at the bottom of a later work, the whimsical Eloping Angels,' — a bit of thistle-down in poetry, suggestive enough if lightly understood, and too impalpable to be stumbled over in dead earnest as it has been by the captious.

The mellowed craft of Mr. Watson's verse appears advantageously in this sonnet, called 'Vanishings':

"As one whose eyes have watched the stricken day
Swoon to its crimson death adown the sea,
Turning his face to eastward suddenly
Sees a lack-lustre world all chill and gray,
Then, wandering sunless whither-so he may,
Feels the first dubious dumb obscurity,
And vague fore-gloomings of the Dark to be,
Close like a sadness round his glimmering way;
So I, from drifting dream-bound on and on
About strange isles of utter bliss, in seas

Whose waves are unimagined melodies,

Rose and beheld the dreamless world anew:

Sad were the fields, and dim with splendours gone
The strait sky-glimpses fugitive and few."

Others of the poems are the offshoot of criticism of poets, and in these a too-fondly conservative spirit is plain. It is no less perceptible, be it understood, that his own poetic gift is a genuine and native endowment. No man's predilections should determine his praise as an artist; but inasmuch as they may come to narrow his power through limiting the growth of his thought-faculty, they may show the bounds the poet sets to his own future. It is from this point of view that one may recognize with pleasure Mr. Watson's instinctive art, and regret the bias that shuts out his mind from catholicity, fit pasturage of the greatest poets. His true appreciation of Tennyson in 'Lachrymæ Musarum,' and of the Laureate's great predecessor, in 'Wordsworth's Grave,' are wrought with a magical smoothness which has earned him his early fame; but his boyish talk of "the froth and flotsom of the Seine," of "the Hugo flare against the night and Weimar's proud elaborate calm" being outweighed by "one flash of Byron's lightning, Wordsworth's light," does not fitly praise either Byron or Wordsworth; it only exhibits in a silly light the young poet's own mental limita

tions. It would be a calamity to the growth of mind and pleasure if, instead of enjoying all true characteristics of poetic utterance, one set pattern and polish should be prescribed as supreme. England should stand in no fear of any Renaissance, that is, of any influx of foreign thought and art-impulse. She has drunk in its heady wine before now with no imitative feebleness, but with reconstructing strength. Esthetic liberty would serve her now in better stead than insularity. Her present symptoms of poetic sameness and thinness are most apparent in the well-nigh universal re-echoing by her latter-day poets of Tennyson and Wordsworth. It is, in fact, the most hopeful sign of life in English poetry that it has differentiated from these all-on-one-note songsters a Meredith who pours forth a strange, new song to speak for England, alongside of the smooth, idyllic, but less compact strain of a Watson.

Let both speak for England; and the English-speaking world, finding delight in the picturesque and pensive loveliness of 'Vanishings,' may find it no less in the passion-mastery that in 'Modern Love' mirrors mind and heart at the most intimate moment of

their interplay. The satire of the materialism and pietism of his countrymen, which leaps out in an odd but ingeniously suitable fashion in Meredith's 'Jump to Glory Jane,' will be least understood by those who most need the tonic of this whim, caught crudely in its own doggerel chains before it could escape a more careful art. Too much should not be made of this caprice; but it is worth a wee cantie" smile to hear this woman, whose body was a harp With winds along the strings," imploring squire and vicar to " up and o'er the flesh with me"!

The sermon George Meredith preaches to "our later Prodigal Son" is, as he says, a "furious Yea of a speech" in the cause he "would have prevail For seed of a nourishing wheat." Whoever goes on to ask, with him

"Is it accepted of song

Does it sound to the mind through the ear
Right sober, pure sane?"

will be likely to find it, as he says, "a test severe."

Yet let him

understand the poet's aim, the lofty humanity of his sudden metaphors, the sheer "spirit in verse" which animates his passionless measures, let him "drink of faith in the brains a full draught," - and he will find it can ring "for Reason a melody clear."

Meredith's poetics are tersely expounded in these lines from 'The Empty Purse':

"No singer is needed to serve

The musical God, my friend.

Needs only his law on a sensible nerve :

A law that to measure invites,

Forbidding the passions contend."

This is "lean fare, but it carries a sparkle," and offers not husks to the Prodigal Sons of this earth, but instead

"for sustainment supreme,

The cry of the conscience of Life:
Keep the young generations in hail,
And bequeath them no tumbled house!
There hast thou the sacred theme,
Therein the inveterate spur,

Of the Innermost. See her one blink
In vision past eyeballs. Not thee
She cares for, but us. Follow her.
Follow her, and thou shalt not sink.
With thy Soul the Life espouse:
This Life of the visible, audible, ring
With thy love tight about, and no death will be ;
The name but an empty thing,

And woe a forgotten old trick:

And battle will come as a challenge to drink;
As a warrior's wound each transient sting.
She leads to the Uppermost link by link;
Exacts but vision, desires not vows."

In Youth in Memory' also, a rare and splendid fire allures the thought to dwell on the pleasures sacred from sensation, although they are the fruit of it, for

"by the final Bacchic of the lusts Propelled, the Bacchic of the spirit trusts."

'Night of Frost in May' and 'Tardy Spring' witness the lighter response of Meredith's originality to the touch of natural outdoor beauty. 'Tardy Spring,' in particular, sounds a lyric note,

the more persuasive to charm that its sweetness is not artfully prolonged and played upon, but strikes home very simply, its tropes sounding sententious, its phrases wearing the air of apothegms of a graceful staccato variety.

ANOTHER Volume of the interesting series of poetical criticisms. edited by Prof. Albert S. Cook has recently been issued. Leigh Hunt's answer to 'What is Poetry?'-being the initial

Leigh Hunt's 'What is Poetry?' including Remarks on Versification, Edited by Albert S. Cook; Analytics of Literature, by L. A. Sherman. Boston: Ginn & Co. 1893. — Orthometry, a Treatise on the Art of Versification, with a New and Complete Rhyming Dictionary, by R. F. Brewer. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. London: C. W. Deacon & Co. 1893. Popular Studies of Nineteenth Century Poets, by J. Marshall Mather. London and New York: Frederick Warne & Co. 1892.

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essay in his volume on 'Imagination and Fancy' is the choice for the present reprint. The essay is marked by that innate good sense and charm of style for which Leigh Hunt's prose is conspicuous. At a time when the incumbents of the critical office felt it their sacred duty to treat all new poets as so many obstreperous school-boys in need of stern castigation from their masters, the penetrative vision of Leigh Hunt recognized prophets where others saw only drivellers. His sweet wide soul could open to the influences of new beauty, but without losing any of its sensitiveness to that of the past. Speaking of Sir Walter Raleigh's verses on The Faery Queene,' in which he said that Petrarch was thenceforward to be no more heard of, and that in all English poetry there was nothing he counted of any price but the effusions of the new author, Hunt laconically remarks, "Yet Petrarch is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter; and Shakespeare is thought somewhat valuable."

The definition of poetry given in this essay is perhaps the most inclusive and satisfactory answer that has been proposed to the stubborn question of "What is poetry?" but a still more interesting topic is the discussion upon the distinction between imagination and fancy. Professor Cook has had the happy thought of printing at the end of the volume extracts from Richter, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, giving their contributions toward the settlement of this difficult question, so that the student may see for himself what a dance imagination and fancy have been led at their hands. Unfortunately, what the English writers call imagination, Richter calls phantasie; and after one has firmly grasped the notion that phantasie is the "World-soul of the soul" and the "elementary spirit of all other forces," it is confusing to have it in its form fancy relegated to a secondary place. The usefulness of this book to students is made complete by the addition of line-numberings, of foot-notes giving the whereabouts of the copious quotations found both in Leigh Hunt's essay and the extracts from the three other writers, and an index of proper

names.

The method of the professor of biology who began his instruc