I then began to notice this preponderance more particularly, and found that, in nine consecutive pages (48-56), there was not one in which the sea in some of its aspects was not conspicuously mentioned.

Passionate lover of nature as he is, the charms of territorial landscape did not come home to him at first:

I dwelt where Nature but prattled familiar language, Trite the theme and the word, prose of the hedges and lanes.

It was his visits to the English Lakes which kindled this new enthusiasm, as he has well told us in Lakeland Once More:

Region separate, sacred, of mere, and of ghyll, and of mountain,
Garrulous, petulant beck, sinister, laughterless tarn;
Haunt of the vagabond feet of my fancy for ever reverting,
Haunt and home of my heart, Cumbrian valleys and fells;
Yours of old was the beauty that rounded my hours with a
nimbus,

Touched my youth with bloom, tender and magical light;
You were my earliest passion, and when shall my fealty falter ?
Ah, when Helvellyn is low! ah, when Winander is dry.

The same lines are interesting for their attempt to reproduce the so-called elegiac (alternate hexameter and pentameter) metre in English.

Mr. Watson has told us very freely what have been the sources of his inspiration, both in nature and in literature. Perhaps if he had not been quite so frank, the critics would not have been in such a hurry to proclaim that his genius was derivative. But the information which he gives us is very much in point here. It is contained chiefly in the poetical epistle To Edward Dowden and in the Apologia. In the former the poet speaks first of the influence of Shelley, and then of that of Keats on his "young days of fervid poesy." Going on to speak of Wordsworth, he says

The first voice, then the second, in their turns
Had sung me captive. This voice sang me free.
Therefore, above all vocal sons of men,

Since him whose sightless eyes saw hell and heaven,
To Wordsworth be my homage, thanks, and love.

I hardly think the critics have taken sufficient notice of the penultimate line of this passage. To my mind it fixes Mr. Watson's place in English poetry as no critic has yet done. His place is in that Puritan succession of which Milton and Wordsworth are the pre-eminent members. This is to be seen sometimes, even at an external view. The sonnets on Gordon and on The Purple East come in the direct line of literary descent from Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints," and from Wordsworth's "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour."

But the inwardness of this identity is felt when we read the Apologia. In no light sense had Mr. Watson already described himself, in the Ode to Traill, as "vowed and dedicated bard"; and now he proceeds

I, too, with constant heart,

And with no light or careless ministry,

Have served what seemed the Voice; and unprofane,

Have dedicated to melodious ends

All of myself that least ignoble was.

For though of faulty and of erring walk,

I have not suffered aught in me of frail

To blur my song; I have not paid the world

The evil and the insolent courtesy

Of offering it my baseness for a gift.
And unto such as think all Art is cold,
All music unimpassioned, if it breathe
An ardour not of Eros' lips, and glow
With fire not caught from Aphrodite's breast,
Be it enough to say that in man's life
Is room for great emotions, unbegot
Of dalliance and embracement, unbegot

Ev'n of the purer nuptials of the soul;
And one not pale of blood, to human touch
Not tardily responsive, yet may know
A deeper transport and a mightier thrill
Than comes of commerce with mortality,
When, rapt from all relation with his kind,
All temporal and immediate circumstance,
In silence, in the visionary mood

That, flashing light on the dark deep, perceives
Order beyond this coil and errancy,

Isled from the fretful hour he stands alone
And hears the eternal movement, and beholds
Above him and around and at his feet,

In million-billowed consentaneousness,

The flowing, flowing, flowing of the world.

Such moments, are they not the peaks of life?
Enough for me, if on these pages fall

The shadow of the summits, and an air

Not dim from human hearth-fires sometimes blow.

Returning from this digression to take up the thread of Mr. Watson's work, we note that the success of Wordsworth's Grave was by no means accidental. Among the minor pieces added to the Poems in 1892, was an elegy of fourteen stanzas, written in Laleham churchyard, Aug. 18, 1890. Its subject was hardly less congenial than that of Wordsworth; for of all the poets who have been actually contemporary with him, Matthew Arnold is the one with whom Mr. Watson shews the greatest affinity. The fanciful interview with Dr. Johnson, in the Excursions in Criticism, concludes with a fine panegyric from the pen. of the beatified doctor on that beautiful threnody, in which Arnold bewailed the death of Clough. And Mr. Watson's mourning for Arnold is, in a simpler strain, hardly less perfect. It possesses, what elegiac compositions too often lack, the charm of light as well as shade:

Rather, it may be, over-much

He shunned the common stain and smutch,
From soilure of ignoble touch

Too grandly free,

Too loftily secure in such

Cold purity.

But he preserved from chance control
The fortress of his 'stablished soul;

In all things sought to see the Whole
Brooked no disguise;

And set his heart upon the goal,
Not on the prize.

With those Elect he shall survive
Who seem not to compete or strive,
Yet with the foremost still arrive,
Prevailing still:

Spirits with whom the stars connive
To work their will.

And ye, the baffled many, who,
Dejected, from afar off view
The easily victorious few

Of calm renown,

Have ye not your sad glory too,

And mournful crown?

Great is the facile conqueror;

Yet haply he, who, wounded sore,
Breathless, unhorsed, all covered o'er
With blood and sweat,

Sinks foiled, but fighting evermore,—
Is greater yet.

It thus happened that when Tennyson died, on the 6th October, 1892, there was already an English poet marked out by previous achievement as specially fitted to sing his requiem. Of all the tributes laid by many bards upon the tomb of the late laureate, the finest undoubtedly was Mr.

B

Watson's poem, Lachrymæ Musarum,-the Muses' tears. It was published by Macmillan & Co., in the month following Tennyson's death, and gave its title to a new volume containing a number of other poems. Of these, that on the centenary of Shelley's birth, 4th August, 1892, is elegiac also. I quote the eleven lines which form the opening movement of the elegy on Tennyson :

Low, like another's, lies the laurelled head:
The life that seemed a perfect song is o'er :
Carry the last great bard to his last bed.
Land that he loved, thy noblest voice is mute.
Land that he loved, that loved him! nevermore
Meadow of thine, smooth lawn or wild sea-shore,
Gardens of odorous bloom and tremulous fruit,
Or woodlands old, like Druid couches spread,
The master's feet shall tread.

Death's little rift hath rent the faultless lute:

The singer of undying songs is dead.

When Tennyson died, Mr. Watson was engaged upon the tiny volume, comprising twenty-nine 8-line stanzas in all, called the Eloping Angels. But the production of the Lachryma Musarum, followed by an untimely malady which afflicted Mr. Watson during the ensuing winter seems to have delayed the publication of this little work until March, 1893. It then appeared under new auspices, being issued, as all Mr. Watson's works have since been, from the Bodley Head. The earlier copyrights have also been acquired by the same establishment; and, simultaneously with the Eloping Angels, an edition of the Prince's Quest was issued, new in typography, though otherwise unaltered. A prose volume, called Excursions in Criticism, was also compiled from Mr. Watson's contributions to the National Review, the Spectator, the Illustrated London News, the Academy, the Bookman, and Atalanta.