A third era commenced about the time of Cowper, when satire ceased to be the main region of the poet, and an illcomprehended classical authority gave place to more natural thoughts and feelings expressed with more spontaneous music. The poets of this period, with almost the single and great exception of Coleridge, have knowingly and purposely despised and neglected the consideration of metre as an art. The consequence has been that the verse of the last half century presents a curious series of illustrations, both of extreme poverty of metre, and of very high spontaneous metrical character, the last being of course in small proportion to the first. In our own day, as we have said, we not unfrequently witness a sort of recurrence to what we have called the experimental age of English metre. Experiments which were tried and ended in failure three centuries ago, are now being tried over again, probably for the most part in ignorance of what has already been done. The last few years have been distinguished by quite a rage for the impossible revival of the dactylic hexameter. But modern experimentalists have not stopped at imitation. The living and lately deceased poets of England and America, have almost without exception tried to originate new and striking metres. A few decided and even brilliant successes may be picked out from amongst the immense number of ignorant and unhappy failures. Coleridge, Campbell, Hood, and Mr. Tennyson have made real additions to our collection of standard metrical forms, and have remarkably contradicted the assertion of the author * of a recent Treatise

on English Versification,' that in the whole compass of English versification, there does not appear to be any room left for discovery.' On considering the condition of English metre in its latest stage, as displayed in the writings of the present Laureate, we seem to comprehend metrical possibilities beyond anything as yet attained. One of the most powerful means of metrical effect remains as yet comparatively untried by English poets. We mean the element of metrical contrast, as developed by the Greeks in their antistrophic poetry. This effect has often been attempted by a formal imitation of the Greek dramatic choruses; but such imitations have necessarily failed; because, not to speak of other causes of difference, these choruses assume the assistance of music, diversity of persons, and stage arrangement, without which their complex metrical symmetry cannot be rendered or artistically felt. Elaborate metrical contrasts and corre

*Rev. W. Crowe.

spondences, if the poet would have them affect the feelings with due simplicity and decision, must depend upon far other principles; and these principles, we think, are only beginning to be apprehended. We see no reason why there should not occur a new development of the powers of metre analogous to the wonderful development in modern times of the corresponding art of music. Mr. Tennyson, in a few of his poems, particularly in that called The Vision of Sin,' has succeeded better than any other poet, except Coleridge, in the exceedingly difficult work of employing different metres, with right effect, in one and the same poem. The Brook' affords another example of such success. The laws of metrical transition have never been examined, and very few poets have attained to the effective practice of such transition, although most have attempted it.

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Another quality which worthily distinguishes the writings of the Laureate and the best of our recent poets, is the great development which their practice has conferred upon some of the long-established English metres. Take, for example, the old ballad-stanza, as it is used in Mr. Tennyson's Talking-Oak,' the eight-syllable quatrain in the Day-Dream,' and blank verse in Ulysses,' and the Morte d'Arthur.' It is impossible not to perceive that a permanent increase of power and beauty has accrued to these metres from that poet's practice. The work of developing the powers of those great standard metres which have proved themselves to be in harmony with the genius of our language by centuries of custom, is perhaps the highest as well as the safest way in which a poet can at present prosecute his art. There are not more than six or eight measures which have gained really extensive popular approval, and of these the powers of not more than the moiety have ever been duly and fully exhibited by recent writers. No modern poet has done full justice, in a long poem, to the eightsyllable couplet, which, as treated by Chaucer and Fletcher, is one of the very finest of our metres; or to rhythm royal,' that most famous measure of the most famous ages of English poetry. Yet, with these admirable, approved, and manageable metres at hand, metres which our early poets have shown to be suited to the most sustained and varied flights of poetry, most of our rising versifiers persist in writing in measures, which, like blankverse' and the heroic couplet,' labour under the triple disadvantage of being extremely easy to write ill in, no less difcult to manage properly, and of having had their powers developed to the utmost by great and recent poets.

ART. IX. 1. Transcaucasia. Sketches of the Nations and Races between the Black Sea and the Caspian. BY BARON VON HAXTHAUSEN. 8vo. London: 1854.

2. Haxthausen. The Tribes of the Caucasus. 12mo. London: 1855.

W HATSOEVER may be the result of the present war in the

East, it can hardly fail to revive and extend our acquaintance with the border-lands of Asia and Europe. Since Constantinople became a Mohammedan city, there have been, until a comparatively recent period, few motives for visiting these regions. The chances of gain scarcely compensated for the certainty of being fleeced, if not worse entreated, by an interminable series of men of prey inn-keepers, guides, government officials, and professional highwaymen, and it argued no ordinary zeal for art and science to carry a portfolio into Georgia, or to study the strata and flora of Armenia. As regards Europe, indeed, these countries have stood still for many ages, and an account of them in the fifteenth century would require little alteration in the nineteenth. But written descriptions of these regions are few in number and meagre in their contents. The Byzantine historians, so diffuse on matters of court etiquette and theological squabbles, rarely condescend to notice their immediate neighbours; and but for the wars of the Roman and Persian empires, we might have searched their pages in vain for the names of Armenia and Georgia. At the time when the Genoese occupied the harbours, and penetrated far into the interior of the Transcaucasian provinces, Europe was too much engrossed by its own divisions to feel much curiosity respecting them; and the few travellers who passed through this district were more anxious to learn the price of furs and bees-wax in the market of Tiflis, than to describe the people, their employments, and their productions. After the lapse of nearly five centuries, the curtain has begun to rise within the last thirty years the isthmus which divides the Euxine and Caspian seas has been frequently visited; and our knowledge of its physical and social aspects has been advanced, sufficiently for a tolerably accurate delineation of

:

them.

Of recent sketches of the lands and races between the Black Sca and the Caspian Baron von Haxthausen's work is one of the most generally instructive. He is very far, indeed, from being a methodical writer, and his readers have often just cause

to complain of the erratic propensities of his pen. He shifts the scene from Thebes to Athens' with more than poetic license; and to have opened any subject is with him generally a signal for dropping or postponing it to some other page and occasion. The English reader, indeed, can hardly be grateful enough to the English translator: and, if he has not essayed to read the original, cannot be aware of the amount of his obligation. Generally when there are French and German versions of the same work, it is better, if time be a consideration, to have recourse to the former, not so much because there are any insuperable difficulties in the German language, as because not one German writer in a hundred has the least conception of the due dimensions of a sentence. But the French version of Haxthausen's Transcaucasia is an exception to the rule. It is better because it is easier to read than the German original. The English translation, however, is a great improvement on both. While the matter of the original is scrupulously retained, the form in which it is presented is made lighter and more agreeable; and the author, always a very instructive companion, is rendered by Mr. Taylor's skill a very pleasant one also.

The Baron von Haxthausen is one of those locomotive and inquisitive persons, to whom all who stay at home by choice or constraint, as well as those who keep to the beaten roads of the world, ought to be very grateful. For their benefit and behoof he has undergone during many years, we believe more than a quarter of a century,- annoyances and privations, which to people of average organisation, are nearly as serious as the discomforts of an excursion-train or the hold of a slaver. Has he not endured the horrors of Russian beds, board and lodging, and that too in regions unvisited by even the rudiments of civilised cooking and cleanliness? And let no uninitiated person talk lightly of a man who can sleep and feed without a murmur on the beds and the fare of ordinary Russian inns. In comparison with the diet, the prodigal son in his worst estate fared delicately; and with regard to the lodging, it is universally preoccupied by tenants, which, like the monsters in Bunyan's vision, are of the nature of flesh-eaters.'

All

these and many more' discomforts come flocking' in the outlandish tracts where the Baron has so often encountered the winter's cold, and the summer's heat to say nothing of foul ways, spavined jades,' and carriages that, after dislocating their owner's limbs, end every other day with a compound fracture of themselves. Yet he seldom complains of these or any other ills that travellers are heirs to in Eastern Europe, and we rather infer his casualties than find them recorded in his pages. And

his sturdy patience is, fortunately for his readers, accompanied by an unwearied spirit of curiosity. He is none of those mealy-mouthed travellers, who would pass from Dan to Beersheba without asking a single home question, or prying into other people's business. Thus partly with the information he has gained directly from official documents and personages, and partly with the wayside hints he has picked up indirectly, the Baron has amassed nearly as much useful knowledge as would fill an ordinary parliamentary report. We shall now proceed to profit by his diligence, and survey briefly the very interesting region which he visited.

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There are districts of the globe which seem destined in all ages to be the highways, rather than the permanent abodes, of civilisation. Among them is the isthmus that divides the seas of Azof and the Euxine from the waters of the Caspian. Its northern mountains are believed by the soundest ethnologists to have been the cradle of the human race; its plains were the homes of the first emigrants. To its highlands ascend equally the streams of primeval history and of the most ancient myths: the ark of Noah and the vulture of Prometheus. Over this ground have passed the drums and tramplings' of a hundred invaders. It was the road of Odin and his Ase to the Elbe and the Baltic. On the shores of a lake at the foot of Mount Ararat, Nimrod is still believed to have been slain by the Caucasian dalesmen. To its coasts the Argonauts steered through 'the blue Symplegades;' through its valleys the Scythians poured themselves upon Western Asia. The river Koor still echoes the name of the prophetical and historical Cyrus; and that of Alexander the Great is familiar even now to every Circassian minstrel. It was the centre of the kingdom of Mithridates, and the scene of his last irretrievable defeat. For centuries Rome and Parthia contended for the possession of it. Goth and Hun successively over-ran this ground. It was for ever coming between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites.' Its civilisation has been rapidly matured, and as rapidly blighted. It has been wasted by the tenth wave' of barbarian desolation; by the hosts of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan. In the middle ages its hills were covered, like those of the Rhine land, with the strongholds of a feudal aristocracy, which in their turn, like every other province and appanage of the Byzantine empire, yielded to the Turk. The Turk has in his turn been partially supplanted by the Russian, and the day may not be far distant in which Western Europe may again contribute to the population of this often won and often lost borderland.