FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY

MYERS.

[BORN at Keswick on February 6, 1843, his father being a Keswick clergyman and his mother a Marshall of Hallsteads. He had a distinguished career at Cheltenham and at Cambridge, where he won no less than six University prizes and was second in the first class both of the Classical and the Moral Sciences Tripos; won a reputation as a critic; and became a leader of the psychical research movement. He died in Rome on January 17, 1901. His Saint Paul (1867), an unsuccessful prize poem, was followed by Foems (1870) and The Renewal of Youth (1882).]

A great deal of human emotion, that is of real and urgent significance, is vague, and in nearly every heart escapes all attempts at the solace of definition. For example, most people know at moments the instinct for some unrealizable self-identification with natural phenomena. While, however, the existence and force of this kind of emotion is unquestionable, no poet can hope to achieve anything in his art until he understands that nebulous feeling, however real it may be, is a thing that words are wholly incapable of expressing. Good poets have sometimes in their apprenticeship, before they have considered wisely the functions of their art, indulged the fallacy that leads to such writing as

'I yearn towards the sunset

In the magic of the twilight,

And the radiance of the heavens

Fills my soul with throbbing beauty...

but unless a man recovers from the error in his very green days, he forfeits any hope of poetic distinction. For to write thus is not to express mysterious and subtle emotion, but to lose oneself in an unintelligible foam of words. The poet, indeed, must by no means ignore this particular sort of emotional experience; it is far too universal and profound a thing for that. But it is his business to realize its essential value and to translate that precise value into an image that is capable of exact and vivid, or poetical, definition in words. It is failure to perceive this fundamental and invariable necessity of the art that is the cause of nearly all the bad poetry in the world.

A great deal of the work of Frederic Myers, a poet of many gifts, suffers from this failure, though his fine classical scholarship ought to have saved him. His most famous and still popular poem, Saint Paul, has metrical interest, though the form in itself is apt to combine with Myers's mental method to throw an emotional haze over the work. Here and there are figures of comparatively sharp definition, as in the passage here given, though a characteristic vagueness in the poem makes it difficult for us to do more than feel that here is a fine spiritual fervour, but that our perception of it is incomplete because of the lack of precision in the poet's statement. Many of Myers's other poems are touched by the same defect, but his real singing quality carries him happily through shorter pieces-such as that general favourite, Simmenthal-often enough to give him permanently something at least of the fame that was so widely his in his own day. With secondary poetic qualities he was well equipped; he had an earnest curiosity about life, wide and liberal knowledge, a sensitive and individual rhythmical gift, considerable grace of style, and spiritual dignity; and when he was visited by the clearer poetic mood, and was not misled by his too volatile imagination, these fine natural gifts were ready to the service of his inspiration, and he wrote shapely verse, infused at its best with a generous temper and real tenderness, and now and again moving with great delicacy, as in the subtle arrangement of the last line of—

Oft shall that flesh imperil and outweary
Soul that would stay it in the straiter scope.
Oft shall the chill day and the even dreary
Force on my heart the frenzy of a hope

Lo, as some ship, outworn and overladen,

Strains for the harbour where her sails are furled ;

Lo, as some innocent and eager maiden

Leans o'er the wistful limit of the world,

Dreams of the glow and glory of the distance,
Wonderful wooing and the grace of tears,
Dreams with what eyes and what a sweet insistence
Lovers are waiting in the hidden years;-

Lo, as some venturer, from his stars receiving
Promise and presage of sublime emprise,
Wears evermore the seal of his believing
Deep in the dark of solitary eyes;

Yea, to the end, in palace or in prison,

Fashions his fancies of the realm to be,
Fallen from the height or from the deeps arisen,
Ringed with the rocks and sundered of the sea;—

So even I, and with a pang more thrilling,
So even I, and with a hope more sweet,
Yearn for the sign, O Christ! of thy fulfilling,
Faint for the flaming of thine advent feet.

SIMMENTHAL.

Far off the old snows ever new
With silver edges cleft the blue
Aloft, alone, divine;

The sunny meadows silent slept,
Silence the sombre armies kept,
The vanguard of the pine.

In that thin air the birds are still,
No ringdove murmurs on the hill
Nor mating cushat calls;
But gay cicalas singing sprang,
And waters from the forest sang
The song of waterfalls.

O Fate! a few enchanted hours
Beneath the firs, among the flowers,
High on the lawn we lay,

Then turned again, contented well,
While bright about us flamed and fell
The rapture of the day.

And softly with a guileless awe
Beyond the purple lake she saw

The embattled summits glow;
She saw the glories melt in one,

The round moon rise, while yet the sun
Was rosy on the snow.

Then like a newly singing bird

The child's soul in her bosom stirred;

I know not what she sung :-
Because the soft wind caught her hair,
Because the golden moon was fair,
Because her heart was young.

I would her sweet soul ever may
Look thus from those glad eyes and grey,
Unfearing, undefiled:

I love her; when her face I see,
Her simple presence wakes in me
The imperishable child.

ARETHUSA.

O gentle rushing of the stainless stream,
Haunt of that maiden's dream!

O beech and sycamore, whose branches made
Her dear ancestral shade!

I call you praying; for she felt your power
In many an inward hour;

To many a wild despairing mood ye gave
Some help to heal or save,

And sang to heavenlier trances, long and long,
Your world-old undersong.

Now therefore, if ye may, one moment show

One look of long ago;

Create from waving sprays and tender dew

Her soft fair form anew;

From deepening azure of those August skies Relume her ardent eyes!

Or if there may not from your sunlit aisle
Be born one flying smile,-

In all your multitudinous music heard
One whisper of one word,—

Then wrap me, forest, with thy blowing breath
In sleep, in peace, in death;

Bear me, swift stream, with immemorial stir,
To love, to God, to her.

VOL. V.

HESIONE.

In silence slept the mossy ground,
Forgetting bird and breeze;
In towering silence slept around
The Spanish chestnut-trees;
Their trailing blossom, feathery-fair,
Made heavy sweetness in the air.

All night she pondered, long and long,
Alone with lake and lawn;

She heard a soft untimely song,

But slept before the dawn:

When eyes no more can wake and weep,

A pensive wisdom comes with sleep.

O love,' she said, 'O man of men,

O passionate and true!

Not once in all these years again
As once we did we do;

What need the dreadful end to tell?

We know it and we knew it well.

'O love,' she said, 'O king of kings,
My master and my joy,

Are we too young for bitter things
Who still are girl and boy?
Too young we won, we cherish yet
That dolorous treasure of regret.'

Hh