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ten on that principle. Their picturesque varieties and diverse uses have often been noticed by travellers, artists, and so forth. But the relation of the head-garment to the thoughts would give a new point of view."

"Well," said Collins, with a tone between defiance and jesting, "there are many odd facts to be noted on that matter. As the land-shells of Madeira are altogether different from those of the neighbouring island of Porto Santo, so the Portuguese population of the one place wear a small funnel-shaped, or unicorn cap, and the same race in the other adorn themselves with a flat bonnet."

"Ah!" said Walsingham, with bland seriousness, "remarks of that depth and originality recall the famous Pythian verses of Nathaniel Lee, the Trophonian prophet:

'Methinks I see a hieroglyphic bat Skim o'er the zenith in a slip-shod hat.'" Both Collins and Maria now laughed loud and merrily; and the Recluse said, "Well, no one can deny that the whole of man is included between his hat and shoes. In these mysterious

integuments are concealed the extreme boundaries of his Being, which, though certainly finite, philosophers aver to be all but infinite."

"Or," said Walsingham," as we may express it in Orphic song :Oh! wondrous powers, ye shoes and hat, That bound our human span, How idly sages puzzle at

The limits set to man!

and moralists, when they have not the Thus does the conversation of poets fear of a pompous public before them, often become mere doggrel and absurdity, and yet suits for the time both the men and the occasion. Such talk

helped on the hour till Maria bade them good-night, and thanking them both, and especially Collins,. for his kindness, left them to themselves. She retired to think, to remember Arthur, to shudder at the image of the lost vessel, to pray, and then to sleep. In the mean-time Collins made more tea for himself, Walsingham having had enough, and drank it by bowlsful, without milk, and sweetened with his own honey.

CHAPTER XI.

"That," said Walsingham to Collins, "was a striking event of which we have been witnesses at the church. But I should like to have observed, unseen, the demeanour of the people when they reached the burning edifice, as I suppose a crowd of them soon did. There is much to attract and awaken one in the thought of a living world startled by the conflagration of a neighbouring world of graves and ghosts. But it ought to be painted on both sides. I mean both from the point of view of the actual beings regarding this convulsion in the realm of the past, and from that of the ruin and its graves impersonated and spiritualized, and brought face to face with bodily mortals. One might round the whole into a little Grecian tragedy, the action consisting of the efforts of the men to save the buildings, and their lamentations over memorials of their ancestors, and the Chorus being a band of spectres, with the grey old founder of the church, clothed in his pall of lead and years, leading the grisly troop, and wailing and admo

nishing through the tempestuous and fiery air."

"Why," answered Collins, "do any thing of the kind? It might be worth while to know what really happened. But what we should gain by taking the mere name of the real event and appending a fiction to it, I do not

see.

When I am not in a very ferocious humour I do not mind seeing a soldier, for I know what he and his dress are, and mean. But some lord or linendraper coxcomb, in the masquerade dress of a soldier, is a thing to be drifted, as soon as possible, down the great sewer of perdition. The uniform, on such shoulders, is but a red rag thrown into the kennel; and the biped is but the fleshly effigy of a man a good deal more offensive than a wax one at a puppet-show. I hold it to be with your supposed poem. By all means give us as much truth as possible, even though the dose is ever so bitter. But lies, whether in verse or prose, are an abomination under the sun, and above it too, if such pests are known there, which for

Now so

the sake of the super-solars, I hope is not the case. Truth, man! truth is the only true poetry, if the business of poetry is to move the feelings, which, for aught I see, might as well be left unmoved. But bread and meat, which we do want daily, are facts. Ambrosia is doubtless a fact too-for the gods. But for me, a man, it is a fiction. Bread and truth are all man wants; and a loaf is only an eatable lump of truth fitted for the body, as truth is the invisible, but no less substantial, bread of the spirit. Tea, too, is truth in its way, and very good for a thirsty throat. Talk to me of nectar by the hour, but my mouth would still be dry, and I should wish you drinking it at Olympus, or any where away from me.

"What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer. But I stand in his shoes, and wait instead of him."

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"Truth is every thing that is. Every thing is truth; and every nothing is lie. Destiny for ever spins things-realities. But man is the only beast I know of that spins nothings fictions poems. So he tries to swindle destiny and his own fellowbeasts. But destiny spins on unswindled, and leaves him to die like a starved spider in his own cobweb. Honesty is the only true religion; all else is mere superstition, more or less poetic that is, more or less false."

"A compendious creed, and that sounds as if it would have saved Aristotle, Quintilian, Strada, and the Schlegels a good deal of trouble. But look closer. All that I, too, want is Truth, but Truth made intelligible and effectual for man. In order to this, what is essential and characteristic in an image or feeling must be separated from what is accidental or futile-I mean, from what must seem so to usfor, doubtless, nothing really is so, must be divided from the endless, unmanageable All, which would only bewilder us. That is, it must be marked out as a distinct Whole by itself, with its own beginning, progress, and conclusion. Now, if this be rightly done, we shall have the essential Thought filling its own circle, excluding all that is extraneous to itself, and taking in and embodying from without whatever is necessary to its own completeness and evidence. All this, however, is quite as true of a history, or a theory, or a speech, as of a poem.

VOL. XLIV. NO, CCLXXVIII,

But herein is the difference, that the poem is not meant to convey knowledge or produce conviction, but to excite a state of feeling at once lively and harmonious. That the feelings may be lively, the poem must have energy, distinctness, glow; that they may be harmonious, it must have consistency and completeness, and must lead to the apprehension of a peaceful order supreme over all confusion. But it may have all these requisites, and therefore be a good poem, and yet be far from a literal representation of the fact, event, thought, or emblem, which supplies the pretext for it. If you rightly weigh all these conditions of a poem's existence, you will see, I think, that it may and often must admit free and marvellous displays of fancy, legend, superstition, and symbolic necromancy. In a word, it must boldly sayTo produce an impression equivalent to that which this actual, but superabundant, overwhelming world would produce in a mind capable of embracing it as a whole, I will shape a world of my own, no less vivid and coherent, but rounded in a smaller circle, readily intelligible to man, and delightful to him, as free from the baffling, confounding immensity of that in which he lives. Every thing, therefore, which we borrow from the actual for the uses of poetry, must be translated not transferred, its form and colouring modified, from that consistent with and dependent on the appearances of the actual world, to those required by the unity of the imaginary creation. Such seem to me the laws required by the slightest song; and yet adequate to explain the Odyssey, Hamlet, and Herman and Dorothea.'

"Well, a very pretty scheme. But in my notion a mere jugglery. The moment you separate a part of human existence from the great All it belongs to, and seek to shape it into a minor, dependent, and analogous, but distinct world, which, as I understand, is your notion, that moment you lose all law and measure of truth and falsehood. A feeling, an image, an event is true that is real, genuine, not when detached, but only when connected with its original circumstances and atmosphere. Suppose, while the clay of nature is yet soft and plastic, I break off a finger or an ear from

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the great image; this is, no doubt, a real part of the whole. But then the fractional edge recalls that it is only a portion, and ought to be replaced in its former position. But if I again knead it up and round it off into a separate work, betraying no violent dislocation, it ceases to be any thing but a fiction of my hands. I cannot make it a small total, recalling in minuter lines, and representing the great one, because the great one is too vast, and I see it only in part. An Iliad was very well, because those for whom it was written believed it all true, read it as history, and had no more doubt of Jupiter and Pallas than of Achilles and Agamemnon. To us, who have looked at the wrong side of the puppet-show, it has lost half its value. But remember, besides, that the free extemporaneous Homeric rhythm is very unlike our modern metres. To me it seems that the very fact of writing in artificial, elaborate verse is a proclamation of a design to be absurd."

"Verse ought to be, and to have the evidence of being, the spontaneous and only suitable utterance of lively and delightful emotion. If not, doubtless it is bad and a trick."

So.

"Almost all I know of, indeed, is As for the verse of Homer and Shakspeare it is only prose fused and fluid. But almost all else is prose pinched, twisted, filed, scraped, and notched into arbitrary forms, in hopes, not of producing any independent feeling, but of awakening some echo of the feeling which the authentic melody of words begets. But, in fine, explain it how you will, all fiction in verse or prose is to me abhorrent. I hate straw-men, snow-men, rag-men, colossal dolls, bronze kings and dukes, and all the sons of scarecrows. I loathe your modern romance which sets up its tawdry wooden Highlanders and calumetted Indians at the door with as keen an eye to gain, and to the public's gross cravings, as the keeper of a snuff-shop. We have not too much thought and energy among us for actual life, and it is idiotic to waste what we have in aimless sympathies, and to spend our days in tracing out the baby-house labyrinths of songs and sonnets. What would you think of a man who, when his ship was sinking, and the only chance lay in working with every sinew, should begin to fiddle on the

deck, and set the sailors off in an insane dance? We, and the world too, are in just this need, and the poets help us as little."

Walsingham answered calmly,— "I do not remember that the seamen in the Greek story were much the better for throwing Arion overboard."

"Ah! I suppose in that tale some poet was pleading his own cause and that of his brethren. In this matter, however, we shall not agree; but I do hold most firmly to the belief that the task of life is a hard, stern, Spartan work-to climb with bleeding feet among rocks of ice and lava. We must have done, once for all, with cobwebs and rose vapours, election ribbons and rockets, flummery and finery of all kinds. Sentimental sighing has no business in a world where there are So many heart-brokengroans. The will is the foundation of a man. He should stand up-speak out-hold fast-stamp his thoughts in strong words-and leave lies, songs, flatteries, fancies, and all other mental sillabub whatever to womanish and sickly stomachs. Then when he stands, as I often do, alone upon the bare hill-top, and thinks of the laws, maxims, amiabilities, decencies, and reputations that make up what we call our country, and which are but one great fermenting mass of falsehood, let him rejoice that he dares keep his own soul pure and in arms, and breathe the air of heaven which has not yet been all filled with the reek of men's vanity and voluptuousness. For in our smooth, delicate, moral days, even conscience has been made nothing more than a kind of voluptu ous self-indulgence. O! for some rude old John Baptist or Wickliffe, to go through the land, and cry, Wo! Wo! and make our feeble busy men of talents and notoriety, and European reputation-Heaven help them 1-skip at his voice like grasshoppers from before the tramp of a rhinoceros."

"Why should not he who so strongly conceives also perform?"

"O! a man may fancy indeed that his arms are long enough to reach the stars; but when, in trying even to raise them above his own head, they have been heavily beaten back and crushed by the demon of the air, he must be content, for a while at least, to rest, and nurse his pangs. But

you, you for whose pipings and madrigals the world has smooth and favourable ears, you, had you the heart of a man instead of the fancy of a conjurer, might indeed find or make the sad hour for speaking severe truths; you might inspirit and shame men into the work of painfully building up for themselves new, and graver, and more serene hopes, instead of lulling them into a drunken dream with wanton airs and music.'

Walsingham shook his head, but not angrily, and said-" One builds Cyclopian walls, another fashions marble carvings. Each must work as he can. But remember that the Cyclopian walls, though they stood indeed, and stand, became useless monuments of a dead past, and the fox and the robber kennel among the

stones.

The marble carvings which humanized their own early age are still the delight of all humane generations."

"Ay, but those marble carvings, for those who wrought and revered them, were most holy realities. Our modern poems and other tinsel work are, for us, as mere toys as musical snuff-boxes or gauze flowers."

"To him who regards them as mere toys they are indeed worthless, nay, dangerous. That which he handles as a squib he may find burst between his fingers as a bomb. But of such men, and those who work for them, there need be no discourse between us."

"Of such men I fear there must be discourse between us, if we are to discourse at all, and in speaking not forget ourselves."

CHAPTER XII.

They bade each other good-night, and lay back in their chairs at opposite sides of the fire. Collins went to sleep. But Walsingham sat revolving the conversation that had passed and his present position. He thought that he saw most distinctly the fallacy of his host's views as to poetry; and judged from this evening's experience that he was not a very acute reasoner, so far, at least, as reasoning is carried on by analysis. He also regarded him as narrow and partial in all his feelings and aims, viewing many things with undue violence, and with undeserved indifference turning from others. The mind, he said to himself, of this recluse resembles a smith's forge, with its small glowing light, its deep imaginative shadows, the strenuous image of the workman, and the weighty and colossal processes to which the whole is devoted. "Well," he thought, "let others forge crowbars and ploughshares, nay, even weapons and armour; enough for me, in my sunny chamber, with vine-leaves round the windows, to mould graceful figures, or even to engrave the small and unobtrusive gem." His mind, however, did not rest here. He could not escape from the feeling that, after all, there was in Collins an earnest though rugged and painful force of some kind, whether of will, or feeling, or imagination, which bore down the poet. This energy but half understood itself, and was unaccompanied by any

sense of the graceful, the harmonious, the complete, without which life to Walsingham appeared so bare and empty. It was a character which, in its dim but broken strength, and large though interrupted outline, seemed to him more imposing than any other he had known, than all that he could find in himself. His curiosity and his sympathy with the mysterious were awakened, and were excited the more by his ignorance of the previous history which, in spite of fervid longings after a high course of human action, had thrown Collins into this solitude a brooding aimless hermit.

Now, as was his custom, he began to collect and arrange all he knew of the man, and the recent circumstances that had brought them acquainted. But here his thoughts were turned into a different direction, for, with the events of the evening, the image of Maria recurred to him. He recalled his previous feelings of admiration for her; his delight in her pure, unselfish elevation of heart; his own intellectual superiority, which had enabled him to see over and round her opinions; and the coldness and weakness of his faith in invisible realities, compared with her devout and practical reliance. The unspeakable loveliness of her whole being presented itself anew to him; and he reflected with how much pleasure he had been able to give her fresh knowledge, and to set her mind in movement in new di

rections. For while his suggestions and ideals rooted themselves in her, and re-appeared in gentler and more attractive forms in her demeanour and language, she had seemed to him a nymph-like Grecian girl, catching new hints of melody and themes of verse from a sage master, by her voice and instrument, her sunny beauty and lyrical glances lending to them roundness, fluency, and a thrilling sweetness. Lastly, he reviewed the singular hour that he had spent with her in the ruined church, and was conscious of a mingled rush of pain and joy while he revived for a moment the free and mounting flight of heart with which they had seemed to live together in the tempest and rise upon its wings above the ordinary restraints of custom and reserve. It was a less selfish train of emotion, more elevating and enthusiastic than he had almost ever experienced. But along with the remembrance of it came that of the discovery of her secret affection, though for whom he could not divine. From this he would fain have withdrawn his attention, for he habitually endeavoured to turn away from all painful considerations. But the facts were too recent, and she was still too near him. A few feet and a thin ceiling were all that divided him from the sleeping girl. Love with his torch lighted the poet's imagination up the dark stair. He seemed to see the beautiful and animated head now reclined in still unconsciousness on the pillow; the delicate and benign hand and rounded arm escaping from the folds designed to hide them; the smooth eyelids, with their dark lashes closed, and the full, half-parted lips. Over all the enchanted picture of his fancy, he viewed the silent dreamworld opened to her spirit, with many images, of which his own was one, blended in the front, and a dark and fiery cloud of destiny, like the smoke of that night's conflagration, opaque to him, though for her transparent, hiding the main and central figure so incomparably dear to Maria. The hour of twelve came. The clear picture of the lady in her chamber vanished, the long and busy past, with its prominent and struggling

forms, broke at once upon him. He had now before his eyes together, Arthur and Sir Charles, Wilson and Hastings, Musgrave, and Walsingham. The student, the baronet, the farmer, the traveller, the divine, the poet-each seemed to him perfectly distinct, yet as to each he had a train of evident remembrances, and each he fancied was himself. So might he have stood in the midst of many large mirrors, each bright and speckless, but each of a differently coloured glass, a blue, a red, a green, a golden, an amethyst, a white, and seen himself, his own form, face, gesture, and expression of countenance reflected in each of the surfaces, but with the dif ference of colouring. But again it seemed that the difference overbalanced the identity, and that he beheld only so many several figures, passing for the same one man by wearing a mask the fac-simile of his face. As the hour glided on, the various forms grew less and less distinct, though his inward recollection of their history I was still clear. He now turned his eyes upon the sleeping countenance of Collins, with its bold and harsh lines still full of melancholy and energetic meaning, and with hair so prematurely grey shading the furrowed brow and beating temples. All the impressions of the evening came upon him with redoubled power. He saw in that face a long inscription to which he required the key. Even without its help he knew of a concentered zeal and torrid vigour, narrow perhaps in its objects and experience, but having a depth and genuineness of life found in few among mankind, and especially rare in profusely accomplished and refined periods and classes. He said to himself I understand and can paint a thousand modes of human existence, from the hero and the sage, to the damsel, the child, and the rude barbarian slave. But there is one character that seems to lie beyond me wrapped in its own dark electric cloud. This, too, shall now lie clear under my gaze and be wielded by my will.

The ring did not refuse its function; and Walsingham slept in utter oblivion.

END OF PART II,

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