The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLetters on Literature

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLetters on LiteratureThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Letters on LiteratureAuthor: Andrew LangRelease date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1395]Most recently updated: December 31, 2020Language: EnglishCredits: Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David Price*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS ON LITERATURE ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Letters on LiteratureAuthor: Andrew LangRelease date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1395]Most recently updated: December 31, 2020Language: EnglishCredits: Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David Price

Title: Letters on Literature

Author: Andrew Lang

Release date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1395]Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS ON LITERATURE ***

Transcribed from the 1892 Longmans, Green, & Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

Contents:

Introductory: Of Modern English PoetryOf Modern English PoetryFieldingLongfellowA Friend of KeatsOn VirgilAucassin and NicolettePlotinus (A.D. 200-262)LucretiusTo a Young American Book-HunterRochefoucauldOf Vers de SociétéOn Vers de SociétéRichardsonGérard de NervalOn Books About Red MenAppendix IAppendix II

Dear Mr. Way,

After so many letters to people who never existed, may I venture a short one, to a person very real to me, though I have never seen him, and only know him by his many kindnesses? Perhaps you will add another to these by accepting the Dedication of a little work, of a sort experimental in English, and in prose, though Horace—in Latin and in verse—was successful with it long ago?

Very sincerely yours,

A. LANG.

To W. J. Way,Esq.Topeka,Kansas.

These Letters were originally published in theIndependentof New York. The idea of writing them occurred to the author after he had produced “Letters to Dead Authors.” That kind of Epistle was open to the objection that nobodywouldwrite so frankly to a correspondent about his own work, and yet it seemed that the form of Letters might be attempted again. TheLettres à Emilie sur la Mythologieare a well-known model, but Emilie was not an imaginary correspondent. The persons addressed here, on the other hand, are all people of fancy—the name of Lady Violet Lebas is an invention of Mr. Thackeray’s: gifted Hopkins is the minor poet in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Guardian Angel.” The author’s object has been to discuss a few literary topics with more freedom and personal bias than might be permitted in a graver kind of essay. The Letter on Samuel Richardson is by a lady more frequently the author’s critic than his collaborator.

To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas.

Dear Wincott,—You write to me, from your “bright home in the setting sun,” with the flattering information that you have read my poor “Letters to Dead Authors.” You are kind enough to say that you wish I would write some “Letters to Living Authors;” but that, I fear, is out of the question,—for me.

A thoughtful critic in theSpectatorhas already remarked that the great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles—if they could read them. Possibly not; but, like Prior, “I may write till they can spell”—an exercise of which ghosts are probably as incapable as was Matt’s little Mistress of Quality. But Living Authors are very different people, and it would be perilous, as well as impertinent, to direct one’s comments on them literally, in the French phrase, “to their address.” Yet there is no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form.

Our old English essays, the papers in theTatlerandSpectator, were originally nothing but letters. The vehicle permits a touch of personal taste, perhaps of personal prejudice. So I shall write my “Letters on Literature,” of the present and of the past, English, American, ancient, or modern, toyou, in your distant Kansas, or to such other correspondents as are kind enough to read these notes.

Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions. Poor Poetry! She is an ancient maiden of good family, and is led out first at banquets, though many would prefer to sit next some livelier and younger Muse, the lady of fiction, or even the chatteringsoubretteof journalism.Seniores priores: Poetry, if no longer very popular, is a dame of the worthiest lineage, and can boast a long train of gallant admirers, dead and gone. She has been much in courts. The old Greek tyrants loved her; great Rhamses seated her at his right hand; every prince had his singers. Now we dwell in an age of democracy, and Poetry wins but a feigned respect, more out of courtesy, and for old friendship’s sake, than for liking. Though so many write verse, as in Juvenal’s time, I doubt if many read it. “None but minstrels list of sonneting.” The purchasing public, for poetry, must now consist chiefly of poets, andtheyare usually poor.

Can anything speak more clearly of the decadence of the art than the birth of so many poetical “societies”? We have the Browning Society, the Shelley Society, the Shakespeare Society, the Wordsworth Society—lately dead. They all demonstrate that people have not the courage to study verse in solitude, and for their proper pleasure; men and women need confederates in this adventure. There is safety in numbers, and, by dint of tea-parties, recitations, discussions, quarrels and the like, Dr. Furnivall and his friends keep blowing the faint embers on the altar of Apollo. They cannot raise a flame!

In England we are in the odd position of having several undeniable poets, and very little new poetry worthy of the name. The chief singers have outlived, if not their genius, at all events its flowering time. Hard it is to estimate poetry, so apt we are, by our very nature, to prefer “the newest songs,” as Odysseus says men did even during the war of Troy. Or, following another ancient example, we say, like the rich niggards who neglected Theocritus, “Homer is enough for all.”

Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinking as dispassionately as we can, we still seem to read the name of Tennyson in the golden book of English poetry. I cannot think that he will ever fall to a lower place, or be among those whom only curious students pore over, like Gower, Drayton, Donne, and the rest. Lovers of poetry will always read him as they will read Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, and Chaucer. Look his defects in the face, throw them into the balance, and how they disappear before his merits! He is the last and youngest of the mighty race, born, as it were, out of due time, late, and into a feebler generation.

Let it be admitted that the gold is not without alloy, that he has a touch of voluntary affectation, of obscurity, even an occasional perversity, a mannerism, a set of favourite epithets (“windy” and “happy”). There is a momentary echo of Donne, of Crashaw, nay, in his earliest pieces, even a touch of Leigh Hunt. You detect it in pieces like “Lilian” and “Eleanore,” and the others of that kind and of that date.

Let it be admitted that “In Memoriam” has certain lapses in all that meed of melodious tears; that there are trivialities which might deserve (here is an example) “to line a box,” or to curl some maiden’s locks, that there are weaknesses of thought, that the poet now speaks of himself as a linnet, singing “because it must,” now dares to approach questions insoluble, and again declines their solution. What is all this but the changeful mood of grief? The singing linnet, like the bird in the old English heathen apologue, dashes its light wings painfully against the walls of the chamber into which it has flown out of the blind night that shall again receive it.

I do not care to dwell on the imperfections in that immortal strain of sympathy and consolation, that enchanted book of consecrated regrets. It is an easier if not more grateful task to note a certain peevish egotism of tone in the heroes of “Locksley Hall,” of “Maud,” of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere.” “You can’t think how poor a figure you make when you tell that story, sir,” said Dr. Johnson to some unlucky gentleman whose “figure” must certainly have been more respectable than that which is cut by these whining and peevish lovers of Maud and Cousin Amy.

Let it be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the “Idylls,” is like an Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, and a Lancelot for friend. The “Idylls,” with all their beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability, and love of talking with Vivien about what is not so respectable. One wishes, at times, that the “Morte d’Arthur” had remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished as Sophocles. But then we must have missed, with many other admirable things, the “Last Battle in the West.”

People who come after us will be more impressed than we are by the Laureate’s versatility. He has touched so many strings, from “Will Waterproof’s Monologue,” so far above Praed, to the agony of “Rizpah,” the invincible energy of “Ulysses,” the languor and the fairy music of the “Lotus Eaters,” the grace as of a Greek epigram which inspires the lines to Catullus and to Virgil. He is with Milton for learning, with Keats for magic and vision, with Virgil for graceful recasting of ancient golden lines, and, even in the latest volume of his long life, “we may tell from the straw,” as Homer says, “what the grain has been.”

There are many who make it a kind of religion to regard Mr. Browning as the greatest of living English poets. For him, too, one is thankful as for a veritable great poet; but can we believe that impartial posterity will rate him with the Laureate, or that so large a proportion of his work will endure? The charm of an enigma now attracts students who feel proud of being able to understand what others find obscure. But this attraction must inevitably become a stumbling-block.

Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question; probably the answer is that he often could not help himself. His darkest poems may be made out by a person of average intelligence who will read them as hard as, for example, he would find it necessary to read the “Logic” of Hegel. There is a story of two clever girls who set out to peruse “Sordello,” and corresponded with each other about their progress. “Somebody is dead in ‘Sordello,’” one of them wrote to her friend. “I don’t quite knowwhoit is, but it must make things a little clearer in the long run.” Alas! a copious use of the guillotine would scarcely clear the stage of “Sordello.” It is hardly to be hoped that “Sordello,” or “Red Cotton Night Cap Country,” or “Fifine,” will continue to be struggled with by posterity. But the mass of “Men and Women,” that unexampled gallery of portraits of the inmost hearts and secret minds of priests, prigs, princes, girls, lovers, poets, painters, must survive immortally, while civilization and literature last, while men care to know what is in men.

No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntary harshness of style, can destroy the merit of these poems, which have nothing like them in the letters of the past, and must remain without successful imitators in the future. They will last all the better for a certain manliness of religious faith—something sturdy and assured—not moved by winds of doctrine, not paltering with doubts, which is certainly one of Mr. Browning’s attractions in this fickle and shifting generation. He cannot be forgotten while, as he says—

“A sunset touch,A chorus ending of Euripides,”

remind men that they are creatures of immortality, and move “a thousand hopes and fears.”

If one were to write out of mere personal preference, and praise most that which best fits one’s private moods, I suppose I should place Mr. Matthew Arnold at the head of contemporary English poets. Reason and reflection, discussion and critical judgment, tell one that he is not quite there.

Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate, nor his versatile mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness. He had not the microscopic glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts, which tears the life out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the very heart from the victim. We know that, but yet Mr. Arnold’s poetry has our love; his lines murmur in our memory through all the stress and accidents of life. “The Scholar Gipsy,” “Obermann,” “Switzerland,” the melancholy majesty of the close of “Sohrab and Rustum,” the tenderness of those elegiacs on two kindred graves beneath the Himalayas and by the Midland Sea; the surge and thunder of “Dover Beach,” with its “melancholy, long-withdrawing roar;” these can only cease to whisper to us and console us in that latest hour when life herself ceases to “moan round with many voices.”

My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting, and too didactic, that he protests too much, and considers too curiously, that his best poems are, at most, “a chain of highly valuable thoughts.” It may be so; but he carries us back to “wet, bird-haunted English lawns;” like him “we know what white and purple fritillaries the grassy harvest of the river yields,” with him we try to practise resignation, and to give ourselves over to that spirit

“Whose purpose is not missed,While life endures, while things subsist.”

Mr. Arnold’s poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth’s was to his generation. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when nature does for him what his “lutin” did for Corneille, “takes the pen from his hand and writes for him.” But he has none of the creeping prose which, to my poor mind, invades even “Tintern Abbey.” He is, as Mr. Swinburne says, “the surest-footed” of our poets. He can give a natural and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient imaginings, as to “these bright and ancient snakes, that once were Cadmus and Harmonia.”

Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruder world coming to us “breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians.” But even the Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and Marsyas, comes more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold’s song, that beautiful song in “Empedocles on Etna,” which has the perfection of sculpture and the charm of the purest colour. It is full of the silver light of dawn among the hills, of the music of the loch’s dark, slow waves among the reeds, of the scent of the heather, and the wet tresses of the birch.

Surely, then, we have had great poets living among us, but the fountains of their song are silent, or flow but rarely over a clogged and stony channel. And who is there to succeed the two who are gone, or who shall be our poet, if the Master be silent? That is a melancholy question, which I shall try to answer (with doubt and dread enough) in my next letter.{1}

My dear Wincott,—I hear that a book has lately been published by an American lady, in which all the modern poets are represented. The singers have been induced to make their own selections, and put forward, as Mr. Browning says, their best foot, anapæst or trochee, or whatever it may be. My information goes further, and declares that there are but eighteen poets of England to sixty inspired Americans.

This Western collection of modern minstrelsy shows how very dangerous it is to write even on the English poetry of the day. Eighteen is long odds against a single critic, and Major Bellenden, in “Old Mortality,” tells us that three to one are odds as long as ever any warrior met victoriously, and that warrior was old Corporal Raddlebanes.

I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimate either the eighteen of England or the sixty of the States. It is enough to speak about three living poets, in addition to those masters treated of in my last letter. Two of the three you will have guessed at—Mr. Swinburne and Mr. William Morris. The third, I dare say, you do not know even by name. I think he is not one of the English eighteen—Mr. Robert Bridges. His muse has followed the epicurean maxim, and chosen the shadowy path,fallentis semita vitæ, where the dew lies longest on the grass, and the red rowan berries droop in autumn above the yellow St. John’s wort. But you will find her all the fresher for her country ways.

My knowledge of Mr. William Morris’s poetry begins in years so far away that they seem like reminiscences of another existence. I remember sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton’s ruined castle at St. Andrews, looking across the bay to the sunset, while some one repeated “Two Red Roses across the Moon.” And I remember thinking that the poem was nonsense. With Mr. Morris’s other early verses, “The Defence of Guinevere,” this song of the moon and the roses was published in 1858. Probably the little book won no attention; it is not popular even now. Yet the lyrics remain in memories which forget all but a general impression of the vast “Earthly Paradise,” that huge decorative poem, in which slim maidens and green-clad men, and waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich palaces are all mingled as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little by the wind of death. They are not living and breathing people, these persons of the fables; they are but shadows, beautiful and faint, and their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons. But the characters in the lyrics in “The Defence of Guinevere” are people of flesh and blood, under their chain armour and their velvet, and the trappings of their tabards.

There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr. Morris’s old Oxford days when the spirit of the Middle Ages entered into him, with all its contradictions of faith and doubt, and its earnest desire to enjoy this life to the full in war and love, or to make certain of a future in which war is not, and all love is pure heavenly. If one were to choose favourites from “The Defence of Guinevere,” they would be the ballads of “Shameful Death,” and of “The Sailing of the Sword,” and “The Wind,” which has the wind’s wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of “Porphyria’s Lover” in its burden.

The use of “colour-words,” in all these pieces, is very curious and happy. The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids, “the scarlet roofs of the good town,” in “The Sailing of the Sword,” make the poem a vivid picture. Then look at the mad, remorseful sea-rover, the slayer of his lady, in “The Wind”:

“For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behindIt is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the wind;On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind;If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far,And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard’s jar,And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war.”

“The Blue Closet,” which is said to have been written for some drawings of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic manner. Our brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-60, when Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were undergraduates. Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire these strange things, though “The Haystack in the Floods,” with its tragedy, must surely appeal to all who read poetry.

For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr. Morris’s long later poems, “The Earthly Paradise” especially, were less art than “art manufacture.” This may be an ungrateful and erroneous sentiment. “The Earthly Paradise,” and still more certainly “Jason,” are full of such pleasure as only poetry can give. As some one said of a contemporary politician, they are “good, but copious.” Even from narrative poetry Mr. Morris has long abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr. Matthew Arnold’s parable of “The Progress of Poetry.”

“The Mount is mute, the channel dry.”

Euripides has been called “the meteoric poet,” and the same title seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his name—I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediæval tale in prose—when he published “Atalanta in Calydon” in 1865. I remember taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford Union, and being instantly led captive by the beauty and originality of the verse.

There was this novel “meteoric” character in the poem: the writer seemed to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, “the blue cold fields and folds of air,” in all the primitive forces which were alive before this earth was; the naked vast powers that circle the planets and farthest constellations. This quality, and his varied and sonorous verse, and his pessimism, put into the mouth of a Greek chorus, were the things that struck one most in Mr. Swinburne. He was, above all, “a mighty-mouthed inventer of harmonies,” and one looked eagerly for his next poems. They came with disappointment and trouble.

The famous “Poems and Ballads” have become so well known that people can hardly understand the noise they made. I don’t wonder at the scandal, even now. I don’t see the fun of several of the pieces, except the mischievous fun of shocking your audience. However, “The Leper” and his company are chiefly boyish, in the least favourable sense of the word. They do not destroy the imperishable merit of the “Hymn to Proserpine” and the “Garden of Proserpine” and the “Triumph of Time” and “Itylus.”

Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one’s old opinion, that English poetry contains no verbal music more original, sonorous, and sweet than Mr. Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very young, remains an opinion unshaken. Twenty years ago, then, he had enabled the world to take his measure; he had given proofs of a true poet; he was learned too in literature as few poets have been since Milton, and, like Milton, skilled to make verse in the languages of the ancient world and in modern tongues. His French songs and Greek elegiacs are of great excellence; probably no scholar who was not also a poet could match his Greek lines on Landor.

What, then, is lacking to make Mr. Swinburne a poet of a rank even higher than that which he occupies? Who can tell? There is no science that can master this chemistry of the brain. He is too copious. “Bothwell” is long enough for six plays, and “Tristram of Lyonesse” is prolix beyond even mediæval narrative. He is too pertinacious; children are the joy of the world and Victor Hugo is a great poet; but Mr. Swinburne almost makes us excuse Herod and Napoleon III. by his endless odes to Hugo, and rondels to small boys and girls.Ne quid nimis, that is the golden rule which he constantly spurns, being too luxuriant, too emphatic, and as fond of repeating himself as Professor Freeman. Such are the defects of so noble a genius; thus perverse Nature has decided that it shall be, Nature which makes no ruby without a flaw.

The name of Mr. Robert Bridges is probably strange to many lovers of poetry who would like nothing better than to make acquaintance with his verse. But his verse is not so easily found. This poet never writes in magazines; his books have not appealed to the public by any sort of advertisement, only two or three of them have come forth in the regular way. The first was “Poems, by Robert Bridges, Batchelor of Arts in the University of Oxford.Parva seges satis est. London: Pickering, 1873.”

This volume was presently, I fancy, withdrawn, and the author has distributed some portions of it in succeeding pamphlets, or in books printed at Mr. Daniel’s private press in Oxford. In these, as in all Mr. Bridges’s poems, there is a certain austere and indifferent beauty of diction and a memory of the old English poets, Milton and the earlier lyrists. I remember being greatly pleased with the “Elegy on a Lady whom Grief for the Death of Her Betrothed Killed.”

“Let the priests go before, arrayed in white,And let the dark-stoled minstrels follow slowNext they that bear her, honoured on this night,And then the maidens in a double row,Each singing soft and low,And each on high a torch upstaying:Unto her lover lead her forth with light,With music and with singing, and with praying.”

This is a stately stanza.

In his first volume Mr. Bridges offered a few rondeaux and triolets, turning his back on all these things as soon as they became popular. In spite of their popularity I have the audacity to like them still, in their humble twittering way. Much more in his true vein were the lines, “Clear and Gentle Stream,” and all the other verses in which, like a true Etonian, he celebrates the beautiful Thames:

“There is a hill beside the silver Thames,Shady with birch and beech and odorous pine,And brilliant under foot with thousand gemsSteeply the thickets to his floods decline.Straight trees in every placeTheir thick tops interlace,And pendent branches trail their foliage fineUpon his watery face.* * * * *A reedy island guards the sacred bowerAnd hides it from the meadow, where in peaceThe lazy cows wrench many a scented flower,Robbing the golden market of the bees.And laden branches floatBy banks of myosote;And scented flag and golden fleur-de-lysDelay the loitering boat.”

* * * * *

A reedy island guards the sacred bowerAnd hides it from the meadow, where in peaceThe lazy cows wrench many a scented flower,Robbing the golden market of the bees.And laden branches floatBy banks of myosote;And scented flag and golden fleur-de-lysDelay the loitering boat.”

I cannot say how often I have read that poem, and how delightfully it carries the breath of our River through the London smoke. Nor less welcome are the two poems on spring, the “Invitation to the Country,” and the “Reply.” In these, besides their verbal beauty and their charming pictures, is a manly philosophy of Life, which animates Mr. Bridges’s more important pieces—his “Prometheus the Firebringer,” and his “Nero,” a tragedy remarkable for the representation of Nero himself, the luxurious human tiger. From “Prometheus” I make a short extract, to show the quality of Mr. Bridges’s blank verse:

“Nor is there any spirit on earth astir,Nor ’neath the airy vault, nor yet beyondIn any dweller in far-reaching spaceNobler or dearer than the spirit of man:That spirit which lives in each and will not die,That wooeth beauty, and for all good thingsUrgeth a voice, or still in passion sigheth,And where he loveth, draweth the heart with him.”

Mr. Bridges’s latest book is his “Eros and Psyche” (Bell & Sons, who publish the “Prometheus”). It is the old story very closely followed, and beautifully retold, with a hundred memories of ancient poets: Homer, Dante, Theocritus, as well as of Apuleius.

I have named Mr. Bridges here because his poems are probably all but unknown to readers well acquainted with many other English writers of late days. On them, especially on actual contemporaries or juniors in age, it would be almost impertinent for me to speak to you; but, even at that risk, I take the chance of directing you to the poetry of Mr. Bridges. I owe so much pleasure to its delicate air, that, if speech be impertinence, silence were ingratitude.{2}

To Mrs. Goodhart, in the Upper Mississippi Valley.

Dear Madam,—Many thanks for the New York newspaper you have kindly sent me, with the statistics of book-buying in the Upper Mississippi Valley. Those are interesting particulars which tell one so much about the taste of a community.

So the Rev. E. P. Roe is your favourite novelist there; a thousand of his books are sold for every two copies of the works of Henry Fielding? This appears to me to speak but oddly for taste in the Upper Mississippi Valley. On Mr. Roe’s works I have no criticism to pass, for I have not read them carefully.

But I do think your neighbours lose a great deal by neglecting Henry Fielding. You will tell me he is coarse (which I cannot deny); you will remind me of what Dr. Johnson said, rebuking Mrs. Hannah More. “I never saw Johnson really angry with me but once,” writes that sainted maiden lady. “I alluded to some witty passage in ‘Tom Jones.’” He replied: “I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am sorry to hear you have read it; a confession which no modest lady should ever make.”

You remind me of this, and that Johnson was no prude, and that his age was tolerant. You add that the literary taste of the Upper Mississippi Valley is much more pure than the waters of her majestic river, and that you only wish you knew who the two culprits were that bought books of Fielding’s.

Ah, madam, how shall I answer you? Remember that if you have Johnson on your side, on mine I have Mrs. More herself, a character purer than “the consecrated snow that lies on Dian’s lap.” Again, we cannot believe Johnson was fair to Fielding, who had made his friend, the author of “Pamela,” very uncomfortable by his jests. Johnson owned that he read all “Amelia” at one sitting. Could so worthy a man have been so absorbed by an unworthy book?

Once more, I am not recommending Fielding to boys and girls. “Tom Jones” was one of the works that Lydia Languish hid under the sofa; even Miss Languish did not care to be caught with that humorous foundling. “Fielding was the last of our writers who drew a man,” Mr. Thackeray said, “and he certainly did not study from a draped model.”

For these reasons, and because his language is often unpolished, and because his morality (that he is always preaching) is not for “those that eddy round and round,” I do not desire to see Fielding popular among Miss Alcott’s readers. But no man who cares for books can neglect him, and many women are quite manly enough, have good sense and good taste enough, to benefit by “Amelia,” by much of “Tom Jones.” I don’t say by “Joseph Andrews.” No man ever respected your sex more than Henry Fielding. What says his reformed rake, Mr. Wilson, in “Joseph Andrews”?

“To say the Truth, I do not perceive that Inferiority of Understanding which the Levity of Rakes, the Dulness of Men of Business, and the Austerity of the Learned would persuade us of in Women. As for my Wife, I declare I have found none of my own Sex capable of making juster Observations on Life, or of delivering them more agreeably, nor do I believe any one possessed of a faithfuller or braver Friend.”

He has no other voice wherein to speak of a happy marriage. Can you find among our genteel writers of this age, a figure more beautiful, tender, devoted, and in all good ways womanly than Sophia Western’s? “Yes,” you will say; “but the man must have been a brute who could give her to Tom Jones, to ‘that fellow who sold himself,’ as Colonel Newcome said.” “There you have me at an avail,” in the language of the old romancers. There we touch the centre of Fielding’s morality, a subject ill to discuss, a morality not for everyday preaching.

Fielding distinctly takes himself for a moralist. He preaches as continually as Thackeray. And his moral is this: “Let a man be kind, generous, charitable, tolerant, brave, honest—and we may pardon him vices of young blood, and the stains of adventurous living.” Fielding has no mercy on a seducer. Lovelace would have fared worse with him than with Richardson, who, I verily believe, admired that infernal (excuse me) coward and villain. The case of young Nightingale, in “Tom Jones,” will show you what Fielding thought of such gallants. Why, Tom himself preaches to Nightingale. “Miss Nancy’s Interest alone, and not yours, ought to be your sole Consideration,” cried Thomas, . . . “and the very best and truest Honour, which is Goodness, requires it of you,” that is, requires that Nightingale shall marry Miss Nancy.

How Tom Jones combined these sentiments, which were perfectly honest, with his own astonishing lack ofretenue, and with Lady Bellaston, is just the puzzle. We cannot very well argue about it. I only ask you to let Jones in his right mind partly excuse Jones in a number of very delicate situations. If you ask me whether Sophia had not, after her marriage, to be as forgiving as Amelia, I fear I must admit that probably it was so. But Dr. Johnson himself thought little of that.

I am afraid our only way of dealing with Fielding’s morality is to take the best of it and leave the remainder alone. Here I find that I have unconsciously agreed with that well-known philosopher, Mr. James Boswell, the younger, of Auchinleck:

“The moral tendency of Fielding’s writings . . . is ever favourable to honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevolent and generous affections. He who is as good as Fielding would make him is an amiable member of society, and may be led on by more regulated instructions to a higher state of ethical perfection.”

Let us be as good and simple as Adams, without his vanity and his oddity, as brave and generous as Jones, without Jones’s faults, and what a world of men and women it will become! Fielding did not paint that unborn world, he sketched the world he knew very well. He found that respectable people were often perfectly blind to the duties of charity in every sense of the word. He found that the only man in a whole company who pitied Joseph Andrews, when stripped and beaten by robbers was a postilion with defects in his moral character. In short, he knew that respectability often practised none but the strictly self-regarding virtues, and that poverty and recklessness did not always extinguish a native goodness of heart. Perhaps this discovery made him leniently disposed to “characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty, that I,” say the author of “Pamela,” “could not be interested for any one of them.”

How amusing Richardson always was about Fielding! How jealousy, spite, and the confusion of mind that befogs a prig when he is not taken seriously, do darken the eyes of the author of “those deplorably tedious lamentations, ‘Clarissa’ and ‘Sir Charles Grandison,’” as Horace Walpole calls them!

Fielding asks his Muse to give him “humour and good humour.” What novelist was ever so rich in both? Who ever laughed at mankind with so much affection for mankind in his heart? This love shines in every book of his. The poor have all his good-will, and in him an untired advocate and friend. What a life the poor led in the England of 1742! There never before was such tyranny without a servile insurrection. I remember a dreadful passage in “Joseph Andrews,” where Lady Booby is trying to have Fanny, Joseph’s sweetheart, locked up in prison:—

“It would do a Man good,” says her accomplice, Scout, “to see his Worship, our Justice, commit a Fellow toBridewell; he takes so much pleasure in it. And when once we ha’ ’um there, we seldom hear any more o’ ’um. He’s either starved or eat up by Vermin in a Month’s Time.”

This England, with its dominant Squires, who behaved much like robber barons on the Rhine, was the merry England Fielding tried to turn from some of its ways. I seriously do believe that, with all its faults, it was a better place, with a better breed of men, than our England of to-day. But Fielding satirized intolerable injustice.

He would be a Reformer, a didactic writer. If we are to have nothing but “Art for Art’s sake,” that burly body of Harry Fielding’s must even go to the wall. The first Beau Didapper of a critic that passes can shove him aside. He preaches like Thackeray; he writes “with a purpose” like Dickens—obsolete old authors. His cause is judged, and into Bridewell he goes, ifl’Art pour l’Artis all the literary law and the prophets.

But Fielding cannot be kept in prison long. His noble English, his sonorous voice must be heard. There is somewhat inexpressibly heartening, to me, in the style of Fielding. One seems to be carried along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one’s self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, of delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water. He is a scholar, nay more, as Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding has his innocent pedantry. He likes to quote Greek (fancy quoting Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to make the rogues of printers set it up correctly. He likes to air his ideas on Homer, to bring in a piece of Aristotle—not hackneyed—to show you that if he is writing about “characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty,” he is yet a student and a critic.

Mr. Samuel Richardson, a man of little reading, according to Johnson, was, I doubt, sadly put to it to understand Booth’s conversations with the author who remarked that “Perhaps Mr. Pope followed the French Translations. I observe, indeed, he talks much in the Notes of Madame Dacier and Monsieur Eustathius.” What knew Samuel of Eustathius? I not only can forgive Fielding his pedantry; I like it! I like a man of letters to be a scholar, and his little pardonable display and ostentation of his Greek only brings him nearer to us, who have none of his genius, and do not approach him but in his faults. They make him more human; one loves him for them as he loves Squire Western, with all his failings. Delightful, immortal Squire!

It was not he, it was another Tory Squire that called out “Hurray for old England! Twenty thousand honest Frenchmen are landed in Sussex.” But itwasWestern that talked of “One Acton, that the Story Book says was turned into a Hare, and his own Dogs kill’d ’un, and eat ’un.” And have you forgotten the popular discussion (during the Forty-five) of the affairs of the Nation, which, as Squire Western said, “all of us understand”? Said the Puppet-Man, “I don’t care what Religion comes, provided the Presbyterians are not uppermost, for they are enemies to Puppet-Shows.” But the Puppet-Man had no vote in 1745. Now, to our comfort, he can and does exercise the glorious privilege of the franchise.

There is no room in this epistle for Fielding’s glorious gallery of characters—for Lady Bellaston, who remains a lady in her debaucheries, and is therefore so unlike our modern representative of her class, Lady Betty, in Miss Broughton’s “Doctor Cupid;” for Square, and Thwackum, and Trulliber, and the jealous spite of Lady Booby, and Honour, that undying lady’s maid, and Partridge, and Captain Blifil and Amelia, the fair and kind and good!

It is like the whole world of that old England—the maids of the Inn, the parish clerk, the two sportsmen, the hosts of the taverns, the beaux, the starveling authors—all alive; all (save the authors) full of beef and beer; a cudgel in every fist, every man ready for a brotherly bout at fisticuffs. What has become of it, the lusty old militant world? What will become of us, and why do we prefer to Fielding—a number of meritorious moderns? Who knows? But do not letusprefer anything to our English follower of Cervantes, our wise, merry, learned Sancho, trudging on English roads, like Don Quixote on the paths of Spain.

But I cannot convert you. You will turn to some story about store-clerks and summer visitors. Such is his fate who argues with the fair.

To Walter Mainwaring, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.

My dear Mainwaring,—You are very good to ask me to come up and listen to a discussion, by the College Browning Society, of the minor characters in “Sordello;” but I think it would suit me better, if you didn’t mind, to come up when the May races are on. I am not deeply concerned about the minor characters in “Sordello,” and have long reconciled myself to the conviction that I must pass through this pilgrimage without hearing Sordello’s story told in an intelligible manner. Your letter, however, set me a-voyaging about my bookshelves, taking up a volume of poetry here and there.

What an interesting tract might be written by any one who could remember, and honestly describe, the impressions that the same books have made on him at different ages! There is Longfellow, for example. I have not read much in him for twenty years. I take him up to-day, and what a flood of memories his music brings with it! To me it is like a sad autumn wind blowing over the woods, blowing over the empty fields, bringing the scents of October, the song of a belated bird, and here and there a red leaf from the tree. There is that autumnal sense of things fair and far behind, in his poetry, or, if it is not there, his poetry stirs it in our forsaken lodges of the past. Yes, it comes to one out of one’s boyhood; it breathes of a world very vaguely realized—a world of imitative sentiments and forebodings of hours to come. Perhaps Longfellow first woke me to that later sense of what poetry means, which comes with early manhood.

Before, one had been content, I am still content, with Scott in his battle pieces; with the ballads of the Border. Longfellow had a touch of reflection you do not find, of course, in battle poems, in a boy’s favourites, such as “Of Nelson and the North,” or “Ye Mariners of England.”

His moral reflections may seem obvious now, and trite; they were neither when one was fifteen. To read the “Voices of the Night,” in particular—those early pieces—is to be back at school again, on a Sunday, reading all alone on a summer’s day, high in some tree, with a wide prospect of gardens and fields.

There is that mysterious note in the tone and measure which one first found in Longfellow, which has since reached our ears more richly and fully in Keats, in Coleridge, in Tennyson. Take, for example,

“The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair,The best-beloved Night!”

Is not that version of Euripides exquisite—does it not seem exquisite still, though this is not the quality you expect chiefly from Longfellow, though you rather look to him for honest human matter than for an indefinable beauty of manner?

I believe it is the manner, after all, of the “Psalm of Life” that has made it so strangely popular. People tell us, excellent people, that it is “as good as a sermon,” that they value it for this reason, that its lesson has strengthened the hearts of men in our difficult life. They say so, and they think so: but the poem is not nearly as good as a sermon; it is not even coherent. But it really has an original cadence of its own, with its double rhymes; and the pleasure of this cadence has combined, with a belief that they are being edified, to make readers out of number consider the “Psalms of Life” a masterpiece. You—my learned prosodist and student of Browning and Shelley—will agree with me that it isnota masterpiece. But I doubt if you have enough of the experience brought by years to tolerate the opposite opinion, as your elders can.

How many other poems of Longfellow’s there are that remind us of youth, and of those kind, vanished faces which were around us when we read “The Reaper and the Flowers”! I read again, and, as the poet says,

“Then the forms of the departedEnter at the open door,The belovèd, the true-heartedCome to visit me once more.”

Compare that simple strain, you lover of Théophile Gautier, with Théo’s own “Château de Souvenir” in “Emaux et Camées,” and confess the truth, which poet brings the break into the reader’s voice? It is not the dainty, accomplished Frenchman, the jeweller in words; it is the simpler speaker of our English tongue who stirs you as a ballad moves you. I find one comes back to Longfellow, and to one’s old self of the old years. I don’t know a poem “of the affections,” as Sir Barnes Newcome would have called it, that I like better than Thackeray’s “Cane-bottomed Chair.” Well, “The Fire of Driftwood” and this other of Longfellow’s with its absolute lack of pretence, its artful avoidance of art, is not less tender and true.

“And she sits and gazes at meWith those deep and tender eyes,Like the stars, so still and saintlike,Looking downward from the skies.”

It is from the skies that they look down, those eyes which once read the “Voices of the Night” from the same book with us, how long ago! So long ago that one was half-frightened by the legend of the “Beleaguered City.” I know the ballad brought the scene to me so vividly that I expected, any frosty night, to see how

“The white pavilions rose and fellOn the alarmed air;”

and it was down the valley of Ettrick, beneath the dark “Three Brethren’s Cairn,” that I half-hoped to watch when “the troubled army fled”—fled with battered banners of mist drifting through the pines, down to the Tweed and the sea. The “Skeleton in Armour” comes out once more as terrific as ever, and the “Wreck of the Hesperus” touches one in the old, simple way after so many, many days of verse-reading and even verse-writing.

In brief, Longfellow’s qualities are so mixed with what the reader brings, with so many kindliest associations of memory, that one cannot easily criticize him in cold blood. Even in spite of this friendliness and affection which Longfellow wins, I can see, of course, that he does moralize too much. The first part of his lyrics is always the best; the part where he is dealing directly with his subject. Then comes the “practical application” as preachers say, and I feel now that it is sometimes uncalled for, disenchanting, and even manufactured.

Look at his “Endymion.” It is the earlier verses that win you:

“And silver white the river gleamsAs if Diana in her dreamsHad dropt her silver bowUpon the meadows low.”

That is as good as Ronsard, and very like him in manner and matter. But the moral and consolatoryapplicationis too long—too much dwelt on:

“Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,Love gives itself, but is not bought.”

Excellent; but there are four weak, moralizing stanzas at the close, and not only does the poet “moralize his song,” but the moral is feeble, and fantastic, and untrue. There are, though he denies it, myriads of persons now of whom it cannot be said that

“Some heart, though unknown,Responds unto his own.”

If it were true, the reflection could only console a school-girl.

A poem like “My Lost Youth” is needed to remind one of what the author really was, “simple, sensuous, passionate.” What a lovely verse this is, a verse somehow inspired by the breath of Longfellow’s favourite Finnish “Kalevala,” “a verse of a Lapland song,” like a wind over pines and salt coasts:

“I remember the black wharves and the slips,And the sea-tide, tossing free,And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,And the beauty and the mystery of the ships,And the magic of the sea.”

Thus Longfellow, though not a very great magician and master of language—not a Keats by any means—has often, by sheer force of plain sincerity, struck exactly the right note, and matched his thought with music that haunts us and will not be forgotten:

“Ye open the eastern windows,That look towards the sun,Where thoughts are singing swallows,And the brooks of morning run.”

There is a picture of Sandro Botticelli’s, the Virgin seated with the Child by a hedge of roses, in a faint blue air, as of dawn in Paradise. This poem of Longfellow’s, “The Children’s Hour,” seems, like Botticelli’s painting, to open a door into the paradise of children, where their angels do ever behold that which is hidden from men—what no man hath seen at any time.

Longfellow is exactly the antithesis of Poe, who, with all his science of verse and ghostly skill, has no humanity, or puts none of it into his lines. One is the poet of Life, and everyday life; the other is the poet of Death, and ofbizarreshapes of death, from which Heaven deliver us!

Neither of them shows any sign of being particularly American, though Longfellow, in “Evangeline” and “Hiawatha,” and the “New England Tragedies,” sought his topics in the history and traditions of the New World.

To me “Hiawatha” seems by far the best of his longer efforts; it is quite full of sympathy with men and women, nature, beasts, birds, weather, and wind and snow. Everything lives with a human breath, as everything should live in a poem concerned with these wild folk, to whom all the world, and all in it, is personal as themselves. Of course there are lapses of style in so long a piece. It jars on us in the lay of the mystic Chibiabos, the boy Persephone of the Indian Eleusinia, to be told that

“the gentle ChibiabosSang in tones of deep emotion!”

“Tones of deep emotion” may pass in a novel, but not in this epic of the wild wood and the wild kindreds, an epic in all ways a worthy record of those dim, mournful races which have left no story of their own, only here and there a ruined wigwam beneath the forest leaves.

A poet’s life is no affair, perhaps, of ours. Who does not wish he knew as little of Burn’s as of Shakespeare’s? Of Longfellow’s there is nothing to know but good, and his poetry testifies to it—his poetry, the voice of the kindest and gentlest heart that poet ever bore. I think there are not many things in poets’ lives more touching than his silence, in verse, as to his own chief sorrow. A stranger intermeddles not with it, and he kept secret his brief lay on that insuperable and incommunicable regret. Much would have been lost had all poets been as reticent, yet one likes him better for it than if he had given us a new “Vita Nuova.”

What an immense long way I have wandered from “Sordello,” my dear Mainwaring, but when a man turns to his books, his thoughts, like those of a boy, “are long, long thoughts.” I have not written on Longfellow’s sonnets, for even you, impeccable sonneteer, admit that you admire them as much as I do.

To Thomas Egerton, Esq., Lothian College, Oxford.

Dear Egerton,—Yes, as you say, Mr. Sidney Colvin’s new “Life of Keats”{3}has only one fault, it’s too short. Perhaps, also, it is almost too studiously free from enthusiasm. But when one considers how Keats (like Shelley) has been gushed about, and how easy it is to gush about Keats, one can only thank Mr. Colvin for his example of reserve. What a good fellow Keats was! How really manly and, in the best sense, moral he seems, when one compares his life and his letters with the vagaries of contemporary poets who lived longer than he, though they, too, died young, and who left more work, though not better, never so good, perhaps, as Keats’s best.

However, it was not of Keats that I wished to write, but of his friend, John Hamilton Reynolds.Noscitur a sociis—a man is known by the company he keeps. Reynolds, I think, must have been excellent company, if we may judge him by his writings. He comes into Lord Houghton’s “Life and Letters of Keats” very early (vol. i. p. 30). We find the poet writing to him in the April of 1817, from the Isle of Wight. “I shall forthwith begin my ‘Endymion,’ which I hope I shall have got some way with before you come, when we will read our verses in a delightful place I have set my heart upon, near the castle.” Keats ends “your sincere friend,” and a man to whom Keats was a sincere friend had some occasion for pride.

About Reynolds’s life neither time nor space permits me to say very much, if I knew very much, which I don’t. He was the son of a master in one of our large schools. He went to the Bar. He married a sister of Thomas Hood. He wrote, like Hood, in theLondon Magazine. With Hood for ally, he published “Odes and Addresses to Great People;” the third edition, which I have here, is of 1826. The late relations of the brothers-in-law were less happy; possibly the ladies of their families quarrelled; that is usually the way of the belligerent sex.

Reynolds died in the enjoyment of a judicial office in the Isle of Wight, some thirty years later than his famous friend, the author of “Endymion.” “It is to be lamented,” says Lord Houghton, “that Mr. Reynolds’s own remarkable verse is not better known.” Let us try to know it a little better.

I have not succeeded in getting Reynolds’s first volume of poems, which was published before “Endymion.” It contained some Oriental melodies, and won a careless good word from Byron. The earliest work of his I can lay my hand on is “The Fancy, a Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray’s Inn, Student at Law, with a brief memoir of his Life.” There is a motto from Wordsworth:

“Frank are the sports, the stains are fugitive.”{4}

It was the old palmy time of the Ring. Every one knows how Byron took lessons from Jackson the boxer; how Shelley had a fight at Eton in which he quoted Homer, but was licked by a smaller boy; how Christopher North whipped the professional pugilist; how Keats himself never had enough of fighting at school, and beat the butcher afterwards. His friend Reynolds, also, liked a set-to with the gloves. His imaginary character, Peter Corcoran, is a poetical lad, who becomes possessed by a passion for prize-fighting. It seems odd in a poet, but “the stains are fugitive.”

We would liefer see a young man rejoicing in his strength and improving his science, than loafing about with long hair and giving anxious thought to the colour of his necktie. It is a disinterested preference, as fighting was never myforte, any more than it was Artemus Ward’s. At school I was “more remarkable for what I suffered than for what I achieved.”

Peter Corcoran “fought nearly as soon as he could walk,” wherein he resembled Keats, and part of his character may even have been borrowed from the author of the “Ode to the Nightingale.” Peter fell in love, wrote poetry, witnessed a “mill” at the Fives-Court, and became the Laureate of the Ring. “He has made a good set-to with Eales, Tom Belcher (the monarch of thegloves!), and Turner, and it is known that he has parried the difficult and ravaging hand even of Randall himself.” “The difficult and ravaging hand”—there is a style for you!

Reynolds has himself the enthusiasm of his hero; let us remember that Homer, Virgil, and Theocritus have all described spirited rallies with admiration and good taste. From his dissipation in cider-cellars and coal-holes, this rival of Tom and Jerry wrote a sonnet that applies well enough to Reynolds’s own career:

“Were this a feather from an eagle’s wing,And thou, my tablet white! a marble tileTaken from ancient Jove’s majestic pile—And might I dip my feather in some spring,Adown Mount Ida threadlike wandering:—And were my thoughts brought from some starry isleIn Heaven’s blue sea—I then might with a smileWrite down a hymn to fame, and proudly sing!“But I am mortal: and I cannot writeAught that may foil the fatal wing of Time.Silent, I look at Fame: I cannot climbTo where her Temple is—Not mine the might:—I have some glimmering of what is sublime—But, ah! it is a most inconstant light.”

“But I am mortal: and I cannot writeAught that may foil the fatal wing of Time.Silent, I look at Fame: I cannot climbTo where her Temple is—Not mine the might:—I have some glimmering of what is sublime—But, ah! it is a most inconstant light.”

Keats might have written this sonnet in a melancholy mood.

“About this time he (Peter) wrote a slang description of a fight he had witnessed to a lady.” Unlucky Peter! “Was ever woman in this manner wooed?” The lady “glanced her eye over page after page in hopes of meeting with something that was intelligible,” and no wonder she did not care for a long letter “devoted to the subject of a mill between Belasco and the Brummagem youth.” Peter was so ill-advised as to appear before her with glorious scars, “two black eyes” in fact, and she “was inexorably cruel.” Peter did not survive her disdain. “The lady still lives, and is married”! It is ever thus!

Peter’s published works contain an American tragedy. Peter says he got it from a friend, who was sending him an American copy of “Guy Mannering” “to present to a young lady who, strange to say, read books and wore pockets,” virtues unusual in the sex. One of the songs (on the delights of bull-baiting) contains the most vigorous lines I have ever met, but they aretoovigorous for our lax age. The tragedy ends most tragically, and the moral comes in “better late,” says the author, “than never.” The other poems are all very lively, and very much out of date. Poor Peter!

Reynolds was married by 1818, and it is impossible to guess whether the poems of Peter Corcoran did or did not contain allusions to his own more lucky love affair. “Upon my soul,” writes Keats, “I have been getting more and more close to you every day, ever since I knew you, and now one of the first pleasures I look to is your happy marriage.” Reynolds was urging Keats to publish the “Pot of Basil” “as an answer to the attack made on me inBlackwood’s Magazineand theQuarterly Review.”

Next Keats writes that he himself “never was in love, yet the voice and shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.” On September 22, 1819, Keats sent Reynolds the “Ode to Autumn,” than which there is no more perfect poem in the language of Shakespeare. This was the last of his published letters to Reynolds. He was dying, haunted eternally by that woman’s shape and voice.

Reynolds’s best-known book, if any of them can be said to be known at all, was published under the name of John Hamilton. It is “The Garden of Florence, and Other Poems” (Warren, London, 1821). There is a dedication—to his young wife.

“Thou hast entreated me to ‘write no more,’” and he, as an elderly “man of twenty-four,” promises to obey. “The lily and myself henceforth aretwo,” he says, implying that he and the lily have previously been “one,” a quaint confession from the poet of Peter Corcoran. There is something very pleasant in the graceful regret and obedience of this farewell to the Muse. He says to Mrs. Reynolds:

“I will not tell the world that thou hast chidMy heart for worshipping the idol Muse;That thy dark eye has given its gentle lidTears for my wanderings; I may not chooseWhen thou dost speak but do as I am bid,—And therefore to the roses and the dews,Very respectfully I make my bow;—And turn my back upon the tulips now.”

“The chief poems in the collection, taken from Boccaccio, were to have been associated with tales from the same source, intended to have been written by a friend; but illness on his part and distracting engagements on mine, prevented us from accomplishing our plan at the time; and Death now, to my deep sorrow, has frustrated it for ever!”

I cannot but quote what follows, the tribute to Keats’s kindness, to the most endearing quality our nature possesses; the quality that was Scott’s in such a winning degree, that was so marked in Molière,

“He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I ever possessed, and yet he was not kinder, perhaps, to me than to others. His intense mind and powerful feeling would, I truly believe, have done the world some service had his life been spared—but he was of too sensitive a nature—and thus he was destroyed! One story he completed, and that is to me now the most pathetic poem in existence.”

It was “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.”

The “Garden of Florence” is written in the couplets of “Endymion,” and is a beautiful version of the tale once more retold by Alfred de Musset in “Simone.” From “The Romance of Youth” let me quote one stanza, which applies to Keats:

“He read and dreamt of young Endymion,Till his romantic fancy drank its fill;He saw that lovely shepherd sitting lone,Watching his white flocks upon Ida’s hill;The Moon adored him—and when all was still,And stars were wakeful—she would earthward stray,And linger with her shepherd love, untilThe hooves of the steeds that bear the car of day,Struck silver light in the east, and then she waned away!”

It was on Latmos, not Ida, that Endymion shepherded his flocks; but that is of no moment, except to schoolmasters. There are other stanzas of Reynolds worthy of Keats; for example, this on the Fairy Queen:

“Her bodice was a pretty sight to see;Ye who would know its colour,—be a thiefOf the rose’s muffled bud from off the tree;And for your knowledge, strip it leaf by leafSpite of your own remorse or Flora’s grief,Till ye have come unto its heart’s pale hue;The last, last leaf, which is the queen,—the chiefOf beautiful dim blooms: ye shall not rue,At sight of that sweet leaf the mischief which ye do.”

One does not know when to leave off gathering buds in the “Garden of Florence.” Even after Shakespeare, and after Keats, this passage on wild flowers has its own charm:

“We gathered wood flowers,—some blue as the veinO’er Hero’s eyelid stealing, and some as white,In the clustering grass, as rich Europa’s handNested amid the curls on Jupiter’s forehead,What time he snatched her through the startled waves;—Some poppies, too, such as in Enna’s meadowsForsook their own green homes and parent stalks,To kiss the fingers of Proserpina:And some were small as fairies’ eyes, and brightAs lovers’ tears!”

I wish I had room for three or four sonnets, the Robin Hood sonnets to Keats, and another on a picture of a lady. Excuse the length of this letter, and read this:

“Sorrow hath made thine eyes more dark and keen,And set a whiter hue upon thy cheeks,—And round thy pressèd lips drawn anguish-streaks,And made thy forehead fearfully serene.Even in thy steady hair her work is seen,For its still parted darkness—till it breaksIn heavy curls upon thy shoulders—speaksLike the stern wave, how hard the storm hath been!“So looked that hapless lady of the South,Sweet Isabella! at that dreary partOf all the passion’d hours of her youth;When her green Basil pot by brother’s artWas stolen away; so look’d her painèd mouthIn the mute patience of a breaking heart!”

“So looked that hapless lady of the South,Sweet Isabella! at that dreary partOf all the passion’d hours of her youth;When her green Basil pot by brother’s artWas stolen away; so look’d her painèd mouthIn the mute patience of a breaking heart!”

There let us leave him, the gay rhymer of prize-fighters and eminent persons—let us leave him in a serious hour, and with a memory of Keats.{5}

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