rature. In Childe Harold he always bisects his Alexandrines, and never uses the musical pause at the seventh syllable."

"Well, father," said the youngster, who was lying on the grass, and munching a green. apple that looked like a spheroid of colic, "I think I almost understand about poetry being simple. What do the other two words meansensuous and passionate ?"

"Poetry,” replied John Silchester to his son, "should appeal to the senses. It should deal with what men see, hear, taste, smell, touch. There is poetry in a daffodil or a glass of wine; there is none in a geometric problem or a syllogism. Pure science deals with skeletons: its points have no parts or magnitude; its ropes are inflexibly rigid. Poetry deals with things as they are with the world as God made it— with flesh and blood, and flower and fruit, and love and hate, and good and evil. Hence must it deal with those things that reach us through the senses."

"I like poetry better than science,” said the young rascal in the grass, munching another apple. "But what does the word passionate mean, father?"

"What children like you who write verses cannot by any means understand. We have many passions, of which love is chief; and I doubt not that you will in time know the meaning of that word; but as yet you have got no farther than to admire that young person behind Dyer's counter who serves you with rhubarb tarts, and is old enough to be your mother."

Silvester blushed. Miss Applegate had now and then flirted with the handsome boy, the Squire's son. She was a buxom florid wench, more like Phebe than Rosalind. She meant no harm it was only the pleasure of talking to a pleasant young gentleman across the counter.

"You may make your poetry simple and sensuous," continued the Squire, "and that is all you can do as yet. Passionate you

cannot make it, until you are a man instead of a boy. Of course you may imitate the thoughts of others, but that is sheer waste of time. You may create a sham Juliet, but you will be dressing a doll,-and you are too old to dress dolls. Think in verse as much as you like, but think your own thoughts, and deal with. what you see and hear.”

Such was the advice which John Silchester gave his son when he first took to verse. Silvester pondered over it many days. The lesson was a hard one for a poetic boy, apt to mistake fine words for eloquence, apt to reflect the thoughts of others, and imagine them his own. Even men of practised brain find it hard to determine whether an idea is home-born, or has passed through the crucible of memory. The metaphor of a "scolding hinge" occurs in the works of two living poets: did one unconsciously rob the other, or did both borrow from some earlier source? When writers of the highest art make these mistakes, no wonder

they are made by the heedless boy when he first rambles through the enchanted gardens of Poesy. In that haunted region he picks asphodel, and thinks it a new flower; he meets a naiad by the rivulet, unknowing that Hylas did the same when the most famous of frigates was steered

"Phasidos ad fluctus et fines Aeetacos."

All things are new to him, all things strange: how should he guess that the ideas brought to his mind have passed through the boyish brains of innumerable others?

When Silchester had thought over his father's lecture for some days, he talked to Silvia about it. It was a fair spring holiday. Winter had been early defeated by his immortal adversary. The larches were a mist of green. The thrush was singing all day long. Brother and sister were going to make a long day of it, down in that wild portion of the demesne where the little river is wide enough

for a boat. They were a picture. The girl, short-frocked as yet, though almost beyond the age at which young ladies begin to conceal their ankles, might remind a spectator of the Greek's description—παρθένος ουρεσίφοιτος, ἐρήμαδ· σύντροφος ὕλῃ. As she wore green serge, she looked forest-born. The boy, in jacket of the same stuff, with the old-fashioned white collar over his shoulders, and breeches of useful cord, was as lithe and agile as a greyhound. Silvia, it has been said, was a big girl; but Silvester could lift her over a gate, or across a brook, without an effort. He could jump his own height. He could swarm up a branchless beech-trunk, smooth almost as an Athenian column. He could run and swim and skate to perfection. There was not a weak point in him yet, thanks to his fine constitution and wise training.

They got into a boat, and he rowed his sister into the odd little land-locked estuary, a Lilliput reflex of Dartmouth harbour. Rest

VOL. I.

7