BOOKS.

JEAN INGELOW'S POEMS.*

SINCE the first brief notice of these poems appeared in our columns,—in ten lines from the clear sound judgment and thoughtful intellect of one, now no longer amongst us, who seldom failed to discriminate genuine power before its recognition by the rest of the world,—this little book has run through five editions and fully justified by the esteem of the public the high estimate then given of it. In truth Miss Ingelow has earned her rank among those minor poets who will be read long after their own generation has passed away, though they will not be known as the leaders of any school of poetry, but rather as filling-in with an imaginative power thoroughly spontaneous and free from imitation, if not thoroughly original, the charac- teristic features of the leading school of the day. There are versifiers,—like Owen Meredith, for example,—who occasionally imitate so cleverly that in single lines and verses you might mistake their productions for those of the greater writers on whose melodies they have just been feeding, but they continually betray the servility of their intellect by numberless false notes, barren platitudes, and filigree orna- ment, of their own devising. Miss Ingelow is very far, indeed, from being one of these. There is not a line of forced or imita- tive poetry in her volume. It is, indeed (with but few distinct exceptions), so deeply graven with the genius of Tennyson that there are many consecutive verses which the most acute critic, if they had been read to him without any account of their origin, would have regarded without hesitation as belonging to un- published minor poems of the Laureate's. There is the same long-drawn note of deep, reflective, and yet pictorial sentiment,— not monotonous only because of the inexhaustible variations in form and beauty all conceived in the same key,—the thought returning again and again to draw at the same fountain of medi- tative feeling. Who, for example, would doubt at the first glance that this was extracted from some minor poem of Tennyson's,- say that it was something which he had composed and after- wards rejected for his "Palace of Art ?"— " I have aspired to know the might of God, As if the story of His love was furled, Nor sacred foot the grasses e'er had trod, Of this redeemed world ;—

" Have sunk my thoughts as lead into the deep, To grope for that abyss whence evil grew, And spirits of il4 with eyes that cannot weep, Hungry and desolate flew.

" As if their legions did not one day crowd

The death-pangs of the Conquering Good to see; As if a sacred head had never bowed

In death for man—for me."

Compare this with the following verses in Tennyson's "Palace of Art :"—

" 'What? is not this my place of strength,' she said, 'My spacious mansion built for me,

Whereof the strong foundation-stones were laid Since my first memory ?'

" But in dark corners of her palace stood Uncertain shapes, and unawares On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood, And horrible nightmares, " And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame, And, with dim-fretted foreheads all,

On corpses three months old at noon she came That stood against the wall."

The superficial likeness in the metre here will, of course, strike the ear at once, but the likeness is much deeper;—in the slow growth of the poetic conception guarding itself tt-,.s.;nst incom- pleteness, and trying to blend at once thought, feelidt, and clear imagination in every movement. The passage in Tennyson is naturally, as his subject requires, much grander and fuller of imagery. He is trying to show how impossible it is for the imagination to feed even on its own creative power,—how that creative power will be turned into a source of torment if it sets itself up above God. Miss Ingelow is only describing how a mind searching high and low for that faith which is close at hand, is driven back upon it by the inadequacy of its own powers to conceive the full greatness of either good or evil without the,aid of the divine story. The drift, therefore, of the two passages, though not unrelated, is quite distinct. Tennyson is summoning up arbitrary images of horror, such as would haunt an unreined imagination affrighted by the loneliness of self-idolatry ;—Miss Ingelow, such images of natural evil as would best drive the mind back to the fullest sense of its own * Poems by Jean Ingelow. Fifth edition. London: Longman.

incompetence to fathom it. The image we have italicized in each poet is so singularly suited to its individual purpose, and they are so like in the essence of their spiritual imaginativeness, that few critics would have hesitated, had either of tho poems been anonymous, to argue a common origin. Miss Ingelow's abyss of evil, whence

" Spirits of ill, with eyes that cannot weep, Lonely and desolate, flew,"

drives us back to that deepest knowledge of evil which is neither tearless, nor hinely, nor desolate. Tennyson's "white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood " paints the capricious im- agination, over-wrought into absolute delirium, calling up pre- ternatural symbols of its own anguish, and ascribing the tears it cannot shed itself to pale shadows, which are only made more monstrous by their human 'weeping.

But it is not in one or two passages alone that one can see the absolute mastery which Tennyson's mode of thought and imagination has gained over Miss Ingelow. It is written in every page of the very beautiful reflective poems in which she struggles to interweave science and faith. There is the same constant shining of spiritual trust through a film of intellectual difficulty., the same light cloud which never hides but always obscures the bright eternal day. Indeed, if the force of intellectual difficulties is less forcibly expressed in these poems, and the glow of the central faith is less coloured and refracted by imaginative mists and clouds than in the wider and deeper intellect of the Laureate, it is no wonder, for we should conceive it to be princi- pally due to the influence of Tennyson's poetry that the in- tellectual difficulties of the modern scientific spirit have laid even so forcible a hold of Miss Ingelow as they have. For example, Tennyson has presented the characteristic doubts which oppress the mind of science in lines the power of which can never bo surpassed :— "Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams ? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life, " That I, considering everywhere, Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear,— " I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar stairs, That slope through darkness up to God,

"I stretch lame hands of faith and grope, And gather dust, and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope."

" So careful of the type; but no !

From scarped cliff and quarried stone, She cries, A thousand types are gone, ' I care for nothing, all shall go.

"' Thou makest thine appeal to me, I bring to life, I bring to death, The spirit does but mean the breath I know no more.' And he,—shall he, "Man, her last work, who seemed so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who rolrd the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fence of fruitless prayer ; "Who trusted God was Love indeed, And Love Creation's final law, The' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shrieked against his creed,—

"Who loved, who suffered countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal'd within the iron hills?"

And Miss Ingelow has rendered the same class of thoughts with much fainter hand, and yet i deeper strain of trust in God, though less of trust in man, in the following beautiful lines, beginning with some doubt as to a real Garden of Eden :—

"The Garden, 0 the Garden! must it go,

Source of our hope and our most dear regret? The ancient story, must it no more show How man may win it yet ?

"And all upon the Titan child's decree, The baby Science, born but yesterday, That in its rash, unlearned infancy, With shells and stones at play, "And delving in the outworks of this world, And little crevices that it could reach, Discovered certain bones laid up and furled Under an ancient beach,

"And other waifs that lay to its young mind. Some fathoms lower than they ought to he, By gain whereof it could not fail to find Much proof of ancientry,

"Hints at a pedigree withdrawn and vast Terrible deeps and old obscurities, Or soulless origin and twilight passed In the primeval seas, "Whereof it tells, as thinking it bath been Of truth, not meant for man, inheritor ; As if this knowledge Heaven had ne'er foreseen And not provided for !

"Knowledge ordained to live ! although the fate Of much that went before it was to die, And be called ignorance by such as wait Till the next drift comes by.

" 0, marvellous credulity of man ! If God, indeed, kept secret, could'st thou know Or follow up the mighty Artisan Unless He willed it so ?"

" And can'st thou of the Maker think, in sooth, That of the Made He shall be found at fault, And dream of wresting from Him hidden truth By force or by assault ?

" Wait ; nor against the half-learned lesson fret, Nor chide at old belief as if it erred, Because thou can'st not reconcile as yet The Worker and the Word."

The train of closely interwoven thought and feeling here, shows at once a singular resemblance to, and a characteristic difference from, the parallel train of closely interwoven thought and feeling which we have quoted from Miss Ingelow's master, the Poet Laureate. It is like, in its final drift as well as in its clear, imaginative representa- tion of the scientific argument against revelation. It differs from Tennyson's greater poem in not daring in the first place to argue with the same power and frankness the brief for Science as against Faith, and in the second place, in taking up the reply from the divine side rather than from the human. Tennyson pictures the greatness of man's faith, and pushes home the ques- tion, " Can this be the mere victim of the Nature it overcomes?" Miss Ingelow pictures the immutability of God's truth, and asks "Can He give two inconsistent revelations of Himself, the one through Science, the other through Christ?" But though the in- tellectual film over human faith in Miss Ingelow's poems is much less marked and oppressive than in Tennyson's poems of this class, the straining of her poetic sight to discriminate the reali- ties of the spiritual world through it, is so much in Tennyson's manner that one cannot doubt that he has given the key-note to these beautiful trains of meditative song.

There are other strong resemblances between the poetry of the pupil and the master. In the remarkable ease and the air of modern flexibility about both their styles, in the metaphysical self- knowledge richly inlaid with beauty of external form and colour, in the profound yearning which is not passion, but which has time to draw its subtle, allusive lauguage from all the range of natural associations, in the graceful snatches of invented conversation with which both of them love to set off a single central sentiment or figure, and so put it in vague relation with the rest of the world,—in all these things Miss Ingelow is to Tennyson what the moon is to the sun. No one can fail to recognize the re- semblance in form between Tennyson's "'Walking to the Mail," or the conversational framework of " The Brook," and many others of like kind, and Miss Ingelow's " Supper at the Mill," " Afternoon in a Parsonage," "Brothers and a Sermon." The great inferiority of the lesser artist in mere painting arises only from that inferiority in what artists call " gradation" which is implied in any inferiority in power. Tennyson's most wonderful power as a picture-painter is the exquisite perspective with which he so subordinates all his lesser touches as to lead the eye constantly back to the _focus of his picture. But the power to do this must depend upon the force and brilliancy of the highest colouring ; no one who cannot approach the highest effects can have the same room for discriminating touches;, the whole scale of poetic power must dwindle with the power of highest intensity. In four lines Tennyson paints a landscape that no one can ever forget,-

" And ono, a full-fed river winding slow By herds upon an endless plain

The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, And shadow-streaks of rain ;"

and it would be impossible for any one to express with equal power the perspective of such a picture who could not concen- trate the same threatening of thunder into its last two lines. Miss Ingelow's sense of pictorial perspective is very delicate,—but her highest touches of light and shadow are so far inferior in in- tensity that she has comparatively but little room to dispose of, and thus her pictures too often seem crowded, though every touch

is true and beautiful. For example, take the beginning of the beautiful little poem called " The Letter L."

" We sat on grassy slopes that meet With sudden dip the level strand ; The trees hung over head—our feet Were on the sand.

"Two silent girls, a thoughtful man, We sunned ourselves in open light; And felt such April airs as fan The Isle of Wight ; "And smelt the wallflower in the crag Whereon that dainty waft had fed Which made the bell-hung cowslip wag Her delicate head ; "And let alighting jackdaws fleet Adown it open-winged, and pass Till they could touch with outstretched feet The warmed grass.

"The happy wave ran up and rang Like service bells a long way off, And down a little freshet sprang From mossy trough.

" And splashed into a rain of spray, And fretted on with daylight's loss, Because so many bluebells lay Leaning across.

" Blue martins gossipped in the sun And pairs of chattering claws flow by, And sailing brigs rocked softly on In company.

"Wild cherry boughs above us spread The whitest shade was ever seen, And flicker, flicker came and fled Sun spots between.

"Bees murmured in the milk-white bloom As babes will sigh for deep content, When their sweet hearts for peace make room As given, not lent."

A prettier picture has seldom been sketched, and its only defect is a certain crowding in of successive details, one of which is apt to obliterate the other, instead of being simultaneously grouped in the mind's eye. And this defect is not due to any want of poetic discrimination, but only to the absence of that power for the higher lights which alone gives sufficient room for perfect artistic "gradation." The poem which combines most of the pictorial power with the greatest intensity in its higher touches is, perhaps, the one called "Divided,"—the first in the volume,— picturing the gradual growth of an alienation, at first so fine as to be quite imperceptible and unconscious, between intellects taking different paths of thought. It is a poem of very delicate beauty.

But, perhaps, the most original things in Miss Ingelow's volume,—certainly those farthest removed from the school of the Laureate,—are her songs. " The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire " has an exquisite artlessness and melancholy, which reminds one in part of. Mr. Kingsley's beautiful "Sands of Dee," and in part of Mr. Clough's Swiss berdswoman's song, but has nothing that is really borrowed from either. It is a simple popular ballad, which is far too completely free from reflective touches and long-drawn cadences for Mr. Tennyson's hand, or that of any of his school. Again, " Lettie White," in the poem called " Supper at the Mall," is one of the same kind, which might genuinely catch the ear even of the least cultivated with its perfect simplicity of feeling and melody of utterance. But, for the most part, Miss Ingelow sings reflectively, like one who is conscious of mediating by an intellectual music of her own, between the outer and the inner world.