No less than any wayside rose,

Dropped in the common dust to die?
Can the mother of us all

Leave her work, to fullness brought,
Lost in the gulf of chance to fall,
As oblivion swallows thought?
Torn away from ocean's rim

To be fashioned by a whim,

Does the briny tempest whirl

To the workman's feet the pearl?

Shall the vulgar, idle crowd

For all ages be allowed

To degrade earth's choicest treasure

At the arbitrary pleasure

Of a mason or a churl?

FROM THE WILD MARE IN THE DESERT›

FT in the waste, the Arab mare untamed,

After three days' wild course awaits the storm

To drain the rain-drops from the thirsty palms;

The sun is leaden, and the silent palms

Droop their long tresses 'neath a fiery sky.
She seeks her well amid the boundless wilds:
The sun has dried it; on the burning rock
Lie shaggy lions growling low in sleep.
Her forces fail; her bleeding nostrils wide
Plunge eager in the sand,- the thirsty sand
Drinks greedily her life's discolored stream.

Then stretches she at length, her great eyes film,
And the wan desert rolls upon its child
In silent folds its ever moving shroud.

She knew not, she, that when the caravan

With all its camels passed beneath the planes,
That, would she follow, bowing her proud neck,
In Bagdad she would find cool stable-stalls,
With gilded mangers, dewy clover turf,

And wells whose depths have never seen the sky.

Laid by, cap and sweeping vest
Ere thou sinkest to repose,
At the hour when half at rest

Folds thy soul as folds a rose;

When sweet Sleep, the sovereign mild,
Peace to all the house has brought,—
Pépita! my charming child!

What, oh, what is then thy thought?

Who knows? Haply dreamest thou
Of some lady doomed to sigh;
All that Hope a truth deems now,
All that Truth shall prove, a lie.

Haply of those mountains grand

That produce- alas! but mice; Castles in Spain; a prince's hand; Bon-bons, lovers, or cream-ice.

A

JUANA

GAIN I see you, ah, my queen,

Of all my old loves that have been,

The first love and the tenderest;

Do you remember or forget

Ah me, for I remember yet—

How the last summer days were blest?

Ah, lady, when we think of this,

The foolish hours of youth and bliss,

How fleet, how sweet, how hard to hold!

10510

How old we are, ere spring be green!
You touch the limit of eighteen,

And I am twenty winters old.

My rose, that mid the red roses
Was brightest, ah, how pale she is!

Yet keeps the beauty of her prime;
Child, never Spanish lady's face
Was lovely with so wild a grace;

Remember the dead summer-time.

Think of our loves, our feuds of old,
And how you gave your chain of gold
To me for a peace-offering;

And how all night I lay awake

To touch and kiss it for your sake,

To touch and kiss the lifeless thing.

Lady, beware, for all we say,
This Love shall live another day,

Awakened from his deathly sleep:
The heart that once has been your shrine
For other loves is too divine;

A home, my dear, too wide and deep.

What did I say — why do I dream?
Why should I struggle with the stream
Whose waves return not any day?

Close heart, and eyes, and arms from me;
Farewell, farewell! so must it be,

So runs, so runs, the world away.

The season bears upon its wing
The swallows and the songs of spring,

And days that were, and days that flit:
The loved lost hours are far away;
And hope and fame are scattered spray
For me, that gave you love a day,

For you that not remember it.

Translation of Andrew Lang.

M

FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS

(1843-)

UCH of what is most subtle and penetrative in contemporary English criticism is embodied in the writings of certain men of letters whose names are familiar only to a special and limited circle. Frederic W. H. Myers is one of those critics whose work, while not in any sense popular, obtains well-established recognition for its literary finish, and pre-eminently for its originality and suggestiveness. The complex forces of the end of the century. may not be favorable to the production of creative genius, but they are favorable to the birth and growth of a sensitive critical spirit. Mr. Myers's Modern and Classical Essays are the work of one to whom the revelations of science in all its branches have been a source of enlightenment on subjects with which it would seem that science primarily had nothing to do. He is of the number of those who would wed the materialistic knowledge of the age to an idealism the more intense because it is denied the outlet of a definite religious faith. He would judge of literature, of personality, of the various phenomena of his own and of a past age, by the new lights of science, and at the same time by the light that never was on sea or land. It is this combination of the idealistic with the exact spirit which gives to the essays of Mr. Myers their peculiar charm, and which fits him to write with such exquisite appreciation of Marcus Aurelius and Virgil, of Rossetti and George Eliot. In his heart he has all the romance of a poet,- his desire to live by admiration, hope, and love, his sensitiveness to the beautiful, his passionate belief in the soul and its great destinies; but his brain rules his heart with typical modern caution. In his efforts to reconcile these elements in his nature, Mr. Myers has infused into his essays, whatever their subjects, the speculative thought of his generation concerning the unseen world and man's relation to it; and especially of that great question of personal immortality, which forever haunts and forever baffles the minds of men. He is drawn naturally to a consideration of such men as Marcus Aurelius. The fitful dejection of the philosophic emperor, his resolve to learn and to endure, his hopeless hope, his calm in the face of the veil which cuts man off from the paradise of certainties, seem to Mr. Myers to prefigure the attitude of the modern mind toward its mysterious environment. Yet he himself has gone beyond the negativity of Stoicism. He believes that love is the gateway to

the unseen universe, being of those who, "while accepting to the full the methods and the results of science, will not yet surrender the ancient hopes of the race."

In 'Modern Poets and Cosmic Law' he traces the influence of Tennyson and Wordsworth on modern religious thought; a regenerating influence, because they have realized "with extraordinary intuition," and promulgated "with commanding genius, the interpenetration of the spiritual and the material world." Mr. Myers's deep sympathy with Wordsworth is completely expressed in his luminous biography of the poet. His sympathy with George Eliot is less keen, or rather it is less that of the mind than of the heart. His depression in the presence of her hopelessness is well described in the essay of which she is the subject:

"I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men,- the words God, Immortality, Duty,- pronounced with terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates.»

Mr. Myers's essays on Science and a Future Life,' on 'Darwin and Agnosticism,' on 'Tennyson as a Prophet,' on 'A New Eirenicon,'

on Modern Poets and Cosmic Law,' are concerned chiefly with the modern answers to the old eternal problems. Even his essays on Mazzini, on George Sand, on Renan, and on the present political and social influences in France, are not without their background of philosophical contemplation of the end and aims of man. Mr. Myers's conclusion of the whole matter is hopeful, sane, temperate. He is confident of the golden branch in the grove of cypress; confident that darkness must eventually become revelation. In his verse, which, while not of the first order, is melodious and graceful, he exhibits the same spiritual intuition. His value as a critic is largely the result of this recognition, based on no ephemeral conclusions, of the spiritual element in the destiny of man. Mr. Myers was born in 1843, in Duffield, England. He is the son of a clergyman of some note as a writer, and a brother of Ernest Myers, whose classical translations are of great literary excellence.