equal term for English poetry. An artist in every line; and dead in despair at failure at twenty-six ! I should myself be sorry, I confess, if the waters of England's Helicon were such alone as Keats drew up. Temples dedicated to the exclusive worship of the Goddess Beauty are apt to be served by sordid ministers. The deity they adore is often a tawdry nymph. Fanes of the Muses ought to be veritable Pantheons, with room for shrines of all the Graces and Virtues. Tenderness, Lovingkindness, Heroism, Faith, and innocent Joy have a right to make their home there; and a Chapel should be consecrated to Sorrow. Not all in Keats's ideal loveliness is real. Many of the supposed classic forms rising from his pages, their locks dewy with liquid unguents, their ivory lips and cheeks made to blush rosy-red as over-animated flesh, are exhalations of a feverish fancy. The sturdy frequenters of the Mermaid might have mocked at some of the magically wrought phantasms. Too much of the landscape is scene-painting. Rude botanists would scoff at the fairy forests and garden-land of the exiled Titans. No lark carols here with the freshness of the Ayrshire ploughman's. The Muse is bidden to keep company with sculptured funeral urns and the sweet-spiced ashes therein, instead of kindling living hearts. But I repent. Let me be forgiven for having been tempted to dwell on a sombre truism, which, after all, is only a half-truth. Side by side with it stands, as I gladly acknowledge, another, that genius has manifold forms. One poet now and then may be spared from the dull haunts of men to roam, enchanted and enchanting, through moonlit forest glades. It is good to be reminded from time to time that the duty of poetry is not to sew and spin; its first obligation, to be fulfilled on pain of being not poetry at all, is to be beautiful as a lily of the field. Keats was born in an age of brute military force. Humanity had been vulgarized by political panic or ambition. Ideas with no money or physical power in them were despised. His nature revolted in disgust. In defiance he set up the image of Beauty to be worshipped. At least the service carried men outside their own poor selves; it fascinated, and refined. Who, old or young, can recall the first revelation to him of The Eve of St. Agnes, the Nightingale Ode, Hyperion, without feeling how, while he read, an ocean seemed to roll illimitably before his eyes, as the Iliad, a new planet, swam into the ken of John Keats! The Poetical Works of John Keats: with a Memoir by Richard Monckton Milnes. New Edition. E. Moxon, 1854. 1 Endymion, Book IV, p. 192. 3 Hyperion, Book II, p. 303. 5 Ode on Melancholy, p. 252. 2 Ibid., Book I, p. 85. • Ode on a Grecian Urn, p. 241. ? Lines on the Mermaid Tavern, p. 253. 16 Hyperion, Book I, pp. 191-2. CHARLES WOLFE 1791-1823 I HAD doubted whether to assign a place to Wolfe's poems rather than to him. Finally, I decided that his nature was too much of a poem for his work not to be classed by his personality. In his schoolboy days at Winchester he was a poet. His lines on the raising of Lazarus show distinct poetic insight. Their note is the feeling of Jesus for others' grief': He knew what pains must pierce a sister's heart.1 It is the same with his prize poem on the Death of Abel : Nor could his lips a deep-drawn sigh restrain, Not for himself he sigh'd-he sigh'd for Cain.2 Throughout a brilliant career at Trinity, Dublin, it was as a poet that he was particularly recognized. An old air could not sound in his ears without hastening to embody itself in melodious verse. His few songs, the poem itself by which he is immortalized, were emotions translated instantly into language. His biographer, who cannot be accused of poetical enthusiasm, describes the effect of music upon his imagination: he felt all its poetry; it transported him.' The same friend recollects how, captivated by a national Spanish air, Viva el Rey Fernando, he 'commenced singing it over and over again, until he produced an English song admirably suited to the tune'. He had music in his heart. There, after the close of his College career, it stayed, mute, but a sweetening influence. It would be romantic to lay down purity in act as a necessary condition of poetic power. Unfortunately a high sensibility constantly tends to lead astray. Not the less true is it that delicacy of feeling, shrinking from grossness of every sort, generosity, and an ideal capacity for friendship, make the poetry of life. They had always been the essence of Wolfe's, while he still sang. Self-sacrifice caused him to abandon, from fear of paining his mother, early thoughts of the Army. Later, religious devotion led him to abjure versifying. When he cast himself outside his academic circle of worshippers, his passion of charity sustained him in the grim. solitude of his curacy in Tyrone. There it won him the equal adoration of three mutually hostile types of so-called Christianity, agreeing only in common hatred of a fourth, the one he was bound to represent. The good Archdeacon, to whom we owe the sketch of his career, portrays the beautiful modesty, simplicity, piety, sympathy, courage, of the youth with all gentle, well-bred tastes and habits, in his new home, a peasant's cabin. Poetizing, the 'mere inspiration of the Muse', the Archdeacon treats as the less important, the less serious' phase of his character. In truth Wolfe was doubtless as essentially a poet in the wilds of Tyrone and Donoughmore as in his Scholar's rooms in Trinity. The splendour of fancy glorified his ruinous, mouldy cottage, and inspired the consolation he carried to many a typhus-stricken hut. 6 His was a noble spirit, entirely consistent with a poet's, yet not in itself necessarily implying it. I am sensible accordingly of the need for an apology when I number him with poets by profession. Obviously I cannot justify it on the ground of virtues happily not a monopoly of any special vocation. I have to rely on his poetical inspiration; and his fits of that, I am aware, are, as evidenced in print, to be measured less by years, than by months or weeks, perhaps by days and hours. The actual bulk of his entire poetical production is scanty indeed. Apart from school and college exercises, it consists of half a dozen songs. Several are pretty and graceful. Yet, on their own merits, I could not claim that they would have survived even their author's brief existence. What then remains? Why, beside, rather than among, the meagre rest, just two of the loveliest flowers in the garden of English verse! The entire Anglo-Saxon world is familiar with the poem on the Burial of Sir John Moore. If I give it here in full, it chiefly is for convenience of comparison with another piece by Wolfe as admirable in a different way : Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note As his corse to the rampart we hurried; We buried him darkly at dead of night, No useless coffin enclosed his breast, Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him ; Few and short were the prayers we said, We thought as we hollow'd his narrow bed That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head, |