The ecstasy of pathos. dering, of Villon's "Ballade of Dead Ladies" "Where are the snows of yester-year?" Are any lyrics more captivating than our English dirges, the song dirges of the dramatists: "Come away, come away, Death," "Call for the robin redbreast and the wren," "Full fathom five thy father lies," and the like? Collins' "Dirge for Fidele," a mere piece of studied art, acquires its beauty from a flawless treatment of the mastertheme. Add to such art the force of a profound emotion, and you have Wordsworth in his more impassioned lyrical strains: “She dwelt among the untrodden ways," "A slumber did my spirit steal;" and the stanzas on Ettrick's "poet dead." Landor's "Rose Aylmer" owes its spell to a consummate union of nature and art in recognition of the unavailability of all that is rarest and most lustrous :"Ah, what avails the sceptred race! Ah, what the form divine! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee." - Of memories and of sighs, yet not of pain, for The per such vigils have a rapture of their own. ished have at least the gift of immortal love, remembrance, tears; and at our festivals the unseen guests are most apparent. Thus the tuneful plaint of sorrow, the tears "wild with all regret," the touch that THE NOTE OF EVANESCENCE 185 consecrates, the preciousness of that which lives. but in memory and echo and dreams, move the purest spirit of poesy to sweep the perfect minstrel lute. To such a poet as Robert Bridges "My song be the note of evanescence is indeed the like an air!" note of charm, and in choosing the symbols of it for the imagery of his most ravishing song,1 he knows that thus, and thus most surely, it shall haunt us with its immortality: "I have loved flowers that fade, Within whose magic tents With sweet unmemoried scents A honeymoon delight— A joy of love at sight, That ages in an hour:- "I have loved airs that die Before their charm is writ Trembling to welcome it. Then die and are nowhere:- "Die, song, die like a breath 'T was thine love's tender sense To feast, now on thy bier Beauty shall shed a tear." 1 Poems by Robert Bridges. Oxford, 1884. TRUTH. IF all natural things make for beauty, statement is well founded that they are as beautiful as they can be under their conditions, then truth and beauty, in the But a last reduction, are equivalent terms, and beauty is the unveiled shining countenance of truth. given truth, to be beautiful, must be complete. Tennyson's line, "A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies," will bear inversion. Truth which is half a lie is intolerable. A certain kind of preachment, antipathetic to the spirit of poesy, has received the name of didacticism. Instinct tells us that it is The didactic heresy. a heresy in any form of art. Yet many persons, after being assured by Keats that the unity of beauty and truth is all we know or need to know, are perplexed to find sententious statements of undisputed facts so commonplace and odious. Note, meanwhile, that Keats' assertion illustrates itself by injuring the otherwise perfect poem which contains it. So obtrusive a moral lessens the effect of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." In other words, the し beauty of the poem would be truer without it. Now, why does a bit of didacticism take the life out of song, and didactic verse proclaim its maker a proser and not a poet? Because pedagogic formulas of truth do not convey its essence. They preach, as I have said elsewhere, the gospel of half-truths, uttered by those who have not the insight to perceive the soul of truth, the expression of which is always beauty. This soul is found in the relations of things to the universal, and its correct expression is beautiful and inspiring. Half-truths are odious. While the beautiful expresses all these relations, the didactic at the best is the expression of one or more of them,—often of arbitrary and temporal, not of essential and infinite, relations. We therefore detest didactic verse, because, though made by well-intentioned people, it is tediously incomplete and false. Poets will interpret nature truthfully, within their liberties; they do not assume to be on as close terms with her, or with her Creator, as some of the teachers and preachers. They are content to find the grass yet bent where she has passed, the bough still swaying which she brushed against. They feel that "What Nature for her poets hides 'Tis wiser to divine than clutch." The imaginative poets, who read without effort the truth of things, have been more faithful in even |