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N the early part of the present year, Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, in a lecture delivered at the Richmond Athenæum on Matthew Arnold, when dwelling upon that eminent writer's careful and conscientious work, illustrated his methods by referring to the great accuracy which he showed in the references to botany in his poems. After explaining that Arnold's delight in flowers became much increased, "passed from its dormant stage into a very vivid life," after 1866, when he was induced to study botany by a friend, the lecturer continued:-" One of the most accurate of our critical botanists, himself a poet of no mean rank, and a most careful student of poetry, once wrote to me of Mr. Arnold :— Of all our poets, he does flowers best.'"

This lecture on Matthew Arnold by one who had been his very intimate friend, attracted much attention in many quarters. The passage quoted above specially struck the writer of the following paragraph in the Editorial programme of NATURE NOTES: "The Allusions to Birds and Flowers which occur in our great poets will be noticed, and a series of articles is planned dealing with some of those masters of song who have found their highest inspiration in the reverent study of natural beauty, 'knowing that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her."

As Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff has been one of the principal supporters of the Selborne Society, a suggestion was made to him that he might find it possible to give some account of the allusions to Nature in Arnold's poems for insertion in NATURE

* The name of this correspondent is not mentioned in the lecture; but the description given above seems to point to Lord de Tabley, better known perhaps as the Hon. J. Leicester Warren.

NOTES. In spite of very numerous calls upon his time, he has most kindly consented to do so, and we have the pleasure of laying before our readers this month the first instalment of his paper on that subject. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff writes as follows:

"In accordance with your wish, I have looked through Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems, with a view to collect for the benefit of your readers the principal passages in which he deals with the vegetable creation. I have had great pleasure in doing so, for there is not one amongst our singers whose allusions to it are more appropriate. The most convenient course will be to take the last edition of his poems, as arranged by himself, and to go through it in order. There are few references to flowers or plants save of the most general kind in the Early Poems, Narrative Poems and Sonnets, which are contained in the first volume. Here is one from Resignation :

"The solemn wastes of heathy hill
Sleep in the July sunshine still;
The self-same shadows now, as then,
Play through this grassy upland glen ;
The loose dark stones on the green way
Lie strewn, it seems, where then they lay;
On this mild bank above the stream,

(You crush them !) the blue gentians gleam.
Still this wild brook, the rushes cool,

The sailing foam, the shining pool!

These are not changed; and we, you say,

Are scarce more changed, in truth, than they.'

"Here is another from Sohrab and Rustum :—

Of

"And he saw that Youth,

age and looks to be his own dear son,
Piteous and lovely, lying on the sand,
Like some rich hyacinth which by the scythe
Of an unskilful gardener has been cut,
Mowing the garden grass-plots near its bed,
And lies, a fragrant tower of purple bloom,
On the mown, dying grass-so Sohrab lay,
Lovely in death, upon the common sand.'

"The following is in the same poem :

"all down his cold white side
The crimson torrent ran, dim now and soil'd,
Like the soil'd tissue of white violets
Left, freshly gather'd, on their native bank,

By children whom their nurses call with haste
Indoors from the sun's eye;'

"The holly and the juniper are delightfully introduced at page 224, in the beautiful description in Tristram and Iseult which begins with the words :

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MATTHEW ARNOLD'S PLANT ALLUSIONS. 83

"Those for whom I write will like to have their attention called to the following passages among the lyric poems in the second volume :

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"I do not know to what part of India this description refers. Melons in the southern part of that peninsula are much grown in the beds of the great rivers—the fruit coming to maturity just as the hot weather begins; but Mr. Arnold's habits of study were so careful that I am sure he could have produced chapter and verse for the proceedings of the Indian, as well as for those of his more northern brother, who appears in the next extract :They see the Scythian

666

On the wide stepp, unharnessing

His wheel'd house at noon.

He tethers his beast down, and makes his meal

Mares' milk, and bread

Baked on the embers ;-all around

The boundless, waving grass-plains stretch, thick-starr'd

With saffron and the yellow hollyhock

And flag-leaved iris-flowers.'

"The transition from this scene to the English Midlands described in the first lines of Bacchanalia is complete :

"The evening comes, the fields are still,
The tinkle of the thirsty rill,
Unheard all day, ascends again;
Deserted is the half-mown plain,
Silent the swaths! the ringing wain,
The mower's cry, the dog's alarms,

All housed within the sleeping farms!
The business of the day is done,
The last-left haymaker is gone.
And from the thyme upon the height,
And from the elder-blossom white
And pale dog-roses in the hedge,
And from the mint-plant in the sedge,
In puffs of balm the night-air blows
The perfume which the day foregoes.'

"The next passage I shall cite is from the Youth of Man, and belongs to the same kind of country:

:

"Here they stand to-night-
Here, where this grey balustrade
Crowns the still valley; behind

Is the castled house, with its woods,

Which shelter'd their childhood-the sun

On its ivied windows; a scent

From the grey-walled gardens, a breath
Of the fragrant stock and the pink,
Perfumes the evening air.'

"With the elegiac poems which fill the second half of the second volume our extracts must become more numerous. The following are from the Scholar Gipsy :

"Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half reap'd field,

And here till sun-down, shepherd! will I be ;

Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,

And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;

And air-swept lindens yield

Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,

And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.

"And then they land, and thou art seen no more!
Maidens, who from the distant hamlets come
To dance around the Fyfield elm in May,
Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam,
Or cross a stile into the public way.

Oft thou hast given them store

Of flowers-the frail-leaf'd, white anemony,

Dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,

And purple orchises with spotted leaves

But none hath words she can report of thee.

"And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here
In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames,
Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass
Where black-wing'd swallows haunt the glittering Thames,
To bathe in the abandon'd lasher pass,

Have often pass'd thee near

Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown ;

Mark'd thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare,

Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air-
But, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone!

"But what-I dream! Two hundred years are flown
Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls,
And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe
That thou wert wander'd from the studious walls
To learn strange arts, and join a gipsy-tribe;
And thou from earth art gone

Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid—
Some country-nook, where o'er thy unknown grave
Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave,
Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree's shade.'"

(To be continued.)

M. E. GRANT DUFF.

* Mr. Arnold first wrote "blue convolvulus," but corrected the slip, as Mr. Keble, his godfather, did in the note in "The Christian Year," which, as originally penned, made the Rhododendron, not the Oleander, grow on the shores of Gennesaret.

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