found it essential for us to administer to us suffering in many forms in order to open our shrinking and limited nature to larger issues than any to which the natural man is ready to adapt himself. We recoil like a sensitive plant from the first rude touch, and yet it is only through these rude touches, and many of them, that our natures can be taught to expand to the craving for higher ideals and the appreciation of nobler efforts. We want to shrink to the dimensions of poorer natures, though we are destined to find our only true happiness in the evolution of a greater fortitude and of loftier hopes.

POETRY AND LANDSCAPE

IN a delightful book on the place of landscape in poetry, by Mr. Palgrave, formerly Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, published by Messrs. Macmillan, we have an exquisite series of illustrations, from Homer to Tennyson, of the curious significance of landscape in the expression of human emotion. On his title page Mr. Palgrave quotes from Beethoven this motto for his Pastoral Symphony, "Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei ""More an expression of emotion than Painting" and a better motto he could hardly have found for a series of exquisite illustrations of the significance of landscape in poetry. And yet, surely nothing can be more curious than that the emotions of man's heart should, from the first dawn of his intellect, have written themselves indelibly, as it were, on the natural scenery by which he is surrounded, so that from Homer to Tennyson it is next to impossible to express any feeling or passion, however profound, without the aid of those external scenes with which they are not so much associated as absolutely identified, and on which they are inscribed as though language were nothing but a series of hieroglyphics sculptured on the rocks or painted on the clouds. From what is almost Mr.

Palgrave's earliest illustration of Homer's love for landscape, in the wonderful picture of the Trojan Camp as Tennyson himself translated it for us with a magic touch, to his last charming illustration of the mode in which Tennyson pictured for himself his own passionate feelings of delight at the coming of Spring, it seems nearly impossible to express emotion at all, without a consent of Earth and Heaven to embody it, or to appear to us to embody it, in the external scenes with which it claims a mysterious affinity. Here is the celebrated passage from Homer in which he has given to the Trojan Plain and watch-fires a sense of mystery and pathos which I doubt if he ever gave to the Camp of the Greeks. It is a pity, I think, that Mr. Palgrave did not quote enough of the passage to bring the landscape before us, instead of only one exquisite fragment:

And these all night upon the bridge of war
Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed;
As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart;
So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And eating hoary grain and pulse, the steeds
Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.

And here again is the wonderful passage in which Tennyson most nearly expressed, as Mr. Mackail

and Mr. Palgrave both hold, "the actual process through which poetry comes into existence":—

Past, Future, glimpse and fade
Through some slight spell,
A gleam from yonder vale,
Some far blue fell,

And sympathies, how frail
In sound and smell!

Till at thy chuckled note,
Thou twinkling bird,
The fairy fancies range,
And, lightly stirred,
Ring little bells of change

From word to word.

For now the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new,

And thaws the cold and fills

The flower with dew;

The blackbirds have their wills,
The poets too.

"The poets have their wills," but not without the help of that external scene, that conspiracy of Earth and Heaven to give them their wills, which impresses on them this necessity for identifying their wills with some strange, and at first sight almost arbitrary, background of bright or dreary scenery. Surely this love of landscape, which seems so inseparable from all human emotion, is a very notable phenomenon deserving of more thought than it usually receives. Who can explain why Tennyson himself finds it impossible to speak of

those tears, idle tears," of which he says that he knows not what they mean, without picturing to himself the "happy autumn fields" on which he gazes through their blinding mist, or to recall the 66 tender grace of a day that is dead," without imaging to himself the breaking of the sea at the foot of the cold grey stones with which that dead day was in his mind identified? Why cannot Matthew Arnold realise to himself the existence of that Something which infects the world" without dwelling on

The mute turf we tread,

The solemn hills around us spread,

The stream which falls incessantly,

The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,

all of which seem to assure him that the world has had inscribed upon it a deep trace of suffering, if not of ruin?

Why should Wordsworth insist that—

Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills,
The generations are prepared, the pangs,

The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will

Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny.

Yet without the "groves" and the "shadowy hills," "the pangs, the internal pangs," would not have fully imaged his thought at all, for to have some glimpse of the scene of these pangs as it presents itself to the imagination of the victim is at once an essential part of the suffering, and also, I suspect, something of an alleviation of its rigours.

To