Much labor had gone to the strengthening of that place. The earthworks were from fifteen to twenty feet in thickness, faced and surmounted by a high wooden stockade, cunningly loopholed. Flanking caponiers abutted at each angle and commanded each wall; two strong fences had been raised without the stockade at distances of fifteen and twenty-five feet respectively, encircling the whole, and the intervening spaces were sown thickly with calthrops, and mined with pitfalls, each harboring a murderously sharpened stake. The deep mud of the rice-swamps formed an outer and final line of defence. It was, Norris saw at a glance, a villainous place to attempt to rush.

He

He had three six-pounder guns with him, and these he posted on low hills on three sides of the stockade. also, during the night of his arrival, threw up a dozen small earth-works to protect the piquets, which he placed at the edge of the rice-swamp in such a manner as to cut off all means of retreat for those within the defences. Then, these preparations completed, he wrote to Saleh explaining that the latter was hopelessly surrounded and outnumbered, advising surrender, promising an amnesty, and winding up with a personal appeal in the name of old times in England and the friendship which had subsisted between them. He also begged Saleh, for old sake's sake, to agree to meet him and to talk things over, giving his word of honor that no unfair advantage should be taken of him if he should consent.

Saleh pondered over that note with tears in his eyes. The references to the old life in England and the memories which he and Norris shared in common, touched him nearly, but they awoke in him a passionate self-pity, blended with a deep self-hatred that only served to put the seal upon his resolve. The note which he returned

-surely the queerest document that ever found its way out of an insurgent stockade in Asia-was scrawled with ink made from lamp-black and a pen improvised from a reed. It ran as follows:

Dear Mr. Norris,-Thank you for your kind letter. I am sorry to give so much trouble, but I cannot accept your terms. I often remember the old times you write of, and I think my heart is broken. I will come and see you to-night. Good-bye, and you must say good-bye to everybody for me. It really has not all been my fault, though all this fighting is all my doing and nobody else's. You must tell Mrs. Le Mesurier and the others that I was not all bad, not really. I don't think sending me to England to be educated was a good plan. Good-bye again. Yours,

Muhammad Saleh.

"Poor little beggar," said Norris, as he read these lines, and there was something like a lump in his throat. "More sinned against than sinning, of course, but I wish I knew what he means. He declines to accept my terms, but says he will see me to-night. I wonder when and how he will come."

XXVII.

And this was the manner of Saleh's coming.

The Malayan night had shut down, and from a velvet heaven the stars blinked sleepily. The forest half a mile distant across the grazinggrounds sent out its dropping chorus of night-song, the hum of insects, the gurgling call of tree-frogs, the occasional strident cry of an argus pheasant, the hoot of an owl, and once in a while the grumpy trumpeting of an elephant or the startled bark of a deer. Coolness had come with the darkness, a coolness that wooed to slumber, and the very earth, rustling ever so faintly under the slow-moving breezes, seemed

to be stretching itself in its sleep. To keep awake amid such universal somnolence was a veritable outrage upon the intentions of nature.

His

So thought Ram Singh, the Sikh sentry at the entrance to Norris's camp, as half-dozing he leaned upon his rifle and listened to the soft splashing of the frogs in the neighboring swamp. They were very active of a sudden, those frogs, but he was too weary, too drowsy, too inert to take much note of them. Presently he caught himself up into painful wakefulness. rifle had nearly fallen from his hands, and, as in a vision, he had seemed to see a dim figure draw itself out of the rice-swamp just ahead of him and creep into the bushes on his right. Was it really something, or merely a figment of a dream? Stepping clumsily, after the manner of his kind, he tramped along his beat in the direction of the bushes. Something moved in the scrub, and "Who goes dar?" cried Ram Singh. "Friend!" came the prompt reply in an English voice, and as the sentry, reassured, lowered the muzzle of his rifle, something wet and warm leapt suddenly upon him, and a kris was plunged into his heart. Ram Singh fell to the ground in a limp heap. with a thud and a rattle of his accoutrements, and at once the peace of the night was broken by the ear-piercing Malayan yell, "Amok! Amok! Amok!"

A lithe yet thickset figure stooped above the fallen Sikh, withdrew the dagger which had done its work, and flitted like a bat into the sleeping camp, and again the stillness was broken rudely by that fierce outcry, "Amok! Amok! Amok!”

The camp, rudely awakened, was humming like a disturbed hive of bees. Meu reaching hurriedly for their weapons were struggling to their feet and tumbling from under the lean-to sheds beneath which they had

been lying,-bearded Sikhs, brawny Pathans, angry little Malays, and alert white men. That shadow, carrying death in its hand and still pealing its war-cry, flung out of the gloom and precipitated itself upon a knot of Sikhs who, crawling clumsily from below a palm-leaf shelter, were hopelessly entangled with one another. Swiftly the knife rose and fell, doing its work with rending wounds, and its bearer, rushing onward like a mad dog, paused not to examine his handiwork, but plunged headlong deeper and deeper into the camp.

As Norris leapt out of his hut, a pistol in his hand, a star-shell burst overhead, and the earth for a minute was illuminated wonderfully. Jack saw the âmok-runner, his head thrown back, his face, livid in the bluish glare, strained heavenward, his right arm, blood-stained to the elbow, rising and falling, the whole figure a picture of the delirium of savage wrath, of the intoxication of that excitement to which the Malays, beyond all other people, are subject. A pair of short fighting drawers clothed the lower limbs, a sleeveless linen jacket fitted the bust closely, there was a huddle of sûrong about the waist, and a head-kerchief was knotted round the head, shaggy black locks escaping from it and streaming behind as the man ran headlong. A little Malay, weaponless and an incarnation of panic, ran from his pursuit, squealing with terror. this Norris saw in a flash. Then three rifles spoke at once: the âmok-runner was suddenly arrested in mid-career; shuddered, as a steam-launch shudders through all its length when brought to a standstill by collision with a hidden rock; the kris fell from the nerveless hand; and the figure pitched forward on to its right shoulder. As it fell, the star-shell aloft was extinguished.

All

"Bring a light!" cried Norris, and his

voice was vibrating with emotion. The face of the amok-runner had been strange to him, but in his heart there was a haunting fear. Had not Saleh said that he would visit him that night?

A hurricane-lamp was speedily produced, and by its light Jack Norris gazed down upon the still form of the thing which had once been Saleh. Fixed upon the face was the expression which it had worn at the moment of death. The lips were drawn back over the gums, exposing the locked Blackwood's Magazine.

teeth, the facial muscles were taut and strained, the cheek-bones stood out prominently, but in the glazed eyes there was still a light of fierce joy. The gay garments in which the lad was clothed were drenched with swamp water and stained with the slime through which he had crawled.

"It's Saleh, poor little wretch," cried Jack, and there was a catch in his voice. "May God forgive us for our sorry deeds and for our glorious intentions!"

To which I say, "Amen!"

The makers of epigrams, of phrases, of pages of all more or less brief judgments-assuredly waste their time when they sum up any one of all mankind, and how do they squander it when their matter is a poet! They may hardly describe him, nor shall any student's care, or psychologist's formula, or man-of-letters' summary, or wit's sentence define him. Definitions, because they would not be inexact or incomprehensive, sweep too wide, and the poet is not held within them; and out of the describer's range and capture he escapes by as many doors as there are outlets from a forest. But a thousand failures have not yet discouraged the critic and the biographer, who continue to appraise, explain, and expound, little guessing how much ready-made platitude brought about their guesses at a man, or what false and flat thought lies behind their epigrams. It is not long since the general guess work assigned melancholy to a poet lately deceased. Real poets, it was said, are unhappy, and this was one exceptionally real. How unhappy must he, .then, certainly have been! And the

blessed Blake himself was incidentally cited as one of the company of depression and despair! It is, perhaps, a liking for symmetry that prompts these futile syllogisms; perhaps, also, it is the fear of human mystery. The biographer used to see "the finger of God" pat in the history of a man; he insists now that he shall at any rate see the finger of a law, or rather of a rule, a custom, a generality. Law I will not call it; there is no intelligible law that, for example, a true poet should be an unhappy man; but the observer thinks he has noticed a custom or habit to that effect, and Blake, who lived and died in bliss, is named at ignorant random, rather than that an example of the custom should be lost.

But it is not only such a platitude of observation, such a cheap generality, that is silenced in the presence of the poet whose name is at the head of these pages. For if ever Nature showed us a poet in whom our phrases, and the judgments they record, should be denied, defeated, and confused, Swinburne is he. We predicate of a poet a great sincerity, a great imagination, a great passion, a great intel

lect; these are the master qualities, and yet we are compelled to see here— if we would not wilfully be blind or blindfold-a poet, yes, a great poet, with a perfervid fancy rather than an imagination, a poet with puny passions, a poet with no more than the momentary and impulsive sincerity of an infirm soul, a poet with small intellect and thrice a poet.

And, assuredly, if the creative arts are duly humbled in the universal contemplation of Nature, if they are accused, if they are weighed, if they are found wanting; if they are excused by nothing but our intimate human sympathy with dear and interesting imperfection; if poetry stands outdone by the passion and experience of an inarticulate soul, and painting by the splen dor of the day, and building by the forest and the cloud, there is another art also that has to be humiliated, and this is the art and science of criticism, confounded by its contemplation of such a poet. Poor little art of examination and formula! The miracle of day and night and immortality are needed to rebuke the nobler arts; but our art, the critic's, mine to-day, is brought to book, and its heart is broken, and its sincerity disgraced, by the paradoxes of the truth. Not in the heavens nor in the sub-celestial landscape does this minor art find its refutation, but in the puzzle between a man and his gift; and in part the man is ignoble and leads us by distasteful paths, and compels us to a reluctant work of literary detection. Useful is the critical spirit, but it loses heart when (to take a very definite instance) it has to ask what literary sincerity what value for art and letters--lived in Swinburne, who hailed a certain old friend, in a dedication, as "poet and painter" when he was pleased with him, and declared him "poetaster and dauber" when something in that dead man's posthumous autobiography

offended his own self-love; when, I say, criticism finds itself called upon, amid its admiration, to do such scavenger work, it loses heart as well as the clue, and would gladly go out into the free air of greater arts, and, with them, take exterior Nature's nobler reprobation.

I have to cite this instance of a change of mind, or of terms and titles, in Swinburne's estimate of art and letters, because it is all-important to my argument. It is a change he makes in published print, and, therefore, no private matter. And I cite it, not as a sign of moral fault, with which I have no business, but as a sign of a most significant literary insensibility-insensibility, whether to the quality of a poetaster when he wrote "poet," or to that of a poet when he wrote "poetaster," is of no matter.

Rather than justify the things I have ventured to affirm as to Swinburne's little intellect, and paltry degree of sincerity, and rachitic passion, and tumid fancy judgment-confounding things to predicate of a great poet-I turn to the happier task of praise. A great writer of English was he, and would have been one of the recurring renewers of our often renewed and incomparable language, had his words not become habitual to himself, so that they quickly lost the light, the breeze, the breath; one whose fondness for beauty deserved the serious name of love; one whom beauty at times favored and filled so visibly, by such obvious visits and possessions, favors so manifest, apparitions so overwhelming, inspirations so complete, that inevitably we forget we are speaking fictions and allegories, and imagine her a visiting power exterior to her poet; a man, moreover, of a less, not more, than manly receptiveness and appreciation, so that he was entirely and easily possessed by admirations. Less than manly we must call his extraor

dinary recklessness of appreciation; it is, as it were, ideally feminine; it is possible, however, that no woman has yet been capable of so entire an emotional impulse and impetus; more than manly it might have been but for the lack of a responsible intellect in that impulse; had it possessed such an intellectual sanction, Swinburne's admiration of Victor Hugo, Mazzini, Dickens, Baudelaire, and Théophile Gautier might-so sung-have resembled an archangel's admiration of God.

We are inclined to complain of such an objection to Swinburne's poetry as was prevalent at his earlier appearance and may be found in criticisms of the time, before the later fashion of praise set in-the obvious objection that it was as indigent in thought as affluent in words; for, though a truth, it is an inadequate truth. It might be affirmed of many a verse-writer of not unusual talent and insignificance, whose affluence of words was inselective and merely abundant, and whose poverty of thought was something less than a national disaster. Swinburne's failure of intellect was, in the fullest and most serious sense, a national disaster, and his riches in words was a national wonder. For what words they are! True, it is in their inexplicable beauty that Swinburne's art finds its absolution from the obligations of meaning, according to the vulgar judgment; and we can hardly wonder.

I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another, and I use the words "music" and "musical" under protest, because the world has been so delighted to call verse that is pleasant to the ear "musical," that it has not supplied me with another and more specialized and appropriate word. Swinburne is a complete master of the rhythm and rhyme, the time and accent, the pause, the balance, the flow of vowel and clash of consonant, that make the

and the rest of the buoyant familiar lines. I confess there is something too obvious, insistent, emphatic, too much that is analogous to dance-music to give me more than a slight pleasure; but it is possible that I am prejudiced by a dislike of English anapæsts. (1 am aware that the classic terms are not really applicable to our English metres, into which quantity enters so little, but the reader will understand that I mean the metre of the lines just quoted.) I do not find these anapæsts in the Elizabethan or in the seventeenth century poets, or most rarely. They were dear to the eighteenth century, and, much more than the heroic couplet, are the distinctive metre of that age. They swaggeror, worse, they strut-in its lighter verse, from its first year to its last. Swinburne's anapæsts are far too delicate for swagger or strut; but for all their dance, all their spring, all their flight, all their flutter, we are compelled to perceive that, as it were, they perform. I love to see English poetry move to many measures, to many numbers, but always with the simple iambic and the simple trochaic foot. Those two are enough for the infinite variety, the epic, the drama, the lyric, of our poetry. It is, accordingly, in these old traditional and proved