Yet let it like an odor rise To all the senses here, And fall like sleep upon their eyes, Or music in their car." When Phant'sy, unable to resist this ex objects in conjunction, it draws all things to one. Fancy is definite; she has a quaint, tiny, delicate, yet definite measure -"no bigger than an agate stone." Imagination deals with the vast and indefinite is surprising, playful, ludicrous, pathetic, "his stature reached the sky." Fancy as the case may be; Imagination is great and sublime. When Swift, after his quisite strain, (she must have been a Goth, if she did,) breaks forth from her cloud, and speaks, the poet manifestly attributes to her the capricious, the incongruous, the fashion, flings off for a Scotch proverb, gay colors and sweet flowers, rather than "A hungry louse bites sore," we recogthe awful beauty and sublimity of nature.nize a wonderful power of fancy in the On the whole, then, imagination and fancy led a vagabond, precarious, and fluctuating existence in language. Sometimes they were used indiscriminately, like gout by the man who could not spell rheumatism. Sometimes imagination was relegated into the thorny realms of Queen Quintessence, of Entelecheia, while fancy was made the Gloriana of the poetic fairy-land from which she was driven. Very often imagination was hypostatized into the airy, feminine element of the human mind, and was pitched by grave philosophers at pleasant essayists, by college dons at mooning undergraduates, and by stupid men generally at the livelier kind of people whom they could not understand." It remained for Wordsworth to give precision to the terms. With him, imagination, acting upon individual images, is the faculty which confers additional properties upon an object: when it acts upon wand of Satan we have a creation of ima gination. Fancy is rapid and profuse: she trusts that the number and felicity of the images which she scatters may atone for their want of individual value; she prides herself sometimes upon a curious and loving subtlety, copying the minutest est. Milton and the Hebrew poets have tracery. Imagination is awful and earnimagination: Tommy Moore has fancy. Imagination rears the columns that support the temple which is a type of the unseen: fancy wreathes them with lilywork. It is the work of induction to discover the laws which come to us in the masquerade of particular facts. And it is the work of imagination to make finite objects images of the infinite and invisible. This digression will be excused by those who recollect that terminologies are the smoke which hangs over the busy city of human thought, and that we must pierce the cloud before we can take in the lie of the streets. It will thus be seen that we place Mr. Arnold's works in a higher class of poetry than those of Mr. MacCarthy: whether he occupies a higher relative position is another question. But the author of "Sohrab and Rustum," and "Balder Dead," has something more than attempted the epic austere simplicity, unity of impression, and sustained grandeur. In Merope he has striven, with much more questionable success, to carve cold and beautiful forms out of the white marble in the quarries of Greek poetry. Mr. MacCarthy, with the exception of "The Bell-Founder," and the "Voyage of St. Brendan," is rather a singer of songs of bubbling and graceful rhyme: a poet of May, with its flowers and birds. A comparison of passages in different poets, embodying the same topic, often helps to contrast their genius in a very vivid way. When we turn to the "fowls of the air," if Mr. Arnold mentions the eagle, it is not, like Tennyson, merely to give us a | and independent; it is but flung before picture: the advance of his song: "As when some hunter in the spring hath found A breeding eagle sitting on her nest And pierced her with an arrow as she rose. .. Anon her mate comes winging back From hunting, and a great way off descries His huddling young left sole: at that, he checks His pinion, and with short uneasy sweep So Rustum knew not his own loss." -Poems, (First Series,) p. 33. When Mr. MacCarthy gets upon birds he is really too bad; he is like a poulterer, and does not let us off for a single feather. Read this, in the Paradise of Birds in the Voyage of St. Brendan"-it is only one of twelve mortal stanzas: "Oft in the sunny mornings, have I seen Bright-yellow birds, of a rich lemon hue, Meeting in crowds upon the branches green, And sweetly singing all the morning through; And others, with their heads grayish and dark, Pressing their cinnamon cheeks to the old trees, And striking on the hard, rough, shriveled bark Like conscience on a bosom ill at ease. And other larger birds with orange cheeks, This is as if we should write : My grand-aunt had an aviary in Dalkey, In a back yard behind her mansion setThere the white cockatoo went talkey, talkey, To the bright green and orange parroquet; And pert cock robins, with breasts red as bricks, And other warblers yellow as a custard, Came and sang songs, upon a pile of sticks To birds all streaked with feathery lines of mustard." Examine one of Mr. Arnold's flowers; it is not an object standing out distinct Mr. MacCarthy too often gives us botany in rhyme, and turns his muse into a flower-painter. In no passage has a river been turned into finer account than in that which we extract; its cold and pure serenity is more beautiful for the strife and passion which have preceded: "But the majestic river floated on Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Under the solitary moon; he flowed The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral sea." -P. 49. Mr. MacCarthy's rivers are pretty girls, with bright eyes and white shoulders, Naiads dancing, Undines flashing, and we know not what beside: "Like a troop of girls -Under-Glimpses, p. 51. Or compare a snow scene as painted by the two poets: "And as in winter, when the frost breaks up, At winter's end, before the spring begins, And a warm west wind blows, and thaw sets in After an hour a dripping sound is heard, And from the boughs the snow-loads shuffle And in fields sloping to the south dark plots And widen, and the peasant's heart is glad; noise Of all things weeping to bring Balder back." "Now a daring climber, she Out along the giddy branches doth she go; Down swinging through the night, "Now she climbs the mighty mast, There she watches in his stead "Or crowning with white fire The minster's topmost spire 1 tion, while we want to know how the weeping fares, that is to bring Balder back, the joy of gods and men. Mr. MacCarthy's strokes are rapid and impetuous, for the pencil is in the hands of a man of genius; some are comparatively false, as any one will see who reads the whole poem; others, are perfectly exquisite. But his description is an end in itself; it is painted for the painting's sake: and the master riots in the strength and luxuriance of his beauty. From these general remarks we pass on to a somewhat more detailed criticism of these two writers. They are poets of a reputation too well established to need the patronizing dandling, which, however flattering it may sound, is really akin to contempt. Indiscriminate panegyric is of much less service to a writer than the fiercest abuse. To the savage, slogging, ungentlemanly style of criticism which assailed Byron, Keats, and Tennyson, has succeeded another of not much more gen With a glory such as sainted foreheads tlemanlike praise. When the first paper show; She teaches peals are given Thus to lift the heart to heaven, There to melt like the Spirit of the Snow. "Oft with pallid figure bowed, Like the Banshee in her shroud, of the day would write up the monotonous rhymed monologue of Bothwell to a place not only above Smith, but above Wordsworth, who "certainly will not live;" when the first review in the Engligh language would promote a prettyish Doth the moon her spectral shadow o'er some domestic love-song, in a hop-and-go-one silent gravestone throw; Then moans the fitful wail, And the wanderer grows pale, measure, through two mortal volumes, to almost archangelic honors, critics are Till at morning fades the phantom of the doubly bound to tell the whole truth. Spirit of the Snow. "In her spotless linen hood, Like the other sisterhood, And first, of the Oxford Professor. Truth compels us to say that the three volumes before us represent two points of declension. Mr. Arnold's first volume She leaves the open cloister when the psalm contains much that is exceedingly beautiful, sounds sweet and low; When some sister's bier doth pass Soon to sink into the earth, like the Spirit of the Snow." These two passages are strikingly characteristic of their writers. Mr. Arnold's strokes are few, but strong and decided, and each tells, until the landscape stands out upon the canvas. The lines are not less remarkable for what they contain, than for their austere self-control and rejection of every superfluous touch. Then, their chief beauty, after all, is that they do not force us to dwell upon their rate excellence, but melt into the whole contexture of the poem, and assist its development, without challenging admira a little that is poor, somewhat that is execrably bad. But, on the whole, a volume the present generation. His second volume of such promise has scarcely appeared in contains some fine things, and a good deal of rubbish. His third volume is a piece of clever, systematic madness. How are we to account for this declension? Mr. Arnold is not one of the artists who mars his fame by carelessness. He has not written himself out. He is hardly in the maturity of his genius. The eye of his intellect is youthful; it is not dim, nor his natural force abated. The answer to our question is, that he is a 66 sepa- viewy" man, a slave of crotchets and theories. The choice of his subjects is based upon a syllogism. Its structure is laid out upon rules of high art. He evokes images from earth, and heaven, and the! abyss, and sends them about their business when they have not Aristotelian figleaves to cover their nakedness. Those who have read Mr. Arnold's preface as well as his poems will, doubtless, have observed that he is most successful when he is most inconsistent with his own professions. To make his verse at all at one with his prose, he should cut out almost every single poem which has excited general interest and admiration. His theory is exclusively ancient, his beauty is almost exclusively modern. His heart is with the poetry of reflection and tenderness, his intellect is imbedded in Schlegel and Aristotle. "Marguerite," "Church of Brou," "Tristram and Iseult,” are too well known to all who are likely to read this article to need transcription. But we may be permitted to quote two passages from the second, and less known series of poems to illustrate our remarks. The first shall be from the "Youth of Nature," a poem suggested by the death of Wordsworth. Many readers may thank us for a specimen of a new species of unrhymed verse, of admirable music, and worthy to obtain a place among standard measures of English poetry. "For oh! is it you, is it you, Moonlight, and shadow, and lake, And mountains that fill us with joy, Or the Poet who sings you so well? Is it you, O Beauty! O Grace! O Charm! O Romance! that we feel, Or the voice which reveals what you are? They are here I heard, as men heard, In Mysian Ide, the voice' Of the mighty Mother, of Crete, the They are here-they are set in the world- ye When ye mourn that a poet is dead, That the singer was less than his themes, Life, and Emotion, and I?' More than the singer are these. Weak is the tremor of pain That thrills in his mournfullest chord To that which ran through his soul. In his gladdest, airiest song, "Vain is the effort to forget So let me lie, and calm as they Let beam upon my inward view Those eyes of deep, soft, lucent hueEyes too expressive to be blue, Too lovely to be gray."-P. 134. Lovely, to be sure. But how modern in their tone, how subjective, (to use a cant word,) how non-classical, how inconsistent with the writer's theory. Mr. Arnold's versification is as crotchet ty as the structure of his subject. We do not allude to manifest vulgarities, utterly inexcusable in a writer of refinement, such as "Pressing his white garment to his eyes, Ah! poor Fawn, poor Fawn, ah! poor "Still gazing on the ever full Nor to such rusty jingle as "Revolu tions," with lines like these in one stanza: "Since he has not yet found the word God the area railing. But it requires some | for blank verse in so eminent a degree hardihood in Mr. Arnold to quote Mr. should have adopted a system which must Spurgeon's favourite lines: "Fires that glow, Shrieks of woe, Sullen moans, Hollow groans, And cries of tortured ghosts:" and append the expressive comment, "horrible." A good-natured critic, in the not very good-natured Guardian, speaks of "strophe and anti-strophe counting their syllables, and performing their graceful dance without the least loosening of their rhythmic fetters." The epithet "graceful" is about as appropriate as Miss Arabella Sawyer's attribute of "swanlike" to the gyrations in skating which left Mr. Winkle deposited upon his proper center of gravity on the ice. Waiving these luckless meters, we pass on to Mr. Arnold's blank verse. For blank verse we have a special respect. These, too, are days when an old prophecy, contained in the preface to the second part of Waller's Poems, is being fulfilled: "Rhyme continues still -and will do so, till some excellent spirit arises that has leisure enough and resolution to break the chain, and free us from the troublesome bondage of rhyming. But this is a thought for times at some distance." Now, on the construction of blank verse, Mr. Arnold has again a theory which we think curiously perverse. "Milton's drama," he says, "has the true oratorical flow of ancient tragedy, produced mainly, I think, by his making it, as the Greeks made it, the rule, not the exception, to put the pause at the end of the line, not in the middle. Shakspeare has some noble passages, particularly in his Richard the Third, constructed with this, the true oratorical rhythm: indeed, that wonderful poet, who has so much besides rhetoric, is also the greatest poetical rhetorician since Euripides. Still, it is to the Elizabethan poets that we owe the bad habit, in dramatic poetry, of perpetually dividing the line in the middle. The constant occurrence of such lines produces, not a sense of variety, but a sense of perpetual interruption."-Preface to Merope, P. xlv. Now, we are glad to see that Mr. Arnold has dropped the disparaging tone about Shakspeare which disfigures the preface to his first volume. But we are sorry to find that one who has the capacity VOL. XLIV.-NO. I. shear his blank verse of a chief beauty. Take the really magnificent description of the burning of Balder's corpse by the gods in the ship: "And they set jars of wine, and oil to lean Against the bodies, and stuck torches near: And brought his arms and gold, and all his stuff, And slew the dogs which at his table fed: They fixt the mast, and hoisted up the sails; Then they put fire to the wood, And the ship floated on the waves, and rocked: But in the hills a strong east wind arose, And, wreathed in smoke, the ship stood out to sea. Soon, with a roaring, rose the mighty fire, And the pile crackled: and between the logs Sharp quivering tongues of flame shot out, and leapt Curling and darting, higher, until they licked The summit of the pile, the dead, the mast, And ate the shriveling sails; but still the ship Drove on, ablaze, above her hull, with fire. Then the wind fell with night, and there was calm: But, through the dark, they watched the burning ship, Still carried o'er the distant waters on, Against the wolves, and all night long it flares So flared, in the far darkness, Balder's pyre. But fainter, as the stars rose high, it burned; The bodies were consumed, ash choked the pile: And, as in a decaying winter fire, A charred log, falling, makes a shower of sparks So, with a shower of sparks, the pile fell in, Silent, and waited for the sacred morn." -Poems, (Second Scries,) p. 50. Awfully beautiful: a passage such as Tennyson himself has, perhaps, never equaled. But Mr. Arnold's unlucky theorizing on blank verse leads us to ask, whether the constant recurrence of monosyllabic-worded lines, and the want of pause and variety, do not seriously mar the ef 5 |