impressing, suggesting, and charming; its absence therefore, leaves much of the music of the poet's lyre unevoked. This argument has been well put by Leigh Hunt:(7)

Poetry modulates what it utters, because in running the whole round of beauty, it must needs include beauty of sound, and because in the height of its enjoyment, it must show the perfection of its triumph and make difficulty itself become part of its facility and joy. . . . . . Poetry shapes this modulation into uniformity for its outline and variety for its parts; because it thus realises the last idea of beauty itself, which includes the charm of diversity within the flowing round of habit and

ease.

It is also the subject of an eloquent page by Victor Cousin, which I translate:(8)

Words are the instrument of Poetry; she plays on them as she will, she makes them capable of expressing ideal beauty; she lends them the charm and power of metre; she makes of them something between speech and music, something at once material and immaterial, something definite, clear, and precise, like Nature's most strong and delicate outlines, something vital and animated like colours, something appealing and infinite like sounds.

Simple words in themselves, but much more, words chosen and transfigured by the poet are the most emphatic and universal of symbols. Taking in her hands this talisman which she has made for herself Poetry reflects all the images of the sensible world, as sculpture and painting do; she reflects sentiment, as painting and music do, with all the variety of detail which music cannot reach, and with the rapid successions which neither painting vor sculpture, fixed in immobility, can follow. Nor is this all: she can express as no other art ever can, thought entirely aloof from the senses, thought formless, thought without colour, thought silent from any sound, thought read in no glance of the eye, thought in its highest flights and most refined abstractions.

Such is indeed the magic power of the word—sensible symbol and reflex of human thought-which Poetry wields a power which is not brought fully into play until language is raised to its highest musical and suggestive power by metre and metrical devices and all the ornaments which seem not at home when away from the society of metre.

7 Imagination and Fancy. This passage, with much else that has proved apropos and helpful to the present paper, is quoted in Mr. R. P. Cowl's volume, Theory of Poetry in England, published by Messrs. Macmillan.

Du Beau and de l'Art: Revue des deux Mondes, September, 1845.

As

As music makes the atmosphere of a festival, so metre makes the climate of poetry, the "largior aether" wherein the highly-wrought ingenuities of verbal artifice and the strangest audacities of the quick imagination are accepted as natural and welcomed as delightful. Metre tempers the tragic, elevates the commonplace, makes all odds even. Poetry first wins the ear and memory of the child by the repeated jingle of metre and rhyme, so by virtue of perfect verse does she exalt the mere vocables of the lexicon to their highest touch of concord with the melodies of heaven. To a mystic dance of metre does she weave her soul-enchaining spells, as our great Irish lyrist has seen and apostrophised her:

Thy lovely motions answering to the rime
That ancient Nature sings,

That keeps the stars in cadence for all time
And echoes through all things.

So far, then, have we carried our study of poetry as finding expression under the laws of beauty; and with it our discussion of poetry must end." Satisfied with having attempted to explain its essence, we shall not enter into consideration of its adaptations or compromises, of the sacrifices sometimes made of its perfection in some one respect in order to secure its faultlessness or force in another. The admissibility of such adaptations, compromises or sacrifices we have nowhere excluded. We shall only add here that if the question be asked: "Are there not prose-poems' of high value, which would lose, not gain, by being translated into verse-form ?" We should answer: "Very possibly; we maintain, however, that they are not, and cannot, be perfect poems."

Much less shall we be tempted to rove outside the inward sphere of poetic art to consider how and to what effect it underlies those vaster laws which regulate the entire ambit of rational thought, speech and action, and by obedience to which its world of beauty is brought to correspond harmoniously with other exigencies of the Divine Goodness and Beauty. Our business on the present occasion is only to

* Not, however, of “the Reverse" of Poetry, which will be dealt with in a further article. Ed. "I. M."]

consider what Poetry is, not how she ought to comport herself. Let it be enough to say, in conclusion, that, as our inquiry so far has justified our regarding her as one of the noblest and strongest natural powers which truth and virtue can summon to their aid, so no angelic apostasy can be more lamentable than the degradation of Poetry to become the minister and voice of baseness, sensuality, sin. There is no more seductive agent of evil, when, forsaking her true allegiances, she decks with her fairy lights and fairy hues the cheats of Vanity Fair, the phantasmagoria of the Pit, the foulness of corruption. But her power for evil is merely in proportion to her capacity for good: for there is no merely human thing that appears more congruously amid the courts of the supernatural, the divine, when, rising to her highest possibilities, she bears aloft on heaven-seeking wings man's sublimest aspirations towards the perfect Beauty, the Ideal Reality, and utters the message of his heart to

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L'amor che muove 'l sole e l'altre stelle

'The love which moves the sun and all the stars."

RATHMORE REVISITED

By REV. JOSEPH GUINAN

FTER an absence of twenty golden years I find myself

A again journeying towards Rathmore by the old,

well-known road, whose half-forgotten landmarks seem partly strange and partly familiar to me; I am going on a visit to its kindly, hospitable pastor, and I am lost in a reverie that is both sweet and sad ever since I entered its borders. There is a strange, inexplicable commingling of joy and sadness in the train of associations and long-dormant memories which every object in the landscape recalls. The feeling is indeed chastening and bitter-sweet, as is natural, but, all the same, it is one of calm, deep peace, which it is worth living to know, once in a while. The emotion has a rejuvenating effect for me. It touches a hidden chord, and wakes a low, sweet music in the soul, bringing back for a blessed, fleeting moment the dreamy gladness of life's morning brightness.

But, what is the meaning, you may justly ask, of this sentimental poetizing, and what claim has Rathmore to fame that it should interest me? Well, it has none, I

answer. It is not even marked on the Map of Ireland, I believe. It is the name of an obscure little country parish, hidden away between the bogs and the Shannon, but it is a dear, never-to-be-forgotten spot of earth to me, for it was the scene of my first curacy. Now you know why I am so deeply moved on re-visiting it.

As I progress on my way to the little hamlet, the parochial pital, I am the victim of the strangest illusions. I someimes think I have left the place but yesterday, and anon I feel as if a whole cycle of eons had elapsed since the memorable day when the postear dumped me at Father John's door, the young gossoon priest," as the people called me,

entering on his first mission. I see the same hills and fields and houses, but-no, not the same faces.

I met some elderly people, who looked between sixty and seventy, and whom I must have well known during my year's stay amongst them; and, although I thought I recognised something familiar in the "cut of their gib," I could not place them. And, although they looked very hard and questioningly at me, with gleams of recognition, at times, they, too, were at fault and could not remember my humble personality.

Ah me, what a change even twenty years bring about! It leaves every-day companions, intimate associates and friends, strangers, black strangers to each other, with no dawning smile of welcome.

But where were the old men and women I had known, with features so hardened and chiselled in their well-remembered individuality that I could not fail to recognise them. I saw none of them, as I passed along. "All were gone, all were gone, the old familiar faces."

No, there was one, at least, an old crone who lived in a bog cabin. I saw her well-remembered rosy, puckered face, as she stood in her little doorway, and I dismounted to have a chat with her. She was over seventy when I last saw her. She was well over ninety now, although she scarcely looked it. The years had touched her gently, and left but few traces of their passing.

I

"Well, Nancy," I said, "don't you remember me. was a curate in this parish twenty years ago, under Father John, God rest his soul!"

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Amin, avic!" she said peering at me curiously. "Sure, my eyesight is gettin' bad, as well as my mimory. We had many's the curate since that. But, maybe, you're the little young priest that got up the wheel o' fortune in the chapel, are you?"

"The wheel o' fortune! What was that?"

"Aye, alannah, for turnin' round with the blessed candles in it. I put many's the candle on it."

"Oh! the votive candle-stick before the picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel. Yes, I'm the same priest, sure enough!"