such as Broken Love, the Agony of Faith, or The Mental Traveller, the world's diffidence would be justifiable. But the charm of the Singer is that, lark-like, while the wings aspire, heart and eye are with the nest upon the dewy ground. Never did poetry succeed better in uniting loftiest aspirations with a bewitching simplicity. In Blake it is sublime for a philosopher, and a lullaby for a child. The Poetical Works of William Blake, edited by W. M. Rossetti. George Bell & Sons, 1891. 1 Songs (Poetical Sketches), stanzas 2 and 43. 2 The Lamb (Songs of Innocence). 4 A Cradle Song (ibid.). 3 Infant Joy (ibid.). 5 On Another's Sorrow (ibid.). • The Little Boy Lost (ibid.), The Little Boy Found (ibid.). 'The Tiger, Second Version. The Defiled Sanctuary (From Jerusalem). • London (Songs of Experience), stanzas 2 and 3. 10 Auguries of Innocence (From Jerusalem), vv. 71–4. 11 Love; Secret. 12 The Wild-Flower's Song. 13 Christian Forbearance (Songs of Experience). 14 Song-How Sweet, &c. (Poetical Sketches). 15 The Land of Dreams. 17 The Two Songs. 19 Smile and Frown. 21 The Little Girl, Lost and Found 22 Auguries of Innocence, vv. 1–4. 24 Ibid., vv. 79-80 and 103–4. 16 Broken Love. 18 The Crystal Cabinet. 23 Ibid., vv. 19-20. SAMUEL ROGERS 1763-1855 A DELIGHTFUL example of a class, which might have been expected to be the largest, and is all but the smallest, in the commonwealth of poets. In these days the readers of Rogers are, I fear, few. Anybody, not already among them, in repairing the neglect will have only one regret, that he had deferred the enjoyment. A single indispensable condition is that he shall require no raptures. Rogers had and has no special message to deliver. The emotions to which he appeals, the ideas he suggests, may easily be considered to be commonplace and antiquated. He has no remarkable personality in himself to reveal. He was never possessed', as were some of his contemporaries. Simply and solely he saw, admired, was pleased, occasionally sorrowed, and allows it to be seen that he was moved, and how. A natural function of the poet is to feel poetical possibilities wherever they may be, and then concentrate them into melody. His intuition operates as the instinct of the miner who has guessed at a vein, before he labours with his pick. If Rogers did not mine, he had at least the poet's instinct for recognizing where precious ore was likely to be found, and keen enough appreciation to gather the grains, genuine if few, from the river's bank. The parading of glittering pebbles as if they were bullion, is the danger besetting writers of his order. A mere charge of triteness itself does not alarm me. Allusions to natural emotions are never to be decried as trite, unless a writer enunciate them with an air of publishing novelties. As a term of reproach it can be so easily flung. From some points of view it might be applied to Goldsmith's Deserted Village; even to Gray's Elegy. We may be grateful to Rogers, whose verse often reminds of Goldsmith, that he was not scared by the possibility of the imputation from dwelling on scenes When nature pleased, for life itself was new, And the heart promised what the fancy drew.1 If, as in the tedious tale of Florio and Julia, he slips into actual triteness, it is because he has become melodramatic under an apprehension that his public might weary of feelings and thoughts scattered by the wayside. On his own ground, whatever the themes, whether the lights and shades of Memory, those of the more mature and satisfying, if less popular, diorama of statecraft, literature, and humours, in Human Life, or of a dead world-empire, his pen goes far towards harmonizing them, so long as he is content to let them play about it. Without apparent effort of his, picturesque images` are constantly passing through his verse, as reflections from the unquiet stir outside over the Lady of Shalott's mirror. It may be she, most gentle, most unfortunate, Crowned but to die-who in her chamber sate or the sweet Saint who sate by Russell's side Under the Judgment-seat.3 It may be Grattan, When the sweet limes, so full of bees in June, Fox himself we see, in his garden at St. Anne's : so soon of Care beguiled, Playful, sincere, and artless as a child! Thee, who wouldst watch a bird's nest on the spray, I saw the sun go down !—Ah, then 'twas thine Shakespeare's or Dryden's—thro' the chequered shade And where we sat—and many a halt we made— To read there with a fervour all thy own, And in thy grand and melancholy tone, Some splendid passage not to thee unknown.5 Then Italy, the Italy of history and romance, of love and war, art and nature, opens her rich gallery to him— every picture framed in a glory of its own. In the glowing light of his grateful sympathy we view the home of blind old Dandolo, the Foscari, and the Falieri: ... where in monstrous league Two phantom-shapes were sitting, side by side, her sister republic, as royal by land as herself by water : Of all the fairest cities of the Earth None is so fair as Florence. 'Tis a gem Of purest ray; and what a light broke forth from its miracles of art, such as the gates of the Baptistery: so marvellously wrought, That they might serve to be the gates of Heaven; 7 to the Gardens of the Hundred Tales, where many a syren voice Sung down the stars; and ever-Imperial Rome, where The very dust we tread stirs as with life; And not a breath but from the ground sends up Something of human grandeur.9 Rogers works in silver-grey tints, while his friend, and for a brief space his travelling companion, a star that thro' the firmament Shot and was lost,10 paints much the same scenes in fire. Yet I am not sure that the black and white may not be as lasting. Under the spell of Childe Harold one is tempted to regard the Italy of Rogers as a versified guide-book. Study it, and you will find it possesses a witchery of its own. Its author is a pilgrim like the Childe, and with more of faith in the motives for his pilgrimage. With his youth cast in a time when the Continent was a sealed chamber, he had longed for Italy as fairyland, and now he has at last discovered it. We can feel him continually comparing facts with fancy, and rejoicing to recognize his dream-children in a material |