erful masters and neighbors on the Neva.

intercourse that alone breeds intimacy and real talk, the talk that goes from Situated as the country is, it has no heart to heart and mind to mind; or doubt occupied an infinitely more favor- we may have neighbors near but not able position under Russia than it did congenial, whom we do not like but as the battle-field between that great cannot shake off; while in the great power and declining Sweden, which cities we all, I suppose, in time find possessed, but could not protect it. friends who share our tastes, and we Independence being hardly possible, certainly need never know our nextno better substitute could have been door neighbor's name unless we will. devised than the existing autonomy, But, after all, we are not satisfied. and assuredly seldom has a people The vagrant life so many of us live, shown a greater capacity for self-gov- backwards and forwards from town to ernment or done so much with a small country and from country to town, is revenue, a rigorous climate, and an the proof that nature, or perhaps the ungrateful soil. Finland is a country healthy English love of fresh air, has every traveller leaves with regret, with still the old power over us. It very a feeling of affection towards its enter- often happens that we do not realize prising and hospitable inhabitants, and the charm of the trees and the hedgewith the best wishes for its future. rows and the farmyards and the cottage gardens till we have settled ourselves away from them, and only see them now and then. That charm grows on us; and so, in the end, when we are tired of hurry and bustle and noise, and when the feeling that there are twenty plays we want to see, and fifty people we want to call on, has lost its attractiveness, we slip back into the country and saunter and potter, or plant trees or grow roses, and enjoy the delightful things spread out by nature all around us far more than we should if we had never left them.

J. D. REES.

From Temple Bar. THE POEMS OF ROBERT BRIDGES.

WE all praise the country nowadays, but very few of us live there. The evolution of civilization, like other evolutions, is from the simple to the complex, and as we grow, or think we grow, more completely civilized, we appear to get further and further from what was once the ideal result of human training, the attainment of self- This is the history of most of us, sufficiency, of the supreme gift and perhaps; but Mr. Bridges, as befits a power of carrying about with us, in poet, has been earlier than the rest of our own minds and bodies, all that is the world in his "return to nature." needful for true happiness and for Perhaps he never left the country; wise and noble living. We care for but, however that may be, every line music and pictures and books, and we of his poems tells of his present life are the better for caring for them; and there, and of the observant eye, the it is not in country villages, but in habit of quiet, leisurely contemplation, Rome and Dresden and Paris and Lon-and, above all, of the gift of imaginadon, that concerts and libraries and tion, which make that life so delightful exhibitions of art are to be found. The mere discovery, too, of the delightfulness of ideas, and so of the pleasure of exchanging them a discovery made, we may hope, by increasing numbers every year, as education extends arouses a sense of the need of human society, and of the dulness of life without it; and in the country we may have no neighbors near enough for the easy

and so rich. A life of this sort is in itself a rebuke to the majority of us; and Mr. Bridges' way of writing and publishing a still stronger rebuke, if he would but feel it, to the average man who writes and publishes. Here is a poet who issues three or four volumes of poetry, at intervals, quite quietly, for private circulation only, and then modestly selects a small number of

T

them to offer to the public! But mod-nature produces perhaps in the scatesty has its disadvantages when one tered intervals of a year or a century. stands alone in practising it, and Mr. Of all this there is nothing in Mr. Bridges has paid for his by remaining Bridges. His Ulysses is the convenlittle known.

tional Ulysses, gifted with no new life, and his other characters are colorless and wanting in originality. But if the play could not be acted, it is one that it is a pleasure to read. Mr. Bridges gives us everywhere in it nature and himself, and a poet can give us nothing better. Here are some fine lines which we can hardly be wrong in taking for an utterance of the poet's personal sympathies, even though he lets Lycomedes, who utters them, be overruled by Achilles :

I'll tell thee what myself have grown to

think

That the best life is oft inglorious.
Since the perfecting of ourselves, which

seems

Our noblest task, may closelier be pursued
Away from camps and cities and the mart
of men, where fame, as it is called, is won
By strife, ambition, competition, fashion,
Ay, and the prattle of wit, the deadliest foe
To sober holiness, which, as I think,
Loves quiet homes, where nature laps us

round

The two volumes, or the two principal volumes, which he has given to the public, are "The Shorter Poems of Robert Bridges," issued in 1890, to which I was just now alluding, and a play called "Achilles in Scyros," the plot of which turns on the artifices used by Ulysses to get Achilles to join the Greek fleet waiting at Aulis to sail for Troy. It must be said at once that the dramatic faculty is not among the special gifts of Mr. Bridges. It is just the gift which a quiet life in a country village cannot possibly produce. For the life and movement and passion a man must be willing to sacrifice repose and plunge into Johnson's "full tide of human existence." He must not refuse to surrender the living of his own life in order to observe how other men live theirs. This has not been Mr. Bridges' way, and the consequence is that his play has many merits as a poem, but not many as a play. There is not a single character in it whose personality fixes itself on the mind and memory. There are none of those little touches which the genuine playwright is using at every moment, to cut the lines of his characters deeper and more marked, to throw them into strong relief and heighten the general effect. Life is long and plays are short; characters lie deep hidden in the cloak of custom and nationality and law, as the statue lies buried in the block of marble, and the work of the dramatist, like that of the sculptor, is to remove the accidental and reveal the essential. The large and salient traits of a man's personality do not in real life reveal themselves in a few hours, any more than the particular circumstances and a specimen of what he lets us see of figures, or the exact effects of sky, himself. His insight into nature, and which a landscape painter needs in his power of interpreting her, are on order to bring out the idea which he every page of the play. This interprehas conceived of a scene, will all occur tation is, as it should be, his own; but just at the moment he has chosen. he has been strongly touched by the Picture and play alike are the concen- quite different influences of our two tration into a single hour of what greatest "poets of nature," Words

With musical silence, and the happy sights
That never fret; and day by day the spirit
Pastures in liberty, with a wide range
Of peaceful meditation, undisturbed.

It can hardly be fanciful to catch the personal note in these lines, the note of self-revelation; but, however that may be, it is certainly not fanciful to see in them proof of that wise and noble seriousness which Matthew Arnold rightly claimed as essential to the best poetic work, as well as of a command of blank verse, only to be learned in the best schools, and there only by rarely gifted pupils.

I said just now that Mr. Bridges in his "Achilles" gave us everywhere nature and himself; and I have given

worth and Keats.
passage, which is
life again, only simpler and less sensu-

ous:

Here is a charming | him in that direction. But in these like Keats come to two last lines there is something more than Miltonic rhythm; there is a curious touch of Miltonic expression. I have not alluded to Mr. Bridges' debts to his predecessors, as meaning anything but honor to him; the poet or artist of to-day is right to regard himself as the heir of the ages, and to use his great inheritance as serves him forms and thoughts such rich and best. He may not be able to give old splendid new birth as Virgil gave to Homer's story and Keats gave to Spenser's spirit, but if he have anything

See while the maids warm in their busy
play,

We may enjoy in quiet the sweet air,
And through the quivering golden green
look up

To the deep sky, and have high thoughts
as idle

And bright, as are the small white clouds

becalmed

In disappointed voyage to the noon :
There is no better pastime.

Here is Keats again, though in an- in him of the life and force of a true other mood :

I Thetis am, daughter of that old god,
Whose wisdom buried in the deep hath

made

The unfathomed water solemn, and I rule The ocean-nymphs, who for their pastime play

In the blue glooms, and darting here and there

Chequer the dark and widespread melancholy

With everlasting laughter and bright

smiles.

There are not many living poets who could show anything to equal the rich

Whose wisdom buried in the deep hath made

The unfathomed water solemn.

One is never satisfied with quoting, but I must only give one more specimen of Mr. Bridges' admirable blank verse. It is from the opening speech of Thetis, when she tells how she alone of the immortals has been through a mother's fears and pains:

And yet not wholly ill is the constraint,
Nor do I pity mortals to be born
Heirs of desire and death, and the rich
thought

Denied to easy pleasure in the days
That neither bring nor take: tho' more to

me

Embittered with foreknowledge of a doom
Threatened by fate and labor how to avert.

Milton's influence is, and must be, on every man who would write English blank verse; and I have already hinted how much Mr. Bridges has learned of

poet, he will not be overweighted or
overpowered, but rather braced and
strengthened by the memory of his

masters.

natural, after the model of the great The whole play is written, as is quite Greek plays, and Mr. Bridges has enriched it with some choruses, which have the tone and temper of the Greek choruses. The metre is also brought nearer to Greek metre than the ordinary English lyrical metres are. Unfortunately, it cannot be considered a quite unqualified success, although certain rich musical effects are produced. The fact is that Mr. Bridges hardly possesses the passion or the flow of language which English ears demand in poetry which is to be sung. We know almost nothing of Greek music and too little of Greek pronunciation to be able to say exactly what effect the singing of an ode of Pindar or a chorus of Sophocles may have had; but it is safe to say that their main charm for us does not lie in their music or their metre, but in the perfection of their structure, in the imaginative richness of their language, and, most of all, in their "noble and profound application of ideas to life." It is in this direction, though, of course, in a different degree, that the merit of the principal chorus in "Achilles in Scyros "" must be looked for. Mr. Bridges is above mere prettiness, has something of his own to say, and, if his metrical effects are sometimes rough and inharmonious, his language is always pure and good,

as free from the taint of a fanciful | I will make only one more remark affectation as from that of a prosaic about " Achilles in Scyros;" and that meanness. Here are two stanzas of is this. If Mr. Bridges ever has any the chorus, which is a song of spring: And on the day of relenting she suddenly

weareth

Her budding crowns.
morn,
Is any song

O then, in the early

that compareth

leisure time on his hands, he could do us all a great service by translating some Sophocles. If we are ever to have a satisfactory rendering of a Greek play, it must come from some one who can in the first place write

With the gaiety of birds that thrill the poetry, which has not been the case

gladdened air

In inexhaustible chorus

To awake the sons of the soil

with all the translators of Greek plays, and in the second place can avoid throwing a modern coloring over an

With music more than in brilliant halls cient thought. Professor Jowett has

sonorous

(-It cannot compare―)

Is fed to the ears of kings

From the reeds and hired strings.
For love maketh them glad ;
And if a soul be sad,

Or a heart oracle dumb,

given us Plato exactly as he would have been if English had been his native tongue. All the peculiarities of the original which belonged to Plato are reproduced in the English, and all those which belonged generally to the

Here may it taste the promise of joy to Greek language disappear. The result

come.

is, perhaps, the best translation in the

For the earth knoweth the love which world, and, as Mr. Huxley said, it

made her,

The omnipotent one desire,

Which burns at her heart like fire,
And hath in gladness arrayed her.
And man with the Maker shareth,
Him also to rival the lands,

To make a work with his hands
And have his children adore it :

The Creator smileth on him who is wise.

and dareth

In understanding with pride :

will make Plato an English classic. It would be even more difficult to make Sophocles an English classic; but the fact of his being a poet does not seem to make it impossible, as Schlegel's Shakespeare" appears to have become a German classic; and, in any case, will Mr. Bridges try ?

66

The other volume, which is called "Shorter Poems," is more important

For God, where'er he hath builded, dwell- and likely to reach a larger circle of

eth wide,

And he careth,

To set a task to the smallest atom,
The law-abiding grains,

That hearken each and rejoice :

readers than the "Achilles."
It con-
tains perhaps nothing quite so fine as
the best blank verse passages of the
play; but the poet is far more at home
in it, and moves with far more ease

For he guideth the world as a horse with and freedom. There are probably not

many volumes of poetry which obtain a very wide circulation; but so long as things remain as they are, it is certain that a volume of short pieces, inspired It would not be hard to point out by love and nature, will find a larger faults of detail here; but I think it is public than a blank verse play, inspired impossible not to feel that the strength by recollections of the classics. And of the whole far outweighs the weak- this is confirmed by the fact that the ness of parts. And the task the poet "Shorter Poems are already in their sets himself is among the best that a poet can find: to take facts in nature which observation or science gives us, and so interpret their secret as to clothe the mystery of matter with a soul.

landscape. The poet's imagination has | them, but his way of looking at her is