lands, weds the poor man whom in her prosperity she had lifted out of the dust. His hidden love is thus described:

'He saw her in the spring-dawns gliding down,
Like Morning on the world, to tend the flowers
That from her touch sprang thrilling with delight.
Darkened into himself, he watcht, all eye,

Like spirit that sees its mortal love go by,
Itself invisible.'

Has the reader marked the horse-chestnut in blossom on a night

in spring ?

'Ah, happy nights and lustrous darks, in which

He watcht her casement when the house was mute,
Where the tall chestnuts husht her beauty round,
Uplifting in their hands a light of flowers!'

The latter of the two following is a lovely line

'In honeyed light, and sweet with pleasant showers,
Lies all the land, a coloured flame of flowers.'

Those who have seen our great manufactories at night will recognise in the following thought something more than a mere fancy

'And not forgotten was that factory world,

Which like a doomed ship far away i' the night
Pleaded-each port-hole lighted up for help!'

Among the 'Glimpses of the War,' which follow, we most admire the description of Inkermann, where the impetuous fiery lines echo the shock of conflict, and sorrow for those

'Who fell in Boyhood's comely bloom, and Bravery's lusty pride;

But they made their bed o' the Russian dead, ere they lay down and died.' 'The Bridegroom of Beauty' is a blank-verse poem, in which is portrayed the enamoured pursuit of artist or of poet after the changeful, multiform Spirit of Beauty. Surely the wooer hath caught a glimpse of his spirit-mistress when he calls flowers

'The coloured clouds that kindle and richly rise
From out the bosom of Earth's emerald sea :- ,

or when he speaks of the

vernal nights so tender, calm, and cool,
When eerie Darkness lays its shadowy hands
On Earth, and reads her sins with myriad eyes,
Like a Confessor o'er a kneeling Nun.'

'Crumbs from the Table' follow next, sundry songs and ballads, whereof the best to our mind is that entitled 'Long Ago.' 'A Ballad of the Old Time' is successful in catching the mediæval spirit, save in such a line as 'Hush the hills in a mystic dream,' which lacks the due simplicity. In the dead Unhappy Midnight,' though spirited in expression, does not tell its own story with sufficient distinctness. It is like a shadowy, echoing corridor, suggestive of some tale of horror, but only suggestive; for the old crone or the decrepit steward, who ought to relate it, is not at our side. The last poem, called 'Only a Dream,' is conspicuous for power and passion, and is distinguished, moreover, by a praiseworthy unity and completeness. But we do not like such a line as this

'Warm-wingéd Ardours plumed her parted lips.'

Shelley is fond of this mythology of abstractions, and personifies and wings ardours,' and 'visions,' and 'thoughts;' but his genius is no true guiding-star in this matter. When Mr. Massey says— 'White waves of sea-like soul had climbed, and dasht The red light from its heaven of her cheek,'

we feel that he expresses himself in a quaint conceit-an ingenious allegory, almost-rather than in that rapid and bold, yet congruous metaphor, which is the true language of passion. Shakspeare makes Romeo say of the dead Juliet,

beauty's ensign yet

Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,

And death's pale flag is not advanced there.'

A passage in which a different conceit, but still a conceit, and not a genuine imaginative figure, is employed to depict a similar object.

Shakspeare's conceit may be better than Mr. Massey's (there is not much to choose), but both are forced and fanciful, both play with the subject. Or, if we defend Shakspeare here just because he is Shakspeare, how shall we justify that metaphor from the lawyer's office, a few lines lower down,

and lips, O you,

The doors of death, seal with a righteous kiss

A dateless bargain to engrossing death.'

Romeo and Juliet was one of Shakspeare's youthful plays, but assuredly were one of our young poets now to perpetrate a metaphor so unnatural, a score of critical tomahawks would be straightway buried in his heart, and it would be long before he heard the last of small jokes about parchment and attorneys' clerks.

We bid farewell to Mr. Massey for the present, with hearty good wishes for the farther ripening of gifts which have already afforded us so much pleasure.

THIS is a clever book, attacking with considerable force that new school of art to which Mr. Ruskin has lent, of late, his powerful advocacy. The fight is a fair one. Mr. Young does not rail at his antagonist. By an admission as cordial, perhaps, as could be expected from an adversary, of Mr. Ruskin's great abilities, Mr. Young shakes hands before the contest. The exposure of the contradictions to be found in the eloquent pages of the Oxford Graduate is acute and unsparing. In fact, Mr. Ruskin is essentially a poetan intense, impressionable nature. Those keen susceptibilities and that subtilty of thought which render his appreciation of art and of nature so admirable, are qualities which render him especially liable to change. Like all strong men, his strength is in some respects his weakness. Bravely and beautifully has he spoken out his thoughts, and made an epoch in the criticism of art. Of the spirit of his endeavour it is impossible to speak too highly. It has been (amidst all inconsistencies) his constant aim to win ac

knowledgment for the highest functions of art, to hallow it with the sense of consecration, to vindicate its divineness. In some

of his examples we think him unfortunate; in some of his generalizations, too hasty and indiscriminate. Associating as he does all art with some moral purpose, a false style is to him a child of the devil the true, a child of God. All his canons of taste are articles of faith. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the connoisseur in the mantle of the prophet should utter many a hard saying, and pronounce many a vehement denunciation. The enmity he has thus incurred is natural enough. He cannot suppose himself a martyr. Other men beside him have also made art a matter of conscience, and differ from him in their conclusions.

The words of Bacon, which Mr. Young has chosen for his motto, indicate very plainly his position :- The world being inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety than can be found in the nature of things.' Such is the ground occupied alike by the lovers of Plato and the lovers of Bacon; in fact, by every idealist, as opposed to the Pre-Raffaelite and other theories, which say that art is merely imitative, and consists simply in a transcript, Chinese or photographic in its fidelity, of nature as we find it. It is Aristotle who says that poetry is an imitative art. But the great dramatists of Greece are poets according to Bacon's definition, not according to Aristotle's. They create, and do not imitate. What could be more unlike the daily life of the Athenian than the figures and the scenes of his tragic stage—those measured processional movements of the chorus about the Thymele-that centre-piece of every scene-the iambics, the cothurnus, the masks, the music, the story itself, with its colossal Fate, working woe to demi-gods and kings? What more unlike actual life than the classic Unities? If the truth by which poetry is to be tested mean truth to the real life of to-day, what truth have the infernal and celestial scenes of Milton and of Dante, and where is the truth of

the Faery Queene? Mr. Ruskin quotes Carlyle, who says that Poetry is nothing more than 'higher knowledge;' and that, for grown persons, the only genuine Romance is Reality.' But Mr. Carlyle is an idealist, if ever there was one. In his philosophy it is our flesh and blood which is the apparition-the phantom; and reality can only be predicated of that Mind (divine and human) of which matter is the product, outcome, or manifestation. When, therefore, Carlyle speaks of reality, he never means the mere actual, but that actual as it is seen by the light of that higher truth and knowledge which are in the seeing mind. Thus Wordsworth's boor, to whom the primrose was but 'a yellow primrose,' and nothing more, did not see the reality, only the outside of the thing. Wordsworth, seeing beneath appearance-communicating, as it were, of his own soul to the flower, sees it truly-has the higher, because the inner, knowledge of it. When, therefore, Pre-Raffaelitism says that there should be no fantastic distortion or indolent neglect of the actual forms of nature-when it demands study, accuracy, and a thorough doing of all we do, it says what is right and true, but not altogether novel. But when (as a recent writer has remarked) it forgets that the eye is not a perfect organ, and must see many things obscurely, and lose many minutiæ, it is untrue to actual nature. If our eyes were magnifying-glasses, then it would be right to paint pictures which required a microscope. When PreRaffaelitism demands that the mind shall never colour with its own hues the forms of matter-that we ought to choose ungraceful or ugly forms in preference to beautiful ones, when the choice is equally open, because they are more common-when it denies that the soul is greater than the world, and may combine therefrom, or create for its solace and delectation-then is it poverty-stricken, prosaic, materialistic, and debasing. A man who says, I will not select a face brutalized by debauchery, and rubicund with grogblossoms, as a subject for my pencil, is surely not to be rebuked as a presumptuous mortal, wanting to improve God's handiwork, and too conceited to take nature as she is. The artist so rebuked might