Chapter D: G. Rossetti

Although Rossetti was not a classical student, he seems here
to have arrived at the Platonic idea of an abstract Beauty, of
whose essence are all beautiful things, “sea or sky or woman.”
Love and death, terror and mystery guard her, as a goddess on
her throne, and all lovers of the beautiful are worshippers at
her shrine.

* * * * *

Thinking is only a dream of feeling; a dead feeling; a pale-grey, feeble life.

NOVALIS.

* * * * *

A whetstone cannot cut, but it makes iron sharp, and gives it a keen edge.

ISOCRATES (436-338 B.C.).

This is quoted in Plutarch’s _Lives_. Isocrates was asked why
he taught rhetoric so much and yet spoke so rarely; and this
was his reply. Horace (_Ars Poetica_ 304) playfully says that
he is no longer able to write verses but he will teach others
to write, adding “a whetstone is not used for cutting, but is
used for sharpening steel nevertheless.”

The career of Isocrates, “that old man eloquent,”[31] is
extremely interesting. He preserved his energy and his
influence to the end of his long life of 98 years.

* * * * *

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods there be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

SWINBURNE (_The Garden of Proserpine_).

A very musical expression of a very ugly thought.

* * * * *

Women never betray themselves to men as they do to each other.

GEORGE ELIOT (_Middlemarch_).

* * * * *

THE RETREAT

Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought:
When yet I had not walk’d above
A mile or two from my first Love,
And looking back, at that short space,
Could see a glimpse of His bright face:
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity:
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My Conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to ev’ry sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.

O how I long to travel back,
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence th’ enlighten’d spirit sees
That shady City of Palm-trees!
But ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way!
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move;
And when this dust falls to the urn,
In that state I came, return.

HENRY VAUGHAN (1621-1695).

I include this poem, although it is in the anthologies, because
from my own experience a young reader will not see its beauty
without some words of explanation. It is the precursor of the
greatest ode ever written, Wordsworth’s _Ode on Intimations
of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_.
Wordsworth, Vaughan, and many others believe that we had a
separate existence before we came into this world (and there is
much in the experience of each of us to warrant that belief).
Wordsworth says:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

But in order to appreciate either Wordsworth’s or Vaughan’s
poem it is not necessary to have this belief in a past separate
existence—it is enough to realize that

Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

* * * * *

One may see the small value God has for riches by the people He gives them to.

ALEXANDER POPE.

* * * * *

There’s a fancy some lean to and others hate—
That, when this life is ended, begins
New work for the soul in another state,
Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins:
Where the strong and the weak, this world’s congeries,
Repeat in large what they practised in small,
Through life after life in unlimited series;
Only the scale’s to be changed, that’s all.

Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen
By the means of Evil that Good is best,
And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven’s serene,—
When our faith in the same has stood the test—
Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod,
The uses of labour are surely done;
There remaineth a rest for the people of God:
And I have had troubles enough, for one.

R. BROWNING (_Old Pictures in Florence_).

Browning in his last poem, the well-known “Epilogue,” speaks
with another voice. He wishes his friends to think of him after
death as he was when alive:—

One who never turned his back but marched breast-forward.
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
“Strive and thrive!” cry, “Speed,—fight on, fare ever,
There as here!”

F. W. H. Myers wrote:—

We need a summons to no houri-haunted paradise, no passionless
contemplation, no monotony of prayer and praise; but to endless
advance by endless effort, and, if need be, by endless pain. Be
it mine, then, to plunge among the unknown Destinies—to dare
and still to dare!

Emerson’s heaven also was

Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.

(“Threnody.”)

* * * * *

In life, Love comes first. Indeed, _we_ only come because Love calls for us. We find it waiting with outstretched arms on arrival. Love is the beginning of everything.

F. W. BOREHAM (_Faces in the Fire_).

* * * * *

Our daies are full of dolor and disease,
Our life afflicted with incessant paine,
That nought on earth may lessen or appease.
Why then should I desire here to remaine?
Or why should he that loves me, sorie bee
For my deliverence, or at all complaine
My good to hear, and tóward joyes to see?

EDMUND SPENSER (_Daphnaïda_).

_Tóward_, “approaching.”

* * * * *

My closing remark is as to avoiding debates that are in their very nature interminable.... There is a certain intensity of emotion, interest, bias or prejudice if you will, that can neither reason nor be reasoned with. On the purely intellectual side, the disqualifying circumstances are complexity and vagueness. If a topic necessarily hauls in numerous other topics of difficulty, the essay may do something for it, but not the debate. Worst of all is the presence of several large, ill-defined, and unsettled terms. A not unfrequent case is a combination of the several defects, each, perhaps, in a small degree. A tinge of predilection or party, a double or triple complication of doctrines, and one or two hazy terms will make a debate that is pretty sure to end as it began. Thus it is that a question, plausible to appearance, may contain within it capacities of misunderstanding, cross-purposes, and pointless issues, sufficient to occupy the long night of Pandemonium, or beguile the journey to the nearest fixed star.

ALEXANDER BAIN (_Contemporary Review, April, 1877_).

From an address to the Edinburgh University Philosophical
Society.

* * * * *

Diogenes, seeing Neptune’s temple with votive pictures of those saved from wreck, says, “Yea, but where are they painted, that have been drowned?”

BACON.

* * * * *

THE BELLE OF THE BALL-ROOM

I saw her at the County Ball:
There, when the sounds of flute and fiddle
Gave signal sweet in that old hall
Of hands across and down the middle,
Hers was the subtlest spell by far
Of all that set young hearts romancing;
She was our queen, our rose, our star;
And then she danced—O Heaven, her dancing!

Through sunny May, through sultry June,
I loved her with a love eternal;
I spoke her praises to the moon,
I wrote them to the Sunday Journal:
My mother laugh’d: I soon found out
That ancient ladies have no feeling;
My father frown’d: but how should gout
See any happiness in kneeling?...

She smiled on many, just for fun,—
I knew that there was nothing in it;
I was the first—the only one
Her heart had thought of for a minute.—
I knew it, for she told me so,
In phrase which was divinely moulded;
She wrote a charming hand,—and oh!
How sweetly all her notes were folded!
...
We parted; months and years roll’d by
We met again four summers after:
Our parting was all sob and sigh;
Our meeting was all mirth and laughter:
For in my heart’s most secret cell
There had been many other lodgers;
And she was not the ball-room’s Belle,
But only—Mrs. Something Rogers!

W. M. PRAED.

* * * * *

A canon of my own in judging verses is that no man has a right to put into metre what he can as well say out of metre. To which I may add, as a corollary, that _a fortiore_ he has no right to put into metre what he can better say out of metre.

W. S. LILLY (_Essay on George Eliot_).

* * * * *

Aujourd’hui, ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d’être dit, on le chante.

(Now-a-days when a thing is not worth saying they sing it—_i.e._ put it in a song.)

BEAUMARCHAIS (_Le Barbier de Séville_, Act I. Sc. I.)

* * * * *

I do not know whether I gave you at any time the details of my work here, or the principles upon which I have been proceeding.... Some of the work set down includes Ancient Ethics—which is almost entirely grossly wrong and great rubbish also. This part I have persistently refused to get up, not because I disliked it, but because it is decidedly injurious to warp and twist the brain by impressing it with wrong thoughts and systems—just as it would be insane in the polisher of a mirror to think it would reflect the external world more truly, if he gave it a dint here, a scratch there, a bulge in another place, and so forth. It would take me too long to describe the details. Suffice it to say that one of the examiners in Mental Philosophy and in Moral and Political Philosophy is an old, _blind_ (literally) man of the old school, who gave a very abnormally large amount of questions relating to Ancient Ethics, and an abnormally large amount to the _early_ part of English Ethics—leaving hardly any marks to be scored by thorough understanding and ability to use the principles of the subjects.

The consequence was that those, who had crammed up the earlier text-books and could reproduce them, had an enormous advantage. This old fogey moreover is strongly anti-Spencerian. Indeed I heard that he had objected to my answers because “there was too much of Spencer and myself!” So that instead of _criticism and originality_, he avowedly preferred _mere reproduction_, a good example of the slavishness of that method of examination predominant mostly, which, as Spencer wrote to me some time ago, is devised for testing a man’s “power of acquisition instead of using that which has been acquired.”

RICHARD HODGSON (1855-1905) (_Letter, Dec., 1881_).

This letter was written to me from Cambridge, when Hodgson
(see Preface) had found his immediate prospects blasted by
the results of the Moral Science Tripos. No one was placed in
the First Class and he (although at the head of the Tripos)
only in the Second Class. This meant that he had no hope of
a Fellowship, which would have enabled him to go on with
original work in philosophy, and he would have to employ his
time in earning a livelihood. Added to this was the cruel
disappointment to his family and friends.

Hodgson was one of the most gifted men that Australia has
produced. He had completed his M.A. and LL.D. courses in
Melbourne by 1877, when he was twenty-two years of age, and
then, discarding the profession of the law, left for Cambridge
to read Mental and Moral Science. While still an undergraduate
there he had written an article in reply to T. H. Green, and
submitted it to Herbert Spencer, who highly approved of it,
and sent it to the _Contemporary_. However, as stated above,
Hodgson’s immediate future depended on the result of the
examination. (He was at the time preparing one of the articles
he contributed to _Mind_, and had in view further original
work.)

When the result of the Tripos appeared, Henry Sidgwick and Venn
who were then Lecturers and by far the best Moral Science men
in Cambridge, came to sympathize with Hodgson, on the unfair
result. They urged him to go to Germany so that he might
acquire that perfect command of the German language which was
necessary for his philosophic work. On learning that he was not
in a position to do this, Sidgwick insisted—as he said, “in
the interests of philosophy”—on defraying _the whole of the
expenses_ of Hodgson’s residence in Germany. As he insisted
strongly, Hodgson accepted the offer, and went to Jena, armed
with a very flattering letter of introduction from Herbert
Spencer to Haeckel.

Almost immediately after his return from Germany the Society
for Psychical Research was founded, and Hodgson joined it. He
came to the conclusion that the work of this Society was more
important than any other study, while probably it would also
be of fundamental assistance to philosophy. He went out to
India in 1884, and thoroughly exposed Madame Blavatsky and her
“Theosophy,” and, from about 1886, devoted the rest of his life
to Psychical Research. Although maintaining his reading and
his intimacy with Henry Sidgwick, William James, and others,
his services practically became lost to philosophy. This,
however, does not affect the important fact illustrated by the
Tripos incident. We learn what ineptitude can exist in a great
university, and what grave results must necessarily follow
therefrom.

Although Hodgson was writing under stress of a grievous
calamity (yet with a dauntless heart—see verse on Dedication
page), his remarks on Ancient Ethics are not, in my opinion,
exaggerated.

Herbert Spencer’s remark to Hodgson about examinations may also
be noted.

* * * * *

_Prometheus._ And thou, O Mother Earth!
_Earth._ I hear, I feel
Thy lips are on me, and their touch runs down
Even to the adamantine central gloom
Along these marble nerves; ’tis life, ’tis joy,
And, through my withered, old, and icy frame
The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down
Circling. Henceforth the many children fair
Folded in my sustaining arms; all plants,
And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged,
And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes,
Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom
Draining the poison of despair, shall take
And interchange sweet nutriment.

SHELLEY (_Prometheus Unbound_, III, 3).

In Shelley’s great poem, Prometheus is not merely the Titan
who, having stolen fire from heaven to benefit man, was chained
to a pillar while an eagle tore at his vitals, he is the
spirit of humanity. Man has (through superstition) given the
god, Zeus, great powers which he uses to enslave and oppress
man’s own mind and body. Ultimately the god is overthrown,
Prometheus, the spirit of man, is released, and the world
enters upon its progress towards perfection.

This and the following quotations are from a collection of
references to Mother-Earth.

* * * * *

Say, mysterious Earth! O say, great mother and goddess,
Was it not well with thee then, when first thy lap was ungirdled,
Thy lap to the genial Heaven, the day that he wooed thee and won thee!...
Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth from the mighty embracement.
Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impelled by thousand-fold instincts.
Filled, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on their channels;
Laughed on their shores the wide seas; the yearning ocean swelled upward;
Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing
mountains,
Wandered bleating in valleys, and warbled on blossoming branches.

S. T. COLERIDGE (_Hymn to the Earth_).

An imitation of Stolberg’s _Hymne an die Erde_.

* * * * *

From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the sun.

SHELLEY (_The Cloud_).

* * * * *

For Nature ever faithful is
To such as trust her faithfulness.
When the forest shall mislead me,
When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
’Twill be time enough to die.
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
The clay of their departed lover.

EMERSON (_Woodnotes_).

* * * * *

Long have I loved what I behold,
The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother-earth
Suffices me—her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.

WORDSWORTH (_Peter Bell_).

* * * * *

So mayst thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop
Into thy mother’s lap.

MILTON (_Paradise Lost_, XI, 535).

* * * * *

SONG OF PROSERPINE.

Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth
Thou from whose immortal bosom
Gods, and men, and beasts have birth,
Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.

If with mists of evening dew
Thou dost nourish these young flowers
Till they grow, in scent and hue,
Fairest children of the Hours,
Breathe thine influence most divine
On thine own child, Proserpine.

SHELLEY.

Proserpine, daughter of Ceres, whilst gathering flowers with
her playmates at Enna in Sicily, was carried off by Pluto, also
called Dis, god of the dead. (For two-thirds, or, according to
later writers, one-half of each year, she returns to the earth,
bringing spring and summer.)

That fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis
Was gathered; which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world.

(_Paradise Lost_, IV, 269).

* * * * *

And ... the rich winds blow,
And ... the waters go,
And the birds for joy, and the trees for prayer,
Bowing their heads in the sunny air....
All make a music, gentle and strong,
Bound by the heart into one sweet song;
And amidst them all, the mother Earth
Sits with the children of her birth....
Go forth to her from the dark and the dust
And weep beside her, if weep thou must;
If she may not hold thee to her breast,
Like a weary infant, that cries for rest;
At least she will press thee to her knee
And tell a low, sweet tale to thee,
Till the hue to thy cheek, and the light to thine eye
Strength to thy limbs, and courage high
To thy fainting heart return amain.

G. MACDONALD (_Phantastes_).

_Hold thee to her breast_, give rest in death.

* * * * *

Ne deeth, allas; ne wol nat han my life; will not take
Thus walke I, lyk a restèlees caityf, restless wretch
And on the ground, which is my modres gate, mother’s
I knokke with my staf, both erly and late,
And seyè, “levè moder, leet me in! say, “Dear mother
Lo, how I vanish, flesh, and blood, and skin! waste away”
Allas! whan shul my bonès be at reste?”

CHAUCER (1340-1400) (_The Pardoner’s Tale_).

* * * * *

Like a shadow thrown
Softly and lightly from a passing cloud,
Death fell upon him, while reclined he lay
For noontide solace on the summer grass,
The warm lap of his mother earth.

WORDSWORTH (_Excursion_ VII, 286).

* * * * *

And O green bounteous Earth!
Bacchante Mother! stern to those
Who live not in thy heart of mirth;
Death shall I shrink from, loving thee?
Into the breast that gives the rose
Shall I with shuddering fall?

G. MEREDITH (_Ode to the Spirit of Earth in
Autumn_).

* * * * *

THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of a leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river....

“This is the way,” laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sat by the river,)
“The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.”
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.

E. B. BROWNING

* * * * *

There is little merit in inventing a happy idea, or attractive situation, so long as it is only the author’s voice which we hear. As a being whom we have called into life by magic arts, as soon as it has received existence, acts independently of the master’s impulse, so the poet creates his persons, and then watches and relates what they do and say. Such creation is poetry in the literal sense of the term, and its possibility is an unfathomable enigma. The gushing fullness of speech belongs to the poet, and it flows from the lips of each of his magic beings in the thoughts and words peculiar to its nature.

NIEBUHR (_Letters_, &c., Vol. III, 196).

* * * * *

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but, when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

SHELLEY (_A Defence of Poetry_).

* * * * *

Who would loose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night?

MILTON (_Paradise Lost_ ii., 146)

“Loose”—by committing suicide.

* * * * *

When the white block of marble shines so solid and so costly, who remembers that it was once made up of decaying shell and rotting bones and millions of dying insect-lives, pressed to ashes ere the rare stone was?

(_Chandos_).

* * * * *

The madness that starves and is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods. For it is an insanity unfruitful—except to the future. And for the future, who cares—save those madmen themselves?

* * * * *

... The gods that most of all have pity on man, the gods of the Night and of the Grave.

* * * * *

Our eyes are set to the light, but our feet are fixed in the mire.

(_Folle-Farine_).

* * * * *

“If the cucumber be bitter, throw it away,” says Antoninus: do the same with a thought.... There is no cucumber so heavy that one cannot throw it over some wall.

OUIDA (_Tricotrin_).

Antoninus, 120-180 A.D., the Roman emperor and Stoic
philosopher, usually known by his first two names Marcus
Aurelius, is the author of the well-known _Meditations_. The
quotation is from Bk. VIII., “The gourd is bitter; drop it,
then! There are brambles in the path; then turn aside! It is
enough. Do not go on to argue, Why pray have these things a
place in the world?” etc.

These quotations from Ouida may serve to illustrate the saying
of Pliny the Elder, “No book is so bad but some good may be
got out of it” (Pliny’s Letters, III., 10)—a saying which was
no doubt true until printing let loose on the world such a
multitude of worthless writers.

* * * * *

WHEN WE ALL ARE ASLEEP

When He returns, and finds the World so drear—
All sleeping,—young and old, unfair and fair,
Will He stoop down and whisper in each ear,
“Awaken!” or for pity’s sake forbear,—
Saying, “How shall I meet their frozen stare
Of wonder, and their eyes so full of fear?
How shall I comfort them in their despair,
If they cry out, ‘Too late! let us sleep here’?”
Perchance He will not wake us up, but when
He sees us look so happy in our rest,
Will murmur, “Poor dead women and dead men!
Dire was their doom, and weary was their quest.
Wherefore awake them into life again?
Let them sleep on untroubled—it is best.”

R. BUCHANAN.

* * * * *

CHORUS

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years;
And froth and drift of the sea;
And dust of the labouring earth;
And bodies of things to be
In the houses of death and of birth;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashioned with loathing and love,
With life before and after
And death beneath and above,
For a day and a night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man.
From the winds of the north and the south
They gathered as unto strife;
They breathed upon his mouth,
They filled his body with life;
Eyesight and speech they wrought
For the veils of the soul therein,
A time for labour and thought,
A time to serve and to sin;
They gave him light in his ways,
And love, and a space for delight,
And beauty and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.
His speech is a burning fire;
With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.

SWINBURNE (_Atalanta in Calydon_).

* * * * *

She (the ship of Odysseus) came to the limits of the world, to the deep flowing Oceanus. There is the land and the city of the Cimmerians, shrouded in mist and cloud, and never does the shining sun look down on them with his rays, neither when he climbs up the starry heavens, nor when again he turns earthward from the firmament, but deadly night is outspread over miserable mortals. Thither we came and ran the ship ashore and took out the sheep; but for our part we held on our way along the stream of Oceanus, till we came to the place which Circe had declared to us.

There Perimedes and Eurylochus held the victims, but I drew my sharp sword from my thigh, and dug a pit, as it were a cubit in length and breadth, and about it poured a drink-offering to all the dead, first with mead and thereafter with sweet wine and for the third time with water.... When I had besought the tribes of the dead with vows and prayers, I took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench, and the dark blood flowed forth, and lo, the spirits of the dead that be departed gathered them from out of Erebus. Brides and youths unwed, and old men of many and evil days, and tender maidens with griefs yet fresh at heart; and many there were, wounded with bronze-shod spears, men slain in fight with their bloody mail about them. And these many ghosts flocked together from every side about the trench with a wondrous cry, and pale fear gat hold on me.... I drew the sharp sword from my thigh and sat there, suffering not the strengthless heads of the dead to draw nigh to the blood, ere I had word of Teiresias....

Anon came up the soul of my mother dead, Anticleia, the daughter of Autolycus, the great-hearted, whom I left alive when I departed for sacred Ilios. At the sight of her I wept, and was moved with compassion, yet even so, for all my sore grief, I suffered her not to draw nigh to the blood, ere I had word of Teiresias.

Anon came the soul of Theban Teiresias, with a golden sceptre in his hand, and he knew me and spake unto me: “Son of Laertes of the seed of Zeus, Odysseus of many devices, what seekest thou _now_, wretched man—wherefore hast thou left the sunlight and come hither to behold the dead and a land desolate of joy? Nay, hold off from the ditch and draw back thy sharp sword, that I may drink of the blood and tell thee sooth.” So spake he, and I put up my silver-studded sword into the sheath, and when he had drunk the dark blood, even then did the noble seer speak unto me....

ODYSSEY, Bk. XI. (_Butcher & Lang’s translation_).

In this weird scene Odysseus is summoning the shade of
Teiresias from the under-world. He has with his sword to keep
off the host of spirits, including that of his own mother, whom
the spilt blood has attracted—and the hero is himself terrified
at the awful spectacle.

What adds to the interest of such a passage is that to the
ancient Greeks this was no imaginary picture but a statement of
actual facts. It will be observed that the dead live in a dark
land, “desolate of joy.”

To the little-travelled Greeks the ocean was a _river_.

* * * * *

For—see your cellarage!
There are forty barrels with Shakespeare’s brand
Some five or six are abroach: the rest
Stand spigoted, fauceted. Try and test
What yourselves call best of the very best!
How comes it that still untouched they stand?
Why don’t you try tap, advance a stage
With the rest in cellarage?
For—see your cellarage!
There are four big butts of Milton’s brew,
How comes it you make old drips and drops
Do duty, and there devotion stops?
Leave such an abyss of malt and hops
Embellied in butts which bungs still glue?
You hate your bard! A fig for your rage!
Free him from cellarage!

R. BROWNING (_Epilogue to Pacchiarotto and
other Poems_).

* * * * *

Though the seasons of man full of losses
Make empty the years full of youth,
If but one thing be constant in crosses,
Change lays not her hand upon truth;
Hopes die, and their tombs are for token
That the grief as the joy of them ends
Ere time that breaks all men has broken
The faith between friends.

Though the many lights dwindle to one light,
There is help if the heaven has one;
Though the skies be discrowned of the sunlight
And the earth dispossessed of the sun,
They have moonlight and sleep for repayment,
When, refreshed as a bride and set free,
With stars and sea-winds in her raiment,
Night sinks on the sea.

SWINBURNE (_Dedication, 1865_).

It is hardly possible for a younger generation to realize the
almost intoxicating effect produced upon us by Swinburne’s new
melodies. Although the _Poems and Ballads_ were largely erotic,
the curious fact is that we were too much carried away by the
beauty and swing of his verse to trouble about the sensual
element in it. That element was in itself an _artificial_
production and not a reflection of the poet’s own emotions, for
he was free from sensuality. It was with us more a question of
_music_. Swinburne himself preferred a musical word or line
to one that would more aptly express his meaning; and in the
“Dedication,” from which the above verses are quoted, several
lines will not bear analysis. However, this was one of our
favourites among his poems.

O daughters of dreams and of stories
That life is not wearied of yet,
Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
Félise and Yolande and Juliette,
Shall I find you not still, shall I miss you,
When sleep, that is true or that seems,
Comes back to me hopeless to kiss you,
O daughters of dreams?

They are past as a slumber that passes,
As the dew of a dawn of old time;
More frail than the shadows on glasses,
More fleet than a wave or a rhyme.
As the waves after ebb drawing seaward,
When their hollows are full of the night,
So the birds that flew singing to me-ward
Recede out of sight.

He asks that his wild “storm-birds of passion” may find a home
in our calmer world:—

In their wings though the sea-wind yet quivers,
Will you spare not a space for them there
Made green with the running of rivers
And gracious with temperate air;
In the fields and the turreted cities,
That cover from sunshine and rain
Fair passions and bountiful pities
And loves without stain?

In a land of clear colours and stories,
In a region of shadowless hours,
Where earth has a garment of glories
And a murmur of musical flowers;
In woods where the spring half uncovers
The flush of her amorous face,
By the waters that listen for lovers
For these is there place?

Though the world of your hands be more gracious
And lovelier in lordship of things
Clothed round by sweet art with the spacious
Warm heaven of her imminent wings,
Let them enter, unfledged and nigh fainting,
For the love of old loves and lost times;
And receive in your palace of painting
This revel of rhymes.

Then come the final verses quoted above. These are somewhat
detached in meaning from the rest, and form a sort of _Envoi_:
“Whatever changes or passes, there is always some beautiful
thing that survives.”

As might be expected Swinburne was much parodied (and indeed
in the _Heptalogia_ and in the poems lately published he
parodied himself). The above poem has been cleverly parodied
by a lawyer, Sir Frederick Pollock. (Although parodies go as
far back as the Fifth Century B.C. I know of no other lawyer
who, _qua_ lawyer, has successfully taken a hand in the game.)
In his parody Pollock’s subject was the great changes effected
by the Judicature Act, when the old Courts of Common Law,
Chancery, and others were consolidated into one Supreme Court,
and the various classes of business assigned to different
“Divisions.” Also owing to changes in procedure, much of the
old technical learning became obsolete. His last verse is as
follows (compare with the second verse quoted above):

Though the Courts that were manifold dwindle
To divers Divisions of one,
And no fire from your face may rekindle
The light of old learning undone,
We have suitors and briefs for our payment,
While, so long as a Court shall hold pleas,
We talk moonshine with wigs for our raiment,
Not sinking the fees.

* * * * *

Wulf died, as he had lived, a heathen. Placidia, who loved him well, as she loved all righteous and noble souls, had succeeded once in persuading him to accept baptism. Adolf himself acted as one of his sponsors; and the old warrior was in the act of stepping into the font, when he turned suddenly to the bishop and asked, ‘Where were the souls of his heathen ancestors?’ “In hell,” replied the worthy prelate. Wulf drew back from the font, and threw his bearskin cloak around him—“He would prefer, if Adolf had no objection, to go to his own people.” And so he died unbaptized, and went to his own place.

CHARLES KINGSLEY (_Hypatia_).

This story appears in several old chronicles (_Notes and
Queries, 7th Ser. X, 33_), but the name should be Radbod. He
was Duke or Chief of the Frisians, and the episode probably
occurred in Heligoland, from which island he ruled his people.

* * * * *

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best; and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.... In the morning I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway.

R. W. EMERSON (Essay on _Experience_).

* * * * *

The bee draws forth from fruit and flower
Sweet dews, that swell his golden dower;
But never injures by his kiss
Those who have made him rich in bliss.

The moth, though tortured by the flame,
Still hovers round and loves the same:
Nor is his fond attachment less:
“Alas!” he whispers, “can it be,
Spite of my ceaseless tenderness,
That I am doomed to death by thee?”

AZY EDDIN ELMOGADESSI (_L. S. Costello’s
translation_).

* * * * *

A pine-tree stands all lonely
On a northern hill-top bare,
And, wrapped in its snowy mantle,
It slumbers peacefully there.

Its dreams are of a palm-tree,
Far-off in the morning land,
Which in lone silence sorrows
On a burning, rocky strand.

HEINRICH HEINE (1797-1856)

* * * * *

Many a time
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake.
... Then in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

WORDSWORTH (_The Prelude_, Bk. V).

* * * * *

THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE KNIFE GRINDER

FRIEND OF HUMANITY.

“Needy Knife-grinder! whither are you going?
Rough is the road, your wheel is out of order;
Bleak blows the blast—your hat has got a hole in’t,
So have your breeches!

“Weary Knife-grinder! little think the proud ones,
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike-road,
what hard work ’tis crying all day ‘Knives and
Scissors to grind O!’”

“Tell me, Knife-grinder, how you came to grind knives?
Did some rich man tyrannically use you?
Was it the squire? or parson of the parish?
Or the attorney?

“Was it the squire, for killing of his game? or
Covetous parson, for his tithes distraining?
Or roguish lawyer, made you lose your little
All in a lawsuit?

(“Have you not read the ‘Rights of Man,’ by Tom Paine?)
Drops of compassion tremble on my eyelids,
Ready to fall, as soon as you have told your
Pitiful story.”

KNIFE-GRINDER.

“Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir,
Only last night a-drinking at the Chequers,
This poor old hat and breeches, as you see, were
Torn in a scuffle.

“Constables came up, for to take me into
Custody; they took me before the justice;
Justice Oldmixon put me in the parish-
-stocks for a vagrant.

“I should be glad to drink your Honour’s health in
A pot of beer, if you will give me sixpence;
But for my part, I never love to meddle
With politics, sir.”

FRIEND OF HUMANITY.

“_I_ give thee sixpence! I will see thee damn’d first—
Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs can rouse to vengeance—
Sordid, unfeeling, reprobate, degraded,
Spiritless outcast!”

(_Kicks the Knife-grinder, overturns his wheel, and exit in a transport
of Republican enthusiasm and universal philanthropy._)

GEORGE CANNING (_The Anti-Jacobin_).

Written in Sapphics and said to be a parody of a poem of
Southey’s, which was afterwards suppressed.

* * * * *

I loved him, but my reason bade prefer
Duty to love, reject the tempter’s bribe
Of rose and lily when each path diverged,
And either I must pace to life’s far end
As love should lead me, or, as duty urged,
Plod the worn causeway arm-in-arm with friend....
But deep within my heart of hearts there hid
Ever the confidence, amends for all,
That heaven repairs what wrong earth’s journey did,
When love from life-long exile comes at call.

R. BROWNING (_Bifurcation_, 1876)

The lady prefers Duty to Love, but she will remain constant
to her lover, and reunion with him in heaven will make amends
for all. (In the remainder of the poem Browning puts the case
of the lover who, although deserted, is expected to remain
constant through life—and who falls. The lady had disobeyed
Love, because of the hardship and trouble that would follow,
and Browning, whose own married life had been a most happy one,
says this was no excuse.)

* * * * *

We are scratched, or we are bitten
By the pets to whom we cling;
Oh, my Love she is a kitten,
And my heart’s a ball of string.

AUTHOR NOT TRACED.

* * * * *

Some man of quality
Who—breathing musk from lace-work and brocade,
His solitaire amid the flow of frill,
Powdered peruke on nose, and bag at back,
And cane dependent from the ruffled wrist.—
Harangues in silvery and selectest phrase,
’Neath waxlight in a glorified saloon
Where mirrors multiply the girandole.

R. BROWNING (_The Ring and the Book, I_).

This and the next five quotations are word-pictures (see p. 85).

* * * * *

“Oh, what are you waiting for here, young man?
What are you looking for over the bridge?”
A little straw hat with streaming blue ribbons;
—And here it comes dancing over the bridge!

JAMES THOMSON (B.V.) (_Sunday up the River_).

* * * * *

Down in yonder greenè field
There lies a knight slain under his shield;
His hounds they lie down at his feet,
So well do they their master keep.

ANON. (_The Three Ravens_).

* * * * *

When we cam’ in by Glasgow toun,
We were a comely sight to see;
My Love was clad in the black velvet,
And I mysel’ in cramasie. crimson

ANON. (_O waly, waly, up the bank_).

* * * * *

They see the Heroes
Sitting in the dark ship
On the foamless, long-heaving,
Violet sea,
At sunset nearing
The Happy Islands.