And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
The full streams feed on flowers of rushes,
Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot,

The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes
From leaf to flower and flower to fruit ;
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire,
And the oat is heard above the lyre,
And the hoofèd heel of a satyr crushes

The chestnut husk at the chestnut-root.
And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,
Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Manad and the Bassarid;

And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

The ivy falls with the Bacchanal's hair
Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes;
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare

Her bright breast shortening into sighs;

The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves,
But the berried ivy catches and cleaves
To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare
The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies.

It may seem superfluous to praise the metrical splendour of this immortal lyric, but one may pardonably dwell on the magical effect produced by the introduction of the couplet after the fourth line; by the choice of a dactyl for the opening of the second stanza instead of the anapæst used for the opening of the first stanza; and by the thunderous reiteration of the word 'fire' in the fourth line of the third stanza.

It must be admitted that in rhymed iambic measures Mr Swinburne is often too diffuse and too alliterative. This is due partly to his training in dancing metres, and partly to his undoubted passion for sacrificing the demands of the eye to the demands of the ear. His habit of allowing the rhyme to master his imagination continually retards the imaginative περιπέτεια :

For rhyme the rudder is of verses,

With which, like ships, they steer their courses. Indeed, it must be said that no great poet has ever defied so defiantly the maxim, Ars est celare artem. He seems to reveal his art as carefully as other poets conceal it. But it would be absurd to suppose that he does so by chance and not by design. He doubtless deliberately accepts the loss in illusion for the sake of the gain in music. It is uncritical, therefore, to censure as insincerity what is evidently a deliberate means towards a definite end. The question whether the end justifies the means is a question of ear as well as eye; for undoubtedly undue servility to the eye tends towards metrical monotony as great as the metrical monotony produced by undue servility to the ear.

On the whole, it must be allowed that Mr Swinburne, by vindicating the stifled claims of lyrical music, has enriched our poetry with an almost inexhaustible variety of new rhythms, new metres, new measures, and new rhymes. He has, indeed, no rival as a metrical inventor. As a specimen of his extreme subtlety in this respect, it is sufficient to cite 'Super Flumina Babylonis,' one of the many grandly sonorous metrical structures which he has built upon the prose cadences of the Old Testament:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
Remembering thee,

That for ages of agony hast endured, and slept,
And wouldst not see.

Apart from its rhythmical beauty, this poem illustrates the Hebraic temper of the poet's genius. In prophetic grandeur and moral sublimity he is close of kin to the great Israelitish seers. His imaginative metempsychosis of the august Hebrew spirit is, indeed, one of the most original features of his poetry, and suggests a comparison with Milton's Hebraism which would, however, take us too far afield.

Another marvellous feat of metrical creation is the Koppós in Atalanta, remarkable for rhythmical qualities quite different from those displayed in the poems already mentioned:

Meleager.

Let your hands meet

Round the weight of my head;

Lift ye my feet

As the feet of the dead;

For the flesh of my body is molten, the limbs of it molten as lead. . .

Unto each man his fate;

Unto each as he saith In whose fingers the weight

Of the world is as breath;

Yet I would that in clamour of battle mine hands had laid hold upon death. . . .

Would God he had found me
Beneath fresh boughs!

Would God he had bound me

Unawares in mine house,

With light in mine eyes, and songs in my lips, and a crown on my brows! . . .

But thou, O mother,

The dreamer of dreams,

Wilt thou bring forth another

To feel the sun's beams

When I move among shadows a shadow, and wail by impassable streams? . . .

Chorus.

When thou dravest the men Of the chosen of Thrace, None turned him again

Nor endured he thy face

Clothed round with the blush of the battle, with light from a terrible place.

Oeneus.

Thou shouldst die as he dies

For whom none sheddeth tears;

Filling thine eyes

And fulfilling thine ears

With the brilliance of battle, the bloom and the beauty,

the splendour of spears. . .

Meleager.

For the dead man no home is;

Ah, better to be

What the flower of the foam is

In fields of the sea

That the sea-waves might be as my raiment, the gulfstream a garment for me. . . .

Would the winds blow me back?

Or the waves hurl me home?

Ah, to touch in the track

Where the pine learnt to roam

Cold girdles and crowns of the sea-gods, cool blossoms of water and foam !

In all poetry there is no funeral dirge so heavily melancholy, so sorrowfully dolorous, so plangently solemn. The rhythms and the rhymes rise and fall like the slow feet of mourners, and the syllables beat with the very pulse of grievous despair. Another kind of metrical invention is found in The Eve of Revolution,' where the magnificent sublimity of the music is heightened and deepened by the splendid leitmotif of the trumpet that breaks up the night. Tremendous are the metrical antitheses and antiphones in Tristram of Lyonesse, notably in the book entitled 'Iseult at Tintagel,' where the wind and the sea chant a terrible choral accompaniment to the anguish of the Queen :

But came and stood above him newly dead,
And felt his death upon her, and her head
Bowed, as to reach the spring that slakes all drouth,
And their four lips became one silent mouth.

In many respects Tristram of Lyonesse must be regarded as Mr Swinburne's masterpiece. It is the noblest lyrical epic' in our literature. In it the heroic couplet is transformed from the cold artificial cadence of Dryden and Pope into a grandly sonorous and sinuous rhythmical life, full of cunningly linked harmonies and anapæstic undulations more nearly resembling the Homeric hexameter than any of the innumerable attempts to reproduce the strong-winged music of Homer,' and at the same time approximating very closely to the fluent continuity of blank verse. Where, for example, can such a passage as the description of Tristram rowing be matched?

And while they sat at speech as at a feast,
Came a light wind fast hardening forth of the east
And blackening till its might had marred the skies;
And the sea thrilled as with heart-sundering sighs
One after one drawn, with each breath it drew,
And the green hardened into iron blue,
And the soft light went out of all its face.
Then Tristram girt him for an oarsman's place
And took his oar and smote, and toiled with might
In the east wind's full face and the strong sea's spite
Labouring; and all the rowers rowed hard, but he
More mightily than any wearier three.

And Iseult watched him rowing with sinless eyes
That loved him but in holy girlish wise
For noble joy in his fair manliness

And trust and tender wonder; none the less
She thought if God had given her grace to be
Man, and make war on danger of earth and sea,
Even such a man she would be; for his stroke
Was mightiest as the mightier water broke,
And in sheer measure like strong music drave
Clean through the wet weight of the wallowing wave,
And as a tune before a great king played

For triumph was the tune their strong strokes made,
And sped the ship through with smooth strife of oars
Over the mid sea's grey foam-paven floors,
For all the loud breach of the waves at will.

So for an hour they fought the storm out still,

And the shorn foam spun from the blades, and high The keel sprang from the wave-ridge, and the sky Glared at them for a breath's space through the rain.

Or take the great couplet in the description of
Tristram's last fight:

But on the slayer exulting like the flame
Whose foot foreshines the thunder Tristram came.
Or the sunset in joyous Gard:

So that day

They communed, even till even was worn away,
Nor aught they said seemed strange or sad to say,
But sweet as night's dim dawn to weariness.
Nor loved they life or love for death's sake less,
Nor feared they death for love's or life's sake more.
And on the sounding soft funereal shore

the Athenæum and the Spectator-'We see no reason why he should not write novels only a little inferior to the best of the present generation.' In 1872 the charming idyl Under the Greenwood Tree appeared, and was recognised as a singularly fresh. and delightful sketch of rural life, comparable with the masterpieces of George Sand. It describes the love affairs of a country schoolmistress, 'a bright little bird,' with the vicar, the churchwarden, and the tranter's son, who wins the prize. It was followed in 1873 by A Pair of Blue Eyes, a tragedy wrought out with much subtlety and pathos. Its irony prevented it from being very popular, though the heroine is one of the most winning among the author's creations. Mr Hardy gained his first notable success with his next book. Far from the Madding Crowd, first published in the Cornhill Magazine, under the editorship of Mr Frederick Greenwood. Appearing anonymously, it was attributed by many readers to George Eliot, though some of the younger critics of the day did not hesitate to deny this on the ground that the story was much too good for her. From that day Mr Hardy had his own circle of warm admirers, both among reviewers and readers. In Far from the Madding Crowd there is a sure and easy power, a wealth of material, an unfailing distinction of expression, and a dramatic power which places the book among the author's finest productions. The Hand of Ethelberta, which followed in 1876, is a very clever and brilliant exercise in comedy. The heroine, Ethelberta, is a butler's daughter, who finds herself placed by marriage in an aristocratic environment, and the tale describes the reactions between her and her circumstances. Next came The Return of the Native, perhaps the greatest and most original of all Mr Hardy's books, the most masterly in style, and the profoundest in its apprehension of nature and character. It was somewhat coldly received, but has steadily grown in favour. Then came The Trumpet-Major, a slighter and more popular book, on the lines of Far from the Madding Crowd. It was succeeded by A Laodicean and Two on a Tower, both highly finished works, but neither marking an advance. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is a sound and strong study of human nature, and the Woodlanders (1887) is a book of more complex and still greater power, ranking with Far from the Madding Crowd and the Return of the Native. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) was the first story of Mr Hardy's that had a really great circulation, and in some respects it marked a new departure in his work. There was no change in the underlying convictions and preferences to which he has been constant from the beginning, but he asserted his right to deal more frankly and explicitly with the problems of life and destiny. This claim was pushed still further in Jude the Obscure (1895), which called forth much hostile criticism. It is certain that Tess and Jude are in every respect among the highest achievements of the author,

whatever be thought of their philosophy. By the time they were published, comparisons between Mr Hardy and the popular novelists who reigned over the dreariest period of British fiction were felt to be ridiculous. In 1897 The Well-beloved, published some years previously in serial form, appeared as a book. Wessex Tales (1888) contains some of the best short stories in the language, and A Group of Noble Dames (1891) embodies in fiction some Wessex traditions. Two volumes of poetry, Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), are characteristic expressions of the author's mind, rugged and sombre, but often with a haunting melody of their own.

Mr Hardy is first of all a most original writer. He is influenced by no master, although it is easy to see that Heine and Schopenhauer have touched him. As a stylist he occupies a high place, though he has cared supremely for rendering the truth as he has seen it in fact and life. He is born of the earth, born of Wessex almost in a more special sense than her other children. His Teniers-like power of catching and fixing phases of peasant life is unapproached except in Shakespeare. At their best his peasants are comparable only with those in Hamlet and A Winter's Tale. It has been complained that he brings the phrases and thoughts of culture into the conversation of his rustics, intertwining distinct phases of either thought or language, or of both. It may be replied that the humours of his peasantry are bound up largely with their use of scriptural language; but the true answer is that such creations of genius attest themselves like Shakespeare's. His sensitiveness to scenic and atmospheric effects; to the moods and changes of day and night; to the voices of the heathbells, the trees, and the winds; to the delicate harmonies of colour, achieves an effect impossible to the closest observation and the minutest vision. It brings the reader into the inmost heart and shrine of nature. In Mr Hardy's view of life the main interest is that of love. has hardly any place for children. His heroes and heroines are isolated. Family ties count for little. The ordinary ambition for a career is scarcely recognised. In his characters the element of flexibility is wanting, and when the phase of passionate love is ended there is little to follow but misery. His women have been described as 'Undines of the earth.' They are fascinating, vivacious, incalculable. They have an elemental purity of nature, and so long as they are led by instinct they are true, but they make no fight against circumstances. They show an impassioned receptivity, and their love is blind and impulsive. From the first, but more explicitly in his later books, Mr Hardy has proclaimed that human life is governed by inscrutable forces; that human beings are puppets of fate, and destined to misery. From an artistic point of view, it is difficult to secure the full effect of tragedy in a book where tragedy itself is treated as hardly more than a deeper ringe

He

of the common leaden colour in the human lot, and it might be fair to say that in the Return of the Native the final impression is rather that of human miserableness than of human grief. But this cannot be said of Tess and Jude the Obscure. There we have a true rendering of the anguish of the human spirit, of the depths, though not of the heights, in life.

From 'The Return of the Native.'

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through

THOMAS HARDY. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.

the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis-the final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the façade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the façade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings over

sadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule: human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it is young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind, and, ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle-gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand-dunes of Scheveningen. . .

It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature-neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.

Valenciennes.

(1793.)

We trenched, we trumpeted and drummed, And from our mortars tons of iron hummed Ath'art the ditch, the mouth we bombed The Town o' Valencieën.

'Twas in the June o' Ninety-dree

(The Duke o' Yark our then Commander beën)
The German Legion, Guards, and we
Laid siege to Valencieën.

This was the first time in the war

That French and English spilled each other's gore; -God knows what year will end the roar

Begun at Valencieën!

'Twas said that we 'd no business there
A-topperèn the French for disagreen;
However, that's not my affair-
We were at Valencieën.
Such snocks and slats, since war began
Never knew raw recruit or veteran :
Stone-deaf therence went many a man
Who served at Valencieën.
Into the streets, ath'art the sky,

A hundred thousand balls and bombs were fleën ;
And harmless townsfolk fell to die
Each hour at Valencieën!

And, sweaten wi' the bombardiers,

A shell was slent to shards anighst my ears:
-'Twas nigh the end of hope and fears
For me at Valencieën!

They bore my wownded frame to camp, And shut my gapèn skull, and washed en clean, And jined en wi' a zilver clamp

Thik night at Valencieën.