And the singing findeth a tongue, And Art, with her cold hands clinging, Comforts the soul she has stung. Then the Poet, holding her to him, Findeth his loss is his gain :

The sweet singing sadness thrills through him,

Though nought of the glory remain;

And the awful sound of the city,

And the terrible faces around,

Take a truer, tenderer pity,

And pass into sweetness and sound; The mystery deepens to thunder,

Strange vanishings gleam from the cloud, And the Poet, with pale lips asunder, Stricken, and smitten, and bow'd, Starteth at times from his wonder, And sendeth his Soul up aloud! -BUCHANAN, ROBERT, 1864, London. The earth is given

To us: we reign by virtue of a sense Which lets us hear the rhythm of that old verse,

The ring of that old tune whereto she spins. Humanity is given to us: we reign

By virtue of a sense which lets us in

To know its troubles ere they have been told, And take them home and lull them into rest With mournfullest music. Time is given

to us,

Time past, time future. Who, good sooth, beside

Have seen it well, have walked this empty world

When she went steaming, and from pulpy hills

Have marked the spurting of their flamy crowns?

-INGELOW, JEAN, 1867, Gladys and Her
Island.

Verse-makers' talk! fit for a world of rhymes
Where facts are feigned to tickle idle ears,
Where good and evil play at tournament,
And end in amity,-a world of lies,—
A carnival of words where every year
Stale falsehoods serve fresh men.

There are few delights in any life so high and rare as the subtle and strong delight of sovereign art and poetry; there are none more pure and more sublime. To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.-SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1875, Victor Hugo, Essays and Studies.

All days are birthdays in the life,
The blessed life that poets live,
Songs keep their own sweet festivals,
And are the gifts they come to give.
The only triumph over Time,

That Time permits, is his who sings;
The poet Time himself defies

By secret help of Time's own wings. -JACKSON, HELEN HUNT, 1879, To O. W. Holmes on his 70th Birthday.

A Poem consists of all the purest and most beautiful elements in the poet's nature, crystallised into the aptest and most exquisite language, and adorned with all the outer embellishment of musical cadence or dainty rhyme. Hence it presents us with the highest and noblest product of the æsthetic faculty, embracing

The busy shuttle comes and goes Across the rhymes, and deftly weaves A tissue out of autumn leaves, With here a thistle, there a rose. -ALDRICH, THOMAS BAILEY, 1874, The Cloth of Gold.

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;— World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers

beauties of all its sister arts. Whatever loveliness in face or feature, in hill or stream or ocean, the painter can place before us on his breathing canvas, that loveliness the poet can body forth in his verse, with the superadded touches of his vivid imagination. Whatever glorious floods of sound the singer can pour out from his ever-welling fountain of liquid treble and thundering bass, that glory the poet can reproduce for us in his graphic delineation of all things seen or heard.

Even more than this the poet can do. For while painting can only portray for us the forms and colours of the human face or of exterral nature, with at best some pregnant suggestion of the passions and emotions at work within it-while music can only play upon our inner cords by dim hints and half-comprehended touches, "telling us of things we have not seen, of things we shall not see"--the supreme art of all can utter in clear and definite language every feeling, external or internal, which makes up the sum of human life.—ALLEN, GRANT, 1879, A Fragment from Keats, The Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 244, p. 676.

He is a poet strong and true

Who loves wild thyme and honey-dew;
And like a brown bee works and sings,
With morning freshness on his wings,
And a gold burden on his thighs,-
The pollen-dust of centuries!

More wise than tender; understanding all, At peace with all, at peace with life and death,

And love that gives a meaning unto life And takes from death the meaning and the sting:

At peace with hate, and every opposite. -AUSTIN, ALFRED, 1889, A Dialogue at Fiesole.

We name thee not the Angel of the Tomb: O'er that, vain-glory fleets, waning wrath: God's light alone dispels the churchyard's gloom:

Yet whisperings hast thou with God's Daughter, Faith.

-DE VERE, AUBREY THOMAS, 1889, Prize Quatrain, Magazine of Poetry, vol. 1, p. 490.

God placed a solid rock man's path across, And bade him climb; but that it might not be

Too rough, He wrapped it o'er with tender

moss:

The rock was Truth, the moss was Poetry.

Oh, we who know thee know we know thee not,

Thou Soul of Beauty, thou Essential Grace! Yet undeterr'd by baffled speech and thought,

The heart stakes all upon thy hidden face. -BATES, KATHARINE LEE, 1889, Prize Quatrain, Magazine of Poetry, vol. 1, p.488. the great gods of Song, in clear white light,

The radiance of their godhead, calmly dwell
And with immutable cold starlike gaze
Scan both the upper and the under world,
As it revolves, themselves serenely fixed.
Their bias is the bias of the sphere,

That turns all ways, but turns away from

none,

Save to return to it. They have no feud With gods or men, the living or the dead, The past or present, and their words complete Life's incompleteness with a healing note. For they are not more sensitive than strong,

Magazine of Poetry, vol. 1, p. 488.

The poet dies as dies the barren mind,

It is in death his deathless days begin. To him of what avail? But he has willed His wealth to every dweller on the soil, That so shall ages drifting by be filled

With lustrous reminiscence of his toil. Through him man's spirit quits its baser pleasures,

Beholding Nature's world as now his own, Astonished at his newly-gotten treasures,—

Into his lap the wealth of ages thrown! -HAKE, THOMAS GORDON, 1890, The New Day, Sonnet xxxi.

He walks with God upon the hills!

And sees, each morn, the world arise
New-bathed in light of Paradise.
He hears the laughter of her rills,
Her melodies of many voices,

And greets her while her heart rejoices.
She, to his spirit undefiled,
Makes answer as a little child;

Unveiled before his eyes she stands, And gives her secrets to his hands. -COOLBRITH, INA D., 1891, The Poet. Poets must ever be their own best listeners. No word from man to men

Shall sound the same again; Something is lost through all interpreters. Never for finest thought

Can crystal words be wrought

That to the crowd afar

Shall show it-more than a telescope a star. -SPENCER, CARL, 1891, Half Heard.