A POET'S PORTFOLIO.*

MR. STORY'S device for piecing together the poetical fragments in his portfolio with dialogue between the author and one of his lady friends, is an agreeable one. On the whole, both the 'conversation and the verse are attractive, and the tiny volume which has resulted from them is one in which there is no temp- tation to skip anything. Mr. Story's poetry is not poetry of • lie and She: or, a Poet's Portfolio. By W. W. Story. London: William Blackwood and Bona

the most potent kind, but it is really good verse, which touches the subjects it deals with with a certain power of fancy, and makes them vivid for the moment. And the same must be said of his dialogue. It is bright dialogue, such as a ready thinker holds with a lively critic like the lady of the afternoon's talk. What can be livelier or pleasanter reading, for instance, than the following conversation on a bit of verse which had been meant to express the movement of a waltz, and of which the author had-said that there was nothing more in it than "mere go :"-

"She. Mere go! You speak of that as if it were nothing; but after' all, is not that the secret of a good deal of our poetry, and especially that of Byron ? You cannot look into it with a critical eye. It is full of bad English, and false metaphor, and strained sentiment ; but there is go' in it, and it intoxicates the thoughts and senses, so that one ceases to he critical. Glissez, glissez mortels, n'appuyen pas, should be your rule in reading him. It won't do to linger. You must gulp, not sip. He. At all events, be did not over-refine, as some of our modern

poets do. For instance, there is —, I suppose he means something, but his meaning is so involved in a complicated web of vague and far-fetched words and phrases, that sometimes it is not a little diffi- cult to get at it ; and I am not sure that after you have got at it, it is worth the trouble.

She. No, we are now getting so euphuistic, that I don't pretend to understand half I read, though I am a woman, and much of it, apparently, is written specially for us women ; or at least so it would seem, there is so little that is manly in it.

He. Some of them talk like Hamlet's friend, Osric---' after what flourish their natures will.' Here is a profile sketch of —. Do you recognise it ? She. Oh, very like; and what are the lines you have written under it ?

He. Mere nonsense.

She. Read them.

He. A Brahmin be sits apart,

Our modern poet, and gazes Attentively into his heart, And its faint and vaporous phases, Examines with infinite care. All his feelings are thin as air, All his passions are mild as milk. He loves but the quaint and the old, He dares not be simple and bold, But refines and refines and refines, And treads on a thread as spare 1 As the spider's gauzy silk, That trembles in all its lines With the breeze, and can scarcely hold The dewdrop the morning has strung ; And so 'twixt the earth and the sky, And to neither wed, he is hung ; And he ponders his words and his rhymes, And his delicate tinkle of chimes, And strives to be deep and intense; While the world of beauty and sense, The strong and palpitant world, The powers and passions of man, By which it is whipped and whirled, Are only to him an offense.

'Tis the chaff blown away by the fan, That he gathers his garners to fill, Not the grain that the world's great mill, Takes out of life as its toll.

For he scorns the common and rude,

And only examines his soul,—

His particular soul,—and wears A vestment of whims, and of airs,

And of fancies so frail and SO thin

That they scarcely can cover the nude.

Little thought he is nursing within, So sitting alone and apart, He broods and he broods and he broods, And plays on his little lute, And sings of his little moods, With a sweet aesthetic art,

And his song is—

There, you see, I have left off. What is his song ?

She. I suppose it is a ballade, with skim-milk love and fine-drawn sentiment, belonging to some other century, and sung perhaps by a mediaeval knight to the accompaniment of some queer instrument, now unknown except in museums, while around him are lying long, lean, languid ladies on a lawn.

He. Charming alliteration, worthy of the theme, but the ballade must have a refrain.

She. Of coarse, what is a ballade without a refrain ?

He. And the refrain must have no connection, as far as meaning goes, with the ballade?

She. Of course not ! For whom do you take me, to imagine that I suppose iknecessary for a refrain to have any sense ? A refrain is always the burden of a poem, and is fitly named a burden.

He. The burden, or bourdon, as Spenser more properly spells it, is intelligible enough in the old ballades,, which were at first improvised, or supposed to be improvised, and always were sung or chanted ; and then it represented the pause or rest which the accompanying instrument filled up with its little ritornello, and bonrdonned some- times alone without words, and sometimes with catch-words con- stantly repeated, so as to give time to the improvisator to think out the following lines, or to the singer to rest his voice or revive his memory. In Italy, as you know, the improvisator is always accom- panied by a guitar and mandoline, which bourdonnent their little phrase between the lines or the stanzas, and fill up the gaps. But in serious poems of the tpresent day, written to be read and not sung, this repetition of the bourdon without the song is a stumbling-block and an offence, and often a mere affectation. She. None the less, Shakespeare uses it. He. I know he does, here and there in his sonnets, but they were to be sung, not read ; for instance,— ' Sine hey, ho. the wind and the rain, For the rain it raineth every day.'

There is a certain grace about that, I admit. Bat he knew how and when to use it. Nowadays these bonrdons bore me, in our modern poems. Suppose, for instance, I should insist in some passionate and pathetic poem in tripping up the reader constantly by interpolating such a refrain as this,— ' The world is wide, the wind is cold, Ah me, the new, ah me, the old.'

She. There is too much meaning in it. It is not a success as a refrain. It is not so good as your description of the Brahmin poet, wherein, indeed, his definement suffers no perdition in you.' He. Ab, I see you know this water-fly,' our friend Osric, as Hamlet jeeringly calls him. Let me see—how does he go on, In the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article; and his infusion of such dearth and rareness, as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror.'

She. 'Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him.' Oh, what fun Shakespeare is !

He. Ah, isn't he ? I know not which most surprises me in him,

his humour or power of passion."

That is really excellent criticism and good sense, expressed with a liveliness that makes one enjoy and remember it. The poetical Osrics of the day have seldom been painted with so much skill, and we wonder that the dialogue should not have turned on the question why, nominally at least, " inten- sity " of feeling should be the favourite ideal of a class of poets whose real subjects appear to be those gossamer threads of sensation which can only be perceived at all in the absence of warm and deep human feelings. We suppose the truth to be that this Osric school of poetry being essentially one of affecta- tion, and dealing by preference with morbid rather than healthy varieties of feeling, and the pretence of intensity being one of the most common of the phases of morbid states of mind, pseudo- intense emotion becomes the only impressive form, the only form even savouring of anything vital, that any falsetto school of over-refinement dares for very shame to assume. You may always make up for the diminutive range and breadth of a feeling by assuming for it a marvellous fineness and intensity. As we have no true measure of intensity, it is always plau- sible to assert that a feeling makes up in intensity what it loses in naturalness and breadth. The "mopping and mowing" of intellectual fops like 'Osric will always claim to express intense feeling ; otherwise, it would be too ridiculous to speak of it as expressing feeling at all.

Now, take a pleasant and piquant picture of the light-minded woman who has no affectation or morbidezza in her, but who cannot for the life of her take life very seriously, not from any moral fault in her, but from a shallowness that is inborn :—

"He. Here, just for a contrast, is another kind of woman, a nice,

cheery little person, whom everybody likes, a brook-little creature.

She. A fool, I suppose, from your preface. You men always like

fools.

He. Thanks.

From early light to late at night, I chatter, chatter, chatter, If things are sad or things are bad, Dear me ? what does it matter ?

The livelong day to me is gay, And I keep always laughing ; The world at best is such a jest, 'Tis only fit for chaffing.

Along the brim of life to skim, Not in its depths be sinking, With jest and smile time to beguile, Not bore one's-self with thinking. To touch and go, and to and fro, To gossip, talk, and tattle, To hear the news, and to amuse One's world with endless prattle,

This is my life : I hate all strife,

With none I am a snarler ; I like to joke with pleasant folk In any pleasant parlor.

And when the day has slipt away, Ere I blow out my candle, I sit awhile, and muse and smile, O'er that last bit of scandal.

She. Yes, I am afraid, I am afraid there is a little bit of truth in

that

He. A little bit ? No more ? She. No, these prattlers have reactions of sadness. We only se& the outside, the world-side of them. Be sure that sometimes, oat of mere nervousness and over-excitement, they cry as bitterly as at other times they laugh loudly. And besides, this humor is often- times put on, just like one's dress, to wear into society. These- creatures have the reputation of being gay, and they feel called upon to act up to their reputation ; but often when they are alone and the excitement is over, comes a corresponding depression. There is always sadness underlying all humor. There is the old story, you know, of the clown—I forget his name—who nightly provokes the world's laughter in the ring, and who was so depressed and melan- choly in his real life and thought, that he consulted a physician to. obtain some remedy for his hypochondria. And the physician re- commended him to go to hear Grimaldi (that is his name, I remember it now). Ah,' answered he, am myself that wretched man.'

He. It is possible ; but such stories are generally mere inventions. I dare say it bored him to go over the same old jokes nightly, but that. is natural. As to his being an hypochondriac, I do not believe it. Besides, his case is different from that of these water-flies that skim and skate over the sunny surface of life. One might as well try to- make a cork sink as to depress them. There are characters and temperaments incapable of profound feeling, which cannot be deeply affected by anything, and are as shallow as they are bright. If these persons ever cry it is sympathetically with another, for a moment,. but before their tears are dry they are laughing again ; and as for this world, they think with Hamlet, though in a different sense,. that 'there's nothing serious in it.' This is not a vice in them, it proceeds from their own nature. They cannot help it."

That is the unkind explanation. Matthew Arnold has given us the same sort of character with a kinder explanation of it in the lines which be has named " Euphrosyne " :—

"But souls whom some benignant breath

Has charm'd at birth from gloom and care, These ask no love, these plight no faith, For they are happy as they are.

. . . . . . . .

They shine upon the world. Their ears To one demand alone are coy ; They will not give us love and tears,

They bring us light, and warmth, and joy.

On one she smiles, and be was blest ; She smiles elsewhere, we make a din ! But 'twas not love which heav'd her breast, Fair child ! it was the bliss within."

Perhaps, however, Mr. Story's Euphrosyne is, after all, the truer picture of the two, though not the most beautiful. The apparent. fickleness may be due to the confusion in our minds between brightness of nature and the love which is the only source of lasting brightness ; but after all, the radiance which is for all alike is mere glitter, and the shallowness which Mr. Story dilates on, is a more essential characteristic of the nature that turns this uniform gaiety to all, than is the joy on which Mr. Arnold insists as the true key. Gaiety without sympathy may sparkle incessantly ; but in that case the "bliss within" hardly bliss in any worthy sense, is a false rather than a true gem. In detecting the inherent shallowness of such natures,. Mr. Story is the truer though the less benignant poet of the two. On the whole, He and She is a charming booklet, though it may not and does not contain that which all the ages will be, eager to preserve.