When he has passed away: And in the meadowy stretch aloof, The puffed fowl feed with querulous whine: So for the soul he loves, his soul shall ever shine The plain spreads, light and shade in line. and pray. VI. The death-calm air is full Of noises dim and faint, That swoon awhile, and lull, Like memories of a saint Ever again a dismal ray O'er the dumb distance, low gray hill EVENING. The sound of withering sycamores, the late bird's Slant flashed the windy sunset's glare lonely plaint. VII. The dull stone clash of spades Of grass and tree grown sere, O'er the sad green upland meadow, And noises on the stillness ebbing from the dis- Shivers in th' uneasy air; tance drear. VIII. The level waves of day Are sinking down the west, Through vistas golden gay Of dark old oaks at rest, The sun amid a wildering haze, Drops through the wild March evening weather, Weep the trickling autumn leaves upon her silent That through the leaden twilight bare, breast. IX. Along each cypress row, Stirred by the phantom breath, Flames as it sinks beneath Shivers beside the casement blind, APRIL. Now from the last of winter skies So toward her dust, where'er he falls, shall turn And dewy April seems to rise WILDLY and clear breaks the blue morn, Out of the clear soft close of day. At morn in cosy nooks again, And o'er their misty marges shine, Is like this sweet memorial rose, That guards a grave-stone still and gray. Tis sweet spring eve in the old elm wood, Looks out to see the cowslips blow. Steadily homeward sails the crow, The wooded isles, and glimmeringly GENETHLIOS MONASTIKOS. I RISE from dreams of the dead, and all alone or another, either direct or second-hand, that anything which helps us to discriminate between what is a good style and what is a bad style in a critic-between the kinds of criticism that are best suited to this or that set of subjects, and most likely to correct and balance the tendencies of the prevailing modes of thought of a given time or a given class of readersmust be very useful, and ought to be made the most of. M. Sainte Beuve, in one of his recently republished Causeries, raises a point of this kind. He insists that observation of character is one of the most important functions of criticism. The examination of a book is principally valuable when it is the means of making us acquainted with some more examples of our kind, and we have not got the best out of a book unless it has taught us something of the nature of the man or woman by whom it was written. As Joubert put it, "knowledge of character is the charm of criticism." The most interesting thing, therefore, about a work is not so much what it is in its results, as by what means and under what conditions it came to be executed. The business of the critic is less to point out what seems to be wise or foolish, true or false, than to furnish explanations from the life of the writer of the excellence or worthlessness of what he has written. Each shoal and creek burns out in sullen flame ought to set himself to answer is not The question which a philosophic critic Passed is that soul to the unknown land of God, Around me beat the waves amid the rocks, Glare with a piteous ghastness round the coast; Fades, darkens, and is gone. And then around Saturday Review. T. IRWIN. AUTHORS AND BOOKS. CRITICISM fills so large a space in the thought and literature of the time, and people who think about it at all hold such widely different views both as to the ends at which criticism should aim and the most effective way of reaching such ends, that there is scarcely any minor subject to which it is better worth while for readers, as well as writers, to recur. We all take in so much criticism in one shape what is the value of the book, but what new glimpse into the intricacies of human character does it offer? And, in order to answer this question adequately, it is of course necessary to know as much as possible of the circumstances by which an author was surrounded, of his origin, of his friends, of his habits. "What were his opinions in the matter of religion? How was he affected by external nature? How did he conduct himself in the matter of women? in the matter of money? Was he rich or poor? What were his habits, what was his daily plan of life?" Not one of these questions, we are assured, is indifferent in judging any book other than a treatise on pure geometry. "Literary production," in short, says M. Sainte-Beuve, "is to me in no way distinct, or at least separable, from the rest of the man and his organization. I can relish a book, but it is difficult for me to judge of it independently of any knowledge of the man himself." Coming from one who is perhaps the most accomplished of living critics, this view is particularly worth considering. Within certain limits, it is a view with which nobody is likely to quarrel. The more we know about men, especially about men of exceptional talent or genius, the more we may be expected to have our sympathies widened and our practical judgment of character expanded and refined. Even if we do not care to imitate the conduct of a man of genius "in the matter of money, in the matter of women, in his daily plan of life," it is impossible for us to know too much of plans of life which rest on principles opposed to our own. Such knowledge is the only means of keeping the mind clear from that pedantic conceit which makes what the French call a Grocer, and the Germans a Philistine. Some men, again, of whom Dr. Johnson is the almost proverbial type, interest us solely by their characters and plans of life, and not at all by what they have written. Their writings may first have drawn our attention to them, but it is not their writings for which they are most valued. Dr. Arnold, and, in a less degree, Edward Irving are more recent examples of men whose biographies will be more durable than their own books and sermons. And, in judging of the scope and force of a man's genius, we ought clearly to take into account all the external circumstances of his life which were of a kind to restrict the free play of his powers in their own proper bounds. A critic would have a very poor notion of his business who attempted to estimate the natural genius and vigor of Shelley without reference to the fact that he was only in his twentyninth year when he was drowned; or of Byron, without remembering that he was an aristocrat, and had a very unwise woman for his mother. So far as all this goes, M. Sainte-Beuve's position is impregnable. The knowledge of the character of an author is always interesting. There are some authors whose character is the most interesting thing about them. And, thirdly, in the words of M. Villemain, "it is only by studying a man's entire life, his character, his habitual thoughts, that we can gain a thorough understanding of his works and his talent." One of the chief merits of a very eminent English writer of the present day is the prominence which he has given to this view. Those who have read the essays on Burns and on Johnson, on Diderot and on Voltaire, have been most effectually taught that there is no divorcing a man from his book; or, in other words, that a book is, after all, only one portion, and perhaps not the most important portion, of the author's whole existence. Even while we admire the interest and graphic force which the adoption of this view lends to the more elaborate pieces of criticism, it is impossible to help noticing that such a view is apt to lead to a confusion between the two distinct provinces of the critic and the moralist. The function of the moralist may be much loftier and more valuable than that of the genuine critic, but it does not lie in the same matter, nor seek the same end. A moralist is concerned with conduct, a critic with intellectual ideas and the forms of expressing ideas-in other words, with thought and style. It may, indeed, be justly said that a man's conduct is more or less regulated by his ideas, and, by the force of an inevitable re-action, his ideas in turn are powerfully colored by his conduct. This is quite true. Still, the thoughts are one thing and the conduct is another, and it is proper that they should be looked at from different points of view, and judged in different ways. A man's life and his book may shed some light on one another, but we may have good reasons for thinking the book very excellent and admirable, and the life just the reverse; as, on the other hand, we may revere a man's conduct, and yet deem what he writes and publishes to be the greatest trash in the world. It is the business of two men, or at least of one man in two quite different capacities, to point out whatever may be worth pointing out in the conduct and character of an author, and to show us what is good and bad, lofty and mean, in his writings. The moralist or the moralizing biographer does the first, the genuine critic the second. To borrow an illustration from painting. Can we not pronounce a judgment on Turner's landscapes and sea-pieces until we have first carefully investigated the truth of the stories about his avarice, and his found out how the philosopher, the poet, orgies at Wapping, and all the rest of it? and the satirist comported themselves Anybody who was writing an essay on in the matters of money and women. As Turner's life or character would nat- has been admitted, there is something in urally busy himself with these stories, this view; but, unless vigilantly kept unand, if they were true, might find exten- der, it is so pleasant to the indolence of uating circumstances, or, if he could not writers who prefer easy gossip about even do that, might bid the rest of us not to people, and vague fine-sounding generalbe too ready to throw stones. But a man ities about life, to the more troublesome might write the truest and most instruc- process of seeking truth, that it would tive criticism upon Turner's pictures, and soon grow so rank as to conceal the highyet never have known Turner's name or a est and most valuable side of criticism. single incident of his life. And in poetry M. Sainte-Beuve seerns to think that the and history, and every other department first thing with which a critic ought to of literature and thought, the case is ex- busy himself in a book is to discover its actly the same. We can judge the work origin, to explain how the ideas which it without judging the workman. The embodies came to enter the head of the critic, as such, confines himself to the author, and, in order to do this, of course product, and leaves the habits of the pro- he must know all about the author's habits ducer to the moralist. Take Words- and mode of life. This is all very well worth's poems, for instance. If Mr. in its place, if the author belongs to the Carlyle were to write upon them, they small band of men the origin of whose would be the text for a vigorous and pen- ideas it is at all instructive to seek out. etrating essay, not upon the poems at all, But in no case does it comprise the critic's but upon the sincerity and honesty of first duty; and there never was a time Wordsworth's nature, and upon the re- when this fact, that merely to "account buke which his simple life conveyed to an for" his author's doctrines or style is not artificial and grossly material age. The the critic's first duty, was in more pressresult would be a piece of moralizing, in ing need of being recognized. And, in which logical flaws enough might be using the word critic, we mean, of course, found, but which, on the whole, young as much the critical reader as the man men would feel to be very inspiring and who writes criticisms for others. If a elevating. Still this is not criticism. It poem appears, everybody's earliest care may be a much finer thing than the fash- seems to be to classify it, to place it in a ion in which Lord Jeffrey wrote about school, to trace the influences to which Wordsworth; but then Jeffrey was not the poet has been most susceptible. The a moralist, and Mr. Carlyle is not a critic question whether the poem is in itself a in the sense in which Jeffrey was a critic. work of art is looked upon as quite subWe think, then, that M. Sainte-Beuve's sidiary. If a philosopher gives birth to idea tends and among inferior writers a new speculation, the only thing, apthe tendency may be seen very plainly-parently, with which we need trouble to extinguish criticism proper, and to substitute for it either pleasant biographical gossip or else a never-ending stream of sermonizing. In France there would be most of the gossip, and among our selves most of the sermonizing. Instead of examining the thing written, men would all begin to twaddle, either anecdotically or morally, about the writer. The purveyors of little items of the personal history of authors would become the critic's most valuable auxiliaries. It would be impossible to pronounce upon the worth of the speculations of a philosopher, or the beauty and tenderness of a poet, or the vigor and depth of a satirist, till we had ourselves is to ascertain how he came to conceive such a speculation. The question of its soundness ought only to come before the critic in a dim and imperfect way. About that there is nothing urgent. All the time we forget that, under such conditions, there would be no such thing as criticism. There would be a history of opinon and a history of the various conceptions of beauty; but criticism is the process of answering, as well as the critic's light enables him, the two questions whether this work of art is more beautiful and finished than another, whether this opinion is truer than another. If there is any substance whatever in the The superiority, mental and bodily, of his elder brother-though Ebenezer never envied it-cast him into insignificance and comparative idiocy, and could hardly fail to throw a shade of sadness over a nature dull and slow, but thoughtful and affectionate. Sowerby's English Botany' made him a collector of plants, and Thomson's 'Seasons' a versifier, in the crisis of his fate, when it was doubtful whether he would become a man or a maltworm; shortly afterwards, or about which time, the curate of Middlesmoor conceptions, of Art in one department of is altogether the poet of circumstances. literature, and of Truth in another-and the practical worth of the conceptions is quite independent of the great controversy as to there being absolute truth and absolute beauty-then every book, from a five-act tragedy to a treatise on logic, is in the first place to be brought up and measured by these standards. To explain and account for a book being good or bad will generally be interesting and instructive; but it is much more important to us to know whether the ideas which it contains are worth little, or much, or nothing. In order to ascertain this, we need know positively nothing about the writer's dealings in the matters of women and money. Art Journal. MEMORIES OF THE AUTHORS OF BY 8. C. HALL, F.S.A., AND MRS. 8. C. HALL. EBENEZER ELLIOTT. IN 1837 I received this letter from Ebenezer Elliott:-"I was born at Masbro, in the parish of Kimberworth, a village about five miles from this place (Sheffield), on the 17th of March, 1781; but my birth was never registered except in a Bible, my father being a Dissenter and thorough hater of the Church as by law established;" and not long afterwards he gave me some further particulars of his life. There can be no reason why I should not print them, although they were supplied to me as notes, out of which I was to write a memoir to accompany some selections of his poems in the Book of Gems. "Ebenezer Elliott-not ill-treated, but neglected in his boyhood, on account of his supposed inability to learn anything useful suffered to go to school, or to stay away, just as he pleased, and employ, at his own sweet will, those years which often leave an impression on the future man that lasts till the grave covers him-listening to the plain, or coarse, and sometimes brutal, but more often instructive and pathetic, conversation of workmen, or wandering in the woods and fields, till he was thirteen years old a lonely hamlet in Craven-died, and left his father a library of many hundred valuable books, among which were 'Father Herepin's Travels of M. de la Salle in America,' the Royal Magazine,' with colored plates in natural history, Ray's Wisdom of God in the Creation,' Derham's Physico-Theology,' Hervey's Meditations,' and Barrow's 'Sermons,' which latter author was a great favorite with the future rhymer, he being then deeply shadowed over with a religion of horrors, and finding relief in Barrow's reasoning from the dreadful declamation which it was his misfortune hourly to hear. To these books, and to the conversation and amateur preaching of his father, an old Cameronian and born rebel, who preached by the hour that God could not damn him, and that hell was hung round with span-long children-to these circumstances, and to the pictures of Israel Putnam, George Washington, Oliver Cromwell, &c., with which the walls of the parlor were covered, followed by the events of the French revolution and awful reign of terror, may clearly traced the poet's character, literary and political, as it exists at this moment. Blessed or cursed with a hatred of wasted labor, he was never known to read a bad book through, but he has read again and again, and deeply studied all the masterpieces of the mind, original and translated, and the masterpieces only; a circumstance to which, more than to any other, he attributes his success such as it is. He does not now know, for he never could learn, grammar, but corrects errors in composition by reflection, and often tells the learned, ‘that the mouth is older than the alphabet.' There is not, he says, a good thought in be |