natural human kind. It was Montgomery who edited 'The Chimney-Sweepers' Annual,' to which Lamb sent Blake's poem as well as his own. It is with truth that he says of these and other poems: 'It appealed to universal principles, to imperishable affections, to primary elements of our common nature.' He says further: 'My small plot of ground is no more than Naboth's vineyard to Ahab's Kingdom; but it is my own, it is no copyhold; I borrowed it, I leased it, from none. ... The secret of my moderate success, I consider to have been the right direction of my abilities to right objects.'

Now here there is perhaps a certain confusion in the mind between what concerns a right object and a successful poem. And is this small plot of ground so entirely unmortgaged as we are assured? Various influences are to be seen: the influences of Cowper, of Wordsworth's 'Lyrical Ballads,' of whatever was best in Southey. The simple humour of such a poem as the 'Soliloquy of a Water-Wagtail' suggests Southey; the fine qualities of 'The Common Lot' are akin, by the prose side, to Wordsworth, of whom it has the grave speech, without the unaccountable poetry. There are other such poems which may well still have their appeal to the audience from whom he looked for remembrance, 'the young, the fair, and the devout'; poems which are as full of pleasant thought and fancy as the dialogues of 'Birds,' and at times with something of the prim meditation of Matthew Arnold. Thought, of a carefully religious kind, there always is, and it is genuine, touched with a sense of beauty and meaning in visible things, to which he is sometimes able to give adequate expression in a lyric, but which is lost or diluted in the long poems on which he probably supposed that his fame would rest: 'The World before the Flood,' 'Greenland,' 'The Pelican Island.' Much of the moralising has come to weary us, and the smooth cadences seem to have been picked out on the keyboard of an early pianoforte. There is something in the whole form, easy and natural as it generally is, that has a little the air of a thing

remembered rather than newly made. Here, for instance, is the typical Montgomery:

'The Dead are like the stars by day;
Withdrawn from mortal eye,

But not extinct, they hold their way
In glory through the sky.'

Thus, it is with no surprise that we find his most satisfying work in his translation of the Psalms in the form of hymns. They have been adopted, I believe, for congregational singing by the churches of all denominations. Nothing could be better suited for the purpose than, for instance, the version of Psalm LXXVI, 'Hail to the Lord's anointed.' I do not say that anything like justice is done to the great poetry of the original, as we read it in the incomparable prose of the English Bible. The greatest of English poets never has done and never will do that. But, in such renderings as these, done for singing, there is a swiftness, an easy flow, together with a real fidelity to the original, which it is unusual to find in professedly pious work. To see how easily the attempt to Ideal with Biblical material, whether in the form of translation or adaptation, can turn to rhetoric, make-believe, or some other sort of insincerity, we need only look at the experiments of Moore and all but the best of Byron's. Montgomery does his useful pedestrian work competently.

MRS. TIGHE (1772-1810) 1

MRS. TIGHE was one of the most famous of the women poets of her period. She is chiefly remembered now because the very early Keats seems to have thought her a poet almost worth imitating. But not long after he could say: 'Mrs. Tighe and Beattie once delighted me now I see through them and can find nothing in them or weakness, and yet how many they still delight.' Her chief and most popular composition was a 1 Psyche; or the Legend of Love, 1805, 1811.

'Psyche,' done at a great distance after Apuleius, but not without a kind of fanciful female prettiness. The luxury of her picture-painting, the smoothness of her Spenserian stanzas, her fluent feeling,

'And all that can the female heart delight,'

had a natural attraction for an audience which began with Moore and ended with Mrs. Hemans.

HENRY FRANCIS CARY (1772-1844) 1

1

HENRY FRANCIS CARY, a busy man of letters in his time, is remembered by only one of his many excellent translations, the still unsurpassed version of the Divine Comedy of Dante. But there is real merit in the translation of the 'Birds' of Aristophanes, which, for its speed and its good homely burlesque English words, has its place somewhere between Mitchell and Frere. Better still are the translations from 'Early French Poets,' from Marot to Gringoire, for the most part in the metres of the original. The book has not been replaced since, and should be reprinted for its choice anthology, in French and English, and its well aware and sympathetic narrative of poets who are hardly better known now than then. Cary shows the true translator's energy, agility, and quick sense of words and rhythms, and without being exactly a poet he conveys from one language to another a great deal more than mere substance or mere form. Who, before Rossetti, could have done Villon so well into English verse?

'Where is Heloise the wise,
For whom Abelard was fain,
Mangled in such cruel wise,

To turn a monk instead of man?'

1 (1) Ode to Lord Heathfield, 1787. (2) Poems, 1788. (3) Sonnets and Odes, 1788. (4) Ode to General Kosciusko, 1797. (5) Inferno of Dante, 1805. (6) The Vision; or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante Alighieri, 3 vols., 1814. (7) Pindar, 1824. (8) Birds of Aristophanes, 1824. (9) The Early French Poets, 1846.

The only lines which he attempts from another ballad have the strong, direct, faithful quality of his Dante. I give the best of them:

'As to our flesh, which once too well we fed,
That now is rotten quite, and mouldered;
And we, the bones, do turn to dust and clay.
None laugh at us that are so ill bested,

But pray ye God to do our sins away.'

Cary published the first part of his translation of what he called 'The Vision; or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise,' in 1805, and the whole trilogy in 1814. To translate Dante is an impossible thing, for to do it would demand, as the first requirement, a concise and luminous style equal to Wordsworth at his best, as when he said (it should have been said of Dante):

"Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.'

The style and cadence of Dante were beyond the best skill of Cary; but what he did was to turn the Italian poem into an English one, to a certain degree Miltonic, but faithful to the simplicity of the words and turns of speech in the original. Only the complete version of Cary, and the daring experiment of Dr. Shadwell, who has rendered the 'Purgatorio? into the metre of Marvell's great ode, have succeeded in the one thing most necessary: that a poem should not cease to be a poem on being transferred into another language. Cary's great task, which he fulfilled, was to do this service to Dante and to England.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) 1

IN one of Rossetti's invaluable notes on poetry, he tells us that to him 'the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human love.' We may remember Coleridge's own words:

1 (1) The Fall of Robespierre, 1794. (2) Poems on Various Subjects (together with four poems by Charles Lamb), 1796. (3) Ode on the Departing Year, 1796. (4) Poems by S. T. Coleridge, Second Edition (together

'To be beloved is all I need,

And whom I love I love indeed.'

Yet love, though it is the word which he uses of himself, is not really what he himself meant when using it, but rather an affectionate sympathy, in which there seems to have been little element of passion. Writing to his wife, during that first absence in Germany, whose solitude tried him so much, he laments that there is 'no one to love.' 'Love is the vital air of my genius,' he tells her, and adds: 'I am deeply convinced that if I were to remain a few years among objects for whom I had no affection, I should wholly lose the powers of intellect.' With this incessant, passionless sensibility, it was not unnatural that his thirst for friendship was stronger than his need of love; that to him friendship was hardly distinguishable from love. Throughout all his letters there is a series of causeless explosions of emotion, which it is hardly possible to take seriously, but which, far from being insincere, is really, no doubt, the dribbling overflow of choked-up feelings, a sort of moral leakage. It might be said of Coleridge, in the phrase which he used of Nelson, that he was 'heart-starved.' Tied for life to a woman with whom he had not one essential sympathy, the whole of his nature was put out of focus; and perhaps nothing but 'the joy of grief,' and the terrible and fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and tracing them to first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his subconsciousness, gave him the courage to support that long ever-present divorce.

with Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd), 1797. (5) Fears in Solitude, 1798. (6) The Piccolomini, or the First Part of Wallenstein. Translated from the German of Friedrich von Schiller, 1800. (7) Poems. Third Edition, 1803. (8) Remorse, 1813. (9) Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision: The Pains of Sleep, 1816. (10) Sibylline Leaves: a Collection of Poems, 1817. (11) Zapolya, 1817. (12) Poetical Works, 3 vols., 1828, 1829, 1834. (13) Poems, 1848. (14) Poems, edited by Derwent and Sara Coleridge, 1852 (1870). (15) Dramatic Works, 1852. (16) Poetical and Dramatic Works, 4 vols., 1877. (17) Poetical Works, edited by J. Dykes Campbell, 1899.