borrow a sanctity from its importance. Even agricultural truth, even the homeliest truths of rural industry, brought into connexion with religious inspiration, will be exalted (like the common culinary utensils in the great vision of the Jewish prophet) and transfigured into vessels of glorious consecration. All things in this early stage of social man are meant mysteriously, have allegoric values; and week-day man moves amongst glorified objects. So that if any doctrine, principle, or system of truth should call for communication at all, infallibly the communication will take the tone of a revelation; and the holiness of a revelation will express itself in the most impassioned form, perhaps with accompaniments of music, but certainly with metre.

Prose, therefore, strange as it may seem to say so, was something of a discovery. If not great invention, at least great courage would be required for the man who should first swim without the bladders of metre. It is all very easy talking when you and your ancestors for fifty generations back have talked prose. But that man must have had triplex æs about his præcordia who first dared to come forward with pure prose as the vehicle for any impassioned form of truth. Even the first physician who dared to lay aside the ample wig and gold-headed cane needed extra courage. All the Jovian terrors of his traditional costume laid aside, he was thrown upon his mere natural resources of skill and good sense. Who was the first lion-hearted man that ventured to make sail in this frail boat of prose? We believe the man's name is reputed to have been Pherecydes. But, as nothing is less worth remembering than the mere hollow shell of a name, where all the pulp and the kernel is gone, we shall presume Herodotus to have been the first respectable artist in prose. And what was this worthy man's view of prose? From the way in which he connected his several books or 'fyttes' with the names of the muses, and from the romantic style of his narratives, as well as from his using a dialect which had certainly become a poetic dialect in literary Greece, it is pretty clear that Herodotus stood, and meant to stand, on that isthmus between the regions of poetry and blank unimpassioned prose, which in modern literature is occupied by such works as Mort d'Arthur. In Thucydides we see the first exhibition of stern philosophic prose. And, considering the very brief interval between the two writers, who stand related to each other, in point of time, pretty much as Dryden and Pope, it is quite impossible to look for the solution of their characteristic differences in the mere graduations of social development. Pericles, as a young man, would most certainly ask Herodotus to dinner, if business or curiosity ever drew that amiable writer to Athens. As an elderly man, Pericles must often have seen Thucydides at his levees; although by that time the sacrifice of his 'social pleasure ill exchanged for power' may have abridged his opportunity of giving ‘feeds' to literary men. will anybody believe that the mere advance of social refinement, within the narrow period of one man's public life, could bring about so marvellous a change as that the friend of his youth should naturally write very much in the spirit of Sir John Mandeville, and the friend of his old age, like Machiavel or Gibbon? No, no; the difference between these two writers does not reflect the different aspects of literary Greece at two eras so slightly removed, too great to be measured by that scale, as though those of the picturesque Herodotus were a splen

But

did semi-barbarous generation, those of the meditative Thucydides, speculative, political, experimental; but we must look to subjective differences of taste and temperament in the men. The men, by nature, and by powerful determination of original sensibility, belong to different orders of intellect. Herodotus was the Froissart of antiquity. He was the man that should have lived to record the Crusades. Thucydides, on the other hand, was obviously the Tacitus of Greece, who (had he been privileged to benefit by some metempsychosis dropping him into congenial scenes of modern history) would have made his election for the wars of the French League, or for our Parliamentary war, or for the colossal conflicts which grew out of the French Revolution. The one was the son of nature, fascinated by the mighty powers of chance or of tragic destiny, as they are seen in elder times moulding the form of empires or training the currents of revolutions. The other was the son of political speculation, delighting to trace the darker agencies which brood in the mind of man-the subtle motives, the combinations, the plots which gather in the brain of 'dark viziers' when entrusted with the fate of millions, and the nation-wielding tempests which move at the bidding of the orator. (From Style.)

Then

Kate's First Bivouac and First March. Right or wrong, however, in Romish casuistry, Kate was resolved to let herself out; and did; and, for fear any man should creep in while vespers lasted, and steal the kitchen grate, she locked her old friends in. she sought a shelter. The air was moderately warm. She hurried into a chestnut wood; and upon withered leaves, which furnished to Kate her very first bivouac in a long succession of such experiences, she slept till earliest dawn. Spanish diet and youth leave the digestion undisordered and the slumbers light. When the lark rose, up rose Catalina. No time to lose; for she was still in the dress of a nun, and therefore, by a law too flagrantly notorious, liable to the peremptory challenge and arrest of any man-the very meanest or poorest -in all Spain. With her armed finger (ay, by the way, I forgot the thimble; but Kate did not), she set to work upon her amply-embroidered petticoat. She turned it wrong side out; and, with the magic that only female hands possess, she had soon sketched and finished a dashing pair of Wellington trousers. All other changes were made according to the materials she possessed, and quite sufficiently to disguise the two main perils- her sex and her monastic dedication. What was she to do next? Speaking of Wellington trousers anywhere in the north of Spain would remind us, but could hardly remind her, of Vittoria, where she dimly had heard of some maternal relative. To Vittoria, therefore, she bent her course; and, like the Duke of Wellington, but arriving more than two centuries earlier, she gained a great victory at that place. She had made a two days' march, with no provisions but wild berries; she depended, for anything better, as light-heartedly as the duke, upon attacking sword in hand, storming her dear friend's entrenchments, and effecting a lodgment in his breakfast-room, should he happen to possess one. This amiable relative proved to be an elderly man, who had but one foible, or perhaps it was a virtue, which had by continual development overshadowed his whole nature; it was pedantry. On that hint Catalina spoke : she knew by heart, from the services of the convent, a

good number of Latin phrases. Latin!-Oh, but that was charming; and in one so young! The grave Don owned the soft impeachment, relented at once, and clasped the hopeful young gentleman in the Wellington trousers to his uncular and rather angular breast. In this house the yarn of life was of a mingled quality. The table was good, but that was exactly what Kate cared least about. On the other hand, the amusement was of the worst kind. It consisted chiefly in conjugating Latin verbs, especially such as were obstinately irregular. To show him a withered frost-bitten verb, that wanted its preterite, wanted its gerunds, wanted its supines, wanted, in fact, everything in this world, fruits or blossoms, that make a verb desirable, was to earn the Don's gratitude for life. All day long he was, as you may say, marching and countermarching his favourite brigades of verbsverbs frequentative, verbs inceptive, verbs desiderative -horse, foot, and artillery; changing front, advancing from the rear, throwing out skirmishing parties; until Kate, not given to faint, must have thought of such a resource, as once in her life she had thought so seasonably of a vesper headache. This was really worse than St Sebastian's. It reminds one of a French gaiety in Thiebault, who describes a rustic party, under equal despair, as employing themselves in conjugating the verb s'ennuyer-Je m'ennuie, tu t'ennuies, il s'ennuit; nous nous ennuyons, etc.; thence to the imperfect-Je m'ennuyois, tu t'ennuyois, etc.; thence to the imperative -Qu'il s'ennuye, etc.; and so on, through the whole dolorous conjugation. Now, you know, when the time comes that nous nous ennuyons, the best course is to part. Kate saw that; and she walked off from the Don's (of whose amorous passion for defective verbs one would have wished to know the catastrophe), taking from his mantelpiece rather more silver than she had levied on her aunt. But then, observe, the Don also was a relative; and really he owed her a small cheque on his banker for turning out on his field-days. A man, if he is a kinsman, has no unlimited privilege of boring one: an uncle has a qualified right to bore his nephews, even when they happen to be nieces; but he has no right to bore either nephew or niece gratis.

(From The Spanish Military Nun.)

The Mail-Coach.

The modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal experience, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find ourselves in York four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an assertion or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On this system the word was, Non magna loquimur, as upon railways, but vivimus. Yes, 'magna vivimus;' we do not make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs, we realise our grandeurs in act, and in the very experience of life. The vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question of our speed; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incar

nated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunderbeating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But the intervening links that connected them, that spread the earthquake of battle into the eyeball of the horse, were the heart of man and its electric thrillings-kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then propagating its own tumults by contagious shouts and gestures to the heart of his servant the horse.

But now, on the new system of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man's heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever; man's imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse; the inter-agencies are gone in the mode of communication between the horse and his master, out of which grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents of mists that hid, or sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings, fitted to convulse all nations, must henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler.

Thus have perished multiform openings for public expressions of interest, scenical yet natural, in great national tidings; for revelations of faces and groups that could not offer themselves amongst the fluctuating mobs of a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about a laurelled mail had one centre, and acknowledged one sole interest. But the crowds attending at a railway station have as little unity as running water, and own as many centres as there are separate carriages in the train. (From The English Mail-Coach.)

Our Ladies of Sorrow.

These sisters-by what name shall we call them? If I say simply, The Sorrows,' there will be a chance of mistaking the term; it might be understood of individual sorrow-separate cases of sorrow, whereas I want a term expressing the mighty abstractions that incarnate themselves in all individual sufferings of man's heart; and I wish to have these abstractions presented as impersonations-that is, as clothed with human attributes of life, and with functions pointing to flesh. Let us call them, therefore, Our Ladies of Sorrow.

I know them thoroughly, and have walked in all their kingdoms. Three sisters they are, of one mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart; but of their dominion there is no end. Them I saw often conversing with Levana, and sometimes about myself. Do they talk, then? Oh no! Mighty phantoms like these disdain the infirmities of language. They may utter voices through the organs of man when they dwell in human hearts, but amongst themselves is no voice nor sound; eternal silence reigns in their kingdoms. They spoke not, as they talked with Levana; they whispered not; they sang not; though oftentimes methought they might have sung: for I upon earth had heard their mysteries oftentimes deciphered by

Like God,

harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and organ. whose servants they are, they utter their pleasure not by sounds that perish, or by words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, by changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heraldries painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written on the tablets of the brain. They wheeled in mazes; I spelled the steps. They telegraphed from afar; I read the signals. They conspired together; and on the mirrors of darkness my eye traced the plots. Theirs were the symbols; mine are the words.

What is it the sisters are? What is it that they do? Let me describe their form and their presence, if form it were that still fluctuated in its outline, or presence it were that for ever advanced to the front or for ever receded amongst shades.

The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachrymarum, Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of lamentation,-Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted. She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword swept its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were stiffened for ever which, heard at times as they tottered along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven. Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy, by turns; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round her head. And I knew by childish memories that she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard that sobbing of litanies, or the thundering of organs, and when she beheld the mustering of summer clouds. This sister, the elder, it is that carries keys more than papal at her girdle, which open every cottage and every palace. She, to my knowledge, sate all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny countenance, resisted the temptations of play and village mirth, to travel all day long on dusty roads with her afflicted father.

For this did God send her a great reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst yet her own spring was budding, He recalled her to himself. But her blind father mourns for ever over her: still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding hand is locked within his own; and still he wakens to a darkness that is now within a second and a deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum also has been sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bedchamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less profound. By the power of the keys it is that Our Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder, into the chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mississippi. And her, because she is the first-born of her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour with the title of Madonna.'

The second sister is called Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium. But she raises not her eyes; her head, on which sits a dilapidated turban,

She

droops for ever, for ever fastens on the dust. weeps not. She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister, Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down to his rest. This sister is the visitor of the Pariah, of the Jew, of the bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys; of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted out from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off England; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes for ever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacrifice, on which altar no oblations can now be availing, whether towards pardon that he might implore, or towards reparation that he might attempt. Every slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun with timid reproach, as he points with one hand to the earth, our general mother, but for him a stepmother, as he points with the other hand to the Bible, our general teacher, but against him sealed and sequestered; every woman sitting in darkness, without love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine her solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kindling in her nature germs of holy affections, which God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the ancients; every nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time by wicked kinsman, whom God will judge; every captive in every dungeon; all that are betrayed, and all that are rejected; outcasts by traditionary law, and children of hereditary disgrace-all these walk with Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key; but she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of man she finds chapels of her own; and even in glorious England there are some that, to the world, carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads.

!

But the third sister, who is also the youngest Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her kingdom is not large, or else no flesh would live; but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within. Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this

youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with a tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum-Our Lady of Darkness.

(From Suspiria de Profundis.)

De Quincey is his own biographer; but a more compact account, with additional matter, will be found in H. A. Page's Thomas de Quincey: his Life and Writings (2 vols., 2nd ed., London, 1879), and in a handier form in Masson's De Quincey in the series of English Men of Letters.' The first collective edition of the works ran to fourteen volumes (Edinburgh, 1853-60); a fifteenth was added in 1863, and a sixteenth in 1871. The American edition, which was begun in 1851, before the author's Edinburgh edition, and was extended to twenty-two volumes, is fuller; and the later Riverside Press edition, in twelve thick volumes, is even more complete. Masson's 'New and Enlarged Edition of The Collected Writings of Thomas de Quincey (14 vols. Edinburgh, 1889-90) con. tains all the known remains, regrouped according to subject.

G. GREGORY SMITH.

John Keats.

Of the greater poets who were writing in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Keats 1795-1821) was born latest and was the first to die. The eldest child of a London stable-keeper of west-country origin, he had lost both his parents when, at the age of fifteen, he left school and was apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton. In 1814 he went into lodgings in London, and began to walk the hospitals. But his passion for poetry, stimulated by intimacy with Leigh Hunt, Haydon, and others, developed into an ardent ambition; and after a time he abandoned his profession, and, living on his small inheritance, devoted himself to literature. Early in 1817 he published a small volume of Poems, which, together with verses of no merit or promise, contained the famous sonnet, 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer,' and several pieces less completely successful but equally characteristic. This volume also shows the influences which had so far most affected him: that of Spenser and other Elizabethans; that of Leigh Hunt; and that of Classical Mythology, as gathered chiefly from books like Lempriere's Dictionary. After its publication, which was hardly noticed outside the circle of his friends, he began to write his first long poem, Endymion, the composition of which occupied him till near the end of 1817, and which was published in the spring of 1818. His mind was growing fast at this time. He was dissatisfied with his work before he had finished it; in the Preface he ascribes to it 'every error denoting a feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished;' and he was little affected by the contempt with which Blackwood's Magazine and the Quarterly greeted an author known to the Tory writers as a friend of the Radical Hunt. Indeed, before Endymion appeared Keats had passed out of the stage of apprenticeship. Early in 1818, when he was a few months over twenty-two, he was writing Isabella; and by the autumn of 1819 he had produced almost all the work on which his fame rests-Isabella, Hyperion, The Eve of St

Agnes, Lamia, the poems in seven-syllable couplets, the Odes, most of the Sonnets, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and the fragment of The Eve of St Mark; an achievement not merely remarkable but quite unparalleled in the history of English poetry.

But even during its accomplishment the turningpoint in Keats's life arrived. His mother had died of consumption. In December 1818 his brother Tom, tenderly nursed by him, succumbed to the same disease. His own health, after a walkingtour in Scotland in the summer of that year, was never satisfactory. And about the time of his brother's death he met Fanny Brawne, and the passion which fevered the last two years of his life fastened on him. In February 1820 his lungs were attacked. He slowly recovered, but in June another attack occurred; and in July, just when his new poems appeared, he was described as 'under sentence of death.' In the early autumn he left England for Italy with the painter Joseph Severn, who remained with him until, after much suffering, he died in Rome on 23rd February 1821. Since that wonderful period of twenty months he had written little of great value, though the revision of Hyperion is extremely interesting for its ideas and for the comparative severity of the style. It is not strange that in the last year of his life he should sometimes have spoken and written with a bitterness quite foreign to his nature in health, or should now have felt the brutal injustice of the attacks which, he thought, had deprived him of fame.

The accounts of Keats left by his friends, like his own letters, which are invaluable, present the picture of a very attractive and, on the whole, a fine character: eager, enthusiastic and sensitive, but humorous, and remarkably reasonable; quite free from pettiness, vanity, and affectation; resolute and, at bottom, deeply serious. The passion of love seems to have affected him violently without engaging his whole nature, and there is something unpleasant in many of his references to this subject; but he was a good brother and a good friend, sweet-tempered and full of helpfulness and tact. Being about a quarter of a century younger than Wordsworth and Coleridge, he had not to experience their political disillusionment, and, like his contemporaries Byron and Shelley, he was a Liberal in politics and quite unorthodox in religion. These subjects are referred to only in his earlier poems, and they never engrossed his attention; but he neither was nor thought that he ought to be absorbed in poetry to the exclusion of all other interests. In spite of much despondency the consciousness of genius was strong in him, but it was accompanied by a winning modesty and an unusual degree of self-knowledge. He was aware of a certain contention in his nature. To the beauty which speaks primarily to the senses, and brings unmingled pleasure, he was exquisitely sensitive; and it is no defect but a

798503 A

great merit in his poetry that it expresses so keenly this poetic joy. But he believed that a higher and more intense beauty is to be found elsewhere for instance, in the 'strife of human hearts'-and that it cannot be found except through a sympathy and a thought or knowledge which bring pain. In this thought' he felt himself wanting, and he felt also that in him it disturbed that simpler enjoyment of beauty which he sometimes called 'sensation' or 'luxury.' But for this very reason he held himself to be unfit as yet for poetry of the highest kinds; and he was determined to go forward. The cry, 'O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts,' is characteristic of Keats, and, however long he had lived, he would never have been content with any

thought that failed to take an imaginative form and so to excite sensation; but not less characteristic of him are words like these: 'I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world. Some do it with their society -some with their wit - some with their benevolence.

traversing the dark places of life, and finds it only when he thinks he has surrendered it-ideas like these were to be embodied in the love-tale of the shepherd and the goddess. But the result is a series of adventures to the details of which it is impossible to assign a distinct symbolical meaning, and which, taken more simply, have the incoherence of a broken dream. And yet this failure reveals more of Keats's mind than any of his later completed works; though full of faults it is also

. . . There is but one way for me. The road lies through application, study, and thought.'

Of Keats's longer poems the two on mythological subjects were far the most ambitious in design. Endymion is a romance in four books; Hyperion was to be an epic in ten; and it seems evident that in both poems something which may be called an 'inner meaning' was to be shadowed forth by the story. The adventures of Endymion are also the experiences of the poetic soul in its search for union with the absolute Beauty. The hero may almost be compared with the hero of the Prelude; the heroine is more like Shelley's Intellectual Beauty than Lempriere's Diana. That the absolute Beauty in its diverse manifestations-moonlight and sunlight, earth and sea, friendship and love, heroic enterprise and heroic death-is still one; that the poet can attain its final fruition only by

full of beauty; and there is no other poem in the world which gives so true a picture of the tumult of imagination and emotion in a youthful poet. Hyperion was abandoned, so far as we know, only because Keats felt that the style, influenced by his study of Milton, was not wholly natural to him. Here again some of the ideas present in Endymion seem to have been at work, but they are now applied to the development

of mankind. The Titans must yield to the Olympians because they are the less complete manifestation of the supreme Beauty. The struggle of these two forces causes

pain and waste, like the conflict of two forms of civilisation or two religions. Yet in reality, since both are manifestations of one and the same principle, the defeat of the less perfect is also the fulfilment of its own being. If such ideas were to govern the conduct of the poem, it must have been intended to close, if not in rapture, yet in harmony. Perhaps here, as in Endymion, the fusion of inner meaning and outward events would have been imperfect, and the events, taken more simply, would have failed to satisfy. Yet the superiority of the fragment to Endymion is in both respects so great that this is far from certain; and in any case Hyperion, which first opened the eyes of Byron and others to the genius of Keats, gives the fullest idea of his capabilities. It has the inspiration, the 'natural magic,' the 'fascinating felicity of diction,' the richness and variety of