the true, and as all veils of falsehood fall at last from the truth, change ends: all types become needless,—instead of the singer, we have the song; instead of the historic personage, the impulse of his age which produced him. [T & S (§ 125) What did Eschylus mean when he used that phrase "God, man, or both mixed"? In the opening chorus of Eschylus's Prometheus Bound,' Sea Nymphs (creatures more than human, but not goddesses, God 'mortal' or mixture of both) came to console Prometheus. He knew the ultimate, the Truth, and said that the Three formed Fates only knew it besides had he learned the ultimate, the Truth, through lifting the veil from, i. e. learning the nature of such beings as these Nymphs, as I can learn it, through lifting the veil that hides Fifine's soul?] (§ 126) And yet all this has been a dream, even commonplace by everyday light. What seemed awhile fresh and strange becomes tame and trite, and the higher our pride has lifted us in our dream, the further we have to descend to earth and fact. Have we not seen that even this Druid monument told its story long ago to waking folk, and never promised to help us dreamers? How then should the buildings of my dream help me when I come to real fact? (§ 127) Let us, my wife, go home together peaceably, complete our circuit of a league, and end where we began. Even so with life, wherever we were nursed to life, death is our last mother,—we find the last truth first, and final too. (§ 128) But, you say, "Why is that truth final now, more than before, when it was a truth proved false?" Because here a new point arises hitherto in my dream of the soul's progress, all falsehoods discovered were so many triumphs to man's nature, and implied no submission to another nature quite as real as his which chose to have its way with man (namely, nature which demands death of the body). But now, facing the fact of death, man's pride is quelled by necessary acquiescence with the law of death. Learning the truth of death does not, as the learning of other truth, through successive shapes and grades of its presentment, promote man's soul a stage: to learn the truth of death is to learn defeat, because on the body's death the soul can no longer in this life, in this world, exercise its power. Therefore there is no triumph for the soul now as there was in its progress through its earthly life, in learning the truths of that life. Sense, or the body, can register its triumphs, because whatever the body needs in the way of development always comes to it soon or late. When need was to walk or run, legs and feet were developed when need was to take up and hold things, hands and fingers were developed, and so on through the history of evolution. In short, the body, or sense, gets what it wants by gradual development o the right organs to carry out its wants. Such promotion of the body

from point to point, analogous to the growth of the soul by learning the truths of life, is a cause for pride in man: if the soul's prompting to rule and be ultimate master here from first to last, could develop it as the body's prompting to grow because of its needs develops the body, the soul too might be proud. But since the approach of the body's death is the ultimate truth learned by the soul here, there is no cause for pride, for this truth merely warns the soul its right of rule will go, and that another soul, succeeding it, must be master in future. Mere wanting to believe will not of itself develop the soul's power of learning truth, as mere wanting a limb will make the body develop that limb. (§ 129) And to conclude, as life ends where it began, so does love, in the soul which runs its round (that is, develops itself for its complementary soul, until they are mutually complete). Such a soul has constancy, faith, ripeness. [T & S Though a man range through women as I have supposed myself to do, and find all the truth that is in them, I so much the more readily come back to Elvire, my wife: the other women represented the change I saw in my dream,—my wife means permanence. Love, as I said, ends where love began. And, as the natural man feels lordlier free than bound, such ending looks like law. There is small chance for pride here, and so far from realizing that one has gained anything, each step aside to search after the nature of other women, proves to be mere vain wandering. I, the wanderer, bring home no profit from my quest, but the feeling that I had best keep house altogether, could I begin my life again. Had I stated my problem right, it would have been-From a given point (that is Elvire, your wife's nature, and your home life with her) evolve the infinite (that is all nature, men, women, and organic life), not, as I did state it, go out from your wife and home, and find what composes the infinite (all nature, men, women, and organic life), and piece them together into one Elvire. Fifine is the foam-flake, as I have shown, Elvire is the sea, which contains many such foam-flakes, and yet you and I left her, our home, and ourselves to catch at the one foam-flake, and got blistered by it for our pains perhaps (because she raised discussion between us for a moment). We are wise now, and want no more of the fickle sea-foam: enough of it and of the roar of the sea (enough, that is, of learning people's natures, and going out into the world to learn it): we will live and die henceforth quietly landlocked: here is our house-door. (That is, I come back from my experiences of men and women in the world, to my true life, with the love of my soul.) (§ 130) How pale you look in the night! Real flesh and blood should not look so pale, even under the night. Touch me to show you are alive, and do not vanish from your repentant husband! Give me your hand. (That is at a life's end, the night of

L

life, even his inmost beliefs are apt to become at moments shadowy and unreal to a man.) (§ 131) Now that we agree at last, let me cast our double horoscope. Let me discard that simile of the sea: you, my wife, are the land, firm and safe. All these word-bubbles come from that unlucky bath in the sea (that is, even a man's most cherished experiences become worthless to him, or seem so, as his physical and mental powers approach death): with your hand on my heart, I promise never to go bathe in the sea again (that is, taste the varied life of the world), nor bask therein, beneath the blue sky (that is, dream after an ideal development of souls). I will live and die a quiet married man, living in the town, and not in this tower apart, where one may mount to its parapet, and get a sight of that tempting sea (that is, I will bring my thoughts into ordinary practical life, and not let them go off to dreamy heights, nor occupy themselves with the knotty problems of life, among men's and women's souls). Let our house be sober and prosaic, with for ornament only some shell picked up where the angry water cast it once, or seaweed that gets damp and soft at threatening of sea storm or wind (that is, let me have nothing to do with the life of souls in the world but a memory or two, and now and then news of those who still are in the fight of thought and passion): soon I shall grow to be astonished how I could ever have gone out, in the sunshine and springtide of my life, to swim in the sea of thought and passion—the more astonished, as time goes on, and brings me warning that I grow too old for such enterprise. Come, be but flesh and blood, and no ghost; smile at me to show you are real, and enter our house for good and all; let fate bolt the door fast, and shut you and me inside, never to wander again. (§ 132) Only, you are not accustomed to have my constancy tried by my being run after by one like Fifine. See here, some one has just slipped a letter between my palm and my glove. It must be from her. Did I unconsciously put two Napoleons between the two half francs I put in her tambourine? Now don't threaten to leave me; I must go and clear the matter up. I'll be back in five minutes: if I'm not, I give you leave to "slip from flesh and blood, and play the ghost again" (that is, after all he has said, Fifine's attraction is stronger than his philosophy).]

to me.

EPILOGUE.

As I was sitting, in my house late, alone, weary, my wife came back I said to her, Let us leave this old house, every brick of which is stained with sin and shame. She said, Well, leave it; but let our leaving be done decently in order. Yes, I said; but time has dragged

So.

The neighbours have been each gossiping fools; such fancies came

to plague me if you only knew what a bad time I have had down here. She said, Do you think I was much better off up there?

I said, Help me to get away: what epitaph shall we write, by way of notice to the parish of our removal? Here lies M. or N. departed from this life, such a day, month, and year? What shall we put for final flourish,-prose or verse?

"Affliction sore long time he bore

Till God did please to grant him ease":

or what? Do end it. She said, I end with Love is all and Death is nought.

In this Epilogue the poet imagines himself alone at the end of his life, and weary with the world, symbolized by his house; he imagines his wife comes to him from heaven at his death, and they leave the world together for good and all, to live in a fairer world, where their love is all and their death nothing.

III. A STATEMENT DIVIDING THE MAIN SUBJECTS OF THE POEM INTO THREE HEADS.

The poem is put into the form of a monologue, spoken by a man; throughout he introduces observations and objections made by his wife, each of which he discusses and answers. The whole Poem is dramatic : the speaker is any man you like, of high attainments, lofty aspirations, strong emotions, and capricious will. Being such a man, he deals partly with Truth, somewhat with Sophism. His reasoning is good so far as his intellect and aspiration direct it; but the last section of the poem proves the truth of his own philosophy (embodied in the swimmer symbol), namely, that a man reaching after too high an ideal is likely to fall the lower, the higher he has striven to reach. The clearest way of showing where he uses (1) Truth, (2) Sophism, (3) a mixture of bothis to say that wherever he speaks of Fifine (whether as type or not) in relation to himself and his own desire for truth, or right living with his wife, he is sophistical; wherever he speaks directly of his wife's value to him (except in the quotation from the poem, pp. 197-8) he speaks truth with an alloy of sophism; and whenever he speaks impersonally he speaks the truth. The man and his wife are cultivated people of independent means living at Pornic in Brittany. It is Pornic fair, and the fair has tempted thither a company of strolling actors, rope-dancers, and athletes. The husband takes the beauty of this strolling company, Fifine, as a type, first, of womanhood, to point the moral of man's relations with women; second, as a symbol of any influence good or bad which a wise man is bound to make use of for his soul's de

ment during its life in this world only. Using her for a text, he moralizes on certain facts and ideas connected with the life of any individual man, as a gregarious and progressive being, among collective men and women. He says in substance :—

I. I take Fifine as an instance of woman in relation to man, and show you her character as a woman. I show you that although her idiosyncrasy apparently defies social laws, she virtually observes them as strictly and with as high a sense of honour, so far as they concern her relations with her own people, as any delicatest lady. That is, she is, physically and morally, true now to her husband and her family, and let her antecedents have been what they may, whenever now she frankly displays her charms for money, it is for the sake of her husband and people alone. To such a man as me, at any rate, she gives nothing but the sight of her. Therefore, she has her real value in the scale of human beings. And by proving to you thus that I know her worst and best qualities, and take her at her value, I prove also that through my learning to know thus much, I am so much the wiser, and have besides increased my power of valuing your far higher qualities, and being true to you as a high-minded and cultured wife. This simple example of how learning a single fact about some one else enhances the value of my life, and through mine, yours and mine together,-leads me to the wider question of how and why people choose each other as man and wife. In discussing this question, I begin by using Plato's theory of each soul seeking its complementary soul; and to illustrate and enforce it, try to solve the question thus :-As the artist is always seeking to make a complete whole from a part,-and as Art is the love of loving, the rage to know, see, and feel absolute truth for its own sake alone,-so the seeking soul is, by the necessity of its being, compelled to find out and set free from its bodily and other hindrances the true character of its complementary soul. But, in order that two such souls may come together, they must each gain their right to do so by learning the world, each in its own way. What each soul thus acquires is its own, to be given only to such other soul whose acquirements complement those. By such a process I claim to have found and to hold you.

a. You object; the process is good as regards soul, but why do I choose Fifine as an example of the world which is to be learned? Is not her physical beauty apt to dazzle and seduce me? I answer, No, it is not my learning Fifine is, in small, merely a type of my learning the world in large. So in answering your objection I will use the type and the antitype interchangeably. The world, then, is to man's soul what the sea is to a swimmer who is, not treading, but standing or hanging in water as long as he keeps still, with his head well back, the swimmer