city, the heated blasts bursting in the doors of defiled sanctuaries all these come with a thousand recollections of wild tales in mediæval romances and chronicles. And the praise of Chaucer and of the great literature of the Elizabethan age are the echoes of hundreds of hours of delight spent in reading. There is no method, as has been said, of supplying the reader suddenly with all this experience of literature, with all these associations, with all this richness of emotional life. An editor may cite examples to explain every line, may pile up instance upon instance until the intellect is thoroughly convinced that such things were common, but not in this way can the reader gain those associations and memories which alone give significance and power to the great figures of history and romance and myth or the scenes and manners of past ages. The only method is to do as the poet himself has done, read these poems and histories, and amass the associations and emotions of this experience with literature.

The third element is the rich and elaborate diction. Here, as with the first element, we are on easier ground; we are dealing with matters which the intellect and imagination can compass immediately by knowledge and native vigor. Such lines as,

"The maiden splendours of the morning star," (1.55),

"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,

And most divinely fair," (ll. 87-88), "The star-like sorrows of immortal eyes," (1. 91), "The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes," (1. III),

"A queen, with swarthy cheeks and bold black

eyes,

Brow-bound with burning gold," (ll. 127–128),

reveal their meanings at once to any one who has imagination. But sometimes Tennyson substitutes the ornate and elaborate for the simple and imaginative, and produces lines that require some ingenuity for interpretation. How many a reader has not beaten his brains to find out what is meant in 1. 1 by "before my eyelids dropt their shade"! It is, indeed, a rather elaborate way of saying, "before I closed my eyes to sleep," and the feeling that it must mean more is so strong that some will still strive vainly for a more mystical interpretation, in spite of the fact that the poem obviously narrates the events of one night, when the poet, after reading Chaucer, passes through that stage of visions which precedes sleep, into a sleep of dreams and finally

wakes and tries to recall his dreams. "The crested bird that claps his wings at dawn" (11. 179 f.) has also shed much ink. If Tennyson meant the cock and took this method of slipping that brilliant but rather prosaic fowl into his bediamonded poetry, we may be glad that it is possible to rescue him by arguing in favor of the crested lark of Theocritus and insisting that no modern student of poetry, as Tennyson was, could write

"That claps his wings at dawn,"

without remembering those exquisite lines of John Lyly's:

"Now at heaven's gates she claps her wings,
The morn not waking till she sings."

Tennyson's poem, though obviously suggested by Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, bears only superficial and unessential resemblances to it. It is true that both poems deal with ill-fated fair women, that in both the poet dreams, and it is even possible that Tennyson has taken from other of Chaucer's poems the thoroughly conventional device of falling asleep after reading a book that determines the subject of his dream. But aside from the fact that Chaucer's style is simple and his mood relaxed and easy, while Tennyson's style is ornate and his mood one of the utmost intensity, the purely external features are very different. The scene of Chaucer's dream is a meadow filled with all the gladness of a May morning, singing birds and blossoming flowers and "softe, swote, greene grass"; the scene of Tennyson's is an ancient wood, oppressive with huge elms, hanging vines, dark walks, a deadly silence, and a pale chill light from the dying dawn. Chaucer meets in his dream the brilliant God of Love and his queen, accompanied by a group of charming maidens, and for sufficiently valid reasons promises to write each succeeding year the story of some fair woman who had been faithful though unfortunate in love; Tennyson meets and converses for a few vivid moments with women, fair and unfortunate, but by no means chiefly "Love's martyrs." It seems not improbable that Tennyson may have been, consciously or unconsciously, influenced by the procession of noble ladies with whom Odysseus spoke in Hades (Odyssey, Bk. XI).

The structure of the poem is very simple and clear:

ll. 1-13. What the poet had been reading and the immediate effect of it.

Il. 13-52. He muses on what he has read, and

FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON

P. 590. Praed (p. 494) and Locker-Lampson are the advance guard of a host of writers of vers de société of exquisite delicacy and refinement. The ideal of such verse is elegant and ingenious trifling with only occasional touches of more serious sentiment as a swallow circles bright and swift through the air, dips its wing for a moment in the water, and like a flash is off again in its careless flight. Some of the lighter verse of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries bears a close resemblance to the work of these later writers, but there is a difference in tone, in attitude, in personal concern with the sentiments expressed. Locker (or Locker-Lampson, to use the name he assumed upon his marriage to Miss Lampson) was far superior to Praed in tenderness, in reserve, in genuine poetic feeling, and in technique. His range of sentiments, of ideas, and of rhythms was greater; and he has had the greater influence upon later writers. With the lines To My Grandmother a curious analogy and contrast are afforded by Oliver Wendell Holmes's The Last Leaf.

SIDNEY DOBELL

P. 591. Sidney Dobell is a notable example of the rather large class of poets in the nineteenth century who gave evidence of true and even great poetic ability, but who failed in unity, in sustained power, in final and perfect utterance.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Neither as poet nor as prose-writer did Arnold catch the ear of the great public, but in both characters he was eminent in his generation as one who taught and guided the teachers and guides of the educated world.

His prose is clear, vivacious, classical in its restraint and its definiteness of aim, and though often careless, its carelessness has always the effect of elegant negligence, not of slipshod ignorance. The importance of the ideas for which he contended and the unwavering and urbane persistence with which he supported a cause that could triumph only in the remote future are among the most admirable of his many admirable qualities.

His verse is more restrained than his prose and it lacks the lightheartedness, the spontaneity, the outward and obvious signs of power necessary for popularity. In his own day it found only a small band of lovers, but its permanent beauty and value

are steadily gaining wider recognition. It now seems probable that he and Browning will in the future be counted the most notable poets of the Victorian period.

THE SCHOLAR GIPSY

Pp. 617 ff. In a note, Arnold gave the following passage from Glanvil's Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) as the foundation of this poem:

"There was lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtility of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem as that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been of his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gipsies; and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told them that the people he went with were not such impostors as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding that of others: that he himself had learned much of their art, and when he had compassed the whole secret, he intended, he said, to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned."

EDWARD FITZGERALD

THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Pp. 621 ff. Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam has long had a place in the hearts of lovers of high and serious poetry. Although a translation, it is in the truest sense an original poem and expresses as scarcely any other does the strange combination of doubt and defiance and sensuousness and religious yearning characteristic of much of the thought and feeling of the Victorian Age.

Rubáiyát is a Persian word, the plural of rubái, which means a quatrain. Omar, surnamed Al Khayyam (the tent-maker), was a distinguished Persian scholar and poet. He was regarded as a paragon of learning, especially in astronomy. In one of his quatrains he refers whimsically to his surname and in another to his reformation of the calendar. His quatrains circulated very widely in the Orient and produced many imitations

COVENTRY PATMORE

Pp. 623 f. Coventry Patmore has been the subject of the most widely divergent judgments. One contemporary critic says: "It may be affirmed that no poet of the present age is more certain of immortality than he." Another regards him as possessing no spark of the divine fire. The selections here presented seem to justify his claim to a unique and high position among the poets of his time, but his range was narrow his vocal register had scarcely a tone that does not find utterance in these selections - and his voice obviously lacked resonance and power. Being incapable of selfcriticism, he wrote much that is prosaic lines that even awaken inextinguishable laughter; but at its best his verse is simple, picturesque, passionate, of exquisite freshness and charm.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

some

Pp. 624 ff. The vigor and intensity of Rossetti's thought is often lost sight of in consequence of the luxuriance and sensuous richness of his imagery and melody. But his poems are not involuntary cries of passion; they are planned and constructed with serious artistic care and wrought out with Of The Blessed infinite attention to details.

Damozel, he said: "I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the i lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven." It would be difficult to find two more impressive examples of logical structure and development than are afforded by this poem and Sister Helen.

The intellectual power of his verse may be seen also in the sonnets On the Refusal of Aid between Nations, The Sonnet, The Landmark, The Choice, Vain Virtues indeed in practically every selection, for even the love-sonnets are as closely reasoned as if they were treatises instead of lyrics.

SISTER HELEN

Pp. 626 ff. The superstition that an enemy's life could be destroyed by making a figure of him

in wax and melting it before a slow fire- the whole process, of course, to be carried out with proper ceremonies of black magic — is a very ancient and almost world-wide belief. The most interesting variants of the belief, in classical literature, are perhaps those in the second Idyl of Theocritus. The whole Idyl is interesting to read in connection with this poem, though the heroine Simaetha is attempting, not to destroy her lover, but to bring back his love; cf. especially the following (ll. 2331):

"Delphis troubled me, and I against Delphis am burning this laurel; and even as it crackles loudly when it has caught the flame, and suddenly is burned up, and we see not even the dust thereof, lo, even thus may the flesh of Delphis waste in the burning!

"My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!

"Even as I melt this wax, with the god to aid, so speedily may he by love be molten, the Myndian Delphis! And as whirls this brazen wheel, so restless, under Aphrodite's spell, may he turn and turn about my doors!

"My magic wheel, draw home to me the man I love!"

Instances of the superstition in England and Ireland are discussed in Thomas Wright's introduction to The Proceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler (Camden Society Publications).

THE BALLAD OF DEAD LADIES

the mother of Charlemagne, heroine of the old French romance Berte aux Grans Pies. Beatrice, apparently Beatrice of Provence, wife of Charles, son of Louis VIII. Alice, perhaps the wife of Louis VII; but many old French songs begin "Belle Aalis" (i.e., Beautiful Alice).

1. 20. Ermengarde married the famous warrior Foulques d'Anjou in 1004.

1. 21. Joan, Jeanne d'Arc.

FRANCESCA DA RIMINI

As Dante, in the Inferno, passed among those whom guilty love had sent to hell, he entreated two to come and speak to him. They were the famous lovers Paolo and Francesca, and this passage is a part of Francesca's account of their love. She was given by her father in marriage to Giovanni Malatesta, a man of extraordinary courage and ability, but deformed. Unfortunately she fell in love with his younger brother, Paolo, and he with her. They were killed by Giovanni. Few love stories have attracted more sympathetic interest. Leigh Hunt wrote a narrative poem on the story, and it has been dramatized in English by G. H. Boker and by Stephen Phillips, and in Italian by Silvio Pellico and by Gabriele D'Annunzio. Pictures illustrating the story have been painted by Ingres, Cabanel, Ary Scheffer, G. F. Watts, and others.

WILLIAM MORRIS

Pp. 633 ff. To no poet of the Victorian period could the term "the idle singer of an empty day" be less appropriately applied than to William Morris. He not only was a chief factor in revolutionizing the general artistic taste of the English people and their house-decorations in particular, but also became a leader in the social reforms which are tending surely though slowly to the reorganization of society and the state. Such a career may seem strange for one whose whole interest as a young man lay apparently in mediæval romance and poetry; yet in reality the art-reformer and the social-reformer were logical and, one may almost say, inevitable developments of the lover of mediævalism, for his love of medieval art taught him the hideousness of the work produced by modern artisans, and practical experience as a decorator soon brought the recognition that art is not possible under the conditions of modern industrialism, that beauty is the product of the free artist, working with a love of his art.

THE EARTHLY PARADISE

The Earthly Paradise was written under the influence of Chaucer (cf. Morris's Prologue, ll. 1-16) and, like the Canterbury Tales, is a collection of stories told by the members of a group of travelers. The Lady of the Land is a retelling of the story told briefly by Sir John Mandeville in his fourth chapter (see pp. 30 ff).

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

Pp. 640 ff. From his youth, almost from his boyhood, Swinburne possessed a wealth of sensuously beautiful words and a facility in versification unsurpassed by any other English poet. Unfortunately both these gifts tempted him to verbosity. He always has a meaning but it is often obscured, if not entirely hidden, by the excess of words and the long and elaborate sentences in which it is expressed. His influence upon other English poets - both great and small was for a time very notable: to the great he taught new lessons and presented new standards of melodious verse; to the small he worked injury, tempting them to produce sound without sense and to indulge in all sorts of hot-house malaise and eroticism. He himself grew steadily in power and seriousness of thought, but he never escaped from the involuted coils of his diction and his syntax. The republican poems written under the influence of Victor Hugo and Mazzini cannot be quoted here, but they should be read by any one who wishes a just idea of his significance in English poetry.

GEORGE MEREDITH

Pp. 644 ff. George Meredith was one of the most richly and variously endowed writers of the nineteenth century. He is best known as a novelist, but to many of his admirers he seems equally great as a poet. All of his work is notable for its combination of significance and beauty. In depth of insight, in subtle apprehension of life and of the problems which it presents to try the hearts of intelligent men and women, even such great writers as Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot are hardly his equals; and his sensitiveness to the beauties of nature and of the soul of man has a wider range and a finer delicacy. The same qualities are manifest in much of his poetry. But the gods gave him also the fatal gift of excessive intellectual ingenuity and a delight in the exercise of it; while the sole gift they denied him was self