have a little chat with her, did not make their appearance. This convinced her more and more how wrong she had been in thwarting a will such as that of her stepmother, which was unbounded in its influence in the family.

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As long as there was yet time, she kept hoping that some would come to take Elizabeth's dress, and that her mother would not carry out in earnest the threat of making her remain at home; but this hope was not realised, and certainly Mrs. Welters could hardly have devised a greater punishment for Emmy than to deprive Elizabeth of the pleasure which she had been looking forward to.

But Emmy slowly forgot everything else, as her thoughts turned to what had been said between herself and Bruno, and she put out of her head all the sufferings of to-day in thinking over the happy future in the far distance, by the side of which the less agreeable present seemed to her too trivial

and unimportant to be worth griev ing about.

She thought over what duties would rest with her in the years of waiting for Bruno. She resolved to perform those duties with holy earnestness, in order that she might thus deserve the happiness which she hoped from the future, and as her first duty she set herself the task of winning her stepmother's favour by strict obedience and submission.

Weary with all the various emotions which the day had called forth, she went early to bed. First, she knelt down and offered a fervent prayer to God; a prayer for blessing and protection for him whom she loved, a prayer for strength and courage and steadfastness for herself also.

Calm and with the confidence of childhood, she laid her head on her pillow; and when she fell asleep it was with Bruno's name on her lips and his image in her heart. (To be continued.)

classical, masterly, and so forth. Without pretending to enumerate all the elements which go to make up this character, we may perhaps find one or two without which it cannot exist. To speak a little formally, we propose to enquire, not what are the sufficient conditions-for that would involve amongst other things the wide and much vexed question: What is Poetry?-but what is a necessary

one.

The two things that strike us most immediately in reading poetry are intensity of emotion and beauty of form. It is tolerably clear, however, that neither of these alone, nor even both together, will suffice for the attainment of greatness; and conversely that a poet may hold his own in the first rank notwithstanding marked deficiencies in one or both directions. Such

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deficiencies have their effect the popularity of the writer; but popularity is one thing, fame, with which we are at present concerned, is another. The first example that occurs to us is of high antiquity, and therefore perhaps preferable to a more recent one for the purpose of dispassionate illustration; it is the contrast of Catullus and Lucretius. Lucretius' thought sometimes rises to enthusiasm, and his verse sometimes swells to a stately magnificence. But on the whole Catullus has unquestionably far more passion and far more beauty of metre. And yet it is almost equally beyond doubt that if we are asked which is the greater of the two we must say Lucretius. A still stronger instance is Pindar, the themes of whose poems, so far as they have come down to us, are for the most part of little or no interest at this day, and whose verse, whatever it may

have been to Greek ears, has lost all its music to ours. But every now and then in the midst of what seems a chaos of mythology and racing calendars, there flashes out something to make one rejoice and worship. The gods cannot help being known by their walk. We may now venture on a modern instance, though at more risk of disagreement with our readers. The two most prominent French poets of this generation have been Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset. For intensity of feeling and perfection of verse Alfred de Musset is absolutely unsurpassable.1 Yet we cannot think of the two together without perceiving that Victor Hugo overshadows the other.

And again, intellectual power in certain directions, even when coupled with emotion and melody, is not yet enough to assure the character of greatness we are in search of. Heine's lyrics, for instance, are not less passionate or less perfect in form than Goethe's, and the wit is more brilliant and piercing. But we feel the same kind of difference we have already noticed in the case of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset, even if we put out of consideration the existence of Goethe's larger works. And a considerable speculative faculty may according to circumstances be an aid or a positive hindrance to poetical development.

It seems to us in fact that we might go on enumerating literary qualities in the abstract without end and never come to the one thing needful: and we see no way of escaping to firm ground but by committing ourselves to a paradox. That which makes a man a great poet is something beyond the proper sphere of poetry. It is a certain largeness and completeness which

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is the fruit not of any special culture or artistic tendency, but of the experience of men and things treasured up and matured in a mind fitted by nature to turn it to the best account. It is a general disposition rather than a particular quality if we are to find any one word for it, we must call it Wisdom. 'No man can be a very great poet,' says Sir Henry Taylor in the preface to Philip van Artevelde, who is not also a great philosopher.' It is written in one of our old law books that a judge ought to be sad,' valiant, and wise: and the same maxim is not inapplicable to the poet. The poet who has this wisdom is master of his work: he knows what he has to say, and does not exhaust himself in vain efforts to bring to the apprehension of others things which he has never made clear to himself. The power of measure and control does not quit him in his most daring flights. Though he pour out his wealth never so lavishly before us, we know that the unseen store is still replenished: we marvel at the work, but we feel that the man is more. Not that the true master will force his personality on us: he will not have us think either of him or of ourselves. But his presence envelops his work whether he will or no, and during our contemplation we find ourselves also enveloped in it unawares. This is indeed true of all forms in which the highest genius manifests itself, and by no means of poetry only. This kind of irresistible, almost involuntary, influence on men's minds seems to have been the leading idea present to Goethe when he spoke of the supernatural element (das Dämonische) of historical or ideal cha

racters.

Moreover the genius of the true masters is shown in what it avoids

as well as in what it achieves. They have a width and clearness of vision that make it impossible for them to fall into the snares that beset others. They take hold of their matter with a firm grasp, and fight not as one that beateth the air. They can look on all the world with a free and serene view, and withal see every single aspect not less truly, nay more truly, than those who can see nothing else. They have patience to wait till their thought is rounded to its full proportions: and even when they seem to break bounds the variety of their forces balances itself in the long run. And this same guiding power, which for want of a better name we have called wisdom, preserves those who bear it from all pettiness and artificial tricks of manner. manner as well as the matter of first-rate poetry is the natural outgrowth of the poet's mind. It may be strongly marked, it may be even eccentric; but it is a true part of the writer's poetic character, not a masquerade to be put on and off.

The

Imperfect as this adumbration is, it may perhaps help the reader towards a clear conception of that which he expects to find in those who claim to achieve greatness, or for whom their friends claim it. The qualities we have vainly striven to describe are to be known by experience in the works of those as to whose greatness there is no dispute; most clearly of all, perhaps, in the Greek dramatists; almost as perfectly in Goethe, if we would find an example nearer to ourselves.

And now we may return to the more immediate contemplation of Our own much abused age. Are there any living writers of English verse who fulfil these conditions? We know it is an evil and unpoetical generation, but we venture to assert that there are not less than five. Mr.

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Tennyson, Sir Henry Taylor, Mr. Browning, George Eliot, and Mr. Lowell, will sufficiently maintain the fame of our half-century in the eyes of posterity. In the first three names we think most readers will agree. We shall recur to Mr. Tennyson, as being for many reasons the most convenient representative of the poetry which sufficed for us before the new Parnassus of King Street blossomed into flowery flyleaves and starry covers. The mention of Mr. Browning suggests an objection which should be met. We have said that great poets are free from mannerism; the mannerism of the so-called new school is accordingly in our view one fatal obstacle to the claims made for its prophets; and it may be asked, what do we say to Mr. Browning's peculiarities? Can these forced and abrupt constructions, these harsh condensations, be natural to a poet and a musician? We say that they can : we even go so far as to conjecture that the apparently unmusical character of Mr. Browning's verse is due to an excessively musical disposition of his ideas. We suspect that a poem comes to him with an imperative musical impulse which fixes the rhythm in a definite form; that a no less imperative intellectual force insists on certain concrete expressions for the thought; and that the words and the rhythm, neither willing to yield, are so yoked together with a strong hand. It is to be observed that the rhythm of Mr. Browning's lyrics is on the whole strongly accented, and specially appropriate to the general idea, notwithstanding the interruptions met with in this or that line. Nothing can be more grandly musical than the construction of Abt

Vogler's monologue in his Dramatis Personce.

Our opinion of George Eliot may seem exaggerated: we can only adduce one significant fact, that the hostile critics of the Spanish Gypsy take the line, not of asserting that it is inferior poetry, but of denying that it is poetry at all; a novelist obviously having no business to surprise the public by suddenly writing dramatic poems.

For Mr. Lowell, it is for the present his misfortune in this country that his own reputation as a humourist almost eclipses him as a poet; but his graver poems will surely live. The Ode for the Harvard Commemoration is a monument for a nation to be proud of. He has the true poetic fire and the true poetic wisdom.

And yet it has become common during the last year or two for critics to speak of Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne as if they had come from heaven to relieve us in a time of all but hopeless poetic dearth. To judge by some of these encomiums, one would think the art of writing English verse had been in absolute suspense since Shelley. Even if the objects of such admiration could be proved full worthy to take their place among the greater prophets of art side by side with those we have already named, the blind and exclusive reverence of the disciples would still be beyond reasonable measure. The pretensions made by the new school of criticism will not bear deliberate reflection in regard either to the intrinsic or to the comparative merits of its models. In the first place, what is offered to us as the ideal of the new poetry which is to dethrone the ruling powers? This will better