Sometimes, also, he has a little passing piece of imagery such as this:

"Two sister-antelopes, By one fair dam, snow-white and swift as wind, Nursed among lilies near a brimming stream—'

A little picture, half painted, half suggested, of an indescribable witchery of effect. As a rule, however, Shelley cares far less for definite imagery than for effects of light and color; effects varying through all the scale, from scenes of vast dim tracts "robed in the lustrous gloom of leaden-colored even'-from wild waves lighted awfully

"By the last glare of day's red agony,

Which from a rent among the fiery clouds

Burns far along the tempest-wrinkled

deep"

down to the light-dissolving star-showers of soft-breaking seas, or the green and golden fire of glowworms gleaming at twilight from the bells of lilies.

But what chiefly separates Shelley's pictures from those of other poets, is his amazingly fine sense of tenderness of color. There is nothing equal to his work in this respect; nothing that glows like it, yet is so delicate. Some of his effects stand quite apart-alone in an unearthly beauty. Take the description of the mystic shell which Proteus gave to Asia:

See the pale azure fading into silver,
Lining it with a soft yet glowing light;
Looks it not like lulled music sleeping

there?"

The secret of this sort of coloring, so rich, yet so ethereal, belongs to Shelley only, among poet-painters.

We will take one more of Shelley's pictures; this time, a scene of sunrise. It will serve not only as an example of his style, but as an illustration of one of the points in which a poet's picture may differ from a painter's.

"The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains: through a
chasm

Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it. Now it wanes; it gleams again,
As the waves fade, and as the burning
threads

Of woven cloud unravel in pale air.

which it is beyond the power of a
painter to represent. A painter, strictly
speaking, cannot paint a sunrise; he
can paint a single, momentary aspect of
it, and no more. But a poet can depict
it wholly; he can follow the rise, the
progress, and the fulness of the imagery.
A painter, in this instance, could depict
the glittering planet, and the orange
sky, the purple mountains, the mist, the
dark lake, the reflected star; but he
could do no more. His sunrise has no
His mist
changes; it is fixed forever.
can never drift and part; his lake can
never shine and fade; his glittering star
can never wane, nor gleam again, nor
die at last among the snowy peaks that
redden with the morning.

This, then, is the distinction. A poet's picture can present a scene complete; a painter's can present a single aspect of it only. We will take another illustration.

Here are the last lines of Keats' Sonnet "On a Picture of Leander":

'Tis young Leander toiling to his death.. O horrid dream! See how his body dips Dead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile;

He's gone up-bubbles all his amorous breath!"'

It is clear that the picture on which these lines are written could have had no real existence; it is a picture of the mind-a poet's picture. The dipping body and the gleaming shoulders might, indeed, be painted; but not on the same Canvas as the vacant waters and the bubbling breath.

We will here note another point in which a poet's picture may exceed the. limit of a painter's. Painting has no power, as language has, of suggesting the effect of scents and sounds; it appeals to the eye only. But the impres

sion of a scene of nature on the mind is

often far less owing to the sense of sight than to the breath of some faint perfume in the air, or to the presence, rather felt than heard, of some soft murmuring sound. A painted picture cannot render these. It cannot render, in a scene of Autumn, "The moist rich smell of

'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud- the rotting leaves;" a line which seems

like snow

The roseate sunlight quivers."

Now if we consider this picture for a moment, we shall see that it is one

to breathe across the mind a sense of the dank days and dying flowers. It cannot represent, in such a picture as that of Peona watching Endymion's

A painter could present the imageries of this scene; but not those stilly forest sounds which make the spirit of it.

light of his own brilliance the Titans in the den, must be set beside the dragon Geryon wheeling in the gorge, or Farinata lifting his proud head out of his tomb of fire. To match the pictures of 'The Eve of St. Agnes" we must come forward to "Enone" and "The Palace of Art; and even here they are matched only in distinctness-not at all in charm. The surest mark of a born painter is the tendency to shun abstractions and to think in imageries; and of this tendency perhaps no poet ever really had so great a share as Keats. To a mind in which this tendency is strong, it is not enough to tell us, for example, that a night is "bitter chill"-chillness is an abstract notion; it must have form and substance; it must proceed to set before our eyes a series of vivid little frosty scenes:

Keats must, on the whole, we think, be placed at the head of poet-painters. He had, in unapproached degree, the two essential gifts of a great artist-the sense of beauty, and the sense of color. He is the greatest colorist in literature. His influence has been so great-the mere reflection of his style has so steep ed in color the work of later poets-that we are apt to forget that in this point he was emphatically the master of them Before him, there was nothing of that passionate delight in color, for its own sake-nothing even in the best of Chaucer or of Spenser-which can bear comparison for a moment with such a study, for example, as that of Lamia, scription against a piece, as nearly like it as possible, of the work of Keats. Here, first, is Scott:

all.

the witch-serpent:

"She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson-barred."

This is the style of "fine excess, the art of "loading every rift with ore." No poems in the language are so rich in colored imageries as "Lamia," "The Eve of St. Agnes,' and "Hyperion." Keats, like all great colorists, loved crimson in his soul. It would not have been possible to him, as it was to Chaucer and to Wordsworth, to glut his passion on a daisy, rather than on "the wealth of globed peonies." He loved the lustrous bubbling of red wine-the glowing of the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings-the blood-red scutcheon. blazoned in the panes. Imageries of crimson stand along his works like colored lamps in the treasury of a king.

Exuberance of color was the gift of Keats to poetry. But in graphic power, besides, he was so great that it is difficult to find his equal. To match the pictures of "Hyperion" we must turn Inferno; Hyperion glowing on his craggy ledge, regarding by the

"The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limped trembling through the
frozen grass;
And silent was the flock in woolly fold."
Scott was
a poet of great graphic
power. Let us try a piece of his de-

"The corbels were carved grotesque and grim."

And here is Keats:

"The carved angels, ever eager-eyed,

Stared, where upon their heads the cornice

rests,

With hair blown back and wings put crosswise on their breasts."

'Grotesque and grim" conveys a general impression, but no image; the reader is left to work out for himself the details of the piece of carving on the corbels. Keats sets the image itself before us, and we have only to regard it.

The work of Keats-the transfiguring influence of his example on the world of poetry-is a subject which could not be adequately treated in less than the limits of a volume. Here, we are attempting no more than just to glance at the most marked characteristics of his style. To do this briefly, coldly, as the case requires, is very difficult. For there are certain readers, among whom we rank ourselves, who, in comparison with the

We must turn away. But the enchanted palace of thought in which we have been lingering, is exhaustless in delights; and often, when the world is too much with us," it is good to enter

there, and to muse among the visionary galleries which the poet-painters have made glorious with the pictures of their dreams.-Temple Bar.

A FORGOTTEN FASHION.

our notions about "Britain" and "Empire" and "the public." If Cromwell was the first Jingo, the great Cominoner was assuredly the first Tory democrat. Some years earlier, Horace Walpole revived Gothic architecture, his friend Garrick rediscovered Shakespearian drama, and Gray and Collins began that romantic movement in literature which has not ended with Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne.

But, in fact, throughout the period as a whole the world was strongly under the influence of a movement which had very little to do with prosaic moderation. That movement or tendency was "sentimentalism."

THE eighteenth century is the butt of the nineteenth. From the high places of their culture most modern critics are in the habit of decrying the well-bred, the rational, the prosaic past. They never tire of pointing out to our flattered perceptions how void was the last century of anything like romance in thought, religion, politics, and art. They disparage it by a most unfair comparison with the age of "Paradise Lost" and Fifth Monarchy. For them the varying phases of Puritan revolution have attractions, but after 1688 they find nothing worthy their notice. In their opinion half-a-dozen names represent the eighteenth century, and those are names of prose. Butler is their typical religion- "The production," says Mr. Saintsist-typical because his moderate Epis- bury, "was one of the social triumphs copalianism is an affair of dry logic; of literature." It was an instance of the Pelhams, sleepy Whig borough-own- literary feeling escaping from the world ers, are their politicians; the age of of books into that of everyday existence, the Walpoles and the Pelhams" is the where it became so fashionable as to phrase of the history books; Pope, Dr. pass from an affectation into something Johnson, Sir Joshua, sum up the history very like a habit. Like pre-Raphaelitof English literature and painting. Of ism in our own time, it came clear of music they say nothing, and advisedly, the merely literary and artistic world, because the solitary foreigner who cared but, unlike modern æstheticism, it into compose in England was Handel, and fluenced society far more widely and he cannot be called prosaic. deeply. "Sensibility so charming' was at one time in every one's mouth. It was right to evince sensibility. It was the proper thing to look upon every feeling as one might upon a newly-pinned insect in a collector's case. But, unlike the insect, the feeling was to be marked, learned, and inwardly digested. The genuine sentimentalist lived simply to collect and feed upon impressions. and feelings. Society, especially the fair and irrational part thereof, was given over to this registering process for more than a century. Fielding's humor turned it to ridicule, Byronism gave it a death-blow. But its dying struggles were long and acute. The ultra-sentimental trick of style, known as "Laura Matilda," and much affected by the

In passing these criticisms your average modern is probably thinking of what Mark Pattison once called "the Age of Reason; that is, the period of Whig supremacy, lasting from the Revolution of 1688 down to the year 1760, when a Tory again ascended the throne. Of that age it certainly may be said that it did not revel in imagination. Yet, although leaders in thought, politics and the arts were, as Mr. Courthope points out, conservative in idea and classically correct in expression, the crowd was coming under a variety of new influences. For about the year 1730 Methodism saw the light at Oxford, a city of new ideas. During the fifties the elder Pitt invented, or at least accentuated,