over unread. For the two long hexameter epistles contain, perhaps, the ripest thought of the poet on such eternal problems as those of art and science, art and nature, egoism and altruism, the state and the individual, the history and destiny of man.

But the ultimate fame of Mr. Bridges will depend almost entirely on his lyrics; for we need not stay to discuss the only other poems, which are neither dramas nor metrical experiments. These are his "Eros and Psyche," an extremely pretty retelling of the story of Apuleius, showing often the strong influence of Keats in a certain delicate exquisiteness of handling; and "The Growth of Love," a series of sonnets, sometimes almost as difficult to disentangle as the most famous of their predecessors. They contain fine and significant things, of course; but one is not altogether surprised that the poet did not himself desire to reprint them. Putting these aside, then, the rest of the work of Mr. Bridges consists of lyrics, and is to be found in the five books of "Shorter Poems" and in those called "New Poems" and "Later Poems." Here unquestionably the poet's vital and permanent poetic achieve-, ment is to be sought. He grew up in an age when all the formative influences of poetry had long been setting in the lyrical direction, as indeed they still in the main are; and, recluse as he has been, he not the less belongs to his own time and bears its mark. lyric is the putting into musical language of an emotional or imaginative experience which the poet has himself individually and personally gone through, but which he recreates as a a work of art, that is as something no longer merely individual but now also universal, a thing which is at once his own and the whole world's, at once the accident of a moment in a single life, and a part of the eternal truth of all time and all existence. That is

The

the ideal lyric, and the attempt at producing it has been the chief business of English poetry since Wordsworth and Shelley. Sometimes the universal aspect has been over-emphasized, as occasionally in Shelley, with the result of a certain emptiness and lack of vitality; sometimes, as occasionally with Wordsworth, the poet has been inclined to lay too much stress on the momentary individual experience, with the result of exposing himself to the charge of triviality. Poetry needs both philosophy and fact, but it can easily have too much of either. It is one of the merits of Mr. Bridges that he has not forgotten either need. He has plenty of thought, but also plenty of observation and of a strong though quiet emotion. His thoughts are seen and felt; his facts felt and thought; his emotions have an intellectual and even a sensuous element in them. He loves life almost as eagerly and realistically as Walt Whitman though not as universally: he has the moral earnestness of the best English tradition, of Milton and Wordsworth; he has a Keats-like quickness of eye for all things curious and delicate and beautiful; and he has an equipment of knowledge of art, science and literature possessed by none of these poets except Milton. What has he made of it all? What is his actual poetic achievement?

Well, it does not include any single poem of the first magnitude. He has done nothing which can be brought into comparison either for quantity or for quality with the principal works of the great nineteenth century poets. "Hyperion," "Adonais," the Immortality Ode, the great parts of "The Prelude" and "The Excursion," he never climbs to such altitudes as these; nor can he remain so long on the highest points to which he does attain. His is a somewhat small voice of occasional intermittent utterance, incapable of

the sustained flights of song which belong to men of higher and more continuous inspiration. No sane admiration of his work will deny that it is that of a minor poet. But within these limits 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 for-
lorn."

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 color 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 wellobserved results of an autumnal storm, the poem comes back to the first note, 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.

See! 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

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 honors he challenges Swinburne and Mr. Kipling, of the pinks in his garden, sending the poet back to Herrick as he tells himself how

"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."

It has that note of a personal experience in a strange but intensely real and vividly seen country which recalls Whitman; but it has also a sense of form, a craftsmanship about it of

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:

he had now and then his supreme moments when he could get all its results with the divine unconsciousness of genius.

"I there before thee, in the country that well thou knowest, Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air:

Mr. Bridges is as sincere, as observant, as interested as Whitman; he cannot be as "naive" as that child of nature. For he is himself a child of a great many other things beside nature of art, science, learning, of the great tradition of two thousand years of literature; and he bears some features of all of them in his face. No poet except Tennyson can compare with him in knowledge of the scientific movement of his day. He is full of botanical, biological, and astronomical facts and allusions. He will write a poem of "Wintry Delights," and exhibit the joy of life as arising not only from art, nature, and the human affections, but from the sciences exploring all fields of knowledge; and will go through them, geology, astronomy, chemistry, anthropology, medicine, and say things worth hearing about them all. But above all, of course, he has loved and studied art, and especially the two that are so often estranged, the "sphere-born harmonious sisters, voice and verse"! Many poets, and not the least musical, Tennyson and Swinburne, for instance, have been totally ignorant of music; Mr. Bridges is a student of music as well as of metre. This is one of the many ways in which he looks back to Milton. Both are as sensitive to the beauty of the art of inarticulate sounds in which they are amateurs as to that of the art of words in which they are professionals. Both evidently feel a responsibility of artistic conscience

place they have given to each word that is found in it. Both love to make their own art speak of the art which is not their own. "Comus," "Lycidas," "Allegro," "Penseroso," "Paradise Lost," all have their great passages about music. It seems as if for Milton, passion, holiness, imagination, ecstasy, Paradise, all found their perfect freedom in music. There seems to be something of the same feeling in Mr. Bridges, too, as when in his fine "Ode to Music" he calls upon her to draw near "in joyous ravishment of mystery,"

"With heavenly echo of thoughts, that dreaming lie

Chain'd in unborn oblivion drear."

But lover of music as he is, and evidently rejoicing to pay his tribute to such masters of the art as Mozart and Purcell and Joachim, yet it is much more often the music of nature than of art which comes into his poetry. Few poets have been more delicately sensitive to the pleasures of sound. In one of his poems he gives a curious list of sounds which his ear holds affectionately in its treasure-house of memory. Few or none of them are things rare or recondite; we can all have them if we will. Here as elsewhere the point in which the poet differs from the rest of us is that he hears with his ear and more than his ear, what we are hardly conscious of hearing at all; that he makes a joy that lives and lasts of what is for most men only an unnoticed experience that passes away; and that he can utter what we at best can only feel. He tells in this poem of a song that "was born" to him and chose for itself a melody "that arose of all fair sounds that I love":

"And I knew not whether From waves of rustling wheat it was, Recoveringly that pass: