POEMS BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER. [To those who watch the ebb and flow of the currents of critical opinion it is evident that since the death of Théophile Gautier, now more than six years ago, his writings have steadily risen in the appreciation of all English and American students of French poetry. During his life, and even for a time after his death, many were prejudiced against him by the evil report of his novel, "Mademoiselle de Maupin "an early indiscretion which arose up against him in later years, and effectually barred him from the chair in the French Academy, which was surely his by right of genius. This prejudice has ceased to operate, and Gautier is now receiving more of the study he deserves so abundantly. Gautier has a fourfold claim to posthumous survival. He was romancer, traveler, critic, and poet. In the first two capacities he has been again and again before the American public in adequate translations. His novel "Spirite" has appeared in Appletons' "Collection of Foreign Authors," and his travels in Russia and to Constantinople are both accessible to the American reader in accurate translations. As a critic, either of the acted drama or of art, plastic and pictorial, his work is so voluminous that it has not as yet, even in France, been wholly gathered into volumes from the newspapers in which he scattered it with the royal liberality of lavish genius. But as a poet his work was of necessity far less-indeed, the best of it, his poetic testament to posterity, is gathered into the one book by which he wished to be judged, "Émaux et Camées." It is fortunately possible to give good English renderings of some of the best and most characteristic of these poems, and in so far to reveal Gautier as a poet to those who can not read him in the original. In the admirable criticism which Mr. Henry James, Jr., in his "French Poets and Novelists," has given us of Gautier, he says of this volume of "Enamels and Cameos": "Every poem is a masterpiece; it has received the author's latest and fondest care; all, as the title indicates, is goldsmith's work. In Gautier's estimation, evidently these exquisite little pieces are the finest distillation of his talent; not one of them but ought to have outweighed a dozen academic blackballs. Gautier's best verse is neither sentimental, satirical, narrative, nor even lyrical. It is always pictorial and plastic-a matter of images, 'effects,' and color. Even when the motive is an idea-of course, a slender one-the image absorbs and swallows it, and the poem becomes a piece of rhythmic imitation. Nearly all his metrical work was clearly chiseled verse, carved in fine lines, with many a curious and recondite suggestion. A supreme master of style, and worshiping with an Athenian idolatry the severe beauty of form, he reveled in the richness of his unrivaled vocabulary-unrivaled except, it may be, by Victor Hugo's, which is not as deftly and delicately handled as was his younger friend and follower's. Obviously a poet of this sort is most difficult of translation, and a happy rendering of his work in another language is almost as much a matter of inspiration as the writing of the original poem. No one man, however gifted, could sit down to the translation into English of the whole of "Enamels and Cameos" with any hope, however slight, of success. But it happens-and this is but another instance of the growth of the more general appreciation referred to above-that various English poets reading Gautier have felt an impulse to bring over into English verse, as best they might, or this or that poem which at the moment struck a responsive chord in them. There are a dozen or more representative poems of Gautier's translated into English by as many different writers, with varying success, of course, but still giving a fairly adequate presentation of the French poet's work. Among the English poets who have made this attempt are Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Frederick Locker, Mr. A. C. Swinburne, and Sir Francis Hastings Doyle. Mr. Dobson, whose chaste style and clear-cut workmanship make him akin to Gautier, has given rather a paraphrase than a close translation of the final effort of Gautier's metrical skill-the beautiful poem on "" 'Art." Mr. Swinburne's lyric fervor echoes the graceful severity of Gautier's song with less aptness; he, too, has given us an imitation rather than an exact rendering. It is to be remembered, as giving an added interest to this lyric, that Mr. Swinburne contributed, to the volume of poetic requiems chanted by the French choir over the grave of Gautier, poems in Greek, Latin, French, and English-surely one of the most extraordinary tributes ever paid by one poet to the memory of another. We have made also one selection from Mr. Harry Curwen's collection of "French Love-Songs."] LOVE AT SEA. We are in Love's Land to-day; Our land-wind is the breath We are in Love's Land to-day. Our seamen are fledged loves, We are in Love's Land to-day. Where shall we land you, sweet? Or where the fire-flowers blow, We are in Love's Land to-day. Land me, she says, where love -A shore like that, my dear, No maiden land. A. C. SWINBURNE. THE SPECTER OF THE ROSE. "Soulève ta paupière close, Qu'effleure un songe virginal!" I. Those slumbering lids unclose, Where pure dreams hover so light! A specter am I—the Rose That you wore at the ball last night. You took me, watered so late My leaves yet glistened with dew; And amid the starry fête You bore me the evening through. II. O lady, for whom I died, You can not drive me away! My specter at your bedside Shall dance till the dawning of day. Yet fear not, nor make lament, Nor breathe sad psalms for my rest! For my soul is this tender scent, And I come from the bowers of the Blest. III, How many for deaths so divine Would have given their lives away! Was never such fate as mine For in death on your neck I lay! To my alabaster bier A poet came with a kiss: And he wrote, "A rose lies here, But kings might envy its bliss." FRANCIS DAVID MORICE. ARS, VICTRIX. Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle Vers, marbre, onyx, émail." Yes; where the ways oppose- More potent far the spell. O Poet! then forbear The loosely sandaled verse, The buskin-strait and terse. The limp pedestrian style. The yielding clay-consign To Parian pure and hard The beauty of thy lineModel thy Satyr's face In bronze of Syracuse; In the veined agate trace The profile of thy Muse. Painter, that still must mix But transient tints anew, Thou in the furnace fix The firm enamel's hue. Let the smooth tile receive Thy dove-drawn Erycine; Thy sirens blue as eve Coiled in a wash of wine. All passes. Art alone Even the gods must go, Only the lofty Rhyme, Paint, chisel then, or write, But that the work surpass, With the hard fashion fight With the resisting mass. AUSTIN DOBSON. THE HUT. Under the thick trees, about it swaying, Dove, rose, pearl, marble, into ruin dim Alike dissolve themselves, alike decay ; Pearls melt, flowers wither, marble shapes dislimn, And bright birds float away. Each element, once free, flies back to feed The unfathomable Life-dust, yearning dumb, Whence God's all shaping hands in silence knead Each form that is to come. By slow, slow change, to white and tender flesh The marble softens down its flawless grain; The rose in lips as sweet and red and fresh, Refigured, blooms again. The doves once more murmur and coo beneath The hearts of two young lovers when they meet; The pearls renew themselves, and flash as teeth Through smiles divinely sweet. Hence sympathetic emanations flow, And with soft tyranny the heart control; Touched by them, kindred spirits learn to know Their sisterhood of soul. Obedient to the hint some fragrance sends, Some color, or some ray with mystic power, Atom to atom never swerving tends, As the bee seeks her flower. Of moonlight visions round the temple shed, Of lives linked in the sea, a memory wakes, Of flower-talk flushing through the petals red Where the bright fountain breaks. Kisses, and wings that shivered to the kiss, On golden domes afar, come back to rain Sweet influence; faithful to remembered bliss, The old love stirs again. Forgotten presences shine forth, the past Where the laugh plays a glittering mouth within Under some low and gentle voice the dove Has found an echo of her tender moan; Resistance grows impossible, and love Springs up from the unknown. O thou whom burning, trembling, I adore! What shrine, what sea, what dome, what rose-tree bower, Saw us, as mingling marble, joined of yore, FRANCIS HASTINGS DOYLE. ard, for instance, is doubtless well acquainted with "international stage-rights," and hence his recent utterance on that topic before the International Lit AMERICAN gentlemen abroad sometimes give erary Congress in London was entitled to considera public utterance of their notions of our people and the Federal Government. There is no harm in this, of course, provided these gentlemen speak judiciously and with knowledge. Lecturers and afterdinner orators at home may misrepresent, without much danger of misleading; but abroad the foreigner is apt to assume that an American speaking of Americans is one having authority, and hence accepts his dicta as the law and the fact. It is desirable, therefore, that Americans who in foreign lands elect themselves to the position of American representatives should have some knowledge of the subjects upon which they undertake to enlighten their listeners. It is not at all surprising that a sojourner abroad should know nothing about our national politics-for, if there is a person anywhere that substitutes a mass of erroneous notions for exact knowledge, it is your cultivated American when discoursing of the nature and conditions of our Government-but it is a little exasperating that he can not consent to hold his tongue until he is authorized to speak. Mr. Bronson How tion. Mr. Howard is a writer of plays, some of which have been successful; and it is entirely probable that he has given the subject of stage-rights adequate attention. But Mr. Howard, when he talks about the peculiarities of the American Government, simply repeats the loose utterances he has heard in the clubs or read in the newspapers; and, when he enters the domain of international copyright, he with equal ease makes gossip do service for knowledge. of the National Government he speaks as follows: Our Government is not intended to be a government by intellectual leaders. We have no confidence in the adequate wisdom of what are called great men for the government of a great people. We have tried to substitute for this wisdom what we consider a much better thing-the average common sense of the entire population. The effort to give expression to this common sense in our national Legislature compels us to have small fractions of the population represented there by men who actually reside among the people whose opinions they must reflect. For this purpose the entire country is di vided into small "Congressional districts." Each of these districts must send one of its own residents to Washington. Many districts have no men to send who can be counted among leading thinkers; but they all have men who can, and who do, express their own and their neighbors' opinions on affairs that affect the local or general interests of the country. That is all we expect from them. On the aggregate of the commonplace opinions thus gathered, and not on the concerted wisdom of a few brilliant leaders, is based the political prosperity, and, as we think, the political safety of the United States. Now, it is quite true that the entire country is divided into Congressional districts, in which, how ever, there is nothing peculiar; and it is also true that each district must elect one of its own residents, which is different from the English custom. But the real peculiarity of the district system with us is that it selects leading men more effectually than European systems do, where in numerous cases the representa tive is simply the traditional Conservative, who is conservative because his family has been so before him; or the traditional Liberal who also is liberal because his family has been liberal. In social culture the members of the House of Commons are to Congress its great men-its Clays, Douglases, Bentons, Haynes, Hunters, not to speak of its Websters, or of those who now shine conspicuously in it, Conkling, Blaine, Edmunds, Stephens, Bayard, and others. No modern people are so fond of intellectualism as the American people, no representatives anywhere have been so generally drawn from the distinctly intellectual class as with us-ideas and acquirements always having in our politics more weight than property or social standing. How is it, then, that we hear so much about our better people withholding from politics? Because it is assumed that what is true of three or four leading cities is also true of the whole country. All that we have said, for instance, is not true of the city of New York, where politics are almost exclusively in the hands of inferior men ; and as the self-confident young men who lounge at clubs, who go abroad to air their patriotism in Pall Mall and on the Boulevart des Italiens, imagine their own set to be the whole world, and naturally delight in showing contempt for qualities exhibited elsewhere, there has come to be prevalent in these would-be high circles a notion that America is in the hands of ignoramuses superior to our Representatives, but there are abso--that popular suffrage must inevitably by the law of lutely in proportion much fewer men of genuine parts at Westminster than at Washington. The real intellectual work in the House of Commons is done by a small group of strong men. The great body have no opinions except the party war-cries; they are not intellectual; exhibit little breadth or knowledge; and, having but few ideas and no skill in uttering those they do have, are unable to take part in the debates. They, accord exactly with Mr. Howard's notion of the American representative-that is, they are men of sturdy common sense, and go to Parliament to reflect the sturdy common sense of their constitu ents. men. The American representative, on the other hand, is usually some young lawyer with the gift of speechmaking, one who has shown talent at the bar, and knows how to hold a popular assembly under a persuasive tongue. A very large proportion of our Congressmen are lawyers, all of whom first won their spurs in some local legal contest. It has often been deplored by critical observers that our rural communities, instead of selecting representatives of good solid standing, must fall victims to the showy eloquence or brilliant parts of lawyers or professional Intellectualism in some form or other-not always of the highest or soundest character, but nevertheless a form of intellectualism-is exactly the quality that captivates our rural and semi-rural communities. Certain men who are fluent of speech, abounding in ideas, ambitious and active-minded, constitute themselves leaders. They are the local speech-makers, the defenders and expounders of party theories and party principles; and it is commonly because they are supposed to be eloquent and wise that they finally reach Washington, where they have longed to display their powers. Some of these men are flighty and light-headed; but the selection in this way of men of parts has been the very thing that has given gravitation place in office incumbents no higher than the level of the voters. This is asserted again and again. Foreigners who come here and are introduced to our higher circles hear this uttered repeatedly as if it were the very corner-stone of democracy; and neither home critics nor foreign critics take the pains to carefully analyze the facts to see if the current indictment is true or not. Mr. Howard simply repeats this gospel of Fifth Avenue, but, like those from whom he quotes, has no knowledge nor perception of the facts as they are. In regard to international copyright, Mr. Howard quotes current notions as glibly and as ignorantly as in the domain of politics. We append a few sentences: American literary piracy-true patriotism does not prevent me from calling a spade a spade; I speak not to foreigners, but among my fellow citizens in the republic of letters; and I decline, furthermore, to treat our literary pirates as representative Americans by screening their crimes under a softer mies within its own lines. The Messrs. Harper Brothname-American literary piracy has developed eneers have suddenly discovered that the competition of irresponsible, petty speculators, small piratical privateers so to speak, is more expensive to them than the honest payment of royalties to foreign authors would be. Other great publishers have made the same discovery. The promise now is that there will be no one in Washington hereafter to present the old arguments against international copyright. Our reformed and suddenly upright publishers will now prove to the practical American law-maker, who still knows and cares nothing about the matter, that the national profit is on the other side. The italics are our own. Mr. Howard might easily have learned, had he so wished, that American publishers for years past have been accustomed to pay royalties to foreign authors, that every British author whose writings possess any certain mercantile |