banter directed against practical men who think it graceful to go into ecstasies about the country,-indeed, the most decided protest in poetry against the main feeling which underlies what some now call the Lake School of English poetry. So far as we can gather Mr. Palgrave's meaning on page fiftytwo, we are to account for Horace's limited allusions to landscape by his limited opportunities of living in the country. But is it not strange that when he does dwell, sincerely and not in mockery, on the delights of a country life, it is on the noctes cænæque deûm, his dinner parties and country society, that he enlarges; not on the joys which the country offers, but on those which can be imported thither from the town? Yet Mr. Palgrave twice (pages 238 and 248) actually compares Horace and Wordsworth as lovers of the country. In characterizing landscape poetry to the close of the eighteenth century, he gives us some excellent criticism which with the necessary modifications might well be applied to Horace: "Man and his works were the chief subject of Dryden's powerful Muse, and, although he looked back to Chaucer, his tales were so modernized by Dryden that the old poet became almost unrec ognizable. The wonderful genius of Pope, who saw what his readers required, largely took for the object of his strenuous labor court life and the artificialities of society. Country life as such was to him intolerable dulness." a Though only too generous in his appreciation of the poets, and too ready to find, even in casual allusions, heart attuned to the spirit of the country, Mr. Palgrave puts one poet alone outside the pale. This is that tunefulest of singers, Ovid. The late Doctor Henry thought the first book of the "Metamorphoses" better than any part of his favorite Virgil's works. With out going so far as this, we would venture to say that the scene in which Proserpina with her girl friends plucks flowers in Enna, though depreciated as "nothing but a gardener's catalogue," vign compares favorably as landscapepainting with any of Horace's ettes inspired by a flask of Cæcuban under a tree, and is not inferior to most of the illustrations cited from the subsequent poets (except Shakespeare and Milton), until we come to genuine feeling for nature in recent poetry. Quintilian, in an oft-quoted passage, pointed out that the Latin poets admired nature only for her amenity; bold and wild scenery, mountain pass and frowning scaur, were to them fœdi and tetri visu (shocking and hideous to behold). Tennyson's "Palace of Art," among its lovely pictures of peace, has its "iron coast and angry waves," its "foreground black with stones and slags," and its Ragged rims of thunder brooding low With shadow-streaks of rain. All these would have been repulsive to an ancient Roman whether in art poetry. or A very similar criticism may be made on landscape in Hebrew poetry. Biblical poetry treats landscape mainly in relation to man. The beautiful scene is the field which the Lord has blessed, which will yield a good harvest. Even the 104th Psalm is hardly landscape poetry so much as a series of reflections on the relation of nature and na ture's God to living things, and especially to mankind. The one phrase in Hebrew literature which seems to show a real sympathy with nature in the modern sense is the allusion to the lilies of the field in the Sermon on the Mount, a passage which has always seemed to us as curiously unique as it is simply beautiful. We have said that Mr. Palgrave here and there enunciates a principle which might have had a regulative influence on his quotations, but that his mind, so attuned to beauty in poetry, cannot resist the Muse when she lays herself out to please; and it has already been pointed out how the condition of "union with human feeling," or even the "sense of the Unity in Nature," is often neglected in the choice of illustrations. Though he quotes Beetho ven's phrase, “Mehr Ausdruck der As to Celtic poetry, we must confess Empfindung als Malerei (more expressive of feeling than painting)," he does no ask his poets for rendering of inner sentiment, if they will only give him sufficiently beautiful or powerful painting, as in the garden of Alcinoüs, the convulsion of nature in the "Prometheus," the praises of Athens in the "Edipus Coloneus." It is only when he comes to Elizabethan poetry that he makes a distinction which, as we conceive, should have guided him throughout, and lays a very down that the statement of a natural fact, however true, is comparatively valueless for his purpose, if too obvious. The consistent application of this principle would deprive large number of his quotations of their claim to a place. Much the same may be said about another excellent rule, which appears, we think for the first time on p. 171, that it is not enough merely to describe nature, she must be described for her own sake, as she is by Shelley and Wordsworth. Again, at p. 202 he clearly sees how essential for his purpose it is that with "truth to nature" should be combined "personal feeling;" but he does not seem to have missed this quality in his many exquisite citations from early Italian and Elizabethan poetry. On p. 136 he quotes from Spenser a passage in which we have "a picture of the and of a vast royal ship of the day which has never been surpassed in English literature." The merit of the passage is perhaps exaggerated, but what one feels most disposed to protest against is the generalization drawn from it: "With what splendid landscape scenes might Spenser have endowed us, had he thus trusted himself more freely!" Not so; neither in its sturdy boyhood in the hands of Chaucer, nor in its graceful adolescence in those of Spenser was English poetry under the influence of nature. When she desired to describe a natural scene she described it, and sometimes very well; but she never felt nature to be a present goddess, and fortunately she never pretended that she did. sea to that to us it seems to prove nothing so clearly as the fact that sometimes the more a poet writes about nature the more he betrays how little he is under her influence. Llywarch's dry catalogues of the features of the external world interspersed with moral platitudes seem to show a temper at the opposite pole to that of the lover of nature: fish Bright are the willow-tops; playful the In the lake; the wind whistles over the tops of the branches; Nature is superior to learning. Bright are the tops of the broom; let the lover arrange meetings; Very yellow are the cluster'd branches; Shallow ford; the contented is apt to enjoy sleep. Yet Mr. Palgrave professes to find landscape poetry here, and indeed one might almost say everywhere. He is often obliged to qualify his eulogies, as when he says of Allan Ramsay that he deserves praise rather for his intention than for his performance, or characterizes a poem as "beautiful, but how inferior to the lyrics of Milton," ΟΙ as "full of life and invention, if not highly poetical." But it is amazing how many delightful pieces he has put before us, not perhaps bearing closely on his theme, but still very delightful for themselves. Among them we would especially note an admirable rendering by Deau Plumptre of the opening of the twentyfourth canto of "The Inferno" (on p. 81), a passage from Ausonius (p. 65), the song of Phædria (p. 134), the rivergod's song to Amoret in "The Faithful Shepherdess" (p. 140), and scores of other beautiful pieces more familiar, but all unfailing in their charm. It is when we come to the fifteenth chapter, on Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, that at last we find ourselves exactly at the author's point of view. And this is because now for the first time landscape begins in the fullest sense of the word to influence poetry. Here we have the personal note which personifies nature and invests her with sea, our human sensibilities, as when (to is interesting to note that schylus take one example out of a thousand in (in the "Agamemnon,' 1408), applies modern poetry) Shelley asks the moon, this same epithet (pvoas) to the but the editors have unanimously struck it out as an error of the copyist and replaced it by the pale and colorless purâs (flowing). Other excellent Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different examples of this gift are "The blasts birth And ever changing like a joyless eye In Wordsworth, of course, this is the us. We have also the vigorous image that presents nature to the mind as vividly as she could come before the eye in Coleridge's, The ghtning fell with never a jag and in Keats's, These green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks; and the minute observation of her moods, as when the latter paints the "swarms of minnows" in a passage closely imitated by Tennyson in "Enid and Geraint" where he compares the champions put to flight by wild Limours to A shoal Of darting fish that on a summer morn Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud From less and less to nothing. In the lavish abundance of English poetry from Coleridge to Tennyson, there must of course be hundreds of admirably characteristic passages omitted in a book like this; but one cannot help wondering how Mr. Palgrave could resist Keats's Magic casements opening on the foam The steady glare or, lastly, that amazing picture in "The A broken chancel with a broken cross On one side lay the Ocean, and on one But if a man who stands upon the brink But lift a shining hand against the sun, There is not left the twinkle of a fin Between the cressy islets white in flower. These and all the other signs of the influence of landscape in poetry are fairly and fully illustrated and appreciated in the delightful chapter which Ideals with recent poetry. The work It is an interesting circumstance is especially pleasing in its illustration that from one point of view the ancient of what is happily called Tennyson's and modern world are sharply con"gift of flashing the landscape before trasted in their attitude towards na us in a word or two," such as "little ture. They both agree in drawing from breezes dusk and shiver" and "the the external world illustrations of menwrinkled sea beneath him crawls." It tal states. Sometimes, indeed, in Let the wild Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, That like a broken purpose waste in air. ancient poetry these analogies are almost grotesque, as when Apollonius Lean-headed eagles yelp aloud, and leave Rhodius compares the fluttering heart The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill of Medea to a ray of light reflected from the troubled surface of a tub of water, or Virgil likens the frenzied Amata's wanderings to the gyrations of a top whipped by boys "round great empty halls." But the process hardly ever inverted in ancient poetry. We can think of no example of such an inversion except one in the Homeric "Hymn to Hermes," where the speed with which a work was done is compared to the speed of thought: same And flushes all the cheek. The expression is very uncharacteristic of early poetry, and perhaps points (with other indications in the poem) to a late, possibly Alexandrian origin of the hymn. And after all "quick as thought" is a conception so familiar and natural that its elaboration into a metaphor hardly makes a real exception to an established rule. But in modern poetry it is quite common. Shelley compares a rock clinging to the side of a ravine to "a wretched soul" which Hour after hour Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging leans, And leaning makes more dark the dread abyss In which it fears to fall. To Browning the black-thorn boughs, dark in the wood but white in the sunshine with coming buds, are "like the bright side of a sorrow." And in "The Princess" there is a very striking fig ure: Every one remembers Homer's com- Ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow and black and pale and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes. It will be seen that in Mr. Palgrave's work we have ventured to take exception only to the method, or rather to suggest that the adoption of a different method might have given more scope to his faculties as a critic, though it might not have produced a more attractive book. The execution is generally excellent. The translations from Greek and Latin poetry show scholarship and taste. Sometimes the printers have gone astray, and the necFor instance, on p. 26 husky must be a essary correction has been lacking. misprint for dusky which would be a very fair rendering of αιθαλίωνες; on page 29 περίπλυον should be περίπλεον in the translation from Menander on p. 32 we should read "shouldst thou live" and "thou wilt see;" birds has usurped the place of buds in the ren dering from the Georgics on p. 46. But the most unfortunate misprint is that of whom for who in a sentence on p. 118: "Dorigen goes on to speak of the hundred thousand whom she fancies have been dashed against the rocks and slain." This is an unfortunate misprint, for it seems to give the great sanction of the editor of "The Golden Treasury" and of a professor of poetry at Oxford, to a vile solecism which is gradually making its way into conversation and into the provincial daily press. In a writer who is usually so tenacious of a pure English diction we do not like to read that "the part omitted is of some length" when the meaning is that it is of considerable length. Such expressions pave the way for the Americanism "he Jas been away quite a time." Finally, "to what simplicity of nature does he not return!" (p. 160) gives countenance to a growing misuse of the negative in interjectional sentences. The words quoted should mean "he returns to every simplicity of nature," but the sentiment intended to be conveyed is obviously "how he returns to the simplicity of nature." "What pleas did I not urge" is right enough for "I urged every plea." But "what tears did I not shed" is wrong, for the meaning could only be "I shed every tear," which would be a very singular expression, nearly as strange as "what a wet day was it not," for "how wet it was." The neglect of this obvious distinction is becoming very prevalent; otherwise it would not have been worth while to dwell on so minute a topic. But, in deed, the general-character of Mr. Palgrave's work is so high that one would naturally like to have it without a flaw; and his position is such that his authority might well be quoted for usages which he would be the first to disown. We should all offer him our hearty thanks and congratulations on a piece of work which few could have attempted, few indeed could have accomplished so well; and we can only regret that criticism must so often emphasize rather points of divergence than of concurrence, and devote to cola appraisement pages which might have been filled with warm praise. ing as the great Cæsar, the modern embodiment of the divine right, the representative of the Almighty, and the universal providence of all mankind. Ten years ago, at the 1887 jubilee, hardly anybody paid the slightest attention to the then Prinz Wilhelm von Preussen. The old emperor, Wilhelm I., was still alive, the crown prince, the husband of our princess royal, in the prime of manhood, and "Willie," a nobody amongst the host of princes from. all parts of the world. And emperor as. well as king though he is to-day, stilr stronger there lives in him the cabotin, the man who continually wants to advertise himself, who daily and even hourly desires to put himself en evidence, and whose strongest craving is to make the world talk of him and occupy itself with him and his doings. Had the German emperor been invited to come to London, heaven onlyknows what he might have done to attract people's attention. Perhaps hewould have adorned the pages of the. Visitor's Book at the Guildhall with his: favorite maxim, Regis voluntas suprema lex-the words which he wrote above his signature in the Golden Book at Munich. Or he might have asked the queen to allow him to put himself at the head of the whole population of England to march past her majesty; for a "march past" is the emperor's ideal of bliss. Not without good rea son, do his witty Berlin subjects with bated breath, that their emperor is suffering from defilirium tremens. say |