Between whose knees, unseen, unheard, The honest mastiff came, Nor fear'd he; no, nor was he fear'd; O come! the same dull stars we'll see, O come! and tell me am I he? O tell me, tell me soon.16 One and all, magical! Yet these nine are only specimens of a host, including, perhaps, others for many minds lovelier still. Indeed, the labour of trying to account by examples for the homage I have rendered to the singer doubtless has been superfluous, when, I dare say, it could have been justified as adequately by a couple of lines : I loved him not; and yet now he is gone, I feel I am alone. Strange, that a multitude of the like should not be household words! What irony of literary fate that the poet's name should be inscribed among the highly honoured in English literature, and his poems remain, unless for a small minority, virtually a sealed book! He has met with a doom analogous to that designed by St. Romuald's votaries, according to Southey's ballad, for their holy townsman. He has been sanctified by a premature death. While he ought to be still living and read, he has been elevated into the dignified repose of a classic. Contrasted qualities in him are equally responsible. He suffers both from diffuseness and from compression. Gebir is a thicket of grand poetical properties. Sonorous gusts of fitful, shadowy ideas blow about it. They constantly elude any ordinary mental grasp. The trilogy, having for its centre miserable Queen Giovanna, is a labyrinth of a hundred and forty pages, in which history and romance go astray, mimicking one another's voice. Sometimes, on the other hand, as in Coresus and Callirhoë, and in many of the lyrics, he is so precipitately brief that the climax is an affront. Then in the longer pieces, based on history, he is apt after an evil and favourite habit of the British Legislature, to proceed by reference'. That is, he assumes that the real events are known, or will be looked up. Not less offensive to popular taste is the want of sifting. Mere exercises, like the trial of Aeschylus, the bandying of indifferent compliments between him and Sophocles, the slaughter of Corythos by his father, and the rescue of Alcestis by Hercules, elbow scenes of absolute loveliness, such as The Hamadryad, Iphigeneia, the first part of Corythos, Peleus and Thetis, and Polyxena. A similar want of assortment doubtless has helped to spoil even the garden of lyrics for a public which will not be at the pains to distinguish between flowers and weeds. The same public, docile when it is a question of economy of brain-worry, has been satisfied to take it on trust from the initiated that Landor is a poet who sits on the dais. It does not trouble to scrutinize his right. Were it to inquire, it would learn that he had the poet's gift of imparting to his verse, over and above all else, a feeling as if of a spirit having hovered near. The attribute is to be prized beyond all others, when apprehended; for it is the readers' then as much as the writer's; and every writer rejoices to share the delight with them. Landor, it is to be feared, had little of that pleasure. But the popular coldness, which was his ordinary experience, cannot have deprived him of the rapture of feeling the descent of inspiration. I read a sense at least of this supreme joy in his own review of a career which impressed his contemporaries as harassed-however needlessly-cross-grained, ineffectual, and unhappy. With spiritual visitations such as favoured him, he cannot have wholly mocked himself in the farewell, which, while it charms, brings somehow an ache to admiring hearts : I strove with none; for none was worth my strife. I warm'd both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.17 The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor. Eight vols. Chapman and Hall, 1876. Vol. vii, Gebir; Acts and Scenes; Hellenics. Vol. viii, Miscellaneous Poems. 1 The Hamadryad (Hellenics). * Iphigeneia and Agamemnon (Hellenics). 3 The Espousals of Polyxena (Hellenics). • Beatrice Cenci (Dialogues in Verse). Б Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn (Dialogues in Verse). • On Catullus (The Last Fruit off an Old Tree, Epigrams, vi). 7 Young (Last Fruit, &c., Ibid., 63). • Miscellaneous Poems, Collection of 1846, No. 63. 12 Miscellaneous Poems, Collection of 1846, No. 152. 17 Prefixed to volume: The Last Fruit off an Old Tree. E. Moxon, 1853. THOMAS MOORE 1779-1852 COURAGE is required to praise Moore even moderately. Admiration of him is likely to be taken as evidence of a preference of sound to sense, and of a propensity to the heinous crime of cheap sensibility. Notwithstanding liability to these terrible charges, I will not without a struggle be parted from old favourites in his life's work. Now as formerly I find in it a power of affording to particular moods the satisfaction they have been craving. Not merely are there special poems which I could not consent to abandon ; there even is a spirit in the whole which asserts for it a right to lodge within the recognized poetic domain. Much of Moore's published work, I willingly allow, has long been out of date. The smoothness of his Anacreon is not Hellenic enough to content modern scholarship. The vivacity of his political and social satire evaporated as it hit its mark. The Twopenny Post-bag, The Intercepted Letters, and The Fudge Family in Paris, with a legion of political epigrams, are forgotten; and it is useless to complain. Their humour and wit, sometimes riotous, oftener caustic, always gay and audacious, require too much reading-in, between the lines, of scandals connected with Carlton House-no longer a Whig centre-and its unwieldy master. For very different reasons Lalla Rookh is similarly neglected. There also I equally recognize the uselessness of quarrelling with public taste. The diffuseness, especially in The Fire Worshippers, and a want of reasonableness, towards which Fadladeen really was over-tolerant, in the entire scheme of the tale of The Veiled Prophet, might have been excused. The treatment of the general theme as if it were a huge operatic libretto, a medley of musical spectacles, was fatal. Moore had learnt so perfectly the art of writing words to an air that he composed a poem of the dimensions of an epic on the same lines. The crowd of imagery in a work on that scale is bewildering. The covering plot is smothered in roses; it is drowned in a butt of sweet malmsey. The whole produces the effect not so much of poetry pure and simple as of poetry in solution. All that remains positively extant out of a prolonged and industrious career's achievement is an accumulation of lyrics. Naturally they differ widely in degrees of merit. A few deserve to survive by virtue of their saucy insolence; for example-juvenile exercise though it was: When I lov'd you, I can't but allow I had many an exquisite minute; And oh ! 'tis delicious to hate you! 1 The clashing melody will rescue one at least of the Sacred Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea! His chariots, his horsemen, all splendid and brave— |