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Sixth Series,
Volume XII.

No. 2731.-November 7, 1896.

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From Beginning,
Vol. CCXI.

CONTENTS.

I. WILLIAM MORRIS'S POEMS. By A. Lang, Longman's Magazine,
II. RUSSIA'S STRENGTH. By

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Spenser Wil

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National Review,

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By Riccardo

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VII. THE CONSTANTINOPLE MASSACRE,
VIII. A "FIDGETY" QUESTION IN SPELLING.
By Alfred Erlebach,

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IX. THE CONFIDENCES OF A SOCIETY POET,
X. A PERSIAN MIRACLE PLAY. By M.

Pechell,

XI. NAPOLEON'S VOYAGE TO ST. HELENA, XII. WILLIAM MORRIS. By H. Buxton Forman,

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XIII. GOLDSMITH'S CONVERSATION,

"THE EUROPEAN POWERS," ADVENIAT REGNUM TUUM,

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PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

THE LIVING AGE COMPANY, BOSTON.

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FOR SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of THE LIVING AGE CO.

Single copies of THE LIVING AGE, 15 cents.

GEO. A. FOXCROFT, Manager Advertising Department, 36 Bromfield St., Room 3.

"THE EUROPEAN POWERS."
Powers? Hard by the Golden Horn
Those satyr lips, as cold as cruel,
Must curl in sly, sardonic scorn!
Will nothing serve as kindling fuel
To fire the chilly "Christian" heart,
Or move from apathetic meekness
The timid thralls of mode and mart?
Powers? What then is craven weak-
ness?

From Thames to Neva runs all blood
As icily as the pole-world frozen?
Kaisers and czars, in fulsome mood,

May dub each other "Christian cousin," War lord, or knightly emperor;

And he, the Unspeakable, sits smiling At "Christian Powers," of spirit poor, Who waste in mutual reviling The black-winged hours, like birds of prey Full gorged with carrion, vulture, raven, Flapping in the full light of day,

Fearless of Christian kings turned craven!

What marvel carrion-fowls are bold

When full-armed war lords pale and

palter,

Like angry spinsters chide and scold,

But at "the name or action" falter? Meanwhile the death-heaps swell and swell.

Mercy, a pale and piteous pleader, Weeps helpless at the gates of hell,

The Christian crowd calls for-a leader Who cometh not! Each lord, each chief, In diplomatic bonds entangled, Scarce dares to stir.. No strong belief Moves any man. The "Powers" have wrangled,

Worried, and watched; but none dares cut The Gordian knot, drawn redder, tighter,

But him, with sinister eyes half shut

In scorn, who mocks at crown and mitre. Who'll lead? who'll strike? the peoples

cry.

Impotent seems appeal or urging; Yet, hid from cold official eye,

Christian humanity seems upsurging, To those who watch. Wistful appeal To an old leader, worn and weary, Proves what small trust the people feel In younger chiefs, callous or cheery. Who'll stir? Who'll strike? Scant answer yet!

The throned assassin lolls and lowers, Mocking, with Crescent crimson-wet, Powerless things called "Christian Powers."

Punch.

ADVENIAT REGNUM TUUM. Thy kingdom come! Yes, bid it come. But when Thy kingdom first began On earth Thy kingdom was a home, A child, a woman, and a man.

The child was in the midst thereof,
O, blessed Jesus, holiest One!
The centre and the fount of love
Mary and Joseph's little Son.

Wherever on the earth shall be
A child, a woman, and a man,
Imaging that sweet trinity
Wherewith Thy kingdom first began,

Establish there Thy kingdom! Yea,
And o'er that trinity of love
Send down, as in Thy appointed day,
The brooding spirit of Thy Dove!
KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON.
Sunday Magazine.

GARIBALDI'S LAST POEM. Friendship, pervading spirit of the blest, Sublimest bounty of the Infinite, Imperishable as the Alpine height That stands secure in everlasting rest:

And what were we, if thou wert unpossest

Midst all the adversities that do us spite? What but thy power can shelter the op

prest

And lift this sunken people to the light?

All pass the Styx-love, pride, ambition's dream,

And human greatness flies, a fugitive, To vanish, cloud-like, in the Lethic stream; Thou, emanate from God, alone dost live The life of the immortal and supreme

The holy comfort which is thine to give. Translated by Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco in the Academy.

A QUATRAIN.

I have trod the upward and the downward slope;

I have endured and done in days before; I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;

And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

From Longman's Magazine.
WILLIAM MORRIS'S POEMS.

"Enough," said the pupil of the wise Imlac, "you have convinced me that no man can be a poet." The study of Mr. William Morris's poems, in the new collected edition, has convinced me that no man, or, at least, no middle-aged man, can be a critic. I read Mr. Morris's poems (thanks to the knightly honors conferred on the Bard of Penrhyn, there is now no ambiguity as to "Mr. Morris"), but it is not the book only that I read. The scroll of my youth is unfolded. I see the dear place where first I perused "The Blue Closet," the old faces of old friends flock around me; old chaff, old laughter, old happiness re-echo and revive. St. Andrews, Oxford, come before the mind's eye, with

Many a place

That's in sad case

Where joy was wont afore, oh!
as Minstrel Burne sings. These voices,
faces, landscapes mingle with the
music and blur the pictures of the poet
who enchanted for us certain hours
passed in the paradise of youth. A re-
viewer who finds himself in this case
may as well frankly confess that he
can no more criticise Mr. Morris dis-
passionately than he could criticise his
old self and the friends whom he shall
never see again, till he meets them

Beyond the sphere of time,
And sin, and grief's control,
Serene in changeless prime
Of body and of soul.

To write of one's own "adventures among books" may be to provide anecdotage more or less trivial, more or less futile, but, at least, it is to write historically. We know how books have affected, and do affect, ourselves, our bundle of prejudices and tastes, of old impressions and revived sensations. To judge books dispassionately and impersonally is much more difficult-indeed, it is practically impossible, for our own tastes and experiences must, more or less, modify our verdicts, do what we will. However, the effort must be made, for to say that, at a cer

tain age, in certain circumstances, an individual took much pleasure in "The Life and Death of Jason," the present of a college friend, is certainly not to criticise "The Life and Death of Jason."

There have been three blossoming times in the English poetry of the nineteenth century. The first dates from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and, later, from Shelley, Byron, Keats. By 1822 the blossoming time was over, and Mr. Murray, of Albemarle Street, soon ceased to publish poetry. This "great refusal" he had reason to regret, for the second blossoming time began in 1830-1833, with young Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning. It broke forth again in 1842 and did not practically cease till England's greatest laureate sang of the "Crossing of the Bar." But while Tennyson put out his full strength in 1842, and Mr. Browning rather later, in "Bells and Pomegranates" (Men and Women), the third spring came in 1858, with Mr. Morris's "Defence of Guinevere," and flowered till Mr. Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" appeared in 1865, followed by his poems of 1866. Mr. Rossetti's book of 1870 belonged, in date of composition, mainly to this period. Since then poetry has not given us more than a few charming scattered lyrics, of Mr. Bridges, Mr. Watson, and one or two others who are of very intermittent inspiration. A reviewer who, like myself, was a schoolboy or an undergraduate in the third vernal season of the century's verse-who was then in imitation-knows well that his judgthe age of enthusiasm, appreciation, ment of Mr. Morris must have a strong personal bias.

In 1858, when "The Defence of Guinevere" came out, Mr. Morris must have been but a year or two from his undergraduateship. heard enough about his companions, Every one has Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. Rossetti, Canon Dixon, and the others of the old Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, where Mr. Morris's wonderful prose fantasies are buried. Why should they not be revived, these strangely colored and magical dreams? As literature, I pre

dyes,

Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands,

fer them vastly above Mr. Morris's A great God's angel standing, with such later romances in prose "The Hollow Land" above "News from Nowhere!" Mr. Morris and his friends were active in the fresh dawn of a new romanticism, a mediæval and Catholic revival, with very little Catholicism in it Showing him well, and making his com

for the most part. This revival is more "innerly," as the Scotch say, more intimate, more "earnest" than the larger and more genial, if more superficial, restoration by Scott. The painful doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of Faith, the dark hours of that epoch, its fantasy, cruelty, luxury, no less than its color and passion, inform Mr. Morris's first poems. The fourteenth and the early fifteenth century is his "period." In "The Defence of Guinevere" he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose narrative manner, without one grain of his humor, inspires "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise." In the early book the rugged style of Mr. Browning has left a mark. There are cockney rhymes, too, such as "short" rhyming to "thought." But, on the whole, Mr. Morris's early manner was all his own, nor had he ever returned to it. In the first poem, "The Queen's Apology," is this passage:

Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

mands

Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too,

Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

And one of these strange choosing cloths
was blue,

Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;
No man could tell the better of the two.

After a shivering half-hour you said,
"God help! heaven's color, the blue;" and
he said, "hell."

Perhaps you then would roll upon your
bed,

And cry to all good men that loved you well,

"Ah Christ! if only I had known, known, known."

There was nothing like that before in English poetry; it has the bizarrerie of a new thing in beauty. How far it is really beautiful how can I tell? How can I discount the "personal bias"?

Listen, suppose your time were come to Only I know that it is unforgetable.

die,

And you were quite alone and very weak;
Yea, laid a dying while very mightily

The wind was ruffling up the narrow
streak

Of river through your broad lands running well:

Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:

"One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,

Now choose one cloth forever, which they be,

Again (Galahad speaks):—

I saw

One sitting on the altar as a throne, Whose face no man could say he did not know,

And, though the bell still rang, he sat alone,

With raiment half blood-red, half white

as snow.

Such things made their own special ineffaceable impact.

Leaving the Arthurian cycle, Mr. Morris entered on his especially sym.

I will not tell you, you must somehow pathetic period-the gloom and sad

tell

sunset glory of the late fourteenth cen

"Of your own strength and mightiness; tury, the age of Froissart and wicked, here, see!"

wasteful wars. To Froissart it all

Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your seemed one magnificent pageant of

eyes,

At foot of your familiar bed to see

1 The new edition is not free from typographical errors: teste noir, and "son" for "sun."

knightly and kingly fortunes; he only murmurs a "great pity" for the death of a knight or the massacre of a town. It is rather the pity of it that Mr. Mor

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And scant five hundred had he in that nor will be again, for Mr. Morris after hold; several years of silence abandoned his His rotten sand-stone walls were wet with early manner. No doubt it was not a

rain,

And fell in lumps wherever a stone hit; Yet for three days about the barrier there The deadly glaives were gather'd, laid across,

And push'd and pull'd; the fourth our engines came;

But still amid the crash of falling walls, And roar of lombards, rattle of hard bolts, The steady bow-strings flash'd, and still stream'd out

St. George's banner, and the seven swords,

manner to presevere in, but happily, in a mood and a moment never to be reborn or return, Mr. Morris did fill a fresh page in English poetry with these imperishable fantasies. They were absolutely neglected by "the reading public," but they found a few Indeed I think of staunch friends. "Guinevere" as Fitzgerald did of Tennyson's poems before 1842. But this, of course, is a purely personal, probably a purely capricious, estimate.

And still they cried, "St. George Gui- Criticism may aver that the influence

enne," until

Their walls were flat as Jericho's of old, And our rush came, and cut them from

the keep.

The astonishing vividness, again, of the tragedy told in "Geffray Teste Noire" is like that of a vision in a magic mirror or a crystal ball, rather than like a picture suggested by printed words. "Shameful Death" has the same enchanted kind of presentment. We look through a "magic casement opening on the foam" of the old waves of war. Poems of a pure fantasy, unequalled out of Coleridge and Poe, are "The Wind" and "The Blue Closet." Each only lives in fantasy. Motives, and facts, and "story" are unimportant

of Mr. Rossetti was strong on Mr. Morris before 1858. Perhaps so, but we read Mr. Morris first (as the world read the "Lay" before "Christabel"), and my own preference is for Mr. Morris.

It was after eight or nine years of silence that Mr. Morris produced, in 1866 or 1867, "The Life and Death of Jason." Young men who had read "The Defence of Guinevere" hurried to purchase it, and, of course, found themselves in contact with something very unlike their old favorite. Morris had told a classical tale in decasyllabic couplets of the Chaucerian sort, and he regarded the heroic age from a medieval point of view; at all

Mr.

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