'Never to appear cold to me, for I would not be treated like a school-boy; that I had had too much of that in my life already ;' and then he goes on: 'Don't you remember how I used to be in pain when Sir William Temple would look cold and out of humour for two or three days and suspect a hundred reasons?' At Moor Park he contracted the deafness which never left him in sitting out of doors in a study he had made for himself in the woods. And we read of his violent exercise, dashing up a bank wooded with firs to relieve himself of sick headaches to which he was subject.

The one spot of relief in all the black book of his life is Laracor, his parsonage at Trim, before he had been removed to the 'great empty Deanery-house which they say is mine,' and at which he took up his residence 'horribly melancholy.' Laracor is in a smiling pastoral country. Stella and her companion Mrs. Dingley had come over from England to live in Trim, within easy reach of Swift. They were his constant companions. He had his glebe and his garden, and the little stream flowing through his possessions, the banks of which he planted with willows. When he had left that quiet life for London and the affairs of State, and under the Harley Ministry he was the mainspring of everything, he often sighs his soul back to Laracor and Stella. 'Why don't you go to Laracor,' he asks, and give me an account of the garden and the river, and the hollies, and the cherry-trees on the river-walk?' And he wonders what the two women are doing: 'Are you good housewives and readers? Are you walkers? I know you are gamesters.' For they used to play at piquet with a certain Dean and Mrs. Wall, their neighbours. He rallies Stella on her liking for a small game and recounts his own ill-luck: Instead of my canal and willows, I lose all my money here among the fine ladies. I have lost five pounds the five weeks I have been here.' He was in London for three years that time, from 1710 to 1713, but he never forgot his fortnightly budget to Stella. In those pages of the Diary, sparkling with the names of the Queen and the Queen's woman, Harley and Bolingbroke, Dukes and Duchesses many a one, he is at his most lovable. Nothing is too great or too little to set down for Stella's eyes. He doesn't sleep well in the house in Little Rider Street over against Stella's old lodgings: the street-criers are at it early in the morning, women with old satin and taffeta, men with old suits and cloaks, and one special fellow crying cabbages so loud that

་

Swift prayed his largest cabbage were in his throat. It is now high cherry-time,' he writes once, 'take notice. Are they so soon with you? We have early apricots, and gooseberries are ripe.' A year later Queen Anne was dead, Bolingbroke fled into France, Harley in the Tower, and Jonathan Swift back at Laracor with the cherries and the willows, and Stella. But only as the petrel that might rest awhile in the sunlight before plunging again into storms, or that might fly before the storm in a faint gleam of light while all the tempests cried upon his track.

ONLY.

KATHARINE TYNAN.

ONLY a leaf, I said,

Damp with the dew,

Flushed with a brown and red

Ominous hue,

Loosened from overhead

If a gale blew.

Only a love, I sighed,

Scorned, overthrown,

All that it asked denied,
Useless alone,

Making as if to chide

Mere monotone.

Only a life, may-be,
Tending to tears,
Losing-in losing thee-

Joy through its years,

All save Eternity

Facing with fears.

LIONEL W. LYDE.

FIVE ENGLISH POETS

VI.-IDEAS AND IDEALS.

We started out with the intention of talking about five poets, and about one of the five hardly a word has been said. Because in many ways Mrs. Browning stands curiously apart from the rest, it is harder to find common ground for the purposes of comparison. The reason of this appears to me to be, that she deals more in abstract ideas; that her thoughts are rarely selfcentred, as is so much the case with Arnold, and with much of Wordsworth and some of Tennyson; and her sympathies are less for individuals than for classes. The Portuguese sonnets, one of which was quoted in a previous paper, are a marked exception to this general statement, but it accounts for the absence from her work of anything of high dramatic quality on the one hand, and of egoistic meditation on the other. For her poetry shows both the susceptibility to strong feeling on her own part and the ready sympathy, the power of understanding other people, which might have been expected to result in outbursts of lyrical passion or dramatic characterisation.

Lyrical passion of a sort we have from her.

'Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years?

They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,

And that cannot stop their tears.

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,

The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing towards the west :
But the young young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!

They are weeping in the play-time of the others,
In the country of the free.'

There is a cry of passionate pity running all through the 'Cry of

the Children;' but if Tennyson had desired to stir the sympathies which are aroused by it, he would have set to work with a poem after the manner of the 'Children's Hospital,' and similarly Browning would have made the interest centre on the sufferings of some individual child. The voice, so to speak, would have come, not from the poet, but from the child. Not the poet, but one of the children, would have interpreted the cry of the rest; the method would have been dramatic. One may say that with Robert Browning the method is always dramatic; even if there is an abstract idea to be dealt with, it is done by 'Lippo, Roland, or Andrea' and the treatment of it is full of the personality of the imagined speaker. On the other hand, the Cry of the Children' is not an expression of the poet's own personal mood, as 'In Memoriam' is, or the 'Ode to Duty,' or Thyrsis.' So that the point of the distinction is, that whereas what I might lamely call the Lyrical as opposed to the Dramatic method is used by the other poets for the expression of a personal mood, and is almost confined to that, Mrs. Browning uses it instead of the Dramatic method; while, like her husband, she rarely expresses her personal mood at all.

It is just the ideas
She forgets the

The habit of mind which has led to this result seems to come out also when she does intend to be dramatic. Her speakers do not really retain their individuality, but become mouthpieces for the declamation of some generalisation; some broad observations which go altogether outside the immediate range of the individual's interest. Imagine any one talking at large after the manner of the lover in 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'! There is not space to quote enough to show what I mean, but no man would ever have dreamed of saying all that. which the situation suggests to the poet. individual feeling of the moment, and generalises, just when generalising is dramatically absurd. Now he of' Locksley Hall,' concerning whom I have said sundry hard things, talks a good deal of nonsense and proves himself rather a poor creature; but his generalising is dramatically right: whereas Lady Geraldine's lover makes exactly the sort of speech that he might have composed for himself a week later as the proper thing for him to have said under the circumstances, but just what he never would have said at the time. Mrs. Browning's sense of dramatic fitness is overturned by her pursuit of abstract ideas. The ideas may be fine, but they are out of place just where they come.

Hence her finest effects are produced when she is not attempting to be dramatic, but is interpreting some comparatively abstract conception; the feeling of a whole class, as in the 'Cry of the Children'; the idea of liberty as in 'Casa Guidi ;' the idea of patriotism as in 'The Forced Recruit'—a Venetian, forced to serve in the Austrian ranks against his countrymen at Solferino.

'By your enemy tortured and goaded

To march with them, stand in their file,
His musket (see) never was loaded,

He facing your guns with that smile.

'As orphans yearn on to their mothers
He yearned to your patriot bands :—
"Let me die for our Italy, brothers,

If not in your ranks, by your hands."

"Twas sublime. In a cruel restriction
Cut off from the guerdon of sons,
With most filial obedience, conviction,
His soul kissed the lips of her guns.

'That moves you? Nay, grudge not to show it,

While digging a grave for him here;
The others who died, says your poet,

Have glory-let him have a tear.'

In her right perception of what is base, in her ready response to what is noble, in her tender sympathy for suffering, in her high conception of the ideals at which a pure nature must aim, Mrs. Browning was a true poet, and a true woman. Her artistic capacity fell very far short of her poetic feeling, and the defectiveness of her versification as well as the other demerits of her manner of composition (as in the dramatic pieces criticised above) makes her work much less effective and convincing than it deserved to be; always with the exception of the Portuguese sonnets, which stand alone as the genuine outpouring of her own heart. Apart from these (and from 'Aurora Leigh,' which is not included for the purpose of these papers), it is in the 'Vision of Poets' that the highest qualities of the poet, the best gift she has given us, are to be found. There at least we find that courageous acceptance of pain, that assurance of holiness, that triumph through suffering, which make men into martyrs and heroes; and to make men ready to be martyrs and heroes would seem to be among the highest functions of the poets. The lines which VOL. 85 (V.-NEW SERIES).

42

NO. 508.