what he finds hurt of, to preserve health.”

is the best physic | the ills we suffer from, something of And we find Bur- that "invigorating tonic quality

which

the Spectator admits may sometimes be found in Arnold's poetry; and which Mr. Birrell, somewhat oddly, seems to find in the following lines from the

ton concluding that: "Our own experience is the best physician; that diet which is most propitious to one, is often pernicious to another. Such is the variety of palates, humors, and tem- same poet, lines which he also finds, peratures; let every man observe and" In reality, in wholesome thought, in be a law unto himself." the pleasures that are afforded by think

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows
Like the wave;

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength

of men.

Love lends life a little grace,
A few sad smiles; and then,
Both are laid in one cold place,
In the grave.

Dreams dawn and fly, friends smile and die
Like spring flowers;

Our vaunted life is one long funeral,
Men dig graves with bitter tears

For their dead hopes; and all,
Mazed with doubts and sick with fears,
Count the hours.

False and hollow,

Is it not much the same with the sus-ing, of incomparable excellence." tenance - call it consolation or stimulus - to be derived from poetry? It is as idle to be angry with a man who does not find the same enjoyment in the same poetry as you do, as it is to be angry with him, if you happen to be a great eater of beef, for preferring a lighter diet. There are, no doubt, certain broad principles of right and wrong in poetry as in peptics, principles which no man can flout and be saved. There are some poets (not so very many) whom if a man reject, clearly there is nothing to be done with him but to follow Dogberry's precedent with that perverse fellow who would not stand. We count the hours! these dreams of ours, We may be pretty sure that there must be something wrong with the man who, like King Valoroso of Paphlagonia, drinks brandy with his breakfast - that at any rate there very soon will be something wrong with him. But when we pass beyond these first principles, as we may call them, we enter upon the-consoling? curious wilderness of taste, or fancy if that name be preferred. Perhaps it is the better name, when one recalls the rejoinder made by a noted cynic to a lady who, pleading the cause of a certain popular writer, observed that he had so much taste: "Madam, he has, and all of it bad." Let us then call it fancy; and who is to dogmatize about fancy?

Do we go hence and find they are not dead?
Joys we dimly apprehend,
Faces that smiled and fled,
Hopes born here, and born to end,
Shall we follow ?

Pretty verses enough, no doubt; but, Certain, 'tis certain; very sure, very sure; death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford Fair?" Yet, if Mr. Birrell can find consolation in this mood of sadness, who shall gainsay him?. He is likely at least to have it all to himself. When Macaulay heard of the death of Hallam's younger son, he wrote in his diary: "Poor Hallam, It is not clear that Mr. Birrell and the what will he do? He is more stoical Spectator even mean the same thing by than I am, to be sure. I walked read"consolation." The Spectator says that ing Epictetus in the streets. AnointMr. Birrell really means "stimulus." ing for broken bones! Let him try One can conceive Mr. Birrell replying how Hallam will be consoled by being that he knew very well what he meant, told that the lives of children are oùк ¿ø' and that he meant consolation. But nuv [matters beyond our control]. the difference between the two qualities Arnold indeed has assured us that in is rather apparent than real. In all certain evil times he found comfort in consolation there must be some stimu- the study of Epictetus; but he has lant, something which braces us to bear also confessed that he found more

ness, the thoughts with which our stammering tongues and fumbling fingers can only play, as children play with a box of letters out of which they can form no certain syllables. It is his mission to interpret what commoner minds have felt, perhaps unconsciously till they saw and knew their wandering thoughts thus stamped in the universal currency of the world. "After life's fitful fever he sleeps well," was

comfort in the study of Homer and forever as a lamp to lighten our darkSophocles. Macaulay, it will of course be said, was a Philistine. As we have never felt quite sure what that terrible epithet implies some people evidently using it, as Cardinal Newman used liberal, to signify anything and everybody displeasing to them-we are not concerned to defend Macaulay from the charge. But if, as we sometimes suspect, it includes the possession of wholesome, manly common sense, then assuredly, Macaulay was a very Shakespeare the first man to whom the fine Philistine indeed.

The amount and quality of the consolation which poetry is capable of providing must obviously depend on the individual temperament of the sufferer. It must depend also, in some degree, on the nature of his sickness. The physicians of Harley and Brook Streets do not prescribe one uniform remedy to every form of bodily disease; nor do they treat all patients suffering from the same disease in the same manner. Every one fond of poetry selects his poet according to his mood. In Shakespeare alone, the universal, may all moods of man find their counterpart.

All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,

Find their sole speech in that victorious

brow.

;

Nor is it only in pain, and grief, and weakness that Shakespeare consoles he consoles by virtue of his natural magic little less, if less at all, than by virtue of his moral truths. The Spectator, after quoting one of Arnold's poems, admits that they "sound consolatory," but maintains that, "if read carefully with a view to practice rather than to mere æsthetic pleasure," the amount of consolation they offer is no great thing. But if considered carefully will not the consolation that poetry offers be found, if not mainly (as. we think) at least in no small part, a matter of æsthetic pleasure? Is it not the beauty of the form in which it is offered that gives the consolation its soothing or its tonic power? The poet translates into words, that shall burn

contemplation of death suggested this consoling thought? Yet with these few words he has moulded it into a form more durable than any wrought of brass or marble. We may be reading the Spectator wrong, but his argument seems to suggest that the sort of consolation he looks for in poetry will most easily and most often be found in Dr. Watts. If the æsthetic pleasure is to count for nothing, then surely,

66

And while the lamp holds out to burn
The vilest sinner may return,

must carry more comfort to the soul
weary with itself and sick of asking,"
than the message Matthew Arnold
heard from the stars and the waters,
"Wouldst thou be as these are?
as they." For one who has felt con-
solation of the mood itself, thousands
must have been refreshed and soothed

Live

by the tender beauty of the lines in which Wordsworth expresses his debt to Nature for,

That blessed mood

In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.

In truth we cannot think that the very
material form of consolation which the
Spectator expects to find in poetry is to
be found there. The poet cannot con-
sole as the leech consoles when he
relieves the sufferer from pain, brings
sleep to the sleepless, or turns mourning
into joy by any practice of his heaven-
sent skill. Such consolation a man can
minister only to himself.

No man can save his brother's soul,
Or pay his brother's debt.

gales. No painter can play the magician for us like the poet. The inward eye sees clearer and further than the outward vision. The philosophical critic may scoff at this as a merely sensual form of consolation, and take his stand on the great moral truths inculcated by the great poets. Nor will we be concerned to refute him. Only we would submit that the pleasures we have described as coming from poetry are more generally felt and more closely loved than those deeper thoughts which not every mind is capable of grasping, and which, when grasped, do not bring the solace we mean to every mind.

Man must endure

His going hence, e'en as his coming hither:
Ripeness is all.

For one whom that great moral truth has comforted, how many thousands, we wonder, have been cheered into forgetfulness by the natural magic of

But from good poetry there comes that the soft canopy of English air; again pure æsthetic pleasure which, when from the dark dingles our enchanted derived from beautiful or noble sub-ears drink in the song of the nightinjects, does undoubtedly exercise on minds capable of appreciating it, and in tune for it, an elevating and refining pleasure; and all that tends to elevate and refine man, tends in its degree to refresh and strengthen, and so to console him. Nor need the poetry which is found to exercise this influence be necessarily concerned with the conduct of life, with what we vaguely call religion. Mr. Birrell very truly observes that Arnold's love of nature and his poetic treatment of her has brought relief and joy to many a vexed soul. And he adds with equal truth that this was due in no small degree to the fact that, greatly as he admired Wordsworth and was influenced by him, the order of his mind led him to reject, with the heartiest good-will, the cloudy pantheism which mars so much of Wordsworth's verse. Empedocles, musing in his last hour on the summit of Etna, looks back regretfully to the days of his youth when he could still delight in the beauty of outward things with the natural joy of a simple mind which had not lost its balance nor grown the slave of thought; when the sports of the country people could give pleasure, sunset and seed-time and harvest, the reapers in the corn, the vine-dresser in his vineyard, the village girl at her wheel. This natural joy at least Arnold never lost, and it is in the expression of this joy that his verse, so some at least of his admirers hold, takes its happiest and most natural touch. It is in this love of natural beauty, and in his power of expressing it, that the poet, we suspect, most often touches the heart. The scenes he pictures, flash, in Wordsworth's phrase, upon the inward eye in lonely rooms and amid the din of towns and cities. As we read, the bare walls fall back; there comes a vision of trees, and a river flowing through the vale of Cheapside. The winds murmur through the pines, the waves whisper on the shore; through the wide fields of breezy grass we wander again beneath

pure

Daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and

take

The winds of March with beauty. Violets,
dim

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath.

In

Nor is it true that such solace is merely
sensual. Not the scene only returns to
us, but all the memories of the scene.
We feel like the poet himself, when the
cry of the cuckoo brought back to him
his vanished youth; like him, we can
"beget that golden time again."
Mr. William Morris's last volume,
"Poems by the Way," there is an ex-
cessively touching passage from the
poem called "The Half of Life Gone."
The poet watches the countryfolk at
work in the hayfields, lying on the
grass, as he used to lie, in the glad time
before he " meddled with right and with
wrong."

The dear sun floods the land as the morn-
ing falls towards noon,
And a little wind is awake in the best of
the latter June.

They are busy winning the hay, and the life | seems impossible for any arrangement

and the picture they make,

If I were as once I was, I should deem it made for my sake.

The scene and the actors in it, he knows them all, and has known them from boyhood.

But little changed are they

of English words, or of any words, one might say, to yield more exquisite music than the "Ode to a Nightingale." To read it is indeed to take a draught from "a beaker full of the warm south ; " and as we drink it we seem in very sooth to "leave the world un

Since I was a lad amongst them; and yet seen," and with the poet, "fade away into the forest dim." Matthew Arnold,

how great is the change!

Strange are they grown unto me! yea I to it is true, rates Keats's "naturalistic myself am strange.

Their talk and their laughter, mingling with the music of the weeds,

interpretation" much higher. Of the "Ode to Autumn" he says that it actually"renders nature," as compared with

Has now no meaning to me, to help or to the "Lines written in the Euganean hinder my needs,

Hills," where Shelley can only "try to

So far from them have I drifted. And yet render her." We should doubt whether

amidst of them goes

A part of myself, my boy, and of pleasure and pain he knows,

And deems it something strange when he is other than glad.

The consolations of poetry are not always of a joyful cast. In the memory of the unreturning days there must ever be some touch of melancholy, even though it bring not the consciousness of chances wasted and powers misapplied. At its best the pleasure it gives will mostly be the subdued and chastened pleasure with which we watch the daylight dying in the dusk of evening. There is one glory of the sunset, and another of the dawn ; both are exquisite, yet so different.

Shelley concerned himself much to
render nature literally; except when,
"meddle with right and with wrong,'
like Mr. Morris, he set himself to
he sang, it has always seemed to us, as
the blackbird and the lark, who

Let loose their carols when they please,
Are quiet when they will.

Certainly we never get from his poetry
the idea, the image of nature as we get
it from Shakespeare or Wordsworth,
from Scott or Byron or Lord Tennyson.
But do we really get it much more
clearly from Keats ?

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where
are they?
Think not of them, - thou hast thy music

too,
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying
day

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats

mourn

Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly
bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble

It is surely then difficult to separate the spiritual from the sensual pleasure of poetry. Some poets reign solely by virtue of the latter quality-Shelley and Keats, for example, and some of the Elizabethan lyrists. Of much of Shelley's poetry it is impossible to analyze the charm; it soothes us like a strain of music or the scent of a flower. To consider it too curiously is to handle a butterfly,—the bloom is gone. The poet of clouds and sunsets he has been called; he is rather the poet of the breeze and the blossom. The charm of Keats is, indeed, more material, but yet for the most part sensual too. To what he might have come no man can is a question of the literal rendering of guess; but of what he did the chief glory is what a poet of our own day has finely called "the glory of words." It

soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden croft, And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. It is not for the moment a question of the poetical quality; on that side it would be hard indeed to better this stanza; it

nature, by which it is to be presumed that Arnold meant to signify the poet's power of bringing the scene before you

The charm of poetry, as Lord TennyIn that respect Keats's elaborate pic-son has so happily said, is often found ture seems to us less successful than in a single golden phrase, or even in the simpler strokes in which Collins paints the scene where from his mountain hut the solitary views the approach of evening,

On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and space to touch on that note which, in

and all the sweet, restful charm of En- the pleasures of poetry it is not to be glish landscape in,