THE MYTHOLOGY OF MIRK-LANE.

pROFESSOR Max Midler, who has done so much to analyze into its scientific elements the mythology of the ancients, and the language of both the ancient and modern world, and who has enforced the truth that local dialects are the great feeders of lan- guage which enrich its resources with a vivid and homely force, might profitably, perhaps, pay some attention to the remarkable imaginative features of the language which commerce is carving out for us in every great city. It is a fashionable statement of the present day that great cities have a poetry of their own, if the poet's mind were but there to see it. On the essential nature and definition of poetry we will not at this time enter; but so far as the most bold and yet homely personification, the most rich and yet faithful metaphor, alle- gorical fancy, tempered by the realism of common life, constitute poetry,—so far we have, in the very centre of our trade and manufac- tures, a nursery of poets, which perhaps only needs the touch of a master-mind to become the origin of a Mark-lane school.

It would be a school, if we may be permitted to anticipate in some degree the shape of events which are already casting their shadows before them, by no means distantly allied to that of Shelley. In saying this we are well aware of the unmerited abuse which that great poet cast upon the spirit of commerce; but we refer not to his esthetic tastes so much as to his intellectual faculty. He gave the

most powerful renovating impulse among us to that semi.Hellenie school of poetry which restores a certain soul to material things, which replaces, to the intellectual eye, the Dryad in the tree, and the Naiad in the stream, and the Fauns amongst the forest glades, which distils nature till a certain spiritual essence rises from the alembic of its various forms for the poet's mind to endow with an ideal life.

" Oh ! there are spirits in the air And genii of the evening breeze,"

is the constant burden of his song; and though the school of which we foresee the rise is not likely to reanimate what we call Nature, but rather to put a living mind (like the Platonic ideas) into some of the more artificial compounds of human skill and industry, yet the intellectual tendency will probably be the same. We cannot write, of course, with that confidence which the rise of one single master- mind would give us ; we can judge only of that prepared intellectual soil on which he will stand; but we can feel sure that Mr. Alexander Smith in his tentative City Poems—probably from a complete want of sympathy with genuine commercial life—quite mistook the intellec- tual tendencies of the world which he strove to interpret, and missed the chance before him. In truth, the homely thoughts of men of business have shown a strength and vivacity of imagination which ought to have indicated to any true City poet the true undercurrent of City fancy. Who can fail to see that the unconscious mind of the man of business, moving, in its real and solid way, among bales of various goods, has so passed into them and identified itself with them as to people Mark.lane with quite a new spiritual race. The genii find their way not only into the empty cask, as in the fanciful tale of

the Arabian Nights, but into the full one, and interpenetrate all the "common things" they find there with the pulses of a rich intellec-

tual life. "There was a better feeling in coarse beef: tallow was lan- guid in the forenoon, but rallied later in the day : heavy brown sheeting& & lively :"—what a breadth of unconscious imagination is revealed in such a sentence as this, the more that it is instinct with

"The homely sympathy that heeds

The common life our nature breeds,— A wisdom suited to the needs"— not, indeed, "of hearts at leisure," bat the next best thing, perhaps, "of hearts in business." Think only of the vitality and self-forget- fulness of thought, the complete "metempsychosis"—which is said to be of the essence of poetry—implied in the grave use by solid men of such a phrase as that we have quoted, "there was a better feeling in coarse beet" The fact conveyed is, no doubt, that beef of the coarser kind was being sold at money prices higher than the previous; yet the medium of "money" entirely vanishes from the mind of the thinker. He projects his own consciousness into the "coarse beef;" he represents to himself the fact that it is more in demand or better appreciated by the mass of mankind, as a sentiment, a nervous exalta- tion, a sympathetic joy, in the beef itself; its own spirits rise with the eagerness of the consumer, as an author's rise with the appre- ciation of his work by the public ; all that is ill-conditioned or bad in grain vanishes at once, coarse though its nature be; there is a "better feeling" in it. Surely this is poetry, if not mythology. Are there not spirits in the beef, and genii in the tallow bales? Nor must we suppose that this is the accidental flight of a mind raised above its contemporaries. The whole mind of the City is instinct with this kind of intellectual force and vivid- ness. The metals are habitually spoken of as if the salamanders, which are supposed to preside over their fining in the furnace, had passed into their essence. "Copper is very excited; iron firm but dull; spelter still exceedingly depressed, though some parcels went off well." Here is the language of the intellect, the emotions, and the will, all attributed with unconscious simplicity to the metals. The fluctuating price of copper is conceived as throwing that valuable ore into a state of almost hysterical perturbation of spirits ; its swarthy face is seen in vision flushing and darkening with the alternations of hope and fear; iron, as we might expect, is a metal of greater will than intellect, "firm but dull," impenetrable but of fixed purpose ; spelter is hypochondriac, and not even animated by the happy augury of a partial appreciation. Or consider the delicacy of this fanciful expression, "Treacle is sluggish ; raisins animated, and Sultanas have ruled firm ; volatile oils lively, but olive dull on the spot." There is a picture in every word, a perfect wealth of impersonation ;—and that happy fitness of significant allusion, that power of drawing images from cognate subjects, which betray the true temperament of the poet. "Sultanas have ruled firm," carries the whole philosophy of government into the description of a simple commercial phenomenon. Or take again the following of the cattle- market : "Inferior veal is dull and drooping ; smile young calves moved off briskly; lambs met a dull inquiry ; pigs unexpectedly became buoyant." This transfigures the homely scenery of a cattle- market with far more than the imaginative power which Words-

worth spends on transmuting the City in poor Susan's reverie, where he describes her beholding in mental vision,

"Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flow on through the vale of Cheapsicle."

This is nothing to the audacious imagination with which the whole scene we have described is penetrated. "Inferior veal," though naturally one of the weaker and dejected spirits, is delineated with as much dramatic force as the young calves trotting off in the elation of high self-esteem, and the lambs meeting a dull inquiry, while the pigs unexpectedly become buoyant. What a group ! the pallid, drooping spirit of the sickly and morbid veal, the proud playful calves tossing their heads in the overflow of youthful spirits, the docile lambs anticipating half-expressed and half-felt wants, and the marked feature—the surprise of the scene—the pigs unexpectedly rising into the air : and all this to represent a few simple commercial phenomena which might have been put in figures!; Can we conceive a more remarkable overflow of the poetic spirit ?

Note, too, how boldly this school of City imagination introduces that audacious kind of metaphor for which Shelley has been so often reproached, which consists in the explanation of material things by immaterial, instead of the immaterial by the material. How often have we heard that this is the audacity of proper mysticism ;—that to

say, for instance,

"The boat is asleep upon Berchio's stream, Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream,"

or to say of the skylark,

"Like a poet hidden, In the light of thought,"

is throwing a shadow rather than a sunbeam over the image P Yet with a true instinct the City imagination does exactly the same

thing, going back from the concrete to the intellectual world for its most vital images, as we have seen already in a dozen instances.

When, for example, it says of " sugars" that "crushed Dutch are

flat but firm," the higher moral qualities of the mind are called in to explain, by a kind of political metaphor, the very ordinary fact of an unchanged price : and this habit of mind is as deeply rooted in the whole school as in Shelley himself. Let us, then, be more generous than Shelley to the influence of commerce over the imagination—as generous as he would have been had he anticipated these remarkable

phenomena. Let us disavow the sentiment : "The harmony and happiness of man

Yield to the wealth of nations. . even the pulse That Fancy kindles in the beating heart To mingle with sensation, it destroys,— Leaves nothing but the sordid love of self, The grovelling hope of interest and gold, Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed."

The imaginative realism of Mark-lane had scarcely shown itself when Shelley wrote these unjust lines.