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And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

This has never been expressed so well as in Wordsworth's elevated phrases. They must always be cited. But a disenchantment is at last upon us, and we are sternly questioning our reason. Is not nature's apparent sympathy, we ask, a purely subjective illusion? The old belief, the new doubt, are well conveyed in the early and later treatment of a favorite themethe moaning of a sea-shell held to the ear. In Landor's "Gebir" we have it thus:

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue;
Shake one and it awakens, then apply
Its polished lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.

Landor complained that Wordsworth stole his shell, and "pounded and flattened it in his

marsh" of "The Excursion":

I have seen

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for from within were heard
Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with its native sea.

Byron acknowledged his obligations to "Gebir" for his lines in "The Island," beginning,

The Ocean scarce spake louder with his swell, Than breathes his mimic murmurer in the shell.

And now, as we near the close of the century which "Gebir" initiated, Eugene Lee-Hamilton devotes one of his remarkable sonnets to this same murmur of the shell, and I cannot find a more poetic, more impassioned recognition of the veil which modern doubt is drawing between our saddened eyes and the beautiful pathetic fallacy:

The hollow sea-shell which for years hath stood
On dusty shelves, when held against the ear
Proclaims its stormy parent; and we hear
The faint far murmur of the breaking flood.
We hear the sea. The sea? It is the blood
In our own veins, impetuous and near,
And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear
And with our feelings' ever-shifting mood.

Lo! in my heart I hear, as in a shell,

The murmur of a world beyond the grave, Distinct, distinct, though faint and far it be. Thou fool! this echo is a cheat as well,

The hum of earthly instincts; and we crave
A world unreal as the shell-heard sea.

How beautiful this ecstasy of disenchantment, -beautiful in its sad sincerity,- and yet how piteous! Here is a fine spirit, for the moment baffled, heroically demanding the truth, the truth. More trustfully leaving the future to "the Power that makes for good," Lowell also confronts the scientific analysis of our attitude toward nature:

What we call Nature, all outside ourselves,
Is but our own conceit of what we see,
Our own reaction upon what we feel;
The world's a woman to our shifting mood,
Feeling with us, or making due pretense;
And therefore we the more persuade ourselves
To make all things our thoughts' confederates,
Conniving with us in whate'er we dream.

The poet, to be aware of this, must have drifted quite away from the antique point of view. The Greek certainly made nature populous with dryads, oreads, naiads, and all the daughters of Nereus; but these had a joy and, like Jaques, a melancholy of their own, not those of common mortals. Doubtless the Greek felt the charm of the hour when twilight descended on his valley, but not the pensive suggestions of the Whence and Whither which it excites in you and me. "No young man," said Hazlitt, "ever thinks he shall die." He recognizes death, but it concerns him not. The Greek accepted it as a natural process; he yielded to nature; we adjure her, as Manfred adjured his spirits, and fain would compel her to our service and demand her to surrender the eternal

secret.

Nature, even in her most tranquil mood, is palpitant with motion, in view of which Humboldt was at times a poet. Motion is life, and therefore fellowship. Herein lies the spell of the sea, which has mastered Heine and Shelley and every poetic soul. Its perpetual change, eternal endurance-these image both life and immortality; its far-away vessels moving to unknown climes, its unbounded horizon suggesting infinity, buoy the imagination, and thence come human passion and thoughts "too deep for tears." We have conquered it, and it is the modern poet's comrade, as it was the ancient's fear and marvel. But what is the sea? Tennyson's "still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand," would be an ocean to a man reduced to insect size-a stretch of water, infused with salt, and roughened into wavelets by the air that moves across it. We have learned that the effect of the sea, of a prairie,

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"No, I suppose not," she rejoined. "I dare say you see a planet which suggests to you apogee, or perigee, or something wise. I see only the rising moon, and it seems to me particularly ominous to-night. I am afraid. Something unexpected - perhaps something terrible is going to happen."

You will note, by the way, that our débutante is scientifically accurate upon a matter in respect to which many a good writer has gone wrong. She sees the moon where it should be of an evening in its third quarter- to wit, rising in the east. Giving the author of "Felicia" credit for this unusual feat, I believe that reason never can greatly lessen the influence of nature upon our feelings, and this in spite of her stolid indifference, her want of compassion, her stern laws, her unfairness, unreason, and general unmorality. To the last, man will be awed by the ocean and saddened by the waning moon, and will find the sun-kissed waves sparkling with his joy, and the stars of even looking down upon his love. One may conceive, moreover, that before a vast and various landscape we are affected by the very presence of divinity revealed only in his works; that, face to face with such an expanse of nature, we recognize more of a pervading spirit than when more closely pent: as in a house of worship, with a host of others like ourselves, we have more of him incarnate in humanity; whence comes a strange elevation, and at times almost a yearning to be reabsorbed in the infinite being from which our individual life has sprung.

The aspect and sentiment of nature, more than other incentives to mental elevation, have supplied a motive to the artistic expression of the last half-century. In the domains of the painter and the poet, and on both sides of the Atlantic, the idealization of nature has been, as never before, supreme. Never has she been portrayed on canvas as by Turner and his successors; never has she received such homage in song as that of the English and American poets from the time of Wordsworth. Two significant advantages confirmed Wordsworth's influence: first, that of longevity, which, in spite of the ancient proverb, is the best gift of the gods to an originative leader; second,

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the fact that, with brief exceptions, he made verse his only form of expression. No wonder that he produced an "ampler body" of good poetry-and of prosaic verse as well-than Burns, or Keats, or Manzoni, or Heine." But in this country also the force of nature has been sovereign, since Bryant first gave voice to the spirit of the glorious forest and waters of a relatively primeval land. During an idyllic yet speculative period, the maxim that "the proper study of mankind is man" has for many reasons been almost in abeyance. At last it is again evident that we cannot live by bread alone, even at the hands of the great mother. There is a longing and a need for emotion excited by action and life, for a more impassioned and dramatic mode-that of a figure-school, so to speak, in both poesy and art. Not to "fresh woods and pastures new," but to human life with its throes and passions and activity, must the coming poet look for the inspirations that will establish his name and fame.

IN my censure of didacticism I used that word in the usually adopted sense. Its radical meaning is not to be dismissed so lightly. If there is a base didacticism false to beauty and essentially commonplace, there is a nobly philosophic strain which I may call the poetry of wisdom. There is an imagination of the intellect, and its utterance is of a very high order-often the prophecy of inspiration itself.

Were this not so, we should have to reverse time's judgment of intellectually poetic masterpieces from which have been derived the wisdom and the rubrics of many lands. Shall we rule out the lofty voice of the preacher, whose lesson that all save the fear of God is vanity has been reaffirmed by a cloud of witnesses, down to the chief of imaginative homilists in our own time? Whether prose or verse, I know nothing grander than "Ecclesiastes" in its impassioned survey of mortal pain and pleasure, its estimate of failure and success; none of more noble sadness; no poem working more indomitably for spiritual illumination. Shall we rule out the elegies of Theognis or the mystic speculations of Empedocles, celebrant of the golden age and declarer of the unapproachable God? And who would lay rude hands upon the poet who concerned himself with the universe, surpassing all other Latins in intellectual passion and dignity of theme? The rugged "De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius seems to me as much greater than the "Eneid" as fate and nature are greater than the world known in that day. Whether his science was false or true,- and meanwhile you know that the atomic theory is once more in vogue,- he essayed "no middle flight," but

soared upon the philosophy of Epicurus to proclaim the very nature of things; meditating which, as he declared, the terrors of the mind were dispelled, the walls of the world parted asunder, and he saw things "in operation throughout the whole void." What shall we do with Omar Khayyám, at least with that unique paraphrase of his "Rubáiyát" which has impressed the rarest spirits of our day, and has so inspired the wondrous pencil of Elihu Vedder, our American Blake? And what of "In Memoriam"? The flower of Tennyson's prime is distinctly also the representative Victorian poem. It transmits the most characteristic religious thought of our intellectual leaders at the date of its production. We have no modern work more profound in feeling, more chaste in beauty, and none so rich with the imaginative philosophy of the higher didacticism. Browning's precepts, ratiocination, morals, are usually the weightier matters of his law. Take from Emerson and Lowell their sage distinctions, their woof of shrewdest wisdom, and you find these so closely interwoven with their warp of beauty that the cloth of gold will be ruined. Like Pope and Tennyson, they have the gift of "saying things," and in such wise that they add to the precious currency of English discourse.

The mention of Pope reminds me that he is the traditional exemplar of the didactic heresy, so much so that the question is still mooted whether he was a poet at all. As to this, one can give only his own impression, and my adverse view has somewhat changed-possibly because we grow more sententious with advancing years. Considering the man with his time, I think Pope was a poet: one whose wit and reason exceeded his lyrical feeling, but still a poet of no mean degree. Assuredly he was a force in his century, and one not even then wholly spent. It seems to me that his didacticism was inherent in the stiff, vicious, Gallic drum-beat of his artificial style-so falsely called "classical," so opposed to the true and live method of the antique- rather than in his genius and quality. Looking at the man, Pope, that fiery, heroic little figure, that vital, electric spirit pitiably encaged,- defying and conquering his foes, loving, hating, questioning, worshiping,- I see the poet. I had hoped to say more of him while upon this subject of the didactic, but, fortunately for your patience, the limits of a lecture are inexorable. However, if you care to see how much more difference there is in the methods than in the poetic gifts of certain bards, amuse yourselves by translating Pope, Tennyson, Emerson, Browning, into one another's measures and styles, and you will find the result suggestive. Three, at least, of these poets have at times

a delicious humor and fancy, as in "The Rape of the Lock," "The Talking Oak," "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue," "The Pied Piper," etc. Humor, in the sense of fun, is doubtless another lyrical heresy. But humor is the overflow of genius,-the humor compounded of mirth and pathos, of smiles and tears, and in the poems cited, and in Thackeray's ballads, it speaks for the universality of the poet's range. While certain notes in excess are fatal to song, in due subordination they supply a needful relief, and act as a fillip to the zest of the listener.

THE highest wisdom-that of ethics—seems closely affiliated with poetic truth. A prosaic moral is injurious to virtue, by making it repulsive. The moment goodness becomes tedious and unideal in a work of art, it is not real goodness; the would-be artist, though a very saint, has mistaken his form of expression. On the other hand, extreme beauty and power in a poem or picture always carry a moral: they are inseparable from a certain ethical standard; while vice suggests a depravity. Affected conviction, affection of any kind, and even sincere conviction inartistically set forth, are vices in themselves- are antagonistic to truth. But the cleverest work, if openly vicious, has no lasting force. A meretricious play, after the first rush of the baser sort, is soon performed to empty boxes. Managers know this to be so, and what is the secret of it? Simply, that to cater to a sensual taste incessant novelty is required. Vice admits of no repose; its votary goes restlessly from one pleasure to another. Thus no form of vicious art bears much repetition: it satiates without satisfying; besides, any one who cares for art at all has some sort of a moral standard. He violates it himself, but does not care to see it violated in art as if upon principle.

Anobtrusive moral in poetic form is a fraud on its face, and outlawed of art. But that all great poetry is essentially ethical is plain from any consideration of Homer, Dante, and the best dramatists and lyrists, old and new. Even Omar, in proud recognition of the immutability of the higher powers, chants a song without fear if without hope. The pagan Lucretius, confronting sublimity, found no cause to fear either the gods or the death that waits for all things. A glimpse of the knowledge which is divine, an approach to the infinite which makes us confess that "an undevout astronomer is mad," inspire the "De Rerum Natura." The poet sat in the darkness before dawn. He would report no vision which he did not see. Like Fitzgerald's Omar he seems to confess, with the epicureanism that after all is but inverted stoicism, and with unfaltering truth:

Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate

I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,

And many a Knot unravell'd by the Road; And not the Master-knot of Human Fate.

Poetry, in short, as an ethical force, may be either iconoclastic or constructive, nor dare I say that the latter attribute is the greater, for the site must be cleared before a new edifice can be raised. Herein consists the moral integrity of Lucretius and Omar. They rebelled against the superstitions of their periods. Better a self-respecting confession of ignorance, a waiting for some voice from out the void, than a bowing down to stone images or reverence for a false prophet. Critics are still to be found who look upon a modern poet-in his lifetime almost an outlaw as a splendid lyrical genius gone far astray. Of course I refer to Shelley. The world is slowly learning that Shelley's of fice was ethical. As an iconoclast, he rebelled against tyranny and dogma. His mistakes were those of poetic youth and temperament, and he grew in love, justice, pity, according to his light. He groped in search of some basis for construction, but died in what was still his formative period. Yet we see sage and elderly moralists applying to Shelley the tests of their own mature years and modern enlightenment, and holding a sensitive and passionate youth to account as if he were an aged philosopher. Even Matthew Arnold, despite his fine recognition of that transcendent lyrist, did not quite avoid this attitude. Professor Shairp assumed it altogether. With respect to the poetry of nature, I can refer you to no more suggestive critic, for he was a Wordsworthian, and all his discourse leads up to Wordsworth as the greatest, because the most contemplative, of nineteenth-century poets. Otherwise he was an extreme type of the class which Arnold had in mind when he said, "We must be on our guard against the Wordsworthians, if we want to se

cure for Wordsworth his due rank as a poet."

His utter failure to see the force of a blind revolt like Shelley's, in the evolution of an ultimately high morality, was inexcusable. A more striking example of faulty criticism could hardly be given. Shelley is not to be measured by his conduct of life nor by his experimental theories, but rather, as Browning estimates him, with every allowance for his conditions and by his highest faculty and attainment.

BUT the most thoughtful and extended of rhythmical productions in the purely didactic method is of less worth, taken as poetry, than any lyrical trifle-an English song or Irish lilt, it may be that is spontaneous and has quality. The disguises of the commonplace are endless; we are always meeting the old foe with a

new face. A fashionable diction, tact, taste, the thought and manner of the season, set them off bravely; but they soon will be flown with the birds of last year's nests. Of such are not the works whose wisdom is imaginative, whether the result of intuition or reflection or of both combined. These "large utterances " of intellectual and moral truth show that nothing is impossible, no domain is forbidden, to the poet, that no thought or fact is incapable of ideal treatment. The bard may proudly forego the office of the lecturer, such as that exercised in this discourse, which is by intention didactic and plainly inferior to any fine example of the art to which its comment is devoted. Yet the new learning doubtless will inspire more of our expression in the near future, since never was man so apt in translation of nature's oracles, and so royally vouchsafed the freedom of her laboratory, as in this age of physical investigation. Accepting the omen, we make, I say, another claim for the absolute liberty of art. Like Gaspar Becerra, the artist must work out his vision in the fabric nearest at hand. His theme, his method, shall be his own: always with the passion for beauty, always with an instinct for right. No effort to change the natural bent of genius was ever quite successful, though such an effort often has spoiled a poet altogether.

This brave freedom alone can breed in a poet the catholicity which justifies Keats's phrase, and insures for his work the fit coherence of beauty and truth. The lover of beauty, in Emerson's "Each and All," marvels at the delicate shells upon the shore: The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;

I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

Disappointed, he forswears the pursuit of beauty, and declares:

- I covet truth; Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;

I leave it behind with the games of youth. But, even as he speaks, the ground-pine curls its pretty wreath beneath his feet, "running

over the club-moss burrs "; he scents the violet's breath, and therewithal

Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and deity;

Beauty through my senses stole;

I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

This recognition, at which the idealist arrives, of the intertransmutations of beauty and truth,

is a kind of natural piety, and renders the labor of the poet or other "artist of the beautiful" a proper form of worship. His heart tells him that this is so: it is lightest when he has worked at his craft with diligence and accomplishment; it is light with a happiness which the religious say one can know only by experience. The piety of his labor is not yet sufficiently comprehended; even the poet, having listened all his life to other tests of sanctification, often mistrusts his own conscience, looks upon himself as out of the fold, and is sure only that he must "gang his ain gait," however much he suffers for it in this world or some other.

Thus a dividing line has been drawn from time immemorial betwixt the conventional and the natural worshipers, betwixt the stately kingdom of Philistia and the wilding vales and copses of that Arcadia which some geographers have named Bohemia. The mistake of the Arcadian is that he virtually accepts a standard not of his own establishment; he is impressed by a traditional conception of his Maker, regards it as fixed, will have none of it, and sheers off defiantly. If rich and his own master, he becomes a pagan virtuoso. If one of the struggling children of art and toil, then,

Loving Beauty, and by chance
Too poor to make her all in all,
He spurns her half-way maintenance,
And lets things mingle as they fall.

This is the way in Arcadia, and it has its pains and charm- as I well know, having journeyed many seasons in that happy-go-lucky land of sun and shower, and still holding a key to one of its entrance-gates. Its citizenship is not to be shaken off, even though one becomes naturalized elsewhere.

Now the artist not only has a right, but it is his duty, to indulge an anthropomorphism of his own. In his conception the divine power must be the supreme poet, the matchless artist, not only the transcendency but the immanence of all that is adorable in thought, feeling, and appearance. Grant that the Creator is the founder of rites and institutes and dignities; yet for the idealist he conceived the sunrise and moonrise, the sounds that ravish, the outlines that enchant and sway. He sets the colors upon the easel, the harp and viol are his invention, he is the model and the clay, his voice is in the story and the song. The love and the beauty of woman, the comradeship of man, the joy of student-life, the mimic life of the drama as much as the tragedy and comedy of the living world, have their sources in his nature; nor only gravity and knowledge, but also irony and wit and mirth. Arcady is a garden of his devising. As far as the poet, the artist, is creative, he becomes a sharer of the divine imagination and power, and even of the divine responsibility.

Edmund Clarence Stedman.

SHELLEY'S WORK.

HE centenary of Shelley's birth will be duly observed with public ceremonies in England and Italy - the land that bore him and drove him forth, and the land that sheltered him and now guards his grave, both equally his home in the eyes of the world; but in the private thoughts of many single lives the day of his birth will be silently remembered with tenderness, with gratitude, and with a renewal of faith in the things in which he believed. Personal devotion must naturally enter into these feelings, for such days are to commemorate a life, and they bring the man back with peculiar power. To win unknown friends, age after age, is a privilege of the poet; it is his reward—the greater because it can touch him no more-for the open trust in mankind with which he confides, to whosoever will, the secret things of his spirit. Yet, to make a poet's personality the main element in his memory, if he be really great, confines his fame too narrowly. Attractive as Shelley was,

his worth did not lie wholly in his charm. Interest in his life may become degraded into ignoble curiosity, and, at the best, love's gift is less weighty than reason's award.

Recognition of noble human traits is an important part of justice done to the dead; but it is not thus that Shelley would wish to be judged. Chaucer's question, "How shall the world be served ?" was the alpha and omega of his life. It inspired his youthful prose; as his faculties grew and the poet emerged from the thinker, it governed the most intense expression of his soul in manhood; it absorbed him, as he himself said, with that passion for reforming the world which was elemental in his genius. It is true that the artistic and the practical instincts in him worked together imperfectly, and that at times of despair he fell back upon himself, pure poet, pouring his heart out in lyrical effusion, with cadences of pain that fill our eyes with tears-the "idle tears," too often, of self-pity. But he took heart again, and returned, though always more wearied, to the large interests of

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