of lyrical poetry. Into the broader life of the metropolis Henley carried his large sane spirit and poignantly observing eye, reaching, in London Voluntaries, the height of this ruling feature of his art. But Henley, like all true poets, is at heart lyrical. His song is full and untremulous. Life, death, fate, and love are his among the immemorial themes: love as the strong man has known it, not the dreamer or the voluptuary; death as the brave man faces it, scorning the crutches of outworn faiths and the palliatives of narcotic romances. The song of Henley is always dauntless, manly, brave, and strong; he finds life bitter, and "fell" "the clutch of circumstance," but none the less he clearly sings:

I am the master of my fate

I am the captain of my soul.

Above such poems of steadfastness, above the grim “Madam Life's a piece of bloom," and the many short direct lyrics of love, too charged with thought merely to sing, too burdened with passion to fall into epigram, I prefer the irregular musical phrases of "Margaritæ Sorori," quoted and praised by Stevenson:

The smoke ascends

In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires
Shine and are changed. In the valley

Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,

Closing his benediction,

Sinks, and the darkening air

Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night —

Night with her train of stars

And her great gift of sleep.

So be my passing!

My task accomplished and the long day done,

My wages taken, and in my heart

Some late lark singing,

Let me be gathered to the quiet west,

The sundown splendid and serene,

Death.

The tuneful chorus of Victorian song continued to the end of the reign and beyond. As well deny the perennial songsters of the spring as affirm that poetry in the English tongue has not continued vocal since the age of reason went its unlamented way to death, and lyricism reawakened with Blake and Chatterton and Burns. The seventies ushered in many a new if lesser lyrist. Among the names which have not already found a mention in these pages are John Payne, happy translator of Villon, most difficult of the old poets of la vie joyeuse; strange original, rhapsodic Gerard Hopkins, hushing his song in the cloister and following, a generation too late, in the wake of the Oxford Movement; bedridden suffering Eugene Lee-Hamilton, writing strongly and fervidly in his Imaginary Sonnets and preserving in his own way not a little of the pictorial and dramatic power of his master Browning; Oliver Maddox Brown, son of the painter, extraordinarily precocious in art and literature, prose and verse, dying at little more than the age of Chatterton. The Wordsworthians, the religious poets, and the sonneteers, too, are still with us in their thousand tributary rills. "Frugal" has been the serious and adequate lyrical note of the eminent critic and Shakespearean scholar, Professor

Edward Dowden; while Mr. Samuel Waddington, besides his judicious collections alike of the Sonnets of the Past and the Sonnets of the Present, has added sonnets of his own to the most teeming of the garners of English lyrical

verse.

And now this chapter of the Victorians, already too long, must be brought to a close. The lyrists of greater note who, beginning to sing in the latter years of the queen, are still with us and tuneful, those whose poetry marks the prolongation of influences still vital and working for the future, must claim attention in the following chapter. For the nonce we must keep in mind that the enumeration of influences and literary phenomena in their order as they arise, loses sight of much that existed side by side, interlaced and mutually affecting each the others. For example, Wordsworth was a laureate and a power in poetry during nearly twenty years of Tennyson's and Browning's activity. Tennyson succeeded, a monarch already strong in a popularity that lasted almost unbroken to his death; while on the other hand, Browning came into the recognition of Browning societies, to become a cult and an obsession, only in the eighties when pre-Raphaelitism had expanded from the intensity of Rossetti to the diffusion, narrative and lyrical, of Morris and Swinburne. Moreover there were grades and degrees in Victorian poetry to an extent not hitherto known in English literature. The people that read The Household Philosophy of Tupper constituted neither the audience of The Light of Asia, The Epic of Hades, nor that of

The Angel in the House, the last of these, be it noted, alone lyrical; and the age begot its "Tory poets," its lyrists of Chartism and Fenianism, its Catholic poets, as well as its poets of "spasm," aspiration, Protestantism and protest. But enough: assuredly Victoria's age has been one rich in lyrical poetry, one in which the lyric, too, has extended its sphere, its diversity of theme and treatment. That it has often been intellectualized into a something that gives us pause as to our definitions is not to be denied. That frequently it has been metamorphosed, too, into a richer, stranger romanticism than our literature had hitherto known, is likewise to be acknowledged. And yet the ground notes of this lyrical chorus, with all its new capriccios, roulades, and novel warblings, remain deep seated in the essential passions of man, love, hope, the political and the religious instincts, with devotion to home, country, and that appreciation of man in nature and acted on by the hidden and mysterious influences of nature which has been the richest contribution of English poetry in the nineteenth century to the literature of the world.

CHAPTER VIII

SOME SUCCESSORS OF SWINBURNE AND MEREDITH

N one of an interesting and exceedingly valuable series of essays on English contemporary poets, completed a few years since, a general grouping of the more considerable names of the successors of Meredith and Swinburne was suggested, which cannot but help us in our present inquiry.1 There are the Wordsworthians, eldest and most orthodox of whom, Mr. Robert Bridges, is the chief; and there is the rhapsodist, Francis Thompson, and Laurence Housman, who group somewhat together from their discipleship to the pre-Raphaelites in general and to Coventry Patmore in particular. There is the wide-spreading and active Celtic revival, headed by Mr. Yeats in Ireland, but disclosing a sympathetic activity in Scotland in the poetry of the late "Fiona Macleod" and in lesser poets of Wales and the Isle of Man. Then there are the virile "poets of empire," the late Mr. Henley, Mr. Kipling and Mr. Henry Newbolt; and the "decadents," such as Mr. Arthur Symons and the late Ernest Dowson. As to Mr. T. Sturge Moore, Mr. A. E. Housman, and the late John Davidson, the critic finds them "differing too greatly from any of the above groups to be associated with them, and differing as

1 "The Irish Literary Revival," by Cornelius Weygandt, The Sewanee Review, XII, No. 4, October, 1904.