If there were

ing example. Yet there is no greater education. a sure path to the peace that passes understanding, even though it were an intricate and difficult way, teaching would be easy. We must not, however, seem to make the matter simpler than it really is. The freeing of the spirit, the power of ideas, the whole life of ideas,—these are experiences which transcend all other things human; but they can shed no steady lights along man's pathway. They are only rays of curious brightness found here and there through a literature so overwhelmingly vast that one man can read only a small portion of it. These beams from the absolute cannot be gathered up and presented in anthologies or birthday books; they cannot be doled out in lectures, as professors are accustomed to present less elusive matters. In fact, they may not properly be said to reside in any one place at all; but they glide over the vast landscape of poets and philosophers like a patch of sunlight that flits across the hills and valleys. The same student reads the Ode on Intimations of Immortality seven times, and it is just a poem. Then the eighth time, it is transfigured with new meaning, and the wisdom of centuries. Meanwhile, the professor teaches patiently on, striving to see and striving to show. Whole classes may go forth unenlightened; in weary moments discouragement will whisper that all is futile. We do not 'get results'. Well, over two thousand years ago, Socrates died in prison, apparently a complete failure. A greater Prophet of Truth suffered an ignominious death at Jerusalem, leaving only a few ignorant followers to perpetuate His teachings. Shall we, who may add to their great doctrines further wisdom that has since come to light, repine if, for the moment, apparently, our message, too, falls unheeded from our lips?

Such should be the thoughts of one broadly educated according to the old principles now once more asserting themselves in some of our most influential institutions of higher learning. In other kinds of work this training will have a similar effect. The situation involves a splendid challenge to all thinkers,-a challenge to support to the utmost the greatest cause now at issue in the world.

The State University of New Mexico.

GEORGE SHELTON HUBBELL.

THE MOOD OF PESSIMISM IN NATURE POETRY:

BOWLES, COLERIDGE, AND ARNOLD

In the literary histories Matthew Arnold is often considered as a disciple of the Greeks, an apostle of Sweetness and Light, a prophet of beauty and reason in daily life and of philosophic calm in an environing world of unrest. Or he is held up as a late Victorian, a poet of the period of transition, a man beset by the ills of his own age and oppressed by the passing of an age of faith. Sometimes, less frequently, he is represented as the spiritual son of his sturdy father, carrying into a wider field of activities much of the magisterial soul that had dominated the little world of Rugby.

To the first of these judgments, especially, the writings of Arnold himself give abundant support. His study of the classics was constant throughout his life, as is clear from his Notebooks as well as from his own poems, essays, and letters; and in Dover Beach, one of his most philosophical and personal poems, he gives direct expression to his feeling of kinship with the Greeks:

"Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea."

But in the mood of his Dover Beach, Arnold is much nearer to William Lisle Bowles, one of the lesser poets of the English Romantic Movement, or to Coleridge in the period of his Dejection: An Ode, than to his favorite Attic tragedian.

However far he may have fallen short of his great disciples in scope and power, Bowles did have a very considerable influence (and at the time, a candidly acknowledged influence) upon the generation of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. I am not aware that Arnold ever made an acknowledgment of any such indebtedness to Bowles. Much as he professed indifference to contemporary literature, Arnold can be shown to have borrowed. extensively, perhaps in many cases unconsciously, from Shelley,

Tennyson, and others to whom he was disinclined to accord critical justice; and it is clear that he must have been acquainted with the poetry of Bowles, which was in the height of its not inconsiderable popularity in Arnold's youth, as it is certain that he felt its indirect influence through the greater Romantic poets. Rather curiously, Bowles resembled Arnold in many things, large or small-such as in his relation to Oxford, in his fondness for Sophocles, in his poetical expression of a hopeless love (whether real or imagined) for a Margaret (usually Marguerite in Arnold, although the Margaret of The Forsaken Merman is perhaps but a variant of the same name), in his rather ascetic habits of life, in his poems of sadness or despair inspired by the Dover Coast and the Channel, and in his winning a wider contemporary reputation in the jousting lists of critical controversy than in the peaceful courts of song.

But Bowles resembled Arnold most deeply and most significantly in his earnest attitude toward life, in his unsatisfied questionings (which even the humdrum and piety of his daily round did not altogether satisfy or allay), in the pessimism with which he was often disposed to regard the outcome of the strivings of men, and in his sensitive aloofness from the outer world with which he suffered, but whose suffering he could never fully share. Bowles, the country clergyman writing doggerel verses for the pious edification of his young parishioners, and Arnold, the methodical examiner visiting a school all day long and sending out a pupil to bring his meagre lunch into the classroom, were yet separated by a gulf from the world about them.

The spirit of pessimism, most fully manifested in his descriptions of the environing world, is to be met with on almost any page of the poetry of Bowles. At times it would seem to be little more than the melancholy sentiment of youth, which loves so well to

talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

And tell sad stories of the death of kings."

The sonnet Netley Abbey is perhaps to be so interpreted :

"Fall'n pile! I ask not what has been thy fate;
But when the winds, slow wafted from the main,

Through each rent arch, like spirits that complain,
Come hollow to my ear, I meditate

On this world's passing pageant, and the lot
Of those who once majestic in their prime

Stood smiling at decay, till bowed by time

Or injury, their early boast forgot,

They may have fall'n like thee!"

Equally juvenile in its inspissated melancholy is the sonnet Evening, with its

“. . . . fairy vales, where the tired mind

Might rest beyond the murmurs of mankind,
Nor hear the hourly moans of misery!

Alas for man! that Hope's fair views the while

Should smile like you, and perish as they smile!"

At times the poet emphasizes his own aloofness from the misfortunes which he deplores, as in the sonnet On a Beautiful Landscape:

"Beautiful landscape! I could look on thee

For hours, unmindful of the storm and strife,
And mingled murmurs of tumultuous life.

No sighs of sad humanity are here."

Or in the Monody, Written at Matlock:

"I think of poor humanity's brief day,

How fast its blossoms fade, its summers speed away!"

And in the poem A Garden-Seat at Home he expresses happiness in his retirement from the world:

'. . . . scarce wishing to emerge

Into the troubled ocean of that life,

Where all is turbulence, and toil, and strife.
Calm roll the seasons o'er my shaded niche."

In Coombe-Ellen the spirit of detachment in Bowles becomes almost Olympian; he sits looking as an immortal upon the rolling centuries at his feet:

"Here let us sit, and watch
The struggling current burst its headlong way,
Hearing the sound it makes, and musing much
On the strange changes of this nether world.
How many ages must have swept to dust
The still succeeding multitudes, that 'fret
Their little hour' upon this restless scene,
Or ere the sweeping waters could have cut
The solid rock so deep! As now its roar

Comes hollow from below, methinks I hear
The noise of generations, as they pass,
O'er the frail arch of earthly vanity,

To silence and oblivion. The loud coil
Ne'er ceases; as the running river sounds
From age to age, though each particular wave
That made its brief noise, as it hurried on,

Ev'n while we speak, is past, and heard no more;

So ever to the ear of Heaven ascends

The long, loud murmur of the rolling globe;

Its strife, its toils, its sighs, its shouts, the same!"

The love of the sea which is so apparent in the poems of Bowles is perhaps a thing to be expected in the work of an English author; but there are three peculiarities in his attitude toward the sea which, although they tend to become monotonous in their frequent repetition throughout his works, serve to give his expression an unusual character. The sea is, with him, to be regarded passively, as by one who watches it but never spreads a sail; it is most often seen from the shore by a melancholy observer who stands dry-shod; and the movement or the sound of the waters is figuratively represented, over and over, as the sadness of humanity.

The frequent recurrence of this mood of melancholy isolation is largely responsible for the seeming 'thinness' of the poems for a modern reader. There is very little of the exultation in conflict with the waves or in voyaging upon the sea, notwithstanding the ambitious attempt in The Spirit of Discovery. This is not to be explained by unacquaintance with travel, but rather by the attitude of aloofness which Bowles assumes toward the sea as his symbol of human woes, as toward humanity itself. For example, in The Grave of the Last Saxon, the monk declares:

I look back upon the past,

And think of joy and sadness upon earth,

Like the vast ocean's fluctuating toil

From everlasting!"

In Banwell Hill, Part First this attitude of aloofness is attributed, by personification, to the islands themselves:

. . . . those sister isles that sit

In the mid channel! Look, how calm they sit,
As listening to the tide's rocking roar!"