FIVE ENGLISH POETS.

V.-RETROSPECTION.

'Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Can never come back to me.'

I WONDER if there is any time in our lives when those words fail entirely to appeal to us: save in those moments—rare moments-of supreme happiness when the past and the future are forgotten in a present that seems an eternity of bliss. In childhood, I suppose, when the infinite possibilitics of being 'grown up' are so impressive, we did not think much about the past; but as the cares of life thicken round us, there is generally a kind of fictitious glow about the halcyon days before this or that particular trouble began to vex our souls.

Is it that

The past will always win

A glory from its being far;
And orb into the perfect star

We saw not when we walked therein'?

The very griefs we suffered in the days that are no more are invested with a tender halo-haec olim meminisse juvabit: 'some day we shall enjoy the memory of these things' said the stormtossed Æneas. There are plenty of men who honestly believe that their school days were the happiest time of their lives, though the schoolboy to whom they make the airy and timehonoured statement for the most part puts it down as 'rot.' He refuses to believe that his predecessors who sat on the same hard benches, and carved their unseemly initials on the same desk, had the positive preference for frequent canings which their words seem to imply. His own impression is that he found life much jollier when he was controlled only by a governess suffi

ciently anxious for her own peace of mind to be disinclined to challenge contests which might be avoided. Still I am bound to say that if you described that reminiscence to the young gentleman as 'the tender grace of a day that is dead,' he would probably repeat the above vulgar but expressive monosyllable, with increased energy.

But schoolboys, as is well known, share Hotspur's views on poetry, save such as is of a martial order. If you quote to them

'Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair,
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes

In looking on the happy autumn fields,

And thinking on the days that are no more,'

they will regard you with a scornful pity. I will not be responsible for the views of the average school-girl on the subject, but I should rather expect her to say, ' How lovely!' and then depart to read King Solomon's Mines' privily. I don't believe she dwells upon the days that are no more, as a rule; at least, in the sense of the song. Still, I was recently informed by a lady who ought to know, that there never was a time in her own life when she didn't regret that the last section of it had come to an end. Coming to the end of anything is rather

melancholy.

But even when the actual school days are over, it may be doubted whether the poetry of retrospection finds very much. favour with young and healthy minds. Time was when it was the correct thing to be occupied in fading away, and the tear of sensibility was ever ready to flow. Brooding over the past was quite en règle; and if you hadn't a past to brood over, you could manufacture one which did very nearly as well. The fashion has changed, and with the development of outdoor life and physical exercise, activity is the order of the day. There is so much to do, and a mere indulgence in the luxury of woeespecially imaginary woe-is waste of time. Besides which, when you are still young enough to be hurt at being considered young, the future-unless in exceptional cases-is really ever so much more interesting than the past.

All the same, there are times when the past comes back upon our minds with an irresistible attraction; even for those who are most persistently engaged on thoughts of the future. When the maiden sang Tears, idle tears' in the Princess,' Ida commented

on the song very much, as young and impatient enthusiasts generally will:—

'If, indeed, there haunt

About the moulder'd lodges of the Past

So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men,

Well needs it we should cram our ears with wool

And so pass by: but thine are fancies hatch'd

In silken-folded idleness; nor is it

Wiser to weep a true occasion lost,

But trim our sails, and let old bygones be.'

Nevertheless, it was no very long time before there was a different scene, when

'Her voice

Choked, and her forehead sank upon her hands,
And her great heart thro' all the faultful Past

Went sorrowing in a pause I dared not break.'

That mood, however, was not very long-lived. It is not much use crying over spilt milk, though it is not much use, either, to try and persuade ourselves that the milk was never spilt at all. The temples of the future are built out of the ruins of the past, and we may lament the vanished glories without harm if we are steadily resolved to match them in the days to come; more than that, the memory of what has been will often help to enrich our conception of what may be, of what it lies with us to do for our own generation and the generations that are to follow. But the doing of that is the main thing.

6

There has passed away a glory from the earth.' It was in no mood of emasculate lamentation that Wordsworth wrote the ode on the Intimations of Immortality.' A certain regret there is for the glory and the dream' (which many people are in the habit of declaring to be altogether fictitious, or contrary to common experience). But regret is not the dominant feeling; rather it is an almost triumphant expectation.

We may quarrel as we will with Wordsworth's doctrine in the ode; we may affirm that in our own experience and that of average mankind, life grows richer; that if we become more alive to the pain, we become also more, not less, alive to the beauty. That may be the general experience, but it is not universal: Mr. Ruskin has given very emphatic support to the contrary judgment. Since the subject has cropped up here, I may as well, having once for all apologised in my first paper, allow myself a digression. The thing that peculiarly offends a certain number of critics seems to be the idea that children enjoy land

scape and the beauty of natural objects as much as, or more than, in later years-which is affirmed to be contrary to general experience. My own impression is that Wordsworth and Mr. Ruskin were by no means as exceptional as they are said to be. A child will often find a vivid delight in a bit of rich colouring, especially colouring which has much light in it, like certain gems ; water, mountains, and sky will affect him intensely. He has not learnt to analyse the feeling; he cannot tell you what it is that sets him

'Singin' out for the happy he feels inside,'

as the author of 'Foc'sle Yarns' has it; and his delight will anyhow be less critical-much more crude in its source as well as in its expression, than in after days. Our satisfaction in a noble landscape is more educated, more definite, as time goes on, no doubt; whether it is really keener, whether the beauty of the external world really acts upon us more, is another question and an open one. Of course, when Mr. Morley says the contrary view is 'contrary to notorious fact, experience, and truth,' there is not much room left for argument. When so sober a critic is so positive, one feels that to question his assertion requires courage. But it appears to me that, as a matter of authority, Wordsworth and Mr. Ruskin know as much about it as their critic; and as a matter of experience, many children are alive to the glory and the dream,' who cease to be so in after years. The power of analysing the glory, the child lacks and the man often gains; the power of feeling it, the child often has and the man loses.

But that is not the important point here.. What the poet emphatically felt was, that the 'tender grace of a day that is dead' is not the source of a weak-kneed despair, but an earnest of splendour to come. And that is a position which you cannot weaken by saying that life is fuller now than it was before. You may be too much occupied with the future to think of the pastthat is the natural tendency of young and vigorous souls into which the iron has not yet entered. You may take to exaggerating the goodness of the past, and refusing to believe that the future can hold in store anything worth having-in which case you are not likely to be much of a comfort to yourself or anybody else, and retrospection becomes an unmixed evil. That is an attitude which deserves sympathy only when it is the outcome of exceptionally bitter experiences. But it is not the attitude of Wordsworth or any other of our poets. As a passing

mood it finds frequent expression; but a passing mood is another matter from a constant mental attitude.

None of these writers take so consistently forward a view of life as Browning. Now and then, however, he too looks back on the past; notably in 'By the Fireside' and in 'Rabbi Ben Ezra.' But it is not a dead past that he looks on in them, but a past which contained the germ of the present, and of a nobler develop

ment to come.

yes; but

'Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again '—
'If I tread

This path back, is it not in pride

To think how little I dreamed it led
To an age so blest that by its side
Youth seems the waste instead?'

And so in 'Rabbi Ben Ezra,' under the metaphor of the Cup and the Potter's Wheel

'What though the earlier grooves

Which ran the laughing loves

Around thy base, no longer pause and press?

What though, about thy rim,

Skull-things in order grim

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?

Look not thou down, but up!'

Of course there are poems which take a very different line, when his dramatis personæ go back to the past in various moods of a temporary character; the passionate grief of May and Death'

'I wish that when you died last May,

Charles, there had died along with you
Three parts of spring's delightful things;
Ay, and, for me, the fourth part, too;'

the bitter disappointment of wasted lives, in 'Dis Aliter Visum' or 'Youth and Art'; the frenzy of the 'Confessional,' and the semi-madness of Confessions.' But these are dramatic, and can never be felt as anything but dramatic; expressions of an accidental mood in the life of this or that individual. For the most part, Browning lets the past alone; at any rate he does not allow its haunting echoes to take the place of the harmonies that the future holds in store. And when he does go back to it, it is