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; But I forgot, when at thy side, That thou couldst mortal be; And I on thee should look my last, And still upon that face I look, But when I speak-thou dost not say, If thou wouldst stay, e'en as thou art, I still might press thy silent heart, 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, 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, Diocese 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. 3 Memoir (Remains), pp. 28-9. 2 On the Death of Abel. Remains, pp. 23-4. 5 Medwin's Conversations of Lord Byron, 1821-2. New edition, 1824, pp. 133-5. 6 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, No perishable denizen of earth; Youth blooms immortal in his beardless face, A God in strength, with more than godlike grace; All, all divine-no struggling muscle glows, 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, for example, 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, besides a careful, but little read, translation from the Sanscrit, two secular and three religious plays; and then, in place of the poet, a philosophic historian. Of the plays, Fazio is a piece for the stage; and accomplished actors have acknowledged its merits as such. The sacred pieces, though 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 the boyish epic. Half a century ago the reading public admired the awe, the pity, of Titus meditating, at the head of his army, over doomed Jerusalem : 'How boldly doth it front us! how majestically! Like a luxurious vineyard, the hill-side Is hung with marble fabrics, line o'er line; And, as our clouds of battle dust and smoke By Hercules! the sight might almost win The offended majesty of Rome to mercy.' 3 It was moved by the prayer-a demand-of defiant Hebrew maidens to Jehovah to repeat against insolent Rome His judgement upon Egypt and her furious King: The Lord from out His cloud, The Lord look'd down upon the proud; And the host drave heavily Down the deep bosom of the sea. With a quick and sudden swell Prone the liquid ramparts fell; The loud thundering billows roll'd. As the level waters spread, Down they sank, they sank like lead, Down without a cry or groan. And the morning sun that shone |