his

LITERATURE.

NEW POEMS BY COVENTRY PATMORE.

THE circle of interest created by the poet is always larger than it seems. So many who never hear him, yet hear of him. They may not listen to song, but they acquire from others a sense of its power. They do not share the emotions of his audience, but they are not entirely untouched by the influence of those emotions, and are perfectly impressed with the truth of them. The fame of other authors is a combination of tributary opinions won from their readers: the poet's fame based on the suffrages of his readers, is often half-composed of the reverence of people who never read him in their lives. All England unites in extolling the poetical grandeur of Milton, and "Paradise Lost” is not read by English

men.

This conviction tells us that any addition to the poetical power of the time has an interest far beyond the small circle whose food is delicate and dainty verse. The poet is the great enricher of the minds of other writers; and his contributions to literature are never without their significance. They come, for example, in the little modest volume before us, in a noticeable shape; and we gladly turn aside to examine and enjoy that literary rarity, a book of poems.

The book bears upon it, manifestly, the mark of youth; and it also bears upon it, as unequivocally, the mark of genius. The power, like the time, is yet young, though surprisingly in advance of it; and it has the characteristics of the time-a glowing fervour, a rich fancy, exalted aspirations, a bold and simple daring, and deep sensibility.

The four principal poems would seem to point to two stages in the writer's progress. The first two might be supposed from their elaborate polish and nicer consistency, their more studied felicity of phrase, and the exactness and harmony of their proportions, to belong to the later period; were it not clear from some remarkable evidence in the other pieces, some subtle speculations, a deepened reflective vein, and expositions of passion and intellect of a broader and more far-seeing character, that these, though of a design far less carefully wrought out, though less delicately modulated, less valuable every way as specimens of high art, were written last, as they here stand. We trust that this is no sign that our new poet has already began to undervalue the essential importance of those graces and harmonies of versification. which rank among the charms of his "Woodman's Daughter," and "The River."

The last-named is a story of love, deep-dyed with melancholy beauty. A forlorn, wandering lover, on his lady's wedding-night, drowns himself: she, by the bridegroom's side, starts in affright from a dream that pictures the horrid reality then passing. It is touching by its pathos, and chilling by its terror. The imagery is everywhere in keeping. We hear in the ring of the verse the bark of the guard-hound:

The guard-hound in the silent night,
Stops wrangling with his chain,
To hear at every burst of barks,

The hills bark back again.

The silent figure by the bare tree in the park, darker than the night, we see through the dull moonshine; we feel what desolation to him is working in the marriage-revel within, and how through the muffled air, the laughter shout comes "mournfully." As gloomily distinct, but dim, we trace while standing where the river "slippeth past," the ivy'd bridge, the willow trembling in the stream, and we hear the "dry reeds talk and clank." The forlorn lover is there; we see "the pale cheeks in the dark," and after a stifled gurgling sound the scene changes, ending in a picture of calm confiding household love;-the lady in a future springtime walking beside the gentle river, remembering her dream with a throbbing pulse, and then passing on through the still air. Where the owl had shrieked, "broodeth the quiet dove." The gloomiest but richest

ornaments of fancy are lavished upon the tale.

The "Woodman's Daughter" is more in the light, though it ends in sad and awful shadow; forest innocence, and childish passionate lovebetrayal, shame, infanticide, are pictured with surpassing truthfulness, and a tragic power that grows naturally out of the subject. Loveliest and most bewitching is the spirit in which the wakening, and wondering, and inquiring the calm and the tumult-the sweet doubts, and the more delicious but trembling consciousness-of an ardent passion growing up at the same instant in two young hearts, throbbing side by side-are in this poem traced and portrayed. Love's birth, and growth, and inward gathering up of strength in a thousand ways-its gambols by the very brink of destruction, its fears in the very embrace of hope, its sighs amidst merry laughter-are indicated with a master's skill, and yet with astonishing simplicity and seeming artlessness. We often say, "How beautiful!" as we read; but it is not until after we have read again, and traced the windings of the passion apart from the interest inspired by its fate, that we cry "How admirable !" Nobody can have the least idea of the delicacy and clearness with which all the process of the blossoming of love is brought into view by the intensity of this poet's feeling, and the tender light of his fancy-who does not read the record to the last line. No word can be missed-no step of that lover's walk which led far away from innocence and safety.

Months pass'd away; and every day

The lovers still were wont

To meet together, and their shame

At meeting had grown blunt ;
For they were of an age, when sin
Is only seen in front.

But this did not continue long,
For Maud began to shun
Her father's sight, in which alone
She knew what she had done.
So Gerald stay'd at home one day,
And ask'd what she had done!

She answered him.-Poor child,-poor child!

Was all he ever said.

Weeks afterwards he'd put his hand
Softly upon her head,

And think of her as tranquilly,

As wise men of the dead.

Such times she strongly shook with tears,
And though she had given o'er

All thoughts of love and Merton, cried-
"If only he forbore

To look so calm, indeed she'd not
See Merton any more."

Of the two other poems, one is a version of the famous "Falcon" story; and, with some tokens of a reckless disregard to rhythm, and an extra-refinement in philosophising, to the sacrifice of that unaffected simplicity and unstrained reach of intellect which is this young poet's stronghold, the poem of "Sir Hubert" has high and rare beauties. Between passages obscure, starry meanings shoot out; and of the thought and fancy generally, we may say that it is finer than the expression.

It is rather with "Lilian" that we would occupy our scanty space. She was the pure idol of a youth of high principles and generous impulses, who now, fevered with a passion that conveys fire into his words, relates how she became lost to him, falling from the heaven in which she seemed to move only "a little lower than the angels," into a sickly and gross corruption of the mind, deep as an acquaintance with the worst depravities pictured by French poem and romance could make it. This order of literature-and a specious, hollow, smiling, cultivator of it, named Winton, are her destroyers; and the object of the verse, in its broken pausings, or its impetuous flow, is to describe the process of the working of this poison so treacherously administered, and to exhibit the storm of resentment and sorrow that overwhelms him on contemplating the ruin. We need not seek to vindicate the extent to which the philosophy inculcated in this poem is run out; enough that it runs in the right direction; and, if it shoots too far, we are to remember that the philosopher has youth's hottest blood coursing in his veins. The sentiments, which are distinctly expressed, are consistent with the characters, which are vividly drawn. It is a poem written in earnest; the lines gush out-in spite of the rugged and inartificial versification-like a tide not to be checked; and the conflicts of passion, the gentle relentings, the touches of pity and the wild outpourings of indignation, form a narrative of singular interest. There is a knowledge of the heart's secrets, and a skill in penetrating to some of the subtlest springs of thought and action in woman, from which too much can scarcely be hoped hereafter. A few lines are all we dare copy. Winton, the trickster, talks with Lilian :

For even when he utter'd common things and clear to sight,

He look'd at you so intently that you hardly thought them trite;
A trick of serious manner wherein women much delight.

His faith in Lilian is a strong thing to destroy; but

As, when we watch bright cloud-banks round about the low sun ranged,

We suddenly remember some rich glory gone, or changed,

All at once the knowledge struck me that her love had grown estranged.

He writes down his accusation, and giving it to her to read, watches:In and out flew sultry blushes: so, when red reflections rise

From conflagrations, filling the alarm'd heart with surprise,

They lighten now, now darken, up and down the spacious skies.

The detection is complete; she sees that his convictions are not to be shaken :

So stood at bay, depending on that crutch made like a stilt,
The impudent vulgarity wherewith women outstare guilt!

And what a creature Lilian was

Quite passionless, but ever bounteous-minded even to waste; Much tenderness in talking; very urgent, yet no haste; And chastity-to laud it would have seem'd almost unchaste. And now with this once spotless sensitive being, he is compelled to school and strain his heart to talk in this fashion:

let me relate what bred

Thy tears and cheapen'd chasteness—(we may talk now as if wed). Her lip's music, we are told, could "make sweet the clack of France," which is but a taste of the bitterness with which the anti-French declamation is conveyed. In the epilogue to "Lilian" are some spirited

stanzas, touched with patriotic fire. We sincerely wish we could praise the poem equally upon all points. But with some of the flights few will venture to trust themselves; and to the style in which many of the stanzas in succession are constructed, none will extend their toleration. They are written in disdain of every thing but the bare strong sense to be expressed. Without the music of verse, we are conscious only of its shackles, and the rhyme becomes an impertinence.

However, this poem, like the rest, must be read. It says much for the present, but it points emphatically to the hereafter, and bids us rely on a steady and uncompromising cultivation of the gift of poetry possessed by Coventry Patmore. Exquisite fancy has often disappointed us by its early brilliancy of promise; but it is here associated with an intellectual strength that awakens higher hope. At this first move he has gained the porch of the temple:-will he consent to wait there?

REVELATIONS OF RUSSIA.

THESE "Revelations" are made on the principle, and given to the world under the persuasion, that the time is come when a vast and manifest outrage on the admitted claims of natural justice, and the rights of the human race at the hands of each other, can no longer be openly perpetrated without awakening the sympathy and stirring up the indignation of those who are not directly affected by such outrage, but who, nevertheless, feel that in tamely witnessing its results upon those who suffer under it, they are, in some degree, consenting parties to its perpetration -nay, that they in some sort suffer under the indignity and the wrong in their own persons. The European world is beginning to feel at least, if not to yet acknowledge, the growth of a moral conscience as between nation and nation, similar to, or rather identical with, that between man and man-it is learning to know that a vast injury inflicted on vast bodies of men is, in reality, inflicted on men in the aggregate, and should be recognised and resented as such. The great moral fact which awakened this National Conscience from its sleep of many ages, was the abolition of the Slave Trade by England: and in the face of that godlike act, and its great and ennobling results, no manifest outrage on natural justice can any longer openly exist and walk abroad in the face of day: it may hide itself in holes and corners-it may skulk in the secret closets of "absolute" princes, or fly to Siberian wilds and Egyptian deserts, and thus a little longer hold its vile way, and work its dark purposes; but once prove its existence, and drag it to the light, and its days are numbered.

That both or either of the above propositions are about to be put to the test by these "Revelations," is more than we shall venture to predict upon the anonymous showing of the writer now before us. It would be unreasonable in him to expect that any thoughtful reader should do so. We can indeed readily imagine very cogent reasons for withholding the author's name from the title-page of this book-reasons growing out of the very circumstances which have enabled him to make these "Revelations." But still the fact of the work being anonymous, must and should have its

weight. Thus much, however, is certain-that no volumes have lately issued from the press which more strongly claim, and will more surely receive, the deep and thoughtful attention of European readers, and of English readers in particular. There is no denying that a general feeling pervades civilised Europe-and England especially-that the vast and growing empire of the Tsar is governed on principles which the advancing intellect of civilised mankind has repudiated for ever-principles which are now felt and believed to be as much at variance with the sound and sane policy of the governing party as they are incompatible, not merely with the happiness and respectability of the governed, but with the due and decreed development of those elements and attributes of human character which alone distinguish us from "the brutes that perish." It is no longer competent to any ruler, however "absolute," openly to govern a nation upon the principle or the pretence that he has a right to do so because he is its rightful sovereign. People may still "do as they like with their own" gold, or their own acres ; but the time is passed when they can act as if they were the absolute masters of other men's wills-the sovereign arbiters of the destiny-future as well as present-of other men's souls. When England pronounced the African slaves of her colonies to be FREE-to be free, not by favour or courtesy, but by the inalienable right of their nature as human beings-she pronounced and decreed the practical freedom of the entire human raceshe prepared for the downfall, at no distant day, of all “absolute monarchies," in the Eastern sense of that truly "vile phrase."

The text on which these "Revelations" are founded, may be gathered from the foregoing hints. But our sympathy with the avowed aim and objects of the volumes, has detained us too long from an examination of their extraordinary details, which make out a case against Russian rule, and the institutions which have risen out of it, that, if once established on an authentic basis, must generate a burst of honest indignation throughout the civilised world, before which no system of government can hold its course-much less one which, if this writer is to be trusted, rests on a foundation as unstable as that of the modern capital which so appropriately represents it. It is by no means out of the range of possibility that St. Petersburg shall some day or other be swept suddenly from the face of those marshes out of which she so recently rose "like an exhalation," and on which she may be said rather to float than to be founded. And if the fearful "Revelations" in regard to the system of Russian rule, which these volumes disclose, be true, the empire of the Tsar rests on as unsteadfast a footing, and may be as suddenly overwhelmed by the mingled tides of European indignation and domestic suffering. It has been said of St. Petersburg, in reference to its perishable character, that it only exists by being perpetually rebuilt; and the same may be said of the empire itself. The (at present) unlimited physical resources, added to the astonishing mental energy, and the consummate skill and tact of her ruler, enable him to be perpetually rebuilding the despotism which he has been called upon to watch over. But as the type of that despotism is ever at the mercy of the mighty waters of the Gulf of Finland, so is the empire itself at the mercy of that mighty tide of European civilisation to which it has long offered the sole and most serious obstacle:-and these "Revelations" will con