INDEX OF AUTHORS.

‘He dressed the Muses in the brav’st attireThat e’er they wore.’

‘He dressed the Muses in the brav’st attire

That e’er they wore.’

If he wrote English verse, and it is difficult to give any other meaning to these lines, none of it has reached us. A few pieces of Latin poetry bearing his name are scattered through the volumes of encomiastic verse which were issued from Cambridge during thetime that he, as Fellow and Tutor of Christ’s, was connected with it. They are only of average merit.—l. 50: A glorious appropriation of Virgil,Buc. x. 9, 10,

‘Quæ nemora aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellæNaiades, indigno cum Gallus amore peribat?’

‘Quæ nemora aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellæ

Naiades, indigno cum Gallus amore peribat?’

l. 132: Observe the exquisite art with which Milton manages the transition from the Christian to the heathen. He assumes that Alpheus and the Sicilian Muse had shrunk away ashamed while St. Peter was speaking. In bidding them now to return, he implies that he is coming down from the spiritual heights to which for a while he had been lifted up, and entering the region of pastoral poetry once more.—l. 159-164: These lines were for a long time very obscure. Dr. Todd in his learned notes, to which I must refer, has done much to dissipate the obscurity, though I cannot think all is clear even now.

P. 148, No. cxxvi.—These lines are the short answer to a very long question, or series of questions, which Davenant has calledThe Philosopher’s Disquisition directed to the dying Christian. This poem, than which I know few weightier with thought, unfortunately extends to nearly four hundred lines—its length, and the fact that it appeals but to a limited circle of readers, precluding me from finding room for more than a brief extract from it, and that in this note; but it literally abounds with lines notable as the following:

‘Tradition, Time’s suspected register,That wears out Truth’s best stories into tales.’

‘Tradition, Time’s suspected register,

That wears out Truth’s best stories into tales.’

I am well aware of the evil report under which Davenant labours, and there are passages in his poems which seem to bear it out, as for example this, which appears to call into question the resurrection:

‘But ask not bodies doomed to die,To what abode they go:Since knowledge is but sorrow’s spy,It is not safe to know.’

‘But ask not bodies doomed to die,

To what abode they go:

Since knowledge is but sorrow’s spy,

It is not safe to know.’

At the same time ‘the Philosopher’ here does not so much deny that there is any truth for man as that he has any organ whereby, of himself, he may attain this truth. The poem—it is the dying Christian who is addressed—opens thus:

‘Before by death you nearer knowledge gain,(For to increase your knowledge you must die)Tell me if all that learning be not vain,On which we proudly in this life rely.Is not the learning which we knowledge call,Our own but by opinion and in part?Not made entirely certain, nor to all,And is not knowledge but disputed art?And though a bad, yet ’tis a froward guide,Who, vexing at the shortness of the day,Doth, to o’ertake swift time, still onward ride,While we still follow, and still doubt our way;A guide, who every step proceeds with doubt,Who guessingly her progress doth begin;And brings us back where first she led us out,To meet dark midnight at our restless inn.It is a plummet to so short a line,As sounds no deeper than the sounder’s eyes;The people’s meteor, which not long can shine,Nor far above the middle region rise.This spy from Schools gets ill intelligence,Where art, imposing rules, oft gravely errs;She steals to nature’s closet, and from thenceBrings nought but undecyphered characters.She doth, like India’s last discoverers, boastOf adding to old maps; though she has binBut sailing by some clear and open coast,Where all is woody, wild, and dark within.Of this forbidden fruit since we but gainA taste, by which we only hungry grow,We merely toil to find our studies vain,And trust to Schools for what they cannot know.’

‘Before by death you nearer knowledge gain,(For to increase your knowledge you must die)Tell me if all that learning be not vain,On which we proudly in this life rely.

‘Before by death you nearer knowledge gain,

(For to increase your knowledge you must die)

Tell me if all that learning be not vain,

On which we proudly in this life rely.

Is not the learning which we knowledge call,Our own but by opinion and in part?Not made entirely certain, nor to all,And is not knowledge but disputed art?

Is not the learning which we knowledge call,

Our own but by opinion and in part?

Not made entirely certain, nor to all,

And is not knowledge but disputed art?

And though a bad, yet ’tis a froward guide,Who, vexing at the shortness of the day,Doth, to o’ertake swift time, still onward ride,While we still follow, and still doubt our way;

And though a bad, yet ’tis a froward guide,

Who, vexing at the shortness of the day,

Doth, to o’ertake swift time, still onward ride,

While we still follow, and still doubt our way;

A guide, who every step proceeds with doubt,Who guessingly her progress doth begin;And brings us back where first she led us out,To meet dark midnight at our restless inn.

A guide, who every step proceeds with doubt,

Who guessingly her progress doth begin;

And brings us back where first she led us out,

To meet dark midnight at our restless inn.

It is a plummet to so short a line,As sounds no deeper than the sounder’s eyes;The people’s meteor, which not long can shine,Nor far above the middle region rise.

It is a plummet to so short a line,

As sounds no deeper than the sounder’s eyes;

The people’s meteor, which not long can shine,

Nor far above the middle region rise.

This spy from Schools gets ill intelligence,Where art, imposing rules, oft gravely errs;She steals to nature’s closet, and from thenceBrings nought but undecyphered characters.

This spy from Schools gets ill intelligence,

Where art, imposing rules, oft gravely errs;

She steals to nature’s closet, and from thence

Brings nought but undecyphered characters.

She doth, like India’s last discoverers, boastOf adding to old maps; though she has binBut sailing by some clear and open coast,Where all is woody, wild, and dark within.

She doth, like India’s last discoverers, boast

Of adding to old maps; though she has bin

But sailing by some clear and open coast,

Where all is woody, wild, and dark within.

Of this forbidden fruit since we but gainA taste, by which we only hungry grow,We merely toil to find our studies vain,And trust to Schools for what they cannot know.’

Of this forbidden fruit since we but gain

A taste, by which we only hungry grow,

We merely toil to find our studies vain,

And trust to Schools for what they cannot know.’

P. 150, No. cxxviii.—This poem, apart from its proper beauty, which is very considerable, has a deeper interest, as containing in the germ Wordsworth’s still higher strain, namely hisOde on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. I do not mean that Wordsworth had ever seen this poem when he wrote his. The coincidences are so remarkable that it is certainly difficult to esteem them accidental; but Wordsworth was so little a reader of anything out of the way, and at the time when his Ode was composed, theSilex Scintillanswas altogether out of the way, a book of such excessive rarity, that an explanation of the points of contact between the poems must be sought for elsewhere. The complete forgetfulness into which poetry, which, though not of the very highest order of all, is yet of a very high one, may fall, is strikingly exemplified in the fact that as nearly as possible two centuries intervened between the first and second editions of Vaughan’s poems. The first edition of the first part of theSilex Scintillansappeared in 1650, the second edition of the book in 1847. Oblivion overtook him from the first. Phillips in hisTheatrum Poetarum, 1675, just mentions him and no more; and knows him only by hisOlor Iscanus, a juvenile production, of comparatively little worth; yet seeing that it yields such lines as the following—they form part of a poem addressed to the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia, our first James’ daughter—it cannot be affirmed to be of none:

Thou seem’st a rosebud born in snow;A flower of purpose sprung to bowTo heedless tempests and the rageOf an incensèd stormy age:And yet as balm-trees gently spendTheir tears for those that do them rend,Thou didst nor murmur nor revile,But drank’st thy wormwood with a smile.’

Thou seem’st a rosebud born in snow;A flower of purpose sprung to bowTo heedless tempests and the rageOf an incensèd stormy age:

Thou seem’st a rosebud born in snow;

A flower of purpose sprung to bow

To heedless tempests and the rage

Of an incensèd stormy age:

And yet as balm-trees gently spendTheir tears for those that do them rend,Thou didst nor murmur nor revile,But drank’st thy wormwood with a smile.’

And yet as balm-trees gently spend

Their tears for those that do them rend,

Thou didst nor murmur nor revile,

But drank’st thy wormwood with a smile.’

As a divine Vaughan may be inferior, but as a poet he is certainly superior, to Herbert, who never wrote anything so purely poetical asThe Retreat. Still Vaughan would probably never have written as he has, if Herbert, whom he gratefully owns as his master, had not shown him the way.

P. 154, No. cxxxii.—This poem, so little known, though the work of one so well known, opens very solemnly and grandly, but does not maintain itself altogether at the same height to the end. Even as I have given it, the two concluding strophes are inferior to the others; and this declension would be felt by the reader still more strongly, if I had not at once lightened the poem, and brought it within reasonable compass, by the omission of no less than six strophes which immediately precede these. It bears date January 14, 1682/3; and was written at season of great weakness and intense bodily suffering (see hisLifeedited by Sylvester, Part III. p. 192); but the actual life of the great non-conformist divine was prolonged for some eight or nine years more.

P. 163, No. cxxxviii.—I have gladly found room in this volume, as often as I fairly could, for poems written by those who, strictly speaking, were not poets; or who, if poets, have only rarely penned their inspiration, and, either wanting the accomplishment of verse, or not caring to use it, have preferred to embody thoughts which might have claimed a metrical garb in other than metrical forms. Poems from such authors must always have a special interest for us. To the former of these classes the author of these manly and high-hearted lines belongs, and another whose epitaph on his companions left behind in the Arctic regions is earlier given (see No. cxix.). Bacon (for who can deny to him a poet’s gifts?) and, before all others as a poet in prose, Jeremy Taylor, belong to the second. It would be more difficult to affirm of Bishop Berkeley (see No. cxxxvii.), and of Sir Thomas Browne (see No. cxxxi.), to which of these classes they ought to be assigned.

P. 166, No. cxxxix.—These lines, in their wit worthy of Lucian, and with a moral purpose which oftentimes Lucian is wholly without, are called A Fable, but manifestly have no right to the name. I have omitted six lines, but with reluctance, being as in fact they are among the most moral lines in the whole poem.

P. 169, No. cxli.—This is a party ballad, and, rightly to understand it, we must understand the circumstances of which it assumes on our part a knowledge. In 1727 Admiral Hosier blockaded Porto-Bello with twenty ships; but was not allowed to attack it, war not having actually broken out with Spain, and, a peace being patched up, his squadron was withdrawn. In 1740 Admiral Vernon took Porto-Bello with six ships. It was apparently a very creditable exploit; but Vernon being an enemy of Walpole’s, and a member of the Opposition, it was glorified by them beyond its merits. When they boasted that he with six ships had effected what Hosier had not been allowed to attempt with twenty, the statement was a perfectly true one, but in nothing dishonourable to him or to his employers. Glover is here the mouthpiece of the Opposition, who, while they exalted Vernon, affected to pity Hosier, who had died, as they declared, of a broken heart; and of whose losses by disease during the blockade they did not fail to make the most. It is a fine ballad, and will do for Glover what hisLeonidaswould altogether have failed to do. This we may confidently affirm, whether we quite agree with Lord Stanhope or not, that it is ‘the noblest song perhaps ever called forth by any British victory, except Mr. Campbell’sBattle of the Baltic.’

P. 172, No. cxlii.—This poem was for a while supposed to be old, and an old line has been worked up into it. This was probably the refrain of an older as it is of the more modern poem, which has Miss Elliott, (1727-1805), an accomplished lady of the Minto family, for its author.—l. 1: ‘lilting,’ singing cheerfully.—l. 3: ‘loaning,’ broad lane.—l. 5: ‘scorning,’ rallying.—l. 6: ‘dowie’ dreary.—l. 8: ‘leglin,’ milkpail.—l. 9: ‘shearing’ reaping.—l. 10: ‘bandsters,’ sheaf-binders.—‘lyart,’ inclining to gray.—‘runkled,’ wrinkled.—l. 11: ‘fleeching,’ coaxing.—l. 14: ‘bogle,’ ghost.

P. 176, No. cxlvi.—One who listens very attentively may catch in these pretty lines a faint prelude of Wordsworth’s immortal poem addressed to the same bird.

P. 177, No. cxlvii.—There can scarcely be a severer trial of the poet’s power of musical expression, of his command of the arts by which melody is produced, than the unrhymed lyric, which very seldom perfectly satisfies the ear. That Collins has so completely succeeded here is itself a sufficient answer to Gray’s assertion that he ‘had a bad ear,’ to Johnson’s complaint, ‘his lines commonly are of slow motion; clogged and impeded with a cluster of consonants.’ Collins, in whom those lines of Wordsworth found only too literal a fulfilment,

‘We poets do begin our lives in gladness,But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness,’

‘We poets do begin our lives in gladness,

But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness,’

has falsified the prediction of Gray. Writing of him and of Warton, who both had lately died, Gray passes this judgment upon them, ‘They both deserve to live some years, but will not.’ Half of this prophecy has come true; and Warton cannot be said to have lasted to our time; but Collins has now won a position so assured that instead of the ‘some years’ which were all that Gray would have allotted to him, we may confidently affirm that he will live as long as any love for English poetry survives.

P. 181, No. cl.—This and the following poem are of the court, courtly. At the same time a truly poetical treatment may raisevers de Sociétésuch as these are, into a higher sphere than their own; and if I do not mistake, it has done so here; and may justly claim for these poems that they be drawn from the absolute oblivion into which they have fallen. Ambrose Philips, it is true, has a niche inJohnson’s Poets; but so much which is stupid, and so much which is worse than stupid, finds its place there, that for a minor poet, for all except those mighty ones to whom admission or exclusion would be a matter of absolute indifference, who are strong enough to burst any cerements, that collection is rather a mausoleum of the dead than a temple of the living. These poems with two or three others of like kind—a singularly beautiful one is quoted in Palgrave’sGolden Treasury—earned for Philips the title of Namby Pamby, so little were his contemporaries able to appreciate even the partial return to nature which they display. For a clever travesty of his style by Isaac Hawkins Browne, beginning,

‘Little tube of mighty power,Charmer of an idle hour,’

‘Little tube of mighty power,

Charmer of an idle hour,’

see Campbell’sSpecimens, vol. v. p. 361.

P. 186, No. cliii.—This admirable poem has this in common with another of scarcely inferior merit,

‘And ye shall walk in silk attire,’

that they both first appeared as broad-sheets sold in the streets of Edinburgh; and, justly popular as they both from the first have been, no one has ever cared to challenge either of them as his own. This, however, though not claimed by Mickle, nor included by him in an edition of his poems published by himself, was after his death claimedforhim, and Allan Cunningham thinks the claim to be fairly made out. It mainly rests on the fact that a copy of the poem with alterations marking the text as in process of formation was found among his papers and in his handwriting. Without inspection of the document, it is impossible to say what value as evidence it possesses. Certainly everything else which we know of Mickle’s is rather evidence against his authorship of this exquisite domesticlyric than for it. Still I have not felt myself at liberty to disturb the ascription of it to him.

P. 189, No. clv.—The immense superiority of this poem over every other in the little volume of Hamilton of Bangour’s poems, which was published at Edinburgh in 1760, some six years after his death, is not easy to account for. This poem has its faults; that it is a modern seeking to write in an ancient manner is sometimes too evident; but it is a tragic story tragically told, the situation boldly conceived, and the treatment marked by strength and passion throughout. Nothing else in the volume contains a trace of passion or of power, or is of the slightest value whatever. The fact that the poet has here come within the circle of the inspirations of Yarrow cannot of itself be accepted as sufficient to explain a fact which is certainly a curious one. It is plain from more than one citation or allusion that Wordsworth, in hisYarrow UnvisitedandYarrow Visited, had this poem quite as much in his eye as the earlier ballads whose scene is laid on the banks of the same stream.

P. 199, No. clx.—I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of quoting Mr. Palgrave’s beautiful criticism of this sonnet, in its own kind of a beauty so peerless:—‘The Editor knows no sonnet more remarkable than this which records Cowper’s gratitude to the Lady whose affectionate care for many years gave what sweetness he could enjoy to a life radically wretched. Petrarch’s sonnets have a more ethereal grace and a more perfect finish, Shakespeare’s more passion, Milton’s stand supreme in stateliness, Wordsworth’s in depth and delicacy. But Cowper’s unites with an exquisiteness in the turn of thought which the ancients would have called irony, an intensity of pathetic tenderness peculiar to his loving and ingenuous nature.’

P. 201, No. clxii.—Gray, who esteemed Tickell ‘a poor short-winded imitator of Addison,’ qualifies his contempt so far that he adds, ‘His ballad, however, of Colin and Lucy I always thought the prettiest in the world.’ After some hesitation I have not thought it pretty enough for a place in this volume. It is otherwise with the poem for which I have found room. Johnson’s censure of poems, whether praise or blame, carries no great weight with it; and when he says of this one, ‘nor is a more sublime or more elegant funeral poem to be found in the whole compass of English literature,’ the praise is extravagant. Still it has real merits, and sounds like the genuine utterance of a true regret for one who had been the poet’s effectual patron and friend.

P. 204, No. clxiii.—There have been many guesses who the ‘Unfortunate Lady’ commemorated in these pathetic, but thoroughly pagan, lines may have been; but the mystery which wraps her story has never been dispersed. With the ten first lines before us nothingcan be idler than to deny that she was one who had laid violent hands on her own life.

P. 207, No. clxiv.—Robert Levet lived above twenty years under Johnson’s roof, a dependant and humble friend, and when under it he died in 1782, Johnson commemorated his genuine worth in these admirable lines. He is mentioned several times in Boswell’sLife.

P. 209, No. clxvi.—This is the last original piece which Cowper wrote; and, as Southey has truly observed, ‘all circumstances considered, one of the most affecting that ever was composed.’ The incident on which it rests is related in Anson’sVoyage round the World, fifth edition, p. 79.

P. 212, No. clxviii.—This noblest elegy has a point of contact with an illustrious event in English history. As the boats were advancing in silence to that night-assault upon the lines of Quebec which should give Canada to the English crown, Wolfe repeated these lines in a low voice to the other officers in his boat, adding at the close of the recitation, ‘Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that poem than take Quebec.’ For himself within a few hours that line was to find its fulfilment,

‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’

We owe to Lord Stanhope (History of England from the Peace of Utrecht, c. 35) this interesting anecdote.—l. 45-72: Gray, who had read almost everything, may have here had in his eye a remarkable passage in Philo,De Sobriet. § 9. Having spoken of the many who were inwardly equipped with the highest gifts and faculties, he goes on: τὀ δἐ κάλλος τῶν ἐν ταῖς διανοίαις ἀγαλμάτων οὐκ ίσχυσαν ἐπιδείξασθαι δ’ἀ πενίαν ἠ ἀδοξίαν, ἠ νόσον σώματος, ἠ τἀς αλλας κῆρας, όσαι τὀν ἀνθρώπινον περιπολοῦσι βίον. And then he goes on, exactly as Gray does, to point out how these outward hindrances have circumscribed not merely the virtues of some but the crimes of others: πάλιν τοίνυν κατἀ τἀ ἐναντία μυρίους ἐστἰν ἰδιῖν ἀνάνδρούς, ἀκολάστους, ἀφρονας, ἀδίκους, ἀσεβεῖς ἐν ταῖς διανοίαις ὑπάρχοντας, τὀ δἐ κακίας ἐκάστης αίσχος ἀδυνατοῦντας ἐπιδεικνυσθαι δἰ ἀκαιμίαν τῶν εἰς τὀ ἁμαρτάνειν καιρῶν.

P. 216, No. clxix.—I have not included hymns in this collection, save only in rare instances when a high poetical treatment of their theme has given them a value quite independent of that which they derive from adequately fulfilling the special objects for which they were composed. It is thus with this noble poem, which, though not eminently adapted for liturgic use, is yet to my mind quite the noblest among Charles Wesley’s hymns. It need hardly be said that the key to it, so far as a key can be found from without and not from within, lies in the study of Gen. xxxii. 24-32.—l. 59: Theattempt to break down in English the distinction between the perfect and the past participle, and because they are identical in some instances to regard them as identical in all, has happily been defeated, at least for the present; but it has left its mark on much of the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and Wesley, who here writes ‘strove’ for ‘striven,’ and l. 68, ‘rose’ for ‘risen,’ only does what Shakespeare and Milton have done before him.

P. 241, No. cxci.—Campbell’sLord Ullin’s Daughteris a poem of considerable merit, but a comparison of it with this of Shelley (the motive of the two compositions is identical) at once reveals the distinction between a poet of first-rate eminence, of ‘imagination all compact,’ and one of the second order. Both poems are narrative; but the imagination in one has fused and absorbed the whole action of the story into itself in a way which is not so much as attempted in the other.

P. 256, No. ccviii.—In Beattie’sLife and Letters of Campbell, vol. ii. p. 42, we have the original sketch of this poem. It is very instructive, revealing as it does how one chief secret of success in poetry may be the daring to omit. As it is there sketched out, extending as it does to twenty stanzas of six lines each, that is to more than twice its present length, many of these stanzas being but of secondary merit, it would have passed as a spirited ballad, and would have presently been forgotten, instead of taking as it has now done its place among the noblest lyrics, the trumpet-notes in the language. But indeed this willingness to sacrifice parts to the interests of the whole is a condition without which no great poem, least of all a great lyric poem, which is absolutely dependent for its effects on rapidity of movement, can be written; and those who would fain escape the inevitable doom of oblivion which awaits almost all verse will do well to keep ever in remembrance how immeasurably more in poetry the half will sometimes be than the whole.

P. 265, No. ccxiv.—There is a mistake here, into which it is curious that one who had watched so closely as Scott had done the struggle with Republican and Imperial France should have fallen. It was not Marengo (1800) but Austerlitz (1805) which did so much to kill Pitt, and with which is connected the anecdote of his last days here referred to, and thus related by Lord Stanhope: ‘On leaving his carriage, as he passed along the passage to his bedroom [at Putney, which he never left], he observed a map of Europe which had been drawn down from the wall; upon which he turned to his niece, and mournfully said, “Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years.”’(Life of Pitt, vol. iv. p. 369.)

P. 266, No. ccxv.—After the battle of Novara, which hadvirtually decided the conflict for a time, but before peace was signed between Austria and Piedmont, the inhabitants of Brescia rose against their Austrian garrison, March 21, 1849. They were crushed after a gallant struggle, but one which had been hopeless from the first.

P. 277, No. ccxix.—This poem is full of allusions to the tragical issues of Shelley’s first rash and ill-considered marriage—issues which must have filled him ever after with very deep self-reproach. Far too slight as the expression of this is here—indeed it is hardly here at all—we know from other sources that the retrospect was one which went far to darken his whole after life. This serious fault has not hindered me from quoting these lines, in many respects of an exquisite tenderness and beauty, and possessing that deep interest which autobiography must always possess. One stanza has been omitted.

P. 291, No. ccxxiv.—These lines, written in Greece, and only three months before his death, are the last which Byron wrote, and, in their earlier stanzas at least, about the truest. In many of his smaller poems of passion, and inChilde Harolditself, there is afalsettowhich strikes painfully on the ear of the mind. But it is quite otherwise with these deeply pathetic lines, in which the spoiled child of this world passes judgment on that whole life of self-pleasing which he had laid out for himself, and declares what had been the mournful end of it all.

P. 315, No. ccxlvii.—This, if I mistake not, is the only poem by Herbert Knowles which survives. It appeared first inThe Quarterly Review, vol. ii. p. 396, with this account of the writer: ‘His life had been eventful and unfortunate, till his extraordinary merits were discovered by persons capable of appreciating and willing and able to assist him. He was then placed under a kind and able instructor, and arrangements had been made for supporting him at the University; but he had not enjoyed that prospect many weeks before it pleased God to remove him to a better world. The reader will remember that they are the verses of a schoolboy, who had not long been taken from one of the lowest stations of life, and he will then judge what might have been expected from one who was capable of writing with such strength and originality upon the tritest of all subjects.’ It was Southey, I believe, who wrote thus, in whose estimate of these verses I entirely concur; as it was he who was prepared to befriend the youthful poet, if he had not passed so soon beyond the reach and need of human help.

P. 326, No. cclvii.—It is not a little remarkable that one to whom English was an acquired language, who can have had little or no experience in the mechanism of English verse, should yet have leftus what Coleridge does not hesitate to call, ‘the finest and most grandly conceived sonnet in our language’—words, it is true, which he slightly modifies by adding, ‘at least it is only in Milton and in Wordsworth that I remember any rival.’

P. 352, No. cclxxii.—This poem is drawn from a small volume with the title,David and Samuel, with other Poems, published in the year 1859. Much in the volume has no right to claim exemption from the doom which before very long awaits all verse except the very best. Yet one or two poems have caught excellently well the tone, half serious, half ironical, of Goethe’s lighter pieces; while more than one of the more uniformly serious, this above all, seem to me to have remarkable merit. It finds its motive, as I need hardly say, in the resolution of the Dutch, when their struggle with the overwhelming might of Louis XIV. and his satellite Charles II. seemed hopeless, to leave in mass their old home, and to found another Holland among their possessions in the Eastern world.

P. 354, No. cclxxiii.—During the last Chinese war the following passage occurred in a letter of the Correspondent ofThe Times: ‘Some Seiks, and a private of the Buffs, having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning, they were brought before the authorities, and commanded to perform the kotou. The Seiks obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head, and his body thrown on a dunghill.’

P. 356, No. cclxxiv.—Turner’s fine picture of the Téméraire, a grand old man-of-war (it had been, as its name indicates, taken from the French) towed into port by a little ugly steamer, that so, after all its noble toils, it might there be broken up, is itself a poem of a very high order, which has here been finely transferred into verse.

P. 359, No. cclxxviii.—A selection of Walt Whitman’s poetry has very lately been published in England, the editor of this declaring that in him American poetry properly so-called begins. I must entirely dissent from this statement. What he has got to say is a very old story indeed, and no one would have attended to his version of it, if he had not put it more uncouthly than others before him. That there is no contradiction between higher and lower, that there is no holy and no profane, that the flesh has just as good rights as the spirit—this has never wanted prophets to preach it, nor people to act upon it; and this is the sum-total of his message to America and to the world. I was glad to find in hisDrum-tapsone little poem which I could quote with real pleasure.

P. 379, No. ccxcviii.—Tithonusis a noble variation on Juvenal’s noble line in the 10th Satire, where, enumerating the things which a wise man may fitly pray for, he includes among these the mind and temper,

Qui spatium vitæ extremum inter munera ponatNaturæ:

Qui spatium vitæ extremum inter munera ponat

Naturæ:

words which, grand as they are, reappear in still grander form, even as they are brought into a more intimate connection with this poem in Dryden’s translation,

‘And count it nature’s privilege to die.’

P. 386, No. ccciv.—Few readers of this and other choice specimens of American poetry—some of which have now for the first time found their way into any English anthology—but will share the admiration which I cannot refuse to express for many among them. It is true that they are not always racy of the soil, that sometimes they only do what has been as well done, though scarcely better, in the old land; but whether we regard the perfect mechanism of the verse, the purity and harmony of the diction, the gracious thoughts so gracefully embodied, these poems, by Whittier, by Bryant, by Holmes, by Emerson and by others, do, so far as they reach, leave nothing to be desired.

A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,V,W.

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