MR. WATSON'S ANTHOLOGY OF LOVE-POEMS.* MR. WATSON'S selections of poems,

either expressive of love or meditative on the subject of love, is a very thought- ful and interesting one, and, on the whole, we heartily agree with his frankly expressed dislike of the artificial

• Lyric Love : an Intholory. Edited by William Watson. London : Macmillan and Co.

character of a great proportion of the love-lyrics of the

reigns of Elizabeth and James. He tells us in his preface that he has found a great many of these lyrics,— in spite of the high praise bestowed on them by poetic

fashion,—profoundly deficient in reality. " With a few memorable and splendid exceptions," he says, " the song- writing of the period was a more or less musical ringing of the changes upon roses and violets, darts and flames, coral lips, ivory foreheads, waving tresses, and starry eyes_ The love-making seems about as real as that of Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses in porcelain." Again,—" for the most part in the amatory writing and sonnet-making of the Elizabethan age, there seems absolutely no personality at all, either in the singer or the sung ; it is an abstraction address- ing an abstraction, a shade apostrophising a shade. The poet seems to have a female lay-figure before him, and, from all one can gather, be might never have seen a real woman in his life." And he complains, too, that in poetry which was written almost at the close of the age of chivalry, the spirit was not unfrequently " absolutely unchivalrous." There is great truth in this apology for selecting rather sparely from the amatory poetry of Elizabeth and the Stuarts. And yet Mr. Watson has not failed to give us a good many of the more memorable ex- ceptions to this rule. Indeed, we are better satisfied with the selection taken from the era of Elizabeth and James, than we are with the selection from the poets of our own century. Mr. Wat- son has given us only two pieces from Matthew Arnold,—whose poetry seems to the present writer some of the loveliest of our age,—of which the first is hardly to be called a poem on love

at all, if, indeed, it be a poem at all, marked, as it is, by that condescending strain which Arnold, as a prose-writer, knew so well how to assume towards human nature in general,— while the second is one of the poorest of his poems. Surely, from " Tristran and Iseult" Mr. Watson might have selected passages of the most exquisite beauty for several of his distinct headings, while from the poems on " Marguerite " he could hardly have selected any so poor as the one actually chosen. Then, again, from Clough, who has one or two exquisite

lyrics of this class,—for example, that most beautiful pastoral poem, " Ite domum saturse," expressing the heartbreak of a Swiss lass for her distant lover as she drives her herd home from pasture,—he gives us nothing but a few hexameters descriptive of the Apennines, the only excuse for which is that in the last of these lines the poet expresses his hero's wish that his beloved were there with him. Again, Words- worth seems to us most imperfectly represented. Under the beading Love and Nature," we should have supposed that the very first and most typical of all poems on that subject would

have been the wonderful lines beginning, "Three years she grew in sun and shower,"—the finest poem of the century (it was written in 1799) on this subject of Love and Nature ; but Mr. Watson only gives us two exceedingly inferior to it,—

indeed, for the first of them, the present writer never could understand the admiration so frequently expressed,—and neither of them a tenth part so germane to the subject of the section as the marvellous poem we have mentioned. Nor do we much admire the selection from Shelley or Byron. Of course, under such a section as " Love's Philosophy," Mr. Watson could hardly avoid giving the not very beautiful or characteristic,—indeed, somewhat commonplace and almost vulgar,—poem of Shelley's with the same title ; but he omits the exquisite little poem which might have been much more truly so named :-

" One word is too often profaned For me to profane it,

One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it ; One hope is too like despair For prudence to smother, And pity from thee more dear Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love ; But wilt thou accept not

The worship the heart lifts above And the heavens reject not ?

The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow."

—which has surely a great deal more of love's true philosophy in it, than the piece so named. Indeed, we should say that only one of Shelley's first-rate poems, " When the lamp is shattered," is given in Mr. Watson's collection out of the very

many which would have been singularly germane to his various sections. For example, where could he have found a poem so perfectly illustrative, either of "Love's Tragedies," or of " The Wings of Eros," as this from the " Prometheus Unbound " ?—

"Ah sister ! Desolation is a delicate thing:—

It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air, But treads with silent footstep, and fans with silent wing, The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear; Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above, And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dream visions of aerial joy, and call the monster Love, And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet."

The selections from Byron, too, though powerful, of course, are too numerous, and not well classified, and the passage from "Don Juan," "Juan and Haidee " should not have been selected at all. So far from belonging to the class "The

Romance of Love," there is no true romance about it, and if there be any, it is certainly not the " romance of love," but of something that deserves a much harsher name. Indeed, the

sneering tone which pervades it, which has the genuine stamp of Byron's genius,—shows pretty well what Byron thought of ti himself. Mr. Watson is happier in his selections from Scott, Coleridge, Coventry Patmore, and Tennyson ; but, on the whole, we are in some degree disappointed with the selections from the poets of the present century. And though Browning certainly does not lend himself well to a selection of this kind, surely, in a volume with this title, Mr. Watson might have quoted the powerful, if in some respects obscure lines, com-

mencing—

"Oh lyric love, half angel and half bird, And all a wonder and a wild desire,"

which Browning addressed to his wife, at the end of the first portion of " The Ring and the Book."

Mr. Watson's preface is a beautiful piece of writing, and his own dedicatory sonnet seems to us one of his finest pieces of work. We will conclude by quoting it :—

" From honeyed slopes of England's Helicon, Where er the visits of the Muse beget Daisy or hyacinth or violet

Born of her tread, these floral spoils were won. Some with caresses of the wooing sun Are passion-flushed and sultry-hearted yet ; And many with immortal tears are wet ; And emptied of its odorous soul is none.

Take, then, this garland of melodious flowers. Till he, whose hand the fragrant chaplet wove, Another wreath from his own garden bring, These captive blossoms of a hundred bowers Hold thou as hostages of Lyric Love, In pledge of all the songs he longs to sing."

No one can deny that that is the work of a true poet. It is a pity that this Anthology has not been furnished with a separate index of authors, with a reference to all the poems selected from each of them, as has been done with most of the " Golden Treasury Series." Also, Mr. Watson's notes are rather irregular. He gives the special sources of some of the poems, and not that of others which are sometimes much leas well known.