And this discomfiture which you had seen
Long served you for your homily and boast,
While, of your beauty and yourself the queen,
You lived a monument of vain love crossed,

With scarce a thought of that which might have been
To scare you with the ghost of pleasures lost.

II.

Your youth flowed on, a river chaste and fair,
Till thirty years were written to your name.
A wife, a mother, these the titles were
Which conquered for you the world's fairest fame.
In all things you were wise but in this one,
That of your wisdom you yourself did doubt.
Youth spent like age, no joy beneath the sun.
Your glass of beauty vainly running out.
Then suddenly again, ere well you knew,
Love looked upon you tenderly, yet sad:

'Are these wise follies, then, enough for you?'

He said ;-'Love's wisdom were itself less mad.'

And you: What wouldst thou of me?' 'My bare due,
In token of what joys may yet be had.'

III.

Again Love left you. With appealing eyes
You watched him go, and lips apart to speak.
He left you, and once more the sun did rise
And the sun set, and week trod close on week
And month on month, till you had reached the goal

Of forty years, and life's full waters grew

To bitterness and flooded all your soul,

Making you loathe old things and pine for new.
And you into the wilderness had fled,

And in your desolation loud did cry,

'Oh for a hand to turn these stones to bread!'
Then in your ear Love whispered scornfully,
'Thou too, poor fool, thou, even thou,' he said,
'Shalt taste thy little honey ere thou die.'

That these last three sonnets are pictures from life, one can scarcely doubt. At any rate, they exhibit considerable study and knowledge of a love experience common to the femme du monde.

The next is a fair specimen of the irregularity so severely deprecated by X. Of course it is not a sonnet. But is it not a poem?

SIBYLLINE Books.

When first, a boy, at your fair knees I kneeled,
"Twas with a worthy offering. In my hand

My young life's book I held, a volume sealed,
Which none but you, I deemed, might understand.
And you I did entreat to loose the band
And read therein your own soul's destiny.
But, Tarquin-like, you turned from my demand,
Too proudly fair to find your fate in me.

When now I come, alas, what hands have turned
Those virgin pages! Some are torn away,

And some defaced, and some with passion burned,
And some besmeared with life's least holy clay.
Say, shall I offer you these pages wet

With blood and tears? and will your sorrow read
What your joy heeded not?-Unopened yet

One page remains. It still may hold a fate,

A counsel for the day of utter need.

Nay, speak, sad heart, speak quick. The hour is late.
Age threatens us. The Gaul is at the gate.

I must reluctantly close my list of quotations; but I cannot refrain from adding to it one sonnet which appears to me a remarkably fine one; subtler in thought, perhaps, than Blanco White's excellent and famous sonnet upon Night and Death.'

6

LAUGHTER AND DEATH.

There is no laughter in the natural world
Of beast or fish or bird, though no sad doubt

Of their futurity to them unfurled

Has dared to check the mirth-compelling shout.

The lion roars his solemn thunder out

To the sleeping woods. The eagle screams her cry.
Even the lark must strain a serious throat

To hurl his blest defiance at the sky.

Fear, anger, jealousy have found a voice.

Love's pain or rapture the brute bosoms swell.

Nature has symbols for her nobler joys,

Her nobler sorrows. Who had dared foretell

That only man, by some sad mockery,

Should learn to laugh who learns that he must die!

I have little care to dwell at any length upon technicalities, and still less upon apparent defects, in the art of any poet whose genius has genuine character and power. But it would be unfair both to the writer and the reader of these poems if, in a notice of them which professes to be plain-spoken, I did not indicate what I am disposed to dissent from and object to in the versification of them. Many poets have a rich vocabulary, but no style. Proteus, however, has style the style of a good writer, whether in prose or verse. Even in the expression of tumultuous feeling his style has repose. It is dignified, reticent, and yet easy. He is sparing of epithets and superlatives, felicitously accurate in the selection of substantives, and he has a fine rhythmical sense. But, though his style is never slovenly, his versification is sometimes careless; or, if not careless, then deliberately regardless of some of the common requirements of prosody, which are so simple and unexacting that I cannot recognise in the frequent disregard of them any commendable principle of versification. His taste, rarely at fault, is too refined to tolerate vulgar rhymes; and I should be surprised to find in his verses such a rhyme as hundred and thundered, even although the loveliest and noblest VOL. X.-No. 57. 3 G

of our living lyrists has once condescended to adopt it. But his verses abound in assonances of a certain kind which seem to be meant for rhymes because they occur where the verse absolutely requires rhyme, and which are certainly not rhymes. For instance, in one of the sonnets I have quoted, on The Sublime,' dim is made to do service as a rhyme for Time. As to which I can only say,

'Poor Tim!
Sorry for him.

I'd rather the rhyme

Had left him Time.'

Again, the fate is hard indeed which has to rhyme to that. Nor can I quite relish such pseudo-rhymes as years and prayers; flies and is; press and kiss; thine and sin; by and good-bye; death and path; extravagance and once; sin and men. Possibly they are the result of an assonantic theory which commends itself to the ear of the poet who adopts them; but if so, it is a theory which does not seem to me recommended to the reader by the result of its adoption. These remarks, however, are the trivialities of criticism, which it is not worth while to pursue. There is another occasional feature in the verse of Proteus to which my objection is more serious, because it is less technical, and it involves a question of taste. He sometimes employs for the illustration of his thought images which seem to me, in their general associations, too solemn or too sacred for the particular associations with which he connects them. This would be one of the common artifices of wit against which I should have nothing to urge, if it were employed only to promote the effect of mockery or satire. But it is not so employed. And when it is used in the service of serious passion, it appears to me unpleasantly out of place. Indeed, its unpleasantness is increased (to my taste, at least) by the obvious absence of any irreverent intention on the part of the poet; who, notwithstanding the passionate and erotic character of his muse, appears to me to be, on the whole, and at heart, a man of ' religious temperament.' The objection to this kind of writing is one which I feel strongly. But I do not urge it on religious grounds, with which I am not here concerned. I urge it on every ground of literary taste and sentiment.

But in this collection of sonnets Proteus seems to be bidding a solemn adieu to the loves which inspired it, and the life it records. A certain Monsieur de Menage, who attained the age of fifty in the time of Richelieu, formally called on all the ladies of his acquaintance and took farewell of them, as a man who thenceforth renounced gallantry. Proteus has not waited so long. He says in his preface that he is closing for ever his account with youth,' that he stands upon the threshold of middle life, and already his dreams are changed. Yet, while looking back upon the feelings here portrayed as things now

foreign to his life, and recognising the many errors of his youth, he finds it impossible wholly to regret the past, knowing that those only are beyond all hope of wisdom who have never dared to be fools.' To any who are disposed to reprove the writer of such a confession, one may perhaps be allowed to say what Antoninus said to those who rebuked young Marcus for weeping- Permittite illi ut homo sit: neque enim philosophia vel imperium tollit affectus.' 'Suffer him to be man, for neither philosophy nor power can take from us the affections.' And in one of his latest love sonnets Proteus says that

HE WOULD LEAD A BETTER LIFE.

I am tired of folly, tired of my own ways,
Love is a strife. I do not want to strive.
If I had foes I now would make my peace.
If I less wedded were I now would wive.
I would do service to my kind, contrive
Something of good for men, some happiness
For those who in the world still love and live;
And, as my fathers did, so end my days.

I would earn praise, I too, of honest men.

No doubt, we are not to take too seriously the renunciations and resolutions of poets, when they sing farewells to love and youth. For poetry is the daughter of youth and love. She may lament the errors of her parents, she may survive their departure, but she cannot renounce her lifelong relation to them. In the mood which prompts such epicedian strains there generally lurks a reaction of sentiment, which has in it something akin to the transient penitence of that Chevalier de Guise (a nephew of the Balafré) who confessed to a Jesuit friar the strength of his attachment to a lady with whom he was in relations forbidden by the Church. The friar refused him absolution unless he would promise to break them off. He hesitated, but was at length persuaded to join with the friar in prayer for strength. The friar prayed, however, with such unction that the Chevalier stopped him, anxiously exclaiming, 'Not so hot, father! not so hot! Heaven may hear you.'

Yet throughout these sonnets there is such marked revelation of that active temperament which the pursuit of pleasure generally attracts in youth, and rarely satisfies in manhood, that I hope I shall not be confounded by the writer of them with those critics who, like the Cynthia of Perseus, would condemn the whole Iliad on account of the naughtiness of Helen, if I welcome, as serious, his farewell-not to Poetry, but to Manon and Juliet. Love, continually contemplating itself, in an attitude of isolation from, and indifference to, the great common movement of mankind, is not a vivifying influence in literature or in life. There is an old fable which every love poet would do well to study. Eros would not grow, to the great grief of his mother. She asked Themis the reason. 'It is,' said Themis,

because he has no companion.' Venus then gave him Anteros for his associate. From that moment Eros began to grow, and at last attained the stature of a man. But, separated from Anteros, he again

became an infant.

Meanwhile, both as a poet and as a man, Proteus has done well and wisely thus to rid his bosom of its perilous stuff.' Goethe, speaking of Werther in his memoirs, says that, whereas his friends feared it would introduce into real life the extravagance of romance, it in fact restored him to serenity of mind. He was, he says, 'like a sinner relieved from the burden of his errors by a general confession,' and he felt inspired with energy to enter on a new existence.' Proteus appears to me to have more of the true temperament of the old Troubadour than most modern Minnesingers, and capacity for enterprise as well as song. Each may powerfully aid the other in the complete liberation of those energies which are in youth the masters, and in manhood the servants, of a vigorous individuality. Even as the great Goethe, in passionate words,' saith Carlyle's tormented Teufelsdröckh, 'must write his Sorrows of Werther, before the spirit freed itself and he could become a Man.' And he adds, 'Vain, truly, is the hope of your swiftest runner to escape from his own shadow.' Yes, but it is not the shadows that slink behind, it is only those we cast before us, that darken the onward path.

LYTTON.