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And he drew his teeth (one big bowie,
And pistols) with no remark-
Then tied him fast with a grin o' glee!
"I call for a Court, to sit," says he,
"In the case of Cunnle Shark!"

It's orful how guilt unnerves a cuss

The Cunnle was clean dumbfounded; And now no longer he'd charms for us,

Though his dern'd old teeth he grounded. But I confess I was full o' grief

To see a man o' mark,
Respected, happy, of all the chief,
Turn out that scum of the airth, a thief,
And I wept for Cunnle Shark.

For a moral place was Grizzly Creek,
No spot to pilfer and pick in.

If a thief was caught, 'twas slickity squeak,
And up he was sent a-kickin'.

The preciousest thing in the creek was a Hoss,

As dear as the dove to the Ark

But a man or two was no grit loss,

;

And life, you guess, was a pitch and a toss

To more than Cunnle Shark.

We form'd a court on the spot jest there,
With his geese around us sissin',
Jedge and jury, and all things square,

And a Testament for kissin'.

The bob'link cried from the laylock spray
And answer'd the meadow-lark ;
The corn was yellow upon thet day,

And the mornin' glories lookt bright and gay
Round the hut o' Cunnle Shark.

Natur' is natur'! When Shark was bound,
And beyond more ruination,

No end o' witnesses were found

Who'd been part o' the deputation!
And they said they'd allays long'd to speak
Of his doin's in the dark,

Only-they'd never found the cheek,
T'accuse such a pop'lar man in the Creek
As the fightin' Cunnle Shark.

"Guilty!"-Guilty, and no mistake,
For the proofs were black as thunder.
I saw the Cunnle tremble and shake,
And his knees a-knocking under.
With a voice that shook, for the Cunnle he
Had been sech a man o' mark,

I spoke his sentence, and it should be

"To be swung by the neck to the nearest tree!" "Euchred!" shrieked Cunnle Shark.

"Pris'ner," says I, "it unnerves a man
To hev this ugly duty,

And to think how promisin' you began-
A character full of beauty.

In the ways of virtue you shot ahead,

War' honour'd both light and dark ;

And you've come to this! To be jedged," I said, "To be hung by the neck till you air dead." "O Lord!" cried Cunnle Shark.

Yes, he stared at fust like a skeery child,
And all his game departed,

I could have kick'd him-I felt so riled
To find him chicken-hearted.

But, you see, to be stript of his hard-eern'd fame
And life at one big jark,

To find his glory all brought to shame,
And to go from life with so bad a name,
Was dern'd hard lines on Shark.

But when he saw his last kerd was play'd,

66

The Cunnle show'd his mettle.

Wal, boys," says he, "it's a mess I've made,

And this dern'd old neck must settle.

Let this yer teach ye to mind the law,

And play no tricks in the dark.

Abner Yoker, jest shake my paw!

Neow, feel in my pants, and give me a chaw !" Was the last words spoke by Shark.

He could see the men in the corn-patch nigh,
And could hear the lark a-singing,

As we carried him to the wood jest by,
Where the hang-birds cried a-swingin';

For Abner Yoker he found a cord

We

On the hitchin' post in the park;

gave him one minute to pray to the Lord, And with glass eye glaring and cheeks scar-scored, Swish! up ran Cunnle Shark!

I was raised in the land where the sun don't set, And the men ain't crook-neck squashes;

I can see as fur as most I've met

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And know what almighty bosh is;
But I never have seen a career to break
So bright, and to end so dark.
I'm putty consid'rable wide awake,
So I do admire at my own mistake
In the matter of Cunnle Shark.

TENNYSON'S CHARM.

"THE proof of a poet," writes the bard of American democracy, "must be sternly delayed until his country absorbs him as affectionately, as he, in the first instance, has absorbed it." The last final consecration, after all, is the approval of the people, or of that section of the people to which the poet specially appeals; and not until that consecration is given, can a poet justly be deemed prosperous, or adequate, or puissant as a vital force. Sometimes, as in the cases of Burns and Byron, and the subject of the present article, the poet, "absorbed" instantaneously, lives to see the seeds of his own intelligence springing up around him in a hundred startling and wonderful forms; and to feel that, whether or not the honour accorded to him be adequate to the influence he is exerting, he has at least moved the heart and illuminated the mind of his generation. At other times, as in the cases of Shelley, Whitman, and Browning, the absorption, although it is no less complete, takes place in so circuitous a fashion, by means of so many intellectual ducts and go-betweens, and is, moreover, often delayed so late, that the public may well be ignorant of the debt it owes to the poets in question; and the poets, in their turn, may well doubt the extent and value of their own influence. Almost from the commencement, Alfred Tennyson has been recognised as a leading English poet; and his name has been ripening, as all good things ripen, from day to day. On the other hand, the Laureate's only formidable English rival, the thinker who is now recognised as the mighty Lancelot to our poetic Arthur, I mean, of course, Robert Browning,-was publishing poetry for thirty years, without half the fame, or one quarter the success, enjoyed in turn by each new ephemeron of the season; and when, a few years ago, he published his collected works, a new generation plunged with wonder into a poetic gold-mine, of which the preceding generation had scarcely told them one syllable. Shelley is to this day a secret rather than a mighty force. To praise Whitman to the British critic is like preaching a new religion to Bishop Colenso's savage. Yet he would be rash, indeed, who said that Shelley and Browning have wasted their time and missed the final consecration, or

I am quite aware that I am only interpreting this passage in its smaller and more simple sense. Whitman means that every true poet assimilates the forces around him and fabricates them into form, and that the poet's work, in its turn, is "absorbed " back into the original forces, plus the colouring force of the poet's imagination.

that Whitman should be silent because he has to be explained like a novel religious system. It is curious, doubtless, to see the public heaping all their gratitude in one, vast shower of roses and yellow gold at one man's feet, while good men and true, to whom so much is owing, stand aside comparatively unrecognised and unappreciated. Still, even fame and recognition do not necessarily imply prosperity personally. Heine dies for years in his Parisian garret, while all Germany recognises him as her greatest poet since Goethe. After all, there are compensations; and he who is not content to give his best to the world, without too eager a clamour for recompense, has possibly no gift to offer which posterity will consider worth the having.

And, meanwhile, we in England here may well rejoice that the British public is right for once, and that, instead of consecrating some later Blackmore or Shadwell, instead of using the laurel to bind over flattery or to glorify mediocrity, it has at last,-nay, for the second time, for did not Wordsworth immediately precede ?done eager honour to a great English poet-one whose works are above all impeachment from any platform, and whose genius is as certain of immortality in England, as that of Heine in Germany, or that of Alfred de Musset in France. True, a certain number of people still persist in confounding clearness of flow with shallowness of depth, and in averring that Tennyson is not sufficiently "tremendous." True, a certain number of dyspeptic and nervously deranged gentlemen, who think poetry ought to be a sort of galvanic battery, to be taken medically at regular intervals, and divers other young persons, with large animal faculties, who regard verse as a sort of soothing hair-brushing by machinery, are almost agreed that the Tennysonian epic is not half wicked enough, and is moreover abominably slow. True, some of the critics who have taken lately to Browning, as other people take to dram-drinking, begin to fancy that the Tennysonian tipple does not taste half strong enough in the mouth. True, in one word, that certain members of this generation, having nourished themselves on the Laureate's wine almost to intoxication, now begin to long for something sharper,-no matter how vile a mixture, something more gingery, and infinitely less mellow. Never was testimony more convincing of the fine nature of the liquor they are rejecting; for its delicious flavour has tempted them over and over again to drink far too much at a sitting, and so to produce a really natural nausea. What on earth were all the poets given us for, if we are to confine ourselves, half in ignorance, half in perversity, to one alone, and to one the nearest to our elbow ? The rich wines of the Muses were meant to correct each other; to please by contrast, to delight by infinite variety. None but a ninny or a boor goes on guzzling one drink until, in sheer disgust, he walks off with a curse at the vintage. The more the British public gets to know of literature in general, the higher will be its delight in Tennyson;

and although there may be some acceptance now of the foolish judgment devised, to their own discredit, by literary tipplers, I feel sure that readers in general will do their favourite the grand justice of tempering his with other poetry. Close "Locksley Hall," or "Maud," and open Heine's "Ratcliffe," or Browning's "Epistle of Karsheesh;" then go back to Tennyson, in due course, and read the stately idyl of "Guinevere." Gallop to Ghent with the three who took the good news, or dance in the wild moonshine with the ghosts of the hanged in Heine's ballad, or step into the dark chamber where De Musset's Rolla lies with his little mistress in his arms; and then, return to the windy downs and the chalk cliffs by the sea, as you find them in the Laureate's English song. The more charming you find any literature, and the more exquisite the gratification you get out of it, the more speedily should you relieve it with the beauties of other books: that is to say, if you would have it keep its charm. I know no poetry-not even Shakespeare's which will stand the test of serving for all occasions. Each singer has his own style of pleasing us. As the public knowledge of good poetry widens (never surely was public ignorance greater than now as to all literature more than fifty years old), we shall be more and more able to ascertain how great an art it must be, how subtle and supreme a genius, which manages to charm any generation as Alfred Tennyson is charming ours.

What is this charm to which wise and foolish yield alike, which warms the hearts of bishops and portly deans, which persuades the smug man of science into approval, which delights youths and maidens, which excites the envy of poets and the despair of scholars? What is the quality of this nectarine drink, that it quickens pulses in those who deem Shelley hysterical and Wordsworth wearisome in the extreme? Why have critics loved Tennyson from the first, and why is the entire British public learning to love him too? Questions readily put, but exceedingly difficult to answer. Much, perhaps, is due to the fact that Tennyson came just in time to reap the harvest sown by those poets of whom he is, in a sense, the direct product, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, poets whose literary charms society was slow to feel till it flowered forth into the perfect speech of the present Laureate. A great deal, doubtless, is due to the thoroughly unimpeachable and middle-class tone of the scenery, the sentiments, and (for the most part) of the subjects. A little, also, has been due to the limpid delicacy of the style, which, though ornate in a certain sense, owes nothing to meretricious ornament and little to fanciful affectation. However the phenomenon may be explained, the facts are undeniable: that, just in the nick of time, just when the poets had been concentrating all their energies into "boring" the public, up started this poetical prodigy, bent on pleasing by the simplest means; with all Landor's culture and none of

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