dom. It is needless to dwell upon such familiar examples as the Faerie Queene and Pilgrim's Progress, but contemporary poems like Rossetti's "Card Dealer," are more likely to be overlooked: "What be her cards, you ask? Even these :- Thou see'st the card that falls,-she knows Her game in thy tongue is called Life, When she shall speak thou'lt learn her tongue The artist, being thus accustomed to play with the great and the petty, and to assemble the most incongruous images in illustration of some simple, majestic thought, renders himself liable to the reproach of extravagance and absurdity. The Faerie Queene is a phantasmagoria; a series of pictures moves onward as in a revolving wheel, or like the banks of a river when one is descending a rapid stream. One scene fades out and is borne on into the distant perspective as another assumes vividness and life; yet it is possible, by an effort of the will, to include both shores, and a long stretch of castled, vine-clad, and mountain-guarded country in a single glance. Not only is there variety of form, but variety of color as well. The artist is not a painter in monochrome, gray on gray. Spenser delights in brilliant hues as heartily as Titian, or any of the Venetian school. Besides, he commits anachronisms. To him all the past is present. Space and time are annihilated. The ancient world is one with that of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. If you sympathize with the poet, and adopt his verities as your own, all will seem concordant, requiring no justification nor apology. If you regard the details of his scheme, and do not share in his fine frenzy, you will be likely to stigmatize the composition as Gothic and barbarous. Upon the former hypothesis the distinction between Fancy and Imagination, so much insisted on, will be obliterated. Nothing will be censured as wild or extravagant which approves itself to be true. IV. DURING the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century there was a revival of Romanticism. Shallow philosophy and formal poetry were no longer adequate to those who felt the pulse of a new and fuller life beating within them. The more advanced of the new generation broke with tradition, and eagerly sought release from the stifling dungeon in which they and their fathers had been confined. In this attempt they were successful. The rusty bars gave way, the ancient moat was dry, the outer fortifications were falling into decay. But those who had thus emerged from the house of bondage knew not at first what they should do with their dear-bought and highly-prized freedom. Many, overcome with joy, laughed and wept alternately, or fell into paroxysms of hysterical weeping and refused to be comforted. These have been already described; they include Sterne and Rousseau, and all the sentimental race that followed. Others, climbing the nearest hill, and surveying the landscape in all directions, looked pityingly down on their late companions and the plain whence they themselves had but just departed, declaring that they had seen it all, and that henceforth there was nothing worth living for. They had been cheated by the dreams of their prison cell. Now they were disillusioned they would neither return to their pallet of straw, nor would they strike out for any goal whatever. They would remain upon the hill, or circle slowly round about it. From their post of observation they had descried all that lay in the distance, and proclaimed that it was in no respect better than what they had just quitted. Of this company Byron may be taken as the type. Still others, ascending the same hill but half-way, looked beyond and over the fortress where they had been immured, and perceived a smiling landscape, dotted with craggy steeps, which were crowned with bat tlemented towers. Knights and ladies were descending through portcullis gates and down winding bridle paths to the plain below. There the gay greensward was gayer still with pavilions and standards. The lists were set, horses pranced and caracoled, and the faint sound of the herald's trumpet, as he blew the signal for the onset, was borne through the expectant air. In another place, a train of black-robed monks was advancing slowly toward a distant monastery, an abbot leading the way, with the cross glittering above his head and pointing out the direction which his followers should take; the tones of the monastery bell, pealing out the summons to evening prayer, blent harmoniously with the subdued clangor of the trumpet. In other words, this band of liberated prisoners, not yet having gained a height whence they could overlook the future, beheld only the past-the Middle Ages, peopled with clerics and cavaliers, and with such picturesque members of the Third Estate as Robin Hood and Maid Marian. If they saw a darker side to this joyous pageantry, it was only as Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe saw their spectres and ogres, without half believing in their existence. These poets of the romantic past can be named: they are such as the Germans Uhland, Bürger, Goethe, Tieck, Schiller; they are the Frenchmen Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo; and their leader in England is Sir Walter Scott. This curiosity regarding the Middle Ages resulted in a deeper study of history. Documents were brought to light and critically examined. Old poems, like the Nibelungen Lied, the Canterbury Tales, the Chanson de Roland, and the Cid, were published, commented upon, and perused with avidity. Antiquarian zeal became fashionable. The historic method, the study of origins, requiring a minute inspection of every fact and event, in itself, and with reference to all the circumstances of its occur rence, now took precedence of any other. Criticism became more exact, but without damping the ardor of the more impassioned votaries of learning. Of this era the Idyls of the King are the poetic product, and such histories as Freeman's "Norman Conquest," Carlyle's "French Revolution," and Michelet's "History of France," are the scholarly product. The first effort of a certain few among the emancipated was to make sure of their own identity and their own freedom. Weary of their shackles, yet seeing multitudes who accepted them without a protest; discontented with their companions, whom they saw scattering in different directions; more than half dissatisfied with themselves, since they found themselves intoxicated with the breath of heaven, and invested with a new accession of strength, yet possessed neither of the ability to liberate others, nor to direct their own course toward any detinite end, they turned to the plashing streamlet and the shady covert for solace and refreshment of the body, and to the Alpine throne of liberty and the unfettered clouds for the courage and unceasing inspiration needed by the spirit. With a renewed and deepened consciousness of personality, of the existence and worth of the soul, concealed, yet manifested, in the organism of their own frames, they went farther than the allegorists, and assigned a soul to every organism. Nature thus became endowed with life; not the blind and creeping life of sap or molluscan lymph, but a vitalizing principle. Self determination and moral qualities are attributed to plant and animal. Fouqué's delicious prose idyl of Undine is the story of a Naiad, who, by means of her love for a young knight, is enabled to acquire a human soul. But it was not one Undine alone who was thus distinguished. Every rill and waterfall, every flower and blade of grass, every mountain and beetling cliff, was conceived of as instinct with Divinity. Wordsworth's Skylark and Linnet are not mere singing-birds. The former has "A soul as strong as a mountain river Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver." "A Life, A Presence like the Air, And what reader, without looking at the superscription, would conclude that the following stanza was addressed to a daisy? "Thou wander'st the wide world about. Uncheck'd by pride or scrupulous doubt, In peace fulfilling." The pantheism, propounded as a philosophical system by Spinoza, begins to appear in fine art with Rousseau, and reaches its literary consummation in Wordsworth and Shelley. Those who attribute intelligence and sensibility to natural objects may be divided into two classes, according as they transfer to these objects the passing emotion with which they themselves are affected, or endeavor to ascertain what is the real or typical nature of each created thing. Whenever the feelings of the poetizing individual are attributed to insentient objects or to the lower animals, we have an instance of what Ruskin calls the "pathetic fallacy." Whenever an attempt is made to express the specific quality of any object or existence inferior to man in terms of human emotion or activity, we are simply idealizing in a manner which is inseparable from our notions of high art. The two modes of poetizing are perfectly distinguishable in theory, though they may be confounded in practice; as where one, in determining the specific quality of a flower, for example, permits himself to be influenced by the mode of feeling which is uppermost at the time. The "pathetic fallacy" is more common in passionate, the idealization of specific quality in reflective poetry. Wordsworth is a master of both, but particularly excels in the second. The latter method is closely akin to that of science. Goethe's discovery that each of the various organs of the flower is modeled upon the structure of the leaf is an example to the purpose, and the union of the poetic and scientific natures in an observer like Alexander von Humboldt will illustrate the same truth. In fact, poetry precedes and accompanies science, as we have already remarked that it precedes and accompanies history. To return again to our point of departure, the ego or personality of the individual. Comfortably housed and safely defended in the eighteenth century, it often found itself homeless and shivering after the French Revolution. Protected even against the assaults of others' self-love by the politeness of which Chesterfield is so famous an exponent, it was suddenly stripped of every adventitious covering and ornament, and obliged to change conditions with the meanest wretches. The footing upon which it had stood disappeared. The aristocrat began to question concerning himself, his inalienable rights, and his duties, at the moment when the man of the people had completed a theory, not only of the aristocrat's rights, but of his own. Henceforth the only patent of prerogative was manhood. In the simple citizen of the new era all ranks were confounded. Man had grown self conscious and reflective; he was now to be analytic. The age of science and exact scholarship was at hand, but science and exact scholarship are evoked only at the bidding of the imperious human spirit which requires their ministrations. Science which investigates the powers and functions of the human soul is psychology. Science which aims to discover the essence and necessary basis of all being is ontology. Spinoza's pantheism, for example, is ontological. Both were to be cultivated in this epoch, and both were to manifest themselves in fiction and poetry. The French exponent of psychology in fiction is Balzac; the English, George Eliot; the American, Hawthorne. In poetic psychology, Dante and Petrarch are the illustrious progenitors of the modern school. All true poetry is fundamentally psychologic, but the word, as here used, refers to an abnormal development of self-consciousness, which therefore becomes in the highest degree observant and critical of its own states and processes. No modern poet is psychologic in this sense than Robert Browning, and the knowledge gained by self-intro more spection makes him the shrewdest diviner of other men's thoughts and motives. But in him the spirit has sublimed away the artistic form, so that his poetry is not ordinarily sensuous enough to be dramatic, nor sometimes to be truly lyrical. From The poet of ontology is Emerson. this point of view, his "Brahma" is peculiarly significant, as marking the point of junction between Occidental and Oriental philosophy. As California is the border, and its shore the barrier, where the Aryan race makes pause before precipitating itself into the bosom of the Orient whence it sprang, so Concord is the halting-place where Western thought, in its final outcome and supreme result, reflects for an instant longer, and finally is merged into the transcendentalism of the East. Goethe and Rückert having established the precedent of composing poems in the Oriental manner, Emerson and Browning have thought fit to follow. Here again scholarship goes hand in hand with poetry. The study of the Sanskrit language and antiquities has kept pace with the growing predilection for Orientalism in poetry and in decorative art. Edwin Arnold is not a pioneer, nor even one of the advanced guard; he is only well up with the main army. The translators of Saadi and Omar Khayyam are sometimes anticipated even by the bard of Lalla Rookh. One practical lesson has been taught by Emerson, or rather clearly formulated by him-the lesson of self-reliance. The French Revolution, like the Protestant Reformation, was a revolt of the individual against society, that is, against law and custom, which, framed in the interest of the few, had grown unendurable to the many. The audacity displayed at these periods, by Mirabeau in the French Tribune, as by Luther at the Diet of Worms, can only be paralleled by that of Paul on Mars' Hill. The energy and self- reliance of the orator and reformer react upon pure literature. Victor Hugo rebels against pseudo-classicism in France, as Wordsworth and Keats do in England. As the trouba dours were both poets and warriors, as Milton was statesman and polemic no less than a de VOL. VI.-5. votee of the Muses, so these new singers grasp the sword with one hand, and wield the pen with the other. What Bertrand de Born was to the Provence of Richard the First's day, Körner was to the Germany that had known Napoleon. The sentimentalism which had been despised as mere weakness, bore fruit in the downfall of monarchies which had outlived their usefulness. Poetry was becoming identical with the truest and noblest life. One indication of this movement is the change which takes place in the poetic conception of the Golden Age. The poets of Greece and Rome have already left it far behind them. Quite otherwise with us who "Doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widened with the pro cess of the suns"; and who perceive "One God, one law, one element, To which the whole creation moves." With the Golden Year in the future, the poets-and every writer is now a poet, a creator or maker-set resolutely about bringing it near. Tennyson cries out "But well I know, That unto him who works, and feels he works, The poets are revolutionary as long as revolutions tend to elevate humanity. Shelley defies authority in the name of Man, for whose sake all authority is constituted. He would set no bounds to the personality which has wrought these stupendous changes. Byron abandons poetry as craftsmanship, and lays his reputation, his fortune, and his life on the altar of Grecian independence. But revolutions accomplish their task, and are succeeded by reforms. Southey and Coleridge form extensive plans for a pantisocracy, or community where all men shall be absolutely equal, and which is to be situated in Pennsylvania. Thus they anticipate the idea of Brook Farm, whose citizens were also to be literary people, and to exist in a state of perfect equality. Shelley will know nothing but "A life of resolute good, Unalterable will, quenchless desire Wordsworth advocates "A more judicious knowledge of the worth Of whom we read, the man whom we behold The watchword is repeated by others. Lowell, Whittier, and Longfellow chant the fetters off the slave. Madame De Stael rises up as the protagonist of womanhood. Her Corinne is the genius who, beneath Italian skies, dares to assert that woman is not a mere appendage of man, and to claim for herself co-equal sovereignty in her own sphere. George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, with the female novelists of the eighteenth century, make a place for woman in fiction. Mrs. Browning writes "The Cry of the Children," muse: "Never may I commence my song, my due To God who best taught song by gift of thee, In the name of humanity, Charles Dick- Albert S. Cook. AN IMPOSSIBLE COINCIDENCE. Everett Boscawen, of Boston, writes from Thompson's Ranch, California, to his cousin and intimate friend, Boscawen Everett, also of Boston. MY DEAR FELLOW: August 12, 1882. I have not written before, because I did not feel sure that you would be on this side, and did not wish my letter to pass you on the Atlantic, and follow you back from London, to be read when as stale as a campaign prophecy after election. I have a great objection to having my letters read when stale; a man appears with a certain absurdity in an old letter, as in an old photograph. tiquities and three-generations-old aristocracy," you say. My dear fellow, think where I am. Our newness and rawness is mellow antiquity to the place I now inhabit. As America to Europe, so California to-America, I was about to say, as though our Atlantic strip constituted America; and, indeed, it does as we know America. It is curious to realize how unconscious we have always remained of what is really the chief bulk of America, our America being a mere little edge in front of this enormous expanse. There is positively something vulgar in its unwieldy breadth-stretching away and away interminably, an endless waste of factory and "Back in the land of one-century-old an- railroad and pork-packing and cattle-raising, |
