THE POETS' CHANTRY
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 
 At the age of 19
 
 
 : : : 
 
 Gbantr^ 
 
 ISuxlfoeritw 
 
 B. Herder 
 
 17 South Broadway 
 St. Louis, Mo. 
 
 Herbert & Daniel 
 
 95 New Bond St. 
 London, W. 
 

 
 TO 
 LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
 THE author acknowledges her grateful indebted- 
 ness to the Reverend John J. Burke, C.S.P., 
 Editor of The Catholic World in which magazine all 
 of these essays have appeared either wholly or in part 
 for permission and encouragement to republish at 
 this time : to Messrs. Geo. Bell & Sons for the extracts 
 taken from "Coventry Patmore " : to Mr. Elkin 
 Mathews for the use of Lionel Johnson's poems : and 
 to Messrs. Burns & Gates for the use of those of 
 Francis Thompson and Aubrey de Vere.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL i 
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON . . . .18 
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW . . . -36 
 
 AUBREY DE VERB . . . . 52 
 
 GERARD HOPKINS . . . . 70 
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE . . . .89 
 LIONEL JOHNSON ..... 120 
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON . . . .142 
 
 ALICE MEYNELL . . . . 159 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . 173 
 
 INDEX ...... 177
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON (at the age of 19) . . Frontispiece 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL, S.J. . . . . .11 
 
 From an old print 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETTO, WHERE 
 
 CRASHAW LIES BURIED . . . 45 
 
 AUBREY DE VERB (at the age of 20) . . . 53 
 
 From a coloured drawing by Walter G. Cotts 
 
 AUBREY DE VERB (in his old age) . . . 65 
 
 FR. GERARD HOPKINS, S.J. . . . . . 81 
 
 By courtesy of Fr. Joseph Keating, SJ, 
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE . . . . . .113 
 
 From a photograph by Barraud 
 
 ALICE MEYNELL . . . . . . 161 
 
 From a photograph by Resta
 
 The Poets' Chantry 
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL 
 
 "As the highest Gospel was a biography, so," 
 asserts Carlyle, "is the life of every good man 
 still an indubitable gospel." It is, indeed, the 
 simplest and first of all evangels, the evangel of 
 fact: and when by happy consummation it becomes 
 also the evangel of beauty the crown is assured. 
 The world is hungry for inspiration, and sooner 
 or later will capitulate. The meek shall possess 
 the land, the martyr shall reign, even the poet 
 shall be listened to at last. 
 
 There is Robert Southwell, for instance one- 
 time priest of the Society of Jesus, onetime prisoner 
 in the Tower of London town, onetime laureate of 
 the Elizabethan Catholics whose story no one 
 can read to-day without more than an intellectual 
 interest. To say that he is best worth knowing 
 for the sublimity of his personal character is to 
 indicate the chasm separating him from the great 
 body of Elizabethan songsters. His memory is 
 not, as so frequently happens, sanctified by his 
 art ; rather is his art sanctified by the life which 
 produced it. And yet one would not willingly 
 forget that the young priest's immortality is mainly 
 due to the unique charm of his literary work. " It 
 marks not only the large Roman Catholic element
 
 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 in the country but also the strange contrasts of 
 the times," comments Dr. Stopford Brooke, "that 
 eleven editions [of his works] were published 
 between 1595 and 1609, at a time when the Venus 
 and Adonis of Shakespeare led the way for a 
 multitude of poems that sung of love and delight 
 in England's glory." Such was once his popu- 
 larity ; and, although that may have lapsed for 
 ever now, the critics are not alone in insisting 
 upon Father Southwell's permanent place in our 
 literature. His poetry, so strangely free from the 
 glad, passionate earthliness of most Elizabethan 
 lyrics, is full of quaint, fanciful grace of the 
 grace, too, that follows deep religious fervour. 
 The hopes, the fears, the pathetic weariness of 
 Catholics in those evil days, all entered into his 
 work ; these, and the tender mysticism which 
 bound them like a spell to the Old Religion. Yet, 
 when all is said, the man's life is in itself our 
 choicest heritage his life as poet, as priest, and 
 at last, as martyr. 
 
 Robert Southwell's birth is usually placed some- 
 where in 1561 ; a year which saw two events memor- 
 able in English history the arrival on Scottish 
 shores of the young Mary Stuart, and Eliza- 
 beth's final break with the Papacy in her refusal 
 to send envoys to the Council of Trent. He was 
 the third son of Richard Southwell, head of a pro- 
 minent Catholic family of Horsham St. Faith's, 
 Norfolk ; it is interesting also to note that his 
 maternal grandmother was a Shelley, and of the 
 same family which later gave birth to the "Sky- 
 lark" poet. Robert's adventures seem to have 
 begun in the very cradle, whence he was stolen by 
 some wandering gypsies ; but, as the theft was 
 promptly discovered, it bore no serious conse- 
 quence. Far more significant is the fact that at a
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL 
 
 very early age the boy was sent to school at 
 Douay, where a seminary had been established to 
 supply the needs of English Catholics. Here, in 
 the person of Leonard Lessius, he first came into 
 intimate contact with the Society of Jesus, destined 
 to be so potent a factor in his life. Later, at Paris, 
 his studies were continued under the guidance of 
 Thomas Darbyshire, a zealous soul and one of the 
 first Englishmen to enter that Order. The Catholic 
 mind will scarcely need any comment on the ardour 
 and self-consecration of these early Jesuits, but it 
 is edifying to read the following tribute from such 
 a critic as Dr. Alexander B. Grosart, in his 
 "Memorial Introduction" to Soutknelfs Poems: 
 "The name of Ignatius Loyola was still a recent 
 'memory' and power, and his magnificent and 
 truly apostolic example of burning love, com- 
 passion, faith, zeal, self-denial, charged the very 
 atmosphere with sympathy as with electricity. . . . 
 The Society was then in its first fresh ' love' and 
 force, unentangled with political action (real or 
 alleged) ; and I pity the Protestant who does not 
 recognise in Loyola and his disciples noble 
 men . . . with the single object to win allegiance 
 to Jesus Christ." There is nothing to surprise in 
 the fact that the colossal Jesuit hope of winning 
 back Europe to Catholic Christianity should have 
 appealed to the earnest young English student, 
 or that their lives should have excited his pas- 
 sionate admiration ; but it is worth noting that 
 while still in his early teens Robert Southwell 
 should have formed a life-purpose, from which he 
 never wavered. To "leave all," to take up the 
 Cross, and bear it back to the old forsaken 
 shrines, became the one dream of this elect young 
 soul. He applied for admission into the Society 
 of Jesus ; and, being refused because of his youth, 
 wrote an impassioned Lament expressing his
 
 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 disappointment. Delay tried, but did not in the 
 least shake, his determination ; so finally the 
 coveted consent was obtained, and on the i7th 
 October, 1578, his name was formally entered 
 "amongst the children" of St. Ignatius. Two 
 years later he took minor orders in Rome, and 
 made his first vows as a scholastic of the Society. 
 Then followed four peaceful years of study, during 
 which Southwell was occupied with philosophy 
 and divinity, and, incidentally it seems, with 
 verse-making. In this case the u poetic tempera- 
 ment" was evidently quite compatible with hard 
 work, for the brilliancy of his labours soon won 
 him the prefecture of the English College at Rome. 
 It was in 1584 probably his own twenty-fourth 
 year that Robert Southwell received the final 
 rites of ordination, and stood prepared to begin 
 his apostolic ministry. 
 
 Almost simultaneously, a law was passed in 
 England (27 Elizabeth, c. 2) declaring any native- 
 born subject who had entered the Catholic priest- 
 hood since the first year of the Queen's accession, 
 and who thereafter resided more than forty days on 
 English soil, to be a traitor, and liable to the 
 penalty of death. Severe as it was, it nowise 
 dampened the ardour of the Jesuits in general, 
 nor of Robert Southwell in particular. The 
 English mission if most interesting was obvi- 
 ously one of the most perilous in Europe : religious 
 fanaticism had been aggravated and embittered by 
 political hostility ; the air was dark with con- 
 spiracies for and against the imprisoned Queen of 
 Scots ; and the whole country was, to quote Mr. 
 Turnbull's Memoir, "in a ferment of political in- 
 trigues." Alarmed by Catholic successes abroad, 
 Elizabeth redoubled the rigour of her Uniformity 
 Acts ; the celebration of Mass was forbidden even 
 in private houses, the fines of recusants were
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL 
 
 increased, and over every Catholic lowered the 
 shadow of high treason. But what was a stone 
 about the neck of the layman became a knife at 
 the throat of the priest ; upon him fell the real 
 weight of the persecution, for him the main work 
 of martyrdom was reserved. Against Jesuits, as 
 supposed tools of the Papacy to sow treason in 
 England, popular hatred was even more intense ; 
 they were "tracked by pursuivants and spies, 
 dragged from their hiding-places, and sent in 
 batches to the Tower." Then from dungeon to 
 scaffold was but a little way. And all this was 
 done, of course, in the name of justice, on purely 
 political grounds ! " To modern eyes," as Green 
 very aptly remarks, "there is something even 
 more revolting than open persecution in a policy 
 which branded every Catholic priest as a traitor, 
 and all Catholic worship as disloyalty." 
 
 But had not Ignatius Loyola besought for his 
 followers this legacy of persecution? And never 
 a prayer so promptly answered ! Seventy priests 
 had already gone into banishment, not to mention 
 those who had suffered death, when, on 8 May, 
 1586, two more intrepid missionaries set out 
 for the island. One of them was Father Garnett, 
 subsequently head of the English Jesuits ; the 
 other, Robert Southwell. In spite of spies, who 
 somehow ascertained their coming, the priests 
 succeeded in landing in July, and in reaching the 
 house of Lord Vaux of Harrowden, whither they 
 were later joined by others of the Society. There 
 was plenty of work for them to do ; there was also 
 plenty of danger. Father Southwell, who passed 
 in secular society by the name of Cotton and who 
 is described as a man of middle height and auburn 
 hair, seems to have been watched rather narrowly 
 from the beginning. It was worse than a dog's 
 life for them all, and the necessary precautions
 
 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 were irksome. Father Gerard, one of his com- 
 panions, tells how the young priest tried to 
 familiarise himself with terms of sport for the 
 purpose of conversing with Protestant nobles, and 
 adds that he " used often to complain of his bad 
 memory for such things." On the other hand, 
 one can well imagine how comforting the presence 
 of this earnest, sympathetic soul was to his co- 
 religionists, to whom he ministered largely in 
 London, with occasional journeys to the north of 
 England. "He much excelled," says Father 
 Gerard, " in the art of helping and gaining souls, 
 being at once prudent, pious, meek, and exceed- 
 ingly winning." 
 
 Almost the first of Father Southwell's cares was 
 to win back the wavering faith of his father and 
 his brother. The former, who had married a Pro- 
 testant lady of the Court, was restored to his 
 birthright by a most eloquent and inimitable 
 epistle from his son. " Howsoever," it concludes, 
 after playing upon almost every key of emotion, 
 "the soft gales of your morning pleasures lulled 
 you into slumbers, however the violent heat of 
 noon might awake affections, yet now in the cool 
 and calm of the evening retire to a Christian rest, 
 and close up the day of your life with a clear 
 sunset." 
 
 In 1589 Father Southwell became chaplain and 
 confessor to the Countess of Arundel, whose hus- 
 band, Philip Howard, was then confined in the 
 Tower. There followed several years of compara- 
 tive safety at Arundel House in the Strand, during 
 which began his real literary activity. Triumphs 
 over Death, perhaps his first known work, was 
 occasioned by the death of a certain " noble lady " 
 of the Howards, and was designed as a comfort 
 and check to inordinate grief. Notes on Theology, 
 and other prose works mostly of a theological
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL 
 
 nature, date also from these years. But it is 
 improbable that any of his English poems were 
 yet composed. From Father Gerard we learn- 
 that Southwell set up a private printing press ; 
 from which it would appear that the "apostolate 
 of the press " is not altogether a recent idea. 
 However, Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears, one 
 of his most popular compositions, and model of 
 Thomas Nash's Chris fs Tears over Jerusalem, was 
 printed by Cawood with a licence. None of these 
 works was signed, but the Government seems 
 somehow to have suspected the authorship. 
 
 The letters written by Father Southwell during 
 these years reveal the Catholic life of the day with 
 terrible simplicity. Mary Stuart had bowed her 
 weary head upon the block ; the Spanish Armada 
 had come and gone, uniting Catholic and Pro- 
 testant in a common zeal to protect England ; it 
 would seem that Elizabeth had no longer much 
 need to fear the Old Religion. Yet the persecu- 
 tions went on with pitiless insistence. "The 
 condition of Catholic recusants here," wrote Father 
 Southwell in 1590, " is the same as usual, deplor- 
 able and full of fears and dangers, more especially 
 since our adversaries have looked for wars. As 
 many as are in chains rejoice, and are comforted 
 in their prisons ; and they that are at liberty set 
 not their hearts upon it, nor expect it to be of long 
 continuance. All, by the great goodness and 
 mercy of God, arm themselves to suffer anything 
 that can come, how hard soever it may be, as it shall 
 please our Lord ... A little while ago they appre- 
 hended two priests, who have suffered such cruel 
 treatment in the prison of Bridewell as can scarce 
 be believed. . . . Some are there hung up for 
 whole days by the hands, in such manner that 
 they can but just touch the ground with the tips 
 of their toes . . . This purgatory we are looking
 
 8 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 for every hour, in which Topcliffe and Young, the 
 two executioners of the Catholics, exercise all 
 kinds of torments. But come what pleaseth God, 
 we hope we shall be able to bear all ' in Him that 
 strengthens us. J " Even through this darkness, 
 eyes of faith caught gleams of a coming sunrise. 
 " It seems to me," he wrote later that year, in 
 words which were to prove so deeply prophetic, 
 "that I see the beginning of a religious life set 
 on foot in England, of which we now sow the seeds 
 with tears, that others hereafter may with joy carry 
 in the sheaves to the heavenly granaries. . . . 
 With such dews as these the Church is watered. 
 . . . We also look for the time (if we are not un- 
 worthy of so great a glory) when our day (like 
 that of the hired servant) shall come." 
 
 His day was, in fact, not long to be deferred. 
 In 1592 Father Southwell made a dangerous ac- 
 quaintance in the person of Richard Bellamy of 
 Uxenden Hall, one of whose kinsmen had been exe- 
 cuted in connection with the " Babington Conspi- 
 racy," and every member of whose family was under 
 suspicion as to his belief. The young Jesuit 
 said Mass at their home and ministered to the 
 whole household, until the storm-cloud suddenly 
 broke above their heads. Anne Bellamy, a young 
 daughter, was chosen as the Government's first 
 victim. She was confined in the Gatehouse at 
 Westminster under the care of one Nicholas Jones, 
 and the story of her double fall is as brief as it is 
 ugly. Having lost both faith and virtue, the girl 
 was soon persuaded to the final baseness of betray- 
 ing her family and her friends. From her the 
 savage Topcliffe learned that Richard Bellamy 
 was in the habit of receiving Father Southwell 
 and other priests at his home ; he learned the 
 manner of their coming and other details ; then, 
 like Judas of old, he acted quickly.
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL 
 
 On 20 June, Southwell rode over to Uxen- 
 den with Thomas Bellamy some say in hopes 
 of ministering to Anne, who herself had written 
 for him and fell directly into Topcliffe's snare. 
 "I never did take so weighty a man, if he 
 be rightly used," wrote that officer to the Queen ; 
 and the sinister meaning of his words was soon 
 apparent. The young priest was brutally tortured 
 in his captor's own house ; then sent to West- 
 minster, under the care of the scoundrel who 
 had now become Anne Bellamy's husband. In 
 September a new entry appeared in the records of 
 the grim Tower of London, that of "Robert 
 Southwell, alias Cotton, a Jesuit and infamous 
 traitor " ; and the old gruesome story was repeated. 
 His fortitude during these ordeals coerced the 
 admiration of Cecil himself. "There is," the 
 latter wrote, "at present confined one Southwell, 
 a Jesuit, who, thirteen times most cruelly tortured, 
 cannot be induced to confess anything, not even 
 the colour of a horse whereon on a certain day he 
 rode, lest from such indication his adversaries 
 might conjecture in what house, or in what 
 company of Catholics, he that day was." 
 
 Persecution makes of some men misanthropes ; 
 of others, saints ; of Father Southwell it made a 
 poet. Broken by torture, imprisoned in the dark- 
 ness and filthiness of the dungeon, he still worked 
 for his beloved people and, unable to speak, he 
 sang. His spirit was like that pure frankincense 
 of which Lyly tells us that it "smelleth most sweet 
 when it is in the fire." Dr. Grosart opines that 
 the entire body of his poetical work was produced 
 in prison, and this, being true, adds enormously 
 to its interest and its pathos. The Government, 
 no doubt in hopes of forcing some revelation, kept 
 him awaiting trial over three years. During most 
 of this time he was confined in a dungeon so
 
 10 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 unspeakably noisome that Richard Southwell 
 finally petitioned the Queen that his son be put to 
 death if he deserved it, or else, as he was a gentle- 
 man, that he be treated as such. This protest 
 availed somewhat, for the prisoner was allowed to 
 receive clothing and a few other necessaries and 
 even some books ; of which, however, he asked 
 only for the Bible and St. Bernard. 
 
 At last, in 1595 and without any previous 
 warning, says the St. Omer MS. he was hurried 
 off to Westminster and placed on trial for High 
 Treason. The courtesy, dignity and Christian 
 meekness of Father Southwell throughout this 
 travesty of justice were most impressive. When 
 questioned, he pleaded " not guilty of any treason " ; 
 but he freely acknowledged the only crime with 
 which he was charged that of fulfilling the duties 
 of a Catholic priest to his suffering co-religionists. 
 The result was fore-ordained; England had a law, 
 "and by that law he ought to die." Once more 
 torture did its revolting work upon his much-tried 
 body ; then, at dawn next morning, his gaoler 
 bore him the final summons. " You could not 
 bring me more joyful tidings," the priest answered 
 simply. 
 
 So at daybreak, on 22 or 23 February, 1595, 
 he was placed in a sledge and drawn to Tyburn 
 for execution. Bishop Challoner tells us that 
 a notorious highwayman was executed on the same 
 day to divert popular attention from Father 
 Southwell's doom ; nevertheless, the usual mob 
 awaited him. The priest who was to pour out his 
 life-blood for these English people, the poet who 
 had sung to them from his dungeon, gazed down 
 upon the upturned faces upon the hostile, the 
 friendly, and the merely curious. Then, signing 
 himself with the Cross, he began to speak. 
 "Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL, S.J. 
 
 From an old print
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL n 
 
 whether we die, we die unto the Lord. Therefore 
 whether we live or whether we die we are the 
 Lord's." The words were scarcely uttered before 
 the sheriff attempted some interruption ; but silence 
 being regained, the young priest continued, crav- 
 ing of the "most clement God and Father of 
 Mercies," forgiveness " for all things wherein I 
 may have offended since my infancy. Then, as 
 regards the Queen (to whom I have never done 
 nor wished any evil), I have daily prayed for her, 
 and now with all my heart do pray, that from His 
 great mercy . . . He may grant that she may use 
 the ample gifts and endowments wherewith He 
 hath endowed her to the immortal glory of His 
 name, the prosperity of the whole nation, and the 
 eternal welfare of her soul and body. For my 
 most miserable and with all tears to be pitied 
 country, I pray the light of truth whereby, the 
 darkness of ignorance being dispelled, it may 
 learn in and above all things to praise God, and 
 seek its eternal good in the right way." 
 
 There is a quite superlative pathos in these 
 prayers of the condemned man for the Queen and 
 country which thus repudiated him. Far ahead 
 into the future of England his thoughts were 
 wandering, when suddenly he returned to the 
 awful present. " For what may be done to my 
 body," he cried, "I have no care. But since 
 death, in the admitted cause for which I die, 
 cannot be otherwise than most happy and desir- 
 able, I pray the God of all comfort that it may be 
 to me the complete cleansing of my sins, and a 
 real solace and increase of faith to others. For I 
 die because I am a Catholic priest, elected unto 
 the Society of Jesus in my youth ; nor has any 
 other thing, during the last three years in which I 
 have been imprisoned, been charged against me. 
 This death, therefore, although it may now seem
 
 12 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 base and ignominious, can to no rightly thinking 
 person appear doubtful but that it is beyond mea- 
 sure an eternal weight of glory to be wrought in 
 us, who look not to the things which are visible, 
 but to those which are unseen." 
 
 The simple spiritual grandeur of this valediction 
 sank into the hearts of the listening multitude, 
 and won them, in spite of Protestant detractors, to 
 the martyr's side. The executioner did his work 
 clumsily, which added extra torment to Father 
 Southwell's death ; but to the last he calmly 
 commended his soul to its Maker. One is com- 
 forted in this dark history to read that the mob 
 itself prevented his body being taken down before 
 dead, as the sentence had directed. "May my 
 soul be with this man's ! " exclaimed Lord 
 Mountjoy, a bystander ; and when the poor, 
 severed head was held aloft to the public gaze, 
 not one voice was heard to cry " Traitor." 
 
 The world, after its wont, was kinder to the 
 man's work than to the man himself. Three 
 volumes of his productions already even popu- 
 lar, as it seems were published immediately 
 after Father Southwell's death ; and they were 
 followed by a host of others. In a very eminent 
 degree was this young Jesuit the " poet of Roman 
 Catholic England " ; but he was not merely the 
 poet of any single class. He spoke to the sorrow- 
 ful and serious of soul, to the meek and the devout ; 
 and the Old Faith and the New ceased their war- 
 fare to listen. The longest and most ambitious of 
 his poems, but by no means his best, is St. Peter's 
 Complaint. The ever sympathetic Dr. Grosart 
 anticipates a very natural objection in pointing 
 out that " regarded as so many distinct studies of 
 the tragic incident, it is ignorance and not know- 
 ledge that will pronounce it tedious or idly para- 
 phrastic," for the constant play of fancy is too
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL 13 
 
 redundant for modern readers. Such striking 
 passages as the following, however, do much to 
 relieve the monotony : 
 
 At Sorrow's door I knocked, they craved my name : 
 
 I answered, one unworthy to be known. 
 
 What one? say they. One worthiest of blame. 
 
 But who? A wretcft, not God's nor yet his own. 
 
 A man? Oh no! a beast; much worse. What creature ? 
 
 A rock. How called ? The rock of scandal, Peter ! 
 
 Throughout his shorter poems Father South- 
 well shows to truer advantage. It was inevitable 
 that the minor notes of life should have struck 
 deepest echo in our poet's heart. Their very 
 titles, Scorn Not the Least, Life is but Loss, What 
 Joy to Live? etc., carry a message which those that 
 run may read. But their sadness is utterly with- 
 out bitterness or pessimism, their weariness of 
 life always presses on to a hope beyond. A 
 few lines from Times go by Turns will serve to 
 illustrate the beauty, even the cheerfulness, of 
 his thought : 
 
 Not always fall of leaf, nor ever spring, 
 No endless night, yet not eternal day ; 
 The saddest birds a season find to sing, 
 The roughest storm a calm may soon allay ; 
 Thus with succeeding turns God tempereth all, 
 That man may hope to rise, yet fear to fall. 
 
 But the most masterful of Father Southwell's 
 lyrics the lyric, indeed, to claim which Drum- 
 mond of Hawthornden tells us Ben Jonson would 
 willingly have destroyed more than one of his own 
 poems, is the famous 
 
 BURNING-BABE. 
 
 As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the 
 snow.
 
 14 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Surprised I was with sudden heat, which made my 
 
 heart to glow ; 
 And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was 
 
 near, 
 
 A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear, 
 Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears 
 
 did shed, 
 As though His floods should quench His flames, which 
 
 with His tears were fed. 
 
 "Alas!" quoth He, "But newly born, in fiery heats 
 
 I fry, 
 Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel My fire 
 
 but I! 
 My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding 
 
 thorns, 
 Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame 
 
 and scorns ; 
 
 The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals ; 
 The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled 
 
 souls, 
 For which, as now on fire I am, to work them to their 
 
 good, 
 So will I melt into a bath to wash them in My 
 
 blood " : 
 With these He vanished out of sight, and swiftly 
 
 shrunk away, 
 And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas 
 
 Day. 
 
 This deep religious fervour permeates the poet's 
 entire work, not merely the Mceonice, a series on 
 the life of our Saviour and His Mother, but even 
 the shortest lyric, without, I think, one single 
 exception. He bitterly regretted the worldliness 
 of most Elizabethan verse, complaining in one of 
 his Introductions that "The finest wits are now 
 given to write passionate discourses." To-day, 
 perhaps, we see the deep human value of many of 
 these same "passionate discourses" more clearly
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL 
 
 than did the pious young priest ; nor can we resist 
 smiling a little at his ingenious recasting of Master 
 Dyer's "Fancy," wherein the subject is made to 
 mourn a lack of grace instead of love! But the 
 constancy and depth of this devotion, and the 
 delicacy of imagination which accompanied it, 
 both charm and coerce our admiration. They are 
 the characteristics of his prose as well as his verse 
 they are the dominant, unmistakable notes of 
 his personality. And if, in his own words, his 
 work be "coarse in respect of others' exquisite 
 labours," we shall not easily forget the circum- 
 stances which called it into being: the "evident 
 fact," to quote Mr. Saintsbury, "that the author 
 thought of nothing else than of merely cultivating 
 the Muses." 
 
 Two obvious defects to be found in Southwell's 
 works are extravagance of metaphor and an almost 
 monotonous habit of playing upon words ; for both 
 of which, however, the age must be held respon- 
 sible. When one recalls the years during which 
 he wrote the vogue of the sonnet-sequences, of 
 Euphuesy Arcadia, and the Faerie Queene it is 
 understood that "conceits" were in the very air. 
 Sir Philip Sidney himself, we remember, has 
 somewhere compared a white horse speckled with 
 red to "a few strawberries scattered in a dish of 
 cream ! " And the fundamental merit of Father 
 Southwell's poetry has ever been recognised by 
 the best critics, his literary influence being to-day 
 more and more appreciated. This influence is 
 very manifest in the poems of Richard Crashaw; 
 and the lines from Scorn Not the Least 
 
 He that the growth on cedars did bestow, 
 Gave also lowly mushrooms leave to grow 
 
 find an echo in Blake's Tiger. "As a whole," 
 summarises Dr. Grosart, "his poetry is healthy
 
 16 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 and strong, and I think has been more po- 
 tential in our literature than appears on the sur- 
 face. I do not think it would be hard to show that 
 others of whom more is heard drew light from 
 him, as well early as more recent, from Burns to 
 Thomas Hood." 
 
 Biography is, after all, the best history ; and the 
 life of Robert Southwell reveals one phase of 
 Elizabethan England better than a dozen com- 
 mentaries. It is not, indeed, the phase oftenest 
 remembered. In the stirring political drama of 
 the day, in the clash of arms and clash of wits 
 through which England was led to unprecedented 
 material splendour, he played but little part. Still 
 further was he from the wild Bohemianism of 
 Greene and Marlowe, or the mature artistic glory 
 of those who congregated at the old Mermaid 
 Tavern. But there was a darker, sadder under- 
 current to this rushing tide of Elizabethan life. 
 There was the ardent Catholic minority, nowise 
 deaf to the call of the young intellectual life, nor 
 blind to the signs of England's growing strength 
 sensitive, indeed, to every vital influence yet 
 compelled into hostile inactivity. Adherents of 
 the Old Faith were shut out from both the great 
 Universities ; they had no part in the adminis- 
 tration of justice ; they were ineligible for any 
 public office in the kingdom. Thus a great body 
 of men with the culture of the New Learning and 
 the passion of the Renaissance were found march- 
 ing not with but against the trend of their age. 
 Some of them sought adventure overseas, or 
 plunged into purely secular activity ; others, 
 already forced into disloyalty, spent their time 
 plotting a change in government, and were the 
 easy prey of each new conspiracy. Still others, 
 purified by persecution, rose above the heat and
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL 
 
 bitterness of personal feud to apostolic zeal and 
 endurance, and fought the losing fight so nobly 
 that in their very defeat lay the assurance of an 
 abiding victory. Of these last was Robert South- 
 well.
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 
 
 IT is sometimes precisely because of his limitations 
 that a poet is interesting. The great genius is cos- 
 mopolitan of all time and every age : the lesser star 
 is personal and national, and often very valuably 
 provincial. He has his unique and particular 
 message, delivered in his own individual way, and, 
 if it be a sincere and beautiful message, the world 
 can ill afford to be without it. Moreover, there 
 exists no infallible authority for determining the 
 status of an author, " infinite riches in a little 
 room " having been more than once revealed in a 
 search through forgotten pages. With all the 
 greater confidence do we remember, and repeat, 
 these truths when the minor poet happens to be 
 such an engaging person as William Habington 
 and one whose life was so representative in its 
 very isolation. 
 
 Gentle by birth, and by nature a student, he 
 seemed at one time claimed for the priesthood. 
 But love, in the person of "Castara," came into 
 Habington's life and behold, his name comes 
 down to us as poet instead. The single volume 
 due to this inspiration is the foundation of his 
 literary fame, and to a large extent the explanation 
 of his life. Were all outer details of his biography 
 lost, we should still know the heart of this austere 
 but lovable young Englishman from the revela- 
 tions of his Castara. 
 
 Happily, however, there are other channels of 
 information. From the reign of Henry IV, the 
 Habington (or Abington) family had been a 
 
 18
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 19 
 
 representative one, and during the sixteenth cen- 
 tury its annals were particularly stirring. A certain 
 John Habington was cofferer to Queen Elizabeth, 
 and seems to have lived peaceably enough through 
 those tumultuous times ; but his two sons were of 
 more radical temper. Edward was executed in 
 1586 for participation in Anthony Babington's 
 Conspiracy ; and his brother Thomas (the father 
 of the poet) was only less unfortunate. His 
 studies at Oxford had been supplemented at Paris 
 and Rheims, whence, ' ' after some time spent there 
 in good letters," he returned to England an 
 exceedingly zealous Catholic. Although onetime 
 godson to Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Habington 
 now acknowledged himself an adherent of Mary 
 Stuart and was promptly despatched to the Tower. 
 His imprisonment there lasted six years, and from 
 Anthony a Wood's account we learn that "he 
 profited more in that time in several sorts of 
 learning than he had before in all his life." He 
 seems, indeed, to have passed most of his sub- 
 sequent years in scholarly pursuits, living at the 
 family estate of Hindlip Hill with his wife Mary, 
 a sister of Lord Mounteagle. 
 
 In the year 1604, after a brief respite, King 
 James revived the penal laws against his Catholic 
 subjects. Severe fines for recusancy were once 
 more demanded (even for the period of toleration) ; 
 and in default of such payment all the personal 
 goods and two-thirds of the lands of the victim 
 became forfeit to the Crown. Hundreds of families 
 were thus pauperised, and conditions became more 
 and more intolerable all over England. "It is 
 both odious and grievous," wrote Father Gerard, 
 "that true and free-born subjects should be given 
 as in prey to others." But the work went on ; 
 until the fanaticism of one little band of zealots 
 rose to fever heat, and in the mind of Robert
 
 20 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Catesby was conceived the Gunpowder Plot. The 
 writer of the warning letter sent to Lord Mount- 
 eagle by which the Plot was frustrated has never 
 been positively identified, but Wood asserts that 
 it was none other than Mary Habington. On the 
 very day which had been set for the Gunpowder 
 affair the fifth (or possibly the fourth) of Novem- 
 ber, 1605 her son William was born. It was in 
 truth a troublous world upon which the future poet 
 opened his infant eyes. England, from her vacil- 
 lating King to her intensely Puritan Commons, 
 had fallen into a panic over the Plot. Catholics 
 were in worse repute than ever, and upon the 
 Jesuits burst the main torrent of popular fury. In 
 this crisis, Father Garnett, their Provincial, (he 
 who had sailed with Robert Southwell to the 
 unhappy island some twenty years before) fled 
 for shelter to the home of the Habingtons. Hindlip 
 was admirably adapted to the situation, containing 
 no less than eleven secret chambers, and having 
 served before this as refuge for the persecuted 
 priesthood. But the Government was watching. 
 In January, 1606, after a search of eleven nights 
 and twelve days, Garnett was discovered : a few 
 months later he, too, was executed. And while 
 the elder Habington's life was spared, it was on 
 condition that he never subsequently put foot out- 
 side of Worcestershire. 
 
 After that, Hindlip Hill was tranquil enough. 
 William's childhood passed uneventfully amid its 
 beautiful surroundings, while the father continued 
 his antiquarian researches concerning the cathe- 
 drals of Worcester, Chichester, etc. At least two 
 characteristics of the poet's later life his fervent 
 and enlightened catholicity and his love of peace 
 may be traced to the environment of these early 
 years. For bloody and turbulent memories were 
 a thing of the past to Hindlip : little by little the
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 21 
 
 smoke of battle faded from its walls, and sunlight 
 entered in. When William was old enough he 
 was sent to the famous Jesuit College at St. 
 Omer's, France, where the Fathers were so deeply 
 impressed by his virtue and ability that after a 
 time he was, says Anthony a Wood, " earnestly 
 invited to take upon him the habit " of the 
 Society. Eminently fitting would it have seemed 
 for a Habington to enter that Company of Jesus, 
 whose aims and dangers the family had shared in 
 England, but human destinies will "e'en gang 
 their ain gate." William, apparently uncertain 
 of his vocation, "by excuses got free and left 
 them," passing on to continue his studies in 
 Paris. And, as the final decision was against the 
 apostolate, he returned to England, where " being 
 then at man's estate," Wood tells us "he was 
 instructed at home in matters of history by his 
 father, and became an accomplished gentleman." 
 It could not have been so very long after this 
 that Habington met Lucy Herbert, youngest 
 daughter of the Baron Powis, and his vita nuova 
 dawned. " I found," he subsequently wrote, " that 
 Oratory was dombe when it began to speak her, 
 and wonder ... a lethargic." His ingenuous 
 little character sketch of "A Mistris " (prefixed to 
 Castara) gives a more detailed description of this 
 "fairest treasure the avarice of love can covet" : 
 " She is chaste. . , . She is as fair as Nature in- 
 tended her, helpt perhaps to a more pleasing grace 
 by the sweetness of education, not by the slight of 
 Art. . . . She is young. . . . She is innocent 
 even from the knowledge of sinne. . . . She is 
 not proud. ... In her carriage she is sober, and 
 thinkes her youth expresseth life enough, without 
 the giddy motion fashion of late hath taken up. 
 She dances to the best applause, but doates not 
 on the vanity of it. ... She sings, but not
 
 22 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 perpetually, for she knows silence in woman is the 
 most persuading oratorie. She never arrived at 
 so much familiarity with man as to know the 
 diminutive of his name, and call him by it. ... 
 She is never sad, and yet not jiggish. . . . 
 She is not ambitious to be prais'd and yet values 
 death beneath infamy." 
 
 But Habington was not to find this Rose of the 
 World altogether without its thorns. His family, 
 although an eminent one, was scarcely a mate for 
 the Herberts or the Percys, whose blood was 
 mingled in " Castara's " veins; and his worldly 
 fortunes were doubtless far inferior to those of 
 other suitors. But there was something in the 
 grave, cultured grace of this young student to 
 which the lady could not be indifferent. More- 
 over, his unfaltering assurances that they were 
 created for each other had a persuasive power 
 quite their own. William Habington knew how 
 to love: and he told his story in a series of poems 
 so severely pure and so exquisitely tender that, in 
 in addition to winning the heart of Lucy Herbert, 
 they won him a place among the makers of 
 English literature. 
 
 Very little did he dream of this latter result as 
 he penned the praises of his well-beloved : 
 
 Let all the amorous Youth, whose faire desire 
 
 Felt never warmth but from a noble fire, 
 
 Bring hither their bright flames : which here shall shine 
 
 As tapers fixt about Castara's shrine. 
 
 While I, the Priest, my untam'd heart surprise, 
 
 And in this Temple make't her sacrifice. . . . 
 
 Thus characteristically does the little volume 
 open ; and from its first part we learn the story of 
 that somewhat chequered courtship. There is a 
 charming little poem, " To Castara, Praying"; 
 another to the same " Softly Singing to Her
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 23 
 
 Selfe." And as evidence that, with all her rare 
 discretion, Lucy Herbert was still a very woman, 
 Habington has left some beautiful verses "To 
 Castara, Inquiring why I loved her." " Why," 
 he retorts, 
 
 Why doth the stubborne iron prove 
 So gentle to th' magnetique stone ? 
 How know you that the orbs do move ; 
 With musicke too ? Since heard of none ? 
 And I will answer why I love. 
 
 But not unnaturally, the young poet was keenly 
 sensitive to the opposition of Castara's family. In 
 lines addressed to her "right honourable" mother, 
 he impetuously wishes that his high-born mistress 
 were 
 
 The daughter of some mountain cottager, 
 Who, with his toils worne out, could dying leave 
 Her no more dowre, than what she did receive 
 From bounteous Nature. 
 
 A few pages further on we find him boldly 
 asserting that 
 
 Parents' lawes must bear no weight 
 When they happinesse prevent. 
 
 But the lady was too dutiful to heed such ques- 
 tionable doctrine, and was finally induced to leave 
 town for Seymors, on the Thames. Habington 
 after the manner of disconsolate lovers composed 
 a number of poems lamenting her absence, im- 
 mortalising "a trembling kisse" stolen at the 
 moment of departure, and be-rating his friends for 
 their philosophical advice. Then, very sensibly, 
 he followed her. 
 
 Subsequent titles "To Castara, being debarr'd 
 her presence," and " To the Dew, In hope to see
 
 24 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Castara walking " usher in the pastoral phase of 
 their romance. Under the u kinde shadow" of 
 some friendly tree, or on the banks of the 
 "courteous Thames," the old vows were once 
 more repeated. And love had grown strong and 
 brave during those months of probation far too 
 strong to fear what the hand of man could do. 
 The young lovers had passed their Purgatory, and 
 now at last the gates of Paradise were yielding 
 before them. 
 
 Yet are we so by Love refin'd, 
 From impure drosse we are all mind. 
 Death could not more have conquer'd sense, 
 
 Habington wrote in the climax of his great joy. 
 A touch of the unearthly, a certain kinship with 
 the angels, tempered his most ardent moments : 
 and it is this spiritual element, more than any 
 other, which has separated his songs from the 
 somewhat u madding crowd" of Cupid's votaries. 
 The marriage of the poet and his Castara was 
 celebrated some time between 1630 and 1633 one 
 cannot be certain of the exact date. And that it 
 was an ideal one, the second part of the poem 
 testifies. It would seem that Lord Powis was to 
 the last unyielding, for one of the finest of these 
 compositions implores his parental blessing as 
 the one thing needful to their happiness : 
 
 'Ere th' astonisht Spring 
 Heard in the ayre the feather'd people sing, 
 Ere time had motion, or the Sunne obtain'd 
 His province o'er the day, this was ordain'd, 
 
 declares the intrepid bridegroom. And surely the 
 most obdurate of fathers could scarcely be un- 
 moved by such a plea, ending as it does with the 
 assurance :
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 25 
 
 To me 
 There's nought beyond this. The whole world is she. 
 
 To just what extent Castara's worth was "above 
 rubies " Habington has not left us ignorant. A 
 second prose portrait, this time of "A Wife," is 
 inserted among the poems ; and, reading it, one 
 scarcely marvels that he calls her " the sweetest part 
 in the harmony of our being." " She is," he writes, 
 " so true a friend, her Husband may to her com- 
 municate even his ambitions, and if successe 
 crowne not expectation, remains neverthelesse un- 
 contemned. She is colleague with him in the 
 Empire of prosperity ; and a safe retyring place 
 when adversity exiles him from the World. . . . 
 She is inquisitive only of new wayes to please 
 him, and her wit sayles by no other compasse 
 than that of his direction. She looks upon him 
 as Conjurors upon the Circle, beyond which there 
 is nothing but Death and Hell ; and in him she 
 believes Paradise circumscrib'd. His virtues are 
 her wonder and imitation ; and his errors her 
 credulite thinkes no more frailtie than makes him 
 descend to the title of Man." So, if Habington 
 did not cease to be a lover when he became a hus- 
 band, the credit was possibly not all his own. 
 
 During those early years of his married life the 
 poet seems to have felt an almost excessive shrink- 
 ing from public activity. Political struggles had 
 brought his family very near to shipwreck in the 
 old days, and he had slight wish to venture upon 
 the stormy main. For although there was no 
 active persecution under King Charles, Catholics 
 knew full well that they were merely tolerated in 
 England, and their wisdom lay in much quiet- 
 ness. It is doubtful, too, if Habington chafed 
 greatly under this restraint. The peaceful tender- 
 ness of his life with Castara is reflected in poem
 
 26 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 after poem ; he writes of her " Being Sicke," then 
 of her recovery ; and on the first anniversary of 
 their marriage he compares their passion to the 
 
 sunlicrht.- 
 
 sunlight, 
 
 Which had increast, but that, by love's decree 
 'Twas such at first, it ne'er could greater be ! 
 
 In the course of time two children were born 
 to them Thomas and Catherine of whom, un- 
 fortunately, we know little. But such glimpses 
 of the home life as do reach us make lines like the 
 following, with all their breath of the lotus flower, 
 entirely comprehensible : 
 
 Though with larger sail 
 Some dance upon the Ocean, yet more fraile 
 And faithlesse is that wave than where we glide. 
 . . . And cause our boat 
 
 Dares not affront the weather, we'll ne'er float 
 Farre from the shore. 
 
 Another and very amiable side of Habington's 
 character is revealed in his friendship with George 
 Talbot, brother of the Earl of Shrewsbury. These 
 two cousins had been close friends from child- 
 hood. Both had known the culture of u a liberall 
 education," and both developed into men of 
 severely high and noble nature. Looking back 
 after Talbot's death, Habington thought that his 
 friend had inherited "the vertues of all his 
 progenitors" ; and he mused lovingly how frank 
 and open had been his speech, yet how faithful 
 his guarding of another's secret ; how he was 
 ''absolute governor, no destroyer of his pas- 
 sions," and so generous that he could for- 
 give an injury. As for Talbot, he had declared, in 
 verses to his "best friend and kinsman William
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 27 
 
 Habington," the absolute unity " in blood as 
 study " between them, and that their sole conten- 
 tion was "who should be best patterne of a 
 friend." Castara herself, it would seem, did not 
 replace this older companionship ; since in the 
 very midst of his courtship Habington found time 
 to reproach Talbot for an absence of three days. 
 But the bond was destined ("Love's the am- 
 bassador of loss") to be the means of a mighty 
 sorrow when the hand of Death fell precipitately 
 upon the vigorous manhood of his friend. For 
 ten days Habington was speechless with grief. 
 Then he sought relief in the touching "Elegies" 
 which add a new solemnity to the 1635 edition of 
 Castara. They are eight in number, perhaps the 
 most powerful being the second : 
 
 Talbot is dead. Like lightning which no part 
 O' th' body touches, but first strikes the heart, 
 This word hath murder'd me. . . . 
 
 No man can look straight into the eyes of Death 
 without having his aspect of Life metamorphosed. 
 After that year, 1634, William Habington was no 
 longer the weaver of delicious day dreams, the 
 tireless singer of Castara's praises. He was her 
 faithful and devoted husband ; but that was not 
 all. In the studious repose of Hindlip Hill we 
 find the quondam poet giving himself more 
 and more to historical research. He produced 
 in collaboration with his father a History of 
 Edward IV, King of England, which was pub- 
 lished in 1640 "at the desire of K. Charles I." 
 That same year saw the appearance of his Queene 
 of A rr agon, a tragi-comedy of considerable merit, 
 which the Earl of Pembroke "caused to be acted 
 at Court and afterwards to be published against 
 the author's will." One little dialogue in this
 
 28 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 play takes on particular interest from the tradition 
 of Habington's Republican sympathies. It is the 
 following : 
 
 The stars shoot 
 
 An equal influence on the open cottage 
 Where the poor shepherd's child is rudely nurs'd, 
 And on the cradle where the prince is rock'd 
 With care and whisper. 
 
 And what hence infer you ? 
 
 That no distinction is 'tween man and man 
 But as his virtues add to him a glory, 
 Or vices cloud him. 
 
 These sentiments may or may not have been 
 personal with the author ; but when one recalls 
 the Royalist doctrine of Divine Right, and even 
 Cromwell's frank predilection for a " gentleman," 
 one perceives how radical their tenor really was. 
 
 Popular opinion has all too readily imputed to 
 the Puritans of that day a monopoly of English 
 piety : but the intensity, the austerity of Habing- 
 ton's later poems might, if better known, serve 
 as a wholesome corrective. The third part of 
 Castara, issued in 1639-40, has comparatively 
 little in common with the earlier pages. Its 
 poems, composed mainly upon Scriptural texts, 
 possess a solemnity, a detachment that is most 
 impressive. From a man like Habington, in- 
 deed, it is even alarming ! All trace of the youth- 
 ful lover, who caught the sound of Castara's 
 name in the brook's " harmonious murmures," or 
 fancied Cupid buried in the dimple of her cheek, 
 has disappeared. The intense seriousness of life, 
 the mutability of human joys, man's high destiny 
 and the dread alternative of Hell these are now 
 the poet's themes. We have earlier referred to
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 29 
 
 Habington's custom of inserting prose sketches 
 which strike the keynote of the various poems : 
 at first it was the " Mistris" ; then the " Wife" ; 
 still later, the " Friend." But for this Third Part 
 was reserved the most famous of all, his vision of 
 "A Holy Man." It seems a thousand pities to 
 mar the continuity of this study, so wise, so sane, 
 so full of austere beauty, by a mere extract ; but 
 the whole is too long to quote. The Holy Man 
 alone, declares Habington, is truly happy : 
 
 " In prosperity he gratefully admires the bounty 
 of the Almighty giver, and useth, not abuseth, 
 plenty : but in adversity he remaines unshaken, 
 and like some eminent mountain hath his head 
 above the clouds. . . . Fame he weighes not, but 
 esteemes a smoake, yet such as carries with it the 
 sweetest odour, and riseth usually from the 
 Sacrifice of our best actions." There is no trace 
 of self-righteousness in this little sermon; "for 
 seldome," says the preacher, "the folly we con- 
 demne is so culpable as the severity of our judg- 
 ment. . . . To live he knowes a benefit, and the 
 contempt of it ingratitude, but . . . Death, how 
 deformed soever an aspect it weares, he is not 
 frighted with ; since it not annihilates but un- 
 cloudes the soule." 
 
 There would seem to be more than a superficial 
 significance in this change of Habington's mental 
 attitude. Was the weight of six additional years, 
 the maturing of a deeply serious nature, even the 
 death of George Talbot, sufficient explanation of 
 it? Or did, perhaps, dreams of a lost vocation 
 haunt the soul of the poet? Only his God (and 
 possibly his Castara) could know what chastening 
 hand had rested upon that heart. For, surely, it 
 was not in the school of ease or joy or human 
 consolation that Habington learned to write lines 
 like those which close his
 
 30 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 My God ! If 'tis thy great decree 
 That this must the last moment be 
 
 Wherein I breathe this ayre 
 My heart obeyes, joy'd to retreate 
 From the false favours of the great 
 
 And treachery of the faire. 
 
 For in the fire when Ore is tryed, 
 And by that torment purified ; 
 Doe we deplore the losse ? 
 And when thou shalt my soule refine, 
 That it thereby may purer shine, 
 Shall I grieve for the drosse? 
 
 Of Habington's last years, which were passed 
 amid much turmoil, few details have survived. In 
 1641 appeared the last of his published works, 
 Observations upon Historic; the next year saw 
 England dark with the smoke of her Civil War. His 
 love of freedom must have rendered him a Royalist 
 with reservations, yet with the fanaticism of the 
 reformers he could have had no part. If there 
 was one word which fired every spark of Puritan 
 wrath and Puritan fanaticism, that word was 
 Popery. Very serviceable at all times has a 
 scapegoat been found ; and the Parliamentary 
 proclamation which declared Catholicism respon- 
 sible for the sins and afflictions of Protestant 
 England are not without their own grim humour. 
 " Under such circumstances," says Dr. Lingard, 
 "the Catholics found themselves exposed to insult 
 and persecution wherever the influence of the 
 Parliament extended : for protection they were 
 compelled to flee to the quarters of the Royalists, 
 and to fight under their banners ; and this again 
 confirmed the prejudice against them, and exposed 
 them to additional obloquy and punishment."
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 31 
 
 William Habington, says Anthony a Wood, "did 
 then run with the times, and was not unknown to 
 Oliver the Usurper " words so ambiguous that 
 one longs to call the old Oxford chronicler back 
 from his grave to give an explanation. 
 
 Very precious, too, would be some news of 
 Lucy Habington during those " evil days." But 
 nothing is clear save the one ultimate fact 
 of the poet's history. On 13 November, 1654, 
 at the beginning of his fiftieth year, William 
 Habington died. His body was laid to rest in 
 the old vault at Hindlip, by the side of his father 
 and his grandfather : and not improbably close 
 also to his beloved Castara. 
 
 Habington's historical works are scarcely read 
 to-day, being supplanted by more recent research ; 
 although we have Edward Phillips' word that, 
 twenty years after our author's death, his Historic 
 of Edward IV. was better known than his Cas- 
 tara. The Queene of Arragon, also, was rather 
 highly esteemed by his contemporaries, being re- 
 vived during the Restoration. In its Prologue, 
 Habington declares the language of this drama to 
 be " easy, such as fell unstudied from his pen " 
 an assertion the reader will be tempted to take 
 cum grano salt's. As might be expected, there is 
 a great deal of beauty in the love passages, and 
 a certain loftiness of tone throughout. Its charac- 
 terisation, especially in the case of Cleantha, is 
 charged with vivacity. " Madam," observes this 
 sprightly beauty, whose wit is almost worthy to 
 rival the immortal Beatrice : 
 
 Madam, 
 
 I have many servants, but not one so valiant 
 
 As dares attempt to marry me ! 
 
 But after all, it is as a lyric poet that William
 
 32 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Habington must stand or fall: although he him- 
 self took poetry with slight seriousness. "I 
 never set so high a rate upon it as to give my- 
 selfe entirely up to its devotion," he once wrote 
 casually ; and, of course, in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury such an attitude was by no means unusual. 
 Poetry was considered less as a vocation than as a 
 graceful accomplishment, and Milton himself laid 
 aside its composition during those twenty strenu- 
 ous years from 1640 to 1660. So, like Donne and 
 others, Habington permitted his verses to pass 
 about in private circulation until " importunity 
 prevailed and cleere judgements advis'd " the 
 more permanent form of a printed volume. Then 
 in 1634, Castara was anonymously published, with 
 the author's half-playful assertion that " to write 
 this, love stole some hours from businesse and 
 my more serious study." The verses (which 
 appeared almost simultaneously with Milton's 
 Comus) met with such success that a second 
 edition was called for during the following year, 
 and a third with additions in 1640. Since then, 
 Castara has been little known to readers in gene- 
 ral, and by the critics little praised. Habington, 
 as we know, was a poet only when some strong 
 emotion love or grief or religious longing cast 
 off the bonds of habitual reserve and freed the 
 wings of fancy. In such moments he must be 
 judged ; and, because those moments were rare, 
 he cannot be placed among poets of the first 
 order. Yet none could fail to feel the exquisite 
 beauty and sincerity of those lines, beginning : 
 
 We saw and woo'd each other's eyes, 
 My soule contracted then with thine, 
 And both burnt in one sacrifice, 
 By which our marriage grew divine. 
 
 They are among the most characteristic that
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 33 
 
 Habington wrote. But, perhaps, equally charm- 
 ing in its way, and with a sweet, frank ingenuous- 
 ness that recalls the lyrics of Elizabeth's own 
 day, is the little poem, " Upon Castara's Depar- 
 ture " : 
 
 Vows are vaine. No suppliant breath 
 Stayes the speed of swift-heel'd death. 
 Life with her is gone and I 
 Learne but a new way to dye. 
 See the flowers condole, and all 
 Wither in my funerall. 
 The bright Lilly, as if day 
 Parted with her, fades away. 
 Violets hang their heads, and lose 
 All their beauty. That the Rose 
 A sad part in sorrow beares, 
 Witnesse all those dewy teares ; 
 Which as Pearle or Dyamond like 
 Swell upon her blushing cheeke. 
 All things mourne, but oh, behold 
 How the wither'd Marigold 
 Closeth up now she is gone, 
 Judging her the setting Sunne. 
 
 In delicacy and chastity of imagination, in ten- 
 derness of sentiment, and in a certain even felicity 
 of verse, Castara has had few rivals. After the 
 fashion of its own age, it may be said to have 
 accomplished very much what Coventry Patmore 
 achieved in The Angel in the House the glorifica- 
 tion of domestic love. 
 
 Habington's religious poems form a curious 
 contrast to those of Richard Crashaw, which ap- 
 peared only five years later. They have scarcely 
 a trace of the younger poet's ecstasy of joy and 
 tenderness, nor of his lyric melody. But they 
 have the solemnity of far-off organ music, and 
 sometimes " heart-perturbing " echoes of the Dies 
 Irae seem floating through the lines : 
 D
 
 34 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Eternitie ! when I think thee, 
 (Which never any end must have, 
 Nor knew'st beginning) and fore-see 
 Hell is designed for sinne a grave, 
 
 My frightened flesh trembles to dust, 
 My blood ebbes fearefully away : 
 Both guilty that they did to lust 
 And vanity my youth betray. 
 
 William Habington lived in the decadence of a 
 great age, the Golden Age of English literature. 
 He was a lad of eleven years when Shakespeare 
 was carried to his grave. He was writing pre- 
 fatory verses for one of Shirley's dramas as early 
 as 1629 and for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio 
 as late as 1647. But there is a directness, a sim- 
 plicity in his verse very rare among his contem- 
 poraries. Neither the overwrought fancies of the 
 Italian School, nor the subtlety and perversityof 
 the so-called ''Metaphysical" poets, would seem 
 to have touched him appreciably. Perhaps that 
 insistent moderation which hampered Habington 
 when he would scale the heights of lyric beauty, 
 saved him, also, from the vices of his age. For 
 in his literary, as in his private life, the man's 
 soul was "like a star and dwelt apart." A modest 
 star it was, yet one from which others have taken 
 light for their pathway. It is impossible, for ex- 
 ample, to read his lines on "The Grave," without 
 being conscious that they contain, as it were in 
 embryo, almost the whole of Gray's immortal 
 Elegy. 
 
 Professor Saintsbury has remarked that our 
 poet's work is " invaluable as showing the counter- 
 side to Milton, the Catholic Puritanism which 
 is no doubt inherent in the English nature." A 
 very just criticism, although the word purity 
 might advantageously be substituted for Puritan-
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 35 
 
 ism. While by no means devoid of humour 
 surely not of satire, when occasion required 
 Habington was pre-eminently a man of high seri- 
 ousness. And his poems are essentially a part 
 of himself. They reveal a nature too proud to 
 stoop to any littleness, yet too gentle for bigotry 
 or censoriousness ; a character wherein learning 
 had been tempered and vitalised by the power of 
 love, and the graces of life flourished but as 
 blossoms of some Paradisal fruit. George Talbot 
 was nowise blinded by friendship when he wrote 
 that affectionate little preface to Castara : 
 
 . . . Beyond your state 
 May be a prouder, not a happier Fate. 
 I write not this in hope t'incroach on fame, 
 Or adde a greater lustre to your name, 
 Bright in itselfe enough . 
 
 But I who know 
 
 Thy soule religious to her ends, where grow 
 No sinnes by art or custome, boldly can 
 Stile thee more than good Poet, a good man. 
 
 For we to-day can reach no truer estimate.
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW 
 
 AMAZING as is the fecundity of Nature which 
 sets an orchid beckoning to us from the dry bark 
 of a fallen tree, or the delicate edelweiss amid the 
 silent Alpine summits History has equal pheno- 
 mena. For History, too, has blossomed "in 
 purple and red " down many a stony highway, up 
 many a forgotten and thorn-choked by-path. One 
 of these gracious miracles has been the persistence 
 of the Catholic note in English poetry, with all the 
 powers of this world uniting to drown and silence 
 it. One can scarcely conjure up a less promising 
 soil for things Catholic than England of the late 
 sixteenth and middle seventeenth centuries ; yet it 
 is a sober fact that the most intensely religious 
 poets of both these eras were of the Old Faith. 
 The latter part of Elizabeth's reign was so barren 
 in devotional poetry that the palm goes quite 
 unhesitatingly to the martyred Robert Southwell ; 
 and his successor's claim, although on more dis- 
 puted ground, is not less assured. 
 
 For Richard Crashaw, if, possibly, less of an 
 apostle than Father Southwell, was even more of 
 a poet so deeply and transcendently a poet that, 
 in his own field, he need fear comparison with no 
 English lyrist, save perhaps only one, before or 
 since. Yet from a strange and troublous back- 
 ground his picture stands out. On one side was 
 the Established Church ; recognised as so much 
 the bulwark of conservative English policies that 
 Charles I. lose up, when about to receive the sac- 
 rament from Archbishop Usher, to declare publicly 
 
 36
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW 37 
 
 his intention of maintaining "the true reformed 
 Protestant religion as it stood in its beauty in the 
 happy days of Queen Elizabeth." On the other 
 hand was Puritanism a tremendous force in 
 national affairs, a leaven of good and of evil 
 through every class of English society. Both sides 
 could point to their representative poets : good 
 poets for the Establishment, one great poet for the 
 Dissenters ; all of whom the world has remem- 
 bered. But it is not for the fervour and intensity 
 of their religious emotion that the world remembers 
 Milton, or Cowley, or even Herbert. And yet 
 the fire of sincerest devotional poetry did burn 
 on through this somewhat frigid time, tended 
 with all devotion by its gentle high-priest ; nor 
 did the light and warmth of it fail to guide 
 Crashaw back to its true altar-source, the Catholic 
 faith. 
 
 Students of heredity may find the usual discrep- 
 ancies in the poet's story. His father, William 
 Crashaw, was a clergyman and scholar of pro- 
 nounced Puritan tendencies ; very active in the 
 production of "Romish Forgeries and Falsifi- 
 cations," and Anti-Jesuit treatises in general. His 
 imagination ran also into the fields of poetry ; his 
 most interesting work (to us) being a " Complaint 
 or Dialogue betwixt the Soule and Body of a 
 damned man. Supposed to be written by St. 
 Bernard." These literary labours do not seem, 
 however, to have brought much remuneration, for 
 we find Queen Elizabeth once proposing the elder 
 Crashaw for a Cambridge fellowship, having 
 learned of his " povertie and yet otherwise good 
 qualities." Richard was born in London in the 
 year 1612-13 ; and one of the pathetic incidents of 
 his life is its almost entire lack of a mother's 
 understanding love. Just when she died is not 
 known nor, in fact, who she was ; but, as early
 
 38 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 as 1620, Archbishop Usher preached the funeral 
 sermon over William Crashaw's second wife, 
 praising her, one is happy to read, for "her sin- 
 gular motherly affection to the child of her prede- 
 cessor." Of the subsequent life in this austere 
 Puritan home few details have come down ; we 
 know that Richard was educated at the Charter- 
 house on the nomination of two nobles, friends of 
 his father ; and that the latter died in 1626. But 
 for the most part his boyhood is a blank. 
 
 It is at Cambridge University, where Crashaw 
 entered in 1631, that the first clear light is thrown 
 upon his life. The loneliness of his youth was 
 over at last ; and here, in the more friendly High 
 Church atmosphere, among friends and tutors alike 
 congenial, the poet's nature blossomed out like a 
 flower in the sunshine. The death of two fellow- 
 students called from him a number of graceful 
 laments, and he contributed several occasional 
 poems in Latin to the University collections a 
 significant but scarcely phenomenal achievement 
 for the undergraduate of those days. 
 
 In 1634, probably his twenty-first or twenty- 
 second year, something more notable occurred : 
 the University Press published (anonymously) his 
 remarkable Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber, con- 
 taining nearly two hundred Latin epigrams, 
 including the oft-quoted and ever-memorable one 
 upon the miracle at Cana : 
 
 Nympha pudica Deum vidit et erubit ; 
 
 It was probably in early youth, also, that 
 Crashaw composed those charming " Wishes to 
 his (supposed) Mistress" : 
 
 Who e'er she be, 
 
 That not impossible she 
 
 That shall command my heart and me ;
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW 39 
 
 Where e'er she lye, 
 Lock't up from mortal eye, 
 In shady leaves of destiny : 
 
 for the ascetic turn of his mind soon banished even 
 the supposition of an earthly sweetheart. Our 
 poet's whole life was a romance, but one looks in 
 vain for any recorded love-story. 
 
 In 1636, the young man passed to Peterhouse, 
 and we must thank the anonymous editor of his 
 first poems for many valuable details of his life 
 there. "He was excellent," it seems, "in five 
 languages (besides his mother-tongue), Hebrew, 
 Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish ; the two last 
 whereof were his own acquisition." Among 
 Crashaw's other accomplishments, "as well pious 
 as harmless," he mentions music, drawing, and 
 graving; and makes comments upon his " rare 
 moderation in diet." The poet's religious life 
 during these years seems to have been almost 
 monastic. Once again let us turn to the editor's 
 picturesque words: " In the temple of God, under 
 his wing, he led his life in St. Mary's Church, 
 near St. Peter's College ; there he lodged under 
 Tertullian's roof of angels ; there he made his 
 nest more gladly than David's swallow near the 
 House of God ; where, like a primitive saint, he 
 offered more prayers in the night than others 
 usually offer in the day." There was very little of 
 earth in this life at Peterhouse ; but his poems 
 many of them composed in the quiet chapel show 
 how much of Heaven. Lines like these speak for 
 themselves : 
 
 Each of us his lamb will bring 1 , 
 
 Each his pair of silver doves ; 
 
 Till burnt at last in fire of Thy fair eyes, 
 
 Ourselves become our own best sacrifice.
 
 4Q THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 A subsequent editor (the Rev. George Gilfillan) 
 asserts that Crashaw " entered, but in what year 
 is uncertain, on holy orders, and became an ardent 
 and powerful preacher." Undoubtedly he did 
 contemplate such a step, but there is no conclu- 
 sive evidence that it was taken. The increasing 
 sway of Puritanism in the English Church would 
 naturally repel and unsettle him ; moreover, about 
 this time many causes were uniting to lead him to 
 a more Catholic outlook. One of his associates 
 at Peterhouse was the gentle Dr. Shelford, whose 
 Five Pious and Learned Discourses bore a prefa- 
 tory poem by Crashaw. Both of these souls pro- 
 tested against the unloveliness of Puritan worship 
 and the bitterness of Puritan feeling ; they were 
 even so radical as to question whether considering 
 the Pope as Anti-Christ were an essential point of 
 Faith. " Whate'er it be," said our young poet, 
 
 Whate'er it be, 
 I'm sure it is no point of Charitie ! 
 
 Crashaw had, moreover, acquired the habit of 
 riding over with some frequency to Little Gidding, 
 there to commune with Nicholas Ferrar and his 
 ascetic companions. This " Protestant Nunnery" 
 was a rock of offence to the Puritans, but Richard, 
 and others of the more devout Cambridge men, 
 found in it a very haven of inspiration. Ferrar's 
 household made no pretence at being a religious 
 order ; it was merely a pious family-community of 
 about thirty members ; but the pervading atmo- 
 sphere was decidedly (although not avowedly) 
 Catholic. "If others knew what comfort God 
 had ministered to them since their sequestration," 
 Ferrar used to say, "they might take the like 
 course." 
 
 Meanwhile the mystic lines of St. Teresa were 
 burning their way into Crashaw's very soul. It
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW 41 
 
 would be hard, indeed, to over-estimate the influ- 
 ence of this newly-canonised Spanish nun, alike 
 upon his literary and his spiritual life, for he seems 
 to have paid her the devotion of a lover, a disciple 
 and a religious enthusiast. Strange and awesome 
 are the ways by which a soul draws near to the 
 Source of Life ; one counts the visible milestones, 
 but dares only guess at the mysteries of that inner 
 guidance. So with Richard Crashaw : not too 
 closely may we trace the gradual steps which led 
 him further and further from his past, and on to the 
 very gates of Peter's Stronghold. Once there, he 
 paused, waiting doubtless for strength to proceed ; 
 like Dante's Beatrice, he had "attained to look 
 upon the beginnings of peace " but its consum- 
 mation was not yet. 
 
 The cannon of the Civil War were destined to 
 awake the dreamer, cruelly indeed, yet kindly in 
 the end. Crashaw had woven the glory of his 
 own visions about the Church of England ; he 
 was soon to see her stripped of her beauties. A 
 few days before Christmas, 1643, Manchester and 
 his soldiers began their " reform " of Cambridge, 
 and the lovely chapel there was sacked and dese- 
 crated. One of the official reports describes with 
 evident elation how the Puritans came to Peter- 
 house "with officers and soldiers," and "pulled 
 down two mighty great angells with wings, and 
 divers other angells, and the foure Evangelists 
 and Peter with his keyes, and divers superstitious 
 letters in gold." A few months later the Parlia- 
 mentary commissioners presented the Solemn 
 League and Covenant to all fellows of that Uni- 
 versity : Crashaw with four others refused to sign, 
 and the little band was formally ejected. The 
 shock to a nature like our poet's must have been 
 terrific the very ground seemed cut from beneath 
 his feet. For twelve years Cambridge had been
 
 42 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 his home ; now its doors were closed to him for 
 ever. Worse than all, he saw his Church impo- 
 tent, subservient, shaken like a very reed before 
 these winds of new doctrine. The two following 
 years of his life are veiled. He is said to have 
 resided for a while at Oxford University ; later he 
 must have been in London, where the first edition 
 of his poems, Steps to the Temple, -with other De- 
 lights to the Muses, was published in 1646. But 
 one event is quite certain morning star of this 
 bitter night ! before leaving England, Richard 
 Crashaw had been received into his soul's true 
 home. Thenceforth he was a Catholic. 
 
 This step was, of course, disastrous to his 
 prospects in England. Even the fondly apprecia- 
 tive London editor speaks of him as "now dead 
 to us " ; and some words of Prynne's flung out 
 regarding Crashaw's "sinful and notorious apos- 
 tasy and revolt" show what a passing over to 
 " Popery" meant to the Puritans. So the young 
 convert tried his fortunes for a while in Paris ; and 
 there in 1646 Abraham Cowley discovered him 
 in poverty, it seems, if not actually in want. 
 Very touching is this reunion of the former 
 college mates, both exiles now from their disown- 
 ing fatherland ; and from this time date Crashaw's 
 modest little lines " On Two Green Apricocks 
 sent to Mr. Cowley." Very characteristic, too, 
 is our poet's answer to his friend's verses on 
 " Hope." " Dear Hope," he cried with wistful 
 optimism : 
 
 Dear Hope, by thee 
 
 We are not where we are nor what we be, 
 
 But where and what we would be ! 
 
 Moreover Cowley (being officially connected with 
 the suite of the exiled English Queen, then also in 
 Paris) was able to offer help to his brother poet.
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW 43 
 
 Henrietta Maria received Crashaw with all 
 graciousness ; and when, a few years later, he 
 determined to visit Rome, she gave him intro- 
 ductory letters there. More than this she was no 
 longer able to do. It is probable that most of 
 Crashaw's later poems those of the Carmen Deo 
 Nostro were written in the French capital. They 
 were entirely religious in character, and Crashaw 
 himself prepared more than half a score of the 
 most interesting and characteristic illustrations 
 for them ; but their publication was not till 1652. 
 The dedication of this volume to the Countess of 
 Denbigh reveals a " friend and patron," whom we 
 would gladly know better ; but even Dr. Grosart 
 has been able to discover little more than that 
 she was probably Susan, the sister of Bucking- 
 ham. This latter lady did, we know, eventually 
 enter the Catholic Church. In one of these poems, 
 "Against Irresolution in Matters of Religion," 
 Crashaw had exhorted her with angelic eloquence 
 to that step which had cost himself so much. 
 
 About 1648 or 1649, Crashaw took up his abode 
 in Italy; and, possibly through the influence 
 of Henrietta Maria, became private secretary to 
 Cardinal Palotta, then Governor of Rome. This 
 " good Cardinal " seems to have won and merited 
 the poet's sincerest admiration ; but the official 
 life was stormy and uncongenial. Dreamer, mys- 
 tic that he was, Crashaw had little place amid the 
 sin and noise and conflict of the world. In time, 
 moreover, he discovered flagrant corruption in 
 the Governor's own suite, and fearlessly reported 
 it. This expostulation appears to have been 
 entirely just, but it drew upon the young English- 
 man's head the whole wrath of the offending 
 Italians ; and so bitter grew the feeling that 
 Cardinal Palotta was obliged to find some other 
 refuge for his protege. So the choice fell upon
 
 44 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 the Loretto, scene of many a pious pilgrimage, 
 and Crashaw was appointed sub-canon of the 
 basilica church there. This last scene in the 
 dreamer's human tragedy has been thus described 
 by Mr. Edmund Gosse : 
 
 " We can imagine with what feelings of rapture 
 and content the world-worn poet crossed the 
 Apennines and descended to the dry little 
 town above the shores of the Adriatic. . . . As 
 he ascended the last hill, and saw before him the 
 magnificent basilica which Bramante had built as 
 a shelter for the Holy House, he would feel that 
 his feet were indeed upon the threshold of his 
 rest. With what joy, with what a beating heart 
 he would long to see that very Santa Casa, the 
 cottage built of brick, which angels lifted from 
 Nazareth out of the black hands of the Saracen, 
 and gently dropped among the nightingales in 
 the forest of Loreta on that mystic night of the 
 year 1294. There . . . the humble Casa lay in 
 the marble enclosure which Sansovino had made 
 for it, and there through the barbaric brickwork 
 window in the Holy Chimney he could see, in a 
 trance of wonder, the gilded head of Madonna's 
 cedarn image that St. Luke the Evangelist had 
 carved with his own hands. . . . To minister all 
 day in the rich incense ... to trim the golden 
 lamps ... to pass in and out between the golden 
 cherubim and brazen seraphim. . . . There, in 
 the very house of Jesus, to hear the noise and 
 mutter of the officiating priest, the bustle of 
 canons, chaplains, monks, and deacons, the shrill 
 sweet voices of the acolytes singing all day long 
 this must have seemed the very end of life and 
 beginning of heaven to the mystical and sensuous 
 Crashaw." 
 
 But a greater rest was at hand. Making his
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETTO 
 Where Crashaw lies buried
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW 45 
 
 journey from Rome in the summer of 1650, the 
 poet contracted a fever which quickly broke his 
 constitution : only a few weeks did he linger 
 before the altar then the church which was to 
 have been his sanctuary became his tomb : 
 
 How well, blest swan, did fate contrive thy death ; 
 And make thee render up thy tuneful breath 
 In thy great Mistress' arms, thou most divine 
 And richest offering- of Loretto's shrine ! 
 
 So sang Abraham Cowley of his friend "poet 
 and saint, O hard and rarest union that can be ! " 
 
 Born in earlier ages, Crashaw might be pictured 
 as going to martyrdom with a smile and a hymn 
 of praise upon his lips : or, in the quiet of a 
 monastic cell he might have worked lovingly upon 
 those heavenly verses a poetic Fra Angelico. 
 But the thundering questions of Cromwell's day 
 woke little echo in his nature. All about him men 
 were demanding if king or parliament should rule 
 England ; he cared little, providing the Counsels 
 of Perfection ruled his own life, and dreamed on 
 while others fought. Crashaw was not, perhaps, 
 a leader of men ; but he was most indubitably a 
 follower of God. And he could act as well as 
 dream when the crisis came he could and did act 
 with such an uncompromising fidelity to truth and 
 to his own ideals that the old world's story is 
 brighter for his record. 
 
 With estimates of Richard Crashaw it is 
 customary to couple the name of George Herbert ; 
 a comparison which was begun by that editor of 
 1646, and has persisted since. Superficially it 
 seems reasonable : their writings were almost 
 contemporaneous ; they were said to be of the 
 same "school"; both were sincerely religious; 
 their very titles, The Temple and Steps to the 
 Temple, imply more than an accidental propin-
 
 46 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 quity. But in truth, one might almost as well 
 compare Jeremy Taylor with Ignatius Loyola. In 
 Herbert's work we have the piously beautiful 
 fancies of a poetic English clergyman ; in 
 Crashaw's, the burning dreams of a genius and 
 a mystic. Speaking of this from a wholly 
 literary standpoint, Dr. Grosart declares our 
 poet's work "of a diviner stuff, and woven in 
 a grander loom ; in sooth, infinitely deeper and 
 finer in almost every element of true singing as 
 differenced from pious and gracious versifying." 
 But obviously the stream was not innocent of 
 tributaries. The influence of the Italian Marino 
 is conspicuous, not only in Crashaw's translation 
 of the " Sospetto d'Herode," but throughout his 
 style as a whole ; indeed, this elaborate fanciful- 
 ness of writing is noticeable in all the poets of the 
 day. There is, to boot, more than a touch of 
 John Donne's subtlety in his work, although but 
 little of his ambiguity. As for Robert Southwell, 
 I think we cannot doubt his influence on Crashaw, 
 and his real affinity of temperament ; he is one of 
 the very few other Englishmen in whom we find 
 this singular blending of " conceit" with deep 
 sincerity of emotional tenderness with ascetic 
 concentration upon things divine. But most 
 potent of all were the writings of the great Spanish 
 contemplative, St. Teresa : 
 
 From thence, 
 I learnt to know that Love is eloquence, 
 
 Crashaw declares : and again 
 
 Thus have I back again to thy bright name, 
 (Fair flood of holy fires !) transfus'd the flame 
 I took from reading thee ! 
 
 Francis Thompson has declared that Crashaw
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW 47 
 
 was a Shelley manque ; while Shelley was what 
 the so-called " Metaphysical School " should have 
 been and tended to be. Something of all this 
 was anticipated by an earlier critic, Mr. Gilfillan, 
 who was happy in pointing out that " in soaring 
 imagination, in gorgeous language, in ecstasy of 
 lyrical movement, Crashaw very much resembles 
 Shelley, and may be called the Christian Shelley : 
 
 ' His raptures are 
 All air and fire.' 
 
 Yes : it is the air of the rose-garden, but the 
 fire of the censer. In his religious poems Crashaw 
 rises altogether above terrestrial limits, and be- 
 queaths us half-intoxicating draughts of fiery, 
 tender beauties. That famous " Hymn to the 
 Name and Honour of the Admirable Sainte 
 Teresa" thrills with a loveliness never bred upon 
 our humble earth. 
 
 Scarce has she blood enough to make 
 A guilty sword blush for her sake ; 
 Yet has she blood enough to prove 
 How much less strong" is Death than Love, 
 
 the poet writes in allusion to her childish desire 
 for martyrdom ; and later he breaks into that 
 wondrous outburst : 
 
 Thou art Love's victime ; and must dy 
 A death more mysticall and high, 
 
 His is the dart must make the death 
 Whose stroke shall taste thy hallow'd breath ; 
 A dart thrice dip't in that rich flame 
 Which writes thy Spouse's radiant name 
 Upon the roof of Heav'n, where ay
 
 5 o THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 English, possibly distasteful even to the colder 
 English mind ; but it is certainly not " swooning " 
 or "languishing," as Gilfillan once complained 
 largely, one infers, because he imagined Catholic 
 mysticism to be a swooning and languishing 
 thing. Crashaw's nature, in every fibre, was as 
 sensitive to each passing emotion as the strings 
 of the harp to its master's touch : and, once struck, 
 the note vibrated indefinitely. II avail les defauts 
 de ses qualites, in the familiar phrase. 
 
 Crashaw was very rarely autobiographical, yet 
 the seal of his individuality is stamped on all his 
 verse. Indeed, as being part of his own life and 
 personality, his poems occupy a place quite apart 
 from their position in literary history. He, in his 
 own day, was often misunderstood ; and it is still 
 the easiest thing for unsympathetic minds to mis- 
 understand the poetry he has left. Paradoxical it 
 may sound, but is none the less true, that we 
 must love the poet a little before we can greatly 
 appreciate him. Strength and weakness were his, 
 doubtless ; but strength predominated alike in the 
 man and in his work. However extravagant his 
 fancies, they are patently the flashes of a mind 
 rushed on by the whirlwind of unbounded imagi- 
 nation never the mock-heroics of a mere rhetori- 
 cian. And the reason of all this is simple enough : 
 Richard Crashaw was fundamentally, consum- 
 mately, sincere. When his verse soars up to 
 heights celestial, among fragrant nests of seraphim 
 and fair adoring saints, his own soul breathes 
 through the ecstasy. Cannot we hear his voice 
 ringing down the ages, as he appeals with 
 characteristic self - abnegation to his beloved 
 Teresa? 
 
 Oh, thou undaunted daughter of desires, 
 By all thy dower of lights and fires ;
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW 51 
 
 By all the eagle in thee, all the dove ; 
 
 By all thy lives and deaths of love ; 
 
 By thy larg draughts of intellectuall day, 
 
 And by thy thirsts of love, more larg than they ; 
 
 By all thy brim-fill'd bowles of fierce desire ; 
 
 By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire ; 
 
 By the full kingdome of that finall kisse 
 
 That seiz'd thy parting soul, and seal'd thee His ; 
 
 By all the Heav'ns thou hast in Him, 
 
 (Fair sister of the seraphim !) 
 
 By all of Him we have in thee, 
 
 Leave nothing of myself in me ; 
 
 Let me so read thy life, that I 
 
 Unto all life of mine may dy ! 
 
 And once having heard, could we, by any chance, 
 confuse this voice with another's?
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 
 
 IT is a misfortune, even if a flattering one, for an 
 author's personality to overshadow his literary 
 reputation. Such, long ago, was the fate of the 
 patriarchal Dr. Johnson (about whom we have all 
 read so much), and such, in a modern instance, 
 would seem to be the case with Aubrey de Vere. 
 His own Recollections, and the more exhaustive 
 Memoir by his friend Wilfrid Ward, are on the 
 shelves of many a library which boasts few 
 volumes of his prose and none at all of his poetry. 
 The gracious culture of his Irish home at Curragh 
 Chase ; the story of his travels and his friendships 
 with the greatest men and women of the time; the 
 Famine years which woke the dreamer into a man 
 of heroic action ; the spiritual pilgrimage which 
 led him eventually into the Catholic communion 
 all this is familiar enough to need no repetition. 
 It is Aubrey de Vere's poetic achievement to 
 which adequate recognition is but seldom ac- 
 corded. " I have lived among poets a great 
 deal and have known greater poets than he is," 
 wrote Sara Coleridge in a memorable passage, 
 " but a more entire poet, and one more a poet in 
 his whole mind and temperament, I never knew 
 or met with." 
 
 Aubrey de Vere's half-century of poetic pre- 
 occupation was richly various in its fruitfulness. 
 The Search after Proserpine appeared in 1843 ; ten 
 years later, a volume of Miscellaneous and Sacred 
 Poems ; in 1857 came the first of the May Carols 
 (completed in 1881); in 1861, Inisfail y The Sisters, 
 
 52
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 
 At the age of 20 
 
 From a coloured drawing by (falter L. Cotts
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 53 
 
 etc.; 1872, Legends of 'St. Patrick; 1874, Alexander 
 the Great; 1876, St. Thomas of Canterbury ; 1882, 
 The Foray of Qiteene Maeve and Legends of Ire- 
 land's Heroic Age ; 1887, Legends and Records of 
 the Church and the Empire; 1893, Mediceval 
 Records and Sonnets; and in 1897 (his eighty- 
 third year), St. Peter's Chains, a series of sonnets 
 on the Italian Revolution. While incomplete, 
 this bibliography includes epic, lyric, and dramatic 
 verse. 
 
 Elsewhere tracing Irish history back almost to 
 the legendary days of the Sidhe, in the latter part 
 of fm'sfail, and in numerous minor poems, de 
 Vere tells the tragic story of his country's recent 
 years. The beautiful closing stanzas of "The 
 Year of Sorrow" illustrate how much of pathos 
 yet how little of bitterness de Vere infused into 
 his elegy of 1849 : 
 
 Fall, snow, and cease not ! Flake by flake 
 The decent winding-sheet compose. 
 
 Thy task is just and pious ; make 
 An end of blasphemies and woes. 
 
 On quaking moor and mountain moss, 
 
 With eyes upstaring at the sky, 
 With arms extended like a cross, 
 
 The long-expectant sufferers lie. 
 
 Bend o'er them, white-robed Acolyte ! 
 
 Put forth thine hand from cloud and mist, 
 And minister the last sad Rite, 
 
 Where altar there is none, nor priest. 
 
 Touch thou the gates of soul and sense ; 
 
 Touch darkening eyes and dying ears : 
 Touch stiffening hands and feet, and thence 
 
 Remove the trace of sin and tears.
 
 54 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 This night the Absolver issues forth : 
 This night the Eternal Victim bleeds : 
 
 O winds and woods O heaven and earth ! 
 Be still this night. The Rite proceeds ! 
 
 Back through the days of the Penal Laws and 
 the Wars of Religion, through the three centuries 
 of outlawry following the Norman Conquest, runs 
 this "lyrical chronicle," Tnisfail; its parts bound 
 together by a continuity of tears and by the poet's 
 insistence upon Ireland's spiritual vocation among 
 the nations of the earth. "No other poem of 
 mine," de Vere wrote some thirty-five years later, 
 "was written more intensely, I may say painfully, 
 from my heart, than Inisfail" And no other 
 poem of his has surpassed it in sweetness or 
 pathos or in a certain fiery, elemental vigour. 
 
 In the earlier record, St. Patrick, crozier in 
 hand, passes before us, treading the hills and 
 vales of Erin, preaching to the poor, baptising 
 those sweet sister-princesses, the "Red Rose" 
 and " Ethna the Fair," confounding the proud 
 and winning them to humility : 
 
 The Saint his great soul flung upon the world, 
 And took the people with him like a wind 
 
 to the very feet of Christ. It is a series of noble 
 national poems, ending with the final "Striving 
 of St. Patrick" on Mount Cruachan. De Vere's 
 Legends of the Saxon Saints form a companion- 
 work of hagiology. "The English differed much 
 from the Irish," says the poet, "even in their 
 primitive saints. There was less of the wild and 
 strange about them . . . less of the missionary, 
 but more of the Christian subject and citizen." 
 Much of the material for this volume was taken 
 from the Venerable Bede, with which there is
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 55 
 
 an interweaving of the Odin legends and pro- 
 phecies. 
 
 His further interest in the old heroic and bardic 
 literature was evident in his " Oiseen " poems; 
 but it was not until 1880, when he became familiar 
 with various MS. collections in the Royal Irish 
 Academy of Dublin, that it took any notable form. 
 Lady Gregory had not yet produced her epoch- 
 making translations of the old Irish sagas; neither 
 Yeats nor Fiona MacLeod nor any of the younger 
 poets had brought the wild notes of Gaelic poetry 
 to English hearing. Aubrey de Vere was the 
 pioneer in re-creating that epoch of primitive and 
 barbaric glory. His Legends of Ireland's Heroic 
 Age told anew of the hapless Foray of Queen 
 Maeve, of the mighty Cuchullain whose "starry 
 head" was destined so soon to sleep in death, of 
 the Children of Lir, and of Deirdre and the Sons 
 of Usnach. When we recall that the poet drew his 
 material from a few incomplete English transla- 
 tions of the great epics, it is amazing, not that he 
 lacked the ingenuous and unforgettable charm of 
 Lady Gregory's version, but that he reproduced 
 so well the spirit of those " great-hearted and 
 light-hearted " heroes. 
 
 Many of the greatest stories of Christendom are 
 included in de Vere's two volumes of Records. 
 The Middle Ages (however imperfectly under- 
 stood) have been an unfailing source of literary 
 inspiration ; but the period preceding them 
 from about 50 A.D. to the reign of Charlemagne 
 has, to all but specialists, been a sort of "outer 
 darkness." Aubrey de Vere, adding the poet's 
 insight to the amateur's erudition, recognised it 
 as covering several of the most significant eras of 
 human history. His Legends of the Church and 
 the Empire cover this whole wondrous period. 
 They sing the death of outworn Paganism and
 
 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 the triumph of that young Church whose face 
 shone as the dawn even when her robe was crim- 
 soned by the sands of the arena ; moans of an 
 impotent and effete civilisation mingle with the 
 battle-cries of Constantine or Theodoric ; and 
 mighty as some resistless sea is the onrushing 
 sweep of those Northern hordes who triumph at 
 last in the Fall of Rome. It seemed a second 
 Deluge, even to men like St. Jerome. But suc- 
 ceeding legends show how the songs of a new 
 Sion brought their message into the Stranger's 
 Land ; they tell of the peaceful conquests of Boni- 
 face and Germanus, of the sweet sanctity of St. 
 Genevieve or Queen Clothilde and at last of 
 Charlemagne's coronation as first emperor of the 
 Holy Roman Empire. 
 
 Mediceval Records and Sonnets continue the his- 
 tory, recounting with the same earnest felicity the 
 Cid's conquests over Moslem power, the stories of 
 Queen Bertha and Jeanne d'Arc and Robert 
 Bruce, of Columbus the discoverer and Coper- 
 nicus the astronomer. Occasional translations from 
 St. Gertrude or the Fioretti y and a poem of notable 
 beauty and elevation (" The Higher Purgatory") 
 partially transcribed from St. Catherine of Genoa, 
 are further evidence of de Vere's affectionate in- 
 timacy with mediaeval life. " It was imaginative, 
 not critical," writes the poet in his Preface: " with 
 much of a childish instability and something of 
 that strange and heedless cruelty sometimes to be 
 found in children, it united a childlike simplicity. 
 It loved to wonder and was not afraid of proving 
 mistaken. Stormy passions swept over it, and 
 great crimes alternated with heroic deeds ; but it 
 was comparatively free from a more insidious 
 snare than the passions that of self-love." Per- 
 haps the heaviest charge to be brought against 
 the dramatic reality of the poems is that they do
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 57 
 
 obscure the full stress of these "stormy passions." 
 De Vere kept his eyes upon the heights, forget- 
 ting, or not forgetting, that only the saints dwell 
 thereon. All too little is there in his Records 
 of that fierce conflict of soul and sense, that youth- 
 ful, passionate ardour both in good and evil, to 
 which the very penances of the ancient Church 
 bear witness. 
 
 A bridal then, and now a death, 
 A short, glad space between them ! Such is life ! 
 That means our earthly life is but betrothal ; 
 The marriage is where marriage vows are none 
 
 so declares one of de Vere's youthful knights, 
 with a detachment and a spiritual grasp char- 
 acteristic, indeed, of the modern poet and in no 
 age possible, one suspects, to the mass of men 
 and women. 
 
 Quotations from narrative poems are seldom 
 satisfying when the poet's virtue lies rather in 
 sustained and comprehensive excellence than in 
 "purple passages." But a number of these 
 legends or records resolve themselves, through 
 their strongly personal quality, into the form of 
 dramatic monologues. The chosen spokesmen 
 are all of exalted and philosophic tendencies, 
 and they are depicted at moments when "life's 
 fitful fever " is well-nigh spent. Yet there is no 
 dull uniformity in the setting of the sun still 
 less in the passing of a soul. De Vere has made 
 the contrast of temperament exceedingly forcible, 
 for instance, in the final soliloquies of Constantine 
 and St. Jerome. Each looks back upon a "life 
 of wars " ; upon aspiration and failure and much 
 hunger of the spirit ; but the difference is as of 
 storm-cloud and starlight. Grimly the frustrated 
 Emperor reviews his gigantic efforts to rebuild 
 the Roman structure, and his cry is vanitas :
 
 5 8 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Some power there was that counter-worked my work 
 With hand too swift for sight, which, crossing mine, 
 Set warp 'gainst woof and ever with my dawn 
 Inwove its night. What hand was that I know not : 
 Perchance it was the Demon's of my House ; 
 Perchance a Hand Divine. 
 
 But as the great silence draws upon Jerome, his 
 voice rings out in challenge : 
 
 Paula, what is earth ? 
 A little bubble trembling ere it breaks, 
 The plaything of that grey-haired infant, Time, 
 Who breaks whate'er he plays with. I was strong : 
 See how he played with me. Am I not broken ? 
 Albeit I strove with men of might ; albeit 
 Those two great Gregories clasped me palm to palm ; 
 Albeit I fought with beasts at Ephesus 
 And bear their tokens still ; albeit the wastes 
 Knew me, and lions fled ; albeit this hand, 
 Wrinkled and prone, hurled to the dust God's scorners, 
 Am I not broken? Lo, this hour I raise 
 High o'er that ruin and wreck of life not less 
 This unsubverted head that bent not ever, 
 And make my great confession ere I die, 
 Since hope I have, though earthly hope no more. 
 And this is my confession : God is great ; 
 There is no other greatness : God is good ; 
 There is no other goodness. He alone 
 Is true existence : all beside is dream. 
 
 That is de Vere's high-water mark in the drama- 
 tic monologue ; there are less felicitous instances. 
 Browning's method in the soliloquy was, it will 
 be remembered, to reproduce the broken sen- 
 tences, the seemingly irrelevant thoughts, the 
 passionate outbursts of a soul communing with 
 itself; hence his dramatic truthfulness hence, 
 also, a measure of ambiguity. With de Vere the 
 tendency was rather to be too clear, too ex-
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 59 
 
 haustive ; and, as in the " Death of Copernicus," 
 unconvincingly replete. 
 
 Stricter dramatic canons, however, are more 
 fairly applied to de Vere's tragedies. They are 
 but two in number (if one except the fragmentary 
 Fall of Rora) Alexander the Great, and 5*. 
 Thomas of Canterbury both of which are quite 
 impossible theatrically. Yet these two "closet 
 dramas" contain much of the noblest poetry de 
 Vere ever produced. None but the greatest 
 genius could vivify a theme so remote as that of 
 Alexander; but de Vere presents a series of 
 splendid and moving tableaux, glowing at times 
 with descriptive passages of surpassing beauty. 
 The character-drawing, while slight, is often im- 
 pressive : the Persian princess Arsinoe to whom 
 are given many of the loveliest lines of the play 
 being one of those tender, meditative souls whom 
 de Vere understood so well how to delineate. 
 The Conqueror himself is scarcely more than a 
 majestic lay figure, our clearest conception of his 
 genius coming less from any revelation of his 
 own than from Ptolemy's brief and telling esti- 
 mate : 
 
 He swifter than the morn 
 O'er rushed the globe. Expectant centuries 
 Condensed themselves into a few brief years 
 To work his will. 
 
 On the other hand, Aubrey de Vere's charac- 
 terisation of Thomas a Becket is deeply convinc- 
 ing : probably the very best portrait of the great 
 primate in English literature 1 With consummate 
 art and uncompromising historic truth is traced 
 that thorny path which led the amiable young 
 
 1 For an interesting 1 comparative study of de Vere's Sf. Thomas 
 and Tennyson's Becket, see " Imitators of Shakespeare" in Dr. 
 Egan's Ghost in Hamlet, and Other Essays,
 
 60 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 diplomat up to heights of Christian sainthood. 
 We hear of Thomas first when, as Chancellor of 
 King Henry, he visits the French court in a 
 pageant of mediaeval splendour : 
 
 " Of his own household there were two hundred 
 clerics and knights chanting hymns. Then 
 followed his hounds ten couples. Next came 
 eight wagons with five horses each . . . then 
 followed twelve sumpter horses. The esquires 
 bore the shields and the falconers the hawks on 
 their fists ; after them came those that held the 
 banners ; and last, my lord on a milk-white horse. 
 . . . Thomas gave gifts to all to the princes, 
 and the clergy, and the knights, and to the poor 
 more than to the rich . . . when he feasted the 
 beggars, he bade them take with them the gilded 
 spoons and goblets." 
 
 Becket is raised to the see of Canterbury, and 
 thenceforth, step by step, the poet pictures his 
 struggle for the freedom of the English Church. 
 Single-handed he fights the pride and treachery 
 of his king, the weakness of his bishops, the 
 guile of tireless enemies ; until, on that black 
 December night of 1170, the blow of martyrdom 
 is struck. It is a scene noble even to sublimity. 
 Vesper time draws near in the great Cathedral, 
 and two priests are speaking brokenly of their 
 Primate : 
 
 At yonder altar of Saint Benedict 
 He said his mass ; then in the chapter-house 
 Conversed with two old monks of thing's divine : 
 Next for his confessor he sent, and made 
 Confession with his humble wont, but briefly ; 
 Last, sat with us an hour, and held discourse 
 Full gladsomely. . . . An old monk cried, 
 "Thank God, my lord, you make good cheer!" 
 
 He answered, 
 " Who goeth to his Master should be glad."
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 61 
 
 (John of Salisbury) : 
 
 His Master ! Ay, his Master ! Still as such 
 
 He thought of God ; he loved Him ; in himself 
 
 Saw nothing great or wise simply a servant. 
 
 Ere yet his earliest troubles had begun 
 
 I heard him say, "A bishop should protect 
 
 That holy thing, God's Church, to him committed, 
 
 Not only from the world but from himself, 
 
 Loving, not hers, but her, with reverent love, 
 
 A servant's love that, gazing, fears to touch her." 
 
 Peace, peace ! O God, we make our tale of him 
 As men that praise the dead ! 
 
 Becket enters in procession from the cloister, 
 and, while in a near-by chapel the monks are 
 chanting, those four traitor-knights steal in. 
 There is a brief colloquy, a briefer prayer and 
 St. Thomas falls dead beneath their swords. 
 
 The lyrics scattered in Elizabethan manner 
 through both dramas claim a mention as graceful 
 and in entire sympathy with the action. Perhaps 
 most charming of all is that little Trouvere sere- 
 nade in St. Thomas, beginning 
 
 I make not songs, but only find ; 
 Love following still the circling sun 
 His carol casts on every wind, 
 And other singer is there none. 
 
 This is one of the instances in which de Vere's 
 verse rings with the true lyric quality. His early 
 lines "To Keats" flash back a gleam of that 
 singer's own "white fire" of beauty; there is a 
 delightful play of fancy throughout his Greek 
 Idyls and through that gracious and delicate 
 masque, "The Search after Proserpine." But 
 in the marvellous felicity of epithet, in the winged
 
 62 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 lightness of thought and radiance of imagery ; 
 above all, in that consummate sense of the music 
 of words which makes the lyrist's eternal heritage, 
 Aubrey de Vere was save in supreme moments 
 deficient. There were indeed these moments. 
 Here, for instance, is a little song, Shakespearian 
 in its sweet and naive inevitability : 
 
 When I was young-, I said to Sorrow, 
 " Come, and I will play with thee " : 
 He is near me now all day ; 
 And at night returns to say, 
 " I will come again to-morrow, 
 I will come and stay with thee." 
 
 Through the woods we walk together ; 
 His soft footsteps rustle nigh me ; 
 To shield an unregarded head, 
 He hath built a winter shed ; 
 And all night in rainy weather, 
 
 I hear his gentle breathings by me. 
 
 Yet in the main, this poet's message was too closely 
 reasoned to be sung: a Gregorian chant would 
 seem the only possible or appropriate vehicle. 
 Weakness of form, Matthew Arnold contended, is 
 nearly always accompanied by weakness of matter 
 and thought. Nevertheless, there are poets whose 
 habitual merit lies in the enchanting beauty of 
 their verse-effects ; and others there are whose 
 highest excellence lies in the soul rather than the 
 body of their verse. So it was with Aubrey de 
 Vere. Blank verse, the ode, the sonnet, and 
 various simpler forms he has used with excellent 
 effect : but one feels that in avoiding more ornate 
 and intricate verse-schemes he was wisely aware 
 of the lyrical deficiencies already noted. 
 
 "The Martyrdom," and others of the earlier 
 devotional poems, betray the influence of South-
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 63 
 
 well and Crashaw, to whose sweet memory they 
 were dedicated ; but de Vere's affinities were not 
 with these choristers of the fiery heart and rapturous 
 voice. His later and abiding model was Words- 
 worth, whose simple diction, his deep sincerity 
 and Nature-brooding, mark de Vere's religious 
 cycle, the May Carols. These are infallibly tender 
 and reverent ; they are lucid, even epigrammatic 
 at moments; their subject-matter is sublimely 
 spiritual. But the poems (save, perhaps, those 
 exquisite little interspersed landscape reveries) are 
 not carols at all. They are a prolonged medita- 
 tion upon Christian truths centring round about 
 the Incarnation. "Mater Christi," one of the 
 least theological, will illustrate the tranquil beauty 
 of the series : 
 
 He willed to lack, he willed to bear ; 
 
 He willed by suffering" to be schooled ; 
 He willed the chains of flesh to wear : 
 
 Yet from her arms the world He ruled. 
 
 He sat beside the lowly door ; 
 
 His homeless eyes appeared to trace 
 In evening' skies remembered lore, 
 
 And shadows of His Father's face. 
 One only knew him. She alone 
 
 Who nightly to His cradle crept, 
 And, lying like the moonbeams prone, 
 
 Worshipped her Maker as He slept. 
 
 It is the obtrusion of a sort of glorified catechetical 
 instruction, and the subordination of the pure 
 poetic quality, which mars many of these May 
 Carols. The tendency is not towards the mystical 
 but towards the metaphysical. Sadly enough, all 
 this was merely de Vere's passionate love of truth, 
 "strained from its fair use" with the usual
 
 64 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 calamitous result. In this case the effect was 
 a consistent restraint of the imaginative and 
 emotional faculties, a philosophic aloofness from 
 "life's beauteous nothings writ in dust" in one 
 word, preoccupation with the catechetical rather 
 than the aesthetic aspect of life. That he contrived 
 to put so much grace into sonnets on let us say 
 "Church Discipline," "Evidences of Religion," 
 the " Irish Constitution of 1872," that he so 
 successfully linked temporary interests with the 
 ultimate and universal in his "occasional " verses, 
 is strongest evidence of his incorrigibly poetic 
 nature. None the less, it is a relief to extricate 
 from this mass of political and commemorative 
 work that bearing the authentic hall-mark. Aubrey 
 de Vere was a great artist ; he was even a greater 
 man. But alike by instinct and by conviction was 
 he given to polemics. " I wish either to be con- 
 sidered as a teacher or as nothing, ' declared 
 Wordsworth, his friend and most potential model ; 
 and one knows that every artist is a teacher ac- 
 cording to the measure of truth within his soul. 
 The danger lies in forgetting or in ignoring 
 how much more he must also be. 
 
 But the poet does all things more graciously 
 than other men, and de Vere's keen sense of 
 beauty transfigured his didacticism even as the 
 illuminator was wont to brighten with bird and 
 flower the page of some old manuscript. One can 
 forgive an occasional zeal in pointing morals to him 
 whose message is summed up perfect, crystal-clear, 
 in that memorably beautiful sonnet, "Sorrow" : 
 
 Count each affliction, whether light or grave, 
 God's messenger sent down to thee ; do thou 
 With courtesy receive him ; rise and bow ; 
 And, ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave 
 Permission first his heavenly feet to lave ; 
 Then lay before him all thou hast : allow
 
 AUBREY DE VERB 
 In his old age
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 65 
 
 No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow, 
 Or mar thy hospitality ; no wave 
 Of mortal tumult to obliterate 
 The soul's marmoreal calmness : Grief should be, 
 Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate, 
 Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free ; 
 Strong to consume small troubles ; to commend 
 Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the 
 end. 
 
 Great and grave thoughts, high and holy 
 thoughts : such were the habitual companions 
 of Aubrey de Vere. He weighed life by those 
 spiritual values which were to him the only 
 realities. And so the religious, the Catholic 
 element permeates his work as sunlight radiates 
 a summer noon. But religion transfigures with- 
 out changing the character ; it spiritualises with- 
 out in any wise stereotyping the imagination. 
 It may, as in Crashaw or Coventry Patmore, 
 surcharge the emotions ; or it may dominate the 
 intellect in its most characteristic channel with 
 de Vere the channel of philosophic meditation. 
 He looked not merely through the deeds of men, 
 but equally through the pageant of external 
 Nature. When, for example, one reads his finely 
 poetical ''Autumnal Ode," one meets very little 
 of that mournful or exultant sensuousness with 
 which poets have immemorially watched the 
 death of summer. There are loving suggestions 
 of the blackbird's last carol, of "dusk-bright 
 cobwebs" and the glory of "sunset forests," but 
 through this symbolic pageant of autumn the poet 
 passes to thoughts of the saintly dead. Precisely 
 this same passion for interpretation runs through 
 his beautiful "Ascent of the Apennines." It is 
 plaintive in that most characteristic "Ode to an 
 Eolian Harp," and in very truth it penetrates his 
 entire secular and religious verse.
 
 66 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Sweetly and sagely 
 
 In order grave the Maker of all Worlds 
 Still modulates the rhythm of human progress ; 
 His angels, on whose songs the seasons float, 
 Keep measured cadence : all good things keep time 
 Lest Good should strangle Better, 
 
 declares his dying Copernicus. And this poet's 
 work is more than peaceful, it is joyous. The 
 St. Thecla of his legend is not only "beauteous 
 as a rose new-blown," she is the " blithesomest" 
 of hermit-missionaries. His St. Dorothea (whom 
 so great a dramatist as Massinger succeeded in 
 portraying only as an heroic prig) speaks gaily, 
 and has room in her consecrated heart for all 
 "lovely things and fair." "Glad man was he, 
 our Cid," cry the companions of the great 
 mediaeval warrior; and one learns with no surprise 
 of Erin's apostle that 
 
 There was ever laughter in his heart, 
 And music in that laughter. 
 
 So has de Vere dwelt upon the blitheness of 
 Christian character, upon the God-like stillness 
 which may dwell even in the tempest's heart. 
 It is all very tranquil and beautiful, this golden 
 haze wrapping the world in peace. And if it 
 be not quite like human life as most of us know 
 it, why so much the worse for us! 
 
 "I am doing what in me lies to keep alive 
 poetry with a little conscience in it," he once said, 
 adding with characteristic humility, "if I fail in 
 that attempt I shall not fret about it ; others will 
 do it later what I have aimed at doing and will 
 probably do it better." The nobility of this aim 
 sweeps through his pages, pure and keen as the 
 mountain's breath. We feel it in his own high 
 seriousness and self-possession, in that tender-
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 67 
 
 ness which is not passion, in the solid and 
 sublime philosophy which underlies his utter- 
 ance. But the Muse is imperious, and will not 
 brook too close restraint. A little rigidity, a 
 suspicion of coldness, a lack of that glorious 
 spontaneity which brings the world down to a 
 poet's feet such is the penalty for reining in 
 the bright spirit ! May it not be, after all, that 
 de Vere put too much conscience into his poetry ; 
 or that he put it too patently and insistently? 
 For there is a wisdom of fools and alas ! a folly 
 of the wise not solely in the spiritual life. 
 
 It has frequently been proclaimed that the writing 
 of even inferior verse is the best possible recipe 
 for such a good prose style as may be acquired. 
 We find in the poet's use of prose not only the 
 habitual delicacy and picturesqueness we should 
 have foreseen, but also a notable precision and 
 sense of proportion as though the use of wings 
 had taught all the possible graces of walking. It 
 was thus with Aubrey de Vere in the many essays 
 he contributed to the Reviews, in his memories of 
 friends like Tennyson, in his voluminous corres- 
 pondence, in his Reminiscences, and the other prose 
 volumes that make prouder, as Landor said his 
 verse did, "his proud name." We do not claim 
 for him the distinction, and music, and vitality of 
 unforgettable prose ; but at least this that his 
 intellectual breadth and seriousness, his poetic 
 sensibility and critical acumen, coupled with his 
 good English and that gracious versatility which 
 one thinks of as Irish (when one knows it is not 
 French) render Aubrey de Vere worthy of a throne 
 among the scribes of the island Israel. 
 
 During the same years of the nineteenth century, 
 English-speaking Catholics possessed three vastly 
 different apologists. They were all converts : John 
 Henry Newman, Isaac Hecker and^ Aubrey de
 
 68 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Vere. Newman's appeal was to the past, to 
 Patristic evidences, to the unity (including, of 
 course, the development) of primitive Christian 
 faith. Father Hecker's appeal was to the present : 
 to the natural laws upon which the supernatural 
 rest, to that "heart's hunger and soul's thirst" 
 which vital Catholic truth alone can satisfy. But 
 Aubrey de Vere was conscious of no past or 
 present in religious experience. In theology, as 
 in all departments of thought, he was a psycho- 
 logical critic. His appeal was to the intuitive 
 sense and "spiritual discernment" first of all; 
 and then, because Catholicity included these, to 
 authority and to human nature. And in his prose, 
 no less than in his verse, he regarded life and art 
 from a standpoint equally soulful. 
 
 His own spiritual nature, and long habits of 
 analytic thought, necessitated this. We find him 
 making fine and delicate distinctions in words 
 (which are always at the same time distinctions of 
 thought), as between reasoning and reason, plea- 
 sure and enjoyment ; we find him pointing out how 
 "in Coleridge's poetry the reasoning faculty is 
 chiefly that of contemplation and reflection, in 
 Wordsworth's the meditative and discursive pre- 
 vail " ; again we find him weighing the Elizabethan 
 drama by psychological standards, where Ruskin 
 would have used ethical, and Matthew Arnold 
 aesthetic values. And throughout his entire critical 
 work the moral and artistic elements constantly 
 interpenetrate. Man, however minutely studied, 
 became a symbol of mankind, and all minor 
 verities, whether of sense or intellect, resolved 
 themselves into one immutable and comprehensive 
 Truth. De Vere has observed that the Greek 
 knew no landscape, although he delighted in 
 detached objects of natural beauty. He himself 
 saw all details as part of some harmonious whole ;
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 69 
 
 nor could his view stop short of the distant horizon. 
 In a measure, this comprehensiveness is part of 
 all criticism, but with De Vere it was a distinct 
 characteristic. It almost became the measure of 
 his ''personal equation" ; and it goes far toward 
 explaining why he could so thoroughly interpret 
 Spenser or Wordsworth, while of Patmore's poetry 
 he should be merely appreciative but not illumin- 
 ating. De Vere was unusually quick to recognize 
 traces of a solid, universal greatness ; he was less 
 sensitive to beauties of an exotic or esoteric char- 
 acter. 
 
 We live by Admiration, Hope and Love ; 
 And, even as these are well and wisely fixed, 
 In dignity of being we ascend. 
 
 These words, loved by De Vere, and chosen as 
 the text of his Essays Chiefly on Poetry, strike the 
 keynote of his attitude toward letters and toward 
 life. His criticism as a whole was overwhelmingly 
 constructive; and while he abhorred "sensual" 
 or "sensational" literature, materialistic and un- 
 sound philosophies, and whatever wars against the 
 soul's life, he still and to the end ' ' enjoyed prais- 
 ing as inferior men enjoy sneering." 
 
 * Aubrey de Vere's own comment on Lander.
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 
 
 Je trouve un singulier plaisir a ddterrer un beau vers dans un 
 poete me"connu ; il me semble que sa pauvre ombre doit etre console, 
 et se rejouir de voir sa pensde enfin comprise ; c'est line re"habilita- 
 tion que je fats, c'est une justice que je rends. 
 
 THEOPHILE GAUTIER. 
 
 IN the Jesuit church of St. Aloysius, Oxford, is a 
 holy-water font of vari-coloured marble bearing 
 this simple inscription : 
 
 In memory of 
 
 FATHER GERARD HOPKINS, S.J., 
 
 who died June 8th, 1889, R. I. P. 
 
 Sometime Priest on this Mission. 
 
 Formerly of Balliol College. 
 
 It was erected by two devoted friends (the Baron 
 and Baroness de Paravicini) and stands to-day as 
 one of the very few objective memorials of a fine 
 and glowing spirit a poet who, when he shall 
 come into his just inheritance of human praise, 
 may well be known as the Crashaw of the Oxford 
 Movement. Very early the imperious obedience 
 of the religious life took him from a purely literary 
 career ; early, too, came the great Silencer. 
 
 Gerard Manley Hopkins was born at Stratford, 
 near London, 28 July, 1844. It was a year of 
 significance. The Oxford Tracts had done their 
 work ; the face of religion was changed ; and art 
 and literature were destined to take on the rainbow 
 colouring. That tremendous re-discovery of the 
 Christian past that vision which included the 
 mystic communion of all Saints, the Real and 
 sacrificial Presence of the Living God, the brood- 
 
 70
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 71 
 
 ing empire of the Holy Ghost over an undivided 
 Church, and all the multitudinous sacramentalisms 
 of a living Catholicity must needs have stretched 
 the horizon upon every side. Such ideas are 
 fountain-heads of art as well as of faith, in the 
 second harvesting. But meanwhile it was an 
 interval of great spiritual struggle. A few months 
 more and John Henry Newman was to break at 
 last from that hopeless Via Media, lighting the 
 pathway for so many other souls "ex umbris et 
 imaginibus in veritatem." All through Gerard's 
 childhood and during his preliminary education at 
 the Cholmondeley School, Highgate, this august 
 exodus continued ; Faber and the Oratorians were 
 followed by Manning, Patmore, Aubrey and 
 Stephen de Vere, Adelaide Procter and Mother 
 Frances Raphael Drane only the angels of God 
 can number them all. And if, to-day, we bow 
 down in spirit before that mighty crusade of half 
 a century ago, what must have been the moral 
 effect upon a highly-sensitive contemporary 
 spirit? It was an effect which found expression 
 less in words than in the complete fusing and 
 fashioning of the spiritual energies ; to those who 
 could receive it, it provided both motive-power 
 and motive for existence. 
 
 We own no surprise, then, in discovering that 
 the wood of Gerard Hopkins' cross lay just 
 beyond his door-sill. But in the wise and sweet 
 economy of life, the cross for most of us is 
 pilgrim-staff as well. This poet's pathway was 
 not destined to lead beside the pleasant ways of 
 garden or hearthstone ; it was to know conflict 
 from without and from within ; but these consola- 
 tions, more especially in youth, were notable. 
 By nature that is to say, God he had been 
 rarely dowered. His intellect was keen and 
 scholarly, his imagination peculiarly quick, subtle
 
 72 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 and original ; he was gifted musically and artisti- 
 cally, and possessed, in the words of his poet- 
 friend Robert Bridges, " humour, great personal 
 charm, and the most attractive virtues of a tender 
 and sympathetic nature." Above and beyond all 
 this, his was the awakened soul ; and something of 
 his absorption in spiritual things may be guessed 
 from the opening stanzas of a little undated Hymn : 
 
 Thee, God, I come from, to thee go ; 
 
 All day long I like fountain flow 
 From thy hand out, swayed about 
 
 Mote-like in thy mighty glow. 
 
 It was in October, 1866, his twenty-third year, 
 that he was received by Newman himself into the 
 fold of Catholicity, finding there the one un- 
 changing haven of a life in which to a degree 
 mercifully unknown by mediocre souls God willed 
 to decree not peace but a sword. 
 
 One reckons among Gerard's lesser privileges 
 his youthful intercourse with that rare and cultured 
 spirit, Walter Pater. It was through this friend's 
 preparation that he entered in 1867 upon his classi- 
 cal first course at Balliol College, Oxford. But 
 to those fair, scholastic precincts the young under- 
 graduate had brought a yet fairer vision a burden 
 of unrest, indeed, until that vision should be 
 wrought into reality. Just how early the ascetic 
 and sacerdotal ideal had taken possession of the 
 convert's heart one perceives from a poem of great 
 beauty, " The Habit of Perfection," written in the 
 year of his reception. All through its stanzas 
 rings the cry of that great renunciation which was 
 soon to be : 
 
 Elected Silence sing to me 
 
 And beat upon my whorled ear, 
 
 Pipe me to pastures still and be 
 The music that I care to hear.
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 73 
 
 Shape nothing 1 , lips ; be lovely-dumb ! 
 
 It is the shut, the curfew sent 
 From there where all surrenders come, 
 
 Which only makes you eloquent. 
 
 Be shelled, eyes, with double dark 
 
 And find the uncreated light ; 
 This ruck and reel which you remark 
 
 Coils, keeps and teases simple sight. 
 
 O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet 
 
 That want the yield of plushy sward, 
 
 But you shall walk the golden street, 
 And you unhouse and house the Lord. 
 
 Those lines prepare us to find the fiery dawn of 
 a religious vocation hastening the expectant soul 
 upon her way. Gerard left Oxford. He spent 
 some six months at the Birmingham Oratory, 
 teaching in the school and enjoying the future 
 Cardinal's advice and friendship. Then, in the 
 spring of 1868 and apparently to the surprise of 
 everyone he offered his life to the Society of 
 Jesus. Now, as he was an incorrigible indivi- 
 dualist, the wisdom of this all-significant step may 
 well have seemed an open question, even to those 
 who knew him best. But Newman, at least, 
 greeted the news approvingly. " Don't call 'the 
 Jesuit discipline hard,' " he wrote : " it will bring 
 you to Heaven." So the great and intricate sacri- 
 fice was begun. On the bare objective side, 
 Father Hopkins' career is quickly told. One hears 
 of him as "select preacher " in London, and again 
 back in Oxford, at St. Aloysius' church. The one 
 available portrait of the young priest pictures him 
 during this latter mission : it shows a face of most 
 delicate and chastened beauty, with noble fore- 
 head and chin of extraordinary determination
 
 74 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 the face of a youthful Englishman, whose eyes 
 might already have known Gethsemane. 
 
 For a while, and until the sensitive, harassed 
 spirit almost broke beneath the strain, Father 
 Gerard laboured in the slums of Liverpool. Thence 
 he passed to a professorship in the philosophic 
 precincts of Stonyhurst. Finally, in 1884, having 
 been elected Fellow of the Royal University of 
 Ireland, he was appointed to the post of classical- 
 examiner at Dublin. And there, five years later, 
 he succumbed to a contagious fever and died. It 
 was a bloodless martyrdom one knows that now 
 a story of tragic consecration to duty and of a 
 heart predestined to suffering. And the poetic 
 life was but the silent, passionate undercurrent to 
 this all-absorbing ministry a life too ruthlessly 
 mortified at first, then cultivated sedulously, in- 
 tricately, but more and more as a refuge from 
 actual things. 
 
 Gerard Hopkins had written poetry as a boy ; 
 in fact (like Milton and Crashaw, and some others 
 never destined to attain their eminence), his verses 
 won him distinction at school. But in the first 
 fervour of his novitiate, and doubtless as a costly 
 exercise of detachment, he burned nearly all these 
 youthful poems. One fragment survived, a 
 "Vision of Mermaids," written back in 1862. Its 
 lyric sweetness carries a momentary suggestion of 
 Tennyson, but in its sensuous love of beauty there 
 is an abiding affinity to the poet of Endyinion. 
 Here is a vignette of early summer, charming in 
 its blithe and sunny abandonment : 
 
 Soon as when Summer of his sister Spring 
 Crushes and tears the rare enjewelling", 
 
 And boasting " I have fairer thing's than these," 
 Plashes amid the billowy apple-trees 
 
 His lusty hands, in gusts of scented wind 
 Swirling out bloom till all the air is blind
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 75 
 
 With rosy foam and pelting 1 blossom and mists 
 
 Of driving vermeil rain ; and, as he lists 
 The dainty onyx-coronals deflowers, 
 
 A glorious wanton ; all the wrecks in showers 
 Crowd down upon a stream, and jostling thick 
 
 With bubbles bugle-eyed, struggle and stick 
 On tangled shoals that bar the brook a crowd 
 
 Of filmy globes and rosy floating cloud. 
 
 The melodiousness, the simplicity of metre and 
 the colour of this early poem are all notable ; but 
 still one feels that the poet, whose touch was most 
 indubitably here, had yet to "find himself." 
 
 " The Habit of Perfection," quoted above rather 
 as a page of character-revelation than as a piece 
 of art, was written four years later. It is in all 
 ways more significant. For, while retaining that 
 delicate and exquisite sweetness, it bears distinct 
 prophecy of those characteristics which were to 
 mark the poet's maturer work ; the subjectivity 
 and intensity of feeling, the eccentricity of ex- 
 pression and preoccupation with spiritual ideas 
 are all here foreshadowed. It is, indeed, one of 
 the most interesting and revealing of his poems 
 the Abrenuntio of a pure and cloistral spirit. But 
 it came perilously near being valedictory as 
 well. For almost ten years after he entered the 
 Jesuit novitiate, Gerard Hopkins' poetic labours 
 ceased, and his lips seem literally to have "shaped 
 nothing " but the mighty offices of his calling. 
 When the young Levite turned once more to the 
 world, her immemorial face had manifold and 
 mysterious meanings for him. With the poet's 
 sensuous appreciation of the outer life was to 
 mingle henceforth a vein of ethical and divine 
 interpretation. Omnia Great a had he not weighed 
 and sounded this world of shadow and symbol 
 and enigma? But two realities abode steadfast: 
 God, and the struggling souJ of man.
 
 76 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 We will admit that all this is emphatically 
 Ignatian but it is also emphatically Catholic; it 
 is even the story of every illumined soul. Nature 
 is first a pageant to us, and then a process ; until 
 at last we perceive it to be, in Goethe's words, the 
 "garment of God" and withal, the enveloping 
 mantle of man. This deepening of vision is very 
 noticeable throughout Father Hopkins' work. 
 Yet always the world was fresh to him, as it is 
 fresh to children and to the very mature. At 
 every turn, and by sheer force of his own vivid 
 individuality, he was finding that " something of 
 the unexplored," that "grain of the unknown" 
 which Flaubert so sagely counselled de Maupas- 
 sant to seek in all things, but which none of us 
 may ever hope to find until we cease looking upon 
 life through the traditional lenses of other eyes. 
 Therefore was Father Hopkins Ignatian in his 
 own very personal way. Few men have loved 
 Nature more rapturously than he ; fewer still with 
 such a youthful and perennial curiosity. There 
 is a tender excitement in his attitude toward 
 natural beauty (whether treated incidentally or as 
 a parable) that is very contagious, and the exulta- 
 tion of that early and earthly "Vision " clung to 
 the Churchman almost with life itself. Nature, 
 indeed, was his one secular inspiration ; and that 
 even she was not wholly secular is evinced by the 
 characteristic music of his spring song : 
 
 Nothing is so beautiful as spring 1 
 When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush : 
 Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush 
 Through the echoing timber does so rinse and ring 
 The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing ; 
 The glassy pear-tree leaves and blooms, they brush 
 The descending blue ; that blue is all in a rush 
 With richness ; the racing lambs, too, have fair their 
 fling.
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 77 
 
 What is all this juice and all this joy? 
 A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning 
 In Eden garden. Have, get before it cloy, 
 Before it cloud, Christ Lord, and sour with sinning, 
 Innocent mind and May day in girl and boy, 
 Most, O Maid's child, thy choice and worthy the 
 winning. 
 
 Here, at last, in one of the most hackneyed of 
 poetic subjects and after an opening line almost 
 banal, we are come upon an original vein of 
 poetry ; a spiritual motivation, a vigour of word- 
 painting, and a metrical proficiency of very real 
 distinction. It was written in 1877, and its exis- 
 tence argues for Father Hopkins more than a 
 mere dilettante use of the poetic faculty. Another 
 poem of the same year, "The Starlight Night," 
 is almost equally striking in music and in meta- 
 phor. But it must be acknowledged that both of 
 these poems bear traces of that eccentricity, that 
 curious and perverse construction, which point 
 forward to Father Hopkins' eventual excesses. 
 Lucidity was the chief grace he sacrificed as years 
 wore on ; and his fondness for uncommon words 
 at one moment academic and literate, at another 
 provincial did not help matters. " Inversnaid " 
 (written in 1881) is an extreme instance of this 
 later manner : there is about it a certain bounding 
 and prancing charm, but in truth the stream's 
 highroad is sadly obstructed by Anglo-Saxon and 
 other archaic undergrowth. Wiry heathpacks, 
 flitches of fern and the groins of the braes that the 
 brook treads through, send the reader's mind back 
 with some ruefulness to that lovely random line 
 from the " Vision of Mermaids " : 
 
 To know the dusk depths of the ponderous sea ! 
 We are not born original in these latter days
 
 78 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 of literature, it would seem ; we must achieve 
 originality and often at the cost of so much 
 complexity. Not a few of us, indeed, would 
 appear to have been born complex, with a con- 
 genital impulse toward entangling an existence 
 already difficult enough. But there is one in- 
 eradicable simplicity about religious men : they 
 are always coming back upon God. To Him 
 they reach out, and peradventure attain, through 
 the mysteries of Nature, through the mazes of 
 science and abstract speculation, even through 
 the fundamental intricacies of their own tempera- 
 ment. His Spirit they perceive brooding above 
 the patient earth, glorifying and illumining her 
 travail. And so one finds Father Hopkins' ulti- 
 mate message, clarion-clear, in this very direct 
 and characteristic sonnet upon " God's Grandeur " : 
 
 The world is charged with the grandeur of God, 
 
 It will flame out like shining from shook foil ; 
 
 It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil 
 
 Crushed. Why do men then now not reck His rod ? 
 
 Generations have trod, have trod, have trod ; 
 
 And all is seared with trade ; bleared, smeared with 
 
 toil, 
 And bears man's smudge, and shares man's smell ; 
 
 the soil 
 
 Is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod. 
 And for all this, nature is never spent ; 
 There lives the dearest freshness deep down things ; 
 And though the last lights from the black west went, 
 Oh, morning at the brown brink eastwards springs 
 Because the Holy Ghost over the bent 
 World broods with warm breast, and with, ah, bright 
 
 wings ! 
 
 The vital and arresting quality of this little 
 poem distinguishes all of Gerard Hopkins' reli- 
 gious poetry ; and it is in his religious poetry, 
 after all, that he attained most unequivocally.
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 79 
 
 There is an invariable quickness and reality in his 
 work although at moments it may also be a bit 
 fantastic at the very point where the tendency of 
 so many others is to become a little cold or a little 
 sweet. One may search for many a long day 
 among the treasures of English verse before 
 one shall find such a powerful and poetic medita- 
 tion upon the Holy Eucharist as he has left 
 us. We quote but two stanzas of " Barnfloor and 
 Winepress," although the entire poem ought to 
 have the recognition due to a devotional classic : 
 
 Thou who on Sin's wages starvest, 
 Behold, we have the Joy of Harvest ; 
 For us was gathered the First-fruits, 
 For us was lifted from the roots, 
 Sheaved in cruel bands, bruised sore, 
 Scourged upon the threshing-floor ; 
 Where the upper millstone roofed His Head, 
 At morn we found the Heavenly Bread ; 
 And on a thousand altars laid, 
 Christ our Sacrifice is made. 
 
 Thou, whose dry plot for moisture gapes, 
 
 We shout with them that tread the grapes ; 
 
 For us the Vine was fenced with thorn, 
 
 Five ways the precious branches torn. 
 
 Terrible fruit was on the tree 
 
 In the acre of Gethsemane : 
 
 For us by Calvary's distress 
 
 The wine was racked from the press ; 
 
 Now, in our altar-vessels stored, 
 
 Lo, the sweet vintage of the Lord ! 
 
 In quite other vein, and of real lyric charm, is 
 Rosa Mystica. Father Hopkins has contrived to 
 throw a glamour of simplicity and ingenuousness 
 over thoughts by no means simple ; while the use 
 of assonance and alliteration (frequent and nearly 
 always felicitous throughout his work) and of the
 
 8o THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 refrain, provide a very rhythmic vehicle. There 
 was a rose-tree blooming once upon Nazareth 
 Hill, he tells us with the playful seriousness of 
 some old ballad but it passed from men's eyes 
 into the secret place of God : and cannot the heart 
 guess the name of this sweet mystery? 
 
 Is Mary that rose then ? Mary the tree ? 
 
 But the Blossom, the Blossom there, who can it be ? 
 
 Who can her rose be ? It could be but One ; 
 
 Christ Jesus, our Lord her God and her Son. 
 
 In the Gardens of God, in the daylight divine, 
 Show me thy Son, Mother, Mother of mine. 
 
 What was the colour of that Blossom bright ? 
 White to begin with, immaculate white. 
 
 But what a wild flush on the flakes of it stood, 
 When the Rose ran in crimsonings down the Cross- 
 wood. 
 
 In the Gardens of God, in the daylight divine 
 I shall worship the Wounds with thee, Mother of mine. 
 
 Though Francis Thompson was, in life and in 
 death, hailed as the successor of Crashaw, the 
 mantle of that mystic dreamer fell even more truly 
 upon the shoulders of Gerard Hopkins. His was 
 the same wistful pathos and resolute detachment 
 from life's more passional aspects. In both men 
 there was a similar tragic sensitiveness an inevi- 
 table recoil from the inconsistency and ugliness 
 and corruption which are a part of human exis- 
 tence. So it seems natural enough, despite the 
 intervening centuries, that even the objective facts 
 of their lives should bear a curious resemblance ; 
 and that both poets should pass, painfully but un- 
 reluctantly, into the larger life, wearied and fore- 
 spent ere half their years. 
 
 But we have yet to consider an ode of sustained 
 beauty and ecstasy, his longest and perhaps most
 
 FR. GERARD HOPKINS, S.J. 
 By courtesy of Fr. Joseph Keating, S.J.
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 81 
 
 ambitious effort, which, lacking a better title, I 
 have ventured to call " Our Lady of the Air." It 
 is built round a unique and apt metaphor : 
 
 Wild air, world-mothering" Air, 
 Nestling" me everywhere, 
 That each eyelash or hair 
 Girdles ; goes home betwixt 
 The fleeciest, frailest-fixed 
 Snowflake ; that's fairly mixed 
 With riddles, and is rife 
 In every least thing's life ; 
 This needful, never spent, 
 And nursing element ; 
 My more than meat and drink, 
 My meal at every wink ; 
 This Air which, by life's law, 
 My lung must draw and draw, 
 Now but to breathe its praise 
 Minds me in many ways 
 Of her, who not only 
 Gave God's Infinity 
 Dwindled to Infancy 
 Welcome in womb and breast, 
 Birth, milk and all the rest, 
 But mothers each new grace 
 That does now reach our race 
 Mary Immaculate, 
 Merely a Woman, yet 
 Whose presence power is 
 Great as no goddess's 
 Was deemed, dreamed ; who 
 This one work has to do 
 Let all God's glory through, 
 God's glory which would go 
 Through her and from her flow 
 Off, and no way but so. 
 
 If I have understood 
 She holds high Motherhood 
 G
 
 82 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Towards all our ghostly good, 
 And plays in grace her part 
 About man's beating heart, 
 Laying, like air's fine flood, 
 The death-dance in his blood ; 
 Yet no part but what will 
 Be Christ our Saviour still. 
 Of her flesh He took Flesh : 
 
 He does take, fresh and fresh, 
 Though much the mystery how, 
 Not flesh but spirit now ; 
 And makes, oh, marvellous, 
 New Nazareths in us, 
 Where she shall yet conceive 
 Him, morning, noon, and eve ; 
 New Bethlems, and He born 
 There evening, noon, and morn 
 Bethlem or Nazareth, 
 Men here may draw like breath 
 More Christ and baffle death ; 
 Who born so comes to be 
 New self and nobler me 
 In each one, and each one 
 More makes, when all is done, 
 Both God and Mary's Son. 
 
 In a passage beginning 
 
 Again, look overhead 
 How air is azured ; 
 Oh, how ; nay, do but stand 
 Where you can lift your hand 
 Skyward 
 
 the poet analyses the essential mission of the 
 atmosphere, and the blinding, staggering possi- 
 bilities of a universe unslaked by this "bath of 
 blue." Then the simile is brought to a tender 
 and beautiful conclusion : 
 
 So God was God of old ; 
 A Mother came to mould
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 83 
 
 These limbs like ours which are 
 What must make our Day-star 
 Much dearer to mankind ; 
 Whose glory bare would blind, 
 Or less would win man's mind. 
 Through her we may see Him 
 Made sweeter, not made dim ; 
 And her hand leaves His light 
 Sifted, to suit our sight. 
 
 There exist but a few other poems bearing 
 Father Hopkins' name. A short but characteristic 
 piece, " Morning, Midday and Evening Sacrifice," 
 should be included among the devotional lyrics ; 
 also that direct and manly " Hymn " referred to 
 earlier. And there is one white rose of a frag- 
 ment, so brief and so exquisite that we give it 
 entire : 
 
 HEAVEN HAVEN. 
 
 (A NUN TAKES THE VEIL) 
 
 I have desired to go 
 
 Where springs not fail, 
 
 To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail, 
 And a few lilies blow. 
 
 And I have asked to be 
 
 Where no storms come, 
 
 Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, 
 And out of the swing of the sea. 
 
 Thinking about Heaven makes all of us wistful ; 
 but it is pondering on the tear-stains and blood- 
 stains of earth that crushes out the joy of life. 
 Father Gerard had, seemingly from boyhood, a 
 dangerous realisation of this omnipresent sorrow 
 of living ; his own experience did not tend to 
 lighten the burden, and throughout his later years 
 the weight was well-nigh intolerable. Sanely
 
 84 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 enough he gauged the cause of so much bitter- 
 ness ; it was the " blight man was born for " if he 
 happened to be an idealist it was the conscious- 
 ness of his own too-twisted nature. "It is 
 Margaret you mourn for," he told one little Mar- 
 garet as she grieved over the falling glory of 
 autumn ; but none the less, outer conditions will 
 all along furnish the occasion of Margaret's grief. 
 There cannot be any doubt that Father Hopkins' 
 life in Dublin was a final crucifixion of spirit as 
 well as body. It was not only the monotonous 
 and consuming toil of his position as examiner in 
 the University ; it was not merely the political 
 irregularity and unreason by which he was perforce 
 surrounded ; although we are told that these com- 
 bined to plunge his final years into a state of utter 
 dejection. One of the sonnets of this period (all 
 of which are coloured by an ominous and leaden 
 grey) reveals his sense of exile "To seem the 
 stranger lies my lot my life among strangers " 
 and expresses his human and priestly sorrow that 
 
 Father and mother dear, 
 Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near. 
 
 But there is another which would seem to indi- 
 cate that the cause of Father Hopkins' darkness 
 lay deeper down than loneliness (too familiar to 
 the sons of St. Ignatius) or than any normal 
 weariness of the day's work. Few lines of such 
 haunting sadness have come to us from the hand 
 of any Christian poet : 
 
 Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend 
 
 With Thee ; but, sir, so what I plead is just, 
 
 Why do sinners' ways prosper ? and why must 
 
 Disappointment all I endeavour end ? 
 
 Wert thou my enemy, O thou my Friend, 
 
 How couldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost 
 
 Defeat, thwart me ? . . . .
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 85 
 
 One must needs surmise a great part of this final 
 struggle ; but it would seem to illustrate that 
 spiritual phenomenon of desolation which has im- 
 mersed so many a chosen soul. For full thirty 
 years was St. Teresa in this desert land, where 
 frustration reigns in all visible things, and to lose 
 the life without finding it again seems the guerdon 
 of superhuman effort. Of course, it is impossible 
 to write healthy poetry in the depths of this tragic 
 experience ; and Father Hopkins was too true a 
 poet not to realise the fact. He submitted, the 
 very year of his death, his noble and highly 
 masterful apologia ; 
 
 "To 
 
 The fine delight that fathers thought ; the strong 
 Spur, live and lancing" like the blowpipe flame, 
 Breathes once, and, quenched faster than it came, 
 Leaves yet the mind a mother of immortal song, 
 Nine months she then, nay years, nine years she long 
 Within her wears, bears, cares and moulds the same : 
 The widow of an insight lost she lives, with aim 
 Not known, and hand at work now never wrong. 
 
 Sweet fire, the sire of muse, my soul needs this ; 
 I want the one rapture of an inspiration. 
 O then if in my lagging lines you miss 
 The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation, 
 My winter world, that scarcely breathes that bliss 
 Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation. 
 
 His winter world ! It was destined sooner than 
 he dreamed to give place to the unwaning spring. 
 Robert Bridges (to whose words we turn once 
 again, because the knowledge of a physician as 
 well as the wisdom of a friend went into them) 
 declares that he made no struggle for life when 
 the fever of 1889 attacked him. He had fought 
 his good fight and carried arms no longer ; but 
 the God of Battles knew. And on the 8th of 
 June the month he had loved so well Gerard
 
 86 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Hopkins' soul marched quietly over the borderland 
 to victory. 
 
 But little remains to be said. The poems have 
 been permitted to speak for themselves, and if 
 their faults are conspicuous enough, so, too, is 
 their unique and magnetic attraction. No doubt 
 this is in the nature of an acquired taste. They 
 were not written for the public (during their 
 maker's lifetime scarcely one of them was permitted 
 to steal into print) ; they were written for the con- 
 solation of the poet and of a few chosen friends. 
 And to such readers no concessions need be made. 
 Coventry Patmore, Robert Bridges, and Richard 
 Watson Dixon were of this elect little company. 
 All were convinced of Father Hopkins' rare poetic 
 ability, of the even "terrible pathos" (the words 
 are Dixon's) which tempered his work ; although 
 Patmore (himself an experimentalist) was never 
 quite won over to the metrical ingenuities and 
 idiosyncrasies of his "new prosody." "System 
 and learned theory are manifest in all these experi- 
 ments ; but they seem to me to be too manifest " 
 wrote the worshipper of the Unknown Eros: "I 
 often find it as hard to follow you as I have found 
 it to follow the darkest parts of Browning." 1 
 
 Gerard Hopkins' exceedingly delicate and intri- 
 cate craftsmanship and not less the singularity 
 of his mental processes must, indeed, produce 
 in many minds an impression of artificiality. 
 Yet nothing could be further from the fact, for in 
 
 1 Patmore's final verdict upon Father Hopkins, written barely 
 two months after the tetter's death, is worth remembering 1 : 
 
 " Gerard Hopkins was the only orthodox and, as far as 
 I could see, saintly man in whom religion had absolutely no 
 narrowing effect upon his general opinions and sympathies. A 
 Catholic of the most scrupulous strictness, he could nevertheless 
 see the Holy Spirit in all goodness, truth, and beauty : and there 
 was something in all his words and manners which was at once 
 a rebuke and an attraction to all who could only aspire to be like 
 him."
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 87 
 
 all the poems of his manhood there is a poignant, 
 even a passionate sincerity. It is quite true that 
 his elliptical and involved expression mars (for all 
 but the very few who shared his theories of verse) 
 more than one poem of rare and vital imagining. 
 It is true also, and of the nature of the case, that 
 our poet was to a certain degree self-centred in his 
 dream of life. He was not an egoist ; but it must 
 be obvious that from first to last he was an in- 
 dividualist. And in our human reckoning the 
 individualist pays, and then he pays again ; and 
 after that, in Wilde's phrase, he keeps on paying. 
 Yet in the final count his chances of survival are 
 excellent. Outside of the poets, Father Hopkins' 
 work has had little recognition or understanding; 
 but his somewhat exotic influence might easily be 
 pointed out in one or two of the foremost Catholic 
 singers of to-day and yesterday. And, for all its 
 aloofness, the young priest's work struck root in 
 the poetic past. Its subtle and complex fanciful- 
 ness and its white heat of spirituality go back in 
 direct line to that earlier Jesuit, Father Southwell ; 
 while one would wager that Hopkins knew and 
 loved other seventeenth-century lyrists beside the 
 very manifest Crashaw. It is by no means with- 
 out significance, moreover, to note that Coventry 
 Patmore's great Odes and Browning's masterpiece, 
 The Ring and the Book, both appeared in that 
 memorable 1868 when Gerard entered upon his 
 novitiate. Those were the days when a young 
 poet might, almost without public comment, fling 
 out to the world his daring and beautiful gift. 
 
 Gerard Hopkins' poems are best known in 
 a few precious anthologies. It is a truism to 
 remark that merely great poetry is seldom popular ; 
 although the greatest of all poetry that of Homer 
 and Dante and Shakespeare strikes a universal 
 echo in the heart of man. It is delusive, and it
 
 88 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 is written not as an escape from life but as 
 the inevitable and impassioned expression of life 
 itself. Now Gerard Hopkins' artistry was not of 
 this supreme sort. He was essentially a minor 
 poet ; he wrote incredibly little and he interpreted 
 but few phases of human experience. Yet, with 
 the minor poet's distinctive merit, he worked his 
 narrow field with completeness and intensity. 
 And who can deny that the very quality which 
 seemed, at worst, an eccentric and literate manner- 
 ism, proved itself in the finer passages a strikingly 
 creative and authentic inspiration ?
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 
 
 THE poet, Patmore himself once declared in a 
 moment of luminous paradox, "occupies a quite 
 peculiar position somewhere between that of a 
 Saint and that of Balaam's Ass " : and save for 
 the fact that both saint and ass are notoriously 
 humble in demeanour, it seems impossible that 
 any phrase should more suggestively crystallise 
 his own lifelong attitude. With meet dramatic 
 insight, Mr. John Sargent chose this poet as 
 model for his Prophet Ezekiel, for to the sense 
 of friend and foe alike there played about him 
 flashes of the untranslatable Vision, echoes of the 
 Voice Crying in the Wilderness. From the days 
 of his vivid and self-conscious childhood, through 
 that maturity of passionate antagonisms and 
 inviolate fealties, into the prophetic old age, 
 ominous, aloof, yet strangely tender, Coventry 
 Patmore was at each moment a unique and com- 
 pelling personality. Aristocrat, pessimist, scholar, 
 poet of human love and of transcendent mysticism, 
 he stood as a stumbling-block and a foolishness 
 to the Philistines of his age. He himself loved 
 and hated strongly : and in the eternal justice it 
 has been decreed that strongly, too, should he be 
 loved and hated a scandal to the timid or un- 
 believing multitude, a seer to the few who cared 
 to understand. 
 
 From the first, there was a singular interde- 
 pendence between Patmore's life and his literary 
 work : a consistent absorption in certain ideals 
 which must always be rare in human nature. 
 
 89
 
 go THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Not that he was free from vagaries ; but his pre- 
 judices and perversities even now are "excellently 
 intelligible," and a certain proud integrity of soul 
 forbids us to separate the poet from the man. 
 Together then, as one single entity, should the 
 life record and the art record be studied. 
 
 Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore was born 
 at Woodford, in Essex, 23 July, 1823. From 
 his mother, an austere woman of Scottish descent, 
 he seems to have received little save the gift of 
 life ; in his father he found not only the insepar- 
 able companion but almost the sole instructor of 
 his youth. Peter George Patmore was himself a 
 literary man of versatile parts, exemplifying that 
 not unusual combination of strong individuality 
 and feeble character. From very childhood, 
 Coventry spent hours in his father's library ; to- 
 gether the two read Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
 and selections from all the great English classics ; 
 while at night this not unliberal education was 
 supplemented by visits to the best playhouses, 
 or to the homes of " Barry Cornwall " and others 
 of the so-called Cockney School. It was doubt- 
 less a desultory method, yet it proved more effec- 
 tive than might many a wiser one. And when, 
 between his twelfth and fifteenth years, the boy 
 manifested keen interest in mathematics and ex- 
 perimental science, his father with customary 
 indulgence and apparently at some pecuniary 
 inconvenience fitted for his use a little labora- 
 tory. To the end of his life, our poet was wont 
 to refer with zest to his investigations there, even 
 asserting that he had in those early years dis- 
 covered a new chloride of bromine. 
 
 But in the life of so transcendent a thinker, it 
 is the spiritual experiences, however youthful and 
 fugitive, which retain permanent interest. The 
 elder Patmore seems to have been what is now
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 91 
 
 known as a " reverent agnostic," and Coventry 
 naively tells us that until his twelfth year he was 
 an agnostic, too. He had, indeed, received no 
 definite religious instruction ; but coming at that 
 time upon some little book of devotion, he was 
 impressed with a gasp " what an exceedingly fine 
 thing it would be if there really were a God " 
 with whom he might live on terms of love and 
 obedience. It was the first of those illuminations 
 or angel-visits of which our poet was vaguely 
 conscious all through his youth : visits which as 
 yet left slight impression upon the outer life, but 
 which cast upon the things of earth sudden 
 gleams of interpretation, and in one memorable 
 instance forced upon him a most intense and 
 lasting apprehension of the supreme worth of 
 personal purity. 
 
 But poetry, that elect lady and predestined 
 passion of his life, early claimed some initiative 
 allegiance. From Patmore's own account, it was 
 at about the age of sixteen (in "The River," and 
 "The Woodman's Daughter") that he first turned 
 seriously to verse-making ; writing then also a 
 remarkable little essay on Macbeth, published 
 later in the Pre-Raphaelite Germ. The fact that 
 an original tragedy was also in contemplation 
 would scarcely be worth noting save for the sub- 
 jective experience which it induced. For by 
 another wholly characteristic illumination, the 
 boy student came to perceive that such tragedy 
 as might inspire the highest poetry "ought to 
 present the solution, rather than the mere con- 
 clusion, by death, of the evils and disasters of 
 life." Here, assuredly, was no ordinary fruit of 
 youthful speculation, but the basis of that philo- 
 sophic and fundamental simplicity which Patmore 
 was so uncommonly to attain. May it not, in 
 truth, be recognised as a note of that Divine
 
 92 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Wisdom which will neither be withstood nor 
 denied by its chosen vessel ? For in casting 
 about for this possible solution of a difficult 
 world, our poet first came into definite contact 
 with the Christian idea. The conception of the 
 God-Man, the Word made Flesh, took immediate 
 root in an intellect and heart peculiarly open, 
 peculiarly sensitive to beauty and to truth. Al- 
 most half a century later, Coventry Patmore de- 
 clared that this thought of God incarnate in Jesus 
 Christ had from that moment remained to him 
 " the only reality worth seriously caring for." 
 
 Kindred experiences were more disquieting. A 
 visit to relatives in Scotland (devout members of 
 the Free Kirk), much " profitable discourse " and 
 an unsuccessful attempt at extemporaneous prayer, 
 sent Coventry back to London in a revulsion of 
 feeling which almost threatened unbelief. But 
 the early vision remained intact, and excesses 
 born of much zeal and little knowledge gradually 
 made way for a new advance. 
 
 Meanwhile Peter George Patmore's parental 
 pride urged his son on to publication, and in 1844 
 the first little volume, Poems, was issued from 
 Moxon's press. The home circle was, of course, 
 enthusiastic, and even the literary world took 
 some slight notice. "A very interesting young 
 poet has blushed into bloom this season," wrote 
 Robert Browning; Leigh Hunt and the "Cock- 
 ney " contingent were vastly appreciative ; and 
 Bulwer Lytton sent a most discerning letter of 
 sincere praise and admonition. Several of the 
 reviews were, on the other hand, actually abusive, 
 and in his later years Patmore himself came to 
 regard these early poems with undisguised con- 
 tempt. To the critic of to-day, untempered praise 
 and blame seem alike superfluous. They were 
 simply experimental verses of pathetic and pic-
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 93 
 
 turesque character, the vigour of their word- 
 painting being as undeniable as, upon one side, 
 a certain hectic quality, or upon the other, an 
 imperfect sense of rhythm. At their best, as, for 
 instance, in "The River," one seems to detect a 
 weak solution of Christabel : 
 
 Beneath the mossy ivied bridge 
 
 The River slippeth past : 
 
 The current deep is still as sleep 
 
 And yet so very fast ! 
 
 There's something 1 in its quietness 
 
 That makes the soul aghast. . . . 
 
 In 1845, just a year after his son's little triumph, 
 Peter George Patmore was overtaken by financial 
 troubles and left England. It meant a radically 
 new era for Coventry. Practically penniless, he 
 was now left dependent upon his own resources ; 
 while the hot-house atmosphere of sympathetic 
 and uncritical praise was simultaneously with- 
 drawn. So the young swimmer made his plunge, 
 and contrived to prove that he was not of the sink- 
 ing sort. None the less, it was a year of arduous 
 struggle, Patmore's work for the current Reviews 
 scarcely sufficing to pay for the humble lodgings 
 which he and a younger brother occupied together. 
 " Who is your lean young friend with the frayed 
 shirt-cuffs?" inquired Monckton Milnes one even- 
 ing of Mrs. Procter, when the impecunious poet 
 had been dining at her house. But after reading 
 the early verses and learning more of their author, 
 the future Lord Houghton made brave reparation 
 for this "heartless flippancy." Through his assist- 
 ance, Coventry obtained, in 1846, the post of 
 assistant librarian at the British Museum, and the 
 friendship thus opened up proved thenceforth of 
 mutual profit. 
 
 It was during those grey days that Patmore
 
 94 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 made the acquaintance of Tennyson then also 
 the occupant of a modest apartment "up two or 
 three flights of stairs." Together they discussed 
 letters, together they dined, together they walked 
 half the nights away ; and although the elder poet 
 had not yet attained universal recognition, he was 
 to the devoted Coventry a font of perfectness. 
 Years later, when a breach had severed the in- 
 timacy, Patmore's proud and essentially original 
 spirit used to refer bitterly to the days when he 
 had followed Tennyson about " like a dog." 
 
 But infinitely more potent than any other in- 
 fluence upon our poet's youth was that of a woman, 
 Emily Augusta Andrews, destined to create for 
 him one of the ideal unions of literary history. 
 She became the wife of Coventry Patmore, after a 
 brief courtship, in 1847 (her twenty-fourth and his 
 twenty-fifth year), and, to the end, the exquisite 
 intimacy and dignity of their love served as a 
 veritable initiation into the mysteries of life. 
 The mingled simplicity and stateliness of Emily 
 Patmore, her strange beauty perpetuated by 
 Woolner, Millais, and Browning 1 her selfless de- 
 votion, her wit and, withal, her practical wisdom, 
 come down to us upon the testimony of nearly all 
 who were privileged to know her. And the gentle 
 sway which she exercised over the heart and mind 
 of her husband was absolute until her death. " I 
 have been thinking to-day," Coventry wrote in 
 1860, when the great shadow was already falling 
 across his hearthstone, "of all your patient, per- 
 sistent goodness, your absolutely flawless life, and 
 all your amiable, innocent graces." In another 
 place he declares that her love revealed to him 
 what was to prove the basic philosophy of his life 
 and work : "The relation of the soul to Christ as 
 his betrothed wife is the key to the feeling with 
 
 1 " A Face " : Dramatis Persona.
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 95 
 
 which prayer and love and honour should be 
 offered to Him. She showed me what that re- 
 lationship involves of heavenly submission and 
 spotless, passionate loyalty." 
 
 A second volume of poems, containing, among 
 others, "Tamerton Church Tower," "The Yew- 
 berry," "The Falcon," was published by Patmore 
 in 1853. Its simplicity bare, and at moments 
 almost crude was an intentional protest against 
 the more wilful metres just then affected by 
 Browning and even Tennyson. Its realism may 
 perhaps be one fruit of our poet's sympathy with 
 the pre-Raphaelites ; although that "last rub 
 which polishes the mirror" (a watchword Patmore 
 himself is said to have furnished the Brotherhood) 
 was the quality it most conspicuously lacked. 
 Yet in spite of much imperfectness and some 
 monotony, there are strange, searching gleams of 
 metaphysical insight in these romantic pieces ; 
 and with curious premonition, the bright par- 
 ticular star was that charming lyric "Eros." 
 
 But the magnum opus of Patmore's early life 
 was at hand. That New Song, "the first of 
 themes, sung last of all," had long been trem- 
 bling upon his lips: in The Angel in the House 
 it found its full and perfect utterance. The theme 
 daring, precisely because it was so simple, so 
 universal, and to the vulgar mind so common- 
 place was a glorification of happy nuptial love. 
 In itself, the graceful and very simple romance 
 scarcely justifies repetition. " Par la grace in- 
 finie^ Dieu les mit au monde ensemble " ; and so 
 in the surpassing pain and joy of love, they woo 
 and wed. There are no memorable obstacles, no 
 heroic sacrifices ; it all passes in the conventional 
 shadow of an English deanery; and like the 
 delicious fairy tales of old, they live happily ever 
 afterward and have many children ! But in
 
 96 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 this quiet domestic idyll one is conscious of the 
 first man and the first woman, of the last man 
 and the last woman, and of God, in whom Love 
 finds its source. Patmore's rare insight into the 
 elemental human consciousness, his reality and 
 delicacy of emotion, form the warp of the poem ; 
 albeit its woof includes the homeliest details of 
 "sun and candle-light." Here is one beautiful 
 fragment, the first recognition of love between 
 Felix and Honoria. With the latter's sisters, 
 they are seated one summer morning in the 
 shadow of the grim Druid rocks 
 
 That scowled their chill gloom from above, 
 Like churls whose stolid wisdom mocks 
 The lightness of immortal love. 
 And, as we talked, my spirit quaff 'd 
 The sparkling winds ; the candid skies 
 At our untruthful strangeness laugh'd ; 
 I kissed with mine her smiling eyes ; 
 And sweet familiarness and awe 
 Prevail'd that hour on either part. 
 And in the eternal light I saw 
 That she was mine ; although my heart 
 Could not conceive, nor would confess 
 Such contentation ; and there grew 
 More form and more fair stateliness 
 Than heretofore between us two. 
 
 Our poet's Primal Love was essentially of the 
 Sacraments ; and early in his song even while 
 seeking expression for things "too simple and 
 too sweet for words " he struck the note of his 
 characteristic message : 
 
 This little germ of nuptial love 
 Which springs so simply from the sod, 
 The root is, as my song shall prove, 
 Of all our love to man and God.
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 97 
 
 With this root, indeed, rather than with any 
 potential flowering, the poem is mainly con- 
 cerned. Yet there is an increasing tendency, 
 notably throughout the Preludes, toward a mys- 
 tical interpretation of sexual love. The " pathos 
 of eternity " has blown across the face of passion : 
 and in the Victories of Love (as the latter part 
 of the work was called) there is even more of 
 this divine pathos than there is of nuptial joy. 
 
 Although the Angel was never completed accord- 
 ing to Patmore's original design, few of us will 
 feel that it could desirably be longer. The last 
 word is spoken in that extraordinary " Wedding 
 Sermon," which brings the poem to a close. 
 Here, where the claims of body and spirit are 
 reconciled with so sweet and austere an eloquence, 
 we realise that the home of love is no longer upon 
 our humble earth. Out from the house of human 
 felicity must the angel now adventure out into 
 realms higher and more loving : although to men 
 of goodwill the body's bond may still reveal 
 itself as 
 
 All else utterly beyond 
 
 In power of love to actualise 
 
 The soul's bond which it signifies. 
 
 Here, for those who could receive it, was antici- 
 pated the whole tremendous doctrine of Patmore's 
 future odes ! 
 
 The metrical scheme of the Angel an iambic 
 octosyllabic line, rhyming throughout the First 
 Part in quatrains, throughout the Second in 
 couplets has often been subjected to ridicule. 
 It is, in fact, a metre trembling perilously upon 
 the border of the commonplace, and lending itself 
 with staggering ease to parody and perversion. 
 But the poet had chosen it deliberately as the 
 vehicle best suited to a simple and for the most 
 H
 
 98 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 part joyous story ; and in the main, he avoided 
 the pitfalls both of his form and his theme to a 
 marvel. There is no denying a certain obvious 
 quality to the Angel in the House. But those 
 who find it merely " sweet" or "innocuous" 
 must have missed the more transcendent message 
 of the Wedding Sermon, and of those interesting 
 Preludes which, chorus-like, precede and inter- 
 pret the various cantos. " The Spirit's Epochs," 
 the " Daughter of Eve," and many another of 
 these lyrics are of singular beauty and power 
 as, for instance, this pregnant stanza of " Un- 
 thrift " : 
 
 Ah, wasteful woman, she who may 
 On her sweet self set her own price, 
 Knowing man cannot choose but pay, 
 How has she cheapened paradise ; 
 How given for naught her priceless gift, 
 How spoil'd the bread and spill'd the wine, 
 Which, spent with due respective thrift, 
 Had made brutes men, and men divine. 
 
 Doubtless it was this rarer quality, coupled with 
 Patmore's eternally real tenderness, which attracted 
 the immediate appreciation of the poets themselves. 
 Tennyson believed it " one of the very small 
 number of great poems which the world has had"; 
 Father Gerard Hopkins (who knew the work in a 
 later edition which his own criticism had helped to 
 perfect) declared that "to dip into it was like open- 
 ing a basket of violets." And Ruskin, both in 
 season and out of season, proclaimed that the 
 Angel ought to become " one of the most blessedly 
 popular" poems in our language. At last, and 
 after much early neglect, his words were fulfilled. 
 Patmore's work became the poetic idol of Eng- 
 land : its colouring of popular taste was reflected 
 in Owen Meredith's Lucile t as in Woolner's My
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 99 
 
 Beautiful Lady; and before the author's death 
 almost a quarter of a million copies had been 
 sold. 
 
 In a most real sense this idyll of domestic love 
 was the fruit of the poet's union with Emily Pat- 
 more. He himself declared that to the " subtlety 
 and severity " of his wife's poetic taste the work 
 owed " whatever completeness it has, not to men- 
 tion many of the best thoughts, which stand 
 verbatim as she gave them to me." Just here it 
 may be wise to remark that Coventry Patmore 
 was an impressionist in all statements of fact, that 
 (in the words of his friend Edmund Gosse) " he 
 talked habitually in a sort of guarded hyper- 
 bole " ; hence his writings and recorded conversa- 
 tions abound in the most excessive appreciation 
 or its opposite ! There seems, however, no 
 doubt that Emily Patmore was responsible not 
 merely for the inspiration of the Angel^ but for 
 much of its actual form. The seal of her firm, 
 frail little hand is upon its beauties and its limita- 
 tions ; and without her revelation of human 
 tenderness, her prodigal self-sacrifice as wife and 
 mother, the poem had scarcely been possible. So 
 about the brief dedication of the finished work 
 there hung a double tragedy. It was " To the 
 memory of her by whom and for whom I became 
 a Poet," for she had died one year before its 
 completion. 
 
 In the summer of 1862, after suffering for five 
 years from consumption, Patmore's wife passed 
 bravely and peacefully out of the little circle which 
 she had made in very truth "a world of love shut 
 in, a world of strife shut out." Slight as were the 
 poet's means, he had spared no effort that Emily 
 should be "as much cared for as any duchess " ; 
 and when the break at last came, his anguish 
 was acute. The " Azalea " ode, which records an
 
 ioo THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 experience of this time, vibrates with a poignancy 
 almost insufferable. Wakened by the perfume of 
 his wife's azalea flower, and momentarily oblivious 
 of his loss, the poet suffers a strange repetitional 
 agony : 
 
 At dawn I dream'd, O God, that she was dead, 
 
 And groaned aloud upon my wretched bed, 
 
 And waked, ah God, and did not waken her, 
 
 But lay, with eyes still closed, 
 
 Perfectly bless'd in the delicious sphere 
 
 By which I knew so well that she was near, 
 
 My heart to speechless thankfulness composed. 
 
 Till 'gan to stir 
 
 A dizzy somewhat in my troubled head 
 
 It was the azalea's breath, and she was dead ! 
 
 The warm night had the lingering buds disclosed, 
 
 And I had fall'n asleep with to my breast 
 
 A chance-found letter press'd 
 
 In which she said, 
 
 " So, till to-morrow eve, my Own, adieu ! 
 
 Parting's well paid with soon again to meet, 
 
 Soon in your arms to feel so small and sweet, 
 
 Sweet to myself that am so sweet to you ! " 
 
 Almost equally pathetic were Patmore's efforts 
 to be "mother and father, too," to his six young 
 children, his impatience at infantine perversity, 
 and the bitter self-accusings which followed. 
 One of the best known among his shorter odes, 
 "The Toys," traces its source back to the rocky 
 path of those sad days. Rocky enough in all 
 truth it was, yet upon its way one flower blossomed 
 into bloom Emily Honoria, the poet's eldest 
 daughter rising as best she might to be care- 
 taker of the little family, companion and con- 
 fidante to the father himself. 
 
 Coventry Patmore's own health had become so 
 much impaired by the long strain of anxiety and
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 101 
 
 sorrow, that in 1864 he obtained leave of absence 
 from the British Museum for a few months' travel 
 in Italy. It was arranged that he should join 
 Aubrey de Vere in Rome ; but, on the whole, the 
 bereaved poet seems to have anticipated the trip 
 without enthusiasm. " I expect," he wrote to that 
 wise little Emily Honoria, "to be very dull and 
 miserable for the first two or three weeks, until I 
 get to Rome ; but when I am there I shall be all 
 right, for nobody can be dull or miserable where 
 Mr. de Vere is." 
 
 A more compelling, though as yet an un- 
 acknowledged, magnet was drawing Patmore to 
 the Eternal City. For almost ten years during 
 which time he stood as a "High" Anglican a 
 shadowy but colossal vision of the Church 
 Catholic had been looming before his conscious- 
 ness, alternately claiming and repulsing his affec- 
 tions. The Catholic position, he tells us, had 
 early been revealed to him as so logically perfect 
 as almost to imply an absence of life : while from 
 his reading of St. Thomas he discovered two 
 luminous facts ; first, the eminent reality of 
 Catholic devotional literature ; secondly, that 
 "true poetry and true theological science have 
 to do with one and the same ideal, and that . . . 
 they differ only as the Peak of Teneriffe and the 
 table-land of Central Asia do." Yet the unalter- 
 able repugnance of his wife Emily (who was the 
 daughter of a Dissenting minister, and all her life 
 "invincibly" prejudiced and terrified by some 
 imaginary spectre of Papistry !) had long seemed 
 a tenable argument against the momentous 
 change. In point of fact, what the poet actually 
 needed, each day more imperiously, was simply 
 the gift of resolute faith. And so, pilgrim-like, 
 with unerring instinct, he travelled back that old, 
 old road which leads to Rome.
 
 102 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Once in the Papal city, Aubrey de Vere intro- 
 duced him into a Catholic circle of notable grace 
 and distinction ; and here, with " deliberate speed, 
 majestic instancy," he continued his search after 
 truth. It was not an easy struggle. We have 
 the whole story in his little "Autobiography" of 
 the spirit ; and it proves that while the man's 
 reason was soon convinced, his will remained 
 faltering and unpersuaded. The further he ad- 
 vanced stepping into the battle of truth and 
 error, he calls it, instead of being merely a spec- 
 tator the more vehemently developed his own 
 natural reluctance. After several weeks of this 
 ordeal, flesh warring against spirit and reason 
 against conscience in the age-old strife of centri- 
 petal and centrifugal force, it flashed upon our 
 poet that nothing but the definite act of submis- 
 sion the experimental and bridge-burning leap 
 could effect the reconciliation he sought. It was 
 late at night when he reached this decision ; but, 
 like the importunate widow of the Gospels, Pat- 
 more rushed from his hotel to the Jesuit monastery, 
 and would be denied neither by rule nor padlock. 
 Father Cardella, the learned and patient priest 
 who had been his instructor, refused to permit the 
 great step in this precipitate haste. But the neo- 
 phyte made then and there his general confession ; 
 and two or three days later he was received into 
 the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. 
 
 The first person to be apprised of this sub- 
 mission was an English lady then resident in 
 Rome, Miss Marianne Caroline Byles, a convert 
 and close friend of Cardinal Manning. " I had 
 never before beheld so beautiful a personality," 
 Coventry declared with his usual ardour, "and 
 this beauty seemed to be the pure effulgence of 
 Catholic sanctity." The world was soon to know 
 her as Mary Patmore, the poet's second wife.
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 103 
 
 1 'Tired Memory," an ode of great beauty, inter- 
 prets that delicate and difficult experience by 
 which the new love was reconciled to that other 
 infinitely mourned, infinitely cherished, scarcely 
 yet resigned to the "stony rock of death's in- 
 sensibility." In the pathos and intimacy of its 
 self-revelation, the poem is not unworthy of com- 
 parison with the Vita Nuova. Emily Patmore, 
 when death seemed quite near, had begged her 
 husband to wed again : so now in a passionate 
 reverie he brings her his confession of the strange 
 new joy which will not be denied. 
 
 O my most dear, 
 
 Was't treason, as I fear ? 
 
 the poet muses. And with brief stroke of sur- 
 passing delicacy he traces Love's "chilly dawn," 
 the coming of this fair stranger with her starlike, 
 half-remembered graces, the tired heart's reluctant 
 stirring, 
 
 And Nature's long suspended breath of flame 
 
 Persuading" soft and whispering Duty's name, 
 
 Awhile to smile and speak 
 
 With this thy Sister sweet, and therefore mine ; 
 
 Thy Sister sweet, 
 
 Who bade the wheels to stir 
 
 Of sensitive delight in the poor brain, 
 
 Dead of devotion and tired memory, 
 
 So that I lived again, 
 
 And, strange to aver, 
 
 With no relapse into the void inane, 
 
 For thee ; 
 
 But (treason was't ?) for thee and also her. 
 
 There were more than subjective difficulties in 
 the way of a marriage, however. Miss Byles 
 would seem to have taken a more or less formal 
 vow of celibacy, from which, later on, she was duly 
 dispensed ; while the poet, on his side, impetu-
 
 io 4 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 ously and quite unreasonably left Rome upon the 
 discovery that his fiancee was possessed of a large 
 personal fortune. By the good agency of friends 
 all was eventually reconciled. Patmore returned 
 to England to prepare his little family for the new 
 mother, and on 18 July, 1864, the couple were 
 married by Cardinal Manning at the church of 
 Saint Mary of the Angels, Bayswater. 
 
 Of course, neither the second marriage nor the 
 religious change was welcome news to our poet's 
 English friends. Yet, in the home-circle at least, 
 Mary Patmore's victory was complete. The few 
 letters of hers which have been preserved evince 
 the most gentle, even scrupulous, tenderness to- 
 ward Patmore's children, a fastidious interest in 
 his literary work, and a certain sweet austerity 
 which must have been distinctly piquante to her 
 outspoken and imperious husband. There is 
 something deliciously daring in her shy com- 
 ments upon the Angel: "It is a shame for you 
 to have been initiated into a thing or two quite 
 solely feminine," she writes to Coventry ; and yet 
 again she refers to the "Wedding Sermon" as 
 "not so high in some parts as Thomas a 
 Kempis, than whom nobody ought to be lower, 
 to my thinking." It sounds just a little bit formid- 
 able ! Yet that uncompromising elevation of soul, 
 and the vestal reserve of manner which few friends 
 were able to pierce, were in reality the best pos- 
 sible foil for Patmore's passionately sensuous yet 
 mystical nature. All of his most searching work 
 the Odes, perhaps the lost "Sponsa Dei," and 
 the complete finding of his own soul were accom- 
 plished during his life with her. 
 
 Shortly after this marriage the poet's lungs 
 were found to be so seriously affected that it be- 
 came necessary to leave London and the Museum 
 permanently. And so during the main part of
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 105 
 
 Mary Patmore's life they resided first at " Heron's 
 Ghyl" (an extensive Sussex estate which Coventry 
 spent several healthful years in supervising and 
 improving) and later at old Hastings by the sea. 
 The circumstances of the family were, of course, 
 vastly more felicitous than during the early days ; 
 and now for the first time in his life Patmore 
 found leisure for continuous concentrated study, 
 as well as for that quiet meditation which is the 
 seed-time of creative thought. His preoccupation 
 with theology proved more absorbing than ever ;' 
 so that he often spent four hours a day upon the 
 works of the more mystical saints Bernard and 
 John of the Cross, St. Teresa's Road to Perfection , 
 and always the monumental Summa. In the sym- 
 bolic teaching of Emanuel Swedenborg, also, he 
 found many points of agreement, being wont to 
 declare that the latter's "Catholic doctrine with- 
 out Catholic authority " would deceive, if possible, 
 the very elect. 
 
 A slender volume of nine Odes, printed for pri- 
 vate distribution in 1868, inaugurated Coventry 
 Patmore's second and greatest poetic period. 
 Superficially, there may seem but slight con- 
 tinuity between these searching and paradoxical 
 poems and the domestic Angel yet in essence 
 they are close akin. For the master-passion of 
 Patmore's life and the abiding inspiration of his 
 poetry were identical : his work was one long 
 Praise of Love. And so it was to an artistic and 
 mystical development rather than to any tem- 
 peramental breach that these odes bore witness. 
 Our poet spoke, indeed, a language little intel- 
 ligible to his countrymen ; and the white heat of 
 his passion, his seemingly esoteric psychology, 
 and his uneven but arresting metres inspired 
 dismay rather than any other emotion. Few of 
 those men (poets, for the most part) to whom the
 
 io6 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 precious volumes had been sent showed the 
 slightest realisation of this "grey secret of the 
 east " ; and only the most perfunctory acknowledg- 
 ments reached the author. So, with characteristic 
 disdain, Patmore consigned all of the edition re- 
 maining to his own log fire. " Tired Memory" 
 was one of the collection ; so also was the brief 
 and beautiful "Beata" ; " Faint Yet Pursuing," an 
 exquisite piece with what we now know as the true 
 Patmorean flavour ; and the resurgent loveliness 
 of " Deliciae Sapientias de Amore." With these 
 were two or three ironic Jeremiads of political and 
 philosophic nature, and " Pain " which no other 
 modern English poet, except perhaps Francis 
 Thompson, could have written. The poet's 
 brooding and scornful reflections as he watched 
 the flames consume these first fruits of his richest 
 thought scarcely tended to commute the pessim- 
 istic opinion he had already formed upon latter- 
 day tastes and institutions. 
 
 The genuine significance of these Odes, both 
 metrically and philosophically, can scarcely be 
 overstated. To discerning readers, even the ex- 
 tracts already quoted must reveal a divine in- 
 tensity, a subtlety of poetic feeling, beside which 
 all of Patmore's early work seems tentative and 
 imperfect. Their verse form (which the poet 
 somewhat vaguely described as based upon cata- 
 lexis) has successfully defied all but the broadest 
 critical analysis, and its effect would seem to 
 depend almost wholly upon some intuition, alike 
 musical and emotional, of pause and rhythm. 1 
 
 1 " It is in the management of the pauses in the recognition of 
 the value of time-beats that Coventry Patmore's supremacy in 
 the Ode form lies. In his ' domestic verses,' he uses rhyme in 
 places where Tennyson would not have dreamed of it recklessly, 
 audaciously, but in his highest moods ... he treats rhyme as an 
 echo." Maurice Francis Egan : "Ode Structure of Coventry 
 Patmore," in Studies in Literature.
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 107 
 
 Yet it provides an ideally perfect vehicle for 
 the intermittent stress and reticence, the amazing 
 passional surge, the mystic and often scholastic 
 reasoning of the poems themselves. Always 
 fascinating and usually dangerous has it proved 
 as a model to younger poets ; but at its best and 
 in the master's hand, there is an impetuous fresh- 
 ness about this ode form which is the next thing 
 to a new-blown wind flower. And this spon- 
 taneity was no mere illusion. Patmore spent 
 months, even years, in maturing the matter of his 
 greatest odes, but their actual form was often the 
 work of two or three hours. 
 
 " I have hit upon the finest metre that ever was 
 invented, and on the finest mine of wholly un- 
 worked material that ever fell to the lot of an 
 English poet," Coventry Patmore wrote exult- 
 antly when the Unknown Eros was in preparation. 
 This mine was mystic Catholic theology, in par- 
 ticular the nuptial relations of the soul to its God, 
 and in general that essential and passionate 
 humanity which is at the core of nearly every 
 doctrine of the Church. But here was a task to 
 stagger Orpheus himself had Orpheus turned 
 Christian ! For how translate the secrets of the 
 saints to a gaping multitude ? How teach men 
 what love meant, and what the Word made Flesh 
 implied? How draw back the veil of mystery and 
 symbol and allegory without breaking in upon 
 the "Divine Silence"? In an agony of concen- 
 tration, in prayer and fasting, the poet toiled on, 
 still falling short of that infinite " beauty and 
 freedom " which the work demanded, were it to 
 be done at all. Patmore reached at length his 
 own explanation of this failure : not until these 
 things should become controlling realities in his 
 own spiritual life could he sing of them worthily ! 
 No shade of religious doubt had crossed his
 
 io8 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 understanding or his conscience from the moment 
 of his reception into the Catholic Church. Yet, 
 with his brave, resolute candour, he has confessed 
 that the quiet and absolute regnancy of faith be- 
 fore which his soul longed to bow was denied for 
 many a weary year. More particularly was he 
 conscious of something perfunctory in his service 
 of the Most Blessed Virgin of an imperfect har- 
 mony with the mind of the Church in this imme- 
 morial devotion. So he resolved upon a curious 
 and conspicuous act, half votive, half penitential, 
 very humble and popular and un-Patmorean 
 namely, a pilgrimage to Lourdes ! The poet set 
 out toward the grotto of Bernadette's vision with 
 a beautiful crushing of personal repugnance, 
 asking much of the good God, giving what in 
 him lay. The result is best told in his own 
 words : 
 
 " On the fourteenth of October, 1877, I knelt at 
 the Shrine by the River Gave, and rose without 
 any emotion or enthusiasm or unusual sense of 
 devotion, but with a tranquil sense that the 
 prayers of thirty-five years had been granted. 
 I paid two visits of thanksgiving to Lourdes in 
 the two succeeding Octobers, for the gift which 
 was then received and which has never since for 
 a single hour been withdrawn." 
 
 One more dogma was thus revealed to Coventry 
 Patmore ; not merely as a convenient "form of 
 sound words " but as a. fact with vital bearing upon 
 the rest of life. Mary of Nazareth became to him 
 thenceforth the essential womanhood the symbol 
 and prototype of humanity, nature, the body. In 
 her littleness and sweetness was found the perfect 
 complement to God's infinitude : she was Regina 
 Mundi as well as Regina Coeli, foreshadowing the 
 triumph of every faithful soul. A great epic upon 
 the Marriage of the Virgin was to have celebrated
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 109 
 
 this theme, but it never saw completion. How- 
 ever, in that extraordinary surge of creative energy 
 which peace brought to our poet, the nucleus of it 
 all stole into one exquisite ode, "The Child's 
 Purchase." This poem, written late in 1877, 
 stands in a true sense as the crown and flower of 
 the Unknown Eros, the consummation of Patmore's 
 poetic career. Opening with the parable of a little 
 child who receives from his mother a golden coin 
 which at first he plans to spend, " or on a horse, 
 a bride-cake, or a crown," but which, at the last, 
 he brings back wearily as guerdon for her own 
 sweet kiss the poet dedicates his gift of precious 
 speech to this most gracious Lady. Then follows 
 the glorious invocation : 
 
 Ah, Lady Elect, 
 
 Whom the Time's scorn has saved from its respect, 
 
 Would I had art 
 
 For uttering that which sings within my heart ! 
 
 But, lo, 
 
 Thee to admire is all the art I know. 
 
 My Mother and God's ; Fountain of miracle ! 
 
 Give me thereby some praise of thee to tell 
 
 In such a song 
 
 As may my Guide severe and glad not wrong, 
 
 Who never spake till thou'dst on him conferr'd 
 
 The right, convincing word ! 
 
 Grant me the steady heat 
 
 Of thought wise, splendid, sweet, 
 
 Urged by the great, rejoicing wind that rings 
 
 With draught of unseen wings, 
 
 Making each phrase, for love and for delight, 
 
 Twinkle like Sirius on a frosty night ! 
 
 Aid thou thine own dear fame, thou only Fair, 
 
 At whose petition meek 
 
 The Heavens themselves decree that, as it were, 
 
 They will be weak ! 
 
 Thou Speaker of all wisdom in a Word, 
 Thy Lord !
 
 no THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Speaker who thus couldst well afford 
 Thence to be silent ah, what silence that 
 Which had for prologue thy " Magnificat ! "- 
 
 Ora pro me ! 
 
 Sweet Girlhood without guile, 
 The extreme of God's creative energy ; 
 Sunshiny Peak of human personality ; 
 The world's sad aspirations' one Success ; 
 Bright Blush, that sav'st our shame from shame- 
 
 lessness ; 
 
 Chief Stone of stumbling ; Sign built in the way 
 To set the foolish everywhere a-bray ; 
 Hem of God's robe, which all who touch are 
 
 heal'd ; 
 
 Peace-beaming Star, by which shall come enticed, 
 
 Though nought thereof as yet they weet, 
 
 Unto thy Babe's small feet, 
 
 The mighty, wand'ring disemparadised, 
 
 Like Lucifer, because to thee 
 
 They will not bend the knee ; 
 
 Ora pro me t 
 
 Desire of Him whom all things else desire ! 
 Blush aye with Him as He with thee on fire ! 
 Neither in his great Deed nor on His throne 
 O, folly of Love, the intense 
 Last culmination of Intelligence, 
 Him seem'd it good that God should be alone ! 
 Basking in unborn laughter of thy lips, 
 Ere the world was, with absolute delight 
 His Infinite reposed in thy Finite ; 
 Well-matched : He, universal being's Spring, 
 And thou, in whom are gather'd up the ends of 
 
 everything ! 
 Ora pro me ! 
 
 Throughout that supreme series to the Unknown
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE m 
 
 Eros, Patmore leads his reader into a realm of 
 palpitating beauty, truth and love. The sensuous 
 nature, by no means annihilated in this new life of 
 the spirit, is glorified and inconceivably satisfied. 
 The capacity of the soul for good (which our poet 
 always contended was "in proportion to the 
 strength of its passions ") is infinite, because these 
 passions are marshalled into the orderly service of 
 God. Here, at last, the Body receives its meet 
 salutation, not as "our Brother the Ass," but as 
 the 
 
 Little sequestered pleasure-house 
 
 For God and for His Spouse ; 
 
 and human love becomes a ladder leading up to 
 mystic visions of Christ as the Love, the Bride- 
 groom of the soul. Pre-eminently in the old 
 exquisite myth of Eros and Psyche, but scarcely 
 less in the experience of every loving and suffering 
 life, Patmore found this all-but-unspeakable truth 
 prefigured, and he played upon the motif in ode 
 after ode of marvellous beauty and tenderness. 
 
 The exceeding intimacy with which our poet 
 clothed (or shall one say unclothed ?) his tran- 
 scendent theme has proved distasteful to many a 
 devout but colder mind ; to Aubrey de Vere, who 
 begged the suppression of the Psyche odes, to 
 Cardinal Newman, who never became quite recon- 
 ciled to thus " mixing up amorousness with re- 
 ligion." The same exception, obviously, might 
 be taken to the Canticle of Canticles and to much 
 subsequent mystical writing. For love, as Coven- 
 try Patmore understood it, was "the highest of 
 virtues as well as the sweetest of emotions . . . 
 being in the brain confession of good ; in the 
 heart, love for, and desire to sacrifice everything 
 for the good of its object ; in the senses, peace, 
 purity and ardour." In this most elemental of
 
 ii2 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 human passions he found the one perfect and 
 consistent symbol of the Divine Desire and the 
 Divine Espousals. 
 
 And without this rare ability to translate spiritual 
 truth into the terms of a vibrating humanity 
 this impassioned and mystic sensuousness (which 
 some, doubtless, will label a " divine sensuality") 
 Patmore could scarcely have escaped the snares 
 which yawn before every poet conscious of a 
 message. In point of fact, he was never more 
 supremely the poet than when he was most radi- 
 cally the seer. Never, save possibly in one or two 
 political arraignments, does the personal note 
 derogate from the permanence of his poetry ; 
 never once, for all his vehemence of belief, does 
 he descend into didacticism. Nor does his sym- 
 bolic analysis of human emotion even for a moment 
 lessen the intense reality of pain and of love 
 throughout his song. Here is one little "Fare- 
 well," scarcely surpassed in its quiet heartbreak : 
 
 With all my will, but much against my heart, 
 
 We two now part. 
 
 My Very Dear, 
 
 Our solace is, the sad road lies so clear. 
 
 It needs no art, 
 
 With faint, averted feet 
 
 And many a tear, 
 
 In our opposed paths to persevere. 
 
 Go thou to East, I West. 
 
 We will not say 
 
 There's any hope, it is so far away. 
 
 But, O, my Best, 
 
 When the one darling of our widowhead, 
 
 The nursling Grief, 
 
 Is dead, 
 
 And no dews blur our eyes 
 
 To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies, 
 
 Perchance we may, 
 
 Where now this night is day,
 
 From a photograph by Barraud
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 113 
 
 And even through faith of still averted feet, 
 Making full circle of our banishment, 
 Amazed meet ; 
 
 The bitter journey to the bourne so sweet 
 Seasoning the termless feast of our content 
 With tears of recognition never dry. 
 
 In " Amelia" (Patmore's favourite poem, but 
 scarcely his readers') we find this ode-form com- 
 bined with the simpler narrative theme of his 
 earlier days. And once again we are forced to 
 feel how dangerous and difficult a thing truth to 
 the letter of life may become. Yet there are 
 perfect touches in the poem ; suggestions of Pat- 
 more's really great sea music, and Nature-flashes 
 like that 
 
 young apple-tree, in flush'd array 
 Of white and ruddy flow'r, auroral, gay, 
 With chilly blue the maiden branch between. 
 
 " St. Valentine's Day" and many another lyric 
 bear witness to this poet's searching observation 
 of natural beauty, yet this was less an object in 
 itself to him than a sensitive inise en scene for the 
 human drama. To the core he was a symbolist ; 
 and of natural phenomena he seems to have felt 
 what he somewhere declared of natural science 
 that its only real use was "to supply similes and 
 parables" to the spiritually elect. 
 
 The year 1880 brought sorrow back into Pat- 
 more's life in the sudden death of his wife Mary. 
 Her loss proved the first of a bitter trilogy. 
 Scarcely two years later, his well-loved daughter 
 Emily (Sister Mary Christina, as she had become, 
 of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus) died in 
 her near-by convent. The passing of this rare 
 and understanding spirit, from childhood so deeply 
 in sympathy with his own a poet herself, and 
 one of the best critics of her father's work can
 
 ii4 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 scarcely have been less than a sundering of the 
 poet's very life. And then there was Henry, Pat- 
 more's third son, whose brief novitiate of pain 
 and promise came to a close in 1883. His little 
 bark had never been very seaworthy, yet in spite 
 of serious illness he left poetic fragments of 
 decided beauty and originality. " At twenty years 
 of age, his spiritual and imaginative insight were 
 far beyond those of any man I ever met," Coventry 
 declared ; and it was his belief that had the boy 
 lived to maturity his poetic achievement might 
 have surpassed his own. 
 
 The decade commencing in 1884 Patmore de- 
 voted to a series of varied and stimulating prose 
 essays, contributed mainly to the St. fames' s Gazette. 
 Politics, religion, economics, art, literature, archi- 
 tecture, were in turn touched upon with powerful 
 and trenchant originality. The most significant 
 of these critiques were subsequently collected, 
 partially in Principle in Art, 1889, partially in 
 that precious volume, Religio Poetce, 1893. A 
 little book of pregnant aphorisms and brief, un- 
 equal essays, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, 
 closed this prose sequence in 1895. 
 
 Meanwhile the Twilight of the Gods was draw- 
 ing apace upon this inspired and imperious spirit. 
 Flashes of comfort there were, indeed the de- 
 voted companionship of Harriet Robson, who 
 became our poet's third wife, and that little late- 
 born son, Epiphanius. In the friendship of Mrs. 
 Meynell, too, Patmore found throughout these 
 latter years one of God's best gifts, an exquisite 
 community of ideals. One of his latest essays 
 was an appreciation of her own work both in 
 prose and verse ; and through her he came into 
 close touch with her friend Francis Thompson, 
 helping on the critical world to a recognition of 
 his genius.
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 115 
 
 During all this time the poet's heart was grow- 
 ing intermittently weaker, and his lungs, long 
 undermined, caused increasing anxiety. At 
 Lymington, whither he had removed, there were 
 repeated attacks and convalescences ; and at last, 
 in the November of 1906, a congestion set in. 
 "What about going to Heaven this time?" 
 Patmore asked his physician, with weary but 
 irrepressible humour. The next day, after re- 
 ceiving the last Sacraments, his agony began. 
 His words were broken prayers and thoughts for 
 those about him.. "I love you, dear," he whis- 
 pered to his wife when the end was very near, 
 "but the Lord is my Life and my Light." Into 
 this larger life he passed painlessly on 26 Novem- 
 ber, 1906 ; and in the humble habit of St. Francis' 
 tertiary, his body was borne to its long rest in 
 the little sea-coast cemetery. 
 
 Coventry Patmore's career as poet had closed 
 full twenty years earlier, with the "collected" 
 edition of 1886 : consequently his place in our 
 literature has long passed the first tentative stage. 
 The waxings and wanings of contemporary taste 
 the flood-tide of the Angel, the ebb-tide of the 
 earlier odes, the ominous calm of the final years 
 no longer any whit affect his reputation. It has 
 attained a solid and certain degree of permanence. 
 He has, quite indisputably, survived : as a name 
 indeed to the "general reader," but as a. fact in 
 the great confraternity of song. Francis Thomp- 
 son was eager in acknowledging his debt to "this 
 strong, sad soul of sovereign song " ; while others 
 not so eager have gathered the riches of his vine- 
 yard. It is even possible to say that the chances 
 of any just appreciation of his work are greater 
 to-day than they were yesterday, and that probably 
 they will be greater to-morrow than they are to- 
 day. For in the literary world, as in the philo-
 
 n6 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 sophic, mysticism the symbolic interpretation of 
 life is once again becoming a potent factor. At 
 the same time, a certain analytical brutality has 
 accustomed latter-day readers to face reality, even 
 to crave reality. Each of these tendencies is 
 favourable to Patmore, creating an audience 
 (larger, though never large !) which his poetry 
 may in time both delight and dominate. 
 
 "I have written little, but it is all my best," 
 he wrote in one of his Prefaces ; * ' I have never 
 spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared 
 time or labour to make my words true. I have 
 respected posterity ; and should there be a pos- 
 terity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that 
 it will respect me." He did, in fact, write little, 
 and not one of the great works he planned was 
 ever completed. Neither can all of this little be 
 rightly termed his best. His style was nervous 
 and unequal ; capable of the most breathless 
 perfection both of passion and of music, but 
 capable also of perversity and a curious common- 
 placeness. Yet the most fastidious posterity shall 
 respect him. He was, in his great moments, one 
 of our supreme lyric artists. He sounded the 
 heart-beats with poignant and unforgettable truth- 
 fulness. He may be said to have created a verse- 
 form of powerful originality. And then, his was 
 that fusing imagination (the crowning gift of 
 genius !) which transmutes reason and emotion 
 with equal facility into one "agile bead of boil- 
 ing gold." 
 
 But it is not merely with Patmore's poetry nor, 
 for that matter, with his prose that the critical 
 world must one day reckon. It is pre-eminently 
 with his poetic philosophy. Teaching in his verse 
 only by suggestions of rare beauty, but through- 
 out the essays with increasing definition and 
 completeness, he formulated a very consistent
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 117 
 
 rationale of life, love, and God. It was a mystical 
 superstructure reared upon the foundation of 
 Christian dogma, an interpretation of the "corol- 
 laries of belief." In another sense it may be called 
 the psychology of sex, since in the mysteries of 
 manhood and womanhood Patmore found the 
 heavens above and the earth beneath explained. 
 God he apprehended as the great positive, mas- 
 culine magnet of the universe the soul as the 
 feminine or receptive force ; and in this con- 
 junction of first and last lay the source of 
 all life and joy. These sexual characteristics he 
 detected in literature and art, as intellectual 
 strength or sensible beauty was found to pre- 
 dominate ; while in the workings of conscience 
 there was a similar duality, the rational and the 
 sensitive soul. But as the poems have shown, 
 it was the great sacrament of nuptial love which 
 most clearly manifested the mystery. 
 
 The whole of life is womanhood to thee, 
 Momently wedded with enormous bliss, 
 
 his Psyche cries out to her immortal lover : and 
 even so did Patmore conceive of the life-giving 
 God. Originally, he declared, there were three 
 sexes (which in the Holy Trinity, Truth, Love 
 and Life, found their divine prototype), and it was 
 mainly in order to achieve this complete, but for- 
 gotten, homo that "nuptial knowledge" became 
 the one thing needful. Woman, he writes in 
 that daring and suggestive essay, Dieu et Ma 
 Dame, "is 'homo' as well as the man, though 
 one element, the male, is suppressed and quies- 
 cent in her, as the other, the female, is in him ; 
 and thus he becomes the Priest and representative 
 to her of the original Fatherhood, while she is 
 made to him the Priestess and representative of 
 that original Beauty which is 'the express image
 
 n8 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 and glory of the Father,' each being equally, 
 though not alike, a manifestation of the Divine to 
 the other." Upon this symbol, conjugal love, 
 Patmore indeed based the body of his work : yet 
 he cannot justly be accused (as it would seem that 
 Swedenborg, in his much-discussed work, must 
 needs be) of sacrificing to it the eternal reality 
 love divine. Chastity our poet recognised as the 
 final and perfect flowering of this fair bud, and it 
 was the " Bride of Christ" alone who fully at- 
 tained here below to that double sex which shall 
 distinguish the regenerate in heaven. One of 
 his most perfect odes, " Delicise Sapiential de 
 Amore," stands for ever as a defence and vindi- 
 cation. Boldly it calls to the glad Palace of 
 Virginity those "To whom generous Love, by 
 any name, is dear " who, all gropingly and un- 
 wittingly, have sought and yet seek 
 
 Nothing but God 
 Or mediate or direct. 
 
 Father Gerard Hopkins, upon his single visit 
 to Hastings in 1885, was shown the manuscript of 
 a prose work, Sponsa Dei, designed by Patmore 
 for posthumous publication, and containing the 
 fullest expansion of these transcendental views. 
 He returned it with one grave remark "That's 
 telling secrets." It was upon the "authority of 
 his goodness," Patmore always declared, that this 
 beautiful treatise became fuel for another historic 
 burnt-offering : but one can scarcely doubt that 
 he himself had come to recognise the delicate 
 Tightness of the priest's judgment, and the fact 
 that his subject demanded the parabolic vesture 
 of poetry. We have the less cause to mourn over 
 this lost manuscript, since most of its matter 
 appears to have reached us through the pages of 
 Religio Poetce. "The Precursor" of this latter
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 119 
 
 volume is probably the most illuminating criticism 
 upon natural and divine love which Patmore (or 
 any other modern) has given us. It is the essence 
 of his poetic philosophy, thrown out with virile 
 sparks of mystical insight. 
 
 There is about Coventry Patmore's work a su- 
 preme, almost an infallible, Tightness of spirit : 
 but not infrequently an extravagance and perver- 
 sity of literal expression. Two explanations are 
 at hand the fact that much of his writing was 
 ''special pleading," and the exalted, autocratic 
 nature of his genius. "My call is that I have 
 seen the truth, and can speak the living words 
 which come of having seen it," he asserted ; and 
 his shafts were driven home with the instinct of a 
 born fighter. Yet there can be no question of the 
 constructive value of his teaching, of the over- 
 whelming reality with which it reveals the doctrines 
 of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Real Presence 
 and the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. All his 
 life he was, in his own words, trying "To dig 
 again the wells which the Philistines had filled " 
 building up the supernatural upon the basis of 
 natural good, bowing down before the divine 
 weakness and nearness of God in Christ, rather 
 than before His primal infinity. It is all symbol- 
 ised in that cryptic Tomb at Lymington : the 
 obelisk of Egypt (Nature) and the Lion of Judah, 
 rising upon the three steps of the Trinity ; the 
 Cross, the Host, the Virgin's lilies ; and for a text 
 that stupendous promise, My covenant shall be in 
 your flesh.
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 
 
 THE news of Lionel Johnson's early and tragic 
 death brought to friends a keen sense of personal 
 loss and to the literary world a consciousness 
 that his place would be difficult to fill, yet could 
 not, save with serious detriment, be left empty. 
 He had stood for something definite and some- 
 thing high. As poet, he had clothed conceptions 
 of delicate and poignant loveliness in the robe of 
 an almost classic austerity. As critic, he had 
 shown himself a master of sure judgment and 
 wide sympathies ; possessing, in his own words, 
 " preferences but no prejudices" if one except 
 that fundamental prejudice against the vulgar, the 
 perverse or the insincere in art. All things pure 
 and noble, and not a few forgotten or despised, 
 found shelter in Lionel Johnson's heart: and then, 
 that heart ceased beating. Even now it is difficult 
 to think dispassionately of the young poet, with 
 his childlike face and his words of memorable wis- 
 dom, of reticent yet compelling pathos. Still more 
 difficult is it to reach any satisfying analysis of the 
 mingled defeat and victory which made up his 
 life's brief conflict. His aloofness, to the very 
 end, was majestic as well as melancholy. 
 
 Strangely enough, it is in the vivid yet uncon- 
 scious self-portraiture of his final poem, the lines 
 to Walter Pater, that the truest comment upon his 
 own life and work is found : 
 
 Gracious God rest him, he who toiled so well 
 
 Secrets of grace to tell 
 Graciously .... 
 
 1 20
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 121 
 
 Half of a passionately pensive soul 
 
 He showed us, not the whole : 
 Who loved him best, they best, they only, knew 
 
 The deeps they might not view ; 
 That, which was private between God and him ; 
 
 To others, justly dim. 
 
 At Broadstairs, Kent, in the March of 1867, 
 Lionel Johnson was born into a family of Pro- 
 testant faith and military predilection ; a family, 
 indeed, which had seen much service and owned 
 to Irish affiliations. Pei'iaps it was the old Gaelic 
 and Cymric strain in his blood which kept the boy 
 so free from hostile influences and planted in his 
 heart an early love of Nature and of the past, a 
 certain mystic kinship with the Beautiful Un- 
 known. Then it was his great good fortune to be 
 educated at Winchester, where were passed six 
 years of deep content and inspiration. The 
 memory of Arnold was still redolent there ; fur- 
 ther back, the memories of Collins, of Otway, of 
 Sir Thomas Browne, and dreams of " half a thou- 
 sand years" of scholarship. There were the 
 natural beauties, too, of that rich and rural 
 England Twyford Down, the near-by hills and 
 woodlands, " walks and streets of ancient days," 
 and that "fair, fern-grown Chauntry of the 
 Lilies," white beneath the moonbeams. 
 
 Music is the thought of thee, 
 Fragrance all thy memory, 
 
 Lionel later wrote ; and there is scarcely a spire 
 or cranny of the old place on which he has not 
 dwelt in loving veneration. At Winchester, very 
 largely, his character was formed and his future 
 taste determined ; there the bent toward scholar- 
 ship, toward solitude and toward Catholicity be- 
 came inalienable parts of his life.
 
 122 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 When Johnson passed on to New College, 
 Oxford, he was scarcely the usual freshman. 
 He had written and had written well ; already a 
 curious maturity of intellect was united to that 
 curious youthfulness of physique which endured 
 even to the end. Several of his published poems 
 date as far back as 1887, 1885, even 1883, albeit 
 their author was but little inclined to rest upon these 
 tentative laurels. The educational process seems 
 to have been in the nature of a triumphal march 
 all along for Lionel Johnson, and the poem 
 "Oxford Nights" is a charming commentary 
 upon his early love of the classics "dear human 
 books "to him, and nowise formidable. In spite 
 of all this, he very nearly missed his first degree 
 because only one member of the entire examining 
 board could decipher his handwriting ! 
 
 Shortly after attaining his majority, Lionel 
 Johnson was received into the Catholic Church. 
 The step implied no sudden change of faith, for 
 he would seem to have been Catholic almost from 
 the first by right of intuitive yearning. His in- 
 stinct was all for legitimacy and orderly develop- 
 ment on the one side on the other, all for the 
 mystical and unworldly, for the" human fired with 
 a touch of the divine : and it is this very inevit- 
 ability which imparts such grace to the story. 
 Here was the return of a son into the arms of his 
 Mother, a great yet simple act ; and, beyond a 
 prayer that his beloved England might so return 
 to allegiance, Lionel appeared quite unconscious 
 that the matter could be made one of controversy. 
 It is said that about this time he had thoughts of 
 entering the priesthood. In his " Vigils" (written 
 at Oxford in 1887), one recognises a spiritual con- 
 centration very like that of the young Crashaw, 
 lone watcher " beneath Tertullian's roof of 
 angels":
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 123 
 
 Song 1 and silence ever be 
 
 All the grace life brings to me : 
 
 Song of Mary, Mighty Mother ; 
 
 Song of Whom she bore, my Brother : 
 
 Silence of an ecstasy 
 
 Where I find Him, and none other. 
 
 Lionel Johnson's vocation to what Faber has called 
 "the mystical apostolate of the inward life " was, 
 to the last, unwavering ; but with characteristic 
 self-criticism he deemed himself better suited to a 
 literary than to a priestly career. Thenceforth he 
 served his art with almost cloistral consecration, 
 finding in the long and painful service a "blessed- 
 ness beyond the pride of kings." 
 
 The first publication of Johnson's poems seems 
 to have been in 1892, when a selection of the 
 earlier ones appeared in the Book of the Rhymers* 
 Club. The beautiful lines " By the Statue of 
 King Charles at Charing Cross " were included 
 in the number, and attracted some attention from 
 the poetically hopeful. That same year he com- 
 pleted his searching and admirable prose work on 
 The Art of Thomas Hardy. The publication of 
 this volume was delayed until 1894, but its final 
 appearance was the signal for Lionel Johnson's 
 immediate welcome. The name of the youthful 
 critic (he was then only twenty-seven) was coupled 
 with those of Arnold and Pater, and his words 
 were thenceforth prized by the foremost literary 
 journals of London. 
 
 The passing of another year added new laurels, 
 for in 1895 his first complete volume of Poems was 
 issued. The power of verses like "The Dark 
 Angel " was recognised on all sides ; but Johnson's 
 intense subjectivity, his preoccupation with spiri- 
 tual ideas and ideals, made the critics somewhat 
 guarded in their praise. Meanwhile, with serene 
 indifference, our poet was preparing a new volume,
 
 i2 4 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 to appear in 1897 under the title Ireland, with Other 
 Poems. This contained some of his most exquisite 
 work ; religious lyrics that soared up straight 
 as the tapers upon an altar, songs of hapless 
 Innisfail, and chastened meditations upon life and 
 love. And it proved, beyond all doubt, that here 
 was a poet of Other-world fealties, with no inten- 
 tion of conciliating the practical English public. 
 With heart-whole sincerity Johnson followed the 
 gods of his affection and for the most part, 
 they were neglected divinities. Yet his poet's 
 insight had prophetic clearness ; looking backward 
 now, one is almost amazed at the number of 
 public movements which shared his sympathy. 
 There was, first of all, the Catholic reaction in 
 England, admittedly one of the great phenomena 
 of nineteenth-century thought ; and Lionel John- 
 son was as distinctively its product as the West- 
 minster Cathedral. Again, he was one of the 
 first to give ardent support to that Celtic Renais- 
 sance which has since proved itself a reality. As 
 an early member of the Irish Literary Society, he 
 mourned with Douglas Hyde over the decline of 
 the Gaelic tongue ; while, with his friend William 
 Butler Yeats, he shared hopes for the future of 
 Irish drama. So, too, did Johnson raise his 
 protest against a certain decadent literary influence 
 from across the Channel, and against various 
 native " professors of strange speech " and stranger 
 graces, who "suffer under the delusion that they 
 are very French." 
 
 But throughout these years when his critical 
 activity brightened the pages of the Academy, 
 the Daily Chronicle and other papers, Johnson's 
 health was perceptibly failing. His body, always 
 frail, grew less and less able to support the con- 
 tinued mental strain. Even those long, wondrous 
 rambles through Wales and Cornwall, which
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 125 
 
 brought the poet so close to Nature's meanings, 
 were powerless to wrest the secret of physical 
 health. Every normal stimulant seemed at last 
 ineffective ; and so it happened that the sad, 
 immemorial story was repeated the story of 
 which Edgar Poe furnished an even more tragic 
 instance. There is slight call to dwe 1 ! ipon the 
 warfare of these later years, or to ren ;tnber the 
 darkness which for a time eclipsed the star. For 
 full twelve months before his death Johnson ap- 
 pears to have published nothing ; from his nearest 
 friends he became a recluse, and all letters and 
 solicitations were met by silence. But scarcely 
 anyone realised the full pathos of his situation 
 until, on 22 September, 1902, the following note 
 came to the editor of the Academy. 
 
 "You last wrote to me some time, I think, in 
 the last century, and I hadn't the grace to answer. 
 But I was in the middle of a serious illness which 
 lasted more than a year, during the whole of which 
 time I was not in the open for even five minutes, 
 and hopelessly crippled in hands and feet. After 
 that long spell of enforced idleness I feel greedy 
 for work." 
 
 Accompanying this precious evidence of the 
 star's enduring and prevailing brightness were 
 the lines before mentioned, to the memory of his 
 "unforgettably most gracious friend," Walter 
 Pater. One week later on the night of 29 Sep- 
 tember he left his lodgings at Clifford's Inn for a 
 solitary walk. He never returned. Death, by some 
 inscrutable irony, waited tryst with this high and 
 solitary soul in all the vulgar glare of a way- 
 side "public house." There was a slight fall 
 (slight, indeed, for any other, but not for this 
 tabernacle of wrought ivory), and when the un- 
 conscious form was raised, the skull was found 
 hopelessly fractured. Mr. Yeats had said the
 
 126 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 word : it was all part of the old world's tragedy 
 that 
 
 So many pitchers of rough clay 
 Should prosper and the porcelain break in two. 
 
 So Lionel Johnson was carried to St. Bartholo- 
 mew's Hospital, where he whom the world had 
 taught weariness slept for four long days and 
 nights. Then, early in the morning of 4 October, 
 1902, he awakened in Eternity. 
 
 Were it not for the poems, it would be difficult 
 to connect this reticent, fragile struggler with life 
 always a pathetic and lovable figure with the 
 serenely impersonal man of letters known to 
 London journalism. But his own hand has 
 bridged the abyss ; through his poetical work may 
 we trace the author's spiritual pilgrimage with no 
 great incompleteness. It is not that the pages are 
 frequently autobiographical it is simply that both 
 choice of theme and treatment are essentially 
 characteristic. Some of the earliest of these 
 poems show the strong influence of Classical litera- 
 ture : "Sertorius" is one instance, and " Julian 
 at Eleusis," that plaintive elegy upon the death of 
 pagan worship, is another. But "The Classics," 
 with its brief and trenchant appreciation of the 
 Greek and Latin writers, is the most complete 
 expression of a culture which very largely moulded 
 Johnson's own literary style. Upon every page 
 of his work lies this stamp of scholarship ; one 
 recognises it in the exquisite, unobtrusive chiselling 
 of his verse-effects, but even more fundamentally 
 in his graceful ordering of ideas and his masterly 
 control of passion and imagination. Considering 
 his poetry as a whole, in matter rather than form, 
 we may safely define the mainsprings of inspira- 
 tion as Nature, Celtic Memories and Catholic Faith. 
 A glorious trio it was, falling into subdivisions of
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 127 
 
 almost equal majesty : exaltation of sky and sea 
 and earth, musings upon the immemorial tragedy 
 of life and death, chivalrous loyalty to Ireland, 
 deep love and reverence for the past, for pagan 
 culture and mediaeval mysticism, with wistful 
 visions of eternity. Even in poems of personal or 
 reminiscent origin, such as "Winchester" or the 
 series to " Malise," most of these elements are 
 discoverable, blended into a harmony which is 
 our poet's very own his characteristic message to 
 the world. 
 
 Because of the universal potency of external 
 beauty, it may be that Johnson's widest appeal 
 will be made through his Nature poems. " Sancta 
 Silvarum," written as early as 1886, expresses in 
 lines of powerful cadence the youth's passionate 
 sympathy with the Nature world, his quick response 
 to the 
 
 music of the mystery, that embraces 
 All forest-depths, and footless, far-off places, 
 
 his awed recognition of one mighty Will that 
 shapes the course of star and blossom, of wind and 
 sea. For the most part it was the wilder and more 
 desolate aspect that he loved to contemplate 
 Nature upon rain-driven moors, where "the wet 
 earth breathes ancient fair fragrance forth," rather 
 than in "vineyard and orchard, flowers and mel- 
 low fruit." 
 
 Great good it is to see how beauty thrives 
 
 For desolate moorland and for moorland men ; 
 
 To smell scents rarer than soft honey cells, 
 
 From bruised wild thyme, pine bark or mouldering peat ; 
 
 To watch the crawling grey clouds drift, and meet 
 
 Midway the ragged cliffs. O mountain spells ; 
 
 Calling us forth, by hill, and moor, and glen ! 
 
 Such is the exalting burden of "Gwynedd";
 
 i 2 8 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 but the author of " Gwynedd," be it remembered, 
 had never known the lotus land of Italy. 
 
 The blending of abstract and concrete throughout 
 these poems is peculiarly interesting : Lionel 
 Johnson's ideal beauty is not invariably wrapped 
 in cloud or dazzling in the splendour of sunrise 
 it is both sought and found beneath some actual, 
 earthly symbol. Hence this poet was increasingly 
 given to the painting of word pictures, little vig- 
 nettes of an almost Cowper-like nicety, which 
 crystallise some momentary aspect of Nature with 
 the soulful simplicity of Wordsworth himself. 
 " In England " abounds in these sketches, as of 
 
 A deep wood, where the air 
 Hangs in a stilly trance, 
 
 or again of : 
 
 Wind on the open down, 
 Riding the wind, the moon. 
 
 A thousand intimate recollections of Johnson's 
 own rambles intensify the personal note, and very 
 charmingly ; he sings of the sea-gulls wheeling off 
 in "a snowstorm of white wings," and of the shy 
 rabbits who hopped away at his approach, the 
 sunlight glowing "red their startled ears." 
 Our poet once wrote that while he could but ill 
 understand the temptation to worship the sun, he 
 found entirely comprehensible that other tempta- 
 tion toward worship of the earth "not with a 
 vague, pantheistic emotion, but with a personal 
 love for the sensible ground beneath his feet." It 
 is impossible not to feel this tenderness, this sense 
 of omnipresent kinship throughout his Nature 
 pictures; in his love of the "freshness of early 
 spray," and of sky and field and moor. The reality 
 of it all reaches final expression in those poignant 
 lines of "Cadgwith" :
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 129 
 
 Ah, how the City of our God is fair ! 
 
 If, without sea, and starless though it be, 
 
 For joy of the majestic beauty there, 
 
 Men shall not miss the stars, nor mourn the sea. 
 
 There has been a general acceptation of Johnson 
 as a poet of the Irish revival which is both true 
 and false. The heart has its own fatherland ; and, 
 while as fundamentally English in many ways as 
 Newman himself, Johnson did throw in his lot 
 unhesitatingly with the fortunes of the Celt. It 
 was at first, no doubt, a poetical and devotional 
 attraction (albeit blood, too, called, on the paternal 
 side) ; the response of a keenly imaginative nature 
 to the half-revealed magic of Celtic lore that 
 magic of fire and of tears. Out of this grew 
 Lionel's passion for Ireland ; albeit the glamour of 
 her romance and her mystery, her thirst for freedom 
 and her unnumbered woes, eventually won from 
 him the allegiance of a very son. That fine and 
 masterly poem which forms the title of his second 
 volume is probably the richest fruit of this self-dedi- 
 cation. From the elemental pathos of " Ireland's " 
 opening stanzas, through the bitter story of wrong 
 and martyrdom, and the cold, terrible arraignment 
 of the land's oppressors, the music sweeps with the 
 majesty at once of death and of victory : 
 
 How long? Justice of Very God ! How long? 
 The Isle of Sorrows from of old hath trod 
 The stony road of unremitting wrong : 
 The purple winepress of the wrath of God. 
 Is then the Isle of Destiny indeed 
 
 To grief predestinate ; 
 Ever foredoomed to agonize and bleed, 
 Beneath the scourging of eternal fate ? 
 Yet against hope shall we still hope, and still 
 
 Beseech the eternal Will ; 
 Our lives to this one service dedicate.
 
 i 3 o THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 And at last comes the plaintive tenderness of 
 that call to Mary : 
 
 Glory of Angels ! Pity, and turn thy face, 
 Praying thy Son, even as we pray thee now, 
 For thy dear sake to set thine Ireland free : 
 
 Pray thou, thy little Child ! 
 Ah ! who can help her, but in mercy He? 
 Pray then, pray thou for Ireland, Mother mild ! 
 
 There are numerous shorter poems in both 
 volumes treating of the same subject : notably 
 those powerful lines " To Parnell," and the elegy 
 beginning, 
 
 God rest you, rest you, rest you, Ireland's dead. 
 
 But "for a' that and a' that," Lionel Johnson 
 was no Celtic poet. One critic has asserted that 
 in him the Irish revival lost "its poet of firmest 
 fibre and its most resonant voice the only voice 
 in which there was the cordial of a great courage." 
 But when all is said, it was a voice from without. 
 Perhaps the clearest way to draw this distinction 
 is to set side by side Johnson's treatment of a 
 Celtic theme with, for instance, that of Mr. Yeats. 
 The latter's poem on the "Death of Cuhoolin" 
 ends thus : 
 
 In three days' time, Cuhoolin with a moan 
 Stood up, and came to the long sands alone : 
 
 For four days warred he with the bitter tide ; 
 And the waves flowed above him, and he died. 
 
 This is by no means a superlative example of the 
 Irish poet's work, but it has caught something of 
 the crude, epic, dream-like simplicity of a primi- 
 tive saga. Now in "Cyhiraeth," Johnson has 
 embodied the story of Llewellyn of Llanarmon
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 131 
 
 and the strange summons that came to him from 
 the Ghostly Gate. In lines of weird beauty he 
 describes the "dolour and the dirge" which 
 swept upon the land one cold midnight, the 
 " bitterness of wounding fire which pierced the 
 chieftain's heart." Then 
 
 While wailed the herald cry 
 Upright he sprang, and stood to die, 
 So, Lion of Llanarmon ! 
 Lion soul and eagle face 
 Fought with death a splendid space ; 
 Oh, proud be thou, Llanarmon ! 
 Not man with man, but man with death 
 Wrestled : thine hoariest minstrel saith 
 No greater deed, Llanarmon ! 
 
 The power of such poetry is undeniable : but is 
 one not conscious of the long vista of time and 
 art through which our bard looks back upon his 
 subject? The Celtic inspiration was in truth a 
 precious and powerful factor in Lionel Johnson's 
 poetry ; one is not so certain that it was an in- 
 evitable or an inalienable one. 
 
 On the other hand, any divorce between the 
 poet and his religious lyrics would be quite in- 
 conceivable. His early lines to u Our Lady of 
 the Snows " are one of the most beautiful expres- 
 sions of the contemplative ideal to be found in 
 English poetry: while his " Visions " of Hell, 
 Purgatory and Heaven are notable alike for ex- 
 treme delicacy of touch and extreme power. But 
 it was reserved for the second volume to prove 
 this scholarly young convert one of the loveliest 
 of our devotional poets. It is seldom possible to 
 wander far among the lily-beds of English sacred 
 lyrics without meeting traces of Crashaw, the 
 ever-fragrant ; and in Lionel Johnsont he affinity 
 is quite manifest. Indeed, many of his Catholic
 
 i 3 2 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 poems are altogether worthy of a place beside the 
 master's. Such is that hymn of exquisite beauty, 
 " Our Lady of the May " : 
 
 O Flower of flowers, our Lady of the May ! 
 
 Thou gavest us the World's one Light of Light : 
 
 Under the stars, amid the snows, He lay ; 
 
 While Angels, through the Galilean night, 
 
 Sang glory and sang peace ; 
 
 Nor doth their singing cease, 
 
 For thou their Queen and He their King sit 
 
 crowned 
 
 Above the stars, above the bitter snows ; 
 They chaunt to thee the Lily, Him the Rose, 
 With white Saints kneeling round. 
 Gone is cold night : thine now are spring and day: 
 O Flower of flowers, our Lady of the May ! 
 
 And this is scarcely more beautiful than a dozen 
 others which follow or precede. " Te Martyrum 
 Candidatus " has been one of the most frequently 
 quoted ; and lines like 
 
 These through the darkness of death, the dominion 
 of night, 
 
 Swept, and they woke in white places at morning 
 tide: 
 
 They saw with their eyes, and sang for joy of the 
 sight, 
 
 They saw with their eyes the Eyes of the Cruci- 
 fied, 
 
 illustrate how admirably its metre reproduces the 
 triumphant onward rush of those White Horse- 
 men, the "fair chivalry of Christ." All this is 
 merely a further instance of the poet's mastery 
 over technical form ; this time in a department 
 where, perhaps more than in any other division of 
 verse, purely artistic excellence is prone to be 
 neglected. Yet every reader must be aware that
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 133 
 
 the religious sincerity of Johnson's poems did not 
 suffer by his formal precision. What could be 
 more tender, more straightforward, than " Sur- 
 sum Corda," lines addressed to his contemporary 
 poet, Francis Thompson ? 
 
 Lift up your hearts! We lift 
 
 Them up 
 To God, and to God's gift, 
 
 The Passion Cup. 
 
 Lift up yotir hearts! Ah, so 
 
 We will : 
 Through storm of fire or snow, 
 
 We lift them still. . . . 
 
 But as an expression of pure spiritual yearning, 
 Lionel Johnson has scarcely left us a gift of more 
 haunting beauty than the short poem, " De Pro- 
 fundis": 
 
 Would that with you I were imparadised, 
 
 White Angels around Christ ! 
 That, by the borders of the eternal sea, 
 
 Singing, I too might be. 
 
 Where reigns the Victor Victim, and His Eyes 
 
 Control eternities ! 
 Immortally your music flows in sweet 
 
 Stream round the Wounded Feet ; 
 And rises to the Wounded Hands ; and then 
 
 Springs to the Home of Men, 
 The Wounded Heart : and there in flooding praise 
 
 Circles, and sings, and stays. 
 
 So far, we recognize the spiritual exaltation, the 
 lyric loveliness of Crashaw and the older Catholic 
 hymnists. But listen :
 
 134 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 My broken music wanders in the night, 
 
 Faints, and finds no delight : 
 White Angels take of it one piteous tone, 
 
 And mix it with your own ! 
 Then, as He feels your chanting flow less clear, 
 
 He will but say : I Tiear 
 The sorrow of My child on earth. 
 
 There we catch the voice of our own Lionel John- 
 son, the poet of austere ideals, bruised and fore- 
 spent by the battle ; the poet of faith through an 
 age incredulous. Bravely he faced the conflict, 
 but no longer joyously : the maladie du siecle had 
 touched him. 
 
 In approaching his more personal poems, we 
 shall have to face the most serious charge ever 
 brought against Johnson's poetry the charge that 
 it is lacking in true emotional quality. We are 
 told that his lyrics spring from and express a 
 thought rather than a feeling ; and to admit this 
 unreservedly is to imply that Johnson should have 
 confined himself to prose. But can one admit it? 
 The plaintive, eerie melody of " Morfydd " goes 
 sighing through the mind : 
 
 A voice on the winds, 
 A voice by the waters, 
 
 Wonders and cries : 
 Oh ! -what are the winds 
 And what are the waters? 
 Mine are your eyes / 
 
 One remembers, too, the splendid climax of those 
 later lines, "To Morfydd Dead" 
 
 Take from me the light, 
 
 God ! of all thy suns : 
 Give me her, who on the winds 
 Wanders lone !
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 135 
 
 and they do not seem to speak of frigid formalism. 
 Neither do the odes to "Winchester," nor the 
 wonderfully tender poems on friendship to be 
 found in both volumes. The truth of the charge 
 is probably this : all the world loves a lover (at 
 least, theoretically), and Lionel Johnson did not 
 show the usual predilection toward interpreting 
 this master passion. His love poems are few in 
 number. But if any reader be tempted to doubt 
 this poet's capacity for the very white heat of 
 emotion, we would commend to his perusal 
 "The Destroyer of a Soul," or those passionately 
 beautiful lines, " A Proselyte" : 
 
 Heart of magnificent desire : 
 O equal of the lordly sun ! 
 Since thou hast cast on me thy fire, 
 My cloistral peace, so hardly won, 
 
 Breaks from its trance : 
 
 One glance 
 From thee hath all its joy undone ! 
 
 Deeper still may we pierce to the heart-pleading 
 of that early and tragic poem " Darkness" even 
 to the vehement self-revelation of "The Dark 
 Angel," and its companion-piece, " To Passions " : 
 
 That hate, and that, and that again 
 Easy and simple are to bear : 
 My hatred of myself is pain 
 Beyond my tolerable share. 
 
 Such lines are more convincing to some of us 
 than the melodramatic outpourings of a Byron. 
 As for "The Dark Angel" perhaps the most 
 famous of all Lionel Johnson's work that is 
 a poem of quintessential power, a very flash-light 
 upon the bitter and eternal conflict which had its 
 rise in Eden :
 
 136 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Dark Angel, with thine aching lust 
 To rid the world of penitence : 
 Malicious Angel, who still dost 
 My soul such subtle violence ! 
 Because of thee, no thought, no thing 
 Abides for me undesecrate : 
 Dark Angel, ever on the wing, 
 Who never readiest me too late ! 
 
 There is something well-nigh intolerable in 
 the verisimilitude of the poem, in its frightful 
 arraignment of this "venomous spirit" who 
 broods over the world of Nature and art, tor- 
 menting the land of dreams, blackening the face 
 of spring and youth and life itself. The lines 
 would be almost sinister were it not for the 
 splendid courage of those final stanzas : 
 
 I fight thee in the Holy Name ! 
 Yet, what thou dost is what God saith : 
 Tempter ! should I escape thy flame, 
 Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death. 
 
 Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so, 
 Dark Angel ! triumph over me : 
 Lonely ', unto the Lone I go ; 
 Divine^ to the Divinity. 
 
 The man who wrote those lines felt, indeed ; but 
 upon his lips lay the seal of culture and of tem- 
 peramental repression. This was the veil of his 
 heart's inner sanctuary that ' ' Precept of Silence " 
 which one of his most characteristic poems has 
 immortalised : 
 
 I know you ! Solitary griefs, 
 Desolate passions, aching hours ! 
 I know you : tremulous beliefs, 
 Agonised hopes, and ashen flowers !
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 137 
 
 Some players upon plaintive strings 
 Publish their wistfulness abroad : 
 I have not spoken of these things, 
 Save to one man, and unto God. 
 
 By no means insignificant is the "criticism of 
 life" throughout this poetry. Lionel Johnson was 
 one of a little band who through all the turmoil 
 of late nineteenth-century thought through the 
 storms of rationalism and materialism and so- 
 called realism kept their faces steadfastly toward 
 the East. Truth and Beauty shone as twin stars 
 before his quiet gaze ; it was his supreme achieve- 
 ment to create works of art which "suffice the 
 eye and save the soul beside." His message, 
 all along, was one of reconciliation. He con- 
 trived to be at once the apostle of culture and 
 of devotion, of art and of nature, of modernity 
 and of the ancient. His love for Catholicity and 
 for Ireland nowise lessened his joy in England ; 
 nor did his exultation in the forest wilds dull his 
 ears to the call of London's thoroughfares. One 
 marvels, seeing the gracious harmony of his pages, 
 where the imagined hostility could have lain. 
 Now, of course, one cause of this comprehensive 
 view was the aloofness of his attitude. His sensi- 
 tiveness was very exquisite, his sympathy with 
 human experience was very keen ; but he stood 
 a little apart from life. His was the attitude of 
 philosopher and contemplative ; although never 
 that of the mere academician. Perhaps his own 
 interior struggle served to obviate a natural 
 tendency toward exclusive/less, and to unite the 
 poet with his great labouring and suffering 
 brotherhood. It is never easy for a temperament 
 like Johnson's to overcome its intolerance for 
 many aspects of human nature. It is never easy 
 to recognise that the spirit is willing and the flesh
 
 138 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 weak, without despising the flesh. But if there 
 be one line of development perceptible through- 
 out our poet's work, it is an increasing tendency 
 toward the human and concrete. It is a long, 
 long cry from the " proud and lonely scorn " of 
 temptation that goes singing through his youth- 
 ful " Ideal," to the humbled yet resolute wrestling 
 of his " Dark Angel." For the rest, we shall have 
 to admit that Lionel Johnson's song was for the 
 few rather than the many that the nun-like 
 delicacy and austerity of his muse made any 
 popular recognition quite improbable. 
 
 As critic, Johnson has met with a more liberal 
 appreciation. The Art of Thomas Hardy > upon 
 which that reputation rests mainly, is universally 
 recognised as one of the sanest and most scholarly 
 pieces of work called forth by recent fiction. The 
 subject of this first volume testifies very clearly 
 to its author's singular openness of mind: "I 
 remember," he says, "but few of Mr. Hardy's 
 general sentiments, about the meaning of the 
 unconscious universe, or of conscious mankind, 
 with which I do not disagree . . . his tone of 
 thought neither charms nor compels me to acqui- 
 esce ; but it is because I am thus averse from the 
 attitude of a disciple, that I admire Mr. Hardy's 
 art so confidently." Here, in truth, is the per- 
 fect critical temper leading the artist to whom 
 spiritual laws were the prime realities to lay his 
 tribute at the shrine of another artist, of another 
 philosophy. But in Hardy, Lionel Johnson 
 recognised the essential humanist, the legitimate 
 descendant of a noble line of English novelists, a 
 master of constructive art, and a truthful portrayer 
 of Wessex life and thought. 
 
 11 He dwells, in a dramatic meditation, upon the 
 earth's antiquity, the thought of 4 the world's grey 
 fathers,' and, in particular, upon certain tracts
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 139 
 
 of land, with which he has an intimacy . . . old 
 names, and old houses lingering in decay . . . 
 pagan impulses, the spirit of material and natural 
 religion, the wisdom and the simplicity, the blind 
 and groping thoughts of a living peasantry still 
 primitive. . . . He loves to contemplate the 
 entrance of new social ways and forms, into a 
 world of old social preference and tradition ; to 
 show how there is waged, all the land over, a 
 conflict between street and field, factory and farm, 
 or between the instincts of blood and the capacities 
 of brain ; to note how a little leaven of fresh learn- 
 ing may work havoc among the weighty mass 
 of ancient, customary thought ... to build up, 
 touch by touch, stroke upon stroke, the tragedy 
 of such collision, the comedy of such contrast, 
 the gentle humour or the heartless satire of it all, 
 watched and recorded by an observant genius." 
 
 Such passages, as sonorous as they are sym- 
 pathetic, bring all of us to the deeper understand- 
 ing of Hardy's work. But the book is even 
 broader in scope, tracing the history of the 
 English novel from the time of Defoe, and 
 characterising with rare insight its different 
 developments. "The modern novel," observes 
 Johnson, " differs from its predecessors mainly 
 in this : that it is concerned, not with the storm 
 and stress of great, clear passions and emotions, 
 but with the complication of them : there is a 
 sense of entanglement. . . . Psychology, to use 
 that ambitious term, supplies the novelist with 
 studies and materials ; not only the free and 
 open aspect of life itself." A sense of entangle- 
 ment! Could any other one phrase so aptly have 
 summed up the strength and weakness of latter- 
 day fiction, from George Meredith or George 
 Eliot to Henry James? 
 
 It was characteristic of Lionel Johnson that his
 
 i4Q THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 appeal should have been ever to the past. " That 
 inestimable debt of reverence, of fidelity, of under- 
 standing " which modern scholarship owes anti- 
 quity less a debt, after all, than "a grace sought 
 and received " was never far from his conscious- 
 ness. Classicist he always was, from those days at 
 old Winchester; " purist and precisian" in style, 
 with slight interest in spelling-reform or other 
 utilitarian devices. Inevitably then, past great- 
 ness, the best that had been known and thought, 
 became for him, as for Arnold, the touchstone by 
 which to try all present achievement, " About con- 
 temporary voices there is an element of uncertainty 
 not undelightful, but forbidding the perfection of 
 faith." Johnson wrote in one of his sage little 
 articles in the Academy: "We prophesy and 
 wait." Yet, although the personal equation in- 
 clined thus to the "serene classics," the critic's 
 attitude toward a living genius was one of wistful 
 appreciation. His every sense was keen in the 
 search for beauty, and he welcomed it in whatever 
 guise : Lucretius and Fielding, Pope and Words- 
 worth, Renan and Hawthorne all of these shared 
 his sympathy and his comprehension. 
 
 The discerning had great hopes of Johnson, 
 with his Celtic dreams, his scholarly and exquisite 
 methods, his unwavering faith in spiritual realities. 
 And they were never fully realised. Without pain 
 at least, without protest he passed on to the 
 mansion prepared from eternity for these " inheri- 
 tors of unfulfilled renown." Of that supreme work 
 which he had contemplated, a beautiful, final, recon- 
 ciling study of Catholic art and Catholic life, a 
 philosophy merging ethics and aesthetics into one 
 harmonious whole, no word whatever remains. But 
 is there not a danger of carrying this regret too far 
 of urging the artist's possibilities at the expense 
 of his actual achievement? The work Johnson has
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 141 
 
 left is superlatively excellent : it needs neither 
 apology nor explanation ; it simply needs to be 
 read. That, indeed, is the prime difficulty ; for 
 the world is busy about many things, and Lionel 
 Johnson spoke with so gentle a sweetness, so 
 modest a serenity. In prose and verse alike, he 
 was stranger to the jealousies and impatiences of 
 mere ambition. Securus judicat orbis errarum,he 
 was fond of quoting "sure and sound is the 
 whole world's judgment " ; and to Time, that 
 judge so deliberate and so infallible, he committed 
 all. It is pleasant and reassuring to remember 
 Lowell's words concerning the two kinds of 
 literary genius. " The first and highest," he tells 
 us, "may be said to speak out of the eternal to 
 the present, and must compel its age to under- 
 stand it; the second understands its age, and tells 
 it what it wishes to be told." 
 
 Lionel Johnson, quite obviously, was not of this 
 latter type ; but one has strong hope that his place 
 is with the higher company.
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 
 
 Designer infinite ! 
 
 Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn 
 with it ? 
 
 Whether man's heart or life it be which yields 
 Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields 
 Be dunged with rotten death ? 
 
 WORDS of terrible import these and of a truth 
 before which one veils the unwilling eyes : the 
 words of a poet whose heart had already endured 
 the charring of God's insatiate flame ; who, in 
 death, was yet to look down upon the whitening 
 harvest of his art. 
 
 For the world knew not Francis Thompson dur- 
 ing the days of his pilgrimage. Only a little band 
 the poets, the elect, and sundry of those whose 
 eyes had by miracle been opened knew him. 
 They, after all, were the only ones whose praise 
 could have signified to the man himself. But after 
 he had gone out from among us the world wakened 
 up. The world had, indeed, almost immediately 
 the grace to realise how costly a loss had befallen 
 it. The world mourned the poet. The world 
 began to read his thrice-precious legacy. And so 
 the world grew rich. Then came that memorable, 
 that almost spectacular, posthumous essay on 
 Shelley, as rich and as radiant as a handful of 
 jewels ; and even the general reader capitulated. 
 So that to-day one may quite declare Thompson's 
 immortality to have been speedily achieved ; for 
 only the dead are immortal. 
 
 142
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 143 
 
 When a certain slender volume of Poems, by 
 one Francis Thompson, was issued in the Novem- 
 ber of 1893, critical London opened wide eyes of 
 attention and even astonishment. It was not, of 
 course, the mere fact of a new luminary upon the 
 poetic horizon too frequent an occurrence to 
 cause much excitement, and prone, alas, to prove 
 but the giddy flight of a star shooting down to 
 oblivion. But in these pages there was mani- 
 festly something unusual something elemental 
 and arresting. Their author was straightway 
 greeted with the dubious distinction of new poet, 
 and every variety of criticism was showered upon 
 his work. The old, old cry of " native woodnotes 
 wild " came from one reviewer, from another the 
 complaint of too much polishing ; his diction was 
 decried as illiterate on one side and as "too liter- 
 ate " on the other. As a whole, however, the 
 verdict was one of rather dazed appreciation ; and, 
 if personal details of a more or less romantic nature 
 began to mingle with current criticism, they merely, 
 and for a time, added to the poet's little vogue. 
 
 But who was the poet? In one sense a young 
 man some thirty-four years as ages go: but 
 bowed already, bent, well-nigh broken by the age- 
 old sorrow of the world. Not unmeet was it that 
 Thompson's birth should have been in Lanca- 
 shire, historic home of the flame-red, blood-red 
 rose. His father and mother were converts to the 
 Faith. He was early sent to the venerable Ushaw 
 school, in half-anticipation of a priestly career. 
 Later came the tragic choice of medicine (his 
 family's choice, for the father was a physician) 
 and the passing on to Owens College, Manchester. 
 But Francis loved the public libraries too well to 
 keep to his Materia Medica ; and he would seem 
 to have lacked courage to tell his father how 
 radically, how painfully, how even ludicrously
 
 144 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 impossible the chosen vocation must be. So the 
 breach came, the needless yet inevitable breach ; 
 only healed by sufferance under the Franciscan 
 shadow of Pantasaph, a few months before the 
 parent's death. " I was in every sense an unsatis- 
 factory son," the poet declared with sad humility 
 in his later life. 
 
 Up to London came the young exile, unfriended, 
 with a body never robust, a heart of aching sensi- 
 tiveness, and a mind absorbed in dreams of ideal 
 beauty. Nothing was ever so inconsolably easy 
 as his steep, his swift descent. Those days upon 
 the cruel London streets ; those nights when he 
 lay outcast, suffering the "abashless inquisition 
 of each star"; the wonderful, tentative efforts; 
 the ceaseless literary discouragements ; the want, 
 the shame, the impotence of it all, bore their 
 speedy fruit. Master of the drug this poet early 
 scorned to be : but now, in his misery, the servi- 
 tude to the drug was his. There, at least, lay the 
 cessation of pain. It sounds almost melodramatic, 
 the sequel to this terrible prologue : yet it comes 
 to us upon Thompson's own word that only the 
 hand of Thomas Chatterton reaching out to him 
 from the twilight world of poetry and of death 
 stayed his own hand in what might have been the 
 hour of despair. That was the night of ultimate 
 darkness. But the angels kept watch and slept 
 not until morning broke. And with morning came 
 the dawn of a new life for Francis Thompson. 
 
 The honour of "discovering" the poet rests 
 primarily with the editor of Merry England 
 through whose insight the worth of his vagrant 
 scraps of manuscript was recognized, through 
 whose tender, indefatigable patience he was 
 tracked and coerced into salvation. To him 
 as, in a double sense, to his wife, Alice Meynell 
 fell due the debt of Thompson's immortal grati-
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 145 
 
 tude : and to these "dear givers" was dedicated 
 the first volume of his poems. Some of these 
 had been written in Sussex, at the Premonstraten- 
 sian Monastery of Storrington, to which the new- 
 found friends had directed him. And here, during 
 the following months, was passed an interval of 
 ardently serene creativeness. Here and in London 
 "The Hound of Heaven" took final form that 
 tremendous and triumphant ode which silenced 
 the most adverse batteries of criticism, and which 
 to the last must stand as one of Thompson's very 
 greatest achievements. Here flamed into life "The 
 Setting Sun." Most of his poems upon children 
 were subsequently composed, and "Love in 
 Dian's Lap" took on its chastely perfect vesture, in 
 London. There too were written the Sister Songs, 
 published as a second volume in 1895; and Panta- 
 saph, near Holywell, in Wales, itself the seat of a 
 Capuchin Monastery, was the birthplace of most 
 of the New Poems which appeared in 1897. 
 Accentuation, all along, might be declared the 
 keynote of this last volume, for every characteristic 
 of the earlier work we here find deepened. It is 
 ' ". once more searchingly philosophical and more 
 richly imaginative ; its tenderness is more impas- 
 sioned, its pathos more intense ; while a certain 
 marvellous verbal jugglery (that purple cloud of 
 chaotic magnificence which so often wrapped, and 
 sometimes obscured, Francis Thompson's thought) 
 is even more inalienably dominant in them. 
 
 Then the poet returned to London ; there he 
 lived, for the greater number of his remaining 
 years, in intimate union with one family of friends, 
 but latterly he wrote little poetry. A few tren- 
 chant prose reviews came from his hand during 
 the final decade. Then also was written that 
 admirable and unique Life of St. Ignatius. But 
 not the wisest and the dearest of our poet's
 
 146 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 friends could recapture the splendid victory of 
 that early renaissance, nor win back health to his 
 own poor life. 
 
 It was on the i3th of November, 1907, that 
 Francis Thompson died : shortly after a visit once 
 again to his peaceful Sussex, at the home of Mr. 
 Wilfrid Blunt. He died in the London to which, 
 rather than to the country, he seemed to belong, 
 and just as dawn was breaking in the east. He 
 left behind him a number of unpublished poems, 
 alike early and late, to be gathered by his literary 
 executor in the collected edition of his work. 
 
 Well one may see Thompson's achievement 
 as a whole now, and through a perspective of 
 time which, naturally, changes some details of 
 the outlook. What does not change or anywise 
 diminish is the conviction of his high place as 
 poet. His work is passionately personal ; for all 
 the debt to Patmorean philosophy, its form and 
 its thought are overwhelmingly his own. But it 
 has added many a " heart-remembered " line to 
 the legitimate heritage of English literature. 
 This subjective colouring, as omnipresent in the 
 lyric of childhood as in the Nature ode, is no- 
 where more emphatic than throughout the " Love 
 in Dian's Lap," addressed to Mrs. Meynell. 
 Nor, indeed, is there any division of Thompson's 
 poetic work more uniquely exquisite. These poems 
 are, for the most part, a record of one of those 
 high and beautiful friendships which literature has 
 again and again immortalised for us. 
 
 At the rich odours from her heart that rise, 
 My soul remembers its lost Paradise, 
 
 I grow essential all, uncloaking me 
 
 From this encumbering virility, 
 
 And feel the primal sex of heaven and poetry,
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 147 
 
 the poet declares, in one of that series which Pat- 
 more has said " St. John of the Cross might have 
 addressed to St. Theresa." In all truth, one must 
 search Jerusalem with many a candle before 
 coming upon anything more ethereally yet poign- 
 antly beautiful in its own field than "Her Por- 
 trait" or " Manus Animam Pinxit." They are 
 not in any sense the usual style of erotic poetry, 
 these poems which see the body but as veil and 
 vesture of the spirit within, and which make 
 their most piercing cry : 
 
 Oh be true 
 To your soul, dearest, as my life to you ! 
 
 But, even aside from their poetic excellence, there 
 is that in them for which Francis Thompson has 
 taken all true womanhood into his debt ; as did 
 long ago that brave Cavalier lyrist who laid his 
 tribute at the feet of " Lucasta." 
 
 Through the love poems of the later and final 
 volume there vibrates a new note of passionate 
 pain, and the pathos of the series entitled 
 " Ultima" is scarcely exceeded, save by its dig- 
 nity. "No man ever attained supreme know- 
 ledge unless his heart had been torn up by the 
 roots " : these are the words chosen by Thomp- 
 son as text for his " Holocaust." And verily 
 hand in hand the joy and the pain of love are 
 seen treading the winepress of the succeeding 
 lyrics, until the vintage of " Ultimum " is 
 reached : 
 
 Now in these last spent drops, slow, slower shed, 
 Love dies, Love dies, Love dies ah, Love is dead ! 
 
 The days draw on too dark for Song or Love : 
 O peace, my songs, nor stir ye any wing ! 
 For lo, the thunder hushing all the grove, 
 

 
 148 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 And did Love live, not even Love could sing. 
 And Lady, thus I dare to say, 
 Not all with you is passed away ! 
 
 Beyond your star, still, still the stars are bright ; 
 Beyond your highness, still I follow height ; 
 Sole I go forth, yet still to my sad view, 
 Beyond your trueness, Lady, Truth stands true. 
 
 In different vein, but full of charm and of a 
 gracious seeming-ingenuousness, is the "little 
 dramatic sequence " which our poet has com- 
 prehended under the title "A Narrow Vessel." 
 There is magic in his " Love Declared," that 
 moment singled out, set apart in the heart's long 
 consciousness, when 
 
 the winds 
 Caught up their breathing, and the world's great 
 
 pulse 
 
 Stayed in mid-throb, and the wild train of life 
 Reeled by, and left us stranded on a hush. 
 
 It is all so naively intimate that almost as a shock 
 comes the Patmorean revelation of the Epilogue, 
 wherein it appears that this very, very human 
 story is but an allegory of something more divine, 
 since 
 
 She, that but giving part, not whole, 
 Took even the part back, is the Soul. 
 
 "The human heart," declared Walter Savage 
 Landor, " is the world of poetry ; the imagination 
 is only its atmosphere." Never a poet under- 
 stood this better than Thompson. While re- 
 moved by the length of the cosmos from the 
 mists of pantheism (in which, by inevitable para- 
 dox, personality tends ever to become imper- 
 sonal !) Thompson beheld in Nature a wondrously 
 vital and sentient thing. Beyond this, he had the
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 149 
 
 rarer quality of the unified vision. He has him- 
 self elsewhere proclaimed the symbolic initiation 
 without which no poet may attain his mystic 
 "land of Luthany"; declaring the final seal of 
 this vocation to be that inner, indubitable light 
 by which he perceives that all created things, 
 
 Near or far, 
 
 Hiddenly 
 
 To each other linked are, 
 
 And thou canst not stir a flower 
 
 Without troubling 1 of a star. 
 
 This mingling of the dainty and the profound is 
 highly characteristic of his own Nature poems. 
 On one page is a fragment like that "To a Snow- 
 flake," of incredible delicacy on the next, an ode 
 that thunders into sublimity. It is interesting to 
 study in the following stanzas an example of this 
 double manner : the personal appeal to the flower, 
 and the equally subjective, although apparently 
 impersonal, interpretation of the sun's diurnal 
 ministry. The first quoted lines are from a poem, 
 "To Daisies," posthumously published in the 
 Atlantic Monthly : 
 
 Ah, drops of gold in whitening flame 
 
 Burning, we know your lovely name 
 
 Daisies, that little children pull ! 
 
 Like all weak things, over the strong 
 
 Ye do not know your power for wrong, 
 
 And much abuse your feebleness. 
 
 Daisies, that little children pull, 
 
 As ye are weak, be merciful ! 
 
 O hide your eyes, they are to me 
 
 Beautiful insupportably. 
 
 Or be but conscious ye are fair, 
 
 And I your loveliness could bear, 
 
 But, being fair so without art, 
 
 Ye vex the silted memories of my heart !
 
 150 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 This from the " Orient Ode," a pageant of com- 
 pelling beauty, is already dear to every lover of 
 Francis Thompson : 
 
 Lo, in the sanctuaried East, 
 
 Day, a dedicated priest 
 
 In all his robes pontifical exprest, 
 
 Lifteth slowly, lifteth sweetly, 
 
 From out its Orient tabernacle drawn, 
 
 Yon orbed sacrament confest 
 
 Which sprinkles benediction through the dawn ; 
 
 And when the grave procession's ceased, 
 
 The earth with due illustrious rite 
 
 Blessed, ere the frail fingers featly 
 
 Of twilight, violet-cassocked acolyte, 
 
 His sacerdotal stoles unvest 
 
 Sets, for high close of the mysterious feast, 
 
 The sun in august exposition meetly 
 
 Within the flaming monstrance of the West. 
 
 It is impossible to quote here from the " Ode to 
 the Setting Sun," with its half-tragic blending of 
 death and birth, or from the wild Bacchic gladness 
 of the "Corymbus for Autumn." For Thompson 
 can, and does, rejoice in beauty with the sensuous 
 loveliness of Keats himself; albeit very soon the 
 visible becomes for him a portent and prophecy of 
 the invisible, and through the glad earth-cry roll 
 dim pealings of " a higher and a solemn voice." 
 There is no more representative expression of this 
 very Christian and very poetic attitude than in the 
 lovely Paschal ode, " From the Night of Fore- 
 being," with its inspiring burden : 
 
 Look up, O mortals, and the portent heed : 
 
 In very deed 
 
 Washed with new fire to their irradiant birth 
 
 Reintegrated are the heavens and earth ! 
 
 From sky to sod, 
 
 The world's unfolded blossom smells of God.
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 151 
 
 Of formally devotional poetry Francis Thomp- 
 son has written little " Ex Ore Infantium," the 
 soaring, surging lines of " Assumpta Maria," and 
 a few others. Yet through all his work the spiritual 
 element is the one commanding, indubitable thing. 
 And religion is more than an emotion to him : it is 
 a philosophy. The mystery of pain and evil one 
 finds acknowledged, not lightly, but through cata- 
 clysmic rending of the spirit ; and a thousandfold 
 more convincing, because of this wide-eyed out- 
 look upon Life, is the poet's ultimate and persistent 
 hold upon Faith. " If hate were none," he has 
 somewhere dared to ask : 
 
 If hate were none, would love burn lowlier bright? 
 God's fair were guessed scarce but for opposite sin ; 
 Yea, and His mercy, I do think it well, 
 Is flashed back from the brazen gates of Hell. 
 
 Throughout the mystical poems which form, 
 then, so large a proportion of Thompson's work, 
 there burns a most poignant message. It is the 
 old, primal story of God and the soul, and one finds 
 it thrilling with never-to-be-forgotten intensity in 
 that magnificent ode, " The Hound of Heaven." 
 
 I fled Him, down the nights and down the days ; 
 
 I fled Him, down the arches of the years ; 
 
 I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways 
 
 Of my own mind ; and in the mist of tears 
 
 I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 
 
 Up vistaed hopes I sped ; 
 
 And shot, precipitated 
 
 Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, 
 
 From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. 
 
 But with unhurrying chase, 
 
 And unperturbed pace, 
 
 Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
 
 They beat and a Voice beat, 
 
 More instant than the Feet 
 
 " All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
 
 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Thus begins the flight from this " tremendous 
 Lover." The Soul speeds on and on, knocking 
 vainly for shelter at the door of earthly love ; 
 next seeking comradeship with the elements, in 
 the very " heart of Nature's secrecies" 
 
 But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart. 
 In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek. 
 For ah ! we know not what each other says, 
 These things and I ; in sound /speak 
 Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences. 
 
 One by one fails each human hope, 
 
 Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist 
 I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist : 
 
 there is one last, bitter cry, and then submission ! 
 Love has conquered, and "like a bursting sea" 
 sounds the voice of the Pursuer : 
 
 " All which I took from thee I did but take, 
 
 Not for thy harms, 
 
 But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. 
 
 All which thy child's mistake 
 
 Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home : 
 
 Rise, clasp My hand, and come." 
 
 Thompson has written greater poems than " The 
 Dread of Height " ; but, with the sole exception 
 of the " Hound," he has written nothing more 
 characteristic. It is the cry of a soul that has 
 stood very high upon the mountain peaks, and in 
 the glory of fire and cloud feels eternal banish- 
 ment from the little, joyful things of mortality ; for 
 
 'Tis to have drunk too well 
 The drink that is divine 
 Maketh the kind earth waste, 
 And breath intolerable. 
 
 Moreover, human feet are weak, and the highest
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 153 
 
 election none too sure ; neither does any know 
 the depths of Hell like him who has gazed down 
 from Heaven's view-point. So with this cry of 
 spiritual isolation is mingled the pleading voice 
 of human impotence : 
 
 Some hold, some stay 
 
 O difficult Joy, I pray, 
 
 Some arms of thine, 
 
 Not only, only arms of mine ! 
 
 Lest like a weary girl I fall 
 
 From clasping love so high, 
 
 And lacking thus thine arms, then may 
 
 Most hapless I 
 
 Turn utterly to love of basest rate ; 
 
 For low they fall whose fall is from the sky. 
 
 This Titanic struggle of soul and sense, of will 
 and work, this struggle which is man 
 
 Bread predilectedly 
 
 O' the worm and Deity ! 
 
 this battle which is the clearest witness of life 
 save only for those few who have attained to the 
 "unitive" life of resurgent victory and peace is 
 mightily mirrored in the pages of Francis Thomp- 
 son. "Any Saint," "To the Dead Cardinal of 
 Westminster," "A Judgment in Heaven" in 
 these the pillars of our habitual and superficial 
 security, " les convenances," fall crashing about 
 our heads. We have no choice but to gaze at 
 the poet's own " heart-perturbing " visions. That 
 little matter of man and his eternal destiny (matter 
 of all the preachers in all the ages), it is this the 
 white-faced poet is considering. He walks through 
 the valley of the great Shadow ; and what wonder 
 that his brows are bound with thorn as well as 
 cypress? It was nowise possible that Thompson 
 should have escaped melancholy intense and
 
 154 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 aching melancholy, that scourge of every sensi- 
 tive mind. Yet his was, ultimately, a cheerful- 
 ness such as merely cheerful men may never 
 know. ''Giotto lived in a gloomier town than 
 Euripides," declares Mr. Chesterton (he who knows 
 so well how to say serious things frivolously), 
 " but in a gayer universe." And our poet walked 
 with Giotto. For he believed supremely in God : 
 and he believed in stepping-stones up which the 
 soul might hope to climb ; down which God him- 
 self might, peradventure, descend. In Francis 
 Thompson, more, seemingly, than in any poet of 
 the present time, has the ascetic ideal found a 
 champion and an exponent. 
 
 Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive; 
 Die, for none other way canst live, 
 
 he bids us, in words which might echo those once 
 spoken beside the Sea of Galilee. The world has 
 never been willing to accept them without a 
 struggle. Indeed, may it not be that only through 
 struggle and conflict and defeat is their truth 
 made manifest? 
 
 No really morbid heart has ever been able to 
 delight in children : but Thompson loved them 
 frankly and faithfully. Few poets have written 
 more feelingly of (one does not say for) these 
 little ones. This is patent in all three volumes of 
 his verse while of the second it is, of course, the 
 very raison d'etre. A passage of imperishable 
 beauty in the Sister Songs hints how one scarcely 
 more than a child, 
 
 a flower 
 
 Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring, 
 And through the city streets blown withering-, 
 
 had lent her ministering touch to the poet's heart 
 in those dark, earlier days. And all the world
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 155 
 
 knows how, in the children of Alice and Wilfrid 
 Meynell, Thompson found one of his inspirations. 
 He has left, as a memorial of his love for them, 
 the verses to his God-child, Francis Meynell ; also 
 a lovely fantasy, " The Making of Viola"; the 
 whole of Sister Songs; "The Poppy"; and that 
 uniquely haunting poem "To Monica Thought 
 Dying," with its image of Death holding state 
 among the little broken playthings, thrice in- 
 tolerable with " this dreadful childish babble on 
 his tongue." In a niche of its own must stand 
 that exquisite " Ex Ore Infantium" 
 
 Little Jesus, wast Thou shy 
 Once, and just so small as I ? 
 And what did it feel like to be 
 Out of Heaven, and just like me? 
 
 of which no detached passage can hope to re- 
 produce the tender gaiety. It recalls nothing so 
 much as one of Crashaw's divinely human touches, 
 his marvelling 
 
 That He whom the sun serves should faintly peepe 
 Through clouds of Infant flesh : that He, the old 
 Eternall Word should be a Child, and weepe. 
 
 Manifestly, Thompson's viewpoint (the viewpoint 
 of verses such as u Daisy " and " The Poppy ") is 
 very far from being a childlike one. But his are 
 the musings of one who, having known the full 
 measure of manhood having known life and love 
 and the grave has still a heart meet for " the 
 nurseries of Heaven." 
 
 We have already suggested the inevitable 
 thing : and now, perforce, we remember that one 
 of the first yea, and one of the last titles laid by 
 appreciative critics at our poet's feet was, "the 
 greater Crashaw." It is as deceptive as such 
 generalisations have, in the main, proved them-
 
 156 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 selves to be. To point out that the human 
 aspiration for supernal beauty, which Edgar Poe 
 once defined as the essence of the poetic principle, 
 was supremely potent in both men is merely say- 
 ing that both were authentic poets. The further 
 resemblance would seem to lie in that mystical 
 and spiritual attitude toward life, in that fervour 
 of imagination coupled with devotional tenderness 
 (a "divine familiarity" Thompson himself once 
 called it in commenting on the older poet) which 
 may almost be claimed as a birthright by our 
 Catholic songsters. But Crashaw's was essentially 
 a lyric genius ; and Francis Thompson is as 
 dramatic as Browning. Temperamental contrasts 
 are quite as striking : for while the voice of 
 Richard Crashaw comes to us in tones of angelic 
 sweetness, soaring ever to the clouds as to its 
 native sphere, the author of the " Hound of 
 Heaven " has pierced to the depths of passional 
 experiences, and speaks in " words accursed of 
 comfortable men." The one might well be called 
 the poet of Bethlehem the other, of Gethsemane ! 
 Obvious enough, for the most part, are the 
 imperfections of Thompson's poetic work. But 
 his was overwhelmingly a creative genius, and his 
 faults are, almost without exception, those secon- 
 dary ones of criticism. He is prone to ellipse and 
 obscurity, to a magnificent anarchy of construction : 
 more than once will his robust and esoteric choice 
 of words plunge the reader in semi-helplessness. 
 Drawbacks such as these may seem superficial 
 enough (and therefore the more unnecessary), but 
 they have their root in some fundamental idiosyn- 
 crasy of thought, and are very rarely overcome. 
 In a searching critique upon the first poems, 
 Coventry Patmore granted Thompson all the 
 masculine virtues of " profound thought and 
 far-fetched splendour of imagery, and nimble-
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 157 
 
 wilted discernment of those analogies which are 
 the 'roots' of the poet's language," but regretted 
 his lack of the " shy moderation which never says 
 as much as it means." Yet, when all is said, one 
 hesitates to bring the "personal equation" too 
 close to a poet's individuality, or to criticise the 
 passion flower because it is neither a rose nor an 
 asphodel. Why should it not be just a passion 
 flower? In all nature there are few things more 
 tragically significant. And no one who has read 
 those illuminating prose reviews, contributed origi- 
 nally to the Athenceum or the Academy ', could 
 for an instant question Thompson's fundamental 
 critical ability. Melody he knew, and dissonance 
 he knew, with purposeful effect : but his was the 
 large way of // Magnifico in things alike good 
 and ill. 
 
 Death has done much for Francis Thompson ; 
 still he is not yet under danger of becoming a 
 " popular poet." In more than a score of passages 
 he has imprisoned emotions still palpitating with 
 life ; he has found words for those flashes of con- 
 sciousness which, almost to our own souls, remain 
 inarticulate. But they are not surface emotions, 
 and in mode of expression the poet was supremely 
 heedless of the wide appeal. Moreover, being far 
 from obvious, his poems demand somewhat of the 
 reader's co-operation, with the inevitable result of 
 minimising the circle of these readers. No one 
 was more conscious of this than Thompson him- 
 self in the rare moments when he can be said to 
 have been at all conscious of his reader; "The 
 Cloud's Swan Song " alludes to it with a delicate 
 and piercing pathos. But this, after all, is the 
 slightest test of poetic worth. Those who are will- 
 ing to delve a little will find real gold in Francis 
 Thompson's volumes gold of a burning purity 
 and brilliance all too rare in the mines of latter-
 
 158 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 day poetry. His work is a precious heritage : 
 memorable for its artistic beauty and its deep 
 human sympathy ; but in the last analysis most 
 memorable for its essential Catholicity, its spiri- 
 tual profundity and elevation. 
 
 Ah ! let the sweet birds of the Lord 
 With earth's waters make accord ; 
 Teach how the crucifix may be 
 Carven from the laurel-tree, 
 Fruit of the Hesperides 
 Burnish take on Eden-trees, 
 The Muses' sacred grove be wet 
 With the red dew of Olivet, 
 And Sappho lay her burning brows 
 In white Cecilia's lap of snows ! 
 
 It is Thompson himself who has achieved this 
 costly and mystical quest !
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 
 
 THE world was first aware of Alice Meynell (or as 
 she then was, Alice Thompson) as a poet when 
 the little initial volume, Preludes, blossomed into 
 life like a March violet early enough, one can 
 never forget, to win Ruskin's enthusiastic praise. 
 Three of its selections ("San Lorenzo's Mother," 
 together with the closing lines of the "Daisy" 
 sonnet and that unforgettable " Letter from a 
 Girl to Her Own Old Age ") he forthright declared 
 "the finest things I have yet seen, or felt, in 
 modern verse." That was a personal estimate, 
 to be sure, since Tennyson, Browning, Patmore, 
 and Swinburne were all in the act of writing 
 memorable things ; but what a thunderously 
 significant tribute to lay at the feet of a young 
 girl just lifting up her voice in song ! Abyssus 
 abyssum mvocat. 
 
 More than a quarter of a century has passed, 
 and in the actual matter of poetry, Mrs. Meynell 
 has published but two additional volumes, the 
 Poems of 1893 (an augmented reprint of the 
 original booklet) and the slight but weighty 
 Later Poems of 1901 ; these, with fugitive strains 
 of rare beauty in some favoured review, make up 
 the sum. The voice in its moment was ex cathedra; 
 having spoken, she may hold her peace. 
 
 She has elected all along to speak in a deliber- 
 ately vestal and cloistral poetry. Remote as the 
 mountain snows, yet near as the wind upon our 
 face, is her song. It is seldom sensuous, the very 
 imagery being evoked, in the main, from the
 
 160 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 intellectual vision ; and there are moments when 
 "amorous thought has sucked pale Fancy's 
 breath " quite out of the stanzas. Yet these 
 tremble with a deep and impassioned emotion- 
 emotion which seems aloof because it is so interior. 
 For the characteristic note of Mrs. Meynell's music 
 is not yearning or aspiration ; it is not the dear 
 and consummate fruition of life ; still less is it a 
 mourning over things lost. It is the note of active 
 renunciation. Renunciation of the beloved by 
 the lover, that both may be more true to the 
 Heart of Love ; renunciation by the poet, the 
 artist, not only of the poor, precious human 
 comforting, but likewise of his own sweet prodi- 
 gality in art that he may see a few things clearly, 
 without excess ; in fine, the ultimate and inevitable 
 renunciations of the elect soul. 
 
 Renunciation of the beloved by the lover ; that, 
 surely is not a new note ; quite a universal note, 
 life and art would seem to say. It is instinct with 
 the power and passion which are the raison d'etre 
 of poetry. Yet it is never a seriously chosen and 
 admitted strain save by the very little flock and 
 Mrs. Meynell has made it quite her own. One 
 exquisite sonnet, "Renouncement," has concen- 
 trated the message ; but the companion poem may 
 bediscerned to beatwith a still more poignant music. 
 " After a Parting " it is named : 
 
 Farewell has long been said ; I have foregone thee ; 
 
 I never name thee even. 
 But how shall I learn virtues and yet shun thee? 
 
 For thou art so near Heaven 
 That heavenward meditations pause upon thee. 
 
 Thou dost beset the path to every shrine ; 
 
 My trembling thoughts discern 
 Thy goodness in the good for which I pine ; 
 
 And, if I turn from but one sin, I turn 
 Unto a smile of thine.
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 
 
 From a photograph by Resta
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 161 
 
 How shall I thrust thee apart 
 
 Since all my growth tends to thee night and day 
 To thee faith, hope, and art? 
 
 Swift are the currents setting all one way ; 
 They draw my life, my life, out of my heart. 
 
 Another early poem, " To the Beloved," should 
 be quoted in contrast. Surpassingly tender and 
 delicate is its feeling ; but its reticence, its singu- 
 lar peace, are almost a rebuke to more vehement 
 possessors : 
 
 Oh, not more subtly silence strays 
 
 Amongst the winds, between the voices, 
 
 Mingling alike with pensive lays, 
 And with the music that rejoices, 
 
 Than thou art present in my days. 
 
 Thou art like silence all unvexed 
 
 Though wild words part my soul from thee. 
 Thou art like silence unperplexed, 
 
 A secret and a mystery 
 Between one footfall and the next. 
 
 Darkness and solitude shine, for me. 
 
 For life's fair outward part are rife 
 The silver noises ; let them be. 
 
 It is the very soul of life 
 Listens for thee, listens for thee. 
 
 Even for this denial, this abeyance of love, has 
 Alice Meynell reserved her own quintessential 
 vehemence. 
 
 All this perennial, repetitional sacrifice of the 
 lower to the higher good was foreshadowed in her 
 earliest verses. It is a solitariness never far from 
 our poet's song a wistful loneliness in the youth- 
 ful stanzas; a pain high-heartedly born, welcomed, 
 
 M
 
 162 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 treasured above all cheaper gifts in the more 
 mature pages. Much has been said about that 
 unique and heart-shaking "Letter from a Girl 
 to her Own Old Age." But there is a less known 
 apostrophe, "The Poet to his Childhood," about 
 which something remains to be spoken. It 
 probes to the heart of the sacrificial vocation 
 whether poetic or sacerdotal matters little : 
 
 If it prove a life of pain, greater have I judged the gain, 
 With a singing soul for music's sake I climb and meet 
 
 the rain, 
 
 And I choose, whilst I am calm, my thought and labour- 
 ing to be 
 
 Unconsoled by sympathy. 
 
 Mrs. Meynell has loved the Lady Poverty as 
 truly as ever the Assisian did : but hers is a Lady 
 whose realm is over letters as well as life. She 
 dwells in the twilight and the dawn ; her cool, 
 quiet fingers are pressed upon the temples of 
 love ; in " slender landscape and austere," in 
 nature marvellously but not rapturously under- 
 stood, she is found. And close beside her treads 
 another Lady, "our sister, the Death of the 
 Body " Death the Revealer, making clear at 
 last the mysteries of weary Life. This is distinctly 
 the motive, very personal and very perfect, not 
 merely of the much-praised sonnet "To a Daisy," 
 but of Mrs. Meynell's Nature poetry as a whole. 
 
 Through "The Neophyte" and "San Lorenzo 
 Giustiniani's Mother" the selfsame cry is variously 
 but unmistakably heard. It stings the soul in 
 that late and mystical lyric : 
 
 Why wilt thou chide, 
 Who hast attained to be denied ? 
 
 Oh learn, above 
 All price is my refusal, Love. 
 
 My sacred Nay
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 163 
 
 Was never cheapened by the way ; 
 
 Thy single sorrow crowns thee lord 
 Of an unpurchasable word. 
 
 Oh strong ! Oh pure ! 
 As Yea makes happier loves secure, 
 
 I vow thee this 
 Unique rejection of a kiss ! 
 
 More than one meditation of this final volume 
 suggest the influence of that immemorial (and in 
 these latter days too little known) treasure-house 
 of poetry and vision, the Roman Breviary. But 
 always the distinction and the originality of Alice 
 Meynell's thought, the peculiar personality of her 
 vision, have about them a very sacredness. Not 
 lightly comes the illumination of the singular 
 soul : that particular judgment so transcendently 
 more appalling than the final and general judg- 
 ment ! She has not feared to travel up the 
 mountain side alone to look down, with eyes 
 that have known both tears and the drying of 
 tears, upon the ways of human life. 
 
 In the matter of artistry and poetic technique, 
 Mrs. Meynell's work is like fine gold smithery ; 
 classic gold smithery, exquisite and austere. "I 
 could wish abstention to exist, and even to be 
 evident in my words," she has somewhere written ; 
 but the words are scrupulously chosen. Her 
 mastery over slight forms the quatrain, the 
 couplet is quite as consummate and almost as 
 felicitous as Father Tabb's. And through this 
 ethereal poetry shine lines of the highest and 
 most serious power. 
 
 They who doomed by infallible decrees 
 Unnumbered man to the innumerable grave, 
 
 falls upon the ear with Miltonic grandeur. And
 
 164 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 any poet might rejoice in the fancy which per- 
 ceives day's memories flocking home at dusk to 
 the " dove-cote doors of sleep," or cries out so 
 subtly in the colourless February dawning : 
 
 A poet's face asleep is this grey morn ! 
 
 Mrs. Meynell's poetry, like a certain school of 
 modern music, suggests and betrays rather than 
 expresses emotion. It is definite but intangible. 
 It creates an atmosphere of angelically clear 
 thought, of rare delicacies of feeling, and speaks 
 with a perfect reticence. Mistakenly, perhaps, 
 the hasty might dub it a poetry of promise : on 
 the contrary, it is a poetry of uncommonly fine 
 achievement. But it does not achieve the expected 
 thing. We are conscious of a light, a flash, a 
 voice, a perfume the soul of the Muse has passed 
 by. And we were looking for the body, flower- 
 crowned ! 
 
 When all is said, it is in her prose that Mrs. 
 Meynell has attained the most compelling and in- 
 dubitable distinction. In much critical work and 
 some biography, and in a series of essays cover- 
 ing subjects all the way from " impressionist " 
 art to the ways of childhood or from " Pocket 
 Vocabularies" to the " Hours of Sleep " her pen 
 has prevailed with a masterful delicacy. These 
 brief pages are seldom distinctly literary in theme, 
 yet they have made literature. Scarcely ever are 
 they professedly religious, yet the whole science 
 of the saints rests by implication within their 
 pages. Alice Meynell is the true contemplative 
 of letters. For contemplation, which in the 
 spiritual world has been described as a looking 
 at and listening to God, is in the world of art 
 a looking at and listening to life. It is an ex- 
 ceedingly quiet and sensitive attention to all that 
 others see but transiently, superficially, in the
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 165 
 
 large. We can scarcely believe many minds 
 capable of the exquisitely subtle and sustained 
 attention, the delicate weighing, the differentia- 
 tion, and withal the liberal sympathy, which have 
 been the very keynote of her criticism. Take, as 
 an instance, this pregnant passage upon the return 
 and periodicity of our mental processes : 
 
 " Distances are not gauged, ellipses not mea- 
 sured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. 
 Nevertheless the recurrence is sure. What the 
 mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not 
 suffer now ; but it will suffer again next week or 
 next year. Happiness is not a matter of events ; 
 it depends upon the tides of the mind. Disease is 
 metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods 
 toward death, sweeping abroad at longer and 
 longer intervals towards recovery. . . . Even the 
 burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound 
 to leave the heart to a temporary peace ; and re- 
 morse itself does not remain it returns. Gaiety 
 takes us by a dear surprise. . . . Love itself has 
 tidal times lapses and ebbs which are due to the 
 metrical rule of the interior heart, but which the 
 lover vainly and unkindly attributes to some out- 
 ward alteration in the beloved." 
 
 Coventry Patmore (who in his turn has been 
 the subject of Mrs. Meynell's illuminative criti- 
 cism) declared fully one half of the volume just 
 quoted, The Rhythm of Life, to be "classical 
 work, embodying as it does new thought in per- 
 fect language, and bearing in every sentence the 
 hall-mark of genius." Only the poets, perhaps, 
 have shared with the saints this singular con- 
 templative attention to things great and small. 
 And in the Nature painting which colours Mrs. 
 Meynell's pages the same quality is conspicuous. 
 Neither the lyre nor the brush seems strange to 
 the hand which has so sketched for us the majesty 
 M 2
 
 166 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 of the cloud not guardian of the sun's rays 
 merely, but "the sun's treasurer"; the course of 
 the south-west wind, regnant and imperious ; and 
 that "heroic sky," beneath whose light "few of 
 the things that were ever done upon earth are 
 great enough " to have dared the doing. Not 
 Wordsworth himself has more graciously sung of 
 the daffodil. And who has so understandingly 
 praised the modest yet prevailing grass of the 
 fields, or the trees of July, or given so discern- 
 ing a study to the gentle " Colour of Life " ? 
 
 Up and down upon the earth, to and fro upon 
 it, wander the children of men ; but few indeed 
 may be trusted to catch the authentic Spirit of 
 Place. Scarcely even our beloved Robert Louis, 
 it would seem, since we have his own record that 
 the act of voyaging was an end in itself there 
 being 
 
 nothing under Heaven so blue 
 That's fairly worth the travelling" to ! 
 
 But to the eyes of this woman there is not the 
 same blue in more than a single zenith. " Spirit 
 of place ! " she cries in one most characteristic 
 passage, "It is for this we travel, to surprise its 
 subtlety ; and where it is a strong and dominant 
 angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the 
 memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its 
 breath, its name. . . . The untravelled spirit of 
 place not to be pursued, for it never flies, but 
 always to be discovered, never absent, without 
 variation lurks in the byways and rules over the 
 tower, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It 
 awaits us always in its ancient and eager fresh- 
 ness. It is sweet and nimble within its imme- 
 morial boundaries, but it never crosses them. . . . 
 Was ever journey too hard or too long, that had 
 to pay such a visit? And if by good fortune it is
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 167 
 
 a child who is the pilgrim, the spirit of place gives 
 him a peculiar welcome. . . . He is well used to 
 words and voices that he does not understand, and 
 this is a condition of his simplicity ; and when 
 those unknown words are bells, loud in the night, 
 they are to him as homely and as old as lulla- 
 bies." 
 
 It is almost a pity, for letters, that so few poets 
 have been mothers ; it is the abiding pity of child- 
 hood that so few mothers have been poets ! Mrs. 
 Meynell has an entire volume dedicated to The 
 Children^ and sealed with that gracious under- 
 standing of child-life which nothing other than 
 experience can quite authenticate. It is so easy 
 to sentimentalise over children easy, also, to re- 
 gard them as necessary nuisances : but to bear 
 with them consistently, in a spirit of love and 
 of discovery, is a beautiful achievement. " Fellow 
 travellers with a bird" (as Alice Meynell felicit- 
 ously calls the protective adults) may learn strange 
 and hidden things, an they have eyes to see or 
 hearts to understand. Not so impatiently will 
 they frown upon the strange excitement which 
 sparkles from the child's eyes, as from the kitten's 
 at dusk inherited memories of the immemorial 
 hunt, and of the " predatory dark" a thousand 
 years ago. Not so surprising will seem the 
 eternal conflict of bed-time, if they once realise 
 the humorous and pretty fact that the little crea- 
 ture "is pursued and overtaken by sleep, caught, 
 surprised, and overcome. He goes no more to 
 sleep than he takes a 'constitutional' with his 
 hoop and hoopstick." In " The Child of Tumult" 
 Mrs. Meynell has given a most tenderly subtle 
 study ; and here is her word upon the forgiveness 
 of children : 
 
 "It is assuredly in the absence of resentment 
 that consists the virtue of childhood. What other
 
 168 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 thing are we to learn of them ? Not simplicity, 
 for they are intricate enough. Not gratitude, for 
 their usual sincere thanklessness makes half the 
 pleasure of doing them good. Not obedience, for 
 the child is born with the love of liberty. And as 
 for humility, the boast of a child is the frankest 
 thing in the world. ... It is the sweet and entire 
 forgiveness of children, who ask pity for their 
 sorrows from those who have caused them, who 
 do not perceive that they are wronged, who never 
 dream that they are forgiving, and who make no bar- 
 gain for apologies it is this that men and women 
 are urged to learn of a child. Graces more con- 
 fessedly childlike they make shift to teach them- 
 selves." 
 
 Many a man, and many a woman, have written 
 more nobly than they have lived : into the art has 
 gone the truest part of the soul. But what unique 
 conviction breathes from work which is at one 
 with life nay, which is the fruit of deep and 
 costly living ! The acuteness, the activity, the 
 profundity of Mrs. Meynell's thought could not fail 
 to achieve their own place in English letters. But 
 her sympathy and her eternal Tightness of vision 
 are qualities in which we rejoice, humbled. These 
 have given to her work that peculiar intuitive 
 truth which is the rarest of beauties. " Her 
 manner," wrote Mr. George Meredith, "presents 
 to me the image of one accustomed to walk in 
 holy places and keep the eye of a fresh mind on 
 our tangled world." But no single virtue of all 
 Mrs. Meynell's work is of the obvious or popular 
 kind. Her pages are packed with thought, and 
 the style one of exceptional precision and excep- 
 tional beauty is yet given to ellipse, to sugges- 
 tion rather than emphasis, and to a quite inalien- 
 able subtlety. She speaks to the higher, even the 
 highest, faculties of the mind. She has pleaded
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 169 
 
 all along for singularity of soul, for distinction 
 and elevation of personality, for the rejection of 
 many things from our multitudinous modern life. 
 
 Sometimes, as in " Decivilised," it is with the 
 trenchant wit and irony that her sentence has been 
 passed : 
 
 " The difficulty of dealing in the course of any 
 critical duty with decivilised man lies in this : 
 when you accuse him of vulgarity sparing him, 
 no doubt, the word he defends himself against 
 the charge of barbarism. Especially from new 
 soil transatlantic, colonial he faces you, bronzed, 
 with a half conviction of savagery, partly per- 
 suaded of his own youthfulness of race. He 
 writes and recites poems about ranches and can- 
 yons ; they are designed to betray the recklessness 
 of his nature and to reveal the good that lurks 
 in the lawless ways of a young society. . . . 
 American fancy played long this pattering part of 
 youth. The New Englander hastened to assure 
 you, with so self-denying a face, he did not wear 
 war-paint and feathers, that it became doubly 
 difficult to communicate to him that you had sus- 
 pected him of nothing wilder than a second-hand 
 dress coat. And when it was a question not of 
 rebuke but of praise, the American was ill-content 
 with the word of the judicious who lauded him 
 for some delicate successes in continuing some- 
 thing of the literature of England, something 
 of the art of France. . . . Even now English 
 voices, with violent commonplace, are constantly 
 calling upon America to begin to begin, for the 
 world is expectant whereas, there is no begin- 
 ning for her, but, instead, a continuity which only 
 a constant care can guide into sustained refine- 
 ment and can save from decivilisation. . . . 
 Who shall discover why derivation becomes 
 degeneration, and where and when and how
 
 170 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 the bastardy befalls ? The decivilised have every 
 grace as the antecedent of their vulgarities, every 
 distinction as the precedent of their mediocrities. 
 . . . They were born into some tendency to 
 derogation, into an inclination for things mentally 
 inexpensive." 
 
 But oftener the word has been spoken gently, 
 almost casually ; that the multitude seeing might 
 not see, and hearing might not understand. Yet 
 this attitude of Mrs. Meynell's is as far as possible 
 from disdain. For the "narrow house," the 
 obtuse mind baffled and inarticulate, for the 
 shackled body, the groping soul, she has spoken 
 with largest sympathy. Further than Charles 
 Lamb's goes her defence of beggars since she 
 pleads their right not simply to free existence but 
 to a common and fraternal courtesy. All the great 
 and elemental things of life have claimed allegiance 
 from Alice Meynell ; her mind, like Raphael's, 
 "a temple for all lovely things to flock to and 
 inhabit." Love and the bond of love, the grace 
 and gaiety of life, the woman's need of a free and 
 educated courage, the delicacies of friendship one 
 finds their praise upon her reticent lips : these, 
 with unflinching truth to self, and a faith lofty and 
 exquisite. For the pathos of the sentimentalist 
 (ubiquitous and not without a suspicion of the 
 ready-made) our artist has shown slight patience. 
 She will not laugh at her fellow-men ; neither will 
 she insist upon weeping over them. There is 
 restraint, "composure " in her dream of life. Yet 
 perchance we open the fortuitous page, and some 
 such lines as these face us : 
 
 "It is a curious slight to generous Fate that 
 man should, like a child, ask for one thing many 
 times. Her answer every time is a resembling 
 but new and single gift ; until the day when she 
 shall make the one tremendous difference among
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 171 
 
 her gifts and make it perhaps in secret by 
 naming one of them the ultimate. What, for 
 novelty? what, for singleness ? what, for separ- 
 ateness, can equal the last? Of many thousand 
 kisses the poor last but even the kisses of your 
 mouth are all numbered." 
 It is as old as sweet and as sad as the world ! 
 
 Art to Mrs. Meynell has been a thrice-holy 
 thing ; a vocation of priestly dignity, of priestly 
 pain, as her poems witnessed. More than once 
 have her words likened the convent-bell, imperious, 
 not to be foregone, to the poet's elect fetters. 
 "Within the gate of these laws which seem so 
 small," she tells us, "lies the world of mystic 
 virtue." Now here is a viewpoint of the highest 
 and rarest insight. What urbanity, what sweet- 
 ness, what prevailing harmony it carries into the 
 troublous matter of living. It has attained per- 
 spective : and perspective is the end as well as the 
 means of life. Surely it is for this prize alone 
 that we wrestle and run. To treat life in the spirit 
 of art that, declared another artist-seer, Walter 
 Pater, is not far from the summum bonum : not far 
 from the kingdom of Heaven, one might add, 
 since the ultimate artist is God alone. 
 
 Truth, then, has been the first of Mrs. Meynell's 
 equipments. First truth of seeing (which only the 
 few may ever attain), and then truth of speaking 
 a rare enough accomplishment. With her work, 
 as with that of Henry James, the fancied obscurity 
 rises mainly from this exceedingly delicate truth- 
 fulness ; a fastidious requirement of the word the 
 word without exaggeration, without superfluity 
 only with Mr. James this desire has led to repeti- 
 tion ; with Mrs. Meynell, to reticence. Having 
 called her contemplative, we now perceive her to 
 be ascetic. The "little less," both in matter and 
 manner, has seemed to her a counsel of perfection.
 
 172 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Only we, the losers, would quarrel now and 
 again with this perfect abstinence would drink 
 oftener, if that might be, from a spring of such 
 diamond clearness, of such depth and healing. 
 The fields of modern literature had been more 
 flowery for such nourishment ! In all truth, modern 
 thought must needs bear both blossom and fruit 
 because of its shy visits. For Alice Meynell has 
 been very potent in her reserves. She has borne 
 the pennant of the Ideal, with never a dip of the 
 banner, over many a causeway, up many a battle- 
 mented height. She has, by many and by One, 
 been found faithful. Scarcely shall we find a more 
 adequate praise for this English writer than her 
 own praise of the Spanish Velasquez that she 
 has "kept the chastity of art when other masters 
 were content with its honesty." 
 
 THE END
 
 THE following contributions towards the Biblio- 
 graphy of the poets named in this volume 
 may prove of assistance to the general reader. 
 
 ROBERT SOUTHWELL 
 
 Poetical Works. Edited by W. B. Turnbull, 1856. 
 (Library of Old Authors.) 
 
 Complete Poems. Edited with memorial introduction 
 and notes by Alexander B. Grosart, 1872. (Fuller's 
 Worthies' Library.) 
 
 Complete Works. With life and death. Burns and 
 Gates : London, 1886. 
 
 WILLIAM HABINGTON 
 
 Poems (with life). Chalmers' English Poets, Vol. VI, 
 1810. 
 
 Castara. Arber's English Reprints, 1869. 
 
 The Queene of Arragon. 1640 fol. Also in Dodsley's 
 Old English Plays. 
 
 RICHARD CRASHAW 
 
 Complete Works. Edited by W. B. Turnbull, 1856. 
 (Library of Old Authors.) 
 
 Complete Works. Edited, with essay on his life and 
 poetry, by Alexander B. Grosart, 1868. (Fuller's 
 Worthies' Library.) 
 N 173
 
 i74 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Poems. Edited by A. R, Waller. Cambridge Univer- 
 sity Press, 1904. 
 
 " Crashaw " : Seventeenth Century Studies. By Edmund 
 Gosse. 
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 
 
 Poetical Works (6 vols). 
 
 May Carols and Legends of the Saxon Saints. 
 
 Legends of S. Patrick and Other Poems. 
 
 Legends and Records of the Church and the Empire. 
 
 Inisfail) a Lyrical Chronicle of Ireland. 
 
 Medueval Records and Sonnets. 
 
 Essays, chiefly on Poetry (2 vols). 
 
 Recollections. 
 
 Aubrey de Vere : a Memoir based on his unpublished 
 Diaries and Correspondence. By Wilfrid Ward. 
 
 Aribrey de Vere's Poems : a Selection. Edited by John 
 Dennis. 
 
 Selections from the Poems of Aubrey de Vere. Edited 
 with a preface by George E. Woodberry. 
 
 GERARD HOPKINS 
 
 Father Hopkins' published verses may be found in 
 the following anthologies : 
 
 Carmina Mariana. Edited by Orby Shipley. 
 Lyra Sacra. H. C. Beeching. 
 
 Poets and Poetry of the Century. Edited by Alfred H. 
 Miles. Vol. VIII (with critique by Dr. Robert 
 Bridges).
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 175 
 
 COVENTRY PATMORE 
 
 Complete Works: Poems (2 vols), Principle in Art, 
 Religio Poetce, Rod, Root and Flower. 
 
 Saint Bernard on the Love of God. Translated by M. C. 
 and C. Patmore. 1881. 
 
 Poetry of Pathos and Delight. A selection by Alice 
 Meynell. 
 
 Florilegi^lm Amantis. A selection by Richard Garnett. 
 
 Coventry Patmore. Memoir and Correspondence. By 
 Basil Champneys. 
 
 Coventry Patmore. By Edmund Gosse. 
 
 LIONEL JOHNSON 
 
 The Art of Thomas Hardy. 
 
 Poems. 
 
 Ireland and Other Poems. 
 
 Selection from Poetical Works. 
 
 Post Liminium Essays and Critical Papers. 
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 
 
 Poems. 
 
 Sister Songs. 
 New Poems. 
 The Hound of Heaven. 
 
 Selected Poems. With Biographical Note by Wilfrid 
 Meynell. 
 
 Health and Holiness. A Study of the Relation between 
 Brother Ass the Body, and his Rider the Soul. 
 
 Shelley. With an Introduction by the Right Hon. 
 George Wyndham. 
 
 St. Ignatius Loyola. 
 
 Life and Labours of St. John Baptist de la Salle,
 
 176 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 ALICE MEYNELL 
 Poems. 
 Later Poems. 
 The Rhythm oj Life. 
 The Colour of Life. 
 The Children. 
 The Spirit of Place. 
 Ceres 1 Runaway. 
 John Ruskin. (Modern English Writers.) 
 
 The Flower of the Mind. A Choice among the 
 Best Poems, made by Alice Meynell.
 
 INDEX 
 
 A Wood, Anthony, 19, 21, 31 
 Andrews, Emily Augusta, 94, 
 
 95, 99, 100, 103 
 Arundel, Countess of, 6 
 
 Bellamy, Anne, 8, 9 
 Bellamy, Richard, 8 
 Ben Jonson, 13 
 Bridges, Robert, 72, 85, 86 
 Brooke, Dr. Stopford, 2 
 Browning, Robert, 92, 94, 95 
 Byles, Marianne Caroline, 102-5, 
 "3 
 
 Cardella, Father, 102 
 "Castara" (see Lucy Herbert) 
 Cecil, Lord, 9 
 Challoner, Bishop, 10 
 Coleridge, Sara, 52 
 Cowley, Abraham, 37, 42, 45 
 Crashaw, Richard, 15, 33, 36; 
 birth, 37 ; education and 
 early life, 41 ; conversion, 
 42 ; visit to Italy, 43, 44 ; 
 death, 45, 46-50, 63, 65, 
 122, 131, 156 
 "Against Irresolution in 
 
 Matters of Religion," 43 
 Carmen Deo Nostro, 43 
 " Cupid's Cryer," 48 
 Epigrammatum Sacrorum 
 
 Liber, 38 
 " Epitaph on a Newly Married 
 
 Couple," 48 
 
 " Hymn to the Name and 
 Honour of the Admirable 
 Sainte Teresa," 47 
 " Love's Horoscope," 48 
 " Musick's Duel," 49 
 "On Two Green Apricocks 
 sent to Mr. Cowley," 42 
 
 "Sospetto d'Herode" (trans- 
 lation), 46 
 
 Steps to the Temple, With 
 other Delights to the Muses, 
 
 42,45 
 
 The Temple, 45 
 " The Weeper," 49 
 "To the Name Above Every 
 
 Name," 48 
 "Wishes to his (supposed) 
 
 Mistress," 38, 48 
 Crashaw, William, 37, 38 
 
 Darbyshire, Thomas, 3 
 Denbigh, the Countess of, 43 
 De Vere, Aubrey, 52-69, 101, 
 
 in 
 
 Alexander the Great, 53, 59 
 "Ascent of the Apennines," 
 
 65 
 
 "Autumnal Ode," 65 
 "Church Discipline," 64 
 " Death of Copernicus, The,' 
 
 59 
 
 Essays, chiefly on Poetry, 69 
 
 " Evidences of Religion," 64 
 
 Fall of Rora, 59 
 
 Inisfail, 52, 53, 54 
 
 "Irish Constitution of 1872, 
 
 The," 64 
 Legends and Records of the 
 
 Church and the Empire, 
 
 53, 55 
 Legends of Ireland's Heroic 
 
 Age, 53, 55 
 
 Legends of St. Patrick, 53 
 
 Legends of the Saxon Saints, 54 
 
 " Mater Christi," 63 
 
 May Carols, 52, 63 
 
 Medice-val Records and Son- 
 nets, 53, 55-8 
 
 177
 
 178 
 
 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 De Vere, Aubrey (continued) 
 Miscellaneous and Sacred 
 
 Poems, 52 
 
 " Ode to an Eolian Harp," 65 
 "Oiseen" poems, 55 
 Recollections, 52 
 Reminiscences, 67 
 St. Peter's Chains, 53 
 St. Thomas of Canterbury, 
 
 53. 59-6i 
 
 Search after Proserpine, 52, 61 
 Sisters, The, 52 
 " Sorrow," 64 
 
 " Striving 1 of St. Patrick, 1 ' 54 
 The Foray of Queene Alaeve, 
 
 53 
 
 " The Higher Purgatory," 56 
 " The Martyrdom," 63 
 " The Year of Sorrow," 53 
 "To Keats," 61 
 
 Donne, John, 32, 46 
 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, 13 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 2, 4, 7, 9-11, 
 *9 36, 37 
 
 Ferrar, Nicholas, 40 
 
 Garnett, Father, 5, 20 
 Gerard, Father, 6, 7, 19 
 Gilfillan, Rev. George, 40, 47,50 
 Gosse, Edmund, 44, 99 
 Grosart, Dr. Alexander B., 3, 
 
 9> I2 I 5. 43. 46 
 Gunpowder Plot, 19, 20 
 
 Habington, Edward, 19 
 Habington, John, 19 
 Habington, Mary, 19, 20 
 Habington, Thomas, 19, 20 
 Habington, William, 18, 19 ; 
 birth, 20; education, 21; 
 friendship and marriage 
 with Lucy Herbert, 21-6 ; 
 friendship with George 
 Talbot, 26, 27, 28-30 ; 
 death, 31, 32-35 
 "A Holy Man," 29 
 "A Mistris," 21 
 "A Wife," 25 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher folio 
 (verses in), 34 
 
 Castara, 19, 21, 27-33, 35 
 
 Dies Irae, 33 
 
 "Elegies," 27 
 
 History of Edward IV, King 
 
 of England, 27, 31 
 Observations upon Historie, 
 
 30 
 
 Queene of Arragon, 27, 31 
 
 " The Grave," 34 
 
 " To Castara, being- debarr'd 
 
 her presence," 23 
 " To Castara, Inquiring why 
 
 I loved her," 23 
 " To Castara, Praying," 22 
 "To Castara, Softly Singing 
 
 to Herselfe," 22, 23 
 " To the Dew, In hope to see 
 Castara walking," 23, 24 a 
 " Upon Castara's Depar- 
 ture," 33 
 
 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 43 
 Herbert, George, 37, 45, 46 
 Herbert, Lucy ("Castara"), 18, 
 
 21-29, 3i 
 
 Hopkins, Gerard, birth, 70 ; 
 education and conversion, 
 
 71, 72 ; enters Society of 
 Jesus, 73 ; death, 74, 75-88, 
 98, 118 
 
 "Barnfloor and Winepress," 
 
 79 
 
 'God's Grandeur," 78 
 ' Habit of Perfection, The," 
 
 72, 74, 75 
 
 ' Heaven Haven," 83 
 
 ' Inversnaid," 77 
 
 ' Morning, Midday and 
 
 Evening Sacrifice," 83 
 "Our Lady of the Air," 
 
 Si-3 
 
 Rosa Mystica, 79, 80 
 Spring song, 76, 77 
 " The Starlight Night," 77 
 "Vision of Mermaids, A," 
 74. 77 
 
 Johnson, Lionel, 120; birth and 
 
 education, 121 ; conversion, 
 
 122, 123 ; failing health, 
 
 124, 125; death, 126, 127-41 
 
 "A Proselyte," 135
 
 INDEX 
 
 179 
 
 Johnson, Lionel (continued) 
 Art of Thomas Hardy, The, 
 
 123, 138, 139 
 
 Book of the Rhymers' Club, 
 
 123 
 "By the Statue of King 
 
 Charles at Charing Cross," 
 
 123 
 
 "Cadgwith," 128, 129 
 Catholic Faith, 126 
 Celtic Memories, 1 26 
 "Classics, The," 126 
 "Cyhiraeth," 130, 131 
 "Dark Angel, The," 123, 
 
 135. !36, 138 
 " Darkness," 135 
 " De Profundis," 133, 134 
 "Gwynedd," 127, 128 
 "Ideal," 138 
 " In England," 128 
 Ireland, with Other Poems, 
 
 124, 129 
 
 "Julian at Eleusis," 126 
 
 "Malise, To," 127 
 
 "Morfydd," 134 
 
 Nature, 126 
 
 "Our Lady of the May," 
 
 132 
 "Our Lady of the Snows," 
 
 '3i 
 
 " Oxford Nights," 122 
 Poems, 123 
 
 " Precept of Silence," 136 
 " Sancta Silvarum," 127 
 " Sertorius," 126 
 " Sursum Corda," 133 
 " Te Martyrum Candidatus," 
 
 132 
 "The Destroyer of a Soul," 
 
 '35 
 
 "To Morfydd Dead," 134 
 "To Parnell," 130 
 " To Passions," 135 
 " Vigils," 122 
 " Visions," 131 
 "Winchester," 127, 135 
 
 Leigh Hunt, 92 
 Lessius, Leonard, 3 
 Lingard, Dr., 30 
 Lytton, Bulwer, 92 
 
 Manning, Cardinal, 102, 104 
 Mary Queen of Scots, 2, 4, 
 
 7 19 
 
 Meredith, George, 168, 169 
 Meynell, Alice, 114; friendship 
 with Francis Thompson, 
 144-6, 155 ; first poems, 
 159, 160-72 
 
 "After a Parting," 160, 161 
 "Child of Tumult, The," 167 
 "Colour of Life," 166 
 " Decivilised," 169, 170 
 " Hours of Sleep," 164 
 Later Poems, 159 
 " Letter from a Girl to her 
 
 Own Old Age," 159, 162 
 " Pocket Vocabularies," 164 
 Poems, 159 
 Preludes, 159 
 " Renouncement," 160 
 "San Lorenzo Giustiniani's 
 
 Mother," 159, 162 
 Spirit of Place, 166 
 " The Neophyte," 162 
 " The Poet to his Childhood," 
 
 162 
 
 The Rhythm of Life, 165 
 "To a Daisy," 159, 162 
 "To the Beloved," 161 
 To the Children, 167, 168 
 Meynell, Wilfrid, 144, 145, 155 
 Milnes, Monckton (Lord Hough- 
 ton), 93 
 
 Milton, 32, 34, 37 
 Mountjoy, Lord, 12 
 
 in 
 
 Nash, Thomas, 7 
 Newman, Cardinal, 72, 73, 
 
 Palotta, Cardinal, 43 
 Pater, Walter, 72, 120, 121, 125 
 Patmore, Coventry, 33, 65, 86, 
 87, 89 ; birth, 90 ; first 
 poems and early life, 91-4 ; 
 first marriage, 94, 95-8 ; 
 death of Emily Patmore, 
 99, 100 ; journey to Rome, 
 101, 102 ; second marriage, 
 102-4, 105-12; death of 
 Mary Patmore, 113; third 
 marriage, 114; failing
 
 i8o 
 
 THE POETS' CHANTRY 
 
 Patmore, Coventry (continued) 
 health and death, 115, 
 116-19, 147, 156, 165 
 "Amelia," 113 
 " Beata," 106 
 "Delicise Sapientias de 
 
 Amore," 106, 118 
 Dieu et Ma Dame, 117 
 "Eros," 95 
 
 "Faint Yet Pursuing," 106 
 " Farewell," 112 
 Macbeth, essay on, 91 
 Odes, 104, 105, 106 
 " Pain," 106 
 Poems, 92 
 
 Principle in Art, 114 
 Religio Poetce, 114, 118 
 "St. Valentine's Day," 113 
 "Spirit's Epochs, The," 98 
 "SponsaDei," 104, 118 
 "Tamerton Church Tower," 
 
 The Angel in the House, 33, 
 95-100, 104, 105, 115 
 
 The " Azalea " ode, 99 
 
 "The Child's Purchase," 109 
 
 " The Daughter of Eve," 98 
 
 "The Falcon, "95 
 
 "The Precursor," 118, 119 
 
 "The River," 91, 93 
 
 The Rod, the Root, and the 
 Floiver, 114 
 
 "The Toys," 100 
 
 1 ' The Woodman's Daughter," 
 
 " The Yewberry," 95 
 "Tired Memory," 103, 106 
 Unknown Eros, The, 107, 109- 
 
 ii 
 
 " Unthrift," 98 
 Victories of Love, 97 
 "\VeddingSermon,"97,98,i04 
 Patmore, Emily (see Emily 
 
 Augusta Andrews) 
 Patmore, Emily Honoria, 100, 
 
 101, 113 
 Patmore, Harriet (see Harriet 
 
 Robson) 
 
 Patmore, Henry, 114 
 Patmore, Mary (see Marianne 
 Caroline Byles) 
 
 Patmore, Peter George, 90, 
 
 9 2 . 93 
 
 Phillips, Edward, 31 
 Procter, Mrs., 93 
 
 Robson, Harriet, 114, 115 
 Ruskin, John, 98, 159 
 
 Saintsbury, Professor, 15, 34 
 
 Sargent, John, 89 
 
 Shakespeare, 2, 34 
 
 Shelford, Dr., 40 
 
 Shelley, 2, 47 
 
 Shirley, 34 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 15 
 
 Society of Jesus, i, 3-5, n, 
 
 20, 21 
 
 Southwell, Richard, 2, 6, 9 
 Southwell, Robert, i ; birth and 
 early life, 2, 3 ; work as a 
 priest, 4-8 ; imprisonment 
 and death, 9-12, 13-17, 46, 
 62 
 
 Burning-Babe, 13, 14 
 Life is but Loss, 13 
 Mceonia, 14 
 Mary Magdalen's Funeral 
 
 Tears, 7 
 
 Notes on Theology, 6 
 St. Peter's Complaint, 12, 13 
 Scorn Not the Least, 13, 15 
 Southwells Poems, 3 
 Times go by Turns, 13 
 Triumphs over Death, 6 
 What Joy to Live, 13 
 
 Talbot, George, 26, 27, 29, 35 
 Tennyson, Lord, 94, 95, 98 
 Thompson, Alice (see Alice 
 
 Meynell) 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 46, 114, 
 115, 133, 142; first poems 
 and early life, 143, 144, 145; 
 death, 146, 147-58 
 "Any Saint," 153 
 "Assumpta Maria," 151 
 "Cloud's Swan Song, The," 
 
 157 
 
 " Corymbus for Autumn,' 150 
 " Daisy," 155
 
 INDEX 
 
 181 
 
 Thompson, Francis (continued) 
 "Dread of Height, The," 
 
 152, iS3 
 "Ex Ore Infantium, 151, 
 
 '55 
 
 " From the Night of Fore- 
 being," 150 
 
 " Her Portrait," 147 
 
 " Holocaust," 147 
 
 "Judgment in Heaven, A," 
 
 J 53 
 
 Life of St. Ignatius, 145 
 " Love Declared," 148 
 "Love in Dian's Lap," 145, 
 
 146 
 
 " Making of Viola, The," 155 
 " Manus Animam Pinxit," 
 
 H7 
 
 " Narrow V r essel, A," 148 
 New Poems, 145 
 
 "Ode to the Setting Sun," 
 
 the, 145, 150 
 "Orient Ode," the, 150 
 Poems, 143 
 
 Sister Songs, 145, 154, 155 
 " The Hound of Heaven," 145 
 "The Poppy," 155 
 " To a Snowflake," 149 
 "To Daisies," 149 
 "To Monica Thought Dy- 
 
 in V' 155 
 "To the Dead Cardinal of 
 
 Westminster," 153 
 " Ultima," 147 
 " Ultimum," 147, 148 
 Topcliffe, 8, 9 
 
 Vaux of Harrowden, Lord, 5 
 Ward, Wilfrid, 52
 
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