 
 ent to record their judgment of their contemporaries. 
 But Landor lived in a critical age, and so acute was 
 his sense of the fitness of things, that it impelled him
 
 CRITICAL POWERS. 
 
 65 
 
 to estimate and comment upon every literary produc- 
 tion that came under his observation. In the vi'armtli 
 of his heart, he was too apt to eulogize the efforts of 
 his personal friends ; but, otherwise considered, his 
 writings are full of criticism than which there is 
 nothing truer, subtler, or more comprehensive in the 
 English tongue. He had, furthermore, a passion for 
 scholarly notes and minute verbal emendation. In 
 the former direction his scholia upon the classical 
 texts are full of learning and beauty ; but when he 
 essayed philology, — of which he had little knowledge, 
 in the modern sense, — and attempted to regulate the 
 orthography of our language, the result was something 
 lamentable. His vagaries of this sort, I need scarcely 
 add, were persisted in to the exclusion of greater things, 
 and partly, no doubt, because they seemed objection- 
 able to others and positively hindered his career. 
 
 While the literary consciousness and thoroughly gen- 
 uine art of Landor's poetry are recognized by all of 
 his own profession, much of it, like certain still-life 
 painting, is chiefly valuable for technical beauty, and 
 admired by the poet rather than by the popular critic. 
 As one might say of Jeremy Taylor, that it was impos- 
 sible, even by chance, that he could write profane or 
 libidinous doctrine, so it seemed impossible for Landor, 
 even in feeble and ill-advised moments, to compose 
 anything that was trite or inartistic. The touch of 
 the master, the quality of the poet, is dominant over 
 all. His voice was sweet, and he could not speak un- 
 musically, though in a rage. His daintiest trifles show 
 this : they are found at random, like precious stones, 
 sometimes broken and incomplete, but every one — so 
 far as it goes — pure in color and absolutely without 
 flaw. A slight object served him for a text, and in 
 
 Technical 
 
 excellence.
 
 66 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Poetic ex- 
 travagance. 
 
 flisfatne. 
 
 honor of a woman who pleased him, but who seemed 
 far enough beneath him to ordinary eyes, he composed 
 eighty-five lyrics that might have beguiled Diana. 
 
 In discoursing upon elevated themes he was seized 
 with that divine extravagance which possessed the 
 bards of old ; and, in verse a,ddressed to persons whom 
 he loved or detested, he took the manner of his favor- 
 ite classical lyrists, and in every instance went to the 
 extreme of gallant compliment or withering scorn. 
 His determination to have freedom from restraint, at 
 all hazards and any cost, exhibits itself in his poetry 
 and prose. Here he found a liberty, an independence 
 of other rules than his own judgment or caprice, which 
 he could not enjoy in daily life, — although in conduct, 
 as in letters, he was so obstreperous and unpleasant 
 an opponent that few cared to set themselves in his 
 way. I repeat that, for all his great powers, he was a 
 royal Bohemian in art, as throughout life, and never 
 in poetry composed the ample work which he himself 
 asserted is requisite to establish the greatness of a 
 poet ; yet, in a more barren period, one fourth as 
 much as he accomplished sufficed for the reputation 
 of Goldsmith, Collins, or Gray. 
 
 With regard to the fame of Landor it may be said, 
 that, while he has not reached a rank which embold- 
 ens any publisher to issue a complete edition of his 
 varied and extensive writings,' — and even his poems, 
 alone, are not brought together and sold with Byron, 
 
 ' At present, the best collection of Landor's works is that made 
 in 1846 (2 vols. 8vo), of such as he himself then deemed worthy 
 of preservation. A new'edition has lately been printed. It con- 
 tains the Imaginary Conversations, Citation of Shakespeare, Pen- 
 tameron, Pericles and Aspasia, Gebir, the first series of Helle7iics, 
 and most of the author's dramatic and lyric poems which pre-
 
 HIS AUDIENCE. 
 
 ^7 
 
 Longfellow, Tennyson, and other public favorites, — 
 it is certain, nevertheless, that he has long emerged 
 from that condition in which De Quincey designated 
 him as a man of great genius who might lay claim to 
 a reputation on the basis of ?iot being read. He has 
 gained a hearing from a fit audience, though few, 
 which will have its successors through many genera- 
 tions. To me his fame seems more secure than that 
 of some of his popular contemporaries. If Landor 
 himself had any feeling upon the subject, it was that 
 time would yield him justice. No one could do better 
 without applause, worked less for it, counted less upon 
 it; yet when it came to him he was delighted in a 
 simple way. It pleased him by its novelty, and often 
 he pronounced it critical — because it was applause — 
 and overestimated the bestower : that is, he knew the 
 verdict of his few admirers was correct, and by it 
 gauged their general understanding. He challenged his 
 critics with a perfect consciousness of his own excellence 
 in art ; yet only asserted his rights when they were de- 
 nied him. In all his books there is no whit of coward- 
 ice or whining. Nothing could make them morbid and 
 jaundiced, for it was chiefly as an author that he had a 
 religion and conscience, and was capable of self-denial. 
 Landor's prolonged discouragements, however, made 
 him contemptuous of putting out his strength before 
 people who did not properly measure him, and he 
 felt all the loneliness of a man superior to his time. 
 
 ceded its date of compilation. The later Hellenics, Last Fruit 
 off an Old Tree, Heroic Idyls, Scenes for a Study, etc., can only 
 be procured in separate volumes and pamphlets, and, in book- 
 seller's diction, are fast becoming "rare." — January, 1875: a 
 complete edition of Landor, in six volumes, is now announced 
 for early publication by a London house. 
 
 His aiiitude 
 
 toward 
 
 applause.
 
 68 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR. 
 
 Desire for 
 
 appreciation. 
 
 In youth he once or twice betrayed a yearning for 
 appreciation. How nobly and tenderly he expressed 
 it ! "I confess to you, if even foolish men had read 
 'Gebir,' I should have continued to write poetry; 
 there is something of summer in the hum of insects." 
 And again : " The popularis aura., though we are 
 ashamed or unable to analyze it, is requisite for the 
 health and growth of genius. Had 'Gebir' been a 
 worse poem, but with more admirers, and I had once 
 filled my sails, I should have made many and per- 
 haps more prosperous voyages. There is almost as 
 much vanity in disdaining the opinion of the world 
 as in pursuing it." 
 
 He did not disdain it, but reconciled himself with 
 what heart he might to its absence. In later years 
 he asserted : " I shall have as many readers as I 
 desire to have in other times than ours. I shall 
 dine late ; but the dining-room will be well lighted, 
 the guests few and select." Southey buried himself 
 in work, when galled by his failure to touch the 
 popular heart ; Landor, in life and action, and in 
 healthful Nature's haunts. The "Imaginary Conver- 
 sations " were, to a certain degree, a popular suc- 
 cess, — at least, were generally known and read by 
 cultured Englishmen ; and for some years their author 
 heartily enjoyed the measure of reputation which he 
 then, for the first time, received. It was during this 
 sunlit period that he addressed a noble ode to Joseph 
 Ablett, containing these impulsive lines : — 
 
 " I never courted friends or Fame ; 
 She pouted at me long, at last she came, 
 And threw her arms around my neck and said, 
 'Take what hath been for years delayed, 
 And fear not that the leaves will fall 
 One hour the earlier from thy coronal.' "
 
 'THE LAST FRUIT OFF AN OLD TREE: 
 
 69 
 
 Threescore years and ten are the natural term of 
 life, yet we find Landor at that point just leaving 
 the meridian of his strength and splendor. When 
 seventy-one, he saw his English writings collected 
 under Forster's supervision, and his renown would 
 have been no less if he had then sung his tiunc di- 
 mittis and composed no longer. Yet we could not 
 spare that most poetical volume which appeared near 
 the close of the ensuing year. At a dash, he made 
 and printed the English version of his Latin Idyls, — 
 written half a lifetime before. We already have 
 classed the "Cupid and Pan," "Dryope," "The Chil- 
 dren of Venus," with their companion-pieces, as a 
 portion of his choicest work. Five years afterward 
 he gathered up The Last Fruit off ati Old Tree, and 
 meant therewith to end his literary labors. To this 
 volume was prefaced the "Dying Speech of an Old 
 Philosopher," — and who but Landor could have writ- 
 ten the faultless and pathetic quatrain ? 
 
 " I strove with none, for none was worth my strife ; 
 Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art; 
 I warmed both hands before the fire of Hfe ; 
 It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 
 
 Our author's prose never was more characteristic 
 than in this book, which contained some modern dia- 
 logues, much literary and political disquisition, and 
 the delightful critical papers upon Theocritus and 
 Catullus. The poetry consisted of lyrics and epistles, 
 with a stirring dramatic fragment, — "The Cenci." 
 Many a time thereafter the poet turned his face to 
 the wall, but could not die : the gods were unkind, 
 and would not send Iris to clip the sacred lock. He 
 was compelled to live on till nothing but his voice 
 was left him \ yet, living, he could not be without 
 
 Threescore 
 years and 
 ten. 
 
 " The Last 
 Fruit off att 
 Old Tree," 
 1853.
 
 70 
 
 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 " Dry Sticks 
 
 Fagoted," 
 
 1858. 
 
 " Heroic 
 Idyls," 1863. 
 
 Kate Field. 
 
 expression. In 1857-58 came a sorrowful affair at 
 Bath, where the old man was enveloped in a swarm 
 of flies and stopped to battle with them ; engaged at 
 eighty-two in a quixotic warfare with people immeas- 
 urably beneath him, and sending forth epigrams, like 
 some worn-out, crazy warrior toying with the bow- 
 and-arrows of his childhood. I am thankful to forget 
 all this, when reading the classical dialogues printed 
 in his eighty-ninth year, under the title of Heroic 
 Idyls. Still more lately were composed the poetical 
 scenes and dialogues given in the closing pages of 
 his biography.^ 
 
 Deaf, lame, and blind, as Landor was, — quails 
 artifex periit ! The letters, poems, and criticisms of 
 his last three years of life are full of thought and 
 excellence. The love of song stayed by him ; he 
 was a poet above all, and, like all true poets, young 
 in feeling to the last, and fond of bringing youth 
 and beauty around him. We owe to one enthusi- 
 astic girl, in whom both these graces were united, a 
 striking picture of the old minstrel with his foam- 
 white, patriarchal beard, his leonine visage, and head 
 not unlike that of Michael Angelo's " Moses " ; and 
 it was to the fresh and eager mind of such a listener, 
 with his own aesthetic sensibilities for the time well 
 pleased, that he offered priceless fragments of wit 
 
 ' Besides additions, in English, to the " Imaginary Conversa- 
 tions," Landor wrote, in Italian, a dialogue entitled Savonarola 
 e it Priore di San Marco. It ajjpeared in i860, but was speedily 
 suppressed through Church influence, and the edition remained 
 on his hands in sheets. The author's old prejudice against Plato 
 breaks out in this pamphlet, quaintly and incongruously, but Mr. 
 Swinburne justly says of the j^roduction that "it is a noble 'last 
 fruit ' of the Italian branch of that mighty tree."
 
 DEATH OF THE LION. 
 
 71 
 
 and courtesy, and expounded the simply perfect can- 
 ons of his verse. The finest thing we know of Swin- 
 burne's life is his pilgrimage to Italy and unselfish 
 reverence at the feet of the incomparable artist, the 
 unconquerable freeman, to whom he 
 
 " Came as one whose thoughts half linger, 
 Half run before ; 
 The youngest to the oldest singer 
 That England bore." 
 
 To some who then for the first time knew Landor, 
 and who were not endowed with the refined percep- 
 tions of these young enthusiasts, the foibles of his 
 latter days obscured his genius ; to us, at this dis- 
 tance, they seem only the tremors of the dying lion. 
 When, at the age of eighty-nine years and nine 
 months, he breathed his last at Florence, it was in- 
 deed like the death of some monarch of the forest, — 
 most untamed when powerless, away from the region 
 which gave him birth and the air which fostered his 
 scornful yet heroic spirit. 
 
 A. C. Swin- 
 burne. 
 
 IV. S. L. 
 died in Flor- 
 ence, Sept. 
 17, 1864.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. — MATTHEW ARNOLD. — BRYAN 
 WALLER PROCTER. 
 
 Cotnparei- 
 tive criti- 
 cism. 
 
 Three poets. 
 
 I. 
 
 I BRING together the foregoing names of poets, 
 whose works very clearly reflect certain phases of 
 English life and literature. It would be difficult to 
 select three more unlike one another in genius, mo- 
 tive, and the results of their devotion to art, or any 
 three whose relations to their period can be defined 
 so justly by a process of contrast and comparison. 
 This process is objectionable when we are testing 
 the success of an author in the fulfilment of his own 
 artistic purpose ; it has its use, nevertheless, in a 
 general survey of the poetry of any given time. 
 
 Here are the poet of sympathy, the poet of cul- 
 tured intellect, and the born vocalist of lyric song. 
 The first is thoroughly democratic in his expression 
 of the mirth and tragedy of common life. The sec- 
 ond equally represents his era, with its excess of cul- 
 ture, subtile intellectuality, poverty of theme, reliance 
 upon the beauty and wisdom of the past. His sym- 
 pathies may be no less acute, but the popular in- 
 stinct has deemed them loyal to his own class ; his 
 humanity takes little note of individuals, but regards 
 social and psychological problems in the abstract; as 
 for his genius, it is critical rather than creative. The
 
 A POET OF THE HEART. 
 
 73 
 
 last of this trinity is delightful for the troubadour 
 quality of his minstrelsy : a dramatist and song-writer, 
 loving poetry for itself, possessing what the musician 
 would call a genuine "voice," and giving blithe, un- 
 studied utterance to his tuneful impulses. Hood is 
 the poet of the crowd ; Arnold, of the closet ; Proc- 
 ter, of the open air: — all are purely English, and 
 belong to the England of a very recent day. 
 
 11. 
 
 Examining the work of these minor, yet representa- 
 tive poets, we find that of Thomas Hood so attractive 
 and familiar, that in his case the former qualification 
 seems a distinction by no wide remove from the best 
 of his contemporaries. He had a portion of almost 
 every gift belonging to a true poet, and but for re- 
 stricted health and fortune would have maintained a 
 higher standard. His sympathetic instinct was espe- 
 cially tender and alert ; he was the poet of the heart, 
 and sound at heart himself, — the poet of humane 
 sentiment, clarified by a living spring of humor, which 
 kept it from any taint of sentimental! sm. To read 
 his pages is to laugh and weep by turns ; to take on 
 human charity ; to regard the earth mournfully, yet 
 be thankful, as he was, for what sunshine falls upon 
 it, and to accept manfully, as he did, each one's 
 condition, however toilsome and suffering, under the 
 changeless law that impels and governs all. Even 
 his artistic weaknesses (and he had no other) were 
 frolicsome and endearing. Much of his verse was 
 the poetry of the beautiful, in a direction opposite to 
 that of the metaphysical kind. His humor — not his 
 jaded humor, the pack-horse of daily task-work, but 
 4 
 
 Thomas 
 Hood: bom 
 in London, 
 May, 1799.
 
 74 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 His youth. 
 
 his humor at its best, which so Hghtened his pack of 
 ills and sorrows, and made all England know him — 
 was the merriment of hamlets and hostels around the 
 skirts of Parnassus, where not the gods, but Earth's 
 common children, hold their gala-days within the 
 shadow. Lastly, his severer lyrical faculty was musi- 
 cal and sweet: its product is as refined as the most 
 exacting need require, and keeps more uniformly than 
 other modern poetry to the idiomatic measures of 
 English song. 
 
 Hood failed in a youthful effort to master the 
 drudgery of a commercial desk. He then attempted 
 to practise the art of engraving, but found it ruin- 
 ous to his health. It served to develop a pleasant 
 knack of sketching, which was similar in quality and 
 after-use to Thackeray's gift in that line, and came 
 as readily to its owner. At last he easily drifted into 
 the life of a working man of letters, and figured 
 creditably, both as humorist and as poet, before the 
 commencement of the present British reign. Yet that 
 portion of his verse which is engrafted upon litera- 
 ture as distinctively his own was not composed, it 
 will be seen, until within the years immediately pre- 
 ceding his death. He thus occupies a niche in the 
 arcade along which our vision at present is directed. 
 
 His youthful career, in fact, belongs to that in- 
 terval when people were beginning to shake off the 
 influence of Byron and his compeers, and to ask for 
 something new. It is noticeable that the works of 
 Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge separated themselves 
 from the debris, and greatly affected the rising genera- 
 tion of poets, inciting a reaction, from the passionate 
 unrestraint of the romantic school, to the fastidious 
 art of which Keats was the rarest and most intuitive
 
 HIS EARLY PRODUCTIONS. 
 
 75 
 
 master. The change was accelerated by such men as 
 Leigh Hunt, — then at his poetic meridian, and a 
 clear, though somewhat gentle, signal-light between 
 the future and the past. Hood's early and serious 
 poems are of the artistic sort, evincing his adherence 
 to the new method, and an eager study of Shake- 
 speare and other Elizabethan models. 
 
 At various times between 182 1 and 1830 were com- 
 posed such pieces as '' Hero and Leander," — in the 
 manner of " Venus and Adonis " ; " The Two Swans," 
 " The Two Peacocks of Bedfont," and " The Plea of 
 the INIidsummer Fairies," — carefully written after the- 
 fashion of Spenser and his teachers ; " Lycus, the Cen- 
 taur " ; numberless fine sonnets ; and a few lyrics, 
 among which the ballad of " Fair Ines " certainly is 
 without a peer. Much of this verse exhibits Hood's 
 persistent defect, — a failing from which he never 
 wholly recovered, and which was due to excess of 
 nervous imagination, — that of overloading a poem 
 with as much verbal and scenic detail as the theme 
 and structure could be made to bear. Otherwise it 
 is very charming : such work as then commended 
 itself to poets, and which the modern public has been 
 taught to recognize. " Lycus, the Centaur," for instance, 
 reads like a production of the latest school ; and 
 Hood's children, in their " Memorials " of the poet, 
 justly term " The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies " 
 a " most artistic poem," which " has latterly been more 
 fairly appreciated in spite of its antiquated style." 
 But his own public took little interest in these fanci- 
 ful compositions of Hood's younger muse, however 
 clearly they reveal the artist side of his nature, his 
 delicate taste, command of rhythm, and devotion to 
 his ideal. These traits were more acceptable in his 
 
 Hood's early 
 
 foems. 
 1821 -30.
 
 76 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 Lyrical bal- 
 lads. 
 
 The verbal 
 tchool. 
 
 shorter lyrics of that period, many of which were de- 
 licious, and beyond his own power to excel in later 
 years. His ballads — contributed to the magazines 
 and annuals, then in vogue, with which he was con- 
 nected — are full of grace, simplicity, pathos, and spirit. 
 All must acknowledge, with Poe, that " Fair Ines " is 
 perfect of its kind. Take this exquisite ballad, and 
 others, written at various dates throughout his life, 
 — "It was not in the Winter," "Sigh on, sad Heart," 
 " She 's up and gone, the graceless Girl," " What 
 can an old Man do but die?" "The Death-Bed," 
 "I Remember, I Remember," "Ruth," "Farewell, 
 Life ! " ; take also the more imaginative odes to be 
 found in his collected works, — such as those " To 
 Melancholy " and " To the Moon " ; take these lyrical 
 poems, and give them, after some consideration of 
 present verse-making, a careful reading anew. They 
 are here cited as his lyrical conceptions, not as work 
 in what afterward proved to be his special field, and 
 we shortly may dismiss this portion of our theme. 
 I call these songs and ballads, poetry : poetry of the 
 lasting sort, native to the English tongue, and attrac- 
 tive to successive generations. I believe that some 
 of them will be read when many years have passed 
 away ; that they will be picked out and treasured by 
 future compilers, as we now select and delight in the 
 songs of Jonson, Suckling, Herrick, and other noble 
 kinsmen. Place them in contrast with efforts of the 
 verbal school, — all sound and color, conveying no pre- 
 cise sentiment, vivified by no motive sweet with feeling 
 or easeful with unstudied rhythm. Of a truth, riiuch 
 of this elaborate modern verse is but the curious 
 fashion of a moment, and as the flower of grass : " the 
 grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away."
 
 A TRUE GIFT OF HUMOR. 
 
 77 
 
 Although Hood took Httle recognition by the deli- 
 cate poems which were the children nearest their 
 begetter's heart, he at once gained the favor of his 
 countrymen through that ready humor which formed 
 so large a portion of his birthright. He had versa- 
 tility, and his measures, however lacking in strength 
 of imagination, exhibit humane and dramatic elements 
 which we miss in those of his greatest contemporary. 
 His fantastic image, though topped with the cap and 
 bells, may well be garlanded with rue, and placed, 
 like Garrick's, between the Muses of Comedy and 
 Tragedy. He had the veritable gift of Humor, — 
 that which makes us weep, yet smile through our 
 tears. But how this faculty was overworked ! and 
 how his verse was thinned and degraded, to suit the 
 caprice of a rude public, by that treacherous facility 
 which it seemed beyond his power rightly to control ! 
 
 Hood's Odes and Addresses, his comic diversions in 
 The London Magazine, and the pronounced success of 
 Whims and Oddities (1826), gave him notoriety as a 
 fun-maker, and doomed him either to starve, or to 
 grimace for the national amusement during the twenty 
 after-years of his toiling, pathetic life. The British 
 always will have their Samson, out of the prison- 
 house, to make them sport. Tickle the ribs of those 
 spleen-devoured idlers or workers, in London and a 
 score of dingy cities ; dispel for a moment the in- 
 sular melancholy ; and you may command the pence 
 of the poor, and the patronage, if you choose, of the 
 rich and titled. But at what a sacrifice ! The mask 
 of more than one Merryman has hidden a death's- 
 head ; his path has slanted to the tomb, though 
 strewn with tinsel and taffeta roses, and garish with 
 all the cressets of the circus-ring. Whatever Hood 
 
 Hood's 
 humor. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A ffier- 
 ica " : f.p. 
 258-260, 
 321. 
 
 A jester by 
 profession.
 
 7^ 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 His poorer 
 verse a7id 
 prose. 
 
 Comic 
 faetry. 
 
 might essay, the pubhc was stoHdly expecting a quip 
 or a jest. These were kindly given, though often 
 poor as the health and fortunes of the jester ; and 
 it is no marvel that, under the prolonged draughts 
 of Hood''s Own and the Comic Annuals., the beery 
 mirth ran swipes. Even then it was just as eagerly 
 received, for the popular sense of wit is none too 
 nice, and the British commons retain their honest 
 youthfulness, coarse of appetite, pleased with a rattle, 
 tickled with a straw. 
 
 There is no more sorrowful display of metrical 
 literature — a tribute extorted from the poet who 
 wrote for a living — than the bulk of his comic verses 
 brought together in the volumes of Hood's remains. 
 It was a sin and a shame to preserve it, but there 
 it lies, with all its wretched puns and nonsense of 
 the vanished past, a warning to every succeeding 
 writer ! To it might be added countless pages of 
 equally valueless and trivial prose. Yet what clever 
 work the man could do ! In extravaganzas like " The 
 Tale of a Trumpet " his sudden laughter flashes into 
 wit ; and there are half-pensive, half-mirthful lyrics, 
 such as "A Retrospective Review," and the "Lament 
 for the Decline of Chivalry," thrown off no less for 
 his own than for the public enjoyment, of which the 
 humor is natural and refined : not that of our day, to 
 be sure, but to be estimated with the author's nation- 
 ality and time. The " Ode to Rae Wilson, Esquire," 
 though long and loosely written, is an honest, health- 
 ful satire, that would have delighted Robert Burns. 
 
 In one sense the term " comic poetry " is a misno- 
 mer. A poem often is just so much the less a poem 
 by the amount it contains of puns, sarcasm, " broad 
 grins," and other munitions of the satirist or farceur
 
 COMIC POETRY. 
 
 79 
 
 Yet the touch of the poet's wand glorifies the lightest, 
 commonest object, and consecrates everything that is 
 human to the magician's use. There is an imagina- 
 tive mirth, no less than an imaginative wrath or pas- 
 sion, and with this element Hood's most important 
 satirical poem is charged throughout. The " Golden 
 Legend " of " Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg," 
 as a sustained piece of metrical humor, is absolutely 
 unique. The flexible metre takes the reader with it, 
 from the first line to the last, and this is no small 
 achievement. The poem is utterly unhampered, yet 
 quite in keeping; the satire faithful and searching; 
 the narrative an audacious, fanciful story ; the final 
 tragedy as grotesque as that of a Flemish Dance of 
 Death. At first the poet revels in his apotheosis of 
 gold, the subject and motive of the poem : the yellow, 
 cruel, pompous metal lines the floor, walls, and ceil- 
 ing of his structure ; it oozes, molten, from every 
 break and crevice ; the personages are clothed in it ; 
 threads of gold bind the rushing couplets together. 
 What a picture of rich, auriferous, vulgar London 
 life ! Passages of grim pathos are scattered here and 
 there, as by Thackeray in the prose satires of " Cath- 
 erine " and "Barry Lyndon." When the murdered 
 Countess's " spark, called vital," has departed, — 
 when in the morning, 
 
 " Her Leg, the Golden Leg, was gone, 
 And the ' Golden Bowl was broken,' " — 
 
 then comes the " Moral " of the jester's tale : — 
 
 "Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! 
 Bright and yellow, hard and cold. 
 Molten, graven, hammered, and rolled ; 
 Heavy to get, and light to hold; 
 
 "MUs Kil- 
 mansegg ."
 
 So 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 Thack-ray 
 ind Hood. 
 
 Hoarded, bartered, bought, and sold, 
 Stolen, borrowed, squandered, doled : 
 Spurned by the young, but hugged by the old 
 To the very verge of the churchyard mould ; 
 Price of many a crime untold ; 
 Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! 
 Good or bad a thousand-fold ! 
 
 How widely its agencies vary — 
 To save — to ruin — to curse — to bless — 
 As even its minted coins express, 
 Now stamped with the image of Good Queen Bess, 
 
 And now of a Bloody Mary." 
 
 The legend of the hapless Kilmansegg is known to 
 every reader. Who can forget her auspicious pedi- 
 gree, her birth, christening, and childhood, her acci- 
 dent, her precious leg, her fancy-ball, her marriage a 
 la 7)iode, followed in swift succession by the Hogarth- 
 ian pictures of her misery and death? The poem 
 is full of rollicking, unhampered fancy ; long as it is, 
 the movement is so rapid that it almost seems to 
 have been written at a heat, — at least, can easily be 
 read at a sitting. Though not without those absurd 
 lapses which constantly irritate us in the perusal of 
 Hood's lighter pieces, it is the most lusty and char- 
 acteristic of them all. Standing at the front of its 
 author's facetious verse, it renders him the leading 
 poet-humorist of his generation ; and, in a critical 
 review of any generation, the elements of mirth and 
 satire cannot be overlooked. Of course, we are now 
 considering a time when the genius of Thackeray 
 scarcely had made itself felt and known. The grave- 
 and-gay ballads of the novelist were but the overflow 
 of his masterful nature ; yet so bounteous was that 
 overflow, so compounded of all parts which go to the 
 making of a Shakespearean mind, that, brief and with-
 
 POVERTY UNFRIENDLY TO ART. 
 
 8i 
 
 out pretension as Thackeray's trifles are, more than 
 one of them — for wit, grace, fancy, and other poetic 
 constituents — is worth whole pages of the doggerel 
 by which Hood earned his bread. What the latter 
 did professionally the former executed with the airy 
 lightness of a cavalier trying his sword-blade. 
 
 Contrasting the taste revealed in Hood's lyrics with 
 the paltriness of his comic jingles, it would seem that 
 his deterioration might be due to the constant neces- 
 sity for labor which poverty imposed upon him, and 
 to the fact that his labor was in the department of 
 journalism. Only the most unremitting toil could 
 support him as a magazine-writer ; he gained the ear 
 of the public not so much by humor as by droller)', 
 and joke he must, be the sallies wise or otherwise, 
 or the fire would go out on the hearth-stone, and the 
 wolf enter at the door. In his day it was the laugh- 
 ter inspired by the actual presence of the comedian, 
 upon the stage, that, in the nature of things, was 
 measured at its worth and paid for. A few hundred 
 pounds to the year were all that England gave the 
 weary penman who could send a smile wreathing from 
 Land's End to John o' Groat's. 
 
 If a poet, or aspiring author, must labor for the 
 daily subsistence of a family, it is well for his art 
 that he should follow some other calling than jour- 
 nalism ; for I can testify that after the day's work is 
 over, — when the brain is exhausted and vagrant, and 
 the lungs pant for air, and body and soul cry out for 
 recreation, — the intellect has done enough, and there 
 is neither strength nor passion left for imaginative 
 composition. I have known a writer who deliberately 
 left the editorial profession, for which he was adapted 
 both by taste and vocation, and took up a pursuit 
 
 Poverty un- 
 friendly to 
 the Muse. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica " ; p. 
 268. 
 
 A itthorship 
 
 and Jour- 
 nalism.
 
 82 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica ■' .• pp. 
 75. 'oS, 
 233. 417- 
 
 Hood a 
 j ournalist- 
 poet. 
 
 which bore no relation to letters ; hoping that author- 
 ship would proffer him thenceforth the freshness of 
 variety, that upon occasion of loss or trouble it might 
 be his solace and recompense, and that, with a less 
 jaded brain, what writing he could accomplish would 
 be of a more enduring kind. It is so true, however, 
 that one nail drives out another ! As an editor, this 
 person was unable to do anything beyond his news- 
 paper work ; as a business-man, with not the soundest 
 health, and with his heart, of course, not fully in his 
 occupation, he found himself neither at ease in his 
 means, nor able to gain sturdier hours for literature 
 than vigorous journalist-authors filch from recreation 
 and sleep. Fortunate in every way is the aesthetic 
 writer who has sufficient income to support him alto- 
 gether, or, at least, when added to the stipend earned 
 by first-class work, to enable him to follow art without 
 harassment. For want of such a resource, poets, with 
 their delicate temperaments, may struggle along from 
 year to year, composing at intervals which other men 
 devote to social enjoyment, rarely doing their best ; 
 possibly with masterpieces stifled in their brains till 
 the creative period is ended ; misjudged by those 
 whom they most respect, and vexed with thoughts of 
 what they could perform, if sacred common duties 
 were not so incumbent upon them. 
 
 Nevertheless, if Hood's life had been one of scho- 
 lastic ease, in all likelihood he would not have writ- 
 ten that for which his name is cherished. He was 
 eminently a journalist-poet, and must be observed in 
 that capacity. Continuous editorial labor, beginning 
 in 1 82 1 with his post upon The London Magazine, 
 and including his management of Tke Comic Annual, 
 Hood's Own, The New Monthly, and, lastly. Hood's
 
 LONDON'S POET. 
 
 83 
 
 Magazine, — established but little more than a year 
 before his death, — this journalistic experience, doubt- 
 less, gave him closer knowledge of the wants and 
 emotions of the masses, and especially of the popu- 
 lace in London's murky streets. Even his facetious 
 poems depict the throng upon the walks. The sweep, 
 the laborer, the sailor, the tradesman, even the dumb 
 beasts that render service or companionship, appeal 
 to his kindly or mirthful sensibilities and figure in 
 his rhymes. Thus he was, also, London's poet, the 
 nursling of the city which gave him birth, and now 
 holds sacred his resting-place in her cemetery of Ken- 
 sal Green. Like the gentle Elia, whom he resembled 
 in other ways, he loved " the sweet security of streets," 
 and well, indeed, he knew them. None but such as 
 he could rightly speak for their wanderers and poor. 
 The rich philanthropist or aristocratic author may 
 honestly give his service to the lower classes, and 
 endeavor by contact with them to enter into their 
 feelings, yet it is almost impossible, unless nurtured 
 yourself at the withered bosom of our Lady of Pov- 
 erty, to read the language of her patient foster-chil- 
 dren. The relation of almoner and beneficiary still 
 exists, a sure though indefinable barrier. Hood was 
 not exclusively a poet of the people, like Elliott or 
 Be'ranger, but one who interpreted the popular heart, 
 being himself a sufferer, and living from hand to 
 mouth by ill-requited toil. If his culture divided him 
 somewhat from the poor, he all the more endured 
 a lack of that free confession which is the privilege 
 of those than whom he was no richer. The genteel 
 poor must hide their wounds, even from one another. 
 Hood solaced his own trials by a plea for those 
 " whom he saw suffer." A man of kindred genius, 
 
 Londoti's 
 Poet. 
 
 Fellowship 
 of the poor.
 
 84 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 Hood atid 
 Dickcjts. 
 
 Similarity 
 
 of tlieir 
 methods. 
 
 the most potent of the band of humanitarian writers, 
 who, in his time, sought to effect reform by means 
 of imaginative art, also understood the poor, but 
 chiefly through the memory of his own youthful expe- 
 riences. In after years the witchery of prose-romance 
 brought to Charles Dickens a competence that Hood 
 never could hope to acquire. Most men of robust 
 physical vigor, who have known privation, yield to 
 luxury when they achieve success, and Dickens was 
 no exception ; but his heart was with the multitude, 
 he never was quite at home in stately mansions, and, 
 though accused of snobbery in other forms, would 
 admit no one's claim to patronize him by virtue of 
 either rank or fortune. 
 
 We readily perceive that Hood's modes of feeling 
 resembled those which intensify the prose of Dickens, 
 though he made no approach to the latter in reputa- 
 tion and affluent power. Could Dickens have written 
 verse, — an art in which his experiments were, for the 
 most part, utter failures, — it would have been marked 
 by wit and pathos like Hood's, and by graphic, Do- 
 resque effects, that have grown to be called melodra- 
 matic, and that give a weird strength to " The Dream 
 of Eugene Aram," " The Haunted House," and to 
 several passages in the death-scene of " Miss Kil- 
 mansegg." Hood has nearly equalled Dickens in the 
 analysis of a murderer's spectral conscience : — 
 
 "But Guilt was my grim Chamberlain 
 That lighted me to bed ; 
 And drew my midnight curtains round, 
 With fingers bloody red ! 
 
 • ■ • • 
 
 "Merrily rose the lark, and shook 
 The dew-drop from its wing ;
 
 HOOD AND DICKENS COMPARED. 
 
 85 
 
 But I never mark'd its morning flight, 
 
 I never heard it sing : 
 For I was stooping once again 
 
 Under the horrid thing." 
 
 The old Hall in "The Haunted House" is a coun- 
 terpart to the shadowy grand-staircase in the Ded- 
 lock Mansion, or to Mr. Tulkinghorn's chamber, — 
 where the Roman points through loneliness and 
 gloom to the dead body upon the floor. This poem 
 is elaborate with that detail which, so painful and 
 over-prolonged, gives force to many of Dickens's 
 descriptive interludes, — such as, for instance, the 
 opening chapter of "Bleak House." The poet and 
 the novelist were fellow-workers in a melodramatic 
 period, and there is something of stage effect in the 
 marked passages of either. Take an example from 
 " Miss Kilmansegg " : — 
 
 "As she went with her taper up the stair, 
 How little her swollen eye was aware 
 
 That the Shadow which followed was double! 
 Or, when she closed her chamber door, 
 It was shutting out, and forevermore, 
 
 The world, — and its worldly trouble. 
 
 • * • • 
 
 "And when she quench'd the taper's light, 
 How little she thought, as the smoke took flight. 
 That her day was done, — and merged in a night 
 Of dreams and duration uncertain, — 
 Or, along with her own, 
 That a Hand of Bone 
 Was closing mortality's curtain ! " 
 
 In extravagance, also, Dickens and Hood resembled 
 each other, and it seems perfectly natural that the 
 fantasies of both should be illustrated by the same 
 Cruikshank or Phiz. Both, also, give us pleasant 
 
 Alike in 
 melodra- 
 niatic feel- 
 ing. 
 
 Other re- 
 semblances.
 
 86 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 His vwst 
 
 /anions 
 
 lyrics. 
 
 glimpses of England's greensward and hedge-rows, 
 yet the special walk and study of each were in the 
 streets and alleys of London ; together they breathed 
 the same burdened, whispering, emotional atmosphere 
 of the monster town. They were of the circle which 
 Jerrold drew around him, the London group of hu- 
 mane satirists and poets. Theirs was no amateur or 
 closet work, but the flower of zeal and fellow-craft, 
 which binds the workmen's hearts together, and 
 makes art at once an industry, a heroism, and a 
 vitalizing faith. 
 
 Our digression at length has brought us to the 
 special group of lyrics upon which Hood's fame indu- 
 bitably rests. The manner of what I call his proper 
 style had been indicated long before, in such pieces 
 as " The Elm-Tree " and " The Dream of Eugene 
 Aram," of which the former is too prolonged, a still- 
 life painting, barren of human elements, — and the 
 latter, as has been seen, a remarkable ballad, ap- 
 proaching Coleridge's " Rime of the Ancient Mariner " 
 in conception and form. In Hood's case the intel- 
 lectual flames shone more brightly as his physical 
 heat went out ; in the very shadow of death he was 
 doing his best, with a hand that returned to the pure 
 ideals of his youth, and a heart that gained increase 
 of gentleness and compassion as its throbs timed more 
 rapidly the brief remainder of his earthly sojourn. In 
 his final year, while editor of Hood's Magazine, a jour- 
 nal to which he literally gave his life, he composed 
 three of the touching lyrics to which I refer : " The 
 Lay of the Laborer," " The Lady's Dream," and 
 " The Bridge of Sighs." The memorable " Song of 
 the Shirt " was written a few months earlier, having 
 appeared anonymously in the preceding Christmas
 
 'THE SONG OF THE SHIRT.' 
 
 87 
 
 number of Punch. With regard to this poem the 
 instinct of the author's devoted wife, who constituted 
 his first public, was prophetic when she said : " Now, 
 mind, Hood, mark my words, this will tell wonder- 
 fully ! It is one of the best things you ever did ! " 
 No other lyric ever was written that at once laid such 
 hold upon the finest emotions of people of every class 
 or nationality, throughout the whole reading or listen- 
 ing world, — for it drew tears from the eyes of princes, 
 and was chanted to rude music by ballad-mongers in 
 the wretchedest streets. 
 
 The judgment of the people has rightly estimated 
 the two last-named poems above their companion- 
 pieces. They are the unequalled presentment of their 
 respective themes, the expressed blood and agony of 
 "London's heart." "The Song of the Shirt" was 
 the impulsive work of an evening, and open to some 
 technical criticism. But who so cold as to criticise 
 it? Consider the place, the occasion, the despair of 
 thousands of working-women at that time, and was 
 ever more inspired and thrilling sermon preached by 
 a dying poet? With like sacredness of feeling, and 
 superior melody, " The Bridge of Sighs " is a still more 
 admirable poem. It is felicitously wrought in a metre 
 before almost unused, and which few will henceforth 
 have the temerity to borrow : " Who henceforth shall 
 sing to thy pipe, O thrice-lamented ! who set mouth to 
 thy reeds?" The tragedy of its stanzas lies at the 
 core of our modern life. The woes of London, the 
 mystery of London Bridge, the spirit of the materials 
 used by Dickens or by Ainsworth in a score of turbid 
 romances, — all these are concentrated in this pre- 
 cious lyric, as if by chemic process in the hollow of a 
 ring. It is the sublimation of charity and forgiveness. 
 
 " The Song 
 of the 
 Shirt." 
 
 "T/ie 
 Bridge of 
 Sighs."
 
 88 
 
 THOMAS HOOD. 
 
 General 
 character- 
 istics. 
 
 " Memorials 
 of r. //." : 
 by his 
 daughter, 
 Mrs. Brnd- 
 
 erip, i860. 
 
 the compassion of the Gospel itself ; the theme is 
 here touched once and forever ; other poets who have 
 essayed it, with few exceptions, have smirched their 
 fingers, and soiled or crushed the shell they picked 
 from the mud, in their very effort to redeem it from pol- 
 lution. The dramatic sorrow which attends the lot of 
 womanhood in the festering city reaches its ultimate 
 expression in " The Bridge of Sighs " and " The Song 
 of the Shirt." They were the twin prayers which the 
 suffering poet sent up from his death-bed, and, me- 
 thinks, should serve as an expiation for the errors of 
 his simple life. 
 
 Our brief summary of the experience and work of 
 Thomas Hood has shown that his more careful poetry 
 is marked by natural melody, simplicity, and direct- 
 ness of language, and is noticeable rather for sweet- 
 ness than imaginative fire. There are no strained 
 and affected cadences in his songs. Their diction 
 is so clear that the expression of the thought has no 
 resisting medium, — a high excellence in ballad-verse. 
 With respect to their sentiment, all must admire the 
 absolute health of Hood's poetry written during years 
 of prostration and disease. He warbled cheering and 
 trustful music, either as a foil to personal distress, — 
 which would have been quite too much to bear, had 
 he encountered its echo in his own voice, — or else 
 through a manly resolve that, come what might, he 
 would have nothing to do with the poetry of despair. 
 The man's humor, also, buoyed him up, and thus was 
 its own exceeding great reward. 
 
 How prolonged his worldly trials were, — what were 
 the privations and constant apprehensions of the lit- 
 tle group beneath his swaying roof-tree, — something 
 of this is told in the Memorials compiled by his
 
 DISTRESS AND HEROISM. 
 
 89 
 
 daughter, and annotated by his son, — the Tom Hood 
 of our day : an imperfect and disarranged biography, 
 yet one which few can read without emotion. Ill 
 health lessened his power to work, and kept him 
 poor, and poverty in turn reacted disastrously upon 
 his health. With all his reputation he was a literary 
 hack, whose income varied as the amount of writing 
 he could execute in a certain time. To such a man, 
 however, the devotion of his family, and the love of 
 Jane Reynolds, — his heroic, accomplished wife, a 
 woman in every way fit to be the companion of an 
 artist and poet, — were abundant compensation for 
 his patient struggle in their behalf. To the last mo- 
 ment, propped up in bed, bleeding from the lungs, 
 almost in the agony of death, he labored equally in a 
 serious or sportive vein ; but while thousands were 
 relishing his productions, they gave no delight to the 
 anxious circle at home. One passage in the Memo- 
 rials tells the whole sad stor}': "His own family 
 never enjoyed his quaint and humorous fancies, for 
 they were all associated with memories of illness and 
 anxiety. Although Hood's Comic Annual, as he him- 
 self used to remark with pleasure, was in every home 
 seized upon, and almost worn out by the handling 
 of little fingers, his own children did not enjoy it till 
 the lapse of many years had mercifully softened down 
 some of the sad recollections connected with it." 
 
 The sorrow and anguish of the closing hours were 
 not without their alleviation. His last letter was writ- 
 ten to Sir Robert Peel, in gratitude for the pension 
 conferred on Mrs. Hood. When it was known that 
 he lay dying, public and private sympathy, for which 
 he cared so greatly, comforted him in unnumbered 
 ways. His friends, neighbors, brother-authors, read- 
 
 The po'efs 
 distress and 
 heroism. 
 
 Sympathy 
 of t/ie Eng- 
 lish people.
 
 90 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 T. H. died 
 in London, 
 Mayz, 1845- 
 
 Matthew 
 A mold : 
 born in 
 Lale/uiTn, 
 Dec. 24, 
 1822. 
 
 ers, and admirers, throughout the kingdom, alike pro- 
 foundly touched, gave him words of consolation as 
 well as practical aid. A new generation has arisen 
 since his death at the age of forty-six, but it is pleas- 
 ant to remember the eagerness and generosity with 
 which, seven years afterward, the English people con- 
 tributed to erect the beautiful monument that stands 
 above his grave. The rich gave their guineas ; the 
 poor artisans and laborers, the needlewomen and 
 dress-makers, in hosts, their shillings and pence. Be- 
 neath the image of the poet, which rests upon the 
 structure, are sculptured the words which he himself, 
 with a still unsatisfied yearning for the affection of 
 his fellow-beings, — and a beautiful perception of the 
 act for which it long should be rendered to his mem- 
 ory, — devised for the inscription : " He sang The 
 Song of the Shirt." 
 
 HI. 
 
 From the grave of Hood we pass to observe a liv- 
 ing writer, in some respects his antipode, who deals 
 with precisely those elements of modern life which 
 the former had least at heart. It is true that Mat- 
 thew Arnold, whose first volume was issued in 1848, 
 had little reputation as a poet until some years after 
 Hood's decease ; but up to that time English verse 
 was not marked by its present extreme variety, nor 
 had the so-called school of culture obtained a foot- 
 hold. Arnold's circumstances have been more favor- 
 able than Hood's, and in youth his mental discipline 
 was thorough ; yet the humorist was the truer poet, 
 although three fourths of his productions never should 
 have been written, and although there scarcely is a
 
 A POET OF THE INTELLECT. 
 
 91 
 
 line of Arnold's which is not richly worth preserving. 
 It may be said of Hood that he was naturally a bet- 
 ter poet than circumstances permitted him to prove 
 himself; of Arnold, that through culture and good 
 fortune he has achieved greater poetical successes 
 than one should expect from his native gifts. His 
 verse often is the result, not of " the first intention," 
 but of determination and judgment ; yet his taste is 
 so cultivated, and his mind so clear, that, between the 
 two, he has o'erleapt the bounds of nature, and almost 
 falsified the adage that a poet is born, not made. 
 
 Certainly he is an illustrious example of the power 
 of training and the human will. Lacking the ease of 
 the lyrist, the boon of a melodious voice, he has, by 
 a tour de force, composed poems which show little 
 deficiency of either gift, — has won reputation, and 
 impressed himself upon his age, as the apostle of 
 culture, spiritual freedom, and classical restraint. 
 
 There is a passion of the voice and a passion of 
 the brain. If Arnold, as a singer, lacks spontaneity, 
 his intellectual processes, on the contrary, are spon- 
 taneous, and sometimes rise to a loftiness which no 
 mere lyrist, without unusual mental faculty, can ever 
 attain. His head not only predominates, but exalts 
 his somewhat languid heart. A poet once sang of a 
 woman, — 
 
 " Affections are as thoughts to her," 
 
 but thought with Arnold is poetical as affection, and 
 in a measure supplies its place. He has an intellect- 
 ual love for the good, beautiful, or true, but imparts 
 to us a vague impression that, like a certain American 
 statesman, he cares less for man in the concrete than 
 for man in the abstract, — a not unusual phenomenon 
 among aesthetic reformers. While admiring his de- 
 
 A mold and 
 Hood. 
 
 A poet of the 
 intelUct.
 
 92 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 Wanting in 
 
 lyrical flow. 
 
 Arnold's 
 poetic the- 
 ory. 
 
 lineations of Heine, the De Guerins, Joubert, and 
 other far-away saints or heroes, we feel that he pos- 
 sibly may overlook some pilgrim at his roadside-door. 
 Such is the effect of his writings, at this distance, 
 and it is by his works that an artist chiefly should be 
 judged. 
 
 Through the whole course of Arnold's verse one 
 searches in vain for a blithe, musical, gay, or serious 
 off-hand poem : such, for example, as Thackeray's 
 "Bouillabaisse," Allingham's "Mary Donnelly," Hood's 
 " I Remember, I Remember," or Kingsley's " The 
 Sands o' Dee." Yet he can be very nobly lyrical in 
 certain uneven measures depending upon tone, and 
 which, like " Philomela," express an ecstatic sensi- 
 bility : — 
 
 " Hark i ah, the nightingale ! 
 The tawny-throated ! 
 
 Hark ! from that moonlit cedar what a burst ! 
 What triumph ! hark — what pain ! 
 
 " Listen, Eugenia — 
 How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves ! 
 
 Again — thou hearest ! 
 Eternal Passion ! 
 Eternal Pain ! " 
 
 In other poems, which reveal his saddest or pro- 
 foundest intellectual moods, he is subjective and 
 refutes his own theory. For his work claims to be 
 produced upon a theory, — that of epic or classical 
 objectivity, well and characteristically set forth in 
 the preface to his edition of 1854. Possibly this 
 was written shortly after the completion of some 
 purely objective poem, like " Sohrab and Rustum," 
 and the theory deduced from the performance. An
 
 HIS LIMITATIONS. 
 
 93 
 
 objective method is well suited to a man of large 
 or subtile intellect and educated tastes, who is 
 deficient in the minor sympathies. Through it he 
 can allow his imagination full play, and give a 
 pleasure to readers without affecting that feminine 
 instinct which really is not a constituent of his 
 poetic mould. 
 
 Arnold has little quality or lightness of touch. His 
 hand is stiff, his voice rough by nature, yet both are 
 refined by practice and thorough study of the best 
 models. His shorter metres, used as the framework 
 of songs and lyrics, rarely are successful ; but through 
 youthful familiarity with the Greek choruses he has 
 caught something of their irregular beauty. " The 
 Strayed Reveller " has much of this unfettered charm. 
 Arnold is restricted in the range of his affections ; but 
 that he is one of those who can love very loyally the 
 few with whom they do enter into sympathy, through 
 consonance of traits or experiences, is shown in the 
 emotional poems entitled " Faded Leaves " and " In- 
 difference," and in later pieces, which display more 
 lyrical fluency, " Calais Sands " and " Dover Beach." 
 A prosaic manner injures many of his lyrics : at least, 
 he does not seem clearly to distinguish between the 
 functions of poetry and of prose. He is more at ease 
 in long, stately, and swelling measures, whose graver 
 movement accords with a serious and elevated pur- 
 pose. Judged as works of art, " Sohrab and Rustum " 
 and " Balder Dead " really are majestic poems. Their 
 blank-verse, while independent of Tennyson's, is the 
 result, like that of the " Morte d'Arthur," of its 
 author's Homeric studies ; is somewhat too slow in 
 Balder Dead, and fails of the antique simplicit}^, but 
 is terse, elegant, and always in " the grand manner." 
 
 His limita- 
 
 lions. 
 
 His blank- 
 verse. 
 
 " Balder 
 Dead."
 
 94 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 " Sohrab 
 and Rus' 
 turn." 
 
 Upon the whole, this is a remarkable production ; it 
 stands at the front of all experiments in a field remote 
 as the northern heavens and almost as glacial and 
 clear. Fifty lines, which describe the burning of Bal- 
 der's ship, — his funeral pyre, — have an imaginative 
 grandeur rarely excelled in the " Idyls of the King." 
 Such work is what lay beyond Hood's power even to 
 attempt ; and shows the larger mould of Arnold's intel- 
 lect. A first-class genius would display the varying 
 endowments of them both. 
 
 Sohrab and Rustum is a still finer poem, because 
 more human, and more complete in itself. The verse 
 is not so devoid of epic swiftness. The powerful 
 conception of the relations between the two chieftains, 
 and the slaying of the son by the father, are tragical 
 and heroic. The descriptive passage at the close, for 
 diction and breadth of tone, would do honor to any 
 living poet : — 
 
 " But the majestic river floated on, 
 Out of the mist and hum of that low land, 
 Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, 
 Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste 
 Under the solitary moon : he flowed 
 Right for the Polar Star, past Orgunje, 
 Brimming, and bright, and large : then sands begin 
 To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, 
 And split his currents ; that for many a league 
 The shorn and parcelled Oxus strains along 
 Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles, — 
 Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had 
 In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, 
 A foiled circuitous wanderer : — till at last 
 The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide 
 His luminous home of waters opens, bright 
 And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars 
 Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea."
 
 PREFERENCE FOR THE ANTIQUE. 
 
 95 
 
 " Tristram and Iseult," an obscure, monotonous va- 
 riation upon a well-worn theme, is far inferior to 
 either of the foregoing episodes. " The Sick King 
 in Bokhara " and " Mycerinus " are better works, but 
 Arnold's narrative poems, and the " Empedocles on 
 P^tna," — his classical drama, — are studies, in an age 
 which he deems uncreative, of as many forms of early 
 art, and successively undertaken in default of con- 
 genial latter-day themes. Their author, a poet and 
 scholar, offers, as an escape from certain heresies, 
 and as a substitute for poetry of the natural kind, a 
 recurrence to antique of mediaeval thought and forms. 
 However well executed, is this a genuine addition to 
 literature 1 I have elsewhere said that finished repro- 
 ductions cannot be accepted in lieu of a nation's 
 spontaneous song. 
 
 Arnold thus explains his own position : " In the 
 sincere endeavor to learn and practise, amid the 
 bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound 
 and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself to find 
 the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among 
 the ancients. They, at any rate, knew what they 
 wanted in Art, and we do not. It is this uncer- 
 tainty which is disheartening, and not hostile criti- 
 cism." This is frank and noteworthy language, but 
 does not the writer protest too much ? Are not his 
 sadness and doubt an unconscious confession of 
 his own special restrictions, — restrictions other than 
 those which, as he perceives, belong to England in 
 her weary age, or those which, in a period of transi- 
 tion from the phenomenal to the scientific, are com- 
 mon to the whole literar}' world ? Were he a greater 
 poet, or even a small, sweet singer, would he stop to 
 reason so curiously ? Rather would he chant and 
 
 Objective 
 themes. 
 
 Preface to 
 edition of
 
 96 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 His menial 
 siructure 
 and atti- 
 tude. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A mer- 
 ica " : pp. 
 339-34'- 
 
 chant away, to ease his quivering 
 
 heartstrings 
 
 of 
 
 some impassioned strain. 
 
 We cannot accept his implication that he was born 
 too late, since by this very reflection of the unrest 
 and bewilderment of our time he holds his represent- 
 ative position in the present survey. The generation 
 listens with interest to a thinker of his speculative 
 cast. He is the pensive, doubting Hamlet of modern 
 verse, saying of himself : " Dii j?ie terrent, et Jupiter 
 hostis ! Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are 
 in poetry; he who neglects the indispensable mechan- 
 ical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows 
 spirituality and feeling ; and he who seeks to arrive 
 at poetry by mere mechanism, in which he can acquire 
 an artisan's readiness, and is without soul and matter. 
 And he adds, that the first does the most harm to 
 Art, and the last to himself." Quite as frankly Ar- 
 nold goes on to enroll himself among dilettanti of the 
 latter class. These he places, inasmuch as they pre- 
 fer A^t to themselves, before those who, with less rev- 
 erence, exhibit merely spirituality and feeling. Here, 
 let me say, he is unjust to himself, for much of his 
 verse combines beautiful and conscientious workman- 
 ship with the purest sentiment, and has nothing of 
 dilettanteism about it. This often is where he for- 
 sakes his own theory, and writes subjectively. " The 
 Buried Life," " A Summer Night," and a few other 
 pieces in the same key, are to me the most poetical 
 of his efforts, because they are the outpourings of his 
 own heart, and show of what exalted tenderness and 
 ideality he is capable. A note of ineffable sadness 
 still arises through them all. A childlike disciple of 
 Wordsworth, he is not, like his master, a law and 
 comfort to himself ; a worshipper of Goethe, he at-
 
 MENTAL STRUCTURE AND ATTITUDE. 
 
 97 
 
 tributes, with unwitting egotism, his inability to vie 
 with the sage of Weimar, not to a deficiency in his 
 own nature, but to the distraction of the age : — 
 
 " But we, brought forth and reared in hours 
 Of change, alarm, surprise, — 
 What shelter to grow ripe is ours? 
 What leisure to grow wise ? 
 
 " Too fast we live, too much are tried, 
 Too harassed, to attain 
 Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide 
 And luminous view to gain." 
 
 Arnold falters upon the march, conscious of a mission 
 too weighty for him to bear, — that of spiritualizing 
 what he deems an era of unparalleled materialism. 
 The age is dull and mean, he cries, 
 
 " The time is out of joint ; O, cursed spite ! 
 That ever I was born to set it right." 
 
 And as Hamlet, in action, was inferior to lesser per- 
 sonages around him, he thus yields to introspection, 
 while protesting against it, and falls behind the bard 
 of a fresher inspiration, or more propitious time. In 
 all this we discern the burden of a thoughtful man, 
 who in vain longs to create some masterpiece of art, 
 and whose yearning and self-esteem make him loath 
 to acknowledge his limitations, even to himself. 
 
 In certain poems, breathing the spirit of the tired 
 scholar's query, — " What is the use ? " he betrays a 
 suspicion that knowledge is not of itself a joy, and 
 an envy of the untaught, healthy children of the wild. 
 Extremes meet, and this is but the old reaction from 
 over-culture ; the desire of the wrestler for new strength 
 from Mother Earth. "The Youth of Nature," "The 
 Youth of Man," and "The Future," are the fruit of 
 5 o 
 
 Reaction 
 from over- 
 culture.
 
 98 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 Clcntgh and 
 A mold. 
 
 " Thyrsis." 
 
 these doubts and longings, and, at times, half sick of 
 bondage, he is almost persuaded to be a wanderer and 
 freeman. " The Scholar Gipsy " is a highly poetical 
 composition, full of idyllic grace, and equally subtile 
 in the beauty of its topic and thought. The poet, 
 and his poet-friend, Arthur Hugh Clough, in their 
 wanderings around Oxford, realize that the life of the 
 vagrant "scholar poor" was finer than their own: — 
 
 " For early didst thou leave the world, with powers 
 Fresh, undiverted to the world without, 
 
 Firm to their mark, not spent on other things : 
 Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt. 
 
 Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings. 
 O Life, unlike to ours ! " 
 
 In after years Clough himself broke away somewhat 
 from the trammels which these lines deplore. Arnold 
 says of him, in *' Thyrsis," 
 
 "It irked him to be here, — he could not rest. 
 He loved each simple joy the country yields. 
 He loved his mates ; but yet he could not keep, 
 For that a shadow lowered on the fields. 
 
 He went ! " 
 
 But even Clough made no such approach as our own 
 Thoreau to the natural freedom of which he was by 
 spells enamored. And who can afifirm that Thoreau 
 truly found the secret of content ? Was not his ideal, 
 even as he seemed to clutch it, as far as ever from 
 his grasp ? 
 
 "Thyrsis," Arnold's more recent idyl, — " a monody 
 to commemorate the author's friend," — is the exqui- 
 site complement of " The Scholar Gipsy." It is 
 another, and one of the best, of the successful Eng-
 
 THE CRITICAL FACULTY IN POETS. 
 
 99 
 
 lish imitations of Bion and Moschus ; among which 
 " Lycidas " is the most famous, though some question 
 whether Swinburne, in his " Ave atqtie Vale" has not 
 surpassed them all. Before the appearance of the 
 last-named eleg}', I wrote of " Thyrsis " that it was 
 noticeable for exhibiting the precise amount of aid 
 which classicism can render to the modern poet. As 
 a threnode, nothing comparable to it had then appeared 
 since the " Adonais " of Shelley. If not its author's 
 farewell to verse, it has been his latest poem of any 
 note ; and, like " The Scholar "Gipsy," probably ex- 
 hibits the highest reach of melody, vigor, and imagi- 
 nation, which it is within his power to show us. 
 
 That the bent of Arnold's faculty lies in the direc- 
 tion rather of criticism and argument than of imagi- 
 native literature, is evident from the increase of his 
 prose-work in volume and significance. Some of the 
 most perfect criticism ever written is to be found in 
 his essays, of which that "On Translating Homer" 
 will serve for an example. He carries easily in prose 
 those problems of religion, discovery, and aesthetics 
 which so retard his verse ; is thoroughly at home in 
 polemic discussion, and a most keen and resolute 
 opponent to all who heretically gainsay him. The 
 critical faculty is not of itself incompatible with im- 
 aginative and creative power. We are indebted for 
 lasting aesthetic canons to great poets of various eras. 
 Even the fragmentary comments and marginalia of 
 Goethe, Byron, Landor, Coleridge, etc., are full of 
 point and suggestion. For one, I believe that, as able 
 lawyers are the best judges of a lawyer's powers and 
 attainments, so the painters, sculptors, musicians, and 
 poets are most competent to decide upon the merits 
 of works in their respective departments of art, — 
 
 Prose- 
 writings. 
 
 The criti- 
 cal factilty 
 in poets, 
 Cp.'^Poeti 
 of Amer- 
 ica " : pp. 
 326-33S.
 
 lOO 
 
 BRYAN WALLER PROCTER. 
 
 Bryatt IVa!- 
 ler Procter : 
 born in 
 Wiltshire, 
 
 Nov. 21, 
 
 1787. 
 
 though not always, being human, openly honest and 
 unprejudiced. Doubtless many lawyers will assent to 
 the first portion of this statement, and scout the 
 remainder. But, at all events, poets, like other men, 
 are wont to become more thoughtful as they grow 
 older, and I do not see that the work of the masters 
 has suffered for it. Arnold, however, is so much 
 greater as a writer of critical prose than as a poet, 
 that people have learned where to look for his genius, 
 and where for his talent and sensibility. 
 
 His essays are illuminated by his poetic imagina- 
 tion, and he thus becomes a better prose-writer than 
 a mere didactician ever could be. In fine, we may 
 regard Matthew Arnold's poetry as an instance of what 
 elevated verse, in this period, can be written, with 
 comparatively little spontaneity, by a man whose vig- 
 orous intellect is etherealized by culture and deliber- 
 ately creates for itself an atmosphere of " sweetness 
 and light." 
 
 IV. 
 
 A WIDE leap, indeed, from Matthew Arnold to 
 " Barry Cornwall," — under which familiar and mu- 
 sical lyronym Bryan Waller Procter has had more 
 singers of his songs than students of his graver 
 pages. No lack of spontaneity here ! Freedom is 
 the life and soul of his delicious melodies, composed 
 during thraldom to the most prosaic work, yet tune- 
 ful as the carols of a lark upon the wing. It is hard 
 to think of Procter as a lawyer, who used to chant 
 to himself in a London omnibus, on his daily jour- 
 neys to and from the city. He is a natural vocalist, 
 were it not for whom we might almost affirm that
 
 SPECIAL QUALITY OF THE SONG. 
 
 lOI 
 
 song-making, the sweetest feature of England's most 
 poetical period, is a lost art, or, at least, suspended 
 during the present reign. There never was a time 
 when little poems were more abundant, or more care- 
 fully finished, but a lyric may be exquisite and yet 
 not possess the attributes of a successful song. 
 
 I can recall a multitude of such productions, each 
 well worth a place in any lyrical " treasury " ; among 
 them, some that are graceful, touching, refined to per- 
 fection ; yet all addressed as much to the eye as to 
 the ear, — to be read with tone and feeling, it may be, 
 but not really demanding to be sung. The special 
 quality of the song is that, however carelessly fash- 
 ioned, it seems alive with the energy of music ; the 
 voice of its stanzas has a constant tendency to break 
 into singing, as a bird, running swiftly, breaks into 
 flying, half unawares. You at once associate true 
 songs with music, and if no tunes have been set to 
 them, they haunt the mind and " beat time to noth- 
 ing " in the brain. The spirit of melody goes hunt- 
 ing for them, just as a dancing-air seeks and enters 
 the feet of all within its circuit. Procter's lays have 
 this vocal qualit}', and are of the genuine kind. To 
 freedom and melody he adds more refinement than 
 any song-writer of his time, and has a double right to 
 his station in the group under review. 
 
 His stanzaic poems have, in fact, the rare merit of 
 uniting the grace and imagery of the lyric to the 
 music and fashion of song. It is well to look at this 
 conjunction. The poet Stoddard, in a preface to his 
 selection of English Madrigals, pronounces the lyric 
 to be " a purer, as it certainly was an earlier, mani- 
 festation of the element which underlies the song," 
 and says that " there are no songs, modernly speak- 
 
 Special 
 qtiality of 
 the song. 
 
 "Melodies 
 and Madri- 
 gals" Neiv 
 York, 1866.
 
 I02 
 
 BRYAN WALLER PROCTER. 
 
 Barry Corn- 
 ivall n lyrist 
 and trite 
 sons-writer. 
 
 ing, in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, 
 but lyrics in abundance." His distinction between a 
 lyric and a song is that the one is " a simple, un- 
 studied expression of thought, sentiment, or passion ; 
 the other its expression according to the mode of 
 the day." Unquestionably the abundant songs of 
 the eighteenth century, and those, even, of the gen- 
 eration when Moore was at his prime, are greatly in- 
 ferior as poetry to the lyrics of the early dramatists. 
 Yet, were not the latter songs as well, save that the 
 mode of their day was more delicate, ethereal, line, 
 and strong? It seems to me that such of the early 
 lyrics as were written to music possess thereby the 
 greater charm. And the songs of Barry Cornwall, 
 beyond those of any other modern, have an excel- 
 lence of " mode " which renders them akin to the 
 melodies of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Heywood, 
 Fletcher, and to the choicer treasures of Davison, 
 and of the composers, Byrd, Wilbye, and Weelkes. 
 They are, at once, delightful to poets and dear to 
 the singing commonalty. I refer, of course, to their 
 pervading character. It may be that none are so ab- 
 solutely flawless as the Bugle-Song of Tennyson. The 
 melody and dying fall of that lyric are almost with- 
 out comparison this side of Amiens' ditties in " As 
 You Like It " and Ariel's in " The Tempest." But 
 how few there are of Procter's numerous songs which 
 stand lower than the nearest place beneath it ! Many 
 of them excel it in swiftness, zest, outdoor quality, 
 and would be more often trolled along the mountain- 
 side, upon the ocean, or under the greenwood-tree. 
 
 The fountain of Procter's melody has not so long 
 been sealed as to exclude him from our synod of the 
 later poets, although — how strange it seems ! — he
 
 LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 103 
 
 was the schoolfellow of Byron at Harrow, and won 
 popular successes when he was the friend and as- 
 sociate of Hunt, Lamb, and Keats. Born ten years 
 earlier than Hood, he was before the public in time 
 to act the prophet, and in the dedication of " The 
 Genealogists " predicted the humorist's later fame. 
 He dates back in years, not in literature, almost as 
 far as Landor, and like him was among the foremost 
 to discern the new spirit of poetry and to assist in 
 giving it form. In a preface to his " Dramatic Scenes " 
 he tells us : " The object that I had in view, when I 
 wrote these scenes, was to try the effect of a more 
 natural style than that which has for a long time pre- 
 vailed in our dramatic literature. I have endeavored 
 to mingle poetical imagery with natural emotion." 
 Like Landor, also, he performed some of his best 
 work at dates well toward the middle of this cen- 
 tury ; in fact, it is upon songs given to the public 
 durinof the fourth and fifth decades that his influence 
 and fame depend. This has led me to consider him 
 among recent poets, rather than in his youthful atti- 
 tude as the pupil of Leigh Hunt. 
 
 Hunt's poetic mission (taken apart from his career 
 as a radical) was of note between 18 15 and 1830, and 
 was that of a propagandist. Without much originality, 
 he was a poet of sweetness, fluency, and sensibility, 
 who became filled with the art-spirit of Keats and 
 his masters, and both by precept and example was a 
 potent force in its dissemination. Beyond the posi- 
 tion attained as a shining light of what was derisively 
 called " The Cockney School," Leigh Hunt made little 
 progress. He lived, it is true, until 1859, — a writer 
 of dainty verse and most delightful prose, beloved by 
 the reading world, and viewed with a queer mixture 
 
 A pioneer. 
 
 y antes 
 Henry 
 Leigh 
 Hunt. 
 1784-1859-
 
 104 
 
 BRYAN WALLER PROCTER. 
 
 Procter's 
 
 dramatic 
 genius. 
 
 of pity, reverence, and affection, by his younger 
 brethren of the craft. Procter's early studies were 
 influenced by Keats and Hunt, to whose work he was 
 attracted by affinity with the methods of their Eliza- 
 bethan models, as opposed to those of Byron and Scott. 
 His nature, also, was too robust — and too aesthetic — 
 to acquire any taste for the metaphysical processes 
 of Wordsworth, which were ultimately to shape the 
 mind, even as Keats begat the body, of the idyllic 
 Victorian School. The fact that Procter's genius was 
 essentially dramatic finally gave him a position inde- 
 pendent of Keats, and, against external restrictions, 
 drew him in advance of Hunt, who — whatever he may 
 have been as critic and essayist — was in some respects 
 the lesser poet. Nevertheless, those restrictions com- 
 pelled Procter, as Landor was compelled, to forego the 
 work at which he would have been greatest, and to 
 exercise his gift only in a fragmentary or lyrical man- 
 ner. He found the period, between the outlets of 
 expression afforded by the newspaper and the novel, 
 unsuited to the reception of objectively dramatic verse, 
 though well enough disposed toward that of an intro- 
 spective kind. In short, Procter at this time was — as 
 Miss Hillard has felicitously entitled his early friend, 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes — a " strayed singer," — an 
 Elizabethan who had wandered into the nineteenth 
 century. His organization included an element of 
 practical common-sense, which led him to adapt him- 
 self, as far as possible, to circumstances, and, forbear- 
 ing a renewal of sustained and lonely explorations, to 
 vent his natural impulses in the " short swallow-flights 
 of song " to which he owes his reputation. The love 
 of minstrelsy is perpetual. Barry Cornwall, the song- 
 writer, has found a place among his people, and
 
 EARLY WRITINGS. 
 
 105 
 
 developed to the rarest excellence at least one faculty 
 of his poetic gift. 
 
 But we have, first, to consider him as a pupil of 
 the renaissance : a poet of what may be termed the 
 interregnum between Byron and Tennyson, — for the 
 Byronic passion is absolutely banished from the idyllic 
 strains of Tennyson and his followers, who, neverthe- 
 less, betray the influences of Wordsworth and Keats 
 in wedded force. Procter's early writings were em- 
 braced in three successive volumes of Dramatic Sce?ies, 
 etc., which appeared in 1819-21, and met with a 
 friendly reception. Some of the plays were headed 
 by quotations from Massinger, Webster, and such 
 dramatists, and otherwise indicated the author's choice 
 of models. His verse, though uneven, was occasion- 
 ally poetical and strong. There is breadth of hand- 
 ling in these lines from " The Way to Conquer " : — 
 
 " The winds 
 Moan and make music through its halls, and there 
 The mountain-loving eagle builds his home. 
 But all 's a waste : for miles and miles around 
 There 's not a cot." 
 
 An extract from a poem entitled " Flowers " has the 
 beauty of favorite passages in " The Winter's Tale " 
 and "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," — the flavor and 
 picturesque detail of Shakespeare's blossomy descrip- 
 tions : — 
 
 " There the rose unveils 
 Her breast of beauty, and each delicate bud 
 O' the season comes in turn to bloom and perish. 
 But first of all the violet, with an eye 
 Blue as the midnight heavens, the frail snowdrop, 
 Born of the breath of Winter, and on his brow 
 Fixed like a pale and solitary star ; 
 5* 
 
 His early 
 writings, 
 1819-21.
 
 io6 
 
 BRYAN WALLER PROCTER. 
 
 Influence 
 upon other 
 poeis. 
 
 The languid hyacinth, and wild primrose, 
 And daisy trodden down like modesty ; 
 The foxglove, in whose drooping bells the be 
 Makes her sweet music ; the narcissus (named 
 From him who died for love) ; the tangled woodbine. 
 Lilacs, and flowering limes, and scented thorns. 
 And some from whom voluptuous winds of June 
 Catch their perfumin^s." 
 
 It may be noted that Procter's early verse had an 
 effect upon poets who have since obtained distinction, 
 and who improved on the hints afforded them. Two 
 of the pieces in the first and second volumes, " A 
 Vision " and " Portraits," contain the germs of Ten- 
 nyson's " Dream of Fair Women," and of his best- 
 known classical poem. The " Lines to " and 
 
 " Lines on the Death of a Friend " bear a striking 
 resemblance in metre, rhythm, and technical " effects," 
 to those wild and musical lyrics written long after- 
 ward by Edgar A. Poe, " The Sleeper " and " The 
 City in the Sea." In several of his metrical tales, 
 Procter, no less than Keats and Hunt, went to that 
 Italian source which, since the days of Chaucer, has 
 been a fountain-spring of romance for the poet's use. 
 His " Sicilian Story " is an inferior study upon the 
 theme of Keats's " Isabella " ; and some of his other 
 themes from Boccaccio have been handled by later 
 poets, — the story of " Love Cured by Kindness," by 
 Mrs. Lewes, and that of "The F'alcon," by our own 
 Longfellow. Among his dramatic sketches, " The 
 Way to Conquer," " The Return of Mark Antony," 
 and especially " Julian the Apostate," have admirable 
 scenes ; their verse displays simplicity, passion, sen- 
 suousness ; one derives from them the feeling that 
 their author might have been a vigorous dramatic 
 poet in a more suitable era. As it was, he stood in
 
 MELODIOUS LYRICS. 
 
 107 
 
 the front rank of his contemporaries, not only as one 
 of the brilliant writers for The Londo7i Magazine, but 
 respected by practical judges who cater for the public 
 taste. His stage tragedy, Mirandola, was brought out 
 at the Covent Garden theatre, apparently with suc- 
 cess. Macready, Charles Kemble, and Miss Foote 
 figured in the cast. It is an acting drama, with a plot 
 resembling that of Byron's " Parisina." A volume 
 of two years' later date exhibits less progress in con- 
 structive power. It contained " The Flood of Thes- 
 saly," "The Girl of Provence," "The Letter of Boc- 
 caccio," " The Fall of Saturn," etc., — poems which 
 show greater finish, but little originality, and more 
 of the influence of Hunt and Keats. Throughout 
 the five books under review, the blank-verse, some- 
 times effective, as in " Marcelia," is often jagged 
 and diffuse. The classical studies are not equal to 
 those of the poet's last-named associate. In Procter's 
 lyrical verses, however, we now begin to see the 
 groundwork of his later eminence as a writer of Eng- 
 lish songs. 
 
 Among the sweetest of these melodies was " Golden- 
 tressed Adelaide," a ditty warbled for the gentle child 
 whose after-career was to be a dream-life of poesy 
 and saintliness, ending all too early, and bearing to 
 his own the relation of a song within a song. I give 
 the opening stanza : — 
 
 " Sing, I pray, a little song, 
 
 Mother dear ! 
 Neither sad, nor very long: 
 It is for a little maid, 
 Golden-tressed Adelaide ! 
 Therefore let it suit a merry, merry ear. 
 
 Mother dear ! " 
 
 " Miran- 
 dola," 1821. 
 
 Adelaide 
 
 Anne 
 
 Procter.
 
 io8 
 
 BRYAN WALLER PROCTER. 
 
 The poet's 
 home. 
 
 The poet had married, it is seen, and other chil- 
 dren blessed his tranquil home, where life glided away 
 as he himself desired, gently : — 
 
 " As we sometimes glide, 
 Through a quiet dream ! " 
 
 The most perfect lyric ever addressed by a poet 
 to his wife is the little song, known, through Neu- 
 komm's melody, in so many homes : — 
 
 " How many summers, love, 
 Have I been thine ? " 
 
 The final stanza is exquisite : — 
 
 "Ah! — with what thankless heart 
 
 I mourn and sing ! 
 Look, where our children start, 
 
 Like sudden Spring ! 
 With tongues all sweet and low, 
 
 Like a pleasant rhyme, 
 They tell how much I owe 
 
 To thee and Time ! " 
 
 After Procter's marriage his muse was silent for a 
 while ; partly, no doubt, from a growing conviction 
 that no mission was then open to a dramatic poet ; 
 partly, from the necessity for close professional work, 
 under the domestic obligations he had assumed. 
 What was lost to art was gained in the happiness of 
 the artist's home ; and if he escaped the discipline 
 of learning in suffering what he taught in song, I, 
 for one, do not regret this enviable exception to a 
 very bitter rule. 
 
 The Muse cannot be wholly banished, even by the 
 strong felicity of wedded love. She enters again and 
 again, and will not be denied. Barry Cornwall's voice
 
 THE DRAMATIC AND LYRICAL FACULTIES. 
 
 109 
 
 came back to him, after a moulting period \ and 
 although he wrote no plays, he exercised it in that 
 portion of dramatic composition which, like music in 
 every-day life, is used as a relief and beguilement, — 
 the utterance of expressive song. 
 
 Dramatic poetry, embracing in completeness every 
 department of verse, seems to reach a peculiar excel- 
 lence in its lyrical interludes. Procter says that " the 
 songs which occur in dramas are generally more nat- 
 ural than those which proceed from the author in 
 person," and gives some reasons therefor. My own 
 belief is that the dramatic and lyrical faculties are 
 correlative, a lyric being a dramatic and musical out- 
 burst of thought, passion, sorrow, or delight ; and 
 never was there a more dramatic song-writer than is 
 Barry Cornwall. His Englis/i Songs appeared at a 
 time when, — setting aside the folk-minstrelsy of Scot- 
 land and Ireland, — the production of genuine lyrics 
 for music was, as we have seen, almost a lost art. 
 He declared of it, however, " The spring will re- 
 turn ! " and was the fulfiller of his own prediction. 
 By the agreement of musicians and poets, his songs, 
 whether as melodies or lyrics, approach perfection, 
 and thousands of sweet voices have paid tribute to 
 their beauty, unconscious of the honeyed lips from 
 which it sprung. Mr. Stoddard — than whom there 
 is no higher authority with respect to English lyrical 
 poetry — judges Procter to be its "most consummate 
 master of modern days " : in fact, he questions 
 " whether all the early English poets ever produced 
 so many and such beautiful songs as Barry Corn- 
 wall," and says that " a selection of their best would 
 be found inferior as a whole to the one hundred and 
 seventy-two little songs in Mr. Procter's volume, — 
 
 The dra- 
 matic and 
 lyrical fac- 
 ilities re- 
 lated.
 
 no 
 
 BRYAN WALLER PROCTER. 
 
 Procter's 
 "English 
 Songs," 
 1832. 
 
 narrower in range, less abundant in measures, and in- 
 finitely less pure as expressions of love." 
 
 There are many who would demur to this compar- 
 ative estimate, and for whom the starry Elizabethan 
 lyrics still shine peerless, yet they too are charmed 
 by the spirit, alternately tender and blithesome, of 
 Procter's songs ; by their unconscious grace, change- 
 ful as the artless and unexpected attitudes of a fair 
 girl ; by their absolute musical quality and compre- 
 hensive range. They include all poetic feelings, from 
 sweetest melancholy to " glad animal joy." Some 
 heartstring answers to each, for each is the fine ex- 
 pression of an emotion ; nor is the emotion simulated 
 for the song's sake. Now, how different in this re- 
 spect are Barry Cornwall's melodies from the still- 
 life lyrics, addressing themselves to the eye, of many 
 recent poets ! How assured in their audible loveli- 
 ness ! Sometimes fresh with the sprayey breeze of 
 ocean, and echoing the innumerous laughter of waves 
 that tumble round the singer's isle : — 
 
 "The sea! the sea! the open sea! 
 The blue, the fresh, the ever free! 
 Without a mark, without a bound, 
 It runneth the earth's wide regions round ; 
 It plays with the clouds; it mocks the skies; 
 Or like a cradled creature lies. 
 
 " I never was on the dull, tame shore, 
 But I loved the great sea more and more, 
 And backwards flew to her billowy breast, 
 Like a bird that seeketh its mother's nest; 
 And a mother she was and is to me ; 
 For I was born on the open sea ! " 
 
 It is a human soul that wanders with " The Stormy
 
 'ENGLISH SONGS! 
 
 Ill 
 
 Petrel," dips its pinions in the brine, and has the hb- 
 erty of Prospero's tricksy spirit, " be 't to fly, to swim, 
 to dive " : — 
 
 " A thousand miles from land are we, 
 Tossing about on the roaring sea ; 
 From billow to bounding billow cast, 
 Like fleecy snow on the stormy blast : 
 
 Up and down ! Up and down ! 
 From the base of the wave to the billow's crown, 
 And amidst the flashing and feathery foam 
 The Stormy Petrel finds a home ! " 
 
 The zest and movements of these and a few kindred 
 melodies have brought them into special favor. Their 
 virile, barytone quality is dominant in the superb 
 " Hunting Song," with its refrain awakening the lusty 
 morn : — 
 
 " Now, thorough the copse, where the fox is found, 
 And over the stream, at a mighty bound, 
 And over the high lands, and over the low. 
 O'er furrows, o'er meadows, the hunters go ! 
 Away ! — as a hawk flies full at its prey, 
 So flieth the hunter, away, — away ! 
 From the burst at the cover till set of sun. 
 When the red fox dies, and — the day is done! 
 
 Hark, hark ! — What sound on the wind is borne ? 
 
 ^Tis the conquering voice of the hunter's horn. 
 The horn, — the horn ! 
 
 The merry, bold voice of the hunter's horn.'''' 
 
 Procter's convivial glees are the choruses of robust 
 and gallant banqueters, and would stifle in the throat 
 of a sensual debauchee. The Vine Song, — 
 
 " Sing ! — Who sings 
 To her who weareth a hundred rings ? " — 
 
 Fresh and 
 
 buoyant 
 
 music.
 
 112 
 
 BRYAN WALLER PROCTER. 
 
 Lyrical 
 variety. 
 
 has the buoyancy of Wolfe's favorite, " How stands 
 the Glass around ? " Among the rest, " Drink, and 
 fill the Night with Mirth ! " and " King Death " are 
 notable, the first for its Anacreontic lightness, and 
 the last for a touch of the grim revelry which so fas- 
 cinates us in " Don Giovanni," and reflects a perfectly 
 natural though grotesque element of our complex 
 mould. 
 
 In one of the many editions of Barry Cornwall's 
 lyrical poems I find two hundred and forty songs, of 
 surprising range and variety : songs of the chase, the 
 forest, and the sea ; lullabies, nocturnes, greetings, and 
 farewells ; songs of mirth and sorrow ; few martial 
 lays, but many which breathe of love in stanzas that 
 are equally fervent, melodious, and pure. Some have 
 a rare and subtile delicacy, so characteristic of this 
 poet as at once to mark their authorship. Such is 
 the melody, commencing 
 
 " Sit down, sad soul, and count 
 The moments flying " ; 
 
 such, also, " A Petition to Time " ; and such the lyric, 
 entitled " Life," the beautiful dirge, " Peace ! what can 
 Tears avail.?" and "The Poet's Song to his Wife," 
 — already quoted. Another class of songs, to which 
 earlier reference has been made, mostly composed in 
 a major key, may fairly be compared with the work of 
 other poets. Bayard Taylor's early lyrics, " The Mar- 
 iners " and " Wind at Sea," have the same clear, 
 healthy ring, and his " Bedouin Song," in fine poetic 
 quality, is not excelled by any similar effort of the 
 British lyrist. Again, without knowing the author, 
 we might assume that Emerson had traced the royal 
 lines descriptive of " The Blood Horse " : —
 
 HIS OLD AGE. 
 
 113 
 
 " Gamarra is a dainty steed, 
 Strong, black, and of a noble breed, 
 Full of fire, and full of bone, 
 With all his line of fathers known ; 
 Fine his nose, his nostrils thin, 
 But blown abroad by the pride within ! 
 His mane is like a river flowing, 
 And his eyes like embers glowing 
 In the darkness of the night, 
 And his pace as swift as light." 
 
 More than other poets, Barry Cornwall tempts the 
 writer to linger on the path of criticism and make 
 selection of the jewels scattered here and there. 
 Like the man in the enchanted cavern, one cannot 
 refrain from picking up a ruby or an emerald, though 
 forbidden by the compact made. The later chips 
 from Procter's dramatic workshop are superior to his 
 early blank-verse in wisdom, strength, and beauty. 
 It is a pity, that, after all, they are but " Dramatic 
 Fragments," and not passages taken from complete 
 and heroic plays. Bryan Waller Procter, restricted 
 from the production of such masterworks, at least did 
 what he could. For some years before his recent 
 death the world listened in vain for the voice of this 
 sweet singer. He lingered to an extreme old age : 
 a white-haired, silent minstrel, into whose secluded 
 mind the reproach would have fallen unheeded, had 
 the rosy-cheeked boys, whom Heine pictures, sprung 
 around him, placed the shattered harp in his trembling 
 hand, and said, laughing, " Thou indolent, gray-headed- 
 old man, sing us again songs of the dreams of thy 
 youth ! " 
 
 H 
 
 "Dramatic 
 Frag- 
 ments." 
 
 B. IV. P. 
 died in Lore 
 don., Oct. An 
 1874.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 A spiritual 
 
 teTnpera- 
 
 tnent. 
 
 THERE are some poets whom we picture to our- 
 selves as surrounded with aureolas ; who are 
 clothed in so pure an atmosphere that when we speak 
 of them, — though with a critical purpose and in this 
 exacting age, — our language must express that tender 
 fealty which sanctity and exaltation compel from all 
 mankind. We are not sure of our judgment : ordinary 
 tests fail us ; the pearl is a pearl, though discolored ; 
 fire is fire, though shrouded in vapor, or tinged with 
 murky hues. We do not see clearly, for often our 
 eyes are blinded with tears ; — we love, we cherish, 
 we revere. 
 
 The memory and career of Elizabeth Barrett Brown- 
 ing appear to us like some beautiful ideal. Nothing 
 is earthly, though all is human ; a spirit is passing 
 before our eyes, yet of like passions with ourselves, 
 and encased in a frame so delicate that every fibre is 
 alive with feeling and tremulous with radiant thought. 
 Her genius certainly may be compared to those sensi- 
 tive, palpitating flames, which harmonically rise and 
 fall in response to every sound-vibration near them. 
 Her whole being was rhythmic, and, in a time when 
 art is largely valued for itself alone, her utterances 
 were the exjoression of her inmost soul.
 
 THE CHIEF OF WOMAN-POETS. 
 
 115 
 
 I have said that while the composite period has 
 exhibited many phases of poetic art, it is not difficult, 
 with respect to each of them taken singly, to find some 
 former epoch more distinguished. The Elizabethan 
 age surpassed it in dramatic creation, and in those 
 madrigals and canzonets which — to transpose Men- 
 delssohn's fancy — are music without harping ; the 
 Protectorate developed more epic grandeur, — the 
 Georgian era, more romantic sentiment and strength 
 of wing. Recent progress has been phenomenal, 
 chiefly, in variety, finish, average excellence of work. 
 To this there is one exception. The Victorian era, 
 with its wider range of opportunities for women, has 
 been illumined by the career of the greatest female 
 poet that England has produced, — nor only England, 
 but the whole territory of the English language ; more 
 than this, the most inspired woman, so far as known, 
 of all who have composed in ancient or modern 
 tongues, or flourished in any land or time. 
 
 What have we of Sappho, beyond a few exquisite 
 fragments, a disputed story, the broken strings of a 
 remote and traditional island-lyre ? Yet, from Sappho 
 down, including the poetry of Southern and Northern 
 Europe and the whole melodious greensward of Eng- 
 lish song, the remains of what woman are left to us, 
 which in quantity and inspiration compete with those 
 of Mrs. Browning? What poet of her own sex, ex- 
 cept Sappho, did she herself find worthy a place 
 among the forty immortals grouped in the hemicycle 
 of her own " Vision of Poets " ? Take the volume of 
 her collected writings, — with so much that we might 
 omit, with' so many weaknesses and faults, — and what 
 riches it contains ! How different, too, from other 
 recent work, thoroughly her own, eminently that of a 
 
 Former pe- 
 riods more 
 eminetU iti 
 special 
 quality, 
 
 bid the Vic- 
 torian has 
 produced 
 tlie greatest 
 0/ ivoman- 
 poets.
 
 ii6 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Her years 
 of unmar- 
 ried life. 
 
 F.lizal-eth 
 Barrett 
 Bartett : 
 born at 
 /-/ofie End, 
 near Led- 
 bury, i8og. 
 
 "An Essay 
 
 on Mind, 
 luitli Other 
 Poems" 
 1826. 
 
 woman, — a Christian sibyl, priestess of the melody, 
 heroism, and religion of the modern world ! 
 
 II. 
 
 What is the stoiy of her maidenhood? Not only 
 of those early years which, no matter how long we 
 continue, are said to make up the greater portion of 
 our life ; but also of an unwedded period which 
 lasted to that ominous year, the thirty-seventh, which 
 has ended the song of other poets at a date when 
 her own — so far as the world heard her — had but 
 just begun. How grew our Psyche in her chrysalid 
 state ? For she was like the insect that weaves itself 
 a shroud, yet by some inward force, after a season, is 
 impelled to break through its covering, and come out 
 a winged tiger-moth, emblem of spirituality in its birth, 
 and of passion in the splendor of its tawny dyes. 
 
 Elizabeth Barrett Barrett was born of wealthy par- 
 ents, in 1809, ^'""d began her literary efforts almost 
 contemporaneously with Tennyson. Apparently, — for 
 the world has not yet received the inner history of a 
 life, which, after all, was so purely intellectual that 
 only herself could have revealed it to us, — appar- 
 ently, I say, she was the idol of her kindred ; and 
 especially of a father who wondered at her genius 
 and encouraged the projects of her eager youth. 
 Otherwise, although she was a rhymer at the age of 
 ten, how could she have published, in her seventeenth 
 year, her didactic Essay, composed in heroics after 
 the method of Pope ? Apparently, too, she had a 
 mind of that fine northern type which hungers after 
 learning for its own sake, and to which the study of 
 books or nature is an instinctive and insatiable de-
 
 READING AND THE IMAGINATION. 
 
 117 
 
 sire. If Mrs. Browning left no formal record of her 
 youth, the spirit of it is indicated so plainly in " Au- 
 rora Leigh," that we scarcely need the letter : — 
 
 " Books, books, books ! 
 I had found the secret of a garret-room 
 Piled high with cases in my father's name ; 
 
 The first book first. And how I felt it beat 
 Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, 
 An hour before the sun would let me read ! 
 My books ! 
 
 At last, because the time was ripe, 
 I chanced upon the poets." 
 
 Doubtless this sleepless child was one to whom her 
 actual surroundings, even if observed, seemed less 
 real than the sights in dreamland and cloudland re- 
 vealed to her by simply opening the magical covers 
 of a printed book. An imaginative girl sometimes 
 becomes so entranced with the ideal world as to 
 quite forego the billing and cooing which attend upon 
 the springtime of womanhood. Such natures often 
 awake to the knowledge that they have missed some- 
 thing : love was everywhere around them, but their 
 eyes were fixed upon the stars, and they perceived it 
 not. This abnormal growth is perilous, and to the 
 feebler class of dreamers, who have poetic sensibility 
 without true constructive power, insures blight, lone- 
 liness, premature deca}^ For the born artist, such 
 experiences in youth not only are inevitable, but are 
 the training which shapes them for their after work. 
 The fittest survive the test. 
 
 Miss Barrett's early feasts were of an omnivorous 
 ivind, the best school-regimen for genius : — 
 
 Influe7ice of 
 reading on 
 the imagi- 
 nation.
 
 ii8 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Unconscious 
 trainings 
 of gotius. 
 Cp. "Pods 
 of Amer- 
 ica'': p. 
 307. 
 
 Her classi- 
 cal slzidies. 
 
 " I read books bad and good — some bad and good 
 At once : . 
 
 And being dashed 
 From error on to error, every turn 
 Still brought me nearer to the central truth." 
 
 A gifted mind in youth has an unconsciousness of 
 evil, and an affinity for the beautiful and true, which 
 enable it, when given the freedom of a library, to as- 
 similate what is suited to its needs. Fact and fiction 
 are inwardly digested, and in maturer years the logi- 
 cal faculty involuntarily assorts and distributes them. 
 Aurora reads her books, 
 
 " Without considering whether they were fit 
 To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good 
 By being ungenerous, even to a book, 
 And calculating profits . . so much help 
 By so much reading. It is rather when 
 We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge 
 Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, 
 Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth — 
 'T is then we get the right good from a book." 
 
 Much of this reading was of that grave character 
 to which court-maidens of Roger Ascham's time were 
 wonted, for her juvenile " Essay on Mind " evinced a 
 knowledge of Plato, Bacon, and others of the world's 
 great thinkers : I do not say familiarity with them ; 
 scholars know what that word means, and how loosely 
 such terms are bandied. She gained that general 
 conception of each, similar to what we learn of a 
 man upon first acquaintance, and often not far wrong. 
 
 With time and occasion afterward came the more 
 disciplinary process of her education. Fortunate in- 
 fluences, possibly those of her father, — if we may still 
 follow " Aurora Leigh," — guided her in the direction
 
 HUGH STUART BOYD. 
 
 119 
 
 of studies as refining as they were severe. She read 
 Latin and Greek. Now, it is noteworthy that a girl's 
 intellect is more adroit in acquirement, not only of 
 the languages, but of pure mathematics, than that of 
 the average boy. Any one trained at the desks of a 
 New England high-school is aware of this. In later 
 years the woman very likely will stop acquiring, while 
 the man still plods along and grows in breadth and 
 accuracy. Miss Barrett became a loving student of 
 Greek, and we shall see that it greatly influenced her 
 literary progress. 
 
 Among her maturer friends was the sweetly gentle 
 and learned Hugh Stuart Boyd, to whom in his blind- 
 ness she read the Attic dramatists, and under whose 
 guidance she explored a remarkably wide field of 
 Grecian philosophy and song. What more beautiful 
 subject for a modern painter than the girl Elizabeth, 
 — " that slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark 
 curls falling on each side of a most expressive face, 
 large tender eyes richly fringed by dark eyelashes, 
 and a smile like a sunbeam," — than this ethereal 
 creature seated at the feet of the blind old scholar, 
 her face aglow with the rhapsody of the sonorous 
 drama, from which she read of CEdipus, until 
 
 "the reader's voice dropped lower 
 When the poet called him blind ! " 
 
 Here was the daughter that Milton should have 
 had ! An oft-quoted stanza from her own " Wine of 
 Cyprus," addressed to her master in after years, may 
 be taken for the legend of the picture : — 
 
 " And I think of those long mornings, 
 Which my Thought goes far to seek, 
 When, betwixt the folio's turnings, 
 Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek. 
 
 Hugh 
 Stuart 
 Boyd. 
 1782-1848. 
 
 Her portrait 
 in Miss Mit- 
 ford's "Rec- 
 ollections 0/ 
 a Literary 
 Life:'
 
 I20 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Beneficent 
 effect of 
 culture. 
 
 C p."- Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica"' : pp. 
 109, 135- 
 
 Past the pane the mountain spreading, 
 Swept the sheep-bell's tinkling noise, 
 
 While a girlish voice was reading, 
 Somewhat low for «/'s and w's." 
 
 Aside from repeated indications in her other writing, 
 this graceful poem shows the Hberal extent of her 
 deUghtful classical explorations. Homer, Pindar, An- 
 acreon, — " ^schylus, the thunderous," " Sophocles, 
 the royal," " Euripides, the human," " Plato, the divine 
 one," — Theocritus, Bion, — not only among the im- 
 mortal pagans did Miss Barrett follow hand in hand 
 with Boyd, but attended him upon his favorite excur- 
 sions to those " noble Christian bishops " — Chrysos- 
 tom, Basil, Nazianzen — " who mouthed grandly the 
 last Greek." 
 
 What other woman and poet of recent times has 
 passed through such a novitiate, in the academic 
 groves and at the fountain-heads of poetry and 
 thought ? I dwell upon Miss Barrett's culture, because 
 I am convinced that it had much to do with her pre- 
 eminence among female poets. Many a past genera- 
 tion has produced its songsters of her sex, whose 
 voices were stifled for want of atmosphere and train- 
 ing. An auspicious era gave her an advantage over 
 predecessors like Joanna Baillie, and her culture placed 
 her immeasurably above Miss Landon, Mrs. Hemans, 
 and others who flourished at the outset of her own 
 career. Lady Barnard, the Baroness Nairn, Mrs. 
 Norton, — women like these have written beautiful 
 lyrics ; but here is one, equally feminine, yet with 
 strength beyond them all, lifting herself to the height 
 of sustained imagination. George Sand, Charlotte 
 Bronte, and Mrs. Lewes have been her only com- 
 peers, but of these the first — at least in form, and
 
 A LIBERAL SCHOLAR. 
 
 121 
 
 the two latter both in form and by instinct, have 
 been writers of prose, before whom the poet takes 
 precedence, by inherited and defensible prerogative. 
 
 It was a piece of good fortune that Miss Barrett's 
 technical study of roots, inflections, and what not was 
 elementary and incidental. She and her companion 
 read Greek for me music and wisdom of a literature 
 which, as nations ripen and grow old, stijl holds its 
 own, — an exponent of pure beauty and the univer- 
 sal mind. The result would furnish a potent example 
 for those who hold, with Professor Tayler Lewis, that 
 the classical tongues should be studied chiefly for the 
 sake of their literature. She was not a scholar, in 
 the grammarian's sense ; but broke the shell of a 
 lanefuas-e for the meat which it contained. Hence 
 her reading was so varied as to make her the most 
 powerful ally of the classicists among popular au- 
 thors. Her poetical instinct for meanings was equal 
 to Shelley's ; — as for Keats, he created a Greece and 
 an Olympus of his own. 
 
 Her first venture of significance was in the field 
 of translation. Prometheus Bound, and Miscellaneous 
 Poems, was published in her twenty-fourth year. The 
 poems were equally noticeable for faults and excel- 
 lences, of which we have yet to speak. The transla- 
 tion was at that time a unique effort for a young lady, 
 and good practice ; but abounded in grotesque pecul- 
 iarities, and in fidelity did not approach the modern 
 standard. In riper years she freed it from her early 
 mannerism, and recast it in the shape now left to us, 
 " in expiation," she said, " of a sin of my youth, with 
 the sincerest application of my mature mind." This 
 later version of a most sublime tragedy is more poet- 
 ical than any other of equal correctness, and has the 
 6 
 
 Her scholar- 
 ship liberal, 
 but 7iot pe- 
 dantic. 
 
 "Prome- 
 theus Bound, 
 and Miscel- 
 laneous 
 Poems," 
 1833.
 
 122 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Her classi- 
 cism distinct 
 from Lan- 
 der's. 
 
 fire and vigor of a master-hand. No one has suc- 
 ceeded better than its author in capturing with rhymed 
 measures the wilful rushing melody of the tragic 
 chorus. Her other translations were executed for her 
 own pleasure, and it rarely was her pleasure to be 
 exactly faithful to her text. She was honest enough 
 to call them what they are ; and we must own that 
 her " Paraphrases on " Theocritus, Homer, Apuleius, 
 etc., are enjoyable poems in themselves, preserving 
 the spirit of their originals, yet graceful with that 
 freedom of which Shelley's " Hymn to Mercury " is 
 the most winsome English exemplar since Chapman's 
 time. 
 
 Our poet was always healthful and at ease wher- 
 ever her classicism suggested the motive of her own 
 song. " The Dead Pan " is an instance of her pe- 
 culiar utilization of Greek tradition, and in other 
 pieces her antique touches are frequent. Late in life, 
 when unquestionably failing, — her eyes growing dim 
 and her poetic force abated, — amid a peal of verses, 
 that sound to me like sweet bells jangled, there is no 
 clearer strain than that of " A Musical Instrument." 
 For a moment, indeed, as she sang a melody of the 
 pastoral god, her 
 
 " sun on the hill forgot to die, 
 And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly 
 Came back to dream on the river." 
 
 A distinction between Landor's workmanship and 
 that of Mrs. Browning was, that the former rarely 
 used his classicism allegorically as a vehicle for mod- 
 ern sentiment ; the latter, who did not write and think 
 as a Greek, goes to the antique for illustration of her 
 own faith and conceptions.
 
 ILLNESS AND SECLUSION. 
 
 123 
 
 Of Miss Barrett's life we now catch glimpses through 
 the kindly eyes of Miss Mitford, who became her near 
 friend in 1836. She had entered upon a less se- 
 cluded period, and probably the four years which fol- 
 lowed the appearance of her " Prometheus " were as 
 happy as any of her maidenhood. But, always fragile, 
 in 1837 she broke a blood-vessel of the lungs ; and 
 after a lingering convalescence was again prostrated 
 in 1839 by the death of her favorite brother, — 
 drowned in her sight off the bar of Torquay. Months 
 elapsed before she could be removed to her father's 
 house, there to enter upon that absolute cloister-life 
 which continued for nearly seven years. It was the 
 life of a couch-ridden invalid, restricted to a large but 
 darkened chamber, and forbidden all society but that 
 of a few dear friends. I think of her, however, in 
 that classic room as of one shut up in some belve- 
 dere, where, by means of a camera, the outer world is 
 reflected upon the table at your breast. For she re- 
 turned to her books as a diversion from her thoughts, 
 and with an eagerness that her physicians could not 
 restrict. Miss Mitford says that she was now " read- 
 ing almost every book worth reading in almost every 
 language, and giving herself, heart and soul, to that 
 poetry of which she seemed born to be the priestess." 
 The creative faculty reasserted itself; the moon will 
 draw the sea despite the storms and darkness that 
 brood between. 
 
 In 1838 she published The Seraphim and other 
 Poems; in another year. The Romaunt of the Page, a 
 volume of ballads entitled from the one which bears 
 that name. In 1842 she contributed to the London 
 Athenceum some Essays on the Greek-Christian and 
 English Poets, — the only specimens of her prose left 
 
 Prolonged 
 illness and 
 seclusion. 
 
 " The Sera- 
 phim," 
 1838. 
 
 " The Ro- 
 
 vtaiinl 0/ 
 the Page," 
 1839.
 
 124 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Critical 
 proie-tvrit- 
 ings, 1842. 
 
 First collec- 
 tive edition 
 of her poems^ 
 1844. 
 
 Her early 
 style. 
 
 Disadvan- 
 tages of over- 
 culture. 
 
 Shelley. 
 
 Her ballads. 
 
 to US, — enthusiastic, not closely written, but showing 
 unusual attainments and critical perception. In 1844 
 — her thirty-fifth year — she found strength for the 
 collection of her writings in their first complete 
 edition, which opened with "A Drama of Exile." 
 These volumes, comprising the bulk of her works 
 during her maiden period, furnish the material and 
 occasion for some remarks upon her characteristics 
 as an English poet. 
 
 Her style, from the beginning, was strikingly origi- 
 nal, uneven to an extreme degree, equally remarkable 
 for defects and beauties, of which the former gradually 
 lessened and the latter grew more admirable as she 
 advanced in years and experience. The disadvan- 
 tages, no less than the advantages, of her education, 
 were apparent at the outset. She could not fail to 
 be- affected by various master-minds, and when she 
 had outgrown one influence was drawn within another, 
 and so tossed about from world to world. " The 
 Seraphim," a diffuse, mystical passion-play, was an 
 echo of the ^schylean drama. Its meaning was 
 scarcely clear even to the author ; the rhythm is wild 
 and discordant ; neither music nor meaning is thor- 
 oughly beaten out. I have mentioned Shelley as one 
 with whom she was akin, — is it that Shelley, dithy- 
 rambic as a votary of Cybele, was the most sexless, 
 as he was the most spiritual, of poets ? There are 
 singers who spurn the earth, yet scarcely rise to the 
 heavens ; they utter a melodious, errant strain that 
 loses itself in a murmur, we know not how. Miss 
 Barrett's early verse was strangely combined of this 
 semi-musical delirium and obscurity, with an attempt 
 at the Greek dramatic form. Her ballads, on the 
 other hand, were a reflection of her English studies;
 
 EARLY WORKS AND STYLE. 
 
 125 
 
 and, as being more English and human, were a vast 
 poetic advance upon " The Seraphim." Evidently, in 
 these varied experiments, she was conscious of power, 
 and strove to exercise it, yet with no direct purpose, 
 and half doubtful of her themes. When, therefore, 
 as in certain of these lyrics, she got hold of a rare 
 story or suggestion, she made an artistic poem ; all 
 are stamped with her sign-manual, and one or two 
 are as lovely as anything on which her fame will rest. 
 
 My own youthful acquaintance with her works be- 
 gan, for example, with the " Rhyme of the Duchess 
 May." It was different from any romance-ballad I 
 had read, and was to me a magic casement opening 
 on " faerylands forlorn " ; and even now I think, as 
 I thought then, that the sweetness and power of scen- 
 ery and language, the delicious metre, the refrain of 
 the passing bell, the feeling and action, are highly 
 poetical and have an indescribable charm. The blem- 
 ishes of this lyric are few: it is nicely adjusted to the 
 proper degree of quaintness ; the overture and epi- 
 logue are exquisitely done, and the tone is maintained 
 throughout, — an unusual feat for Mrs. Browning. I 
 have never forgotten a pleasure which so contrasted 
 with the barren sentiment of a plain New England 
 life, and here fulfil my obligation to lay a flower of 
 gratitude upon her grave. Yes, indeed : all she 
 needed was a theme to evoke her rich imaginings, 
 and I wish she had more frequently ceased from in- 
 trospection and composed other ballads like that of 
 the " Duchess May." 
 
 Of her minor lyrics during this period, — " Isobel's 
 Child," " The Romaunt of the Page," " The Lay of 
 the Brown Rosary," "The Poet's Vow," etc., — few 
 are so good as the example just cited ; but each is 
 
 " Rhyme 0/ 
 
 the Duchess 
 May." 
 
 Minor 
 lyrics.
 
 126 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Her diction. 
 
 Lack of 
 taste. 
 
 NoHHty of 
 feeling. 
 
 Grossly de- 
 fective art. 
 
 quite removed from commonplace, and, with its con- 
 trasts of strength and weakness, entirely characteristic 
 of its author. 
 
 The effect of Miss Barrett's secluded life was visible 
 in her diction, which was acquired from books rather 
 than by intercourse with the living world ; and from 
 books of all periods, so that she seemed unconscious 
 that certain words were obsolete, or repellent even to 
 cultured and tasteful people. Reviewers who accused 
 her of affectation were partly correct ; yet many un- 
 couth phrases and forgotten words seemed to her no 
 less available than common forms obtained from the 
 same sources. By this she gained a richer structure ; 
 just as Kossuth, learning our language from books, 
 had a more copious vocabulary than many English 
 orators. But she lost credit for good sense, and cer- 
 tainly at one time had no sure judgment in the use 
 of terms. Since she explored the French, Spanish, 
 and Italian classics as eagerly as those of her own 
 tongue, perhaps the wonder is that her diction was 
 not even more fantastical. Her taste never seemed 
 quite developed, but through life subordinate to her 
 excess of feeling. So noble, however, was the latter 
 quality, that the critics gave her poetry their attention, 
 and endeavored to correct its faults of style. For a 
 time she showed a lack of the genuine artist's rever- 
 ence, and not without egotism followed her wilful 
 way. The difficulty with her obsolete words was that 
 they were introduced unnaturally, and produced a 
 grotesque effect instead of an attractive quaintness. 
 Moreover, her slovenly elisions, indiscriminate mixture 
 of old and new verbal inflections, eccentric rhymes, 
 forced accents, wearisome repetition of favored words 
 to a degree that almost implied poveity of thought, —
 
 SERIOUS DEFECTS AS AN ARTIST. 
 
 127 
 
 such matters justly were held to be an outrage upon 
 the beauty and dignity of metrical art. An occa- 
 sional discord has its use and charm, but harshness 
 in her verse was the rule rather than the exception. 
 When she had a felicitous refrain — a peculiar grace 
 of her lyrics — she frequently would mar the effect 
 and give a shock to her readers by the introduction 
 of some whimsical or repulsive image. Her passion 
 was spasmodic ; her sensuousness lacked substance ; 
 as for simplicity, it was at one time questionable 
 whether she was not to be classed among those who, 
 with a turbulent desire for utterance, really have 
 nothing definite to say. Her sonnet on " The Soul's 
 Expression " showed that the only thing clear to her 
 mind was that she could state nothing clearly : — 
 
 " With stammering lips and insufficient sound 
 I strive and struggle to deliver right 
 That music of my nature, day and night 
 "With dream and thought and feeling interwound." 
 
 Metaphysical reading aggravated her natural vague- 
 ness and what is termed transcendentalism, — perilous 
 qualities in the domain of art. Long afterward she 
 herself spoke of " the weakness of these earlier verses, 
 which no subsequent revision has succeeded in 
 strengthening." 
 
 In " A Drama of Exile," where she had a more 
 definite object, these faults are less apparent, and 
 her genius shines through the clouds ; so that we 
 catch glimpses of the brightness which eventually 
 lighted her to a station in the Valhalla of renown. 
 
 During her years of illness she had added some 
 knowledge of Hebrew to her acquirements, and could 
 read the Old Testament in the original. The grander 
 
 Clouded 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A mer- 
 
 ica " : pp. 
 16S, 169, 
 249> 253- 
 
 "W Drama 
 0/ Exile," 
 1844.
 
 128 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 elements of her imagination received a new stimulus 
 from the sacred text, with which, after all, her mind 
 was more in sympathy than with the serene beauty 
 of the Greek. In the " Drama of Exile " she aimed 
 at the highest, and failed ; but such failures are im- 
 possible to smaller poets. It contains wonderfully 
 fine passages ; is a chaotic mass, from which dazzling 
 lustres break out so frequently that a critic aptly 
 spoke of the " flashes " of her " wild and magnificent 
 genius," the " number and close propinquity of which 
 render her book one flame." My review presupposes 
 the reader's familiarity with her writings, so that cita- 
 tion of passages does not fall within its intention. 
 Yet, let me ask what other female poet has risen to 
 such language as this of Adam to Lucifer ? 
 
 Fervent im- 
 agittation. 
 
 "The prodigy 
 Of thy vast brows and melancholy eyes 
 Which comprehend the heights of some great fall. 
 I think that thou hast one day worn a crown 
 Under the eyes of God." 
 
 And where in modern verse is there a more vigorous 
 and imaginative episode than Lucifer's remembrance 
 of the couched lion, " when the ended curse left silence 
 in the world " .'' 
 
 " Right suddenly 
 He sprang up rampant and stood straight and stiff, 
 As if the new reality of death 
 
 Were dashed against his eyes, — and roared so fierce 
 (Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat 
 Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear) 
 And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills 
 Such fast, keen echoes crumbling down the vales 
 Precipitately, — that the forest beasts, 
 One after one, did mutter a response 
 Of savage and of sorrowful complaint
 
 LYRICAL EFFORTS. 
 
 129 
 
 Which trailed along the gorges. Then, at once, 
 He fell back, and rolled crashing from the height 
 Into the dusk of pines." 
 
 Miss Barrett in this drama displayed a true concep- 
 tion of the sublime j though as yet she had neither 
 grace, logic, nor sustained power. The most fragile 
 and delicate of beings, she essayed, with more than 
 man's audacit}^, to reach the infinite and soar to " the 
 gates of light." 
 
 That she was a tender woman, also, and that her 
 hand had been somewhat trained by varied lyrical 
 efforts, was manifest from some of those minor pieces 
 through which she now began to attract the popular 
 regard. Among those not previously mentioned, the 
 tributes to Mrs. Hemans and Miss Landon, " Cata- 
 rina to Camoens," " Crowned and Wedded," " Cow- 
 per's Grave," " The Sea-Mew," " To Flush, my Dog," 
 and " The Swan's Nest," were more simple and open 
 to general esteem than their companion pieces. " An 
 Island," " The Lost Bower," and " The House of 
 Clouds " are pure efforts of fancy, for the most part 
 charmingly executed. " Bertha in the Lane " is treas- 
 ured by the poet's admirers for its virginal pathos, — 
 the sacred revelation of a dying maiden's heart, — an 
 exquisite poem, but greatly marred in the closing. It 
 was difficult for the author, however fine her begin- 
 nings, to end a poem, once begun, or to end it well 
 under final compulsion. "The Cry of the Human," 
 with its impassioned refrain and almost agonized plea 
 that the ancient curse may be lightened, evinced her 
 recognition of the sorrows and mysteries of existence : 
 — all these things she " kept in her heart," and ut- 
 tered b1-ave invectives against black or white slavery, 
 
 and other social wrongs. 
 6* 
 
 The Cry of the Children," 
 
 Successful 
 
 lyrical 
 
 efforts. 
 
 Humayiita- 
 rian poems.
 
 I30 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Her most 
 
 popular 
 
 ballad. 
 
 uneven as it is, takes its place beside Hood's " Song 
 of the Shirt," for sweet pity and frowning indignation. 
 In behalf of the little factory-slaves, after reading 
 Home's report of his Commission, her soul took fire 
 and she did what she could. If the British mill- 
 owners were little likely to be impressed by her imagi- 
 native ode, with its Greek motto, it certainly affected 
 the minds of public writers and speakers, who could 
 fashion their more practical agitation after the pat- 
 tern thus given them in the Mount. 
 
 But " Lady Geraldine's Courtship " was the ballad 
 — and often a poet has one such — which gained 
 her a sudden repute among lay-readers. It is said 
 that she composed it in twelve hours, and not im- 
 probably ; for, although full of melodious sentiment 
 and dainty lines, the poem is marred by common- 
 places of frequent occurrence. Many have classed it 
 with " Locksley Hall," but, while certain stanzas are 
 equal to Tennyson's best, it is far from displaying 
 the completeness of that enduring lyric. I value it 
 chiefly as an illustration of the greater freedom and 
 elegance to which her poetic faculty had now at- 
 tained, and as her first open avowal, and a brave 
 one in England, of the democracy which generous 
 and gifted spirits, the round world over, are wont to 
 confess. As for her story, she only succeeded in 
 showing how meanly a womanish fellow might act, 
 when enamored of one above him in social station, 
 and that the heart of a man possessed of healthy 
 self-respect was something she had not yet found out. 
 Her Bertram is a dreadful prig, who cries, mouths, 
 and faints like a school-girl, allowing himself to eat 
 the bread of the Philistines and betray his sense of 
 inequality, and upon whom Lady Geraldine certainly
 
 A MATURE WOMAN. 
 
 131 
 
 End of her 
 formative 
 
 throws herself away. He is a libel upon the whole 
 race of poets. The romance, none the less, met with 
 instant popularity on both sides of the Atlantic, and 
 has passed into literature, somewhat pruned by later 
 touches, as oue of its author's more conspicuous 
 efforts. 
 
 Miss Barrett now, at the relatively mature age of 
 thirty-five, appeared to have completed her intellect- 
 ual growth. It was a chance whether her future 
 should be greater than her past. Thus far I regard 
 her experience as merely formative. Much of her 
 vagueness and gloom had departed with the physical 
 prostration that so long had borne her down. For her 
 improving health showed that study and authorship, 
 though against the wishes of her attendants, were the 
 best medicine for a body and mind diseased. 
 
 As the scent of the rose came back " above the 
 mould," she was to emerge upon a new life, different 
 from that which we hitherto have considered as the 
 day is from the night. She was not to be enrolled 
 among the mournful sisterhood of women, who 
 
 "sit still 
 On winter nights by solitary fires 
 And hear the nations praising them far off." 
 
 The dearest common joys were yet to be hers, and 
 that full development which a woman's genius needs 
 to make it rounded and complete. There is a pretty 
 story of her first meeting with the poet Browning, 
 based upon the lines referring to him in " Lady Ger- 
 aldine's Courtship." This, however, is not credited 
 by Theodore Tilton, her American editor, who wrote 
 the Memorial prefixed to the collection of her " Last "';''• "/-^ 
 
 ^ I lieodore 
 
 Poems." Four lyrics, thrown off at this time, — en- 1 rzV/^«, 1862. 
 
 Robert 
 Browning 
 
 ' Memo-
 
 132 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 her mar- 
 rius:e, Lon- 
 don, 1S46. 
 
 Married 
 life. 
 
 Influence o, ' 
 love upon a 
 ivoman^s 
 genius. 
 
 titled "Life and Love," "A Denial," "Proof and 
 Disproof," and " Liclusions," — go far to show Miss 
 Barrett's humility, and inability to comprehend the 
 happiness which had come to her. But, nevertheless, 
 the poet wooed and won her; and in 1846, her 
 thirty-seventh year, she was taken from her couch to 
 the altar, and at once borne away by her husband 
 from her native land. Some facts in my possession 
 with respect to this event have too slight a bearing 
 upon the record of her literary achievements to war- 
 rant their insertion here. It is well known that the 
 marriage was opposed by her father, but she builded 
 better than he knew. Her cloister-life of maiden- 
 hood in England was at an end. Fifteen happy and 
 illustrious years in Italy lay before her ; and in her 
 case the proverb Ccelum, non animum, was unful- 
 filled. Never was there a more complete transmuta- 
 tion of the habits and sympathies of life than that 
 which she experienced beneath the blue Italian skies. 
 Still, before all and above all, her refined soul re- 
 mained in allegiance to the eternal Muse. 
 
 IIL 
 
 He is but a shallow critic who neglects to take 
 into his account of a woman's genius a factor repre- 
 senting the master-element of Love. The chief event 
 in the life of Elizabeth Barrett was her marriage, and 
 causes readily suggest themselves which might deter- 
 mine the most generous parent to oppose such a step 
 on her part. The dedication of her edition of 1844 
 shows how close was the relation existing between 
 her father and herself, and I am told by one who 
 knew her for many years, that Mr. Barrett "was a
 
 EFFECT OF LOVE UPON HER GENIUS. 
 
 133 
 
 man of intellect and culture, and she had been his 
 pride, as well as the light of his eyes, after he be- 
 came a widower." To such a parent, now well in 
 the vale of years, a marriage which was to lift his 
 fragile daughter from the couch to which she had 
 been bound as a picture to its frame must have 
 seemed a rash experiment, and a cruel blow to him- 
 self, however eminent and devoted the suitor who 
 had claimed her. But when the long-closed tide-ways 
 of a woman's heart are opened, the torrent comes 
 with double force at last, sweeping kith and kin 
 away by Nature's inexorable law. If the old West 
 India merchant had not afterwards acted with utter 
 selfishness in respect to the marriage of another 
 daughter, I should be disposed to estimate his wounded 
 love for Elizabeth, as she herself did, by his stead- 
 fast refusal, despite her "frequent and heart-moving" 
 appeals, to be reconciled to her throughout the re- 
 mainder of his darkened life. 
 
 Wedlock was so thoroughly a new existence to her, 
 that her kindred well might fear for the result. A 
 veritable Lady of Shalott, she now entered the open 
 highways of a peopled world. She left a polar region 
 of dreams, solitude, introspection, for the equatorial 
 belt of outer and real life. The beneficent sequel 
 shows how wise are the instincts of a refined nature. 
 To Mrs. Browning, love, marriage, travel, were happi- 
 ness, desire of life, renewed bodily and spiritual 
 health ; and when, in her fortieth year, the sacred 
 and mysterious functions of maternity were given her 
 to realize, there also came that ripe fruition of a gen- 
 ius that hitherto, blooming in the night, had yielded 
 fragrant and impassioned, but only sterile flowers. 
 
 The question of an artist's married life, it seems 
 
 Her/aiher's 
 opfoiitiott 
 to the nup- 
 tials. 
 
 Complete 
 womanhood.
 
 134 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Relations of 
 art and 
 marriage : 
 
 A s they af- 
 fect, I, the 
 husband ; 
 
 to me, has wholly different bearings when considered 
 from the opposite standing-points of the two sexes. 
 A discerning writer has recently mentioned an artist 
 whose view was, that a man devoted to art might 
 marry " either a plain, uneducated woman devoted to 
 household matters, or else a woman quite capable of 
 entering into his artistic life"; but no one between 
 the two extremes. The former would be less perilous 
 than to marry a daughter of the Philistines, " equally 
 incapable of comprehending his pursuits, but much 
 more likely to interfere with them." Yet in behalf 
 of a man of artistic genius and sensibility, who is 
 born to a career if he chooses to pursue it, I would 
 not accept even the first-named alternative, unless he 
 has sufficient wealth to insure him perfect indepen- 
 dence or seclusion. An author's growth, and the hap- 
 piness of both parties, are vastly imperilled by his 
 union with the most affectionate of creatures, if she 
 has an inartistic nature and a dull or commonplace 
 mind. The Laureate makes the simple wife exclaim : 
 "I cannot understand: I love!" — but there is no per- 
 fect love without mutual comprehension ; at the best, 
 a wearisome, unemotional forbearance takes its place. 
 On the one part jealousy, active or disguised, of the 
 other's wider range, too often exerts a restrictive in- 
 fluence, by which the art-impulse, and the experiences 
 it should feed upon, are modified or repressed. It 
 is a law of psychological mathematics that the con- 
 stant force of dulness will in the end overcome any 
 varying force resisting it ; and when Pegasus can be 
 driven in harness, one generally finds him yoked with 
 a brood-mare, — ay, and broken-in when young and 
 more or less defenceless. 
 
 Again, we so readily persuade ourselves to lapse
 
 RELATIONS OF ART AND MARRIAGE. 
 
 135 
 
 from the efforts of creative labor, when temptation 
 puts on the specious guise of duty ! The finest kind 
 of art — that possessing originality — is unremunerative 
 for years ; and who has the courage to pursue it, 
 while responsible for the conventional ease and hap- 
 piness of those who possibly regret that he is not so 
 practical as other men, and look with distrust upon 
 his habits of life and labor? Ordinary people can 
 more easily attain to that perfect mating which is the 
 sum of bliss. But let an artist marry art, and be true 
 to it alone, unless by some rare chance he can find a 
 companion whose soul is kindred with his own, who 
 can sympathize with his tastes, and aid him with tact 
 and circumstance in his social and professional career. 
 If she has genius of her own, and her own purposes 
 in any department of art, then all obligations can be 
 entirely mutual, and under favorable auspices the high- 
 est wedded felicity should be the result. 
 
 The relations of art and marriage, where the devel- 
 opment of female genius is concerned, are of a dis- 
 tinctive character, and must be so considered. It is 
 no doubt true that a woman, also, can only arrive at 
 extreme happiness by wedlock founded upon entire 
 congeniality of mind and purpose ; and yet there are 
 conditions under which it may become essential to her 
 complete development as an artist that she should 
 marry out of her own ideal, rather than not be mar- 
 ried at all. So closely interwrought are her physical 
 and spiritual existences, that otherwise the product of 
 her genius may be litde more than a beautiful frag- 
 ment at the most. We must therefore esteem Mrs. 
 Browning doubly fortunate, and protected by the gods 
 themselves. For marriage not only nad given her, by 
 one of Nature's charming miracles, a precious lease 
 
 A s tJiey af- 
 fect, 2, the 
 wife.
 
 136 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 The ivedded 
 poets. 
 
 Summit 
 of Mrs. 
 Browning' s 
 greatness. 
 
 Her foivcrs 
 fully devel- 
 oped. 
 
 of life, but had united her with a fellow-artist whose 
 disposition and pursuits were in absolute harmony 
 with her own, — the one man in the world whom 
 she would have chosen, yet who sought her out, and 
 deemed it his highest joy to possess her as a wife, 
 and cherish her as companion, lover, and friend. In 
 this life of incongruities it is encouraging to find such 
 an instance of the serene fitness of things. The world 
 is richer for their union, than which none more dis- 
 tinguished is of record in the annals of authorship. 
 
 The ten years following the date of Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's marriage were the noonday of her life, and three 
 master-works, embraced in this period, represent her 
 at her prime. Casa Guidi Windotvs appeared in 185 1, 
 the same volume including the matchless " Sonnets 
 from the Portuguese." Aurora Leigh was published 
 in 1 85 6. None of her later or earlier compositions 
 were equal to these in scope, method, and true poet- 
 ical value. 
 
 At first the influence of her new life was of a com- 
 plex nature. It opened a sealed fountain of love 
 within her, which broke forth in celestial song : it 
 gave her a land and a cause to which she thoroughly 
 devoted her woman's soul ; finally, a surprising ad- 
 vance was evident in the rhythm, language, and all 
 other constituents of her metrical work. The Saxon 
 English, which she hitherto had quarried for the ba- 
 sis of her verse, now became conspicuous through- 
 out the whole structure. Her technical gain was 
 partly due to the stronger themes which now bore up 
 her wing, — and partly, I have no doubt, to the com- 
 panionship of 'Robert Browning. Even if he did not 
 directly revise h^ works, neither could fail to profit 
 by the other's genius and experience ; and the blem-
 
 'SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE.' 
 
 137 
 
 ishes of his wife's earlier style were such as Browning 
 at this time would not relish, for they were of a dif- 
 ferent kind from his own. Besides, we are sensitive 
 to faults in those we love, while committing them our- 
 selves as if by chartered right. 
 
 I am disposed to consider the Sonnets from the Por- 
 tuguese as, if not the finest, a portion of the finest 
 subjective poetry in our literature. Their form re- 
 minds us of an English prototype, and it is no sacri- 
 lege to say that their music is showered from a higher 
 and purer atmosphere than that of the Swan of Avon. 
 We need not enter upon cold comparison of their 
 respective excellences ; but Shakespeare's personal 
 poems were the overflow of his impetuous youth : — his 
 broader vision, that took a world within its ken, was 
 absolutely objective ; while Mrs. Browning's Love Son- 
 nets are the outpourings of a woman's tenderest emo- 
 tions, at an epoch when her art was most mature, 
 and her whole nature exalted by a passion that to 
 such a being comes but once and for all. Here, in- 
 deed, the singer rose to her height. Here she is ab- 
 sorbed in rapturous utterance, radiant and triumphant 
 with her own joy. The mists have risen and her 
 sight is clear. Her mouthing and affectation are for- 
 gotten, her lips cease to stammer, the lyrical spirit 
 has full control. The sonnet, artificial in weaker 
 hands, becomes swift with feeling, red with a " veined 
 humanity," the chosen vehicle of a royal woman's 
 vows. Graces, felicities, vigor, glory of speech, here 
 are so crowded as to tread each upon the other's 
 sceptred pall. The first sonnet, equal to any in our 
 tongue, is an overture containing the motive of the 
 canticle ; — " not Death, but Love " had seized her 
 unaware. The growth of this happiness, her worship 
 
 " Sonnets 
 frotn the 
 Portu- 
 guese" 
 1850.
 
 1^.8 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Devotion to 
 Italy. 
 
 of its bringer, her doubts of her own worthiness, are 
 the theme of these poems. She is in a sweet and, 
 to us, pathetic surprise at the delight which at last 
 had fallen to her : — 
 
 "The wonder was not yet quite gone 
 From that still look of hers." 
 
 Never was man or minstrel so honored as her "most 
 gracious singer of high poems." In the tremor of her 
 love she undervalued herself, — with all her feebleness 
 of body, it was enough for any man to live within the 
 atmosphere of such a soul ! In fine, the Portuguese 
 Sonnets, whose title was a screen behind which the 
 singer poured out her full heart, are the most exqui- 
 site poetry hitherto written by a woman, and of them- 
 selves justify us in pronouncing their author the great- 
 est of her sex, — on the ground that the highest 
 mission of a female poet is the expression of love, 
 and that no other woman approaching her in genius 
 has essayed the ultimate form of that expression. An 
 analogy with " In Memoriam " may be derived from 
 their arrangement and their presentation of a single 
 analytic theme ; but Tennyson's poem — though ex- 
 hibiting equal art, more subtile reasoning and com- 
 prehensive thought — is devoted to the analysis of 
 philosophic Grief, while the Sonnets reveal to us that 
 Love which is the most ecstatic of human emotions 
 and worth all other gifts in life. 
 
 Mrs. Browning's more than filial devotion to Italy 
 has become a portion of the history of our time. In- 
 dependently of her husband's enthusiasm, everything 
 in the aspect and condition of the country of her 
 adoption was fitted to arouse this sentiment. It be- 
 came a passion with her ; she identified herself with
 
 'CASA GuiDi windows: 
 
 139 
 
 the Italian cause, and for fourteen years her oratory 
 in Casa Guidl was vocal with the aspiration of that 
 fair land struggling to be free. Its beauty and sorrow 
 enthralled her ; its poetr}'- spoke through her voice ; 
 its grateful soil finally received her ashes, and will 
 treasure them for many an age to come. 
 
 Nothing can be finer than the burst of song at the 
 opening of her Italian poem, — 
 
 " I heard last night a little child go singing, 
 'Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church, 
 bdla liberta, O bella ! " — 
 
 unless it be the passages which begin and close the 
 second portion of the same work, composed after an 
 interval of three years, when the hope of the first 
 exultant outbreak was for the time obscured. Be- 
 tween the two extremes the chant is eloquently sus- 
 tained, and is our best example of lucid, sonorous 
 English verse composed in a semi-Italian rima. While 
 full of poetry, its increase of intellectual vigor shows 
 how a singer may be lifted by the occasion and ca- 
 pacity for pleading a noble cause. Deep voice, strong 
 heart, fine brain, — the three must go together in 
 the making of a great poet. " Casa Guidi Windows " 
 won a host of friends to Italy, and gained for its 
 devoted author an historic name. During the inter- 
 val mentioned she had given birth to the child whose 
 presence was the awakening of a new prophetic gift : — 
 
 " The sun strikes through the windows, up the floor ; 
 
 Stand out in it, my own young Florentine, 
 Not two years old, and let me see thee more ! 
 
 It grows along thy amber curls to shine 
 Brighter than elsewhere. Now look straight before, 
 
 And fix thy brave blue English eyes on mine, 
 And from thy soul, which fronts the future so 
 
 " Casa 
 Guidi ll'in- 
 doivs" 1 85 1.
 
 140 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Strength, 
 hapfiiness, 
 aftd/ame. 
 
 " A iirora 
 
 Leigh," 
 
 1856. 
 
 With unabashed and unabated gaze, 
 Teach me to hope for what the Angels know 
 When they smile dear as thou dost ! " 
 
 While experience of motherhood now had perfected 
 her woman's nature, Mrs. Browning was also at the 
 zenith of her lyrical career. Her minor verses of 
 the period are admirable. She revised her earlier 
 poetry for the edition of 1856, and Mr. Tilton has 
 pointed out some of her fastidious and usually suc- 
 cessful emendations. It was the happiest portion of 
 her life, as well as the most artistic. The sunshine 
 of an enviable fame enwreathed her ; rare and gifted 
 spirits, wandering through Italy, were attracted to her 
 presence and paid homage to its laurelled charm. 
 Hence, as a secondary effect of her marriage, her 
 knowledge of the world increased ; she became a keen 
 though impulsive observer of men and women, and 
 of the thought and action of her own time. Few 
 social movements escaped her notice, whether in Eu- 
 rope or our own unrestful land ; her instincts were 
 in favor of agitation and reform, and her imagination 
 was ever looking forward to the Golden Year. And 
 it was now that, summoning all her strength — alas ! 
 how unequal was her frail body to the tasks laid upon 
 it by the aspiring soul! — with heroic determination 
 and most persistent industry, she undertook and com- 
 pleted her capo d'opera, — the poem which, in dedicat- 
 ing to John Kenyon, she declares to be the most 
 mature of her works, " and the one into which my 
 highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." 
 
 If Mrs. Browning's vitality had failed her before 
 the production of " Aurora Leigh," — a poem com- 
 prising twelve thousand lines of blank-verse, — her 
 generation certainly would have lost one of its repre-
 
 'AURORA LEIGH.' 
 
 141 
 
 sentative and original creations : representative in a 
 versatile, kaleidoscopic presentment of modern life 
 and issues ; original, because the most idiosyncratic 
 of its author's poems. An audacious, speculative 
 freedom pervades it, which smacks of the New World 
 rather than the Old. Tennyson, while examining the 
 social and intellectual phases of his era, maintains a 
 judicial impassiveness ; Mrs. Browning, with finer 
 dramatic insight, — the result of intense human sym- 
 pathy, enters into the spirit of each experiment, and 
 for the moment puts herself in its advocate's position. 
 " Aurora Leigh " is a mirror of contemporary life, 
 while its learned and beautiful illustrations make it, 
 almost, a handbook of literature and the arts. As a 
 poem, merely, it is a failure, if it be fair to judge 
 it by accepted standards. One may say of it, as of 
 Byron's " Don Juan " (though loath to couple the two 
 works in any comparison), that, although a most 
 uneven production, full of ups and downs, of capri- 
 cious or prosaic episodes, it nevertheless contains 
 poetry as fine as its author has given us elsewhere, 
 and enough spare inspiration to set up a dozen smaller 
 poets. The flexible verse is noticeably her own, and 
 often handled with as much spirit as freedom ; it is 
 terser than her husband's, and, although his influence 
 now began to grow upon her, is not in the least ob- 
 scure to any cultured reader. The plan of the work 
 is a metrical concession to the fashion of a time which 
 has substituted the novel for the dramatic poem. Con- 
 sidered as a " novel in verse," it is a failure by lack 
 of either constructive talent or experience on the 
 author's part. Few great poets invent their myths ; 
 few prose character-painters are successful poets ; the 
 epic songsters have gone to tradition for their themes, 
 
 A charac- 
 teristic pro- 
 duction.
 
 142 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Landor to 
 y. Forster, 
 1857. 
 
 the romantic to romance, the dramatic to history and 
 incident. Mrs. Browning essayed to invent her whole 
 story, and the result was an incongruous framework, 
 covered with her thronging, suggestive ideas, her 
 flashing poetry and metaphor, and confronting you by 
 whichever gateway you enter with the instant presence 
 of her very self. But either as poem or novel, how 
 superior the whole, in beauty and intellectual power, 
 to contemporary structures upon a similar model, 
 which found favor with the admirers of parlor ro- 
 mance or the lamb's-wool sentiment of orderly British 
 life ! As a social treatise it is also a failure, since 
 nothing definite is arrived at. Yet the poet's sense 
 of existing wrongs is clear and exalted, and if her 
 exposition of them is chaotic, so was the transition 
 period in which she found herself involved. Upon 
 the whole, I think that the chief value and interest of 
 " Aurora Leigh " appertain to its marvellous illustra- 
 tions of the development, from childhood on, of an 
 resthetical, imaginative nature. Nowhere in literature 
 is the process of culture by iheans of study and pas- 
 sional experience so graphically depicted. It is the 
 metrical and feminine complement to Thackeray's 
 " Pendennis " ; a poem that will be rightly appreci- 
 ated by artists, thinkers, poets, and by them alone. 
 Landor, for example, at once received it into favor, 
 and also laid an unerring finger upon its weakest 
 point: "I am reading a poem," he wrote, "full of 
 thought and fascinating with fancy. In many pages 
 
 there is the wild imagination of Shakespeare 
 
 I had no idea that any one in this age was capa- 
 ble of such poetry There are, indeed, even 
 
 here, some flies upon the surface, as there always 
 will be upon what is sweet and strong. I know not
 
 HER PERIOD OF DECLINE. 
 
 143 
 
 yet what the story is. Few possess the power of 
 construction." 
 
 The five remaining years of Mrs. Browning's Hfe 
 were years of self-forgetfulness and devotion to the 
 heroic and true. Her beautiful character is exhibited 
 in her correspondence, and in the tributes of those 
 who were privileged to know her. What poetry she 
 wrote is left to us, and I am compelled to look upon 
 it as belonging to her period of decline. However 
 fine its motive, " we are here," as M. Taine has said, 
 to judge of the product alone, and " to realize, not an 
 ode, but a law." Physical debility was the main cause 
 of this lyrical falling off. Her exhausted frame was 
 now, more than ever, whgit Hillard had pronounced it, 
 " nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immor- 
 tal spirit." Her feelings were again more imperative 
 than her mastery of art ; her hand trembled, her voice 
 quavered with that emotion which is not strength. 
 She now, as I have said, unconsciously began to yield 
 to the prolonged influence of her husband's later style, 
 and it affected her own injuriously, though it must 
 be acknowledged that her poetry acquired, toward the 
 last, a new and genuine, but painful, dramatic quality. 
 Her " Napoleon HI. in Italy," and the minor lyrics 
 upon the Italian question, are submitted in evidence 
 of the several points just made. Some of her later 
 poems were contributed to a New York newspaper, 
 with whose declared opinions she was in sympathy, 
 and which was the mouthpiece of her warmest Amer- 
 ican admirers ; and, in the effort to promptly meet her 
 engagements, she tendered unrevised and faulty work. 
 At intervals the production of some gracious, health- 
 ful hour would be a truly effective poem, and such 
 lyrics as " De Profundis," "A Court Lady," "The| 
 
 Mrs. 
 
 Browning' s 
 period 0/ 
 decline. 
 
 Secondary 
 influence 0/ 
 her married 
 life. 
 
 " Poems be- 
 fore Con- 
 gress" i860. 
 
 " The Inde- 
 pendent.''^
 
 144 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 "Last 
 
 Poets," 
 
 1860-1861. 
 
 Final esti- 
 mate of Mrs. 
 Browning' s 
 genius. 
 
 Her art. 
 
 Tennyson 
 and .Mrs, 
 Browning. 
 
 Forced Recruit," " Parting Lovers," and " Mother and 
 Poet," made the world realize how rich and tuneful 
 could be the voice still left to her. One evening it 
 was my fortune to listen to a recitation of the last- 
 named poem, from the lips of a beautiful girl who 
 looked the very embodiment of the lyric Muse, and I 
 was struck with the truthfulness and strength displayed 
 in the poet's dramatic conception of the mingled pa- 
 triotism and anguish in a bereaved Italian mother's 
 heart. But the dominant roughness which too gen- 
 erally pervades her Last Poems shows how completely 
 she now had accepted Browning's theor}?^ of entire 
 subordination, in poetry, of the art to the thought, 
 and his method of giving expression to the latter, no 
 matter how inchoate, at any cost to the finish and 
 effectiveness of the work in hand. 
 
 IV. 
 
 In a former chapter I wrote of " an inspired singer, 
 if there ever was one, — all fire and air, — her song 
 and soul alike devoted to liberty, aspiration, and love." 
 The career of this gifted woman has now been traced. 
 In conclusion, let us attempt to estimate her genius 
 and discover the position to be assigned to her 
 among contemporary poets. 
 
 And first, with regard to her qualities as an 
 artist. She was thought to resemble Tennyson in 
 some of her early pieces, but this was a mistake, if 
 anything beyond form is to be considered. In read- 
 ing Tennyson you feel that he drives stately and 
 thoroughbred horses, and has them always under 
 control ; that he could reach a higher speed at pleas- 
 ure ; while Mrs. Browning's chargers, half-untamed,
 
 FINAL ESTIMATE OF HER GENIUS. 
 
 145 
 
 prance or halt at their own will, and often bear her 
 away over some rugged, dimly lighted tract. Her 
 verse was the perfect exponent of her own nature, in- 
 cluding a wide variety of topics in its range, but with 
 the author's manner injected through every line of 
 it. Health is not its prominent characteristic. Mrs. 
 Browning's creative power was not equal to her ca- 
 pacity to feel ; otherwise there was nothing she might 
 not have accomplished. She evinced over-possession, 
 and certainly had the contortions of the Sibyl, though 
 not lacking the inspiration. We feel that she must 
 have expression, or perish, — a lack of restraint com- 
 mon to female poets. She was somewhat deficient in 
 Eesthetic conscientiousness, and we cannot say of her 
 works, as of Tennyson's, that they include nothing 
 which has failed to receive the author's utmost care. 
 She had that distrust of the "effect" of her produc- 
 tions which betrays a clouded vision ; and in truth, 
 much of her vaguer work well might be distrusted. 
 Her imagination was radiant, but seldom clear; it was 
 the moon obscured by mists, yet encircled with a glo- 
 rious halo. 
 
 Her metres came by chance, and this often to her 
 detriment ; she rarely had the patience to discover 
 those best adapted to her needs, but gave voice to the 
 first strain which occurred to her. Hence she had a 
 spontaneity which is absent from the Laureate's work. 
 This charming element has its drawbacks : she found 
 herself hampered by difficulties which a little fore- 
 thought would have avoided, and her song, though as 
 fresh, was too often as purposeless, as that of a forest- 
 bird. There is great music in her voice, but one 
 wishes that it were better trained. She had a gift of 
 melodious and effective refrains : " The Nightingales, 
 , 7 J 
 
 Over-posses- 
 sion. 
 
 Incertitude. 
 
 Sponiatieity. 
 
 Her re- 
 frains.
 
 146 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica ' ; p. 
 245. 
 
 Undue fa- 
 cility. 
 
 Lack of 
 humor. 
 
 Slight idyl- 
 lic tendency. 
 
 the Nightingales," " Margret, Margret," " You see 
 we 're tired, my Heart and I," " Toll slowly ! " " The 
 River floweth on," " Pan, Pan is dead ! " — these and 
 other examples captivate the memory, but occasion- 
 ally the burden is the chief sustainer of the song. 
 One of her repetends, " He giveth His beloved Sleep," 
 is the motive of an almost celestial lyric, faultless in 
 holy and melodious design. It is a poem to read by 
 the weary couch of some loved one passing away, 
 and doubtless in many a heart is already associated 
 with memories that " lie too deep for tears." 
 
 Her spontaneous and exhaustless command of words 
 gave her a large and free style, but likewise a danger- 
 ous facility, and it was only in rare instances, like the 
 one just cited, that she attained to the strength and 
 sweetness of repose. Her intense earnestness spared 
 her no leisure for humor, a feature curiously absent 
 from her writings : she almost lacked the sense of the 
 ludicrous, as may be deduced from some of her two- 
 word rhymes, and from various absurdities solemnly 
 indulged in. But of wit and satire she has more 
 than enough, and lashes all kinds of tyranny and 
 hypocrisy with supernal scorn. It is perhaps due 
 to her years of indoor life that the influence of land- 
 scape-scenery is not more visible in her poetry. Her 
 girlhood, nevertheless, was partly spent in Hereford- 
 shire, among the Malvern Hills, and we find in " Au- 
 rora Leigh," and in some of her minor pieces, not 
 only reminiscences of that region, but other landscape, 
 both English and Italian, executed in a broad and 
 admirable manner. But when she follows the idyllic 
 method, making the tone of the background enhance 
 the feeling of a poem, she uses by preference the 
 works of man rather than those of Nature : architect-
 
 THE MOST BELOVED OF POETS. 
 
 147 
 
 ure, furniture, pictures, books above all, rather than 
 water, sky, and forest. Men and women were the 
 chief objects of her regard, — her genius was more 
 dramatic than idyllic, and lyric first of all. 
 
 The instinct of worship and the religion of human- 
 ity were pervading constituents of Mrs. Browning's 
 nature, and demand no less attention than the love 
 which dictated her most fervent poems. A spiritual 
 trinity, of zeal, love, and worship, presided over her 
 work. If in her outcry against wrong she had noth- 
 ing decisive to suggest, she at least sounded a clarion 
 note for the incitement of her comrades and succes- 
 sors, and this was her mission as a reformer. Re- 
 ligious exaltation breathes through every page of her 
 compositions. Her eulogist aptly called her the Blaise 
 Pascal of women, and said that her books were prayer- 
 books. She had a profound faith in Christian revela- 
 tion, interpreted in its most catholic sense. Her 
 broad humanity and religion, her defence of her sex, 
 her subtile and tender knowledge of the hearts of 
 children, her abnegation, hope, and faith, seemed the 
 apotheosis of womanhood and drew to her the affec- 
 tion of readers in distant lands. She was the most 
 beloved of minstrels and women. Jean Paul said of 
 Herder that he was less a poet than a poem, but in 
 Mrs. Browning the two were blended : she wrote her- 
 self into her works, and I have closely reviewed her 
 experience, because it is inseparable from her lyrical 
 career. The English love to call her Shakespeare's 
 Daughter, and in truth she bears to their greatest 
 poet the relation of Miranda to Prospero. Her deli- 
 cate genius was purely feminine and subjective, attri- 
 butes that are made to go together. Most introspective 
 poetry, in spite of Sidney's injunction, wearies us. 
 
 Her symfia- 
 
 thetic and 
 
 religious 
 
 nature. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A mer- 
 ica " .• // 
 123-128. 
 
 The tnost 
 beloved of 
 pods. 
 
 Subjecihie 
 quality of 
 her genius.
 
 I4S 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 0/ Amer- 
 ica " : p. 
 146. 
 
 Her repre- 
 sentative 
 position. 
 
 Belief in 
 inspiration. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A mer- 
 ica " .■ p. 
 129. 
 
 Her exalta- 
 tion and 
 rapture. 
 
 because it so often is the petty or morbid sentiment 
 of natures little superior to our own. Men have more 
 conceit, with less tact, than women, and, as a rule, 
 when male poets write objectively they are on the 
 safer side. But when an impassioned woman, yearn- 
 ing to let the world share her poetic rapture or grief, 
 reveals the secrets of her burning heart, generations 
 adore her, literature is enriched, and grosser beings 
 have glimpses of a purity with which we invest our 
 conceptions of disenthralled spirits in some ideal 
 sphere. 
 
 I therefore regard Mrs. Browning as the representa- 
 tive of her sex in the Victorian era, and a luminous 
 example of the fact that " woman is not undeveloped 
 man, but diverse " ; as the passion-flower of the cen- 
 tury ; the conscious medium of some power beyond 
 the veil. For, if she was wanting in reverence for 
 the form and body of the poet's art, she more than 
 all her tuneful brethren revered the poet's inspiration. 
 To her poets were 
 
 " the only truth-tellers now left to God ; 
 The only speakers of essential truth, 
 Opposed to relative, comparative, 
 And temporal truths ; the only holders by 
 His sun-skirts." 
 
 And this in a period when technical refinement ' has 
 caused the mass of verse-makers to forget that art 
 is vital chiefly as a means of expression. Like her 
 Hebrew poets, she was obedient " to the heavenly 
 vision," and I think that the form of her religion, 
 which was in sympathy with the teachings of Emanuel 
 Swedenborg, enables us clearly to understand her 
 genius and works. I have no doubt that she surren- 
 dered herself to the play of her imagination, as if
 
 DEATH OF THE SIBYL. 
 
 149 
 
 some angelic voice were speaking through her, — and 
 of what other modern poet can this be said ? With 
 equal powers of expression, such a faith exalts the 
 bard to an apocalyptic prophet, — to the consecrated 
 interpreter, of whom Plato said in " Ion," " A poet 
 is a thing light, with wings, and unable to compose 
 poetry until he becomes inspired and is out of his 
 sober senses, and his imagination is no longer under 
 his control ; for he does not compose by art, but 
 through a divine power." 
 
 At the close of the first summer month of 186 1, a 
 memorable year for Italy, the land of song was free, 
 united, once more a queen among the nations ; but 
 the voice of its sweetest singer was hushed, the golden 
 harp was broken ; the sibylline minstrel lay dying in 
 the City of Flowers. She was at the last, as ever, 
 the enraptured seer of celestial visions. Some efflux 
 of imperishable glory passed before her eyes, and she 
 said that it was beautiful. It seemed, to those around 
 her, as if she died beholding 
 
 " in jasper-stone as clear as glass, 
 The first foundation-s of that new, near Day 
 Which should be builded out of Heaven to God." 
 
 Died in 
 Florence, 
 yum 29, 
 1861.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Alfred 
 Tennyson^ 
 Poet-Lau- 
 reate : born 
 at So}nerby, 
 Lincoln- 
 shire, A ug. 
 5, 1809. 
 
 Laiu of 
 change in 
 public taste. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A mer- 
 ica " ; pp. 
 •39. 273- 
 
 A case in 
 point. 
 
 THAT a new king should arise " over Egypt, which 
 knew not Joseph," was but the natural order 
 of events. The wonder is that nothing less than the 
 death of one Pharaoh, and the succession of another, 
 could oust a favorite from his position. Statesman 
 or author, that public man is fortunate who does not 
 find himself subjected to the neglectful caprices of his 
 own generation, after some time be past and the dura- 
 tion of his influence unusually prolonged. There is 
 a law founded in our dread of monotony, in that 
 weariness of soul which we call ennui, — the spiritual 
 counterpart of a loathing which even the manna that 
 fell from heaven at last bred in the Israelites : a law 
 that affects, as surely as death, statesmen, moralists, 
 heroes, — and equally the renowned artist or poet. 
 The law is Nature's own, and man's perception of it 
 is the true apology for each fashion as it flies. But 
 Nature, with all her changes, is secure in certain 
 noble, recurrent types ; and so there are elevated 
 modes of art, to which we sometimes not unwillingly 
 bid farewell, knowing that after a time they will re- 
 turn, and be welcome again and forever. 
 
 At present we have only to observe the working of 
 this law with respect to the acknowledged leader, by
 
 LA W OF, CHANGE IN PUBLIC TASTE. 
 
 151 
 
 influence and laurelled rank, of the Victorian poetic 
 hierarchy. He, too, has verified in his recent experi- 
 ence the statement that, as admired poets advance in 
 years, the people and the critics begin to mistrust the 
 quality of their genius, are disposed to revise the laud- 
 atory judgments formerly pronounced upon them, and, 
 finally, to claim that they have been overrated, and are 
 not men of high reach. Such is the result of that long 
 familiarity whereby a singer's audience becomes some- 
 what weary of his notes, and it is exaggerated in 
 direct ratio with the potency of the influence against 
 which a revolt is made. In fact, the grander the 
 success the more trying the reaction. It is what the 
 ancients meant by the envy of the gods, unto which 
 too fortunate men were greatly subjected. Alternate 
 periods of favor and rejection not only follow one 
 another in cycles, by generations, or by centuries 
 even ; but the individual artist, during a long career, 
 will find himself tested by minor perturbations of the 
 same kind, varying with his successive achievements, 
 and the varying conditions of atmosphere and time. 
 
 The influence of Alfred Tennyson has been almost 
 unprecedentedly dominant, fascinating, extended, yet of 
 late has somewhat vexed the public mind. Its repose- 
 ful charm has given it a more secure hold upon our 
 affections than is usual in this era, whose changes 
 are the more incessant because so much more is 
 crowded into a few years than of old. Even of this 
 serene beauty we are wearied ; a murmur arises ; re- 
 bellion has broken out ; the Laureate is irreverently 
 criticised, suspected, no longer worshipped as a demi- 
 god. Either because he is not a demi-god, or that 
 through long security he has lost the power to take 
 the buffets and rewards of fortune "with equal 
 
 Recent 
 strictures.
 
 152 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 "TJl£ 
 
 Flower." 
 
 OJ/ice of ike 
 critic. 
 
 thanks," he does not move entirely contented within 
 the shadow that for the hour has crossed his tri- 
 umphal path. A little poem, "The Flower," is the 
 expression of a genuine grievance : his plant, at first 
 novel and despised, grew into a superb flower of art, 
 was everywhere glorious and accepted, yet now is 
 again pronounced a weed because the seed is com- 
 mon, and men weary of a beauty too familiar. The 
 petulance of these stanzas reveals a less edifying mat- 
 ter, to wit, the failure of their author in submission 
 to the inevitable, the lack of a philosophy which he 
 is not slow to recommend to his fellows. If he verily 
 hears "the roll of the ages," as he has declared in 
 his answer to "A Spiteful Letter," why then so rest- 
 ive ? Why not recognize, even in his own case, the 
 benignity of a law which, as Cicero said of death, 
 must be a blessing because it is universal.-' He him- 
 self has taught us, in the wisest language of our time, 
 
 that 
 
 "God fulfils himself in many ways, 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 
 
 No change, no progress. Better to decline, if need 
 be, upon some inferior grade, that all methods may 
 be tested. Ultimately, disgust of the false will bring 
 a reaction to something as good as the best which 
 has been known before. 
 
 Last of all, the world's true and enduring verdict. 
 In calmer moments the Laureate must needs reflect 
 that a future age will look back, measure him as he 
 is, and compare his works with those of his contem- 
 poraries. To forestall, as far as may be, this stead- 
 fast judgment of posterity, is the aim and serAdce of 
 the critic. Let us separate ourselves from the adu- 
 lation and envy of the moment, and search for the
 
 HE REPRESENTS HIS PERIOD. 
 
 153 
 
 true relation of Tennyson to his era, — estimating his 
 poetry, not by our appetite for it, but by its inherent 
 quahty, and its lasting value in the progress of British 
 
 song. 
 
 There have been few comprehensive reviews of 
 Tennyson's poetical career. The artistic excellence 
 of his work has been, from the first, so distinguished 
 that lay critics are often at a loss how to estimate 
 this poet. We have had admirable homilies upon 
 the spirit of his teachings, the scope and nature of 
 his imagination, his idyllic quality, — his landscape, 
 characters, language, Anglicanism, — but nothing ade- 
 quately setting forth his technical superiority. I am 
 aware that professional criticism is apt to be unduly 
 technical ; to neglect the soul, in its concern for the 
 body, of art. My present effort is to consider both ; 
 nevertheless, with relation to Tennyson, above all 
 other modern poets, how little can be embraced within 
 the limits of an essay ! The specialist-reviewer has 
 the advantage of being thorough as far as he goes. 
 All I can hope is to leave no important point un- 
 touched, though my reference to it may be restricted 
 to a single phrase. 
 
 II. 
 
 It seems to me that the only just estimate of Ten- 
 nyson's position is that which declares him to be, 
 by eminence, the representative poet of the recent 
 era. Not, like one or another of his compeers, repre- 
 sentative of the melody, wisdom, passion, or other 
 partial phase of the era, but of the time itself, with its 
 diverse elements in harmonious conjunction. Years 
 have strengthened my belief that a future age will 
 
 Dual nature 
 of art. 
 
 Tennyson 
 represents 
 his era.
 
 154 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 E. A. Poe's 
 esiay on 
 " T/te Poetic 
 Principle." 
 
 regard him, independently of his merits, as bearing 
 this relation to his period. In his verse he is as 
 truly " the glass of fashion and the mould of form " 
 of the Victorian generation in the nineteenth century 
 as Spenser was of the Elizabethan court, Milton of 
 the Protectorate, Pope of the reign of Queen Anne. 
 During his supremacy there have been few great 
 leaders, at the head of different schools, such as be- 
 longed to the time of Byron, Wordsworth, and Keats. 
 His poetry has gathered all the elements which find 
 vital expression in the complex modern art. 
 
 Has the influence of Tennyson made the recent 
 British school, or has his genius itself been modified 
 and guided by the period ? It is the old question of 
 the river and the valley. The two have taken shape 
 together ; yet the beauty of Tennyson's verse was so 
 potent from the first, and has so increased in potency, 
 that we must pronounce him an independent genius, 
 certainly more than the mere creature of his sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 Years ago, when he was yet comparatively unknown, 
 an American poet, himself finely gifted with the lyrical 
 ear, was so impressed by Tennyson's method, that, 
 " in perfect sincerity," he pronounced him " the noblest 
 poet that ever lived." If he had said " the noblest 
 artist," and confined this judgment to lyrists of the 
 English tongue, he possibly would have made no 
 exaggeration. Yet there have been artists with a less 
 conscious manner and a broader style. The Laureate 
 is always aware of what he is doing ; he is his own 
 daimon, — the inspirer and controller of his own 
 utterances. He sings by note no less than by ear, 
 and follows a score of his own inditing. But, ac- 
 knowledging his culture, we have no right to assume
 
 A BORN ARTIST. 
 
 155 
 
 that his ear is not as fine as that of any poet who 
 gives voice with more careless rapture. His aver- 
 age is higher than that of other English masters, 
 though there may be scarcely one who in special 
 flights has not excelled him. By Spencer's law of 
 progress, founded on the distribution of values, his 
 poetry is more eminent than most which has pre- 
 ceded it. 
 
 I have inferred that the very success of Tennyson's 
 art has made it common in our eyes, and rendered 
 us incapable of fairly judging it. When a poet has 
 length of days, and sees his language a familiar por- 
 tion of men's thoughts, he no longer can attract that 
 romantic interest with which the world regards a 
 genius freshly brought to hearing. Men forget that 
 he, too, was once new, unhackneyed, appetizing. But 
 recall the youth of Tennyson, and see how complete 
 the revolution with which he has, at least, been coeval, 
 and how distinct his music then seemed from every- 
 thing which had gone before. 
 
 He began as a metrical artist, pure and simple, 
 and with a feeling perfectly unique, — at a long re- 
 move, even, from that of so absolute an artist as was 
 John Keats. He had very little notion beyond the 
 production of rhythm, melody, color, and other poetic 
 effects. Instinct led him to construct his machinery 
 before essaying to build. Many have discerned, in 
 his youthful pieces, the influence of Wordsworth and 
 Keats, but no less that of the Italian poets, and of 
 the early English balladists. I shall hereafter revert 
 to " Oriana," " Mariana," and " The Lady of Shalott," 
 as work that in its kind is fully up to the best of 
 those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrest of devel- 
 opment, stop precisely where Tennyson made his 
 
 Hindrancei 
 to correct 
 apprecia- 
 tion. 
 
 A bom 
 artist. 
 
 The Pre- 
 Raphixelites.
 
 156 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 His early 
 study of 
 details 
 
 Poetry chief 
 of the fine 
 arts. 
 
 second step forward, and censure him for having gone 
 beyond them. 
 
 Meaningless as are the opening melodies of his col- 
 lected verse, how delicious they once seemed, as a 
 change from even the greatest productions which then 
 held the public ear. Here was something of a new 
 kind ! The charm was legitimate. Tennyson's im- 
 mediate predecessors were so fully occupied with the 
 mass of a composition that they slighted details : 
 what beauty they displayed was not of the parts, but 
 of the whole. Now, in all arts, the natural advance 
 is from detail to general effect. How seldom those 
 who begin with a broad treatment, which apes ma- 
 turity, acquire subsequently the minor graces that 
 alone can finish the perfect work ! By comparison 
 of the late and early writings of great English poets, 
 — Shakespeare and Milton, — one observes the pro- 
 cess of healthful growth. Tennyson proved his kin- 
 dred genius by this instinctive study of details in his 
 immature verses. In marked contrast to his fellows, 
 and to every predecessor but Keats, — " that strong, 
 excepted soul," — he seemed to perceive from the 
 outset, that Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine arts : 
 the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach 
 true excellence; that it has its technical secrets, its 
 mysterious lowly paths that reach to aerial outlooks, 
 and this no less than sculpture, painting, music, 
 or architecture, but even more. He devoted himself, 
 with the eager spirit of youth, to mastering this ex- 
 quisite art, and wreaked his thoughts upon expres- 
 sion, for the expression's sake. And what else should 
 one attempt, with small experiences, little concern 
 for the real world, and less observation of it .-• He 
 had dreams rather than thoughts ; but was at the
 
 A TRANSITION PERIOD. 
 
 157 
 
 most sensitive period of life with regard to rhythm, 
 color, and form. In youth feeling is indeed " deeper 
 than all thought," and responds divinely to every 
 sensuous confrontment with the presence of beauty. 
 
 It is difficult now to realize how chaotic was the 
 notion of art among English verse-makers at the be- 
 ginning of Tennyson's career. Not even the example 
 of Keats had taught the needful lesson, and I look 
 upon his successor's early efforts as of no small 
 importance. These were dreamy experiments in metre 
 and word-painting, and spontaneous after their kind. 
 Readers sought not to analyze their meaning and 
 grace. The significance of art has since become so 
 well understood, and such results have been attained, 
 that " Claribel," " Lilian," " The Merman," " The Dy- 
 ing Swan," " The Owl," etc., seem slight enough to 
 us now ; and even then the affectation pervading 
 them, which was merely the error of a poetic soul 
 groping for its true form of expression, repelled men 
 of severe and established tastes ; but to the neophyte 
 they had the charm of sighing winds and babbling 
 waters, a wonder of luxury and weirdness, inexpres- 
 sible, not to be effaced. How we lay on the grass, in 
 June, and softly read them from the white page ! 
 To this day what lyrics better hold their own than 
 " Mariana " and the " Recollections of the Arabian 
 Nights." In these pieces, however, as in the crude 
 yet picturesque " Ode to Memory," the poet exhibited 
 some distinctness of theme and motive, and, in a 
 word, seemed to feel that he had something to ex- 
 press, if it were but the arabesque shadows of his 
 fancy-laden dreams. Of a mass of lyrics, sonnets, 
 and other metrical essays, published theretofore, — 
 some contained in the Poems by Two Brothers, and 
 
 A transition- 
 period, 
 1820- 1830. 
 
 Cliartn 0/ 
 TennysojC s 
 early lyrics. 
 
 " Pocfits, 
 chiefly 
 Lyrical,'" 
 1830. 
 
 "Poems by 
 Two Broth- 
 ers,^' 1827.
 
 158 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 "Poems," 
 
 1832-33. 
 
 Sudden and 
 delightful 
 poetic 
 growth. 
 
 A n expres- 
 sion 0/ the 
 beaiiti/til. 
 
 Others in the original vokune of 1830, — I say noth- 
 ing, for they show little of the purpose that charac- 
 terizes the few early pieces which our poet himself 
 retains in his collected works. One of them, " Hero 
 and Leander," is too good in its way to be discarded \ 
 the greater number are juvenile, often imitative, and 
 the excellent judgment of Tennyson is shown by his 
 rejection of all that have no true position in his 
 lyrical rise and progress. 
 
 The volume of 1832, which began with "The Lady 
 of Shalott," and contained " Eleanore," " Margaret," 
 " The Miller's Daughter," " The Palace of Art," " The 
 May Queen," " Fatima," "The Lotos-Eaters," and 
 " A Dream of Fair Women," was published in his 
 twenty-second year. All in all, a more original and 
 beautiful volume of minor poetry never was added 
 to our literature. The Tennysonian manner here was 
 clearly developed, largely pruned of mannerisms. 
 The command of delicious metres ; the rhythmic su- 
 surrus of stanzas whose every word is as needful and 
 studied as the flower or scroll of ornamental archi- 
 tecture, — yet so much an interlaced portion of the 
 whole, that the special device is forgotten in the 
 general excellence ; the effect of color, of that music 
 which is a passion in itself, of the scenic pictures 
 which are the counterparts of changeful emotions ; 
 all are here, and the poet's work is the epitome of 
 every mode in art. Even if these lyrics and idyls had 
 expressed nothing, they were of priceless value as 
 guides to the renaissance of beauty. Thenceforward 
 slovenly work was impossible, subject to instant re- 
 buke by contrast. The force of metrical elegance 
 made its way and carried everything before it. From 
 this day Tennyson confessedly took his place at the
 
 THE VOLUME OF 1832. 
 
 159 
 
 head of what some attempt to classify as the art- 
 school : that is, of poets who largely produce their 
 effect by harmonizing scenery and detail with the 
 emotions or impassioned action of their verse. 
 
 The tendency of his genius was revealed in this 
 volume. The author plainly was a college-man, a 
 student of many literatures, and, though an English- 
 man to the core, alive to suggestions from Italian 
 and Grecian sources. His Gothic feeling was mani- 
 fest in "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Sisters"; 
 his classicism in " Qinone " ; his idyllic method, es- 
 pecially, now defined itself, making the scenery of a 
 poem enhance the central idea, — thought and land- 
 scape being so blended that it was difficult to deter- 
 mine which suggested the other. 
 
 I shall elsewhere examine with some care the rela- 
 tions between Tennyson and Theocritus, and the gen- 
 eral likeness of the Victorian to the Alexandrian 
 period, and at present need not enter upon this spe- 
 cial ground. Enough to say that the Greek influence 
 is visible in many portions of the volume of 1832, 
 sometimes through almost literal translations of clas- 
 sical passages. " CEnone," modelled upon the new- 
 Doric verse, ranks with " Lycidas " as an Hellenic 
 study. While this most chaste and beautiful poem 
 fascinated every reader, the wisest criticism found 
 more of genuine worth in the purely English quality 
 of those limpid pieces in which the melody of the 
 lyric is wedded to the sentiment and picture of the 
 idyl, — "The Miller's Daughter," "The May Queen," 
 and " Lady Clara Vere de Vere." More dewy, fresh, 
 pathetic, native verse had not been written since the 
 era of "As You Like It" and "A Winter's Tale." 
 During ten years this book accomplished its auspi- 
 
 The"art- 
 sckool." 
 
 Tendency 
 
 o/tliepoeVs 
 
 genius. 
 
 See Chapter 
 VI. 
 
 Classicism. 
 
 Purely Eng- 
 lish idyls.
 
 i6o 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 "Poems," 
 1S42. 
 
 A treasury 
 0/ represetit- 
 ative poems. 
 
 Blank-verse. 
 
 Previous 
 styles. 
 
 cious work, until the authors fame and influence had 
 so extended that he was encouraged to print the vol- 
 ume of 1842, wherein he first gave the name of idyls 
 to poems of the class that has brought him a distinc- 
 tive reputation. 
 
 At the present day, were this volume to be lost, 
 we possibly should be deprived of a larger specific 
 variety of Tennyson's most admired poems than is 
 contained in any other of his successive ventures. It 
 is an assortment of representative poems. To an art 
 more restrained and natural we here find wedded a 
 living soul. The poet has convictions : he is not a 
 pupil, but a master, and reaches intellectual greatness. 
 His verses still bewitch youths and artists by their 
 sentiments and beauty, but their thought takes hold of 
 thinkers and men of the world. He has learned not 
 only that art, when followed for its own sake, is al- 
 luring, but that, when used as a means of expressing 
 what cannot otherwise be quite revealed, it becomes 
 seraphic. We could spare, rather than this collection, 
 much which he has since given us : possibly " Maud," 
 — without doubt, idyls like "The Golden Supper" and 
 "Aylmer's Field." Look at the material structure of 
 the poetry. Here, at last, we observe the ripening 
 of that blank-verse which had been suggested in the 
 "CEnone." Consider Tennyson's handling of this 
 measure, — the domino of a poetaster, the state gar- 
 ment of a lofty poet. It must be owned that he now 
 enriched it by a style entirely his own, and as well- 
 defined as those already established. Foremost of 
 the latter was the Elizabethan, marked by freedom 
 and power, and liever excelled for dramatic compo- 
 sition. Next, the Miltonic or Anglo-Epic, with its 
 sonorous grandeur and stately Roman syntax, of which
 
 THE VOLUME OF 1842. 
 
 161 
 
 "Paradise Lost" is the masterpiece, and "Hyperion" 
 the finest specimen in modern times. That it really 
 has no place in our usage is proved by the fact that 
 Keats, with true insight, refused, after some experi- 
 ence, to complete " Hyperion," on the ground that 
 it had too many " Miltonic inversions." Meanwhile 
 blank-verse had been used for less imaginative or less 
 heroical work ; notably, for didactic and moralizing 
 essays, by Cowper, Wordsworth, and other leaders of 
 the contemplative school. 
 
 Tennyson's is of two kinds, one of which is suited 
 to the heroic episodes in his idyllic poetry, — the first 
 important example being the " Morte d'Arthur," which 
 opened the volume of 1842, and is now made a por- 
 tion of the "Idyls of the King." I hold the verse of 
 that poem to be his own invention, derived from the 
 study of Homer and his natural mastery of the Saxon 
 element in our language. Milton's Latinism is so 
 pronounced as to be un-English ; on the other hand, 
 there is such affinity between the simple strength of 
 the Homeric Greek and that of the English in which 
 Saxon words prevail, that the former can be rendered 
 into the latter with great effect. Tennyson recognizes 
 this in his prelude to "Morte d'Arthur," deprecating 
 his heroics as "faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth." 
 But almost with the perusal of the first two lines, 
 
 " So all day long the noise of battle roll'd 
 Among the mountains by the winter sea," 
 
 we see that this style surpasses other blank-verse in 
 strength and condensation. It soon became the 
 model for a score of younger aspirants ; in short, 
 impressed itself upon the artistic mind as a new and 
 vigorous form of our grandest English measure. 
 
 K 
 
 Cp. "Poets 
 0/ A tner- 
 ica": pp. 
 79. 87, 374- 
 
 Origittality 
 and perfec- 
 tion of Ten- 
 nyson^! 
 blank-verse. 
 
 " Morte 
 d'Arthur:' 
 
 Hoyneric 
 and Saxon 
 qualities.
 
 1 62 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Tfie Victo- 
 rian idyllic 
 verse. 
 
 Crabbe. 
 
 "Dora." 
 
 "Godiva." 
 
 " The Gar- 
 
 dener''s 
 
 Dattghter." 
 
 'Ulysses." 
 
 Comprehen- 
 sive range 
 of "English 
 Idyls and 
 Other 
 Poems." 
 
 " The Talk- 
 ing Oak." 
 
 The other style of Tennyson's blank-verse is found 
 in his purely idyllic pieces, — "The Gardener's Daugh- 
 ter," " Dora," " Godiva," and, upon a lower plane, 
 such eclogues as " Audley Court " and " Edwin Mor- 
 ris." " St. Simeon Stylites " and " Ulysses " have each 
 a special manner. In the first-named group, the poet 
 brought to completeness the Victorian idyllic verse. 
 The three are models from which he could not ad- 
 vance : in surpassing beauty and naturalness une- 
 qualled, I say, by many of his later efforts. What 
 Crabbe essayed in a homely fashion, now, at the 
 touch of a finer artist, became the perfection of rural, 
 idyllic tenderness. " Dora " is like a Hebrew pasto- 
 ral, the paragon of its kind, with not a quotable de- 
 tail, a line too much or too little, but faultless as a 
 whole. Who can read it without tears .'' " Godiva " 
 and " The Gardener's Daughter " demand no less 
 praise for descriptive felicity of another kind. But, 
 for virile grandeur and astonishingly compact expres- 
 sion, there is no blank-verse poem, equally restricted 
 as to length, that approaches the " Ulysses " : concep- 
 tion, imagery, and thought are royally imaginative, 
 and the assured hand is Tennyson's throughout. 
 
 I reserve for later discussion the poet's general 
 characteristics, fairly displayed in this volume. The 
 great feature is its comprehensive range; it includes 
 a finished specimen of every kind of poetry within 
 the author's power to essay. The variety is surpris- 
 ing, and the novelty was no less so at the date of 
 its appearance. Here is "The Talking Oak," that 
 marvel of grace and fancy, the nonpareil of sustained 
 lyrics in quatrain verse ; as exquisite in filigree-work 
 as "The Rape of the Lock," with an airy beauty and 
 rippling flow, compared with which the motion of
 
 'ENGLISH IDYLS AND OTHER POEMS: 
 
 163 
 
 Pope's couplets is that of partners in an eighteenth- 
 century minuet. Here is the modern lover reciting 
 "Locksley Hall," which, despite its sentimental ego- 
 tism and consolation of the heart by the head, has 
 fine metrical quality, is fixed in literature, and fur- 
 nishes genuine illustrations of the poet's time. In 
 "The Two Voices" and "The Vision of Sin" the 
 excess of his speculative intellect makes itself felt: 
 but the second of these seems to me a strained and 
 fantastic production ; for which very reason, perchance, 
 it drew the attention of semi-metaphysical persons 
 who have no perception of the true mission of poetry, 
 and, by a certain affectation, mistaken for subtilty, 
 has excited more comment and analysis than it de- 
 serves. " The Day-Dream," like " The Talking Oak," 
 gives the poet an opportunity for dying falls, melliflu- 
 ous cadences, and delicately fanciful pictures. The 
 story is made to his hand ; he rarely invents a story, 
 though often, as in the last-named poem, chancing 
 upon the conceit of a dainty and original theme. 
 Here, too, are " Lady Clare," " The Lord of Bur- 
 leigh," and " Edward Gray," each a simple, crystal- 
 line, and flawless ballad. Nor has Tennyson ever 
 composed, in his minor key, more enduring and sug- 
 gestive little songs than " Break, break, break ! " and 
 f"Flow down, cold Rivulet, to the Sea!" both, also, in 
 this volume. His humor, which seldom becomes him, 
 is at its best in that half pensive, half-rollicking, 
 wholly poetic composition, dear to wits and dreamers, 
 " Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue." In this col- 
 lection, too, we find his early experiments in the now 
 famous measure of " In Memoriam." Purest and 
 highest of all the lyrical pieces are " St. Agnes " and 
 " Sir Galahad," full of white light, and each a stain- 
 
 ^^ Locksley 
 Hall." 
 
 " The Two 
 Voices." 
 
 " T/ie Vision 
 ofSiti." 
 
 " The Day- 
 Dream." 
 
 Ballads. 
 
 Songs. 
 
 Tlie" lyr- 
 ical Mono- 
 logue." 
 
 "St. 
 
 Agnes " atiA 
 " Sir Gala- 
 had."
 
 164 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 A composite 
 and influen- 
 tial voiutne. 
 
 Climacterics 
 in art. 
 
 " The 
 
 Princess : a 
 Medley" 
 1847. 
 
 A romantic 
 lomposition. 
 
 less idealization of its theme. " Sir Galahad " must 
 be recited by a clarion voice, ere one can fully appre- 
 ciate the sounding melody, the knightly, heroic ring. 
 The poet has never chanted a more ennobling strain. 
 
 Such is the excellence, and such the unusual range 
 of a volume in which every department of poetry, 
 except the dramatic, is exhibited in great perfection, 
 if not at the most imaginative height. To the au- 
 thor's students it is a favorite among his books, as 
 the one that fairly represents his composite genius. 
 It powerfully affected the rising group of poets, giv- 
 ing their work a tendency which established its gen- 
 eral character for the ensuing thirty years. 
 
 There comes a time in the life of every aspiring 
 artist, when, if he be a painter, he tires of painting 
 cabinet-pictures, — however much they satisfy his ad- 
 mirers ; if a poet, he says to himself : " Enough of 
 lyrics and idyls ; let me essay a masterpiece, a sus- 
 tained production, that shall bear to my former work 
 the relation which an opera or oratorio bears to a 
 composer's sonatas and canzonets." It may be that 
 some feeling of this kind impelled Tennyson to write 
 The Princess, the theme and story of which are both 
 his own invention. At that time he had not learned 
 the truth of Emerson's maxim that " Tradition sup- 
 plies a better fable than any invention can " ; and 
 that it is as well for a poet to borrow from history 
 or romance a tale made ready to his hands, and 
 which his genius must transfigure. The poem is, as 
 he entitled it, " A Medley," constructed of ancient 
 and modern materials, — a show of mediceval pomp 
 and movement, observed through an atmosphere of 
 latter-day thought and emotion ; so varying, withal, 
 in the scenes and language of its successive parts.
 
 'THE princess: 
 
 165 
 
 that one may well conceive it to be told by the group 
 of thoroughbred men and maidens who, one after 
 another, rehearse its cantos to beguile a festive sum- 
 mer's day. I do not symjDathize with the criticisms 
 to which it has been subjected upon this score, and 
 which is but the old outcry of the French classicists 
 against Victor Hugo and the romance school. The 
 poet, in his prelude, anticipates every stricture, and 
 to me the anachronisms and impossibilities of the 
 story seem not only lawful, but attractive. Like those 
 of Shakespeare's comedies, they invite the reader 
 off-hand to a purely ideal world ; he seats himself 
 upon an English lawn, as upon a Persian enchanted 
 carpet, — hears the mystic word pronounced, and, 
 presto ! finds himself in fairy-land. Moreover, Ten- 
 nyson's special gift of reducing incongruous details 
 to a common structure and tone is fully illustrated 
 in a poem made 
 
 " to suit with Time and place, 
 A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, 
 A talk of college and of ladies' rights, 
 A feudal knight in silken masquerade. 
 
 This were a medley ! we should have him back 
 Who told the ' Winter's Tale ' to do it for us." 
 
 But not often has a lovelier story been recited. After 
 the idyllic introduction, the body of the poem is 
 composed in a semi-heroic verse. Other works of our 
 poet are greater, but none is so fascinating as this 
 romantic tale : English throughout, yet combining the 
 England of Coeur de Leon with that of Victoria in 
 one bewitching picture. Some of the author's most 
 delicately musical lines — " jewels five words long " 
 
 The Prel- 
 tule.
 
 i66 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Epic swift- 
 ness of 
 ttzoventcnt. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica " .• /. 
 88. 
 
 A notable 
 group of 
 lyrics. 
 
 Isometric 
 songs. 
 
 — are herein contained, and the ending of each canto 
 is an effective piece of art. 
 
 The tournament scene, at the close of the fifth 
 book, is the most vehement and rapid passage to be 
 found in the whole range of Tennyson's poetry. By 
 an approach to the Homeric swiftness, it presents a 
 contrast to the laborious and faulty movement of 
 much of his narrative verse. The songs, added in 
 the second edition of this poem, reach the high-water 
 mark of lyrical composition. Few will deny that, 
 taken together, the five melodies : " As through the 
 land," " Sweet and low," " The splendor falls on 
 castle walls," " Home they brought her warrior dead," 
 and " Ask me no more ! " — that these constitute the 
 finest group of songs produced in our century ; and 
 the third, known as the " Bugle Song," seems to many 
 the most perfect English lyric since the time of Shake- 
 speare. In " The Princess " we also find Tennyson's 
 most successful studies upon the model of the The- 
 ocritan isometric verse. He was the first to enrich 
 our poetry with this class of melodies, for the bur- 
 lesque pastorals of the eighteenth century need not 
 be considered. Not one of the blank-verse songs in 
 his Arthurian epic equals in structure or feeling the 
 " Tears, idle tears," and " O swallow, swallow, flying, 
 flying south ! " Again, what witchery of landscape 
 and action ; what fair women and brave men, who, 
 if they be somewhat stagy and traditional, at least 
 are more sharply defined than the actors in our poet's 
 other romances ! Besides, " The Princess " has a dis- 
 tinct purpose, — the illustration of woman's struggles, 
 aspirations, and proper sphere ; and the conclusion 
 is one wherewith the instincts of cultured people are 
 so thoroughly in accord, that some are used to an-
 
 HIS INTELLECTUAL GROWTH. 
 
 167 
 
 swer, when asked to present their view of the " wo- 
 man question," " You will find it at the close of 
 ' The Princess.' " Those who disagree with Tenny- 
 son's presentation acknowledge that if it be not true 
 it is well told. His Ida is, in truth, a beautiful and 
 heroic figure : — 
 
 ) " She bow'd as if to veil a noble tear. 
 
 Not peace she looked, the Head : but rising up 
 Robed in the long night of her deep hair, so 
 To the open window moved. 
 
 She stretched her arms and call'd 
 Across the tumult and the tumult fell." 
 
 Of the author's shortcomings in this and other poems 
 we have to speak hereafter. I leave " The Princess," 
 deeming it the most varied and interesting of his 
 works with respect to freshness and invention. All 
 mankind love a story-teller such as Tennyson, by this 
 creation, proved himself to be. 
 
 In the youth of poets it is the material value of 
 their work that makes it precious, and for certain 
 gifts of language and color we esteem one more 
 highly than another. When a sweet singer dies pre- 
 maturely, we lament his loss ; but in a poet's later 
 years character and intellect begin to tell. His other 
 gifts being equal, he who has the more vigorous mind 
 will draw ahead of his fellows, and take the front 
 position. Tennyson, like Browning and Arnold, has 
 that which Keats was bereft of, and which Wordsworth, 
 Landor, and Procter possessed in full measure, — the 
 gift of years, and must be judged according to his 
 fortune. In mental ability he comes near to the 
 greatest of the five, and in synthetic grasp surpasses 
 them* all. Arnold's thought is wholly included m 
 
 IVoman's 
 Rights. 
 
 Tennysofi' s 
 intellectual 
 growth and 
 advantage.
 
 1 68 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 The prittu 
 
 of life. 
 
 " In Menio- 
 riatn" 1850. 
 
 His tnost 
 unique and 
 distinctive 
 production. 
 
 Elegiac 
 master- 
 fieces. 
 
 This poem 
 the greatest 
 0/ tliem all. 
 
 Tennyson ; if you miss Browning's psychology, you 
 find a more varied analysis, qualified by wise restraint. 
 His intellectual growth has steadily progressed, and 
 is reflected in the nature of his successive poems. 
 
 At the age of forty a man, blessed with a sound 
 mind in a sound bod}^, should reach the maturity of 
 his intellectual power. At such a period Tennyson 
 produced In Memoriam, his most characteristic and 
 significant work : not so ambitious as his epic of 
 King Arthur, but more distinctively a poem of this 
 century, and displaying the author's genius in a sub- 
 jective form. In it are concentrated his wisest re- 
 flections upon life, death, and immortality, the worlds 
 within and without, while the whole song is so largely 
 uttered, and so joervaded with the singer's manner, 
 that any isolated line is recognized at once. This 
 work stands by itself : none can essay another upon 
 its model, without yielding every claim to personality 
 and at the risk of an inferiority that would be ap- 
 palling. The strength of Tennyson's intellect has full 
 sweep in this elegiac poem, — the great threnody of 
 our language, by virtue of unique conception and 
 power. " Lycidas," with its primrose beauty and 
 varied lofty flights, is but the extension of a theme 
 set by Moschus and Bion. Shelley, in " Adonais," 
 despite his spiritual ecstasy and splendor of lament, 
 followed the same masters, — yes, and took his land- 
 scape and imagery from distant climes. Swinburne's 
 dirge for Baudelaire is a wonder of melody ; nor do 
 we forget the " Thyrsis " of Arnold, and other modern 
 ventures in a direction where the sweet and absolute 
 solemnity of the Saxon tongue is most apparent. 
 Still, as an original and intellectual production, " la 
 Memoriam " is beyond them all : and a more im'por-
 
 'IN memoriam: 
 
 169 
 
 tant, though possibly no more enduring, creation of 
 rhythmic art. 
 
 The metrical form of this work deserves attention. 
 The author's choice of the transposed-quatrain verse 
 was a piece of good fortune. Its hymnal quality, 
 finely exemplified in the opening prayer, is always 
 impressive, and, although a monotone, no more mo- 
 notonous than the sounds of nature, — the murmur 
 of ocean, the soughing of the mountain pines. Were 
 " In Memoriam " written in direct quatrains, I think 
 the effect would grow to be unendurable. The work 
 as a whole is built up of successive lyrics, each ex- 
 pressing a single phase of the poet's sorrow-brooding 
 thought ; and here again is followed the method of 
 nature, which evolves cell after cell, and, joining each 
 to each, constructs the sentient organization. But 
 Tennyson's art-instincts are always perfect ; he does 
 the fitting thing, and rarely seeks through eccentric 
 and curious movements to attract the popular regard. 
 
 As to scenery, imagery, and general treatment, " In 
 Memoriam " is eminently a British poem. The grave, 
 majestic, hymnal measure swells like the peal of an 
 organ, yet acts as a brake on undue spasmodic out- 
 bursts of discordant grief. A steady, yet varying 
 marche funebre ; a sense of passion held in check, of 
 reserved elegiac power. For the strain is ever^'where 
 calm, even in rehearsing a bygone violence of emo- 
 tion, along its passage from woe to desolation, and 
 anon, by tranquil stages, to reverence, thought, aspira- 
 tion, endurance, hope. On sea and shore the ele- 
 ments are calm ; even the wild winds and snows of 
 winter are brought in hand, and made subservient, as 
 the bells ring out the dying year, to the new birth of 
 Nature and the sure purpose of eternal God. 
 8 
 
 Its metrical 
 and stamaic 
 arrange- 
 ment. 
 
 A thorough- 
 ly 7iational 
 poem. 
 
 Rhythmic 
 grandeur 
 and solem- 
 nity.
 
 I/O 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Incorrect 
 estimates. 
 
 Faith and 
 doubt. 
 
 Poetic use 
 of scientific 
 wateriai. 
 
 Critical objections are urged against " In Memo- 
 riam " ; mostly, in my opinion, such as more fitly 
 apply to poems upon a lower grade. It is said to 
 present a confusion of religion and skepticism, an 
 attempt to reconcile faith and knowledge, to blend 
 the feeling of Dante with that of Lucretius ; but, if 
 this be so, the author only follows the example of 
 his generation, and the more faithfully gives voice to 
 its spiritual questionings. Even here he is accused 
 of " idealizing the thoughts of his contemporaries " ; 
 to which we rejoin, in the words of another, " that 
 great writers do not anticipate the thought of their 
 age ; they but anticipate its expression." His scien- 
 tific language and imagery are censured also, but do 
 not his efforts in this direction, tentative as they are, 
 constitute a merit? Failing, as others have failed, to 
 reconcile poetry and metaphysics, he succeeds better 
 in speculations inspired by the revelations of lens 
 and laboratory. Why should not such facts be taken 
 into account? The phenomenal stage of art is pass- 
 ing away, and all things, even poetic diction and 
 metaphor, must endure a change. It is absurd to 
 think that a man like Tennyson will rest content with 
 ignoring or misstating what has become every-day 
 knowledge. The spiritual domain is still the poet's 
 own ; but let his illustrations be derived from living 
 truths, rather than from the worn and ancient fables 
 of the pastoral age. A certain writer declares that 
 Tennyson shows sound sense instead of imaginative 
 power. Not only sense, methinks, but " the sanity 
 of true genius " ; and the Strephon-and-Chloe singers 
 must change their tune, or be left without a hearing. 
 A charge requiring more serious consideration is that 
 the sorrow of " In Memoriam " is but food for thought,
 
 'IN ME MORI am: 
 
 171 
 
 a passion of the head, not of the heart. The poet, 
 however, has reached a philosophical zenith of his 
 life, far above ignoble weakness, and performs the 
 office which an enfranchised spirit might well require 
 of him ; building a mausoleum of immortal verse, — 
 conceiving his friend as no longer dead, but as hav- 
 ing solved the mysteries they so often have discussed 
 together. If there is didacticism in the poem, it is a 
 teaching which leads ad astra, by a path strictly within 
 the province of an elegiac minstrel's song. 
 
 For the rest, " In Memoriam " is a serene and 
 truthful panorama of refined experiences ; filled with 
 pictures of gentle, scholastic life, and of English 
 scenery through all the changes of a rolling year ; 
 expressing, moreover, the thoughts engendered by 
 these changes. When too sombre, it is lightened by 
 sweet reminiscences ; when too light, recalled to grief 
 by stanzas that have the deep solemnity of a passing 
 bell. Among its author's productions it is the one 
 most valued by educated and professional readers. 
 Recently, a number of authors having been asked 
 to name three leading poems of this century which 
 they would most prefer to have written, each gave 
 " In Memoriam " either the first or second place 
 upon his list. Obviously it is not a work to read 
 at a sitting, nor to take up in every mood, but one 
 in which we are sure to find something of worth in 
 every stanza. It contains more notable sayings than 
 any other of Tennyson's poems. The wisdom, yearn- 
 ings, and aspirations of a noble mind are here; curi- 
 ous reasoning, for once, is not out of place; the poet's 
 imagination, shut in upon itself, strives to irradiate 
 with inward light the mystic problems of life. At 
 the close, Nature's eternal miracle is made symbolici 
 
 ll^tsdo?n 
 spiritualized 
 h grief. 
 
 General 
 qiuility of 
 this noble 
 poem. 
 
 Admired by 
 men 0/ let- 
 ters.
 
 1/2 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Poet -Laure- 
 ate of Eng- 
 land, Nov. 
 21, 1850. 
 
 The Wel- 
 lington Ode- 
 
 Forced qual- 
 ity of his 
 occasional 
 pieces. 
 
 of the soul's palingenesis, and the tender and beau- 
 tiful marriage-lay tranquillizes the reader with the 
 thought of the dear common joys which are the heri- 
 tage of every living kind. 
 
 III. 
 
 In the year 1850 Tennyson received the laurel, 
 and almost immediately was called upon by the 
 national sentiment to exercise the functions of his 
 poetic office. The " Ode on the Death of the Duke 
 of Wellington " was the first, and remains the most 
 ambitious, of his patriotic lyrics. This tribute to the 
 " last great Englishman " may fairly be pronounced 
 equal to the occasion ; a respectable performance for 
 Tennyson, a strong one for another poet. None but 
 a great artist could have written it, yet it scarcely 
 is a great poem, and certainly, though Tennyson's 
 most important ode, is not comparable with his pred- 
 ecessor's lofty discourse upon the " Intimations of 
 Immortality." Several passages have become folk- 
 words, such as " O good gray head which all men 
 
 knew ! " and 
 
 " This is England's greatest son, — 
 He that gain'd a hundred fights, 
 Nor ever lost an English gun ! " 
 
 but the ode, upon the whole, is labored, built up of 
 high-sounding lines and refrains after the manner 
 of Dryden, in which rhetoric often is substituted for 
 imagination and richness of thought. 
 
 The Laureate never has been at ease in handling 
 events of the day. To his brooding and essentially 
 poetic nature such matters seem of no more moment, 
 beside the mysteries of eternal beauty and truth,
 
 'MAUD, AND OTHER POEMS: 
 
 173 
 
 than was the noise of catapults and armed men to 
 Archimedes studying out problems during the city's 
 siege. If he succeeds at all with them, it is by 
 sheer will and workmanship. Even then his voice 
 is hollow, and his didacticism, as in " Maud," arti- 
 ficial and insincere. The laurel, and the fame which 
 now had come to him, seemed for a time to bring 
 him more in sympathy with his countrymen, and he 
 made an honest endeavor to rehearse their achieve- 
 ments in his song. The result, seen in the volume 
 Maud, and Other Poems, illustrates what I say. Here 
 are contained his prominent occasional pieces, " The 
 Charge of the Light Brigade," the Wellington ode, 
 and the metrical romance from which the volume 
 takes its name. After several revisions, the Balak- 
 lavan lyric has passed into literature, but ranks 
 below the nobler measures of Drayton and Campbell. 
 " Maud," however, with its strength and weakness, 
 has divided public opinion more than any other of 
 the author's works. I think that his judicious 
 students will not demur to my opinion that it is 
 quite below his other sustained productions ; rather, 
 that it is not sustained at all, but, while replete 
 with beauties, weak and uneven as a whole, — and 
 that this is due to the poet's having gone outside 
 his own nature, and to his surrender of the joy of 
 art, in an effort to produce something that should 
 at once catch the favor of the multitude. " Maud " 
 is scanty in theme, thin in treatment, poor in 
 thought ; but has musical episodes, with much fine 
 scenery and diction. It is a greater medley than 
 "The Princess," shifting from vague speculations to 
 passionate outbreaks, and glorying in one famous 
 and beautiful nocturne, — but all intermixed with 
 
 The volume 
 o/iiss- 
 
 "Maud."
 
 174 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Lyric and 
 
 idyllic 
 
 verse. 
 
 cheap satire, and conspicuous for affectations un- 
 worthy of the poet. The pity of it was that this 
 production appeared when Tennyson suddenly had 
 become fashionable, in England and America, through 
 his accession to the laureate's honors, and for this 
 reason, as well as for its theme and eccentric qual- 
 ities, had a wider reading than his previous works : 
 not only among the masses, to whom the other vol- 
 umes had been sealed books, but among thoughtful 
 people, who now first made the poet's acquaintance 
 and received " Maud " as the foremost example of 
 his style. First impressions are lasting, and to this 
 day Tennyson is deemed, by many of the latter 
 class, an apostle of tinsel and affectation. In our 
 own country especially, his popular reputation began 
 with " Maud," — a work which, for lack of construc- 
 tive beauty, is the opposite of his other narrative 
 poems. 
 
 A pleasing feature of the volume of 1855 was an 
 idyl, " The Brook," which is charmingly finished and 
 contains a swift and rippling inter-lyric delightful to 
 every reader. A winsome, novel stanzaic form, possi- 
 bly of the Laureate's own invention, is to be found 
 in " The Daisy," and in the Horatian lines to his 
 friend Maurice. Here, too, is much of that felicitous 
 word-painting for which he is deservedly renowned : — 
 
 " O Milan, O the chanting quires, 
 The giant windows' blazon'd fires. 
 
 The height, the space, the gloom, the glory ! 
 A mount of marble, a hundred spires ! 
 
 ■ • ■ ■ • 
 
 " How faintly-flush'd, how phantom-fair, 
 Was Monte Rosa, hanging there 
 
 A thousand shadowy-pencill'd valleys 
 And snowy dells in a golden air."
 
 'IDYLS OF THE KING: 
 
 175 
 
 We come at last to Tennyson's master-work, so 
 recently brought to a completion after the labor of 
 twenty years, — during which period the separate 
 Idyls of the King had appeared from time to time. 
 Nave and transept, aisle after aisle, the Gothic min- 
 ster has extended, until, with the addition of a cloister 
 here and a chapel yonder, the structure stands com- 
 plete. I hardly think that the poet at first expected 
 to compose an epic. It has grown insensibly, under 
 the hands of one man who has given it the best 
 years of his life, — but somewhat as Wolf conceived 
 the Homeric poems to have grown, chant by chant, 
 until the time came for the whole to be welded to- 
 gether in heroic form. Yet in other great epics the 
 action rarely ceases, the links are connected, and the 
 movement continues from day to day until the end. 
 Here, we have a series of idyls, — like the tapestr}^- 
 work illustrations of a romance, scene after scene, with 
 much change of actors and emotions, yet all leading 
 to one solemn and tragic close. It is the epic of 
 chivalry, — the Christian ideal of chivalry which we 
 have deduced from a barbaric source, — our concep- 
 tion of what knighthood should be, rather than what 
 it really was ; but so skilfully wrought of high imag- 
 inings, faery spells, fantastic legends, and mediaeval 
 splendors, that the whole work, suffused with the 
 Tennysonian glamour of golden mist, seems like a 
 chronicle illuminated by saintly hands, and often 
 blazes with light like that which flashed from the 
 holy wizard's book when the covers were unclasped. 
 And, indeed, if this be not the greatest narrative- 
 poem since " Paradise Lost," what other English 
 production are you to name in its place ? Never 
 so lofty as the grander portions of Milton's epic, 
 
 " Idyls of 
 tke King" 
 1859-72. 
 
 A n epic of 
 ideal chiv' 
 airy.
 
 1/6 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Malory's 
 "Le Morte 
 Darthur," 
 1485- 
 
 Tennyson a 
 Pre-Raph- 
 aelite in 
 youth. 
 
 His love 0/ 
 tUfgory. 
 
 it is more evenly sustained and has no long prosaic 
 passages ; while " Paradise Lost " is justly declared 
 to be a work of superhuman genius impoverished by 
 dreary wastes of theology. 
 
 Tennyson early struck a vein in the black-letter 
 compilation of Sir Thomas Malory. A tale was 
 already fashioned to his use, from which to derive 
 his legends and exalt them with whatsoever spiritual 
 meanings they might require. The picturesque qual- 
 ities of the old Anglo-Breton romance fascinated his 
 youth, and found lyrical expression in the weird, 
 melodious, Pre-Raphaelite ballad of " The Lady of 
 Shalott." The young poet here attained great ex- 
 cellence in a walk which Rossetti and his pupils 
 have since chosen for their own, and his early 
 studies are on a level with some of their master- 
 pieces. Until recently, they have made success in 
 this direction a special aim, while Tennyson would 
 not be restricted even to such attractive work, but 
 went steadily on, claiming the entire field of im- 
 aginative research as the poet's own. 
 
 His strong allegorical bent, evinced in that early 
 lyric, was heightened by analysis of the Arthurian 
 legends. The English caught this tendency, long 
 since, from the Italians ; the Elizabethan era was 
 so charged with it, that the courtiers of the Virgin 
 Queen hardly could speak without a mystical double- 
 meaning, — for an illustration of which read the 
 dialogue in certain portions of Kingsley's " Amyas 
 Leigh." From Sidney and Spenser down to plain John 
 Bunyan, and even to Sir Walter Scott, allegory is a 
 natural English mode ; and, while adopted in several 
 of Tennyson's pieces, it finds a special development 
 in the "Idyls of the King."
 
 'IDYLS OF THE KING: 
 
 177 
 
 The name thus bestowed upon the early instal- 
 ments of this production seems less adapted to its 
 complete form. Like the walls of Troy, it 
 
 " Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed, 
 A cloud that gathered shape." 
 
 The shape no longer is idyllic, and doubt no longer 
 exists whether a successful epic can be written in a 
 mature period of national literature. We have one 
 here, but subdivided into ten distinct poems, each 
 of which suits the canonical requirement, and may 
 be read at a single sitting. 
 
 To my mind, there is a marked difference in st}'le 
 between the original and later portions of this work. 
 The " Morte d'Arthur " of 1842 is Homeric to the 
 farthest degree possible in the slow, Saxon move- 
 ment of the verse \ grander, with its " hollow oes 
 and aes," than any succeeding canto, always except- 
 ing " Guinevere." Nor do I think the later idyls 
 equal to those four which first were issued in one 
 volume, and which so cleared the Laureate's fame 
 from the doubts suggested by " Maud, and Other 
 Poems." " Vivien " is a bold and subtle analysis, 
 a closer study of certain human types than Tenny- 
 son is wont to make. " Elaine " still remains, for 
 pathetic sweetness and absolute beauty of narrative 
 and rhythm, dearest to the heart of maiden, youth, 
 or sage. " Enid," while upon the lower level of 
 " Pelleas and Ettarre " and " Gareth and Lynette," 
 is clear and strong, and shows a freedom from 
 mannerism characteristic of the author's best period. 
 It would seem that his creative vigor reached its 
 height during the composition of these four idyls ; 
 certainly, since the production of " Enoch Arden," 
 8* L 
 
 Distinction 
 betzveen the 
 early and 
 later blank- * 
 verse. 
 
 Vivien." 
 
 'Elaine." 
 
 "E,iid." 
 
 " Pelleas 
 and Et- 
 tarre."
 
 178 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 " Guine- 
 vere " the 
 Laureate^ s 
 most dra- 
 matic and 
 imaginative 
 work. 
 
 " The Pass- 
 ing of Ar- 
 thur ." 
 
 at an early subsequent date, he has not advanced in 
 freshness and imagination. His greatest achievement 
 still is that noblest of modern episodes, the canto 
 entitled " Guinevere," surcharged with tragic pathos 
 and high dramatic power. He never has so reached 
 the passio vera of the early dramatists as in this im- 
 posing scene. There is nothing finer in modern verse 
 than the interview between Arthur and his remorseful 
 wife; nothing loftier than the passage beginning — 
 
 " Lo ! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 
 Forgives : do thou for thine own soul the rest. 
 But how to take last leave of all I loved ? 
 
 golden hair, with which I used to play 
 Not knowing ! O imperial-moulded form, 
 And beauty such as never woman wore, 
 Until it came a kingdom's curse with thee — 
 
 1 cannot touch thy lips, they are not mine, 
 
 But Lancelot's : nay, they never were the King's." 
 
 When this idyl first appeared, what elevation seized 
 upon the soul of every poetic aspirant as he read 
 it ! What despair of rivalling a passion so imagina- 
 tive, an art so majestic and supreme ! 
 
 I have referred to the Homeric manner of the 
 fragment now made the conclusion of the epic, and 
 entitled " The Passing of Arthur." The magnificent 
 battle-piece, by which it is here preluded, is so dif- 
 ferent in manner from the original " Morte d'Arthur," 
 that both are injured by their juxtaposition. The 
 canto, moreover, plainly weakens at the close. The 
 epic properly ends with the line, 
 
 " And on the mere the wailing died away." 
 The poet's sense of proportion here works injuri-
 
 / 
 
 'IDYLS OF THE KING: 
 
 17.9 
 
 ously, urging him to bring out fully the moral of his 
 
 allegory, albeit the effect really is harmed by this 
 
 addition of the sequel, down to the line which 
 finishes the work : — 
 
 " And the new sun rose bringing the new year." 
 
 In conclusion, observe the technical features of 
 " Gareth and Lynette," a canto recently added to 
 the poem. It displays Tennyson's latest, not his 
 best manner, carried to an extreme ; the verse is 
 clamped together, with every conjunction omitted 
 that can be spared, yet interspersed with lines of 
 a galloping, redundant nature, as if the Laureate 
 were somewhat influenced by Swinburne and adapt- 
 ing himself to a fashion of the time. A special 
 fault is the substitution of alliteration for the simple 
 excellence of his standard verse. This may be a 
 concession to the modern school, or a result of his 
 mousing among Pre-Chaucerian ballads. It palls on 
 the ear, as does the poet's excessive reiteration and 
 play upon words. We are compensated for all this 
 by a stalwart presentation of that fine old English 
 which Emerson has pronounced " a stern and dread- 
 ful language." The public is indebted to Tennyson 
 for a restoration of precious Saxon words, too long 
 forgotten, which, we trust, will hereafter maintain 
 their ground. He is a purifier of our tongue : a 
 resistant to the novelties of slang and affectation 
 intruded upon our literature by the mixture of races 
 and the extension of English-speaking colonies to 
 every clime and continent in the world. 
 
 It is not probable that another sustained poem 
 will hereafter be written upon the Arthurian legends. 
 Milton's dream inconsonant with his own time and 
 
 " Garetk 
 and Ly- 
 nette." 
 
 Recent man> 
 nerisms. 
 
 Tennyson's 
 English.
 
 i8o 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Resolute 
 and fortu- 
 nate ad- 
 vance in 
 work and 
 fame. 
 
 higher aspirations, has, at last, its due fulfilment. 
 The subject waited long, a sleeping beauty, until 
 the "fated fairy-prince" came, woke it into life, 
 and the spell is forever at an end. But who shall 
 say whether future generations will rate this epic 
 as highly as we do ; whether it will stand out like 
 " The Faery Queene " and " Paradise Lost," as one 
 of the epochal compositions by which an age is 
 symbolized? More than one poem, or series of 
 poems, — Drayton's "The Barons' Wars," for in- 
 stance, — has wrongly in its own time been thought 
 a work of this class, though now men say of it that 
 only the shadow of its name remains. At present 
 we have no right to declare of the " Idyls of the 
 King," as of " In Memoriam," that it is so original, 
 so representative both of the author and of his 
 period, as to defy the dust of time. 
 
 A famous life often falls short of its promise. 
 Temperament and circumstance hedge it with ob- 
 stacles ; or, perhaps, the " Fury with the abhorred 
 shears " slits its thin-spun tissue before the decisive 
 hour. In the case of Tennyson this has been re- 
 versed. He has advanced by regular stages to the 
 highest office of a poet. More fortunate than Lan- 
 dor, he was suited to the time, and the time to his 
 genius ; he has been happier than Keats or Shelley 
 in length of years, and, in ease of circumstances, 
 than Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Hood. Had he 
 died after completing the epic, his work would still 
 seem rounded and complete. Surely a poet's youth- 
 ful dream never was more fully realized, and we 
 must regard the Laureate's genius as developed 
 through good fortune to the utmost degree per- 
 mitted by inherent limitations.
 
 'ENOCH arden: 
 
 i8i 
 
 During the growth of this epic he has, however, 
 produced a few other poems which take high rank. 
 Of these, Enoch Arden, in sustained beauty, bears 
 a relation to his shorter pastorals similar to that 
 existing between the epic and his minor heroic-verse. 
 Coming within the average range of emotions, it 
 has been very widely read. This poem is in its 
 author's purest idyllic style ; noticeable for evenness 
 of tone, clearness of diction, successful description 
 of coast and ocean, — finally, for the loveliness and 
 fidelity of its genre scenes. In study of a class 
 below him, hearts "centred in the sphere of com- 
 mon duties," the Laureate is unsurpassed. A far 
 different creation is " Lucretius," a brooding charac- 
 ter with which Tennyson is quite in sympathy. He 
 has invested it with a certain restless grandeur, yet 
 hardly, I should conceive, wrought out the work he 
 thought possible when the theme was first suggested 
 to his mind. He found its limits and contented 
 himself with portraying a gloomy, isolated figure, 
 as strongly and subtly as Browning would have 
 drawn it, and with a terseness beyond the latter's 
 art. 
 
 I have already spoken of " The Golden Supper " 
 and "Aylmer's Field." Among other and better 
 pieces, " Sea-Dreams," — a poem of measureless 
 satire and much idyllic beauty, — " Tithonus," " The 
 Voyage," — a fine lyric, and such masterly ballads 
 as "The Victor," "The Captor," and "The Sailor- 
 Boy," will not be forgotten. It is worth while to 
 observe the few dialect poems which Tennyson has 
 written, — thrown off, as if merely to show that he 
 could be easily first in a field which he resigns to 
 others. The " Northern Farmer " ballads, old and 
 
 "Enoch 
 Arden, and 
 Other 
 Poems," 
 
 1864. 
 
 " Lucre- 
 tius." 
 
 Miscellane- 
 ous pieces. 
 
 Dialect 
 poems, etc.
 
 1 82 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Character- 
 istics of 
 Tennyson'' s 
 genius. 
 
 Synthetic 
 perfection. 
 
 Lack (if 
 spirit and 
 qitality. 
 
 new, are the best English dialect studies of our 
 time. Among his minor diversions are light oc- 
 casional pieces and some experiments in classical 
 measures, — often finished sketches, germs of works 
 to which he has given no further attention. He 
 saw that " Boadicea " offered no such field as that 
 afforded by the Arthurian legends, and wisely gave 
 it over. Again, he unquestionably could have made 
 a great blank-verse translation of Homer, but chose 
 the better part in devoting his middle life solely 
 to creative work. The world can ill afford to lose 
 a poet's golden prime in the labors of a translator. 
 
 IV. 
 
 In whatsoever light we examine the characteristics 
 of the Laureate's genius, the complete and even 
 balance of his poetry is from first to last con- 
 spicuous. It exhibits that just combination of lyrical 
 elements which makes a symphony, wherein it is 
 difficult to say what quality predominates. Review- 
 ing minor poets, we think this one attractive for 
 the wild flavor of his unstudied verse ; another, for 
 the gush and music of his songs ; a third, for idyllic 
 sweetness or tragic power ; but in Tennyson we 
 have the strong repose of art, whereof — as of the 
 perfection of nature — the world is slow to tire. 
 It has become conventional, but remember that 
 nothing endures to the point of conventionalism 
 which is not based upon lasting rules ; that it once 
 was new and refreshing, and is sure, in future days, 
 to regain the early charm. 
 
 The one thing longed for, and most frequently 
 missed, in work of this kind, is the very wilding
 
 ANALYSIS OF HIS GENIUS. 
 
 183 
 
 flavor of which I speak. We are not always broad 
 enough and elevated enough to be content with 
 symphonic art. Guinevere wearies of Arthur. There 
 are times when a tart apple, a crust of bread, a bit 
 of wild honey, are worth more to us than all the 
 delicacies of the larder. We wish more rugged 
 outbreaks, more impetuous discords ; we listen for 
 the sudden irregular trill of the thicket songster. 
 The fulness of Tennyson's art evades the charm 
 of spontaneity. How rarely he takes you by sur- 
 prise ! His stream is sweet, assured, strong ; but 
 how seldom the abrupt bend, the plunge of the 
 cataract, the thunder and the spray ! Doubtless he 
 has enthusiasms, but all are held in hand ; college- 
 life, study, restraint, comfort, reverence, have done 
 their work upon him. He is well broken, as we 
 say of a thoroughbred, — proud and true, and, 
 though he makes few bursts of speed, keeps easily 
 forward, and is sure to be first at the stand. 
 
 We come back to the avowal that in technical 
 excellence, as an artist in verse, Alfred Tennyson 
 is the greatest of modern poets. Other masters, 
 old or new, have surpassed him in special instances ; 
 but he is the one who rarely nods, and who always 
 finishes his verse to the extreme. Not that he is 
 free from weaknesses : to the present day, when 
 pushed for inspiration, he resorts to inventions as 
 disagreeable as the affectation which repelled many 
 healthy minds from his youthful lyrics. Faults of 
 this sort, in " Maud " and later poems, have somewhat 
 prejudiced another class of readers, — people who, 
 with what a critic denominates their " eighteenth 
 century " taste, still pay homage to the genius of 
 Pope for merits which the Laureate has in even 
 
 A great and 
 conscientious 
 artist.
 
 1 84 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Points of 
 resemblance 
 between 
 Tennyson 
 and Pope. 
 
 greater excess. A question recently has been 
 mooted, whether Milton, were he living in our time, 
 could write "Paradise Lost"? A no less interesting 
 conjecture would relate to the kind of poetry that 
 we should have from Pope, were he of Tennyson's 
 generation. The physical traits of the two men 
 being so utterly at variance, no doubt many will 
 scout my suggestion that the verse of the former 
 might closely resemble that of the latter. Pope 
 excelled in qualities which, mutatis mutandis, are 
 noticeable in Tennyson : finish and minuteness of 
 detail, and the elevation of common things to fanci- 
 ful beauty. Here, again, compare "The Rape of 
 the Lock" with "The Sleeping Beauty," and espe- 
 cially with " The Talking Oak." A faculty of " say- 
 ing things," which, in Pope (his being a cruder age, 
 when persons needed that homely wisdom which 
 seems trite enough in our day), became didacticism, 
 in Tennyson is sweetly natural and poetic. Since 
 the period of the " Essay on Man," from what writer 
 can you cull so many wise and fine proverbial 
 phrases as from the poet who says : — 
 
 "'Tis better to have loved and lost, 
 Than never to have loved at all " ; 
 
 "Kind hearts are more than coronets, 
 
 And simple faith than Norman blood " ; 
 
 "There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds " ; 
 
 who puts the theory of evolution in a couplet when 
 
 he sings of 
 
 " one far-off divine event, 
 
 To which the whole creation moves";
 
 TENNYSON AND POPE. 
 
 185 
 
 who so tersely avows that 
 
 " Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers " ; 
 
 " Things seen are mightier than things heard " ; 
 and, again : — 
 
 *' Old age hath yet his honor and his toil " ; 
 
 from whom else so many of these proverbs, which are 
 not isolated, but, as in Pope's works, recur by tens 
 and scores ? Curious felicities of verse : — 
 
 " Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere " ; 
 
 lines which record the most exquisite thrills of life : — 
 
 " Our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips " ; 
 
 and unforgotten similes : — 
 
 "Dear as remembered kisses after death"; — 
 
 such beauties as these occur in multitudes, and lit- 
 erally make up the body of the Laureate's song. In 
 feeling, imagination, largeness of heart and head, the 
 diminutive satirist can enter into no comparison with 
 our poet, but the situation is otherwise as respects 
 finish and moralistic power. The essence of Pope's 
 art was false, because it was the product of a false 
 age ; Dryden had been his guide to the stilted hero- 
 ics of the French school, which so long afterwards. 
 Pope lending them such authority, stalked through 
 English verse. In this day he would, like Tennyson, 
 have found his masters among the early, natural 
 poets, or obtained, in a direct manner, what classi- 
 cism he needed, and not through Gallic filters. Yet 
 it is not long since I heard an eminent man laud- 
 ing Pope for the very characteristics which, as here 
 
 Points of 
 difference, 
 subjective 
 and objec- 
 tive.
 
 1 86 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Supreme 
 and cojnplex 
 ntodern art. 
 
 shown, are conspicuous in Tennyson ; and decrying 
 the latter, misled by that chance acquaintance with 
 his poetry which is worse than no acquaintance at 
 all. In siiggestiveness Pope was singularly deficient : 
 his constructive faculty so prevailed, that he left 
 nothing to the reader's fancy, but explained to the 
 end. He had no such moods as those evoked by 
 " Tears, idle tears," and " Break, break, break ! " and 
 therefore his verses never suggest them. In irony 
 Tennyson would equal Pope, had he not risen above 
 it. The man who wrote " The New Timon and the 
 Poets," and afterwards rebuked himself for so doing, 
 could write another " Dunciad," or, without resort to 
 any models, a still more j^olished and bitter satire of 
 his own. 
 
 Tennyson's original and fastidious art is of itself a 
 theme for an essay. The poet who studies it may 
 well despair ; he never can excel it, and is tempted 
 to a reactionary carelessness, trusting to make his 
 individuality felt thereby. Its strength is that of per- 
 fection ; its weakness, the over-perfection which marks 
 a still-life painter. Here is the absolute sway of 
 metre, compelling every rhyme and measure needful 
 to the thought ; here are sinuous alliterations, unique 
 and varying breaks and pauses, winged flights and 
 falls, the glory of sound and color, everywhere pres- 
 ent, or, if missing, absent of the poet's free will. Art 
 so complex was not possible until centuries of litera- 
 ture had passed, and an artist could overlook the 
 field, essay each style, and evolve a metrical result, 
 which should be to that of earlier periods what the 
 music of Meyerbeer and Rossini is to the narrower 
 range of Piccini or Gluck. In Tennyson's artistic 
 conscientiousness, he is the opposite of that com-
 
 HIS DESCRIPTIVE POWER. 
 
 187 
 
 peer who approaches him most nearly in years and 
 strength of intellect, Robert Browning. His gift of 
 language is not so copious as Swinburne's, yet through 
 its use the higher excellence is attained. But I shall 
 elsewhere write of these matters. Let me conclude 
 my remarks upon the Laureate's art with a reference 
 to his unfailing taste and sense of the fitness of things. 
 This is neatly exemplified in the openings, and espe- 
 cially in the endings, of his idyls. " Audley Court " 
 very well illustrates what I mean. Observe, also, the 
 beautiful dedication of his collected works to the 
 Queen, and the solemn and faithful character-painting 
 of the tribute to Prince Albert which forms the prelude 
 to the Idyls of the King. The two dedications are 
 equal to the best ever written, and each is a poem 
 by itself. They fully sustained the wisdom of Victo- 
 ria's choice of a successor to 
 
 " This laurel greener from the brows 
 Of him that uttered nothing base." 
 
 Leaving the architecture of Tennyson's poetry and 
 coming to the sentiment which it seeks to express, 
 we are struck at once by the fact that an idyllic, 
 or picturesque mode of conveying that sentiment is 
 the one natural to this poet, if not the only one 
 permitted by his limitations. In this he surpasses all 
 the poets since Theocritus ; and his work is greater 
 than the Syracusan's, because his thought and period 
 are greater. His eyes are his purveyors ; with " wis- 
 dom at one entrance quite shut out " he would be 
 helpless. To use the lingo of the phrenologists, his 
 locality is better than his individuality. He does not, 
 like- Browning, catch the secret of a master-passion, 
 nor, like the old dramatists, the very life of action ; 
 
 Browning. 
 Swinburne. 
 
 Taste. 
 
 The Laure- 
 ate an idyl- 
 list.
 
 i88 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 His descrip- 
 tive/acuity. 
 
 l^imitaiions. 
 
 on the contrary, he gives us an ideal picture of an 
 ideal person, but set against a background more 
 tangible than other artists can draw, — making the 
 accessories, and even the atmosphere, convey the 
 meaning of his poem. As we study his verse, and 
 the sound and color of it enter our souls, we think 
 with him, we partake of his feeling, and are led to 
 regions which he finds himself unable to open for 
 us except in this suggestive way. The fidelity of his 
 accessories is peculiar to the time : realistic, without 
 the Flemish homeliness ; true as Pre-Raphaelitism, 
 but mellowed with the atmosphere of a riper art. 
 This idyllic method is not that of the most inspired 
 poets and the most impassioned periods. But, merely 
 as a descriptive writer, who is so delightful as Ten- 
 nyson ? He has the unerring first touch, which in a 
 single line proves the artist; and it justly has been 
 remarked that there is more true English landscape 
 in many an isolated stanza of " In Memoriam " than 
 in the whole of " The Seasons," — that vaunted de- 
 scriptive poem of a former century. A paper has 
 been written upon the Lincolnshire scenery depicted 
 in his poems, and we might have others, just as well, 
 upon his marine or highland views. He is a born 
 observer of physical nature, and, whenever he applies 
 an adjective to some object, or passingly alludes to 
 some phenomenon which others have not noted, is 
 almost infallibly correct. Possibly he does this too 
 methodically, but his opponents cannot deny that his 
 outdoor rambles are guided by their eloquent apostle's 
 "Lamp of Truth." 
 
 His limitations are nearly as conspicuous as his 
 abundant gifts. They are indicated, first, by a style 
 pronounced to the degree of mannerism, and, sec-
 
 HIS LIMITATIONS. 
 
 189 
 
 ondly, by failure, until within a very recent date, to 
 produce dramatic work of the genuine kind. 
 
 With respect to his style, it may be said that 
 Tennyson — while objective in the variety of his 
 themes, and in ability to separate his own experi- 
 ence from their development — is the most sub- 
 jective of poets in the distinguishable flavor of his 
 language and rhythm. Reading him you might not 
 guess his life and story, — the reverse of which is 
 true with Byron, whom I take as a familiar example 
 of the subjective in literature ; nevertheless, it is im- 
 possible to observe a single line, or an entire speci- 
 men, of the Laureate's poems, without feeling that 
 they are in the handwriting of the same master, or 
 of some disciple who has caught his fascinating and 
 contagious st}de. 
 
 I speak of his second limitation, with a full 
 knowledge that many claim a dramatic crown for the 
 author of the " Northern Farmer," " Tithonus," " St. 
 Simeon Stylites," — for the poet of the Round 
 Table and the Holy Grail. But isolated studies 
 are not sufficient : a group of living men and women 
 is necessary to broad dramatic action. Tennyson 
 forces his characters to adapt themselves to pre- 
 conceived, statuesque ideals of his own. His chief 
 success is with those in humble life • in " Enoch 
 Arden," and elsewhere, he has very sweetly depicted 
 the emotions of simple natures, rarely at a sublime 
 height or depth of passion. He also draws — with 
 an easy touch occasionally found in the prose of 
 the author of " The Warden " — a group of sturdy, 
 refined, comfortable fellows upon their daily ram- 
 bles, British and modern in their wholesome talk. 
 But the true dramatist instinctively portrays either 
 
 Cp.pageiqu 
 
 Style. 
 
 Lack of the 
 true dra- 
 matic gift- 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 0/ Amer- 
 ica " ; pp. 
 204, 467.
 
 IQO 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Effect of a 
 secluded life. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A mer- 
 ica" : pp. 
 '55. 156. 
 
 His ideal 
 personages. 
 
 exceptional characters, or ordinary beings in im- 
 passioned and extraordinary moods. This Tennyson 
 rarely essays to do, except when presenting imagi- 
 nary heroes of a visioned past. A great master of 
 contemplative, descriptive, or lyrical verse, he falls 
 short in that combination of action and passion which 
 we call dramatic, and often gives us a series of mar- 
 vellous tableaux in lieu of exalted speech and deeds. 
 
 This lack of individuality is somewhat due to 
 the influence of the period ; largely, also, to ths 
 habit of solitude which the poet has chosen to in- 
 dulge. His life has been passed among his books 
 or in the seclusion of rural haunts ; when in town, 
 in the company of a few chosen friends. This has 
 heightened his tendency to reverie, and unfitted him 
 to distinguish sharply between men and men. The 
 great novelists of our day, who correspond to the 
 dramatists of a past age, have plunged into the roar 
 of cities and the thick of the crowd, touching people 
 closely and on every side. It must be owned that 
 we do not find in their works that close knowledge 
 of inanimate nature for which Tennyson has fore- 
 gone "the proper study of mankind." The one 
 seems to curtail the other, Wordsworth's writings 
 being another example in point. " Men my brothers, 
 men the workers," sings the Laureate, and is pleased 
 to watch and encourage them, but always from afar. 
 
 With few exceptions, then, his most poetical types 
 of men and women are not substantial beings, but 
 beautiful shadows, which, like the phantoms of a 
 stereopticon, dissolve if you examine them too long 
 and closely. His knights are the old bequest of chiv- 
 alry, yet how stalwart and picturesque ! His early 
 ideals of women are cathedral-paintings, — scarcely
 
 PERFECTLY ADAPTED TO HIS TIME. 
 
 191 
 
 flesh and blood, but certain attributes personified and 
 made angelical. Where a story has been made for 
 him he is more dramatic. Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin, 
 Guinevere, are strong, wise, or beautiful, and so we 
 find them in the chronicle from which the poet drew 
 his legend. He has advanced them to the require- 
 ments of modern Christianity, yet hardly created them 
 anew. It is not improbable that Tennyson may force 
 himself to compose some notably dramatic work \ but 
 only through skill and strength of purpose, in this 
 age, and with his habit of life. In a dramatic period 
 he might find himself as sadly out of place as Bed- 
 does, Darley, Landor, have been in his own century. 
 By sheer good fortune he has flourished in a time 
 calling for tenderness, thought, excellent workman- 
 ship, and not for wild extremes of power. So chaste, 
 varied, and tuneful are his notes, that they are scorn- 
 fully compared to piano-music, in distinction from 
 what he himself has entitled the " God-gifted organ 
 voice of England." Take, however, the piano as an 
 instrumental expression of recent musical taste, and 
 see to what a height of execution, of capacity to give 
 almost universal pleasure, the art of playing it has 
 been carried. A great pianist is a great artist ; and it 
 is no light fame which holds, with relation to poetry, 
 the supremacy awarded to Liszt or Schumann by the 
 refined musicians of our time. 
 
 The cast of Tennyson's intellect is such, that his 
 social rank, his training at an old university, and his 
 philosophic learning have bred in him a liberal con- 
 servatism. Increase of ease and of fame has strength- 
 ened his inclination to accept things as they are, 
 and, while recognizing the law of progress, to make 
 no undue effort to hasten the order of events. He 
 
 He may yet 
 write (ijine 
 drama. 
 
 P. S. See 
 p. i,\s,and 
 cp. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica " .• A 
 467. 
 
 Perfectly 
 adapted to 
 his time. 
 
 A liberal 
 conserva- 
 tive :
 
 192 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 In politics, 
 
 and in re- 
 ligion. 
 
 A rlistic 
 
 reverence. 
 
 sees that "the thoughts of men are widened with the 
 process of the suns," but is not the man to lead a 
 reform, or to disturb the pleasant conditions in which 
 his lot is cast. No personal wrong has allied him 
 to the oppressed and struggling classes, yet he is 
 too intellectual not to perceive that such wrongs 
 exist. It must be remembered that Shakespeare and 
 Goethe were no more heroic. Just so with his re- 
 ligious attitude. Reverence for beauty would of itself 
 dispose him to love the ivied Church, with all its 
 art, and faith, and ancestral legendary associations ; 
 and therefore, while amply reflecting in his verse the 
 doubt and disquiet of the age, his tranquil sense of 
 order, together with the failure of iconoclasts to sub- 
 stitute any creed for that which they are breaking 
 down, have brought him to the position of stanch Sir 
 William Petty {obiit 1687), who wrote in his will these 
 memorable words : " As for religion, I die in the 
 profession of that Faith, and in the practice of such 
 Worship, as I find established by the law of my 
 country, not being able to believe what I myself 
 please, nor to worship God better than by doing as 
 I would be done unto, and observing the laws of 
 my country, and expressing my love and honor unto 
 Almighty God by such signs and tokens as are un- 
 derstood to be such by the people with whom I live, 
 God knowing my heart even without any at all." 
 
 So far as the "religion of art" is concerned, Ten- 
 nyson is the most conscientious of devotees. Through- 
 out his work we find a pure and thoughtful purpose, 
 abhorrent of the mere licentious passion for beauty, 
 
 "such as lurks 
 In some wild Poet, when he works 
 Without a conscience or an aim."
 
 WORDSWORTH UPON SCIENCE AND POETRY. 
 
 193 
 
 In my remarks upon " In Memoriam " I have shown 
 that in one direction he readily keeps pace with the 
 advance of modern thought. A leading mission of 
 .his art appears to be that of hastening the transition 
 of our poetic nomenclature and imagery from the old 
 or phenomenal method to one in accordance with 
 knowledge and truth. His laurel is brighter for the 
 fact that he constantly avails himself of the results 
 of scientific discovery, without making them prosaic. 
 This tendency, beginning with " Locksley Hall " and 
 " The Princess," has increased with him to the present 
 time. If modern story-writers can make the wonders 
 of chemistry and astronomy the basis of tales more 
 fascinating to children than the Arabian Nights, why 
 should not the poet explore this field for the creation 
 of a new imagery and expression ? There is a remark- 
 able passage in Wordsworth's preface to the second 
 edition of his poems ; a prophecy which, half a cen- 
 tury ago, could only have been uttered by a man of 
 lofty intellect and extraordinary premonition of changes 
 even now at hand : — 
 
 "The objects of the poet's thoughts are ever\'- 
 where ; though the eyes and senses of men are, it is 
 true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow whereso- 
 ever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which 
 to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all 
 knowledge, — it is immortal as the heart of man. If 
 the labors of the men of science should ever create 
 any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our con- 
 dition, and in the impressions which we habitually 
 receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at 
 present ; he will be ready to follow the steps of the 
 man of science, not only in those general indirect 
 effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation 
 
 9 M 
 
 His verse 
 conformed 
 to modern 
 progress and 
 discovery. 
 
 Words- 
 worth upon 
 the future 
 relations of 
 Science and 
 Poetry. 
 See also 
 page 15.
 
 194 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Tnine's 
 afialysis : 
 
 into the midst of the objects of the science itself. 
 The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the bot- 
 anist, or mineralogist will be as proper objects of the 
 poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, (/ 
 the time should ever come when these thhigs shall be 
 familiar to us, and the relations wider which they are 
 contemplated by the followers of the respective sciences 
 shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoy- 
 ing and suffering beings. If the time should ever come 
 when what is now called scie?ice, thus familiarized to 
 men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh 
 and blood, the poet will lend his divijie spirit to aid the 
 transfguration, and will welcome the Being thus pro- 
 duced, as a dear and genuine in?nate of the household of 
 man.^' 
 
 It is not unlikely that Tennyson was early im- 
 pressed by these profound observations ; at all events, 
 he has seen the truths of science becoming familiar 
 "to the general," and has governed his art accord- 
 ingly. The poet and man of science have a common 
 ground, since few discoveries are made without the 
 exercise of the poet's special gift, — the imagination. 
 This faculty is required to enable a child to compre- 
 hend any scientific paradox : for instance, that of the 
 rotation of the Earth upon its axis. The imagination 
 of an investigator advances from one step to another, 
 and thus, in a certain sense, the mental processes of 
 a Milton and a Newton are near akin. A plod- 
 ding, didactic intellect is not strictly scientific ; nor 
 will great poetry ever spring from a merely phan- 
 tasmal brain: "best bard because the wisest," sings 
 the poet. 
 
 M. Taine's chapter upon Tennyson .shows an intelli- 
 gent perception of the Laureate's relations to his time,
 
 TAINE'S ESTIMATE OF HIM. 
 
 195 
 
 and especially to England ; but though containing a 
 fine interlude upon the perennial freshness of a poet 
 and the zest which makes nature a constant surprise 
 to him, — declaring that the poet, in the presence of 
 this world, is as the first man on the first day, — with 
 all this excellence the chapter fails to rightly appre- 
 ciate Tennyson, and overestimates Alfred de Musset 
 in comparison. M. Taine's failure, I think, is due to 
 the fact that no one, however successful in mastering 
 a foreign language, can fully enter into that nicety 
 of art which is the potent witchery of Tennyson's 
 verse. The minute distinction between one poem 
 and another, where the ideas are upon a level, and 
 the difference is one of essential flavor, a foreigner 
 loses without perceiving his loss. Precisely this deli- 
 cacy of aroma separates Tennyson from other masters 
 of verse. An English school-girl will see in his work 
 a beauty that wholly escapes the most accomplished 
 Frenchman : the latter may have ten times her knowl- 
 edge of the language, but she "hears a voice he 
 cannot hear " and feds an influence he never can 
 fairly understand. Again, M. Taine does not allow 
 credit for the importance of the works actually pro- 
 duced by Tennyson. Largeness and proportion go 
 for something in edifices ; and although De Musset, 
 the errant, impassioned, suffering Parisian, had the 
 sacred fire, and gave out burning flashes here and 
 there, his light was fitful, nor long sustained, and we 
 think rather of what one so gifted ought to have 
 accomplished than of what he actually did. 
 
 But Taine's catholicity, and the very fact that he 
 is a foreigner, have protected him, on the other hand, 
 from the overweening influence of Tennyson's art, that 
 holds us 
 
 Its defects. 
 
 De Musset. 
 
 Wherein 
 tJie French 
 critic Jias 
 succeeded.
 
 196 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 Tennyson 
 and Byron .' 
 
 A contrast. 
 
 " Above the subject, as strong gales 
 Hold swollen clouds from raining " ; 
 
 have made him a wiser judge of the poet's intellect- 
 ual and imaginative position. In this matter he is 
 like a deaf man watching a battle, undisturbed by 
 the bewildering power of sound. His remarks upon 
 the limitations of a " comfortable, luxurious, English " 
 muse are not without reason ; all in all, he has a 
 just idea of Tennyson's representative attitude in the 
 present state of British thought and art. He has 
 laid too little stress upon the difference between 
 Tennyson and Byron, by observing which we gather 
 a clearer estimate of the former's genius than in any 
 other way. 
 
 Tennyson is the antithesis of Byron, in both the 
 form and spirit of his song. The Georgian poet, 
 with all the glow of genius, constantly giving utter- 
 ance to condensed and powerful expressions, never 
 attempted condensation in his general style ; there 
 was nothing he so little cared for ; his inspiration 
 must have full flow and break through every barrier ; 
 it was the roaring of a mighty wind, the current of 
 a great river, — prone to overflow, and often to spread 
 thinly and unevenly upon the shoals and lowlands. 
 Tennyson, though composing an extended work, seeks 
 the utmost terseness of expression ; howsoever com- 
 posite his verse, it is tightly packed and cemented, 
 and decorated to repletion with fretwork and precious 
 stones ; nothing is neglected, nothing wasted, nothing 
 misapplied. You cannot take out a word or sentence 
 without marring the structure, nor can you find a 
 blemish ; while much might ■ be profitably omitted 
 from Byron's longer poems, and their blemishes are 
 frequent as the beauties. Prolixity, diffuseness, were
 
 TENNYSON AND BYRON 
 
 197 
 
 characteristic of Byron's time. Again, Tennyson is 
 greater in analysis and synthesis, the two strong 
 servitors of art. In sense of proportion Byron was 
 all abroad. He struck bravely into a poem, and, 
 trusting to the fire of his inspiration, let it write 
 itself, neither seeing the end nor troubling his mind 
 concerning it. Certainly this was true with regard 
 to his greatest productions, " Childe Harold " and 
 " Don Juan " ; though others, such as " Manfred," 
 were exceptions through dramatic necessity. In Ten- 
 nyson's method, as in architecture, we are sure that 
 the whole structure is foreseen at the outset. Every 
 block is numbered and swings into an appointed 
 place ; often the final portions are made first, that 
 the burden of the plan may be off the designer's 
 mind. Leaving the matter of art, there is no less 
 difference between the two poets as we consider 
 their perceptive and imaginative gifts, and here the 
 largeness of Byron's vision tells in his favor. Ten- 
 nyson, sometimes grand and exalted, is equally deli- 
 cate, — an artist of the beautiful in a minute way. 
 Of this Byron took little account ; his soul was ex- 
 alted by the broad and mighty aspects of nature ; for 
 mosaic-work he was unfitted : a mountain, the sea, 
 a thunder-storm, a glorious woman, — such imposing 
 objects aroused his noble rage. You never could 
 have persuaded him that the microcosm is equal 
 to the macrocosm. Again, his subjectivity, so in- 
 tense, was wholly different from Tennyson's, in that 
 )ie became one with Nature, — a part of that which 
 was around him. Tennyson is subjective, so far as 
 a pervading sameness of style, a landscape seen 
 through one shade of glass, can make him, yet few 
 Liave stood more calmly aloof from NatUiT, and viewed 
 
 I . Their 
 difference 
 in method I 
 
 2. In per- 
 ception and 
 imagina- 
 tion ; 
 
 3. In sub- 
 jectivity ;
 
 198 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 4. In the 
 matter 0/ 
 influence. 
 
 A n ideal 
 poetic ca- 
 
 her more objectively. He contemplates things with- 
 out identifying himself with them. In these respects, 
 Tennyson and Byron not only are antithetical, but 
 — each above his contemporaries — reflect the an- 
 tithetical qualities of their respective eras. In con- 
 clusion, it should be noticed that, although each has 
 had a host of followers, Byron affected the spirit of 
 the people at large, rather than the style of his 
 brother poets ; while Tennyson, through the force of 
 his admirable art, has affected the poets themselves, 
 who do not sympathize with his spirit, but show 
 themselves awed and instructed by his mastery of 
 technics. Byron's influence was national ; that of 
 Tennyson is professional to an unprecedented degree. 
 If the temperament of Byron or of Mrs. Browning 
 may be pronounced an ideal poetic temperament, 
 certainly the career of Tennyson is an ideal poetic 
 career. He has been less in contact with the rude 
 outer world than any poet save Wordsworth ; again, 
 while even the latter wrote much prose, Tennyson, 
 " having wherewithal," and consecrating his life whol- 
 ly to metrical art, has been a verse-maker and noth- 
 ing else. He has passed through all gradations, 
 from obscurity to laurelled fame ; beginning with the 
 lightest lyrics, he has lived to write the one success- 
 ful epic of the last two hundred years ; and though 
 he well might rest content, if contentment were pos- 
 sible to poets and men, with the glory of a far- 
 reaching and apparently lasting renown, he still 
 pursues his art, and seems, unlike Campbell and 
 many another poet, to have no fear of the shadow 
 of his own success. His lot has been truly enviable. 
 We have observed the disadvantages of amateurship 
 in the case of Landor, and noted the limitations
 
 A FINAL SUMMARY 
 
 199 
 
 imposed upon Thomas Hood by the poverty which 
 clung to him through Ufe ; but Tennyson has made 
 the former condition a vantage-ground, and thereby 
 carried his work to a perfection almost unattainable 
 in the experience of a professional, hard-working lit- 
 terateur. Writing as much and as little as he chose, 
 he has escaped the drudgery which breeds contempt. 
 His song has been the sweeter for his retirement, 
 like that of a cicada piping from a distant grove. 
 
 Reviewing our analysis of his genius and works, 
 we find in Alfred Tennyson the true poetic irritability, 
 a sensitiveness increased by his secluded life, and dis- 
 played from time to time in "the least little touch 
 of the spleen " ; we perceive him to be the most 
 faultless of modern poets in technical execution, but 
 one whose verse is more remarkable for artistic per- 
 fection than for dramatic action and inspired fervor. 
 His adroitness surpasses his invention. Give him a 
 theme, and no poet can handle it so exquisitely, — yet 
 we feel that, with the Malory legends to draw upon, 
 he could go on writing " Idyls of the King " forever. 
 We find him objective in the spirit of his verse, but 
 subjective in the decided manner of his st^'le ; pos- 
 sessing a sense of proportion, based upon the high- 
 est analytic and synthetic powers, — a faculty that can 
 harmonize the incongruous thoughts, scenes, and gen- 
 eral details of a composite period ; in thought resem- 
 bling Wordsworth, in art instructed by Keats, but 
 rejecting the passion of Byron, or having nothing in 
 his nature that aspires to it ; finally, an artist so per- 
 fect in a widely extended range, that nothing of his 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica " ; //. 
 222, 223. 
 
 Sutnmary 
 
 of the fore- 
 going analy- 
 sis.
 
 200 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 work can be spared, and, in this respect, approaching 
 Horace and outvying Pope ; not one of the great 
 wits nearly allied to madness, yet possibly to be ac- 
 cepted as a wiser poet, serene above the frenzy of 
 the storm ; certainly to be regarded, in time to come, 
 as, all in all, the fullest representative of the refined, 
 speculative, complex Victorian age.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 HAVING acknowledged Tennyson as master of 
 the idyllic school, — and having seen that his 
 method, during the last thirty years, whatever its 
 strength or weakness, has been conspicuous in the 
 prevailing form and spirit of English verse, — it does 
 not seem amiss, in the case of this poet, to supple- 
 ment my review of his genius and works by some 
 remarks upon the likeness which he bears to the 
 Dorian father of idyllic song, and upon the relations 
 of both the ancient and modern poets to their respec- 
 tive eras. 
 
 I. 
 
 Until within a very recent period, the text of the 
 Greek idyls was not embraced in the course of study 
 at our foremost American colleges. Nevertheless, the 
 Greek Reader which, a score of years ago, was largely 
 in use for the preparatory lessons of the high schools, 
 contained, amidst an assorted lot of passages from 
 various writers, that wonderful elegy, " The Epitaph 
 of Bion," whose authorship is attributed to Moschus. 
 The novelty, the beauty, the fresh and modern thought 
 of this undying poem were visible even to the school- 
 fagged intellect of youths to whom poetry was a vague 
 9* 
 
 Supple- 
 mental no- 
 tice of Ten- 
 nyson and 
 the idyllic 
 school. 
 
 " The Epi- 
 taph of 
 Bion." 
 
 Moschus, 
 III.
 
 202 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 Ohligations 
 to tlie Greek 
 idyllic poets. 
 
 delight. Well might they be, for this eleg}', — in 
 which the pain and passion of lamentation for a 
 brother-minstrel are sung in strains echoing those 
 which Bion himself had chanted in artificial sorrow 
 for the mystic Adonis, — this perpetual elegy was the 
 mould, if not the inspiration, of four great English 
 dirges : laments beyond which the force of poetic an- 
 guish can no further go, and each of which is but a 
 later affirmation that the ancient pupil of Theocritus 
 found the one key-note to which all high idyllic elegy 
 should be attuned thenceforth. 
 
 Having made a first acquaintance with the work of 
 Tennyson, — and who does not remember how new and 
 delicious the lyrics of the rising English poet seemed 
 to us, half surfeited, as we were, with the fulness of 
 his predecessors ? — I could not fail to observe a re- 
 semblance between certain portions of his verse and 
 the only Greek idyl which I then knew. For exam- 
 ple, in the use of the elegiac refrain, in the special 
 imagery, in the adaptation of landscape and color to 
 the feeling of a poem, and, often, in the suggestion of 
 the feeling by the mere scenic effect. It was not till 
 after that thorough knowledge of the English master's 
 art, which has been no less absorbing and perilous 
 than instructive to the singers of our period, that I 
 was led to study the entire relics of the Greek idyllic 
 poets. Then, for the first time, I became aware of 
 the immense obligations of Tennyson to Theocritus, 
 not only for the method, sentiment, and purpose, but 
 for the very form and language, which render beautiful 
 much of his most widely celebrated verse. 
 
 Three points were distinctly brought in view : — 
 I. The likeness of the Victorian to the Alexandrian 
 age.
 
 DESIGN OF THIS CHAPTER. 
 
 203 
 
 2. The close study made by Tennyson of the Syra- 
 cusan idyls, resulting in the adjustment of their struc- 
 ture to English theme and composition, and in the 
 artistic imitation of their choicest passages^ 
 
 3. Hence, his own discovery of his proper function 
 as a poet, and the gradual evolution and shaping of 
 his whole literary career. 
 
 II. 
 
 The design of this supplemental chapter is to ex- 
 hibit some of the evidences on which the foregoing 
 points are taken. They may interest the student of 
 comparative minstrelsy, as an addition to his list of 
 " Historic Counterparts " in literature, and are worth 
 the attention of that host of readers, so wonted to 
 the faultless art of Tennyson that each trick and 
 turn of his verse, his every image and thought, are 
 more familiar to them than were the sentimental 
 ditties of Moore and the romantic cantos of Scott 
 and Byron to the poetic taste of an earlier genera- 
 tion. And how few, indeed, of his pieces could we 
 spare ! so few, that when he does trifle with his art 
 the critics laugh like school-boys delighted to catch 
 the master tripping for once ; not wholly sure but 
 that the matter may be noble, because, forsooth, he 
 composed it. Yet men, wont to fare sumptuously, 
 will now and then leave their delicate viands un- 
 tasted, and hanker with lusty appetite for ruder and 
 more sinewy fare. We turn again to Byron for sweep 
 and fervor, to Coleridge and Shelley for the music 
 that is divine •, and it is through Wordsworth that 
 we commune with the very spirits of the woodland 
 and the misty mountain winds. 
 
 Illustration 
 of tJie fore- 
 going points.
 
 204 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 The father 
 of idyllic 
 song. 
 
 It will not harm the noble army of verse-readers to 
 be guided for a moment to the original fountain of that 
 stream from which they take their favorite draughts. 
 The Sicili^ idyls were very familiar to the dramatists 
 and songsters of Shakespeare's time, and a knowledge 
 of them was affected, at least, by the artificial jinglers 
 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nowa- 
 days, we have Homer and Horace by heart ; but The- 
 ocritus, to most of us, is but the echo of a melodious 
 name. As the creator of the fourth great order of 
 poetry, the composite, or idyllic, he bears to it the 
 relation of Homer to epic, Pindar to lyric, ^schylus 
 to dramatic verse ; and if he had not sung as he song, 
 in Syracuse and Alexandria, two thousand years ago, 
 it is doubtful whether modern English fancy would 
 have been under the spell of that minstrelsy by which 
 it was of late so justly and delightfully enthralled. 
 
 I do not know that any extended references to 
 our topic were brought together before the appear- 
 ance of a monograph, by the present writer, in which 
 the substance of this chapter first appeared in print ; 
 nevertheless, within the last decade, during a revival 
 of the study and translation of the Greek poets, allu- 
 sions to the relations of Tennyson and Theocritus 
 have been made, and parallel passages occasionally 
 noted, — as by Thackeray in his Anthology, and by 
 Snow in his appendix to the Clarendon school edi- 
 tion of Theocritus, — such waifs confirming me in my 
 recognition of the evidence on which the foregoing 
 statements are adventured. But, even now, many of 
 the Laureate's reviewers, while noticing the " itera- 
 tion " of his refrains, the arrangement of his idyllic 
 songs, etc., seem to be unconscious of the influences 
 under which these at the outset were produced.
 
 THE ALEXANDRIAN AGE. 
 
 205 
 
 Let us briefly consider the likeness of the Victorian 
 to the Alexandrian age. The latter covered the time 
 wherein the city, by which Alexander marked the 
 splendor of his western conquests, was the capital 
 of a new Greece, and had grouped within it all that 
 was left of Hellenic philosophy, beaut)', and power. 
 Latin thought and imagination were still in their 
 dawning, and Alexandria was the centre, the new 
 Athens, of the civilized world. But the period, if 
 not that of a decadence, was reflective, critical, schol- 
 arly, rather than creative ; a comfortable era, in which 
 to live and enjoy the gathered harvests of what had 
 gone before. All the previous history of Greece led 
 up to the high Alexandrian refinement. Her litera- 
 ture had completed a round of four hundred years, 
 of which the first three centuries, in the slower prog- 
 ress of national adolescence, comprised an epic and 
 lyric period, reaching from Homer and Hesiod to 
 Anacreon and Pindar. The remainder was the golden 
 Attic age, the time of the Old, Middle, and New 
 Comedy, of the dramatists from ^schylus to Aris- 
 tophanes. Greek poetry then passed its noontide ; 
 the Alexandrian school arose, flourishing for two 
 centuries before the birth of Christ. 
 
 Literary accomplishments now were widely diffused. 
 There was a mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease. 
 Tact and scholarship so abounded, that it was diffi- 
 cult to draw the line between talent and genius. 
 We see a period of scholia and revised and anno- 
 tated editions of the elder writers; wherein was done 
 for Homer, Plato, the Hebrew Scriptures, what is 
 now doing for Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. 
 Philology came into being, and criticism began to 
 clog the fancy. Schoell says that " the poets were 
 
 Comparison 
 o/the Victo- 
 rian atid 
 A lexan- 
 drian eras. 
 
 Cp. Matter'. 
 Hist, de 
 FEcole 
 d'Alexan- 
 drie.
 
 206 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 Schoell: 
 Hist, de la 
 Liu. 
 Grecqite 
 Profane. 
 
 Distinction 
 hetiveen the 
 Greek and 
 English 
 tongues. 
 
 Ptolemy II. 
 
 deeply read, but wanting in imagination, and often 
 also in judgment." It was impossible for most to 
 rise above the influence of the time. Science, how- 
 ever, made great strides. In material growth it was 
 indeed a " wondrous age," an era of inventions, 
 travel, and discovery : the period of Euclid and Ar- 
 chimedes ; of Ptolemy with his astronomers \ of Hiero, 
 with his galleys long as clipper-ships ; of academies, 
 museums, theatres, lecture-halls, gymnasia ; of a hun- 
 dred philosophies ; of geographers, botanists, casuists, 
 scholiasts, reformers, and what not, — all springing 
 into existence and finding support in the luxurious, 
 speculative, bustling, news-devouring hurly-burly of 
 that strangely modern Alexandrian time. 
 
 It is unnecessary to dwell upon the analogy which 
 my readers already have drawn for themselves. It 
 is not an even one. There is no parallel between 
 the Greek and English languages. The former is 
 copious, but simple, and a departure from the Attic 
 purity was in itself a decline to vagueness and af- 
 fectation. Our own tongue grows richer and stronger 
 every year. Again, though England has also passed 
 through great dramatic and lyric periods, our modern 
 cycles are not of antique duration, but are likely to 
 repeat themselves again and again. Our golden year 
 is shorter, and the seasons in their turns come often 
 round. Nevertheless, at the close of the poetical 
 renaissance which marked the first quarter of the 
 nineteenth century, English literature drifted into an 
 indecisive, characterless period, bearing a resemblance 
 to that of Alexandria when Ptolemy Philadelphus 
 commenced his reign. 
 
 That liberal and ambitious monarch confirmed the 
 structure of an empire, and made the capital city
 
 THE GREEK IDYLLIC SCHOOL. 
 
 207 
 
 attractive and renowned. The wisest and most fa- 
 mous scholars resorted to his court, but not even 
 imperial patronage could restore the lost spirit of 
 Greek creative art. There was a single exception. 
 A poet of original and abounding genius, nurtured 
 in the beautiful island of Sicily, where the sky and 
 sea are bluer, the piny mountains, with yEtna at 
 their head, more kingly, the breezes fresher, the 
 rivulets more musical, and the upland pastures greener 
 than upon any other shores which the Mediterranean 
 borders, — such a poet felt himself inspired to utter 
 a fresh and native melody, even in that over-learned 
 and bustling time. Disdaining any feeble variations 
 of worn-out themes, he saw that Greek poetry had 
 achieved little in the delineation of common, every- 
 day life, and so flung himself right upon nature, 
 which he knew and reverenced well ; and erelong the 
 pastoral and town idyls of Theocritus, with their 
 amoebean dialogue and elegant occasional songs, won 
 the ear of both the fashionable and critical worlds. 
 Although his subjects were entirely novel, he availed 
 himself, in form, of all his predecessors' arts ; com- 
 posing in the new Doric, the most liquid, colloquial, 
 and flexible of the dialects : and thus he fashioned 
 his eididlia, — little pictures of real life upon the hill- 
 side and in the town, among the high and low, — 
 portraying characters with a few distinct touches in 
 lyric, epic, or dramatic form, and often by a com- 
 bination of the whole. It is not my province here 
 to show who were his immediate teachers, or from 
 what rude island ditties and mimes he conceived and 
 shaped his art ; only, to state that Theocritus found 
 one field of verse then unworked, and so availed 
 himself of it as to make it his own, capturing the 
 
 Theocritus. 
 
 Birth o/the 
 idyl.
 
 208 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 Kingsley^s 
 
 " A lex a 71- 
 dria and her 
 Schools." 
 
 hearts of those who still loved freshness and beauty, 
 and forthwith attaining such excellence that the relics 
 left us by him and two of his pupils are even now 
 the wonder and imitation of mankind. A few sen- 
 tences from Charles Kingsley's reference to the father 
 of idyllic poetry tell the truth as simply and clearly 
 as it can be told : — 
 
 " One natural strain is heard amid all this artificial jingle, 
 — that of Theocritus. It is not altogether Alexandrian. 
 Its sweetest notes were learnt amid the chestnut-groves 
 and orchards, the volcanic glens and sunny pastures of 
 Sicily ; but the intercourse between the courts of Hiero and 
 the Ptolemies seems to have been continual. Poets and 
 philosophers moved freely from one to the other, and found 
 
 a like atmosphere in both One can well conceive the 
 
 delight which his idyls must have given to the dusty Alex- 
 andrians, pent up forever between sea and sand-hills, drink- 
 ing the tank-water and never hearing the sound of a run- 
 ning stream; whirling, too, forever, in all the bustle and 
 intrigue of a great commercial and literary city. To them 
 and to us also. I believe Theocritus is one of the poets 
 who will never die. He sees men and things, in his own 
 light way, truly ; and he describes them simply, honestly, 
 with little careless touches of pathos and humor, while he 
 floods his whole scene with that gorgeous Sicilian air, like 
 one of Titian's pictures ; . . . . and all this told in a lan- 
 guage and a metre which shapes itself almost unconsciously, 
 wave after wave, into the most luscious song." 
 
 It was in this wise that Theocritus founded and 
 endowed the Greek idyllic school. Let us see how 
 Tennyson, living in a somewhat analogous period, 
 may be compared with him. How far has the repre- 
 sentative idyllist of the nineteenth century profited 
 by the example of his prototype ? To what extent is 
 the one indebted to the other for the structure, the
 
 GROWTH OF THE LAUREATE'S STYLE. 
 
 209 
 
 manner, it may be even the matter, of many of his 
 poems ? 
 
 We are uninformed of the year in which the boy 
 Tennyson was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, 
 but find him there in 1829, taking the chancellor's 
 gold medal for English verse ; this by the poem " Tim- 
 buctoo," a creditable performance for a lad of nine- 
 teen, and favored with the approval of the "Athenaeum." 
 It was thought to show traces of Milton, Shelley, and 
 Wordsworth. In the years 1826 -1829 a Cambridge 
 reprint was made of the Kiessling edition of Theoc- 
 ritus, Bion, and Moschus, including a Doric Lexicon, 
 the whole in two octavo volumes ; an excellent text 
 and commentary, and altogether the most noticeable 
 English edition of the Sicilian poets since that superb 
 Oxford Theocritus, edited by the laureate, Warton, 
 which appeared in 1770. The publication of a Cam- 
 bridge text must have directed unusual attention to 
 the study of these classics, and if Tennyson did not 
 place them upon his list for the public examinations, 
 there can be little doubt that he at this time famil- 
 iarized himself with their difficult and exquisite verse. 
 His present admiration of them is well known. 
 
 I have shown that in his early poems we find an 
 open loyalty to Wordsworth's canon of reliance upon 
 nature, and occasionally Wordsworth's mannerism 
 and language, with something of the music of Shelley 
 and the sensuous beauty of Keats. A study of old 
 English ballad-poetry is also apparent. The influence 
 of the great Italian poets is quite marked ; whether 
 by reflection from the Chaucerian and Elizabethan 
 periods, or by more direct absorption, it is difficult to 
 pronounce. The truth was, that the poet began his 
 career at an intercalary, transition period. To quote 
 
 N 
 
 Tennyson at 
 Cambridge. 
 
 Formation 
 of his style.
 
 210 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 Ttie result 
 an idyllic 
 method. 
 
 Two kinds 
 of resem- 
 blance. 
 
 from a eulogistic book-note by E. A. Poe : " Matters 
 were now verging to their worst ; and, at length, in 
 Tennyson, poetic inconsistency attained its extreme. 
 But it was precisely this extreme which wrought 
 in him a natural and inevitable revulsion ; leading 
 him first to contemn, and secondly to investigate, 
 his early manner, and finally to winnow from its 
 magnificent elements the truest and purest of all po- 
 etical styles." 
 
 In all that concerns form the young poet soon 
 found himself in sympathy with the Greek idyllic 
 compositions. He saw the opportunity for work 
 after these models, and willingly yielded himself to 
 their beautiful influence. It has never left him, but 
 is present in his latest and most sustained produc- 
 tions. But there is a difference between his maturer 
 work — which is the adjustment of the idyllic method 
 to native, modern conceptions, with a delightful pres- 
 entation of English landscape and atmosphere, and 
 the manners and dialects of English life — and the 
 experimental, early poems, which were written upon 
 antique themes. Of these " CEnone " and " The Lotos- 
 Eaters" appeared in the collection of 1832, and in 
 the same volume are other poems appealing more 
 directly to modern sympathies, which show traces of 
 the master with whom Tennyson had put his genius 
 to school. 
 
 III. 
 
 There are two modes in which the workmanship 
 of one poet may resemble that of another. The first, 
 while not subjecting an author to the charge of direct 
 appropriation, in the vulgar sense of plagiarism, is
 
 'HYLAS' AND 'GODIVA: 
 
 211 
 
 detected by critical analogy, and, of the two, is more 
 easily recognized by the skilled reader. It is the 
 mode which involves either a sympathetic treatment 
 of rhythmical breaks, pauses, accents, alliterations ; 
 a correspondence of the architecture of two poems, 
 with parallel interludes and effects ; correspondence 
 of theme, allowing for difference of place and period ; 
 or, a correspondence of scenic and metrical purpose ; 
 in fine, general analogy of atmosphere and tone. 
 The second, more obvious and commonplace, mode 
 is that displaying immediate coincidence of structure, 
 language, and thought ; a mode which, in the hands 
 of inferior men, leaves the users at the mercy of their 
 dullest reviewers. 
 
 A citation of passages, exemplifying these two kinds 
 of resemblance between the Sicilian idyls and the 
 poetry of Tennyson, will confirm and illustrate the 
 statements upon which this chapter is based. The 
 instance first set forth is that of a general, and not 
 the special, likeness ; but no subsequent attempt is 
 made to classify the obligations of our modern poet 
 to the ancient, as it is believed that the reader will 
 easily distinguish for himself the significant analogies 
 in each collection. 
 
 " Hylas," the celebrated thirteenth idyl of Theoc- 
 ritus, is one of the most perfect which have come 
 down to our time. It is not a bucolic poem, but 
 classified as narrative or semi-epic in character, yet 
 exhibits many touches of the bucolic sweetness ; is a 
 poem of seventy-five verses, written in the honey- 
 flowing pastoral hexameter, so distinct, in cffisura 
 and dact}'lic structure, from the verse of Homer, and 
 commencing thus : — 
 
 and " Go- 
 diva."
 
 212 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 A lovely 
 foeut. 
 
 "Not only for ourselves the God begat 
 Eros — whoever, Nicias, was his sire — 
 As once we thought ; nor unto us the first 
 Have lovely things seemed lovely; not to us 
 Mortals, who cannot see beyond a day ; 
 But he, that heart of brass, Amphitryon's son, 
 Who braved the ruthless lion, — he, too, loved 
 A youth, .the graceful Hylas." ' 
 
 As a counterpart to this, and directly modelled 
 upon it in form, take the " Godiva " of Tennyson, — 
 that lovely and faultless poem, whose rhythm is full 
 of the melodious quality which gives specific distinc- 
 tion to the Laureate's blank-verse ; a " flower," of 
 which so many followers now have the "seed" that 
 it has taken its place as the standard idyllic meas- 
 ure of our language. 
 
 "Godiva" is a narrative or semi-epic idyl, which, 
 like the "Hylas," contains — after a didactic pre- 
 lude, divided from the story proper— just seventy-five 
 verses, and commences thus : — 
 
 " Not only we, the latest seed of Time, 
 New men, that in the flying of a wheel 
 
 ' This translation, and many which follow, I have rendered in 
 blank-verse, not because I deem that measure at all adequate 
 in effect to the original. But even a tolerable version in " Eng- 
 lish hexameter" would require more labor than is needful for 
 our immediate purpose; and again, blank-verse is the form in 
 which the English poet chiefly has availed himself of his Dorian 
 models. I have translated most of the passages as rapidly as 
 possible ; only taking care, first, that my versions should be lit- 
 eral ; secondly, that by no artifice they should seem to resemble 
 the work of Tennyson any more closely than in fact they do. 
 
 Scholars will recall the fact that the text of the Bucolicorum 
 GrcEcorum Reliquice is greatly in dispute. In some instances the 
 editions which I have followed may differ from their wonted 
 readings.
 
 (enone: 
 
 213 
 
 Cry down the past, not only we, that prate 
 
 Of rights and wrongs, have loved the people well, 
 
 And loathed to see them overtaxed ; but she 
 
 Did more, and underwent, and overcame, 
 
 The woman of a thousand summers back, 
 
 Godiva, wife to that grim Earl, who ruled 
 
 In Coventry — " 
 
 But it is in the " CEnone " that we discover Tenny- 
 son's earliest adaptation of that refrain which was a 
 striking beauty of the pastoral elegiac verse. 
 
 " O mother Ida, hearken ere I die," 
 
 IS the analogue of (Theocr., II.) 
 
 " See thou, whence came my love, O lady Moon " ; 
 
 of the refrain to the lament of Daphnis (Theocr., I.), 
 
 " Begin, dear Muse, begin the woodland song " ; 
 
 and of the recurrent wail in the " Epitaph of Bion " 
 (Mosch., III.), 
 
 " Begin, Sicilian Muses, begin the song of your sorrow ! " 
 
 Throughout the poem the Syracusan manner and feel- 
 ing are strictly and nobly maintained ; and, while we 
 are considering " CEnone," a few points of more exact 
 resemblance may be noted : — 
 
 The Thalysia (Theocr., VII. 21-23), 
 
 " Whither at noonday dost thou drag thy feet ? 
 For now the lizard sleeps upon the wall. 
 The crested lark is wandering no more — " 
 
 The Enchantress (Theocr., II. 38-41). 
 
 "Lo, now the sea is silent, and the winds 
 Are hushed. Not silent is the wretchedness 
 Within my breast ; but I am all aflame 
 With love for him who made me thus forlorn, — 
 A thing of evil, neither maid nor wife." 
 
 * CEnone^ 
 
 The elegiac 
 refrain.
 
 214 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 Note : In his 
 ri'vised edi- 
 tion the Laii- 
 re ite substi- 
 tute- d " tlie 
 luincis are 
 de.W for 
 " the cicala 
 sleep s." 
 (1899.) 
 
 •• The Lotos- 
 Eaters" 
 
 The Young Herdsman (Theocr., XX. 19, 20; 30, 31). 
 
 " O shepherds, tell me truth ! Am I not fair ? 
 Hath some god made me, then, from what I was, 
 Off-hand, another being ? . . . . 
 Along the mountains all the women call 
 Me beautiful, all love me." 
 
 CEnone, 
 
 " For now the noonday quiet holds the hill : 
 The grasshopper is silent in the grass : 
 The lizard, with his shadow on the stone. 
 Rests like a shadow, and the cicala sleeps. 
 The purple flowers droop : the golden bee 
 Is lily-cradled : I alone awake. 
 My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,' 
 My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim, 
 And I am all aweary of my life. 
 
 " Yet, mother Ida, hearken ere I die. 
 Fairest — why fairest wife.' Am I not fair."" 
 My love hath told me so a thousand times. 
 Methinks I must be fair, for yesterday," etc. 
 
 "The Lotos-Eaters," another imaginative present- 
 ment of an antique theme, — full of Tennyson's ex- 
 cellences, no less than of early mannerisms since fore- 
 gone, — while Gothic in some respects, is charged 
 from beginning to end with the effects and very lan- 
 guage of the Greek pastoral poets. As in "CEnone," 
 there is no consecutive imitation of any one idyl ; but 
 the work is curiously filled out with passages bor- 
 rowed here and there, as the growth of the poem 
 recalled them at random to the author's mind. The 
 idyls of Theocritus often have been subjected to this 
 
 ' " Mine eyes are full of tears, my heart of grief." 
 
 Secfnd Part 0/ King Henrti VI , Act II. Sc. 3.
 
 'THE lotos-eaters: 
 
 215 
 
 process ; first, by Virgil, in several of whose eclogues 
 the component parts were culled from his master, as 
 one selects from a flower-plot a white rose, a red, 
 and then a sprig of green, to suit the exigencies of 
 color, while the wreath grows under the hand. Pope, 
 among moderns, has followed the method of Virgil, 
 as may be observed in either of his four " Pastorals." 
 The process used by Pope is tame, artificial, and 
 avowed ; in " The Lotos-Eaters " it is subtile, mas- 
 terly, yet of a completeness which only parallel quo- 
 tations can display. 
 
 The Argonauts (Theocr., XIII.) come in the after- 
 noon unto a land of cliffs and thickets and streams ; 
 of meadows set with sedge, whence they cut for their 
 couches sharp flowering-rush and the low galingale. 
 "In the afternoon" the Lotos-Eaters "come unto a 
 land " where 
 
 "Through mountain clefts the dale , 
 Was seen far inland, and the yellow down 
 Bordered with palm, and many a winding vale 
 And meadow, set with slender galingale." 
 
 Except the landscape, all this, in either poem, is after 
 Homer, from the ninth book of the Odyssey. The 
 "Choric Song" follows, of them to whom 
 
 " Evermore 
 Most weary seemed the sea, weary the oar, 
 Weary the wandering fields of barren foam " ; 
 
 and in this, the feature of the poem, are certain coin- 
 cidences to which I refer: — 
 
 Europa (Mosch., II. 3, 4). 
 
 "When Sleep, that sweeter on the eyelids lies 
 Than honey, and doth fetter down the eyes 
 With gentle bond." 
 
 A culling 
 process.
 
 2l6 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 The Wayfarers (Theocr., V. 50, 51). 
 " Here, if you come, your feet shall tread on wool, 
 The fleece of lambs, softer than downy Sleep." 
 
 Ibid. (45-49)- 
 " Here are the oaks, and here is galingale, 
 Here bees are sweetly humming near their hives; 
 Here are twin fountains of cool water; here 
 The birds are prattling on the trees, — the shade 
 Is deeper than beyond ; and here the pine 
 From overhead casts down to us its cones." 
 
 Ibid. (31, 34). 
 
 " More sweetly will you sing 
 Propt underneath the olive, in these groves. 
 Here are cool waters plashing down, and here 
 The grasses spring ; and here, too, is a bed 
 Of leafage, and the locusts babble here." 
 
 The Choice (Mosch., V. 4- 13). 
 
 ' When the gray deep has sounded, and the sea 
 Climbs up in foam and far the loud waves roar, 
 I seek for land and trees, and flee the brine, 
 And earth to me is welcome : the dark wood 
 Delights me, where, although the great wind blow, 
 The pine-tree sings. An evil life indeed 
 The fisherman's, whose vessel is his home, 
 The sea his toil, the fish his wandering prey. 
 But sweet to me to sleep beneath the plane 
 Thick-leaved ; and near me I would love to hear 
 The babble of the spring, that murmuring 
 Perturbs him. not, but is the woodman's joy." 
 
 The Lotos-Eaters. 
 
 "Music, that gentlier on the spirit lies 
 Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes ; 
 Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. 
 
 " Here are cool mosses deep. 
 And through the moss the ivies creep,
 
 THE LAUREATE'S ENGLISH IDYLS. 
 
 217 
 
 And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, 
 And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep. 
 
 » • • • • 
 
 Lo ! sweetened with the summer light 
 The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, 
 Drops in a silent autumn night. 
 
 But, propt on beds of amaranth and moly. 
 
 How sweet (while warm airs lull us, blowing lowly) 
 
 , • • • • 
 
 To watch the emerald-colored water falling 
 
 Through many a woven acanthus-wreath divine ! 
 
 Only to hear and see the far-off sparkling brine, 
 
 Only to hear were sweet, stretched out beneath the pine. 
 
 Hateful is the dark blue sky, 
 Vaulted o'er the dark blue sea. 
 
 • • ■ • • 
 
 Is there any peace 
 In ever climbing up the climbing wave ? 
 
 All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone. 
 
 How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, 
 With half-shut eyes ever to seem 
 Falling asleep in a half-dream." 
 
 Dismissing these two poems, the earlier of Tenny- 
 son's experiments upon classical myths, let us look at 
 another class of idyls, wherein the Theocritan method 
 is adapted to modern themes ; where the form is Do- 
 rian, but the feeling, color, and thought are thoroughly 
 and naturally English. Of "Godiva" I have already 
 spoken, and the Laureate's rural compositions in 
 blank-verse are directly in point, reflecting every fea- 
 ture of the so-called " pastoral idjds " of Theocritus. 
 « The Gardener's Daughter," " Audley Court," " Walk- 
 10 
 
 His modem 
 idyli.
 
 2l8 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 The isomet- 
 ric song. 
 
 Amcebean 
 contests. 
 
 ing to the Mail," " Edwin Morris, or the Lake," and 
 "The Golden Year" are modelled upon such patterns 
 as " The Thalysia," " The Singers of Pastorals," " The 
 Rival Singers," and "The Triumph of Daphnis." In 
 all of them, cultured and country- loving friends are 
 sauntering, resting, singing, sometimes lunching in 
 the open air among the hills, the waters, and the 
 woods ; in all of them there is dialogue, healthful 
 philosophy, a wealth of atmosphere and color ; and 
 in nearly all we see for the first time successfully 
 handled in English and made really melodious the 
 true isometric song as found in Theocritus. The effects 
 of this are not produced by any change to a strictly 
 lyrical measure, but it is composed in the metre of 
 the whole poem ; the Greek, of course, in hexam- 
 eter, the English, in unrhymed iambic-pentameter 
 verse. Still, it is a song, with stanzaic divisions into 
 distiches, triplets, quatrains, etc., as the case may be. 
 As in Theocritus, so in Tennyson, two songs by rival 
 comrades sometimes are balanced against each other: 
 a love-ditty against a proverbial or worldly-wise lyric, 
 — the latter, in the modern idyl, frequently rising to 
 the height of modern faith and progress. These 
 " blank-verse songs," as they are termed, are a spe- 
 cial beauty of the Laureate's verse. Where each 
 stanza has a refrain or burden, as in " Tears, idle 
 tears," " Our enemies have fallen, have fallen," etc., 
 they partake both of the bucolic and elegiac manner ; 
 but elsewhere Tennyson's personages discourse against 
 each other as in the eclogues proper. For example, 
 the two songs in " Audley Court," 
 
 " Oh ! who would fight and march and countermarch ? " 
 " Sleep, Ellen Aubrey, sleep and dream of me ! "
 
 ISOMETRIC SONG. 
 
 219 
 
 are the Doppelgdnger, so to speak, of the ditties sung 
 respectively by Milo and Battus, in " The Harvesters " 
 (Theocr., X.). Thirteen of these songs, many of them 
 in " riddling triplets of old time," are scattered through 
 "Audley Court," "The Golden Year," "The Prin- 
 cess," and the completed " Idyls of the King." And 
 where Tennyson's rustic and civic graduates content 
 themselves with jest and debate, it is after a semi- 
 amoebean fashion, which no student of the Syracusan 
 idyls can fail to recognize. 
 
 Even in " The Gardener's Daughter " there are pas- 
 sages which respond to the verse of Theocritus. That 
 simply perfect idyl, " Dora," and such pieces as " The 
 Brook " and " Sea-Dreams," are more original, yet 
 the legitimate outgrowth of the antique school. The 
 blank-verse idyls of Tennyson, though connecting him 
 with Theocritus, do not establish a ratio between the 
 relations of the ancient and the modern poet to their 
 respective periods. The Laureate is a more genuine, 
 because more independent and English, idyllist and 
 lyrist in "The May Queen," "The Miller's Daugh- 
 ter," "The Talking Oak," "The Grandmother," and 
 "Northern Farmer, Old Style." Theocritus created his 
 own school, with no models except those obtainable 
 from the popular mimes and catches of his own re- 
 gion ; just as Burns, availing himself of the simple 
 Scottish ballads, lifted the poetry of Scotland to an 
 eminent and winsome individuality. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The co-relations of Theocritus and Tennyson lie in 
 the fact that our poet discovered years ago that a 
 period had arrived for poetry of the idyllic or com- 
 
 " The May 
 Queen" etc. 
 
 Bums. 
 
 Theocritus 
 and Ten- 
 nyson.
 
 220 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 The Swal- 
 low Sott^. 
 
 posite order ; and that much of the manner, form, 
 and language of the latter is directly taken from the 
 former. Mr. Tennyson's maturer poems, " The Prin- 
 cess " and " The Idyls of the King," are written 
 Dorian-wise. " The Holy Grail " and its associate 
 legendary pieces occupy the same position in his life- 
 work which those semi-epic poems, " The Dioscuri," 
 " The Infant Heracles," and " Heracles the Lion- 
 Slayer " hold in the relics of Theocritus. The 
 " Morte d'Arthur " is written as he would have trans- 
 ■iated Homer, judging from his version of a passage 
 ■in the Iliad, and was composed years before the other 
 " Idyls of the King," and in a noticeably different 
 style. For all this, — especially in the speech of the 
 departing Arthur, — it is semi-idyllic, to say the least ; 
 a grand poem, a 'chant without a discord, strong 
 throughout with ringing, monosyllabic Saxon verse. 
 
 The Swallow Song, in " The Princess," is modelled 
 upon the isometric songs in the third and eleventh 
 idyls of Theocritus, bearing a special likeness to the 
 lover's serenade in Idyl III., as divided by Ahrens 
 and others into stanzas of three verses each. There 
 is also some correspondence of imagery : — 
 
 The Serenade (Theocr., III. 12-14). 
 " Would that I were 
 
 w 
 
 The humming-bee, to pass within thy cave, 
 Thridding the ivy and the feather-fern 
 By which thou 'rt hidden." 
 
 Cyclops (Theocr., XI. 54-57). 
 " O that I had been born a thing with fins 
 To sink anear thee, and to kiss thy hands, — 
 If thou deniedst thy mouth, — and now to bring 
 White lilies to thee, and the red-leaved bloom 
 Of tender poppies ! "
 
 MINOR RESEMBLANCES. 
 
 221 
 
 The Princess (Book IV.). 
 
 " O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light 
 Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill, 
 And cheep and twitter twenty million loves." 
 
 "O were I thou that she might take me in, 
 And lay me on her bosom, and her heart 
 Would rock the snowy cradle till I died." 
 
 Throughout the work of Tennyson we meet with 
 isolated passages which also seem to be reflections or 
 reminiscences of verses in the relics of the Syracusan 
 triad. Where the thought or image of such a passage 
 is of a familiar type, common to many classical writers, 
 there is often a flavor about it to indicate that its im- 
 mediate inspiration was caught from Theocritus, Bion, 
 or Moschus. One of the following comparisons, how- 
 ever, can only be made between the two poets from 
 whom it is derived. Many have been struck by the 
 novelty, no less than the fitness, of an image which 
 I will quote from "Enid." Nothing in earlier Eng- 
 lish poetry suggests it, and I was surprised to find a 
 conceit, which, with a shade of difference, is so akin, 
 in the semi-epic fragment of " The Dioscuri." The 
 modern verse and image are the more excellent : — 
 
 The Dioscuri (Theocr., XXII. 46-50). 
 
 " His massive breast and back were rounded high 
 With flesh of iron, like that of which is wrought 
 A forged colossus. On his stalwart arms. 
 Sheer over the huge shoulder, standing out 
 Were muscles, — like the rolled and spheric stones, 
 Which, in its mighty eddies whirling on, 
 The winter-flowing stream hath worn right smooth 
 This side and that." 
 
 Miscellane- 
 ous passages 
 selected for 
 comparitoH.
 
 222 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 Enid. 
 " And bared the knotted column of his throat, 
 The massive square of his heroic breast, 
 And arms on which the standing muscle sloped 
 As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, 
 Running too vehemently to break upon it." 
 
 Pastorals (Theocr., IX. 31, 32). 
 " Dear is cicala to cicala, dear 
 The ant to ant, and hawk to hawk, but I 
 Hold only dear to me the Muse and Song." 
 
 The Princess (Book III.). 
 " ' The crane,' I said, ' may chatter of the crane, 
 The dove may murmur of the dove, but I 
 An eagle clang an eagle to the sphere.' " 
 
 The Syracusan Gossips (Theocr., XV. 102-105). 
 " How fair to thee the gentle-footed Hours 
 Have brought Adonis back from Acheron ! 
 Sweet Hours, and slowest of the Blessed Ones : 
 But still they come desired, and ever bring 
 Gifts to all mortals." ' 
 
 Love and Duty. 
 " The slow, sweet Hours that bring us all things good, 
 The slow, sad Hours that bring us all things ill, 
 And all good things from evil." 
 
 The Bridal of Helen (Theocr., XVIII. 47, 48). 
 " In Dorian letters on the bark 
 We '11 carve for men to see, 
 Pay honor to me, all who mark, 
 For I am Helen's tree." 
 
 ' " I thought how once Theocritus had sung 
 
 Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years, 
 Who each one in a gracious hand appears 
 To bear a gift for mortals, old or young." 
 
 Mrs. Browning, Sonnets front the Portuguese.
 
 MINOR RESEMBLANCES. 
 
 223 
 
 The Talking Oak. 
 
 " But tell me, did she read the name 
 I carved with many vows, 
 When last with throbbing heart I came 
 To rest beneath thy boughs ? 
 • ■ • • • 
 
 "And I will work in prose and rhyme, 
 And praise thee more in both, 
 Than bard has honored beech or lime," etc. 
 
 TAe Little Heracles (Theocr. XXIV., 7-9). 
 (Alcmene's Lullaby.) 
 " Sleep ye, my babes, a sweet and healthful sleep ! 
 Sleep safe, ye brothers twain that are my life : 
 Sleep, happy now, and happy wake at morn." 
 
 " Cradle Song," in The Princess. 
 
 " Sleep and rest, sleep and rest. 
 Father will come to thee soon ! 
 Rest, rest, on mother's breast, 
 Faither will come to thee soon ! 
 
 Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep." 
 
 Epitaph of B ion (Mosch., III. 68, 69). 
 
 " Thee Cypris holds more dear than that last kiss 
 She gave Adonis, as he lay a-dying." 
 
 Tears, Idle Tears. 
 "Dear as remembered kisses after death." 
 
 Bion (III. 16). 
 " Where neither cold of frost, nor sun, doth harm us." 
 
 Morte d'' Arthur. 
 " Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow."
 
 224 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 Cp., also, 
 Titml. III. 
 4. 31 and 
 Catul. 
 LXII. 
 ao-23. 
 
 The Triumph of Daphnis (Theocr., VIII. 90, 91). 
 " But as the other pined, and in his heart 
 
 Smouldered with grief, even so a girl betrothed 
 
 Still feels regret." 
 
 ("A maid first parting from her home might wear as sad a face." 
 — CalverLy's Transl.) 
 
 In Memoriam (XL). 
 " When crowned with blessing she doth rise 
 To take her latest leave of home, 
 And hopes and light regrets that come 
 Make April of her tender eyes." 
 
 The Distaff {Theocr., XXVIII. 24, 25). 
 " For, seeing thee, one to his friend shall say : 
 Lo, what a grace enriches this poor gift ! 
 All gifts from friends are ever gifts of worth." 
 
 Elaine. 
 " Diamonds for me ! they had been thrice their worth, 
 Being your gift, had you not lost your own. 
 To loyal hearts the value of all gifts 
 Must vary as the giver's." ' 
 
 Cyclops (Theocr., XI. 25-29). 
 (Love at first sight.) 
 " For I have loved you, maiden, since you first, 
 A-gathering hyacinths from yonder mount, 
 Came with my mother, and I was your guide. 
 So, having seen you once, I could not cease 
 To love you from that time, nor can I now." 
 
 The Gardener's Daughter. 
 "But she, a Rose 
 In roses, mingled with her fragrant toil, 
 
 ' But see, also, Hamlet (III. i) : — 
 
 " And with them, words of so sweet breath composed 
 As made the things more rich : their perfume lost, 
 Take these again ; for to the noble mind 
 Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind."
 
 MINOR RESEMBLANCES. 
 
 225 
 
 Nor heard us come, nor from her tendance turned 
 
 Into the world without 
 
 So home I went, but could not sleep for joy, 
 Reading her perfect features in the gloom. 
 • • • • • 
 
 Love at first sight, first-born and heir to all, 
 
 Made this night thus." 
 
 There are passages of another class, in Mr. Ten- 
 nyson's verse, which bear a common likeness to the 
 work of various classical poets, his university studies 
 retaining their influence over him through life. In 
 some of these, by brief touches, he reproduces the 
 whole picture of a Greek idyl : — 
 
 Europa (Mosch., II. 125-130). 
 " But she, upon the ox-like back of Zeus 
 Sitting, with one hand held the bull's great horn, 
 And with the other her garment's purple fold 
 Drew upward, that the infinite hoary spray 
 Of the salt ocean might not drench it through ; 
 The while Europa's mantle by the winds 
 Was filled and swollen like a vessel's sail, 
 Buoying the maiden onward." 
 
 The Palace of Art. 
 
 " Or sweet Europa's mantle blew unclasped, 
 From off her shoulder backward borne : 
 From one hand drooped a crocus ; one hand grasped 
 The mild bull's golden horn." 
 
 Elsewhere, in the " Europa," the heroine is said to 
 "shine most eminent, as the Foam-Born among her 
 Graces three." Tennyson's classical feeling is so 
 strong, that, in the closing scene of " The Princess," 
 at the height of his dramatic passion, he stops to 
 draw a picture of Aphrodite coming "from barren 
 deeps to conquer all with love," and follows the god- 
 10* o 
 
 Minor re- 
 seinblances.
 
 226 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 Siiiiilar 
 effects of 
 rhythm. 
 
 dess even to her Graces, who " decked her out for 
 worship without end." Both the ancient and modern 
 idyllists are mindful of the second Homeric Hymn 
 to Aphrodite ; and the excursus of the latter poet is 
 so beautiful that we forgive him for delaying the 
 action of his poem. In his other classical allusions 
 such phrases as " the cold-crowned snake," " the 
 charm of married brows," "softer than sleep," "like 
 a dog he hunts in dreams," " thou comest, much 
 wept-for ! " and " sneeze out a full God-bless-you right 
 and left," repeat not only the language of Theocritus 
 and his pupils, but of Homer, Anacreon, and the 
 Latin Lucretius and Catullus. 
 
 The lover's song, " It is the Miller's Daughter," is 
 an exquisite imitation of the sixteenth ode of Anac- 
 reon. Often, however, the Laureate enriches his ro- 
 mantic and epic poems with effects borrowed from 
 Gothic, mediaeval sources. A reference, for example, 
 to the " The'atre Frangais au Moyen Age," printed 
 by Monmerque in 1839, will discover the miracle-play 
 from which he obtained something more than a hint 
 for the isometric burden, — " Too late, too late ! ye 
 cannot enter now." 
 
 Alliterations and rhymes within lines, graces of 
 poetry in which Tennyson has excelled English prede- 
 cessors, are a continuous excellence of his Syracusan 
 teachers. There is a wandering melody, wholly dif- 
 ferent from the sounding Homeric rhythm, and impos- 
 sible for a translator to reproduce, which the author 
 of " The Princess " has approached in such lines as 
 these : — 
 
 " O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light." 
 
 " Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine."
 
 SIMILAR EFFECTS OF RHYTHM. 
 
 237 
 
 "Laborious, orient ivory, sphere in sphere." 
 
 " The lime a summer home of murmurous wings." 
 
 " Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs 
 With bunch and berry and flower through and through." 
 
 " The flower of all the west and all the world." 
 
 " And in the meadow tremulous aspen-trees 
 And poplars made a noise of falling showers." 
 
 " Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet, 
 Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, 
 The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
 And murmuring of innumerable bees." 
 
 These effects, which the Laureate employs with such 
 variation and continuance that the resultant style is 
 known as Tennysonian, were Dorian first of all. 
 Whole idyls of Theocritus, composed in the flexible 
 bucolic hexameter, are a succession of melodies which 
 are simply consonant with the genius of the new Doric 
 tongue. The four English verses last cited above are 
 curiously imitated from the musical passage in the 
 first idyl (Theocr., I. 7, 8). 
 
 " Sweeter thy song, O shepherd, than the sound 
 Of yon loud stream, falling adown, adown," 
 
 combined with the alliterative line, which mimics the 
 murmuring of bees (Theocr., V. 46), 
 
 (55e KoXhv ^o/M^evvTi irorl crfj.di'eafft fieXicraai. 
 
 It may be said, generally, that our poet imitates the 
 Sicilians, and them alone, of all his classical models, 
 in the persistent ease with which sound, color, form, 
 and meaning are allied in his compositions. False 
 notes are never struck, and no discordant hues are 
 admitted. 
 
 Dorian 
 
 iiitiic.
 
 228 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 "Cyclops" 
 ami i/te 
 "ShephercTs 
 Idyl." 
 
 V. 
 
 This chapter has extended beyond its proposed 
 limits, but, ere dismissing the theme, I will cite two 
 more examples in which Mr. Tennyson has very 
 closely followed his prototype. The first is that 
 " small sweet idyl " in the seventh division of " The 
 Princess " ; possibly, so far as objective beauty and 
 finish are concerned, the nonpareil of the whole poem. 
 It is an imitation of the apostrophe of Polyphemus 
 to Galatea, and never were the antique and modern 
 feelings more finely contrasted : the one, clear, simple, 
 childlike, perfect (in the Greek) as regards melody 
 and tone ; the other, nobler, more intellectual, the an- 
 tique body with the modern soul. The substitution 
 of the mountains for the sea, as the haunt of the 
 beloved nymph, is the Laureate's only departure from 
 the material employed by Theocritus : — 
 
 Cyclop (Theocr., XL 42-49, 60-66). 
 
 " Come thou to me, and thou shalt have no worse ; 
 Leave the green sea to stretch itself to shore ! 
 More sweetly shalt thou pass the night with me 
 In yonder cave ; for laurels cluster there, 
 And slender-pointed cypresses ; and there 
 Is the dark ivy, the sweet-fruited vine ; 
 There the cool water, that from shining snows 
 Thick-wooded j^tna sends, a draught for gods. 
 Who these would barter for the sea and waves? 
 
 There are oak fagots and unceasing fire 
 
 Beneath the ashes 
 
 Now will I learn to swim, that I may see 
 What pleasure thus to diuell in water depths 
 Thou findestl Nay, Init, Galatea, come! 
 Come thence, and having come, forget henceforth, 
 As I (who tarry here), to seek thy home!
 
 THE 'SHEPHERD'S IDYL? 
 
 229 
 
 And mayst thou love with me to feed the flocks 
 And milk them, and to press the cheese with me, 
 Curdling their milk with rennet." 
 
 The Princess (Book VII.). 
 " Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height ; 
 What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang), 
 In height and cold, the splendor of the hills.' 
 But cease to move so near the heavens, and cease 
 To glide a sunbeam by the blasted pine, 
 To sit a star upon the sparkling spire; 
 And cotne, for Love is of the valley, come. 
 For Love is of the valley, come thou down 
 And find him ; by the happy threshold he, 
 Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize. 
 Or red with spurted purple of the vats. 
 Or fox-like in the vine : . . . . 
 
 . . . . Let the torrent dance thee down 
 To find him in the valley; let the wild 
 Lean-headed eagles yelp alone, and leave 
 The monstroics ledges there to slope .... 
 . . . . but come ; for all the vales 
 Await thee ; azure pillars of the hearth 
 Arise to thee ; the children call, and I, 
 Thy shepherd, pipe, and sweet is every sound." 
 
 The closing example is from " The Thalysia," or 
 Harvest-Home, which has furnished Mr. Tennyson 
 with the design for portions of " The Gardener's 
 Daughter" and " Audley Court." There is no exact 
 reproduction, but in outhne and spirit the passages 
 herewith compared will be seen to resemble each 
 other more nearly than others already given, where 
 the expressions of the Greek text are repeated in the 
 English adaptation : — 
 
 The Thalysia (Theocr., VII. i, 2, 130-147). 
 " It was the day when I and Eucritus 
 
 Strolled from the city to the river-side : 
 
 With us a third, Amyntas." 
 
 "The 
 TJialysia," 
 and its court- 
 terparis.
 
 230 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 (After this opening follows a eulogy of the poet's 
 friends, Phrasidamus and Antigenes.) 
 
 " He, leftward turning, sauntered on the road 
 To Pyxa ; as for Eucritus and me 
 With handsome young Amyntas, — having gained 
 The house of Phrasidamus, and lain down 
 On beds of fragrant rushes and on leaves 
 Fresh from the vines, — we took our fill of joy. 
 Poplars and elms were rustling in the wind 
 Above us, and a sacred rivulet 
 From the Nymphs' cave was murmuring anigh. 
 The red cicalas ceaselessly amid 
 The shady boughs were chirping; from afar 
 The tree frog in the briers chanted shrill ; 
 The crest-larks and the thistle-finches sang, 
 The turtle-dove 7aas plaining ; tawny bees 
 Were hovering round the fountain. All things near 
 Smelt of the ripened summery all things smelt 
 Of fruit-time. Pears were rolling at our feet, 
 And apples for the taking ; to the ground 
 The plum-tree staggered, burdened with its fruit ; 
 And we, meanwhile, brushed from a wine-jar's mouth 
 The pitch, four years unbroken." 
 
 The Gardener's Daughter. 
 
 "This morning is the morning of the day 
 When I and Eustace from the city went 
 To see the Gardener's Daughter : 
 
 (After this opening follows a eulogy of Eustace 
 and Juliet.) 
 
 " . . . . All the land in flowery squares, 
 Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind. 
 Smelt of the coming summer. .... 
 . . . . From the woods 
 Came voices of the well-contented doves. 
 The lark could scarce get out his notes for Joy, 
 But shook his song together as he ncared
 
 'THE thalysia: 
 
 231 
 
 " His happy home, the ground. To left and right 
 
 The atckoo told his name to all the hills; 
 The mellow ouzel fluted in the ehn ; 
 The red-cap whistled ; and the nightingale 
 Sang loud, as though he were the bird of day." 
 
 Audley Court. 
 " There, on a slope of orchard, Francis laid 
 A damask napkin wrought with horse and hound, 
 Brought out a dusky loaf that smelt of home, 
 And, half cut down, a pasty costly made, 
 Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret, lay 
 Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks 
 Imbedded and injellied ; last, with these, 
 A flask of cider from his father's vats 
 Prime, which I knew." 
 
 Each portion of the foregoing English Idyls, so far 
 as quoted, is a reminiscence of some portion of the 
 "Thalysia" {mutatis mutandis, with regard to theme, 
 season, and country), and the general analogy is 
 equally spirited and remarkable. As for the two 
 lunches, the one is pure Sicilian, of the fruits of the 
 orchard and the vine; the other, pure Briton, smack- 
 ing of the cook and the larder. Your true English- 
 man, while sensible of the beauty of the song of the 
 lark, who can " scarce get out his notes for joy," ap- 
 preciates him none the less when lying "imbedded 
 and injellied " beneath the crust of " a pasty costly 
 made." It should be remembered, however, that the 
 bird does not appear under these differing conditions 
 in the same idyl. 
 
 VI. 
 
 A SUFFICIENT number of analogous passages have 
 now been cited to illustrate the homage which the 
 Laureate has paid to the example of Theocritus, and 
 
 A close 
 analogy.
 
 232 
 
 TENNYSON AND THEOCRITUS. 
 
 Tennyson 
 none the less 
 an orie^inal 
 poet. 
 
 Pseudo- 
 pastoral 
 verse. 
 
 the perfection of that art by which he has wedded 
 his master's method to the spirit and resources of 
 the English tongue. I have written with genuine rev- 
 erence for Tennyson's work, and with a gratitude, felt 
 by all who take pleasure in noble verse, for the de- 
 light imparted through many years by the successive 
 productions of his genius. In study of the Sicilian 
 models he has been true to his poetic instinct, and 
 fortunate in discernment of the wants of his day and 
 generation. Emerson, in an essay on " Imitation and 
 Originality," has said : " We expect a great man to be 
 a good reader ; or in proportion to the spontaneous 
 power should be the assimilating power " ; and again, 
 " There are great ways of borrowing. Genius borrows 
 nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to 
 his authors, Landor replies : ' Yet he was more origi- 
 nal than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies 
 and brought them to life.'" 
 
 It must be acknowledged that somewhat of this 
 applies to Tennyson's variations upon Theocritus. To 
 him, also, may be adjudged the credit of being the 
 first to catch the manner of the classical idyls and 
 reproduce it in modern use and being. Before his 
 time Milton and Shelley were the only poets who 
 measurably succeeded in this attempt, and neither of 
 them repeated it after a single trial. Other reproduc- 
 tions of the Greek idyllic form have been by a kind 
 of filtration through the Latin medium ; and often, 
 by a third remove, after a redistillation of the French 
 product. The odious result is visible in the absurd 
 pastorals of " standard British poets," from Drj^den 
 himself and Pope, to Browne, Ambrose Philips, Shen- 
 stone, and Gay. Their bucolics have made us sicken 
 at the very mention of • such names as Daphnis and
 
 CLOSE OF THE IDYLLIC PERIOD. 
 
 233 
 
 The true 
 idyl. 
 
 Corydon, soiled as these are with all ignoble use. Ten- 
 nyson revived the true idyllic purpose, adopting the 
 form mainly as a structure in which to exhibit, with 
 equal naturalness and beauty, the scenery, thought, 
 manners, of his own country and time. Assuming 
 the tide of idyllic poet, he made the term " idyl " 
 honored and understood ; but carried his method to 
 such perfection, that its cycle seems already near an 
 end, and a new generation is calling for work of a 
 different order, for more vital passion and dramatic 
 power.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE GENERAL CHOIR. 
 
 An era 
 fairly rep- 
 resented by 
 its -miscella- 
 neous poets. 
 
 The early 
 situation 
 and outlook. 
 
 THE choral leaders are few in number, and it i^ 
 from a blended maltitude of voices that we d^ 
 rive the general tone and volume, at any epoch, of a 
 nation's poetic song. The miscellaneous poets, singly 
 or in characteristic groups, give us the pervading 
 quality of a stated era. Great singers, lifted by 
 imagination, make style secondary to thought ; or, 
 rather, the thought of each assumes a correlative 
 form of expression. Younger or minor contempora- 
 ries catch and reflect the fashion of these forms, 
 even if they fail to create a soul beneath. It is said 
 that very great poets never, through this process, have 
 founded schools, their art having been of inimitable 
 loftiness or simplicity ; but who of the accepted few, 
 during recent years, has thus held the unattainable 
 before the vision of the facile English throng? 
 
 At the beginning of the present reign Tennyson 
 
 was slowly obtaining recognition, and his influence 
 
 Accession of '^3.d uot yct established the poetic fashion of the 
 
 time. Wordsworth shone by himself, in a serene and 
 
 luminous orbit, at a height reached only after a pro- 
 
 Victoria 
 June 20, 
 1837.
 
 EARLY SITUATION AND OUTLOOK. 
 
 235 
 
 longed career. The death of Byron closed a splendid 
 but tempestuous era, and was followed by years of 
 reaction, — almost of sluggish calm. At least, the 
 group of poets was without a leader, and was com- 
 posed of men who, with few great names among them, 
 utilized their gifts, — each after his own method or 
 after one of that master, among men of the previous 
 generation, whom he most affected. A kind of in- 
 terregnum occurred. Numbers of minor poets and 
 scholars survived their former compeers, and wrote 
 creditable verse, but produced little that was essen- 
 tially new. Motherwell had died, at the early age of 
 thirty-eight, having done service in the revival of 
 Scottish ballad-minstrelsy : and with the loss of the 
 author of that exquisite lyric, " Jeanie Morrison," of 
 "The Cavalier's Song," and "The Sword-Chant of 
 Thorstein Raudi," there passed away a vigorous and 
 sympathetic poet. Southey, Moore, Rogers, Frere, 
 Wilson, James Montgomery, Campbell, James and 
 Horace Smith, Croly, Joanna Baillie, Bernard Barton, 
 Elliott, Cunningham, Tennant, Bowles, Maginn, Pea- 
 cock, poor John Clare, the translators Cary and Lock- 
 hart,' — all these were still alive, but had outlived 
 their generation, and, as far as verse was concerned, 
 
 ' Robert Southey, /'^^^ Laureate, 1774- 1843; Thomas Moore, 
 1779- 1852; Samuel Rogers, 1763 -1855; Rt. Hon. John Hook- 
 ham Frere, 1769 -1846; John Wilson, 1785 -1854; Rev. James 
 Montgomery, 1771 - 1854 ; Thomas Campbell, 1777" 1844; James 
 Smith, 1775- 1839; Horace Smith, 1779 -1849; Rev. George 
 Croly, 1780- i860; Joanna Baillie, 1762- 1851; Bernard Barton, 
 1784- 1849; Ebenezer Elliott, 1781-1849; Allan Cunningham, 
 1784-1842; William Tennant, 1785 -1848; Rev. William Lisle 
 Bowles, 1762- 1850; William Maginn, 1793- 1842; Thomas Love 
 Peacock, 1785 -1866; John Clare, 1793 -1864; Rev. Henry 
 Francis Gary, 1772 -1844; John Gibson Lockhart, 1794- 1854. 
 
 William 
 Words- 
 worth, Poet- 
 Laureate : 
 born April 
 
 7. 1770; 
 died April 
 23. 1850. 
 
 William 
 
 Motheriuell'. 
 
 1797-1835. 
 
 TJie retired 
 list.
 
 236 
 
 DA RLE Y. — BED DOES. — TA YLOR. 
 
 Leigh 
 Hunt. See 
 fage 103. 
 
 Rev. Henry 
 Hart Mil- 
 man : 
 1791-1868. 
 
 Sir Thomas 
 Noon Tal- 
 fourd: 
 179s- 1854. 
 
 James 
 Slieridan 
 
 KnoTvles : 
 1784- 1862. 
 
 Mary Rjis- 
 sell M it- 
 ford: 
 1786-1855. 
 
 "Strayed 
 fingers." 
 
 George 
 Darley : 
 1785-1849. 
 
 were more or less superannuated. What Landor, 
 Hood, and Procter were doing has passed ah-eady 
 under review. Leigh Hunt continued his pleasant 
 verse and prose, and did much to popularize the 
 canons of art exemplified in the poetry of his former 
 song-mates, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Milman, 
 afterward Dean of St. Paul's, a pious and conven- 
 tional poet who dated his literary career from the 
 success of an early drama, " Fazio," still was writing 
 plays that did credit to a churchman and Oxford 
 professor. Talfourd's " Ion " and " The Athenian 
 Captive " also had made a stage-success : the poets 
 had not yet discovered that a stage which the talent 
 of Macready exactly fitted, and a histrionic feeling 
 of which the plays of Sheridan Knowles had come 
 to be the faithful expression, were not stimulating to 
 the production of the highest grade of dramatic 
 poetry. Various dramas and poems, by that cheery, 
 versatile authoress. Miss Mitford, had succeeded her 
 tragedies of "Julian" and " Rienzi." It must be 
 owned that these three were good names in a day 
 of which the fashion has gone by. At this distance 
 we see plainly that they were minor poets, or that 
 the times were unfriendly to work whose attraction 
 should be lasting. Doubtless, were they alive and 
 active now, they would contend for favor with many 
 whom the present delights to honor. 
 
 Meanwhile a few men of genius, somewhat out of 
 place in their generation, had been essaying dramatic 
 work for the love of it, but had little ambition or 
 continuity, finding themselves so hopelessly astray. 
 Darley, after his first effort, " Sylvia," — a crude 
 but poetical study in the sweet pastoral manner of 
 Jonson and Fletcher, — was silent, except for some
 
 THE SENTIMENTALISTS. 
 
 237 
 
 occasional song, full of melody and strange purpose- 
 lessness. Beddoes, a stronger spirit, author of " The 
 Bride's Tragedy " and " Death's Jest-Book," wandered 
 off to Germany, and no collection of his wild and 
 powerful verse was made until after his decease. 
 Taylor, whose noble intellect and fine constructive 
 powers were early affected by the teachings of Words- 
 worth, entered a grand protest against the sentimen- 
 talism into which the Byronic passion now had de- 
 generated. He would, I believe, have done even 
 better work, if this very influence of Wordsworth had 
 not deadened his genuine dramatic power. He saw 
 the current evils, but could not substitute a potential 
 excellence or found an original school. As it is, 
 " Philip van Artevelde " and " Edwin the Fair " have 
 gained a place for him in English literature more 
 enduring than the honors awarded to many popular 
 authors of his time. 
 
 The sentimental feeling of these years was nurtured 
 on the verse of female writers, Mrs. Hemans and 
 Miss Landon, whose deaths seemed to have given 
 their work, always in demand, a still wider reading. 
 It had been fashionable for a throng of humbler 
 imitators, including some of gentle blood, to con- 
 tribute to the " annuals " and " souvenirs " of Alaric 
 Watts, but their summer-time was nearly over and the 
 chirping rapidly grew faint. The Hon. Mrs. Norton, 
 styled " the Byron of poetesses," was at. the height 
 of her popularity. A pure religious sentiment in- 
 spired the sacred hymns of Keble. Young Hallam 
 had died, leaving material for a volume of literary 
 remains ; if he did not live to prove himself great, 
 his memory was to be the cause of greatness in 
 others, and is now as abiding as any fame which 
 
 Thomas 
 Love II Bed- 
 does: 1803- 
 49- 
 
 Sir Henry 
 Taylor : 
 1800- 86. 
 
 The senti- 
 mentalists. 
 
 The "An- 
 nuals." 
 
 A laric 
 Alexander 
 IVatts : 
 1799-1864. 
 
 Caroline 
 
 Elizabeth 
 Sarah 
 Norton : 
 1808- 77. 
 
 IHezi. John 
 Keble : 
 1792- 1 866. 
 
 Arthur 
 Henry 
 Hallam : 
 1811-33.
 
 238 
 
 FORMATION OF A NEW SCHOOL. 
 
 Rev. Rich- 
 ard Harris 
 
 Bur ham : 
 17S8-1845. 
 
 Wittihrofi 
 Mackivorth 
 Vraed: 
 \ 802 - 39. 
 
 A critical 
 analogy. 
 
 maturity could have brought him. Besides the comic 
 verse of Hood, noticed in a previous chapter, other 
 jingling trifles, like Barham's Ingoldsby Legends, a cross 
 between Hood's whimsicality and that of Peter Pindar, 
 were much in vogue, and serve to illustrate the broad 
 and very obvious quality of the humor of the day. 
 Lastly, Praed, a sprightly and delicate genius, soon to 
 die and long to be affectionately lamented, was restor- 
 ing the lost art of writing society-verse, and, in a style 
 even now modern and attractive, was lightly throw- 
 ing off stanzas neater than anything produced since 
 the wit of Canning and the fancy of Tommy Moore. 
 All this was light enough, and now seems to us to 
 have betokened a shabby, profitless condition. From 
 it, however, certain elements were gradually to crys- 
 tallize and to assume definite purpose and form. The 
 influence of Wordsworth began to deepen and widen ; 
 and erelong, under the lead of Tennyson, composite 
 groups and schools were to arise, having clearer ideas 
 of poetry as an art, and adorning with the graces of 
 a new culture studies after models derived from the 
 choicest poetry of every literature and time. 
 
 II. 
 
 The cyclic aspect of a nation's literary history has 
 been so frequently observed that any reference to it 
 involves a truism. The analogy between the courses 
 through which the art of different countries advances 
 and declines is no less thoroughly understood. The 
 country whose round of being, in every department 
 of effort, is most sharply defined to us, was Ancient 
 Greece. The rise, splendor, and final decline of her 
 imaginative literature constitute the fullest paradigm
 
 HISTORICAL ANALOGY. 
 
 239 
 
 of a nation's literary existence and of the supporting 
 laws. In the preceding chapter I have enlarged upon 
 the active, critical, and learned Alexandrian period, 
 which succeeded to the three creative stages of Hel- 
 lenic song. I have said that' during this epoch the 
 Hellenic spirit grew elaborately feeble ; what was 
 once so easily creative became impotent, and at last 
 entirely died away. Study could not supply the force 
 of nature. A formidable circle of acquirements must 
 be formed before one could aspire to the title of an 
 author. Verbal criticism was introduced ; researches 
 were made into the Greek tongue; antique and quaint 
 words were sought for by the poets, and, to quote 
 again from Schoell, " they sought to hide their defects 
 beneath singularity of idea, and novelty and extrava- 
 gance of expression ; while the bad taste of some 
 displayed itself in their choice of subjects still more 
 than in their manner of treating them." 
 
 In modern times, when more events are crowded 
 into a decade than formerly occurred in a century, 
 and when civilization ripens, mellows, and declines, 
 only to repeat the process in successively briefer 
 periods, men do not count a decline in national Htera- 
 ture a symptom that the national glory is approaching 
 its end. Still, more than one recurring cycle of Eng- 
 lish literature has its analogue in the entire course 
 of that of Ancient Greece. And, when we come to 
 the issue of supremacy in poetic creation, the ques- 
 tion arises whether Great Britain has not recently 
 been going through a period similar to the Alexan- 
 drian in other respects than the production of a fine 
 idyllic poet. It is difficult to estimate our own time, 
 so insensibly does the judgment ally itself to the 
 graces and culture in vogue. Take up any well- 
 
 See pages 
 20s, 206. 
 
 Contrast be- 
 tween an- 
 cient and 
 7nodern lit- 
 erary cycles.
 
 240 
 
 FAMOUS ENGLISH PERIODS. 
 
 Skill and 
 
 Tefincmcnt 
 of the minor 
 poets. 
 
 The Geor- 
 gian rcvi- 
 ■val: 1790- 
 1824. 
 
 Essny on 
 " The Book 
 o/the 
 Poets:' 
 E. B. B. 
 
 edited selection from English minor poetry of the last 
 thirty years, and our first thought is, — how full this 
 is of poetry, or at least of poetic material ! What 
 refined sentiment ! what artistic skill ! what elaborate 
 metrical successes ! From beginning to end, how 
 very readable, high-toned, close, and subtile in thought ! 
 Here and there, also, poems are to be found of the 
 veritable cast, — simple, sensuous, passionate ; but 
 not so often as to give shape and color to the whole. 
 With the same standard in view, one could not cull 
 such a garland from the minor poetry of any portion 
 of the last century ; nor, indeed, from that of any in- 
 terval later than the generation after Shakespeare, and 
 earlier than the great revival, which numbered Burns, 
 Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats among tlie leaders of 
 an awakened chorus of natural English minstrelsy. 
 
 That revival, in its minor and major aspects, was 
 truly glorious and inspiring. The poets who sus- 
 tained it were led, through the disgust following a 
 hundred years of false and flippant art, and by some- 
 thing of an intellectual process, to seek again that 
 full and limpid fountain of nature to which the Eliza- 
 bethan singers resorted intuitively for their draughts. 
 But the unconscious vigor of that early period was 
 still more brave and immortal than its philosophical 
 counterpart in our own century. Ah, those days of 
 Elizabeth ! of which Mrs. Browning said, in her exult- 
 ant, womanly way, — that "full were they of poets as 
 
 the summer days are of birds Never since the 
 
 first nightingale brake voice in Eden arose such a 
 jubilee-concert ; never before nor since has such a 
 crowd of true poets uttered true poetic speech in one 
 
 day Why, a common man, walking through the 
 
 earth in those days, grew a poet by position."
 
 THE MEDITATIVE SCHOOL. 
 
 241 
 
 Now, have freshness, synthetical art, and sustained 
 imaginative power been the prominent endowments of 
 the recent schools of British minor poets ? For an 
 answer we must give attention to their blended or 
 distinctive voices, remembering that certain of the ear- 
 liest groups have recruited their numbers, and pro- 
 longed their vitality, throughout the middle and even 
 the latest divisions of the period under review. 
 
 III. 
 
 The tone of the first of these divisions upon the 
 whole was suggested by Wordsworth, while the poetic 
 form had not yet lost the Georgian simplicity and 
 profuseness. Filtered through the intervening period 
 of which we have spoken, its eloquence had grown 
 tame, its simplicity somewhat barren and prosaic. 
 Still, both tone and form, continuing even to our day, 
 are as readily distinguished, by the absence of elabo- 
 rate adornment and of curious nicety of thought, from 
 those of either the Tennysonian or the very latest 
 school, as the water of the Mississippi from that of 
 the Missouri for miles below their confluence. The 
 poets of the group before us are not inaptly thought 
 to constitute the Meditative School, characterized by 
 seriousness, reflection, earnestness, and, withal, by re- 
 ligious faith, or by impressive conscientious bewilder- 
 ment among the weighty problems of modern thought. 
 
 The name of Hartley Coleridge here may be recalled. 
 His poetry, slight in force and volume, yet relieved 
 by half-tokens of his father's sudden melody and pas- 
 sion, is cast in the mould and phrase of his father's 
 life-long friend. This mingled quality came by de- 
 scent and early association. The younger Coleridge 
 II p 
 
 A question 
 before the 
 reader. 
 
 Influetice of 
 Words- 
 worth. 
 
 The Medi- 
 tative 
 School. 
 
 Rev. Hart- 
 ley Cole- 
 ridge : 
 1796-1849.
 
 242 
 
 MITFORD. — TRENCH. — ALFORD. 
 
 Rev. "John 
 
 Mitford: 
 
 1811-58. 
 
 Richard 
 Chenevix 
 Trench : 
 1S07-86. 
 
 Henry 
 
 Al/ord: 
 
 1810-71. 
 
 A ubrey 
 Thomas dt 
 Vere : 
 18 14- 
 
 (whose beautiful child-picture by Wilkie adds a touch- 
 ing interest to his memoirs) inherited to the full the 
 physical and psychological infirmities of the elder, with 
 but a limited portion of that "rapt one's" divine gift. 
 The atmosphere of his boyhood was full of learning 
 and idealism. He had great accomplishments, and 
 had the poetic temperament, with all its weaknesses 
 and dangers, yet without a coequal faculty of reflec- 
 tion and expression. Hence the inevitable and pa- 
 thetic tragedy of a groping, clouded life, sustained 
 only by piteous resignation and faith. Several moral- 
 istic poets date from this early period, — Mitford, 
 Trench, Alford, and others of a like religious mood. 
 Archbishop Trench's work is careful and scholarly, 
 marked by earnestness, and occasionally rises above 
 a didactic level. Dean Alford's consists largely of 
 Wordsworthian sonnets, to which add a poem mod- 
 elled upon " The Excursion " ; yet he has written a 
 few sweet lyrics that may preserve his name. The 
 devotional traits of these writers gave some of them 
 a wider reading, in England and America, than their 
 scanty measure of inspiration really deserved. Grad- 
 ually they have fallen out of fashion, and again illus- 
 trate the truth that no ethical virtue will compensate 
 us in art for dulness, didacticism, want of imaginative 
 fire. Aubrey de Vere, a later disciple of the Cumber- 
 land school, is of a different type, and has shown ver- 
 satility, taste, and a more natural gift of song. This 
 gentle poet and scholar, though hampered by too rigid 
 adoption of Wordsworth's theory, often has an attrac- 
 tive manner of his own. Criticized from the artistic 
 point of view, a few studies after the antique seem 
 \ very terse when compared with his other work. A 
 late drama, " Alexander the Great," has strength of
 
 DE VERE. —BURBIDGE. — STERLING. 
 
 243 
 
 language and construction. The earnestness and pu- 
 rity of his patriotic and religious verses give them 
 exaltation, and, on the whole, the Irish have a right 
 to be proud of this most spiritual of their poets, — 
 one who, unlike Hartley Coleridge, has improved upon 
 an inherited endowment. Returning on our course, 
 we see in the verse of Burbidge another reflection of 
 Wordsworth, but also something that reminds us of 
 the older English poets. As a whole, it is of mid- 
 dle quality, but so correct and finished that it is 
 no wonder the author never fulfilled the dangerous 
 promise of his boyhood. He was a schoolfellow of 
 Clough, and I am not aware that he ever published 
 any volume subsequent to that by which this note is 
 ^suggested, and which bears the date of 1838. The 
 relics of Sterling, the subject of Carlyle's familiar me- 
 moir, like those of Hallam, do not of themselves 
 exhibit the full ground of the biographer's devotion. 
 The two names, nevertheless, have given occasion re- 
 spectively for the most characteristic poem and the 
 finest prose memorial of recent times. A few of 
 Sterling's minor lyrics, such as " Mirabeau," are elo- 
 quent, and, while defaced by conceits and prosaic 
 expressions, show flashes of imagination which bright- 
 en the even twilight of a meditative poet. Between 
 the deaths of Sterling and Clough a long interval 
 elapsed, yet there is a resemblance between them in 
 temperament and mental cast. It may be said of 
 Clough, as Carlyle said of Sterling, that he was " a 
 remarkable soul, .... who, more than others, sensi- 
 ble to its influences, took intensely into him such tint 
 and shape of feature as the world had to offer 
 there and then ; fashioning himself eagerly by what- 
 soever of noble presented itself." It may be said of 
 
 Thomas 
 Burl/id i^e : 
 born abcut 
 1816. 
 
 John 
 Sterling: •• 
 1806-44- 
 
 A rihur 
 Hugh 
 Clough : 
 1819-61.
 
 244 
 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 »/ Amer- 
 ica " ; //. 
 339i 340- 
 
 ClougVs 
 
 hexameter 
 
 foem. 
 
 him, likewise, that in his writings and actions " there 
 is for all true hearts, and especially for young noble 
 seekers, and strivers towards what is highest, a mirror 
 in which some shadow of themselves and of their 
 immeasurably complex arena will profitably present 
 itself. Here also is one encompassed and struggling 
 even as they now are." Clough must have been a 
 rare and lovable spirit, else he could never have so 
 wrapped himself within the affections of true men. 
 Though he did much as a poet, it is doubtful whether 
 his genius reached anything like a fair development. 
 Intimate as he was with the Tennysons, his style, 
 while often reflective, remained essentially his own. 
 His fine original nature was never quite subservient 
 to passing influences. His free temperament and. 
 radical way of thought, with a manly disdain of all 
 factitious advancement, made him a force even among 
 the choice companions attached to his side ; and he 
 was valued as much for his character and for what he 
 was able to do, as for the things he actually accom- 
 plished. There was nothing second-rate in his mould, 
 and his Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, which bears the 
 reader along less easily than the billowy hexameters 
 of Kingsley, is charmingly faithful to its Highland 
 theme, and has a Doric simplicity and strength. His 
 shorter pieces are uneven in merit, but all suggestive 
 and worth a thinker's attention. If he could have 
 remained in the liberal American atmosphere, and 
 have been spared his untimely taking-off, he might 
 have come to greatness ; but he is now no more, and 
 with him departed a radical thinker and a living 
 protest against the truckling expedients of the mode. 
 The poetry of Lord Houghton is of a modern con- 
 templative type, very pure, and often sweetly lyrical.
 
 MILNES. — NE WMA N. — PALGRA VE. 
 
 245 
 
 Emotion and intellect blend harmoniously in his deli- 
 cate, suggestive verse, and a few of his songs — 
 among which " I wandered by the brookside " at 
 once recurs to the memory — have a deserved and 
 lasting place in English antholog)% This beloved 
 writer has kept within his limitations. He has the 
 sincere affection of men of letters, who all honor 
 his free thought, his catholic taste, and his generous 
 devotion to authors and the literary life. To the 
 friend and biographer of Keats, the thoughtful patron 
 of David Gray, and the progressive enthusiast in 
 poetry and art, I venture to pay this cordial tribute, 
 knowing that I but feebly repeat the sentiments of a 
 multitude of authors on either side of the Atlantic. 
 
 Dr. Newman has lightened the arduous labors and 
 controversies of his distinguished career by the com- 
 position of many thoughtful hymns, imbued with the 
 most devotional spirit of his faith. As representing 
 the side of obedience to tradition these Verses of 
 Mafiy Years have their significance. At the opposite 
 pole of theological feeling, Palgrave, just as earnest 
 and sincere, seems to illustrate the Laureate's say- 
 ing,— 
 
 " There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds." 
 
 Nevertheless, in "The Reign of Law," one of his 
 best and most characteristic pieces, he argues himself 
 into a reverential optimism, that seems, just now, to 
 be the resting-place of the speculative religious mind. 
 He may be said to represent the latest attitude of 
 the meditative poets, and in this closely resembles 
 Arnold, of whom I have already spoken as the most 
 conspicuous and able modern leader of their school. 
 
 Richard 
 Monckton 
 Milnes ■■ 
 1S09-8S 
 
 Rev. John 
 Henry 
 Newman ." 
 1801- 
 
 Frnncis 
 Turner 
 Palgrave I 
 1824-
 
 246 
 
 PL UMP TRE. — M VERS. — HA MER TON. 
 
 Rev. Ed- 
 ward Hayes 
 Plutnptre : 
 1821- 
 
 Frederic 
 William 
 Henry 
 Myers : 
 1843- 
 
 Philip 
 Gilbert 
 Hamerton : 
 1834- 
 
 Spirit of the 
 cotiteynpla- 
 tive poets. 
 See also pp. 
 96-98. 
 
 Indeed, there is scarcely a criticism which I have 
 made upon the one that will not apply to the other. 
 Palgrave, with less objective taste and rhythmical 
 skill than are displayed in Arnold's larger poems, 
 is in his lyrics equally searching and philosophical, 
 and occasionally shows evidence of a musical and 
 more natural ear. The Biblical legends and narrative 
 poems of Dr. Plumptre are simple, and somewhat like 
 those of the American Willis, but didactic and of a 
 kind going out of vogue. His hymns are much bet- 
 ter, but it is as a classical translator that we find 
 him at his best. Among the later religious poets 
 Myers deserves notice for the feeling, careful finish, 
 and poetic sentiment of his longer pieces. A few of 
 his quatrain-lyrics are exceedingly delicate ; his son- 
 nets, more than respectable. From the resemblance 
 of the artist Hamerton's descriptive poetry to that of 
 Wordsworth, I refer, in this place, to his volume, 
 T/ie Isles of Loch Awe., and Other Poems., issued in 
 1859. This dainty book, with its author's illustrations, 
 is interesting as the production of one who has since 
 achieved merited popularity both as an artist and 
 prose author, — in either of which capacities he 
 probably is more at home than if he had followed 
 the art which gave vent to the enthusiasm of his 
 younger days. He may, however, be called the tour- 
 ist's poet ; his book is an excellent companion to one 
 travelling northward ; the poems, though lacking terse- 
 ness and force, and written on a too obvious theory, 
 are picturesque, and, as the author claimed for them 
 in an appendix, "coherent, and easily understood." 
 
 Regarding Palgrave and Arnold, then, as advanced 
 members of the contemplative group, I renew the 
 question concerning the freshness and creative in-
 
 DOUBTING HEARTS. 
 
 247 
 
 stinct of this recent school. The unconscious but 
 uppermost emotion of both is one of doubt and inde- 
 cision : a feeling, I have said, that they were born 
 too late. They are awed and despondent before the 
 mysteries of life and nature. As to art, their con- 
 viction is that somehow the glory and the dream 
 have left our bustling generation for a long, long ab- 
 sence, and may not come again. Palgrave's " Reign 
 of Law," after all, is but making the best of a dark 
 matter. It reasons too closely to be highly poetical. 
 The doubts and refined melancholy of his other poetry 
 reflect the sentiment of the still more subtile Arnold, 
 from whose writings many a passage such as this may 
 be taken, to show a dissatisfaction with his mission 
 and the time : — 
 
 " Who can see the green Earth any more . 
 As she was by the sources of Time } 
 Who imagine her fields as they lay 
 In the sunshine, unworn by the plough "i 
 Who thinks as they thought, 
 The tribes who then lived on her breast, 
 Her vigorous, primitive sons } 
 
 • • • • 
 
 What Bard, 
 At the height of his vision, can dream 
 Of God, of the world, of the soul, 
 With a plainness as near. 
 As flashing as Moses felt. 
 When he lay in the night by his flock 
 On the starlit Arabian waste ? 
 Can rise and obey 
 The beck of the Spirit like him ? 
 
 And we say that repose has fled 
 
 Forever the course of the River of Time," etc. 
 
 Great or small, the meditative poets lack that elas- 
 
 A ititude of 
 Palgrave 
 and A mold.
 
 248 
 
 A FEW STRONG SINGERS. 
 
 Weakness 
 and declhie 
 of the school. 
 
 A few inde- 
 pendent 
 singers. 
 
 Richard 
 Hens^ist 
 Horne : 
 born 
 1802-03, 
 died 
 
 tiJarch 13, 
 1^64. 
 
 ticity which is imparted by a true lyrical period, — 
 whose very life is gladness, with song and art for an 
 undoubting, blithesome expression. The better class, 
 thus sadly impressed, and believing it in vain to 
 grasp at the skirts of the vanishing Muse, are im- 
 pelled to substitute choice simulacra, which culture 
 and artifice can produce, for the simplicity, sensuous- 
 ness, and passion, declared by Milton to be the ele- 
 ments of genuine poetry. They are what training 
 has made them. Some of the lesser names were 
 cherished by their readers, in a mild and sterile time, 
 for their domestic or religious feeling, — very few 
 really for their imagination or art. At last even 
 sentiment has failed to sustain them, and one by one 
 they have been relegated to the ever-increasing col- 
 lection of unread and rarely cited " specimen " verse. 
 
 IV. 
 
 So active a literary period could not fail to devel- 
 op, among its minor poets, singers of a more fresh 
 and genuine order. Here and there one may be dis- 
 covered whose voice, however cultivated, has been 
 less dependent upon culture, and more upon emotion 
 and unstudied art. One of the finest of these, un- 
 questionably, is Horne, author of " Cosmo de' Medici," 
 "Gregory the Seventh," "The Death of Marlowe," 
 and " Orion." I am not sure that in natural gift he 
 is inferior to his most famous contem.poraries. That 
 he here receives brief attention is due to the dispro- 
 portion between the sum of his productions and the 
 length of his career, — for he still is an occasional 
 and eccentric contributor to letters. There is some- 
 thing Elizabethan in Home's writings, and no less in
 
 RICHARD HENGIST HORNE. 
 
 249 
 
 a restless love of adventure, which has borne him 
 wandering and fighting around the world, and breaks 
 out in the robust and virile, though uneven, character 
 of his poems and plays. He has not only, it would 
 seem, dreamed of life, but lived it. Taken together, 
 his poetry exhibits carelessness, want of tact and wise 
 method, but often the highest beauty and power. A 
 fine erratic genius, in temperament not unlike Bed- 
 does and Landor, he has not properly utilized his 
 birthright. His verse is not improved by a certain 
 transcendentalism which pervaded the talk and writ- 
 ings of a set in which he used to move. Thus 
 Orion was written with an allegorical purpose, which 
 luckily did not prevent it from being one of the no- 
 blest poems of our time ; a complete, vigorous, highly 
 imaginative effort in blank-verse, rich with the an- 
 tique imagery, yet modern in thought, — and full of 
 passages that are not far removed from the majestic 
 beauty of "Hyperion." The author's Ballad Romances, 
 issued more lately, is not up to the level of his 
 younger work. While it seems as if Home's life has 
 been unfruitful, and that he failed — through what 
 cause I know not — to conceive a definite purpose 
 in art, and pursue it to the end, it must be remem- 
 bered that a poet is subject to laws over which we 
 have no control, and in his external relations is a 
 law unto himself. I think we fairly may point to 
 this one as another man of genius adversely affected 
 by a period not suited to him, and not as one who 
 in a dramatic era would be incapable of making any 
 larger figure. He was the successor of Darley and 
 Beddoes, and the prototype of Browning, but capable 
 at his best of more finish and terseness than the last- 
 named poet. In most of his productions that have 
 II * 
 
 A fine er- 
 ratic genius. 
 
 His 
 
 " OrioH," 
 
 etc. 
 
 Home UH- 
 suited to his 
 period.
 
 250 
 
 MA CA ULA v. — A YTOUN. 
 
 Thomas 
 Babingtmi 
 
 Aliicatilay : 
 1800-59. 
 
 William 
 Edmond- 
 stoune Ay- 
 toun: 1813- 
 65. 
 
 reached me, amidst much that is strange and gro- 
 tesque, I find little that is sentimental or weak. 
 
 Lord Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rofne was a liter- 
 ary surprise, but its poetry is the rhythmical outflow 
 of a vigorous and affluent writer, given to splendor 
 of diction and imagery in his flowing prose. He 
 spoke once in verse, and unexpectedly. His themes 
 were legendary, and suited to the author's heroic cast, 
 nor was Latinism ever more poetical than under his 
 thoroughly sympathetic handling. I am aware that 
 the Lays are criticised as being stilted and false to the 
 antique, but to me they have a charm, and to almost 
 every healthy young mind are an immediate delight. 
 Where in modern ballad-verse will you find more 
 ringing stanzas, or more impetuous movement and 
 action ? Occasionally we have a noble epithet or 
 image. Within his range — little as one who met 
 him might have surmised it — Macaulay was a poet, 
 and of the kind which Scott would have been first to 
 honor. " Horatius " and " Virginius," among the Ro- 
 aian lays, and that resonant battle-cry of " Ivry," have 
 become, it would seem, a lasting portion of English 
 verse. In the work of Professor Aytoun, similar in 
 kind, but more varied, and upon Scottish themes, we 
 also discern what wholesome and noteworthy verse 
 may be composed by a man who, if not a poet of 
 high rank, is of too honest a breed to resort to un- 
 wonted styles, and to measures inconsonant with the 
 English tongue. The ballads of both himself and 
 Macaulay rank among the worthiest of their class. 
 Aytoun's " Execution of Montrose " is a fine produc- 
 tion. In " Bothwell," his romantic poem in the metre 
 and manner of Scott, he took a subject above his 
 powers, which are at their best in the lyric before
 
 CHARLES KINGS LEY. 
 
 251 
 
 named. Canon Kingsley, as a poet, had a wider 
 range. His "Andromeda" is an admirable composi- 
 tion, — a poem laden with the Greek sensuousness, 
 yet pure as crystal, and the best-sustained example 
 of English hexameters produced up to the date of 
 its composition. It is a matter of indifference whether 
 the measure bearing that name is akin to the antique 
 model, for it became, in the hands of Kingsley, 
 Hawtrey, Longfellow, and Howells, an effective form 
 of English verse. The author of "Andromeda" re- 
 peated the error of ignoring such quantities as do 
 obtain in our prosody, and relying upon accent alone ; 
 but his fine ear and command of words kept him 
 musical, interfluent, swift. In " St. Maura," and the 
 drama called " The Saint's Tragedy," the influence 
 of Browning is perceptible, Kingsley's true poetic fac- 
 ulty is best expressed in various sounding lyrics for 
 which he was popularly and justly esteemed. These 
 are new, brimful of music, and national to the core. 
 " The Sands o' Dee," " The Three Fishers," and " The 
 Last Buccaneer " are very beautiful ; not studies, but 
 a true expression of the strong and tender English 
 heart. 
 
 Here we observe a suggestive fact. With few ex- 
 ceptions the freshest and most independent poets of 
 the middle division — those who seem to have been 
 born and not made — have been, by profession and 
 reputation, first, writers of prose ; secondly, poets. 
 Their verses appear to me, like their humor, "strength's 
 rich superfluity." Look at Macaulay, Aytoun, and 
 Arnold, — the first a historian and critic, the others, 
 essayists and college professors. Kingsley and Thack- 
 eray might have been dramatic poets in a different 
 time and country, but accepted the romance and 
 
 Rev. Char lei 
 KingiUy : 
 1819-75. 
 
 English 
 hexameter 
 verse. 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A nier- 
 ica " ; //. 
 90, gi, aiid 
 pp. 195- 
 199. 
 
 Kingsley's 
 ballads. 
 
 Fresh and 
 genuine poe- 
 try by nota- 
 ble writers 
 0/ prose. 
 
 Cp. ''Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica " .• //. 
 462-464.
 
 252 
 
 TIIORNBUR V. — THA CKERA Y 
 
 George 
 Walter 
 Thorn- 
 bury : 
 18^8-76. 
 
 novel as affording the most dramatic methods of 
 the day. Thornbury is widely known by his prose 
 volumes, but has composed some of the most fiery 
 and rhythmical songs in the English tongue. His 
 Ballads of the New World are inferior to his Songs 
 of the Cavaliers and Roimdheads, and to his other lyrics 
 of war and revolution in Great Britain and France, 
 which are full of unstudied lyrical power. Some of 
 these remind us of Browning's " Cavalier Tunes " ; 
 but Browning may well be proud of the pupil who 
 wrote " The Sally from Coventry " and " The Three 
 Scars." He is hasty and careless, and sometimes 
 coarse and extravagant ; his pieces seem to be struck 
 off at a heat, — but what can be better than " The 
 Jester's Sermon," "The Old Grenadier's Story," and 
 " La Tricoteuse " ? How unique the jfacoblte Ballads ! 
 Read "The White Rose over the Water." "The 
 Three Troopers," a ballad of the Protectorate, has a 
 clash and clang not often resonant in these piping 
 times: — 
 
 A true lyri- 
 cal poet. • 
 
 William 
 Makepeace 
 Thackeray : 
 1811-63. 
 
 " Into the Devil tavern 
 
 Three booted troopers strode, 
 From spur to feather spotted and splashed 
 
 With the mud of a winter road. 
 In each of their cups they dropped a crust, 
 
 And stared at the guests with a frown ; 
 Then drew their swords and roared, for a toast, 
 
 ' God send this Crum-well-down ! ' " 
 
 I have a feeling that this author has not been 
 fairly appreciated as a ballad-maker. Equally perfect 
 of their sort are " The Mahogany-Tree," " The Ballad 
 of Bouillabaise," " The Age of Wisdom," and " The 
 End of the Play," — all by the kindly hand of Thack- 
 eray, which shall sweep the strings of melody no
 
 SPONTANEITY. 
 
 253 
 
 more ; yet iheir author was a satirist and novel-writer, 
 never a professed poet. Nor can one read the col- 
 lection made, late in life, by Doyle, another Oxford 
 professor, of his occasional verse, without thinking 
 that "The Return of the Guards," "The Old Cava- 
 lier," "The Private of the Buffs," and other soldierly 
 ballads are the modest effusions of a natural lyrist, 
 who probably has felt no great encouragement to 
 perfect a lyrical gift that has been crowded -out of 
 fashion by the manner of the latter-day school. 
 
 The success of these unpretentious singers again 
 illustrates the statement that spontaneity is an essen- 
 tial principle of the art. The poet should carol like 
 the bird : — 
 
 " He knows not why nor whence he sings, 
 Nor whither goes his warbled song ; 
 As Joy itself delights in joy, 
 His soul finds strength in its employ, 
 And grows by utterance strong." 
 
 The songs of minstrels in the early heroic ages dis- 
 played the elasticity of national youth. When verses 
 were recited, not written, a pseudo-poet must have 
 found few listeners. In a more cultivated stage, 
 poetry should have all this unconscious freshness, re- 
 fined and harmonized with the thought and finish of 
 the day. 
 
 Many of the novelists have written verse, but 
 usually, with the foregoing exceptions, by a profes- 
 sional effort rather than a born gift. The Bronte 
 sisters began as rhymesters, but quickly found their 
 true field. Mrs. Craik has composed tender stanzas 
 
 Sir Francis 
 Hastings 
 
 Doyle : 
 
 Spontaneity 
 an essential 
 principle 0/ 
 lyric art. 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica " .• pp. 
 316, 317. 
 
 Inferior 
 novelist- 
 poets. 
 
 The Bronte 
 sisters.
 
 254 
 
 NO VELIS T-POE TS. 
 
 Dinah 
 Maria Mu- 
 lock Craik: 
 1S26- 
 
 Marian 
 
 Evaits 
 
 Lewes 
 
 [Mrs. 
 
 Cross) : 
 
 1819-80. 
 
 Edivard, 
 Lord Lyt- 
 ton : 1 80s - 
 73- 
 
 resembling those of Miss Procter, and mostly of a 
 grave and pleasing kind. George Eliot's metrical 
 work has special interest, coming from a woman ac- 
 knowledged to be, in her realistic yet imaginative 
 prose, at the head of living female writers. She has 
 brought all her energies to bear, first upon the con- 
 struction of a drama, which was only a siicres d' estime, 
 and recently upon a new volume containing " The 
 Legend of Jubal " and other poems. The result 
 shows plainly that Mrs. Lewes, though possessed of 
 great intellect and sensibility, is not, in respect to 
 metrical expression, a poet. Nor has she a full con- 
 ception of the simple strength and melody of English 
 verse, her polysyllabic language, noticeable in the 
 moralizing passages of Middlemarch, being very in- 
 effective in her poems. That wealth of thought which 
 atones for all her deficiencies in prose does not seem 
 to be at her command in poetr3\ The Spanish Gypsy 
 reads like a second-rate production of the Byronic 
 school. " The Legend of Jubal " and " How Lisa 
 loved the King " suffer by comparison with the 
 narrative poems, in rhymed pentameter, of Morris, 
 Longfellow, or Stoddard. A little poem in blank- 
 verse, entitled " O may T join the choir invisible ! " 
 and setting forth her conception of the "religion of 
 humanity," is worth all the rest of her poetry, for it 
 is the outburst of an exalted soul, foregoing personal 
 immortality and compensated by a vision of the 
 growth and happiness of the human race. 
 
 Bulwer was another novelist-poet, and one of the 
 most persistent. During middle age he renewed the 
 efforts made in his youth to obtain for his metrical 
 writings a recognition always accorded to his ingenious 
 and varied prose-romance \ but whatever he did in
 
 BULWER, AND THE MAGAZINISTS. 
 
 255 
 
 verse was the result of deliberate intellect and culture. 
 The fire was not in him, and his measures do not 
 give out heat and light. His shorter lyrics never 
 have the true ring ; his translations are somewhat 
 rough and pedantic ; his satires were often in poor 
 taste, and brought him no great profit; his serio 
 comic legendary poem of King Arthur is a monument 
 to industry, but never was labor more hopelessly 
 thrown away. In dramas like " Richelieu " and 
 "Cromwell" he was more successful; they contain pas- 
 sages which are wise, eloquent, and effective, though 
 rarely giving out the subtile aroma which comes from 
 the essential poetic principle. Yet Bulwer had an 
 honest love for the beautiful and sublime, and his 
 futile effort to express it was almost pathetic. 
 
 Many of his odes and translations were contributed, 
 I think, to Blackwood's magazine. This suggests men- 
 tion of the ephemeral groups of lyrists that gathered 
 about the serials of his time. Among the Blackwood 
 writers, Moir, Aird, — a Scotsman of some imagina- 
 tion and fervor, — Simmons, and a few greater or lesser 
 lights, are still remembered. Benl/efs was the mouth- 
 piece of a rollicking set of pedantic and witty rhyme- 
 sters, from whose diversions a book of comic ballads 
 has been compiled. Fraser's, The Dublin Ufiiversiiy, 
 and other magazines, attracted each its own staff of 
 verse-makers, besides receiving the frequent assistance 
 of poets of wide repute. I may say that throughout 
 the period much creditable verse has been produced by 
 studious men who have given poetry the second place 
 as a vocation. Among recent productions of this 
 class the historical drama of Hannibal, by Professor 
 Nichol, of Glasgow, may be taken as a type and a 
 fair example. 
 
 The maga- 
 zines and 
 their con- 
 iribuiors. 
 
 David Mac- 
 beth Moir: 
 1798-1851. 
 
 Thotitas 
 A ird : 
 1802-76. 
 
 B. Sim- 
 mons : died 
 1850. 
 
 John 
 
 Nichol'. 
 
 1833-
 
 256 
 
 WADE. — DOMETT. 
 
 Diffusion 0/ 
 
 inferior 
 
 verse. 
 
 Thomas 
 Kibble 
 Hervey : 
 1799-1859. 
 
 Martin 
 Farquhar 
 Tupper: 
 1810- 
 
 Rev. Robert 
 Montgom- 
 ery : 1 807 - 
 55- 
 
 A fei^v men 
 0/ early 
 promise. 
 
 Thomas 
 Wade : 
 1805-75. 
 
 Alfred 
 Domett : 
 
 His Black- 
 wood lyrics. 
 
 With respect to poetry, as to prose, the coarser and 
 less discriminating appetite is the more widely dif- 
 fused. Create a popular taste for reading, and an 
 inferior article comes to satisfy it, by the law of sup- 
 ply and demand. Hence the enormous circulation of 
 didactic artificial measures, adjusted to the moral and 
 intellectual levels of commonplace, like those of Her- 
 vey, Tupper, and Robert Montgomery : while other 
 poets of the early and middle divisions, who had 
 sparks of genius in them, but who could not adapt 
 themselves to either the select or popular markets of 
 their time, found the struggle too hard for them, and 
 have passed out of general sight and mind. At the 
 very beginning of the period Wade gave promise of 
 something fine. A copy of his Mimdi et Cordis lies 
 before me, dated 1835. It is marked with the extrava- 
 gance and turgidity which soon after. broke out among 
 the rhapsodists, yet shows plainly the sensitiveness 
 and passion of the poet. The contents are in sym- 
 pathy with, and like, the early work of Shelley, and 
 various poems are of a democratic, liberal stripe, in- 
 spired by the struggle then commencing over Europe. 
 As long ago as 1837 Domett was contributing lyrics 
 to Blackwood which justly won the favor of the burly 
 editor. From a young poet who could throw off a 
 glee like " Hence, rude Winter, crabbed old fellow ! " 
 or " All who 've known each other long," his friends 
 had a right to expect a brilliant future. But he was 
 an insatiable wanderer, and could " not rest from 
 travel." His productions dated from every portion 
 of the globe ; finally he disappeared altogether, and 
 ceased to be heard from, but his memory was kept 
 green by Browning's nervous characterization of him, 
 — " What 's become of Waring ? " After three dec-
 
 SCOTT. — MRS. ADAMS. 
 
 257 
 
 ades the question is answered, and our vagrant bard 
 returns from Australia with a long South Sea idyl, 
 Ranolf and Anw/iia, — a poem justly praised by Brown- 
 ing for varied beauty and power, but charged with 
 the diffuseness, transcendentalism, defects of art and 
 action, that were current among Domett's radical breth- 
 ren so many years ago. The world has gone by him. 
 The lyrics of his youth, and chiefly a beautiful "Christ- 
 mas Hymn," are, after all, the best fruits, as they were 
 the first, of his long and restless life. But doubtless 
 the life itself has been a full compensation. There 
 also was Scott, who wrote The Year of the World, a 
 poem commended by our Concord Brahmin for its 
 faithful utilization of the Hindoo mythology. The 
 author, a distinguished painter and critic, is now one 
 of the highest authorities upon matters pertaining to 
 the arts of design.' There were women too : among 
 them, Mrs. Adams, author of remembered hymns, 
 and of that forgotten drama of Vivia Perpetua, — a 
 creature whose beauty and enthusiasm drew around 
 her the flower of the liberal party ; the friend of Hunt 
 and Carlyle and W. J. Fox, and of Browning in his 
 eager youth. Of many such as these, in whom the 
 lyrical aspiration was checked by too profuse admix- 
 ture with a passion for affairs, for active life, for arts 
 of design, or for some ardent cause to which they be- 
 came devoted, or who failed, through extreme sensibil- 
 ity, to be calm among the turbid elements about them, 
 — of such it may be asked, where are they and their 
 
 ^ Mr. Scott has now published his miscellaneous ballads, stud- 
 ies from nature, etc., — many of them written years ago, — in a 
 volume to which his own etchings, and those of Alma Tadema, 
 give additional beauty. 
 
 Thirty-five 
 
 years later. 
 
 William 
 Bell Scott: 
 1811- 
 
 Sarah 
 
 Flcnuer 
 Adams : 
 1805-48.
 
 258 
 
 LO VER. — ALLINGHAM. 
 
 Poetry a 
 jealous tnis- 
 tress. Cp. 
 " Poets of 
 Amer- 
 ica": pp. 
 75, 409- 
 
 The song- 
 Viriiers. 
 
 Samuel 
 Lover: 
 1797 - 1868. 
 
 William 
 A llinghatn : 
 1828- 
 
 productions, except in the tender memory and honor 
 of their early comrades and friends ? Poetry is a jeal- 
 ous mistress : she demands life, worship, tact, the 
 devotion of our highest faculties ; and he who refuses 
 all of this and more never can be, first, and above 
 his other attributes, an eminent or in any sense a 
 true and consecrated poet. 
 
 VI. 
 
 We come to a brood of minstrels scattered numer- 
 ously as birds over the meadows of England, the rye- 
 fields of Scotland, and the green Irish hills. They are 
 of a kind which in any active poetic era it is a pleas- 
 ure to regard. They make no claims to eminence. 
 Their work, however, though it may be faulty and 
 uneven, has the charm of freshness, and comes from 
 the heart. The common people must have songs ; 
 and the children of a generation that had found 
 pleasure in the lyrics of Moore and Haynes Bayley 
 have not been without their simple warblers. One 
 of the most lovable and natural has but lately passed 
 away ; Lover, a versatile artist, blitheful humorist and 
 poet. In writing of Barry Cornwall I have referred 
 to the essential nature of the song, as distinguished 
 from that of the lyric, and in Lover's melodies the 
 former is to be found. The ofhce of such men is to 
 give pleasure in the household, and even if they are 
 not long to be held of account (though no one can 
 safely predict how this shall be), they gain a prompt 
 reward in the affection of their living countrymen. 
 We find spontaneity, also, in the rhymes of Ailing- 
 ham, whose " Mary Donnelly " and " The Fairies " 
 have that intuitive grace called quality, — a grace
 
 OTHER SONG-WRITERS. 
 
 259 
 
 which no amount of artifice can ever hope to pro- 
 duce, and for whose absence mere talent can never 
 compensate us. The ballads of Miss Downing, Waller, 
 and MacCarthy, all have displayed traces of the same 
 charm ; the last-named lyrist, a man of much culture 
 and literary ability, has produced still more attractive 
 work of another kind. Bennett, within his bounds, is 
 a true poet, who not only has composed many lovely 
 songs, but has been successful in more thoughtful 
 efforts. A few of his poems upon infancy and child- 
 hood are sweetly and simply turned. Dr. Mackay, in 
 the course of a long and prolific career, has furnished 
 many good songs. Some of his studied productions 
 have merit, but his proper gift is confined to lyrical 
 work. Among the remaining Scottish and English 
 song-makers, Eliza Cook, the Howitts, Gilfillan, and 
 Swain probably have had the widest recognition ; all 
 have been simple, and often homely, warblers, having 
 their use in fostering the tender piety of household 
 life. Miller, a mild and amiable poet, resembling the 
 Howitts in his love for nature, wrote correct and 
 quiet verse thirty years ago, and was more noticeable 
 for his rural and descriptive measures than for a few 
 conventional songs. 
 
 It will be observed that, as in earlier years, the 
 most characteristic and impressive songs are of Irish 
 and Scottish production ; and, indeed, lyrical genius 
 is a special gift of the warm-hearted, impulsive Celtic 
 race. Nations die smging, and Ireland has been a 
 land of song, — of melodies suggested by the political 
 distress of a beautiful and unfortunate country, by the 
 poverty that has enforced emigration and brought 
 pathos to every family, and by the traditional loves, 
 hates, fears, that are a second nature to the humble 
 
 Mary 
 Doivning : 
 1830- 
 
 yoAn Fran- 
 cis i-Valler: 
 iSto- 
 
 Denis 
 Florence 
 MacCarthy: 
 1817-82. 
 
 lyaiiam 
 
 Cox Ben- 
 nett: 1820- 
 
 Cluirles 
 
 Mackay : 
 1S14- 
 
 Eliza Cook: 
 18.7- 
 
 IVilliatn 
 Hoivitt : 
 1795-1879. 
 
 Mary How- 
 itt: 1798- 
 
 Rohert 
 Gilfillan : 
 1798-1850. 
 
 Charles 
 Swain .' 
 1803-74. 
 
 Thomas 
 
 Miller: 
 iSog- 74. 
 
 Irish and 
 
 Scottish 
 
 songs. 
 
 Patriotic 
 ballads.
 
 26o 
 
 IRISH MINSTRELSY. 
 
 Tlie Dublin 
 
 newspaper 
 
 press. 
 
 Gerald 
 Griffin : 
 1803 -40. 
 
 John 
 Batiini : 
 179S- 1S42. 
 
 Helen Se- 
 
 lina. Lady 
 Duffer in : 
 1S07-67. 
 
 Thomas 
 
 D'A rcy 
 McGee: 
 1825-68. 
 
 John Kells 
 Ingratn : 
 1820- 
 
 Thoijias 
 Davis : 
 i8>4-45- 
 
 Sir Charles 
 
 Gavan 
 
 Duffy: 
 
 1S16- 
 
 John 
 Keegan : 
 1 809 - 49. 
 
 Linton (see 
 Chap. 
 VI I L). 
 
 Mrs. Varian 
 ("Finola"). 
 
 Lady 
 
 Wilde 
 
 (" S per an- 
 
 za-"). 
 
 y antes 
 Clarence 
 Mangan : 
 1803-49. 
 
 Other 
 
 democratic 
 
 rhymesters. 
 
 peasant. All Irish art is faulty and irregular, but 
 often its faults are endearing, and in its discords 
 there is sweet sound. That was a signiiicant chorus 
 which broke out during the prosperous times of The 
 Nation, thirty years ago, and there was more than 
 one tuneful voice among the patriotic contributors to 
 the Dublin newspaper press. Griffin and Banim, novel- 
 ists and poets, flourished at a somewhat earlier date, 
 and did much to revive the Irish poetical spirit. 
 Read Banim's " Soggarth Aroon " ; in fact, examine 
 the mass of poetry, old and recent, collected in Hayes' 
 " Ballads," with all its poverty and riches, and, amid 
 a great amount of rubbish, we find many genuine 
 folk-songs, brimming with emotion and natural poetic 
 fire. Certain ballads of Lady Dufferin, and such a 
 lyric as McGee's "Irish Wife," are not speedily for- 
 gotten. Among the most prominent of the song- 
 makers were the group to which I have referred, — 
 Ingram, Davis, Duffy, Keegan, McGee, Linton (the 
 English liberal), Mrs. Varian, Lady Wilde, and others, 
 not forgetting Mangan, in some respects the most origi- 
 nal of all. These political rhymers truthfully repre- 
 sented the popular feeling of their own day. Their 
 songs and ballads will be the study of some future 
 Macaulay, and are of the kind that both makes and 
 illustrates national history. Their object was not art ; 
 some of their rhymes are poor indeed ; but they fairly 
 belong to that class of which Fletcher of Saltoun 
 wrote : "If a man were permitted to make all the 
 ballads, he need not care who should make the laws 
 of a nation." 
 
 Here, too, we may say a word of a contemporary 
 tribe of English democratic poets, many of them 
 springing from the people, who kept up such an ala-
 
 CHARTIST VERSE. 
 
 261 
 
 rum during the Chartist agitation. After Thorn, the 
 " Inverury poet," who mostly confined himself to dia- 
 lect and genre verses, and young Nicoll, who, at the 
 beginning of our period strayed from Scotland down 
 to Leeds, and poured out stirring liberal lyrics during 
 the few months left to him, — after these we come to 
 the bards of Chartism itself. This movement lasted 
 from 1836 to 1850, and had a distinct school of its 
 own. There was Cooper, known as " the Chartist 
 poet." Linton, afterward to become so eminent as 
 an artist and engraver, was equally prolific and more 
 poetical, — a born reformer, who relieved his eager 
 spirit by incessant poetizing over the pseudonym of 
 " Spartacus," and of whom I shall have occasion to 
 speak again. Ebenezer Jones was another Chartist 
 rhymester, but also composed erotic verse ; a man of 
 considerable talent, who died young. These men and 
 their associates were greatly in earnest as agitators, 
 and often to the injury of their position as artist* 
 and poets. 
 
 WiUiam 
 Thont : 
 1799- 1850. 
 
 Robert 
 
 Nicoll: 
 1814-37- 
 
 Chartism. 
 
 Thomas 
 Cooper : 
 1805- 
 
 " sparta- 
 cus." 
 
 EbeTiezer 
 "jfones : 
 1820 - 60.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. 
 
 Recent 
 errors and 
 affectations. 
 
 The Rhap- 
 
 sodisis ; or 
 the " Spas- 
 ■modic ' ■ 
 school. 
 
 " Firmil- 
 ian." 
 
 FEW of the minor poets belonging to the middle 
 division of our period have been of the healthy 
 and independent cast of Kingsley, Thackeray, Thorn- 
 bury, or Aytoun. Some have servilely followed the 
 vocal leaders, or even imitated one another, — the law 
 of imitation involving a lack of judgment, and caus- 
 ing them to copy the heresies, rather than the virtues 
 of their favorites ; and we are compelled to observe 
 the devices by which they have striven, often uncon- 
 sciously, to resist adverse influences or to hide the 
 poverty of their own invention. 
 
 The Chartist or radical poets, of whom we have 
 just spoken, were the forerunners of a more artistic 
 group whose outpourings the wits speedily character- 
 ized by the epithet " spasmodic." Their work con- 
 stantly affords examples of the knack of substitution. 
 Mention of Aytoun reminds us that he did good ser- 
 vice, through his racy burlesque, Firniilian, in turning 
 the laugh upon the pseudo-earnestness of this rhap- 
 sodical school. Its adherents, lacking perception and 
 synthesis, and mistaking the materials of poetry for
 
 THE RHAPSODISTS. 
 
 263 
 
 poetry itself, aimed at the production of quotable 
 passages, and crammed their verse with mixed and 
 conceited imagery, gushing diction, interjections, and 
 that mockery of passion which is but surface-deep. 
 
 Bailey was one of the most notable of this group, 
 and from his earliest production may be termed the 
 founder of the order. Festus certainly made an im- 
 pression upon a host of readers, and is not without 
 inchoate elements of power. The poet exhausted 
 himself by this one effort, his later productions want- 
 ing even the semblance of force which marked it and 
 established the new emotional school. The poets that 
 took the contagion were mostly very young. Alex- 
 ander Smith years afterward seized Bailey's mantle, 
 and flaunted it bravely for a while, gaining by A 
 Life-Drama as sudden and extensive a reputation as 
 that of his master. This poet wrote of 
 
 " A Poem round and perfect as a star," 
 
 but the work from which the line is taken is not of 
 that sort. With much impressiveness of imagery and 
 extravagant diction that caught the easily, but not 
 long, tricked public ear, it was vicious in style, loose 
 in thought, and devoid of real vigor or beauty. In 
 after years, through honest study, Smith acquired bet- 
 ter taste and worked after a more becoming purpose. 
 His prose essays were charming, and his City Foems, 
 marked by sins of omission only, may be rated as 
 negatively good. " Glasgow " and " The Night before 
 the Wedding " really are excellent. The poet became 
 a genuine man of letters, but died young, and when 
 he was doing his best work. Massey, another emo- 
 tional versifier, came on (like Ernest Jones, — who 
 went out more speedily) in the wake of the Chartist 
 
 Philip 
 y antes 
 Bailey : 
 1816- 
 
 A lexander 
 Smith : 
 1830-67. 
 
 Gerald 
 Massey : 
 1828-
 
 264 
 
 BA ILE Y. — SMITH. — MA SSE Y. — MA CD ONA LD. 
 
 George 
 
 Macdonald : 
 1824- 
 
 Davld 
 Gray: 
 1838-61. 
 
 movement, to which its old supporters vainly sought 
 to give new life with the hopes aroused by the con- 
 tinental revolutions of 1848. He made his sensation 
 by cheap rhetoric, and the substitution of sentiment 
 for feeling, in an otherwise laudable championship of 
 the working-classes from which he sprang. Sympathy 
 for his cause gained his social verses a wide hearing ; 
 but his voice sounds to better advantage in his songs 
 of wedded love and other fireside lyrics, which often 
 are earnest and sweet. He also has written an un- 
 usually good ballad, " Sir Richard Grenville's Last 
 Fight." 
 
 The latest of the transcendental poets is Macdon- 
 ald, who none the less has great abilities as a preacher 
 and novelist, and in various literary efforts has shown 
 himself possessed of deep emotion and a fertile, deli- 
 cate fancy. Some of his realistic, semi-religious tales 
 of Scottish life are admirable. " Light," an ode, is 
 imaginative and eloquent, but not well sustained, and 
 his poetry too often, when not commonplace, is vague, 
 effeminate, or otherwise poor. Is it defective vision, 
 or the irresistible tendency of race, that inclines even 
 the most imaginative North-Country writers to what is 
 termed mysticism? A "Celtic glamour" is veiling the 
 muse of Buchanan, — of whom I shall write more fully 
 hereafter, — so that she is in danger of confusing her- 
 self with the forgotten phantoms of the spasmodic 
 school. The touching story and writings of poor 
 Gray — who lived just long enough to sing his own 
 dirges, and died with all his music in him — reveal 
 a sensitive temperament unsustained by co-ordinate 
 power. Possibly we should more justly say that his 
 powers were undeveloped, for I do not wholly agree 
 with those who deny that he had genius, and who
 
 DAVID GRAY. 
 
 265 
 
 think his work devoid of true promise. The limitless 
 conceit involved in his estimate of himself was only 
 what is secretly cherished by many a bantling poet, 
 who is not driven to confess it by the horror of im- 
 pending death. His main performance, " The Luggie," 
 shows a poverty due to the want of proper literary 
 models in his stinted cottage-home. It is an eigh- 
 teenth-century poem, suggested by too close reading 
 of Thomson and the like. Education, as compared 
 with aspiration, comes slowly to low-born poets. The 
 sonnets entitled " In the Shadows," written during the 
 gradual progress of Gray's disease, are far more poet- 
 ical, because a more genuine expression of feeling. 
 They are indeed a painful study. Here is a subjec- 
 tive monody, uttered from the depths, but rounded 
 off with that artistic instinct which haunts a poet to 
 the last. The self-pity, struggle, self-discipline, and 
 final resignation are inexpressibly sorrowful and tragic. 
 Gray had the making of a poet in him, and suffered 
 all the agonies of an exquisite nature contemplating 
 the swift and surely coming doom. 
 
 II. 
 
 After the death of Wordsworth the influence of 
 Tennyson and that of Browning had more effect upon 
 the abundant offerings of the minor poets. In the 
 work of many we discover the elaboration and finesse 
 of an art-method superadded by the present Laureate 
 to the contemplative philosophy of his predecessor ; 
 while not a few, impressed by Browning's dramatic 
 studies, assume an abrupt and picturesque manner, 
 and hunt for grotesque and mediasval themes. Often 
 the former class substitute a commonplace realism 
 12 
 
 Influence of 
 Tennyson 
 and Brown- 
 ins. 
 
 False sim- 
 plicity.
 
 266 
 
 INFLUENCE OF TENNYSON AND BROWNING. 
 
 Balzac on 
 the true ntis- 
 sion of Art. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of A tner- 
 ica " ; //. 
 367-369. 
 
 Afihorisms 
 of IVilliam 
 Blake. 
 
 Coventry 
 Kearsey 
 Dighion 
 Patntore .' 
 1823- 
 
 for the simplicity of Tennyson's English idyls, just 
 as the latest aspirants, trying to cope with thj Pre- 
 Raphaelite leaders, whose work is elevated by genius, 
 carry the treatment beyond conscientiousness into 
 sectarianism, and divide the surface of Nature from 
 her perspective, laying hold upon her body, yet evaded 
 by her soul. Balzac makes a teacher say to his pupil: 
 " The mission of Art is not to copy Nature, but to 
 express her. You are not a vile copyist, but a poet! 
 Take a cast from the hand of your mistress ; place 
 it before you ; you will find it a horrible corpse with- 
 out any resemblance, and you will be forced to resort 
 to the chisel of an artist, who, without exactly copy- 
 ing it, will give you its movement and its life. We 
 have to seize the spirit, the soul, the expression, of 
 beings and things." Many of Blake's aphorisms ex- 
 press the same idea. " Practice and opportunit}'," 
 he said, " very soon teach the language of art. Its 
 spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, 
 
 never can be taught ; and these make the artist 
 
 Men think they can copy Nature as correctly as I 
 copy the imagination. This they will find impossible. 
 . . . . Nature and Fancy are two things, and never 
 can be joined ; neither ought any one to attempt it, 
 for it is idolatry, and destroys the soul." 
 
 Coventry Patmore, not fully comprehending these 
 truths, has made verses in which, despite a few 
 lovely and attractive passages, the simplicity is af- 
 fected and the realism too bald. A carpet-knight in 
 poetry, as the younger Trollope latterly is in prose, 
 he merely photographs life, and often in its poor and 
 commonplace forms. He thus falls short of that aris- 
 tocracy of art which by instinct selects an elevated 
 theme. It is better to beautify life, though by an
 
 PA TMORE. — DOB ELL. — L YTTON. 
 
 267 
 
 illusive reflection in a Claude Lorraine mirror, than 
 to repeat its every wrinkle in a sixpenny looking- 
 glass, after the fashion of such lines as these : — 
 
 " Restless, and sick of long exile 
 
 From those sweet friends, I rode to see 
 The church repairs ; and, after a while, 
 
 Waylaying the Dean, was asked to tea. 
 They introduced the Cousin Fred 
 
 I 'd heard of. Honor's favorite : grave, 
 Dark, handsome, bluff, but gently bred, 
 
 And with an air of the salt wave. 
 He stared, and gave his hand, and I 
 
 Stared too," etc. 
 
 This is not the simplicity of Wordsworth in his better 
 moods, nor of the true idyllists, nor of him who was 
 the simplest of all poets, yet the kingliest in manner 
 and theme. 
 
 Sydney Dobell, a man of an eccentric yet very 
 poetic disposition, had the faults of both the spas- 
 modic and realistic modes, and these were aggravated 
 by a desire to maintain a separate position of his 
 own. His notes were pitched on a strident key, 
 piping shrill and harsh through all the clamor of his 
 fellow-bards. " Balder " is the very type of a spas- 
 modic drama. " The Roman " is a healthier, though 
 earlier, production, at least devoid of egotism and 
 gush. His lyrics constantly strive for effect. In 
 " How 's My Boy ? " and " Tommy 's Dead," he struck 
 pathetic, natural chords, but more often his measures 
 and inversions were disagreeably strange, while his 
 sentiment was tame and his action slighted. " Owen 
 Meredith," — what shall be said of the author of 
 "The Wanderer," " Clytemnestra," and "The Apple 
 of Life " ? Certainly not that " Chronicles and Char- 
 
 Sydney 
 Dobell: 
 1824-74. 
 
 Robert, 
 Lord Lyt- 
 ion: 1831'
 
 268 
 
 THE TWO BULWERS. 
 
 'Lucik.' 
 
 The two 
 Buliuers. 
 
 acters," " Orval," and others of his maturer poems 
 are an advance upon these early lyrics which so 
 pleased young readers half a generation ago. They 
 are not open to criticism that will apply to " The 
 Wanderer," etc., but incur the severer charge of dul- 
 ness which must preclude them from the welcome 
 given to his first books. " Lucile," with all its light- 
 ness, remains his best poem, as well as the most 
 popular : a really interesting, though sentimental, par- 
 lor-novel, written in fluent verse, — a kind of pro- 
 duction exactly suited to his gift and limitations. 
 It is quite original, for Lytton adds to an inherited 
 talent for melodramatic tale-writing a poetical ear, good 
 knowledge of effect, and a taste for social excitements. 
 His society-poems, with their sensuousness and af- 
 fected cynicism, present a later aspect of the quality 
 that commended Ernest Maltravers and Pelhain to 
 the young people of a former day. Some of his 
 early lyrics are tender, warm, and beautiful ; but 
 more are filled with hot-house passion, — with the ra- 
 diance, not of stars, but of chandeliers and gas-lights. 
 The Bulwers always have been a puzzle. Their cul- 
 tured talent and cleverness in many departments have 
 rivalled the genius of other men. We admire their 
 glittering and elaborate structures, though aware of 
 something hollow or stuccoed in the walls, columns, 
 and ceilings, and even suspicious of the floor on 
 which we stand. Father and son, — their love of 
 letters, determination, indomitable industry, have com- 
 manded praise. The son, writing in poetry as nat- 
 urally as his father wrote in prose, has the same 
 adroitness, the same unbounded ambition, the same 
 conscientiousness in labor and lack of it in method. 
 In his metaphysical moods we see a reflection of the
 
 MINOR IDYLUC SCHOOL. 
 
 269 
 
 clearer Tennysonian thought; and, indeed, while in- 
 teresting and amusing us, he always was something 
 of an imitator. His lyrics were like Browning's 
 dramatic stanzas ; his blank-verse appropriated the 
 breaks and cadences of Tennyson, and ventured on 
 subjects which the Laureate was long known to have 
 in hand. The better passages of " Clytemnestra " 
 were taken almost literally from ^schylus. Those 
 versed in Oriental poetry have alleged that his wan- 
 derings upon its borders are mere forays in " fresh 
 woods and pastures new." His voluminous later 
 works, in which every style of poetry is essayed, cer- 
 tainly have not fulfilled the promise of his youth, 
 and those friends are disappointed who once looked 
 to him for signs of a new poetical dawn. 
 
 III. 
 
 The merits and weakness of the idyllic method, as 
 compared with that of a time when a high lyric or 
 epic feeling has prevailed, can best be studied in the 
 productions of the Laureate's followers, rather than 
 in his own verse ; for the latter, whatever the method, 
 would derive from his intellectual genius a glory and 
 a charm. The idyl is a picturesque, rather than an 
 imaginative, form of art, and calls for no great amount 
 of invention or passion. It invariably has the method 
 of a busy, anxious age, seeking rest rather than ex- 
 citement. Through restrained emotion, music, and 
 picturesque simplicity it pleases, but seems to betoken 
 absence of creative power. The minor idyllists hunt 
 for themes, — they do not write because their themes 
 compel them ; they construct poems as still-life artists 
 paint their pictures, becoming thorough workmen, but 
 
 Minor idyl- 
 lic poets. 
 
 The idyl.
 
 270 
 
 F. TENNYSON.— WOOLNER.— LINTON. 
 
 Frederick 
 Tennyson. 
 
 Charles 
 ( Te>i?iyson) 
 Tur^ier : 
 1S08-79. 
 
 Ed7vin Ar- 
 nold: 1832- 
 
 Roden 
 Noel. Bui 
 see Supple- 
 ment. 
 
 Thomas 
 U'oolner, R. 
 A.: 1S26- 
 
 William 
 yames 
 L ittton : 
 1812- 
 See page 
 261. 
 
 at last we yearn for some swift heroic composition 
 whose very faults are qualities, and whose inspiration 
 fills the maker's soul. 
 
 Frederick Tennyson, for example, treats outdoor 
 nature with painstaking and curious discernment, re- 
 peating every shadow ; but the result is a pleasantly 
 illustrated catalogue of scenic details. It is nature 
 refined by a tasteful landscape-gardener. Few late 
 poets, however, have shown more elegance in verse- 
 structure and rhythm. An artistic motive runs through 
 his poems, all of which are carefully finished and not 
 marred by the acrobatism of the rhapsodic school. 
 Turner, another of the Tennyson brothers, was the 
 least modern of them in his cast. His sonnets do not 
 conform to either the Italian or English requirements, 
 but have some poetical value. Edwin Arnold's verse 
 is that of a scholarly gentleman. The books of Roden 
 Noel may pass without comment. My Beautiful Lady, 
 by Woolner, is a true product of the art-school, with 
 just that tinge of gentle affectation which the name 
 implies. It has a distinct motive, — to commemorate 
 the growth, maintenance, and final strengthening by 
 death, of a pure and sacred love, and is a votive 
 tribute to its theme : a delicate volume of such verse 
 as could have been produced in no other time. Lin- 
 ton's Claribel and Other Poems, 1865, distinctly belongs 
 to the same school, and is noteworthy as an early 
 specimen of a method frequently imitated by the latest 
 poets. At the date of its appearance this pretty vol- 
 ume was almost unique, — the twofold work of the 
 author, as artist and poet, and dedicated to William 
 Bell Scott, a man of sympathetic views and associa- 
 tions. We have seen that Linton's early writings were 
 devoted to liberal and radical propagandism. The
 
 JVESTWOOD. — MEREDITH. — ASHE. 
 
 271 
 
 volume before me is a collection of more finished 
 poetry, imbued with an artistic purpose, and with 
 beauty of execution and design. Few men have so 
 much individuality as its author, or are more versatile 
 in acquirements and adventure. He is a famous en- 
 graver, and his work as a draughtsman and painter 
 is full of meaning. These gifts are used to heighten 
 the effect of his songs ; fanciful and poetical designs 
 are scattered along the pages of this book ; nor can 
 it be said that such aids are meretricious, in these 
 latter days, when poetry is addressed not only to the 
 ear but also to the eye. Some of the verse requires 
 no pictures to sustain it. A "Threnody" in memory 
 of Albert Darasz is an addition to the few good and 
 imaginative English elegiac poems ; and it may be 
 said of whatever Linton does, that, if sometimes ec- 
 centric, it shows a decisive purpose and a love of art 
 for its own sake. Westwood's "The Quest of the Sanc- 
 greall " marks him for one of Tennyson's pupils. His 
 minor lyrics are more pleasing. All these poets turn 
 at will from one method to another, and may be 
 classed as of the composite school. Meredith's verse 
 is a further illustration ; he is dramatic and realistic, 
 but occasionally ventures upon a classical or romantic 
 study. He often fails of his purpose, though usually 
 having one. The Poems of the English Roadside seem 
 to me his most original work, and of them "Juggling 
 Jerry" is the best. Ashe is one of those minor 
 poets who catch and reflect the prevailing mode : he 
 belongs to the chorus, and is not an independent 
 singer. His Poems, 1859, are mildly classical and 
 idyllic; but in 1867 he gave us The Sorrows of Hyp- 
 sipyle, — after Atalania in Calydon had revived an in- 
 terest in dramatic poetry modelled upon the antique. 
 
 Thomas 
 
 Westwood: 
 
 1814- 
 
 George 
 
 Meredith : 
 182S- 
 
 Thontas 
 Ashe: 1836-
 
 272 
 
 'VERS DE SOCIEtE: 
 
 Vers de 
 tocieU, 
 
 including 
 satire, par- 
 ody, etc. 
 Cp. " Pods 
 of Amer- 
 ica " ; pp. 
 284, 2S5, 
 448. 
 
 Rev. 
 
 Francis 
 
 Mahojiey '. 
 1805-66. 
 
 Qualities of 
 gnod society- 
 verse. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Of those patrician rhymes which, for want of an 
 English equivalent, are termed vers de society, the gentle 
 Praed, who died at the commencement of the period, 
 was an elegant composer. In verse under this head 
 may also be included, for the occasion, epigrammatic 
 couplets, witty and satirical songs, and all that metrical 
 badinage which is to other poetry what the feiiilleton 
 is to prose. During the first half of our retrospect it 
 was practised chiefly by scholarly and fluent wits. In 
 the form of satire and parody it was cleverly employed, 
 we have seen, by Aytoun, in his " spasmodic tragedy " 
 of "Firmilian"; merrily, too, by Aytoun and Martin 
 in the Bon Gualtier ballads ; by Thackeray in " Love- 
 Songs made Easy," " Lyra Hibernica," the ballads of 
 " Pleaceman X.," etc. ; by Hood in an interminable 
 string of mirth and nonsense ; and with mock-heroic 
 scholarship by the undaunted Irish wit, poet, and Lat- 
 inist, " Father Prout," and the whole jovial cohort 
 that succeeded to the foregoing worthies in the pages 
 of the monthly magazines. But with the restrained 
 manners of the present time, and the finish to which 
 everything is subjected, we have a revival of the more 
 select order of society-verse. This is marked by an 
 indefinable aroma which elevates it to the region of 
 poetic art, and owing to which, as to the imperishable 
 essence of a subtile perfume, the lightest ballads of 
 Suckling and Waller are current to this day. In fine, 
 true vers de societe is marked by humor, by spontane- 
 ity, joined with extreme elegance of finish, by the 
 quality we call breeding, — above all, by lightness of 
 touch. Its composer holds a place in the Parnassian 
 hemicycle as legitimate as that of Robin Goodfellow
 
 MAHONE Y. — LOCKER. — CAL VERLE Y. — DOB SON. 
 
 273 
 
 in Oberon's court. The dainty lyrics of Locker not 
 unfrequently display these characteristics : he is not 
 strikingly original, but at times reminds us of Praed 
 or of Thackeray, and again, in such verses as " To 
 my Grandmother," of an American, — Dr. Holmes. 
 But his verse is light, sweet, graceful, gayly wise, and 
 sometimes pathetic. Calverley and Dobson are the 
 best of the new farceurs. Fly-Leaves., by the former, 
 contains several burlesques and serio-comic transla- 
 tions that are excellent in their way, with most agree- 
 able qualities of fancy and thought. Dobson's Vign- 
 ettes in Rhyme has one or two lyrics, besides lighter 
 pieces equal to the best of Calverley's, which show 
 their author to be not only a gentleman and a scholar, 
 but a most graceful poet, — titles that used to be 
 associated in the thought of courtly and debonair 
 wits. Such a poet, to hold the hearts he has won, 
 not only must maintain his qualit}', but strive to vary 
 his style ; because, while there is no work, brightly and 
 originally done, which secures a welcome so instant as 
 that accorded to his charming verse, there is none to 
 which the public ear becomes so quickly wonted, and 
 none from which the world so lightly turns upon the 
 arrival of a new favorite with a different note. 
 
 Society-verse, then, has been another symptom of 
 cultured and refined periods, — of the times of Horace, 
 Catullus, Theocritus, Waller, Pope, Voltaire, Tenny- 
 son, and Thackeray. The intense mental activity of 
 our own era is still more clearly evinced by the 
 great number of recent English versions of the poetic 
 masterpieces of other tongues. Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge have filled Great Britain with scholars, some 
 of whom, acquiring rhythmical aptness, have produced 
 
 Frederick 
 Locker- 
 Latnpson: 
 1821- 
 
 Charles 
 Sttiart 
 Calverley ." 
 1831-84. 
 
 A ustin Dob' 
 son: 1840- 
 
 Otlier tokens 
 0/ a refined 
 and schol- 
 arly period. 
 
 Recent 
 trattslators, 
 nitd the new 
 theory pf 
 translation. 
 
 12' 
 
 R
 
 274 
 
 THE TRANSLATORS. 
 
 Sir John 
 Boiuring : 
 1792- 1872. 
 
 T/ie elder 
 Lytton. 
 
 Sir Theo- 
 dore Mar- 
 tin: 1816- 
 See p. 272. 
 
 Horace, 
 Hofner, and 
 their trans- 
 lators. 
 
 good work of this kind. Modern translations differ 
 noticeably, in their scholastic accuracy, from those of 
 earlier date, — among which Chapman's are the no- 
 blest, Pope's the freest, and those by Hunt, Shelley, 
 and Frere scarcely inferior to the best. The theory 
 of translation has undergone a change ; the old idea 
 having been that as long as the spirit of a foreign au- 
 thor was reproduced an exact rendering need not be 
 attemjDted. But to how few it is given to catch that 
 spirit, and hence what wretched versions have ap- 
 peared from time to time ! Only natural poets worked 
 successfully upon the earlier plan. The modern 
 school possibly go too near the extreme of conscien- 
 tiousness, yet a few have found the art of seizing 
 upon both the spirit and the text. The amount pro- 
 duced is amazing, and has given the public access, in 
 our own language, to the choicest treasures of almost 
 every foreign literature, be it old or new. 
 
 In the earlier division, Bowring was the most pro- 
 lific, and he has also published several volumes of a 
 very recent date. His excursions into the fields of 
 continental literature have had most importance ; but 
 his versions, however valuable in the absence of bet- 
 ter, rarely display any poetic fire. The elder Lytton 
 was a fair type of the elegant Latinists and minor 
 translators belonging to the earlier school. His best 
 performance was a recent version of Horace, in me- 
 tres resembling, but not copied from, the original, — 
 a translation more faithful than Martin's paraphrases, 
 but not approaching the latter in elegance. Martin's 
 Horace has the flavor and polish of Tennyson, and 
 plainly is modelled upon the Laureate's verse. Of all 
 classical authors Horace is the Briton's favorite. The 
 statement of Bulwer's preface is under the truth when
 
 THE TRANSLATORS. 
 
 275 
 
 it says: "Paraphrases and translations are still more 
 numerous than editions and commentaries. There is 
 scarcely a man of letters who has not at one time or 
 other versified or imitated some of the odes ; and 
 scarcely a year passes without a new translation of 
 them all." Upon Homer, also, the poetic scholars 
 have expended immense energy, and various theories 
 as to the proper form of measure have given birth to 
 several noble versions, — distinguished from a multi- 
 tude of no worth. Those of Wright, Worsley, Pro- 
 fessor Newman, Professor Blackie, and Lord Derby 
 may be pronounced the best ; though admirable bits 
 have been done by Arnold, Dr. Hawtrey, and the 
 Laureate. I do not, however, hesitate to say — and 
 believe that few will deny — that the ideal translation 
 of Homer, marked by swiftness, simplicity, and gran- 
 deur, has yet to be made ; nor do I doubt that it 
 ultimately will be, having already stated that our 
 Saxon-Norman language is finely adapted to repro- 
 duce the strength and sweetness of the early Ionic 
 Greek. Professor Conington's Virgil, in the measure 
 of " Marmion," was no advance, all things considered, 
 upon Dryden's, nor equal to that of the American, 
 Cranch. Some of the best modern translations have 
 been made by women, who, following Mrs. Browning, 
 mostly affect the Greek. Miss Swanwick and Mrs. 
 Webster, among others, nearly maintain the standard 
 of their inspired exemplar. M. P. Fitz-Gerald's ver- 
 sions of Euripides, and of the pastoral and lyric Greek 
 poets, may be taken as specimens of the general ex- 
 cellence now attained, and I will not omit mention 
 of Calverley's complete rendition of Theocritus, — 
 undoubtedly as good as can be made by one who 
 fears to undertake the original metres. Among me- 
 
 Ichabod 
 Charles 
 
 Wright: 
 1795- 1871. 
 
 Philip 
 Stanhope 
 IVorsley ' 
 died 1866. 
 
 Francis 
 William 
 Newman '. 
 1805- 
 
 John Stuart 
 
 Blackie : 
 1809- 
 
 Eduiard, 
 Lord 
 Derby : 
 1799- 1869. 
 
 Rev. 
 
 Edward 
 Craven 
 Hawtrey : 
 1789- 1862. 
 See page 2^1. 
 
 yohn Con- 
 
 ington : 
 1825-69. 
 
 Anna 
 Swanwick. 
 
 Augusta 
 Webster. 
 
 Maurice 
 
 Purcetl 
 
 Fitz-Gerald. 
 
 Calverley. 
 Seepage 273.
 
 276 
 
 THE TRANSLATORS. 
 
 Rossetti and 
 Morris. 
 Sec Chap. X. 
 
 MacCarthy. 
 Seepage 259. 
 
 Ediuard 
 FitzGer- 
 aid: 1808- 
 83. 
 
 See Chap. 
 VI., page 
 205. 
 
 diaeval and modern writers Dante and Goethe have 
 received the most attention; but Longfellow and Tay- 
 lor, in their translations of the Divine Comedy and 
 of Faust, — and Bryant in his stately version of the 
 Iliad and the Odyssey, — bear ofif the palm for Amer- 
 ica in reproduction of the Greek, Italian, and Ger- 
 man poems. Of Rossetti's exquisite presentation of 
 the Early Italian Poets, and Morris's Icelandic re- 
 searches, I shall speak elsewhere, and can only make 
 a passing reference to MacCartliy's extended and beau- 
 tiful selections from Calderon, rendered into English 
 asonante verse. Martin has made translations from 
 the Danish, and, together with Aytoun, of the bal- 
 lads of Goethe. Of modern Oriental explorations, 
 altogether the best is a version of the grave and 
 imaginative Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, by E. Fitz- 
 Gerald, who has made other successful translations 
 from the Persian, as well as from the Spanish and 
 the Attic Greek. 
 
 The foregoing are but a few of the host of transla- 
 tors ; but their labors fairly represent the richness 
 and excellence of this kind of work in our time, 
 and are cited as further illustrations of the critical 
 spirit of an age in which it would almost seem as if 
 the home-field were exhausted, such researches are 
 made into the literature of foreign tongues. I again 
 use the language of those who describe the Alexan- 
 drian period of Greek song : men " of tact and 
 scholarship greatly abound," and by elegant studies 
 endeavor to supply the force of nature. Early and 
 strictly non-creative periods of English literature have 
 been similarly characterized, — notably the century 
 which included Pitt, Rowe, Cooke, West, and Fawkes 
 among its scholars and poets.
 
 HYMNOLOGY. 
 
 277 
 
 In glancing at the lyrical poetry of the era, its 
 hymnology should not be overlooked. Religious verse 
 is one of the most genuine forms of song, inspired 
 by the loftiest emotion, and rehearsed wherever the 
 instinct of worship takes outward form. Written for 
 music, it is lyrical in the original sense, and repre- 
 sentative, even more than the domestic folk-songs, 
 of our common life and aspiration. We are not sur- 
 prised to find the work of recent British hymn-writers 
 displaying the chief qualities of contemporary secular 
 poetT}'. to wit, finish, tender beauty of sentiment and 
 expression, metrical variety, and often culture of a 
 high grade. What their measures lack is the lyrical 
 fire, vigor, and passionate devotion of the earlier 
 time. Within their province they reflect the method 
 of Tennyson, and — with all their polish and subtilty 
 of thought — write devotional verse that is somewhat 
 tame beside the fervid strains of Watts, at his best, 
 and the beautiful lyrics of the younger Wesley. In 
 place of strength, exaltation, religious ecstasy, we 
 have elaborate sweetness, refinement, emotional re- 
 pose. Many hymn-writers of the transition period 
 have held over to a recent time, such as James 
 Montgomery, Keble, Lyte, Edmeston, Bowring, Mil- 
 man, and Moir, and the stanzas of the first-named 
 two have become an essential portion of English 
 hymnody. The best results accomplished by recent 
 devotional poets — and this also is an outgrowth of 
 the new culture — have been the profuse and admi- 
 rable translations of the ancient and mediaeval Latin 
 hymns by the English divines, Chandler, Neale, and 
 Caswall, — the last-named being the deftest workman 
 of the three, although the others may be credited with 
 equal poetic glow. Among the most successful origi- 
 
 Recent kym- 
 nology : 
 
 Its cliarac- 
 terisiics. 
 
 The early 
 and later 
 composers 0/ 
 sacred verse. 
 
 Watts and 
 C. Wesley. 
 
 Montgom- 
 ery, Keble, 
 and others. 
 
 The trans- 
 lators : 
 
 Rev. Jfhn 
 Cltandler 
 {Chnrch of 
 E7igla7id) : 
 1 806 - 76. 
 
 Rev. yohn 
 Mason 
 Neale {Ritu- 
 alist): 1818- 
 66. 
 
 I Rev. 
 
 Ediuard 
 j Caswall 
 
 (Church of 
 
 Rome) : 
 
 1814-78. 
 
 Orig-iiial 
 composers :
 
 2/8 
 
 DIALECT VERSE. 
 
 Rev. Hora- 
 tiiis Bonar : 
 iSoS- (Scot- 
 tishChurch.) 
 Rev. Fred- 
 erick IV. Fa- 
 ber: 1814-63 
 (Church of 
 Rome. ) 
 Mrs.AiLitns. 
 (Unitarian.) 
 Seepage 257. 
 Cliarlotte 
 Elliott: 
 1789-1871. 
 Rev. Christo- 
 pher IVords- 
 worth : 
 1807-85. 
 Rev. A rthur 
 Penrhyn 
 Stanley: 
 1815-81. 
 Rev. Sabine 
 Baring- 
 Gould: 
 1834- 
 Rev. Ed- 
 ward Henry 
 Bickersteth : 
 182s- 
 Hytnns 
 from tJie 
 German, 
 and their 
 translators. 
 Catherine 
 IVinkworth: 
 1829-78. 
 Frances 
 Elizabeth 
 Cox. 
 
 Jane Both- 
 •wick: 1813- 
 Mrs. Eric 
 Bothwick 
 Findlater. 
 Richard 
 Mnssie : 
 1800- 
 
 nal composers Dr. Bonar should be mentioned, 
 many of whose hymns are so widely and favorably 
 known ; Faber, also, is one of the best and most 
 prolific of this class of poets, notable for the sweet- 
 ness and beauty of his sacred lyrics. Others, such 
 as Dr. Newman, Dean Trench, Dean Alford, Pal- 
 grave, and Mrs. Adams, have been named elsewhere. 
 I will barely refer, among a host of lesser note, to 
 Miss Elliott, that pure and inspired sibyl, to Dr. 
 Wordsworth, Dean Stanley, and Baring-Gould. Bick- 
 ersteth, whose longest poem, like the writings of 
 Tupper, has had a circulation strictly owing to its 
 theme and in inverse proportion to its poetic merits, 
 has composed a few hymns that have passed into 
 favor. Excellent service also has been rendered by 
 those who work the German field, and it is notice- 
 able that, while the strongest versions from the Lat- 
 in have been made by the divines before named, 
 the most successful Germanic translators have been 
 women. Among them, Miss Winkworth, who in 1855 
 and 1858 published the two series of the Lyra Ger- 
 manica ; Miss Cox, editor of Sacred Hymns from the 
 German, 1841 ; and the Bothwick sisters, whose Hymns 
 frojn the Land of Luther appeared in several series, 
 from 1854 to 1862. Massie, translator of Luther'' s 
 Spiritual Songs, 1854, has been the chief competitor 
 of these skilful and enthusiastic devotees. With re- 
 spect to English hymnody, I may add that probably 
 there never was another period when the sacred 
 lyrics of all ages were so carefully edited, brought 
 together, and arranged for the use and enjoyment of 
 the religious world. 
 
 The success of the dialect-poets is a special mark
 
 SHAIRP. — IV A UGH. — BARNES. 
 
 279 
 
 of an idyllic period. The novel and pleasing effect 
 of the more musical dialects often has been used to 
 give an interest to mediocre verse ; and close atten- 
 tion is required to discriminate between the true and 
 the false pretensions of lyrics composed in the Scotch, 
 that liquid Doric, or even in the rougher phrases of 
 Lancashire, Dorsetshire, and other counties of Eng- 
 land. Several Scottish bards, of more or less merit, 
 — Thom, Ballantine, Maclagan, Janet Hamilton, — fig- 
 ure in the period. Professor Shairp's highland and 
 border lyrics, faithful enough and painstaking, scarcely 
 could be ranked with natural song. In England, 
 Lancashire maintains her old reputation for the num- 
 ber and sweetness of her provincial songs and ballads. 
 Waugh is by far the best of her recent dialect-poets. 
 To say nothing of many other little garlands of poesy 
 which have their origin in his knowledge of humble 
 life in that district, the Lancashire Songs have gained 
 a wide reception by pleasing, truthful studies of 
 their dialect and themes. Barnes, an idyllic and 
 learned philologist, has done even better work in his 
 bucolic poems of Dorsetshire, and his Poems of Rural 
 Life (in common English) are very attractive. The 
 minor dialect-verses of England, such as the street- 
 ballads and the sea-songs of many a would-be Dibdin, 
 are unimportant and beyond our present view. 
 
 V. 
 
 Leaving the specialists, it is observable that the 
 voices of the female poets, if not the best-trained, cer- 
 tainly are as natural and independent as any. Their 
 utterance is less finished, but also shows less of Tenny- 
 son's influence, and seems to express a truly feminine 
 
 Dialect- 
 verse. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of Atner- 
 ica ".•/). 
 455- 
 
 Thorn. See 
 page 261. 
 
 ycimes 
 
 Ballantine : 
 
 1808-77. 
 
 Alexander 
 
 Maclagan : 
 
 1811-79. 
 
 yanet Hatn- 
 
 ilton: in'y- 
 
 1873- 
 
 yohn Camp' 
 
 bell SJuiirp : 
 
 1819-85. 
 
 Edwin 
 
 IVaugh : 
 
 1818- 
 
 Rev. 
 William 
 Barnes : 
 1801-86. 
 
 Female 
 poets.
 
 28o 
 
 JEAN INGELOW. — CHRISTINA ROSSETTL 
 
 yean Inge- 
 low: 1830- 
 
 Adelaide 
 A nne Proc- 
 ter: 1825- 
 64. See 
 fage 107. 
 
 Isa Craig 
 
 Knox: 
 
 1831- 
 
 Christina 
 Georgitta 
 Rossetti: 
 1830- 
 
 emotion and to come from the heart. As the voice 
 of Mrs. Browning igrew silent, the songs of Miss Inge- 
 low began, and had instant and merited popularity. 
 They sprung up suddenly and tunefully as skylarks 
 from the daisy-spangled, hawthorn-bordered meadows 
 of old England, with a blitheness long unknown, and 
 in their idyllic underfiights moved with the tenderest 
 currents of human life. Miss Ingelow may be termed 
 an idyllic lyrist, her lyrical pieces having always much 
 idyllic beauty, and being more original than her recent 
 ambitious efforts in blank-verse. Her faults are those 
 common to her sex, — too rapid composition, and a 
 diffuseness that already has lessened her reputation. 
 But " The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire " 
 (with its quaint and true sixteenth-century dialect), 
 " Winstanley," " Songs of Seven," and " The Long 
 White Seam," are lyrical treasures, and their author 
 especially may be said to evince that sincerity which 
 is poetry's most enduring warrant. The gentle stanzas 
 of Miss Procter also are spontaneous, as far as they 
 go, but have had less significance as part of the litera- 
 ture of the time. Yet it is like telling one's beads, 
 or reading a prayer-book, to turn over her pages, — 
 so beautiful, so pure and unselfish a spirit of faith, 
 hope, and charity pervades and hallows them. These 
 women, with their melodious voices, spotless hearts, 
 and holy aspirations, are priestesses of the oracle. 
 Their ministry is sacred ; in their presence the most 
 irreverent become subdued. I do not find in the 
 lyrics of Mrs. Knox, the Scottish poetess, anything 
 better than the ode in honor of Burns, which took the 
 centenar}' prize. Miss Rossetti demands closer atten- 
 tion. She is a woman of genius, whose songs, hymns, 
 ballads, and various lyrical pieces are studied and
 
 NEO-ROMANTIC SCHOOL. 
 
 281 
 
 original. I do not greatly admire her longer poems, 
 which are more fantastic than imaginative ; but else- 
 where she is a poet of a profound and serious cast, 
 whose lips part with the breathing of a fervid spirit 
 within. She has no lack of matter to express ; it is 
 that expression wherein others are so fluent and adroit 
 which fails to serve her purpose quickly ; but when, 
 at last, she beats her music out, it has mysterious and 
 soul-felt meaning. Another woman-poet is Mrs. Web- 
 ster, already mentioned as a translator. For many 
 poetic qualities this lady's work is nearly equal, in 
 several departments of verse, to that of the best of 
 her sister artists ; and I am not sure but her general 
 level is above them all. She has a dramatic faculty 
 unusual with women, a versatile range, and much 
 penetration of thought ; is objective in her dramatic 
 scenes and longer idyls, which are thinner than Brown- 
 ing's, but less rugged and obscure ; shows great 
 culture, and is remarkably free from the tricks and 
 dangerous mannerism of recent verse. 
 
 VI. 
 
 The minor poetry of the last few years is of a 
 strangely composite order, vacillating between the art 
 of Tennyson and the grotesqueness of Browning, while 
 the latest of all illustrates, in rhythmical quality, the 
 powerful effect Swinburne's manner already has had 
 upon the poetic ear. We can see that the long-unpop- 
 ular Browning at length has become a potent force 
 as the pioneer of a half-dramatic, half-psychological 
 method, whose adherents seek a change from the idyl- 
 lic repose of the Laureate and his followers. With 
 this intent, and with a strong leaning toward the art- 
 
 A ugitsia 
 IVebster : 
 born abjul 
 1840- 
 
 The latest 
 schools. 
 
 Psychology 
 cal and Nef 
 Rofnantic 
 poets.
 
 282 
 
 E VA NS. — SIMCOX. — MA RSTON. — HA KE. 
 
 Sebastian 
 Evans : 
 1830- 
 
 George Aii- 
 giisius Sim- 
 cox : 1841- 
 Westlatid 
 Marston : 
 1819- 
 Philip 
 Bourke 
 Marston : 
 1850-87. 
 
 Thomas 
 Gordon 
 Hake, 
 M. D. : 
 1809- 
 
 studies and convictions of the Rossetti group, a Neo- 
 Romantic School has arisen, and many of the prom- 
 ising younger aspirants are upon its roll. 
 
 Among recent volumes decidedly in the manner of 
 Browning may be mentioned Brother Fabian's Manu- 
 script ; and Other Poems, by Evans. On the other 
 side, Simcox's Poems and Roniances are elaborate and 
 curious romantic studies, resembling works of this sort 
 by Morris and Rossetti, P. B. Marston inherits a 
 poetic gift from his father (Dr. Westland Marston, au- 
 thor of " The Patrician's Daughter " and many other 
 plays). The son is of the new school. I do not 
 remember any experimental volume that has shown 
 more artistic perfection than his Song-Tide and Other 
 Poe?>is. His sonnets and lyrics approach those of 
 Rossetti in terseness and beauty, and, while he pos- 
 sesses more restraint than others of his group, there 
 is extreme feeling, pathetic yearning, and that self- 
 pity which is consolation, in his sonnets of a love 
 that has been, and is gone, — of " the joy that was, is 
 not, and cannot be." It is said that Marston is 
 blind, but not from birth ; and certainly his imagina- 
 tion finely supplies the want of outward vision in 
 these picturesque and deeply emotional poems. 
 
 Sometimes, in a garden that has changed owners 
 and has been replanted with exotics of brilliant and 
 various hues, the visitor is struck with surprise to see 
 a sweet and sturdy native flower sprung up of itself, 
 amid the new-fangled exuberance, from seed dropped 
 in a season long gone by. It is with a kindred 
 feeling that we examine Dr. Hake's volume, Made- 
 line, and Other Poems and Parables, so strangely and 
 pleasantly different from the contemporary mode. It 
 is filled with quaint, grave, thoughtful measures, that
 
 WARREN. — PA YNE. 
 
 283 
 
 remind us, by their devotion, of Herbert or Vauglian, 
 — by their radical insight, of the plain-spoken hom- 
 ilies of a time when England's clergymen believed 
 what they preached, — and, by their emblematic and 
 symbolic imagery, of Francis Quarles. " Old Souls," 
 " The Lily of the Valley," and other parables, are 
 well worth close reading, and possibly are the 
 selectest portion of this very original writer's verse. 
 Warren's Philoctefcs, an antique drama, is a good ex- 
 ample of the excellence attained in this kind of work 
 by the new men. It is close, compact, Grecian, less 
 rich with poetry and music than " Atalanta," but even 
 more statuesque and severe. This poet is of the 
 most cultured type. His Rehearsals is a collection 
 of verses that generally show the influence of Swin- 
 burne, but include a few psychological studies in a 
 widely different vein. He is less florid and ornate 
 than his favorite master ; all of his work is highly 
 finished, and much of it very effective. Among his 
 other successes must be reckoned an admirable use 
 of the stately Persian quatrain. Payne is a more 
 open and pronounced disciple of the Neo-Romantic 
 school. His first book. The Masque of Shadows, is a 
 collection of mystical " romaunts," containing much 
 old-fashioned diction, in form reminding us of Morris's 
 octo-syllabic measures, but pervaded by an allegorical 
 spirit. In his Intaglios we have a series of sonnets 
 inscribed, like those of Rossetti, to their common 
 master, Dante. Finally, the volume entitled Songs of 
 Lfe and Death shows the influence of Swinburne, so 
 that his works, if brought together, would present a 
 curious mixture and reflection of styles. Neverthe- 
 less, this young poet has fire, imagination, and other 
 inborn qualities, and should be entirely competent 
 
 John 
 Leicester 
 Warren ' 
 1835- 
 
 Jokn Payne'. 
 1842-
 
 284 
 
 aSHA UGH NESS Y. —MARZIALS. 
 
 A rthur 
 W. E. 
 O'Sliaugh- 
 nessy : 
 1844 -8» 
 
 T/ie new 
 method car- 
 ried to an 
 extreme. 
 
 Theophile 
 
 Marzials : 
 1850- 
 
 to achieve distinction in a manner plainly original. 
 His friend O'Shaughnessy, another man who appears 
 to have the natural faculty, is moving on a parallel 
 line. Alusic and Moonlighl, his latest volume, is no 
 advance upon the Lays of France, — a highly poetical, 
 though somewhat extravagant adaptation of the Lais 
 de Marie, composed in the new manner, but showing, 
 in style and measure, that the author has a person- 
 ality of his own. The " Lays " resemble the work of 
 Morris rather than that of Swinburne ; but " Music 
 and Moonlight," and the author's first venture. An 
 Epic of Women, are full of the diction and sugges- 
 tions of the last-named poet. When this romancer 
 becomes lyrical, he is vague and far less pleasing 
 than in his narrative-verse. He, too, needs to shake 
 off external influences, and acquire a definite purpose, 
 before we can attempt to cast his horoscope. Both 
 Payne and O'Shaughnessy have thus far shown 
 themselves, by culture and affinity, to be pupils of 
 the French Romantic school, so elaborate in style 
 and subtile in allusions, but not really broad or 
 healthy in manner and design. Its romanticism, as 
 a new element added to English poetry, is worth 
 something, and I hope that its beauty will survive 
 its defects. It is an exotic, but English literature 
 (like English architecture, sculpture, and music) is so 
 thickly grafted with exotic scions as to yield little 
 fruit that comes wholly from the parent stock. 
 
 In order to test the new method, let us study it 
 when carried to an extreme. This is done by Mar- 
 zials, whose poems are the result of Provencal studies. 
 In The Gallery of I^igeons, and other Poems, he turns 
 his back upon a more serene deity, and vows alle- 
 giance to the Muse of Fantasy, or (as he prefers to
 
 THE MUSE OF FANTASY. 
 
 28: 
 
 write it) " Phantasy." At first sight his volume seems 
 
 a burlesque, and certainly would pass for as clever 
 
 a satire as " Firmilian." How else can we interpret 
 
 such a passage as this, which is neither more nor 
 
 less affected than the greater portion of our author's 
 
 work ? — 
 
 " They chase them each, below, above, — 
 Half maddened by their minstrelsy, — 
 
 Thro' garths of crimson gladioles ; 
 And, shimmering soft like damoisels, 
 
 The angels swarm in glimmering shoals, 
 
 And pin them to their aurioles, 
 And mimick back their ritournels." 
 
 The long poem of which this is a specimen is aptly 
 named "A Conceit." Then we have a pastoral of 
 " Passionate Dowsabella," and her rival Blowselind. 
 Again, "A Tragedy," beginning, 
 
 " Death ! 
 Plop. 
 The barges down in the river flop," 
 
 and ending, 
 
 "Drop 
 
 Dead. 
 Plop, flop. 
 
 Plop." 
 
 Were this written by a satirist, it would be deemed 
 the wildest caricature. Read closely, and you see 
 that this fantastic nonsense is the work of an artist ; 
 that it has a logical design, afid is composed in 
 serious earnest. Throughout the book there is melo- 
 dy, color, and much fancy of a delicate kind. Here 
 is a minstrel, with his head turned by a false method, 
 and in very great danger, I should say. But lyrical 
 absurdities are so much the fashion just now in Eng- 
 
 Poetry of 
 the fantastic 
 and gro- 
 tesque.
 
 286 
 
 RECENT CRITICISM. 
 
 Want of 
 
 wholesome 
 
 eriticistn. 
 
 " Scholar's 
 •work ht 
 poetry." 
 
 See pag^es 
 205, 206. 
 
 The fore- 
 going list of 
 poets selected 
 to represent 
 the Mass. 
 
 land, that reviewers seem complacently to accept them. 
 It is enough to make us forgive the Georgian critics 
 their brutality, and cry out for an hour of Jeffrey or 
 Gifford ! To see how these fine fellows plume them- 
 selves! They intensify the mannerism of their leader, 
 but do not sustain it by his imagination, fervor, and 
 tireless poetic growth. 
 
 Every effort is expended upon decoration rather 
 than construction, and upon construction rather than 
 invention, by the minor adherents of the romance 
 school. In critical notices, which the British pub- 
 lishers are wont to print on the ily-leaves of their 
 books of verse, praise is frequently bestowed upon 
 the contents as " excellent scholar's work in poetry." 
 Poetry is treated as an art, not as an inspiration. 
 Moreover, just as in the Alexandrian period, researches 
 are made into the early tongue; "antique and quaint 
 words " are employed ; study endeavors to supply the 
 force of nature, and too often hampers the genius of 
 true poets. Renaissance, and not creation, is the aim 
 and process of the day. 
 
 VII. 
 
 In the foregoing review of the course of British 
 minor poetry during the present reign I have not 
 tried to be exhaustive, nor to include all the lesser 
 poets of the era. The latter would be a difficult 
 task, for the time,* if not creative, has been abun- 
 dantly prolific. Of modern minstrels, as of a certain 
 class of heroes, it may be said, that " every year and 
 month sends forth a new one"; the press groans with 
 their issues. My effort has been to select from the 
 large number, whose volumes are within my reach,
 
 ERRORS OF THE MINOR POETS. 
 
 287 
 
 such names as represent the various phases consid- 
 ered. Although I have been led insensibly to men- 
 tion more than were embraced in my original design, 
 doubtless some have been omitted of more repute or 
 merit than others that have taken their place. But 
 enough has been said to enable us to frame an an- 
 swer to the questions implied at the outset : The 
 spirit of later British poetry ; is it fresh and proud 
 with life, buoyant in hope, and tuneful with the melody 
 of unwearied song? Again; has the usage of the time 
 eschewed gilded devices and meretricious effect .'' Is 
 it essentially simple, creative, noble, and enduring ? 
 
 Certainly, with respect to what has been written by 
 poets of the meditative school, the former question 
 cannot be answered in the affirmative. With much 
 simplicity and composure of manner, they have been 
 tame, perplexed, and more or less despondent. The 
 second test, applied to those guided by Tennyson, 
 Browning, and Swinburne, — and who have more or 
 less succeeded in catching the manner of these greater 
 poets, — is one which their productions fail to un- 
 dergo successfully. It may be said that the charac- 
 teristics of the early Victorian schools — distinguished 
 from those of famous poetic epochs — have been 
 reflective, sombre, metaphysical, rather than fruitful, 
 spontaneous, and joyously inspired ; while those of 
 the later section are more related to culture and ele- 
 gant artifice, than to the interpretation of nature or 
 the artistic presentation of essential truth. The minor 
 idyllists, romancers, and dramatic lyrists have pos- 
 sessed much excellence of expression, but do not 
 subordinate this to what is to be expressed. They 
 laboriously, therefore, hunt for themes, and in various 
 ways endeavor to compromise the want of virile imagi- 
 
 Qiiestions 
 
 origituiUy 
 
 suggested. 
 
 Tone of the 
 minor philo- 
 sophic poets. 
 
 The idyl- 
 lists, ro- 
 mancers, 
 and others.
 
 288 
 
 THE TRUE FUNCTION OF ART. 
 
 Ruskin uf on- 
 Art oi a 
 means of 
 expression. 
 
 His oivn 
 •word-paint- 
 ing. 
 
 nation. Ruskin, who always has made an outcry against 
 this frigid, perverted taste, established a correct rule 
 in the first volume of Modern Painters, applying it to 
 either of the fine arts: "Art," he said, "with all its 
 technicalities, difficulties, and particular ends, is noth- 
 ing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable 
 
 as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing 
 
 Rhythm, melody, precision, and force are, in the words 
 of the orator and poet, necessary to their greatness, 
 but not the tests of their greatness. It is not by the 
 mode of representing and saying, but by what is 
 represented and said, that the respective greatness 
 either of the painter or writer is to be finally deter- 
 mined. • .... It is not, however, always easy, either 
 in painting or literature, to determine where the in- 
 fluence of language stops and where that of thought 
 
 begins But the highest thoughts are those 
 
 which are least dependent on language, and the dig- 
 nity of any composition and the praise to which it is 
 entitled are in exact proportion to its independency 
 of language or expression." Ruskin's own rhetorical 
 gifts are so eminent, formerly leading him into word- 
 painting for their display, that he pronounces deci- 
 sively on this point, as one who does penance for a 
 besetting fault. He might have added that the high- 
 est thought naturally finds a noble vehicle of expres- 
 sion, though the latter does not always include the 
 former. To a certain extent he implies this, in his 
 statement of a difference (which frequently confronts 
 the reader of these late English poets) between what 
 is ornamental in language and what is expressive : 
 this distinction " is peculiarly necessary in painting : 
 for in the language of words it is nearly impossible 
 for that which is not expressive to be beautiful, ex-
 
 CONSTRUCTIOIV AND DECORATION. 
 
 289 
 
 cept by mere rhythm or melody, any sacrifice to which 
 is immediately stigmatized as error." Upon this point 
 Arnold well calls attention to Goethe's statement that 
 "what distinguishes the artist from the amateur is 
 archiiectonike in the highest sense ; that power of ex- 
 ecution which creates, forms, and constitutes : not the 
 profoundness of single thoughts, not the richness of 
 imagery, not the abundance of illustration." 
 
 The rule of architecture may safely be applied to 
 poetry, — that construction must be decorated, not dec- 
 oration constructed. The reverse of this is practised 
 by many of these writers, who are abundantly supplied 
 with poetical material, with images, quaint words, con- 
 ceits, and dainty rhymes and alliteration, and who 
 laboriously seek for themes to constitute the ground- 
 work over which these allurements can be displayed. 
 Having not even a definite purpose, to say nothing 
 of real inspiration, their work, however curious in 
 technique, fails to permanently impress even the 
 refined reader, and never reaches the heart of the 
 people, — to which all emotional art is in the end 
 addressed. Far more genuine, as poetry, is the rude 
 spontaneous lyric of a natural bard, expressing the 
 love, or patriotism, or ardor, to which the common 
 pulse of man beats time. The latter outlasts the 
 former ; the former, however acceptable for a while, 
 inevitably passes out of fashion, — being but a fashion, 
 — and is sure to repel the taste of those who, in an- 
 other age, may admire some equally false production 
 that has come in vogue. 
 
 Judged by the severe rule which requires soul, 
 matter, and expression, all combined, does the char- 
 acter of recent minor poetry of itself give us cause 
 
 to expect a speedy renewal of the imaginative periods 
 13 s 
 
 Goethe^s 
 statement. 
 
 Construction 
 and decora- 
 tion. See 
 also page 
 286. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 0/ A mer- 
 ica ■'.■/• 
 459- 
 
 The present 
 
 cndlook.
 
 290 
 
 ENGLAND AND AMERICA. 
 
 British and 
 A merican 
 minor poets 
 contrasted, 
 
 Cp. "Poets 
 of A nter- 
 ica " .• p. 
 456. 
 
 Freshness 
 and individ- 
 vality of the 
 latter. 
 
 See Cfiap. 
 XL 
 
 of British song? To apply another test which is Hke 
 holding a mirror up to a drawing, suppose that the 
 younger American singers were wholly devoted to 
 work of the scholastic dilettant sort, would not their 
 poetry be subjected to still more neglect and contu- 
 mely than it has received from English critics ? On 
 the whole, our poets do not occupy themselves with 
 mediaeval and classical studies, with elaborate alliter- 
 ations, curious measures, and affected refrains. Yet 
 they have a periiect right to do this, — or, at least, 
 every right that an English poet possesses, under the 
 canon that the domain of the artist is boundless, and 
 that the historic themes and treasures of all ages and 
 places are at his disposal. America has no tradi- 
 tional period, except her memories of the mother- 
 land. She has as much right to British history, ante- 
 dating Queen Anne's time, as the modern British 
 poet. Before that epoch, her history, laws, relations, 
 all were English, and her books were printed across 
 the sea. The story of Mary Stuart, for instance, is 
 as proper a theme for an American as for the author 
 of Bothwell. Yet even our most eminent poets do 
 not greatly avail themselves of this usufruct, and the 
 minor songsters, who are many and sweet, sing to ex- 
 press some emotion aroused by natural landscape, 
 patriotism, friendship, religion, or love. There is 
 much originality among those whose note is harsh, 
 and much sweetness among those who repeat the 
 note of others. And the notes of what foreign bard 
 do they repeat with a servility that merits the epithet 
 of " mocking-birds," applied to them by a poet whom 
 I greatly admire, and often hinted at by others "i 
 There is far less imitation of Tennyson, Browning, 
 and Swinburne in the minor poetry of America than
 
 A COMPARATIVE SURVEY. 
 
 291 
 
 in that of Great Britain ; the former always has sweet- 
 ness, and often strength, — and not seldom a fresh- 
 ness and simplicity that are the garb of fresh and 
 simple thoughts. America has been passing through 
 the two phases which precede the higher forms of 
 art : the landscape period, and the sentimental or emo- 
 tional ; and she is now establishing her figure-schools 
 of painting and song. A dramatic element is rapidly 
 coming to light. The truth is that our minor poetry, 
 with a few exceptions, is not well known abroad ; a 
 matter of the less importance, since this is the coun- 
 try, with its millions of living readers, to which the 
 true American bard must look for the affectionate 
 preservation of his name and fame. After a close 
 examination of the minor poets of Britain, during the 
 last fifteen years, I have formed, most unexpectedly, 
 the belief that an anthology could be culled from the 
 miscellaneous poetry of the United States equally 
 lasting and attractive with any selected from that of 
 Great Britain. I do not think that British poetry is 
 to decline with the loss of Tennyson, Arnold, Brown- 
 ing, and the rest. There is no cause for dejection, 
 none for discouragement, as to the imaginative litera- 
 ture of the motherland. The sterility in question is 
 not symbolical of the over-ripening of the historical 
 and aged British nation ; but is rather the afternoon 
 lethargy and fatigue of a glorious day, — the product 
 of a critical, scholarly period succeeding a period of 
 unusual splendor, and soon to be followed, as I shall 
 hereafter show, by a new cycle of lyrical and dramatic 
 achievement; England, the mother of nations, renews 
 her youth from her children, and hereafter will not 
 be unwilling to receive from us fresh, sturdy, and 
 vigorous returns for the gifts we have for two centu- 
 
 The recent 
 aspect, and 
 its true 
 meaning. 
 
 Reflex in- 
 fluence 0/ 
 A nterica 
 upon the 
 tnotherland.
 
 292 
 
 THE NEW DAWN. 
 
 Past and 
 future. 
 
 ries obtained from her hands. The catholic thinker 
 derives from the, new-born hope and liberty of our 
 own country the prediction of a jubilant and meas- 
 ureless art-revival, in which England and America 
 shall labor hand to hand. If we have been children, 
 guided by our elders, and taught to repeat lispingly 
 their antiquated and timorous words, we boast that 
 we have attained majority through fire and blood, and 
 even now are learning to speak for ourselves. I be- 
 lieve that the day is not far distant when the fine 
 and sensitive lyrical feeling of America will swell into 
 
 floods of creative song. 
 
 The most musical of Eng- 
 
 land's younger poets — those on whom her hopes 
 depend — are with us, and inscribe their works to 
 the champions of freedom and equality in either 
 world. Thus our progress may exert a reflex influ- 
 ence upon the mother-country; and to the land from 
 which we inherit the wisdom of Shakespeare, the rapt- 
 ure of Milton, and Wordsworth's insight of natural 
 things, our own shall return themes and forces that 
 may animate a new-risen choir of her minstrels, while 
 neither shall be forbidden to follow melodiously where 
 the other may be inspired to lead.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 IN a study of Browning, the most original and un- 
 equal of living poets, three features obviously 
 present themselves. His dramatic gift, so rare in 
 these times, calls for recognition and analysis ; his 
 method — the eccentric quality of his expression — 
 constantly intrudes upon the reader; lastly, the moral 
 of his verse warrants a closer examination than we 
 give to the sentiments of a more conventional poet. 
 My own perception of the spirit which his poetry, 
 despite his assumption of a purely dramatic purpose, 
 has breathed from the outset, is one which I shall 
 endeavor to convey in simple and direct terms. 
 
 Various other examples have served to illustrate 
 the phases of a poet's life, but Browning arouses 
 discussion with respect to the elements of poetry as 
 an art. Hitherto I have given some account of an 
 author's career and writings before proffering a crit- 
 ical estimate of the latter. But this man's genius is 
 so peculiar, and he has been so isolated in style and 
 purpose, that I know not how to speak of his works 
 without first seeking a key to their interpretation, and 
 hence must reverse in some measure the order hitherto 
 pursued. 
 
 Robert 
 Browning : 
 horn in 
 Camberwell, 
 near Lon- 
 don, 1812.
 
 294 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Character 
 of his dra- 
 matic g;en- 
 ius. 
 
 The true 
 
 dratnatic 
 period. 
 
 It is customary to call Browning a dramatist, and 
 without doubt he represents the dramatic element, 
 such as it is, of the recent English school. He counts 
 among his admirers many intellectual persons, some 
 of whom pronounce him the greatest dramatic poet 
 since Shakespeare, and one has said that " it is to 
 him we must pay homage for whatever is good, and 
 great, and profound, in the second period of the 
 Poetic Drama of England." 
 
 This may be true ; nevertheless, it also should be 
 declared, with certain modifications, that Robert Brown- 
 ing, in the original sense of the term, is not a dra- 
 matic poet at all. 
 
 Procter, in the preface to a collection of his own 
 songs, remarks with precision and truth : " It is, in 
 fact, this power of forgetting himself, and of imagin- 
 ing and fashioning characters different from his own, 
 which constitutes the dramatic quality. A man who 
 can set aside his own idiosyncrasy is half a drama- 
 tist." Although Browning's earlier poems were in the 
 form of plays, and have a dramatic purpose, they are 
 at the opposite remove, in spirit and method, from 
 the models of the true histrionic era, — the work of 
 Fletcher, Webster, and Shakespeare. They have the 
 sacred rage and fire, but the flame is that of Brown- 
 ing, and not of the separate creations which he strives 
 to inform. 
 
 The early drama was the mouthpiece of a passion- 
 ate and adventurous era. The stage bore to the 
 period the relations of the modern novel and news- 
 paper to our own, not only holding the mirror up to 
 nature, but showing the "very age and body of the
 
 HIS DRAMATIC GENIUS. 
 
 295 
 
 time." It was a vital growth, sprung from the people, 
 and having a reflex action upon their imagination and 
 conduct. Even in Queen Anne's day the theatre was 
 the meeting-place of wits, and, if the plays were 
 meaner, it was because they copied the manners of 
 an artificial world. But, in either case, the play- 
 wrights were in no more hazard of representing their 
 own natures, in one role after another, than are the 
 leader-writers in their versatile articles upon topics of 
 our day. They invented a score of characters, or 
 took them from real life, grouped them with con- 
 summate effect, placed them in dramatic situations, 
 lightened tragedy with mirth, mellowed comedy with 
 pathos, and produced a healthful and objective dra- 
 matic literature. They looked outward, not inward : 
 their imagination was the richer for it, and of a 
 more varied kind. 
 
 The stage still has its office, but one more sub- 
 sidiary than of old. Our own age is no less stirring 
 than was the true dramatic period, and is far more 
 subtile in thought. But the poets fail to represent it 
 objectively, and the drama does not act as a safety- 
 valve for the escape of extreme passion and desire. 
 That office the novelists have undertaken, while the 
 press brings its dramas to every fireside. Yet the 
 form of the play still seems to a poet the most com- 
 prehensive mould in which to cast a masterpiece. It 
 is a combination of scenic and plastic art ; it includes 
 monologue, dialogue, and song, — action and medita- 
 tion, — man and woman, the lover, the soldier, and 
 the thinker, — all vivified by the imagination, and 
 each essential to the completeness of the whole. 
 Even to poets like Byron, who have no perception of 
 natures differing from their own, it has a fascination 
 
 T/ie modern, 
 stage. 
 
 Cp. " Poeti 
 of Amer- 
 ica '■ ; pp. 
 467-469.
 
 296 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Brenuning's 
 
 iubjectivity. 
 
 as a vehicle of expression, and the result is seen in 
 "Sardanapalus" and "Cain." Hence the closet-drama; 
 and although praiseworthy efforts, as in " Virginius " 
 and "Ion," have been made to revive the early method, 
 these modern stage-plays often are unpoetical and 
 tame. Most of what is excellent in our dramatic 
 verse is to be found in plays that could not be suc- 
 cessfully enacted. 
 
 While Browning's earlier poems are in the dramatic 
 form, his own personality is manifest in the speech 
 and movement of almost every character of each 
 piece. His spirit is infused, as if by metempsychosis, 
 within them all, and forces each to assume a strange 
 Pentecostal tone, which we discover to be that of the 
 poet himself. Bass, treble, or recitative, — whether in 
 pleading, invective, or banter, — the voice still is 
 there. But while his characters have a common 
 manner and diction, we become so wonted to the 
 latter that it seems like a new dialect which we have 
 mastered for the sake of its literature. This feeling 
 is acquired after some acquaintance with his poems, 
 and not upon a first or casual reading of them. 
 
 The brief, separate pieces, which he terms " dra- 
 matic lyrics," are just as properly dramas as are 
 many of his five-act plays. Several of the latter were 
 intended for stage-production. In these we feel that 
 the author's special genius is hampered, so that the 
 student of Browning deems them less rich and rare 
 than his strictly characteristic essays. Even in the 
 most conventional, this poet cannot refrain from the 
 long monologues, stilted action, and metaphysical dis- 
 cursion, which mark the closet-drama and unfit a 
 composition for the stage. His chief success is in 
 the portrayal of single characters and specific mooda
 
 THE POET OF PSYCHOLOGY. 
 
 297 
 
 I would not be understood to praise his originality 
 at the expense of his greatness. His mission has 
 been that of exploring those secret regions which 
 generate the forces whose outward phenomena it is 
 for the playwrights to illustrate. He has opened a 
 new field for the display of emotional power, — found- 
 ing, so to speak, a sub-dramatic school of poetry, 
 whose office is to follow the workings of the mind, 
 to discover the impalpable elements of which human 
 motives and passions are composed. The greatest 
 forces are the most elusive, the unseen mightier than 
 the seen ; modern genius chooses to seek for the 
 under-currents of the soul rather than to depict acts 
 and situations. Browning, as the poet of psychology, 
 escapes to that stronghold whither, as I have said, 
 science and materialism are not yet prepared to follow 
 him. How shall the chemist read the soul ^ No 
 former poet has so relied upon this province for the 
 excursions of his muse. True, he explores by night, 
 stumbles, halts," has vague ideas of the topography, 
 and often goes back upon his course. But, though 
 others complete the unfinished work of Columbus, it 
 is to him that we award the glory of discovery, — 
 not to the engineers and colonists that succeed him, 
 however firmly they plant themselves and correctly 
 map out the now undisputed land. 
 
 II. 
 
 Browning's manner is so eccentric as to challenge 
 attention and greatly affect our estimate of him as a 
 poet. Eccentricity is not a proof of genius, and even 
 an artist should remember that originality consists not 
 only in doing things differently, but also in " doing 
 13* 
 
 ffis sfecial 
 
 A nalysis of 
 Browniiig^s 
 method.
 
 298 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 What con- 
 ititutes a 
 Poet. 
 
 Ruskin on 
 fopular ap- 
 preciation. 
 
 things better." The genius of Shakespeare and Mo- 
 li^re enlarged and beautified their style ; it did not 
 distort it. Again, the grammarian's statement is true, 
 that Poetry is a means of Expression. A poet may 
 differ from other men in having profounder emotions 
 and clearer perceptions, but this is not for him to 
 assume, nor a claim which they are swift to grant. 
 The lines, 
 
 "O many are the poets that are sown 
 By Nature ! men endowed with highest gifts, 
 The vision and the faculty divine ; 
 Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse," 
 
 imply that the recognized poet is one who gives voice, 
 in expressive language, to the common thought and 
 feeling which lie deeper than ordinary speech. He 
 is the interpreter : moreover, he is the maker, — an 
 artist of the beautiful, the inventor of harmonious 
 numbers which shall be a lure and a repose. 
 
 A poet, however emotional or rich in thought, must 
 not fail to express his conception and make his work 
 attractive. Over-possession is worth less than a more 
 commonplace faculty ; he that has the former is a 
 sorrow to himself and a vexation to his hearers, 
 while one whose speech is equal to his needs, and 
 who knows his limitations, adds something to the 
 treasury of song, and is able to shine in his place, 
 "and be content." Certain effects are suggested by 
 nature ; the poet discovers new combinations within 
 the ground which these afford. Ruskin has shown 
 that in the course of years, though long at fault, the 
 masses come to appreciate any admirable work. By 
 inversion, if, after a long time has passed, the world 
 still is repelled by a singer, and finds neither rest 
 nor music in him, the fault is not with the world,
 
 POETRY AND PROSE DISTINGUISHED. 
 
 299 
 
 there is something deficient in his genius, — he is so 
 much the less a poet. 
 
 ■ The distinction between poetry and prose must be 
 sharply observed. Poetry is an art, — a specific fact, 
 which, owing to the vagueness fostered by minor wits, 
 we do not sufficiently insist upon. We hear it said 
 that an eloquent prose passage is poetry, that a sun- 
 set is a poem, and so on. This is well enough for 
 rhetorical effect, yet wholly untrue, and no poet should 
 permit himself to talk in that way. Poetr}^ is poetry, 
 because it differs from prose ; it is artificial, and gives 
 us pleasure because we know it to be so. It is 
 beautiful thought expressed in rhythmical form, not 
 half expressed or uttered in the form of prose. It is 
 a metrical structure; a spirit not disembodied, but in 
 the flesh, — so as to affect the senses of living men. 
 Such is the poetry of Earth ; what that of a more 
 spiritual region may be I know not. Milton and 
 Keats never were in doubt as to the meaning of 
 their art. It is true that fine prose is a higher form 
 of expression than wretched verse ; but when a dis- 
 tinguished young English poet thus writes to me, — 
 
 " My own impression is that Verse is an inferior, or infant, 
 
 form of speech, which will ultimately perish altogether 
 
 The Seer, the Vates, the teacher of a new truth, is single, 
 while what you call artists are legion," 
 
 — when I read these words, I remember that the few 
 great seers have furnished models for the simplest 
 and greatest forms of art ; I feel that this poet 
 is growing heretical with respect, not to the law of 
 custom, but to a law which is above us all ; I fear 
 to discover a want of beauty, a vague transcenden- 
 talism, rather than a clear inspiration, in his verse, — 
 
 Poetry. 
 
 Misuse of 
 the term. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 0/ A mer- 
 ica " : //. 
 327. 373- 
 
 Letter from 
 a rising 
 English 
 poet. 
 
 Dangers of 
 
 transcen- 
 dentalis>n. 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica " .- pp. 
 168, 169, 
 249, 253.
 
 300 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Jtnpression 
 produced by 
 Browning's 
 work. 
 
 to see him become prosaic and substitute rhetoric for 
 passion, realism for naturalness, affectation for lofty 
 thought, and, "having been praised for bluntness," to 
 " affect a saucy roughness." In short, he is on the 
 edge of danger. Yet his remark denotes a just im- 
 patience of forms so hackneyed that, once beautiful, 
 they now are stale and corrupt. It may be neces- 
 sary, with the Pre-Raphaelites, to escape their thral- 
 dom and begin anew. But the poet is a creator, not 
 an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say 
 in prose what can only be expressed in song. And 
 I have faith that my friend's wings will unfold, in 
 spite of himself, and lift him bravely as ever on their 
 accustomed flights. 
 
 Has the lapse of years made Browning any more 
 attractive to the masses, or even to the judicious few ? 
 He is said to have " succeeded by a series of fail- 
 ures," and so he has, as far as notoriety means suc- 
 cess, and despite the perpetuation of his faults. But 
 what is the fact which strikes the admiring and sym- 
 pathetic student of his poetry and career ? Distrust- 
 ing my own judgment, I asked a clear and impar- 
 tial thinker, — " How does Browning's work impress 
 you ? " His reply, after a moment's consideration, 
 was : " Now that I try to formulate the sensation 
 which it always has given me, his work seems that 
 of a grand intellect painfully striving for adequate 
 use and expression, and never quite attaining either." 
 This was, and is, precisely my own feeling. The 
 question arises, What is at fault? Browning's genius, 
 his chosen mode of expression, his period, or one 
 and all of these ? After the flush of youth is over, a 
 poet must have a wise method, if he would move 
 ahead. He must improve upon instinct by experience
 
 THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION. 
 
 301 
 
 and common-sense. There is something amiss in one 
 who has to grope for his theme and cannot adjust 
 himself to his period \ especially in one who cannot 
 agreeably handle such themes as he arrives at. More 
 than this, however, is the difficulty in Browning's case. 
 Expression is the flower of thought ; a fine imagina- 
 tion is wont to be rhythmical and creative, and many 
 passages, scattered throughout Browning's works, show 
 that his is no exception. It is a certain caprice or 
 perverseness of method, that, by long practice, has 
 injured his gift of expression ; while an abnormal 
 power of ratiocination, and a prosaic regard for de- 
 tails, have handicapped him from the beginning. Be- 
 sides, in mental arrogance and scorn of authority, he 
 has insulted Beauty herself, and furnished too much 
 excuse for small offenders. What may be condoned 
 in one of his breed is intolerable when mimicked by 
 every jackanapes and self-appointed reformer. 
 
 A group of evils, then, has interfered with the 
 greatness of his poetry. His style is that of a man 
 caught in a morass of ideas through which he has to 
 travel, — wearily floundering, grasping here and there, 
 and often sinking deeper until there seems no prospect 
 of getting through. His latest works have been more 
 involved and excursive, less beautiful and elevating, 
 than most of those which preceded them. Possibly 
 his theory is that which was his wife's instinct, — a 
 man being more apt than a woman with some reason 
 for what he does, — that poetry is valuable only for 
 the statement which it makes, and must always be 
 subordinate thereto. Nevertheless, Emerson, in this 
 country, seems to have followed a kindred method ; 
 and who of our poets is greater, or so wise? 
 
 Defective 
 and capri- 
 cious ex- 
 pression. 
 
 His recent 
 productions.
 
 302 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Fine Ttatu- 
 ral gifts. 
 
 Various 
 stirring 
 lyrics. 
 
 III. 
 
 Browning's early lyrics, and occasional passages of 
 recent date, show that he has melodious intervals, 
 and can be very artistic with no loss of original 
 power. Often the ring of his verse is sonorous, and 
 overcomes the jagged consonantal diction with stir- 
 ring lyrical effect. The " Cavalier Tunes " are ex- 
 amples. Such choruses as 
 
 "Marching along, fifty-score strong, 
 Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song ! " 
 
 " King Charles, and who '11 do him right now ? 
 King Charles, and who 's ripe for fight now ? 
 Give a rouse : here 's, in Hell's despite now, 
 King Charles!" 
 
 — these, with, " Boot, saddle, to horse, and away ! " 
 show that Browning can put in verse the spirit of a 
 historic period, and has, or had, in him the making 
 of a lyric poet. How fresh and wholesome this work ! 
 Finer still that superb stirrup-piece, best of its class 
 in the language, " How they brought the good news 
 from Ghent to Aix." "Ratisbon" and "The Lost 
 Leader," no less, are poems that fasten themselves 
 upon literature, and will not be forgotten. The old 
 fire flashes out, thirty years after, in " Herve Riel," 
 another vigorous production, — unevenly sustained, 
 but superior to Longfellow's legendary ballads and 
 sagas. From among lighter pieces I will select for 
 present mention two, very unlike each other ; one, as 
 delightful a child's poem as ever was written, in fancy 
 and airy extravagance, and having a wildness and 
 pathos all its own, — the daintiest bit of folk-lore in 
 English verse, — to what should I refer but " The 
 Pied Piper of Hamelin.?" The author made a strong
 
 HIS GENERAL STYLE. 
 
 303 
 
 bid for the love of children, when he placed " By 
 Robert Browning" at its head, in the collection of 
 his poems. The other, 
 
 '* Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead ! 
 
 Sit and watch by her side an hour," 
 
 appeals, like Wordsworth's " She dwelt among the 
 untrodden ways," and Landor's " Rose Aylmer," to 
 the hearts of learned and unlettered, one and all. 
 
 Browning's style is the more aggressive, because, in 
 compelling beauty itself to suffer a change and con- 
 form to all exigencies, it presents such a contrast to 
 the refined art of our day. I have shown that much 
 of this is due to natural awkwardness, — but that the 
 author is able, on fortunate occasions, to better his 
 work, has just been amply illustrated. More often 
 he either has let his verse have its way, or has shaped 
 a theory of art by his own restrictions, and with that 
 contempt for the structure of his song which Plato 
 and St. Paul entertained for their fleshly bodies. If 
 the mischief ceased here, it would not be so bad, 
 but his genius has won pupils who copy his vices 
 without his strength. He and his wife injured each 
 the other's style as much as they sustained their 
 common aspiration and love of poesy. To be sure, 
 there was a strange similarity, by nature, between 
 their modes of speech ; and what I have said of the 
 woman's obscurity, affectations, elisions, will apply to 
 the man's — with . his t'ihes and o't/ies, his dashes, 
 breaks, halting measures, and oracular exclamations 
 that convey no dramatic meaning to the reader. Her 
 verse is the more spasmodic ; his, the more meta- 
 physical, and, while effective in the best of his dramatic 
 lyrics, is constantly running into impertinences worse 
 
 Evils of his 
 
 general 
 
 style. 
 
 The two 
 Brownings.
 
 304 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Disregard 
 of the fitness 
 of things. 
 
 Irreverence. 
 
 Crude real- 
 
 than those of his poorest imitators, and which would 
 not be tolerated for a moment in a lesser poet. 
 Parodies on his st}'le, thrown off as burlesques, are more 
 intelligible than much of his " Dramatis Personae." 
 Unlike Tennyson, he does not comprehend the limits 
 of a theme ; nor is he careful as to the relative im- 
 portance either of themes or details ; his mind is sc 
 alert that its minutest turn of thought must be ut- 
 tered ; he dwells with equal precision upon the meanest 
 and grandest objects, and laboriously jots down every 
 point that occurs to him, — parenthesis within paren- 
 thesis, — until we have a tangle as intricate as the 
 line drawn by an anemometer upon the recording- 
 sheet. The poem is all zigzag, criss-cross, at odds 
 and ends, — and, though we come out right at last, 
 strength and patience are exhausted in mastering it. 
 Apply the rule that nothing should be told in verse 
 which can be told in prose, and half his measures 
 would be condemned ; since their chief metrical pur- 
 pose is, through the stress of rhythm, to fix our at- 
 tention, by a certain unpleasant fascination, upon a 
 process of reasoning from which it otherwise would 
 break away. 
 
 For so much of Browning's crudeness as comes from 
 inability to express himself, or to find a proper theme, 
 he may readily be forgiven \ but whatever is due to 
 real or assumed irreverence for the divine art, among 
 whose votaries he stands enrolled, is a grievous wrong, 
 unworthy of the humble and delightful spirit of a true 
 craftsman. He forgets that art is the bride of the 
 imagination, from whose embraces true creative work 
 must spring. Lastly, concerning realism, while poets 
 are, as Mrs. Browning said, "your only truth-tellers,' 
 it is not well that repulsive or petty facts should
 
 'PARACELSUS: 
 
 305 
 
 always be recorded ; only the high, essential truths 
 demand a poet's illumination. The obscurity wherein 
 Browning disguises his realism is but the semblance 
 of imagination, — a mist through which rugged details 
 jut out, while the central truth is feebly to be seen. 
 
 IV. 
 
 After a period of study at the London University 
 young Browning, in 1832, went to Italy, and acquired 
 a remarkable knowledge of the Italian life and lan- 
 guage. He mingled with all classes of the people, 
 mastered details, and rummaged among the monas- 
 teries of Lombardy and Venice, studying mediaeval 
 history, and filling his mind with the relics of a by- 
 gone time. All this had much to do with the bent 
 of his subsequent work, and possibly was of more 
 benefit to his learning than to his ideality. 
 
 At the age of twenty-three he published his first 
 drama, Paracelsus; a most unique production, — strictly 
 speaking, a metaphysical dialogue, as noticeable for 
 analytic power as the romances of Keats for pure 
 beauty. It did not find many readers, but no man 
 of letters could peruse it without seeing that a genu- 
 ine poet had come to light. From that time the 
 author moved in the literary society of London, and 
 was recognized as one who had done something and 
 might do something more. The play is " Faust," 
 with the action and passion, and much of the poetry 
 and music, — upon which the fascination of the German 
 work depends, — omitted; the hero resembles "Faust" 
 in the double aspiration to know and to enjoy, to 
 search out mystical knowledge, yet drink at all the 
 fountains of pleasure, — lest, after a long struggle, 
 
 T 
 
 Browning's 
 dramas, and 
 "SordeUo." 
 
 " Paracel- 
 sus r 
 1835-36-
 
 3o6 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 failing of knowledge, he should have lived in vain. 
 It must be understood that Mr. Browning's Paracel- 
 sus was his own creation : a man of heroic lonmnsrs, 
 observed at various intervals, from his twentieth year, 
 in which he leaves his native hamlet, until he dies 
 at the age of forty-eight, — obscure, and with his 
 ideal seemingly unattained ; not the juggler, empiric, 
 and charlatan of history, whose record the poet 
 frankly gives us in a foot-note. 
 
 This poem has every characteristic of Browning's 
 genius. The verse is as strong and as weak as the 
 best and worst he has composed during thirty years, 
 and is pitched in a key now familiar to us all. 
 " Paracelsus," the fruit of his youth, serves as well 
 for a study of this poet as any later effort, and, 
 though inferior to " Pippa Passes " and " In a Bal- 
 cony," is much better than his newest romance in 
 blank verse. I cannot agree with critics who say 
 that he did his poorest work first and has been mov- 
 ing along an ascending scale ; on the contrary, his 
 faults and beauties have been somewhat evenly dis- 
 tributed throughout his career. We are vexed in 
 " Paracelsus " by a vice that haunts him still, — that 
 tedious garrulity which, however relieved by beautiful 
 passages, palls on the reader and weakens the gen- 
 eral effect. As an offset, he displays in this poem, 
 with respect to every kind of poetic faculty except 
 the sense of proportion, gifts equal to those of any 
 compeer. By turns he is surpassingly fine. We have 
 strong dramatic diction : — 
 
 Character- 
 istic merits 
 and defects. 
 
 'Festus, strange secrets are let out by Death, 
 Who blabs so oft the follies of this world : 
 And I am Death's familiar, as you know.
 
 'PARACELSUS: 
 
 307 
 
 I helped a man to die, some few weeks since ; 
 
 . . . . No mean trick 
 He left untried ; and truly wellnigh wormed 
 All traces of God's finger out of him. 
 Then died, grown old; and just an hour before — 
 Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes — 
 He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice 
 Said, that in spite of thick air and closed doors 
 God told him it was June ; and he knew well. 
 Without such telling, harebells grew in June ; 
 And all that kings could ever give or take 
 Would not be precious as those blooms to him." 
 
 The conception is old as Shakespeare, but the 
 manner is large and effective. Few authors vary the 
 breaks and pauses of their blank verse so naturally 
 as Browning, and none can so well dare to extend 
 the proper limits of a poem. Here, as in later plays, 
 he shows a more realistic perception of scenery and 
 nature than is common with dramatic poets. We have 
 a bit of painting at the outset, in the passage begin- 
 ning, 
 
 "Nay, Autumn wins you best by this its mute 
 Appeal to sympathy for its decay ! " 
 
 and others, equally fine and true, are scattered through- 
 out the dialogue. 
 
 "Paracelsus" is meant to illustrate the growth and 
 progress of a lofty spirit, groping in the darkness of 
 his time. He first aspires to knowledge, and fails ; 
 then to pleasure and knowledge, and equally fails 
 — to human eyes. The secret ever seems close at 
 hand : — 
 
 "Ah, the curse, Aprile, Aprile ! 
 We get so near — so very, very near! 
 'T is an old tale : Jove strikes the Titans down 
 Not when they set about their mountain-piling. 
 But when another rock would crown their work!" 
 
 Browning's 
 lilattk verse.
 
 ?o8 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 "Straf- 
 ford," 1837. 
 
 Now, it is a part of Browning's life-long habit, that 
 he here refuses to judge by ordinary standards, and 
 makes the hero's attainment lie even in his failure 
 and death. There are few more daring assertions of 
 the soul's absolute freedom than the words of Festus, 
 impressed by the nobility of his dying friend : — 
 
 " I am for noble Aureole, God ! 
 I am upon his side, come weal or woe ! 
 His portion shall be mine ! He has done well ! 
 I would have sinned, had I been strong enough, 
 As he has sinned ! Reward him, or I waive 
 Reward ! If thou canst find no place for him 
 He shall be king elsewhere, and I will be 
 His slave forever ! There are two of us ! " 
 
 The drama is well worth preserving, and even now 
 a curious and highly suggestive study. Its lyrical 
 interludes seem out of place. As an author's first 
 drama, it promised more for his future than if it had 
 been a finished production, and in any other case 
 but that of the capricious, tongue-tied Browning, the 
 promise might have been abundantly fulfilled. 
 
 In " Strafford," his second drama, the interest also 
 centres upon the struggles and motives of one heroic 
 personage, this time entangled in a fatal mesh of 
 great events. Apparently the poet, after some ex- 
 perience of authorship, wished to commend his work 
 to popular sympathy, and tried to write a play that 
 should be fitted for the stage ; hence a tragedy, dedi- 
 cated to Macready, of which the chief character, — the 
 hapless Earl of Strafford, — was assumed by that 
 tragedian. The piece is said to have been well re- 
 ceived, but ran for five nights only, one of the chief 
 actors suddenly withdrawing from the cast. The 
 characters are eccentrically drawn, and are more
 
 ■STRAFFORD' AND ' SORDELLO: 
 
 309 
 
 serious and mystical than even the gloom of their 
 period would demand. It is hard to perceive the 
 motives of Lady Carlisle and the Queen ; there is no 
 underplot of love in the play, to develop the womanly 
 element, nor has it the humor of the great play- 
 wrights, — so essential to dramatic contrast, and for 
 which the Puritans and the London populace might 
 afford rich material. Imagine Macready stalking por- 
 tentously through the piece, the audience trying to 
 follow the story, and listening with patience to the 
 solemn speeches of Pym and Strafford, which answer 
 for a death-scene at the close. The language is 
 more natural than is usual with Browning, but here, 
 where he is least eccentric, he becomes tame — until 
 we see that he is out of his element, and prefer his 
 striking psychology to a forced attempt at writing of 
 the academic kind. 
 
 Something of this must have struck the poet him- 
 self, for, as if chagrined at his effort, he swung back 
 to the other extreme, and beyond his early starting- 
 place : farther, happily, than any point he since has 
 ventured to reach. In no one of his recent works 
 has he been quite so "hard," loquacious, and im- 
 practicable as in the renowned nondescript entitled 
 Sordello. Twenty-three years after its appearance he 
 owned that its "faults of expression were many," and 
 added, "but with care for a man or book such would 
 be surmounted." The acknowledgment was partial. 
 " Sordello " is a fault throughout, in conception and 
 execution : nothing is " expressed," not even the " in- 
 cidents in the development of a soul," though such 
 incidents may have had some nebulous origin in the 
 poet's mind. It is asking too much of our care for 
 \ book or a man that we should surmount this chaotic 
 
 "Sordelh," 
 1840.
 
 3IO 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 " Bells and 
 Pomegran- 
 ates," 1840- 
 46. 
 
 "Luria." 
 
 mass of word-building. Carlyle's " Sartor Resartus " 
 is a hard study, but, once entered upon, how po- 
 etical ! what lofty episodes ! what wisdom, beauty, 
 and scorn ! Few such treasures await him that would 
 read the eleven thousand verses into which the fatal 
 facility of the rhymed-heroic measure has led the 
 muse of Browning. The structure, by its very ugli- 
 ness and bulk, like some half-buried colossus in the 
 desert, may survive a lapse of time. I cannot per- 
 suade myself to solicit credit for deeper insight by 
 differing from the common judgment with regard to 
 this unattractive prodigy. 
 
 It had its uses, seemingly, in acting as a purge to 
 cleanse the visual humors of the poet's eyes and to 
 leave his general system in an auspicious condition. 
 His next six years were devoted to the composition 
 of a picturesque group of dramas, — the exact order 
 of which escapes me, but which finally were collected 
 in Bells and Pomegranates, a popular edition, issued 
 in serial numbers, of this maturer work. " Luria," 
 " King Victor and King Charles," and " The Return 
 of the Druses," are stately pieces, historical or legend- 
 ary, cast in full stage-form. In Luria we again see 
 Browning's favorite characterization, from a different 
 point of view. This is a large-moulded, suffering hero, 
 akin, if disturbed in conscience, to Wallenstein, — 
 if devoted and magnanimous, to Othello. Luria, the 
 Moor, is like Othello in many ways: a brave and skil- 
 ful general, who serves Florence (instead of Venice), 
 and declares, 
 
 "I can and have perhaps obliged the state, 
 Nor paid a mere son's duty." 
 
 He is so true and simple, that Domizia says of 
 him.
 
 'LURIA. 
 
 311 
 
 "How plainly is true greatness charactered 
 By such unconsciousness as Luria's here, 
 And sharing least the secret of itself!" 
 
 Browning makes devotion to an ideal or trust, how- 
 ever unworthy of it, the chief trait of this class of 
 personages. Strafford dies in behalf of ungrateful 
 Charles ; Luria is sacrificed by the Florence he has 
 saved, and destroys himself at the moment when love 
 and honor are hastening, too late, to crown him. 
 Djabal, false to himself, is true to the cause of the 
 Druses, and at last dies in expiation of his fault. 
 Valence, in " Colombe's Birthday," shows devotion of 
 a double kind, but is rewarded for his fidelity and 
 honor. Luitolfo, in " A Soul's Tragedy," is of a 
 kindred type. But I am anticipating. The language 
 of " Luria " often is in the grand manner. In depict- 
 ing the Moorish general and his friend Husain, — 
 brooding, generous children of the sun, — the soldierly 
 Tiburzio, painted with a few master-strokes, — and in 
 the element of Italian craft and intrigue, the author 
 is at home and well served by his knowledge of 
 mediaeval times. That is an eloquent speech of Do- 
 mizia, near the end of the fourth act. Despite the 
 poverty of action, and the prolonged harangues, this 
 drama is worthy of its dedication to Landor and the 
 wish that it might be " read by his light " : almost 
 worthy (Landor always weighed out gold for silver !) 
 of the old bard's munificent return of praise : — 
 
 "Shakespeare is not our poet but the world's, 
 Therefore on him no speech ! and brief for thee. 
 Browning ! Since Chaucer was alive and hale, 
 No man hath walked along our roads with step 
 So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue 
 So varied in discourse. But warmer climes 
 
 A favorite 
 cluiracteri- 
 zatwn. 
 
 Landor to 
 Browning.
 
 312 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 " The Re- 
 turn of the 
 Druses." 
 
 Give brighter plumage, stronger wing : the breeze 
 Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on 
 Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where 
 The Siren waits thee, singing song for song." 
 
 "The Return of the Druses," with its scenic and 
 choric effects, is like some of Byron's plays : the 
 scene, an isle of the Sporades ; the legend, half- 
 Venetian, half-Oriental, one that only Browning could 
 make available. The girl Anael is an impassioned 
 character, divided between adoration for Hakeem, the 
 god of her race, — whom she believes incarnate in 
 Djabal, — and her love for Djabal as a man. The 
 tragedy, amid a good deal of trite and pedantic lan- 
 guage, is marked by heroic situations and sudden 
 dramatic catastrophes. Several brilliant points are 
 made : one, where the Prefect lifts the arras, on the 
 other side of which death awaits him, and says, — 
 
 " This is the first time for long years I enter 
 Thus, without feeling just as if I lifted 
 The lid up of my tomb ! . . . . 
 
 Let me repeat — for the first time, no draught 
 Coming as from a sepulchre salutes me ! " 
 
 A moment, and the dagger is through his heart. 
 Another such is the wonder and contempt of Anael 
 at finding Djabal no deity, but an impostor ; while 
 perhaps the most telling point in the whole series of 
 Browning's plays is her cry of Hakeem! made when 
 she comes to denounce Djabal, but, moved by love, 
 proclaims him as the god, and falls dead with the 
 effort. The poet, however, is justly censured for too 
 frequently taking off his personages by the intensity 
 of their own passions, without recourse to the dagger
 
 'THE RETURN OF THE DRUSES: 
 
 313 
 
 and bowl. He rarely does it after the "high Roman 
 fashion."' 
 
 This tragedy observes the classic unities of time 
 and place. A hall in the Prefect's palace is made to 
 cover its entire action, which occupies only one day. 
 In its earnest pitch and lack of sprightly underplot, 
 it also is Greek or Italian. Not long ago, Hstening 
 to Salvini in "Samson" and other plays, I was struck 
 by their likeness, in simplicity of action and costume, 
 to the antique dramas. The actors were sufficient to 
 themselves, and the audience was intent upon their 
 lofty speech and passion ; there was no lack of 
 interest, but a refreshing spiritual elevation. The 
 Gothic method better suits the English stage, never- 
 theless we need not refuse to profit by the experi- 
 ence of other lands. Our poetry, like the language, 
 should draw its riches from all tongues and races, 
 and well can endure a larger infusion of the ancient 
 grandeur and simplicity. In the play before us 
 Browning has but renewed the debt, long since in- 
 curred, of English literature to the Italian, — greater 
 than that to all other sources combined. Not with- 
 out reason, in " De Gustibus," he sang, — 
 
 " Open my heart and you will see, 
 Graved inside of it, 'Italy.' 
 Such lovers old are I and she ; 
 So it always was, so it still shall be ! " 
 
 " King Victor " is one of those conventional plays 
 in which he appears to ordinary advantage. His 
 three dramatic masterpieces are " Pippa Passes," " A 
 Blot in the 'Scutcheon," and "Colombe's Birthday." 
 
 The last-named play, inscribed to Barry Cornwall, 
 really is a fresh and lovely little drama. The fair 
 14 
 
 The Classi- 
 cal and 
 Gothic meth- 
 ods in dra- 
 7natic art. 
 
 "Kin^ Vic- 
 tor and 
 King 
 Charles:'' 
 
 " Colomhe's 
 Birthday:'
 
 314 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 "A Blot in 
 the 'Scutch- 
 eon." 
 
 young heroine has possessed her duchy for a single 
 year, and now, upon her birthday, as she unsuspect- 
 ingly awaits the greetings of her courtiers, is called 
 upon to surrender her inheritance to Prince Berthold, 
 decreed to be the lawful heir. At the same time 
 Valence, a poor advocate of Cleves, seeks audience 
 in behalf of his suffering townsmen, and ends by 
 defending the Duchess's title to her rank. She loves 
 him, and is so impressed by his nobility and cour- 
 age as to decline the hand of the Prince, and sur- 
 render her duchy, to become the wife of Valence, 
 with whom she joyfully retires to the ruined castle 
 where her youth was spent. This play might be 
 performed to the great interest of an audience com- 
 posed exclusively of intellectual persons, who could 
 follow the elaborate dialogue and would be charmed 
 with its poetry and subtile thought. Once accept the 
 manner of Browning, and you must be pleased with 
 the delineation of the characters. " Colombe " herself 
 is exquisite, and like one of Shakespeare's women. 
 Valence seems too harsh and dry to win her, and 
 her choice, despite his loyalty and intellect, is hardly 
 defensible. Still, " Colombe's Birthday " is the most 
 natural and winsome of the author's stage-plays. 
 
 " A Blot in the 'Scutcheon " was brought out at 
 Drury Lane, in 1843. l^ is full of poetry and pathos, 
 but there is little in it to relieve the human spirit, — 
 which cannot bear too much of earnestness and woe 
 added to the mystery and burden of our daily lives. 
 Yet the piece has such tragic strength as to stamp 
 the author as a great poet, though in a narrow range. 
 One almost forgets the singular improbabilities of the 
 story, the d/ase talk of the child-lovers (an English 
 Juliet of fourteen is against nature), the stiff language
 
 'A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON: 
 
 315 
 
 of the retainers, and various other blemishes. There 
 is a serenade in which, unchecked by his fear of 
 detection, Mertoun is made to sing under Mildred's 
 window, — 
 
 " There 's a woman like the dew-drop, she 's so purer than the 
 purest ! " 
 
 This song, composed seven years before the poet's 
 meeting with Miss Barrett, is precisely in the style of 
 " Lady Geraldine's Courtship," and other ballads of 
 the gifted woman who became his wife. 
 
 The most simple and varied of his plays — that 
 which shows every side of his genius, has most light- 
 ness and strength, and all in all may be termed a 
 representative poem — is the beautiful drama with 
 the quaint title of " Pippa Passes." It is a cluster of 
 four scenes, with prologue, epilogue, and interludes ; 
 half prose, half poetry, varying with the refinement of 
 the dialogue. Pippa is a delicately pure, good, blithe- 
 some peasant-maid. " 'T is but a little black-eyed, 
 pretty, singing Felippa, gay silk-winding girl," — though 
 with token, ere the end, that she is the child of a 
 nobleman, put out of the way by a villain, Maffeo, at 
 instigation of the next heir. Pippa knows nothing of 
 this, but is piously content with her life of toil. It 
 is New Year's Day at Asolo. She springs from bed, 
 in her garret chamber, at sunrise, — resolved to enjoy 
 to the full her sole holiday : she will not " squander 
 a wavelet " of it, not a " mite of her twelve hours' 
 treasure." Others can be happy throughout the year: 
 haughty Ottima and Sebald, the lovers on the hill ; 
 Jules and Phene, the artist and his bride ; Luigi and 
 his mother ; Monsignor, the Bishop ; but Pippa has 
 only this one day to enjoy. She envies these great 
 
 "Pifipa 
 Passes:' 
 
 /
 
 3i6 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Intense pas- 
 sion atui 
 beauty. 
 
 ones a little, but reflects that God's love is best, after 
 all. And yet, how little can she do ! How can she 
 possibly affect the world ? Thus she muses, and goes 
 out, singing, to her holiday and the sunshine. Now, 
 it so happens that she passes, this day, each of the 
 groups or persons we have named, at an important 
 crisis in their lives, and they hear her various carols 
 as she trills them forth in the innocent gladness of 
 her heart. Sebald and Ottima have murdered the 
 latter's aged husband, and are unremorseful in their 
 guilty love. Jules is the victim of a fraud practised 
 by his rival artists, who have put in his way a young 
 girl, a paid model, whom he believes to be a pure 
 and cultured maiden. He has married her, and just 
 discovered the imposture. Luigi is hesitating whether 
 to join a patriotic conspiracy. Monsignor is tempted 
 by Maffeo to overlook his late brother's murder, for 
 the 'sake of the estates, and utterly to ruin Pippa. 
 The scene between Ottima and Sebald is the most 
 intense and striking passage of all Browning's poetr}', 
 and, possibly, of any dramatic verse composed during 
 his lifetime up to the date of this play. A passion- 
 ate esoteric theme is treated with such vigor and 
 skill as to free it from any debasing taint, in the 
 dialogue from which I quote : — 
 
 " Ottima The past, would you give up the past 
 
 Such as it is, pleasure and crime together .' 
 Give up that noon I owned my love for you — 
 The garden's silence — even the single bee, 
 Persisting in his toil, suddenly stopt, 
 And where he hid you only could surmise 
 By some campanula's chalice set a-swing 
 As he clung there — ' Yes, I love you ! ' 
 
 Sebald. And I drew 
 
 Back ; put far back your face with both my hands
 
 'PIP PA passes: 
 
 317 
 
 Lest you should grow too full of me — your face 
 So seemed athirst for my whole soul and body ! 
 
 The July night ? 
 
 Ottima. Then our crowning night — 
 
 Sebald. 
 
 Ottiyjia. The day of it too, Sebald ! 
 When the heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat, 
 Its black-blue canopy seemed let descend 
 Close on us both, to weigh down each to each, 
 And smother up all life except our life. 
 So lay we till the storm came. 
 
 Sebald. How it came ! 
 
 Ottima. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect; 
 Swift ran the searching tempest overhead ; 
 And ever and anon some bright white shaft 
 Burnt thro' the pine-tree roof, — here burnt and there, 
 As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen 
 Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, 
 Feeling for guilty thee and me : then broke 
 The thunder like a whole sea overhead — 
 
 Sebald. Yes ! 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 How did we ever rise .-' 
 Was it that we slept ? Why did it end } 
 
 Ottima. I felt you. 
 
 Fresh tapering to a point the ruffled ends 
 Of my loose locks 'twixt both your humid lips — 
 (My hair is fallen now — knot it again ! ) 
 
 Sebald. I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now, and now ! 
 This way ? Will you forgive me — be once more 
 My great queen ? 
 
 Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow ; 
 
 Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress. 
 Magnificent in sin. Say that ! 
 
 Sebald. I crown you 
 
 My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress, 
 Magnificent — " 
 
 But here Pippa passes, singing 
 
 "God's in his heaven, — 
 All 's right with the world ! " 
 
 See " Pi/>pa 
 Passes" 
 Scent I.
 
 318 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Too intel- 
 lectual. 
 
 Sebald is stricken with fear and remorse ; his para- 
 mour becomes hideous in his eyes; he bids her dress 
 her shoulders, wipe off that paint, and leave him, for 
 he hates her ! She, the woman, is at least true to 
 her lover, and prays God to be merciful, not to her, 
 but to him. 
 
 The scene changes to the post-nuptial meeting of 
 Jules and Phene, and then in succession to the other 
 passages and characters we have mentioned. All 
 these persons are vitally affected, — have their lives 
 changed, merely by Pippa's weird and suggestive 
 songs, coming, as if by accident, upon their hearing 
 at the critical moment. With certain reservations this 
 is a strong and delicate conception, admirably worked 
 out. The usual fault is present : the characters, 
 whether students, peasants, or soldiers, all talk like 
 sages ; Pippa reasons like a Paracelsus in panta- 
 lets, — her intellectual songs are strangely put in the 
 mouth of an ignorant silk-winding girl ; Phene is 
 more natural, though mature, even for Italy, at four- 
 teen. Browning's children are old as himself ; — he 
 rarely sees them objectively. Even in the songs he is 
 awkward, void of lyric grace ; if they have the wild- 
 ing flavor, they have more than need be of specks 
 and gnarledness. In the epilogue Pippa seeks her 
 garret, and, as she disrobes, after artlessly running 
 over the events of her holiday, soliloquizes thus : — 
 
 " Now, one thing I should like really to know : 
 How near I ever might approach all these 
 I only fancied being, this long day — 
 — Approach, I mean, so as to touch them — so 
 As to . . in some way . . move them — if you please, 
 Do good or evil to them some slight way." 
 
 Finally, she sleeps, — unconscious of her day's mis-
 
 M sours tragedy: 
 
 319 
 
 sion, — and of the fact that her own life is to be 
 something more than it has been, — but not until she 
 has murmured these words of a hymn : — 
 
 " All service is the same with God, — 
 With God, whose puppets, best and worst, 
 Are we : there is no last nor first." 
 
 " Pippa Passes " is a work of pure art, and has a 
 wealth of original fancy and romance, apart from its 
 wisdom, to which every poet will do justice. Its 
 faults are those of style and undue intellectuality. 
 To quote the author's words, in another drama, 
 
 " Ah ? well ! he o'er-refines, — the scholar's fault ! " 
 
 As it is, we accept his work, looking upon it as upon 
 some treasured yet bizarre painting of the mixed 
 school, whose beauties are the more striking for its 
 defects. The former are inherent, the latter external 
 and subordinate. 
 
 Everything from this poet is, or used to be, of 
 value and interest, and " A Soul's Tragedy " is of 
 both : first, for a masterly distinction between the 
 action of sentiment and that founded on principle, 
 and, secondly, for wit, satire, and knowledge of af- 
 fairs. Ogniben, the Legate, is the most thorough 
 man of the world Browning has drawn. That is a 
 matchless stroke, at the close, where he says : " I 
 have seen four-and-twenty leaders of revolts." It is 
 a consolation to recall this when a pretender arises ; 
 his race is measured, — his fall will surely come. 
 
 With " Luria," in 1845-6, Browning, whose plays 
 had been briefly performed, and whose closet-dra- 
 mas had found too small a reading, made his "last 
 attempt, for the present, at dramatic poetry." It 
 
 A rare and 
 
 exquisite 
 
 production. 
 
 "/} SouVs 
 Tragedy."
 
 320 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Dramatic 
 nature of 
 Bronvning' s 
 lyrics. 
 
 Founder of 
 the new life- 
 ichool. 
 
 remains to examine his miscellaneous after-work, in- 
 cluding the long poems which have appeared within 
 the last five years, — thus far the most prolific, if not 
 the most creative, period of his untiring life. 
 
 Something of a dramatic character pertains to 
 nearly all of Browning's lyrics. Like his wife, he has 
 preferred to study human hearts rather than the 
 forms of nature. A note to the first collection of 
 his briefer poems places them under the head of 
 Dramatic Pieces. This was at a time when English 
 poets were enslaved to the idyllic method, and forgot 
 that their readers had passions most suggestive to art 
 when exalted above the tranquillity of picturesque re- 
 pose. Herein Browning justly may claim originality. 
 Even the Laureate combined the art of Keats with 
 the contemplative habit of Wordsworth, and adapted 
 them to his own times ; while Browning was the 
 prophet of that reaction which holds that the proper 
 study of mankind is man. His effort, weak or able, 
 was at figure-painting, in distinction from that of 
 landscape or still-life. It has not flourished during 
 the recent period, but we are indebted to him for 
 what we have of it. In an adverse time it was 
 natural for it to assume peculiar, almost morbid 
 phases ; but of this struggling, turbid figure-school, — 
 variously represented by the younger Lytton, Rossetti, 
 Swinburne, and others, he was the long-neglected 
 progenitor. His genius may have been unequal to 
 his aims. It is not easy for him to combine a score 
 of figures upon the ample canvas : his work is at its 
 best in separate ideals, or, rather, in portraits, — his
 
 DRAMATIC ROMANCES AND LYRICS. 
 
 321 
 
 dramatic talent b«ing more realistic than imaginative. 
 Still, portraiture, in a certain sense, is the highest 
 form of painting, and Browning's personal studies 
 must not be undervalued. As usual, even here he is 
 unequal, and, while some of them are matchless, in 
 others, like all men of genius who aim at the highest, 
 he conspicuously fails. A man of talent may never 
 fail, yet never rise above a fixed height. Yet if 
 Browning were a man of great genius his failures 
 would not so outnumber his successes that half his 
 lyrics could be missed without injury to his repu- 
 tation. 
 
 The shorter pieces, "Dramatic Romances and Lyr- 
 ics," in the first general collection of his works, are 
 of a better average grade than those in his latest 
 book of miscellanies. One of the best is " My Last 
 Duchess," a masterly sketch, comprising within sixty 
 lines enough matter to furnish Browning, nowadays, 
 with an excuse for a quarto. Nothing can be subtler 
 than the art whereby the Duke is made to reveal a 
 cruel tragedy of which he was the relentless villain, 
 to betray the blackness of his heart, and to suggest 
 a companion-tragedy in his betrothal close at hand. 
 Thus was introduced a new method, applied with 
 such coolness as to suggest the idea of vivisection or 
 morbid anatomy. 
 
 But let us group other lyrics in this collection with 
 the matter of two later volumes, ATen a?id Women, 
 and, Dramatis Personce. These books, made up of 
 isolated poems, contain the bulk of his work during 
 the eighteen years which followed his marriage in 
 1846. While their contents include no long poem or 
 drama, they seem, upon the whole, to be the fullest 
 expression of his genius, and that for which he is 
 14* u 
 
 "My Last 
 Duc/iess" 
 
 "Men and 
 IVomen," 
 
 ■Sss- 
 
 " Dramatis 
 PcrsoncE," 
 
 1S64.
 
 322 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Inferiority 
 
 of the last- 
 named vol- 
 ume. 
 
 " Men and 
 ll'ome}i" a 
 refiresenta- 
 tive work. 
 
 " Andrea 
 iel Sarto." 
 
 likeliest to be remembered. Every, poet has limita- 
 tions, and in such briefer studies Browning keeps 
 within the narrowest bounds allotted to him. Very 
 few of his best pieces are in " Dramatis Personx," 
 the greater part of which book is made up of his 
 most ragged, uncouth, and even puerile verse ; and 
 it is curious that it appeared at a time when his wife 
 was scribbling the rhetorical verse of those years 
 which I have designated as her period of decline. 
 But observe the general excellence of the fifty poems 
 in "Men and Women," — collected nine years earlier, 
 when the author was forty-three years old, and at his 
 prime. In the chapter upon Tennyson it was stated 
 that almost every poet has a representative book, 
 showing him at full height and variety. " Men and 
 Women," like the Laureate's volume of 1842, is the 
 most finished and comprehensive of the author's 
 works, and the one his readers least could spare. 
 Here we find numbers of those thrilling, skilfully 
 dramatic studies, which so many have imitated with- 
 out catching the secret of their power. 
 
 The general effect of Browning's miscellaneous 
 poems is like that of a picture-gallery, where cabinet- 
 paintings, by old and modern masters, are placed at 
 random upon the walls. Some are rich in color ; 
 others, strong in light and shade. A few are elabo- 
 rately finished, — more are careless drawings, fresh, but 
 hurriedly sketched in. Often the subjects are repul- 
 sive, but occasionally we have the solitary, impressive 
 figure of a lover or a saint. 
 
 The poet is as familiar with medieeval thought and 
 story as most authors with their own time, and adapts 
 them to his lyrical uses. " Andrea del Sarto " be- 
 longs to the same group with " My Last Duchess."
 
 'MEN AND women: 
 
 323 
 
 It is the language of "the faultless painter," ad- 
 dressed to his beautiful and thoughtless wife, for 
 whom he has lowered his ideal — and from whose 
 chains he cannot break, though he knows she is un- 
 worthy, and even false to him. He moans before 
 one of Rafael's drawings, excusing the faults, in envy 
 of the genius : — 
 
 " Still, what an arm ! and I could alter it. 
 But all the play, the insight and the stretch — 
 Out of me ! out of me ! And wherefore out ? 
 Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul, 
 We might have risen to Rafael, I and you. 
 
 c • • • • 
 
 But had you — O, with the same perfect brow. 
 And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth, 
 And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird 
 The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare, — 
 Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind ! 
 Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged 
 ' God and the glory ! never care for gain ! ' 
 
 • • • • * 
 
 I might have done it for you." 
 
 Were it indeed "all for love," then were the "world 
 well lost " ; but even while he dallies with his wife 
 she listens for her gallant's signal. This poem is 
 one of Browning's finest studies : of late he has 
 given us nothing equal to it. The picture of the 
 rollicking " Fra Lippo Lippi " is broad, free-handed, 
 yet scarcely so well done. " Pictor Ignotus " is upon 
 another art-theme, and in quiet beauty differs from 
 the poet's usual manner. Other old-time studies, 
 good and poor, which served to set the fashion for a 
 number of minor poets, are such pieces as " Count 
 Gismond," " Cristina," "The Laboratory," and "The 
 Confessional." 
 
 "Fra Lippo 
 Lipjii" etc.
 
 324 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 " Christmas 
 Eve" and 
 "Easier 
 Day," 1850. 
 
 Excellent 
 medicBval 
 church 
 studies. 
 
 How perilous an easy rhymed-metre is to this 
 author was discernible in "Sordello." After the same 
 manner he is tempted to garrulity in the semi-relig- 
 ious poems, " Christmas Eve " and " Easter Day." It 
 is difficult otherwise to account for their dreary flow, 
 since they are no more original in theology than 
 poetical in language and design. 
 
 It would be strange if Browning were not indebted, 
 for some of his most powerful themes, to the super- 
 stition from which mediaeval art, politics, and daily 
 life took their prevailing tone. In his analysis of 
 its quality he seems to me extremely profound. Mo- 
 nasticism in Spain even now is not so different from 
 that of the fifteenth century, and the repulsive im- 
 agery of a piece like the " Soliloquy of the Spanish 
 Cloister," written in the harshest verse, well consorts 
 with a period when the orders, that took their origin 
 in exalted purity, had become degraded through lust, 
 gluttony, jealousy, and every cardinaKsin. Browning 
 draws his monks, as Dore in the illustrations to "Les 
 Contes Drolatiques," with porcine or wolfish faces, 
 monstrous, seamed with vice, defiled in body and 
 soul. "The Bishop orders his Tomb" has been criti- 
 cised as not being a faithful study of the Romish 
 ecclesiastic, A. D. 15 — ; but, unless I misapprehend 
 the spirit of that period, this is one of the poet's 
 strongest portraitures. Religion then was often a 
 compound of fear, bigotry, and greed ; its officers, 
 trained in the Church, seemed to themselves invested 
 with something greater than themselves ; their ideas 
 of good and evil, after years of ritualistic service, — 
 made gross with pelf, jealousy, sensualism, and even 
 blood-guiltiness, — became strangely intermixed. The 
 poet overlays this groundwork with that love of art
 
 MEDIEVAL STUDIES. 
 
 325 
 
 and luxury — of jasper, peach-blossom marble, and 
 lazuli — inbred in every Italian, — and even with the 
 scholar's desire to have his epitaph carved aright : — 
 
 "Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tally's every word, 
 No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line, — 
 Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need! 
 And then how I shall lie through centuries, 
 And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, 
 And see God made and eaten all day long. 
 And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste 
 Good, strong, thick, stupefying incense-smoke ! " 
 
 All this commanded to his bastards ! And for the 
 rest, were ever suspicion, hatred, delight at outwit- 
 ting a rival in love and preferment, and every other 
 loathsome passion strong in death, more ruthlessly 
 and truthfully depicted ? 
 
 Of strictly mediaeval church studies, "The Heretic's 
 Tragedy" and "Holy-Cross Day," with their grotesque 
 diction, annotations, and prefixes, are the most skil- 
 ful reproductions essayed in our time. Browning 
 alone could have conceived or written them. In " A 
 Grammarian's Funeral," " Abt Vogler," and " Master 
 Hugues," early scholarship and music are commemo- 
 rated. The language of the simplest of these is so in- 
 tricate that we have to be educated in a new tongue 
 to comprehend them. Their value lies in the human 
 nature revealed under such fantastic, and, to us, un- 
 natural aspects developed in other times. 
 
 "Artemis Prologuizes," the poet's antique sketch, 
 is as unclassical as one might expect from its affected 
 title. " Saul," a finer poem, may have furnished hints 
 to Swinburne with respect to anapestic verse and the 
 Hebraic feeling. Three poems, which strive to re- 
 produce the early likeness and spirit of Christianity, 
 
 The Her- 
 etic's Trag- 
 edy," etc. 
 
 Studies 
 upon themes 
 taken from 
 the first 
 century-
 
 326 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 "Clean." 
 
 "A Death 
 in the Des- 
 ert." 
 
 merit close attention. One describes the raising of 
 Lazarus, narrated in an "Epistle of Karshish, the 
 Arab Physician." The pious, learned mage sees in 
 the miracle 
 
 " but a case of mania — subinduced 
 By epilepsy, at the turning-point 
 Of trance prolonged unduly some three days." 
 
 " Cleon " is an exposition of the highest ground 
 reached by the Pagan philosophy, set forth in a 
 letter written, by a wise poet, to Protos, the King. 
 At the end he makes light of the preachings of Paul, 
 who is welcome to the few proselytes he can make 
 among the ignorant slaves : — 
 
 "And (as I gathered from a bystander) 
 Their doctrines could be held by no sane man." 
 
 The reader is forced to stop and consider what 
 despised doctrines even now may be afloat, which in 
 time may constitute the whole world's creed. The 
 most elaborate of these pieces is "A Death in the 
 Desert," the last words of St. John, the Evangelist, 
 recorded by Pamphylax, an Antiochene martyr. The 
 prologue and epilogue are sufficiently pedantic, but, 
 like the long-drawn narrative, so characteristic, that 
 this curious production may be taken as a represent- 
 ative poem. A similar bit of realism is the sketch 
 of a great poet, seen in every-day life by a fellow- 
 townsman, entitled, " How it Strikes a Contempo- 
 rary." And now, having selected a few of these 
 miscellaneous pieces to represent the mass, how shall 
 we define their true value, and their influence upon 
 recent art ? 
 
 Browning is justified in offering such works as a 
 substitute for poetic treatment of English themes,
 
 SCHOLASTIC REALISM. 
 
 327 
 
 since he is upon ground naturally his own. Yet as 
 poems they fail to move us, and to elevate gloriously 
 the soul, but are the outgrowth of minute realism and 
 speculation. To quote from one who is reviewing a 
 kindred sort of literature, they sin " against the spirit 
 of antiquity, in carrying back the modern analytic 
 feeling to a scene where it does not belong." It is 
 owing precisely to this sin that several of Browning's 
 longer works are literary and rhythmical prodigies, 
 monuments of learning and labor rather than enno- 
 bling efforts of the imagination. His hand is bur- 
 dened by too great accumulation of details, — and 
 then there is the ever-present spirit of Robert Brown- 
 ing peering from the eyes of each likeness, however 
 faithful, that he portrays. 
 
 He is the most intellectual of poets, Tennyson not 
 excepted. Take, for example, " Caliban," with its 
 text, "Thou thoughtest I was altogether such an one 
 as thyself." The motive is a study of anthropomor- 
 phism, by reflection of its counterpart in a lower 
 animal, half man, half beast, possessed of the faculty 
 of speech. The "natural theology" is food for thought; 
 the poetry, descriptive and otherwise, realism carried 
 to such perfection as to seem imagination. Here we 
 have Browning's curious reasoning at its best. But 
 what can be more vulgar and strictly unpoetical than 
 " Mr. Sludge, the Medium," a composition of the 
 same period } Our familiarity with such types as 
 those to which the author's method is here applied 
 enables us to test it with anything but satisfaction. 
 Applied to a finer subject, in " Bishop Blougram's 
 Apology," we heartily admire its virile analysis of the 
 motives actuating the great prelate, who after due 
 reflection has rejected 
 
 Defect of 
 the fore- 
 cited poetns. 
 
 Browning's 
 subtilty of 
 intellect. 
 
 "Caliban." 
 
 "Mr. 
 Sludge. " 
 
 " Bishop 
 Blougratn. ''
 
 328 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Occasional 
 lyrics : 
 
 T/ieir excel- 
 lence and 
 faults. 
 
 "A life of doubt diversified by faith 
 For one of faith diversified by doubt." 
 
 Cardinal Wiseman is worldly and insincere ; the 
 poet, Gigadibs, is earnest and on the right side ; yet, 
 somehow, we do not quite despise the churchman 
 nor admire the poet. This piece is at once the fore- 
 most defence and arraignment of Philistinism, drawn 
 up by a thinker broad enough to comprehend both 
 sides. As an intellectual work, it is meat and wine ; 
 as a poem, as a thing of beauty, — but that is quite 
 another point in issue. 
 
 Browning's offhand, occasional lyrics, such as " War- 
 ing," "Time's Revenges," " Up in a Villa," "The Ital- 
 ian in England," " By the Fireside," " The Worst of 
 It," etc.^ are suggestive, and some of them widely 
 familiar. His style has been caught by others. The 
 picturesqueness and easy rhythm of " The Flight of 
 the Duchess," and the touches in briefer lyrics, are 
 repeated by minnesingers like Owen Meredith and 
 Dobell. There is a grace and turn that still evades 
 them, for sometimes their master can be as sweet and 
 tuneful as Lodge, or any other of the skylarks. Wit- 
 ness " In a Gondola," that delicious Venetian cantata, 
 full of music and sweet sorrow, or "One Way of Love," 
 for example, — but such melodies are none too fre- 
 quent. When he paints nature, as in " Home Thoughts, 
 from Abroad," how fresh and fine the landscape ! 
 
 " And after April, when May follows, 
 And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows, — 
 Hark ! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge 
 Leans to the field and scatters on the clover 
 Blossoms, and dew-drops — at the bent spray's edge — 
 That 's the wise thrush ; he sings each song twice over. 
 Lest you should think he never could recapture 
 The first fine careless rapture ! "
 
 HIS SUGGESTIVENESS. 
 
 329 
 
 Having in mind Shakespeare and Shelley, I neverthe- 
 less think the last three lines the finest ever written 
 touching the song of a bird. Contrast therewith the 
 poet's later method, — the prose-run-mad of stanzas 
 such as this : — 
 
 " Hobbs hints blue, — straight he turtle eats. 
 Nobbs prints blue, — claret crowns his cup. 
 Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats, — 
 
 Both gorge. Who fished the murex up ? 
 What porridge had John Keats .' " 
 
 And this by no means the most impertinent of kindred 
 verses in his books, — poetry that neither gods nor 
 men can endure or understand, and yet interstrewn 
 with delicate trifles, such as " Memorabilia," which for 
 suggestiveness long will be preserved. Who so deft to 
 catch the one immortal moment, the fleeting exqui- 
 site word? Who so wont to reach for it, and wholly 
 fail? 
 
 VI. 
 
 We come, at last, to a class of Browning's poems 
 that I have grouped for their expression of that domi- 
 nating sentiment, to which reference was made at the 
 beginning of this review. Their moral is that of the 
 apothegm that " Attractions are proportional to desti- 
 nies " j of rationalistic freedom, as opposed to Calvin- 
 ism ; of a belief that the greatest sin does not consist 
 in giving rein to our desires, but in stinting or too 
 prudently repressing them. Life must have its full 
 and free development. And, as love is the master- 
 passion, he is most earnest in illustrating this belief 
 from its good or evil progress, and to this end has 
 composed his most impressive verse. 
 
 Moral of his 
 
 ev'^ional
 
 330 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 lis subjec- 
 tive under- 
 tone. 
 
 A main lesson of Browning's emotional poetry is 
 that the unpardonable sin is "to dare something 
 against nature." To set bounds to love is to commit 
 that sin. Through his instinct for conditions which 
 engender the most dramatic forms of speech and ac- 
 tion, he is, at least, as an artist, tolerant of what is 
 called an intrigue ; and that many complacent English 
 and American readers do not recognize this, speaks 
 volumes either for their stupidity, or for their hypoc- 
 risy and inward sympathy in a creed which they pro- 
 fess to abhor. Affecting to comprehend and admire 
 Browning, they still refuse to forgive Swinburne, — 
 whose crude earlier poems brought the lust of the 
 ilesh to the edge of a grossness too palpable to be 
 seductive, and from which his riper manhood has 
 departed altogether. The elder poet, from first to 
 last, has appeared to defend the elective affinities 
 against impediments of law, theology, or social rank. 
 It is not my province to discuss the ethics of this 
 matter, but simply to speak of it as a fact. 
 
 It will not do to fall back upon Browning's protest, 
 in the note to his " Dramatic Lyrics," that these are 
 " so many utterances of so many imaginary persons," 
 and not his own. For when he returns persistently 
 to a certain theme, illustrates it in divers ways, and 
 heaps the coals of genius upon it till it breaks out 
 into flame, he ceases to be objective and reveals his 
 secret thought. No matter how conservative his habit, 
 he is to be judged, like any artist, by his work ; and 
 in all his poems we see a taste for the joys and sor- 
 rows of a free, irresponsible life, — like that of the 
 Italian lovers, of students in their vagrant youth, or 
 of Consuelo and her husband upon the windy heath. 
 Above all, he tells us : —
 
 'IN A balcony: 
 
 331 
 
 "Thou shalt know, those arms once curled 
 About thee, what we knew before, 
 How love is the only good in the world." 
 
 "In a Balcony" is the longest and finest of his emo- 
 tional poems: a dramatic episode, in three dialogues, 
 the personages of which talk at too great length, — 
 although, no doubt, many and varied thoughts flash 
 through the mind at supreme moments, and it is 
 Browning's custom to put them all upon the record. 
 How clearly the story is wrought! What exquisite 
 language, and passion triumphant over life and death ! 
 Mark the transformation of the lonely queen, in the 
 one radiant hour of her life that tells her she is be- 
 loved, and makes her an angel of goodness and light. 
 She barters power and pride for love, clutching at 
 this one thing as at Heaven, and feels 
 
 " How soon a smile of God can change the world." 
 
 Then comes the transformation, upon discovery of 
 the cruel deceit, — her vengeance and despair. The 
 love of Constance, who for it will surrender life, and 
 even Norbert's hand, is more unselfish ; never more 
 subtly, perhaps, than in this poem, has been illus- 
 trated Byron's epigram : — 
 
 " In her first passion, woman loves her lover : 
 In all the others, all she loves is love." 
 
 Here, too, is the profound lesson of the whole, that 
 a word of the man Norbert's simple, blundering truth 
 would have prevented all this coil. But the poet is 
 at his height in treating of the master passion : — 
 
 "Remember, I (and what am I to you?) 
 Would give up all for one, leave throne, lose life, 
 Do all but just unlove him ! he loves me." 
 
 "InaBal- 
 co}ty.'"
 
 332 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 ''The Statue 
 and the 
 Bust." 
 
 With fine abandonment he makes the real worth 
 so much more than the ideal : — 
 
 " We live, and they experiment on life, 
 These poets, painters, all who stand aloof 
 To overlook the farther. Let us be 
 The thing they look at ! " 
 
 But in a large variety of minor lyrics it is hinted 
 that our instincts have something divine about them ; 
 that, regardless of other obligations, we may not dis- 
 obey the inward monition. A man not only may for- 
 sake father and mother and cleave to his wife ; but 
 forsake his wife and cleave to the predestined one. 
 
 No sin like repression ; no 
 
 stmg 
 
 like regret ; no 
 
 requital for the opportunity slighted and gone by. 
 In " The Statue and the Bust," — a typical piece, — 
 had the man and woman seen clearly " the end " of 
 life, though " a crime," they had not so failed of 
 it: — 
 
 " If you choose to play — is my principle ! 
 Let a man contend to the uttermost 
 For his life's set prize, be it what it will ! 
 
 "The counter our lovers staked was lost 
 As surely as if it were lawful coin : 
 And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
 
 "Was, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin. 
 Though the end in sight was a crime, I say." 
 
 " A Light Woman " turns upon the right of every 
 soul, however despicable, to its own happiness, and 
 to freedom from the meddling of others. The words 
 of many lyrics, attesting the boundless liberty and 
 sovereignty of love, are plainly written, and to say 
 the lesson is not there is to ape those commentators
 
 POETRY ADDRESSED TO HIS WIFE. 
 
 33; 
 
 who discover an allegorical meaning in each Scrip- 
 tural text that interferes with their special creeds. 
 
 Both Browning and his wife possessed by nature a 
 radical gift for sifting things to the core, an heroic 
 disregard of every conventional gloss or institution. 
 They were thoroughly mated in this respect, though 
 one may have outstripped the other in exercise of the 
 faculty. Their union, apparently, was so absolute 
 that neither felt any need of fuller emotional life. 
 The sentiment of Browning's passional verse, there- 
 fore, is not the outgrowth of perceptions sharpened 
 by restraint. The poetry addressed to his wife is, if 
 anything, of a still higher order. He watches her 
 
 "Reading by firelight, that great brow 
 And the spirit-small hand propping it 
 Mutely — my heart knows how — 
 
 "When, if I think but deep enough, 
 
 You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme"; 
 
 and again and again addresses her in such lines as 
 these : — 
 
 " God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 
 Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 
 One to show a woman when he loves her. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 This to you — yourself my moon of poets! 
 
 Ah, but that 's the world's side — there 's the wonder — 
 
 Thus they se'e you, praise you, think they know you." 
 
 In fine, not only his passional lyrics, but all the 
 poems relating to the wedded love in which his own 
 deepest instincts were thoroughly gratified, are the 
 most strong and simple portion of his verse, — show- 
 ing that luminous expression is still the product of 
 high emotion, as some conceive the diamond to have 
 been crystallized by the electric shock. 
 
 Wedded 
 poets. 
 
 Truepassion 
 ennobles art.
 
 334 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 " Dramatis 
 Persona." 
 
 " The Ring 
 and the 
 Book," 1869. 
 
 An intel- 
 lectual mar- 
 vel. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Many of the lyrics in the volume of 1864 are so 
 thin and faulty, and so fail to carry out the author's 
 intent, — the one great failure in art, — as sadly to 
 illustrate the progressive ills which attend upon a 
 wrong method. 
 
 The gift still remained, however, for no work dis- 
 plays more of ill-diffused power and swift application 
 than Browning's longest poem, The Ring and the Book, 
 It has been succeeded rapidly, within five years, by 
 other works, — the whole almost equalling, in bulk, 
 the entire volume of his former writings. Their special 
 quality is affluence : limitless wealth of language and 
 illustration. They abound in the material of poetry. 
 A poet should condense from such star-dust the orbs 
 which give light and outlast time. As in " Sordello," 
 Browning again fails to do this ; he gives us his 
 first draught, • — the huge, outlined block, yet to be 
 reduced to fit proportions, — the painter's sketch, 
 blotchy and too obscure, and of late without the 
 early freshness. 
 
 Nevertheless, " The Ring and the Book " is a won- 
 derful production, the extreme of realistic art, and 
 considered, not without reason, by the poet's admi- 
 rers, to be his greatest work. To review it would 
 require a special chapter, and I have said enough 
 with respect to the author's style in my citation of 
 his less extended poems; but as the product of sheer 
 intellect this surpasses them all. It is the story of a 
 tragedy which took place at Rome one hundred and 
 seventy years ago. The poet seems to have found 
 his thesis in an old book, — part print, part manu- 
 script, — bought for eight pence at a Florence stall: —
 
 'THE RING AND THE BOOK.' 
 
 335 
 
 "A book in shape, but, really, pure crude fact 
 Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard, 
 And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since." 
 
 The versified narrative of the child PampiHa's sale to 
 Count Guido, of his cruelty and violence, of her 
 rescue by a young priest, — the pursuit, the lawful 
 separation, the murder by Guido of the girl and her 
 putative parents, the trial and condemnation of the 
 murderer, and the affirmation of his sentence by the 
 Pope, — all this is made to fill out a poem of twenty- 
 one thousand lines ; but these include ten different 
 versions of the same tale, besides the poet's prelude, 
 — in which latter he gives a general oudine of it, so 
 that the reader plainly may understand it, and the 
 historian then be privileged to wander as he choose. 
 The chapters which contain the statements of the 
 priest-lover and Pampilia are full of tragic beauty and 
 emotion ; the Pope's soliloquy, though too prolonged, 
 is a wonderful piece of literary metempsychosis ; but 
 the speeches of the opposing lawyers carry realism 
 to an intolerable, prosaic extreme. Each of these 
 books, possibly, should be read by itself, and not too 
 steadily nor too often. Observe that the author, in 
 elevated passages, sometimes forgets his usual manner 
 and breaks into the cadences of Tennyson's style ; for 
 instance, the apostrophe to his dead wife, beginning 
 
 " O lyric Love, half angel and half bird, 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire ! " 
 
 But elsewhere he still leads the reaction from the 
 art-school. His presentations are endless : in his ar- 
 chitecture the tracery, scroll-work, and multifoil be- 
 wilder us and divert attention from the main design. 
 Yet in presence of the changeful flow of his verse, 
 
 Outline of 
 the poem. 
 
 The style oj 
 certain pas- 
 sages-
 
 336 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 "Balaus- 
 tiotCs A d- 
 veniure," 
 1871. 
 
 " Fifine at 
 the Fair,'' 
 1872. 
 
 and the facility wherewith he records the speculations 
 of his various characters, we are struck with wonder. 
 " The Ring and the Book " is thus far imaginative, 
 and a rhythmical marvel, but is it a stronghold of 
 poetic art ? As a whole, we cannot admit that it is ; 
 and yet the thought, the vocabulary, the imagery, the 
 wisdom, lavished upon this story, would equip a score 
 of ordinary writers, and place them beyond danger of 
 neglect. 
 
 Balaustion's Adventure, the poet's next volume, dis- 
 plays a tranquil beauty uncommon in his verse, and 
 it seems as if he sought, after his most prolonged 
 effort, to refresh his mind with the' sweetness and 
 repose of Greek art. He treads decently and rever- 
 ently in the buskins of Euripides, and forgets to be 
 garrulous in his chaste semi-translation of the Alcestis. 
 The girl Balaustion's prelude and conclusion are very 
 neatly turned, reminding us of Landor ; nor does the 
 book, as a whole, lack the antique flavor and the 
 blue, laughing freshness of the Trinacrian sea. 
 
 What shall be said of Fifitie at the Fair, or of that 
 volume, the last but one of Browning's essays, which 
 not long ago succeeded it? Certainly, that they ex- 
 hibit his steadfast tendency to produce work that is 
 less and less poetical. There is no harder reading 
 than the first of these poems; no more badly chosen, 
 rudely handled measure than the verse selected for 
 it ; no pretentious work, from so great a pen, has less 
 of the spirit of grace and comeliness. It is a pity 
 that the author has not somewhat accustomed himself 
 to write in prose, for he insists upon recording all of 
 his thoughts, and many of them are essentially pro- 
 saic. Strength and subtilty are not enough in art : 
 beauty, either of the fair, the terrible, or the gro-
 
 HIS LATER PRODUCTIONS. 
 
 337 
 
 tesque, is its justification, and a poem that repels at 
 the outset has small excuse for being. " Prince 
 Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Savior of Society," is another 
 of Browning's experiments in vivisection, the subject 
 readily made out to be the late Emperor of the 
 French. It is longer than " Bishop Blougram's Apol- 
 ogy," but compare it therewith, and we are forced to 
 perceive a decline in terseness, virility, and true im- 
 aginative power. 
 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or, Tiirf and Towers, 
 — what exasperating titles Browning puts forth ! this 
 time under the protection of Miss Thackeray. That 
 the habit is inbred, however, is proved by some ab- 
 surd invention whenever it becomes necessary to coin 
 a proper name. After " Bluphocks " and " Gigadibs," 
 we have no right to complain of the title of his 
 Breton romance. The poem itself contains a melo- 
 dramatic story, and hence is less uninteresting than 
 " Fifine." But to have such a volume, after Brown- 
 ing's finer works, come out with each revolving year, 
 is enough to extort from his truest admirers the 
 cry of " Words ! Words ! Words ! " Much of the 
 detail is paltry, and altogether local or temporal, so 
 that it will become inexplicable fifty years hence. 
 There is a constant " dropping into " prose ; more- 
 over, whole pages of wandering nonsense are called 
 forth by some word, like " night-cap " or " fiddle," 
 taken for a text, as if to show the poet's mastery of 
 verse-building and how contemptible he can make it. 
 Once he would have put the narrative of this poem 
 into a brief dramatic sketch that would have had 
 beauty and interest. " My Last Duchess " is a more 
 genuine addition to literature than the two hundred 
 pages of this tedious and affected romance. A pro-| 
 15 V 
 
 " Prince 
 Hohenstiel- 
 Schwan- 
 gau." 
 
 "Red Cot- 
 ton Nigkt- 
 Cap Coun- 
 try" 1873- 
 
 Decline in 
 poetic valtte.
 
 338 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 " AristopJia- 
 nes' Apol- 
 ogy" 1875. 
 
 Filial esti- 
 mate 0/ this 
 poet. 
 
 Most origi- 
 ftnl and 
 t*nequal. 
 
 longed 
 
 career has not been of advantage to the 
 
 reputation of Browning: his tree was well-rooted and 
 reached a sturdy growth, but the yield is too profuse, 
 of a fruit that still grows sourer from year to year. 
 
 Nevertheless, this poet, like all men of genius, has 
 happy seasons in which, by some remarkable per- 
 formance, he seems to renew his prime. Aristopha- 
 nes' Apology continues the charm of " Balaustion's 
 Adventure," to which poem it is a sequel. What I 
 have said of the classical purity and sweetness of 
 the earlier production will apply to portions of " the 
 last adventure of Balaustion," — which also includes 
 " a transcript from Euripides." Besides, it displays 
 the richness of scholarship, command of learned de- 
 tails, skill in sophistry and analysis, power to recall, 
 awaken, and dramatically inform the historic past, in 
 all which qualifications this master still remains un- 
 equalled by any modern writer, even by the most 
 gifted and affluent pupil of his own impressive school. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 A FAIR estimate of Browning may, I think, be de- 
 duced from the foregoing review of his career. It 
 is hard to speak of one whose verse is a metrical 
 paradox. I have called him the most original and 
 the most unequal of living poets \ he continually 
 descends to a prosaic level, but at times is elevated 
 to the Laureate's highest flights. Without realizing 
 the proper functions of art, he nevertheless sympa- 
 thizes with the joyous liberty of its devotees; his life 
 may be conventional, but he never forgets the Latin 
 Quarter, and often celebrates that freedom in love 
 and song which is the soul of Beranger's
 
 LA W AND LA WLESSNESS IN ART. 
 
 339 
 
 " Dans un grenier qu'on est bicn i vingt ans." 
 
 Then, too, what working man of letters does not thank 
 him when he says, — 
 
 " But you are of the trade, my Puccio ! 
 You have the fellow-craftsman's sympathy. 
 There 's none knows like a fellow of the craft 
 The all unestimated sum of pains 
 That go to a success the world can see." 
 
 He is an eclectic, and will not be restricted in his 
 themes ; on the other hand, he gives us too gross a 
 mixture of poetry, fact, and metaphysics, appearing 
 to have no sense of composite harmony, but to revel 
 in arabesque strangeness and confusion. He has a 
 barbaric sense of color and lack of form. Striving 
 against the trammels of verse, he really is far less a 
 master of expression than others who make less re- 
 sistance. We read in " Pippa Passes " : " If there 
 should arise a new painter, will it not be in some 
 such way by a poet, now, or a musician (spirits who 
 have conceived and perfected an Ideal through some 
 other channel), transferring it to this, and escaping 
 our conventional roads by pure ignorance of them } " 
 This is the Pre-Raphaelite idea, and, so far, good ; 
 but Browning's fault is that, if he has "conceived," he 
 certainly has made no effort to " perfect " an Ideal. 
 
 And here I wish to say, — and this is something 
 which, soon or late, every thoughtful poet must dis- 
 cover, — that the structural exigencies of art, if one 
 adapts his genius to them, have a beneficent reaction 
 upon the artist's original design. By some friendly 
 law they help the work to higher excellence, suggest- 
 ing unthought-of touches, and refracting, so to speak, 
 the single beam of light in rays of varied and delight- 
 ful beauty. 
 
 A truefel- 
 low-crafti- 
 ntati. 
 
 Rich, yet 
 harbaiic 
 taste. 
 
 The limits 
 of freedom 
 in art : 
 
 Their benefi- 
 cent reaction 
 upon the art- 
 ist's work.
 
 340 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 Ultimate re- 
 sults of law- 
 lessness. 
 
 Browning's 
 
 minute dra- 
 Tiiatic ill- 
 sight. 
 
 The brakes which art applies to the poet's move- 
 ment not only regulate, but strengthen its progress. 
 Their absence is painfully evinced by the mass of 
 Browning's unread verse. Works like " Sordello " and 
 " Fifine," however intellectual, seem, like the removal 
 of the Malvern Hills, a melancholy waste of human 
 power. When some romance like the last-named 
 comes from his pen, — an addition in volume, not in 
 quality, to what he has done before, — I feel a sad- 
 ness like that engendered among hundreds of gloomy 
 folios in some black-letter alcove : books, forever closed, 
 over which the mighty monks of old wore out their 
 lives, debating minute points of casuistic theology, 
 though now the very memory of their discussions has 
 passed away. Would that Browning might take to 
 heart his own words, addressed, in "Transcendental- 
 ism," to a brother-poet : — 
 
 " Song's our art : 
 Whereas you please to speak these naked thoughts 
 Instead of draping them in sights and sounds. 
 — True thoughts, good thoughts, thoughts fit to treasure up ! 
 But why such long prolusion and display, 
 Such turning and adjustment of the harp .'' 
 
 But here 's your fault ; grown men want thought, you think ; 
 
 Thought 's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse : 
 
 Boys seek for images and melody. 
 
 Men must have reason, — so you aim at men. 
 
 Quite otherwise ! " 
 
 Incidentally we have noted the distinction between 
 the drama of Browning and that of the absolute 
 kind, observing that his characters reflect his own 
 mental traits, and that their action and emotion are 
 of small moment compared with the speculations to 
 which he makes them all give voice. Still, he has
 
 ULTIMATE STANDING AS A POET. 
 
 341 
 
 dramatic insight, and a minute power of reading other 
 men's hearts. His moral sentiment has a potent and 
 subtile quality : — through his early poems he really 
 founded a school, and had imitators, and, although 
 of his later method there are few, the younger poets 
 whom he has most affected very naturally began work 
 by carrying his philosophy to a startling yet perfectly 
 logical extreme. 
 
 Much of his poetry is either very great or very 
 poor. It has been compared to Wagner's music, and 
 entitled the "poetry of the future"; but if this be just, 
 then we must revise our conception of what poetry 
 really is. The doubter incurs the contemptuous en- 
 mity of two classes of the dramatist's admirers : first, 
 of the metaphysical, who disregard considerations of 
 passion, melody, and form ; secondly, of those who 
 are sensitive to their master's failings, but, in view of 
 his greatness, make it a point of honor to defend 
 them. That greatness lies in his originality ; his 
 error, arising from perverseness or congenital defect, 
 is the violation of natural and beautiful laws. This 
 renders his longer poems of less worth than his lyri- 
 cal studies, while, through avoidance of it, produc- 
 tions, differing as widely as "The Eve of St. Agnes" 
 and " In Memoriam," will outlive " The Ring and the 
 Book." In writing of Arnold I cited his own quota- 
 tion of Goethe's distinction between the dilettanti, who 
 •afifect genius and despise art, and those who respect 
 their calling though not gifted with high creative power. 
 Browning escapes the limitations of the latter class, 
 but incurs the reproach visited upon the former ; and 
 by his contempt of beauty, or inability to surely ex- 
 press it, fails of that union of art and spiritual power 
 which always characterizes a poet "entirely great." 
 
 The "foetry 
 of the fu- 
 ture" 
 
 What con- 
 stitutes true 
 greatness in 
 art.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 LATTER-DAY SINGERS. 
 
 ROBERT BUCHANAN. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. — 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 A new de- 
 parture. 
 
 The latter- 
 day poets. 
 
 THROUGHOUT the recent poetry of Great Brit- 
 ain a new departure is indicated, and there are 
 signs that the true Victorian era has nearly reached 
 a close. To speak more fully, we approach the end 
 of that time in which — although a composite school 
 has derived its models from all preceding forms — 
 the idyllic method, as represented by Tennyson, upon 
 the whole has prevailed, and has been more success- 
 ful than in earlier times, and than contemporary 
 efforts in the higher scale of song. 
 
 All periods are transitional ; yet it may be said 
 that the calling of the British poets, during the last 
 fifteen years, has been a " struggle," not so much for 
 recognition, as for the vital influence which consti- 
 tutes a genuine "existence." The latter-day singers, 
 who bear a special relation to the immediate future, 
 are like those priests of the Sun, who, on hills over- 
 looking the temples of strange gods, and above the 
 tumult of a hostile nation, tend the sacred fire, in 
 presence of their band of devotees, and wait for the 
 coming of a fairer day. Not that the blood of Eng-
 
 A CONFLICT OF INTERESTS. 
 
 343 
 
 lishmen is more frigid, and their wants more sordid, 
 than of old. The time is sufficiently imaginative. 
 Love of excitement, the most persistent of human 
 motives, is strong as ever. But the sources are vari- 
 ous which now supply to the imagination that stimu- 
 lus for which the new generation otherwise might 
 resort to poetry. It is an age of journalism ; all the 
 acts of all the world are narrated by the daily press. 
 It is, we have seen, a time of criticism and scholar- 
 ship, similar to the Alexandrian period of Greek 
 thought. It is the very noontide of imaginative work 
 in prose ; and so largely have great novelists sup- 
 planted the poets in general regard, that annalists 
 designate the Victorian period as the " age of prose 
 romance." Finally, and notably within the last dec- 
 ade, readers have been confronted with those won- 
 ders of science which have a double effect, — destroy- 
 ing the old poetic diction and imagery, and elevating 
 the soul with beauty and sublimity beyond anything 
 proffered by verse of the idyllic kind. The poets — 
 especially Tennyson, in his recognition of modern 
 science and the new theology — have tried to meet 
 the exigency, but their efforts have been timid and 
 hardly successful. Their art, though noble and re- 
 fined, rarely has swayed the multitude, or even led 
 the literary progress of the time, — that which verse 
 was wont to do in the great poetic epochs. Year by 
 year these adverse conditions have been more se- 
 verely felt. To the latest poets, I say, the situation 
 is so oppressive that there is reason to believe it 
 must be near an end, and hence we see them striv- 
 ing to break through and out of the restrictions that 
 surround them. 
 
 Where is the point of exit ? This is the problem 
 
 Tkeir em- 
 barrass- 
 ments. 
 
 Cfi. " Poeti 
 of A nter- 
 ica " .• /. 
 437.
 
 344 
 
 LA TTER-DA Y SINGERS. 
 
 Remedial 
 efforts. 
 
 Need of a 
 dra»taiic 
 revival. 
 Cp. " Poets 
 of Amer- 
 ica^'' : pp. 
 466-469. 
 
 which, singly or in groups, they are trying, perhaps 
 unconsciously, to solve. Some return to a purely 
 natural method, applying it to scenes whose fresh- 
 ness and simplicity may win attention ; others with- 
 draw to the region of absolute art, and by new and 
 studied forms of constructive beauty gratify their own 
 taste, and at least secure a delight in labor which, 
 of itself, is full compensation. Some have applied 
 poetic investigation to the spiritual themes which 
 float like shadows among the pillars and arches of 
 recent materialism ; finally, all are agreed in attempt- 
 ing to infuse with more dramatic passion the over- 
 cultured method of the day. 
 
 In this last endeavor I am sure their instinct is 
 right. Modern art has carried restraint and breeding 
 below the level of repose. Poetry, to recover its 
 station, must shake off its luxurious sleep : the Phi- 
 listines are upon it. It must stimulate feeling, arouse 
 to life, love, and action, before there can be a true 
 revival of its ancient power. 
 
 It would be invidious to lay any stress upon the 
 fact that the body of recent English verse is supplied 
 by those smaller lyrists, who, the poet tells us, never 
 weary of singing the old eternal song. Socialists 
 avow that Nature is unerring in the distribution of 
 her groups. Among a thousand men are so many 
 natural farmers, so many mechanics, a number of 
 scholars, two or three musicians, — a single philan- 
 thropist, it may be. But we search groups of a hun- 
 dred thousand for a tolerable poet, and of a million 
 for a good one. The inspired are in the proportion 
 of diamonds to amethysts, of gold to iron. If, in the 
 generation younger than Tennyson and the Brown- 
 ings, we discover three or four singers fit to aspire
 
 REPRESENTATIVE NAMES. 
 
 345 
 
 and lead the way, especially at this stage of compe- 
 tition with science and prose romance, there surely is 
 no need that we should wholly despair. 
 
 I have spoken elsewhere of the minor poets, and of 
 those specialists who excel in dialect-writing and so- 
 ciety-verse, and have derived from their miscellaneous 
 productions an idea of the tone and fashion of the 
 period. As we seek for those who are distinguished, 
 not only by power and individuality, but by the impor- 
 tance of their accomplished work, three or four, at 
 most, require specific attention. Another year, and 
 the position may be changed ; for poets are like com- 
 ets in the suddenness of their appearance, and too 
 often also in brief glory, hyperbolic orbit, and abrupt 
 departure to be seen no more. 
 
 Of the four whose names most readily occur to the 
 mind, — Buchanan, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne, 
 — the first holds an isolated position; the remaining 
 three, though their gifts are entirely distinctive, have 
 an appearance of association through sympathy in 
 taste or studies, — so that, while to classify them as 
 a school might be unphilosophical, to think of one is 
 to recall the others. Such a group is not without 
 precedent. It is not for this cause that I include the 
 thtee under one review ; if it were so, Buchanan, from 
 his antagonistic position, well might be placed else- 
 where. The fact is, that all are latter-day poets, and 
 need not object to meet on the footing of guests in 
 the house of a common friend. With the exception of 
 Rossetti, these later poets are alike in at least one 
 respect : they are distinguished from the Farringford 
 school by a less condensed, more affluent order of 
 work, — are prodigal of their verse, pouring it out in 
 youth, and flooding the ear with rhythm. There is 
 IS* 
 
 Representa- 
 tive names.
 
 346 
 
 ROBERT BUCHANAN. 
 
 Robert Bu- 
 cha?ian : 
 born in Scot- 
 land, Aug. 
 18, 1841. 
 
 Hh temper- 
 ament. 
 
 no nursing of couplets, and so fruitful a yield may be 
 taken as the evidence of a rich and fertile soil. 
 
 II. 
 
 Judged either by his verse or by his critical writings, 
 Robert Buchanan seems to have a highly developed 
 poetic temperament, with great earnestness, strength 
 of conviction, and sensitiveness to points of right and 
 wrong. Upon the whole, he represents, possibly more 
 than any other rising man, the Scottish element in 
 literature, — an element that stubbornly retains its char- 
 acteristics, just as Scotch blood manages to hold its 
 own through many changes of emigration, intermar- 
 riage, or long descent. The most prosaic Scotsman 
 has something of the imagination and warmth of feel- 
 ing that belong to a poet ; the Scottish minstrel has 
 the latter quality, at least, to an extent beyond ordi- 
 nary comprehension. He wears his heart upon his 
 sleeve ; his naivete and self-consciousness subject him 
 to charges of egotism ; he has strong friends, but 
 makes as many enemies by tilting against other peo- 
 ple's convictions, and by zealous advocacy of his own. 
 
 It is difficult for such a man to confine himself to 
 pure art, and Buchanan is no exception to the rule. 
 He is a Scotsman all over, and not only in push and 
 aggressiveness, but, let me add, in versatility, in gen- 
 uine love and knowledge of nature, and in his reli- 
 gious aspiration. The latter does not manifest itself 
 through allegiance to any traditional belief, but through 
 a spirit of individual inquiry, resulting in speculations 
 which he advances with all the fervor of Knox or 
 Chalmers, and thus furnishes another illustration of 
 the saying that every Scot has a creed of his own.
 
 A PUPIL OF WORDSWORTH. 
 
 347 
 
 Great Britain can well afford to tolerate the meta- 
 physics of Scotland for the sake of her poetry. Bu- 
 chanan's transcendentalism is mentioned here, because 
 he has made his verse its exponent, and thus, in his 
 chosen quest after the knowledge of good and evil, has 
 placed himself apart from the other poets of his time. 
 
 The library edition of his writings, recently issued, 
 does not exhibit accurately the progress of his growth. 
 The poems are not arranged in the order of their 
 composition, but upon a system adapted to the au- 
 thor's taste. In their perusal this is not the only 
 feature to remind us of Wordsworth, whose arbitrary 
 classification of his works is familiar to all. Both the 
 early and the later writings of Buchanan show that 
 much of his tutelage came from a youthful study of 
 the bard of Rydal Mount, and he thus took a bent 
 in a direction quite separate from that of the modern 
 art-school. What he gained in freedom he lost in 
 reserve, acquiring Wordsworth's gravest fault, — the 
 habit of versifying every thought that comes to mind. 
 A useful mission of the art-school has been to correct 
 this tendency. Like Wordsworth, also, Buchanan is 
 a natural sonneteer and idyllist, and he resembles the 
 whole Lake school in the Orphic utterance of his 
 opinions upon half the questions that fill the air. 
 Hence some notable mistakes and beliefs, subject 
 to revision ; hence, also, ill-conceived and spasmodic 
 work, like the " Napoleon Fallen " and " The Drama 
 of Kings," of which I believe that only a select 
 portion has been retained in a new edition of this 
 author's works. 
 
 Thus Robert Buchanan is one of the least restrained 
 and most unequal of the younger poets ; yet he is to 
 be placed by himself on the ground of his decided 
 
 His writ- 
 ings. 
 
 Influence 
 of Words- 
 worth and 
 tiie Lake 
 school. 
 
 An isolated 
 position.
 
 348 
 
 ROBERT BUCHANAN. 
 
 " Under- 
 tones" 1 860. 
 
 "Idyls and 
 Legends of 
 Inverburn" 
 1865. 
 
 purpose and originality. What he lacks is the faculty 
 of restraint. Stimulated, it may be, by his quick suc- 
 cess, he has printed a great quantity of verse since 
 the day, fourteen years ago, when David Gray and 
 himself first started for London. That portion which 
 is most carefully finished is, also, the freshest and 
 
 most original ; 
 
 showing either that in his case the 
 
 labor limce is not thrown away, or else that, if the 
 ruggedness of certain pieces is its result, he should 
 have left them as they came from his brain. Of 
 course his early efforts were experiments in verse 
 rather than new and sweet pipings of his own. Under- 
 tones consisted chiefly of classical studies, — a kind of 
 work, I should say, apart from his natural turn, and 
 in which he was not very successful. We do not 
 find the true classical spirit in "Pan," nor in "The 
 Last Song of Apollo," good as both these pieces are 
 in a certain way. " Polypheme's Passion," imitated 
 from Euripides and Theocritus, is nearer the mark. 
 The strength, precision, and beauty of the antique 
 are what evade him. After Keats, Landor, Tennyson, 
 and Arnold, his classicism is no real addition to work 
 of this kind in English poetry. 
 
 Five years later his Scottish idyls and legends 
 showed the touch and feeling of the real poet. 
 They introduced us to scenes and language before 
 almost unstudied, and were affecting, truthful, and 
 picturesque. His songs of Lowland superstition are 
 light with fancy, and sometimes musical as the chim- 
 ing of glass bells. The Inverburn tales, in rhymed- 
 heroic and blank verse, were rightly named idyls. 
 They are exquisite pictures of humble life, more full 
 of dialogue and incident than Wordsworth's, broader 
 in treatment than Tennyson's ; in short, composed in
 
 A FAITHFUL POET OF NATURE. 
 
 349 
 
 their author's own style, and transcripts of the man- 
 ners and landscape which he best knew. Few poems 
 have more fairly deserved their welcome than " Willie 
 Baird," "Poet Andrew," "John" ("The English Hus- 
 wife's Gossip "), and " The Widow Mysie." Buchanan 
 justly may be pronounced the most faithful poet of 
 Nature among the new men. He is her familiar, and 
 in this respect it would seem as if the mantle of Words- 
 worth had fallen to him from some fine sunset or misty 
 height. He knows the country with that knowledge 
 which is gained only in youth. Like an American 
 poet, and like no British poet save himself, he knows 
 the hills and valleys, the woods and rippling trout- 
 streams. An artist is apt to underrate his special gift. 
 Buchanan is said to place more value upon his town- 
 poems ; yet they do not affect us as these rural studies 
 do, and the persons he best describes are those found 
 in bucolic life. His four " Pastoral Pictures " rank 
 with the pastorals of Bryant and Wordsworth in being 
 so imaginative as to have the charm of more dramatic 
 poems. " A Summer Pool " and " Up the River " are 
 full of excellence. The following lines, taken almost 
 at random, show what poetic beauty can be reached 
 in purely descriptive verse : — 
 
 "The air is hotter here. The bee booms by 
 With honey-laden thigh, 
 Doubling the heat with sounds akin to heat ; 
 
 And like a floating flower the butterfly 
 Swims upward, downward, till its feet 
 Cling to the hedge-rows white and sweet. 
 • . . . • 
 
 The sunlight fades on mossy rocks, 
 And on the mountain-sides the flocks 
 
 Are spilt like streams ; — the highway dips 
 Down, narrowing to the path where lambs 
 
 Fidelity to 
 Nature. 
 
 Pastoral 
 verse.
 
 350 
 
 ROBERT BUCHANAN. 
 
 "London 
 
 Poems," 
 
 1866. 
 
 Lay to the udders of their dams 
 
 Their soft and pulpy lips. 
 The hills grow closer ; to the right 
 The path sweeps round a shadowy bay, 
 Upon whose slated fringes white 
 And crested wavelets play. 
 All else is still. But list, O list! 
 Hidden by bowlders and by mist, 
 A shepherd whistles in his fist ; 
 From height to height the far sheep bleat 
 In answering iteration sweet. 
 Sound, seeking Silence, bends above her. 
 Within some haunted mountain grot; 
 Kisses her, like a trembling lover, — 
 So that she stirs in sleep, but wakens not!" 
 
 As a writer of Scottish idyls, Buchanan was strictly 
 within his limitations, and secure from rivalry. There 
 is no dispute concerning a specialist, but a host will 
 rebuke the claims of one who aims at universal suc- 
 cess, and would fain, like the hard-handed man of 
 Athens, play all parts at once. The young poet, how- 
 ever, having so well availed himself of these home- 
 scenes, certainly had warrant for attempting other 
 labors than those of a mere genre painter in verse. 
 He took from the city various subjects for his maturer 
 work, treating these and his North-coast pictures in 
 a more realistic fashion, discarding adornment, and 
 letting his art teach its lesson by fidelity to actual 
 life. A series of the lighter city-poems, suggested by 
 early experiences in town, and entitled "London Lyr- 
 ics" in the edition of 1874, is not in any way remark- 
 able. The lines " To the Luggie " are a more poetical 
 tribute to his comrade, Gray, than is the lyric "To 
 David in Heaven." For poems of a later date he 
 made studies from the poor of London and it required 
 some courage to set before his comfortable readers
 
 'LONDON poems: 
 
 351 
 
 the wretchedness of the lowest classes, — to introduce 
 their woful phantoms at the poetic feast. " Nell " 
 and " Liz " have the unquestionable power of truth ; 
 they are faithfully, even painfully, realistic. The metre 
 is purposely irregular, that nothing may cramp the 
 language or blur the scene. " Nell " — the plaint of 
 a creature whose husband has just been hanged for 
 murder, and who, over the corpse of her still-born 
 babe, tells the story of her misery and devotion — is 
 stronger than its companion-piece ; but each is the 
 striking expression of a woman's anguish put in rug- 
 ged and impressive verse. "Meg Blane," among the 
 North-coast pieces, is Buchanan's longest example of 
 a similar method applied to a rural theme. I do him 
 no wrong by not quoting from any one of these pro- 
 ductions, whose force lies in their general effect, and 
 which are composed in a manner directly opposite to 
 that of the elaborate modern school. 
 
 As a presentment of something new and strong, 
 these are remarkable poems. Nevertheless, and grant- 
 ing that propagandism is a legitimate mission of art, 
 does not that poetry teach the most effectually which 
 is the most attractive to a poet's audience ? Have 
 the great evangelists kept their hearers in an exalted 
 state of anguish without frequent intermissions of 
 relief? Hogarth, in his realistic pictures of low life, 
 followed nature, and made their wretchedness endur- 
 able by seizing upon every humorous or grotesque 
 point that could be made. " Nell," " Liz," and " Meg 
 Blane " harrow us from first to last ; there is no re- 
 mission, — the poet is inexorable ; the pain is contin- 
 uous ; we are willing to accept these lessons, but 
 would be spared from others of the same cast. 
 
 Better as a poem, more tempting in its graphic 
 
 Their tner- 
 its and de- 
 fects.
 
 352 
 
 ROBERT BUCHANAN. 
 
 A beautiful 
 idyl. 
 
 Humor. 
 
 " The Book 
 
 o/Orm," 
 
 1870. 
 
 pictures of coast-life and brave sailorly forms, more 
 pathetic as a narrative, and told in verse at once 
 sturdier and more sweet, is that dramatic and beauti- 
 ful idyl, "The Scairth o' Barde," in which we find a 
 union of naturalism and realism at their best. The 
 lesson is just as impressive as that of " Meg Blane," 
 and the verse — how tender and strong! I think that 
 other poets, of the rhetorical sort, might have written 
 the one, while Buchanan alone could have so ren- 
 dered the Scottish-sailor dialect of the other, and 
 have given to its changeful scenery and detail those 
 fine effects which warrant us in placing "The Scairth 
 o' Bartle " at the high-water mark of the author's 
 North-coast poems. 
 
 Among other realistic studies, " Edward Crowhurst " 
 and " Jane Lawson " will repay attention. That this 
 poet has humor of the Tam-o'-Shanter kind is shown 
 in the racy sketch of Widow Mysie, and by the Eng- 
 lish and Scottish Eclogues. He also has done good 
 work after Browning's lighter manner, of which " De 
 Berny " (a life-like study of a French refugee in 
 London) and " Kitty Kemble " may be taken as ex- 
 amples. The latter, by its flowing satire, reminds us 
 of Swift, but is mellowed with the kindness and char- 
 ity which redeem from cynicism the wit of a true 
 poet. The ease and grace of these two poems are 
 very noticeable. 
 
 It is in another direction that Buchanan has made 
 his decided revolt against the modes and canons of 
 the period. The Book of Orm invites us to a spirit- 
 ual region, where fact and materialism cannot hamper 
 his imaginings. To many it will seem that, in tak- 
 ing metaphysics with him, he but exchanges one set 
 of hindrances for another. It is a natural outcome
 
 'THE BOOK OF ORM: 
 
 353 
 
 of his Scottish genius that he should find himself 
 discussing the nature of evil, and applying mysticism 
 to the old theological problems. The " Book " itself 
 is hard to describe, being a study of the meaning of 
 good arid evil, as observed through a kind of Celtic 
 haze ; and even the author, to explain his own pur- 
 pose, resorts to the language of a friendly critic, who 
 pronounces it "a striking attempt to combine a quasi- 
 Ossianic treatment of nature with a philosophy of 
 rebellion rising into something like a Pantheistic 
 vision of the necessity of evil." The poet himself 
 adds that to him its whole scope is "to vindicate the 
 ways of God to Man \sic\" He thus brings the 
 great instance of Milton to sustain his propagandism, 
 but w^hile poetry, written with such intent, may be 
 sensuous, and often is passionate, it never can be 
 entirely simple. The world has well agreed that 
 what is fine in " Paradise Lost " is the poetry ; what 
 is tiresome, the theology ; yet the latter certainly fur- 
 nished the motive of England's greatest epic. In 
 adopting a theme which, after all, is didactics under 
 a spiritual glamour, Buchanan has chosen a distinc- 
 tive ground. The question is, What sort of art is the 
 result ? Inevitably a strange mixture of poetry and 
 prose, — the relative proportions varying with the flow 
 of the poet's imagination. " The Book of Orm " is 
 largely made up of vague aspiration, rhetoric, padded 
 and unsatisfactory verse. It contains, withal, very 
 fine poetry, of which one or two specimens are as 
 good as anything the author has composed. A por- 
 tion of the work has a trace of the weird quality to 
 be found in nearly all of Blake's pictures, and in most 
 of his verse. The " Soul and Flesh," the " Flower of 
 the World," and the " Drinkers of Hemlock " are thus 
 
 w 
 
 Transcen- 
 dental and 
 lacking sint' 
 plicity ; 
 
 but fitie here 
 and there.
 
 354 
 
 ROBERT BUCHANAN. 
 
 ^^ Napoleon 
 Fallen" and 
 the " Dra}na 
 of Kings," 
 1871. 
 
 characterized. Two episodes are prominent among 
 the rest. "The Dream of the World without Death" 
 is a strong and effective poem : a vision of the time 
 when 
 
 " There were no kisses on familiar faces, 
 No weaving of white grave-clothes, no lost pondering 
 Over the still wax cheeks and folded fingers. 
 
 "There was no putting tokens under pillows, 
 There was no dreadful beauty slowly fading, 
 Fading like moonlight softly into darkness. 
 
 "There were no churchyard paths to walk on, thinking 
 How near the well-beloved ones are lying. 
 There were no sweet green graves to sit and muse on, 
 
 " Till grief should grow a summer meditation. 
 The shadow of the passing of an angel. 
 And sleeping should seem easy, and not cruel. 
 
 "Nothing but wondrous parting and a blankness." 
 
 Of a still higher order is " The Vision of the Man 
 Accurst," which is marked by fine imagination, though 
 conceits and artificial phrases somewhat lessen its 
 effect. It seems to me the poet's strongest produc- 
 tion thus far, and holds among his mystical pieces 
 the position of " The Scairth o' Bartle " among the 
 Scottish tales. 
 
 In applying the Orphic method to contemporary 
 politics he makes a failure akin to that of Shelley 
 in "The Revolt of Islam." Having perceived the 
 weakness of his poems upon the Franco-German war, 
 he gives them to us under new titles, and largely 
 pruned or otherwise remodelled. Much of the politi- 
 cal verse is written in a mouthing manner, inferior 
 to his narrative style. The aspiration of Shelley's
 
 HIS VERSATILITY. 
 
 355 
 
 writings doubtless went far to sustain the melody 
 that renders them so exquisite. Whatever Buchanan's 
 mission may be, it detracts from, rather than en- 
 hances, his genius as a poet. In reformatory lyrics 
 and sonnets he does not rise so very far above the 
 level of Massey and other spasmodic rhymesters. An 
 American, living in a country where every mechanic 
 is the peer of Buchanan as a reformer, and where 
 poetry is considerably scarcer than " progress," is 
 likely to care not so much for a singer's theories as 
 for the quality of his song. 
 
 Buchanan's versatility, and desire to obtain a hear- 
 ing in every province of his art, have impelled him 
 to some curious ventures, among which are two ro- 
 mantic volumes upon American themes, published 
 anonymously, but now acknowledged as his own. St. 
 Abe and White Rose and Red have been commended 
 for fidelity of local color and diction, but readers to 
 the manner born will assure the author that he has 
 succeeded only in being faithful to a British ideal of 
 American frontier life. To compensate us, we have 
 some thin poetry in his Maine romance, while in the 
 Salt Lake extravaganza I can find none at all. His 
 critical prose-writings are marked by eloquence and 
 vigor, but those of a polemical order have, I should 
 opine, entailed upon him more vexation than profit. 
 He is said to figure creditably as a playwright, "The 
 Witch-Finder " and " The Madcap Prince " having 
 met with success upon the London stage. 
 
 As a result of his impulse to handle every theme 
 that occurs to him, and to essay all varieties of style, 
 much of his poetry, even after the winnowing to 
 which it has been subjected, is not free from sterile 
 and prosaic chaff. A lesser fault is the custom of 
 
 1871. 
 
 " White 
 Rose and 
 Red," 1S73. 
 
 Prose writ- 
 ings. 
 
 Stage-plays. 
 
 Faiths of 
 judgment 
 and style.
 
 356 
 
 ROBERT BUCHANAN. 
 
 A n impres- 
 sive ballad. 
 
 The past 
 tnd/uiure. 
 
 handicapping his pieces with affected prekides, and 
 his vokimes with metrical statements of their purpose, 
 — barbarisms taken from a period when people did 
 not clearly see that Art must stand without crutches. 
 Occasionally a theme which he selects, such as the 
 description from Heine's " Reisebilder" of the vanish- 
 ing of the old gods, is more of a poem than any 
 verses that can be set to it. Nor do we care for 
 such an excess of self-annunciation as is found in 
 the prelude to " Bexhill." Faults of style are less 
 common, yet he does not wholly escape the affecta- 
 tions of a school with which he is in open conflict. 
 Still, he can be artistic to a degree not exceeded in 
 the most careful poetry of his time. "The Ballad of 
 Judas Iscariot," which he has done well to place at 
 the opening of his collection, is equal in finish to 
 anything written since " The Rime of the Ancient 
 Mariner," and approaches that poem in weird impres- 
 siveness and power. Among his sonnets, those of 
 the Coruisken series, sustained by lofty feeling and 
 noble diction, are without doubt the best. 
 
 In conclusion, it would appear that his work of the 
 last five years is not an advance upon his Scottish 
 idyls, and that a natural and charming poet has been 
 retarded by conceiving an undue sense of his inspi- 
 ration as a seer, a mystic, a prophet of the future. 
 Moreover, like Southey, Buchanan has somewhat too 
 carefully nursed his reputation. The sibyls confided 
 their leaves to the winds, and knew that nothing 
 which the gods thought worth preserving could be 
 effaced by the wanton storm. His merits lie in his 
 originality, earnestness, and admirable understanding 
 of nature, in freedom of style and strength of gen- 
 eral effect. His best poetry grows upon the reader.
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTL 
 
 357 
 
 He still is young, scarcely having begun the n:iature 
 creative period, and, if he will study the graces of 
 restraint, and cling to some department of art in 
 which he is easily foremost, should not fail of a new 
 and still more successful career. 
 
 III. 
 
 RossETTi is one of those men whose significant 
 position is not so much due to the amount of work 
 which they produce as to its quality, and to the prin- 
 ciples it has suggested. Such leaders often are found, 
 and influence contemporary thought by the personal 
 magnetism that attracts young and eager spirits to 
 gather around them. Sometimes a man of this kind, 
 in respect to creative labor, is greater than his pro- 
 ductions. But if Rossetti's special attitude has been 
 of more account than his poetry, it is not because 
 he lacks the power to equalize the two. He has 
 chosen to give his energies to a kindred art of ex- 
 pression, for which his genius is no less decided. 
 Yet his influence as a poet, judging from his writ- 
 ings, and from even a meagre knowledge of his life 
 and associates, seems to be radical and more or less 
 enduring. 
 
 A stream broadens as it flows. Already, in the 
 careers of Morris and Swinburne, we see the forms 
 of extension through which the indestructibility of 
 nature is secured for a specific mode of art. The 
 instinct is not so far wrong which connects these 
 poets with Rossetti, and calls the circle by his name. 
 Three men could not be more independent of one 
 another in their essential gifts ; yet there is some 
 common chain between them to which the clew most 
 
 Dante Go- 
 briel Ros- 
 setti: born 
 in London, 
 May 12, 
 1828. 
 
 His distinc- 
 tive/orce 
 and attitude. 
 
 Comrades 
 in art.
 
 358 
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTL 
 
 Recent poe- 
 try and the 
 arts of de- 
 tign. 
 
 PreRaph- 
 aelitism : its 
 tise and 
 abuse. 
 
 likely was obtained first by Rossetti, — he being the 
 eldest, and the first to seize it in his search after 
 beauty's underlying laws. It is true that Morris, a 
 comrade near his own age, dedicated a book of poe- 
 try to him long before the artist had compiled a 
 
 volume of his own poems ; nevertheless, we 
 
 gather 
 
 the idea that the conversation and presence of Ros- 
 setti had a formative influence upon the author of 
 "The Earthly Paradise," as well as upon that younger 
 singer whose dramatic genius already has half deter- 
 mined what is to be the poetic tendency of the era 
 now beginning. We turn to the young for confirma- 
 tion of our views with regard to the immediate out- 
 look ; for it is the privilege of youth to discern the 
 freshest and most potential style. A prophetic sen- 
 sitiveness, wiser than the dulled experience of age, 
 unites it to the party of the future. 
 
 Since the master treatise of Lessing there has been 
 no question of the impassable barriers betwixt the 
 provinces of the artist and the poet. Poetry, however, 
 furnishes themes to the painter ; and of late, painting, 
 through study of elemental processes, has enriched 
 the field of poetry, — to which Rossetti's contribution 
 is the latest, if not the greatest, and has the charm of 
 something rare that is brought to us from another 
 land. He was an early member of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 brotherhood in painting, Millais and Holman Hunt 
 being his most famous associates. He also has had 
 some connection with Morris in the decorative art- 
 work to which the latter has been so enviably de- 
 voted. The element which Rossetti's verse and bear- 
 ing have brought into English poetry holds to that 
 art the relation of Pre-Raphaelite painting and deco- 
 ration to painting and decoration of the academic .
 
 PRE-RAPHA ELITISM. 
 
 359 
 
 kind. As a figure-painter, his drawings, such as I 
 have seen, are far above the strictly realistic work 
 produced by acolytes of his order. The term real- 
 ism constantly is used to cloak the mediocrity of 
 artists whose designs are stiff, barren, and grotesque, 
 — the form without the soul. They deal with the 
 minor facts of art, unable to compass the major ; their 
 labor is scarcely useful as a stepping-stone to higher 
 things ; if it were not so unimaginative, it would have 
 more value as a protest against conventionalism and 
 a guide to something new. But Rossetti, a man of 
 genius, has lighted his canvas and his pages with a 
 quaUty that is more ennobling. He has discerned 
 the spirit of beauty, wandering within the confines of 
 a region whose landscape is visible, not to ground- 
 lings, but to the poet's finer sight. Even his strictly 
 Pre-Raphaelite verse, odd and weird as it may at first 
 appear, is full of exaltation and lyrical power. 
 
 Such of his ballads as recall the Troubadour period 
 are no more realistic than the ballads of the idyllic 
 poets. They are studies of what the Pre-Chaucerian 
 minstrels saw, and partly result from use of their 
 materials. However rich and rare, they hold, in the 
 youth of the new movement, no more advanced posi- 
 tion than that of Tennyson's " Oriana " and " The 
 Lady of Shalott " compared with his epic and philo- 
 sophic masterpieces. This point is worth considera- 
 tion. The Laureate's work of this kind was an effort, 
 in default of natural themes, to borrow something 
 from that old Romantic art which so long has passed 
 away as again to have the effect of newness. 
 
 Much of Rossetti's verse is of this sort, yet possess- 
 ing a quality which shows that his genius, if fully ex- 
 ercised, might lead him to far greater achievements 
 
 Genius of 
 Rossetti. 
 
 Seepage 176.
 
 36o 
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 
 
 Transla- 
 tions from 
 " The Early 
 Italian 
 Poets." 
 
 *'Poems," 
 
 1870. 
 
 as an English poet. Consecrated, from his Italian 
 parentage, to learning, art, and song, — reared in a 
 household over which the medieval spirit has brooded, 
 — he is thoroughly at home among romantic themes 
 and processes, while a feeling like that of Dante exalts 
 the maturer portion of his emblematic verse. 
 
 In fact, he made his first appearance as a writer 
 with a volume of translations, — The Early Italian 
 Poets., published in 1861. In the new edition (1874), 
 entitled " Dante and his Circle, with the Italian Poets 
 preceding him," more stress is laid upon the arrange- 
 ment of the book, Dante, through the " Vita Nuova " 
 and many lyrics associated with his friends, is made 
 the luminous central figure of a group of poets who 
 shine partly by their own and partly by reflected 
 light. Sonnets, lyrics, and canzonets are given also 
 from more than forty additional writers, chiefly of an 
 earlier date, and the whole volume is edited with 
 patient learning and religious care. The time and 
 poetry are elucidated with a fidelity and beauty not 
 to be found in any English or Continental essays in 
 the same field. An exquisite spirit possesses the 
 workman and the work. An Anglo-Italian, he has a 
 double nature, like that of the enchanter who under- 
 stood the speech of birds. Whatever original work he 
 might have produced with the same labor, it hardly 
 could be a greater addition to our literature than this 
 admirable transcript of Italy's most suggestive period 
 and song. 
 
 Rossetti's own poems are collected in a single vol- 
 ume. Twoscore ballads, songs, and studies, with 
 thrice that number of sonnets, make up its contents ; 
 but there are not a few to maintain that here we 
 have "infinite riches in a little room." A reviewer
 
 HIS COLLECTED POEMS. 
 
 361 
 
 is grateful to one who waits for songs that sing them- 
 selves, and does not force us to examine long cantos 
 for a satisfactory estimate of his power. Some of 
 these poems were composed years ago, but the author 
 does not specify them, " as nothing has been included 
 which he believes to be immature." Conscientious- 
 ness is a feature of this artist's work. A poet is not 
 to be measured by the quantity of his outpourings ; if 
 otherwise, what of Keats or Collins, and what of 
 Southey and Young ? 
 
 In this collection, then, I find no verse so realistic 
 as to be unimaginative ; but I do find a quaint use 
 of old phraseology, and a revival of the early rhyth- 
 mical accents. The result is a not unpleasant man- 
 nerism, of a kind that is visible in the poetry of 
 Morris and Swinburne, and also crops out frequently 
 in recent miscellaneous verse. Besides enriching, like 
 Tennyson, our modern English by the revival of obso- 
 lete yet effective Saxon and Norman words, Rossetti 
 adds to its flexibility by novel inversions and accent- 
 ual endings. With regard to the diction, it should 
 be noted that such forms as " herseemed," though 
 here in keeping, would be unendurable in the verse 
 of an imitator. Throughout his poetry we discern a 
 finesse, a regard for detail, and a knowledge of color 
 and sound, that distinguish this master of the Neo- 
 Romantic school. His end is gained by simplicity 
 and sure precision of touch. He knows exactly what 
 effect he desires, and produces it by a firm stroke of 
 color, a beam of light, a single musical tone. Herein 
 he surpasses his comrades, and exhibits great tact 
 in preferring only the best of a dozen graces which 
 either of them would introduce. In terseness he cer- 
 tainly is before them all. 
 16 
 
 Style and 
 language. 
 
 Precision 
 0/ touch.
 
 362 
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTL 
 
 An earnest 
 and spirit- 
 ual artist. 
 
 We must accept a true poet for what he is, and be 
 thankful. Rossetti is not the man to attract a dul- 
 lard. His quaintness must seem to many as " out- 
 landish " as the speech and garments of Christian and 
 Faithful among the worldlings of Vanity Fair ; and 
 he is so indifferent to its outlandishness that some 
 may deem him wanting in sense and humor. But 
 he is too earnest, too absorbed in his own vision of 
 things spiritual and lovely, to look at matters from the 
 common point of view. To one willing to share his 
 feeling, and apt to recognize the inspiration of Diirer, 
 or William Blake, or John La Farge, the effect is not 
 to be gainsaid. The strangeness passes away with 
 a study of his poems. Yielding to their melody and 
 illumination, we are bathed in the rich colors of an 
 abbey-window and listen to the music of choristers 
 chanting from some skyey, hidden loft. 
 
 The melody is indisputably fine, — whether from the 
 
 lips of the transfigured maiden, of whom he tells us 
 
 that, when 
 
 " She spoke through the still weather, 
 Her voice was like the voice the stars 
 Had when they sang together"; 
 
 or the witch-music of Lilith, the wife of Adam : — 
 
 " Not a drop of her blood was human, 
 • But she was made like a soft, sweet woman." 
 
 It is difficult, however, to separate a single tone 
 from the current harmony. Light and color are worthy 
 of the music : — 
 
 " 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."
 
 'THE BLESSED DAMOZEL: 
 
 363 
 
 " Her hair, that lay along her back, 
 Was yellow, like ripe corn." 
 
 « 
 
 — "The clear-ranged unnumbered heads 
 Bowed with their aureoles." 
 
 — " She ceased. 
 The light thrilled toward her, filled 
 With angels in strong level flight." 
 
 Of Rossetti's lyrics in the Gothic or Romantic form, 
 " The Blessed Damozel," from which I quote, is most 
 widely known, and deserves its reputation. Nothing, 
 save great originality and beauty, could win us over 
 to its peculiar manner. It is full of imagination : — 
 
 " Herseemed she scarce had been a day 
 One of God's choristers ; 
 The wonder was not yet quite gone 
 From that still look of hers " ; 
 
 "And the souls mounting up to God 
 Went by her like thin flames." 
 
 " I '11 take his hand and go with him 
 To the deep wells of light, — 
 We will step down as to a stream. 
 And bathe there in God's sight." 
 
 The spell of this poem, I think, lies in the feeling 
 that even in heaven the maiden, as on earth, is so 
 real, so living, that 
 
 " her bosom must have made 
 The bar she leaned on warm " ; 
 
 and that her terrestrial love and yearning are more 
 to her than all the joys of Paradise. The poet, 
 moreover, in this brief, wild lyric, seems to have 
 conceived, like Dante, an apotheosis of some buried 
 
 " The Bless- 
 ed Da»io- 
 zeV
 
 364 
 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 
 
 Ballads. 
 
 Miscellane- 
 ous poems. 
 
 Transla- 
 tions from 
 the French. 
 
 These, 
 Scrip," 
 as any 
 
 mistress, — regarded, it may be, with worship, but no 
 less with immortal passion and desire. 
 
 In three mediaeval ballads of another class there 
 is lyrical and dramatic power. I refer to "Troy 
 Town," "Eden Bower," and "Sister Helen." 
 with "Stratton Water" and "The Staff and 
 probably are as characteristic and successful 
 late revival of the ballad forms. 
 
 " A Last Confession " is a tragical Italian story, in 
 blank-verse, not unlike what Browning — leaving out 
 Rossetti's Italian song — might write upon a similar 
 theme. " Dante at Verona " is a grave and earnest 
 poem, sustained with dignity throughout, yet I prefer 
 Dr. Parsons's lines " On a Bust of Dante," — that 
 majestic lyric, the noblest of tributes to the great 
 Florentine in our own or any other tongue. At the 
 opposite extreme, and in a vein that differs from 
 Rossetti's other works, we have a curious and vivid 
 piece of realism entitled "Jenny." The poet moral- 
 izes, with equal taste and feeling, and much pictu- 
 resqueness, over a beautiful but ignorant girl of the 
 town, who no more than a child is aware of the 
 train of thought she has inspired. A striking passage 
 upon lust is specially effective and poetical. 
 
 I have said that as an Italian translator Rossetti is 
 unsurpassed, and he is nearly as fine in renderings 
 from the old French, of which both Swinburne and 
 himself have made enthusiastic studies. Witness a 
 stanza from " The Ballad of Dead Ladies," Frangois 
 Villon, 1450. The translator's inherent quaintness is 
 suited to his task : — 
 
 'Tell me now in what hidden way is 
 Lady Flora the lovely Roman ?
 
 HIS MELODY AND IMAGINATION. 
 
 365 
 
 Where 's Hipparchia, and where is Thais, 
 
 Neither of them the fairer woman ? 
 
 Where is Echo, beheld of no man, 
 Only heard on river and mere, — 
 
 She whose beauty was more than human ? . . . . 
 But where are the snows of yester-year ? " 
 
 His lyrical faculty is exquisite ; not often swift, but 
 chaste, and purely English. " The Song of the 
 Bower," a most tuneful love-chant, reminding us of 
 George Darley, is a good specimen of his melody, 
 while " The Stream's Secret " has more music in it 
 than any slow lyric that I now remember. Dramatic 
 power is indicated by true lyrical genius, and we are 
 not surprised to find Rossetti's poems surcharged 
 with it. As a sonneteer, also, he has no living equal. 
 Take the group written for pictures and read the 
 sonnet of "Mary Magdalene." It is a complete dra- 
 matic poem. The series belonging to "The House 
 of Life," in finish, spontaneity, and richness of feel- 
 ing, is such as this man alone can produce. Mrs. 
 Browning's sonnets were the deathless revelation of 
 her own beautiful soul ; if these are more objective, 
 they are equally perfect in another way. Finally, the 
 imagination to which I have alluded is rarely absent 
 from Rossetti's verse. His touches now are delicate, 
 and again have a broad sweep : — 
 
 " As though mine image in the glass 
 Should tarry when myself am gone." 
 
 " How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope, 
 The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope, 
 The wind of Death's imperishable wing .' " 
 
 In measuring his career as a poet, we at once per- 
 ceive that he has moved in a somewhat narrow range 
 with respect to both the thought and method of his 
 
 Melody, 
 
 Rossetti's 
 sonnets. 
 
 Imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 A spects 0/ 
 his poetry 
 and career.
 
 366 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 n. G. R. 
 
 died at 
 Birching- 
 ton-071-Sea, 
 April 9, 
 
 1882. 
 
 William 
 Morris : 
 born near 
 Lo'idon, 
 1834- 
 
 A n artist of 
 tJi€ beautiful. 
 
 compositions ; but that he approaches Tennyson in 
 simplicity, purity, and richness of tone. His dramatic 
 and lyrical powers are very marked, though not fully 
 developed ; if he had been restricted to verse as a 
 means of expression, he no doubt would have added 
 greatly to our English song. Sonnets like the " Bri- 
 dal Birth " and " Nuptial Sleep," and poems so pro- 
 foundly thoughtful as " The Sea-Limits " and " The 
 Woodspurge," place him among his foremost contem- 
 poraries. He has had a magnetic influence upon 
 those who come within his aureole. Should he com- 
 plete " The House of Life " upon its original pro- 
 jection, he will leave a monument of beauty more 
 lasting than the tradition of his presence. His verse 
 is compact of tenderness, emotional ecstasy, and po- 
 etic fire. The spirit of the master whose name he 
 bears clothes him as with a white garment. And we 
 should expect his associates to be humble lovers of 
 the beautiful, first of all, and through its ministry to 
 rise to the lustrous upper heaven of spiritual art. 
 
 IV. 
 
 It is but natural, then, that we should find in 
 William Morris a poet who may be described, to use 
 the phrase of Hawthorne, as an Artist of the feeautiful. 
 He delights in the manifestation of objective beauty. 
 Byron felt himself one with Nature. Morris is ab- 
 sorbed in the loveliness of his romantic work, and 
 as an artist seems to find enchantment and content. 
 
 In this serenity of mood he possesses that which 
 has been denied to greater poets. True, he sings of 
 himself,
 
 AN ARTIST OF THE BE A UTIFUL. 
 
 1^7 
 
 " Dreamer of dreams, born out of niy due time, 
 Why should I strive to set the crooked straight ? " 
 
 but what time could be to him more fortunate ? 
 Amid the problems of our day, and the uncertainty 
 as to what kind of art is to result from its confused 
 elements, there is at least repose in the enjoyment of 
 absolute beauty. There is safety in an art without a 
 purpose other than to refresh and charm. People 
 who labor in " six counties overhung with smoke " 
 are willing enough to forget them. Morris's proffer 
 of the means to this end could not have been more 
 timely. Keats had juster cause for dissatisfaction : 
 he could not know how eagerly men would turn to 
 his work when the grandiloquent period, in which he 
 found himself so valueless, should have worn itself 
 away. Besides, he never fairly attained his ideal. 
 To him the pursuit of Beauty, rather than the pos- 
 session, was a passion and an appetite. He followed 
 after, and depicted her, but was not at rest in her 
 presence. Had Keats lived, — had he lived to gain 
 the feeling of Morris, to pass from aspiration to at- 
 tainment, and had his delicious poems been succeeded 
 by others, comparing with "Isabella" and "The Eve 
 of St. Agnes," as " The Earthly Paradise " compares 
 with " The Defence of Guenevere," then indeed the 
 world would have listened to a singer 
 
 " Such as it had 
 In the ages glad, 
 
 Lo 
 
 ng ago!" 
 
 Morris appears to have been devoted from youth 
 to the service of the beautiful. He has followed 
 more than one branch of art, and enjoys, besides his 
 fame as a poet, a practical reputation as an original 
 
 Morris and 
 Keats.
 
 368 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 Taste, the 
 parent of 
 versatility 
 hi art. 
 
 " The De- 
 fence of 
 Gtu'ftevere,' 
 1858. 
 
 and graceful designer in decorative work of many 
 kinds. The present era, like the Venetian, and others 
 in which taste has sprung from the luxury of wealth, 
 seems to breed a class of handicraftsmen who are 
 adepts in various departments of creative art. Ros- 
 setti, Morris, Linton, Scott, Woolner, Hamerton, among 
 others, follow the arts of song or of design at will. 
 Doubtless the poet Morris, while making his unique 
 drawings for stained glass, wall-paper, or decorative 
 tile-work, finds a pleasure as keen as that of the 
 artist Morris in the construction of his metrical ro- 
 mances. There is balm and recreation to any writer 
 in some tasteful pursuit which may serve as a foil to 
 that which is the main labor and highest purpose of 
 his life. 
 
 As for his poetry, it is of a sort which must be 
 delightful to construct : wholly removed from self, 
 breeding neither anguish nor disquiet, but full of soft 
 music and a familiar olden charm. So easeful to read, 
 it cannot be unrestful to compose, and to the maker 
 must be its own reward. He keeps within his self- 
 allotted region ; if it be that of a lotos-eater's dream, 
 he is willing to be deluded, and no longing for the 
 real makes him "half sick of shadows." In this re- 
 spect he is a wise, sweet, and very fortunate bard. 
 
 Some years ago, judging of Morris by The Defence 
 of Guenevere, mid Other Poetns, the only volume which 
 he then had printed, I wrote of him : " Never a slov- 
 enly writer, he gives us pieces that repay close reading, 
 but also compel it, for they smack of the closet and 
 studio rather than of the world of men and women, 
 or that of the woods and fields. He, too, sings the 
 deeds of Arthur and Lancelot." Let me now say that 
 there is no purer or fresher landscape, more clearly
 
 'THE DEFENCE OF GUENEVERE? 
 
 369 
 
 visible both to the author and the reader, than is to 
 be found everywhere in the course of Morris's later 
 volumes. Not only are his descriptions of every as- 
 pect of Nature perfect, but he enters fully into the 
 effect produced by her changes upon our lives and 
 feelings. He sings of June, 
 
 " And that desire that rippHng water gives 
 To youthful hearts to wander anywhere " ; 
 
 of the drowsy August languor, 
 
 " When men were happy, they could scarce tell why, 
 Although they felt the rich year slipping by." 
 
 A thousand similar examples may be selected fr6m 
 his poems. But his first work was quite in sympathy 
 with that of Rossetti : an effort to disconnect poetry 
 from modern thought and purpose, through a return 
 not so much to nature as to models taken from the 
 age of ballad-romance. It was saturated with the 
 Pre-Chaucerian spirit. In medieval tone, color, and 
 somewhat rigid drawing, it corresponded to the missal- 
 work style of the Pre-Raphaelites in art. The manner 
 was too studied to permit of swift movement or broad 
 scope ; the language somewhat ancient and obscure. 
 There is much that is fine, however, in the plumed 
 and heroic ballad, " Riding Together," and " The 
 Haystack in the Flood" is a powerful conception, 
 wrought out with historic truth of detail and grim 
 dramatic effect. " 
 
 These thirty poems, fitly inscribed to Rossetti, made 
 up a work whose value somewhat depended ujDon its 
 promise for the future. The true Pre-Raphaelite is 
 willing to bury his own name in order to serve his 
 art ; to spend a life, if need be, in laying the ground- 
 16* X 
 
 Pre-Chau- 
 cerian bal- 
 lads.
 
 370 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 "The Life 
 and Death 
 of Jason," 
 1865. 
 
 Q. " Poets 
 vf A mer- 
 ica'\- p. 
 
 wall upon which his successors can build a new tem- 
 ple that shall replace the time-worn structure he has 
 helped to tear away. But, to a man of genius, the 
 higher service often is given later in his own career. 
 Morris's second volume showed that he had left 
 the shadows of ballad minstrelsy, and entered the 
 pleasant sunlight of Chaucer. After seven years of 
 silence T/ie Life and Death of jfason was a surprise, 
 and was welcomed as the sustained performance of 
 a true poet. It is a narrative poem, of epic propor- 
 tions, all story and action, composed in the rhymed 
 pentameter, strongly and sweetly carried from the 
 first book to the last of seventeen. In this produc- 
 tion, as in all the works of Morris, — in some respects 
 the most notable raconteur since the time of his 
 avowed master, Geoffrey Chaucer, — the statement is 
 newly illustrated, that imaginative poets do not invent 
 their own legends, but are wise in taking them from 
 those historic treasuries of fact and fiction, the out- 
 lines of which await only a master-hand to invest them 
 with living beauty. The invention of " Jason," for 
 instance, does not consist in the story of the Golden 
 Fleece, but in new effects of combination, and in the 
 melody and vigor of the means by which these old 
 adventurous Greeks again are made to voyage, sing, 
 love, fight, and die before us. Its author has a close 
 knowledge of antiquities. Here and there his method 
 is borrowed from Homer, — as in the gathering of the 
 chiefs, which occupies the third book. Octosyllabic 
 songs are interspersed, such as that of Orpheus, 
 
 " O bitter sea, tumultuous sea, 
 Full many an ill is wrought by thee ! " 
 
 after which,
 
 'THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JASON: 
 
 371 
 
 "Then shouted all the heroes, and they drove 
 The good ship forth, so that the birds above, 
 With long white wings, scarce flew so fast as they." 
 
 These three lines convey an idea of the general dic- 
 tion ; nor can any be selected from the ten thousand 
 which compose the work that do not show how well 
 our Saxon English is adapted for the transmission of 
 the Homeric spirit. The poem is fresh and stirring, 
 and the style befits the theme, though not free from 
 harshness and careless rhymes ; moreover, it must be 
 confessed that the reader often grows weary of the 
 prolonged tale. This is an Odyssean epic, but written 
 with continuity of effort ; not growing of itself with 
 the growth of a nation, nor builded at long intervals 
 like the " Idyls of the King." The poet lacks variety. 
 His voice is in a single key, and, although it be 
 a natural one that does not tire the ear, we are con- 
 tent as we close the volume, and heave a sigh of 
 satisfied appetite rather than of regret that the enter- 
 tainment has reached an end. 
 
 In his learned taste for whatever is curious and 
 rare Morris has made researches among the Sagas 
 of Norse literature, especially those of Iceland. The 
 admirable translations which he made, in company 
 with E. Magnusson, from the Icelandic Grettis and 
 Volsunga Sagas, show how thoroughly every class of 
 work is fashioned by his hands, and illustrate the 
 wealth of the resources from which he obtained the 
 conception of his latest poem.' The Story of Grdtir 
 the Strong^ and The Story of the Volsungs and Nibhings, 
 
 ' He now is said to be engaged upon a lineal and literal 
 translation of Virgil, — a work which he can hardly fail to exe- 
 cute speedily and well. 
 
 Transla- 
 tions from 
 the Iceland- 
 ic, i86g.
 
 372 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 "The 
 
 Earthly 
 
 Paradise," 
 
 1868-70. 
 
 Historic 
 mytlis and 
 legends. 
 
 tp. " Poets 
 ef A tner- 
 
 ica " ; //. 
 108, log. 
 
 appeared in 1869 ; but in 1868, five years after the 
 completion of "Jason," the public had been delighted 
 with the early instalments of a charming production, 
 which, whatever he may accomplish hereafter, fairly 
 exhibits his powers in their most sustained and varied 
 form. 
 
 The plan of The Earthly Paradise was conceived 
 in a day that should be marked with a white stone, 
 since for this poet to undertake it was to complete 
 it. The effort was so sure to adjust itself to his genius 
 (which is epic rather than dramatic), that the only 
 question was one of time, and that is now a question 
 of the past. In this important work Morris reaches 
 the height of his success as a relator. His poems 
 always have been stories. Even the shortest ballads 
 in his first book are upon themes from the old chron- 
 icles. " The Earthly Paradise " has the universe of 
 fiction for a field, and reclothes the choicest and most 
 famous legends of Asia and Europe with the delicate 
 fabric of its verse. Greek and Oriental lore, the tales 
 of the Gesta Romanorum, the romance of the Nibe- 
 lungen-Lied, and even the myths of the Eddas, con- 
 tribute to this thesaurus of narrative song. All these 
 tales are familiar: many of a type from which John 
 Fiske or Miiller would prove their long descent, tra- 
 cing them far as the " most eastern East " ; but never 
 before did they appear in more attractive shape, or 
 fall so musically from a poet's honeyed mouth. Their 
 fascination is beyond question. We listen to the 
 narrator, as Arabs before the desert fire hang upon 
 the lips of one who recites some legend of the good 
 Haroun. Here is a successor to Boccaccio and to 
 Chaucer. The verse, indeed, is exclusively Chauce- 
 rian, of which three styles are used, the hero.'c, sestina,
 
 'THE EARTHLY PARADISE? 
 
 37: 
 
 and octosyllabic. Chance quotations show with what 
 fehcity and perfect ease the modern poet renews the 
 cadences of his master. Take one from " Atalanta's 
 Race": — 
 
 "Through thick Arcadian woods a hunter went, 
 Following the beasts up, on a fresh spring day; 
 But since his horn-tipped bow, but seldom bent, 
 Now at the noontide naught had happed to slay, 
 Within a vale he called his hounds away. 
 Hearkening the echoes of his lone voice cling 
 About the cliffs, and through the beech-trees ring." 
 
 Another from " The Man Born to be King " : — 
 
 " So long he rode he drew anigh 
 A mill upon the river's brim, 
 That seemed a goodly place to him, 
 For o'er the oily, smooth millhead 
 There hung the apples growing red. 
 And many an ancient apple-tree 
 Within the orchard could he see, 
 While the smooth millwalls, white and black, 
 Shook to the great wheel's measured clack, 
 And grumble of the gear within ; 
 While o'er the roof that dulled that din 
 The doves sat crooning half the day. 
 And round the half-cut stack of hay 
 The sparrows fluttered twittering." 
 
 And this, from "The Story of Cupid and Psyche" :- 
 
 "From place to place Love followed her that day 
 And ever fairer to his eyes she grew. 
 So that at last when from her bower she flew, 
 And tinderneath his feet the moonlit sea 
 Went shepherding his waves disorderly, 
 He swore that of all gods and men, no one 
 Should hold her in his arms but he alone." 
 
 The couplet which I have italicized has an imagi-l 
 
 Three modes 
 of Chauce- 
 rian verse.
 
 374 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 Clear ex- 
 fression. 
 
 native quality not frequent in Morris's verse, for the 
 excellence of this poet lies rather in his clear vision 
 and exquisite directness of speech. Examples, other- 
 wise neither better nor worse than the foregoing, may 
 be taken from any one of the sixteen hundred pages 
 of his great work. I can give but the briefest state- 
 ment of its method and range. 
 
 In each of these metrical forms the verse is smooth 
 and transparent, — the choice result of the author's 
 Chaucerian studies, with what addition of beauty and 
 suggestiveness his genius can bestow. His language 
 is so pure that there absolutely is no resisting medi- 
 um to obscure the interest of a tale. We feel that 
 he enjoys his story as we do, yet the technical excel- 
 lence, seen at once by a writer, scarcely is thought 
 of by the lay reader, to whom poetry is in the main 
 addressed. Morris easily grasps the feeling of each 
 successive literature from which his stories are de- 
 rived. He is at will a pagan, a Christian, or a wor- 
 shipper of Odin and Thor; and especially has caught 
 the spirit of those generations which, scarcely emerged 
 from classicism in the South, and bordered by hea- 
 thendom on the North, peopled their unhallowed 
 places with beings drawn from either source. Christ 
 reigned, yet the old gods had not wholly faded out, 
 but acted, whether fair or devilish, as subjects and 
 allies of Satan. All this is magically conveyed in 
 such poems as " The Ring given to Venus " and 
 "The Lady of the Land." The former may be con- 
 sulted (and any other will do almost as well) for evi- 
 dence of the advantage possessed by Morris through 
 his knowledge of mediaeval costumes, armor, dances, 
 festivals, and all the curious paraphernalia of days 
 gone by. So well equipped a virtuoso, and so facile
 
 'THE EARTHLY PARADISE: 
 
 375 
 
 a rhythmist, was warranted in undertaking to write 
 "The Earthly Paradise," broad as it is in scope, and 
 extended to the enormous length of forty thousand 
 lines. The result shows that he set himself a per- 
 fectly feasible task. 
 
 In this work he avoids the prolonged strain of 
 " Jason," by making, with few exceptions, each story 
 of a length that can be read at a sitting. His har- 
 monic turn is shown in the arrangement of them all 
 under the signs of the zodiac. We have one clas- 
 sical and one mediaeval legend for each month of 
 the year. I take it that the framework of the whole, 
 the romance of voyagers in search of an earthly 
 Paradise, is familiar to the reader. While Morris 
 claims Chaucer, as Dante claimed Virgil, for his 
 master, this only relates to the purpose and form of 
 his poetry, for the freshness and sweetness are his 
 own. He has gone to Chaucer, but also to nature, 
 — to the earth whence sprang that well of English 
 undefiled. His descriptive preludes, that serenely 
 paint each phase of the revolving year, and the 
 scenic touches throughout his stories, are truthful and 
 picturesque. He uses but few and often-repeated ad- 
 jectives ; like the early rhapsodists, once having chosen 
 an epithet for a certain thing, he clings to it, never 
 introducing, for novelty's sake, another that is poorer 
 than the best. 
 
 Morris fairly escapes from our turmoil and mate- 
 rialism by this flight to the refuge of amusement and 
 simple art. A correlative moral runs through all of 
 his poetry ; one which, it must be owned, savors of 
 pagan fatalism. The thought conveyed is that noth- 
 ing should concern men but to enjoy what hollow 
 good the gods award us, and this in the present, be- : 
 
 A tinge of 
 fatalism.
 
 376 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 " Car/e 
 ifiem." 
 
 fore the days come when we shall say we have no 
 pleasure in them, — before death come, which closes 
 all. He not only chooses to be a dreamer of dreams, 
 and will not " strive to set the crooked straight," but 
 tells us, — 
 
 " Yes, ye are made immortal on the day 
 Ye cease the dusty grains of time to weigh"; 
 
 and in every poem has some passage like this : — 
 
 " Fear little, then, I counsel you, 
 What any son of man can do; 
 Because a log of wood will last 
 While many a life of man goes past, 
 And all is over in slight space." 
 
 His hoary voyagers have toiled and wandered, as they 
 
 find, in vain : — 
 
 "Lo, 
 A long life gone, and nothing more they know, 
 Why they should live to have desire and foil. 
 And toil, that, overcome, brings yet more toil, 
 Than that day of their vanished youth, when first 
 They saw Death clear, and deemed all life accurst 
 By that cold, overshadowing threat, — the End." 
 
 They have nothing left but to beguile the remnant of 
 their hours with story and repose, until the grave shall 
 be reached, in which there is neither device, nor knowl- 
 edge, nor wisdom. The poet's constant injunction is 
 to seize the day, to strive not for greater or new 
 things, since all will soon be over, and who knoweth 
 what is beyond ? In his epilogue to the entire work 
 he faithfully epitomizes its spirit : — 
 
 " Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant ; 
 Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere, 
 Though still tlie less we knew of its intent : 
 The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year,
 
 '77/A EARTHLY PARADISE:' 
 
 Z77 
 
 Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair, 
 Hung round about a little room, where play 
 Weeping and laughter of man's empty day." 
 
 This tinge of fatalism has a saddening effect upon 
 Morris's verse, and thus far lessens its charm. A 
 shadow falls across the feast. One of his critics has 
 well said that " A poet, in this age of the world, who 
 would be immortal, must write as if he himself be- 
 lieved in immortality." His personages, moreover, are 
 phantasmal, and really seem as if they issued from the 
 ivory gate. Again, while his latest work is a marvel 
 of prolonged strength and industry, its length gives 
 it somewhat of an encyclopedic character. The last 
 volume was not received so eagerly as the first. I 
 would not quote against the author that saying of 
 Callimachus, " a great book is a great evil " ; never- 
 theless we feel that he has a too facile power, — a 
 story once given him, — of putting it into rippling 
 verse as rapidly as another man can write it in prose. 
 Still, " The Earthly Paradise " is a library of itself, 
 and in yielding to its spell we experience anew the 
 delights which the " Arabian Nights " afforded to our 
 childhood. What more tempting than to loll in such 
 an " orchard-close " as the poet is wont to paint for 
 us, and — with clover blooming everywhere, and the 
 robins singing about their, nests — to think it a por- 
 tion of that fairy-land " East of the Sun and West of 
 the Moon " ; or to read the fay-legends of " The Watch- 
 ing of the Falcon " and " Ogier the Dane," or that 
 history of " The Lovers of Gudrun," which possibly 
 is the finest, as it is the most extended, of all our 
 author's romantic poems .'' What more potent spell 
 to banish care and pain ? And let there be some 
 one near to sing : — 
 
 Metrical 
 facility.
 
 378 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 Sweet, hui 
 ttnimpcis- 
 stojted, 
 measures. 
 
 Relative 
 f>ositions of 
 the Neo- 
 Rontaniic 
 poets. 
 
 " In the white-flowered hawthorn brake, 
 Love, be merry for my sake ; 
 Twine the blossoms in my hair. 
 Kiss me where I am most fair, — 
 Kiss me, love ! for who knoweth 
 What thing cometh after death ? " 
 
 We have seen that the poetry of William Morris is 
 thoroughly sweet and wholesome, fair with the beauty 
 of green fields and summer skies, and pervaded by a 
 restful charm. Yet it is but the choicest fashion of 
 romantic narrative-verse. The poet's imagination is 
 dear, but never lofty ; he never will rouse the soul 
 to elevated thoughts and deeds. His low, continuous 
 music reminds us of those Moorish melodies whose 
 delicacy and pathos come from the gentle hearts of 
 an expiring race, and seem the murmurous echo of 
 strains that had an epic glory in the far-away past. 
 Readers who look for passion, faith, and high im- 
 aginings, will find his measures cloying in the end. 
 Rossetti's work has been confined to Pre-Chaucerian 
 minstrelsy, and to the spiritualism of the early Italian 
 school. Morris advances to a revival of the narra- 
 tive art of Chaucer. The next effort, to complete the 
 cyclic movement, should renew the fire and lyric out- 
 burst of the dramatic poets. Let us estimate the 
 promise of what already has been essayed in that 
 direction; — but to do this we must listen to the 
 voice of the youngest and most impassioned of the 
 group that stand with feet planted upon the outer 
 circuit of the Victorian choir, and with faces looking 
 eagerly toward the future.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 LATTER-DAY SINGERS. 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 SOME years have passed since this poet took the 
 critical outposts by storm, and with a single 
 effort gained a laurel-crown, of which no public envy, 
 nor any lesser action of his own, thenceforth could 
 dispossess him. The time has been so crowded with 
 his successive productions — his career, with all its 
 strength and imprudence, has been so thoroughly that 
 of a poet — as to heighten the interest which only a 
 spirit of most unusual quality can excite and long 
 maintain. 
 
 We have just observed the somewhat limited range 
 of William Morris's vocabulary. It is composed mainly 
 of plain Saxon words, chosen with great taste and 
 musically put together. No barrenness, however, is 
 perceptible, since to enrich that writer's language 
 from learned or modern sources would disturb the 
 tone of his pure English feeling. The nature of 
 Swinburne's diction is precisely opposite. His faculty 
 of expression is so brilliant as to obscure the other 
 elements which are to be found in his verse, and 
 constantly to lead him beyond the wisdom of art. 
 Nevertheless, reflecting upon his genius and the 
 chances of his future, it is difficult for any one to 
 write with cold restraint who has an eye to see, an 
 
 A Igernon 
 Cliarles 
 Swinhtrnc : 
 born in Lon- 
 don, April 
 5. 1S37. 
 
 His diction.
 
 38o 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 His surpris- 
 ing com- 
 mand of 
 rhythm. 
 
 ear to hear, and the practice which forces an artist 
 to wonder at the lustre, the melody, the unstinted 
 fire and movement, of his imperious song. 
 
 I. 
 
 I WISH, then, to speak at some length upon the one 
 faculty in which Swinburne excels any living English 
 poet ; in which I doubt if his equal has existed 
 among recent poets of any tongue, unless Shelley be 
 excepted, or, possibly, some lyrist of the modern 
 French school. This is his miraculous gift of rhythm, 
 his command over the unsuspected resources of a 
 language. That Shelley had a like power is, I think, 
 shown in passages like the choruses of " Prometheus 
 Unbound," but he flourished half a century ago, and 
 did not have (as Swinburne has) Shelley for a prede- 
 cessor ! A new generation, refining upon the les- 
 sons given by himself and Keats, has carried the 
 art of rhythm to extreme variety and finish. Were 
 Shelley to have a second career, his work, if no finer 
 in single passages, would have, all in all, a range of 
 musical variations such as we discover in Swinburne's. 
 So close is the resemblance in quality of these two 
 voices, however great the difference in development, 
 as almost to justify a belief in metempsychosis. A 
 master is needed to awake the spirit slumbering in 
 any musical instrument. Before the advent of Swin- 
 burne we did not realize the full scope of English 
 verse. In his hands it is like the violin of Paganini. 
 The range of his fantasias, roulades, arias, new effects 
 of measure and sound, is incomparable with anything 
 hitherto known. The first emotion of one who studies 
 even his immature work is that of wonder at the
 
 HIS COMMAND OF RHYTHM. 
 
 381 
 
 freedom and richness of his diction, the susurrus of 
 his rhythm, his unconscious alliterations, the endless 
 change of his syllabic harmonies, — resulting in the 
 alternate softness and strength, height and fall, riot- 
 ous or chastened music, of his alifluent verse. How 
 does he produce it? Who taught him all the hidden 
 springs of melody ? He was born a tamer of words : 
 a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most copious of 
 the literary tongues. In his poetry we discover qual- 
 ities we did not know were in the language, — a soft- 
 ness that seemed Italian, a rugged strength we thought 
 was German, a blithe and debonair lightness we de- 
 spaired of capturing from the French. He has added 
 a score of new stops and pedals to the instrument. 
 He has introduced, partly from other tongues, stanzaic 
 forms, measures and effects untried before ; and has 
 brought out the swiftness and force of metres like 
 the anapestic, carrying each to perfection at a single 
 trial. Words in his hands are like the ivory balls of 
 a juggler, and all words seem to be in his hands. 
 His fellow- craftsmen, who alone can understand what 
 has been done in their art, will not term this state- 
 ment extravagance. Speaking only of his command 
 over language and metre, I have a right to reaffirm, 
 and to show by many illustrations, that he is the 
 most sovereign of rhythmists. He compels the in- 
 flexible elements to his use. Chaucer is more limpid, 
 Shakespeare more kingly, Milton loftier at times, 
 Byron has an unaffected power, — but neither Shelley 
 nor the greatest of his predecessors is so dithyrambic, 
 and no one has been in all moods so absolute an 
 autocrat of verse. With equal gifts, I say, none 
 could have been, for Swinburne comes after and prof- 
 its by the art of all. Poets often win distinction by 
 
 Unprece- 
 dented mel- 
 ody and 
 freedom. 
 
 The most 
 dithyrambic 
 of poets.
 
 382 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 ^xfiression 
 carried to 
 fatiguitig 
 excess. 
 
 producing work that differs from what has gone be- 
 fore. It seems as if Swinburne, in this ripe period, 
 resolved to excel others by a mastery of known 
 melodies, adding a new magic to each, and going 
 beyond the range of the farthest. His amazing tricks 
 of rhythm are those of a gymnast outleaping his 
 fellows. We had Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge, after 
 Collins and Gray, and Tennyson after Keats, but now 
 Swinburne adds such elaboration, that an art which 
 we thought perfected seems almost tame. In the 
 first place, he was born a prodigy, — as much so as 
 Morphy in chess ; added to this he is the product of 
 these latter days, a phenomenon impossible before. 
 It is safe to declare that at last a time has come 
 when the force of expression can no further go. 
 
 I do not say that it has not gone too far. The 
 fruit may be, and here is, too luscious ; the flower is 
 often of an odor too intoxicating to endure. Yet 
 what execution ! Poetry, the rarest poetic feeling, 
 may be found in simpler verse. Yet again, what exe- 
 cution ! The voice may not be equal to the grandest 
 music, nor trained and restrained as it should be. 
 But the voice is there, and its possessor has the finest 
 natural organ to which this generation has listened. 
 
 Right here it is plain that Swinburne, especially in 
 his early poems, has weakened his effects by cloying 
 us with excessive richness of epithet and sound : in 
 later works, by too elaborate expression and redun- 
 dancy of treatment. Still, while Browning's amplifi- 
 cation is wont to be harsh and obscure, Swinburne, 
 even if obscure, or when the thought is one that he 
 has repeated again and again, always gives us unap- 
 proachable melody and grace. It is true that his glo- 
 ries of speech often hang upon the slightest thread
 
 VOICE AND EXECUTION. 
 
 383 
 
 of purpose. He so constantly wants to stop and sing 
 that he gets along slowly with a plot. As we listen 
 to his fascinating music, the meaning, like the libretto 
 of an opera, often passes out of mind. The melody 
 is unbroken : in this, as in other matters, Swinburne's 
 fault is that of excess. He does not frequently admit 
 the sweet discords, of which he is a master, nor re- 
 lieve his work by simple, contrasting interludes. Un- 
 til recently his voice had a narrow range ; its effect 
 resulted from changes upon a few notes. The rich- 
 ness of these permutations was a marvel, yet a series 
 of them blended into mannerism. Shelley could be 
 academic at times, and even humorous ; but Swin- 
 burne's monotone, original and varied within its 
 bounds, was thought to be the expression of a limited 
 range of feeling, and restricted his early efforts as a 
 dramatic lyrist. 
 
 The question first asked, with regard to either a 
 poet or singer, is, Has he voice ? and then. Has he 
 execution ? We have lastly to measure the passion, 
 imagination, invention, to which voice and method 
 are but ministers. From the quality of the latter, the 
 style being the man, we often may estimate the higher 
 faculties that control them. The principle here in- 
 volved runs through all the arts of beauty and use 
 A fine vocal gift is priceless, both for itself and for 
 the spiritual force behind it. With this preliminary 
 stress upon Swinburne's most conspicuous gift, let us 
 briefly examine his record, bethinking ourselves how 
 difficult it is to judge a poet who is obscured by his 
 own excess of light, and whose earlier verses so cloyed 
 the mind with richness as to deprive it of the judicial 
 taste. 
 
 Voice and 
 execution 
 aliuays 
 essential.
 
 384 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 Swinburne 
 and Lander. 
 
 Early dra- 
 tnris : pub- 
 lished in 
 1861. 
 
 An Eliza- 
 bethan tnan- 
 ner. 
 
 II. 
 
 There is a resemblance, both of temperament and 
 intellect, between Swinburne and what is known of 
 Landor in his youth. The latter remained for a com- 
 paratively brief time at college, but the younger poet, 
 like the elder, was a natural scholar and linguist. 
 He profited largely by his four years at Oxford, and 
 the five at Eton which preceded them, for his intuitive 
 command of languages is so unusual, that a year of 
 his study must be worth a lustrum of other men's, 
 and he has developed this gift by frequent and ex- 
 quisite usage. No other Englishman has been so 
 able to vary his effects by modes drawn, not only 
 from classical and Oriental literatures, but from the 
 haunting beauty of medieval song. I should suppose 
 him to be as familiar with French verse, from Ron- 
 sard to Hugo, as most of us are with the poetry of 
 our own language, — and he writes either in Greek 
 or Latin, old and new, or in troubadour French, as 
 if his thoughts came to him in the diction for the 
 time assumed. No really admirable work, I think, 
 can be produced in a foreign tongue, until this kind 
 of lingui-naturalization has been attained. 
 
 His first volume, The Queen Mother and Rosamond, 
 gave him no reputation. Possibly it was unnoticed 
 amid the mass of new verse offered the public. We 
 now see that it was of much significance. It showed 
 the new author to be completely unaffected by the 
 current idyllic mode. Not a trace of Tennyson ; just 
 a trace, on the other hand, of Browning; above all, a 
 true dramatic manner of the poet's own, — like noth- 
 ing modern, but recalling the cadences, fire, and ac- 
 tion of England's great dramatic period. There were
 
 'THE QUEEN MOTHER' AND 'ROSAMOND? 
 
 385 
 
 many faults of construction, but also very strong and 
 beautiful characterizations, in this youth's first essays : 
 a manifest living in his personages for the time ; such 
 fine language as this, in " Rosamond " : — 
 
 " I see not flesh is holier than flesh, 
 Or blood than blood more choicely qualified 
 That scorn should live between them." 
 
 And this: — 
 
 " I that have roses in my name, and make 
 All flowers glad to set their color by ; 
 I that have held a land between twin lips 
 And turned large England to a little kiss ; 
 God thinks not of me as contemptible." 
 
 " The Queen Mother " (time : the massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew) is a longer and more complex tragedy 
 than that from which the foregoing lines are taken. 
 Catherine de' Medici is strongly and clearly delineated, 
 — a cruel, relentless, yet imposing figure. The style 
 is caught from Shakespeare, as if the youth's pride 
 of intellect would let him go no lower for a model. 
 Study, for example, the language of Teligny, Act III., 
 Scene 2 ; and that of Catherine, Act V., Scene 3, 
 where she avows that if God's ministers could see 
 what she was about to do, then 
 
 " Surely the wind would be as a hard fire, 
 And the sea's yellow and distempered foam 
 Displease the happy heaven ; . . . . 
 
 . . . . towers and popular streets 
 
 Should in the middle green smother and drown, 
 
 And Havoc die with fulness." 
 
 In another scene the king says of Denise : — 
 17 Y 
 
 "Rosa- 
 mond.''* 
 
 " The Queen 
 Mother."
 
 386 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 " Atalanta 
 in Calydon" 
 1864. 
 
 "Yea, dead? 
 She is all white to the dead hair, who was 
 So full of gracious rose the air took color, 
 Turned to a kiss against her face." 
 
 The scene in which Catherine poisons her clown, 
 and the whole of the closing portion of Act V., are 
 full of strength and spirit. Scattered through the two 
 plays are some of the curious Latin, old French, and 
 old English lyrics which the author already was so 
 deft at turning. The volume was inscribed to Rossetti. 
 It reveals to a penetrative eye many traits of the gen- 
 ius that has since blazed out so finely, and shows the 
 nature of Swinburne's studies and associates. The 
 man had come who was to do what Browning had 
 failed to do in a less propitious time, and make a 
 successful diversion from the idyllic lead of Tennyson. 
 The body of recent minor verse fully displays the 
 swift and radical character of the change. 
 
 Three years later Swinburne printed his classical 
 tragedy, Atalanta in Calydon^ Whatever may be said 
 of the genuineness of any reproduction of the antique, 
 this is the best of its kind. One who undertakes such 
 work has the knowledge that his theme is removed 
 from popular sympathy, and must be content with a 
 restricted audience. Swinburne took up the classical 
 dramatic form, and really made the dry bones live, — 
 as even Landor and Arnold had not; as no man had, 
 before or after Shelley ; that is to say, as no man 
 has, for the " Prometheus Unbound," grand as it is, 
 is classical only in some of its personages and in the 
 
 ' During this time he also had written " Chastelard," but held 
 it in reserve for future publication. "Atalanta" was begun on 
 the day following the completion of the last-named poem.
 
 ' ATALANTA IN CALYDON: 
 
 387 
 
 mythical germ of its conception, — a sublime poem, 
 full of absorbing beauty, but antique neither in spirit 
 nor in form. "Atalanta" is upon the severest Greek 
 model, that of ^schylus or Sophocles, and reads like 
 an inspired translation. We cannot repeat the antique 
 as it existed, though a poem may be better or worse. 
 But consider the nearness of this success, and the 
 very great poetry involved. 
 
 Poetry and all, this thing has for once been done 
 as well as possible, and no future poet can safely at- 
 tempt to rival it. "Atalanta" is Greek in unity 
 and simplicity, not only in the technical unities, — 
 utterly disregarded in " Prometheus Unbound," — but 
 in maintenance of a single pervading thought, the im- 
 possibility of resisting the inexorable high gods. The 
 hopeless fatalism of this tragedy was not the senti- 
 ment of the joyous and reverential Greeks, but reminds 
 us of the Hebrews, whose God was of a stern and 
 dreadful type. This feeling, expressed in much of 
 Swinburne's early verse, is the outcome of a haughty 
 and untamed intellect chafing against a law which it 
 cannot resist. Here is an imperious mind, requiring 
 years of discipline and achievement to bring it into 
 that harmony with its conditions through which we 
 arrive at strength, happiness, repose. 
 
 The opening invocation of the Chief Huntsman, 
 with its majestic verse and imagery, alone secures the 
 reader's attention, and the succeeding chorus, at the 
 height of Swinburne's lyric reach, resolves attention 
 to enchantment : — 
 
 " When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, 
 The mother of months in meadow or plain 
 Fills the shadows and windy places 
 With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain ; 
 
 The best 
 English re- 
 production 
 of the an- 
 tique-
 
 388 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 And the brown bright nightingale amorous 
 Is half-assuaged for Itylus, 
 For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, 
 The tongueless vigil, and all the pain." 
 
 Read this divine chorus, and three others equally 
 perfect of their kind, deepening in grandeur and im- 
 pressiveness : " Before the beginning of years," " We 
 have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair," "Who hath 
 given man speech?" — and we have read the noblest 
 verse of a purely lyric order that has appeared since 
 the songs and choruses of the " Prometheus." How 
 much more dithyrambic than the unrhymed measures 
 of Arnold ! Rhyme is free as the air, that chartered 
 libertine, to this poet, and our language in his mouth 
 becomes not only as strong, but as musical, as the 
 Greek. The choric spirit is here, however inharmo- 
 nious the thought that God is the "supreme evil," 
 covering us with his " hate," or the conclusion of the 
 whole matter : — 
 
 " Who shall contend with his lords, 
 
 Or cross them or do them wrong .-• 
 Who shall bind them as with cords ? 
 
 Who shall tame them as with song .' 
 Who shall smite them as with swords .'' 
 
 For the hands of their kingdom are strong." 
 
 Finally, the conception of the drama is large, the 
 imagination clear, elevated, of an even tone through- 
 out. The herald's account of the hunt is finely poetic. 
 The choric responses of the last dialogue form a reso- 
 nant climax to the whole. As a work of art it still 
 remains the poet's flawless effort, showing the most 
 objective purpose and clarified by the necessity of 
 restraint. It is good to know that a work of pure 
 art could at once make its way. It appealed to a
 
 'POEMS AND ballads: 
 
 389 
 
 select audience, but the verdict of the few was so 
 loud and instant as to gain for " Atalanta " a popular 
 reading, — especially in rude America, with her strange, 
 pathetic, misunderstood yearning for a rightful share 
 of the culture and beauty of the older world. 
 
 " Chastelard " appeared in the ensuing year ; but 
 as I wish to mention this poem in some discussion of 
 the larger work to which it holds the relation of the 
 first division of a trilogy, and of Swinburne's char- 
 acter as a dramatist, let us pass to the miscellaneous 
 productions of the ten years intervening between "Ata- 
 lanta " and "Bothwell." 
 
 III. 
 
 Swinburne's work revived the interest felt in poetry. 
 His power was so evident that the public looked to 
 see what else had come from his pen. This led to 
 the collection, under the title of Foems and Ballads, 
 of various lyrical pieces, some of which had been 
 contributed to the serials, while others now were 
 printed for the first time. Without fair consideration, 
 this volume was taken as a new and studied work of 
 the mature poet, and there was much astonishment 
 over its contents. Here began a notable literary dis- 
 cussion. If unmeasured praise had been awarded to 
 Swinburne for the chastity and beauty of " Atalanta," 
 he now was made to feel how the critical breath could 
 shift to the opposite extreme and balance its early 
 favor with reprehension of the severest kind. Here 
 was a series of wild and Gothic pieces, full of sensu- 
 ous and turbid passion, lavishing a prodigious wealth 
 &f music and imagery upon the most perilous themes, 
 and treating them in an openly defiant manner. 
 
 " Poems and 
 
 Ballads" 
 
 1866. 
 
 Excitement 
 created by 
 this book.
 
 390 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SIVLNBURNE. 
 
 " Notes on 
 Poems and 
 Reviews," 
 1866. 
 
 A literary 
 tntagonism. 
 
 Sense was everywhere exalted above spirituality ; and 
 to them who did not consider the formative nature of 
 the book and the dramatic purpose of the least re- 
 strained ballads, it seemed as if the young author was 
 
 lusting 
 
 after 
 
 strange 
 
 gods, and had plunged into 
 
 adoration of Venus and Priapus ; or that he had 
 drunk of Circe's goblet, and was crowning himself 
 with garlands ere his transformation into one of the 
 beasts that follow in her train. Rebukes were freely 
 uttered, — indeed, a storm of denunciation began. 
 Friends and partisans rushed to his defence ; and at 
 last the poet spoke for himself, with no doubtful force 
 of satire and scorn, in reply both to the reviewers 
 and to an able but covert attack made against him 
 by a rival singer. So fierce a literary antagonism has 
 not been known since the contests of Byron and the 
 Lake school. Of course it gave the book a wide 
 reading, followed by a marked influence upon the 
 style of fledgling poets. The lyrics were reprinted in 
 America, with the new title of " Laus Veneris," — 
 taken from the opening poem, another presentment 
 of the Tannhauser legend that has bewitched so 
 many of the recent French and English minstrels. 
 The author's reputation, hitherto confined to the ad- 
 mirers of " Atalanta," now extended to the masses 
 who read from curiosity. Some were content to rep- 
 rehend, or smack their lips over the questionable 
 portions of the new book ; but many, while perceiv- 
 ing the crudeness of the ruder strains, rejoiced in 
 the lyrical splendor that broke out here and there, 
 and welcomed the poet's unique additions to the 
 metric and stanzaic forms of English verse. 
 
 That Swinburne fairly provoked censure he must 
 himself have been aware, if he cared enough about
 
 THE POET AND HIS CRITICS. 
 
 391 
 
 the matter to reflect at all. I have no doubt he was 
 astonished at its vehemence, and in truth the outcry 
 of the moralists may have been overloud. People did 
 not see, what now is clear enough, that these poems 
 and ballads represented the primal stages of the 
 poet's growth. Good or bad, they were brought to- 
 gether and frankly given to the public. Doubtless, 
 were the author now to make up a library edition of 
 his works, there are several of these pieces he would 
 prefer to omit. Of what writer may there not as 
 much be said, unless, like Rossetti, he has lived be- 
 yond the years of Byron before publishing at all 1 
 It chances, however, that certain lyrics which we 
 well could spare on account of their unpleasant sug- 
 gestions are among the most beautiful in language 
 and form. Others, against which no ethical objec- 
 tions can lie, are weakened by the author's feeblest 
 affectations. All young poets have sins to answer 
 for: to Swinburne men could say, as Arthur to Guen- 
 evere, " And in the flesh thou hast sinned ! " so mor- 
 bid and absurd are some of the phrases in this 
 collection. Certainly there was an offence against 
 good taste and discretion, and, if some of the poems 
 were open to the interpretation given them, an offence 
 of a more serious nature, for all indecency is out- 
 lawed of art. The young poet, under a combination 
 of influences, seems to have had a marked attack of 
 that green-sickness which the excited and untrained im- 
 agination, mistaking its own fancies for experience, 
 undergoes before gaining strength through the vigor 
 of healthy passion, mature and self-contained. Still, 
 there are those who can more easily forgive the worst 
 of Swinburne's youthful antics than those unconscious 
 sins of commonplace, plagiarism, turgidity, — the hun- 
 
 Censure 
 
 fdirly pro- 
 voked, but 
 too vehe- 
 ment. 
 
 The voltime 
 an mit- 
 grovjth of 
 the poefs 
 formative 
 period.
 
 392 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 The "/er- 
 tnejit of neiv 
 •wifie." 
 
 Early 
 Gothic 
 stittiies. 
 
 dred weak offences that are pardoned in the early 
 verse of men who make their mark as poets. 
 
 After all, " Poems and Ballads " was a first book, 
 tliough printed later than " Atalanta." The juvenile 
 pieces which it contained, written during college life, 
 are now announced for removal into a volume of ac- 
 knowledged " Early Poems," including also the dra- 
 mas of " Rosamond " and " The Queen Mother." But 
 the original volume is of great interest, because it 
 exhibits the germs of everything for which the author 
 has become distinguished. Its spirit is that of un- 
 bounded freedom, of resistance to an established ideal, 
 — for Swinburne, with Shelley and kindred poets, has 
 seen that finer ideals will take the place of those that 
 are set aside. Meantime, in advance of a new reve- 
 lation, he devoted himself to the expression of sensu- 
 ous, even riotous beauty. Unequal as they are, these 
 lyrics led up to work like " Atalanta," " Songs before 
 Sunrise," and " Bothwell." They were the ferment of 
 the heated fancy, and, though murky and unsettled, 
 to be followed by clarity, sweetness, and strength. 
 The fault of the book is excess. This poet, extrava- 
 gant in spiritual or political revolt, in disdain, in 
 dramatic outbursts, was no less so in his treatment 
 of sensuous themes. He could not be otherwise, ex- 
 cept when restrained by his artistic conscience in 
 work modelled upon accepted forms. 
 
 Among the earlier lyrics are to be numbered, I 
 imagine, those mediaeval studies near the close of the 
 volume which belong to the same class with much 
 of Rossetti's and Morris's verse, yet never could be 
 thought to come from any hand but Swinburne's 
 own. Such are " The Masque of Queen Bersabe " 
 (a miracle play), "A Christmas Carol," "St. Dorothy,"
 
 EARLY LYRICS. 
 
 393 
 
 and various ballads, — besides the " Laus Veneris," to 
 which I already have referred. In other pieces we 
 discover the influence which French art and litera- 
 ture had exerted upon the author. His acquaintance 
 with the round of French minstrelsy made it natural 
 for him to produce a kind of work that at first would 
 not be relished by the British taste and ear. The 
 richness of the foreign qualities brought into English 
 verse by Swinburne has made amends for a passing 
 phase of Gallic sensualism. What now crosses the 
 Channel is of a different breed from the stilted for- 
 malism of Boileau. With the rise of Hugo and the 
 new Romantic school came freedom, lyrical melody, 
 and dramatic fire. Elsewhere in this volume we note 
 the still more potential Hebraic influence. " Aholi- 
 bah " is closely imitated from Hebrew prophecy, and 
 " A Ballad of Burdens " is imbued with a similar 
 spirit, reading like the middle choruses in " Atalanta." 
 More classical studies, " Phaedra " and " At Eleusis," 
 approach the grade of Landor's " Hellenics." The 
 " Hymn to Proserpine " is a beautiful and noble 
 poem, dramatically reviving the emotion of a pagan 
 who chooses to die with his gods, and musical with 
 cadences which this poet has made distinctly his own. 
 " Anactoria " and " Dolores," two pieces against which 
 special objection has been made, exhibit great beauty 
 of treatment, and a mystical though abnormal feeling, 
 and are quite too fine to lose. The author holds 
 them to be dramatic studies, written for men and not 
 for babes, and connects them with " The Garden of 
 Proserpine " and " Hesperia," in order to illustrate 
 the transition from passion to satiety, and thence to 
 wisdom and repose. The little sonnet, " A Cameo," 
 suggests the rationale of this conception, and the 
 17* 
 
 French, 
 
 Hebraic, 
 
 and classical 
 influences.
 
 394 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 latter, I may add, is practically illustrated by a re- 
 view of Swinburne's own productions, from the " Poems 
 and Ballads" up to "Bothwell." 
 
 The value of the book consists in its fine poetry, 
 and especially in the structure of that poetry, so full 
 of lyrical revelations, of harmonies unknown before. 
 Take any stanza of an apostrophe to the sea, in 
 " The Triumph of Time " : — 
 
 Very fine 
 foetry. 
 
 " O fair green-girdled mother of mine, 
 
 Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain. 
 Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine, 
 
 Thy large embraces are keen like pain. 
 Save me and hide me with all thy waves, 
 Find me one grave of thy thousand graves, 
 Those pure cold populous graves of thine. 
 
 Wrought without hand in a world without stain." 
 
 Or take any couplet from " Anactoria," that musical 
 and fervent poem, whose imagination and expression 
 are so welded together, and wherein the English 
 heroic verse is long sustained at a height to which 
 it rarely has ventured to aspire : — 
 
 " Yea, thou shall be forgotten like spilt wtne, 
 Except these kisses of my lips on thine 
 Brand them with immortality ; but me — 
 Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea, 
 Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold 
 Cast forth of heaven with feet of awful gold 
 And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind, 
 Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind 
 Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown, — 
 But in the light and laughter, in the moan 
 And music, and in grasp of lip and hand 
 And shudder of water that makes felt on land 
 The immeasurable tremor of all the sea. 
 Memories shall mix and metaphors of me." 
 
 A certain amount of such writing is bold and fine.
 
 METRICAL VARIATIONS. 
 
 395 
 
 The public knows, however, that it was carried by 
 Swinburne to excess ; that in erotic verse a confec- 
 tion of luscious and cloying epithets was presented 
 again and again. At times there was an extravagance 
 which would have been absent if this poet, who has 
 abundant wit and satire, had also then had a hearty 
 sense of humor, and which he himself must smile at 
 now. But go further, and observe his original hand- 
 ling of metres, as in the " Hymn to Proserpine " : — 
 
 " Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean ? but these thou shalt not take, 
 The laurel, the palms, and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs 
 in the brake" ; 
 
 and in " Hesperia " : — 
 
 " Out of the golden remote wild west where the sea without 
 shore is. 
 Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness of joy, 
 As a wind sets in with the autumn that blows from the region 
 of stories. 
 Blows with a perfume of songs and of memories beloved from 
 a boy." 
 
 Examine, too, the remarkable group of songs, set to 
 melodies so fresh and novel : among others, " Dedi- 
 cation," " The Garden of Proserpine," " Madonna 
 Mia," " Rococo," and " Before Dawn." If these have 
 their faults, what wrinkle can any Sybarite find in 
 such a rose-leaf as the lyric called " A Match " : — 
 
 " If love were what the rose is. 
 
 And I were like the leaf. 
 Our lives would grow together 
 In sad or singing weather. 
 Blown fields or flowerful closes, 
 
 Green pleasure or gray grief; 
 If love were what the rose is, 
 
 And I were like the leaf" 
 
 Unwhole- 
 some and 
 fcititastic 
 extrava- 
 gance. 
 
 for which 
 we are com- 
 pensated by 
 novel and 
 beautiful 
 effects of 
 rhythm.
 
 396 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 "Ave aique 
 Vale": a 
 lofty eUgiac 
 ode. 
 
 Baudelaire, 
 
 The tender and pious stanzas in memory of Lan- 
 dor are included among these lyrics. The collection, 
 after we have noted its weaknesses, extravagance, lack 
 of technical and moral restraint, still remains the 
 most striking, the most suggestive volume of miscel- 
 laneous poems that has been offered by any poet of 
 the younger schools. And it must be confessed that 
 since its appearance, and after the period of growth 
 which it represents, not a note has been uttered by 
 its author to which the most rigid of moralists can 
 honestly object. 
 
 The full bloom of his lyrical genius appears not 
 only in the choruses of " Atalanta," but in that large- 
 moulded ode, " Ave atque Vale," composed in memory 
 of Charles Baudelaire. It is founded on the model 
 of famous English prototypes, to wit, the " Epitaph of 
 Bion." If unequal to " Lycidas " in idyllic feeling, 
 or to " Adonais " in lofty scorn and sorrow, it is more 
 imaginative than the former, and surpasses either in 
 continuity of tone and the absolute melody of elabo- 
 rate verse. Arnold's " Thyrsis " is a wise and manly 
 poem, closely adjusted to the classic phrase ; but 
 here is an ethereal strain of the highest elegiac or- 
 der, fashioned in a severe yet flexible spirit of lyric 
 art. In stanzaic beauty it ranks, with Keats's odes, 
 among our rarest examples. Critics who have sat at 
 the feet of Wordsworth should remember that Swin- 
 burne, in youth, was powerfully affected by the poetry 
 of the wild and gifted author of " Les Fleurs du 
 Mai." This threnody comes as directly from the 
 heart as those of Shelley or Arnold lamenting Keats 
 or Clough. Baudelaire and his group constituted 
 what might be termed the Franco-Sapphic school. 
 Their spirit pervades many of the " Poems and Bal-
 
 'AVE ATQUE VALE: 
 
 397 
 
 lads"; but Swinburne, more fortunate than his teacher, 
 has lived to outlive this phase, and is nearing his 
 visioned " Hesperia " of strength and luminous calm. 
 The " Ave atque Vale " is a perfect example of the 
 metrical affluence that renders his verse a marvel. It 
 is found in the opening lines : — 
 
 " Shall I strew on thee rose, or rue, or laurel, 
 Brother, on this that was the veil of thee ? " — 
 
 The second stanza, recalling the dead poet's favor- 
 ite ideal, is highly characteristic : — 
 
 " For always thee the fervid, languid glories 
 Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies ; 
 Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs 
 
 Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories. 
 The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave, 
 That knows not where is that Leucadian grave 
 
 Which hides too deep the supreme head of song." 
 
 An imagination like that of " Hyperion " is found 
 in other stanzas : — 
 
 " Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over, 
 Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet. 
 Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet 
 Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover, 
 Such as thy vision here solicited, 
 Under the shadow of her fair vast head. 
 The deep division of prodigious breasts, 
 The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep, 
 The weight of awful tresses that still keep 
 The savor and shade of old-world pine-forests 
 Where the wet hill-winds weep?" — 
 
 In one sense the motive thought is below the tech- 
 nical grandeur of the poem. Its ideals are Sappho, 
 Proserpine, Apollo, and the Venus of Baudelaire, — 
 not the Cytherean, but the Gothic Venus "of the 
 
 I^Ietrical 
 affluence.
 
 398 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWLNBURNE. 
 
 Trihite to 
 the tjie^nory 
 of Gautier. 
 1872. 
 
 Sivinhurne' s 
 ?'ft of 
 tongues. 
 
 See page 62. 
 
 hollow hill." The round of Baudelaire's conceptions 
 is thus pursued, after the antique fashion, with ex- 
 quisite and solemn power. The tone is not one of 
 high laudation, but of a minstrel who recalls the dead 
 as he was, — a chant of sorrow and appreciation, not 
 of hope. What extravagance there may be is in the 
 passion and poetry lavished upon the theme. It is 
 an ode written for persons of delicate culture ; no 
 one else can grasp the allusions, though who so dull 
 as not to be captivated by the sound ! But the same 
 may be said of " Adonais " or " Hylas " ; and here 
 again recurs the question asked concerning Landor, 
 Shall not the wise, as well as the witless, have their 
 poets ? 
 
 The " Memorial Verses on the Death of Theophile 
 Gautier" are also beautiful. They are composed in a 
 grave form of quatrain resembling, though with a dif- 
 ference, FitzGerald's version of the " Rubaiyat of Omar 
 Khayyam." The elegy is the longest of our author's 
 contributions to a volume in which eighty poets of 
 France, Italy, and England united to lay upon the 
 tomb of Gautier a wreath more profuse with laurels 
 than any other which has been recorded in the history 
 of elegiac song. Swinburne's portion of this remark- 
 able tribute includes, also, an English sonnet, a son- 
 net and an ode in French, and Greek and Latin 
 verses such as, I think, no other of the chanting 
 multitude could have composed. A word in respect 
 to his talent for this kind of work. Possibly Landor 
 was a more ready Latinist, but no Englishman has 
 written Greek elegiac to equal either the dedication 
 of " Atalanta " or the Gautier " inscriptions " con- 
 tained in this memorial volume. Having spoken of 
 the uselessness of Landor's classical exploits, I would
 
 GREEK AND LATIN VERSES. 
 
 399 
 
 here add that their uselessness relates to the audi- 
 ence, and not to the poet. The effect of such prac- 
 tice upon himself and Swinburne would of itself argue 
 for this amendment. The younger poet's own language 
 is so modest and suggestive, that in repeating what 
 was privately uttered I simply do him justice by 
 stating his position better than it can otherwise be 
 stated. " The value of modern Latin or Greek verse," 
 he says, "depends, I think, upon the execution. Good 
 verse, at any time, is a good thing, and a change of 
 instrument now and then is good practice for the 
 
 performer's hand I confess that I take delight 
 
 in the metrical forms of any language of which I 
 know anything whatever, simply for the metre's sake, 
 as a new musical instrument ; and, as soon as I can, 
 I am tempted to try my hand or my voice at a new 
 mode of verse, like a child trying to sing before it 
 can speak plain." In short, to a poet like Swinburne 
 diversions of this kind have a practical value, even 
 though they seem to be those of a knight tilting at 
 a wayside tournament as he rides on his votive 
 quest. 
 
 We have dwelt so long upon the lyrics as to have 
 little space for examination of more recent and im- 
 portant works. My object has been to observe the 
 development of the poet's genius, and thence derive 
 an estimate of his present career. From 1867 to 
 187 1 he gave his ardent sympathy to the cause of 
 European freedom, exerting himself in laudation, al- 
 most in apotheosis, of the republican heroes and 
 martyrs. Possibly his radical tendency was strength- 
 ened in youth by association with a sturdy grandsire, 
 the late Sir John Swinburne, who was a personal 
 friend of Mirabeau, and to the last of his ninety- 
 
 His own 
 statement of 
 tlie value of 
 modern 
 Latin or 
 Greek 
 
 Revolution- 
 ary poems.
 
 40O 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWhWBURNE. 
 
 " A Song of 
 Italy," 1867. 
 
 " Ode on the 
 French 
 Republic," 
 1S70. 
 
 "Songs be- 
 fore Sun- 
 rise," 1871. 
 
 eight years an ultra-liberal of the French revolu- 
 tionary school. The democratic poets of this century 
 — men like Landor, Shelley, Hugo, Swinburne — often 
 are to be found among those of patrician birth and 
 culture. Swinburne, as if tired of art followed for its 
 own sake, threw his soul into the struggle of the 
 French and Italian patriots. A Song of Italy is 
 marked by sonorous eloquence, and carries us buoy- 
 antly along ; yet, despite its splendid apostrophes to 
 Mazzini and Garibaldi, it was not a poem to be 
 widely received and to stir the common heart. It 
 appeals to the lover of high poetry rather than to 
 votaries of the cause. The Ode on the French Republic 
 was less worthy of the author, and not equal to its 
 occasion. It bears the stamp of work composed for 
 a special event as plainly as some of Southey's or 
 Wordsworth's laureate odes. We may apply to it a 
 portion of Swinburne's own censure of a far nobler 
 poem, Lowell's " Commemoration Ode," of which 
 many an isolated line is worth more to a great nation 
 than the whole French ode can ever be to them that 
 love France. Songs before Sunrise may be taken as 
 the crowning effort of the author during the period 
 just named. It is a series of lofty and imposing odes, 
 exhibiting Swinburne's varied lyrical powers and his 
 most earnest traits of character. The conflict of day 
 with night before the sunrise of freedom is rehearsed 
 in twoscore pieces, which chant the democratic up- 
 rising of Continental Europe and the outbreak in 
 Crete. Grouped together, the efifect is that of a strong 
 symphonic movement ; yet much of it is tumultuous 
 and ineffective. The prolonged earnestness fags the 
 reader, and helps a cause less than might some pop- 
 ular lyric or soldier's hymn. A trace of the spas-
 
 PROSE WRITINGS. 
 
 401 
 
 modic manner injures much of Swinburne's revolu- 
 tionary verse. Yet here are powerful single poems : 
 "The Watch in the Night," " Hertha," the "Hymn 
 of Man," and " Perinde ac Cadaver." " Hertha " rates 
 high among the author's pieces, having so much lyric 
 force and music united with condensed and clarified 
 thought. "The Eve of Revolution " is like the sound 
 of a trumpet, and charged with fiery imagination, a 
 fit companion-piece to Coleridge's finest ode. 
 
 In Swinburne's poems we do not perceive the love 
 of nature which was so passionate an element in the 
 spirit and writings of Shelley, that exile from the 
 hearts and households of his fellow-men. Were he 
 compelled to follow art as a means of subsistence 
 and to suit his work to the market, it would be more 
 condensed and practical, yet would, I think, lose some- 
 thing of its essential flavor. After all, he has been 
 an industrious man of letters, devoted to literature 
 as a matter of love and religion. The exhaustive 
 essays upon Blake and Chapman, his various pref- 
 aces and annotations, and his criticisms of Arnold, 
 Morris, and Hugo, among other professional labors, 
 are fresh in mind. The prose, like the poetry, is 
 unflagging and impetuous beyond that of other men. 
 No modern writer, save De Quincey, has sustained 
 himself so easily and with such cumulative force 
 through passages which strain the reader's mental 
 power. His organ of expression is so developed that 
 no exercise of it seems to produce brain-weariness, 
 and he does not realize that others are subject to that 
 kind of fatigue. 
 
 He rarely takes up the critical pen unless to pay 
 honor to a work he admires, or to confront some foe 
 with dangerous satire and wrath. His language is so 
 
 z 
 
 No marked 
 passio7i for 
 nature. 
 
 Critical and 
 other prose 
 essays.
 
 402 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 A brilliant 
 and origi- 
 nal, hit not 
 always judi- 
 cial tnind. 
 
 " Under the 
 Microscope," 
 1872. 
 
 Thoughtless 
 estitnate 0/ 
 A inerican 
 foeis. 
 
 enthusiastic that it does not always convince ; in fact, 
 his rhetoric and generous partisanship lessen his ju- 
 dicial authority. His writings often are too learned. 
 Scholarship is a second nature with him ; he is not 
 obscure, like Browning, but his allusions are so famil- 
 iar to himself that he cannot bring them to the level 
 of popular comprehension. Nor can he, however laud- 
 atory of the masters he affected in youth, look upon 
 other modern poets except with the complacency felt 
 by one who listens to a stranger's rude handling of 
 the native tongue. His command of verse is so be- 
 yond that of any other Briton, that poets of different 
 grades must seem to him pretty much alike, and their 
 relative gifts scarcely worth distinguishing. By the 
 law of attractions I should expect to see him inter- 
 ested in verse of the most bald and primeval form. 
 Many excel him in humor, simplicity, range of in- 
 ventive power. But contend with him in rhythm, 
 and, though you are Thor himself, you are trying to 
 drain the horn of which one end is open to the sea. 
 While recognizing his thorough honesty, I do not 
 assent to his judgment of American poets. In 
 Under the Microscope he pays a tribute to Poe, and 
 has a just understanding of the merits and defects 
 of Whitman. His denunciation of all the rest, as 
 either mocking-birds in their adherence to models, 
 or corn-crakes in the harshness and worthlessness of 
 their original song, results, it is plain, not from preju- 
 dice, but from ignorance of the atmosphere which per- 
 vades American life. A poet must sing for his own 
 people. Whitman, for instance, well and boldly avows 
 himself the mouthpiece of our democratic nationality. 
 Aside from the unconscious formalism that injures his 
 poems, and which Swinburne has pointed out, he has
 
 AMERICAN POETS. 
 
 403 
 
 done what he could, and we acknowledge the justice 
 shown to one, at least, of our representative men. 
 But to cite other examples, — and a few are enough 
 for this digression, — if Swinburne thoroughly under- 
 stood the deep religious sentiment, the patriotism, the 
 tender aspiration, of the best American homes, he 
 would perceive that our revered Whittier had fairly 
 expressed these emotions \ would comprehend the na- 
 tional affection which discerns quality even in his 
 faults, and originality and music in his fervent strains. 
 And if he could feel the mighty presence of American 
 woods and waters, he would see how simply and 
 grandly the author of " Thanatopsis," " A Forest 
 Hymn," and " The Night Journey of a River," had 
 communed with nature, and acknowledge the Doric 
 strength and purity of his imaginative verse. Our 
 figure-school is but lately founded j landscape-art and 
 sentiment have had to precede it ; but, again, cannot 
 even a foreign critic find in poems like Lowell's " The 
 Courtin'" an idyllic truth that Theocritus might re- 
 joice in, all that can be made of the New England 
 dialect, and pictures full of sweetness and feeling? 
 Of this much I am confident, and this much will 
 serve. America is not all frontier, and her riper 
 thought and life are reflected in her literature. Our 
 poets may avail themselves of " the glory that was 
 Greece " with as much justice and originality as any 
 British minstrel. The artist claims all subjects, times, 
 and places for his own. Bryant, Emerson, Whittier, 
 Lowell, Longfellow, — to cite no lesser or younger 
 names, — are esteemed by a host of their countrymen 
 who can read between the lines ; their poems are the 
 music of a land to which British authors now must 
 look for the largest and ever-growing portion of their
 
 404 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 " Ckastel- 
 ard," 1865. 
 
 A romantic 
 
 historical 
 
 dranui. 
 
 The poefs 
 conception 
 of Mary 
 Stuart. 
 
 own constituency. Each one of these poets as truly 
 represents his country as any of their comrades who 
 secure foreign attention by claiming a special prerog- 
 ative in this office. 
 
 IV. 
 
 To return to Chastelard, which appeared close after 
 " Atalanta," but in order of composition, as I have 
 said, is known to have preceded the classical drama. 
 The latter poem seemed flooded with moonlight, but 
 " Chastelard " is warm-blooded and modern, charged 
 with lurid passion and romance. As a historical 
 tragedy it was a direct test of the dramatic powers 
 of the author, and it is as a dramatic poet that he 
 must be chiefly regarded. In this play we see the 
 ripening of the genius that in youth produced " The 
 Queen Mother," and to me it has far more interest 
 than Swinburne's political lyrics. Mary Stuart and 
 her " four Maries "' are the women of the piece ; 
 Chastelard, her minstrel-lover, and Darnley, the lead- 
 ing men ; Knox, who is to figure so grandly in another 
 and greater work, drifts as a gloomy and portentous 
 shadow across the scene. The poem opens with an 
 exquisitely light French song of the period. A fine 
 romantic flavor, smacking of the " dance and Pro- 
 vencal song," pervades the interludes of the tragedy. 
 The interest centres in the charm wrought by Mary 
 upon Chastelard, although he knows the cruelty of 
 one who toys with him while her ambition suffers 
 him to be put to death. The dungeon-scene, in which 
 he foregoes the Queen's pardon, is very powerful. 
 Swinburne may almost be said to have discovered 
 Mary Stuart. Upon his conception of her character
 
 chastelard: 
 
 405 
 
 he lavishes his strength ; she becomes the historic 
 parallel of the Gothic Venus, loving love rather than 
 her lover, full of passion, full of softness and beauty, 
 full of caprice, vengeance, and deceit. She says of 
 herself : — 
 
 " Nay, dear, I have 
 No tears in me ; I never shall weep much, 
 I think, in all my life ; I have wept for wrath 
 Sometimes, and for mere pain, but for love's pity 
 I cannot weep at all. I would to God 
 You loved me less ; I give you all I can 
 For all this love of yours, and yet I am sure 
 I shall live out the sorrow of your death 
 And be glad afterwards." 
 
 Yet this royal Lamia, when with a lover (and she 
 never is without one), is so much passion's slave as 
 to invite risks which certainly will be the death of 
 her favorite, and possibly her own ruin. In depict- 
 ing her as she moves through the historic changes of 
 her life Swinburne has fortunately chosen a theme 
 well suited to him. Mary Beaton, who in secret 
 adores Chastelard, serves as a foil to the Queen, and 
 is an equally resolute character. The execution scene 
 is strongly managed, with thrilling dialogue between 
 this Mary and Mary Carmichael ; at the end room is 
 made for my lord of Bothwell, next the Queen. 
 Though alive with poetry and passion, this play, like 
 " Atalanta," is restrained within artistic bounds. It 
 has less mannerism than we find in most of the au- 
 thor's early style. The chief personages are drawn 
 strongly and distinctly, and the language of the Scot- 
 tish citizens, burgesses, courtiers, etc., is true to the 
 matter and the time. The whole play is intensely 
 emotional, the scenes and dialogue are vigorously 
 conceived, and it must be owned that "Chastelard"} 
 
 Choice of 
 theme.
 
 4o6 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 "Bothwell," 
 1874. 
 
 The author 
 in the front 
 rank of 
 Tnodern dra- 
 tnaiic poets. 
 
 "BothiveU," 
 an epic in 
 dratnatic 
 form. 
 
 was a remarkable essay for a poet of Swinburne's 
 age at the date of its production. 
 
 Nevertheless, youth is .the time to feel, and there- 
 fore for a poet to illustrate, the extreme abandonment 
 of delirious but unselfish passion. The second and 
 greater portion of the Stuart trilogy required a man 
 to write it. Now that almost a decade of creative 
 and somewhat tempestuous experience has strength- 
 ened, calmed, and otherwise perfected Swinburne's 
 faculties, he completes the grand historical poem of 
 Bothwell; a prodigious work in every way, — possibly 
 the longest five-act drama ever written, and, at least, 
 longer than any whose power and interest have not 
 given out before the close. The time has not yet 
 come to determine its place in English literature. 
 But I agree with them who declare that Swinburne, 
 by this massive and heroic composition, has placed 
 himself in the front line of our poets ; that no one 
 can be thought his superior in true dramatic power. 
 The work not only is large, but written in a large 
 manner. It seems deficient in contrasts, especially 
 needing the relief which humor, song and by-play af- 
 ford to a tragic plot. But it is a great historical 
 poem, cast in a dramatic rather than epic form, for 
 the sake of stronger analysis and dialogue. Consid- 
 ered as a dramatic epic, it has no parallel, and is 
 replete with proofs of laborious study and faithful 
 use of the rich materials afforded by the theme. .Ar- 
 tistically speaking, this painstaking has checked the 
 movement ; even so free and ardent a genius is ham- 
 pered by scholarship, on which Jonson prided himself, 
 though imagination served Shakespeare's turn. 
 
 On the other hand, " Bothwell " is a genuine con- 
 tribution to history. The subject has grown upon
 
 'BOTHWELL. 
 
 407 
 
 the poet. This section of the trilogy is many times 
 the length of " Chastelard." " Things, now, that bear 
 a weighty and a serious brow " are set before the 
 reader. Great affairs of state hang at poise ; Rizzio, 
 Darnley, Murray, Gordon, Knox, Bothwell, and the 
 Queen are made to live or die in our presence, and 
 the most of them are tangled in a red and desperate 
 coil. Mary's character has hardened ; she has grown 
 more reckless, fuller of evil passion, and now is not 
 only a murderess by implication, but, outraged by the 
 slaughter of Rizzio, becomes a murderess in fact. 
 The sum of her iniquities is recounted by Knox in 
 his preachment to the citizens of Edinburgh. That 
 wonderful harangue seems to me the most sustained 
 and characteristic passage in modern verse ; but even 
 this Mary Stuart, who " washed her feet " in the 
 blood of her lovers, — even she has found her tamer 
 in the brutal and ruthless Bothwell, who towers like 
 a black demon throughout the play. Nevertheless, 
 amid her cruelties and crimes, we discover, from her 
 very self-abandonment to the first really strong man 
 she has met, that her falseness has been the reac- 
 tion of a fine nature warped and degraded by the 
 feeble creatures hitherto imposed upon her. Such 
 love as she had for the beautiful was given to her 
 poet and her musician, to Chastelard and Rizzio; 
 but only the virile and heroic can fully satisfy her 
 own nature and master it for good or evil. Under 
 certain auspices, from her youth up, she might have 
 been a paragon of love, sovereignty, and womanhood. 
 Among the various notable passages in this drama 
 are : the death of Rizzio, the scenes before and after 
 the murder of Darnley, the interviews between Both- 
 well and Mary in Hermitage Casde and elsewhere. 
 
 The Queen 
 0/ Scots. 
 
 Notable pas- 
 sages and 
 scenes.
 
 4o8 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 the populace harangued by Knox ; finally, the clos- 
 ing speech of the Queen to Mary Beaton, whose 
 sinister avowal, 
 
 " But I will never leave you till you die ! " 
 
 connects the entire plot with that ominous future, 
 whose story, ever deepening in gloom, has yet to 
 make the trilogy complete. " Bothwell " exhibits no 
 excess but that of length, and no mannerism ; on the 
 contrary, a superb manner, and a ripe, pure, and ma- 
 jestic style. To show the strength, richness, and 
 dramatic variety of Swinburne's mature language, let 
 us take a few extracts from the dialogue of this 
 historical play, with its threescore personages and as 
 many shifting scenes. The first portrays the soldier, 
 Bothwell : — 
 
 Bothwell. 
 
 Mary. 
 
 " Queen. Does your wound pain you ? 
 
 Bothwell. What, I have a wound ? 
 
 Queen. How should one love enough, though she gave all, 
 Who had your like to love .'' I pray you tell me, 
 How did you fight .' 
 
 Bothwell. Why, what were this to tell ? 
 
 I caught this riever, by some chance of God, • 
 
 That put his death into mine hand, alone, 
 And charged him ; foot to foot we fought some space. 
 And he fought well ; a gallant knave, God wot, 
 And worth a sword for better soldier's work 
 Than these thieves' brawls; I would have given him life 
 To ride among mine own men here and serve, 
 But he would nought ; so being sore hurt i' the thigh, 
 I pushed upon him suddenly, and clove 
 His crown through to the chin." 
 
 The second is from the lips of Mary, shut up in 
 Lochleven Castle : — 
 
 " Queen. Ay, we were fools, we Maries twain, and thought 
 To be into the summer back again
 
 'bothwell: 
 
 409 
 
 And see the broom blow in the golden world, 
 
 The gentle broom on hill. For all men's talk 
 
 And all things come and gone yet, yet I find 
 
 I am not tired of that I see not here, 
 
 The sun, and the large air, and the sweet earth, 
 
 And the hours that hum like fire-flies on the hills 
 
 As they burn out and die, and the bowed heaven, 
 
 And the small clouds that swim and swoon i' the sun, 
 
 And the small flowers." 
 
 Lastly, a few powerful lines from Knox's terrific 
 indictment of the Queen : — 
 
 ^'' John Knox Then shall one say, 
 
 Seeing these men also smitten, as ye now 
 Seeing them that bled before to do her good, 
 God is not mocked ; and ye shall surely know 
 What men were these and what man he that spake 
 The things I speak now prophesying, and said 
 That if ye spare to shed her blood for shame. 
 For fear or pity of her great name or face, 
 God shall require of you the innocent blood 
 Shed for her fair face' sake, and from your hands 
 Wring the price forth of her blood-guiltiness." 
 
 . . . . " Her reign and end 
 Shall be like Athaliah's, as her birth 
 Was from the womb of Jezebel, that slew 
 The prophets, and made foul with blood and fire 
 The same land's face that now her seed makes foul 
 With whoredoms and with witchcrafts ; yet they say 
 Peace, where is no peace, while the adulterous blood 
 Feeds yet with life and sin the murderous heart 
 That hath brought forth a wonder to the world 
 And to all time a terror ; and this blood 
 The hands are clean that shed, and they that spare 
 In God's just sight spotted aj foul as Cain'%" 
 
 The exceptions taken against poems of Swinburne's 
 youth will not hold in respect to this fine production. 
 The most serious charge that can be brought is that 
 18 
 
 John Knox,
 
 410 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 Length of 
 this poem. 
 
 Restraint 
 an element 
 of perfect 
 art. 
 
 See page i. 
 
 of its undue length, and as to this the judgments of 
 different readers will be as various as their tempera- 
 ments. " Bothwell " is a work for vigorous minds, 
 and to such it must always seem the bloom of beauty 
 and power. I think it would be fortunate if some 
 new outlet of expression could be made for the dra- 
 matic spirit of our time. Men like Browning and 
 Swinburne do not readily become playwrights ; the 
 stage now requires of a drama that it shall be written 
 in sparkling prose or the lightest of verse, and, of the 
 author, cleverness and ingenuity rather than poetic 
 greatness. It would not injure this writer to shape 
 his work for a direct hearing, to be restricted by the 
 limits of an arbitrary system ; but might have upon 
 
 these historical tragedies a 
 
 gracious 
 
 effect like that 
 
 which resulted from the antique method applied to 
 his " Atalanta." Ritualism, the bane of less prolific 
 natures, is what such a man need not fear. Ease of 
 circumstances has not made an amateur of this artist 
 and enthusiast ; nevertheless, in his case, the benefits 
 of professional independence are nearly balanced by 
 the ills. 
 
 V. 
 
 Taine brings' a great cloud of examples to show 
 that each period shapes the work and fortunes of its 
 authors, but it is equally true that men of genius 
 create new modes, and often determine the nature of 
 periods yet to come. Swinburne may live to see the 
 time and himself in correspondence. To me he seems 
 the foremost of the younger school of British poets. 
 The fact that a man is not yet haloed with the light 
 that comes only when, in death or in hoary age, he
 
 HIS GENIUS AND WORKS. 
 
 411 
 
 recalls to us the past, need not debar him from full 
 recognition. A critic must be quick to estimate the 
 present. For some years, as I have observed the 
 successive efforts of this poet, a feeling of his genius 
 has grown upon me, derived not only from his prom- 
 ise, but from what he actually has done. If he were 
 to write no more, and his past works should be col- 
 lected in a single volume, — although, as in the re- 
 mains of Shelley, we might find little narrative-verse, 
 what a world of melody, and what a wealth of imagi- 
 native song ! It is true that his well-known manner 
 would pervade the book ; we should find no great 
 variety of mood, few studies of visible objects, a 
 meagre reflection of English life as it exists to-day. 
 Yet a subtile observer would perceive how truly he 
 represents his own time, and to a poet this compen- 
 dium would become a lyi-ical hand-book, a treasured 
 exposition of creative and beautiful design. 
 
 Acknowledging the presence of true genius, minor 
 objections are of small account. A poet may hold 
 himself apart, or from caprice may do things un- 
 w'orthy of his noblest self, but we think of him al- 
 ways as at his best. The gift is not so common ; 
 let us value it while it is here. Let us also do 
 justice to the world, — to the world that, remember- 
 ing its past errors, no longer demands of great wits 
 that they should wholly forego madness. Fifty years 
 ago, and Swinburne, for his eccentricities and dis- 
 dain, might have been an exile like Byron and Shel- 
 ley, or, for his republicanism, imprisoned like Leigh 
 Hunt. We have learned that poets gather from strange 
 experiences what they teach in song. If rank un- 
 wholesome flowers spring from too rich a soil, in the 
 end a single fruitful blossoming will compensate us 
 
 A mount 
 and richness 
 of the work 
 already ac- 
 complished 
 by this poet. 
 
 Genius to be 
 measured at 
 its best.
 
 412 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 Application. 
 
 Retrospec- 
 tive si<m- 
 9»ary. 
 
 The Geor- 
 gian era : 
 1790- 1824. 
 
 A transition 
 period. 
 
 Victorian 
 foets. 
 
 for the sterile fleiirs du mal of youth. Lastly, Swin- 
 burne has been said to lack application, but ten years 
 of profuse and consecutive labors refute the charge. 
 Works like his are not produced without energy and 
 long industrious hours. If done at a heat, the slow 
 hidden fire has never ceased its burning. Who shall 
 dictate to a poet his modes and tenses, or his choice 
 of work } But all this matters nothing ; the entire 
 host of traditional follies need not abash us if, with 
 their coming, we have a revival of the olden passion 
 and the olden power. 
 
 During the Georgian era a romantic sentimentalism, 
 exalted to passion in the utterance of Byron, was the 
 dominating spirit of British verse. The more subtile 
 but slowly maturing influence of the Lake school, and 
 that of the idealists Shelley and Keats, did not lay 
 firm hold upon the immediate generation. Their effect 
 was not wholly apparent until the beginning of our 
 own time. Nevertheless, a few poets, among whom 
 Hunt and Procter were notable, extended it over a 
 transition period, and finally saw it become a general 
 and potent force. The reader now has observed the 
 technical finish, the worship of pure beauty, and the 
 revival of classical taste, discernible, before the work 
 of Keats, in the artistic method of Landor, — a poet 
 who so recently ended his career. These constituents, 
 more fully developed by the exquisite genius of Keats, 
 were to mark the outward features of English metri- 
 cal literature during the refined era whose poets have 
 been included under this review ; whose spirit, more- 
 over, suggested that contemplative method which rose 
 to imagination in the high discourse of Wordsworth,
 
 RETROSPECTIVE SUMMARY. 
 
 413 
 
 and too often sinks to didacticism in the perplexed 
 and timorous strains of his disciples. 
 
 After passion, — reflection, taste, repose ; and such 
 have been the qualities displayed by numbers of the 
 Victorian poets in the contemplation of beauty and 
 knowledge, and in the production of their composite 
 verse. At last a Neo-Romantic school, of which 
 Browning and Rossetti have been leaders, is engaged 
 in a nervous effort to reunite beauty and passion in 
 rhythmical art. Swinburne, beyond the rest, having 
 carried expression to its farthest extreme, obeys a 
 healthful impulse, seeking to renew the true dramatic 
 vigor and thus begin another cycle of creative song. 
 Even Tennyson, in the mellow ripeness of his fame, 
 perceives that the mission of the idyllist is ended, and 
 extends to the latest movement his adherence and prac- 
 tical aid. Going outside his special genius and life- 
 long wont, he now — through sheer intellectual force, 
 and the skill made perfect by fifty years of practice — 
 has composed, with deliberate forethought and consum- 
 mate art, a drama that does not belie the name. With- 
 out much imaginative splendor, it is at least objective 
 and adapted to the fitness of things, and thus essen- 
 tially different from Browning's essays toward a revival 
 of the dramatic mould. On the other hand, it also dif- 
 fers from the work of the Elizabethan dramatists, in 
 that it is the result of a forced effort, while the models 
 after which it is shaped were in their day an intui- 
 tive form of expression, — the natural outgrowth of a 
 thoroughly dramatic age. The very effort, however, is 
 alike honorable to England's Laureate and significant 
 of the present need. Wisdom, beauty, and passion — 
 a blended trinity — constitute the poetic strength of 
 every imaginative era, and memorably that of Shake- 
 
 The present 
 situation 
 and outlook. 
 
 Tennyson's 
 drama : 
 " Queen 
 Mary" 
 1875- 
 
 Seepage 191. 
 
 The constit- 
 uents of 
 great dra- 
 77tatic verse.
 
 414 
 
 RETROSPECTIVE SUMMARY. 
 
 speare's time. So long as the true critic's faith, hope, 
 and charity abide (and the greatest of these is charity), 
 he will justify every well-timed, masterly effort to re- 
 call the triune spirit of Britain's noblest and most 
 enduring song. 
 
 [End of the Original Text.1
 
 TWELVE YEARS LATER. 
 
 A SUPPLEMENTARY REVIEW. 
 
 1887. 
 
 WITH respect to the poetry of Great Britain, 
 the fancy may be indulged that this year's 
 festivals not only celebrate the rounding of a bril- 
 liant and distinct period, but stand for a kind of 
 Secular Games as well. It is just a century since 
 Burns and Coleridge and Wordsworth were in the 
 joy of that new dawn, when 
 
 " To be young was very heaven " ; 
 
 and no other land than theirs, meanwhile, has shown 
 a more unbroken procession of imaginative poets. 
 There was a brief nooning between the early and 
 later rehearsals, but the music of great voices has 
 never wholly stopped. This still is heard, though 
 more than a decade of years ago it seemed, and 
 rightly, as if the typical Victorian era were complete. 
 But in the summer of the North the last hours of a 
 day whose wings of light come near to touching its 
 successor's, — although the winds fall and the chief 
 workers mostly go to rest, — have a lustre of their 
 own. The survival of influences that long since be- 
 came historic is a chance coincidence with the pro- 
 longation of a fortunate reign, and due to veteran 
 leaders whose strength has been more than equal to 
 their day. 
 
 Limits of 
 the typical 
 Victorin/t 
 Period.
 
 4i6 
 
 THE VICTORIAN SCHOOL. 
 
 Survival 
 of Us lead- 
 ers. 
 
 lis specific 
 character- 
 istics. 
 
 Tennyson and Browning, although two generations 
 of younger men pay homage to them, have been, 
 with the exception of Swinburne, the most unflag- 
 ging poets of the recent interval. Moreover, — and 
 maugre the flings of wits who judge them by trifles 
 and failures, and who neither care for nor compre- 
 hend their important work, — they have given us 
 much that is up to the standard of their prime. In 
 no respect have they been superannuated or piping 
 out of date, — little as they have had to do with the 
 jest and prettiness, the vivacious experiments, with 
 which youth busies itself ere an hour comes for se- 
 rious attention to the conduct of a new movement. 
 
 Yet if literary eras, like those of Elizabeth and 
 Anne, are characterized by a special style or spirit, 
 that for which the Victorian is already historic, on 
 its poetic side, results from certain idyllic and reflec- 
 tive tendencies, with their interblendings and out- 
 growths. It ceased to be dominant before 1875, 
 going off, as I pointed out, into aesthetic neo-Ro- 
 manticism on the one hand, and a sub-dramatic or 
 psychological method on the other. If life may be 
 judged by its mature and most prolonged activities, 
 the Victorian school will be recognized as we have 
 recognized it. It is beyond ordinary precedent that 
 its two chief poets are still in voice, and still pre- 
 eminent. Of Browning it may be said that he has 
 bided his time, and now is the master of an enthu- 
 siastic following. But even Tennyson has charged 
 his later idyls with passion, and succeeded in mak- 
 ing at least his lyrics dramatic. On the technical 
 side, recent craftsmen take their cue from the forms, 
 melody, color, of Swinburne and Rossetti. What dif- 
 fers and is strictly novel, though much in vogue,
 
 ITS GREATEST LEADERS. 
 
 417 
 
 seldom aspires to the higher range in which these 
 elder leaders have moved almost alone. 
 
 The conjectural length of a poet's life doubtless 
 is not yet reckoned in the tables of insurance actu- 
 aries. But the longevity of modern poets really 
 seems to have been governed by their mental cast. 
 The romancers, and the lyrists of great sensibility 
 or intense experience, quicken their heart-beats and 
 often have died young. Many poets of " self-rev- 
 erence, self-knowledge, self-control," whose intellect 
 is the regulator of well-ordered lives, have lived 
 long : such men as Emerson and Longfellow in 
 America — as Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning in 
 England. The recent drift — and they have strength- 
 ened it — has been toward the rule of intellect over 
 passion, and the brain-power of such masters has 
 maintained them in wonderful vitality and produc- 
 tiveness to an advanced age. 
 
 However this may be, the most suggestive portion 
 of the record now before us is that concerned with 
 the last-named poets. England alone can now boast 
 of two so equal in years and fame, yet so distinct 
 in genius, and still producing works unsurpassed by 
 the efforts of their juniors. Like two brave galleys 
 they still head the fleet, and with all sails spread, 
 though the mists of an unknown sea are straight be- 
 fore them. As for the Laureate, all England knows 
 him by heart. Successive ranks of generous and 
 cultured youths have doted on his works, so that 
 his gradual age is watched and understood, some- 
 what as in a family the bodily and mental changes 
 of its revered master are observed by the household. 
 At times his verse, and oftener than that of his 
 more dramatic compeer's, has sprung from sudden 
 
 The poei''s 
 horoscope. 
 
 Two noble 
 kinsmen.
 
 4i8 
 
 TENNYSON. 
 
 Tennyson. 
 Cp. Chaps, 
 v., VI. 
 
 His dra- 
 matic 
 efforts. 
 
 cp. pp. 
 191, 413. 
 
 Minor 
 Plays. 
 
 outbursts of feeling, and never more so than in the 
 fine heat and choler of his later years. New read- 
 ers may not comprehend these moods, but they are 
 intelligible to those who have owed him so much in 
 the past, and do not affect our judgment of his long 
 career. 
 
 A good deal of force has been expended by the 
 Laureate to disprove the claim that he would not 
 greatly excel as a dramatist for either the closet or 
 the stage. His mental and constructive gifts are 
 such that, if he had begun as a " writer of plays," he 
 doubtless would have been successful, — but never, 
 I believe, could have reached his present eminence. 
 His first drama, " Queen Mary," seemed to confirm 
 an early prediction that he might yet produce a tol- 
 erable work of that kind, though only by a tour de 
 force. Since then, through strong will and persistency, 
 he has composed a succession of dramas, historical 
 and romantic ; but neither will nor judgment, nor 
 the ambition to prove his mastery of the highest 
 and most inclusive form of literature, has enabled 
 him in the afternoon of life to triumph as a drama- 
 tist. The first actor of England, with matchless re- 
 sources for theatrical presentation, was able more 
 than once to make the performance of a play by 
 Tennyson a notable and picturesque event, but noth- 
 ing more ; nor have those produced with equal care 
 by others become any part of the stage repertory. 
 There are charmingly poetic qualities in the minor 
 pieces, and one of them, "The Cup," is not without 
 effects, — but even this will not hold the stage, — 
 while "The Falcon " and "The Promise of May" are
 
 HIS DRAMATIC EFFORTS. 
 
 419 
 
 plainly amateurish. They contain lovely songs and 
 trifles, but when a gi-eat master merges the poet in 
 the playwright he must be judged accordingly. Har- 
 old and Becket are of a more imposing cast, and 
 have significance as examples of what may — and 
 of what may not — be effected by a strong artist in a 
 department to which he is not led by compulsive 
 instinct. Their ancestral themes are in every way 
 worthy of an English poet. " Harold," in style and 
 language, is much like the Idyls of the King, nor 
 does it greatly surpass them in dramatic quality, 
 though a work cast in the standard five-act mould. 
 There is a strong scene where the last of the Saxon 
 kings is forced to swear allegiance to William of 
 Normandy. As a whole, the work is conventional, its 
 battle-scenes reminiscent of Shakespeare and Scott, 
 and the diction tinged with the author's old manner- 
 isms. "Becket," seven years later, is his nearest 
 approach to a dramatic masterpiece, and at a differ- 
 ent time might have ranged itself in stage-literature. 
 It is quite superior, as such, to pieces by Talfourd, 
 Knowles, etc., that are still revived ; but this is poor 
 praise indeed for one of Tennyson's fame, and as- 
 suredly not worth trying for. It must be admitted 
 that years of self-abstraction, of intimacy with books 
 and nature, are not likely to develop the gift of 
 even a born novelist or dramatic poet. Human life 
 is his proper study : his task the expression of its 
 struggle, passion, mirth and sorrow, virtue and crime, 
 — and these must be transcribed by one that has 
 been whirled in their eddies or who observes them 
 very closely from the shore. 
 
 In striking contrast, Tennyson's recent lyrical po- 
 etry is the afterglow of a still radiant genius. Here 
 
 Tragediet. 
 
 "Harold," 
 1876. 
 
 «' Becket,'" 
 1884. 
 
 Lyrical 
 Verse.
 
 420 
 
 LA TER L YRICS. 
 
 •'Ballads, 
 ami Other 
 Poems,'''' 
 i8So. 
 
 " Tiresias, 
 unci Other 
 Poems," 
 
 1885. 
 
 we see undimmed the fire and beauty of his natural 
 gift, and wisdom increased with age. What a col- 
 lection, short as it is, forms the volume of Ballads 
 issued in his seventy-first year ! It opens with the 
 thoroughly English story of "The First Quarrel," 
 with its tragic culmination, — 
 
 " And the boat went down that night, — the boat went down 
 that night ! " 
 
 Country life is what he has observed, and he re- 
 flects it with truth of action and dialect. " The 
 Northern Cobbler" and "The Village Wife" could 
 be written only by the idyllist whose Yorkshire bal- 
 lads delighted us in 1866. But here are greater 
 things, two or three at his highest mark. The passion 
 and lyrical might of " Rizpah " never have been ex- 
 ceeded by the author, nor, I think, by any other poet 
 of his day. " The Revenge " and " Lucknow " are 
 magnificent ballads. " Sir John Oldcastle " and " Co- 
 lumbus " are not what Browning would have made 
 of them; but, again, "The Voyage of Maeldune " is a 
 weird and vocal fantasy, unequally poetic, with the 
 well-known touch in every number. Five years later 
 another book of purely Tennysonian ballads ap- 
 peared. Its title-piece, Tiresias, may be classed with 
 "Lucretius" and "Tithonus," yet scarcely equals the 
 one as a study, or the other for indefinable poetic 
 charm. " The Wreck " and " Despair " are full of 
 power, and there are two more of the unique dia- 
 lect-pieces, " To-morrow " and " The Spinster's Sweet- 
 'arts." A final Arthurian idyl, " Balin and Balan," 
 is below the level of the work whose bulk it en- 
 larges. "The Charge of the Heavy Brigade," much 
 inferior to the Balaklavan lyric, shows that will can-
 
 THE SECOND '' LOCKSLEY HALW 
 
 421 
 
 not supply the heat excited by a thrilling and in- 
 stant occasion. 
 
 A poem in this volume, "The Ancient Sage," con- 
 sists of speculations on the Nameless, — and on the 
 universal question which presents itself ever more 
 strenuously as life's shadows lengthen. In this sense, 
 it is of kin to Browning's " Ferishtah " and " Jo- 
 channan Hakkadosh." Still more noteworthy is the 
 impetuous elegiac " Vastness," written in 1885, and 
 as yet not placed in a collection. The persiflage 
 bestowed upon this, and afterward, in various quar- 
 ters, upon the second Locksley Hall, proclaimed the 
 rise of a generation not wonted to the poet's habit 
 of speech ; more, it revealed one out of patience 
 with its creeds, and consoling itself by avoiding res- 
 olute thought upon what confronts and challenges 
 our mortality. Tennyson, smitten by the death of a 
 friend, reflects that not here alone dear faces steadily 
 vanish, — but 
 
 " Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a van- 
 ish'd race." 
 
 In the knowledge of this, what are all our politics, 
 turmoil, love, ambition, but " a trouble of ants in 
 the gleam of a million million of suns " ? What is 
 it all, forsooth, if at last we end, 
 
 " Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown 'd in the deeps of 
 a meaningless Past " ? 
 
 As was natural, the sequel to " Locksley Hall " was 
 received with more than curiosity — with a certain 
 philosophical interest. I do not see that it is out of 
 temper with that fervid chant which, forty-five years 
 before, seized upon all young hearts and caught the 
 ear of the world. Here is the same protest against 
 
 " Locksley 
 Hall Sixty 
 Years 
 After," 
 1S86.
 
 422 
 
 THE PEERAGE. 
 
 T}te poeCs 
 youth and 
 
 conditions : in youth, a revolt from convention and 
 class-tyranny ; in age, a protest against lawlessness 
 and irreverence. The poet now as then resists the 
 main grievance — but with an old man's increased 
 petulance of speech. His after-song does not wreak 
 itself upon the master passions of love and ambition, 
 and hence fastens less strongly on the thoughts of 
 the young ; nor does it come with the unused rhythm, 
 the fresh and novel cadence, that stamped the now 
 hackneyed measure with a lyric's name. Yet, as to 
 its art and imagery, the same effects are there, dif- 
 fering only in a more vigorous method, an inten- 
 tional roughness, from the individual early verse. 
 The new burthen is termed pessimistic, but for all 
 its impatient summary of ills, it ends with a cry of 
 faith. And so ends " Vastness " : — 
 
 " Peace, let it be ! for I loved him, and love him forever ; 
 dead are not dead but alive." 
 
 the 
 
 If Browning is more intelligibly an optimist, it is be- 
 cause he studies mankind from a scientific point of 
 view, keeping his own temper and spirits withal. He 
 has a more abiding and " saving faith " in the im- 
 manence of a beneficent ruling power. Both these 
 poets have deepened and widened their outlook : the 
 one listens to the roll of the ages, and marks the 
 courses of the stars ; the other pierces the soul, to 
 find the secret of a universe in the microcosm, man. 
 Tennyson is the more impressed by that science 
 which observes the astronomic and cosmic whole of 
 nature, while biology and psychology are anticipated 
 by Browning and subjected to his usufruct. 
 
 When the laureate was raised to the peerage — a 
 station which he tvrice declined in middle life — he
 
 A FIT BESTOWAL. 
 
 423 
 
 gained some attention from the satirists, and his ac- 
 ceptance of rank no doubt was honestly bemoaned 
 by many sturdy radicals. It is difficult, nevertheless, 
 to find any violation of principle or taste in the re- 
 ceipt by England's favorite and official poet of such 
 an honor, bestowed at the climax of his years and 
 fame. Republicans should bear in mind that the 
 republic of letters is the only one to which Alfred 
 Tennyson owed allegiance ; that he was the " first 
 citizen" of an ancient monarchy, which honored let- 
 ters by gratefully conferring upon him its high tradi- 
 tional award. It would be truckling for an Amer- 
 ican, loyal to his own form of government, to receive 
 an aristocratic title from some foreign potentate. 
 Longfellow, for example, promptly declined an order 
 tendered him by the king of Italy. But a sense of 
 fitness, and even patriotism, should make it easy for 
 an Englishman, faithful to a constitutional monarchy, 
 to accept any well-earned dignity under that system. 
 In every country it is thought worth while for one 
 to be the founder of his family ; and in Great Britain 
 no able man could do more for descendants, to whom 
 he is not sure of bequeathing his talents, than by 
 handing down a class-privilege, even though it con- 
 
 fers no additional glory upon the original winner. 
 
 Extreme British democrats, who openly or covertly 
 wish to change the form of government, and even 
 communists, are aware that Tennyson does not be- 
 long to their ranks. He has been, as I long since 
 wrote, a liberal conservative : liberal in humanity and 
 progressive thought, strictly conservative in allegiance 
 to the national sj^stem. As for that, touch but the 
 territory, imperil the institutions, of Great Britain, 
 and Swinburne himself — the pupil of Landor, Maz- 1 
 
 Created 
 Baron 
 Tennyson 
 of Aid- 
 worth, 
 Surrey, 
 and Far- 
 ringford, 
 Freshtua- 
 ter. Isle oj 
 Wight, 
 Jan. 24,
 
 424 
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 " This 
 laurel 
 greener.^ 
 
 BrmvniKg. 
 Cfi. Chap. 
 IX. 
 
 zini, and Hugo — betrays the blood in his veins. 
 Tennyson, a Uberal of the Maurice group, has been 
 cleverly styled by Whitman a " poet of feudalism " ; 
 he is a celebrator of the past, of sovereignty and 
 knighthood ; he is no lost leader, " just for a ribbon " 
 leaving some gallant cause forsworn or any song un- 
 sung. In all fairness, his acceptance of rank savors 
 less of inconsistency than does the logic of those who 
 rail at the world for neglect of genius, and then up- 
 braid them both for coming to an understanding. 
 
 As a final word about Lord Tennyson, a laureate 
 of thirty-seven years' service, it may be said that no 
 predecessor has filled his office with fewer lapses 
 from the quality of a poet. Southey's patriotic rub- 
 bish was no better, and not much worse, than his 
 verse at large. Wordsworth, during the few years of 
 his incumbency, wrote little official verse. Tennyson 
 has freshened the greenness of the laurel ; a vivid 
 series of national odes and ballads is the result of 
 his journey as its wearer. That some of his perfunc- 
 tory salutations and paeans have been failures, not- 
 ably the Jubilee ode of the current year, is evidence 
 that genius does not always obey orders. The Wel- 
 lington ode, " The Charge of the Light Brigade," the 
 dedications of " In Memoriam " and the " Idyls," and 
 such noble ballads as those of " Grenville," " The 
 Revenge," " Lucknow " — these are his vouchers for 
 the wreath, and, whether inspired by it or not, are 
 henceforth a secure portion of his country's song. 
 
 IL 
 
 Old lovers of Tennyson feel that he is best un- 
 derstood by those who grew up with his poems, and
 
 •' THE INN album:' 
 
 425 
 
 " The Inn 
 Album;' 
 
 1875. 
 
 profited by his advance to the mature art and power 
 of " In Memoriam " and the four chief " Idyls." 
 Browning began and continued in quite another way. 
 A neophyte might as well get hold of his middle- 
 life work, and thence read backward and forward. 
 If one prefers to gain an introduction to the author 
 of The Inn Album from a sustained poem, rather than 
 from his lyrics, nothing better could be chosen than 
 that nervous, coherent work, the first in date of his 
 productions during the time we are considering. I re- 
 call its effect upon one or two of my younger friends, 
 who ascribe to it their first sense of those profound 
 emotions which set the spirit free. Seldom is there 
 a work more inwrought with characterization, fateful 
 gathering, intense human passion, tragic action to 
 which the realistic scene and manners serve as height- 
 ening foils, than this thrilUng epic of men and women 
 whose destinies are compressed within a single day. 
 The tragedy ends with the death of two sinners, whose 
 souls are first laid bare. No one of Browning's works 
 is better proportioned, or less sophisticated in dic- 
 tion, — the latter, in truth, being never suffered to 
 divert attention from the movement and interest of 
 this electric novel in verse. It was quickly followed by 
 a various little book, Pacchiarotto. The poet now turns 
 upon his critics, with countering satire and a defense 
 of his hardy methods ; but he welcomes, in title-piece 
 and epilogue, " friends who are sound " to his Thirty- 
 Four Port, promising " nettlebroth " galore to the 
 feeble and maudlin. Of the shorter efforts, " A For- 
 giveness " displays to the full his dramatic and psy- 
 chological mastery. Its verse is modeled with the 
 strong right hand that painted " My Last Duchess," to 
 which it is in all respects a vigorous companion- 
 piece. 
 
 " Pacchia- 
 rotto, and 
 Ho-w He 
 worked in 
 Distem- 
 per;'' 1876
 
 426 
 
 " DRA MA TIC ID YLS. ' ' 
 
 Agamem- 
 no7i of 
 jEschyius, 
 1S77. 
 
 " La Stti- 
 siaz" etc., 
 1878. 
 
 " Dramat- 
 
 ic Idyls'": 
 1st Series, 
 1879. zd 
 Series, 
 1880. 
 
 A third translation from the Greek drama, the Aga- 
 matmon of ^schylus, is marked by fidelity to the text, 
 gained through a free disregard of English idiom, 
 but scarcely has the sweetness and grace of " Balaus- 
 tion " and " Aristophanes' Apology." 
 
 The volume entitled La Saisiaz : The T%vo Poets 
 of Croisk, like "The Inn Album," commends itself 
 to lay readers, being direct and forcible, with abun- 
 dant food for thought. The opening poem, in the 
 " Locksley Hall " measure, bravely considers the 
 problem of mortal and immortal life. Its successor 
 reeks with humorous wisdom, irony, knowledge of 
 the world. An ideal lyric supplements them, in- 
 scribed to the woman whose aid to the writer's song 
 is symbolized by the cricket's note that helped out 
 a minstrel's tune when his lyre had broken a string. 
 But the finest and richest display of Browning's 
 triune lyrical, narrative, and analytical vigor, which 
 he has given us since the memorable " Dramatic 
 Lyrics " and " Men and Women," is found in the 
 series of Drajiiatic Idyls. These silence critical com- 
 plaint of the neglect or dilution of Browning's orig- 
 inal genius. The most impressive of the metrical 
 tales are "Martin Ralph," " Clive " — a marvelous 
 evocation, and " Ned Bratts " — a Holbeinish con- 
 jecture of the efifect on a dull brutish hind of Bun- 
 yan's teachings. " Pheidippides," a figure of the 
 Athenian runner with news from Marathon, is superb, 
 
 and " Doctor " quite unapproachable for jest and 
 
 satire. The story of " Muyle'ykeh " and his Arab steed 
 is already a classic. Always throughout these vivid 
 impersonations, as in " Ivan Ivanovitch " and " Pietro 
 of Albano," the magician's supreme intent is to 
 reveal
 
 BROWNING'S RECENT WORKS. 
 
 427 
 
 " What 's under lock and key — 
 Man's soul ! " 
 
 jfocoseria, made up of brief and sturdy poems, illus- 
 trates again the author's habit of exploration through 
 all literatures for his texts and themes. After the 
 grim, pathetic ballad of " Donald " and the grimmer 
 " Christina and Monaldeschi," we have in " Jochan- 
 nan Hakkadosh " the vital lessons of the book. 
 The Rabbi and the pupils, who find his sayings hard 
 indeed, are no inapt types of our modern poet and 
 his circle. As in "Paracelsus," Browning's favorite 
 theorem continues to be the soul's real victory 
 achieved in the apparent failures of earthly life. 
 His latter years are given more and more to the 
 consideration of eternal rather than temporal ques- 
 tions. Under the guise of a Dervish he proffers, 
 in Ferishtah^s Fancies, a sum of hopeful wisdom as 
 to the meaning of existence, the goodness of the 
 Creator. The thought, like all great thought, is sim- 
 ple, yet put so subtle-wise as to make it well that 
 our latter-day Solomon has the fame that tempts a 
 world to study the riddling homilies of his old age. 
 To those who balk thereat no comfort is vouchsafed 
 except such as they find in " Pambo " of the preced- 
 ing volume, — for he still merrily "offends with his 
 tongue," though clearly an interpreter of the purest 
 theistic spirit of our time. My brief references to 
 Browning's plenteous aftermath close with his Par- 
 leyings with Certain People of Importance in Their 
 Day. His intellect disports itself more than ever in 
 these half dozen citations of far-away personages 
 whom he raises from the dead at will. The work is 
 capricious enough, but he does not forget, in the 
 most rugged and obscure passages, to give us inter- 
 
 " Jocose- 
 ria,'' 1883. 
 
 " Ferish- 
 tak's Fan- 
 cies,"' 1884. 
 
 " Parley- 
 ings," etc., 
 1S87.
 
 428 
 
 BROWNING'S RHYMED VERSE. 
 
 ludes that prove his voice still unimpaired. " Gerard 
 de Lareise " is smooth and delicate enough for a 
 fastidious ear, with rare bits of song included, and 
 music itself receives expert attention in " Charles 
 Avison." The prologue and epilogue of this book 
 are not its least essential matters. All in all, how- 
 ever, it is not so ultimate and satisfactory as one 
 could desire. At whatever worth he may rate the 
 clubs of quidnuncs associated to study him, he does 
 not disdain to make riddles for them, as in the Pre- 
 lude, and to choose remote, obscure topics for their 
 discussion — somewhat as the wizard Michael Scott, 
 compelled to supply tasks for his familiar, succeeded 
 at last by ordering him to make ropes out of sea- 
 sand. He is right in affording them no special 
 clews, for that which, written in verse, can be con- 
 veyed as well by a paraphrase certainly is not po- 
 etry. 
 
 Most of the foregoing work, so varied and af- 
 fluent, is in rhymed verse. Great respect is paid to 
 the observance of the rhyme, even though meaning 
 and measure halt for it. Whitman's Hebraic chant, 
 often vibrating with rhythmical harmony, is the out- 
 come of a belief that rhymes are hackneyed and 
 trivial ; and as Browning's rhymes are not seldom 
 forced and artificial to a degree reached by no other 
 master, the question is asked why he should rhyme 
 at all, why he does not confine himself to his typi- 
 cal blank-verse and other free-hand measures. 
 
 To this it might be replied that he was born a 
 poet, with the English lyrical ear and accentual in- 
 stinct ; that he rhymes by nature, and exquisitely, as 
 we see from all his simpler melodies, and that he is 
 not the man to slight an intuitive note of expres- 
 
 Brown- 
 ing's use of 
 
 rhyme : 
 
 — /ts cause 
 and effect.
 
 HIS TRAITS OF STYLE. 
 
 429 
 
 sion. With all his headlong tyranny over restraints 
 of form, an adherence to rhyme, as in the case of 
 Swinburne, is " a brake upon his speech " ; other- 
 wise his fluency, although the result of endlessly 
 changeful thought, would quite outleap the effective 
 limits of art. I'hat the brakes creak and groan is a 
 proof they are doing their work. But what of his 
 involved and parenthetical style ? A rule concerning 
 language is that it has power to formulate not only 
 problems of absolute geometry, but those of imagi- 
 native thought ; and clearness of style has been a 
 grace of the first poets and thinkers. When Brown- 
 ing's tangled syntax is involuntary, it may denote a 
 struggling process of thought, for the style is the 
 man. But, in defense of such of these "hard read- 
 
 mgs 
 
 as seem voluntary and of aforethought, we 
 call to mind the oriental feeling that truth is most 
 oractilar when couched in emblems and deep phrases. 
 Nature arms her sweetest kernels with a prickly 
 and resistful exterior, so that they are procured by 
 toil which gives them worth. This poet surrounds 
 his treasures with labyrinths and thorn-hedges that 
 stimulate the reader's onset. The habit is defensi- 
 ble when the treasures are so genuine. To experts 
 and thinkers, who do not need a lure to make them 
 value the quest, such things are an irritation and 
 open to the disfavor shown by many who yield to 
 none in respect for Browning's creative power. 
 
 Yet it is plain that both the style and matter of 
 his work, after years of self-respecting adherence to 
 his own ways, have at last given occasion for the 
 most royal warrant of fame and appreciation ever 
 granted to poet or sage while still in the flesh. To 
 be sure there never was a time when such a result 
 
 A n apothe 
 osis.
 
 430 
 
 THE INVASION OF ARCADY. 
 
 Poets and 
 Pedants. 
 
 The 
 
 BroTvning 
 
 Societies. 
 
 could more reasonably be expected. Our period ex- 
 ceeds all others, even the Alexandrian, in literary 
 bustle and research. What organized phalanxes for 
 the study and annotation of our classics, — of course, 
 and as is fitting, with the Shakespeare societies at 
 their head ! How rude the capture of Shelley, the 
 avatar of our ideality and lyrical feeling ! Old and 
 young, even the " little hordes " of Fourier's social- 
 istic dream, divide the ethereal raiment of the poet's 
 poet, that each may bear away some shred of its 
 gossamer. Shelley's lifelong and reverent lovers, who 
 yield themselves silently to the imponderable, divine 
 beauty of his numbers, and who would as soon make 
 an autopsy of Lycidas himself as to approach his 
 verse with hook and scalpel, look with equal wonder 
 at the tribes which now claim their poet as if by 
 right of discovery and the select few who burden 
 his music with their notes and scholia. Tq its 
 transformation into a " cult " they apply the stric- 
 ture of a famous preacher who was concerned at 
 the multiplication of cheap Bibles. The evangelical 
 bodies, he declared, by placing Holy Writ in every 
 lobby and corridor, have dispelled the sacred awe in 
 which it was held, and in fact have made it " as 
 common as a pack of cards." Feeling, taste, in- 
 stinct, — all are against making a text-book of Shel- 
 ley's poetry, almost the last reliquary guarded, with 
 some right of distant kinship, by those who claim a 
 humble inheritance of song. The sudden uprising 
 of many Browning clubs is the latest symptom of the 
 rage for elucidation. The like of it has not been 
 witnessed since the days of the neo-Platonists and 
 grammarians ; nor were there a thousand printings 
 presses at the command of the Alexandrian scholi-
 
 BROWNING SOCIETIES. 
 
 431 
 
 asts. Not only more than one University quadran- 
 gle, but every mercantile town, from London where 
 the poet dwells to the farthest outpost of the west- 
 ern continent, has its central Browning Society, from 
 which dependants radiate like the little spiders that 
 spin their tiny strands near the maternal web. Em- 
 erson was a seer ; Browning is a virile poet and 
 scholar ; but it has been the same with the follow- 
 ers of both — a Browning student of the first order 
 can do much for us, — while one of the third or fourth 
 remove, whose degree is expressed algebraically as 
 
 B" or 
 
 ;|b. 
 
 may be and often is as prosaic a claim- 
 
 ant to special illumination as one is apt to meet. 
 The " study " of Browning takes strong hold upon 
 theorists, analysts, didacticians, who care little for 
 poetry in itself, and who, like Chinese artists, pay 
 more respect to the facial dimensions of his Muse 
 than to her essential beauty and the divine light of 
 her eyes. The master himself may well view with 
 distrust certain phases of a movement originating 
 with his more-favored disciples ; nor is poetry that 
 requires annotation in its own time surer, on that 
 account, of supremacy in the future. Perhaps the 
 best that can be said of this matter is that some- 
 thing out of the common is needed to direct atten- 
 tion to a great original genius, and to secure for a 
 poet, after his long experience of neglect, some prac- 
 tical return for the fruits of his imagination. 
 
 A contrast between the objective, or classical, 
 dramatic mode and that of Browning is not deroga- 
 tory to the resources of either. In the former, the 
 author's thinking is done outside of the work ; the 
 work itself, the product of thought, stands as a cre- 
 
 Dramatic 
 
 psychohgy.
 
 432 
 
 DRAMA TIC INTROSPECTION. 
 
 ation, with the details of its moulding unexplained. 
 The other exliibits the play of the constructor's 
 thought. The result, as affecting the imagination, 
 justiiies the conventional aim — to make us see, as 
 in real life, the outside of persons and events, con- 
 cerning ourselves rather with actual speech and 
 movement than with a search for hidden influences, 
 esoteric laws. To read one of Browning's psychical 
 analyses is like consulting a watch that has a trans- 
 parent glass, instead of a cap of gold, surmounting 
 the interior. We forget the beauty and proportions 
 of the jeweled timepiece, even its ofifice as a chron- 
 icler of time, and are absorbed by the intricate and 
 dexterous, rather than artistic, display of the works 
 within. Here is movement, here is curious and ex- 
 act machinery — here is the very soul of the thing, 
 no doubt ; but a watch of the kind that marks the 
 time as if by some will and guerdon of its own is 
 even more suggestive and often as satisfying to its 
 possessor. All the more, Browning represents the 
 introspective science of the new age. Regard one 
 of his men or women : you detect not only the 
 striking figure, the impassioned human speech and 
 conduct, but as if from some electric coil so intense 
 a light is shot beyond that every organ and integu- 
 ment are revealed. You see the blood in its secret- 
 est channels, the convolutions and gyrations of the 
 molecular braiii, all the mechanism that obeys the 
 impulse of the resultant personage. Attention is di- 
 verted from the entire creation to the functions of 
 its parts. Events become of import chiefly for the 
 currents which promote them, or which they initiate. 
 Browning's genius has made this under-world a trib- 
 utary of its domain. As a mind-reader, then, he is
 
 TENNYSON, BROWNING, — THEIR PERIOD. 
 
 433 
 
 the most dramatic of poets. The fact that, after 
 scrutinizing his personages, he translates the thoughts 
 of all into his own tongue, may lessen their objec- 
 tive value, but those wonted to the language find 
 nothins: better suited to their taste. 
 
 His judicial acceptance of things as they are is 
 largely a matter of temperament, and does not imply 
 that he is more devout and theistic, or a sounder op- 
 timist, than his chief compeer. The broadening ef- 
 fect of experience as a man of the world also has 
 much to do with it. Both Tennyson and Browning 
 are highly intellectual. The former's instinct for art 
 and beauty is supreme, and mental analytics yield to 
 them in his work. To Browning poetic effects, of 
 which he has proved himself a master, often are noth- 
 ing but impedimenta, to be discarded when fairly in 
 pursuit of psychological discovery. 
 
 A conclusion with respect to Tennyson, in my re- 
 view of his career from a much earlier point of time, 
 was that he would be regarded long hereafter as, 
 " all in all, the fullest representative " of the " refined 
 and complex Victorian age." To this I added that 
 he had carried his idyllic mode " to such perfection 
 that its cycle seems already near an end " and " a 
 new generation is calling for work of a different 
 order, for more vital passion and dramatic force." 
 After many years, he still seems to me the exponent 
 of the typical Victorian period — that in which the 
 sentiment poetized in the " Idyls " and " In Memo- 
 riam" was at its height. It is equally true that 
 Browning: was in reserve as the leader-elect of the 
 present succeeding time. The Queen is still on her 
 throne, but her reign outlasts the schools to which 
 her name belongs. New movements are initiated, and 
 
 Tennys(m. 
 
 and 
 
 Browning. 
 
 Their dif- 
 ferifig re- 
 latiofts to 
 the Period.
 
 434 
 
 SWINBURNE. 
 
 Swin- 
 burne. Cp. 
 Chap. XI. 
 
 Browning is their interpreter so far as poetic insight 
 is concerned. To this we only have to add that he 
 is an eminent example of the justice of our excep- 
 tion to Taine's dogma of the invariable subjection 
 of an artist to his accidental conditions. He has 
 proved that his genius is of the kind that creates its 
 own environment and makes for itself a new atmos- 
 phere, whether of heaven or of earth. 
 
 III. 
 
 Swinburne also has been a leader, particularly on 
 the side of form and expression, and through his 
 brilliant command of effects which novices are just 
 as sure to copy as young musicians are to adopt the 
 " methods " of a Chopin or a Liszt. Obvious ten- 
 dencies of the new school reveal the influence of 
 Browning, modified structurally by Swinburne's lyrical 
 abandonment and feats of diction and rhythm. 
 
 As he reaches middle life, the volume of his pro- 
 ductions becomes remarkable, putting to confusion 
 those who doubted his vitality and staying - power. 
 His second classical drama, Erectheus, is severely an- 
 tique in mould, with strong text and choruses. But it 
 is relatively frigid, apart from common interest, and 
 lacks something of the fire and melody of " Atalanta." 
 The author's compulsive lyrical faculty, however, has 
 not ceased its exercise — the resulting odes, songs, 
 and manifold brief poems having been collected chiefly 
 in the second series of Poems and Ballads and in 
 " Songs of the Springtides," " Studies in Song," " A 
 Century of Roimdels," and " A Midsummer Holiday." 
 Their variety and splendor sustain the minstrel's early 
 promise ; — any one of the collections would make a 
 
 "Erecth- 
 eus," iSj6. 
 
 Recent lyr- 
 ical vol- 
 
 " Poems 
 and Bal- 
 lads," 2d 
 Series, 
 1878.
 
 HIS NE IV LYRICAL VOLUMES. 
 
 435 
 
 reputation. If they have been greeted with less than 
 our old wonder and relish, it is due to the unforgetable 
 novelty of those first impressions, and to the profusion 
 of this poet's exhaustless outgiving. Masterpieces of 
 their kind among the new songs and ballads are the 
 " Ave atque Vale," of which I wrote in a former es- 
 say, and " A Forsaken Garden." The translations 
 from Villon charm the ear with a witching sense 
 possibly unfelt by the vagabond balladist's contem- 
 poraries. Swinburne is still at the head of British 
 elegiac and memorial poets. Witness the twin odes 
 in honor of Landor and Hugo, covering the entire 
 progress of their achievements, and the second ode 
 to Hugo, the lines to Mazzini, and other composi- 
 tions in the highest mood of tributary song. A per- 
 vasive element of these books is that relating to the 
 sea, of which their author is a familiar and votary. 
 One of them (as also the poem " By the North Sea") 
 is inscribed to his " best friend, Theodore Watts," 
 the poet and critic to whom Mr. Swinburne is in- 
 debted for loyal companionship and devotion. The 
 Songs of the Springtides are surcharged with end- 
 less harmony of ocean winds and surges. " Thalas- 
 sius," " On the Cliffs," " The Garden of Cymodoce," 
 full of alliterative and billowy cadence, are fashioned 
 in a classical and nobly swelling mould. The unique 
 poem of Sappho, " On the Cliffs," was suggested by 
 the fancy that the nightingales still repeat fragments 
 of her Lesbian song. A Midsummer Holiday takes 
 us again by the sea and through the 'longshore lanes 
 of England ; its refrain — " Our father Chaucer, here 
 we praise thy name " — recalls the enduring fresh- 
 ness of a poet to whom still the avowal can be made 
 that 
 
 " studies 
 in Song,"' 
 1880. 
 
 " Songs of 
 the Spring' 
 tides," 
 1880. 
 
 " A Mid- 
 summer 
 
 Holiday,'' 
 1S84.
 
 436 
 
 SWINBURNE'S COMPLETED TRILOGY. 
 
 "A Cen- 
 zury of 
 Roundels^^ 
 1883. 
 
 ^^ Tristram 
 of Lyon- 
 esse," 1882. 
 
 New 
 Dramas : 
 " Mary 
 Stuart," 
 
 18S1. 
 
 " Each year that England clothes herself with May 
 She takes thy likeness on her." 
 
 Elaborate and refined as all these pieces are, they 
 exhale a purely English atmosphere. A Century of 
 Roimdds is the most simple and distinctive of the 
 lyrical collections. Among the noteworthy roundels 
 are several discoursing with Death, and those on 
 Autumn and Winter ; best of all, the clear-cut series 
 on " A Baby's Death." In the latter, as in the cradle- 
 songs and other notes of infancy and childhood, he 
 is winning and tender — in all his poems on age, rev- 
 erent and eulogistic. The artistic motive of his polit 
 ical outbursts, at various crises, is quite subordinate 
 to their writer's impulsive views ; their satire and in- 
 vective possibly act as safety-valves and are of in- 
 terest to curious students of the poetic temperaxnent 
 in its extremes. 
 
 Not a few consider Tristram of Lyonesse to be his 
 most attractive and ideal narrative poem. The con- 
 ception of the Arthurian legend is distinct from that 
 of either Tennyson or Arnold, and the verse is rich 
 with desire, foreboding, and pathetic beauty. The 
 opening phrase, " The Sailing of the Swallow," is en- 
 chanting ; the description of Iseult of Ireland is a 
 wonder, and the whole coil of burning love and pite- 
 ous mischance was never before so marvelously 
 woven. 
 
 Of Swinburne's recent dramas, Mary Stuart com- 
 pletes the most imposing Trilogy in modern literature, 
 and is, while less romantic than " Chastelard " and 
 less eloquent than " Bothwell," a fit successor to the 
 two. Its vigor is condensed and joined with a grav- 
 ity becoming the firm hand of maturer years as it 
 depicts the culmination of this historic tragedy — the
 
 ''MARINO FALIEROr 
 
 437 
 
 taking-off of a picturesque, impassioned, superbly self- 
 ish type of royalty and womanhood. The author's 
 consistent ideal of Mary Stuart is formed by intui- 
 tion and critical study, and is reasonably set forth in 
 his prose essay. The future will accept his concep- 
 tion as justly interpreting the secret of her career. 
 In the Trilogy her fate, through the agency of Mary 
 Beaton, is made the predestined outcome of early and 
 heartless misdeeds, and dramatically ends the steady 
 process of the work. 
 
 Marino Faliero, postdating by sixty-five years By- 
 ron's drama of that name, following the same chron- 
 icle and with the same personages, is a direct chal- 
 lenge to comparison. Both are fairly representative 
 of their authors. Neither is a stage-play : Byron's 
 was tested against his own judgment, and he found 
 no fault with the critics who thought his genius un- 
 dramatic. There is no talk of love in either play, 
 except the innocent passion which Swinburne creates 
 between Bertuccio and the Duchess. Both poets make 
 the Doge's part o'ertop all others, but Byron light- 
 ens Faliero's monologues with stage business, etc., 
 and pays serious attention to the action of the piece. 
 Swinburne uses the higher poetic strain throughout ; 
 his language is heroic, the verse and diction are al- 
 ways imposing, but proportion, background, and the 
 question of relative values obtain too little of his at- 
 tention. All know the slovenly and unstudied char- 
 acter of Byron's blank-verse. Swinburne adheres to 
 the type, equally finished and prodigal, to which he 
 has wonted us. In every sense he is a better work- 
 man. But the directness and simplicity of Byron's 
 drama are to be considered. The death-speech which 
 he puts in Faliero's mouth, theatrical as it is, will 
 
 '■'■ Marino 
 Faliero •' 
 A Trag- 
 edy;' 1885, 
 
 Contrast' 
 ed -iuitli 
 Byron's 
 drama.
 
 438 
 
 SWINBURNE'S PROSE MISCELLANIES. 
 
 Swin- 
 burm'S 
 later prose. 
 
 continue memorable as a fine instance of Byronic 
 power. In the modern play the Doge's speech ex- 
 tends to fifteen pages (with the chanting interludes), 
 and this directly after a trial-scene in which he has 
 done most of the talking. Half this rhythmical elo- 
 quence would be more impressive than the whole. 
 
 In spite of Swinburne's deprecation of Lord By- 
 ron, and his own more direct inheritance from Shel- 
 ley, he has several of the former's traits : the scorn 
 of dullness and commonplace, faith in his own con- 
 clusions, and the swift and bold mastery of a forci- 
 ble theme. Continuing the habit of prose-writing, as 
 is the custom of the times, he has displayed his 
 scholarship and versatility in new critical essays. 
 The value of some of these — such, for example, as 
 the prose dithyrambic on Hugo — lies not so much 
 in their judicial quality as in those felicitous critical 
 epigrams which take the reader by their sudden in- 
 sight and originality. " A Note on Charlotte Bronte " 
 is admirable in this way, for all its tendency to ex- 
 tremes. The volume of Miscellanies contains, on 
 the whole, his soundest and most varied prose-writ- 
 ing, much of it as well considered as one could de- 
 sire, and expressing, brilliantly of course, the judg- 
 ment of a poetic scholar in his dispassionate mood. 
 It is interesting to see how easily and royally Mr. 
 Swinburne keeps up his domination over an active 
 class of writers. His scholarship, indisputable talent, 
 and Napoleonic method of judgment and warfare 
 render him a kind of autocrat whom few of his 
 craft care to encounter openly, though specialists in 
 matters of research and criticism occasionally ven- 
 ture on rebellion. Whatever ground he loses is lost 
 in consequence of a law already pointed out, which 
 
 " yictor 
 Hugo,'' 
 
 i8S6. 
 
 " Char. 
 
 lotte 
 
 Bronte,''' 
 
 1877. 
 
 " Miscel- 
 lanies,'''' 
 1886.
 
 STILLED VOICES. 
 
 439 
 
 operates in the case of a vein too rich and produc- 
 tive. The torrent of his rhythm, beautiful and imag- 
 inative as it is, satiates the public — even animals 
 fed on too nutritious food will turn to bran and 
 husks for a relief. And the workings of his genius, 
 from its very force and individuality, are such as he 
 cannot be expected to vary or suspend. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Death has summoned with his impartial touch 
 young and old alike from the cycle of poets consid- 
 ered in our original review. None was more de- 
 plored than Rossetti, the child of astral light, founder 
 of a conjoint school of art and minstrelsy, — the 
 most unworldly and nervously exalted of modern 
 poets. No one has made a more definite, though 
 specific and limited, impression in his time. His 
 work was pursued for its own sake, yet the expres- 
 sion of as rare a personality as the fire of Italy and 
 training of England could develop. A collection of 
 his lyrics, piously made by fitting hands, and the 
 critical mementos by Sharp and Hall Caine, render 
 it needful for me to add but little more. Among 
 the rhymes not in former collections, the finely wrought 
 mediaeval poem of " Rose-Mary " and the strong bal- 
 lad of " The King's Tragedy " are prominent. There 
 are also a few characteristic minor songs and lyrics, 
 and at last the full series of quatorzains comprising 
 The House of Life, — that wondrous rosary of impas- 
 sioned sonnets of life, love, and death, — so distinct 
 from Mrs. Browning's yet henceforth to be named 
 with hers as no less inspired and memorable. An- 
 other poetic soul, that of the old minstrel Home, 
 
 Staled 
 Voices. 
 
 Rossetti, 
 
 d. 1882. 
 
 Home, 
 d. 1884.
 
 440 
 
 ''BREAK THE STRING 
 
 O^Shaugh- 
 nessy, 
 d. 1881. 
 
 P. B. 
 
 Marsion, 
 d. 1887. 
 
 Lord 
 
 Hougkton, 
 
 etc. See 
 
 Cfuipters 
 
 VII., 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Robert 
 Steplien 
 Ila-wker : 
 1803-75. 
 
 Menclla 
 
 Bute 
 
 S medley : 
 
 '825-75. 
 
 has passed away in its due season of years, and 
 therewith a bold and various dramatic bard, typically 
 English in his restless, independent nature. Laura 
 Dibalzo, a fruit of his ripe old age, though not so 
 equable and compact a work as " Cosmo de' Medici," 
 is a tragedy befitting the hand of a friend of Landor 
 and Browning. Arthur O'Shaughnessy was cut off 
 in the midst of an active but scarcely brightening ca- 
 reer. Songs of a Worker, the posthumous volume of 
 this young member of the Neo-Romantic group, 
 shows him in his graver and more humane moods, 
 but contains little better than the striking transla- 
 tions from modern French poets with whom he was 
 thoroughly in rapport. Appreciative tributes to his 
 late brother-in-law are still appearing. Philip Mars- 
 ton's life and early death were very pathetic. There 
 is a touching sincerity in his poems, and their finish, 
 considering his blindness, was noteworthy from the 
 first. He had a sensitive and vibratory but coura- 
 geous nature. Nor was the life of this suffering 
 writer, fostered always by choice and sympathetic as- 
 sociates, without its compensations. Depth of feel- 
 ing is evident throughout Wind-Voices^ his last vol* 
 ume. He wrote of it in one of his letters : " I can 
 at least say of these poems that they have come from 
 the heart." Among others who have joined the silent 
 majority, and whose later works call for no fresh re- 
 marks, are Lord Houghton, George Eliot, Turner, 
 FitzGerald, Thornbury, Calverley, and the Dorsetshire 
 idyllist, William Barnes. Hawker, the sturdy Vicar 
 of Morwenstow, left the record of a unique character, 
 a few vigorous ballads, and the " Song of the West- 
 ern Men." Miss Smedley was a delicate, thoughtful 
 poet, of the Tennysonian school, whose refined lyrics
 
 FOLD MUSICS WING!'' 
 
 441 
 
 were marked by feeling and quiet beauty. A collec- 
 tion was recently made for the first time of Laman 
 Blanchard's verse. He was the long-ago friend of 
 Bulwer, Procter, and Browning, a journalist-poet and 
 humorist of the old type, who wrote some good son- 
 nets and miscellaneous pieces of variable worth. A 
 book of selections, made last year by Percy Cot- 
 ton, from the poetical works of the late Mortimer 
 Collins, receives its warrant through their merit. 
 Collins was a genuine poet within his range. "A 
 Greek Idyll," written years ago, is second only to 
 Dobson's " Autonoe." " The Ivory Gate " has cap- 
 tivating original melody, — a lyric that poets learn 
 by heart. One remembers kindly the natural and 
 even careless singers, such as Collins, who utter their 
 song without pretence or affectation, having sweet 
 voices, and because they can thus express fleeting 
 and spontaneous moods, and in no other way. 
 
 The reproduction, after half a century and in the 
 author's old age, of Wells's jfoseph and his Brethren^ 
 was a new example of the fact that both gods and 
 men conspire to preserve a work of genius. Rossetti 
 and Morley among others took part in this ante- 
 mortem recognition of a poet neglected by his own 
 generation, who certainly had no ground for Cato's 
 protest against the arbitrament of the people of a time 
 different from that in which one has lived. His 
 poem, heralded by Swinburne's introduction with tem- 
 pered praise, — though long, diffuse, with various 
 prosaic interludes, and curiously revealing Wells's ab- 
 solute lack of the sense of humor, — is still an im- 
 posing and dramatic narration, lavish with color and 
 notable for an old-English quality of diction and 
 verse. Its author had drunk so impartially at the 
 
 Lainan 
 Bianch- 
 ard: 
 1804-45. 
 
 Mortimer 
 Coll his .* 
 1827-76. 
 
 Charles 
 Jeremiah 
 irells : 
 1800-79. 
 
 A restored 
 master- 
 piece.
 
 442 
 
 Af. ARNOLD. — W. MORRIS. 
 
 Notes on 
 surviving 
 poets of 
 the origi- 
 nal list. 
 
 Matthew 
 A mold. 
 
 Some 
 
 after- 
 thoughts. 
 
 springs of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton, that it 
 wants evenness of tone. But it was well worth re- 
 viving, and has excited enthusiasm even in this age 
 of research and discovery. 
 
 IVilliaTn 
 Morris. 
 
 The new poems of several authors discussed in the 
 body of this work introduce few notes that suggest 
 much comment or a reversal of early opinion. Pro- 
 fessor Arnold has given us too little verse of late, 
 but his authority as a critic of modern tendencies 
 has steadily widened. Traversing my first notice of 
 him, and as in the case of Browning, I think it right 
 to set down a few qualifications. I feel that the re- 
 gret and unrest which pervade some of his lyrical 
 verse, and which I thought opposed to the healthy 
 impulses of song, were in their own way as truly the 
 expression of Youth as the romanticism of Childe 
 Harold or Locksley Hall. That Arnold was the rep- 
 resentative in his poetry, as he has been a leader 
 through his prose, of the questioning progress of the 
 day — of a day whose perturbation of itself declares 
 a forward-looking spirit — is now more plain to me. 
 Like Emerson in America, he was a teacher and 
 stimulator of many now conspicuous in fields of men- 
 tal activity. A tribute is due, no less, to his most 
 ideal trait, — the subtilty with which he responds to, 
 and almost expresses, the inexpressible — the haunt- 
 ing suggestions, the yearnings, of man and nature — 
 the notes of starlight and shadow, the evasive mys- 
 tery of what we are and " all that we behold." 
 
 The most objective of these poets, William Morris, 
 to whom I applied Hawthorne's phrase — the Artist
 
 MISS ROSSETTI.— MRS. WEBSTER. 
 
 443 
 
 of the Beautiful, now devotes himself rather zealously 
 to the work of social reform, as if content no longer 
 to be "the idle singer of an empty day." Yet his 
 rapid production of verse has scarcely lagged. A 
 translation of the Aeneids of Virgil, in the sounding 
 measure of Chapman's " Iliads," while not verbally 
 archaic, does not fully translate — in the sense of 
 making modern — an epic that was thoroughly mod- 
 ern in its own time. Morris, with his prodigious 
 facility, has completed a similar version of the Iliads, 
 now just published. The Story of Sigurd the Volsung 
 is perhaps his chief sustained work : a timely epic 
 in this reign of Wagner, built up from the German 
 Lied and surely with imposing effect : 
 
 " There was a dwelling of Kings, ere the world was waxen old ; 
 Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched 
 with gold." 
 
 A wonderful achievement, to fashion this monumental 
 work, after re-creating for us the classical and mediae- 
 val tales of Southern Europe and the Sagas of the 
 icy North. Of women poets. Miss Rossetti still finds 
 none beside her on the heights of spiritual vision. 
 The fanciful Masque of the Months, in A Pageant 
 and Other Poems, strengthens belief that her genius is 
 less visible through such constructions than in brief, 
 impassioned lyrics, — stanzas like " Passing and 
 Glassing," — and her sonnets, of which the series 
 entitled " Later Life " is a complement to that on 
 Love in an early volume. Of Mrs. Webster's new 
 dramas /// a Day, a terse Greek tragedy, is the 
 most effective. The lyrics and pastoral romance of 
 Disguises are its best features. A Book of Rhyme adds 
 to the impression that, with all her uncommon gifts, 
 she is too versatile and facile; most of her poetry 
 
 Miss 
 Rossetti. 
 
 Mrs. 
 Webster,
 
 444 
 
 MISS INGELOW. — ALLINGHAM, ETC. 
 
 Miss 
 Ingelcnx). 
 
 A lling- 
 kant. 
 
 Ridiard 
 Garneit : 
 "83s- 
 
 De Vere. 
 
 Palgrave. 
 
 Hake. 
 
 is good, but she has yet to write a poem or drama 
 of the highest class. Jean Ingelow's Focnis of the 
 Old Days and the New, a little graver than those of 
 her springtime, still have many skylark notes. Her 
 ambitious pieces, with the exception of "The World- 
 Martyr," owe their chief value to the songs which 
 they include. It is pleasant to find a general collec- 
 tion of Songs, Ballads a?id Stories, by Allingham, an- 
 other natural singer. He justly says that " these lit- 
 tle songs, found here and there," are not the product 
 of the goose-wing or inkstand ; — 
 
 " — they came without search, — 
 Were found as by chance." 
 
 Many will long retain their liking for the modest 
 poet of " The Fairies " and " Lovely Mary Donnelly." 
 Some genuine harbor-ballads, in a conjuring legen- 
 dary vein, have been written by Dr. Garnett, whose 
 earlier work should have been noted in my original 
 text. Among the Wordsworthians, Aubrey de Vere 
 is the busiest survivor. His Legends of the Saxon 
 Saints and Foray of Queen Meave exhibit no change 
 of characteristics. A diffuse closet-drama, .5"/. Thomas 
 of Canterbury, written from the church point of view, 
 did not preclude Tennyson from entering the same 
 field. Palgrave's Visions of Ejigland transcribes many 
 of the Gesta Romanorum in a great variety of 
 forms. " England Once More," at the close, is a 
 vigorous strain. It is odd at this late day to find a 
 critic, who compiled the Golden Treasury, burdening 
 his own poetry with notes, and in ^ long, collegiate 
 preface defending very simple forms of English 
 metre. Dr. Hake's Legends of the Morrote.' and 
 Maiden Ecstasy show him as the same quaint with- 
 drawn maker of symbolic verse ; a little more vari-
 
 WA RREA^. — PA YNE. — DOMETT, ETC. 
 
 445 
 
 ous than of old, yet scarcely to be read at a stretch. 
 In a stray poem of his, " Farewell to Nature," the 
 " pathetic fallacy " of the soliloquists receives the 
 best treatment which any writer has given it. 
 
 In these days it is probably a mistake to compose 
 a tragedy upon the scale of The Soldier of Fortune 
 (1876), by J. Leicester Warren, the author of " Phi- 
 loctetes." In length it approaches " Bothwell," and 
 Warren certainly betrays an admiration of Swin- 
 burne's verse. But this drama is written throughout 
 with care and vigor, and often with high eloquence, 
 and the lover of true poetry will find much to re- 
 ward him in its scenes. Pygmalion and Silenus, by 
 Woolner, have no more absolute poetic motive than 
 his early pieces : cold as the marble of his sculpture, 
 they would be didactic but for the nature of their 
 themes. John Payne, at the date of his last collec- 
 tion, was still a Neo-Romantic extremist. Neither 
 in the powerful and uncanny Lautrec, nor in his IVew 
 Poems, is there any more trace of realism or mod- 
 ernness than appears in old tapestry or a vellum 
 book of lays. He is a lyrical Ruskin as concerns 
 latter-day innovations. His scholarship and gift for 
 translation into English verse and prose have been 
 memorably utilized for his renderings of Villon, The 
 Thousand Nights and One Night, etc. My early 
 remarks on Domett apply to the well-named collec- 
 tion of his Flotsam and Jetsam, which includes " A 
 Christmas Hymn, New Style," and " Cripplegate " — 
 a poem concerning Milton. Robert Buchanan also 
 has made no new departure. His volume of 1882 
 confirms our respect for him as a balladist, and he 
 has done few better things than " The Lights of 
 Leith." Of late he has been scornful of the Muse 
 
 IVarren. 
 Cp.p. 2S3. 
 
 Woolner. 
 
 PayTit. 
 
 Domett. 
 
 Buchanan.
 
 446 
 
 SCOTT. — PA TMORE. — F. MYERS. — NOEL. 
 
 and her Arcadian haunts and minstrels, but has ex- 
 tended with success his efforts as a playwright, — for 
 which a melodramatic tendency, that does not im- 
 prove his novels, has given him undoubted qualifica- 
 tions. 
 
 Definite advances have been scored, however, by 
 a few of these our old acquaintances. A Poet's Har- 
 vest Home, by the veteran artist Bell Scott, is a 
 century of precious gems in verse, not one of which 
 is without beauty. The quaintness that would be af- 
 fectation in younger men is his by nature, and 
 withal a taste and intellect resembling Landor's. It 
 is rare that so poetic a little book appears. Coven- 
 try Patmore's strain, in the new portions of his 
 
 Marked 
 advances. 
 
 Scott. 
 
 Paimore. 
 
 F. Myers. 
 
 Noel. 
 
 Florilegium Amantis, is " of a higher mood " than 
 his early realism of the grass-plot and drawing-room. 
 The odes first published as "The Unknown Eros," 
 in irregular but stately measures, have a fine re- 
 served power — visible also in the striking apostro- 
 phes to P^ngland. His poem to " My Little Son " is 
 exquisitely touching. The Renewal of Yotith, by 
 Frederick Myers, bears out the promise of his early 
 prime. He is of the school that regards song as a 
 means of expression, and depends on thought and 
 feeling to animate the simplest forms. The " Stan- 
 zas on Mr. Watts's Collected Works " are akin to 
 Parsons's lines on Dante — high praise indeed ; and 
 there is a nobility of tone even in his meditative 
 pieces which reveals an unusual character. Roden 
 Noel is another of whom good words may be hon- 
 estly said — not so much for his more labored vol- 
 umes, The Red Flag, and The House of Razmisbtirg — 
 a semi-drama ; but the utterances found in A Little 
 Child's Mo7iument spring from the inmost depths of
 
 MEREDITH.— PROLIFIC NEW WRITERS. 
 
 447 
 
 a poet's heart, whose impulsive feeling always must 
 constitute its strongest appeal. The most suggestive 
 verse latterly put forth by writers named in this section 
 is that of Meredith, whose touch never yet lacked 
 individuality. He is another of those novelists, such 
 as Kingsley and Thackeray, quite at home on the 
 poet's own ground. His lyrics 0/ the jfoy of Earth 
 (to which a complemental series is announced) have 
 a purpose that reveals itself to one willing to ponder 
 on their often involved, always thought-hoarding lines. 
 He is, with a difference, the Emerson of English 
 poets : " The Woods of Westermain " and " The 
 Lark Ascending " are in veritable harmony with our 
 Concord " Woodnotes." Meredith's talent for melody 
 and structure is sufficient. Even his sonnets are 
 welcome, and whether aptly or carelessly put to- 
 gether; for in each there is some deep or majestic 
 thought, while in fluent measures he runs too much 
 at large. " Lucifer in Starlight " and " The Spirit of 
 Shakespeare " add to our list of important sonnets, 
 and come from one who, in his own phrase, has 
 "never stood at Fortune's beck." 
 
 VL 
 
 Of the poets whose books have appeared mainly 
 since the date of our earlier review, a few are con- 
 spicuous for the extent of their work, and demand 
 attention in any notice of the time. What are their 
 respective claims to the favor awarded leaders whom 
 .hey rival in productiveness ? 
 
 Symonds is fairly typical of the best results of the 
 English university training. He is an exemplar of 
 taste ; this, and liberal culture, joined with fine per- 
 
 George 
 Meredith. 
 
 Prolifi€ 
 tvritera. 
 
 John 
 
 A ddittgioH 
 
 Symonds: 
 
 1840-
 
 448 
 
 SYMONDS. 
 
 A n exctn- 
 filar of 
 Taste. 
 
 His 
 
 poetical 
 works. 
 
 ceptive faculties, endow a writer who has the respect 
 of lovers of the beautiful for his service as a guide 
 to its history and masterpieces. A wealth of lan- 
 guage and material sustains his prose explorations in 
 the renaissance, his Grecian and Italian sketches, his 
 charming discourse of the Greek poets and of the 
 Italian and other literatures. He has given us com- 
 plete and almost ideal translations of the sonnets 
 of Angelo and Campanella. Coming to his original 
 verse, we- again see what taste and sympathy can do 
 for a receptive nature ; all, in fact, that they can do 
 toward the making of a poet born, not with genius, 
 but with a facile and persistent bent for art. The 
 division between friendship and love is no more ab- 
 solute, as not of degree but of kind, than that between 
 the connoisseur and the most careless but impassioned 
 poet. Symonds recognizes this in a thoroughbred pref- 
 ace to ATany Moods, a book covering the verses of 
 fifteen years. He proffers attractive work, good hand- 
 ling of the slow metres, and an Italian modification 
 of the antique feeling. There is some lyrical quality 
 in his " Spring Songs." Almost the same remarks 
 apply to a later volume, New a?id Old. Its atmos- 
 phere, landscape, and notes of sympathy therewith 
 are so unEnglish that one must possess the author's 
 latinesque training to feel them adequately. We have 
 sequences of polished sonnets in the Aninii Figiira 
 and its interpreter, Vagabundi Libclbis. These studies 
 of a "beauty-loving and impulsive, but at the same 
 time self-tormenting and conscientious mind " are his 
 most satisfactory efforts in verse ; but if their emo- 
 tions are, as he avows, " imagined," he reasons too 
 curiously for a poet. " Stella " has a right to com- 
 plain of his hero, and it is no wonder she went mad.
 
 EDWIN ARNOLD. 
 
 449 
 
 His poems are suggestive to careful students only, in 
 spite of their exquisite word-painting and the merit 
 of sonnets like those on " The Thought of Death." 
 Admiring the finish of them all, we try in vain to re- 
 call the one abiding piece or stanza. Here is scholar's 
 work of the first order, the outcome of knowledge 
 and a sense of beauty. Perhaps the author would 
 have succeeded as well as a painter, sculptor, or 
 architect, for in any direction taste would be his main- 
 stay. Nothing can be happier than his rendering, with 
 comments, of the mediaeval Latin Students' Songs, 
 neatly entitled Wine, Woman and Song ; and in the 
 prose " Italian By-ways " his critical touch is so light 
 and rare that we are thankful for his companion- 
 ship. 
 
 Those who wish to make more than a ripple on 
 the stream may profit by the example of Edwin 
 Arnold. During the latest quarter of a busy life he 
 has gained a respectful hearing in his own country 
 and something like fame in America. He is not a 
 creative poet, yet the success of his Asiatic legends 
 is due to more than an attractive dressing-up of the 
 commonplace. He has zest, learning, industry, and 
 an instinct for color and picturesqueness strength- 
 ened through absorption of the Oriental poetry, by 
 turns fanciful and sublime. Above all, he shows the 
 advantage of new ground, or of ground newly sur- 
 veyed, and an interest in his subject which is con- 
 tagious. There is a man behind his cantos, and a 
 man clever enough to move in the latest direction 
 of our unsettled taste and thought. A distinct theme 
 and motive, skilfully followed, are the next best things 
 to inventive power. The Light of Asia was not an 
 ordinary production. With The Indian Song of Songs 
 
 Edwin 
 
 Arnold! 
 
 1832- 
 
 Cnuses cf 
 his popt4f 
 larity.
 
 450 
 
 ALFRED AUSTIN. 
 
 C/>. "Poets 
 of A tner- 
 tea," -p. 
 465- 
 
 Alfred 
 A 7tstin : 
 183s- 
 
 Racy criti- 
 tal Essays. 
 
 and Pearls of the Faith it formed a triune exposition, 
 on the poetic side, of the Hindoo and Arabian theolo- 
 gies. Probably Arnold's ideals of Buddhism, even of 
 Islamism, insensibly spring from a western conception, 
 but he conveys them with sensuous warmth and much 
 artistic skill. In these books and the translations 
 from the Mahribhfirata, he works an old vein in a 
 new way. Both the accuracy and ethics of his Ori- 
 ental pieces have been lauded and attacked with equal 
 vehemence. They have received great attention in 
 that section of the United States where discussion is 
 most " advanced " and speculative, and where Bud- 
 dhism and theosophy are just now indiscriminately 
 a fashion, and likely to pass away as have many fash- 
 ions that led up to them. Arnold's longer works may 
 soon be laid aside, but such a lyric as " After Death 
 in Arabia," whether original or a paraphrase, will be 
 treasured for its genuine beauty and serene pledges 
 to human faith and hope. 
 
 Alfred Austin's essays on " The Poetry of the 
 Period " justly attracted notice. They were epigram- 
 matic, conceived in a logical if disciplinary spirit, and 
 almost the first severe criticism to which our "chief 
 musicians " have been subjected. Here was one who 
 dared to lay his hand on the sacred images. He bore 
 down mercilessly upon " the feminine, narrow, domes- 
 ticated, timorous " verse of the day, calling Tennyson 
 feminine, Browning studious. Whitman noisy and 
 chaotic, Swinburne and Morris not great because the 
 times are bad, but only less tedious than the rest. 
 While an iconoclast, his effort was constructive in its 
 demand for the movement and passion that have an- 
 imated more virile eras. When so lusty a critic him- 
 self came out as a poet, it fairly might have been
 
 ALFRED AUSTIN. 
 
 451 
 
 expected that he would at least, whatever his demerits, 
 avoid the tameness thus deplored. But movement and 
 the divine fire are precisely what are lacking in Mr, 
 Austin's respectable and somewhat labored books of 
 verse. The Human Tragedy, a work by which he 
 doubtless would wish to be judged, includes an early 
 printed section, "Madonna's Child," which is a key 
 to the poem. The whole requires ten thousand lines, 
 cast in ottava rhna and other standard forms. The 
 Georgian measures are here, but not their force and 
 glow. The movement is of the slowest, the philos- 
 ophy prudish, and the story hard to follow : lovers 
 are kept from marriage by religious zeal ; they don 
 the Red Cross, travel and talk interminably, and fi- 
 nally are shot, and die in each other's arms to the 
 great comfort of the reader. " Savonarola " is a bet- 
 ter work, — a studious tragedy, but not relieved by 
 humor and realism, and with few touches that are 
 imaginative. The title - piece of At the Gate of the 
 Conveitt is artistic and interesting, and is followed by 
 a good deal of contemplative verse, mostly lyrical in 
 form, with the lofty ode not slighted. What we miss 
 is the incense of divine poesy. The author's satirical 
 interludes have point, and I have seen graceful lyrics 
 from his pen ; but his ambitious verse, on whatever 
 principle composed, is not of the class that reaches 
 the popular heart, nor likely, on the other hand, to 
 capture a select group of votaries like those so loyal 
 from the outset to Rossetti and Browning. 
 
 In every generation there is some maker of books 
 who, without being a great writer, figures as such in 
 his own and other minds. His thorough belief in his 
 function and his hold upon a faithful constituency 
 are things which men of better parts may not envy 
 
 ''The 
 Human 
 Tragedy,''' 
 1S76. 
 
 Lewis 
 Morris : 
 1834-
 
 452 
 
 LEWIS MORRIS. 
 
 /4 mbitiaus 
 facility. 
 
 him, yet find beyond their reach, Lewis Morris with 
 his Epic of Hades, Gwen, Songs of Two Worlds., and 
 other works of many editions, seems to be a writer 
 whose fluent verse satisfies the popular need for rhyth- 
 mical diet. Certain observances usually are noted in 
 poetry of this kind. Its author handles a pretentious 
 theme, and at much length, thus giving his effort 
 an air of importance. He falls into the manner of 
 popular models, and with great facility. He has a 
 story to tell, or some lesson to teach, in all cases 
 trite enough to an expert, but more impressive to the 
 multitude than the expert suspects. Finally, he has 
 zeal and measureless industry, and takes himself more 
 seriously than if he were a sensitive and less robust 
 personage. It would be wrong to say that Mr. Mor- 
 ris's verse is no better than that of Pollok, Tupper, 
 and Bickersteth. But he bears to this, the most re- 
 fined of periods, very nearly the same relation which 
 they bore respectively to their own. " The Epic of 
 Hades " is written in diluted Tennysonian verse, its 
 merit lying in simplicity and avoidance of affecta- 
 tions. It is, however, only a metrical restatement of 
 the Greek mythology according to Lempriere, and 
 without that magic transmutation which alone jus- 
 tifies a resmelting of the antique. " Gwen " is a drama 
 in monologue — an English love-story, and, as far as 
 " Maud " is dramatic, an attenuated Maud, without 
 novelty of form or incident. In few of Morris's poems 
 is there the radiant spirit which floods a word, a line, 
 a passage, with essential meaning. In "The Ode of 
 Life " he girds himself for a Pindaric effort, and 
 strives with much grandiloquence to display the en- 
 tire panorama of existence. His truest poetry, though 
 neither he nor his admirers may so regard it, is found
 
 BA RLOW. — SMITH. — MRS. SINGLE TON. 
 
 453 
 
 among the " Songs of Two Worlds " and Songs Un- 
 sung, and chiefly in simple pieces like "The Organ 
 Boy." A longer poem, " Clytemnestra in Paris," 
 should be mentioned for its originality and interest ; 
 it is based on the trial reports of a recent murder, 
 and shows the worth of a vivid subject and a con- 
 ception due solely to the poet. Morris also is for- 
 cible, though prolix, in some of his speculative theses, 
 but leaves an impression of infallibility and that there 
 are few subjects he would hesitate to preempt. 
 
 A survey of these energetic writers leads to the 
 inference that the more ambitious recent efforts do 
 not acquaint us with the new poets who possess the 
 greatest delicacy of hand and vision, and are subject 
 to the most spiritual moods. Barlow's many volumes, 
 and the successive books of Walter Smith, — author of 
 Olrig Grange, Hilda, Kildrostan, etc., — only strengthen 
 this inference. The vogue of Dr. Smith's produc- 
 tions with a certain class is due to the fact, that, 
 like Mrs. (" Violet Fane ") Singleton's very feminine 
 poem of Denzil Place, each is what she honestly calls 
 the latter — a story in verse. They are metrical novel- 
 ettes, with the excess of interest and liveliness in 
 favor of the lady, who gives zest to her romance by 
 a warmth of realism, upon which the Scotch idyllist 
 would doubtless blush to venture. His North Country 
 Folk contains some good short pieces. Mrs. Single- 
 ton's Queen of the Fairies is a tender story, purely 
 and simply told. Her drama, Anthony Babington, is 
 very creditable, above the common range of woman's 
 work, which scarcely can be said of her miscellaneous 
 lyrics. Her love-poetry is of all grades, and not al- 
 ways in the best taste. Mrs. Pfeiffer has been an 
 untiring producer of verse of a different cast. Her 
 
 George 
 Barlow i 
 
 i8- 
 
 Walter C. 
 Smith : 
 
 Mrs. Sin- 
 gleton' 
 
 Emily 
 P/eiffert
 
 454 
 
 MRS. PFEIFFER.—MRS. KING. — MUNBY. 
 
 Harriet 
 E. Hamil- 
 ton King: 
 1840- 
 
 A rthur 
 Joseph 
 Munby : 
 1828- 
 
 " Doro- 
 thy," 1880. 
 
 A cJtarnt- 
 ing idyl. 
 
 early Poems embraced, besides a good ode " To the 
 Teuton Woman," one or two striking ballads which 
 indicated her natural bent, since developed in " The 
 Fight at Rorke's Drift," and other spirited pieces. 
 Under the Aspens is perhaps her most enjoyable col- 
 lection. Her sonnets are thoughtful and intelligible, 
 in this wise differing from the work of many sonnet- 
 mongers, and those on Shelley and George Eliot are 
 well worth preservation. In her more arduous flights 
 she often fails, but there is an air of refinement and 
 sincerity in much that comes from her pen. 
 
 Mrs. Hamilton King's long poem. The Disciples., has 
 been widely read. Four disciples of Mazzini narrate, 
 chiefly in blank-verse and rhymed heroics, the story 
 of Garibaldi. The influence of the two Brownings is 
 visible in Mrs. King's style. Her chief poem, the 
 story of Fra Ugo Bassi, though too long, has strong 
 passages, and effective pictures of Italian and Sicil- 
 ian scenery. Her defects are a lack of condensed 
 vigor and imagination. 
 
 There are one or two marked exceptions to the in- 
 ference just now drawn. When Mr. Munby's Dorothy 
 appeared, sound-minded readers had a sense of re- 
 freshment. It was a novel pleasure to light upon a 
 complete and wholesome poem, faithfully and win- 
 ningly going at its purpose, that of depicting pastoral 
 English scenes and extolling health and strength as 
 elements of beauty in woman. The heroine of this 
 unique " country story in elegiac verse " is genuine 
 as one of Millet's peasant-girls or Winslow Homer's 
 fisher-maidens. Seldom, nowadays, do we find such 
 pictures of farm-life, bucolic work and sports, outside 
 of Hardy's and Blackmore's novels. The ploughing- 
 scene is a subject for a painter, and he could find,
 
 JAMES THOMSON. 
 
 455 
 
 indeed, a score of charming themes in this one 
 poem. Dorothy's sweet face and noble bearing re- 
 quire, it is true, the device of an aristocratic father- 
 hood, and there is possibly an implication of the 
 benefits of cross-breeding. Munby equals Millet in 
 honest candor, but I think he goes beyond nature in 
 the one blemish of his idyl ; there is an over-coarse- 
 ness in giving even a plough-girl hands that would 
 disgust a navvy or pitman. As might be expected of 
 the poet who wrote " Doris," that lovely pastoral, he 
 is an artist, and has achieved a difficult feat in popu- 
 larizing his elegiac distiches. 
 
 A second exception is that of a man to whom a 
 long chapter might be devoted, and whose life and 
 writings, I doubt not, will be subjects of recurring 
 interest during years to come. For it may almost 
 be said of the late James Thomson, author of The 
 City of Dreadful Night, that he was the English Poe. 
 Not only in his command of measures, his weird im- 
 aginings, intellectual power and gloom, but with re- 
 spect to his errant yet earnest temper, his isola,tion, 
 and divergence from the ways of society as now con- 
 stituted, — and very strangely also in the successive 
 chances of his life so poor and proud, in his final 
 decline through unfortunate habits and infirmities, 
 even to the sad coincidence of his death in a hos- 
 pital, — do the man, his genius, and career afiford an 
 almost starthng parallel to what we know of our 
 poet of "the grotesque and arabesque." Shelley, 
 Heine, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, — such were the writ- 
 ers whom Thomson valued most, and whose influence 
 is visible in his poetr}^ Yet the production already 
 mentioned, and many others, have traits which are 
 not found elsewhere in prose or verse. So much 
 
 James 
 Thomson ', 
 1834-S2. 
 
 Cp. "■Poets 
 of A mer- 
 ka," pp. 
 2 30-23 9- 
 
 A sombre 
 and poivey 
 /ulsenius.
 
 456 
 
 « THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHTP 
 
 " The City 
 of Dread- 
 ful 
 
 Night," 
 1874. 
 
 " Vane^i 
 Story," 
 
 1864. 
 
 might be said of Thomson's work that I scarcely 
 ought to touch upon it here. But "The City of 
 Dreadful Night " may be characterized as a sombre, 
 darkly wrought composition toned to a minor key 
 from which it never varies. It is a mystical allegory, 
 the outgrowth of broodings on hopelessness and 
 spiritual desolation. The legend of Diirer's Melan- 
 cholia is marvelously transcribed, and the isometric 
 interlude, " As I came through the Desert thus it 
 was," is only surpassed by Browning's " Childe Ro- 
 land." The cup of pessimism, with all its conjuring 
 bitterness, is drunk to the dregs in this enshrouded, 
 and again lurid, but always remarkable poem. We 
 have Omar Khayyam's bewilderment, without his ep- 
 icurean compensations. Vane's Story, the title-piece 
 of another volume, is similarly impressive, and minor 
 lyrics are worth study for their intenseness and fre- 
 quent strange beauty. " Vane's Story," though melo- 
 dramatic, and curiously outspoken in its notion of 
 life and death, its opposition to ordinary views, is 
 not easily forgotten. On the side of artistic poetry 
 we have the Arabic love-tale of "Weddah," and 
 " Two Lovers " — a beautiful legend in quatrains. 
 No one can read these, or the passionate " Mater 
 Tenebrarum," or such a rhapsody as " He heard 
 Her Sing," surcharged with melody and fire, without 
 feeling that here was a true and foreordained poet. 
 More profuse than Poe, less careful of his art, often 
 purposely and effectively coarse, he holds a place of 
 his own. He was a natural come-outer, and declared 
 for all sorts and conditions of men, independently of 
 rank or record. At times he proved, by such verses 
 as " Sunday at Hampstead " and " Sunday on the 
 River," that a blither nature underlay his gloom, and
 
 RADICAL AND ALTRUISTIC VERSE. 
 
 4S7 
 
 that happy experiences would have made his song 
 less pessimistic. But if ever a poet learned in suffer- 
 ing, it was he, and if the cup had passed from him 
 we should have lost some powerful and distinctive 
 verse. The posthumous volume, A Voice from the 
 Nile, contains, with a friendly memoir by Bertram 
 Dobell, the fugitive productions of Thomson's early 
 and later years. 
 
 What may be termed the poetry of conviction is 
 not yet without a few representatives. Of these Call, 
 the author of Reverberatioiis and Golden Histories^ is 
 the most facile and poetic. Transcendentalism and 
 positivism are curiously blended in his utterance, and 
 he was one of the first after Emerson to recognize the 
 scientific movement on its imaginative side. He has 
 written, also, verse of an ideal kind, including some 
 winning lyrics. One of the latter, " In Summer when 
 the Days were long," is to be found in anthologies, 
 and usually without the author's name. Miss Beving- 
 ton's Poems, Lyrics, and Sonnets largely consist of ear- 
 nest, but troubled, speculative verse. Miss Blind is 
 another altruistic viriter whose work, in The Prophecy 
 of Saint Olan, has feeling, but is a trifle monotonous. 
 Her later volume, The Heather on Fire, shows a de- 
 cided gain in vigor and the art of picturesque word- 
 painting. The radical and rebellious lyrics of Clarke, 
 the young author of Storm-Drift, evince talent, but 
 his well-told " Story of Salerno " betrays a willing- 
 ness to take risks in an ultimately profitless direc- 
 tion. 
 
 "A Voice 
 frottt the 
 Nile;' 
 1884. 
 
 The Poe- 
 try of Corr 
 viction. 
 
 VVathen 
 
 Mark 
 
 IVilks 
 
 Call: 
 
 1817- 
 
 Lmiisa S. 
 Bevington 
 (Mrs. 
 Giiggen- 
 berger) : 
 
 Mathilde 
 
 Blind: 
 
 1850- 
 
 Herlert E. 
 Clarke : 
 i8-
 
 458 
 
 VARIOUS RECENT POETS. 
 
 A look 
 round tht 
 field. 
 
 Edmund 
 Gosse : 
 1849- 
 
 VII. 
 
 The poetry of many recent authors is still to be 
 considered. They scarcely can be said to initiate a 
 new school, or to divide themselves into groups like 
 those formed by the minor poets of a slightly earlier 
 time. Listening to various masters, and feeling the 
 absence just now of any special tone or drift, more 
 than one new aspirant essays some note of his own. 
 Their very lack of assumption, and failure to claim 
 by bold efforts a share of the attention secured by 
 the novelists, imply a tacit acknowledgment that po- 
 etry cannot maintain at the moment its former dom- 
 inance in the English world of letters. This is an 
 unpromising attitude ; but if they do not exhibit the 
 ardent, full-throated confidence that begets leadership, 
 there still are not a few who devote themselves to 
 ideal beauty, and sing, in spite of discouragements, 
 because the song is in them. They bear in one re- 
 spect a mutual likeness. Though not given to the 
 technical freaks of the recent art-extremists, the work 
 of all displays a finish unknown at the outset of the 
 Victorian period. The art of dexterous verse-making 
 is so established that the neophyte has it at com- 
 mand. As with the technics of modern instrumental 
 music, it is within common reach and not a subject 
 for much remark. 
 
 Gosse, whom the public first knew as a poet, and 
 who has become prominent as a literary scholar and 
 critic, has not suffered general authorship to hinder 
 his more ideal efforts for any length of time. That 
 he is an attractive and competent master of English 
 prose the leading journals and magazines bear con- 
 stant witness, no less than his " Studies in Northern
 
 EDMUND GOSSE. 
 
 459 
 
 " On Viol 
 andFluie^' 
 1873- 
 
 ''New 
 
 Poems," 
 
 1879. 
 
 Literature," his edition of Gray, lectures on poetry, 
 and other essays, biographies, and contributions to 
 works that are richer for his aid. All this prose 
 matter has been refined and bettered by his poetic 
 sensibility. And as a poet, the title of the first 
 book for which he was sole sponsor. On Viol and 
 Flute, hints of his early quality. Though plainly 
 alive to the renaissance movement, it was full of 
 young blood and tuneful impulse ; its contents apper- 
 taining to music, art, love, and the Norse legendary 
 so familiar to him. His JVew Poems, six years later 
 in date, are simpler, more restrained and meditative. 
 They are deftly finished, pure and cool, a degree too 
 cool for current taste. His classical sonnets — from 
 the first he has been a good sonneteer — exhibit all 
 these traits. He has a strong and logical sense of 
 form, while his color is keyed to the tranquil and 
 secondary, rather than the sensuous primitive tones. 
 A grace in which he has few equals is the fidelity 
 to nature of his pastorals and lyrics. There is true 
 and sweet landscape, the very spirit of the English 
 coppices, rivers, and moors, in his quiet pieces. 
 Successful with the French forms which he did much 
 to introduce, he uses them sparingly ; in fact, he 
 seldom or never plays the tricks of the extreme dec- 
 orationists, but trusts to the force of his thoughts 
 and impressions. The contents of the volume, Fir- 
 dausi in Exile, may be taken, I suppose, as his most 
 mature and varied work, for the early drama of 
 *' King Erik," though creditably done and on a 
 theme quite native to him, does not show his bent 
 to be strongly dramatic. Reviewing his verse, one 
 finds a genuine feeling for nature, and subtile ideal- 
 ity, in "Sunshine before Sunrise," "The Whitethroat," 
 
 " Firdatisi 
 in Exile,'''' 
 1885.
 
 460 
 
 IV. S. DL UNT. — ERIC MA CKA V. 
 
 Wilfrid 
 Scawen 
 Blunt : 
 1840- 
 
 Eric 
 
 Mackay: 
 i8x 
 
 "Lying in the Grass," "The Shepherd of the 
 Thames," " Obermann Yet Again." His " Theocri- 
 tus " has delicious melody and charm. There is a 
 return in his longer poems, " Firdausi " and " The 
 Island of the Blest," to the Italian method of Hunt 
 and Keats. Gosse is an example of the latter-day 
 poet who does so well and learnedly in prose as 
 scarcely to obtain full credit for his natural poetic 
 gift. His verse, like that of Arnold, with whom its 
 spirit is allied, grows on one by acquaintance. It is 
 not often of a swift and lyrical character ; yet that 
 he can be both resonant and picturesque is evident 
 from a vigorous ballad, " The Cruise of the Rover," 
 which will bear reading with the sea-ballads of Ten- 
 nyson and Kingsley, and of itself bestows upon its 
 author the name of poet. 
 
 Blunt's Love Sonnets of Proteus are interesting as 
 the artistic and sole utterance of their composer — 
 the record, whether personal or not, of a man's suc- 
 cessive love - experiences. This series of sonnets 
 comes from one guided by the foremost English mas- 
 ter, yet they are idiosyncratic and do not betray a 
 weak or inexpert hand. Their savor of artificiality 
 disappears when the writer ceases to be introspec- 
 tive, as in the fresh and wholesome sonnet on Gi- 
 braltar at the close. While the composition of these 
 Protean verses seems to have been, as a man's love 
 is said to be, an episode, it is plain that The Love 
 Letters of a Violinist and Other Poems (1885), by Eric 
 Mackay, are the handiwork of a brilliant metrical artist 
 and poet born. It requires an effort to acknowledge 
 this, after reading the preposterous " Introductory 
 Notice " with which the author permits some absurd 
 friend to preface the "Canterbury" edition of his
 
 ''MICHAEL field:' 
 
 461 
 
 book. Despite, however, the flaunting bush displayed 
 at the portal, the wine within is rich and brimming, 
 and of an exhilarating flavor. The series of Love 
 Letters in six-line stanzas, while confessedly of the 
 ecstatic virtuoso-type, is a beautiful and passionate 
 work : its beauty that of construction, language, im- 
 agery, — its passion characteristic of the artistic na- 
 ture, and while intensely human, free from any 
 taint of vulgar coarseness. The poem is quite orig- 
 inal, its manner Elizabethan, freshened by a resort 
 to the Italian fountain from which the clearest 
 streams of English song so often have flowed. 
 Mackay's poetic ability is of varied range. The 
 appended studies and lyrics, though conspicuously 
 uneven, all have quality. He is a natural lyrist, 
 with a singing faculty, a novel metrical turn, such 
 as few recent lyrists have at command. In some of 
 his pieces we come suddenly upon a prosaic, almost 
 grotesque, fault of expression ; but there is a fine 
 impulsive spirit animating all. With the very strik- 
 ing poem of " Mary Arden " we at last have, to apply 
 Lowell's phrase, something new said of Shakespeare, 
 and it is said sweetly and imaginatively. It is a pity 
 that there was any clap-trap in the early heralding 
 of these poems, for they do not stand in need of it. 
 A claim to regard was at once established by 
 " Michael Field," through her first volume, embrac- 
 ing the dramas of Callirhoe and Fair Rosamond. It 
 seemed a reoccupation of Swinburne's early ground, 
 but this was only true with respect to the choice of 
 themes. " Callirhoe " is classical merely in subject 
 and time, and is treated in a modern way, the char- 
 acters being living men and women with a language 
 compact of beauty and imagination. " Fair Rosa- 
 
 " MkJiael 
 
 Field": 
 
 18-
 
 462 
 
 ROBERT BRIDGES. 
 
 Rohert 
 Bridges • 
 18- 
 
 culminating 
 
 great 
 
 act of a 
 
 artists to its 
 
 mond " is brief, strong ; the 
 tragic scheme that has beguiled 
 handUng. The dramas in this writer's second book, 
 The Father's Tragedy, etc., reveal the same vigorous 
 touch, but are diffuse and lack contrasting lights and 
 shades ; there is no humor, — speech and action are 
 always at concert-pitch. Their diction, however, is 
 very original. Often an epithet carries force, and is 
 used in an entirely fresh way. This dramatist lacks 
 proportion ; her manner betokens close study of the 
 Elizabethans, but of the minor ones rather than the 
 greatest. Her work is notable for its freedom, even 
 audacity, and contrasts in all respects with that of 
 Tennyson — so correct of style and proportion, yet 
 without natural dramatic fire. Her advance in B7-u- 
 tus Ultor is not of the right kind. It seems as if 
 she hunted history for plots and themes. This is a 
 Roman tragedy, compressed and over-virile — even 
 coarse at times, as if the effort to speak as a man 
 were a forced one. " Michael Field " is ambitious 
 and has warrant for it. Her motto should be 
 " strength and beauty," and not strength alone. The 
 Nero of Robert Bridges, an historical tragedy of the 
 emperor's early reign, with narrower extremes of 
 passion, is to my mind a more essentially virile 
 work. There is a nobler severity in dialogue, which 
 merits the name of Roman. The diction and blank- 
 verse are restrained but impressive. The characters 
 of Nero, Poppaea, Seneca, Agrippina, are distinctly 
 drawn. While in a sense conventional, " Nero " 
 shows the mark of a selfpoised, confident hand. A 
 few of the lyrics in Bridges' eclectic and privately 
 printed volume of 1884 strengthen my opinion that 
 he is a very ideal and artistic poet. The elegy "I
 
 R. W. DIXON.— MISS ROBINSON. 
 
 463 
 
 have loved flowers that fade " is matchless in its 
 way, apparently old in feeling yet perfectly original ; 
 and some of his songs rival it in their brief melody. 
 
 Canon Dixon's early work betrayed the close affin- 
 ity between the new ecclesiasticism and the methods 
 of Rossetti. His Odes and Eclogues, on the other 
 hand, are the most extreme type of Anglo-classic 
 verse, — that peculiar grafting of modern thought 
 upon the Grecian stock in which Arnold was a lead- 
 ing expert, and which is so fascinating to a scholar- 
 poet. His latest lyrics have a peculiar wandering 
 beauty. All his work is finished to a notable de- 
 gree. Dixon and Bridges at this distance appear to 
 be the chief lights of a quaintly esoteric Oxford 
 School. 
 
 Miss Robinson's verse is a delicate spray, en- 
 gendered by influences which began with Ruskin 
 and the pre-Raphaelites, and in the end supplied 
 the motive of British taste in plastic and decorative 
 art, in letters, and in all the refinements of social 
 life. She shows the effect of culture upon an im- 
 pressible feminine nature, placed among devotees 
 of the beautiful, and breathing its atmosphere from 
 her childhood. Her classical studies were like those 
 of Mrs. Browning, with an aesthetic training super- 
 added that was not obtainable in Mrs. Browning's 
 time. Her first little book, A Handful of Honey- 
 suckle., bears the obvious impress of Rossetti, — a 
 shoot from his garden, but with new and fragrant 
 blossoms of its own. The lyrics appended to her 
 next work — a praiseworthy translation of The 
 Crowned Hippolytus — were of a maturer cast. Af- 
 terward, applying her gift to humane transcripts of 
 real life, she wrote The New Arcadia., a group of 
 
 Richard 
 
 Watson 
 Dixon : 
 1833- 
 
 Agnes 
 
 Mary 
 Frances 
 Robinson'. 
 i8s7-
 
 464 
 
 THEODORE WATTS. 
 
 ballads in behalf of suffering womanhood and Eng- 
 land's poor. Doubtless this was too grave an exper- 
 imental task, for in turning at last to Italy, and its 
 rispetti and stornelli, she seems thoroughly at home. 
 Her book of songs. An Italian Garden, is the most 
 essentially poetic of her works thus far. It breathes 
 the Anglo-Italian spirit which is in fact her own. 
 The rispetti forming her wreath of Tuscan cypress, 
 with their beauty and sadness, are in every way 
 characteristic of this poet, and in her most sugges- 
 tive vein. Meanwhile her acquirements enable her 
 to take an active part in the critical and biographi- 
 cal industries which the inevitable book-purveyor now 
 opens for every rising author. Of her sister poets 
 not yet mentioned, Mrs. Liddell and Miss Nesbit 
 deserve notice. The former's "Songs in Minor 
 Keys " are suffused with deep religious feeling, al- 
 ways expressed in good taste. Miss Nesbit's " Lays 
 and Legends " suggest immature but promising indi- 
 viduality. She is capable of strong emotion, which 
 is most effective in her shorter lays. 
 
 Watts, the scholarly critic of poetry and romantic 
 art, and a frequent contributor of verse to the liter- 
 ary journals, has thus far made no public collection 
 of his poems. My knowledge of them is confined 
 to some very perfect sonnets — a form of verse in 
 which he is a natural and acknowledged master — 
 and a few lyrics of an elevated type. His ode to a 
 Caged Petrel shows an eloquent method and a per- 
 ception of Nature's grander aspects. He apparently 
 seeks to revive the broad feeling of the Georgian 
 leaders ; at all events, his touch is quite independent 
 of any bias derived from the eminent poets with 
 whom his life has been closely associated. Among 
 
 Catherine 
 
 ClirUthia 
 
 (Fraser- 
 
 Tytler) 
 
 Liddell: 
 
 1848- 
 
 E. Nesbit : 
 18- 
 
 Theodore 
 Watts : 
 1836-
 
 WA TSON. — LEE-HAMIL TON. — E. MYERS. 
 
 465 
 
 the many writers of good sonnets I may mention 
 Caine — Rossetti's young friend and memorialist. 
 Professor Dowden, whose critical work is always of a 
 high order, has published a volume of poems, from 
 which two or three imaginative examples of the same 
 class have met my eye. 
 
 Watson, judging from The Pri7ice's Quest, is a dis- 
 ciple of Morris and a good one — a poet of slow 
 movement, from whom we have also careful sonnets 
 and Landorian quatrains. Lee- Hamilton's varied 
 Poems and Transcripts, with the studies in Apollo and 
 Marsyas, remind one of the sculptor-poet Story by 
 their reflection of Browning's manner ; yet where he 
 is Browningesque or Rossettian it is usually because 
 the subject cannot be so well treated in another way. 
 He has a taste for the psychologically-dramatic, and 
 usually interests the reader. " The Bride of Porphy- 
 rion " and " The Wonder of the World " are far from 
 commonplace, and his sonnets are exceptionally fine. 
 Dawson is quite possessed by Rossetti, but has re- 
 sources of fancy, rhythm, decoration. If he contrives 
 to outgrow his pupilage, something of worth may be 
 expected from him. There is much simplicity and 
 grace in the Poems of Ernest Myers, largely suggested 
 by study and travel, and they belong to the com- 
 posite art school. The contents of Wyville Home's 
 volumes are too diffuse, and there is nothing in his 
 Lay Canticles superior to a few sonnets in the earlier 
 Songs of a Wayfarer. His failures, however, are those 
 of one who aims high and in time may reach his 
 mark. 
 
 Many of the young writers devote themselves to 
 cabinet-picture making, whether their dainty verse is 
 properly idyllic or dramatic. The scenic tendency 
 
 r. Hall 
 Cattle : 
 18- 
 
 Edward 
 
 Doivden : 
 1843- 
 
 IViUUun 
 Watson : 
 1858- 
 
 Eugene 
 James 
 Lee-Hatnr 
 ilton : 
 1845- 
 
 IVilliant 
 yames 
 Dawson : 
 1854- 
 
 Ernest 
 Myers : 
 1844- 
 
 Home : 
 
 Crayoff 
 Verse.
 
 466 
 
 LEFROY. — POLLOCK. — RAFFALOVICH. 
 
 Edward 
 
 Cracro/t 
 Lefroy : 
 185s- 
 
 IValter 
 /ferries 
 Pollock: 
 1850- 
 
 Mark An- 
 dre Raffa- 
 lovich : 
 18- 
 
 increases, just as it has grown, with an Irving to 
 foster it, upon the stage. New poets strive, through 
 affecting the mind's eye, to outdo the painter's ap- 
 peal to the bodily vision. This invasion of a neigh- 
 boring domain is a failure to utilize their own, and 
 an undervaluation of the noblest of arts. Very pretty 
 things of the kind, however, are often produced in 
 this way. 
 
 A graceful scholar-poet is Lefroy, whose Echoes irn 
 troduce us to old friends in a new guise. His open 
 method is to compress into a single sonnet the tenor 
 of some well - known poem. Gautier's " L'Art," al- 
 ready paraphrased by Dobson, thus appears in son- 
 net-form, and many idyls of Theocritus are treated 
 similarly. But these are supplemented by pleasing 
 sonnets of English cloister and outdoor life. Pollock's 
 Songs and Rhymes, with a prelude by Lang, make up 
 a little book of neat and polished verse Ma-mode, 
 which doubtless scarcely represents the mature or se- 
 rious purpose of its author. Raffalovich's Cyril and 
 Lionel contains well-turned verse of a motive which, 
 although it is not imitative, I find difficult to under- 
 stand. By his name this writer would seem to be 
 more justified than others in eking out his book with 
 lyrics in other tongues than the English. Since the 
 date of " Chastelard " this practice has been more or 
 less affected by the new men. Swinburne put French 
 songs into a play where they rightly belong, as an 
 obligato to the action and discourse. Now every luta- 
 nist splits his tongue, like a parrot's, to sing strange 
 words, — but there are capabilities still left in our 
 native English. If such linguistic feats must be es- 
 sayed, why not compose in the universal Volapuk, 
 — or more mellifiuously in the late Mr. Pearl An- 
 drews's " Alwato '' }
 
 OSCAR WILDE. — RENNELL RODD. 
 
 467 
 
 A phase of the aesthetic crusade in defense of 
 poetry as an utterance of the beautiful solely, — a 
 movement having almost perfect development at its 
 start with Keats so long ago, — has appeared in the 
 outgivings of some of Ruskin's disciples, and avow- 
 edly in the verse of Oscar Wilde. His Poems, with 
 all their conceits, are the fruit of no mean talent. 
 The opening group, under the head " Eleutheria," 
 are the strongest. A lyric to England, " Ave Im- 
 peratrix," is manly verse, — a poetic and eloquent 
 invocation. " The Garden of Eros," " Burden of 
 Itys," " Charmides," are examples of the sensuous 
 pseudo - classicism. There is a good deal of Keats, 
 and something of Swinburne, in Wilde's pages, but 
 his best master is Milton, whom he has studied, as 
 did Keats, to good effect. His scholarship and clev- 
 erness are evident, as well as a native poetic gift. 
 The latter indeed might prove his highest gift, if 
 tended a little more seriously, and possibly he could 
 be on better terms with 'himself in his heart of 
 hearts if he would forego his fancies in behalf of his 
 imagination — as there is still time for him to do. 
 It is fair to accept the statement of his own ground, 
 in his preface to the decorative verse of his friend 
 Rennell Rodd, — though one doubts whether Gautier 
 would not have dubbed the twain jeunes brodeurs, 
 rather than jeunes guerriers, du drapeau romantique. 
 The apostles of our Lord were filled, like them, with 
 a " passionate ambition to go forth into far and fair 
 lands with some message for the nations and some 
 mission for the world.'" But not until many centu- 
 ries had passed were their texts illuminated to the 
 extent displayed by Mr. Rodd and his printer, with 
 their resources of India - paper, apple-green tissue, 
 
 Oscar 
 
 Wilde: 
 
 1856- 
 
 RenneU 
 
 Rodd: 
 
 1858-
 
 468 
 
 STE VENSON. — COLONIAL POETS. — SHARP. 
 
 Robert 
 Louis 
 Bal/our 
 SUvemo7t : 
 1850- 
 
 tVilliam 
 Sharp : 
 18- 
 
 Colonial 
 end 
 
 Provincial 
 Vene. 
 
 vellum, and all the rarities desired by those who die 
 of a rose in aromatic pain. Yet the verse of Rose 
 Leaf and Apple Leaf is not so effeminate as one 
 would suppose. The minstrel's greensickness is now 
 well o"-er, judging from his Feda and other Poems ; 
 and in throwing it off he gives a token of the vigor 
 needful for a decisive mark. 
 
 Now, as a minor but genuine example of poetic 
 art, not alone for art's sake, but for dear nature's 
 sake, — in the light of whose maternal smile all art 
 must thrive and blossom if at all, — take A Child's 
 Garden of Verses by Stevenson. This is a real ad- 
 dition to the lore for children, and to that for man, 
 to whom the child is father. The flowers of this lit- 
 tle garden spring from the surplusage of a genius 
 that creates nothing void of charm and originality. 
 Thanks, then, for the fresh, pure touch, for the reve- 
 lation of childhood with its vision of the lands of 
 Nod and Counterpane, and of those next-door Foreign 
 Lands spied from cherry-tree top, and beyond the 
 trellised wall. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 There is promise in Earth's Voiees, by Sharp, who 
 celebrates Nature, not in a Wordsworthian vein — 
 but somewhat after the manner of Heine and the 
 Germans. The trouble with a long series of studies, 
 like "Earth's Voices" or the rispetti entitled "Tran- 
 scripts from Nature," is that much of it is mere word- 
 painting, and only a few numbers are apt to be spon- 
 taneous. "Sospitra" is his strongest effort. Pos- 
 sibly Sharp — whose critical biography of Rossetti 
 is of value — should not be named with the Aus- 
 tralian contingent of writers, though some of his
 
 GORDON. — SLA DEN. — ROBER TS, E TC. 
 
 469 
 
 sketches and ballads are by one familiar with the 
 South Sea Continent. But there is no questioning 
 the local flavor of Gordon's "Bush Ballads," or the 
 ringing, spirited effectiveness of his lyrics of the field, 
 the turf, and the campaign. Receiving from Mel- 
 bourne the posthumous collection of his Poans, I 
 was at once taken by the dash and verve of this 
 ex-cadet and Australian refugee, — a sheep-farmer, 
 sportsman, amateur steeple-chase rider, and author of 
 " How We Beat the Favorite," the best racing ballad 
 in the language. Gordon's tragic and untimely death 
 may, or may not, have involved a loss to poetry : he 
 was one of the headstrong adventurous spirits whose 
 talent is unquestionable, but whose restless nature 
 and lack of fixed purpose hinder its full development, 
 and from whom their mates are always expecting 
 more than is achieved. Gordon was all by turns and 
 nothing long. There are plentiful traces of Byron, 
 Browning, Swinburne, in his careless style ; but when 
 most himself he bears to Australia the relation of 
 Harte to California, as a poet. What originality marks 
 A Poetry of Exiles and Australian Sketches, by Sladen, 
 is mainly the effect upon one reared in England of 
 a novel atmosphere and sky. Otherwise, Coeliim ?io?i 
 animiim mutant may be said of many colonial poets, 
 and certainly of this scholar of Trinity, Oxford. His 
 key-note is that love of motherland, not yet stifled 
 even among Americans, and which the home-keep- 
 ing Briton does not fully comprehend. Of a few 
 rising British Canadian poets Roberts, the author of 
 In Divers Tones, seems to be foremost. His verse 
 is thoughtful and finished, and conveys a hopeful ex- 
 pression of the native sentiment now perceptible in 
 a land so long only '"' the child of nations." Toru 
 
 Adant 
 Lindsay 
 Gordon I 
 18- 
 
 Douglas 
 B. W. 
 Sladen Z 
 xS- 
 
 CJtarles 
 George 
 Douglas 
 Roberts : 
 i860
 
 470 
 
 SONG, SENTIMENT, AND FANCY. 
 
 Taru 
 Dutt: 
 1856-77. 
 
 A kxander 
 A nderson : 
 18- 
 
 Son?-, 
 Sentiment, 
 and Fattcy. 
 
 Hamilton 
 Aide, 18- 
 
 Marziah. 
 
 Clement 
 William 
 Scott : 
 S841- 
 
 Dutt's Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, edited by 
 Gosse, are the pressed leaves of a tropic flower that, 
 striving to adapt itself to an atmosphere not its own, 
 exhaled some fragrance ere it died. Her verse was 
 curiously western, while narrating legends of a faith 
 which this " pure Hindu, full of the typical qualities 
 of her race and blood," had learned not to believe. 
 It has touches of lyrical melody, and an aspiration 
 that might in time have strengthened into fulfilment. 
 The list of colonial aspirants in Australia, Tasmania, 
 India, and elsewhere, is growing, and after a season 
 more than one of these imperial outposts will give 
 voice to a language of its own. Among local and 
 provincial verse - makers, Anderson, " the surface- 
 man," may be mentioned as one of the best. His 
 dialect-pieces, and poems "of the rail," are welcome, 
 but when he ventures toward the high precincts of 
 Keats and Shelley he leaves his proper ground. 
 
 The song-writers and makers of popular verse are 
 relatively fewer than of old. Many of Aide's Songs 
 without Music are excellent, — the work of a con- 
 noisseur. He preserves for us a little of that spring- 
 time sentiment, without which the world were colder. 
 The later songs of Marzials, who is both composer 
 and balladist, are far more enjoyable than his early 
 rococo-verse which served as a text for a comment 
 in Chapter VIII. As I have said elsewhere, a poet 
 is to be envied who can hear, wherever he goes, his 
 own words and music. In Clement Scott's Lays 
 of a Londoner there are some effective, sympathetic 
 lyrics, — "A Prisoner of War," the " Story of a 
 Stowaway," "The Midshipmite," — and apt memorial 
 poems. His lighter verse also marks him as a suc- 
 cessor to the London group of Hood, Jerrold, Thacfc
 
 THE POETIC DRAMA. — MERIVALE. 
 
 47 i 
 
 eray, etc. T/u- Lazy Minstrel is Ashby-Sterry's latest 
 collection of old-style ditties, and warranted by the 
 favor bestowed upon " Boudoir Ballads." Most of 
 his work is more strictly society - verse than much 
 which goes under that name. A queer but popular 
 field is that laid out and occupied by Dodgson, who, 
 as " Lewis Carroll," has proffered a merry antidote to 
 the hyper-aesthetic and other fads of the day. His 
 Rhyme and Reason contains " Phantasmagoria " and 
 "The Hunting of the Snark " — bright audacities in 
 which the fancy that created " Alice in Wonder- 
 land " plays without tether, and affords delight to the 
 healthy and fun-loving mind. Courthope, also, has a 
 clever vein of his own. His Ltcdibrice Lwm, a light 
 satire on " woman's rights," and The Paradise of 
 Birds., an Aristophanic extravaganza, are enlivened by 
 an easy command of measures, scholarly humor, and 
 abundant fancy. 
 
 The few who are bold enough to write poetry for 
 the dramatic stage lead a forlorn hope, and at least 
 deserve consideration. But first a word of tribute is 
 due to Dr. Marston, of whose works a general col- 
 lection was made in 1876. Some of his dramas were 
 well suited to their purpose, and scenes of true poe- 
 try and emotion are not wanting in " Strathmore " and 
 other plays. Merivale is the most elevated of the 
 dramatists not hitherto mentioned, and success as an 
 artistic playwright is of marked advantage to a dra- 
 matic poet. The White Pilgrim is a good poetic dra- 
 ma, with weirdly imaginative scenes. Florien, a later 
 tragedy, is scarcely a literary advance ; but it dis- 
 plays the author's skill in historic reproduction, is con- 
 sistently English, and of decided interest. Merivale's 
 songs — the "Venetian Boat-Song," for example — 
 
 Joseph 
 A shby- 
 S terry : 
 1838- 
 
 C/uir/es 
 Lutwidge 
 Dodgson : 
 about 1833- 
 
 William 
 John 
 Court- 
 hope : 
 1842- 
 
 Tlu 
 
 Poetic 
 
 Drama. 
 
 Westland 
 Marston : 
 1819- 
 
 Herman 
 Charles 
 
 Merivale i 
 1839-
 
 472 
 
 GILBER T. — RECENT TRANS LA TORS. 
 
 " Ross 
 
 Neil," 18- 
 
 William 
 Gorman 
 
 Wilh : 
 1828- 
 
 are especially good, as those of a dramatist should 
 be. " Ross Neil " has been a fertile composer of 
 metrical dramas and plays. Of the many contained 
 in live books published since 1872, I have seen only 
 those grouped with Andrea the Painter. They are 
 creditable for incident, situation, language, and con- 
 struction, but the writer seldom gains a height com- 
 mensurate with her poetic aim. Wills's Melchior, a 
 long romantic art-poem, which I mention as the work 
 of an active playwright, will not increase the reputa- 
 tion of the author of " The Man o' Airlie " and " Clau- 
 dian." Plainly the shield has been touched with most 
 lightness and precision by the bearer of Mercury's 
 caduceus, — that wit and singular genius, Gilbert, 
 whose Original Plays, delightful with humor and pa- 
 thos, have captured the airiest spirit of our time and 
 added to " the gayety of nations." " Pygmalion and 
 Galatea," " The Wicked World," — and that little 
 poem so charming in scene and dialogue, so pure and 
 original as a piece of fancy, " Broken Hearts," — may 
 not be cast in the noblest moulds of imaginative art ; 
 but for ideality, truth to nature, and thorough adap- 
 tation of means to ends, they have not recently been 
 surpassed in English dramatic literature. 
 
 The field of translation is less persistently tilled than 
 at the date of my former review. The British scholar 
 no longer deems it his bounden duty to produce a 
 fresh metrical version of Horace. There have been 
 a few more translations of Homer, — the most note- 
 worthy being Cayley's Iliad, and the prose texts by 
 
 William 
 Schwenck 
 Gilbert : 
 1836- 
 
 Transla- 
 tiens. 
 
 Lans and his associates. 
 
 Kegan Paul's 
 
 literal and 
 
 lineal " l'\iust " appeared in 1872, and five years later 
 Miss Swanwick published her translation of the same 
 drama. Attention has been paid to the Italian and
 
 £COLE INTERMJ^DIAIRE. 
 
 473 
 
 Spanish masterpieces, and to minor reproductions 
 from the Turkish, Russian, and other modern anthol- 
 ogies. 
 
 IX. 
 
 Finally we observe what has been, all in all, the 
 most specific phase of British minstrelsy since 1875. 
 This is seen in the profusion of lyrical elegantioe, 
 the varied grave and gay ditties, idyls, metrical cameos 
 and intaglios, polished epistles and satires, classed 
 as Society Verse, the Court Verse of older times. 
 Perceiving signs of its revival, I could not foresee 
 that it would flourish as it has, and really constitute 
 the main thing upon which a lyrical interval would 
 plume itself. Its popularity is curious and significant. 
 The pioneer in verse of a movement already evident 
 in society and household art was Austin Dobson. 
 This favorite poet, by turns the Horace, Suckling, 
 Prior, of his day, allying a debonair spirit with the 
 learning and precision of Queen Anne's witty fabu- 
 lists, has well advanced a career which began with 
 "Vignettes in Rhyme." Enjoying the quality of that 
 book, I felt that its poet, to hold his listeners, must 
 change his song from time to time. Of this he has 
 proved himself fully capable. His second volume. 
 Proverbs in Porcelain, gave us a series of little " prov- 
 erbs " in dialogue, exquisite bits of " Louis Quinze," 
 and perfectly unique in English verse. Nothing can 
 excel the beauty and pathos of " Good-Night, Ba- 
 bette," with the Angelus song low-blended in its dy- 
 ing fall. The lines " To a Greek Girl," in the same 
 collection, and the paraphrase of Gautier, " Ars Vic- 
 trix," superadd a grace even beyond that of Dob- 
 son's early lyrics. Who has not read the "Idyl of 
 
 Garde- 
 
 Joyeuse. 
 Cp. "Poeti 
 of A mer- 
 ifa, pp. 
 27s, 448. 
 
 Dobson. 
 cp. p. 273.
 
 474 
 
 AUSTIN DOBSON. 
 
 His many 
 followers. 
 
 the Carp," and the racy ballad of " Beau Brocade " ? 
 Here, too, are his little marvels in the shape of the 
 rondel, rondeau, villanelle, triolet, — those P'rench 
 forms which he has handled with an ease almost in- 
 imitable, yet so wantonly provoking imitation. 
 
 Perhaps Dobson more than others has shaped the 
 temper of our youngest poets. A first selection from 
 his works appeared in the United States in 1880, its 
 welcome justifying a second in 1885. Meanwhile the 
 choice editions de luxe. Old World Idyls and At the 
 Sign of the Lyre, represent the greater portion of his 
 verse. Any author might point to such a record 
 with pride ; there is scarcely a stanza in these vol- 
 umes wanting in extreme refinement, and this with- 
 out marring its freshness and originality. In his 
 place one should never yield — as there are stray 
 omens that he sometimes is yielding — to any popu- 
 lar or journalistic temptation that would add a line 
 to these fortunate pieces, except under the impulse 
 of an artistic and spirited mood. 
 
 The influence of Dobson and his associates has 
 been a characteristic — a symptomatic — expression 
 of the interval between the close of the true Victo- 
 rian period and the beginning of some new and, let 
 us hope, inspiring poetic era. It has created, in 
 fact, a sort of ecole intermediaire, of which the gay 
 and buoyant minstrelsy is doubtless preferable to 
 those affected heroics that bore every one save the 
 egotist who gives vent to them. For real poetry, 
 though but a careless song, light as thistle-down and 
 floating far from view, will find some lodgment for 
 its seed even on distant shores and after long time. 
 The roundelays of Villon, of Du Bellay and his 
 
 Aft Ecole 
 InterTne- 
 iiaire. 
 
 Ple'iade, waited centuries for a fit English welcome
 
 ANDREW LANG. 
 
 475 
 
 and interpretation. Lang's Ballads and Lyrics of old 
 France, in 1872, captured the spirit of early French 
 romantic song. Nine years afterward, his Ballades 
 in Blue China chimed in with the temper of our new- 
 fangled minstrel times. Such craftsmanship as the 
 villanelle on Theocritus, the ballade to the same 
 poet, and the ballades " Of Sleep " and " Of the 
 Book- Hunter," came from a sympathetic hand. In 
 the later " Ballades and Verses Vain " are new trans- 
 lations, etc., and a few striking addenda, memorably 
 the resonant sonnet on the Odyssey. A " Ballade 
 of his Choice of a Sepulchre " is Lang's highest 
 mark as a lyrist, and perhaps the freest vein of his 
 Rhymes a la Mode is in the long poems that do not 
 fall under that designation, such as " The Fortunate 
 Islands." He has almost preempted the " Ballade," 
 but his later specimens of it are scarcely up to his 
 own standard. " Cameos " and " Sonnets from the 
 Antique " are at the head of their class, and natu- 
 rally, for no other Oxonian is at once so variously 
 equipped a scholar and so much of a poet. The fi- 
 delity, diction, and style of his prose translations of 
 Homer and Theocritus are equally distinguished. 
 Thus far his most serious contribution to poetry is 
 Helen of Troy, — a poem taking, as one would ex- 
 pect, the minority view of its legend, and depicting 
 the fair cause of Troy's downfall as a victim to the 
 plots of the gods. It is written felicitously in eight- 
 line stanzas of a novel type, and, while not strong 
 in special phrases and epithets, has much tranquil 
 beauty. On his working-day side, readers never wait 
 long for something bright from this versatile, inven- 
 tive feuilletonist, — a master of persiflage, whose 
 learned humor and audacity, when he is most insu- j 
 lar, are perhaps the most entertaining. 
 
 A ndreio 
 Lang: 
 
 1844-
 
 476 
 
 THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE. 
 
 Considera- 
 tions sug- 
 gested by 
 this review. 
 
 X. 
 
 If imitation be flattery, Dobson and Lang have 
 breathed sufficient of its incense. Their " forms " 
 have haunted a multitude of young singers, and 
 proved as taking and infectious as the airs of Sulli- 
 van's operettas. They have crossed the seas and 
 multiplied in America more rapidly than the English 
 sparrows which preceded them, — so that, as in the 
 case of their feathered compatriots, the question is 
 whether a check can be put to the breed. As I 
 have said, this elegant rhyming, however light and 
 delicate, is in fact a special feature of the latest 
 Victorian literature, and, with its pretty notes ting- 
 ling on the ear, is a text for some last words in dis- 
 cussion of what has gone before. 
 
 First, let me say that it is but shallow reasoning 
 to worry over the outbreak of any fancy or fashion 
 in art. Let a good thing — a much better thing 
 than any form in verse — be overdone, and people 
 will signify their weariness of it so decisively that 
 the quickness of its exit will be as surprising as its 
 temporary vogue. 
 
 What conclusions, then, are derivable from our 
 summary of the British poetic movement of the last 
 dozen years ? We have paid tribute to the noble 
 chants of a few masters who still teach us that 
 Poetry is the child of the soul and the imagination. 
 But one looks to the general drift of the younger 
 poets, who initiate currents to the future, for an an- 
 swer to the question, — What next ? The direct in 
 fluences of Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley are no 
 longer servilely displayed; few echo even Tennyson: 
 Browning, Rossetti, and Swinburne are more widely 
 
 Question of 
 ike outlook.
 
 EXISTING CHA RA CTERISTICS. 
 
 477 
 
 favored ; but ancestral and paternal strains are as 
 much confused and blended in the verse of the new- 
 est aspirants as in genealogy. Their work is more 
 composite than ever, judging from the poets selected 
 as fairly representative. Only two of its divisions 
 are sufficiently pronounced for even a fanciful classi- 
 fication. One is the Stained-Glass poetry, if I may so 
 term it, that dates from " The Blessed Damozel " and 
 cognate models by Rossetti and his group ; the other, 
 that Debonair Verse, whose composers apply them- 
 selves by turns to imitation of the French minstrelsy 
 and forms, and to the aesthetic embroidery of Ken- 
 sington-stitch rhyme, — for in each of these pleasant 
 devices the same practitioners excel. Now the class 
 first named, and the first division of the second, are 
 of alien origin: they are exotics — their renaissance 
 is of the chivalry, romance, mysticism, and balladry 
 of foreign literatures. Only that witty, gallant verse 
 which takes its cue from the courtly British models 
 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is an ex- 
 ception, — and that, whatever its cleverness and pop- 
 ularity, can hardly be termed inventive. 
 
 The next thing to be noted is the finical nicety to 
 which, as we see, the technique of poetry has ad- 
 vanced. Never were there so many capable of pol- 
 ishing measures quite unexceptionable as to form 
 and structure, never fewer whose efforts have lifted 
 them above what is, to be sure, an unprecedented 
 level — but still a level. The cult of beauty and art, 
 delightfully revived so long ago by Hunt and Keats, 
 has brought us at last to this. Concerning inspira- 
 tion and the creative impulse, we have seen first : 
 that recent verse-makers who are most ambitious and 
 prolific have not given much proof of exceptional 
 
 Stained- 
 
 Gliiss 
 
 poetry. 
 
 The Debo- 
 nair Poett. 
 
 A rtisan^ 
 ship. 
 
 Two kindi 
 of limita- 
 tion.
 
 478 
 
 TRUE REALISM. 
 
 The epoch. 
 
 True 
 Realism. 
 
 genius. Their productions have the form and dimen- 
 sion of masterpieces, and little more. Secondly : 
 those who appear to be real poets, shrinking from 
 the effort to do great things in an uncongenial time, 
 reveal their quality by lovely minor work — some- 
 times rising to an heroic and passionate but briefly 
 uttered strain. And it is better to do small things 
 well than to essay bolder ventures without heart or 
 seriousness. Still, I think they must now and then 
 doubt the importance of thus increasing, without 
 specific increase of beauty and novelty, the mass of 
 England's rich anthology. Looking back, years from 
 now, it will be seen that one noble song on a com- 
 pulsive theme has survived whole volumes of elabo- 
 rate, soulless artisanship by even the natural poets. 
 
 What is it, then, that chills the " heart and seri- 
 ousness " of those most artistic and ideal ? The rise 
 of conditions adverse to the imaginative exercise of 
 their powers has been acknowledged from the first 
 in these essays. It is clear that instinct has become 
 measurably dulled, as concerns the relative value of 
 efforts ; so that poets do not magnify their calling 
 as of old. There is less bounce, and, unfortunately, 
 still less aspiration. Nor has the modern spirit, now 
 freed from sentimental illusions, as yet brought its 
 wits to a thorough understanding of what true Real- 
 ism is — viz., that which is just as faithful to the 
 ideal and to the soul of things as to obvious and 
 external matters of artistic treatment. Here again 
 the law of reaction will in the end prevail. Its op- 
 eration is already visible in the demand for more in- 
 ventive and wholesomely romantic works of fiction; 
 and this is but the forerunner of a corresponding 
 impulse by which the poet — the maker — the crea-
 
 SCHOLAR'S WORK. 
 
 479 
 
 tive idealist — whose office it is to perceive and il- 
 lumine all realities, both material and spiritual, will 
 have his place again. 
 
 For a time, however, the revival of creative prose- 
 fiction may occupy more than one poetic mind. 
 Novel-writing is more vigorously pursued than ever, 
 by fresh hands. Journalism opens new and broader 
 courts tempting for their influence, sense of power, 
 and the subsistence yielded. Criticism, book-making, 
 book-editing, are flourishing industries. Scholar's 
 work is steadily pursued, and carried even to analy- 
 sis of living authors. Our poetry itself is too schol- 
 arly. A recent happy statement concerning Byron, 
 that he "did not know enough," does not apply to 
 the typical latter-day poet. He has too much learn- 
 ing withal, of a technical, linguistic, treasure-hunting 
 sort. The over - intellectuality and scholarship of 
 many lyrists absorb them in curious studies, and 
 deaden their impulse toward original and glowing ef- 
 forts. They revive and translate, and borrow far too 
 much the hoardings of all time. Even in their judg- 
 ments they set an undue relative value upon the 
 learning or philosophy of a master under discussion. 
 Moreover, their literary skill and acquirements make 
 the brightest of them serviceable aids to the pub- 
 lishers. No sooner are their names in public favor 
 than the great houses smooth their way along the 
 lucrative paths of book-making. Great and small 
 houses have multiplied, and printing is easy and uni- 
 versal. To all this we indeed owe attractive series 
 of critico-biographical volumes, anthologies catholic 
 and select, encyclopsedias, translations, and texts 
 without end. Good and welcome as much of this 
 work is, my present question must be : Does it not 
 
 Cp. " Poets 
 
 of A >ner- 
 
 ica,^^ pp. 
 
 26, 27, 437» 
 463. 
 
 Learning' 
 vs. Imagi- 
 nation. 
 
 Book- 
 making,
 
 48o 
 
 LACK OF A NATIONAL STYLE. 
 
 Loch of a 
 
 national 
 
 Style. 
 
 chasten and absorb the poet's faculties ? Has he 
 not, at last, too good a literary market ? The com- 
 mon-sense reply is, that, after all, he must live, — 
 and the belief is antiquated that poets, like caged 
 birds, sing better for starving. Yet if you chance of 
 late upon a unique and terribly earnest bard, — a 
 man like Thomson, — you find that he vi^as out of 
 the literary " swim " and usually out of pocket ; 
 while his well-to-do brother more often is the man 
 of letters, corresponding to Southey and Wilson 
 rather than to their fiery contemporaries. If the po- 
 etic drama, for example, were now more frequently 
 calling for elevated work, imagination and subsistence 
 would both be subserved. The stage does make 
 welcome beautiful and witty verse of a light order, 
 but what it regularly supports is the facile play- 
 wright ; and its operettas and scenic plays are logi- 
 cally adapted to the zest for amusement and the 
 ruling decorative frenzy. 
 
 The desire of the critic and the public alike, and 
 first of all, is for something new and additional. 
 But that which is iiew is of higher worth when it 
 contributes to the furtherance of a true national 
 style. What is Spanish, French, German, we at once 
 recognize as such, however different from previous 
 works of like origin ; but how seldom the later Vic- 
 torian minstrelsy is essentially English ! A recent 
 article by W. P. P. Longfellow criticises existing 
 tendencies of architecture in Great Britain. He re- 
 cords the progress of a style which advanced to its 
 culmination with the design for the new Law Courts, 
 and until the " Victorian Gothic was everywhere." 
 He writes that — 
 
 " Success was due, not so much to the style chosen as
 
 WHAT THIS IMPLIES. 
 
 481 
 
 to the fact, that, having found a style which suited them, 
 the English followed it unitedly and persistently. Here 
 seemed to be a national movement, strong, deep, and 
 promising to endure. . . . Then, suddenly, at the signal 
 of two or three restless and clever young men, whose 
 eyes had caught something else, the Enghsh architects 
 with one accord threw the whole thing away; as a boy, 
 after working the morning through at some plaything, 
 with a sudden weariness drops his unfinished toy to run 
 after the first butterfly. . • . They have seemed to show 
 us that their progress was at the impulse of whim rather 
 than conviction, ruled rather by fashion than tradition. 
 It is the mobile Frenchman who in this century has set 
 us an example of steadiness. If his work, like all the 
 rest in our day, lacks some of the higher qualities of older 
 and greater styles, it has, more than any other modern 
 work, the coherency and firmness that are at the bottom 
 of all style." 
 
 The point thus made has a bearing upon more 
 arts than one. A style of architecture, it is true, is 
 the outcome of centuries. Literary style has a read- 
 ier formation and is quickly affected by individual 
 leadership. Yet a national manner has distinguished 
 the most subtile and inclusive of literary forms in 
 every important era. This is not sustained by curious 
 devices and imitations, however choice and attractive, 
 but by harmonizing personal quality y^'ith the national 
 note of expression. I think there is a lack of recog- 
 nizable and pervasive style in our English poetry of 
 the period ; that, with the exception of the portion 
 which confessedly revives the manners of Queen 
 Anne's time and the Georgian, it is chiefly English 
 in its intense desire to escape from Anglicism. 
 
 What does this imply, — style being a visible em- 
 blem of spiritual traits, — other than a want, so far 
 
 See " The 
 
 Neiu 
 
 Pritueton 
 
 Review" 
 
 March, 
 
 1887. 
 
 A deduc 
 tion.
 
 482 
 
 ''THE SAME ARTS THAT DID GAIN 
 
 Post 
 
 Wtbila 
 
 Phtebus. 
 
 as poetry can indicate it, of individual and national 
 purpose ? Breadth, passion, and imagination seem to 
 be the elements least conspicuous in much of the re- 
 cent song. The new men withdraw themselves from 
 the movement of their time and country, forgetting 
 it all in dreamland — in no-man's-land. They com- 
 pose sonnets and ballads as inexpressive of the reso- 
 lution of an imperial and stalwart people as are the 
 figures upon certain modern canvases — the dis- 
 traught, unearthly youths and maidens that wander 
 along shadowy meads by nameless streams, with their 
 eyes fixed on some hand we " cannot see, which 
 beckons " them away. 
 
 It may be that before we can hope for a return 
 of poetic vigor some heroic crisis must be endured, 
 some experience undergone, of more import than the 
 mock-campaigns in weak and barbarous provinces, 
 wliereby Great Britain preserves her military and col- 
 onizing traditions, and avoids the stagnation of utter 
 repose. The grand old realm bids fair to have her 
 awakening. There are clouds enough to bode sterner 
 issues and nearer conflicts than she has faced since 
 Cromwell's time. Ireland is filling men's ears with 
 her threats and appeals. In a season of jubilee so- 
 cialists crowd St. Paul's, their banners inscribed with 
 " Justice and Liberty, or Death " ; the Marseillaise 
 is chorused in London thoroughfares, and London 
 poets sing — triolets. The wise are not swift to pro- 
 nounce this troubadour insouciance a mark of ef- 
 feminacy and declining genius. A great dramatist 
 makes Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, and their com- 
 rades within the fated barricade, heroes all, while 
 casting bullets and waiting for the struggle at dawn, 
 sing — not battle -odes but love -songs. England's
 
 A POWER MUST IT MAINTAIN." 
 
 483 
 
 heroism and imagination are not to be judged by 
 her verse at this moment. Whether the Mother of 
 Nations is to be hke Niobe, or long with loyal chil- 
 dren to rise up and call her blessed, her poets in 
 fit succession will enrich the noblest imaginative lit- 
 erature of any race or tongue, though, peradventure, 
 '' after some time be past."
 
 INDEX.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 AiiLETT, Joseph, 68. 
 
 Adams, Sarah Flower, 257, 278. 
 
 Adonais, Shelley's, 99, 16S, 396, 39S. 
 
 ^schylus, 204, 269. 
 
 /Esthetic Movement, Recent, 416, 
 463 ; Wilde, Rodd, etc., 467 ; Ken- 
 sington-Stitch Verse, 477. 
 
 Affectation, 262 et seq., 300. 
 
 Affluence, of Landor's imagination, 
 46 ; of the recent schools, 345. 
 
 Agamemnon of jEschylus, Browning's, 
 426. 
 
 Aide, Hamilton, 470. 
 
 Aird, Thomas, 255. 
 
 Alcestis, of Euripides, 336. 
 
 Alexander the Great, De Vere's, 242. 
 
 Alexandrian Period, described and 
 compared to the Victorian, 202- 
 209, 430 ; Kingsley on, 208 ; and 
 see pp. 239, 276, 286. 
 
 Alfieri, compared to Landor, 57. 
 
 Alford, Henry, 242, 278. 
 
 Allegorj', Tennyson's love of, 176; 
 borrowed from the Italian, 176; of 
 Home's Orion, 249. 
 
 Allingham, William, 92, 258, 444. 
 
 Alliteration, Tennyson's, 179, 226; 
 Swinburne's, 381. 
 
 Amateurship, generally to be dis- 
 trusted, 58, 59; Landor's, 59; 
 Swinburne's, 410. 
 
 Ambition, L. Morris's, 452. 
 
 America, not understood by Landor, 
 64 • history and song, 290, 291 ; re- 
 
 flex influence on England, 291, 292; 
 and see 389. 
 
 American poets, their freshness and 
 individuality, 290; American and 
 British minor poets contrasted, 290, 
 291 ; Swinburne's strictures upon, 
 402-404. 
 
 Amoebean contests, in Theocritus and 
 in Tennyson, 218, 219. 
 
 Anacreon, 205, 226. 
 
 Analysis, and synthesis, the servitors 
 of Art, 197. 
 
 Anapestic Verse, Browning's and 
 Swinburne's, 325. 
 
 Anderson, Alex., 470. 
 
 " Andrea del Sarto," Browning's, 322. 
 
 Andrea of Hungary, Landor's, 42. 
 
 Andrews, S. P., his "Alwato" lan- 
 guage, 466. 
 
 Andromeda, Kingsley's, 43, 251. 
 
 Angelo, Michael, 448. 
 
 Anglicism, love of motherland, 469; 
 recent lack of, 481. 
 
 Animals, Landor's love for, 61. 
 
 " Annuals," The, 237. 
 
 Anthologia Graca, 204. 
 
 Anthropomorphism, 327. 
 
 Antique, the ; Atalanta the best at- 
 tempt to reproduce it, 386, 387 ; re- 
 moved from popular sympathy, 386; 
 and see Hellenics. 
 
 Application, 412. 
 
 Appreciation, Ruskin on, 298. 
 
 Arabian Nights, 377.
 
 488 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Architecture, and national style, 481. 
 
 Ariosto, II. 
 
 Aristocracy in Art, law of, 53. 
 
 Aristophanes'' Apology, Browning's, 
 l,-^% 426. 
 
 Arnold, Edwin, 270; The Light of 
 Asia, etc., 449, 450. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, a poet of the closet, 
 73 ; review of his genius and writ- 
 ings, 90-100; his first volume, 90; 
 contrasted with Hood, 90, 91 ; a 
 poet of the intellect, 91 ; lyrical ex- 
 cellence and defects, 92 ; his poetic 
 theory, 92 ; his limitations, 93 ; ele- 
 vated blank-verse, 93 ; Balder Dead, 
 93 ; Sohrab and Rustiwi, 94 ; other 
 poems and studies, 95 ; Preface ex- 
 planatory of his own position, 95; 
 his mental structure and attitude, 
 96 ; subjective pieces, 96 ; exhibits 
 reaction from over - culture, 97 ; 
 Clough and Arnold, 98 ; " Thyr- 
 sis," 98 ; his masterly prose-writ- 
 ings, 99 ; final estimate of his stand- 
 ing as a poet, ico; despondent atti- 
 tude of Arnold and Palgrave, 247 ; 
 quoted, 247 ; his citation of Goethe, 
 341 ; revision of foregoing criticism, 
 442 ; a leader of modern thought, 
 ib. ; his most ideal trait, ib. ; and 
 see 5, 40, 167, 168, 251, 289, 348, 
 386, 396, 401, 435, 460, 463. 
 
 Art, spirit of antique, 10 ; Hebraic 
 feeling, 10; mediaeval spirit, 10, 11 ; 
 modern spirit, 11, 12; tendency to 
 reflect its own time, 27 ; transient 
 effect of novelty, 29; law of sym- 
 pathy, 38 ; art as a means of sub- 
 sistence, 58 ; defective art of Mrs. 
 Browning, 126, 144, 146; complex 
 modern art, shown by Tennyson, 
 183, 186; refinement of the minor 
 poets, 240 ; Ruskin on art as a means 
 
 of expression, 288; Balzac on true 
 mission of, 266; Blake on nature 
 and imagination, 266 ; a wise meth- 
 od necessary to art, 300 ; tyranny 
 of forms, 300 ; Art the bride of the 
 imagination, 304; universality of 
 her domain, 403. 
 
 Artisanship, not a substitute for Im- 
 agination, 478. 
 
 Art-School, evolution of, 4, 5 ; Ten- 
 nyson its head, 159; and see 270, 
 
 271,347- 
 Ashby-Sterry, Joseph, 471. 
 
 Ashe, Thomas, 271. 
 
 Aspiration, and attainment, 367 ; mo- 
 dern restriction of, 458, 478. 
 
 Ataianta in Calydon, Swinburne's, re- 
 viewed, 386-389; as a reproduction 
 of the antique, 387 ; choric verse, 
 388 ; Greek dedication of, 398 ; and 
 see 43, 271, 283, 392, 404, 405. 
 
 Athenaum, London, Miss Barrett's 
 contributions to, 123. 
 
 Attic Period, 205. 
 
 Aurora Leigh, Mrs. Browning's, re- 
 flects her own experience, 117, 118; 
 review of, 140-143; Landor's esti- 
 mate of, 142 ; and see 146. 
 
 Austin, Alfred, 450, 451. 
 
 " Ave atque Vale," Swinburne's, 99 ; 
 examined, 396-398 ; a lofty ode, 
 and how it compares with other 
 elegies, 396 ; metrical beauty, 397. 
 
 Awkwardness, Browning's, 303. 
 
 Aytoun, William Edmondstoune, 250^ 
 251, 262 ; Firmilian, and Bon Gual^ 
 tier, 272 ; translations, 276. 
 
 Bacon, 118. 
 Baconian Method, 9. 
 Bailey, Philip James, 263. 
 Baillie, Joanna, 120, 235.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 489 
 
 Balaiistioti's Adventure, Browning's, 
 
 336. ZZ^^ 4-6- 
 
 Balder, Dobell's, 267. 
 
 Balder Dead, Arnold's, 55, 93. 
 
 Balin and Balan, Tennyson's, 420. 
 
 Ballad Romances, Home's, 249. 
 
 Ballads and Other Poems, Tennyson's, 
 420. 
 
 Ballads, Hood's, 76; Kingsley's, 251 ; 
 Buchanan's, 356 ; Rossetti's, 359, 
 364; strength of Tennyson's later, 
 420; Mrs. Pfeiffer's, 454; Gosse's 
 " Cruise of the Rover," 460. 
 
 Ballantine, James, 279. 
 
 Balzac, on the true mission of Art, 
 266. 
 
 Banim, John, 260. 
 
 Barbaric Taste, Browning's, 339. 
 
 Barham, Richard Harris, 238. 
 
 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 278. 
 
 Barlow, George, 453. 
 
 Barnard, Lady Ann, 120. 
 
 Barnes, William, 279, 440. 
 
 Barojis' IVars, Drayton's, 180. 
 
 Barrett, Miss. See Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browniti!^. 
 
 Barrett, Mr., father of Mrs. Browning, 
 116; opposes his daughter's mar- 
 riage, 132, 133. 
 
 " Barry Cornwall." See B. W. Proc- 
 ter. 
 
 Barton, Bernard, 235. 
 
 Baudelaire, Charles, Swinburne's me- 
 morial to, 168, 396-398; Les Flei-.rs 
 dii Mai, 396, 412. 
 
 Bayley, Thomas Haynes, 258. 
 
 Beauty, one of three kinds essential 
 in art, 336. 
 
 Beautiful, the, Morris an artist of, 
 366 et seq. ; Keats devoted to, 367. 
 
 Becket, Tennyson's, 419. 
 
 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, quoted, 20 ; 
 and see 2, 47, 104, 191, 237, 249. 
 
 Bells and Pomegranates, Browning's, 
 310. 
 
 Bennett, William Cox, 259. 
 
 Bentley's Magazine, 255. 
 
 Beranger, 3, 83, 339. 
 
 Bevington, Louisa S., 457. 
 
 Bickersteth, Edward Henry, 278, 452. 
 
 Biography, in estimating an author's 
 works, 54. 
 
 Bion, Epitaph of, 201, 396. 
 
 Bion, and Moschus, 99, 168, 201, 215, 
 216, 221, 223,225; and see Theocri- 
 tus and Tennyson. 
 
 "Bishop Blougram's Apology," 327, 
 328, 337. 
 
 Blackie, John Stuart, 275. 
 
 Blackmore, R. D., 454. 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 255. 
 
 Blake, William, his idealism, 19 ; 
 aphorisms of, 266 ; and see 353, 
 362, 401. 
 
 Blanchard, Laman, 441. 
 
 Blank- Verse, a crucial test, 45 ; Lan- 
 dor's, 45, 46; Tennyson's, 160-162; 
 Elizabethan, 160 ; Miltonic, 160 ; 
 idyllic, 212 ; Byron's and Swin- 
 burne's, 437. 
 
 " Blessed Damozel, The," 363. 
 
 Blessington, Countess of, 38. 
 
 Blind, Mathilde, 457. 
 
 Blot in the 'Sctitcheon, Browning's, 
 
 314- 
 
 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 460. 
 
 Boccaccio, 11, 372. 
 
 Boileau, 393. 
 
 Bonar, Horatius, 278. 
 
 Book of Orm, Buchanan's, 352-354; 
 transcendental, and lacking sim- 
 plicity, but fine here and there, 353, 
 354. "The Dream of the World 
 without Death," and " The Vision 
 of the Man Accurst," 354.
 
 490 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Book of the Poets, Mrs. Browning's, 
 240. 
 
 Book-making, as an industry, 479. 
 
 Books, and reading, effect upon the 
 young imagination, 117. 
 
 Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, Clough's, 
 244. 
 
 Bothwell, Aytoun's, 250. 
 
 Botlnuell, Swinburne's, 290 ; reviewed, 
 406-410; an epic in dramatic form, 
 406, 407 ; notable passages, 407 ; ab- 
 sence of mannerism, 408 ; extracts 
 from, 408, 409 ; general character- 
 istics, 410 ; and see 389, 394, 436. 
 
 Bothwick, Jane, 278. 
 
 Bowles, William Lisle, 235. 
 
 Bowring, Sir John, 274. 
 
 Boyd, Hugh Stuart, his friendship 
 with Mrs. Browning, 119. 
 
 " Boythorn," portrait of Landor, by 
 Dickens, 57. 
 
 Breeding, 272. 
 
 "Bridge of Sighs," Hood's, 86; its 
 purity and pathos, 87, 88. 
 
 Bridges, Robert, Nero, and lyrical 
 pieces, 462, 463. 
 
 Broderip, Mrs., 88. 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 120. 
 
 Bronte Sisters, 253. 
 
 Brown, Armitage, 37. 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 52. 
 
 Browne, William, 232. 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 5, 30, 38 ; 
 review of her life and writings, 1 14- 
 149 ; her spiritual temperament, 
 114; the greatest female poet, 115; 
 unmarried life, 1 16-132 ; birth, 116; 
 Essay on Mind, 116; early training, 
 1 17-120; friendship with Hugh S. 
 Boyd, 119; classical studies, 119, 
 121 ; portrait by Miss Mitford, 119; 
 general culture, 120; compared with 
 other female writers, 120; her schol- 
 
 arship not pedantic, 121; Prome- 
 theus Bound, and Miscellatteous Po- 
 ems, 121 ; Paraphrases on Theocri- 
 tus, etc., 122; her classicism, 122; 
 distinct from Landor's, 122 ; pro- 
 longed illness and seclusion, 123; 
 friendship with Mary Russell Mit- 
 ford, 123 ; The Seraphim and other 
 Poems, 123,-124; The Romaunt of the 
 Page, 123; Essays on the Greek- 
 Christian and English Poets, 123, 
 124; first collective edition of her 
 poems, 124: The Drama of Exile, 
 124; reviewed, 127-129; character- 
 istics as an English poet, 124-127 ; 
 her early style, 124; disadvantages 
 of over-culture, 1 24 ; compared to 
 Shelley, 124 ; her ballads and minor 
 lyrics, 124, 125; "Rhyme of the 
 Duchess May," 125 ; her diction, 
 126; lack of taste, 126; nobility of 
 feeling, 126; defective art, 126; 
 clouded vision, 127 ; transcenden- 
 talism, 127 ; knowledge of Hebrew, 
 127; minor lyrics, 129; humanita- 
 rian poems, 129; " Lady Geraldine's 
 Courtship," 130; end of her forma- 
 tive career, 131 ; improving health, 
 131 ; her meeting with Robert 
 Browning, 131 ; courtship and mar- 
 riage, 132 ; Mr. Barrett's opposition 
 to the nuptials, 132, 133; complete 
 womanhood, 133 ; her years of mar- 
 ried life, 133-149; the wedded poets, 
 136; summit of Mrs. Browning's 
 greatness, 136; primary and benefi- 
 cent influence of wedlock, 136; Son- 
 nets from the Portuguese, 137, 138, 
 439 ; compared with " In Memo- 
 riam," 138; her devotion to Italy, 
 138; Casa Guidi Wirtdows, 136, 139; 
 lines to her son, 139; revised edi- 
 tion of her poems (1856), 140; de-
 
 INDEX. 
 
 491 
 
 lightful residence in Italy, 140 ; Au- 
 rora Leigh, 136 ; reviewed, 140-142 ; 
 Mrs. Browning's period of decline 
 in health and creative power, 143, 
 322 ; secondary influence of her 
 married life, 143 ; Poems before Con- 
 gress, 143; contributions to the In- 
 depeiuienl, 143 ; Last Poems, 144 ; 
 final estimate of her genius, 144- 
 149; her qualities as an artist, 144 ; 
 contrasted with Tennyson, 144, 145 ; 
 her over - possession, 145, incerti- 
 tude, 145, spontaneity, 145, use of 
 the refrain, 145, dangerous facility, 
 146, lack of humor, 146, satirical 
 power, 146, slight idyllic tendency, 
 146 ; her sympathetic and religious 
 nature, 147 ; her personal sweet- 
 ness, 147 ; subjective quality of her 
 writings, 147 ; represents her sex in 
 the Victorian era, 148 ; her faith in 
 inspiration, 148 ; her exaltation and 
 rapture, 148, belief in the doctrines 
 of Swedenborg, 148 ; her death, 
 149; poetry addressed to her by 
 her husband, 333 ; and see 198, 222, 
 315,320,463. 
 Browning, Robert, characteristics, 30 ; 
 first acquaintance with Miss Bar- 
 rett, 131 ; courtship and marriage, 
 132 ; good and bad effects upon his 
 wife's style, 136, 143, 144; imitated 
 by Thornbury, 252 ; influence on 
 minor poets, 265 ; Neo-Romantic 
 influence, 281 ; review of his career 
 and writings, 293-341 ; an original, 
 unequal poet, 293, 338 ; birth, 293 ; 
 three aspects of his genius, 293 ; 
 analysis of his dramatic gift, 294- 
 296; represents the new dramatic 
 element, 294 ; not dramatic in the 
 early sense of the term, 294, 295 ; 
 his own personality visible in all his 
 
 characters, 296 ; mannerism, 296 
 stage-plays not his best work, 296 
 his chief success in portrayal of sin 
 gle characters and moods, 296 ; his 
 special mission, 297 ; the poet of 
 psychology, 297 ; founder of a sub- 
 dramatic school, 297 ; his style and 
 method, 297-301 ; eccentricity, 297 ; 
 impression left by his work, 300; 
 the same, as stated by a clear think- 
 er, 300 ; his defective and capricious 
 expression, 301 ; style of his early 
 and latest works, 301 ; his apparent 
 theory, 301 ; vigorous early lyrics, 
 302 ; the " Cavalier Tunes," stirrup- 
 pieces, " Herve Riel," " The Pied 
 Piper," etc., 302 ; his general style, 
 303, 429 ; mutual influence of him- 
 self and his wife, 303 ; the two poets 
 compared, 303 ; his disregard of the 
 fitness of things, 304 ; excessive de- 
 tail, 304 ; irreverent to art, 304 ; 
 crude realism, 304 ; at the London 
 University, 305 ; goes to Italy, 305; 
 Paracelsus, 305-308; recognition 
 gained by it, 305 ; its garrulity, 306 ; 
 fine thought and diction, 306-308; 
 Strafford, 308, 309 ; intended as a 
 stage-play, 308 ; enacted by Macrea- 
 dy, 309; Sordello, 309,310; Bells 
 and Pomegranates, 310-319 ; " Lu- 
 ria," 310-312 ; the poet's favorite 
 type of hero, 310; Landor's verses 
 to Browning, 311 ; "The Return of 
 the Druses," 312, 313; good dra- 
 matic effects, 312; the author's clas- 
 sicism, 313; his debt to Italy, 313; 
 " King Victor and King Charles," 
 
 313 ; three dramatic masterpieces, 
 313; "Colombe's Birthday," 313, 
 314; "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," 
 
 314 ; a song resembling Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's style, 315; " Pippa Passes,"
 
 492 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 reviewed, quoted, with notice of its 
 faults and beauties, 315-319; "A 
 Soul's Tragedy," 319 ; the poet fore- 
 goes strictly dramatic poetry, 319; 
 dramatic nature of his lyrics, 320 ; 
 originality in rejecting the idyllic 
 method, 320 ; founder of the new 
 life-school, 320 ; more realistic than 
 imaginative, 321 ; his genius, 321 ; 
 Dramatic Rotna>ices and Lyrics, 321 ; 
 " My Last Duchess," 321 ; Men a7id 
 Women, and Dramatis Persones, 
 321-329 ; inferiority of the last- 
 named volume, 322 ; excellence of 
 the former, 322 ; thrilling dramatic 
 studies, 322 ; mediasval themes, 322 ; 
 " Andrea del Sarto," " Fra Lippo 
 Lippi," etc., 322, 323 ; facility of 
 diction, 324 ; " Christmas Eve " and 
 " Easter Day," 324 ; excellent me- 
 diaeval church studies, 324, 352 ; 
 their truth and subtilty, 324 ; " The 
 Heretic's Tragedy," etc., 325 ; stud- 
 ies upon themes taken from the 
 first century, 325, 326 ; " Cleon," 
 "A Death in the Desert," etc., 326; 
 defect of these pieces, 327 ; his sub- 
 tilty of intellect, 327; "Caliban," 
 "Bishop Blougram," etc., 327, 328; 
 occasional lyrics, 328, imitated by 
 younger poets, 328, their beauty, 
 328, landscape, 328, and snggesti-je- 
 7iess, 329; moral of this poet's emo- 
 tional and erotic verse, 329, 330 ; 
 rationalistic freedom, 329 ; admired 
 by those who reject Swinburne, 330 ; 
 subjective undertone of his " Dra- 
 matic Lyrics," 330 ; " In a Balcony," 
 331 ; teaches respect for passional 
 instincts, 332 ; " The Statue and the 
 Bust," 332 ; perfect union with his 
 wife, 333 ; poetry addressed to her, 
 
 333. 335 ; faulty quality of many 
 lyrics, 334 ; T/te Ring and the Book, 
 334 - 336 ; occasional likeness to 
 Tennyson, 335; Balaustion's Adven- 
 ture, 336; Fijine at the Fair, 336; 
 tendency to prosaic work, 337 ; Red 
 Cotton Night - Cap Country, 337 ; 
 evils of an unwise method, 337 ; 
 Aristophanes'' Apology, 338 ; final 
 estimate of his genius, 338-341 ; un- 
 conventional spirit of his verse, 
 338 ; a true fellow-craftsman, 339 ; 
 rich, yet barbaric, taste, 339 ; does 
 not perfect his ideal, 339 ; results of 
 his lawlessness, 340 ; feeling engen- 
 dered by his recent work, 340 ; mi- 
 nute dramatic insight, 340 ; is his 
 the "poetry of the future "? 341 ; 
 opinions as to his ultimate rank as 
 a poet, 341 ; his style and Swin- 
 burne's compared, 382 ; his recent 
 leadership, 416; longevity, 417 ; op- 
 timism, 422, 433 ; The Imt Allm?n, 
 425 ; Pacchiarotto, 425 ; Agamem- 
 non, 426 ; La Saisiaz, etc., 426 ; 
 Dra^natic Idyls, 426 ; Jocoseria, 
 427; Ferishtah's Fancies, ^zj ; Par- 
 leyings, etc., 427 ; his use of Rhyme, 
 428 ; increase of popularity, 429- 
 431 ; the Browning Societies, 430, 
 431 ; his introspective gift, 431-433 ; 
 compared with Tennyson, and their 
 differing relations to the Period, 
 433 ; and see 38, 47, 57, 62, 167, 168, 
 187, 249, 256, 257, 290, 291, 352, 384, 
 386, 402, 413, 420, 421, 440, 441, 450, 
 451, 465, 469, 476. 
 
 Brownings, the two, 2 ; friendship with 
 Landor, 38 ; effect on each other's 
 style, 303 ; and see 333, 344. 
 
 Browning .and Rossetti, leaders of the 
 new romantic school, 6.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 493 
 
 Bryant, William Cullen, translator of 
 Homer, 276 ; pastorals, 349 ; and 
 see American Poets. 
 
 Buchanan, Robert, 264 ; his antago- 
 nistic position, 345 ; birth, 346 ; po- 
 etic temperament, 346 ; represents 
 the Scottish element, 346; religious 
 aspiration, 346; transcendentalism, 
 347 ; library edition of his works, 
 347 ; how far a pupil of Words- 
 worth, and the Lake School, 347 ; 
 inequality, 347 ; purpose and orig- 
 inality, 348 ; lack of restraint, 348 ; 
 Undertones, 348 ; classicism, 348 ; 
 Idyls and Legends of Inverburn, 
 34S-350 ; his fidelity to Nature, 349 ; 
 pastoral verse, 349, 350 ; North- 
 Coast poems, 350; London Poems, 
 350, 351 ; "The Scairth o' Bartle," 
 352 ; humorous verse, etc., 352 ; The 
 Book of Orm, 352-354; its mysti- 
 cism, faults, and beauties, 353, 354; 
 Napoleon Fallen, 354 ; The Drama 
 of Kings, 354 ; reformatory work, 
 355 ; St. Abe, 355 ; White Rose and 
 Red, 355 ; his prose writings, 355 ; 
 stage-plays, 355 ; faults of judgment 
 and style, 355, 356 ; " The Ballad 
 of Judas Iscariot," 356; " Coruis- 
 ken Sonnets," 356 ; estimate of his 
 genius and prospects, 356 ; " The 
 Lights of Leith," 445 ; as a play- 
 wright, 446. 
 
 Buddhism, 450. 
 
 " Bugle-Song," Tennyson's, 102. 
 
 Bulwers, the two, 268 ; and see Ed- 
 ward, Lord Lytton, and Robert, Lord 
 Lytton. 
 
 Bunyan, 176. 
 
 Burbidge, Thomas, 243. 
 
 Burlesque, 272, 273. 
 
 Burns, 3, 22, 40, 219, 240, 415. 
 
 Byron, sentiment of his school, 4,412; 
 
 at Harrow, 103 ; contrasted with 
 Tennyson, 196-198; their difference 
 in method, perception, imagination, 
 and subjectivity, 197, in influence, 
 198 ; his dramas, 295, 296 ; his 
 " Marino Faliero," and Swinburne's, 
 437, 438 ; and see 22, 34, 39, 41, 57, 
 74, 99, 104, 105, 107, 154, 189, 198, 
 199, 203, 235, 237, 240, 312,366,381, 
 390. 39i»4ii. 412, 469. 
 
 Caine, T. Hall, his volume on Ros- 
 setti, 439 ; and see 465. 
 
 Call, Wathen M. W., 457. 
 
 Callimachus, a saying of, 377. 
 
 Calverley, Charles Stuart, his Fly- 
 Lcaves, 273 ; Translation of The- 
 ocritus, 224, 275 ; and see 440. 
 
 Calvinism, 329. 
 
 Campanella, 448. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas, 198, 235. 
 
 Canning, George, 238. 
 
 Caprice, hurtful to Expression, 301. 
 
 Gary, Henry Francis, 235. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 37, 257 ; on Ster- 
 ling, 243 ; Sartor Resartiis, 310. 
 
 " Carroll, Lewis." See C. L. Dodgson. 
 
 Casa Guidi Windows, Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's, 136; reviewed, 139. 
 
 Caswall, Edward, 277. 
 
 Catullus, 60, 69, 224, 226, 273. 
 
 " Cavalier Tunes," Browning's, 302. 
 
 Cayley, Charles Bagot ((/. 1883), 472. 
 
 Cenci, The, Landor's, 69. 
 
 Cenci, The, Shelley's, 41. 
 
 Centttry of Roundels, A, Swinburne's, 
 
 436- 
 Chandler, John, 277. 
 Chapman, George, 122, 274, 401. 
 Charicles, Becker's, 52. 
 Charitable Dowager, Landor's, 41. 
 Chartist Verse, 261, 262. 
 Chastelard, Swinburne's, 3S6, 389 ; re-
 
 494 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 viewed, 404-406 ; a romantic histori- 
 cal drama, 404; its ideal of Mary 
 Stuart, 405 ; a strongly emotional 
 play, 405 ; and see 436, 466. 
 
 Chaucer, 2S, 381, 435; the master of 
 jM orris, 370 et seq. 
 
 Chaucerian metres, heroic, sestina, 
 and octosyllabic, 372, 373. 
 
 Chaucerian Period, 209. 
 
 Choric Verse, in Atalanta, 387, 3SS. 
 
 " Christmas Eve," Browning's, 324. 
 
 Church Studies, Browning's, 324,325. 
 
 Cicero, upon Death, 152. 
 
 Citation of Shakespeare, Landor's, 
 
 51- 
 
 City of Dreadful Night, The, Thom- 
 son's, 455, 456. 
 
 Clare, John, 235. 
 
 Clarke, Herbert E., 457. 
 
 Classical Studies, Mrs. Browning's, 
 1 18-120. 
 
 Classicism, in poetry, 4 ; Landor's, 
 43, 62 ; must be liberal, not pedan- 
 tic, 121 ; Tennyson's, 225, 226; con- 
 trasted with the Gothic method, 
 313; the unities, 313; Italian clas- 
 sicism, 313; Browning's, 336, 33S; 
 Buchanan's, 348 ; in Swinburne's 
 early poems, 393 ; Symonds's, 448 ; 
 Anglo-classicism, 463; pseudo-clas- 
 sicism, 467; Lang's, 475; and see 
 Atala7ita, Keats, Shelley, The An- 
 tique, University School, etc. 
 
 Climacterics in art-life, 164. 
 
 Closet-Drama, The, 296. 
 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh, Arnold's 
 " Scholar Gypsy," 98 ; life and 
 ■work, 243, 244 ; compared to Ster- 
 ling, 243 ; his hexameter poem, 
 7.44 ; and see 396. 
 
 Cockney School, 103. 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 241, 243. 
 
 Coleridge, vS. T., his definition of 
 
 Poetry, 9 ; and see 34, 36, 37, 74, 99, 
 180, 203, 235,382,401,415. 
 
 Collins, Mortimer, 441. 
 
 Collins, William, 22, 66, 361, 3S2. 
 
 Colombe's Birthday, Browning's, 311, 
 
 3'3. 314- 
 
 Colonial Poetry, 468-470. 
 
 Color, 362 ; Browning's sense of, 339. 
 
 Comic Amiual, Hood's, 78, 82, 89. 
 
 Comic Poetry, a misnomer, 78. 
 
 Composers, musical : Byrd, Wilbye, 
 and Weelkes, 102. 
 
 Composite School, otherwise the Idyl- 
 lic, 5 ; Tennyson its master, 5 ; now 
 universal, 477; and see 204, 219, 
 271, 342, 413. 
 
 Comrades in Art, the Rossetti group, 
 
 357- 
 
 Conscientiousness in Art, defective in 
 Mrs. Browning, 145 ; Kossetti's, 361 ; 
 Swinburne's in Both-well, 406. 
 
 Conservatism, Tennyson's, 192, 423. 
 
 Construction, 2S6; its relations to 
 Decoration, 289. 
 
 Contemplative Poets. See Meditative 
 School. 
 
 Contes Drolatiques, Balzac's, 324. 
 
 Conventionalism, Browning's disre- 
 gard of, y^2>^ 338. 
 
 Conviction, Poetry of, 254, 261, 264, 
 
 457- 
 Cook, Eliza, 259. 
 Cooper, Thomas, 261. 
 Co7-tiisken Sonnets, Buchanan's, 356. 
 Cotton, Percy, 441. 
 Counterparts, Literary, 203, 211 ; and 
 
 see throughout Chapter VI. 
 Count Julian, Landor's, 41. 
 Courthope, W. J., 471. 
 Court Verse, 473. See 'Society Verse. 
 Cowper, 22, 40, 58 ; his blank-verse, 
 
 161. 
 Cox. Frances Elizabeth, 278.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 495 
 
 Crabbe, 162. 
 
 Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock, 254, 
 
 Craiich, Christopher Pearse, 275. 
 
 Crayon Verse. See Painting. 
 
 Creative Faculty, wanting in certain 
 ambitious poets, 477. 
 
 Criticism, its province, 4 ; Landor's 
 powers of, 64 ; comparative, its use 
 and abuse, 72 ; Arnold's, 99; poets 
 as critics of poetry, 99 ; Tennyson 
 and his critics, 1 51-153; verbal, 
 239; defects of recent, 286; Swin- 
 burne and his critics, 390, 391 ; 
 Swinburne's critical genius and es- 
 says, 401-404, 438 ; duty of the crit- 
 ic, 411, 414; Austin's Poetry of the 
 Period, 450; as an industry, 479; 
 and see 480. 
 
 Croly, George, 235. 
 
 Cromwellian Period, 28, 115. 
 
 Cross, Mrs. See M. E. Lewes. 
 
 Cruikshank, George, 85. 
 
 " Cults," Shelley, Browning, etc., 430, 
 431 ; Art for beauty's sake, 477. 
 
 Culture, effect upon spontaneity, 3; 
 on creative art, 23, 406; the recent 
 period of, 23 ; over-restraint, 24 ; 
 breeding, 24 ; school of culture, 90 ; 
 good effect in case of Mrs. Brown- 
 ing, 1 20 ; over-training, 24S ; criti- 
 cism and scholarship, 343; poetry 
 for cultured people, 398 ; Symonds, 
 447 ; Miss Robinson, 463 ; Lang, 
 475; and see Over-culture, Univer- 
 sity School, etc. 
 
 Cunningham, Allan, 235. 
 
 "Cup, The," Tennyson's, 418. 
 
 " Cyclops," imitated by Tennyson, 
 228. 
 
 Dante, ii, 51, 170, 276, 375; Ros- 
 setti's translations, 360. 
 
 Darley, George, 2, 47, 191, 236, 249; 
 his melody, 365. 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 20. 
 
 Davis, Thomas, 260. 
 
 Dawson, W. J., 465. 
 
 Death of Marlowe, Home's, 248. 
 
 Deaths Jest-Book, Beddoes', 237. 
 
 Debonair Poets. See Society Verse. 
 
 Decoration, and Construction, 286, 
 289. 
 
 Decorative Verse, 467. 
 
 Defence of Guenevere, Morris's, 367, 
 368, 370. 
 
 Democracy, in Great Britain, 423. 
 
 Democratic Poets, 260 ; often of aris- 
 tocratic birth, 400. 
 
 De Musset, Alfred, compared with 
 Tennyson, 195. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, his estimate of 
 Landor, 63, 67 ; style, 401. 
 
 Derby, Edward, Lord, 275. 
 
 Descriptive Faculty and Verse, Ten- 
 nyson's, 188; Hamerton's, 246; 
 Browning's, 307 ; Buchanan's, 349 ; 
 Morris's, 368, 369; Munby's, 454; 
 Gosse's English landscape, 459 ; and 
 see Nature, Scenic Tendency, etc. 
 
 Design, Arts of, 368. 
 
 De Vere, Aubrey Thomas, 242, 444. 
 
 Dialect-Verse, Tennyson's, 181, 420; 
 miscellaneous, 279, 470. 
 
 Dickens, 38 ; portrait of Landor, 57 ; 
 compared to Hood, 84-S6. 
 
 Diction, Hood's, 88 ; Tennyson's, 
 179; Miss Barrett's, 126; Mrs. 
 Lewes', 254; of Paracelsus, 306; 
 Rossetti's revival of old English, 
 361 ; Morris's and Swinburne's, 379, 
 381 ; Wells's old English, 441 ; " Mi- 
 chael Field's," 462. 
 
 Didacticism, 4, 242, 413. 
 
 Dilettanteism, 59, 290; Goethe and 
 Arnold upon, 96.
 
 496 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Discords, certain effects of, 383. 
 
 Disraeli, Isaac, 51. 
 
 Dithvrambic Verse, and quality, 381, 
 3S8. 
 
 Dixon, Richard Watson, 463. 
 
 Dobell, Sydney, 267, 328. 
 
 Dobson, Austin, 273, 473, 474 ; Prcw- 
 erbs in Porcelain, 473 ; Old World 
 Idyls, and At the Sign of the Lyre, 
 474 ; influence in England and 
 America, 474 ; and see 441, 466, 
 476. 
 
 Dodgson, C. L., 471. 
 
 Domett, Alfred, his Blackwood\j^x\c%, 
 256; Browning's characterization 
 of, 256; Ranolf and Amohia, 257; 
 Flotsam and Jetsam , 445. 
 
 Don Juan, Byron's, 141. 
 
 Dore, Les Contes Drdlatiques, 324. 
 
 Dorothy, Munby's, 454. 
 
 Dowden, Edward, 465. 
 
 Downing, Mary, 259. 
 
 Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings, 253. 
 
 Drama of Exile, W\%?, Barrett's, 124, 
 127-129. 
 
 Drama of Kings, Buchanan's, 347, 
 
 354- 
 " Dramatic Fragments," Procter's, 
 
 "3- 
 Dramatic Idyls, Browning's, 426. 
 
 Dramatic Periods : The early drama, 
 294, 295; Queen Anne's time, 295; 
 the recent aspect, 294-296. 
 
 Dramatic Poetry, and Poets : Landor's 
 dramatic genius and verse, 41, 42, 
 47, 48; Procter's, 106, 107; lyrical 
 interludes in dramatic verse, 109, — 
 their relation, 109 ; Procter a dra- 
 matic song-writer, 109 ; Tennyson's 
 genius not essentially dramatic, 189- 
 191 ; this opinion confirmed by 
 Queen Mary, 413; Bulwer's plays, 
 25s; Browning chief of the recent 
 
 school, 294 ; his dramatic genius, 
 294 ; I'rocter's definition of the 
 dramatic faculty, 294 ; the true his- 
 toric era, 294 ; Byron's dramas, 
 296; Browning's dramatic lyrics, 
 296, 320 et seq. ; dramatic effects 
 in The Return of the Druses, 312; 
 subjective moral of Browning's lyr- 
 ics, 330 ; his minute insight, 340 ; 
 Rossetti's dramatic gift, 365 ; con- 
 stituents of great dramatic verse, 
 413; Swinburne's Chastelard and 
 Both-well, 404-410; Tennyson's 
 later dramas, 418, 419; personal 
 study of Life required, 419 ; Brown- 
 ing's dramatic psychology, 431- 
 433 ; Swinburne's Mary Stuart, 436, 
 Marino Faliero, 437 ; " Michael 
 Field," 461 ; recent poetic drama, 
 471, 472; Merivale, 471; "Ross 
 Neil," 472; Wills, 472; Gilbert, 
 ib. ; and see R. H. Home, W. 
 Marston, A. Webster, J. L. Warren, 
 A. Austin, Mrs. Singleton, R. 
 Bridges, etc. 
 
 Dramatic Psychology, 431-433. 
 
 " Dramatic Romances and Lyrics," 
 Browning's, 321. 
 
 Dramatic Scenes, Procter's, preface 
 to, 103; reviewed, 105. 
 
 Dramatic School, New, 5, 6, 31 ; out- 
 look in America, 291 ; need of a re- 
 vival, 344. 
 
 Dramatis Persona, Browning's, 304 ; 
 reviewed, 321-329; inferior io Men 
 and Women, 322 ; faulty lyrics, 334. 
 
 Drayton, 180. 
 
 " Dream of Eugene Aram," Hood's, 
 84, 86. 
 
 Drury Lane Theatre, 314. 
 
 Dryden, 185, 232, 275. 
 
 Dry Stichs Fagoted, Landor's, 70. 
 
 Du Bellay, 474.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 497 
 
 Dublin Newspaper Press, 260. 
 Dublin Universiiy Magazine, 255. 
 Dufferln, Lady, 260. 
 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 260. 
 Dunciad, The, 186. 
 Diirer, Albert, 362, 456. 
 Dutt, Toru. 
 
 Early Italian Poets, translations 
 by Rossetti, 276, 360. 
 
 Early promise, men of, 256. 
 
 Earnestness, Rossetti's, 362. 
 
 Earthly Paradise, Morris's, reviewed, 
 372-378 ; epic rather than dramatic, 
 372 ; a treasury of historic myths 
 and legends, 372 ; its fascination, 
 372, 377 ; Chaucerian verse, 372, 
 373 ; clear expression, 374; a virtu- 
 oso's poem, 374 ; enormous length, 
 375. 377; harmonic plan, 375; 
 moral, 375-377- 
 
 Ease of Circumstances favorable to 
 art, in Tennyson's case, 199; effect 
 on Swinburne, 410. 
 
 " Easter-Day," Browning's, 324. 
 
 Eccentricity not a proof of genius, 
 297. 
 
 £cole Intermediaire, the recent, 474. 
 
 Edmeston, James, 277. 
 
 Elegance, Poetic, Landor's, 44, 45. 
 
 Elegiac Measure, Munby's, 454, 455. 
 
 Elegiac Verse, Linton's " Threnody," 
 271; Swinburne's, 435; and see 
 Adonais, Ave atque Vale, Epitaph 
 of Bion, Lycidas, Thyrsis, etc. 
 
 " Eliot, George." See M. E. Lewes. 
 
 Elizabethan Period, 11, 28, no, 115, 
 209, 248, 416; its dramatic style, 
 47, 413 ; songs and lyrics, 102, 104; 
 allegory, 176; Mrs. Browning on, 
 240 ; style caught by Swinburne in 
 his early dramas, 384, 385; "Mi- 
 chael Field's " style, 462. 
 
 Elliott, Charlotte, 278. 
 
 Elliott, Ebenezer, 83, 235. 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 37, 112, 179; 
 Essay on " The Poet," 27 ; on tra- 
 dition and invention, 164; on imi- 
 tation and originality, 232 ; his 
 method, 301 ; and see 417, 442, 447, 
 457, and American Poets. 
 
 Emotion, new school of, 297 ; in 
 Browning's verse, 329 ; a source of 
 strength, t^t^t,. 
 
 English Idyls, Tennyson's, 162; how 
 far modelled on Theocritus, 217- 
 219. 
 
 English landscape, etc. See Descrip 
 five Faculty. 
 
 English Language, adapted for trans- 
 lation of the Greek, 275. 
 
 English Songs, — Procter's, 109; re- 
 viewed, 109-113; their virile qual- 
 ity, in; convivial, iii; delicacy 
 and pathos, 112 ; great variety, 112. 
 
 Enoch Arden, Tennyson's, 177, 181, 
 189. 
 
 Epic of Hades, The, L. Morris's, 452. 
 
 Erectheus, Swinburne's, 434. 
 
 Erotic Verse, Swinburne's, 395. 
 
 Esoteric Quality, 463. 
 
 Essay on Mind, Miss Barrett's, 1 16. 
 
 Euripides, 348 ; translated by Brown- 
 ing, 336, 338- 
 
 Evans, Sebastian, 282. 
 
 Eve of St. Agnes, Keats's, 341, 367. 
 
 Excess, Swinburne's, 392, 395, 439. 
 
 Excursion, Wordsworth's, imitated 
 by Alford, 242. 
 
 Execution, 383. 
 
 Expression, the aim of recent poetry, 
 13 ; of Tennyson's early works, 
 1 56 ; greater than invention among 
 the minor poets, 287 ; the poet's 
 special office, 298 ; the flower of 
 thought, 301 ; brilliant quality of
 
 498 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Swinburne's, 379; carried to ex- 
 cess by him, 3S2, 383. 
 Extravagance, 66 ; of fantasy in Hood, 
 85 ; Swinburne's, 392. 
 
 Faber, P'rederick William, 278. 
 
 Facility, 146; injurious to Browning, 
 324; Morris's, 377; Symonds's, 
 447-449 ; E. Arnold, 449 ; L. Morris, 
 451-453 ; Smith and others, 453, 454- 
 
 Faery Queene, The, 180. 
 
 " Fair Ines" Hood's ballad, 76. 
 
 " Falcon, The," Tennyson's, 418. 
 
 Fame, Lander's, 66 ; sudden increase 
 of Browning's, 429. 
 
 Fancy, 80, 272, 273,471. 
 
 Fantastic Verse, 285. 
 
 " Farringford School." See Idyllic 
 Poetry. 
 
 Fashion in thought and art, passing 
 vogues, 450, 476. 
 
 Fatalism, of Morris's poetry, 375, 
 377 ; its adverse effect, 377 ; of 
 Swinburne's Atalanta, 387. 
 
 " Father Prout." See Francis Ma- 
 honey. 
 
 Faust, compared with Paracelsus, 305. 
 
 Fazio, Milman's, 236. 
 
 Feeling, high quality of Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's, 126. 
 
 Fellow-craftsmanship, Browning on, 
 
 339- 
 Female Poets, 120, 254, 279-281 ; their 
 
 independence and emotion, 279. 
 Ferishtah's Fancies, Browning's, 427. 
 Festus, Bailey's, 263. 
 Field, Kate, her portrait of Landor, 
 
 in The Atlantic Monthly, 70. 
 "Field, Michael," Callirhoe, Brutus 
 
 Ultor, etc., 461, 462 ; diction and 
 
 dramatic quality, 462. 
 Fifinc at the Fair, Browning's, 336- 
 
 337. 340. 
 
 Figure-School. See Life School. 
 Findlater, Eric Bothwick, 278. 
 " Finola" (Mrs. Varian), 260. 
 Firmilian, Aytoun's, 262, 285. 
 First-Century Studies, Browning's, 
 
 325. 326. 
 Fiske, John, 372. 
 Fitness of Things, Tennyson's sense 
 
 of, 187 ; Browning's disregard of, 
 
 304- 
 FitzGerald, Edward, 276, 398, 440. 
 
 Fitz-Gerald, Maurice Purcell, 275. 
 
 Fletcher, John, 11, 102, 236, 294. 
 
 Fletcher of Saltoun, his famous say- 
 ing, 260. 
 
 " Flower, The," Tennyson's, 152, 212. 
 
 Fly-Leaves, Calverley's, 273. 
 
 Foote, Miss, the actress, 107. 
 
 Form, Browning's lack of, 339. 
 
 Forster, John, biographer of Landor, 
 37 ; upon Gebir, 40 ; and see 49, 
 57, 60, 69. 
 
 Fourier, Charles, theory of the pas- 
 sions, 56; his famous apothegm, 
 329 ; and see 430. 
 
 Fox, W. J., 257. 
 
 Franco-Sapphic School, 396. 
 
 Fra Rupert, Landor's, 42. 
 
 Fraser's Magazine, 255. 
 
 Fraser-Tytler. See C. C. Liddell. 
 
 Freedom, Browning's ideal of, 308 ; 
 limits of, in Art, 339 ; radicalism of 
 Swinburne's, 392. 
 
 French Forms, Gosse's poetry in, 459 ; 
 Dobson's, 474 ; Lang's Ballades, 
 etc., 475; vogue in England and 
 America, 476, 477. 
 
 French Influence, upon Swinburnes. 
 
 384. 393- 
 French School, 380. 
 Frere, John Hookham, 235, 274. 
 Fuller, Margaret, 62.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 499 
 
 Garibaldi, 64, 400. 
 
 Garnett, Richard, 444. 
 
 Garrulity, Browning's, 306, 324. 
 
 Gautier, Theophile, Memorial to, 398. 
 
 Gay, John, 232. 
 
 Gebir, Landor's, 39, 40, 68. 
 
 Cebirus, Latin version of the forego-' 
 ing, 41. 
 
 Genius, its independence, i ; needs 
 appreciation, 68 ; unconscious train- 
 ing of, 118; certain men of, un- 
 suited to their period, 236, 249 ; pe- 
 culiarity of Browning's, 293, 432- 
 434 ; distinguished from talent, 321 ; 
 Rossetti a man of, 359 ; genius to 
 be judged at its best, 411 ; freedom 
 of, 412; vitality of works of, 441; 
 J. Thomson's, 455. 
 
 Gentletnan's Magazine, 48. 
 
 " George Eliot." See Marian Evans 
 Lewes. 
 
 Georgian Period, 34, 115; contrasted 
 with the Victorian, 196 ; revival of 
 poetry in, 240, 241 ; sentiment and 
 passion of, 412; and see 464, 481, 
 Byron, Keats, Scott, Shelley, etc. 
 
 Gesta Ronianorwn, 372. 
 
 Gifford, William, 286. 
 
 Gilbert, W. S., Original Plays, etc., 
 472. 
 
 Gilfillan, Robert, 259. 
 
 Giovanna of Naples, Landor's, 42. 
 
 " Godiva," compared to " Hylas," 211, 
 213. 
 
 Goethe, quoted, 20 ; on dilettanteism, 
 96, 341 ; English translators of, 276; 
 on distinction between the artist 
 and the amateur, 289 ; and see 37, 
 
 99. 192. 
 
 Goldsmith, 22, 66. 
 
 Gordon, A. Lindsay, 469. 
 
 Gosse, Edmund, 45S-460, 470 ; admi- 
 rable prose, 458 ; poetical works — 
 
 On Viol and Flute, King Erik, Neio 
 Poems, Firdausi in Exile, 459 ; char- 
 acteristics, 460. 
 Gothic Methods and Studies, 313, 
 
 392. 
 
 " Grand Manner, The," 93. 
 
 Gray, David, 245, 264, 265 ; friend- 
 ship with Buchanan, 34S. 
 
 Gray, Thomas, 40, 66, 382. 
 
 Great Britain, a crisis imminent, 482. 
 
 Greatness in Art, how constituted, 
 
 341- 
 
 Greece, spirit of her idealism, 10 ; 
 rise and decline of her poetry, 238, 
 239 ; England compared to, 239. 
 
 Greek-Christian Poets, read and anno- 
 tated by Mrs. Browning, 120, 123. 
 
 Greek Idyls, 201-233. See Tennyson 
 and Theocritus; also, Bion and 
 Moschus. 
 
 Greek and Latin Verses, Landor's, 
 43, 62 ; Swinburne's, 398, 399 ; the 
 latter's statement of their value to 
 the maker, 399. 
 
 GrifiSn, Gerald, 260. 
 
 "Guenevere," Tennyson's, 177, 17S. 
 
 Guido, his " Aurora," 9, 10. 
 
 Hake, Thomas Gordon, 282, 444. 
 
 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 237, 243. 
 
 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 246, 368. 
 
 Hamilton, Janet, 279. 
 
 Hannibal, Prof. Nichol's, 255. 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 454. 
 
 Hare, the brothers Francis and Juli 
 
 us, 37. 
 Harold, Tennyson's, 419. 
 Harte, F. Bret, 469. 
 " Haunted House," Hood's, 84. 
 Hawker, Robert Stephen, 440. 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 366. 
 Hawtrey, Edward Craven, 275.^ 
 Hazlitt, William, 37.
 
 500 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Hebraism, Browning's, 325 ; Swin- 
 burne's, 3S7, 393. 
 
 Hebrew language. Miss Barrett's 
 study of, 127. 
 
 Hemans, Mrs., 120, 237. 
 
 Heine, his idealism, i8 ; the Reisebil- 
 der, 356; and see 92, 113, 455, 
 468. 
 
 Hellenics, Lander's, 39, 42-45. 
 
 Herbert, George, 28, 283. 
 
 Herder, a saying of Jean Paul, 147. 
 
 Heroic Idyls, Landor's, 70. 
 
 Herrick, Robert, 76. 
 
 Hervey, Thomas Kibble, 256. 
 
 Hesiod, 205. 
 
 Hexameter Verse, the Pastoral or 
 Bucolic, 2(1, 227; Clough's, 244; 
 Kingsley's and Hawtrey's, 251. 
 
 Heywood, Thomas, 102. 
 
 Hillard, George S., 143. 
 
 Hillard, Kate, 104. 
 
 Hogarth, his method in Art, 351. 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 273. 
 
 Home, J. Wyville, 465. 
 
 Homer, method of, 9, 178; Arnold 
 on translating, 99; Tennyson as a 
 translator of, 182; his simplicity, 
 267; English translations of, 275; 
 imitated by Morris, 370; and see 
 i5i, 204, 205, 215,472. 
 
 Homer, Winslow, 454. 
 
 Hood's Magazine, 82, 86. 
 
 Hood, Thomas, review of his life and 
 writings, 72-90; the poet of sympa- 
 thy, 72 ; of the crowd, 73 ; his birth, 
 73; character and genius, 73, 74; 
 early life, 74; youthful career as a 
 writer, 74, 75; early poems in the 
 manner of Spenser, 75 ; their beau- 
 ties and defects, 75; his exquisite 
 lyrical ballads, imaginative odes, 
 etc., 76 ; these more truly poetical 
 than work of the verbal school, 76; 
 
 his humor, 77 ; Odes and Addresses, 
 Wltitiis and Oddities, London Mag- 
 azine, etc., 77 ; a jester by profes- 
 sion, 77; Hood^s Own, and the 
 Comic Annuals, 78; his poorer 
 verse and prose, 78 ; " Ode to Rae 
 Wilson," 78 ; Miss Kilmansegg, 79, 
 80; a sustained, powerful, and 
 unique satire, ibid. ; Thackeray and 
 Hood, 80; detrimental effect of 
 poverty upon his work, 81 ; a jour- 
 nalist-poet, 82; London's poet, 
 83; his understanding of the poor, 
 83; Hood and Dickens, 84-86; 
 similarity of their methods, 84; 
 alike in melodramatic work, extrav- 
 agance, humane feeling, 85, 86; 
 "Dream of Eugene Aram," 86; 
 " Song of the Shirt," 86, 87 ; " Bridge 
 of Sighs," 87,88 ; general characteris- 
 tics, 88 ; Mrs. Broderip's Memorials^ 
 88 ; his wife, 89 ; his closing hours, 
 89; sympathy of the English peo- 
 ple, 89; his death, 90; monument 
 to his memory, 90; and see 5, 26, 
 56, 91, 92, 103, 180, 199, 236, 238, 
 272. 
 
 Horace, 200, 204, 273 ; English trans- 
 lations of, 274, 472 ; and see 473. 
 
 Home, Richard Hengist, 2, 130; gen- 
 ius and works, 248-250; dramas, 
 248 ; temperament, 249 ; Orion, 249 ; 
 Ballad Romances, 249 ; unsuited to 
 his period, 249; his death, 439; 
 Laura Dibalzo, 440. 
 
 Houghton, Lord. See Milnes. 
 
 House of Life, Rossetti's, 366. 
 
 Howells, William Dean, 251. 
 
 Howitt, William and Mary, 259. 
 
 Hugo Victor, 165, 393, 400, 401, 424, 
 435 ; Les Miserables, 482. 
 
 Human Tragedy, 77/^, Austin'.s, 451. 
 
 Humor, Hood's, 73, 74, 77; deficient
 
 INDEX. 
 
 501 
 
 in Mrs. Browning, 146; Tennyson's, 
 163 ; Buchanan's, 352 ; Swinburne's 
 lacic of, 395 ; W. S. Gilbert, 472. 
 
 Hunt, Holman, 358. 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, his poetic mission, 103 ; 
 estimate of his quaUty and life, 103, 
 104; Hunt and Procter, 104; and 
 see 37, 51, 75, 106, 236, 257, 274, 
 411, 412, 460, 477. 
 
 Huxley, T. H., strictures on Expres- 
 sion, 13, 26. 
 
 " Hylas," compared with " Godiva," 
 211-213 ; and see 398. 
 
 Hymnology, recent, 277, 278 ; its char- 
 acteristics, 277 ; early and later 
 composers, 277 ; translations of 
 the Latin and German hymns, 277, 
 278. 
 
 Hyperion, Keats's, 40, 161, 249, 397. 
 
 Icelandic Translations, by Mor- 
 ris and Magnusson, 371. 
 
 Iconoclasm, scientific, 7 ; the poet not 
 an iconoclast, 300. 
 
 Ideal, how conceived and perfected, 
 
 339- 
 
 Ideality, poetic, iS ; restrictions to, 
 23 ; Lander's, 46 ; of Morris and 
 Keats, 367 ; Gilbert's Plays, 472. 
 
 Idyliia Hei oica, Landor's, 43. 
 
 Idyllic Period, Dialect-verse a mark 
 of, 279. 
 
 Idyllic Poetry and School, 2, 4 ; qual- 
 ities of the school, 5 ; Landor's idyl- 
 lic verse, 44 ; Mrs. Browning's lack 
 of idyllic quality, 146; method of 
 Tennyson, 159, 187 ; the recent 
 school, how far modelled upon the 
 Alexandrian, see Tennyson and 
 Theocritus, 201-233 ; the true idyl, 
 233, 269; minor idyllic poets, 269- 
 271 ; their strength and weakness, 
 269 ; mission of the idyllists near- 
 
 ly ended, 342 ; the " Farringford 
 School," 345 ; Munby's Dorothy, 
 454; and see 320,413. 
 
 Idyls atid legends of Inverburn, P)U- 
 chanan's, 348-350 ; compared with 
 Wordsworth's and Tennyson's idyls, 
 348; their truth to nature, 349,350. 
 
 Idyls of the King, Tennyson's, 94 ; 
 reviewed, 175-180; an epic of ideal 
 chivalry, 175 ; based on Malory's 
 romance, 176; allegorical tendency, 
 176; grown from a series of idyls 
 to an epic, 177 ; its early and later 
 blank -verse, 177; " Morte d'Ar- 
 thur," and the four succeeding idyls, 
 177, 178 ; " Gareth and Lynette," 
 179; the style and diction of this 
 poem, 179; the subject, iSo; dedi- 
 cation, 187 ; " Balin and Balan," 
 420; and see 220, 371, 419, 425. 
 
 Imaginary Conversations, Landor's, 
 50, 59, 63, 68, 70. 
 
 Imagination, its action in youth, 117 ; 
 Miss Barrett's, 128; recent stimu- 
 lants to, 343 ; Rossetti's, 363, 365 ; 
 placid, in Morris, 373, 374, 378 ; 
 Swinburne's, 397, 411 ; recent sub- 
 stitutes for, 479 ; modern deficiency 
 of, 482. 
 
 Imitation, literary, — the culling pro- 
 cess, 215 ; " Owen Meredith's," 269; 
 and see 290. 
 
 Importance, law of, in Art, 48. 
 
 " In a Balcony," Browning's, 306, 331. 
 
 Incertitude, Mrs. Browning's, 145. 
 
 Independent, The, 143. 
 
 Independent Singers, among minor 
 poets, 248-253. 
 
 Individuality, Meredith's, 447. 
 
 Inequality, 293, 338. 
 
 Ingelow, Jean, 26, 280, 440. 
 
 Ingoldsby legends, Barham's, 238. 
 
 Ingram, John Kells, 260.
 
 502 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 In Manoriam, Tennyson's, compared 
 with Mrs. Browning's sonnets, 138 ; 
 reviewed, 168-172; the greatest of 
 elegies, 168 ; its form and arrange- 
 ment, 169; a national poem, 169; 
 rhythm, 169; incorrect estimates of , 
 170; faith and doubt, 170; use of 
 scientific material, 170; its wisdom 
 and grief, 171 ; general quality, 171 ; 
 admired by authors, 171 ; landscape, 
 iSS ; and see 180, 193, 341, 425. 
 
 Inn Album, The, Browning's, 425. 
 
 Inspiration, Mrs. Browning's faith in, 
 148 ; lacking in the most prolific 
 new poets, 477. 
 
 Intellectuality, Landor's, 33 ; of Ar- 
 nold's verse, 91 ; Tennyson's, 167 ; 
 too marked in Pippa Passes, 318; 
 " Caliban," 327 ; favorable to lon- 
 gevity, 417. 
 
 Introspective Poetry, 432. 
 
 Invention, demand for, 478. 
 
 Inversions, 361. 
 
 " Inverury Poet," 261. 
 
 Ion, Talfourd's, 236, 296. 
 
 Ireland, 482. 
 
 Irish Minstrelsy, 259, 260. 
 
 Irreverence to Art, 304. 
 
 Irving, Henry, and Tennyson's dra- 
 mas, 418 ; and see 466. 
 
 Isabella, Keats's, 367. 
 
 Isles of loch Awe, Hamerton's, 246. 
 
 Isometric Songs, in The Princess, 166; 
 nature of their mode, ?i8; popu- 
 larized by Tennyson, 218. 
 
 Italian Period, and Influence, 11 ; al- 
 legory, 176 ; Browning's studies, 
 305, 313; debt of P^nglish litera- 
 ture to, 313; effect upon Rossetti, 
 360, 378, — upon Symonds, 448, — 
 Gosse, 460, — Miss Robinson, 464; 
 rispelti and stornelli, 464, 468 ; and 
 see 461. 
 
 Italy, Mrs. Browning's devotion ta 
 138. 
 
 "Jacobite Ballads," Thornbury's, 
 
 2 ^2. 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 286. 
 
 'Jocoseria, Browning's, 427. 
 
 Jones, Ebenezer, 261. 
 
 Jones, Ernest, 263. 
 
 Jonson, Ben, 76, 102, 236, 406. 
 
 Journalism, as a calling, injurious to 
 a poet, 81 ; Hood a journalist-poet, 
 82 ; instance of an editor, 82 ; the 
 newspaper age, 343, 479 ; L. Blan- 
 chard, 441. 
 
 Keats, his ideality, 18 ; how far a 
 progenitor of the Victorian School, 
 104, 105 ; influence on Tennyson, 
 155 ; Morris compared to, 367 ; and 
 see 4, 5, 26, 31, 35, 40, 74, 103, 104, 
 106, 121, 154, 157, 161, 167, 180, 199, 
 209, 236, 240, 245, 299, 305, 320, 348, 
 361, 380, 382, 396, 412, 460, 467, 476, 
 
 477- 
 
 Keble, John, 237. 
 
 Keegan, John, 260. 
 
 Kemble, Charles, 107. 
 
 Kenyon, John, 140. 
 
 Kensal Green Cemetery, 83. 
 
 Kensington - Stitch Verse. See Soci- 
 ety Verse. 
 
 King Arthtir, Bulwer's, 255. 
 
 King, Harriet E. Hamilton, 454. 
 
 Kingsley, Charles, 26, 43, 92, 262 ; 
 upon Theocritus, 208 ; his poetic 
 works and genius, 251 ; and see 460. 
 
 King Victor and King Charles, Brown- 
 ing's, 310, 313. 
 
 Knowles, James Sheridan, 236, 419. 
 
 Knox, John, Swinburne's characteri< 
 zation, 404, 407-409. 
 
 Knox, Isa Craig, 280. 
 
 Kossuth, 62, 126.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 503 
 
 "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," 
 Mrs. Browning's, 130, 315. 
 
 La Farge, John, 362. 
 
 La Fontaine, 61. 
 
 Lake School, 242, 347, 390, 412. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 37, 51, 103. 
 
 Lancashire Songs, Waugh's, 279. 
 
 Landon, Miss, 120, 237. 
 
 Landor, Robert, 57. 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, illustrating 
 growth of the art-school, 5 ; quoted, 
 15 ; review of life and writings, 33- 
 81 ; a pioneer of the Victorian 
 School, 33 ; birth, 34 ; prolonged 
 career, 34; retention of power, 34- 
 36 ; sustained equality, 36 ; univer- 
 sality, 36 ; prose and poetry, 37 ; de- 
 ficient in sympathy, 37 ; friends, 37, 
 38 ; early rhymed productions, 39 ; 
 Poems, English and Latin, 39 ; a 
 Moral Epistle, 39 ; Gebir, 40 ; mis- 
 cellaneous pieces, 41 ; dramatic gen- 
 ius and work, 41-42, 47, 48 ; Count 
 Julian, 41 ; the Trilogy, 42 ; the 
 Hellenics, 42-44 ; Ldyllia Heroica, 
 43 ; Poemata et Inscriptiones, 43 ; 
 Latin verse, 43, 45, 62 ; qualities as 
 an artist, 44-47 ; blank-verse, 45 ; 
 lyrical affluence, 46 ; restrictions, 48, 
 49 ; lack of theme, 49 ; great as a 
 writer of English prose, 49 ; Imag- 
 inary Conversations, 50 ; Citation of 
 Shakespeare, 51 ; the Pentameron, 
 51 ; Pericles and Aspasia, 52-54 ; 
 personal history and character con- 
 sidered, 54-71; temperament, 55, 
 56 ; extraordinary disposition and 
 career, 55; physical gifts, 56; inde- 
 pendence, 56, 57 ; vivacity, 57 ; por- 
 trait by Dickens, 57 ; an amateur, 
 58; but not a dilettant, 59; his love 
 of nature, 60 ; biography by Forster, 
 60; affection for animals, 61 ; clas- 
 
 sicism, 62 ; radicalism, 62 ; learning, 
 63 ; republicanism, 64 ; estimate of 
 America, 64 ; critical powers, 64 ; 
 technical excellence, 65 ; poetic ex- 
 travagance, 66 ; fame, 66 ; desire for 
 appreciation, 67 ; editions of his 
 works, 66, 67 ; lines to Ablett, 68 ; 
 Landor at seventy, 69 ; Last Fruit 
 off an Old Tree, 69 ; Dry Sticks Fag- 
 oted, 70 ; Heroic Idyls, 70 ; Landor 
 venerated by Kate Field, A. G. 
 Swinburne, and other young admir- 
 ers, 70, 7 1 ; his death, 71; his clas- 
 sicism distinct from Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's, 122 ; opinion of " Aurora 
 Leigh," 142 ; on Shakespeare's imi- 
 tations, 232 ; sonnet to Browning, 
 311 ; .Swinburne compared to, 3S4 ; 
 Swinburne's stanzas to, 396 ; and 
 see 4, 30, 99, 103, 167, 191, 198, 236, 
 303. 336. 386, 398, 400, 412, 423. 43S> 
 440, 446. 
 
 Landscape. See Descriptive Faculty. 
 
 Lang, Andrew, Ballads, etc., of Old 
 France, Ballades in Blue China, 
 Rhymes h la Mode, 475; Helen of 
 Troy, ib.; and see 466, 472, 476. 
 
 Languages, the Greek and English 
 contrasted, 206. 
 
 La Saisiaz, etc.. Browning's, 426. 
 
 Last Fruit off an Old Tree, Lan dor's, 
 69. 
 
 Last Poems, Mrs. Browning's, 144. 
 
 Latest Schools, 281 ; decoration a 
 main end of, 286. 
 
 Latin Hymns, 277. 
 
 Latin Idyls, Landor's, translated, 69. 
 
 Latin Students' Songs, Symonds's 
 Wine, Women, and Song, 449. 
 
 Latin Verse. See Greek and Latin 
 Verses. 
 
 Latter-Day Poets. See Chapters X. 
 and XL ; their position and embar"
 
 504 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 rassments, 342, 343; remedial ef- 
 forts, 344 ; dramatic instinct, 344 ; 
 four representative names, 345 ; 
 prodigal of verse, 345. 
 
 Laureates, Warton, Pye, etc., 34 ; 
 Tennyson, 172, 424 ; Southey and 
 Wordsworth, 424. 
 
 Lawlessness, evils of, exemplified, 
 
 340,341- 
 Laws of Art, their beneficent reaction, 
 
 339- 
 
 Lays of Ancient Rotnc, Macaulay's, 
 250. 
 
 Leadership in Art, often dependent 
 on personal bearing, 357 ; prolonga- 
 tion of Tennyson's and Browning's, 
 415-418,433; Swinburne's, 434. 
 
 Learning, Landor's, 63 ; not a substi- 
 tute for Imagination, 479. 
 
 Lee-Hamilton, E. J., 465. 
 
 Lefroy, E. C, 466. 
 
 Leopardi, 455. 
 
 Letter from a young English poet, 
 299. 
 
 Lewes, Marian Evans, 106, 120, 254, 
 440. 
 
 Lewis, Tayler, his theory of classical 
 study, 121. 
 
 Liddell, Catherine C. (Fraser-Tytler), 
 464. 
 
 Life and Death of fason, Morris's, 
 370, 371- 
 
 Life-Drama, Smith's, 263. 
 
 Life-School, Browning the founder of 
 the modern, 320 ; younger repre- 
 sentatives, 320; portraiture a high 
 art, 321 ; Rossetti's drawings and 
 poems, 359. 
 
 Light, 362. 
 
 Lightness of Touch, 272. 
 
 LigJit of Asia, The, E. Arnold's, 449. 
 
 Limitations, Tennyson's, 188; Brown- 
 ing's, 322 ; Buchanan's, 350. 
 
 Linton, William James, 260, 261, 368; 
 Claribel, etc., 270; versatility, 271. 
 
 Literary Market, the, — criticism, 
 book-making, etc., 464. 
 
 Locker, Frederick, 273. 
 
 Lockhart, John Gibson, 235. 
 
 " Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," 
 Tennyson's, 421, 422. 
 
 London, its humane satirists and po- 
 ets, 86, 470, 471. 
 
 London Magazine, 77, 82, 107. 
 
 London Poems, Buchanan's, 350, 351. 
 
 London's Poet (Hood), 83. 
 
 Longevity, 180; of intellectual poets, 
 417. 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wad.sworth, 106, 
 254, 302, 417, 423; translation of 
 Dante, 276; and see American Po- 
 ets. 
 
 Longfellow, W. P. P., quoted, 480, 
 481. 
 
 " Lotos-Eaters," Tennyson's, likeness 
 to portions of the Greek Idyls, 214- 
 217. 
 
 Love, its effect upon a woman's gen- 
 ius, 132. 
 
 Love Sonnets of Proteus, Plant's, 460. 
 
 Lover, Samuel, 258. 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, remark upon 
 Landor, 36; "Commemoration 
 Ode," 400; and see 461, and Amer- 
 ican Poets. 
 
 Lucile, Lytton's, 268. 
 
 Lucretius, 20, 32, 226. 
 
 " Lucretius," Tennyson's, 181. 
 
 Luggie, The, Gray's, 265. 
 
 Luria, Browning's, reviewed, 310, 
 311; exhibits the author's favorite 
 characterization, 310; dedicated to 
 Landor, 311 ; and see 319. 
 
 " Lycidas," Milton's, 99, 396; com- 
 pared with /;/ Metnoriam, 168. 
 
 " Lycus the Centaur," Hood's, 75.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 505 
 
 Lyra Germafiica, etc., 278. 
 
 Lyrical Poetry, refinement of Lan- 
 der's, 45; Arnold's lacking flow, 
 92; Miss Barrett's, 129; distinction 
 between a lyric and a song, loi ; 
 views of R. H. Stoddard, loi, 102; 
 Browning's early lyrics, 302 ; dra- 
 matic quality, 320; his occasional 
 lyrics, 328, 329; their suggestive- 
 ness, 329; defects, 329; Rossetti's 
 lyrical faculty, 365; Swinburne's, 
 394, 395. 396, 434-436; Tennyson's 
 later lyrics, 419-422; E. Mackay, 
 461. 
 
 Lyte, H. F., 277. 
 
 Lytton, Edward, Lord, a novelist- 
 poet, 254; King Art htir, 255; dra- 
 mas, 255; translations, 274; re- 
 marks on Horace, 275; and see 
 441. 
 
 Lytton, Robert, Lord, 267-269; Lii- 
 cile, 268 ; likeness to his father, 
 268 ; his imitation of Tennyson 
 and Browning, 269; and see 320, 
 328. 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 
 250, 251, 260. 
 
 MacCarthy, Denis Florence, 259; se- 
 lections from Calderon, 276. 
 
 Macdonald, George, 264. 
 
 Mackay, Charles, 259. 
 
 Mackay, Eric, L(n)e Letters of a Vio- 
 linist, etc., 460. 
 
 Maclagan, Alexander, 279. 
 
 Macready, the Tragedian, 107, 236, 
 308, 309. 
 
 Madrigals, Stoddard's selection of, 
 
 lOI. 
 
 Magazines, 255. 
 Maginn, William, 235. 
 Magnitude, in Art, differing from 
 greatness, 377. 
 
 Magnusson, Eirikr, 371. 
 
 Mahabharata, the, E. Arnold's ver- 
 sions, 450. 
 
 Mahoney, Francis, 272. 
 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, his black-letter 
 romance, 176. 
 
 Manfred, Byron's, 41. 
 
 Mangan, James Clarence, 260. 
 
 Mannerism, of the new schools, 286; 
 Swinburne's, 383. 
 
 Marino Faliero, Swinburne's, 437. 
 
 Market, the Literary, 479, 480. 
 
 Marlowe, 102, 442. 
 
 Marriage, Procter's, 108 ; Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's, 132; essential to full growth 
 of a woman's genius, 132-136; re- 
 lation to Art, 134; with respect to 
 the husband, 134, 135; to the wife, 
 
 135- 
 Marston, Westland, 2S2, 471. 
 
 Marston, Philip Bourke, 282, 440. 
 
 Martin, Theodore, Bo7t Gtcaliier, 272 ; 
 
 paraphrase of Horace, 274 ; Danish 
 
 translations, 276. 
 Marvell, Andrew, 28. 
 " Mary Arden," E. Mackay's, 461. 
 Mary Stuart, Swinburne's, 436. 
 Marzials, Theophile, 284, 285, 470. 
 Massey, Gerald, 263, 355. 
 Massie, Richard, 278. 
 Massinger, 105. 
 Masterpieces, not recently produced, 
 
 478. 
 
 Masters, in Art, their triumph over 
 restrictions, 30. 
 
 Material, Poetic, 262, 334. 
 
 Matter, his account of the Alexan- 
 drian School, 205. 
 
 Matid, and other Poems, Tennyson's, 
 
 173, 177- 
 Maurice, Rev. F. D., 424. 
 
 Mazzini, 64, 400, 423, 435. 
 
 McGee, Thomas D'Arcy, 260.
 
 5o6 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Medioeval Studies, Browning's, 324, 
 325; Swinburne's, 392. 
 
 Mediocrity, popularity of, 452. 
 
 Meditative School, its minor poets, 
 241-24S; general spirit of, 246- 
 248 ; weakness and decline, 248 ; de- 
 spondent tone, 287 ; and see 96-98. 
 
 Melody, Rossetti's, 362, 365; Swin- 
 burne's, 383, 395. 
 
 Manorials of Hood, by Mrs. Erode- 
 rip, 88. 
 
 Men and Women, Browning's, 321- 
 328 ; his representative book, 322 ; 
 general excellence, 322. 
 
 Meredith, George, 271, 447. 
 
 Merivale, H. C, 471. 
 
 Metaphysical Poetry, 163, 341 ; and 
 see Transcendentalism. 
 
 Metempsychosis, literary, 335. 
 
 Method, Poetic, evils of unwise, 334, 
 
 337- 
 Metre, of In Memoriam, 169; of 
 
 "The Daisy," 174; Swinburne's 
 
 novel variations, 395 ; Ave atque 
 
 Vale, 397. 
 Middlcmarch, George Eliot's, 254. 
 Midsutntner Holiday, A, Swinburne's, 
 
 435- 
 
 Millais, the artist, 358. 
 
 Miller, Thomas, 259. 
 
 Millet, J. F., 454, 455. 
 
 Milman, Henry Hart, 236. 
 
 Milnes, Richard Monckton (Lord 
 Houghton), 37, 245, 440. 
 
 Milton, his blank-verse, 46; Latinism, 
 161 ; plan of an Arthurian epic, 
 180 ; the Greek idyls, 232 ; his po- 
 etic canon, 353; and see t^j, 58, 60, 
 
 H9. 154. 156, 175' 184, 209, 292, 
 
 299, 381, 442, 467. 
 Mind-Reading, Browning's, 432. 
 Minor Poets, 6; how affected by their 
 
 period, 28. 
 
 Mirabeau, 399. 
 
 Mirandola, Procter's, 107. 
 
 Miscellaneous Poets. The various 
 groups, schools, and minor poets 
 of the Victorian Period. See Chap- 
 ters VII. and VIII., 234-292; an 
 era fairly represented by its miscel- 
 laneous poets, 234; early situation 
 and outlook, 234 ; " retired list," 
 235, 236; minor dramatists, 236; 
 sentimentalists, 237 ; skill and re- 
 finement of recent minor poets, 
 240; those of the Elizabethan Pe- 
 riod, 240; influence of Wordsworth 
 — the Meditative School, 241-248; 
 its characteristics, 247 ; decline, 
 248; independent singers, 248-253; 
 poetry of successful prose-writers, 
 251 ; inferior novelist-poets, 253- 
 255; magazinists, 255; diffusion of 
 poor verse, 256; a few men of early 
 promise, 256-258; song - writers, 
 258-261 ; English and Scottish, 258, 
 259; Irish, 260; Democratic and 
 Chartist, 261 ; recent errors and af- 
 fectations, 262, 2S5 ; the Rhapso- 
 dists, or the " Spasmodic School," 
 262-265 ; influence of Tennyson and 
 Browning, 265-269 ; false simplicity, 
 266; minor idyllic poets, 269-271; 
 vers de societe, satire, parody, etc., 
 272, 273; translators and transla- 
 tion, 273-276; hymnology, 277, 278; 
 dialect-verse, 279; female poets, 
 279-281; latest schools, 281-286; 
 psychological and Neo-Romantic 
 group, 281-286; poetry of the fan- 
 tastic and grotesque, 285 ; want of 
 wholesome criticism, 286; "schol- 
 ar's work in poetry," 286 ; tone of 
 the minor philosophic poets, 287; 
 that of the idyllists, romancers, etc, 
 2S7 ; present outlook, 2S9 ; British
 
 INDEX. 
 
 507 
 
 and American poets contrasted, 
 290; freshness and individuality of 
 tiie latter, 290; meaning of the re- 
 cent aspect, 291 ; reflex influence of 
 America upon the motherland, 291 ; 
 the future, 292 ; great number of the 
 minor Victorian poets, 286, 344; 
 necrology, 439, 442 ; a prolific con- 
 tingent, 447-454; a look round the 
 latest field, 458-475; recent lack of 
 assumption, 458 ; scenic tendency, 
 465 ; university school, 462, etc. ; 
 aesthetic group, 467 ; colonial, etc., 
 468-470; society- verse, 473-475; 
 want of national tone, 480-482. 
 
 Miscellanies, Swinburne's, 438. 
 
 Miss Kilmansegg, Hood's, 79, 80, 84, 
 85. 
 
 Mitford, John, 242. 
 
 Mitford, Mary Russell, portrait of 
 Miss Barrett, 123; dramas, etc., 
 236. 
 
 Mixed School, 319. 
 
 Moir, David Macbeth, 255. 
 
 Moliere, 298. 
 
 Monastic Studies, Browning's, 324, 
 
 325- 
 Montgomery, James, 235. 
 
 Montgomery, Robert, 256. 
 
 Moore, Thomas, 102, 203, 235, 238, 
 
 258- 
 
 Moral Epistle, Lander's, 39. 
 
 Moralistic Group, 242. 
 
 Morley, Henry, 441. 
 
 Morris, Lewis, 451-453. 
 
 Morris, William, Icelandic Transla- 
 tions, 276; a Neo-Romantic poet, 
 282-284; associated with Rossetti 
 and Swinburne, 345, 358 ; decora- 
 tive art-work, 358; review of his 
 career and works, 366-378 ; an Ar- 
 tist of the Beautiful, 366 ; serenity, 
 366; compared with Keats, 367; 
 
 practice in the arts of design, 367, 
 368 ; pleasant ease of his poetry, 
 368 ; The De/etice of Gtienevere, 
 368, 369 ; landscape, ib. ; his ear- 
 ly work like Rossetti's, 369; Pre- 
 Raphaelite ballads, 369; The Life 
 and Death of fason, 370, 371; a 
 notable raconteur, 370, 372 ; his 
 close knowledge of antiquities, 370, 
 374; lack of variety, 371; transla- 
 tions from the Icelandic, etc., 371, 
 372 ; The Earthly Paradise, 372- 
 378 ; a successor to Boccaccio and 
 Chaucer, 372, 375; not often highly 
 imaginative, 373, 378 ; possessed of 
 clear vision and speech, 374 ; fatal- 
 istic moral of his verse, 375, 377; 
 excessive facility, 377 ; his station 
 among the Neo-Romantic leaders, 
 378 ; Saxon diction, 379 ; social re- 
 form, 433 ; translations of Homer, 
 Virgil, etc., ib. ; SigJird the Volsiing, 
 ib. ; and see 40, 357, 392, 401, 450. 
 
 Morte Darthur, Le, Malory's, 176. 
 
 Morte d'Arthiir, Tennyson's, 161, 177, 
 220. 
 
 Moschus. See Bion and Moschus. 
 
 Motherwell, William, 235. 
 
 Movement, the epic swiftness, 166. 
 
 Miiller, Max, 372. 
 
 Munby, Arthur J., Dorothy, etc., 454. 
 
 Miindi et Cordis, Wade's, 256. 
 
 My Beautiful Lady, Woolner's, 270. 
 
 Myers, Ernest, 465. 
 
 Myers, Frederic W. H., 246, 446. 
 
 " My Last Duchess," Browning's, 321, 
 
 322, 337, 425- 
 Mysticism. See Trattscendentalistn . 
 Myths and Legends, of The Earthly 
 
 Paradise, 372. 
 
 Nairn, Baroness, 120. 
 Napier, Sir William, 38.
 
 5o8 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Napoleon Fallen, Buchanan's, 347, 354. 
 
 " Napoleon III. in Italy," Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's, 143. 
 
 Narrative Verse, Morris a master of, 
 370, 1,1-2.. 
 
 Nation, Tlte (Dublin), 260. 
 
 Natural method, in Art, 38. 
 
 Nature, Lander's love of, 60 ; Buchan- 
 an's, 349 ; Swinburne's slight regard 
 for, 401. 
 
 Neale, John Mason, 277. 
 
 Necrolog}', of twelve years, 439-442. 
 
 " Neil, Ross," 472. 
 
 Neo-Romantic School, 6, 281-286 ; led 
 by Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, 
 281 ; French Romanticism, 284 ; 
 carried to an extreme by Marzials, 
 284, 285 ; relative positions of the 
 leaders, 361, 378 ; Lang's Ballads of 
 Old France, 475 ; its French min- 
 strelsy an exotic, 477 ; and see 393, 
 413, 416, 440, 445, also Romanti- 
 cism. 
 
 Nesbit, E., 464. 
 
 Neukomm, Chevalier, 108. 
 
 New Departure, a change from the 
 idyllic method, 342. 
 
 Newman, Francis William, 275. 
 
 Newman, John Henry, 245, 278. 
 
 New Monthly Magazine, 82. 
 
 " New Princeton Review, The," quot- 
 ed, 481. 
 
 Nibehingen-Lied, 372. 
 
 Nichol, John, 255. 
 
 Nicoll, Robert, 261. 
 
 Noel, Roden, 270, 446. 
 
 Non-Creative Period, from Milton to 
 Cowper, 21, 22. 
 
 Norse Literature, 374. 
 
 North-Coast Poems, Buchanan's, 350, 
 
 351- 
 Norton, Caroline Elizabeth Sarah, 
 
 120, 237. 
 
 Note on Charlotte Bronte, A, Swin- 
 burne's, 438. 
 
 N^otes on Poems and Reviews, Swin- 
 burne's, 390. 
 
 Novel, The, supplying the place of 
 the drama, 25, 47, 295. 
 
 Novelist-Poets, Kingsley and Thack- 
 eray, 251 ; inferior names, 253-255 ; 
 Meredith, 447. 
 
 Novels in Verse, 453. 
 
 Novel-Writing, diversion to, 479. 
 
 Objective Dramatic Mode, con- 
 trasted with Browning's, 431-433. 
 
 Objectivity, in poetry, 47 ; Arnold's, 
 92, 95 ; dramatic, 295 ; Morris's, 
 
 366, 367- 
 
 Obscurity, only the semblance of im- 
 agination, 305. 
 
 Obsolete Forms, 361. 
 
 " Ode on the French Republic," Swin- 
 burne's, 400. 
 
 " Ode to Rae Wilson," Hood's, 78. 
 
 Odes and Addresses, Hood's, 77. 
 
 " GEnone," Tennyson's, the elegiac 
 refrain, 213, resemblance to vari- 
 ous passages in Theocritus, 213- 
 214. 
 
 Omar Khayyam, Rubdiydt of, 276, 398, 
 456. 
 
 Optimism, 422, 433. 
 
 Orientalism, E. Arnold, 449, 450 ; 
 Toru Dutt, 470. 
 
 Originality, Tennyson's, 232 ; in what 
 consisting, 297 ; Browning's, 293, 
 297> 320. 2,^^^ 341 ; Buchanan's, 348. 
 
 Original Plays, Gilbert's, 472. 
 
 Orion, Home's, 249. 
 
 Orphic utterances, of the Lake School 
 and Buchanan, 347, 354. 
 
 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur W. E., 284, 
 440. 
 
 "Othello," 310.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 509 
 
 Over-Culture, Arnold's reaction from, 
 97 ; evils of, 1 24. 
 
 Over-Possession, 145, 298. 
 
 Over-Production, dangers of the liter- 
 ary market, 470. 
 
 " Owen Meredith." See Robert, Lord 
 Lytton. 
 
 Oxford Group, 463. See University 
 School. 
 
 Pacchiarotto, Browning's, 425. 
 
 Painting, its recent services to poetry, 
 358 ; the Pre - Raphaelite method, 
 358 ; Rossetti's drawmgs, etc., 359 ; 
 Crayon Verse, etc., 465. 
 
 Palgrave, Francis Turner, 245-248 ; re- 
 semblance to Arnold, 245 ; his Reign 
 of Law, 2^1, 247 ; his attitude, 247 ; 
 hymns, 278 ; and see 444. 
 
 Parables, Hake's, 282. 
 
 Paracelsus, Browning's, 305-308 ; ana- 
 lytic power, 305 ; compared with 
 Faust, 305 ; merits and defects, 306 ; 
 garrulity, 306 ; fine diction, 306, 307 ; 
 blank-verse, 307 ; meanmg, 307. 
 
 Paradise Lost, 161, 175, 180, 184; its 
 theology, 353. 
 
 Parleyings, etc., Browning's, 427. 
 
 Parody, 272, 273, 304. 
 
 Parr, Samuel, 37.- 
 
 Parsons, Thomas W., lines " On a Bust 
 of Dante," 364. 
 
 Pascal, Blaise, 147. 
 
 Passion, two kinds, 91 ; Pippa Passes, 
 316; moral of Browning's, 332; en- 
 nobling to Art, 333 ; Tennyson's in- 
 crease of, 416, 420; Rossetti's son- 
 nets, 439 ; recent lack of, 482. 
 
 Pastoral Verse, of Wordsworth, Bry- 
 ant, and Buchanan, 349; Munby's, 
 
 454- 
 * Pathetic Fallacy," the, 445. 
 Patmore, Coventry, 266, 267, 446. 
 
 Patriotic Verse, 259, 260. 
 Paul, C. Kegan, 472. 
 Payne, John, 283, 445. 
 Peacock, Thomas Love, 235. 
 Pedantry, the rage for elucidation, 
 
 43°- 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 89. 
 
 Peerage, the, Tennyson and, 422-424. 
 
 Pendennis, Thackeray's, 142. 
 
 Pentanieron, Landor's, 48, 51. 
 
 Pericles and Aspasia, Landor's, 38, 
 
 51, 54- 
 
 Persian Quatrain, 2S3. 
 
 Pessimism, 422 ; J. Thomson, 456. 
 
 " Peter Pindar," 238. 
 
 Petrarch, 11. 
 
 Petty, Sir William, his declaration of 
 faith, 192. 
 
 Pfeiffer, Emily, 453, 454. 
 
 Philanthropy, Hood's and Dickens's, 
 83, 84; Arnold's, 91 ; Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's, 129. 
 
 Philip Van Artevelde, Taylor's, 237. 
 
 Philips, Ambrose, 232. 
 
 Philistinism, its defence and arraign- 
 ment, 328 ; false distinction between 
 Browning and Swinburne, 330. 
 
 Philoctetes, Warren, 283. 
 
 Philology, Landor's, 65. 
 
 Phocceans, Landor's, 41. 
 
 Piano-music, a term applied to recent 
 verse, 191. 
 
 Pindar, 60, 204, 205. 
 
 Pippa Passes, Browning's, 306, 313, 
 315-319; his most simple and beau- 
 tiful drama, 315 ; scene between Ot- 
 timaand Sebald, 316-318; too intel- 
 lectual and subjective, 318; a work 
 of pure art, 319 ; its faults and beau- 
 ties, 319; quoted, 339. 
 
 Plagiarism, 210, 211. 
 
 Plato, 14, 119, 303; Landor's opinion, 
 70; description of a poet, 149.
 
 Sio 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Play, Form of the, its advantages for 
 a masterpiece, 295. 
 
 Play^vrights, 295 ; Buchanan, 445 ; and 
 see 471, 472. 
 
 Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, 
 Hood's, 75. 
 
 Pleiadc, the French, 474. 
 
 Pkimptre, Edward Hayes, 246. 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, Sonnet to Science, 
 8; indebted to Procter, 106; esti- 
 mate of Tennyson, 154, 210; Thom- 
 son's likeness to, 455, 456; and see 
 American Poets. 
 
 Pocmata et Ittscriptiones, Landor's, 
 
 43- 
 Poems, Tennyson's volume of 1832, 
 
 158, 210; of 1S42, 160. 
 
 Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's, 389- 
 396 ; criticism evoked by this book, 
 390 ; the poet's rejoinder, 390 ; re- 
 printed in America, 390 ; a collec- 
 tion of early poems, 391, 392; me- 
 diaeval studies, 392 ; French, He- 
 braic, and Italian influences, 393 ; 
 poetic quality, 394 ; extravagance, 
 395 ; novel and beautiful metres, 
 395 ; a suggestive volume, 396. 
 
 Poems and Ballads, 2d Series, Swin- 
 burne's, 434. 
 
 Poems before Congress, Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's, 143. 
 
 Poems by Two Brothers, 157. 
 
 Poems, chiefly Lyrical, Tennyson's, 
 
 157. 158- 
 
 Poems of Rural Life, Barnes's, 279. 
 
 Poetic Decline, Mrs. Browning's, 143. 
 
 Poetic Revival (1791-1824), 22, 240. 
 
 Poetry, compared with sister-arts, 3, 
 1 56 ; Poetry and Science, 8, 20 ; its 
 office, 16; "poetry of the future," 
 21, 31, 32, 341 ; its reserved domain, 
 21; advance as an art, 25-27; the 
 ksting kind, 76 ; Arnold's theory, 
 
 95, 97 ; four great orders, 204 ; dif- 
 fusion of inferior verse, 256 ; Poetry 
 a jealous mistress, 258 ; elements as 
 an art, 293 ; a means of expression, 
 298 ; what constitutes a poet, 298 ; 
 misuse of the term, 299; Brown- 
 ing's theory, 301 ; Lessing on Po- 
 etry and Painting, 358 ; obligations 
 of the former to the latter, 358 ; a 
 century of, 415; annotation of, 431 ; 
 vitality of, 441, 474; national style 
 required, 481 ; and see Latter-Day 
 Poets, Miscellaneous Poets, Dramatic 
 Poetry, Idyllic Poetry, etc., etc. 
 
 Poetry of the Period, The, Austin's es- 
 says, 450. 
 
 Poets of America, by the author of 
 this volume : references to, 2, 3, 4, 
 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 28, 37, 53, 77, 81, 
 82, 96, 99, 118, 120, 146, 147, 148, 
 150, 161, 166, 189, 190, 191, 199, 244, 
 251, 253, 258, 266, 272, 279, 289, 290, 
 29s. 299, 343, 344. 370, 372, 450. 455. 
 
 473. 479- 
 
 Political Verse, Swinburne's, 436. 
 
 Pollock, W. H., 466. 
 
 Pollok, 452. 
 
 Polyglot poets, 466. 
 
 Pope, imitated by Landor, 39 ; resem- 
 blance between him and Tenny- 
 son, 184; difference, 185; deficient 
 in suggestiveness, 186; " Pastorals," 
 215; and see 40, 60, 154, 163, 200, 
 232, 273, 274. 
 
 Popularity, no guarantee of fame, 
 452. 
 
 Positivism, "Geo. Eliot," 254; Call, 
 Blind, etc., 457. 
 
 Poverty, unfriendly to Art, 81, 82 ; fel- 
 lowship of the poor, 83 ; the " gen 
 teel poor," 83. 
 
 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, 238, 272 
 
 Pre-Chaucerian Period, 369.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 531 
 
 Pre - Chaucerian Verse and Method, 
 
 179. 359. Zl'^- 
 Precision of Touch, 361. 
 
 Precocity, 243. 
 
 Pre - RaphaeUtism, Tennyson's, in 
 youth, 155, 176; Browning's, 339; 
 the painters of the school, 358 ; its 
 relation to academic art, 358 ; Ros- 
 setti's, in poetry and painting, 359 ; 
 Morris's, 369 ; feeling of the true 
 disciple, 369, 370; its Stained-Glass 
 verse, 477 ; and see 266, 300, 463. 
 
 " Prince Hohenstiel - Schwangau," 
 Browning's, 337. 
 
 Princess, The, Tennyson's, 164-167, 
 220, 225. 
 
 Prior, 473. 
 
 Procter, Adelaide Anne, 107, 254, 280. 
 
 Procter, Bryan Waller (" Barry Corn- 
 wall "), 73 ; review of his career and 
 writings, 100-113; his birth, 100; 
 a natural vocalist, 100; genuine 
 quality of his songs, loi, 102 ; his 
 youth and early associates, 103 ; a 
 pioneer of the recent school, 103 ; 
 preface to his " Dramatic Scenes," 
 103 ; a pupil of Leigh Hunt, 103 ; 
 restrictions upon his dramatic gen- 
 ius, 104 ; a poet of the Renaissance, 
 105; Dramatic Scenes, etc., 105; 
 his influence upon other poets, 106 ; 
 Mirandola, 107 ; poems of a later 
 date, 107 ; his daughter Adelaide, 
 107 ; home and domestic happiness, 
 ic8 ; English Songs, 109-112 ; their 
 number and beauty, 109; Stoddard's 
 estimate of them, 109; their sur- 
 prising range and variety, 112; 
 "Dramatic Fragments," 113; his 
 old age and death, 113 ; "A Blot in 
 the 'Scutcheon " dedicated to him, 
 313; and see 26, 167, 236, 258, 412, 
 441. 
 
 Progress, Law of, in Art, 17, 27. 
 
 Prometheus, of yEschylus, 42 ; trans- 
 lated by Mrs. Browning, 121. 
 
 Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's, 380, 
 386, 388. 
 
 " Promise of May, The," Tennyson's, 
 418. 
 
 Propagandism, 351, 353; Buchanan's, 
 
 355. 356- 
 
 Prose, rarely confused with Verse by 
 true poets, 37 ; Landor's, 37, 42, 49, 
 51 ; Arnold's, 99, 100; Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's, 123 ; recent prose-writers who 
 have written poetry, 251-253 ; sharp- 
 ly distinguished from poetry, 299 ; 
 Swinburne's, 401, 404, 438 ; Gosse's, 
 458. 
 
 Prose Romance, a rival to poetry, 
 343 ; the modem period of, 343. 
 
 Protectorate, The. See CroiJiwcllian 
 Period. 
 
 Psychological Verse, Browning's, 297, 
 309; and see 416, 431-433. 465. and 
 N'co-Romantic School. 
 
 Ptolemy Philadelphus, 206, 207. 
 
 Public Taste, law of change in, 150; 
 application to Tennyson, 151, 152. 
 
 Publishers, 479. 
 
 Puritans, the, 309. 
 
 Pye, Henry James, 34. 
 
 QuAiNTNESS, Rossetti's, 361, 362. 
 Quality, deficient in Arnold, 93 ; in 
 
 Tennyson, 183 ; an intuitive grace, 
 
 258, 259 ; quality and quantity, 361 ; 
 
 Eric Mackay's, 461. 
 Quarles, Francis, 283. 
 Queen Anne's Time, 295, 416, 43l. 
 Queen Mary, Tennyson's, 413, 418. 
 Queen Mother, Swinburne's, 384-386^ 
 
 392, 404. 
 Queen of Scots. See Mary Stuart,
 
 512 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Radicalism, and conservatism, 423. 
 
 Radical Poets, 262, 456, 457. 
 
 Rafael, 323. 
 
 Raffalovich, M. A., 466. 
 
 Range, 47. 
 
 Rationalism vs. Calvinism, 329. 
 
 Rational method in Art, 9. 
 
 Real and Ideal, 332. 
 
 Realism, modern, 12; Tennyson's, 
 188; Patmore's, 266; Dobell's, 267 ; 
 limits of, 304; as a substitute for 
 imagination, 327 ; abuse of the 
 term, 359 ; definition of true, 478. 
 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, Brown- 
 ing's, 337. 
 
 Reform-verse, Buchanan's, 355. 
 
 Refrains, Mrs. Browning's, 145, 146. 
 
 " Reign of Law," Palgrave's, 245, 247. 
 
 Religious feeling, Mrs. Browning's, 
 147 ; Tennyson's attitude, 192. 
 
 Renaissance, the, 105 ; revival of old 
 forms, 286 ; a fashion of the day, 
 
 477, 479- 
 
 Republicanism, Lander's, 64 ; Swin- 
 burne's, 399, 423. 
 
 Reputation, 356. 
 
 Restraint, Arnold's, 91 ; lack of, among 
 subjective poets, 145 ; Buchanan's 
 need of, 348 ; an element of perfect 
 art, 410. 
 
 Retrospective Summary, 412-414. 
 
 Return of the Drtcses, Browning's, 310, 
 312, 313 ; classical form, 313. 
 
 Reverence in Art, 148 ; Tennyson's, 
 192. 
 
 Revival, \<I ells' s Joseph, 441. 
 
 Revolutionary poems, Swinburne's, 
 399-401. 
 
 Reynolds, Jane (Mrs. Hood), 89. 
 
 Rhapsodists. See Spasmodic School. 
 
 Rhetoric, 288. 
 
 Rhyme, Browning's use of, discussed, 
 428. 
 
 " Rhyme of the Duchess May," Mrs. 
 Browning's, 125. 
 
 Rhythm, Tennyson's, 226, 227 ; Swin- 
 burne's, 380-3S3, 402. 
 
 Richter, Jean Paul, 147. 
 
 Rienzi, Miss Mitford's, 236. 
 
 Rime of the Aticient Mariner, 86. 
 
 Ring a7id the Book, Browning's, 334- 
 336; deemed his greatest work, 334 ; 
 an intellectual prodigy, 334; outline 
 of, 335 ; style of certain passages, 
 335 ; estimate of, as a poem, 336 ; 
 and see 341. 
 
 Rispetti and Stornelli. See Italian 
 Period. 
 
 Ritualism, 410. 
 
 " Rizpah," Tennyson's, 420. 
 
 Roberts, Charles G. D., 469. 
 
 Robinson, A. Mary F., 463. 
 
 Robinson, Crabb, 51. 
 
 Rodd, Rennell, 467. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, 235. 
 
 Roman, The, Dobell's, 267. 
 
 Romanticism, 74 ; French Romantic 
 School, 284 ; carried to an extreme, 
 284, 285 ; contrasted with classi- 
 cism, 313; the early, 359; Swin- 
 burne's, 404; and see 412, and Neo- 
 Rovi antic School. 
 
 " Romaunt of the Page," Miss Bar- 
 rett's, 123. 
 
 " Rosamond," Swinburne's. See Queen 
 Mother. 
 
 " Rose Aylmer," Landor's, 46, 303. 
 
 Rossetti, Christina Georgina, 280, 
 
 443- 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, compared 
 with Tennyson, 176; Neo-Romanti- 
 cism, 282-284 ; Early Italian Poets, 
 276, 360 ; relations with Morris and 
 Swinburne, 345, 358, 369, 378; re- 
 view of his works and career, 357- 
 366; birth, 357; distinctive force
 
 INDEX. 
 
 513 
 
 and attitude, 357 ; influence as a 
 leader, 357 ; a circle called by his 
 name, 357; an early Pre-Raphaelite 
 in art and poetry, 358, 359; a man 
 of genius, 359; ballads, 359; Italian 
 parentage, 360; Poems, 360-365; 
 his conscientiousness, 361 ; quaint- 
 ness of diction and accent, 361, of 
 feeling, 362 ; a master of the Neo- 
 Roniantic school, 361 ; simplicity, 
 and precision of touch, 361 ; terse- 
 ness, 361 ; an earnest and spiritual 
 artist, 362 ; melody, 362, 365 ; light 
 and color, 362 ; " The Blessed Uam- 
 ozel," 363 ; mediaeval ballads, 364 ; 
 miscellaneous poems, 364 ; a trans- 
 lator from the old French, 364 ; lyr- 
 ical faculty, 365 ; dramatic power, 
 365 ; a sonneteer, 365 ; his imagina- 
 tion, 365 ; aspects of his poetry and 
 career, 365, 366; The House of Life, 
 366, 439 ; his death, 439 ; memori- 
 als of, 439 ; Stained-Glas3 poetry of 
 his pupils, 477 ; and see 2, 320, 386, 
 391. 392. 4i3> 441. 451. 463. 465. 468, 
 476. 
 Ruskin, John, on Art as a means of 
 Expression, 288 ; his word-painting, 
 288 ; on popular appreciation, 298 ; 
 and see 445, 463, 467. 
 
 Sacred Verse. See Hymnology. 
 
 Sand, George, 120. 
 
 Sappho, 115, 435. 
 
 Satire, 272; Browning's, 425; Court- 
 hope, 471. 
 
 Saxon English, in translating Homer, 
 371 ; Morris's diction, 379. 
 
 " Scairth o' Bartle," Buchanan's, 352, 
 
 354- 
 Scenic Tendency, 465, 466. 
 Schoell, quoted, 206, 239. 
 Science, its iconoclastic stress, 7 ; bear- 
 
 ing on religion and poetry, 7 ; no 
 inherent antagonism, 8 ; a tempo- 
 rary struggle, 9; Lyell, Darwin, 
 Agassiz, Huxley, Spencer, 13, 19; 
 approaching harmony, 19-21 ; ad- 
 dress of Dr. Wurz, 19; complete 
 understanding not yet possible, 21 ; 
 use of scientific material by Tenny- 
 son in " In Memoriam," etc., 170, 
 193 ; Wordsworth upon relations of 
 science and poetry, 193 ; effect up- 
 on modern imagination, 343 ; and 
 see 457. 
 
 Scholar-Poets. See University School. 
 
 Scholar's work, modern, 479. 
 
 Schopenhauer, 455. 
 
 Scotland, represented by Buchanan in 
 recent poetry, 346 ; character of the 
 Scottish element, 346, 347. 
 
 Scott, Clement W., 470. 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 34, 104, 176, 203. 
 
 Scott, William Bell, his Year of the 
 World, 257 ; Poefs Harvest Home, 
 446 ; and see 270, 368. 
 
 Scottish Idyls, Buchanan's, 349, 350^ 
 
 352- 
 
 Seasons, The, Thomson's, 188. 
 
 Seclusion, effect on Tennyson, 190. 
 
 Sensuousness, 389-391. 
 
 Sentiment, 470. 
 
 Sentimentalism, 237, 412, 478. 
 
 Seraphim, Mrs. Browning's, 123, 124. 
 
 Serenity of mood, 366. 
 
 Serio-Comic Verse, 272, 273. 
 
 Shairp, John Campbell, 279. 
 
 Shakespeare, his human sympathy, 
 37 ; stage-presentation of his plays, 
 38; his women, 314; diction caught 
 by Swinburne, 385; and see 11, 14, 
 63, 75, 102, 142, 156, 192, 204, 224, 
 292, 294, 29S, 307,329. 38'. 4 '3. 44?- 
 461. 
 
 " Shakespeare's Scholar," 24.
 
 514 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Shakespeare Societies, 430. 
 
 Sharp, William, his volume on Ros- 
 
 setti, 439 ; and see 468. 
 Shelley, his Adottais, 99; classical 
 instinct, 121 ; translations, 122 ; Mrs. 
 Browning's resemblance to, 1 24 ; 
 Greek idyls, 232 ; Revolt of Islam, 
 354 ; rhythmical genius, compared 
 to Swinburne's, 380, 381, 383; Shel- 
 ley societies, 430 ; and see 34, 39, 
 41, 64, 74, 168, iSo, 203, 209, 236, 
 274. 329. 382, 392, 396, 400. 401, 
 411, 412, 438, 455, 476. 
 Shenstone, William, 232. 
 "Shepherd's Idyl," resemblance to 
 
 " Cyclops," 228. 
 Shirley, James, 28. 
 Sicilian Idyls, 204; and see Greek 
 
 Idyls. 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 52, 147, 176. 
 Sigurd the Volsung, Morris's, 443. 
 Simcox, George Augustus, 282. 
 Simmons, Bartholomew, 255. 
 Simplicity, Hood's, 88; spurious, of 
 minor poets, 265, 266 ; Tennyson's, 
 266; classical, 313 ; Rossetti's, 361. 
 Singleton, Mrs., 453. 
 Skepticism, its bearing on creative art, 
 18 ; faith and doubt of In Memori- 
 am, 170. 
 Sladen, D. B. W., 469- 
 Smedley, Menella B., 440. 
 Smith, Alexander, 263. 
 Smith, the brothers James and Hor- 
 ace, 235. 
 Smith, Walter C., 453. 
 Socialism, increase of, 482. 
 Societies, the Browning, etc., 430, 431. 
 Society Verse, restored by Praed, 
 238; "Owen Meredith's," 268; re- 
 cent, 272; Locker, Calverley, etc., 
 273; characteristics, 272, 273 ; mark 
 of a refined period, 273; specific 
 
 renewal of, 473-475; Dobson and 
 his influence, 273, 473, 474 ; an in- 
 terlude, 474 ; the Debonair poets, 
 477 ; Kensington-Stitch Verse, 477 ; 
 and see 466, 47 1 . 
 " Sohrab and Rustum," Arnold's, 92- 
 
 94. 
 Song of Italy, Swinburne's, 400. 
 " Song of the Shirt," Hood's, 87, 88, 
 
 90, 130. 
 Songs, and Song-Making; the latter 
 almost a lost art, loi ; special quality 
 of the song, loi ; Stoddard's defini- 
 tion of, 102 ; songs of the eighteenth 
 century, 102; Procter's, 102; Ten- 
 nyson's, 163 ; charm and ofifice of 
 songs, 258 ; Victorian song-makers, 
 258-261 ; Irish and patriotic, 259, 
 260 ; chartist and democratic, 260, 
 261 ; songs in Swinburne's ballads, 
 395 ; Aide, Marzials, Scott, Ashby- 
 Sterry, Merivale, etc., 470, 471. 
 Songs before Sunrise, Swinburne's, 400, 
 
 401. 
 Softgs of the Cavaliers and Round- 
 heads, Thornbury's, 252. 
 Songs of the Springtides, Swinburne's, 
 
 435- 
 
 Sonnets, Rossetti's, 365 ; Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's, 365 ; Gosse's, 459 ; Blunt's, 
 460; Watts's, 464; Caine's, Dow- 
 den's, etc., 465. 
 
 Sonnets from the Portuguese, Mrs. 
 Browning's, 136; reviewed, 137, 138. 
 
 Sordello, Browning's, 309, 310; con- 
 trasted with Sartor Resartus, 310; 
 and see 334, 340. 
 
 Souls Tragedy, Browning's, 311, 319. 
 
 Southey, 34, 37, 41, 57. 61, 68, 235, 
 356, 361, 400, 480. 
 
 Spanish Gypsry, George Eliot's, 254. 
 
 " Spartacus," 261. 
 
 Spasmodic School, notice of, 262-265 ;
 
 INDEX. 
 
 515 
 
 origin of the epithet, 262 ; satirized 
 by Aytoun, 262 ; faults, 263 ; and 
 see 355. 
 Spencer, Herbert, law of progress, 
 
 155- 
 
 Spenser, 154, 176. 
 
 " Speranza," 260. 
 
 Spirituality, of Mrs. Browning, 148 ; 
 of Rossetti, 362 ; inseparable from 
 true Realism, 478, 479. 
 
 Spontaneity, Procter's, 100 ; Mrs. 
 Browning's, 145 ; slight in Tenny- 
 son, 183 ; essential to lyric art, 253 ; 
 Rossetti's, 365 ; M. CoUins's, 441 ; 
 and see 241, 258, 289. 
 
 St. Abe, Buchanan's, 355. 
 
 Stage-Plays, Buchanan's, 355; Tenny- 
 son's, 418, 419; Gilbert's, 472. 
 
 Stage, the, 294, 295, 410; relation to 
 modern authorship, 4S0. 
 
 Stained-Glass Poetry, 477. 
 
 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 27S. 
 
 " Statue and the Bust," Browning's, 
 
 332. 
 
 Sterling, John, 243. 
 
 Stevenson, Robert L. B., 468. 
 
 Stoddard, Richard Henry, upon the 
 lyric and the song, 10 1 ; eulogy of 
 Procter's songs, 109; and see 254. 
 
 Story, W. W., 465. 
 
 Strafford, Browning's, 308, 309, 31 1. 
 
 " Strayed Singers," 236. 
 
 Stuart, Mary, Queen of Scots, Swin- 
 burne's ideal of, 404, 405, 407-409. 
 
 Studies, a substitute for spontaneous 
 work, 95; Browning's, 327, — their 
 defects, 327, subjectivity, 327, ex- 
 cessive realism and detail, 327. 
 
 Studies ill Song, Swinburne's, 435. 
 
 Style, Mrs. Browning's, 124; Tenny- 
 son's, 189 ; Browning's, 429. 
 
 Style, National, recent lack of, 480- 
 482 ; W. P. P. Longfellow quoted. 
 
 480; how to maintain, 481 ; what 
 its absence implies, 482. 
 
 Subjectivity, in poetry, 47 ; a feminine 
 trait, 147 ; Mrs. Browning's, 148 •, 
 Byron's, 197 ; Tennyson's, 197 ; 
 Browning's, 296, 340 ; hurtful to 
 Pippa Passes, 318. 
 
 Suckling, 76, 272, 473. 
 
 Suggestiveness, 329. 
 
 Sullivan, Arthur S., 476. 
 
 Swain, Charles, 259. 
 
 " Swallow Song," in The Princess, 220. 
 
 Swanwick, Anna, 275, 472. 
 
 Swedenborg, 148. 
 
 " Sw.eetness and Light," 100. 
 
 Swift, 352. 
 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, unites 
 qualities of Browning and Rossetti, 
 6 ; on Landor's first book, 39 ; pil- 
 grimage to Italy, 71 ; influence, 179; 
 Neo-Romanticism, 281, 283 ; clas- 
 sicism, etc., 313, 386-3S9, 393 ; erotic 
 verse, and Browning's, 330 ; asso- 
 ciated with Rossetti and Morris, 
 345 ; review of his genius and ca- 
 reer, 379-412; birth, 379; diction 
 contrasted with Morris's, 379 ; sur- 
 prising command of rhythm, 3S0- 
 383; compared to Shelley, 380; un- 
 precedented melody and freedom, 
 381 ; the most dithyrambic of poets, 
 381 ; e.xpression carried to fatiguing 
 excess, 382 ; voice and execution, 
 383 ; likeness to Landor, 384, 398 ; 
 linguistic gifts and attainments, 384 ; 
 The Queen Mother and Rosamond, 
 384 - 3S6 ; Elizabethan manner of 
 these plays, 384 ; a diversion from 
 the idyllic method, 3S6 ; Atacanta in 
 Calydon, 386-389 ; Poems and Bal- 
 lads, 389-396 ; excitement aroused 
 by this book, 389, 390 ; " Notes on 
 Poems and Reviews," 390; a liter-
 
 516 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 ary antagonism, 390, 391 ; the vol- 
 ume an outgrowth of the poet's 
 formative period, 391, 392 ; early 
 Gothic studies, 392 ; French, He- 
 braic, and classical influences, 393 ; 
 lyrical genius, 394-399 ; " Ave atque 
 Vale," 396, 398 ; Baudelaire, 396 ; 
 tribute to Gautier, 39S ; Latin and 
 Greek verse, 398, 399 ; revolution- 
 ary poems, 399 ; the poet's grand- 
 father, 399 ; Song of Italy, 400 ; 
 " Ode on the FVench Republic," 
 400 ; Songs before Sunrise, 400 ; few 
 early poems of Nature, 401 ; prose- 
 writings, 401 ; critical traits, 401, 
 402 ; Under the Microscope, 402 ; es- 
 timate of American poets, 402, 403 ; 
 Chastelard, 404-406 ; the poet's con- 
 ception of Mary Stuart, 404 ; Both- 
 well, 406-410 ; the author in the 
 front rank of modern dramatic po- 
 ets, 406 ; the Stuart " trilogy," 406 
 et seq. ; lack of restraint, 410 ; 
 amount and richness of his work, 
 411,434; application, 412 ; aleader 
 of recent form, 434 ; Erectheus, 434 ; 
 Poems and Ballads, 2d Series, 434 ; 
 elegiac odes, etc., 435 ; Studies in 
 Song, ib. ; Songs of the Springtides, 
 ib. ; A Midsummer Holiday, ib. ; A 
 Century of Rottndels, 436 ; political 
 verse, ib. ; Tristram oflyonesse, ib. ; 
 later dramas, 436-438 ; Mary Stu- 
 art, 436 ; Marino Faliero, 437 ; com- 
 pared to Byron, 438 ; Victor Hugo, 
 43S ; prose Miscellanies, ib. ; liter- 
 ary influence, ib. ; and see 2, 3 1 , 38, 
 43, 71, 168, 187, 290, 320, 325, 357, 
 364, 413, 441, 445, 450, 461, 466, 467, 
 469, 476. 
 
 Swinburne, Sir John, 399. 
 
 Sylvia, Barley's, 236. 
 
 Sympathy, law of, in Art, 38. 
 
 Symonds, J. Addington, 447-449; an 
 
 exemplar of Taste, 448. 
 Synthesis, 182, 241. 
 
 Tadema, Alma, 257. 
 
 Taine, H. A., critical theory, i, 41CV 
 434; quoted, 143; analysis of Ten- 
 nyson, 194 ; its defects, 195, merits, 
 195, 196 ; estimate of De Musset 
 and Tennyson, 195. 
 
 Talent, distinguished from genius, 321, 
 448. 
 
 Talfourd, Sir Thomas Noon, 236, 419. 
 
 Tasso, II. 
 
 Taste, British, subordinate to love 
 of novelty, 31 ; deficient in Mrs. 
 Browning, 1 26 ; faultless in Tenny- 
 son, 187 ; the parent of versatility, 
 368 ; Symonds an exemplar of, 447, 
 448. 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, tone of his early lyr- 
 ics, 112; translation of Faust, 276- 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 65. 
 
 Taylor, Sir Henry, his Preface to 
 Philip van Artevelde, 28, 29, 237 ; 
 and see 2, 47. 
 
 Technique, recent perfection of, 22, 
 412, 458; Landor's, 65; Morris's, 
 374 ; recent models, 416. 
 
 Temperament, Byron's, and Mrs. 
 Browning's, 198; the poetic, when 
 unsustained by true genius, 264. 
 
 Tennant, William, 235. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, his blank-verse, 46 ; 
 the same, compared with Arnold's, 
 93; hints from Procter, 106; con- 
 trasted with Mrs. Browning, 144, 
 145 ; review of his poems, genius, 
 and career, 150-200; birth, 150; 
 prolonged influence, 151 ; recently 
 subjected to adverse criticism, 151, 
 1 52 ; " The Flower," and " A Spite- 
 ful Letter," 1 52 ; represents his ex%
 
 INDEX. 
 
 517 
 
 153; an independent leader, 154; 
 Poe's opinion of him, 154 ; high 
 average of his poetry, 155 ; hin- 
 drances to a correct estimate, 1 55 ; 
 a bom artist, 155; youthful pieces, 
 155; their Pre - Raphaelitism, 155, 
 176; their charm, 156, 157; early 
 study of details, 1 56 ; Poems, chiefly 
 Lyrical, 157 ; Poems by Two Broth- 
 ers, 157 ; volume of 1832, Poems, 
 158-160; sudden poetic growth, 
 1 58 ; an expression of the beauti- 
 ful, 158 ; at the head of the "Art- 
 School," 159; tendency of his gen- 
 ius, and mfluences affecting it, 1 59 ; 
 Greek influence, 159; "CEnone," 
 1 59 ; purely English idyls, 1 59 ; the 
 volume of 1842, Poems, 160-164; a 
 treasur)' of his representative po- 
 ems, 160; advance in thought and 
 art, 160 ; formation of his blank- 
 verse style, 160 ; its originality and 
 perfection, 161 ; epic verse of 
 " Morte d' Arthur," 161 ; Victorian 
 idyllic style of his other blank-verse 
 poems, 162 ; " Dora," " Godiva," 
 " Ulysses," etc., 162 ; comprehen- 
 sive range of Efiglish Idyls and 
 Other Poems, 162, 163 ; a composite 
 and influential volume, 164 ; The 
 Princess, 164-167 ; its group of lyr- 
 ics, 166; isometric songs, 166; in- 
 tellectual growth and advantage, 
 167; at his prime, 168; In Metno- 
 riatn, reviewed, 168-172 ; his most 
 distinctive effort, 168 ; greatest of 
 elegiac masterpieces, 168, 169; its 
 metrical and stanzaic arrangement, 
 169; its general quality, 171 ; Ten- 
 nyson made Laureate, 172 ; the 
 Wellington Ode, 172 ; other occa- 
 sional pieces, 173 ; Maud and Other 
 Poems, 173, 174 ; Idyls 0/ the King, 
 
 \ \ 
 
 reviewed at length, 175-180 ; love 
 of allegory, 176 ; early and later 
 blank -verse, 177; recent manner- 
 isms, 179; English, 179; steady ad- 
 vance in work and fame, 180 ; Enoch 
 Arden and Other Poems, 181 ; " Lu- 
 cretius," 181 ; dialect - poems, etc., 
 iSi ; general characteristics of his 
 genius, 182-189 ; synthetic perfec- 
 tion, 182 ; lack of spirit and quality, 
 183 ; a conscientious artist, 183 ; 
 certain weaknesses, 183 ; Tennyson 
 and Pope, their points of resem- 
 blance, 184, 185 ; points of differ- 
 ence, 185, 186 ; supreme and com- 
 plex modem art of Tennyson, 186; 
 taste, 187 ; an idyllist, 187 ; descrip- 
 tive faculty, 188; limitations, 188; 
 style, 189 ; lack of the true dramatic 
 gift, 189- 191, 413; secluded life, 
 190; his ideal personages, 190 ; per- 
 fectly adapted to his time, 191 ; a 
 liberal conservative in politics, 191, 
 192, in religion, 192 ; artistic rever- 
 ence, 192 ; verse conformed to mod- 
 ern progress and discovery, 193, 194 ; 
 Taine's analysis, its defects, 195 ; 
 its merits, 195, 196; Tennyson and 
 Byron contrasted, 196-198 ; their 
 difference in method, 197, in per- 
 ception and imagination, 197, in 
 subjectivity, 197, in influence, 198; 
 Tennyson's ideal poetic career, 198, 
 199 ; final summary of the forego- 
 ing analysis, 199, 200. (For a sup- 
 plemental notice of Tennyson and 
 the idyllic school, including his ob- 
 ligations to Theocritus, and a view 
 of the resemblance between the Al- 
 exandrian and Victorian periods, see 
 Tennyson and Theocritus^ The 
 Laureate's influence upon minor 
 poets, 265-271 ; imitated by " Owen
 
 5i8 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Meredith," 269; his method easily 
 studied in the verse of his pupils, 
 269 ; joins the new dramatic move- 
 ment, 413; (P^f^Wil/rtrj', 413, 418; his 
 prolonged leadership, and Brown- 
 ing's, 416-418 ; longevity, 417; im- 
 pulsiveness, 418 ; later dramatic 
 work, 418, 419 ; " The Cup," " The 
 Falcon," "The Promise of May," 
 418; Harold and Becket, 419; later 
 lyrical volumes, 419-422 ; Ballads, 
 etc., 420 ; Tirestas, 420 ; the second 
 " Locksley Hall " and " Vastness," 
 421, 422 ; elevation to the Peerage, 
 422-424 ; Whitman on, 424 ; record 
 as Laureate, 424 ; his relation, and 
 Krownuig's, to the Period, 433 ; no 
 longer imitated, 476; and see also 
 2, 26, 30, 3 1, 34, 35, 62, 102, 105, 1 16, 
 130, 234, 238, 241, 244, 273, 274, 277, 
 279, 281, 290, 291, 320, 322, 335, 342, 
 343. 344. 348, 361. 366, 382, 384, 386, 
 436, 450, 460. 
 Tennyson and Theocritus, resem- 
 blances between these poets, and 
 between their respective periods, 
 201-233; text of the Greek idyls, 
 201, 212; "Epitaph of Bion," by 
 Moschus, 201 ; obligations of Ten- 
 nyson to the Syracusan poets, 202 ; 
 points taken, 202, 203 ; Theocritus, 
 the father of idyllic song, 204 ; the 
 fourth great order of poetry, 204 ; 
 previous references to this subject, 
 204 ; study of the Alexandrian Era, 
 205-208 ; Matter and Schoell's de- 
 scriptions, 205, 206 ; comparison of 
 the Greek and English tongues, 
 2o6 ; the reign of Ptolemy II., 207 ; 
 rise of Theocritus, 207 ; birth of the 
 idyl, 207, 208 ; Kingsley upon The- 
 ocritus, 208 ; Tennyson at Cam- 
 bridge, 209; Warton's edition of 
 
 Theocritus, 209, Kiessling's, 209; 
 formation of the Laureate's style, 
 2IO; influence of his Dorian stud- 
 ies, 210; two modes of resemblance 
 between poets, 210, 211; original 
 translations from the Syracusan po- 
 ets, and their likeness to portions 
 of Tennyson's verse, 21 1-23 1 ; " Hy- 
 las " and " Godiva," 21 1-213 ; meth- 
 od pursued in translation, 212 ; the 
 e\Qgi3.c refrain, 213; " Qinone," 213, 
 214; "The Lotos - Eaters," thor- 
 oughly Doria.n, 214-217 ; Virgil and 
 Pope, 215 ; Tennyson's modern idyls, 
 217-219; the isometric song, 218 ; 
 amcEbean contests, 218 ; where the 
 Laureate is independent, 219; 
 Burns, 219; general co-relations of 
 Theocritus and Tennyson, 219; 
 " Swallow Song," 220 ; miscella- 
 neous passages compared, 221-225 ' 
 minor resemblances, 225, 226 ; simi- 
 lar effects of rhythm, 226; Dorian 
 melody, 227 ; " Cyclops " and the 
 " Shepherd's Idyl," 228, 229 ; " The 
 Thalysia" and its modern counter- 
 parts, 229-231 ; Tennyson none the 
 less original, 232 ; Emerson and 
 Landor upon originality, 232 ; 
 pseudo-pastoral verse of other Eng- 
 lish periods, 232 ; the true idyl re- 
 vived by Tennyson, 233; and see 
 159, 187. 
 
 Tennyson, Charles. See Charles Tur- 
 fter. 
 
 Tennyson, Frederick, 270. 
 
 Tennysonian School, 269-271,440; L. 
 Morris, 451-453- 
 
 Terseness, 361. 
 
 Thackeray, William Makepeace, his 
 English types, 24 ; gift of sketching, 
 74 ; grim pathos, 79 ; compared 
 with Hood, 80; poetic genius, 251,
 
 INDEX. 
 
 519 
 
 252 ; humorous verse, 272 ; and see 
 
 92, 142, 262, 273. 
 Thackeray, Miss, 337. 
 "Thalysia," of Theocritus, 229-231. 
 " Theatre Francjais au Moyen Age," 
 
 226. 
 Theism, Browning's, 433. 
 Theme, recent lack of, 49, 287 ; choice 
 
 of, 405 ; and see Tradition. 
 Theocritus, Landor's paper on, 69 ; 
 
 editions of, 204, 209 ; and see 60, 
 
 273. 348, 403, and Tennyson and 
 
 Theocritus. 
 Theology. — The divine and the poet, 
 
 13- 
 
 Theosophy, 450. 
 
 Theory, Arnold's poetic, 92. 
 Thom, William, 261, 279. 
 Thomson, 265. 
 Thomson, J., author of The City of 
 
 Dreadful Night, 455-457 ; a man of 
 
 genius, ib. ; resemblance to Poe, ib. ; 
 
 posthumous volume, 457 ; and see 
 
 480. 
 Thombury, Geo. Walter, 252, 262, 440. 
 " Thyrsis," Arnold's, 98, 99, 168, 396. 
 Tibullus, 224. 
 Tilton, Theodore, his sketch of Mrs. 
 
 Browning, 131, 140. 
 " Timbuctoo," Tennyson's, 209. 
 Tiresias, Tennyson's, 420. 
 Tone, effect of, 92. 
 Tradition vs. Invention, 164, 370. 
 Training, Arnold an example of, 91 ; 
 
 Symonds's, 447-449. 
 Transcendentalism, a perilous quality 
 
 in Art, 127; Home's, 249; that of 
 
 Macdonald, Buchanan, and other 
 
 North Country Poets, 264; Call, 
 
 etc., 457 ; and see 299. 
 Transition Periods, 14, 157, 342, 412. 
 Translation and Translators, recent, 
 
 273-278 ; new theory of translation, 
 
 274; versions of Horace, Homer, 
 Virgil, and other classical texts, 274, 
 275, 472 ; female translators, 122, 
 275 ; versions of Dante, Goethe, 
 and other mediaeval and modern po- 
 ets, 276, 472 ; Oriental, 276 ; this 
 work a token of a refined and criti- 
 cal period, 276 ; the early translators, 
 Pitt, Rowe, Cooke, West, and 
 Fawkes, 276 ; ancient and mediae- 
 val Latin hymns, 277 ; hymns from 
 the German, 278 ; Rossetti's trans- 
 lations from the Italian, 360, from 
 the old French, 364 ; Morris's, from 
 the Icelandic, and from Virgil, 371, 
 ' from Homer, 443 ; O'Shaughnessy, 
 440; J. Payne, 445. 
 
 Trench, Richard Chenevix, 242, 278. 
 
 Trilogies. — Landor's, 42 ; Swinburne's, 
 407. 
 
 Tristram of Lyonesse, Swinburne's, 
 
 436- 
 Trollope, Anthony, 189, 266. 
 Troubadour Period, 359 ; and see Pre- 
 
 Chatccerian Verse, etc. 
 Tupper, Martin Farquhar, 256, 278, 
 
 452. 
 Turner, Charles (Tennyson), 270, 440. 
 
 Unconventionalism, 333. 
 
 Under the Microscope, Swinburne's 
 
 402-404. 
 Undertones, Buchanan's, 348. 
 Unities, the classical, 387. 
 University School, Symonds, 447-449; 
 
 DLxon and Bridges, 463 ; Lang, 475; 
 
 and see M. Arnold, etc., etc. 
 
 Vane's Story, Thomson's, 456. 
 Varian, Mrs. ("Finola"), 260. 
 Variety, Morris deficient in, 371. 
 " Vastness," Tennyson's, 421, 422. 
 Vaughan, 28, 283.
 
 520 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Venetian Period, its taste and luxury, 
 368. 
 
 Verbal School, 76. 
 
 Versatility, Buchanan's, 355 ; of the 
 art-school, 368. 
 
 Vers de SociitS. See Society Verse. 
 
 Verse, as a form o£ speech, 299. 
 
 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 52. 
 
 Victoria, accession of Her Majesty, 
 234; her jubilee year, 415; prolon- 
 gation of her reign, 433. 
 
 Victorian Gothic Style, in architec- 
 ture, 480. 
 
 Victorian Period, review of its charac- 
 ter and progress in poetry, 1-32 ; 
 how far it illustrates Taine's theory, 
 I, 2 ; points of variance from the 
 same, 1,2; its outset, 4 ; successive 
 phases and representative poets, 5, 
 6 ; likeness to the Alexandrian era, 
 6 ; general conditions, 6 ; its scien- 
 tific iconoclasm, 7, 13, 14 ; effort of 
 its poets to avail themselves of sci- 
 entific progress, 8, 9, 19, 20, 21; 
 spirit as compared with that of for- 
 mer eras, 10-12, 21, 22 ; realistic 
 tendencies, 12, 13 ; transitional as- 
 pect, 14; idealism, 16, 17; psychical 
 phases, 17; skepticism, 17, 18; both 
 transitional and creative, 21 ; tran- 
 sitional in thought and feeling, 22 ; 
 creative in style and form, 22 ; crit- 
 ical and scholarly, 23 ; restrictions 
 to ideality : journalism, 23, novel- 
 writing, 23, 25, over-refinement, 23, 
 over-restraint, 24, high breeding, 24, 
 impassiljility, 24 ; not a dramatic 
 period, 24, 25 ; not adventurous, 25 ; 
 great advance in poetry as an art, 
 25, 26; its effects upon the minor 
 poets, 28 ; longing for novelty, 29, 
 31 ; dilettanteism, 29 ; multitude of 
 verse-makers, 29; leaders and rep- 
 
 resentative poets, 30, 31 ; the end 
 already indicated, 31, 32, 342 ; prom- 
 ise for the future, 32 ; method of, 
 34 ; has produced the greatest fe- 
 male poet, 115; specially represent- 
 ed by Tennyson, 154; resemblance 
 to Alexandrian Period, 159, 202- 
 209; its peculiar idyllic verse, 162; 
 limits of its typical portion, 415; 
 specific characteristics, 416 ; in- 
 creased likeness to the Alexandrian, 
 430, 431, 479; Browning the leader 
 of its af terprime, 433 ; Swinburne's 
 influence, 434 ; recent necrology, 
 439-442 ; Austin on its Poetry, 450; 
 extreme polish, 458; the Colonies, 
 468-470 ; closing phases, 474-483 ; 
 recent lack of a national stvle, 480- 
 482; and see 200, 413. 
 
 Victor Hugo, Swinburne's essay, 438. 
 
 Villon, 435, 445, 474. 
 
 " Violet Fane." See Mrs. Sitigletojt. 
 
 Virgil, 215, 375; translations of, 275. 
 
 "Virginius," 296. 
 
 Vision, clouded in Mrs. Browning, 
 127 ; clear, in Morris, 374. 
 
 Vita Nuova, 360. 
 
 Vivia Perpetua, Mrs. Adams's, 257. 
 
 Vivisection, Browning's skill in, 321, 
 
 337- 
 Voice, 382, 383. 
 Voice from the Nile, A, Thomson's, 
 
 457-^ 
 Volapuk, the new language, 466. 
 Voltaire, 36, 273. 
 
 Wade, Thomas, 256. 
 
 Wagner, Browning compared, to, 341; 
 
 and see 443. 
 Wallenstein, 41, 310. 
 Waller, Edmund, 272, 273. 
 Waller, John Francis, 259. 
 Warren, John Leicester, 283, 445.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 521 
 
 Warton, Thomas, 34, 40, 209. 
 
 Warwickshire, 36. 
 
 Watson, William, 465. 
 
 W^atts, Alaric, 237. 
 
 Watts's Hymns, 277. 
 
 Watts, Theodore, 435 ; sonnets and 
 lyrics, 464. 
 
 Waugh, Edwin, 279. 
 
 Webster, Augusta, 275, 281, 443. 
 
 Webster, John, 48, 105, 294. 
 
 Wedded Poets, the Brownings, 333. 
 
 Wellington Ode, Tennyson's, 172. 
 
 Wells, Charles J., Joseph and His 
 Brethren, 441. 
 
 Wesley's Hymns, 277. 
 
 Westwood, Thomas, 271. 
 
 Whims and Oddities, Hood's, 77. 
 
 White, Richard Grant, essay on " The 
 Play of the Period," 24. 
 
 White Rose and Red, Buchanan's, 355. 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 402 ; on Tennyson, 
 424; and see 428, 450, and Ameri- 
 can Poets. 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf, extract from 
 Miriam, 14 ; and see Avterican Poets. 
 
 Wilde, Lady (" Speranza "), 260. 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, 467. 
 
 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 246. 
 
 Wills, W. G., 472. 
 
 Wilson, John, 235, 480. 
 
 Winkvvorth, Catherine, 278. 
 
 Wiseman, Cardinal, 328. 
 
 Wolf's Homeric theory, 175. 
 
 Woman, Tennyson's view in Tht 
 Princess, 167. 
 
 Womanhood, rendered complete by 
 marriage and maternity, 133, 136, 
 140. 
 
 Woolner, Thomas, 270, 368, 445. 
 
 Word-painting, 174. 
 
 Wordsworth, Christopher, 278. 
 
 Wordsworth, William, his mission, 
 and its close, 31, 34, 37; compared 
 with Landor, 45 ; teacher of Arnold, 
 96 ; shaped the mind of the idyllic 
 school, 104, 105 ; influence on Ten- 
 nyson, 155; blank-verse, 161; on 
 Science and Poetry, 193 ; birth and 
 death, 235 ; influence on the minor 
 poets, 241 - 248 ; simplicity, 267 ; 
 quoted, 298 ; influence on Buchanan, 
 347 ; and see 4, 15, 22, 56, 58, 154, 
 167, 180, 198, 199, 203, 209, 237, 238, 
 240, 242, 265, 292, 303, 320, 348, 349, 
 396,400, 412,415,417,476. 
 
 Wordsworthian School, 241-248, 444. 
 
 Worsley, Philip Stanhope, 275. 
 
 Wright, Ichabod Charles, 275. 
 
 Young, 361. 
 
 Youth, united to the party of the fu- 
 ture, 358 ; Arnold's expression of, 
 442 ; Tennyson's Youth and Age^ 
 421, 422. 
 
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