The Winter falls; the frozen rut

Is bound with silver bars;

The snow-drift heaps against the hut,

And night is pierc'd with stars.

In 1862 Patmore edited, with his first wife's help, the anthology called The Children's Garland; in 1877 he edited and largely supplemented his friend B. W. Procter's Autobiography (page 227), and in 1884 edited the poems of his own son, Henry John Patmore (1860-83). Florilegium Amantis (1888) was a selection from his poems by Dr R. Garnett; Poems of Pathos and Delight was another (1895), by Mrs Meynell. In 1900 Mr Basil Champneys, who designed the memorial church at Brighton, published a Life of Patmore in two volumes.

Sydney Thompson Dobell (1824-74) was born at Cranford in Kent, whence his father, a wine-merchant, removed that same year to London, and in 1835 to Cheltenham; with Gloucestershire and with his father's business Sydney's whole after-life was connected. Under the influence of a sect of 'Freethinking Christians' founded by Samuel Thompson, his maternal grandfather, he developed a hothouse precocity, and at fifteen became engaged to the girl whom he married at twenty. He never quite recovered from a severe illness (1847); and the chief events

of his life were visits to Switzerland, Scotland, Cannes, Spain, and Italy, in quest of health for himself or his wife. He died at Barton End

House, among the Cotswold Hills. His principal works are The Roman, a dramatic poem by 'Sydney Yendys' (1850); Balder, Part the First (1854); Sonnets on the War, written in conjunction with Alexander Smith (1855); and England in Time of War (1856). The first and the last had a success to wonder at. For though some of his lyrics are pretty, though his fancy is sparkling and exuberant, his poems are often superfine, grandiose, transcendental; and save to unusually sympathetic readers, it seems that 'spasmodic' or some equivalent epithet does hit them off better than comparison either with Shelley or with Donne.

The Ruins of Ancient Rome.

Upstood

The hoar unconscious walls, bisson and bare,
Like an old man deaf, blind, and gray, in whom
The years of old stand in the sun, and murmur
Of childhood and the dead.
From parapets
Where the sky rests, from broken niches-each
More than Olympus-for gods dwelt in them—
Below from senatorial haunts and seats

Imperial, where the ever-passing fates

Wore out the stone, strange hermit birds croaked forth
Sorrowful sounds, like watchers on the height
Crying the hours of ruin. When the clouds
Dressed every myrtle on the walls in mourning,
With calm prerogative the eternal pile
Impassive shone with the unearthly light
Of immortality. When conquering suns
Triumphed in jubilant earth, it stood out dark
With thoughts of ages: like some mighty captive
Upon his death-bed in a Christian land,

And lying, through the chant of psalm and creed,
Unshriven and stern, with peace upon his brow,
And on his lips strange gods.

Rank weeds and grasses,
Careless and nodding, grew, and asked no leave,
Where Romans trembled. Where the wreck was saddest,
Sweet pensive herbs, that had been gay elsewhere,
With conscious mien of place rose tall and still,
And bent with duty. Like some village children
Who found a dead king on a battlefield,
And with decorous care and reverent pity
Composed the lordly ruin, and sat down
Grave without tears. At length the giant lay,
And everywhere he was begirt with years,
And everywhere the torn and mouldering Past
Hung with the ivy. For Time, smit with honour
Of what he slew, cast his own mantle on him,
That none should mock the dead.

(From The Roman.)

The Mystery of Beauty.

Loveliness

Is precious for its essence; time and space
Make it not near nor far nor old nor new,
Celestial nor terrestrial. Seven snowdrops
Sister the Pleiads, the primrose is kin
To Hesper, Hesper to the world to come!
For sovereign Beauty as divine is free;
Herself perfection, in herself complete,

Love strong as death
Measures eternity and fills a tear;
And beauty universal may be touched
As at the lips in any single rose.

See how I turn toward the turf, as he
Who after a long pilgrimage once more
Beholds the face that was his dearest dream,
Turning from heaven and earth bends over it,
And parts the happy tresses from her brow,
Counting her ringlets, and discoursing bliss
On every hint of beauty in the dear
Regained possession, oft and oft retraced,
So could I lie down in the summer grass
Content, and in the round of my fond arm
Enclose enough dominion, and all day
Do tender descant, owning one by one
Floweret and flower, and telling o'er and o'er
The changing sum of beauty, still repaid
In the unending task for ever new,

And in a love which first sees but the whole,
But when the whole is partially beloved
Doth feast the multitude upon the bread
Of one, endow the units with no less
Than all, and make each meanest integer
The total of my joy.
(From Balder, Scene xxiv.)

Keith of Ravelston.

The murmur of the mourning ghost

That keeps the shadowy kine,

'Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line!'

Ravelston, Ravelston,

The merry path that leads Down the golden morning hill, And thro' the silver meads; Ravelston, Ravelston,

The stile beneath the tree,
The maid that kept her mother's kine,
The song that sang she!

She sang her song, she kept her kine,
She sat beneath the thorn
When Andrew Keith of Ravelston
Rode thro' the Monday morn.

His henchmen sing, his hawk-bells ring,
His belted jewels shine!

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line!

Year after year, where Andrew came,
Comes evening down the glade,
And still there sits a moonshine ghost
Where sat the sunshine maid.

Her misty hair is faint and fair,
She keeps the shadowy kine;

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line!

I lay my hand upon the stile,
The stile is lone and cold,
The burnie that goes babbling by
Says nought that can be told.

Yet, stranger! here, from year to year,

She keeps her shadowy kine; Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line!

Step out three steps, where Andrew stood-
Why blanch thy cheeks for fear?
The ancient stile is not alone,

'Tis not the burn I hear!

She makes her immemorial moan,

She keeps her shadowy kine;

Oh, Keith of Ravelston,

The sorrows of thy line!

(From 'A Nuptial Eve,' in England in Time of War.) Professor Nichol edited Dobell's collected poems in 1875, and his prose works in 1876 as Thoughts on Art, Philosophy, and Religion. The Life and Letters of Sydney Dobell appeared in 1878; and there is a Memoir by W. Sharp prefixed to his selected poems (1887).

Alexander Smith (1830-67), born at Kilmarnock, but brought up at Paisley and Glasgow, became, like his father, a pattern-designer, and sent occasional poems to the Glasgow Citizen. His Life Drama appeared in the London Critic (1851), and in 1853 was reprinted in a volume of which ten thousand copies were sold. A reaction soon set in, and the poet had scarcely found himself famous when he began to be fiercely assailed. The faults of his book were obvious enough; every page bore tokens of immaturity and extravagance; while a somewhat narrow reading having passionately attached him to Keats and Tennyson, their turns of expression reappeared here and there in his verse, and the cry of plagiarism was of course raised. With all his defects, Alexander Smith has always a richness and originality of imagery that more than atone for them; and few poets since Shakespeare's day have written occasional lines with a more Shakespearian ring. In one of Miss Mitford's letters we read: 'Mr Kingsley says that Alfred Tennyson says that Alexander Smith's poems show fancy, but not imagination; and on my repeating this to Mrs Browning, she said it was exactly her impression.' In 1854 Smith was appointed Secretary to Edinburgh University, and continued his literary pursuits. He joined with Sydney Dobell in writing a series of War Sonnets; he contributed prose essays to some of the periodicals; and in 1857 he published City Poems, in 1861 Edwin of Deira. His prose works, which show poetic feeling and have not a little poetic charm, include Dreamthorp, a volume of essays (1863); A Summer in Skye (1865); and Alfred Hagart's Household (1866), a semi-autobiographical story of Scottish life. He edited, with a good Memoir, Burns's Poems (1865), and Howe's Golden Leaves from the American Poets (1866).

Autumn.

The lark is singing in the blinding sky,

Hedges are white with May. The bridegroom sea
Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride,
And, in the fullness of his marriage joy,
He decorates her tawny brow with shells,
Retires a space, to see how fair she looks,

Then proud, runs up to kiss her. All is fair-
All glad, from grass to sun! Yet more I love
Than this, the shrinking day, that sometimes comes
In Winter's front, so fair 'mong its dark peers,
It seems a straggler from the files of June,
Which in its wanderings had lost its wits,
And half its beauty; and, when it returned,
Finding its old companions gone away,

It joined November's troop, then marching past;
And so the frail thing comes, and greets the world
With a thin crazy smile, then bursts in tears,
And all the while it holds within its hand

The Canker in the Rose.

A little footpath quivers up the height,
And what a vision for a townsman's sight!

A village, peeping from its orchard bloom,

With lowly roofs of thatch, blue threads of smoke,
O'erlooking all, a parsonage of white.

I hear the smithy's hammer, stroke on stroke;
A steed is at the door; the rustics talk,
Proud of the notice of the gaitered groom;
A shallow river breaks o'er shallow falls.
Beside the ancient sluice that turns the mill
The lusty miller bawls;

The parson listens in his garden-walk,
The red-cloaked woman pauses on the hill.
This is a place, you say, exempt from ill,
A paradise, where, all the loitering day,
Enamoured pigeons coo upon the roof,
Where children ever play.—

Alas! Time's webs are rotten, warp and woof;
Rotten his cloth of gold, his coarsest wear:
Here, black-eyed Richard ruins red-cheeked Moll,
Indifferent as a lord to her despair.

The broken barrow hates the prosperous dray;
And, for a padded pew in which to pray,
The grocer sells his soul.

(From 'Squire Maurice' in City Poems.)

The Bonds of Environment.
Afar, the banner of the year
Unfurls but dimly prisoned here,
"Tis only when I greet

A dropt rose lying in my way,
A butterfly that flutters gay

Athwart the noisy street,

I know the happy Summer smiles
Around thy suburbs, miles on miles.
'Twere neither pæan now, nor dirge,
The flash and thunder of the surge
On flat sands wide and bare;
No haunting joy or anguish dwells
In the green light of sunny dells,
Or in the starry air.

Alike to me the desert flower,
The rainbow laughing o'er the shower.
While o'er thy walls the darkness sails,
I lean against the churchyard rails;
Up in the midnight towers

The belfried spire, the street is dead,
I hear in silence overhead

The clang of iron hours:

It moves me not-I know her tomb

Is yonder in the shapeless gloom.

All raptures of this mortal breath,
Solemnities of life and death,

Dwell in thy noise alone:

Of me thou hast become a partSome kindred with my human heart Lives in thy streets of stone; For we have been familiar more Than galley-slave and weary oar.

(From 'Glasgow' in City Poems.)

Besides Early Years of Alexander Smith (1869), by the Rev. T. Brisbane, there is a Memoir by Patrick Proctor Alexander prefixed to his Last Leaves (1869).

William Allingham (1824-89) was of English family, but was a native of Ballyshannon in Donegal, where his father managed a bank. There he was educated, and there at an early age he began to contribute to periodical literature. He became supervisor of Customs in his native place

The kindly spot, the friendly town, where every one is known,

And not a face in all the place but partly seems my own; but removed in the same service to England, and settled in London, where in 1874 he succeeded Froude as editor of Fraser's Magazine. His works included Poems (1850); Day and Night Songs (1854); Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864); Fifty Modern Poems (1865); Songs, Poems, and Ballads (1877); Evil May Day and Ashby Manor (1883); Blackberries (1884); and Irish Songs and Poems (1887). His verse is free from obscurity, mysticism, or the 'spasmodic' temper, is fresh and graceful, shows a delicate fancy and, especially in the lyrics, a sweet and varied melody. Some of his best work is descriptive. Laurence Bloomfield, the story of a young Irish landlord who, amidst manifold discouragement, seeks to improve the condition of the people on his property, was by Allingham regarded as his best work, yet by the general reader it was but coldly received. He wrote two plays which were never produced, and a delightful prose record of his walks in various corners of England, The Rambles of Patricius Walker (reprinted from Fraser). In 1874 he had married Helen Paterson, who, born near Burtonon-Trent, entered the schools of the Academy in 1867, and made herself a name as a book-illustrator and painter in water-colours.

An Irishman to the Nightingales.
You sweet fastidious nightingales!
The myrtle blooms in Irish vales,
By Avondhu and rich Lough Lene,
Through many a grove and bowerlet green,
Fair-mirrored round the loitering skiff.
The purple peak, the tinted cliff,

The glen where mountain-torrents rave,
And foliage blinds their leaping wave,
Broad emerald meadows filled with flowers,
Embosomed ocean-bays are ours

With all their isles; and mystic towers
Lonely and gray, deserted long,

Less sad if they might hear that perfect song!

What scared ye? (ours, I think, of old)
The sombre Fowl hatched in the cold?
King Henry's Normans, mailed and stern,
Smiters of galloglas and kern?1
Or, most and worse, fraternal feud,
Which sad Iernè long hath rued?
Forsook ye, when the Geraldine,
Great chieftain of a glorious line,
Was hunted on his hills and slain,
And, one to France and one to Spain,
The remnant of the race withdrew?
Was it from anarchy ye flew,

And fierce oppression's bigot crew,
Wild complaint, and menace hoarse,
Misled, misleading voices, loud and coarse?

GEORGE MACDONALD. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.

Come back, O birds, or come at last! For Ireland's furious days are past; And, purged of enmity and wrong, Her eye, her step, grow calm and strong. Why should we miss that pure delight? Brief is the journey, swift the flight; And Hesper finds no fairer maids In Spanish bowers or English glades, No loves more true on any shore, No lovers loving music more. Melodious Erin, warm of heart, Entreats you; stay not then apart, But bid the merles and throstles know (And ere another May-time go) Their place is in the second row. Come to the west, dear nightingales ! The rose and myrtle bloom in Irish vales. 1 Native Irish warriors.

A Dream.

I heard the dogs howl in the moonlight night;

I went to the window to see the sight;
All the Dead that ever I knew
Going one by one and two by two.

On they pass'd, and on they pass'd;
Townsfellows all, from first to last;
Born in the moonlight of the lane,
Quench'd in the heavy shadow again.

Schoolmates, marching as when we play'd
At soldiers once-but now more staid ;
Those were the strangest sight to me
Who were drown'd, I knew, in the awful sea.

Straight and handsome folk; bent and weak, too;
Some that I loved, and gasp'd to speak to;
Some but a day in their churchyard bed;
Some that I had not known were dead.

A long, long crowd-where each seem'd lonely,
Yet of them all there was one, one only,
Raised a head or look'd my way:

She linger'd a moment-she might not stay.

How long since I saw that fair pale face!
Ah! Mother dear! might I only place
My head on thy breast, a moment to rest,
While thy hand on my tearful cheek were prest!

On, on, a moving bridge they made

Across the moon-stream, from shade to shade,

Young and old, women and men ;

Many long-forgot, but remember'd then.

And first there came a bitter laughter;

A sound of tears the moment after;
And then a music so lofty and gay,
That every morning, day by day,
I strive to recall it if I may.

His complete works, prose and verse, were published in six volumes in 1888-93, and a one-volume selection in 1892; and D. G. Rossetti's Letters to Allingham were edited by Dr Birkbeck Hill (1898). A Life by his wife was promised.

George Macdonald, born at Huntly in Aberdeenshire, of the Glencoe stock, in 1824, was educated at Aberdeen University and the Independent College at Highbury. He became pastor at Arundel and at Manchester, but ill-health drove him to Algiers and to literature. His first book, Within and Without (1856), a dramatic poem, was followed by another volume of Poems (1857) and by Phantastes, a Faerie Romance (1858). A long series of novels succeeded, including David Elginbrod, his first really popular success (1862), The Portent (1864), Alec Forbes (1865), Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1866), Guild Court (1867), The Seaboard Parish (1868), Robert Falconer (1868), Malcolm (1874), St George and St Michael (1875), The Marquis of Lossie (1877), Sir Gibbie (1879), Mary Marston (1881), Lilith (1895), and Salted with Fire (1897). From time to time he continued to preach most impressive sermons, and as a lecturer on Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and other literary topics he attracted large audiences at home and in the United States. His poetry is simple

but spiritual, instinct with a fresh and delicate fancy, and a tender and loving insight into nature. In his novels, to the essential story-telling and dramatic gift he adds a genial humour, a tolerant and kindly sympathy with most sides of life, especially that (so much exploited since his day) of Scottish country-folk. In the earnestness

of his recoil from what he conceived to be the narrowness of Calvinism, he at times waxes too polemical and hortatory; even then the didactic manner is relieved by the romancer's power of dramatic dialogue, as well as by the revelation of exceptionally keen spiritual instincts, tolerance, and native fervour of faith, hope, and charity. It is perhaps characteristic of his Scottish temper that his eminently moral and Puritan criticism of life is softened and brightened by frequent gleams of tenderness. He is an original writer of delicate imagination and profound suggestiveness. His earlier books are indisputably his best; in them especially the characters do quite visibly develop. And in his handling of the dialect of his native district, in its vigour, vivacity, and truth to philology and nature, he has been equalled by no recent kail-yarder. His health was for many years very broken, and his home was mainly on the Riviera. His Alma Mater had given him her honorary degree of LL.D. in 1868; and in 1877 a Civil List pension was conferred on him.

Other novels are Adela Cathcart (1864); Wilfrid Cumbermede (1871); Thomas Wingfield, Curate (1876); Paul Faber, Surgeon (1878); What's Mine's Mine, Home Again, Our Elect Lady, and Heather and Snow between 1886 and 1893. Admirable books for the young were Dealings with the Fairies, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, At the Back of the North Wind, and The Princess and the Goblin, all between 1867 and 1871. Three series of Unspoken Sermons were issued in 1866, 1885, and 1889, and there was a work on The Miracles of Our Lord (1870). Dr Macdonald edited England's Antiphon, studies on English poets; Exotics, translated from Novalis and elsewhere; and Rampolli, also a translation. The Diet of Orts was a miscellany; and Hamlet, a Shakespearian study of originality and power. He collected and arranged his Poetical Works in two volumes in 1893, and issued in 1884 A Work of Fancy and Imagination, ten volumes of poetry and prose idyls. He also assisted his wife with her Chamber Dramas for Children.

Walter Chalmers Smith, born in Aberdeen in 1824, studied at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and preached to a Presbyterian church in London ere as a Free Church minister he settled in his first country cure in Kinross-shire. Thence he passed to a charge in Glasgow, and from 1876 till his resignation in 1894 he was a minister in Edinburgh. During these years he published a series of volumes of verse, including The Bishop's Walk, by 'Orwell' (1861); Olrig Grange, by 'Hermann Kunst' (1872); Hilda among the Broken Gods (1878); Raban, or Life Splinters (1880); NorthCountry Folk (1883); Kildrostan, a Dramatic Poem (1884); and A Heretic (1890). These various books were collected in a one-volume edition in 1902, with the addition of some thirty Ballads from Scottish History, on subjects as various as Wishart and Montrose, the Scots abroad and the outlawed Macgregors, the persecuted Jesuits and the kid

napped Lady Grange. Dr Smith's poems (he was made D.D. and LL.D.) illustrate in simple, vigorous, homely, and often rather rough, shambling verse 'the varying shades of thought and feeling during the latter part of the nineteenth century;' his singularly catholic temper enabling him to represent with almost equal fairness the true-blue Presbyterian orthodoxy of the olden time, the hard but conscientious unfaith of the modern materialist, and the tolerant and only slightly unorthodox modern Christianity with which he was himself identified. In his works kindly satire, autobiographical reminiscence, exhortation, and encouragement towards a higher life are happily combined with the more directly poetic elements.

Thomas Woolner (1826-92), poet-sculptor, was born at Hadleigh, and studied at the Royal Academy from 1842. Already in 1843 his 'Eleanor sucking the Poison from Prince Edward's Wound' attracted much attention; it was followed by a long series of works in sculpture, including statues and portrait-busts of most of his famous contemporaries. He produced in all about a hundred and twenty works, and was successively A.R.A. and R.A. As a conspicuous member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (see the article on Rossetti) he contributed poems to The Germ, which with others were expanded into a volume as My Beautiful Lady (1863; 5th ed. 1892). Other poems were Pygmalion, Silenus, Tiresias, and Nelly Dale. If his sculptures were greatly praised as imaginative and poetic, it may with equal truth be said that his poems have some of the charms of sculpture—they were picturesque, sincere, and impressive.

Walter Horatio Pater (1839-94) was the son of an American of Dutch extraction who had settled as a medical practitioner in Shadwell (not then incorporated with London), but was brought up at Enfield. Neither at school in Canterbury nor at Queen's College, Oxford, did he manifest any exceptional literary gift or impulse, though he attracted Jowett and was stimulated by T. H. Green. He became a Fellow of Brasenose, read with pupils, gave up thoughts of taking Anglican orders, and through Unitarianism passed to a non-Christian scheme of philosophical eclecticism. His home alternated between Oxford in termtime and London. Throughout life he was, in thought as in style, the disciple of no one master. Already in a magazine article on Coleridge in 1866 his singularly polished style is as characteristic as it is in most of his later work. Other remarkable articles on Winckelmann, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and others followed; and when collected and added to in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) attracted even more notice. But Marius the Epicurean (1885) is his principal legacy to the world; though his four Imaginary Portraits (dealing with Watteau amongst the rest), and his Appreciations of Lamb, Wordsworth, Rossetti,