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and lower-middle classes and a certain section of the press. The sudden prominence given to the Republican party since that event has had a marked influence on him. He has been flattered, appealed to, and in every way has had the idea of his own importance continually crammed down his throat, in spite of the apathy with which he received these attentions. The political agitator has appeared on the scene, and holds out a republic as the only cure for the numberless ills from which the country suffers. Factory hands, artisans, &c., are always the first to embrace republican ideas, and the present case is no exception to the rule. Trades-unions have been formed, and employers of labour are already beginning to feel their

power; and it is certain that in a short time the working man will make, and possibly obtain, demands which would have been considered outrageous a couple of years ago. I believe, however, that the actual peasant neither understands the ills of his country nor cares what the form of government may be. He suffers from a very heavy indirect taxation, from want of justice, and from want of power of making his grievances heard and getting redress; but he has not reached that depth of misery which manifests itself in an overthrow of existing institutions. Should such an event take place, it will be due to the efforts of another class; and though José may accept the change, he will take no active part in bringing it about.

A SONG IN WINTER.

You turn the gloom to gold!
The skies are grey, and the sea;

And the old year's fingers cold

Have left not a leaf on the tree;

And the landward winds still moan and scold,—

Yet nothing reck to me,

Whose gloom is turned to gold!

But in greenest growth of the spring

So but we two be apart,

And what's the song the birds sing

To my sick, sore, weary heart,—

Though in anthems high the glad woods ring,

And when cuckoo is gone the nightingale's king,

If we, sweet Briar, are apart, apart,

In the flush o' the fairest spring!

C. W. B.

GEORGE MACDONALD AS A POET.

"When the Eve has its last streak,
The Night has its first star."

AMONG the happiest tributes ever paid by one son of song to another was that bestowed on Wordsworth by Matthew Arnold, in the memorable lines where he says of him

"He was a Priest to us all Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes and were glad."

And truly this is not only happy as an ascription of homage to the individual poet, but, as a description, it is the most felicitous we know, of what constitutes, in the true sense, the poet by preeminence. It is a crystallising in words of the supreme quality distinguishing the "Dii Majores" of the lyre that quality, without which other endowments, such as wealth of fresh imagery, music of expression, and power to seize and portray characters and feelings, although most precious as auxiliaries, will yet fail, apart from a diviner gift, to reach the true aureole of the Muse.

In the case of the great Pan of the Lakes, it was this power, frequently yet only fitfully manifested even by him, of what we are inclined to call "Orphic Song," that has made the name of Wordsworth the greatest in English literature since Milton, and one of the Three Mighties in the field of English as distinguished from Scottish poetry.

In conversation on one occasion with H. Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth came nearest to a revelation of the secret of this mystic power -the occasion, namely, when he let fall the observation as to how

common things can be glorified, in the words, "The imagination must irradiate an object with that infinity without which there is no poetry." This, when interpreted, must mean that only when an object is linked on to, and lit up in the light of, the infinite and the eternal, is there any radiance on the horizon, or any vista of hope or joy encircling it beyond this visible diurnal sphere.

It is this "Orphic" element, characterising the great Hierophant of Nature in his higher moods, that has been transfused, as is now well known, from him and his twin-brother Coleridge, through Keats and Shelley and Tennyson, into the main stream of our English verse during the present century; and wherever this element cannot be found, there we may feel sure there is no true title to the supreme dignity of poetry, and we look in vain for the inspiration and the poet's dream

"The light that never was on sea or land."

Through the might of this mystic power Wordsworth was enabled to irradiate the common sights and sounds of nature so largely with the light of eternal beauty, and to reveal to us, as

none

ever did before him with such potency, the glory of the visible world as the symbol of a divine and invisible omnipresence. Hence to him the radiance of mystery surrounding the meanest flower that blows, and the inscrutable, depths of feeling in the human heart, which is dowered

to be the interpreter of that mystery. All this vision, as Arnold expresses it, of "the wonder and bloom of the world," he taught us to see with his eyes as a fresh revelation, for the world was through this new Orpheus touched with a new emotion, the most fruitful and potential1 in the domain of Poesy known to this latter age and time. Perhaps the most notable trophy of this Orphic spell as exerted by Wordsworth is the Titanic Muse of Lord Byron. That proud and strong spirit long resisted, but in the end succumbed, while snorting scorn and indignation, to drink deep finally of the love of nature as distilled from Wordsworth, and imbibed through the medium of Shelley, so that in the later cantos of "Childe Harold" he too has learned the mystic mood, and, as he elsewhere expresses it, can find it joy,

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"To bend upon the mountains high The quict of a loving eye.' Thus Byron, the Titanic, has grown Orphic, and become a priest of "the wonder and bloom of the world."

Have we still among us, apart from Tennyson, any of this bright succession, full of light and lightgiving any of this "priestly" race still surviving? Can we point to any living poet who can claim to fulfil the high ideal, one to whom this definition of an "" Orphic" seer can be applied? The question is one of deepest interest, affecting as it does the present honour and the future hopes of our literature, and to this question the following paper is intended to be a reply.

After the fullest and fairest appraisement of most of the English poets now living, many of them, doubtless, brilliant artists in rhyme, clever at dashing off nice vers de société, and one or two possessing music and force, with only a sounding vacuum devoid of thought, justice compels the conclusion that, apart from the Laureate, there is one, and we fear only one, whose claim stands out pre-eminent for this Orphic crown : one in whom the Laureate might recognise a younger brother carrying on the true succession. This conclusion was forced home upon us when we observed that the poet to whom we refer has made bold to describe his poetic function under parallel imagery to that used by Matthew Arnold, but with a richness and freedom marking that imagery as unborrowed and his own. parallel words are these :

The

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1 The depth of Wordsworth's influence can best be measured by judging the intensity of emotion which Shelley expresses in his Sonnet to Wordsworth, and Browning in his "Lost Leader." Their abjuration of him politically only deepens and intensifies the poetic homage they were constrained yet felt proud to yield.

2

by the priestly function, as Arnold calls it, of the highest poets, or of the Orphic element, as we are inclined to style it, in the supreme region of the Muse.

The author of these lines is George MacDonald; and although he has written many that might seem more felicitous as a frontispiece, they may be accepted as an appropriate starting - point, since they show clearly, to those qualified to judge, the true and potential quality of his muse. We propose to open the casket of his poetry, with a view to let the lovers of high song know the treasures lying there, as in a mine, for their exploration, and in the course of our investigations we hope to indicate how far he can claim to have answered his own lofty ideal. It may be a surprise to many who know him only in another capacity to hear of him in such relation, and we think we hear some one exclaim: "What! George MacDonald a Poet! We know him and the world knows him as a Novelist, and a writer of Prose Fictions many and various, and of as various quality; but a Poet? -as such we know him not." And yet a poet he is by nature and the grace of God; he is a prose-writer and novelist only in the second resort, by what we deem an evil fate, the compulsion of "the Row" and the yoke of the publishers, who have too long bound him in shackles as their slave. Moreover, it is always to be remembered that his first homage was given to the Muse; that it was as a poet that George Macdonald first made his mark; by the poems of his early days he gained the ear of a select but admiring few, and the four volumes of verse out of the ten composing his collected Works of Fancy and Imagination,' as far back as

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1871, constitute a noble evidence, as well as enduring monument, of his poetic power. Not that he is at all times equally felicitous either in treatment or in theme-Wordsworth himself, as we could show, had his weaker times, and fell not seldom below his own ideal-not that he has always the sustained strength of Tennyson-that calm and equable poise which remind us so often of the Virgilian Muse; not that he can be exempted from the charge of having tossed out his poems sometimes without the final touches, and with signs of haste and immaturity. All these deductions fall now and again to be made; but notwithstanding, and in spite of all weaker elements, it will be found that there is in his poems a large proportion of the purest gold, without inferior alloy, and we even make bold to say that in native gift of poetic insight he was born with a richer dower than has fallen to any of our age now living since Alfred Tennyson saw the light of day.

This sounds an ample, if not ambitious, proposition. It can, however, be made good to the full measure of its import; for, in spite of the servitude which it has been his fate to endure to

what in a Prospero so gifted we must deem the Caliban of prose fiction, MacDonald has left hostages sufficient to acquit him of neglecting the Ariel-like faculty with which he was endowed; and while we may regret that under other and happier auspices he might have enriched the world with poems more numerous and of larger-perhaps epic-scope, he could not have excelled in quality many of the gems which he has given us, some of which are of a ray serene that will make them, in our belief, sparkle on the forefinger of Time for ever.

And here

we may remark apologetically: George MacDonald is not the first poet hailing from benorth the Tweed, who has allowed himself in his literary course to be whirled off into the region of Fiction out of the empyrean of the Muse. The great Sir Walter immediately occurs to us as a typical example of the same phenomenon. Each of these Northern Lights begins with poetry, and each, when midway, or nearly so, in his course, descends from the poetic car and mounts the omnibus of prose, reaping pecuniarily a larger harvest, and multiplying the area of distinction, but not enhancing or deepening the lustre of his renown. It deserves to be noted also that the author of 'Waverley' made the transition with a sort of misgiving, as if he felt he was falling away from his original loyalty to the Muse, to which cause we may partly ascribe the long incognito he maintained. The advent of the stronger eagle of the Byronic Muse hastened, as we know, the migration; and to the Giaour' we owe indirectly those prose romances of Sir Walter which are the delight of humanity, and which have added a larger increment than ever came from any single literary work that can be named to the enjoyment and happiness of mankind.

What may have been the propelling causes in the case of George MacDonald, leading him to a similar withdrawal from his first allegiance, it would be hazardous, in the absence of proper evidence, to conjecture. It is possible, although we do not affirm it as more than probable, that one disturbing element has been the desire to influence opinion theologically as a preacher rather than as a poet, and hence may have suggested itself, as a vehicle for theo

logical views, the prose fiction, to which he has given so much of his strength and power. Be this as it may-and we must not be held as passing any opinion on his theology-we fear, as a matter of fact, that the result has been unfavourable to the full-orbed brightness of his fame, and that just like Burns, whose dabblings in theology have not helped but retarded his full fame, and who is great not not because of but in spite of his sallies into such regions, so MacDonald has lost as much as he gained by the tempting diversion from his primal walk into the wilderness of prose fiction.

There is one region in which the muse of MacDonald may be said to walk alone-the domain, namely, of Faery Fancy and Eerie Eerie Imagination. Into this realm he has penetrated further than any of our poets since the bard of "Bonnie Kilmeny" passed away. Here we refer not merely to his noble handling in general of the supernatural, as witness his deft treatment of a vision of Hallowe'en in his weird Scotch ballad of "All Souls' Eve," nor can we do more than simply cite his "Somnium Mystici," an attempt to tread with Dante the regions of the unseen; we appeal, at present, rather to the felicity with which, even on the soil of this common world, he unclasps the Book of Fairyland, and, scattering airy fancies, wiles from Queen Mab the most fantastic improvisations of her power. Among his poems for children, take, for example, his picture of the sun, given under the title, "What makes Summer?" Every word is level to the infant comprehension; and yet the iridescence shed from the urn of fancy over the sights and sounds of nature, makes the picture glorious, even

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