spring. Aught more precious he could not find to name with the very darling of his heart. Brave old big Ben !

With these generous lines we must close our excerpts, although we could glean a few others of minor importance. I can scarcely better conclude this long series of papers than with some sentences from Mr. Swinburne's very fine Introduction to the works of George Chapman (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875), which has also been reprinted separately:

"Even the Atlantean shoulders of Jonson, fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies, have been hardly tasked to support and transmit to our own day the fame of his great genius, overburdened as it was with the twofold load of his theories on art and his pedantries of practice.* And Chapman, though also a brother of the giant brood, had not the Herculean sinews of his younger friend and fellow-student. The weight that could but bend the back that carried the vast world of invention whose twin hemispheres are 'Volpone' and the 'Alchemist,' was wellnigh enough to crush the staggering strength of the lesser Titan. . . . The learning of Jonson, doubtless far wider and sounder than that of Chapman, never allowed or allured him to exchange for a turbid and tortuous jargon the vigorous purity of his own English spirit and style. . . . But when on a fresh reading we skip over these blocks [the savourless interludes of buffoonery, too common in even our best old plays, whether comedies or tragedies: gross baits for the gross

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* Per contra: Lamb, for whose critical genius Mr. Swinburne has a most righteous admiration, says of the "Poetaster": "This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies of Ben, in his own day and ours, who have said that he made a pedantical use of his learning. He has here revived the whole court of Augustus by a learned spell. We are admitted to the society of the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus converse in our own tongue more finely and poetically than they were used to express themselves in their native Latin," &c.

groundlings] laid as if on purpose in our way through so magnificent a gallery of comic and poetic inventions, the monument of a mind so mighty, the palace of so gigantic a genius as Ben Jonson's, we are more than content to forget such passing and perishable impediments to our admiration of that sovereign intellect which has transported us across them into the royal presence of its ruling and informing power. Here, again, we find that Jonson and Chapman stand far apart from their fellow-men of genius. The most ambitious and the most laborious poets of their day, conscious of high aims and large capacities, they would be content with no crown that might be shared by others; they had each his own severe and haughty scheme of study and invention, and sought for no excellence which lay beyond or outside it; that any could lie above, past the reach of their strong arms and skilful hands, past the scope of their keen and studious eyes, they would probably have been unable to believe or to conceive. And yet there were whole regions of high poetic air, whole worlds of human passion and divine imagination, which might be seen by humbler eyes than theirs and trodden by feebler feet, where their robust lungs were ́ powerless to breathe, and their strenuous song fell silent."

The reader will do well to study the whole of this Introduction, which is not unworthy in its sphere of the author of "Atalanta in Calydon," being the fit reverse of the golden medallion of which that is the noble obverse.

THE POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE *

"I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance, and not action. . . . I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it."

“The angel who presided at my birth

Said: Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,

Go, love without the help of anything on earth.”

BEFORE the publication of these volumes I knew but one of Blake's poems, that on the Human Form, or Divine Image, quoted by James John Garth Wilkinson in his great work. The wisdom and the celestial simplicity of this little piece prepared one to love the author and all that he had done; yet the selections from his poems and other writings were a revelation

* 'Life of William Blake, Pictor Ignotus, with Selections from his Poems and other Writings." By the late Alexander Gilchrist, author of the "Life of William Etty." Illustrated from Blake's own works, in facsimile, by W. J. Linton, and in photolithography, with a few of Blake's original plates. In 2 vols. London: Macmillan & Co., 1863.

I give the full title, in recommending the work to all good readers. The first volume contains the Life and a noble supplementary chapter by Mr. D. G. Rossetti; the second volume contains the Selections, admirably edited by Mr. D. G. Rossetti, with the assistance of Mr. W. M. Rossetti. There is magnificent prose as well as poetry in the selections, and the engravings in themselves are worth more than most books.

far richer than my hopes. Not only are these selections most beautiful in themselves, they are also of great national interest as filling up a void in the cycle of our poetic literature. I had long felt, and probably many others had felt, that much of the poetry of the present and the last age must have had an antecedent less remote in time than the Elizabethan works, and less remote in resemblance than the works of Cowper and Burns; yet, since Macaulay's essay on Byron appeared, Cowper and Burnsand in general these two only-had been continually named as the heralds of that resurrection of her poetry which makes glorious for England the crescent quarter of the nineteenth century. A third herald of that resurrection was undoubtedly William Blake; and although he was scarcely listened to at all, while his colleagues held in attention the whole kingdom, the fact may at length be recognised that by him, even more clearly than by them, was anticipated and announced both the event now already past and the event still in process of evolution.

If it be objected that one who was scarcely listened to at all could not exercise much influence, the reply is that we are concerned not with the influence, but with the accuracy and period of the presage. It is written that mankind did not heed Noah, or heeded only to mock, during the six-score years in which he foretold the Flood and built the Ark ready for it. If the Flood really came as he foretold, it attested the truth of his inspiration; but no one now would think that his prophecies were instrumental in accomplishing their own fulfilment, although this opinion must have been general among those who were being sub

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merged. Or we may answer, applying a metaphor which has been with good reason much used, that the mountain-peaks which in any district first reflect the rays of the dawn exercise little or no influence on the dawn's development, even in relation to the country around them; they cast some glimmer of light into obscure valleys below (whose obscurity, on the other hand, their shadows make trebly deep when the sun is sinking); they prophesy very early of the coming noontide; we may judge as to their positions and altitudes by the periods of their reflection; but the dawn would grow and become noon, and the noon would sink and become night, just the same if they were not there. So the Spirit of the Ages, the Zeitgeist, is developed universally and independently by its own mysterious laws throughout mankind; and the eminent men from whom it first radiates the expression of what we call a new aspect (the continuous imperceptible increments of change having accumulated to an amount of change which we can clearly perceive, and which even our gross standards are fine enough to measure), the illustrious prototypes of an age, really cast but a faint reflex upon those beneath them; and while pre-eminently interesting in biography, are of small account in history except as prominent indices of growth and progress and decay, as early effects, not efficient causes. They help us to read clearly the advance of time; but this advance they do not cause any more than the gnomon of a sundial causes the procession of the hours which it indicates, or a tidal-rock the swelling of the seas whose oncoming is signalled in white foam around it. and in shadowed waters over it.