POPULAR STUDIES OF 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 POETS. 
 
POPULAR STUDIES OF 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 POETS- IYT~ 
 
 OF 
 
 ]. MARSHALL MATHER, 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'LIFE AND TEACHINGS/OF JOHN RUSKih 
 
 LONDON AND NEW YORK : 
 FREDERICK WARNE AND CO, 
 
 1892. 
 
 [All rights reserved.] 
 

 PREFACE. 
 
 THE following studies were prepared for a class of working 
 men, with the sole aim of rousing their interest in, and 
 provoking them to a study of, our nineteenth century 
 poets. 
 
 They were reported in the provincial press at the time of 
 their delivery, and therefrom I have endeavoured to throw 
 them into volume form. 
 
 No material alteration has been made in either style 
 or setting, as I am anxious they should still appeal to a 
 wider section of the same community for whom they 
 were originally prepared. 
 
 J. MARSHALL MATHER 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 I. 
 
 PAoS 
 WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST - I 
 
 II. 
 SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST - - 2/ 
 
 III. 
 
 COLERIDGE, THE METAPHYSICIAN - 51 
 
 IV. 
 BYRON, THE PESSIMIST - - 75 
 
 V. 
 HOOD, THE HUMORIST - - 99 
 
 VI. 
 TENNYSON, THE MOODIST - - 125 
 
 VII. 
 BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST - 155 
 
I. 
 
 WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 
 

 I. '.,,/, ' ' < [: ; 
 
 WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 
 
 WORDSWORTH, as a poet, stood upon the threshold of the 
 nineteenth century, and may be looked upon as its first 
 great seer in the realm of song. Not only was he distinct 
 from his predecessors of the eighteenth century in the fact 
 that he formed a new school, but the direct antagonism 
 between his school and theirs was so severe that his 
 personality and poetry were thrown into most original and 
 unmistakable relief. The eighteenth-century poets were 
 slavishly classic in their style, going back to heathen legend 
 and to ancient history for their themes. They loved the 
 halo of antiquity : the old world was the Valhalla from 
 which they called forth their heroes, and the fabled past the 
 paradise out of which they invoked their deities. Gods, 
 kings, battles, feasts these were the subjects of their 
 rhymes, their treatment thereof being stiff, formal, and 
 pedantic. They shunned the common-place as subject for 
 song. The present that which was around them and of 
 them was too flat, too stale, too unprofitable for their 
 muse. With them scholarship asserted its supremacy over 
 humanity status was more than soul, and the glamour of 
 environment incalculably greater than the disposition and 
 
 I 2 
 
4 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 the heart. Thus, the wide world of every-day life was shut 
 out from their consideration ; and the realms of poetry, 
 hidden away in cottage life and in peasant character, 
 received no glance from their eye, no record from their 
 
 . : 
 
 : ^.Wordswortli" re versed all this. He turned from history to 
 
 ^N^twte^afitt From .classic legend to the every-day life of man. 
 : Ancf wfra't was" more, he turned to Nature in her humblest 
 dress, to Nature as she shyly showed herself in field and 
 hedgerow, in daisy and in daffodil, in wayside pool and 
 moorland pond. Not that he was a stranger to her 
 grander, wilder moods. Far from it. For he, as no other 
 poet, has painted her cloud-built citadels and flaming skies. 
 He likewise approached man in his poverty and rags. The 
 beggar, the leech-gatherer, the idiot girl, the worn widow- 
 all these caught his eye, and touched his heart, and started 
 forth the music from his lyre. His words concerning 
 another may be truthfully applied to himself, and to his 
 methods and themes : 
 
 \J ' Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; 
 His daily teachers had been woods and rills, 
 The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills.' 
 
 In that verse lies the key to Wordsworth's poetry; indeed, 
 it may be inscribed over the portals of the great school of 
 song which he established, and in which he has ever 
 remained the central figure. He went back neither to 
 great names nor to great deeds, but sought the men of his 
 own age and in his own village ; nor did he desire the 
 glories of tropic climes or the gorgeous colours of Italian 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 5 
 
 skies, but delighted in the mountain and moor that reared 
 and stretched themselves around his Westmorland home. 
 
 Wordsworth was pre-eminently fitted, both by disposition 
 and environment, for the founding and perfecting of this 
 great school of poetry. He was a man of simple mind and 
 of simple habits. Crowds possessed no charm for him, nor 
 was commerce congenial. For the greater part of his life a 
 village was his home, a cottage his shelter, a handful of 
 books his instructors ; a sister and a wife his companions, 
 and a few men, such as Southey, Coleridge, and De Quincey, 
 his familiar friends. His passion was for rural sights and 
 sounds, and it is computed that during his life he walked 
 somewhere about 180,000 English miles. He lived in the 
 open air. The country, in its silences and in its solitudes, 
 was his library, his study, his heaven. He could not 
 compose when closeted in his house, and as for inspiration, 
 has he not said : 
 
 1 One impulse from a vernal wood 
 May teach you more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good, 
 Than all the sages can ' ? 
 
 And again : 
 
 ' To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.' 
 
 What, however, was still more important was the position 
 in which Wordsworth was kindly placed by fortune. 
 Though never rich, he was saved from the pinching poverty 
 that forces a man to trim his style to the demands of a 
 reading public. Thus, he was enabled to follow his ideal, 
 and patiently await his constituency. He permitted neither 
 
6 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 scoffs, entreaties, nor criticism to force his hand. He played 
 his own game, and in the long-run he came off winner. This 
 would have been impossible to him had he not held a small 
 competency at command, entirely independent of literary 
 earnings, and had he not been a man of simplest and most 
 inexpensive habits. 
 
 It is well, therefore, to bear in mind that fortune favoured 
 Wordsworth in his work. Poetry such as his demands con- 
 ditions other than the midnight oil and the gossip of the city 
 club. Contemplation calls for time and quiet. It cannot 
 keep pace with hurrying feet, nor is its ' still, small voice ' 
 distinguishable amid the clamour of tongues. Nature also 
 is rigid in the conditions she enforces before she yields her 
 secrets. Her votaries must wait long, and wait with humble 
 hearts. They must listen, they must learn, they must open 
 their minds for the inflowing of her sounds and sights. Nor 
 can they do this until familiar with her loneliness and 
 silence. 
 
 To how many so-called practical men would Wordsworth's 
 life have been one of mooning and aimlessness ! Tramping 
 lanes, lying under overhanging rocks, crossing wind-swept 
 wastes, listening to waterfalls, communing with beggars and 
 leech-gatherers, going in rhapsodies over a field of daffodils 
 all these to the practical man seem so much waste, so 
 much non-productive energy. But it is not so. Whitman 
 says : 
 
 ' I loaf, and invite my soul.' 
 
 And it is even so. We must loaf to invite the soul out of 
 its hiding-places out of its shy seclusions. To call forth 
 the deeper instinct, to rouse the nobler power, to coax 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 7 
 
 those spiritual forces that go out towards and communicate 
 with the unseen, there must be some other passion besides 
 the passion for advancement, and some other end than the 
 end pursued by the busy and the eager of the day. But all 
 this supposes time and retirement, and demands a staple 
 sustenance as a set-off against the pangs of hunger and 
 the claims and responsibilities of life. This Wordsworth 
 had. He could go out and come in at his leisure. His 
 board was always spread, and his purse was never empty. 
 He could Moaf, and invite his soul,' and his soul was 
 responsive to the invitation. He could give his days and 
 nights to Nature, looking hard and long, listening in all 
 patience for her truths. In London his vision would have 
 been blinded, and if he had been called to keep his nose to 
 the grindstone he would never have seen the stars. 
 
 Thus Wordsworth was enabled to go direct to Nature, 
 to look at her with * a quiet eye,' and into her with a 
 responsive soul. And in return Nature became vocal to 
 him, and inspirational ; her sounds were voices and her 
 moods suggestions. She was the revelation of the Divine. 
 He says : 
 
 ( Divine monition Nature yields, 
 That not by bread alone we live, 
 Or what a hand of flesh can give.' 
 Or again : 
 
 * And I have felt 
 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts : a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man 
 
8 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 
 A lover of the meadows and the woods, 
 And mountains ; and of all that we behold 
 From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 
 Of eye and ear, both what they half create, 
 And what perceive ; well pleased to recognise 
 In nature and the language of the sense, 
 The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
 Of all my moral being. ' 
 
 In writing such as this Wordsworth implied something 
 more than that Nature was merely an external object calling 
 forth admiration. He went further, and realized in 
 Nature a Presence a Spirit breathing through her, and 
 manifest in all her moods. The truth was, Wordsworth 
 ' felt ' the Divine Immanence in Nature. He was not a 
 pantheist, as some suppose ; nor was he a transcendentalist. 
 He stood midway between the two. He was not a pan- 
 theist, for he discovered in Nature a Personality : ' I 
 have felt a Presence/ says he. Nor was he a transcen- 
 dentalist, as Browning, who not only saw God immanent 
 in Nature, but transcending it. He looked not upon Nature 
 as a machine, started by some unseen and distant hand ; 
 nor did he approach Nature as a museum of curiosities 
 brought from far and near by the evolution of ages. To him 
 it was the presence chamber of the Unseen the abode of the 
 Divine Being the mighty Being who is ever awake, 
 
 1 And doth with His eternal motion make 
 A sound like thunder everlastingly.' 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 9 
 
 Thus Wordsworth taught us that Nature is the embodiment 
 of the thought of God. 
 
 Wordsworth, in ' The Excursion/ lays down a threefold 
 rule of life, which may be taken as an interpretative rule in 
 the exposition of his poetry. He says, 
 
 * We live by admiration, hope, and love.' 
 
 In that line there lies a threefold education education in 
 nature, in humanity, and in self. 
 
 Admiration ! How few really admire the world in which 
 they find themselves ! To how few is it the * presence 
 chamber of God ' ! Wordsworth says men only live as they 
 possess the eye to see and the mind to wonder. Not sight 
 of and wonder for the startling and the phenomenal merely, 
 but sight of and wonder for the common features of every- 
 day life, 'the harvest of a quiet eye/ Only thus does 
 the mind become ' a mansion for all lovely forms, and 
 the memory a dwelling-place for all sweet sounds and 
 harmonies.' This admiration in Wordsworth was boundless. 
 For example, it is found in such lines as these : 
 
 ' My heart leaps up when I behold 
 
 A rainbow in the sky : 
 So was it when my life began ; 
 So is it now I am a man ; 
 So be it when I shall grow old, 
 
 Or let me die ! 
 
 The Child is Father of the Man ; 
 And I could wish my days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety.' 
 
 Again, in another poem, he speaks of the ' sympathies of 
 them who look upon the hills with tenderness, and make 
 
10 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 dear friendship with the streams and groves.' Add to this 
 the instinct for all that was good and ennobling in human 
 nature, and it will be understood what Wordsworth meant 
 by ' admiration/ Surely the need of this 'age is culture 
 both of eye and heart. Our inappreciation of the beauty 
 in the world around us, our scepticism and jealousy with 
 regard to the excellencies of our fellow-men how these 
 detract from and mar the strength and sanctity of our lives ! 
 We live too little by admiration. The sated eye, the blase 
 soul, the indifferent mind where is their enjoyment, their 
 peace, their blessedness ? But the man who in his forties 
 can pluck the ' wee, modest, crimson-tippit flower ' with the 
 same passion and joy as when he was a child the man 
 who can retain the same trust in the innate goodness of 
 human nature as when he first looked up into his father's 
 eye and trusted his father's hand that man grows young 
 with years ; time neither wastes him nor wearies him ; he 
 lives * by admiration/ 
 
 Further. Wordsworth says, 'We live by hope.' In re- 
 ferring again to ' The Excursion,' we find two characters set 
 off one against the other ' The Wanderer ' and ' The Soli- 
 tary.' ' The Wanderer ' is a pedlar-philosopher, a packman 
 or a bagman, travelling from village to village with his wares 
 a man with a large heart and an observant mind, cultured 
 in the ways of men, and sympathetic towards their sorrows. 
 ' The Solitary ' lives alone among the hills a scholar and a 
 recluse ; yet withal, sceptical, moody, hopeless. Both men 
 have suffered sorely from loss loss of wealth and kindred. 
 But how widely different the effect wrought upon their 
 respective characters thereby ! { The Wanderer ' is loved of 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. II 
 
 all, and welcomed by all ; his words are helpful, and his 
 cheering presence an inspiration. * The Solitary' shuns, 
 and in his turn is shunned by, his fellows. And wherein 
 lies the difference ? In this: ' The Wanderer ' is hopeful; 
 ' The Solitary ' hopeless. The one sees a future, and lives 
 for it; the other dwells upon a desolate past, and would 
 fain die. How well may Longfellow's words be quoted 
 here ! 
 
 ' Not sorrow 
 
 Is our destined end or way ; 
 But to act that each to-morrow 
 Find us further than to-day.' 
 
 We are cursed to-day with the spirit of a brooding 
 pessimism. Hope is looked upon as a phantom to be 
 chased only by the insane. One teacher has gone so far 
 as to say that if God made this world He made it with 
 His left hand, and the sooner He destroys it with His right 
 hand the better. To cherish such a spirit as this is death 
 death in its gloomiest and deadliest form. To ward it 
 off, and to inspire us with the thrill and possibility of life, 
 Wordsworth raises his voice and makes * The Wanderer ' 
 say : 
 
 ' The food of hope 
 Is meditated action ; robbed of this 
 Her sole support, she languishes and dies. 
 We perish also, for we live by hope 
 And by desire ; we see by the glad light, 
 And breathe by the sweet air of futurity, 
 And so we live or else we have no life.' 
 
 And, further, according to Wordsworth we live by love. 
 Love of what ? Of the true and the beautiful, no matter 
 
12 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 where found, or in whom found. The love of our kind as 
 well as of our kin, the love of universal man as well as the 
 caste or grade to which we ourselves belong. A love of 
 things simple and unrenowned love of what the proud 
 call ' common,' and what the exclusive do not admit within 
 their sphere. Love for the love found in cots where poor 
 men lie. Love for the colour of a wayside flower, for the 
 instinct of a beast of burden, for the silences of heaven, 
 and for the wastes and wilds of earth. Listen to the lines 
 of Wordsworth, illustrative of himself as possessed by this 
 all-consuming passion : 
 
 ' Long have I loved what I behold, 
 The night that calms, the clay that cheers ; 
 The common growth of Mother Earth 
 Suffices me her tears, her mirth, 
 Pier humblest mirth and tears.' 
 
 We speak of Wordsworth as* the naturalist because he 
 was the apostle of Nature. Not history, not philosophy 
 not art, but Nature. True, he had the antiquarian spirit, 
 the philosophic mind, the artist touch, but all these were 
 subordinate to Nature, and to Nature in her commonest 
 and, to the majority of men, most uninteresting moods. 
 Many say they cannot understand Wordsworth. - And 
 why ? Because he is so childlike. There is a subtlety in 
 true simplicity, a subtlety that only simplicity can under- 
 stand. You must prepare yourselves to understand him by 
 divesting your mind of all pride and all preconception. 
 Our poet did not write for clever men, but for men meek 
 and lowly ; not to tax a cunning brain, but to appeal to a 
 human heart. Take one or two examples : 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 13 
 
 ' A rock there is whose homely front 
 The passing traveller slights.' 
 
 That is, the common eye sees nothing there but a bare, 
 blank surface, and passes heedlessly along ; but the poet's 
 eye is caught, and the poet's step is stayed, for 
 
 ' There the glow-worms hang their lamps, 
 Like stars, at various heights ; 
 And one coy primrose to that rock 
 The vernal breeze invites.' 
 
 Thus, at nightfall, to him who can see, the bare rock 
 becomes a firmament of fire, while during the day it is a 
 garden, gay with primrose rathe. 
 
 Now notice the great underlying laws the poet sees in 
 this, and note their gradation. 
 
 1 The flowers, still faithful to the stems, 
 
 Their fellowship renew ; 
 The stems are faithful to the root 
 
 That worketh out of view. 
 And to the rock the root adheres 
 
 In every fibre true. 
 Close clings to earth the living rock, 
 ' Though threatening still to fall ; 
 The earth is constant to her sphere ; 
 
 And God upholds them all : 
 So blooms this lonely Plant, nor dreads 
 
 Her annual funeral.' 
 
 * Thus, the life of the primrose is linked with the vastness 
 of creation. Branch and root and rock and sphere and 
 universe of God are but inseparable links in an unbroken 
 chain. A tremulous stalk, efflorescent with yellow petals, 
 is an inseparable part of the great cosmos, and as secure 
 
14 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 as the Infinite. Though least, it is none the less a sharer 
 of His eternal majesty and might. 
 
 Wordsworth's simplicity has often been denounced as 
 puerility, and no poem has been so much burlesqued as 
 i We are Seven.' True, it is found in all the early primers, 
 and known to most of our little ones. And yet, how tender 
 in tone, how rich in conception ! Let us disabuse our 
 minds of the idea that it is a nursery-rhyme. It is, in 
 very truth, a meditation upon life and death, as viewed 
 and understood from the child-standpoint, in contradis- 
 tinction to the standpoint of the sage. It is, in a word, 
 what a little one, full of life and mirth, thinks of * the 
 shadow feared by man '; and as a foil to the child's views 
 we have the views of the aged philosopher, the man to whom 
 death is dissolution and decay. The picture is artistic in 
 the extreme. A buoyant child a cluster of silent graves a 
 gloomy sage, who sees the awfulness and inevitableness of 
 our final doom 
 
 ' A simple child 
 That lightly draws its breath, 
 And feels its life in every limb, 
 What should it know of death ?' 
 
 Now comes upon the scene the grave questioner : 
 
 1 "Sisters and brothers, little maid, 
 How many may you be ?" ' 
 
 As though there were no question nor doubt, the child 
 replies : 
 
 ' '' How many? Seven in all," she said, 
 And wondering looked at me. 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 15 
 
 1 " And where are they ? I pray you tell." 
 
 She answered, " Seven are we, 
 And two of us at Conway dwell, 
 And two are gone to sea. 
 
 " Two of us in the churchyard lie, 
 
 My sister and my brother ; 
 And in the churchyard cottage I 
 
 Dwell near them with my mother." ' 
 
 Note the relationship still real to the little maid's mind 
 through the proximity of the graves. Sister and brother lie 
 under the mould, it is true ; but the mould is only a stone's- 
 throw from the cot where dwell the little maid and the 
 mother. Then the philosopher tries to show the child the 
 difference between herself and the dead sister and brother : 
 
 ' " You run about, my little maid, 
 
 Your limbs they are alive ; 
 If two are in the churchyard laid, 
 Then ye are only five." ' 
 
 But what of that ? Her brother and sister, though they run 
 not about, sleep close to where she lives, and to where she 
 runs about : 
 
 1 " Their graves are green, they may be seen," 
 
 The little maid replied, 
 
 " Twelve steps or more from my mother's door, 
 And they are side by side. 
 
 <; My stockings there I often knit, 
 
 My kerchief there I hem, 
 And there upon the ground I sit 
 
 I sit and sing to them." ' 
 
 For surely if they were only a few feet beneath the ground 
 the lullaby that soothed them when they slept at home would 
 soothe them now that they sleep in the grave ? 
 
1 6 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 * " And often, after sunset, sir, 
 
 When it is light and fair, 
 I take my little porringer, 
 And eat my supper there." ' 
 
 What was death when she could work so close to the dear 
 ones, and when at their side she could eat her evening 
 meal ? 
 
 ' " The first that died was little Jane ; 
 
 In bed she moaning lay, 
 Till God released her of her pain ; 
 And then she went away. 
 
 " So in the churchyard she was laid ; 
 
 And, when the grass was dry, 
 Together round the grave we played, 
 
 My brother John and I." ' 
 
 What was death when she and her brother could romp and 
 play so near to where the dead ones lay ? 
 
 ' " And when the ground was white with snow, 
 
 And I could run and slide ; 
 My brother John was forced to go, 
 And he lies by her side." ' 
 
 Then the philosopher expostulates with the child, and some- 
 what impatiently cries : 
 
 ' " But they are dead. Those two are dead. 
 
 Their spirits are in heaven." 
 'Twas throwing words away, for still 
 The little Maid would have her will, 
 And said, " Nay. We are seven." ' 
 
 J That simple poem is a flawless gem, and sets before us two 
 views of death the child view and the philosophic; and 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 17 
 
 who shall say the child view is not the truer ? Surely 
 Wordsworth thought so, for has he not elsewhere said : 
 
 * Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! 
 Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 
 Upon the growing Boy, 
 But He beholds the light, and whence it flows 
 
 He sees it in his joy : 
 The Youth, who daily farther from the East 
 
 Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, 
 
 And by the vision splendid 
 
 Is on his way attended : 
 At length the Man perceives it die away , 
 And fade into the light of common day.' 
 
 Let us stand by the faith of our childhood. It may not 
 be the light of logic, but it is the flame of love. It may 
 not be the teaching of the schools, but it is the instinct of 
 the soul. It may not be the creed of a world out of which 
 all romance has departed, but it is a lingering echo of 
 heaven's truth which in childhood so clearly expressed itself 
 in our heart. 
 
 Wordsworth may be spoken of as a king amongst those 
 who have aspired to rule through the sonnet. While it 
 would be extravagance to match him in this realm with 
 Shakespeare, or even with Milton in his finest productions, it 
 must be admitted that, taking into consideration the great 
 number of sonnets he wrote, he can lay claim to a greater 
 share of excellence than most of his fellow-poets. It is in 
 these sonnets his finest work is perceptible his loftiest 
 teaching set forth. While he claims this form of poem as 
 his pastime, it is none the less true that beneath his touch 
 and inspiration it becomes a prophecy. Almost all the sins 
 
 2 
 
1 8 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 of his much-loved England he set forth in the sonnet \ all 
 he feared as to her future, all he counted grand in her 
 history, all he sought to hand down to her coming genera- 
 tions, are found in these poetic limitations. The sonnet 
 addressed to the Sonnet is a master-piece, closing with the 
 lines : 
 
 ' In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound 
 Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground ; 
 Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) 
 Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, 
 Should find brief solace there, as I have found.' 
 
 In the sonnet, too, Wordsworth apostrophises his native 
 land, as he views her in the distance at evening from the 
 shore of Calais : 
 
 * Fair Star of Evening ! Splendour of the West, 
 Star of my country ! on the horizon's brink 
 Thou hangest, stooping, as might seem, to sink 
 On England's bosom :' 
 
 1 There ! that dusky spot 
 Beneath thee, it is England ; there it lies. 
 Blessings on you both ! one hope, one lot, 
 One life, one glory !' 
 
 And whose heart has not pulsed with patriotic fervour 
 when reading 
 
 ' Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent, 
 Ye children of a soil that doth advance 
 Her haughty brow against the coast of France' ! 
 
 remembering the words were written in time of threatened 
 invasion and Napoleonic boast. 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 19 
 
 Or, again, note how Wordsworth points to the internal 
 dangers of his country through the sonnet : 
 
 ' When I have borne in memory what has tamed 
 Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart, 
 When men change Swords for Ledgers, and desert 
 The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed 
 I had, my country ! am I to be blamed ?' 
 
 Or again : 
 
 ' The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers : 
 Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
 This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers ; 
 For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 
 It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea : 
 And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.' 
 
 I am aware all this is called preaching, and no doubt it 
 is. The poet, however, is entitled to preach indeed, 
 preaching is one of the gifts entrusted to him, and for which 
 we must ever hold him responsible. He must know our 
 weakness and our sin ; as individuals, and as a nation, he 
 must inspire us inspire us with high ideals and lofty aims. 
 He must deliver us from the sordid spirit and the mercantile 
 mood from the selfishness of mere individualism, and the 
 unpatriotic mania begotten by a competitive age. He must 
 stand between us and materialism, whether of faith or of 
 
 2 3 
 
20 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 practice ; he must clean the windows of our souls, and open 
 our eyes to the supersensuous world around ; yes, he must 
 preach, whether he please or not. Only one thing he 
 must not do he must not prose. His words must be life, 
 and his teaching inspiration and revelation, rather than echo 
 and repetition. 
 
 Now, I do not know of a finer study for any thoughtful 
 man, who seeks the moral nerve-power essential for true 
 patriotism and true manhood, than the sonnets of Words- 
 worth. Let him go to them as to his Bible, and read them 
 until the spirit of every line fires and flames in his soul. At 
 first they may be vague, their full beauty and power dawn- 
 ing but slowly. This need not daunt, how? er. Read and 
 re-read, they will unfold truth upon truth and wonder upon 
 wonder. The mystic spirit of their religion will insinuate 
 itself into the conscience ; and the noble life of their moral 
 teaching build up a manhood fearless of temptation, aggres- 
 sive in all noble endeavours, and true at core. I repeat, I 
 know of no finer study for any thoughtful man. Their 
 truths will base a nation upon impregnable rock, and their 
 spirit awaken to the noblest life. I venture to assert, after 
 long study, that the best Wordsworth had to give us is 
 given to us in his sonnets ; and, what is more, in them he 
 has given us his best in his best workmanship. For delicacy 
 of finish, for subtle shade of colour, for marvellous force 
 of expression, they stand almost alone and unequalled 
 from out the seventy years of his versatile poetic produc- 
 tiveness. 
 
 Perhaps the true Words worthian's purest enjoyment is to 
 be drawn from the lyrical poems. In them are matchless 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 21 
 
 touches, and conceptions unspeakably sublime. What can 
 be finer than when he sings 
 
 1 Of the Sun going down to his rest 
 
 In the broad open eye of the solitary sky* ? 
 Or, 
 
 ' I wandered lonely as a cloud 
 That floats on high o'er vales and hills ' 
 
 Or that triplet of verses, worthy to rank with Tennyson's 
 
 ' Break, break, break, 
 On thy cold, gray stones, O sea ' 
 
 ' S]r i welt among the untrodden ways 
 
 B the springs of Dove, 
 A Mai .vhom there were none to praise 
 And very few to love. 
 
 A Violet by a mossy stone 
 
 Half hidden from the eye ! 
 Fair as a star, when only one 
 
 Is shining in the s ky. 
 
 She lived unknown, and few could know 
 
 When Lucy ceased to be ; 
 But she is in her grave, and, oh ! 
 
 The difference to me !' 
 
 In his narrative poems he is more prosaic, and too often 
 lapses into the mood that moralizes over trifles. Here 
 he becomes the slave of his system, not seldom seeking 
 poetry in subjects where no poetry is to be found. There 
 is the ' common-place/ and there is the common * common- 
 place.' In the former, much that is beautiful and inspiring 
 may be discovered ; in the latter, however, there is nothing ; 
 and he who works its mine works it in vain. Even the 
 transcendent genius of Wordsworth was powerless to manu- 
 
22 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 facture a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The truth is, he 
 wrote too much, because he wrote about everything he 
 chanced to meet. He, like other great men, possessed 
 a passion for idealizing objects that were never meant for 
 such distinction the result being that, while he did not 
 succeed in glorifying the object, he did succeed somewhat 
 in betraying the elements of weakness in his own poetic 
 powers. These, however, were but spots in the sun of his 
 genius. He rose to heights unattained, save by few of the 
 poets of his own or of any age. The man who could give to 
 the world the ' Ode on Intimations of Immortality,' * Lines 
 composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting 
 the Banks of the Wye/ ' The Ode to Duty/ and ' Laoda- 
 meia,' may well be pardoned the few puerilities and prosaics 
 that deflect somewhat from the line of his excellence. 
 
 The greatest drawback, however, to Wordsworth as a 
 poet grew out of those very conditions which we have 
 already seen enabled him to attain to his ideal. While 
 the comfort and undisturbed character of his environ- 
 ment gave him leisure and quiet, and while the yearly 
 income, which was never wanting, granted him freedom 
 from the rubs and cuffs of life, they nevertheless wrought 
 harm, inasmuch as they kept him a stranger to the fierce 
 fight and the galling sorrow which have made many poets 
 sing so sweetly, so touchingly, and so humanly. Words- 
 worth was shielded by circumstances from the pinch that 
 has wrung sweetest music from so many hearts. His home 
 life was happy and congenial in its relations and harmonies 
 he knew little of sickness and little of bereavement. He 
 was of an equable temperament, of simple faith, and ever 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 23 
 
 free from doubt. In religion he was not vexed and plagued 
 as other men. Hence, while he could give us and un- 
 derstand as he gave it us a character such as * The Wan- 
 derer/ he was altogether at a loss in his treatment of ' The 
 Solitary.' How much more would Tennyson or Browning 
 have made of him ! Scepticism and doubt, however, lie 
 outside the limits of Wordsworth's realm. He could not 
 understand them ; and when he attempted to deal with them 
 he was at fault. If Wordsworth's life had been more storm- 
 tossed, his poetry would not only have possessed more 
 pathos and passion, but a realm of truth truth deep, 
 far-reaching, and eternal would have come up for treat- 
 ment and exposition. In this respect his friend Coleridge 
 the poor opium-cursed and brandy-imbibing Coleridge was 
 far ahead of him. None the less, the calm and joy of Words- 
 worth's life, together with his stainless purity and trustful 
 soul, enable him to give us a poetry which no other condi- 
 tions could have created. They fostered in him the temper 
 and disposition that made him peculiarly 'the Child of 
 Nature ' and put him in direct and unbroken communion 
 with 
 
 * The light of setting suns, 
 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 
 And the blue sky.' 
 
 I do not wish it to be understood that Wordsworth was 
 not in sympathy with his kind. Far from it. He was of 
 large heart, and loved all men. But his surroundings and 
 temper limited his appreciation of, and sympathy with, those 
 moods so well known to, and so well expressed by, the poets 
 who know something of the sorrows and sins of life. 
 
24 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Wordsworth was indeed a lover of his kind. No man can 
 commune with Nature as he did, and not be, for the 
 child of nature is almost sure to be the brother of man. 
 The student of art and of philosophy is in danger of exclu- 
 siveness and selfishness, and may be tempted to look with 
 coldness and contempt on certain classes of men ; but 
 he whom Nature teaches learns to know and to love ; 
 he is imbued and interpenetrated with the forces and 
 passions of the Presence which Wordsworth felt was always 
 haunting and animating the great world around. The 
 equanimity, the repose, the purity, the silence, the vastness 
 all these reflect themselves and reproduce themselves in 
 the soul that learns to look on them in their varied and 
 varying manifestations. They reproduced themselves in 
 Wordsworth, and were seen in his love for his kind, his 
 evenness of temper, his child-like trust, his freedom from 
 envy, and the restraint which he placed upon the gratifica- 
 tion of the basilar instincts of his being. As he himself has 
 said : 
 
 * For the man 
 
 Who, in this spirit, communes with the forms 
 Of nature, who with understanding heart 
 Doth know and love such objects as excite 
 No morbid passions, no disquietude, 
 No vengeance, and no hatred, needs must feel 
 The joy of that pure principle of love 
 So deeply, that, unsatisfied with aught 
 Less pure and exquisite, he cannot choose 
 But seek for objects of a kindred love 
 In fellow-natures, and a kindred joy.' 
 
 Yes, like begets like in every realm. He who communes 
 with Nature and becomes receptive to Nature's secrets and 
 
WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. 25 
 
 to Nature's moods, will, in turn, reflect her disposition in his 
 own in a word, he will become, as Wordsworth became, 
 Nature's child. 
 
 I have done my best to initiate you into the secret of 
 Wordsworth. If you would put yourselves in touch with 
 him you must put yourselves in touch with his themes. 
 You cannot understand him in an easy-chair, with your feet 
 on the fender and a pipe between your teeth. No ; you 
 must go out into the realm of wonder and of beauty. Climb 
 the hills, wander across the moors, watch the changing cloud- 
 forms and sky colours, look into the meanest flower that 
 blows/ keep an open ear to song of bird and sough of wind, 
 and count no object, no man, common or unclean. Thus 
 do, preserving while you do it the humble heart and the 
 devout mind, and Wordsworth's secret will in due time be 
 yours. He will not chant for you the triumphs of the great, 
 but the sorrows of the humble poor. He will not recount 
 the victory of conquering legions, but will tell you of the 
 cottage child whose cry was ' We are seven. 7 The 
 character, too, of the man affords glorious companionship. 
 Literary records portray no nobler example for emulation 
 unassuming, frugal, simple, pure. What more inspiriting, 
 what more needful in these days of patronage and popu- 
 larity, than the example of one who with unflinching consis- 
 tency held on to his own high ideal, refusing the baits which 
 offered a ready-made reputation, and bearing up bravely 
 beneath the sneers and jeers of contemporaries ? Oh, it was 
 a sight for angels and for men ! But Wordsworth was con- 
 scious he was right ; he had firm faith in his ideal, and he 
 knew it would eventually be accepted : he had firm faith in 
 
26 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 the instincts of mankind, and knew that finally it would 
 listen to his song. Like one of his fellow-poets, when the 
 world rejected his work, he could say: * T shall dine late; 
 but the dining-room will be well lighted, and the guests few 
 and select.' There was moral fibre in Wordsworth. The 
 world could neither turn him aside from his purpose nor 
 hurry him towards its consummation. He marched amid 
 men as stainlessly, and with as stately tread, as he marches 
 in his poems. He held his head high in the permissible 
 pride of strength. What he said of Milton, we may as 
 truly say of him : 
 
 1 Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart : 
 Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea : 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 
 So didst thou travel on life's common way, 
 In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 
 The lowliest duties on herself did lay. ' 
 
 Simple and unassuming as his fellow-dalesmen, fearless and 
 free as his own mountain winds, a poet by birth, a poet by 
 choice, he lived in the eye of Nature, and at a ripe old age 
 breathed away his soul to Nature's God. 
 
II. 
 
 SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 
 
II. 
 SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 
 
 OF all our poets Shelley is the most imaginative. He 
 associates, as no other of the illustrious school in which he 
 holds so high a rank, an ' airy fairy ' form and an * airy 
 fairy ' meaning with almost all he sees and hears. While he 
 is, within certain limits, both teacher and thinker, his chief 
 power lies in the prodigality of the great gifts which, apart 
 from revelation and reason, build up their own universe, 
 and people it with their own creations. To bear this in 
 mind is an indispensable condition for the right appreciation 
 of his works ; otherwise the reader may be vexed and 
 perplexed with what seems the unreal and the fantastic. > 
 Taken, however, on his own lines, and measured by hisi~" 
 own peculiar genius, Shelley stands alone for subtle sweet- 
 ness of song and entrancing beauty of vision. 
 
 If among all our poets Shelley is the most imaginative, 
 it will be well to consider for a little while the nature and 
 functions of that great faculty. The imagination is a 
 creative power, purely subjective, yet gathering material 
 from hints thrown off by the objective world that is, from 
 the sights and sounds appealing to it from without. Not 
 that its creations are materialized because the offspring of 
 
30 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 the seen ; rather, like the child who with its doll discovers 
 the springs of deepest devotion, and peoples its toy house 
 with sylph-like presences, the idealist, while starting and 
 steering his course from Mother Earth, proceeds there- 
 from to ' scale the empyrean.' A wayside lily fired the 
 imagination of Jesus, and the flame thereof scorched the 
 tawdry dresses of kings, and threw into relief the inex- 
 haustible care of Providence. The imagination of Shelley 
 awoke into song at the blithe note of the skylark 'in the 
 golden lightning of the sunken sun,' and he sang 
 
 ' Like a poet hidden 
 
 In the light of thought, 
 Singing hymns unbidden, 
 
 Till the world is wrought 
 To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.' 
 
 In both these instances the creations are subjective, and 
 yet they are suggested by the objective and the material. 
 
 Imagination is something more than fancy. Fancy lacks 
 power of embodiment ; it possesses no distinctness of 
 feature ; it is as impalpable as air. Its forms are ghostly, 
 and ever varying ; it can neither be grasped, localized, nor 
 recalled. It is otherwise with the imagination. Despite its 
 subjectivity, it embodies itself in abiding forms, in unfading 
 colours, and in undying truths. On the other hand, the 
 imagination is distinct from mere intellectual processes and 
 logical deductions. These latter submit themselves to 
 analyses and demonstrations ; they may be measured, 
 tested, and confirmed. Not so, however, with the products 
 of the imagination. Real yet unreal, embodiments yet 
 etherealizations, on the earth yet not of it, walking the 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 31 
 
 strange border-line termed by the many as mystical, they yet 
 are, and demonstrate themselves in unmistakable manner. 
 They have won battles as when, for example, ten thousand 
 hearts were fired with the ever-memorable words, ' From 
 the summit of yonder pyramids forty centuries behold you. 7 
 They have changed the forms of governments, and renewed 
 the life of nations, as well as been potent weapons in the 
 hands of subtle statesmen. They have been the germ of 
 many religions, and the secret of their ascendancy over the 
 millions of the earth. They are shades in the web of life 
 rather than coloured threads ; visions rather than dreams ; 
 presences rather than forms. 
 
 Now, Shelley is an idealist. He introduces us to a* 
 realm other than earth, yet in part built out of it ; and he 
 peoples it with presences which, while suggested by outward 
 objects, convey other and higher than outward meanings. 
 So changed is this realm, and so transformed are these 
 presences in the alembic of his brain, and by the alchemy 
 of his imagination, that they become freed from all laws of 
 matter, time, and space, and by way of illustration nothing 
 more striking can be selected than the following : 
 
 * Through the purple night " . 
 
 I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds 
 Which trample the dim winds ; in each there stands 
 A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight. 
 Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there, 
 And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars : 
 Others, with burning eyes lean forth, and drink 
 With eager lips the wind of their own speed, 
 As if the thing they loved fled on before, 
 And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks 
 Stream like a comet's flashing hair ; they all 
 Sweep onward.' 
 
 
32 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 ' These are the immortal hours, 
 Of whom thou didst demand. One waits for thee.' 
 
 Here is a passage aglow with imaginative' fire, yet lighting 
 itself from the material world. The mighty course is the 
 dome of heaven. While sweeping it we behold cars, 
 coursers, and charioteers objects common to the earth 
 and familiar to the eye. From these the poet's imagination 
 warms, the coursers being rainbow-winged, suggestive of 
 their power of flight and sweep throughout the circle of the 
 heavens ; while the * dim winds ' neither direct nor speed 
 them, but are trampled regardlessly beneath their feet. 
 
 Further, the charioteers are of two kinds those whose 
 looks are backward, as though pursued by some dread and 
 overtaking forms; and those whose looks are forward, as 
 though in pursuit of some prize. Both speed onward, ever 
 onward, with wild and burning eyes, their bright locks 
 streaming like a comet's flashing hair. 
 
 Now the imagination of the poet burns with intenser 
 glow, for these figures, created out of the heavenly spaces 
 and earthly objects, are made to stand for profoundest 
 truths, being nothing less than the immortal hours wait- 
 ing to bear the mortal onwards, ever onwards, towards 
 his destiny. The charioteers with backward look and wild, 
 fear-flashing eye are those who seek escape from a dreadful 
 past ; and yet in vain, for the flight of the immortal hours 
 is not fleet enough for an overtaking Nemesis. On the 
 other hand, the charioteer who looks ahead, as though to 
 overtake some prize, is Hope, whose car is 
 
 * An ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire, 
 Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 33 
 
 Of delicate strange tracery. The young Spirit 
 That guides it has the dove-like eyes of Hope. 
 How its soft smiles attract the soul ! as light 
 Lures winged insects through the lampless air.' 
 
 Here, then, is a truth setting forth human destiny, pre- 
 sented in imaginative form, the imagination gathering its 
 materials from the earthly and visible realm. 
 
 This is but one passage a representative passage out 
 of hundreds to be found in the poems of Shelley. It is 
 enough, however, to show what I mean by the use and 
 interpretation of the imaginative faculty. 
 It is also necessary that those who purpose a study of 
 Shelley's writings should bear in mind that much of his 
 imagination embodies itself in classic form, for he not only 
 personifies the powers of Nature, but he paganizes them. 
 In his poetry the heathen religions find, in part, a renaissance, 
 with this difference, however that while their teachers 
 believed in the presences they supposed to be existent in the 
 powers around them, Shelley calls them forth as abstractions 
 of a mind ever seeking, yet never finding, some all-satisfying 
 ideal. No one can read his poems with any degree of 
 intelligence without wondering at the strange beings demi- 
 gods and personified creatures with which he fills his 
 world; and no one can read his life without discovering 
 that these demi-gods and personified creatures were not so 
 much beings in whom he believed, as creations of his ever- 
 changing feelings after someone, or some thing, in whom 
 he would fain believe. 
 
 For example, to the West Wind he cries : 
 
 3 
 
34 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 ' Be thou, Spirit fierce, 
 My spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one ! 
 
 Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, 
 Like withered leaves, to quicken a new'birth ; 
 
 And, by the incantation of this verse, 
 Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth 
 
 Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind !' 
 
 Again, in the ' Hymn to Apollo ': 
 
 * I am the eye with which the universe 
 
 Beholds itself, and knows itself divine ; 
 All harmony of instrument or verse, 
 
 All prophecy, all medicine, are mine, 
 All light of art or nature : to my song 
 Victory and praise in its own right belong.' 
 
 In the 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty' there is this still 
 more striking passage : 
 
 ^~ ' The awful shadow of some unseen Power 
 
 Floats, though unseen, among us ; visiting 
 This various world with as inconstant wing 
 As summer winds that creep from flower to flower. 
 
 Let thy power, which like the truth 
 
 Of Nature on my passive youth 
 Descended, to my onward life supply 
 
 Its calm to one who worships thee, 
 
 And every form containing thee, 
 Whom, Spirit fair, thy spells did bind 
 To fear himself, and love all human kind.' 
 
 ^ There are among the students of Shelley those who class 
 him with the pantheists, and no doubt much pantheistic 
 teaching is discoverable in his works. Others there are 
 who claim for him in his latter days a faith in the unseen 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 35 
 
 and eternal, as well as in the immortality of the divine in 
 man. Apart from any approval of, or dissent from, these 
 questions questions far too disputable there can be little 
 
 S 
 
 doubt that Shelley's beliefs, or unbeliefs, contain a dash of 
 paganism, but it is paganism artistically rather than super- 
 stitiously enthroned. Do not suppose I count Shelley a 
 pagan. All I contend for is that in his search after the 
 eternal and after this his life was one long earnest search 
 he passed through the pagan phase only to find its 
 insufficiency. This accounts for his embodiment and 
 personification of the forces around him. He wanted One 
 to whom he could unbosom himself, One who knew his 
 thoughts and could fulfil his ideals. Indeed, much of his 
 poetry is a passionate cry after this, and yet, alas ! nothing 
 but a cry. 
 
 Another feature in Shelley's character, and hence a 
 r- 
 further key to the right interpretation of his poetry, 
 
 is unconventwnafom, He recognises no precedents ; to 
 him the past is neither a god to whom reverence is due, 
 nor a tyrant to whom servility need be rendered. He is 
 never swayed by what has been ; he never maps his course 
 by the latitude and longitude of early teachers and mind- 
 geographers. No ; he rather sails the unknown seas, 
 explores the forbidden lands, and rushes wildly within the 
 precincts of the esoteric shrines. Religion, politics, social 
 observance all these to him, despite their hoar antiquity^ 
 and restrictive power, are but superstitions, party cries, and 
 mockeries. Here he resembles Byron, without Byron's 
 excesses. Thus, while we turn away with loathing from the 
 latter, we are fascinated by the daring of the former. Nor 
 
 32 
 
36 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 was this mere bravado on Shelley's part. He hated shams 
 with 'the hate of hates,' and his eye was as quick to 
 discern, and his heart to despise, as his 'tongue was to 
 scath them. Looking at the religion of his age, he saw its 
 hypocrisies : priests whose lives traversed their creed, and 
 professors who damned others for disbelieving what they 
 believed in only by rote. Looking at the political life of 
 his age, he saw its corruptness and cruelty : statesmen who 
 retained power by lies and craft, and used it for their own 
 selfish ends. Looking at the social life of his age, he saw 
 its artificiality and insincerity : men and women, married by 
 law, hating one another, and, while true to the bond of the 
 altar, false, awfully false, to the bond of devotion and love. 
 All this maddened Shelley, and prompted him to the utter- 
 ance of much which stung and embittered the smug 
 insincerity of his age. Says he : 
 
 V 
 
 I * They have three words God, Hell, and Heaven, r* 
 A vengeful, pitiless, and almighty fiend, 
 Whose mercy is a nick-name for the rage 
 Of tameless tigers hungering for blood ; 
 Hell, a red gulf of everlasting fire, 
 Where poisonous and undying worms prolong 
 Eternal misery to those hapless slaves 
 Whose life has been a penance for its crimes ; 
 And Heaven, a meed for those who dare belie 
 Their human nature, quake, believe, and cringe 
 Before the mockeries of earthly power. 
 
 # # # * # # 
 
 These tools the tyrant tempers to his work, 
 Wields in his wrath, and, as he wills, destroys, 
 Omnipotent in wickedness.' 
 
 That this is strong language none will deny ; that it is 
 blasphemous many will assert. I offer no defence for its 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 37 
 
 use, but only ask that, when read, it may be read in the 
 light of Shelley's terrible rebound from the conventionalism 
 of his age. To him it was blasphemy to preach the 
 Calvinistic God, ' almighty in His fiendishness '; it was 
 tyranny to use a popular form of government as an instru- 
 ment for selfish ends ; it was cruelty to hedge round a 
 home by legal purity, and yet wink at the encroachments of 
 the lust of hate in heart of husband and of wife. Again, I 
 say, I offer no defence for many of these utterances of 
 Shelley, which the religious mind will be slow to forgive. I 
 only ask those who purpose a study of his poetry to 
 approach such poems as ' Queen Mab ' and ' The Revolt of 
 Islam,' remembering the frenzied hate of Shelley to what he 
 believed to be the conventionalisms of his age. 
 
 Unconventionality is a necessary feature in the character 
 of the teacher. Without it he is soon whittled down, and 
 shorn of the personality which is his inherent strength./ 
 When he becomes formal, he becomes forceless ; and no 
 sooner is he changed into a time-server than he ceases to be 
 a factor in the growth of the future. Each age calls for the 
 unconventional man. In the pulpit, in the senate, in the 
 social circle for him there is crying need. This may be 
 understood when we remember that nothing is so easily 
 acquired by a people, and, when once acquired, so fatal to a 
 people, as acting. When men seem to be rather than are, 
 when the gloss and the veneer are laid on without rebuke, 
 and blindly valued without exposure, then the things belong- 
 ing to a nation's peace are almost at an end. Hence, the 
 need of the unconventional man. In Hebrew days he was 
 the prophet ; in the Classic age of Rome he was the satirist ; 
 
38 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 in these days not infrequently he is the poet. It matters 
 little when or how he appears he is ever the servant of 
 truth and the forerunner of further advance. 
 
 It is indispensable, however, that the unconventional man 
 should be permeated with the leaven of reverence. Without 
 this his unconventionalism runs away with his better judg- 
 ment and leads him into extremes. Under the leadership 
 of such, reformations flame into revolutions, and truth is 
 oftentimes overthrown in the assault made upon error and 
 falsehood. The Greatest of all innovators, and yet withal 
 the most reverent of teachers, bade His follower desist from 
 plucking up the tares, lest in so doing the wheat was plucked 
 up with them ; and when storming a system honeycombed 
 with hypocrisy, He said : 4 1 came not to destroy, but to 
 fulfil.' While not prepared to yield universal and unqualified 
 allegiance to these principles, I venture to assert that he who 
 would rightly reform abuses must show some respect for the 
 existing leaven of truth, and remember that before the 
 unconventional can keep the world rejuvenescent, it must be 
 allied to reverence and discretion. 
 
 Shelley possessed the one, but lacked the other. This 
 accounts for much of his reckless and blasphemous writing, 
 and makes him a one-sided and extravagant teacher. For 
 example, what can be stronger proof of oblique vision and 
 biased mind than the following ? 
 
 1 How bold the flight of Passion's wandering wing, 
 How swift the step of Reason's firmer tread, 
 How calm and sweet the victories of life, 
 How terrorless the triumph of the grave 
 But for thy aid, 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 1 39 
 
 Religion ! but for thee, prolific fiend, 
 
 Who peoples! earth with demons, hell with men, 
 
 And heaven with slaves !' 
 
 No reverent man could write words such as these. That 
 abuses did and still do exist under the shadow of religion, no 
 one will deny ; but have they not also existed in the name 
 and under the shadow of Liberty ? Were not Madame 
 Roland's words prior to her execution, ' O Liberty ! what 
 things are done in thy name !' ? And yet, despite this, 
 we do not drag down and denounce liberty as the author 
 and enhancer of crimes. Shelley did not. He personified 
 her in exaggerated forms, and apostrophized her in glowing 
 song. Ah ! it was his want of reverence that led him to 
 look with oblique vision and partial mind upon religion, and 
 to see no escape from its priest-created excrescences save 
 wholesale denunciations and destruction. 
 
 Another striking proof of this one-sidedness and extra- 
 vagance is seen in the following lines, in which the faith 
 and kingdom of the Hebrew people are held up to unmiti- 
 gated scorn : 
 
 ' Behold yon sterile spot, 
 Where now the wandering Arab's tent 
 
 Flaps in the desert-blast. 
 There once old Salem's haughty fane 
 Reared high to heaven its thousand golden domes, 
 And in the blushing face of day 
 
 Exposed its shameful glory. 
 Oh ! many a widow, many an orphan, cursed 
 The building of that fane ; and many a father, 
 Worn out with toil and slavery, implored 
 The poor man's God to sweep it from the earth. 
 And spare His children the detested task 
 Of piling stone on stone, and poisoning 
 
40 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 The choicest days of life 
 To soothe a dotard's vanity. 
 There an inhuman and uncultured race 
 Howled hideous praises to their Demon-God. 
 
 Such a description of the Hebrew race and of the Hebrew 
 faith, to say the least, is an irreverent travesty. The very 
 spirit of this religion was Deliverance deliverance from the 
 oppression of kings and of priests and of self. Its moral 
 law was a people's law, set up for their rights and for their 
 defence. Its prophets laid the axe to the roots of those 
 tyrannies that sought to enslave the conscience and the 
 mind. Its poets sung of a golden age, a day of redemption, 
 a King who should rule in righteousness and break the 
 oppressor with a rod of iron ; and its Jehovah, despite the 
 cant of Levites and the tricks of statesmen, was the poor 
 man's defence. Who delighted not in the fat of rams, 
 but in the service of the heart? Who bade His 
 people love mercy and walk uprightly ? Who hated those 
 that * oppressed the hireling in his wages ' ? The Jehovah 
 of the Hebrews, the God of Salem, the One denominated 
 by Shelley as 'the Demon-God.' No man possessed with 
 reverence, no man approaching religion with a fair, un- 
 biased mind, would so write concerning, or would so over- 
 look, the other and redeeming side of the Hebrew faith. 
 This faith sprang from an idea greater, and sublimer far, 
 than any ever fledged within, and soaring from, the 
 mighty mind of Shelley an idea of universal deliverance 
 through a nation, and that deliverance wrought by the life 
 and sacrifice of its choicest son. Your unconventional 
 man, when leavened with reverence, becomes the prophet ; 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST, 4! 
 
 lacking reverence, he seldom rises higher than the iconoclast 
 and such, in many respects, was Shelley. 
 f Another interpretative key to much of Shelley's writing is 
 his passionate devotion to freedom. Well has Stopford" 
 Brooke named him l the prophet of liberty, equality, and 
 fraternity.' He fronted the world's thought just as the fire of 
 the French Revolution was dying down, and after the excesses 
 attendant on that strange yet formative episode had led 
 to the revulsion of many minds from the popular cause, 
 and the withdrawal of men like Wordsworth from the 
 political faith of their early years. The communistic ideas 
 born in 1789 were well-nigh dead, and a selfish, slumberous 
 conservatism was settling upon the higher and middle classes, 
 to the entire forgetfulness of the struggling poor. It was 
 then Shelley raised his voice, and sang of freedom, man- 
 hood, and universal rights. The result was the production 
 of his poem entitled ' The Revolt of Islam.' Throughout 
 the whole of this somewhat unequal work, his passionate 
 devotion to mankind beneath the rod of custom, oppression, 
 and religion is betrayed ; while scattered throughout its 
 many cantos is his revolutionary creed. In this creed 
 Shelley was far in advance of his age ; indeed, many of the 
 passages to which he gave utterance might well be used by 
 the advanced politicians and socialists of the present day. 
 
 At one time Shelley sought to rouse the soul of the 
 English people by the composition of short popular songs ; 
 but, as Mr. Symonds shows, he lacked the directness which 
 is the secret of the rhyme that catches the ear and rouses 
 the imagination of the masses. Had he been less gifted, 
 greater success would have followed this essay. He was, 
 
42 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 however, too abstract and too philosophic ; he could not 
 come down to the unintelligent as others of his school, and 
 yet there was strange fire in words such as these : 
 
 1 Men of England, wherefore plough 
 For the lords who lay ye low ? 
 Wherefore weave with toil and care 
 The rich robes your tyrants wear? 
 
 Wherefore feed and clothe and save, 
 From the cradle to the grave, 
 Those ungrateful drones who would 
 Drain your sweat nay, drink your blood ? 
 
 Wherefore, Bees of England, forge 
 Many a weapon, chain, and scourge, 
 That these stingless drones may spoil 
 The forced produce of your toil ? 
 
 The seed ye sow another reaps : 
 The wealth ye find another keeps ; 
 The robes ye weave another wears ; 
 The arms ye forge another bears. 
 
 Sow seed but let no tyrant reap : 
 Find wealth let no impostor heap : 
 Weave robes let not the idle wear ; 
 Forge arms, in your defence to bear. 
 
 With plough and spade and hoe and loom, 
 Trace your grave, and build your tomb, 
 And weave your winding-sheet, till fair 
 England be your sepulchre.' 
 
 Finer far, however, is the following : 
 
 1 From Freedom's form divine, 
 
 From Nature's inmost shrine, 
 Strip every impious gaud, rend Error veil by veil : 
 
 O'er Ruin desolate, 
 
 O'er Falsehood's fallen state, 
 Sit thou sublime, unawed : be the Destroyer pale ! 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 43 
 
 And equal laws be thine, 
 And winged words let sail, 
 
 Freighted with truth even from the throne of God : 
 That wealth, surviving fate, 
 Be thine. All hail !' 
 
 Or again : 
 
 ' Life may change, but it may fly not ; 
 Hope may vanish, but can die not ; 
 Truth be veiled, but still it burneth ; 
 Love repulsed but it returneth ! 
 
 Yet were Life a charnel where 
 Hope lay coffin'd with Despair ; 
 Yet were truth a sacred lie, 
 Love were lust if Liberty 
 
 Lent not life its soul of light, 
 Hope its iris of delight, 
 Truth its prophet's robe to wear, 
 Love its power to give and bear.' 
 
 In those words beat the passion of a lover of his kind 
 one whose great soul irked the restraint of form and prece- 
 dent, of kingly rod and priestly curse. Yes, Shelley was 
 the son of freedom ; he came forth from her womb, and 
 through his too short life he never lost the dew of his 
 youth. In earliest days he threw aside all limitation : a I 
 parent's mandate, a university's tests, a sacred covenant of 
 his country all these to him were mere barriers of air. i 
 He grew delirious at the very shadow of restraint ; he hated 
 religion because it limited thought, and he hated Govern- 
 ments because they levied laws upon men. Freedom was an 
 essential of his nature freedom in every form and in every 
 sphere. Thought, relation, action in all these he brooked 
 
44 POPULAR STUDIES OP^ NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 no fetters, no limitations, no impedimenta. He claimed the 
 / universe as his roaming field, and he demanded that every 
 
 man should assert his rights as a god. 
 
 < / There is one other feature in Shelley that needs to be 
 I borne in mind when studying his writings, viz., his intense 
 I yearning after the Infinite. After the revolt of his youth, 
 land when the wild fires had burnt down to steady flame, he 
 turned from the chaos and contradiction of the world with- 
 out to the complex heart in his own breast. Here he dis- 
 covered an individual life as great in its confusion, and as 
 great in its mystery, as the realms of matter and of man 
 which hitherto he had so madly questioned and so wildly 
 stormed, He found that as an individual he needed light, 
 guidance, power some truth supreme that could satisfy 
 and sublimate. He turned to Nature, looked out upon her 
 glories, gazed at her wonders, and sought to lose himself in 
 her profundities, and yet he yearned for more. Then he 
 sought, as we have seen, to personify her forces to clothe 
 them with an intelligence so that he might hold communion 
 with them, and find in them a response to his inward desire. 
 But here his labour was in vain ; he could not find his pro- 
 totype, the counterpart of his better self. Think, for a 
 moment, of this infinite yearning on the part of this highly- 
 sensitive soul, of the passionate cry, of the unwearied search, 
 of the utter failure, of the cold despair, of the helpless de- 
 feat. Well has he been termed ' the pilgrim of nature/ 
 ever wandering, and ever wandering in search of a shrine 
 a shrine hidden, perchance, in distant, dimmest star, or in 
 the solitary heart of mighty forests, or in the unfathomed 
 deeps of ocean cave, or, perchance, in some secret retreat, 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 45 
 
 where beauty imaged herself in faultless form, or love took 
 shape, and clasped the ever-yearning heart. No such shrine 
 did he find; he died, as he lived, 'The Pilgrim of Nature.' 
 The poem ' Alastor,' read in the light of the intense yearn- 
 ing of a highly-sensitive and spiritual nature, after the 
 embodiment of its highest aspirations, is its own exposition, 
 and a reflex of Shelley's inner life. 
 
 I cannot close without a summary of the influences re- 
 sultant from Shelley's poetry. He was pre-eminently a poet, 
 an imaginative poet, a poet among poets, and his message 
 has been no mean factor in the shaping of the century in 
 which he lived. Stopford Brooke asserts that when Shelley 
 died scarcely fifty people read his poetry, and even these 
 failed to understand it. The young men of Cambridge 
 Arthur Hallam, Monckton Mills, and Sunderland were the 
 first to respond to the subtle charm of his writings, and they 
 printed his 'Adonais' in 1829. Four years later his star 
 was in the ascendant. As the political life of the nation 
 awoke, many of Shelley's sentiments lent themselves to 
 those who proclaimed the rights and liberties of men ; and 
 ever since, with slight obscurations, he has held his own 
 among the immortal sons of song. Indirectly, he in- 
 fluenced religion, politics, and philosophy. The Church was 
 disrobed of many mockeries, the Government of many shams, 
 and the schools of much of the coldness and barrenness 
 wherein they had been wont to dream in what Carlyle called a 
 God-forsaken, logic-chopping, dry-as-dust domain. Religious 
 revivals are not always from within ; again and again a life- 
 reviving wound is derived from the foeman's hand, and from 
 the camp without the walls. Political life does not always renew 
 
46 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 its strength on promises and protestations, but rejuvenates 
 from the stimulus of the reformer and the anarchist. And 
 thought is not merely the product of the schools, nor does it 
 live and thrive there only; it needs the daring flight and 
 the wild vision. Those who care to trace to their source 
 the religious, the political, and the philosophic revivals of 
 the last fifty years, will find much of Shelley's teaching 
 flowing as tributary streams. And, after all, these three 
 great forces are the main factors of life ; they are the world's 
 great Trinity the triune god of the ages. At times this 
 god sleeps nay, degenerates. Then it is the quickening, 
 rejuvenating power is needed, as well as the prophet, with 
 crying voice that spares not. Such was Shelley's voice 
 sometimes wild, often blasphemous, always sincere. Spiritu- 
 ality, equality, transcendentalism, the three children born 
 of the early part of the nineteenth century, may be said to 
 be in part the nurslings of this ' child of feeling,' this prince 
 of idealists, this immortal youth. 
 
 Two other facts remain to be stated the first is 
 
 vr Shelley's peerless rank as a lyrical poet ; the second, the 
 all-important fact that he was a poet's poet. Just a word 
 or two bearing directly on these by way of finish to this 
 sketch. 
 ' r Shelley is a lyrical poet ; none surpass him in the sweet- 
 
 'ness of his song. Sylphine thoughts are set to sylphine 
 words, their music floating towards us like the murmur of a 
 distant sea, the strains whereof, rising and falling and linger- 
 ing in our ears, create yearnings after the infinite tranquillity 
 of which they are a dim and distant echo. In reading these 
 lyrics of Shelley, we may best express the strange sentiments 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 47 
 
 they create in the language the poet puts into the lips of 
 Asia in ' Prometheus Unbound ' : 
 
 ' My soul is an enchanted boat, 
 
 Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float 
 Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing ; 
 
 And thine doth like an angel sit 
 
 Beside a helm conducting it 
 Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing. 
 
 It seems to float ever, for ever, 
 
 Upon that many-winding river, 
 
 Between mountains, woods, abysses, 
 
 A paradise of wildernesses ! 
 Till, like one in slumber bound, 
 Borne to the ocean, I float down, around, 
 Into a sea profound, of ever-spreading sound.' 
 
 Again, Shelley is a poet's poet ; he has fed the fire of 
 those who in their day have kindled and fed the poetic 
 passion of their age. To those who care to give a little 
 time to a comparative study of Shelley's l Alastor ' and 
 Browning's ' Pauline,' the indebtedness of the latter poet to 
 the former will be easily discerned ; and, as is well known, 
 in Pauline Browning apostrophizes Shelley as 'the Sun- 
 treader.' 
 
 ' His award, 
 
 His whom all honour, whose renown springs up 
 Like sunlight which will visit all the world, 
 So that e'en they who sneered at him at first, 
 Come out to it, as some dark spider crawls 
 From his foul nets which some lit torch invades, 
 Yet spinning still new films for his retreat. 
 Thou did'st smile, poet, but can we forgive ? 
 Sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever ! 
 Thou art gone from us : years go by and spring 
 Gladdens and the young earth is beautiful, 
 
48 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Yet thy songs come not, other bards arise, 
 But none like thee : they stand, thy majesties, 
 Like mighty works which tell some spirit there 
 Hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn', 
 Till, its long task completed, it hath risen 
 And left us, never to return, and all 
 Rush in to peer and praise when all is vain.' 
 
 Tennyson was somewhat indebted in his earlier years to 
 inspiration drawn from Shelley ; while throughout * In 
 Memoriam ' run many of the prior poet's sentiments, as, for 
 example : 
 
 ' He is made one with Nature ; there is heard 
 His voice in all her music, from the moan 
 Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.' 
 
 Or again : 
 
 1 He is a portion of the loveliness 
 Which once he made more lovely.' 
 
 There is a popular idea abroad that Shelley was a sort of 
 monster in human form a kind of second Byron, if 
 not an exaggeration of that great and lawless man. A 
 greater error cannot be nursed. Shelley was as pure as a 
 sunbeam, and as chivalrous as a knight. That a blot stains 
 his nuptial relations is true ; yet his reverence for woman, 
 and for her inalienable rights, was one of the supreme 
 features in his character. He was no despoiler, no 
 breaker in upon the sanctities of home, no scoffer at the 
 honour of womanhood. To use De Quincey's words, ' He 
 was pure from all fleshliness of appetite/ His tenderness 
 was that of an angel, and his love the unchanging and 
 absorbing passion of a god. As for his sincerity, it led him 
 
SHELLEY, THE IDEALIST. 49 
 
 to utter those cries and denunciations and blasphemies 
 which roused so much bitter feeling on the part of the 
 religious community.y/It is a misfortune when a man is too 
 sincere a misfortune for himself and for the relationships 
 he bears towards his fellow-men. He sees much which it is 
 impolitic to see ; and, seeing it, must needs expose and 
 denounce it. And yet, against all these admirable features 
 in Shelley, I admit there was a dark background a back- 
 ground of ' insolent infidelity,' of filial lawlessness, of 
 domestic rashness and license. I do not forget his malign 
 attacks upon much of what the saintliest men counted 
 sacred, nor his wild and frenzied conflicts with the eternal 
 limits fenced round the path of man. Yet I remember 
 hands other than Shelley's had to do with the filling in of 
 that background. The parent who told his son he was 
 willing to pay for as many illegitimate children as he was 
 father to, yet threatened disinheritance if he married out of 
 his own order ; the Cambridge friend who fed his infidelity, 
 and poisoned his receptive mind with shameful gibes from 
 Hebrew Scriptures ; the untimely age on which his genius 
 was cast an age of hypocrisy in the Church, of time- 
 serving in the State, of unprofitableness in thought. 1 
 remember, too, the fearless soul, the impatient spirit, the 
 wild imagination, the passionate, yearning youth, face to 
 ~~face with all these, and much more of a kind as base and 
 maddening. I remember, also, that he died ere reaching his 
 thirtieth year, before time granted him his redemptive term, 
 or a mellowing mind could yield a riper fruit. Not many 
 men would care to take the judgment of their fellows upon 
 a life severed by * the accursed shears ' at thirty ; indeed 
 
 4 
 
50 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 few would care to risk it at threescore years and ten. 
 Remembering all this, and much more, I am prepared to 
 stand by Gilfillan's estimate of Shelley : * Qn all other sub- 
 jects the wisest of the wise, the gentlest of the gentle, the 
 bravest of the brave ; yet, when ONE topic was introduced, 
 he became straightway insane his eyes glared, his voice 
 screamed, his hand vibrated frenzy.' 
 
 That freaks of frenzy such as these possess, from time to 
 time, the men of greatest genius is only too well known ; 
 indeed, it has been argued that they are the necessary con- 
 comitant of genius. With different men they take different 
 forms ; with Shelley they took the form of almost imbecile 
 rage at revealed religion and lawful restraint. Remember, 
 however, this was his weakness, not his strength ; his un- 
 soundness, and not his health. How far non-accountability 
 excuses this penalty of genius is a moot point \ and there- 
 fore it must not be ours to condemn apart from considera- 
 tion, nor pass judgment divorced from scientific and moral 
 discrimination, as to the limits and possibilities of those who 
 are not only crowned with gifts glorious, but cursed with 
 their accompanying cranks and extravagances. 
 
 Shelley has been called 'the eternal child.' He died ere 
 his eye grew dim, ere his hand forgot its cunning. The 
 buoyancy of an expanding life pulses in his poetry and 
 the passion of undying youth runs through all he wrote. 
 
III. 
 
 COLERIDGE, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 
 
[53] 
 
 ... 
 
 III. 
 
 COLERIDGE, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 
 
 As upon the surface of smooth waters ripple gives 
 place to ripple, so in the realm of truth mind communi- 
 cates itself to mind. Man in touch with his fellow-men 
 transmits that subtle force we call thought, the invisible 
 wavelets of which ' roll from soul to soul, and grow for 
 ever and for ever.' Not only is it true that ' the thoughts of 
 men are widened with the process of the suns ' ; but men 
 widen one another's thoughts as they together meet and 
 converse. As iron sharpeneth iron, so the countenance 
 the intellectual countenance of a man his friend. Thus 
 mind does not so much create mind as it stimulates and 
 directs it. Mind is a quantity fixed at birth, each mind 
 in its turn relegating itself to its own order or family. The 
 lesser minds are distinct from the greater the sparrows do 
 not soar with the eagles. Indeed, the lesser minds are 
 seldom influenced by the greater seldom sit at their feet. 
 Here, as in other realms, the law of ' like ' holds good : 
 there must be similarity before there can be recognition or 
 reciprocity. It is the great man who becomes the disciple 
 of the great man : it needs a Plato to become the follower 
 and friend of a Socrates. Thus was it with Coleridge and 
 
54 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Wordsworth. Indeed, we claim for Coleridge even a higher 
 rank in the realm of intelligence than we claim for Words- 
 worth ; yet, undoubtedly, Wordsworth set 'him thinking, 
 and was for many years his inspiration. First disciple, then 
 friend, finally Coleridge became his co-worker. Intellectual 
 labourers were they, resembling twin stars, which, while 
 moving in the same orbit, fulfil their own course, shed 
 their own lustre, and retain the component parts of their 
 own respective bodies. 
 
 It was the midsummer of the year 1793 when Coleridge 
 first came across the poems of Wordsworth. At that time 
 he was twenty-one years of age, and Wordsworth two years 
 his senior. The poems were entitled * Descriptive Sketches,' 
 and their only success seems to have been that they roused 
 the admiration of Coleridge. But what a success this was 
 a success greater far than the shouts of a blatant world, 
 or the renown born of the welcomes of an addle-headed 
 age. I have no hesitation in saying that at this time Cole- 
 ridge's was one of the first and finest minds in England. 
 After reading these ' Descriptive Sketches,' Coleridge re- 
 marks : ' In them I see the emergence of an original poetic 
 genius above the horizon never more evidently announced.' 
 In that recognition of greatness we see the greatness of 
 Coleridge himself announced, for it needs greatness to 
 detect greatness ; and more especially does this hold good 
 with greatness in its inception. For long years after this 
 recognition the critic and the reading community ignored 
 everything that Wordsworth wrote ; indeed, it was more 
 than a quarter of a century later before a world paid tribute 
 to hirn at whose shrine Coleridge was the first and solitary 
 
COLERIDGE, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 55 
 
 worshipper. In 1797, four years later, the poets met, and 
 discipleship merged into friendship. At this period Cole- 
 ridge writes to a friend : ' The giant Wordsworth God love 
 him ! When I speak in the terms due to his intellect, I 
 fear lest these terms should keep out of sight the amiable- 
 ness of his manners. He has written near twelve hundred 
 lines of blank verse, superior, I hesitate not to aver, to any- 
 thing written in our language which any way resembles it.' 
 Nor were Wordsworth's impressions of Coleridge less favour- 
 able, his sister writing : ' Coleridge is a wonderful man ; his 
 face beams with mind, soul, and spirit. Then he is so 
 benevolent, so good-tempered and cheerful. At first I 
 thought him plain that is for about three minutes : he is 
 pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good 
 teeth ; longish loose-growing, half- curling, rough black hair. 
 His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but gray, such 
 an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest 
 expression ; but it speaks every emotion in his animated 
 mind : it has more of " the poet's eye in fine frenzy rolling " 
 than I ever witnessed He has fine dark eyebrows, and 
 over-hanging forehead.' 
 
 After their first meeting the friendship between the men 
 ripened, and they together resolved to form two schools 
 of poetry, viz., the Naturalistic and the Imaginative Schools. 
 Now, it is this I want you to follow closely in order that 
 you may see where the two men were distinct, yet one. 
 The naturalist tells you what he sees in Nature. He paints 
 rocks and rivers sunshine and storm. The idealist 
 peoples these with the supernatural, he allows his fancy to 
 clothe and animate them. In other words, the one is a 
 
56 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 realist, the other a romanticist. If you would trace out 
 these fine yet definite distinctions in the style and themes 
 of the two poets, I commend to your study the little poem, 
 < We are Seven,' by Wordsworth, and the fragment entitled 
 'The Three Graves,' by Coleridge. Another striking 
 example, differentiating Wordsworth the naturalist from 
 Coleridge, may be seen in a comparison of the following 
 poems on evening. Says Wordsworth : 
 
 ' It is a beauteous evening, calm and free ; 
 The holy time is quiet as a Nun 
 Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun 
 Is sinking down in its tranquillity ; 
 The gentleness of heaven is on the sea : 
 Listen ! the mighty Being is awake, 
 And doth with His eternal motion make 
 A sound like thunder everlastingly.' 
 
 Now take Coleridge : 
 
 1 'Tis calm indeed ! So calm, that it disturbs 
 And vexes meditation with its strange 
 And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, 
 This populous village ! Sea, and hill, and wood, 
 With all the numberless goings on of life, 
 Inaudible as dreams ! The thin blue flame 
 Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not ; 
 Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, 
 Still flutters there the sole unquiet thing. 
 Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature 
 Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, 
 Making it a companionable form, 
 Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling spirit 
 By its own rnoods interprets, everywhere 
 Echo or mirror seeking of itself, 
 And makes a toy of Thought.' 
 
COLERIDGE, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 57 
 
 Now, I think you will have noticed the difference, and 
 yet the similarity, in these two poems. With both poets it 
 is evening, and both are spell-bound with its silence ; and 
 yet how different the sensations such silence begets ! One 
 feels the * mighty Being is awake/ and is hushed into 
 meditation ; the other feels the silence too strange and 
 extreme, and his meditation is vexed. With Wordsworth 
 the scene is peaceful as a nun at adoration, with Coleridge 
 it is ' inaudible as dreams.' There you have the index to 
 the two minds. Wordsworth sees in the reflection of the 
 smooth sea the image of, the Almighty ; Coleridge sees 
 in the flaps and freaks of the smut that flutters on the 
 grate of the dying fire, and which our ancestors ever viewed 
 with awe, the personification of the freaks of his own idling 
 spirit that makes a toy of thought. To fall back upon the 
 antithesis of Hall Caine, ' Wordsworth gives us a series of 4 
 realistic themes ; Coleridge gives us supernatural incident 
 possessed with the reality of human interest.' 
 
 And this is the keynote to Coleridge's poetry. He was 
 a man possessed of an imagination that soared into the, 
 realm of the supernatural. He looked into the void, and 
 found it peopled with presences. His was the uncommon 
 eye that beheld the unseen. He was a clairvoyant in * 
 no empirical sense a man who saw that prTase of life 
 whose front is from the gaping crowd yet towards the 
 seer. Hence there are certain moods, or qualities of 
 disposition, necessary on our part before we can appreciate 
 Coleridge. In the first place, we must have a dash of the 
 visionary in our nature we must be dreamers. Dreamers 
 are of two kinds. There are those who dream between the 
 
58 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 blankets, when their eyes are closed in sleep ; and there are 
 those who dream in wakeful moments. Dreams in sleep 
 are a mystery no science has discovered the strange laws 
 that govern them ; but the dreams that visit us in our 
 wakeful moments are more mysterious still. Reverie is all- 
 eluding. You cannot define it, you cannot grasp it ; all 
 you know is that at rare moments you are visited by it, and 
 carried away out of your corporeal surroundings into far-off 
 airy regions, peopled with fairy forms, and leading onward 
 towards a vast unknown. As far as I understand it, reverie 
 is the season when the higher forces of the soul are let 
 loose from the lower, and the divine instincts, finding them- 
 selves free from the human, to which while on earth they 
 are in bondage, soar off into the ethereal, where one day 
 they will find their natural sphere. Seasons such as these 
 visit all men. It is unwise to ignore them ; it is foolish to 
 over-indulge them. They come now and again to remind 
 us that we are not altogether of the earth earthy, and 
 that we are, after all, allied with the impalpable and the 
 unseen. He who becomes a slave to them sinks into the 
 enfeebling state of a day-dreamer ; he who controls them 
 rises to the heights of the seer ; while he who ignores them 
 falls into the stupidity and grossness of the beast. Mar- 
 tineau has said, concerning these ethereal moods, that the 
 herds that low amid the Alpine echoes see the outline of 
 the everlasting hills, and the verdure of the pine-cleared 
 slope, as well as hear the chant of the distant torrents, 
 swelling and falling on their ear. But man sees through nature 
 to the eternity of God. Grandeur and glory and expressive- 
 ness all appeal to him the mingling of something secret 
 
COLERIDGE, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 59 
 
 with his spirit, as if unseen thought were flowing from the 
 mountains and the sky to meet the answering radiations of 
 his soul. Are these phantoms of unreality delusions of 
 the brain ? l It is impossible. Call it imagination, call it 
 wonder, call it love, whatever it be that shows us the 
 deeper significance of the world and humanity, and makes 
 the difference between the surface-light of sagacity and the 
 interpenetrating glow of worship, we owe to it whatever 
 highest truth, whatever trustiest guidance, we have.' Those 
 are the words of one of our greatest living thinkers the 
 words of a man who, while he reverences science, refuses to 
 allow what he sees with the eye to disabuse him of what he 
 feels in the soul. 
 
 Let me try and put before you an example of what this 
 writer means, and, at the same time, show you how Coleridge 
 may be understood and appreciated. Suppose that we 
 stand upon a vantage point in some valley at sundown. 
 Mists creep up from below, and curl along the lower levels, 
 the hills beyond taking a sombre hue of green, or, if more 
 distant, of slaty blue and purple. Along the ridge of the 
 farthest moorlands lies a line of gold ; while beyond, on the 
 western sky, is a panorama of cloud-forms and sun-colours 
 stretched and sketched and burnished by the hand of God. 
 Around is a silence unbroken, profound ; above, the 
 eternities, the vast unknown. What are the thoughts that 
 then steal in upon our minds ? Are they not far, far-off 
 thoughts ? thoughts of realms other than earth, of treasures 
 other than the sordid and the perishable ? Ethereal thoughts 
 unspeakable thoughts thoughts we cannot even recall. 
 We see a land without geographical limit, and we people it 
 
60 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 with those whose forms are not gross with common clay. 
 In a moment all is gone ; we are once more human ; we 
 shiver with the cold, we want our supper, and turn our 
 steps homeward. True : but we have had our transfigura- 
 tion ; we have caught a glimpse of the spiritual ; our higher 
 faculties have been freed for the moment; we have been 
 upon the mount with God. It was in reverie such as this 
 that Coleridge wrote : 
 
 ' O ! it is pleasant with a heart at ease, 
 
 Just after sunset, or by moonlit skies, 
 To make the shifting clouds be what you please, 
 
 Or let the easily persuaded eyes 
 Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould 
 
 Of a friend's fancy ; or with head bent low 
 And cheek aslant see rivers flow of gold 
 'Twixt crimson banks ; and then, a traveller, go 
 From mount to mount through Cloudland, glorious land !' 
 
 Now, while all this may appear so much rant to the man 
 who never looks at the clouds, except when he ques- 
 tions the advisability of taking his umbrella, it none the 
 less touches an experience felt by the highest souls, and 
 more or less, at one time or other, felt by the souls of all 
 men. 
 
 Again, to truly appreciate Coleridge we must have a dash 
 of the supernatural in our nature. I do not say we must 
 necessarily believe in ghosts ; but we must believe in the 
 existence of disembodied spirits, and, to some extent, in 
 their influence over us. It is always amusing to me to hear 
 men make a mock at the supernatural, and then see them 
 five minutes after their bravado turn white in the presence 
 of death, or tremble beneath what they cannot shake off as 
 
COLERIDGE, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 6 1 
 
 a premonition. The most practical and hard-headed men 
 I have ever known have told me they have had experiences 
 for which they could not account on natural grounds. Did 
 not Shakespeare acknowledge this when he made one of his 
 characters say : 
 
 ' There are more things in heaven and earth, 
 Than are dreamed of in our philosophy' ? 
 
 Now, however we may deny it, there is a vein of superstition 
 in all of us, and it is well for us there is. If it were not so, 
 what narrow and unromantic lives we should live ! We are 
 sitting alone in our hushed chamber at the stealthy advance 
 of the dead-hour of night. The lamp is out ; the fire is low, 
 fantastic shadows play fitfully upon the walls and ceiling. 
 Every tick of the clock sounds like the footfall of some 
 approaching presence, and the silence carries to our inward 
 ear a horror other and more terrible than the cries of 
 a tortured soul. What is it that comes over us, and 
 unmans us ? Nervousness ! excitement ! foolish fear ! Ah, 
 wise rejoinders, yet insufficient far ! How is it all men 
 have felt this, and at this hour, until the nations have 
 agreed in embodying the universal sensation into the 
 proverb, ' the dead-hour of night ' the hour when the 
 silent and the shadowy are supposed to walk abroad? 
 Mind you, I do not say there is anything in it. It may be 
 superstition only, or it may not. The fact is, it is there, and 
 the inner nature of man corroborates it by fearing it, and 
 shrinking from it. Now, Coleridge had a nature alive to 
 all this. Midnight with him was his hour of solemn com- 
 munion. The owl, and not the lark, was his favourite bird. 
 
62 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 He loved to call up spirits from the vasty deep, from the 
 impenetrable gloom. 
 
 For example, take the following from ' Chrystabel ': 
 
 1 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, 
 And the owls have awakened the crowing cock ! 
 Tu-whit ! Tu-whoo ! 
 And hark, again ! the crowing cock, 
 How drowsily it crew. 
 Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, 
 Hath a toothless mastiff, which 
 From her kennel beneath the rock 
 Maketh answer to the clock, 
 Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour ; 
 Ever and aye, by shine and shower, 
 Sixteen short howls, not over-loud : 
 Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. 
 
 31- * * -X- # # 
 
 The lovely lady, Chrystabel, 
 
 Whom her father loves so well, 
 
 What makes her in the wood so late, 
 
 A furlong from the castle gate ? 
 
 She had dreams all yester night 
 
 Of her own betrothed knight ; 
 
 And she in the midnight wood will pray 
 
 For the weal of her lover that's far away. 
 
 She stole along, she nothing spoke, 
 
 The sighs she heaved were soft and low, 
 
 And naught was green upon the oak, 
 
 But moss and rarest misletoe : 
 
 She kneels beneath the huge oak-tree, 
 
 And in silence prayeth she. 
 
 The lady sprung up suddenly, 
 
 The lovely lady, Chrystabel ! 
 
 It moaned as near, as near can be, 
 
 But what it is, she cannot tell. 
 
 On the other side it seemed to be, 
 
 Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak-tree. 
 
COLERIDGE, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 63 
 
 The night is chill ; the forest bare ; 
 Is it the wind that moaneth bleak ? 
 There is not wind enough in the air 
 To move away the ringlet curl 
 From the lovely lady's cheek- 
 There is not wind enough to twirl 
 The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
 That dances as often as dance it can, 
 Hanging so light, and hanging so high, 
 On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. 
 Hush, beating heart of Chrystabel ! 
 Jesu, Maria, shield her well ! 
 She folded her arms beneath her cloak, 
 And stole to the other side of the oak. 
 What sees she there ? 
 
 There she sees a damsel bright, 
 Dressed in a silken robe of white, 
 That shadowy in the moonlight shone : 
 The neck that made that white robe wan, 
 Her stately neck, and arms were bare : 
 Her blue- veined feet unsandaled were ; 
 And wildly glittered here and there 
 The gems entangled in her hair. 
 I guess, 'twas frightful there to see 
 A lady so richly clad as she 
 Beautiful exceedingly ! 
 
 " Mary, mother, save me now !" 
 
 (Said Chrystabel). " And who art thou ?" ' 
 
 I think you will see how the mystic and the weird enter 
 into the spirit and framework of that fragment. The owl, 
 the moan of the toothless mastiff, the dead-hour of night, 
 the hush and silence, and the presence felt, and then seen, of 
 the ghostly form that arrests the devotions of Chrystabel, and 
 which, in the latter part of the poem, are shown to personify 
 evil all these are so blended and portrayed as to produce 
 
64 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 a picture on the border-line of that shadowy realm called 
 the supernatural. 
 
 Again, all students of Coleridge must be more or less 
 psychologists they must be possessed of the power that 
 can read and analyze the inner man. Most men may be 
 said to live two lives, viz., the outward and visible, and the 
 inward and spiritual. It is not what we say and do that 
 constitutes the man, but what we feel and aspire to be. 
 * As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.' But the ways 
 of the heart, who knoweth ? Who can lay bare the secret 
 purposes, and read the interior motives, or describe the 
 surging passions ? The observant eye can tell you how a 
 man is dressed, how he spreads his table, how he entertains 
 his friends, what he talks about and how he lives before his 
 fellows. But how about the other side of the man's life 
 the soul side that mysterious being governed by laws other 
 than those of earth, and shaping destinies other than those 
 fulfilled within the limits of time ? Understand me, I do 
 not refer to that morbid introspection which is the curse of 
 the present age, and which tends to utter weariness and 
 loathing of life. I refer rather to the knowledge of the inner 
 principles the permanent factors of being the soul. 
 Coleridge was as familiar with the avenues of the soul as 
 Wordsworth was with the dales of his much-loved county. 
 He could translate soul-hieroglyphics as accurately as his 
 fellow-poet could portray the landscape and the flower. 
 Take the following as descriptive of the twofold effects of 
 remorse : 
 
 ' Remorse is as the heart in which it grows : 
 If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews 
 
COLERIDGE, THE METAPHYSICIAN. 65 
 
 Of true repentance ; but if proud and gloomy, 
 It is a poison-tree, that pierced to the inmost 
 Weeps only tears of poison !' 
 
 Take that poetically expressed truth and let it translate 
 the remorse of two such men as David and Saul. Both 
 men sinned sinned deeply ; and both men felt the pangs 
 of remorse. With David, however, there went forth the cry, 
 * Be merciful unto me, O Lord, and blot out all my trans- 
 gressions.' With Saul there was blackness of despair and 
 doom. And why ? Coleridge, who read the inner nature 
 of man aright, gives us the clue : ' Remorse is as the heart 
 in which it grows.' Where there is humility and sorrow, 
 where the heart is gentle, the eyes drop balmy dews dews 
 that refresh and restore. Where the heart is proud and 
 gloomy, like a poisoned tree, the more it is pierced by 
 remorse the more poison in the tears it weeps. Or again 
 pass from ' Remorse ' to his lines on { Joy ': 
 
 ' O pure of heart ! thou need'st not ask of me 
 What this strong music in the soul may be ! 
 What, and wherein it doth exist, 
 This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, 
 This beautiful and beauty- making power. 
 Joy, virtuous Lady ! Joy that ne'er was given, 
 Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, 
 Life, and Life's effluence cloud at once and shower, 
 Joy, Lady ! is the spirit and the power 
 Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower, 
 
 A new Earth and a new Heaven, 
 Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud 
 Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud 
 
 We in ourselves rejoice ! 
 And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, 
 
 All melodies the echoes of that voice, 
 All colours a suffusion from that light.' 
 
 5 
 
66 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Thus Coleridge defines, and thus he translates, joy : * The 
 strong music of the soul/ 'a luminous mist/ 'a beauty- 
 making power,' ' life's Effluence,' 'a new earth and heaven 
 undreamt of by the sensual and the proud/ begotten of 
 purity of heart. 
 
 Or again, to the man who denies immortality to him 
 who limits life to time's space, and looks upon death as the 
 end of all : 
 
 1 Why rejoices thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good ? 
 Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood, 
 Why waste thy sighs and thy lamenting voices, 
 Image of image ghost of ghostly elf 
 That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold ? 
 What and whence thy gain if thou withhold 
 These costless shadows of thy shadowy self? 
 Be sad ! be glad ! be neither ! seek or shun ! 
 Thou hast no reason why ! Thou canst have none ; 
 Thy being's being is contradiction.' 
 
 Finer words were never penned. Their refined subtlety, 
 their interpenetrating power, their masterly dissection of the 
 very core of man's mystic being, lift Coleridge into the first 
 rank of psychological poets. 
 
 This brief summary of Coleridge's power and parts as a 
 poet enables me now to take you through an analysis of his 
 master-production, ' The Ancient Mariner.' If you bear 
 in mind that he was a dreamer a man given to reverie, 
 to a belief in the supernatural, and possessed withal of a 
 master insight into the human mind if you bear in mind 
 his early vagaries, his tender conscience, and his unshaken 
 faith in the unseen I think I can make plain what 
 to many has hitherto been an inexplicable jumble of words, 
 thoughts and pictures. 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. 79 
 
 while his pride was soon intoxicated with the plaudits of 
 Europe, which, from the first, acknowledged his transcendent 
 genius. His religious instincts were outraged by the cant 
 of the evangelical theology of the day, and the lies told 
 about him so destroyed his moral self-respect, that he 
 actually repeated them in an exaggerated form that he 
 might the more outrage pious folks who sullied their own 
 lips to blacken and defame his already blackened and 
 defamed character. Before he was one-and-twenty, he had 
 made up his mind to rule, and not to serve, to be in 
 literature what Bonaparte was in warfare, and in ten short 
 years he carried out his aim. He entered the lists single- 
 handed to fight against God, against law, against society. 
 The ten commandments were his enemies, and, with the 
 exception of the eighth * Thou shalt not steal ' he knocked 
 them over again and again, until at last he knocked them 
 over once too often, and fell with them in their fall. And 
 yet he did a mighty work. [Jrle was the apostle of a new 
 literature raised to crush the canting creeds of the mock 
 religion of his day, and to tear off the hollow mask of*" 
 propriety that hid for the time the baseness, the greed, and 
 the uncharitableness of the respectability of England. 1 He 
 was introspective, egotistic, and pessimistic ; but he had an 
 eye for nature's beauty, a soul for humanity's freedom, and 
 his heroines, for the most part, are the purest creations of 
 poet's brain. He was inspirational rather than reflective. 
 He did not shut himself up and think, but he moved along 
 the world's highway and saw saw sights glorious in their 
 light and purity, as well as lurid in their sin and shame. 
 But over all there hung the gloom of despair. The only 
 
80 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 strong thing he found was his own will, and this, poor 
 fellow ! he never learned to rule never learnt that its glory 
 was in its submission and service. He was a rudderless 
 vessel on a tempestuous sea, cresting the waves, yet drifting 
 towards the rocks. He was a king without a sceptre, a 
 
 s 
 
 genius without restraint, a mighty man without moral ballast. 
 And yet he could sing such songs as this : 
 
 ' On Jordan's banks the Arab's camels stray, 
 On Zion's hills the False One's votaries pray, 
 The Baal-adorer bows on Sinai's steep. 
 Yet there even there O God, Thy thunders sleep. 
 
 ' There where Thy Finger scorched the tablet stone ! 
 There where Thy shadow to Thy people shone ! 
 Thy glory shrouded in its garb of fire : 
 Thyself none living see, and not expire !' 
 
 Surely words such as these came from some hidden and far-off 
 chamber of a soul where a shrine still stood, and where the 
 shadow of the Almighty still fell. 
 
 Nor was he a stranger to the spiritual in nature. Listen ! 
 
 ' 'Tis midnight : on the mountains brown 
 
 The cold, round moon shines deeply down ; 
 Blue rdk the waters, blue the sky 
 Spreads like an ocean hun'g on high, 
 Bespangled with those isles of light. 
 So wildly, spiritually bright ; 
 Who ever gazed upon them shining, 
 And turned to -earth without repining, 
 Nor wished for wings to flee a-way, 
 And mix with their eterrial day ?' 
 
 Pessimism ! Yes, pessimism ; but very beautiful, and 
 instinct with that divine something in men that longs for 
 union with the Infinite. 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. 8 1 
 
 Or, if you want the stately march to the lofty theme, 
 what finer than this : 
 
 1 Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean roll ! 
 Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain : 
 Man marks the earth with ruin : his control 
 Stops with the shore : upon the watery plain 
 The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain 
 A shadow of man's ravages, save his own 
 When for a moment, like a drop of rain, 
 He sinks into the depth with bubbling groan, 
 Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown. 
 
 1 Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form 
 Glasses itself in tempests : in all time, 
 Calm or convulsed in breeze, or gale, or storm, 
 Icing the pole or in the torrid clime 
 Dark heaving : boundless, endless and sublime 
 The image of eternity the throne 
 Of the Invisible ' Even from out thy slime 
 The monsters of the deep are made : each zone 
 Obeys thee ; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone. 
 
 I now purpose to direct you to those poems in which 
 the personality, genius, and philosophy of the poet are most 
 powerfully concentrated and strikingly expressed, and for 
 this end I shall content myself with ' Cain,' * Manfred/ and 
 1 Don Juan. 1 In * Cain ' we have portrayed a gigantic, self- j 
 centred, rebellious, and pessimistic personality one who 
 writhed under the restraint imposed by Nature's iron hand, ^ 
 and who saw in her workings nothing but food for doubt, 
 for scorn, and for sadness. He has to toil before he ; 
 can eat such is the tax imposed by earth. He can but 
 know in part such is the limit of a finite mind. His years 
 at best are few and numbered such is the veto passed by 
 death. Against these he rages. Why was he cursed with 
 
 6 
 
82 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 such an inheritance, and why should he be made the puppet 
 of his father Adam's foolery and his mother Eve's dis- 
 obedience? The poem, or drama, opens with a scene in 
 which the family group are gathered outside the closed 
 gates of Paradise, where Adam and Eve, Adah and Zillah, 
 together with Abel, entreat Cain to join them in their recog- 
 nition of the supreme power of the eternal God, disobe- 
 dience to whom has led to their banishment. But Cain is 
 full of resentment and rebellion. Why should he worship a 
 God who has thus measured a father's sin upon a son's 
 shoulders ? And when again besought to pray, he says : ' I 
 have naught to ask for and naught to thank for.' 
 
 In this rebellious state he is approached by Lucifer, in 
 whom Cain at once discovers a fascinating and all-mastering 
 power. When they meet the arch-fiend announces to Cain 
 the secret thoughts of his heart, he translates the silent 
 language of his proud and defiant soul. Soon a bond of 
 sympathy and soul-likeness is discovered between the two ; 
 both are restless and rebellious, Cain warring with Nature, 
 Lucifer warring with God in fact, both warring with the 
 same force, only under different relationships and names. 
 Lucifer cries : * He conquered ; let Him reign. He'd have 
 us that He may torture ; let Him ! He is great, but in His 
 greatness is no happier than we in our conflict/ Sentiments 
 such as these add fuel to the dissatisfaction burning at the 
 core of Cain's existence. And here Byron touches one of 
 his deepest truths. Speaking of the serpent that tempted 
 his mother, Cain says : ' The thing' 1 had a demon.' ' Yes,' 
 says Lucifer, ' and he woke one in those he spoke to.' And 
 so with Lucifer and Cain. The fascination wrought by the 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. 83 
 
 evil of the greater was due to the response on the part of 
 the evil in the lesser it was deep calling unto deep, like 
 drawing forth like. Here lies the secret of every fall. 
 When the Prince of this world cometh, he findeth a kindred 
 something in us. 
 
 Lucifer seeks to enlist Cain as his follower by adopting 
 two lines of temptation the temptation of the intellect, and 
 the temptation of the affections. In the temptation of the 
 intellect he plays upon Cain's ignorance and limited know- 
 ledge ; and in the temptation of the affection he plays upon 
 Cain's jealousy, and shows up the favour apparently con- 
 ferred by God upon his brother Abel. Let us follow these 
 in their subtle currents. 
 
 There are two things that fret the intellect a knowledge 
 of sin, and a knowledge of death. What is sin ? Why does 
 it exist ? Who is responsible for its origin ? Where will be 
 its final end ? Then comes the mystery of death the 
 desire while living to lift or rend the veil as Cain says : 
 
 ' Since I heard 
 
 Of death : although I know not what it is, 
 Yet it seems horrible. I have looked out 
 In the vast desolate night in search of him ; 
 And when I saw gigantic shadows in 
 The umbrage of the walls of Eden, chequered 
 By the far Hashing of the cherubs' swords, 
 I watched for what I thought his coming ; for 
 With fear rose longing in my heart to know 
 What 'twas which shook us all but nothing came. ' 
 
 Now Lucifer promises to initiate him into these realms of 
 knowledge on condition that he falls down and worships 
 him, and here comes in the following : 
 
 62 
 
84 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Cain. Wilt thou teach me all ? 
 
 Luc. Ay ! on one condition. 
 
 Cain. Name it. 
 
 Luc. That thou dost fall down and worship 'me thy lord. 
 
 Cain. Thou art not the Lord my father worships ? 
 
 Luc. No. 
 
 Cain. His equal ? 
 
 Luc. No : I have nought in common with Him, 
 
 ****** 
 
 I dwell apart and I am great ; 
 
 Many there are who worship me, and more 
 
 Who shall be thou among the first. 
 Cain. I never as yet have bowed unto my father's God, 
 
 Although my brother Abel oft implores 
 
 That I would join him in his sacrifice : 
 
 Why should I bow to thee ? 
 Luc. Hast thou ne'er bowed to Him ? 
 Cain. Have I not said it ? 
 
 ****** 
 Luc. He who bows not to Him has bowed to me. 
 Cain. But I will bend to neither. 
 Luc. Ne'er the less, thou art my worshipper. 
 
 Not worshipping Him makes thee mine the same. 
 
 ****** 
 Cain. Let me but be taught the mystery of my being. 
 Luc. Follow where I will lead thee. 
 
 Now, Adah, Cain's wife, approaches, and with the woman- 
 instinct, as well as a keen perception born of purity and 
 humility of heart, she chides Cain for converse with a spirit 
 other than those of heaven, while still the same in form. 
 She sees at once that Cain's affection has been cooled, and 
 she cries to Lucifer : 
 
 * Who art thou, that steppest between heart and heart ?' 
 Then in a conversation in which Adah feels Lucifer's strange 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. 85 
 
 fascinating power, and is overawed with his subtility of argu- 
 ment and wealth of knowledge, she cries : 
 
 ' I have heard it said, 
 
 The seraphs love most cherubim know most, 
 And this should be a cherub since he loves not. 
 
 ****** 
 
 Oh, Cain ! choose love.' 
 
 But Cain chooses knowledge. Knowledge fits him best 
 Does not knowledge give power? Does it not gratify 
 pride ? Will it not make him a god ? 
 
 Then follows Cain's education under Lucifer, which we 
 need not follow, only to note that as he underwent it the 
 fountains of his natural affection were dried, and a rooted 
 hatred begotten in him towards his brother Abel. And is 
 it not ever so ? Is not the whole history of the race a com- 
 mentary upon and confirmation of the pride and arrogance 
 and cruelty following an insatiable thirst after knowledge 
 outside the realms of finttude and revelation ? Those of 
 you who know your Browning know how that great poet 
 exemplifies this truth. In Pauline, in Paracelsus, in 
 Sordello; in poet, in artist, and in priest; the divorce of 
 intellect from affection, of knowledge from love, works in- 
 difference to others, and begets the cold isolation of self. 
 Knowledge needs limitation. Love is the illimitable, the 
 boundless. A man may know too much, know until he is 
 miserable, know until he is proud, know until there is no 
 realm for faith, and hence no upward flight for the soul. 
 But not so with love. We can never over-love. The more 
 we love the more we live; and in a deep and spiritual 
 sense the more we love the more we know. There is a 
 
86 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 knowledge, however, that kills love the knowledge of the 
 cold and imperious intellect; an intellect that seeks and 
 serves no end but self; a knowledge that refuses alike 
 God's lead and God's limits ; a knowledge spoken of in 
 the Bible as a light that when in us is darkness. There is 
 a love that itself brings a sweet and searching light a light 
 such as that that dawns upon us when we see light in 
 God's light, and know because we are known. 
 
 Now see how this imperious and rebelliant nature, intoxi- 
 cated with the knowledge of evil, and of the occult, engenders 
 the selfishness, the pride, and the cruelty that finally vent 
 themselves in murder. 
 
 After Cain's return from his journey with Lucifer, during 
 which he has seen the mysteries of sin and death, the 
 littleness of the earth in the great system of creation, and 
 the littleness of man in relation to the earth, and all the 
 facts which, viewed alone, belittle man after this return of 
 Cain's he is met. by his sister- wife Adah, and solicited to 
 join in worship and sacrifice, to which solicitation he replies 
 in the following defiant words : 
 
 ' I have toil'd, and till'd, and sweaten in the sun 
 According to the curse : must I do more ? 
 For what should I be gentle ? for a war 
 With all the elements ere they will yield 
 The bread we eat ? For what must I be grateful ? 
 For being dust, and grovelling in the dust, 
 Till I return to dust ? If I am nothing 
 For nothing shall I be a hypocrite, 
 And seem well pleased with pain? For what should I 
 Be contrite ? For my father's sin, already 
 Expiate with what we all have undergone ?' 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. 87 
 
 There you have rebellion. Who is God that I should 
 worship Him ? or Nature's laws that I should obey them ? 
 And there, in the spirit of Cain, you have depicted the 
 spirit of Byron. 
 
 But this rebellion and hatred intensifies. Abel appears, 
 and, in his turn, also entreats his brother to bow down 
 and worship, whereupon Cain is roused to greater wrath. 
 As Abel sees the fire in his brother's eye, and the restless- 
 ness in his mien, he entreats him to seek the favour of 
 God and join in sacrifice with him, to which Cain replies : 
 * I bid thee sacrifice alone, Jehovah loves thee well.' 
 
 Abel. Both well, I hope. 
 Cain. But thee the better. 
 
 At last Cain yields to Abel's entreaty, selects the highest 
 altar, thus betraying his pride ; and complains as he puts 
 his fruit thereon that it has cost him so much sweat and 
 toil, thus betraying his grudging spirit. It is needless to 
 follow the prayers of the two men. That of Abel is meek 
 and contrite, full of sorrow for shortcoming and gratitude 
 for favour shown ; while Cain's is impious and defiant. 
 Their prayers are answered, the one by fire, the smoke 
 and flame of Abel's altar ascending to heaven ; the other 
 by destruction, a whirlwind overturning the altar of Cain 
 to earth. Whereupon Cain makes a rush to overturn the 
 standing, flaming altar of Abel, which rouses the younger 
 brother to cry : 
 
 ' Thou shalt not : add not impious works to impious 
 Words ! Let that altar stand 'tis hallowed now 
 By the immortal pleasure of Jehovah, 
 In His acceptance of the victims.' 
 
88 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Cain. His pleasure ! What was His high pleasure in 
 
 The fumes of scorching flesh and smoking blood ? 
 ****** 
 
 Give way. This bloody record 
 
 Shall not stand in the sun to shame creation. 
 Abel. Brother, give back, thou shalt not touch my altar 
 
 With violence. 
 
 Cain. Give way, or else that sacrifice may be 
 Abel. What meanest thou ? 
 Cain. Give way ! Thy God loves blood ! 
 
 Then look to it, ere He hath more. 
 Abel. In His great name 
 
 I stand between thee and the shrine which hath 
 
 Had His acceptance. 
 Cain. If thou lovest thyself, stand back. 
 
 ****** 
 Abel. I love God far more than life. 
 Cain. Then take thy life unto thy God. 
 
 And so saying, Cain smites , him upon the temple with a 
 brand and fells him to the ground. 
 
 %< Cain ' is a drama in which Byron depicts the magnificence 
 of a soul's revolt, the awfulness of a soul's isolation and 
 despair, and the untold desolation of a soul's defeat when 
 powerless in the face of irrevocable law. That soul was 
 Byron's, 'Cain' being the historic fragment in which he 
 portrayed himself and his destiny. 
 
 ' Manfred ' is, in part, the complement of ' Cain.' Man- 
 fred, a man of mighty genius, carries about with him the 
 memory of a past sin a sin dark, loveless, and unspeak- 
 able. His one desire is to forget it to wipe it out from 
 the tablets of recollection, and thus attain forgetfulness. 
 To secure this he has already given his mind to study ; but 
 in vain knowledge does not supplant remembrance. He 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. 89 
 
 has also wrought noble deeds among his fellows ; but these 
 do not atone, they do not bring the * sweet oblivious 
 antidote/ He has risen to power and attained distinction, 
 but even these fail to lay the ghost of the past. It is ever 
 there before him within him dark, dread, and distressing. 
 
 He next seeks the aid of the spirits of Nature the 
 ' couriers of the air that wait on man's bidding ' and when 
 they ask of him his business and his quest, he tells them 
 he would fain secure from them the secret of forgetfulness. 
 They ask of what ? of whom ? and why ? But when they 
 are told that it is the forgetfulness of that which is within 
 him which he cannot speak, but which they full well know 
 they inform him they are powerless subjects. Sovereignty, 
 earth these they can dispense ; but it is neither in their 
 essence, nor in their skill, to grant self-oblivion. At last, 
 after further questioning by Manfred, they suggest suicide 
 as a means of escape; but upon Manfred asking if death 
 be annihilation, they falter in reply, hinting that if he per- 
 chance should be immortal, the immortal do not, cannot, 
 forget. 
 
 We next find Manfred abandoned by the spirits, and 
 standing upon the Alpine heights alone, save for the ghostly 
 past that haunts his heart. He looks around, and sees 
 the fresh breaking day, the mountains beautiful, and the 
 sun opening over all, and unto all. These, however, have 
 no power over him; their spell upon his heart is broken, 
 and he is as though they were not. Then, with a cry of 
 despair : 
 
 ' Farewell, ye opening heavens ! 
 Look not upon me thus reproachfully 
 You were not meant for me Earth, take these atoms !' 
 
90 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 he seeks to hurl himself from the mountain-heights into 
 the gloomy depths below, but is stayed by the hand of a 
 chamois-hunter, and led away by this deliverer to his lone 
 hut for shelter and recovery. 
 
 We next find Manfred seeking the power of evil agency 
 like Saul, in ancient story, he consults a witch. To her 
 he recounts his hidden sorrow his undying remorse. 
 He tells her how he has sought solace in books, in battles, 
 and even in self-destruction ; but owing to some preven- 
 tive fate has been balked in all. Thereupon she offers 
 him help on one condition, viz., that he swear obedience 
 to her will. This he refuses, his own pride resenting such 
 acknowledgment of weakness ; upon which she disappears, 
 Manfred being left alone, crying : 
 
 4 1 have one resource 
 Still in my science. I can call the dead, 
 And ask them what it is we dread to be.' 
 
 We now find him in the hall of Arimanes, surrounded 
 by the Destinies and Nemesis. As they listen to his 
 request, that the woman he seduced and wrecked through 
 his false love should be called up from the shades, they 
 cry to Arimanes : 
 
 ' Great Arimanes ! doth thy will avouch 
 The wishes of this mortal ?' 
 
 And upon the assent of the king the dead one appears. 
 Manfred bids her speak, but she responds not. He cries : 
 
 ' Speak to me ! 
 
 For I have called on thee in the still night. 
 . Startled the slumbering birds from the hushed boughs, 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. t>I 
 
 And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves 
 Acquainted with thy vainly-echoed name. 
 
 ****** 
 Speak to me, though it be in wrath : but say 
 I reck not what but let me hear thee once 
 This once once more.' 
 
 To which the phantom of the wronged woman replies : 
 ' Manfred/ That is all. No more, in spite of his con- 
 tinuous pleading save this : ' To-morrow ends thy ills. 
 Farewell.' * Am I forgiven ?' cries the distracted man. 
 ' Farewell/ is tne response. ' Shall we meet again ?' No 
 answer save ' Farewell.' ' A word of mercy. Say thou 
 lovest me.' ' Manfred ' is the only response, uttered in the 
 dying voice of the vanishing phantom. Thus the dead tell 
 no secrets. The awful other-world affords no help. 
 
 Then comes the scene in Manfred's castle - chamber, 
 where the old Abbot seeks to soothe his despairing soul by 
 the rites of the Church and the balm of Gospel hope. 
 The good old man warns Manfred of the deadly danger 
 threatening those who follow a study of the occult sciences 
 and converse with spirits, to which Manfred replies : 
 
 * I shall not choose a mortal 
 To be my mediator. Have I sinned 
 Against your ordinances ? Prove and punish. 
 
 Abbot. My son, I did not speak of punishment, 
 But penitence and pardon : 
 ****** 
 
 Manfred. Old man, there is no power in holy men, 
 
 Nor charm in prayer nor purifying form of penitence 
 * * * * * * 
 
 Can exorcise from out the unbounded spirit 
 The quick sense of its own sins. 
 
92 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 To this the abbot replies : 
 
 ' There is yet hope ;' 
 but Manfred's answer is : 
 
 ' It is too late. ' 
 
 And this he argues from the fact that his noble aspirations 
 have forsaken him ; that desire is no more ; that hope is 
 death. 
 
 The last scene is most tragic. When the demons come 
 for Manfred's soul, he defies them, and compels them to 
 return, dying with his hand in that of the priest, and saying 
 with his last breath : 
 
 1 Old man ! 'tis not so difficult to die.' 
 
 \ In Manfred we again see Byron. Like a moth around 
 the flame, so was he ever drawn to his great characters. 
 He could not give the public a hero without giving himself. 
 Byron, like Manfred, sought self-oblivion. He would fain 
 have forgotten the deeds haunting the past. To books, to 
 philanthropy, to necromancy, he turned in vain. The 
 religion of the age, the ecclesiasticism of the day, he merely 
 tolerated as a superstition, as Manfred tolerated the priest 
 as a harmless and effete servant of a charlatan Church. And 
 yet Byron felt that his own inherent greatness, his defiance, 
 his genius, his will, were instinct with, and proof of, an 
 immortality, and that he himself, of himself, and by himself, 
 through one supreme act, could lift himself out of his hell 
 of self, and regenerate his nature by giving himself a ransom 
 for the liberty of his kind the attempt at which was 
 instanced in his last years in relation to Greece. 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. 93 
 
 Permit me here to introduce the following passage from 
 Maurice's * Lectures on Conscience.' He asks : * Do you 
 know Lord Byron's " Manfred " ? Have you read that won- 
 derful play of the conscience ? No one who reads it can 
 believe it to be a mere work of imagination. There is a 
 burning individuality experienced in every sentence. Count 
 Manfred has come of ancient line. His castle in the Alps ; 
 the monarch of mountains continually before him. He 
 revels in the grand forms of nature ; but they have become 
 like everything else, an oppression to him. There is on him 
 the burden of a great crime. He has power over spirits. 
 They are ready to do his bidding, to give him anything he 
 asks. He asks forgetfulness. That is the one thing they 
 cannot give. What else is of any worth to Irim ? The 
 form of him whom he has injured rises before him. What 
 he has done is clearer to him than ever before. He is on 
 the edge of a precipice. Why 'may he not throw himself 
 over it? What if he did? Will the vision depart? A 
 chamois-hunter saves him and brings him to his castle. At 
 length the destined hour arrives. A priest visits him in his 
 dying hours, a kindly, well-intentioned man, willing to use 
 his knowledge and the powers of his office for- the good of 
 his fellow-creature. It is in vain. What are subordinate 
 agents to him? He is face to face with. the powers of good 
 and evil. Which is the stronger? Which is to prevail ?' 
 
 We may speak of ' Don Juan' as Byron's. autobiography 
 written by his own hands in letters of fire*. There are some 
 who denounce the production as a- slough of filth. It is, 
 however, far from this. Indeed, it is a magnificent poem, 
 depicting the gradual fall of a magnificently rebellious soul. 
 
94 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 A great teacher has said ' that in " Don Juan " we have the 
 commandments written anew, by one who had broken 
 them.' That there is ribaldry, and even bestiality, in the 
 poem, I admit, but there is grandeur and sanctity also. 
 He who wrote it was half angel and half devil, and the two 
 meet in conflicting forces in this, his most -colossal work. 
 He started life with genius, with affection, with deep 
 religious instincts ; but to these were allied, through the 
 cruel law of heredity, all that was base in a father, and all 
 that was foolish and reckless in a mother. His surround- 
 ings also favoured the fostering in hrm of all that was bad. 
 Yet, for all this, there was genius, affection, and awe. But 
 he determined, calmly determined, that his lusts should 
 have their freedom, and his rebellious will its own wild 
 way. He said to evil, * Be thou my good/ and to all law 
 and restraint, ' Be ye far from me.' There was scarcely a 
 doubt he did not cherish, scarcely a scorn he-did not nurse,, 
 scarcely a sin he did not commit. And yet in his downward 
 course the better nature of the man did brave battle again 
 and again the angel strove for mastejy, and the demon was 
 laid. But the strife was unequal, for Byron willed the bad ; 
 he threw the balance of his moral being "on the darker side, 
 and lent the impetus of his own will- to the lower rather 
 than to the higher plane. He mocked at God, he scoffed 
 at chastity, he delighted to outrage public opinion, he hated 
 his age, he was out of joint with his country, and he added 
 to his own actual sins a deeper dye by exaggerating them 
 when he recounted them, and by encouraging the gossips, 
 who, by their lies, sought to make him ten times worse than 
 he was. Yet all through this wild and ungovernable career 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. 95 
 
 the angel was avenging itself upon the devil. It avenged 
 itself.in fits of fearful remorse, in moods of low-spiritedness, 
 in flashes of lurid flame that leaped up to, scorch, with 
 writhing worm that knew no death. It avenged itself in 
 gradually withdrawing itself withdrawing itself from imagi- 
 nation, so that nature lost its soothing power; from affec- 
 tion, so that the friendship of man no longer charmed or 
 brought peace. Downward he fell, his mighty genius 
 powerless to stay him nay, indeed, accelerating his de- 
 scent ; and yet, withal, the man knowing whither he was 
 going counting the stages of his fall, and marking them off 
 in this great poem a warning rather than an incentive to 
 those who read. If he had been a weaker man he would 
 have saved himself; if he had been a wickeder man he 
 would not have fallen so far. But his was the moral wreck 
 of a Titan ; it was the collapse of an archangel. The sense 
 of sin made him sin more, and if he had sinned more 
 deeply his sin would not have told against him as it did. 
 And then, when the end came, Byron sat upon the ruins of 
 his life, and sketched them in * Don Juan.' But with what 
 a pen ! A pen corroded by drops of that hot ink we call 
 remorse, pricking and burning its characters indelibly in 
 canto after canto, setting forth the degeneration of the fine- 
 spirited boy neglected, pampered, poisoned by foolish 
 parentage to the last and lowest stage of a degenerate and 
 blas6 roue* ; his own corpse-coffin a sepulchre of dead 
 men's bones. 
 
 But, you say, why could not Byron have given us the 
 history of his ruin without the ribaldry and filth that mar 
 the poem, and make ' Don Juan ' dangerous reading to the 
 
96 POPULAR STUDIES ON NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 young and offensive reading to the chaste ? Did you ever 
 see a ruin without its lizards, its dank, rank grass, and 
 stagnant pools ? No ; nor did you ever see a moral wreck 
 without its attendants of evil. That Byron might have 
 clothed it in less realistic form, I admit. That this would 
 have added beauty to the poem I also admit. But, then, 
 Byron hated his age. Had it not hated him? tried to 
 crush him, and failed ? Had not its canting evangelicalism, 
 its religious hypocrisies and shams, sought to damn him, 
 dared to misrepresent him, and actually socially ostracized 
 him ? So here was his revenge here was the interest paid 
 back a thousand-fold. Thus, the faiths men loved were 
 assailed, the laws they reverenced hurled back in their 
 faces by the arm of a giant law-breaker ; the morals they 
 respected held up to scorn, and the devil's vocabulary of 
 bestiality, as well as his harem of lust, ransacked for all that 
 was worst and basest in them to make mud balls nay, hell 
 balls wherewith to bespatter the delicate faces and pure 
 garments of what he believed to be a false religion and 
 quasi moral age. Nevertheless, I turn to ' Don Juan ' again 
 and again not for its filth, but for its force ; not for its dark 
 pictures, but for its terrible lessons. The metre is stately 
 and seldom halts ; the philosophy is profound and all-con- 
 clusive ; the wit is keen with the edge of genius, the pictures 
 are portrayed with an artist-hand, the fund of information 
 crammed into its verses encyclopaedic, and the whole, the 
 grandest work of a man grand in his genius and grand in 
 his fall. I read it with tears, and not laughter. I read it 
 as I would read a life-tragedy, and not as I would read a 
 
BYRON, THE PESSIMIST. 97 
 
 shilling shocker ; and I read it with the verse of Browning 
 ringing in my ears : 
 
 ' It's wiser being good than bad. 
 It's safer being meek than fierce. 
 It's fitter being sane than mad. 
 My own hope is a sun will pierce 
 The thickest cloud earth ever stretched. 
 That, after last, returns the first, 
 Though a wide compass round be fetched. 
 That what began best can't end worst, 
 Nor what God blessed once prove accurst.' 
 
V. 
 HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 
 
 72 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 
 
 IN what sense may a poet be a humorist ? So far, we have 
 associated the poet with the beautiful, the mystical, and the 
 gloomy and grand is it possible to further associate him 
 with 
 
 ' Sport, that wrinkled Care derides, 
 And Laughter holding both his sides ?' 
 
 Yes ! I think it is. Already the poet has introduced us to 
 the sorrows of life, and taught us to weep with those who 
 weep ; why should he not introduce us to its mirthfulness and 
 frolic, and so teach us to rejoice with those who joy ? Comedy, 
 as well as tragedy, makes up no little of man's experience, 
 and there is food for laughter as for tears. There are glints 
 and gleams that fall athwart the gloom of our existence ; 
 and dull indeed is his eye who sees them not, and heavy his 
 heart who responds not to their playfulness and light. The 
 comic, the amusing, the grotesque these form part of the 
 gentle by-play the Good Father grants His children ; and 
 laughter is as much a right and rational attitude on the part 
 of man as solemn litany or sober speech. 
 
 Now, as the poet sees deeper, and sees more truly, than his 
 brethren, and as there is mirth as well as beauty and 
 grandeur and sadness in life, there will be from time to time 
 
102 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 among the sons of song those who call forth for us, and 
 present to us, this mirthful and comical element. Hood was 
 such an one. He loved to take his readers where the vein 
 of hull- our wi?s discoverable. He loved to raise his gentle 
 hand and playfully point to the ridiculous and to the absurd. 
 He loved to rouec the hearty, genial laugh, and thus cheer 
 men along the fagging, dragging road of life. He loved to 
 sing so as to loosen the muscles of faces rigid with care and 
 sad with disappointment. In a word, Hood was a humorist, 
 playful, gentle, loving. 
 
 Here it is well you should distinguish between humour, 
 satire, and sarcasm. Sarcasm is reckless and relentless. It 
 is administered in a cruel spirit, and for a spiteful end. It is 
 derived from an old word that means ' stripping the flesh 
 from the bones/ and is in literary warfare cruel rather than 
 critical, and unprincipled rather than just. Carlyle calls it 
 the * language of the devil.' Satire, on the other hand, is 
 keen and severe, but never brutal. It is free from the spirit 
 of hate, and, while wounding, leaves not behind it the fester- 
 ing sore nor the fatal thrust. But humour is a gentle thing ; 
 it administers its rebukes in mirthfulness but, mind you, 
 they are none the less rebukes and it carries home con- 
 viction under the guise of pleasantry. As an example of 
 sarcasm, take Byron's attack upon Coleridge, who had 
 chanced to write a poem on an ass : 
 
 4 Yet none in lofty numbers can surpass 
 The bard who soars to elegize an ass. 
 How well the subject suits his noble mind ! 
 A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.' 
 
 Language such as that is coarse and brutal uncalled for, 
 and unwarrantable even if true. 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 103 
 
 As an example of satire take the following from Ruskin : 
 * If a man spends lavishly upon his library you call him 
 mad a bibliomaniac. But you never call a man a horse- 
 maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their 
 horses, and you don't hear of people ruining themselves 
 by their books.' There you have a keen and dexter 
 stroke; but there is nothing brutal nor unkind about 
 it. 
 
 And now for a sample of humour from the prince of 
 humorists, Charles Lamb. When once asked by a lady, 
 who had been gushing over a baby : ' How do you like 
 babies, Mr. Lamb?' he replied: ' Boiled, madam/ And 
 upon another occasion, when, after turning up late for 
 several successive mornings at the India Office, he was 
 called into the directors' room and asked the reason of his 
 delinquencies, he said : ' Well, gentlemen, if I come late, I 
 always go away early/ 
 
 Humour must also be distinguished from buffoonery, 
 from ribaldry and burlesque. The genuine humorist 
 never drops to the lower plane by seeking to tickle an un- 
 lawful appetite. He is always pure he speaks with a clean 
 tongue out of the fulness of a clean heart. He never 
 walks where the angels fear to tread, nor does he reach 
 over to the forbidden fruit. It is a thousand pities that 
 laughter should so often be allied to the lewd, and that 
 the only scintillations of mirth, with too many, should flash 
 from the devil's dross-heaps rather than from the pleasant 
 path of lawful jollity. In a word, humour is gentle, pure, 
 and instructive, inasmuch as it is allied to the moral and 
 the didactic. It is the by-play of noble natures making for 
 serious ends. Thackeray has admirably defined humour 
 
104 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 as 'a combination of wit and love/ Note the union. 
 A wag may have the former ; but he only is the humorist 
 who touches the heart as well as rouses 'the laugh, and 
 who can blend smiles with tears, and so combine the 
 minors with the fantasias as to call forth the music of the 
 dual man. 
 
 The holiest men have not shrunk from using humour; 
 and in showing men their folly, and in reclaiming them 
 from their sins, it has played a useful part in all schools. 
 Thus, there is no reason why the humorist may not be 
 the teacher and the poet. There is a proverb that men 
 prefer to be tickled rather than taught ; it is also true they 
 prefer to be tickled while being taught. Oftentimes the 
 light and airy touch of a wit such as Hood is a more 
 potent weapon in the field of truth than the lucubrations 
 of the philosopher and the logic of the schools. XWe have 
 need to thank God that we can see through smiles as well 
 as through tears, and that laughter wings the soul as much 
 as * chant and solemn litany.' He who dowered man with 
 the humorous instinct will never forbid, but bless, its 
 rational play ; and the apostle of mirth is as much the 
 anointed of the Lord as the weeping prophet of old. It 
 is a mistake to think that humour is opposed either to 
 earnestness or truth. Many of the men who have been 
 the most deadly in earnest have had merry hearts and 
 cheerful countenances ; and although Tom Hood could 
 scarcely open his lips, or put pen to paper, without uttering 
 or recording a pun, there were few men of his day who felt 
 more deeply, or who taught more truly. This, however, 
 we shall see as we proceed. 
 
 Hood's life was a very beautiful one beautiful in its 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 105 
 
 sadness, in its sweetness, and in its resignation. Strange 
 to say, he who made others smile, himself wept oft and 
 sore. He brought into this world the germ of a pulmonary 
 affection, which, developing into haemorrhage of the lungs, 
 carried him off to an early grave ; and he was prompted 
 to say in one of his paroxysms : * For my epitaph write : 
 " Here lies a man who spat more blood and made more 
 puns than any man in England." ' But afterwards his 
 request was that his tomb might bear but one distinguish- 
 ing line ' He sang the Song of the Shirt/ Throughout 
 the whole of his life he was tortured with an overwrought 
 nervous system, super-sensitive to noise and shock of all 
 kinds ; and through his over-trustfulness he was all his 
 days burdened with a load of debt. Owing to this, he 
 was never independent of publishers, who worked him as 
 their hack, and, to use the phrase of a modern author, 
 1 kicked his brains up and down Paternoster Row to keep 
 their feet warm.' As a father he was gentle, considerate, 
 and loving. He would steal upstairs when his little ones 
 lay asleep to place his comic sketches upon their counter- 
 panes, and in the morning stealthily peep through the half- 
 open door and watch with delight their childish glee. He 
 was devout and religious not perhaps as the orthodox 
 count religion, but as the Apostle counted it when he said, 
 ' Pure religion and undefiled is this : to visit the widows 
 and orphans in their afflictions, and keep one's self un- 
 spotted from the flesh/ Shortly before his death, in one 
 of those suddenly changing moods so common to pulmonary 
 disease, when to-day seems an assurance of decease, and 
 to morrow of recovery, he penned the following lines, the 
 last product of his genius : 
 
106 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 ' Farewell, life ! my senses swim ; 
 And the world is growing dim ; 
 Thronging shadows cloud the light, 
 Like the advent of the night 
 Colder, colder, colder still, 
 Upwards steals a vapour's chill 
 Strong the earthly odour grows 
 I smell the Mould above the Rose ! 
 
 1 Welcome, life ! the spirit strives ! 
 Strength returns, and hope revives ; 
 Cloudy fears and hopes forlorn 
 Fly like shadows of the Morn, 
 O'er the earth there comes a bloom 
 Sunny light for sullen gloom, 
 Warm perfume for vapours cold 
 I smell the Rose above the Mould !' 
 
 Oh, rare and tender-hearted Hood ! As gentle as a child, 
 as patient as a saint, as pure as an angel ; in suffering as 
 silent as a martyr ; under misfortune as cheerful and radiant 
 as a seraph ; forgetting his sorrow that he might cheer his 
 fellows, and hiding his sickness and his grief that he might 
 buoy up wife and children. Even on his deathbed, when 
 worn to a skeleton by much blood-spitting and waste of 
 lung tissue, and smarting beneath the application of a 
 mustard-plaster applied by the doctor's orders, he could 
 smile and say to his wife : ( My dear ! did you ever see so 
 much mustard to so little meat before ?' 
 
 Hood was London-bred, and of the so-called ' Cockney 
 School.' He was a city man and a city poet. Unlike 
 Wordsworth, he climbed no hills, nor wandered amid 
 wastes of moorland. Unlike Byron, ancient history and 
 the drama appealed not to his muse. But the crowd 
 the crowd with its sins and sorrows ; its broken hearts 
 and wasted lives \ the Nemesis of wealth, the tragedy 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 107 
 
 of poverty ; the playfulness and innocence of the child- 
 life ; the drawn blind, the hushed room, the silent tear 
 of these he sang as only one could sing, who had wit- 
 nessed and experienced something of them all. 
 
 He has left us a charming reminiscence of his boyhood 
 at Clapham Academy, where he ' was birched and bred ;' 
 and among many beautiful verses, none surpass 
 
 1 Ay, there's the playground ! there's the lime 
 Beneath whose shade in summer's prime 
 
 So wildly I have read ! 
 Who sits there now, and skims the cream 
 Of young Romance, and weaves a dream 
 
 Of love and cottage-bread ?' 
 
 As we have said, Hood was a devout man, although 
 anything but sanctimonious. Upon one occasion his 
 religion was attacked by a narrow-minded Scotchman of 
 the name of Rae Wilson. It seems that Hood, in one of 
 his poems, had likened something to a sow, from whose 
 jaw a cabbage-sprout 
 
 ' Protruded, as the dove so stanch 
 For peace supports an olive-branch.' 
 
 Whereupon Wilson at once accused him of blasphemy, 
 contending that such burlesque had reference to the Holy 
 Ghost. Our poet at once replied in a chaste yet witty and 
 trenchant ode, in which we get side-lights of his own beauti- 
 ful and deeply religious life. In this poem he says : 
 
 ' I'm not a saint. 
 
 Not one of those self-constituted saints, 
 Quacks not physicians in the cure of souls, 
 Censors who sniff out mortal taints, 
 And call the devil over his own coals.' 
 
108 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Then, proceeding to describe himself as he knows himself : 
 
 1 There wants a certain cast about the eye ; 
 A certain lifting of the nose's tip ; 
 A certain curling of the nether lip, 
 In scorn of all that is, beneath the sky ; 
 In brief, it is an aspect deleterious, 
 A face decidedly not serious, 
 A face profane, that would not do at all 
 To make a face at Exeter Hall.' 
 
 But for all this Hood claims to be religious. He says : 
 
 4 1 do enjoy this bounteous, beauteous earth ; 
 
 And dote upon a jest, 
 " Within the limits of becoming rnirth." 
 
 * -X: * * * * 
 
 I own I laugh at over-righteous men, 
 
 I own I shake my sides at ranters, 
 
 And treat sham Abram saints with wicked banters. 
 
 I've no ambition to enact the spy 
 
 On fellow-souls, a spiritual pry. 
 
 '*'-.."*"' 
 For I consider faith and prayers 
 Amongst the privatest of men's affairs.' 
 
 Hood then goes on to declare he has no sympathy what- 
 ever with Rae Wilson and his school in their attempt to 
 force religious observance on the people by the enactment 
 of laws of Parliament : 
 
 ' No solemn sanctimonious face I pull, 
 Nor think I'm pious when I'm only bilious 
 Nor study in my sanctum supercilious 
 To frame a Sabbath bill or forge a Bull. 
 I pray for grace repent each sinful act 
 Peruse, but underneath the rose, my Bible : 
 And love my neighbour, far too well, in fact, 
 To call and twit him with a godly tract. 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. IOQ 
 
 I honestly confess that I would hinder 
 The Scottish member's legislative rigs, 
 Who looks on erring souls as straying pigs 
 That must be lashed by law, wherever found, 
 And driven to church as to the parish pound.' 
 
 Then follow these beautiful lines : 
 
 1 Spontaneously to God should tend the soul, 
 Like the magnetic needle to the Pole ; 
 But what were that intrinsic virtue worth, 
 Suppose some fellow with more zeal than knowledge, 
 Fresh from St. Andrew's College, 
 Should nail the conscious needle to the north ?' 
 
 Then comes an autobiographic gem of rare beauty and 
 workmanship a gem flashing forth a ray serene of the 
 inner and holier life of Hood : 
 
 ' The humble records of my life to search, 
 I have not herded with mere pagan beasts ; 
 But sometimes I have "sat at good men's feasts," 
 And I have been " where bells have knolled to church." 
 Dear bells ! how sweet the sounds of village bells, 
 When on the undulating air they swim ! 
 Now loud as welcomes ! faint, now, as farewells ! 
 And trembling all about the breezy dells, 
 As fluttered by the wings of Cherubim.' 
 
 This is followed by a solemn scorn for those whose only 
 religion is one of words and not of deeds. He says : 
 
 1 A man may cry " Church ! Church !" at every word, 
 With no more piety than other people 
 A daw's not reckoned a religious bird 
 Because it keeps a-cawing from a steeple.' 
 
 Next in turn is a scathing line or two on spiritual pride 
 
 ' Shun pride, O Rae ! whatever sort beside 
 You take in lieu, shun spiritual pride ! 
 A pride there is of rank a pride of birth, 
 A pride of learning, and a pride of purse, 
 
110 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 A London pride in short, there be on earth 
 A host of prides, some better and some worse. 
 But of all prides, since Lucifer's attaint, 
 The proudest swells a self-elected saint. ' 
 
 While the crown of the poem is a closing' apostrophe to 
 what Hood considers a truly religious life : 
 
 4 Thrice blessed, rather, is the man with whom 
 The gracious prodigality of nature, 
 The balm, the bliss, the beauty, and the bloom, 
 The bounteous providence in every feature, 
 Recall the good Creator to His creature, 
 Making all earth a fane, all heaven its dome ! 
 To his tuned spirit the wild heather-bells 
 
 Ring Sabbath knells ; 
 The jubilate of the soaring lark 
 
 Is chaunt of clerk ; 
 
 For Choir, the thrush and the gregarious linnet ; 
 The sod's a cushion for his pious want : 
 And, consecrated by the heaven within it, 
 The sky-blue pool a font. 
 Each cloud-capped mountain is a holy altar ; 
 An organ breathes in every grove ; 
 
 And the full heart's a Psalter 
 Rich in deep hymns of gratitude and love.' 
 
 Such was the deep, fervid, healthy religion of Hood not 
 creed, but character ; not cant, but praise. 
 
 Another powerful, yet humorous, sermon that Hood 
 preached was on the unutterable selfishness of those who, 
 in the wondrous wave of mercantile prosperity marking the 
 early part of this century, built up fabulous fortunes and 
 sought thereby to ape the aristocracy. It is said now that 
 the day of large fortunes is over and for many reasons it 
 is a good thing it is so. The day for money-worship, how- 
 ever, is not over, and one of the tendencies democracy is 
 undoubtedly evincing is an undue reverence for the golden 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. Ill 
 
 calf. In the days of Hood, however, money was the 
 universal passport : to be rich was to be god-like to be 
 poor was to be accursed poverty was the Englishman's 
 hell. Carlyle, writing of these days, says : * Hell generally 
 signifies the infinite terror, the thing a man is infinitely 
 afraid of, and shudders and shrinks from, struggling with 
 his whole soul to escape from it. With Christians it is the 
 infinite terror of being found guilty before the just Judge. 
 With old Romans it. was the terror not of Pluto, for whom 
 probably they cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing 
 unvirtuously, which was their word for unmanfully. And 
 now what is it if you pierce through his cants his oft- 
 repeated hearsays, what he calls his worship and so forth 
 What is his hell after all these reputable, oft-repeated hear- 
 says, what is it ? With hesitation, with astonishment, I 
 pronounce it to be the terror of not succeeding ; of not 
 making Money, fame, or some other figure in the world 
 chiefly of not making money. Is it not a somewhat singular 
 hell ?' So asks Carlyle, and we say in reply, It is a very 
 singular hell indeed. Well, to show up the folly, the vanity, 
 the selfishness, and the sin associated with, and growing 
 out of, this abject worship of money, as well as the 
 toadyism and foolery that follow in its train, Hood wrote 
 the poem of ' Miss Kilmansegg and her Golden Leg.' In 
 it he sketches the pedigree, birth, childhood, education, 
 accident, marriage, misery, and death of a daughter born 
 of wealthiest parents, and inheritress of a fabulous fortune. 
 And yet what did wealth do for her ? It did not give her 
 happiness, it did not stave off accident, and when accident 
 came it could not save the precious limb. It did not secure 
 for her a pure and loving husband, nor happy home nor 
 
I 1 2 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 did it save her from an ignominious death. Gold could pur- 
 chase gold. As gold it multiplied, and mounted up towards 
 heaven ; but its weight eventually sank the one who carried 
 it, and betrayed the one who loved it. The poem might 
 reasonably and rightly be called 'The Nemesis of Wealth.' 
 In the first place, Hood tells us how her ancestors laid 
 the basis of family wealth in the dark days of taxation and 
 usury adopted for the raising of funds in the war times 
 and Pitt administration. This ancestor, we are told, kept 
 
 * One yearling bull 
 Worth all Smithfield-market full 
 
 Of the golden bulls of Pope Gregory. 
 ****** 
 Moreover, he had a Golden Ass, 
 Sometimes at stall, and sometimes at grass, 
 
 That was worth his own weight in money 
 And a golden hive, on a Golden Bank, 
 Where golden bees, by alchemical prank, 
 
 Gathered gold instead of honey. 
 
 # * * * * * 
 
 But the Golden Ass, or the Golden Bull, 
 Was English John, with his pockets full, 
 
 Then at war by land and water, 
 fc # # # # # 
 
 And as money makes money, his golden bees 
 Were the Five per Cents or which you please.' 
 
 So the family fortune was laid, and so it was built up. The 
 next generation, however, was more favoured (or more 
 cursed), inheriting this fabulous wealth, with a power to 
 multiply and keep it. To this generation was born a daughter 
 the heiress to the fortune the heroine of the poem : 
 
 * She was born exactly at half-past two, 
 
 As witnessed a timepiece in ormolu 
 
 That stood on a marble table 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 113 
 
 Showing at once the time of day, 
 And a team of Gildings running away 
 
 As fast as they were able, 
 With a Golden God, with a golden Star, 
 And a golden Spear, in a golden Car, 
 
 According to Grecian fable.' 
 
 Of course her christening was in keeping with her birth and 
 position. 
 
 1 A wealthy Nabob was God-papa, 
 And an Indian Begum was God-mamma, 
 
 Whose jewels a queen might covet 
 And the priest was a Vicar, and Dean withal 
 Of that temple we see with a Golden Ball, 
 
 And a Golden Cross above it. 
 ****** 
 Gold ! still gold ! it rained on the nurse, 
 Who, unlike Danae, was none the worse ; 
 There was nothing but guineas glistening ! 
 Fifty were given to Doctor James, 
 For calling the little Baby names, 
 And for saying " Amen " 
 The Clerk had ten, 
 And that was the end of the Christening.' 
 
 Of her childhood, Hood tells us : 
 
 4 Born in wealth, and wealthily nursed, 
 Capp'd, papp'd, napp'd, and lapp'd from the first 
 
 On the knees of Prodigality, 
 Her childhood was one eternal round 
 Of the game of going on Tickler's ground, 
 Picking up gold in reality.' 
 
 As for her education : 
 
 ' Long before her A B and C, 
 They had taught her by heart her L. S. D. 
 And as how she was born a great heiress ; 
 
114 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 And as sure as London is built of bricks, 
 My Lord would ask her the day to fix, 
 To ride in a fine gilt coach and six, 
 
 Like Her Worship the Lady May'ress.' 
 
 Thus are the children born to wealth too often and too 
 early fooled. But, what was worse, her attendants mixed 
 the alloy of gold with her morals ; for : 
 
 ' The very metal of merit they told, 
 And praised her for being as " good as gold !" 
 
 Till she grew as a peacock haughty ; 
 Of money they talked the whole day round, 
 And weighed desert like grapes by the pound, 
 Till she had an idea from the very sound, 
 
 That people with naught were naughty. 
 
 # . * * * * * 
 
 They praised her falls, as well as her walk, 
 Flatterers make cream cheese of chalk 
 They praised how they praised ! her very small talk, 
 
 As if it fell from a Solon.' 
 
 Among other accomplishments, this heiress was taught the 
 art of horseman- or horsewoman-ship ; and here Hood's 
 humour runs riot. The horse's name was ' Banker,' and it 
 was of ' metal rare. 7 One day as he was carrying his 
 mistress his golden treasure he shied at what ? At the 
 ' sight of a beggar in rags. 7 
 
 ' Away went the horse in the madness of fright, 
 And away went the horsewoman, mocking the sight 
 Was yonder blue flash a flash of blue light, 
 Or only the skirt of her habit ?' 
 
 And now comes a description of the ride as fine an 
 example of imitative and descriptive writing as ever fell from 
 pen, and only equalled by Browning in his galloping song, 
 1 How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.' 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 115 
 
 .y she gallops ! its awful work ! ' 
 It's faster than Turpin's ride to York, 
 
 On Bess, that notable clipper ! 
 She has circled the ring ! she crosses the Park ! 
 Mazeppa, although he was stripp'd so stark, 
 
 Mazeppa could not outstrip her ! 
 The fields seem running away with the folks ! 
 The Elms are having a race for the Oaks 
 
 At a pace that all jockies disparages ! 
 All, all is racing ! The Serpentine 
 Seems rushing past like the " arrowy Rhine," 
 The houses have got on a railway line, 
 
 And are off like the first-class carriages ! 
 
 ****** 
 Alas ! for the hope of the Kilmanseggs ! 
 For her head, her brains, her body, and legs, 
 
 Her life's not worth a copper ! 
 Willy-nilly, 
 In Piccadilly, 
 A hundred hearts turn sick and chilly, 
 
 A hundred voices cry " Stop her !" 
 And one old gentleman stares and stands, 
 Shakes his head and lifts his hands, 
 
 And says, " How very improper !" 
 
 ****** 
 Sick with horror, she shuts her eyes, 
 But the very stones seem uttering cries, 
 
 ****** 
 " Batter her ! Shatter her ! 
 Throw and scatter her " 
 Shouts each stony-hearted chatterer ! 
 
 " Dash at the heavy Dover ! 
 Spill her, kill her, tear and tatter her ! 
 Smash her ! crash her !" (the stones didn't flatter her !) 
 " Kick her brains out ! let her blood spatter her ! 
 
 Roll on her over and over." 
 
 ****** 
 On and on ! still frightfully fast ! 
 Dover Street, Bond Street, all are past, 
 
 82 
 
Il6 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 But yes no yes ! they are down at last ! 
 
 The Furies and Fates have found them ! 
 Down they go with a sparkle and crash, 
 Like a bark that's struck by the lightning flash 
 There's a shriek and a sob 
 And the dense, dark mob 
 Like a billow closes around them. 
 * * * * * # 
 
 " She breathes !" " She don't !" 
 " She'll recover !" " She won't !" 
 " She's stirring ! she's living, by Nemesis !" ' 
 
 She is at once removed into the nearest house, which 
 happens to be ' an opulent goldsmith's premises.' 
 
 4 But what avails gold to Miss Kilmansegg, 
 
 When the femoral bone of her dexter leg 
 
 Has met with a compound fracture ? 
 
 X- )< * * * # 
 
 Gold may soothe adversity's smart ; 
 Nay, help to bind up a broken heart ; 
 But to try it on any other part 
 
 Were as certain a disappointment 
 As if one should rub the dish and plate 
 Taken out of a Staffordshire crate 
 In the hope of a golden service of state 
 
 With Singleton's Golden Ointment.' 
 
 In spite of all that gold could do, the leg had to be 
 amputated. But how replaced ? Ah ! that was the ques- 
 tion. An heiress must have a leg to match. A wooden 
 leg ? Pah ! nothing so common. 
 
 ' Wood, indeed, in forest and park, 
 With its sylvan honours and feudal bark, 
 
 Is an aristocratical article ; 
 But split and sawn, and hack'd about town, 
 Serving all needs of pauper or clown, 
 Trod on ! staggered on ! Wood cut down 
 Is vulgar fibre and particle.' 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 117 
 
 Well, if wood is too vulgar, what about cork ? Could she 
 not move gracefully with a neatly shaped limb of so light a 
 material ? No ; worse and worse. 
 
 ' Cork ! When the noble Cork Tree shades 
 A lovely group of Castilian maids, 
 
 'Tis a thing for a song and sonnet. 
 But cork, as it stops the bottle of gin, 
 Or bungs the beer the small beer in, 
 It pierced her heart like a corking-pin 
 
 To think of standing upon it.' 
 
 No ; she would have a leg of gold, 
 
 1 So a leg was made in a comely mould, 
 Of gold, fine virgin glittering gold, 
 
 As solid as man could make it 
 Solid in foot, and calf, and shank, 
 A prodigious sum of money it sank, 
 In fact, 'twas a Branch of the family Bank, 
 
 And no easy matter to break it.' 
 
 And now commenced her career of notoriety. Her 
 fame spread far and wide ; and so proud was she that she 
 rested not until she had given a fancy ball, to which the 
 nobility and plutocracy were invited, and in which the 
 great show-object was the leg of gold. It is needless to 
 follow her through the many intrigues formed to secure her 
 hand or rather, we should say, leg, for the golden limb 
 was the attraction. At last she singled out a worthless 
 foreign count, who married her, abused her, and finally 
 brained her with the limb of gold, to her so precious, and to 
 him so coveted, because by it he purposed to pay off his 
 ever-accumulating debts, 
 
 Sad indeed is the ending of this unfortunate girl as 
 depicted by Hood. She is not married for love, but bought 
 for her wealth her money bringing no happiness to the 
 
Il8 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 home, but only feeding the reckless and lustful habits of 
 her husband. Night after night she sits alone in her gilded 
 room, surrounded by her golden ornaments and her wealth 
 of Midas. But there is no one to comfort her no, 
 not one. Her childhood never the golden childhood 
 of happiness, because so overshadowed with greed and 
 selfishness lies in the past. Her mother is hopelessly 
 insane, her brain turned to imbecility by gold ; and her 
 father lies dead. Yet for these she weeps not. She rather 
 weeps for very pride pride wounded by the neglect of him 
 whom she has made rich, and who repays her by his scorn 
 and falsity. To whom can she turn ? Alas ! gold has 
 separated her from all. 
 
 1 But friend or gossip she had not one 
 To hear the vile deeds that the Count had done, 
 
 How night after night he rambled ; 
 And how she had learned by sad degrees 
 That he drank, and smoked, and worse than these, 
 That he swindled, intrigued, and gambled.' 
 
 So while gold purchases much, it loses much. It can win 
 sycophancy, but it scatters sympathy. While it purchases 
 flattery it sacrifices friends. 
 
 So enraged and mortified is this woman at her husband's 
 treatment of her that she burns the will before his face, in 
 which she has turned over her estates to him. As a 
 revenge, and also because of a crying need of cash for his 
 instant wants, he robs her of her limb in sleep, and as she 
 wakes in alarm, dashes it down upon her head, her idol 
 becoming her doom. 
 
 A terrible sermon from a terrible text to those who can 
 read the truth between the lines of humour. While we 
 laugh at the absurdity of the plot, we weep at the irony and 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 119 
 
 tragedy hidden therein. The Nemesis of wealth ! What 
 avenging spirit more certain in its tread, more awful in its 
 doom ? ' Born to the world's wine, honey, and corn ;' 
 pampered in all the extravagance of affluence, trained in 
 childhood to worship at the golden altar of a golden god, 
 and to reverence the golden rule of cash rather than the 
 golden rule of Christ. Taught her s. d. before her 
 ABC, and morally debauched with flattering lips set loose 
 with salve of gold. Courted, suited, sought after for what she 
 had and not for what she was. And then to awaken to the 
 terrible fact that her wealth could neither stave off accident 
 nor mitigate misfortune ; neither win a husband's heart nor 
 a friend's solace ; neither ease a proud spirit nor comfort a 
 broken heart. And, worst of all, to be sacrificed upon a 
 golden altar, herself the unwilling yet golden victim, the 
 very death-blow given with that which in life she had hugged, 
 and loved, and cherished. A picture this too often seen 
 a fact too frequently enacted. ' Go to, now, ye rich men, 
 weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. 
 Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. 
 Your gold and your silver is cankered, and shall eat into 
 your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped up treasure 
 together for the last days.' 
 
 Hood had a large heart, and was an intense lover of his 
 kind. Suffering moved him, and by his poems he did much 
 to lessen the pangs of the overworked and of the fallen. 
 Indeed, almost all the social evils of the day received his 
 sympathetic attention, and towards their amelioration he 
 said and wrote much. The land and game laws were then, 
 as now, a scandal ; and it was with the purpose of showing 
 up their inefficiency, and even their aggravation of the evil 
 
120 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 they pretended to cure, that he wrote * The Lay of the 
 Labourer/ in which occur the lines : 
 
 ' Ay, only give me work, 
 
 And then you need not fear 
 That I shall snare his worship's hare, 
 
 Or kill his grace's deer. 
 ****** 
 
 Wherever Nature needs, 
 
 Whenever Labour calls, 
 No job I'll shirk of the hardest work, 
 
 To shun the workhouse walls ; 
 ****** 
 My only claim is this, 
 
 With labour stiff and stark, 
 By lawful turn, my living to earn, 
 
 Between the light and dark : 
 My daily bread, and nightly bed, 
 
 My bacon and drop of beer 
 But all from the hand that holds the land, 
 
 And none from the overseer.' 
 
 Hood stood up for the rights of the overworked, and 
 showed how in many instances such overwork grew out of 
 the thoughtlessness of the rich. This is strikingly set forth 
 in the c Lady's Dream,' where one of the high-born beauties 
 is roused in the middle of the night by the tortured bodies 
 of those who have had to toil to dress her in her robes so 
 rich and rare. 
 
 1 And oh ! those maidens young, 
 
 Who wrought in that dreary room, 
 With figures drooping and spectres thin, 
 
 And cheeks without a bloom : 
 And the Voice that cried " For the pomp of pride 
 
 We haste to an early tomb. 
 
 ' " For the pomp and pleasure of Pride, 
 
 We toil like Afric's slaves, 
 And only to earn a home at last 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. 121 
 
 Where yonder cypress waves " ; 
 And then they pointed, I never saw 
 
 A ground so full of graves. 
 ****** 
 ' ' Alas ! I have walked thro' life 
 
 Too heedless where I trod ; 
 Nay, helping to trample my fellow-worm, 
 
 And fill the burial sod 
 Forgetting that even the sparrow falls 
 
 Not unmarked of God. 
 ****** 
 The wounds I might have heal'd ! 
 
 The human sorrow and smart ! 
 And yet it never was in my soul 
 
 To play so ill a part : 
 But evil is wrought by want of Thought 
 
 As well as want of Heart." ' 
 
 ' The Song of the Shirt,' a poem too well known to call 
 for comment here, is of the same order, and has, in its 
 own way, done much to free the many thousands of poor 
 seamstresses from the tyranny of money-making masters. 
 Though much yet remains to be done ere this curse of toil 
 is removed, those who seek to lessen the evil return again 
 and again to Hood for their inspiration ; while f The Bridge 
 of Sighs ' has done much towards rousing in the heart of 
 Christendom a thought for the fallen and the unfortunate of 
 our large cities. 
 
 Hood's tenderness was as marked as his humour. There 
 are touches in his poems as gentle and as beautiful as any 
 in the idylls of our own Laureate. For example, upon the 
 death of his sister from consumption, he wrote : 
 
 ' We watch'd her breathing thro' the night, 
 
 Her breathing soft and low, 
 As in her breast the wave of life 
 Kept heaving to and fro. 
 
122 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 ' So silently we seem'd to speak, 
 
 So slowly moved about, 
 As we had lent her half our powers 
 
 To eke her living out. 
 1 Our very hopes belied our fears, 
 Our fears our hopes belied 
 We thought her dying when she slept, 
 
 And sleeping when she died. 
 ' For when the morn came dim and sad, 
 
 And chill with early showers, 
 Her quiet eyelids closed she had 
 Another morn than ours.' 
 
 There is also a psychological and dramatic instinct in 
 Hood that calls for note. In * Eugene Aram 7 and ' The 
 Haunted House' we have betrayed an insight into con- 
 science, and a weird, realistic touch that places Hood high 
 above the mere comic school of poets. But, alas ! he had 
 to write to live ; and he found that puns were the best 
 preservatives against duns, for his publishers paid him for his 
 rollicking mirth rather than for his graver and greater themes. 
 
 We have need to thank God for teachers such as Hood. 
 Too many of those who instruct us leave behind in their 
 instruction the sting of severity they are too personal, too 
 cynical, too severe. They portray our follies in high 
 colours, they use a superabundance of vermilion and lamp- 
 black. In their schools we learn to loathe humanity, and 
 look at ourselves in hopelessness and despair. Against 
 these we have another school of teachers, who treat life as 
 a huge joke. Their text is, ' A short life and a merry one, 
 and a fig for care, and a sneer for sin.' They degrade all 
 the moral element we possess by flippancy and ridicule, 
 until righteousness and truth nay, religion itself become 
 part and parcel of a fool's burlesque and a simpleton's 
 
HOOD, THE HUMORIST. I 23 
 
 fantasy. One class of teachers dress life in crape the 
 other don it with tinsel and cap and bells. To one it is a 
 dirge, to the other drollery. The first dispirit us, the 
 second debauch us. The former show us sins, and weight 
 us with condemnation. The latter scoff at our sins, 
 and so honeycomb our moral sense. Hood belonged to 
 neither school. He saw sin, and he rebuked it ; but he so 
 rebuked it as not only to shame the sinner, but to inspirit him 
 with hope and life. Wordsworth was sombre and stately in 
 all rebukes he administered to his age and its sins. Byron 
 was profane and immoral, and turned even the eternal 
 verities of life into food for jest. But Hood combined 
 Wordsworth's righteousness with Byron's jest. He often 
 pointed a moral with a pun, and climaxed a sermon with a 
 joke. 
 
 Then think of all the pleasure Hood has brought to us 
 as an English-reading people. We hail the discoverer of a 
 new drug, and look upon him as a benefactor of the race 
 who, by introducing some anaesthetic, lessens pain and 
 expedites surgery. We immortalize the man who invents a 
 labour-saving and capital-increasing machine. But what of 
 the man who, with his merry rhyme, and artless drollery, 
 and innocent mirth, can dry the eye and cheer the heart, 
 and lighten care, and gild the sombre cloud ? who enables 
 the harassed to forget their burden, and the sorrowful their 
 despair ? This is what Hood has done for us, and we 
 acknowledge God in the gift. If there is one man to be 
 pitied more than another, it is he who is a stranger to 
 Lamb, to Thackeray, and to Hood, and others of their 
 school, who, while themselves tormented and afflicted, sang 
 the sweeter for their darkened cage, and sent forth rarer 
 
124 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 scents because their petals were bruised and torn. Lamb, 
 shutting up in his heart the secret of his sister's insanity, 
 and working night and day to keep her from the walls of 
 a madhouse, and yet withal cheering the* world with his 
 1 Essays of Elia.' Thackeray, fighting with monetary diffi- 
 culties, and the victim of an insidious disease, and yet, 
 notwithstanding these, giving us his immortal creations, and 
 delivering his humorous sketches in reality sermons a 
 prince amongst the teachers of the day. And Hood poor 
 Hood ! wasted by constant haemorrhage of the lungs, and 
 flying from duns for the debts of those for whom he had 
 become responsible, and in the pauses of his paroxysms, 
 and in the pauses of his flight, throwing off the side-splitting 
 stanza on the all too-comic phase of life. Ah ! these are 
 the men who have made life under all its horrible con- 
 ditions tolerable who have made literature a panacea for 
 care and grief who have so retouched the sombre horizon 
 that the faded colours reappear, and the tints of hope and 
 gladness start forth afresh. 
 
 We are loath to part with Hood Hood the delicate, the 
 simple-hearted, the gentle, tender, childlike Hood ; merry 
 in his misery and hopeful in his gloom ; chivalrous towards 
 women, irreproachable in his dealings with his fellow-men ; 
 wroth at injustice, merciful towards the fallen ; the favourite 
 of little children, the pet and playfellow of the best men of 
 his age ; the friend of all, the enemy of none. We can best 
 bid him farewell in the words of Landor : 
 
 ' Before me in each path there stood 
 The witty and the tender Hood.' 
 
VI. 
 
 TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 
 
VI. 
 TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 
 
 IN my definition of the characteristic of Tennyson's poetry 
 I have ventured to coin the word ' moodist ' a word which 
 however impermissible is none the less apposite. Tennyson 
 is, undoubtedly, the poet of moods. He is in touch with every 
 sensation common to the heart of man, woman, and child. 
 He can pitch his poetry to any key in the gamut of feeling : 
 from monody to jubilate his note is true, his touch is 
 perfect. Or to change the figure he is familiar with the 
 demons and the angels that people the soul, overshadowing 
 it with mist, or irradiating it with glory \ now stealing in 
 uninvited, and remaining in spite of frantic efforts at dis- 
 missal ; now refusing to linger when besought to remain 
 with cries and prayers. Hate of man and hate of money, 
 and love of woman and love of wealth. Scorn of sham 
 and scorn of self; tears for the dead, and tears for the 
 desolate. The maddened wail of disappointment, the wild 
 cry of revenge, the heart-sob of the mother, the sad retro- 
 spect of the grandmother, the childish delight on a bright 
 May day, the gloomy ghost of doubt, the mute shadow of 
 grief, the rollicking carouser, the spectre of lust haunting a 
 heart worn out and gray with dying fires, the well-con- 
 ditioned, yet chilly self-centred god in the Palace of Art, the 
 
T28 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 yearning, passionate lonesomeness of a forsaken wife all 
 these, and many more of the phantoms, passions, and 
 moods, by which mankind is visited, are no strangers to him, 
 and to these he introduces us in his poems. ' It is as though 
 Tennyson had thrown all human hearts, in all their mad 
 passions and gruesome griefs, in all their wild excitements 
 and passionate joys, into life-pictures on the walls of some 
 great gallery, and bidden the spectators (or readers of his 
 poems) to look at them, and behold the moods of the souls 
 of men. Next to the Bible and Shakespeare, I know of no 
 writings so full, so true, so startling in their revelation of 
 moods as the writings or poems of Tennyson. 
 
 Thus it is important for those who mean to appreciate 
 Tennyson to put themselves, as far as they can, in the place 
 and in the spirit of the characters whom the poet describes ; 
 and also, as far as possible, to enter into the temper, or shade 
 of temper (for Tennyson is fine even to shades), peculiar to the 
 time, the place, and the personality. In a word, the student 
 of Tennyson, like the student of Shakespeare, must be a 
 student of human nature. I claim this as a sine qua non 
 for a right appreciation of the Laureate. Apart from this 
 you may admire his chaste and superbly finished style, his 
 pictorial genius in the setting forth of landscape, his pre- 
 Raphaelite touch, peculiar to his vignette sketches, and his 
 marvellous power of condensation, saying in a line, as Ruskin 
 puts it, what it takes a first-class author a page or a page 
 and a half to express. All these striking features, each 
 distinct and pre-eminent in his writings, you may admire ; 
 but only they who are students of the human heart, its 
 passions, its aspirations, its disappointments, and its gloom, 
 can truly and fairly appreciate Tennyson, the poet of moods. 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 1 29 
 
 Now what is a mood ? It is a soul experience or sensa- 
 tion, resultant from one of two causes, or, it may be, from 
 both. For example, we bring into this world with us a 
 certain mental or psychologic atmosphere an atmosphere, 
 for the most part, in which we live and move and have our 
 being. Such atmosphere may be rarefied or intensified as 
 the case may be ; this being consequent upon circumstances 
 and conditions. Say, a man brings with him into the world 
 the spirit of jealousy. He may be a good man, a con- 
 siderate man, even a self-sacrificing man ; but he is always 
 plagued and fretted by this atmosphere of jealousy. When 
 rivals press him the cloud thickens, and the vapours fall. 
 When they are removed from immediate contact, although 
 the sky clears, the clouds still curl in their coppery folds 
 along the distant horizon. More or less the thing is there 
 either in murk or haze in blackness or in falling 
 shadow. As with jealousy, so with a hundred other passions 
 and crazes. We are belted with a moral atmosphere, 
 ever changing in rarity and colour, according to the hour, 
 the place, the circumstance. Thus our souls move as orbs 
 through an ever-varying medium ; all within them taking 
 tone from the all-encompassing and ever-pressing mood. 
 
 This mental-atmosphere is Tennyson's world. It seems 
 as though he had visited it in a thousand souls, and knew 
 it in all its manifold changes. For example, take the follow- 
 ing as setting forth the mood of hate and thickening into 
 the passion-storm of cruel, deadly revenge. The poem is 
 entitled * The Sisters/ and it consists of six verses of four 
 lines, each verse relieved with two lines of a refrain that rise 
 in passion as the storm outside the castle increases in fury. 
 
 9 
 
130 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 The plot is as follows : A young earl of great beauty wooes 
 a girl, and then seduces and deserts her. She dies of a 
 broken heart, while the elder sister, once the earl's betrothed, 
 and who had withdrawn in favour of the younger, whom 
 he loved more than herself,, determines upon a plan of 
 revenge relentless, unwomanly, and hellish. She in- 
 sinuates herself into his affections, decoys him to her 
 couch, lulls him to sleep, stabs him dead, and lays his 
 bloody corpse at his mother's feet. I want you to note the 
 rise of this woman's passion, with the rise of the storm the 
 mood of the soul and the mood of nature keeping pace, and 
 tune, and strength together. 
 
 1 We were two daughters of one race : 
 She was the fairest in the face : 
 
 The wind is blowing in turret and tree. 
 They were together, and she fell ; 
 Therefore revenge became me well. 
 O the earl was fair to see ! 
 
 I She died : she went to burning flame : 
 She mixed her ancient blood with shame. 
 
 The wind is howling in turret and tree. 
 Whole weeks and months, and early and late, 
 To win his love I lay in wait ; 
 
 O the earl was fair to see ! 
 
 I 1 made a feast ; I bade him come ; 
 
 I won his love, I brought him home. 
 
 The wind is roaring in turret and tree. 
 And after supper, on a bed, 
 Upon my lap he laid his head ; 
 
 O the earl was fair to see ! 
 ' I kiss'd his eyelids into rest : 
 His ruddy cheeks upon my breast. 
 
 The wind is raging in turret and tree. 
 I hated him with the hate of hell, 
 But I loved his beauty passing well. 
 
 O the earl was fair to see ! 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 131 
 
 4 1 rose up in the silent night : 
 I made my dagger sharp and bright. 
 
 The wind is raving in turret and tree. 
 As half asleep his breath he drew, 
 Three times I stabbed him thro' and thro'. 
 
 O the earl was fair to see ! 
 
 1 1 curled and combed his comely head, 
 He looked so grand when he was dead. 
 
 The wind is blowing in turret and tree. 
 I wrapped his body in the sheet, 
 And laid him at his mother's feet. 
 
 O the earl was fair to see !' 
 
 After all, the poem is but the elder sister's dream ; yet it is 
 the dream of hate intensified to revenge a mood of the soul. 
 
 Another poem portraying soul-moods is 'The Palace of 
 Art.' It unfolds the tempers of selfishness and self- 
 renouncement of isolation, ending in despair, and uni- 
 versal sympathy, crowned with joy. In the former temper 
 the soul proposes to itself a life of gratification, and we are 
 introduced to its intentions and doings in the following lines : 
 
 ' I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, 
 
 Wherein at ease for aye to dwell. 
 I said, " O Soul, make merry and carouse, 
 Dear soul, for all is well." ' 
 
 Then, in graphic sketches, Tennyson gives us the position, 
 the prospect, and the surroundings of the Palace. The site 
 selected is 'far away from, and far above, the world of 
 toiling men,' built upon ' a huge crag platform, smooth as 
 burnished brass.' The outlook is upon ' level meadow 
 bases of deep grass,' while the scenes and sounds of the 
 great sea of life its wrecks and storms are shut out by 
 1 bright ranged ramparts, which rise and scale the light.' 
 
 92 
 
132 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 These sheltered quarters of the selfish soul are laid out in 
 richest luxuriance. ' Floods of fountain foam ' are poured 
 from the golden throats of cisterns forged in the forms of 
 dragons, which stand at the four angles of the Palace, the 
 currents of these uniting in one mighty stream, which, 
 rushing over the mountain-side, scatters clouds of spray, on 
 which the sunbeams paint the rainbow arch ; while beyond 
 lies the sapphire sea. 
 
 The poet then proceeds to sketch the interior of the 
 Palace. The rooms are hung with richest draperies, and 
 the walls relieved with finished works of art. The fittings 
 are of deep-wrought wood, the niches of which are filled 
 with the statuettes of saviours, martyrs, and patriots of all 
 ages. The roof is a mighty angel with outstretched 
 wings ; the floor a marvellous mosaic, representative of the 
 struggling, toiling, forsaken, and perishing races of men. 
 Within this costly home the selfish soul shuts herself up 
 from all her kind, and lives alone, away from sight and 
 sound of suffering, as well as from the call and appeal of 
 duty. Then Tennyson proceeds to outline the selfish mood. 
 
 ' She took her throne : 
 She sat betwixt the shining Oriels, 
 To sing her songs alone.' 
 
 And 
 
 1 Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth, 
 
 Joying to feel herself alive, 
 Lord over Nature, Lord of the visible earth, 
 
 Lord of the senses five ; 
 Communing with herself : "All these are mine, 
 
 And let the world have peace or wars, 
 'Tis one to me." 
 
 & * # * * * 
 
 O God-like isolation which art mine, 
 
 I can but count thee perfect gain, 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 133 
 
 * * * & * * 
 
 I take possession of man's mind and deed. 
 
 I care not what the sects may brawl. 
 I sit as God, holding no form of creed, 
 
 But contemplating all." ' 
 
 For some time the selfish soul draws joy from this isola- 
 tion, shelter, and aesthetic environment. Eventually, how- 
 ever, she is troubled with strange questionings questionings 
 that press in upon her from the world without, despite her 
 withdrawal and distance therefrom : 
 
 * Full oft the riddle of the painful earth 
 
 Flashed thro' her as she sat alone, 
 Yet not the less held she her solemn mirth, 
 
 And intellectual throne. 
 And so she throve and prosper'd ; so three years 
 
 She prosper'd on the fourth she fell.' 
 
 Yes ! she fell and how great that fall the poet proceeds to 
 depict. In a dream, as when one awaketh, so suddenly and 
 precipitately, came the collapse. The Palace is changed to 
 a tomb ; the kingdom of her contemplation passes into 
 wildest confusion ; solitude, once so sweet, is unbearable ; 
 and the much-sought-after and hardly-earned isolation is 
 turned into a hell. Uncertain shapes start from out the 
 void that belts her, ' white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of 
 blood,' human forms, their foreheads fretted deep with 
 care, their hearts alight with flame,, baby corpses, stark and 
 staring, reared against the crumbling walls these being 
 meant by the poet to represent all who had been allowed 
 to perish unhelped and unheeded by the neglect and isola- 
 tion of the selfish soul. Yes ! the sick whom she might 
 have visited, the naked whom she might have clothed, the 
 hungry whom she might have fed, now rise up against 
 
J34 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 her to torment and condemn her. Thus Tennyson 
 paints the hell to which every self-seeking and self- 
 centred life is doomed. I cannot help here inserting in 
 passing the words of Ruskin : ' They who are begrudging 
 of their means, and store it up from others, find ere long 
 that, like the manna kept in the wilderness tent, it doth 
 naught but stink and breed worms.' 
 
 Tennyson goes on to show that the suffering through 
 which this selfish soul is passing is punitive rather than 
 vindictive in its character. She soon cries out : 
 
 ' "I am on fire within." 
 There comes no murmur of reply. 
 " What is it that will take away my sin, 
 
 And save me lest I die ?" 
 * * # # * * 
 
 So when four years were wholly finished, 
 
 She threw her royal robes away. 
 " Make me a cottage in the vale," she said, 
 
 '* Where I may mourn and pray. 
 Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are 
 
 So lightly, beautifully built : 
 Perchance I may return with others there 
 When I have purged my guilt." ' 
 
 Note the word 'others.' She would for ever live in the 
 cottage and in the vale rather than return alone to her Palace 
 of Art. Her punishment has taught her the greatest of all 
 life's lessons, that to live well and to live happily we must 
 live for others. Not that the Palace need be pulled down. 
 No ! The sin was in neither its costliness nor its beauty. 
 It was the selfishness of the occupant that cursed it. She 
 sought to break the God-forged link, ' Ye are members one 
 of another.' She sought to reverse the God-made law, ' He 
 that would save his life must lose it.' She wanted to possess 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 135 
 
 life's pleasures without sharing them, to live disintegrated 
 from her kind. For this end she removed herself from the 
 world, and enshrined herself with all that heart, fancy, and 
 genius could imagine. And with what consequence ? The 
 ruin of her nature, the distress of her soul. 
 
 Thus it is with every soul that severs itself from its fellow- 
 souls. Like the shallow pool, left high by the receding tide, 
 it can know no freshness, no sweetness, no fulness, until 
 once more gathered into the great tidal ocean which is its 
 native source. Only as we find room in our hearts and 
 homes for others can we enter into the true purpose of 
 being. ' Except the Lord build the house they labour in 
 vain that build it.' 
 
 * Locksley Hall,' the poem I consider Tennyson's 
 masterpiece, is another swiftly moving panorama of 
 moods. An orphaned youth, poor, yet highly gifted, seeks 
 the hand of his heiress-cousin Amy, whose father, the 
 squire, owns the broad acres of Locksley, in Lincolnshire. 
 This squire opposes the match, forcing his child into 
 wedlock with a scion of the aristocracy ; whereupon her 
 disconsolate and rejected cousin enlists in the army, and 
 seeks relief upon the field of battle. Here, despite his 
 reckless deeds, he remains unhurt, and lives to return with 
 his regiment to the old land. As chance would have it, the 
 regiment in marching to barracks-quarters takes the turn- 
 pike, from which is caught a glimpse of Locksley Hall, the 
 scene of his early love and sorrow. Old thoughts and associa- 
 tions come rushing back upon him, old wounds are torn 
 open, and he is, for the moment, unmanned with reminis- 
 cences of the past. He asks his comrades to leave him for a 
 short time in the rear while he again surveys the once loved, 
 
136 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 and now long forsaken, spot. The same old hall ; the 
 same waste of moorland, with its dreary gleams and calling 
 curlews, and distant roar of hollow breaking waves. He 
 sees the ivied casement-windows from which,, in the days of 
 boyhood, he used to watch the stars and the level stretches 
 of beach along which he was wont to study history and 
 science. Then the ghost of his lost Amy flits before 
 him Amy, tender-hearted, with her pale and delicate 
 cheek, that flushed as with the ' rosy red ' of the northern 
 night at the mention of his love. Next follows his remem- 
 brance of the delirium of love's young dream, when 
 
 ' Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands ; 
 Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. 
 Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with 
 
 might ; 
 Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.' 
 
 But, alas ! Amy was shallow-hearted she was false and 
 fickle. She yielded to her father's threats, and quailed 
 before her mother's tongue, as they twain bade her forsake 
 an impoverished cousin for the hand of a wealthy lord. And 
 now commences the series of moods through which the 
 wronged and disappointed man passes as he looks at her with 
 the eye of fancy, and compares what he deems she may be 
 with what she might have been had she married him. Can 
 he wish her happiness, seeing she has thus thrown herself 
 away ? Did she not in that act decline to a range of lower 
 feeling and to a narrower heart ? Has she not, through her 
 union with mere wealth and rank and animalism, sunk to 
 their level, 'all within her growing coarse to sympathize 
 with clay ' ? for 
 
 ' As the husband is, the wife is : thou art mated with a clown, 
 And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down. 
 
: 
 
 TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 137 
 
 He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, 
 Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.' 
 
 Then, swift as passing cloud, the mood changes, and 
 he dwells with passionate denunciation upon the causes of 
 his failure to gain her heart and retain her love. He was 
 without social rank, without worldly means, without fine 
 polish of manners ; and wanting these his manliness and 
 truthfulness and pure spontaneous devotion went for nought, 
 and he cries : 
 
 ' Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth ! 
 Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth ! 
 Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule ! 
 Cursed be the gold that gilds the straitened forehead of the fool !' 
 
 And now he passes to another mood a quieter and more 
 reflective one. He asks himself if it is well he should 
 thus bluster and rave? Is he not mad to cherish that 
 which bears such bitter fruit? Will it not be wiser to 
 forget to wash the tablets of his memory in the waters of 
 oblivion ? But he cannot. In vain he looks for the sweet, 
 oblivious antidote. To forget is impossible the past is 
 indelibly stamped upon his heart. Then he tries to find 
 comfort in the divisions of the mind that is, he dwells 
 upon the sunny rather than upon the gloomy past. He 
 will part Amy from her self, taking that portion of her life 
 which she lived when she was his, and when she loved him. 
 But, on a moment's reflection, he finds he cannot because 
 she never loved him truly. If she had, she would still have 
 loved him, 'for love is love for evermore.' 
 
 Then there passes before him, like a vision in the night, 
 the awful blight of a pure woman linked to the man who is 
 nothing more in tastes and tendencies than a brute-beast. 
 
138 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 It is the dead, unhappy night ; the rain beats upon the 
 roof, while she lies with sleepless eye staring at the chamber- 
 wall whereon the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows 
 rise and fall, while upon the marriage-pillow her husband 
 sleeps off his drunken orgie. Surely, now her thoughts 
 will turn to her old love, to her true love, to him whom she 
 cast off, and who would never thus have outraged her 
 modesty and womanhood? Surely, now she will see his 
 eye looking ancient kindness, and think of ' the might have 
 beens.' No. He cannot even hope for solace here, for a 
 babe is born to her, and this new life not only helps to bring 
 her solace, but altogether crowds the old love out of her 
 memory. And here come the beautiful lines : 
 
 * Nay, but Nature brings thee solace ; for a tender voice will cry. 
 'Tis a purer life than thine ; a lip to drain thy trouble dry. 
 Baby lips will laugh me down ; my latest rival brings thee rest. 
 Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast.' 
 
 Again the mood changes. He passes from the passive to 
 the active. He will brood no longer, but seek solace in the 
 activities of life : 
 
 1 Overlive it lower yet be happy ! Wherefore should I care ? 
 I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.' 
 
 But to what is he to turn ? He is poor, and the gates of 
 advance open only to the golden key ; and what is more, 
 they are thronged with suitors ; all the world's market-places 
 are crowded. Well, then, he will try to relive his life. He 
 will seek once more to feel the wild pulsation which he felt 
 before the strife when he yearned for the large excitement 
 that coming years would yield when he looked out with 
 the eye of hope, and beheld a propitious future when he 
 pictured in no fancy, but as a near reality, the parliament of 
 
TENNYSON, THP; MOODIST. 139 
 
 man and the federation of the world. But, alas ! wherein 
 lies the uses of recalling old aspirations ? They were only the 
 political dream of his youth, shattered long since by revolu- 
 tion and civil strife. 
 
 At this moment the bugle sounds for his return, and 
 with the sounding bugle the mood again changes. This 
 time it is the mood of scorn scorn at his own folly to thus 
 fret and fume over a woman's fickleness and falsity : 
 
 1 Weakness to be wrath with weakness ! Woman's pleasure, woman's 
 
 pain 
 
 Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain : 
 Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine, 
 Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.' 
 
 Once more the mood changes. He will go back to the 
 old civilizations of the East he will wander towards the 
 gateways of the day he will dwell in lands where no 
 trader comes where no European flag floats where there 
 is neither steamship nor railway, nor any of those thought- 
 problems that shake mankind : 
 
 4 There the passions, cramp'd no longer, shall have scope and 
 
 breathing-space ; 
 I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.' 
 
 And then, in a moment, he passes into a better mood : 
 
 1 Fool, again the dream, the fancy ! but I know my words are wild. 
 But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child. 
 I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains, 
 Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains !' 
 
 And now the mood brightens and heightens. He sees, 
 after all, a beacon in the distance. Not eastward, but west- 
 ward, moves the world, and fifty years of Europe are better 
 than a cycle of Cathay. Therefore, farewell to Locksley 
 
14 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Hall, and farewell to Amy. The past is irrevocable ; the 
 future is sure and filled with promise. 
 
 ' Forward, forward, let us range. 
 Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing, grooves of change.' 
 
 I call that poem a gorgeous panorama of moods moods 
 common to the disappointed and dispirited mind. Every 
 phase of despair and every phase of hope are flashed 
 before our eyes, until at last, with cry of ' onward,' ' for- 
 ward,' ' duty,' ' work/ the victorious mood is reached out of 
 which ascends the man. 
 
 And now we come to ' In Memoriam,' another mighty 
 panorama of moods, only the moods are those of grief and 
 loss the moods benighting and fogging a bereaved soul. 
 I need scarcely pause to remark that the poem is a 
 monument in verse erected by Tennyson to the memory of 
 the friend of his youth, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died an 
 early death while in search of health in distant lands. It 
 has not only immortalized the name of him to whom it 
 was erected, but it has immortalized him who erected it. 
 It is one of England's great classics. Religion and philo- 
 sophy, science and art, are wrought into its verse like a 
 glorious mosaic. It is a biography of Hallam, an auto- 
 biography of Tennyson, a revelation of the soul-experience 
 of humanity under the shadow of loss, as well as a repertory 
 of the doubts and faiths of the age. 
 
 You must remember, then, that ' In Memoriam ' is a 
 bereaved man's pilgrimage and progress from loss and 
 doubt to reunion and faith. In the first stage of grief the 
 lone sufferer falls back upon the old faith, that men may 
 rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things ; 
 but when he comes to test the value of this principle in the 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 141 
 
 face of the great loss under whose shadow he stands, he 
 fails to find in it a gain to match. Out of Hallam's death, 
 and his own broken heart, he can find no stepping-stone to 
 higher things. But one thing is possible. He can keep his 
 memory as a shrine whereat to worship, and so continue to 
 love his dear dead friend. In order to do this he will nurse 
 his grief, so that the lost in form shall never be the lost 
 in thought. 
 
 * Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd ; 
 Let darkness keep her raven gloss ; 
 Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss, 
 To dance with death, to beat the ground, 
 
 Than that the victor hours should scorn 
 The long results of love, and boast, 
 " Behold the man that loved and lost, 
 
 But all he was is overworn." ' 
 
 Soon, however, the sympathy of friends is showered upon 
 the poet in his bereavement. Kindly words and letters 
 of condolence come from far and near, all well meant, but 
 bringing nothing of cheer or comfort. 
 
 1 One writes, that " Other friends remain, 
 That Loss is common to the race," 
 And common is the common place, 
 And vacant chaff well meant for grain. 
 
 ' That loss is common would not make 
 My own less bitter, rather more ; 
 Too common ! Never morning wore 
 To evening, but some heart did break.' 
 
 The poet continues to feed and nurse his grief until all 
 nature is seen through its solemn gloom. The once- 
 peaceful surroundings of life lose their charm, the old 
 scenes and associations are beclouded, because Hallam is 
 no longer there to share them with him. 
 
142 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 ' So find I every pleasant spot 
 
 In which we two were wont to meet, 
 The field, the chamber, and the street, 
 For all is dark, where thou art not.' 
 
 At last the burden of his grief is unbearable. The 
 channels of relief in words and tears are choked. Like the 
 old Hebrew poet, ( He is so troubled that he cannot speak. 
 His eyes are held waking.'. This mood he has faultlessly 
 portrayed in the following lines : 
 
 ' The lesser griefs that may be said, 
 
 That breathe a thousand tender vows, 
 Are but as servants in a house 
 Where lies the master newly dead ; 
 1 Who speak their feeling as it is, 
 
 And weep the fulness from the mind : 
 " It will be hard," they say, " to find 
 Another service such as this." 
 ' My lighter moods are like to these, 
 That out of words a comfort win ; 
 But there are other griefs within, 
 And tears that at their fountain freeze. 
 
 * For by the hearth the children sit, 
 Cold in that atmosphere of Death, 
 And scarce endure to draw the breath, 
 Or like to noiseless phantoms flit. 
 
 1 But open converse is there none, 
 So much the vital spirits sink, 
 To see the vacant chair, and think, 
 " How good ! how kind ! and he is gone." ' 
 
 At last the gloom of sorrow is somewhat relieved. There 
 is the subtle influence of the past at work. Is not he, 
 Tennyson, a better and a holier man for having once 
 had Hallam as a friend and guide ? Does not the memory 
 of Hallam still exert itself over him and companion him ? 
 Is there not the posthumous immortality of influence ? To 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 143 
 
 this he will cling, and rejoice in the fact that it is ' better 
 to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' 
 
 But soon there dawns upon him another immortality 
 the immortality of his soul the personality of Hallam 
 that which thought and loved and hoped that in Hallam 
 after which Tennyson was drawn, and to which Tennyson 
 was attached. This it is impossible for death to touch; 
 and although unseen, yet it is none the less real and near. 
 
 1 My own dim life should teach me this, 
 That life shall live for evermore, 
 Else earth is darkness at the core, 
 And dust and ashes all that is.' 
 
 And now the gloom of despair is changed to the dawn 
 of hope. Death does not end all it is rather the Spirit's 
 bridal day the hour of those nuptials when the soul of 
 man is linked in celestial wedlock to the Lord of Life. And 
 just as it behoves the bride to forsake father and mother and 
 home, to take upon herself the higher and holier duties of a 
 new sphere of life, so it was needful that Hallam should pass 
 from earthly scenes and companionships, through the gate 
 of death, to the bridal morn and marriage-feast, awaiting him 
 in the heavenlies beyond. Realizing this, Tennyson sings : 
 
 1 And, doubtless, unto thee is given 
 A life that bears immortal fruit, 
 In those great offices that suit 
 The full-grown energies of heaven.' 
 
 Then Tennyson realizes another and grander truth, viz., 
 that it was God's need of Hallam's power of usefulness in 
 other worlds that led to his all too early removal : 
 4 So many worlds, so much to do, 
 So little done, such things to be, 
 How know I what had need of thee ? 
 For thou wert strong as thou wert true. 
 
144 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH- CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Thus death is not only a gain to Hallam, it is a gain also 
 to other worlds and to other intelligences ; while in the 
 end it is also a gain to the poet, his bereaved friend, for out 
 of the suffering has come the purified and thoughtful mind, 
 as he cries : 
 
 * Forgive my grief for one removed, 
 Thy creature, whom I found so fair. 
 I trust he lives in Thee, and there 
 I find him worthy to be loved.' 
 
 Verily tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, 
 and experience hope a hope that maketh not ashamed. 
 
 This is but the barest outline of the poem a key only, 
 with which I trust in your spare moments you will seek to 
 unlock the doors of its many treasures. 
 
 ' Maud,' rather than a panorama, is a rapid succession of 
 tempestuous moods. The poem is a monologue, discover- 
 ing a heart, in turn soured by life's failures, delirious with 
 love's passions, maddened by poverty's limitations, burdened 
 by blood-shedding remorse, and eventually emancipated by 
 uniting itself with a world-reforming scheme, alike divine 
 in its purpose and assured of its end. The monologist is 
 the son and only child of a man who has lost all through 
 a speculation into which he was fraudulently led, and who, 
 to ease his aching heart, and escape his disgraced record, 
 sought surcease in an act of self-destruction. He was soon 
 followed to his untimely grave by his sorrowing and de- 
 spondent wife, the boy alone remaining, a prey to 'the 
 slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/ Tennyson intro- 
 duces him to us while wrapped in the mood of cynicism 
 and raillery. Looking out upon the world, he sees nothing 
 but shammery and selfishness. The age is wrong, is 
 false, is belittled by its passion for ill-gotten and ill-spent 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 145 
 
 gain. c Only the ledger lives, and only not all men lie.' 
 Food is adulterated, and drink is drugged; the thief is 
 abroad, discoverable alike in the stealthy marauder of the 
 night and in the wage-oppressing capitalist. All this, how- 
 ever, he is asked to forget in the fact that the era of peace 
 has dawned. Era of peace, forsooth ! When the poor are 
 hovelled and hustled together, each sex like swine when 
 a mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial-fee when 
 men care only for factory, counter, and till ? Bah ! such 
 peace is a thousand times worse than war. Thus he grows 
 weary and sickened with all things, even with his old love 
 his child-love Maud, who is about to return, after years 
 of education and travel, to the Hall on the hill. What will 
 she care for him now that fortune has frowned upon him ? 
 What does he want with her now that all a woman counts 
 dear has been withdrawn ? No. Even against her he will 
 close the door of his heart, and c busy himself in himself 
 while the devil pipes to his own. 7 
 
 His next mood opens with an endeavour after a philo- 
 sophic calm, broken by a glimpse of the beautiful Maud. 
 He has seen her with her cold and clean-cut face, and down- 
 cast eye ; but it is only a passing glance, and he con- 
 gratulates himself upon escaping heart-free, with '-the least 
 little touch of spleen.' He sees her again, however. This 
 time to be sensitive to her surpassing beauty. She breaks 
 like a star on his gloom profound ; she grows and fades 
 and grows upon his imagination, holding his eyes from 
 sleep, and driving him to seek solace without the confines 
 of himself and home. A third time he sees her, when she 
 wafts him a sign of recognition ; and then, sitting in the 
 
 10 
 
146 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 quiet of his own garden, he hears her voice stealing forth 
 in song as she sings a martial strain beneath the cedar-tree 
 in the meadow under the Hall. 
 
 In these successive sights, and in this climax of sound, 
 Tennyson subtly traces out the development of the love- 
 moods in the man's nature : in other words, we have in 
 these musings and melancholies a revelation of the pro- 
 gressive stages of a heart in its love - ascent from the 
 soured cynic that looks out upon a dead world to the 
 awakened man that sees its light and glory. 
 
 The next mood is that in which his passion craves for 
 contact, direct and personal. He must meet her face to 
 face, and talk over with her the days of long ago. To this 
 end he journeys forth in the wannish glare of a pale and 
 stormy morning, only to be disappointed, for Maud remains 
 within the shelter of the Hall. At evening, however, when 
 the sunset burns on the blossomed gables of the cottages, 
 and he, once more restless for her presence, wanders down the 
 village street, they meet, touch hands, and talk of times gone by. 
 
 And now follow, in marvellous rapidity and graphic faith- 
 fulness, the varying and tormenting moods of one who 
 stands midway between an all-absorbing passion and un- 
 certainty as to its reciprocity on the part of the woman he 
 loves. First, there is a suspicion : what if her smile were 
 a snare to entrap and prostrate him at her feet, only that 
 she might the more ignominiously spurn after she had 
 befooled him : what if it were a trick to secure his vote at 
 the county contest, where her brother is to stand as candi- 
 date ; or worse, what if it were only the pitying smile of 
 womanhood,, started by sentimental thoughts as to his 
 orphanhood, his poverty, and his isolation ? 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 147 
 
 Then succeeds the mood of pride. Supposing Maud 
 should love him ! Will not her brother 'the jewelled mass 
 of millinery,' oiled and curled, smelling of musk and inso- 
 lence will not he oppose the troth ? Yet, after all, who is 
 he that he should ? To be scorned by one that we scorn is not 
 a matter to make us fret is not a calamity hard to be borne. 
 
 But there follows a mood that is hard to be borne the 
 mood of jealousy ; for now comes upon the scene the new- 
 made lord, before whom the villagers doff their hats, and 
 who inherits untold wealth from an old grandfather, just 
 dead, and gone to a blacker pit than the shafts of coal out 
 of which he dug his wealth at the sacrifice of the helots he 
 employed. He is rich ' in the grace all women desire,' and 
 strong in 'the power all men adore.' A formidable rival, 
 he, with his simper and drawl, his gewgaw castle and his 
 modern title. How dares he to press in upon the presence 
 of Maud the darling of his heart his loved one ? 
 
 Gradually this love - passion becomes all-absorbing ; he 
 cannot withdraw from it, and all he hears and sees is 
 leavened by it. As the birds sing in the falling twilight, 
 their cry and call is ' Maud Maud Maud !' As he crosses 
 the meadows in her wake, the tread of her feet gives a 
 deeper crimson to the daisy-tips. Then the shadow falls, 
 for ' my lord's ' horse stands at the Hall front ; his rival is 
 kneeling at the shrine. 
 
 Upon the departure of this rival with her brother, our 
 hero determines to press his suit. To this end Fortune is 
 propitious, for he sees her approaching ; whereat he cries : 
 
 1 1 see my Oread coming down, 
 O this is the day ! 
 
 10 1 
 
148 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 beautiful creature, what am I 
 That I dare to look her way; 
 Think I may hold dominion sweet, 
 
 Lord of the pulse that is lord of her breast, 
 And dream of her beauty with tender drea'd, 
 From the delicate Arab arch of her feet 
 To the grace that, bright and light as the crest 
 Of a peacock, sits on her shining head, 
 And she knows it not : O, if she knew it, 
 To know her beauty might half undo it. 
 
 1 know it the one bright thing to save 
 My yet young life in the wilds of Time, 
 Perhaps from madness, perhaps from crime, 
 Perhaps from a selfish grave.' 
 
 They meet ; he pleads his love. She yields, and in 
 promise becomes his own. 
 
 And now all is changed. A new heaven and a new 
 earth, because a goddess reigns therein. He sees all 
 through the rainbow colours of love. He asks : 
 
 ' Has our whole earth gone nearer to the glow 
 Of your soft splendours that you look so bright ? 
 /have climbed nearer out of lonely Hell. 
 Beat, happy stars, timing with things below, 
 Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell.' 
 
 All too soon the brother returns ; and when informed by 
 Maud in girlish hints of the affections of her heart, he first 
 laughs her down, eventually frowning, and forbidding her to 
 speak further with her betrothed. Thus their love-greetings 
 and trysts are intercepted ; yet Maud remains true, though 
 she seeks to retain her sisterly duties side by side with the 
 plight of love. 
 
 It so happens that this brother the ' ponderous squire/ 
 as he is called in the poem gives a grand political dinner 
 to half the squirelings of the neighbourhood, to follow with 
 a dance for the maids and marriage-makers, where Maud is 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 149 
 
 to appear in her jewels. It goes without saying our hero 
 remains uninvited. At nightfall, however, he steals down 
 to Maud's garden in the grounds of the Hall, where she 
 meets him meets him in her fairy attire, resplendent in 
 her jewels and her budding youth. And yet, scarcely 
 have they met, before her brother, who has been an unseen 
 watcher, approaches, and accuses his sister's lover of trickery 
 and ungentlemanliness in the urging and carrying out of 
 his suit. This is indignantly denied, when, for reply, our 
 hero receives a blow. Bad blood is now uppermost, and in 
 return he fells his lover's brother with the stroke of Cain. 
 1 Fly, fly P was the dying man's cry. ' The fault was mine/ 
 
 And now the mood changes, as he flies before the 
 minions of justice, bearing the murderer's brand, to the 
 Breton coast. A deadlier gloom settles down upon him ; 
 not the former gloom of the man who has been wronged, 
 but the more terrible gloom of the man who himself has 
 perpetrated the wrong, and played the aggressor's part. On 
 a foreign strand he sits and plucks the harmless field-flowers ; 
 but his hand is guilty with that hand he plucked the life 
 from the brother of Maud. He walks by the shore, and 
 looks upon the ' tiny shells, forlorn ' and void of their 
 ' living will ' ; so Maud, like ' the empty cell/ has neither 
 brother nor lover, and all through his own rash deed. He 
 listens to the roar of ocean, and hears it thunder of wrecks 
 and spoil. Alas ! he of all wrecks is the greatest and 
 saddest a shipwrecked man on ' a coast of ancient fable 
 and fear.' He raises his eye, but the horizon is ever 
 darkened by the phantom of Maud. There she is, flitting 
 to and fro, as ' his restless eyeballs roll/ Is it a disease 
 a mechanic ghost a juggle of the brain ? Why do all his 
 
150 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 surroundings awaken the deed of death ? Why do flower 
 and shell and sea all awaken reminiscences of the act of sin ? 
 Then comes the hope Is he dead ! Was he not only 
 stunned ? May he not be living, and he hirhself only self- 
 accused and innocent ? And if this be so, may not Maud 
 still love him ? and may he not be reunited to her ? 
 But alas ! there comes again the phantom : 
 ' It leads me forth at evening, 
 It lightly winds and steals 
 In a cold white robe before" me, 
 When all my spirit reels 
 At the shouts, the leagues of lights, 
 And the roaring of the wheels.' 
 
 It leads him back to a happy past : 
 
 ' 'Tis a morning pure and sweet, 
 And a dewy splendour falls 
 On the little flower that clings 
 To the turrets and the walls ; 
 'Tis a morning pure and sweet, 
 And the light and shadow fleet ; 
 She is walking in the meadow, 
 And the woodland echo rings ; 
 In a moment we shall meet ; 
 She is singing in the meadow, 
 And the rivulet at her feet 
 Ripples on in light and shadow 
 To the ballad that she sings. 
 Do I hear her sing as of old, 
 My bird with the shining head, 
 My own dove with the tender eye ? 
 1 Biit there rings on a sudden a passionate cry. 
 There is some one dying or dead.'* 
 
 Then all changes. A sudden thunder rolls, and the 
 dream is broken. He goes forth, ' the death-like type of 
 pain.' The eavedrops fall; the "yellow vapours hang low, 
 * Italics ours. 
 
TENNYSON, THE MOODIST. 151 
 
 and choke the awakening city ; the dull red sun is wrapped 
 in drifts of lurid smoke. He goes forth, through the hubbub 
 of the market, but the shadow is still there. 
 
 ' But the broad light glares and beats, 
 And the shadow flits and fleets 
 And will not let me be ; 
 And I loathe the squares and streets, 
 And the faces that one meets, 
 Hearts with no love for me ; 
 Always I long to creep 
 Into some still cavern deep, 
 There to weep, and weep, and weep, 
 My whole soul out to thee.' 
 
 This mood is followed by one of utter hopelessness. He 
 is as though he were dead ; with this exception, however, 
 that, though dead, he cannot rest though buried to every- 
 thing, he lies not deep enough. He can hear the wheels go 
 over his head, while his bones are shaken with the pain, 
 the very horses beating with their hoofs into his scalp and 
 brain : 
 
 ' Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying, 
 
 Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter, 
 
 And here, beneath it all, as bad, 
 
 For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so ; 
 
 To have no peace in the grave is that not sad ?' 
 
 And now the railing mood of early days returns, but 
 intensified a hundred-fold. The statesman betrays his 
 party secret : the physician blabs the case of his patient. 
 No man thinks for the public good. All is babble and 
 cackle ; confidence is betrayed for money or for gossip ; all, 
 all is rottenness, corruption, and sham. 
 
 Then we come to -the closing, and, "as Tennyson always 
 has it, the triumphant mood. When, after weary years of 
 creeping on with broken wing, through cells of madness 
 
152 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 and haunts of fear, the spring again returns, with its dewy 
 downs and shining daffodils, he hears of a coming strife. 
 As the months run on, this rumour of battle grows, and the 
 armaments are ramped while he stands 
 
 ' On a giant deck and mixed his breath 
 With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry,' 
 
 and he himself awakes to the better mind ; for 
 
 1 It is better to fight for the good than rail at the ill ; 
 I have felt with my native land. I am one with my kind ; 
 I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assigned.' 
 
 Thus Tennyson takes us through the four great stages in 
 the development of a man. Starting with a soured and 
 selfish nature, he finds surcease in an isolated love. Ruth- 
 lessly despoiled of his love, he vents himself in a rage that 
 buries him in despair, at last to awaken to the only secret of 
 character-formation, viz., that one must lose self not in an 
 isolated love, but in a world-wide passion for righteousness, 
 liberty, and mankind. 
 
 Whatever may be said by the peace party, and the Man- 
 chester School, as to the vagaries of this poem in its senti- 
 ments on war and commerce, one thing is certain the 
 principle underlying the poem is as eternal as the heavens. 
 Selfish peace is the devil's curse it makes men cruel, 
 mean and crafty ; while, again and again, a just war has 
 given new life to the noble who declared it, and to the 
 brave who waged it. 
 
 Tennyson is the poet of moods. Remembering this, 
 much he has written will be read in a clearer light, and with 
 suggestive and delightful results. 
 
VII. 
 
 BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 
 
VII. 
 BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 
 
 BROWNING may be spoken of as the apostle of hope. He 
 seldom touches a note of sadness ; and when he does, 
 it is only that he may follow and complete it with the 
 note of triumph and faith. His is the poetry that makes 
 men, and having made them, makes them make the best of 
 life. He never wraps our hearts in gloom, nor paralyzes 
 our hands with fear, nor unnerves our footsteps with uncer- 
 tainty. He is positive, valorous and trustful. His two 
 verities are God and the soul : his key truth concerning the 
 former that God is love ; and concerning the latter that 
 man is endlessly progressive. To Browning there are no 
 such things as accidents, and no such things as failures. 
 * God's in His heaven : all's right wjth the world ;' and ' that 
 which God counts blest can't prove accursed.' Nor are 
 these mere assertions on the poet's part, as we shall see. 
 He has fought for his foothold, and holds it not as the 
 sinecure, but as the honest toiler ; and, having gained this 
 foothold, he seeks to raise others to his level, and to his 
 range of vision. No charge is more baseless than the 
 common one that Browning is c an easy-going optimist.' 
 
 * Optimist he is easy-going he is not. He has dug deep 
 and found rock. Thereon, and therefrom, he builds not 
 wood, hay, and stubble but gold, silver, and precious stones. 
 
156 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 And now let me try and discover to you the bottom rock 
 which Browning has bared, and upon which he has built. 
 It is this * God is love.' You say ' Ah, everybody knows 
 that.' The question is, does everybody believe it? Is 
 their knowledge proven in the attitude they preserve amid 
 the dance of circumstance ? For they who have firm faith 
 in God's love cannot doubt cannot be despondent can- 
 not be craven-hearted ! It was this irremovable faith on 
 Browning's part that made him an optimist. And I will tell 
 you how he found it, and show you how he kept it. In the 
 poem entitled i Christmas Eve ' he tells us that in his youth 
 he looked at the silent stars, and saw in them 'power' 
 c God's visible power.' Yet withal, in his heart, he felt ' that 
 love was the nobler dower.' Do you see that truth? It is 
 self-evident to every thoughtful mind. Love is a grander 
 thing than power grander every way. If this be so, then 
 behind the visible power of the universe there must be love 
 for power, without love, would be an incomplete thing 
 an ungodlike thing, for 
 
 * A loving worm beneath its clod 
 Were diviner than a loveless God 
 Amid His worlds.' 
 
 Grasp that truth, and you have grasped the key to Brown- 
 ing's position. The stars indicate power power immense, 
 omnipotent. But if there is nothing beyond them, then the 
 poor, degraded, sin-stained woman who clasps her child of 
 sin to her bosom, the one warm place, is diviner than the God 
 who made the stars, for she loves and such love is mightier, 
 grander far, than power. Therefore, if we believe in God at 
 all we must believe He is love love first and last all love. 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 157 
 
 Ay ! and love with wisdom and power as its instruments. If, 
 then, God be love with wisdom to direct and power to fulfil 
 what can go wrong, either in this world or in any other ? 
 
 Now, it is essential you should grasp that argument. If 
 there be a God He must be a God of love, or He is no 
 God at all ; for it is love that makes a God, because love is 
 the crowning attribute of any life, and of all life. If God 
 be not love, where does our love come from ? Is it self- 
 made ? Love, as the element of moral life, can be no more 
 self-created than can force in physical life. The fact that it 
 is in us, manifesting itself in affection, in sacrifice, and in 
 devotion to others, clearly shows that from some source it 
 proceeded, and that source is God. Granted, however, that 
 it is self-created. Very well. Then we, as loving worms, 
 beneath the clod, are diviner than a loveless God amid His 
 worlds, for we are crowned, though we be below, while He 
 is crownless, though throned above. 
 
 J Now, all Browning's poetry turns upon this pivot : If 
 God is love, and if He is in His heaven, all is right with 
 the world. If God is love, what He blesses can never be 
 accursed. If my love to my child is only crippled by my 
 inabilities from lack of power, and not from lack of will, 
 what will not God do for me, whose will and power are the 
 servants of His love ? And this principle Browning applies 
 ' to every imaginable phase of life. The men who, like the 
 hero in Pauline, and who, like Paracelsus, cultivate the 
 intellect at the expense of the affection, stumble in dark- 
 ness and err in unbelief; while a simple, childlike trust in 
 the unfathomable love of a Father leads to the clear and 
 unshaken confidence of a girl like Pippa, and of a man like 
 Lazarus, as portrayed in ' Karshish,' 
 
158 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Out of this great truth Browning educes the correlative 
 truth of immortality. In his own words, there are but two 
 real and abiding things God and the soul. And I know 
 of no writer who piles argument upon argument so con- 
 vincingly on behalf of man's immortality as Browning. 
 What means, he asks, the incompleteness of man as 
 measured by the time element the prophecies which he 
 never lives on earth to fulfil the ideals which he can never 
 attain to encumbered by the flesh ? Is the highest and 
 best voice in us a false voice, or is it true? If God is love, 
 He will neither deceive nor befool. No. And just as our 
 children trust us, and accept our veracity of statement in 
 proportion to their realization of our love, so with men and 
 their Father in heaven. 
 
 Now, I think, you will all see how a faith like this begets 
 hope, and how such hope yields strength. No man holding 
 Browning's faith can be a coward. Death and duty will 
 neither terrify nor deter. Nor can any man holding his 
 faith be a pessimist, for faith in an eternal love clears the 
 sky of all clouds, and determines a victorious voyage over 
 the most distant sea. Pessimism not only grows out of 
 Godlessness, but out of a gloomy faith in Omnipotence 
 divorced from love. Where, however, love rules and power 
 serves, you have the root of the glorious optimism that the 
 Teacher of Nazareth foreshadowed when He prayed that 
 His joy might remain in us so that our joy might be full. 
 
 One of Browning's key-truths, then, is Love the soul of 
 the universe. In other words, Love, the foundation of life, 
 the bottom rock upon which God builds ; love, the con- 
 summation of life, the top-stone of the structure at which 
 the race has sweat and toiled, and told its tale of bricks ; 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 159 
 
 and love, the interpretative key of the vast design of life, 
 which the surveyors and builders view but in parts and 
 pieces, and so view amiss. Grasp that truth, and you hold 
 the fort of Browning's philosophy and poetry. 
 
 Take the following poem, entitled ' Wanting is what?' 
 as beautifully expressive of this truth, and remember that in 
 it Browning supposes himself to be looking out upon a God- 
 less, or loveless, world, In such a world, What is wanting? 
 
 1 Wanting is what ? 
 
 Summer redundant, 
 
 Blueness abundant, 
 
 - Where is the blot ? 
 
 Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same, 
 Framework which waits for a picture to frame. 
 What of the leafage, what of the flower ? 
 Roses embowering with naught they embower ! 
 Come then, complete incompletion, O comer, 
 Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer ! 
 
 Breathe but one breath 
 
 Rose-beauty above, 
 
 And all that was death 
 
 Grows life, grows love, 
 Grows love !' 
 
 Do you want me to mar that gem by throwing it into a 
 vulgar, or, as some would say, a simple, form ? I will try. 
 What is the universe without the soul of Love ? A universe 
 concerning which it may be said, ' One thing is lacking ' a 
 world, despite its manifold wonders, in which one thing is 
 needful. True, you have the glory of summer-tide the 
 abundant blueness of the heavens. But what of these ? 
 There is a want a blot. The brightness does not fill up 
 the blank. There is a magnificent frame, but where is the 
 picture if love if Divine personality be wanting ? There 
 is the foliage of the forest, there is the fragrance and beauty 
 
l6o POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 of the flowers ; but what do they embower if there be no 
 great Creator whose beauty they show forth ? Apart from 
 Him, the soul of Love, all is incompleteness ; and before 
 incompleteness can become completeness, a' Comer must 
 come, one whose breath is sweeter than the fragrance of 
 the rose, and whose glory outshines the tide of summer ; 
 and when He comes a dead universe is instinct with life, 
 and instinct with love. 
 
 Another of Browning's great truths is the undying pro- 
 gression of man. He treats death with contempt. What 
 can it do when it has done its worst ? Only break the 
 shell, and free the songster only slough the skin, and let 
 loose the wings only put off the mortal that mortality may 
 be swallowed up of life ! For example, take his poem 
 entitled 'Prospice.' 
 
 ' Fear death ? to feel the fog in my throat, 
 
 The mist in my face, 
 When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 
 
 I am nearing the place, 
 The power of the night, the press of the storm, 
 
 The post of the foe ; 
 Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form, 
 
 Yet the strong man must go : 
 For the journey is done and the summit attained, 
 
 And the barriers fall, 
 Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, 
 
 The reward of it all. 
 I was ever a fighter, so one fight more, 
 
 The best and the last ! 
 I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore, 
 
 And bade me creep past. 
 No ! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers 
 
 The heroes of old, 
 Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears 
 
 Of pain, darkness and cold* 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. l6l 
 
 For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, 
 
 The black minutes at end, 
 And the elements' rage, the fiend -voices that rave, 
 
 Shall dwindle, shall blend, 
 Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 
 
 Then a light, then thy breast, 
 O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again, 
 
 And with God be the rest.' 
 
 I venture to rank that as one of the victorious death- 
 songs of the world, fit to stand side by side with Isaiah's 
 ' Death shall be swallowed up in victory, 'and Paul's 'The time 
 of my departure is at hand.' This, indeed, is optimism nay, 
 it is more, for optimism is but hope, and this is triumph. 
 
 And now you ask me, what was the basis of this triumph ? 
 Was it mere sentiment ? or, worse, was it mere brag ? Nay, 
 Browning bases it upon argument argument irrefragable 
 and clear. You will find, as you read him, that many of 
 his poems are mighty defences built up on its behalf, as, for 
 example, in ' Cleon.' 
 
 Just as the poem entitled ' Wanting is What ?' sets 
 before us the incompletion of a universe without God, in 
 like manner this poem entitled ' Cleon ' sets before us the 
 incompleteness of man's life when shorn of immortality. It 
 is supposed to be an epistle by a Grecian philosopher and 
 poet, in reply to an inquiry respecting life's problems made 
 to him by an imaginary tyrant called Protus, who, in his 
 admiration of Cleon, and of Cleon's works, longs for the 
 immortal praise and glory that, outliving the philosopher, 
 will yield him a posthumous immortality. 
 ; / The commencement of the poem introduces us to Cleon, 
 who thanks Protus for the costly gifts accompanying his 
 
 Ji 
 
1 62 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 letter of inquiry, and aspiration after an unknown life ; and 
 then goes on to praise Protus for his aspiration, which he 
 likens to the building of a tower, not for building's sake, 
 but that his soul might at last rest atop and view the east. 
 This is a beautiful figure, and in it Browning sets forth the 
 aspiration of the pagan world after the unknown future 
 ever building ever climbing ever looking led on by the 
 hope of reaching an eventual rest. 
 
 Cleon then proceeds to acknowledge the attainments 
 which Protus attributes to him Yes, it is true he wrote the 
 Epos, composed the little chant, imaged the sun-god, and 
 originated three books upon the soul. In brief, 'All arts 
 are his.' Well, what of these? "All the people know it, 
 and recognise it, just as Protus does, with this abatement, 
 that the men of his day, and Cleon with them, though 
 greater than their forerunners, do not look so great to, nor 
 are counted so great by, their contemporaries the crowd. 
 In other words, Cleon's greatness is not recognised by the 
 mass as was the greatness of his early predecessors, and the 
 reason is, that those who judge the present, and the men 
 of the present, judge only by a part of a man, and not by 
 the man in his entirety. Nevertheless, each age is greater 
 than its predecessor, and however great the heroes of old, 
 the heroes of to-day are greater. We have no right to view 
 man apart from men ; the soul's achievements are meant to 
 be looked at eventually as a great whole, and not isolated 
 and analysed in parts. Each part has a reference to all, 
 and no part can be pronounced complete without its com- 
 plemental and succeeding part. The ages do not obliterate 
 one another, but complete one another. When an artist 
 paints a picture, his last colours and shades do not destroy 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 163 
 
 the earlier colours and shades. The first, though hidden, 
 are part of the perfect finish. This, Cleon argues, is pro- 
 gress. Not to argue that the former days are better than 
 these, or that the heroes of old out-gianted the giants of 
 to-day. No ! If this were so, there would be no progress. 
 It is only the vulgar who go back, and match man against 
 man in odious comparison. In the evolution of the race 
 there is first the portion of mankind, then the combinations. 
 The heroes of old were great in single acts, their successors 
 are great in multiform acts. A little water in a sphere may 
 be made to touch every part of the sphere if it be rightly 
 manipulated; but the finer air, neither so palpable nor 
 obvious, touches the whole circumference of the sphere 
 when emptied, and fills it more fully than the water did. 
 And yet the vulgar call the sphere full when they see the 
 water, and empty when the water is replaced by air, not 
 knowing air's more hidden properties. Thus men think 
 the world is retrogressing because they miss the so-called 
 greatness of the heroic ages, and fail to see in the composite 
 age, and the composite man, a greater thing than they see 
 in the isolated age and the isolated man. 
 
 Now, I want you to grasp this thought of progress. It is 
 a marvellously fine one. Progress is advance from the 
 portion to the combination, from the individual to the race, 
 or, as Herbert Spencer would say, from the simple to the 
 complex. Let me illustrate it. Let us take two men 
 separated by a distance of three thousand years Plato and 
 Gladstone. Which of the two is the greater man ? You 
 say Plato. Cleon or Browning if you like, for he makes 
 Cleon his mouthpiece would say Gladstone. And why ? 
 
164 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Because in Plato you see a man great in one direction, in 
 Gladstone you see a man great in many directions. Plato 
 might reach farther than Gladstone ; but he only touched 
 one point. Gladstone may not have so long a reach, but he 
 has a wider sweep. In the former you have the 'portion,' 
 in the latter you have the ' combination.' A little water in 
 a sphere may be made to touch every point, but only one 
 point at a time, but when the sphere is filled with air, though 
 invisible to vulgar eyes, the whole hemisphere is reached. 
 This is the march of the ages, this is the inheritance of him 
 who is the heir, and not the founder, of the ages. Cry up 
 your heroes of old. Your men of to-day, though less 
 palpably so, are greater and better. Then Cleon proceeds : 
 
 1 1 have not chanted verse like Homer, no 
 Nor swept string like Terpander, no nor carved 
 And painted men like Phidias and his friend : 
 I am not great as they are, point by point. 
 But I have entered into sympathy 
 With these four, running these into one soul, 
 Who, separate, ignored each other's art.' 
 
 The next portion of the letter is given to answering a 
 question submitted by Protus as to whether or not Cleon 
 has not in his great works of genius gained the very crown 
 and end of life. Says Protus, comparing the short-lived 
 fame of a king with the long-lived fame of a philosopher, 
 artist and poet : 
 
 * Thou leavest much behind, while I leave naught. 
 Thy life stays in the poems men shall sing, 
 The pictures men shall study ; while my life, 
 Complete and whole now in its power and joy, 
 Dies altogether with my brain and arm, 
 Is lost indeed ; since, what survives myself?' 
 
 Here we have the instinct of the human, after posthu- 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 165 
 
 mous immortality. Now, note how Cleon meets it, pagan 
 though he be, by throwing out one of those strange feelers 
 after immortality, now and again peculiar to the old pagan 
 world, and in which he shows the utter inadequacy of any 
 kind of immortality save that brought to light, and con- 
 firmed, by Christianity. Cleon asks Why was man made 
 other than a beast? Why was he made self-conscious? 
 Why was he made with capacities for enjoyment he could 
 never fill, and aspirations after truth he could never reach ? 
 Better no self-consciousness, no infinity of desire, than that 
 such consciousness and desire should be made to be 
 mocked. Now, here' is a root-thought, viz., that self-con- 
 scious life must have eternity for its fulfilment. You look 
 at the brute world, arid what do you see ? 
 
 1 All's perfect else : the shell sucks fast the rock, 
 
 The fish strikes through the sea, the snake both swims 
 
 And slides, forth range the beasts, the birds take flight, 
 
 Till life's mechanics can no further go.' 
 
 In other words, in the brute creation, everything achieves 
 its end the end of its being ' Life's mechanics can no 
 further go.' 
 
 ' And all this joy in natural life is put 
 
 Like fire from off thy (Zeus) finger into each, 
 
 So exquisitely perfect is the same. 
 
 But 'tis pure fire, and they mere matter are ; 
 
 It has them, not they it.' 
 
 Browning never put a greater truth in grander form. * They 
 mere matter are; life has them, and not they it.' That 
 is, though living, they are not self-conscious. There is 
 mechanism, but not soul. But when man was made he was 
 made self-conscious. 
 
 1 A quality arose within his soul, 
 Which, intro-active, made to supervise 
 
1 66 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 And feel the force it has, may view itself, 
 And so be happy.' 
 
 Ah ! but there's the rub. ' Be happy ?' How can he be 
 happy ? The beast can, because the beast attains the end 
 of his being, and answers his purpose. But man has desires 
 and powers which, if he be not immortal, must for ever remain 
 unfulfilled, and which, after all, only make a mock of him. 
 The beast, God's lower work, is complete in itself. Man, 
 God's highest work, if not immortal, is incomplete a total 
 failure, a cruel travesty. 
 
 * In man there's failure, only since he left 
 The lower and inconscious forms of life. ' 
 
 Take immortality from man, and what does he resemble ? 
 In his thirst after enjoyment, in his capacity for endless pro- 
 gression, in his aspirations after the unattainable, he is like 
 
 ' A tower that crowns a country. But alas, 
 The soul now climbs it just to perish there ! 
 For thence we have discovered 
 There's a world of capability 
 For joy, spread round about us, meant for us, 
 Inviting us ; and still the soul craves all, 
 And still the flesh replies, " Take no jot more 
 Than ere thou clomb'st the tower to look abroad ! 
 Nay, so much less as that fatigue has brought 
 Deduction to it." ' 
 
 And then Cleon goes on to say : The more we desire the 
 more we are mocked. * Life's inadequate to joy.' The 
 capacity is there. Where the fulfilment, when death ends all ? 
 
 But he imagines Protus replying, * Is there not joy in thy 
 works?' Ah! joy is one thing, and feeling joy another. 
 Nay, his very works mock him as he toils at them. 
 
 ' Because in my great epos I display 
 How divers men, young, strong, fair, wise, can act 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 167 
 
 Is this as though I acted ? If I paint, 
 
 Carve the young Phoebus, am I therefore young ?' 
 
 And then there follows the still keener irony : 
 
 ' Every day my sense of joy 
 
 Grows more acute, my soul more enlarged, more keen ; 
 While every clay my hairs fall more and more, 
 My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase 
 The horror quickening still from year to year, 
 The consummation coming past escape, 
 When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy 
 When all my works wherein I prove my worth, 
 Being present still to mock me in men's mouths, 
 Alive still, in the praise of such as thou, 
 I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man, 
 The man who loved his life so over-much, 
 Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible, 
 I dare at times imagine to my need 
 Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 
 Unlimited in capability 
 For joy, as this is in desire for joy.' 
 
 Wanting is what ? A world without a God of Love is cold, 
 cheerless, and dreary. A soul with unlimited capacity and 
 a limited life is a mockery and a sham. 
 
 Thus Browning has painted for us both wants, and 
 pointed us to both fulfilments. 
 
 If, then, man is immortal, his outlook of life will not be 
 Cleon's, but rather such an one as Browning gives us in 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra. Let us now turn to the life-philosophy of 
 this grand old teacher, none other than Browning himself. 
 Listen to his opening notes : 
 
 ' Grow old along with me.' 
 
 Why, that was the very thing Cleon and Protus dreaded. 
 They anticipated age with terror. With them it was 
 1 The horror quickening still from year to year.' 
 
1 68 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Not so with this grand old optimist, Ben Ezra. No ! 
 ' Grow old along with me ! 
 The best is yet to be, 
 
 The last of life, for which the first was made : 
 Our times are in His hand 
 Who saith, "A whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half ; trust God ; see all, nor be afraid !" ' 
 
 You will please observe the words : Youth shows but 
 half. 7 This is the keynote of the poem. Life on earth is 
 divided between youth and age, and the poet proceeds to 
 show how a noble life may be evolved out of both. Let us 
 take first the period of youth. It is either retrogressive 
 going back to the brute ; or progressive moving onward 
 and upward to the angel. If the former be the course deter- 
 mined upon, then the soul becomes the servant of the flesh : 
 
 1 What is he but a brute 
 Whose flesh has soul to suit?' 
 
 If the latter be the course decided upon, then flesh helps 
 soul, and each faculty in our animal nature becomes an 
 instrument in the attainment of soul-perfection. 
 
 But how is flesh to be subordinated to these higher ends ? 
 
 Listen : 
 
 ' Rejoice we are allied 
 To That which doth provide 
 And not partake, effect and not receive ! 
 A spark disturbs our clod ; 
 Nearer we hold of God 
 Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.' 
 
 In other words Browning says : We stand between two 
 forces moulding and shaping forces we are clay * clods ;' 
 but in us there is a spark, ethereal and divine, that disturbs 
 us, then transfixes us. Now this spark is the God-element 
 in us. It allies us to God, and dissociates us from the 
 beast. We are nearer to God than to his tribes, i.e., the 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 169 
 
 fishes, birds, and beasts. We are nearer to Him who 
 provides than to the brutes who receive. Here Browning 
 combats what Carlyle calls the doctrine of dirt, or the 
 material origin of man. Says our poet We are more than 
 brute, we are divine, for we are allied to the Divine. Clods ? 
 
 Yes ! But 
 
 ' A spark disturbs our clod ; 
 Nearer we hold of God 
 Who gives, than of His tribes that take.' 
 
 Thus we stand between two forces the lower and the 
 higher. The clod may sink to brute level, and there be 
 finished and finite ; or it may rise even higher and higher 
 towards the God-level, and though never attaining to it, yet 
 always be the nearer for the effort after its attainment. If 
 the former, then although the stomach be full, and the head 
 pillowed on down, and lazy content like a dreamy atmo- 
 sphere brings with it rest : 
 
 ' Such feasting ended, then 
 As sure an end to men.' 
 
 Yes, the man has gone ; only the brute remains. The 
 noble, the possible God, is eliminated. 
 
 But to save us from thus settling on our lees, and thus 
 drifting backward, God has fronted us with elements that rouse 
 soul-powers and call for conflict. He has not let us alone : 
 
 1 Then welcome each rebuff 
 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 
 
 Be our joy three-parts pain ! 
 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain ; 
 Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe.' 
 
 In other words, if you are thrown upon a bed of thorns 
 
 \rather than upon a bed of roses, thank God for it. The 
 
 scent of the rose-couch may breathe you off into slumber, 
 
170 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 but the sting of the thorn may rouse you into the activity of 
 progression. 
 
 Thus, every young man stands between a choice the 
 finite clod the brute ; and the transformed clod the 
 infolding and developing god. Towards this latter con- 
 summation nothing so helps us as the rough rather than 
 the smooth, the sting rather than the stroking down. I 
 would that every young man would take to heart and 
 rejoice in this teaching of Browning's. The young man of 
 to-day is too often content to be the clod without the fire. 
 He eats and drinks and sleeps. If he is one who has to 
 work, he either works because he is compelled, or works 
 that he may amass wealth. His spare moments are 
 moments of gratification ; his delirium one of lust and sin. 
 His ideal life is either where there is no factory, or else 
 where there is nothing save money, and all that money 
 brings. Duty is drudgery, time is a task-master, work is 
 weariness, and pleasures only to him are counted profit- 
 able. Shame on him ! Browning would say. 
 ' Poor vaunt of life indeed, 
 Were man but formed to feed 
 
 On joy, to solely seek and find and feast : 
 Such feasting ended, then 
 As sure an end to men : 
 
 Irks care the cropful-bird ? 
 
 Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast ?' 
 
 Rejoice, rather, young men, that true life is conflict and 
 not content ; ascending and aspiring, aspiring and ascending, 
 though the top be the unreachable stars. Only thus can you 
 escape the ' finished and finite clod/ But having escaped it, 
 1 Thence shall I pass, approved 
 A man, for aye removed 
 From the developed brute; a god, though in the germ.' 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. iyi 
 
 Not a god yet, you observe ? but a god in the germ. A 
 clod in the flame, the clay transfixed with fire ; ready to face 
 the future because you have proved the past. Listen to the 
 teaching of Browning concerning the next stage in life the 
 stage of manhood : 
 
 ' And I shall thereupon 
 
 Take rest, ere I be gone 
 Once more on my adventure brave and new ; 
 
 Youth ended, I shall try 
 
 My gain or loss thereby ; 
 Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold ; 
 
 And I shall weigh the same, 
 
 Give life its praise or blame ; 
 Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old.' 
 
 In other words, wisdom comes with experience. Age brings 
 knowledge. With youth all was tentative, with age all may 
 be known. The right, the good, the infinite these we 
 may be as sure of as we are our hands are our own. Then 
 Browning addresses himself to answer the objection that 
 we cannot know truth because no two schools agree as to 
 what truth is, and that therefore as age creeps on all lies in 
 dispute. No, says he, this is not so. 
 
 1 Now, who shall arbitrate ? 
 
 Ten men love what I hate, 
 Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; 
 
 Ten, who in ears and eyes 
 
 Match me; we all surmise, 
 They this thing, and I that : whom shall my soul believe ?' 
 
 We have all been in that dilemma. Some say this 
 thing, and others that. Which is right, and which 
 are we to follow ? The answer lies here a true man 
 always knows the higher from the lower path : nay, he 
 knows the higher of two high paths. By instinct he can 
 
172 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 detect, though he may not follow, the highest and best in 
 him, and possible to him. In taking our stand, in making 
 our choice, we must be, as men, true to our highest selves. 
 It is not what others say or what others praise ; it is not in 
 majorities nor in popularities. No : 
 
 ' Not on the vulgar mass 
 
 Called " work " must sentence pass, 
 Things done, that took the eye and had the price ; 
 
 O'er which, from level stand, 
 
 The low world laid its hand, 
 Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice.' 
 
 What though the low world vote for loudness and fanfare, 
 for wealth and show, for the moment's sensation and for the 
 moment's possession, are these to seduce the man from 
 right ? No ; rather 
 
 ' But all, the world's coarse thumb 
 
 And finger failed to plumb, 
 So passed in making up the main account ; 
 
 All instincts immature, 
 
 All purposes unsure, 
 That weighed not as his work, 
 Yet swelled the man's amount.' 
 
 In other words, there is a great deal of unseen material 
 ever going to make up the character of the true man ; a 
 great deal no one knows anything of but God. But although 
 unseen and unknown, it is swelling the man's account. For 
 example, such things as 
 
 ' Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 
 Into a narrow act, 
 Fancies that broke through language and escaped; 
 
 All I could never be, 
 
 All men ignore in me, 
 This, I was worth to God, 
 Whose wheel the pitcher shaped.' 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 173 
 
 The world measures a man by what he does and by what 
 he is. Browning says God measures a man by what he 
 desires and aspires to be by thoughts he cannot reduce 
 to acts by desires he cannot even put into his prayers. 
 By the perfection he strives after, and to which he can 
 never attain by the failures in attempts at the ideal at 
 which the fools of this world laugh and sneer. But what 
 the vulgar mass sneers at as sin, God looks at as falls in the 
 man's attempt to walk. 
 
 Then Browning returns to the clod the clay. Whatever 
 else may perish two things remain, God and the soul ; 
 ' Potter and clay endure.' The clay is on the wheel of 
 plastic circumstance, and the Divine Hand moulds, while 
 time spins the wheel. Here is the soul, the clay, the clod, 
 leavened with the Divine and its possibilities. Here is the 
 world, its surroundings, circumstances, ups and downs, all 
 plastic, not iron-bound, but 
 
 ' Machinery just meant 
 To give thy soul its bent, 
 Try thee, arid turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.' 
 
 Here is time the years, the earlier ones running swift and 
 joyous, the latter ones bringing the graver mood. But over 
 all there is the Master's hand, and the Master's plan design- 
 ing and moulding what ? A soul, which Browning likens 
 to a cup. And what is the cup meant for ? It is meant 
 for the Master's table ; nay, more, it is meant for the 
 Master's lips. Thus man is being moulded here by God's 
 own hand, as time turns the wheel amid the mechanism of 
 circumstance, that at last he may be 
 
 ' Heaven's consummated cup,' 
 Browning ending with these words ; 
 
174 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 * So, take and use Thy work : 
 
 Amend what flaws may lurk, 
 What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim ! 
 
 My times be in Thy hand ! 
 
 Perfect the cup as planned ! 
 Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same.' 
 
 This is optimism. Man's dignity and hope lie in the 
 fact that he is for God's use. The rebuffs and stings, the 
 slings and arrows of fortune, are factors in the completion 
 of his life and of his life's service. The man as God means 
 him to be is the spiritual man the form and life the world's 
 coarse eye cannot see, nor her coarse thumb measure. In 
 the making up of this spiritual man, unuttered thoughts, 
 unattainable desires, are factors of growth and strength. 
 Compare this, I ask you, with the hopelessness of Cleon, and 
 the antithesis, I think, will be explanatory and profitable. 
 
 Now, a man with such a life-creed as this will be altogether 
 indifferent to death ; he will never be in bondage to its 
 fear. The reality of life will be so real that the negation 
 of death will sink into nothingness. The late Lord Houghton 
 was wont to say that his happiest moments and most delight- 
 some tasks were always blighted with the shadow of death. 
 Browning's faith, as set forth in Rabbi Ben Ezra, treats 
 death with contempt. Let him come and do his worst. 
 The cup is made for the Master, and for the Master's lips. 
 
 The full teaching of this truth is illustrated in 'The 
 Grammarian's Funeral,' to which poem I now turn. The 
 old Grammarian was one who could not be diverted from 
 his studies even by death, and like a soldier at his post in 
 the hour of danger, he died grinding at grammar, and 
 Browning idealizes his funeral. 
 
 The poem commences by describing a group of the 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 175 
 
 Grammarian's disciples carrying his corpse towards the place 
 of interment, the hour chosen being that of dawn. One of 
 these disciples, the spokesman, who talks to us through the 
 poem, cries to his comrades : 
 
 ' Let us begin and carry up this corpse, 
 
 Singing together. 
 Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpcs 
 
 Each in its tether 
 Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, 
 
 Cared-for till cock-crow : 
 Look out if yonder be not day again 
 
 Rimming the rock-row !' 
 
 The place of interment is the mountain-heights ; for such 
 a noble soul as this old Grammarian's is worthy of sky-lit 
 summits rather than the gloom of the plain. 
 
 1 Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop ; 
 
 Seek we sepulture 
 
 On a tall mountain, citied to the top, 
 Crowded with culture !' 
 
 And why morning for his interment, and mountain-heights 
 for his grave ? 
 
 ' Our low life was the level's and the night's ; 
 
 He's for the morning.' 
 
 Then comes a description of the old Grammarian. He was 
 a man born with the face and throat of Apollo. Long he 
 lived nameless, his youth spent at learning. Then youth 
 passed, and age crept on with its cramped limbs and 
 diminished forces. Well, what did he do ? Did he throw 
 down his books, vexed with the world because it had 
 neglected him, soured because the prizes had passed to 
 others, and he was left alone, too old to labour longer ? 
 No ! Oh no ! 
 
 1 He knew the signal, and stepped on with pride 
 Over men's pity ; 
 
I 76 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 Left play for work, and grappled with the world 
 Bent on escaping.' 
 
 Thus, in his last moments he donned his professor's gown, 
 and gathered his students around him, asking for the scroll. 
 He was bald, with eyes like lead, and a voice almost silenced 
 with the throttling finger of death. They ask him to desist ; 
 they tell him he has mastered the text. This he admits, 
 but replies, ' Still there's the comment.' Other men, seeing 
 the sands of life were thus running out, would have said : 
 
 ' " Time to taste life. Up with the curtain." 
 
 This man said rather "Actual life comes next." ' 
 
 Thus the leader of the funeral procession praises their 
 master's true valour and defiant persistence in work in face 
 of death. 
 
 Now the procession reaches the town-gate and the market- 
 place. This rouses the leader of the procession to more 
 panegyric, which he manages to get in between the pauses 
 of the grand funeral hymn. And thus Browning describes 
 the scene (remember the leader of the procession is keeping 
 up the time of the processional hymn, and talking loudly 
 between the pauses) : 
 
 4 (Here's the town-gate reached ; there's the market-place 
 
 Gaping before us) 
 Yea this in him was the peculiar grace 
 
 (Hearten our chorus !) 
 That before living he'd learn how to live 
 
 No end to learning ; 
 Earn the means first God surely will contrive 
 
 Use for our earning. 
 Others mistrust and say, " But time escapes ; 
 
 Live now or never !" 
 He said, "What's time ? Leave ' Now ' for dogs and apes : 
 
 Man has Forever." ' 
 And so crying, the leader describes how the old Grammarian 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 1 77 
 
 went back to his books racked with calculus, and how, 
 when his disciples bade him take a little rest, he returned to 
 his studies ' fierce as a dragon.' 
 
 Then comes the following marvellous passage, full of fire 
 and titanic force a kind of commentary on the Gram- 
 marian's life, still spoken by the leader : 
 
 ' Oh, if we draw a circle premature, 
 
 Heedless of far gain, 
 Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure 
 
 Bad is our bargain ! 
 Was it not great ? did not he throw on God 
 
 (He loves the burthen) 
 God's task to make the heavenly period 
 
 Perfect the earthen ? 
 Did not he magnify the mind, show clear 
 
 Just what it all meant ? 
 He would not discount life, as fools do here, 
 
 Paid by instalment. 
 He ventured neck or nothing heaven's success 
 
 Found, or earth's failure : 
 " Wilt thou trust death or not ?" He answered, " Yes ; 
 
 Hence with life's pale lure !" 
 That low man seeks a little thing to do, 
 
 Sees it and does it : 
 This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 
 
 Dies ere he knows it. 
 That low man goes on adding one to one 
 
 His hundreds soon hit : 
 This high man, aiming at a million, 
 
 Misses a unit. 
 That, has the world here should he need the next, 
 
 Let the world mind him ! 
 This throws himself on God, and unperplexed 
 
 Seeking shall find Him.' 
 
 It was even so with the old Grammarian. Still he toiled at 
 his verbs, despite the death-rattle in his throat. 
 
 12 
 
178 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETKENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 ' Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic " De," 
 Dead from the waist down.' 
 
 At last the lofty crag platform is reached, where the 
 high-flyers of the feathered race the swallows and curlews 
 sweep round and sing, while the multitude slumbered 
 below. 
 
 1 Here here's his place where meteors shoot, clouds form, 
 
 Lightnings are loosened, 
 Stars come and go ! Let joy break with the storm, 
 
 Peace let the dew send ! 
 Lofty designs must close in like effects : 
 
 Loftily lying, 
 
 Leave him still loftier than the world suspects, 
 Living and dying.' 
 
 That is indeed a psalm of life it is the mighty optimistic 
 song of a life lived in the light of eternity rather than within 
 the limits of time. 
 
 Let us now turn to Abt Vogler. Abt Vogler, the musician, 
 seated at his organ, and rapt in the ecstasy of harmony, is 
 throwing off from the notes an improvisation or impromptu 
 melody. As it rises and swells, or as it falls and ' grovells 
 blatant,' towering and falling, sweeping out into infinitude 
 of grandeur, then dying away in dreamy maze, he regrets 
 that he cannot bid this structure of sound rush into sight, 
 and take form before the eye, and tarry there for future 
 admiration. He then goes on to show how this temple of 
 sound is raised by pressing down and importuning the keys; 
 how, now apart, and now combined, they hasten to heighten 
 their master's thought. The bass burying his brow with a 
 blind plunge in the deeps, and there building broad on the 
 roots of things, and thus founding well the palace of harmony 
 which rises into sound, to be followed by the trebles that 
 mount and march like excellent minions, crowd upon crowd, 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 179 
 
 and crest upon crest, and raise rampired walls of gold as 
 transparent as glass, higher and higher, until at last the musi- 
 cian reaches the pinnacled glory reaches it only to find that 
 not the half has been yet attained. For at the very height 
 of these heart-shattering melodies creation itself seems as 
 though drawn by it to reveal all its wonders. Heaven makes 
 effort to reach earth, just as earth has done its best to 
 reach heaven, Browning throwing out the grand conception 
 that not only are harmonies spiritual ladders by which we 
 climb to heaven, but echoes of heavenly strains by which the 
 spiritual presences also come down to us. As the notes leap 
 forth, the slaves to the musician's touch his touch being 
 the instrument of his fancy * earth attained heaven, nor 
 was there any more near and far/ i.e., music killed both 
 time and space. Nor was this all; spiritual presences 
 began to people the glare and glow the musician soaring 
 on his notes communed with the unseen, the spirits 
 of just men made perfect, the wonderful dead ' who : had 
 passed through the body and gone, but were back once 
 more to breathe in an old world worth their new.' What 
 never had been before was now realized, and what had been 
 was as it is to be ; and what was matched both. Browning 
 meaning that in the harmonies new creations were found, 
 old creations perfected for the moment in the prophecies 
 of what one day they would become, while that which then 
 was the common and unattractive stood forth in all the 
 glory of the Divine. Then we have the musician differ- 
 entiated from the painter and the poet. Had he painted 
 this creation, there it would have stood ; had he written it, 
 it would have lived to be told as a tale. But he could do 
 
 12 2 
 
l8o POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 neither. For music is the finger of God a flash of the 
 will existent behind all laws He has made. And now the 
 strain falls, the melody ceases, the organ is silent, the 
 player sinks back in tears, and the same music is never to 
 be again. Nay, that cannot be it cannot be lost for music 
 such as this is but the uninterrupted communion and 
 harmony between man's soul and God's, for all true aspira- 
 tions, all soul ascensions, are but earth's notes rising up to 
 heaven, and cannot die in air and perish with the ceasing 
 sound. Oh no : 
 
 ' The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 
 
 The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, 
 Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
 
 Enough that He heard it once ; we shall hear it by-and-by.' 
 
 So the musician returns to the common chord as he retires 
 to earth : 
 
 1 Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, 
 Sliding by semitones till I sink to the minor, yes, 
 
 And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground, 
 Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep ; 
 
 Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, 
 The C Major of this life : so, now I will try to sleep.' 
 
 In this poem Browning depicts what music is. He is 
 not the first who has tried : he is one of the few who have 
 succeeded. Three men besides himself have left us never- 
 dying descriptions of harmony Newman, De Quincey, and 
 Tennyson ; and now you shall have the three to compare and 
 muse upon with Browning's. Newman says : ' There are 
 seven notes in the scale : make them fourteen : yet what a 
 slender outfit for so vast an enterprise ! Out of what poor 
 elements does some great master in it create his new world ! 
 Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. l8l 
 
 ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the 
 day, without reality, without meaning ? Is it possible that 
 that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich 
 yet so simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so 
 majestic, should be mere sound, which is gone and perishes? 
 Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of the heart, and 
 keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not 
 what, and awful impressions from we know not where, 
 should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and 
 comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not 
 so ; it cannot be. No ; they have escaped from some 
 higher sphere : they are the outpourings of eternal harmony 
 in the medium of created sound ; they are echoes from our 
 home; they are the voice of angels, or the magnificat of 
 saints, or the living laws of the Divine governance, or the 
 Divine attributes. Something they are besides themselves 
 which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter though 
 mortal man, and he, perhaps, not otherwise distinguished 
 above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them.' 
 
 Now for De Quincey's description : c Let any person of 
 musical sensibility listen to the exquisite music composed 
 by Beethoven, as an opening idea for Burger's " Lenore," 
 the running idea of which is a triumphal return of a 
 crusading host, decorated with laurels and with palms, 
 within the gates of their native city. A spectacle of young 
 men and women flowing through the mazes of an intricate 
 dance under a full volume of music, taken with all the cir- 
 cumstantial adjuncts of such a scene in rich men's halls 
 the blaze of lights and jewels, the motion, the sea-like undu- 
 lation of heads, the interweaving of the figures, the self- 
 revolving both of dance and music, never ending still be- 
 
1 82 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 ginning, and the continual regeneration of order from a 
 system of motions which for ever touch the brink of con- 
 fusion. Such a scene presents a sort of mask of human life, 
 with its whole equipage of pomps and glories, its luxuries 
 of sounds, its hours of golden youth, and the interminable 
 revolution of ages hurrying after ages, and one generation 
 treading upon the flying footsteps of another ; whilst all the 
 while the overruling music attempers the mind to the 
 spectacle, the subject to the object, the beholder to the 
 vision. And although this is known to be but one phase of 
 life of life culminating and in ascent yet the darker phase 
 is concealed upon the hidden or averted side of the golden 
 arras, known but not felt ; or seen but dimly in the rear, 
 crowding into indistinct proportions. The effect of the 
 music is to place the mind in elective attraction for every- 
 thing in harmony with its own prevailing key.' 
 And now take Tennyson's description : 
 
 ' Then methought I heard a mellow sound, 
 Gathering up from all the lower ground ; 
 Narrowing in to where they sat assembled 
 Low voluptuous music winding trembled, 
 Woven in circles. 
 
 *".*'*.* 
 Then the music touched the gates and died ; 
 Rose again from where it seemed to fail, 
 Stormed in orbs of song, a growing gale; 
 Till thronging in and on, to where they waited, 
 As 'twere a hundred-throated nightingale. 
 The strong tempestuous treble throb'd and palpitated ; 
 Ran into its giddiest whirl of sound, 
 Caught the sparkles, and in circles, 
 Purple gauzes, golden hazes, liquid mazes 
 Flung the torrent rainbow round.' 
 
 Now we come to Browning in Abt Vogler : 
 
BROWNING, THE OPTIMIST. 183 
 
 { And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth 
 
 * * * # * * * 
 
 Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine, 
 Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star : 
 Meteor-moons, balls of blaze : and they did not pale nor pine, 
 For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far. 
 Nay more : for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow, 
 Presences plain in the place : or, fresh from the Protoplast, 
 Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow, 
 Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last ; 
 Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed thro' the body and gone, 
 But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new ; 
 What never had been, was now ; what was, as it shall be anon ; 
 And what is shall I say, matched both ? for I was made perfect too.' 
 
 1 Vague writing,' you say. Not vague, .but mystical, 
 and bound to be mystical because seeking to throw into 
 words the greatest of all mysteries music. 
 9 And this brings me to say in conclusion that what is 
 termed Browning's vagueness is often mistaken for Brown- 
 ing's mysticism. Heaven has a language as well as earth, 
 and he who seeks to translate it must be content to be de- 
 spised by the vulgar crowd. Browning soars, and he seeks 
 to tell us on his descent what he has seen. We grovel, and 
 care neither for his heights nor for his message. Paul tells 
 us he saw sights in the third heaven it was not possible for 
 man to communicate. Browning, with Paul's experience, 
 abandons Paul's reserve, and, rushing into song, tells us what 
 he sees. We, poor fools ! either sit and stare, or turn aside 
 and mock. We tell him he cannot talk in plain English, 
 that he cannot make simple his message. Did you ever try 
 to write down your highest thoughts and loftiest experiences ? 
 If not, sit down and try to do so, and then see how far 
 you succeed; and when you have succeeded, let your friends 
 read your written words, and see how much is plain to them. 
 
184 POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETS. 
 
 There are degrees of poetry each degree proportionate to 
 its theme. Longfellow sings lowly songs of lowly themes, 
 and his poetry is read by all. Milton sat alone, blind to 
 earth, but with open eye to heaven's splen'dours, and his 
 words are read by few. We call one simple, the other 
 vague. We should be nearer the mark if we called one 
 simple and the other profound. And it is even so with 
 Browning. To use his own term, he walks ' the rampired 
 heights 7 he dwells amid l the pinnacled glory.' It is not 
 by mastering the rules of grammar and the laws of the 
 English language we train ourselves to understand him, but 
 by going down into the deeps of our own experience, and 
 climbing to the heights of God. And yet from out of the 
 mazes of his music, and the labyrinthine windings of his 
 poetry, the feeblest mind may gather strength and inspira- 
 tion. God is, and man is; two immortals, yea, rather an 
 infinite and an immortal God and the soul. Whatever 
 else perishes, these remain. God stoops to man ; man rises 
 to God. Thus with a God who is all love, and whose 
 power and wisdom are in servitude to this love, no mistake 
 can be made, no accident can happen ; while with a soul 
 vigorous with the seed of eternal life there must ever be 
 the upward look, the onward movement, and the crown 
 and consummation of life. In Browning's words : 
 
 1 There shall never be one lost good ! What was shall live as before : 
 
 The evil is null is naught is silence implying sound ; 
 What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more ; 
 On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect round.' 
 
 * THE END 
 
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