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Title: The Germ
       Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art

Author: Various

Commentator: William Michael Rossetti

Editor: Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Release Date: January 31, 2006 [EBook #17649]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GERM ***




Produced by Andrew Sly







THE GERM

Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature
and Art

BEING
A _FACSIMILE_ REPRINT OF THE LITERARY
ORGAN OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITE
BROTHERHOOD, PUBLISHED
IN 1850

WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI

LONDON
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
1901




INTRODUCTION.


Of late years it has been my fate or my whim to write a good deal
about the early days of the Praeraphaelite movement, the members of
the Praeraphaelite Brotherhood, and especially my brother Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, and my sister Christina Georgina Rossetti. I am now
invited to write something further on the subject, with immediate
reference to the Praeraphaelite magazine "The Germ," republished in
this volume. I know of no particular reason why I should not do this,
for certain it is that few people living know, or ever knew, so much
as I do about "The Germ,"; and if some press-critics who regarded
previous writings of mine as superfluous or ill-judged should
entertain a like opinion now, in equal or increased measure, I
willingly leave them to say so, while I pursue my own course none the
less.

"The Germ" is here my direct theme, not the Praeraphaelite
Brotherhood; but it seems requisite to say in the first instance
something about the Brotherhood--its members, allies, and ideas--so
as to exhibit a raison d'etre for the magazine. In doing this I must
necessarily repeat some things which I have set forth before, and
which, from the writings of others as well as myself, are well enough
known to many. I can vary my form of expression, but cannot introduce
much novelty into my statements of fact.

In 1848 the British School of Painting was in anything but a vital or
a lively condition. One very great and incomparable genius, Turner,
belonged to it. He was old and past his executive prime. There were
some other highly able men--Etty and David Scott, then both very near
their death; Maclise, Dyce, Cope, Mulready, Linnell, Poole, William
Henry Hunt, Landseer, Leslie, Watts, Cox, J.F. Lewis, and some
others. There were also some distinctly clever men, such as Ward,
Frith, and Egg. Paton, Gilbert, Ford Madox Brown, Mark Anthony, had
given sufficient indication of their powers, but were all in an early
stage. On the whole the school had sunk very far below what it had
been in the days of Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Blake, and
its ordinary average had come to be something for which commonplace
is a laudatory term, and imbecility a not excessive one.

There were in the late summer of 1848, in the Schools of the Royal
Academy or barely emergent from them, four young men to whom this
condition of the art seemed offensive, contemptible, and even
scandalous. Their names were William Holman-Hunt, John Everett
Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painters, and Thomas Woolner,
sculptor. Their ages varied from twenty-two to nineteen--Woolner
being the eldest, and Millais the youngest. Being little more than
lads, these young men were naturally not very deep in either the
theory or the practice of art: but they had open eyes and minds, and
could discern that some things were good and other bad--that some
things they liked, and others they hated. They hated the lack of
ideas in art, and the lack of character; the silliness and vacuity
which belong to the one, the flimsiness and make-believe which result
from the other. They hated those forms of execution which are merely
smooth and prettyish, and those which, pretending to mastery, are
nothing better than slovenly and slapdash, or what the P.R.B.'s
called "sloshy." Still more did they hate the notion that each artist
should not obey his own individual impulse, act upon his own
perception and study of Nature, and scrutinize and work at his
objective material with assiduity before he could attempt to display
and interpret it; but that, instead of all this, he should try to be
"like somebody else," imitating some extant style and manner, and
applying the cut-and-dry rules enunciated by A from the practice of B
or C. They determined to do the exact contrary. The temper of these
striplings, after some years of the current academic training, was
the temper of rebels: they meant revolt, and produced revolution. It
would be a mistake to suppose, because the called themselves
Praeraphaelites, that they seriously disliked the works produced by
Raphael; but they disliked the works produced by Raphael's uninspired
satellites, and were resolved to find out, by personal study and
practice, what their own several faculties and adaptabilities might
be, without being bound by rules and big-wiggeries founded upon the
performance of Raphael or of any one. They were to have no master
except their own powers of mind and hand, and their own first-hand
study of Nature. Their minds were to furnish them with subjects for
works of art, and with the general scheme of treatment; Nature was to
be their one or their paramount storehouse of materials for objects
to be represented; the study of her was to be deep, and the
representation (at any rate in the earlier stages of self-discipline
and work) in the highest degree exact; executive methods were to be
learned partly from precept and example, but most essentially from
practice and experiment. As their minds were very different in range
and direction, their products also, from the first, differed greatly;
and these soon ceased to have any link of resemblance.

The Praeraphaelite Brothers entertained a deep respect and a sincere
affection for the works of some of the artists who had preceded
Raphael; and they thought that they should more or less be following
the lead of those artists if they themselves were to develop their
own individuality, disregarding school-rules. This was really the sum
and substance of their "Praeraphaelitism." It may freely be allowed
that, as they were very young, and fired by certain ideas impressive
to their own spirits, they unduly ignored some other ideas and
theories which have none the less a deal to say for themselves. They
contemned some things and some practitioners of art not at all
contemptible, and, in speech still more than in thought, they at
times wilfully heaped up the scorn. You cannot have a youthful rebel
with a faculty who is also a model head-boy in a school.

The P.R.B. was completed by the accession of three members to the
four already mentioned. These were James Collinson, a domestic
painter; Frederic George Stephens, an Academy-student of painting;
and myself, a Government-clerk. These again, when the P.R.B. was
formed towards September 1848, were all young, aged respectively
about twenty-three, twenty-one, and nineteen.

This Praeraphaelite Brotherhood was the independent creation of
Holman-Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, and (in perhaps a somewhat minor
degree) Woolner: it cannot be said that they were prompted or abetted
by any one. Ruskin, whose name has been sometimes inaccurately mixed
up in the matter, and who had as yet published only the first two
volumes of "Modern Painters," was wholly unknown to them personally,
and in his writings was probably known only to Holman-Hunt. Ford
Madox Brown had been an intimate of Rossetti since March 1848, and he
sympathized, fully as much as any of these younger men, with some
old-world developments of art preceding its ripeness or
over-ripeness: but he had no inclination to join any organization for
protest and reform, and he followed his own course--more influenced,
for four or five years ensuing, by what the P.R.B.'s were doing than
influencing them. Among the persons who were most intimate with the
members of the Brotherhood towards the date of its formation, and
onwards till the inception of "The Germ," I may mention the
following. For Holman-Hunt, the sculptor John Lucas Tupper, who had
been a fellow Academy-student, and was now an anatomical designer at
Guy's Hospital: he and his family were equally well acquainted with
Mr. Stephens. For Millais, the painter Charles Allston Collins, son
of the well-known painter of domestic life and coast-scenes
William Collins; the painter Arthur Hughes; also his own brother,
William Henry Millais, who had musical aptitudes and became a
landscape-painter. For Rossetti, William Bell Scott (brother of David
Scott), painter, poet, and Master of the Government School of Design
in Newcastle-on-Tyne; Major Calder Campbell, a retired Officer of the
Indian army, and a somewhat popular writer of tales, verses, etc.;
Alexander Munro the sculptor; Walter Howell Deverell, a young
painter, son of the Secretary to the Government Schools of Design;
James Hannay, the novelist, satirical writer, and journalist; and
(known through Madox Brown) William Cave Thomas, a painter who had
studied in the severe classical school of Germany, and had earned a
name in the Westminster Hall competitions for frescoes in Parliament.
For Woolner, John Hancock and Bernhard Smith, sculptors; Coventry
Patmore the poet, with his connections the Orme family and Professor
Masson; also William North, an eccentric young literary man, of much
effervescence and some talent, author of "Anti-Coningsby" and other
novels. For Collinson, the prominent painter of romantic and biblical
subjects John Rogers Herbert, who was, like Collinson himself, a
Roman Catholic convert.

The Praeraphaelite Brotherhood having been founded in September 1848,
the members exhibited in 1849 works conceived in the new spirit.
These were received by critics and by the public with more than
moderate though certainly not unmixed favour: it had not as yet
transpired that there was a league of unquiet and ambitious young
spirits, bent upon making a fresh start of their own, and a clean
sweep of some effete respectabilities. It was not until after the
exhibitions were near closing in 1849 that any idea of bringing out a
magazine came to be discussed. The author of the project was Dante
Gabriel Rossetti. He alone among the P.R.B.'s had already cultivated
the art of writing in verse and in prose to some noticeable extent
("The Blessed Damozel" had been produced before May 1847), and he was
better acquainted than any other member with British and foreign
literature. There need be no self-conceit in saying that in these
respects I came next to him. Holman-Hunt, Woolner, and Stephens, were
all reading men (in British literature only) within straiter bounds
than Rossetti: not any one of them, I think, had as yet done in
writing anything worth mentioning. Millais and Collinson, more
especially the former, were men of the brush, not the pen, yet both
of them capable of writing with point, and even in verse. By July 13
and 14, 1849, some steps were taken towards discussing the project of
a magazine. The price, as at first proposed, was to be sixpence; the
title, "Monthly Thoughts in Literature, Poetry, and Art"; each number
was to have an etching. Soon afterwards a price of one shilling was
decided upon, and two etchings per number: but this latter intention
was not carried out.{1} All the P.R.B.'s were to be proprietors of
the magazine: I question however whether Collinson was ever persuaded
to assume this responsibility, entailing payment of an eventual
deficit. We were quite ready also to have some other proprietors. Mr.
Herbert was addressed by Collinson, and at one time was regarded as
pretty safe. Mr. Hancock the sculptor did not resist the pressure put
upon him; but after all he contributed nothing to "The Germ," either
in work or in money. Walter Deverell assented, and paid when the time
came. Thus there seem to have been eight, or else seven,
proprietors--not one of them having any spare cash, and not all of
them much steadiness of interest in the scheme set going by Dante
Rossetti.

{1} Many of the particulars here given regarding "The Germ" appear in
the so-called "P.R.B. Journal," which was published towards December
1899, in the volume named "Preraphaelite Diaries and Letters, edited
by W.M. Rossetti." At the date when I wrote the present introduction,
that volume had not been offered for publication.

With so many persons having a kind of co-equal right to decide what
should be done with the magazine, it soon became apparent that
somebody ought to be appointed Editor, and assume the control. I,
during an absence from London, was fixed upon for this purpose by
Woolner and my brother--with the express or tacit assent, so far as I
know, of all the others, I received notice of my new dignity on
September 23, 1849, being just under twenty years of age, and I
forthwith applied myself to the task. It had at first been proposed
to print upon the prospectus and wrappers of the magazine the words
"Conducted by Artists," and also (just about this time) to entitle it
"The P.R.B. Journal." I called attention to the first of these points
as running counter to my assuming the editorship, and to the second
as in itself inappropriate: both had in fact been already set aside.
My brother had ere this been introduced to Messrs. Aylott and Jones,
publishers in Paternoster Row (principally concerned, I believe, with
books of evangelical religion), and had entered into terms with them,
and got them to print a prospectus. "P.R.B." was at first printed on
the latter, but to this Mr. Holman-Hunt objected in November, and it
was omitted. The printers were to be Messrs. Tupper and Sons, a firm
of lithographic and general printers in the City, the same family to
which John Lucas Tupper belonged. The then title, invented by my
brother, was "Thoughts towards Nature," a phrase which, though
somewhat extra-peculiar, indicated accurately enough the predominant
conception of the Praeraphaelite Brotherhood, that an artist, whether
painter or writer, ought to be bent upon defining and expressing his
own personal thoughts, and that these ought to be based upon a direct
study of Nature, and harmonized with her manifestations. It was not
until December 19, when the issue of our No. 1 was closely impending,
that a different title, "The Germ," was proposed. On that evening
there was a rather large gathering at Dante Rossetti's studio, 72
Newman Street; the seven P.R.B.'s, Madox Brown, Cave Thomas,
Deverell, Hancock, and John and George Tupper. Mr. Thomas had drawn
up a list of no less than sixty-five possible titles (a facsimile of
his MS. of some of them appears in the "Letters of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti to William Allingham," edited by George Birkbeck
Hill--Unwin, 1897). Only a few of them met with favour; and one of
them, "The Germ," going to the vote along with "The Seed" and "The
Scroll," was approved by a vote of six to four. The next best were, I
think, "The Harbinger," "First Thoughts," "The Sower," "The
Truth-Seeker," and "The Acorn." Appended to the new title we
retained, as a sub-title, something of what had been previously
proposed; and the serial appeared as "The Germ. Thoughts towards
Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art." At this same meeting Mr.
Woolner suggested that authors' names should not be published in the
magazine. I alone opposed him, and his motion was carried. I cannot
at this distance of time remember with any precision what his reasons
were; but I think that he, and all the other artists concerned,
entertained a general feeling that to appear publicly as writers, and
especially as writers opposing the ordinary current of opinions on
fine art, would damage their professional position, which already
involved uphill work more than enough.

"The Germ," No. 1, came out on or about January 1, 1850. The number
of copies printed was 700. Something like 200 were sold, in about
equal proportions by the publishers, and by ourselves among
acquaintances and well-wishers. This was not encouraging, so we
reduced the issue of No. 2 to 500 copies. It sold less well than No.
1. With this number was introduced the change of printing on the
wrapper the names of most of the contributors: not of all, for some
still preferred to remain unnamed, or to figure under a fancy
designation. Had we been left to our own resources, we must now have
dropped the magazine. But the printing-firm--or Mr. George I.F.
Tupper as representing it--came forward, and undertook to try the
chance of two numbers more. The title was altered (at Mr. Alexander
Tupper's suggestion) to "Art and Poetry, being Thoughts towards
Nature, conducted principally by Artists"; and Messrs. Dickinson and
Co., of New Bond Street, the printsellers, consented to join their
name as publishers to that of Messrs. Aylott and Jones. Mr. Robert
Dickinson, the head of this firm, and more especially his brother,
the able portrait-painter Mr. Lowes Dickinson, were well known to
Madox Brown, and through him to members of the P.R.B. I continued to
be editor; but, as the money stake of myself and my colleagues in the
publication had now ceased, I naturally accommodated myself more than
before to any wish evinced by the Tupper family. No. 3, which ought
to have appeared March 1, was delayed by these uncertainties and
changes till March 31. No. 4 came out on April 30. Some small amount
of advertising was done, more particularly by posters carried about
in front of the Royal Academy (then in Trafalgar Square), which
opened at the beginning of May. All efforts proved useless. People
would not buy "The Germ," and would scarcely consent to know of its
existence. So the magazine breathed its last, and its obsequies were
conducted in the strictest privacy. Its debts exceeded its assets,
and a sum of L33 odd, due on Nos. 1 and 2, had to be cleared off by
the seven (or eight) proprietors, conscientious against the grain.
What may have been the loss of Messrs. Tupper on Nos. 3 and 4 I am
unable to say. It is hardly worth specifying that neither the editor,
nor any of the contributors whether literary or artistic, received
any sort of payment. This was foreseen from the first as being "in
the bond," and was no grievance to anybody.

"The Germ," as we have seen, was a most decided failure, yet it would
be a mistake to suppose that it excited no amount of literary
attention whatsoever. There were laudatory notices in "The Dispatch,"
"The Guardian," "Howitt's Standard of Freedom," "John Bull," "The
Critic," "Bell's Weekly Messenger," "The Morning Chronicle," and I
dare say some other papers. A pat on the back, with a very lukewarm
hand, was bestowed by "The Art Journal." There were notices also--not
eulogistic--in "The Spectator" and elsewhere. The editor of "The
Critic," Mr. (afterwards Serjeant) Cox, on the faith of doings in
"The Germ," invited me, or some other of the art-writers there, to
undertake the fine-art department--picture-exhibitions, etc.--of his
weekly review. This I did for a short time, and, on getting
transferred to "The Spectator," I was succeeded on "The Critic" by
Mr. F.G. Stephens. I also received some letters consequent upon "The
Germ," and made some acquaintances among authors; Horne, Clough,
Heraud, Westland Marston, also Miss Glyn the actress. I as editor
came in for this; but of course the attractiveness of "The Germ"
depended upon the writings of others, chiefly Messrs. Woolner,
Patmore, and Orchard, my sister, and above all my brother, and, among
the artist-etchers, Mr. Holman-Hunt.

I happen to be still in possession of the notices which appeared in
"The Critic," "Bell's Weekly Messenger," and "The Guardian," and of
extracts (as given in our present facsimile) from those in "John
Bull," "The Morning Chronicle," and "The Standard of Freedom": I here
reproduce the first three for the curious reader's perusal. First
comes the review which appeared in "The Critic" on February 15, 1850,
followed by a second review on June 1. The former was (as shown by
the initials) written by Mr. Cox, and I presume the latter also.
Major Calder Campbell must have called the particular attention of
Mr. Cox to "The Germ." My own first personal acquaintance with this
gentleman may have been intermediate between 15 February and 1 June.

_The Germ. Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature, and Art._
Nos. I. and II. London: Aylott and Jones.

We depart from our usual plan of noticing the periodicals under one
heading, for the purpose of introducing to our readers a new aspirant
for public favour, which has peculiar and uncommon claims to
attention, for in design and execution it differs from all other
periodicals. _The Germ_ is the somewhat affected and unpromising
title give to a small monthly journal, which is devoted almost
entirely to poetry and art, and is the production of a party of young
persons. This statement is of itself, as we are well aware, enough to
cause it to be looked upon with shyness. A periodical largely
occupied with poetry wears an unpromising aspect to readers who have
learned from experience what nonsensical stuff most fugitive
magazine-poetry is; nor is this natural prejudice diminished by the
knowledge that it is the production of young gentlemen and ladies.
But, when they have read a few extracts which we propose to make, we
think they will own that for once appearances are deceitful, and that
an affected title and an unpromising theme really hides a great deal
of genius; mingled however, we must also admit, with many conceits
which youth is prone to, but which time and experience will assuredly
tame.

That the contents of _The Germ_ are the production of no common minds
the following extracts will sufficiently prove, and we may add that
these are but a small portion of the contents which might prefer
equal claims to applause.

"My Beautiful Lady," and "Of my Lady in Death," are two poems
in a quaint metre, full of true poetry, marred by not a few
affectations--the genuine metal, but wanting to be purified from its
dross. Nevertheless, it is pleasant to find the precious ore anywhere
in these unpoetical times.

To our taste the following is replete with poetry. What a _picture_
it is! A poet's tongue has told what an artist's eye has seen. It is
the first of a series to be entitled "Songs of One Household." [Here
comes Dante Rossetti's poem, "My Sister's Sleep," followed by
Patmore's "Seasons," and Christina Rossetti's "Testimony."] We have
not space to take any specimens of the prose, but the essays on art
are conceived with an equal appreciation of its _meaning_ and
requirements. Being such, _The Germ_ has our heartiest wishes for its
success; but we scarcely dare to _hope_ that it may win the
popularity it deserves. The truth is that it is too good for the
time. It is not _material_ enough for the age.

_Art and Poetry: being Thoughts towards Nature._ Conducted
principally by Artists. Nos. 3 and 4. London: Dickinson and Co.

Some time since we had occasion to direct the attention of our
readers to a periodical then just issued under the modest title of
_The Germ_. The surprise and pleasure with which we read it was, as
we are informed, very generally shared by our readers upon perusing
the poems we extracted from it; and it was manifest to every person
of the slightest taste that the contributors were possessed of genius
of a very high order, and that _The Germ_ was not wantonly so
entitled, for it abounded with the promise of a rich harvest to be
anticipated from the maturity of those whose youth could accomplish
so much.

But we expressed also our fear lest the very excellence of this
magazine should be fatal to its success. It was too good--that is to
say, too refined and of too lofty a class, both in its art and in its
poetry--to be sufficiently popular to pay even the printer's bill.
The name, too, was against it, being somewhat unintelligible to the
thoughtless, and conveying to the considerate a notion of something
very juvenile. Those fears were not unfounded, for it was suspended
for a short time; but other journals after a while discovered and
proclaimed the merit that was scattered profusely over the pages of
_The Germ_, and, thus encouraged, the enterprise has been resumed,
with a change of name which we must regard as an improvement. _Art
and Poetry_ precisely describes its character. It is wholly devoted
to them, and it aims at originality in both. It is seeking out for
itself new paths, in a spirit of earnestness, and with an undoubted
ability which must lead to a new era. The writers may err somewhat at
first, show themselves too defiant of prescriptive rules, and mistake
extravagance for originality; but this fault (inherent in youth when,
conscious of its powers, it first sets up for itself) will after a
while work its own cure, and with experience will come soberer
action. But we cannot contemplate this young and rising school in art
and literature without the most ardent anticipations of something
great to grow from it, something new and worthy of our age, and we
bid them God speed upon the path they have adventured.

But our more immediate purpose here is with the poetry, of which
about one-half of each number is composed. It is all beautiful, must
of it of extraordinary merit, and equal to anything that any of our
known poets could write, save Tennyson, of whom the strains sometimes
remind us, although they are not imitations in any sense of the word.
[The Reviewer next proceeds to quote, with a few words of comment,
Christina Rossetti's "Sweet Death," John Tupper's "Viola and Olivia,"
Orchard's "Whit-Sunday Morn," and (later on) Dante Rossetti's "Pax
Vobis."]

Almost one half of the April number is occupied with a "Dialogue on
Art," the composition of an Artist whose works are well known to the
public. It was written during a period of ill health, which forbad
the use of the brush, and, taking his pen, he has given to the world
his thoughts upon art in a paper which the _Edinburgh Review_ in its
best days might have been proud to possess.

Sure we are that not one of our readers will regret the length at
which we have noticed this work.

    *  *  *  *  *  *  *

The short and unpretending critique which I add from "Bell's Weekly
Messenger" was written, I believe, either by or at the instance of
Mr. Bellamy, a gentleman who acted as secretary to the National Club.
His son addressed me as editor of "The Germ," in terms of great
ardour, and through the son I on one occasion saw the father as well.

_Art and Poetry._ Nos. I., II., and III. London, Dickinson and Co.

The present numbers are the commencement of a very useful
publication, conducted principally by artists, the design of which is
to "express thoughts towards Nature." We see much to commend in its
pages, which are also nicely illustrated in the mediaeval style of
art and in outline. The paper upon Shakespeare's tragedy of
"Macbeth," in the third number, abounds with striking passages, and
will be found to be well worthy of consideration.

    *  *  *  *  *  *  *

I now proceed to "The Guardian." The notice came out on August 20,
1850, some months after "The Germ" had expired. I do not now know who
wrote it, and (so far as memory serves me) I never did know. The
writer truly said that Millais "contributes nothing" to the magazine.
This however was not Millais's fault, for he made an etching for a
prose story by my brother (named "An Autopsychology," or now "St.
Agnes of Intercession"); and this etching, along with the story, had
been expected to appear in a No. 5 of "The Germ" which never came
out. The "very curious but very striking picture" by Rossetti was the
"Annunciation," now in the National British Gallery.

_Art and Poetry._ Being Thoughts towards Nature. Conducted
principally by Artists. Dickinson and Co., and Aylott and Jones.

We are very sorry to find that, after a short life of four monthly
numbers, this magazine is not likely to be continued. Independently
of the great ability displayed by some of its contributors, we have
been anxious to see the rising school of young and clever artists
find a voice, and tell us what they are aiming at, and how they
propose to reach their aim. This magazine was to a great extent
connected with the Pre-Raffaelle Brethren, whose paintings have
attracted this year a more than ordinary quantity of attention, and
an amount of praise and blame perhaps equally extravagant. As might
have been expected, the school has been identified with its cleverest
manipulator, Mr. Millais, and his merits or defects have been made
the measure of the admiration or contempt bestowed by the public upon
those whom it chooses to class with him. This is not matter of
complaint, but it is a mistake. As far as these papers enable us to
judge, Mr. Millais is by no means the leading _mind_ among his
fraternity; and judged by the principles of some clever and beautiful
papers upon art in the magazine before us, his pictures would be
described by them as wanting in some of the very highest artistic
qualities, although possessing many which entitle them to attention
and respect. The chief contributors to this magazine (to which Mr.
Millais contributes nothing) are other artists, as yet not greatly
known, but with feeling and purpose about them such as must make them
remarkable in time. Some of the best papers are by two brothers named
Rossetti, one of whom, Mr. D. G. Rossetti, has a very curious but
very striking picture now exhibiting in the Portland Gallery. Mr.
Deverell, who has also a very clever picture in the same gallery,
contributes some beautiful poetry. It is perhaps chiefly in the
poetry that the abilities of these writers are displayed; for, with
somewhat absurd and much that is affected, there is yet in the
poetical pieces of these four numbers a beauty and grace of language
and sentiment, and not seldom a vigour of conception, altogether
above the common run. Want of purpose may be easily charged against
them as a fault, and with some justice, but it is a very common
defect of youthful poetry, which is sure to disappear with time if
there be anything real and manly in the poet. The best pieces are too
long to extracted in entire, and are not to be judged of fairly
except as wholes. There is a very fine poem called "Repining" of
which this is particularly true. [Next comes a quotation of Christina
Rossetti's "Dream Land," and of a portion of Dante Rossetti's
"Blessed Damozel."] The last number contains a remarkable dialogue on
Art, written by a young man, John Orchard, who has since died. It is
well worth study. Kalon, Kosmon, Sophon, and Christian, whose names,
of course, represent the opinions they defend, discuss a number of
subjects connected with the arts. Each character is well supported,
and the wisdom and candour of the whole piece is very striking,
especially when we consider the youth and inexperience of the writer.
Art lost a true and high-minded votary in Mr. Orchard. [A rather long
extract from the "Dialogue" follows here.]

It is a pity that the publication is to stop. English artists have
hitherto worked each one by himself, with too little of common
purpose, too little of mutual support, too little of distinct and
steadily pursued intellectual object. We do not believe that they are
one whit more jealous than the followers of other professions. But
they are less forced to be together, and the little jealousies which
deform the natures of us all have in their case, for this reason,
freer scope, and tend more to isolation. Here, at last, we have a
_school_, ignorant it may be, conceited possibly, as yet with but
vague and unrealised objects, but working together with a common
purpose, according to certain admitted principles, and looking to one
another for help and sympathy. This is new in England, and we are
very anxious it should have a fair trial. Its aim, moreover, however
imperfectly attained as yet, is high and pure. No one can walk along
our streets and not see how debased and sensual our tastes have
become. The saying of Burke (so unworthy of a great man), that vice
loses half its evil by losing all its grossness, is practically acted
upon, and voluptuous and seductive figures, recommended only by a
soft effeminacy, swarm our shop-windows and defile our drawing-rooms.
It is impossible to over-state the extent to which they minister to,
and increase the foul sins of, a corrupt and luxurious age. A school
of artists who attempt to bring back the popular taste to the severe
draperies and pure forms of early art are at least deserving of
encouragement. Success in their attempt would be a national blessing.

    *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Shrivelling in the Spring of 1850, "The Germ" showed no further sign
of sprouting for many years, though I suppose it may have been known
to the promoters of "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," produced in
1856, and may have furnished some incitement towards that
enterprise--again an unsuccessful one commercially. Gradually some
people began to take a little interest in the knowledge that such a
publication had existed, and to inquire after stray copies here and
there. This may perhaps have commenced before 1870, or at any rate
shortly afterwards, as in that year the "Poems" of Dante Rossetti
were brought out, exciting a great amount of attention and
admiration, and curiosity attached to anything that he might have
published before. One heard of such prices as ten shillings for a set
of the "The Germ," then L2, L10, L30, etc., and in 1899 a copy
handsomely bound by Cobden-Saunderson was sold in America for about
L104. Will that high-water mark ever be exceeded? For the sake of
common-sense, let us hope not.

I will now go through the articles in "The Germ" one by one. Wherever
any of them may seem to invite a few words of explanation I offer
such to the reader; and I give the names of the authors, when not
named in the magazine itself. Those articles which do not call for
any particular comment receive none here.

On the wrapper of each number is to be found a sonnet, printed in a
rather aggressively Gothic type, beginning, "When whoso merely hath a
little thought." This sonnet is my performance; it had been suggested
that one or other of the proprietors of the magazine should write a
sonnet to express the spirit in which the publication was undertaken.
I wrote the one here in question, which met with general acceptance;
and I do not remember that any one else competed. This sonnet may not
be a good one, but I do not see why it should be considered
unintelligible. Mr. Bell Scott, in his "Autobiographical Notes,"
expressed the opinion that to master the production would almost need
a Browning Society's united intellects. And he then gave his
interpretation, differing not essentially from my own. What I meant
is this: A writer ought to think out his subject honestly and
personally, not imitatively, and ought to express it with directness
and precision; if he does this, we should respect his performance as
truthful, even though it may not be important. This indicated, for
writers, much the same principle which the P.R.B. professed for
painters,--individual genuineness in the thought, reproductive
genuineness in the presentment.

By Thomas Woolner: "My Beautiful Lady," and "Of My Lady in Death."
These compositions were, I think, nearly the first attempts which Mr.
Woolner made in verse; any earlier endeavours must have been few and
slight. The author's long poem "My Beautiful Lady," published in
1863, started from these beginnings. Coventry Patmore, on hearing the
poems in September 1849, was considerably impressed by them: "the
only defect he found" (as notified in a letter from Dante Rossetti)
"being that they were a trifle too much in earnest in the passionate
parts, and too sculpturesque generally. He means by this that each
stanza stands too much alone, and has its own ideas too much to
itself."

By Ford Madox Brown: "The Love of Beauty: Sonnet."

By John L. Tupper: "The Subject in Art." Two papers, which do not
complete the important thesis here undertaken. Mr. Tupper was, for an
artist, a man of unusually scientific mind; yet he was not, I think,
distinguished by that power of orderly and progressive exposition
which befits an argumentation. These papers exhibit a good deal of
thought, and state several truths which, even if partial truths, are
not the less deserving of attention; but the dissertation does not
produce a very clear impression, inasmuch as there is too great a
readiness to plunge, _in medias res_, checked by too great a tendency
to harking back, and re-stating some conclusion in modified terms and
with insecure corollaries. Two points which Mr. Tupper chiefly
insists upon are: (1) that the subject in a work of art affects the
beholder in the same sort of way as the same subject, occurring as a
fact or aspect of Nature, affects him; and thus whatever in Nature
excites the mental and moral emotion of man is a right subject for
fine art; and (2), that subjects of our own day should not be
discarded in favour of those of a past time. These principles, along
with others bearing in the same direction, underlie the propositions
lately advanced by Count Leo Tolstoy in his most interesting and
valuable (though I think one-sided) book entitled "What is Art?"--and
the like may be said of the principles announced in the "Hand and
Soul" of Dante Rossetti, and in the "Dialogue on Art" by John
Orchard, through the mouths of two of the speakers, Christian and
Sophon. I have once or twice seen these papers by Mr. Tupper
commented upon to the effect that he wholly ignores the question of
art-merit in a work of art, the question whether it is good or bad in
form, colour, etc. But this is a mistake, for in fact he allows that
this is a relevant consideration, but declines to bring it within his
own lines of discussion. There is also a curious passage which has
been remarked upon as next door to absurd; that where, in treating of
various forms of still life as inferior subjects for art, he says
that "the dead pheasant in a picture will always be as 'food,' while
the same at the poulterer's will be but a dead pheasant." I do not
perceive that this is really absurd. At the poulterer's (and Mr.
Tupper has proceeded to say as much in his article) all the items are
in fact food, and therefore the spectator attends to the differences
between them; one being a pheasant, one a fowl, one a rabbit, etc.
But, in a varied collection of pictures, most of the works
representing some subject quite unconnected with food; and, if you
see among them one, such as a dead pheasant, representing an article
of food, that is the point which primarily occurs to your mind as
distinguishing this particular picture from the others. The views
expressed by Mr. Tupper in these two papers should be regarded as his
own, and not by any means necessarily those upheld by the
Praeraphaelite Brotherhood. The members of this body must however
have agreed with several of his utterances, and sympathized with
others, apart from strict agreement.

By Patmore: "The Seasons." This choice little poem was volunteered to
"The Germ" in September, after the author had read our prospectus,
which impressed him favourably. He withheld his name, much to our
disappointment, having resolved to do so in all instances where
something of his might be published pending the issue of a new
volume.

By Christina Rossetti: "Dream Land." Though my sister was only just
nineteen when this remarkable lyric was printed, she had already made
some slight appearance in published type (not to speak of the
privately printed "Verses" of 1847), as two small poems of hers had
been inserted in "The Athenaeum" in October 1848. "Dream Land" was
written in April 1849, before "The Germ" was thought of; and it may
be as well to say that all my sister's contributions to this magazine
were produced without any reference to publication in that or in any
particular form.

By Dante G. Rossetti: "My Sister's Sleep." This purports to be No. 1
of "Songs of One Household." I do not much think that Dante Rossetti
ever wrote any other poem which would have been proper to such a
series. "My Sister's Sleep" was composed very soon after he emerged
from a merely juvenile stage of work. I believe that it dates before
"The Blessed Damozel," and therefore before May 1847. It is not
founded upon any actual event affecting the Rossetti family, nor any
family of our acquaintance. As I have said in my Memoir of my brother
(1895), the poem was shown, perhaps early in 1848, by Major Calder
Campbell to the editress of the "Belle Assemblee," who heartily
admired it, but, for one reason or another, did not publish it. This
composition is somewhat noticeable on more grounds than one; not
least as being in a metre which was not much in use until it became
famous in Tennyson's "In Memoriam," published in 1850, and of course
totally unknown to Rossetti when he wrote "My Sister's Sleep." In
later years my brother viewed this early work with some distaste, and
he only reluctantly reprinted it in his "Poems," 1870. He then wholly
omitted the four stanzas 7, 8, 12, 13, beginning: "Silence was
speaking," "I said, full knowledge," "She stood a moment," "Almost
unwittingly"; and he made some other verbal alterations.{2} It will
be observed that this poem was written long before the Praeraphaelite
movement began. None the less it shows in an eminent degree one of
the influences which guided that movement: the intimate intertexture
of a spiritual sense with a material form; small actualities made
vocal of lofty meanings.

{2} I may call attention to Stanza 16, "She stooped an instant." The
word is "stooped" in "The Germ," and in the "Poems" of 1870. This is
undoubtedly correct; but in my brother's re-issue of the "Poems,"
1881, the word got mis-printed "stopped"; and I find the same
mis-print in subsequent editions.

By Dante G. Rossetti: "Hand and Soul." This tale was, I think,
written with an express view to its appearing in No. 1 of our
magazine, and Rossetti began making for it an etching, which, though
not ready for No. 1, was intended to appear in some number later than
the second. He drew it in March 1850; but, being disgusted with the
performance, he scratched the plate over, and tore up the prints. The
design showed Chiaro dell' Erma in the act of painting his embodied
Soul. Though the form of this tale is that of romantic metaphor, its
substance is a very serious manifesto of art-dogma. It amounts to
saying, The only satisfactory works of art are those which exhibit
the very soul of the artist. To work for fame or self-display is a
failure, and to work for direct moral proselytizing is a failure; but
to paint that which your own perceptions and emotions urge you to
paint promises to be a success for yourself, and hence a benefit to
the mass of beholders. This was the core of the "Praeraphaelite"
creed; with the adjunct (which hardly came within the scope of
Rossetti's tale, and yet may be partly traced there) that the artist
cannot attain to adequate self-expression save through a stern study
and realization of natural appearances. And it may be said that to
this core of the Praeraphaelite creed Rossetti always adhered
throughout his life, greatly different though his later works are
from his earlier ones in the externals of artistic style. Most of
"Hand and Soul" was written on December 21, 1849, day and night,
chiefly in some five hours beginning after midnight. Three currents
of thought may be traced in this story: (1) A certain amount of
knowledge regarding the beginnings of Italian art, mingled with some
ignorance, voluntary or involuntary, of what was possible to be done
in the middle of the thirteenth century; (2) a highly ideal, yet
individual, general treatment of the narrative; and (3) a curious
aptitude at detailing figments as if they were facts. All about
Chiaro dell' Erma himself, Dresden and Dr. Aemmster, D'Agincourt,
pictures at the Pitti Gallery, the author's visit to Florence in
1847, etc., are pure inventions or "mystifications"; but so
realistically put that they have in various instances been relied
upon and cited as truths. I gave some details as to this in my Memoir
of Dante Rossetti. The style of writing in "Hand and Soul" is of a
very exceptional kind. My brother had at that time a great affection
for "Stories after Nature," written by Charles Wells (author of
"Joseph and his Brethren"), and these he kept in view to some extent
as a model, though the direct resemblance is faint indeed. In the
conversation of foreign art-students, forming the epilogue, he may
have been not wholly oblivious of the scene in Browning's "Pippa
Passes" (a prime favourite of his), where some "foreign students of
painting and sculpture" are preparing a disagreeable surprise for the
French sculptor Jules. There is, however, no sort of imitation; and
Rossetti's dialogue is the more markedly natural of the two. In
re-reading "Hand and Soul," I am struck by two passages which came
true of Rossetti himself in after-life: (1) "Sometimes after
nightfall he would walk abroad in the most solitary places he could
find--hardly feeling the ground under him because of the thoughts of
the day which held him in fever." (2) "Often he would remain at work
through the whole of a day, not resting once so long as the light
lasted." When Rossetti, in 1869, was collecting his poems, and
getting them privately printed with a view to after-publication, he
thought of including "Hand and Soul" in the same volume, but did not
eventually do so. The privately-printed copy forms a small pamphlet,
which has sometimes been sold at high prices--I believe L10 and
upwards. At this time I pointed out to him that the church at Pisa
which he named San Rocco could not possibly have borne that name--San
Rocco being a historical character who lived at a later date: the
Church was then re-named "San Petronio," and this I believe is the
only change of the least importance introduced into the reprint. In
December 1870 the tale was published in "The Fortnightly Review." The
Rev. Alfred Gurney (deceased not long ago) was a great admirer of
Dante Rossetti's works. He published in 1883 a brochure named "A
Dream of Fair Women, a Study of some Pictures by Dante Gabriel
Rossetti"; he also published an essay on "Hand and Soul," giving a
more directly religious interpretation to the story than its author
had at all intended. It is entitled "A Painter's Day-dream."

By W. M. Rossetti: "Review of Clough's Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich."
The only remark which I need to make on this somewhat ponderous
article is that I, as Editor of "The Germ," was more or less expected
to do the sort of work for which other "proprietors" had little
inclination--such especially as the regular reviewing of new poems.

By W. M. Rossetti: "Her First Season: Sonnet." As I have said
elsewhere, my brother and I were at one time greatly addicted to
writing sonnets together to _bouts-rimes_: the date may have been
chiefly 1848, and the practice had, I think, quite ceased for some
little while before "The Germ" commenced in 1850. This sonnet was one
of my _bouts-rimes_ performances. I ought to have been more chary
than I was of introducing into our seriously-intended magazine such
hap-hazard things as _bouts-rimes_ poems: one reason for doing so was
that we were often at a loss for something to fill a spare page.

By John L. Tupper: "A Sketch from Nature." The locality indicated in
these very spirited descriptive lines is given as "Sydenham Wood."
When I was compiling the posthumous volume of John Tupper's "Poems"
which came out in 1897, I should, so far as merit is concerned, have
wished to include this little piece: it was omitted solely on the
ground of its being already published.

By Christina Rossetti: "An End." Written in March 1849.

By Collinson: "The Child Jesus, a Record Typical of the Five
Sorrowful Mysteries." Collinson, as I have already said, was hardly a
writing man, and I question whether he had produced a line of verse
prior to undertaking this by no means trivial task. The poem, like
the etching which he did for it, is deficient in native strength, nor
is there much invention in the symbolical incidents which make it up:
but its general level, and several of its lines and passages, always
appeared to me, and still appear, highly laudable, and far better
than could have been reckoned for. Here and there a telling line was
supplied by Dante Rossetti. Millais, when shortly afterwards in
Oxford, found that the poem had made some sensation there. It is
singular that Collinson should, throughout his composition, speak of
Nazareth as being on the sea-shore--which is the reverse of the fact.
The Praeraphaelites, with all their love of exact truth to nature,
were a little arbitrary in applying the principle; and Collinson
seems to have regarded it as quite superfluous to look into a map,
and see whether Nazareth was near the sea or not. Or possibly he
trusted to Dante Rossetti's poem "Ave," in which likewise Nazareth is
a marine town. My brother advisedly stuck to this in 1869, when I
pointed out the error to him: he replied, "I fear the sea must remain
at Nazareth: you know an old painter would have made no bones if he
wanted it for his background." I cannot say whether Collinson, if put
to it, would have pleaded the like arbitrary and almost burlesque
excuse: at any rate he made the blunder, and in a much more detailed
shape than in Rossetti's lyric. "The Child Jesus" is, I think, the
poem of any importance that he ever wrote.

By Christina Rossetti: "A Pause of Thought." On the wrapper of "The
Germ" the writer's name is given as "Ellen Alleyn": this was my
brother's concoction, as Christina did not care to figure under her
own name. "A Pause of Thought" was written in February 1848, when she
was but little turned of seventeen. Taken as a personal utterance
(which I presume it to be, though I never inquired as to that, and
though it was at first named "Lines in Memory of Schiller's Der
Pilgrim"), it is remarkable; for it seems to show that, even at that
early age, she aspired ardently after poetic fame, with a keen sense
of "hope deferred."

By F. G. Stephens (called "John Seward" on the wrapper): "The Purpose
and Tendency of Early Italian Art." This article speaks for itself as
being a direct outcome of the Praeraphaelite movement: its aim is to
enforce personal independent endeavour, based upon close study of
nature, and to illustrate the like qualities shown in the earlier
school of art. It is more hortatory than argumentative, and is in
fact too short to develop its thesis--it indicates some main points
for reflection.

By W. Bell Scott: "Morning Sleep." This poem delighted us extremely
when Mr. Scott sent it in reply to a request for contributions. I
still think it a noticeably fine thing, and one of his most equable
pieces of execution. It was republished in his volume of "Poems,"
1875--with some verbal changes, and shortened, I think damaged.

By Patmore: "Stars and Moon."

By Ford Madox Brown: "On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture": Part
1, the Design. It is by this time a well-recognized fact that Brown
was one of the men in England, or indeed in Europe, most capable of
painting a historical picture, and it is a matter of regret that "The
Germ" came to an end before he had an opportunity of continuing and
completing this serviceable compendium of precepts. He had studied
art in continental schools; but I do not think he imported into his
article much of what he had been taught,--rather what he had thought
out for himself, and had begun putting into practice.

By W. M. Rossetti: "Fancies at Leisure." The first three of these
were written to _bouts-rimes_. As to No. 1, "Noon Rest," I have a
tolerably clear recollection that the rhymes were prescribed to me by
Millais, on one of the days in 1849 when I was sitting to him for the
head of Lorenzo in his first Praeraphaelite picture from Keats's
"Isabella." No. 4, "Sheer Waste," was not a _bouts-rimes_
performance. It was chiefly the outcome of an early afternoon spent
lazily in Regent's Park.

By Walter H. Deverell: "The Light Beyond." These sonnets are not of
very finished execution, but they have a dignified sustained tone and
some good lines. Had Deverell lived a little longer, he might
probably have proved that he had some genuine vocation as a poet, no
less than a decided pictorial faculty. He died young in February
1854.

By Dante G. Rossetti: "The Blessed Damozel." As to this celebrated
poem much might be said; but I shall not say it here, partly because
I wrote an Introduction to a reprint (published by Messrs. Duckworth
and Co. in 1898) of the "Germ" version of the poem, which is the
earliest version extant, and in that Introduction I gave a number of
particulars forestalling what I could now set down. I will however
take this opportunity of correcting a blunder into which I fell in
the Introduction above mentioned. I called attention to "calm" and
"warm," which make a "cockney rhyme" in stanza 9 of this "Germ"
version; and I said that, in the later version printed in "The Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine" in 1856, a change in the line was made,
substituting "swam" for "calm," and that the cockneyism, though
shuffled, was not thus corrected. In "The Saturday Review," June 25,
1898, the publication of Messrs. Duckworth was criticized; and the
writer very properly pointed out that I had made a crass mistake.
"Mr. Rossetti," he said, "must be a very hasty reader of texts. What
is printed [in 'The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine'] is 'swarm,' not
'swam,' and the rhyme with 'warm' is perfect, stultifying the
editor's criticism completely." Probably the critic considered my
error as unaccountable as it was serious; and yet it could be fully
accounted for, though not fully excused. I had not been "a very hasty
reader of texts" in the sense indicated by "The Saturday Review." The
fact is that, not possessing a copy of "The Oxford and Cambridge
Magazine," I had referred to the book brought out by Mr. William
Sharp in 1882, "Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study," in
which are given (with every appearance of care and completeness) the
passages of "The Blessed Damozel" as they appeared in "The Germ,"
with the alterations printed in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine."
From the latter, the line in question is given by Mr. Sharp as "Waste
sea of worlds that swam"; and I, supposing him to be correct (though
I allow that memory ought to have taught me the contrary), reproduced
that line to the same effect. "Always verify your references" is a
precept to which editors and commentators cannot too carefully
conform. Many thanks to the writer in "The Saturday Review" for
showing that, while I, and also Mr. Sharp, had made a mistake, my
brother had made none.

By W. M. Rossetti: "Review of the Strayed Reveller and other Poems,
by A." As we all now know, "A." was Matthew Arnold, and this was his
first published volume; but I, at the time of writing the review,
knew nothing of the identity of "A.," and even had I been told that
he was Matthew Arnold, that would have carried the matter hardly at
all further. I remember that, after I had written the whole or most
of this admiring review, I found that the volume had been abused in
"Blackwood's Magazine"; a fact of sweet savour to myself and other
P.R.B.'s, as we entertained a hearty detestation of that magazine,
with its blustering "Christopher North," and its traditions of
truculency against Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Tennyson, Ruskin, and
some others. I read "A.'s" volume with great attention, and piqued
myself somewhat upon having introduced into my review some reference
(detailed or cursory) to every poem in it. Possibly (but I hardly
think so) the critique was afterwards shortened, so as to bereave it
of this merit.

By Madox Brown (the etching) and by W. M. Rossetti (the verses):
"Cordelia." For the belated No. 3 of "The Germ" we were much at a
loss for an illustration. Mr. Brown offered to accommodate us by
etching this design, one of a series from "King Lear" which he had
drawn in Paris in 1844. That series, though not very sightly to the
eye, is of extraordinary value for dramatic insight and energy. We
gladly accepted, and he produced this etching with very little
self-satisfaction, so far as the technique of execution is concerned.
Dante Rossetti was to have furnished some verses for the etching; but
for this he did not find time, so I was put in as a stopgap, and I am
not sure that any reader of "The Germ" has ever thanked me for my
obedience to the call of duty.

By Patmore: "Essay on Macbeth." In this interesting and
well-considered paper Mr. Patmore assumes that he was the first
person to put into writing the opinion that Macbeth, before meeting
with the witches, had already definitely conceived and imparted the
idea of obtaining the crown of Scotland by wrongful means. I have
always felt some uncertainty whether Mr. Patmore was really the
first; if he was, it certainly seems strange that the train of
reasoning which he furnishes in this essay--forcible, even if we do
not regard it as unanswerable--should not have presented itself to
the mind and pen of some earlier writer. The Essay appears to have
been left incomplete in at least one respect. In speaking of "the
fifth scene," the author refers to "postponement of comment" upon
Macbeth's letter to his wife, and he "leaves it for the present." But
the comment never comes.

By Christina Rossetti: "Repining." This rather long poem, written in
December 1847 on a still broader scale, was never republished by the
authoress, although all her other poems in "The Germ" were so. She
did not think that its deservings were such as to call for
republication. I apprehend that herein she exercised a wise
discretion: none the less, when I was compiling the volume of her
"New Poems," issued in 1896, I included "Repining"--for I think that
some of the considerations which apply to the works of an author
while living do not remain in anything like full force after death.

By Dante G. Rossetti: "The Carillon, Antwerp and Bruges." These
verses, and some others further on in "The Germ," were written during
the brief trip, in Paris and Belgium, which my brother made along
with Holman-Hunt in the autumn of 1849. He did not republish "The
Carillon"; but he left in MS. an abridged form of it, with the title
"Antwerp and Bruges," and this I included in his "Collected Works,"
1886. The only important change was the omission of stanzas 1 and 4.

By Dante G. Rossetti: "From the Cliffs, Noon." Altering some phrases
in this lyric, and adding two stanzas, Rossetti republished it under
the name of "The Sea-limits."

By W. M. Rossetti: "Fancies at Leisure." The first four were written
to _bouts-rimes_: not the fifth, "The Fire Smouldering," which is, I
think, as old as 1848, or even 1847.

By John L. Tupper: "Papers of the MS. Society; No. 1, An Incident in
the Siege of Troy." This grotesque outburst, though sprightly and
clever, was not well-suited to the pages of "The Germ." My attention
had been called to it at an earlier date, when my editorial power was
unmodified, but I then staved it off, and indeed John Tupper himself
did not deem it appropriate. It will be observed that "MS. Society"
is said not to mean "Manuscript Society." I forget what it did
mean--possibly "Medical Student Society." The whole thing is replete
with semi-private _sous-entendus_, and banter at Free Trade, medical
and anatomical matters, etc. The like general remarks apply to No. 4,
"Smoke," by the same writer. It is a rollicking semi-intelligible
chaunt, a forcible thing in its way, proper in the first instance (I
believe) to a sort of club of medical students, Royal Academy
students, and others--highly-seasoned smokers most of them--in which
John Tupper exercised a quasi-privacy, and was called (owing to his
thinness, much over-stated in the poem) "The Spectro-cadaveral King."
No. 5, "Rain," is again by John Tupper, and is the only item in "The
Papers of the MS. Society" which seems, in tone and method, to be
reasonably appropriate for "The Germ."

By Alexander Tupper: No. 2, "Swift's Dunces."

By George I. F. Tupper: No. 3, "Mental Scales." This also, in the
scrappy condition which it here presents, reads rather as a joke than
as a serious proposition: I believe it was meant for the latter.

By John L. Tupper: "Viola and Olivia." The verses are not of much
significance. The etching by Deverell, however defective in
technique, claims more attention, as the Viola was drawn from Miss
Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, whom Deverell had observed in a bonnet-shop
some few months before the etching was done, and who in 1860 became
the wife of Dante Rossetti. This face does not give much idea of
hers, and yet it is not unlike her in a way. The face of Olivia bears
some resemblance to Christina Rossetti: I think however that it was
drawn, not from her, but from a sister of the artist.

By John Orchard: "A Dialogue on Art." The brief remarks prefacing
this dialogue were written by Dante Rossetti. The diction of the
dialogue itself was also, at Orchard's instance, revised to some
minor extent by my brother, and I dare say by me. Orchard was a
painter of whom perhaps no memory remains at the present day: he
exhibited some few pictures, among which I can dimly remember one of
"The Flight of Archbishop Becket from England." His age may, I
suppose, have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight years at the date of
his death. In our circle he was unknown; but, conceiving a deep
admiration for Rossetti's first exhibited picture (1849), "The
Girlhood of Mary Virgin," he wrote to him, enclosing a sonnet upon
the picture--a very bad sonnet in all executive respects, and far
from giving promise of the spirited, if unequal, poetic treatment
which we find in the lines in "The Germ," "On a Whit-Sunday Morn in
the Month of May." This led to a call from Orchard to Rossetti. I
think there was only one call, and I, as well as my brother, saw him
on that occasion. Afterwards, he sent this dialogue for "The Germ."
The dialogue has always, and I think justly, been regarded as a
remarkable performance. The form of expression is not impeccable, but
there is a large amount of eloquence, coming in aid of definite and
expansive thought. From what is here said it will be understood that
Orchard was quite unconnected with the P.R.B. He expressed opinions
of his own which may indeed have assimilated in some points to
theirs, but he was not in any degree the mouthpiece of their
organization, nor prompted by any member of the Brotherhood. In the
dialogue, the speaker whose opinions appear manifestly to represent
those of Orchard himself is Christian, who is mostly backed up by
Sophon. Christian forces ideas of purism or puritanism to an extreme,
beyond anything which I can recollect as characterizing any of the
P.R.B. His upholding of the painters who preceded Raphael as the best
men for nurturing new and noble developments of art in our own day
was more in their line. In my brother's prefatory note a question is
raised of publishing any other writings which Orchard might have left
behind. None such, however, were found. Dr. W. C. Bennett (afterwards
known as the author of "Songs for Sailors," etc.), who had been
intimate with Orchard, aided my brother in his researches.

By F. G. Stephens (called "Laura Savage" on the wrapper): "Modern
Giants."

By Dante G. Rossetti: "Pax Vobis." Republished by the author, with
some alterations, under the title of "World's Worth."

By Dante G. Rossetti: "Sonnets for Pictures." No. 1, "A Virgin and
Child, by Hans Memmeling," was not reprinted by Rossetti, but is
included (with a few verbal alterations made by him in MS.) in his
"Collected Works." No. 2, "A Marriage of St. Katherine, by the same."
A similar observation. No. 3, "A Dance of Nymphs, by Andrea
Mantegna," was republished by Rossetti, with some verbal alterations.
No. 4, "A Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione"--the like. The alterations
here are of considerable moment. Rossetti, in a published letter of
October 8, 1849, referred to the Giorgione picture as follows: "A
Pastoral--at least, a kind of Pastoral--by Giorgione, which is so
intensely fine that I condescended to sit down before it and write a
sonnet. You must have heard me rave about the engraving before, and,
I fancy, have seen it yourself. There is a woman, naked, at one side,
who is dipping a glass vessel into a well, and in the centre two men
and another naked woman, who seem to have paused for a moment in
playing on the musical instruments which they hold." Nos. 5 and 6,
"Angelica Rescued from the Sea-Monster, by Ingres," were also
reprinted by the author, with scarcely any alteration. Patmore, on
reading these two sonnets, was much struck with their truthfulness of
quality, as being descriptive of paintings. As to some of the other
sonnets, Mr. W. M. Hardinge wrote in "Temple Bar," several years ago,
an article containing various pertinent and acute remarks.

By W. M. Rossetti: "Review of Browning's Christmas Eve and Easter
Day." The only observation I need make upon this review--which was
merely intended as introductory to a fuller estimate of the poem, to
appear in an ensuing number of "The Germ"--is that it exemplifies
that profound cultus of Robert Browning which, commenced by Dante
Rossetti, had permeated the whole of the Praeraphaelite Brotherhood,
and formed, not less than some other ideas, a bond of union among
them. It will be readily understood that, in Mr. Stephens's article,
"Modern Giants," the person spoken of as "the greatest perhaps of
modern poets" is Browning.

By W. M. Rossetti: "The Evil under the Sun: Sonnet." This sonnet was
composed in August 1849, when the great cause of the Hungarian
insurrection against Austrian tyranny was, like revolutionary
movements elsewhere, precipitating towards its fall. My original
title for the sonnet was, "For the General Oppression of the Better
by the Worse Cause, Autumn 1849." When the verses had to be published
in "The Germ," a magazine which did not aim at taking any side in
politics, it was thought that this title was inappropriate, and the
other was substituted. At a much later date the sonnet was reprinted
with yet another and more significant title, "Democracy
Down-trodden."

Having now disposed of "The Germ" in general, and singly of most of
the articles in it, I have very little to add. The project of
reprinting the magazine was conceived by its present publisher, Mr.
Stock, many years ago--perhaps about 1883. At that time several
contributors assented, but others declined, and considerations of
copyright made it impracticable to proceed with the project. It is
only now that lapse of time has disposed of the copyright question,
and Mr. Stock is free to act as he likes. I was from the first one of
those (the majority) who assented to the republication, acting herein
on behalf of my brother, then lately deceased, as well as of myself.
I am quite aware that some of the articles in "The Germ" are far from
good, and some others, though good in essentials, are to a certain
extent juvenile; but juvenility is anything but uninteresting when it
is that of such men as Coventry Patmore and Dante Rossetti. "The
Germ" contains nothing of which, in spirit and in purport, the
writers need be ashamed. If people like to read it without paying
fancy prices for the original edition, they were and are, so far as I
am concerned, welcome to do so. Before Mr. Stock's long-standing
scheme could be legally carried into effect, an American publisher,
Mr. Mosher, towards the close of 1898, brought out a handsome reprint
of "The Germ" (not in any wise a facsimile), and a few of the copies
were placed on sale in London.{3} Mr. Mosher gave as an introduction
to his volume an article by the late J. Ashcroft Noble which
originally appeared in an English magazine in May 1882. This article
is entitled "A Pre-Raphaelite Magazine." It is written in a spirit of
generous sympathy, and is mostly correct in its facts. I may here
mention another article on "The Germ," also published, towards 1868,
in some magazine. It is by John Burnell Payne (originally a Clergyman
of the Church of England), who died young in 1869. He wrote a triplet
of articles, named "Praeraphaelite Poetry and Painting," of which
Part I. is on "The Germ." He expresses himself sympathetically
enough; but his main drift is to show that the Praeraphaelite
movement, after passing through some immature stages, developed into
a quasi-Renaissance result. A perusal of his paper will show that Mr.
Payne was one of the persons who supposed Chiaro dell'Erma, the hero
of "Hand and Soul," to have been a real painter, author of an extant
picture.

{3} I have seen in the "Irish Figaro", May 6, 1899, a very pleasant
notice, signed "J. Reid," of this reprint.

Mr. Stock's reprint is of the facsimile order, and even faults of
print are reproduced. I am not called upon to say with any precision
what there are. On page 45 I observe "ear," which should be "car"; on
page 62, Angilico, and Rossini (for Rosini). On page 155 the words,
"I believe that the thought-wrapped philosopher," ought to begin a
new sentence. On page 159 "Phyrnes" ought of course to be "Phrynes."
The punctuation could frequently be improved.

I will conclude by appending a little list (it makes no pretension to
completeness) of writings bearing upon the Praeraphaelite Brotherhood
and its members. Writings of that kind are by this date rather
numerous; but some readers of the present pages may not well know
where to find them, and might none the less be inclined to read up
the subject a little. I give these works in the order (as far as I
know it) of their dates, without any attempt to indicate the degree
of their importance. That is a question on which I naturally
entertain opinions of my own, but I shall not intrude them upon the
reader.

  Ruskin: Pre-Raphaelitism, 1854, and other later writings.
  F. G. Stephens: William Holman-Hunt and his Works, 1860.
  William Sharp: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1882.
  Hall Caine: Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1882.
  Walter Hamilton: The aesthetic Movement in England, 1882.
  T. Watts-Dunton: The Truth about Rossetti, 1883, and other writings.
  W. Holman-Hunt: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1884 (?).
  Earnest Chesneau: La Peinture Anglaise, 1884 (?).
  Joseph Knight: Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1887.
  W. M. Rossetti: Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer, 1889.
  Harry Quilter: Preferences in Art, 1892.
  W. Bell Scott: Autobiographical Notes, 1892.
  Esther Wood: Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, 1894.
  Robert de la Sizeranne: La Peinture Anglaise Contemporaine, 1895.
  Dante G. Rossetti: Family Letters, with Memoir by W. M. Rossetti, 1895.
  Richard Muther: The History of Modern Painting, vols. ii. and iii., 1896.
  Ford H. M. Hueffer: Ford Madox Brown, 1896.
  Dante G. Rossetti: Letters to William Allingham, edited by Dr. Birkbeck
    Hill, 1897.
  M. H. Spielmann: Millais and his Works, 1898.
  Antonio Agresti: Poesie di Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Traduzione con uno
    Studio su la Pittura Inglese, etc., 1899.
  Fraulein Wilmersdoerffer: Dante Gabriel Rossetti und sein Einflusz, 1899.
  Edited by W. M. Rossetti: Ruskin, Rossetti, Praeraphaelitism, 1899.
  J. Guille Millais: Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1899.
  Percy H. Bate: The English Praeraphaelite Painters, 1899.
  H. C. Marillier: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1899.
  Edited by W. M. Rossetti: Praeraphaelite Diaries and Letters, 1899.

There are also books on Burne-Jones and Willaim Morris with which I
am not accurately acquainted. It seems strange that no memoir of
Thomas Woolner has yet been published; a fine sculptor and remarkable
man known to and appreciated by all sorts of people, and certain to
have figured extensively in correspondence. He died in October 1892.
Mr. Holman-Hunt is understood to have been engaged for a long while
past upon a book on Praeraphaelitism which would cast into the shade
most of the earlier literature on the subject.

  W. M. ROSSETTI
  London, _July 1899._

N.B.--When the third number of the magazine was about to appear, with
a change of title from "The Germ" to "Art and Poetry," two fly-sheets
were drawn up, more, I think, by Messrs. Tupper the printing-firm
than by myself. They contain some "Opinions of the Press," already
referred to in this Introduction, and an explanation as to the change
of title. The fly-sheets appear in facsimile as follows:


"The Germ"


The Subscribers to this Periodical are respectfully informed that
in future it will appear under the title of "Art and Poetry"
instead of the original arbitrary one, which occasioned much
misapprehension--This alteration will not be productive of any ill
consequence, as the title has never occurred in the work itself, and
Label will be supplied for placing on the old wrappers, so as to make
them conformable to the new--

It should also be noticed that the Numbers will henceforward be
published on the last day of the Month for which they are dated--

Town Subscribers will oblige by filling up & returning the
accompanying form, which will ensure the Numbers being duly forwarded
as directed.--

Country Subscribers may obtain their copies by kindly forwarding
their orders to any Booksellers in their respective Neighborhoods.--


Opinions of the press.


"... Original Poems, stories to develop thought and principle, essays
concerning Art & other subjects, are the materials which are to
compose this unique addition to our periodical literature Among the
poetry, there are some rare gems of poetic conception; among the
prose essays, we notice "the Subject in Art" which treats of Art
itself in a noble and lofty tone, with the view which he must take of
it who would, in the truest sense of the word, be an Artist, and
another paper, not less interesting, on "the Purpose and Tendency of
Early Italian Art" A well executed Etching in the medieval style,
accompanies each number"

  John Bull.

"... There are so many original and beautiful thoughts in these
pages--indeed some of the poems & tales are in themselves so
beautiful in spirit & form--that we have hopes of the writers, when
they shall have got rid of those ghosts of mediaeval art which now
haunt their every page. The essay 'On the Mechanism of a Historical
Picture' is a good practical treatise, and indicates the hand of
writing which is much wanted among artists"

  Morning Chronicle.

"We depart from our usual plan of noticing the periodicals under one
heading, for the purpose of introducing to our readers a new aspirant
for public favour, which has pecu liar and uncommon claims to
attention, for in design & execution it differs from all other
periodicals ... A periodical largely occupied with poetry wears an
unpromising aspect to readers who have learned from experience what
nonsensical stuff most fugitive Magazine poetry is.... But, when they
have read a few extracts which we propose to make, we think they will
own that for once appearances are deceitful.... That the contents of
this work are the productions of no common minds, the following
extracts will sufficiently prove.... We have not space to take any
specimens of the prose; but the essays on Art are conceived with an
equal appreciation of its _meaning_ & requirements. Being such, this
work has our heartiest wishes for its success, but we scarcely dare
to _hope_ that it may win the popularity it deserves. The truth is
that it is too good for the time. It is not _material_ enough for the
age"

  Critic.

"... It bears unquestionable evidences of true inspirations and, in
fact, is so thoroughly spiritual that it is more likely to find 'the
fit audience though few' than to attract the multitude ... The prose
articles are much to our taste ... We know, however, of no periodical
of the time which is so genuinely poetical and artistic in its tone."

  Standard of Freedom.




No. 1. (_Price One Shilling_.) JANUARY, 1850.

With an Etching by W. HOLMAN HUNT.

The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature In Poetry, Literature, and Art.

  When whoso merely hath a little thought
      Will plainly think the thought which is in him,--
      Not imaging another's bright or dim,
  Not mangling with new words what others taught;
  When whoso speaks, from having either sought
      Or only found,--will speak, not just to skim
      A shallow surface with words made and trim,
  But in that very speech the matter brought:
  Be not too keen to cry--"So this is all!--
      A thing I might myself have thought as well,
    But would not say it, for it was not worth!"
      Ask: "Is this truth?" For is it still to tell
    That, be the theme a point or the whole earth,
  Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?

London: AYLOTT & JONES, 8, PATERNOSTER ROW.

G. F Tupper, Printer, Clement's Lane. Lombard Street.


CONTENTS.

  My Beautiful Lady: by _Thomas Woolner_ 1
  Of my Lady in Death: by _Thomas Woolner_ 5
  The Love of Beauty: by _F. Madox Brown_ 10
  The Subject in Art, (No. 1.) 11
  The Seasons 19
  Dream Land: by _Ellen Allyn_ 20
  Songs of one Household, (My Sister's Sleep): by _Dante G. Rossetti_ 21
  Hand and Soul: by _Dante G. Rossetti_ 23
  REVIEWS: The "Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich": by _Wm. M. Rossetti_ 34
  Her First Season: by _Wm. M. Rossetti_ 46
  A Sketch From Nature 47
  An End: by _Ellen Allyn_ 48

It is requested that those who may have by them any un-published
Poems, Essays, or other articles appearing to coincide with the views
in which this Periodical is established, and who may feel desirous of
contributing such papers--will forward them, for the approval of the
Editor, to the Office of publication. It may be relied upon that the
most sincere attention will be paid to the examination of all
manuscripts, whether they be eventually accepted or declined.


[Illustration]


My Beautiful Lady


  I love my lady; she is very fair;
  Her brow is white, and bound by simple hair;
    Her spirit sits aloof, and high,
    Altho' it looks thro' her soft eye
    Sweetly and tenderly.

  As a young forest, when the wind drives thro',
  My life is stirred when she breaks on my view.
    Altho' her beauty has such power,
    Her soul is like the simple flower
    Trembling beneath a shower.

  As bliss of saints, when dreaming of large wings,
  The bloom around her fancied presence flings,
    I feast and wile her absence, by
    Pressing her choice hand passionately--
    Imagining her sigh.

  My lady's voice, altho' so very mild,
  Maketh me feel as strong wine would a child;
    My lady's touch, however slight,
    Moves all my senses with its might,
    Like to a sudden fright.

  A hawk poised high in air, whose nerved wing-tips
  Tremble with might suppressed, before he dips,--
    In vigilance, not more intense
    Than I; when her word's gentle sense
    Makes full-eyed my suspense.

  Her mention of a thing--august or poor,
  Makes it seem nobler than it was before:
    As where the sun strikes, life will gush,
    And what is pale receive a flush,
    Rich hues--a richer blush.

  My lady's name, if I hear strangers use,--
  Not meaning her--seems like a lax misuse.
    I love none by my lady's name;
    Rose, Maud, or Grace, are all the same,
    So blank, so very tame.

  My lady walks as I have seen a swan
  Swim thro' the water just where the sun shone.
    There ends of willow branches ride,
    Quivering with the current's glide,
    By the deep river-side.

  Whene'er she moves there are fresh beauties stirred;
  As the sunned bosom of a humming-bird
    At each pant shows some fiery hue,
    Burns gold, intensest green or blue:
    The same, yet ever new.

  What time she walketh under flowering May,
  I am quite sure the scented blossoms say,
    "O lady with the sunlit hair!
    "Stay, and drink our odorous air--
    "The incense that we bear:

  "Your beauty, lady, we would ever shade;
  "Being near you, our sweetness might not fade."
    If trees could be broken-hearted,
    I am sure that the green sap smarted,
    When my lady parted.

  This is why I thought weeds were beautiful;--
  Because one day I saw my lady pull
    Some weeds up near a little brook,
    Which home most carefully she took,
    Then shut them in a book.

  A deer when startled by the stealthy ounce,--
  A bird escaping from the falcon's trounce,
    Feels his heart swell as mine, when she
    Stands statelier, expecting me,
    Than tall white lilies be.

  The first white flutter of her robe to trace,
  Where binds and perfumed jasmine interlace,
    Expands my gaze triumphantly:
    Even such his gaze, who sees on high
    His flag, for victory.

  We wander forth unconsciously, because
  The azure beauty of the evening draws:
    When sober hues pervade the ground,
    And life in one vast hush seems drowned,
    Air stirs so little sound.

  We thread a copse where frequent bramble spray
  With loose obtrusion from the side roots stray,
    (Forcing sweet pauses on our walk):
    I'll lift one with my foot, and talk
    About its leaves and stalk.

  Or may be that the prickles of some stem
  Will hold a prisoner her long garment's hem;
    To disentangle it I kneel,
    Oft wounding more than I can heal;
    It makes her laugh, my zeal.

  Then on before a thin-legged robin hops,
  Or leaping on a twig, he pertly stops,
    Speaking a few clear notes, till nigh
    We draw, when quickly he will fly
    Into a bush close by.

  A flock of goldfinches may stop their flight,
  And wheeling round a birchen tree alight
    Deep in its glittering leaves, until
    They see us, when their swift rise will
    Startle a sudden thrill.

  I recollect my lady in a wood,
  Keeping her breath and peering--(firm she stood
    Her slim shape balanced on tiptoe--)
    Into a nest which lay below,
    Leaves shadowing her brow.

  I recollect my lady asking me,
  What that sharp tapping in the wood might be?
    I told her blackbirds made it, which,
    For slimy morsels they count rich,
    Cracked the snail's curling niche:

  She made no answer. When we reached the stone
  Where the shell fragments on the grass were strewn,
    Close to the margin of a rill;
    "The air," she said, "seems damp and chill,
    "We'll go home if you will."

  "Make not my pathway dull so soon," I cried,
  "See how those vast cloudpiles in sun-glow dyed,
    "Roll out their splendour: while the breeze
    "Lifts gold from leaf to leaf, as these
    "Ash saplings move at ease."

  Piercing the silence in our ears, a bird
  Threw some notes up just then, and quickly stirred
    The covert birds that startled, sent
    Their music thro' the air; leaves lent
    Their rustling and blent,

  Until the whole of the blue warmth was filled
  So much with sun and sound, that the air thrilled.
    She gleamed, wrapt in the dying day's
    Glory: altho' she spoke no praise,
    I saw much in her gaze.

  Then, flushed with resolution, I told all;--
  The mighty love I bore her,--how would pall
    My very breath of life, if she
    For ever breathed not hers with me;--
    Could I a cherub be,

  How, idly hoping to enrich her grace,
  I would snatch jewels from the orbs of space;--
    Then back thro' the vague distance beat,
    Glowing with joy her smile to meet,
    And heap them round her feet.

  Her waist shook to my arm. She bowed her head,
  Silent, with hands clasped and arms straightened:
    (Just then we both heard a church bell)
    O God! It is not right to tell:
    But I remember well

  Each breast swelled with its pleasure, and her whole
  Bosom grew heavy with love; the swift roll
    Of new sensations dimmed her eyes,
    Half closing them in ecstasies,
    Turned full against the skies.

  The rest is gone; it seemed a whirling round--
  No pressure of my feet upon the ground:
    But even when parted from her, bright
    Showed all; yea, to my throbbing sight
    The dark was starred with light.




Of My Lady In Death


  All seems a painted show. I look
    Up thro' the bloom that's shed
    By leaves above my head,
  And feel the earnest life forsook
    All being, when she died:--
    My heart halts, hot and dried
  As the parched course where once a brook
    Thro' fresh growth used to flow,--
    Because her past is now
  No more than stories in a printed book.

  The grass has grown above that breast,
    Now cold and sadly still,
    My happy face felt thrill:--
  Her mouth's mere tones so much expressed!
    Those lips are now close set,--
    Lips which my own have met;
  Her eyelids by the earth are pressed;
    Damp earth weighs on her eyes;
    Damp earth shuts out the skies.
  My lady rests her heavy, heavy rest.

  To see her slim perfection sweep,
    Trembling impatiently,
    With eager gaze at me!
  Her feet spared little things that creep:--
    "We've no more right," she'd say,
    "In this the earth than they."
  Some remember it but to weep.
    Her hand's slight weight was such,
    Care lightened with its touch;
  My lady sleeps her heavy, heavy sleep.

  My day-dreams hovered round her brow;
    Now o'er its perfect forms
    Go softly real worms.
  Stern death, it was a cruel blow,
    To cut that sweet girl's life
    Sharply, as with a knife.
  Cursed life that lets me live and grow,
    Just as a poisonous root,
    From which rank blossoms shoot;
  My lady's laid so very, very low.

  Dread power, grief cries aloud, "unjust,"--
    To let her young life play
    Its easy, natural way;
  Then, with an unexpected thrust,
    Strike out the life you lent,
    Just when her feelings blent
  With those around whom she saw trust
    Her willing power to bless,
    For their whole happiness;
  My lady moulders into common dust.

  Small birds twitter and peck the weeds
    That wave above her head,
    Shading her lowly bed:
  Their brisk wings burst light globes of seeds,
    Scattering the downy pride
    Of dandelions, wide:
  Speargrass stoops with watery beads:
    The weight from its fine tips
    Occasionally drips:
  The bee drops in the mallow-bloom, and feeds.

  About her window, at the dawn,
    From the vine's crooked boughs
    Birds chirupped an arouse:
  Flies, buzzing, strengthened with the morn;--
    She'll not hear them again
    At random strike the pane:
  No more upon the close-cut lawn,
    Her garment's sun-white hem
    Bend the prim daisy's stem,
  In walking forth to view what flowers are born.

  No more she'll watch the dark-green rings
    Stained quaintly on the lea,
    To image fairy glee;
  While thro' dry grass a faint breeze sings,
    And swarms of insects revel
    Along the sultry level:--
  No more will watch their brilliant wings,
    Now lightly dip, now soar,
    Then sink, and rise once more.
  My lady's death makes dear these trivial things.

  Within a huge tree's steady shade,
    When resting from our walk,
    How pleasant was her talk!
  Elegant deer leaped o'er the glade,
    Or stood with wide bright eyes,
    Staring a short surprise:
  Outside the shadow cows were laid,
    Chewing with drowsy eye
    Their cuds complacently:
  Dim for sunshine drew near a milking-maid.

  Rooks cawed and labored thro' the heat;
    Each wing-flap seemed to make
    Their weary bodies ache:
  The swallows, tho' so very fleet,
    Made breathless pauses there
    At something in the air:--
  All disappeared: our pulses beat
    Distincter throbs: then each
    Turned and kissed, without speech,--
  She trembling, from her mouth down to her feet.

  My head sank on her bosom's heave,
    So close to the soft skin
    I heard the life within.
  My forehead felt her coolly breathe,
    As with her breath it rose:
    To perfect my repose
  Her two arms clasped my neck. The eve
    Spread silently around,
    A hush along the ground,
  And all sound with the sunlight seemed to leave.

  By my still gaze she must have known
    The mighty bliss that filled
    My whole soul, for she thrilled,
  Drooping her face, flushed, on my own;
    I felt that it was such
    By its light warmth of touch.
  My lady was with me alone:
    That vague sensation brought
    More real joy than thought.
  I am without her now, truly alone.

  We had no heed of time: the cause
    Was that our minds were quite
    Absorbed in our delight,
  Silently blessed. Such stillness awes,
    And stops with doubt, the breath,
    Like the mute doom of death.
  I felt Time's instantaneous pause;
    An instant, on my eye
    Flashed all Eternity:--
  I started, as if clutched by wild beasts' claws,

  Awakened from some dizzy swoon:
    I felt strange vacant fears,
    With singings in my ears,
  And wondered that the pallid moon
    Swung round the dome of night
    With such tremendous might.
  A sweetness, like the air of June,
    Next paled me with suspense,
    A weight of clinging sense--
  Some hidden evil would burst on me soon.

  My lady's love has passed away,
    To know that it is so
    To me is living woe.
  That body lies in cold decay,
    Which held the vital soul
    When she was my life's soul.
  Bitter mockery it was to say--
    "Our souls are as the same:"
    My words now sting like shame;
  Her spirit went, and mine did not obey.

  It was as if a fiery dart
    Passed seething thro' my brain
    When I beheld her lain
  There whence in life she did not part.
    Her beauty by degrees,
    Sank, sharpened with disease:
  The heavy sinking at her heart
    Sucked hollows in her cheek,
    And made her eyelids weak,
  Tho' oft they'd open wide with sudden start.

  The deathly power in silence drew
    My lady's life away.
    I watched, dumb with dismay,
  The shock of thrills that quivered thro'
    And tightened every limb:
    For grief my eyes grew dim;
  More near, more near, the moment grew.
    O horrible suspense!
    O giddy impotence!
  I saw her fingers lax, and change their hue.

  Her gaze, grown large with fate, was cast
    Where my mute agonies
    Made more sad her sad eyes:
  Her breath caught with short plucks and fast:--
    Then one hot choking strain.
    She never breathed again:
  I had the look which was her last:
    Even after breath was gone,
    Her love one moment shone,--
  Then slowly closed, and hope for ever passed.

  Silence seemed to start in space
    When first the bell's harsh toll
    Rang for my lady's soul.
  Vitality was hell; her grace
    The shadow of a dream:
    Things then did scarcely seem:
  Oblivion's stroke fell like a mace:
    As a tree that's just hewn
    I dropped, in a dead swoon,
  And lay a long time cold upon my face.

  Earth had one quarter turned before
    My miserable fate
    Pressed on with its whole weight.
  My sense came back; and, shivering o'er,
    I felt a pain to bear
    The sun's keen cruel glare;
  It seemed not warm as heretofore.
    Oh, never more its rays
    Will satisfy my gaze.
  No more; no more; oh, never any more.




The Love of Beauty


  John Boccaccio, love's own squire, deep sworn
    In service to all beauty, joy, and rest,--
    When first the love-earned royal Mary press'd,
  To her smooth cheek, his pale brows, passion-worn,--
  'Tis said, he, by her grace nigh frenzied, torn
    By longings unattainable, address'd
    To his chief friend most strange misgivings, lest
  Some madness in his brain had thence been born.
  The artist-mind alone can feel his meaning:--
    Such as have watched the battle-rank'd array
  Of sunset, or the face of girlhood seen in
    Line-blending twilight, with sick hope. Oh! they
  May feed desire on some fond bosom leaning:
    But where shall such their thirst of Nature stay?




The Subject in Art

(No. 1.)


If Painting and Sculpture delight us like other works of ingenuity,
merely from the difficulties they surmount; like an 'egg in a
bottle,' a tree made out of stone, or a face made of pigment; and the
pleasure we receive, is our wonder at the achievement; then, to such
as so believe, this treatise is not written. But if, as the writer
conceives, works of Fine Art delight us by the interest the objects
they depict excite in the beholder, just as those objects in nature
would excite his interest; if by any association of ideas in the one
case, by the same in the other, without reference to the
representations being other than the objects they represent:--then,
to such as so believe, the following upon 'SUBJECT' is addressed.
Whilst, at the same time, it is not disallowed that a subsequent
pleasure may and does result, upon reflecting that the objects
contemplated were the work of human ingenuity.

Now the subject to be treated, is the 'subject' of Painter and
Sculptor; what ought to be the nature of that 'subject,' how far that
subject may be drawn from past or present time with advantage, how
far the subject may tend to confer upon its embodiment the title,
'High Art,' how far the subject may tend to confer upon its
embodiment the title 'Low Art;' what is 'High Art,' what is 'Low
Art'?

To begin then (at the end) with 'High Art.' However we may differ as
to facts, the principle will be readily granted, that 'High Art,'
_i.e._ Art, par excellence, Art, in its most exalted character,
addresses pre-eminently the highest attributes of man, viz.: his
mental and his moral faculties.

'Low Art,' or Art in its less exalted character, is that which
addresses the less exalted attributes of man, viz.: his mere sensory
faculties, without affecting the mind or heart, excepting through the
volitional agency of the observer.

These definitions are too general and simple to be disputed; but
before we endeavour to define more particularly, let us analyze the
subject, and see what it will yield.

All the works which remain to us of the Ancients, and this appears
somewhat remarkable, are, with the exception of those by incompetent
artists, universally admitted to be 'High Art.' Now do we afford them
this high title, because all remnants of the antique world, by
tempting a comparison between what was, and is, will set the mental
faculties at work, and thus address the highest attributes of man?
Or, as this is owing to the agency of the observer, and not to the
subject represented, are we to seek for the cause in the subjects
themselves!

Let us examine the subjects. They are mostly in sculpture; but this
cannot be the cause, unless all modern sculpture be considered 'High
Art.' This is leaving out of the question in both ages, all works
badly executed, and obviously incorrect, of which there are numerous
examples both ancient and modern.

The subjects we find in sculpture are, in "the round," mostly men or
women in thoughtful or impassioned action: sometimes they are indeed
acting physically; but then, as in the Jason adjusting his Sandal,
acting by mechanical impulse, and thinking or looking in another
direction. In relievo we have an historical combat, such as that
between the Centaurs and Lapithae; sometimes a group in conversation,
sometimes a recitation of verses to the Lyre; a dance, or religious
procession.

As to the first class in "the round," as they seem to appeal to the
intellectual, and often to the moral faculties, they are naturally,
and according to the broad definition, works of 'High Art.' Of the
relievo, the historical combat appeals to the passions; and, being
historical, probably to the intellect. The like may be said of the
conversational groups, and lyrical recitation which follow. The dance
appeals to the passions and the intellect; since the intellect
recognises therein an order and design, her own planning; while the
solemn, modest demeanour in the religious procession speaks to the
heart and the mind. The same remarks will apply to the few ancient
paintings we possess, always excluding such merely decorative works
as are not fine art at all.

Thus it appears that all these works of the ancients _might_
rationally have been denominated works of 'High Art;' and here we
remark the difference between the hypothetical or rational, and the
historical account of facts; for though here is _reason_ enough why
ancient art _might_ have been denominated 'High Art,' that it _was_
so denominated on this account, is a position not capable of proof:
whereas, in all probability, the true account of the matter runs
thus--The works of antiquity awe us by their time-hallowed presence;
the mind is sent into a serious contemplation of things; and, the
subject itself in nowise contravening, we attribute all this potent
effect to the agency of the subject before us, and 'High Art,' it
becomes _then_ and _for ever_, with all such as "follow its cut." But
then as this was so named, not from the abstract cause, but from a
result and effect; when a _new_ work is produced in a similar spirit,
but clothed in a dissimilar matter, and the critics have to settle to
what class of art it belongs,--then is the new work dragged up to
fight with the old one, like the poor beggar Irus in front of
Ulysses; then are they turned over and applied, each to each, like
the two triangles in Euclid; and then, if they square, fit and tally
in every quarter--with the nude to the draped in the one, as the nude
to the draped in the other--with the standing to the sitting in the
one, as the standing to the sitting in the other--with the fat to the
lean in the one, as the fat to the lean in the other--with the young
to the old in the one, as the young to the old in the other--with
head to body, as head to body; and nose to knee, as nose to knee, &c.
&c., (and the critics have done a great deal)--then is the work
oracularly pronounced one of 'High Art;' and the obsequious artist is
pleased to consider it is.

But if, per contra, as in the former case, the works are not to be
literally reconciled, though wrought in the self-same spirit; then
this unfortunate creature of genius is degraded into a lower rank of
art; and the artist, if he have faith in the learned, despairs; or,
if he have none, he _swears_. But listen, an artist speaks: "If I
have genius to produce a work in the true spirit of high art, and yet
am so ignorant of its principles, that I scarce know whereon the
success of the work depends, and scarcely whether I have succeeded or
no; with this ignorance and this power, what needs your knowledge or
your reasoning, seeing that nature is all-sufficient, and produces a
painter as she produces a plant?" To the artist (the last of his
race), who spoke thus, it is answered, that science is not meant for
him, if he like it not, seeing he can do without it, and seeing,
moreover, that with it _alone_ he can never do. Science here does not
make; it unmakes, wonderingly to find the making of what God has
made--of what God has made through the poet, leading him blindly by a
path which he has not known; this path science follows slowly and in
wonder. But though science is not to make the artist, there is no
reason in nature that the artist reject it. Still, science is
properly the birthright of the critic; 'tis his all in all. It shows
him poets, painters, sculptors, his fellow men, often his inferiors
in their want of it, his superiors in the ability to do what he
cannot do; it teaches him to love them as angels bringing him food
which _he_ cannot attain, and to venerate their works as a gift from
the Creator.

But to return to the critical errors relating to 'High Art.' While
the constituents of high art were unknown, whilst its abstract
principles were unsought, and whilst it was only recognized in the
concrete, the critics, certainly guilty of the most unpardonable
blindness, blundered up to the masses of 'High Art,' left by
antiquity, saying, "there let us fix our observatory," and here came
out perspective glass, and callipers and compasses; and here they
made squares and triangles, and circles, and ellipses, for, said
they, "this is 'High Art,' and this hath certain proportions;" then
in the logic of their hearts, they continued, "all these proportions
we know by admeasurement, whatsoever hath these is 'High Art,'
whatsoever hath not, is 'Low Art.'" This was as certain as the fact
that the sun is a globe of glowing charcoal, because forsooth
they both yield light and heat. Now if the phantom of a then
embryon-electrician had arisen and told them that their "high art
marbles possessed an electric influence, which, acting in the
brain of the observer, would awake in him emotions of so exalted
a character, that he forthwith, inevitably nodding at them,
must utter the tremendous syllables 'High Art;'" he, the then
embryon-electrician, from that age withheld to bless and irradiate
the physiology of ours, would have done something more to the purpose
than all the critics and the compasses.

Thus then we see, that the antique, however successfully it may have
wrought, is not our model; for, according to that faith demanded at
setting out, fine art delights us from its being the semblance of
what in nature delights. Now, as the artist does not work by the
instrumentality of rule and science, but mainly by an instinctive
impulse; if he copy the antique, unable as he is to segregate the
merely delectable matter, he must needs copy the whole, and thereby
multiply models, which the casting-man can do equally well; whereas
if he copy nature, with a like inability to distinguish that
delectable attribute which allures him to copy her, and under the
same necessity of copying the whole, to make sure of this "tenant of
nowhere;" we then have the artist, the instructed of nature,
fulfilling his natural capacity, while his works we have as manifold
yet various as nature's own thoughts for her children.

But reverting to the subject, it was stated at the beginning that
'Fine Art' delights, by presenting us with objects, which in nature
delight us; and 'High Art' was defined, that which addresses the
intellect; and hence it might appear, as delight is an emotion of the
mind, that 'Low Art,' which addresses the senses, is not Fine Art at
all. But then it must be remembered, that it was neither stated of
'Fine Art,' nor of 'High Art,' that it always delights; and again,
that delight is not entirely mental. To point out the confines of
high and low art, where the one terminates and the other commences,
would be difficult, if not impracticable without sub-defining or
circumscribing the import of the terms, pain, pleasure, delight,
sensory, mental, psychical, intellectual, objective, subjective, &c.
&c.; and then, as little or nothing would be gained mainly pertinent
to the subject, it must be content to receive no better definitions
than those broad ones already laid down, with their latitude somewhat
corrected by practical examples. Yet before proceeding to give these
examples, it might be remarked of 'High Art,' that it always might,
if it do not always excite some portion of delight, irrespective of
that subsequent delight consequent upon the examination of a
curiosity; that its function is sometimes, with this portion of
delight, to commingle grief or distress, and that it may, (though
this is _not_ its function,) excite mental anguish, and by a reflex
action, actual body pain. Now then to particularize, by example; let
us suppose a perfect and correct painting of a stone, a common stone
such as we walk over. Now although this subject might to a religious
man, suggest a text of scripture; and to the geologist a theory of
scientific interest; yet its general effect upon the average number
of observers will be readily allowed to be more that of wonder or
admiration at a triumph over the apparently impossible (to make a
round stone upon a flat piece of canvass) than at aught else the
subject possesses. Now a subject such as this belongs to such very
low art, that it narrowly illudes precipitation over the confines of
Fine Art; yet, that it is Fine Art is indisputable, since no mere
mechanic artisan, or other than one specially gifted by nature, could
produce it. This then shall introduce us to "Subject." This subject
then, standing where fine art gradually confines with mechanic art,
and almost midway between them; of no use nor beauty; but to be
wondered at as a curiosity; is a subject of scandalous import to the
artist, to the artist thus gifted by nature with a talent to
reproduce her fleeting and wondrous forms. But if, as the writer
doubts, nature could afford a monster so qualified for a poet, yet
destitute of poetical genius; then the scandal attaches if he attempt
a step in advance, or neglect to join himself to those, a most useful
class of mechanic artists, who illustrate the sciences by drawing and
diagram.

But as the subject supposed is one never treated in painting; only
instanced, in fact, to exemplify an extreme; let us consider the
merits of a subject really practical, such as 'dead game,' or 'a
basket of fruit;' and the first general idea such a subject will
excite is simply that of _food_, 'something to eat.' For though fruit
on the tree, or a pheasant in the air, is a portion of nature and
properly belongs to the section, 'Landscape,' a division of art
intellectual enough; yet gather the fruit or bring down the pheasant,
and you presently bring down the poetry with it; and although Sterne
could sentimentalize upon a dead ass; and though a dead pheasant in
the larder, or a dead sheep at a butcher's, may excite feelings akin
to anything but good living; and though they may _there_ be the
excitive causes of poetical, nay, or moral reflexion; yet, see them
on the canvass, and the first and uppermost idea will be that of
'_Food_,' and how, in the name of decency, they ever came there. It
will be vain to argue that gathered fruit is only nature under a
certain phase, and that a dead sheep or a dead pheasant is only a
dead animal like a dead ass--it will be pitiably vain and miserable
sophistry, since we know that the dead pheasant in a picture will
always be as _food_, while the same at he poulterer's will be but a
dead pheasant.

For we have not one only, but numerous general ideas annexed to every
object in nature. Thus one of the series may be that that object is
matter, one that it is individual matter, one that it is animal
matter, one that it is a bird, one that it is a pheasant, one that it
is a dead pheasant, and one that it is food. Now, our general ideas
or notions are not evoked in this order as each new object addresses
the mind; but that general idea is _first_ elicited which accords
with the first or principle destination of the object: thus the first
general idea of a cowry, to the Indian, is that of money, not of a
shell; and our first general idea of a dead pheasant is that of food,
whereas to a zoologist it might have a different effect: but this is
the exception. But it was said, that a dead pheasant in a picture
would always be as food, while the same at the poulterer's would be
but a dead pheasant: what then becomes of the first general idea? It
seems to be disposed of thus: at the first sight of the shop, the
idea is that of food, and next (if you are not hungry, and poets
never are), the mind will be attracted to the species of animal,
and (unless hunger presses) you may be led on to moralize like
Sterne: but, amongst pictures, where there is nothing else to
excite the general ideas of food, this, whenever adverted to,
must over re-excite that idea; and hence it appears that these
_esculent_ subjects might be poetical enough if exhibited all
together, _i.e._, they must be surrounded with eatables, like
a possibly-poetical-pheasant in a poulterer's shop.

Longer stress has been laid upon this subject, "Still Life," than
would seem justified by its insignificance, but as this is a branch
of art which has never aspired to be 'High Art,' it contains
something definite in its character which makes it better worth the
analysis than might appear at first sight; but still, as a latitude
has been taken in the investigation which is ever unavoidable in the
handling of such mercurial matter as poetry (where one must spread
out a broad definition to catch it wherever it runs), and as this is
ever incomprehensible to such as are unaccustomed to abstract
thinking, from the difficulty of educing a rule amidst an infinite
array of exceptions, and of recognising a principle shrouded in the
obscurity of conflicting details; it appears expedient, before
pursuing the question, to reinforce the first broad elementary
principles with what definite modification they may have acquired in
their progress to this point in the argument, together with the
additional data which may have resulted from analytic reference to
other correlative matter.

First then, as Fine Art delights in proportion to the delectating
interest of the objects it depicts, and, as subsequently stated,
grieves or distresses in proportion as the objects are grievous or
distressing, we have this resultant: "Fine Art _excites_ in
proportion to the excitor influence of the object;" and then, that
"_fine art_ excites either the sensory or the mental faculties, in a
like proportion to the excitor properties of the objects
respectively." Thus then we have, definitely stated, the powers or
capabilities of _Fine Art_, as regulated and governed by the objects
it selects, and the objects it selects making its subject. Now the
question in hand is, "what the nature of that _subject_ should be,"
but the _subject_ must be according to what Fine Art proposes to
effect; all then must depend upon this proposition. For if you
propose that Fine Art shall excite sensual pleasure, then such
objects as excite sensual pleasure should form the _subject_ of Fine
Art; and those which excite sensual pleasure in the highest degree,
will form the _highest subject_--'High Art.' Or if you propose that
Fine Art shall excite a physical energetic activity, by addressing
the sensory organism, which is a phase of the former proposition,
(for what are popularly called sensual pleasures, are only particular
sensory excitements sought by a physical appetite, while this
sensory-organic activity is physically appetent also,) then the
subjects of art ought to be draw form such objects as excite a
general activity, such as field-sports, bull-fights, battles,
executions, court pageants, conflagrations, murders; and those which
most intensely excite this sensory-organic activity, by expressing
most of physical human power or suffering, such as battles,
executions, regality, murder, would afford the _highest subject_ of
Fine Art, and consequently these would be "_High Art_." But if you
propose (with the writer) that _Fine Art_ shall regard the general
happiness of man, but addressing those attributes which are
_peculiarly human_, by exciting the activity of his rational and
benevolent powers (and the writer would add, man's religious
aspirations, but omits it as sufficiently evolvable from the
proposition, and since some well-willing men cannot at present
recognize man as a religious animal), then the subject of Fine Art
should be drawn from objects which address and excite the activity of
man's rational and benevolent powers, such as:--acts of justice--of
mercy--good government--order--acts of intellect--men obviously
speaking or thinking abstract thoughts, as evinced by one speaking to
another, and looking at, or indicating, a flower, or a picture, or a
star, or by looking on the wall while speaking--or, if the scene be
from a _good_ play, or story, or another beneficent work, then not
only of men in abstract thought or meditation, but, it may be, in
simple conversation, or in passion--or a simple representation of a
person in a play or story, as of Jacques, Ferdinand, or Cordelia; or,
in real life, portraits of those who are honestly beautiful; or
expressive of innocence, happiness, benevolence, or intellectuality,
but not of gluttony, wantonness, anger, hatred, or malevolence,
unless in some cases of justifiable satire--of histrionic or historic
portraiture--landscape--natural phenomena--animals, not
_indiscriminately_--in some cases, grand or beautiful buildings, even
without figures--any scene on sea or land which induces
reflection--all subjects from such parts of history as are morally or
intellectually instructive or attractive--and therefore
pageants--battles--and _even_ executions--all forms of thought and
poetry, however wild, if consistent with rational benevolence--all
scenes serious or comic, domestic or historical--all religious
subjects proposing good that will not shock any reasonable number of
reasonable men--all subjects that leave the artist wiser and
happier--and none which intrinsically act otherwise--to sum all,
every thing or incident in nature which excites, or may be made to
excite, the mind and the heart of man as a mentally intelligent, not
as a brute animal, is a subject for Fine Art, at all times, in all
places, and in all ages. But as all these subjects in nature affect
our hearts or our understanding in proportion to the heart and
understanding we have to apprehend and to love them, those will
excite us most intensely which we know most of and love most. But as
we may learn to know them all and to love them all, and what is dark
to-day may be luminous to-morrow, and things, dumb to-day, to-morrow
grow voiceful, and the strange voice of to-day be plain and reproach
us to-morrow; who shall adventure to say that this or that is the
highest? And if it appear that all these subjects in nature _may_
affect us with equal intensity, and that the artist's representations
affect as the subjects affect, then it follows, with all these
subjects, Fine Art may affect us equally; but the subjects may all be
high; therefore, all Fine Art may be High Art.




The Seasons


  The crocus, in the shrewd March morn,
    Thrusts up its saffron spear;
  And April dots the sombre thorn
    With gems, and loveliest cheer.

  Then sleep the seasons, full of might;
    While slowly swells the pod,
  And rounds the peach, and in the night
    The mushroom bursts the sod.

  The winter falls: the frozen rut
    Is bound with silver bars;
  The white drift heaps against the hut;
    And night is pierced with stars.




Dream Land


  Where sunless rivers weep
  Their waves into the deep,
  She sleeps a charmed sleep;
    Awake her not.
  Led by a single star,
  She came from very far,
  To seek where shadows are
    Her pleasant lot.

  She left the rosy morn,
  She left the fields of corn,
  For twilight cold and lorn,
    And water-springs.
  Thro' sleep, as thro' a veil,
  She sees the sky look pale,
  And hears the nightingale,
    That sadly sings.

  Rest, rest, a perfect rest,
  Shed over brow and breast;
  Her face is toward the west,
    The purple land.
  She cannot see the grain
  Ripening on hill and plain;
  She cannot feel the rain
    Upon her hand.

  Rest, rest, for evermore
  Upon a mossy shore,
  Rest, rest, that shall endure,
    Till time shall cease;--
  Sleep that no pain shall wake,
  Night that no morn shall break,
  Till joy shall overtake
    Her perfect peace.




Songs of One Household

No. 1.

My Sister's Sleep


  She fell asleep on Christmas Eve.
    Upon her eyes' most patient calms
    The lids were shut; her uplaid arms
  Covered her bosom, I believe.

  Our mother, who had leaned all day
    Over the bed from chime to chime,
    Then raised herself for the first time,
  And as she sat her down, did pray.

  Her little work-table was spread
    With work to finish. For the glare
    Made by her candle, she had care
  To work some distance from the bed.

  Without, there was a good moon up,
    Which left its shadows far within;
    The depth of light that it was in
  Seemed hollow like an altar-cup.

  Through the small room, with subtle sound
    Of flame, by vents the fireshine drove
    And reddened. In its dim alcove
  The mirror shed a clearness round.

  I had been sitting up some nights,
    And my tir'd mind felt weak and blank;
    Like a sharp strengthening wine, it drank
  The stillness and the broken lights.

  Silence was speaking at my side
    With an exceedingly clear voice:
    I knew the calm as of a choice
  Made in God for me, to abide.

  I said, "Full knowledge does not grieve:
    This which upon my spirit dwells
    Perhaps would have been sorrow else:
  But I am glad 'tis Christmas Eve."

  Twelve struck. That sound, which all the years
    Hear in each hour, crept off; and then
    The ruffled silence spread again,
  Like water that a pebble stirs.

  Our mother rose from where she sat.
    Her needles, as she laid them down,
    Met lightly, and her silken gown
  Settled: no other noise than that.

  "Glory unto the Newly Born!"
    So, as said angels, she did say;
    Because we were in Christmas-day,
  Though it would still be long till dawn.

  She stood a moment with her hands
    Kept in each other, praying much;
    A moment that the soul may touch
  But the heart only understands.

  Almost unwittingly, my mind
    Repeated her words after her;
    Perhaps tho' my lips did not stir;
  It was scarce thought, or cause assign'd.

  Just then in the room over us
    There was a pushing back of chairs,
    As some who had sat unawares
  So late, now heard the hour, and rose.

  Anxious, with softly stepping haste,
    Our mother went where Margaret lay,
    Fearing the sounds o'erhead--should they
  Have broken her long-watched for rest!

  She stooped an instant, calm, and turned;
    But suddenly turned back again;
    And all her features seemed in pain
  With woe, and her eyes gazed and yearned.

  For my part, I but hid my face,
    And held my breath, and spake no word:
    There was none spoken; but _I heard_
  _The silence_ for a little space.

  My mother bowed herself and wept.
    And both my arms fell, and I said:
    "God knows I knew that she was dead."
  And there, all white, my sister slept.

  Then kneeling, upon Christmas morn
    A little after twelve o'clock
    We said, ere the first quarter struck,
  "Christ's blessing on the newly born!"




Hand and Soul


  "Rivolsimi in quel lato
  La 'nde venia la voce,
  E parvemi una luce
  Che lucea quanto stella:
  La mia mente era quella."

    _Bonaggiunta Urbiciani_, (1250.)

Before any knowledge of painting was brought to Florence, there were
already painters in Lucca, and Pisa, and Arezzo, who feared God and
loved the art. The keen, grave workmen from Greece, whose trade it
was to sell their own works in Italy and teach Italians to imitate
them, had already found rivals of the soil with skill that could
forestall their lessons and cheapen their crucifixes and
_addolorate_, more years than is supposed before the art came at all
into Florence. The pre-eminence to which Cimabue was raised at once
by his contemporaries, and which he still retains to a wide extent
even in the modern mind, is to be accounted for, partly by the
circumstances under which he arose, and partly by that extraordinary
_purpose of fortune_ born with the lives of some few, and through
which it is not a little thing for any who went before, if they are
even remembered as the shadows of the coming of such an one, and the
voices which prepared his way in the wilderness. It is thus, almost
exclusively, that the painters of whom I speak are now known. They
have left little, and but little heed is taken of that which men hold
to have been surpassed; it is gone like time gone--a track of dust
and dead leaves that merely led to the fountain.

Nevertheless, of very late years, and in very rare instances, some
signs of a better understanding have become manifest. A case in point
is that of the tryptic and two cruciform pictures at Dresden, by
Chiaro di Messer Bello dell' Erma, to which the eloquent pamphlet of
Dr. Aemmster has at length succeeded in attracting the students.
There is another, still more solemn and beautiful work, now proved to
be by the same hand, in the gallery at Florence. It is the one to
which my narrative will relate.

    *  *  *  *  *  *  *

This Chiaro dell' Erma was a young man of very honorable family in
Arezzo; where, conceiving art almost, as it were, for himself, and
loving it deeply, he endeavored from early boyhood towards the
imitation of any objects offered in nature. The extreme longing after
a visible embodiment of his thoughts strengthened as his years
increased, more even than his sinews or the blood of his life; until
he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons.
When he had lived nineteen years, he heard of the famous Giunta
Pisano; and, feeling much of admiration, with, perhaps, a little of
that envy which youth always feels until it has learned to measure
success by time and opportunity, he determined that he would seek out
Giunta, and, if possible, become his pupil.

Having arrived in Pisa, he clothed himself in humble apparel, being
unwilling that any other thing than the desire he had for knowledge
should be his plea with the great painter; and then, leaving his
baggage at a house of entertainment, he took his way along the
street, asking whom he met for the lodging of Giunta. It soon chanced
that one of that city, conceiving him to be a stranger and poor, took
him into his house, and refreshed him; afterwards directing him on
his way.

When he was brought to speech of Giunta, he said merely that he was a
student, and that nothing in the world was so much at his heart as to
become that which he had heard told of him with whom he was speaking.
He was received with courtesy and consideration, and shewn into the
study of the famous artist. But the forms he saw there were lifeless
and incomplete; and a sudden exultation possessed him as he said
within himself, "I am the master of this man." The blood came at
first into his face, but the next moment he was quite pale and fell
to trembling. He was able, however, to conceal his emotion; speaking
very little to Giunta, but, when he took his leave, thanking him
respectfully.

After this, Chiaro's first resolve was, that he would work out
thoroughly some one of his thoughts, and let the world know him. But
the lesson which he had now learned, of how small a greatness might
win fame, and how little there was to strive against, served to make
him torpid, and rendered his exertions less continual. Also Pisa was
a larger and more luxurious city than Arezzo; and, when in his walks,
he saw the great gardens laid out for pleasure, and the beautiful
women who passed to and fro, and heard the music that was in the
groves of the city at evening, he was taken with wonder that he had
never claimed his share of the inheritance of those years in which
his youth was cast. And women loved Chiaro; for, in despite of the
burthen of study, he was well-favoured and very manly in his walking;
and, seeing his face in front, there was a glory upon it, as upon the
face of one who feels a light round his hair.

So he put thought from him, and partook of his life. But, one night,
being in a certain company of ladies, a gentleman that was there with
him began to speak of the paintings of a youth named Bonaventura,
which he had seen in Lucca; adding that Giunta Pisano might now look
for a rival. When Chiaro heard this, the lamps shook before him, and
the music beat in his ears and made him giddy. He rose up, alleging a
sudden sickness, and went out of that house with his teeth set.

He now took to work diligently; not returning to Arezzo, but
remaining in Pisa, that no day more might be lost; only living
entirely to himself. Sometimes, after nightfall, he would walk abroad
in the most solitary places he could find; hardly feeling the ground
under him, because of the thoughts of the day which held him in
fever.

The lodging he had chosen was in a house that looked upon gardens
fast by the Church of San Rocco. During the offices, as he sat at
work, he could hear the music of the organ and the long murmur that
the chanting left; and if his window were open, sometimes, at those
parts of the mass where there is silence throughout the church, his
ear caught faintly the single voice of the priest. Beside the matters
of his art and a very few books, almost the only object to be noticed
in Chiaro's room was a small consecrated image of St. Mary Virgin
wrought out of silver, before which stood always, in summer-time, a
glass containing a lily and a rose.

It was here, and at this time, that Chiaro painted the Dresden
pictures; as also, in all likelihood, the one--inferior in merit, but
certainly his--which is now at Munich. For the most part, he was calm
and regular in his manner of study; though often he would remain at
work through the whole of the day, not resting once so long as the
light lasted; flushed, and with the hair from his face. Or, at times,
when he could not paint, he would sit for hours in thought of all the
greatness the world had known from of old; until he was weak with
yearning, like one who gazes upon a path of stars.

He continued in this patient endeavour for about three years, at the
end of which his name was spoken throughout all Tuscany. As his fame
waxed, he began to be employed, besides easel-pictures, upon
paintings in fresco: but I believe that no traces remain to us of any
of these latter. He is said to have painted in the Duomo: and
D'Agincourt mentions having seen some portions of a fresco by him
which originally had its place above the high altar in the Church of
the Certosa; but which, at the time he saw it, being very
dilapidated, had been hewn out of the wall, and was preserved in the
stores of the convent. Before the period of Dr. Aemmster's
researches, however, it had been entirely destroyed.

Chiaro was now famous. It was for the race of fame that he had girded
up his loins; and he had not paused until fame was reached: yet now,
in taking breath, he found that the weight was still at his heart.
The years of his labor had fallen from him, and his life was still in
its first painful desire.

With all that Chiaro had done during these three years, and even
before, with the studies of his early youth, there had always been a
feeling of worship and service. It was the peace-offering that he
made to God and to his own soul for the eager selfishness of his aim.
There was earth, indeed, upon the hem of his raiment; but _this_ was
of the heaven, heavenly. He had seasons when he could endure to think
of no other feature of his hope than this: and sometimes, in the
ecstacy of prayer, it had even seemed to him to behold that day when
his mistress--his mystical lady (now hardly in her ninth year, but
whose solemn smile at meeting had already lighted on his soul like
the dove of the Trinity)--even she, his own gracious and holy Italian
art--with her virginal bosom, and her unfathomable eyes, and the
thread of sunlight round her brows--should pass, through the sun that
never sets, into the circle of the shadow of the tree of life, and be
seen of God, and found good: and then it had seemed to him, that he,
with many who, since his coming, had joined the band of whom he was
one (for, in his dream, the body he had worn on earth had been dead
an hundred years), were permitted to gather round the blessed maiden,
and to worship with her through all ages and ages of ages, saying,
Holy, holy, holy. This thing he had seen with the eyes of his spirit;
and in this thing had trusted, believing that it would surely come to
pass.

But now, (being at length led to enquire closely into himself,) even
as, in the pursuit of fame, the unrest abiding after attainment had
proved to him that he had misinterpreted the craving of his own
spirit--so also, now that he would willingly have fallen back on
devotion, he became aware that much of that reverence which he had
mistaken for faith had been no more than the worship of beauty.
Therefore, after certain days passed in perplexity, Chiaro said
within himself, "My life and my will are yet before me: I will take
another aim to my life."

From that moment Chiaro set a watch on his soul, and put his hand to
no other works but only to such as had for their end the presentment
of some moral greatness that should impress the beholder: and, in
doing this, he did not choose for his medium the action and passion
of human life, but cold symbolism and abstract impersonation. So the
people ceased to throng about his pictures as heretofore; and, when
they were carried through town and town to their destination, they
were no longer delayed by the crowds eager to gaze and admire: and no
prayers or offerings were brought to them on their path, as to his
Madonnas, and his Saints, and his Holy Children. Only the critical
audience remained to him; and these, in default of more worthy
matter, would have turned their scrutiny on a puppet or a mantle.
Meanwhile, he had no more of fever upon him; but was calm and pale
each day in all that he did and in his goings in and out. The works
he produced at this time have perished--in all likelihood, not
unjustly. It is said (and we may easily believe it), that, though
more labored than his former pictures, they were cold and unemphatic;
bearing marked out upon them, as they must certainly have done, the
measure of that boundary to which they were made to conform.

And the weight was still close at Chiaro's heart: but he held in his
breath, never resting (for he was afraid), and would not know it.

Now it happened, within these days, that there fell a great feast in
Pisa, for holy matters: and each man left his occupation; and all the
guilds and companies of the city were got together for games and
rejoicings. And there were scarcely any that stayed in the houses,
except ladies who lay or sat along their balconies between open
windows which let the breeze beat through the rooms and over the
spread tables from end to end. And the golden cloths that their arms
lay upon drew all eyes upward to see their beauty; and the day was
long; and every hour of the day was bright with the sun.

So Chiaro's model, when he awoke that morning on the hot pavement of
the Piazza Nunziata, and saw the hurry of people that passed him, got
up and went along with them; and Chiaro waited for him in vain.

For the whole of that morning, the music was in Chiaro's room from
the Church close at hand: and he could hear the sounds that the crowd
made in the streets; hushed only at long intervals while the
processions for the feast-day chanted in going under his windows.
Also, more than once, there was a high clamour from the meeting of
factious persons: for the ladies of both leagues were looking down;
and he who encountered his enemy could not choose but draw upon him.
Chiaro waited a long time idle; and then knew that his model was gone
elsewhere. When at his work, he was blind and deaf to all else; but
he feared sloth: for then his stealthy thoughts would begin, as it
were, to beat round and round him, seeking a point for attack. He now
rose, therefore, and went to the window. It was within a short space
of noon; and underneath him a throng of people was coming out through
the porch of San Rocco.

The two greatest houses of the feud in Pisa had filled the church for
that mass. The first to leave had been the Gherghiotti; who, stopping
on the threshold, had fallen back in ranks along each side of the
archway: so that now, in passing outward, the Marotoli had to walk
between two files of men whom they hated, and whose fathers had hated
theirs. All the chiefs were there and their whole adherence; and each
knew the name of each. Every man of the Marotoli, as he came forth
and saw his foes, laid back his hood and gazed about him, to show the
badge upon the close cap that held his hair. And of the Gherghiotti
there were some who tightened their girdles; and some shrilled and
threw up their wrists scornfully, as who flies a falcon; for that was
the crest of their house.

On the walls within the entry were a number of tall, narrow frescoes,
presenting a moral allegory of Peace, which Chiaro had painted that
year for the Church. The Gherghiotti stood with their backs to these
frescoes: and among them Golzo Ninuccio, the youngest noble of the
faction, called by the people of Golaghiotta, for his debased life.
This youth had remained for some while talking listlessly to his
fellows, though with his sleepy sunken eyes fixed on them who passed:
but now, seeing that no man jostled another, he drew the long silver
shoe off his foot, and struck the dust out of it on the cloak of him
who was going by, asking him how far the tides rose at Viderza. And
he said so because it was three months since, at that place, the
Gherghiotti had beaten the Marotoli to the sands, and held them there
while the sea came in; whereby many had been drowned. And, when he
had spoken, at once the whole archway was dazzling with the light of
confused swords; and they who had left turned back; and they who were
still behind made haste to come forth: and there was so much blood
cast up the walls on a sudden, that it ran in long streams down
Chiaro's paintings.

Chiaro turned himself from the window; for the light felt dry between
his lids, and he could not look. He sat down, and heard the noise of
contention driven out of the church-porch and a great way through the
streets; and soon there was a deep murmur that heaved and waxed from
the other side of the city, where those of both parties were
gathering to join in the tumult.

Chiaro sat with his face in his open hands. Once again he had wished
to set his foot on a place that looked green and fertile; and once
again it seemed to him that the thin rank mask was about to spread
away, and that this time the chill of the water must leave leprosy in
his flesh. The light still swam in his head, and bewildered him at
first; but when he knew his thoughts, they were these:--

"Fame failed me: faith failed me: and now this also,--the hope that I
nourished in this my generation of men,--shall pass from me, and
leave my feet and my hands groping. Yet, because of this, are my feet
become slow and my hands thin. I am as one who, through the whole
night, holding his way diligently, hath smitten the steel unto the
flint, to lead some whom he knew darkling; who hath kept his eyes
always on the sparks that himself made, lest they should fail; and
who, towards dawn, turning to bid them that he had guided God speed,
sees the wet grass untrodden except of his own feet. I am as the last
hour of the day, whose chimes are a perfect number; whom the next
followeth not, nor light ensueth from him; but in the same darkness
is the old order begun afresh. Men say, 'This is not God nor man; he
is not as we are, neither above us: let him sit beneath us, for we
are many.' Where I write Peace, in that spot is the drawing of
swords, and there men's footprints are red. When I would sow, another
harvest is ripe. Nay, it is much worse with me than thus much. Am I
not as a cloth drawn before the light, that the looker may not be
blinded; but which sheweth thereby the grain of its own coarseness;
so that the light seems defiled, and men say, 'We will not walk by
it.' Wherefore through me they shall be doubly accursed, seeing that
through me they reject the light. May one be a devil and not know
it?"

As Chiaro was in these thoughts, the fever encroached slowly on his
veins, till he could sit no longer, and would have risen; but
suddenly he found awe within him, and held his head bowed, without
stirring. The warmth of the air was not shaken; but there seemed a
pulse in the light, and a living freshness, like rain. The silence
was a painful music, that made the blood ache in his temples; and he
lifted his face and his deep eyes.

A woman was present in his room, clad to the hands and feet with a
green and grey raiment, fashioned to that time. It seemed that the
first thoughts he had ever known were given him as at first from her
eyes, and he knew her hair to be the golden veil through which he
beheld his dreams. Though her hands were joined, her face was not
lifted, but set forward; and though the gaze was austere, yet her
mouth was supreme in gentleness. And as he looked, Chiaro's spirit
appeared abashed of its own intimate presence, and his lips shook
with the thrill of tears; it seemed such a bitter while till the
spirit might be indeed alone.

She did not move closer towards him, but he felt her to be as much
with him as his breath. He was like one who, scaling a great
steepness, hears his own voice echoed in some place much higher than
he can see, and the name of which is not known to him. As the woman
stood, her speech was with Chiaro: not, as it were, from her mouth or
in his ears; but distinctly between them.

"I am an image, Chiaro, of thine own soul within thee. See me, and
know me as I am. Thou sayest that fame has failed thee, and faith
failed thee; but because at least thou hast not laid thy life unto
riches, therefore, though thus late, I am suffered to come into thy
knowledge. Fame sufficed not, for that thou didst seek fame: seek
thine own conscience (not thy mind's conscience, but thine heart's),
and all shall approve and suffice. For Fame, in noble soils, is a
fruit of the Spring: but not therefore should it be said: 'Lo! my
garden that I planted is barren: the crocus is here, but the lily is
dead in the dry ground, and shall not lift the earth that covers it:
therefore I will fling my garden together, and give it unto the
builders.' Take heed rather that thou trouble not the wise secret
earth; for in the mould that thou throwest up shall the first tender
growth lie to waste; which else had been made strong in its season.
Yea, and even if the year fall past in all its months, and the soil
be indeed, to thee, peevish and incapable, and though thou indeed
gather all thy harvest, and it suffice for others, and thou remain
vext with emptiness; and others drink of thy streams, and the drouth
rasp thy throat;--let it be enough that these have found the feast
good, and thanked the giver: remembering that, when the winter is
striven through, there is another year, whose wind is meek, and whose
sun fulfilleth all."

While he heard, Chiaro went slowly on his knees. It was not to her
that spoke, for the speech seemed within him and his own. The air
brooded in sunshine, and though the turmoil was great outside, the
air within was at peace. But when he looked in her eyes, he wept. And
she came to him, and cast her hair over him, and, took her hands
about his forehead, and spoke again:

"Thou hadst said," she continued, gently, "that faith failed thee.
This cannot be so. Either thou hadst it not, or thou hast it. But who
bade thee strike the point betwixt love and faith? Wouldst thou sift
the warm breeze from the sun that quickens it? Who bade thee turn
upon God and say: "Behold, my offering is of earth, and not worthy:
thy fire comes not upon it: therefore, though I slay not my brother
whom thou acceptest, I will depart before thou smite me." Why
shouldst thou rise up and tell God He is not content? Had He, of His
warrant, certified so to thee? Be not nice to seek out division; but
possess thy love in sufficiency: assuredly this is faith, for the
heart must believe first. What He hath set in thine heart to do, that
do thou; and even though thou do it without thought of Him, it shall
be well done: it is this sacrifice that He asketh of thee, and His
flame is upon it for a sign. Think not of Him; but of His love and
thy love. For God is no morbid exactor: he hath no hand to bow
beneath, nor a foot, that thou shouldst kiss it."

And Chiaro held silence, and wept into her hair which covered his
face; and the salt tears that he shed ran through her hair upon his
lips; and he tasted the bitterness of shame.

Then the fair woman, that was his soul, spoke again to him, saying:

"And for this thy last purpose, and for those unprofitable truths of
thy teaching,--thine heart hath already put them away, and it needs
not that I lay my bidding upon thee. How is it that thou, a man,
wouldst say coldly to the mind what God hath said to the heart
warmly? Thy will was honest and wholesome; but look well lest this
also be folly,--to say, 'I, in doing this, do strengthen God among
men.' When at any time hath he cried unto thee, saying, 'My son, lend
me thy shoulder, for I fall?' Deemest thou that the men who enter
God's temple in malice, to the provoking of blood, and neither for
his love nor for his wrath will abate their purpose,--shall
afterwards stand with thee in the porch, midway between Him and
themselves, to give ear unto thy thin voice, which merely the fall of
their visors can drown, and to see thy hands, stretched feebly,
tremble among their swords? Give thou to God no more than he asketh
of thee; but to man also, that which is man's. In all that thou
doest, work from thine own heart, simply; for his heart is as thine,
when thine is wise and humble; and he shall have understanding of
thee. One drop of rain is as another, and the sun's prism in all: and
shalt not thou be as he, whose lives are the breath of One? Only by
making thyself his equal can he learn to hold communion with thee,
and at last own thee above him. Not till thou lean over the water
shalt thou see thine image therein: stand erect, and it shall slope
from thy feet and be lost. Know that there is but this means whereby
thou may'st serve God with man:--Set thine hand and thy soul to serve
man with God."

And when she that spoke had said these words within Chiaro's spirit,
she left his side quietly, and stood up as he had first seen her;
with her fingers laid together, and her eyes steadfast, and with the
breadth of her long dress covering her feet on the floor. And,
speaking again, she said:

"Chiaro, servant of God, take now thine Art unto thee, and paint me
thus, as I am, to know me: weak, as I am, and in the weeds of this
time; only with eyes which seek out labour, and with a faith, not
learned, yet jealous of prayer. Do this; so shall thy soul stand
before thee always, and perplex thee no more."

And Chiaro did as she bade him. While he worked, his face grew solemn
with knowledge: and before the shadows had turned, his work was done.
Having finished, he lay back where he sat, and was asleep
immediately: for the growth of that strong sunset was heavy about
him, and he felt weak and haggard; like one just come out of a dusk,
hollow country, bewildered with echoes, where he had lost himself,
and who has not slept for many days and nights. And when she saw him
lie back, the beautiful woman came to him, and sat at his head,
gazing, and quieted his sleep with her voice.

The tumult of the factions had endured all that day through all Pisa,
though Chiaro had not heard it: and the last service of that Feast
was a mass sung at midnight from the windows of all the churches for
the many dead who lay about the city, and who had to be buried before
morning, because of the extreme heats.

    *  *  *  *  *  *  *

In the Spring of 1847 I was at Florence. Such as were there at
the same time with myself--those, at least, to whom Art is
something,--will certainly recollect how many rooms of the Pitti
Gallery were closed through that season, in order that some of the
pictures they contained might be examined, and repaired without the
necessity of removal. The hall, the staircases, and the vast central
suite of apartments, were the only accessible portions; and in these
such paintings as they could admit from the sealed _penetralia_ were
profanely huddled together, without respect of dates, schools, or
persons.

I fear that, through this interdict, I may have missed seeing many of
the best pictures. I do not mean _only_ the most talked of: for
these, as they were restored, generally found their way somehow into
the open rooms, owing to the clamours raised by the students; and I
remember how old Ercoli's, the curator's, spectacles used to be
mirrored in the reclaimed surface, as he leaned mysteriously over
these works with some of the visitors, to scrutinize and elucidate.

One picture, that I saw that Spring, I shall not easily forget. It
was among those, I believe, brought from the other rooms, and had
been hung, obviously out of all chronology, immediately beneath that
head by Raphael so long known as the "Berrettino," and now said to be
the portrait of Cecco Ciulli.

The picture I speak of is a small one, and represents merely the
figure of a woman, clad to the hands and feet with a green and grey
raiment, chaste and early in its fashion, but exceedingly simple. She
is standing: her hands are held together lightly, and her eyes set
earnestly open.

The face and hands in this picture, though wrought with great
delicacy, have the appearance of being painted at once, in a single
sitting: the drapery is unfinished. As soon as I saw the figure, it
drew an awe upon me, like water in shadow. I shall not attempt to
describe it more than I have already done; for the most absorbing
wonder of it was its literality. You knew that figure, when painted,
had been seen; yet it was not a thing to be seen of men. This
language will appear ridiculous to such as have never looked on the
work; and it may be even to some among those who have. On examining
it closely, I perceived in one corner of the canvass the words _Manus
Animam pinxit_, and the date 1239.

I turned to my Catalogue, but that was useless, for the pictures were
all displaced. I then stepped up to the Cavaliere Ercoli, who was in
the room at the moment, and asked him regarding the subject of
authorship of the painting. He treated the matter, I thought,
somewhat slightingly, and said that he could show me the reference in
the Catalogue, which he had compiled. This, when found, was not of
much value, as it merely said, "Schizzo d'autore incerto," adding the
inscription.{4} I could willingly have prolonged my inquiry, in the
hope that it might somehow lead to some result; but I had disturbed
the curator from certain yards of Guido, and he was not
communicative. I went back therefore, and stood before the picture
till it grew dusk.

{4}I should here say, that in the catalogue for the year just over,
(owing, as in cases before mentioned, to the zeal and enthusiasm of
Dr. Aemmester) this, and several other pictures, have been more
competently entered. The work in question is now placed in the _Sala
Sessagona_, a room I did not see--under the number 161. It is
described as "Figura mistica di Chiaro dell' Erma," and there is a
brief notice of the author appended.

The next day I was there again; but this time a circle of students
was round the spot, all copying the "Berrettino." I contrived,
however, to find a place whence I could see _my_ picture, and where I
seemed to be in nobody's way. For some minutes I remained
undisturbed; and then I heard, in an English voice: "Might I beg of
you, sir, to stand a little more to this side, as you interrupt my
view."

I felt vext, for, standing where he asked me, a glare struck on the
picture from the windows, and I could not see it. However, the
request was reasonably made, and from a countryman; so I complied,
and turning away, stood by his easel. I knew it was not worth while;
yet I referred in some way to the work underneath the one he was
copying. He did not laugh, but he smiled as we do in England: "_Very_
odd, is it not?" said he.

The other students near us were all continental; and seeing an
Englishman select an Englishman to speak with, conceived, I suppose,
that he could understand no language but his own. They had evidently
been noticing the interest which the little picture appeared to
excite in me.

One of them, and Italian, said something to another who stood next to
him. He spoke with a Genoese accent, and I lost the sense in the
villainous dialect. "Che so?" replied the other, lifting his eyebrows
towards the figure; "roba mistica: 'st' Inglesi son matti sul
misticismo: somiglia alle nebbie di la. Li fa pensare alla patria,

        "E intenerisce il core
  Lo di ch' han detto ai dolci amici adio."

"La notte, vuoi dire," said a third.

There was a general laugh. My compatriot was evidently a novice in
the language, and did not take in what was said. I remained silent,
being amused.

"Et toi donc?" said he who had quoted Dante, turning to a student,
whose birthplace was unmistakable even had he been addressed in any
other language: "que dis-tu de ce genre-la?"

"Moi?" returned the Frenchman, standing back from his easel, and
looking at me and at the figure, quite politely, though with an
evident reservation: "Je dis, mon cher, que c'est une specialite dont
je me fiche pas mal. Je tiens que quand on ne comprend pas une chose,
c'est qu' elle ne signifie rein."

My reader thinks possibly that the French student was right.




Reviews

_The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich: a Long-vacation Pastoral. By Arthur
Hugh Clough. Oxford: Macpherson. London: Chapman and Hall.--1848_


The critic who should undertake to speak of all the poetry which
issues from the press of these present days, what is so called by
courtesy as well as that which may claim the title as of right, would
impose on himself a task demanding no little labor, and entailing no
little disgust and weariness. Nor is the trouble well repaid. More
profit will not accrue to him who studies, if the word can be used,
fifty of a certain class of versifiers, than to him who glances over
one: and, while a successful effort to warn such that poetry is not
their proper sphere, and that they must seek elsewhere for a vocation
to work out, might embolden a philanthropist to assume the position
of scare-crow, and drive away the unclean birds from the flowers and
the green leaves; on the other hand, the small results which appear
to have hitherto attended such endeavors are calculated rather to
induce those who have yet made, to relinquish them than to lead
others to follow in the same track. It is truly a disheartening task.
To the critic himself no good, though some amusement occasionally,
can be expected: to the criticised, good but rarely, for he is seldom
convinced, and annoyance and rancour almost of course; and, even in
those few cases where the voice crying "in the wilderness" produces
its effect, the one thistle that abandons the attempt at bearing figs
sees its neighbors still believing in their success, and soon has its
own place filled up. The sentence of those who do not read is the
best criticism on those who will not think.

It is acting on these considerations that we propose not to take
count of any works that do not either show a purpose achieved or give
promise of a worthy event; while of such we hope to overlook none.

We believe it may safely be assumed that at no previous period has
the public been more buzzed round by triviality and common-place; but
we hold firm, at the same time, that at none other has there been a
greater or a grander body of genius, or so honorable a display of
well cultivated taste and talent. Certainly the public do not seem to
know this: certainly the critics deny it, or rather speak as though
they never contemplated that such a position would be advanced: but,
if the fact be so, it will make itself known, and the poets of this
day will assert themselves, and take their places.

Of these it is our desire to speak truthfully, indeed, and without
compromise, but always as bearing in mind that the inventor is more
than the commentator, and the book more than the notes; and that, if
it is we who speak, we do so not for ourselves, nor as of ourselves.

The work of Arthur Hugh Clough now before us, (we feel warranted in
the dropping of the _Mr._ even at his first work,) unites the most
enduring forms of nature, and the most unsophisticated conditions of
life and character, with the technicalities of speech, of manners,
and of persons of an Oxford reading party in the long vacation. His
hero is

    "Philip Hewson, the poet,
  Hewson, the radical hot, hating lords and scorning ladies;"

and his heroine is no heroine, but a woman, "Elspie, the quiet, the
brave."

The metre he has chosen, the hexametral, harmonises with the spirit
of primitive simplicity in which the poem is conceived; is itself a
background, as much as are "Knoydart, Croydart, Moydart, Morrer, and
Ardnamurchan;" and gives a new individuality to the passages of
familiar narrative and every day conversation. It has an intrinsic
appropriateness; although, at first thought of the subject, this
will, perhaps, be scarcely admitted of so old and so stately a
rhythmical form.

As regards execution, however, there may be noted, in qualification
of much pliancy and vigour, a certain air of experiment in occasional
passages, and a license in versification, which more than warrants a
warning "to expect every kind of irregularity in these modern
hexameters." The following lines defy all efforts at reading in
dactyls or spondees, and require an almost complete transposition of
accent.

  "There was a point which I forgot, which our gallant Highland
    homes have;"--
  "While the little drunken Piper came across to shake hands with
    Lindsay:"--
  "Something of the world, of men and women: you will not refuse me."

In the first of these lines, the omission of the former "_which_,"
would remove all objection; and there are others where a final
syllable appears clearly deficient; as thus:--

  "Only the road and larches and ruinous millstead between"
    [_them_]:--
  "Always welcome the stranger: I may say, delighted to see
    [_such_] Fine young men:"--
  "Nay, never talk: listen now. What I say you can't apprehend"
    [_yet_]:--
  "Laid her hand on her lap. Philip took it. She did not resist"
    [_him_]:--

Yet the following would be scarcely improved by greater exactness:

  "Roaring after their prey, do seek their meat from God;"

Nor, perhaps, ought this to be made correct:

  "Close as the bodies and intertwining limbs of athletic wrestlers."

The aspect of _fact_ pervading "the Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich,"--(in
English, "the hut of the bearded well," a somewhat singular title, to
say the least,) is so strong and complete as to render necessary the
few words of dedication, where, in inscribing the poem, (or, as the
author terms it, "trifle,") to his "long-vacation pupils," he
expresses a hope, that they "will not be displeased if, in a fiction,
purely fiction, they are here and there reminded of times enjoyed
together."

As the story opens, the Oxford party are about to proceed to dinner
at "the place of the Clansmen's meeting." Their characters,
discriminated with the nicest taste, and perfectly worked out, are
thus introduced:

  "Be it recorded in song who was first, who last, in dressing.
  Hope was the first, black-tied, white-waistcoated, simple, his Honor;
  For the postman made out he was a son to the Earl of Ilay,
  (As, indeed, he was to the younger brother, the Colonel);
  Treated him therefore with special respect, doffed bonnet, and ever
  Called him his Honor: his Honor he therefore was at the cottage;
  Always his Honor at least, sometimes the Viscount of Ilay.

  "Hope was the first, his Honor; and, next to his Honor, the Tutor.
  Still more plain the tutor, the grave man nicknamed Adam,
  White-tied, clerical, silent, with antique square-cut waistcoat,
  Formal, unchanged, of black cloth, but with sense and feeling beneath it;
  Skilful in ethics and logic, in Pindar and poets unrivalled;
  _Shady_ in Latin, said Lindsay, but _topping_ in plays and Aldrich.

  "Somewhat more splendid in dress, in a waistcoat of a lady,
  Lindsay succeeded, the lively, the cheery, cigar-loving Lindsay,
  Lindsay the ready of speech, the Piper, the Dialectician:
  This was his title from Adam, because of the words he invented,
  Who in three weeks had created a dialect new for the party.

  "Hewson and Hobbes were down at the _matutine_ bathing; of course
  Arthur Audley, the bather _par excellence_ glory of headers:
  Arthur they called him for love and for euphony: so were they bathing
  There where in mornings was custom, where, over a ledge of granite,
  Into a granite bason descended the amber torrent.
  There were they bathing and dressing: it was but a step from the cottage,
  Only the road and larches and ruinous millstead between.
  Hewson and Hobbes followed quick upon Adam; on them followed Arthur.

  "Airlie descended the last, splendescent as god of Olympus.
  When for ten minutes already the fourwheel had stood at the gateway;
  He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olympian chamber."--pp. 5, 6.

A peculiar point of style in this poem, and one which gives a certain
classic character to some of its more familiar aspects, is the
frequent recurrence of the same line, and the repeated definition of
a personage by the same attributes. Thus, Lindsay is "the Piper, the
Dialectician," Arthur Audley "the glory of headers," and the tutor
"the grave man nicknamed Adam," from beginning to end; and so also of
the others.

Omitting the after-dinner speeches, with their "Long constructions
strange and plusquam-Thucydidean," that only of "Sir Hector, the
Chief and the Chairman;" in honor of the Oxonians, than which nothing
could be more unpoetically truthful, is preserved, with the
acknowledgment, ending in a sarcasm at the game laws, by Hewson, who,
as he is leaving the room, is accosted by "a thin man, clad as the
Saxon:"

  "'Young man, if ye pass thro' the Braes o'Lochaber,
  See by the Loch-side ye come to the Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich.'"--p. 9.

Throughout this scene, as through the whole book, no opportunity is
overlooked for giving individuality to the persons introduced: Sir
Hector, of whom we lose sight henceforward, the attache, the
Guards-man, are not mere names, but characters: it is not enough to
say that two tables were set apart "for keeper and gillie and
peasant:" there is something to be added yet; and with others
assembled around them were "Pipers five or six; _among them the young
one, the drunkard_."

The morrow's conversation of the reading party turns on "noble ladies
and rustic girls, their partners." And here speaks out Hewson the
chartist:

  "'Never (of course you will laugh, but of course all the
    same I shall say it,)
  Never, believe me, revealed itself to me the sexual glory,
  Till, in some village fields, in holidays now getting stupid,
  One day sauntering long and listless, as Tennyson has it,
  Long and listless strolling, ungainly in hobbydihoyhood,
  Chanced it my eye fell aside on a capless bonnetless maiden,
  Bending with three-pronged fork in a garden uprooting potatoes.
  Was it the air? who can say? or herself? or the charm of the labor?
  But a new thing was in me, and longing delicious possessed me,
  Longing to take her and lift her, and put her away from her slaving.
  Was it to clasp her in lifting, or was it to lift her by clasping,
  Was it embracing or aiding was most in my mind? Hard question.
  But a new thing was in me: I too was a youth among maidens.
  Was it the air? who can say? But, in part, 'twas the charm of
    the labor.'"

And he proceeds in a rapture to talk on the beauty of household
service.

Hereat Arthur remarks: "'Is not all this just the same that one hears
at common room breakfasts, Or perhaps Trinity-wines, about Gothic
buildings and beauty?'"--p. 13.

The character of Hobbes, called into energy by this observation, is
perfectly developed in the lines succeeding:

  "And with a start from the sofa came Hobbes; with a cry from
    the sofa,
  There where he lay, the great Hobbes, contemplative, corpulent,
    witty;
  Author forgotten and silent of currentest phrase and fancy;
  Mute and exuberant by turns, a fountain at intervals playing,
  Mute and abstracted, or strong and abundant as rain in the tropics;
  Studious; careless of dress; inobservant; by smooth persuasions
  Lately decoyed into kilt on example of Hope and the Piper,
  Hope an Antinous mere, Hyperion of calves the Piper.....
  "'Ah! could they only be taught,' he resumed, 'by a Pugin of women
  How even churning and washing, the dairy, the scullery duties,
  Wait but a touch to redeem and convert them to charms and attractions;
  Scrubbing requires for true grace but frank and artistical handling,
  And the removal of slops to be ornamentally treated!"--pp. 13, 14.

Here, in the tutor's answer to Hewson, we come on the moral of the
poem, a moral to be pursued through commonplace lowliness of station
and through high rank, into the habit of life which would be, in the
one, not petty,--in the other, not overweening,--in any, calm and
dignified.

  "'You are a boy; when you grow to a man, you'll find things alter.
  You will learn to seek the good, to scorn the attractive,
  Scorn all mere cosmetics, as now of rank and fashion,
  Delicate hands, and wealth, so then of poverty also,
  Poverty truly attractive, more truly, I bear you witness.
  Good, wherever found, you will choose, be it humble or stately,
  Happy if only you find, and, finding, do not lose it.'"--p. 14.

When the discussion is ended, the party propose to separate, some
proceeding on their tour; and Philip Hewson will be of these.

  "'Finally, too,' from the kilt and the sofa said Hobbes in conclusion,
  'Finally Philip must hunt for that home of the probable poacher,
  Hid in the Braes of Lochaber, the Bothie of what-did-he-call-it.
  Hopeless of you and of us, of gillies and marquises hopeless,
  Weary of ethic and logic, of rhetoric yet more weary,
  There shall he, smit by the charm of a lovely potatoe-uprooter,
  Study the question of sex in the Bothie of what-did-he-call-it."'--p.18.

The action here becomes divided; and, omitting points of detail, we
must confine ourselves to tracing the development of the idea in
which the subject of the poem consists.

Philip and his companions, losing their road, are received at a farm,
where they stay for three days: and this experience of himself
begins. He comes prepared; and, if he seems to love the
"golden-haired Katie," it is less that she is "the youngest and
comeliest daughter" than because of her position, and that in that
she realises his preconceived wishes. For three days he is with her
and about her; and he remains when his friends leave the farm-house.
But his love is no more than the consequence of his principles; it is
his own will unconsidered and but half understood. And a letter to
Adam tells how it had an end:

  "'I was walking along some two miles from the cottage,
  Full of my dreamings. A girl went by in a party with others:
  She had a cloak on,--was stepping on quickly, for rain was
    beginning;
  But, as she passed, from the hood I saw her eyes glance at me:--
  So quick a glance, so regardless I, that, altho' I felt it,
  You couldn't properly say our eyes met; she cast it, and left it.
  It was three minutes, perhaps, ere I knew what it was. I had
    seen her
  Somewhere before, I am sure; but that wasn't it,--not its import.
  No; it had seemed to regard me with simple superior insight,
  Quietly saying to herself: 'Yes, there he is still in his
    fancy......
  Doesn't yet see we have here just the things he is used to
    elsewhere,
  And that the things he likes here, elsewhere he wouldn't have
    looked at;
  People here, too, are people, and not as fairy-land creatures.
  He is in a trance, and possessed,--I wonder how long to continue.
  It is a shame and pity,--and no good likely to follow.'--
  Something like this; but, indeed, I cannot the least define it.
  Only, three hours thence, I was off and away in the moor-land,
  Hiding myself from myself, if I could, the arrow within me.'"--p.29.

Philip Hewson has been going on

  "Even as cloud passing subtly unseen from mountain to mountain,
  Leaving the crest of Benmore to be palpable next on Benvohrlich,
  Or like to hawk of the hill, which ranges and soars in its hunting,
  Seen and unseen by turns."...... And these are his words in the
    mountains:......

  "'Surely the force that here sweeps me along in its violent impulse,
  Surely my strength shall be in her, my help and protection about her,
  Surely in inner-sweet gladness and vigor of joy shall sustain her;
  Till, the brief winter o'erpast, her own true sap in the springtide
  Rise, and the tree I have bared be verdurous e'en as aforetime:
  Surely it may be, it should be, it must be. Yet, ever and ever,
  'Would I were dead,' I keep saying, 'that so I could go and
    uphold her.'"--pp. 26, 27.

And, meanwhile, Katie, among the others, is dancing and smiling still
on some one who is to her all that Philip had ever been.

When Hewson writes next, his experience has reached its second stage.
He is at Balloch, with the aunt and the cousin of his friend Hope:
and the lady Maria has made his beliefs begin to fail and totter, and
he feels for something to hold firmly. He seems to think, at one
moment, that the mere knowledge of the existence of such an one ought
to compensate for lives of drudgery hemmed in with want; then he
turns round on himself with, "How shall that be?" And, at length, he
appeases his questions, saying that it must and should be so, if it is.

After this, come scraps of letters, crossed and recrossed, from the
Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich. In his travelling towards home, a horse
cast a shoe, and the were directed to David Mackaye. Hewson is still
in the clachan hard by when he urges his friend to come to him: and
he comes.

  "There on the blank hill-side, looking down through the loch to
    the ocean;
  There, with a runnel beside, and pine-trees twain before it,
  There, with the road underneath, and in sight of coaches and
    steamers,
  Dwelling of David Mackaye and his daughters, Elspie and Bella,
  Sends up a column of smoke the Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich.....

  "So on the road they walk, by the shore of the salt sea-water,
  Silent a youth and maid, the elders twain conversing."--pp. 36, 37.

  "Ten more days, with Adam, did Philip abide at the changehouse;
  Ten more nights they met, they walked with father and daughter.
  Ten more nights; and, night by night, more distant away were
  Philip and she; every night less heedful, by habit, the
    father."--pp. 38, 39.

From this point, we must give ourselves up to quotation; and the
narrow space remaining to us is our only apology to the reader for
making any omission whatever in these extracts.

  "For she confessed, as they sat in the dusk, and he saw not her
    blushes,
  Elspie confessed, at the sports, long ago, with her father, she
    saw him,
  When at the door the old man had told him the name of the Bothie;
  There, after that, at the dance; yet again at the dance in Rannoch;
  And she was silent, confused. Confused much rather Philip
  Buried his face in his hands, his face that with blood was
    bursting.
  Silent, confused; yet by pity she conquered here fear, and
    continued:
  'Katie is good and not silly: be comforted, Sir, about her;
  Katie is good and not silly; tender, but not, like many,
  Carrying off, and at once, for fear of being seen, in the bosom
  Locking up as in a cupboard, the pleasure that any man gives them,
  Keeping it out of sight as a prize they need be ashamed of:
  That is the way, I think, Sir, in England more than in Scotland.
  No; she lives and takes pleasure in all, as in beautiful weather;
  Sorry to lose it; but just as we would be to lose fine weather.....
  There were at least five or six,--not there; no, that I don't say,
  But in the country about,--you might just as well have been courting.
  That was what gave me much pain; and (you won't remember that tho'),
  Three days after, I met you, beside my Uncle's walking;
  And I was wondering much, and hoped you wouldn't notice;
  So, as I passed, I couldn't help looking. You didn't know me;
  But I was glad when I heard, next day, you were gone to the teacher.'

  "And, uplifting his face at last, with eyes dilated,
  Large as great stars in mist, and dim with dabbled lashes.
  Philip, with new tears starting,

    'You think I do not remember,'
  Said, 'suppose that I did not observe. Ah me! shall I tell you?
  Elspie, it was your look that sent me away from Rannoch.'....
  And he continued more firmly, altho' with stronger emotion.
  'Elspie, why should I speak it? You cannot believe it, and should not.
  Why should I say that I love, which I all but said to another?
  Yet, should I dare, should I say, Oh Elspie you only I love, you,
  First and sole in my life that has been, and surely that shall be;
  Could, oh could, you believe it, oh Elspie, believe it, and spurn not?
  Is it possible,--possible, Elspie?'

  'Well,' she answered,
  Quietly, after her fashion, still knitting; 'Well, I think of it.
  Yes, I don't know, Mr. Philip; but only it feels to me strangely,--
  Like to the high new bridge they used to build at, below there,
  Over the burn and glen, on the road. You won't understand me.....
  Sometimes I find myself dreaming at nights about arches and bridges;
  Sometimes I dream of a great invisible hand coming down, and
  Dropping a great key-stone in the middle.'....

    "But while she was speaking,--
  So it happened,--a moment she paused from her work, and, pondering,
  Laid her hand on her lap. Philip took it, she did not resist.
  So he retained her fingers, the knitting being stopped. But emotion
  Came all over her more and more, from his hand, from her heart, and
  Most from the sweet idea and image her brain was renewing.
  So he retained her hand, and, his tears down-dropping on it,
  Trembling a long time, kissed it at last: and she ended.
  And, as she ended, up rose he, saying: 'What have I heard? Oh!
  What have I done, that such words should be said to me? Oh! I see it,
  See the great key-stone coming down from the heaven of heavens.'
  And he fell at her feet, and buried his face in her apron.
  "But, as, under the moon and stars, they went to the cottage,
  Elspie sighed and said: 'Be patient, dear Mr. Philip;
  Do not do anything hasty. It is all so soon, so sudden.
  Do not say anything yet to any one.'

  'Elspie,' he answered,
  "Does not my friend go on Friday? I then shall see nothing of you:
  Do not I myself go on Monday? 'But oh!' he said, 'Elspie,
  Do as I bid you, my child; do not go on calling me _Mr._
  Might I not just as well be calling you _Miss Elspie?_
  Call me, this heavenly night, for once, for the first time, Philip.'
  "'Philip,' she said, and laughed, and said she could not say it.
  'Philip,' she said. He turned, and kissed the sweet lips as they
    said it.
  "But, on the morrow, Elspie kept out of the way of Philip;
  And, at the evening seat, when he took her hand by the alders,
  Drew it back, saying, almost peevishly:

  "'No, Mr. Philip;
  I was quite right last night: it is too soon, too sudden,
  What I told you before was foolish, perhaps,--was hasty.
  When I think it over, I am shocked and terrified at it.'"....
  "Ere she had spoken two words, had Philip released her fingers;
  As she went on, he recoiled, fell back, and shook, and shivered.
  There he stood, looking pale and ghastly; when she had ended,
  Answering in a hollow voice:

    "'It is true; oh! quite true, Elspie.
  Oh! you are always right; oh! what, what, have I been doing?
  I will depart to-morrow. But oh! forget me not wholly,
  Wholly, Elspie, nor hate me; no, do not hate me, my Elspie.'"

  "But a revulsion passed thro' the brain and bosom of Elspie;
  And she got up from her seat on the rock, putting by her knitting,
  Went to him where he stood, and answered:

  "'No, Mr. Philip:
  No; you are good, Mr. Philip, and gentle; and I am the foolish:
  No, Mr. Philip; forgive me.'

    "She stepped right to him, and boldly
  Took up his hand, and placed it in her's, he daring no movement;
  Took up the cold hanging hand, up-forcing the heavy elbow.
  'I am afraid,' she said; 'but I will;' and kissed the fingers.
  And he fell on his knees, and kissed her own past counting......
  "As he was kissing her fingers, and knelt on the ground before her,
  Yielding, backward she sank to her seat, and, of what she was doing
  Ignorant, bewildered, in sweet multitudinous vague emotion,
  Stooping, knowing not what, put her lips to the curl on his forehead.
  And Philip, raising himself, gently, for the first time, round her
  Passing his arms, close, close, enfolded her close to his bosom.
  "As they went home by the moon, 'Forgive me, Philip,' she whispered:
  'I have so many things to talk of all of a sudden,
  I who have never once thought a thing in my ignorant Highlands.'"
    --pp. 39-44.

We may spare criticism here, for what reader will not have felt such
poetry? There is something in this of the very tenderness of
tenderness; this is true delicacy, fearless and unembarrassed. Here
it seems almost captious to object: perhaps, indeed, it is rather
personal whim than legitimate criticism which makes us take some
exception at "the curl on his forehead;" yet somehow there seems a
hint in it of the pet curate.

Elspie's doubts now return upon her with increased force; and it is
not till after many conversations with the "teacher" that she allows
her resolve to be fixed. So, at last,

  "There, upon Saturday eve, in the gorgeous bright October,
  Under that alders knitting, gave Elspie her troth to Philip."

And, after their talk, she feels strong again, and fit to be
his.--Then they rise.

  "'But we must go, Mr. Philip.'

  "'I shall not go at all,' said
  He, 'If you call me _Mr._ Thank Heaven! that's well over!'
  "'No, but it's not,' she said; 'it is not over, nor will be.
  Was it not, then,' she asked, 'the name I called you first by?
  No, Mr. Philip, no. You have kissed me enough for two nights.
  No.--Come, Philip, come, or I'll go myself without you.'
  "'You never call me Philip,' he answered, 'until I kiss you.'"
    --pp. 47, 48.

David Mackaye gives his consent; but first Hewson must return to
College, and study for a year.

His views have not been stationary. To his old scorn for the idle of
the earth had succeeded the surprise that overtook him at Balloch:
and he would now hold to his creed, yet not as rejecting his
experience. Some, he says, were made for use; others for ornament;
but let these be so _made_, of a truth, and not such as find
themselves merely thrust into exemption from labor. Let each know his
place, and take it, "For it is beautiful only to do the thing we are
meant for." And of his friend urging Providence he can only, while
answering that doubtless he must be in the right, ask where the limit
comes between circumstance and Providence, and can but wish for a
great cause, and the trumpet that should call him to God's battle,
whereas he sees

  "Only infinite jumble and mess and dislocation,
  Backed by a solemn appeal, 'For God's sake, do not stir there.'"
  And the year is now out.
  "Philip returned to his books, but returned to his Highlands after....
  There in the bright October, the gorgeous bright October,
  When the brackens are changed, and heather blooms are faded,
  And, amid russet of heather and fern, green trees are bonnie,
  There, when shearing had ended, and barley-stooks were garnered,
  David gave Philip to wife his daughter, his darling Elspie;
  Elspie, the quiet, the brave, was wedded to Philip, the poet.....
  So won Philip his bride. They are married, and gone to New Zealand.
  Five hundred pounds in pocket, with books and two or three pictures,
  Tool-box, plough, and the rest, they rounded the sphere to New Zealand.
  There he hewed and dug; subdued the earth and his spirit."
    --pp. 52-55.

Among the prominent attributes of this poem is its completeness. The
elaboration, not only of character and of mental discipline, but of
incident also, is unbroken. The absences of all mention of Elspie in
the opening scene and again at the dance at Rannoch may at first seem
to be a failure in this respect; but second thoughts will show it to
be far otherwise: for, in the former case, her presence would not
have had any significance for Hewson, and, in the latter, would have
been overlooked by him save so far as might warrant a future vague
recollection, pre-occupied as his eyes and thoughts were by another.
There is one condition still under which we have as yet had little
opportunity of displaying this quality; but it will be found to be as
fully carried out in the descriptions of nature. In the first of our
extracts the worlds are few, but stand for many.

    "Meaely glen, the heart of Lochiel's fair forest,
  Where Scotch firs are darkest and amplest, and intermingle
  Grandly with rowan and ash;--in Mar you have no ashes;
  There the pine is alone or relieved by birch and alder."--p. 22.

In the next mere sound and the names go far towards the entire
effect; but not so far as to induce any negligence in essential
details:

  "As, at return of tide, the total weight of ocean,
  Drawn by moon and sun from Labrador and Greenland,
  Sets in amain in the open space betwixt Mull and Scarfa,
  Heaving, swelling, spreading, the might of the mighty Atlantic;
  There into cranny and slit of the rocky cavernous bottom
  Settles down; and with dimples huge the smooth sea-surface
  Eddies, coils, and whirls, and dangerous Corryvreckan."--p. 52.

Two more passages, and they must suffice as examples. Here the
isolation is perfect; but it is the isolation, not of the place and
the actors only; it is, as it were, almost our own in an equal
degree;

    "Ourselves too seeming
  Not as spectators, accepted into it, immingled, as truly
  Part of it as are the kine of the field lying there by the birches."
  "There, across the great rocky wharves a wooden bridge goes,
  Carrying a path to the forest; below,--three hundred yards, say,--
  Lower in level some twenty-five feet, thro' flats of shingle,
  Stepping-stones and a cart-track cross in the open valley.
  But, in the interval here, the boiling pent-up water
  Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a bason
  Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury
  Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror;
  Beautiful there for the color derived from green rocks under;
  Beautiful most of all where beads of foam uprising
  Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness.
  Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch-boughs,
  Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway,
  Still more concealed from below by wood and rocky projection.
  You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water,
  Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing."--

  "So they bathed, they read, they roamed in glen and forest;
  Far amid blackest pines to the waterfall they shadow,
  Far up the long long glen to the loch, and the loch beyond it
  Deep under huge red cliffs, a secret."

In many of the images of this poem, as also in the volume
"Ambarvalia," the joint production of Clough and Thomas Burbidge,
there is a peculiar moderness, a reference distinctly to the means
and habits of society in these days, a recognition of every-day fact,
and a willingness to believe it as capable of poetry as that which,
but for having once been fact, would not now be tradition. There is a
certain special character in passages like the following, the
familiarity of the matter blending with the remoteness of the form of
metre, such as should not be overlooked in attempting to estimate the
author's mind and views of art:

  "Still, as before (and as now), balls, dances, and evening parties,....
  Seemed like a sort of unnatural up-in-the-air balloon work,....
  As mere gratuitous trifling in presence of business and duty
  As does the turning aside of the tourist to look at a landscape
  Seem in the steamer or coach to the merchant in haste for the city."
    --p. 12.

  "I was as one that sleeps on the railway; one who, dreaming,
  Hears thro' his dream the name of his home shouted out,--hears
    and hears not,
  Faint, and louder again, and less loud, dying in distance,--
  Dimly conscious, with something of inward debate and choice, and
  Sense of [present] claim and reality present; relapses,
  Nevertheless, and continues the dream and fancy, while forward,
  Swiftly, remorseless, the car presses on, he knows not whither."
    --p.38.

Indeed, the general adaptation of the style to the immediate matter,
the alternation of the poetic and the familiar, with a certain
mixture even of classical phrase and allusion, is highly appropriate,
and may almost be termed constant, except in occasional instances
where more poetry, and especially more conception and working out of
images, is introduced than squares with a strict observance of
nature. Thus the lines quoted where Elspie applies to herself the
incident of "the high new bridge" and "the great key-stone in the
middle" are succeeded by others (omitted in our extract) where the
idea is followed into its details; and there is another passage in
which, through no less than seventeen lines, she compares herself to
an inland stream disturbed and hurried on by the mingling with it of
the sea's tide. Thus also one of the most elaborate descriptions in
the poem,--an episode in itself of the extremest beauty and finish,
but, as we think, clearly misplaced,--is a picture of the dawn over a
great city, introduced into a letter of Philip's, and that, too,
simply as an image of his own mental condition. There are but few
poets for whom it would be superfluous to reflect whether pieces of
such-like mere poetry might not more properly form part of the
descriptive groundwork, and be altogether banished from discourse and
conversation, where the greater amount of their intrinsic care and
excellence becomes, by its position, a proportionally increasing load
of disregard for truthfulness.

For a specimen of a peculiarly noble spirit which pervades the whole
work, we would refer the reader to the character of Arthur Audley,
unnecessary to the story, but most important to the sentiment; for a
comprehensive instance of minute feeling for individuality, to the
narrative of Lindsay and the corrections of Arthur on returning from
their tour.

  "He to the great _might have been_ upsoaring, sublime and ideal;
  He to the merest _it was_ restricting, diminishing, dwarfing;"

For pleasant ingenuity, involving, too, a point of character, to the
final letter of Hobbes to Philip, wherein, in a manner made up of
playful subtlety and real poetical feeling, he proves how "this
Rachel and Leah is marriage."

"The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich" will not, it is to be feared, be
extensively read; its length combined with the metre in which it is
written, or indeed a first hasty glance at the contents, does not
allure the majority even of poetical readers; but it will not be left
or forgotten by such as fairly enter upon it. This is a poem
essentially thought and studied, if not while in the act of writing,
at least as the result of a condition of mind; and the author owes it
to the appreciations of all into whose hands it shall come, and who
are willing to judge for themselves, to call it, should a second
edition appear, by its true name;--not a trifle, but a work.

That public attention should have been so little engaged by this poem
is a fact in one respect somewhat remarkable, as contrasting with the
notice which the "Ambarvalia" has received. Nevertheless,
independently of the greater importance of "the Bothie" in length and
development, it must, we think, be admitted to be written on sounder
and more matured principles of taste,--the style being sufficiently
characterized and distinctive without special prominence, whereas not
a few of the poems in the other volume are examples rather of style
than of thought, and might be held in recollection on account of the
former quality alone.




Her First Season


  He gazed her over, from her eyebrows down
    Even to her feet: he gazed so with the good
    Undoubting faith of fools, much as who should
  Accost God for a comrade. In the brown
  Of all her curls he seemed to think the town
    Would make an acquisition; but her hood
    Was not the newest fashion, and his brood
  Of lady-friends might scarce approve her gown.
  If I did smile, 'twas faintly; for my cheeks
    Burned, thinking she'd be shown up to be sold,
    And cried about, in the thick jostling run
  Of the loud world, till all the weary weeks
    Should bring her back to herself and to the old
    Familiar face of nature and the sun.




A Sketch From Nature


  The air blows pure, for twenty miles,
    Over this vast countrie:
  Over hill and wood and vale, it goeth,
    Over steeple, and stack, and tree:
  And there's not a bird on the wind but knoweth
    How sweet these meadows be.

  The swallows are flying beside the wood,
    And the corbies are hoarsely crying;
  And the sun at the end of the earth hath stood,
  And, thorough the hedge and over the road,
    On the grassy slope is lying:
  And the sheep are taking their supper-food
    While yet the rays are dying.

  Sleepy shadows are filling the furrows,
    And giant-long shadows the trees are making;
  And velvet soft are the woodland tufts,
  And misty-gray the low-down crofts;
  But the aspens there have gold-green tops,
    And the gold-green tops are shaking:
  The spires are white in the sun's last light;--
  And yet a moment ere he drops,
  Gazes the sun on the golden slopes.

  Two sheep, afar from fold,
    Are on the hill-side straying,
  With backs all silver, breasts all gold:
    The merle is something saying,
  Something very very sweet:--
    'The day--the day--the day is done:'
  There answereth a single bleat--
  The air is cold, the sky is dimming,
  And clouds are long like fishes swimming.

    _Sydenham Wood_, 1849.




An End


  Love, strong as death, is dead.
  Come, let us make his bed
    Among the dying flowers:
  A green turf at his head;
  And a stone at his feet,
  Whereon we may sit
    In the quiet evening hours.

  He was born in the spring,
  And died before the harvesting.
    On the last warm summer day
    He left us;--he would not stay
    For autumn twilight cold and grey
  Sit we by his grave and sing
    He is gone away.

  To few chords, and sad, and low,
    Sing we so.
  Be our eyes fixed on the grass,
  Shadow-veiled, as the years pass,
  While we think of all that was
    In the long ago.


_Published Monthly, price 1s._

This Periodical will consist of original Poems, Stories to develope
thought and principle, Essays concerning Art and other subjects, and
analytic Reviews of current Literature--particularly of Poetry. Each
number will also contain an Etching; the subject to be taken from the
opening article of the month.

An attempt will be made, both intrinsically and by review, to claim
for Poetry that place to which its present development in the
literature of this country so emphatically entitles it.

The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will be to
encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of
nature; and also to direct attention, as an auxiliary medium, to the
comparatively few works which Art has yet produced in this spirit. It
need scarcely be added that the chief object of the etched designs
will be to illustrate this aim practically, as far as the method of
execution will permit; in which purpose they will be produced with
the utmost care and completeness.




No. 2. (_Price One Shilling_.) FEBRUARY, 1850.

With an Etching by JAMES COLLINSON.

The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature In Poetry, Literature, and Art.

  When whoso merely hath a little thought
      Will plainly think the thought which is in him,--
      Not imaging another's bright or dim,
  Not mangling with new words what others taught;
  When whoso speaks, from having either sought
      Or only found,--will speak, not just to skim
      A shallow surface with words made and trim,
  But in that very speech the matter brought:
  Be not too keen to cry--"So this is all!--
      A thing I might myself have thought as well,
    But would not say it, for it was not worth!"
      Ask: "Is this truth?" For is it still to tell
    That, be the theme a point or the whole earth,
  Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?


  London:
  AYLOTT & JONES, 8, PATERNOSTER ROW.

  G. F Tupper, Printer, Clement's Lane. Lombard Street.



CONTENTS.

  The Child Jesus: by _James Collinson_ 49
  A Pause of Thought: by _Ellen Alleyn_ 57
  The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art: by _John Seward_ 58
  Song: by _Ellen Alleyn_ 64
  Morning Sleep: by _Wm. B. Scott_ 65
  Sonnet: by _Calder Campbell_ 68
  Stars and Moon 69
  On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture: by _F. Madox Brown_ 70
  A Testimony: by _Ellen Alleyn_ 73
  O When and Where: by _Thomas Woolner_ 75
  Fancies at Leisure: by _Wm. M. Rossetti_ 76
  The Sight Beyond: by _Walter H. Deverell_ 79
  The Blessed Damozel: by _Dante G. Rossetti_ 80
  REVIEWS: "The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems:" by _Wm. M. Rossetti_ 84


To Correspondents.

All persons from whom Communications have been received, and who have
not been otherwise replied to, are requested to accept the Editor's
acknowledgments.

[Illustration: Ex ore infantiam et lartentium pertecizli laudem.]



The Child Jesus


"O all ye that pass by the way, attend and see if there be any sorrow
like to my sorrow."--

  _Lamentations i.12._

I. The Agony in the Garden

  Joseph, a carpenter of Nazareth,
  And his wife Mary had an only child,
  Jesus: One holy from his mother's womb.
  Both parents loved him: Mary's heart alone
  Beat with his blood, and, by her love and his,
  She knew that God was with her, and she strove
  Meekly to do the work appointed her;
  To cherish him with undivided care
  Who deigned to call her mother, and who loved
  From her the name of son. And Mary gave
  Her heart to him, and feared not; yet she seemed
  To hold as sacred that he said or did;
  And, unlike other women, never spake
  His words of innocence again; but all
  Were humbly treasured in her memory
  With the first secret of his birth. So strong
  Grew her affection, as the child increased
  In wisdom and in stature with his years,
  That many mothers wondered, saying: "These
  Our little ones claim in our hearts a place
  The next to God; but Mary's tenderness
  Grows almost into reverence for her child.
  Is he not of herself? I' the temple when
  Kneeling to pray, on him she bends her eyes,
  As though God only heard her prayer through him.
  Is he to be a prophet? Nay, we know
  That out of Galilee no prophet comes."

  But all their children made the boy their friend.

  Three cottages that overlooked the sea
  Stood side by side eastward of Nazareth.
  Behind them rose a sheltering range of cliffs,
  Purple and yellow, verdure-spotted, red,
  Layer upon layer built up against the sky.
  In front a row of sloping meadows lay,
  Parted by narrow streams, that rose above,
  Leaped from the rocks, and cut the sands below
  Into deep channels widening to the sea.

  Within the humblest of these three abodes
  Dwelt Joseph, his wife Mary, and their child.
  A honeysuckle and a moss-rose grew,
  With many blossoms, on their cottage front;
  And o'er the gable warmed by the South
  A sunny grape vine broadened shady leaves
  Which gave its tendrils shelter, as they hung
  Trembling upon the bloom of purple fruit.
  And, like the wreathed shadows and deep glows
  Which the sun spreads from some old oriel
  Upon the marble Altar and the gold
  Of God's own Tabernacle, where he dwells
  For ever, so the blossoms and the vine,
  On Jesus' home climbing above the roof,
  Traced intricate their windings all about
  The yellow thatch, and part concealed the nests
  Whence noisy close-housed sparrows peeped unseen.
  And Joseph had a little dove-cote placed
  Between the gable-window and the eaves,
  Where two white turtle doves (a gift of love
  From Mary's kinsman Zachary to her child)
  Cooed pleasantly; and broke upon the ear
  The ever dying sound of falling waves.

  And so it came to pass, one Summer morn,
  The mother dove first brought her fledgeling out
  To see the sun. It was her only one,
  And she had breasted it through three long weeks
  With patient instinct till it broke the shell;
  And she had nursed it with all tender care,
  Another three, and watched the white down grow
  Into full feather, till it left her nest.
  And now it stood outside its narrow home,
  With tremulous wings let loose and blinking eyes;
  While, hovering near, the old dove often tried
  By many lures to tempt it to the ground,
  That they might feed from Jesus' hand, who stood
  Watching them from below. The timid bird
  At last took heart, and, stretching out its wings,
  Brushed the light vine-leaves as it fluttered down.
  Just then a hawk rose from a tree, and thrice
  Wheeled in the air, and poised his aim to drop
  On the young dove, whose quivering plumage swelled
  About the sunken talons as it died.
  Then the hawk fixed his round eye on the child,
  Shook from his beak the stained down, screamed, and flapped
  His broad arched wings, and, darting to a cleft
  I' the rocks, there sullenly devoured his prey.
  And Jesus heard the mother's anguished cry,
  Weak like the distant sob of some lost child,
  Who in his terror runs from path to path,
  Doubtful alike of all; so did the dove,
  As though death-stricken, beat about the air;
  Till, settling on the vine, she drooped her head
  Deep in her ruffled feathers. She sat there,
  Brooding upon her loss, and did not move
  All through that day.

  And, sitting by her, covered up his face:
  Until a cloud, alone between the earth
  And sun, passed with its shadow over him.
  Then Jesus for a moment looked above;
  And a few drops of rain fell on his brow,
  Sad, as with broken hints of a lost dream,
  Or dim foreboding of some future ill.

  Now, from a garden near, a fair-haired girl
  Came, carrying a handful of choice flowers,
  Which in her lap she sorted orderly,
  As little children do at Easter-time
  To have all seemly when their Lord shall rise.
  Then Jesus' covered face she gently raised,
  Placed in his hand the flowers, and kissed his cheek
  And tried with soothing words to comfort him;
  He from his eyes spoke thanks.

  Fast trickling down his face, drop upon drop,
  Fell to the ground. That sad look left him not
  Till night brought sleep, and sleep closed o'er his woe.

II. The Scourging

  Again there came a day when Mary sat
  Within the latticed doorway's fretted shade,
  Working in bright and many colored threads
  A girdle for her child, who at her feet
  Lay with his gentle face upon her lap.
  Both little hands were crossed and tightly clasped
  Around her knee. On them the gleams of light
  Which broke through overhanging blossoms warm,
  And cool transparent leaves, seemed like the gems
  Which deck Our Lady's shrine when incense-smoke
  Ascends before her, like them, dimly seen
  Behind the stream of white and slanting rays
  Which came from heaven, as a veil of light,
  Across the darkened porch, and glanced upon
  The threshold-stone; and here a moth, just born
  To new existence, stopped upon her flight,
  To bask her blue-eyed scarlet wings spread out
  Broad to the sun on Jesus' naked foot,
  Advancing its warm glow to where the grass,
  Trimmed neatly, grew around the cottage door.

  And the child, looking in his mother's face,
  Would join in converse upon holy things
  With her, or, lost in thought, would seem to watch
  The orange-belted wild bees when they stilled
  Their hum, to press with honey-searching trunk
  The juicy grape; or drag their waxed legs
  Half buried in some leafy cool recess
  Found in a rose; or else swing heavily
  Upon the bending woodbine's fragrant mouth,
  And rob the flower of sweets to feed the rock,
  Where, in a hazel-covered crag aloft
  Parting two streams that fell in mist below,
  The wild bees ranged their waxen vaulted cells.

  As the time passed, an ass's yearling colt,
  Bearing a heavy load, came down the lane
  That wound from Nazareth by Joseph's house,
  Sloping down to the sands. And two young men,
  The owners of the colt, with many blows
  From lash and goad wearied its patient sides;
  Urging it past its strength, so they might win
  Unto the beach before a ship should sail.
  Passing the door, the ass turned round its head,
  And looked on Jesus: and he knew the look;
  And, knowing it, knew too the strange dark cross
  Laying upon its shoulders and its back.
  It was a foal of that same ass which bare
  The infant and the mother, when they fled
  To Egypt from the edge of Herod's sword.
  And Jesus watched them, till they reached the sands.
  Then, by his mother sitting down once more,
  Once more there came that shadow of deep grief
  Upon his brow when Mary looked at him:
  And she remembered it in days that came.

III. The Crowning with Thorns

  And the time passed.
  The child sat by himself upon the beach,
  While Joseph's barge freighted with heavy wood,
  Bound homewards, slowly labored thro' the calm.
  And, as he watched the long waves swell and break,
  Run glistening to his feet, and sink again,
  Three children, and then two, with each an arm
  Around the other, throwing up their songs,
  Such happy songs as only children know,
  Came by the place where Jesus sat alone.
  But, when they saw his thoughtful face, they ceased,
  And, looking at each other, drew near him;
  While one who had upon his head a wreath
  Of hawthorn flowers, and in his hand a reed,
  Put these both from him, saying, "Here is one
  Whom you shall all prefer instead of me
  To be our king;" and then he placed the wreath
  On Jesus' brow, who meekly bowed his head.
  And, when he took the reed, the children knelt,
  And cast their simple offerings at his feet:
  And, almost wondering why they loved him so,
  Kissed him with reverence, promising to yield
  Grave fealty. And Jesus did return
  Their childish salutations; and they passed
  Singing another song, whose music chimed
  With the sea's murmur, like a low sweet chant
  Chanted in some wide church to Jesus Christ.
  And Jesus listened till their voices sank
  Behind the jutting rocks, and died away:
  Then the wave broke, and Jesus felt alone.
  Who being alone, on his fair countenance
  And saddened beauty all unlike a child's
  The sun of innocence did light no smile,
  As on the group of happy faces gone.

IV. Jesus Carrying his Cross

  And, when the barge arrived, and Joseph bare
  The wood upon his shoulders, piece by piece,
  Up to his shed, Jesus ran by his side,
  Yearning for strength to help the aged man
  Who tired himself with work all day for him.
  But Joseph said: "My child, it is God's will
  That I should work for thee until thou art
  Of age to help thyself.--Bide thou his time
  Which cometh--when thou wilt be strong enough,
  And on thy shoulders bear a tree like this."
  So, while he spake, he took the last one up,
  Settling it with heaved back, fetching his breath.
  Then Jesus lifted deep prophetic eyes
  Full in the old man's face, but nothing said,
  Running still on to open first the door.

V. The Crucifixion

  Joseph had one ewe-sheep; and she brought forth,
  Early one season, and before her time,
  A weakly lamb. It chanced to be upon
  Jesus' birthday, when he was eight years old.
  So Mary said--"We'll name it after him,"--
  (Because she ever thought to please her child)--
  "And we will sign it with a small red cross
  Upon the back, a mark to know it by."
  And Jesus loved the lamb; and, as it grew
  Spotless and pure and loving like himself,
  White as the mother's milk it fed upon,
  He gave not up his care, till it became
  Of strength enough to browse and then, because
  Joseph had no land of his own, being poor,
  He sent away the lamb to feed amongst
  A neighbour's flock some distance from his home;
  Where Jesus went to see it every day.

  One late Spring eve, their daily work being done,
  Mother and child, according to their wont,
  Went, hand in hand, their chosen evening walk.
  A pleasant wind rose from the sea, and blew
  Light flakes of waving silver o'er the fields
  Ready for mowing, and the golden West
  Warmed half the sky: the low sun flickered through
  The hedge-rows, as they passed; while hawthorn trees
  Scattered their snowy leaves and scent around.
  The sloping woods were rich in varied leaf,
  And musical in murmur and in song.

  Long ere they reached the field, the wistful lamb
  Saw them approach, and ran from side to side
  The gate, pushing its eager face between
  The lowest bars, and bleating for pure joy.
  And Jesus, kneeling by it, fondled with
  The little creature, that could scarce find how
  To show its love enough; licking his hands,
  Then, starting from him, gambolled back again,
  And, with its white feet upon Jesus' knees,
  Nestled its head by his: and, as the sun
  Sank down behind them, broadening as it neared
  The low horizon, Mary thought it seemed
  To clothe them like a glory.--But her look
  Grew thoughtful, and she said: "I had, last night,
  A wandering dream. This brings it to my mind;
  And I will tell it thee as we walk home.

  "I dreamed a weary way I had to go
  Alone, across an unknown land: such wastes
  We sometimes see in visions of the night,
  Barren and dimly lighted. There was not
  A tree in sight, save one seared leafless trunk,
  Like a rude cross; and, scattered here and there,
  A shrivelled thistle grew: the grass was dead,
  And the starved soil glared through its scanty tufts
  In bare and chalky patches, cracked and hot,
  Chafing my tired feet, that caught upon
  Its parched surface; for a thirsty sun
  Had sucked all moisture from the ground it burned,
  And, red and glowing, stared upon me like
  A furnace eye when all the flame is spent.
  I felt it was a dream; and so I tried
  To close my eyes, and shut it out from sight.
  Then, sitting down, I hid my face; but this
  Only increased the dread; and so I gazed
  With open eyes into my dream again.
  The mists had thickened, and had grown quite black
  Over the sun; and darkness closed round me.
  (Thy father said it thundered towards the morn.)
  But soon, far off, I saw a dull green light
  Break though the clouds, which fell across the earth,
  Like death upon a bad man's upturned face.
  Sudden it burst with fifty forked darts
  In one white flash, so dazzling bright it seemed
  To hide the landscape in one blaze of light.
  When the loud crash that came down with it had
  Rolled its long echo into stillness, through
  The calm dark silence came a plaintive sound;
  And, looking towards the tree, I saw that it
  Was scorched with the lightning; and there stood
  Close to its foot a solitary sheep
  Bleating upon the edge of a deep pit,
  Unseen till now, choked up with briars and thorns;
  And into this a little snow white lamb,
  Like to thine own, had fallen. It was dead
  And cold, and must have lain there very long;
  While, all the time, the mother had stood by,
  Helpless, and moaning with a piteous bleat.
  The lamb had struggled much to free itself,
  For many cruel thorns had torn its head
  And bleeding feet; and one had pierced its side,
  From which flowed blood and water. Strange the things
  We see in dreams, and hard to understand;--
  For, stooping down to raise its lifeless head,
  I thought it changed into the quiet face
  Of my own child. Then I awoke, and saw
  The dim moon shining through the watery clouds
  On thee awake within thy little bed."

  Then Jesus, looking up, said quietly:
  "We read that God will speak to those he loves
  Sometimes in visions. He might speak to thee
  Of things to come his mercy partly veils
  From thee, my mother; or perhaps, the thought
  Floated across thy mind of what we read
  Aloud before we went to rest last night;--
  I mean that passage in Isaias' book,
  Which tells about the patient suffering lamb,
  And which it seems that no one understands."
  Then Mary bent her face to the child's brow,
  And kissed him twice, and, parting back his hair,
  Kissed him again. And Jesus felt her tears
  Drop warm upon his cheek, and he looked sad
  When silently he put his hand again
  Within his mother's. As they came, they went,
  Hand in hand homeward.
  With Mary and with Joseph, till the time
  When all the things should be fulfilled in him
  Which God had spoken by his prophets' mouth
  Long since; and God was with him, and God's grace.




A Pause of Thought


  I looked for that which is not, nor can be,
    And hope deferred made my heart sick, in truth;
    But years must pass before a hope of youth
      Is resigned utterly.

  I watched and waited with a steadfast will:
    And, tho' the object seemed to flee away
    That I so longed for, ever, day by day,
      I watched and waited still.

  Sometimes I said,--"This thing shall be no more;
    My expectation wearies, and shall cease;
    I will resign it now, and be at peace:"--
      Yet never gave it o'er.

  Sometimes I said,--"It is an empty name
    I long for; to a name why should I give
    The peace of all the days I have to live?"--
      Yet gave it all the same.

  Alas! thou foolish one,--alike unfit
    For healthy joy and salutary pain,
    Thou knowest the chase useless, and again
      Turnest to follow it.




The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art


The object we have proposed to ourselves in writing on Art, has been
"an endeavour to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the
simplicity of nature; and also to direct attention, as an auxiliary
medium, to the comparatively few works which Art has yet produced in
this spirit." It is in accordance with the former and more prominent
of these objects that the writer proposes at present to treat.

An unprejudiced spectator of the recent progress and main direction
of Art in England will have observed, as a great change in the
character of the productions of the modern school, a marked attempt
to lead the taste of the public into a new channel by producing pure
transcripts and faithful studies from nature, instead of
conventionalities and feeble reminiscences from the Old Masters; an
entire seeking after originality in a more humble manner than has
been practised since the decline of Italian Art in the Middle Ages.
This has been most strongly shown by the landscape painters, among
whom there are many who have raised an entirely new school of natural
painting, and whose productions undoubtedly surpass all others in the
simple attention to nature in detail as well as in generalities. By
this they have succeeded in earning for themselves the reputation of
being the finest landscape painters in Europe. But, although this
success has been great and merited, it is not of them that we have at
present to treat, but rather to recommend their example to their
fellow-labourers, the historical painters.

That the system of study to which this would necessarily lead
requires a somewhat longer and more devoted course of observation
than any other is undoubted; but that it has a reward in a greater
effect produced, and more delight in the searching, is, the writer
thinks, equally certain. We shall find a greater pleasure in
proportion to our closer communion with nature, and by a more exact
adherence to all her details, (for nature has no peculiarities or
excentricities) in whatsoever direction her study may conduct.

This patient devotedness appears to be a conviction peculiar to, or
at least more purely followed by, the early Italian Painters; a
feeling which, exaggerated, and its object mistaken by them, though
still held holy and pure, was the cause of the retirement of many of
the greatest men from the world to the monastery; there, in
undisturbed silence and humility,

    "Monotonous to paint
  Those endless cloisters and eternal aisles
  With the same series, Virgin, Babe, and Saint,
  With the same cold, calm, beautiful regard."

Even with this there is not associated a melancholy feeling alone;
for, although the object was mistaken, yet there is evinced a
consciousness of purpose definite and most elevated; and again, we
must remember, as a great cause of this effect, that the Arts were,
for the most part, cleric, and not laic, or at least were under the
predominant influence of the clergy, who were the most important
patrons by far, and their houses the safest receptacles for the works
of the great painter.

The modern artist does not retire to monasteries, or practise
discipline; but he may show his participation in the same high
feeling by a firm attachment to truth in every point of
representation, which is the most just method. For how can good be
sought by evil means, or by falsehood, or by slight in any degree? By
a determination to represent the thing and the whole of the thing, by
training himself to the deepest observation of its fact and detail,
enabling himself to reproduce, as far as possible, nature herself,
the painter will best evince his share of faith.

It is by this attachment to truth in its most severe form that the
followers of the Arts have to show that they share in the peculiar
character of the present age,--a humility of knowledge, a diffidence
of attainment; for, as Emerson has well observed,

  "The time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness,--
      'Sicklied o'er with the the pale cast of thought.'

Is this so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we
be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink
truth dry?"

It has been said that there is presumption in this movement of the
modern school, a want of deference to established authorities, a
removing of ancient landmarks. This is best answered by the
profession that nothing can be more humble than the pretension to the
observation of facts alone, and the truthful rendering of them. If we
are not to depart from established principles, how are we to advance
at all? Are we to remain still? Remember, no thing remains still;
that which does not advance falls backward. That this movement is an
advance, and that it is of nature herself, is shown by its going
nearer to truth in every object produced, and by its being guided by
the very principles the ancient painters followed, as soon as they
attained the mere power of representing an object faithfully. These
principles are now revived, not from them, though through their
example, but from nature herself.

That the earlier painters came nearer to fact, that they were less of
the art, artificial, cannot be better shown than by the statement of
a few examples from their works. There is a magnificent Niello work
by an unknown Florentine artist, on which is a group of the Saviour
in the lap of the Virgin. She is old, (a most touching point);
lamenting aloud, clutches passionately the heavy-weighted body on her
knee; her mouth is open. Altogether it is one of the most powerful
appeals possible to be conceived; for there are few but will consider
this identification with humanity to be of more effect than any
refined or emasculate treatment of the same subject by later artists,
in which we have the fact forgotten for the sake of the type of
religion, which the Virgin was always taken to represent, whence she
is shown as still young; as if, nature being taken typically, it were
not better to adhere to the emblem throughout, confident by this
means to maintain its appropriateness, and, therefore, its value and
force.

In the Niello work here mentioned there is a delineation of the Fall,
in which the serpent has given to it a human head with a most sweet,
crafty expression. Now in these two instances the style is somewhat
rude; but there are passion and feeling in it. This is not a question
of mere execution, but of mind, however developed. Let us not
mistake, however, from this that execution should be neglected, but
only maintained as a most important _aid_, and in that quality alone,
so that we do not forget the soul for the hand. The power of
representing an object, that its entire intention may be visible, its
lesson felt, is all that is absolutely necessary: mere technicalities
of performance are but additions; and not the real intent and end of
painting, as many have considered them to be. For as the knowledge is
stronger and more pure in Masaccio than in the Caracci, and the faith
higher and greater,--so the first represents nature with more true
feeling and love, with a deeper insight into her tenderness; he
follows her more humbly, and has produced to us more of her
simplicity; we feel his appeal to be more earnest: it is the crying
out of the man, with none of the strut of the actor.

Let us have the mind and the mind's-workings, not the remains of
earnest thought which has been frittered away by a long dreary course
of preparatory study, by which all life has been evaporated. Never
forget that there is in the wide river of nature something which
every body who has a rod and line may catch, precious things which
every one may dive for.

It need not be feared that this course of education would lead to a
repetition of the toe-trippings of the earliest Italian school, a
sneer which is manifestly unfair; for this error, as well as several
others of a similar kind, was not the result of blindness or
stupidity, but of the simple ignorance of what had not been applied
to the service of painting at their time. It cannot be shown that
they were incorrect in expression, false in drawing, or unnatural in
what is called composition. On the contrary, it is demonstrable that
they exceeded all others in these particulars, that they partook less
of coarseness and of conventional sentiment than any school which
succeeded them, and that they looked more to nature; in fact, were
more true, and less artificial. That their subjects were generally of
a melancholy cast is acknowledged, which was an accident resulting
from the positions their pictures were destined to occupy. No man
ever complained that the Scriptures were morbid in their tendency
because they treat of serious and earnest subjects: then why of the
pictures which represent such? A certain gaunt length and slenderness
have also been commented upon most severely; as if the Italians of
the fourteenth century were as so many dray horses, and the artist
were blamed for not following his model. The consequence of this
direction of taste is that we have life-guardsmen and pugilists taken
as models for kings, gentlemen, and philosophers. The writer was once
in a studio where a man, six feet two inches in height, with
atlantean shoulders, was sitting for King Alfred. That there is no
greater absurdity than this will be perceived by any one that has
ever read the description of the person of the king given by his
historian and friend Asser.

The sciences have become almost exact within the present century.
Geology and chemistry are almost re-instituted. The first has been
nearly created; the second expanded so widely that it now searches
and measures the creation. And how has this been done but by bringing
greater knowledge to bear upon a wider range of experiment; by being
precise in the search after truth? If this adherence to fact, to
experiment and not theory,--to begin at the beginning and not fly to
the end,--has added so much to the knowledge of man in science; why
may it not greatly assist the moral purposes of the Arts? It cannot
be well to degrade a lesson by falsehood. Truth in every particular
ought to be the aim of the artist. Admit no untruth: let the priest's
garment be clean.

Let us now return to the Early Italian Painters. A complete
refutation of any charge that the character of their school was
neccessarily gloomy will be found in the works of Benozzo Gozzoli, as
in his 'Vineyard' where there are some grape-gatherers the most
elegant and graceful imaginable; this painter's children are the most
natural ever painted. In Ghiberti,--in Fra Angilico, (well
named),--in Masaccio,--in Ghirlandajo, and in Baccio della Porta, in
fact in nearly all the works of the painters of this school, will be
found a character of gentleness, grace, and freedom, which cannot be
surpassed by any other school, be that which it may; and it is
evident that this result must have been obtained by their peculiar
attachment to simple nature alone, their casting aside all ornament,
or rather their perfect ignorance of such,--a happy fortune none have
shared with them. To show that with all these qualifications they
have been pre-eminent in energy and dignity, let us instance the 'Air
Demons' of Orcagna, where there is a woman borne through the air by
an Evil Spirit. Her expression is the most terrible imaginable; she
grasps her bearer with desperation, looking out around her into
space, agonized with terror. There are other figures in the same
picture of men who have been cast down, and are falling through the
air: one descends with his hands tied, his chin up, and long hair
hanging from his head in a mass. One of the Evil Spirits hovering
over them has flat wings, as though they were made of plank: this
gives a most powerful character to the figure. Altogether, this
picture contains perhaps a greater amount of bold imagination and
originality of conception than any of the kind ever painted. For
sublimity there are few works which equal the 'Archangels' of Giotto,
who stand singly, holding their sceptres, and with relapsed wings.
The 'Paul' of Masaccio is a well-known example of the dignified
simplicity of which these artists possessed so large a share. These
instances might be multiplied without end; but surely enough have
been cited in the way of example to show the surpassing talent and
knowledge of these painters, and their consequent success, by
following natural principles, until the introduction of false and
meretricious ornament led the Arts from the simple chastity of
nature, which it is as useless to attempt to elevate as to endeavour
to match the works of God by those of man. Let the artist be content
to study nature alone, and not dream of elevating any of her works,
which are alone worthy of representation.{5}

{5} The sources from which these examples are drawn, and where many
more might be found, are principally:--_D'Agincourt: "Histoire de
l'Art par les Monumens;"--Rossini: "Storia della Pittura;"--Ottley:
"Italian School of Design,"_ and his 120 Fac-similes of scarce
prints;--and the "Gates of San Giovanni," by Ghiberti; of which last
a cast of one entire is set up in the Central School of Design,
Somerset House; portions of the same are also in the Royal Academy.

The Arts have always been most important moral guides. Their
flourishing has always been coincident with the most wholesome period
of a nation's: never with the full and gaudy bloom which but hides
corruption, but the severe health of its most active and vigorous
life; its mature youth, and not the floridity of age, which, like the
wide full open petals of a flower, indicates that its glory is about
to pass away. There has certainly always been a period like the short
warm season the Canadians call the "Indian Summer," which is said to
be produced by the burning of the western forests, causing a
factitious revival of the dying year: so there always seems to have
been a flush of life before the final death of the Arts in each
period:--in Greece, in the sculptors and architects of the time after
Pericles; in the Germans, with the successors of Albert Durer. In
fact, in every school there has been a spring, a summer, an autumn,
an "Indian Summer," and then winter; for as surely as the "Indian
Summer," (which is, after all, but an unhealthy flush produced by
destruction,) so surely does winter come. In the Arts, the winter has
been exaggerated action, conventionalism, gaudy colour, false
sentiment, voluptuousness, and poverty of invention: and, of all
these characters, that which has been the most infallible herald of
decease, voluptuousness, has been the most rapid and sure. Corruption
lieth under it; and every school, and indeed every individual, that
has pandered to this, and departed from the true spirit in which all
study should be conducted, sought to degrade and sensualize, instead
of chasten and render pure, the humanity it was instructed to
elevate. So has that school, and so have those individuals, lost
their own power and descended from their high seat, fallen from the
priest to the mere parasite, from the law-giver to the mere courtier.

If we have entered upon a new age, a new cycle of man, of which there
are many signs, let us have it unstained by this vice of sensuality
of mind. The English school has lately lost a great deal of this
character; why should we not be altogether free from it? Nothing can
degrade a man or a nation more than this meanness; why should we not
avoid it? Sensuality is a meanness repugnant to youth, and disgusting
in age: a degradation at all times. Let us say

  "My strength is as the strength of ten,
  Because my heart is pure."

Bearing this in mind,--the conviction that, without the pure heart,
nothing can be done worthy of us; by this, that the most successful
school of painters has produced upon us the intention of their
earnestness at this distance of time,--let us follow in their path,
guided by their light: not so subservient as to lose our own freedom,
but in the confidence of equal power and equal destiny; and then rely
that we shall obtain the same success and equal or greater power,
such as is given to the age in which we live. This is the only course
that is worthy of the influence which might be exerted by means of
the Arts upon the character of the people: therefore let it be the
only one for us to follow if we hope to share in the work.

That the real power of the Arts, in conjunction with Poetry, upon the
actions of any age is, or might be, predominant above all others will
be readily allowed by all that have given any thought to the subject:
and that there is no assignable limit to the good that may be wrought
by their influence is another point on which there can be small
doubt. Let us then endeavour to call up and exert this power in the
worthiest manner, not forgetting that we chose a difficult path in
which there are many snares, and holding in mind the motto, _"No
Cross, no Crown."_

Believe that there is that in the fact of truth, though it be only in
the character of a single leaf earnestly studied, which may do its
share in the great labor of the world: remember that it is by truth
alone that the Arts can ever hold the position for which they were
intended, as the most powerful instruments, the most gentle guides;
that, of all classes, there is none to whom the celebrated words of
Lessing, "That the destinies of a nation depend upon its young men
between nineteen and twenty-five years of age," can apply so well as
to yourselves. Recollect, that your portion in this is most
important: that your share is with the poet's share; that, in every
careless thought or neglected doubt, you shelve your duty, and
forsake your trust; fulfil and maintain these, whether in the hope of
personal fame and fortune, or from a sense of power used to its
intentions; and you may hold out both hands to the world. Trust it,
and it will have faith in you; will hearken to the precepts you may
have permission to impart.




Song


  Oh! roses for the flush of youth,
    And laurel for the perfect prime;
  But pluck an ivy-branch for me,
    Grown old before my time.

  Oh! violets for the grave of youth,
    And bay for those dead in their prime;
  Give me the withered leaves I chose
    Before in the olden time.




Morning Sleep


  Another day hath dawned
  Since, hastily and tired, I threw myself
  Into the dark lap of advancing sleep.
  Meanwhile through the oblivion of the night
  The ponderous world its old course hath fulfilled;
  And now the gradual sun begins to throw
  Its slanting glory on the heads of trees,
  And every bird stirs in its nest revealed,
  And shakes its dewy wings.

        A blessed gift
  Unto the weary hath been mine to-night,
  Slumber unbroken: now it floats away:--
  But whether 'twere not best to woo it still,
  The head thus properly disposed, the eyes
  In a continual dawning, mingling earth
  And heaven with vagrant fantasies,--one hour,--
  Yet for another hour? I will not break
  The shining woof; I will not rudely leap
  Out of this golden atmosphere, through which
  I see the forms of immortalities.
  Verily, soon enough the laboring day
  With its necessitous unmusical calls
  Will force the indolent conscience into life.

  The uncouth moth upon the window-panes
  Hath ceased to flap, or traverse with blind whirr
  The room's dusk corners; and the leaves without
  Vibrate upon their thin stems with the breeze
  Flying towards the light. To an Eastern vale
  That light may now be waning, and across
  The tall reeds by the Ganges, lotus-paved,
  Lengthening the shadows of the banyan-tree.
  The rice-fields are all silent in the glow,
  All silent the deep heaven without a cloud,
  Burning like molten gold. A red canoe
  Crosses with fan-like paddles and the sound
  Of feminine song, freighted with great-eyed maids
  Whose unzoned bosoms swell on the rich air;
  A lamp is in each hand; some mystic rite
  Go they to try. Such rites the birds may see,
  Ibis or emu, from their cocoa nooks,--
  What time the granite sentinels that watch
  The mouths of cavern-temples hail the first
  Faint star, and feel the gradual darkness blend
  Their august lineaments;--what time Haroun
  Perambulated Bagdat, and none knew
  He was the Caliph who knocked soberly
  By Giafar's hand at their gates shut betimes;--
  What time prince Assad sat on the high hill
  'Neath the pomegranate-tree, long wearying
  For his lost brother's step;--what time, as now,
  Along our English sky, flame-furrows cleave
  And break the quiet of the cold blue clouds,
  And the first rays look in upon our roofs.

  Let the day come or go; there is no let
  Or hindrance to the indolent wilfulness
  Of fantasy and dream-land. Place and time
  And bodily weight are for the wakeful only.
  Now they exist not: life is like that cloud,
  Floating, poised happily in mid-air, bathed
  In a sustaining halo, soft yet clear,
  Voyaging on, though to no bourne; all heaven
  Its own wide home alike, earth far below
  Fading still further, further. Yet we see,
  In fancy, its green fields, its towers, and towns
  Smoking with life, its roads with traffic thronged
  And tedious travellers within iron cars,
  Its rivers with their ships, and laborers,
  To whose raised eye, as, stretched upon the sward,
  They may enjoy some interval of rest,
  That little cloud appears no living thing,
  Although it moves, and changes as it moves.
  There is an old and memorable tale
  Of some sound sleeper being borne away
  By banded fairies in the mottled hour
  Before the cockcrow, through unknown weird woods
  And mighty forests, where the boughs and roots
  Opened before him, closed behind;--thenceforth
  A wise man lived he, all unchanged by years.
  Perchance again these fairies may return,
  And evermore shall I remain as now,
  A dreamer half awake, a wandering cloud!

        The spell
  Of Merlin old that ministered to fate,
  The tales of visiting ghosts, or fairy elves,
  Or witchcraft, are no fables. But his task
  Is ended with the night;--the thin white moon
  Evades the eye, the sun breaks through the trees,
  And the charmed wizard comes forth a mere man
  From out his circle. Thus it is, whate'er
  We know and understand hath lost the power
  Over us;--we are then the master. Still
  All Fancy's world is real; no diverse mark
  Is on the stores of memory, whether gleaned
  From childhood's early wonder at the charm
  That bound the lady in the echoless cave
  Where lay the sheath'd sword and the bugle horn,--
  Or from the fullgrown intellect, that works
  From age to age, exploring darkest truths,
  With sympathy and knowledge in one yoke
  Ploughing the harvest land.

        The lark is up,
  Piercing the dazzling sky beyond the search
  Of the acutest love: enough for me
  To hear its song: but now it dies away,
  Leaving the chirping sparrow to attract
  The listless ear,--a minstrel, sooth to say,
  Nearly as good. And now a hum like that
  Of swarming bees on meadow-flowers comes up.
  Each hath its just and yet luxurious joy,
  As if to live were to be blessed. The mild
  Maternal influence of nature thus
  Ennobles both the sentient and the dead;--
  The human heart is as an altar wreathed,
  On which old wine pours, streaming o'er the leaves,
  And down the symbol-carved sides. Behold!
  Unbidden, yet most welcome, who be these?
  The high-priests of this altar, poet-kings;--
  Chaucer, still young with silvery beard that seems
  Worthy the adoration of a child;
  And Spenser, perfect master, to whom all
  Sweet graces ministered. The shut eye weaves
  A picture;--the immortals pass along
  Into the heaven, and others follow still,
  Each on his own ray-path, till all the field
  Is threaded with the foot-prints of the great.
  And now the passengers are lost; long lines
  Only are left, all intertwisted, dark
  Upon a flood of light......... I am awake!
  I hear domestic voices on the stair.

  Already hath the mower finished half
  His summer day's ripe task; already hath
  His scythe been whetted often; and the heaps
  Behind him lie like ridges from the tide.
  In sooth, it is high time to wave away
  The cup of Comus, though with nectar filled,
  And sweet as odours to the mariner
  From lands unseen, across the wide blank sea.




Sonnet


  When midst the summer-roses the warm bees
    Are swarming in the sun, and thou--so full
    Of innocent glee--dost with thy white hands pull
  Pink scented apples from the garden trees
  To fling at me, I catch them, on my knees,
    Like those who gather'd manna; and I cull
    Some hasty buds to pelt thee--white as wool
  Lilies, or yellow jonquils, or heartsease;--
  Then I can speak my love, ev'n tho' thy smiles
    Gush out among thy blushes, like a flock
  Of bright birds from rose-bowers; but when thou'rt gone
    I have no speech,--no magic that beguiles,
    The stream of utterance from the harden'd rock:--
  The dial cannot speak without the sun!



Stars and Moon


  Beneath the stars and summer moon
    A pair of wedded lovers walk,
  Upon the stars and summer moon
    They turn their happy eyes, and talk.

EDITH.

  "Those stars, that moon, for me they shine
    With lovely, but no startling light;
  My joy is much, but not as thine,
    A joy that fills the pulse, like fright."

ALFRED.

  "My love, a darken'd conscience clothes
    The world in sackcloth; and, I fear,
  The stain of life this new heart loathes,
    Still clouds my sight; but thine is clear.

  "True vision is no startling boon
    To one in whom it always lies;
  But if true sight of stars and moon
    Were strange to thee, it would surprise.

  "Disease it is and dearth in me
    Which thou believest genius, wealth;
  And that imagined want in thee
    Is riches and abundant health.

  "O, little merit I my bride!
    And therefore will I love her more;
  Renewing, by her gentle side,
    Lost worth: let this thy smile restore!"

EDITH.

  "Ah, love! we both, with longing deep,
    Love words and actions kind, which are
  More good for life than bread or sleep,
    More beautiful than Moon or Star."




On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture


Part I. The Design

In tracing these memoranda of the course to be pursued in producing a
work of the class commonly denominated "Historic Art," we have no
wish to set ourselves in opposition to the practice of other artists.
We are quite willing to believe that there may be various methods of
working out the same idea, each productive of a satisfactory result.
Should any one therefore regard it as a subject for controversy, we
would only reply that, if different, or to them better, methods be
adopted by other painters, no less certain is it that there are
numbers who at the onset of their career have not the least knowledge
of any one of these methods; and that it is chiefly for such that
these notes have been penned. In short, that to all about to paint
their first picture we address ourselves.

The first advice that should be given, on painting a historical
picture, ought undoubtedly to be on the choosing of a fit subject;
but, the object of the present paper being purely practical, it would
ill commence with a question which would entail a dissertation
bearing upon the most abstract properties of Art. Should it
afterwards appear necessary, we may append such a paper to the last
number of these articles; but, for the present, we will content
ourselves with beginning where the student may first encounter a
difficulty in giving body to his idea.

The first care of the painter, after having selected his subject,
should be to make himself thoroughly acquainted with the character of
the times, and habits of the people, which he is about to represent;
and next, to consult the proper authorities for his costume, and such
objects as may fill his canvass; as the architecture, furniture,
vegetation or landscape, or accessories, necessary to the elucidation
of the subject. By not pursuing this course, the artist is in danger
of imagining an effect, or disposition of lines, incompatible with
the costume of his figures, or objects surrounding them; and it will
be found always a most difficult thing to efface an idea that has
once taken possession of the mind. Besides which, it is impossible to
conceive a design with any truth, not being acquainted with the
character, habits, and appearance, of the people represented.

Having, by such means, secured the materials of which his work must
be composed, the artist must endeavour, as far as lies in his power,
to embody the picture in his thoughts, before having recourse to
paper. He must patiently consider his subject, revolving in his mind
every means that may assist the clear development of the story:
giving the most prominent places to the most important actors, and
carefully rejecting incidents that cannot be expressed by pantomimic
art without the aid of text. He must also, in this mental forerunner
of his picture, arrange the "grouping" of his figures,--that is, the
disposing of them in such agreeable clusters or situations on his
canvass as may be compatible with the dramatic truth of the whole,
(technically called the lines of a composition.) He must also
consider the color, and disposition of light and dark masses in his
design, so as to call attention to the principal objects,
(technically called the "effect.") Thus, to recapitulate, the
painter, in his first conception of his picture, will have to combine
three qualities, each subordinate to the other;--the intellectual, or
clear development, dramatic truth, and sentiment, of his
incident;--the construction, or disposition of his groups and lines,
as most conducive to clearness, effect, and harmony;--and the
chromatic, or arrangement of colors, light and shade, most suitable
to impress and attract the beholder.{6}

{6} Many artists, chiefly of the schools not colorists, are in the
habit of making their designs in outline, leaving the colors and
light and shade to be thought of afterwards. This plan may offer
facilities; but we doubt if it be possible to arrange satisfactorily
the colors of a work which has been designed in outline without
consideration of these qualities.

Having settled these points in his mind, as definitely as his
faculties will allow of, the student will take pencil and paper, and
sketch roughly each separate figure in his composition, studying his
own acting, (in a looking-glass) or else that of any friend he may
have of an artistic or poetic temperament, but not employing for the
purpose the ordinary paid models.--It will be always found that they
are stiff and feelingless, and, as such, tend to curb the vivacity of
a first conception, so much so that the artist may believe an action
impossible, through the want of comprehension of the model, which to
himself or a friend might prove easy.

Here let the artist spare neither time nor labor, but exert himself
beyond his natural energies, seeking to enter into the character of
each actor, studying them one after the other, limb for limb, hand
for hand, finger for finger, noting each inflection of joint, or
tension of sinew, searching for dramatic truth internally in himself,
and in all external nature, shunning affectation and exaggeration,
and striving after pathos, and purity of feeling, with patient
endeavor and utter simplicity of heart. For on this labor must depend
the success of his work with the public. Artists may praise his
color, drawing, or manipulation, his chiaroscuro, or his lines; but
the clearness, truth, and sentiment, of his work will alone affect
the many.

The action of each figure being now determinate, the next step will
be to make a sketch in oil of the whole design; after which, living
models, as like the artist's conception as can be found, must be
procured, to make outlines of the nude of each figure, and again
sketches of the same, draped in the proper costume.{7}

{7} There is always difficulty attending this very necessary portion
of the study of the picture; because, if the dresses be borrowed or
hired, at this period they may be only wanted for a few hours, and
perhaps not required again for some months to paint into the
picture.--Again, if the costume have to be made, and of expensive
material, the portion of it seen may be sufficient to pin on to a lay
figure, without having the whole made, which could not be worn by the
living model. However, with all the larger or loose draperies, it is
very necessary to sketch them first from the living model.

From these studies, the painter will prepare a second sketch, in
outline, of the whole, being, in fact, a small and hasty cartoon.{8}

{8} Should the picture be of small dimensions, it will be found more
expeditious to make an outline of it on paper the full size, which
can be traced on to the canvass, keeping the latter clean. On the
contrary, should the painting be large, the outline had better be
made small, and squared to transfer to the canvass.

In this last preparation of the design, the chief care of the student
will be the grouping, and the correct size and place of each figure;
also the perspective of the architecture and ground plan will now
have to be settled; a task requiring much patient calculation, and
usually proving a source of disgust to the novice not endowed with
much perseverance. But, above all, the quality to be most studied in
this outline design will be the _proportion_ of the whole work.

And with a few remarks on this quality, which might appropriately be
termed "constructive beauty in art," we will close this paper on "the
Design," as belonging more properly to the mechanical than the
intellectual side of art; as being rather the slow growth of
experience than the spontaneous impulse of the artistic temperament.
It is a feature in art rather apt to savor of conventionality to such
as would look on nature as the only school of art, who would consider
it but as the exponent of thought and feeling; while, on the other
hand, we fear it likely to be studied to little effect by such as
receive with indiscriminate and phlegmatic avidity all that is handed
down to them in the shape of experience or time-sanctioned rule. But
plastic art claims not merely our sympathy, in its highest capacity
to emit thought and sentiment; but as form, colour, light, life, and
beauty; and who shall settle the claims between thought and beauty?
But art has beauties of its own, which neither impair nor contradict
the beauties of nature; but which are not of nature, and yet are,
inasmuch as art itself is but part of nature: and of such, the
beauties of the nature of art, is the feeling for constructive
beauty. It interferes not with truth or sentiment; it is not the
cause of unlikely order and improbable symmetry; it is not bounded by
line or rule, nor taught by theory. It is a feeling for proportion,
ever varying from an infinity of conflicting causes, that balances
the picture as it balances the Gothic edifice; it is a germ planted
in the breast of the artist, that gradually expands by cultivation.

To those who would foster its development the only rule we could
offer would be never to leave a design, while they imagine they could
alter for the better (subordinate to the truth of nature) the place
of a single figure or group, or the direction of a line.

And to such as think it beneath their care we can only say that they
neglect a refinement, of which every great master takes advantage to
increase the fascination which beauty, feeling, or passion, exercises
over the multitude.



A Testimony


  I said of laughter: It is vain;--
    Of mirth I said: What profits it?--
    Therefore I found a book, and writ
  Therein, how ease and also pain,
  How health and sickness, every one
  Is vanity beneath the sun.

  Man walks in a vain shadow; he
    Disquieteth himself in vain.
    The things that were shall be again.
  The rivers do not fill the sea,
  But turn back to their secret source:
  The winds, too, turn upon their course.

  Our treasures, moth and rust corrupt;
    Or thieves break through and steal; or they
    Make themselves wings and fly away.
  One man made merry as he supp'd,
  Nor guessed how when that night grew dim,
  His soul would be required of him.

  We build our houses on the sand
    Comely withoutside, and within;
    But when the winds and rains begin
  To beat on them, they cannot stand;
  They perish, quickly overthrown,
  Loose at the hidden basement stone.

  All things are vanity, I said:
    Yea vanity of vanities.
    The rich man dies; and the poor dies:
  The worm feeds sweetly on the dead.
  Whatso thou lackest, keep this trust:--
  All in the end shall have but dust.

  The one inheritance, which best
    And worst alike shall find and share.
    The wicked cease from troubling there,
  And there the weary are at rest;
  There all the wisdom of the wise
  Is vanity of vanities.

  Man flourishes as a green leaf,
    And as a leaf doth pass away;
    Or, as a shade that cannot stay,
  And leaves no track, his course is brief:
  Yet doth man hope and fear and plan
  Till he is dead:--oh foolish man!

  Our eyes cannot be satisfied
    With seeing; nor our ears be fill'd
    With hearing: yet we plant and build,
  And buy, and make our borders wide:
  We gather wealth, we gather care,
  But know not who shall be our heir.

  Why should we hasten to arise
    So early, and so late take rest?
    Our labor is not good; our best
  Hopes fade; our heart is stayed on lies:
  Verily, we sow wind; and we
  Shall reap the whirlwind, verily.

  He who hath little shall not lack;
    He who hath plenty shall decay:
    Our fathers went; we pass away;
  Our children follow on our track:
  So generations fail, and so
  They are renewed, and come and go.

  The earth is fattened with our dead;
    She swallows more and doth not cease;
    Therefore her wine and oil increase
  And her sheaves are not numbered;
  Therefore her plants are green, and all
  Her pleasant trees lusty and tall.

  Therefore the maidens cease to sing,
    And the young men are very sad;
    Therefore the sowing is not glad,
  And weary is the harvesting.
  Of high and low, of great and small,
  Vanity is the lot of all.

  A king dwelt in Jerusalem:
    He was the wisest man on earth;
    He had all riches from his birth,
  And pleasures till he tired of them:
  Then, having tested all things, he
  Witnessed that all are vanity.




O When and Where


  All knowledge hath taught me,
  All sorrow hath brought me,
    Are smothered sighs
    That pleasure lies,
  Like the last gleam of evening's ray,
  So far and far away,--far away.

  Under the cold moist herbs
  No wind the calm disturbs.
    O when and where?
    Nor here nor there.
  Grass cools my face, grief heats my heart.
  Will this life I swoon with never part?




Fancies at Leisure


I. Noon Rest

  Following the river's course,
    We come to where the sedges plant
  Their thickest twinings at its source;--
    A spot that makes the heart to pant,
  Feeling its rest and beauty. Pull
  The reeds' tops thro' your fingers; dull
  Your sense of the world's life; and toss
  The thought away of hap or cross:
  Then shall the river seem to call
  Your name, and the slow quiet crawl
  Between your eyelids like a swoon;
  And all the sounds at heat of noon
  And all the silence shall so sing
  Your eyes asleep as that no wing
  Of bird in rustling by, no prone
  Willow-branch on your hair, no drone
  Droning about and past you,--nought
  May soon avail to rouse you, caught
  With sleep thro' heat in the sun's light,--
  So good, tho' losing sound and sight,
  You scarce would waken, if you might.

II. A Quiet Place

  My friend, are not the grasses here as tall
  As you would wish to see? The runnell's fall
  Over the rise of pebbles, and its blink
  Of shining points which, upon this side, sink
  In dark, yet still are there; this ragged crane
  Spreading his wings at seeing us with vain
  Terror, forsooth; the trees, a pulpy stock
  Of toadstools huddled round them; and the flock--
  Black wings after black wings--of ancient rook
  By rook; has not the whole scene got a look
  As though we were the first whose breath should fan
  In two this spider's web, to give a span
  Of life more to three flies? See, there's a stone
  Seems made for us to sit on. Have men gone
  By here, and passed? or rested on that bank
  Or on this stone, yet seen no cause to thank
  For the grass growing here so green and rank?

III. A Fall of Rain

  It was at day-break my thought said:
  "The moon makes chequered chestnut-shade
  There by the south-side where the vine
  Grapples the wall; and if it shine
  This evening thro' the boughs and leaves,
  And if the wind with silence weaves
  More silence than itself, each stalk
  Of flower just swayed by it, we'll walk,
  Mary and I, when every fowl
  Hides beak and eyes in breast, the owl
  Only awake to hoot."--But clover
  Is beaten down now, and birds hover,
  Peering for shelter round; no blade
  Of grass stands sharp and tall; men wade
  Thro' mire with frequent plashing sting
  Of rain upon their faces. Sing,
  Then, Mary, to me thro' the dark:
  But kiss me first: my hand shall mark
  Time, pressing yours the while I hark.

IV. Sheer Waste

  Is it a little thing to lie down here
    Beside the water, looking into it,
    And see there grass and fallen leaves interknit,
    And small fish sometimes passing thro' some bit
  Of tangled grass where there's an outlet clear?

  And then a drift of wind perhaps will come,
    And blow the insects hovering all about
    Into the water. Some of them get out;
    Others swim with sharp twitches; and you doubt
  Whether of life or death for other some.

  Meanwhile the blueflies sway themselves along
    Over the water's surface, or close by;
    Not one in ten beyond the grass will fly
    That closely skirts the stream; nor will your eye
  Meet any where the sunshine is not strong.

  After a time you find, you know not how,
    That it is quite a stretch of energy
    To do what you have done unconsciously,--
    That is, pull up the grass; and then you see
  You may as well rise and be going now.

  So, having walked for a few steps, you fall
    Bodily on the grass under the sun,
    And listen to the rustle, one by one,
    Of the trees' leaves; and soon the wind has done
  For a short space, and it is quiet all;

  Except because the rooks will make a caw
    Just now and then together: and the breeze
    Soon rises up again among the trees,
    Making the grass, moreover, bend and tease
  Your face, but pleasantly. Mayhap the paw

  Of a dog touches you and makes you rise
    Upon one arm to pat him; and he licks
    Your hand for that. A child is throwing sticks,
    Hard by, at some half-dozen cows, which fix
  Upon him their unmoved contented eyes.

  The sun's heat now is painful. Scarce can you
    Move, and even less lie still. You shuffle then,
    Poised on your arms, again to shade. Again
    There comes a pleasant laxness on you. When
  You have done enough of nothing, you will go.

  Some hours perhaps have passed. Say not you fling
    These hours or such-like recklessly away.
    Seeing the grass and sun and children, say,
    Is not this something more than idle play,
  Than careless waste? Is it a little thing?




The Light beyond

I

  Though we may brood with keenest subtlety,
    Sending our reason forth, like Noah's dove,
    To know why we are here to die, hate, love,
  With Hope to lead and help our eyes to see
  Through labour daily in dim mystery,
    Like those who in dense theatre and hall,
    When fire breaks out or weight-strained rafters fall,
  Towards some egress struggle doubtfully;
  Though we through silent midnight may address
    The mind to many a speculative page,
  Yearning to solve our wrongs and wretchedness,
  Yet duty and wise passiveness are won,--
    (So it hath been and is from age to age)--
  Though we be blind, by doubting not the sun.

II

  Bear on to death serenely, day by day,
    Midst losses, gains, toil, and monotony,
    The ignorance of social apathy,
  And artifice which men to men display:
  Like one who tramps a long and lonely way
    Under the constant rain's inclemency,
    With vast clouds drifting in obscurity,
  And sudden lightnings in the welkin grey.
  To-morrow may be bright with healthy pleasure,
    Banishing discontents and vain defiance:
  The pearly clouds will pass to a slow measure,
    Wayfarers walk the dusty road in joyance,
    The wide heaths spread far in the sun's alliance,
  Among the furze inviting us to leisure.

III

  Vanity, say they, quoting him of old.
    Yet, if full knowledge lifted us serene
    To look beyond mortality's stern screen,
  A reconciling vision could be told,
  Brighter than western clouds or shapes of gold
    That change in amber fires,--or the demesne
    Of ever mystic sleep. Mists intervene,
  Which then would melt, to show our eyesight bold
  From God a perfect chain throughout the skies,
    Like Jacob's ladder light with winged men.
  And as this world, all notched to terrene eyes
    With Alpine ranges, smoothes to higher ken,
  So death and sin and social miseries;
    By God fixed as His bow o'er moor and fen.



The Blessed Damozel


  The blessed Damozel leaned out
    From the gold bar of Heaven:
  Her blue grave eyes were deeper much
    Than a deep water, even.
  She had three lilies in her hand,
    And the stars in her hair were seven.

  Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
    No wrought flowers did adorn,
  But a white rose of Mary's gift
    On the neck meetly worn;
  And her hair, lying down her back,
    Was yellow like ripe corn.

  Herseemed she scarce had been a day
    One of God's choristers;
  The wonder was not yet quite gone
    From that still look of hers;
  Albeit to them she left, her day
    Had counted as ten years.

  (To _one_ it is ten years of years:
    ........ Yet now, here in this place
  Surely she leaned o'er me,--her hair
    Fell all about my face.........
  Nothing: the Autumn-fall of leaves.
    The whole year sets apace.)

  It was the terrace of God's house
    That she was standing on,--
  By God built over the sheer depth
    In which Space is begun;
  So high, that looking downward thence,
    She could scarce see the sun.

  It lies from Heaven across the flood
    Of ether, as a bridge.
  Beneath, the tides of day and night
    With flame and blackness ridge
  The void, as low as where this earth
    Spins like a fretful midge.

  But in those tracts, with her, it was
    The peace of utter light
  And silence. For no breeze may stir
    Along the steady flight
  O seraphim; no echo there,
    Beyond all depth or height.

  Heard hardly, some of her new friends,
    Playing at holy games,
  Spake, gentle-mouthed, among themselves,
    Their virginal chaste names;
  And the souls, mounting up to God,
    Went by her like thin flames.

  And still she bowed herself, and stooped
    Into the vast waste calm;
  Till her bosom's pressure must have made
    The bar she leaned on warm,
  And the lilies lay as if asleep
    Along her bended arm.

  From the fixt lull of heaven, she saw
    Time, like a pulse, shake fierce
  Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove,
    In that steep gulph, to pierce
  The swarm: and then she spake, as when
    The stars sang in their spheres.

  "I wish that he were come to me,
    For he will come," she said.
  "Have I not prayed in solemn heaven?
    On earth, has he not prayed?
  Are not two prayers a perfect strength?
    And shall I feel afraid?

  "When round his head the aureole clings,
    And he is clothed in white,
  I'll take his hand, and go with him
    To the deep wells of light,
  And we will step down as to a stream
    And bathe there in God's sight.

  "We two will stand beside that shrine,
    Occult, withheld, untrod,
  Whose lamps tremble continually
    With prayer sent up to God;
  And where each need, revealed, expects
    Its patient period.

  "We two will lie i' the shadow of
    That living mystic tree
  Within whose secret growth the Dove
    Sometimes is felt to be,
  While every leaf that His plumes touch
    Saith His name audibly.

  "And I myself will teach to him--
    I myself, lying so,--
  The songs I sing here; which his mouth
    Shall pause in, hushed and slow,
  Finding some knowledge at each pause
    And some new thing to know."

  (Alas! to _her_ wise simple mind
    These things were all but known
  Before: they trembled on her sense,--
    Her voice had caught their tone.
  Alas for lonely Heaven! Alas
    For life wrung out alone!

  Alas, and though the end were reached?........
    Was _thy_ part understood
  Or borne in trust? And for her sake
    Shall this too be found good?--
  May the close lips that knew not prayer
    Praise ever, though they would?)

  "We two," she said, "will seek the groves
    Where the lady Mary is,
  With her five handmaidens, whose names
    Are five sweet symphonies:--
  Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
    Margaret, and Rosalys.

  "Circle-wise sit they, with bound locks
    And bosoms covered;
  Into the fine cloth, white like flame,
    Weaving the golden thread,
  To fashion the birth-robes for them
    Who are just born, being dead.

  "He shall fear haply, and be dumb.
    Then I will lay my cheek
  To his, and tell about our love,
    Not once abashed or weak:
  And the dear Mother will approve
    My pride, and let me speak.

  "Herself shall bring us, hand in hand,
    To Him round whom all souls
  Kneel--the unnumber'd solemn heads
    Bowed with their aureoles:
  And Angels, meeting us, shall sing
    To their citherns and citoles.

  "There will I ask of Christ the Lord
    Thus much for him and me:--
  To have more blessing than on earth
    In nowise; but to be
  As then we were,--being as then
    At peace. Yea, verily.

  "Yea, verily; when he is come
    We will do thus and thus:
  Till this my vigil seem quite strange
    And almost fabulous;
  We two will live at once, one life;
    And peace shall be with us."

  She gazed, and listened, and then said,
    Less sad of speech than mild:
  "All this is when he comes." She ceased;
    The light thrilled past her, filled
  With Angels, in strong level lapse.
    Her eyes prayed, and she smiled.

  (I saw her smile.) But soon their flight
    Was vague 'mid the poised spheres.
  And then she cast her arms along
    The golden barriers,
  And laid her face between her hands,
    And wept. (I heard her tears.)




Reviews


The Strayed Reveller; and other Poems. By A.--Fellowes,
Ludgate-street.--1849.

If any one quality may be considered common to all living poets, it
is that which we have heard aptly described as _self-consciousness_.
In this many appear to see the only permanent trace of the now old
usurping deluge of Byronism; but it is truly a fact of the
time,--less a characteristic than a portion of it. Every species of
composition--the dramatic, the narrative, the lyric, the didactic,
the descriptive--is imbued with this spirit; and the reader may
calculate with almost equal certainty on becoming acquainted with the
belief of a poet as of a theologian or a moralist. Of the evils
resulting from the practice, the most annoying and the worst is that
some of the lesser poets, and all mere pretenders, in their desire to
emulate the really great, feel themselves under a kind of obligation
to assume opinions, vague, incongruous, or exaggerated, often not
only not their own, but the direct reverse of their own,--a kind of
meanness that has replaced, and goes far to compensate for, the
flatteries of our literary ancestors. On the other hand, this quality
has created a new tie of interest between the author and his public,
enhances the significance of great works, and confers value on even
the slightest productions of a true poet.

That the systematic infusion of this spirit into the drama and epic
compositions is incompatible with strict notions of art will scarcely
be disputed: but such a general objection does not apply in the case
of lyric poetry, where even the character of the subject is optional.
It is an instance of this kind that we are now about to consider.

"The Strayed Reveller and other Poems," constitutes, we believe, the
first published poetical work of its author, although the following
would rather lead to the inference that he is no longer young.

  "But my youth reminds me: 'Thou
  Hast lived light as these live now;
  As these are, thou too wert such.'"--p. 59.

And, in another poem:

    "In vain, all, all, in vain,
  They beat upon mine ear again,
  Those melancholy tones so sweet and still:
  Those lute-like tones which, in long-distant years,
  Did steal into mine ears."--p. 86.

Accordingly, we find but little passion in the volume, only four
pieces (for "The Strayed Reveller" can scarcely be so considered)
being essentially connected with it. Of these the "Modern Sappho"
appears to us not only inferior, but as evidencing less maturity both
of thought and style; the second, "Stagyrus," is an urgent appeal to
God; the third, "The New Sirens," though passionate in utterance, is,
in purpose, a rejection of passion, as having been weighed in the
balance and found wanting; and, in the last, where he tells of the
voice which once

  "Blew such a thrilling summons to his will,
      Yet could not shake it;
  Drained all the life his full heart had to spill;
      Yet could not break it:"--

he records the "intolerable change of thought" with which it now
comes to his "long-sobered heart." Perhaps "The Forsaken Merman"
should be added to these; but the grief here is more nearly
approaching to gloomy submission and the sickness of hope deferred.

The lessons that the author would learn of nature are, as set forth
in the sonnet that opens the volume,

  "Of toil unsevered from tranquillity;
        Of labor that in one short hour outgrows
        Man's noisy schemes,--accomplished in repose,
  Too great for haste, too high for rivalry."--p. 1.

His conception of the poet is of one who

      "Sees before him life unroll,
  A placid and continuous whole;
  That general life which does not cease;
  Whose secret is, not joy, but peace;
  That life, whose dumb wish is not missed
  If birth proceeds, if things subsist;
  The life of plants and stones and rain;
  The life he craves:--if not in vain
  Fate gave, what chance shall not control,
  His sad lucidity of soul."--pp. 123-4.

    (_Resignation._)

Such is the author's purpose in these poems. He recognises in each
thing a part of the whole: and the poet must know even as he sees, or
breathes, as by a spontaneous, half-passive exercise of a faculty: he
must receive rather than seek.

  "Action and suffering tho' he know,
  He hath not lived, if he lives so."

Connected with this view of life as "a placid and continuous whole,"
is the principle which will be found here manifested in different
modes, and thro' different phases of event, of the permanence and
changelessness of natural laws, and of the large necessity wherewith
they compel life and man. This is the thought which animates the
"Fragment of an 'Antigone:'" "The World and the Quietest" has no
other scope than this:--

      "Critias, long since, I know,
      (For fate decreed it so),
  Long since the world hath set its heart to live.
      Long since, with credulous zeal,
      It turns life's mighty wheel:
      Still doth for laborers send;
      Who still their labor give.
      And still expects an end."--p. 109.

This principle is brought a step futher into the relations of life in
"The Sick King in Bokhara," the following passage from which claims
to be quoted, not less for its vividness as description, than in
illustration of this thought:--

    "In vain, therefore, with wistful eyes
      Gazing up hither, the poor man
    Who loiters by the high-heaped booths
      Below there in the Registan

    "Says: 'Happy he who lodges there!
      With silken raiment, store of rice,
    And, for this drought, all kinds of fruits,
      Grape-syrup, squares of colored ice,

    "'With cherries served in drifts of snow.'
      In vain hath a king power to build
    Houses, arcades, enamelled mosques,
      And to make orchard-closes filled

    "With curious fruit trees brought from far,
      With cisterns for the winter rain;
    And, in the desert, spacious inns
      In divers places;--if that pain

    "Is not more lightened which he feels,
      If his will be not satisfied:
    And that it be not from all time
      The law is planted, to abide."--pp. 47-8.

The author applies this basis of fixity in nature generally to the
rules of man's nature, and avow himself a Quietist. Yet he would not
despond, but contents himself, and waits. In no poem of the volume is
this character more clearly defined and developed than in the sonnets
"To a Republican Friend," the first of which expresses concurrence in
certain broad progressive principles of humanity: to the second we
would call the reader's attention, as to an example of the author's
more firm and serious writing:--

    "Yet when I muse on what life is, I seem
      Rather to patience prompted than that proud
      Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud;
    France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme:--
    Seeing this vale, this earth whereon we dream,
      Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high
      Uno'erleaped mountains of necessity,
    Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.
    Nor will that day dawn at a human nod,
      When, bursting thro' the net-work superposed
      By selfish occupation--plot and plan,
      Lust, avarice, envy,--liberated man,
    All difference with his fellow-man composed,
    Shall be left standing face to face with God."--p. 57.

In the adjuration entitled "Stagyrus," already mentioned, he prays to
be set free

  "From doubt, where all is double,
  Where Faiths are built on dust;"

and there seems continually recurring to him a haunting presage of
the unprofitableness of the life, after which men have not "any more
a portion for ever in anything that is done under the sun." Where he
speaks of resignation, after showing how the less impetuous and
self-concentred natures can acquiesce in the order of this life, even
were it to bring them back with an end unattained to the place whence
they set forth; after showing how it is the poet's office to live
rather than to act in and thro' the whole life round about him, he
concludes thus:

  "The world in which we live and move
  Outlasts aversion, outlasts love.....
  Nay, and since death, which wipes out man,
  Finds him with many an unsolved plan,....
  Still gazing on the ever full
  Eternal mundane spectacle,
  This world in which we draw our breath
  In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death.....

  Enough, we live:--and, if a life
  With large results so little rife,
  Tho' bearable, seem scarcely worth
  This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth,
  Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
  The solemn hills around us spread,
  This stream that falls incessantly,
  The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
  If I might lend their life a voice,
  Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
  And, even could the intemperate prayer
  Man iterates, while these forbear,
  For movement, for an ampler sphere,
  Pierce fate's impenetrable ear,
  Not milder is the general lot
  Because our spirits have forgot,
  In actions's dizzying eddy whirled,
  The something that infects the world."--pp. 125-8.--_Resignation._

"Shall we," he asks, "go hence and find that our vain dreams are not
dead? Shall we follow our vague joys, and the old dead faces, and the
dead hopes?"

He exhorts man to be "_in utrumque paratus_." If the world be the
materialized thought of one all-pure, let him, "by lonely pureness,"
seek his way through the colored dream of life up again to that
all-pure fount:--

  "But, if the wild unfathered mass no birth
      In divine seats hath known;
  In the blank echoing solitude, if earth,
  Rocking her obscure body to and fro,
      Ceases not from all time to heave and groan,
  Unfruitful oft, and, at her happiest throe,
      Forms what she forms, alone:"

then man, the only self-conscious being, "seeming sole to awake,"
must, recognizing his brotherhood with this world which stirs at his
feet unknown, confess that he too but seems.

Thus far for the scheme and the creed of the author. Concerning these
we leave the reader to draw his own conclusions.

Before proceeding to a more minute notice of the various poems, we
would observe that a predilection is apparent throughout for
antiquity and classical association; not that strong love which made
Shelley, as it were, the heir of Plato; not that vital grasp of
conception which enabled Keats without, and enables Landor with, the
most intimate knowledge of form and detail, to return to and renew
the old thoughts and beliefs of Greece; still less the mere
superficial acquaintance with names and hackneyed attributes which
was once poetry. Of this conventionalism, however, we have detected
two instances; the first, an allusion to "shy Dian's horn" in
"breathless glades" of the days we live, peculiarly inappropriate in
a sonnet addressed "To George Cruikshank on his Picture of 'The
Bottle;'" the second a grave call to Memory to bring her tablets,
occurring in, and forming the burden of, a poem strictly personal,
and written for a particular occasion. But the author's partiality is
shown, exclusively of such poems as "Mycerinus" and "The Strayed
Reveller," where the subjects are taken from antiquity, rather in the
framing than in the ground work, as in the titles "A Modern Sappho,"
"The New Sirens," "Stagyrus," and "_In utrumque paratus_." It is
Homer and Epictetus and Sophocles who "prop his mind;" the immortal
air which the poet breathes is "Where Orpheus and where Homer are;"
and he addresses "Fausta" and "Critias."

There are four narrative poems in the volume:--"Mycerinus," "The
Strayed Reveller," "The Sick King in Bokhara," and "The Forsaken
Merman." The first of these, the only one altogether narrative in
form, founded on a passage in the 2nd Book of Herodotus, is the story
of the six years of life portioned to a King of Egypt succeeding a
father "who had loved injustice, and lived long;" and tells how he
who had "loved the good" revels out his "six drops of time." He takes
leave of his people with bitter words, and goes out

  "To the cool regions of the groves he loved........
  Here came the king holding high feast at morn,
  Rose-crowned; and ever, when the sun went down,
  A hundred lamps beamed in the tranquil gloom,
  From tree to tree, all thro' the twinkling grove,
  Revealing all the tumult of the feast,
  Flushed guests, and golden goblets foamed with wine;
  While the deep-burnished foliage overhead
  Splintered the silver arrows of the moon."--p. 7.

(a daring image, verging towards a conceit, though not absolutely
such, and the only one of that character that has struck us in the
volume.)

  "So six long years he revelled, night and day:
  And, when the mirth waxed loudest, with dull sound
  Sometimes from the grove's centre echoes came,
  To tell his wondering people of their king;
  In the still night, across the steaming flats,
  Mixed with the murmur of the moving Nile."--pp. 8, 9.

Here a Tennysonian influence is very perceptible, more especially in
the last quotation; and traces of the same will be found in "The
Forsaken Merman."

In this poem the story is conveyed by allusions and reminiscences
whilst the Merman makes his children call after her who had returned
to her own earth, hearing the Easter bells over the bay, and who is
not yet come back for all the voices calling "Margaret! Margaret!"
The piece is scarcely long enough or sufficiently distinct otherwise
than as a whole to allow of extract; but we cannot but express regret
that a poem far from common-place either in ubject or treatment
should conclude with such sing-song as

  ------"There dwells a loved one,
      But cruel is she;
  She left lonely for ever
      The kings of the sea."

"The Strayed Reveller" is written without rhyme--(not being blank
verse, however,)--and not unfrequently, it must be admitted, without
rhythm. Witness the following lines:

  "Down the dark valley--I saw."--
  "Trembling, I entered; beheld"--
  "Thro' the islands some divine bard."--

Nor are these by any means the only ones that might be cited in
proof; and, indeed, even where there is nothing precisely contrary to
rhythm, the verse might, generally speaking, almost be read as prose.
Seldom indeed, as it appears to us, is the attempt to write without
some fixed laws of metrical construction attended with success;
never, perhaps, can it be considered as the most appropriate
embodiment of thought. The fashion has obtained of late years; but it
is a fashion, and will die out. But few persons will doubt the
superiority of the established blank verse, after reading the
following passage, or will hesitate in pronouncing that it ought to
be the rule, instead of the exception, in this poem:

        "They see the merchants
        On the Oxus stream:--but care
  _Must visit first them too, and make them pale:_
        Whether, thro' whirling sand,
  _A cloud of desert robber-horse has burst_
  _Upon their caravan; or greedy kings,_
  _In the walled cities the way passes thro',_
  Crushed them with tolls; or fever airs
        On some great river's marge
        Mown them down, far from home."--p. 25.

The Reveller, going to join the train of Bacchus in his temple, has
strayed into the house of Circe and has drunk of her cup: he believes
that, while poets can see and know only through participation in
endurance, he shares the power belonging to the gods of seeing
"without pain, without labour;" and has looked over the valley all
day long at the Moenads and Fauns, and Bacchus, "sometimes, for a
moment, passing through the dark stems." Apart from the inherent
defects of the metre, there is great beauty of pictorial description
in some passages of the poem, from which the following (where he is
speaking of the gods) may be taken as a specimen:--

        "They see the Indian
        Drifting, knife in hand,
        His frail boat moored to
      A floating isle, thick-matted
  With large-leaved low-creeping melon plants,
      And the dark cucumber.
        He reaps and stows them,
  Drifting--drifting:--round him,
      Round his green harvest-plot,
      Flow the cool lake-waves:
        The mountains ring them."--p. 20.

From "the Sick King in Bokhara," we have already quoted at some
length. It is one of the most considerable, and perhaps, as being the
most simple and life-like, the best of the narrative poems. A vizier
is receiving the dues from the cloth merchants, when he is summoned
to the presence of the king, who is ill at ease, by Hussein: "a
teller of sweet tales." Arrived, Hussein is desired to relate the
cause of the king's sickness; and he tells how, three days since, a
certain Moollah came before the king's path, calling for justice on
himself, whom, deemed a fool or a drunkard, the guards pricked off
with their spears, while the king passed on into the mosque: and how
the man came on the morrow with yesterday's blood-spots on him, and
cried out for right. What follows is told with great singleness and
truth: "Thou knowest," the man says,

        "'How fierce
    In these last day the sun hath burned;
  That the green water in the tanks
    Is to a putrid puddle turned;
  And the canal that from the stream
  Of Samarcand is brought this way
  Wastes and runs thinner every day.
  "'Now I at nightfall had gone forth
    Alone; and, in a darksome place
  Under some mulberry-trees, I found
    A little pool; and, in brief space,
  With all the water that was there
    I filled my pitcher, and stole home
  Unseen; and, having drink to spare,
  I hid the can behind the door,
  And went up on the roof to sleep.

  "'But, in the night, which was with wind
    And burning dust, again I creep
  Down, having fever, for a drink.

  "'Now, meanwhile, had my brethren found
    The water-pitcher, where it stood
  Behind the door upon the ground,
  And called my mother: and they all,
  As they were thirsty and the night
    Most sultry, drained the pitcher there;
  That they sat with it in my sight,
    Their lips still wet, when I came down.

  "'Now mark: I, being fevered, sick,
  (Most unblessed also,) at that sight
    Brake forth and cursed them. Dost thou hear?
  One was my mother. Now, do right.'

  "But my lord mused a space, and said,
    'Send him away, sirs, and make on.
  It is some madman,' the king said.
    As the king said, so was it done.

  "The morrow at the self-same hour,
    In the king's path, behold, the man,
  Not kneeling, sternly fixed. He stood
    Right opposite, and thus began,

  "Frowning grim down: 'Thou wicked king,
    Most deaf where thou shouldst most give ear;
  What? Must I howl in the next world,
    Because thou wilt not listen here?

  "'What, wilt thou pray and get thee grace,
    And all grace shall to me be grudged?
  Nay but, I swear, from this thy path
    I will not stir till I be judged.'

  "Then they who stood about the king
    Drew close together and conferred;
  Till that the king stood forth and said:
    'Before the priests thou shalt be heard.'

  "But, when the Ulema were met
    And the thing heard, they doubted not;
  But sentenced him, as the law is,
    To die by stoning on the spot.

  "Now the king charged us secretly:
    'Stoned must he be: the law stands so:
  Yet, if he seek to fly, give way;
    Forbid him not, but let him go.'

  "So saying, the king took a stone,
    And cast it softly: but the man,
  With a great joy upon his face,
    Kneeled down, and cried not, neither ran.

  "So they whose lot it was cast stones,
    That they flew thick and bruised him sore:
  But he praised Allah with loud voice,
    And remained kneeling as before.

  "My lord had covered up his face:
    But, when one told him, 'He is dead;'
  Turning him quickly to go in,
    'Bring thou to me his corpse,' he said.

  "And truly, while I speak, oh king,
    I hear the bearers on the stair.
  Wilt thou they straightway bring him in?--
    Ho! enter ye who tarry there."--pp. 39-43.

The Vizier counsels the king that each man's private grief suffices
him, and that he should not seek increase of it in the griefs of
other men. But he answers him, (this passage we have before quoted,)
that the king's lot and the poor man's is the same, for that neither
has his will; and he takes order that the dead man be buried in his
own royal tomb.

We know few poems the style of which is more unaffectedly without
labor, and to the purpose, than this. The metre, however, of the
earlier part is not always quite so uniform and intelligible as might
be desired; and we must protest against the use, for the sake of
rhyme, of _broke_ in lieu of _broken_, as also of _stole_ for
_stolen_ in "the New Sirens." While on the subject of style, we may
instance, from the "Fragment of an Antigone," the following uncouth
stanza, which, at the first reading, hardly appears to be correctly
put together:

    "But hush! Hoemon, whom Antigone,
  Robbing herself of life in burying,
    Against Creon's laws, Polynices,
  Robs of a loved bride, pale, imploring,
      Waiting her passage,
  Forth from the palace hitherward comes."--p. 30.

Perhaps the most perfect and elevated in tone of all these poems is
"The New Sirens." The author addresses, in imagination, a company of
fair women, one of whose train he had been at morning; but in the
evening he has dreamed under the cedar shade, and seen the same forms
"on shores and sea-washed places," "With blown tresses, and with
beckoning hands."

He thinks how at sunrise he had beheld those ladies playing between
the vines; but now their warm locks have fallen down over their arms.
He prays them to speak and shame away his sadness; but there comes
only a broken gleaming from their windows, which "Reels and shivers
on the ruffled gloom." He asks them whether they have seen the end of
all this, the load of passion and the emptiness of reaction, whether
they dare look at life's latter days,

  "When a dreary light is wading
      Thro' this waste of sunless greens,
  When the flashing lights are fading
      On the peerless cheek of queens,
  When the mean shall no more sorrow,
      And the proudest no more smile;
    While the dawning of the morrow
  Widens slowly westward all that while?"

And he implores them to "let fall one tear, and set him free." The
past was no mere pretence; it was true while it lasted; but it is
gone now, and the East is white with day. Shall they meet again, only
that he may ask whose blank face that is?

  "Pluck, pluck cypress, oh pale maidens;
    Dusk the hall with yew."

This poem must be read as a whole; for not only would it be difficult
to select particular passages for extraction, but such extracts, if
made, would fail in producing any adequate impression.

We have already quoted so larely from the concluding piece,
"Resignation," that it may here be necessary to say only that it is
in the form of speech held with "Fausta" in retracing, after a lapse
of ten years, the same way they had once trod with a joyful company.
The tone is calm and sustained, not without touches of familiar
truth.

The minor poems comprise eleven sonnets, among which, those "To the
Duke of Wellington, on hearing him mispraised," and on "Religious
Isolation," deserve mention; and it is with pleasure we find one, in
the tenor of strong appreciation, written on reading the Essays of
the great American, Emerson. The sonnet for "Butler's Sermons" is
more indistinct, and, as such, less to be approved, in imagery than
is usual with this poet. That "To an Independent Preacher who
preached that we should be in harmony with nature," seems to call for
some remark. The sonnet ends with these words:

  "Man must begin, know this, where nature ends;
  Nature and man can never be fast friends;
    Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave."

Now, as far as this sonnet shows of the discourse which occasioned
it, we cannot see anything so absurd in that discourse; and where the
author confutes the Independent preacher by arguing that

  "Nature is cruel; man is sick of blood:
  Nature is stubborn; man would fain adore:
  Nature is fickle; man hath need of rest:"

we cannot but think that, by attributing to nature a certain human
degree of qualities, which will not suffice for man, he loses sight
of the point really raised: for is not man's nature only a part of
nature? and, if a part, necessary to the completeness of the whole?
and should not the individual, avoiding a factitious life, order
himself in conformity with his own rule of being? And, indeed, the
author himself would converse with the self-sufficing progress of
nature, with its rest in action, as distinguished from the troublous
vexation of man's toiling:--

    "Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee,
    Two lessons that in every wind are blown;
    Two blending duties harmonised in one,
  Tho' the loud world proclaim their enmity."--p. 1.

The short lyric poem, "To Fausta" has a Shelleian spirit and grace in
it. & "The Hayswater Boat" seems a little _got up_, and is scarcely
positive enough. This remark applies also, and in a stonger degree,
to the "Stanzas on a Gipsy Child," which, and the "Modern Sappho,"
previously mentioned, are the pieces least to our taste in the
volume. There is a something about them of drawing-room
sentimentality; and they might almost, without losing much save in
size, be compressed into poems of the class commonly set to music. It
is rather the basis of thought than the writing of the "Gipsy Child,"
which affords cause for objection; nevertheless, there is a passage
in which a comparison is started between this child and a "Seraph in
an alien planet born,"--an idea not new, and never, as we think,
worth much; for it might require some subtlety to show how a planet
capable of producing a Seraph should be alien from that Seraph.

We may here notice a few cases of looseness, either of thought or of
expression, to be met with in these pages; a point of style to be
particularly looked to when the occurrence or the absence of such
forms one very sensible difference between the first-rate and the
second-rate poets of the present times.

Thus, in the sonnet "Shakspear," the conclusion says,

  "All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
  All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
  Find their sole _voice_ in that victorious brow;"

whereas a brow's voice remains to be uttered: nor, till the nature of
the victory gained by the brow shall have been pointed out, are we
able to hazard an opinion of the precise value of the epithet.

In the address to George Cruikshank, we find: "Artist, whose hand
with horror _winged_;" where a similar question arises; and,
returning to the "Gipsy Child," we are struck with the unmeaningness
of the line: "Who massed round that slight brow these clouds of
doom?"

Nor does the following, from the first of the sonnets, "To a
Republican Friend," appear reconcileable with any ideas of
appropriateness:

      ----"While before me _flow_
  The _armies_ of the homeless and unfed."

It is but right to state that the only instance of the kind we
remember throughout the volume have now been mentioned.

To conclude. Our extracts will enable the reader to judge of this
Poet's style: it is clear and comprehensive, and eschews flowery
adornment. No particular model has been followed, though that general
influence which Tennyson exercises over so many writers of this
generation may be traced here as elsewhere. It may be said that the
author has little, if anything, to unlearn. Care and consistent
arrangement, and the necessary subordination of the parts to the
whole, are evident throughout; the reflective, which appears the more
essential form of his thought, does not absorb the due observation or
presentment of the outward facts of nature; and a well-poised and
serious mind shows itself in every page.


_Published Monthly, price 1s._

This Periodical will consist of original Poems, Stories to develope
thought and principle, Essays concerning Art and other subjects, and
analytic Reviews of current Literature--particularly of Poetry. Each
number will also contain an Etching; the subject to be taken from the
opening article of the month.

An attempt will be made, both intrinsically and by review, to claim
for Poetry that place to which its present development in the
literature of this country so emphatically entitles it.

The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will be to
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nature; and also to direct attention, as an auxiliary medium, to the
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the utmost care and completeness.




No. 3. (_Price One Shilling_.) MARCH, 1850.

With an Etching by F. Madox Brown.

Art and Poetry: Being Thoughts towards Nature Conducted principally
by Artists.

  When whoso merely hath a little thought
      Will plainly think the thought which is in him,--
      Not imaging another's bright or dim,
  Not mangling with new words what others taught;
  When whoso speaks, from having either sought
      Or only found,--will speak, not just to skim
      A shallow surface with words made and trim,
  But in that very speech the matter brought:
  Be not too keen to cry--"So this is all!--
      A thing I might myself have thought as well,
    But would not say it, for it was not worth!"
      Ask: "Is this truth?" For is it still to tell
    That, be the theme a point or the whole earth,
  Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?

  London:
  DICKINSON & Co., 114, NEW BOND STREET,
  AND
  AYLOTT & JONES, 8, PATERNOSTER ROW.

  G. F Tupper, Printer, Clement's Lane, Lombard Street.


CONTENTS.

  Cordelia--_W. M. Rossetti_ 97
  Macbeth 99
  Repining.--_Ellen Alleyn_ 111
  Sweet Death--_Ellen Alleyn_ 117
  Subject in Art, No. II 118
  Carillon.--_Dante G. Rossetti_ 126
  Emblems.--_Thomas Woolner_ 127
  Sonnet.--_W. B. Scott_ 128
  From the Cliffs.--_Dante G. Rossetti_ 129
  Fancies at Leisure.--_W. M. Rossetti_ 129
  Papers of "The M. S. Society," Nos. I. II. & III 131
  Review, Sir Reginald Mohun.--_W.M. Rossetti_ 137


The Subscribers to this Work are respectfully informed that the
future Numbers will appear on the last day of the Month for which
they are dated. Also, that a supplementary, or large-sized Etching
will occasionally be given (as with the present Number.)


[Illustration: GONERIL: REGAN: LEAR: FOOL: CORDELIA: FRANCE:]


Cordelia


    "The jewels of our father, with washed eyes
    Cordelia leaves you. I know you what you are
    And, like a sister, am most loth to tell
    Your faults, as they are named. Use well our father:
    To your professed bosoms I commit him.
    But yet, alas!--stood I within his grace,
    I would prefer him to a better place.
    So farewell to you both."


  Cordelia, unabashed and strong,
    Her voice's quite scarcely less
  Than yester-eve, enduring wrong
  And curses of her father's tongue,
    Departs, a righteous-souled princess;
  Bidding her sisters cherish him.

  They turn on her and fix their eyes,
    But cease not passing inward;--one
  Sneering with lips still curled to lies,
  Sinuous of body, serpent-wise;
    Her footfall creeps, and her looks shun
  The very thing on which they dwell.

  The other, proud, with heavy cheeks
    And massive forehead, where remains
  A mark of frowning. If she seeks
  With smiles to tame her eyes, or speaks,
    Her mouth grows wanton: she disdains
  The ground with haughty, measured steps.

  The silent years had grown between
    Father and daughter. Always she
  Had waited on his will, and been
  Foremost in doing it,--unseen
    Often: she wished him not to see,
  But served him for his sake alone.

  He saw her constant love; and, tho'
    Occasion surely was not scant,
  Perhaps had never sought to know
  How she could give it wording. So
    His love, not stumbling at a want,
  Among the three preferred her first.

  Her's is the soul not stubborn, yet
    Asserting self. The heart was rich;
  But, questioned, she had rather let
  Men judge her conscious of a debt
    Than freely giving: thus, her speech
  Is love according to her bond.

  In France the queen Cordelia had
    Her hours well satisfied with love:
  She loved her king, too, and was glad:
  And yet, at times, a something sad,
    May be, was with her, thinking of
  The manner of his life at home.

  But this does not usurp her mind.
    It is but sorrow guessed from far
  Thro' twilight dimly. She must find
  Her duty elsewhere: not resigned--
    Because she knows them what they are,
  Yet scarcely ruffled from her peace.

  Cordelia--a name well revered;
    Synonymous with truth and tried
  Affection; which but needs be heard
  To raise one selfsame thought endeared
    To men and women far and wide;
  A name our mothers taught to us.

  Like placid faces which you knew
    Years since, but not again shall meet;
  On a sick bed like wind that blew;
  An excellent thing, best likened to
    Her own voice, gentle, soft, and sweet;
  Shakpere's Cordelia;--better thus.




Macbeth {9}

{9} It is proper to state that this article was written, and seen,
exactly as it at present stands, by several literary friends of the
writer, a considerable time before the appearance, in the
"Westminster Review," of a Paper advocating a view of "Macbeth,"
similar to that which is here taken. But although the publication of
the particular view was thus anticipated, nearly all the most
forcible arguments for maintaining it were omitted; and the subject,
mixed up, as it was, with lengthy disquisitions upon very minor
topics of Shaksperian acting, &c. made no very general impression at
the time.


The purpose of the following Essay is to demonstrate the existence of
a very important error in the hitherto universally adopted
interpretation of the character of Macbeth. We shall prove that _a
design of illegitimately obtaining the crown of Scotland had been
conceived by Macbeth, and that it had been communicated by him to his
wife, prior to his first meeting with the witches, who are commonly
supposed to have suggested that design_.

Most persons when they commence the study of the great Shaksperian
dramas, already entertain concerning them a set of traditional
notions, generally originated by the representations, or
misrepresentations, of the theatre, afterwards to become strengthened
or confirmed by desultory reading and corroborative criticism. With
this class of persons it was our misfortune to rank, when we first
entered upon the _study_ of "Macbeth," fully believing that, in the
character of the hero, Shakspere intended to represent a man whose
general rectitude of soul is drawn on to ruin by the temptations of
supernatural agents; temptations which have the effect of eliciting
his latent ambition, and of misdirecting that ambition when it has
been thus elicited.

As long as we continued under this idea, the impression produced upon
us by "Macbeth" came far short of that sense of complete satisfaction
which we were accustomed to receive from every other of the higher
works of Shakspere. But, upon deeper study, the view now proposed
suggested itself, and seemed to render every thing as it should be.
We say that this view suggested _itself_, because it did not arise
directly from any one of the numerous passages which can be quoted in
its support; it originated in a general feeling of what seemed to be
wanting to the completion of the entire effect; a circumstance which
has been stated at length from the persuasion that it is of itself no
mean presumption in favour of the opinion which it is the aim of this
paper to establish.

Let us proceed to examine the validity of a position, which, if it
deserves any attention at all, may certainly claim an investigation
more than usually minute. We shall commence by giving an analysis of
the first Act, wherein will be considered, successively, every
passage which may appear to bear either way upon the point in
question.

The inferences which we believe to be deducible from the first scene
can be profitably employed only in conjunction with those to be
discovered in the third. Our analysis must, therefore, be entered
upon by an attempt to ascertain the true character of the impressions
which it was the desire of Shakspere to convey by the second.

This scene is almost exclusively occupied with the narrations of the
"bleeding Soldier," and of _Rosse_. These narrations are constructed
with the express purpose of vividly setting forth the personal valour
of Duncan's generals, "Macbeth and Banquo." Let us consider what is
the _maximum_ worth which the words of Shakspere will, at this period
of the play, allow us to attribute to the moral character of the
hero:--a point, let it be observed, of first-rate importance to the
present argument. We find Macbeth, in this scene, designated by
various epithets, _all_ of which, either directly or indirectly,
arise from feelings of admiration created by his courageous conduct
in the war in which he is supposed to have been engaged. "Brave" and
"Noble Macbeth," "Bellona's Bridegroom," "Valiant Cousin," and
"Worthy Gentleman," are the general titles by which he is here spoken
of; but none of them afford any positive clue whatever to his _moral_
character. Nor is any such clue supplied by the scenes in which he is
presently received by the messengers of Duncan, and afterwards
received and lauded by Duncan himself. Macbeth's moral character, up
to the development of his criminal hopes, remains strictly
_negative_. Hence it is difficult to fathom the meaning of those
critics, (A. Schlegel at their head), who have over and over again
made the ruin of Macbeth's "so many noble qualities"{10} the subject
of their comment.

{10} A. Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature." Vol. II. p.
208.

In the third scene we have the meeting of the witches, the
announcement of whose intention to re-assemble upon the heath, _there
to meet with Macbeth_, forms the certainly most obvious, though not
perhaps, altogether the most important, aim of the short scene by
which the tragedy is opened. An enquiry of much interest here
suggests itself. Did Shakspere intend that in his tragedy of
"Macbeth" the witches should figure as originators of gratuitous
destruction, in direct opposition to the traditional, and even
proverbial, character of the _genus?_ By that character such
personages have been denied the possession of any influence whatever
over the untainted soul. Has Shakspere in this instance re tained, or
has he abolished, the chief of those characteristics which have been
universally attributed to the beings in question?

We think that he has retained it, and for the following reasons:
Whenever Shakspere has elsewhere embodied superstitions, he has
treated them as direct and unalterable _facts_ of human nature; and
this he has done because he was too profound a philosopher to be
capable of regarding genuine superstition as the product of random
spectra of the fancy, having absolute darkness for the prime
condition of their being, instead of eeing in it rather the zodiacal
light of truth, the concomitant of the uprising, and of the setting
of the truth, and a partaker in its essence. Again, Shakspere has in
this very play devoted a considerable space to the purpose of
suggesting the self-same trait of character now under discussion, and
this he appears to have done with the express intent of guarding
against a mistake, the probability of the occurrence of which he
foresaw, but which, for reasons connected with the construction of
the play, he could not hope otherwise to obviate.

We allude to the introductory portion of the present scene. One
sister, we learn, has just returned from killing _swine;_ another
breathes forth vengeance against a sailor, on account of the
uncharitable act of his wife; but "his bark _cannot be lost,_" though
it may be "tempest tossed." The last words are scarcely uttered
before the confabulation is interrupted by the approach of Macbeth,
to whom they have as yet made no direct allusion whatever, throughout
the whole of this opening passage, consisting in all of some five and
twenty lines. Now this were a digression which would be a complete
anomaly, having place, as it is supposed to have, at this early stage
of one of the most consummate of the tragedies of Shakspere. We may
be sure, therefore, that it is the chief object of these lines to
impress the reader beforehand with an idea that, in the mind of
Macbeth, there already exist sure foundations for that great
superstructure of evil, to the erection of which, the "metaphysical
_aid_" of the weird sisters is now to be offered. An opinion which is
further supported by the reproaches of Hecate, who, afterwards,
referring to what occurs in this scene, exclaims,

    "All you have done
  Hath been but for a wayward son,
  Spiteful, and wrathful, who, as others do,
  Loves for his own end, not for you."

Words which seem to relate to ends loved of Macbeth before the
witches had spurred him on to their acquirement.

The fact that in the old chronicle, from which the plot of the play
is taken, the machinations of the witches are not assumed to be
_un_-gratuitous, cannot be employed as an argument against our
position. In history the sisters figure in the capacity of prophets
_merely_. There we have no previous announcement of their intention
"to meet with Macbeth." But in Shakspere they are invested with all
other of their superstitional attributes, in order that they may
become the evil instruments of holy vengeance upon evil; of that most
terrible of vengeance which punishes sin, after it has exceeded
certain bounds, by deepening it.

Proceeding now with our analysis, upon the entrance of Macbeth and
Banquo, the witches wind up their hurried charm. They are first
perceived by Banquo. To his questions the sisters refuse to reply;
but, at the command of Macbeth, they immediately speak, and forthwith
utter the prophecy which seals the fate of Duncan.

Now, assuming the truth of our view, what would be the natural
behaviour of Macbeth upon coming into sudden contact with beings who
appear to hold intelligence of his most secret thoughts; and upon
hearing those thoughts, as it were, spoken aloud in the presence of a
third party? His behaviour would be precisely that which is implied
by the question of Banquo.

  "Good sir, why do you _start and seem to fear_
  Things which do sound so fair?"

If, on the other hand, our view is _not_ true, why, seeing that their
characters are in the abstract so much alike, why does the present
conduct of Macbeth differ from that of Banquo, when the witches
direct their prophecies to him? Why has Shakspere altered the
narrative of Holinshed, without the prospect of gaining any advantage
commensurate to the licence taken in making that alteration? These
are the words of the old chronicle: "This (the recontre with the
witches) was reputed at the first but some vain fantastical illusion
by Macbeth and Banquo, insomuch that Banquo would call Macbeth in
jest king of Scotland; and Macbeth again would call him in jest
likewise the father of many kings." Now it was the invariable
practice of Shakspere to give facts or traditions just as he found
them, whenever the introduction of those facts or traditions was not
totally irreconcileable with the tone of his conception. How then
(should we still receive the notion which we are now combating) are
we to account for his anomalous practice in this particular case?

When the witches are about to vanish, Macbeth attempts to delay their
departure, exclaiming,

  "Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more:
  By Sinol's death, I know I am thane of Glamis;
  But how of Cawdor? the thane of Cawdor lives,
  A prosperous gentleman; _and, to be king_
  _Stands not within the prospect of belief,_
  _No more than to be Cawdor_. Say, from whence
  You owe this strange _intelligence?_"

"To be king stands not within the prospect of belief, _no more than
to be Cawdor_." No! it naturally stands much _less_ within the
prospect of belief. Here the mind of Macbeth, having long been
accustomed to the nurture of its "royal hope," conceives that it is
uttering a very suitable hyperbole of comparison. Had that mind been
hitherto an honest mind the word "Cawdor" would have occupied the
place of "king," "king" that of "Cawdor." Observe too the general
character of this speech: Although the coincidence of the principal
prophecy with his own thoughts has so strong an effect upon Macbeth
as to induce him to, at once, pronounce the words of the sisters,
"intelligence;" he nevertheless affects to treat that prophecy as
completely secondary to the other in the strength of its claims upon
his consideration. This is a piece of _over-cautious_ hypocrisy which
is fully in keeping with the tenor of his conduct throughout the rest
of the tragedy.

No sooner have the witches vanished than Banquo begins to doubt
whether there had been "such things there as they did speak about."
This is the natural incredulity of a free mind so circumstanced. On
the other hand, Macbeth, whose manner, since the first announcement
of the sisters, has been that of a man in a _reverie_, makes no doubt
whatever of the reality of their appearance, nor does he reply to the
expressed scepticism of Banquo, but abruptly exclaims, "your children
shall be kings." To this Banquo answers, "you shall be king." "And
thane of Cawdor too: went it not so?" continues Macbeth. Now, what,
in either case, is the condition of mind which can have given rise to
this part of the dialogue? It is, we imagine, sufficiently evident
that the playful words of Banquo were suggested to Shakspere by the
narration of Holinshed; but how are we to account for those of
Macbeth, otherwise than by supposing that the question of the crown
is now settled in his mind by the coincidence of the principal
prediction, with the shapings of his own thoughts, and that he is at
this moment occupied with the _wholly unanticipated_ revelations,
touching the thaneship of Cawdor, and the future possession of the
throne by the offspring of Banquo?

Now comes the fulfilment of the first prophecy. Mark the words of
these men, upon receiving the announcement of Rosse:

  "_Banquo_. What! can the devil speak truth?
  _Macbeth_. The thane of Cawdor lives: why do you dress me
  In borrowed robes?"

Mark how that reception is in either case precisely the reverse of
that given to the prophecy itself. Here _Banquo_ starts. But what is
here done for Banquo, by the coincidence of the prophecy with the
truth, has been already done for Macbeth, by the coincidence of his
thought with the prophecy. Accordingly, Macbeth is calm enough to
play the hypocrite, when he must otherwise have experienced surprise
far greater than that of Banquo, because he is much more nearly
concerned in the source of it. So far indeed from being overcome with
astonishment, Macbeth still continues to dwell upon the prophecy, by
which his peace of mind is afterwards constantly disturbed,

  "Do you not hope your children shall be kings,
  When those that gave the thane of Cawdor to me
  Promised no less to them?"

Banquo's reply to this question has been one of the chief sources of
the interpretation, the error of which we are now endeavouring to
expose. He says,

    "That, trusted home,
  Might yet enkindle you unto the crown,
  Besides the thane of Cawdor. But, 'tis strange;
  And often times, to win us to our harm,
  The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
  Win us with honest trifles, to betray us
  In deepest consequence."

Now, these words have usually been considered to afford the clue to
the _entire_ nature and extent of the supernatural influence brought
into play upon the present tragedy; whereas, in truth, all that they
express is a natural suspicion, called up in the mind of Banquo, by
Macbeth's remarkable deportment, that _such_ is the character of the
influence which is at this moment being exerted upon the soul of the
man to whom he therefore thinks proper to hint the warning they
contain.

The soliloquy which immediately follows the above passage is
particularly worthy of comment:

  "This supernatural soliciting
  Cannot be ill; cannot be good:--if ill,
  Why hath it given me earnest of success,
  Commencing in a truth? I am thane of Cawdor:
  If good, why do I yield to that suggestion,
  Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
  And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
  Against the use of nature? Present fears
  Are less than horrible imaginings.
  My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
  Shakes so my single state of man, that function
  Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is,
  But what is not."

The early portion of this passage assuredly indicates that Macbeth
regards the communications of the witches merely in the light of an
invitation to the carrying out of a design pre-existent in his own
mind. He thinks that the _spontaneous_ fulfilment of the chief
prophecy is in no way probable; the consummation of the lesser
prophecy being held by him, but as an "earnest of success" to his own
efforts in consummating the greater. From the latter portion of this
soliloquy we learn the real extent to which "metaphysical aid" is
implicated in bringing about the crime of Duncan's murder. It serves
to assure Macbeth that _that_ is the "nearest way" to the attainment
of his wishes;--a way to the suggestion of which he now, for the
first time, "_yields_," because the chances of its failure have been
infinitely lessened by the "earnest of success" which he has just
received.

After the above soliloquy Macbeth breaks the long pause, implied in
Banquo's words, "Look how our partner's rapt," by exclaiming,

  "If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me,
    Without my stir."

Which is a very logical conclusion; but one at which he would long
ago have arrived, had "soliciting" meant "suggestion," as most people
suppose it to have done; or at least, under those circumstances, he
would have been satisfied with that conclusion, instead of
immediately afterwards changing it, as we see that he has done, when
he adds,

        "Come what come may,
  Time and the hour runs through the roughest day!"

With that the third scene closes; the parties engaged in it
proceeding forthwith to the palace of Duncan at Fores.

Towards the conclusion of the fourth scene, Duncan names his
successor in the realm of Scotland. After this Macbeth hastily
departs, to inform his wife of the king's proposed visit to their
castle, at Inverness. The last words of Macbeth are the following,

  "The prince of Cumberland!--That is a step,
  On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap.
  For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires!
  Let not light see my black and deep desires;
  The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
  Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see."

These lines are equally remarkable for a tone of settled assurance as
to the fulfilment of the speaker's royal hope, and for an entire
absence of any expression of reliance upon the power of the
witches,--the hitherto supposed originators of that hope,--in aiding
its consummation. It is particularly noticeable that Macbeth should
make no reference whatever, not even in thought, (that is, in
soliloquy) to any supernatural agency during the long period
intervening between the fulfilment of the two prophecies. Is it
probable that this would have been the case had Shakspere intended
that such an agency should be understood to have been the first
motive and mainspring of that deed, which, with all its accompanying
struggles of conscience, he has so minutely pictured to us as having
been, during that period, enacted? But besides this negative
argument, we have a positive one for his non-reliance upon their
promises in the fact that he attempts to outwit them by the murder of
Fleance even after the fulfilment of the second prophecy.

The fifth scene opens with Lady Macbeth's perusal of her husband's
narration of his interview with the witches. The order of our
investigation requires the postponement of comment upon the contents
of this letter. We leave it for the present, merely cautioning the
reader against taking up any hasty objections to a very important
clause in the enunciation of our view by reminding him that, contrary
to Shakspere's custom in ordinary cases, we are made acquainted only
with a _portion_ of the missive in question. Let us then proceed to
consider the soliloquy which immediately follows the perusal of this
letter:

        "I do fear thy nature.
  It is too full o' the milk of human kindness,
  To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
  Art not without ambition; but without
  The illness should attend it. That thou wouldst highly,
  That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false
  And yet wouldst wrongly win: thou'dst have, great Glamis,
  That which cries this thou must do if thou have it,
  And that which rather thou dost fear to do,
  Thou wishest should be undone."

It is vividly apparent that this passage indicates a knowledge of the
character it depicts, which is far too intimate to allow of its being
other than a _direct_ inference from facts connected with previous
communications upon similar topics between the speaker and the
writer: unless, indeed, we assume that in this instance Shakspere has
notably departed from his usual principles of characterization, in
having invested Lady Macbeth with an amount of philosophical
acuteness, and a faculty of deduction, much beyond those pretended to
by any other of the female creations of the same author.

The above passage is interrupted by the announcement of the approach
of Duncan. Observe Lady Macbeth's behaviour upon receiving it. She
immediately determines upon what is to be done, and all without (are
we to suppose?) in any way consulting, or being aware of, the wishes
or inclinations of her husband! Observe too, that neither does _she_
appear to regard the witches' prophecies as anything more than an
invitation, and holding forth of "metaphysical _aid_" to the carrying
out of an independent project. That this should be the case in both
instances vastly strengthens the argument legitimately deducible from
each.

At the conclusion of the passage which called for the last remark,
Macbeth, after a long and eventful period of absence, let it be
recollected, enters to a wife who, we will for a moment suppose, is
completely ignorant of the character of her husband's recent
cogitations. These are the first words which pass between them,

  "_Macbeth_. My dearest love,
  Duncan comes here to-night.

  _L. Macbeth_. And when goes hence?

  _Macbeth_. To-morrow, as he purposes.

  _L. Macbeth_. Oh! never
  Shall sun that morrow see!
  Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
  May read strange matters:--to beguile the time,
  Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
  Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
  But be the serpent under it. He that's coming
  Must be provided for; and you shall put
  This night's great business into my dispatch,
  Which shall to all our nights and days to come
  Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.

  _Macbeth_. We will speak further."

Are these words those which would naturally arise from the situation
at present, by common consent, attributed to the speakers of them?
That is to say a situation in which _each speaker is totally ignorant
of the sentiments pre-existent in the mind of the other_. Are the
words, "we will speak further," those which might in nature form the
whole and sole reply made by a man to his wife's completely
unexpected anticipation of his own fearful purposes? If not, if few
or none of these lines, thus interpreted, will satisfy the reader's
feeling for common truth, does not the view which we have adopted
invest them with new light, and improved, or perfected meaning?

The next scene represents the arrival of Duncan at Inverness, and
contains nothing which bears either way upon the point in question.
Proceeding, therefore, to the seventh and last scene of the first act
we come to what we cannot but consider to be proof positive of the
opinion under examination. We shall transcribe at length the portion
of this scene containing that proof; having first reminded the reader
that a few hours at most can have elapsed between the arrival of
Macbeth, and the period at which the words, now to be quoted, are
uttered.

  "_Lady Macbeth. Was the hope drunk,_
  _Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since,_
  _And wakes it now, to look so green and pale_
  _At what it did so freely?_ From this time,
  Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
  To be the same in thine own act and valour,
  As thou art in desire? Would'st thou have that
  Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
  And live a coward in thine own esteem,
  Letting, I dare not, wait upon, I would,
  Like the poor cat in the adage?

  _Macbeth_. Prithee, peace:
  I dare do all that may become a man;
  Who dares do more is none.

  _Lady Macbeth. What beast was't then_
  _That made you break this enterprise to me?_
  _When you durst do it, then you were a man,_
  _And to be more than what you were you would_
  _Be so much more the man. Nor time nor place_
  _Did then adhere, and yet you would make both._
  They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
  Does unmake you. I have given suck, and know
  How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
  I would, while it was smiling in my face,
  Have plucked my nipple from its boneless gums,
  And dashed the brains out, _had I so sworn_
  _As you have done to this_."

With respect to the above lines, let us observe that, the words, "nor
time nor place did then adhere," render it evident that they hold
reference to something which passed before Duncan had signified his
intention of visiting the castle of Macbeth. Consequently the words
of Lady Macbeth can have no reference to the previous communication
of any definite intention, on the part of her husband, to murder the
king; because, not long before, she professes herself aware that
Macbeth's nature is "too full of the milk of human kindness to catch
the nearest way;" indeed, she has every reason to suppose that she
herself has been the means of breaking that enterprise to _him_,
though, in truth, the crime had already, as we have seen, suggested
itself to his thought, "whose murder was as yet fantastical."

Again the whole tenor of this passage shows that it refers to verbal
communication between them. _But no such communication can have taken
place since Macbeth's rencontre with the witches_; for, besides that
he is, immediately after that recontre, conducted to the presence of
the king, who there signifies an intention of proceeding directly to
Macbeth's castle, such a communication would have rendered the
contents of the letter to Lady Macbeth completely superfluous. What
then are we to conclude concerning these problematical lines? First
begging the reader to bear in mind the tone of sophistry which has
been observed by Schlegel to pervade, and which is indeed manifest
throughout the persuasions of Lady Macbeth, we answer, that
she wilfully confounds her husband's,--probably vague and
unplanned--"enterprise" of obtaining the crown, with that "nearest
way" to which she now urges him; but, at the same time, she obscurely
individualizes the separate purposes in the words, "and to be _more_
than what you were, you would be so much more the man."

It is a fact which is highly interesting in itself, and one which
strongly impeaches the candour of the majority of Shakspere's
commentators, that the impenetrable obscurity which must have
pervaded the whole of this passage should never have been made the
subject of remark. As far as we can remember, not a word has been
said upon the matter in any one of the many superfluously explanatory
editions of our dramatist's productions. Censures have been
repeatedly lavished upon minor cases of obscurity, none upon this. In
the former case the fault has been felt to be Shakspere's, for it has
usually existed in the expression; but in the latter the language is
unexceptional, and the avowal of obscurity might imply the
possibility of misapprehension or stupidity upon the part of the
avower.

Probably the only considerable obstacle likely to act against the
general adoption of those views will be the doubt, whether so
important a feature of this consummate tragedy can have been left by
Shakspere so obscurely expressed as to be capable of remaining
totally unperceived during upwards of two centuries, within which
period the genius of a Coleridge and of a Schlegel has been applied
to its interpretation. Should this objection be brought forward, we
reply, in the first place, that the objector is 'begging' his
question in assuming that the feature under examination has remained
_totally_ unperceived. Coleridge by way of comment upon these words
of Banquo,

  "Good sir, why do you stand, and seem to fear
  Things that do sound so fair?"

writes thus: "The general idea is all that can be required of a
poet--not a scholastic logical consistency in all the parts, so as to
meet metaphysical objectors. * * * * * * * * How strictly true to
nature it is, that Banquo, and not Macbeth himself, directs our
notice to the effects produced in Macbeth's mind, _rendered temptible
by previous dalliance with ambitious thoughts_." Here Coleridge
denies the _necessity_ of "logical consistency, so as to meet
metaphysical objectors," although he has, throughout his criticisms
upon Shakspere, endeavored, and nearly always with success, to prove
the _existence_ of that consistency; and so strongly has he felt the
want of it here, that he has, in order to satisfy himself, _assumed_
that "previous dalliance with ambitious thoughts," whose existence it
has been our object to _prove_.

But, putting Coleridge's imperfect perception of the truth out of the
question, surely nothing can be easier than to believe _that_ for the
belief in which we have so many precedents. How many beauties, lost
upon Dryden, were perceived by Johnson; How many, hidden to Johnson
and his cotemporaries, have been brought to light by Schlegel and by
Coleridge.




Repining


  She sat alway thro' the long day
  Spinning the weary thread away;
  And ever said in undertone:
  "Come, that I be no more alone."

  From early dawn to set of sun
  Working, her task was still undone;
  And the long thread seemed to increase
  Even while she spun and did not cease.
  She heard the gentle turtle-dove
  Tell to its mate a tale of love;
  She saw the glancing swallows fly,
  Ever a social company;
  She knew each bird upon its nest
  Had cheering songs to bring it rest;
  None lived alone save only she;--
  The wheel went round more wearily;
  She wept and said in undertone:
  "Come, that I be no more alone."

  Day followed day, and still she sighed
  For love, and was not satisfied;
  Until one night, when the moonlight
  Turned all the trees to silver white,
  She heard, what ne'er she heard before,
  A steady hand undo the door.
  The nightingale since set of sun
  Her throbbing music had not done,
  And she had listened silently;
  But now the wind had changed, and she
  Heard the sweet song no more, but heard
  Beside her bed a whispered word:
  "Damsel, rise up; be not afraid;
  For I am come at last," it said.

  She trembled, tho' the voice was mild;
  She trembled like a frightened child;--
  Till she looked up, and then she saw
  The unknown speaker without awe.
  He seemed a fair young man, his eyes
  Beaming with serious charities;
  His cheek was white, but hardly pale;
  And a dim glory like a veil
  Hovered about his head, and shone
  Thro' the whole room till night was gone.

  So her fear fled; and then she said,
  Leaning upon her quiet bed:
  "Now thou art come, I prithee stay,
  That I may see thee in the day,
  And learn to know thy voice, and hear
  It evermore calling me near."

  He answered: "Rise, and follow me."
  But she looked upwards wonderingly:
  "And whither would'st thou go, friend? stay
  Until the dawning of the day."
  But he said: "The wind ceaseth, Maid;
  Of chill nor damp be thou afraid."

  She bound her hair up from the floor,
  And passed in silence from the door.

  So they went forth together, he
  Helping her forward tenderly.
  The hedges bowed beneath his hand;
  Forth from the streams came the dry land
  As they passed over; evermore
  The pallid moonbeams shone before;
  And the wind hushed, and nothing stirred;
  Not even a solitary bird,
  Scared by their footsteps, fluttered by
  Where aspen-trees stood steadily.

  As they went on, at length a sound
  Came trembling on the air around;
  The undistinguishable hum
  Of life, voices that go and come
  Of busy men, and the child's sweet
  High laugh, and noise of trampling feet.

  Then he said: "Wilt thou go and see?"
  And she made answer joyfully;
  "The noise of life, of human life,
  Of dear communion without strife,
  Of converse held 'twixt friend and friend;
  Is it not here our path shall end?"
  He led her on a little way
  Until they reached a hillock: "Stay."

  It was a village in a plain.
  High mountains screened it from the rain
  And stormy wind; and nigh at hand
  A bubbling streamlet flowed, o'er sand
  Pebbly and fine, and sent life up
  Green succous stalk and flower-cup.

  Gradually, day's harbinger,
  A chilly wind began to stir.
  It seemed a gentle powerless breeze
  That scarcely rustled thro' the trees;
  And yet it touched the mountain's head
  And the paths man might never tread.
  But hearken: in the quiet weather
  Do all the streams flow down together?--
  No, 'tis a sound more terrible
  Than tho' a thousand rivers fell.
  The everlasting ice and snow
  Were loosened then, but not to flow;--
  With a loud crash like solid thunder
  The avalanche came, burying under
  The village; turning life and breath
  And rest and joy and plans to death.

  "Oh! let us fly, for pity fly;
  Let us go hence, friend, thou and I.
  There must be many regions yet
  Where these things make not desolate."
  He looked upon her seriously;
  Then said: "Arise and follow me."
  The path that lay before them was
  Nigh covered over with long grass;
  And many slimy things and slow
  Trailed on between the roots below.
  The moon looked dimmer than before;
  And shadowy cloudlets floating o'er
  Its face sometimes quite hid its light,
  And filled the skies with deeper night.

  At last, as they went on, the noise
  Was heard of the sea's mighty voice;
  And soon the ocean could be seen
  In its long restlessness serene.
  Upon its breast a vessel rode
  That drowsily appeared to nod
  As the great billows rose and fell,
  And swelled to sink, and sank to swell.

  Meanwhile the strong wind had come forth
  From the chill regions of the North,
  The mighty wind invisible.
  And the low waves began to swell;
  And the sky darkened overhead;
  And the moon once looked forth, then fled
  Behind dark clouds; while here and there
  The lightning shone out in the air;
  And the approaching thunder rolled
  With angry pealings manifold.
  How many vows were made, and prayers
  That in safe times were cold and scarce.
  Still all availed not; and at length
  The waves arose in all their strength,
  And fought against the ship, and filled
  The ship. Then were the clouds unsealed,
  And the rain hurried forth, and beat
  On every side and over it.

  Some clung together, and some kept
  A long stern silence, and some wept.
  Many half-crazed looked on in wonder
  As the strong timbers rent asunder;
  Friends forgot friends, foes fled to foes;--
  And still the water rose and rose.

  "Ah woe is me! Whom I have seen
  Are now as tho' they had not been.
  In the earth there is room for birth,
  And there are graves enough in earth;
  Why should the cold sea, tempest-torn,
  Bury those whom it hath not borne?"

  He answered not, and they went on.
  The glory of the heavens was gone;
  The moon gleamed not nor any star;
  Cold winds were rustling near and far,
  And from the trees the dry leaves fell
  With a sad sound unspeakable.

  The air was cold; till from the South
  A gust blew hot, like sudden drouth,
  Into their faces; and a light
  Glowing and red, shone thro' the night.

  A mighty city full of flame
  And death and sounds without a name.
  Amid the black and blinding smoke,
  The people, as one man, awoke.
  Oh! happy they who yesterday
  On the long journey went away;
  Whose pallid lips, smiling and chill,
  While the flames scorch them smile on still;
  Who murmur not; who tremble not
  When the bier crackles fiery hot;
  Who, dying, said in love's increase:
  "Lord, let thy servant part in peace."

  Those in the town could see and hear
  A shaded river flowing near;
  The broad deep bed could hardly hold
  Its plenteous waters calm and cold.
  Was flame-wrapped all the city wall,
  The city gates were flame-wrapped all.

  What was man's strength, what puissance then?
  Women were mighty as strong men.
  Some knelt in prayer, believing still,
  Resigned unto a righteous will,
  Bowing beneath the chastening rod,
  Lost to the world, but found of God.
  Some prayed for friend, for child, for wife;
  Some prayed for faith; some prayed for life;
  While some, proud even in death, hope gone,
  Steadfast and still, stood looking on.

  "Death--death--oh! let us fly from death;
  Where'er we go it followeth;
  All these are dead; and we alone
  Remain to weep for what is gone.
  What is this thing? thus hurriedly
  To pass into eternity;
  To leave the earth so full of mirth;
  To lose the profit of our birth;
  To die and be no more; to cease,
  Having numbness that is not peace.
  Let us go hence; and, even if thus
  Death everywhere must go with us,
  Let us not see the change, but see
  Those who have been or still shall be."

  He sighed and they went on together;
  Beneath their feet did the grass wither;
  Across the heaven high overhead
  Dark misty clouds floated and fled;
  And in their bosom was the thunder,
  And angry lightnings flashed out under,
  Forked and red and menacing;
  Far off the wind was muttering;
  It seemed to tell, not understood,
  Strange secrets to the listening wood.

  Upon its wings it bore the scent
  Of blood of a great armament:
  Then saw they how on either side
  Fields were down-trodden far and wide.
  That morning at the break of day
  Two nations had gone forth to slay.

  As a man soweth so he reaps.
  The field was full of bleeding heaps;
  Ghastly corpses of men and horses
  That met death at a thousand sources;
  Cold limbs and putrifying flesh;
  Long love-locks clotted to a mesh
  That stifled; stiffened mouths beneath
  Staring eyes that had looked on death.

  But these were dead: these felt no more
  The anguish of the wounds they bore.
  Behold, they shall not sigh again,
  Nor justly fear, nor hope in vain.
  What if none wept above them?--is
  The sleeper less at rest for this?
  Is not the young child's slumber sweet
  When no man watcheth over it?
  These had deep calm; but all around
  There was a deadly smothered sound,
  The choking cry of agony
  From wounded men who could not die;
  Who watched the black wing of the raven
  Rise like a cloud 'twixt them and heaven,
  And in the distance flying fast
  Beheld the eagle come at last.

  She knelt down in her agony:
  "O Lord, it is enough," said she:
  "My heart's prayer putteth me to shame;
  "Let me return to whence I came.
  "Thou for who love's sake didst reprove,
  "Forgive me for the sake of love."




Sweet Death


      The sweetest blossoms die.
  And so it was that, going day by day
    Unto the church to praise and pray,
  And crossing the green church-yard thoughtfully,
      I saw how on the graves the flowers
      Shed their fresh leaves in showers;
  And how their perfume rose up to the sky
      Before it passed away.

      The youngest blossoms die.
  They die, and fall, and nourish the rich earth
    From which they lately had their birth.
  Sweet life: but sweeter death that passeth by,
      And is as tho' it had not been.
      All colors turn to green:
  The bright hues vanish, and the odours fly;
      The grass hath lasting worth.

      And youth and beauty die.
  So be it, O my God, thou God of truth.
    Better than beauty and than youth
  Are saints and angels, a glad company:
      And Thou, O lord, our Rest and Ease,
      Are better far than these.
  Why should we shrink from our full harvest? why
      Prefer to glean with Ruth?




The Subject in Art No. II


Resuming a consideration of the subject-matter suitable in painting
and sculpture, it is necessary to repeat those premises, and to
re-establish those principles which were advanced or elicited in the
first number of this essay.

It was premised then that works of Fine Art affect the beholder in
the same ratio as the _natural prototypes_ of those works would
affect him; and not in proportion to the difficulties overcome in the
artificial representation of those prototypes. Not contending,
meanwhile, that the picture painted by the hand of the artist, and
then by the hand of nature on the eye of the beholder, is, in amount,
the same as the picture painted there by nature alone; but
disregarding, as irrelevant to this investigation, _all concomitants
of fine art wherein they involve an ulterior impression as to the
relative merits of the work by the amount of its success,_ and, for a
like reason, disregarding all emotions and impressions which are not
the immediate and proximate result of an excitor influence of, or
pertaining to, the _things artificial_, as a bona fide equivalent of
the _things natural_.

Or the premises may be practically stated thus:--(1st.) When one
looks on a certain painting or sculpture for the first time, the
first notion is that of a painting or sculpture. (2nd.) In the next
place, while the objects depicted are revealing themselves as real
objects, the notion of a painting or sculpture has elapsed, and, in
its place, there are emotions, passions, actions (moral or
intellectual) according in sort and degree to the heart or
mind-moving influence of the objects represented. (3rd.) Finally,
there is a notion of a painting or sculpture, and a judgment or
sentiment commensurate with the estimated merits of the work.--The
second statement gives the premised conditions under which Fine Art
is about to be treated: the 3rd statement exemplifies a phase in the
being of Fine Art under which it is never to be considered: and
furthermore, whilst the mental reflection last mentioned (the
judgment on the work) is being made, it may occur that certain
objects, most difficult of artistic execution, had been most
successfully handled: the merits of introducing such objects, in such
a manner, are the merits of those concomitants mentioned as equally
without the scope of consideration.

Thus much for the premises--next to the re-establishment of
principles.

1st. The principle was elicited, that Fine Art should regard the
general happiness of man, by addressing those of his attributes which
are _peculiarly human_, by exciting the activity of his rational and
benevolent powers; and thereafter:--2nd, that the Subject in Art
should be drawn from objects which so address and excite him; and
3rd, as objects so exciting the mental activity may (in proportion to
the mental capacity) excite it to any amount, and so possibly in the
highest degree (the function of Fine Art being _mental excitement_,
and that of High Art being the _highest mental excitement_) that all
objects so exciting mental activity and emotion in the highest
degree, may afford subjects for High Art.

Having thus re-stated the premises and principles already deduced,
let us proceed to enquire into the propriety of selecting the Subject
from the past or the present time; which enquiry resolves itself
fundamentally into the analysis of objects and incidents experienced
immediately by the senses, or acquired by mental education.

Here then we have to explore the specific difference between the
incidents and objects of to-day, as exposed to our daily observation,
and the incidents and objects of time past, as bequeathed to us by
history, poetry, or tradition.

In the first place, there is, no doubt, a considerable _real_
difference between the things of to-day and those of times past: but
as all former times, their incidents and objects differ amongst
themselves, this can hardly be the cause of the specific difference
sought for--a difference between our share of things past and things
present. This real, but not specific difference then, however
admitted, shall not be considered here.

It is obvious, in the meanwhile, that all which we have of the past
is stamped with an impress of mental assimilation: an impress it has
received from the mind of the author who has garnered it up, and
disposed it in that form and order which ensure it acceptance with
posterity. For let a writer of history be as matter of fact as he
will, the very order and classification of events will save us the
trouble of confusion, and render them graspable, and more capable of
assimilation, than is the raw material of every-day experience. In
fact the work of mind is begun, the key of intelligence is given, and
we have only to continue the process. Where the vehicle for the
transmission of things past is poetry, then we have them presented in
that succession, and with that modification of force, a resilient
plasticity, now advancing, now recoiling, insinuating and grappling,
that ere this material and mental warfare is over, we find the facts
thus transmitted are incorporated with our psychical existence. And
in tradition is it otherwise?--Every man tells the tale in his own
way; and the merits of the story itself, or the person who tells it,
or his way of telling, procures it a lodgment in the mind of the
hearer, whence it is ever ready to start up and claim kindred with
some external excitement.

Thus it is the luck of all things of the past to come down to us with
some poetry about them; while from those of diurnal experience we
must extract this poetry ourselves: and although all good men are,
more or less, poets, they are passive or recipient poets; while the
active or donative poet caters for them what they fail to collect.
For let a poet walk through London, and he shall see a succession of
incidents, suggesting some moral beauty by a contrast of times with
times, unfolding some principle of nature, developing some attribute
of man, or pointing to some glory in The Maker: while the man who
walked behind him saw nothing but shops and pavement, and coats and
faces; neither did he hear the aggregated turmoil of a city of
nations, nor the noisy exponents of various desires, appetites and
pursuits: each pulsing tremour of the atmosphere was not struck into
it by a subtile ineffable something willed forcibly out of a cranium:
neither did he see the driver of horses holding a rod of light in his
eye and feeling his way, in a world he was rushing through, by the
motion of the end of that rod:--he only saw the wheels in motion, and
heard the rattle on the stones; and yet this man stopped twice at a
book shop to buy 'a Tennyson,' or a 'Browning's Sordello.' Now this
man might have seen all that the poet saw; he walked through the same
streets: yet the poet goes home and writes a poem; and he who failed
to feel the poetry of the things themselves detects it readily in the
poet's version. Then why, it is asked, does not this man, schooled by
the poet's example, look out for himself for the future, and so find
attractions in things of to-day? He does so to a trifling extent, but
the reason why he does so rarely will be found in the former
demonstration.

It was shown how bygone objects and incidents come down to us
invested in peculiar attractions: this the poet knows and feels, and
the probabilities are that he transferred the incidents of to-day,
with all their poetical and moral suggestions, to the romantic
long-ago, partly from a feeling of prudence, and partly that he
himself was under this spell of antiquity, How many a Troubadour, who
recited tales of king Arthur, had his incidents furnished him by the
events of his own time! And thus it is the many are attracted to the
poetry of things past, yet impervious to the poetry of things
present. But this retrograde movement in the poet, painter, or
sculptor (except in certain cases as will subsequently appear), if
not the result of necessity, is an error in judgment or a culpable
dishonesty. For why should he not acknowledge the source of his
inspiration, that others may drink of the same spring with himself;
and perhaps drink deeper and a clearer draught?--For the water is
unebbing and exhaustless, and fills the more it is emptied: why then
should it be filtered through his tank _where_ he can teach men to
drink it at the fountain?

If, as every poet, every painter, every sculptor will acknowledge,
his best and most original ideas are derived from his own times: if
his great lessonings to piety, truth, charity, love, honor, honesty,
gallantry, generosity, courage, are derived from the same source; why
transfer them to distant periods, and make them _not things of
to-day?_ Why teach us to revere the saints of old, and not our own
family-worshippers? Why to admire the lance-armed knight, and not the
patience-armed hero of misfortune? Why to draw a sword we do not wear
to aid and oppressed damsel, and not a purse which we do wear to
rescue an erring one? Why to worship a martyred St. Agatha, and not a
sick woman attending the sick? Why teach us to honor an Aristides or
a Regulus, and not one who pays an equitable, though to him ruinous,
tax without a railing accusation? And why not teach us to help what
the laws cannot help?--Why teach us to hate a Nero or an Appius, and
not an underselling oppressor of workmen and betrayer of women and
children? Why to love a _Ladie in bower_, and not a wife's fireside?
Why paint or poetically depict the horrible race of Ogres and Giants,
and not show Giant Despair dressed in that modern habit he walks the
streets in? Why teach men what were great and good deeds in the old
time, neglecting to show them any good for themselves?--Till these
questions are answered absolutory to the artist, it were unwise to
propose the other question--Why a poet, painter or sculptor is not
honored and loved as formerly? "As formerly," says some avowed
sceptic in _old world transcendency_ and _golden age affairs_, "I
believe _formerly_ the artist was as much respected and cared for as
he is now. 'Tis true the Greeks granted an immunity from taxation to
some of their artists, who were often great men in the state, and
even the companions of princes. And are not some of our poets peers?
Have not some of our artists received knighthood from the hand of
their Sovereign, and have not some of them received pensions?"

To answer objections of this latitude demands the assertion of
certain characteristic facts which, tho' not here demonstrated, may
be authenticated by reference to history. Of these, the facts of
Alfred's disguised visit to the Danish camp, and Aulaff's visit to
the Saxon, are sufficient to show in what respect the poets of that
period were held; when a man without any safe conduct whatever
could enter the enemy's camp on the very eve of battle, as was
here the case; could enter unopposed, unquestioned, and return
unmolested!--What could have conferred upon the poet of that day so
singular a privilege? What upon the poet of an earlier time that
sanctity in behoof whereof

  "The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
  The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
  Went to the ground: and the repeated air
  Of sad Electra's poet had the power
  To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare."

What but an universal recognition of the poet as an universal
benefactor of mankind? And did mankind recognize him as such, from
some unaccountable infatuation, or because his labours obtained for
him an indefeasible right to that estimate? How came it, when a Greek
sculptor had completed some operose performance, that his countrymen
bore him in triumph thro' their city, and rejoiced in his prosperity
as identical with their own? How but because his art had embodied
some principle of beauty whose mysterious influence it was their
pride to appreciate--or he had enduringly moulded the limbs of some
well-trained Athlete, such as it was their interest to develop, or he
had recorded the overthrow of some barbaric invader whom their
fathers had fallen to repel.

In the middle ages when a knight listened, in the morning, to some
song of brave doing, ere evening he himself might be the hero of such
song.--What wonder then that he held sacred the function of the poet!
Now-a-days our heroes (and we have them) are left unchapleted and
neglected--and therefore the poet lives and dies neglected.

Thus it would appear from these facts (which have been collaterally
evolved in course of enquiring into the propriety of choosing the
subject from past or present time, and in course of the consequent
analysis) that Art, to become a more powerful engine of civilization,
assuming a practically humanizing tendency (the admitted function of
Art), should be made more directly conversant with the things,
incidents, and influences which surround and constitute the living
world of those whom Art proposes to improve, and, whether it should
appear in event that Art can or can not assume this attitude without
jeopardizing her specific existence, that such a consummation were
desirable must be equally obvious in either case.

Let us return now to the former consideration. It was stated that the
poet is affected by every day incidents, which would have little or
no effect on the mind of a general observer: and if you ask the poet,
who from his conduct may be the supposed advocate of the past as the
fittest medium for poetic eduction, why he embodied the suggestions
of to-day in the matter and dress of antiquity; he is likely to
answer as follows.--"You have stated that men pass by that which
furnishes me with my subject: If I merely reproduce what they
slighted, the reproduction will be slighted equally. It appears then
that I must devise some means of attracting their sympathies--and the
medium of antiquity is the fittest for three several reasons.
1st.--Nothing comes down to us from antiquity unless fraught with
sufficient interest of some sort, to warrant it being worthy of
record. Thus, all incidents which we possess of the old time being
more or less interesting, there arises an illative impression that
all things of old really were so: and all things in idea associated
with that time, whether real or fictitious, are afforded a favorable
entertainment. Now these associations are neither trivial nor
fanciful:{11} for I remember to have discovered, after visiting the
British Museum for the first time, that the odour of camphor, for
which I had hitherto no predilection, afforded me a peculiar
satisfaction, seemingly suggestive of things scientific or artistic;
it was in fact a _literary smell!_ All this was vague and
unaccountable until some time after when this happened again, and I
was at once reminded of an enormous walrus at the British Museum, and
then remembered how the whole collection, from end to end, was
permeated with the odour of camphor! Still, despite the
_consciousness_ of this, the camphor retains its influence. Now let a
poem, a painting, or sculpture, smell ever so little of antiquity,
and every intelligent reader will be full of delightful imaginations.
2nd.--All things ancient are mysterious in obscurity:--veneration,
wonder, and curiosity are the result. 3rd.--All things ancient are
dead and gone:--we sympathize with them accordingly. All these
effects of antiquity, as a means of enforcing poetry, declare it too
powerful an ally to be readily abandoned by the poet." To all this
the painter will add that the costume of almost any ancient time is
more beautiful than that of the present--added to which it exposes
more of that most beautiful of all objects, the human figure.

{11} Here the author, in the person of respondent, takes occasion to
narrate a real fact.

Thus we have a formidable array of objections to the choice of
_present-day subjects:_ and first, it was objected and granted, that
incidents of the present time are well nigh barren in poetic
attraction for the many. Then it was objected, but not granted, that
their poetic or pictorial counterparts will be equally unattractive
also: but this last remains to be proved. It was said, and is
believed by the author, (and such as doubt it he does not address)
that all good men are more or less poetical in some way or other;
while their poetry shows itself at various times. Thus the
business-man in the street has other to think of than poetry; but
when he is inclined to look at a picture, or in his more poetical
humour, will he neglect the pictorial counterpart of what he
neglected before? To test this, show him a camera obscura, where
there is a more literal transcript of present-day nature than any
painting can be:--what is the result? He expresses no anxiety to quit
it, but a great curiosity to investigate; he feels it is very
beautiful, indeed more beautiful than nature: and this he will say is
because he does not see nature as an artist does. Now the solution of
all this is easy: 1st. He is in a mood of mind which renders him
accessible to the influences of poetry, which was not before the
case. 2nd. He looks at that steadily which he before regarded
cursorily; and, as the picture remains in his eye, it acquires an
amount of harmony, in behoof of an intrinsic harmony resident in the
organ itself, which exerts proportionately modifying influences on
all things that enter within it; and of the nervous harmony, and the
beautifully apportioned stimuli of alternating ocular spectra. 3rd.
There is a resolution of discord effected by the instrument itself,
inasmuch as its effects are homogeneous. All these harmonizing
influences are equally true of the painting; and though we have no
longer the homogeneous effect of the camera, we have the homogeneous
effect of one mind, viz., the mind of the artist.

Thus having disproved the supposed poetical obstacles to the
rendering of real life or nature in its own real garb and time, as
faithfully as Art can render it, nothing need be said to answer the
advantages of the antique or mediaeval rendering; since they were
only called in to neutralize the aforesaid obstacles, which obstacles
have proved to be fictitious. It remains then to consider the
_artistic_ objection of costume, &c., which consideration ranges
under the head of _real differences between the things of past and
present times_, a consideration formerly postponed. But this
requiring a patient analysis, will necessitate a further
postponement, and in conclusion, there will be briefly stated the
elements of the argument, thus.--It must be obvious to every
physicist that physical beauty (which this subject involves on the
one side [the ancient] as opposed to the want of it on the other [the
modern]) was in ancient times as superior to physical beauty in the
modern, as psychical beauty in the modern is superior to psychical
beauty in the ancient. Costume then, as physical, is more beautiful
ancient than modern. Now that a certain amount of physical beauty is
requisite to constitute Fine Art, will be readily admitted; but what
that amount is, must be ever undefined. That the maximum of physical
beauty does not constitute the maximum of Fine Art, is apparent from
the facts of the physical beauty of _Early Christian_ Art being
inferior to that of Grecian art; whilst, in the concrete, Early
Christian Art is superior to Grecian. Indeed some specimens of Early
Christian Art are repulsive rather than beautiful, yet these are in
many cases the highest works of Art.

In the "Plague at Ashdod," great physical beauty, resulting from
picturesque costume and the exposed human figure, was so far from
desirable, that it seems purposely deformed by blotches of livid
color; yet the whole is a most noble work of Poussin. Containing as
much physical beauty as this picture, the writer remembers to have
seen an incident in the streets where a black-haired, sordid,
wicked-headed man, was striking the butt of his whip at the neck of a
horse, to urge him round an angle of the pavement; a smocked
countryman offered him the loan of his mules: a blacksmith standing
by, showed him how to free the wheel, by only swerving the animal to
the left: he, taking no notice whatever, went on striking and
striking; whilst a woman waiting to cross, with a child in her one
hand, and with the other pushing its little head close to her side,
looked with wide eyes at this monster.

This familiar incident, affording a subject fraught with more moral
interest than, and as much picturesque matter as, many antique or
mediaeval subjects, is only wanting in that romantic attraction
which, by association, attaches to things of the past. Yet, let these
modern subjects once excite interest, as it really appears they can,
and the incidents of to-day will acquire romantic attractions by the
same association of ideas.

The claims of ancient, mediaeval, and modern subjects will be
considered in detail at a future period.




The Carillon. (Antwerp and Bruges)

In these and others of the Flemish Towns, the _Carillon_, or chimes
which have a most fantastic and delicate music, are played almost
continually The custom is very ancient.


  At Antwerp, there is a low wall
    Binding the city, and a moat
    Beneath, that the wind keeps afloat.
  You pass the gates in a slow drawl
  Of wheels. If it is warm at all
    The Carillon will give you thought.

  I climbed the stair in Antwerp church,
    What time the urgent weight of sound
    At sunset seems to heave it round.
  Far up, the Carillon did search
  The wind; and the birds came to perch
    Far under, where the gables wound.

  In Antwerp harbour on the Scheldt
    I stood along, a certain space
    Of night. The mist was near my face:
  Deep on, the flow was heard and felt.
  The Carillon kept pause, and dwelt
    In music through the silent place.

  At Bruges, when you leave the train,
    --A singing numbness in your ears,--
    The Carillon's first sound appears
  Only the inner moil. Again
  A little minute though--your brain
    Takes quiet, and the whole sense hears.

  John Memmeling and John Van Eyck
    Hold state at Bruges. In sore shame
    I scanned the works that keep their name.
  The Carillon, which then did strike
  Mine ears, was heard of theirs alike:
    It set me closer unto them.

  I climbed at Bruges all the flight
    The Belfry has of ancient stone.
    For leagues I saw the east wind blown:
  The earth was grey, the sky was white.
  I stood so near upon the height
    That my flesh felt the Carillon.

    _October_, 1849.




Emblems


  I lay through one long afternoon,
    Vacantly plucking the grass.
  I lay on my back, with steadfast gaze
    Watching the cloud-shapes pass;
  Until the evening's chilly damps
    Rose from the hollows below,
    Where the cold marsh-reeds grow.

  I saw the sun sink down behind
    The high point of a mountain;
  Its last light lingered on the weeds
    That choked a shattered fountain,
  Where lay a rotting bird, whose plumes
    Had beat the air in soaring.
    On these things I was poring:--

  The sun seemed like my sense of life,
    Now weak, that was so strong;
  The fountain--that continual pulse
    Which throbbed with human song:
  The bird lay dead as that wild hope
    Which nerved my thoughts when young.
    These symbols had a tongue,

  And told the dreary lengths of years
    I must drag my weight with me;
  Or be like a mastless ship stuck fast
    On a deep, stagnant sea.
  A man on a dangerous height alone,
    If suddenly struck blind,
    Will never his home path find.

  When divers plunge for ocean's pearls,
    And chance to strike a rock,
  Who plunged with greatest force below
    Receives the heaviest shock.
  With nostrils wide and breath drawn in,
    I rushed resolved on the race;
    Then, stumbling, fell in the chase.

  Yet with time's cycles forests swell
    Where stretched a desert plain:
  Time's cycles make the mountains rise
    Where heaved the restless main:
  On swamps where moped the lonely stork,
    In the silent lapse of time
    Stands a city in its prime.

  I thought: then saw the broadening shade
    Grow slowly over the mound,
  That reached with one long level slope
    Down to a rich vineyard ground:
  The air about lay still and hushed,
    As if in serious thought:
    But I scarcely heeded aught,

  Till I heard, hard by, a thrush break forth,
    Shouting with his whole voice,
  So that he made the distant air
    And the things around rejoice.
  My soul gushed, for the sound awoke
    Memories of early joy:
    I sobbed like a chidden boy.






Sonnet: Early Aspirations


  How many a throb of the young poet-heart,
    Aspiring to the ideal bliss of Fame,
    Deems that Time soon may sanctify his claim
  Among the sons of song to dwell apart.--
    Time passes--passes! The aspiring flame
  Of Hope shrinks down; the white flower Poesy
  Breaks on its stalk, and from its earth-turned eye
    Drop sleepy tears instead of that sweet dew
      Rich with inspiring odours, insect wings
  Drew from its leaves with every changing sky,
    While its young innocent petals unsunn'd grew.
      No more in pride to other ears he sings,
    But with a dying charm himself unto:--
      For a sad season: then, to active life he springs.



From the Cliffs: Noon


  The sea is in its listless chime:
    Time's lapse it is, made audible,--
    The murmur of the earth's large shell.
  In a sad blueness beyond rhyme
    It ends: sense, without thought, can pass
    No stadium further. Since time was,
  This sound hath told the lapse of time.

  No stagnance that death wins,--it hath
    The mournfulness of ancient life,
    Always enduring at dull strife.
  As the world's heart of rest and wrath,
    Its painful pulse is in the sands.
    Last utterly, the whole sky stands,
  Grey and not known, along its path.






Fancies at Leisure


I. In Spring

  The sky is blue here, scarcely with a stain
  Of grey for clouds: here the young grasses gain
  A larger growth of green over this splinter
  Fallen from the ruin. Spring seems to have told Winter
  He shall not freeze again here. Tho' their loss
  Of leaves is not yet quite repaired, trees toss
  Sprouts from their boughs. The ash you called so stiff
  Curves, daily, broader shadow down the cliff.

II. In Summer

  How the rooks caw, and their beaks seem to clank!
    Let us just move out there,--(it might be cool
  Under those trees,) and watch how the thick tank
    By the old mill is black,--a stagnant pool
  Of rot and insects. There goes by a lank
    Dead hairy dog floating. Will Nature's rule
  Of life return hither no more? The plank
    Rots in the crushed weeds, and the sun is cruel.

III. The Breadth of Noon

  Long time I lay there, while a breeze would blow
    From the south softly, and, hard by, a slender
    Poplar swayed to and fro to it. Surrender
  Was made of all myself to quiet. No
  Least thought was in my mind of the least woe:
    Yet the void silence slowly seemed to render
    My calmness not less calm, but yet more tender,
  And I was nigh to weeping.--'Ere I go,'
  I thought, 'I must make all this stillness mine;
    The sky's blue almost purple, and these three
  Hills carved against it, and the pine on pine
    The wood in their shade has. All this I see
    So inwardly I fancy it may be
  Seen thus of parted souls by _their_ sunshine.'

IV. Sea-Freshness

  Look at that crab there. See if you can't haul
    His backward progress to this spar of a ship
    Thrown up and sunk into the sand here. Clip
  His clipping feelers hard, and give him all
  Your hand to gripe at: he'll take care not fall:
    So,--but with heed, for you are like to slip
    In stepping on the plank's sea-slime. Your lip--
  No wonder--curves in mirth at the slow drawl
  Of the squat creature's legs. We've quite a shine
    Of waves round us, and here there comes a wind
      So fresh it must bode us good luck. How long
  Boatman, for one and sixpence? Line by line
    The sea comes toward us sun-ridged. Oh! we sinned
      Taking the crab out: let's redress his wrong.

V. The Fire Smouldering

  I look into the burning coals, and see
    Faces and forms of things; but they soon pass,
    Melting one into other: the firm mass
  Crumbles, and breaks, and fades gradually,
  Shape into shape as in a dream may be,
    Into an image other than it was:
    And so on till the whole falls in, and has
  Not any likeness,--face, and hand, and tree,
  All gone. So with the mind: thought follows thought,
    This hastening, and that pressing upon this,
      A mighty crowd within so narrow room:
      And then at length heavy-eyed slumbers come,
    The drowsy fancies grope about, and miss
  Their way, and what was so alive is nought.




Papers of "The M.S. Society" {12}

{12} The Editor is requested to state that "M. S." does not here mean
Manuscript.


No. I. An Incident in the Siege of Troy, seen from a modern Observatory

  Sixteen Specials in Priam's Keep
    Sat down to their mahogany:
  The League, just then, had made _busters_ cheap,
    And Hesiod writ his "Theogony,"
  A work written to prove "that, if men would be men,
  And demand their rights again and again,
  They might live like gods, have infinite _smokes_,
  Drink infinite rum, drive infinite _mokes_,
  Which would come from every part of the known
  And civilized globe, twice as good as their own,
  And, finally, Ilion, the work-shop should be
  Of the world--one vast manufactory!"

  From arrow-slits, port-holes, windows, what not,
  Their sixteen quarrels the Specials had shot
  From sixteen arblasts, their daily task;
  Why they'd to do it they didn't ask,
  For, after they'd done it, they sat down to dinner;
  The sixteen Specials they didn't get thinner;
  But kept quite loyal, and every day
  Asked no questions but fired away.

  Would you like me to tell you the reason why
  These sixteen Specials kept letting fly
  From eleven till one, as the Chronicle speaks?
  They did it, my boys, to annoy the Greeks,
  Who kept up a perpetual cannonade
  On the walls, and threaten'd an escalade.
  The sixteen Specials were so arranged
  That the shots they shot were not shots exchanged,
  But every shot so told on the foe
    The Greeks were obliged to draw it mild:
  Diomedes--"A fix," Ulysses--"No go"
    Declared it, the "king of men" cried like a child;
  Whilst the Specials, no more than a fine black Tom
  I keep to serenade Mary from
  The tiles, where he lounges every night,
  Knew nor cared what they did, and were perfectly right.

  But the fact was thus: one Helenus,
  A man much faster than any of us,
  More fast than a gent at the top of a "bus,"
  More fast than the coming of "Per col. sus."
  Which Shakespeare says comes galloping,
  (I take his word for anything)
  This Helenus had a cure of souls--
    He had cured the souls of several Greeks,
  Achilles sole or heel,--the rolls
    Of fame (not French) say Paris:--speaks
    Anatomist Quain thereof. Who seeks
  May read the story from z to a;
  He has handled and argued it every way;--
  A subject on which there's a good deal to say.
  His work was ever the best, and still is,
  Because of this note on the Tendo Achillis.

  This Helenus was a man well bred,
    He was _up_ in Electricity,
    Fortification, Theology,
    aesthetics and Pugilicity;
  Celsus and Gregory he'd read;
    Knew every "dodge" of _glove and fist;_
  Was a capital curate, (I think I've said)
    And Transcendental Anatomist:
  _Well up_ in Materia Medica,
    _Right up_ in Toxicology,
  And Medical Jurisprudence, that sell!
    And the _dead sell_ Physiology:
  Knew what and how much of any potation
  Would get him through any examination:
  With credit not small, had passed the Hall
  And the College----and they couldn't _pluck_ him at all.
  He'd written on Rail-roads, delivered a lecture
    Upon the Electric Telegraph,
  Had played at single-stick with Hector,
    And written a paper on half-and-half.

  With those and other works of note
  He was not at all a "_people's man_,"
  Though public, for the works he wrote
  Were not that sort the people can
  Admire or read; they were Mathematic
  The most part, some were Hydrostatic;
  But Algebraic, in the main,
  And full of a, b, c, and n--
  And other letters which perplex--
  The last was full of double x!
  In fact, such stuff as one may easily
  Imagine, didn't go down greasily,
  Nor calculated to produce
  Such heat as "cooks the public goose,"
  And does it of so brown a hue
  Men wonder while they relish too.

  It therefore was that much alone
  He studied; and a room is shown
  In a coffee-house, an upper room,
  Where none but hungry devils come,
  Wherein 'tis said, with animation
  He read "Vestiges of Creation."

  Accordingly, a month about
  After he'd _chalked up_ steak and stout
  For the last time, he gave the world
  A pamphlet, wherein he unfurled
  A tissue of facts which, soon as blown,
  Ran like wildfire through the town.
  And, first of all, he plainly showed
  A capital error in the mode
  Of national defences, thus--
  "The Greek one thousand miles from us,"
  Said he, (for nine hundred and ninety-nine
  The citadel stood above the brine
  In perpendicular height, allowing
  For slope of glacis, thereby showing
  An increase of a mile,) "'tis plain
  The force that shot and shell would gain,
  By gravitation, with their own,
  Would fire the ground by friction alone;
  Which, being once in fusion schooled
  Ere cool, as _Fire-mist had cooled_"
  Would gain a motion, which must soon,
  Just as the earth detached the moon
  And gave her locomotive birth,
  Detach some twenty miles of earth,
  And send it swinging in the air,
  The Devil only could tell where!
  Then came the probability
  With what increased facility
  The Greeks, by this projectile power,
  Might land on Ilion's highest tower,
  All safe and sound, in battle array,
  With howitzers prepared to play,
  And muskets to the muzzles rammed;--
  Why, the town would be utterly smashed and jammed,
  And positively, as the phrase is
  Vernacular, be "sent to blazes"!

  In the second place, he then would ask,
  (And here he took several members to task,
  And wondered--"he really must presume
  To wonder" a statesman like--you know whom--
  Who ever evinced the deepest sense
  Of a crying sin in any expense,
  Should so besotted be, and lost
  To the fact that now, at public cost,
  Powder was being day by day
  Wantonly wasted, blown away);--
  Yes, he would ask, "with what intent
  But to perch the Greeks on a battlement
  From which they might o'erlook the town,
  The easier to batter it down,
  Which he had proved must be the case
  (If it hadn't already taken place):
  He called on his readers to fear and dread it,
  _Whilst he wrote it,--whilst they read it!_"
  "How simple! How beautifully simple," said he,
  "And obvious was the remedy!
  Look back a century or so--
  And there was the ancient Norman bow,
  A weapon (he gave them leave to laugh)
  Efficient, better, cheaper by half:
  (He knew quite well the age abused it
  Because, forsooth, the Normans used it)
  These, planted in the citadel,
  Would reach the walls say,--very well;
  There, having spent their utmost force,
  They'd drop down right, as a matter of course,
  A thousand miles! Think--a thousand miles!
  What was the weight for driving piles
  To this? He calculated it--
  'Twould equal, when both Houses sit,
  The weight of the entire building,
  Including Members, paint, and gilding;
  But, if a speech or the address
  From the throne were given, something less,
  Because, as certain snores aver,
  The House is then much heavier.

  Now this, though very much a rub like
  For Ministers, convinced the public;
  And Priam, who liked to hear its brays
  To any tune but "the Marseillaise,"
  Summoned a Privy Council, where
  'Twas shortly settled to confer
  On Helenus a sole command
  Of Specials.--He headed that daring band!

  And sixteen Specials in Priam's keep
    Got up from their mahogany;
  They smoked their pipes in silence deep
    Till there was such a fog--any
  Attempt to discover the priest in the smother
  Had bothered old Airy and Adams and t'other
  And--Every son of an _English_ mother.

    June, 1848.

No. II. Swift's Dunces

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this
sign, that the DUNCES are all in confederacy against him."--_Swift_.

How shall we know the dunces from the man of genius, who is no doubt
our superior in judgment, yet knows himself for a fool--by the
proverb?

At least, my dear Doctor, you will let me, with the mass of readers,
have clearer wits than the dunces--then why should I not know what
you are as soon as, or sooner than Bavius, &c.--unless a dunce has a
good nose, or a natural instinct for detecting wit.

Now I take it that these people stigmatized as dunces are but men of
ill-balanced mental faculties, yet perhaps, in a great degree,
superior to the average of minds. For instance, a poet of much merit,
but more ambition, has written the "Lampiad," an epic; when he should
not have dared beyond the Doric reed: his ambitious pride has
prevented the publication of excellent pastorals, therefore the world
only knows him for his failure. This, I say, is a likely man to
become a detractor; for his good judgment shows the imperfections of
most works, his own included; his ambition (an ill-combination of
self-conscious worth and spleen) leads him to compare works of the
highest repute; the works of contemporaries; and his own. In all
cases where success is most difficult, he will be most severe; this
naturally leads him to criticise the very best works.

He has himself failed; he sees errors in successful writers; he knows
he possesses certain merits, and knows what the perfection of them
should be. This is the ground work of envy, which makes a man of
parts a comparative fool, and a confederate against "true genius."

No. III. Mental Scales

I make out my case thus--

There is an exact balance in the distribution of causes of pleasure
and pain: this has been satisfactorily proved in my next paper, upon
"Cause and Effect," therefore I shall take it for granted. What,
then, is there but the mind to determine its own state of happiness,
or misery: just as the motion of the scales depends upon themselves,
when two equal weights are put into them. The balance ought to be
truly hung; but if the unpleasant scale is heavier, then the motion
is in favor of the pleasant scale, and vice versa. Whether the beam
stands horizontally, or otherwise, does not matter (that only
determines the key): draw a line at right angles to it, then put in
your equal weights; if the angle becomes larger on the unpleasant
scale's side of the line, happiness is the result, if on the other,
misery.

It requires but a slight acquaintance with mechanics to see that he
who would be happy should have the unpleasant side heavier. I hate
corollaries or we might have a group of them equally applicable to
Art and Models.

  _June_, 1848.




Reviews


_Some Account of the Life and Adventures of Sir Reginald Mohun, Bart.
Done in Verse by George John Cayley. Canto 1st. Pickering._ 1849.

Inconsistency, whether in matters of importance or in trifles,
whether in substance or in detail, is never pleasant. We do not here
impute to this poem any inconsistency between one portion and
another; but certainly its form is at variance with its subject and
treatment. In the wording of the title, and the character of
typography, there is a studious archaism: more modern the poem itself
could scarcely be.

"Sir Reginald Mohun" aims, to judge from the present sample, at
depicting the easy intercourse of high life; and the author enters on
his theme with a due amount of sympathy. It is in this respect, if in
any, that the mediaeval tone of the work lasts beyond the title page.
In Mr. Cayley's eyes, the proof of the comparative prosperity of
England is that

  "Still Queen Victoria sits upon her throne;
    Our aristocracy still keep alive,
    And, on the whole, may still be said to thrive,--
  Tho' now and then with ducal acres groan
    The honored tables of the auctioneer.
    Nathless, our aristocracy is dear,
  Tho' their estates go cheap; and all must own
  That they still give society its tone."--p. 16.

He proceeds in these terms:

  "Our baronets of late appear to be
    Unjustly snubbed and talked and written down;
    Partly from follies of Sir Something Brown,
  Stickling for badges due to their degree,
    And partly that their honor's late editions
    Have been much swelled with surgeons and physicians;
  For 'honor hath small skill in surgery,'
  And skill in surgery small honor."--p. 17.

What "honor" is here meant? and against whom is the taunt
implied?--against the "surgeons and physicians," or against the
depreciation of them. Surely the former can hardly have been
intended. The sentence will bear to be cleared of some ambiguity, or
else to be cleared off altogether.

Our introduction to Sir Reginald Mohun, Lord of Nornyth Place, and of
"an income clear of 20,000 pounds," and to his friends Raymond St.
Oun, De Lacy, Wilton, Tancarville, and Vivian--(for the author's
names are aristocratic, like his predilections)--is effected through
the medium of a stanza, new, we believe, in arrangement, though
differing but slightly from the established octave, and of verses so
easy and flowing as to make us wonder less at the promise of

    "provision plenty
  For cantos twelve, or may be, four and twenty,"

than at Mr. Cayley's assertion that he "Can never get along at all in
prose."

The incidents, as might be expected of a first canto, are neither
many nor important, and will admit of compression into a very small
compass.

Sir Reginald, whose five friends had arrived at Nornyth Place late on
the preceding night, is going over the grounds with them in a
shooting party after a late breakfast. St. Oun expresses a wish to
"prowl about the place" in preference, not feeling in the mood for
the required exertion.

  "'Of lazy dogs the laziest ever fate
    Set on two useless legs you surely are,
    And born beneath some wayward sauntering star
  To sit for ever swinging on a gate,
    And laugh at wiser people passing through.'
    So spake the bard De Lacy: for they two
  In frequent skirmishes of fierce debate
  Would bicker, tho' their mutual love was great."--p. 35.

Mohun, however, sides with St. Oun, and agrees to escort him in his
rambles after the first few shots. He accordingly soon resigns his
gun to the keeper Oswald, whose position as one who

        "came into possession
  Of the head-keepership by due succession
  Thro' sire and grandsire, who, when one was dead,
  Left his right heir-male keeper in his stead,"

Mr. Cayley evidently regards with some complacence. The friends enter
a boat: here, while sailing along a rivulet that winds through the
estate, St. Oun falls to talking of wealth, its value and
insufficiency, of death, and life, and fame; and coming at length to
ask after the history of Sir Reginald's past life, he suggests "this
true epic opening for relation:"

  "'The sun, from his meridian heights declining
  Mirrored his richest tints upon the shining
  Bosom of a lake. In a light shallop, two
    _Young men, whose dress,_ etcaetera, _proclaims,_
    Etcaetera,--so would write G.P.R. James--
  Glided in silence o'er the waters blue,
  Skirting the wooded slopes. Upward they gazed
  On Nornyth's ancient pile, whose windows blazed

  "'In sunset rays, whose crimson fulgence streamed
  Across the flood: wrapped in deep thought they seemed.
  'You are pensive, Reginald,' at length thus spake
    The helmsman: 'ha! it is the mystic power
    Fraught by the sacred stillness of the hour:
  Forgive me if your reverie I break,
  Craving, with friendship's sympathy, to share
  _Your spirit's burden, be it joy or care.'"_--pp. 48, 49.

Sir Reginald Mohun's story is soon told.--Born in Italy, and losing
his mother at the moment of his birth, and his father and only sister
dying also soon after, he is left alone in the world.

  "'My father was a melancholy man,
    Having a touch of genius, and a heart,
    But not much of that worldly better part
  Called force of character, which finds some plan
    For getting over anguish that will crush
  Weak hearts of stronger feeling. He began
    To pine; was pale; and had a hectic flush
    At times; and from his eyelids tears would gush.

  "'Some law of hearts afflicted seems to bind
    A spell by which the scenes of grief grew dear;
    He never could leave Italy, tho' here
  And there he wandered with unquiet mind,--
    Rome, Florence, Mantua, Milan; once as far
  As Venice; but still Naples had a blind
    Attraction which still drew him thither. There
    He died. Heaven rest his ashes from their care.

  "'He wrote, a month or so before he died,
    To Wilton's father; (he is Earl of Eure,
    My mother's brother); saying he was sure
  That he should soon be gone, and would confide
    Us to his guardian care. My uncle came
  Before his death. We stood by his bedside.
    He blessed us. We, who scarcely knew the name
    Of death, yet read in the expiring flame

  "'Of his sunk eyes some awful mystery,
    And wept we knew not why. There was a grace
    Of radiant joyful hope upon his face,
  Most unaccustomed, and which seemed to be
    All foreign to his wasted frame; and yet
  So heavenly in its consolation we
    Smiled through the tears with which our lids were wet.
    His lips were cold, as, whispering, 'Do not fret

  "'When I am gone,' he kissed us: and he took
    Our uncle's hands, which on our heads he laid,
    And said: 'My children, do not be afraid
  Of Death, but be prepared to meet him. Look;
    Here is your mother's brother; he to her
  As Reginald to Eve.' His thin voice shook.--
    'Eve was your Mother's name.' His words did err,
    As dreaming; and his wan lips ceased to stir.'"--pp. 55-57.

(We have quoted this passage, not insensible to its defects,--some
common-place in sentiment and diction; but independently of the good
it does really contain, as being the only one of such a character
sustained in quality to a moderate length.)

Reginald and his cousin Wilton grew up together friends, though not
bound by common sympathies. The latter has known life early, and
"earned experience piecemeal:" with the former, thought has already
become a custom.

Thus far only does Reginald bring his retrospect; his other friends
come up, and they all return homeward. Here, too, ends the story of
this canto; but not without warranting some surmise of what will
furnish out the next. There is evidence of observation adroitly
applied in the talk of the two under-keepers who take charge of the
boat.

  "They said: 'Oh! what a gentleman to talk
    Is that there Lacy! What a tongue he've got!
    But Mr. Vivian _is_ a pretty shot.
  And what a pace his lordship wish to walk!
    Which Mr. Tancarville, he seemed quite beat:
  But he's a pleasant gentleman. Good lawk!
    How he do make me laugh! Dang! this 'ere seat
    Have wet my smalls slap thro'. Dang! what a treat!

  "'There's company coming to the Place to morn:
    Bess housemaid told me. Lord and Lady----: dash
    My wigs! I can't think on. But there's a mash
  O' comp'ny and fine ladies; fit to torn
    The heads of these young chaps. Why now I'd lay
  This here gun to an empty powder-horn
    Sir Reginald be in love, or that-a-way.
    He looks a little downcast-loikish,--eh?'"--pp.62, 63.

It will be observed that there is no vulgarity in this vulgarism:
indeed, the gentlemanly good humour of the poem is uninterrupted.
This, combined with neatness of handling, and the habit of not
over-doing, produces that general facility of appearance which it is
no disparagement, in speaking of a first canto, to term the chief
result of so much of these life and adventures as is here "done into
verse." It may be fairly anticipated, however, that no want of
variety in the conception, or of success in the pourtrayal, of
character will need to be complained of: meanwhile, a few passages
may be quoted to confirm our assertions. The two first extracts are
examples of mere cleverness; and all that is aimed at is attained.
The former follows out a previous comparison of the world with a
"huge churn."

  "Yet some, despising life's legitimate aim,
    Instead of butter, would become "the cheese;"
  A low term for distinction. Whence the name
    I know not: gents invented it; and these
  Gave not an etymology. I see no
    Likelier than this, which with their taste agrees;
  The _caseine_ element I conceive to mean no
  Less than the _beau ideal_ of the Casino."--p.12.

  "Wise were the Augurers of old, nor erred
    In substance, deeming that the life of man--
    (This is a new reflection, spick and span)--
  May be much influenced by the flight of birds.
    Our senate can no longer hold their house
    When culminates the evil star of grouse;
  And stoutest patriots will their shot-belts gird
  When first o'er stubble-field hath partridge whirred."--p.25.

In these others there is more purpose, with a no less definite
conciseness:

  "Comes forth the first great poet. Then a number
  Of followers leave much literary lumber.
  He cuts his phrases in the sapling grain
    Of language; and so weaves them at his will.
  They from his wickerwork extract with pain
    The wands now warped and stiffened, which but ill
  Bend to their second-hand employment."--pp. 4, 5.

    "What's life? A riddle;
  Or sieve which sifts you thro' it in the middle."--p.45.

The misadventures of the five friends on their road to Nornyth are
very sufficiently described:

  "The night was cold and cloudy as they topped
    A moorland slope, and met the bitter blast,
  So cutting that their ears it almost cropped;
    And rain began to fall extremely fast.
  A broken sign-post left them in great doubt
    About two roads; and, when an hour was passed,
  They learned their error from a lucid lout;
  Soon after, one by one, their lamps went out."--p.29.

There remains to point out one fault,--and that the last fault the
occurrence of which could be looked for, after so clearly expressed
an intention as this:

  "But, if an Author takes to writing fine,
    (Which means, I think, an artificial tone),
  The public sicken and won't read a line.
  I hope there's nothing of this sort in mine."--p. 6.

A quotation or two will fully explain our meaning: and we would
seriously ask Mr. Cayley to reflect whether he has always borne his
principle in mind, and avoided "writing fine;" whether he has not
sometimes fallen into high-flown common-place of the most undisguised
stamp, rendered, moreover, doubly inexcusable and out of place by
being put into the mouth of one of the personages of the poem; It is
Sir Reginald Mohun that speaks; and truly, though not thrust forward
as a "wondrous paragon of praise," he must be confessed to be,

  "Judging by specimens the author quotes,
  An utterer of most ordinary phrases,"

not words only and sentences, but real _phrases_, in the more
distinct and specific sense of the term.

      "'There, while yet a new born thing,
    Death o'er my cradle waved his darksome wing;
  My mother died to give me birth: forlorn
    I came into the world, a babe of woe,
  Ill-omened from my childhood's early morn;
    Yet heir to what the idolators of show
    Deem life's good things, which earthly bliss bestow.

  "'The riches of the heart they call a dream;
    Love, hope, faith, friendship, hollow phantasies:
    Living but for their pockets and their eyes,
  They stifle in their breasts the purer beam
    Of sunshine glanced from heaven upon their clay,
  To be its light and warmth. This is a theme
    For homilies: and I will only say,
    The heart feeds not on fortune's baubles gay.'"--p. 51.

Sir Reginald's narrative concludes after this fashion:

  "'But what is this? A dubious compromise;
    Twilight of cloudy zones, whereon the blaze
    Of sunshine breaks but seldom with its rays
  Of heavenly hope, towards which the spirit sighs
    Its aspirations, and is lost again
  'Mid doubts: to grasp the wisdom of the skies
    Too feeble, tho' convinced earth's bonds are vain,
    Cowering faint-hearted in the festering chain.'"--p. 60.

A similar instance of conventionality constantly repeated is the sin
of inversion, which is no less prevalent, throughout the poem, in the
conversational than in the narrative portions. In some cases the
exigencies of rhyme may be pleaded in palliation, as for "Cam's marge
along" and "breezy willows cool," which occur in two consecutive
lines of a speech; but there are many for which no such excuse can be
urged. Does any one talk of "sloth obscure," or of "hearts
afflicted?" Or what reason is there for preferring "verses easy" to
_easy verses?_ Ought not the principle laid down in the following
passage of the introduction to be followed out, not only into the
intention, but into the manner and quality also, of the whole work?

    "'I mean to be _sincere_ in this my lay:
  That which I think I shall write down without
    A drop of pain or varnish. Therefore, pray,
  Whatever I may chance to rhyme about,
  Read it without the shadow of a doubt.'"--p. 12.

Again, the Author appears to us to have acted unwisely in
occasionally departing from the usual construction of his stanzas, as
in this instance:

  "'But, as I said, you know my history;
  And your's--not that you made a mystery
  Of it, nor used reserve, yet, being not
    By nature an Autophonophilete,
    (A word De Lacy fashioned and called me it)--
  Your's you have never told me yet. And what
  Can be a more appropriate occasion
  Than this true epic opening for relation?'"--p. 48.

Here the lines do not cohere so happily as in the more varied
distribution of the rhymes; and, moreover, as a question of
principle, we think it not advisable to allow of minor deviations
from the uniformity of a prescribed metre.

It may be well to take leave of Mr. Cayley with a last quotation of
his own words,--words which no critic ought to disregard:

  "I shall be deeply grateful to reviews,
    Whether they deign approval, or rebuke,
  For any hints they think may disabuse
  Delusions of my inexperienced muse."--p.8.

If our remarks have been such as to justify the Author's wish for
sincere criticism, our object is attained; and we look forward for
the second canto with confidence in his powers.


_Published Monthly.--Price One S._

  Art and Poetry,
  Being Thoughts towards Nature.

  Conducted principally by Artists.

Of the little worthy the name of writing that has ever been written
upon the principles of Art, (of course excepting that on the mere
mechanism), a very small portion is by Artists themselves; and that
is so scattered, that one scarcely knows where to find the ideas of
an Artist except in his pictures.

With a view to obtain the thoughts of Artists, upon Nature as evolved
in Art, in another language besides their _own proper_ one, this
Periodical has been established. Thus, then, it is not open to the
conflicting opinions of all who handle the brush and palette, nor is
it restricted to actual practitioners; but is intended to enunciate
the principles of those who, in the true spirit of Art, enforce a
rigid adherence to the simplicity of Nature either in Art or Poetry,
and consequently regardless whether emanating from practical Artists,
or from those who have studied nature in the Artist's School.

Hence this work will contain such original Tales (in prose or verse),
Poems, Essays, and the like, as may seem conceived in the spirit, or
with the intent, of exhibiting a pure and unaffected style, to which
purpose analytical Reviews of current Literature--especially
Poetry--will be introduced; as also illustrative Etchings, one of
which latter, executed with the utmost care and completeness, will
appear in each number.




No. 4. (_Price One Shilling_.) MAY, 1850.

With an Etching by W.H. Deverell.

Art and Poetry: Being Thoughts towards Nature Conducted principally
by Artists.

  When whoso merely hath a little thought
      Will plainly think the thought which is in him,--
      Not imaging another's bright or dim,
  Not mangling with new words what others taught;
  When whoso speaks, from having either sought
      Or only found,--will speak, not just to skim
      A shallow surface with words made and trim,
  But in that very speech the matter brought:
  Be not too keen to cry--"So this is all!--
      A thing I might myself have thought as well,
    But would not say it, for it was not worth!"
      Ask: "Is this truth?" For is it still to tell
    That, be the theme a point or the whole earth,
  Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?


  London:
  DICKINSON & Co., 114, NEW BOND STREET,
  AND
  AYLOTT & JONES, 8, PATERNOSTER ROW.

  G. F Tupper, Printer, Clement's Lane, Lombard Street.


CONTENTS.

  Etching.--Viola and Olivia.
  Viola and Olivia 145
  A Dialogue.--_John Orchard_ 146
  On a Whit-sunday Morn in the Month of May.--_John Orchard_ 167
  Modern Giants.--_Laura Savage_ 169
  To the Castle Ramparts--_W.M. Rossetti_ 173
  Pax Vobis.--_Dante G. Rossetti_ 176
  A Modern Idyl.--_Walter H. Deverell_ 177
  "Jesus Wept."--_W.M. Rossetti_ 179
  Sonnets for Pictures.--_Dante G Rossetti_ 180
  Papers of "The M. S. Society,"
    No IV. Smoke 183
    No. V. Rain 186
  Review: Christmas Eve and Easter Day.--_W.M. Rossetti_ 187
  The Evil under the Sun 192


The Subscribers to this Work are respectfully informed that the
future Numbers will appear on the last day of the Month for which
they are dated. Also, that a supplementary, or large-sized Etching
will occasionally be given.


[Illustration]



Viola and Olivia


  When Viola, a servant of the Duke,
  Of him she loved the page, went, sent by him,
  To tell Olivia that great love which shook
  His breast and stopt his tongue; was it a whim,
  Or jealousy or fear that she must look
    Upon the face of that Olivia?

  'Tis hard to say if it were whim or fear
  Or jealousy, but it was natural,
  As natural as what came next, the near
  Intelligence of hearts: Olivia
  Loveth, her eye abused by a thin wall
    Of custom, but her spirit's eyes were clear.

  Clear? we have oft been curious to know
  The after-fortunes of those lovers dear;
  Having a steady faith some deed must show
  That they were married souls--unmarried here--
  Having an inward faith that love, called so
  In verity, is of the spirit, clear
  Of earth and dress and sex--it may be near
    What Viola returned Olivia?



A Dialogue on Art


[The following paper had been sent as a contribution to this
publication scarcely more than a week before its author, Mr. John
Orchard, died. It was written to commence a series of "Dialogues on
Art," which death has rendered for ever incomplete: nevertheless, the
merits of this commencement are such that they seemed to warrant its
publication as a fragment; and in order that the chain of argument
might be preserved, so far as it goes, uninterrupted, the dialogue is
printed entire in the present number, despite its length. Of the
writer, but little can be said. He was an artist; but ill health,
almost amounting to infirmity--his portion from childhood--rendered
him unequal to the bodily labour inseparable from his profession: and
in the course of his short life, whose youth was scarcely
consummated, he exhibited, from time to time, only a very few small
pictures, and these, as regards public recognition, in no way
successfully. In art, however, he gave to the "seeing eye," token of
that ability and earnestness which the "hearing ear" will not fail to
recognize in the dialogue now published; where the vehicle of
expression, being more purely intellectual, was more within his grasp
than was the physical and toilsome embodiment of art.

It is possible that a search among the papers he has left, may bring
to light a few other fugitive pieces, which will, in such event, as
the Poem succeeding this Dialogue, be published in these pages.

To the end that the Author's scheme may be, as far as is now
possible, understood and appreciated, we subjoin, in his own words,
some explanation of his further intent, and of the views and feelings
which guided him in the composition of the dialogue:

"I have adopted the form of dialogue for several, to me, cogent
reasons; 1st, because it gives the writer the power of exhibiting the
question, Art, on all its sides; 2nd, because the great phases of Art
could be represented idiosyncratically; and, to make this clear, I
have named the several speakers accordingly; 3rd, because dialogue
secures the attention; and, that secured, deeper things strike, and
go deeper than otherwise they could be made to; and, 4th and last,
because all my earliest and most delightful pleasures associate
themselves with dialogue,--(the old dramatists, Lucian, Walter Savage
Landor, &c.)

"You will find that I have not made one speaker say a thing on
purpose for another to condemn it; but that I make each one utter his
wisest in the very wisest manner he can, or rather, that I can for
him.

"The further continuation of this 1st dialogue embraces the question
_Nature_, and its processes, invention and imitation,--imitation
chiefly. Kosmon begins by showing, in illustration of the truth of
Christian's concluding sentences, how imperfectly all the Ancients,
excepting the Hebrews, loved, understood, or felt Nature, &c. This is
not an unimportant portion of Art knowledge.

"I must not forget to say that the last speech of Kosmon will be
answered by Christian when they discourse of imitation. It properly
belongs to imitation; and, under that head, it can be most
effectively and perfectly confuted. Somewhat after this idea, the
"verticalism" and "involution" will be shown to be direct from
Nature; the gilding, &c., disposed of on the ground of the old piety
using the most precious materials as the most religious and worthy of
them; and hence, by a very easy and probable transition, they
concluded that that which was most soul-worthy, was also most
natural."]


Dialogue I., in the House of Kalon


_Kalon._ Welcome, my friends:--this day above all others; to-day is
the first day of spring. May it be the herald of a bountiful
year,--not alone in harvests of seeds. Great impulses are moving
through man; swift as the steam-shot shuttle, weaving some mighty
pattern, goes the new birth of mind. As yet, hidden from eyes is the
design: whether it be poetry, or painting, or music, or architecture,
or whether it be a divine harmony of all, no manner of mind can tell;
but that it is mighty, all manners of minds, moved to involuntary
utterance, affirm. The intellect has at last again got to work upon
thought: too long fascinated by matter and prisoned to motive
geometry, genius--wisdom seem once more to have become human, to have
put on man, and to speak with divine simplicity. Kosmon, Sophon,
again welcome! your journey is well-timed; Christian, my young
friend, of whom I have often written to you, this morning tells me by
letter that to-day he will pay me his long-promised visit. You, I
know, must rejoice to meet him: this interchange of knowledge cannot
fail to improve us, both by knocking down and building up: what is
true we shall hold in common; what is false not less in common
detest. The debateable ground, if at last equally debateable as it
was at first, is yet ploughed; and some after-comer may sow it with
seed, and reap therefrom a plentiful harvest.

_Sophon._ Kalon, you speak wisely. Truth hath many sides like a
diamond with innumerable facets, each one alike brilliant and
piercing. Your information respecting your friend Christian has not a
little interested me, and made me desirous of knowing him.

_Kosmon._ And I, no less than Sophon, am delighted to hear that we
shall both see and taste your friend.

_Sophon._ Kalon, by what you just now said, you would seem to think a
dearth of original thought in the world, at any time, was an evil:
perhaps it is not so; nay, perhaps, it is a good! Is not an
interregnum of genius necessary somewhere? A great genius, sun-like,
compels lesser suns to gravitate with and to him; and this is
subversive of originality. Age is as visible in thought as it is in
man. Death is indispensably requisite for a _new_ life. Genius is
like a tree, sheltering and affording support to numberless creepers
and climbers, which latter die and live many times before their
protecting tree does; flourishing even whilst that decays, and thus,
lending to it a greenness not its own; but no new life can come out
of that expiring tree; it must die: and it is not until it is dead,
and fallen, and _rotted into compost_, that another tree can grow
there; and many years will elapse before the new birth can increase
and occupy the room the previous one occupied, and flourish anew with
a greenness all its own. This on one side. On another; genius is
essentially imitative, or rather, as I just now said, gravitative; it
gravitates towards that point peculiarly important at the moment of
its existence; as air, more rarified in some places than in others,
causes the winds to rush towards _them_ as toward a centre: so that
if poetry, painting, or music slumbers, oratory may ravish the world,
or chemistry, or steam-power may seduce and rule, or the sciences sit
enthroned. Thus, nature ever compensates one art with another; her
balance alone is the always just one; for, like her course of the
seasons, she grows, ripens, and lies fallow, only that stronger,
larger and better food may be reared.

_Kalon._ By your speaking of chemistry, and the mechanical arts and
sciences, as periodically ruling the world along with poetry,
painting, and music,--am I to understand that you deem them powers
intellectually equal, and to require of their respective professors
as mighty, original, and _human_ a genius for their successful
practice?

_Kosmon._ Human genius! why not? Are they not equally human?--nay,
are they not--especially steam-power, chemistry and the electric
telegraph--more--eminently more--useful to man, more radically
civilizers, than music, poetry, painting, sculpture, or architecture?

_Kalon._ Stay, Kosmon! whither do you hurry? Between chemistry and
the mechanical arts and sciences, and between poetry, painting, and
music, there exists the whole totality of genius--of genius as
distinguished from talent and industry. To be useful alone is not to
be great: _plus_ only is _plus_, and the sum is _minus_ something and
_plus_ in nothing if the most unimaginable particle only be absent.
The fine arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture,
as thought, or idea, Athene-like, are complete, finished, revelations
of wisdom at once. Not so the mechanical arts and sciences: they are
arts of growth; they are shaped and formed gradually, (and that, more
by a blind sort of guessing than by intuition,) and take many men's
lives to win even to one true principle. On all sides they are the
exact opposites of each other; for, in the former, the principles
from the first are mature, and only the manipulation immature; in the
latter, it is the principles that are almost always immature, and the
manipulation as constantly mature. The fine arts are always grounded
upon truth; the mechanical arts and sciences almost always upon
hypothesis; the first are unconfined, infinite, immaterial,
impossible of reduction into formulas, or of conversion into
machines; the last are limited, finite, material, can be uttered
through formulas, worked by arithmetic, tabulated and seen in
machines.

_Sophon._ Kosmon, you see that Kalon, true to his nature, prefers the
beautiful and good, to the good without the beautiful; and you, who
love nature, and regard all that she, and what man from her, can
produce, with equal delight,--true to your's,--cannot perceive
wherefore he limits genius to the fine arts. Let me show you why
Kalon's ideas are truer than yours. You say that chemistry,
steam-power, and the electric telegraph, are more radically
civilizers than poetry, painting, or music: but bethink you: what
emotions beyond the common and selfish ones of wonder and fear do the
mechanical arts or sciences excite, or communicate? what pity, or
love, or other holy and unselfish desires and aspirations, do they
elicit? Inert of themselves in all teachable things, they are the
agents only whereby teachable things,--the charities, sympathies and
love,--may be more swiftly and more certainly conveyed and diffused:
and beyond diffusing media the mechanical arts or sciences cannot
get; for they are merely simple facts; nothing more: they cannot
induct; for they, in or of themselves, have no inductive powers, and
their office is confined to that of carrying and spreading abroad the
powers which do induct; which powers make a full, complete, and
visible existence only in the fine arts. In FACT and THOUGHT we have
the whole question of superiority decided. Fact is merely physical
record: Thought is the application of that record to something
_human_. Without application, the fact is only fact, and nothing
more; the application, thought, then, certainly must be superior to
the record, fact. Also in thought man gets the clearest glimpse he
will ever have of soul, and sees the incorporeal make the nearest
approach to the corporeal that it is possible for it to do here upon
earth. And hence, these noble acts of wisdom are--far--far above the
mechanical arts and sciences, and are properly called fine arts,
because their high and peculiar office is to refine.

_Kosmon._ But, certainly thought is as much exercised in deducting
from physical facts the sciences and mechanical arts as ever it is in
poetry, painting, or music. The act of inventing print, or of
applying steam, is quite as soul-like as the inventing of a picture,
poem, or statue.

_Kalon._ Quite. The chemist, poet, engineer, or painter, alike,
think. But the things upon which they exercise their several
faculties are very widely unlike each other; the chemist or engineer
cogitates only the physical; the poet or painter joins to the
physical the human, and investigates soul--scans the world in man
added to the world without him--takes in universal creation, its
sights, sounds, aspects, and ideas. Sophon says that the fine arts
are thoughts; but I think I know a more comprehensive word; for they
are something more than thoughts; they are things also; that word is
NATURE--Nature fully--thorough nature--the world of creation. All
that is _in_ man, his mysteries of soul, his thoughts and
emotions--deep, wise, holy, loving, touching, and fearful,--or in the
world, beautiful, vast, ponderous, gloomy, and awful, moved with
rhythmic harmonious utterance--_that_ is Poetry. All that is _of_
man--his triumphs, glory, power, and passions; or of the world--its
sunshine and clouds, its plains, hills or valleys, its wind-swept
mountains and snowy Alps, river and ocean--silent, lonely, severe,
and sublime--mocked with living colours, hue and tone,--_that_ is
Painting. Man--heroic man, his acts, emotions, loves,--aspirative,
tender, deep, and calm,--intensified, purified, colourless,--exhibited
peculiarly and directly through his own form;_that_ is sculpture.
All the voices of nature--of man--his bursts of rage, pity, and
fear--his cries of joy--his sighs of love; of the winds and the
waters--tumultuous, hurrying, surging, tremulous, or gently
falling--married to melodious numbers;_that_ is music. And, the music
of proportions--of nature and man, and the harmony and opposition of
light and shadow, set forth in the ponderous; _that_ is Architecture.

_Christian._ [_as he enters_] Forbear, Kalon! These I know for your
dear fiends, Kosmon and Sophon. The moment of discoursing with them
has at last arrived: May I profit by it! Kalon, fearful of checking
your current of thought, I stood without, and heard that which you
said: and, though I agree with you in all your definitions of poetry,
painting, sculpture, music, and architecture; yet certainly all
things in or of man, or the world, are not, however equally
beautiful, equally worthy of being used by the artist. Fine art
absolutely rejects all impurities of form; not less absolutely does
it reject all impurities of passion and expression. Everything
throughout a poem, picture, or statue, or in music, may be sensuously
beautiful; but nothing must be sensually so. Sins are only paid for
in virtues; thus, every sin found is a virtue lost--lost--not only to
the artist, but a cause of loss to others--to all who look upon what
he does. He should deem his art a sacred treasure, intrusted to him
for the common good; and over it he should build, of the most
precious materials, in the simplest, chastest, and truest
proportions, a temple fit for universal worship: instead of which, it
is too often the case that he raises above it an edifice of clay;
which, as mortal as his life, falls, burying both it and himself
under a heap of dirt. To preserve him from this corruption of his
art, let him erect for his guidance a standard awfully high above
himself. Let him think of Christ; and what he would not show to as
pure a nature as His, let him never be seduced to work on, or expose
to the world.

_Kosmon._ Oh, Kalon, whither do we go! Greek art is condemned, and
Satire hath got its death-stroke. The beautiful is not the beautiful
unless it is fettered to the moral; and Virtue rejects the physical
perfections, lest she should fall in love with herself, and sin and
cause sin.

_Christian._ Nay, Kosmon. Nothing pure,--nothing that is innocent,
chaste, unsensual,--whether Greek or satirical, is condemned: but
everything--every picture, poem, statue, or piece of music--which
elicits the sensual, viceful, and unholy desires of our nature--is,
and that utterly. The beautiful was created the true, morally as well
as physically; vice is a deformment of virtue,--not of form, to which
it is a parasitical addition--an accretion which can and must be
excised before the beautiful can show itself as it was originally
made, morally as well as formally perfect. How we all wish the
sensual, indecent, and brutal, away from Hogarth, so that we might
show him to the purest virgin without fear or blushing.

_Sophon._ And as well from Shakspere. Rotten members, though small in
themselves, are yet large enough to taint the whole body. And those
impurities, like rank growths of vine, may be lopped away without
injuring any vital principle. In perfect art the utmost purity of
intention, design, and execution, alone is wisdom. Every tree--every
flower, in defiance of adverse contingencies, grows with perfect will
to be perfect: and, shall man, who hath what they have not, a soul
wherewith he may defy all ill, do less?

_Kosmon._ But how may this purity be attained? I see every where
close round the pricks; not a single step may be taken in advance
without wounding something vital. Corruption strews thick both earth
and ocean; it is only the heavens that are pure, and man cannot live
upon manna alone.

_Christian._ Kosmon, you would seem to mistake what Sophon and I
mean. Neither he nor I wish nature to be used less, or otherwise than
as it appears; on the contrary, we wish it used more--more directly.
Nature itself is comparatively pure; all that we desire is the
removal of the factitious matter that the vice of fashion, evil
hearts, and infamous desires, graft upon it. It is not simple
innocent nature that we would exile, but the devilish and libidinous
corruptions that sully nature.

_Kalon._ But, if your ideas were strictly carried out, there would be
but little of worth left in the world for the artist to use; for, if
I understand you rightly, you object to his making use of any
passion, whether heroic, patriotic, or loving, that is not rigidly
virtuous.

_Christian._ I do. Without he has a didactic aim; like as Hogarth
had. A picture, poem, or statue, unless it speaks some purpose, is
mere paint, paper, or stone. A work of art must have a purpose, or it
is not a work of _fine_ art: thus, then, if it be a work of fine art,
it has a purpose; and, having purpose, it has either a good or an
evil one: there is no alternative. An artist's works are his
children, his immortal heirs, to his evil as well as to his good; as
he hath trained them, so will they teach. Let him ask himself why
does a parent so tenderly rear his children. Is it not because he
knows that evil is evil, whether it take the shape of angels or
devils? And is not the parent's example worthy of the artist's
imitation? What advantage has a man over a child? Is there any
preservative peculiar to manhood that it alone may see and touch sin,
and yet be not defiled? Verily, there is none! All mere battles,
assassinations, immolations, horrible deaths, and terrible situations
used by the artist solely to excite,--every passion degrading to
man's perfect nature,--should certainly be rejected, and that
unhesitatingly.

_Sophon._--Suffer me to extend the just conclusions of Christian.
Art--true art--fine art--cannot be either coarse or low.
Innocent-like, no taint will cling to it, and a smock frock is as
pure as "virginal-chaste robes." And,--sensualism, indecency, and
brutality, excepted--sin is not sin, if not in the act; and, in
satire, with the same exceptions, even sin in the act is tolerated
when used to point forcibly a moral crime, or to warn society of a
crying shame which it can remedy.

_Kalon._ But, my dear Sophon,--and you, Christian,--you do not
condemn the oak because of its apples; and, like them, the sin in the
poem, picture, or statue, may be a wormy accretion grafted from
without. The spectator often makes sin where the artist intended
none. For instance, in the nude,--where perhaps, the poet, painter,
or sculptor, imagines he has embodied only the purest and chastest
ideas and forms, the sensualist sees--what he wills to see; and,
serpent-like, previous to devouring his prey, he covers it with his
saliva.

_Christian._ The Circean poison, whether drunk from the clearest
crystal or the coarsest clay, alike intoxicates and makes beasts of
men. Be assured that every nude figure or nudity introduced in a
poem, picture, or piece of sculpture, merely on physical grounds, and
only for effect, is vicious. And, where it is boldly introduced and
forms the central idea, it ought never to have a sense of its
condition: it is not nudity that is sinful, but the figure's
knowledge of its nudity,(too surely communicated by it to the
spectator,) that makes it so. Eve and Adam before their fall were not
more utterly shameless than the artist ought to make his inventions.
The Turk believes that, at the judgment-day, every artist will be
compelled to furnish, from his own soul, soul for every one of his
creations. This thought is a noble one, and should thoroughly awake
poet, painter, and sculptor, to the awful responsibilities they
labour under. With regard to the sensualist,--who is omnivorous, and
swine-like, assimilates indifferently pure and impure, degrading
everything he hears or sees,--little can be said beyond this; that
for him, if the artist _be_ without sin, he is not answerable. But in
this responsibility he has two rigid yet just judges, God and
himself;--let him answer there before that tribunal. God will acquit
or condemn him only as he can acquit or condemn himself.

_Kalon._ But, under any circumstance, beautiful nude flesh
beautifully painted must kindle sensuality; and, described as
beautifully in poetry, it will do the like, almost, if not quite, as
readily. Sculpture is the only form of art in which it can be used
thoroughly pure, chaste, unsullied, and unsullying. I feel,
Christian, that you mean this. And see what you do!--What a vast
domain of art you set a Solomon's seal upon! how numberless are the
poems, pictures, and statues--the most beautiful productions of their
authors--you put in limbo! To me, I confess, it appears the very top
of prudery to condemn these lovely creations, merely because they
quicken some men's pulses.

_Kosmon._ And, to me, it appears hypercriticism to object to
pictures, poems, and statues, calling them not works of art--or fine
art--because they have no higher purpose than eye or ear-delight. If
this law be held to be good, very few pictures called of the English
school--of the English school, did I say?--very few pictures at all,
of any school, are safe from condemnation: almost all the Dutch must
suffer judgment, and a very large proportion of modern sculpture,
poetry, and music, will not pass. Even "Christabel" and the "Eve of
St. Agnes" could not stand the ordeal.

_Christian._ Oh, Kalon, you hardly need an answer! What! shall the
artist spend weeks and months, nay, sometimes years, in thought and
study, contriving and perfecting some beautiful invention,--in order
only that men's pulses may be quickened? What!--can he, jesuit-like,
dwell in the house of soul, only to discover where to sap her
foundations?--Satan-like, does he turn his angel of light into a
fiend of darkness, and use his God-delegated might against its giver,
making Astartes and Molochs to draw other thousands of innocent lives
into the embrace of sin? And as for you, Kosmon, I regard purpose as
I regard soul; one is not more the light of the thought than the
other is the light of the body; and both, soul and purpose, are
necessary for a complete intellect; and intellect, of the
intellectual--of which the fine arts are the capital members--is not
more to be expected than demanded. I believe that most of the
pictures you mean are mere natural history paintings from the animal
side of man. The Dutchmen may, certainly, go Letheward; but for their
colour, and subtleties of execution, they would not be tolerated by
any man of taste.

_Sophon._ Christian here, I think, is too stringent. Though walls be
necessary round our flower gardens to keep out swine and other vile
cattle--yet I can see no reason why, with excluding beasts, we should
also exclude light and air. Purpose is purpose or not, according to
the individual capacity to assimilate it. Different plants require
different soils, and they will rather die than grow on unfriendly
ones; it is the same with animals; they endure existence only through
their natural food; and this variety of soils, plants, and
vegetables, is the world less man. But man, as well as the other
created forms, is subject to the same law: he takes only that aliment
he can digest. It is sufficient with some men that their sensoria be
delighted with pleasurable and animated grouping, colour, light, and
shade: this feeling or desire of their's is, in itself, thoroughly
innocent: it is true, it is not a great burden for them to carry; no,
but it is the lightness of the burden that is the merit; for thereby,
their step is quickened and not clogged, their intellect is
exhilarated and not oppressed. Thus, then, a purpose _is_ secured,
from a picture or poem or statue, which may not have in it the
smallest particle of what Christian and I think necessary for it to
possess; he reckons a poem, picture, or statue, to be a work of fine
art by the quality and quantity of thought it contains, by the mental
leverage it possesses wherewith to move his mind, by the honey which
he may hive, and by the heavenly manna he may gather therefrom.

_Kosmon._ Christian wants art like Magdalen Hospitals, where the
windows are so contrived that all of earth is excluded, and only
heaven is seen. Wisdom is not only shown in the soul, but also in the
body: the bones, nerves, and muscles, are quite as wonderful in idea
as is the incorporeal essence which rules them. And the animal part
of man wants as much caring for as the spiritual: God made both, and
is equally praised through each. And men's souls are as much
touchable and teachable through their animal feelings as ever they
are through their mental aspirations; this both Orpheus and Amphion
knew when they, with their music, made towns to rise in savage woods
by savage hands. And hence, in that light, nothing is without a
purpose; and I maintain,--if they give but the least glimpse of
happiness to a single human being,--that even the Dutch masters are
useful, I believe that the thought-wrapped philosopher, who, in his
close-pent study, designs some valuable blessing for his lower and
more animal brethren, only pursues the craving of his nature; and
that his happiness is no higher than their's in their several
occupations and delights. Sight and sense are fully as powerful for
happiness as thought and ratiocination. Nature grows flowers wherever
she can; she causes sweet waters to ripple over stony beds, and
living wells to spring up in deserts, so that grass and herbs may
grow and afford nourishment to _some_ of God's creatures. Even the
granite and the lava must put forth blossoms.

_Kalon._ Oh Christian, children cannot digest strong meats! Neither
can a blind man be made to see by placing him opposite the sun. The
sound of the violin is as innocent as that of the organ. And, though
there be a wide difference in the sacredness of the occupations, yet
dance, song, and the other amusements common to society, are quite as
necessary to a healthy condition of the mind and body, as is to the
soul the pursuit and daily practice of religion. The healthy
condition of the mind and body is, after all, the happy life; and
whether that life be most mental or most animal it matters little,
even before God, so long as its delights, amusements, and
occupations, be thoroughly innocent and chaste.

_Christian._ So long as the pursuits, pastimes, and pleasures of
mankind be innocent and chaste,--with you all, heartily, I believe it
matters little how or in what form they be enjoyed. Pure water is
certainly equally pure, whether it trickle from the hill-side or flow
through crystal conduits; and equally refreshing whether drunk from
the iron bowl or the golden goblet;--only the crystal and gold will
better please some natures than the hill-side and the iron. I know
also that a star may give more light than the moon,--but that is up
in its own heavens and not here on earth. I know that it is not light
and shade which make a complete globe, but, as well, the local and
neutral tints. Thus, my friends, you perceive that I am neither for
building a wall, nor for contriving windows so as to exclude light,
air, and earth. As much as any of you, I am for every man's sitting
under his own vine, and for his training, pruning, and eating its
fruit how he pleases. Let the artist paint, write, or carve, what and
how he wills, teach the world through sense or through thought,--I
will not dissent; I have no patent to entitle me to do so; nay, I
will be thoroughly satisfied with whatsoever he does, so long as it
is pure, unsensual, and earnestly true. But, as the mental is the
peculiar feature that places man apart from and above animals,--so
ought all that he does to be apart from and above their nature;
especially in the fine arts, which are the intellectual perfection of
the intellectual. And nothing short of this intellectual
perfection,--however much they may be pictures, poems, statues, or
music,--can rank such works to be works of Fine Art. They may have
merit,--nay, be useful, and hence, in some sort, have a purpose: but
they are as much works of Fine Art as Babel was the Temple of
Solomon.

_Sophon._ And man can be made to understand these truths--can be
drawn to crave for and love the fine arts: it is only to take him in
hand as we would take some animal--tenderly using it--entreating it,
as it were, to do its best--to put forth all its powers with all its
capable force and beauty. Nor is it so very difficult a task to
raise, in the low, conceptions of things high: the mass of men have a
fine appreciation of God and his goodness: and as active, charitable,
and sympathetic a nurture in the beautiful and true as they have
given to them in religion, would as surely and swiftly raise in them
an equally high appreciation of the fine arts. But, if the artist
would essay such a labour, he must show them what fine art is: and,
in order to do this effectually, as an architect clears away from
some sacred edifice which he restores the shambles and shops, which,
like filthy toads cowering on a precious monument, have squatted
themselves round its noble proportions; so must he remove from his
art-edifice the deformities which hide--the corruptions which shame
it.

_Christian._ How truly Sophon speaks a retrospective look will show.
The disfigurements which both he and I deplore are strictly what he
compared them to; they are shambles and shops grafted on a sacred
edifice. Still, indigenous art is sacred and devoted to religious
purposes: this keeps it pure for a time; but, like a stream
travelling and gathering other streams as it goes through wide
stretches of country to the sea, it receives greater and more
numerous impurities the farther it gets from its source, until, at
last, what was, in its rise, a gentle rilling through snows and over
whitest stones, roars into the ocean a muddy and contentious river.
Men soon long to touch and taste all that they see; savage-like, him
whom to-day they deem a god and worship, they on the morrow get an
appetite for and kill, to eat and barter. And thus art is degraded,
made a thing of carnal desire--a commodity of the exchange. Yes,
Sophon, to be instructive, to become a teaching instrument, the
art-edifice must be cleansed from its abominations; and, with them,
must the artist sweep out the improvements and ruthless restorations
that hang on it like formless botches on peopled tapestry. The
multitude must be brought to stand face to face with the pious and
earnest builders, to enjoy the severely simple, beautiful, aspiring,
and solemn temple, in all its first purity, the same as they
bequeathed it to them as their posterity.

_Kalon._ The peasant, upon acquaintance, quickly prefers wheaten
bread to the black and sour mass that formerly served him: and when
true jewels are placed before him, counterfeit ones in his eyes soon
lose their lustre, and become things which he scorns. The multitude
are teachable--teachable as a child; but, like a child, they are
self-willed and obstinate, and will learn in their own way, or not at
all. And, if the artist wishes to raise them unto a fit audience, he
must consult their very waywardness, or his work will be a Penelope's
web of done and undone: he must be to them not only cords of support
staying their every weakness against sin and temptation, but also,
tendrils of delight winding around them. But I cannot understand why
regeneration can flow to them through sacred art alone. All pure art
is sacred art. And the artist having soul as well as nature--the
lodestar as well as the lodestone--to steer his path by--and seeing
that he must circle earth--it matters little from what quarter he
first points his course; all that is necessary is that he go as
direct as possible, his knowledge keeping him from quicksands and
sunken rocks.

_Christian._ Yes, Kalon;--and, to compare things humble--though
conceived in the same spirit of love--with things mighty, the artist,
if he desires to inform the people thoroughly, must imitate Christ,
and, like him, stoop down to earth and become flesh of their flesh;
and his work should be wrought out with all his soul and strength in
the same world-broad charity, and truth, and virtue, and be, for
himself as well as for them, a justification for his teaching. But
all art, simply because it is pure and perfect, cannot, for those
grounds alone, be called sacred: Christian, it may, and that justly;
for only since Christ taught have morals been considered a religion.
Christian and sacred art bear that relation to each other that the
circle bears to its generating point; the first is only volume, the
last is power: and though the first--as the world includes
God--includes with it the last, still, the last is the greatest, for
it makes that which includes it: thus all pure art is Christian, but
not all is sacred. Christian art comprises the earth and its
humanities, and, by implication, God and Christ also; and sacred art
is the emanating idea--the central causating power--the jasper
throne, whereon sits Christ, surrounded by the prophets, apostles,
and saints, administering judgement, wisdom, and holiness. In this
sense, then, the art you would call sacred is not sacred, but
Christian: and, as _all perfect art is Christian_, regeneration
necessarily can only flow thence; and thus it is, as you say, that,
from whatever quarter the artist steers his course, he steers aright.

_Kosmon._ And, Christian, is a return to this sacred or Christian art
by you deemed possible? I question it. How can you get the art of one
age to reflect that of another, when the image to be reflected is
without the angle of reflection? The sun cannot be seen of us when it
is night! and that class of art has got its golden age too
remote--its night too long set--for it to hope ever to grasp rule
again, or again to see its day break upon it. You have likened art to
a river rising pure, and rolling a turbid volume into the ocean. I
have a comparison equally just. The career of one artist contains in
itself the whole of art-history; its every phase is presented by him
in the course of his life. Savage art is beheld in his childish
scratchings and barbarous glimmerings; Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian
art in his boyish rigidity and crude fixedness of idea and purpose;
Mediaeval, or pre-Raffaelle art is seen in his youthful timid
darings, his unripe fancies oscillating between earth and heaven;
there where we expect truth, we see conceit; there where we want
little, much is given--now a blank eyed riddle,--dark with excess of
self,--now a giant thought--vast but repulsive,--and now angel
visitors startling us with wisdom and touches of heavenly beauty.
Every where is seen exactness; but it is the exactness of hesitation,
and not of knowledge--the line of doubt, and not of power: all the
promises for ripeness are there; but, as yet, all are immature. And
mature art is presented when all these rude scaffoldings are thrown
down--when the man steps out of the chrysalis a complete idea--both
Psyche and Eros--free-thoughted, free-tongued, and free-handed;--a
being whose soul moves through the heavens and the earth--now
choiring it with angels--and now enthroning it, bay-crowned, among
the men-kings;--whose hand passes over all earth, spreading forth its
beauties unerring as the seasons--stretches through cloudland,
revealing its delectable glories, or, eagle-like, soars right up
against the sun;--or seaward goes seizing the cresting foam as it
leaps--the ships and their crews as they wallow in the watery
valleys, or climb their steeps, or hang over their flying
ridges:--daring and doing all whatsoever it shall dare to do, with
boundless fruitfulness of idea, and power, and line; that is mature
art--art of the time of Phidias, of Raffaelle, and of Shakspere. And,
Christian, in preferring the art of the period previous to Raffaelle
to the art of his time, you set up the worse for the better, elevate
youth above manhood, and tell us that the half-formed and unripe
berry is wholesomer than the perfect and ripened fruit.

_Christian._ Kosmon, your thoughts seduce you; or rather, your nature
prefers the full and rich to the exact and simple: you do not go deep
enough--do not penetrate beneath the image's gilt overlay, and see
that it covers only worm-devoured wood. Your very comparison tells
against you. What you call ripeness, others, with as much truth, may
call over-ripeness, nay, even rottenness; when all the juices are
drunk with their lusciousness, sick with over-sweetness. And the art
which you call youthful and immature--may be, most likely is, mature
and wholesome in the same degree that it is tasteful, a perfect round
of beautiful, pure, and good. You call youth immature; but in what
does it come short of manhood. Has it not all that man can
have,--free, happy, noble, and spiritual thoughts? And are not those
thoughts newer, purer, and more unselfish in the youth than in the
man? What eye has the man, that the youth's is not as comprehensive,
keen, rapid, and penetrating? or what hand, that the youth's is not
as swift, forceful, cunning, and true? And what does the youth gain
in becoming man? Is it freshness, or deepness, or power, or wisdom?
nay rather--is it not languor--the languor of satiety--of
indifferentism? And thus soul-rusted and earth-charmed, what mate is
he for his former youth? Drunken with the world-lees, what can he do
but pourtray nature drunken as well, and consumed with the same fever
or stupor that consumes himself, making up with gilding and filigree
what he lacks in truth and sincerity? and what comparison shall exist
here and between what his youth might or could have done, with a soul
innocent and untroubled as heaven's deep calm of blue, gazing on
earth with seraph eyes--looking, but not longing--or, in the spirit
rapt away before the emerald-like rainbow-crowned throne, witnessing
"things that shall be hereafter," and drawing them down almost as
stainless as he beheld them? What an array of deep, earnest, and
noble thinkers, like angels armed with a brightness that withers,
stand between Giotto and Raffaelle; to mention only Orcagna,
Ghiberti, Masaccio, Lippi, Fra Beato Angelico, and Francia. Parallel
_them_ with post-Raffaelle artists? If you think you can, you have
dared a labour of which the fruit shall be to you as Dead Sea apples,
golden and sweet to the eye, but, in the mouth, ashes and bitterness.
And the Phidian era was a youthful one--the highest and purest period
of Hellenic art: after that time they added no more gods or heroes,
but took for models instead--the Alcibiadeses and Phyrnes, and made
Bacchuses and Aphrodites; not as Phidias would have--clothed with the
greatness of thought, or girded with valour, or veiled with modesty;
but dissolved with the voluptuousness of the bath, naked, wanton, and
shameless.

_Sophon._ You hear, Kosmon, that Christian prefers ripe youth to ripe
manhood: and he is right. Early summer is nobler than early autumn;
the head is wiser than the hand. You take the hand to mean too much:
you should not judge by quantity, or luxuriance, or dexterity, but by
quality, chastity, and fidelity. And colour and tone are only a fair
setting to thought and virtue. Perhaps it is the fate, or rather the
duty, of mortals to make a sacrifice for all things, withheld as well
as given. Hand sometimes succumbs to head, and head in its turn
succumbs to hand; the first is the lot of youth, the last of manhood.
The question is--which of the two we can best afford to do without.
Narrowed down to this, I think but very few men would be found who
would not sacrifice in the loss of hand in preference to its gain at
the loss of head.

_Kosmon._ But, Christian, in advocating a return to this
pre-Raffaelle art, are you not--you yourself--urging the committal
of "ruthless restorations" and "improvements," new and vile as any
that you have denounced? You tell the artist, that he should restore
the sacred edifice to its first purity--the same as it was bequeathed
by its pious and earnest builders. But can he do this and be himself
original? For myself, I would above all things urge him to study how
to _reproduce_, and not how to represent--to imitate no past
perfection, but to create for himself another, as beautiful, wise,
and true. I would say to him, "build not on old ground, profaned,
polluted, trod into slough by filthy animals; but break new
ground--virgin ground--ground that thought has never imagined or eye
seen, and dig into our hearts a foundation, deep and broad as our
humanity. Let it not be a temple formed of hands only, but built up
of _us_--us of the present--body of our body, soul of our soul."

_Christian._ When men wish to raise a piece of stone, or to move it
along, they seek for a fulcrum to use their lever from; and, this
obtained, they can place the stone wheresoever they please. And
world-perfections come into existence too slowly for men to reject
all the teaching and experience of their predecessors: the labour of
learning is trifling compared to the labour of finding out; the first
implies only days, the last, hundreds of years. The discovery of the
new world without the compass would have been sheer chance; but with
it, it became an absolute certainty. So, and in such manner, the
modern artist seeks to use early mediaeval art, as a fulcrum to raise
through, but only as a fulcrum; for he himself holds the lever,
whereby he shall both guide and fix the stones of his art temple; as
experience, which shall be to him a rudder directing the motion of
his ship, but in subordination to his control; and as a compass,
which shall regulate his journey, but which, so far from taking away
his liberty, shall even add to it, because through it his course is
set so fast in the ways of truth as to allow him, undividedly, to
give up his whole soul to the purpose of his voyage, and to steer a
wider and freer path over the trackless, but to him, with his rudder
and compass, no longer the trackless or waste ocean; for, God and his
endeavours prospering him, that shall yield up unto his hands
discoveries as man-worthy as any hitherto beheld by men, or conceived
by poets.

_Kalon._ But, Christian, another artist with equal justness might use
Hellenic art as a means toward making happy discoveries; formatively,
there is nothing in it that is not both beautiful and perfect; and
beautiful things, rainbow-like, are once and for ever beautiful; and
the contemplation and study of its dignified, graceful, and truthful
embodiments--which, by common consent, it only is allowed to possess
in an eminent and universal degree--is full as likely to awaken in
the mind of its student as high revelations of wisdom, and cause him
to bear to earth as many perfections for man, as ever the study of
pre-Raffaelle art can reveal or give, through its votary.

_Christian._ But beautiful things, to be beautiful in the highest
degree, like the rainbow, must have a spiritual as well as a physical
voice. Lovely as it is, it is not the arch of colours that glows in
the heavens of our hearts; what does, is the inner and invisible
sense for which it was set up of old by God, and of which its
many-hued form is only the outward and visible sign. Thus, beautiful
things alone, of themselves, are not sufficient for this task; to be
sufficient they must be as vital with soul as they are with shape. To
be formatively perfect is not enough; they must also be spiritually
perfect, and this not _locally_ but universally. The art of the
Greeks was a local art; and hence, now, it has no spiritual. Their
gods speak to us no longer as gods, or teach us divinely: they have
become mere images of stone--profane embodiments. False to our
spiritual, Hellenic art wants every thing that Christian art is full
of. Sacred and universal, this clasps us, as Abraham's bosom did
Lazarus, within its infinite embraces, causing every fibre of our
being to quicken under its heavenly truths. Ithuriel's golden spear
was not more antagonistic to Satan's loathly transformation--than is
Christian opposed to pagan art. The wide, the awful gulf, separating
one from the other, will be felt instantly in its true force by first
thinking ZEUS, and then thinking CHRIST. How pale, shadowy, and
shapeless the vision of lust, revenge, and impotence, that rises at
the thought of Zeus; but at the thought of Christ, how overwhelming
the inrush of sublime and touching realities; what height and depth
of love and power; what humility, and beauty, and immaculate purity
are made ours at the mention of his name; the Saviour, the
Intercessor, the Judge, the Resurrection and the Life. These--these
are the divinely awful truths taught by our faith; and which should
also be taught by our art. Hellenic art, like the fig tree that only
bore leaves, withered at Christ's coming; and thus no "happy
discoveries" can flow thence, or "revelations of wisdom," or other
perfections be borne to earth for man.

_Sophon._ Christian thinks and says, that if the spiritual be not
_in_ a thing, it cannot be put upon it; and hence, if a work of art
be not a god, it must be a man, or a mere image of one; and that the
faith of the Pagan is the foolishness of the Christian. Nor does he
utter unreason; for, notwithstanding their perfect forms, their gods
are not gods to us, but only perfect forms: Apollo, Theseus, the
Ilissus, Aphrodite, Artemis, Psyche, and Eros, are only shapeful
manhood, womanhood, virginhood, and youth, and move us only by the
exact amount of humanity they possess in common with ourselves.
_Homer and aeschylus, and Sophocles, and Phidias, live not by the
sacred in them, but by the human:_ and, but for this common bond,
Hellenic art would have been submerged in the same Lethe that has
drowned the Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian Theogonies and arts. And,
if we except form, what other thing does Hellenic art offer to the
modern artist, that is not thoroughly opposed to his faith, wants,
and practice? And thought--thought in accordance with all the lines
of his knowledge, temperament, and habits--thought through which he
makes and shapes for men, and is understood by them--it is as
destitute of, as inorganic matter of soul and reason. But Christian
art, because of the faith upon which it is built, suffers under no
such drawbacks, for that faith is as personal and vigorous now as
ever it was at its origin--every motion and principle of our being
moves to it like a singing harmony;--it is the breath which brings
out of us, aeolian-harp-like, our most penetrating and heavenly
music--the river of the water of life, which searches all our dry
parts and nourishes them, causing them to spring up and bear
abundantly the happy seed which shall enrich and make fat the earth
to the uttermost parts thereof.

_Kalon._ With you both I believe, that faith is necessary to a man,
and that without faith sight even is feeble: but I also believe that
a man is as much a part of the religious, moral, and social system in
which he lives, as is a plant of the soil, situation, and climate in
which it exists: and that external applications have just as much
power to change the belief of the man, as they have to alter the
structure of the plant. A faith once in a man, it is there always;
and, though unfelt even by himself, works actively: and Hellenic art,
so far from being an impediment to the Christian belief, is the exact
reverse; for, it is the privilege of that belief, through its sublime
alchymy, to be able to transmute all it touches into itself: and the
perfect forms of Hellenic art, so touched, move our souls only the
more energetically upwards, because of their transcendent beauty; for
through them alone can we see how wonderfully and divinely God
wrought--how majestic, powerful, and vigorous he made man--how
lovely, soft, and winning, he made woman: and in beholding these
things, we are thankful to him that we are permitted to see them--not
as Pagans, but altogether as Christians. Whether Christian or Pagan,
the highest beauty is still the highest beauty; and the highest
beauty alone, to the total exclusion of gods and their myths, compels
our admiration.

_Kosmon._ Another thing we ought to remember, when judging Hellenic
Art, is, but for its existence, all other kinds--pre-Raffaelle as
well--could not have had being. The Greeks were, by far, more
inclined to worship nature as contained in themselves, than the
gods,--if the gods are not reflexes of themselves, which is most
likely. And, thus impelled, they broke through the monstrous
symbolism of Egypt, and made them gods after their own hearts; that
is, fashioned them out of themselves. And herein, I think we may
discern something of providence; for, suppose their natures had not
been so powerfully antagonistic to the traditions and conventions of
their religion, what other people in the world could or would have
done their work? Cast about a brief while in your memories, and
endeavor to find whether there has ever existed a people who in their
nature, nationality, and religion, have been so eminently fitted to
perform such a task as the Hellenic? You will then feel that we have
reason to be thankful that they were allowed to do what else had
never been done; and, which not done, all posterity would have
suffered to the last throe of time. And, if they have not made a
thorough perfection--a spiritual as well as a physical one--forget
not that, at least, they have made this physical representation a
finished one. They took it from the Egyptians, rude, clumsy, and
seated; its head stony--pinned to its chest; its hands tied to its
side, and its legs joined; they shaped it, beautiful, majestic, and
erect; elevated its head; breathed into it animal fire; gave movement
and action to its arms and hands; opened its legs and made it
walk--made it human at all points--the radical impersonation of
physical and sensuous beauty. And, if the god has receded into the
past and become a "pale, shadowy, and shapeless vision of lust,
revenge, and impotence," the human lives on graceful, vigorous, and
deathless, as at first, and excites in us admiration as unbounded as
ever followed it of old in Greece or Italy.

_Christian._ Yes, Kosmon, yes! they are flourished all over with the
rhetoric of the body; but nowhere is to be seen in them that diviner
poetry, the oratory of the soul! Truly they are a splendid casket
enclosing nothing--at least nothing now of importance to us; for what
they once contained, the world, when stirred with nobler matter,
disregarded, and left to perish. But, Kosmon, we cannot discuss
probabilities. Our question is--not whether the Greeks only could
have made such masterpieces of nature and art; but whether their
works are of that kind the _most fitted_ to carry forward to a more
ultimate perfection that idea which is peculiarly our's. All art,
more or less, is a species of symbolism; and the Hellenic,
notwithstanding its more universal method of typification, was fully
as symbolic as the Egyptian; and hence its language is not only dead,
but forgotten, and is now past recovery: and, if it were not, what
purpose would be served by its republication? For, for whom does the
artist work? The inevitable answer is, "For his nation!" His statue,
or picture, poem, or music, must be made up and out of them; they are
at once his exemplars, his audience, and his worshippers; and he is
their mirror in which they behold themselves as they are: he breathes
them vitally as an atmosphere, and they breathe him. Zeus, Athene,
Heracles, Prometheus, Agamemnon, Orestes, the House of Oedipus,
Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, and Antigone, spoke something to the
Hellenic nations; woke their piety, pity, or horror,--thrilled,
soothed, or delighted them; but they have no charm for our ears; for
us, they are literally disembodied ghosts, and voiceless as
shapeless. But not so are Christ, and the holy Apostles and saints,
and the Blessed Virgin; and not so is Hamlet, or Richard the Third,
or Macbeth, or Shylock, or the House of Lear, Ophelia, Desdemona,
Grisildis, or Una, or Genevieve. No: _they_ all speak and move real
and palpable before our eyes, and are felt deep down in the heart's
core of every thinking soul among us:--they all grapple to us with
holds that only life will loose. Of all this I feel assured, because,
a brief while since, we agreed together that man could only be raised
through an incarnation of himself. Tacitly, we would also seem to
have limited the uses of Hellenic art to the serving as models of
proportion, or as a gradus for form: and, though I cannot deny them
any merit they may have in this respect, still, I would wish to deal
cautiously with them: the artist,--most especially the young one, and
who is and would be most subject to them and open to their
influence,--should never have his soul asleep when his hand is awake;
but, like voice and instrument, one should always accompany the other
harmoniously.

_Kosmon._ But surely you will deal no less cautiously with early
mediaeval art. Archaisms are not more tolerable in pictures than they
are in statues, poems, or music; and the archaisms of this kind of
art are so numerous as to be at first sight the most striking feature
belonging to it. Most remarkable among these unnatural peculiarities
are gilded backgrounds, gilded hair, gilded ornaments and borders to
draperies and dresses, the latter's excessive verticalism of lines
and tedious involution of folds, and the childlike passivity of
countenance and expression: all of which are very prominent, and
operate as serious drawbacks to their merits; which--as I have freely
admitted--are in truth not a few, nor mean.

_Christian._ The artist is only a man, and living with other men in a
state of being called society; and,--though perhaps in a lesser
degree--he is as subject to its influences--its fashions and
customs--as they are. But in this respect his failings may be likened
to the dross which the purest metal in its molten state continually
throws up to its surface, but which is mere excrement, and so little
essential that it can be skimmed away: and, as the dross to the
metal, just so little essential are the archaisms you speak of to the
early art, and just so easily can they be cast aside. But bethink
you, Kosmon. Is Hellenic art without archaisms? And that feature of
it held to be its crowning perfection--its head--is not that a very
marked one? And, is it not so completely opposed to the artist's
experience in the forms of nature that--except in subjects from Greek
history and mythology--he dares not use it--at least without
modifying it so as to destroy its Hellenism?

_Sophon._ Then Hellenic Art is like a musical bell with a flaw in it;
before it can be serviceable it must be broken up and recast. If its
sum of beauty--its line of lines, the facial angle, must be
destroyed--as it undoubtedly must,--before it can be used for the
general purposes of art, then its claims over early mediaeval art, in
respect of form, are small indeed. But is it not altogether a great
archaism?

_Kalon._ Oh, Sophon! weighty as are the reasons urged against
Hellenic art by Christian and yourself, they are not weighty enough
to outbalance its beauty, at least to me: at present they may have
set its sun in gloom; yet I know that that obscuration, like a dark
foreground to a bright distance, will make its rising again only the
more surpassingly glorious. I admire its exquisite creations, because
they are beautiful, and noble, and perfect, and they elevate me
because I think them so; and their silent capabilities, like the
stardust of heaven before the intellectual insight, resolve
themselves into new worlds of thoughts and things so ever as I
contemplate their perfections: like a prolonged music, full of sweet
yet melancholy cadences, they have sunk into my heart--my brain--my
soul--never, never to cease while life shall hold with me. But, for
all that, my hands are not full; and, whithersoever the happy seed
shall require me, I am not for withholding plough or spade, planting
or watering; and that which I am called in the spirit to do--will I
do manfully and with my whole strength.

_Sophon._ Kalon, the conclusion of your speech is better than the
commencement. It is better to sacrifice myrrh and frankincense than
virtue and wisdom, thoughts than deeds. Would that all men were as
ready as yourself to dispark their little selfish enclosures, and
burn out all their hedges of prickly briers and brambles--turning the
evil into the good--the seed-catching into the seed-nourishing. Of
the too consumptions let us prefer the active, benevolent, and
purifying one of fire, to the passive, self-eating, and corrupting
one of rust: one half minute's clear shining may touch some watching
and waiting soul, and through him kindle whole ages of light.

_Christian._ Men do not stumble over what they know; and the day
fades so imperceptibly into night that were it not for experience,
darkness would surprise us long before we believed the day done: and,
in relation to art, its revolutions are still more imperceptible in
their gradations; and, in fulfilling themselves, they spread over
such an extent of time, that in their knowledge the experience of one
artist is next to nothing; and its twilight is so lengthy, that those
who never saw other, believe its gloom to be day; nor are their
successors more aware that the deepening darkness is the contrary,
until night drops big like a great clap of thunder, and awakes them
staringly to a pitiable sense of their condition. But, if we cannot
have this experience through ourselves, we can through others; and
that will show us that Pagan art has once--nay twice--already brought
over Christian art a "darkness which might be felt;" from a little
handful cloud out of the studio of Squarcione, it gathered density
and volume through his scholar Mantegna--made itself a nucleus in the
Academy of the Medici, and thence it issued in such a flood of
"heathenesse" that Italy finally became covered with one vast deep
and thick night of Pagandom. But in every deep there is a lower deep;
and, through the same gods-worship, a night intenser still fell upon
art when the pantomime of David made its appearance. With these two
fearful lessons before his eyes, the modern artist can have no other
than a settled conviction that Pagan art, Devil-like, glozes but to
seduce--tempts but to betray; and hence, he chooses to avoid that
which he believes to be bad, and to follow that which he holds to be
good, and blots out from his eye and memory all art between the
present and its first taint of heathenism, and ascends to the art
previous to Raffaelle; and he ascends thither, not so much for its
forms as he does for its THOUGHT and NATURE--the root and trunk of
the art-tree, of whose numerous branches form is only one--though the
most important one: and he goes to pre-Raffaelle art for those two
things, because the stream at that point is clearer and deeper, and
less polluted with animal impurities, than at any other in its
course. And, Kalon and Kosmon, had you remembered this, and at the
same time recollected that the words, "Nature" and "Thought" express
very peculiar ideas to modern eyes and ears--ideas which are totally
unknown to Hellenic Art--you would have instantly felt, that the
artist cannot study from it things chiefest in importance to him--of
which it is destitute, even as is a shore-driven boulder of life and
verdure.




On a Whit-sunday morn in the month of May


  The sun looked over the highest hills,
    And down in the vales looked he;
  And sprang up blithe all things of life,
    And put forth their energy;
  The flowers creeped out their tender cups,
    And offered their dewy fee;
  And rivers and rills they shimmered along
    Their winding ways to the sea;
  And the little birds their morning song
    Trilled forth from every tree,
  On a Whit-sunday morn in the month of May.

  Lord Thomas he rose and donned his clothes;
    For he was a sleepless man:
  And ever he tried to change his thoughts,
    Yet ever they one way ran.
  He to catch the breeze through the apple trees,
    By the orchard path did stray,
  Till he was aware of a lady there
    Came walking adown that way:
  Out gushed the song the trees among
    Then soared and sank away,
  On a Whit-sunday morn in the month of May.

  With eyes down-cast care-slow she came,
    Heedless of shine or shade,
  Or the dewy grass that wetted her feet,
    And heavy her dress all made:
  Oh trembled the song the trees among,
    And all at once was stayed,
  On a Whit-sunday morn in the month of May.

  Lord Thomas he was a truth-fast knight,
    And a calm-eyed man was he.
  He pledged his troth to his mother's maid
    A damsel of low degree:
  He spoke her fair, he spoke her true
    And well to him listened she.
  He gave her a kiss, she gave him twain
    All beneath an apple tree:
  The little birds trilled, the little birds filled
    The air with their melody,
  On a Whit-sunday morn in the month of May.

  A goodly sight it was, I ween,
    This loving couple to see,
  For he was a tall and a stately man,
    And a queenly shape had she.
  With arms each laced round other's waist,
    Through the orchard paths they tread
  With gliding pace, face mixed with face,
    Yet never a word they said:
  Oh! soared the song the birds among,
    And seemed with a rapture sped,
  On a Whit-sunday morn in the month of May.

  The dew-wet grass all through they pass,
    The orchard they compass round;
  Save words like sighs and swimming eyes
    No utterance they found.
  Upon his chest she leaned her breast,
    And nestled her small, small head,
  And cast a look so sad, that shook
    Him all with the meaning said:
  Oh hushed was the song the trees among,
    As over there sailed a gled,
  On a Whit-sunday morn in the month of May.

  Then forth with a faltering voice there came,
    "Ah would Lord Thomas for thee
  That I were come of a lineage high,
    And not of a low degree."
  Lord Thomas her lips with his fingers touched,
    And stilled her all with his ee':
  "Dear Ella! Dear Ella!" he said,
    "Beyond all my ancestry
  Is this dower of thine--that precious thing,
    Dear Ella, thy purity.
  Thee will I wed--lift up thy head--
    All I have I give to thee--
  Yes--all that is mine is also thine--
    My lands and my ancestry."
  The little birds sang and the orchard rang
    With a heavenly melody,
  On a Whit-sunday morn in the month of May.




Modern Giants


Yes! there are Giants on the earth in these days; but it is their
great bulk, and the nearness of our view, which prevents us from
perceiving their grandeur. This is how it is that the glory of the
present is lost upon the contemporaries of the greatest men; and,
perhaps this was Swift's meaning, when he said that Gulliver could
not discover exactly what it was that strode among the corn-ridges in
the Brobdignagian field: thus, we lose the brightness of things of
our own time in consequence of their proximity.

It is of the development of our individual perceptions, and the
application thereof to a good use, that the writer humbly endeavours
to treat. We will for this purpose take as an example, that which may
be held to indicate the civilization of a period more than any thing
else; namely, the popular perception of the essentials of Poetry; and
endeavour to show that while the beauties of old writers are
acknowledged, (tho' not in proportion to the attention of each
individual in his works to nature alone) the modern school is
contemned and unconsidered; and also that much of the active poetry
of modern life is neglected by the majority of the writers
themselves.

There seems to be an opinion gaining ground fast, in spite of all the
shaking of conventional heads, that the Poets of the present day are
equal to all others, excepting one: however this may be, it is
certain we are not fair judges, because of the natural reason stated
before; and there is decidedly one great fault in the moderns, that
not only do they study models with which they can never become
intimately acquainted, but that they neglect, or rather reject as
worthless, that which they alone can carry on with perfect success: I
mean the knowledge of themselves, and the characteristics of their
own actual living. Thus, if a modern Poet or Artist (the latter much
more culpably errs) seeks a subject exemplifying charity, he rambles
into ancient Greece or Rome, awakening not one half the sympathy in
the spectator, as do such incidents as may be seen in the streets
every day. For instance; walking with a friend the other day, we met
an old woman, exceedingly dirty, restlessly pattering along the kerb
of a crowded thoroughfare, trying to cross: her eyes were always
wandering here and there, and her mouth was never still; her object
was evident, but for my own part, I must needs be fastidious and
prefer to allow her to take the risk of being run over, to overcoming
my own disgust. Not so my friend; he marched up manfully, and putting
his arm over the old woman's shoulder, led her across as carefully as
though she were a princess. Of course, I was ashamed: ashamed! I was
frightened; I expected to see the old woman change into a tall angel
and take him off to heaven, leaving me her original shape to repent
in. On recovering my thoughts, I was inclined to take up my friend
and carry him home in triumph, I felt so strong. Why should not this
thing be as poetical as any in the life of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary
or any one else? for, so we look at it with a pure thought, we shall
see about it the same light the Areopagite saw at Jerusalem surround
the Holy Virgin, and the same angels attending and guarding it.

And there is something else we miss; there is the poetry of the
things about us; our railways, factories, mines, roaring cities,
steam vessels, and the endless novelties and wonders produced every
day; which if they were found only in the Thousand and One Nights, or
in any poem classical or romantic, would be gloried over without end;
for as the majority of us know not a bit more about them, but merely
their names, we keep up the same mystery, the main thing required for
the surprise of the imagination.

Next to Poetry, Painting and Music have most power over the mind; and
how do you apply this influence? In what direction is it forced? Why,
for the last, you sit in your drawing-rooms, and listen to a quantity
of tinkling of brazen marches of going to war; but you never see
before your very eyes, the palpable victory of leading nature by her
own power, to a conquest of blessings; and when the music is over,
you turn to each other, and enthusiastically whisper, "How
fine!"--You point out to others, (as if they had no eyes) the
sentiment of a flowing river with the moon on it, as an emblem of the
after-peace, but you see not this in the long white cloud of steam,
the locomotive pours forth under the same moon, rushing on; the
perfect type of the same, with the presentment of the struggle
beforehand. The strong engine is never before you, sighing all night,
with the white cloud above the chimney-shaft, escaping like the
spirits Solomon put his seal upon, in the Arabian Tales; these
mightier spirits are bound in a faster vessel; and then let forth, as
of little worth, when their work is done.

The Earth shakes under you, from the footfall of the Genii man has
made, and you groan about the noise. Vast roads draw together the
Earth, and you say how they spoil the prospect, which you never cared
a farthing about before.

You revel in Geology: but in chemistry, the modern science,
possessing thousands of powers as great as any used yet, you see no
glory:--the only thought is so many Acids and Alkalies. You require a
metaphor for treachery, and of course you think of our puny old
friend the Viper; but the Alkaline, more searching and more unknown,
that may destroy you and your race, you have never heard of,--and yet
this possesses more of the very quality required, namely, mystery,
than any other that is in your hands.

The only ancient character you have retained in its proper force is
Love; but you seem never to see any light about the results of long
labour of mind, the most intense Love. Devotedness, magnanimity,
generosity, you seem to think have left the Earth since the Crusades.
In fact, you never go out into Life: living only in the past world,
you go on repeating in new combinations the same elements for the
same effect. You have taught an enlightened Public, that the province
of Poetry is to reproduce the Ancients; not as Keats did, with the
living heart of our own Life; but so as to cause the impression that
you are not aware that they had wives and families like yourselves,
and laboured and rested like us all.

The greatest, perhaps, of modern poets seeming to take refuge from
this, has looked into the heart of man, and shown you its pulsations,
fears, self-doubts, hates, goodness, devotedness, and noble
world-love; this is not done under pretty flowers of metaphor in the
lispings of a pet parson, or in the strong but uncertain fashion of
the American school; still less in the dry operose quackery of
professed doctors of psychology, mere chaff not studied from nature,
and therefore worthless, never felt, and therefore useless; but with
the firm knowing hand of the anatomist, demonstrating and making
clear to others, that the knowledge may be applied to purpose. All
this difficult task is achieved so that you may read till your own
soul is before you, and you know it; but the enervated public
complains that the work is obscure forsooth: so we are always looking
for green grass--verdant meads, tall pines, vineyards, etc., as the
essentials of poetry; these are all very pretty and very delicate,
the dust blows not in your eyes, but Chaucer has told us all this,
and while it was new, far better than any one else; why are we not to
have something besides? Let us see a little of the poetry of man's
own works,--"Visibly in his garden walketh God."

The great portion of the public take a morbid delight in such works
as Frankenstein, that "Poor, impossible monster abhorred," who would
be disgusting if he were not so extremely ludicrous: and all this
search after impossible mystery, such trumpery! growing into the
popular taste, is fed with garbage; doing more harm than all the
preachings and poundings of optimistic Reviews will be able to remedy
in an hundred years.

The study of such matters as these does other harm than merely
poisoning the mind in one direction; it renders us sceptical of
virtue in others, and we lose the power of pure perception. So
--reading the glorious tale of Griselda and looking about you, you
say there never was such a woman; your wise men say she was a fool;
are there no such fools round about you? pray look close:--so the
result of this is, you see no lesson in such things, or at least
cannot apply it, and therefore the powers of the author are thrown
away. Do you think God made Boccaccio and Chaucer to amuse you in
your idle hours, only that you might sit listening like crowned
idiots, and then debate concerning their faithfulness to truth? You
never can imagine but they knew more of nature than any of us, or
that they had less reverence for her.

In reference to Painting, the Public are taught to look with delight
upon murky old masters, with dismally demoniac trees, and dull waters
of lead, colourless and like ice; upon rocks that make geologists
wonder, their angles are so impossible, their fractures are so new.
Thousands are given for uncomfortable Dutch sun-lights; but if you
are shown a transcript of day itself, with the purple shadow upon the
mountains, and across the still lake, you know nothing of it because
your fathers never bought such: so you look for nothing in it; nay,
let me set you in the actual place, let the water damp your feet,
stand in the chill of the shadow itself, and you will never tell me
the colour on the hill, or where the last of the crows caught the
sinking sunlight. Letting observation sleep, what can you know of
nature? and you _are_ a judge of landscape indeed. So it is that the
world is taught to think of nature, as seen through other men's eyes,
without any reference to its own original powers of perception, and
much natural beauty is lost.




To the Castle Ramparts


  The Castle is erect on the hill's top,
  To moulder there all day and night: it stands
  With the long shadow lying at its foot.
  That is a weary height which you must climb
  Before you reach it; and a dizziness
  Turns in your eyes when you look down from it,
  So standing clearly up into the sky.

  I rose one day, having a mind to see it.
  'Twas on a clear Spring morning, and a blackbird
  Awoke me with his warbling near my window:
  My dream had fashioned this into a song
  That some one with grey eyes was singing me,
  And which had drawn me so into myself
  That all the other shapes of sleep were gone:
  And then, at last, it woke me, as I said.
  The sun shone fully in on me; and brisk
  Cool airs, that had been cold but for his warmth,
  Blow thro' the open casement, and sweet smells
  Of flowers with the dew yet fresh upon them,--
  Rose-buds, and showery lilacs, and what stayed
  Of April wallflowers.

        I set early forth,
  Wishing to reach the Castle when the heat
  Should weigh upon it, vertical at noon.
  My path lay thro' green open fields at first,
  With now and then trees rising statelily
  Out of the grass; and afterwards came lanes
  Closed in by hedges smelling of the may,
  And overshadowed by the meeting trees.
  So I walked on with none but pleasant thoughts;
  The Spring was in me, not alone around me,
  And smiles came rippling o'er my lips for nothing.
  I reached at length,--issuing from a lane
  Which wound so that it seemed about to end
  Always, yet ended not for a long while,--
  A space of ground thick grassed and level to
  The overhanging sky and the strong sun:
  Before me the brown sultry hill stood out,
  Peaked by its rooted Castle, like a part
  Of its own self. I laid me in the grass,
  Turning from it, and looking on the sky,
  And listening to the humming in the air
  That hums when no sound is; because I chose
  To gaze on that which I had left, not that
  Which I had yet to see. As one who strives
  After some knowledge known not till he sought,
  Whose soul acquaints him that his step by step
  Has led him to a few steps next the end,
  Which he foresees already, waits a little
  Before he passes onward, gathering
  Together in his thoughts what he has done.

  Rising after a while, the ascent began.
  Broken and bare the soil was; and thin grass,
  Dry and scarce green, was scattered here and there
  In tufts: and, toiling up, my knees almost
  Reaching my chin, one hand upon my knee,
  Or grasping sometimes at the earth, I went,
  With eyes fixed on the next step to be taken,
  Not glancing right or left; till, at the end,
  I stood straight up, and the tower stood straight up
  Before my face. One tower, and nothing more;
  For all the rest has gone this way and that,
  And is not anywhere, saving a few
  Fragments that lie about, some on the top,
  Some fallen half down on either side the hill,
  Uncared for, well nigh grown into the ground.
  The tower is grey, and brown, and black, with green
  Patches of mildew and of ivy woven
  Over the sightless loopholes and the sides:
  And from the ivy deaf-coiled spiders dangle,
  Or scurry to catch food; and their fine webs
  Touch at your face wherever you may pass.
  The sun's light scorched upon it; and a fry
  Of insects in one spot quivered for ever,
  Out and in, in and out, with glancing wings
  That caught the light, and buzzings here and there;
  That little life which swarms about large death;
  No one too many or too few, but each
  Ordained, and being each in its own place.
  The ancient door, cut deep into the wall,
  And cramped with iron rusty now and rotten,
  Was open half: and, when I strove to move it
  That I might have free passage inwards, stood
  Unmoved and creaking with old uselessness:
  So, pushing it, I entered, while the dust
  Was shaken down upon me from all sides.
  The narrow stairs, lighted by scanty streaks
  That poured in thro' the loopholes pierced high up,
  Wound with the winding tower, until I gained,
  Delivered from the closeness and the damp
  And the dim air, the outer battlements.

  There opposite, the tower's black turret-girth
  Suppressed the multiplied steep chasm of fathoms,
  So that immediately the fields far down
  Lay to their heaving distance for the eyes,
  Satisfied with one gaze unconsciously,
  To pass to glory of heaven, and to know light.
  Here was no need of thinking:--merely sense
  Was found sufficient: the wind made me free,
  Breathed, and returned by me in a hard breath:
  And what at first seemed silence, being roused
  By callings of the cuckoo from far off,
  Resolved itself into a sound of trees
  That swayed, and into chirps reciprocal
  On each side, and revolving drone of flies.

  Then, stepping to the brink, and looking sheer
  To where the slope ceased in the level stretch
  Of country, I sat down to lay my head
  Backwards into a single ivy-bush
  Complex of leaf. I lay there till the wind
  Blew to me, from a church seen miles away,
  Half the hour's chimes.

        Great clouds were arched abroad
  Like angels' wings; returning beneath which,
  I lingered homewards. All their forms had merged
  And loosened when my walk was ended; and,
  While yet I saw the sun a perfect disc,
  There was the moon beginning in the sky.




Pax Vobis


  'Tis of the Father Hilary.
    He strove, but could not pray: so took
    The darkened stair, where his feet shook
  A sad blind echo. He kept up
    Slowly. 'Twas a chill sway of air
    That autumn noon within the stair,
  Sick, dizzy, like a turning cup.
    His brain perplexed him, void and thin:
    He shut his eyes and felt it spin;
    The obscure deafness hemmed him in.
  He said: "the air is calm outside."

  He leaned unto the gallery
    Where the chime keeps the night and day:
    It hurt his brain,--he could not pray.
  He had his face upon the stone:
    Deep 'twixt the narrow shafts, his eye
    Passed all the roofs unto the sky
  Whose greyness the wind swept alone.
    Close by his feet he saw it shake
    With wind in pools that the rains make:
    The ripple set his eyes to ache.
  He said, "Calm hath its peace outside."

  He stood within the mystery
    Girding God's blessed Eucharist:
    The organ and the chaunt had ceased:
  A few words paused against his ear,
    Said from the altar: drawn round him,
    The silence was at rest and dim.
  He could not pray. The bell shook clear
    And ceased. All was great awe,--the breath
    Of God in man, that warranteth
    Wholly the inner things of Faith.
  He said: "There is the world outside."

    _Ghent: Church of St. Bavon._




A Modern Idyl


  "Pride clings to age, for few and withered powers,
    Which fall on youth in pleasures manifold,
  Like some bright dancer with a crowd of flowers
    And scented presents more than she can hold:

  "Or as it were a child beneath a tree,
    Who in his healthy joy holds hand and cap
  Beneath the shaken boughs, and eagerly
    Expects the fruit to fall into his lap."

  So thought I while my cousin sat alone,
  Moving with many leaves in under tone,
  And, sheened as snow lit by a pale moonlight,
  Her childish dress struck clearly on the sight:
  That, as the lilies growing by her side
  Casting their silver radiance forth with pride,
  She seemed to dart an arrowy halo round,
  Brightening the spring time trees, brightening the ground;
  And beauty, like keen lustre from a star,
  Glorified all the garden near and far.
  The sunlight smote the grey and mossy wall
  Where, 'mid the leaves, the peaches one and all,
  Most like twin cherubim entranced above,
  Leaned their soft cheeks together, pressed in love.

  As the child sat, the tendrils shook round her;
  And, blended tenderly in middle air,
  Gleamed the long orchard through the ivied gate:
  And slanting sunbeams made the heart elate,
  Startling it into gladness like the sound,--
  Which echo childlike mimicks faintly round
  Blending it with the lull of some far flood,--
  Of one long shout heard in a quiet wood.
  A gurgling laugh far off the fountain sent,
  As if the mermaid shape that in it bent
  Spoke with subdued and faintest melody:
  And birds sang their whole hearts spontaneously.

  When from your books released, pass here your hours,
  Dear child, the sweet companion of these flowers,
  These poplars, scented shrubs, and blossomed boughs
  Of fruit-trees, where the noisy sparrows house,
  Shaking from off the leaves the beaded dew.
  Now while the air is warm, the heavens blue,
  Give full abandonment to all your gay
  Swift childlike impulses in rompish play;--
  The while your sisters in shrill laughter shout,
  Whirling above the leaves and round about,--
  Until at length it drops behind the wall,--
  With awkward jerks, the particoloured ball:
  Winning a smile even from the stooping age
  Of that old matron leaning on her page,
  Who in the orchard takes a stroll or two,
  Watching you closely yet unseen by you.

  Then, tired of gambols, turn into the dark
  Fir-skirted margins of your father's park;
  And watch the moving shadows, as you pass,
  Trace their dim network on the tufted grass,
  And how on birch-trunks smooth and branches old,
  The velvet moss bursts out in green and gold,
  Like the rich lustre full and manifold
  On breasts of birds that star the curtained gloom
  From their glass cases in the drawing room.
  Mark the spring leafage bend its tender spray
  Gracefully on the sky's aerial grey;
  And listen how the birds so voluble
  Sing joyful paeans winding to a swell,
  And how the wind, fitful and mournful, grieves
  In gusty whirls among the dry red leaves;
  And watch the minnows in the water cool,
  And floating insects wrinkling all the pool.

  So in your ramblings bend your earnest eyes.
    High thoughts and feelings will come unto you,--
    Gladness will fall upon your heart like dew,--
  Because you love the earth and love the skies.

  Fair pearl, the pride of all our family:
    Girt with the plenitude of joys so strong,
    Fashion and custom dull can do no wrong:
  Nestling your young face thus on Nature's knee.




"Jesus Wept"


  Mary rose up, as one in sleep might rise,
    And went to meet her brother's Friend: and they
    Who tarried with her said: "she goes to pray
  And weep where her dead brother's body lies."
  So, with their wringing of hands and with sighs,
    They stood before Him in the public way.
    "Had'st Thou been with him, Lord, upon that day,
  He had not died," she said, drooping her eyes.
  Mary and Martha with bowed faces kept
    Holding His garments, one on each side.--"Where
      Have ye laid him?" He asked. "Lord, come and see."
      The sound of grieving voices heavily
    And universally was round Him there,
  A sound that smote His spirit. Jesus wept.





Sonnets for Pictures


1. For a Virgin and Child, by Hans Memmelinck; in the Academy of
Bruges

  Mystery: God, Man's Life, born into man
    Of woman. There abideth on her brow
    The ended pang of knowledge, the which now
  Is calm assured. Since first her task began,
  She hath known all. What more of anguish than
    Endurance oft hath lived through, the whole space
    Through night till night, passed weak upon her face
  While like a heavy flood the darkness ran?
  All hath been told her touching her dear Son,
    And all shall be accomplished. Where he sits
      Even now, a babe, he holds the symbol fruit
    Perfect and chosen. Until God permits,
      His soul's elect still have the absolute
  Harsh nether darkness, and make painful moan.


2. A Marriage of St. Katharine, by the same; in the Hospital of St.
John at Bruges.

  Mystery: Katharine, the bride of Christ.
    She kneels, and on her hand the holy Child
    Setteth the ring. Her life is sad and mild,
  Laid in God's knowledge--ever unenticed
  From Him, and in the end thus fitly priced.
    Awe, and the music that is near her, wrought
    Of Angels, hath possessed her eyes in thought:
  Her utter joy is her's, and hath sufficed.
  There is a pause while Mary Virgin turns
    The leaf, and reads. With eyes on the spread book,
      That damsel at her knees reads after her.
      John whom He loved and John His harbinger
    Listen and watch. Whereon soe'er thou look,
  The light is starred in gems, and the gold burns.

3. A Dance of Nymphs, by Andrea Mantegna; in the Louvre.

(It is necessary to mention, that this picture would appear to have
been in the artist's mind an allegory, which the modern spectator may
seek vainly to interpret.)

  Scarcely, I think; yet it indeed _may_ be
    The meaning reached him, when this music rang
    Sharp through his brain, a distinct rapid pang,
  And he beheld these rocks and that ridg'd sea.
  But I believe he just leaned passively,
    And felt their hair carried across his face
    As each nymph passed him; nor gave ear to trace
  How many feet; nor bent assuredly
  His eyes from the blind fixedness of thought
    To see the dancers. It is bitter glad
      Even unto tears. Its meaning filleth it,
      A portion of most secret life: to wit:--
    Each human pulse shall keep the sense it had
  With all, though the mind's labour run to nought.

4. A Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione; in the Louvre.

(In this picture, two cavaliers and an undraped woman are seated in
the grass, with musical instruments, while another woman dips a vase
into a well hard by, for water.)

  Water, for anguish of the solstice,--yea,
    Over the vessel's mouth still widening
    Listlessly dipt to let the water in
  With slow vague gurgle. Blue, and deep away,
  The heat lies silent at the brink of day.
    Now the hand trails upon the viol-string
    That sobs; and the brown faces cease to sing,
  Mournful with complete pleasure. Her eyes stray
  In distance; through her lips the pipe doth creep
    And leaves them pouting; the green shadowed grass
      Is cool against her naked flesh. Let be:
  Do not now speak unto her lest she weep,--
    Nor name this ever. Be it as it was:--
      Silence of heat, and solemn poetry.

5. "Angelica rescued from the Sea-monster," by Ingres; in the
Luxembourg.

  A remote sky, prolonged to the sea's brim:
    One rock-point standing buffetted alone,
    Vexed at its base with a foul beast unknown,
  Hell-spurge of geomaunt and teraphim:
  A knight, and a winged creature bearing him,
    Reared at the rock: a woman fettered there,
    Leaning into the hollow with loose hair
  And throat let back and heartsick trail of limb.
  The sky is harsh, and the sea shrewd and salt.
    Under his lord, the griffin-horse ramps blind
      With rigid wings and tail. The spear's lithe stem
    Thrills in the roaring of those jaws: behind,
  The evil length of body chafes at fault.
      She doth not hear nor see--she knows of them.

6. The same.

  Clench thine eyes now,--'tis the last instant, girl:
    Draw in thy senses, set thy knees, and take
    One breath for all: thy life is keen awake,--
  Thou may'st not swoon. Was that the scattered whirl
  Of its foam drenched thee?--or the waves that curl
    And split, bleak spray wherein thy temples ache?--
    Or was it his the champion's blood to flake
  Thy flesh?--Or thine own blood's anointing, girl?....
  ....Now, silence; for the sea's is such a sound
    As irks not silence; and except the sea,
      All is now still. Now the dead thing doth cease
    To writhe, and drifts. He turns to her: and she
  Cast from the jaws of Death, remains there, bound,
      Again a woman in her nakedness.





Papers of "The M. S. Society"


No. IV. Smoke.

    I'm the king of the _Cadaverals_,
      I'm _Spectral_ President;
      And, all from east to occident,
    There's not a man whose dermal walls
    Contain so narrow intervals,
      So lank a resident.

    Look at me and you shall see
    The ghastliest of the ghastly;
    The eyes that have watched a thousand years,
    The forehead lined with a thousand cares,
    The seaweed-character of hairs!--
    You shall see and you shall see,
    Or you may hear, as I can feel,
  When the winds batter, how these _parchments_ clatter,
  And the beautiful tenor that's ever ringing
  When thro' the _Seaweed_ the breeze is singing:
  And you should know, I know a great deal,
    When the _bacchi arcanum_ I clutch and gripe,
  I know a great deal of wind and weather
  By hearing my own cheeks slap together
    A-pulling up a pipe.

    I believe--and I conceive
      I'm an authority
      In all things ghastly,
    First for tenuity
    For stringiness secondly,
      And sallowness lastly--
  I say I believe a cadaverous man
  Who would live as _long_ and as _lean_ as he can
    Should live entirely on bacchi--
  On the bacchic ambrosia entirely feed him;
    When living thus, so little lack I,
  So easy am I, I'll never heed him
  Who anything seeketh beyond the _Leaf:_
    For, what with mumbling pipe-ends freely,
    And snuffing the ashes now and then,
  I give it as my firm belief
    One might go living on genteelly
    To the age of an antediluvian.

  This from the king to each spectral _Grim_--
    Mind, we address no _bibbing smoker_!
  Tell not us 'tis as broad as it's long,
  We've no breadth more than a leathern thong
    Tanned--or a tarnished poker:
  Ye are also lank and slim?--
    Your king he comes of an ancient _line_
    Which "length without breadth" the Gods define,
  And look ye follow him!
    Lanky lieges! the Gods one day
    Will cut off this _line_, as geometers say,
    Equal to any given line:--
    PI,--PE--their hands divine
    Do more than we can see:
    They cut off every length of clay
    Really in a most extraordinary way--
    They fill your bowls up--Dutch C'naster,
    Shag, York River--fill 'em faster,
    Fill 'em faster up, I say.
    What Turkey, Oronoko, Cavendish!
    There's the fuel to make a chafing dish,
    A chafing dish to peel the petty
    Paint that girls and boys call pretty--
    Peel it off from lip and cheek:
    We've none such here; yet, if ye seek
    An infallible test for a raw beginner,
    Mundungus will always discover a sinner.

  Now ye are charged, we give the word
  Light! and pour it thro' your noses,
    And let it hover and lodge in your hair
    Bird-like, bird-like--You're aware
  Anacreon had a bird--
    A bird! and filled _his_ bowl with roses.
    Ha ha! ye laugh in ghastlywise,
    And the smoke comes through your eyes,
    And you're looking very grim,
    And the air is very dim,
    And the casual paper flare
    Taketh still a redder glare.

    Now thou pretty little fellow,
    Now thine eyes are turning yellow,
      Thou shalt be our page to-night!
    Come and sit thee next to us,
      And as we may want a light
    See that thou be dexterous.

    Now bring forth your tractates musty,
    Dry, cadaverous, and dusty,
    One, on the sound of mammoths' bones
    In motion; one, on Druid-stones:
    Show designs for pipes most ghastly,
    And devils and ogres grinning nastily!
    Show, show the limnings ye brought back,
    Since round and round the zodiac
    Ye galloped goblin horses which
    Were light as smoke and black as pitch;
    And those ye made in the mouldy moon,
    And Uranus, Saturn, and Neptune,
    And in the planet Mercury,
    Where all things living and dead have an eye
    Which sometimes opening suddenly
    Stareth and startleth strangely

    But now the night is growing better,
    And every jet of smoke grows _jetter_,
    While yet there blinks sufficient light,
    Bring in those skeletons that fright
    Most men into fits, but that
    We relish for their want of fat.
    Bring them in, the Cimabues
    With all or each that horribly true is,
    Francias, Giottos, Masaccios,
    That tread on the tops of their bony toes,
    And every one with a long sharp arrow
    Cleverly shot through his spinal marrow,
    With plenty of gridirons, spikes, and fires
    And fiddling angels in sheets and quires.

    Hold! 'tis dark! 'tis lack of light,
    Or something wrong in this royal sight,
    Or else our musty, dusty, and right
    Well-beloved lieges all
    Are standing in rank against the wall,
    And ever thin and thinner, and tall
    And taller grow and _cadaveral!_
    Subjects, ye are sharp and spare,
    Every nose is blue and frosty,
    And your back-bone's growing bare,
    And your king can count your _costae_,
    And your bones are clattering,
    And your teeth are chattering,
    And ye spit out bits of pipe,
    Which, shorter grown, ye faster gripe
      In jaws; and weave a cloudy cloak
    That wraps up all except your bones
      Whose every joint is oozing smoke:
    And there's a creaky music drones
    Whenas your lungs distend your ribs,
    A sound, that's like the grating nibs
    Of pens on paper late at night;
    Your shanks are yellow more than white
    And very like what Holbein drew!
    Avaunt! ye are a ghastly crew
    Too like the Campo Santo--down!
    We are your monarch, but we own
    That were we not, we very well
    Might take ye to be imps of hell:
    But ye are glorious ghastly sprites,
    What ho! our page! Sir knave--lights, lights,
    The final pipes are to be lit:
    Sit, gentlemen, we charge ye sit
    Until the cock affrays the night
  And heralds in the limping morn,
    And makes the owl and raven flit;
    Until the jolly moon is white,
  And till the stars and moon are gone.


No. V. Rain.

  The chamber is lonely and light;
  Outside there is nothing but night--
  And wind and a creeping rain.
  And the rain clings to the pane:
  And heavy and drear's
  The night; and the tears
  Of heaven are dropt in pain.

  And the tears of heaven are dropt in pain;
  And man pains heaven and shuts the rain
  Outside, and sleeps: and winds are sighing;
  And turning worlds sing mass for the dying.




Reviews

Christmas Eve and Easter Day: by Robert Browning.--Chapman and Hall.
1850.


There are occasions when the office of the critic becomes almost
simply that of an expositor; when his duty is not to assert, but to
interpret. It is his privilege to have been the first to study a
subject, and become familiar with it; what remains is to state facts,
and to suggest considerations; not to lay down dogmas. That which he
speaks of is to him itself a dogma; he starts from conviction: his it
is to convince others, and, as far as may be, by the same means as
satisfied himself; to incite to the same study, doing his poor best,
meanwhile, to supply the present want of it.

Thus much, indeed, is the critic's duty always; but he generally
feels the right, and has it, of speaking with authority. He condemns,
or gives praise; and his judgment, though merely individual and
subject to revision, is judgment. Before the certainty of genius and
deathless power, in the contemplation of consummate art, his position
changes: and well for him if he knows, and is contented it should be
so. Here he must follow, happy if he only follows and serves; and
while even here he will not shelve his doubts, or blindly refuse to
exercise a candid discrimination, his demur at unquestioning assent,
far from betraying any arrogance, will be discreetly advanced, and on
clearly stated grounds.

Of all poets, there is none more than Robert Browning, in approaching
whom diffidence is necessary. The mere extent of his information
cannot pass unobserved, either as a fact, or as a title to respect.
No one who has read the body of his works will deny that they are
replete with mental and speculative subtlety, with vivid and most
diversified conception of character, with dramatic incident and
feeling; with that intimate knowledge of outward nature which makes
every sentence of description a living truth; replete with a most
human tenderness and pathos. Common as is the accusation of
"extravagance," and unhesitatingly as it is applied, in a general
off-hand style, to the entire character of Browning's poems, it would
require some jesuitism of self-persuasion to induce any one to affirm
his belief in the existence of such extravagance in the conception of
the poems, or in the sentiments expressed; of any want of
concentration in thought, of national or historical keeping. Far from
this, indeed, a deliberate unity of purpose is strikingly apparent.
Without referring for the present to what are assumed to be perverse
faults of execution--a question the principles and bearing of which
will shortly be considered--assuredly the mention of the names of a
few among Browning's poems--of "Paracelsus," "Pippa Passes," "Luria,"
the "Souls's Tragedy," "King Victor and King Charles," even of the
less perfect achievement, "Strafford"; or, passing to the smaller
poems, of "The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," "The Laboratory,"
and "The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's";--will at once
realize to the memory of all readers an abstruse ideal never lost
sight of, and treated to the extreme of elaboration. As regards this
point, we address all in any manner acquainted with the poet's works,
certain of receiving an affirmative answer even from those who
"_can't_ read Sordello, or understand the object of writing in that
style."

If so many exceptions to Browning's "system of extravagance" be
admitted,--and we again refer for confirmation or refutation to all
who have sincerely read him, and who, valuing written criticism at
its worth, value also at _its_ worth the criticism of individual
conviction,--wherein are we to seek this extravagance? The groundwork
exempted, the imputation attaches, if anywhere, to the framework; to
the body, if not to the soul. And we are thus left to consider the
style, or mode of expression.

Style is not stationary, or, _in the concrete_, matter of principle:
style is, firstly, national; next, chronological; and lastly,
individual. To try the oriental system by the European, and pronounce
either wrong by so much as it exceeds or falls short, would imply so
entire a want of comprehensive appreciation as can scarcely fail to
induce the conviction, that the two are distinct and independent,
each to be tested on its own merits. Again, were the Elizabethan
dramatists right, or are those of our own day? Neither absolutely, as
by comparison alone; his period speaks in each; and each must be
judged by this: not whether he is true to any given type, but whether
his own type be a true one for himself. And this, which holds good
between nations and ages, holds good also between individuals. Very
different from Shelley's are Wordsworth's nature in description, his
sentiment, his love; Burn's and Keats's different from these and from
each other: yet are all these, nature, and sentiment, and love.

But here it will be urged: by this process any and every style is
pronounced good, so that it but find a measure of recognition in its
own age and country; nay, even the author's self-approval will be
sufficient. And, as a corollary, each age must and ought to reject
its predecessor; and Voltaire was no less than right in dubbing
Shakspere barbarian. That it is not so, however, will appear when the
last element of truth in style, that with which all others combine,
which includes and implies consistency with the author's self, with
his age and his country, is taken into account. Appropriateness of
treatment to subject it is which lies at the root of all controversy
on style: this is the last and the whole test. And the fact that none
other is requisite, or, more strictly, that all others are but
aspects of this one, will very easily be allowed when it is reflected
that the subject, to be of an earnest and sincere ideal, must be an
emanation of the poet's most secret soul; and that the soul receives
teaching from circumstance, which is the time when and place where.

This premised, it must next be borne in mind that the poet's
conception of his subject is not identical with, and, in the majority
of cases, will be unlike, his reader's. And, the question of style
(manner) being necessarily subordinate to that of subject (matter),
it is not for the reader to dispute with the author on his mode of
rendering, provided that should be accepted as embodying (within the
bounds of grammatical logic) the intention preconceived. The object
of the poet in writing, why he attempts to describe an event as
resulting from this cause or this, or why he assumes such as the
effect; all these considerations the reader is competent to
entertain: any two men may deduce from the same premises, and may
probably arrive at different conclusions: but, these conclusions
reached, what remains is a question of resemblance, which each must
determine for himself, as best conscious of his own intention. To
take an instance. Shakspere's conception of Macbeth as a man capable
of uttering a pompous conceit--

        ("Here lay Duncan,
  His silver skin laced with his golden blood--")

in a moment, to him, and to all present, of startling purport, may be
a correct or an impressive conception, or it may be the reverse. That
the rendering of the momentary intention is adequate here there is no
reason to doubt. If so, in what respect is the reader called upon to
investigate a matter of style? He must simply return to the question
of whether this point of character be consistent with others imagined
of the same person; this, answered affirmatively, is an
approval,--negatively, a condemnation, of _intention_; the merit of
_style_, in either case, being mere competence, and that admitted
irrespectively of the reader's liking or disliking of the passage
_per se_, or as part of a context. Why, in this same tragedy of
Macbeth, is a drunken porter introduced between a murder and its
discovery? Did Shakspere really intend him to be a sharp-witted man?
These questions are pertinent and necessary. There is no room for
disputing that this scene is purposely a comic scene: and, if this is
certain, the style of the speech is appropriate to the scene, and of
the scene, to the conception of the drama? Is _that conception_
admirable?

We have entered thus at length on the investigation of adequacy and
appropriateness of style, and of the mode by which entire classes of
disputable points, usually judged under that name, may be reduced to
the more essential element of conception; because it will be almost
invariably found, that a mere arbitrary standard of irresponsible
private predilection is then resorted to. Nor can this be well
guarded against. The concrete, _style_, being assumed as always
constituting an entity auxiliary to, but not of necessity modified
by, and representing subject,--as something substantially
pre-existing in the author's mind or practice, and belonging to him
individually; the reader will, not without show of reason, betake
himself to the trial of personality by personality, another's by his
own; and will thus pronounce on poems or passages of poems not as
elevated, or vigorous, or well-sustained, or the opposite, in idea,
but, according to certain notions of his own, as attractive,
original, or conventional writing.

Thus far as regards those parts of execution which concern human{13}
embodiment--the metaphysical and dramatic or epic faculties. Of style
in description the reader is more nearly as competent a judge as the
writer. In the one case, the poet is bound to realize an idea, which
is his own, and the justness of which, and therefore of the form of
its expression, can be decided only by reasoning and analogy; in the
other, having for his type material phaenomena, he must reproduce the
things as cognizable by all, though not hereby in any way exempt from
adhering absolutely to his proper perception of them. Here, even as
to ideal description or simile, the reader can assert its truth or
falsehood of purpose, its sufficiency or insufficiency of means: but
here again he must beware of exceeding his rights, and of
substituting himself to his author. He must not dictate under what
aspect nature is to be considered, stigmatizing the one chosen,
because his own bent is rather towards some other. In the exercise of
censure, he cannot fairly allow any personal _peculiarities_ of view
to influence him; but will have to decide from common grounds of
perception, unless clearly conscious of short-coming, or of the
extreme of any corresponding peculiarity on the author's part.

{13} In employing the word "human," we would have our intention
understood to include organic spiritualism--the superhuman treated,
from a human _pou sto,_ as ideal mind, form, power, action, &c.

In speaking of the adaptation of style to conception, we advanced
that, details of character and of action being a portion of the
latter, the real point to determine in reference to the former is,
whether such details are completely rendered in relation to the
general purpose. And here, to return to Robert Browning, we would
enforce on the attention of those among his readers who assume that
he spoils fine thoughts by a vicious, extravagant, and involved
style, a few analytical questions, to be answered unbiassed by
hearsay evidence. Concerning the dramatic works: Is the leading idea
conspicuously brought forward throughout each work? Is the language
of the several speakers such as does not create any impression other
than that warranted by the subject matter of each? If so, does it
create the impression apparently intended? Is the character of speech
varied according to that of the speaker? Are the passages of
description and abstract reflection so introduced as to add to
poetic, without detracting from dramatic, excellence? About the
narrative poems, and those of a more occasional and personal quality
the same questions may be asked with some obvious adaptation; and
this about all:--Are the versification strong, the sound sharp or
soft, monotonous, hurried, in proportion to the requirement of sense;
the illustrative thoughts apt and new; the humour quaint and
relishing? Finally, is not in many cases that which is spoken of as
something extraneous, dragged in aforethought, for the purpose of
singularity, the result more truly of a most earnest and
single-minded labor after the utmost rendering of idiomatic
conversational truth; the rejection of all stop-gap words; about the
most literal transcript of fact compatible with the ends of poetry
and true feeling for Art? This a point worthy note, and not capable
of contradiction.{14}

{14} We may instance several scenes of "Pippa Passes,"--the
concluding one especially, where Pippa reviews her day; the whole of
the "Soul's Tragedy,"--the poetic as well as the prose portion; "The
Flight of the Duchess;" "Waring," &c.; and passages continually
recurring in "Sordello," and in "Colombe's Birthday."

These questions answered categorically will, we believe, be found to
establish the assurance that Browning's style is copious, and
certainly not other than appropriate,--instance contrasted with
instance--as the form of expression bestowed on the several phases of
a certain ever-present form of thought. We have already endeavored to
show that, where style is not inadequate, its object as a means being
attained, the mind must revert to its decision as to relative and
collective value of intention: and we will again leave Browning's
manifestations of intellectual purpose, as such, for the verdict of
his readers.

To those who yet insist: "Why cannot I read Sordello?" we can only
answer:--Admitted a leading idea, not only metaphysical but subtle
and complicated to the highest degree; how work out this idea, unless
through the finest intricacy of shades of mental development?
Admitted a philosophic comprehensiveness of historical estimate and a
minuteness of familiarity with details, with the added assumption,
besides, of speaking with the very voice of the times; how present
this position, unless by standing at an eminent point, and addressing
thence a not unprepared audience? Admitted an intense aching
concentration of thought; how be self-consistent, unless uttering
words condensed to the limits of language?--And let us at last say:
Read Sordello again. Why hold firm that you ought to be able at once
to know Browning's stops, and to pluck out the heart of his mystery?
Surely, if you do not understand him, the fact tells two ways. But,
if you _will_ understand him, you shall.

We have been desirous to explain and justify the state of feeling in
which we enter on the consideration of a new poem by Robert Browning.
Those who already feel with us will scarcely be disposed to forgive
the prolixity which, for the present, has put it out of our power to
come at the work itself: but, if earnestness of intention will plead
our excuse, we need seek for no other.




The Evil under the Sun


  How long, oh Lord?--The voice is sounding still,
    Not only heard beneath the altar stone,
    Not heard of John Evangelist alone
  In Patmos. It doth cry aloud and will
  Between the earth's end and earth's end, until
    The day of the great reckoning, bone for bone,
    And blood for righteous blood, and groan for groan:
  Then shall it cease on the air with a sudden thrill;
  Not slowly growing fainter if the rod
    Strikes one or two amid the evil throng,
    Or one oppressor's hand is stayed and numbs,--
    Not till the vengeance that is coming comes:
  For shall all hear the voice excepting God?
    Or God not listen, hearing?--Lord, how long?


_Published Monthly.--Price One Shilling._

  Art and Poetry,
  Being Thoughts towards Nature.

  Conducted principally by Artists.

Of the little worthy the name of writing that has ever been written
upon the principles of Art, (of course excepting that on the mere
mechanism), a very small portion is by Artists themselves; and that
is so scattered, that one scarcely knows where to find the ideas of
an Artist except in his pictures.

With a view to obtain the thoughts of Artists, upon Nature as evolved
in Art, in another language besides their _own proper_ one, this
Periodical has been established. Thus, then, it is not open to the
conflicting opinions of all who handle the brush and palette, nor is
it restricted to actual practitioners; but is intended to enunciate
the principles of those who, in the true spirit of Art, enforce a
rigid adherence to the simplicity of Nature either in Art or Poetry,
and consequently regardless whether emanating from practical Artists,
or from those who have studied nature in the Artist's School.

Hence this work will contain such original Tales (in prose or verse),
Poems, Essays, and the like, as may seem conceived in the spirit, or
with the intent, of exhibiting a pure and unaffected style, to which
purpose analytical Reviews of current Literature--especially
Poetry--will be introduced; as also illustrative Etchings, one of
which latter, executed with the utmost care and completeness, will
appear in each number.








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