Int. The whole theory of versification has been so revolutionized since your time, that I doubt if you and I could find any common ground upon which to discuss the subject without mutual misapprehension. Ideals of excellence have been reversed. In the religion of the lyre, your God has become our Devil. But as to the other matter in which you claim superiority for the eighteenth century, it seems to me, and it seemed to the majority of my contemporaries that Pope was less the poet of human nature than of a phase of society, less of man than of manners.

Johnson.-Nay, Sir, what sophistical distinction is here? You are to consider there is no such thing apprehensible by

us as naked human nature. Human nature can only be known to us under the local and temporal conditions through

which it discloses itself. Would have you Pope paint you his Atticus, and Bufo, and Sporus, and Atossa, minus the conditions under which alone these persons are cognizable? You might as well have asked Sir Joshua to paint his sitters without their clothes.

Int. But there is such a thing in literature as painting the clothes very conscientiously, and leaving out the man. I don't say Pope did that, but I do say that in reading him we feel rather oppressed by a predominance of social accidents over human essentials-much more so, for instance, than we feel in reading Shakespeare. I admit, however, that in the failure to give classical literary form to the presentation of social life is the vulnerable side of modern poetry. But I won't admit that Pope was the last poet who understood human nature. There lived, in my own time, Robert Browning. Johnson.-I have his works. The terrors of his style were great, but he that valiantly faced and overcame them had his reward. Yes, Sir, Browning could read men. The pity is, men cannot read Browning. But we were speaking of Shelley. I hold him, in a large measure, responsible for that prevalence of the loosely thought and the inexactly said which deforms so much of your modern poetry. His friend, Mr. Keats, though not a scholar, had far more of the instinct of scholarship in the use of words, as well as of the instinct of exactness in the mention of things. I take down a volume of Shelley, and I open it, let us say, at his

last completed performance, "Hellas." All that is remembered of this drama is the choruses, in which some of your critics profess to find the summit of his lyrical accomplishment. The poet is speaking of Jesus Christ.

A mortal shape to Him Was like the vapor dim Which the orient planet animates with light. Now that is excellent, but mark you what comes after.

Hell, sin, and slavery came,

Like bloodhounds mild and tame, Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight. Here, you are to observe, the poet brings whose persons cannot properly be ranked arbitrarily together an allegorical trinity

in the same plane of category: hell, a place or state; sin, an act or propensity; It is somewhat as slavery, an institution. if one should say, heaven, joy, and marriage rose.

Hell, sin, and slavery came,

Like bloodhounds mild and tame, Nor preyed, etc.

Bloodhounds, like other dogs of chase, do not prey, but bunt.

Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight. Where is the pertinence of making Christ the lord of slavery? The word lord has here no relevancy, except in the general sense whereby we speak of Christ as lord of all things. It were as apposite to style him the lord of polygamy. And, lastly, we have the gross impropriety, in this association, of the phrase taken flight. In fine, within the compass of about twenty syllables, your poet stands convicted of four lapses into the flagrantly solecistical. Now, Sir, in my time, to have written like this would have been to incur the censure of not knowing how to write at all. Yet your poets look down with disdain, or with the civil insolence of patronage, upon an age before whose rigorous modes of criticism they could not have stood for a moment.

Int. I think it is you yourself who somewhere speak with a proper contempt of the sort of criticism which consists in "the rude detection of faults which perhaps the censor was not able to have committed."

Johnson.-Yes, Sir; but the faults I have been exposing are not such as there is needed genius to commit. Rather,

they are such as true genius has the felicity to escape. For genius is itself a kind of felicity-a charmed life-a magical exemption from perils to which mediocrity is obnoxious. The faults I have been exposing are such as are sown broadcast over some of the most belauded verse of your century.

Int. A certain negligence and laxity of self-criticism was common enough in Shelley and Byron, and other poets of that period. But we have changed all that since their time. Tennyson and Rossetti were most fastidious judges of themselves. They probably never published a stanza or a line until they had tested it with a severity which few mere critics are capable of exercising.

Johnson.-Tennyson was indeed a master who had the art of precision in luxuriance. I could wish his thought were no less invariably exact than his expression. In the imagery of his justly famous elegiac poem I find an occasional deficience of perspicuity; the thoughts are too apt to be pursued to their remotest ramifications. I stick fast in their mazy turns and windings. (After a pause.) I become entoiled in their labyrinthine circumplications and multiflexuous anfractuosities.

Int. (aside).—The old fellow's mannerisms seem to grow upon him.

Johnson. As to Rossetti, though I remember the having read him, I found in him but little that pleased.

Int. He certainly had what you praise Tennyson for-precision in luxuriance. For romantic richness of color I believe him to be without an equal, and along with this gorgeous affluence he has the strictest verbal compression. He valued himself upon his turn for condensation-rightly, I think.

Here Dr. Johnson takes down from his shelves Rossetti's Poems, opens at random, and reads aloud as follows:

Like labor-laden moonclouds faint to flee From winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold

Like multiform circumfluence manifold
Of night's flood-tide-like terrors that agree
Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea
Even such, within some glass dimmed by our
breath,

Our hearts discern wild images of death, Shadows and shoals that edge eternity. Howbeit athwart Death's imminent shade doth

soar

One Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove Sweeter to glide around, to brood above.

Tell me, my heart, what angel-greeted door
Or threshold of wing winnowed threshing-floor.
Hath guest fire-fledged as thine, whose lord is
Love?

Sir, I know not but you are in the right to claim for Rossetti's verse the merit of condensation. Here is truly a greater body of nonsense condensed within fourteen lines than I had believed fourteen lines to be capacious of. Now, Sir, I invite you to consider with me this sonnet line by line. Let us begin at the beginning. Clouds are often enough spoken of as laboring; and clouds may also, with permissible looseness, be said to be laden, as with rain; but how can they be laborladen, that is, laden with labor? And what is a mooncloud? And what does

faint to flee mean? Circumfluence of night's flood-tide is inoffensive, but multiform and manifold have here little, if any, meaning, and of use none whatever, save to swell out a line. In terrors that agree of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea, I know not what agreement is to be understood. In line seven, the words within some glass dimmed by our breath can only be held to verge toward a possible meaning by being charitably supposed figurative; but figurative of what does not appear. Shadows and shoals are brought together for no better reason than their initial alliteration; a reason, however, which appears to have much weight with some of your modern poets. Howbeit is an odd and uncouth word, by which good taste is revolted. Expletives like doth were in my time, by common consent of the judicious, rejected as awkward encumbrances, and I am sorry to see them come in after our diction had been supposed purged of them. In lines nine to eleven, a Power sweeter to glide around and to brood above than either the flow of a stream or the flight of a dove is, soars against the imminent shade of death. were vain to discuss these lines in hope to come at their meaning. They have none. The three lines which follow, and in which we meet with the guest of the threshold of a threshing-floor, are equally vacant of import. Pope speaks of writers who "blunder round about a meaning." To blunder round about a meaning is bad enough, but it at least implies a meaning round about which the writer blunders; and when we see an author in manifest labor and travail with a thought, compas.

It

sion for his pangs disposes us to assist at the delivery. We are willing to believe that the value of the thought may compensate its difficult bringing forth. But this is not Rossetti's plight. It is not that he is here painfully struggling to present us with a thought. He had no thought to present. Your contemporaries, I presume, called this poetry. Mine would have called it gibberish.

Int. -I think you have not lit upon a good example of Rossetti's sonnets. This one does seem open to a certain kind of criticism. But others, you will find, contain poetry which is above all profanation of criticism and beyond all flight of praise; touches which only the very greatest poets can rival-Homer, Dante, Villon, Swi

Johnson. Well, Sir, let's have them. Let's have the touches.

Int. Is not the accent, the manner, of the highest poets in this? I have quoted it repeatedly in critical articles as an instance of supreme attainment in style.

The sunrise blooms and withers on the hill Like any hill-flower, and the noblest troth Dies here to dust.

Johnson.-But why has he made a sunrise to wither? The progress of the sun toward its meridian is an ascent and expansion. There is no propriety in associating with it images of decadence and dissolution. Elsewhere I observe he speaks of a curse lying furled. When I find your poetry scattered thick with such expressions as these, I can but conclude you had arrived at such a pass as that a phrase, if proper, seemed dull. The measure of its power to please you was the extent of its departure from rectitude. Int.-Does not style, after all, depend for its impressiveness upon some subtle exaggeration, or perhaps distortion? Take, for example, such a line as Keats's

There is a budding morrow in midnight, which Rossetti thought the finest single line of English poetry. Does it not rely for its effect upon

Johnson.-In the name of nonsense, what" effect,' "Sir? Why, sir, the man might as well have said "There is a blossoming gooseberry bush in mid-winter." Int. But has a gooseberry bush blos

The weltering London ways, where children

weep

And girls whom none call maidens laugh-
strange road,
Miring his outward steps who inly trode
The bright Castalian brink and Latmos' steep.

What perversity is here! Poetry should
present to us what is characteristic and
essential in objects, but here is a poet in
whose vision of city life the tears of chil-
foremost place.
dren and gayety of courtesans оссиру the

Even such his life's cross-paths; till deathly deep

He toiled through sands of Lethe, and long pain,

Weary with labor spurned and love found vain, In dead Rome's sheltering shadow wrapped

his sleep.

"Deathly deep" is a vile phrase, and the allusion to Lethe I do not understand, but what was it that wrapped his sleep"? Was it " pain"? And was it "pain" that was "Weary with labor spurned and love found vain"? Here truly is neither sense nor grammar. Thenceforward the piece goes on in the fantastic manner of your day.

O pang-dowered poet, whose reverberant lips And heart-strung lyre awoke the moon's eclipse,

and so forth. A poet who was dowered with pangs, and whose lips reverberated -a lyre which was heart strung, and which awoke the moon's eclipse-it is hard to say whether the poet or his lyre

were the more remarkable.

Int. I think the two sonnets you have quoted must have been an early and a late example of his art; neither of them contains any of those splendid single lines which light up so many of his sonnets with a kind of sudden coruscation. member an admirable critic in one of the

I re

magazines pointing out the frequency with

which Rossetti would end a sonnet with some line of great sonority and resonance, like

The wind of death's imperishable wing,

or

Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes, etc.

Johnson.-Nay, sir, if you come to talk of eminent single lines, Pope is all starred and blazing with them. If you have read him diligently, and have a moderately tenacious memory, you may at any moment call them up by the score. Thus

to

he has, to "Break a butterfly upon a wheel" to "Wonder with a foolish face of praise;" to "Marry discord in a noble wife;" to " Keep awhile one parent from the skies;" to Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art;" to "Make each day a critic on the last ;' "Waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole ;" to "Help me through this long disease, my life;" to "Do good by stealth and blush to find it fame;" to "Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year;" to "Die of a rose in aromatic pain ;" to "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer;" "And

66

wretches hang, that jurymen may dine;" "And mistress of herself, though china fall;""The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease;" 66 A youth of frolics, an old age of cards ;" "I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came ;" "As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye;" "Stretched on the rack of a too easy chair;" and so on, to infinity. For the most part, as you perceive, these lines may not only be detached without harm to the integrity of the sense, but they are self-explanatory no less than self-continent. I say, for the most part, they are You might select from the same poet other lines as rich in various merit as these, to be ranged under certain heads, as, for example:

So.

Forms of Government. Whate'er is best administered is best.

Ambition.

The glorious fault of angels and of gods. Dull Poets. Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.

Admiration of Archaic Authors.

It is the rust we value, not the gold.
Man.

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world. Besides these he has a multitude of single lines, perhaps of no very eminent literary merit, but withal having somewhat that has earned for them the distinction of proverbial currency: such as, "A little learning is a dangerous thing," "Who shall decide when doctors disagree?" "Man never is, but always to be blest," "The Feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul," "Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend," "The proper study of mankind is man, ," "An honest man's the noblest work of God ;" and many more such. I would have you also to observe

that in what little of erotic poetry Pope essayed, he discovers an equal gift of expressing in single lines the most impassioned and tumultuary states of feeling; as in "Eloisa to Abelard ".

Oppose thyself to heaven; dispute my heart! And

All my loose soul unbounded springs to thee. These lines, Sir, are more than rhetorical; they are nobly passionate and dramatic. I suppose it is a small merit in the eyes of your generation that these lines do not purchase their force or felicity by extravagance of epithet or intemperance of phrase.

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Int. Is it not possible to place too high a value on mere negative virtuesmere freedom from literary vice? If I may add another to your list of Pope's memorable single lines, I would remind you that Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend." But on the score of classic severity, which of your poets of the Boileau-Pope school can show as pure a diction as Matthew Arnold's? I myself like splendor and sumptuousness for their own sake, and don't object to a style that is stiff with gorgeous embroidery ;" but if purity of design and chaste frugality of decoration make a classic, I confess Pope seems to me merely a magnificent barbarian beside such a poet as Matthew Arnold. Have you read his verse, Dr. Johnson?

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Johnson.-I have; and it is among the most excellent which your age produced. I lament that there is in it much that is alien to my apprehension-much that reflects, apparently, a mental world of which I have no private report; but he has many pages where I encounter no such impediment to understanding, and when I come to write his memoir in the continuation which I am preparing of my Lives of the Poets, you shall not need to reproach me with parsimony of praise. [Takes up his pen, writes fluently, and slowly declaims while writing.] His sonnets almost persuade me to a reluctant respect for that literary form. His elegiac poem of "Thyrsis," if not the noblest, is the most perfect threnody in our language. Undeformed by the juxtaposition of irreconcilables, the jostling of Saint Peter and Jove, which makes Gothic the grace and barbaric the splendor of " 'Lycidas;" unvexed by the hostilities and resentments which distort the beauty and interrupt the

harmony of Adonais;" it borrows just so much of classic costume, it employs just so much of antique allusion, as dig. nify without encumbering, and, without

disguising, adorn; and it preserves the accents of grief unsilenced by the chords of poesy, the chords of poesy unjarred by the accents of grief.-National Review.

THE notion of a tower 1,000 feet in height is not new. It has haunted the imagination of Englishmen and Americans. As early as 1833, the celebrated English engineer Trevitick proposed to construct a cast-iron tower 1,000 feet high, of which the diameter should be 100 feet at the base and 4 feet at the summit. But his project was never put in execution, and was but imperfectly worked out, even on paper.

At the time of the Exhibition at Philadelphia, in 1876, the great American engineers, Messrs. Clarke and Reeves, brought forward a new project. Their tower was to consist of an iron cylinder 9 metres in diameter as nucleus, and supported by a series of metal buttresses disposed round it, and starting from a base with a diameter of 45 metres. This was a distinct improvement on the English project, although it still left room for criticism; and yet the Americans, in spite of their enterprising spirit, and the national enthusiasm excited by this conception, shrank from its execu

tion.

In 1881 M. Sébillot proposed to light Paris by an electric lamp placed at a height of 1,000 feet. This idea, which has, in my opinion, no practical value, had no better fate than its predecessors. I need only mention the designs, some in masonry, some in metal-work and masonry combined, others, lastly, in wood, like the proposed tower for the Brussels Exhibition, which were produced at the same time as my own. But all these remained in the domain of fancy, proposals easy to frame but hard to execute. I come to the project which has been realized.

In 1885, after the studies which my engineers and I had occasion to make with regard to the lofty metal piers which support railway viaducts like that of Garabit, we were led to believe that it was possible to construct these, without any great difficulty, of a much greater height than any

hitherto made which did not exceed 230 feet. We planned on these lines a great pier for a viaduct, which should have a height of 395 feet and a base of 131 feet.

The result of these studies led me, with a view to the Exhibition of 1889, to propose the erection of the tower, now completed, of which the first plans had been drawn out by two of my chief engineers, Messrs. Nouguier and Koechlin, and by M. Sauvestre, an architect.

The fundamental idea of these pylons or great archways is based on a method of construction peculiar to me, of which the principle consists in giving to the edges of the pyramid a curve of such a nature that this pyramid shall be capable of resisting the force of the wind, without necessitating the junction of the edges by diagonals, as is usually done.

On this principle the tower was designed. in the form of a pyramid, with four curved supports, isolated from each other and joined only by the platforms of the different stories. Higher up only, and where the four supports are sufficiently close to each other, the ordinary diagonals are

used.

In June, 1886, a commission nominated by M. Lockroy, then Minister of Commerce and Industry, finally accepted the plans I had submitted to it, and on January 8th, 1887, the agreement with the State and the City of Paris was signed, fixing the conditions under which the tower was to be constructed.

It is needless to state that considerable energy and perseverance were required to attain this result, for there was much resistance to overcome, and my project had many opponents.

But I was sustained by the belief that what I proposed would contribute to the honor of our national industry and to the success of the Exhibition, and it was not without a legitimate sense of satisfaction that I saw an army of navvies begin, on