it may be said to be both fairly abundant and almost invariably of fine quality. Many poets who have left a few much greater things have not left half as many poems which their readers wish to get by heart as may be found in the seven books of Mr Bridges' lyrics. Not many lyrics of the last thirty years are more often repeated by lovers of poetry than such things as, 'I have loved flowers that fade,'' Since thou, O fondest and truest,' 'I love all beauteous things,' the great Eton Ode, the 'Nightingales,' and the two wonderful poems over dead children, I never shall love the snow again Since Maurice died,' and 'Perfect little body without fault or stain on thee.' And few poets have published so little that their readers wish away. If it is the business of poetry to give a new life to life itself, then the poetry which arises spontaneously in our minds as we go through the experiences which life brings with it is poetry that has the real thing in it. Not much stands that test better than the 'Shorter Poems' of Mr Bridges. To everyone who knows them they are for ever recurring, making some sight or sound encountered on our way a thing of more interest and significance than it would have been if we had never read that little volume. For foreigners the poet may suffer, as Wordsworth suffers, by his very English character, and still more by the almost exclusively English limitations of his landscape. But many inhabitants of this island, who have never left it, and for whom the rich Italian landscape of Shelley and Byron and Browning can never give more than that occasional and temporary satisfaction, which belongs to the escape from experienced truth, will find it an added source of gratitude to Mr Bridges that his birds and trees and flowers are familiar and their own. No poet, perhaps not even Wordsworth or Tennyson or Cowper, has done more to fill English fields and lanes with poetry. Mr Bridges has seen everything with a Whitmanlike simplicity, directness and modernity, yet he never forgets, as Whitman often forgets, that the taking of inventories is the business, not of a poet, but of an auctioneer. He touches nothing but what he has seen with more than the naked eye; what he can use to set up a current of poetic force which will flow between him and his readers, each feeling each. But within the limits from which art has

no wish to escape, how abundant he is, how fresh, how sincere! We walk by the seashore, and it is he who has made the sea poppy more for us than a yellow flower.

'A poppy grows upon the shore,

Bursts her twin cup in summer late;

Her leaves are glaucous-green and hoar,
Her petals yellow, delicate.

Oft to her cousins turns her thought,

In wonder if they care that she
Is fed with spray for dew, and caught
By every gale that sweeps the sea.

She has no lovers like the red,
That dances with the noble corn:

Her blossoms on the waves are shed,

Where she stands shivering and forlorn.'

The thing is done; the flower which was merely a flower before is now also a creature of poetry, arousing memory, imagination, the sense of a really living world. The botanical facts about its shape and date and colour are observed and given as accurately as if the verses were Tennyson's; the lightness and delicacy of handling are what Tennyson's large and ornate manner could not give; they look back to the young Keats or earlier still. The combination is Robert Bridges; and the result is a poem that connects the yellow poppy for ever with him, in the same way as the Small Celandine is connected with Wordsworth, the Daffodil with Wordsworth or Herrick, the Sensitive Plant with Shelley.

Or take a somewhat larger canvas covering a wider field, and crowded with curious charm of truthful detail. No one has ever made poetry for us of so many things we may see and hear on a late winter day in England.

'Hark to the merry birds, hark how they sing!
Although 'tis not yet spring

And keen the air;

Hale Winter, half resigning ere he go,
Doth to his heiress shew

His kingdom fair.

In patient russet is his forest spread,
All bright with bramble red,

With beechen moss

And holly sheen: the oak silver and stark

Sunneth his aged bark

And wrinkled boss.

But 'neath the ruin of the withered brake
Primroses now awake

From nursing shades:

The crumpled carpet of the dry leaves brown
Avails not to keep down

The hyacinth blades.

The hazel hath put forth his tassels ruffed;
The willow's flossy tuft

Hath slipped him free:

The rose amid her ransacked orange hips
Braggeth the tender tips

Of bowers to be.

A black rook stirs the branches here and there,
Foraging to repair

His broken home:

And hark, on the ash boughs! Never thrush did sing
Louder in praise of spring,

When spring is come.'

Here, no doubt, the wealth of observation somewhat overweights the impetus of the poetry and makes its flight a little slow and heavy. The poet has not completely transformed his abundant material. But no one who has the sense for poetic temperatures will fail to be conscious of the imaginative fire at work. The matter has not been brought to the red-hot heat in which it could be perfectly fused into the form which the poet designed for it. But the fire has been visibly at work; and if the result is not a finished creation, it is at least a most stimulating sketch, showing, as a sketch may, a master's firmness of line and a master's eye for the essential truth of his subject.

But more often he will let the imagination do its perfect work, as when, in the piece which begins,

'The storm is over, the land hushes to rest,'

after detailing a world of well-observed results of an autumnal storm, the poem comes back to the first note, Vol. 219.-No. 436.

R

as fine poems, like music, so often do ; and the experience is made a vision by the last beautiful stanza :

'The day is done: the tired land looks for night:

She prays to the night to keep

In peace her nerves of delight:

While silver mist upstealeth silently,

And the broad cloud-driving moon in the clear sky
Lifts o'er the firs her shining shield,

And in her tranquil light

Sleep falls on forest and field.

Sée! sleep hath fallen: the trees are asleep:

The night is come. The land is wrapt in sleep.'

This making of experiences into imaginative or spiritual visions, which is another way of trying to state the work of poetry, is done again and again unforgettably by Mr Bridges: visions of a winter sunrise:

'Like what the shepherd sees

On late mid-winter dawns,
When thro' the branchèd trees,
O'er the white-frosted lawns,

The huge unclouded sun,
Surprising the world whist,
Is all uprisen thereon,

Golden with melting mist':

visions of night and morning, and the birds of night and morning, in May, as in the last stanza of Nightingales,' which is perhaps the most beautiful of all his lyrics:

'Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men

We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,

As night is withdrawn

From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,

Dream, while the innumerable choir of day

Welcome the dawn:'

visions of the windmill and the miller, of the larks, of the flame-throated robin on the topmost bough of the leafless oak,' of the village church with its brass of the warrior with the sword

'Wherewith he led his men
O'ersea, and smote to hell

The astonisht Saracen,

Nor doubted he did well

of the bold majestic dawns smooth, fair and lovely,' for whose laureate honours he challenges Swinburne and Mr Kipling, of the pinks in his garden, sending the poet back to Herrick as he tells himself how

'Their dazzling snows forth-bursting soon

Will lade the idle breath of June:

And waken thro' the fragrant night

To steal the pale moonlight':

of the winter evening, where the poet is entirely himself, at once a realist and a mystic, like so many imaginative men of to-day:

The clouds have left the sky,
The wind hath left the sea,
The half-moon up on high
Shrinketh her face of dree.

She lightens on the comb
Of leaden waves, that roar
And thrust their hurried foam
Up on the dusky shore.

Behind the western bars
The shrouded day retreats,
And unperceived the stars
Steal to their sovran seats.

And whiter grows the foam,
The small moon lightens more ;
And as I turn me home,

My shadow walks before.'

These, and a hundred more, must be at this moment the occasional companions of readers of poetry, who, as they walk about England, find their eyes and ears and imaginations confronted by the same birds and flowers, the same slow rivers, white shores and windy downs as have met Mr Bridges, and find also that the inarticulate something, which vaguely stirs within them at these experiences, takes delight in discovering its formed expression in some poem of his. It is only occasionally that he travels quite outside our island; as in that fine voyage of imagination which he takes in pursuit of the ship he is watching from the English coast:

'Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding.'