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lost all hold on himself. He was torn up by the roots, and the flower of his mind withered. What this transplanting did for him is enough to show how native to him was his own soil, and how his songs grew out of it.

In the last book published before he entered the asylum, "The Rural Muse,' he repeated all his familiar notes with a fluency which long practice had given him, and what he gains in ease he loses in directness. All that remains to us of his subsequent work is contained in the 'Asylum Poems,' first printed in 1873; and it is to be regretted that the too scrupulous editor, Mr. Cherry, did not print them as they stood. 'Scarcely one poem,' he tells us, 'was found in a state in which it could be submitted to the public without more or less of revision and correction.' It is in these poems that, for the first time, Clare's lyrical quality gets free. Strangely enough, a new joy comes into the verse, as if at last he is at rest. It is only rarely, in this new contentment, this solitude even from himself, that recollection returns. Then he remembers

'I am a sad lonely hind: Trees tell me so, day after day,

As slowly they wave in the wind.'

He seems to accept nature now more easily, because his mind is in a kind of oblivion of everything else; madness being, as it were, his security. He writes love songs that have an airy fancy, a liquid and thrilling note of song. They are mostly exultations of memory, which goes from Mary to Patty, and thence to a gipsy girl and to vague Isabellas and Scotch maids. A new feeling for children comes in, sometimes in songs of childish humour, like 'Little Trotty Wagtail' or 'Clock-aClay,' made out of bright, laughing sound; and once in a lovely poem, one of the most nearly perfect he ever wrote, called "The Dying Child,' which reminds one of beautiful things that have been done since, but of nothing done earlier. As we have them (and so subtle an essence could scarcely be extracted by any editor) there is no insanity; they have only

dropped nearly all of the prose. A gentle hallucination comes in from time to time, and, no doubt, helps to make the poetry better.

It must not be assumed that because Clare is a peasant, his poetry is in every sense typically peasant poetry. He was gifted for poetry by those very qualities which made him ineffectual as a peasant. The common error about him is repeated by Mr. Lucas in his life of Lamb: 'He was to have been another Burns, but succeeded only in being a better Bloomfield.' The difference between Clare and Bloomfield is the difference between what is poetry and what is not, and neither is nearer to or farther from being a poet because he was also a peasant. The difference between Burns and Clare is the difference between two kinds and qualities of poetry. Burns was a great poet, filled with ideas, passions, and every sort of intoxication; but he had no such minute local love as Clare, nor, indeed, so deep a love of the earth. He could create by naming, while Clare, who lived on the memory of his heart, had to enumerate, not leaving out one detail, because he loved every detail. Burns or Hogg, however, we can very well imagine at any period following the plough with skill or keeping cattle with care. But Clare was never a good labourer; he pottered in the fields feebly, he tried fruitless way after way of making his living. What was strangely sensitive in him might well have been hereditary if the wild and unproved story told by his biographer Martin is true: that his father was the illegitimate son of a nameless wanderer, who came to the village with his fiddle, saying he was a Scotchman or an Irishman, and taught in the village school, and disappeared one day as suddenly as he had come. The story is at least symbolic, if not true. That wandering and strange instinct was in his blood, and it spoiled the peasant in him and made the poet.

FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS (1793-1835) 1

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IT was said at the time of Mrs. Hemans' death that she had 'founded a school of imitators in England, and a yet larger one in America.' 'So general has been the attention,' it was said in America, 'to those of her pieces adapted to the purposes of a newspaper, we hardly fear to assert that throughout a great part of this country there is not a family of the middling class in which some of them have not been read.' And the same writer assures us that 'the voice of America, deciding on the literature of England, resembles the voice of posterity more nearly than anything else that is contemporaneous can do.' Has the voice of posterity, in this instance, corroborated the voice of America?

Out of the seven volumes of her collected works, not seven poems are still remembered, and these chiefly because they were taught, and probably still are, to children. There are 'Casabianca,' 'The Graves of a Household,' 'The Homes of England,' 'The Fall of d'Assas,' with a few others; these are not fundamentally different from the hundreds of poems which have been forgotten, or which seem to us now little more than the liltings of a kind of female Moore. But they have the merit of being not only very sincere and very straightforward, but of concentrating into themselves a more definite parcel of the floating sensibility of a woman who was tremulously awake

1 (1) Poems, 1808. (2) England and Spain, 1808. (3) Domestic Affections, 1812. (4) Translations from Camoens, and other Poets, 1818. (5) Tales and Historic Scenes, 1819. (6) The Meeting of Bruce and Wallace, 1820. (7) The Sceptic, 1820. (8) Superstition and Error, 1820. (9) Welsh Melodies, 1822. (10) The Vespers of Palermo, 1823. (11) The Siege of Valencia, 1823. (12) De Chantillon, 1823. (13) Lays of Many Lands, 1825. (14) The Forest Sanctuary, 1825. (15) Records of Women, 1828. (16) Songs of the Affections, 1830. (17) Hymns on the Wake of Nature, 1833. (18) Hymns for Childhood, 1834. (19) National Lyrics and Songs for Music, 1834. (20) Scenes and Hymns of Life, 1834. (21) Collected Poems, 7 vols., 1839; 1 vol., 1849.

to every appeal of beauty or nobility. "The highest degree of beauty in art,' she wrote, 'certainly always excites, if not tears, at least the inward feeling of tears.' She has ‘a pure passion for flowers,' and suffers from the intense delight of music, without which she feels that she would die; the sight and society of Scott or Wordsworth fill her with an ecstasy hardly to be borne; she discovers Carlyle writing anonymously on Burns in the 'Edinburgh Review' and she notes: 'I wonder who the writer is; he certainly gives us a great deal of what Boswell, I think, calls bark and steel for the mind.' She had all the feminine accomplishments of her time, and they meant to her, especially her harp, some form of personal expression. She wrote from genuine feeling and with easy spontaneity, and it may still be said of her verse, as Lord Jeffrey said of it: 'It may not be the best imaginable poetry, and may not indicate the highest or most commanding genius, but it embraces a great deal of that which gives the very best poetry its chief power of pleasing.'

Its chief power, that is, of pleasing the majority. In spite of an origin partly Irish, partly German, blended with an Italian strain, there was no rarity in her nature, or if it was there, it found no expression in her poems. She said of Irish tunes that there was in them 'something unconquerable yet sorrowful'; but that something, though she compared herself to an Irish tune, she never got. Living much of her life in Wales, and caring greatly for its ancient literature, she loses, in the improvisations of the 'Welsh Melodies,' whatever is finest and most elemental in her Celtic originals. It is sufficient criticism to set side by side the first stanza of 'The Hall of Cynddylan' and the opening of the poem of Llwarch Hen. Mrs. Hemans says, lightly:

"The Hall of Cynddylan is gloomy to-night;

I weep, for the grave has extinguished its light;
The beam of the lamp from its summit is o'er,
The blaze of its hearth shall give welcome no more.'

But what Llwarch Hen has said is this: "The Hall of Cynddylan is gloomy this night, without fire, without bed: I must weep awhile, and then be silent.'

That is poetry, but the other is a kind of prattle. It is difficult to say of Mrs. Hemans that her poems are not womanly, and yet it would be more natural to say that they are feminine. The art of verse to her was like her harp and her sketch-book, not an accomplishment indeed, but an instrument on which to improvise. One of her disciples, Letitia Landon, imagined that she was only speaking in her favour when she said: 'One single emotion is never the original subject' of her poems. 'Some graceful or touching anecdote or situation catches her attention, and its poetry is developed in a strain of mourning melody and a vein of gentle moralising.' Her poems are for the most part touching anecdotes; they are never without some gentle moralising. If poetry were really what the average person thinks it to be, an idealisation of the feelings, at those moments when the mind is open to every passing impression, ready to catch at similitudes and call up associations, but not in the grip of a strong thought or vital passion, then the verse of Felicia Hemans would be, as people once thought it was, the ideal poetry. It would, however, be necessary to go on from that conclusion to another, which indeed we find in the surprising American Professor, who, 'after reading such works as she had written,' could not but perceive, on turning over 'the volumes of a collection of English poetry, like that of Chalmers,' that 'the greater part of it appears more worthless and distasteful than before.'

JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART (1794-1854) 1

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JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART, the biographer of Scott, a fierce critic, a brilliant prose-writer, the writer of a remarkable

1 Ancient Spanish Ballads, 1823.

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