Be good, my dear, and let who will be clever; I THE DEAR OLD DOLL HAD once a sweet little doll, dears, Her cheeks were so red and so white, dears, As I played in the heath one day; And I cried for her more than a week, dears, I found my poor little doll, dears, As I played in the heath one day; And her arm trodden off by the cows, dears, THE WORLD'S AGE WH WHO will say the world is dying? Earth a failure, God-forsaken, Still the race of Hero-spirits Pass the lamp from hand to hand; Fiery joy from wold and wood; While a slave bewails his fetters; THE THE THREE FISHERS HREE fishers went sailing away to the West, Each thought on the woman who loved him the best, town; For men must work, and women must weep, Three wives sat up in the light-house tower, And they trimmed the lamps as the sun went down; They looked at the squall, and they looked at the shower, And the night-rack came rolling up ragged and brown. CAUSES OF THE DEFECTS IN MODERN POETRY But men must work, and women must weep, Three corpses lay on the shining sands, In the morning gleam as the tide went down, And the women are weeping and wringing their hands, For those who will never come home to the town; CAUSES OF THE DEFECTS IN T is impossible to give outward form to that which is in its very nature formless, like doubt and discontent. For on such subjects thought itself is not defined: it has no limit, no self-coherence, not even method or organic law. And in a poem, as in all else, the body must be formed according to the law of the inner life; the utterance must be the expression, the outward and visible autotype of the spirit which animates it. But where the thought is defined by no limits, it cannot express itself in form, for form is that which has limits. Where it has no inward unity it cannot have any outward one. If the spirit be impatient of all moral rule, its utterance will be equally impatient of all artistic rule; and thus, as we are now beginning to discover from experience, the poetry of doubt will find itself unable to use those forms of verse which have been always held to be the highest: tragedy, epic, the ballad, and lastly, even the subjective lyrical ode. For they, too, to judge by every great lyric which remains to us, require a ground-work of consistent, self-coherent belief; and they require also an appreciation of melody even more delicate, and a verbal polish even more complete, than any other form of poetic utterance. But where there is no melody within, there will be no melody without. It is in vain to attempt the setting of spiritual discords to physical music. The mere practical patience and self-restraint requisite to work out rhythm when fixed on, will be wanting; nay, the fitting rhythm will never be found, the subject itself being rhythmic: and thus we shall have, or rather, alas! do have, a wider and wider divorce of sound and sense, a greater and greater carelessness for polish, and for the charm of musical utterance, and watch the clear and spirit-stirring melodies of the older poets swept away by a deluge of half-metrical prose-run-mad, diffuse, unfinished, unmusical, to which any other meter than that in which it happens to have been written would have been equally appropriate, because all are equally inappropriate; and where men have nothing to sing, it is not of the slightest consequence how they sing it. While poets persist in thinking and writing thus, it is vain for them to talk aloud about the poet's divine mission, as the prophet of mankind, the swayer of the universe, and so forth. Not that we believe the poet simply by virtue of being a singer to have any such power. While young gentlemen are talking about governing heaven and earth by verse, Wellingstons and Peels, Arkwrights and Stephensons, Frys and Chisholms, are doing it by plain practical prose; and even of those who have moved and led the hearts of men by verse, every one, as far as we know, has produced his magical effects by poetry of the very opposite form to that which is now in fashion. What poet ever had more influence than Homer? What poet is more utterly antipodal to our modern schools? There are certain Hebrew psalms, too, which will be confessed, even by those who differ most from them, to have exercised some slight influence on human thought and action, and to be likely to exercise the same for some time to come. Are they any more like our modern poetic forms than they are like our modern poetic matter? Ay, even in our own time, what has been the forms, what the temper, of all poetry, from Körner and Heine, what has made the German heart leap up, but simplicity, manhood, clearness, finished melody, the very opposite, in a word, of our new school? And to look at our home, what is the modern poetry which lives on the lips and in the hearts of Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen? It is not only simple in form and language, but much of it fitted, by a severe exercise of artistic patience, to tunes already existing. Who does not remember how the "Marseillaise" was born, or how Burns's "Scotts wha ha wi' Wallace bled," or the story of Moore's taking the old "Red Fox March," and giving it a new immortality as "Let Erin remember the days of old," while poor Emmett sprang up and cried, "Oh, that I had twenty thousand Irishmen marching to that tune!" So it is, even to this day, and let those who hanker after poetic fame take note of it: not a poem which is now really living but has gained its immortality by virtue of simplicity and positive faith. A HYPATIA'S DEATH (From "Hypatia") ND was the Amal's news true, then? Philammon saw Raphael rush across the street into the Museum gardens. His last words had been a command to stay where he was, and the boy obeyed |