IV

IVLOUISE IMOGEN GUINEYSOME critic has said of Miss Guiney’s work, that to come suddenly upon it among other volumes of modern poetry is like coming upon a Greek temple in an American woodland; and the comparison is an apt one, though the temple should scarcely be Greek, for while the feeling and structure of the work are classic in atmosphere, they are not warm enough, sensuous enough, to be Greek. It would, indeed, be hard to say with what race classicism Miss Guiney’s work is tinctured. Rather say that she is a classic by temperament and has drawn to herself, as by chemical affinity, such things as are rare and choice in the world of books and life, and has fused them in the alembic of her own nature, until the resultant blend is something new and strange, having a racy tang and a flavor all its own, and yet with a hint of all the elements that went to its compounding.Most minds take on learning by a miscellaneous accretion that results in informationwithout individuality, but Miss Guiney hives in many fields and lands the quaint, the picturesque, the beautiful, to which her temperament calls her unerringly, and can no more be tempted to range outside her limit of attraction than a bee to waste his precious hours dipping into bloom that holds no nectar for him. To be sure, Miss Guiney’s range of attraction is wide, but it enlarges its own confines, and does not reach out to alien territory. It follows as a corollary to this fact that unless one be in the range of attraction with Miss Guiney, the subjects which claim her thought may be more or less alien to him, and the restrained, wholly individual manner of her work may be equally alien to his nature. He may require more warmth, more abandon, more of the element of to-day and to-morrow in the theme and mood; for Miss Guiney has little to do with the times and conditions in which she finds herself; contemporary life is only incidentally in her verse, and one would have difficulty from it in declaring her day and generation. Her poetry demands that synchronism of temperament by which one responds to her mood independent of the time or place to which it transports him.Illustration of Louise Imogen GuineyTake, for illustration, “A Friend’s Song forSimoisius,” with its charm of music, its beauty of expression, and its crystal clarity. Few would be unconscious of the poetic side of it; but to how many would the subject appeal? What’s Simoisius to them or they to Simoisius that they should weep for him? Let, however, this feeling for the atmosphere of myth and legend be added, and what charm do the lines take on:The breath of dew, and twilight’s grace,Be on the lonely battle-place;And to so young, so kind a face,The long, protecting grasses cling!(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)In rocky hollows cool and deep,The bees our boyhood hunted sleep;The early moon from Ida’s steepComes to the empty wrestling-ring,(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)Upon the widowed wind recedeNo echoes of the shepherd’s reed,And children without laughter leadThe war-horse to the watering.(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)Thou stranger, Ajax Telamon!What to the loveliest hast thou done,That ne’er with him a maid may runAcross the marigolds in spring?(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)· · · · ·The world to me has nothing dearBeyond the namesake river here:O Simois is wild and clear!And to his brink my heart I bring;(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)The rhyme scheme in this poem has a distinct fascination to the ear; there is music in the lucid words and in the rhythmic lines, climaxing in each stanza, and, moreover, every stanza is a picture, with a concrete relation to the whole. The poem illustrates several of Miss Guiney’s characteristics: first, the compactness of her verse. It is never pirouetting merely to show its grace; in other words, she does not let the unity of the idea escape in a profusion of imagery. She uses figure and symbol with an individual freshness of conception, but always that which is structural with the thought, so that one can rarely detach a stanza or even fugitive lines of her poems without a loss of value. She develops the theme without over-developing it, which is the restraint of the artist. The above poem illustrates, also, the white light which she throws upon herwords when clarity and simplicity are demanded by the form; whereas, in sonnets, in her dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” and in other forms of verse, her work is sometimes lacking in that clear, swiftly communicative quality which poetry should possess; but in her lyric inspirations, where the form and melody condition the diction, one may note the perfect clarity and flexibility which she attains, without loss of the rare and picturesque word-feeling that belongs so inseparably to her.The stanzas to “Athassal Abbey,” the “Footnote To A Famous Lyric,” the delicate “Lilac Song,” and many others blend the finer qualities of word and metre. With the exception of the last poem, however, they have not the emotional warmth that imbues several other of her lyrics, as the two “Irish Peasant Songs,” which are inspirations of sheer beauty, especially the first, in its subtlety of race-temperament and personal mood, left unanalyzed,—for a further hint would destroy it,—but holding spring and tears and youth in its wistful word and measure:I knead and I spin, but my life is low the while,Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile,Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,Why, from me that’s young, should the wild tears fall?The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams,They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill,And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin’s hedges call,The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!It is not surprising that William Black should have quoted this poem in one of his volumes, for it is certainly one of the most exquisite and temperamental of folk-songs. The second is wholly different in note, brimming over with the exuberance of the Celtic imagination, and fresh as the breath of spring which inspires it:’Tis the time o’ the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch,And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heavesIn little angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.· · · · ·’Tis the time o’ the year in early light and glad,The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;The downs are dripping nightly, the breathéd damps arise,Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling’s golden eyes,And lying in a row against the chilly North, the sheepInclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.The out-of-door atmosphere which Miss Guiney has managed to infuse into these lines is fairly palpable. What sense of moisture in the dew-heavy air is in the second stanza, and what elation and buoyancy of returning life vitalizes the first! While on this phase of her work there is another poem as magnetically charged, and full of ozone, but its objective side incidental to a subjective query which nature and science force to the lips:The spur is red upon the briar,The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;The wind shakes out the colored fireFrom lamps a-row on the sycamore;The tanager with flitting noteShows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;The mink is busy; herds againGo hillward in the honeyed rain;The midges meet. I cry to TheeWhose heartRemembers each of these: Thou artMy God who hast forgotten me.Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,The lined gulls in the offing ride;Along an edge of marshy ground,The shad-bush enters like a bride.Yon little clouds are washed of careThat climb the blue New England air,And almost merrily withalThe tree-frog plays at evenfallHis oboe in a mossy tree.So, too,Am I not Thine? Arise, undoThis fear Thou hast forgotten me.From the nature side these lines are pictures, taken each by each they are free-hand strokes with pigment. Note the picturesque quality, for illustration, in the words,Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,The lined gulls in the offing ride,and their imaginative vision with no hint of the fantastic; for one need only have it glimpsed before him to know that he has seen the same effect a score of times. Miss Guiney comes to the world without, as if no eyes but hers had looked upon it; she brings no other image upon the lens of her vision, and hence the imprint is as newly mirrored, and as fresh with each changing view as a moving reflection upon the surface of the water.The subjective touch in the above poem:I cry to Thee,Whose heartRemembers each of these: Thou artMy God who hast forgotten me!—articulates the cry which life wrings at sometime from each of us, noting the infinite solicitudethat writes self-executing laws in the hearts of the creatures, while man goes blundering after intimations and dreams. One comes at times face to face with the necessity to justify the ways of God to man, when he notes throughout nature the unerring certainty of instinct, and the stumbling fallibility of reason. He questions why the bee excels him in wisdom and force and persistence, in shaping conditions for its maintenance, and in intuitions of destiny; or why the infinite exactness that established the goings of the ant in the devious ways of her endeavor should have left man to follow so fatuous a gleam as human intuition in finding his own foot-path among the tortuous ways of life. And these queries Miss Guiney’s poem raises, though not with arraignment, rather with the logical demand:As to a weed, to me but giveThy sap! lest aye inoperativeHere in the Pit my strength shall be:And still,Help me endure the Pit untilThou wilt not have forgotten me.There is sinew and brawn in Miss Guiney’s work; she is not dallying in the scented gardens of poesy, but entering the tourney in valorous emprise. Not a man of them who can meetfate in a braver joust than she, and he must needs look well to his armor if he come off as unscathed. She never stops to bewail the prick of the spear, though it draw blood, but enters the field again for the“Hope not compassed, and yet not void.”There is tonic in her work for the craven heart, a note to shame one back to the ranks. Each is a “Recruit” and should take to himself this marching order:So much to me is imminent:To leave Revolt that is my tent,And Failure, chosen for my bride,And into life’s highway be goneEre yet Creation marches on,Obedient, jocund, glorified:And, last of things afoot, to knowHow to be free is still to goWith glad concession, grave accord,Nor longer, bond and imbecile,Stand out against the Gradual Will,The guessed ‘Fall in’! of God the Lord.And the plea of Saint George, awaiting the hour to essay his quest,O give my youth, my faith, my sword,Choice of the heart’s desire:A short life in the saddle, Lord!Not long life by the fire,—sets one’s sluggish blood in responsive motion,—as do the succeeding lines:I fear no breathing bowman,But only, east and west,The awful other foemanImpowered in my breast.The outer fray in the sun shall be,The inner beneath the moon;And may Our Lady lend to meSight of the dragon soon.At the outset of her work Miss Guiney sang an electrifying song of which men begrudged her the glory, being theft of Jove’s thunder. It was hight valiantly “The Wild Ride,” and has the spirit of all the knights and troopers in Christendom packed within its tense and vibrant lines:I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle,Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn galloping legion,With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses;There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:What odds? we are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding.I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind;We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil,Thou leadest, O God! all’s well with Thy troopers that follow!“The Kings” and “The Perfect Hour” are other trumpet notes of Miss Guiney’s, illustrating the individuality of her point of view and the personality of her expression.A poet’s words may be wind-blown feathers, or they may be flint-tipped arrows singing to a mark. The defect with much of present-day poetry is that it is not aimed, it is content to be a pretty flight of feathers, blown by the breath of fancy, and reaching no vital spot.To test Miss Guiney’s marksmanship with words, one may separate her at once from the class who are flying airy illusions nowhither, for she concentrates, instead of diffusing, andhas, at the outset, a definite point in view. She works upon the arrow principle, but now and again glances from the mark. In such a poem as “The Recruit,” in “The Wild Ride,” or the “Saint George” quoted from, in her stirring poem “Sanctuary,” beginning,High above Hate I dwell,O storms! farewell,and in many others, she cleaves straight to her aim with no deflection. The same may be said of many of her lighter poems, the charming “Lilac Song,” or this delicately wrought love-song, speeding to the heart:When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken,And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar;Or when my lattice opens, before the lark has spoken,On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star,I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!)Whose great and noonday splendor the many share and see,While, sacred and forever, some perfect law is keepingThe late and early twilight alone and sweet for me.In poems of this kind and in deeper ones from the spiritual side of her nature, as well as in those of valor and daring, she uses such words as are tipped with a penetrative point; but in some of her sonnets, such as “TheChantry,” in a narrative poem, such as “The Vigil in Tyrone,” though not without picturesque quality, in “The Squall,” despite its frequently fine imagery, and often in the dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” the words are too much weighted to carry to the mark; they suggest undue care in selection which interposes between the motive of the poem and the sympathy of the reader. One pauses to consider the words; and the initial impulse, like a spent shell, falls at his feet. Miss Guiney’s diction is, in the main, peculiarly crisp and apposite; but she does not always hold to the directness of appeal that distinguishes her truest work, but withdraws herself into subtleties, often beautiful, but too remote. “A Martyr’s Idyl” is a dramatically conceived incident, well wrought as to scene and character, and having many passages of great beauty; but the effort to keep the expression to the manner of the time results in a lack of flexibility in the style that is now and then cumbrous. On the whole, it is not in a dramatic poem of this sort that Miss Guiney best reveals herself, but in such inspirations as she has taken—Neither from sires nor sons,Nor the delivered ones,Holy, invoked with awe.Her best work answers, by practical demonstration, her own query:“Where shall I find my light?”“Turn from another’s track,Whether for gain or lack,Love but thy natal right.Cease to follow withal,Though on thine upled feetFlakes of the phosphor fall.Oracles overheardAre never again for thee,Nor at a magian’s kneeUnder the hemlock tree,Burns the illumining word.”The term “original” is one to be used charily and with forethought, but it is one that belongs without danger of challenge to Miss Guiney’s work. There is a distinct quality, both of treatment and conception, that is hers alone, a rare, unfamiliar note, without reminiscent echoes. While it has a certain classic quaintness, it has also vitality and concrete forcefulness.Her metrical command is varied, and she employs many forms with assurance of touch. She has a group of Alexandrian songs inA Roadside Harp, most of them with beauty of measure and atmosphere. Here, in three lines, is a rhythmic achievement:Me, deep-tresséd meadows, take to your loyal keeping,Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping!How the “swish of sickles” conveys their very sound! This ability to put into certain words both the music and the picture distinguishes Miss Guiney. In her sonnet upon the “Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford,” even the names that would seem to suggest an inartistic enumeration are made to convey the sense of sabbatical sweetness and calm and to visualize the scene.The Sonnets Written at Oxfordmark, as a whole, her finest work in this form, although the twelve London sonnets are full of strong lines and images, and several of them, such as “Doves” and “In The Docks,” take swift hold upon one’s sympathy. The former flashes a picture at the close, by way of rebuke to the over-solicitous mood, which is not only charming from the artistic side, but opens the eyes in sudden content and gladness.Ah, if man’s boast, and man’s advance be vain,And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,And the lone Tree foreknow it, and the Dome,The monstrous island of the middle main;If each inheritor must sink againUnder his sires, as falleth where it clombBack on the gone wave the disheartened foam—I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul’sShook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.“God keeps,” I said, “our little flock of years.”This note of spiritual assurance appears throughout Miss Guiney’s work, speaking in her sonnet, “The Acknowledgment,” and again and again in other poems. She has the mystic’s passion for the One Good, the One Beauty—O hidden, O perfect, O desired, the first and the final fair!—and gives it impassioned expression in the lines, “Deo Optimo Maximo,”All else for use, one only for desire;Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,Impel Thou me.Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by,Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.Oft as the morn, (though none of earth denyThese three are dear,)Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys;O close my hand upon Beatitude!Not on her toys.And here at the last is the tenderest Nativity song for which dedicated words were ever found; so quaint, so gentle, so reverent, so blended of sweet and sad. The second stanza is an artist’s grouping from life:The Ox he openeth wide the dooreAnd from the snowe he calls her inne,And he hath seen her Smile therefore,Our Lady without sinne.Now soone from sleepeA starre shall leap,And soon arrive both King and Hinde;Amen,Amen:But O, the place co’d I but find!The Ox hath husht his voyce and bentTrewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,The Blessed lays her Browe.Around her feetFull Warme and SweeteHis Bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell;Amen,Amen:But sore am I with Vaine Travél!The Ox is Host in Juda’s stall,And Host of more than onelie one,For close she gathereth withalOur Lorde, her littel Sonne:Glad Hinde and KingTheir Gyfte may bring,But wo’d to-night my Teares were there;Amen,Amen:Between her Bosom and His hayre!To sum up Miss Guiney’s work, as well as one may, in a sentence,—it has no flaccid thought. There is fibre in all she writes; fibre and nerve. Were the fervor and passion which she throws into her songs of valor to be diffused throughout her verse, making its appeal more intimate and personal, she would speak more widely, but scarcely to more appreciative readers than now delight in her individuality.

SOME critic has said of Miss Guiney’s work, that to come suddenly upon it among other volumes of modern poetry is like coming upon a Greek temple in an American woodland; and the comparison is an apt one, though the temple should scarcely be Greek, for while the feeling and structure of the work are classic in atmosphere, they are not warm enough, sensuous enough, to be Greek. It would, indeed, be hard to say with what race classicism Miss Guiney’s work is tinctured. Rather say that she is a classic by temperament and has drawn to herself, as by chemical affinity, such things as are rare and choice in the world of books and life, and has fused them in the alembic of her own nature, until the resultant blend is something new and strange, having a racy tang and a flavor all its own, and yet with a hint of all the elements that went to its compounding.

Most minds take on learning by a miscellaneous accretion that results in informationwithout individuality, but Miss Guiney hives in many fields and lands the quaint, the picturesque, the beautiful, to which her temperament calls her unerringly, and can no more be tempted to range outside her limit of attraction than a bee to waste his precious hours dipping into bloom that holds no nectar for him. To be sure, Miss Guiney’s range of attraction is wide, but it enlarges its own confines, and does not reach out to alien territory. It follows as a corollary to this fact that unless one be in the range of attraction with Miss Guiney, the subjects which claim her thought may be more or less alien to him, and the restrained, wholly individual manner of her work may be equally alien to his nature. He may require more warmth, more abandon, more of the element of to-day and to-morrow in the theme and mood; for Miss Guiney has little to do with the times and conditions in which she finds herself; contemporary life is only incidentally in her verse, and one would have difficulty from it in declaring her day and generation. Her poetry demands that synchronism of temperament by which one responds to her mood independent of the time or place to which it transports him.

Illustration of Louise Imogen Guiney

Take, for illustration, “A Friend’s Song forSimoisius,” with its charm of music, its beauty of expression, and its crystal clarity. Few would be unconscious of the poetic side of it; but to how many would the subject appeal? What’s Simoisius to them or they to Simoisius that they should weep for him? Let, however, this feeling for the atmosphere of myth and legend be added, and what charm do the lines take on:

The breath of dew, and twilight’s grace,Be on the lonely battle-place;And to so young, so kind a face,The long, protecting grasses cling!(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)In rocky hollows cool and deep,The bees our boyhood hunted sleep;The early moon from Ida’s steepComes to the empty wrestling-ring,(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)Upon the widowed wind recedeNo echoes of the shepherd’s reed,And children without laughter leadThe war-horse to the watering.(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)Thou stranger, Ajax Telamon!What to the loveliest hast thou done,That ne’er with him a maid may runAcross the marigolds in spring?(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)· · · · ·The world to me has nothing dearBeyond the namesake river here:O Simois is wild and clear!And to his brink my heart I bring;(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)

The breath of dew, and twilight’s grace,Be on the lonely battle-place;And to so young, so kind a face,The long, protecting grasses cling!(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)

The breath of dew, and twilight’s grace,

Be on the lonely battle-place;

And to so young, so kind a face,

The long, protecting grasses cling!

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

In rocky hollows cool and deep,The bees our boyhood hunted sleep;The early moon from Ida’s steepComes to the empty wrestling-ring,(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)

In rocky hollows cool and deep,

The bees our boyhood hunted sleep;

The early moon from Ida’s steep

Comes to the empty wrestling-ring,

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

Upon the widowed wind recedeNo echoes of the shepherd’s reed,And children without laughter leadThe war-horse to the watering.(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)

Upon the widowed wind recede

No echoes of the shepherd’s reed,

And children without laughter lead

The war-horse to the watering.

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

Thou stranger, Ajax Telamon!What to the loveliest hast thou done,That ne’er with him a maid may runAcross the marigolds in spring?(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)· · · · ·The world to me has nothing dearBeyond the namesake river here:O Simois is wild and clear!And to his brink my heart I bring;(Alas, alas,The one inexorable thing!)

Thou stranger, Ajax Telamon!

What to the loveliest hast thou done,

That ne’er with him a maid may run

Across the marigolds in spring?

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

· · · · ·

The world to me has nothing dear

Beyond the namesake river here:

O Simois is wild and clear!

And to his brink my heart I bring;

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

The rhyme scheme in this poem has a distinct fascination to the ear; there is music in the lucid words and in the rhythmic lines, climaxing in each stanza, and, moreover, every stanza is a picture, with a concrete relation to the whole. The poem illustrates several of Miss Guiney’s characteristics: first, the compactness of her verse. It is never pirouetting merely to show its grace; in other words, she does not let the unity of the idea escape in a profusion of imagery. She uses figure and symbol with an individual freshness of conception, but always that which is structural with the thought, so that one can rarely detach a stanza or even fugitive lines of her poems without a loss of value. She develops the theme without over-developing it, which is the restraint of the artist. The above poem illustrates, also, the white light which she throws upon herwords when clarity and simplicity are demanded by the form; whereas, in sonnets, in her dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” and in other forms of verse, her work is sometimes lacking in that clear, swiftly communicative quality which poetry should possess; but in her lyric inspirations, where the form and melody condition the diction, one may note the perfect clarity and flexibility which she attains, without loss of the rare and picturesque word-feeling that belongs so inseparably to her.

The stanzas to “Athassal Abbey,” the “Footnote To A Famous Lyric,” the delicate “Lilac Song,” and many others blend the finer qualities of word and metre. With the exception of the last poem, however, they have not the emotional warmth that imbues several other of her lyrics, as the two “Irish Peasant Songs,” which are inspirations of sheer beauty, especially the first, in its subtlety of race-temperament and personal mood, left unanalyzed,—for a further hint would destroy it,—but holding spring and tears and youth in its wistful word and measure:

I knead and I spin, but my life is low the while,Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile,Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,Why, from me that’s young, should the wild tears fall?The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams,They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill,And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin’s hedges call,The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

I knead and I spin, but my life is low the while,

Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile,

Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,

Why, from me that’s young, should the wild tears fall?

The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams,They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.

The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams,

They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,

And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,

It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.

The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill,And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin’s hedges call,The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill,

And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;

But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin’s hedges call,

The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

It is not surprising that William Black should have quoted this poem in one of his volumes, for it is certainly one of the most exquisite and temperamental of folk-songs. The second is wholly different in note, brimming over with the exuberance of the Celtic imagination, and fresh as the breath of spring which inspires it:

’Tis the time o’ the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch,And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heavesIn little angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.· · · · ·’Tis the time o’ the year in early light and glad,The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;The downs are dripping nightly, the breathéd damps arise,Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling’s golden eyes,And lying in a row against the chilly North, the sheepInclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.

’Tis the time o’ the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,

The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch,

And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves

In little angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;

And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,

And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.

· · · · ·

’Tis the time o’ the year in early light and glad,

The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;

The downs are dripping nightly, the breathéd damps arise,

Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling’s golden eyes,

And lying in a row against the chilly North, the sheep

Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.

The out-of-door atmosphere which Miss Guiney has managed to infuse into these lines is fairly palpable. What sense of moisture in the dew-heavy air is in the second stanza, and what elation and buoyancy of returning life vitalizes the first! While on this phase of her work there is another poem as magnetically charged, and full of ozone, but its objective side incidental to a subjective query which nature and science force to the lips:

The spur is red upon the briar,The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;The wind shakes out the colored fireFrom lamps a-row on the sycamore;The tanager with flitting noteShows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;The mink is busy; herds againGo hillward in the honeyed rain;The midges meet. I cry to TheeWhose heartRemembers each of these: Thou artMy God who hast forgotten me.Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,The lined gulls in the offing ride;Along an edge of marshy ground,The shad-bush enters like a bride.Yon little clouds are washed of careThat climb the blue New England air,And almost merrily withalThe tree-frog plays at evenfallHis oboe in a mossy tree.So, too,Am I not Thine? Arise, undoThis fear Thou hast forgotten me.

The spur is red upon the briar,

The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;

The wind shakes out the colored fire

From lamps a-row on the sycamore;

The tanager with flitting note

Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;

The mink is busy; herds again

Go hillward in the honeyed rain;

The midges meet. I cry to Thee

Whose heart

Remembers each of these: Thou art

My God who hast forgotten me.

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,The lined gulls in the offing ride;Along an edge of marshy ground,The shad-bush enters like a bride.Yon little clouds are washed of careThat climb the blue New England air,And almost merrily withalThe tree-frog plays at evenfallHis oboe in a mossy tree.So, too,Am I not Thine? Arise, undoThis fear Thou hast forgotten me.

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,

The lined gulls in the offing ride;

Along an edge of marshy ground,

The shad-bush enters like a bride.

Yon little clouds are washed of care

That climb the blue New England air,

And almost merrily withal

The tree-frog plays at evenfall

His oboe in a mossy tree.

So, too,

Am I not Thine? Arise, undo

This fear Thou hast forgotten me.

From the nature side these lines are pictures, taken each by each they are free-hand strokes with pigment. Note the picturesque quality, for illustration, in the words,

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,The lined gulls in the offing ride,

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,

The lined gulls in the offing ride,

and their imaginative vision with no hint of the fantastic; for one need only have it glimpsed before him to know that he has seen the same effect a score of times. Miss Guiney comes to the world without, as if no eyes but hers had looked upon it; she brings no other image upon the lens of her vision, and hence the imprint is as newly mirrored, and as fresh with each changing view as a moving reflection upon the surface of the water.

The subjective touch in the above poem:

I cry to Thee,Whose heartRemembers each of these: Thou artMy God who hast forgotten me!—

I cry to Thee,

Whose heart

Remembers each of these: Thou art

My God who hast forgotten me!—

articulates the cry which life wrings at sometime from each of us, noting the infinite solicitudethat writes self-executing laws in the hearts of the creatures, while man goes blundering after intimations and dreams. One comes at times face to face with the necessity to justify the ways of God to man, when he notes throughout nature the unerring certainty of instinct, and the stumbling fallibility of reason. He questions why the bee excels him in wisdom and force and persistence, in shaping conditions for its maintenance, and in intuitions of destiny; or why the infinite exactness that established the goings of the ant in the devious ways of her endeavor should have left man to follow so fatuous a gleam as human intuition in finding his own foot-path among the tortuous ways of life. And these queries Miss Guiney’s poem raises, though not with arraignment, rather with the logical demand:

As to a weed, to me but giveThy sap! lest aye inoperativeHere in the Pit my strength shall be:And still,Help me endure the Pit untilThou wilt not have forgotten me.

As to a weed, to me but give

Thy sap! lest aye inoperative

Here in the Pit my strength shall be:

And still,

Help me endure the Pit until

Thou wilt not have forgotten me.

There is sinew and brawn in Miss Guiney’s work; she is not dallying in the scented gardens of poesy, but entering the tourney in valorous emprise. Not a man of them who can meetfate in a braver joust than she, and he must needs look well to his armor if he come off as unscathed. She never stops to bewail the prick of the spear, though it draw blood, but enters the field again for the

“Hope not compassed, and yet not void.”

There is tonic in her work for the craven heart, a note to shame one back to the ranks. Each is a “Recruit” and should take to himself this marching order:

So much to me is imminent:To leave Revolt that is my tent,And Failure, chosen for my bride,And into life’s highway be goneEre yet Creation marches on,Obedient, jocund, glorified:And, last of things afoot, to knowHow to be free is still to goWith glad concession, grave accord,Nor longer, bond and imbecile,Stand out against the Gradual Will,The guessed ‘Fall in’! of God the Lord.

So much to me is imminent:To leave Revolt that is my tent,And Failure, chosen for my bride,

So much to me is imminent:

To leave Revolt that is my tent,

And Failure, chosen for my bride,

And into life’s highway be goneEre yet Creation marches on,Obedient, jocund, glorified:

And into life’s highway be gone

Ere yet Creation marches on,

Obedient, jocund, glorified:

And, last of things afoot, to knowHow to be free is still to goWith glad concession, grave accord,

And, last of things afoot, to know

How to be free is still to go

With glad concession, grave accord,

Nor longer, bond and imbecile,Stand out against the Gradual Will,The guessed ‘Fall in’! of God the Lord.

Nor longer, bond and imbecile,

Stand out against the Gradual Will,

The guessed ‘Fall in’! of God the Lord.

And the plea of Saint George, awaiting the hour to essay his quest,

O give my youth, my faith, my sword,Choice of the heart’s desire:A short life in the saddle, Lord!Not long life by the fire,—

O give my youth, my faith, my sword,

Choice of the heart’s desire:

A short life in the saddle, Lord!

Not long life by the fire,—

sets one’s sluggish blood in responsive motion,—as do the succeeding lines:

I fear no breathing bowman,But only, east and west,The awful other foemanImpowered in my breast.The outer fray in the sun shall be,The inner beneath the moon;And may Our Lady lend to meSight of the dragon soon.

I fear no breathing bowman,

But only, east and west,

The awful other foeman

Impowered in my breast.

The outer fray in the sun shall be,

The inner beneath the moon;

And may Our Lady lend to me

Sight of the dragon soon.

At the outset of her work Miss Guiney sang an electrifying song of which men begrudged her the glory, being theft of Jove’s thunder. It was hight valiantly “The Wild Ride,” and has the spirit of all the knights and troopers in Christendom packed within its tense and vibrant lines:

I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle,Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn galloping legion,With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses;There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:What odds? we are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding.I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind;We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil,Thou leadest, O God! all’s well with Thy troopers that follow!

I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.

I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,

All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;

All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.

Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle,Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn galloping legion,With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle,

Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn galloping legion,

With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses;There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:What odds? we are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding.

The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses;

There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:

What odds? we are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding.

I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.

I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,

All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;

All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing.

We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind;We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil,Thou leadest, O God! all’s well with Thy troopers that follow!

We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind;

We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil,

Thou leadest, O God! all’s well with Thy troopers that follow!

“The Kings” and “The Perfect Hour” are other trumpet notes of Miss Guiney’s, illustrating the individuality of her point of view and the personality of her expression.

A poet’s words may be wind-blown feathers, or they may be flint-tipped arrows singing to a mark. The defect with much of present-day poetry is that it is not aimed, it is content to be a pretty flight of feathers, blown by the breath of fancy, and reaching no vital spot.

To test Miss Guiney’s marksmanship with words, one may separate her at once from the class who are flying airy illusions nowhither, for she concentrates, instead of diffusing, andhas, at the outset, a definite point in view. She works upon the arrow principle, but now and again glances from the mark. In such a poem as “The Recruit,” in “The Wild Ride,” or the “Saint George” quoted from, in her stirring poem “Sanctuary,” beginning,

High above Hate I dwell,O storms! farewell,

High above Hate I dwell,

O storms! farewell,

and in many others, she cleaves straight to her aim with no deflection. The same may be said of many of her lighter poems, the charming “Lilac Song,” or this delicately wrought love-song, speeding to the heart:

When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken,And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar;Or when my lattice opens, before the lark has spoken,On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star,I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!)Whose great and noonday splendor the many share and see,While, sacred and forever, some perfect law is keepingThe late and early twilight alone and sweet for me.

When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken,

And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar;

Or when my lattice opens, before the lark has spoken,

On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star,

I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!)Whose great and noonday splendor the many share and see,While, sacred and forever, some perfect law is keepingThe late and early twilight alone and sweet for me.

I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!)

Whose great and noonday splendor the many share and see,

While, sacred and forever, some perfect law is keeping

The late and early twilight alone and sweet for me.

In poems of this kind and in deeper ones from the spiritual side of her nature, as well as in those of valor and daring, she uses such words as are tipped with a penetrative point; but in some of her sonnets, such as “TheChantry,” in a narrative poem, such as “The Vigil in Tyrone,” though not without picturesque quality, in “The Squall,” despite its frequently fine imagery, and often in the dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” the words are too much weighted to carry to the mark; they suggest undue care in selection which interposes between the motive of the poem and the sympathy of the reader. One pauses to consider the words; and the initial impulse, like a spent shell, falls at his feet. Miss Guiney’s diction is, in the main, peculiarly crisp and apposite; but she does not always hold to the directness of appeal that distinguishes her truest work, but withdraws herself into subtleties, often beautiful, but too remote. “A Martyr’s Idyl” is a dramatically conceived incident, well wrought as to scene and character, and having many passages of great beauty; but the effort to keep the expression to the manner of the time results in a lack of flexibility in the style that is now and then cumbrous. On the whole, it is not in a dramatic poem of this sort that Miss Guiney best reveals herself, but in such inspirations as she has taken—

Neither from sires nor sons,Nor the delivered ones,Holy, invoked with awe.

Neither from sires nor sons,

Nor the delivered ones,

Holy, invoked with awe.

Her best work answers, by practical demonstration, her own query:

“Where shall I find my light?”“Turn from another’s track,Whether for gain or lack,Love but thy natal right.Cease to follow withal,Though on thine upled feetFlakes of the phosphor fall.Oracles overheardAre never again for thee,Nor at a magian’s kneeUnder the hemlock tree,Burns the illumining word.”

“Where shall I find my light?”

“Turn from another’s track,Whether for gain or lack,Love but thy natal right.Cease to follow withal,Though on thine upled feetFlakes of the phosphor fall.Oracles overheardAre never again for thee,Nor at a magian’s kneeUnder the hemlock tree,Burns the illumining word.”

“Turn from another’s track,

Whether for gain or lack,

Love but thy natal right.

Cease to follow withal,

Though on thine upled feet

Flakes of the phosphor fall.

Oracles overheard

Are never again for thee,

Nor at a magian’s knee

Under the hemlock tree,

Burns the illumining word.”

The term “original” is one to be used charily and with forethought, but it is one that belongs without danger of challenge to Miss Guiney’s work. There is a distinct quality, both of treatment and conception, that is hers alone, a rare, unfamiliar note, without reminiscent echoes. While it has a certain classic quaintness, it has also vitality and concrete forcefulness.

Her metrical command is varied, and she employs many forms with assurance of touch. She has a group of Alexandrian songs inA Roadside Harp, most of them with beauty of measure and atmosphere. Here, in three lines, is a rhythmic achievement:

Me, deep-tresséd meadows, take to your loyal keeping,Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping!

Me, deep-tresséd meadows, take to your loyal keeping,

Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,

Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping!

How the “swish of sickles” conveys their very sound! This ability to put into certain words both the music and the picture distinguishes Miss Guiney. In her sonnet upon the “Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford,” even the names that would seem to suggest an inartistic enumeration are made to convey the sense of sabbatical sweetness and calm and to visualize the scene.

The Sonnets Written at Oxfordmark, as a whole, her finest work in this form, although the twelve London sonnets are full of strong lines and images, and several of them, such as “Doves” and “In The Docks,” take swift hold upon one’s sympathy. The former flashes a picture at the close, by way of rebuke to the over-solicitous mood, which is not only charming from the artistic side, but opens the eyes in sudden content and gladness.

Ah, if man’s boast, and man’s advance be vain,And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,And the lone Tree foreknow it, and the Dome,The monstrous island of the middle main;If each inheritor must sink againUnder his sires, as falleth where it clombBack on the gone wave the disheartened foam—I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul’sShook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.“God keeps,” I said, “our little flock of years.”

Ah, if man’s boast, and man’s advance be vain,

And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,

And the lone Tree foreknow it, and the Dome,

The monstrous island of the middle main;

If each inheritor must sink again

Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb

Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam—

I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.

What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul’sShook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.“God keeps,” I said, “our little flock of years.”

What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!

Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,

Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul’s

Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,

And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.

“God keeps,” I said, “our little flock of years.”

This note of spiritual assurance appears throughout Miss Guiney’s work, speaking in her sonnet, “The Acknowledgment,” and again and again in other poems. She has the mystic’s passion for the One Good, the One Beauty—

O hidden, O perfect, O desired, the first and the final fair!—

and gives it impassioned expression in the lines, “Deo Optimo Maximo,”

All else for use, one only for desire;Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,Impel Thou me.Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by,Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.Oft as the morn, (though none of earth denyThese three are dear,)Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys;O close my hand upon Beatitude!Not on her toys.

All else for use, one only for desire;Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,Impel Thou me.

All else for use, one only for desire;

Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:

Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,

Impel Thou me.

Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by,Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.Oft as the morn, (though none of earth denyThese three are dear,)

Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by,

Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.

Oft as the morn, (though none of earth deny

These three are dear,)

Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys;O close my hand upon Beatitude!Not on her toys.

Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,

Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys;

O close my hand upon Beatitude!

Not on her toys.

And here at the last is the tenderest Nativity song for which dedicated words were ever found; so quaint, so gentle, so reverent, so blended of sweet and sad. The second stanza is an artist’s grouping from life:

The Ox he openeth wide the dooreAnd from the snowe he calls her inne,And he hath seen her Smile therefore,Our Lady without sinne.Now soone from sleepeA starre shall leap,And soon arrive both King and Hinde;Amen,Amen:But O, the place co’d I but find!The Ox hath husht his voyce and bentTrewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,The Blessed lays her Browe.Around her feetFull Warme and SweeteHis Bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell;Amen,Amen:But sore am I with Vaine Travél!The Ox is Host in Juda’s stall,And Host of more than onelie one,For close she gathereth withalOur Lorde, her littel Sonne:Glad Hinde and KingTheir Gyfte may bring,But wo’d to-night my Teares were there;Amen,Amen:Between her Bosom and His hayre!

The Ox he openeth wide the doore

And from the snowe he calls her inne,

And he hath seen her Smile therefore,

Our Lady without sinne.

Now soone from sleepe

A starre shall leap,

And soon arrive both King and Hinde;

Amen,Amen:

But O, the place co’d I but find!

The Ox hath husht his voyce and bentTrewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,The Blessed lays her Browe.Around her feetFull Warme and SweeteHis Bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell;Amen,Amen:But sore am I with Vaine Travél!

The Ox hath husht his voyce and bent

Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,

And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,

The Blessed lays her Browe.

Around her feet

Full Warme and Sweete

His Bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell;

Amen,Amen:

But sore am I with Vaine Travél!

The Ox is Host in Juda’s stall,And Host of more than onelie one,For close she gathereth withalOur Lorde, her littel Sonne:Glad Hinde and KingTheir Gyfte may bring,But wo’d to-night my Teares were there;Amen,Amen:Between her Bosom and His hayre!

The Ox is Host in Juda’s stall,

And Host of more than onelie one,

For close she gathereth withal

Our Lorde, her littel Sonne:

Glad Hinde and King

Their Gyfte may bring,

But wo’d to-night my Teares were there;

Amen,Amen:

Between her Bosom and His hayre!

To sum up Miss Guiney’s work, as well as one may, in a sentence,—it has no flaccid thought. There is fibre in all she writes; fibre and nerve. Were the fervor and passion which she throws into her songs of valor to be diffused throughout her verse, making its appeal more intimate and personal, she would speak more widely, but scarcely to more appreciative readers than now delight in her individuality.

VGEORGE E. SANTAYANAEMOTION recollected in tranquillity,” perfectly defines the work of Mr. George Santayana. He is a musing philosopher environed by himself. He‘Shuts himself in with his soulAnd the shapes come eddying forth,’shapes that have no being in the world of sense, but are rather phantasms materialized in the ether of dreams. There is no evidence in Mr. Santayana’s work that he is living in America in the twentieth century—and upon his own testimony he is not; he has withdrawn from the importunity of things:Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,Unmindful of the changing outer skies,—and in this inviolate seclusion he enamels the pearl with the nacre of his own spirit.Mr. Santayana’s poet-kinsmen are not to be found in contemporary literature; he is alone in the midst of the singers as regards temperamentand attitude toward life. His school is that of beauty; his time that of the gods; his faith the sanctity of loveliness; and his creed the restoration of the fair. He would shut out all the obtrusive shows of nature and life, and dwell in the Nirvana of his own contemplation:A wall, a wall around my garden rear,And hedge me in from the disconsolate hills;Give me but one of all the mountain rills,Enough of ocean in its voice I hear.Come no profane insatiate mortal nearWith the contagion of his passionate ills;The smoke of battle all the valleys fills,Let the eternal sunlight greet me here.—and once enshrined in this Nirvanic close, where the strife of living had merged into the poise of being, he would repeople the desolated earth and air with the forms of his imagination:A thousand beauties that have never beenHaunt me with hope and tempt me to pursue;The gods, methink, dwell just behind the blue;The satyrs at my coming fled the green.The flitting shadows of the grove betweenThe dryads’ eyes were winking, and I knewThe wings of sacred Eros as he flew,And left me to the love of things not seen.’Tis a sad love, like an eternal prayer,And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease,Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase,And heaven shines as if the gods were there.Had Dian passed, there could no deeper peaceEmbalm the purple stretches of the air.It is no exaggeration to say that were Mr. Santayana in a cloister, or upon a mid-sea island with his books and dreams, he could scarcely be less in touch with the passing world than he is in the midst of the clamor and insistence of modern life, where he keeps the tranquillity of the inner silence as if there were no voices dinning in his ears. He is subjective to the degree of transfusing himself with another’s consciousness, and looking upon his own nature from an impersonal standpoint:There we live o’er, amid angelic powers,Our lives without remorse, as if not ours,And others’ lives with love, as if our own,—says one of the sonnets, imaging the passion-stilled world of reflection.There is a subtlety in Mr. Santayana’s processes of thought that demands intuitive divination on the part of the reader; there is so little objectivity to the idea that its essence may almost escape him. His illustrative symbolism is almost never drawn from nature or the world of men and events, but from the treasure of beauty at the depth of his spirit,where, by some mystic chemistry, he has separated all the elements not in harmony with him. There must at some time have been reaction and repulsion, ferment and explosion, in the laboratory of Mr. Santayana’s mind; but he awaited the subsidence of the action; awaited the period when emotion, thought, and learning had distilled and crystallized before he shaped them forth before the world.This gives to his work a certain fixity both of mood and form; his thoughts are as gems that flash without heat, not the ruby-hearted, passion-dyed gems, but the pale topaz or the amber, holding the imprisoned glow of reflection. If this may seem to limit Mr. Santayana’s achievement, it is not so intended, but rather to reveal his distinction. He is not only a true poet, but one of rare accomplishment; his work, however, is for those who are deeply subjective, who trance themselves with the beautiful as an anodyne for pain; those who subordinate to-day to the storied charm of yesterday, and look backward to the twilight of the gods, rather than forward to the renewing sunrise. It is not for those whose creed of poetry is that it should be all things to all men; that life, in travail to deliver truth, should utter its cries through the poet. It is for thosewho know that poetry can no more be adapted to all than could the spoken words of a great teacher reach equally the diverse minds of a multitude whom he might address; and that while it may be the office of one poet to interpret the struggles, the activities, the aims of life, it may be equally the part of another to penetrate to that calm at the depth of the soul where throes have brought forth peace. Not only are there various natures to whom poetry speaks, but natures within natures, so that all poets speak to different phases of our consciousness: some to the mind,—and here the range is infinite,—some to the heart, and some to the soul, and of the last is Mr. Santayana. He is for the meditative hours when we are sounding the depths of ourselves and come back to the surface of things, bringing with us the unsatisfied pain of being. Hours when we turn instinctively to a sonnet like this to find our mood expressed:I would I might forget that I am I,And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.What in the body’s tomb doth buried lieIs boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,Lord of the future, guardian of the past,And soon must forth to know his own at last.In his large life to live, I fain would die.Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,But calling not his suffering his own;Blesséd the angel, gazing on all good,But knowing not he sits upon a throne;Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,And doomed to know his aching heart alone.The much-mooted, but vaguely understood, sub-conscious mind, speaks in this sonnet in terms of the conscious. It is a subtle bit of philosophy, but not more so than several others in the same sequence which show the evolution of Mr. Santayana’s attitude toward life. One may not in a brief space follow out the clews to this development, whose beginning was in religious emotion:· · · · ·My sad youth worshipped at the piteous heightWhere God vouchsafed the death of man to share;His love made mortal sorrow light to bear,But his deep wounds put joy to shaméd flight,And though his arms outstretched upon the tree,Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace,My sins were loth to look upon his face.So came I down from Golgotha to thee,Eternal Mother; let the sun and seaHeal me, and keep me in thy dwelling-place.The succeeding sonnet traces the winding of the new way, the reluctance, the… many farewell pious looks behind,And dumb misgivings where the path might wind,And questionings of nature, as I went,—which every life duplicates as it leaves its well-guarded walls of belief and ventures out upon undiscovered ways. The pain of letting go the old, the loneliness of the new, the alien look of all the heights that encompass one, and the psychology of that impulse by which one is both impelled to retrace his way and withheld from it,—are suggested by the sonnet. In the next occurs one of Mr. Santayana’s finest lines, the counselTo trust the soul’s invincible surmise.It would be difficult to define intuition more succinctly than this. It is not, as less subtle poets would have put it, the soul’s assurance that one is to trust; this would be to assume, for what assurance have we but that which Mr. Santayana has so subtly termed the “invincible surmise”?Lines which lead one out into speculative thought are frequent in Mr. Santayana’s sonnets. His philosophy is constructive only in so far as it unifies a succession of moods and experiences; but it is pregnant with suggestionto a psychological mind. One of the sonnets which questions:Of my two lives, which should I call the dream?Which action vanity? which vision sight?—after declaring thatSome greater waking must pronounce arightand blend the two visions to one seeing, continues:Even such a dream I dream, and know full wellMy waking passeth like a midnight spell,But know not if my dreaming breaketh throughInto the deeps of heaven and of hell.I know but this of all I would I knew:Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.The thought in this passage is elusive, but it is more than a play upon words. It is another way of putting the question, which shall be trusted, which shall become the reality, the objective or the subjective world? One knows that his “waking,” his sense perception, is transitory, that it apprehends but the present, which “passeth like a midnight spell,” but how far does the other and finer sight penetrateInto the deeps of heaven and of hell?No answer from the void to this query, but by the mystical conclusion thatTruth is a dream, unless my dream is true.In simpler phrase, unless the vision and conviction are to be trusted, unless, to revert to Mr. Santayana’s former words, the soul’s “invincible surmise” be taken as truth, that which we know as truth is but a phantasm.The sonnet sequence is the intimate record of an individual soul in its evolving spiritual life, and has the significance belonging only to art which interprets a personality, an experience, in whose development one finds some clew to his own labyrinth. It reveals the many phases of speculation, reflection, questioning, through which one passes in the transition from beliefs indoctrinated in the mind at its earliest consciousness, to convictions which follow thought liberated by life, by intimacy with nature, and by recognition of its own spiritual authority. It is the winning of this conviction, with its attendant seeking and unrest, allayed by draughts from the wayside springs of beauty, memory, and imagination,—which comprises the record of the first sonnet sequence, whose conclusions, as “strewn thoughts” springing along the way, are gathered into a final chaplet for the brows of the “Eternal Mother,” Nature, whose peace he sought when he came down from Golgotha, and whose larger meaning, synonymous withthe primal freedom of the soul, is conveyed in the sonnet:These strewn thoughts, by the mountain pathway sprung,I conned for comfort, till I ceased to grieve,And with these flowering thorns I dare to weaveThe crown, great Mother, on thine altar hung.Teach thou a larger speech to my loosed tongue,And to mine opened eyes thy secrets give,That in thy perfect love I learn to live,And in thine immortality be young.The soul is not on earth an alien thingThat hath her life’s rich sources otherwhere;She is a parcel of the sacred air.She takes her being from the breath of Spring,The glance of Phœbus is her fount of light,And her long sleep a draught of primal night.Aside from Mr. Santayana’s philosophical sonnets he has a second sequence, upon love, which, too, is philosophically tinged. In the matter of beauty this is perhaps the more finished and artistic work; but I have chosen rather to dwell upon the subtlety of his speculations in those phases of thought less universally treated of by poets than is love. It has not been possible, however, to follow the sequence in its order, or to present more than certain individual notes of its philosophy.Thus far it has been the matter, rather than the manner, of Mr. Santayana’s verse that has been considered; but before glancing at thelater sonnet sequence, what of his touch upon the strings of his instrument? One can scarcely have followed the extracts quoted without noting the mellow suavity, the ease, the poise of his work. There is everywhere assurance of expression, nothing tentative, nothing halting. His lines are disposed by the laws of counter-point into well-ordered cadences where nothing jars; his words are rich and mellifluous, in short, he has, as a sonneteer, a finish, a classical command of the vehicle reminiscent of Petrarch and Camoens. The sonnet is, by the nature of the case, a somewhat inadaptable instrument, and yet it is susceptible of great individuality, as one may note by recalling an intricate sonnet by Rossetti and a sweeping, sonorous one by Milton. The criticism which is, perhaps, most apposite to Mr. Santayana’s sonnets is that they are “faultily faultless;” they are so finished that one would welcome a false note now and then, that suggested a choke in the voice, or a heart-beat out of time.There is an atmosphere about all of Mr. Santayana’s work that conveys a sense of wandering in the moonlight; it is tempered, softened, stilled; it is like an Isis-veil cast over the eyes; but at times one becomes oppressed with the consciousness of himself, and of theimpalpable visions glimpsed in the wan light, and longs to snatch the veil away and flee to the garish world again. One may seek Mr. Santayana’s poetry when his mood demands it, and it will be as a cooling hand in fever; but when the pulse of being is low, and one needs the touch to vitalize, he must turn to others, for Mr. Santayana’s work is not charged with the electricity that thrills.Because he is not inventive in metre nor sufficiently light in touch, Mr. Santayana is not a lyrist. He has scarcely any purely lyrical verse in his collections, and what is contained in them is too lacking in spontaneity to be classed with his best work. It is not wanting in lines of beauty and in English undefiled; but the sense of tone and rhythm, except of the smoothly conventional sort, is absent. There are no innovations in form and the impulse is too subdued for a true lyric. That called “Midnight” has more warmth than the others. Several of his odes in the Sapphic metre have great charm, especially the first. His elegiac verse has often rare elevation of thought; but it, also, has too set a measure, too much of the “formed style” to be vital. It brings well-conceived, well-imaged thought, as in this stanza:How should the vision stay to guide the hand,How should the holy thought and ardour stay,When the false deeps of all the soul are sand,And the loose rivets of the spirit, clay?but it rarely shocks one into thinking for himself.In relation to diction, there are few American writers who use English of such purity and finish as does Mr. Santayana; but it is the scholar’s English, the English drawn from familiarity with the great masters and models, and hence lacks the creative flexibility, the quick, warm, ductile adaptability, that a much less accomplished poet may give to his words. It keeps to the accepted canons, the highest, the purest, and uses the consecrated words of literature with an artist’s touch; but the racy idiom, the word which some daring poet coined yesterday in an exigent moment—with these it has naught to do.Mr. Santayana has several dramatic poems, “The Hermit of Carmel,” “The Knight’s Return,” and a dialogue between Hermes and Lucifer, in which the latter relates the details of his banishment from heaven for his daring arraignment and interrogation of God. The dialogue has little dramatic coloring; one hearing it read aloud would have difficulty in determiningfrom the outward change of expression and personality where Lucifer leaves off speaking and Hermes begins, but it puts into the mouth of Lucifer some words full of the challenge of thought, and speaks through both some beautiful fantasies, such as this reply of Lucifer to Hermes’ question as to the state of bliss in which the angels dwell:A doubtful thingIs blessedness like that….Their raptured souls, like lilies in a streamThat from their fluid pillow never rise,Float on the lazy current of a dream.Mr. Santayana has not written “The Hermit of Carmel” or “The Knight’s Return” with a theatrical manager in view. They are stories told in verse, tales of gentle melancholy, pleasant to the ear; but when all is said, one returns to his sonnets as the true expression of his nature and the consummation of his gifts. He is a sonneteer, by every phase of his temperament and every canon of his art. His work in all other forms is cultivated, philosophical, finely finished, but pervaded by an atmosphere of cultured conventionality; whereas in the sonnet he finds a medium whose classic distinction and subtlety are so harmonized to his nature and his characteristic mode of thought, that it becomes to himthe predestined expression. A glance, then, in closing, at the flexile phrases, the psychological analyses of the later sonnet sequence, turning chiefly upon love.But, first, let me cite from one of the earlier sonnets, an image drawn from this theme, a jewel-like flash of beauty, not to be overlooked. The first line of the metaphor is commonplace; but note the succeeding ones:Love but the formless and eternal WholeFrom whose effulgence one unheeded rayBreaks on this prism of dissolving clayInto the flickering colors of thy soul.This is defining the individual spirit in exquisite terms.The second sequence teems with beautiful passages, now and again with a note of thetrovatore, as in the sestett of this sonnet:Yet why, of one who loved thee not, commandThy counterfeit, for other men to see,When God himself did on my heart for meThy face, like Christ’s upon the napkin, brand?O how much subtler than a painter’s handIs love to render back the truth of thee!My soul should be thy glass in time to be,And in my thought thine effigy should stand.Yet, lest the churlish critics of that ageShould flout my praise, and deem a lover’s rageCould gild a virtue and a grace exceed,I bid thine image here confront my page,That men may look upon thee as they read,And cry: “Such eyes a better poet need!”This has art and charm, but in contrast note the impassioned nobility of utterance which imbues the one that follows. Here are lines of pure emotion and beauty:We needs must be divided in the tomb,For I would die among the hills of Spain,And o’er the treeless, melancholy plainAwait the coming of the final gloom.But thou—O pitiful!—wilt find scant roomAmong thy kindred by the northern main,And fade into the drifting mist again,The hemlocks’ shadow, or the pines’ perfume.Let gallants lie beside their ladies’ dustIn one cold grave, with mortal love inurned;Let the sea part our ashes, if it must,The souls fled thence which love immortal burned,For they were wedded without bond of lust,And nothing of our heart to earth returned.Such sonnets as this mark Mr. Santayana as a master of this form, and while his other work has value, it is as a sonneteer that he has made his really individual contribution to literature.

EMOTION recollected in tranquillity,” perfectly defines the work of Mr. George Santayana. He is a musing philosopher environed by himself. He

‘Shuts himself in with his soulAnd the shapes come eddying forth,’

‘Shuts himself in with his soul

And the shapes come eddying forth,’

shapes that have no being in the world of sense, but are rather phantasms materialized in the ether of dreams. There is no evidence in Mr. Santayana’s work that he is living in America in the twentieth century—and upon his own testimony he is not; he has withdrawn from the importunity of things:

Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,Unmindful of the changing outer skies,—

Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,

Unmindful of the changing outer skies,—

and in this inviolate seclusion he enamels the pearl with the nacre of his own spirit.

Mr. Santayana’s poet-kinsmen are not to be found in contemporary literature; he is alone in the midst of the singers as regards temperamentand attitude toward life. His school is that of beauty; his time that of the gods; his faith the sanctity of loveliness; and his creed the restoration of the fair. He would shut out all the obtrusive shows of nature and life, and dwell in the Nirvana of his own contemplation:

A wall, a wall around my garden rear,And hedge me in from the disconsolate hills;Give me but one of all the mountain rills,Enough of ocean in its voice I hear.Come no profane insatiate mortal nearWith the contagion of his passionate ills;The smoke of battle all the valleys fills,Let the eternal sunlight greet me here.—

A wall, a wall around my garden rear,

And hedge me in from the disconsolate hills;

Give me but one of all the mountain rills,

Enough of ocean in its voice I hear.

Come no profane insatiate mortal near

With the contagion of his passionate ills;

The smoke of battle all the valleys fills,

Let the eternal sunlight greet me here.—

and once enshrined in this Nirvanic close, where the strife of living had merged into the poise of being, he would repeople the desolated earth and air with the forms of his imagination:

A thousand beauties that have never beenHaunt me with hope and tempt me to pursue;The gods, methink, dwell just behind the blue;The satyrs at my coming fled the green.The flitting shadows of the grove betweenThe dryads’ eyes were winking, and I knewThe wings of sacred Eros as he flew,And left me to the love of things not seen.’Tis a sad love, like an eternal prayer,And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease,Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase,And heaven shines as if the gods were there.Had Dian passed, there could no deeper peaceEmbalm the purple stretches of the air.

A thousand beauties that have never been

Haunt me with hope and tempt me to pursue;

The gods, methink, dwell just behind the blue;

The satyrs at my coming fled the green.

The flitting shadows of the grove between

The dryads’ eyes were winking, and I knew

The wings of sacred Eros as he flew,

And left me to the love of things not seen.

’Tis a sad love, like an eternal prayer,

And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease,

Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase,

And heaven shines as if the gods were there.

Had Dian passed, there could no deeper peace

Embalm the purple stretches of the air.

It is no exaggeration to say that were Mr. Santayana in a cloister, or upon a mid-sea island with his books and dreams, he could scarcely be less in touch with the passing world than he is in the midst of the clamor and insistence of modern life, where he keeps the tranquillity of the inner silence as if there were no voices dinning in his ears. He is subjective to the degree of transfusing himself with another’s consciousness, and looking upon his own nature from an impersonal standpoint:

There we live o’er, amid angelic powers,Our lives without remorse, as if not ours,And others’ lives with love, as if our own,—

There we live o’er, amid angelic powers,

Our lives without remorse, as if not ours,

And others’ lives with love, as if our own,—

says one of the sonnets, imaging the passion-stilled world of reflection.

There is a subtlety in Mr. Santayana’s processes of thought that demands intuitive divination on the part of the reader; there is so little objectivity to the idea that its essence may almost escape him. His illustrative symbolism is almost never drawn from nature or the world of men and events, but from the treasure of beauty at the depth of his spirit,where, by some mystic chemistry, he has separated all the elements not in harmony with him. There must at some time have been reaction and repulsion, ferment and explosion, in the laboratory of Mr. Santayana’s mind; but he awaited the subsidence of the action; awaited the period when emotion, thought, and learning had distilled and crystallized before he shaped them forth before the world.

This gives to his work a certain fixity both of mood and form; his thoughts are as gems that flash without heat, not the ruby-hearted, passion-dyed gems, but the pale topaz or the amber, holding the imprisoned glow of reflection. If this may seem to limit Mr. Santayana’s achievement, it is not so intended, but rather to reveal his distinction. He is not only a true poet, but one of rare accomplishment; his work, however, is for those who are deeply subjective, who trance themselves with the beautiful as an anodyne for pain; those who subordinate to-day to the storied charm of yesterday, and look backward to the twilight of the gods, rather than forward to the renewing sunrise. It is not for those whose creed of poetry is that it should be all things to all men; that life, in travail to deliver truth, should utter its cries through the poet. It is for thosewho know that poetry can no more be adapted to all than could the spoken words of a great teacher reach equally the diverse minds of a multitude whom he might address; and that while it may be the office of one poet to interpret the struggles, the activities, the aims of life, it may be equally the part of another to penetrate to that calm at the depth of the soul where throes have brought forth peace. Not only are there various natures to whom poetry speaks, but natures within natures, so that all poets speak to different phases of our consciousness: some to the mind,—and here the range is infinite,—some to the heart, and some to the soul, and of the last is Mr. Santayana. He is for the meditative hours when we are sounding the depths of ourselves and come back to the surface of things, bringing with us the unsatisfied pain of being. Hours when we turn instinctively to a sonnet like this to find our mood expressed:

I would I might forget that I am I,And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.What in the body’s tomb doth buried lieIs boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,Lord of the future, guardian of the past,And soon must forth to know his own at last.In his large life to live, I fain would die.Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,But calling not his suffering his own;Blesséd the angel, gazing on all good,But knowing not he sits upon a throne;Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,And doomed to know his aching heart alone.

I would I might forget that I am I,

And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,

Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.

What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie

Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,

Lord of the future, guardian of the past,

And soon must forth to know his own at last.

In his large life to live, I fain would die.

Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,

But calling not his suffering his own;

Blesséd the angel, gazing on all good,

But knowing not he sits upon a throne;

Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,

And doomed to know his aching heart alone.

The much-mooted, but vaguely understood, sub-conscious mind, speaks in this sonnet in terms of the conscious. It is a subtle bit of philosophy, but not more so than several others in the same sequence which show the evolution of Mr. Santayana’s attitude toward life. One may not in a brief space follow out the clews to this development, whose beginning was in religious emotion:

· · · · ·My sad youth worshipped at the piteous heightWhere God vouchsafed the death of man to share;His love made mortal sorrow light to bear,But his deep wounds put joy to shaméd flight,And though his arms outstretched upon the tree,Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace,My sins were loth to look upon his face.So came I down from Golgotha to thee,Eternal Mother; let the sun and seaHeal me, and keep me in thy dwelling-place.

· · · · ·

My sad youth worshipped at the piteous height

Where God vouchsafed the death of man to share;

His love made mortal sorrow light to bear,

But his deep wounds put joy to shaméd flight,

And though his arms outstretched upon the tree,

Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace,

My sins were loth to look upon his face.

So came I down from Golgotha to thee,

Eternal Mother; let the sun and sea

Heal me, and keep me in thy dwelling-place.

The succeeding sonnet traces the winding of the new way, the reluctance, the

… many farewell pious looks behind,And dumb misgivings where the path might wind,And questionings of nature, as I went,—

… many farewell pious looks behind,

And dumb misgivings where the path might wind,

And questionings of nature, as I went,—

which every life duplicates as it leaves its well-guarded walls of belief and ventures out upon undiscovered ways. The pain of letting go the old, the loneliness of the new, the alien look of all the heights that encompass one, and the psychology of that impulse by which one is both impelled to retrace his way and withheld from it,—are suggested by the sonnet. In the next occurs one of Mr. Santayana’s finest lines, the counsel

To trust the soul’s invincible surmise.

It would be difficult to define intuition more succinctly than this. It is not, as less subtle poets would have put it, the soul’s assurance that one is to trust; this would be to assume, for what assurance have we but that which Mr. Santayana has so subtly termed the “invincible surmise”?

Lines which lead one out into speculative thought are frequent in Mr. Santayana’s sonnets. His philosophy is constructive only in so far as it unifies a succession of moods and experiences; but it is pregnant with suggestionto a psychological mind. One of the sonnets which questions:

Of my two lives, which should I call the dream?Which action vanity? which vision sight?—

Of my two lives, which should I call the dream?

Which action vanity? which vision sight?—

after declaring that

Some greater waking must pronounce aright

and blend the two visions to one seeing, continues:

Even such a dream I dream, and know full wellMy waking passeth like a midnight spell,But know not if my dreaming breaketh throughInto the deeps of heaven and of hell.I know but this of all I would I knew:Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.

Even such a dream I dream, and know full well

My waking passeth like a midnight spell,

But know not if my dreaming breaketh through

Into the deeps of heaven and of hell.

I know but this of all I would I knew:

Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.

The thought in this passage is elusive, but it is more than a play upon words. It is another way of putting the question, which shall be trusted, which shall become the reality, the objective or the subjective world? One knows that his “waking,” his sense perception, is transitory, that it apprehends but the present, which “passeth like a midnight spell,” but how far does the other and finer sight penetrate

Into the deeps of heaven and of hell?

No answer from the void to this query, but by the mystical conclusion that

Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.

In simpler phrase, unless the vision and conviction are to be trusted, unless, to revert to Mr. Santayana’s former words, the soul’s “invincible surmise” be taken as truth, that which we know as truth is but a phantasm.

The sonnet sequence is the intimate record of an individual soul in its evolving spiritual life, and has the significance belonging only to art which interprets a personality, an experience, in whose development one finds some clew to his own labyrinth. It reveals the many phases of speculation, reflection, questioning, through which one passes in the transition from beliefs indoctrinated in the mind at its earliest consciousness, to convictions which follow thought liberated by life, by intimacy with nature, and by recognition of its own spiritual authority. It is the winning of this conviction, with its attendant seeking and unrest, allayed by draughts from the wayside springs of beauty, memory, and imagination,—which comprises the record of the first sonnet sequence, whose conclusions, as “strewn thoughts” springing along the way, are gathered into a final chaplet for the brows of the “Eternal Mother,” Nature, whose peace he sought when he came down from Golgotha, and whose larger meaning, synonymous withthe primal freedom of the soul, is conveyed in the sonnet:

These strewn thoughts, by the mountain pathway sprung,I conned for comfort, till I ceased to grieve,And with these flowering thorns I dare to weaveThe crown, great Mother, on thine altar hung.Teach thou a larger speech to my loosed tongue,And to mine opened eyes thy secrets give,That in thy perfect love I learn to live,And in thine immortality be young.The soul is not on earth an alien thingThat hath her life’s rich sources otherwhere;She is a parcel of the sacred air.She takes her being from the breath of Spring,The glance of Phœbus is her fount of light,And her long sleep a draught of primal night.

These strewn thoughts, by the mountain pathway sprung,

I conned for comfort, till I ceased to grieve,

And with these flowering thorns I dare to weave

The crown, great Mother, on thine altar hung.

Teach thou a larger speech to my loosed tongue,

And to mine opened eyes thy secrets give,

That in thy perfect love I learn to live,

And in thine immortality be young.

The soul is not on earth an alien thing

That hath her life’s rich sources otherwhere;

She is a parcel of the sacred air.

She takes her being from the breath of Spring,

The glance of Phœbus is her fount of light,

And her long sleep a draught of primal night.

Aside from Mr. Santayana’s philosophical sonnets he has a second sequence, upon love, which, too, is philosophically tinged. In the matter of beauty this is perhaps the more finished and artistic work; but I have chosen rather to dwell upon the subtlety of his speculations in those phases of thought less universally treated of by poets than is love. It has not been possible, however, to follow the sequence in its order, or to present more than certain individual notes of its philosophy.

Thus far it has been the matter, rather than the manner, of Mr. Santayana’s verse that has been considered; but before glancing at thelater sonnet sequence, what of his touch upon the strings of his instrument? One can scarcely have followed the extracts quoted without noting the mellow suavity, the ease, the poise of his work. There is everywhere assurance of expression, nothing tentative, nothing halting. His lines are disposed by the laws of counter-point into well-ordered cadences where nothing jars; his words are rich and mellifluous, in short, he has, as a sonneteer, a finish, a classical command of the vehicle reminiscent of Petrarch and Camoens. The sonnet is, by the nature of the case, a somewhat inadaptable instrument, and yet it is susceptible of great individuality, as one may note by recalling an intricate sonnet by Rossetti and a sweeping, sonorous one by Milton. The criticism which is, perhaps, most apposite to Mr. Santayana’s sonnets is that they are “faultily faultless;” they are so finished that one would welcome a false note now and then, that suggested a choke in the voice, or a heart-beat out of time.

There is an atmosphere about all of Mr. Santayana’s work that conveys a sense of wandering in the moonlight; it is tempered, softened, stilled; it is like an Isis-veil cast over the eyes; but at times one becomes oppressed with the consciousness of himself, and of theimpalpable visions glimpsed in the wan light, and longs to snatch the veil away and flee to the garish world again. One may seek Mr. Santayana’s poetry when his mood demands it, and it will be as a cooling hand in fever; but when the pulse of being is low, and one needs the touch to vitalize, he must turn to others, for Mr. Santayana’s work is not charged with the electricity that thrills.

Because he is not inventive in metre nor sufficiently light in touch, Mr. Santayana is not a lyrist. He has scarcely any purely lyrical verse in his collections, and what is contained in them is too lacking in spontaneity to be classed with his best work. It is not wanting in lines of beauty and in English undefiled; but the sense of tone and rhythm, except of the smoothly conventional sort, is absent. There are no innovations in form and the impulse is too subdued for a true lyric. That called “Midnight” has more warmth than the others. Several of his odes in the Sapphic metre have great charm, especially the first. His elegiac verse has often rare elevation of thought; but it, also, has too set a measure, too much of the “formed style” to be vital. It brings well-conceived, well-imaged thought, as in this stanza:

How should the vision stay to guide the hand,How should the holy thought and ardour stay,When the false deeps of all the soul are sand,And the loose rivets of the spirit, clay?

How should the vision stay to guide the hand,

How should the holy thought and ardour stay,

When the false deeps of all the soul are sand,

And the loose rivets of the spirit, clay?

but it rarely shocks one into thinking for himself.

In relation to diction, there are few American writers who use English of such purity and finish as does Mr. Santayana; but it is the scholar’s English, the English drawn from familiarity with the great masters and models, and hence lacks the creative flexibility, the quick, warm, ductile adaptability, that a much less accomplished poet may give to his words. It keeps to the accepted canons, the highest, the purest, and uses the consecrated words of literature with an artist’s touch; but the racy idiom, the word which some daring poet coined yesterday in an exigent moment—with these it has naught to do.

Mr. Santayana has several dramatic poems, “The Hermit of Carmel,” “The Knight’s Return,” and a dialogue between Hermes and Lucifer, in which the latter relates the details of his banishment from heaven for his daring arraignment and interrogation of God. The dialogue has little dramatic coloring; one hearing it read aloud would have difficulty in determiningfrom the outward change of expression and personality where Lucifer leaves off speaking and Hermes begins, but it puts into the mouth of Lucifer some words full of the challenge of thought, and speaks through both some beautiful fantasies, such as this reply of Lucifer to Hermes’ question as to the state of bliss in which the angels dwell:

A doubtful thingIs blessedness like that….Their raptured souls, like lilies in a streamThat from their fluid pillow never rise,Float on the lazy current of a dream.

A doubtful thing

Is blessedness like that….

Their raptured souls, like lilies in a stream

That from their fluid pillow never rise,

Float on the lazy current of a dream.

Mr. Santayana has not written “The Hermit of Carmel” or “The Knight’s Return” with a theatrical manager in view. They are stories told in verse, tales of gentle melancholy, pleasant to the ear; but when all is said, one returns to his sonnets as the true expression of his nature and the consummation of his gifts. He is a sonneteer, by every phase of his temperament and every canon of his art. His work in all other forms is cultivated, philosophical, finely finished, but pervaded by an atmosphere of cultured conventionality; whereas in the sonnet he finds a medium whose classic distinction and subtlety are so harmonized to his nature and his characteristic mode of thought, that it becomes to himthe predestined expression. A glance, then, in closing, at the flexile phrases, the psychological analyses of the later sonnet sequence, turning chiefly upon love.

But, first, let me cite from one of the earlier sonnets, an image drawn from this theme, a jewel-like flash of beauty, not to be overlooked. The first line of the metaphor is commonplace; but note the succeeding ones:

Love but the formless and eternal WholeFrom whose effulgence one unheeded rayBreaks on this prism of dissolving clayInto the flickering colors of thy soul.

Love but the formless and eternal Whole

From whose effulgence one unheeded ray

Breaks on this prism of dissolving clay

Into the flickering colors of thy soul.

This is defining the individual spirit in exquisite terms.

The second sequence teems with beautiful passages, now and again with a note of thetrovatore, as in the sestett of this sonnet:

Yet why, of one who loved thee not, commandThy counterfeit, for other men to see,When God himself did on my heart for meThy face, like Christ’s upon the napkin, brand?O how much subtler than a painter’s handIs love to render back the truth of thee!My soul should be thy glass in time to be,And in my thought thine effigy should stand.Yet, lest the churlish critics of that ageShould flout my praise, and deem a lover’s rageCould gild a virtue and a grace exceed,I bid thine image here confront my page,That men may look upon thee as they read,And cry: “Such eyes a better poet need!”

Yet why, of one who loved thee not, command

Thy counterfeit, for other men to see,

When God himself did on my heart for me

Thy face, like Christ’s upon the napkin, brand?

O how much subtler than a painter’s hand

Is love to render back the truth of thee!

My soul should be thy glass in time to be,

And in my thought thine effigy should stand.

Yet, lest the churlish critics of that age

Should flout my praise, and deem a lover’s rage

Could gild a virtue and a grace exceed,

I bid thine image here confront my page,

That men may look upon thee as they read,

And cry: “Such eyes a better poet need!”

This has art and charm, but in contrast note the impassioned nobility of utterance which imbues the one that follows. Here are lines of pure emotion and beauty:

We needs must be divided in the tomb,For I would die among the hills of Spain,And o’er the treeless, melancholy plainAwait the coming of the final gloom.But thou—O pitiful!—wilt find scant roomAmong thy kindred by the northern main,And fade into the drifting mist again,The hemlocks’ shadow, or the pines’ perfume.Let gallants lie beside their ladies’ dustIn one cold grave, with mortal love inurned;Let the sea part our ashes, if it must,The souls fled thence which love immortal burned,For they were wedded without bond of lust,And nothing of our heart to earth returned.

We needs must be divided in the tomb,

For I would die among the hills of Spain,

And o’er the treeless, melancholy plain

Await the coming of the final gloom.

But thou—O pitiful!—wilt find scant room

Among thy kindred by the northern main,

And fade into the drifting mist again,

The hemlocks’ shadow, or the pines’ perfume.

Let gallants lie beside their ladies’ dust

In one cold grave, with mortal love inurned;

Let the sea part our ashes, if it must,

The souls fled thence which love immortal burned,

For they were wedded without bond of lust,

And nothing of our heart to earth returned.

Such sonnets as this mark Mr. Santayana as a master of this form, and while his other work has value, it is as a sonneteer that he has made his really individual contribution to literature.

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