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You, who when living, were so daintysweet All down the grassy glades where Silence broods Beneath his shroud of golden blazoning; That even summer suns would seem to Where amid leafy boughs, from spray to glow With heartier radiance on the path your feet spray, Falls the first touch of Winter's icy breath Might choose to tread, you, who from The first faint sign of lingering decay long ago, (From fairy babyhood to those dark days When laughter ceased), have ever loyally spread Your tender witchery before our gaze, Are there no moments in your calm grave rest When you remember earth, and earth's Has recollection paled before that best Into heart-crosses, but its pain thus fled, It would not harm your unity of praise. And smites the ruddy beech with crim- MORNING. THE tide of human life ebbs to and fro, And toiling men awake to come and go, Afar from ways that breathe of sordid care, To where the maiden Morning's smiles are fair, By rippling streams beneath unsullied skies, Where winds come murmuring through the balmy air Now they are veiled our own we dumbly With sound of angels' wings in Paradise; raise To fix them on the blue of Paradise. Ah! for we miss you, dear! you, being And still beyond, where blossoms have no THE DEATH OF SUMMER. WILD Autumn winds blow chill and drear Across the cloudy, storm-rent sky, While hill and valley, far and near, Folded in misty silence lie. No sound of music fills the air, No voice of bird along the brake; Gone is the glory of the summer noon; The soft, sweet radiance of the rising moon, TEARS in my heart that weeps, O sweet sound of the rain Vain tears, vain tears, my heart! This is the weariest woe, PAUL VERLAINE. From The Contemporary Review. THE LAST DECADE OF THE LAST IT is just a hundred and one years since a certain undergraduate of St. John's College, Cambridge, by name Wordsworth, took his bachelor's degree and went his way into the world. The studies of the university had not greatly attracted him, at least so as to pursue them in the spirit that wins "marks" and produces "wranglers." "William, you may have heard," writes his sister to her friend, Miss Pollard, in June, 1791, "lost the chance (indeed, the certainty) of a fellowship by not combating his inclinations. He gave way to his natural dislike to study so dry as many parts of mathematics; consequently could not succeed at Cambridge. He reads Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin, and English, but never opens a mathematical book." And he himself speaks, in a letter to his sister, of his having acquainted his uncle (his mother's brother, the Rev. Dr. Cookson) with his having given up "all thoughts of a fellowship." Only in a general way did mathematics, which in the Procrustean system of the then Cambridge formed the main occupation of the place, excite his interest and admiration : Yet may we not entirely overlook With its own struggles, did I meditate To Nature's laws, and by what process led, From system on to system without end. More frequently from the same source I drew A pleasure quiet and profound, a sense peace And silence did await upon these thoughts That were a frequent comfort to my youth. (Prelude, Bk. vi.) So that it was not so much the spirit of these great studies, as the spirit in which they were prosecuted, that discouraged him from taking them up. He felt then as he felt and wrote some years afterwards, that there is no real antagonism between poetry and science. Poetry," he wrote in the preface to the second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads," "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned. expression which is in the countenance of all science. If the labors of men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself." Thus, after all, the future poet's soul may have found. some food and sustenance in the Cambridge atmosphere. And his experience may be of some significance if any one should thoroughly investigate the striking fact that so many of our chief poetical geniuses from Spenser to Tennyson have been bred in a university. especially devoted to "exact studies. which Wordsworth's Cambridge life did Probably there are other respects in more for him than he thought-more, at all events, than he acknowledges in that careful analysis he gives in the "Prelude " of his development and growth, and more than any one of his biographers has yet fully ascertained. Still, it remains true that during his residence at Cambridge he had no high opinion of the place, which, indeed, was not then at its best; nor had the place any very high opinion of him. He achieved no academic distinction; he | examination; and in December, 1794, "disturbed at times" by was a strangeness in the mind, A feeling that I was not for that hour, his connection with Cambridge finally ceased. Nor in his case, though he was more highly thought of than Wordsworth, was there any conception that and when he had completed his terms he was to be one of the chief beginners of a new literary age. and ceased to Nor, in the last decade of the last century, if Cambridge was so unconscious of the promise and prowess of two such illustrious men, was the world at large better-sighted and better-informed as to the great movement that was then in fact taking place. Works like the "Pleasures of Memory," published in 1791, Darwin's "Loves of the Plants" (the second part of the "Botanic Garden"), his "Zoonomia, or Laws of Organic Life," and "Physiologia," published respectively in 1791, 1794-6, and 1799, and the "Pleasures of Hope," published in 1799, might well leave the impression that the old poetical paths were still being trodden. The " Kingdom of Heaven," told, "cometh not with observation." And the same may be said of other spiritual kingdoms. The world is slow to recognize a new note in poetry; it is slow merely to listen and attend to it. The old songs and the old voices occupy its ear, absorb its interest, monopolize its admiration, and to turn to new sing we are In that same year, 1791, there went "up" to Jesus College of the same university one Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he, too, not ever to take kindly to the then academic ways and limits, though he was a classical scholar of considerable attainments, and won a university prize for Greek verse. Already a brilliant talker, and, as always, a man of a restlessly active mind and thirsty for new ideas, he availed himself much more than did Wordsworth of the social advantages which are one of the most precious benefits of a university career-I mean the advantages of a thorough interchange and comparison of opinions with his contemporaries, ers seems a kind of treason. It has though indeed from the very beginning been said that every new poet has to Coleridge seems to have shone rather make an audience for himself. Cerin monologue than dialogue, and from tainly his audience is likely to be but the beginning his companions seem to small at first; and for a time the people have been ready to sit and listen to his at large doubt whether the faith of his wonderful outpourings. At one time scanty band of hearers is not a mere pecuniary and other troubles beset him, craze, or a mere transitory illusion or partly at least due to his own thought- delusion. And indeed, amid a great lessness; and he disappeared, and no mingling of cries it requires some sensione at Cambridge or elsewhere knew tiveness to select the one that is best what had become of him. Presently worth hearing, and which the coming discovered by his writing a Latin sen-generations will hear with delight. It tence (Eheu! quam infortunii miserri- is easy to prophesy after the event-to mum est fuisse felicem) on the wall of a assume the prophetic mantle, and solstable he had enlisted as a light dra- emnly re-anoint and crown him who is goon he came back to the university already known to be born a king. Still, and (6 kept" two more terms; but as contemporary criticism in great periods through certain theological scruples, is for the most part a marvel, and the which the kindly master of his college perusal of it should certainly inspire us in vain discussed with him, he could in our day with a profound humility and take no degree, he declined the final an undogmatic caution. 66 The impulses and energies which I propose to specify, as in an effective way acting upon that decade, and cooperating with each other and with other causes to produce results so noticeable and so far-reaching, are these: Looking back to the close of the last edition of "The Hecuba," Malthus's century, we nowadays can easily dis-"Treatise on Population," Lyrical cern, to a large extent at least, the signs Ballads," "Gebir" (the English verof the times. Figures that reached no sion). Let us further note that John great height as their age saw them, Wesley died in 1791, Gibbon in 1794, have become colossal to us; and, vice Burns in 1796, Cowper in 1800; and versa, some figures that were then that Shelley was born in 1792, Keats thought gigantic have become smaller in 1796, Macaulay in 1800; and we see and smaller -have dwindled into the clearly enough that the last ten years of puniest dwarfs. The keen intelligence the last century were in a special sense, of Coleridge separated him from the so far as literature is concerned, a time crowd that received Wordsworth's "De- of transition a time in which old scriptive Sketches," published in 1793, things were passing away, and all things with indifference and neglect. "Sel- were becoming new -a time of death dom, if ever," he wrote, "was the and a time of birth. emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced." But for many a long year there was no poet whom the public and its ordinary advisers more carefully and contemptuously ignored than Wordsworth. They became ec- the great intellectual vigor and brilstatic over Scott, and presently when Sir Walter ceased to reign in poetry and ascended the throne of prose fiction, over Byron; they gave Wordsworth a frigid reception; and yet, who nowadays would compare in value and in influence what Scott and Byron have added to our poetry with the contributions made by Wordsworth? And not only with regard to men, but with regard to movements, is it difficult for an age to realize what is going on in its midst. I propose now to call attention to some of the tendencies and changes that were working their way in England in the last decade of the last century, and that were profoundly to influence and modify our literature, but which, at the time, were scarcely noticed or per ceived. liancy of Germany; the deepened influence of Greek literature and art; the revived study and appreciation of our own older poetry; the growing powers of the democratic movement; and, lastly, the new cult of nature, so to speak-that is, the new enthusiasm with which men regarded the external world, and what we call natural scenery. Now, it is true that many traces of these tendencies and movements can be recognized in the earlier years of the eighteenth century. Influences that so deeply penetrate and pervade the mind of an age cannot be sudden and abrupt in their action. In the case both of individuals and nations conduct that seems strange and surprising, seems so only because our knowledge of their inner history is so limited and so slight. It is Some of these movements will be at in fact the outcome of suggestions and once indicated if we mention certain aspirations and predispositions that other works which came out in the have long been rendering it probable decade 1791-1800-viz.: Mary Woll- and certain. It is only because of our stonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights ignorance that nothing happens but the of Women," "The Romance of the unexpected. Assuredly, if we were Forest," "Descriptive Sketches," God- better informed, we might rather say win's "Political Justice," Cowper's that the unexpectable never happens. "Miscellaneous Poems," "Caleb Wil-In literature, long before a great revoliams,' "" Mysteries of Udolpho," South-lution comes to pass, the murmur of its ey's "Joan of Arc," Lewis's "Monk," coming may be detected, by subsequent Landor's "Poems," "Camilla," "The students at least, if we watch and listen Anti-Jacobin," "The Italian," Porson's carefully. And all through the last |