cal master or fruit-witholding gardener in our mind's eye, when he broke out

Only think what a world we should have of it here,

If the haters of peace, of affection and glee,

Were to fly off to Saturn's comfortless sphere,

Leaving Earth to such spirits as you, Boys, and me.

It is true that he wrote "Love," not "Boys," but we used to take the liberty of making an undoubted emendation in our own favor. Then did he not teach us "The Minstrel Boy"? How real as well as noble we thought the lad, and how our breasts swelled with sacred pity when we heard that

The Minstrel fell!-but the foeman's chain

Could not bring his proud soul under; The harp he loved ne'er spoke again For he tore its cords asunder.

We endorsed that last act of the poor little hero, without pausing to thinkseeing what is the toughness of catgut -how very trying a feat it must have been for his relaxing fingers. Then, when we had grown somewhat older, when sentiment, with its gratuitous but very real sadness, had begun to work in us, how grateful we were for such lines as

No, not more welcome the fairy numbers

Of music fall on the sleeper's ear, When, half awaking from fearful slumbers,

He dreams the full quire of heaven is

near,

Than came that voice when all forsaken

This heart long had sleeping lain, Nor deemed its cold pulse, &c., &c.

By the time that such tender catastrophes had lost something of their original poignancy, had not Lalla Rookh already grown dear to us? Did we not rejoice over the hoodwinking of Fadladeen? And were we not-wicked

young puppies-uncertain whether we were glad or sorry that the seductive king's messenger, the mysterious and handsome singer of romantic stories, who beguiled the long journey as he rode beside the litter of his master's bride, should turn out to be her betrothed himself, so that there was nothing like naughtiness or irregularity in the loves of Feramorz and Lalla Rookh after all? And how our hearts had ached over "The Fire-Worshippers," and the sweet lament for Hinda at the close of that poem. Poor Tom Moore, what Fame will end by doing with you we do not care to enquire; we trust that you may even now be sipping your nectar and water, cooled to a consolatory point, in the company of Anacreon and a pleasant group of the Anthologists. It may be that no future generation of old fellows will be grateful to you, or recall, when they think of you, the merriment and little heartaches of their youth. We suppose that our grandchildren will have merriment and heart-aches, but will they have a Tom Moore also? We, at all events, not foreseeing either their temperament or their destiny, will return thanks for having had you. As for your politics, or your satire, we knew very little about them, and cared less; they may possibly have amused our elders.

The Reactionaries were assisted in the tilt which they ran against Byron and Shelley by the contrast of the decent life and calm genius of Wordsworth, seated remote and contemplative among the hills and vales of the Lake country. There he was, in honest communion with Nature, and, save for an occasional outburst of judicial indignation, breathing nothing but resignation and content, while the others were storming in vain fever and fury, and flaunting a somewhat ostentatious violation of what they affected to mistake and despise. The range of thought in Wordsworth, his rustic dig

His

nity, his power of seeing the true poetry in common things, his gentle unaffected mysticism, and his simple method of expressing it, are qualities so well and so long acknowledged in him that, except in an historic sketch, it would be too late to call attention to them. But even now it may be worth while to recur to his love for the poor and his reverence for woman. poor are not the shepherds and shepherdesses of earlier sentimentalists; they are living, working, loving, thinking human creatures, with sins, virtues, and sufferings of their own, not to be pitied, blamed, or loved one whit more or less than their betters, and affording equal food for the contemplative poet or the humane philosopher. What we might call the "village" stanzas of Gray's "Elegy" form a shorthand registration of a vast amount of Wordsworth's poems; and to the minds and tastes of many the multiplicity and elaboration of concrete instances by the later poet grow wearisome in comparison with the brief and easy summary of the elder. Possibly so voluminous a writer as Wordsworth suffers from attempts to read too much of him at one time. There seems in him a reiteration of subject, in which minute shades of distinction merge into dreariness, and beget a monotony of treatment which has, perhaps, no minute shades to lose. His unchanging simplicity is apt to pall, like the bread diet of the poor of whom he loved to sing. But his worship of women is as supreme as it is simple. It would be unfair to it to say that it has been achieved by no one else, for it is clearly innate in the man; it is not an achievement, it is an intuition. In the days of duelling it would have been unsafe to give a full and true expression of our opinion to his face of the man to whom the "Lucy" poems did not appeal.

Among the worthier workers of the

second rank George Darley must not be forgotten. He was not great; he had no mission; and, unfortunately for him, he arose at a moment when men were for asking, with a new directness, of all who proposed themselves for fame, "What have you come to teach?" His impulse was secondary, his style derivative. He savored, now of the Elizabethans, now of Milton, now of Shelley, and now of Keats. His method was inartistic. He had nothing of his own to say, but he remembered what others had said before him, and he piped away to their airs, sometimes almost as they would have done it themselves, and always prettily, because he was like them. He was an echo, faint, but not unfascinating. Of his two best known works, the Fairy drama "Sylvia" and "Nepenthe," we prefer the former. Darley's merits may be said to be those of an anthologist on a large scale, and that is as far as one can go in recalling him.

Another strange and half-formed genius who broke into a brief show of prominence along with Darley was Thomas Lovell Beddoes. He had more of strength and less of grace than Darley, but his light was, like that of his friend, planetary, and his work purposeless. Such fame as he had was equally fugitive, and the kindly attempt of his late editor to revive him has, as in Darley's case, failed. Yet both in "The Bride's Tragedy" and in that so-called of "The Fool" there is poetry, and in his fragments, especially in those of "Death's Jest Book," Beddoes scintillates at whiles with some thought or expression, some little halfgleam of self-revelation, which seems to hint at a mind that never shone with its full power. It may be that real madness lay at the root of his imperfection, for his life was eccentric and unaccountable, and he died a suicide.

As to the value of a certain contemporary of Darley and Beddoes, we

could wish that we were more heartily in accord with critics to whose judgment we should be glad to subordinate our own. But we cannot affect an unfelt admiration, and we can only present the long drama of "Joseph and his Brethren," by Charles Wells, as a work which many persons highly competent to judge have as highly praised. It does not seem to us that the touching old tale has gained anything by its elaboration. In the reprint of 1876 it occupies some 252 pages of considerably more than twenty lines apiece on an average. Its first act alone is about as long as most of Shakespeare's plays, and there are four of them. The composition consists of little else than a series of sermons preached upon texts supplied by the main incidents of the story. Reuben's lecture to his brothers on their treatment of Joseph occupies some three hundred lines at least, and is only broken by ejaculatory sentences from one or other of his ten listeners. The disquisitions upon cruelty, mercy, pity, patience, ambition, and as soon as Phraxanor, Potiphar's wife, and the only female character, comes on the scene upon lust, love, honesty, duty, and God's providence, are surely unredeemed by originality. Phraxanor herself falls immeasurably below the Phædra of Euripides, and adds nothing to the Phèdre of Racine. Perhaps the truest apology for the poem is that the work was that of a very young

man.

Among the strong men of his generation who deliberately adopted verse, very few were more deliberate in their adoption or stronger in their use of it than Walter Savage Landor. He did not hesitate between prose and verse, but he oscillated between them as a man may between a town and a country house. With now a play, now some "Imaginary Conversations," now an epic, he turned backwards and forwards from one to another with a

lordly alternation too magnificent to be called caprice. His power in both directions no man may call in question, but there is an indescribable difference betwen poetic genius and such power. As a boy, he was a precocious scholar, and, when he could be persuaded to try, he produced Latin and Greek verses, original and in translation, which were the bewilderment, and more than once provoked the envy, of his teachers. But his waywardness and wilfulness were as transcendent as his aptitudes, and he was as a lazy animal that will not put forth its strength. Later on, with like irregularity, he chose his own models, and invented his own methods. Though he studied Dante, he undervalued him on the score of his medievalism. He idolized Milton, whose mightiness in music appealed to him; probably from analogy he would have loved Handel as a musical composer. As a poet we may admire his elevation of style and his intellectual pride, which, scorning small subjects, held itself aloof from playfulness in metre, tricksiness in fancy, triviality in sentiment. We may acknowledge that he never dandled a commonplace, and that he avoided poetical doll-dressing, with all the thousand and one prettinesses in which too many, who ought to have known better, have either courted popularity among half-cultivated coteries, or stooped to solicit the applause of the mob. But it would be difficult to own that he ever moves us; we leave him as calm and unexcited as he is himself. Even his landscape is not vivid; he has not fed his reverence with it like Wordsworth, mastered it like Milton, or assimilated it as Byron did that of Spain, of the Alps, and, above all, of Italy. He cannot bid Nature sing, as Shelley did, ode upon ode of her own making. In short, he is not an evangelist. He had not that kind of self out of which, after all, Gospels are made.

And so he remains, colossal, impressive, like a ruin whose purpose is unknown, and from which we turn not without wonderment, but unstirred by reverence, sympathy, or affection. Half a dozen of Shakespeare's sonnets, Byron's "Isles of Greece," Shelley's "Skylark," and the "Ode to a Nightingale" of Keats are, any one of them, worth a wilderness of "Gebirs" or "Hellenics," fine as these may be. We may admit Landor's stateliness of diction, though this is not so much native as derived. We may acknowledge his power of creating weird situations, but what is there either in his subjects or his treatment of them that satisfies or seduces us? Does he feel, or make us feel, what he writes? Grievously as we may revolt from much that we find in Byron or Shelley, at least we feel that they felt, and thence comes the touch of Nature that makes us akin to them. Not so with Landor.

Perhaps the lowest depths beneath style were plumbed by Wordsworth, just as its high-water mark was habitually paced by his immediate successor in the primacy of English poetry. We reserve the expression "grand style" to express the majesty of verse, say, in Milton and Virgil, but that is a matter apart. We employ the term "style" for a more general purpose. It conveys the idea of masterly elevation of manner, of an inevitable form of phrase, of chasteness in rhythm, of caution in expression, and of a general finish and polish in work. Now, in all these, especially when his volume, his range of subject, and his multiplicity of metre are considered, we hold Tennyson to have been supreme. As he ranges below the majesty of Milton, so he cannot be said to have caught and reproduced the inmost melodies of verse like Shelley, while the rhetoric of Byron he may consciously have shunned. But style, as representing the conscientious handicraft of a master deter

mined to send forth nothing slipshod, common, or unclean, he certainly had and used as no Englishman has ever had or used it. He represents in this respect a staglike bound of our poetry out of the wilds of the rough and the unkempt into a smooth, well-shaven lawn of gardenlike order. It was natural that such a method should be allied to a receptive rather than to a creative mind. Imagination he had, and fancy in abundance, and he relied upon the latter more, perhaps, than on the former. His constructive faculty was not large. The consequence of this last limitation, so long as he remained conscious of it, was his love for short pieces. None of his poems up to and inclusive of those published in 1842 is 500 lines long. "In Memoriam" is but a wondrous collection of pearls strung together. Very few of its odes are absolutely essential to one another. They follow in fair sequence, though rather like separate stones in an ungraduated necklace; but it requires some ingenuity to plead a general design. So it is with the "Idylls of the King"; the connection between these is confined to the reappearance, ever and anon, of the same personages. In short, Tennyson was a carver of cameos, which he set in a blank matrix. But, then, what gems these cameos are! The two exceptions, outside the dramas, are "The Princess" and "Maud." "The Princess" especially stands apart. Its story is consecutive, directly told, and is constructed without flaw, but it is slight. Still, as a production, especially taking size into consideration, we are inclined to put it as high as anything he ever did. Perhaps its excellence is partly owed to an element of jocularity, to the fact that it was originally started for fun; this feeling, working unconsciously in its author all through it, may have given him a sense of ease and freedom. Certainly he does touch the serious sub

jects involved in it with a surer hand than elsewhere. Absolute seriousness of approach towards the highest is apt to work hesitancy and a want of precision, sometimes even of courage and candor. There are few minds in the whole history of literature that have been equal to this test. A little ripple of laughter, however restrained, evades the difficulty, and leaves success complete. Of "Maud," in spite of its many beauties, we had rather not say much. It has been called its author's masterpiece. After much reflection, we take leave to doubt this. Its subject is needlessly disagreeable. Its hero provokes no sympathy; its heroine is a phantom, a statue for Pygmalion to write verses to. The brother and the lordling are unfair caricatures. It is immortalized by some exquisite fragments, such as the garden song, the apostrophe to the Swainston cedar, many lines of the song that begins "Oh, that t'were possible After long grief and pain," and the nautilus. But it is defaced by metres here and there that are positively ugly, and by satire that is unexciting because too often undeserved. Of Tennyson perhaps the last word to say is this: Outside and below the group of the very grandest, he is the most perfect and companionable of poets, and will be remembered by an unusual quantity of his work. He will stand forever in the history of English literature as the champion who refound and rescued the lost Lady of Style. His aim was always lofty; he never wrote a line, much less conceived a poem, that should express himself at the expense of his readers. He never laughed, at or with society, the laugh which corrupts while it affects to censure. It was not in him to gloze over the commonplaces of lust, or to elaborate the portraiture of great crimes with a half-concealed admiration; he could never have written his own apol ogy, or excused his readers' fascination

as did the author of "Monsieur de Camors" when he bade farewell to his adulterous traitor and suicide with the words, "Sans doute un grand coupable, mais qui pourtant fut un homme." No "Cencis," no "Beppos," no "Don Juans" for him; though perhaps he did spend too much time over the episode of Launcelot and Guinevere, and though his fame would not have suffered if he had abstained from the somewhat namby-pamby love-making of Rosamund and Henry. Let us forget these blemishes of substance, with here and there a false experiment in form; they are but a few specks in the crop of rich fruit which the garden of his soul has borne for the world; let us turn them lovingly to the bottom of the basket. The poetry of the nineteenth century culminated in him, and, fitly, in the very noontide of its own course. He may be said, in his own words,

To sit a star upon the sparkling spire,

and there is none to dispute his throne with him.

Side by side and almost year for year with the great laureate there was working a man whose genius was at once the contrast and a complement of his own. Browning's method was not so much a negative lack of style as a positive rejection of it. His magnificent imagination, his intellectual force, his instinct for a fine subject, his love for and mastery over landscape, his penetration into the devious passages and closed chambers of human nature, are all undoubted; but so are his wilfulness, his roughness, his unliterary avoidance of simplicity, his love of leaving his reader, and perhaps sometimes himself, lost in half-lights of intention, and half-thridded mazes of unexpounded philosophy. His burliness and muscularity found acceptance with many persons not too capable of appreciating his highest qualities, but who fancied that they had found in