THE POETRY OF OXFORD.*

IT was a good idea to make a collection of poems relating to Oxford; and Mr. Firth's anthology, as he lays it before us, runs to nearly four hundred pages, by far the greater part belonging to our own generation. There could be no better testimony to the love and respect that the University con- tinues to inspire. And yet, as one thins the pages, the question keeps recurring whether such filial rhapsodies ought to be subjected to the cold eye of criticism. Their place seems to be rather in love's "scented manuscript," or the comparative privacy of a limited edition. For the Latin poet taught us long ago bow difficult it is proprie communia dicere. The word that touches the common heart, and releases the universal feeling, must be a commonplace, but it requires the simplicity of genius to utter it. Perhaps no anthology ever published exhibited in so clear and decisive a way the insuperable interval between great and minor poetry. The great poetry about Oxford, if we exclude Chaucer's picture of the Clerk, is confined to the two exquisite pastorals of Matthew Arnold :— " Runs it not hero, the track by Childsworth farm

Past the high wood, to where the elm-tree crowns The hills behind whose ridge the sunset flames?

The signal-elm that looks on Haley downs,

The vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames P- This winter eve is warm,

Humid the air, leafless, yet soft as spring, The tender purple spray on copse and briers;

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,

She needs not June for beauty's heightening."

The stanza moves along, simply descriptive, making no fuss; and then come two lines in the close, as simple as the rest, as unaffected, but saying once for all, and with perfect adequacy, what needs to be said about the matchless beauty of the city of spires. Further on in the poem we have the picture of the ever-joyous and youthful side of Oxford life in the bunters returning down "the dusk hillside " ; and then in the picture of the Gipsy Scholar the poet touches with a fine ideality the serious studies of the place :—

" A fugitive and gracious light ho seeks, Shy to illumine ; and I seek it too."

Reading " Thyrsis " over again, and remembering " Lycidas," we come to realise that it was not by mere haphazard that

these two great artists sung their praises of Alma Mater, as it were, by the way. They saw the loved place transfigured in the solemn light of a great human passion. Now the young gentlemen who in Mr. Firth's pages mourn their departure from Oxford, or revisit her grey quadrangles by the

• The Minstrelsy of Isis: an Anthology of Poems Relating to Orford, and All Phases of Oxford Life. &looted by J.13...Orth. London: Chapman and Hall. [Gs. Hot.]

‘glimpses of the moon, are all for frontal attach. They pile Pelion upon Ossa in their effort to scale the heaven of -invention. Their verse e gleam with epithets and tears as they sing with affectionate melancholy of Oxford's towers and solemn shrines and ghostly memories

"Over the Radcliffe dome the moon, as the ghost of a flower Weary and white awakes in the phantom fields of the sky, The trustful shepherded clouds are asleep over steeple and tower, Dark under Magdalen walls the Cher like a dream goes by.

Back, we come wandering back, poor ghosts, to the home that' one misses Out in the shelterless world, the world that was heaven to Mr then, tack from the coil and the vastness, the stars and the boundless abysses, Like monks from a pilgrimage stealing in bliss to their cloisters again."

So sings Mr. Alfred Noyes in many stanzas, all musical and sad and clever. Where these valedictory odes are most successful is where they are content to leave generalities, and distil their vague love for the :mighty mother into a particular tear for some log comrade, as in Mr. St. John Lucas's "I will go up to Cumnor height." But failing the great way of the great poets, there are many other ways of celebrating Oxford in • which success is not so impossible to achieve. There is the way of humour; which lies very close to pathos; and Mr. Quiller-COuch treads it with sure foot ; and theee is the way of wit, which Mr. Godley in this generation has made his own, but Mr. Menzies knows it too; and there is the way of the artist, content to do. some small thing exquisitely, and in this kind we have the "Envoy" of Mr. Robert Bridges, and the " Bablockhythe " of his disciple, Mr. Binyon, and not a few Bonnets, the best of them perhaps two on Magdalen Walks and Magdalen Bridge by Mr. Bowyer Nichols, and one or two by F. W. Faber and Canon Rawnsley.

The older poetry—and Mr. Firth has sought his prey with great diligence among the minor verse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—is fair less sentimental than that of recent years, and far less in quantity ; and, with few exceptions it is less interesting. One of these exceptions is Cowley's Pindario Ode on the Bodleian, full of thought and wit, in which he, in the manner of the great masters, turns aside from his special subject to apostrophise the University in a memorable phrase :--

"Hail, Tree of Knowledge, thy Leaves Fruit which well Dost in the midst of Paradise arise,

Oxford, the Muses' Paradise,

From which may never Sword the Blest expel "

George Wither has a prosaic but interesting account of how he mastered the Oxford logic, and a jolly song, "In Summer Time to Medley "; and John Davies, the writing. master of Hereford (whom Mr. Firth makes a knight of), celebrates the Colleges which patronised him. Else the seventeenth-century rhymers content themselves with an address to Majesty, or an epigram or epitaph on some Master or Fellow. In Latin, however, they are much better worth reading. Mr. Firth prints the witty stanzas of Dr. Alliboud on the results of the Visitation of the University by the Parliamentarians in 1648':•••■

4 Culinas illie frigescentes,

Capellas sine precibus, In cellis comas sitientes Et anise sine messibus.

In tempts queens conciones Aut quicquid est decorum? Habebis haesitationes

Extemposaneornm,"

and so forth for more than fifty verses. He also prints some interesting hexameters by F. Vernon, of Christ Church (1660), on undergraduate recreations, which would surprise their descendants to-day

"Pars humiles texit calathos, atque online juncos Coinplicat,"

which a note paraphrases as "Making triintrams with rushes and flowers."

For the eighteenth century the anthology draws mainly upon that well-known collection, "The Oxford Sausage"; but more serious verse is 'represented by Dr. Johnson and T'Om Warton, and for its earlier 'years by Thomas' Tickell. The undergraduate in Tickell's verse appears almost as seraphic as in Ackerman's pictures a century later " See how the matehless youth their hours improve And in the glorious way to knowledge move! Eager for fame prevent the rising sun And watch the midnight labours of the moon. Not tender years their bold attempts restrain, Who leave dull time and hasten into men; Pure to the soul and pleasing to the eyes, Like angels youthful and like angels wise."

Queen's College, which nursed Mr. Tickell, must have been a different place from St. John's, which about the same date was the home of Mr. Nicholas Amherst, who writes thus to. a friend in London :—

" Well dost thou ask me in thy friendly lays

How in this factious place I spend my days. Why briefly thus :—As is the modish way, Seldom I read, and much more seldom pray.

The tenor of a college life I keep,

Eat thrice a day, pun, smoke, get drunk, and sleep."

The eighteenth century also supplies the first sentimental note in the stanzas of William Shenstone, Esq. Mr. Firth, prints two, but omits the best, the passage about Oxford in..

the "Ode to Memory" :—

" 0 sketch with care the muses' bow'r

Where Isis rolls her silver tide ; Nor yet omit one rood or flow'r That shines on Cherwell's verdant side; If so thou may'st those hours prolong When pblish'd Lydon join'd my song.

The song, it 'voila not to recite— But sure to soothe our yputhful dreams, Those banks and streams appeared more bright Than other banks, than other streams ; Or by thy softening pencil shown,

Assume they beauties not their own?"

We must not omit, in conclusion, to congratulate editor and' publishers on the many charming illustrations, especially the, pictorial end-papers, with which their volume is adorned.