as the muse of a mythopoeic age, still live and inspire song. The epic of Geography is still to be written. Possibly we may now read the muse in a new and different light, a light both warm and diffusive; we may cover her with some consecrated vestment and bring flesh upon the dead bones. Speaking according to a wide interpretation of the term, Geography may be regarded as a history, a science, and an art. As a history, Geography means the story of the unfolding of the features of the great earth, the opening up of fertile river-valleys, the exploration of deserts, the traversing of mighty wastes of sea, the labours of pioneers, and the world-wide tasks of men travelling with their lives in their hands,Othello's adventurous career repeated again and again,—the terrors of the ice-blast, the shafts of the tropic sun, the wiles of savage foes. As time goes on, it is the story of reclamation and development; how, from primeval barbarism and primeval forest-gloom, there springs into sight the wealth of some happy Acadian village, fair orchards, and the bounty of waving miles of golden corn. As a science, Geography points with her magic wand not only to the terrestrial but to the celestial globe. She teaches us to read the secrets of things above and things below, of the movements of the stars no less than the dark genesis of some deep ocean-current, of the cradle of the winds, of the birth of the clouds, of the falling of grateful showers, of the roaring of the mighty trade-winds, of the thunderous fury of the devastating hurricane; she tells us why the stagnant pools are foul, why the breath of sweet-lipped morn is fragrant, why the morning mists are formed, VOL. CLVI.-NO. DCCCCXLVIII. For whose path the Atlantic's level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice." As a science Geography involves many and deep considerations; she treats of general laws as well as particular and descriptive manifestations. She is the spirit of kosmos acting upon chaos, reducing the world's phenomena to order and arrangement. As an art Geography implies, inter alia, the technical skill of the map-maker, the moulding in relief of mountain ranges and hills, the scarred ravines, the deepsunk river-valleys, the blue levels of the sea and lakes-in fact, a human replica of the features of the earth. It may be that the art of map-making is only just in its infancy; and, as it has been the ambition of sculptors to carve the human form divine, so it may be the desire of geographers yet unborn to represent, according to the rules of some plastic art, the lineaments of ancient Earth herself. At a glance we might then view our country laid out according to its various elevations, terraces, plateaux, and valleys, according to scale and the surveyors' calculation. 2 L Read, therefore, in the light of a history, science, and an art, the muse of Geography may lead us far afield; and Geography, in such a full sense, may become so vast a subject as to lie beyond the reach of the ordinary man. Human life might be insufficient to enable us to grasp the subsidiary sciences which are really necessary for this TσTýμn ȧpxTEXTOVIKŃ, which, after all, is the study of nature writ large everywhere. Must we really know all about the laws of storms, winds, currents, the ebb and flow of tides, climatology, meteorology, the variations of heat and cold, to say nothing of the science of the muse Urania? No, we may answer, it is not necessary for the ordinary geographer to aim at this encyclopedia of knowledge. For the present such a definition would be far too wide and vague to be accepted by any one. It may be sufficient to point out here that Geography, if it does not require an accurate knowledge of the physical sciences, at any rate it recruits largely from them, and is indebted deeply to them. Its province is being enlarged and its interpretation is becoming wider. No longer can a geographer be a mere collector of names or facts, little better than a philatelist infected with a stamp mania, nor Geography simply a department of the statistician's art. The Earth is full of colour and ripeness, her surface an ever-varying and poetical rendering of mighty forces; her operations are too sublime, her whispers too mysterious, to leave the imagination unimpressed and the heart of man untouched. In these latter days we have come closer to nature, and the horizon of the poet has ever "widened with the process of the suns. Instead of lingering, more apis Matinæ, along the hedgerows and heather-slopes of his own fatherland, the poet, following the expansion of the geographical science, has taken the wings of the morning and gone to the uttermost parts of the earth. "Moving incidents by flood and field" became part of his stock-in-trade; and, borne on the mighty tradewinds, he could anchor, like a sprite of air, in a tropic nook. Therefore a great poet and traveller, like Camoens, could shake the dust of an ungrateful country from off his feet, and, with the stately flight of the albatross, sweep past distant points of earth, and replenish his verse with endless imagery. Invoking the Cape of Storms, the discovery of which brought such lustre upon the Portuguese name, Camoens could write— "I am that hidden, mighty head of land, The Cape of Tempests, fitly named by you, Which Ptolemy, Mela, Strabo never fand, Nor Pliny dreamt of, nor all sages knew." If we examine general influences and tendencies closely we shall find that, although there has arisen in England no poet-geographer like Camoens to chant an epic of commerce and adventure in stately verse for a nation like ourselves, who have done so much for Geography, there has never been wanting, malgré Dr Johnson, a keen appreciation of Geography as an inspiring department of human knowledge. It was greater at some times than at others. the Tudor days there occurred the great renaissance of Geography. Such men as Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, together with many others, were cosmographers as well as poets. In In the eighteenth century Bishop Berkeley, with his prophetic vision of 'The Rise of Empire and of Arts,' was a most remarkable instance of a poet-geographer in the widest and most comprehensive sense. Afterwards we know that the muse of Geography suffered a period of obscure neglect, until, indeed, we descend to the ampler reign of Queen Victoria, resembling the "spacious times" of Queen Elizabeth, and Geography is almost born again. The national ambition to explore the hidden fountains of the Niger in North-west Africa, and to lay bare the fountains of the Nile in Equatorial Africa, as well as the heroic efforts of our sailors and explorers to find the Northwest Passage and to penetrate to the North Pole, provide in themselves a page of adventure, unparalleled in any other age or country, and testify to a second renaissance of Geography. In the history of England the muse of Geography deserves to be enshrined as the tenth muse. Yet how long did the effete school of classicists, obscurantists, and mere formal imitators of ancient models ignore the wider spirit and more ample range which_geographical knowledge gave. Pope's Pastorals, Addison's Italy, breathe a narrow world, different from the wider landscapes of Shelley or Wordsworth. The pedantry of imitators cramped their genius and bound them to narrow ways. We long to expatiate in an ampler region and draw breath in an atmosphere more congenial to our national instincts, where the great element ary features of the universe, "the common sun, the air, the skies," are restored to us. True it might be that, according to the old classicists, whilst Clio showed her open roll of paper, Euterpe held her flute, and Melpomene flourished her sword, there was no symbol, such as a chart or a map, given by the ancients to the genius of exploration and discovery. But was Geography destined never to be a muse? Was she alone to be debarred from the springs of Castaly? Castaly? Was the poet's vision to end with the sweep of the longitudes southwards to darkness, chaos, and perhaps sweltering spaces of molten sea, as many of the ancients thought? In an age of discovery, could the narrow hypotheses of Mela, Strabo, and Ptolemy satisfy mankind? If, indeed, we were so bound to the landscapes and seascapes of the ancients, we might well retire into cold and frozen obscurity in the north, and be in reality Britons toto penitus orbe divisi. It may be worth while, therefore, to trace in a few particular instances the magic influences of the muse of Geography upon some of our great poets, and see how they utilised, to the aggrandisement of their art, the revelations borne in upon them from wider spheres of travel. The stories of national adventure in regions outside Europe fell upon the ever-attentive ear of our great Shakespeare, and lent wings to his fancy. What things in heaven and earth did not Shakespeare touch upon? The intrepid "Portingals" who had sailed with Ferdinand Magelhaens had brought back strange tales of Patagonia and the inhabitants of those stormy latitudes, their vast size, uncouth appearance, their manners, customs, and an account of their god Setebos. So in the "Tempest"—that most imaginative and descriptive play, in which Shakespeare sweeps the latitudes for his similes, at any rate from the "His art is of such power, It would control my dam's god, Setebos, West Indies to Patagonia-Cali- sweetest and most pleasing temper ban confesses the magic authority of all others." Henceforward, the of Prospero :group is veritably the abode of angels, as once it was the den of devils. They were the true Fortunatæ Insulæ of the seventeenth century, where the blest living might wander in fair elysian fields. Andrew Marvell, inspired by their beauty, went into raptures over And make a vassal of him." -Act i. sc. ii. To the Bermudas in the same play Shakespeare expressly alludes. These islands were reported to be the habitations of furies and monsters, who could stir up mighty hurricanes and overwhelm the hapless mariner. The Spanish sailors had called them the isles of devils, Sir Walter Raleigh had termed them "a hellish sea for thunder, lightning, and storms," and in 1609 Gates and Somers were wrecked on them in the Sea Venture. Evidently Shakespeare must have had these incidents in mind when he wrote "This eternal spring, Which here enamels everything," "In the remote Bermudas wide, In ocean's bosom unespied." As a refuge from religious persecution at home the Bermudas were indeed inexpressibly grateful. There lay, indeed, the island of Eleutheria, where Liberty had the free use of her wings, and there the persecuted refugee might wander unmolested in meads of asphodel in an "Isle so long unknown, And yet far kinder than our own, Safe from the storms and prelates' rage.' Waller, also, described the place thus "So sweet the air, so moderate the clime, None sickly lives, or dies before his time; Heaven sure has kept this spot of earth uncurst To show how all things were created first.' In Bermuda, also, the poet-philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, carried away by his inspiring vision of The Rise of Empire and of Arts,' wished to found the St Paul's College (1724) from architectural designs in Italy as a centre whence light might be spread westward to the continent of America, and the torch of learning handed on, as in the λauradоpopía of the Greeks. In our own century Thomas Moore inherited the inspiration and the dream drawn from the Bermudas, and being appointed Here were the lands "Which bards of old with kindly fancy placed For happy spirits in the Atlantic waste." The Bermudas, therefore, are a striking instance of islands which, both in the mythopoeic age of geographical exploration as well as during subsequent periods of more exact knowledge and thorough investigation, inspired the minds of poets. There is no tract of land so dreamy or so fascinating as an island, bathed in distant tropic light, self-contained, blest in its solitude, and rich in great ocean's gifts. It is the very place whither the sprite in Milton's "Comus" flies : "To the ocean now I fly, And those happy climes that lie And it was upon the great Milton, of whom Wordsworth wrote "Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free" that the tales of explorers and the romance of geography had their greatest influence. He too had the power of assimilating what he heard, and of making it all tributary to his genius. Listen to this passage, which recalls the efforts of our navigators to find the Northeast Passage past the Vaigatz strait and the mouth of the river Ob. On such an adventure Wil "argosies with portly sail, Like seigniors and rich burghers of the flood," which Shakespeare alludes to in "The Merchant of Venice," provide Milton also with a magnificent simile, replete with geographical associations :— "As when far off at sea a fleet descried Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring Their spicy drugs; they, on the trading flood, Through the wide Ethiopian to the Ply stemming nightly towards the But the most splendid geographical description which Milton gives us is when he takes Adam to the hill "of Paradise the highest," from which the hemisphere of earth could be seen in clearest ken, "stretched out to the amplest reach of prospect." This is a fitting opportunity for the poet to ransack old and new, to draw from the romantic and imaginative accounts of the sixteenth and |