ture began to wear away on Paradise Lost, and even the great 'hexameter sounded to me tinkling when I had recited aloud, in my solitary walks on the sea-shore, the haughty appeal of 'Satan and the repentance of Eve.' In such walks for the most part, and under such influences, Gebir was composed; and it was probably no mere illusion of his fancy which led him to say repeatedly in after life that he was never happier than when thus writing it, and not exchanging twelve sentences with men. Copper works had not as yet quite filled the woods around Swansea among which he lived, and he might take his daily walks over sandy sea-coast deserts covered only with low roses and nameless flowers and plants, and with nothing save occasional prints of the Welsh peasantry's naked feet to give token of the neighbourhood of human creatures. Hardly human indeed, in their savagery in those days, were the lower orders of the Welsh. The English visitor might have some excuse for regarding them as only something a very little higher than the animals, and as much mere adjuncts to his landscape as its stranded boats or masses of weed.

The accident which led him to the subject I have often heard him relate. He was on friendly terms with some of the family of Lord Aylmer, who were staying in his neighbourhood, and one of the young ladies lent him a book, by a now forgotten writer of romances, from the Swansea circulating library. Clara Reeve was the author; but Landor, confusing in his recollection a bad romance writer with a worse of the same sex, thought it was that sister of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble who lived in the small Welsh town, and wrote under the name of Anne of Swansea. Few of my readers will have heard her name, and I may warn them all against her books, which are mere nonsensical imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe; but Clara Reeve had really some merit, though not discoverable in the particular book lent to Landor. He found it to be a history of romance, having no kind of interest for him until he came at its close to the description of an Arabian tale. This arrested his fancy, and yielded him the germ of Gebir. More than sixty years later he wrote to me from Bath (30th November 1857), that he had just discovered and sent to a lady living near him, Mrs. Paynter, also

of that Aylmer family, a little piece called 'St. Clair' written all those years ago for her who thus lent him the book. She was the same Rose Aylmer on whose death, a few years later, he composed the most enchanting of his minor poems.

One of his critics afterwards charged him with having stolen his Gebir story, and merely imitated Milton in telling it. On both points light will very shortly be thrown. He was now to quit the levels, and rise to the heights, of English verse; and to this extent he had profited by his recent study of Milton. But that was the whole of his present debt to the incomparable master; and whether, to anybody, his Muse owed anything whatever for the story in which she was to find herself involved, the reader of what follows will probably think more than doubtful.

BOOK SECOND.

1797-1805. ÆT. 22-30.

FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.

1. Gebir and some Opinions of it. II. Doctor Parr and the Critics. III. Mr. Serjeant Rough. IV. Writing for the Newspapers. v. Åt Paris in 1802. VI. Again writing Poetry. VII. Succession to the Family Estates.

I. GEBIR AND SOME OPINIONS OF IT.

Ir is easier to laugh at a thing than to take the trouble to comprehend it; and when the Quarterly Review said, a good many years ago, that Gebir was a poem it did any man credit to have understood, there was more in the saying than its author meant. It was not a credit he was himself entitled to.

The intention of the poem is, by means of the story of Gebir and his brother Tamar, to rebuke the ambition of conquest, however excusable its origin, and to reward the contests of peace, however at first unsuccessful. Gebir is an Iberian prince, sovereign of Bætic Spain,* whose conquest of Egypt, undertaken to avenge the wrongs and assert the claims of his ancestors, is suspended through his love for its young queen Charoba, by the treachery of whose nurse he is nevertheless slain amid the rejoicings of his marriage-feast. Tamar is a shepherd youth, the keeper of his brother's herds and flocks, by whom nothing is so eagerly desired as to conquer to his love one of the sea-nymphs, whom at first he vainly contends with, but who, made subject to mortal control by the superior power of his brother, yields to the passion already inspired in her, and carries Tamar to dwell with her for ever beyond the reach of human ambitions.

* From Gebir we are to suppose Gibraltar to be derived, after the fashion of the Teucro Latin names in Virgil.

Fanciful and wild in its progress as the Arabian tale that suggested it, there is yet thus much purpose in the outline of Gebir; but its merit lies apart from either intention or construction, style and treatment constituting the charm of it. It presents many splendours of imagination, in a setting of unusual strength and range of mind. The characteristics preeminent in it are the intellect and reflection which pervade and interfuse its passion; the concentration yet richness of its descriptive power; the vividness with which everything in it is presented to sight as well as thought; the wealth of its imagery; and its marvels of language. Everywhere as real to the eye as to the mind are its. painted pictures, its sculptured forms, and the profusion of its varied but always thoughtful emotion. These qualities have not even yet had general acknowledgment; but the effect produced. by the poem upon a few extraordinary men was such as to more than satisfy any writer's ambition. The mark it made in Landor's life will constantly recur; and of the manner in which his genius affected his contemporaries, not by influencing the many, but by exercising mastery over the few who ultimately rule the many, no completer illustration could be given.

It is not my intention now to give any critical account of it; but the lines for which alone I have space will exhibit the beauties indicated, and show sufficiently its transcendent merit. Observe here one of those touches which are frequent in it, and proof of high imagination: where a single epithet conveys to the mind the full impression which the sense would receive from detailed presentment of the objects sought to be depicted. The 'dark helm' covers the crowd of invading warriors.

'He blew his battle-horn, at which uprose

Whole nations; here, ten thousand of most might

He called aloud; and soon Charoba saw

His dark helm hover o'er the land of Nile.'

In the picture of the sea-nymph's dress are two lines—
'Her mantle showed the yellow samphire-pod,

Her girdle the dove-coloured wave serene'

with which I may connect a characteristic trait of the writer, who told me once that he had never hesitated more about a verse than in determining whether the mantle or the girdle was to be

dove-coloured; his doubts having arisen, after he had written the lines, on recollecting, from the great Lucretius, that the Roman ladies wore a vest of the same description-teriturque thalassina vestis Assidue, &c.

A prize to be contended for had been proposed between Tamar and the nymph. She has nothing of equal worth to one of his sheep to offer, but she tells him, in a passage which has become one of the priceless possessions of English poetry, and which it is impossible even to transcribe without something of the pleasure that must have attended its conception :

'But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue
Within, and they that lustre have imbibed

In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave:
Shake one, and it awakens; then apply

Its polisht lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,

And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.'

Nor unworthy of these are the lines wherein Gebir bids his followers supplicate the gods, and prayers are personified, of which Southey thought that no English poetry presented anything so Homeric. It would be difficult certainly to imagine a finer image.

'Swifter than light are they, and every face,

Though different, glows with beauty; at the throne
Of Mercy, when clouds shut it from mankind,
They fall bare-bosomed, and indignant Jove
Drops at the soothing sweetness of their voice
The thunder from his hand.'

The grandeur of nature in the Egyptian queen, 'soul dis'contented with capacity,' receives an illustration from her childhood

'Past are three summers since she first beheld

The ocean; all around the child await

Some exclamation of amazement here:
She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,

Is this the mighty Ocean? is this all?'

-which Shelley, Humphrey Davy, Walter Scott, and above all Charles Lamb, were enchanted by. The last of those lines had a strange fascination for Lamb, who wearied his friends by continually repeating it.