61 Balder (Song sc. xxviii.), vol. ii. Poetical Works of Sydney Dobell. 62 A Nuptial Eve (Keith of Ravelston). Ibid.

63 Anna Letitia Aikin. Works. Ed. Lucy Aikin, 1825.

64 Jesus, and A Long Railway Journey. Rev. Henry Stebbing, D.D. 1851.

65 Fo'c's'le Yarns. Rev. Thomas Edward Brown.

66 London Lyrics. Frederick Locker-Lampson.

67 Echo, st. 1, Christina Rossetti. Goblin Market and Other Poems: 68 Song. Ibid. 69 Up-hill. Ibid.

70 Skipper Ireson's Ride. John Greenleaf Whittier, st. 8...

71 To a Waterfowl, stanzas 1-6. William Cullen Bryant.

72 Plaint. Ebenezer Elliott. More Verse and Prose by the Corn-law Rhymer.

73 Lays of Ancient Rome (Battle of Lake Regillus). Thomas Babington Macaulay.

74 Night and Death. Joseph Blanco White. Life, by himself. 75 The Red Fisherman.

76 A Song.

William Mackworth Praed.

Hartley Coleridge. Poems.

77 Shadows. Poems. Richard Monckton-Milnes (Lord Houghton). 78 Poems. Jean Ingelow.

79 William Makepeace Thackeray. Poems.

So The Phrontisterion. Letters, &c. Very Rev. Henry Longueville Mansel, D.D.

81 The Little Land. A Child's Garden of Verses. Robert Louis Stevenson.

82 The Croppy Boy, The Shan Van Vocht. The Wearing of the Green. Anon. The Memory of the Dead. John Kells Ingram, D.D. The Bells of Shandon. Rev. Francis Mahony ('Father Prout '). I'm not Myself at all. Samuel Lover. The Groves of Blarney. R. A. Milliken. Irish Minstrelsy, H. Halliday Sparling. 1888.

83 Verses Written in India. Sir Alfred Lyall. Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1893.

84 The Lark Ascending. George Meredith's Works.

89 Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn. Ibid.

86 Ibid.

Memorial

CONCLUSIONS?

FROM my first to my latest words on verse which is poetry, though, it may be, without a poet, I have had in my mind two questions. Consciously or unconsciously I have been asking myself: 'What, then, is Poetry?' and 'What makes a Poet?' I am unable to answer them yet to my own entire satisfaction.

I can enumerate the qualities which, single or several, never all together, unless perhaps in one superhuman case, I myself find in English verse. Fancy and Imagination, Form-or Style-, Stateliness, Passion, Charm, Mystery, Pathos, Atmosphere, and Spontaneity share among them whatever poetry is, in my judgement, entitled to be called great. Imagination and Fancy stand foremost; Imagination, conducting the processes of reconstructing, anticipating, prophesying; setting Fancy in motion; Fancy, whether independently, or, after Imagination has done its work, and sometimes before, seeing things under a changed aspect, the old as if they were new.

The absence of Form is more readily noted than its presence. When the distinguishing characteristic, as of Ben Jonson as poet, of Herrick, Waller, Suckling, and Lovelace, it is almost identical with Style. It implies Selfrestraint, and Reserve. Frequently it has the happiness to be associated with too much of grandeur for it to be singled out as the writer's badge. Yet a poet may be illustrious without it; for Wordsworth is.

Stateliness and Passion, necessities sometimes, are often out of place. We want no finer example of the former than Paradise Lost, and no worse than Night Thoughts.

For Passion take Shelley, Swinburne. At their best they exemplify to perfection the self-abandonment, the ecstasy, which is the triumph of poetic art.

Charm in poetry every one feels, none can explain. It alters its hues to each reader's eyes. Analyse it, and the hand grasps air. It comes at nobody's beck and call; not even Milton's or Shelley's. Commonly, by no means always, it turns its back upon Wordsworth. It will not be parted from Herrick and Keats.

Mystery is a rare visitant, and welcome only when rare. It is among the distinctions of Christabel. It is the glory of Webster's weird execution-dirge; of Scottish Edward, Edward'; of Sydney Dobell's Keith of Ravelston. It is Edgar Allan Poe's prime engine, and his Evil Genius.

None can speak of Pathos as any longer shy and retiring. Of old it was little used. Not unknown among the Elizabethans, it was with them far from habitual. In later days it is its absence which would be remarkable. Both writer and critic are apt to find it a dangerous snare. They are liable to be bribed by it to accept their own heart-beats for music of the spheres. I hope I have already sufficiently warned my readers that they are free to discount my praises of verse whenever they themselves are inclined to shed a tear over it. In a poet to aim at pathos, scheme for it, is criminal. When it comes it should come as an incident, not as the motive, or calculated result. In great poetry, as Wordsworth's, it steals forth almost, as it were, against the poet's will.

I have left to the end a couple of qualities which are not so much separate properties of poetry as conditions or states of it. Each I regard as exceedingly precious. When we are not sure that we have learnt from a poem all which is to be learnt, that we have felt all which is to be felt,

when we suspect that it holds in reserve for us delightful possibilities, that it has entered into us, and that we are in spiritual unison with it-then and there I recognize Atmosphere. It is not a beginning or basis, but a result. When the feast is over a box of spikenard is broken; and a fragrant vapour envelops all. Blake's verse floats in Atmosphere. So does Keats's Eve of St. Agnes. So Christabel. There is Atmosphere in Hogg's Kilmeny. I find none in Campbell, and little in Scott's own verse, though abundance in his Border Minstrelsy.

Akin to it, I suppose, though the state is as hard to describe as Atmosphere, is every supreme poet's and poem's strange power suddenly to open fresh sources in brain and heart. Forthwith issues a flood of feeling as magically sweet to reader as to writer. A mere versifier may go up and down, sinking wells everywhere. He tortures the depths of the soil. The entire region remains for him a desert, a Sahara. The poet comes with his willow bough; and springs gush from the solid rock to meet the divining rod as it bends. It is a real gift, like the spell, the touch on human eyes, which used to reveal the coexistence with this earthy world of ours of actual Fairyland. I have named the condition for want of a better word, Spontaneity; for its effects have no manifest cause. Really spontaneous generation is as unknown in poetry as in physics. Fancy sows the germs, and forgets where. They, when sprung-up, remember, and, after wandering away, return, as birds to their nesting-places. Nobody can tell the precise nature of the agent, whether it be a thing, or a power, a mode of action, an aspect of something else. It roams about the realm of poetry, lending itself out to this or that separate quality. Pomp at its touch becomes majesty. Charm rises everywhere, like

a floweret of the soil. Chimes from invisible belfries peal through the midnight air. The long dull story of poor Simon Lee is transfigured into an anthem of Humanity.

I have often thought what a surprise to the poet himself must be this investiture of the children of his brain with trailing clouds of glory, whence voyaging he knows not; the apparition among the creations for which his imagination had sorely laboured, of angelic beings as strange to him as the companion of the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace to the Chaldean King. Inspiration works no greater miracles than with its Spontaneity, and its Atmosphere.

Other qualities besides all those I have mentioned doubtless might be valuable in verse, if present. For example, there is Unselfconsciousness, a real virtue; only, I do not happen to have met with it in English poetry, outside Shakespeare's Plays. There is Surprise, which—not very rarely does occur, as in the thrilling transition in Herrick's Daffodils from pity for the fleeting beauty of a flower to a call of universal mortality to prayer:

Stay, stay

Until the wasting day

Has run

But to the evensong;

And having prayed together, we

Will go with you along.

The properties I have been describing distinguish poems when composed. Before they came to their birth the poet must have undergone the influence of his period. Few besides Milton in his chief work, if he entirely, and Keats in all of his, have escaped a close relation to their age and its essential characteristics. The rule is for poetry to belong to its time. Its propensity is to express ideas, capable of true expression only in poetry, which have been