ven's phrase, "Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei (more expressive of feeling than painting)," he does no ask his poets for rendering of inner sentiment, if they will only give him sufficiently beautiful or powerful painting, as in the garden of Alcinoüs, the convulsion of nature in the "Prometheus," the praises of Athens in the "Edipus Coloneus." a very It is only when he comes to Elizabethan poetry that he makes a distinction which, as we conceive, should have guided him throughout, and lays down that the statement of a natural fact, however true, is comparatively valueless for his purpose, if too obvious. The consistent application of this principle would deprive large number of his quotations of their claim to a place. Much the same may be said about another excellent rule, which appears, we think for the first time on p. 171, that it is not enough merely to describe nature, she must be described for her own sake, as she is by Shelley and Wordsworth. Again. at p. 202 he clearly sees how essential for his purpose it is that with "truth to nature" should be combined "personal feeling;" but he does not seem to have missed this quality in his many exquisite citations from early Italian and Elizabethan poetry. On p. 136 he quotes from Spenser a passage in which we have "a picture of the and of a vast royal ship of the day which has never been surpassed in English literature." The merit of the passage is perhaps exaggerated, but what one feels most disposed to protest against is the generalization drawn from it: "With what splendid landscape scenes might Spenser have endowed us, had he thus trusted to himself more freely!" Not so; neither in its sturdy boyhood in the hands of Chaucer, nor in its graceful adolescence in those of Spenser was English poetry under the influence of nature. When she desired to describe a natural scene she described it, and sometimes very well; but she never felt nature to be a present goddess, and fortunately she never pretended that she did. sea As to Celtic poetry, we must confess that to us it seems to prove nothing so clearly as the fact that sometimes the more a poet writes about nature the more he betrays how little he is under her influence. Llywarch's dry catalogues of the features of the external world interspersed with moral platitudes seem to show a temper at the opposite pole to that of the lover of nature: fish Bright are the willow-tops; playful the In the lake; the wind whistles over the tops of the branches; Nature is superior to learning. Bright are the tops of the broom; let the lover arrange meetings; Very yellow are the cluster'd branches: Shallow ford; the contented is apt to enjoy sleep. Yet Mr. Palgrave professes to find landscape poetry here, and indeed one might almost say everywhere. He is often obliged to qualify his eulogies, as when he says of Allan Ramsay that he deserves praise rather for his intention than for his performance, or characterizes a poem as "beautiful, but how inferior to the lyrics of Milton," or as "full of life and invention, if not highly poetical." But it is amazing how many delightful pieces he has put before us, not perhaps bearing closely on his theme, but still very delightful for themselves. Among them we would especially note an admirable rendering by Dean Plumptre of the opening of the twentyfourth canto of "The Inferno" (on p. 81), a passage from Ausonius (p. 65), the song of Phædria (p. 134), the rivergod's song to Amoret in "The Faithful Shepherdess" (p. 140), and scores of other beautiful pieces more familiar, but all unfailing in their charm. It is when we come to the fifteenth chapter, on Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, that at last we find ourselves exactly at the author's point of view. And this is because now for the first time landscape begins in the fullest sense of the word to influence poetry. Here we have the personal note which personifies nature and invests her with sea, our human sensibilities, as when (to is interesting to note that Eschylus take one example out of a thousand in (in the "Agamemnon,' 1408), applies modern poetry) Shelley asks the moon, this same epithet (pvoas) to the but the editors have unanimously struck it out as an error of the copyist and replaced it by the pale and colorless purâs (flowing). Other excellent Art thou pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different examples of this gift are "The blasts that blow the poplar white" in "In Memoriam;" in "The Brook" birth And ever changing like a joyless eye In Wordsworth, of course, this is the us. We have also the vigorous image that presents nature to the mind as vividly as she could come before the eye in Coleridge's, The ghtning fell with never a jag and in Keats's, These green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks; and the minute observation of her moods, as when the latter paints the "swarms of minnows" in a passage closely imitated by Tennyson in "Enid and Geraint" where he compares the champions put to flight by wild Limours to A shoal Of darting fish that on a summer morn Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud From less and less to nothing. In the lavish abundance of English poetry from Coleridge to Tennyson, there must of course be hundreds of characteristic admirably passages omitted in a book like this; but one cannot help wondering how Mr. Palgrave could resist Keats's Magic casements opening on the foam The steady glare or, lastly, that amazing picture in "The A broken chancel with a broken cross On one side lay the Ocean, and on one But if a man who stands upon the briak But lift a shining hand against the sun, There is not left the twinkle of a fin Between the cressy islets white in flower. These and all the other signs of the influence of landscape in poetry are fairly and fully illustrated and appreciated in the delightful chapter which deals with recent poetry. The work It is an interesting circumstance is especially pleasing in its illustration that from one point of view the ancient of what is happily called Tennyson's and modern world are sharply con "gift of flashing the landscape before trasted in their attitude towards naus in a word or two," such as "little ture. They both agree in drawing from breezes dusk and shiver" and "the the external world illustrations of menwrinkled sea beneath him crawls." It tal states. Sometimes, indeed, in LIVING AGE. VOL. XV. 757 ancient poetry these analogies are al Let the wild Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, That like a broken purpose waste in air. com most grotesque, as when Apollonius Lean-headed eagles yelp aloud, and leave Rhodius compares the fluttering heart The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill of Medea to a ray of light reflected from the troubled surface of a tub of water, or Virgil likens the frenzied Amata's wanderings to the gyrations of a top whipped by boys "round great empty halls." But the process is hardly ever inverted in ancient poetry. We can think of no example of such an inversion except one in the Homeric "Hymn to Hermes," where the speed with which a work was done is compared to the speed of thought: Every one remembers Homer's parison of man to the leaves of the forest; but we had to wait till the era of Shelley for simile in which the dead autumn leaves are likened to the converse Ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow and black and pale and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes. It will be seen that in Mr. Palgrave's work we have ventured to take exception only to the method, or rather to suggest that the adoption of a different method might have given more scope to his faculties as a critic, though it might not have produced a more attractive book. The execution is generally excellent. The translations from Greek and Latin poetry show scholarship and taste. Sometimes the printers have gone astray, and the nechas essary correction For instance, on p. 26 husky must be a been lacking. misprint for dusky which would be a very fair rendering of αιθαλίωνες; on page 29 περίπλυον should be περίπλεον in the translation from Menander on p. 32 we should read "shouldst thou live" and "thou wilt see;" birds has usurped the place of buds in the rendering from the Georgics on p. 46. But the most unfortunate misprint is that of whom for who in a sentence on p. 118: "Dorigen goes on to speak of the hundred thousand whom she fancies have been dashed against the rocks and slain." This is an unfortunate misprint, for it seems to give the great sanction of the editor of "The Golden Treasury" and of a professor of poetry at Oxford, to a vile solecism which is gradually making its way into conversation and into the provincial daily press. In a writer who is usually so tenacious of a pure English diction we do not like to read that "the part bodiment of the divine right, the representative of the Almighty, and the universal providence of all mankind. Ten years ago, at the 1887 jubilee, hardly anybody paid the slightest attention to the then Prinz Wilhelm von Preussen. The old emperor, Wilhelmr I., was still alive, the crown prince, the husband of our princess royal, in the prime of manhood, and "Willie," a nobody amongst the host of princes from all parts of the world. And emperor as well as king though he is to-day, stir stronger there lives in him the cabotin, the man who continually wants to advertise himself, who daily and even hourly desires to put himself en evidence, and whose strongest craving is to make the world talk of him and occupy itself with him and his doings. omitted is of some length" when the ing as the great Cæsar, the modern emmeaning is that it is of considerable length. Such expressions pave the way for the Americanism "he as been away quite a time." Finally, "to what simplicity of nature does he not return!" (p. 160) gives countenance to a growing misuse of the negative in interjectional sentences. The words quoted should mean "he returns to every simplicity of nature," but the sentiment intended to be conveyed is obviously "how he returns to the simplicity of nature." "What pleas did I not urge" is right enough for "I urged every plea." But "what tears did I not shed" is wrong, for the meaning could only be "I shed every tear," which would be a very singular expression, nearly as strange as "what a wet day was it not," for "how wet it was." The neglect of this obvious distinction is becoming very prevalent; otherwise it would not have been worth while to dwell on so minute a topic. But, indeed, the general character of Mr. Palgrave's work is so high that one would naturally like to have it without flaw; and his position is such that his authority might well be quoted for usages which he would be the first to disown. We should all offer him our hearty thanks and congratulations on a piece of work which few could have attempted, few indeed could have accomplished so well; and we can only regret that criticism must so often emphasize rather points of divergence than of concurrence, and devote to cola appraisement pages which might have been filled with warm praise. R. Y. TYRRELL. From The Contemporary Review. THE GERMANS AND THEIR KAISER. a Had the German emperor been invited to come to London, heaven only knows what he might have done to attract people's attention. Perhaps ho would have adorned the pages of the Visitor's Book at the Guildhall with his favorite maxim, Regis voluntas suprema lex-the words which he wrote above his signature in the Golden Book at Munich. Or he might have asked the queen to allow him to put himself at the head of the whole population of England to march past her majesty; for a "march past" is the emperor's ideal of bliss. Not without good reason, do his witty Berlin subjects say with bated breath, that their emperor is suffering from defilirium tremens. But perhaps it is just as well that the emperor should not leave Germany at the present moment. The public mind through the length and breadth of the Fatherland appears to be uneasy. The foreign observer must find it somewhat difficult to understand, why there should be so much excitement at present in Germany. But to the close student the reasons cannot be secret. The emperor leads a double life, a kind of Jekyll and Hyde existence. In theory he acknowledges that the present age represents progress and forward movement, but in practice he recognizes no other will but his own, in every sphere, in every department of public and, as far as possible, of private life. Regis voluntas suprema lex. The king's will, and nothing else, is the law of the land; this maxim forms the guiding principle of all his actions. Omniscience he claims as one of the attributes of his kingly majesty; popular wit expresses this in the words, "God knows everything, but the emperor William knows everything better." Ger A jury of experts decides which drama ought to receive the Schiller prize for the finest play; the emperor annuls their decision, for his judgment is more competent than theirs. The pope claims infallibility only in matters of faith or religion; but the man emperor claims that he is infallible in everything and anything, and not only in his judgment about the works of others, but also in his own acts and doings, in his private as well as in his public capacity. What he, the emperor, does not know is not worth knowing, and when one of his sisters, the present Duchess of Sparta, ventured to express the opinion that English men-of-war looked finer than the German ironclads, his Omniscience, in quite a loud voice, and before some ladies of the court, called her a stupid goose for her pains. are Things must have come to a pretty pass in Germany when the Cologne Gazette, one of the most loyal and patriotic of German newspapers, writes that the emperor is surrounded exclusively by men who belong to the Junker class, and that the statesmen on whom falls the responsibility not in personal touch with his Majesty, and, like the ministers of the sultan, have to combat the permanent influence of his entourage. There is the rub. The Rhenish Gazette has touched the real sore point. It is supposed that Germany possesses an imperial constitution, that Prussia also has such a document, that there is an Imperial Diet, and that a Prussian Chamber is also at work. True, quite true. only in theory do all these fine institutions exist, just as the law about duel But ling is upon the pages of the statutebook, or the paragraph in the constitution, that "all Prussians possess the same political rights." The will of the emperor is the real law of the land. He commands, and a duel must take place, whatever the law may say; he declares that the Adeligen are the better, the higher men in the Fatherland, whatever musty paragraphs may declare to the contrary. The nobleman alone is of full weight; all the other citizens must consider themselves under a kind of capitis diminutio, as only second-best. The lowest Herr von is by birth, or becomes by being ennobled, a far superior being to the most illustrious commoner; the younger sub-lieutenant, by wearing the king's uniform-the Koenigsrock-and therefore participating in, or representing, the king's majesty, rises immediately above all merely civilian citizens, be they the best and worthiest of the land. Not once, but many times, on various occasions and in numberless public speeches, has the emperor expressed these views. What can the constitution, the charter, mean to such a monarch? The National Zeitung of Berlin, a very mildly liberal bourgeois paper, is compelled to say that it is clear enough that the rights of Prussians are to be reduced to what they were at the end of the last century, when civil liberty, in a constitutional sense, simply did not exist. The hatred of the present German emperor against the very slightest approach to freedom and liberty shows itself in his unfilial contempt for his father, the good Emperor Frederic. It is a well-known fact that during the too short reign of that unfortunate martyr, expressions were used by the immediate friends of the then crown prince with reference to the Emperor Frederic, which, if uttered to-day concerning the present monarch, would be most severely punished, as lèsemajesté, with long terms of imprisonment. And in all the hundreds of his speeches, addresses, and toasts, William II. has hardly ever, if at all, men |