For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made

payable to the order of LITTELL & CO.

Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

"IF THOU WERT TRUE AS THOU ART | And Regulus hath fought nor vainly

Then shouldst thou reign upon love's The hymn that telleth of the patriot's

High towering o'er the tides of weal and How tonic were the words, how strange,

Ah, fain would we all we his country-"Behold !" I cried, "the inner touch

From The Fortnightly Review. THE POETRY OF ROBERT BRIDGES.

Society. All he has to tell is that he loves beauty and loves love; and all he has done is to praise God in the best of ways by making some beautiful things.

FATHER GERARD HOPKINS, an English priest of the Society of Jesus, died young, and one of his good deeds remains to the present time unrecorded. The body of Mr. Bridges' work is We were strangers to each other, and now considerable. A volume of lyrics, might have been friends. I took for a volume of sonnets, a narrative poem, granted that he belonged to the other the libretto for an oratorio, an historcamp in Irish politics, on the outskirts ical tragedy, a tragedy "in a mixed of which- -and not on the outskirts manner,' "" a comedy "in the Latin ouly — a motley crew of traders in manner,' ," several other dramas, clascrime have squatted. I learn from a sical or romantic, and a searching notice of his life that among other dis- study of the prosody of Miltontresses "the political dishonesty which this is no inconsiderable achievement. he was forced to witness in Dublin, And Mr. Bridges has published nothso tortured his sensitive spirit that he ing that is not carefully considered, and fell into a melancholy state;" and soon wrought to such excellence as can be afterwards he died. Father Hopkins conferred on it by studious and deliwas a lover of literature, and himself a cate workmanship. He is, doubtless, poet. Perhaps he did in many quar-known best by his "Shorter Poems," ters missionary work on behalf of the poetry of his favorite, Robert Bridges. He certainly left, a good many years since, at my door two volumes by Mr. Bridges, and with them a note begging that I would make no acknowledgment of the gift. I did not acknowledge it then; but with sorrow for a fine spirit lost, I acknowledge it now.

Mr. Bridges, more than some other men of letters, needed in those days a mediator between his work and the public. He has never learnt the art of self-advertisement. The interviewer has not appeared at Yattendon, or captured him in some shy nook on his beloved Thames. Among poets he has been somewhat of a scholar-gipsy For most, I know, thou lov'st retired

ground!

seen in the rare glimpses of limited black-letter issues from Mr. Daniel's Oxford press

In type of antique shape and wrapper grey. But to-day Mr. Bridges shows his face in the Royal Academy; and happily no critic has to discover him, for he has gradually revealed himself. There is comfort for the critic in this; and perhaps there is comfort also in the fact that he is not a poet with a mission; he has no new creed to proclaim to the age; he need fear no Robert Bridges

to which in the popular edition must
be added on its next appearance a
fifth book at present in the hands of
the possessors of Mr. Daniel's limited
issue. And it is not ill that he should
be first thought of as a writer of lyrics.
So much excellent lyrical verse has
been written by poets born within the
last half century that it is difficult to
conjecture an order of merit; but some
persons will incline to believe that
Mr. Miles exercised a sound judgment
when he named the eighth volume of
his poetical encyclopædia (in which
writers younger than Mr. William
Morris and younger than Mr. Swin-
burne appear), "Robert Bridges and
Contemporary Poets." The clan,
though agile and shapely, are not of
pre-eminent stature (I speak as one of
the minor poets) but to overtop them
should secure the respect of all.
emperor of Lilliput," said Gulliver, "is
taller, by almost the breadth of my
nail, than any of his court, which alone
is enough to strike an awe into his
beholders." Such an awe many of the
writers in Mr. Miles's eighth volume
may well feel in presence of the author
of "There is a Hill beside the Silver
Thames" and "The Winnowers."

"The

There is a lyric which is the direct outcry of passion transformed to art— such are some of the songs of Burns;

a lyric which is the expression of pro- | reaches of the Thames supplies a suitfound and ardent contemplation suchable environment for such moods. Mr. are some of Wordsworth's poems; a Bridges is a most exact observer of lyric, which is architectonic in charac- these natural phenomena which accord ter, the product of an elaborate evolu- with his temper of mind; but his obtion such are some of the odes of servation is not in the manner of a Gray. Mr. Bridges' poems are seldom realism hard and crude; it is guided mere outcries of passion; they do not by a delicate instinct of selection; it often explore the heights and depths of is subject to a law of beauty; it is a thought; they are in general of fault- quest, not for fact, but for delight. less evolution, but their design is His eye can read the details, the minion rarely (save in the choral odes of his type in the book of nature; and it also dramas) complex and of large dimen- can find rest or excitement in breadths sions. Elements of many and various of prospect — the still solitude of Eukinds enter into his volume of "Shorter glish downs, a woodland after the havoc Poems" - delicate observation, delight of autumn gales, the scourge of the in external nature, delight in art, de- surf and sweep of the tides seen from light in love, gladness, and grief, eth-the cliff. Spring and summer are dear ical seriousness, pensive meditation, to him. No one who has read the graceful play of fancy. But all are "Shorter Poems" will forget the exsubdued to balance, measure, harmony; quisite personification of spring as the and sometimes our infirmity craves for virgin-mother clad in green, some dominant note, some fine extrav

agance, even some splendid sius. Mr. Walking the sprinkled meadows at sunBridges' audacities are to be found

down.

in occasional phrases - often felicitous But he can also celebrate the joys of and of true descriptive or interpretative winter in a fine sonnet (No. 10 of power, sometimes not felicitous-and "The Growth of Love"), and one of in his metrical experiments. But in his most admirable pieces of observahis metrical experiments there is noth- tion is the description of the London ing revolutionary; they are extensions streets at morning after a night of of a true tradition in English verse; snow. I will set side by side, as conthey amount to little more than nicely trasted pieces of pictorial poetry, calculated variations of stress. No a stanza from "The Garden in Sepwriter of verse understands his busi-tember" and a stanza from "The ness better than Mr. Bridges; and Downs:

if finer and subtler harmonies are

beams

attained unconsciously or half-uncon- Now thin mists temper the slow-ripening sciously by greater poets, our ear soon Of the September sun: his golden gleams adapts itself to the delicate surprises On gaudy flowers shine, that prank the

and delicate satisfactions which he has thought out and felt out as a skilled craftsman. He is no representative in English poetry of M. Réné Ghil's école évolutive instrumentiste; he has it is likely a prejudice against talking nonsense; but he has made curious inquisition into the sources of Milton's metrical effects, and in that great school he is an ingenious pupil.

Pleasure rounded with peace, a tender tranquillity with sudden impulses of joy give origin to some of the most beautiful of these lyrical poems. And the scenery of the upper and unsullied

rows

Of high-grown hollyhocks, and all tall

shows

That Autumn flaunteth in his bushy

bowers :

Where tomtits, hanging from the drooping
heads

Of giant sunflowers, peck the nutty seeds,
And in the feathery aster bees on wing
Seize and set free the honied flowers,
Till thousand stars leap with their visiting:
While ever across the path mazily flit,
Unpiloted in the sun,
The dreamy butterflies,
With dazzling colors powdered and soft
glooms,

White, black, and crimson stripes, and | Nay, barren are those mountains and spent

peacock eyes,

Or on chance flowers sit,

With idle effort plundering one by one
The nectaries of deepest-throated blooms.
There is something of the rich lethargy

of autumn even in the versification of
this elaborate stanza. In contrast let
the opening of "The Downs" suf-
fice:

the streams :

Alone aloud in the raptured ear of men

O bold majestic downs, smooth, fair, and We pour our dark nocturnal secret: and lonely;

O still solitude, only matched in the skies :

Perilous in steep places,

Soft in the level races,

then,

As night is withdrawn

From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,

Where sweeping in phantom silence the Dream while the innumerable choir of day

cloudland flies;

With lovely undulation of fall and rise;

Entrenched with thickets thorned,
By delicate miniature dainty flowers

adorned.

Welcome the dawn.

There is something of southern radiance and southern desire in the imagination and sentiment of this poem, and, in several instances, Mr. Bridges has found his masters and models in Italian literature. Yet he is characteristically English in most of his shorter poems; and the fineness of beauty and reserve of passion in English landscape accord with his peculiar character as a poet.

It is difficult to turn away from the lyrics, for though they would fill only a slender volume, Mr. Bridges has been fastidious as regards his work, and has admitted no verse into his collection which has not some grace of its own. But other parts of his poetical achievement must be noticed.

Mr. Bridges' poems have been censured for a lack of warm humanity, and, with the exception of certain poems of joy and love, his lyrics are not direct and simple utterances of passion. But many of his lyrics are charged with fine and tender human sentiment, and he can express moods of dejection and meditative sorrow as well as the happiness of lovers. There well as the happiness of lovers. There is poignant grief, purged of all that is violent, in the beautiful stanzas "On a Dead Child." Even into his interpretation of nature an element of humanity enters. It was a bold enterprise for any poet to attempt a new rendering of the nightingales' voices when Keats had been his predecessor; but there is magic in Mr. Bridges' poem, "Nightingales," and half the magic is won, not from the birds' songs, but has been simply followed." The subfrom the heart of man. The poem ap-ject did not escape the writers of the pears in the fifth book of "Shorter seventeenth century; it was treated in Poems," which has not been yet ina graceful narrative poem by Shackcluded in the popular edition : erley Marmion, and in dramatic form Beautiful must be the mountains whence by Thomas Heywood, in his "Love's Mistress." Mr. Bridges' poem certainly gains much upon Mrs. Tighe's 'Psyche," by the fact that the writer does not flourish over the narrative

ye come,

And bright in the fruitful valleys the

streams, wherefrom Ye learn your song:

Where are those starry woods? O might

I wander there,

Among the flowers, which in that heavenly

air

Bloom the year long!