A poet so sensitive to every mood of who in after-life could scarcely, one nature as Tennyson could not fail to write admirably of the wind.

would think, have had more personal experience of a sea-storm that comes to Mrs. Ritchie tells us that when he him who has crossed the Channelwas no more than five years old he was though, no doubt, a Channel-storm can once caught and swept along by the be fierce enough. In the opening of wind down the rectory garden, crying" The Tempest" the salt sea-wind as he was hurried past, "I hear a voice seems to blow through the dialogue; that's speaking in the wind;" and Mr. while in "Pericles" the reader's imArthur Waugh has some extremely in-agination is taken captive by the very teresting and suggestive remarks upon Spirit of the Sea. this.

It is obvious why the finest poetical pictures of the sea should be English; Here, as elsewhere, we may always it is by no means obvious why the finest feel confident of one thing: his deof these pictures should be by Shake- scriptions are true, as true as those speare, a midlander full of the Teutonic of a naturalist. No generalities about passion for the "wild-wood," who could" dark-blue " ocean, emerald-green never have seen the sea as a child, and billows, would satisfy him. In describ

From Longman's Magazine.

THE JOURNAL TO STELLA.

ing water, whether fresh or salt, his adjectives of color are never used, in the conventional way of so many poets, A DIM light was burning in the back for mere ornamentation, but are used room of a first floor in Bury Street, St. for a classification as true as that of the James's. The apartment it illumined man of science. Just as it would be was not a spacious one; and the furniimpossible for him to use the word blue ture, adequate rather than luxurious, in relation to the emerald-green waters had that indefinable lack of physiogof the Rhine (as so many have done), nomy which only lodging-house furniand impossible for him to use the word ture seems to acquire. There was no green in describing the blue waters of fireplace; but in the adjoining parlor, the Rhone, so it would be impossible partly visible through the open door, for him to use the word blue in relation the last embers were dying in a grate to these Northern seas of ours where from which the larger pieces of coal the intense saltness which, in warmer had been lifted away, and carefully latitudes, makes the water blue, is con- ranged in order on the hobs. Across stantly being diluted by the meeting of the heavy, high-backed chairs in the the Arctic ice-water from latitudes bedroom lay various neatly folded garabove, and so rendered "green-glim-ments, one of which was the black gown mering" as Tennyson paints it.

In the following description of the waves breaking on a "table shore" by moonlight the realism is quite as wonderful as the beauty :

selves,

Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,

From less and less to nothing.

with pudding sleeves usually worn in public by the eighteenth-century clergyman, while at the bottom of the bed hung a clerical-looking periwig. In the bed itself, and leaning toward a tall wax candle at his side (which, from a faint smelt of burnt woollen still lingering about the chamber, must

have

The crest of some slow-arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table-shore, Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin them-recently come into contact with the now tucked-back bed-curtain) was a gentleman of forty or thereabouts, writing in a very small hand upon a very large sheet of paper, folded, for greater convenience, into one long, horizontal slip. I seem to have scarcely begun to treat He had dark, fierce-looking eyebrows, a Tennyson as a nature-poet, and already slightly aquiline nose, full-lidded and my allotted space is filled. No critic rather prominent clear blue eyes, a who tries to do justice to any true poet | firmly cut, handsome mouth, and a can avoid feeling a deep dissatisfaction wide, massive forehead, the extent of at the result of his attempt. Therefore I do not hope to satisfy others—I do not hope to satisfy those who will turn to these remarks of mine and read them on account of the beloved name that heads them. Every reader will recall his own favorite bits of Tennysonian description, and be angry at not finding them dwelt upon here. Yet that very injustice towards myself will not be unaccompanied by a deep pleasure; for will it not be another proof of Tennyson's hold upon all readers—another proof of what I have before affirmed, that, in his case, an entire nation loved the man "this side idolatry " ?

THEODORE WATTS.

which, for the moment, was abnormally exaggerated by the fact that, in the energy of composition, the fur-lined cap he had substituted for his wig had been slightly tilted backward. As his task proceeded his expression altered from time to time, now growing grave and stern, now inexpressibly soft and tender. Occasionally, the look almost passed into a kind of grimace, resembling nothing so much as the imitative motion of the lips which one makes in speaking to a pet bird. He continued writing until, in the distance, the step of the watchman, first pausing deliberately, then passing slowly forward for a few paces, was heard in the street

But even more interesting

below. "Past twelve o'clock !" camne | graving. a wheezy cry at the window. "Paaaaast than the similitude of Swift in the fultwelvvve o'clock !" followed the writer, ness of his ungratified ambition are the dragging out his letters so as to repro- letters we have seen him writing. With duce the speaker's drawl. After this one exception, those of them which he rapidly set down a string of words were printed, and garbled, by his fatuin what looked like some unknown ous namesake, Mrs. Whiteway's son-intongue, ending off with a trail of seem- | law, are destroyed or lost; but all the ing hieroglyphics. "Nite, nown deelest latter portion, again with the exception sollahs. Nite dee litt MD, Pdfr's MD. of one, which Hakesworth, a more conRove Pdfr, poo Pdfr, MD MD MD FW scientious, though by no means an irreFW FW Lele Lele Lele Lele michar proachable, editor, gave to the world in MD." 1 Then, tucking his paper un- 1766, are preserved in the MSS. Departder his pillow, he popped out the gut- ment of the British Museum, having tering candle, and turning round upon fortunately been consigned in the same his side with a smile of exceeding year by their confederated publishers sweetness, settled himself to sleep. to the safe keeping of that institution. They still bear, in many cases, the little seal (a classic female head) with which, after addressing them in laboriously legible fashion" To Mrs. Dingley, at Mr. Curry's House, over against the Ram in Capel Street, Dublin, Ireland,” Swift was wont to fasten up his periodical despatches. Several of them are written on quarto paper with faint gilding at the edges, the "pretty small gilt sheet" to which he somewhere refers; but the majority are on a wide folio page crowded from top to bottom with an extremely minute and often abbreviated script, which must have tried other eyes besides those of Esther Johnson. "I looked over a bit of my last letter," he says himself on one occasion, "and could hardly read it." Elsewhere, in one of the letters now lost, he counts up no fewer than one hundred and ninety-nine lines; and in another of those that remain, taken at a venture, there are on the first side sixtynine lines, making, in the type of Scott's edition, rather more than five octavo pages. As for the "little language which produced the facial contortions above referred to ("When I am writing in our language I make up my mouth, just as if I were speaking "), it has been sadly mutilated by Hawkesworth's relentless pen. Many of the passages which he struck through were, with great ingenuity, restored by the late John Forster, from whom, in the little picture at the beginning of this paper, we borrowed a few of those re

The personage thus depicted was Jonathan Swift, doctor of divinity, vicar of Laracor by Trim, in the diocese of Meath in the kingdom of Ireland, and prebendary of Dunlavin in St. Patrick's Cathedral. He had not been long in London, having but recently come over at the suggestion of Dr. William King, Archbishop of Dublin, to endeavor to obtain for the Irish clergy the remission (already conceded to their English brethren) of the first fruits payable to the crown; and he was writing off, or up, his daily record of his doings to Mrs. Rebecca Dingley and Mrs. Esther Johnson, two maiden ladies, who, in his absence from the Irish capital, were temporarily occupying his lodgings in Capel Street. At this date he must have been looking his best, for he had just been sitting to Pope's friend, Charles Jervas, who, having painted him two years earlier, had found him grown so much fatter and better for his sojourn in Ireland that he had volunteered to retouch the portrait. He had given it "quite another turn," Swift tells his correspondents, "and now approves it entirely." Nearly twenty years later Alderman Barber presented this very picture to the Bodleian, where it is still to be seen; and it is, besides, familiar to the collector in George Vertue's fine en

1 "Sollahs," Sirrahs; "MD," Stella, or My Dear, but sometimes Stella-cum-Dingley; "FW," Farewell, or Foolish Wenches; "Lele" is doubt

ful.

covered hieroglyphs. But the bulk of home, the Treaty of Utrecht was pretheir "huge babyisms " and "dear paring. Of all this, however, one diminutives" are almost too intimate rather overhears than hears. In Swift's and particular for the rude publicities gallery there are no portraits à la Camof type. "Dans ce ravissant opéra eron with sweeping robes; at best there qu'on appelle l'amour," says Victor are but thumb-nail sketches. NoHugo, "le libretto n'est presque rien ; "where have we such a finished fulland if for "6 amour we read "amitié," length as that of Bolingbroke in the the aphorism, it must be admitted, is "Inquiry into the Behavior of the not untrue of Swift's famous 66 special Ministry "nowhere a scathing satire code" to Stella. like the Verres" kitcat of Wharton in the seventeenth "Examiner." Nor are there anywhere accounts of occurrences which loom much larger than the stabbing of Harley by Guiscard, or the duel of Hamilton and Mohun. Not the less does the canvas swarm with figures, many of whom bear famous names. Now it is Anna Augusta herself, driving red-faced to hounds in her one-horse chaise, or yawning behind her fan-sticks at a tedious reception; now it is that "pure trifler" Harley, dawdling and temporizing as he does in Prior,

There can, however, be no doubt of the pleasure with which Swift's communications must have been welcomed by the two ladies at Capel Street, not occupied, as was the writer, with the ceaseless bustle of an unusually busy world, but restricted to such minor dissipations as a little horse exercise, or a quiet game of ombre at Dean Sterne's, to the modest accompaniment of claret and oranges. Swift's unique and wonderful command of his mother tongue has never been shown to such advantage as in these familiar records, bristling with proverbs and folk-lore invented ad hoc, with puns good and bad, with humor, irony, common sense, and playfulness. One can imagine with what eagerness the large sheet must have been unfolded, and read not all at once, but in easy stages-by Mrs. Dingley to the impatient Mrs. Johnson, for whom it was primarily intended, but whose eyes were too weak to read it. Yet, to the modern student, the "Journal to Stella," taken as a whole, scarcely achieves the success which its peculiar attributes lead one to anticipate. It remains, as must always be remembered, strictly a journal with a journal's defects. There is a lack of connected interest; there is also a superfluity of detail. Regarded in the light of an low cheeks, sitting solemnly at the historical picture, it is like Hogarth's Smyrna receiving visits of ceremony, March to Finchley; "the crowd in or walking in the Park to make himthe foreground obscures the central self fat, or disappearing mysteriously action. It treats, indeed, of a stirring on diplomatic expeditions to Paris; and a momentous time, for power was grave Addison rehearsing " Cato," and changing hands. The Whigs had given sometimes un-Catonically fuddled; place to the Tories; adroit Mrs. Masham Steele bustling over "Tatlers" and had supplanted "Mrs. Freeman; "the"Spectators," and "governed by his Great Captain himself was falling with wife most abominably, as bad as Marla crash. Abroad, the long Continental borough ; pastoral Philips (with war was dwindling to its close; at his red stockings), just arrived from

"Yea," quoth the Erle, "but not to-day," or spelling out the inn signs between Kew and London; now it is Peterborough, "the ramblingest lying rogue on earth," talking deep politics at a barber's, preparatory to starting for the world's end with the morrow; now it is Mrs. St. John, on her way to the Bath, beseeching Swift to watch over her illustrious husband, who (like Stella !) is not to be governed, and will certainly make himself ill between business and Burgundy. Many others pass and re-pass · Congreve (quantum mutatus!), a broken man, but cheerful, though "almost blind with cataracts growing on his eyes; " Prior, with hol

66

his

Denmark; clever, kindly Dr. Arbuth- dogs the Mohocks ("Who has not not, "the queen's favorite physician," trembled at the Mohock's name?"); meditating new "bites" for the maids the ira, to a considerable extent, for of honor or fresh chapters in "John that most exasperating of retainers, Bull : " young Mr. Berkeley of Kil- manservant Patrick. kenny with his Dialogues against It has been said that the "Journal to Atheism in his pocket, and burning Stella" contains no finished character"to make acquaintance with men of sketches; but so many entries are inmerit ;' "Atterbury, finessing for his volved by the peccadilloes of Patrick Christ Church deanery. Then there that after a time he begins, from sheer are the great ladies-Mrs. Masham, force of reappearance, to assume the who has a red nose, but is Swift's lineaments of a personage. At first he friend; Lady Somerset, the "Carrots " is merely a wheedling, good-looking of the "Windsor Prophecy," who has Irish boy an obvious "Teaguered hair, and is his enemy; sensible lander," as Sir Thomas Mansel calls and spirited Lady Betty Germaine; the him. He makes his début in the third Duchess of Grafton (in a fontange of letter with the remark that "the rabble the last reign); Newton's niece, pretty here [i.e., in London] are much more Mrs. Barton; good-tempered Lady inquisitive in politics than in Ireland,” Harley, hapless Mrs. Ann Long, and a an utterance having all the air of a host of others. And among them all,philosophic reflection. Being, how66 unhasting, unresting," filling the ever, endowed with fine natural aptiscene like Coquelin in "L'Etourdi," tudes, he is speedily demoralized by comes and goes the figure of "Parson those rakes the Loudon footmen. Swift" himself, now striding full-blown" Patrick is drunk about three times a down St. James's Street in his cassock, week," says the next record, "and I gown, and three-guinea periwig; now bear it, and he has got the better of me; riding through Windsor Forest in a but one of these days I will positively borrowed suit of "light camlet, faced turn him off to the wide world, when with red velvet, and silver buttons.' none of you are by to intercede for Sometimes he is feasting royally at him," from which we must infer that Ozinda's or the Thatched House Patrick was, or had been, a favorite with the society of "Brothers "with the ladies at Dublin. He has ansometimes dining moderately in the other vice in Swift's eyes: he is exCity with Barber, his printer, or Will travagant. Coals cost twelvepence a Pate, the "learned woollen-draper; " week, yet he piles up the fires so recksometimes scurvily at a blind tavern lessly that his economical master has upon gill ale, bad broth, and three laboriously to pick them to pieces again. chops of mutton.” You may follow Still he has a good heart, for he buys him wherever he goes, whether it be to a linnet for Mrs. Dingley, at a perGreenwich with the Deau of Carlisle, sonal sacrifice of sixpence, and in direct or to Hampton with "Lord Treasurer," opposition to his master's advice. "I or to hear the nightingales at Vauxhall laid before him the greatness of the with my Lady Kerry. He tells you sum, and the rashness of the attempt; when he buys books at Bateman's in showed how impossible it would be to Little Britain, or spectacles for Stella carry him safe over the salt sea; but he on Ludgate Hill, or Brazil tobacco, would not take my counsel, and he will which Mrs. Dingley will rasp into repent it." A month later the unhappy snuff, at Charles Lillie the perfum- bird is still alive, though grown very er's in Beaufort Buildings. He sets wild. It lives in a closet, where it down everything-his maladies (very makes a terrible litter. "But I say specifically), his misadventures, econ-nothing; I am as tame as a clout." omies, extravagances. dreams, disap- This restraint is the more notable in pointments his votum, timor, ira, that Patrick himself has been for ten woluptas. The timor is chiefly for those days out of favor. "I talk dry and

-66