'The city of the smoky fray ; A prodded ox, it drags and moans; it needs but to read such poetry to feel that it follows the best traditions of English verse, owing its effects, not to verbal ingenuities, but to simple gravity of thought, expressed in words which follow a natural order, whose music is the wholly unforced music of the greater poets. The poetry of Mr. Meredith gives a new aim to art, and demands a new feeling for the results attained in pursuance of that aim, and the altered conditions essential to it. But the lovers of the poetry of an elder day will not find it impossible, or even difficult, to accommodate their vision to the changed surroundings. There is a sentence quoted by Professor Dowden in his essay from Edgar Quinet, which seems to me to express with admirable strength and conciseness the impressions that will finally be left upon the reader of Mr. Meredith's poetry: Each day justice has appeared to me more holy, liberty more fair, speech more sacred, art more real, reality more artistic, poetry more true, truth more poetical, nature more divine, and what is divine more natural.' THE POETRY OF THE DE VERES THE Wordsworthian tradition has fared ill in poetry since 1850. That tradition lays emphasis upon the attitude and habit of mind involved in poetic composition, and thus upon its substance; to language, however skilfully handled, it denies any sufficient virtue to elevate or of itself make poetic the ordinary material of thought. With Wordsworth it was the impassioned and truthful view of things that was essential; when that was lacking, the accomplishment of verse' was a trivial copy-book matter. Poetry for him was the breath and finer spirit of knowledge, the impassioned expression that was on the face of science,' and against all theories of poetic diction,' against any effort to construct poetry out of words in the absence of the inspiring idea he had set his face from the first. The root-conception in the Wordsworthian, as in the classical theory of poetry, is that the employment of rhythm, and more especially of the complex rhythms of lyric verse, presupposes some depth of meaning, some intensity of emotion which prose at its best can but imperfectly and inadequately render. It is certain that verse attracts because verse is an intense and emphatic form of expression. It is equally certain that verse disappoints and wearies, save in the way of parody or comedy, when there is nothing intense or emphatic to express; when an attempt is made to transmute the trite, the fanciful, or the commonplace, to disguise them in the robes of sovereign thought, or of sovereign emotion, by tricking them out in metrical dress. If it were possible to constitute a Supreme Court of Appeal in matters poetic before which aspirants for the poet's bays were compelled to appear, such a court would perhaps do no great injustice by requiring from each candidate some work in prose, not as an exercise in language, but as a witness to intellectual or imaginative power, as witness to a way of regarding things, to mental methods at once rational and suggestive, to types of thought or feeling for the perfect representation of which verse was the natural and proper medium. Did such a court exist, we should be spared the frequent necessity of the judgment best delivered in Heine's words, 'Das hättest du Alles sehr gut in guter Prosa sagen können.' But the decrees of such a court would condemn not a few of our poets to the exile of perpetual silence. Wordsworth denied then that 'poetry can boast any celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose.' But in the 'superlative lollipops' of his early verse Tennyson once more asserted the indefinable charm of new and cunning modulations and verbal melodies, even when but slightly informed by real strength of thought or fire of feeling. The course of the later stream of poetry has flowed in other channels than those in which Wordsworth would have had it run. The sovereignty of the spirit is no longer recognised, and, with exceptions few and honourable, the poets have sworn allegiance to Our Lady of Music. The poetry approximating to music, expressive of halfarticulate emotion not yet definitely yoked with or transmuted into mental images,-this poetry, dependent for such value as it may possess upon its expression rather than upon its spirit, is the characteristic poetry of the latter half of the present century. In Mr. Swinburne, its leader, and the popular choir, the view of things taken by the poet, his philosophy, his imaginative grasp and interpretation of life count for little. In their place delicate turns of phrase are zealously sought out, the dainty effects of collocated vowels, the ripple of alliteration, the aromas and the colours that fascinate the sense. We are presented by the poets of to-day with phials full of odours, and he is the best poet whose distillations catch the breath and sting the nerves with the most pungent perfumes. Yet, however far we are tempted to wander from it, the severe magnificence of pure as distinct from decorative art never fails to recall us, and we know that to it the final success indisputably belongs. Read but diligently enough in Mr. Swinburne's many volumes, and after a time the charm begins to fail, it ceases to have its early effects we are taking in nothing, we are simply marking time musically. In the verse of the majority of our poets it is the same. Nothing is to be found there that is not very pleasing, but in the end we are not pleased. : 'The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.' There is nothing to hold or to keep,' and we recognise that beyond the marking of time musically we have been unemployed. A critic who abides by the Wordsworthian tradition essays to distinguish between poets by the internal differences in their work due to divergent mental methods and sympathies, by the intellectual and emotional framework upon which the artist builds. Such a critic seeks for the soul of the work, which is the fountain of its power; his endeavour must be to find the individual character, the man in the poem. He will recognise a poem as Shelley's or as |