In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;

With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years;

With travail of day after day, and with trouble

of hour upon hour;

And bitter as blood is the spray, and the crests are as fangs that devour:

And its vapor and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;

And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea:

And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air;

And the ends of the earth at the might thereof

tremble, and time is made bare.

The variety and rapidity of suspension, the reveling in power, are not more remarkable here than in many other passages, though even here it is not variety and rapidity of thought. The anapæst to which Mr. Swinburne so habitually resorts is the only foot that suffices for his never-staying impetuosity. In the 'Song in Time of Revolution' he employs it appropriately and with a sweeping force as of the elements:

The heart of the rulers is sick, and the high priest covers his head:

For this is the song of the quick that is heard in the ears of the dead.

The poor and the halt and the blind are keen and mighty and fleet;

Like the noise of the blowing of wind is the sound of the noise of their feet.

There are, too, sweet and picturesque lines scattered in the midst of this fire which the poet tosses to and fro about his verses. Most of the poems, in his wearisomely iterated phrase, are meant to 'sting the senses like wine,' but to some stray pictures one may apply his own exquisite phrases on certain of Victor Hugo's songs, which, he says:Or fell more soft than dew or snow by night Or wailed as in some flooded cave Sobs the strong broken spirit of a wave.

For instance, there is a perfect delicacy and duty in four lines of the 'Hendecasyllabics'a metre that is

familiar in the Latin line often found on clocks and sundials, Horæ nam pereunt et imputantur:—

When low light was upon the windy reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows
And green fields of the sea that make no pasture.

Nothing can be more simple and exquisite than:

For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span.

Or than this:

In deep wet ways by gray old gardens
Fed with sharp spring the sweet fruit hardens;
They know not what fruits wane or grow;
Red summer burns to the utmost ember;
They know not, neither can remember,

The old years and flowers they used to know. Or again:

With stars and sea winds for her raiment
Night sinks on the sea.

Up to a certain point one of the deepest and most really poetical pieces is that called 'The Sundew.' A couple of verses may be quoted to illustrate the graver side of the poet's mind:

The deep scent of the heather burns
About it; breathless though it be,
Bow down and worship; more than we
Is the least flower whose life returns,
Least weed renascent in the sea.

You call it sundew: how it grows,
If with its color it have breath,
If life taste sweet to it, if death
Pain its soft petal, no man knows:
Man has no sight or sense that saith.

There is no finer effect of poetry than to recall to the mind of men the bounds that have been set to the scope of their sight and sense, to inspire their imaginations with a vivid apprehension of the size and the wonder and the strange remote companionship of the world of force and growth and form outside of man. Qui se considérera de la sorte,' said Pascal, 's'effraiera, sans doute, de se voir comme suspendu dans la masse que la

nature lui a donnée entre ces deux abimes de l'infini et du néant.' And there are two ways in which a man can treat this affright that seizes his fellows as they catch interrupted glimpses of their positions. He can transfigure their baseness of fear into true poetic awe, which shall underlie their lives as a lasting record of solemn rapture. Or else he can jeer and mock at them like an unclean fiery imp from the pit. Mr. Swinburne does not, at all events, treat the whole lot of mankind in the former spirit. In his best mood, he can only brood over 'the exceeding weight of God's intolerable scorn not to be borne.' He can only ask us, 'O fools and blind, what seek ye there high up in the air?' or, 'Will ye beat always on the gate, ye fools of fate?'

If he is not in his best mood he is in his worst- a mood of schoolboy lustfulness. The bottomless pit encompasses us on one side, and stews and bagnios on the other. He is either the

vindictive and scornful apostle of a crushing iron-shod despair, or else he is the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs. Not all the fervor of his imagination, the beauty of his melody, the splendor of many phrases and pictures, can blind us to the absence of judgment and reason, the reckless contempt for anything like a balance, and the audacious counterfeiting of strong and noble passion by mad intoxicated sensuality. The lurid clouds of lust or of fiery despair and defiance never lift to let us see the pure and peaceful and bounteous kindly aspects of the great landscape of human life. Of enlarged meditation, the note of the highest poetry, there is not a trace, and there are too many signs that Mr. Swinburne is without any faculty in this direction. Never have such bountifulness of imagination, such mastery of the music of verse, been yoked with such thinness of contemplation and such poverty of genuinely impassioned thought.

Is there any record that the Jane knew and enjoyed her namesake's work? Miss Austen did not die till 1817, and before then Jane Taylor had published her best work, the work by which she is still very well remembered and loved. It was not long ago that Mr. Lucas edited a capital edition of Jane and Ann's poems for children; before then an earlier generation had seen 'Little Anne,' in the inimitable illustrations of Kate Greenaway, and many of us, burrowing in the treasures that mothers or aunts had kept from their maternal libraries, had discovered and delighted in the little volumes in which childhood was realistically portrayed and properly admonished. It is not fancy that sees a kinship between Miss Jane Austen and Miss Jane Taylor. Each had a wit, the exercise of which natural kindliness was never allowed to hamper; each had a very due sense of the Butlerian philosophy that 'things are what they are,' and each takes a pleasure, malicious or religious as you will, in the conclusion of that famous sentence. There is a touch too of the governess in Miss Austen. The satirist would be content to make a fool of Mr. Collins for his shame and her amusement; but Miss Austen is determined he shall wear the fool's cap coram publico, and be put in the corner before the whole class. So Jane Taylor allows her better children to see what fools the sillier ones are, and what penalties the fool can never entirely escape. Of course it would be absurd to put Jane Taylor's sketches on a level with

1 From the New Statesman (London Independent weekly), May 1

the best of Miss Austen; but this very skillful volume of selections proves that she had a talent not quite so slender or so limited in range as might appear to those who know only her poems for, and about, children. The Essays in Rhyme-first published in 1816 1816-contain some delicious things. There is, perhaps, an affinity to Crabbe and to Cowper; but in method Jane Taylor is not at all evidently derivative, and the temperament displayed is perfectly genuine and independent. Take, for instance, these passages from 'Recreation':

We took our work, and went, you see, To take an early cup of tea. We did so now and then, to pay The friendly debt, and so did they. Not that our friendship burnt so bright That all the world could see the light; 'T was of the ordinary genus, And little love was lost between us: We lov'd, I think, about as true As such near neighbors mostly do.

At first, we all were somewhat dry; Mamma felt cold, and so did I: Indeed, that room, sit where you will, Has draught enough to turn a mill. 'I hope you're warm,' says Mrs. G. 'Oh, quite so,' says mamma, says she: 'I'll take my shawl off by and by' "This room is always warm,' says I.

'Miss F.,' says I, 'I've understood, Spends all her time in doing good: The people say her coming down Is quite a blessing to the town.' At that our hostess fetch'd a sigh, And shook her head; and so, says I, 'It's very kind of her, I'm sure, To be so generous to the poor.' 'No doubt,' says she, "t is very true; Perhaps there may be reasons too: You know some people like to pass For patrons with the lower class.'

I would not trust a creature here, For all the world, but you, my dear. Perhaps it's false, I wish it may, But let it go no further, pray!'

'Oh,' says mamma, 'you need not fear,
We never mention what we hear.'

And so, we drew our chairs the nearer,
And whispering, lest the child should hear her,
She told a tale, at least too long
To be repeated in a song;
We, panting every breath between,
With curiosity and spleen.

And how we did enjoy the sport!
And echo every faint report,
And answer every candid doubt,
And turn her motives inside out,
And holes in all her virtues pick,
Till we were sated, almost sick.

Her satire is limpid, simple even. She had the clear-eyed, lucid virtues of her family's class, that sturdy, no-nonsense, Dissenting stock which has always refused to be overimpressed with the feathers of fine birds. You see the same contempt, gentle but very determined, in her satiric little note on the fashionable beau of the period, with his affectation of complete indifference:

Nature and art might vainly strive
To keep his intellect alive.

"T would not have forc'd an exclamation
Worthy a note of admiration

If he had been on Gibeon's hill,

And seen the sun and moon stand still.
What prodigy was ever known
To raise the pitch of fashion's tone!
Or make it yield, by any chance,
That studied air of nonchalance,
Which after all, however grac'd,
Is apathy and want of taste.

Of course she had the limitations of her training; but if she had been brought up in a less vigorous atmosphere she might easily have been merely one of the less foolish supporters of London salons, of the type which Blake had

earlier scarified in his odd Peacockian satire, a kind of gushing, overenthusiastic bluestocking, a fribble doomed to an infinity of Della-Cruscan imbecilities. The Dissenting interest in culture was at that time serious and pursued seriously; and the fact that it was largely confined to literature and the pictorial arts prevented that dissipation of energy which is the curse of clever young people in more broadminded circles. There is nothing like a little narrowness to encourage talent either positively or by opposition. Jane Taylor developed her talent without ever losing her sense. The little tract, for which we are extremely grateful to Miss Barry, on 'I can do without it' is a real model in a kind of moral training which is now grossly depreciated; today we too easily confuse wastefulness with generosity, and have reduced that fine word economy to the level of one of the dingier precautions of life, dethroning it from its proper place as the guardian of all philanthropic effort. Jane Taylor struck, in this tract, exactly the right note; she is as aware of the dangers of meanness as of an incontinent slackness in spending, and always sees something saved, not as hoarded for herself, but as kept for someone else.

With her sense goes a pleasant and very feminine humor. Her novel Display, if we may judge from Miss Barry's selections, should be worth reprinting. There is an amusing modernity in many of her notes on character. Do we not know Elizabeth who 'would have been really agreeable, if she could but have forgotten to be charming'? How pleasant again, if of a refreshing simplicity, is the account of the moment when Elizabeth decides that Lieutenant Robinson must not be neglected.

When they reached home, Elizabeth threw herself on the sofa, saying:

'Don't talk to me; I am tired this evening, Mr. Robinson.'

"That Emily what-d'-ye-call-her is a confounded pretty girl!'

you

'Do think so?' said Elizabeth, rousing up. 'Well, she does look rather pretty in her bonnet.'

Here the lieutenant resumed his walk and his whistle; but the remark had a fortunate effect upon Elizabeth. The momentary jealousy made him appear surprisingly more agreeable, and worth securing; and while she sat watching him as he paced up and down in the dusk, she said to herself:

'He whistles uncommonly well.'

Jane Taylor's children's poems are still well known, and it is by them that she will be longest remembered. It is not only that they are in themselves excellent, and exactly the kind of writing which children love, but that they set a certain standard and style in children's verse which have not been superseded. Miss Barry calls the sisters Jane and Ann 'great-aunts-inliterature of Louis Stevenson.' It is a happy phrase and may pass; but both Jane and Ann knew far more of the normal child than Stevenson ever did. They derive from Watts; and if one would know how near they are to the child's view of life, simple, concrete,

unshadowed, one can compare their work with that of the child genius, Marjorie Fleming. The manner of the adults in her poems may seem at times insufferably priggish; but nearly all grown-ups seem either priggish or ridiculous, or both, to the ordinary child. In the best poems Jane Taylor frankly adopts the child's standpoint, as in that little gem, 'The Pigs,' in which Dick's father really does nothing more than retort to his son, 'Horrid little pig, yourself, Dick.' The famous "The Star,' Jane's most widely known poem, is a perfect little thing in its way; it might have been written by a Quaker Blake in a pinafore. There is a certain sublime folly, a lovely and infantile confidence, in that last verse in which the speaker gravely encourages the

star:

As your bright and tiny spark
Lights the traveler in the dark,
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star!

That has all the grave impertinence of its era and of Jane's training. The stars are to be allowed to shine only as they too do a useful work; and for this they shall be forgiven their incomprehensibility. The Jane would have laughed a little at Jane Taylor, had she known her; but certainly she would have loved her too.