BOOKS.

MR. PALGRAVE'S POEMS.*

Mn. PALGRAVE belongs to the Oxford school of student-poets, both in fact and in the character of his poetry. The fibre of -thought is almost always visible as the centre-thread even of his poems of feeling, and where this is least true, he is, as a rule, least -successful. We must except, however, from this criticism the trst poem, called " Melusine," in which he deals with the old subject of the mermaid who adopts for a time our human life, with exquisite fancy and beauty. Indeed, this seems to us the only poem in which, where he almost courts comparison with Matthew Arnold, as he often does, we should be inclined to prefer Mr. Pal- grave to the great lyrical critic or critical lyrist of our day. The whole treatment of Mr. Arnold's "Forsaken Merman," and of Mr. Palgrave's " Melusine," is, indeed, so different that in detail no one would think of comparing them ; but where many poems of a dater author court comparison with many of an earlier, we cannot -choose but observe how the two have treated their common subjects, and we cannot but think there is, on the whole, more of the „painter's power, with quite as much of delicate pathos, in Mr. Palgrave's treatment of this sweet old tale, as in the lament which Mr. Arnold puts into the mouth of his "Forsaken Merman." -Can any description be fuller of bright tranquillity than this of the spot where the maid of the deep fixed her human abode ?— " The happy days go by ;

The life of earth is blessed, where by the mere, The cottage sees its second self below So still, so clear, That calm itself has no more to bestow.

"Gray mountains all around Immovable ; green meadows bosom'd high, Haunted with solitude ; the clinking bell Far off, yet nigh, Where the still herds like spots of shadow dwell :— "Lush aspens by the lake; Lake-level pastures ; and the hidden nook Where, o'er worn boulders arrowy breaking by, The clear brown brook Makes stillness stiller with its one sweet cry:— " Gray mountains all around ; Above, the crystal azure, perfect, pale ; As if a skirt of Eden's heaven-forgot Arched o'er the vale,

,Guarding a peace beyond earth's common lot.

"All these things, day by day, So wrought on her, though fairy-born and wild, —As the soft handling of the mother steals Into the child, 'Till it becomes the gentleness it feels,— " That from the seas her heart 'Turned landward to that cottage life :—the kine, 'The garden, the low bee-hive bench, the trough Of hustling swine,

'The colt that neigled beholding her far off.

"Rarely her steps were set To that small village by the bay, where he Followed his craft, and with some inborn sense Of courtesy Kept from her eyes the nets and cordage, whence "Ho drew their food. But she,

When heat of summer spoiled the chase afloat, Would lead him to the lake, and grasp the ear Of some small boat

That lay there, and push merrily from the shore.

* Lyrical Poems. By Francis Turner Palgrave, late Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. London: Macmillan. 1871.

"But in the midmost azere's Deep crystal, pure, invisible, where the keel Hung like a bird o'er some sheer mountain glen, A light would steal Into her eyes, a passionate tone :—and then "Quick tears : till now she seized Her oar, and breathless made the land, and wild Ran in, and lent above her firstborn's cot, And slowly smiled, As when one sees a face too long forgot."

The beauty of that description no one with the slightest tincture of poetic feeling can question. The green meadows "haunted with solitude," where the clinking bell seems "far off, yet nigh," the "clear brown brook," that "makes stillness stiller with its one sweet cry ;" and most of all, the tranquillizing influence of these soft scenes, sinking into her, "though fairy-born and wild,"—

" As the soft handling of the mother steals Into the child,

Till it becomes the gentleness it feels,"

—are all touches worthy at once of a first-rate artist and a first- rate poet. The ending given by Mr. Palgrave to his story has to our minds something capricious and unsatisfactory. That at the touch of the deepest affections and sorrows of human life the creature of nature should return to her "fairy-born and wild" condition, and plunge into the sea by the corpses of her husband and son without even recognizing them, is a reverse reading of De la Motte Fouque's beautiful tale of Undine, that fills us with, dissatisfaction, and seems to us hardly justifiable in art. Still, taken as a whole, " Melusine " is a most lovely poem, quite unequalled in its kind in Mr. Palgrave's volume, and perhaps the only one which does not owe its fascination much more to the intellectual thread of the poem than to the power of expression with which it is worked out. Fancy and pathos predominate in " Melusine," but in no other poem of Mr. Palgrave's do they seem to us to win a true success. " Alcestis " strikes us as tame, and "A Story of Naples," probably true, has in it no ring of tragic force. Here and there, in the volume, a fancy is expressed with a delicacy and point which give it a great fascination, as, for instance, in these lines "To a Child :"- "If by any device or knowledge The rosebud its beauty could know, It would stay a rosebud for ever, Nor into its fulness grow.

"And if thou could'at know thy own sweetness, 0 little one, perfect and sweet ! Thou would'at be child for ever ; Completer whilst incomplete."

But as a rule, it is neither in the fanciful nor in the purely lyri- cal verses that Mr. Palgrave seems to us to shine, so much as in the musing verses on the relation of philosophy to faith, which form to our mind, after " Melusine," the chief charm of the volume.

As a poetical critic of human genius Mr. Palgrave more than once seems to court comparison with Mr. Arnold, and here we cannot help thinking that in subtlety and felicity of touch he falls indefinitely behind that gracious and delicate intellectual painter. Mr. Palgrave has a poem on the graves of Shelley and Keats written in very much the same peculiar metre as Mr. Arnold's on the grave of Heine, but failing, as we think, to draw the subtle lineaments of either poet,—nay, surely misreading Shelley altogether when it picks out as a main characteristic of Shelley's, the "divine mirth" with which he "hailed what was human and sweet," and "the human eyes" with which. he watched human griefs and sorrows. Was there any true " mirth" in Shelley at all,—surely not in his poetry ? And what little mirth we read of in his life was surely shrill and unnatural, far from 'divine.' The eager intensity of impulsive compassion with which he rushed to console human sorrow was sweet and childlike enough, but hardly to be described as filling the eyes which watched that sorrow with a specially " human " sympathy,—for that rather suggests a breadth and depth of patient sympathy which realizes how much of human sorrow it is unavailing even to attempt to cure, than Shelley's keen and passionate impulse of violent pity. If we compare, too, the essential criticism of Mr. Palgrave's sonorous memorial verses on Wordsworth with Mr. Arnold's exquisite lines on the same poet (whom he contrasts with Byron and Goethe), we shall see how much Mr. Palgrave as a poetical critic falls behind the senior oxford poet :-- d' 0 crown of venerable age !

0 brighter crown of well-spent years! The bard, the patriot, and the sage, The heart that never bow'd to fears! That was an age of soaring souls ; Yet none with a more liberal scope Survey'd the sphere of human things ; None with such manliness of hope.

" Others, perchance, as keenly felt, As musically sang as he ; To Nature as devoutly knelt, Or toil'd to serve humanity: But none with those ethereal notes, That star-like sweep of self-control; The insight into worlds unseen, The lucid sanity of soul.

"The fever of our fretful life, The autumn poison of the air,

The soul with its own self at strife, He saw and felt, but could not share: With eye made clear by pureness, pierced The life of Man and Nature through ; And read the heart of common things, Till new seem'd old, and old was new.

"To his own self not always just,

Bound in the bonds that all mon share,—

Confess the failings as we must, The lion's mark is always there!

Nor any song so pure, so great, Since his, who closed the sightless eyes, Our Homer of the war in Heaven, To wake in his own Paradise."

Compare that,—and as we read it seems to court comparison,— with Mr. Arnold's exquisite poetical criticism written on the death of Wordsworth :—

" And Wordsworth! Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice

For never has such soothing voice Been, to your shadowy world conveyed, Since erst, at morn, some wandering shade Heard the clear song of Orpheus come Through Hades and the mournful gloom.

Wordsworth has gone from us,—and ye, Oh, may ye feel his voice as we He, too, upon a wintry clime Had fallen,—on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears, He found us when the age had bound

Oar souls in its benumbing round,—

He spoke and loosed our heart in tears.

He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool, flowery lap of earth ; Smiles broke from us, and we had ease, The hills were round us and the breexe Went o'er the sunlit fields again ; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain, Our youth returned, for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furled, The freshness of the early world.

" Ab, since dark days still bring to light Man's prudence and man's fiery might, Time may restore us in his course, Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force ; But when will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power ?

Others will teach us how to dare, And against fear our hearts to steel ;

Others will strengthen us to bear,—

But who, ah I who, will make us feel?

The cloud of mortal destiny, • Others will front it fearlessly,— Rut who, like him, will put it by?

"Keep fresh the grass upon his grave, 0 Rotha! with thy living wave, Sing him thy best ! for few or none, Hear thy voice right, now he is gone."

Of Mr. Palgrave's criticism we should say that he utterly errs in asserting that "none with a more liberal scope" than Wordsworth "surveyed the sphere of human things." Far nearer is Mr. Arnold's criticism, when he makes Wordsworth's charm consist in restoring the freshness to nature and life, and as he elsewhere says, in averting "his ken from half of human fate,"—

" Bat Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken From half of human fate,

And Goethe's course few sons of men Can dare to emulate."

Wordsworth surely was almost as narrow as he was lofty, deep, and fresh ; and the liberal scope' of his view of the sphere of human things would be the last characteristic we should find in it. That line seems to us as false as the noble verse is true in which Mr. Palgrave describes Wordsworth's poetry :— "But none with those ethereal notes, That star-like sweep of self-control, The insight into worlds unseen, The lucid sanity of soul."

There we have some true touches which were wanting in Mr. Arnold's study, but there is this difference between the two poetical critics, that while Mr. Arnold is often incomplete, every positive touch he gives is at once verified by the reader as true and usually striking, whereas Mr. Palgrave's tenches are not unfrequently wavering and at random, though not un- frequently also fine and expressive. The lines on Dickens present the same faults in a far higher degree, and with more sense of effort; than those on Wordsworth.

But by far the most striking elements in Mr. PalgraveIr volume are his thinkings aloud on the great themes of philo-

sophy and theology, difficult matters to throw into a truly poetic form, and yet, as it seems to us, rendered really poetic..

in the very fine poems called "The Reign of Law," "The

Voices of Nature", " 'Apuive eve," and "To Fidele." The- grating tone which sometimes comes out in the pure lyrics, and gives one the idea of an imagination not thoroughly. warmed to its subject, disappears here, partly perhaps because,, through their very need of a firm and watchful intellectual touch,

the subjects treated stir Mr. Palgrave's whole powers more com- pletely, and compel him to summon up all his force. There is a stateliness of movement and a lucidity of feeling in these poems which express with marvellous accuracy the intellectual point of view, and fit the form to the matter. The tone reminds us of the majestic modesty, the lofty humility, the imaginative trust with which Plato, at the end of some fine dialogue on the secrets of human thought and destiny, sums up the certainties and uncer- tainties at which the inquiry has arrived, and leaves the whole end of the search in divine keeping. What can be more worthy of the philosopher-poet of such a day as ours than the following noble verses from the poem called "Voices of Nature " 2—

"—Voice of Nature in the heart,

Narrow though our science, though Here we only know in part, Give us faith in what we know!

To a fuller life aspiring, Satisfy the heart's desiring, "Tell us of a force behind Nature's force, supreme, alone : Tell us of a larger mind Than the partial power we own: Tell us of a Being wholly Wise and great and just and holy:— _ " Toning down the pride of mind To a wiser humbleness, Teach the limits of mankind, Weak to know, and prompt to guess, On the mighty shores that bound us Childlike gathering trifles round us:— " Teach how, yet, what here we know To the unknown leads the way, As the light that, faint and low, Prophesies consummate day; How the little arc before us Proves the perfect circle o'er us:— " How the marr'd unequal scheme That on all sides here we meet, Either is a lawless dream, Or must somewhere be complete:— Where or when, if near, or distant, Known but to the One Existent.

"—He is. We meanwhile repair From the noise of human things To the fields of larger air, To the shadow of his wings ; Listening for his message only In the wild with Nature lonely."

We greatly prefer, we confess, the intellectual outcome of such' poems as these, to the shadowy and vague exhortations, containect for instance in Mr. Arnold's Obermann, to have faith in " though there is nob, in Mr. Palgrave's musings, the same frame- work of radiant natural loveliness and Alpine grandeur to charm, the visionary eye. But the heart needs a soothing under the-

imperfection of Obermann's chaotic and wistful spiritual teaching,. of which it is not so much in want under the influence of Mr.- Palgrave's serener and firmer faith.