less striking. If the reader will bear in mind that by far the greater number of the poems here quoted have been written within the past ten years, I think he will admit that the last decade of the nineteenth century has been anything but a barren period. For my part, I do not hesitate to express my conviction that the poetry of the eighteennineties does no discredit whatever to a century so glorious in the annals of song that even the resplendent seventeenth century will have much ado to outshine it.

If I thought otherwise-if I believed in the decadence of which we hear so much-I should be sad indeed. It would show a strange and ominous change in the spirit of the nation if England ceased to utter her exultations and her agonies, her faith and hope and doubt and pride and love, in noble and vital verse. For three centuries and a quarter (not to go back to the very "morning star of song ") her poetry has indeed been "the breath and finer spirit of all [her] knowledge," the supreme glory of her literature.

And were she the same England, made to feel
A brightness gone from out those starry eyes,
A splendour from that constellated brow?

It is a purblind practicality that thinks of poetry as one of the mere decorations of life, an idle toying with baubles of speech set in scroll-works of rhythm. Poetry is actually a great force, and potentially the greatest, in the world. It has the religion of the future in its hands. What is the vital element in the religion of the present? Not, certainly, its dogma, not its metaphysics, not even its ethics, but simply the poetry of the life, character, and utterances of its Founder, reinforced by the more magnificent but less penetrating poetry of the lyrists and rhapsodists who preceded him, and the didactic and apocalyptic poetry of his immediate successors. In like manner must the religion of the future spring from some body of poetry potent

enough to give the spirit of man a new elevation and a larger outlook upon nature and destiny.

The poet speaks to the imagination, and through the imagination to the will. Imagination is the greatest of spiritual forces. The frame of things is plastic to its touch, as clay in the hands of the potter. The world will be whatever the imagination of mankind decrees that the world shall be. It is the present impotence of man to imagine a peaceful and beautiful world that prevents or defers its realisation. If a poet mighty enough to overcome this impotence were to arise to-morrow, the world would be re-created in three generations. He need not have greater genius than the great poets of the past, but he must know more than they. Miracles do not happen, and even the poet requires knowledge as well as divination. But knowledge is being rapidly garnered; and when LAW is sufficiently ascertained, there will arise a great poet to absorb, co-ordinate, transfigure, and promulgate it, touched with magical persuasiveness, to the renovation of the spirit of

man.

In the meantime, let us cherish the habit, and perfect and keep bright the mechanism, of song. One supreme world-poet-the poet of the world-pageant-has already spoken in our English tongue. The other supreme worldpoet-the poet of love and law-must needs speak in the same tongue if he is to find, as it is essential to his calling that he should find, the largest possible audience. Let us, then, preserve and enrich for him, to the best of our power, the language and the rhythms of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and Tennyson.

H. C. BEECHING

THOUGH the title of Mr. H. C. Beeching's collected poems -In a Garden-refers particularly to the opening sequence, it in reality covers the whole book. An English garden is the congenial haunt of Mr. Beeching's muse. We recognise it at a glance as a parsonage garden. The French windows of the drawing-room open, under a narrow verandah festooned with clematis and jasmine, upon a deep-piled lawn of immemorial sward. A cedar in the middle of the lawn seems, in springing from the soil, to have carried whole swaths of turf with it into mid-air, so dense and velvety is the verdure of its level branches. There are flower-beds on each side, filled with old-fashioned cottage flowers:

We turn'd our steps and loiter'd slow
'Twixt borders pale with later spring-
Polyanthus crowding ring on ring,

Love's banner, heartsease, balm for thought,
White tulips, blue forget-me-not.

One slim narcissus drooped his head,

And from her closely curtain'd bed

One lily shook out half her bells.

Below the lawn, and behind an array of rose-bushes, a box hedge shuts off the vegetable garden, enclosed by walls once red, long hoar with age, on which pear and peach trees stretch their Briarean arms. The gables of modest glass-houses peer forth in this corner and that, embowered,