INTRODUCTORY NOTES

The poetry of the Victorian age has hardly received its due meed of appreciation. This need not surprise us when we consider the achievements of the forty years which immediately preceded it-years to which the genius of Byron, the greatest elemental force since Shakespeare, as he has been truly called, gave an overwhelming advantage. It has nevertheless some merits of its own which are not surpassed by those of any other period. In addition to its greater poets-those whose names are in all men's mouths,—it produced an altogether exceptional number of writers whom it would be ridiculous to describe as "minor poets," unless that phrase is used, as it so seldom is, in its true sense, to designate poets who have given to the world little in point of quantity, although the quality may entitle them to rank with the very greatest.

Distinguished as was the time of which I am speaking by the presence of a large number of poets, it would have been, had it begun even a very few years earlier, much more distinguished. worth's beautiful lines, written in 1835, to remind us how many stars set just

Words

are there

before its

"When first descending from the moorlands, I saw the Stream of Yarrow gliae Along a bare and open valley,

The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.

When last along its banks I wandered,
Through groves that had begun to shed
Their golden leaves upon the pathways,
My steps the Border-minstrel led.

The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer,
Mid mouldering ruins low he lies;
And death upon the braes of Yarrow,
Has closed the Shepherd-poet's eyes.

Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source;

The rapt one, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

Like clouds that rake the mountain summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land.

Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber
Were earlier raised, remain to hear
A timid voice, that asks in whispers,
'Who next will drop and disappear?'

Our haughty life is crowned with darkness,
Like London with its own black wreath,
On which with thee, O Crabbe! forth looking,
I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath.

As if but yesterday departed,

Thou, too, art gone before; but why,
O'er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered,
Should frail survivors heave a sigh?

1

Mourn rather for that holy Spirit,
Sweet as the Spring, as Ocean deep;
For Her who, ere her summer faded,

Has sunk into a breathless sleep.

No more of old romantic sorrows,

For slaughtered Youth or love-lorn Maid!

With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten,

And Ettrick mourns with her their Poet dead."

If LORD BYRON had attained the sum of years which, as he tells us, the "Psalmist numbered out," he would have been long a subject of Queen Victoria. So would both Keats and Shelley, if they had passed middle life. A good many poets famous in the first part of the century actually did survive the year 1837. Southey died in 1843, Moore in 1852. The lamp in the case of both of these had begun to burn with a very feeble light before the death of William IV.; but we may claim as being alive and active after the accession of the late Queen, a large number of poets whose fame had been won earlier.

SAMUEL ROGERS (1763-1855), though he lived through the first eighteen years of the reign of Queen Victoria, was a survival from a remote past; but the great editions of his "Italy" and of his "Poems," which put the seal upon his fame, were only published

1 Mrs. Hemans,

in 1830 and 1834 respectively, and he was an admitted arbiter of poetry no less than of taste as late as the earlier years of the last half-century. He cannot accordingly be quite left out of the list of Victorian poets.

LADY NAIRNE (1766-1845), who will be long famous as the authoress of the "Land o' the Leal," was born before any one else save Rogers, of whose work I have given specimens in this book. She died on the verge of eighty in 1845, and the very beautiful poem which I have quoted under her name was written near the end of her life.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850) had done much of his best work a whole generation before the accession of Queen Victoria. He survived that event, however, about thirteen years, and it was only after it that he began to receive the general recognition which had been denied to him so long. In 1839 he was made D.C.L.; in 1843 he was appointed Poet Laureate, and in 1844 Keble dedicated to him his Latin lectures on Poetry.

I have not thought myself justified in transferring to these pages any of his more important poems. They belong to another period. The verses which I have quoted from him, in the body of this work, were products of the Victorian age. They do not compare at all favourably with some of his earlier pieces, but по one should expect the setting sun to equal its meridian splendour. The years from 1798 to 1808 were Wordsworth's Anni Mirabiles.