landscape. The poet's imagination has | them, but his way of looking at her is a freer field, and he is now and then carried away by it into such verse as Her beauty would surprise Gazers on autumn eves, or this I have loved flowers that fade, With sweet unmemoried scents, verse which could not fail to arrest our attention if we found it in the pages of one of the two or three of our living poets whose reputations are already made, instead of in those of one who must look to the future to make his. And if Mr. Bridges does not often (as who does?) attain to such complete felicity of expression as this, he very rarely falls below his own level, which is a high one. The chief subjects with which the poems in this volume deal are love and nature. The first book consists mainly of love-poems. They are always interesting, often musical and pretty, now and then really fine, but I do not think they show Mr. Bridges quite at his best. He has the quaint, fanciful way of looking at love so common in the days of "Eliza and our James." It is all pretty enough and pleasing enough, but we miss the deeper earnestness of passion, the greater intensity, which our later poets have taught us to look for. Here is a specimen : I will not let thee go, The stars that crowd the summer skies I dare not let thee go. I will not let thee go, Have not the young flowers been content, I cannot let thee go. after all his own. Wordsworth, Keats, Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, have all had their influence, and it is interesting to trace it. The poet whose influence is conspicuously not there is Shelley. Shelley looked at nature as an elemental spirit, airy, intangible, and too often "pinnacled dim in the intense inane;" and there is nothing of this in Mr. Bridges. There is more of Wordsworth's way, which was to look at nature as a human soul, suffer ing from human sorrows and rejoicing in human joys; and of Keats, for whom nature was a fairy child, on whose beauty and strange, delightful ways it was his highest happiness to Matthew Arnold's habit of trying to gaze; and there are frequent traces of build up human patience and stoical resignation out of the unbroken calm and regularity of nature; and traces here and there of something which reminds us of Walt Whitman's way of treating the world as a sort of museum of dormant curiosities to be awakened into life and movement by the poet's imagination. Whitman takes a very ordinary thing, and renders it a subject for poetic treatment by simply trying to realize it; his mission was to reveal in a new way the latent poetry of the ordinary world. Mr. Bridges' "Passer By" treats the ship he is watching in just this very way, and to heighten the resemblance he has chosen to give his verse Whitman's halting and uncouth movement, which may perhaps after all be an effort after a new music, more complex than the old, and too strange as yet to be fully heard by our unaccustomed ears: I there before thee, in the country so well thou knowest Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air: I watch thee enter unerringly where thou goest And anchor queen of the strange shipping there, The note is pretty enough, but we seem to have heard it before. His treatment of nature is altogether more interesting. He has heard the voices of many or most of her great inter- Nor is aught from the foaming reef to the preters, and caught something from Thy sails for awning spread, thy masts bare: snowcapped, grandest Peak that is over the feathery palms | Oft to her cousins turns her thought, thou standest. It seems to me that here is exactly the same sort of power as Walt Whitman shows, when he builds up his curious and often beautiful dreams while watching the " or the man cars in the street. But this is a digression, for what I was speaking of was Mr. Bridges' way of dealing with nature; and among the poems of nature, the resemblance with Whitman must be looked for in pieces like "London Snow," where the details of description are accumulated to heighten the idea of its whiteness and softness in a manner that is almost exactly Whitman's. And it is a quality, which has its kinship to some of Whitman's most striking qualities, that is the special and distinctive thing about Mr. Bridges. He has seen things with his own eyes, in his own way, and sends them out touched and colored by his own imagination; but that is only what every poet must do whose treatment of nature is to interest us, and the distinguishing mark of Mr. Bridges' way of seeing her is that he has an eye as Whitman had for every detail. He has not Whitman's largeness of imagination, but he has far more delicacy and far more of that instinctive good sense which knows in a moment what is and what is not worth seeing and describing. He has, in fact, what Whitman had not always, perfect taste; for Le goût n'est rien qu'un bon sens délicat. And this wise use of detail is conspicuous everywhere in these poems, whatever the special tone of the moment may be. Take a poem, for instance, that makes us think of Wordsworth and his daisies and daffodils and small summer streams are cool, when they have played Among their fibrous hair. A rushy island guards the sacred bower, And hides it from the meadow, where in peace The lazy cows crunch many a scented flower, Robbing the golden market of the bees : Delay the loitering boat. This wants the perfection of the little celandines, endowed with human pains piece last quoted, but it has the same and pleasures: wealth of detail and descriptive power coming out in a different way. The picture is complete and completely successful, and the poem seems to carry with it the lazy, silent atmosphere of 4348 the river so dear to those who know it about Oxford, both above and below. But the defect of poems of this sort is their want of ambition. We ask something more of a poet in whom we have any real belief, something larger and bolder. No doubt we must not look for anything very large in a volume entitled "Shorter Poems; " but there are in it one or two poems more ambitious than those I have quoted; and the best of them is the longest, an elegy which is called, with a halting awkwardness of expression, which clogs Mr. Bridges from time to time, Elegy on a lady whom grief for the death of her betrothed killed." I cannot quote it all, but a few verses will show that it is a really fine elegy, severe in tone as an elegy should be, but of a large and rich imagination. The idea that, as the bridegroom is already dead, the funeral of the bride becomes, for her, the truest and only possible wedding, is well worked out all through. I quote the first two verses and the Style, the sense of what is beautiful and right in thought and language, is so rare a thing, that when we find it exhibited in such full measure as we find it here, the voice of criticism does well to be silent, and our best part is simply to rest and be thankful. With Mr. Bridges, it is clear, literature is what it should be, an art pursued for no ulterior object, but rather, these splendid lines are proof enough of it, in obedience to an inner prompting of nature which will not be resisted. It is a pleasure after reading a volume of poetry to have almost nothing but praise for it, even if, as here, the praise be of promise rather than of fulfilment. May we treat these two volumes as merely the first-fruits of Mr. Bridges' poetic gift? He has shown by them that he possesses the divine afflatus which is like faith in the Christian, the moving principle of all the rest; but him not to let it lie dead or dormant, we are entitled, like the apostle, to ask but continually to show forth his faith by his works. And if a suggestion might be made to him, it would be that he should let his imagination have freer rein. What he chiefly seems to need for the attainment of complete success is more life and flow and freedom, a more absolute surrender to the mood of inspiration. His is as yet too cloistered a muse. He is of the same race as Gray and Matthew Arnold, hesitating, fastidious, critical, critical most of all no doubt of himself. It is good to be so in an age of slipshod workmanship, but it is not good to be so too much. The habit of self-criticism in art, as in life, too easily leads to sterility and inaction. That this may not be Mr. Bridges' case will be the hope of all who have read these two little volumes. Let him nurse his spark of the sacred flame, I would not say, lest it should die; rather in order that it may rise up anew, larger, brighter, warmer, and this time seen not only by friends | fame, but whose most beautiful creaclose at hand, but all around and from tion beyond all doubt is Colonel Newafar. J. C. BAILEY. From The Nineteenth Century. A STUDY FOR COLONEL NEWCOME. come. I first heard the name of Thackeray in 1848 from the lips of my uncle, a gallant colonel of engineers, who had married a first cousin and old playmate of W. M. T.'s, and who was then living at Little Holland House, Kensington, not far from Thackeray's home in Young Street. I remember that the name sounded to me queer, not to say ugly; nor can I now account it musical, although many happy associations have clothed it with abundant charms. IT happens to some of us to have a personal and peculiar association with some incident, of more or less possible public interest, which makes us the proper reporter of it. Of such sort is my own connection with that one which lends its name to this paper. I alone can give original and first-hand witness touching "A Study for Colonel New-pearing month by month in its yellow come." During many years I have from time to time been urged by Carthusian and other friends to commit my memories to writing, but I have tarried until now when Colonel Newcome has been a dear familiar friend of the Englishspeaking races for well-nigh forty years, and the brain which conceived him has been dormant for thirty. At this present I have been stimulated to the effort by a letter received a few days back from a Scottish gentleman to whom I had in a journey of business imparted my little tale, and who has The "genesis" of Thackeray's idea of Colonel Newcome, "Old Codd Colonel," is far more interesting to most people, I should think, than that of Gladstone's idea of Home Rule, and as no one can tell it so well as you can, I hope you will embrace an early opportunity of doing so. These lines, immediately followed by days of heat which drove me from my study to seek occupation which I could undertake apart from books patule sub tegmine fagi, are answerable for this little narration, which I desire by the favor of an indulgent editor to lay before a public to whom Thackeray is still dear. "Pendennis " was at that time ap covers, and I recollect telling one of my schoolfellows at Charterhouse (what I had heard my uncle say) that Thackeray valued himself more on his drawings than on his letterpress, which brought out the expression, “Ah, there he's wrong!" Other members of my own family knew Thackeray before I did. My eldest brother used to meet him at Little Holland House and go to him in Young Street. He had always been delicate, and died of phthisis at Brompton July 13, 1850, active mischief having been set up from his having got drenched out hunting in Leicestershire in November, 1849, and gone on in his wet clothes. I recognize from the charming volume of his letters to Mrs. Brookfield that Thackeray visited my brother on the 25th of February. Under date the 26th of February, 1850, he writes: or so, what did I go out for to see? First Yesterday, after writing for three hours the Miss Jinglebys, looking very fresh and pretty; you see we have consolations; then a poor fellow dying of consumption. He talked as they all do, with a jaunty, lively manner, as if he should recover; his sister sat with us looking very wistfully at him as he talked on about hunting, and how he Perhaps I may be permitted to pref- had got his cold by falling with his horse in ace my special anecdote - my pièce de a brook, and how he should get better by résistance-with a short record of my he would, and his sister looked at him very going to St. Leonards; and I said of course acquaintance with the great writer whom Becky Sharp and other inhabitants of Vanity Fair first introduced to hard.1 1 Letters of W. M. Thackeray, p. 103. My own first sight of the great [left upon my mind a deep impression author was at Tunbridge Wells, about of the tenderness of the man exhibited April, 1852, when I was recruiting after a serious school illness at the house of my aunt already alluded to, then become a widow. Thackeray made his appearance at breakfast, and on entering put his hands together to indicate that he had seen us through the window at family prayer. He stayed literally the whole day, not leaving until after supper, though he vanished awhile after early dinner for a smoke. especially towards his old playmate (still in the thirties) in her widow's weeds, and his charming courtesy to girl and womankind. I think I may be permitted here to quote a letter which Thackeray wrote when my uncle died, which seems to me of great beauty. It was addressed to Charlotte, eldest daughter of the late General Sir John Low, K.C.B., G.C.S.I., of Clatto (afterwards the wife of Sir John Theophilus Metcalfe, BaroIn the drawing-room during both net). She was living with my uncle morning and afternoon he was talking and aunt (who were hers also), her delightfully with my aunt and her sis-parents being in India, and had comter, Miss Shakespear, occupied most of municated to Thackeray the sad tidings. the time in making pen-and-ink draw- My cousin, who has the good fortune ings, for which he had brought the to possess the original, has kindly requisite materials — a drawing-pad and made for me the copy which I now colored inks as well as black in a capa-transcribe: cious side-pocket. Kensington: Dec. 31, 1849. My dear Charlotte, — There is no answer I have in my possession the first sketch of that morning-of a youth who can offer any consolation to a tender to such an afflicting letter as yours—for telling the old, old story to a young girl and devoted wife bereaved of her greatest resting her pitcher at a well, with a earthly treasure? I think we have scarce rather doubtful dog for witness, and a a right even to offer condolence. May God pretty gabled house in the background. Almighty help and comfort your dear aunt Several other sketches followed this under her calamity. The pang which one; two, I think, representing scenes makes the parting with such a man, so upconnected with "Esmond"-the one right, so honest, so pure-minded, so tender(unless my memory ill serves me) of a hearted, inexpressibly bitter to the woman bridal pair in a state coach of the time who has possessed his entire confidence of Queen Anne; the other, a scene in and affection (and knows his goodness ina theatre. These are still, I believe, in finitely better than we) must yet after the first keenness yield to thoughts more comthe hands in which Thackeray placed forting. Where can a good and pious man them that day, those of his cousin, be better than in the presence of God? Selina Shakespear. away from ill and temptation and care, and He told us, I remember, of his forth-secure of reward. What a comfort to think coming work, "Esmond," and said, that he, who was so good and so faithful "You'll find it dull, but it's founded here, must be called away to dwell among upon family papers - for General the good and just forever? Richmond Webb, one of Marlborough's generals, has a place in the Thackeray pedigree. I do not think that any of us have found "Esmond" " dull!" I remember also that he spoke of Dickens (no doubt, in answer to some question) and said, "He can't forgive me for my success with Vanity Fair;' as if there were not room in the world for both of us! " I can never forget that day, which There never seems to me to be any cause for grief at the thought of a good man dying, beyond the sorrow for those who survive him, and trusting in God's mercy and wisdom, infinite here and everywhere, await the day when they too shall be called away. Good-bye, my dear Charlotte, write to me if I can be of any service, and believe me always, Affectionately yours, W. M. THACKERAY. |