fight? Is it any good to the puzzled spellers-out of an enigma less intensely interesting, which one gives up in despair at last till the post comes, and the slower and surer intelligence? And if, after all, it is only good for per-centages, why this mighty pother about the instrument which falls into no higher rank than that of a modern convenience? Our faith is perilously shaken in those grand bulwarks of modern belief. We have little dependence to put, further than we can see them, on Trade and Science. We have tried to make a Paul and a Peter of the two, but they have not turned out Apostles. An older Apostle-a fierce John Baptist, violent and sudden-has startled us out of his desert,-War, grim with pain and hardships, carrying his misery full in front of him, so that every man may see. We have learned so much by his stormy advent which the smoother influences had never taught us, that it is hard not to assign some positive virtue to that great scourge of the world. We who had been forgetting our humanity in our civilisation we to whom, amid all the comforts of peace, an entire annihilation of pain seemed the great thing to hope and wish for what a revelation was that, shining lambent out of the rude soldiers' huts on the cold hills above Sebastopol, blazing from the desecrated English houses and fortress-walls of India! It is nature, but nature that has heard of a Gospel-rising up against philosophy, against knowledge, against the cold intellect which rules the earth. "It is not Death that kills," cry those rude martyrsoldiers, simple fellows that knew nothing, loyally dying unknown and glorious in the dark trenches; and the cry is echoed with a still profounder tone from the royal tortured race on yonder burning plains. One can die, one can be slaughtered bit by bit, and torn limb from limbone cannot lie or fail. With a force which it is impossible to over-estimate, that sudden revelation fell upon us in our calm. When they left us, we knew, among our cheers and tears, what was before them-they knew it, going like bridegrooms, not only to the field, but to the trench and

hospital; and all that world of endurance and courage and patience all that heaven of consolation and sympathy and strength, which we had been used to dismiss into the shade, and assign to invisible heroes and heroines of domestic life, came out in visible light and colour, as if it had been written on the skies. The pity of it might strike any beholder; the profound necessity of it- the bounden duty to send them out yonder, God consoling them, to endure whatsoever agony might fall to their lot, only never to yield, or betray, or fail-sank deep into the heart of this nation. For many a long year we had been solacing ourselves with cures and cordials, careful of life, chary of pain, fain to think comfort the one thing needful-concluding to ourselves that the heroic elements had subsided into the deepest quiet of private life, and lived now only in women with false lovers, and men struggling against disaster and poverty. We have even heard it said as most other people doubtless have heard-that the poet in our own wonder-working days must change his sphere of operation--that the minstrel of the nineteenth century behoved to turn his eyes to sublimer instruments than that petty mechanism of humanity which had occupied too much the other ages. He had to sing electricity and its triumphs. He had to transport himself back in imagination to that gorgeous, muddy universe in which the mastodon and the ichthyosaurus lived and loved, before such a creature as man was heard of. Who does not remember, some calm day ten years ago, when such things were suggested?-quite in spite of revolution on the Continent, and the first chapter of the imperial fairy-tale which, to be sure, might set these distant molehills by the ears, but had nothing to do with the placid workshop in which we mended and patched and dated this old old earth! What a change! Who, does anybody suppose, would recommend geology now in preference to the Round Table? Who has a word to say in favour of that Sybil, thick of utterance and confused of meaning, the telegraph, which once was prophesied to be the biggest post of this age? This age

has gone back with a plunge to the primitive humanities. The genii have ceased to charm us. Slaves constrained to serve, willingly or unwillinglyvast, cruel, heartless forces, as ready to massacre as to help-by this time we have learned to bind on their harness calmly, and give them their place of servitude; and with a shock which vibrates through every nerve, have learned to know, that the common heart and life, common creatures that jostle us at every corner, are, in fact, all that the statesman, all that the poet, all that the age has of valuable and precious. We could do without those big blind slaves who do our bidding, careless whether we bless or curse them. Life would be much less convenient, but not a whit less noble, if we had neither steamengine nor electric telegraph. All magic and glamour has died out of these bond-servants; and some Ithuriel with a touch of his spear has recalled us out of our foolish canonisation of such dumb elements to show us how the strength and comeliness and honour of a country-all that it needs for its poetry, because all that it needs for its life-depend not on what it knows or has, but on its heart and spirit-on its muscle and sinews on the resolute soul and the firm limb. It is that fiery angel of War which, to our land and generation, has brought this lesson strange evangelist, but not the less a true one. It is he who has turned us from our costumes and conveniences to find out the worth and importance of the common creature man,-who alone gives importance and worth to those lifeless surroundings. Perhaps he has done us still a greater service. Perhaps we never understand so well the great central truth of Christianity, as when, distant lands and seas away from those of our own who are in the hottest peril, we can think with an unspeakable consolation of that chiefest Healer, Physician, Friend, whom neither land nor sea can divide from His wandering children. This common pang of war has relieved us from statistics and generalisationfrom the hard bondage of progress, modern improvement, and the nineteenth century. We are not the tenants of an exceptional period-a

a

summer of St Comfort and St Safety. We are, as our fathers were, driven to primitive hardships and endurances, sore put to it-life, and more than life, sometimes put upon the cast. We too, like our fathers, have yielded up the flower of our youth, the desire of our eyes. We have returned to our broad common ground of humanity, where we are all brethren. The schoolmaster has gone to sleep for a while, and that old grey beard Experience, who has seen so many changes in his day, has taken us in hand. And who will say that the current of life has not run stronger, and with an impetus more full and free, since we have learned this great lesson of humility, and found out that no discoveries, however great, can light upon anything which we can put in the place of this perennial unimproving man?

And as a natural consequence, the air is all a-twitter with that birdsinging which hails the cleared atmosphere after a storm. Poets did not take kindly to that suggestion of the mastodon. Nobody answered the invitation of science to sing the preAdamic history, and these were very small pipes which echoed the praises of the electric sprite. The new reign of poetry never was so much as inaugurated, and a languor fell upon this supreme branch of literature, enough to give some countenance to the idea that ours was an unpoetical age. Now everything is different. To-day is no longer a big Pharisee, holier than thou to all other human days, but fallen into like troubles and agitations with its long array of brethren, and better persuaded of its genealogy and universal connection than it has ever been hitherto. Of the common reinvigoration of the time, the faculty of verse has had more than its even share. Poetry has glided out of the intermediary period, during which it is represented as in a kind of interregnum, by volumes of fugitive verses, and has once more taken upon itself, in more stately wise, to put forth works entitled to the grave judgment of its generation, some of which may distinguish that generation to posterity. A volume of detached verses is seldom more than a vehicle for the conveyance of

some one or two little poems to the world. It is not to be supposed that the author intends it so; but such is the usual result, unless the volume happens to be one of mere mediocrity, from which no remarkable verse, how ever tiny, manages to detach itself. Such productions are, and ever will be, there is an audience, never exhausted, which receives and esteems the fare; but Shakespeare himself could scarcely be expected (unless he is the real WE, and half-a-dozen people-a lawyer, a doctor, Lord Chancellor Bacon, and who knows what beside) to produce a volume of short poems all equally worth remembering. When the throne is vacant, or when the king is lazy, the poetic interregnum maintains itself by those soft pipings and stray notes of music-copies of verses, as our grandmothers called them; but a poem which the world willingly receives and acknowledges as such, belongs to a period when the Art is full awake and regnant in its proper sphere, and when the fugitive verses fall into their proper position, soft clouds and floating nebulæ about the greater planet. Two or three such poems have lately taken their reigning place, as everybody knows -poems of a character altogether individual and characteristic, and as much unlike the last illustrious generation of great poems, unquestionable as are their traces of legitimacy and honest descent, as they are unlike the productions of the days of Anne. Here is no recluse serenely meditating on his hills, no wierd Mariner of ghostly romance. These ancestors have tinged the diction and coloured the thoughts of young Arthur Hallam's faithful mourner, of Maud's unreasonable lover, and of Aurora Leigh; but the strain is different, almost more distinctly different than are the two periods of time which have produced them. These poems, which we have received and acknowledged for our best, are conclusive proofs, above all others, of our return to the common humanity and the broadest simple use of art. Maud, Mrs Browning's great poem, and scarcely less the Idylls-though the remote and fabulous distance of that

famous Round Table somewhat restores the compromised dignity of the poet-are all stories, active dramatic episodes; novels in verse, as clever critics say. In Memoriam is just so much more living than a story, as a heart is more alive than the external incidents in which by glimpses it reveals itself, being, as it is, a picture unparalleled of the movements and gestures, the broken thoughts, the mournful circles of musing always returning to one centre, which distinguish a great personal grief. Let us note that it is not grief in the abstract-nothing can be further apart from the vague elegiac performances already well known in the lower ranks of literature. The book is a book which we lay apart, very near our Bibles, for the solace of our dark hours. Never was a consolation book of pious sermons or exhortations to patience one-half so soothing to a mourner. Just so, when the great blow has fallen, and the world and the skies are dark, do we sit through the silent days, wading and wandering through those mists of reverietaking up languidly one thought after another, looking at it with our dim eyes, turning to lay it, where everything is laid, on that grave. The very ring of the verses, and their somewhat artificial cadence, soothe the sick soul with a monotony that suits her mood. None of the other poetical productions of our age are half so perfect; but they are so much akin in character that it is the present life, and the common emotions, with which all concern themselves. It is not very long since we somewhat despised narrative poetry, with a comfortable feeling of patronage towards Sir Walter, and a certain condescending approbation of Crabbe: narrative poetry has taken its revenge. The voice of our cotemporary song has come down out of the clouds-not without a plentiful train of mists and rainbow-reflections got in that vapoury region-to the universal soil, where it no longer does itself into verses, but into men and women, with all due material accompaniments of place and scene. Novels in verse, to be sure-the title is perfectly appropriate, while, at the same time, ac

knowledged and undeniable poems, which we need not fear to compare with the best of other years.

Such has been the very unexpected result of the improvements and perfections of our mechanical age. So far as men and women are concerned, the arts of improvement are extremely limited. We can improve custom undeniably, and comfort to any extent; but, with very little allowance for these changes, could adopt the personages who move about in the oldest of all old stories as perfectly satisfactory types of the personages of to-day. And of all things in the world, nothing is so interesting as this incomplete unreasonable creature who dominates the world. We come back to him with renewed cordiality after every excursion otherwheres into which we may have been seduced for the moment. He is always new in his perennial identity. It was not by any philosophic delineations of the supreme Spirit, but by so many broad and simple pictures of the primitive intercourse between a personal God and an actual man, that the first revelation came. By the divine extraordinary history of a man's life and death, came the gospel. God has acknowledged and countenanced by all modes-by history and parable, and, greatest of all, by Incarnation-that infallible means of getting at the human heart and interest. It is perhaps the only means by which the universal understand ing can be thoroughly reached at and penetrated. Philosophy has its school, and there is a limited audience for the higher expositions of thought; but all mankind can be touched, can be roused, can be interested by the history of men.

And it is surely a vast mistake to suppose that poetry, of all arts, wants a recondite and select audience. Poetry and painting, the two simplest open-air expositors of the thoughts and heart of human genius !-yet how common it is to profess one does not understand, does not pretend to be a judge, would not presume to venture an opinion! Whose fault is it if the good people say so? Partly, doubtless, their own self-regard and selftimidity, afraid to like something

that connoisseurs forbid them to like, and so damage their own character and reputation with their wiser neighbours; but partly, at the same time, the fault of the artists, who forget their true vocation, and work for the few instead of for the many, to whom they are specially commissioned. Does anybody suppose that a lecture, or any amount of lectures, would charm the rude heart out of a salvage man like a picture or a story-the sweet colour or the sweet tonguethat takes him captive, soul and sense? What is there in all the obscure poems or obscure pictures ever produced which, in all the uses of true poetry and art, can equal that rude Christopher, painted gigantic on a common wall, or thrusting out his big limbs from a German churchpillar, which whoso sees in the morning has a day of luck and good fortune, and meets no harm? Why cannot we somehow or other present something conveying that same idea the Christopher-giant, the big strength that will serve only the greatest-to bring sweet luck and heavenly fortune to the work-day and the labouring man! What these two human teachers say, instead of an enigma, doubtful unless to connoisseurs and critics, should be such that he may run who readeth it. Long ago, in the ages which some of us call dark, the poet and the painter were the popular expositors, familiar to every one; and even now there is an unreasoning delight of admiration in the gaze of an Italian peasant who happens to be brought face to face with a picture, which testifies to the lingering far-off traces of that familiar friendship. Perhaps, indeed, our own peasant population, or the plainspoken multitude at the bottom of the social scale, might in a like manner avow a hereditary comprehension of the old friend so long departed. from them. It is only the middle class who do not venture to believe themselves judges, and are afraid to think that they can tell what they like in that ethereal creature Art who never was a friend of theirs. Never more, perhaps, shall we fill a royal old city, like that old London of Elizabeth, with such a fresh tide of

new life and new inhabitants as came forth immortal through the amazed old Globe, when the unconscious playwright, who most likely did not recognise in himself that Shakespeare whom the whole world wots of, was behind the scenes. Never more, it is certain, shall the civic politics and local gossip of any town swell out into another Inferno, grim, splendid, everlasting; but there is surely still, when we can come at it, some means by which Poetry may reach a universal audience, and be recognised as a more intimate influence than any other form of literature. All that is obscure, and of doubtful meaning all that which it requires special intellect or culture to comprehend, is as untrue to the meaning of this great human agency as it must be always false to art.

Herein lies the safety of narrative. We have no desire to yoke our Pegasus to cart or plough, but he goes better in this shining harness which is perfectly congenial to him, than with the loose and flying rein which so often slips from the rider's fingers. Perhaps it would be true to say that he is no true poet who has not left to the world-whatever wealth of verse may be accumulated behind him— some one portrait of man or woman, some one impersonation, lifelike and recognisable among humankind. For ourselves, we cannot undertake to remember a single verse of Shelley's; but we can as little forget that pale Prometheus on his rock, with the gloomy pale horror of firmament behind him, and the groan of his agony thrilling through earth and heaven. Did we see it painted somewhere, or was it but so many words that made the picture? So if the verses perished, and were made an end of if even in a chance memory no musical line lingered, and the charm of words had evaporated from the tale who could forget that noble Lancelot, sorrowful to the soul for the sin he could not shake off, profoundly and sadly faithful to the love which broke his heart? Or maiden Elaine, lovesick for that grandest melancholy figure, dying for love of the unattainable splendour and excellence-sweet, maidenly visionary, longing towards the highest? This is true poetry: if

some new fashion of despot, inimical to the art, should seize upon every edition of the Idylls of the King, break the types, burn the manuscript, blot out miraculously every line of the poem out of every memory, this ethereal essence would still survive. Perhaps a still more ethereal, less describable essence floats out of the impassioned story of Aurora Leigh. It is not character, it is rather a certain sublimated soul of description, which haunts one's eyes, and gives a distinctness and warmth of colour to things one sees for one's self, but which happen to have been seen beforehand by that poet in a more radiant and intenser light. This still independent of words, however great the charm of these words may be. For example, to take one of the most popular morsels of the poem, let us see a beautiful child suddenly awaked out of its sleep, and though we cannot remember a syllable of the oftquoted lines which everybody knows, we can no more help remembering the rosy infant which woke under the eyes of Aurora, than if that memorable baby had been presented, flesh and blood, before us. More or less of this soul of deathless character or vivid impression must survive out of every poem that truly claims the name. It is the bit of spiritual asbestos-the indestructible diamond which lives through the greatest burning. Were Wordsworth's works swept out of existence, Wordsworth's hills would breathe to each other this spiritual essence of his life; and that poem is not a great poem which could not afford to be consumed and perish, leaving behind it some such imperishable soul.

These characteristics, however, belong to great poems, and only a few works in any department of art ever reach to that supreme rank. A host of poems which are not great, make one of the earliest superficial proofs that great poems are come or coming, since the climax never arrives without a certain general prophetic excitement of the common soul. The air is numerous with verses; poetry, like the bees, murmurs through the gales, which are not zephyrs, of this reluctant summer, as they have done with gradual increase through some