in a vision Bunyan saw his pilgrim, journeying through perils. So Novalis saw visions, so Richter dreamed dreams. In a vision (recorded in the only prose-poem he has left us) Lamb saw the Child-Angel-most beautiful of apparitions-who keeps in heaven. perpetual childhood, and still goes lame and lovely.

Poe's prose-poems stand apart. In their peculiar characteristics no other writings in the world resemble these. Nor is this wonderful-for what mortal ever resembled their extraordinary creator? His was a cast of mind beyond all other men's unearthly. His spirit set up her abiding house in a strange and weird land.

It was a land haunted by shapes of loveliness and by shapes of terror; a land in which were sights and sounds to freeze the blood; but a land which also held in its odd angles the Island of the Fay and the Valley of the Many coloured Grass. His style became, when he so desired, a power which added a deeper colour of romance to what was in itself romantic, as sunset wraps some wild land of ruins in its glow of sombre fires. Undoubtedly Poe's finest effort is the piece called 'Silence.' It is a piece which stands among the finest specimens existing of the power of prose to take poetic tone, the power which loads a sentence with impressiveness. The sweet and limpid music of Landor's 'Depths of Love' is far away. The words move forward, in the phrase of Casca, like "a tempest dropping fire." Take any paragraph, at random

"And, all at once, the moon arose through the thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in colour. And mine eyes fell upon a huge grey rock which stood by the shore of the river, and was lighted by the light of the moon. And the rock was grey and ghastly, and talland the rock was grey. Upon its front were characters engraven in the stone; and I walked through the morass of water-lilies, until I came close unto the shore, that I might read the characters upon the stone. But I could not decipher them. And I was going back into the morass when the moon shone with a fuller red, and I turned and

looked again upon the rock and upon the characters; and the characters were Desolation."

Poe's other work in this direction, prose-poems which may stand in the same rank with 'Silence,' are 'The Island of the Fay,' and 'Eleanora.' But all his poetry, whether prose or verse, is such as has no counterpart elsewhere. Alike at its best and at its weakest it bears the recognised impression of his mind. It breathes in every line its own peculiar fra

grance, not to be mistaken-as the honey of Hymettus tasted of the wild thyme.

Mr. Ruskin comes into our category by reason rather of his unrivalled mastery of poetic prose than for any deliberate prose-poem, which, indeed, he has never set himself to write. There are passages without number in his works in which word-painting (to use a phrase which would be hateful were it not so convenient), and even eloquence-two things vastly different from poetry, however often they are confused with it-are made poetical by sheer excess of beauty. This distinction between description which is poetical, and description which, however fine, is merely graphic, is a distinction which, if rigorously applied, at once puts out of court nine-tenths of what is generally called poetic prose. An illustration here is far better than any argument, for the distinction is one that must be felt, not argued. Compare, then, together these two descriptions of the same scene-the scene of Turner's picture of 'Chryses on the Shore.' The first is by a recent critic, the second is Mr. Ruskin's.

"The large picture of Chryses merits attention not only from its fine drawing of rocks, trees, and above all of waves, but also from its departure from the conventional brown landscape-manner of the time. We have here warm and noble colour; the golden light of sunset suffuses the whole scene, and turns from blue to green the sea round the path of the sun."

This is a fair instance of the de

scription which is pictorial, but not poetical. Now take the next :

"There the priest is on the beach alone, the sun setting. He prays to it as it descends; flakes of its sheeted light are borne to him by the melancholy waves, and cast away with sighs upon the sand."

This is a prose-poem. It is a poem both in tone and cadence. Its words have something of the power usually found only in the finest verse. Like that, it steals upon the soul with music, dies off, and leaves it satisfied.

And what is this on Venice?

"a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak, so quiet, so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City and which the Shadow."

Or this on lichens ?

"Unfading as motionless, the worm frets them not, and the Autumn wastes not. Strong in loveliness, they neither blanch in heat, nor pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark, eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris-dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance! and while the winds of departing Spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and Summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of its cowslip-gold, far above, among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, star-like, on the stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years."

Or, as a last example, this on Imagination?

"Imagination is a pilgrim on the earth, and her home is in heaven. Shut her from the fields of the celestial mountains, bar her from breathing their lofty, sun-warmed air; and we may as well turn upon her the last bolt of the Tower of Famine, and give the keys to the keeping of the wildest surge that washes Capraja and Gorgona."

Such a passage bears the highest mark of the poetic mind; the mind of which even the most abstract thought comes forth in form and shape, calls up a train of glorious imageries, as a sultan calls his slaves, and so appears before the eye in visible No. 324.-VOL. LIV.

presentment-rich, impressive, solemn, or gorgeous as the procession of a king. But a consideration of this power, in which no prose writer ever rivalled Mr. Ruskin, would beguile us from our purpose. We must go no more astray. Our design was not to wander in the wild and witching regions of poetic prose, but to reckon up our stock of strict prose-poems. And in truth, when we descend to the work of weaker writers, it is to find, too often, that the Muse, released from building verse into a finished structure, is apt to prove contented with a heap of rich material. The pilgrim whom she undertakes to guide, far from finding himself ushered into some fair Palace of Art, made beautiful with loving skill, firm-built on its cragplatform, fringed with its golden gallery, a statue poised on every peak, its pictured windows glowing like fixed flames, finds himself perpetually, like Clarence, among the wedges of gold and heaps of pearls, surrounded by waste wrecks of futile treasure.

6

What, then, of strict prose-poems have we left-of the highest rank, that is, what have we? Hawthorn, to whom some may be disposed to turn, is, at least to certain readers, repellently self-conscious. Coleridge has given us 'The Wanderings of Cain and the Allegoric Vision;' Dickens has given us, 'A Child's Dream of a Star;' Christopher North, 'The Fairy's Funeral.' But these and such as these are all we have remaining— rank far below the highest. These are no rivals of the power of verse. On the whole, our list of greatest must consist of five names onlyLandor, Poe, Lamb, Ruskin, and De Quincey. Inter viburna cupressithese are the cypresses among the vines.

Collections of verse-poems are not rare; but of prose-poems proper no such collection has as yet been made. And this is strange. It is true that the volume which collected our possessions would, if made, be far from

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bulky. Yet it is not too much to say that such a volume would contain specimens of the noblest writing in our language. Glowing imagery, rich and varied music, would combine to make its pages "a perpetual feast of nectared sweets." In these would meet together all the lovely and awful creations of the great men at whose writings we have been glancing. There would be Fiammetta, holding the vase of magic water, the lilies gleaming in her hair. There would be the caverns, the warm ocean, the innumerable arches, and the breezy sunshine of the mole of Baiæ; and the grottoes, forts, and dells of Naples. There would be the dust of Posilippo, "soft as the feathers in the wings of Sleep"; the form of Love hiding his arrow-barb behind his heels, and Hope, whose face is always shadowed by a coloured

cloud. There would be the crashing forest and the yellow ghastly marsh beside the river Zaire, with the man trembling on the rock, and the demon hiding among the sighing lilies beneath the crimson moon. There would be the ghostly Island, and the frail canoe, and the fading Fay upon the shadowy waters; and the asphodels, the red flamingoes, the singing river and the golden clouds of the Valley of the Many-coloured Grass. There would be the Babe "who goeth lame and lovely," and the grave of Adah by the river Pison; and there would be our Lady of Tears, with the diadem about her brow, calling by night and day for vanished faces. Well might the slender volume which gathered up such treasures bear for the motto of its title page this inscription, "INFINITE RICHES IN A NARROW ROOM."

ONE of the commonest of the many fallacies prevalent in England regarding our American kinsfolk is the one that credits them with an indifference to field-sports. This is probably only an aggravated form of that egotism which makes the lip of your true Britisher curl with scorn at all alien claims to proficiency with horse or gun: I say an aggravated form of this insular creed, for Americans being one with us in blood might fairly be supposed to inherit a portion at least of the "savage' instinct which is such a marked peculiarity of our common

race.

The

So far as my experience goes the sporting instinct is upon the whole as strong among our cousins as in the stock from which they sprang. practical absence of fox-hunting removes one element of a comparison which in any case would be difficult. Sport, too, in America lacks the prestige that it owns in this country. The distinction that is secured in Great Britain by superior excellence in such things is in no way the same beyond the Atlantic. Our social views of sport, which turn hundreds of indifferent and lukewarm persons into ornamental and passable Nimrods, have not yet developed with our cousins. The well-to-do Englishman, unless his tastes are distinctly adverse, finds himself in the natural order of events on the moors, among the turnips, or by the covert-side. All

society is either taking part in the same performance or interesting itself in the matter. But the well-to-do American intent on such things has almost always to "cut out his own line," to detach himself from the common herd of his equals in the holiday-time of the year, to plan his own campaign, to look after his own dogs, to put up with a good deal of hard work and

generally very plain fare and quarters. Great as is the number of these, they are lost to their friends in so vast a space as the sporting-grounds of America. What is known as society contributes largely to this annually increasing body; but society, having no connection with the land which produces the game, has no motive for concerning itself about the doings of members who abjure its fascinations for a month in the Adirondacks, the Alleghanies, or the Carolinas. So even the bestintroduced traveller does not hear much sporting talk in the gay centres which he visits; and when he adds another book of first impressions of America to the astounding list of such works already on Mr. Mudie's catalogue, he generally informs his readers that "Americans don't care for field - sports." The admirable sporting papers circulating throughout every part of Canada and the Union, the gun-stores and tackleshops that abound in the main streets of the principal cities, do not seem to have any effect in dispelling this extraordinary delusion.

To place the American or Virginian quail (ortyx Virginiana) at the head of the American game list might at the first sight seem somewhat arbitrary. To Englishmen the quail mostly means the little migratory European or Eastern bird of that species; and the latter, though entitled no doubt to honourable mention, can hardly be associated with so exalted a position as that claimed for its larger American relative. The American duck-shooter, moreover, from his sinkbox on the Chesapeake shore or his club-house on Wisconsin lakes, will no doubt protest against such an elevation of the beautiful and game Virginian bird. The chicken-shooter of the west may perhaps affect contempt

for the dimensions of our little friend "Bob White," and point to the noble form of the pinnated grouse, as with defiant crow and thunderous whirr he springs from the prairie grass. The frequenter of Appalachian forests may swear there is no satisfaction like that of trudging homeward on an October night with a hardly-earned four brace of ruffed grouse. The cock-shooter of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or Maine, may recall the delighted yap of his spaniel in the crisp autumn woods as the sweetest of all music, but for "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," and not only that, but as affording the highest class of sport, and demanding at the same time the greatest smartness with the gun, the quail has no rival among American birds. I venture to go even further, and affirm in my partiality that he has no equal anywhere. The quail is, in short, over a considerable slice of North America what the partridge is with us. Other varieties of American winged game vanish before civilisation, but the quail, in a majority of the older states, has survived the cultivation of two centuries; nay, where that cultivation is careless and natural conditions are favourable, he has flourished with unremitting vigour. His piping His piping call in spring-time sounds from the very garden fences of homesteads whose walls and porches are tottering with respectable old age. He springs He springs with his brood in autumn from stubbles whence the stumps had rotted long before George Washington was born. Civilisation, when not too violent, is to the quail rather a friend than a foe; wherever grain-growing is most general, provided that woodlands and running streams are plentiful, there in most abundance will he be found. Like his cousin, the English partridge, the Virginian quail is a product of the soil and clings to the lands that reared him. The landowner feels a natural sense of proprietorship in the quail that does not apply to the duck, the woodcock, or the ruffed grouse. The farmer has watched

his birds through the cycle of the year; has listened to the "Ah, Bob White! ah, Bob White!" that with the fall of the apple blossoms begins to fill the air; has stumbled upon their nests perchance later on among the clover fields, and protected the eggs from the teeth of the mower and the clutch of the ruthless Ethiopian. In the warm days of August and September he has come again and again upon the infant coveys, and watched them fluttering up like sparrows from the thickets and brushy watercourses where they hide from the hawks which sweep unmolested through the air. So when the strong, full-grown birds come out upon the November stubbles to feed and become ripe for the sportsman, they occupy a position in the estimation of the community somewhat different from any other Transatlantic game - bird. They are recognised, not merely by a written law that sometimes does not amount to much beyond the Atlantic, but by a yet stronger unwritten law, as appurtenances of the land which reared them. The lower class American, who owns no land of his own, as a general thing resents nothing more than the preservation of game and close seasons of all kinds, but even he has been forced to tacitly acknowledge the domestic position of the quail. To open a cannonade within sight of a man's window, or to beat a stubble-field where his horses are ploughing, is not quite the same thing as traversing a prairie, a mountain, or a forest in which, though ownership exists, it has made no visible impress. Private property in land is nowhere held more sacred than in America. Legislation which interfered with the rights of property would nowhere upon earth be so resented as in the Western Republic. So when the pursuit of game (theoretically in America common property) entails evident intrusion or trespass upon a farmer's fields, the most democratic and coarse-natured hunter instinctively comes to a halt outside the gate.