1859.] The Saint's Tragedy, again, is full of "I have mental anachronisms, such as, prepared my nerves for a shock;" "I had Something orthodox ready;" and almost every line in the politico-economical discussions in Act II. By passages like these, we are too much reminded that it is a modern writer writing about old times. This is never so in Mr. Taylor's plays. There is also far more of what we have described as the unintelligent adoption of Shakspeare's manner, in Mr. Kingsley than in Mr. Taylor. The action does not go on singly, orderly, and plainly, as in Philip Van Artevelde, but is mixed with a good deal of matter which has more than the merely apparent irrelevancy of the subordinate by - play in Shakspeare. When, to these deductions from the perfection of the Saint's Tragedy, we have added the fault of an unnecessarily obtrusive and didactic sexuality, (not sensuality,) which appears also in other works of Mr. Kingsley, we may give free scope to our admiration of this remarkable production of this writer's youth. It has the merit of being what few poems of late years have been, namely, a thoroughly conscientious work; the author did not leave off until he had made his play as good as he possibly could at the then stage of his faculties. There is not one slovenly line in the whole; and the action is every where kept up with a steady and equable vigor, which is not to be found elsewhere in recent dramas, if we except the dramas of Mr. Taylor, to whom Mr. Kingsley has evidently looked up, as to a noble model of masculine poetic power, especially in the lyrical portions of his work. Mr. Kingsley has been too often and too highly praised in this Review for it to be likely that the Saint's Tragedy is unknown to the majority of our readers. We may therefore be excused from entering into any detailed notice of it. Mr. Matthew Arnold, also, has been 43 so fully and so recently noticed by us,* and what we said about his addiction to ancient forms of art is so exactly applicable to Merope, that we need say little more of it here than that, with the exception of Samson Agonistes, it is by far the most faithful, poetical, and learned reWe must rival of the Greek drama of which the English language can boast. confess, however, that Mr. Arnold's admirable workmanship, and the weight which justly attaches to his opinion, have failed to impress us with the general feasibility of what he had attempted, or rather, done. It seems to us that the forms of the Greek drama can never be revived among us, if it were only that their simplicity and severity exclude the representation of characters under other than very general aspects of good and evil. Our "used up"?-inmodern-shall we say tellects are entirely dead to causes which were powerfully moving in other times and under other conditions. Even among ourselves, in earlier days, an audience or a circle of readers might have been convulsed with excitement at the crisis in which Merope is on the point of slaying her son, mistaking him for her son's assassin; but, alas for the modern reader! "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba," unless they are better acquainted than the nature of the Greek drama allows them to be? We must know Merope and pytus better, we must become personally interested in them as individuals, beWe do not say fore we can care a straw for their fates as mere man and woman. that this is a right state of feeling, but we do say that it is the condition of all modern readers above fifteen years of age, and that it is fatal to the success of any thorough-going revival of the Greek drama. *North British Review, vol. xxi. p. 493. From Titan. AN ALPINE STORM TEN THOUSAND FEET HIGH.* STRANGE wavering maze of whirling haze, No masses of crimsoning cloud, Yet reason might reel at each long-drawn peal Of tremulous thunder loud! Though it roareth past, like an Etna blast, It is not peace though the echoes cease, O'er the dim profound, though never a sound The light foam floats, with its myriad motes, With the speed of thought comes glancing athwart The stillness dreary and lone. Deep hoary caves are tossed into waves, Curled frothing of white waves free, No vestige of earth, O region of birth Vast, formless space, with never a trace When Hope is decoyed to thy desolate void But the tempest has cleft the thick wizard weft, And we gaze through a hurricane frame! Thousands of feet from the turbulent sleet So far may we glance below, Calm soothing sheen, of the meadows so green, Clear rivers of silvery flow, Beam through the cold of the Ice-King's stronghold, Through his bleak, encrusted lair, Glimmer of Paradise, all beyond price, Visions of Eden mid-air! O raving wind! we are leaving behind A long farewell, 'mid each stormy swell, With the dazzling light of her garments white, A wan pink shimmer, a light rose glimmer, Where each lone spire is fanned with fire Those splinters rifted, are pale hands lifted And the wide vales share in that evening prayer For a reign of peace and love! Storm ravaged screen, of the dark ravine, The outmost lines, of an army of pines, O sweet, faint changes, borne o'er the ranges, Warm homes low lying, where birds are flying, From wilds unknown, swift broadening Rhone, Martigny's plain, with its infinite train With gentle speeches, sublime snow-reaches, *An Alpine sketch at an altitude of ten thou- 'Midst balmy gales of the perfumed vales, sand feet. In a world of welcoming life! Eclected for the Eclectic. WORD PAINTINGS IN RICH FRAMES. "AND overcome us like a summer cloud." Macbeth. "The lightest thoughts have their roots in gravity, and the most fugitive colors of the world are set off by the mighty background of eternity. One of the greatest pleasures of so light and airy a thing as the vernal season arises from the consciousness that the world is young again; that the spring is come round, that we shall not all cease, and be no world. Nature has begun again, and not begun for nothing. One fancies some how that she could not have the heart to put a stop to us in April or May.” "A vision like incarnate April, warning, "Chiefly it is when sunshine floods the sky, LEIGH HUNT: The Seer. SHELLEY: Epipsychidion. HOFFMANN. "At this time the declining sun flamed goldenly in the west. It was a glorious hour. The air fell upon the heart like balm; the sky, gold and vermilion-checked, hung, a celestial tent, above mortal man. . . . 'Did ever God walk the earth in finer weather?' said the Hermit. this,' continued the Hermit, after a pause, 'seem to me the very holiday time of death,' etc. "What kinsman hath mid Summer with the grave?" "Yet can not I by force be led To think upon the wormy-bed 'Evenings such as Chronicles of Clovernook. The Recluse. CHARLES LAMB: Hester. By common consent the image of death | wise again, and a great deal taller. The is connected with what is chill, winterly, desolate. How is it, then, that we so often associate it with glorious spring-tide, and the pomp of summer suns? But do we so associate it? perhaps the reader will ask. Are you not taking for granted what it would be less convenient to prove? Unquestionably it appears more natural, at first sight, and is infinitely more common, to think of death in connection with winter and its bleak wretchedness, than with mid-summer, and its garniture of green and gold. Frost at midnight, while the pitiless blast is raging, seems as nearly allied to stone-cold death, as July splendors do not. "In winter," says Charles Lamb, in an essay he never surpassed-" in winter this intolerable disinclination to dying-to give it its mildest name-does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then we are as strong again, as valiant again, as blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death." Similar was the feeling expressed by Delta, (Moir,) when witnessing a child's burial in Spring: "Under the shroud of the solemn cloud, when the hills are capped with snow, When the moaning breeze, through leafless trees, bears tempest on its wing; In the Winter's wrath we think of death, but not when lilies blow, And, Lazarus-like, from March's tomb walks forth triumphant Spring." Thus, too, when his betrothed is dying, on a bitter winter's night, Ernest Maltravers is described as throwing open his window, stepping into the balcony, and baring his breast to the keen air: "the icy heavens looked down upon the hoarrime that gathered over the grass, and the ghostly boughs of the death-like trees. All things in the world without, brought the thought of the grave, and the pause of being, and the withering up of beauty. closer and closer to his soul. In the palpable and griping winter, death itself seemed to wind round him its skeleton and joyless arms." Hence it is in accordance with the common feeling, that a story of death, or a thought of the grave, is, in Shelley's phrase, -more fit for the weird winter nights, Than for those garish summer days, when we Scarcely believe much more than we can see.' Make of it, if you will, a Winter's Tale; but forbear weaving it into a Midsummer Night's Dream. be lying now on a sick-bed, and to be in danger of dying!" The then and there have a psychological significance, as most things in Jane Eyre have. But leaving spring-tide freshness and summer twilight, and advancing to the full blaze of sunshine, when the days of "the year are at their longest and brightest, how stands the question of relationship with death and decay? Wordsworth describes the journey he one day took, in youth's delightful prime, "over the smooth sands of Leven's ample estuary," and "beneath a genial sun,” Nevertheless, if we look a little deeper into the matter, we do find a connection of subtle power between summer glories and that chill presence, the shadow of death. "Is it regret for buried time," asks the laureate, "that keenlier in sweet April wakes ?" The question is suggestive in its bearing on that now before us. And here let us refer to another passage by the author of Ernest Maltravers in a later work, and every way a riper, better, healthier one. The young cousins in The Caxtons sit down together in the church-yard, one calm evening in spring, while the roseate streaks are fading gradually from the dark gray of long, narrow fantastic clouds. Blanche has gently objected, how cold and still it is among the graves; but "Sisty" answers, not colder than on the village green. His record of that sweet silent session then "With distant prospect among gleams of sky Creatures of one ethereal substance met Or crown of burning seraphs as they sit Among whose happy fields I had grown up Enrapt; but brightest things are wont to Sad opposites out of the inner heart, As even their pensive influence drew from mine." Herein lies the solution of the seeming paradox-in this suggestion of opposites. "The brightest sunshine," says Hood, in Tylney Hall-an unequal but underrated work-"throws the darkest shadow, and the horrible specter of Death could never frown so sternly and blackly as when thus introduced into the full blaze of the golden glorious light of love." Or as he puts it in his Ode to Melancholy merges in meditation: "There is a certain melancholy in the evenings of early spring, which is among those influences of Nature the most universally recognized, the most difficult to explain. . . . Examine not, O child of man! examine not that mysterious melancholy with the hard eyes of thy reason; thou canst not impale it on the spikes of thy thorny logic, nor describe its enchanted circle by problems conned from thy schools. Borderer thyself of two worlds-the Dead and the Living-Milverton, in his account of a bright day's The essay-writer in Friends in Council, give thine ear to the tones, bow thy soul "The sunniest things throw sternest shade, And then, how it was I know not, I thought of death. Perhaps any thing very beautiful has that thought in the to the shadows, that steal, in the Season gay experiences in the Spanish capital, to the shadows, that steal, in the Season has this memento: "And I looked up at of Change, from the dim Border Land." the splendid palace of Madrid, and It was "one evening in the beginning of thought of regal pomps and vanities. June," that Jane Eyre, an orphan schoolgirl at Lowood, lingered alone in the garden, and kept lingering a little longer still, for "it was such a pleasant evening, so serene, so warm; the still glowing west promised so fairly another fine day on the morrow;" and then and there it was, that, "noting these things, and enjoying them as a child might," it entered her head "as it had never done before-' How sad to *We walked awhile since through its gorgeous saloons, among the most magnificent in Europe. profusely adorned with the richest gem-paintings of art, and every door-frame and window-frame of the palace is of variegated marble, of which there are one hundred and eighty-two kinds in Spain.-ED. ECLECTIC. background." The "perhaps" is no reck- | Journal of the Statistical Society-that unless conjecture, beyond or beside the fortunately for such foreign assumptions, mark. Leigh Hunt points to the same the fact is exactly opposite to what is philosophy when discussing the theme, generally supposed; for whereas the nowhy sweet music produces sadness-why tion that there are more suicides in gloomy in the midst of even the most light and weather than in fine weather used always joyous music, our eyes shall sometimes to be taken for granted, and was a favorfill with tears. How is this? The rea- ite topic with the French wits, who were son surely is, that we have an instinctive never weary of expatiating on our love of sense of the fugitive and perishing nature self-murder, and on the relation between of all sweet things-of beauty, of youth, it and our murky climate-we have, on of life of all those fair shows of the the contrary, decisive evidence that there world, of which music seems to be the are more suicides in summer than in voice, and of whose transitory nature it winter. reminds us most when it is most beautiful, because it is then that we most regret our mortality. Writing (July, 1795) to his Jewish friend, Emanuel, after a visit to Baireuth, Jean Paul Richter says: "The day that I left Baireuth, the longest day of the year, was my shortest and happiest. ... It is wonderful that men, in seasons of happiness, in youth, in beautiful places, in the fairest season of the year, incline more surely to the enthusiasm of longing; they think oftener of a future world, and more readily form pictures of death; while the opposite takes place in want, in age, in Greenland, and in winter." Rousseau felt something of this when he wrote, in his Confessions-what he (of course) thought "une chose bien singulière "— that his imagination was most cheerful amid adverse environments. It is in the Confessions of another, and very different writer, that the question of association between summer splendors and the shadow of death, is more fully and impressively expounded than by any other philosopher. Before referring, however, to this forcible exposition, by one who combines the prose-poet with the philosopher, let us interpose an illustration of a thoroughly prosaic and matter-of-fact kind a statistical conclusion-showing that bright summer days have no necessary opposition to, nor dreary winter any necessary concord with, man's tendency to brood on his mortality, or shape his thoughts, or fears, or wishes, thitherward. Alluding to the once accepted belief in France-not yet exploded, perhaps that we English, the victims of natural melancholy, are constantly committing suicide, particularly in November," when we hang and shoot ourselves by thousands, Mr. Buckle states-as the result of his researches in Quetelet, and Tissot, and Forbes Winslow, and Hawkins, and the 66 The remarkable paragraph in the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, to which we have referred, is the following: "I have had occasion to remark, at various periods of my life, that the deaths of those whom we love, and, indeed, the contemplation of death generally, is (cæteris paribus) more affecting in summer than in any other season of the year. And the reasons are these three, I think: first, that the visible heavens in summer appear far higher, more distant, and (if such a solecism may be excused) more infinite; the clouds by which chiefly the eye expounds the distance of the blue pavilion stretched over our heads are in summer more voluminous, more massed, and are accumulated in far grander and more towering piles; secondly, the light and the appearances of the declining and the setting sun are much more fitted to be types and characters of the infinite; and, thirdly, (which is the main reason,) the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest each other. On these accounts it is that I find it impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the endless days of summer; and any particular death, if not actually more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly, in that season." In that unrivaled chapter, The Afflic tion of Childhood, with which the same writer's Autobiographic Sketches open, he recurs to his explanation-thirty years before-in the Opium Confessions, of the reason why death, other conditions remaining the same, is more profoundly |