he was born too late, since by this very reflection of the unrest and bewilderment of our time he holds his representative position in the present survey. The generation listens with interest to a thinker of his speculative cast. He is the pensive, doubting Hamlet of modern verse, saying of himself: "Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis! Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to arrive at poetry by mere mechanism, in which he can acquire an artizan's readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that the first does the most harm to Art, and the last to himself." Quite as frankly Arnold goes on to enroll himself among dilettanti of the latter class. These he places, inasmuch as they prefer Art to themselves, before those who, with less reverence, exhibit merely spirituality and feeling. Here, let me say, he is unjust to himself, for much of his verse combines beautiful and conscientious workmanship, with the purest sentiment, and has nothing of dilettantism about it. This often is where he forsakes his own theory, and writes subjectively. "The Buried Life," "A Summer Night," and a few other pieces in the same key, are to me the most poetical of his efforts, because they are the outpourings of his own heart, and show of what exalted tenderness and ideality he is capable. A note of ineffable sadness still arises through them all. A child-like disciple of Wordsworth, he is not, like his master, a law and comfort to himself; a worshiper of Goethe, he attributes, with unwitting egotism, his inability to vie with. the sage of Weimar, not to a deficiency in his own nature, but to the distraction of the age: And as Hamlet, in action, was inferior to lesser personages around him, he thus yields to introspection, while protesting against it, and falls behind the bard of a fresher inspiration, or more propitious time. In all this we discern the burden of a thoughtful man, who in vain longs to create some masterpiece of art, and whose yearning and self-esteem make him loth to acknowledge his limitations, even to himself. 66 In certain poems, breathing the spirit of the tired scholar's query-"What is the use?" he betrays a suspicion that knowledge is not of itself a joy, and an envy of the untaught, healthy children of the wild. Extremes meet, and this is but the old reaction from over-culture; the desire of the wrestler for new strength from mother Earth. "The Youth of Nature," The Youth of Man," and "The Future," are the fruit of these doubts and longings, and, at times, half-sick of bondage, he is almost persuaded to be a wanderer and freeman. "The Scholar Gypsy" is a highly poetical composition, full of idyllic grace, and equally subtile in the beauty of its topic and thought. The poet, and his poetfriend, Arthur Hugh Clough, in their wanderings around Oxford, realize that the life of the vagrant scholar poor" was finer than their own: "For early dids't thou leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without, Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings. "The Scholar Gypsy." It is another, and one of the best, of the successful English imitations of Bion and Moschus; among which "Lycidas" is the most famous, though some question whether Swinburne, in his Ave atque Vale," has not surpassed them all. Before the appearance of the lastnamed elegy, I wrote of "Thyrsis" that it was noticeable for exhibiting the precise amount of aid which classicism can render to the modern poet. As a threnode, nothing comparable to it had then appeared since the "Adonais" of Shelley. If not its author's farewell to verse, it has been | his latest poem of any note; and, like "The Scholar Gypsy" probably exhibits the highest reach of melody, vigor, and imagination, which it is within his power to show us. imagination, and he thus becomes a better prose-writer than a mere didactician ever could be. In fine, we may regard Mathew Arnold's poetry as an instance of what elevated verse, in this period, can be written, with comparatively little spontaneity, by a man whose vigorous intellect is etherealized by culture and deliberately creates for itself an atmosphere of "sweetness and light." 66 IV. A WIDE leap, indeed, from Matthew Arnold to Barry Cornwall "-under which familiar and musical lyronym Bryan Waller Procter has had more singers of his songs than students of his graver pages. No lack of spontaneity here! Freedom is the life and soul of his delicious melodies, composed during thraldom to the most prosaic work, yet tuneful as the carols of a lark upon the wing. It is hard to think of Procter as a lawyer, chanting to himself in a London omnibus, on his daily journeys to and from the courts. He is a natural vocalist, were it not for whom we might almost affirm that song-making, the sweetest feature of England's most poetical period, is a lost art, or, at least, suspended during the present reign. There never was a time when little poems were more abundant, or more carefully finished, but a lyric may be exquisite and yet not possess the attributes of a successful song. That the bent of Arnold's faculty lies in the direction rather of criticism and argument than of imaginative literature, is evident from the increase of his prose work in volume and significance. Some of the most perfect criticism ever written is to be found in his essays, of which that "On Translating Homer," will serve for an example. He carries easily in prose those problems of religion, discovery, and æsthetics, which so retard his verse; is thoroughly at home in polemic discussion, and a most keen and resolute opponent to all who heretically gainsay him. The critical faculty is not of itself incompatible with imaginative and creative power. We are indebted for lasting æsthetic canons to great poets of various eras. Even the fragmentary comments and marginalia of Goethe, Byron, Landor, Coleridge, etc., are full of point and suggestion. For one, I believe that, as able lawyers are the best judges of a lawyer's powers and attainments, so the painters, sculptors, musicians and poets, are most competent to decide upon the merits of works in their respective departments of art,-though not always, being human, openly honest and un-running swiftly, breaks into flying, half unprejudiced. Doubtless many lawyers will assent to the first portion of this statement, and scout the remainder. But, at all events, poets, like other men, are wont to become more thoughtful as they grow older, and I do not see that the work of the masters has suffered for it. Arnold, however, is so much greater as a writer of critical prose than as a poet, that people have learned where to look for his genius, and where for his talent and sensibility. . His essays are illuminated by his poetic I can recall a multitude of such productions, each well worth a place in any lyrical "Treasury;" among them, some that are graceful, touching, refined to perfection; yet all addressed as much to the eye as to the ear-to be read with tone and feeling, it may be, but not really demanding to be sung. The special quality of the song is that, however carelessly fashioned, it seems alive with the energy of music; the voice of its stanzas has a constant tendency to break into singing, as a bird, awares. You at once associate true songs with music, and if no tunes have been set to them, they haunt the mind and "beat time to nothing" in the brain. The spirit of melody goes hunting for them, just as a dancing-air seeks and enters the feet of all within its circuit. Procter's lays have this vocal quality, and are of the genuine kind. To freedom and melody he adds more refinement than any song-writer of his time, and has a double right to his station in the group under review. It His stanzaic poems have, in fact, the rare merit of uniting the grace and imagery of the lyric to the music and fashion of song. It is well to look at this conjunction. The poet Stoddard, in a preface to his selection of English Madrigals, pronounces the lyric to be " a purer, as it certainly was an earlier, manifestation of the element which underlies the song," and says that there are no songs, modernly speaking, in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, but lyrics in abundance." His distinction between a lyric and a song is that the one is "a simple, unstudied expression of thought, sentiment, or passion; the other its expression according to the mode of the day." Unquestionably the overplentiful songs of the Eighteenth Century, and those, even, of the generation when Moore was at his prime, are greatly inferior as poetry to the lyrics of the early dramatists. Yet, were not the latter songs as well, save that the mode of their day was more delicate, etherial, fine and strong? seems to me that such of the early lyrics as were written to music possess thereby the greater charm. And the songs of Barry Cornwall, beyond those of any other modern, have an excellence of "mode" which renders them akin to the melodies of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Heywood, Fletcher, and to the choicer treasures of Davison, and of the composers, Byrd, Wilbye and Weelkes. They are, at once, delightful to poets and dear to the singing commonalty. I refer, of course, to their pervading character. It may be that none are so absolutely flawless as the BugleSong of Tennyson. The melody and dying fall of that lyric are almost without comparison this side of Amiens' ditties in "As You Like It" and Ariel's in "The Tempest." But how few there are of Procter's numerous songs which stand lower than the nearest place beneath it! Many of them excel it in swiftness, zest, out-door quality, and would be more often trolled along the mountain-side, upon the ocean, or under the greenwoodtree. The fountain of Procter's melody has not so long been sealed as to exclude him from our synod of the later poets, although, -how strange it seems,-he was the schoolfellow of Byron at Harrow, and won popular successes when he was the friend and associate of Hunt, Lamb and Keats. Born twelve years earlier than Hood, he was before the public in time to act the pro phet, and in the dedication of "The Genealogists" predicted the humorist's later fame. He dates back in years, not in literature, almost as far as Landor, and like him was among the foremost to discern the new spirit of poetry and to assist in giving it form. In a preface to his "Dramatic Scenes" he tells us: "The object that I had in view, when I wrote these scenes, was to try the effect of a more natural style than that which has for a long time prevailed in our dramatic literature. I have endeavored to mingle poetical imagery with natural emotion." Like Landor, also, he performed some of his best works at dates well toward the middle of this century; in fact, it is upon songs given to the public during the fourth and fifth decades that his influence and fame depend. This has led me to consider him among recent poets, rather than in his youthful attitude as the pupil of Leigh Hunt. Hunt's poetic mission (taken apart from his career as a radical) was of note between 1815 and 1830, and was that of a propagandist. Without much originality, he was a poet of sweetness, fluency, and sensibility, who became filled with the artspirit of Keats and his masters, and both by precept and example was a potent force in its dissemination. Beyond the position attained as a shining light of what was derisively called the derisively called the "Cockney School," Leigh Hunt made little progress. He lived, it is true, until 1859, a writer of dainty verse and most delightful prose, beloved by the reading world, and viewed with a queer mixture of pity, reverence, and affection, by his younger brethren of the craft. Procter's early studies were influenced by Keats and Hunt, to whose work he was attracted by affinity with the methods of their Elizabethan models, as opposed to that of Byron and Scott. His nature, also, was too robust,—and too aesthetic, to acquire any taste for the metaphysical processes of Wordsworth, which were ultimately to shape the mind, even as Keats begat the body, of the idyllic Victorian School. The fact that Procter's genius was essentially dramatic finally gave him a position independent of Keats, and, against external restrictions, drew him far ahead of Hunt, who,-whatever he may have been as critic and essayist,—was in all respects the lesser poet. Nevertheless, those restrictions compelled Procter, as Landor was compelled, to forego the work at which he would have been greatest, and to exercise his gift only in a fragmentary or lyrical manner. He found the period, between the outlets of expression afforded by the newspaper and the novel, unsuited to the reception of objectively dramatic. verse, though well enough disposed toward that of an introspective kind. In short, Procter at this time was,-as Miss Hillard has felicitously entitled his early friend, Thomas Lovell Beddoes,-a "strayed singer"-an Elizabethan who had wandered into the nineteenth century. His organization included an element of practical common-sense, which led him to adapt himself, as far as possible, to circumstances, and, forbearing a renewal of sustained and lonely explorations, to vent his natural impulses in the "short swallow-flights of song" to which he owes his reputation. The love of minstrelsy is perpetual. Barry Cornwall, the song-writer, has found a place among his people, and developed to the rarest excellence at least one faculty of his poetic gift. But first of all the violet, with an eye Fixed like a pale and solitary star; The languid hyacinth, and wild primrose, Lilacs, and flowering limes, and scented thorns, ," and It may be noted that Procter's early verse had an effect upon poets who since have obtained distinction, and who improved on the hints afforded them. Two of the pieces in the first and second volumes, "A Vision," and "Portraits," contain the germs of Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women," and of his best-known classical poem. The "Lines to "Lines on the Death of a Friend," bear a striking resemblance in meter, rhythm, and technical "effects," to those wild and musical lyrics written long afterward by Edgar A. Poe, "The Sleeper," and "The City in the Sea." In several of his metrical tales, Procter, no less than Keats and Hunt, went to that Italian source which, since the days of Chaucer, has been a fountain-spring of romance for the poet's use. His "Sicilian Story," is an inferior study upon the theme of Keat's " Isabella;" and some of his other themes from Boccaccio have been handled by later poets,-the story of "Love Cured by Kindness," by Mrs. Lewes, and that of "The Falcon," by our own Longfellow. Among his dramatic. sketches, "The Way to Conquer," "The Return of Mark Antony," and especially But we have, first, to consider him as a pupil of the renaissance: a poet of what may be termed the interregnum between Byron and Tennyson-for the Byronic passion is absolutely banished from the idyllic strains of Tennyson and his followers, who, nevertheless, betray the influences of Wordsworth and Keats in wedded force. Procter's early writings were embraced in three successive volumes of Dramatic Scenes, etc., which appeared in 1819-21, and met with a friendly reception. Some of the plays were headed by quotations from Massinger, Webster, and such dramatists, and otherwise indicated" Julian the Apostate," have admirable the author's choice of models. His verse, though uneven, was occasionally poetical and strong. There is breadth of handling in these lines from "The Way to Conquer:' "The winds Moan and make music through its halls, and there An extract from a poem entitled "Flowers," has the beauty of favorite passages in "The Winter's Tale," and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"-the flavor and picturesque detail of Shakespeare's blossomy descriptions: "There the rose unveils Her breast of beauty, and each delicate bud O' the season comes in turn to bloom and perish. scenes; their verse displays simplicity, passion, sensuousness; one derives from them the feeling that their author might have been a vigorous dramatic poet in a more suitable era. As it was, he stood in the front rank of his contemporaries, not only as one of the brilliant writers for The London Magazine, but respected by practical judges who cater for the public taste. His stage tragedy, Mirandola, was brought out at the Covent Garden theater, apparently with success. Macready, Charles Kemble, and Miss Foote, figured in the cast. It is an acting drama, with a plot resembling that of Byron's "Parasina. volume of two years later date exhibits less progress in constructive power. It contained "The Flood of Thessaly," "The Girl of Provence," "The Letter of Boc caccio,' ,""The Fall of Saturn," etc.; poems which show greater finish, but little originality, and more of the influence of Hunt and Keats. Throughout the five books under review, the blank verse, sometimes effective as in "Marcelina," is often jagged and diffuse. The classical studies are not equal to those of the poet's last-named associate. In Procter's lyrical verses, however, we now begin to see the groundwork of his later eminence as a writer of English songs. Among the sweetest of these melodies was "Golden-tressed Adelaide," a ditty warbled for the gentle child whose aftercareer was to be a dream-life of poesy and saintliness, ending all too early, and bearing to his own the relation of a song within a song. I give the opening stanza: "Sing, I pray, a little song, Mother dear! Neither sad, nor very long; Therefore let it suit a merry, merry ear, The poet had mraried, it is seen, and other children blessed his tranquil home, where life glided away, as he himself desired, gently: "As we sometimes glide, Through a quiet dream!" The most perfect lyric ever addressed by a poet to his wife is the little song, known, through Neukomm's melody, in so many homes : do not regret this enviable exception to a | very bitter rule. The Muse cannot be wholly banished, even by the strong felicity of wedded love. She enters again and again, and will not be denied. Barry Cornwall's voice came back to him, after a molting period; and, although he wrote no plays, he exercised it in that portion of dramatic composition which, like music in every-day life, is used as a relief and beguilement,-the utterance of expressive song. His Dramatic poetry, embracing in completeness every department of verse, seems to reach a peculiar excellence in its lyrical interludes. Procter says that "the songs which occur in dramas are generally more natural than those which proceed from the author in person," and gives some reasons therefor. My own belief is that the dramatic and lyrical faculties are correlative, a lyric being a dramatic and musical outburst of thought, passion, sorrow, or delight; and never was there a more dramatic song-writer than is Barry Cornwall. English Songs appeared at a time when,— setting aside the folk-minstrelsy of Scotland and Ireland, the production of genuine lyrics for music was, as we have seen, almost a lost art. He declared of it, however, "The Spring will return!" and was the fulfiller of his own, prediction. By the agreement of musicians and poets, his songs, whether as melodies or lyrics, approach perfection, and thousands of sweet voices have paid tribute to their beauty, unconscious of the honeyed lips from which it sprung. Mr. Stoddard,-than whom there is no higher authority with respect. to English lyrical poetry,-judges Procter to be its "most consummate master of modern days": in fact, he questions "whether all the early English poets ever produced so many and such beautiful songs as Barry Cornwall," and says that "a selection of their best would be found inferior as a whole to the one hundred and seventytwo little songs in Mr. Procter's volumenarrower in range, less abundant in measures, and infinitely less pure as expressions of love." There are many who would demur to this comparative estimate, and for whom the starry Elizabethan lyrics still shine peerless, yet they too are charmed by the spirit, alternately tender and blithesome, of Procter's songs; by their unconscious grace, changeful as the artless and unexpected attitudes of a fair girl; by their ab |