they make Into a long, returning rosary, Whereon their lives are threaded for Meekness and vigilance and chastity. They heed no voices in their dream of And there they rest; they have serene insight Of the illuminating dawn to be; Mary's sweet star dispels for them the night, The proper darkness of humanity. Calm, sad, serene; with faces worn and mild; seriousness of poetic purpose already | These heed not time; their nights and days noted, and belongs to the thought rather than to the style. A light and only half-serious manner has generally been characteristic of young poets; the emotions expressed might be passionate enough, but they were understood not to be more than skin-deep. The young poets of to-day seem imbued with a seriousness which is not, as might reasonably be suspected, mere affectation. Neither is it pessimism, which is almost always affectation, except when it is indigestion. It is simply a habit of thinking seriously, of allowing the mind to dwell upon grave topics. Of course there is sometimes exaggeration, sometimes even insincerity, in this seriousness, the former, at any rate, being the natural concomitant of immaturity; but the basis of it is sincere and genuine. It is partly an inheritance from Matthew Arnold, partly the result of the same causes that produced it in Matthew Arnold himself. The conditions of modThe thought here is obvious enough, ern life are serious enough. Serious and far from new; but the seriousness thoughts, in philosophy, in politics, in is neither forced nor exaggerated. A social matters, in religion, surround us rather stronger poem is that entitled all from schooldays onward. Some The Last Music," " by Mr. Lionel minds pass them over, some play with Johnson :— them because they are fashionable, some are touched by them, it may be lightly, it may be deeply. But even a light acquaintance with them, if it be genuine, may be sufficient to color poetry; and this will account for the general tone of contemporary verse, where there are no special circumstances, as in the case of Philip Marston, that "inheritor of unfulfilled renown," to justify a real melancholy. One or two more quotations may be pardoned, in illustration of this feature in the better work of the Rhymers and their contemporaries. 66 Mr. Ernest Dowson has a poem on the "Carmelite Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration: Surely their choice of vigil is the best? Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild; But there, beside the altar, there is rest.1 Calmly, breathe calmly all your music, maids! Breathe a calm music over my dead queen. seen Fairer than she, whose hair in sombre braids With beauty overshades Her brow broad and serene. Maidens make a low music; merely make As mourning love can play. Holy my queen lies in the arms of death; Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent In earth thus calmly, under the wind's There is much here that reminds us of Matthew Arnold; and though Matthew Arnold was not quite in the first rank of poets, we should be glad indeed to think that Mr. Johnson might in time become such another as he. of this article to the poetry of this age artistic handling of language and delight in depicting minute details of natural scenery. These methods, which have already at times become mannerisms, may be expected to pass away. and these features of poetry, admirable as they are, are likely to take a less prominent place in the poetry of the future. The impulse which began with Keats and Wordsworth (though shared in part by their contemporaries) may be expected to have exhausted itself, and the development of our poetry should work itself out on other lines. But, indeed, it is not easy to prophesy The lesson should have been learned, the future, either of these individual writers or of English poetry in general. That there is a pause in its progress at present will hardly be questioned; that it has other periods of efflorescence before it need be questioned as little; but what form that efflorescence will take may be questioned indeed, but will hardly be answered. Too much depends on the idiosyncrasies of individual genius for it to be possible to calculate the future with any confidence. When a poet has appeared, it is easy enough to trace his relation to his predecessors, and show how he developed out of them, whether by way of continuation or by contrast. But beforehand either method is possible. He may follow his predecessors either as Wordsworth followed Pope, or as Tennyson followed Wordsworth. The only hope is to try to discern what particular poetical methods have been worked out, and may therefore be expected to disappear, or at least to take a subordinate position. We have spoken little in this article of Browning, and that although he was the greatest force among the poets of his generation, with the most farreaching imagination, and with infinitely the greatest dramatic insight. Among readers he has far more devoted admirers than Tennyson; but among poets he has far fewer followers, and for a sufficient reason. The passion of this generation is for form, and in form Browning was greatly inferior to his rival. His influence can never be that of Spenser, of Pope, of Keats, of Tennyson; he can never leave a mark on the technique of English verse. Nevertheless, he may exercise a very real It is only in relation to the themes influence on the poetry of the coming and forms of poetry that prediction is generation on its spirit, if not upon even remotely possible. The amount its form. In him the dramatic faculty, and quality of the inspiration of the dormant in English verse since the unborn poet are beyond the powers of close of the Elizabethan period, rose calculation. They cannot be handed on again to vigor. And there are reasons from master to pupil. Pope could teach why the dramatic spirit, or at least the his followers how to write the heroic spirit of distinctively human interest, couplet; Wordsworth could turn the should be prominent in the poetry of taste of poets towards natural scenery; the future. The social surroundings of Scott could teach Byron the manner of a generation react on its poetry; and narrative verse; but in every case the the social surroundings of the generation extent to which the lesson was carried now beginning active life promise to be out depended on the genius of the indi- very full of human interest. The lower vidual writer. So it is to-day, and will orders in the social scale are becoming be to-morrow. Tennyson has, on the articulate, as they have not been articuwhole, dominated the verse of the late for centuries; and as they gain Victorian age; but it is Tennyson's education and thought and indepentechnique, not his genius, that is com-dence, so they become more individual. municable. It is to his example that The truth that every man has a soul to we ascribe the prevalence of the char- be saved, a mind to be taught, a body acteristics attributed at the beginning to be cared for, is being brought home and at the same time skilled in the technical knowledge of his art, and we may still have an epic which will rank with the great epics of the world. Let the right story be told, with the right spirit and the right art, and the world, complex and civilized though it be, will listen fast enough. to the world at large, not as an abstract | enthusiasm which is in the air to-day, proposition, but as a concrete fact. It and will be more in the air to-morrow. may be that the sense of a common humanity will be the influence that will inspire the coming poet; though even so it is impossible to predict what form his inspiration may take. It may be actual drama, as it was in the great days of the stirring of the nation, three centuries ago. Or it may take the form of narrative, of a narrative in which When the new age of poetry will characterization plays a part not less come, or which of us will be alive to important than the actual story-telling. see it, it is impossible to say. It may It is often held that the day of the be on the threshold now; it may be epic, or long narrative poetry, is over barely on the horizon. The new poet -that epics are for simple ages, and may be sending his manuscript to the are unsuited to the complex conditions printers, or he may be playing with of modern life. It is not easy to see on his coral in his cradle. But meanwhile what basis this notion rests. Whatever we have little to complain of, and no be the exact nature of the merits of cause at all for pessimism. Every age the "neid," it can hardly be denied requires to have its thoughts expressed that it is both great and an epic; and in verse; but we have not yet outgrown yet the conditions under which it was the methods of expression which we produced were as complex, as artificial, find in Tennyson and Browning, in as full of self-consciousness, as those Matthew Arnold and Clough, in Swinunder which we live. Neither was the burne and Rossetti. We could still find "Divina Commedia," 66 nor yet Para- a laureate, if need be, worthy to sucdise Lost," written for altogether simple ceed the holders of the office during hearers. And to come down to our the present century. Our poetry, if it own days, the passion for the novel is has lost for the moment the highest a sure sign that the love of a story has inspiration, has not lost either life or not passed away. The instantaneous earnestness. It has not reached and universal success of Scott's poems empty repetition of stereotyped forms shows that the nineteenth century is which marked the Roman decadence, not too old to delight in narrative nor the weary-eyed melancholy of the poetry, as the success of stories like Greek. There is much that is prosaic Treasure Island" shows the love of in the surroundings in which we live, prose narrative to-day. Yet our lead- but the very prose of them drives us to ing poets have distinctly avoided the look elsewhere for gratification of the long narrative poem, and prefer the non-prosaic element which exists in dramatic study, the single sketch, or nearly every human soul. Since the the lyric. "The Idylls of the King days of the Elizabethans the general is a series of semi-detached episodes, average of poetic merit has never been "The Ring and the Book" a series so high, and never has there been a of dramatic monologues. Mr. William public more appreciative of good poetry, Morris is the only real story-teller more eager to find it, more ready to among the Victorian poets; and "Si- listen to those who would show it the gurd the Volsung" is a sufficient proof that a good narrative poem can still be written. The popularity of "The Light of Asia," again, shows that there is vitality in the epic form. Only let a poet arise filled with the dramatic insight into humanity which underlies the best narrative, sharing the human 66 the way. It may follow false leaders for a After ests and wonderful glaciers, for ourselves. We found that a steamer going to Alaska and back was timed to leave Vancouver only two days after we were due to land there, which fitted in with a nicety bordering on the miraculous, and seemed almost to amount to predes tination. Cabins were rather an anx- From The Nineteenth Century. ALASKA AND ITS GLACIERS, IT is the unexpected that happens, we are sometimes told, and certainly till within ten days of our trip to Alaska I should have said it was the last country I was ever likely to visit, or even to have the least desire to visit. Vaguely in my mind it was connected with extreme cold, and with sealskin jackets; but exactly whether this arose from sealskin jackets being worn in cold weather, or because I imagined Alaska to be a frost-bound country, I am not sure; still, as I particularly disliked cold, it seemed scarcely likely to have any attractions for me. On returning, however, from Japan, while my daughter and I were crossing the Pacific from Yokohama to Vancouver, we chanced to meet with some Americans who had made this trip the year before, and who drew a delightful picture of the voyage they had then made in the calmest of seas; how they went on, and ever on, for a fortnight, through the most lovely and varied scenery, With the exception of two or three reaching at last the land of the mid- Germans, our fellow-passengers were night sun, where were mountains cov- all Americans; there was a large perered with snow, with magnificent gla-sonally conducted tourist party on board, ciers creeping down their sides, and similar to our Cook's parties, except (as breaking off into the sea with reports was carefully explained to me) that, like thunder; where we should see ice- whereas Cook's tours are done on the bergs floating about, and whales and cheap, these Grafton tourists expected seals disporting themselves; but where to be taken to the best hotels, and to be the sea would have scarcely a ripple on generally magnificently done for everyits surface, and the air be ever fresh, where. They were forty-six in numbalmy, and invigorating. So delightful ber, and were principally from Chicago; it all sounded that, before we had as it may be supposed, therefore, we reached Vancouver, we had decided that heard a great deal of Chicago and of we too should like to make this pleas- the World's Fair to be held next year ant voyage, and to see this strange, at Chicago, and we used to find ourwild country, with its endless pine for-selves endlessly explaining our reasons LIVING AGE. VOL. LXXXI. 4175 for not returning to America next year | somewhere from the inner recesses of to see its wonders. Before the end of which these hundreds of logs must have our twelve days' trip we were all to come since no clearance was visible. become great friends, but on this first There are many such lumber camps in day we all stood slightly on the defen- the inlets along the coast of Vansive and rather glared at each other; couver's Island and British Columbia, the other passengers, having come from and just now the Douglas pine is most a distance, had already travelled to- in demand among these forest trees. gether for several days, and many had We put out hay for the oxen (kept there known each other before, while we, hav- to drag the logs out of the forest), and ing only just joined, were, so to speak, provisions and tools for the men, and interlopers. Still, in the afternoon of then steamed away into the rapidly that first day, we began to make friends. increasing darkness, and in a few minWe were in a wide stretch of sea sev- utes two little glimmering lights were all eral miles across, and came upon a we could see or should ever see again number of whales, turning themselves of Grant's Camp. In the middle of the into amateur fountains, and disporting night, between sleeping and waking, I themselves in a clumsy but presumably dimly heard the dropping of the anchor, whaline fashion, entertaining and de- the engines stopped, and I knew we lightful to see. Immense Catherine- were in Alert Bay, where next morning wheels they curled themselves into, and we were to land, and make our first then, as they plunged head foremost acquaintance with an Indian village. into the sea, they would leave a large forked tail sticking up and waggling in the air for a few seconds, till it slowly disappeared after its owner. It was a sight we were often to behold during the voyage, and always with delight; but most of us saw it then for the first time, and the strangeness and wonder of it loosed our tongues and brought us all together; and then, when later, towards nightfall, the ship stopped at a few log huts dropped down drearily in the midst of the dense pine forest, and began to put out some sacks and kegs on to a raft that came alongside to receive them, these first acquaintances were renewed, and the position of old friends was almost attained. Accordingly, everybody next morning was astir very early, and soon some of the passengers were making their way along the row of little wooden houses placed by the water's edge, which constitutes, more or less, their Indian villages. It was here I first saw the totem poles of which I had heard so much, and most eccentric-looking and extraordinary they were. Imagine a huge log, forty to fifty feet high, set up flagstaff fashion, in front or at the side of a low, one-storied wooden house, and carved in its whole height into immense, but grotesque, representations of man, beast, and bird, and you will know what a totem pole is - certainly the most characteristic and striking object in these Grant's Camp, we were told, these Indian villages. Exactly what they huts were called, and a dreary enough mean to the Indians I never could displace for a residence Grant's Camp tinctly ascertain; a mixture of many looked nine or ten huts and sheds things—family pride, veneration of dropped down at the water's edge, with ancestors, emblematic legendary relisome twenty rough-looking men to live gion it seemed to be something of all in them, and huge logs lying raft fash- this. Sometimes there is only a masion on the water in front, waiting to be sive pole with a bird or some weird floated down to some sawmill along the animal at the top; in this case it reprecoast, there to be cut up, and thence sents what we should call the crest of shipped off to distant, more treeless, the chief by whose house it stands. I regions of the earth. Behind and on was curious to see if any Indian could each side of the few poor little huts be induced to sell his totem pole, and rose the dense forest of tall fir-trees, tried to buy one at several of the places hemlocks, Douglas pines, and cedars, at which we touched—it would have |