the genuine poetic ardor in his "Bard" Hen. I hope you are not going to suggest that the suicide at the close had better have been omitted. It was always my special delight when I repeated the poem to my mother.

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than in his "Progress of Poesy;" entirely as I agree with all that you, Geoffrey, have said in praise of it. The subject, to begin with, is better suited to an ode, according to your account of one, which I approve of. Gray, not having much to sing about in his own proper person only reflections on the vicissitudes of life, such as those with which the sight of Eton College inspired him (a solemn and touching lay, but hardly an ode according to our definition)-did wisely in transporting himself into the person of the ancient bard of Wales. There was the

Geof. Those two closing lines and the explanation at the beginning are alien to the genuine nature of an ode. Strictly speaking, the bard should have been his own interpreter throughout. Still, we could ill bear the loss of Gray's introduction that description of the bard when Loose his beard and hoary hair

Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air,

and the words which tell us how he
With a master's hand and prophet's fire
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre.
But an ode should only have one speaker
the poet himself, or the person whom
he represents.

Hen. Pindar makes Medea speak at length in one of his odes, if I remember right.

fall of an old polity to bewail; the cry for
vengeance of tuneful brethren's innocent
blood to send up with ringing notes to
the skies; the divine justice, slow but
sure, to mark, tracking the descendants
of the guilty in response to it. Here Gray
is indeed Pindaric, as he marshals the
long procession of our kings and queens;
not with the toilsome and slow precision
of a historian, but each, shrouded in dark-
ness as to the rest of their career, re-
vealed, as by a sudden lightning-flash, at
the moment when they are wanted for
the accomplishment of the sentence
passed by the poet-prophet on their guilty
line. If you want an example of how
alliteration can reinforce lines strong"
enough in themselves, look at the five
first of this poem :-

Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!
Confusion on thy banners wait!
Though fanned by conquest's crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state.
Helm, nor hauberk's twisted mail, etc.
If you wish to know how to intersperse
trochaics with your iambics so as to bring
out solemn and pathetic effects, look at
the first and last of these five, and at
lines like

Cold is Cadwallo's tongue,

and many more. How grandly pathetic, too, is the description of Edward III.'s closing days, so well contrasted with the

careless jollity of his successor's first years!

Geof. The last strophe of the ode strikes me as rather artificial. The dying bard, consoled by the vision of his great successors, Spenser and Shakespeare, flourishing under a queen of British descent, hearing Milton's voice and those of other English poets from the yet remoter distance, is almost too gentle a termination. One is inclined to exclaim,

Too softly falls the lay in fear and wrath begun.

Geof. Yes; he quotes her prophecy, That is different. Still I do not think being himself throughout the speaker. the digression an improvement.

Hen. Dryden's "Ode for St. Cecilia's "Alexander's Feast," I mean Day," mixes up narration and song as Gray's Bard" does.

Bas. What say you to that great example, Geoffrey? for that ode consists of Dryden's report of what Timotheus sang to Alexander (given in two instances in his own words), and of the diverse affections produced in the conqueror by his varied strain. He tells us, if I recollect right, how, at the appeal to the king's pride, by the announcement of his divine parentage, Alexander

Assumes the god;
Affects to nod,

And seems to shake the spheres ;

how, having drunk deep draughts at the skilful musician's praise of Bacchus, the king (as his meanest soldier might)

Fought all his battles o'er again, And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain;

how Timotheus drew tears from him by his sad picture of

Darius great and good
Fallen from his high estate;
how he led him for a moment to prefer
love to war, when

War, he sung, is toil and trouble,
Honor but an empty bubble,

The oracles are dumb;

No voice or hideous hum

Bas. And what a vivid green it is! That pious priest whom I heard preach

Runs through the arched roof in words de- ing on the creation in Milan Cathedral

ceiving.

Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos
leaving.

No nightly trance, or breathed spell,
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic

cell.

Geof. That is indeed an instance of
well-applied classical knowledge. How
often it is misapplied now! There is
something truly majestic there in the
march of Milton's words contrasting
beautifully, in their dignified sternness,
with the tenderer and more pathetic lines
which follow, and lament the beauty,
linked to so many delusions, which
ished with them for a while. Do you
think the hillside we are scaling, and the
small cascade which has just come into
sight, heard anything on that day of sor-
row of which Milton speaks, when

The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,

per

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edged with poplar pale,

The parting genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-enwoven tresses torn,

when I was last in Italy, and who dilated so much on God's goodness in making the earth, not black to sadden, or red to affright, but green to delight, the eye, would burst into double raptures of thankfulness if he could visit our lakes in sum

mer.

Hen. (returning from an excursion to a rock under the fall). I have been thinking what a pity it is that Milton was not a Royalist. What an ode he might have written on the death of Charles I.!

Geof. Perhaps. But the greatest occasions do not always draw forth the best poetry. As it is, the best lines which celebrate the king's fate were written by a political foe. It is Andrew Marvell who says of Charles,

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe's edge did try,

Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,

But bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed.

Bas. Cowley speaks in a higher strain,

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thick-though, of the monarch

ets mourn?

Bas. The naïad might well be sorry to leave that cool bath. Look how absolutely clear the water is! You can count every pebble. There is the industrious little waterfall above it, as hard at work as ever, enlarging the recess below for the fair tenant who will never come back to it. She seems, however, to have carried the flowers away with her in her long silky coils of hair. There are none to be seen

now.

Geof. Come back six weeks hence and you will find turquoises set in gold waiting to adorn her the forget-me-not and the marsh-marigold; and very likely, on this swampy slope down to the stream, a fair carpet for her feet of globe-flowers, mingling their paler yellow with the rich lilac of the mealy primrose. Before then, that heckberry-bush will have thrown out its graceful white pendants, and the mountain-ash, which dips its branches in the foam of the fall, will have promised us stores of red coral in autumn by pretty bunches of white blossom. Then, too, the green bracken will be waving its graceful fronds over those cold grey rocks, and this fellside grass, now brown as winter, will refresh the eye with green.

to whom alone was given The double royalty of earth and heaven, Who crowned the kingly with the martyr's

To this day's merriment.

Queen to the last, and in no humbled guise | So goodly all agree, with sweet consent,
To swell the triumph's haughty pageantry.
Bas. That is pretty well, considering
that the wily Egyptian lady had outwitted
Horace's master, Augustus, and deprived
him and the expectant Roman crowd of a
pleasant holiday sight.

Hen. But that is not the whole of the ode. Earlier on, Horace speaks very ill of Cleopatra indeed.

Bas. He could not speak worse of her than she deserved. I declare that Martin has improved on Horace in that third stanza: that "prideful smile" of his is very good, and so is his “ queen to the

last."

Hen. Has he been equally successful

with Catullus?

Bas. I am ashamed to say that I have

not read his version. I should like, though, some day, to see what he has made of that melancholy Epithalamium of his, and that pretty, but most discour aging, comparison of the rose, so prized in the bud, so despised when she has done setting her petals wide open.

Geof. Heathen poets might well write sadly about marriage. They did not know what we Christians know about it. Now, contrast Catullus with a really Christian poet-Spenser, for example. Hen. Spenser unites a good many happy couples in the course of that long but most delightful "Faëry Queen" of his.

Bas. I am glad you delight in it, my dear boy! (A man to all others, you will let me call you so a little longer, I know.) It is good, as well as pleasant, to dwell among his types of Christian knighthood. But Geoffrey was thinking of Spenser's great bridal ode, made for his own wedding an ode which has always seemed to me a very great achievement, because its rapturous joy, sustained at highest pitch throughout, without one under-note of sorrow, never palls on the ear.

Hen. Yes, that is wonderful. It is so much easier, in song as in real life, to 66 weep with those that weep " than to 'rejoice with those who rejoice."

Geof. Poor Spenser! What sorrows followed that joyful song of his! But at any rate, he was happy when he wrote it, and that is something. He was happy listening to the birds on his wedding

morning:

Hark, how the cheerful birds do chaunt their layes,

And carol of love's praise.

The merry lark her matins sings aloft,
The thrush replies, the mavis descant plays,
The ouzel shrills, the ruddock warbles soft;

When meeter were that ye should now awake,
Ah! my dear love, why do ye sleep thus long,
T' await the coming of your joyous make,
And hearken to the birds' love-learned song
The dewy leaves among?

For they of joy and pleasance to you sing,
That all the woods them answer and their echo
ring.

He was happy when he called on the hours to dress his lady for the bridal, and bade the graces

Help to adorn my beautifullest bride. would have That superlative, which tion of the exuberance of his delight, shocked Lindley Murray, gives one a nowhich the minstrels and the shouting crowd can hardly proclaim loudly enough for him. And when the bride comes forth ready-decked from her chamber the moon, as he tells us, in her gentle dignity-with what rapture he surveys

her!

- like

To holy earth's dark bosom bringing,
We trust the work our hands have made:
The sower there his seed has laid,
And hopes 'twill bless his sight, upspringing
Abundant as the Lord shall aid.

But seeds, more precious far, entombing,
We hide with tears on earth's dark breast,
"And hope, for fairer morrow blooming,
To see them break their coffined rest.
From the church-tower
Sounds the Bell,

That all the woods may answer and your echo Solemnly its mournful tolls attending One whose wanderings now on earth have ending.

of sonnets. There is a fine one of his to glory. One still finer is that in which he addresses Rienzi, and conjures him by the Geof. Oh yes. His bells ring merrily shades of the Scipios, by the yet dearer on the day which is to change his roman-memory of the buried apostles, to restore tic young pair of lovers into the sober, liberty to Rome. plodding housefather and housewife, and he sighs as he reflects that