IN MEMORIAM. The poet refuses to give any description! of his lost friend; partly from the hopeless difficulty of conveying in words the impressions produced by personal power and converse; and partly in natural shrinking from that coldness of the world "which credits what is done," but has little care for unfulfilled promise, though it was Death that broke the earthly performance which is going on somewhere else. But he is not always able to retain this distrustful silence. We give one of several attempts to communicate the peculiar presence of his friend : "Heart-affluence in discursive talk From household fountains never dry; Seraphic intellect and force To seize and throw the doubts of man; High nature amorous of the good, Of freedom in her regal seat Of England, not the schoolboy heat, The blind hysterics of the Celt; And manhood fused with female grace Some of the most touching poems in the volume, for all have had the experience that inspired them, are those which celebrate the return of anniversaries after the death of one with whom all their joy and all their hope had been interwoven. We have the records of at least three Christmas days, and they mark the spiritual stages of grief. The first is but a patient, all-enduring concession to custom: the holy emblems do not yet sway the heart, though the pious will consents to lift the consecrated signs:"With such compelling cause to grieve As daily vexes household peace, [Oct., Yet and while the holly boughs Gray nurses, loving nothing new; Why should they miss their yearly due Before their time? They too will die.”—p. 47. The next Christmas, the outward calm is recovered, and the tears dried, but there sleeps at the heart, "the quiet sense of something lost:" on the last, whose record we have, the spiritual Hope is quite in the ascendant. Christ, and all who slept in him, are alive that day; and comforted Sorrow has become ardent, longing, perhaps impatient, Faith. The dirge of death gives place to the hymn of confidence: and the heart of the reader, somewhat oppressed by the long melancholy, rejoices at last to have the claims of Earth and Heaven harmonized in the trustfulness of love and expectation. It is finely marked by the incidents of domestic history appearing in the poem, that this effect had been aided by the liberation from over-powering associations consequent on a change of dwelling. The old bells, now heard no more, had tones that could recal only one set of feelings. The change of scene has helped to break the bond of use, and give the Future its rightful power. Ring out old shapes of foul disease, Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be."-p. 163. The deepest interest of these poems is in the strivings of the spirit to hold converse with the dead, to conceive aright the nature of the unseen ties that may still connect the loving and faithful of each world, and through the heart to reason against and set aside the fear of widening separation between souls in different conditions of existence, and subject perhaps to different laws and measures of spiritual growth. There is much curiosity, both of a physical and of a moral kind, which simple love should silence, taking her own trusts and prophesies as sufficient for her confidence, as Mary was satisfied to ask no questions of Lazarus, of his four days' sojourn beyond mortality, in her full contentment with his presence, and that of the holy Love which gave him back. "Her eyes are homes of silent prayer, Nor other thought her mind admits, But, he was dead, and there he sits, And he that brought him back is there. Then one deep love doth supersede All other, when her ardent gaze All subtle thought, all curious fears, Borne down by gladness so complete, Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers, There is no more common trepidation of the heart, than that new and inconceivable modes of existence may so deprive us of all fellowship in the links that bind the changes" of the dead, that never can we be truly mated again. The fear belongs to the speculative, not to the spiritual nature. It is powerfully put in one of these poems, and nobly answered in the next. And so may Place retain us still, And he the much-beloved again, A lord of large experience, train To riper growth the mind and will: And what delights can equal those That stir the spirit's inner deeps, When one that loves, but knows not, reaps A truth from one that loves and knows?"-p. 64. Love indeed is the only condition of intercourse, and so he speaks his confidence out of the noble trusts of the heart: "I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can The soul of Shakspeare love thee more." Nor does Love fear the holiness of God's sainted ones. How noble, how truly Christian and trustful, is this vindication of the boldness of earthly affection, even through much consciousness of failure, weakness, and sin, to meet the inspecting eye of the righteous dead. The heart suggests no fears, so long as the will is loyal, and the aspiration that admits us to God, cannot be rejected by any that stand between us and Him. "Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side? I wrong the grave with fears untrue : Be near us when we climb or fall: Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours Again how true to love, and therefore to God, is the strong desire for personal identity and recognition, though compelled to struggle with spiritual trusts and weapons against some of nature's signs of individual decay! There is something spiritual even in the constancy with which he clings to the 'eternal form" that shall still individualize, "divide the eternal soul from all beside," as a protest and protection against the heartless mockery of any "remerging in the general 66 Soul." "The wish that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave; Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul? Are God and Nature then at strife, I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my wait of cares The fears and doubts that issue out of the perishableness of our bodies and the sins of our souls, are worthily extinguished by the cries of the heart, and the prophesies of the spirit accredited by Faith as God's own voice and word. That faith is itself not the evidence, but the reality of a divine nature in us. "Oh, yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, That not a moth with vain desire I can but trust that good shall fall This subservience of Knowledge to Faith They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee,-And thou, O Lord, art more than they. We have but faith: we cannot know; For knowledge is of things we see ; And yet we trust it comes from thee, A beam in darkness: let it grow. Let knowledge grow from more to more, But vaster." [Oct., A warmth within the breast would melt The progress of individual man and of the race, and the successive changes even of the inanimate earth through the slow periods of geology, are all signs to the poet's heart of God's full intention to fulfil the longings after perfection, the prophetic intimations of the nature He has given. We have the earnest of His spirit; and such are the proofs with which Religion deals; all else is sense or science. And this faith touches all the springs of individual effort, for unless we co-operate with God's spirit where can be our confidence that we are born to such hopes? All the inferences we may trace from the course of Providence are for us null and void, until we partake of the creative spirit, and feel the force of Christ's axiom, "My father worketh, and I work." It is only the consciousness that there is no answering reality within, that could dim the prophecies of man's future blessedness and perfection. "Contemplate all this work of Time, The giant laboring in his youth; Nor dream of human love and truth, As dying nature's earth and lime; But trust that those we call the dead, Are breathers of an ampler day Forever noble ends. They say The solid earth whereon we tread In tracts of fluent heat began, And grew to seeming random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at the last arose the man; Who throve and branch'd from clime to clime, Within himself, from more to more ; And crown'd with attributes of woe But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears; And dipp'd in baths of hissing tears, And batter'd with the shocks of doom To shape and use. Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die." -p. 183. This faith can spiritually subdue all the outward and material evidences of decay and annihilation-the worm and the grave, but it cannot subdue the hunger of the heart for renewed personal communication. If it could, indeed, it would subdue the heart itself, the basis of Faith, for what redemption of His pledges could God owe to us, if it could become to us a matter of indifference whether our affections fed on phantoms or realities? It is unsatisfied desire that promises the future. "I wage not any feud with Death For changes wrought on form and face; No lower life that earth's embrace May breed with him, can fright my faith. Ay me, the difference I discern ! And tell them all they would have told, IN MEMORIAM. And bring her babe, and make her boast, But thou and I have shaken hands, "How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affections bold In vain shalt thou, or any, call The spirits from their golden day, They haunt the silence of the breast, But when the heart is full of din, And doubt beside the portal waits, They can but listen at the gates And hear the household jar within." "Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all."* [Oct., "O living will that shalt endure When all that seems shall suffer shock, Flow through our deeds and make them pure, And all we flow from, soul in soul."-p. 201. There is added to the volume a Marriage Lay; but the old strain returns at the remembrance of another marriage that was to have been and when through those fair portals he beholds the unspoiled Future, and the unborn races that in the long succession of the ages are to have their origin in Love, and God giving with every new generation a new hope and a new trial to mankind, his faith in the far-off Perfection, which would seem thus secured, is still strengthened by the remembrance of what has been :- "Whereof the man, that with me trod This planet, was a noble type, We must draw these extracts to a close. We had designed to say much more of our own, but as we turned the pages something exquisite forced itself upon us and extinguished our thought. We do not regret this. The best review of such a book is that which will draw the reader into some sympathy with the spirit which, out of such circumstan- *These lines remind us of Monckton Milnes, than ces, breathes such sweetness and sacredness. whom none has developed more worthily the ReliThe key-note of the whole is struck at thegion of Sorrow. The coincidence of the words that beginning : "I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; form the rhyme is curious, "He who for Love hath undergone The worst that can befall, |