with a weight of woe and misfortune mysteriously beyond the conception of common men; but unlike himand the difference is characteristic these unhappy lads are solemnly bent on "improving their minds," in spite of their misery. For our own part, we are much disposed, in the first instance, to set down Maud as one of the greatest impertinences ever perpetrated by a poet; but we confess, after an hour's trial of Balder, and the ceaseless singing of that wife of his, which of itself certainly was almost enough to drive a sober man crazy, and ought to be received as an extenuating circumstance, we return in a kinder spirit to the nameless young gentleman who wrote the Laureate's poem. After all, he is only an idle boy, scorning other people, as idle boys are not unwont to scorn their neighbours in the world; he does not think himself a divinity; he has not a manuscript at hand to draw forth and gaze upon with delighted eyes; he is not let us be grateful-a poet. His history is all pure playing with the reader, a wanton waste of our attention and the singer's powers; but, after all, there is something of the breath of life in it, when we compare it with the solemn foolery of its much-pretending contemporaries, the lauds of the self-worshipping man, or the rhapsodies of the self-admiring youth.

We remember to have heard a very skilful painter of still life describe how the composition, the light and shade, and arrangement of one of his pictures, was taken from a great old picture of a scriptural 1 scene. Instead of men and women, the story and the action of the original, our friend had only things inanimate to group upon his canvass, but he kept the arrangement, the sunshine and the shadow, the same. One can suppose that some such artistie whim had seized upon Mr Tenny

son.

In the wantonness of conscious power, he has been looking about him for some feat to do when, lo! the crash of a travelling orchestra smote upon the ears of the poet. Are there German bands in the Isle of Wight? or was it the sublimer music of some provincial opera which woke the Laureate's soul to this deed of high emprise? Yes, Maud is an

overture done into words; beginning with a jar and thunder-all the breath of all the players drawn out in lengthened suspiration upon the noisy notes; then bits of humaner interlude-soft flute-voices--here and there a momentary silvery trumpetnote, or the tinkle of a harp, and then a concluding crash of all the instruments, a tumult of noises fast and furious, an assault upon our ears and our patience, only endurable because we see the end. Such is this poem-which indeed it is sad to call a poem, especially in those hard days. We mean no disparagement to Mr Tennyson's powers. It is perhaps only when we compare this with other poems of the day that we see how prettily managed is the thread of the story, and how these morsels of verse carry us through every scene as clear as if every scene was a picture; but a man who knows only too consciously that a whole nation of people acknowledge him as their best singer-a man who also doubtless must have noted how the good public, those common people who take their ill names so tenderly, hurry his books into sixth and tenth editions, a fact which ought somewhat to counterbalance the cheating yardwand-and one, moreover, so thoroughly acquainted with the gravity and passion of this time, and how it has been startled into a humbler estimate of itself by the fiery touch of war, that such a man, at such an hour, should send forth this piece of trifling as his contribution to the courage and heartening of his country, is as near an insult to the audience he addresses as anything which is not personal can be.

Mr Tennyson, however, has insight and perception to keep him from the strand on which his imitators the smaller people who endeavour to compete with him in poetry, and triumphantly excel him in extravagance-go ashore. He knows that a poet's hero ought not to be a poet that a man's genius was given him, if not for the glory of God, its best aim, yet, at worst, for the glory of some other man, and not for the pitiful delight of self-laudation, meanest of human follies. A great book is a great thing, and a great poem is the

"POETS," said the ancient wisdom, "are not made, but born." We have made miraculous progress in all the arts of manufacture since the time of this saying, but we have not been able to controvert the judgment of our forefathers. Education, refinement, taste, and talent, are great things in their way, and men do wonders with them; but we have not fallen yet upon a successful method of bringing down the divine spark into the marble, let us work it ever so curiously. The celestial gift in these new times, as in the old, comes down with divine impartiality, yet seldom into the tenement most specially built and garnished for its reception. We can make critics, connoisseurs," an enlightened audience," but, let us labour at it as we will, we cannot make a poet.

And indeed, to tell the truth, it is but small help we can give, with all our arts and ingenuities, even to the perfecting of the poet born. Science. discusses the subject gravely-at one time troubled with apprehensions lest her severe shadow should kill the singer outright, as Reason killed Love at another, elate with the happier thought of increasing all his conquests, and sending forth as her own esquire, bearing her ponderous lance and helmet, the glorious boy in his perennial youth. It is a vain speculation. The poet glances past this important figure with a calm eye and

VOL. LXXIX.-NO. CCCCLXXXIV.

a far-shining smile. His vocation is beyond and beyond the range of all the sciences. The heart and soul that were in the first home, ere ever even spade and distaff were invented, when two forlorn hopeful creatures, wistfully looking back to the sunset of Eden, wistfully looking forward to the solemn nightfall of the drear world without, with all its starry promises of another morning and a higher heaven, were all the human race-are world and scope enough for the humanest and most divine of arts. That God has made of one blood all the nations and all the generations of this many-peopled earth, is the argument on which he speaks; that heart answers unto heart all the world over, is the secret of his power. The petulant passion of a child, the heroisms and exultations and agonies of that fantastical sweet youth, over whose unconscious mockery of our real conflict we graver people smile and weep, are of more import to the poet than all the secrets of the earth, and all the wonders of the sky; and he turns

it is his vocation-from the discovery of a planet, forgetting all about it, to make the whole world ring with joy over a cottage cradle, or weigh down the very wings of the winds with wailing over some uncommemorated grave.

Yes, it is a humiliating confessionbut in reality we are quite as like to injure as to elevate our poet by all

I

our educations. Perhaps the heavenly glamour in his eyne had best be left entirely unobscured by any laws save those of nature; but at all events it seems tolerably sure, that the more we labour at his training, the less satisfactory is the result of it. A school of poets is the most hopeless affair in existence; and whether it dwindle into those smallest of small rhymsters, leaden echoes of the silver chimes of Pope, in whom the eighteenth century delighted, or to the present makers of dislocated verses, whose glory it is to break stones upon the road where the Laureate's gilded coach flashes by, we wait with equal weariness and equal impatience for the Coming Man, who knows neither school nor education-whose business it is to rout the superannuated spinsters, and make the world ring once more with the involuntary outburst of song and youth.

But we who are but the unhappy victims of the mania, why do we blame ourselves? Alas! it is not we, but our poets, foolish fraternity, who have set about this fatal task of making a school and perfecting themselves in their art. How do you suppose they are to do it, kindest reader? In other arts and professions the self-love of the student in most instances suffers a woeful downfall at his very outset. Tutors and books, dire conspirators against his innocence, startle the hapless neophyte out of all his young complacency; professors set him down calmly as a know-nothing; chums, with storms of laughter, drive him out of his last stronghold. He has to shut himself out from his college doors; seal himself up, poor boy, in his home letters, and so sit down and study other people's wisdom, till he comes by that far-away and roundabout process to some true estimate of his

own.

But the poet, say the poets, needs other training. For him it is safest that we shut him up with himself. Himself, a separated creature, garlanded and crowned for the sacrifice, is, in one noble concentration, all the ethics, the humanity, and the religion with which he has to do; significances, occult and mysterious, are in every breath of wind that whispers

about his dedicated head; his smallest actions are note-worthy, his sport is a mystery, his very bread and cheese symbolical. He is a poet-everywhere, and in all places, it is the destiny of this unfortunate to reverence himself, to contemplate himself, to expound and study the growth of a poet's mind, the impulses of a poet's affections; he is not to be permitted to be unconscious of the sweet stirrings within him of the unspoken song; he is not to be allowed to believe with that sweetest simplicity of genius that every other youthful eye beholds "the light that never was on sea or land," as well as his own. Unhappy genius! ill-fated poet! for him alone of all men must the heavens and the earth be blurred over with a miserable I,-and so he wanders, a woeful Narcissus, seeing his own image only, and nothing better, in all the lakes and fountains; and, bound by all the canons of his art, falls at last desperately either in love or in hate with the persistent double, which, go where he will, still looks him in the face.

But we bethink us of the greater poets, sons of the elder time. There was David, prince of lyric-singers; there was Shakespeare, greatest maker among men. The lyricist was a king, a statesman, a warrior, and a prophet; the leisure of his very youth was the leisure of occupation, when the flocks were feeding safe in the green pastures, and by the quiet waters; and even then the dreaming poet-eye had need to be wary, and sometimes flashed into sudden lightning at sight of the lion which the stripling slew. He sung out of the tumult and fulness of his heart-out of the labours, wars, and tempests of his most human and most troubled life: his business in this world was to live, and not to make poems. Yet what songs he made! They are Holy Writ, inspired and sacred; yet they are human songs, the lyrics of a struggling and kingly existence-the overflow of the grand primal human emotions to which every living heart resounds. His "heart moved him," his "soul was stirred within him"true poet-heart-true soul of inspiration! and not what other men might endure, glassed in the mirror of his

own profound poetic spirit, a study of mankind; but of what himself was bearing there and at that moment, the royal singer made his outery, suddenly, and in his haste," to God. What cries of distress and agony are these! what bursts of hope amid the heartbreak! what shouts and triumphs of great joy! For David did not live to sing, but sang because he strove and fought, rejoiced and suffered, in the very heart and heat of life. Let us say a word of King David ere we go further. Never crowned head had so many critics as this man has had in these two thousand years; and many a scorner takes occasion by his failings, and religious lips have often faltered to call him "the man after God's own heart;" yet if we would but think of it, how touching is this name! Not the lofty and philosophic Paul, though his tranced eyes beheld the very heaven of heavens; not John, although the human love of the Lord yearned towards that vehement angel-enthusiast, whose very passion was for God's honour; but on this sinning, struggling, repenting David, who fights and falls, and rises only to fall and fight again-who only never will be content to lie still in his overthrow, and acknowledge himself vanquished -who bears about with him every day the traces of some downfall, yet every day is up again, struggling on as he can, now discouraged, now desperate, now exultant; who has a sore fighting life of it all his days, with enemies within and without, his hands full of wars, his soul of ardours, his life of temptations. Upon this man fell the election of Heaven. And small must his knowledge be, of himself or of his race, who is not moved to the very soul to think upon God's choice of this David, as the man after His own heart. Heaven send us all as little content with our sins as had the King of Israel! Amen.

And then there is Shakespeare: never man among men, before or after him, has made so many memorable people; yet amid all the crowding faces on his canvass, we cannot point to one as "the portrait of the painter." He had leisure to make lives and histories for all these men and women, but not to leave a

single personal token to us of himself. The chances seem to be, that this multitudinous man, having so many other things to think of, thought marvellously little of William Shakespeare; and that all that grave, noble face would have brightened into mirthfullest laughter had he ever heard, in his own manful days, of the Swan of Avon. His very magnitude, so to speak, lessens him in our eyes; we are all inclined to be apologetic when we find him going home in comfort and good estate, and ending his days neither tragically nor romantically, but in ease and honour. He is the greatest of poets, but he is not what you call a poetical personage. He writes his plays for the Globe, but, once begun upon them, thinks only of his Hamlet or his Lear, and not a whit of his audience; nor, in the flush and fulness of his genius, does a single shadow of himself cross the brilliant stage, where, truth to speak, there is no need of him. The common conception of a poet, the lofty, narrow, dreamy soul, made higher and more abstract still by the glittering crown of light upon his crested forehead, is entirely extinguished in the broad flood of sunshine wherein stands this Shakespeare, a common man, sublimed and radiant in a very deluge and overflow of genial power. Whether it be true or not that these same marvellous gifts of his would have made as great a statesman or as great a philosopher as they made a poet, it does not lie in our way to discover; but to know that the prince of English poets did his work, which no man has equalled, with as much simplicity and as little egotism as any labouring peasant of his time-to see him setting out upon it day by day, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race, but never once revealing to us those laborious tokens of difficulties overcome, which of themselves, as Mr Ruskin says, are among the admirable excellences of Art-to perceive his ease and speed of progress, and how his occupation constantly is with his story and never with himself,- what a lesson it is! But alas, and alas! we are none of us Shakespeares. Far above his motives, we would scorn to