There is a strange pathos in his criticism when he was first shown the magnificent but somewhat appalling portrait of himself painted by Mr. Herkomer, taken when he was not far from the end. "Do I really look as though I held the world so cheap?" he said. It was like a kind of recantation, a kind of protest against the opinion which held him to be so innately an unkindly man; a kind of claim to be reckoned as one of the human race whom he was popularly supposed to despise.
An impressive figure is gone from us. We cannot, without a pang, see our characteristic types pass and disappear from the gallery of life. The late Master of Trinity possessed, perhaps, a character that appealed more to the older, to the humorous than to the young, the generous, the ardent. But we shall terribly misunderstand him if we do not see that a heart beat beneath the cynical mask, that the figure inside the sardonic shrine was of pure gold.
1886.
THOSE who on that grey February day, with its pitiless east wind, straggled sadly away from the shadow of the great church where they had laid all that was mortal of their friend, must have found it hard to believe that the familiar figure would never again be seen pacing down that very walk. Day by day it used to pass along the huge white front of the Fellows' buildings, with steps short but never hurried, the broad shoulders swaying almost imperceptibly, the great head set back, and the kindly humorous eye glancing over the great buttresses that fronted him, as he clasped the well-worn note-book to his side. And the mourners felt the blank still more, because it was just on such occasions as that which they had been attending, that he knew how to render sympathy and comfort as no one else alive could do. They could some of them remember how in such moments of unutterable regret, he would come close to them with no easy words of healing, for a grief that words could not touch, but with love and sadness andmute inquiry in his eyes, would in tender demonstration take and retain a hand—and nothing more—only saying, perhaps, "I understand," and so pass on, knowing that by showing human fellowship, by suffering with you—for he made no pretence not to suffer—he had done far more than if he had pointed you to a help of which you knew already, and to a strength to which you could not yet aspire.
And thus it was that the grey-headed contemporaries of his undergraduate days wept at that vault with men young enough to have been his sons, all feeling that the earth was poorer—not only for all the learning that had descended almost unrecorded into the grave, not because of the works unfinished that no one else could dare to do, but because they had lost so much love. And not love of an ordinary kind: Henry Bradshaw loved both well and wisely—of the words and events of intercourse with him you never wished a single thing done or said otherwise. He was one of those on whom had fallen the true priestly nature. It came so naturally to him to bear others' burdens that it at last became natural for others to lay them on him; he knew that repentant recital of failures to one whom we revere is in itself a potent absolution—and he had the true priest's tact: he did not want to set right, to give advice, but to hear what his friend had to say: how it was said was nearly as importantto him as what was said; the more detailed was the difficulty or the struggle or the misadventure, the better he was pleased. "Go on," he would say, if the inquirer feared he wearied him, "tell me every thing you can: it is sointeresting." In that word lay the secret of his influence over the young men who talked so naturally to him of all their doings—the young men that many complain it is so hard to influence. The fact is, they do not want merely sympathy—thatthey can get, and more than they want, in their home circle—where it is apt to be (they think) unintelligent sympathy—which floods but does not fill. No! what they want is to feel that their trials areinteresting. It is the season of egoism—they are supremely interested in themselves, self-conscious. Any one who finds them interesting too will influence them.
No one is ever widely loved who has not mannerisms—those little ways and methods that stir such smiling affection, that are so eagerly consulted during life, and that wring the heart with pathos, and brim the eyes to recall, when all is over. Who that knew them well will ever forget those broad high rooms? They were on the first-floor, by the Hall, looking into the College Court in front with all its trim stillness, broken only by the drip of the falling fountain. The windows that looked that way were always bright with flowers, geranium and lobelia as Iremember them. The room behind looked across a little grassy court, on the huddled high-roofed buildings of St. Catharine's, with their Flemish outline, on the left, and the huge glossy walnut in the inner court; straight in front it commanded Queen's Lane from end to end, and on the right there rose the battlemented brick towers and the quaint oakenflècheseen over apple trees and orchard walls—and the whole view rounded off by the high garden-elms across the river.
In the window-boxes in that room—for many years his favourite sitting-room—grew stubbly smoke-dried evergreens, cypress and lignum vitæ. On the left as you entered stood a huge serviceable deal press with innumerable drawers, on one side of which were pinned notices and invitations; to the left of the room, books, the larger at the top in a book-case, passing over the door and embedding it—a family picture or two, and some dusky oil paintings. In one corner an untenanted frame, with the glass in it, showing the wall-paper through, which he would neither take down nor get refilled. A large telescope on a stand by one of the windows—and the broad table with its rough red cloth strewn with books and papers, in orderly confusion, at which his visitor would find him sitting, with his back to the fire, writing in that broad blunt readable hand, or handling affectionately some yellow manuscript or brownclasped quarto. "How nice of you," he would say as you entered and stepped on to the square bordered carpet laid on the bare boarded floor. "I suppose you mean that I ought to get it stained," he would add with a smile, interpreting a hardly momentary glance that you gave as you crossed the threshold.
In the outer room, rarely used except in the summer, were many books and a few pictures—an original sketch by Thackeray, a bold pen-and-ink drawing of the view from the back window of the rooms—six postcards illustrated and sent him by some artistic friend on a tour, a grand piano, on which I never heard him or any one but Dr. Stanford presume to play. In this room were held the delightful Sunday evening assemblies to which friends used to drop in uninvited for tea and talk, while he would sit caressing the hand of some more favoured intimate, or dropping those wonderfully humorous sentences, sometimes caustic, had it not been for the glance with which they were accompanied, shooting through with little shafts of criticism any affectation or prejudice, any little idiosyncrasy and personal peculiarity that displayed itself in those round him, and laughing every now and then with that delightful intimate laugh, that irradiated his face. "Oh I forgot," he would say (after mentioning the name of some other undergraduate) to the young friend sitting byhim, reputed to be exclusive in his social estimates—"not b.s." (best set), or, by a little gesture with his finger he would indicate the "nasus aduncus"—or on the entrance of another he would playfully hide a little gold charm which he wore on his watch chain, because the newcomer was supposed to have an aversion to it—and if the delinquent pleaded that such an aversion had never been hinted or expressed, "Oh, I like you to dislike it," he would say, "it's so characteristic."
And one special gift he had, which is indeed rare. He could rebuke and yet not give offence—for he was never an instant out of season. He could, with a little barbed speech, pierce right to the heart of some weakness, probe some secret fault that, unconsciously to its possessor, was betraying itself to others, stab a pretence or an arrogance through and through at the right moment, and yet never make the auditor dislike him. As a rule, the critic and the censor are obeyed and hated. We recognise that we are the better for the stroke, but we hate the hand that directed it. But with Henry Bradshaw it was never so: one could not feel personal resentment, though the little wound rankled long. Even those whom he emphatically did not like, with whom he was most unsparing of criticism and direct derision, did not resent it: they were uneasy under it, but anxious for his goodopinion, anxious to redeem themselves in his eyes.
The conversation with him, as I remember it, was never sustained or argumentative. He did not care to sift the problems of life and being, or to hear them sifted before him—that was not the way in which life presented itself to him. He was hereditarily endowed with much of the Quietist instinct: he had not (on the surface, at least) questionings of heart and searchings of spirit. He was what can be called a life-philosopher; that is to say, he was not for ever deducing a system from faith or experience, like some restless spirits, and modifying it from day to day; he was simply acting, when it became him to act, in the way that his pure high instincts led him, and growing wiser so. And thus voluble or flashy talkers, keen, disputative, absorbed spirits, conversational dogmatists, found little to satisfy them in him: they were even apt to despise him in his greatness; and he too was uneasy in such society, he sported his door against them, he gave them no encouragement—unless, indeed, he had been their father's friend; then everything was forgiven.
In his bedroom, which latterly became his sitting-room, he kept all the Irish pamphlets which he and his father had amassed—for he was of Irish descent. It was a very characteristic room—the walls were covered to the topwith bookcases, painted white, and gradually sloping away inwards as they descended, so that he could have the larger books at the top, and the smaller at the bottom. These were filled with grey and white and blue paper volumes, many unbound and dusty, tied up in masses with strings and paper of all colours; in one corner an immense heap standing high up on the floor. "I know they oughtn't to be here—they ought to be in the library," he would say, "but of course that has never been done." It was in this room, so he told us, that he used to be ceaselessly annoyed by a mouse, which began to perambulate about 2 A.M., night after night, for many weeks: night after night he would resolve, he said, to "humour it no longer"—but night after night he would at last get up and open the door for it to go into his other room, which it instantly did, returning by some secret way to renew its wanderings the next night. "There never was such a pampered mouse," he used to say.
The rooms all through were filled with little mementoes, of which he would sometimes give us the history, from the little pictures and ornaments on the ledges and chimney-pieces, to the incongruous-looking tea-set that he used, and that formed so integral a part of the picture intête-à-têtetalks with him—every single piece of which was a memorial of some one. In formertimes he had a little toy, a model of the old Eton Long Chamber bedsteads that stood on his table. One evening a fantastic wild friend, who had been at Eton with him, was sitting with him—a man who had been miserable, hounded and persecuted through the whole of his school-life there—and, stung by a sudden thought, perhaps some barbarous association, seized this model with the tongs, and crushed it into the fire—the owner sate immovable till the holocaust was over, and then said gently, "Was that necessary?"
Nothing was more remarkable than the kind of men to be found in his rooms: any one engaged in arduous literary work of a nature involving special research we were sure to see there sooner or later. Many of the rising men in the University who knew greatness when they saw it—and not only these, but scapegraces to whom Bradshaw accorded an almost fatherly protection, "outsiders," so called, who for some venial social defect, some ungraciousness of manner, or want of refining influences, society in general had rigorously excluded—these were to be found expanding in his presence—and the strangest thing about these intimacies was a point to which many will bear testimony, that if they grew at all, they grew to include all the home circle of which his friend was a part. "All my brothers and sisters," said one who was much with him,"unknown to him before—he came to realise and love them all for themselves."
He was a wonderful instance of a man, unmethodical and dreamy by nature, made business-like by consideration for other people: his library-work was always exactly done. His own private work suffered by the rigorous self-sacrifice with which he devoted his time to the details of business: invitations and other social requirements did not come off so well. He was said frequently to neglect these. "I hardly ever go out," he used to say, though it was not for want of being asked: but it so soon got to be understood that such was his habit, and he was so welcome when he did come, though he had not announced his intention of so doing, that the delinquencies were accepted in the spirit in which they had been committed. Indeed, so great was his dislike of being forced to a decision, that it is related of him that a friend who had written to ask him to dinner, on receiving no answer, sent him two postcards, with "Yes" written on one, "No" on the other, and by return of post received them both.
When one speaks of Bradshaw's "work," it is hard to make the uninitiated quite understand either its extent, its importance, or its perfection. He knew more about printed books than any man living—he could tell at a glance the date and country, generally the town, at which a bookwas published. And the enormous range of this subject cannot be explained without a technical knowledge of the same. He was one of the foremost of Chaucer scholars, a very efficient linguist in range (though for reading, not speaking purposes), as, for instance, in the case of the old Breton language, which he evolved from notes and glosses, scribbled between the lines and on margins of Mass books—and his joy at the discovery of a word that he had suspected but never encountered was delightful to see. He could acquire a language for practical purposes with great rapidity—as, for instance, Armenian, which he began on a Thursday morning at Venice, and could read, so as to decipher titles for cataloguing, on Saturday night. He had a close and unrivalled knowledge of cathedral statutes and constitutions. He was an advanced student in the origins of liturgies—especially Irish—and, indeed, in the whole of Irish literature and printing he was supreme—and, finally, he was by common consent the best palæographist, or critic of the date of MSS. in the world.
The story of his adventure in the Parisian Library is worth recording here: a book had been lost for nearly a century; he went over to Paris to see if he could discover it. Search was fruitless, though there was a strong presumption as to the part of the library where it would be found.He stood in one of the classes describing its probable appearance to the librarian, and to illustrate it said, "About the height, thickness, and of similar binding to this," taking a book out of the shelves as he did so. It was the missing volume.
So too he would refer Oxford men by memory to the case and shelf of the Bodleian where they would find the book for which they had looked in vain—and most characteristic of him was the explanation which he once gave me of his enormous knowledge. "You know," he said, "I have never worked at anything for myself, except, perhaps, at Chaucer, all my life long: all the things that I do know I have stumbled across in investigating questions for other people." How much of this knowledge was merely held in solution in that amazing brain, how much was committed to paper, I do not know—of the latter, comparatively little. He had a long series of miscellaneous note-books, but most of them so technical as to be unintelligible except to one as far advanced in such knowledge as himself. His published works are but a few pamphlets.
The way in which all this work was done, all this knowledge was accumulated, was, among the other peculiarities of his genius, the most amazing. No man ever seemed to have more leisure; he would talk with perfect readiness not only on any special matter that any friend wished toconsult him on, but he enjoyed trivial, leisurely gossip, and never showed impatience to continue his work, or the least desire to return to it. The secret was that he never left off. Except for rare holidays, visits to relations or foreign tours, he never left Cambridge for years. His hours were most perplexing; he would generally work very late at night, sometimes till four or five in the morning, if there was much work on hand, go to the library about eleven, return for lunch, then back to the library again, with perhaps a visit to a Board or Syndicate till tea-time—for he took no exercise except spasmodically. Then he would go into Hall, or not, as the fancy took him, on the majority of days not doing so, and tasting nothing but tea and bread-and-butter in his rooms—and then from eight o'clock he would sit there, working if uninterrupted, but with his doors generally open to welcome all intruders, ceaselessly, patiently acquiring, amassing, disintegrating the enormous mass of delicate and subtle information which not only did he never forget, but all of which he seemed to carry on the surface, and carry so lightly and easily too—for he did not appear to be erudite—he never played therôleof the learned man, though with acquirements as ponderous and detailed, and to the generality of people as uninteresting, as the real or the fictitious Casaubon.
Yet this knowledge was not only of thingsthat lay inside his own subjects, but extended to all kinds of paths that could never have been suspected. I have never met a person so nearly omniscient. If you wanted to hear private and personal details about a man with whom you became connected in a business or official capacity, he could give them. He drew the man, or the family, or the place he lived in. I once travelled up to London with him and pointed out a great house that was gradually getting absorbed into the creeping metropolis but which still preserved its country characteristics, stately and smoke-dried. "Yes," he said, "it used to be much fresher; I used often to go there when I was a boy; it belonged to the——" and there came out a little string of old-world anecdotes and tales. Presently we passed a church (near Barnet) with an ivied tower, which had been engulfed in the town. This also I showed him. "Yes," he said, "I was christened there."
The story is almost too well-known to require repetition, of Mommsen, who said, after half-an-hour's conversation with Bradshaw on some historicalspecialité: "If I had had a shorthand writer with me, I could have got in half-an-hour's talk enough materials to have made an interesting volume." And this fabric had been ceaselessly growing and expanding, fitting itself into order and connecting itself together, ever since the early days when in the school-yard atEton, a boy who was possessed of some bibliographical treasures saw Henry Bradshaw issue out of college, carrying two curious volumes under his arms, stealing off to some secret haunt to study them, and greeted him with: "Hullo, Bradshaw, whose books have you got there?" The only answer, delivered without a sign of confusion, in the tones which even then were more expressive in their imperturbability than most men's, "Yours."
Professor Prothero, in his Life of Henry Bradshaw, gives a rationalistic explanation of this story that I can hardly credit. He says that the books were from the School Library, and that Bradshaw's reply was meant to indicate that the volumes belonged as much to one person as another. As this explanation deprives the story of most of its point and all of its humour, I have preferred to retain it in its lighter, if more apocryphal, form—the form in which I heard it from one of Bradshaw's Eton friends. And we may here add the delightful touch with which he dismissed the claims of a celebrated forger of MSS. to have been the writer of the "Codex Sinaiticus." "I am sure if he had ever seen it, he could never have pretended to have written it," he said.
And in an instant the whole structure breaks and melts before our eyes: the knowledge gone, God knows whither: the centre of so many quietactivities, of so many dependent lives slipped from its place. However often we say to ourselves that nothing runs to waste, that hoarded experience—gathered painfully in life and seemingly only to be applied in life—thus vanishing in an instant, is hidden not gone, the blank is there. As Bradshaw himself said to a friend after a great trial that he had told him of, which seemed to have in it no wholesome flavour, to be nothing either in prospect or in retrospect, but the very root of bitterness itself, "Everything is the result of something—whether it is our own fault or not, it means something: what we have to do is to try and interpret it."
And we feel that when such a life, acting as it did so directly on others and affecting them so visibly, is cut short, there is not a sheer waste of love. And though we may be called fanciful, we seem to trace a hopeful analogy in the ease with which he renewed old intimacies, silent for a long interval—he took up the friendship where he had laid it down: there was no adjustment necessary—one became part of his life again at once, because one had never ceased to be so. Such an affection, when it has passed the veil, seems to be waiting for us still—it seems emphatically to have but gone before.
1885.
FEW poetical writers lived more consistently in the shadow of death than Christina Rossetti. There was a certain taint of doom about her writings from the first, and something of the hollow-eyed listlessness of low vitality, that characterises the artistic work of the school to which she primarily belonged, is never absent for very long together from her writings. There is extant a portrait of her at about the age of thirty-six, by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which will be familiar to many of my readers. After subtracting from it the languorous mannerism of the artist, there remains in the wide, pathetic eyes, the wistful uplifting of the eyebrows and the depressed curves of the stately mouth something dreary and uncomforted about the whole aspect. And a later photograph, which I have had the privilege of seeing, has the same regretful patience. For many years she had been an invalid, and lived a life of singular seclusion in Torrington Square, one of the dreariest and least romantic of London thoroughfares. Latterlyshe had been an acute sufferer from a wearing disease, borne with silent fortitude. One after another, her mother, and the two aunts to whom she devoted her tenderest care, were taken from her; and her brother William Michael, the critic and editor of Shelley, was the only survivor of the brilliant circle in which her life began. Her fervent religious faith, inspired and matured by desolate experience, had nothing dreary or undecided about it; it issued in a sedulous dutifulness and a patient devotion that were the best proof of its sincerity.
Her artistic nature developed early, and before she was seventeen, a little volume entitledVerses by Christina Rossetti, dedicated to her mother, was printed by her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, at his private printing-press in Regent's Park. This is now one of the rarest of bibliographical treasures. Here her precise delineation of natural objects, and a certain delicate antique charm, are distinctly observable. But in 1850, under thenom-de-plumeof Ellen Alleyne, she contributed verses to theGerm, that fertile organ of the pre-Raphaelites, Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others. Of these lyrics we shall presently have occasion to quote one, "Dreamland," which shows how early her lyrical gift had matured. And indeed it may be said that of the seven poems which she contributed to theGerm, at least five are among her best lyrics.
In 1862 appearedGoblin Market and other Poems; and in this, as is so often the case with the work of poets done before the thirty-fifth year—the year that has so often been fatal to genius—she reached the zenith of her poetical powers. Not that much of her later work was not excellent, and would have sufficed for a definite reputation; but it may be said that twenty or thirty of these earlier poems are those by which she will be best remembered.
Some writers have the power of creating a species of aerial landscape in the minds of their readers, often vague and shadowy, not obtruding itself strongly upon the consciousness, but forming a quiet background, like the scenery of portraits, in which the action of the lyric or the sonnet seems to lie. I am not now speaking of pictorial writing, which definitely aims at producing, with more or less vividness, a house, a park, a valley, but lyrics and poems of pure thought and feeling, which have none the less a haunting sense of locality in which the mood dreams itself out.
Christina Rossetti'smise-en-scèneis a place of gardens, orchards, wooded dingles, with a churchyard in the distance. The scene shifts a little, but the spirit never wanders far afield; and it is certainly singular that one who lived out almost the whole of her life in a city so majestic, sober, and inspiriting as London, shouldnever bring the consciousness of streets and thoroughfares and populous murmur into her writings. She, whose heart was so with birds and fruits, cornfields and farmyard sounds, never even revolts against or despairs of the huge desolation, the laborious monotony of a great town. She does not sing as a caged bird, with exotic memories of freedom stirred by the flashing water, the hanging groundsel of her wired prison, but with a wild voice, with visions only limited by the rustic conventionalities of toil and tillage. The dewy English woodland, the sharp silences of winter, the gloom of low-hung clouds, and the sigh of weeping rain are her backgrounds; and it is strange that one of Italian blood should write with no alien longings for warm and sun-dried lands. Robert Browning, who brings into sudden being by a word, the whole atmosphere of the fiery Italian summer, the terraced vines, the gnarled olive, the bulging plaster where the scorpion lies folded, still yearned for an English spring morning. But Christina Rossetti, unlike even her brother, had no leanings to the home of her race.
The critic of future ages, if he were confronted with the works of Mrs. Browning and Miss Rossetti, and a history of their lives, would, it may be said, acting on internal evidence only, assign such poems asAurora Leighand theCasa-Guidi Windowsto MissRossetti, and trace the natural heart-beats which still thrilled her for the home of her origin, and equally attribute the essentially English character of Miss Rossetti's feeling to the English poetess. It is said that Miss Rossetti never visited Italy, and had no wish to do so. It is a strange thing that the two greatest of English poetesses should have, so to speak, so passionately adopted each other's country as their own.
The only point in which Christina Rossetti's imagery may be held to be tropical, is in the matters of fruit. In "Goblin Market," in the "Pageant of the Months," even in such a poem as the "Apple Gathering," and in many other poems she seems to revel in descriptions of fruit which the harsh apples and half-baked plums of English gardens can hardly have suggested. Keats is the only other English poet who had the same sensuous delight in the pulpy juiciness of summer fruit. It will be found, I think, that in the majority of English poets fruit is quite as often typical of immaturity and acidity as of cooling and delight. And even Stevenson couples the onion and the nectarine as the noblest fruits of God's creation. But the
Plump unpecked cherries.Bloom down-cheeked peaches,Wild free-born cranberries,Pineapples, strawberries,All ripe togetherIn summer weather.
are hardly the produce of the rushy glen where the leering goblin merchants tramped and whisked up and down.
This leads me to speak of another region which Christina Rossetti trode with an eager familiarity—the land of dreams and visions. With the exception of Coleridge, who, in his three great poems, moved in that difficult and turbid air with so proud a freedom, it may be said that no English poet except Christina, her brother, and James Thomson, have ever successfully attempted such work. Mr. Yeats, it is true, of younger writers, has passed beyond the threshold of that eerie and unsubstantial land; but with him it is the melancholy Celtic twilight, the home of old earth-spirits, neither high nor hopeful, but with a bewildered sadness, as of discrowned kings and discredited magicians. To a characteristically English poet such as Wordsworth, such a region, as he betrays in the memorable sonnet, "The world is too much with us," was a place of desperate soulless horror. But Christina Rossetti, in "Goblin Market," and the "Ballad of Boding," as her brother in "Rose Mary," and "Sister Helen," passed successfully along the narrow road of allegory. In English hands such subjects are apt to pass with fatal swiftness into the ludicrous and the grotesque. Witness the merry horned demons of monkish MSS., and the cheerful oddities, so far aloof from fantastichorror, of our English gurgoyles and stall-work, the straddling and padding forms of Bunyan. What is needed is a sort of twilight of the soul, a simple directness such as children value, a sense of grave verisimilitude, hopelessly alien from the business-like Puritan mind.
Then, too, there is the singular creation of the modern ballad, initiated by Coleridge, and carried to supreme perfection by D. G. Rossetti, and in a less degree by his sister; that vague, dream-laden writing which, using old forms of austere simplicity, charges them with a whole world of modern sicknesses and degenerate dreams. It was this that Matthew Arnold went so passionately in search of in a poem like the "Scholar Gipsy," and yet could contrive no inner picture of the haunted wanderer's thoughts, but only touch in the external aspects of the phantom traveller, as seen unexpectedly by human toilers and pleasure-seekers engaged in homely exercises.
But Miss Rossetti, in such poems as "Brandons Both," and in a supreme degree in the exquisite ballad of "Noble Sisters," which we will quotein extenso, laid a secure hand on the precise medium required:—
NOBLE SISTERS
"Now did you mark a falcon,Sister dear, sister dear,Flying toward my windowIn the morning cool and clear?With jingling bells about her neck.But what beneath her wing?It may have been a ribbon,Or it may have been a ring.""I marked a falcon swoopingAt the break of day;And for your love, my sister dove,I 'frayed the thief away.""Or did you spy a ruddy hound,Sister fair and tall,Went snuffing round my garden bound,Or crouched by my bower wall.With a silken leash about his neck;But in his mouth may beA chain of gold and silver links,Or a letter writ to me?""I heard a hound, highborn sister,Stood baying at the moon;I rose and drove him from your wall,Lest you should wake too soon.""Or did you meet a pretty page,Sat swinging on the gate;Sat whistling, whistling like a bird—Or may be slept too late—With eaglets broidered on his cap,And eaglets on his glove?If you had turned his pockets out,You had found some pledge of love.""I met him at this daybreak,Scarce the east was red;Lest the creaking gate should anger you,I packed him off to bed.""Oh patience, sister. Did you seeA young man tall and strong,Swift-footed to uphold the rightAnd to uproot the wrong,Come home across the desolate seaTo woo me for his wife?And in his heart my heart is locked,And in his life my life.""I met a nameless man, sister.Who loitered round our door;I said: 'Her husband loves her much.And yet she loves him more.'""Fie, sister, fie; a wicked lie,A lie, a wicked lie.I have none other love but him,Nor will have till I die;And you have turned him from our door,And stabbed him with a lie.I will go seek him through the worldIn sorrow till I die.""Go seek in sorrow, sister,And find in sorrow too;If thus you shame our father's name,My curse go forth with you."
But such writings, exquisite as they are, are but the outworks and bastions of the inner life. One could almost wish that Christina Rossetti were further removed by time and space, and were passed beyond the region of letters, biographies, and personal memoirs, which before long will possibly begin "to tear her heart before the crowd." Nowadays, in the excessive zest for personal information, which received such shameful incentives from Carlyle, and still more shameless encouragement from his biographers, we may thank God, as Tennyson did, that there are yet poets of whom we know as littleas we know of Shakespeare, about whom even the utmost diligence of researchers has disinterred but a handful of sordid and humiliating facts.
But Miss Rossetti's poems are so passionately human a document as to set one tracing by a sort of inevitable instinct the secrets of a buoyant and tender soul, sharpened and refined by blow after blow of harsh discipline. The same autobiographical savour haunts all her work as haunted the eager dramas of Charlotte Brontë, the first of women-writers of every age. Step by step it reveals itself, the sad and stately development of this august soul. The first tremulous outlook upon the intolerable loveliness of life, the fantastic melancholy of youth, the deep desire of love, the drawing nearer of the veiled star, disappointment, disillusionment, the over-powering rush of the melancholy, that had waited like a beast in ambush for moments of lassitude and reaction. Then was the crisis: would the wounded life creep on on a broken wing, or would the spiritual vitality suffice to fill the intolerable void? It did suffice; and the strength of the character that thus found repose was attested by the rational and temperate form of faith that ministered to the failing soul.
At such a moment the sensuous spirit is apt to slide into the luxurious self-surrender that Roman Catholicism permits. To me, indeed, it is a matter of profound surprise that Miss Rossettidid not fall into this temptation; but just as she had, with instinctive moderation, chosen the cool and temperate landscape of her adopted country, so the National Church of England, with its decorous moderation, its liberal generosity, its refined ardour, was the chosen home of this austere spirit. The other danger to be feared was that of a bitter renunciation of old delights, a sojourn in the wilderness of some arid and fantastic pietism. An elder sister of Miss Rossetti's indeed sought the elaborate seclusion of a religious house; and had D. G. Rossetti—to use the uncouth Puritan phrase—"found religion," there is no doubt that he too would have reverted to the Church of his fathers. But Miss Rossetti became, as Mr. Edmund Gosse has, in a penetrating criticism in theCentury Magazine(June 1893) pointed out, the poetess, not of Protestantism, but of Anglicanism.
We must retrace our steps for a moment, and touch first on Miss Rossetti's love lyrics. Very occasionally she allowed herself, in the early days, to speak of love with the generous abandon of an ardent spirit, as in the exquisite lyric where she still lingers in the pictorial splendours of the pre-Raphaelite school.
A BIRTHDAY.
My heart is like a singing birdWhose nest is in a watered shoot;My heart is like an apple-treeWhose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;My heart is like a rainbow shellThat paddles in a halcyon sea;My heart is gladder than all these,Because my love is come to me.Raise me a daïs of silk and down;Hang it with vair and purple dyes;Carve it in doves and pomegranatesAnd peacocks with a hundred eyes;Work in it gold and silver grapes,In leaves and silver fleur-de-lys;Because the birthday of my lifeIs come, my love is come to me.
But, as a rule, her thoughts of love are clouded by some dark sense of loss, of having missed the satisfaction that the hungering soul might claim. Take two sonnets:
REMEMBER.
Remember me when I am gone away,Gone far away into the silent land,When you can no more hold me by the hand,Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.Remember me when no more day by dayYou tell me of our future that you planned;Only remember me. You understand,It will be late to counsel then or pray.Yet, if you should forget me for a while,And afterwards remember, do not grieve;For if the darkness and corruption leaveA vestige of the thoughts that once I had,Better by far you should forget and smile,Than that you should remember and be sad.
AFTER DEATH.
The curtains were half-drawn, the floor was sweptAnd strewn with rushes; rosemary and mayLay thick upon the bed on which I lay,Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.He leaned above me, thinking that I sleptAnd could not hear him; but I heard him say,"Poor child, poor child!" and as he turned awayCame a deep silence, and I knew he wept.He did not touch the shroud, or raise the foldThat hid my face, or take my hand in his,Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head.He did not love me living; but once deadHe pitied me; and very sweet it isTo know he still is warm, though I am cold.
In these sonnets the veil of some pathetic possibility unfulfilled is drawn reverently aside, and the soul-history is written in plain characters. But again the poet is more reticent; and only in sad allusions, incessantly recurring, in unhappy hints, she reveals the hunger of the spirit, the hand that was held out in hope for the heavenly bread, and closed upon a stone. After this the mood becomes one of reluctant certainty, with little bitterness or recrimination; the surrender is accepted, but the thought of what might have been is for ever present.
Then, as in some desolate estuary, the tide begins to set strongly in from the vast and wholesome sea. Sometimes a stoic note is struck of pure desolation, as in the noble lyric;—
UP-HILL.
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?Yes, to the very end.Will the day's journey take the whole long day?From morn to night, my friend.But is there for the night a resting-place,A roof for when the slow dark hours begin?May not the darkness hide it from my face?You cannot miss that inn.Shall I meet other wayfarers at night,Those who have gone before?Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?They will not keep you standing at that door.Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?Of labour you shall find the sum.Will there be beds for me and all who seek?Yea, beds for all who come.
But this bitterness is not enduring. From the first, even in what we may call her Pagan days, the sense of responsibility and deliberate choice had been hers. We venture to quote the noble allegory, "A Triad," omitted, in some vigorous revulsion of spirit, from her later writings:
Three sang of love together, one with lipsCrimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips;And one there sang who, soft and smooth as snow,Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;And one was blue with famine after love,Who, like a harpstring snapped, rang harsh and lowThe burden of what those were singing of.One shamed herself in love; one temperatelyGrew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;One famished, died for love. Thus two of threeTook death for love, and won him after strife.One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee;All on the threshold, yet all short of life.
Into the service, then, of her religion, Miss Rossetti brought all the passionate fervour of her unsatisfied heart, all her intense enthusiasm after art, and passed steadily, we believe, to the forefront of all English religious poetry. She had not, perhaps, the curious felicity of George Herbert, but, on the other hand, she had the balanced simplicity that stepped clear of his elaborate conceit, the desperate euphuism of Crashaw, and even the pathetic refinement of Henry Vaughan. Again, her passionate imagery put her ahead of the soft beauty of Keble, too apt to degenerate into a honied domesticity; above the pensive richness of Charles Wesley, whose Puritan outlook made his hand unsure; above even the divine ardour of Newman, whose technical dogmatism and paucity of human experience limited his range. With Miss Rossetti it was as the strong man armed, in the Gospel parable. When the stronger victor came, the spoil was annexed, and the ancient pride of defence was applied by a more dexterous hand. Can there be found in the rank of English religious poetry two more majestic lyrics than
A BETTER RESURRECTION.
I have no wit, no words, no tears;My heart within me like a stoneIs numbed too much for hopes or fears.Look right, look left, I dwell alone;I lift mine eyes, but, dimmed with grief,No everlasting hills I see;My life is in the falling leaf.O Jesus, quicken me.My life is like a faded leaf,My harvest dwindled to a husk;Truly my life is void and briefAnd tedious in the barren dusk.My life is like a frozen thing,No bud nor greenness can I see.Yet rise it shall—the sap of spring.O Jesus, rise in me.My life is like a broken bowl,A broken bowl that cannot holdOne drop of water for my soulOr cordial in the searching cold.Cast in the fire the perished thing;Melt and remould it, till it beA royal cup for Him, my King.O Jesus, drink of me.
Or the third of the "Old and New Year Ditties?"
Passing away, saith the World, passing away;Chances, beauty, and youth sapped day by day;Thy life never continueth in one stay,Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to greyThat hath won neither laurel nor bay?I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May;Thou, root-stricken, shall not rebuild thy decayOn my bosom for aye.Then I answered, Yea.Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away,With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play.Hearken what the past doth witness and say:Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day,Lo! the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;Watch, thou, and pray.Then I answered, Yea.Passing away, saith my God, passing away;Winter passeth after the long delay;New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May.Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray,Arise, come away, night is past, and lo! it is day,My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.Then I answered, Yea.
The last-mentioned poem is indeed worthy of a technical remark. It is written in an irregular dactylic metre, the longer lines having a beat of five accents, the shorter of three or two; but the whole scheme of rhyme, all three stanzas—a common form with Miss Rossetti—is actually built upon one single rhyme throughout. For such a conception one would be inclined to predicate certain failure; the simplicity is too rude and daring; but consider the result. For sheer simplicity again note her "Christmas Carol":
In the bleak mid-winterFrosty wind made moan,Earth stood hard as iron,Water like a stone;Snow had fallen, snow on snow,Snow on snow,In the bleak mid-winter,Long ago.Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him,Nor earth sustain;Heaven and earth shall flee away,When He comes to reign.In the bleak mid-winterA stable-place sufficedThe Lord God Almighty,Jesus Christ.Enough for Him whom cherubimWorship night and day,A breastful of milkAnd a mangerful of hay.Enough for Him whom angelsFall down before,The ox and ass and camelWhich adore.Angels and archangelsMay have gathered there,Cherubim and seraphimThrong'd the air,But only His mother,In her maiden bliss.Worshipped the BelovedWith a kiss.What can I give Him,Poor as I am?If I were a shepherd,I would bring a lamb.If I were a wise man,I would do my part;Yet what can I give Him?Give my heart.
which, from beginning to end, has the very note of a Tuscan Adoration.
This exquisite felicity did not continue. It could not be expected that it should. Miss Rossetti had always been capable in her writings of complete and unexpected failures; in many of her lyrics everything is there—style, feeling, harmony, but somehow the mood does not quicken into poetry. In later life she published an immense volume, theFace of the Deep, extending to over 550 pages, a devotional commentary on the "Apocalypse." This is written in uncouth and shapeless prose, as a rule; and though it has many suggestive and striking thoughts, and some images of exquisite beauty, yet it is a singular monument of failure. Scattered up and down in it are several hundred religious lyrics, which are never exactly commonplace, but seldom satisfactory. I venture to quote one, which may serve as a fair sample, p. 119, chap. iii. v. 10:
Wisest of sparrows, that sparrow which sitteth alonePerched on the housetop, its own upper chamber, for nest.Wisest of swallows, that swallow which timely hath flownOver the turbulent sea to the land of its rest;Wisest of sparrows and swallows, if I were as wise!Wisest of spirits, that spirit which dwelleth apart,Hid in the Presence of God for a chapel and nest,Sending a wish and a will and a passionate heartOver the eddy of life to that Presence in rest,Seated alone and in peace till God bids it arise.
One word must, perhaps, be said here on the question of her technical skill and metrical handling. With characteristic humility, she was herself of opinion, as appears from a letter to Mr. Gosse, that the inspiration of her sonnets was wholly derived from her brother. That was an entire, if affectionate, mistake. There is no real or even apparent connection. There is none of the intricate scheming, the subtle inter-weaving of tremulous tones which make D. G. Rossetti's sonnets the most musical of English sonnets. But the consequence is that Dante Gabriel's sonnets are not in the least characteristically English. The sonnets of Milton and Wordsworth may be regarded as the true examples of English sonnet-writing, stiff, grave, sober, drawing through precise and even stilted metres to a sonorous and rhetorical close. D. G. Rossetti's are exotic work essentially. But that is not true of Miss Rossetti's. They are simple and severe. In such a sequence as "Monna Innominata," there is not a trace of the luscious and labyrinthine ecstacies of her brother's work; they are indeed far more like Mrs. Browning'sSonnets from the Portuguese.
Trust me, I have not earned your dear rebuke;I love, as you would have me, God the most;Would lose not Him, but you, must one be lost;Nor with Lot's wife cast back a faithless look,Unready to forego what I forsook.This say I, having counted up the cost.This, though I be the feeblest of God's host,The sorriest sheep Christ shepherds with His crook.Yet while I love my God the most, I deemThat I can never love you overmuch;I love Him more, so let me love you too;Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such,I cannot love you if I love not Him,I cannot love Him if I love not you.
This severity is not the same in her lyrics; it will be obvious from the specimens already quoted, that, if anything, the metrical scheme is not strict enough. In many lines will be found a deficiency of syllables, musically compensated for by variety of accent; many of her rhymes are almost licentious in their vagueness. But for some reason I have found that they do not offend the critical judgment, as Mrs. Browning's do. Whether it is that the directness and simplicity of the feeling overpowers all minute fastidiousness, or whether they are all part of the careful artlessness of the mood, is hard to determine. But the fact remains, that none but the most inquisitive of critics would be likely to hold that the art is thereby vitiated.
Lastly, of all the great themes with which Miss Rossetti deals, she is, above all writers, the singer of Death. Whether as the eternal home-coming, or the quiet relief after the intolerable restlessness of the world, or as the deep reality in which the fretful vanities of life aremerged, it is always in view, as the dark majestic portal to which the weary road winds at last. True, in one of the earliest and most beautiful of all her lyrics, the sense of dissatisfied loneliness is carried on beyond the gate of Death.
AT HOME.
When I was dead, my spirit turnedTo seek the much-frequented house;I passed the door, and saw my friendsFeasting beneath green orange boughs;From hand to hand they pushed the wine,They sucked the pulp of plum and peach;They sang, they jested, and they laughed,For each was loved of each.I listened to their honest chat.Said one: "To-morrow we shall bePlod, plod along the featureless sands,And coasting miles and miles of sea."Said one: "Before the turn of tide,We will achieve the eyrie-seat."Said one; "To-morrow shall be likeTo-day, but much more sweet.""To-morrow," said they, strong with hope.And dwelt upon the pleasant way."To-morrow," cried they one and all,While no one spoke of yesterday.Their life stood full at blessed noon;I, only I, had passed away."To-morrow and to-day," they cried;I was of yesterday.I shivered comfortless, but castNo chill across the tablecloth;I all-forgotten shivered, sadTo stay and yet to part how loth.I passed from the familiar room,I, who from love had passed away.Like the remembrance of a guestThat tarrieth but a day.
But, if we can but read into it the hallowing radiance of a tremulous hope, the poem, which as Ellen Alleyne she contributed to the Germ in the days of her unregenerate energies, may be her requiem now:
DREAM LAND.
Where sunless rivers weepTheir waves into the deep,She sleeps a charmed sleepAwake her not.Led by a single star.She came from very farTo seek where shadows areHer pleasant lot.She left the rosy morn,She left the fields of corn.For twilight cold and lornAnd water springs.Through sleep, as through a veil,She sees the sky look pale,And hears the nightingaleThat sadly sings.Rest, rest, a perfect restShed over brow and breast;Her face is toward the west,The purple land.She cannot see the grainRipening on hill and plain;She cannot feel the rainUpon her hand.Rest, rest, for evermoreUpon a mossy shore;Rest, rest, at the heart's coreTill time shall cease.Sleep that no pain shall wake;Night that no morn shall breakTill joy shall overtakeHer perfect peace.
1895.
IT happened the other day, in the library of a remote house, that I lighted upon a shelf of oldBlackwoods, from fifty to sixty years old, and, being confined to the house by wet weather, read largely in them. Christopher North was at his glory then, with his flagrant egotism and stupid bellowings. But what struck me most in the old pages was that, with all his loud Philistinism, he was penetrated with a profound respect for poetry. It is hardly too much to say that poetry was the staple product of the magazine. Almost every number contained long, nightmare poems in Cowperian blank verse by Delta or some other tedious unknown. Mrs. Hemans fluted monotonously. Almost every number, too, contained an article of poetical criticism; even the terribleNoctes Ambrosianæare full of low verses. All this contrasted sharply, I will not say painfully, with modern tendencies. I do not think we are less wanting in respect for really great poetry now, but there is a large class of persons writing verses now which for feeling, expression,and execution beat Delta and Christopher North's favourites out of the field. At the same time, the minor poet is the perennial gibe of the journalist, who would have us believe that the only audience that exists for these amiable singers are themselves. And this is not impossibly the case. But all who take a serious and hopeful view of literature will believe that there are shadowy instincts in the human heart which even journalism cannot satisfy, and the large class of persons—youthful, perhaps, and, as Praed says, "so thankful for illusion"—which the earth is constantly producing, will continue to be grateful to any one who "from the soul speaks instant to the soul."
But between the greater and the lesser lights there are a few living poets who, without captivating an unwilling public, have, at least, extorted a recognition from it: those gentlemen whom theWestminster Budgetnot long ago represented in a genial caricature as trying the effect of a laurel wreath on their more or less scanty locks before a mirror. And one of these was Mr. Gosse. His poetical work extends over a period of some five-and-twenty years. His first book,On Viol and Flute, written when the author was hardly out of his teens, was instantly welcomed by the critics as an offshoot of the Rossetti school, but untainted by any of the uncomfortable irregularities of that fellowship. Since then he has producedNew Poems; Firdausi in Exile and Other Poems; King Erik, a literary tragedy; while, last of all, there appeared, in 1894, a volume entitledIn Russet and Silver. This essay will treat exclusively of Mr. Gosse's poetical work, although the present writer may freely confess his conviction that Mr. Gosse's true vehicle, in which he works more spontaneously, is melodious and amusing prose.
The first point that strikes any careful and critical reader of the volumes I have mentioned is the steady and virile progress that the art of the writer compasses.On Viol and Flutewas a graceful, tender volume, of sensuous and picturesque, but essentially superficial verse. InNew Poemsa certain philosophy, epicurean in tone, began to shape itself. InFirdausi in Exilethere is a strong and manly note audible. Finally, inIn Russet and Silverthe tumultuous impulse is over, and the poet looks out with a serious resignation backwards over a life of genial effort and happy love, and forwards over a gentle sunset slope.King Eriklies apart from the rest, and will be considered separately.
In Mr. Gosse's graceful ode, "The Gifts of the Muses," the goddesses of song take away from Daphnis his beechwood flute and give him an ivory lyre, with which, at the cost of secret sorrow, he charms the ears of the world. Buthis last prayer to Apollo is that he may have his flute again before he dies. Mr. Gosse is like Daphnis in his preference for the homely flute. The ivory lyre, "the sorrowful great gift," as Mrs. Browning calls it, he has not chosen. His graceful, melodious verse, flawless in construction, delicate in form, does not anywhere show signs of passionate conviction or imperious stress; it has none of the "perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart." Intensity there is, but it is the intensity of enjoyment; Mr. Gosse's poems are full of the spirit of the sunlit wood, the breezy headland, the fragrant garden-walks at dusk; they are full of the cheerful felicity that plays about the wholesome energies of life, the happy love of wife and child, inspiriting talk, leisurely sessions in warm orchards, or libraries full of books. Mr. Gosse has the active love of nature intensified by the confinement of town life. He has inherited the eager instinct of the naturalist, and his studies of woodland things are produced with the eye on the object, or, better still, from loving and accurate recollection. There is nothing vague in his transcripts from sea or wood: the broken imitative music of the white-throat, the yellow water-lily stealing up to daylight through the dim pool, the beetle with his jewelled wing-cases, the bright crest of the swooping wood-chat, the whispering of the rain upon the leaves, the mist flooding theorchard, all these are touched with that swift intuition which comes from patient watchfulness.
Mr. Gosse's muse is fond of masquerading—and she does it very gracefully, too—in a classical dress. In such poems as the "Suppliant" he catches the very spirit, the unadorned sweetness, of the Greek Anthology. But this classical flavour belongs essentially to his earlier work. Mr. Gosse has within himself the untainted Greek spirit, and has grown to feel more and more, I venture to believe, that there is no need to shift his readers to an earlier age and a sunnier scenery: that the ardent natural sense of enjoyment, without morbidity even in its sadness, which is the essence of Greek feeling, needs no setting to declare itself. It can exist in London smoke, on the promontory with its short turf, in the Devonshire orchard. If this be so, the instinct which has led him gradually to abjure the earlier forms is a true one.
Of the poems which have a philosophical motive—not a numerous class—we may take "Verdleigh Coppice" (New Poems, p. 74) as a type. It is a sensitive description of the horror that creeps over even the most thoughtless heart on realising that below the surface of nature in her most peaceful moods lies a whole world of death and strife. But this leads to no Puritan or melancholy conclusion. "I learn," he says,in the exquisite stanza with which the poem concludes,
I learn 'tis best in all things to hold living very lightly,Taste the perfumes of the fir-wood, but not linger theretoo long,Lest the mazes of the forest lead to foulnesses unsightly,And a haunting horror clash upon the night-bird's liquidsong.
Mr. Gosse's latest volume,In Russet and Silver, shows, as we have said, the true and gentle development of this happy philosophy. From end to end it breathes the genial resignation of one who feels a happy youth depart with promise of calm and gracious hours to come. But at the same time, as far as poetical power goes, it is incomparably stronger than any of the author's previous work. The noble dedication to "Tusitala in Vailima" (Mr. R. L. Stevenson in Samoa) is the high-water mark of Mr. Gosse's genius. The haunting melody of this poem, its serene and equable sweep, exalt the writer among his contemporaries; although for ardent feeling and pure workmanship the idyll entitled "A Tragedy without Words" ranks nearly as high.
But we must pass to the technical consideration of Mr. Gosse's art.
In the first place, he is singularly free from mannerism, and his style has clarified itself every year. It would be difficult for the most ingenious imitator to produce a poem which should be indisputablyin Mr. Gosse's manner. There is an equable lucidity about his expression; it is never necessary to pause in order to adjust the sense of a passage. Robert Browning, perhaps, of contemporary poets, presents the most acute contrast to Mr. Gosse. Browning's style may be compared to a Swiss pasture, where the green meadows which form the foreground of a sublime landscape are yet cumbered with awkward blocks and boulders—things not without a certain rough dignity of their own, but essentially out of place. Mr. Gosse's poems, on the other hand, are like trim meadow-lands, with wealth of wood and water, where the pilgrim can linger without fear of obstacles or catastrophes.
Another salient characteristic of Mr. Gosse is the entire absence of errors of taste. There is nothing that can jar on the most sensitive reader either in feeling or expression; and in this he may be called somewhat of a reactionary when compared with the tendency of much modern poetry. There is, moreover, a sweetness and simplicity about his handling both of metre and rhyme which never degenerates into commonplace, and yet is never affected. The only trace of affectation, indeed, is in a certain dabbling, in earlier work, with names of jewels such as "chrysoprase," and plants such as "euphrasy" and "agrimony." It may be doubted whether such names—for the introduction of which intoour poetry Mrs. Browning is largely responsible—ever succeed in giving true or accurate vividness to a picture, for the simple reason that most readers, and, we fear, many writers, have no idea what jewel or flower is intended.
Lastly, in the difficult matter of epithets Mr. Gosse is a master. Nowadays, when all ordinary combinations of adjectives and nouns have been employed in poetry, the poet must give special attention to epithets which shall arrest and please, shall be, in fact, almost paradoxical at first sight, yet shall justify themselves on examination. And here Mr. Gosse is singularly successful; without multiplying instances, let any reader judicially examine the two poems mentioned above, inIn Russet and Silver, where experiment in epithet is carried to the verge of daring, and say whether the adjectives do not drop into their places in a predestined fashion, like the swans which Virgil describes settling in the marsh:—"Aut capere, aut captas jam despectare videntur."