now, but also as we know them to have been in the past, that furnish ever fresh poetic materials. It has often been a marvel to me that English poets, with their own grand national history behind them, have made so little use of it.

Since Shakespeare wrote his historical dramas, how few poetic blocks have been dug from that quarry? What I now say applies to England especially, rather than to Scotland. Our picturesque historians of recent years, while they have done the work of partisans very effectively, have also been in some sort poets of the past. But how seldom have our regular singers set forth on that field! The Laureate, no doubt, after having done his work in England's mythic region, has, late in his career, descended from those shadowy heights to the more solid ground and more substantial figures of her recorded history. Let us hail the omen, and hope that the coming generation of poets may follow him, and enter into the rich world of England's history and possess it.

Surely this land, if any other, supplies the material in her long unbroken story, her heroic names, her battle-fields scattered all over the island, where railways and factories have not obliterated them;

"the halls in which are hung

Armory of the invincible knights of old;"

where hang, too, the portraits of famous men, the homes in which they were reared, either still inhabited, or mouldering,

"In all the imploring beauty of decay;"

-these things remain to add life and color to that which chronicle and tradition and family histories have preserved. How is it that our English poets have so turned their back on all that? I confess it has often pained me to see fine poetic faculty expended on a poem, long as Paradise Lost, about some demigod or hero of Greece, in whom the Teutonic mind. can never find more than a passing interest; or in discussing hard problems of psychology, better left to the philosophers; or in cutting the inner man to shreds in morbid self-analysis, while the great fresh fields of our own history lie all unvisited.

4. One word as to the relation which substance bears to form, thought to expression, in poetry.

"Lively feeling for a situation, and power to express it, constitute the poet," said Goethe. "The power of clear and eloquent expression is a talent distinct from poetry, though often mistaken for it," says Dr. Newman. Into this large question, whether he can be called a poet who lacks the power of expressing the poetic thought that is in him, I shall not enter. On the one hand you have Goethe and Coleridge maintaining that poetic conception and expression are inseparable-powers born in one birth. On the other hand, Wordsworth and Dr Newman agree in holding that

"Many are the poets sown by Nature,

Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse."

As, however, the "vision," even if it exist, cannot reveal itself to others without the "accomplishment" of expression, there is little need further to discuss the question. But while both of these powers are indispensable, they seem to exist in various proportions in different poets. One poet is strong in thought and substance, less effective in form and expression. In another the case is exactly reversed. It is only in the greatest poets, and in those when in their happiest mood, that the two powers are seen in perfect equipoise—that is, that we find the highest thoughts wedded to the most perfect words. Among wellknown poets, Cowper and Scott have been noted as stronger in substance than in form; Pope and Gray as poets in whom finish of style exceeds power of thought; Moore as hiding commonplace sentiment under elaborate ornament. On the whole, it may be said that the early poets of any nation are for the most part stronger in substance than in style; whereas, as time goes on, power of expression grows, style gets cultivated for its own. sake, so that in later poets expression very often outruns thought.

As an illustration of the wide limits within which two styles of expression, each perfect after its kind, may range, take two poems, well known to every one-Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence," and Tennyson's "Palace of Art." Each poem well represents the manner of its author. In one thing only they agree-that each contains a moral truth, though to teach this is not probably the main object of either. In all

other respects their manner of conveying the truth, the form, coloring, style of diction-no two poems could well be more unlike.

Wordsworth's poem sets forth tie alternation of two opposite moods, to which imaginative natures are exposed—the highest exaltation and rejoicing in sympathy with the joy of Nature, quickly succeeded by the deepest despondency. These two moods powerfully depicted, admonition and restoration come from the sight of a hard lot patiently, even cheerfully, borne by a poor leech-gatherer, who wanders about the moors, plying his trade. This sight acts as a tonic on the poet's spirit, bracing him to fortitude and content.

The early poem of the Laureate begins by personifying the Spirit of Art, who speaks forth her own aims and desires, her own purpose to enjoy beauty always and only by herself, for her own selfish enjoyment, the artistic temptation to worship beauty apart from truth and goodness. Every one remembers how she describes the palace, so royal rich and wide, with which she surrounded herself, the life she led there; then, after a time, how, smitten to the core with sense of her own inward poverty and misery, she loathes herself in despair.

Wordsworth's "plain imagination and severe" moves rapidly from the most literal everyday commonplace into the remotest distance of brooding phantasy, before which the old man and the plain visible scene entirely disappear, or are transfigured. And the diction moves with the thought, passing from the barest prose to the most elevated poetic style. Thus, if on the one hand you have such lines as

and

44

"To me that morning did it happen so,"

'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?"

you have, on the other,

"I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride;

Of him who walked in glory and in joy,

Following his plough, along the mountain side :
We poets in our youth begin in gladness;

But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.”

You have also the strong lines, likening the sudden apparition of the old man on the moor to a huge boulder stone,

"Couched on the bald top of an eminence;"

then to a sea beast that has crawled forth on a sandbank or rock-ledge, to sun itself. Then rising into—

“Upon the margin of that moorish flood,
Motionless as a cloud, the old man stood;

That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
And moveth all together, if it move at all."

Many may object to the appearance of the bald lines in the poem as blemishes. To me, while they give great reality to the whole, they enhance, I know not how much, the power of the grander lines. I would not, if I could, have them otherwise.

Mr. Tennyson again from end to end of his poem pitches the style at a high artistic level, from which he never once descends. Image comes on image, picture succeeds picture, each perfect, rich in color, clear in outline. When you first read the poem, every stanza almost startles you as with a new and brilliant surprise. There is not a line which the most fastidious could wish away.

In another thing the two poems are strikingly contrasted. Wordsworth's is almost colorless: there is only a word or two in it that can suggest color. Mr. Tennyson's is inlaid throughout with the richest hues, yet so deftly as not to satiate, but only to bring out more fully the purpose of the poem. In reading the one you feel as though you were in the midst of a plain, bare moor, out of which the precipiced crags and blue mountain peaks soar suddenly, yet not inharmoniously, all the more im pressive from the dead level that surrounds them. In the other you are, as it were, walking along some high mountain level, without marked elevation or depression anywhere, but yielding on either side wide outlooks over land and sea.

I have alluded to these two poems, not by any means to make estimate of their excellence, but as instances in which two great poets give expression to high thoughts, each in his own characteristic style, and that style perfect according to its kind and aim.

In these two instances the idea and the expression are well

balanced, in perfect equipoise. But it is otherwise with much of the poetry, or attempts at poetry, of the present time. A tincture of letters is now so common, that the number of those who can versify is greatly increased; but the power of expression often lamentably outruns the thought. The opposite of this is sometimes seen-strong thought with little skill to utter itan instance of which will occur to every one in the case of one of the most prominent living poets, in whom the power of lucid utterance halts breathlessly and painfully behind the jerks and jolts of his subtle and eccentric thought. But this is not a common fault. Rather, I should say, we are overdone with superabundant imagery and luscious melody. We are so cloyed with the perfume of flowers, that we long for the bare bracing heights where only stern north winds blow. Or, to put it otherwise, in many modern poems you are presented with a richly chased casket; you open it, and find only a common pebble within. This is a malady incident to periods of late civilization and of much criticism. Poetry gets narrowed into an art—an art which many can practise, but which when practised is not worth much. How many are there in the present day of more or less poetical faculty, who can express admirably whatever they have to say, but that amounts to little or nothing. At best it is but a collection of poetic prettinesses, sometimes of hysteric exaggerations and extravagances.

Had these men, with their fine faculty of expression, only made themselves seriously at home in any one field of thought; if they had ever learned to love any subject for its own sake, and not merely for its artistic capabilities, if they had ever laid a strong heart-hold of any side of human interest, no one can say what they might not have achieved. But for want of this grasp of substance the result is in so many cases what we see. Not by manipulating phrases, and fiddling at expression-not indeed unless some great stirring of the stagnant waters be vouchsafed, some new awakening to the higher side of things-not till some mighty wind blows over the souls of men. will another epoch of great and creative poetry once more arise.

5. The views which I have here set forth will, if they are true, determine what value we ought to place on that modern theory which maintains "the moral indifference of true art."