As none can ever guess,

Who walk not with the feet

Of joy in idleness

Mr. Bridges lives on the crest of a hill which rises about eight hundred feet above Oxford, and commands a sweep of land from Bletchley in the east to the Berkshire Downs in the west. This is a lovely country at all seasons. In summer tulips, floxes, pinks, roses and all kinds of painted insects, make its drowsy villages gaudier than Oxford City when full of festive maidens; hyacinths, primroses and foxgloves bloom in its ancient woods, resembling, so one fancies, dancing nymphs; the cuckoo-song is their orchestra, and Merlin's oaks their "tall pensioners be." In Winter it is magical. The westering sun sends down broad shafts of light through one or two rifts in the masses of grey cloud, marking with gold, in what seems an illimitable forest of mist-clad trees, long, winding tracts of canal and river, and touching with fire the sky-suspended towers and domes and pinnacles of Oxford. When Spring comes, high over the downs and the level plains, drive the Atlantic clouds like splendid ships with white sails crowding.

Wanton with long delay the gay Spring leaping cometh;

The blackthorn starreth now his bough on the eve of May:
All day in the sweet box-tree the bee for pleasure hummeth:
The cuckoo sends afloat his note on the air all day.

Now dewy nights again and rain in gentle showers

At root of tree and flower have quenched the winter's drouth;
On high the hot sun smiles, and banks of cloud uptower

In bulging heads that crown for miles the dazzling south. The subject of Mr. Bridges' best poetry is the country round his home. It deals also, however, as I have shown, with the Philosophy and Art with which he has beautified his life of retirement. His philosophy of life is given with fullest details in two epistles written in classical hexameters, one to a friend, and the other to a socialist. In some of his lyrics, also, he expresses his philosophic ideas. They resemble strongly certain early 17th century poems written by scholars in the universities and by soldiers grown tired of warfare. I refer especially to those of Sir Henry Wotton, the friend of Milton, who three centuries before Bridges wrote his "Ode to Eton College," was its headmaster.

There is another philosophy Bridges writes about-the Philosophy of Love as given in Socrates' speech in Plato's Symposium. This speech has caught in its net generation after generation of English poets. It reconciles them, one must suppose, to the wild excesses of Love, its arrogance, its flightiness, to believe golden hair and sparkling eyes and cheeks sprinkled with red and white, snares wherein goodness entraps those she will have attend her. However this be, Bridges has written with as much feeling about the theories set forth in it, as Sepenser and Shelley before him.

"All earthly beauty hath one cause and proof

To lead the pilgrim soul to beauty above.

is the theme of the sonnet-sequence he wrote as a young man -"The Growth of Love"-and the theme, too, of a dozen fine lyrics.

My eyes for beauty pine,

My soul for Goddës grace.
No other care or hope is mine
To heaven I turn my face.

One splendour thence is shed
From all the stars above

"Tis named when God's name is said,
'Tis Love, 'tis heavenly Love.

And every gentle heart

That burns with true desire

Is lit from eyes that mirror part

Of that celestial fire.

Next to the pleasures of "steeping the soul in nature's beauty" and to those of philosophic meditation, he esteems those which come from reading Shakespeare, Petrarch, the Renaissance poets, and classical tragedy.

Deep in wintertide

When winds without make moan

I love my own fireside

Not least when most alone.

Then oft I turn the page

In which our country's name,
Spoiling the Greek of fame,
Shall sound to every age:
Or some Terentian play
Renew, whose excellent
Adjusted folds betray
How once Menander went.

It is to intensify the pleasures of his winter reading that he writes such imitations of the works of his favorite authors as "Prometheus The Firegiver," "Demeter," "Achilles in Scyros," "Eros and Psyche," etc., etc. None of them are of first-rate importance. To resurrect the legend of Prometheus requires a passion equal to that which breathed from the nostrils of the first Prometheus, as Kratos and Bia nailed him panting to the Caucasian rock. Shelley had that, which accounts for the greatness of his "Prometheus Unbound." But in Bridges' life there is nothing resembling it. "Prometheus the Firegiver" is a vehicle through which he expresses his liking for a secluded life, and his belief in the genius of the spirit of man. Prometheus and Inachus confer in it like two Oxford dons.

Prometheus: For Nature's varied pleasance

Without man's life is but a desert wild,

Which most, where most she mocks him, needs his aid.

She knows her silence sweeter when it girds

His murmurous cities, her wide wasteful curves

Larger beside his economic line.

Or what can add a mystery to the dark

As doth his measured music when it moves

With rhythmic sweetness through the void of night.

The poem which has in it nothing but speeches of this kind may be pleasant, as "Prometheus The Firegiver" certainly is, but it is not of the first importance. The same is true of "Eros and Psyche," Apuleius' story done into English verse, and of "Achilles in Scyros," his best drama in the Greek manner. The first contains a series of delicately colored but lifeless pictures; the second is a fine pastoral, manifestly owing much to the work of Sidney and Spenser.

It is from the Nature, the Philosophy and the Art with which Bridges beautifies his quiet life that he makes his poems. The critic has an easy task in making this plain. It is not so easy, however, when he comes to tell how the poet's emotions touch this matter into life, and how his language and rhythms give it wings.

Notice, first, that Bridges is one of the poets whose guiding principle is, “Make beautiful things." The poet according to him selects only beautiful themes, and sets them forth in his poems only in the most beautiful words. There are ugly and

filthy things in Nature and real life, which he must avoid if he will make a true poem. In the process of selection he has sure guides; he has the practice of the poets of the past, and that innate consciousness of beauty, possessed by all men but more especially by the poets-that consciousness which is a proof of a mysterious kinship between men and the perfect pattern of beauty laid up in the heavens. Some English poets pay no attention to this theory. Some even take pleasure in going against it: Wordsworth and Donne, for example, sacrifice ruthlessly beauty of sound and propriety of image to the truths of circumstance and life. On the other hand to Spenser, Milton and Keats it is a creed; they strive in their work to accord with standards of taste set up in an age before their own, to hit out in their own times the tunes invented by Homer, Vergil and Chaucer. Mr. Bridges stands with the second group; and, so far as allegiance to the theory goes, is the most prominent in it: for, far more even than Milton and Keats, both deliberate students of the "technique" of the poetic art, he has studied the effects of different qualities of vowel sounds and of different rhythmical movements. He is the chief authority on Milton's metres. He has suggested a new system of spelling, and invented a new fount of print for English poets. Like his great predecessors of the 16th century he has tried the metres of classical prosody in his native language. And all his endeavours have been prompted by a desire to make poetry beautiful.

Mr. Bridges first lessens the volume of his poetic emotions by the nature of his retired life; and then lessens it still more by scrupulously taking away from it whatever does not please his fastidious sense of beauty. No wonder his poems are infinitely delicate! He is like a worker in fine metals, who in a very small circle and with the most precise tools, portrays a face or suggests a landscape. Like him he often hammers away so long at his lines and forms, that the result is characterless; that is the case, for instance, with the pictures of "Eros and Psyche" which are all beaten down to a dull sameness. All the more subtle and rare his success! It is the fineness of the sentiment, the carefully selected words, the consciously intricate rhythm and the double rhymes, which make "Whither, O splendid ship," a great lyric.

Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding,
Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West,
That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding,
Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest?
Ah! soon, when Winter has all our vales opprest,
When skies are cold and misty, and hail is hurling,
Wilt thou glide on the blue Pacific, or rest

In a summer haven asleep, thy white sails furling.

I there before thee, in the country that well thou knowest,
Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air;

I watch thee enter unerringly where thou goest,

And anchor queen of the strange shipping there,

Thy sails for awnings spread, thy masts bare;

Nor is aught from the foaming reef to the snow-capped, grandest Peak, that is over the feathery palms more fair

Than thou, so upright, so stately, and still thou standest.

And yet, O splendid ship, unhailed and nameless,

I know not if, aiming a fancy, I rightly divine

That thou hast a purpose joyful, a courage blameless,

Thy port assured in a happier land than mine.

But for all I have given thee, beauty enough is thine,
As thou, aslant with trim tackle and shrouding
From the proud nostril curve of a prow's line.

In the offing scatterest foam, thy white sails crowding.

W. D. TAYLOR.