which yearly takes place at the few remaining spots around our coasts where sea-birds yet throng to build.* It is sickening to think of heaps (we are speaking literally) of winged kittiwakes and body-struck guillemots drifting out with the ebbing tide to be nibbled to death by fishes, while their callow young are perishing miserably on the cliffs above for want of the food which their parents met their fate in bringing. And all that a trainful of sea-side excursionists may enjoy (save the mark!) a holiday. Surely it is but a step from acclimatization to preservation, and a society formed for the promotion of the one object hardly exceeds its functions if it extends them to embrace the other. Only bring it home to the public mind that the destruction of an animal at its breeding place, or when it is seeking for its breeding-place, is a cruel, and consequently an unsportsmanlike act, and the practice will cease; for the English people are, of all nations, at once the most prone to humanity and the most addicted to sport. We certainly think that the Acclimatization Society might work this change of opinion, and obtain strength for their other objects by the attempt.

The acclimatization of animals, then, on sound principles, and thus extended, we believe, deserves the utmost encouragement it can receive at the hands of every one, for to all classes do its results appeal. The high-born dame may derive from her silk-worms or her aviary constant occupation and excitement of the most harmless description, even if no more practical results wait upon her ministrations. The humble cottager may in like manner form one more tie to his own home by attending to his modest poultry-yard. The mechanic solace himself in his hours of rest by the care which his dove-cote will demand. The sportsman will be better pleased with the day's shooting that affords him greater variety of game than with one of prolonged sameness, even though the bouquets of pheasants be unceasing, and each bird a "rocketter." The farmer add to his substance from cattle newly introduced to his flocks and herds; and the manufacturer may gain by new kinds of raw material out of which to produce his fabrics. The philosopher, the painter, and the poet draw fresh ideas to illustrate never-dying works; while the political economist thus will see the wealth, the health, and the happiness of his fellow-men augmented. It is an old saying, that "he who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before, deserves well of his country," and the truth of the proverb is not confined to the improved cultivation of plants.

The Farn islands off the Northumberland coast must be mentioned as a creditable exception. The protection to the birds nesting there is due to the efforts of the late Archdeacon Thorp.

ART. VIII. THE POETRY OF OWEN MEREDITH.

Clytemnestra, the Earl's Return, the Artist, and other Poems. By Owen Meredith. Chapman and Hall. 1855.

The Wanderer. By Owen Meredith.

and Hall. 1859.

Second edition. Chapman

Lucile. By Owen Meredith. Chapman and Hall. 1860.

MR. OWEN MEREDITH's poetry has won a considerable share of general popularity. Two of the books at the head of this article are already out of print, and he himself refers in his last long poem, with modest self-congratulation, to the gratifying fact that several of his early poems have been set to music, and are favourites with the young ladies of the present day. He has established a certain position, therefore, in the world which entitles him to the benefit of serious criticism at the hands of all who are jealous of the fame of English literature.

Mr. Matthew Arnold has recently invented a new name for the quality which characterises permanent as contrasted with ephemeral fame, that fine clear-cut individuality of touch which does not merely stimulate the mind with transient little shocks of interest, but engraves the form of a poet's thought on the memory, as distant hills are chiselled out against a sunset sky; -he calls it "distinction." "Of this quality," he says, "the world is impatient; it chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it; it ends by receiving its influence and by undergoing its law. This quality at last invariably corrects the world's blunders and fixes the world's ideals. It procures that the popular poet shall not finally pass for a Pindar, nor the popular preacher for a Bossuet." And it will, we feel no doubt, convince the readers of English poetry, after careful study, that the clever writer who composes under the name of Owen Meredith has no part or share in the true poetic faculty.

Mr. Owen Meredith is by no means what would generally be called a dull writer. His verses shimmer like shot-silk with antithesis, sentiment, and similes. There are smart hits at times, that show a considerable knowledge of the world. He admires nature, and analyses character, and versifies with a fatal fluency. But the more you read of him, the more clear it becomes that he is a poet of what we may call the decorative school, and that even his decorative art is essentially meretricious. His poems remind us of the judgment passed by Eckermann (or shall we rather say by Goethe's mind speaking through

Eckermann), and approved by the great poet, on a certain German poem: "They are the impressions of a dilettante who has more good intention than power, and to whom the highlydeveloped state of our literature has lent a ready-made language which sings and rhymes for him, while he imagines himself speaking." And this seems to hit exactly the sort of talent displayed by Mr. Owen Meredith. He plays on what Coleridge calls the ready-made barrel-organ of our poetic phraseology with a facility that pleases the ear unaccustomed to true and individually elaborated poems. But the more you read the less you admire him; the colours with which his poetry is so liberally heightened seem all hot and glaring, and put on in patches, like rouge; the artificial tone of the pleasantry jars more and more; the sentiment is thick and blurred, and overluscious, like Tokay; and, on the whole, you feel that this poetry is a gaudy artificial costume for life, which catches the eye at first as striking, but the enjoyment of which is soon exhausted. We are sorry to pass so severe a judgment on a poet who has no doubt attained a certain level of popularity; but we are convinced that it is a true one by many concurrent evidences, and fear that we can only too easily convince our readers also.

When we attempt to compare Mr. Owen Meredith's poems, or any poems of the same class, with a high poetical standard, we are vividly reminded of the fine passage in Plato's Gorgias in which he compares with the four genuine Arts that concern themselves with preserving or restoring the well-being of the body and the mind,-namely, Gymnastics, Medicine, Law, and Justice, the four imitative counterfeits which concern themselves not with the well-being but the temporary gratification of the body and the mind;-the trick of dressing up the body so as to counterfeit the symmetry and beauty produced by gymnastic training, the trick of dressing up food so as to make it gratify the palate instead of imparting nourishment, the trick of recommending false measures to the people which salve over the public disorders instead of ensuring the well-being of the commonwealth, and finally the trick of persuading the judges so as to gain for the criminal not justice but impunity. This last spurious or counterfeit "dexterity,"—namely Rhetoric,-which is concerned not with procuring the true wellbeing of the soul, but its immunity from temporary pain, is defined by Socrates as "a state not belonging to true Art at all, but the quality of a soul ready in taking aim, and bold and clever by nature in its intercourse with men." It is impossible for a modern critic not to add to this enumeration of genuine Arts, and the corresponding parasitical dexterities

which aim at a temporary gratification instead of true artistic standards, on the one hand the genuine poetry which aims at taking the veil from life, whether the life of nature or of men, and showing us, on however modest a scale, the impressions made by men and things on the creative imagination,and, on the other hand, that merely decorative talent which seems to aim at giving the pleasure and surprises which poetry gives, but without the labour, without the fidelity, without the spontaneous simplicity of true poetry. While true poetry unveils through the imagination the secrets of natural and of human expression, the decorative poetry of which we speak paints for it a new, and at first sight pleasing, external veil, which bears the same relation to the transparent medium of the poet which the patterns drawn on ground glass to prevent vision bear to the images of living forms in a perfect mirror. This decorative trick of false poetry seems to be exactly described in Plato's words as "a state not belonging to true Art at all, but the quality of a soul ready in taking aim, and bold and clever by nature in its intercourse with men.". Socrates adds that he considers the sum and substance of these pleasureseeking parasites of true art to be a species of flattery,*—a dexterity, that is, in selecting the weak place in human nature, where a very little tickling with plausible falsehoods will win a great deal of temporary power. And this is, though of course without any of the dishonourable character of personal flattery, exactly the characteristic of the kind of poetry we wish to discuss. It is the instrument of minds "ready in aim, and bold and clever by nature in their intercourse with men," and its method of procedure seems to be just that amount of plau sible deception which is certain to follow from taking the superficial tickling of the fancy as the aim of poetry, instead of the effort to grasp truly in the imagination, the life within and the life without.

In the first place you may see this false aim at the plausibly agreeable, instead of at the true, in Mr. Owen Meredith's occasionally clever but always over-emphatic descriptive poetry. True poetic descriptions are of many kinds, following the law of the poet's own mind. There is the careless school of description, which succeeds like Byron's later genius by the mere audacity with which he thrusts into his verse accidental and miscellaneous objects in the arbitrary kind of way in which they would arrest the eye of an absent-minded spectator,-“ a sail peeping out here and there, so full of life that you seem to feel the sea-breeze blowing;" and here again London sights

* κολακεία.

† Goethe's conversation on Byron with Eckermann.

and sounds tumbled in pell-mell upon the imagination, "the wigs in a hair-cutter's window and the passing lamplighters jostling one another in the memory. Or there is the tranquil German school of description, which Goethe adorned, a school that aims at realising in due perspective, moral as well as physical, the whole picture before the eye, choosing your point of sight at some defined personal centre,-as for instance in the mind of the good old hostess of the Golden Lion in Hermann and Dorothea, and then painting the scene traversed by her exactly as it would seem to her eye, looking at the kitchen garden with a gardener's vigilance for the caterpillars on the leaves, or scarlet runners that need new staking, and so forth. Or there is the meditative school of description, like Wordsworth's, which describes not so much the outward reality as the trains of reverie it set moving in his breast. But whatever the school be, so long as it is a true poetic description, there is always some one point of view which reconciles all that is noted down into a distinct harmony of intellectual effect. Nothing of the kind is discernible in Mr. Owen Meredith's descriptions, which sometimes remind us of a lady's letter, with dashes under all the non-emphatic words, and notes of admiration after all the least significant sentences. Take for instance the following description of the Pyrenees by moonlight, in Lucile:

"The moon of September, now half at the full,

Was unfolding from darkness and dreamland the lull

Of the quiet blue air, where the many-faced hills

Watch'd, well-pleased, their fair slaves, the light, foam-footed rills, Dance and sing down the steep marble stairs of their courts,

And gracefully fashion a thousand sweet sports.

Like ogres in council those mountains look'd down,
Impassive, each king in his purple and crown."

For the moon to unfold "the lull of the quiet blue air" must, we suppose, mean that it was unfolding the quiet of the quiet blue air, a difficult thing for moonlight to effect, though it may well indeed make stillness more emphatic, the silence being much more striking when the air is luminous than when it is dark. Whether that were Mr. Owen Meredith's meaning we do not know; but what we care to point out is not the mere clumsiness, which may have been the result of random rhyme, but the incongruity of emphasis, the absolute want of keeping, in the whole passage. The moon is just gaining power to conquer out of" darkness and dreamland" the blue air of night, when we discover "the many-faced hills" "watching well pleased the light foam-footed rills," and find that the latter remind us of dancing slaves singing and leaping in the marble courts of a palace, and the former, who were a moment

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