SUSSEX VERSE.*

So much local piety and patriotism have gone to the making of this anthology, so much interesting and beautiful verse is contained in its pages, and such industry and research have been shown in its compilation that a reviewer may well be pardoned for wishing to forgo the functions of criticism or merge them in those of commendation. But apart from the feelings of gratitude which the editor hasinspired in all lovers of Sussex, there is another reason why the rigorous application of literary canons would be inappropriate. He has not aimed at giving us only the best poetry written about Sussex; he Lae east his net so wide as to take in not only verse that is representative and characteristic of Sussex, but also that which has a Sussex motif; such as the curious black-letter ballad of the English merchant born in Chichester, or the " excellent Ballad of the Mercer's Son of Midhurst, and the Clothier's Daughter of Guildford," or the "True Mayde of the South," in which the heroine comes from Rye. In all of these there is practically nothing about Sussex beyond the mention of the place-name. Still, that may be taken as a possible indication of the local origin of the ballad. More characteristic and topical are the anonymous verses which Mr. Cook has unearthed from the parish register of Poynings in praise of the bounty of Richard Weller, from which we may quote one stanza:— "When to the Beath he took his ways To seek his health forlorne

He feasted manic poore that days And sent them all some corns."

"How far more interesting was the old Register," the editor observes, " which gave some scope to the taste and feelings, as well as to the activity of mind and research of the clergy, than the present dull and mechanical, though more accurate form !" And we do not grudge any of the spare devoted to the old Sussex folk-songs, which treat of sheep-shearing, wood- cutting, ploughing, and harvest home, and include the following quaint lines affixed to an old Sussex Mill Post:—

"The windmill is a Couris thing

Compleatly built by art of man,

To grind the corn for man and beast

That they alike may have a feast.

The mill she is built of wood, iron, and stone, Therefor she cannot go aloau; Therefore, to make the mill to go, Tho wind from some part she must blow.

The motison of the mill is swift,

The miller must be very thrift, To jump about and get things ready Or else the mill will soon run empty."

These are all well enough, though in some cases the interest is archaeological rather than literary. The most disputable numbers are those which, though written by Sussex authors or on Sussex themes, are devoid of any intrinsic merit, melody or magic, and call up no clear picture, but simply apply the conventional phraseology of eighteenth-century verse to the subject in hand. Such are the sonnets of the second Lord Thurlow, the butt of Byron and Moore, the quality of which may be judged from the octave of that inspired by Bedlam Castle

"0 than brave ruin of the passed time, When glorious spirits shone in burning arms, And the brave trumpet, with its sweet alarms, Call'd honour ! at the matte hour sublime,

And the grey ev'aing thou host had thy prime, And thy full vigour, and the eating harms

Of age have robb'd thee of thy warlike charms, And placed thee here, an image in my rhyme."

Such, too, are the faded elegies of the much-harassed Charlotte Smith, the protegee of Hayley, though her book of sonnets, subscribed for by Fox, Horace Walpole, and Mrs. Siddons, ran through eleven editions and earned the praise of Leigh Hunt and Miss Mitford. Charles Crocker is repre- sented by two poems, but not by his sonnet on the British oak, which Southey regarded as one of the finest in the English language; and Mr. (look has also given us specimens of the work of that ingenious polymath George F. Richardson, the

- industrious Mark Antony Lower, and another schoolmaster, James Howell, who all cultivated the Muse with unremunera- tire zeal. To speak frankly, they claim a hearing more as

• The Hook o Blows Vers. Edited by C. F. Cook. Foreword by Arthur F. Bell. Holm, Sussex, Cambridge., 15e. set; pocket edition, Ie. net.)

Sussex worthies and annalists than as poets. Their literary ambition was greater than their artistic achievement. Crocker and Howell are remarkable instances of men of humble parent- age and no educational advantages who hada genuine thirst for learning and a disinterested love of letters. But their poetry seldom rose above the level of essays in discipleship. Robert Bloomfield, the author of The Farmer's Boy, is in a different category, and his lines " On a First View of the Sea," from the northern approach to Worthing, have both vision and fidelity. Of the older writers, the dilettantes, light horsemen, and amateurs show to greater advantage. Under this heading one may notice Horace Smith's witty paraphrase of " Solvitur aerie likens " and William Stewart Rose's charming rhymed epistle—a model of easy urbanity—to Hookham Frere at Malta, which has the real savour of the Downs in its opening couplets

" Upon this rumpled bed of thyme and turf I loiter, listening to the rumbling surf;

Or idly mark the shadows as they fly, While green Earth maps the changes of the sky;

When, at the passing of the summer cloud,

The frighted wheatear runs in haste, to shroud Its body in some sheltering hole and there (Poor fool !) is prison'd in the fowler's snare.

So may not I—to moralize my verse—

Shun paltry perils, and encounter worse!"

But for condensed picturesqueness there is nothing to equal the last two lines of Tennyson's " View Eastward over the Weald from Blackdown" :—

" Green Sussex fading into blue With one grey glimpse of sea."

Swinburne's poem, "On the South Coast," with its double inner rhymes, is a case of materiam superabeet opus, but there is something more than melody in the passage on Shoreham Gap

" Reae-red eve on the seas that heave sinks fair as dawn mhos the first ray peers ; Winds are glancing from sun-bright Lancing to Shoreham, crowned with the grace of years ; Shoreham, clad with the sunset, glad and grave with glory that death reveres.

• • • • Higher and higher to the north aspire the green smooth- swelling unending downs ;

East and west on the brave earth's breast glow girdle-jewels of gleaming towns;

Southward shining, the lands declining subside in peace that the sea's light crowns."

But the chief attraction of the book undoubtedly resides in the contributions of living or recent poets. We welcome Francis Thompson's beautiful "Daisy," an idyll of the Sussex hills, in spite of its note of nnresigned despair

"The fairest things have fleetest end, Their scent survives their close But the rose's scent is bitterness To him that loved the rose.

•

Nothing begins, and nothing ends, That is not paid with moan; For we are born in other's pain,

And perish in our own."

There is a touch of unconscious humour in the juxtaposition of Thompson's Prelude to "Ode on the Setting Sun," which ends with the fine allueion to a song "for Rome too daring. and for Greece too dark," with Lady Burrell's blameless moralizing. on Knepp Castle. Dr. Habberton Lulham's poem "On the Downs" runs to some four hundred lines, but it is marked by intimate and faithful observation, and the portrait of the old shepherd is finely done. Mr. Floersheim'a "Ruth," a tragic idyll of the South Downs, proves him an apt disciple of Crabbe, while Mr. A. F. Bell has summed up his abiding love for Sussex in "The Happy Phantom" "When the toil of the flesh is over

And my last breath sighed away, My body can rot in the church-yard

In the grip of the London clay ;

But my ghost shall go on a North wind

Like a child that runs to play.

My ghost shall go on a North wind To the combo of a Sussex down, And hover about a homestead

Where the thatch is old and brown, And hear the creaking waggons Set off, are dawn, to town. And this shall be at a season Before the leaf is born, When the chestnut buds swell sticky And the thrush is loud at morn, And the furrows of fragrant plough-land Are misty with rising corn.

My ghost shall watch in the daytime The red-cheeked children go The ways where the wind-flowers waver And the hawthorn breaks in snow, And be sorry or glad as their eyes smile pew Or gather a gleam of woe.

Young girls that dream at evening When the end of dusk is near

Shall think my breath the night wind

That flutters at the ear, My foot the fall of a reddened leaf That has outstayed its year.

But when the night is waning And the moon stands on the hill, And from the tar sea-places Comes a little wind and chill, And the first kine stir in the lowland, And the red cock's note is shrill, With none but the moon to mock me, High up on the hills alone, I will run with the flickering shadows By racing cloud-wisps thrown, And laugh to think of my body That ilea 'neath the church-yard stone."

Mr. Kipling's famous lines on Sussex, packed full of allusion and vivid detail, and Mr. Belloc'e delightful homage to "the great hills of the South Country" are too well known to call for quotation. But in their diverse ways they illustrate the pre-eminence of modern poets in the art of eulogizing the genius loaf.