in which the chronic conflict of earth and ocean is so wonderfully reflected. But in all his music there is the note of discord, which verse drowns. He is at one with the great silent forces of Nature, or tries to be so; but he no sooner sees man (and he cares very little about anything else) than he lifts up his voice and shrieks or sighs like the wind which precedes a tempest.

I have heard a very able literary man defend Mr. Carlyle's thesis so far as this goes, at least, that a great deal of the finest poets' thoughts might be just as effectively expressed in prose as in verse— by referring to the fine prose scene in Hamlet (Act ii. Scene 2), where we find Shakespeare putting such thoughts as these, for instance, into Hamlet's mouth and giving them in prose:- "What a piece of work

is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty in form and moving how express and admirable in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" Yet nothing could better illustrate Mr. Carlyle's own preference of prose to verse. Hamlet speaks this fine passage in prose, why? Because he is expressing not so much his intellectual admiration, but the failure of his heart to admire; he is expressing not his feelings, but the jar in them. "It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." And how does he end his panegyric on the great masterpiece of creation, man? Why, by saying, "And yet, to me, what is this quintessence

of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither." Indeed, nothing seems to me more remarkable than the use of prose by Hamlet throughout the play, to express that jar in his mind which Mr. Carlyle always feels so keenly. In the earlier part of the play, before the discord is fully developed, he speaks in the usual verse. Throughout, when in soliloquy, and not directly measuring himself against the world, he speaks in verse, which expresses the lyrical pain within him. Even with his mother, since he feels that she can partly respond to his passionate, but tender reproaches, he speaks in verse. But in fencing with Rosencranz and Guildenstern, in his mockery of Polonius, in his harshness with Ophelia, in his bitter comments in the graveyard, in his scornful reception of Osric, he uses a prose nearer in tone and movement to Mr. Carlyle's than almost any other English literature could produce, though, of course, for many reasons different enough.

The truth is, that true poetry could no more be given in prose without a complete failure to express the writer's mind than common, everyday prose could be given in poetry; and Mr. Carlyle himself is one of my best witnesses. Doubtless a great deal of

verse is mere prose in conventional fetters; but I doubt whether any of this was worth giving at all, either in prose or verse. Take the one great poet, who most often falls into pure prose, Wordsworth, and wherever you find a prosaic line, you find one which neither in prose nor verse was worth keeping. No doubt Mr. Browning is a great exception to this. Many of his semi-dramatic monologues would have been studied with as much interest if they had been given in prose as in verse, and some of them with a great deal more. The Roman lawyers in "The

Ring and the Book " would have been far more amusing and readable in prose than in verse. But then Mr. Browning, great as he is as an imaginative writer, is hardly a great poet. There is a jar between the acute practical sense in him and the visionary feeling which resounds through a very great part of his verse. But as for such an assertion as that Shelley's, or Tennyson's, or Wordsworth's poetry, or any true poetry whatever, loses "earnestness" by its form of verse, it seems to me simply ludicrous. Just imagine how this wail would gain in "earnestness" by being expressed in prose :

When the lamp is shattered,

The light on the dust lies dead;
When the cloud is scattered,

The rainbow's glory is shed d;

When the lute is broken,

Sweet tones are remembered not;

When the lips have spoken,

Love's accents are soon forgot.

Any cry of the spirit of this sort would, I take it, lose indefinitely in earnestness by its translation into prose; and to take quite another sort of composition, who would venture to distort and torture into prose even the highest specimens of specifically "earnest poetry, Milton's "Samson Agonistes," or Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty"?

Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face:

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds
And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.

No; Mr. Carlyle's objection to verse is the objection of a noble mind out of tune, which is always craving to mark the discords of its own depths. Verse is the natural and only possible instrument of expression both for overpowering lyrical feeling and for complete imaginative insight.

MRS. CARLYLE

IF Mrs. Carlyle married for ambition, as Mr. Froude reports, it is probable that she has gained what most ambitious people hope to gain,—whether they ultimately value what they have gained or not,—a name of her own in literature, and not merely the name of a faithful companion to her famous husband. Never were letters, unless they were the letters of Cowper, so full of fascination as Mrs. Carlyle's. Her letters surpass those of her husband in every quality which letters should have except vividness, -in variety, naturalness, lightness of touch; in the rapid, but never abrupt, change from tender to satirical, from satirical to imaginative, and from imaginative, again, to the keen, shrewd, matter-offact of mother-wit; while in a few of them there is a wild, gipsy kind of waywardness which is, of course, entirely foreign to Mr. Carlyle's sphere. But I am not going to discuss Mrs. Carlyle's letters, but to attempt to reconstruct, so far as it is possible, from the insight they give, the figure of the author of the letters, who, while linked with a man of marvellous, though narrow, genius, made for herselfquite unconsciously too-a fame which shines distinctly enough even in the immediate neighbourhood of his, and which shines by no reflected light.