reader, perhaps as the worker, sees it, shall bear upon its face no evidence of the pains it has cost. Not the less is it the fruit of a protracted and vehement course of spiritual gymnastics; frequently of agony.

Courage, curiosity, patience, obstinacy, egotism, selfreliance, perhaps a spice too of self-conceit, all are wanted for the struggle against adversaries at home and abroad. The poet must have a will. He must insist on being blind and deaf to the claims of rival faculties; of his own, when inspiration is on him. They must even let themselves be harnessed to its chariot. Lack of doggedness in breakingin counter intellectual and spiritual impulses, in obliging them to serve, has often smothered the poet under the philosopher or critic. A trial yet more afflicting is the duty of being master in his own house, to the self-torturing extent of setting bounds to the flights of his Queen-his Genius, his Inspiration itself; of imposing silence, of seating reason above ecstasy. All the time the world outside may act as though resentful of his mere existence. Having suffered his Muse, Medea-like, to toss him into the boiling cauldron, he issues forth, believing himself adorable. He sallies out in the cold, rain, storm, and darkness to woo the public with guitar and serenade, as if it were a loving mistress. He finds himself a butt for insolent ridicule, when, absorbed in his ideas, carried away by a prophetic rapture, he dances, like David, before the Ark. He must steel himself to bear persecution because he is honest, chill surprise when he is sublime, contempt when he announces to his age novelties which will be truisms for the next!

In the long and illustrious line scarcely a single member has not had to grope his way to renown through stifling fogs of prejudice. Nature seldom models any for poets without adding extreme sensitiveness to outside opinion.

They have to pretend not to care. on the course. There have been

Some stumble outright

mighty Poets in their misery dead.

The immediate prizes at best are few, with hundreds to compete. Many are the early failures of ultimate winners. Almost more disheartening are the half-successes, like the fall of the fringe of a rain-cloud in a drought. Moore may have felt the ache when he found that his Melodies were not the forerunners of a great poem. Absolute triumphs themselves have their drawbacks in misapprehensions by popular enthusiasm of the real point and motive. Verily, as I take a bird's-eye view of the poetical hierarchy, with its perils and temptations, I am not surprised at the general coincidence of toughness, physical and mental, with inspiration in the few of its members who, in any age, stay out the race to the end.

A 'general', not universal, coincidence, I repeat-and the same qualification must be introduced whenever an attempt is made to imprison poetry and poets inside an absolute definition. I have tried the experiment with an enumeration of essential properties, as they might seem, belonging to whatever poetry is genuine. It has always failed, even down to the specification of metre itself as indispensable. None will deny that Ruskin constantly sings in prose, and De Quincey frequently. Shelley could be as musical in an essay as with his Skylark. I know of a sentence which is poetry in Hallam, an author as habitually unpicturesque as his own Wimpole Street. I have my doubts about a piece of Plantagenet portraiture in tough Bishop Stubbs. Though I cling to the belief that imagination and fancy are, one or both, necessary to true poetry, I should not care to dogmatize on it. Charm, I am

sure, ought to be; and is not. With the splendour of the Ode on the Passions confronting me, I can lay down no law of an inevitable relationship of sentiment in great poetry to its period and country. While I am fully persuaded of the especial convenience of the union of moral and physical strength with the poetical temperament, I shrink from going further. Were I to pronounce the marriage indissoluble, I might expose myself to an immediate dilemma of having to choose between eating my words and the rejection of a masterpiece.

The utmost of certainty I possess is that, as I have many times intimated, the soul has moods, emotions, ideas, which, were there no such thing as poetry, would probably never have come into active, visible existence. As there is, they exist, and operate, yet, in default of poetry, would remain, for most of us, as if they were not. Poetry, whatever in its origin and essence it may be, proves its being by furnishing expression for them. For the purpose, it takes ordinary speech. Having by some strange, untraceable process of spiritual chemistry, which we call Inspiration, fused with it the mute spiritual germs, it introduces the amalgam into the common mind. Thereupon emotions, ideas, moods cease to be dumb; and language swells into the diapason of an organ.

Without the poets innumerable phases of the soul, many of them among the highest, would never have come to life, completely, if at all. Eternal gratitude is their due, and, on the whole, is, I dare say, adequately rendered to the acknowledged princes of song. Candidates struggling upwards to the light receive hard measure. It appears to be considered that the ignominy of defeat in poetry ought to be proportionate to the possible, the rare, glory. Failures in prose are liable usually, as I know, to no more condign

penalty than neglect. Poets, unless they be crowned, are never safe from the pillory. They enter the lists at the peril of the doom threatened to law reformers in the old Greek State. In equity they well might plead that their critics ought equally to abide the risk. For myself I am fully conscious how fair the claim would be, and sincerely trust that I have behaved as if I were. Throughout I can assert that, in venturing to assume the critical character, I have had a constant sense of a cord round my own neck instead of the poet's. I have even felt a lively apprehension that the noose might be tightened by the thick fingers of some Georgian poet's ghost. For their own sakes, no less than for that of the public, members of the obnoxious profession, in which for my present purpose I have enrolled myself, are bound, I believe, to be always on the watch that they do not bar entrance within the temple of the Muses to angels unawares. Continually they should be reminding themselves that aspirants vainly seeking admittance in the despised guise of Minor Poets have been discovered ere this to be meditating poetry which is Great.

A drowzy frowzy poem, call'd the 'Excursion'

A greater name The list of Glory boasts not

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331

305

288

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A light that is more than the sunlight, an air that is brighter

And crown him martyr; and his name will ring

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And Harald reigned and went his way.

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And if I laugh at any mortal thing

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