Clayton. "Now," he called out in a loud voice, "I want this couple ter have ther floor, 'n' everybody ter look on 'n' see what is dancin'. Start the fiddles, boys."

It was dancing. The young mountaineer was a slender, active fellow, not without grace, and Easter seemed scarcely to touch the floor. They began very slowly at first, till Easter, glancing aside at Clayton and seeing his face deepen with interest, and urged by the remonstrances of her father, the remarks of the onlookers, and the increasing abandon of the music, gave herself up to the dance. The young mountaineer was no mean partner. Forward and back they glided, their swift feet beating every note of the music; Easter receding before her partner, and now advancing toward him, now whirling away with a disdainful toss of head and arms, and now giving him her hand and whirling till her white skirts floated from the floor. At last, with head bent coquettishly toward her partner, she danced around him, and when it seemed that she would be caught by his outstretched hands she slipped from his clasp, and, with flaming cheeks, flashing eyes, and bridal wreath showering its pink and white petals about her, flew to Clayton's side.

"Mebbe ye don't like that," cried Hicks, turning to Raines, who had been gravely watching the scene.

Raines said nothing in reply, but only looked the drunken man in the face.

"You, too," he continued, indicating Clayton with an angry shake of his head, "air a-tryin' ter spile everybody's fun. Both of ye air too high-heeled fer us folks. Ye hev got mighty good now thet ye air a preacher," he added, with a drunken sneer, irritated beyond endurance by Raines's silence and his steady look. "I want ye ter know. Bill Hicks air a-runnin' things here, 'n' I don't want no interferin'. I'll drink right here in front o' ye,”— holding a bottle defiantly above his head,-"'n' I mean ter dance, too. I warn ye now," he added, staggering toward the door, "I don't want no interferin'."

During this scene Easter had buried her face in her hands. Her mother stood near her husband, helplessly trying to get him away, and fearing to arouse him more. Raines was the most composed man in the room, and a few moments later, when dancing was resumed, Clayton heard his voice at his ear:

of Hicks toward Clayton during the night, and he had felt vaguely Clayton's distress of mind. A moment later, unseen by the rest, the two mounted the stairway to the little room where Easter's girlhood had been passed. To Clayton the peace of the primitive little chamber was an infinite relief. A dim light showed a rude cot in one corner and a pine table close by whereon lay a few books and a pen and an inkbottle. Above, the roof rose to a sharp angle, and the low, unplastered walls were covered with pictures cut from the books he had given her. A single window opened into the night over the valley and to the mountains beyond. Two small cane-bottom chairs were near this, and in these they sat down. In the east dark clouds were moving swiftly across the face of the moon, checking its light and giving the dim valley startling depth and blackness. Raindrops struck the roof at intervals, a shower of appleblossoms rustled against the window and drifted on, and below the muffled sound of music and shuffling feet was now and then pierced by the shrill calls of the prompter. There was something ominous in the persistent tread of feet and the steady flight of the gloomy clouds, and, quivering with vague fears, Easter sank down from her chair to Clayton's feet, and burst into tears, as he put his arms tenderly about her. "Has he ever treated you badly?" asked Clayton.

No, no," she answered; "it's the whisky." It was not alone of her father's behavior that she had been thinking. Memories were busy within her, and a thousand threads of feeling were tightening her love of home, the only home she had ever known. Now she was leaving it for a strange world of which she knew nothing, and the thought pierced her like a physical pain. "Are we ever coming back again?" she asked with sudden fear.

"Yes, dear," answered Clayton, divining her thoughts; "whenever you wish."

After that she grew calmer, and remained quiet so long that she seemed to have fallen asleep like a tired child relieved of its fears. Leaning forward, he looked into the darkness. It was after midnight, surely. The clouds had become lighter, more luminous, and gradually the moon broke through them, lifting the pall from the valley, playing about the edge of the forest, and quivering at last on the window. As he bent back to look at the sleeping girl, the moonlight fell softly upon her face, revealing its purity of color, and touching the loosened folds of her hair, and shining through a teardrop which had escaped from her closed lashes. How lovely the face was! How pure! How childlike with all its hidden strength! How absolute her confidence in him! How great her love! It was of her love that he thought, not

P

OETIC expression is that of light from a star, our straightest message from the inaccessible human soul. Critics may apply their spectrum analysis to the beam, but without such a process our sympathetic instinct tells us how fine, how rude, how rare or common, are the primal constituents from which its vibrations are derived. The heat-rays, the light, the actinic― these may be combined in ever various proportions, but to make a vivid expression they must in some proportion come together. Behind the action at their startingplace glows and pulsates a spirit of mysterious and immortal force, the "vital spark," to comprehend which were to lay hold upon divinity itself. As to the poet's share of this, Wordsworth, that inspired schoolmaster with the gift to create a soul under the ribs of pedantry, conceived his impressive title-"the faculty divine." Before approaching more closely to this radiant source, we have to touch upon one remaining element which seems most of all to excite its activity, and to which, in truth, a whole discourse might be devoted as equitably as to truth, or beauty, or imagination.

I HAVE laid stress, heretofore, upon the passion which so vivifies all true poetry that certain thinkers believe the art has no other office than to give emotion vent. And I have just said that, while poetry which is not imaginative cannot be great, the utterance which lacks passion is seldom imaginative. It may tranquilize, but it seldom exalts and thrills. Therefore, what is this quality which we recognize as passion in imaginative literature? What does Milton signify, in his masterly tractate on education, by the element of poetry which, as we have seen, he mentions last as if to emphasize it? Poetry, he says, is simple,—and so is all art at its best; it is sensuous,—and thus related to our mortal perceptions; lastly, it is passionate, and this, I think, it must be to be genuine.

In popular usage the word "passion" is almost a synonym for love, and we hear of "poets of passion," votaries of Eros or Anteros, as the case may be. Love has a fair claim to its title of the master passion, despite the arguments made in behalf of friendship and ambition respectively, and whether supremacy

over human conduct, or its service to the artistic imagination, be the less. Almost every narrative-poem, novel, or drama, whatsoever other threads its coil may carry, seems to have love for a central strand. Love has the heart of youth in it,

-and the heart Giveth grace unto every art.

Love, we know, has brought about historic wars and treaties, has founded dynasties, made and unmade chiefs and cabinets, inspired men to great deeds or lured them to evil: in our own day has led more than one of its subjects to imperil the liberty of a nation, if not to deem, with Dryden's royal pair, "the world well lost." A strenuous passion indeed, and one the force of which pervades imaginative literature.

But if Milton had used the word "impassioned," his meaning would be plainer to the vulgar apprehension. Poetic passion is intensity of emotion. Absolute sincerity banishes artifice, insures earnest and natural expression; then beauty comes without effort, and the imaginative note is heard. We have the increased stress of breath, the tone, and volume, that sway the listener. You cannot fire his imagination, you cannot rouse your own, in quite cold blood. Profound emotion seems, also, to find the aptest word, the strongest utterance,

not the most voluble or spasmodic,-— and to be content with it. Wordsworth speaks of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," while Mill says that "the poetry of a poet is Feeling itself, using thought only as a means of expression." The truth is that passion uses the imagination to supply conceptions for its language. On the other hand, the poet, imagining situations and experiences, becomes excited through dwelling on them. But whether passion or imagination be first aroused, they speed together like the wind-sired horses of Achilles.

The mere artisan in verse, however adroit, will do well to keep within his liberties. Sometimes you find one affecting the impassioned tone. It is a dangerous test. His wings usually melt in the heat of the flame he would approach. Passion has a finer art than that of the esthete with whom beauty is the sole end. Sappho illustrated this, even among the Greeks, with

whom art and passion were one. Keats felt that "the excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relations with beauty and truth." Passion rises above the sensuous, certainly above the merely sensual, or it has no staying power. I heard a wit say of a certain painting that it was "repulsive equally to the artist, the moralist, and the voluptuary." Even in love there must be something ideal, or it is soon outlawed of art. A few of Swinburne's early lyrics, usually classed as erotic, with all their rhythmic beauty, are not impassioned. His true genius, his sacred rage, break forth in measures burning with devotion to art, to knowledge, or to liberty. There is more real passion in one of the resonant "Songs before Sunrise" than in all the studiously erotic verse of the period, his own included.

The idea that poetry is uttered emotion, though now somewhat in abeyance, is on the

whole modern. It was distinctive with the romantic school, until the successors of Scott and

Byron allied a new and refined tenderness to beauty. The first rush had been that of splendid barbarians. It is so true that strong natures recognize the force of passion, that even Wordsworth, conscious of great moods, was led to confess that "poetry is the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings," and saved himself by adding that it takes "its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." Poets do retain the impressions of rare moments, and express them at their own time. But "the passion of Wordsworth," under which title I have read an ingenious plea for it by Dr. Coan, was at its best very serene, and not of a kind to hasten dangerously his heart-beats. Like Goethe, he regarded human nature from without; furthermore, he studied by choice a single class. of people, whose sensibilities were not so acute, say what you will, as those of persons wonted to varied and dramatic experiences. The highest passion of his song was inspired by inanimate nature; it was a tide of exultation and worship, the yearning of a strong spirit to be at one with the elements. Add to this his occasional notes of feeling: the pathos of love in his thought of Lucy

But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

the pathos of broken comradeship in the quat

rain

Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits, Or waves that own no curbing hand, How fast has brother followed brother From sunshine to the sunless land! include also his elevated religious and patriotic moods, and we have Wordsworth's none too frequent episodes of intense expression.

All passion obtains relief by rhythmic utterance in music or speech; it is soothed like Saul in his frenzy by the minstrel harp of David. But the emotion which most usually gives life to poetry is not that of fits of passion, but, as in the verses just quoted, of the universal moods embraced in the word "feeling." Out of natural feeling, one touch of which "makes the whole world kin," come the lyrics and popular verse of all nations; it is the fountain of spontaneous song. Take the poetry of this class from Southern literatures, such as the Italian and Spanish, and you leave only their masterpieces. At first thought, it seems more passionate than our own, and certainly it is more sonorous. But AngloSaxon words are deep and strong, although there is a good deal of insularity in the song from "The Princess":

O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest cach, That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,

And dark and true and tender is the North.

If this be so, they should wed indissolubly, for each must be the other's complement. Scottish verse is full of sentiment, often with the added force of pathos. For pure feeling we all carry

in

our hearts" Auld Lang Syne," "The Land o' the Leal," Motherwell's "Jeanie Morrison" and "My heid is like to rend, Willie." Robert Burns is first and always the poet of natural emotion, and his fame is a steadfast lesson to minstrels that if they wish their fellow-men to feel for and with them, they must themselves have feeling. Only from the depths of a great soul could come the stanzas of "Highland Mary" and "To Mary in Heaven." He touches chords for high and low alike in the unsurpas

sable"Farewell":

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met or never parted,

We had ne'er been broken-hearted!

His lyrics of joy, ambition, patriotism, are all virile with the feeling of a brave and strong nature.

English emotional verse is more self-conscious, and often flooded with sentimentalism. Yet Byron's fame rests upon his intensity, whether that of magnificent apostrophes, or of his personal poems, among which none is more genuine than his last lyric, written upon completing his thirty-sixth year. In the Victorian period the regard for art has covered sentiment with an aristocratic reserve, but Hood was a poet of emotion in his beautiful songs and ballads no less than in "The Bridge of Sighs."

From the middle register of emotion, poetry rises to the supreme, such as that of Shelley's "Lines to an Indian Air," or the more

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of its mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Of recent English lyrical poets Mrs. Browning is one of the most impassioned. Her lips were touched with fire; her songs were magnetic with sympathy, ardor, consecration. But our women poets of the century usually have written from the heart; none more so than Emma Lazarus, whose early verse had been that of an artpupil, and who died young-but not before she seized the harp of Judah and made it give out strains that all too briefly renewed the ancient fervor and inspiration.

Every note of emotion has its varying organstops: religious feeling, for instance, whether perfectly allied with music in cloistral hymns, or expressed objectively in studies like Tennyson's "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," and Elizabeth Lloyd's "Milton in his Blindness," or rising to the eloquent height of Coleridge's "Chamouni Hymn." So it is with martial songs and national hymns, from Motherwell's "Cavalier's Song," and Campbell's "Ye Mariners of England," to the Marseillaise hymn, to "My Maryland" and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." It is the passion of Lowell's "Memorial Odes" that so lifts their rhythm and argument. With Poe, beauty was a passion, but always hovering with strange light above some haunted tomb. Emerson exhibits the intensity of joy as he listens to nature's "perfect rune." On the one side we have Poe avowing that the "tone" of the highest manifestations of beauty is one of sadness. "Beauty of whatever kind," he said, "in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears." This is the key-note of our romanticism, of which there has been no more sensitive exemplar than Poe-Grecian as he was at times in his sense of form. But far more Grecian, in temper and philosophy, was Emerson, who found the poet's royal trait to be his cheerfulness, without which " no man can be a poet, for beauty is his aim. . . . Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds upon the universe." What diverse interpretations, each a lesson to those who would limit the uncharted range of feeling and art! Yet it is easy to comprehend what Poe meant, and to confess that mortal joy is less intense of expression than mortal grief. And it was Emerson himself who, in his one outburst of sorrow, gave us the most impassioned of American lyrics, the "Threnody" for his lost child—his "hyacynthine boy."

tural beauty, so uncommon in Emerson's work -must rank with memorable odes. But the poet's faith, thought, imagination, are all quickened by his sorrow, so that the “ Threnody' is one of the most consolatory as well as melodiously impulsive elegies in the language.

Taken for all in all, Whittier," our bard and prophet best-beloved," that purely American minstrel, so virginal and so impassioned, at once the man of peace and the poet militant, is the Sir Galahad of American song. He has read the hearts of his own people, and chanted their emotions, and powerfully affected their convictions. His lyrics of freedom and reform, in his own justified language, were "words wrung from the nation's heart, forged at white heat." Longfellow's national poems, with all their finish, cannot rival the natural art of Whittier's; they lack the glow, the earnestness, the intense characterization, of such pieces as "Randolph of Roanoke," "Ichabod," and "The Lost Occasion." The Quaker bard, besides, no less than Longfellow, is a poet of sympathy. Human feeling, derived from real life and environment, is the charm of "Snow-Bound," even more than its absolute transcript of nature. Years enough have passed since it was written for us to see that, within its range, it is not inferior to "The Deserted Village," "The Cotter's Saturday Night," and "Tam O'Shanter."

Mark Pattison justly declared that "poets of the first order" always have felt that "human action or passion" is the highest theme. These are the topics of Homer, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Hugo. Dante, while perceiving by the smiling of the stars, and by the increasing beauty and divineness of Beatrice, that she is translating him to the highest spheres, still clings to his love for the woman. Its blood-red strand connects his Paradise with earth. The FaustMargaret legend is human to the radiant end. Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" idealizes the naïve materialism of the cathedral ages. The motive of that prismatic ballad is the deathless human passion of the sainted maiden. Her arms make warm the bar of Heaven on which she leans, still mortal in her immortality, waiting for the soul of her lover. Such is the poetic instinct that no creature can be finer in quality, however advanced in power, than man himself; that the emotions of his soul are of the uttermost account. Rossetti was ever an impassioned poet, in whom were blended Northern and Italian types. His series of sonnets, "The House of Life," quivers with feeling. Christina Rossetti, his sister, holds her eminence not by the variety and extent of her verse, but for its emotion deep inwrought. Tennyson's career indicates that the line of advance for a poet is that of greater intensity; nevertheless,