creatures

inclusive thought as verse nine. (1) God the sole changeless, to whom we turn with passionate desire as the one abiding-place, as we find how all things suffer loss and change, ourselves, alas! the greatest. (2) His power and love able and willing to satisfy the hearts of His -the thought expatiated on by St. Augustine and George Herbert here crystallized in one line:-'Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?' (3) Then the magnificent declaration, ‘There shall never be one lost good'—the eternal nature of goodness, while its opposite evil... is a non-essential which shall one day pass away entirely, and be swallowed up of good. . . .

"Now follows an announcement, as by tongue of prophet or seer, that we shall at last find all our ideals complete in the mind of God, not put forth timorously, but with triumphant knowledge-knowledge gained by music whose creative power has for the moment revealed to us the permanent existence of these ideals.

"The sorrow and pain and failure which we are all called upon to suffer here, . . . are seen to be proofs and evidences of this great belief. Without the discords how should we learn to prize the harmony?

"Carried on the wings of music and high thought, we have ascended one of those Delectable mountains · Pisgah-peaks from which

"Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither;'

and whence we can descry, however faintly, the land that is very far off to which we travel, and we would fain linger, nay, abide, on the mount, building there our tabernacles.

...

"But it cannot be. That fine air is difficult to breathe long, and life, with its rounds of custom and duty, recalls us. So we descend with the musician, through varying harmonies and sliding modulations . . . deadening the poignancy of the minor third in the more satisfying reassuring chord of the dominant ninth, which again finds its rest on the key-note- C major— the common chord, so sober and uninteresting that it well symbolizes the common level of life, the prosaic keynote to which unfortunately most of our lives are set.

"We return, however, strengthened and refreshed, braced to endure the wrongs which we know shall be one day righted, to acquiesce in the limited and imperfect conditions of earth, which we know shall be merged at last in heaven's perfect round, and to accept with patience the renunciation demanded of us here, knowing

"All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall exist.' "

In his Introductory Address to the Browning Society,' the Rev. J. Kirkman, of Queen's College, Cambridge, says of 'Abt Volger':

"The spiritual transcendentalism of music, the inscrutable relation between the seen and the eternal, of which music alone unlocks the gate by inarticulate expression, has never had an articulate utterance from a poet before Abt Vogler.' This is of a higher order of composition, quite nobler, than the merely fretful rebellion against the earthly condition imposed here below upon heavenly things, seen in 'Master Hughes' [of Saxe-Gotha]. In that and other places, I am not sure that persons of musical attainment, as distinguished from musical soul and sympathy, do not rather find a professional gratification at the technicalities... than get conducted to 'the law within the law.' But in Abt Vogler,' the understanding is spell-bound, and carried on the wings of the emotions, as Ganymede in the soft down of the eagle. into the world of spirit. . . .

...

"The beautiful utterances of Richter alone approach to the value of Browning's on music. Well does he deserve remembrance for the remark, that 'Music is the only language incapable of expressing anything impure,' and for many others. They all [the poets quoted in the passage omitted above], comparatively, speak from outside; Browning speaks from inside, as if an angel came to give all the hints we could receive,

"Of that imperial palace whence we came.'

He speaks of music as Dante does of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, because he has been there. Even the musical Milton, whose best line is, 'In linked sweetness long drawn out,' whose best special treatment of music is in the occasional poem, 'At a solemn music,' has given us nothing of the nature of Abt Vogler.' It should be perfectly learnt by heart; and it will be ever whispering analogies to the soul in daily life. Because, of course, the mystery of life and the mystery of music make one of the most fundamental transcendental harmonies breathed into our being."

'TOUCH HIM NE'ER SO LIGHTLY,' ETC.

In the first stanza some one describes admiringly a writer of mushroom poems. In the second stanza another gives the genesis of a poem which becomes a nation's heritage.

MEMORABILIA.

The speaker is one to whom Shelley is an almost ideal being. He can hardly think of him as a man of flesh and blood. He meets some one who has actually seen him and talked with him ; and it's all so strange to him, and he expresses so much surprise at it, that it moves the laughter of the other, and he breaks off and speaks of crossing a moor. Only a hand's breadth of it shines alone 'mid the blank miles round about; for there he picked up, and put inside his breast, a moulted feather, an eagle-feather. He forgets the rest. There is, in fact, nothing more for him to remember. The eagle-feather causes an isolated flash of association with the poet of the atmosphere, the winds, and the clouds,

"The meteoric poet of air and sea."

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY.

The speaker, a Spaniard, it must be supposed, describes to his companion the only poet he knew in his life, who roamed along the promenades and through the by-streets and lanes and alleys of Valladolid, an old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels. He appeared interested in whatever he looked on, and his looks went everywhere, taking in the cobbler at his trade, the man slicing lemons into drink, the coffee-roaster's brazier, and the boys turning its winch; books on stalls, strung-up fly-leaf ballads, posters by the wall;

666

"If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;
If any cursed a woman, he took note.'
Yet stared at nobody,—you stared at him,
And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know you, and expect as much."

Popular imagination is active as to who and what he is; perhaps
a spy, or it may be "a recording chief-inquisitor, the town's true
master if the town but knew," who by letters keeps
the King" well informed "of all thought, said, and acted"; but

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our Lord

of the King's approval of these letters there has been no evidence of any kind.

The speaker found no truth in one of the popular reports, namely, that this strange man lived in great luxury and splendor. On the contrary, he lived in the plainest, simplest manner; played a game of cribbage with his maid, in the evening, and, when the church clock struck ten, went straight off to bed. It seems that while the belief of the people was, that this man kept up a correspondence with their earthly Lord, the King, noting all that went on, the speaker, in the monologue is aware that it was the Heavenly King with whom he corresponded. In the last paragraph of his monologue he expresses the wish that he might have looked in, yet had haply been afraid, when this man came to die, and seen, ministering to him, the heavenly attendants,

"who lined the clean gay garret sides,

And stood about the neat low truckle-bed
With the heavenly manner of relieving guard.

Here had been, mark, the general-in-chief,

Thro' a whole campaign of the world's life and death,
Doing the King's work all the dim day long,

And, now the day was won, relieved at once!"

He then adds that there was

"No further show or need of that old coat,

You are sure, for one thing! Bless us, all the while
How sprucely we are dressed out, you and I!'"

we who are so inferior to that divine poet; but,

"A second, and the angels alter that.”

"TRANSCENDENTALISM."

A poem in twelve books.

This monologue is addressed by a poet to a brother-poet whom he finds fault with for speaking naked thoughts instead of draping

them in sights and sounds. If boys want images and melody, grown men, you think, want abstract thought. Far from it. The objects which throng our youth, we see and hear, quite as a matter of course. But what of it, if you could tell what they mean? The German Boehme, with his affinities for the abstract, never cared for plants until, one day, he noticed they could speak; that the daisy colloquized with the cowslip on such themes! themes found extant in Jacob's prose. But when life's summer passes while reading prose in that tough book he wrote, getting some sense or other out of it, who helps, then, to repair our loss? Another Boehme, say you, with a tougher book and subtler abstract meanings of what roses say? Or some stout Mage like John of Halberstadt, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about? Ah, John's the man for us! who instead of giving us the wise talk of roses, scatters all around us the roses themselves, pouring heaven into this shut house of life. So come, the harp back to your heart again, instead of speaking dry words across its strings. Your own boy-face bent over the finer chords, and following the cherub at the top that points to God with his paired halfmoon wings, is a far better poem than your poem with all its naked thoughts.

APPARENT FAILURE.

The poet, it appears, speaks here in his own person. Sauntering about Paris, he comes upon the Doric little Morgue, the deadhouse, where they show their drowned. He enters, and sees through the screen of glass, the bodies of three men who committed suicide, the day before, by drowning themselves in the Seine.

In the last stanza, he gives expression to his hopeful philosophy, which recognizes "some soul of goodness, in things evil";1 which sees in human nature, "potentiality of final deliverance from the evil in it, given only time enough for the work." In this age of professed and often, no doubt, affected, agnosticism and pessimism,