PHILIP JAMES BAILEY-RICHARD HENRY

HORNE.

PHILIP JAMES BAILEY was born at Basford, county of Nottingham, in 1816. He was educated in his native town and at Glasgow University, after which he studied for the bar. In 1819 he produced his first and greatest poem, Festus, subsequently enlarged, and now in its fifth edition. The next work of the poet was The Angel World, 1850, which was followed in 1855 by The Mystic, and in 1858 Mr Bailey published The Age, a Colloquial Satire. All of these works, excepting the last, are in blank verse, and have one tendency and object-to describe the history of a divinely instructed mind or soul, soaring upwards to communion with the universal life.' With the boldness of Milton, Mr Bailey passes' the flaming bounds of space and time,' and carries his Mystic even into the presence of the 'fontal Deity.' His spiritualism and symbolical meanings are frequently incomprehensible, and his language crude and harsh, with affected archaisms. Yet there are fragments of beautiful and splendid imagery in the poems, and a spirit of devotional rapture that has recommended them to many who rarely read poetry. The Colloquial Satire is a failure -mere garrulity and slipshod criticism. Thus of

war:

Of all conceits misgrafted on God's Word,
A Christian soldier seems the most absurd.
That Word commands us so to act in all things,
As not to hurt another e'en in small things.
To flee from anger, hatred, bloodshed, strife;
To pray for, and to care for others' life.
A Christian soldier's duty is to slay,
Wound, harass, slaughter, hack in every way
Those men whose souls he prays for night and day;
With what consistency let prelates say.
He's told to love his enemies; don't scoff;
He does so; and with rifles picks them off.
He's told to do to all as he'd be done

By, and he therefore blows them from a gun;
To bless his foes, he 'hangs them up like fun.'

We may contrast this doggerel with a specimen of Mr Bailey's ambitious blank verse, descriptive of the solitary, mystic recluse, dwelling ‘lion-like within the desert:'

Lofty and passionless as date-palm's bride,
High on the upmost summits of his soul-
Wrought of the elemental light of heaven,
And pure and plastic flame that soul could shew,
Whose nature, like the perfume of a flower
Enriched with aromatic sun-dust, charms
All, and with all ingratiates itself,
Sat dazzling Purity; for loftiest things,
Snow-like, are purest. As in mountain morns
Expectant air the sun-birth, so his soul
Her God into its supranatural depths
Accepted brightly and sublimely. Vowed
To mystic visions of supernal things;
Daily endowed with spheres and astral thrones,
His, by pre-emptive right, throughout all time;
Immerged in his own essence, clarified
From all those rude propensities which rule
Man's heart, a tyrant mob, and, venal, sell
All virtues-ay, the crown of life-to what
Passion soe'er prepotent, worst deludes
Or deftliest flatters, he, death-calm, beheld,
As though through glass of some far-sighting tube,
The restful future; and, consummed in bliss,

In vital and ethereal thought abstract, The depth of Deity and heights of heaven. Or the following fine lines from Festus:

We live in deeds, not years, in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives

Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
And he whose heart beats quickest lives the longest :
Lives in one hour more than in years do some
Whose fat blood sleeps as it slips along the veins.
Life is but a means unto an end; that end,
Beginning, mean, and end to all things-God.
The dead have all the glory of the world.
And on universal love :

Love is the happy privilege of the mind-
Love is the reason of all living things.
A Trinity there seems of principles,
Which represent and rule created life-
The love of self, our fellows, and our God.
In all throughout one common feeling reigns:
Each doth maintain, and is maintained by the other:
All are compatible--all needful; one

To life-to virtue one-and one to bliss:
Which thus together make the power, the end,
And the perfection of created Being.
From these three principles doth every deed,
Desire, and will, and reasoning, good or bad, come;
To these they all determine-sum and scheme:
The three are one in centre and in round;
Wrapping the world of life as do the skies
Our world. Hail! air of love, by which we live!
How sweet, how fragrant! Spirit, though unseen-
Void of gross sign-is scarce a simple essence,
Immortal, immaterial, though it be.

One only simple essence liveth-God-
Creator, uncreate. The brutes beneath,
The angels high above us, with ourselves,
Are but compounded things of mind and form.
In all things animate is therefore cored
An elemental sameness of existence;
For God, being Love, in love created all,
As he contains the whole and penetrates.
Seraphs love God, and angels love the good:
We love each other; and these lower lives,
Which walk the earth in thousand diverse shapes,
According to their reason, love us too:
The most intelligent affect us most.
Nay, man's chief wisdom 's love-the love of God.
The new religion-final, perfect, pure-
Was that of Christ and love. His great command-
His all-sufficing precept-was 't not love?
Truly to love ourselves we must love God-
To love God we must all his creatures love-
To love his creatures, both ourselves and Him.
Thus love is all that's wise, fair, good, and happy!

In 1867 Mr Bailey added to his poetical works a production in the style of his early Muse, entitled The Universal Hymn.

RICHARD HENRY HORNE, born in London in 1803, commenced active life as a midshipman in the Mexican navy. When the war between Mexico and Spain had ceased, Mr Horne returned to England and devoted himself to literature. He is the author of several dramatic pieces -Cosmo de Medici, 1837; The Death of Marlowe, 1838; and Gregory the Seventh, 1840. In 1841 he produced a Life of Napoleon; and in 1843, Orion, an Epic Poem, the most successful of his works, of which the ninth edition is now (1874) before us. In 1844 Mr Horne published two volumes of prose sketches entitled A New Spirit

of the Age, being short biographies, with criticism, of the most distinguished living authors. In 1846 appeared Ballad Romances; in 1848, Judas Iscariot, a Mystery Play; and in 1851, The Dreamer and the Worker, two vols. In 1852 Mr Horne went to Australia, and for some time held the office of Gold Commissioner. We may note that Orion was originally published at the price of one farthing, being an experiment upon the mind of a nation,' and 'as there was scarcely any instance of an epic poem attaining any reasonable circulation during its author's lifetime.' This nominal price saved the author 'the trouble and greatly additional expense of forwarding presentation copies,' which, he adds, 'are not always particularly desired by those who receive them.' Three of these farthing editions were published, after which there were several at a price which 'amply remunerated the publisher, and left the author no great loser.' Orion, the hero of the poem, was meant to present a type of the struggle of man with himself-that is, the contest between the intellect and the senses, when powerful energies are equally balanced.' The allegorical portion of the poem is defective and obscure, but it contains striking and noble passages.

The Progress of Mankind.-From 'Orion.'
The wisdom of mankind creeps slowly on,
Subject to every doubt that can retard,
Or fling it back upon an earlier time;
So timid are man's footsteps in the dark,
But blindest those who have no inward light.
One mind perchance in every age contains
The sum of all before, and much to come;
Much that's far distant still; but that full mind,
Companioned oft by others of like scope,
Belief, and tendency, and anxious will,
A circle small transpierces and illumes:
Expanding, soon its subtle radiance

Falls blunted from the mass of flesh and bone,
The man who for his race might supersede
The work of ages, dies worn out-not used,
And in his track disciples onward strive,
Some hair-breadths only from his starting-point :
Yet lives he not in vain; for if his soul
Hath entered others, though imperfectly,
The circle widens as the world spins round-

His soul works on while he sleeps 'neath the grass.
So let the firm Philosopher renew

His wasted lamp-the lamp wastes not in vain,
Though he no mirrors for its rays may see,

Nor trace them through the darkness; let the Hand
Which feels primeval impulses, direct

A forthright plough, and make his furrow broad,
With heart untiring while one field remains;
So let the herald poet shed his thoughts,
Like seeds that seem but lost upon the wind.
Work in the night, thou sage, while Mammon's brain
Teems with low visions on his couch of down;
Break thou the clods while high-throned Vanity,
Midst glaring lights and trumpets, holds its court;
Sing thou thy song amidst the stoning crowd,
Then stand apart, obscure to man, with God.

WILLIAM ALLINGHAM.

He was born in 1828, and from an early age contributed to periodical literature; removing. to England he obtained an appointment in the Customs. His publications are-Poems, 1850; Day and Night Songs, 1854; Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (a poem in twelve chapters), 1864; and Fifty Modern Poems, 1865. Mr Allingham says his works' claim to be 'genuine in their way.' They are free from all obscurity and mysticism, and evince a fine feeling for nature, as well as graceful fancy and poetic diction. Mr Allingham is editor of Fraser's Magazine.

To the Nightingales.

You sweet fastidious nightingales !
The myrtle blooms in Irish vales,
By Avondhu and rich Lough Lene,
Through many a grove and bowerlet green,
Fair-mirrored round the loitering skiff.
The purple peak, the tinted cliff,
The glen where mountain-torrents rave,
And foliage blinds their leaping wave,
Broad emerald meadows filled with flowers,
Embosomed ocean-bays are ours

With all their isles; and mystic towers
Lonely and gray, deserted long,

Less sad if they might hear that perfect song!

What scared ye? (ours, I think, of old)
The sombre fowl hatched in the cold?
King Henry's Normans, mailed and stern,
Smiters of galloglas and kern?1

Or, most and worst, fraternal feud,
Which sad Iernè long hath rued?
Forsook ye, when the Geraldine,
Great chieftain of a glorious line,
Was haunted on his hills and slain,
And, one to France and one to Spain,
The remnant of the race withdrew?
Was it from anarchy ye flew,

And fierce Oppression's bigot crew,
Wild complaint, and menace hoarse,
Misled, misleading voices, loud and coarse?

Come back, O birds, or come at last!
For Ireland's furious days are past;
And, purged of enmity and wrong,
Her eye, her step, grow calm and strong.
Why should we miss that pure delight?
Brief is the journey, swift the flight;
And Hesper finds no fairer maids
In Spanish bowers or English glades,
No loves more true on any shore,
No lovers loving music more.
Melodious Erin, warm of heart,
Entreats you; stay not then apart,
But bid the merles and throstles know

(And ere another May-time go)

Their place is in the second row.

Come to the west, dear nightingales! The rose and myrtle bloom in Irish vales.

ALFRED TENNYSON.

The kindly spot, the friendly town, where every one is known,

And not a face in all the place but partly seems my

own.

1 Galloglas-kern-Irish foot-soldier; the first heavy-armed, the second light.

* The mother of the laureate was also of a clerical family, daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche. His paternal grandfather

been a man remarkable for strength and stature, and for the energetic force of his character. This gentleman had a family of eleven or twelve children, seven of whom were sons.

The eldest three we have mentioned were all educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, pupils of Dr Whewell. Alfred was born in the parsonage of Somersby (near Spilsby) in 1810. In 1829, he gained the Chancellor's medal for the English prize poem, his subject being Timbuctoo. Previous to this, in conjunction with his brother Charles, he published anonymously a small volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers. In 1830 appeared Poems, chiefly Lyrical, by Alfred Tennyson. This volume contained poems since altered and incorporated in later collections. These early productions had the faults of youthful genius-irregularity, indistinctness of conception, florid puerilities, and occasional affectation. In such poems, however, as Mariana, Recollections of the Arabian Nights, and Claribel, it was obvious that a true original poet had arisen. In 1833, Mr Tennyson issued another volume, shewing an advance in poetical power and in variety of style, though the collection met with severe treatment from the critics. nine years the poet continued silent. In 1842, he reappeared with Poems, in two volumes-this third series being a reprint of some of the pieces in the former volumes considerably altered, with many new poems, including the most striking and popular of all his productions. These were of various classes-fragments of legendary and chivalrous story, as Morte d'Arthur, Godiva, &c.; or pathetic and beautiful, as The May Queen and Dora; or impassioned love-poems, as The Gardener's Daughter, The Miller's Daughter, The Talking Oak, and Locksley Hall. The last is the most finished of Tennyson's works, full of passionate grandeur and intensity of feeling and imagination. It partly combines the energy and impetuosity of Byron with the pictorial beauty and melody of Coleridge. The lover of Locksley Hall is ardent, generous, and noble-minded, 'nourishing a youth sublime' with lofty aspirations and dreams of felicity. His passion is at first returned :

Extracts from 'Locksley Hall.'

For

Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands;

Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;

Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight.

Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,

And our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips.

The fair one proves faithless, and after a tumult of conflicting passions-indignation, grief, self-reproach, and despair-the suf ferer finds relief in glowing visions of future enterprise and the world's progress.

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic

sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battleflags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal

law.

*The route from Alum Bay to Carisbrooke takes you past Farringford, where resides Alfred Tennyson. The house stands so far back as to be invisible from the road; but the grounds

A careless ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down-

And her whisper thronged my pulses with the fullness of the Spring.

was a Lincolnshire squire, owner of Bayons Manor and Usselby Hall-properties afterwards held by the poet's uncle, the Right Hon. Charles Tennyson D'Eyncourt, who assumed the name of D'Eyncourt to commemorate his descent from that ancient Norman family, and in compliance with a condition attached to the possession of certain manors and estates. The eldest of the laureate's brothers, Frederick, is author of a volume of poemsgraceful, but without any original distinctive character-entitled Days and Hours, 1854. Charles, the second brother, who joined with Alfred, as stated above, in the composition of a volume of verse, became vicar of Grassby, Lincolnshire, in 1835. He took the name of Turner, on succeeding to a property in Lincolnshire. In 1864, he published a volume of Sonnets.

the poem from which I have quoted-the invitation to the Rev. F. D. Maurice-he exactly describes the situation of Farringford:

For groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter, stand;
And further on, the hoary channel

Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand.

Every one well acquainted with Tennyson's writings will have noticed how the spirit of the scenery which he has depicted has changed from the glooming flats,' the 'level waste,' where 'stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,' which were the reflex of his Lincolnshire observation, to the beautiful meadow and orchard, thoroughly English ruralities of The Gardener's Daughter and The Brook. Many glimpses in the neighbourhood of Farringford will call to mind descriptive passages in these lastnamed poems.-Letter in the Daily News. The laureate has also an estate in Surrey (Aldworth, Haslemere), to which he retreats when the tourists and admirers become oppressive in the Isle of Wight.

A league of grass, washed by a slow broad stream,
That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge
Crowned with the minster towers.

The fields between

Are dewy-fresh, browsed by deep-uddered kine,
And all about the large lime feathers low,
The lime a summer home of murmurous wings.

The poet, while a dweller amidst the fens of Lincolnshire, painted morasses, quiet meres, and sighing reeds. The exquisitely modulated poem of The Dying Swan affords a picture drawn, we think, with wonderful delicacy:

Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows;

One willow over the river wept,

And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will;

And far through the marish green and still,
The tangled water-courses slept,

Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.

The ballad of The May Queen introduces similar scenery :

When the flowers come again, mother, beneath the waning light,

You'll never see me more in the long gray fields at night;

When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the pool.

The Talking Oak is the title of a fanciful and beautiful poem of seventy-five stanzas, in which a lover and an oak-tree converse upon the charms of a certain fair Olivia. The oak-tree thus describes to the lover her visit to the park in which it grew :

Extracts from 'The Talking Oak!

"Then ran she, gamesome as the colt, And livelier than a lark

She sent her voice through all the holt Before her, and the park. . . .

'And here she came, and round me played,

And sang to me the whole

Of those three stanzas that you made
About my “giant bole;"

'And in a fit of frolic mirth

She strove to span my waist: Alas! I was so broad of girth, I could not be embraced.

'I wished myself the fair young beech That here beside me stands,

That round me, clasping each in each, She might have locked her hands.'. . .

O muffle round thy knees with fern,
And shadow Sumner-chace!
Long may thy topmost branch discern
The roofs of Sumner-place!

But tell me, did she read the name
I carved with many vows,

When last with throbbing heart I came
To rest beneath thy boughs?

'O yes; she wandered round and round
These knotted knees of mine,
And found, and kissed the name she found,
And sweetly murmured thine.

'A tear-drop trembled from its source,
And down my surface crept.
My sense of touch is something coarse,
But I believe she wept.

"Then flushed her cheek with rosy light;
She glanced across the plain;
But not a creature was in sight:
She kissed me once again.

'Her kisses were so close and kind,
That, trust me on my word,
Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind,
But yet my sap was stirred:

'And even into my inmost ring

A pleasure I discerned,

Like those blind motions of the Spring, That shew the year is turned. ..

'I, rooted here among the groves, But languidly adjust

My vapid vegetable loves

With anthers and with dust:

He laughed, and swore by Peter and by Paul:
Then filliped at the diamond in her ear;

O ay, ay, ay, you talk!'-'Alas!' she said, 'But prove me what it is I would not do.' And from a heart as rough as Esau's hand,

He answered: 'Ride you naked through the town,
And I repeal it ;' and nodding as in scorn,
He parted, with great strides among his dogs.
So left alone, the passions of her mind-
As winds from all the compass shift and blow-
Made war upon each other for an hour,
Till pity won. She sent a herald forth,
And bade him cry, with sound of trumpet, all
The hard condition; but that she would loose
The people: therefore, as they loved her well,
From then till noon no foot should pace the street,
No eye look down, she passing; but that all
Should keep within, door shut, and window barred.
Then fled she to her inmost bower, and there
Unclasped the wedded eagles of her belt,
The grim Earl's gift; but ever at a breath
She lingered, looking like a summer moon
Half-dipt in cloud: anon she shook her head,
And showered the rippled ringlets to her knee;
Unclad herself in haste; adown the stair
Stole on; and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid
From pillar unto pillar, until she reached
The gateway; there she found her palfrey trapt
In purple blazoned with armorial gold.

Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity:
The deep air listened round her as she rode,
And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.
The little wide-mouthed heads upon the spouts
Had cunning eyes to see: the barking cur
Made her cheek flame: her palfrey's footfall shot
Light horrors through her pulses: the blind walls
Were full of chinks and holes; and overhead
Fantastic gables, crowding, stared: but she
Not less through all bore up, till, last, she saw
The white-flowered elder-thicket from the field
Gleam through the Gothic archways in the wall.
Then she rode back, clothed on with chastity:
And one low churl, compact of thankless earth,
The fatal byword of all years to come,
Boring a little auger-hole in fear,
Peeped-but his eyes, before they had their will,
Were shrivelled into darkness in his head,

And dropt before him. So the Powers, who wait
On noble deeds, cancelled a sense misused;
And she, that knew not, passed: and all at once,
With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless

noon

Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers,
One after one: but even then she gained
Her bower; whence reissuing, robed and crowned,
To meet her lord, she took the tax away,
And built herself an everlasting name.

An extract from The Lotos-eaters will give a specimen of our poet's modulations of rhythm. This poem represents the luxurious lazy sleepiness said to be produced in those who feed upon the lotos, and contains passages not surpassed by the finest descriptions in the Castle of Indolence. It is rich in striking and appropriate imagery, and is sung to a rhythm which is music itself.

Lo! in the middle of the wood,

The folded leaf is wooed from out the bud
With winds upon the branch, and there
Grows green and broad, and takes no care,
Sun-steeped at noon, and in the moon
Nightly dew-fed ; and turning yellow
Falls, and floats adown the air.

Lo! sweetened with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night.
All its allotted length of days,
The flower ripens in its place,

Ripens and fades, and falls, and hath no toil,
Fast-rooted in the fruitful soil. ...

How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,
With half-shut eyes ever to seem
Falling asleep in a half-dream!...
To hear each other's whispered speech;
Eating the lotos day by day,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,
And tender curving lines of creamy spray;
To lend our hearts and spirits wholly
To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;
To muse and brood and live again in memory,
With those old faces of our infancy,

Heaped over with a mound of grass,

Two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!

The most prominent defects in these volumes of Mr Tennyson were occasional quaintness and obscurity of expression, with some incongruous combinations of low and familiar with poetical images. His next work, The Princess, a Medley, appeared in December 1847. This is a story of a prince and princess contracted by their parents without having seen each other. The lady repudiates the alliance; but after a series of adventures and incidents as improbable and incoherent as the plots of some of the old wild Elizabethan tales and dramas, the princess relents and surrenders. The mixture of modern ideas and manners with those of the age of chivalry and romance-the attempted amalgamation of the conventional with the real, the farcical with the sentimental-renders The Princess truly a medley, and produces an unpleasing grotesque effect. Parts of the poem, however, are sweetly written; there are subtle touches of thought and satire, and some exquisite lyrical passages. Tennyson has nothing finer than these stanzas: