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. a strange fascination for Lamb, who tinually repeating it.

The last of those lines had wearied his friends by con

There are lines also in the description of the embassy that carries proposals of friendship from Charoba to Gebir which have in them a wonderful attractiveness.

'Then went the victims forward crown'd with flowers,
Crown'd were tame crocodiles, and boys white-robed
Guided their creaking crests across the stream.
In gilded barges went the female train, ...
Sweet airs of music ruled the rowing palms,
Now rose they glistening and aslant reclined,
Now they descended and with one consent
Plunging, seem'd swift each other to pursue,
And now to tremble wearied o'er the wave....
Meantime, with pomp august and solemn, borne
On four white camels tinkling plates of gold,
Heralds before and Ethiop slaves behind...
The four ambassadors of peace proceed.
Rich carpets bear they, corn and generous wine,
The Syrian olive's cheerful gift they bear,
With stubborn goats that eye the mountain-top
Askance, and riot with reluctant horn. ...
The king, who sat before his tent, descried
The dust rise redden'd from the setting sun.'

Landor's own statement in regard to the poem, in the preface to his collected edition, should not be omitted. This tells us that it was written in his twentieth year; that many parts were first composed in Latin, and he doubted in which language to complete it; that he had lost the manuscript, but found it afterwards in a box of letters; and that before printing it he reduced it to little more than half. In substance this was the account he always gave, though the circumstances varied slightly in his memory. Writing to me in 1857 of Aurora Leigh,* he exclaims: 'What 'loads I carted off from Gebir in order to give it proportion, yet 'nearly all would have liked it better with incorrectness;' and in a letter to Southey, forty years earlier, he had written: 'As

* 'I am reading a poem,' he says, 'full of thought and fascinating with fancy: Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. In many pages, and particularly 126 and 127, there is the wild imagination of Shakespeare. I have not yet read much farther. I had no idea that any one in this age was capable of so much poetry. I am half drunk with it. Never did I think I should have a good hearty draught of poetry again: the distemper had got into the vineyard that produced it. Here are indeed, even here, some flies upon the surface, as there always will be upon what is sweet and strong. I know not yet what the story is. Few possess the power of construction.'