Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that 's gone, But half of our heavy task was done When the clock struck the hour for retiring; Slowly and sadly we laid him down, From the field of his fame fresh and gory; The whole had flashed out of a casual glance at a flinty paragraph in a superannuated number of the Edinburgh Annual Register. Byron, whose sympathetic eyes it first caught, through no self-advertising by the author, accounted it little inferior to the best the present age had brought forth 2.5 The third stanza in particular drew from him the exclamation, 'Perfect!' The unpremeditated art itself is excellent. Observe, for example, how the seventh labours in instinctive sympathy with the burden. In absoluteness of pictorial effect the poem has few equals in its kind, no superior. The precise correspondence of the details with the prose narrative, which has been urged in depreciation, in fact greatly enhances the merit. Wolfe's version is identical with its source, except that a soul has been added. In the lines To Mary the process is, after a manner, reversed. Wolfe found an air of melancholy beauty, Gramachree, deformed by alien, commonplace words. He gave it back its proper significance. In tone and character the song, while matching the Burial of Sir John Moore in loveliness, is, it will, I think, be recognized, so generally distinct as to indicate that, in Wolfe's poetical career, the phenomenon, the accident, is not his authorship of a couple of paragons of melody, but his omission to add a score of equal marvels : If I had thought thou couldst have died, I might not weep for thee; That thou couldst mortal be; And I on thee should look my last, And still upon that face I look, And think 'twill smile again; And still the thought I will not brook, And now I feel, as well I may, Sweet Mary! thou art dead. If thou wouldst stay, e'en as thou art, I still might press thy silent heart, And where thy smiles have been! But there I lay thee in thy grave,— I do not think, where'er thou art, And I, perhaps, may soothe this heart In thinking, too, of thee; Yet, there was round thee such a dawn As fancy never could have drawn, And never can restore ! 6 In its origin this was at once as spontaneous, and as compulsory, as the other. And yet the unconscious art with which, in the second half of the final stanza, the thought starts, and gleams! Wolfe told an acquaintance that it referred to no real being or incident. Simply he had, as with the Viva el Rey, sung the air over and over, till he burst into a flood of tears, and in that mood wrote. Both there, and in the genealogy of the Dirge, we have the man; a composite of elements, loftiness, tenderness, sympathy, instinct-the whole a poet. That he was to the end, when, after two years of wasting consumption, he whispered to the affectionate watcher of his death-bed with what almost seems pathetic humour: 'Close this eye, the other is closed already; and, now, farewell!' Remains of the late Rev. Charles Wolfe, A.B., Curate of Donoughmore, Dioceses of Armagh with a brief memoir of his life, by the Rev. John Russell, M.A., Archdeacon of Clogher. Seventh edition. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1838. 1 Jesus Raising Lazarus, p. 352. 3 Memoir (Remains), pp. 28-9. 2 On the Death of Abel, p. 355. Remains, pp. 23-4. 5 Medwin's Conversations of Byron, vol. ii, p. 154, second edition. • Remains, HENRY HART MILMAN 1791-1868 I REMEMBER to have heard from persons old when even I was young, that the sensation stirred by Milman's sacred dramas was comparable with that which attended the appearance of a new poem by Byron. He was hailed as a living proof of the compatibility of poetic genius with religion by the orthodox who were soon to ban him as a schismatic. The enthusiasm subsided sooner than the hostility. It, perhaps they, had a solid foundation in the fact of the great brain and brave heart of their object. He never wrote, whether verse, or history, without the promptings of deep thought and a strong dramatic instinct. From youth upwards he possessed and displayed taste, fancy, a fine ear, thirst for knowledge, and a resolute combativeness. He leapt into fame with his Newdigate prize for the Apollo Belvidere. Some of the lines are never likely to be forgotten; for instance: Heard ye the arrow hurtle in the sky? Heard ye the dragon monster's deathful cry? In settled majesty of fierce disdain, Proud of his might, yet scornful of the slain, No perishable denizen of earth ; Youth blooms immortal in his beardless face, Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows, In deathless glory lives the breathing stone. Beauteous as vision seen in dreamy sleep Too fair to worship, too divine to love.1 But the whole brief poem, excepting the conclusion with its sickly sentimentality, is almost faultless. The Judicium Regale, composed in anticipation of the visit of the Allied Sovereigns to England, followed. Its rhetoric approaches grandeur, notwithstanding that it also has its flaw in an ungenerous vindictiveness towards a fallen foe. Already he virtually had completed Samor, Lord of the Bright City, commenced when he was a lad at Eton. The epic abounds in vivid dramatic situations, like the sonorous narrative of King Argantyr's surrender to Samor. Its weakness is a juvenile inclination to rioting in horrors. An instance, by no means exceptional, is the sacrifice by Caswallon's savage ambition to the Gods of Valhalla of his only daughter. He had left her to grow up as a wild flower by Derwent's blue lake : Like a forgotten lute, play'd on alone The grotesque extravagances themselves, however, testify to power. The whole, in its prodigal expenditure of effects, lurid splashes of colour on acres of canvas, and audacious defiances of history, might well have been material for the growth of a mighty poet. From the same source issued, in fact, one secular and three religious plays, all of distinction; and then, in place of the poet, a philosophic historian. Fazio is a piece for the stage; and accomplished actors have acknowledged its merits as such. The others in dramatic form are essentially poems, and as such to be judged. They have undergone the proper refining from the noisiness, the violence, the absurdities of |