upon, to turn back to, when the mind is relaxed or uncertain. Rhymesters do not say such things; poets do.

Q. The best plan is, to produce some of your wise things.

Z. Good! Longfellow's Golden Legend' is not a pretentious poem ; I have even seen it called 'childish' by a very respectable critic; but Longfellow is wiser than he seems. There is no animal vigour, no sledge-hammerism, in his writing, and the good folk think it is superficial. But here, in a speech of Prince Henry, who is engaged in a discussion with Lucifer, is a nugget of wisdom, which, I am well sure, was dug from the depths of sorrowful experience :

'No action, whether foul or fair,

Is ever done, but it leaves somewhere
A record, written by fingers ghostly,
As a blessing or a curse; and mostly
In the greater weakness or greater strength
Of the acts which follow it."

My dear friend, you look as if you were going to say you had heard that before, or something like it. But I hope you do not find it common-place, that Sin is the great weakener of the human soul? If the history of some of our failures in common life were written from within, as well as from without, I think that we should often see that the prophecy of the failures was there, in our own hearts, from the beginning. The truth is, that after unconfessed, unforsaken Sin, the soul cannot be strong, because it cannot rest. It is in the condition of the body, when weakened and fevered by broken sleep; and all it does is feeble and ill-directed.

Q. Do you mean to tell me, you believe Longfellow meant all that? Z. I have not a doubt of it not the shadow of a doubt. He looked in his own heart first, then watched the lives of others, and registered the result. That he was really thinking of what he wrote is plain from that word 'mostly'-it is not always the case, that the acts which follow a wrong act are weaker, but it is 'mostly' so, and especially where self-consciousness is quick.

6

Q. You are cutting it too fine. Mostly' was put in because it rhymed with 'ghostly,' and there's an end of your wisdom of the poet!'

Z. I would stake my head that the whole passage was composed in less than a flash of lightning, and that the two rhymed adjectives took their places in subservience to the sense, and not as leading it. If there was a traceable process in the composition, I should say that the 'mostly' preceded the 'ghostly;' and that, in its first rough form, the lines stood in the poet's mind thus:

then, in an instant, 'somewhere' suggested as a rhyme, foul or fair;' and 'mostly' suggested' ghostly,' which was not a long way from

'ghostly fingers; and, last of all, trace, impression, mark, or whatever was the first crude word, got turned into 'record'suggested by 'fingers. All this, as we said just now, done in a flash of lightning. Q. It seems to me very easy to be a poet.

Z. Columbus and the egg, you know. Try it. Talking of Lucifer reminds me of another touch of poet's wisdom, which has been of use to me. Charles Lamb calls Satan

Q. I fancy your poets seem very partial to Satan!

Z. Not partial-but think of his use as a symbol. He stands for the height of foolishness, and the height of cunning, and the height of badness, and the height of misery. That brings us back to what Lamb says. You know Hawthorne insists that the great want of mankind at present is-Sleep-that the world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow, and take an age-long nap

as the only method of restoring to us the simple perception of what is right, and the single-hearted desire to achieve it.' I have always felt rest to be my own greatest difficulty, and have long been convinced that restlessness is another name for silliness, and implicite, wickedness. But it was reserved for two words of Charles Lamb, two golden words, to thrust home in my mind the utter unloveliness, unheavenliness of morbid activity. If any man be restless, let him know henceforth that he is pro tanto a child of

the Being unblest, alien from good, Sabbathless Satan!

'Sabbathless Satan !'-What a magical phrase! It stuck to me like a burr. Who would be like the unsabbatic Devil, if he could help it? Henceforward, said I, I will know how good rest is,' like the Scandinavian dwarf.

Q. Scandinavian dwarf?

Z. A Swedish peasant (there were fairies in those days) engaged a lubber troll to help him carry away some corn from a barn. Take some more on your back,' said the peasant, when the dwarf was well loaded-take some more-by-and-by we'll have a rest.' 'Rest?' said the unsabbatic dwarf; 'what is rest?'--Soon after, they sat down on the step of a church-door, and the peasant said, 'There, this is rest. Oh!' cried the dwarf, if I had only known how good rest is, I'd have brought away the whole barn!'

Q. I own I like the two bits of poets' wisdom we have got at present. Repose is heavenly, and a life without it is neither human nor divine, but diabolic. That is good. And so it is that Sin is the great weakener. Two excellent sermons in little.

Z. And more likely to be remembered in this poetic form than some sermons. Now, we will have a passage from Tennyson,-not very unlike the one from Longfellow in its ultimate drift. His last volume, 'Maud and other Poems,' contains two verses on Will,' not much noticed by the press,' but I will be bound to say plentifully noticed in the closet. Listen. The first verse is about the glory of a healthy will in a man; the second proceeds,

'But ill for him who, bettering not with time,
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,
And ever weaker grows through acted crime,
Or seeming-genial, venial fault,
Recurring and suggesting still!

He seems as one whose footsteps halt,
Toiling in immeasurable sand,
And o'er a weary sultry land,

Far beneath a blazing vault,

Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,

The City sparkles like a grain of salt.'

Here, again, we have the poet drawing on his own experience, applied to his observation of life, for a lesson of peculiar timeliness. a man of poetic mould, liable to a hundred solicitations in an hour Only from everything in nature and life with a touch of beauty in it, could so feelingly write of the dangers of

seeming-genial, venial faults, Recurring and suggesting still.'

Q. He means a glass too much, now and then, without getting right down tipsy.

Z. I should think not. I doubt if he thought of wine at all. Men like him are subject to more debilitating temptations still.

Q. What can be worse than drunkenness?

6

Z. To some people, nothing perhaps. To others it would not be a cardinal sin. It would almost come under the definition of acted crime' (rather an improper expression, as 'crime' means illegal wrongdoing); but there are 'seeming-genial, venial faults' of a much subtler character than indulgence in wine. Excusing himself to his conscience on pleas of necessary development,' 'all one-sidedness bad,' and so forth, a man may allow his moods to master him, and his sense of external beauty to puzzle his moral sense by intimations recurring and suggesting still,' till his feet, which once ran well,' halt in the sand, and the Celestial City appears actually farther off than it might do after some open, soul-shattering sin.

Q. I am not sure I take you.

Z. Perhaps not, but there are those who would-entangled souls, who could once count the towers of the City, and now only discern it 'like a grain of salt, sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill.' Entangled souls! and for some of their entanglement, I blame your Christian criers up of the manly virtues. For them, too, Tennyson has a word of the right sort

'Hold thou the good-define it well;

For fear divine Philosophy

Should push beyond her mark, and be
Procuress to the Lords of Hell.'

Q. Why, poetry seems to be very serious now-o'-days. It hits hard. Z. And is not always obscure, as you seem to think the passage in 'Will.' This, from Maud,' is very plain :

'For a raven ever croaks at my side,

Keep watch and ward, keep watch and ward,

Yes. Multum in parvo. When you find yourself suspecting anybody else of designs upon your dignity, mind you suspect yourself as well -that is the poet's advice, and it is poet's wisdom, I confess. Let's have some more.

Z. We will call upon a lady next time. Mrs. Browning will oblige us with some fine things, if we ask her. Aurora Leigh's cousin has been disappointed of marrying, as he intended to do, a girl whom, as Aurora discerned, he did not love, though he thought he did. He is now believed to be on the point of marrying an unworthy woman, whom, notwithstanding, it is possible he may love. Aurora, reflecting upon it, says :

'Albeit she prove as slippery as spilt oil

On marble floors, I will not augur him

Ill luck for that. Good love, howe'er ill-placed,
Is better for a man's soul in the end,

Than if he loved ill what deserves love well,'

Is not that beautifully said, my friend?

Q. It means that a man had better be the injured by defect of worth, than the injurer by defect of love.

Z. That; and also, more widely, that a mistake of the intellect is comparatively little if the heart be right. See how the idea takes this turn directly:

Good love, howe'er ill-placed,

Is better for a man's soul in the end

Than if he loved ill what deserves love well.

A Pagan, kissing, for a step of Pan,

The wild goat's hoof-print on the loamy down,
Exceeds our modern thinker, who turns back
The strata, granite, limestone, coal, and clay,

Concluding coldly with, "Here's law! Where's God?”'

Q. Certainly, my friend, that is very fine. one's brain.

Z. That is what the wisdom of a poet does.

It makes a mark on

The rhythmic form

and the imagery stamp the idea, and there it stays. Try again :—

Again :

'How sure it is,

That if we say a true word, instantly

We feel 'tis God's, not ours, and pass it on;
As bread at sacrament, we taste and pass,
Nor handle for a moment, as indeed
We dared to set up any claim to such.'

'There's too much abstract willing, purposing,
In this poor world. We talk by aggregates,

And think by systems; and, being used to face
Our evils in statistics, are inclined

To cap them with unreal remedies

Drawn out in haste on the other side the slate.
Fewer programmes; we who have no prescience.
Fewer systems; we who are held and do not hold.
Less mapping out of masses to be saved,
By nations or by sexes! Fourier's void,
And Comte is dwarfed, and Cabet puerile!
Subsists no law of life outside of life;
No perfect manners without Christian souls:
The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless He had given the life, too, with the law.'

Q. Halte-là! Is it a woman says that?

Z. Certainly. A married woman with one child, a little girl. Q. Then that woman must be the coming man, for she knows how to box the social compass better than any member of the 'Social Science Association,' which has just met at Birmingham.

2. I believe you are wrong. Depend upon it, the coming man' will not know what he is doing when he does his best thing. Too much intelligence is fatal to action.

Q. Then is too much action fatal to intelligence?

Z. Fatal to the intelligence which communicates itself by art.
Q. Things are all in a tangle!

Z. Most true. They

'Walk and work, above, beneath, Work and weave in endless motion, Birth and death, an infinite ocean--'

and the result is what you sce; and, also, what no one sees.

Q. I see things working in and out, and can trace nothing to its end. The wisdom and the action appear to be working contrariwise, and neither knows the other for what it is.

Z. Nevertheless we, according to His promise '

Q. 'Look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.'

Z. When the tree of knowledge and the tree of life shall be one. Q. Does the wisdom of your poetess recognise that also?

6

Z. Hear how she concludes Aurora Leigh: '—