and fortify the weak. But, of the men we have just named, the only genius approaching the first-class was Milton; and so no language can be too great to celebrate the praises of his singing. Passage after passage, however, might be cited from his great work, where, like Molière's "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," he talks prose without knowing it; and, to our thinking, his sublimest feats of pure music are to be found in that drama* where he permits himself, in the ancient manner, the free use of loosened cadence. Milton, however, great as he is, is a great formalist, sitting "stately at the harpsichord." A genius of equal earnestness, and of almost equal strength-we mean Jeremy Taylor -wrote entirely in prose; and it has been well observed by a good critic that "in any one of his prose folios there is more fine fancy and original imagery-more brilliant conceptions and glowing expressions-more new figures and new applications of old figures-more, in short, of the body and soul of poetry, than in all the odes and epics that have since been produced in Europe." Nor should we have omitted to mention, in glancing at the Elizabethan drama, that the prose of Bacon is as poetical, as lofty, and in a certain sense as musical, as the more formal "poetry" of the best of his contemporaries.

Very true, exclaims the reader, but what are we driving at? Would we condemn verse altogether as a form of speech, and abolish rhyme from literature for ever? Certainly not! We would merely suggest the dangers of Verse, and the limitations of Rhyme, and briefly show how the highest Poetry of all answers to no fixed scholastic rules, but embraces, or ought to embrace, all the resources both of Verse generally and of what is usually, for want of a better name, entitled Prose. On this, as on many points, tradition confuses us. The word "Poet" means something more than a singer of songs or weaver of rhymes. What are we to say to a literary classification which calls "Absalom and Achitophel" a poem, and denies the title to "The Pilgrim's Progress;" which includes "Cato" and the "Rape of the Lock" under the poetical head, and excludes Sidney's "Arcadia" and the "Vicar of Wakefield;" which extends to Cowper, Chatterton, Gray, Keats, and Campbell the laurel

it indignantly denies to Swedenborg, Addison, (who created Sir Roger de Coverley!) Burke, Dickens, and Carlyle; and which has for so long delayed the placing of Walter Scott's novels in their due niche just below the plays of Shakspeare?

Instead of being the spontaneous speech of inspired men in musical moods, Verse has become a "form of literature," binding so-called "poets" as strictly as bonds of brass and iron; and the effort of most of our strong men has been to free their limbs as much as possible, by working in the most flexible chain of all, that of blank verse. If the reader will take the trouble to compare the early verse of Tennyson with his later works, wherein he has found it necessary to shake his soul free of its over-modulated formalism, he will understand what we mean. If, just after a perusal of even "Guinevere" and 'Lucretius," he will read Whitman's "Centenarian's story" or Coleridge's "Wanderings of Cain," his feeling of the "wonderfulness of prose" will be much strengthened. That feeling may thereupon be deepened to conviction by taking up and reading any modern poet immediately before a perusal of the authorized English version of the "Book of Job," "Ecclesiastes," or the wonderful " Psalms of David."

It is really strange that Wordsworth just hit the truth, in the masterly preface to his "Lyrical Ballads." "It may be safely affirmed," he says, "that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition. .. Much confusion has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact, or science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this in truth a strict antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them even were it desirable." Theoretically in the right, this great poet was often practically in the wrong; using rhythmic speech habitually for non-rhythmic moods, and leaving us no example of glorious loosened speech, combining all the effects of pure diction and of metre. After generations of " Pope" ridden poets, the Wordsworthian language was "loosened," indeed; but it sounds now sufficiently formal and pedantic. His only contemporaries of equal greatness-we

mean of course Scott and Byron-were sufficiently encumbered by verse. Scott soon threw off his fetters, and rose to the feet of Shakspeare. Byron never had the courage to abandon them altogether; but he played fine pranks with them in "Don Juan," and, had he lived, would have pitched them over entirely. On the other hand, the fine genius of Shelley and the wan genius of Keats worked with perfect freedom in the form of verse: first, because they neither of them possessed much humor or human unction; second, because their subjects were vague, unsubstantial, and often (as in the Cenci") grossly morbid; and third, because they were both of them overshadowed by false models, involving a very retrograde criterion of poetic beauty. Writers of the third or perhaps of the fourth rank, they occupy their places, masters of metric beauty, often deep and subtle, never very light or strong. Once more, what shall we say to a literary classification which grants Shelley the name of "poet" and denies it to Jean Paul? and which (since poetry is admittedly the highest literary form of all, and worthy of the highest honor) sets a spare falsetto singer like John Keats high over the head of a consummate artist like George Sand?

We have had it retorted, by those who disagreed with Wordsworth's theory, that its reductio ad absurdum was to be found in Wordsworth's own "Excursion;" that "poem" being full of the most veritable prose that was ever penned by man. Very good. Take a passage:

"Ah, gentle sir! slight, if you will, the means, but spare to slight the end, of those who did, by system, rank as the prime object of a wise man's aim-security from shock of accident, release from fear; and cherished peaceful days for their own sakes, as mutual life's chief good and only reasonable felicity. What motive drew, what impulse, I would ask, through a long course of later ages, drove the hermit to his cell in forest wide; or what detained him, till his closing eyes took their last farewell of the sun and stars, fast anchored in the desert?"-Excursion, Book III.

This is not only prose, but indifferent prose; poor, colloquial, ununctional; and no amount of modulation could make it poetry. Contrast with it another passage, of great and familiar beauty:

"I have seen a curious child, who dwelt upon a tract of inland ground, applying to his ear the convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell, to which, in silence hushed, his very soul listened intently. His countenance soon brightened with joy; for NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVI., No. 5

native sea.

from within were heard murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed mysterious union with its self is to the ear of Faith. And there are times, Even such a shell the universe itI doubt not, when to you it doth impart authentic tidings of invisible things, of ebb and flow, and ever-during power, and central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation." Excursion, Book IV.

Prose again, but how magnificent! poetical imagery worthy of Jeremy Taylor; but losing nothing by being printed naturally. The conclusion of the whole matter, so far as it affects the "Excursion," is that the work, while essentially fine in substance, suffers from an unnatural form. Read as it stands, it is rather prosy poetry. Written properly, it would have been admitted universally as a surpassing poem in prose; although it contains a great deal which, whether printed as prose or verse, would be unanimously accepted as commonplace and unpoetic.

Our store of acknowledged poetry is very precious; but it might be easily doubled, were we suffered to select from our prose writers-from Plato, from Boccaccio, from Pascal, from Rousseau, from Jean Paul, from Novalis, from George Sand, from Charles Dickens, from Nathaniel Hawthorne,-the magnificent nuggets of pure poetic ore in which these writers abound. Read Boccaccio's story of Isabella and the Pot of Basil, or Dickens's description of a sea-storm in "David Copperfield," or Hawthorne's picture of Phoebe Pyncheon's bedchamber (quoted recently by an admirable writer, himself a fine prose poet,* in this magazine), and confess that, if these things be not poetry, poetry was never written. If you still doubt that the rhythmic form is essential to the highest poetic matter, read that wondrous dream of the World without a Father at the end of Jean Paul's "Siebenkäs," and then peruse Heine's description before the thorn-crowned coming of Christ. of the fading away of the Hellenic gods What these prose fragments lose in neatness of form, they gain in mystery and glamor. After reading them, and many another similar efforts, one almost feels that rhymed poetry is a poor, petty, and in ferior form of language after all.

Just at this present moment we want a great Poet, if we want anything; and we particularly want a great Poet with the cour

38

* Matthew Browne.

age to "loosen" the conventional poetic speech. "Off, off, ye lendings!" Away with lutes and fiddles; shut up Pope, Dryden, Gray, Keats, Shelley, and the other professors of music, and try something free and original-say, even a course of Whitman. Among living men, one poet at least is to be applauded for having, inspired by Goethe, "kicked" at the traces of rhyme, and written such poems as "The Strayed Reveller," "Rugby Chapel," and "Heine's Grave." We select a passage

from the first-named of these fine po

ems:

THE YOUTH (loquitur).

The gods are happy;
They turn on all sides
Their shining eyes,
And see, below them,
The earth and men.
They see Teresias
Sitting, staff in hand,
On the warm grassy
Asopus' bank,

His robe, drawn over
His old sightless head,
Revolving only

The doom of Thebes.

They see the centaurs
In the upper glens

Of Pelion, in the streams
Where red-berried ashes fringe
The clear brown shallow pools
With streaming flanks and heads
Rear'd proudly, snuffing
The mountain wind.

They see the Indian

Drifting, knife in hand,

His frail boat moor'd to

A floating isle, thick matted

With larged-leaved, low-creeping melon plants
And the dark cucumber.

He reaps and stows them,
Drifting-drifting-round him,

Round his green harvest-plot,

Flow the cool lake-waves:

The mountains ring them.

They see the Scythian

On the wide steppe, unharnessing

His wheel'd house at noon,

He tethers his beast down, and makes his meal, Mare's milk and bread

Baked on the embers; all around

The boundless waving grass plains stretch, thick starred

With saffron and the yellow hollyhock
And flag-leaved iris flowers.

Sitting in his cart

He makes his meal; before him, for long miles, Alive with bright green lizards

And springing bustard-fowl,

The track, a straight black line,

Furrows the rich soil; here and there

Clusters of lonely mounds,

Topp'd with rough-hewn,

Grey, rain-bleared statues, overspread
The sunny waste.
They see the ferry

On the broad clay-laden

Lone Charasmian stream; thereupon
With snort and steam,

Two horses, strongly swimming, tow
The ferry-boat, with woven ropes
To either bow

Firm-harness'd by the wain; a chief,
With shout and shaken spear,

Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern
The cowering merchants, in long robes,
Sit pale beside their wealth
Of silk bales and of balsam-drops,
Of gold and ivory,

Of turquoise, earth, and amethyst,
Jasper and chalcedony,

And milk-barr'd onyx stones.

The loaded boat swings groaning
In the yellow eddies.

The gods behold them.

Matthew Arnold's Poetical Works, vol. ii.

Equally fine are some of the choric passages in the "Philoctetes" of the Hon. J. Leicester Warren, one of the first of our young poets. Passages such as we have quoted differ little from prose, and would seem equally beautiful if printed as prose. They move to their own music, and need no adventitious aid of the printer. The same may be said of Goethe's "Prometheus" :

Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus,
Mit Wolkendunst,

Und übe, dem Knaben gleich

Der Disteln köpft,

An Eichen dich an Bergeshöhn;

Musst mir meine Erde

Doch lassen stehn,

It

The strain rolls on in simple grandeur, too massive for rhyme or formal verse. bears to the "Poe" species of poetry about the same relation that the Venus of Milo does to Gibson's tinted Venus.

Illustrations so crowd upon us as we write that they threaten to swell this little paper out of all moderate limits. We must conclude; and what shall be our conclusion? This: A truly great Poet is not he who wearies us with eternally sweet numbers; is not Pope, is not Poe, is not even Keats. It is he who is master of all speech, and uses all speech fitly; able, like Shakspeare, to chop the prosiest of prose with Polonius and the Clowns, as well as to sing the sweetest of songs with Ariel and the outlaws "under the green

wood tree." It is not Hawthorne, because his exquisite speech never once rose to pure song; it is Dickens, because (as could be easily shown, had we space) he was a great master of melody as well as a great workaday humorist. It is not Thackeray, because he never reached that subtle modulation which comes of imaginative creation; and it is not Shelley, because he was essentially a singer, and many of the profoundest and delightfullest things absolutely refuse to be sung. It is Shakspeare par excellence, and it is Goethe par hasard. Historically speaking, however,

it may be observed that the greatest Poets have not been those men who have used Verse habitually and necessarily ; and if we glance over the names of living men of genius, we shall perhaps not count those most poetic who call their productions openly "poems." Meanwhile, we wait on for the Miracle-worker who never comes, the Poet. We fail as yet to catch the tones of his voice; but we have no hesitation in deciding that his first proot of ministry will be dissatisfaction with the limitations of Verse as at present written. [From St. Paul's.

THE world is proverbially ungrateful, and it is not uncommon to find people who are unmindful of a benefit, the advantages of which they are actually enjoying at the very time they profess to ignore its existence. A very striking exemplification of this is afforded by the numerous English who have left their own country and pitched their tents in France, merely because life there is supposed to be so much cheaper than at home. Although this is the raison d'être of their sojourn in a foreign land, and notwithstanding that they have practical evidence that the supposed cheapness is no supposition at all, but a very comfortable fact; they still never cease to remark that France is as dear as England, and from trying to persuade others end by persuading themselves of the truth of the proposition; and this whilst they are actually reaping the solid comfort resulting from the move they have made, to say nothing of the pleasant exchange from the daily wear and tear of pinching and scraping, cutting and contriving, for an existence of tolerable ease.

It is undesirable to have illusions on any subject, but it is a real misfortune that there should be any doubt or mistake upon this. The income of a large proportion of our middle classes is so limited, such a large number of our fellow-countrymen are compelled to seek for homes on the other side of the globe, that the relative differences of expense between two countries so close to each other as England and France is a subject of real imporWe believe that if some misappre

tance.

hension did not exist on this point, many families who have exiled themselves to Natal, the Diamond Fields, the Falkland Islands, &c.—all expeditions of the utmost uncertainty and risk-would have settled in France or Germany, where they would be still within easy reach of England, and where, therefore, many home ties could still be maintained.

For the guidance of others, therefore, who may find it as difficult as we did ourselves to obtain anything like accurate statistics and information on the subject of expense in France, we propose giving the result of our experience, entirely personal. and practical.

We shall begin by making two assertions, the truth of both of which we hope to substantiate in the course of the following observations: first, that the scale of prices, taking one thing with another, is positively lower in France than in England; and,. secondly, that the ways of life there are so different from ours in their simplicity and independence, that a far smaller income would suffice to purchase comfort, even were the prices the same in both countries.

That prices are actually lower in France is beyond a doubt. Even since the war, after which a decided augmentation took place in almost every article of consump tion, meat of the best quality, even prime. joints as they are called, are supplied for sevenpence and eightpence a pound, allowing for the French pound being larger than the English, and remembering that a franc is not tenpence, but ninepence-halfpenny. Now we are frequently assured.

by our friends in England that adroit housekeepers can buy their meat for tenpence a pound, and we do not forget that great things are said to be achieved by the Civil Service Co-operative Society; but on an average our own experience and that of others alike demonstrate that it is impossible in England to count on paying less than a shilling per pound for meat, whilst it is notorious that if you go into any butcher's shop at random, and ask for a beef-steak, you have to pay fifteen and eighteen pence a pound for it. In France, eggs in the summer are seldom more than sevenpence-halfpenny a dozen, milk never exceeds twopence and threepence a quart, and butter at the dearest part of the year has never risen, even since the war, beyond fourteenpence a pound. Fruit in England, with the exception, perhaps, of gooseberries, is hardly attainable at all, in any appreciable quantity, by people of the very narrow incomes of which we are speaking-incomes, we will say, of from three to four hundred a year. In France few people either dine or breakfast without it; 'le dessert' is during the season as much a matter of course in the kitchen as on the master's table, and is a luxury in which the servants are always able to share. A sou a basket is not an uncommon price for the best cherries, and from one to two francs a basket for the finest kinds of apricots. We have mentioned cherries and apricots, as our space will not allow of too long a list, but every species of fruit is, at most, one-third the price it would fetch in England.

Poultry is very decidedly dearer in England than it is in France, where, unless at some exceptionally unfavorable time, such as immediately after a Prussian occupation, it is by no means rare to buy turkeys in the market for five or six shillings, fine fowls for half-a-crown, and ducks equally cheap. It is as well to state here that we are mentioning the prices and quoting the tariff of the larger provincial cities, omitting Paris as beside the present question. In the smaller and less important towns farther removed from the capital, the whole scale would obviously be lower.

The sole articles of food which could perhaps be quoted as an exception to the general rule of the superior cheapness of living in France are groceries, some of which, such as coffee, tea, and sugar, are

in excess of the English price; but even granting, this exception, it will be admitted that, as far as the question of food at least is concerned, France must be a less expensive country to live in than England.

The next item we shall mention is servants' wages; and here the difference is remarkable, the advantage again remaining on the French side. A man and his wife, or a ménage as it is technically called, seldom receive more than 32l., 36., or 40l. a year. These two servants undertake the whole work of the household, including polishing the uncarpeted floors; the man takes care of the horse if there is one, drives it if necessary, and works in the garden when not otherwise employed; if there is a small vineyard attached to the house, he is, or should be, capable of making the barrel or two of wine which it produces; and we have our selves had a servant, who, besides doing all this, baked excellent bread. A bonne capable of performing several distinct branches of work expects only 127. a year, and this is thought good wages; and a smart lady's maid, in very large establishments where such appendages are kept, would be contented to receive the same sum; the wages of the same individuals with us are, unfortunately, so well known to our cost that it is unnecessary to recapitulate them here; and we think it will be admitted that under the article of servants' wages we have proved our case. It may be mentioned here once for all, that we do not of course include in the comparison of the relative expense of life in England and France the amount of household economy which can be practised with comfort in retired villages in the wilds of Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland, where exceptional prices are to be met with, for these are likewise beyond the reach of all educational advantages. We speak of every part of France except the capital, including the larger towns equal in size and importance to Bath, Cheltenham, Winchester, Nottingham, &c. Having disposed of the two departments of the kitchen and servants' hall, we approach the domain of the schoolroom, and here the difference of expense is still more apparent, and we think it hardly will be contended that the education of children, whether boys or girls, is-cæteris paribus-as cheap in England as in France. It matters not whether a daily or a resident governess is