CHAPTER VIII.

FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME.

1832-1893.

The literature of the past fifty years is too close to our eyes to

enable the critic to pronounce a final judgment, or the literary

historian to get a true perspective. Many of the principal writers of

the time are still living, and many others have been dead but a few

years. This concluding chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the

consideration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, as the leaders

of literary thought, and who seem likely, under all future changes of

fashion and taste, to remain representatives of their generation. As

regards _form_, the most striking fact in the history of the period

under review is the immense preponderance in its imaginative literature

of prose fiction, of the novel of real life. The novel has become to the

solitary reader of to-day what the stage play was to the audiences of

Elizabeth's reign, or the periodical essay, like the _Tatler_ and

_Spectator_, to the clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen Anne's. And if

its criticism of life is less concentrated and brilliant than the drama

gives, it is far more searching and minute. No period has ever left in

its literary records so complete a picture of its whole society as the

period which is just closing. At any other time than the present, the

names of authors like Charlotte Bronté, Charles Kingsley, and Charles

Reade--names which are here merely mentioned in passing--besides many

others which want of space forbids us even to mention--would be of

capital importance. As it is, we must limit our review to the three

acknowledged masters of modern English fiction, Charles Dickens

(1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), and "George

Eliot" (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880).

It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer to his lowest term, in

order to see what the prevailing bent of his genius is. This lowest term

may often be found in his early work, before experience of the world has

overlaid his original impulse with foreign accretions. Dickens was much

more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and George Eliot than a

moralist; but they had their starting-points respectively in humor, in

burlesque, and in strong ethical and religious feeling. Dickens began

with a broadly comic series of papers, contributed to the _Old Magazine_

and the _Evening Chronicle_, and reprinted in book form, in 1836, as

_Sketches by Boz_. The success of these suggested to a firm of

publishers the preparation of a number of similar sketches of the

misadventures of cockney sportsmen, to accompany plates by the comic

draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour. This suggestion resulted in the _Pickwick

Papers_, published in monthly installments in 1836-1837. The series

grew, under Dickens's hand, into a continuous though rather loosely

strung narrative of the doings of a set of characters, conceived with

such exuberant and novel humor that it took the public by storm and

raised its author at once to fame. _Pickwick_ is by no means Dickens's

best, but it is his most characteristic and most popular book. At the

time that he wrote these early sketches he was a reporter for the

_Morning Chronicle_. His naturally acute powers of observation had been

trained in this pursuit to the utmost efficiency, and there always

continued to be about his descriptive writing a reportorial and

newspaper air. He had the eye for effect, the sharp fidelity to detail,

the instinct for rapidly seizing upon and exaggerating the salient

point, which are developed by the requirements of modern journalism.

Dickens knew London as no one else has ever known it, and, in

particular, he knew its hideous and grotesque recesses, with the strange

developments of human nature that abide there; slums like

Tom-all-Alone's, in _Bleak House_; the river-side haunts of Rogue

Riderhood, in _Our Mutual Friend_; as well as the old inns, like the

"White Hart," and the "dusky purlieus of the law." As a man, his

favorite occupation was walking the streets, where, as a child, he had

picked up the most valuable part of his education. His tramps about

London--often after nightfall--sometimes extended to fifteen miles in a

day. He knew, too, the shifts of poverty. His father--some traits of

whom are preserved in Mr. Micawber--was imprisoned for debt in the

Marshalsea prison, where his wife took lodging with him, while Charles,

then a boy of ten, was employed at six shillings a week to cover

blacking-pots in Warner's blacking warehouse. The hardships and

loneliness of this part of his life are told under a thin disguise in

Dickens's masterpiece, _David Copperfield_, the most autobiographical of

his novels. From these young experiences he gained that insight into the

lives of the lower classes and that sympathy with children and with the

poor which shine out in his pathetic sketches of Little Nell, in _The

Old Curiosity Shop_; of Paul Dombey; of poor Jo, in _Bleak House_; of

"the Marchioness," and a hundred other figures.

In _Oliver Twist_, contributed, during 1837-1838, to _Bentley's

Miscellany_, a monthly magazine of which Dickens was editor, he produced

his first regular novel. In this story of the criminal classes the

author showed a tragic power which he had not hitherto exhibited.

Thenceforward his career was a series of dazzling successes. It is

impossible here to particularize his numerous novels, sketches, short

tales, and "Christmas Stories"--the latter a fashion which he

inaugurated, and which has produced a whole literature in itself. In

_Nicholas Nickleby_, 1839; _Master Humphrey's Clock_, 1840; _Martin

Chuzzlewit_, 1844; _Dombey and Son_, 1848; _David Copperfield_, 1850,

and _Bleak House_, 1853, there is no falling off in strength. The last

named was, in some respects, and especially in the skillful

construction of the plot, his best novel. In some of his latest books,

as _Great Expectations_, 1861, and _Our Mutual Friend_, 1865, there are

signs of a decline. This showed itself in an unnatural exaggeration of

characters and motives, and a painful straining after humorous effects;

faults, indeed, from which Dickens was never wholly free. There was a

histrionic side to him, which came out in his fondness for private

theatricals, in which he exhibited remarkable talent, and in the

dramatic action which he introduced into the delightful public readings

from his works that he gave before vast audiences all over the United

Kingdom, and in his two visits to America. It is not surprising, either,

to learn that upon the stage his preference was for melodrama and farce.

His own serious writing was always dangerously close to the

melodramatic, and his humor to the farcical. There is much false art,

bad taste, and even vulgarity in Dickens. He was never quite a

gentleman, and never succeeded well in drawing gentlemen or ladies. In

the region of low comedy he is easily the most original, the most

inexhaustible, the most wonderful, of modern humorists. Creations such

as Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller, Sairy Gamp, take rank with

Falstaff and Dogberry; while many others, like Dick Swiveller, Stiggins,

Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Julia Mills, are almost equally good. In the

innumerable swarm of minor characters with which he has enriched our

comic literature there is no indistinctness. Indeed, the objection that

has been made to him is that his characters are too distinct--that he

puts labels on them; that they are often mere personifications of a

single trick of speech or manner, which becomes tedious and unnatural by

repetition. Thus, Grandfather Smallweed is always settling down into his

cushion, and having to be shaken up; Mr. Jellyby is always sitting with

his head against the wall; Peggotty is always bursting her buttons off,

etc. As Dickens's humorous characters tend perpetually to run into

caricatures and grotesques, so his sentiment, from the same excess,

slops over too frequently into "gush," and into a too deliberate and

protracted attack upon the pity. A favorite humorous device in his style

is a stately and roundabout way of telling a trivial incident, as where,

for example, Mr. Roker "muttered certain unpleasant invocations

concerning his own eyes, limbs, and circulating fluids;" or where the

drunken man who is singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr.

Smangle "a gentle intimation, through the medium of the water-jug, that

his audience were not musically disposed." This manner was original with

Dickens, though he may have taken a hint of it from the mock heroic

language of _Jonathan Wild_; but as practiced by a thousand imitators,

ever since, it has gradually become a burden.

It would not be the whole truth to say that the difference between the

humor of Thackeray and Dickens is the same as between that of Shakspere

and Ben Jonson. Yet it is true that the "humors" of Ben Jonson have an

analogy with the extremer instances of Dickens's character sketches in

this respect, namely, that they are both studies of the eccentric, the

abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the typical and universal;

studies of manners, rather than of whole characters. And it is easily

conceivable that, at no distant day, the oddities of Captain Cuttle,

Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and Newman Noggs will seem as

far-fetched and impossible as those of Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk

and Sir Amorous La-Foole.

When Dickens was looking about for some one to take Seymour's place as

illustrator of _Pickwick_, Thackeray applied for the job, but without

success. He was then a young man of twenty-five, and still hesitating

between art and literature. He had begun to draw caricatures with his

pencil when a school-boy at the Charter House, and to scribble them with

his pen when a student at Cambridge, editing _The Snob_, a weekly

under-graduate paper, and parodying the prize poem _Timbuctoo_ of his

contemporary at the university, Alfred Tennyson. Then he went abroad to

study art, passing a season at Weimar, where he met Goethe and filled

the albums of the young Saxon ladies with caricatures; afterward living

a bohemian existence in the Latin quarter at Paris, studying art in a

desultory way, and seeing men and cities; accumulating portfolios full

of sketches, but laying up stores of material to be used afterward to

greater advantage when he should settle upon his true medium of

expression. By 1837, having lost his fortune of five hundred pounds a

year in speculation and gambling, he began to contribute to _Fraser's_,

and thereafter to the _New Monthly_, Cruikshank's _Comic Almanac_,

_Punch_, and other periodicals, clever burlesques, art criticisms by

"Michael Angelo Titmarsh," _Yellowplush Papers_, and all manner of

skits, satirical character sketches, and humorous tales, like the _Great

Hoggarty Diamond_ and the _Luck of Barry Lyndon_. Some of these were

collected in the _Paris Sketch-Book_, 1840, and the _Irish Sketch-Book_,

1843; but Thackeray was slow in winning recognition, and it was not

until the publication of his first great novel, _Vanity Fair_, in

monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he achieved any thing like the

general reputation that Dickens had reached at a bound. _Vanity Fair_

described itself, on its title-page, as "a novel without a hero." It was

also a novel without a plot--in the sense in which _Bleak House_ or

_Nicholas Nickleby_ had a plot--and in that respect it set the fashion

for the latest school of realistic fiction, being a transcript of life,

without necessary beginning or end. Indeed, one of the pleasantest

things to a reader of Thackeray is the way which his characters have of

re-appearing, as old acquaintances, in his different books; just as, in

real life, people drop out of mind and then turn up again in other years

and places. _Vanity Fair_ is Thackeray's masterpiece, but it is not the

best introduction to his writings. There are no illusions in it, and,

to a young reader fresh from Scott's romances or Dickens's sympathetic

extravagances, it will seem hard and repellent. But men who, like

Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitterness and felt its

hollowness know how to prize it. Thackeray does not merely expose the

cant, the emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, flunkeyism,

and snobbery--the "mean admiration of mean things"--in the great world

of London society; his keen, unsparing vision detects the base alloy in

the purest natures. There are no "heroes" in his books, no perfect

characters. Even his good women, such as Helen and Laura Pendennis, are

capable of cruel injustice toward less fortunate sisters, like little

Fanny; and Amelia Sedley is led, by blind feminine instinct, to snub and

tyrannize over poor Dobbin. The shabby miseries of life, the numbing and

belittling influences of failure and poverty on the most generous

natures, are the tragic themes which Thackeray handles by preference. He

has been called a cynic, but the boyish playfulness of his humor and his

kindly spirit are incompatible with cynicism. Charlotte Bronté said that

Fielding was the vulture and Thackeray the eagle. The comparison would

have been truer if made between Swift and Thackeray. Swift was a cynic;

his pen was driven by hate, but Thackeray's by love, and it was not in

bitterness but in sadness that the latter laid bare the wickedness of

the world. He was himself a thorough man of the world, and he had that

dislike for a display of feeling which characterizes the modern

Englishman. But behind his satiric mask he concealed the manliest

tenderness, and a reverence for every thing in human nature that is good

and true. Thackeray's other great novels are _Pendennis_, 1849; _Henry

Esmond_, 1852, and _The Newcomes_, 1855--the last of which contains his

most lovable character, the pathetic and immortal figure of Colonel

Newcome, a creation worthy to stand, in its dignity and its sublime

weakness, by the side of Don Quixote. It was alleged against Thackeray

that he made all his good characters, like Major Dobbin and Amelia

Sedley and Colonel Newcome, intellectually feeble, and his brilliant

characters, like Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne and Blanche Amory, morally

bad. This is not entirely true, but the other complaint--that his women

are inferior to his men--is true in a general way. Somewhat inferior to

his other novels were _The Virginians_, 1858, and _The Adventures of

Philip_, 1862. All of these were stories of contemporary life, except

_Henry Esmond_ and its sequel, _The Virginians_, which, though not

precisely historical fictions, introduced historical figures, such as

Washington and the Earl of Peterborough. Their period of action was the

18th century, and the dialogue was a cunning imitation of the language

of that time. Thackeray was strongly attracted by the 18th century. His

literary teachers were Addison, Swift, Steele, Gay, Johnson, Richardson,

Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, and his special master and

model was Fielding. He projected a history of the century, and his

studies in this kind took shape in his two charming series of lectures

on _The English Humorists_ and _The Four Georges_. These he delivered in

England and in America, to which country he, like Dickens, made two

several visits.

[Illustration: Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray, Dickens.]

Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonishing than Dickens's; less

fertile, spontaneous, and inventive; but his art is sounder, and his

delineation of character more truthful. After one has formed a taste for

his books, Dickens's sentiment will seem overdone, and much of his humor

will have the air of buffoonery. Thackeray had the advantage in another

particular: he described the life of the upper classes, and Dickens of

the lower. It may be true that the latter offers richer material to the

novelist, in the play of elementary passions and in strong native

developments of character. It is true, also, that Thackeray approached

"society" rather to satirize it than to set forth its agreeableness.

Yet, after all, it is "the great world" which he describes, that world

upon which the broadening and refining processes of a high civilization

have done their utmost, and which, consequently, must possess an

intellectual interest superior to any thing in the life of London

thieves, traveling showmen, and coachees. Thackeray is the equal of

Swift as a satirist, of Dickens as a humorist, and of Scott as a

novelist. The one element lacking in him--and which Scott had in a high

degree--is the poetic imagination. "I have no brains above my eyes" he

said; "I describe what I see." Hence there is wanting in his creations

that final charm which Shakspere's have. For what the eyes see is not

all.

The great woman who wrote under the pen-name of George Eliot was a

humorist, too. She had a rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that

crystallized into sayings which are not epigrams only because their

wisdom strikes more than their smartness. But humor was not, as with

Thackeray and Dickens, her point of view. A country girl, the daughter

of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, her early

letters and journals exhibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity.

Later, when her truth to her convictions led her to renounce the

Christian belief, she carried into positivism the same religious

earnestness, and wrote the one English hymn of the religion of humanity:

O, let me join the choir invisible, etc.

Her first published work was a translation of Strauss's _Leben Jesu_,

1846. In 1851 she went to London and became one of the editors of the

Radical organ, the _Westminster Review_. Here she formed a connection--a

marriage in all but the name--with George Henry Lewes, who was, like

herself, a freethinker, and who published, among other things, a

_Biographical History of Philosophy_. Lewes had also written fiction,

and it was at his suggestion that his wife undertook story writing. Her

_Scenes of Clerical Life_ were contributed to _Blackwood's Magazine_ for

1857, and published in book form in the following year. _Adam Bede_

followed in 1859, the _Mill on the Floss_ in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in

1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt_ in 1866, and _Middlemarch_ in 1872.

All of these, except _Romola_, are tales of provincial and largely of

domestic life in the midland counties. _Romola_ is an historical novel,

the scene of which is Florence in the 15th century; the Florence of

Macchiavelli and of Savonarola.

George Eliot's method was very different from that of Thackeray or

Dickens. She did not crowd her canvas with the swarming life of cities.

Her figures are comparatively few, and they are selected from the

middle-class families of rural parishes or small towns, amid that

atmosphere of "fine old leisure;" whose disappearance she lamented. Her

drama is a still-life drama, intensely and profoundly inward. Character

is the stuff that she works in, and she deals with it more subtly than

Thackeray. With him the tragedy is produced by the pressure of society

and its false standards upon the individual; with her, by the malign

influence of individuals upon one another. She watches "the stealthy

convergence of human fates," the intersection at various angles of the

planes of character, the power that the lower nature has to thwart,

stupefy, or corrupt the higher, which has become entangled with it in

the mesh of destiny. At the bottom of every one of her stories there is

a problem of the conscience or the intellect. In this respect she

resembles Hawthorne, though she is not, like him, a romancer, but a

realist.

There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, most of which are tales

of failure or frustration. The _Mill on the Floss_ contains a large

element of autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, is, perhaps,

her idealized self. Her aspirations after a fuller and nobler existence

are condemned to struggle against the resistance of a narrow, provincial

environment, and the pressure of untoward fates. She is tempted to seek

an escape even through a desperate throwing off of moral obligations,

and is driven back to her duty only to die by a sudden stroke of

destiny. "Life is a bad business," wrote George Eliot, in a letter to a

friend, "and we must make the most of it." _Adam Bede_ is, in

construction, the most perfect of her novels, and _Silas Marner_ of her

shorter stories. Her analytic habit gained more and more upon her as she

wrote. _Middlemarch_, in some respects her greatest book, lacks the

unity of her earlier novels, and the story tends to become subordinate

to the working out of character studies and social problems. The

philosophic speculations which she shared with her husband were

seemingly unfavorable to her artistic growth, a circumstance which

becomes apparent in her last novel, _Daniel Deronda_, 1877. Finally in

the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, 1879, she abandoned narrative

altogether, and recurred to that type of "character" books which we have

met as a flourishing department of literature in the 17th century,

represented by such works as Earle's _Microcosmographie_ and Fuller's

_Holy and Profane State_. The moral of George Eliot's writings is not

obtruded. She never made the artistic mistake of writing a novel of

purpose, or what the Germans call a _tendenz-roman_; as Dickens did, for

example, when he attacked imprisonment for debt, in _Pickwick_; the poor

laws, in _Oliver Twist_; the Court of Chancery, in _Bleak House_; and

the Circumlocution office, in _Little Dorrit_.

Next to the novel, the essay has been the most overflowing literary form

used by the writers of this generation--a form characteristic, it may

be, of an age which "lectures, not creates." It is not the essay of

Bacon, nor yet of Addison, nor of Lamb, but attempts a complete

treatment. Indeed, many longish books, like Carlyle's _Heroes and Hero

Worship_ and Ruskin's _Modern Painters_, are, in spirit, rather literary

essays than formal treatises. The most popular essayist and historian of

his time was Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), an active and

versatile man, who won splendid success in many fields of labor. He was

prominent in public life as one of the leading orators and writers of

the Whig party. He sat many times in the House of Commons, as member for

Calne, for Leeds, and for Edinburgh, and took a distinguished part in

the debates on the Reform bill of 1832. He held office in several Whig

governments, and during his four years' service in British India, as

member of the Supreme Council of Calcutta, he did valuable work in

promoting education in that province, and in codifying the Indian penal

law. After his return to England, and especially after the publication

of his _History of England from The Accession of James II.,_ honors and

appointments of all kinds were showered upon him. In 1857 he was raised

to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley.

Macaulay's equipment, as a writer on historical and biographical

subjects, was, in some points, unique. His reading was prodigious, and

his memory so tenacious that it was said, with but little exaggeration,

that he never forgot any thing that he had read. He could repeat the

whole of _Paradise Lost_ by heart, and thought it probable that he could

rewrite _Sir Charles Grandison_ from memory. In his books, in his

speeches in the House of Commons, and in private conversation--for he

was an eager and fluent talker, running on often for hours at a

stretch--he was never at a loss to fortify and illustrate his positions

by citation after citation of dates, names, facts of all kinds, and

passages quoted _verbatim_ from his multifarious reading. The first of

Macaulay's writings to attract general notice was his article on

_Milton_, printed in the August number of the _Edinburgh Review_ for

1825. The editor, Lord Jeffrey, in acknowledging the receipt of the

manuscript, wrote to his new contributor, "The more I think, the less I

can conceive where you picked up that style." That celebrated

style--about which so much has since been written--was an index to the

mental character of its owner. Macaulay was of a confident, sanguine,

impetuous nature. He had great common sense, and he saw what he saw

quickly and clearly, but he did not see very far below the surface. He

wrote with the conviction of an advocate, and the easy omniscience of a

man whose learning is really nothing more than "general information"

raised to a very high power, rather than with the subtle penetration of

an original or truly philosophic intellect, like Coleridge's or De

Quincey's. He always had at hand explanations of events or of characters

which were admirably easy and simple--too simple, indeed, for the

complicated phenomena which they professed to explain. His style was

clear, animated, showy, and even its faults were of an exciting kind. It

was his habit to give piquancy to his writing by putting things

concretely. Thus, instead of saying, in general terms--as Hume or Gibbon

might have done--that the Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 1200,

he says: "The great-grandsons of those who had fought under William and

the great grandsons of those who had fought under Harold began to draw

near to each other." Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected

delicate truths of detail for exaggerated distemper effects. He used the

rhetorical machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth,

and he "made points"--as in his essay on _Bacon_--by creating

antithesis. In his _History of England_ he inaugurated the picturesque

method of historical writing. The book was as fascinating as any novel.

Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though his method of

turning history into romance was very different from Scott's. Among his

essays the best are those which, like the ones on _Lord Clive, Warren

Hastings_, and _Frederick the Great_, deal with historical subjects; or

those which deal with literary subjects under their public historic

relations, such as the essays on _Addison, Bunyan_, and _The Comic

Dramatists of the Restoration_. "I have never written a page of

criticism on poetry, or the fine arts," wrote Macaulay, "which I would

not burn if I had the power." Nevertheless his own _Lays of Ancient

Rome_, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the emphatic and declamatory

kind, though their quality may be rather rhetorical than poetic.

Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the

writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the

one who railed most desperately against the "spirit of the age." Thomas

Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly in

imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature. He

published, among other things, a _Life of Schiller_, a translation of

Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and two volumes of translations from the

German romancers--Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouqué--and contributed

to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_ articles on Goethe, Werner,

Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the _Nibelungen Lied_, etc. His

own diction became more and more tinctured with Germanisms. There was

something Gothic in his taste, which was attracted by the lawless, the

grotesque, and the whimsical in the writings of Jean Paul Richter. His

favorite among English humorists was Sterne, who has a share of these

same qualities. He spoke disparagingly of "the sensuous literature of

the Greeks," and preferred the Norse to the Hellenic mythology. Even in

his admirable critical essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot,

and Voltaire, which are free from his later mannerism--written in

English, and not in Carlylese--his sense of spirit is always more lively

than his sense of form. He finally became so impatient of art as to

maintain--half-seriously--the paradox that Shakspere would have done

better to write in prose. In three of these early essays--on the _Signs

of the Times_, 1829; on _History_, 1830, and on _Characteristics_,

1831--are to be found the germs of all his later writings. The first of

these was an arraignment of the mechanical spirit of the age. In every

province of thought he discovered too great a reliance upon systems,

institutions, machinery, instead of upon men. Thus, in religion, we have

Bible societies, "machines for converting the heathen." "In defect of

Raphaels and Angelos and Mozarts, we have royal academies of painting,

sculpture, music." In like manner, he complains, government is a

machine. "Its duties and faults are not those of a father, but of an

active parish-constable." Against the "police theory," as distinguished

from the "paternal" theory, of government, Carlyle protested with ever

shriller iteration. In _Chartism_, 1839, _Past and Present_, 1843, and

_Latter-day Pamphlets,_ 1850, he denounced this _laissez faire_ idea.

The business of government, he repeated, is to govern; but this view

makes it its business to refrain from governing. He fought most fiercely

against the conclusions of political economy, "the dismal science"

which, he said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their

stomachs. He protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of

Bentham and Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," which

reduced virtue to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with

modern liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all

the talk about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc. But

he was reactionary without being conservative. He had studied the French

Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy.

He had no faith in government "by counting noses," and he hated talking

Parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an aristocracy that spent

its time in "preserving the game." What he wanted was a great individual

ruler; a real king or hero; and this doctrine he set forth afterward

most fully in _Hero Worship_, 1841, and illustrated in his lives of

representative heroes, such as his _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_,

1845, and his great _History of Frederick the Great,_ 1858-1865.

Cromwell and Frederick were well enough; but as Carlyle grew older his

admiration for mere force grew, and his latest hero was none other than

that infamous Dr. Francia, the South American dictator, whose career of

bloody and crafty crime horrified the civilized world.

The essay on _History_ was a protest against the scientific view of

history which attempts to explain away and account for the wonderful.

"Wonder," he wrote in _Sartor Resartus_, "is the basis of all worship."

He defined history as "the essence of innumerable biographies." "Mr.

Carlyle," said the Italian patriot, Mazzini, "comprehends only the

individual. The nationality of Italy is, in his eyes, the glory of

having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus." This trait comes out in

his greatest book, _The French Revolution_, 1837, which is a mighty

tragedy enacted by a few leading characters--Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon.

He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over fiction as

dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned was a

Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows

itself, in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective

metaphysics; and in literature, as sentimentalism, and "view-hunting."

But Carlyle's epoch-making book was _Sartor Resartus_ (The Tailor

Retailored), published in _Fraser's Magazine_ for 1833-1834, and first

reprinted in book form in America. This was a satire upon shams,

conventions, the disguises which overlie the most spiritual realities of

the soul. It purported to be the life and "clothes-philosophy" of a

certain Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Professor _der Allerlei

Wissenschaft_--of things in general--in the University of Weissnichtwo.

"Society," said Carlyle, "is founded upon cloth," following the

suggestions of Lear's speech to the naked bedlam beggar: "Thou art the

thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare,

forked animal as thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical

hint from a paragraph in Swift's _Tale of a Tub_: "A sect was

established who held the universe to be a large suit of clothes....If

certain ermines or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a

judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a

bishop." In _Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle let himself go. It was willful,

uncouth, amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the

combination--the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental

dream of Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not

sense; it was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even

the thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowledge the powerful

beauty of many chapters and passages, rich with humor, eloquence,

poetry, deep-hearted tenderness, or passionate scorn.

[Illustration: Geo. Eliot, Froude, Browning, Tennyson.]

Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder of whole literatures is

strewn over his pages. He flung about the resources of the language with

a giant's strength, and made new words at every turn. The concreteness

and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced by his enormous

vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, or any other single

writer's in the English tongue. His style lacks the crowning grace of

simplicity and repose. It astonishes, but it also fatigues.

Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his attitude than in any

special truth which he has preached. It has been the influence of a

moralist, of a practical rather than a speculative philosopher. "The end

of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been able

to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms have

been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic age he

has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience, silence, and

reverence. _Ehrfurcht_, reverence--the text of his address to the

students of Edinburgh University in 1866--is the last word of his

philosophy.

In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), a young graduate of Cambridge,

published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages entitled _Poems, Chiefly

Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, such as the _Sleeping

Beauty, Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_, were

full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like character,

and were without definite theme, resembling an artist's studies, or

exercises in music--a few touches of the brush, a few sweet chords, but

no _aria_. A number of them--_Claribel, Lilian, Adeline, Isabel,

Mariana, Madeline_--were sketches of women; not character portraits,

like Browning's _Men and Women_, but impressions of temperament, of

delicately differentiated types of feminine beauty. In _Mariana_,

expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid in Shakspere's _Measure for

Measure_, "Mariana at the moated grange," the poet showed an art then

peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening the central feeling

by landscape accessories. The level waste, the stagnant sluices, the

neglected garden, the wind in the single poplar, re-enforce, by their

monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the hopeless waiting and weariness

of life in the one human figure of the poem. In _Mariana_, the _Ode to

Memory_, and the _Dying Swan_, it was the fens of Cambridge and of his

native Lincolnshire that furnished Tennyson's scenery.

Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh,

Where from the frequent bridge,

Like emblems of infinity,

The trenched waters run from sky to sky.

A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited a greater scope and

variety, but was still in his earlier manner. The studies of feminine

types were continued in _Margaret, Fatima, Eleanore, Mariana in the

South_, and _A Dream of Fair Women_, suggested by Chaucer's _Legend of

Good Women_. In the _Lady of Shalott_ the poet first touched the

Arthurian legends. The subject is the same as that of _Elaine_, in the

_Idylls of the King_, but the treatment is shadowy, and even

allegorical. In _OEnone_ and the _Lotus Eaters_ he handled Homeric

subjects, but in a romantic fashion which contrasts markedly with the

style of his later pieces, _Ulysses_ and _Tithonus._ These last have the

true classic severity, and are among the noblest specimens of weighty

and sonorous blank verse in modern poetry. In general, Tennyson's art is

unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite; not statuesque so much as

picturesque. He is a great painter, and the critics complain that in

passages calling for movement and action--a battle, a tournament, or the

like--his figures stand still as in a tableau; and they contrast such

passages unfavorably with scenes of the same kind in Scott, and with

Browning's spirited ballad, _How we brought the Good News from Ghent to

Aix_. In the _Palace of Art_ these elaborate pictorial effects were

combined with allegory; in the _Lotus Eaters_, with that expressive

treatment of landscape noted in _Mariana_; the lotus land, "in which it

seemed always afternoon," reflecting and promoting the enchanted

indolence of the heroes. Two of the pieces in this 1833 volume, the _May

Queen_ and the _Miller's Daughter_, were Tennyson's first poems of the

affections, and as ballads of simple rustic life they anticipated his

more perfect idyls in blank verse, such as _Dora_, the _Brook, Edwin

Morris_, and the _Gardener's Daughter._ The songs in the _Miller's

Daughter_ had a more spontaneous lyrical movement than any thing he had

yet published, and foretokened the lovely songs which interlude the

divisions of the _Princess_, the famous _Bugle Song_, the no-less famous

_Cradle Song_, and the rest. In 1833 Tennyson's friend, Arthur Hallam,

died, and the effect of this great sorrow upon the poet was to deepen

and strengthen the character of his genius. It turned his mind in upon

itself, and set it brooding over questions which his poetry had so far

left untouched; the meaning of life and death, the uses of adversity,

the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, and the dealings of

God with mankind.

Thou madest Death: and, lo, thy foot

Is on the skull which thou hast made.

His elegy on Hallam, _In Memoriam_, was not published till 1850. He

kept it by him all those years, adding section after section, gathering

up into it whatever reflections crystallized about its central theme. It

is his most intellectual and most individual work; a great song of

sorrow and consolation. In 1842 he published a third collection of

poems, among which were _Locksley Hall_, displaying a new strength, of

passion; _Ulysses_, suggested by a passage in Dante: pieces of a

speculative cast, like the _Two Voices_ and the _Vision of Sin_; the

song _Break, Break, Break_, which preluded _In Memoriam_; and, lastly,

some additional gropings toward the subject of the Arthurian romance,

such as _Sir Galahad, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere_, and _Morte d'

Arthur._ The last was in blank verse, and, as afterward incorporated in

the _Passing of Arthur_, forms one of the best passages in the _Idylls

of the King_. The _Princess, a Medley_, published in 1849, represents

the eclectic character of Tennyson's art; a mediæval tale with an

admixture of modern sentiment, and with the very modern problem of

woman's sphere for its theme. The first four _Idylls of the King_, 1859,

with those since added, constitute, when taken together, an epic poem on

the old story of King Arthur. Tennyson went to Malory's _Morte Darthur_

for his material, but the outline of the first idyl, _Enid_, was taken

from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Welsh _Mabinogion_. In

the idyl of _Guinevere_ Tennyson's genius reached its high-water mark.

The interview between Arthur and his fallen queen is marked by a moral

sublimity and a tragic intensity which move the soul as nobly as any

scene in modern literature. Here, at least, the art is pure and not

"decorated;" the effect is produced by the simplest means, and all is

just, natural, and grand. _Maud_--a love novel in verse--published in

1855, and considerably enlarged in 1856, had great sweetness and beauty,

particularly in its lyrical portions, but it was uneven in execution,

imperfect in design, and marred by lapses into mawkishness and excess

in language. Since 1860 Tennyson has added little of permanent value to

his work. His dramatic experiments, like _Queen Mary_, are not, on the

whole, successful, though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power to

the poet who has written, upon one hand, _Guinevere_ and the _Passing of

Arthur_, and upon the other the homely dialectic monologue of the

_Northern Farmer_.

When we tire of Tennyson's smooth perfection, of an art that is over

exquisite, and a beauty that is well-nigh too beautiful, and crave a

rougher touch, and a meaning that will not yield itself too readily, we

turn to the thorny pages of his great contemporary, Robert Browning

(1812-1889). Dr. Holmes says that Tennyson is white meat and Browning is

dark meat. A masculine taste, it is inferred, is shown in a preference

for the gamier flavor. Browning makes us think; his poems are puzzles,

and furnish business for "Browning Societies." There are no Tennyson

societies, because Tennyson is his own interpreter. Intellect in a poet

may display itself quite as properly in the construction of his poem as

in its content; we value a building for its architecture, and not

entirely for the amount of timber in it. Browning's thought never wears

so thin as Tennyson's sometimes does in his latest verse, where the

trick of his style goes on of itself with nothing behind it. Tennyson,

at his worst, is weak. Browning, when not at his best, is hoarse.

Hoarseness, in itself, is no sign of strength. In Browning, however, the

failure is in art, not in thought.

He chooses his subjects from abnormal character types, such as are

presented, for example, in _Caliban upon Setebos_, the _Grammarian's

Funeral, My Last Duchess_ and _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_. These are all

psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner

consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and gives

their point of view. They are dramatic soliloquies; but the poet's

self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains

incomplete. His curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at

the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his

_Dramatic Lyrics_, 1845, _Men and Women_, 1855, _Dramatis Personæ_,

1864, and other collections of the kind. The words are the words of

Caliban or Mr. Sludge; but the voice is the voice of Robert Browning.

His first complete poem, _Paracelsus_, 1835, aimed to give the true

inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name

became a synonym with charlatan. His second, _Sordello_, 1840, traced

the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not

reconcile his life with his art. _Paracelsus_ was hard, but _Sordello_

was incomprehensible. Browning has denied that he was ever perversely

crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be allowed to say things in

his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the Gothic builders

knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in literature. One is

inseparable from the subtlety and difficulty of the thought or the

compression and pregnant indirectness of the phrase. Instances of this

occur in the clear deeps of Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe. The other

comes from a vice of style, a willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of

expressing thought. Both kinds of obscurity exist in Browning. He was a

deep and subtle thinker, but he was also a very eccentric writer;

abrupt, harsh, disjointed. It has been well said that the reader of

Browning learns a new dialect. But one need not grudge the labor that is

rewarded with an intellectual pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating.

The odd, grotesque impression made by his poetry arises, in part, from

his desire to use the artistic values of ugliness, as well as of

obscurity; to avoid the shallow prettiness that comes from blinking the

disagreeable truth: not to leave the saltness out of the sea. Whenever

he emerges into clearness, as he does in hundreds of places, he is a

poet of great qualities. There are a fire and a swing in his _Cavalier

Tunes_, and in pieces like the _Glove_ and the _Lost_ _Leader_; and

humor in such ballads as the _Pied Piper of Hamelin_ and the _Soliloquy

of the Spanish Cloister_, which appeal to the most conservative reader.

He seldom deals directly in the pathetic, but now and then, as in

_Evelyn Hope_, the _Last Ride Together_, or the _Incident of the French

Camp_, a tenderness comes over the strong verse

as sheathes

A film the mother eagle's eye

When her bruised eaglet breathes.

Perhaps the most astonishing example of Browning's mental vigor is the

huge composition, entitled _The Ring and the Book,_ 1868; a narrative

poem in twenty-one thousand lines in which the same story is repeated

eleven times in eleven different ways. It is the story of a criminal

trial which occurred at Rome about 1700, the trial of one Count Guido

for the murder of his young wife. First the poet tells the tale himself;

then he tells what one half the world said and what the other; then he

gives the deposition of the dying girl, the testimony of witnesses, the

speech made by the count in his own defense, the arguments of counsel,

etc., and, finally, the judgment of the pope. So wonderful are

Browning's resources in casuistry, and so cunningly does he ravel the

intricate motives at play in this tragedy and lay bare the secrets of

the heart, that the interest increases at each repetition of the tale.

He studied the Middle Age carefully, not for its picturesque externals,

its feudalisms, chivalries, and the like; but because he found it a rich

quarry of spiritual monstrosities, strange outcroppings of fanaticism,

superstition, and moral and mental distortion of all shapes. It

furnished him especially with a great variety of ecclesiastical types,

such as are painted in _Fra Lippo Lippi, The Heretic's Tragedy,_ and

_The Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church._

Browning's dramatic instinct always attracted him to the stage. His

tragedy, _Strafford_ (1837), was written for Macready, and put on at

Covent Garden Theater, but without pronounced success. He wrote many

fine dramatic poems, like _Pippa Passes, Colombe's Birthday_, and _In a

Balcony_; and at least two good acting plays, _Luria_ and _A Blot in the

Scutcheon._ The last named has recently been given to the American

public, with Lawrence Barrett's careful and intelligent presentation of

the leading role. The motive of the tragedy is somewhat strained and

fantastic, but it is, notwithstanding, very effective on the stage. It

gives one an unwonted thrill to listen to a play, by a contemporary

English writer, which is really literature. One gets a faint idea of

what it must have been to assist at the first night of _Hamlet_.

1. English Literature in the Reign of Victoria. Henry

Morley. (Tauchnitz Series.)

2. Victorian Poets. E.C. Stedman. Boston: Houghton,

Mifflin & Co., 1886.

3. Dickens. Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, David

Copperfield, Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities.

4. Thackeray. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Henry Esmond,

The Newcomes.

5. George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life, Mill on the

Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Adam Bede, Middlemarch.

6. Macaulay. Essays, Lays of Ancient Rome.

7. Carlyle. Sartor Resartus, French Revolution, Essays

on History, Signs of the Times, Characteristics, Burns, Scott,

Voltaire, and Goethe.

8 The Works of Alfred Tennyson. London: Stranham

& Co., 1872. 6 vols.

9. Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert Browning.

London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1880. 2 vols.

APPENDIX.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

THE PRIORESS.

[From the general prologue to the Canterbury Tales.]

There was also a nonne, a prioresse,

That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy;

Hire gretest othe n'as but by Seint Eloy;

And she was clepëd[23] madame Eglentine.

Ful wel she sange the servicë devine,

Entunëd in hire nose ful swetëly;

And Frenche she spake ful fayre and fetisly[24]

After the scole of Stratford-attë-Bowe,[25]

For Frenche of Paris was to hire unknowe.

At mete was she wel ytaught withalle;

She lette no morsel from hire lippë falle,

Ne wette hire fingres in hire saucë depe.

Wel coude she carie a morsel, and wel kepe,

Thatte no drope ne fell upon hire brest.

In curtesie was sette ful moche hire lest.[26]

Hire over lippë wipëd she so clene

That in hire cuppe was no ferthing[27] sene

Of gresë, whan she dronken hadde hire draught.

Ful semëly after hire mete she raught.[28]

And sikerly[29] she was of grete disport

And ful plesánt and amiable of port,

And peinëd hire to contrefeten chere

Of court,[30] and ben estatelich of manére

And to ben holden digne[31] of reverence.

But for to speken of hire conscience,

She was so charitable and so pitoús,

She woldë wepe if that she saw a mous

Caughte in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.

Of smalë houndës hadde she, that she fedde

With rested flesh and milk and wastel brede.[32]

But sore wept she if on of hem were dede,

Or if men smote it with a yerdë[33] smert:[34]

And all was conscience and tendre herte.

[Footnote 23: Called.]

[Footnote 24: Neatly.]

[Footnote 25: Stratford on the Bow (river): a small village where such

French as was spoken would be provincial.]

[Footnote 26: Delight.]

[Footnote 27: Farthing, bit.]

[Footnote 28: Reached.]

[Footnote 29: Surely.]

[Footnote 30: Took pains to imitate court manners.]

[Footnote 31: Worthy.]

[Footnote 32: Fine bread.]

[Footnote 33: Stick.]

[Footnote 34: Smartly.]

PALAMON'S FAREWELL TO EMELIE.

[From the Knightes Tale.]

Naught may the woful spirit in myn herte

Declare o[35] point of all my sorwes smerte

To you, my lady, that I lovë most.

But I bequethe the service of my gost

To you aboven every crëatúre,

Sin[36] that my lif ne may no lenger dure.

Alas the wo! alas the peinës stronge

That I for you have suffered, and so longe!

Alas the deth! alas min Emelie!

Alas departing of our compagnie!

Alas min hertës quene! alas my wif!

Min hertës ladie, euder of my lif!

What is this world? what axen[37] men to have?

Now with his love, now in his coldë grave

Alone withouten any compagnie.

Farewel my swete, farewel min Emelie,

And softë take me in your armës twey,[38]

For love of God, and herkeneth[39] what I sey.

[Footnote 35: One.]

[Footnote 36: Since.]

[Footnote 37: Ask.]

[Footnote 38: Two.]

[Footnote 39: Hearken.]

EMELIE IN THE GARDEN.

[From the Knightes Tale.]

Thus passeth yere by yere, and day by day,

Till it felle onës in a morwe[40] of May

That Emelie, that fayrer was to sene[41]

Than is the lilie upon his stalkë grene,

And fresher than the May with flourës newe,

(For with the rose colour strof hire hewe;

I n'ot[42] which was the finer of hem two)

Er it was day, as she was wont to do,

She was arisen and all redy dight,[43]

For May wol have no slogardie a-night.

The seson priketh every gentil herte,

And maketh him out of his slepe to sterte,

And sayth, "Arise, and do thin observánce."

This maketh Emelie han remembránce

To dou honoúr to May, and for to rise.

Yclothëd was she fresh for to devise.[44]

Hire yelwe here was broided in a tresse

Behind hire back, a yerdë long I gesse.

And in the gardin at the sonne uprist[45]

She walketh up and doun wher as hire list.[46]

She gathereth floures, partie white and red,

To make a sotel[47] gerlond for hire bed,

And as an angel hevenlich she song.

[Footnote 40: Morning.]

[Footnote 41: See.]

[Footnote 42: Know not.]

[Footnote 43: Dressed.]

[Footnote 44: Describe.]

[Footnote 45: Sunrise.]

[Footnote 46: Wherever it pleases her.]

[Footnote 47: Subtle, cunningly enwoven.]

ALISON.

[From the Millere's Tale.]

Fayre was this yongë wif, and therwithal

As any wesel hire body gent and smal[48]

A seint[49] she werëd, barrëd al of silk,

A barm-cloth[50] eke as white as morne milk[51]

Upon hire lendës[52] ful of many a gore,

White was hire smok, and brouded[53] al before

And eke behind on hire colére[54] aboute

Of cole-black silk within and eke withoute.

The tapës of hire whitë volupere[55]

Were of the samë suit of hire colére;

Hire fillet brode of silk and set ful hye;

And sikerly[56] she had a likerous[57] eye,

Ful smal ypulled[58] were hire browës two,

And they were bent and black as any slo,

She was wel morë blisful on to see

Than is the newë perjenetë[59] tree,

And softer than the wolle is of a wether.

And by hire girdle heng a purse of lether,

Tasseled with silk and perlëd with latoun,[60]

In all this world to seken up and doun

Ther n'is no man so wise that coude thenche[61]

So gay a popelot[62] or swiche[63] a wenche.

Ful brighter was the shining of hire hewe

Than in the tour, the noble yforged newe.

But of hire song, it was as loud and yerne[64]

As any swalow sitting on a berne.

Thereto she coudë skip and make a game

As any kid or calf folowing his dame.

Hire mouth was swete as braket[65] or the meth,[66]

Or horde of apples laid in hay or heth.

Winsing[67] she was, as is a jolly colt,

Long as a mast, and upright as a bolt.

A broche she bare upon hire low colére.

As brode as is the bosse of a bokelére.[68]

Hire shoon were lacëd on hire leggës hie;

She was a primerole,[69] a piggesnie,[70]

For any lord, to liggen[71] in his bedde,

Or yet for any good yemán[72] to wedde.

[Footnote 48: Trim and slim.]

[Footnote 49: Girdle.]

[Footnote 50: Apron.]

[Footnote 51: Morning's milk.]

[Footnote 52: Loins.]

[Footnote 53: Embroidered.]

[Footnote 54: Collar.]

[Footnote 55: Cap.]

[Footnote 56: Surely.]

[Footnote 57: Wanton.]

[Footnote 58: Trimmed fine.]

[Footnote 59: Young pear.]

[Footnote 60: Ornamented with pearl-shaped beads of a metal resembling

brass.]

[Footnote 61: Think.]

[Footnote 62: Puppet.]

[Footnote 63: Such.]

[Footnote 64: Brisk.]

[Footnote 65: A sweet drink of ale, honey, and spice.]

[Footnote 66: Mead.]

[Footnote 67: Skittish.]

[Footnote 68: Buckler.]

[Footnote 69: Primrose.]

[Footnote 70: Pansy.]

[Footnote 71: Lie.]

[Footnote 72: Yeoman.]

* * * * *

ANONYMOUS BALLADS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.

WALY, WALY BUT LOVE BE BONNY.

O waly,[73] waly up the bank,

And waly, waly down the brae,[74]

And waly, waly yon burn[75] side,

Where I and my love wont to gae.

I lean'd my back unto an aik,[76]

I thought it was a trusty tree;

But first it bow'd and syne[77] it brak,

Sae my true love did lightly me.

O waly, waly but love be bonny,

A little time while it is new;

But when 'tis auld it waxeth cauld,

And fades away like the morning dew.

O wherefore should I busk[78] my head?

Or wherefore should I kame[79] my hair?

For my true love has me forsook,

And says he'll never love me mair.

Now Arthur-Seat shall be my bed,

The sheets shall ne'er be fyl'd by me;

Saint Anton's well[80] shall be my drink,

Sinn my true love has forsaken me.

Martinmas' wind, when wilt thou blaw

And shake the green leaves off the tree?

O gentle death, when wilt thou come?

For of my life I'm aweary.

'Tis not the frost that freezes fell,

Nor blawing snow's inclemency;

'Tis not sic cauld that makes me cry,

But my love's heart grown cauld to me.

When we came in by Glasgow town

We were a comely sight to see;

My love was clad in the black velvet,

And I myself in cramasie.[81]

But had I wist, before I kissed,

That love had been sae ill to win,

I'd lock'd my heart in a case of gold,

And pin'd it with a silver pin.

Oh, oh, if my young babe were born,

And set upon the nurse's knee,

And I myself were dead and gane,

And the green grass growing over me!

[Footnote 73: An exclamation of sorrow, woe! alas!]

[Footnote 74: Hillside.]

[Footnote 75: Brook.]

[Footnote 76: Oak.]

[Footnote 77: Then.]

[Footnote 78: Adorn.]

[Footnote 79: Comb.]

[Footnote 80: At the foot of Arthur's-Seat, a cliff near Edinburgh.]

[Footnote 81: Crimson.]

THE TWO CORBIES.[82]

As I was walking all alane

I heard twa corbies making a mane;

The tane unto the t'other say,

"Where sail we gang and dine to-day?"

"In behint yon auld fail[83] dyke,

I wot there lies a new-slain knight;

And naebody kens that he lies there

But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.

"His hound is to the hunting gane,

His hawk to fetch the wild fowl hame,

His lady's ta'en another mate,

So we may mak our dinner sweet.

"Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,[84]

And I'll pick out his bonny blue een;

Wi' ae[85] lock o' his gowden hair,

We'll theck[86] our nest when it grows bare.

"Mony a one for him makes mane,

But nane sail ken where he is gane;

O'er his white banes, when they are bare,

The wind sail blow for evermair."

BONNIE GEORGE CAMPBELL.

Hie upon Highlands and low upon Tay,

Bonnie George Campbell rade out on a day.

Saddled and bridled and gallant rade he;

Hame cam' his horse, but never cam' he.

Out came his auld mother, greeting[87] fu' sair;

And out cam' his bonnie bride, riving her hair.

Saddled and bridled and booted rade he;

Toom[88] hame cam' the saddle, but never cam' he.

"My meadow lies green and my corn is unshorn;

My barn is to bigg[89] and my babie's unborn."

Saddled and bridled and booted rade he;

Toom cam' the saddle, but never cam' he.

[Footnote 82: The two ravens.]

[Footnote 83: Turf.]

[Footnote 84: Neck-bone.]

[Footnote 85: One.]

[Footnote 86: Thach.]

[Footnote 87: Weeping.]

[Footnote 88: Empty.]

[Footnote 89: Build.]

EDMUND SPENSER.

THE SUITOR'S LIFE.

Full little knowest thou that hast not tride,

What hell it is in suing long to bide;

To lose good days that might be better spent;

To wast long nights in pensive discontent:

To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;

To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;

To have thy prince's grace, yet want her peere's[90]:

To have thy asking, yet waite manie yeers,

To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;

To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires:

To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,

To spend, to give, to want, to be undone!

THE MUSIC OF THE BOWER OF BLISS.

[From the _Faerie Queene_. Book II. Canto XII.]

Eftsoones they heard a most melodious sound,

Of all that mote[2] delight a daintie eare,

Such as attonce[91] might not on living ground,

Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere:

Right hard it was for wight which did it heare,

To read what manner of music that mote[92] bee;

For all that pleasing is to living eare

Was there consorted in one harmonee;

Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree.

The joyous birdes, shrouded in chearefull shade,

Their notes unto the voyce attempred sweet;

Th' angelicall soft trembling voyces made

To th' instruments divine respondence meet;

The silver sounding instruments did meet

With the base[93] murmure of the waters fall;

The waters fall with difference discreet,

Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;

The gentle warbling wind low answered to all....

The whiles some one did chaunt this lovely lay;

Ah! see, whoso fayre thing doest faine[94] to see,

In springing flowre the image of thy day!

Ah! see the virgin rose, how sweetly shee

Doth first peepe foorth with bashfull modestee,

That fairer seemes the lesse ye see her may!

Lo! see, soone after how more bold and free

Her barëd bosome she doth broad display;

Lo! see, soone after how she fades and falls away.

So passeth, in the passing of a day,

Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre;

Ne more doth florish after first decay,

That earst[95] was sought to deck both bed and bowre

Of many a lady, and many a paramowre!

Gather therefore the rose whilst yet is prime,[96]

For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre:

Gather the rose of love whilst yet is time,

Whilst loving thou mayst lovëd be with equall crime.

[Footnote 90: A reference to Lord Burleigh's hostility to the poet]

[Footnote 91: Might.]

[Footnote 92: At once.]

[Footnote 93: Bass.]

THE HOUSE OF SLEEP.

[From the _Faerie Queene_. Book I. Canto I.]

He, making speedy way through spersëd ayre,

And through the world of waters wide and deepe,

To Morpheus' house doth hastily repaire:

Amid the bowels of the earth full steepe

And low, where dawning day doth never peepe,

His dwelling is; there Tethys his wet bed

Doth ever wash, and Cynthia still doth steepe

In silver deaw his ever-drouping hed,

Whiles sad Night over him her mantle black doth spred....

And more to lulle him in his slumber soft,

A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,

And ever-drizling raine upon the loft,

Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne

Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.

No other noyse, nor people's troublous cryes,

As still are wont t'annoy the wallëd towne,

Might there be heard; but careless quiet lyes

Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes.

[Footnote 94: Rejoice.]

[Footnote 95: First, formerly.]

[Footnote 96: Spring.]

WILLIAM SHAKSPERE.

SONNET XC.

Then hate me when thou wilt: if ever, now:

Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,

Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,

And do not drop in for an after loss.

Ah! do not when my heart hath scaped this sorrow,

Come in the rearward of a conquered woe;

Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,

To linger out a purposed overthrow.

If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,

When other petty griefs have done their spite;

But in the onset come: So shall I taste

At first the very worst of fortune's might;

And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,

Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so.

SONG.

[From _As You Like It_.]

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Thou art not so unkind

As man's ingratitude;

Thy tooth is not so keen,

Because thou art not seen

Although thy breath be rude.

Heigh ho! Sing heigh ho! unto the green holly:

Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly,

Then heigh ho! the holly!

This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky,

Thou dost not bite so nigh

As benefits forgot;

Though thou the waters warp,

Thy sting is not so sharp

As friend remembered not.

Heigh ho! sing heigh ho! etc.

THE SLEEP OF KINGS.

[From _Henry IV_.--Part II.]

How many thousand of my poorest subjects

Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,

That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down,

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,

Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,

And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,

Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,

Under the canopy of costly state,

And lull'd with sounds of sweetest melody?

O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile,

In loathsome beds; and leav'st the kingly couch,

A watch-case, or a common 'larum bell?

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge;

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

With deaf'ning clamors in the slippery clouds,

That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?

Can'st thou, O partial sleep! give thy repose

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;

And, in the calmest and most stillest night,

With all appliances and means to boot,

Deny it to a king? Then, happy low-lie-down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

FALSTAFF AND BARDOLPH.

[From _Henry IV_.--Part I.]

_Falstaff_. Bardolph, am I not fallen away vilely since this last

action? do I not bate? do I not dwindle?

Why, my skin hangs about me like an old lady's loose gown; I am wither'd

like an old apple-John.

Well, I'll repent, and that suddenly, while I am in some liking; I shall

be out of heart shortly, and then I shall have no strength to repent.

An I have not forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I am a

peppercorn, a brewer's horse: the inside of a church! Company,

villainous company hath been the spoil of me:

_Bardolph_. Sir John, you are so fretful, you cannot live long.

_Fal_. Why, there it is. Come, sing me a bawdy song; make me merry. I

was as virtuously given, as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough:

swore little; diced, not above seven times a week; paid money that I

borrowed, three or four times; lived well, and in good compass: and now

I live out of all order, out of all compass.

_Bard_. Why you are so fat, Sir John, that you must needs be out of all

compass; out of all reasonable compass, Sir John.

_Fal_. Do thou amend thy face, and I'll amend my life: Thou art our

admiral, thou bearest the lantern in the poop--but 'tis in the nose of

thee; thou art the knight of the burning lamp.

_Bard_. Why, Sir John, my face does you no harm.

_Fal_ No, I'll be sworn; I make as good use of it as many a man doth of

a death's head or a _memento mori_: I never see thy face but I think

upon hell-fire, and Dives that lived in purple; for there he is in his

robes, burning, burning. If thou wert anyway given to virtue, I would

swear by thy face; my oath should be: By this fire: but thou art

altogether given over; and wert indeed, but for the light of thy face,

the son of utter darkness. When thou runn'st up Gad's Hill in the night

to catch my horse, if I did not think thou hadst been an _ignis fatuus_,

or a ball of wildfire, there's no purchase in money. O, thou art a

perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire-light! Thou hast saved me a

thousand marks in links and torches, walking with thee in the night

betwixt tavern and tavern; but the sack that thou hast drunk me, would

have bought me lights as good cheap, at the dearest chandler's in

Europe. I have maintained that Salamander of yours with fire, any time

this two and thirty years; Heaven reward me for it!

THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN.

[From _As You Like It_.]

_Jacques_. All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;

Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school: and then, the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow: Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like a pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth: And then the justice,

In fair round belly, with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well-saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans[97] teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.

HAMLET'S SOLILOQUY.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune;

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing, end them? To die--to sleep--

No more; and, by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to--'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished: to die, to sleep;

To sleep! perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there's the respect,

That makes calamity of so long life:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus take

With a bare bodkin?[98] Who would fardels[99] bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life;

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will;

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment,

With this regard, their currents turn away

And lose the name of action.

[Footnote 97: Without.]

DETACHED PASSAGES FROM THE PLAYS.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Our revels now are ended: these our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself--

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack[100] behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded[101] with a sleep.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts

Imagine howling! 'tis too horrible!

O who can hold a fire in his hand,

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite

By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow,

By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?

O no! the apprehension of the good

Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,

Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy,

She sat, like patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief.

Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,

Could ever hear by tale or history,

The course of true love never did run smooth:

But either it was different in blood;

Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,

War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it;

Making it momentary as a sound,

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,

Brief as the lightning in the collied[102] night,

That, in a spleen,[103] unfolds both heaven and earth,

And ere a man hath power to say, Behold!

The jaws of darkness do devour it up:

So quick bright things come to confusion.

[Footnote 98: Small sword.]

[Footnote 99: Burdens.]

[Footnote 100: Cloud.]

[Footnote 101: Encompassed.]

[Footnote 102: Black.]

[Footnote 103: Caprice, whim.]

FRANCIS BACON.

OF DEATH.

[From the Essays.]

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural

fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. Certainly,

the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another

world, is holy and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto

nature, is weak. Yet in religious meditations there is sometimes mixture

of vanity and of superstition. You shall read in some of the friars'

books of mortification, that a man should think with himself what the

pain is, if he have but his finger's end pressed or tortured; and

thereby imagine what the pains of death are, when the whole body is

corrupted and dissolved; when many times death passeth with less pain

than the torture of a limb; for the most vital parts are not the

quickest of sense. And by him that spake only as a philosopher and

natural man, it was well said, _Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors

ipsa._[104] Groans and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends

weeping, and blacks and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible. It

is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man so

weak but it mates and masters the fear of death, and therefore death is

no such terrible enemy, when a man hath so many attendants about him

that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love

slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear

preoccupateth[105] it. It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a

little infant perhaps the one is as painful as the other. He that dies

in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood: who, for

the time, scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind fixed and bent

upon somewhat that is good doth avert the dolours of death; but, above

all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is _Nunc dimittis_[106] when a

man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations. Death hath this also,

that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy:

_Extinctus amabitur idem_.[107]

[Footnote 104: The shows of death terrify more than death itself.]

[Footnote 105: Anticipates.]

[Footnote 106: Now thou dismissest us.]

[Footnote 107: The same man will be loved when dead.]

OF STUDIES.

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief

use for delight is in privateness and retiring: for ornament, is in

discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of

business; for expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars,

one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshaling of

affairs come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time

in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation;

to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar: they

perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities

are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies

themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be

bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire

them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that

is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation. Read not to

contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find

talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be

tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested;

that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but

not curiously;[108] and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence

and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made

of them by others; but that would be only in the less important

arguments,[109] and the meaner sorts of books; else distilled books are,

like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man,

conference a ready man, and writing an exact man; and therefore, if a

man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little,

he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have

much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise;

poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral,

grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend: _Abeunt studia in

mores_;[110] nay, there is no stand or impediment in the wit, but may be

wrought out by fit studies: like as diseases of the body may have

appropriate exercises--bowling is good for the stone and reins, shooting

for the lungs and breast, gentle walking for the stomach, riding for the

head and the like; so, if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the

mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so

little, he must begin again; if his wit be not apt to distinguish or

find differences, let him study the school-men, for they are _Cymini

sectores_;[111] if he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up

one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers'

cases: so every defect of the mind may have a special receipt.

[Footnote 108: Attentively.]

[Footnote 109: Subjects.]

[Footnote 110: Studies pass into the character.]

[Footnote 111: Hair-splitters.]

OF ADVERSITY.

It was a high speech of Seneca (after the manner of the Stoics), that

"the good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the

good things that belong to adversity are to be admired"--_Bona rerum

secundarum optabilia, adversarum mirabilia_. Certainly, if miracles be

the command over Nature, they appear most in adversity. It is yet a

higher speech of his than the other (much too high for a heathen), "It

is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security

of a god "--_Vere magnum habere fragilitatem hominis, securitatem dei_.

This would have done better in poesy, where transcendencies are more

allowed; and the poets indeed have been busy with it; for it is in

effect the thing which is figured in that strange fiction of the ancient

poets, which seemeth not to be without mystery;[112] nay, and to have

some approach to the state of a Christian; "that Hercules, when he went

to unbind _Prometheus_ (by whom human nature is represented), sailed the

length of the great ocean in an earthen pot or pitcher," lively

describing Christian resolution, that saileth in the frail bark of the

flesh through the waves of the world. But, to speak in a _mean_[113] the

virtue of prosperity is temperance, the virtue of adversity is

fortitude, which in morals is the more heroical virtue. Prosperity is

the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New,

which carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer revelation of

God's favor. Yet, even in the Old Testament, if you listen to David's

harp, you shall hear as many hearse-like airs as carols; and the pencil

of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job

than the felicities of Solomon. Prosperity is not without many fears and

distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes. We see in

needle-works and embroideries it is more pleasing to have a lively work

upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work

upon a lightsome ground: judge, therefore, of the pleasure of the heart

by the pleasure of the eye. Certainly virtue is like precious odors,

most fragrant when they are incensed[114] or crushed: for prosperity

doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

[Footnote 112: An allegorical meaning.]

[Footnote 113: Moderately, that is, without poetic figures.]

[Footnote 114: Burnt.]

BEN JONSON.

SONG TO CELIA.

Drink to me only with thine eyes,

And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

And I'll not look for wine.

The thirst that from the soul doth rise

Doth ask a drink divine;

But might I of Jove's nectar sup

I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

Not so much honoring thee,

As giving it a hope, that there

It could not withered be.

But thou thereon did'st only breathe

And sent'st it back to me:

Since when it grows and smells, I swear,

Not of itself, but thee.

LONG LIFE.

It is not growing like a tree

In bulk, doth make men better be;

Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,

To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:

A lily of a day

Is fairer far in May,

Although it fall and die that night;

It was the plant and flower of light.

In small proportions we just beauty see;

And in short measures life may perfect be.

EPITAPH ON THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE.

Underneath this sable hearse

Lies the subject of all verse,

Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;

Death, ere thou hast slain another,

Learn'd and fair and good as she,

Time shall throw a dart at thee.

THE THANKLESS MUSE.

[From _The Poetaster_.]

O this would make a learned and liberal soul

To rive his stainéd quill up to the back,

And damn his long-watched labours to the fire--

Things that were born when none, but the still night

And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes;

Were not his own free merit a more crown,

Unto his travails than their reeling claps.[115]

This 'tis that strikes me silent, seals my lips,

And apts me rather to sleep out my time,

Than I would waste it in contemnéd strifes

With these vile Ibidés,[116] these unclean birds

That make their mouths their clysters, and still purge

From their hot entrails. But I leave the monsters

To their own fate. And, since the Comic Muse

Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try

If tragedy have a more kind aspect:

Her favors in my next I will pursue,

Where, if I prove the pleasure but of one,

So he judicious be, he shall be alone

A theater unto me. Once I'll 'say[117]

To strike the ear of time in those fresh strains,

As shall, beside the cunning of their ground,

Give cause to some of wonder, some despite,

And more despair to imitate their sound.

I, that spend half my nights and all my days

Here in a cell, to get a dark pale face,

To come forth worth the ivy or the bays,

And in this age can hope no other grace--

Leave me! There's something come into my thought

That must and shall be sung high and aloof,

Safe from the wolf's black jaw and the dull ass's hoof.[118]

[Footnote 115: Applauses.]

[Footnote 116: Plural of ibis.]

[Footnote 117: That is, I will try once for all.]

[Footnote 118: That is, envy and stupidity.]

JOHN FLETCHER AND FRANCIS BEAUMONT.

A SONG OF TRUE LOVE DEAD.

[From _The Maid's Tragedy_.]

Lay a garland on my hearse

Of the dismal yew;

Maidens willow branches bear;

Say I died true:

My love was false, but I was firm

From my hour of birth:

Upon my buried body lie

Lightly, gentle earth.

A SONG OF CRUEL LOVE.[119]

[From _Rollo, Duke of Normandy_.]

Take, oh take those lips away,

That so sweetly were forsworn,

And those eyes, the break of day,

Lights that do mislead the morn;

But my kisses bring again,

Seals of love, though sealed in vain.

Hide, oh hide those hills of snow,

Which thy frozen bosom bears,

On whose tops the pinks that grow

Are of those that April wears;

But first set my poor heart free,

Bound in those icy chains by thee.

SWEET MELANCHOLY.[120]

[From _The Nice Valor_.]

Hence, all your vain delights,

As short as are the nights

Wherein you spend your folly!

There's naught in this life sweet,

If man were wise to see't,

But only melancholy:

O sweetest melancholy!

Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes,

A sigh that piercing mortifies,

A look that's fastened on the ground,

A tongue chained up without a sound!

Fountain-heads and pathless groves,

Places which pale passion loves,

Moonlight walks when all the fowls

Are warmly housed, save bats and owls,

A midnight bell, a parting groan,

These are the sounds we feed upon;

Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley:

Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.

[Footnote 119: The first stanza of this song was probably Shakspere's.]

[Footnote 120: This should be compared with Milton's _Il Penserosa_.]

CÆSAR'S LAMENT OVER POMPEY.

[From _The False One._]

O thou conqueror,

Thou glory of the world once, now the pity:

Thou awe of nations, wherefore didst thou fall thus?

What poor fate followed thee and plucked thee on

To trust thy sacred life to an Egyptian?

The life and light of Rome to a blind stranger

That honorable war ne'er taught a nobleness,

Nor worthy circumstance showed what a man was?

That never heard thy name sung but in banquets

And loose lascivious pleasures? To a boy

That had no faith to comprehend thy greatness,

No study of thy life to know thy goodness?...

Egyptians, dare you think your high pyrámidës,

Built to out-dure the sun, as you suppose,

Where your unworthy kings lie raked in ashes,

Are monuments fit for him? No, brood of Nilus,

Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven;

No pyramid set off his memories,

But the eternal substance of his greatness,

To which I leave him.

JOHN MILTON.

FAME.

[From _Lycidas._]

Alas! what boots it with incessant care

To tend the homely, slighted, shepherd's trade,

And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?

Were it not better done, as others use,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights and live laborious days;

But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,

And think to burst out into sudden blaze,

Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,[121]

And slits the thin-spun life. "But not the praise,"

Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears:

"Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,

Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies,

But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes

And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;

As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed."

THE PLEASURES OF MELANCHOLY.

[From _Il Penseroso._]

Sweet bird that shun'st the noise of folly,

Most musical, most melancholy!

Thee, chauntress, oft the woods among

I woo, to hear thy even-song;

And, missing thee, I walk unseen

On the dry smooth-shaven green,

To behold the wandering moon,

Riding near her highest noon,

Like one that had been led astray

Through the heaven's wide pathless way,

And oft, as if her head she bowed,

Stooping through a fleecy cloud.

Oft, on a plat of rising ground,

I hear the far-off curfew sound,

Over some wide-watered shore,

Swinging slow with sullen roar;

Or, if the air will not permit,

Some still removèd place will fit,

Where glowing embers through the room

Teach light to counterfeit a gloom,

Far from all resort of mirth,

Save the cricket on the hearth,

Or the bellman's drowsy charm[122]

To bless the doors from nightly harm....

But let my due feet never fail

To walk the studious cloister's pale,

And love the high embowèd roof.

With antique pillars massy-proof,

And storied windows richly dight,

Casting a dim religious light.

There let the pealing organ blow,

To the full-voiced quire below,

In service high and anthem clear,

As may with sweetness, through mine ear,

Dissolve me into ecstasies,

And bring all Heaven before mine eyes.

And may at last my weary age

Find out the peaceful hermitage,

The hairy gown and mossy cell,

Where I may sit and rightly spell

Of every star that heaven doth shew,

And every herb that sips the dew,

Till old experience do attain

To something like prophetic strain.

These pleasures, Melancholy, give;

And I with thee will choose to live.

[Footnote 121: Atropos, the fate who cuts the thread of life.]

[Footnote 122: The watchman's call.]

THE PROTECTION OF CONSCIENCE.

[From _Comus_.]

Scene: A wild wood; night.

_Lady_: My brothers, when they saw me wearied out

With this long way, resolving here to lodge

Under the spreading favor of these pines,

Stepped, as they said, to the next thicket-side

To bring me berries, or such cooling fruit

As the kind hospitable woods provide.

They left me then when the grey-hooded Even,

Like a sad votarist in palmer's weed,

Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phoebus' wain.

But where they are, and why they came not back,

Is now the labor of my thoughts. 'Tis likeliest

They had engaged their wandering steps too far;

And envious darkness, ere they could return,

Had stolen them from me. Else, O thievish Night,

Why shouldst thou, but for some felonious end,

In thy dark lantern thus close up the stars

That Nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps

With everlasting oil, to give due light

To the misled and lonely traveller?

This is the place, as well as I may guess,

Whence even now the tumult of loud mirth

Was rife, and perfect in my listening ear;

Yet nought but single darkness do I find.

What might this be? A thousand fantasies

Begin to throng into my memory,

Of calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire,

And airy tongues that syllable men's names

On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.

These thoughts may startle well, but not astound

The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended

By a strong siding champion, Conscience.

O, welcome, pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope,

Thou hovering angel girt with golden wings,

And thou unblemished form of Chastity!

I see ye visibly, and now believe

That He, the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill

Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,

Would send a glistening guardian, if need were,

To keep my life and honor unassailed....

Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud

Turn forth her silver lining on the night?

I did not err: there does a sable cloud

Turn forth her silver lining on the night,

And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.

INVOCATION TO LIGHT.

[From _Paradise Lost_.]

Thee I revisit safe,

And feel thy sovereign vital lamp; but thou

Revisitest not these eyes, that roll in vain

To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;

So thick a drop serene[123] hath quenched their orbs,

Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more

Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt

Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,

Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief

Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,

That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,

Nightly I visit: nor sometimes forget

Those other two equalled with me in fate,

I equalled with them in renown,

Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides,[124]

And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old:

Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move

Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird

Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid

Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year

Seasons return, but not to me returns

Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,

Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,

Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;

But cloud instead, and ever-during dark,

Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men

Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair

Presented with a universal blank

Of nature's works, to me expunged and rased,

And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.

So much the rather thou, celestial Light,

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence

Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight.

[Footnote 123: The _gutta serena_, or cataract.]

[Footnote 124: Homer.]

SATAN.

[From _Paradise Lost_.]

He scarce had ceased when the superior Fiend

Was moving toward the shore: his ponderous shield,

Etherial temper, massy, large and round,

Behind him cast; the broad circumference

Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb

Through optic glass the Tuscan artist[125] views

At evening from the top of Fesole,[126]

Or in Valdamo, to descry new lands,

Rivers or mountains on her spotty globe.

His spear (to equal which the tallest pine

Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast

Of some great ammiral, were but a wand)

He walked with, to support uneasy steps

Over the burning marle, not like those steps

On heaven's azure; and the torrid clime

Smote on him sore beside, vaulted with fire.

Nathless he so endured, till on the beach

Of that inflamèd sea he stood, and called

His legions, angel-forms, who lay entranced

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks

In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades

High over-arched embower, or scattered sedge

Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed

Hath vexed the Red Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew

Busiris and his Memphian chivalry,

While with perfidious hatred they pursued

The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld

From the safe shore their floating carcasses

And broken chariot-wheels: so thick bestrewn,

Abject and lost lay these, covering the flood,

Under amazement of their hideous change.

[Footnote 125: Galileo.]

[Footnote 126: A hill near Florence.]

ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.[127]

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;

Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,

Forget not: in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold

Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled

Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans

The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow

O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway

The triple Tyrant,[128] that from these may grow

A hundred-fold, who, having learnt thy way,

Early may fly the Babylonian woe.[129]

[Footnote 127: This sonnet refers to the persecution instituted in 1655

by the Duke of Savoy against the Vaudois Protestants.]

[Footnote 128: The Pope, who wore the triple crown or tiara.]

[Footnote 129: The Papacy, with which the Protestant reformers identified

Babylon the Great, the "Scarlet Woman" of Revelation.]

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

THE VANITY OF MONUMENTS.

[From _Urn Burial_]

There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally

considereth all things. Our fathers find their graves in our short

memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.

Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some

trees stand, and old families last not three oaks....The iniquity[130]

of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of

men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the

founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives, that burnt the temple of

Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of

Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our

felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal

durations and Thersites[131] is like to live as long as Agamemnon. Who

knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more

remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known

account of time? Without the favor of the everlasting register, the

first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methusaleh's long life

had been his only chronicle.

Oblivion is not to be hired.[132] The greater part must be content to be

as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in

the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story, and the

reported names ever since contain not one living century. The number of

the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far

surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? Every hour adds

unto that current arithmetic which scarce stands one moment. And since

death must be the Lucina[133] of life, and even pagans could doubt

whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right

descensions and makes but winter arches, and, therefore, it cannot be

long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes. Since

the brother[134] of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and time

that grows old in itself bids us hope no long duration; diuturnity is a

dream and folly of expectation....

There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality. Whatever hath no

beginning may be confident of no end. All others have a dependent being

and within the reach of destruction, which is the peculiar of that

necessary essence that cannot destroy itself, and the highest strain of

omnipotency, to be so powerfully constituted as not to suffer even from

the power of itself. But the sufficiency of Christian immortality

frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after

death makes a folly of posthumous memory. God, who can only[135] destroy

our souls, and hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or

names hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of

chance that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustrations, and

to hold long subsistence seems but a scape[136] in oblivion. But man is

a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnizing

nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of

bravery[137] in the infamy of his nature.

[Footnote 130: Injustice.]

[Footnote 131: See Shakspere's _Troilus and Cressida_.]

[Footnote 132: That is, bribed, bought off.]

[Footnote 133: The goddess of childbirth. We must die to be born again.]

[Footnote 134: Sleep.]

[Footnote 135: That is, the only one who can.]

[Footnote 136: Freak.]

[Footnote 137: Ostentation.]

* * * * *

JOHN DRYDEN.

THE CHARACTER OF ZIMRI.[138]

[From _Absalom and Achitophel_.]

In the first rank of these did Zimri stand,

A man so various that he seemed to be

Not one, but all mankind's epitome:

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,

Was every thing by turns, and nothing long;

But in the course of one revolving moon

Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;

Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,

Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking,

Blest madman, who could every hour employ

With something new to wish or to enjoy!

Railing and praising were his usual themes,

And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:

So over-violent or over-civil

That every man with him was God or Devil.

In squandering wealth was his peculiar art;

Nothing went unrewarded but desert.

Beggared by fools whom still he found[139] too late,

He had his jest, and they had his estate.

He laughed himself from court; then sought relief

By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief:

For spite of him, the weight of business fell

To Absalom and wise Achitophel.[140]

Thus, wicked but in will, of means bereft,

He left not faction, but of that was left.

[Footnote 138: This is a satirical

sketch of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.]

[Footnote 139: Found out, detected.]

[Footnote 140: The Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Shaftesbury.]

THE CHEATS OF HOPE.

[From _Aurengzebe_.]

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;

Yet, fooled with hope, men favor the deceit,

Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay;

To-morrow's falser than the former day.

Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blest

With some new joys, cuts off what we possessed.

Strange cozenage! none would live past years again,

Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain,

And from the dregs of life think to receive

What the first sprightly running could not give.

I'm tired of waiting for this chymic[141] gold

Which fools us young and beggars us when old.

[Footnote 141: The gold which the

alchemists tried to make from base metals.]

* * * * *

JONATHAN SWIFT.

THE EMPEROR OF LILLIPUT.

[From _Gulliver's Travels_.]

He is taller by almost the breadth of my nail than any of his court;

which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders. His features

are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his

complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well

proportioned, all his motions graceful, and his deportment majestic. He

was then past his prime, being twenty-eight years and three quarters

old, of which he had reigned about seven in great felicity, and

generally victorious. For the better convenience of beholding him, I lay

on my side, so that my face was parallel to his, and he stood but three

yards off; however, I have had him since many times in my hand, and

therefore cannot be deceived in the description. His dress was very

plain and simple, and the fashion of it between the Asiatic and the

European; but he had on his head a light helmet of gold, adorned with

jewels and a plume on the crest. He held his sword drawn in his hand to

defend himself, if I should happen to break loose; it was almost three

inches long: the hilt and scabbard were gold enriched with diamonds. His

voice was shrill, but very clear and articulate, and I could distinctly

hear it, when I stood up.

THE STRULDBRUGS.

[From _Gulliver's Travels_.]

One day in much good company, I was asked by a person of quality whether

I had seen any of their _Struldbrugs_, or immortals? I said I had not,

and desired he would explain to me what he meant by such an appellation,

applied to a mortal creature. He told me that sometimes, though very

rarely, a child happened to be born in a family with a red circular spot

in the forehead, directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible

mark that it should never die....He said these births were so rare that

he did not believe there could be above eleven hundred _Struldbrugs_ of

both sexes in the whole kingdom; of which he computed about fifty in the

metropolis, and among the rest, a young girl born about three years ago;

that these productions were not peculiar to any family, but a mere

effect of chance; and the children of the _Struldbrugs_ themselves were

equally mortal with the rest of the people....After this preface, he

gave me a particular account of the _Struldbrugs_ among them. He said

they commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after

which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both

till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession;

for otherwise, there not being above two or three of that species born

in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they

came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in

this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other

old men, but many more, which arose from the dreadful prospect of never

dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain,

talkative, but incapable of friendship and dead to all natural

affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and

impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects

against which their envy seems principally directed are the vices of the

younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former,

they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and

whenever they see a funeral they lament and repine that others are gone

to a harbor of rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive.

They have no remembrance of any thing but what they learned and

observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect,

And for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on

common tradition than upon their best recollections. The least miserable

among them appear to be those who turn to dotage and entirely lose their

memories; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want

many bad qualities which abound in others....At ninety, they lose their

teeth and hair; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat

and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite. The

diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or

diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things,

and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends

and relatives. For the same reason they never can amuse themselves with

reading, because their memory will not serve to carry them from the

beginning of a sentence to the end; and by this defect they are deprived

of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable....

They are despised and hated by all sorts of people; when one of them is

born, it is reckoned ominous, and their birth is recorded very

particularly....They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld; and

the women were homelier than the men Beside the usual deformities in

extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion

to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half a

dozen I soon distinguished which was the eldest, although there was not

above a century or two between them.

* * * * *

ALEXANDER POPE.

A CHARACTER OF ADDISON.

[From the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_.]

Peace to all such! but were there one whose fires

True genius kindles and fair fame inspires;

Blest with each talent and each art to please,

And born to write, converse, and live with ease:

Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,

Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne;

View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,

And hate, for arts that caused himself to rise;

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,

And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;

Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,

Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike;

Alike reserved to blame or to commend,

A timorous foe and a suspicious friend;

Dreading even fools, by flatterers besieged;

And so obliging that he ne'er obliged;

Like _Cato_,[142] give his little Senate laws,

And sit attentive to his own applause;

While wits and templars[143] every sentence raise,

And wonder with a foolish face of praise--

Who but must laugh if such a man there be?

Who would not weep if Atticus were he?

AN ORNAMENT TO HER SEX.

[From the _Epistle of the Characters of Women_.]