Ponkapog Papers

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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  • LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK
  • ASIDES
  • ROBERT HERRICK

  • This etext was created by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska.
    TO FRANCIS BARTLETT


    THESE miscellaneous notes and
    essays are called Ponkapog Papers
    not simply because they chanced, for
    the most part, to be written within the
    limits of the old Indian Reservation,
    but, rather, because there is something
    typical of their unpretentiousness in the
    modesty with which Ponkapog assumes
    to being even a village. The little
    Massachusetts settlement, nestled under
    the wing of the Blue Hills, has no illu-
    sions concerning itself, never mistakes
    the cackle of the bourg for the sound
    that echoes round the world, and no
    more thinks of rivalling great centres of
    human activity than these slight papers
    dream of inviting comparison between
    themselves and important pieces of
    literature. Therefore there seems some-
    thing especially appropriate in the geo-
    graphical title selected, and if the au-
    thor's choice of name need further
    excuse, it is to be found in the alluring
    alliteration lying ready at his hand.

    REDMAN FARM, Ponkapog,
    1903.


    LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK






    IN his Memoirs, Kropotkin states the singular
    fact that the natives of the Malayan Archipel-
    ago have an idea that something is extracted from
    them when their likenesses are taken by photo-
    graphy. Here is the motive for a fantastic short
    story, in which the hero--an author in vogue
    or a popular actor--might be depicted as having
    all his good qualities gradually photographed
    out of him. This could well be the result of
    too prolonged indulgence in the effort to "look
    natural." First the man loses his charming sim-
    plicity; then he begins to pose in intellectual
    attitudes, with finger on brow; then he becomes
    morbidly self-conscious, and finally ends in an
    asylum for incurable egotists. His death might
    be brought about by a cold caught in going out
    bareheaded, there being, for the moment, no hat
    in the market of sufficient circumference to meet
    his enlarged requirement.

    THE evening we dropped anchor in the Bay
    of Yedo the moon was hanging directly over
    Yokohama. It was a mother-of-pearl moon,
    and might have been manufactured by any of
    the delicate artisans in the Hanchodori quarter.
    It impressed one as being a very good imitation,
    but nothing more. Nammikawa, the cloisonne-
    worker at Tokio, could have made a better
    moon.

    I NOTICE the announcement of a new edition
    of "The Two First Centuries of Florentine
    Literature," by Professor Pasquale Villari. I
    am not acquainted with the work in question,
    but I trust that Professor Villari makes it plain
    to the reader how both centuries happened to be
    first.

    THE walking delegates of a higher civiliza-
    tion, who have nothing to divide, look upon the
    notion of property as a purely artificial creation
    of human society. According to these advanced
    philosophers, the time will come when no man
    shall be allowed to call anything his. The bene-
    ficent law which takes away an author's rights
    in his own books just at the period when old
    age is creeping upon him seems to me a hand-
    some stride toward the longed-for millennium.

    SAVE US from our friends--our enemies we
    can guard against. The well-meaning rector of
    the little parish of Woodgates, England, and
    several of Robert Browning's local admirers
    have recently busied themselves in erecting a
    tablet to the memory of "the first known fore-
    father of the poet." This lately turned up an-
    cestor, who does not date very far back, was also
    named Robert Browning, and is described on
    the mural marble as "formerly footman and
    butler to Sir John Bankes of Corfe Castle."
    Now, Robert Browning the poet had as good
    right as Abou Ben Adhem himself to ask to be
    placed on the list of those who love their fellow
    men; but if the poet could have been consulted
    in the matter he probably would have preferred
    not to have that particular footman exhumed.
    However, it is an ill wind that blows nobody
    good. Sir John Bankes would scarcely have
    been heard of in our young century if it had
    not been for his footman. As Robert stood day
    by day, sleek and solemn, behind his master's
    chair in Corfe Castle, how little it entered into
    the head of Sir John that his highly respectable
    name would be served up to posterity--like a
    cold relish--by his own butler! By Robert!

    IN the east-side slums of New York, some-
    where in the picturesque Bowery district,
    stretches a malodorous little street wholly
    given over to long-bearded, bird-beaked mer-
    chants of ready-made and second-hand clothing.
    The contents of the dingy shops seem to have
    revolted, and rushed pell-mell out of doors, and
    taken possession of the sidewalk. One could
    fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this
    point, and that those ghastly rows of complete
    suits strung up on either side of the doorways
    were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders.
    But as you approach these limp figures, each
    dangling and gyrating on its cord in a most
    suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the
    lapel of a coat here and there, a strip of paper
    announcing the very low price at which you
    may become the happy possessor. That dis-
    sipates the illusion.

    POLONIUS, in the play, gets killed--and not
    any too soon. If it only were practicable to kill
    him in real life! A story--to be called The
    Passing of Polonius--in which a king issues a
    decree condemning to death every long-winded,
    didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of
    rank, and is himself instantly arrested and de-
    capitated. The man who suspects his own
    tediousness is yet to be born.

    WHENEVER I take up Emerson's poems I find
    myself turning automatically to his Bacchus.
    Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in
    mediocre verse, he rises for a moment to heights
    not reached by any other of our poets; but
    Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its tex-
    ture can bear comparison with the world's best
    in this kind. In imaginative quality and austere
    richness of diction what other verse of our
    period approaches it? The day Emerson wrote
    Bacchus he had in him, as Michael Drayton said
    of Marlowe, "those brave translunary things
    that the first poets had."


    IMAGINE all human beings swept off the face of
    the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this
    man in some vast city, New York or London.
    Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his
    solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring
    at the door-bell!

    No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an
    honest portrait of himself in an autobiography,
    however sedulously he may have set to work
    about it. In spite of his candid purpose he
    omits necessary touches and adds superfluous
    ones. At times he cannot help draping his
    thought, and the least shred of drapery becomes
    a disguise. It is only the diarist who accom-
    plishes the feat of self-portraiture, and he, with-
    out any such end in view, does it unconsciously.
    A man cannot keep a daily record of his com-
    ings and goings and the little items that make
    up the sum of his life, and not inadvertently
    betray himself at every turn. He lays bare his
    heart with a candor not possible to the self-
    consciousness that inevitably colors premeditated
    revelation. While Pepys was filling those small
    octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he
    never once suspected that he was adding a pho-
    tographic portrait of himself to the world's gal-
    lery of immortals. We are more intimately
    acquainted with Mr. Samuel Pepys, the inner
    man--his little meannesses and his large gener-
    osities--then we are with half the persons we
    call our dear friends.

    THE young girl in my story is to be as sensitive
    to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever any-
    body praises her she breaks into colors.

    IN the process of dusting my study, the other
    morning, the maid replaced an engraving of
    Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the man-
    tel-shelf, and his majesty has remained in that
    undignified posture ever since. I have no dis-
    position to come to his aid. My abhorrence of
    the wretch is as hearty as if he had not been
    dead and--otherwise provided for these last
    three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England
    was nearly as merciless, but she was sincere and
    uncompromising in her extirpation of heretics.

    Philip II., whose one recorded hearty laugh was
    occasioned by the news of the St. Bartholomew
    massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop it
    for the time being, when it seemed politic to do
    so. Queen Mary was a maniac; but the suc-
    cessor of Torquemada was the incarnation of
    cruelty pure and simple, and I have a mind to
    let my counterfeit presentment of him stand on
    its head for the rest of its natural life. I cor-
    dially dislike several persons, but I hate no-
    body, living or dead, excepting Philip II. of
    Spain. He appears to give me as much trouble
    as Charles I. gave the amiable Mr. Dick.

    AMONG the delightful men and women whom
    you are certain to meet at an English country
    house there is generally one guest who is sup-
    posed to be preternaturally clever and amusing
    --"so very droll, don't you know." He recites
    things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and
    mimics public characters. He is a type of a
    class, and I take him to be one of the elemen-
    tary forms of animal life, like the acalephae.
    His presence is capable of adding a gloom to
    an undertaker's establishment. The last time I
    fell in with him was on a coaching trip through
    Devon, and in spite of what I have said I must
    confess to receiving an instant of entertainment
    at his hands. He was delivering a little dis-
    sertation on "the English and American lan-
    guages." As there were two Americans on the
    back seat--it seems we term ourselves "Amur-
    ricans"--his choice of subject was full of tact.
    It was exhilarating to get a lesson in pronuncia-
    tion from a gentleman who said boult for bolt,
    called St. John Sin' Jun, and did not know
    how to pronounce the beautiful name of his
    own college at Oxford. Fancy a perfectly sober
    man saying Maudlin for Magdalen! Perhaps
    the purest English spoken is that of the English
    folk who have resided abroad ever since the
    Elizabethan period, or thereabouts.

    EVERY one has a bookplate these days, and the
    collectors are after it. The fool and his book-
    plate are soon parted. To distribute one's ex-
    libris
    is inanely to destroy the only significance
    it has, that of indicating the past or present
    ownership of the volume in which it is placed.

    WHEN an Englishman is not highly imaginative
    he is apt to be the most matter-of-fact of mortals.
    He is rarely imaginative, and seldom has an alert
    sense of humor. Yet England has produced
    the finest of humorists and the greatest of
    poets. The humor and imagination which
    are diffused through other peoples concentrate
    themselves from time to time in individual
    Englishmen.

    THIS is a page of autobiography, though not
    written in the first person: Many years ago a
    noted Boston publisher used to keep a large
    memorandum-book on a table in his personal
    office. The volume always lay open, and was in
    no manner a private affair, being the receptacle
    of nothing more important than hastily scrawled
    reminders to attend to this thing or the other. It
    chanced one day that a very young, unfledged
    author, passing through the city, looked in upon
    the publisher, who was also the editor of a
    famous magazine. The unfledged had a copy
    of verses secreted about his person. The pub-
    lisher was absent, and young Milton, feeling
    that "they also serve who only stand and wait,"
    sat down and waited. Presently his eye fell
    upon the memorandum-book, lying there spread
    out like a morning newspaper, and almost in
    spite of himself he read: "Don't forget to see
    the binder," "Don't forget to mail E----- his
    contract," "Don't forget H-----'s proofs," etc.
    An inspiration seized upon the youth; he took
    a pencil, and at the tail of this long list of
    "don't forgets " he wrote: "Don't forget to
    accept A 's poem." He left his manuscript
    on the table and disappeared. That afternoon
    when the publisher glanced over his memo-
    randa, he was not a little astonished at the last
    item; but his sense of humor was so strong that
    he did accept the poem (it required a strong
    sense of humor to do that), and sent the lad a
    check for it, though the verses remain to this
    day unprinted. That kindly publisher was wise
    as well as kind.

    FRENCH novels with metaphysical or psycholo-
    gical prefaces are always certain to be particu-
    larly indecent.

    I HAVE lately discovered that Master Harry
    Sandford of England, the priggish little boy
    in the story of "Sandford and Merton," has a
    worthy American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore,
    who sedately pirouettes through a seemingly end-
    less succession of girls' books. I came across
    a nest of fifteen of them the other day. This
    impossible female is carried from infancy up to
    grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still lei-
    surely pursuing her way down to the tomb in an
    ecstatic state of uninterrupted didacticism. There
    are twenty-five volumes of her and the grand-
    daughter, who is also christened Elsie, and is her
    grandmother's own child, with the same preco-
    cious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to
    her elders. An interesting instance of hereditary
    talent!

    H-----'s intellect resembles a bamboo--slender,
    graceful, and hollow. Personally, he is long and
    narrow, and looks as if he might have been
    the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put
    together, like an ill-constructed sentence, and
    affects me like one. His figure is ungrammatical.

    AMERICAN humor is nearly as ephemeral as
    the flowers that bloom in the spring. Each gen-
    eration has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists on
    cultivating a new kind. That of 1860, if it were
    to break into blossom at the present moment,
    would probably be left to fade upon the stem.

    Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing
    hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety
    is especially subject to very early frosts, as is
    also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor
    is not to be classed with the fragile plants; it
    has a serious root striking deep down into
    rich earth, and I think it will go on flowering
    indefinitely.

    I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical journal,
    whose plan should involve the discharge of the
    chief literary critic and the installment of a fresh
    censor on the completion of each issue. To
    place a man in permanent absolute control of a
    certain number of pages, in which to express his
    opinions, is to place him in a position of great
    personal danger, It is almost inevitable that he
    should come to overrate the importance of those
    opinions, to take himself with far too much
    seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of
    his own infallibility. The liberty to summon
    this or that man-of-letters to a supposititious
    bar of justice is apt to beget in the self-ap-
    pointed judge an exaggerated sense of superi-
    ority. He becomes impatient of any rulings not
    his, and says in effect, if not in so many words:
    " I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let
    no dog bark." When the critic reaches this
    exalted frame of mind his slight usefulness is
    gone.

    AFTER a debauch of thunder-shower, the
    weather takes the pledge and signs it with a
    rainbow.

    I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told
    in full. When every detail is given, the mind
    rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the
    desire to use its own wings. The partly draped
    statue has a charm which the nude lacks. Who
    would have those marble folds slip from the
    raised knee of the Venus of Melos? Hawthorne
    knew how to make his lovely thought lovelier
    by sometimes half veiling it.

    I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a
    slight fancy which Herrick has handled twice
    in the "Hesperides." The fancy, however, is
    not Herrick's; it is as old as poetry and the ex-
    aggeration of lovers, and I have the same privi-
    lege as another to try my fortune with it:

    UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE

    CHAUCER



    When some hand has partly drawn
       The cloudy curtains of her bed,
       And my lady's golden head
    Glimmers in the dusk like dawn,
    Then methinks is day begun.
    Later, when her dream has ceased
       And she softly stirs and wakes,
       Then it is as when the East
       A sudden rosy magic takes
    From the cloud-enfolded sun,
       And full day breaks!

    Shakespeare, who has done so much to discour-
    age literature by anticipating everybody, puts the
    whole matter into a nutshell:

       But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
       It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

    THERE is a phrase spoken by Hamlet which I
    have seen quoted innumerable times, and never
    once correctly. Hamlet, addressing Horatio,
    says:

                                  Give me that man
       That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
       In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart.

    The words italicized are invariably written
    "heart of hearts"--as if a person possessed
    that organ in duplicate. Perhaps no one living,
    with the exception of Sir Henry Irving, is more
    familiar with the play of Hamlet than my good
    friend Mr. Bram Stoker, who makes his heart
    plural on two occasions in his recent novel,
    "The Mystery of the Sea." Mrs. Humphry
    Ward also twice misquotes the passage in
    "Lady Rose's Daughter."

    BOOKS that have become classics--books that
    ave had their day and now get more praise
    than perusal--always remind me of venerable
    colonels and majors and captains who, having
    reached the age limit, find themselves retired
    upon half pay.

    WHETHER or not the fretful porcupine rolls itself
    into a ball is a subject over which my friend
    John Burroughs and several brother naturalists
    have lately become as heated as if the question
    involved points of theology. Up among the
    Adirondacks, and in the very heart of the re-
    gion of porcupines, I happen to have a modest
    cottage. This retreat is called The Porcupine,
    and I ought by good rights to know something
    about the habits of the small animal from which
    it derives its name. Last winter my dog Buster
    used to return home on an average of three times
    a month from an excursion up Mt. Pisgah with
    his nose stuck full of quills, and he ought to
    have some concrete ideas on the subject. We
    two, then, are prepared to testify that the por-
    cupine in its moments of relaxation occasion-
    ally contracts itself into what might be taken
    for a ball by persons not too difficult to please
    in the matter of spheres. But neither Buster
    nor I--being unwilling to get into trouble--
    would like to assert that it is an actual ball.
    That it is a shape with which one had better
    not thoughtlessly meddle is a conviction that
    my friend Buster stands ready to defend against
    all comers.

    WORDSWORTH'S characterization of the woman
    in one of his poems as "a creature not too bright
    or good for human nature's daily food" has
    always appeared to me too cannibalesque to be
    poetical. It directly sets one to thinking of the
    South Sea islanders.

    THOUGH Iago was not exactly the kind of per-
    son one would select as a superintendent for a
    Sunday-school, his advice to young Roderigo
    was wisdom itself--"Put money in thy purse."
    Whoever disparages money disparages every
    step in the progress of the human race. I lis-
    tened the other day to a sermon in which gold was
    personified as a sort of glittering devil tempting
    mortals to their ruin. I had an instant of natural
    hesitation when the contribution-plate was passed
    around immediately afterward. Personally, I be-
    lieve that the possession of gold has ruined fewer
    men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises
    have been checked and what fine souls have been
    blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will
    never know. "After the love of knowledge,"
    says Buckle, " there is no one passion which has
    done so much good to mankind as the love of
    money."

    DIALECT tempered with slang is an admirable
    medium of communication between persons who
    have nothing to say and persons who would not
    care for anything properly said.

    DR. HOLMES had an odd liking for ingenious
    desk-accessories in the way of pencil-sharpeners,
    paper-weights, penholders, etc. The latest con-
    trivances in this fashion--probably dropped
    down to him by the inventor angling for a nibble
    of commendation--were always making one
    another's acquaintance on his study table. He
    once said to me: "I 'm waiting for somebody to
    invent a mucilage-brush that you can't by any
    accident put into your inkstand. It would save
    me frequent moments of humiliation."

    THE deceptive Mr. False and the volatile Mrs.
    Giddy, who figure in the pages of seventeenth
    and eighteenth century fiction, are not tolerated in
    modern novels and plays. Steal the burglar and
    Palette the artist have ceased to be. A name
    indicating the quality or occupation of the bearer
    strikes us as a too transparent device. Yet there
    are such names in contemporary real life. That
    of our worthy Adjutant-General Drum may be
    instanced. Neal and Pray are a pair of deacons
    who linger in the memory of my boyhood. Sweet
    the confectioner and Lamb the butcher are indi-
    viduals with whom I have had dealings. The
    old-time sign of Ketchum Cheetam, Brokers,
    in Wall Street, New York, seems almost too
    good to be true. But it was once, if it is not
    now, an actuality.

    I HAVE observed that whenever a Boston author
    dies, New York immediately becomes a great
    literary centre.

    THE possession of unlimited power will make
    a despot of almost any man. There is a pos-
    sible Nero in the gentlest human creature that
    walks.

    EVERY living author has a projection of him-
    self, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near
    and remote places making friends or enemies
    for him among persons who never lay eyes upon
    the writer in the flesh. When he dies, this phan-
    tasmal personality fades away, and the author
    lives only in the impression created by his own
    literature. It is only then that the world begins
    to perceive what manner of man the poet, the
    novelist, or the historian really was. Not until
    he is dead, and perhaps some long time dead, is
    it possible for the public to take his exact mea-
    sure. Up to that point contemporary criticism
    has either overrated him or underrated him, or
    ignored him altogether, having been misled by
    the eidolon, which always plays fantastic tricks
    with the writer temporarily under its dominion.
    It invariably represents him as either a greater
    or a smaller personage than he actually is. Pre-
    sently the simulacrum works no more spells,
    good or evil, and the deception is unveiled. The
    hitherto disregarded author is recognized, and
    the idol of yesterday, which seemed so impor-
    tant, is taken down from his too large pedestal
    and carted off to the dumping-ground of inade-
    quate things. To be sure, if he chances to have
    been not entirely unworthy, and on cool exam-
    ination is found to possess some appreciable
    degree of merit, then he is set up on a new slab
    of appropriate dimensions. The late colossal
    statue shrinks to a modest bas-relief. On the
    other hand, some scarcely noticed bust may
    suddenly become a revered full-length figure.
    Between the reputation of the author living and
    the reputation of the same author dead there is
    ever a wide discrepancy.

    A NOT too enchanting glimpse of Tennyson is
    incidentally given by Charles Brookfield, the
    English actor, in his "Random Recollections."
    Mr. Brookfield's father was, on one occasion,
    dining at the Oxford and Cambridge Club with
    George Venables, Frank Lushington, Alfred
    Tennyson, and others. "After dinner," relates
    the random recollector, "the poet insisted upon
    putting his feet on the table, tilting back his
    chair more Americano. There were strangers
    in the room, and he was expostulated with for
    his uncouthness, but in vain. 'Do put down
    your feet!' pleaded his host. 'Why should I?'
    retorted Tennyson. 'I 'm very comfortable as
    I am.' 'Every one's staring at you,' said an-
    other. 'Let 'em stare,' replied the poet, pla-
    cidly. 'Alfred,' said my father, 'people will
    think you're Longfellow.' Down went the
    feet." That more Americano of Brookfield the
    younger is delicious with its fine insular flavor,
    but the holding up of Longfellow--the soul of
    gentleness, the prince of courtesy--as a buga-
    boo of bad manners is simply inimitable. It
    will take England years and years to detect the
    full unconscious humor of it.

    GREAT orators who are not also great writers
    become very indistinct historical shadows to the
    generations immediately following them. The
    spell vanishes with the voice. A man's voice is
    almost the only part of him entirely obliterated
    by death. The violet of his native land may be
    made of his ashes, but nature in her economy
    seems to have taken no care of his intonations,
    unless she perpetuates them in restless waves of
    air surging about the poles. The well-graced
    actor who leaves no perceptible record of his
    genius has a decided advantage over the mere
    orator. The tradition of the player's method
    and presence is associated with works of endur-
    ing beauty. Turning to the pages of the drama-
    tist, we can picture to ourselves the greatness of
    Garrick or Siddons in this or that scene, in this
    or that character. It is not so easy to conjure up
    the impassioned orator from the pages of a dry
    and possibly illogical argument in favor of or
    against some long-ago-exploded measure of gov-
    ernment. The laurels of an orator who is not a
    master of literary art wither quickly.

    ALL the best sands of my life are somehow get-
    ting into the wrong end of the hour-glass. If I
    could only reverse it! Were it in my power to
    do so, would I?

    SHAKESPEARE is forever coming into our affairs
    --putting in his oar, so to speak--with some
    pat word or sentence. The conversation, the
    other evening, had turned on the subject of
    watches, when one of the gentlemen present,
    the manager of a large watch-making establish-
    ment, told us a rather interesting fact. The
    component parts of a watch are produced by
    different workmen, who have no concern with
    the complex piece of mechanism as a whole,
    and possibly, as a rule, understand it imper-
    fectly. Each worker needs to be expert in only
    his own special branch. When the watch has
    reached a certain advanced state, the work
    requires a touch as delicate and firm as that of
    an oculist performing an operation. Here the
    most skilled and trustworthy artisans are em-
    ployed; they receive high wages, and have the
    benefit of a singular indulgence. In case the
    workman, through too continuous application,
    finds himself lacking the steadiness of nerve
    demanded by his task, he is allowed without
    forfeiture of pay to remain idle temporarily, in
    order that his hand may recover the requisite
    precision of touch. As I listened, Hamlet's
    courtly criticism of the grave-digger's want of
    sensibility came drifting into my memory.
    "The hand of little employment hath the dain-
    tier sense," says Shakespeare, who has left no-
    thing unsaid.

    IT was a festival in honor of Dai Butsu or some
    one of the auxiliary deities that preside over the
    destinies of Japland. For three days and nights
    the streets of Tokio--where the squat little
    brown houses look for all the world as if they
    were mimicking the favorite sitting posture of
    the Japanese--were crowded with smiling hol-
    iday makers, and made gay with devices of
    tinted tissue paper, dolphins, devils, dragons, and
    mythical winged creatures which at night amia-
    bly turned themselves into lanterns. Garlands
    of these, arranged close together, were stretched
    across the streets from ridgepoles to ridgepole,
    and your jinrikisha whisked you through inter-
    minable arbors of soft illumination. The spec-
    tacle gave one an idea of fairyland, but then all
    Japan does that.

    A land not like ours, that land of strange flowers,
    Of daemons and spooks with mysterious powers--
         Of gods who breathe ice, who cause peach-blooms and rice
    And manage the moonshine and turn on the showers.

    Each day has its fair or its festival there,
    And life seems immune to all trouble and care--
         Perhaps only seems, in that island of dreams,
    Sea-girdled and basking in magical air.

    They've streets of bazaars filled with lacquers and jars,
    And silk stuffs, and sword-blades that tell of old wars;
         They've Fuji's white cone looming up, bleak and lone,
    As if it were trying to reach to the stars.

    They've temples and gongs, and grim Buddhas in throngs,
    And pearl-powdered geisha with dances and songs:
         Each girl at her back has an imp, brown or black,
    And dresses her hair in remarkable prongs.

    On roadside and street toddling images meet,
    And smirk and kotow in a way that is sweet;
         Their obis are tied with particular pride,
    Their silken kimonos hang scant to the feet.

    With purrs like a cat they all giggle and chat,
    Now spreading their fans, and now holding them flat;
         A fan by its play whispers, "Go now!" or "Stay!"
    "I hate you! "I love you!"--a fan can say that!
    Beneath a dwarf tree, here and there, two or three
    Squat coolies are sipping small cups of green tea;
         They sputter, and leer, and cry out, and appear
    Like bad little chessmen gone off on a spree.

    At night--ah, at night the long streets are a sight,
    With garlands of soft-colored lanterns alight--
         Blue, yellow, and red twinkling high overhead,
    Like thousands of butterflies taking their flight.

    Somewhere in the gloom that no lanterns illume
    Stand groups of slim lilies and jonquils in bloom;
         On tiptoe, unseen 'mid a tangle of green,
    They offer the midnight their cups of perfume.

    At times, sweet and clear from some tea-garden near,
    A ripple of laughter steals out to your ear;
         Anon the wind brings from a samisen's strings
    The pathos that's born of a smile and a tear.

    THE difference between an English audience
    and a French audience at the theatre is marked.
    The Frenchman brings down a witticism on the
    wing. The Briton pauses for it to alight and
    give him reasonable time for deliberate aim. In
    English playhouses an appreciable number of
    seconds usually precede the smile or the ripple
    of laughter that follows a facetious turn of the
    least fineness. I disclaim all responsibility for
    this statement of my personal observation, since
    it has recently been indorsed by one of London's
    most eminent actors.

    AT the next table, taking his opal drops of
    absinthe, was a French gentleman with the
    blase aspect of an empty champagne-bottle,
    which always has the air of saying: "I have
    lived!"

    WE often read of wonderful manifestations of
    memory, but they are always instances of the
    faculty working in some special direction. It is
    memory playing, like Paganini, on one string.
    No doubt the persons performing the phenome-
    nal feats ascribed to them have forgotten more
    than they remember. To be able to repeat a
    hundred lines of verse after a single reading is
    no proof of a retentive mind, excepting so far as
    the hundred lines go. A man might easily fail
    under such a test, and yet have a good memory;
    by which I mean a catholic one, and that I
    imagine to be nearly the rarest of gifts. I have
    never met more than four or five persons pos-
    sessing it. The small boy who defined memory
    as "the thing you forget with" described the
    faculty as it exists and works in the majority of
    men and women.

    THE survival in publishers of the imitative in-
    stinct is a strong argument in support of Mr.
    Darwin's theory of the descent of man. One
    publisher no sooner brings out a new style of
    book-cover than half a dozen other publishers
    fall to duplicating it.

    THE cavalry sabre hung over the chimney-place
    with a knot of violets tied to the dinted guard,
    there being no known grave to decorate. For
    many a year, on each Decoration Day, a sorrow-
    ful woman had come and fastened these flowers
    there. The first time she brought her offering
    she was a slender girl, as fresh as her own vio-
    lets. It is a slender figure still, but there are
    threads of silver in the black hair.

    FORTUNATE was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,
    who in early youth was taught "to abstain from
    rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing"--espe-
    cially the fine writing. Simplicity is art's last
    word.

    The man is clearly an adventurer. In the seven-
    teenth century he would have worn huge flint-
    lock pistols stuck into a wide leather belt, and
    been something in the seafaring line. The fel-
    low is always smartly dressed, but where he
    lives and how he lives are as unknown as
    "what song the Sirens sang, or what name
    Achilles assumed when he hid himself among
    women." He is a man who apparently has no
    appointment with his breakfast and whose din-
    ner is a chance acquaintance. His probable
    banker is the next person. A great city like
    this is the only geography for such a character.
    He would be impossible in a small country
    town, where everybody knows everybody and
    what everybody has for lunch.

    I HAVE been seeking, thus far in vain, for the
    proprietor of the saying that "Economy is sec-
    ond or third cousin to Avarice." I went rather
    confidently to Rochefoucauld, but it is not
    among that gentleman's light luggage of cynical
    maxims.

    THERE is a popular vague impression that butch-
    ers are not allowed to serve as jurors on mur-
    der trials. This is not really the case, but it
    logically might be. To a man daily familiar
    with the lurid incidents of the abattoir, the
    summary extinction of a fellow creature (whe-
    ther the victim or the criminal) can scarcely
    seem a circumstance of so serious moment
    as to another man engaged in less strenuous
    pursuits.
    WE do not, and cannot, read many of the novels
    that most delighted our ancestors. Some of our
    popular fiction is doubtless as poor, but poor
    with a difference. There is always a heavy de-
    mand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation
    the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.
    There is ragtime literature as well as ragtime
    music for the many.

    G----- is a man who had rather fail in a great
    purpose than not accomplish it in precisely his
    own way. He has the courage of his conviction
    and the intolerance of his courage. He is op-
    posed to the death penalty for murder, but he
    would willingly have any one electrocuted who
    disagreed with him on the subject.


    I HAVE thought of an essay to be called "On
    the Art of Short-Story Writing," but have given
    it up as smacking too much of the shop. It
    would be too intime, since I should have to deal
    chiefly with my own ways, and so give myself
    the false air of seeming to consider them of im-
    portance. It would interest nobody to know
    that I always write the last paragraph first, and
    then work directly up to that, avoiding all di-
    gressions and side issues. Then who on earth
    would care to be told about the trouble my
    characters cause me by talking too much?
    They will talk, and I have to let them; but
    when the story is finished, I go over the dia-
    logue and strike out four fifths of the long
    speeches. I fancy that makes my characters
    pretty mad.

    THIS is the golden age of the inventor. He is
    no longer looked upon as a madman or a wiz-
    ard, incontinently to be made away with. Two
    or three centuries ago Marconi would not have
    escaped a ropeless end with his wireless telegra-
    phy. Even so late as 1800, the friends of one
    Robert Fulton seriously entertained the lumi-
    nous idea of hustling the poor man into an asy-
    lum for the unsound before he had a chance to
    fire up the boiler of his tiny steamboat on the
    Hudson river. In olden times the pillory and
    the whipping-post were among the gentler forms
    of encouragement awaiting the inventor. If a
    man devised an especially practical apple-peeler
    he was in imminent danger of being peeled with
    it by an incensed populace. To-day we hail
    with enthusiasm a scientific or a mechanical
    discovery, and stand ready to make a stock
    company of it.

    A MAN is known by the company his mind
    keeps. To live continually with noble books,
    with "high-erected thoughts seated in the heart
    of courtesy," teaches the soul good manners.

    THE unconventional has ever a morbid attrac-
    tion for a certain class of mind. There is always
    a small coterie of highly intellectual men and
    women eager to give welcome to whatever is
    eccentric, obscure, or chaotic. Worshipers at
    the shrine of the Unpopular, they tingle with
    a sense of tolerant superiority when they say:
    "Of course this is not the kind of thing you
    would like." Sometimes these impressionable
    souls almost seem to make a sort of reputation
    for their fetish.

    I HEAR that B----- directed to have himself
    buried on the edge of the pond where his duck-
    stand was located, in order that flocks of migrat-
    ing birds might fly over his grave every autumn.
    He did not have to die, to become a dead shot.
    A comrade once said of him: "Yes, B----- is
    a great sportsman. He has peppered every-
    thing from grouse in North Dakota to his best
    friend in the Maine woods."

    WHEN the novelist introduces a bore into his
    novel he must not let him bore the reader. The
    fellow must be made amusing, which he would
    not be in real life. In nine cases out of ten
    an exact reproduction of real life would prove
    tedious. Facts are not necessarily valuable, and
    frequently they add nothing to fiction. The art
    of the realistic novelist sometimes seems akin to
    that of the Chinese tailor who perpetuated the
    old patch on the new trousers. True art selects
    and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim
    translation.

    THE last meeting I had with Lowell was in the
    north room of his house at Elmwood, the sleep-
    ing-room I had occupied during a two years'
    tenancy of the place in his absence abroad. He
    was lying half propped up in bed, convales-
    cing from one of the severe attacks that were
    ultimately to prove fatal. Near the bed was a
    chair on which stood a marine picture in aqua-
    relle--a stretch of calm sea, a bit of rocky
    shore in the foreground, if I remember, and a
    vessel at anchor. The afternoon sunlight, falling
    through the window, cast a bloom over the pic-
    ture, which was turned toward Lowell. From
    time to time, as he spoke, his eyes rested
    thoughtfully on the water-color. A friend, he
    said, had just sent it to him. It seemed to me
    then, and the fancy has often haunted me since,
    that that ship, in the golden haze, with top-
    sails loosened, was waiting to bear his spirit
    away.

    CIVILIZATION is the lamb's skin in which bar-
    barism masquerades. If somebody has already
    said that, I forgive him the mortification he
    causes me. At the beginning of the twentieth
    century barbarism can throw off its gentle dis-
    guise, and burn a man at the stake as compla-
    cently as in the Middle Ages.

    WHAT is slang in one age sometimes goes into
    the vocabulary of the purist in the next. On
    the other hand, expressions that once were not
    considered inelegant are looked at askance in
    the period following. The word "brass" was
    formerly an accepted synonym for money; but
    at present, when it takes on that significance, it
    is not admitted into genteel circles of language.
    It may be said to have seen better days, like
    another word I have in mind--a word that has
    become slang, employed in the sense which
    once did not exclude it from very good society.
    A friend lately informed me that he had "fired"
    his housekeeper--that is, dismissed her. He
    little dreamed that he was speaking excellent
    Elizabethan.

    THE "Journal des Goncourt" is crowded with
    beautiful and hideous things, like a Japanese
    Museum.

    "AND she shuddered as she sat, still silent, on
    her seat, and he saw that she shuddered." This
    is from Anthony Trollope's novel, "Can You
    Forgive Her?" Can you forgive him? is the
    next question.

    A LITTLE thing may be perfect, but perfection
    is not a little thing. Possessing this quality, a
    trifle "no bigger than an agate-stone on the
    forefinger of an alderman" shall outlast the
    Pyramids. The world will have forgotten all
    the great masterpieces of literature when it for-
    gets Lovelace's three verses to Lucasta on his
    going to the wars. More durable than marble
    or bronze are the words, "I could not love
    thee, deare, so much, loved I not honor more."

    I CALLED on the dear old doctor this afternoon
    to say good-by. I shall probably not find him
    here when I come back from the long voyage
    which I have in front of me. He is very fragile,
    and looks as though a puff of wind would blow
    him away. He said himself, with his old-time
    cheerfulness, that he was attached to this earth
    by only a little piece of twine. He has percep-
    tibly failed since I saw him a month ago; but
    he was full of the wise and radiant talk to which
    all the world has listened, and will miss. I
    found him absorbed in a newly made card-cata-
    logue of his library. "It was absurd of me to
    have it done," he remarked. "What I really
    require is a little bookcase holding only two
    volumes; then I could go from one to the other
    in alternation and always find each book as fresh
    as if I never had read it." This arraignment of
    his memory was in pure jest, for the doctor's
    mind was to the end like an unclouded crystal.
    It was interesting to note how he studied him-
    self, taking his own pulse, as it were, and diag-
    nosing his own case in a sort of scientific,
    impersonal way, as if it were somebody else's
    case and he were the consulting specialist. I
    intended to spend a quarter of an hour with
    him, and he kept me three hours. I went there
    rather depressed, but I returned home leavened
    with his good spirits, which, I think, will never
    desert him, here or hereafter. To keep the heart
    unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful,
    reverent--that is to triumph over old age.

    THE thing one reads and likes, and then forgets,
    is of no account. The thing that stays, and
    haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is
    the sincere thing. I am describing the impres-
    sion left upon me by Mr. Howells's blank-verse
    sketch called "Father and Mother: A Mystery"
    --a strangely touching and imaginative piece
    of work, not unlike in effect to some of Mae-
    terlinck's psychical dramas. As I read on, I
    seemed to be standing in a shadow cast by some
    half-remembered experience of my own in a
    previous state of existence. When I went to
    bed that night I had to lie awake and think it
    over as an event that had actually befallen me.
    I should call the effect weird, if the word had
    not lately been worked to death. The gloom of
    Poe and the spirituality of Hawthorne touch
    cold finger-tips in those three or four pages.

    FOR a character-study--a man made up en-
    tirely of limitations. His conservatism and neg-
    ative qualities to be represented as causing him
    to attain success where men of conviction and
    real ability fail of it.

    A DARK, saturnine man sat opposite me at table
    on board the steamer. During the entire run from
    Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed no
    one at meal-times excepting his table steward.
    Seated next to him, on the right, was a viva-
    cious gentleman, who, like Gratiano in the play,
    spoke "an infinite deal of nothing." He made
    persistent and pathetic attempts to lure his silent
    neighbor (we had christened him "William the
    Silent") into conversation, but a monosyllable
    was always the poor result--until one day. It
    was the last day of the voyage. We had stopped
    at the entrance to Queenstown harbor to deliver
    the mails, and some fish had been brought
    aboard. The vivacious gentleman was in a
    high state of excitement that morning at table.
    "Fresh fish!" he exclaimed; "actually fresh!
    They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish,
    of course. Can you tell me, sir," he inquired,
    turning to his gloomy shipmate, "what kind of
    fish these are?" "Cork soles," said the saturn-
    ine man, in a deep voice, and then went on
    with his breakfast.

    LOWELL used to find food for great mirth in
    General George P. Morris's line,

         Her heart and morning broke together.

    Lowell's well-beloved Dr. Donne, however,
    had an attack of the same platitude, and pos-
    sibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature
    seems to have its mischief-making bacilli. The
    late "incomparable and ingenious Dean of St.
    Paul's" says,

         The day breaks not, it is my heart.

    I think Dr. Donne's case rather worse than
    Morris's. Chaucer had the malady in a milder
    form when he wrote:

         Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye.

    The charming naivete of it!

    SITTING in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the
    Lyceum Theatre one evening during that lady's
    temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bern-
    hardt picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty
    word on the mirror--Dearling, mistaking it
    for the word darling. The French actress lighted
    by chance upon a Spenserianism now become
    obsolete without good reason. It is a more
    charming adjective than the one that has re-
    placed it.

    A DEAD author appears to be bereft of all earthly
    rights. He is scarcely buried before old maga-
    zines and newspapers are ransacked in search
    of matters which, for reasons sufficient to him,
    he had carefully excluded from the definitive
    edition of his collected writings.

         He gave the people of his best;
         His worst he kept, his best he gave.

    One can imagine a poet tempted to address
    some such appeal as this to any possible future
    publisher of his poems:

         Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line,
         Take all, take nothing--and God send thee cheer!
         But my anathema on thee and thine
         If thou add'st aught to what is printed here.


    THE claim of this country to call itself "The
    Land of the Free" must be held in abeyance
    until every man in it, whether he belongs or
    does not belong to a labor organization, shall
    have the right to work for his daily bread.

    THERE is a strain of primitive poetry running
    through the entire Irish race, a fleeting lyrical
    emotion which expresses itself in a flash, usually
    in connection with love of country and kindred
    across the sea. I had a touching illustration of it
    the other morning. The despot who reigns over
    our kitchen was gathering a mess of dandelions on
    the rear lawn. It was one of those blue and gold
    days which seem especially to belong New Eng-
    land. "It's in County Westmeath I 'd be this
    day," she said, looking up at me. "I'd go cool
    my hands in the grass on my ould mother's
    grave in the bit of churchyard foreninst
    the priest's house at Mullingar."
    I have
    seen poorer poetry than that in the magazines.


    SPEAKING of the late Major Pond, the well-
    known director of a lecture bureau, an old client
    of his remarked: "He was a most capable
    manager, but it always made me a little sore to
    have him deduct twenty-five per cent. commis-
    sion." "Pond's Extract," murmured one of the
    gentlemen present.

    EACH of our great towns has its "Little Italy,"
    with shops where nothing is spoken but Italian
    and streets in which the alien pedestrian had
    better not linger after nightfall. The chief in-
    dustry of these exotic communities seems to be
    spaghetti and stilettos. What with our Little
    Italys and Chinatowns, and the like, an Ameri-
    can need not cross the ocean in order to visit
    foreign lands and enjoy the benefits of older
    civilizations.

    POETS are made as well as born, the proverb
    notwithstanding. They are made possible by
    the general love of poetry and the consequent
    imperious demand for it. When this is non-
    existent, poets become mute, the atmosphere
    stifles them. There would have been no Shake-
    speare had there been no Elizabethan audience.
    That was an age when, as Emerson finely puts
    it,

                    Men became
         Poets, for the air was fame.

    THE stolid gentleman in livery who has his car-
    riage-stand at the corner opposite my house is
    constantly touching on the extremes of human
    experience, with probably not the remotest per-
    ception of the fact. Now he takes a pair of lovers
    out for an airing, and now he drives the abscond-
    ing bank-teller to the railway-station. Except-
    ing as question of distance, the man has positively
    no choice between a theatre and a graveyard. I
    met him this morning dashing up to the portals
    of Trinity Church with a bridal party, and this
    afternoon, as I was crossing Cambridge Bridge,
    I saw him creeping along next to the hearse, on
    his way to Mount Auburn. The wedding af-
    forded him no pleasure, and the funeral gave
    him no grief; yet he was a factor in both. It is
    his odd destiny to be wholly detached from the
    vital part of his own acts. If the carriage itself
    could speak! The autobiography of a public
    hack written without reservation would be dra-
    matic reading.

    IN this blotted memorandum-book are a score
    or two of suggestions for essays, sketches, and
    poems, which I have not written, and never
    shall write. The instant I jot down an idea the
    desire to utilize it leaves me, and I turn away to
    do something unpremeditated. The shabby vol-
    ume has become a sort of Potter's Field where I
    bury my literary intentions, good and bad, with-
    out any belief in their final resurrection.

    A STAGE DIRECTION: exit time; enter
    Eternity--with a soliloquy.





    ASIDES






    TOM FOLIO



    IN my early Boston days a gentle soul was
    often to be met with about town, furtively
    haunting old book-shops and dusty editorial
    rooms, a man of ingratiating simplicity of man-
    ner, who always spoke in a low, hesitating voice,
    with a note of refinement in it. He was a de-
    vout worshiper of Elia, and wrote pleasant dis-
    cursive essays smacking somewhat of his master's
    flavor--suggesting rather than imitating it--
    which he signed "Tom Folio." I forget how
    he glided into my acquaintanceship; doubtless in
    some way too shy and elusive for remembrance.
    I never knew him intimately, perhaps no one
    did, but the intercourse between us was most
    cordial, and our chance meetings and bookish
    chats extended over a space of a dozen years.
         Tom Folio--I cling to the winning pseu-
    donym--was sparely built and under medium
    height, or maybe a slight droop of the shoulders
    made it seem so, with a fragile look about him
    and an aspect of youth that was not his. En-
    countering him casually on a street corner, you
    would, at the first glance, have taken him for a
    youngish man, but the second glance left you
    doubtful. It was a figure that struck a note of
    singularity and would have attracted your atten-
    tion even in a crowd.
         During the first four or five years of our ac-
    quaintance, meeting him only out of doors or in
    shops, I had never happened to see him with his
    hat off. One day he recklessly removed it, and
    in the twinkling of an eye he became an elderly
    bald-headed man. The Tom Folio I once knew
    had virtually vanished. An instant earlier he
    was a familiar shape; an instant later, an almost
    unrecognizable individual. A narrow fringe of
    light-colored hair, extending from ear to ear
    under the rear brim of his hat, had perpetrated
    an unintentional deception by leading one to sup-
    pose a head profusely covered with curly locks.
    "Tom Folio," I said, "put on your hat and
    come back! But after that day he never seemed
    young to me.
         I had few or no inklings of his life discon-
    nected with the streets and the book-stalls, chiefly
    those on Cornhill or in the vicinity. It is possi-
    ble I am wrong in inferring that he occupied a
    room somewhere at the South End or in South
    Boston, and lived entirely alone, heating his cof-
    fee and boiling his egg over an alcohol lamp. I
    got from him one or two fortuitous hints of
    quaint housekeeping. Every winter, it appeared,
    some relative, far or near, sent him a large batch
    of mince pies, twenty or thirty at least. He once
    spoke to me of having laid in his winter pie, just
    as another might speak of laying in his winter
    coal. The only fireside companion Tom Folio
    ever alluded to in my presence was a Maltese
    cat, whose poor health seriously disturbed him
    from time to time. I suspected those mince
    pies. The cat, I recollect, was named Miss
    Mowcher.
         If he had any immediate family ties beyond
    this I was unaware of them, and not curious to
    be enlightened on the subject. He was more pic-
    turesque solitary. I preferred him to remain so.
    Other figures introduced into the background of
    the canvas would have spoiled the artistic effect.
         Tom Folio was a cheerful, lonely man--a
    recluse even when he allowed himself to be
    jostled and hurried along on the turbulent stream
    of humanity sweeping in opposite directions
    through Washington Street and its busy estu-
    aries. He was in the crowd, but not of it. I
    had so little real knowledge of him that I was
    obliged to imagine his more intimate environ-
    ments. However wide of the mark my conjec-
    tures may have fallen, they were as satisfying to
    me as facts would have been. His secluded
    room I could picture to myself with a sense of
    certainty--the couch (a sofa by day), the cup-
    board, the writing-table with its student lamp,
    the litter of pamphlets and old quartos and oc-
    tavos in tattered bindings, among which were
    scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb,
    and perhaps--nay, surely--an editio prin-
    ceps
    of the "Essays."
         The gentle Elia never had a gentler follower
    or a more loving disciple than Tom Folio. He
    moved and had much of his being in the early
    part of the last century. To him the South-Sea
    House was the most important edifice on the
    globe, remaining the same venerable pile it used
    to be, in spite of all the changes that had be-
    fallen it. It was there Charles Lamb passed the
    novitiate of his long years of clerkship in the
    East India Company. In Tom Folio's fancy a
    slender, boyish figure was still seated, quill in
    hand, behind those stately porticoes looking upon
    Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. That
    famous first paper in the "Essays," describing
    the South-Sea House and the group of human
    oddities which occupied desks within its gloomy
    chambers, had left an indelible impression upon
    the dreamer. Every line traced by the "lean
    annuitant" was as familiar to Tom Folio as if
    he had written it himself. Stray scraps, which
    had escaped the vigilance of able editors, were
    known to him, and it was his to unearth amid
    a heap of mouldy, worm-eaten magazines, a
    handful of leaves hitherto forgotten of all men.
    Trifles, yes--but Charles Lamb's! "The
    king's chaff is as good as other people's corn,"
    says Tom Folio.
         Often his talk was sweet and racy with old-
    fashioned phrases; the talk of a man who loved
    books and drew habitual breath in an atmosphere
    of fine thought. Next to Charles Lamb, but at
    a convenable distance, Izaak Walton was Tom
    Folio's favorite. His poet was Alexander Pope,
    though he thought Mr. Addison's tragedy of
    "Cato" contained some proper good lines. Our
    friend was a wide reader in English classics,
    greatly preferring the literature of the earlier pe-
    riods to that of the Victorian age. His smiling,
    tenderly expressed disapprobation of various
    modern authors was enchanting. John Keats's
    verses were monstrous pretty, but over-orna-
    mented. A little too much lucent syrup tinct
    with cinnamon, don't you think? The poetry
    of Shelley might have been composed in the
    moon by a slightly deranged, well-meaning per-
    son. If you wanted a sound mind in a sound
    metrical body, why there was Mr. Pope's "Essay
    on Man." There was something winsome and
    by-gone in the general make-up of Tom Folio.
    No man living in the world ever seemed to me
    to live so much out of it, or to live more com-
    fortably.
         At times I half suspected him of a conva-
    lescent amatory disappointment. Perhaps long
    before I knew him he had taken a little senti-
    mental journey, the unsuccessful end of which
    had touched him with a gentle sadness. It was
    something far off and softened by memory. If
    Tom Folio had any love-affair on hand in my
    day, it must have been of an airy, platonic sort
    --a chaste secret passion for Mistress Peg Wof-
    fington or Nell Gwyn, or possibly Mr. Wal-
    ler's Saccharissa.
         Although Tom Folio was not a collector--
    that means dividends and bank balances--he
    had a passion for the Past and all its belongings,
    with a virtuoso's knowledge of them. A fan
    painted by Vanloo, a bit of rare Nankin (he had
    caught from Charles Lamb the love of old china),
    or an undoctored stipple of Bartolozzi, gave him
    delight in the handling, though he might not
    aspire to ownership. I believe he would will-
    ingly have drunk any horrible decoction from
    a silver teapot of Queen Anne's time. These
    things were not for him in a coarse, materialistic
    sense; in a spiritual sense he held possession of
    them in fee-simple. I learned thus much of his
    tastes one day during an hour we spent together
    in the rear showroom of a dealer in antiquities.
         I have spoken of Tom Folio as lonely, but I
    am inclined to think that I mis-stated it. He
    had hosts of friends who used to climb the rather
    steep staircase leading to that modest third-story
    front room which I have imagined for him--a
    room with Turkey-red curtains, I like to believe,
    and a rare engraving of a scene from Mr. Ho-
    garth's excellent moral of "The Industrious and
    Idle Apprentices" pinned against the chimney
    breast. Young Chatterton, who was not always
    the best of company, dropped in at intervals.
    There Mr. Samuel Pepys had a special chair
    reserved for him by the window, where he could
    catch a glimpse of the pretty housemaid over the
    way, chatting with the policeman at the area
    railing. Dr. Johnson and the unworldly author
    of "The Deserted Village" were frequent visit-
    ors, sometimes appearing together arm-in-arm,
    with James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck, fol-
    lowing obsequiously behind. Not that Tom
    Folio did not have callers vastly more aristo-
    cratic, though he could have had none plea-
    santer or wholesomer. Sir Philip Sidney (who
    must have given Folio that copy of the "Arca-
    dia"), the Viscount St. Albans, and even two
    or three others before whom either of these might
    have doffed his bonnet, did not disdain to gather
    round that hearthstone. Fielding, Smollett,
    Sterne, Defoe, Dick Steele, Dean Swift--there
    was no end to them! On certain nights, when all
    the stolid neighborhood was lapped in slumber,
    the narrow street stretching beneath Tom Folio's
    windows must have been blocked with invisible
    coaches and sedan-chairs, and illuminated by the
    visionary glare of torches borne by shadowy
    linkboys hurrying hither and thither. A man
    so sought after and companioned cannot be
    described as lonely.
         My memory here recalls the fact that he had
    a few friends less insubstantial--that quaint
    anatomy perched on the top of a hand-organ, to
    whom Tom Folio was wont to give a bite of his
    apple; and the brown-legged little Neapolitan
    who was always nearly certain of a copper when
    this multi-millionaire strolled through the slums
    on a Saturday afternoon--Saturday probably
    being the essayist's pay-day. The withered
    woman of the peanut-stand on the corner over
    against Faneuil Hall Market knew him for a
    friend, as did also the blind lead-pencil merchant,
    whom Tom Folio, on occasions, safely piloted
    across the stormy traffic of Dock Square. No-
    blesse oblige!
    He was no stranger in those
    purlieus. Without designing to confuse small
    things with great, I may say that a certain strip
    of pavement in North Street could be pointed
    out as Tom Folio's Walk, just as Addison's
    Walk is pointed out on the banks of the Cher-
    well at Oxford.
         I used to observe that when Tom Folio was
    not in quest of a print or a pamphlet or some
    such urgent thing, but was walking for mere
    recreation, he instinctively avoided respectable
    latitudes. He liked best the squalid, ill-kept
    thoroughfares shadowed by tall, smudgy tene-
    ment-houses and teeming with unprosperous,
    noisy life. Perhaps he had, half consciously,
    a sense of subtle kinship to the unsuccess and
    cheerful resignation of it all.
         Returning home from abroad one October
    morning several years ago, I was told that that
    simple spirit had passed on. His death had
    been little heeded; but in him had passed away
    an intangible genuine bit of Old Boston--as
    genuine a bit, in its kind, as the Autocrat himself
    --a personality not to be restored or replaced.
    Tom Folio could never happen again!

         Strolling to-day through the streets of the older
    section of the town, I miss many a venerable
    landmark submerged in the rising tide of change,
    but I miss nothing quite so much as I do the
    sight of Tom Folio entering the doorway of the
    Old Corner Bookstore, or carefully taking down
    a musty volume from its shelf at some melan-
    choly old book-stall on Cornhill.



    FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES



    WHEN an English novelist does us the
    honor to introduce any of our country-
    men into his fiction, he generally displays a
    commendable desire to present something typi-
    cal in the way of names for his adopted char-
    acters--to give a dash of local color, as it were,
    with his nomenclature. His success is seldom
    commensurate to the desire. He falls into the
    error of appealing to his invention, instead of
    consulting some city directory, in which he
    would find more material than he could exhaust
    in ten centuries. Charles Reade might have
    secured in the pages of such a compendium a
    happier title than Fullalove for his Yankee
    sea-captain; though I doubt, on the whole, if
    Anthony Trollope could have discovered any-
    thing better than Olivia Q. Fleabody for the
    young woman from "the States" in his novel
    called "Is He Popenjoy?"
         To christen a sprightly young female advo-
    cate of woman's rights Olivia Q. Fleabody was
    very happy indeed; to be candid, it was much
    better than was usual with Mr. Trollope, whose
    understanding of American life and manners was
    not enlarged by extensive travel in this country.
    An English tourist's preconceived idea of us is
    a thing he brings over with him on the steamer
    and carries home again intact; it is as much a
    part of his indispensable impedimenta as his hat-
    box. But Fleabody is excellent; it was prob-
    ably suggested by Peabody, which may have
    struck Mr. Trollope as comical (just as Trollope
    strikes us as comical), or, at least, as not seri-
    ous. What a capital name Veronica Trollope
    would be for a hoydenish young woman in a
    society novel! I fancy that all foreign names
    are odd to the alien. I remember that the signs
    above shop-doors in England and on the Conti-
    nent used to amuse me often enough, when I
    was over there. It is a notable circumstance
    that extraordinary names never seem extraordi-
    nary to the persons bearing them. If a fellow-
    creature were branded Ebenezer Cuttlefish he
    would remain to the end of his days quite un-
    conscious of anything out of the common.
         I am aware that many of our American names
    are sufficiently queer; but English writers make
    merry over them, as if our most eccentric were
    not thrown into the shade by some of their own.
    No American, living or dead, can surpass the
    verbal infelicity of Knatchbull-Hugessen, for ex-
    ample--if the gentleman will forgive me for
    conscripting him. Quite as remarkable, in a
    grimly significant way, is the appellation of a
    British officer who was fighting the Boers in the
    Transvaal in the year of blessed memory 1899.
    This young soldier, who highly distinguished
    himself on the field, was known to his brothers-
    in-arms as Major Pine Coffin. I trust that the
    gallant major became a colonel later and is still
    alive. It would eclipse the gayety of nations to
    lose a man with a name like that.
         Several years ago I read in the sober police
    reports of "The Pall Mall Gazette" an account
    of a young man named George F. Onions, who
    was arrested (it ought to have been by "a
    peeler") for purloining money from his em-
    ployers, Messrs. Joseph Pickles Son, stuff
    merchants, of Bradford--des noms bien idyl-
    liques!
    What mortal could have a more ludi-
    crous name than Onions, unless it were Pickles,
    or Pickled Onions? And then for Onions to rob
    Pickles! Could there be a more incredible coin-
    cidence? As a coincidence it is nearly sublime.
    No story-writer would dare to present that fact
    or those names in his fiction; neither would be
    accepted as possible. Meanwhile Olivia Q. Flea-
    body is ben trovato.



    A NOTE ON "L'AIGLON"



    THE night-scene on the battlefield of Wa-
    gram in "L'Aiglon"--an episode whose
    sharp pathos pierces the heart and the imagina-
    tion like the point of a rapier--bears a striking
    resemblance to a picturesque passage in Victor
    Hugo's "Les Miserables." It is the one intense
    great moment in the play, and has been widely
    discussed, but so far as I am aware none of M.
    Rostand's innumerable critics has touched on the
    resemblance mentioned. In the master's ro-
    mance it is not the field of Wagram, but the
    field of Waterloo, that is magically repeopled
    with contending armies of spooks, to use the
    grim old Dutch word, and made vivid to the
    mind's eye. The passage occurs at the end
    of the sixteenth chapter in the second part of
    "Les Miserables" (Cosette), and runs as
    follows:

         Le champ de Waterloo aujourd'hui a le calme qui
    appartient a la terre, support impassible de l'homme,
    et il resemble a toutes les plaines. La nuit pourtant
    une espece de brume visionnaire s'en degage, et si
    quelque voyageur s'y promene, s'il regarde, s'il ecoute,
    s'il reve comme Virgile dans les funestes plaines de
    Philippes, l'hallucination de la catastrophe le saisit.
    L'effrayant 18 juin revit; la fausse colline-monument
    s'efface, ce lion quelconque se dissipe, le champ de
    bataille reprend sa realite; des lignes d'infanterie
    ondulent dans la plaine, des galops furieux traversent
    l'horizon; le songeur effare voit l'eclair des sabres,
    l'etincelle des bayonnettes, le flamboiement des bombes,
    l'entre-croisement monstrueux des tonnerres; il en-
    tend, comme un rale au fond d'une tombe, la clameur
    vague de la bataille-fantome; ces ombres, ce sont les
    grenadiers; ces lueurs, ce sont les cuirassiers; . . .
    tout cela n'est plus et se heurte et combat encore; et
    les ravins s'empourprent, et les arbres frissonnent, et
    il y a de la furie jusque dans les nuees, et, dans les
    tenebres, toutes ces hauteurs farouches, Mont-Saint-
    Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plance-
    noit, apparaissent confusement couronnees de tour-
    billons de spectres s'exterminant.

         Here is the whole battle scene in "L'Aiglon,"
    with scarcely a gruesome detail omitted. The
    vast plain glimmering in phantasmal light; the
    ghostly squadrons hurling themselves against

          The field of Waterloo has to-day the peacefulness which be-
    longs to earth, the impassive support of man, and is like all other
    plains. At night, however, a kind of visionary mist is exhaled,
    and if any traveler walks there, and watches and listens, and
    dreams like Virgil on the sorrowful plains of Philippi, the hallu-
    cination of the catastrophe takes possession of him. The terrible
    June 18 relives; the artificial commemorative mound effaces itself,
    the lion disappears, the field of battle assumes its reality; lines
    of infantry waver on the plain, the horizon is broken by furious
    charges of cavalry; the alarmed dreamer sees the gleam of sabres,
    the glimmer of bayonets, the lurid glare of bursting shells, the
    clashing of mighty thunderbolts; the muffled clamor of the
    phantom conflict comes to him like dying moans from the tomb;
    these shadows are grenadiers, these lights are cuirassiers . . .
    all this does not really exist, yet the combat goes on; the ravines are
    stained with purple, the trees tremble, there is fury even in the
    clouds, and in the obscurity the sombre heights--Mont Saint-
    Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--ap-
    pear dimly crowned with throngs of apparitions annihilating one
    another.

    One another (seen only through the eyes of the
    poor little Duke of Reichstadt); the mangled
    shapes lying motionless in various postures of
    death upon the blood-stained sward; the moans
    of the wounded rising up and sweeping by like
    vague wailings of the wind--all this might be
    taken for an artful appropriation of Victor
    Hugo's text; but I do not think it was, though
    it is possible that a faint reflection of a brilliant
    page, read in early youth, still lingered on the
    retina of M. Rostand's memory. If such were
    the case, it does not necessarily detract from the
    integrity of the conception or the playwright's
    presentment of it.
         The idea of repeopling old battlefields with
    the shades of vanished hosts is not novel. In
    such tragic spots the twilight always lays a dark
    hand on the imagination, and prompts one to
    invoke the unappeased spirit of the past that
    haunts the place. One summer evening long
    ago, as I was standing alone by the ruined walls
    of Hougomont, with that sense of not being
    alone which is sometimes so strangely stirred by
    solitude, I had a sudden vision of that desperate
    last charge of Napoleon's Old Guard. Marshal
    Ney rose from the grave and again shouted
    those heroic words to Drouet d'Erlon: "Are
    you not going to get yourself killed?" For
    an instant a thousand sabres flashed in the
    air. The deathly silence that accompanied the
    ghostly onset was an added poignancy to the
    short-lived dream. A moment later I beheld a
    hunched little figure mounted on a white horse
    with housings of purple velvet. The reins lay
    slack in the rider's hand; his three-cornered hat
    was slouched over his brows, and his chin
    rested on the breast of his great-coat. Thus he
    slowly rode away through the twilight, and
    nobody cried, Vive l'Empereur!
         The ground on which a famous battle has
    been fought casts a spell upon every man's
    mind; and the impression made upon two men
    of poetic genius, like Victor Hugo and Edmond
    Rostand, might well be nearly identical. This
    sufficiently explains the likeness between the
    fantastic silhouette in "Les Miserables" and the
    battle of the ghosts in "L'Aiglon." A muse so
    rich in the improbable as M. Rostand's need
    not borrow a piece of supernaturalness from
    anybody.



    PLOT AND CHARACTER



    HENRY JAMES, in his paper on Anthony
    Trollope, says that if Trollope "had taken
    sides on the rather superficial opposition between
    novels of character and novels of plot, I can
    imagine him to have said (except that he never
    expressed himself in epigram) that he preferred
    the former class, inasmuch as character in itself
    is plot, while plot is by no means character."
    So neat an antithesis would surely never have
    found itself between Mr. Trollope's lips if Mr.
    James had not cunningly lent it to him. What-
    ever theory of novel-writing Mr. Trollope may
    have preached, his almost invariable practice
    was to have a plot. He always had a story to
    tell, and a story involves beginning, middle, and
    end--in short, a framework of some description.
         There have been delightful books filled wholly
    with character-drawing; but they have not been
    great novels. The great novel deals with human
    action as well as with mental portraiture and
    analysis. That "character in itself is plot" is
    true only in a limited sense. A plan, a motive
    with a logical conclusion, is as necessary to a
    novel or a romance as it is to a drama. A group
    of skillfully made-up men and women lounging
    in the green-room or at the wings is not the
    play. It is not enough to say that this is Romeo
    and that Lady Macbeth. It is not enough to
    inform us that certain passions are supposed to
    be embodied in such and such persons: these
    persons should be placed in situations develop-
    ing those passions. A series of unrelated scenes
    and dialogues leading to nothing is inadequate.
         Mr. James's engaging epigram seems to me
    vulnerable at both ends--unlike Achilles.
    "Plot is by no means character." Strictly
    speaking, it is not. It appears to me, however,
    that plot approaches nearer to being character
    than character does to being plot. Plot necessi-
    tates action, and it is impossible to describe a
    man's actions' under whatever conditions, with-
    out revealing something of his character, his
    way of looking at things, his moral and mental
    pose. What a hero of fiction does paints him
    better than what he says, and vastly better than
    anything his creator may say of him. Mr.
    James asserts that "we care what happens to
    people only in proportion as we know what
    people are." I think we care very little what
    people are (in fiction) when we do not know
    what happens to them.


    THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE



    IN the process of their experiments upon the
    bodies of living animals some anatomists do
    not, I fear, sufficiently realize that

         The poor beetle, that we tread upon,
         In corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great
         As when a giant dies.

    I am not for a moment challenging the neces-
    sity of vivisection, though distinguished sur-
    geons have themselves challenged it; I merely
    contend that science is apt to be cold-hearted,
    and does not seem always to take into consider-
    ation the tortures she inflicts in her search for
    knowledge.
         Just now, in turning over the leaves of an old
    number of the "London Lancet," I came upon
    the report of a lecture on experimental physiology
    delivered by Professor William Rutherford be-
    fore a learned association in London. Though
    the type had become antiquated and the paper
    yellowed in the lapse of years, the pathos of
    those pages was alive and palpitating.
         The following passages from the report will
    illustrate not unfairly the point I am making.
    In the course of his remarks the lecturer ex-
    hibited certain interesting experiments on living
    frogs. Intellectually I go very strongly for Pro-
    fessor Rutherford, but I am bound to confess
    that the weight of my sympathy rests with the
    frogs.

         Observe this frog [said the professor], it is regard-
    ing our manoeuvres with a somewhat lively air. Now
    and then it gives a jump. What the precise object of
    its leaps may be I dare not pretend to say; but prob-
    ably it regards us with some apprehension, and desires
    to escape.

         To be perfectly impartial, it must be admitted
    that the frog had some slight reason for appre-
    hension. The lecturer proceeded:

    I touch one of its toes, and you see it resents the
    molestation in a very decided manner. Why does it so
    struggle to get away when I pinch its toes? Doubt-
    less, you will say, because it feels the pinch and would
    rather not have it repeated. I now behead the animal
    with the aid of a sharp chisel. . . . The headless trunk
    lies as though it were dead. The spinal cord seems to
    be suffering from shock. Probably, however, it will
    soon recover from this. . . . Observe that the animal
    has now spontaneously drawn up its legs and arms,
    and it is sitting with its neck erect just as if it had
    not lost its head at all. I pinch its toes, and you see
    the leg is at once thrust out as if to spurn away the
    offending instrument. Does it still feel? and is the
    motion still the result of the volition?

         That the frog did feel, and delicately hinted
    at the circumstance, there seems to be no room to
    doubt, for Professor Rutherford related that
    having once decapitated a frog, the animal sud-
    denly bounded from the table, a movement that
    presumably indicated a kind of consciousness.
    He then returned to the subject immediately
    under observation, pinched its foot again, the
    frog again "resenting the stimulation." He then
    thrust a needle down the spinal cord. "The
    limbs are now flaccid," observed the experi-
    menter; "we may wait as long as we please,
    but a pinch of the toes will never again cause
    the limbs of this animal to move." Here is
    where congratulations can come in for la gre-
    nouille
    . That frog being concluded, the lec-
    turer continued:

    I take another frog. In this case I open the cranium
    and remove the brain and medulla oblongata. . . .
    I thrust a pin through the nose and hang the animal

    thereby to a support, so that it can move its pendent
    legs without any difficulty. . . . I gently pinch the
    toes. . . . The leg of the same side is pulled up. . . .
    I pinch the same more severely. . . . Both legs are
    thrown into motion.

         Having thus satisfactorily proved that the
    wretched creature could still suffer acutely, the
    professor resumed:

         The cutaneous nerves of the frog are extremely sen-
    sitive to acids; so I put a drop of acetic acid on the
    outside of one knee. This, you see, gives rise to most
    violent movements both of arms and legs, and notice
    particularly that the animal is using the toes of the
    leg on the same side for the purpose of rubbing the
    irritated spot. I dip the whole animal into water
    in order to wash away the acid, and now it is all at
    rest again. . . . I put a drop of acid on the skin
    over the lumbar region of the spine. . . . Both feet
    are instantly raised to the irritated spot. The animal
    is able to localize the seat of irritation. . . . I wash
    the acid from the back, and I amputate one of the
    feet at the ankle. . . . I apply a drop of acid over
    the knee of the footless leg. . . . Again, the animal
    turns the leg towards the knee, as if to reach the irri-
    tated spot with the toes; these, however, are not now
    available. But watch the other foot. The foot of the
    other leg
    is now being used to rub away the acid. The
    animal, finding that the object is not accomplished
    with the foot of the same side, uses the other one.

         I think that at least one thing will be patent
    to every unprejudiced reader of these excerpts,
    namely--that any frog (with its head on or
    its head off) which happened to make the per-
    sonal acquaintance of Professor Rutherford must
    have found him poor company. What benefit
    science may have derived from such association
    I am not qualified to pronounce upon. The lec-
    turer showed conclusively that the frog is a
    peculiarly sensitive and intelligent little batra-
    chian. I hope that the genial professor, in the
    years which followed, did not frequently con-
    sider it necessary to demonstrate the fact.



    LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL



    IT has recently become the fashion to speak
    disparagingly of Leigh Hunt as a poet, to
    class him as a sort of pursuivant or shield-bearer
    to Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Truth to tell,
    Hunt was not a Keats nor a Shelley nor a Cole-
    ridge, but he was a most excellent Hunt. He
    was a delightful essayist--quite unsurpassed,
    indeed, in his blithe, optimistic way--and as a
    poet deserves to rank high among the lesser
    singers of his time. I should place him far
    above Barry Cornwall, who has not half the
    freshness, variety, and originality of his com-
    peer.
         I instance Barry Cornwall because there has
    seemed a disposition since his death to praise
    him unduly. Barry Cornwall has always struck
    me as extremely artificial, especially in his dra-
    matic sketches. His verses in this line are
    mostly soft Elizabethan echoes. Of course a
    dramatist may find it to his profit to go out of
    his own age and atmosphere for inspiration; but
    in order successfully to do so he must be a dra-
    matist. Barry Cornwall fell short of filling the
    role; he got no further than the composing of
    brief disconnected scenes and scraps of solilo-
    quies, and a tragedy entitled Mirandola, for
    which the stage had no use. His chief claim to
    recognition lies in his lyrics. Here, as in the
    dramatic studies, his attitude is nearly always
    affected. He studiously strives to reproduce the
    form and spirit of the early poets. Being a Lon-
    doner, he naturally sings much of rural English
    life, but his England is the England of two or
    three centuries ago. He has a great deal to say
    about the "falcon," but the poor bird has the
    air of beating fatigued wings against the book-
    shelves of a well-furnished library! This well-
    furnished library was--if I may be pardoned a
    mixed image--the rock on which Barry Corn-
    wall split. He did not look into his own heart,
    and write: he looked into his books.
         A poet need not confine himself to his indi-
    vidual experiences; the world is all before him
    where to choose; but there are subjects which
    he had better not handle unless he have some
    personal knowledge of them. The sea is one of
    these. The man who sang,

         The sea! the sea! the open sea!
         The blue, the fresh, the ever free!

    (a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have
    penned), should never have permitted himself to
    sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of
    Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I
    first read this singularly vapid poem years ago,
    in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had
    ever laid eyes on any piece of water wider than
    the Thames at Greenwich, and in looking over
    Barry Cornwall's "Life and Letters" I am not
    so much surprised as amused to learn that he was
    never out of sight of land in the whole course
    of his existence. It is to be said of him more
    positively than the captain of the Pinafore said
    it of himself, that he was hardly ever sick at
    sea.
         Imagine Byron or Shelley, who knew the
    ocean in all its protean moods, piping such
    thin feebleness as

         The blue, the fresh, the ever free!

    To do that required a man whose acquaintance
    with the deep was limited to a view of it from
    an upper window at Margate or Scarborough.
    Even frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait
    at the sign of The Ship and Turtle will not en-
    able one to write sea poetry.
         Considering the actual facts, there is some-
    thing weird in the statement,

         I 'm on the sea! I 'm on the sea!
         I am where I would ever be.

    The words, to be sure, are placed in the mouth
    of an imagined sailor, but they are none the
    less diverting. The stanza containing the distich
    ends with a striking piece of realism:

         If a storm should come and awake the deep,
         What matter? I shall ride and sleep.

    This is the course of action usually pursued
    by sailors during a gale. The first or second
    mate goes around and tucks them up comfort-
    ably, each in his hammock, and serves them
    out an extra ration of grog after the storm is
    over.
         Barry Cornwall must have had an exception-
    ally winning personality, for he drew to him the
    friendship of men as differently constituted as
    Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, and Forster.
    He was liked by the best of his time, from
    Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne,
    who caught a glimpse of the aged poet in his
    vanishing. The personal magnetism of an au-
    thor does not extend far beyond the orbit of his
    contemporaries. It is of the lyrist and not of
    the man I am speaking here. One could wish
    he had written more prose like his admirable
    "Recollections of Elia."
         Barry Cornwall seldom sounds a natural note,
    but when he does it is extremely sweet. That
    little ballad in the minor key beginning,

         Touch us gently, Time!
         Let us glide adown thy stream,

    was written in one of his rare moments. Leigh
    Hunt, though not without questionable manner-
    isms, was rich in the inspiration that came but
    infrequently to his friend. Hunt's verse is full
    of natural felicities. He also was a bookman,
    but, unlike Barry Cornwall, he generally knew
    how to mint his gathered gold, and to stamp the
    coinage with his own head. In "Hero and Lean-
    der" there is one line which, at my valuing, is
    worth any twenty stanzas that Barry Cornwall
    has written:

         So might they now have lived, and so have died;
         The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side.

         Hunt's fortunate verse about the kiss Jane
    Carlyle gave him lingers on everybody's lip.
    That and the rhyme of "Abou Ben Adhem and
    the Angel" are spice enough to embalm a man's
    memory. After all, it takes only a handful.



    DECORATION DAY



    HOW quickly Nature takes possession of
    a deserted battlefield, and goes to work
    repairing the ravages of man! With invisible
    magic hand she smooths the rough earthworks,
    fills the rifle-pits with delicate flowers, and
    wraps the splintered tree-trunks with her fluent
    drapery of tendrils. Soon the whole sharp out-
    line of the spot is lost in unremembering grass.
    Where the deadly rifle-ball whistled through the
    foliage, the robin or the thrush pipes its tremu-
    lous note; and where the menacing shell de-
    scribed its curve through the air, a harmless
    crow flies in circles. Season after season the
    gentle work goes on, healing the wounds and
    rents made by the merciless enginery of war,
    until at last the once hotly contested battle-
    ground differs from none of its quiet surround-
    ings, except, perhaps, that here the flowers take
    a richer tint and the grasses a deeper emerald.
         It is thus the battle lines may be obliterated
    by Time, but there are left other and more last-
    ing relics of the struggle. That dinted army
    sabre, with a bit of faded crepe knotted at its
    hilt, which hangs over the mantel-piece of the
    "best room" of many a town and country house
    in these States, is one; and the graven headstone
    of the fallen hero is another. The old swords
    will be treasured and handed down from gener-
    ation to generation as priceless heirlooms, and
    with them, let us trust, will be cherished the
    custom of dressing with annual flowers the rest-
    ing-places of those who fell during the Civil
    War.

         With the tears a Land hath shed
            Their graves should ever be green.

         Ever their fair, true glory
            Fondly should fame rehearse--
         Light of legend and story,
            Flower of marble and verse.

         The impulse which led us to set apart a day
    for decorating the graves of our soldiers sprung
    from the grieved heart of the nation, and in our
    own time there is little chance of the rite being
    neglected. But the generations that come after
    us should not allow the observance to fall into
    disuse. What with us is an expression of fresh
    love and sorrow, should be with them an ac-
    knowledgment of an incalculable debt.
         Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our
    national holidays. How different from those sul-
    len batteries which used to go rumbling through
    our streets are the crowds of light carriages,
    laden with flowers and greenery, wending their
    way to the neighboring cemeteries! The grim
    cannon have turned into palm branches, and the
    shell and shrapnel into peach blooms. There is
    no hint of war in these gay baggage trains, ex-
    cept the presence of men in undress uniform,
    and perhaps here and there an empty sleeve to
    remind one of what has been. Year by year
    that empty sleeve is less in evidence.
         The observance of Decoration Day is un-
    marked by that disorder and confusion common
    enough with our people in their holiday moods.
    The earlier sorrow has faded out of the hour,
    leaving a softened solemnity. It quickly ceased
    to be simply a local commemoration. While
    the sequestered country churchyards and burial-
    places near our great northern cities were being
    hung with May garlands, the thought could not
    but come to us that there were graves lying
    southward above which bent a grief as tender
    and sacred as our own. Invisibly we dropped
    unseen flowers upon those mounds. There is a
    beautiful significance in the fact that, two years
    after the close of the war, the women of Colum-
    bus, Mississippi, laid their offerings alike on
    Northern and Southern graves. When all is
    said, the great Nation has but one heart.



    WRITERS AND TALKERS



    AS a class, literary men do not shine in con-
    versation. The scintillating and playful
    essayist whom you pictured to yourself as the
    most genial and entertaining of companions,
    turns out to be a shy and untalkable individual,
    who chills you with his reticence when you
    chance to meet him. The poet whose fascinating
    volume you always drop into your gripsack on
    your summer vacation--the poet whom you
    have so long desired to know personally--is a
    moody and abstracted middle-aged gentleman,
    who fails to catch your name on introduction,
    and seems the avatar of the commonplace. The
    witty and ferocious critic whom your fancy had
    painted as a literary cannibal with a morbid
    appetite for tender young poets--the writer of
    those caustic and scholarly reviews which you
    never neglect to read--destroys the un-lifelike
    portrait you had drawn by appearing before you
    as a personage of slender limb and deprecat-
    ing glance, who stammers and makes a painful
    spectacle of himself when you ask him his
    opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches," by Popo-
    catepetl Jones. The slender, dark-haired novel-
    ist of your imagination, with epigrammatic
    points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape
    of a short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose
    conversation does not sparkle at all, and you
    were on the lookout for the most brilliant of
    verbal fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you
    have idealized. Fresh from witnessing his de-
    lightful comedy of manners, you meet him face
    to face only to discover that his own manners
    are anything but delightful. The play and the
    playwright are two very distinct entities. You
    grow skeptical touching the truth of Buffon's
    assertion that the style is the man himself. Who
    that has encountered his favorite author in the
    flesh has not sometimes been a little, if not
    wholly, disappointed?
         After all, is it not expecting too much to
    expect a novelist to talk as cleverly as the clever
    characters in his novels? Must a dramatist
    necessarily go about armed to the teeth with
    crisp dialogue? May not a poet be allowed to
    lay aside his singing-robes and put on a con-
    ventional dress-suit when he dines out? Why
    is it not permissible in him to be as prosaic
    and tiresome as the rest of the company? He
    usually is.



    ON EARLY RISING



    A CERTAIN scientific gentleman of my
    acquaintance, who has devoted years to
    investigating the subject, states that he has never
    come across a case of remarkable longevity un-
    accompanied by the habit of early rising; from
    which testimony it might be inferred that they
    die early who lie abed late. But this would be
    getting out at the wrong station. That the
    majority of elderly persons are early risers is due
    to the simple fact that they cannot sleep morn-
    ings. After a man passes his fiftieth milestone
    he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakeful-
    ness is no credit to him. As the theorist con-
    fined his observations to the aged, he easily
    reached the conclusion that men live to be old
    because they do not sleep late, instead of per-
    ceiving that men do not sleep late because they
    are old. He moreover failed to take into ac-
    count the numberless young lives that have been
    shortened by matutinal habits.
         The intelligent reader, and no other is sup-
    posable, need not be told that the early bird
    aphorism is a warning and not an incentive.
    The fate of the worm refutes the pretended
    ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes
    to illustrate the advantage of early rising and
    does so by showing how extremely dangerous
    it is. I have no patience with the worm, and
    when I rise with the lark I am always careful
    to select a lark that has overslept himself.
         The example set by this mythical bird, a myth-
    ical bird so far as New England is concerned,
    has wrought wide-spread mischief and discom-
    fort. It is worth noting that his method of ac-
    complishing these ends is directly the reverse of
    that of the Caribbean insect mentioned by Laf-
    cadio Hearn in his enchanting "Two Years in
    the French West Indies"--a species of colossal
    cricket called the wood-kid; in the creole tongue,
    cabritt-bois. This ingenious pest works a sooth-
    ing, sleep-compelling chant from sundown until
    precisely half past four in the morning, when
    it suddenly stops and by its silence awakens
    everybody it has lulled into slumber with its in-
    sidious croon. Mr. Hearn, with strange obtuse-
    ness to the enormity of the thing, blandly re-
    marks: "For thousands of early risers too poor
    to own a clock, the cessation of its song is the
    signal to get up." I devoutly trust that none of
    the West India islands furnishing such satanic
    entomological specimens will ever be annexed
    to the United States. Some of our extreme ad-
    vocates of territorial expansion might spend a
    profitable few weeks on one of those favored
    isles. A brief association with that cabritt-bois
    would be likely to cool the enthusiasm of the
    most ardent imperialist.
         An incalculable amount of specious sentiment
    has been lavished upon daybreak, chiefly by poets
    who breakfasted, when they did breakfast, at
    mid-day. It is charitably to be said that their
    practice was better than their precept--or their
    poetry. Thomson, the author of "The Castle
    of Indolence," who gave birth to the depraved
    apostrophe,

         Falsely luxurious, will not man awake,

    was one of the laziest men of his century. He
    customarily lay in bed until noon meditating
    pentameters on sunrise. This creature used to
    be seen in his garden of an afternoon, with both
    hands in his waistcoat pockets, eating peaches
    from a pendent bough. Nearly all the English
    poets who at that epoch celebrated what they
    called "the effulgent orb of day" were denizens
    of London, where pure sunshine is unknown
    eleven months out of the twelve.
         In a great city there are few incentives to
    early rising. What charm is there in roof-tops
    and chimney-stacks to induce one to escape even
    from a nightmare? What is more depressing
    than a city street before the shop-windows have
    lifted an eyelid, when "the very houses seem
    asleep," as Wordsworth says, and nobody is
    astir but the belated burglar or the milk-and-
    water man or Mary washing off the front steps?
    Daybreak at the seaside or up among the moun-
    tains is sometimes worth while, though famil-
    iarity with it breeds indifference. The man
    forced by restlessness or occupation to drink the
    first vintage of the morning every day of his life
    has no right appreciation of the beverage, how-
    ever much he may profess to relish it. It is
    only your habitual late riser who takes in the
    full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when
    he gets up to go a-fishing. He brings virginal
    emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling
    freshness of earth and stream and sky. For him
    --a momentary Adam--the world is newly
    created. It is Eden come again, with Eve in the
    similitude of a three-pound trout.
         In the country, then, it is well enough occa-
    sionally to dress by candle-light and assist at the
    ceremony of dawn; it is well if for no other
    purpose than to disarm the intolerance of the
    professional early riser who, were he in a state
    of perfect health, would not be the wandering
    victim of insomnia, and boast of it. There are
    few small things more exasperating than this
    early bird with the worm of his conceit in his
    bill.



    UN POETE MANQUE



    IN the first volume of Miss Dickinson's poet-
    ical melange is a little poem which needs
    only a slight revision of the initial stanza to
    entitle it to rank with some of the swallow-
    flights in Heine's lyrical intermezzo. I have ten-
    tatively tucked a rhyme into that opening stanza:

         I taste a liquor never brewed
         In vats upon the Rhine;
         No tankard ever held a draught
         Of alcohol like mine.

         Inebriate of air am I,
         And debauchee of dew,
         Reeling, through endless summer days,
         From inns of molten blue.

         When landlords turn the drunken bee
         Out of the Foxglove's door,
         When butterflies renounce their drams,
         I shall but drink the more!
         Till seraphs swing their snowy caps
         And saints to windows run,
         To see the little tippler
         Leaning against the sun!

    Those inns of molten blue, and the disreputable
    honey-gatherer who gets himself turned out-of-
    doors at the sign of the Foxglove, are very
    taking matters. I know of more important
    things that interest me vastly less. This is one
    of the ten or twelve brief pieces so nearly per-
    fect in structure as almost to warrant the reader
    in suspecting that Miss Dickinson's general dis-
    regard of form was a deliberate affectation. The
    artistic finish of the following sunset-piece
    makes her usual quatrains unforgivable:

         This is the land the sunset washes,
         These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
         Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
         These are the western mystery!

         Night after night her purple traffic
         Strews the landing with opal bales;
         Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
         Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.

    The little picture has all the opaline atmosphere
    of a Claude Lorraine. One instantly frames it
    in one's memory. Several such bits of impres-
    sionist landscape may be found in the portfolio.
         It is to be said, in passing, that there are few
    things in Miss Dickinson's poetry so felicitous
    as Mr. Higginson's characterization of it in his
    preface to the volume: "In many cases these
    verses will seem to the reader like poetry
    pulled up by the roots
    , with rain and dew and
    earth clinging to them." Possibly it might be
    objected that this is not the best way to gather
    either flowers or poetry.
         Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely un-
    conventional and bizarre mind. She was deeply
    tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly
    influenced by the mannerism of Emerson. The
    very gesture with which she tied her bonnet-
    strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like
    walks in her garden at Amherst, must
    have had something dreamy and Emersonian
    in it. She had much fancy of a quaint kind,
    but only, as it appears to me, intermittent
    flashes of imagination.
         That Miss Dickinson's memoranda have a cer-
    tain something which, for want of a more pre-
    cise name, we term quality, is not to be denied.
    But the incoherence and shapelessness of the
    greater part of her verse are fatal. On nearly
    every page one lights upon an unsupported
    exquisite line or a lonely happy epithet; but a
    single happy epithet or an isolated exquisite line
    does not constitute a poem. What Lowell says
    of Dr. Donne applies in a manner to Miss
    Dickinson: "Donne is full of salient verses
    that would take the rudest March winds of
    criticism with their beauty, of thoughts that first
    tease us like charades and then delight us with
    the felicity of their solution; but these have not
    saved him. He is exiled to the limbo of the
    formless and the fragmentary."
         Touching this question of mere technique Mr.
    Ruskin has a word to say (it appears that he
    said it "in his earlier and better days"), and
    Mr. Higginson quotes it: "No weight, nor
    mass, nor beauty of execution can outweigh one
    grain or fragment of thought." This is a pro-
    position to which one would cordially subscribe
    if it were not so intemperately stated. A sug-
    gestive commentary on Mr. Ruskin's impressive
    dictum is furnished by his own volume of verse.
    The substance of it is weighty enough, but the
    workmanship lacks just that touch which dis-
    tinguishes the artist from the bungler--the
    touch which Mr. Ruskin, except when writing
    prose, appears not much to have regarded either
    in his later or "in his earlier and better days."
         Miss Dickinson's stanzas, with their impos-
    sible rhyme, their involved significance, their
    interrupted flute-note of birds that have no con-
    tinuous music, seem to have caught the ear of a
    group of eager listeners. A shy New England
    bluebird, shifting its light load of song, has for
    the moment been mistaken for a stray nightingale.



    THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD



    I WENT to see a play the other night, one of
    those good old-fashioned English comedies
    that are in five acts and seem to be in fifteen.
    The piece with its wrinkled conventionality, its
    archaic stiffness, and obsolete code of morals,
    was devoid of interest excepting as a collection
    of dramatic curios. Still I managed to sit it
    through. The one thing in it that held me a
    pleased spectator was the graceful costume of a
    certain player who looked like a fine old por-
    trait--by Vandyke or Velasquez, let us say--
    that had come to life and kicked off its tar-
    nished frame.
         I do not know at what epoch of the world's
    history the scene of the play was laid; possibly
    the author originally knew, but it was evident
    that the actors did not, for their make-ups re-
    presented quite antagonistic periods. This cir-
    cumstance, however, detracted only slightly from
    the special pleasure I took in the young person
    called Delorme. He was not in himself inter-
    esting; he was like that Major Waters in
    "Pepys's Diary"--"a most amorous melan-
    choly gentleman who is under a despayr in love,
    which makes him bad company;" it was en-
    tirely Delorme's dress.

         I never saw mortal man in a dress more sen-
    sible and becoming. The material was accord-
    ing to Polonius's dictum, rich but not gaudy, of
    some dark cherry-colored stuff with trimmings
    of a deeper shade. My idea of a doublet is so
    misty that I shall not venture to affirm that the
    gentleman wore a doublet. It was a loose coat
    of some description hanging negligently from
    the shoulders and looped at the throat, showing
    a tasteful arrangement of lacework below and at
    the wrists. Full trousers reaching to the tops of
    buckskin boots, and a low-crowned soft hat--
    not a Puritan's sugar-loaf, but a picturesque
    shapeless head-gear, one side jauntily fastened
    up with a jewel--completed the essential por-
    tions of our friend's attire. It was a costume to
    walk in, to ride in, to sit in. The wearer of it
    could not be awkward if he tried, and I will do
    Delorme the justice to say that he put his dress
    to some severe tests. But he was graceful all
    the while, and made me wish that my country-
    men would throw aside their present hideous
    habiliments and hasten to the measuring-room
    of Delorme's tailor.
         In looking over the plates of an old book of
    fashions we smile at the monstrous attire in
    which our worthy great-grandsires saw fit to
    deck themselves. Presently it will be the turn
    of posterity to smile at us, for in our own way
    we are no less ridiculous than were our ances-
    tors in their knee-breeches, pig-tail and chapeau
    de bras
    . In fact we are really more absurd. If
    a fashionably dressed man of to-day could catch
    a single glimpse of himself through the eyes of
    his descendants four or five generations re-
    moved, he would have a strong impression of
    being something that had escaped from some-
    where.
         Whatever strides we may have made in arts
    and sciences, we have made no advance in the
    matter of costume. That Americans do not
    tattoo themselves, and do go fully clad--I am
    speaking exclusively of my own sex--is about
    all that can be said in favor of our present
    fashions. I wish I had the vocabulary of Herr
    Teufelsdrockh with which to inveigh against
    the dress-coat of our evening parties, the angu-
    lar swallow-tailed coat that makes a man look
    like a poor species of bird and gets him mis-
    taken for the waiter. "As long as a man wears
    the modern coat," says Leigh Hunt, "he has no
    right to despise any dress. What snips at the
    collar and lapels! What a mechanical and ridic-
    ulous cut about the flaps! What buttons in front
    that are never meant to button, and yet are no
    ornament! And what an exquisitely absurd pair
    of buttons at the back! gravely regarded, never-
    theless, and thought as indispensably necessary
    to every well-conditioned coat, as other bits of
    metal or bone are to the bodies of savages whom
    we laugh at. There is absolutely not one iota of
    sense, grace, or even economy in the modern
    coat."
         Still more deplorable is the ceremonial hat of
    the period. That a Christian can go about un-
    abashed with a shiny black cylinder on his head
    shows what civilization has done for us in the
    way of taste in personal decoration. The scalp-
    lock of an Apache brave has more style. When
    an Indian squaw comes into a frontier settle-
    ment the first "marked-down" article she pur-
    chases is a section of stove-pipe. Her instinct
    as to the eternal fitness of things tells her that
    its proper place is on the skull of a barbarian.
         It was while revolving these pleasing reflec-
    tions in my mind, that our friend Delorme
    walked across the stage in the fourth act, and
    though there was nothing in the situation nor in
    the text of the play to warrant it, I broke into
    tremendous applause, from which I desisted
    only at the scowl of an usher--an object in a
    celluloid collar and a claw-hammer coat. My
    solitary ovation to Master Delorme was an in-
    voluntary and, I think, pardonable protest against
    the male costume of our own time.


    ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION



    EXCEPTING on the ground that youth is
    the age of vain fantasy, there is no ac-
    counting for the fact that young men and young
    women of poetical temperament should so fre-
    quently assume to look upon an early demise
    for themselves as the most desirable thing in
    the world. Though one may incidentally be
    tempted to agree with them in the abstract, one
    cannot help wondering. That persons who are
    exceptionally fortunate in their environment, and
    in private do not pretend to be otherwise, should
    openly announce their intention of retiring at
    once into the family tomb, is a problem not
    easily solved. The public has so long listened
    to these funereal solos that if a few of the poets
    thus impatient to be gone were to go, their de-
    parture would perhaps be attended by that re-
    signed speeding which the proverb invokes on
    behalf of the parting guest.
         The existence of at least one magazine editor
    would, I know, have a shadow lifted from it.
    At this writing, in a small mortuary basket
    under his desk are seven or eight poems of so
    gloomy a nature that he would not be able to
    remain in the same room with them if he did
    not suspect the integrity of their pessimism.
    The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable
    than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated
    sorrow.
         The Miss Gladys who sends a poem entitled
    "Forsaken," in which she addresses death as her
    only friend, makes pictures in the editor's eyes.
    He sees, among other dissolving views, a little
    hoyden in magnificent spirits, perhaps one of
    this season's social buds, with half a score of
    lovers ready to pluck her from the family stem
    --a rose whose countless petals are coupons. A
    caramel has disagreed with her, or she would
    not have written in this despondent vein. The
    young man who seeks to inform the world in
    eleven anaemic stanzas of terze rime that the
    cup of happiness has been forever dashed from
    his lip (he appears to have but one) and darkly
    intimates that the end is "nigh" (rhyming af-
    fably with "sigh"), will probably be engaged
    a quarter of a century from now in making simi-
    lar declarations. He is simply echoing some
    dysthymic poet of the past--reaching out with
    some other man's hat for the stray nickel of your
    sympathy.
         This morbidness seldom accompanies gen-
    uine poetic gifts. The case of David Gray, the
    young Scottish poet who died in 1861, is an in-
    stance to the contrary. His lot was exceedingly
    sad, and the failure of health just as he was on
    the verge of achieving something like success
    justified his profound melancholy; but that he
    tuned this melancholy and played upon it, as if
    it were a musical instrument, is plainly seen in
    one of his sonnets.
         In Monckton Milnes's (Lord Houghton's)
    "Life and Letters of John Keats" it is related
    that Keats, one day, on finding a stain of blood
    upon his lips after coughing, said to his friend
    Charles Brown: "I know the color of that blood;
    it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived. That
    drop is my death-warrant. I must die." Who
    that ever read the passage could forget it? David
    Gray did not, for he versified the incident as
    happening to himself and appropriated, as his
    own, Keats's comment:

         Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain,
         There came arterial blood, and with a sigh
         Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein,
         That drop is my death-warrant; I must die.

         The incident was likely enough a personal
    experience, but the comment should have been
    placed in quotation marks. I know of few
    stranger things in literature than this poet's
    dramatization of another man's pathos. Even
    Keats's epitaph--Here lies one whose name
    was writ in water--finds an echo in David Gray's
    Below lies one whose name was traced in sand.
    Poor Gray was at least the better prophet.


    WISHMAKERS' TOWN



    A LIMITED edition of this little volume
    of verse, which seems to me in many re-
    spects unique, was issued in 1885, and has long
    been out of print. The reissue of the book is
    in response to the desire off certain readers who
    have not forgotten the charm which William
    Young's poem exercised upon them years ago,
    and, finding the charm still potent, would have
    others share it.
         The scheme of the poem, for it is a poem
    and not simply a series of unrelated lyrics, is in-
    genious and original, and unfolds itself in mea-
    sures at once strong and delicate. The mood of
    the poet and the method of the playwright are
    obvious throughout. Wishmakers' Town--a
    little town situated in the no-man's-land of "The
    Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
    --is shown to us as it awakens, touched by the
    dawn. The clangor of bells far and near calls
    the townfolk to their various avocations, the
    toiler to his toil, the idler to his idleness, the
    miser to his gold. In swift and picturesque se-
    quence the personages of the Masque pass be-
    fore us. Merchants, hucksters, players, lovers,
    gossips, soldiers, vagabonds, and princes crowd
    the scene, and have in turn their word of poign-
    ant speech. We mingle with the throng in the
    streets; we hear the whir of looms and the din
    of foundries, the blare of trumpets, the whisper
    of lovers, the scandals of the market-place, and,
    in brief, are let into all the secrets of the busy
    microcosm. A contracted stage, indeed, yet
    large enough for the play of many passions, as
    the narrowest hearthstone may be. With the
    sounding of the curfew, the town is hushed to
    sleep again, and the curtain falls on this mimic
    drama of life.
         The charm of it all is not easily to be defined.
    Perhaps if one could name it, the spell were
    broken. Above the changing rhythms hangs
    an atmosphere too evasive for measurement--an
    atmosphere that stipulates an imaginative mood
    on the part of the reader. The quality which
    pleases in certain of the lyrical episodes is less
    intangible. One readily explains one's liking
    for so gracious a lyric as The Flower-Seller, to
    select an example at random. Next to the plea-
    sure that lies in the writing of such exquisite
    verse is the pleasure of quoting it. I copy the
    stanzas partly for my own gratification, and
    partly to win the reader to "Wishmakers'
    Town," not knowing better how to do it.

         Myrtle, and eglantine,
         For the old love and the new!
         And the columbine,
         With its cap and bells, for folly!
         And the daffodil, for the hopes of youth! and the rue,
         For melancholy!
         But of all the blossoms that blow,
         Fair gallants all, I charge you to win, if ye may,
         This gentle guest,
         Who dreams apart, in her wimple of purple and gray,
         Like the blessed Virgin, with meek head bending low
         Upon her breast.
         For the orange flower
         Ye may buy as ye will: but the violet of the wood
         Is the love of maidenhood;
         And he that hath worn it but once, though but for an hour,
         He shall never again, though he wander by many a stream,
         No, never again shall he meet with a dower that shall seem
         So sweet and pure; and forever, in after years,
         At the thought of its bloom, or the fragrance of its breath,
         The past shall arise,
         And his eyes shall be dim with tears,
         And his soul shall be far in the gardens of Paradise
         Though he stand in the Shambles of death.

         In a different tone, but displaying the same
    sureness of execution, is the cry of the lowly
    folk, the wretched pawns in the great game of
    life:

         Prince, and Bishop, and Knight, and Dame,
            Plot, and plunder, and disagree!
         O but the game is a royal game!
            O but your tourneys are fair to see!

         None too hopeful we found our lives;
            Sore was labor from day to day;
         Still we strove for our babes and wives--
            Now, to the trumpet, we march away!

         "Why?"--For some one hath will'd it so!
          Nothing we know of the why or the where--
         To swamp, or jungle, or wastes of snow--
            Nothing we know, and little we care.

         Give us to kill!--since this is the end
            Of love and labor in Nature's plan;
         Give us to kill and ravish and rend,
            Yea, since this is the end of man.

         States shall perish, and states be born:
            Leaders, out of the throng, shall press;
         Some to honor, and some to scorn:
            We, that are little, shall yet be less.

         Over our lines shall the vultures soar;
            Hard on our flanks shall the jackals cry;
         And the dead shall be as the sands of the shore;
            And daily the living shall pray to die.

         Nay, what matter!--When all is said,
            Prince and Bishop will plunder still:
         Lord and Lady must dance and wed.
         Pity us, pray for us, ye that will!

         It is only the fear of impinging on Mr.
    Young's copyright that prevents me reprinting
    the graphic ballad of The Wanderer and the
    prologue of The Strollers, which reads like a page
    from the prelude to some Old-World miracle
    play. The setting of these things is frequently
    antique, but the thought is the thought of to-
    day. I think there is a new generation of
    readers for such poetry as Mr. Young's. I ven-
    ture the prophecy that it will not lack for them
    later when the time comes for the inevitable
    rearrangement of present poetic values.
         The author of "Wishmakers' Town" is the
    child of his period, and has not escaped the ma-
    ladie du siecle
    . The doubt and pessimism that
    marked the end of the nineteenth century find a
    voice in the bell-like strophes with which the
    volume closes. It is the dramatist rather than
    the poet who speaks here. The real message of
    the poet to mankind is ever one of hope. Amid
    the problems that perplex and discourage, it is
    for him to sing

         Of what the world shall be
         When the years have died away.



    HISTORICAL NOVELS



    IN default of such an admirable piece of work
    as Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne," I
    like best those fictions which deal with king-
    doms and principalities that exist only in the
    mind's eye. One's knowledge of actual events
    and real personages runs no serious risk of re-
    ceiving shocks in this no-man's-land. Everything
    that happens in an imaginary realm--in the
    realm of Ruritania, for illustration--has an air
    of possibility, at least a shadowy vraisemblance.
    The atmosphere and local color, having an au-
    thenticity of their own, are not to be challenged.
    You cannot charge the writer with ignorance of
    the period in which his narrative is laid, since
    the period is as vague as the geography. He
    walks on safe ground, eluding many of the perils
    that beset the story-teller who ventures to stray
    beyond the bounds of the make-believe. One
    peril he cannot escape--that of misrepresenting
    human nature.
         The anachronisms of the average historical
    novel, pretending to reflect history, are among
    its minor defects. It is a thing altogether won-
    derfully and fearfully made--the imbecile in-
    trigue, the cast-iron characters, the plumed and
    armored dialogue with its lance of gory rheto-
    ric forever at charge. The stage at its worst
    moments is not so unreal. Here art has broken
    into smithereens the mirror which she is sup-
    posed to hold up to nature.
         In this romance-world somebody is always
    somebody's unsuspected father, mother, or child,
    deceiving every one excepting the reader. Usu-
    ally the anonymous person is the hero, to whom
    it is mere recreation to hold twenty swordsmen
    at bay on a staircase, killing ten or twelve of
    them before he escapes through a door that ever
    providentially opens directly behind him. How
    tired one gets of that door! The "caitiff" in
    these chronicles of when knighthood was in
    flower is invariably hanged from "the highest
    battlement"--the second highest would not do
    at all; or else he is thrown into "the deepest
    dungeon of the castle"--the second deepest
    dungeon was never known to be used on these
    occasions. The hero habitually "cleaves" his
    foeman "to the midriff," the "midriff" being
    what the properly brought up hero always has
    in view. A certain fictional historian of my
    acquaintance makes his swashbuckler exclaim:
    "My sword will [shall] kiss his midriff;" but
    that is an exceptionally lofty flight of diction.
    My friend's heroine dresses as a page, and in
    the course of long interviews with her lover re-
    mains unrecognized--a diaphanous literary in-
    vention that must have been old when the Pyra-
    mids were young. The heroine's small brother,
    with playful archaicism called "a springald,"
    puts on her skirts and things and passes him-
    self off for his sister or anybody else he pleases.
    In brief, there is no puerility that is not at home
    in this sphere of misbegotten effort. Listen--
    a priest, a princess, and a young man in woman's
    clothes are on the scene:

               The princess rose to her feet and
         approached the priest.
               "Father," she said swiftly, "this
         is not the Lady Joan, my brother's
         wife, but a youth marvelously like
         her, who hath offered himself in
         her place that she might escape. . . .
         He is the Count von Loen, a lord
         of Kernsburg. And I love him. We
         want you to marry us now, dear
         Father--now, without a moment's
         delay; for if you do not they will
         kill him, and I shall have to marry
         Prince Wasp!"

    This is from "Joan of the Sword Hand," and
    if ever I read a more silly performance I have
    forgotten it.



    POOR YORICK



    THERE is extant in the city of New York
    an odd piece of bric-a-brac which I am
    sometimes tempted to wish was in my own
    possession. On a bracket in Edwin Booth's
    bedroom at The Players--the apartment re-
    mains as he left it that solemn June day ten
    years ago--stands a sadly dilapidated skull
    which the elder Booth, and afterward his son
    Edwin, used to soliloquize over in the grave-
    yard at Elsinore in the fifth act of "Hamlet."
         A skull is an object that always invokes
    interest more or less poignant; it always
    has its pathetic story, whether told or untold;
    but this skull is especially a skull "with a
    past."
         In the early forties, while playing an engage-
    ment somewhere in the wild West, Junius
    Brutus Booth did a series of kindnesses to a
    particularly undeserving fellow, the name of
    him unknown to us. The man, as it seemed,
    was a combination of gambler, horse-stealer,
    and highwayman--in brief, a miscellaneous
    desperado, and precisely the melodramatic sort
    of person likely to touch the sympathies of the
    half-mad player. In the course of nature or the
    law, presumably the law, the adventurer bodily
    disappeared one day, and soon ceased to exist
    even as a reminiscence in the florid mind of his
    sometime benefactor.
         As the elder Booth was seated at breakfast
    one morning in a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky,
    a negro boy entered the room bearing a small
    osier basket neatly covered with a snowy nap-
    kin. It had the general appearance of a basket
    of fruit or flowers sent by some admirer, and as
    such it figured for a moment in Mr. Booth's
    conjecture. On lifting the cloth the actor started
    from the chair with a genuine expression on his
    features of that terror which he was used so
    marvelously to simulate as Richard III. in the
    midnight tent-scene or as Macbeth when the
    ghost of Banquo usurped his seat at table.
         In the pretty willow-woven basket lay the
    head of Booth's old pensioner, which head the
    old pensioner had bequeathed in due legal form
    to the tragedian, begging him henceforth to
    adopt it as one of the necessary stage properties
    in the fifth act of Mr. Shakespeare's tragedy
    of "Hamlet.'' "Take it away, you black
    imp!" thundered the actor to the equally aghast
    negro boy, whose curiosity had happily not
    prompted him to investigate the dark nature of
    his burden.
         Shortly afterward, however, the horse-stealer's
    residuary legatee, recovering from the first shock
    of his surprise, fell into the grim humor of the
    situation, and proceeded to carry out to the
    letter the testator's whimsical request. Thus it
    was that the skull came to secure an engage-
    ment to play the role of poor Yorick in J. B.
    Booth's company of strolling players, and to
    continue a while longer to glimmer behind the
    footlights in the hands of his famous son.
         Observing that the grave-digger in his too
    eager realism was damaging the thing--the
    marks of his pick and spade are visible on the
    cranium--Edwin Booth presently replaced it
    with a papier-mache counterfeit manufactured
    in the property-room of the theatre. During
    his subsequent wanderings in Australia and
    California, he carefully preserved the relic,
    which finally found repose on the bracket in
    question.
         How often have I sat, of an afternoon, in
    that front room on the fourth floor of the club-
    house in Gramercy Park, watching the winter
    or summer twilight gradually softening and
    blurring the sharp outline of the skull until it
    vanished uncannily into the gloom! Edwin
    Booth had forgotten, if ever he knew, the name
    of the man; but I had no need of it in order to
    establish acquaintance with poor Yorick. In
    this association I was conscious of a deep tinge
    of sentiment on my own part, a circumstance
    not without its queerness, considering how very
    distant the acquaintance really was.
         Possibly he was a fellow of infinite jest in his
    day; he was sober enough now, and in no way
    disposed to indulge in those flashes of merri-
    ment "that were wont to set the table on a
    roar." But I did not regret his evaporated
    hilarity; I liked his more befitting genial si-
    lence, and had learned to look upon his rather
    open countenance with the same friendliness as
    that with which I regarded the faces of less
    phantasmal members of the club. He had be-
    come to me a dramatic personality as distinct as
    that of any of the Thespians I met in the grill-
    room or the library.
         Yorick's feeling in regard to me was a sub-
    ject upon which I frequently speculated. There
    was at intervals an alert gleam of intelligence
    in those cavernous eye-sockets, as if the sudden
    remembrance of some old experience had illu-
    mined them. He had been a great traveler, and
    had known strange vicissitudes in life; his stage
    career had brought him into contact with a
    varied assortment of men and women, and ex-
    tended his horizon. His more peaceful profes-
    sion of holding up mail-coaches on lonely roads
    had surely not been without incident. It was
    inconceivable that all this had left no impres-
    sions. He must have had at least a faint recol-
    lection of the tempestuous Junius Brutus Booth.
    That Yorick had formed his estimate of me, and
    probably not a flattering one, is something of
    which I am strongly convinced.
         At the death of Edwin Booth, poor Yorick
    passed out of my personal cognizance, and now
    lingers an incongruous shadow amid the mem-
    ories of the precious things I lost then.
         The suite of apartments formerly occupied by
    Edwin Booth at The Players has been, as I have
    said, kept unchanged--a shrine to which from
    time to time some loving heart makes silent
    pilgrimage. On a table in the centre of his
    bedroom lies the book just where he laid it
    down, an ivory paper-cutter marking the page
    his eyes last rested upon; and in this chamber,
    with its familiar pictures, pipes, and ornaments,
    the skull finds its proper sanctuary. If at odd
    moments I wish that by chance poor Yorick
    had fallen to my care, the wish is only half-
    hearted, though had that happened, I would
    have given him welcome to the choicest corner
    in my study and tenderly cherished him for the
    sake of one who comes no more.



    THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER



     One that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!--King Lear.

    THE material for this paper on the auto-
    graph hunter, his ways and his manners,
    has been drawn chiefly from experiences not
    my own. My personal relations with him have
    been comparatively restricted, a circumstance
    to which I owe the privilege of treating the
    subject with a freedom that might otherwise not
    seem becoming.
         No author is insensible to the compliment in-
    volved in a request for his autograph, assuming
    the request to come from some sincere lover of
    books and bookmen. It is an affair of different
    complection when he is importuned to give time
    and attention to the innumerable unknown who
    "collect" autographs as they would collect post-
    age stamps, with no interest in the matter be-
    yond the desire to accumulate as many as possi-
    ble. The average autograph hunter, with his
    purposeless insistence, reminds one of the queen
    in Stockton's story whose fad was "the button-
    holes of all nations."
         In our population of eighty millions and up-
    ward there are probably two hundred thousand
    persons interested more or less in what is termed
    the literary world. This estimate is absurdly
    low, but it serves to cast a sufficient side-light
    upon the situation. Now, any unit of these two
    hundred thousand is likely at any moment to in-
    dite a letter to some favorite novelist, historian,
    poet, or what not. It will be seen, then, that
    the autograph hunter is no inconsiderable per-
    son. He has made it embarrassing work for the
    author fortunate or unfortunate enough to be re-
    garded as worth while. Every mail adds to his
    reproachful pile of unanswered letters. If he
    have a conscience, and no amanuensis, he quickly
    finds himself tangled in the meshes of endless
    and futile correspondence. Through policy,
    good nature, or vanity he is apt to become facile
    prey.
         A certain literary collector once confessed in
    print that he always studied the idiosyncrasies
    of his "subject" as carefully as another sort of
    collector studies the plan of the house to which
    he meditates a midnight visit. We were as-
    sured that with skillful preparation and adroit
    approach an autograph could be extracted from
    anybody. According to the revelations of the
    writer, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, and Mr.
    Gladstone had their respective point of easy
    access--their one unfastened door or window,
    metaphorically speaking. The strongest man
    has his weak side.
         Dr. Holmes's affability in replying to every
    one who wrote to him was perhaps not a trait
    characteristic of the elder group. Mr. Lowell,
    for instance, was harder-hearted and rather diffi-
    cult to reach. I recall one day in the library at
    Elmwood. As I was taking down a volume
    from the shelf a sealed letter escaped from the
    pages and fluttered to my feet. I handed it to
    Mr. Lowell, who glanced incuriously at the
    superscription. "Oh, yes," he said, smiling,
    "I know 'em by instinct." Relieved of its en-
    velope, the missive turned out to be eighteen
    months old, and began with the usual amusing
    solecism: "As one of the most famous of
    American authors I would like to possess your
    autograph."
         Each recipient of such requests has of course
    his own way of responding. Mr. Whittier used
    to be obliging; Mr. Longfellow politic; Mr.
    Emerson, always philosophical, dreamily con-
    fiscated the postage stamps.
         Time was when the collector contented him-
    self with a signature on a card; but that, I am
    told, no longer satisfies. He must have a letter
    addressed to him personally--"on any subject
    you please," as an immature scribe lately sug-
    gested to an acquaintance of mine. The in-
    genuous youth purposed to flourish a letter in the
    faces of his less fortunate competitors, in order
    to show them that he was on familiar terms with
    the celebrated So-and-So. This or a kindred
    motive is the spur to many a collector. The
    stratagems he employs to compass his end are
    inexhaustible. He drops you an off-hand note
    to inquire in what year you first published your
    beautiful poem entitled "A Psalm of Life." If
    you are a simple soul, you hasten to assure him
    that you are not the author of that poem, which
    he must have confused with your "Rime of the
    Ancient Mariner"--and there you are. Another
    expedient is to ask if your father's middle name
    was not Hierophilus. Now, your father has
    probably been dead many years, and as perhaps
    he was not a public man in his day, you are
    naturally touched that any one should have in-
    terest in him after this long flight of time. In
    the innocence of your heart you reply by the
    next mail that your father's middle name was
    not Hierophilus, but Epaminondas--and there
    you are again. It is humiliating to be caught
    swinging, like a simian ancestor, on a branch
    of one's genealogical tree.
         Some morning you find beside your plate at
    breakfast an imposing parchment with a great
    gold seal in the upper left-hand corner. This
    document--I am relating an actual occurrence
    --announces with a flourish that you have unan-
    imously been elected an honorary member of
    The Kalamazoo International Literary Associa-
    tion. Possibly the honor does not take away
    your respiration; but you are bound by courtesy
    to make an acknowledgment, and you express
    your insincere thanks to the obliging secretary
    of a literary organization which does not exist
    anywhere on earth.
         A scheme of lighter creative touch is that of
    the correspondent who advises you that he is
    replenishing his library and desires a detailed
    list of your works, with the respective dates of
    their first issue, price, style of binding, etc. A
    bibliophile, you say to yourself. These inter-
    rogations should of course have been addressed
    to your publisher; but they are addressed to
    you, with the stereotyped "thanks in advance."
    The natural inference is that the correspondent,
    who writes in a brisk commercial vein, wishes
    to fill out his collection of your books, or, pos-
    sibly, to treat himself to a complete set in full
    crushed Levant. Eight or ten months later this
    individual, having forgotten (or hoping you
    will not remember) that he has already de-
    manded a chronological list of your writings,
    forwards another application couched in the
    self-same words. The length of time it takes
    him to "replenish" his library (with your
    books) strikes you as pathetic. You cannot
    control your emotions sufficiently to pen a
    reply. From a purely literary point of view
    this gentleman cares nothing whatever for your
    holograph; from a mercantile point of view
    he cares greatly and likes to obtain duplicate
    specimens, which he disposes of to dealers in
    such frail merchandise.
         The pseudo-journalist who is engaged in
    preparing a critical and biographical sketch of
    you, and wants to incorporate, if possible, some
    slight hitherto unnoted event in your life--a
    signed photograph and a copy of your book-
    plate are here in order--is also a character
    which periodically appears upon the scene. In
    this little Comedy of Deceptions there are as
    many players as men have fancies.
         A brother slave-of-the-lamp permits me to
    transfer this leaf from the book of his experi-
    ence: "Not long ago the postman brought me
    a letter of a rather touching kind. The unknown
    writer, lately a widow, and plainly a woman of
    refinement, had just suffered a new affliction in
    the loss of her little girl. My correspondent
    asked me to copy for her ten or a dozen lines
    from a poem which I had written years before
    on the death of a child. The request was so
    shrinkingly put, with such an appealing air of
    doubt as to its being heeded, that I immediately
    transcribed the entire poem, a matter of a hun-
    dred lines or so, and sent it to her. I am unable
    to this day to decide whether I was wholly hurt
    or wholly amused when, two months afterward,
    I stumbled over my manuscript, with a neat
    price attached to it, in a second-hand book-
    shop."
         Perhaps the most distressing feature of the
    whole business is the very poor health which
    seems to prevail among autograph hunters. No
    other class of persons in the community shows
    so large a percentage of confirmed invalids.
    There certainly is some mysterious connection
    between incipient spinal trouble and the col-
    lecting of autographs. Which superinduces the
    other is a question for pathology. It is a fact
    that one out of every eight applicants for a
    specimen of penmanship bases his or her claim
    upon the possession of some vertebral disability
    which leaves him or her incapable of doing
    anything but write to authors for their auto-
    graph. Why this particular diversion should be
    the sole resource remains undisclosed. But so
    it appears to be, and the appeal to one's sympa-
    thy is most direct and persuasive. Personally,
    however, I have my suspicions, suspicions that
    are shared by several men of letters, who have
    come to regard this plea of invalidism, in the
    majority of cases, as simply the variation of a
    very old and familiar tune. I firmly believe
    that the health of autograph hunters, as a class,
    is excellent.




    ROBERT HERRICK



    I



    A LITTLE over three hundred years ago
    England had given to her a poet of the
    very rarest lyrical quality, but she did not dis-
    cover the fact for more than a hundred and
    fifty years afterward. The poet himself was
    aware of the fact at once, and stated it, perhaps
    not too modestly, in countless quatrains and
    couplets, which were not read, or, if read, were
    not much regarded at the moment. It has al-
    ways been an incredulous world in this matter.
    So many poets have announced their arrival,
    and not arrived!
         Robert Herrick was descended in a direct
    line from an ancient family in Lincolnshire, the
    Eyricks, a mentionable representative of which
    was John Eyrick of Leicester, the poet's grand-
    father, admitted freeman in 1535, and afterward
    twice made mayor of the town. John Eyrick
    or Heyricke--he spelled his name recklessly--
    had five sons, the second of which sought a
    career in London, where he became a gold-
    smith, and in December, 1582, married Julian
    Stone, spinster, of Bedfordshire, a sister to
    Anne, Lady Soame, the wife of Sir Stephen
    Soame. One of the many children of this mar-
    riage was Robert Herrick.
         It is the common misfortune of the poet's
    biographers, though it was the poet's own great
    good fortune, that the personal interviewer was
    an unknown quantity at the period when Her-
    rick played his part on the stage of life. Of
    that performance, in its intimate aspects, we
    have only the slightest record.
         Robert Herrick was born in Wood street,
    Cheapside, London, in 1591, and baptized at
    St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, on August 24 of that
    year. He had several brothers and sisters, with
    whom we shall not concern ourselves. It would
    be idle to add the little we know about these
    persons to the little we know about Herrick
    himself. He is a sufficient problem without
    dragging in the rest of the family.
         When the future lyrist was fifteen months old
    his father, Nicholas Herrick, made his will,
    and immediately fell out of an upper win-
    dow. Whether or not this fall was an intended
    sequence to the will, the high almoner, Dr.
    Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, promptly put in
    his claim to the estate, "all goods and chattels
    of suicides" becoming his by law. The cir-
    cumstances were suspicious, though not conclu-
    sive, and the good bishop, after long litigation,
    consented to refer the case to arbitrators, who
    awarded him two hundred and twenty pounds,
    thus leaving the question at issue--whether or
    not Herrick's death had been his own premedi-
    tated act--still wrapped in its original mystery.
    This singular law, which had the possible effect
    of inducing high almoners to encourage suicide
    among well-to-do persons of the lower and
    middle classes, was afterward rescinded.
         Nicholas Herrick did not leave his household
    destitute, for his estate amounted to five thousand
    pounds, that is to say, twenty-five thousand
    pounds in to-day's money; but there were many
    mouths to feed. The poet's two uncles, Robert
    Herrick and William Herrick of Beaumanor,
    the latter subsequently knighted for his useful-
    ness as jeweller and money-lender to James I.,
    were appointed guardians to the children.
         Young Robert appears to have attended school
    in Westminster until his fifteenth year, when
    he was apprenticed to Sir William, who had
    learned the gentle art of goldsmith from his
    nephew's father. Though Robert's indentures

          Dr. Grosart, in his interesting and valuable Memorial-Intro-
    duction to Herrick's poems, quotes this curious item from Win-
    wood's Manorials of Affairs of State: "On Easter Tuesday [1605],
    one Mr. William Herrick, a goldsmith in Cheapside, was Knighted
    for making a Hole in the great Diamond the King cloth wear. The
    party little expected the honour, but he did his work so well as
    won the King to an extraordinary liking of it."
    bound him for ten years, Sir William is sup-
    posed to have offered no remonstrance when he
    was asked, long before that term expired, to
    cancel the engagement and allow Robert to enter
    Cambridge, which he did as fellow-commoner
    at St. John's College. At the end of two years
    he transferred himself to Trinity Hall, with a
    view to economy and the pursuit of the law--
    the two frequently go together. He received
    his degree of B. A. in 1617, and his M. A. in
    1620, having relinquished the law for the arts.
         During this time he was assumed to be in
    receipt of a quarterly allowance of ten pounds--
    a not illiberal provision, the pound being then
    five times its present value; but as the payments
    were eccentric, the master of arts was in recur-
    rent distress. If this money came from his own
    share of his father's estate, as seems likely,
    Herrick had cause for complaint; if otherwise,
    the pith is taken out of his grievance.
         The Iliad of his financial woes at this juncture
    is told in a few chance-preserved letters written
    to his "most careful uncle," as he calls that
    evidently thrifty person. In one of these mono-
    tonous and dreary epistles, which are signed
    "R. Hearick," the writer says: "The essence
    of my writing is (as heretofore) to entreat
    you to paye for my use to Mr. Arthour Johnson,
    bookseller, in Paule's Churchyarde, the ordi-
    narie sume of tenn pounds, and that with as
    much sceleritie as you maye." He also indulges
    in the natural wish that his college bills "had
    leaden wings and tortice feet." This was in
    1617. The young man's patrimony, whatever
    it may have been, had dwindled, and he con-
    fesses to "many a throe and pinches of the
    purse." For the moment, at least, his prospects
    were not flattering.
         Robert Herrick's means of livelihood, when
    in 1620 he quitted the university and went up to
    London, are conjectural. It is clear that he was
    not without some resources, since he did not
    starve to death on his wits before he discovered
    a patron in the Earl of Pembroke. In the court
    circle Herrick also unearthed humbler, but per-
    haps not less useful, allies in the persons of
    Edward Norgate, clerk of the signet, and Master
    John Crofts, cup-bearer to the king. Through
    the two New Year anthems, honored by the
    music of Henry Lawes, his Majesty's organist
    at Westminster, it is more than possible that
    Herrick was brought to the personal notice of
    Charles and Henrietta Maria. All this was a
    promise of success, but not success itself. It
    has been thought probable that Herrick may
    have secured some minor office in the chapel
    at Whitehall. That would accord with his sub-
    sequent appointment (September, 1627,) as
    chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham's unfortu-
    nate expedition of the Isle of Rhe.
         Precisely when Herrick was invested with
    holy orders is not ascertainable. If one may
    draw an inference from his poems, the life he
    led meanwhile was not such as his "most care-
    ful uncle" would have warmly approved. The
    literary clubs and coffee-houses of the day were
    open to a free-lance like young Herrick, some
    of whose blithe measures, passing in manuscript
    from hand to hand, had brought him faintly to
    light as a poet. The Dog and the Triple Tun
    were not places devoted to worship, unless it
    were to the worship of "rare Ben Jonson," at
    whose feet Herrick now sat, with the other
    blossoming young poets of the season. He was
    a faithful disciple to the end, and addressed
    many loving lyrics to the master, of which not
    the least graceful is His Prayer to Ben Jonson:

         When I a verse shall make,
         Know I have praid thee
         For old religion's sake,
         Saint Ben, to aide me.

         Make the way smooth for me,
         When I, thy Herrick,
         Honouring thee, on my knee
         Offer my lyric.

         Candles I'll give to thee,
         And a new altar;
         And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
         Writ in my Psalter.


         On September 30, 1629, Charles I., at the
    recommending of the Earl of Exeter, presented
    Herrick with the vicarage of Dean Prior, near
    Totnes, in Devonshire. Here he was destined
    to pass the next nineteen years of his life among
    surroundings not congenial. For Herrick to be
    a mile away from London stone was for Herrick
    to be in exile. Even with railway and tele-
    graphic interruptions from the outside world,
    the dullness of a provincial English town of to-
    day is something formidable. The dullness of a
    sequestered English hamlet in the early part of
    the seventeenth century must have been appall-
    ing. One is dimly conscious of a belated throb
    of sympathy for Robert Herrick. Yet, however
    discontented or unhappy he may have been at
    first in that lonely vicarage, the world may con-
    gratulate itself on the circumstances that stranded
    him there, far from the distractions of the town,
    and with no other solace than his Muse, for there
    it was he wrote the greater number of the poems
    which were to make his fame. It is to this acci-
    dental banishment to Devon that we owe the
    cluster of exquisite pieces descriptive of obso-
    lete rural manners and customs--the Christ-
    mas masks, the Twelfth-night mummeries, the
    morris-dances, and the May-day festivals.
         The November following Herrick's appoint-
    ment to the benefice was marked by the death
    of his mother, who left him no heavier legacy
    than "a ringe of twenty shillings." Perhaps
    this was an understood arrangement between
    them; but it is to be observed that, though Her-
    rick was a spendthrift in epitaphs, he wasted no
    funeral lines on Julian Herrick. In the matter
    of verse he dealt generously with his family
    down to the latest nephew. One of his most
    charming and touching poems is entitled To
    His Dying Brother, Master William Herrick,
    a posthumous son. There appear to have been
    two brothers named William. The younger,
    who died early, is supposed to be referred to
    here.
         The story of Herrick's existence at Dean Prior
    is as vague and bare of detail as the rest of the
    narrative. His parochial duties must have been
    irksome to him, and it is to be imagined that he
    wore his cassock lightly. As a preparation for
    ecclesiastical life he forswore sack and poetry;
    but presently he was with the Muse again, and
    his farewell to sack was in a strictly Pickwickian
    sense. Herrick had probably accepted the vicar-
    ship as he would have accepted a lieutenancy in
    a troop of horse--with an eye to present emol-
    ument and future promotion. The promotion
    never came, and the emolument was nearly as
    scant as that of Goldsmith's parson, who con-
    sidered himself "passing rich with forty pounds
    a year"--a height of optimism beyond the
    reach of Herrick, with his expensive town wants
    and habits. But fifty pounds--the salary of his
    benefice--and possible perquisites in the way
    of marriage and burial fees would enable him to
    live for the time being. It was better than a
    possible nothing a year in London.
         Herrick's religious convictions were assuredly
    not deeper than those of the average layman.
    Various writers have taken a different view of
    the subject; but it is inconceivable that a clergy-
    man with a fitting sense of his function could
    have written certain of the poems which Her-
    rick afterward gave to the world--those aston-
    ishing epigrams upon his rustic enemies, and
    those habitual bridal compliments which, among
    his personal friends, must have added a terror
    to matrimony. Had he written only in that vein,
    the posterity which he so often invoked with
    pathetic confidence would not have greatly
    troubled itself about him.
         It cannot positively be asserted that all the
    verses in question relate to the period of his in-
    cumbency, for none of his verse is dated, with
    the exception of the Dialogue betwixt Horace
    and Lydia. The date of some of the composi-
    tions may be arrived at by induction. The re-
    ligious pieces grouped under the title of Noble
    Numbers distinctly associate themselves with
    Dean Prior, and have little other interest. Very
    few of them are "born of the royal blood."
    They lack the inspiration and magic of his secu-
    lar poetry, and are frequently so fantastical and
    grotesque as to stir a suspicion touching the ab-
    solute soundness of Herrick's mind at all times.
    The lines in which the Supreme Being is as-
    sured that he may read Herrick's poems with-
    out taking any tincture from their sinfulness
    might have been written in a retreat for the un-
    balanced. "For unconscious impiety," remarks
    Mr. Edmund Gosse, "this rivals the famous
    passage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted
    God to 'pause and think.'" Elsewhere, in an
    apostrophe to "Heaven," Herrick says:

                  Let mercy be
               So kind to set me free,
                  And I will straight
               Come in, or force the gate.

    In any event, the poet did not purpose to be
    left out!
         Relative to the inclusion of unworthy pieces

          In Seventeenth-Century Studies.
    and the general absence of arrangement in the
    "Hesperides," Dr. Grosart advances the theory
    that the printers exercised arbitrary authority on
    these points. Dr. Grosart assumes that Herrick
    kept the epigrams and personal tributes in
    manuscript books separate from the rest of the
    work, which would have made a too slender
    volume by itself, and on the plea of this slender-
    ness was induced to trust the two collections
    to the publisher, "whereupon he or some un-
    skilled subordinate proceeded to intermix these
    additions with the others. That the poet him-
    self had nothing to do with the arrangement or
    disarrangement lies on the surface." This is an
    amiable supposition, but merely a supposition.
    Herrick personally placed the "copy" in the
    hands of John Williams and Francis Eglesfield,
    and if he were over-persuaded to allow them
    to print unfit verses, and to observe no method
    whatever in the contents of the book, the dis-
    credit is none the less his. It is charitable to
    believe that Herrick's coarseness was not the
    coarseness of the man, but of the time, and that
    he followed the fashion malgre lui. With re-
    gard to the fairy poems, they certainly should
    have been given in sequence; but if there are
    careless printers, there are also authors who are
    careless in the arrangement of their manuscript,
    a kind of task, moreover, in which Herrick was
    wholly unpractised, and might easily have made
    mistakes. The "Hesperides" was his sole
    publication.
         Herrick was now thirty-eight years of age.
    Of his personal appearance at this time we have
    no description. The portrait of him prefixed to
    the original edition of his works belongs to a
    much later moment. Whether or not the bovine
    features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on
    the poet, it is to be regretted that oblivion has
    not laid its erasing finger on that singularly un-
    pleasant counterfeit presentment. It is interest-
    ing to note that this same Marshall engraved the
    head of Milton for the first collection of his mis-
    cellaneous poems--the precious 1645 volume
    containing Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, etc.
    The plate gave great offense to the serious-
    minded young Milton, not only because it re-
    presented him as an elderly person, but because
    of certain minute figures of peasant lads and
    lassies who are very indistinctly seen dancing
    frivolously under the trees in the background.
    Herrick had more reason to protest. The ag-
    gressive face bestowed upon him by the artist
    lends a tone of veracity to the tradition that the
    vicar occasionally hurled the manuscript of his
    sermon at the heads of his drowsy parishioners,
    accompanying the missive with pregnant re-
    marks. He has the aspect of one meditating
    assault and battery.
         To offset the picture there is much indirect
    testimony to the amiability of the man, aside
    from the evidence furnished by his own writ-
    ings. He exhibits a fine trait in the poem on the
    Bishop of Lincoln's imprisonment--a poem full
    of deference and tenderness for a person who
    had evidently injured the writer, probably by
    opposing him in some affair of church prefer-
    ment. Anthony Wood says that Herrick "be-
    came much beloved by the gentry in these parts
    for his florid and witty (wise) discourses." It
    appears that he was fond of animals, and had a
    pet spaniel called Tracy, which did not get away
    without a couplet attached to him:


         Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see
         For shape and service spaniell like to thee.

    Among the exile's chance acquaintances was a
    sparrow, whose elegy he also sings, comparing
    the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter's
    disadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans.
    On the authority of Dorothy King, the daughter
    of a woman who served Herrick's successor at
    Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet
    kept a pig, which he had taught to drink out of
    a tankard--a kind of instruction he was admir-
    ably qualified to impart. Dorothy was in her
    ninety-ninth year when she communicated this
    fact to Mr. Barron Field, the author of the
    paper on Herrick published in the "Quarterly
    Review" for August, 1810, and in the Boston
    edition of the "Hesperides" attributed to
    Southey.
         What else do we know of the vicar? A very
    favorite theme with Herrick was Herrick. Scat-
    tered through his book are no fewer than twenty-
    five pieces entitled On Himself, not to men-
    tion numberless autobiographical hints under
    other captions. They are merely hints, throw-
    ing casual side-lights on his likes and dislikes,
    and illuminating his vanity. A whimsical per-
    sonage without any very definite outlines might
    be evolved from these fragments. I picture him
    as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with perhaps less
    quaintness, and the poetical temperament added.
    Like the prince of gossips, too, he somehow
    gets at your affections. In one place Herrick

          The Biographical Notice prefacing this volume of The British
    Poets is a remarkable production, grammatically and chronologi-
    cally. On page 7 the writer speaks of Herrick as living "in habits
    of intimacy" with Ben Jonson in 1648. If that was the case, Her-
    rick must have taken up his quarters in Westminster Abbey, for
    Jonson had been dead eleven years.
    laments the threatened failure of his eyesight
    (quite in what would have been Pepys's man-
    ner had Pepys written verse), and in another
    place he tells us of the loss of a finger. The
    quatrain treating of this latter catastrophe is as
    fantastic as some of Dr. Donne's concetti:

         One of the five straight branches of my hand
         Is lopt already, and the rest but stand
         Expecting when to fall, which soon will be:
         First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree.

    With all his great show of candor Herrick really
    reveals as little of himself as ever poet did. One
    thing, however, is manifest--he understood and
    loved music. None but a lover could have said:

         The mellow touch of musick most doth wound
         The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound.

    Or this to Julia:

         So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice,
         As could they hear, the damn'd would make no noise,
         But listen to thee walking in thy chamber
         Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.

         . . . Then let me lye
         Entranc'd, and lost confusedly;
         And by thy musick stricken mute,
         Die, and be turn'd into a lute.

         Herrick never married. His modest Devon-
    shire establishment was managed by a maid-
    servant named Prudence Baldwin. "Fate likes
    fine names," says Lowell. That of Herrick's
    maid-of-all-work was certainly a happy meeting
    of gentle vowels and consonants, and has had
    the good fortune to be embalmed in the amber
    of what may be called a joyous little threnody:

         In this little urne is laid
         Prewdence Baldwin, once my maid;
         From whose happy spark here let
         Spring the purple violet.

    Herrick addressed a number of poems to her
    before her death, which seems to have deeply
    touched him in his loneliness. We shall not al-
    low a pleasing illusion to be disturbed by the flip-
    pancy of an old writer who says that "Prue was
    but indifferently qualified to be a tenth muse."
    She was a faithful handmaid, and had the merit
    of causing Herrick in this octave to strike a note
    of sincerity not usual with him:

         These summer birds did with thy master stay
         The times of warmth, but then they flew away,
         Leaving their poet, being now grown old,
         Expos'd to all the coming winter's cold.
         But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide
         As well the winter's as the summer's tide:
         For which thy love, live with thy master here
         Not two, but all the seasons of the year.

    Thus much have I done for thy memory, Mis-
    tress Prew!
         In spite of Herrick's disparagement of Dean-
    bourn, which he calls "a rude river," and
    his characterization of Devon folk as "a peo-
    ple currish, churlish as the seas," the fullest
    and pleasantest days of his life were prob-
    ably spent at Dean Prior. He was not un-
    mindful meanwhile of the gathering political
    storm that was to shake England to its foun-
    dations. How anxiously, in his solitude, he
    watched the course of events, is attested by
    many of his poems. This solitude was not
    without its compensation. "I confess," he
    says,

            I ne'er invented such
         Ennobled numbers for the presse
            Than where I loath'd so much.

         A man is never wholly unhappy when he is
    writing verses. Herrick was firmly convinced
    that each new lyric was a stone added to the
    pillar of his fame, and perhaps his sense of
    relief was tinged with indefinable regret when
    he found himself suddenly deprived of his bene-
    fice. The integrity of some of his royalistic
    poems is doubtful; but he was not given the
    benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament,
    which ejected the panegyrist of young Prince
    Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior, and
    installed in his place the venerable John Syms,
    a gentleman with pronounced Cromwellian
    views.
         Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers
    at the Puritans, discarded his clerical habili-
    ments, and hastened to London to pick up such
    as were left of the gay-colored threads of his
    old experience there. Once more he would
    drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he
    would breathe the air breathed by such poets
    and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden,
    and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and gin-
    ger shall be hot I' the mouth too." In the
    gladness of getting back "from the dull con-
    fines of the drooping west," he writes a glow-
    ing apostrophe to London--that "stony step-
    mother to poets." He claims to be a free-born
    Roman, and is proud to find himself a citizen
    again. According to his earlier biographers,
    Herrick had much ado not to starve in that
    same longed-for London, and fell into great
    misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing,
    with justness, that Herrick's family, which was
    wealthy and influential, would not have allowed
    him to come to abject want. With his royal-
    istic tendencies he may not have breathed quite
    freely in the atmosphere of the Commonwealth,
    and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot,
    but among them was not poverty.
         The poet was now engaged in preparing his
    works for the press, and a few weeks following
    his return to London they were issued in a sin-
    gle volume with the title "Hesperides; or, The
    Works both Humane and Divine of Robert
    Herrick, Esq."
         The time was not ready for him. A new era
    had dawned--the era of the commonplace.
    The interval was come when Shakespeare him-
    self was to lie in a kind of twilight. Herrick
    was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had strayed
    by chance into an artificial and prosaic age--
    a sylvan singing creature alighting on an alien
    planet. "He was too natural," says Mr. Pal-
    grave in his Chrysomela, "too purely poetical;
    he had not the learned polish, the political al-
    lusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn,
    which were then and onward demanded from
    poetry." Yet it is strange that a public which
    had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect
    a poet who was fifty times finer than Waller
    in his own specialty. What poet then, or in the
    half-century that followed the Restoration, could
    have written Corinna's Going a-Maying, or ap-
    proached in kind the ineffable grace and perfec-
    tion to be found in a score of Herrick's lyrics?
         The "Hesperides" was received with chilling
    indifference. None of Herrick's great contem-
    poraries has left a consecrating word concerning
    it. The book was not reprinted during the au-
    thor's lifetime, and for more than a century after
    his death Herrick was virtually unread. In 1796
    the "Gentleman's Magazine" copied a few of
    the poems, and two years later Dr. Nathan Drake
    published in his "Literary Hours" three critical
    papers on the poet, with specimens of his writ-
    ings. Dr. Johnson omitted him from the "Lives
    of the Poets," though space was found for half a
    score of poetasters whose names are to be found
    nowhere else. In 1810 Dr. Nott, a physician
    of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections.
    It was not until 1823 that Herrick was reprinted
    in full. It remained for the taste of our own
    day to multiply editions of him.
         In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it
    is now only needful that some wiseacre should
    attribute the authorship of the poems to some
    man who could not possibly have written a line
    of them. The opportunity presents attractions
    that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a hand-
    ful of Herrick's college letters there is no scrap
    of his manuscript extant; the men who drank
    and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple
    Tun make no reference to him; and in the wide
    parenthesis formed by his birth and death we
    find as little tangible incident as is discover-
    able in the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty-
    two years. Here is material for profundity and
    ciphers!
         Herrick's second sojourn in London covered
    the period between 1648 and 1662, curing which
    interim he fades from sight, excepting for the

          With the single exception of the writer of some verses in the
    Musarum Deliciae (1656) who mentions

                    That old sack
         Young Herrick took to entertain
         The Muses in a sprightly vein.
    instant when he is publishing his book. If he
    engaged in further literary work there are no
    evidences of it beyond one contribution to the
    "Lacrymae Musarum" in 1649.
         He seems to have had lodgings, for a while
    at least, in St. Anne's, Westminster. With the
    court in exile and the grim Roundheads seated
    in the seats of the mighty, it was no longer the
    merry London of his early manhood. Time and
    war had thinned the ranks of friends; in the
    old haunts the old familiar faces were wanting.
    Ben Jonson was dead, Waller banished, and
    many another comrade "in disgrace with for-
    tune and men's eyes." As Herrick walked
    through crowded Cheapside or along the dingy
    river-bank in those years, his thought must have
    turned more than once to the little vicarage in
    Devonshire, and lingered tenderly.
         On the accession of Charles II. a favorable
    change of wind wafted Herrick back to his
    former moorings at Dean Prior, the obnoxious
    Syms having been turned adrift. This occurred
    on August 24, 1662, the seventy-first anniver-
    sary of the poet's baptism. Of Herrick's move-
    ments after that, tradition does not furnish even
    the shadow of an outline. The only notable
    event concerning him is recorded twelve years
    later in the parish register: "Robert Herrick,
    vicker, was buried ye 15" day October, 1674."
    He was eighty-three years old. The location of
    his grave is unknown. In 1857 a monument to
    his memory was erected in Dean Church. And
    this is all.



    II



    THE details that have come down to us touch-
    ing Herrick's private life are as meagre as if he
    had been a Marlowe or a Shakespeare. But
    were they as ample as could be desired they
    would still be unimportant compared with the
    single fact that in 1648 he gave to the world his
    "Hesperides." The environments of the man
    were accidental and transitory. The significant
    part of him we have, and that is enduring so
    long as wit, fancy, and melodious numbers hold
    a charm for mankind.
         A fine thing incomparably said instantly be-
    comes familiar, and has henceforth a sort of
    dateless excellence. Though it may have been
    said three hundred years ago, it is as modern
    as yesterday; though it may have been said
    yesterday, it has the trick of seeming to have
    been always in our keeping. This quality of
    remoteness and nearness belongs, in a striking
    degree, to Herrick's poems. They are as novel
    to-day as they were on the lips of a choice few
    of his contemporaries, who, in reading them in
    their freshness, must surely have been aware
    here and there of the ageless grace of old idyllic
    poets dead and gone.
         Herrick was the bearer of no heavy message
    to the world, and such message as he had he
    was apparently in no hurry to deliver. On this
    point he somewhere says:

         Let others to the printing presse run fast;
         Since after death comes glory, I 'll not haste.

    He had need of his patience, for he was long
    detained on the road by many of those obstacles
    that waylay poets on their journeys to the
    printer.
         Herrick was nearly sixty years old when he
    published the "Hesperides." It was, I repeat,
    no heavy message, and the bearer was left an
    unconscionable time to cool his heels in the ante-
    chamber. Though his pieces had been set to
    music by such composers as Lawes, Ramsay,
    and Laniers, and his court poems had naturally
    won favor with the Cavalier party, Herrick cut
    but a small figure at the side of several of his
    rhyming contemporaries who are now forgotten.
    It sometimes happens that the light love-song,
    reaching few or no ears at its first singing, out-
    lasts the seemingly more prosperous ode which,
    dealing with some passing phase of thought,
    social or political, gains the instant applause of
    the multitude. In most cases the timely ode is
    somehow apt to fade with the circumstance that
    inspired it, and becomes the yesterday's edito-
    rial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to
    get hold of occasional poems. That makes it
    hard for feeble poets laureate.
         Mr. Henry James once characterized Al-
    phonse Daudet as "a great little novelist."
    Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brev-
    ity of his poems, for he wrote nothing de longue
    haleine
    , would place him among the minor
    singers; his workmanship places him among
    the masters. The Herricks were not a family
    of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. The
    accurate touch of the artificer in jewels and
    costly metals was one of the gifts transmitted to
    Robert Herrick. Much of his work is as ex-
    quisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger-
    hilt by Cellini; the line has nearly always that
    vine-like fluency which seems impromptu, and
    is never the result of anything but austere labor.
    The critic who, borrowing Milton's words,
    described these carefully wrought poems as
    "wood-notes wild" showed a singular lapse of
    penetration. They are full of subtle simplicity.
    Here we come across a stanza as severely cut as
    an antique cameo--the stanza, for instance, in
    which the poet speaks of his lady-love's "win-
    ter face"--and there a couplet that breaks into
    unfading daffodils and violets. The art, though
    invisible, is always there. His amatory songs
    and catches are such poetry as Orlando would
    have liked to hang on the boughs in the forest
    of Arden. None of the work is hastily done,
    not even that portion of it we could wish had
    not been done at all. Be the motive grave or
    gay, it is given that faultlessness of form which
    distinguishes everything in literature that has
    survived its own period. There is no such thing
    as "form" alone; it is only the close-grained
    material that takes the highest finish. The struc-
    ture of Herrick's verse, like that of Blake, is
    simple to the verge of innocence. Such rhyth-
    mic intricacies as those of Shelley, Tennyson,
    and Swinburne he never dreamed of. But his
    manner has this perfection: it fits his matter as
    the cup of the acorn fits its meat.
         Of passion, in the deeper sense, Herrick has
    little or none. Here are no "tears from the
    depth of some divine despair," no probings into
    the tragic heart of man, no insight that goes
    much farther than the pathos of a cowslip on a
    maiden's grave. The tendrils of his verse reach
    up to the light, and love the warmer side of the
    garden wall. But the reader who does not de-
    tect the seriousness under the lightness misreads
    Herrick. Nearly all true poets have been whole-
    some and joyous singers. A pessimistic poet,
    like the poisonous ivy, is one of nature's sar-
    casms. In his own bright pastoral way Herrick
    must always remain unexcelled. His limitations
    are certainly narrow, but they leave him in the
    sunshine. Neither in his thought nor in his
    utterance is there any complexity; both are as
    pellucid as a woodland pond, content to du-
    plicate the osiers and ferns, and, by chance,
    the face of a girl straying near its crystal. His
    is no troubled stream in which large trout
    are caught. He must be accepted on his own
    terms.
         The greatest poets have, with rare exceptions,
    been the most indebted to their predecessors
    or to their contemporaries. It has wittily been
    remarked that only mediocrity is ever wholly
    original. Impressionability is one of the condi-
    tions of the creative faculty: the sensitive mind
    is the only mind that invents. What the poet
    reads, sees, and feels, goes into his blood, and
    becomes an ingredient of his originality. The
    color of his thought instinctively blends itself
    with the color of its affinities. A writer's style,
    if it have distinction, is the outcome of a hun-
    dred styles.
         Though a generous borrower of the ancients,
    Herrick appears to have been exceptionally free
    from the influence of contemporary minds.
    Here and there in his work are traces of his
    beloved Ben Jonson, or fleeting impressions
    of Fletcher, and in one instance a direct in-
    fringement on Suckling; but the sum of
    Herrick's obligations of this sort is inconsider-
    able.
         This indifference to other writers of his time,
    this insularity, was doubtless his loss. The more
    exalted imagination of Vaughan or Marvell or
    Herbert might have taught him a deeper note
    than he sounded in his purely devotional poems.
    Milton, of course, moved in a sphere apart.
    Shakespeare, whose personality still haunted the
    clubs and taverns which Herrick frequented on
    his first going up to London, failed to lay any
    appreciable spell upon him. That great name,
    moreover, is a jewel which finds no setting in
    Herrick's rhyme. His general reticence rela-
    tive to brother poets is extremely curious when
    we reflect on his penchant for addressing four-
    line epics to this or that individual. They were,
    in the main, obscure individuals, whose iden-
    tity is scarcely worth establishing. His London
    life, at two different periods, brought him into
    contact with many of the celebrities of the day;
    but his verse has helped to confer immortality
    on very few of them. That his verse had the
    secret of conferring immortality was one of his
    unshaken convictions. Shakespeare had not a
    finer confidence when he wrote,

         Not marble nor the gilded monuments
         Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

    than has Herrick whenever he speaks of his own
    poetry, and he is not by any means backward in
    speaking of it. It was the breath of his nostrils.
    Without his Muse those nineteen years in that
    dull, secluded Devonshire village would have
    been unendurable.
         His poetry has the value and the defect of that
    seclusion. In spite, however, of his contracted
    horizon there is great variety in Herrick's themes.
    Their scope cannot be stated so happily as he has
    stated it:

         I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
         Of April, May, of June, and July flowers;
         I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
         Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes;
         I write of Youth, of Love, and have access
         By these to sing of cleanly wantonness;
         I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece
         Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris;
         I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write
         How roses first came red and lilies white;
         I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
         The Court of Mab, and of the Fairy King;
         I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)
         Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

         Never was there so pretty a table of contents!
    When you open his book the breath of the Eng-
    lish rural year fans your cheek; the pages seem
    to exhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if
    sprigs of tansy and lavender had been shut up
    in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense
    of hawthorn hedges and wide-spreading oaks,
    of open lead-set lattices half hidden with honey-
    suckle; and distant voices of the haymakers, re-
    turning home in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily
    on one's ear, as sounds should fall when fancy
    listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly
    English as Herrick. He painted the country
    life of his own time as no other has painted it at
    any time.
         It is to be remarked that the majority of Eng-
    lish poets regarded as national have sought their
    chief inspiration in almost every land and period
    excepting their own. Shakespeare went to Italy,
    Denmark, Greece, Egypt, and to many a hitherto
    unfooted region of the imagination, for plot and
    character. It was not Whitehall Garden, but
    the Garden of Eden and the celestial spaces, that
    lured Milton. It is the Ode on a Grecian Urn,
    The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment
    of Hyperion that have given Keats his spacious
    niche in the gallery of England's poets. Shelley's
    two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The
    Cenci, belong respectively to Greece and Italy.
    Browning's The Ring and the Book is Italian;
    Tennyson wandered to the land of myth for the
    Idylls of the King, and Matthew Arnold's Soh-
    rab and Rustum--a narrative poem second in
    dignity to none produced in the nineteenth cen-
    tury--is a Persian story. But Herrick's "golden
    apples" sprang from the soil in his own day,
    and reddened in the mist and sunshine of his
    native island.
         Even the fairy poems, which must be classed
    by themselves, are not wanting in local flavor.
    Herrick's fairy world is an immeasurable dis-
    tance from that of "A Midsummer Night's
    Dream." Puck and Titania are of finer breath
    than Herrick's little folk, who may be said to
    have Devonshire manners and to live in a minia-
    ture England of their own. Like the magician
    who summons them from nowhere, they are
    fond of color and perfume and substantial feasts,
    and indulge in heavy draughts--from the cups
    of morning-glories. In the tiny sphere they in-
    habit everything is marvelously adapted to their
    requirement; nothing is out of proportion or out
    of perspective. The elves are a strictly religious
    people in their winsome way, "part pagan, part
    papistical;" they have their pardons and indul-
    gences, their psalters and chapels, and

         An apple's-core is hung up dried,
         With rattling kernels, which is rung
         To call to Morn and Even-song;

    and very conveniently,

         Hard by, I' th' shell of half a nut,
         The Holy-water there is put.

    It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-
    world, where the impossible does not strike one
    as incongruous, and the England of 1648 seems
    never very far away.
         It is only among the apparently unpremedi-
    tated lyrical flights of the Elizabethan dramatists
    that one meets with anything like the lilt and
    liquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no de-
    gree Shakespearian echoes, there are epithalamia
    and dirges of his that might properly have fallen
    from the lips of Posthumus in "Cymbeline."
    This delicate epicede would have fitted Imogen:

         Here a solemne fast we keepe
         While all beauty lyes asleepe;
         Husht be all things; no noyse here
         But the toning of a teare,
         Or a sigh of such as bring
         Cowslips for her covering.

    Many of the pieces are purely dramatic in
    essence; the Mad Maid's Song, for example.
    The lyrist may speak in character, like the
    dramatist. A poet's lyrics may be, as most of
    Browning's are, just so many dramatis per-
    sonae
    . "Enter a Song singing" is the stage-
    direction in a seventeenth-century play whose
    name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized in
    a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression.
    In one of his couplets Herrick neatly denies that
    his more mercurial utterances are intended pre-
    sentations of himself:

         To his Book's end this last line he'd have placed--
         Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste.

    In point of fact he was a whole group of im-
    aginary lovers in one. Silvia, Anthea, Electra,
    Perilla, Perenna, and the rest of those lively
    ladies ending in a, were doubtless, for the most
    part, but airy phantoms dancing--as they should
    not have danced--through the brain of a senti-
    mental old bachelor who happened to be a vicar
    of the Church of England. Even with his over-
    plus of heart it would have been quite impossible
    for him to have had enough to go round had
    there been so numerous actual demands upon it.
         Thus much may be conceded to Herrick's
    verse: at its best it has wings that carry it nearly
    as close to heaven's gate as any of Shakespeare's
    lark-like interludes. The brevity of the poems
    and their uniform smoothness sometimes produce
    the effect of monotony. The crowded richness
    of the line advises a desultory reading. But one
    must go back to them again and again. They
    bewitch the memory, having once caught it,
    and insist on saying themselves over and over.
    Among the poets of England the author of the
    "Hesperides" remains, and is likely to remain,
    unique. As Shakespeare stands alone in his vast
    domain, so Herrick stands alone in his scanty
    plot of ground.


         Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content.