they scarcely come in at all. Wordsworth used to say that the business of poetry consisted not so much in stating new truths as in giving old truths a new value and a new life; and certainly a large part of his poetic greatness lies in the power with which he acted upon this doctrine in his own work. So with Mr Bridges, in his different way. It is not the man of science, the artist, the master of metre, the thinker, the student of nature, who is the author of that class of his poems which is, perhaps, even finer than the lyrics inspired by English landscape. They belong to a more primitive order of things, before men were so greatly moved by trees and flowers, storms and sunsets, as to make them the primary subject of works of art; when the activity of the critical intellect had hardly begun; when love and religion, the most ancient and universal, were also the only interests that distinguished man from the brutes, and almost the only subjects of his poetry and art. Of one primitive subject indeed, that of fighting, Mr Bridges has little to say. His Achilles is a boy who has never seen a battle: and the Peace Ode, Matres Dolorosae,' and the Ode in memory of Old Etonians, which were his contribution to the poetry of the South African War, are certainly not among his happiest efforts. He tells no tales of heroes or warriors ancient or modern. Only once, perhaps, in the other and far greater Eton Ode, one of his noblest productions, does he strike the heroic note of soldiership, when he calls upon the boys to look forward to their future lives:

'Then to the world let shine your light,
Children in play be lions in fight,

And match with red immortal deeds

The victory that made ring the meads.'

But to the other two most ancient of all poetic themes he returns again and again. In his own way, of course; in a mood and manner very far away from that of the primitive man; in the mood of a man who has thought as well as felt, who can no longer be the slave of mere passion or mere superstition and yet knows still that love and religion are the greatest things that have ever come into human life. Love is everywhere in his poetry. Sometimes, it is true, the love poems ('Dear lady, when thou frownest,' I will not let thee go') seem to be little

more than literary exercises in an outworn poetic fashion. But these are early attempts. The latter books are full of things that ring with truth as well as beauty. It is indeed one special kind of love that inspires him. He has no Swinburnian or other affectations of reviving the worship of Aphrodite Pandemos. His love is one that unites souls as well as bodies. Only once, I think, in all his poems does he deal expressly with the old primitive Eros and then it is to ask him,

:

'Why hast thou nothing in thy face?

Surely thy body is thy mind,

For in thy face is nought to find,

Only thy soft unchristen'd smile,
That shadows neither love nor guile,

But shameless will and power immense,

In secret sensuous innocence.'

For Mr Bridges, a man of Northern race and Northern gravity of manners, with centuries of Teutonic blood and Christian morals in him, love has to be a great deal more than a naked instinct.

'Since we loved,-(the earth that shook

As we kissed, fresh beauty took)—
Love hath been as poets paint,

Life as heaven is to a saint;

All my joys my hope excel,
All my work hath prosper'd well,
All my songs have happy been,

O my love, my life, my queen.'

Here is no lack of passion assuredly; but it is a passion that has filled with fire the whole of life and not the senses only. There is another thing too. The best love poems of Mr Bridges are very modern; they give the impression of an actual experience which has been lived through and it is a kind of experience which is far commoner in our own than in earlier generations, the experience of love as a source not only of rapture but also of a new wisdom and a new power of life which could not have been without it. Highly civilised ages tend to lose much of the spontaneity and universality of primitive love: and yet, like art or religion, or any other high human achievement, love welcomes and requires

the highest attainable standard of life in those who exhibit its working. It may then have more obstacles to contend against, but when it gets its way perfectly with a man and a woman whose civilisation is a reality and a whole, the result is a greater thing than it could be when it owed its origin only to accident and the senses, and ran its course without touching more than a fragment of the lives of the lovers. So Mr Bridges is able to shake off all that traditional silliness and unreality which is an irritating presence in all but the very best of the Elizabethan and Jacobean love poetry, and makes much of it the most tedious reading in the world. When the mind and imagination are themselves playing a part in the business of love, they find their own natural utterance; and instead of forced extravagances of compliment and despair, which leave the reader weary and unconvinced, we get such stanzas as:

'So sweet love seemed that April morn,
When first we kissed beside the thorn,
So strangely sweet, it was not strange
We thought that love could never change.

But I can tell-let truth be told-
That love will change in growing old;
Though day by day is nought to see,
So delicate his motions be.

And in the end 'twill come to pass
Quite to forget what once he was,
Nor even in fancy to recall
The pleasure that was all in all.

His little spring, that sweet we found,
So deep in summer floods is drowned,
I wonder, bathed in joy complete,

How love so young could be so sweet.'

That is the love which occupies the whole of life and, when life draws to an end, can face the inevitable parting in words which recall the old age of Landor in everything except in the happiness to which they look back:

'When Death to either shall come,

I pray it be first to me,

Be happy as ever at home,

If so, as I wish, it be.

Possess thy heart, my own;

And sing to the child on thy knee,

Or read to thyself alone

The songs that I made for thee.'

So with the manner in which Mr Bridges handles religion, if we include in the meaning of that word all the aspirations and activities inspired in man by the faith that there is in the world something higher and greater than himself, that he is in touch with eternal forces and eternal possibilities, and that these are especially related to the moral and spiritual parts of his nature. In Wintry Delights' his most philosophical, though not his most poetic treatment of these problems, he declares that man is external nature's superior and judge:

"Turn our thought for a while to the symphonies of Beethoven,

Or the rever'd preludes of mighty Sebastian; Is there
One work of Nature's contrivance beautiful as these?'

Man 'as an artist born' is 'impell'd to devise a religion'; and by some cause which is 'an unsolv'd mystery' to choose the most beautiful for his art, and the best that he can imagine for his faith and truth.

'Truth to the soul is merely the best that mind can imagine.'

So 'man is Nature's judge and tearful accuser'; though Nature still has the ready reply, 'Fool, and who made thee?' a reply which seems to point back to the 'unsolv'd mystery' or to some Power above both man and Nature who foresees and prepares the ultimate harmony between Nature's apparently indifferent force and man's artistic and moral conscience. But all this is matter which poetry can scarcely handle without an excessive infusion of philosophy or theology. Her happier business is with the primitive instinct of worship which no questionings will ever kill.

'O golden Sun, whose ray

My path illumineth:

Light of the circling day,

Whose night is birth and death:

That dost not stint the prime
Of wise and strong, nor stay
The changeful ordering time,
That brings their sure decay:

Now with resplendent flood
Gladden my waking eyes,
And stir my slothful blood
To joyous enterprise.

Arise, arise, as when

At first God said LIGHT BE!
That He might make us men
With eyes His light to see.

Scatter the clouds that hide
The face of heaven, and show
Where sweet Peace doth abide,
Where Truth and Beauty grow.

Awaken, cheer, adorn,
Invite, aspire, assure

The joys that praise thy morn,
The toil thy noons mature:

And soothe the eve of day,
That darkens back to death;
O golden Sun, whose ray
Our path illumineth!'

Could there be a finer instance of the continuity of the human spirit? Here is a hymn to the Sun, which, in the unquoted even more than in the quoted verses, gives all the primitive man's joy in the great source of light and warmth: yet gives it transformed by all that so many centuries of Christianity have written indelibly on our minds: gives it in language and in a verse which belong to to-day and yet have still about them more than a little flavour of an august tradition of thought and speech, to which the great Latin hymns and the noble English version of the Bible, and much else, have made their contributions. Part of the greatness of poetry lies in its power to hold together in one the fleeting and changing generations of men. The greatest lines of any great poet are found centuries after his death to have meanings of which he dreamt dimly, if at all; and the poem of to-day may awaken in us ancient memories that