that has yet been held could compete with a Belgian exhibition in interest, or even in the beauty of some of its fabrics. It must be remembered that for upwards of six hundred years, albeit certain checks have been given to arts and manufactures, they have, like the Belgian king of the present age, weathered many a storm, and even in a measure held their way through it with his Majesty. If the loom stopped, the artist worked on; and in the rush of the Iconoclasts, under the fiery blasts of Spain, and the dread ordeal of later revolutions, many a chef d'œuvre was carried into private sanctuaries, and religiously guarded with reliquaires, exquisite enamels of the Holbein school, altar draperies of lace, and lovely bits of sculpture and wood-carving, till better times came. Painting on glass, which had lost its prestige in the Netherlands since the days of Van Eyck, the inventor, is now in full revival there; and an altar screen in St. Gudule in Brussels, but lately executed in wood, will bear the test of a microscope. The looms are all in full play again; and the nobles, gentlemen, and artists are beginning to throw open their galleries and studios as cordially as can be desired, especially to English people.

England herself is hardly aware how much she owes to Brabant in the way of artists and artizans; for when, during "the troubles of the Pays Bas," as those terrible times were termed, many of the industrious and talented classes emigrated into Holland, our wise Queen Elizabeth took good care, in return for the aid she sent, to have some of these people dispatched to England. Not a whit did she care for any feeling that existed against "foreign talent." No doubt, however, it embittered the mind of many a poor artizan at home, while at the same time it would not fail to evoke the dormant spirit of emulation; and when, some years afterwards, Rubens came as ambassador from Spain to the court of Charles the First, a new and nobler impulse was given to the fine arts in England. Whitehall, Windsor, and Hampton Court, many public and private buildings were enriched by his genius; and his well known reply to the remark of an eminent person about the court had, it may be supposed, something to do with raising the dignity of his profession.

Entering the great master's studio unannounced one day, the courtier observed, "The ambassador of His Most Catholic Majesty amuses himself by painting sometimes."

"I amuse myself by playing the ambassador sometimes," replied Rubens, with a significant smile.

Besides other advantages that would accrue to Belgium and Great Britain by an Exhibition at Brussels on the plan of our first Crystal Palace and that which closed at Paris last year, it would bring her people, her noblesse and gentry, artists and artisans, into more intimate acquaintanceship with us; and thus establish an understanding, which at the present is very immature. It is true that from the higher classes of Belgian men living so much in their Sociétés and Cafés, Englishmen and themselves soon become acquainted; but, except at official or public soirées, our countrywomen have little opportunity of knowing anything of Belgian ladies. It is said of the latter that they do not wish to mingle with the English. This is not surprising, for if it must be admitted that while the easy dignity of a well bred English woman, always ready to receive her friends, is incomprehensible to a Belgian, who is never en toilette but for company, it cannot on the other hand be denied that persons have been tolerated on the continent, whose conduct has already banished them from respectable society at home. This the Belgians invariably find out, and what is worse, they too often see such persons encouraged and patronized by those in authority, whose example is looked to by foreigners as the reflex of public opinion and public morals at home. We speak advisedly; many who read this page will recognize and admit the force of our assertion.

It is to these circumstances we owe the shyness with which foreign women meet us abroad, a shyness legitimate and laudable in itself, but from which the innocent suffer more than the guilty. As regards continental morals, that is not our affair. It should be our pride and pleasure to uphold the honor of the British name whereever we may go; it is but a kind of passive mission, in the fashion we would exercise it, and neither exciting nor enterprising enough for some of our

sex ; but, like the seed that germinates in silence and in shade, must bear fruit in time for good or for evil, and the wider the circle of its growth, the more beneficial or mischievous its influence will prove.

Courtesy at present supplies, as far as it can, the lack of social cordiality between the Belgians and ourselves. The stranger has the entrée of the clubs; the musical réunions-another great feature in art-gatherings in Belgium-and all the public libraries are thrown open to him. We have shewn how the archives of Antwerp were ransacked for our edification by Monsieur Verachter; at Brussels we revelled in its Bibliotheque Royale; at Antwerp, thanks to M. Boeschardt, a British merchant and Waterloo officer, we sat in a superb garden, listening to fine music that cost us nothing; at Ghent we descended into the crypt of St. Bavon; and all by the courtesy of intelligent individuals, who appreciated our desire for information. But something more than courtesy was shown in certain incidents which occurred in Antwerp, shortly before the Russian war burst forth; incidents trifling in themselves, but important as marking the respect entertained by King Leopold's officers for those in the service of Her Majesty Queen Victoria; interesting, too, since he, alas! with whom they are chiefly connected fell in one of the bloodiest affrays before Sebastopol.

One afternoon an English baronet and his friend, both field officers in Her Majesty's service, had the pleaasure to meet at dinner, at the table d'hote of the Hotel des Pays Bas, several members of the garrison, who, happy at such an accession to their party, vied with each other in offering the strangers every courtesy in their power. They opened the preliminaries of the entente cordiale by an invitation to adjourn to the club; there the English officers were presented to the general commanding the garrison, who was won at once by that frank and kindly manner which endeared the late Sir

to all

who knew him. Never having seen Belgian troops before, he desired to acquaint himself with all that concerned the profession he loved; and was consequently delighted to accept an invitation to visit the barracks and citadel next morning. At an early

hour an officer arrived to conduct Sir and his friend to the inspection, for such it was, as much as though the colonel on leave had been a general on duty. Men in light marching order, others heavily accoutred, and others in full dress, stood at intervals, awaiting the scrutiny of the British officers, who in their turn were exceedingly struck with the efficiency of all they saw, and especially with the interior economy of the system they had an opportunity of examining throughout; for, on the threshold of each new department, the one officer took his leave, and another replaced him. The courtesy did not end here; next day was the fête du roi, which was celebrated by a military mass, and an inspection of the troops; another invitation to be present at this spectacle was duly forwarded to Sir

and a young officer, as before, was appointed to attend him. As may be supposed, he left Belgium deeply impressed not only by the brotherly cordiality of its officers, but by the efficiency and completeness of the army in every department, from the magnificent armoury at Antwerp, to the smart cantiniere of that perfectly equipped corps, the Guides at Brussels.

The King of the Belgians may rejoice, his fatiguing progress over, in the satisfaction he has given his people, by sharing with them, so to speak, the quaint and piquantes fêtes which they have revived to do him honor. It is not long since it was reported that His Majesty thought of abdicating in favor of his eldest son; and some considered that the alliance with Austria, while the principal parties were yet of tender age, was but the forerunner of such a step. What such an event as the birth of an heir to the young couple's high fortunes might lead to, it is impossible to say; in the mean time, King Leopold seems to grow wiser as he grows older, illustrating daily that acuteness of disposition in government which marked the policy by which he held his throne through the shock of political convulsions close by. When all looked dark and gloomy round him, when the people of Belgium themselves scarce knew what to do in the midst of the threatened strife between kingdoms, their sove

reign got up a little quiet coup d'etat of his own, which met the occasion perfectly. He offered to abdicate if his people saw fit! They hesitatedbut not for long. "How shall we

better ourselves ?" they asked, and the king remained sovereign of Belgium by the grace of God, and, most certainly, by the will of the people.

LIKE a very grievous murrain the cacoethes scribendi is abroad. A terrible disease it is, tingling at the ends of the fingers, and sending horrible delights and pains, shaking hopes, and conceited fears to its source-a verrucose development of the organ of self esteem. It is as it was in the days of Horace; one will spin us out a thousand verses standing on one leg-and one idea. Another will be seized with Pierian thirst, and lo! as he stoops to drink, the fountain subsides, and he is abandoned on the sand of prose. Another, essaying Parnassus, finds when too late he has mistaken the mountain, and that he treads the hill of the terrible Chimera. It is our own fault. The public capacity is Curtian; it must have the best thrown into it, or it will not close. We ask for writers, and like Tarpeia we are crushed with our own request. The all producing earth never poured forth with such fecundity as the all mothering press. Much need, oh typeful mother! hast thou of a season of barrenness, till some Isaac, full of fresh young life, have time to germinate the child of genius and of joy. Doth not thy leaden bosom throb with indignation as the more leaden sheets pass over thee? How oft has a second edition stirred thee to pain ineffable! Far otherwise was it with thee in the days of thy primal being, when William Caxton drew from thy bosom, where his fame reposed, the deep black letters of the "Recuyell of Troy." What a great antique memory is that! Then men considered for many years before they stamped the immortality of printing on the unexpressed thought. Now we plunge into type, and it never occurs to us that we have made our imaginings immortal. We do not recognize now the importance of our own ideas, and that is the chief reason that they are so generally worthless. Whatever

we write is read, will always find readers of some class, and through them we necessarily influence all future time-it may be by infinitesi mal gradations. This may seem fanciful, but it is a true and solemn thought. We should ever write with the veiled face of the great Future watching and solemnizing all, as did the Egyptian skeleton. We do not say that men should write only for the future; but, while writing for the present, let them remember that the present is ever changing to the future, in fact, that there is no such thing as present time at all. It is for this reason, that men do not recognize the importance of what they are doing, and for the consequent harmfulness of their productions, that we fearful of the multitudinous poetics of this time.

are

Every man writeth what is right in his own eyes. The press teems with poems of the foolishest; truly, with few of the noblest kind. There is but one hope for us, and it may seem a paradox to say so. It lies in the very cause of the misfortune. It is the liberty of the press. Is not freedom the parent of all nobleness? and would not the foolish element become sheer idiocy or madness by restraint. There is no hope, of a truth, left for us but in the freedom which will permit this diluted folly to evaporate, and perchance, which may the Gods grant, leave a precipitate of sense at the bottom. But the situation of the poetry-reading public at present is that of a prima donna almost choked with bouquets. The boxes write, the pit writes, the galleries write, and on every possible subject. We are a verse-writing nation. The danger

is that we shall cease to be a poetic nation. Let us think more and write less. The red hot bar of poetical feeling is violently hammered out into nothing but sparks, instead of being slowly weld

ed into poetry. We think our thought out too fast, and then we are reduced to thinking about thinking, and feeling about feeling, instead of slowly progressing by producing thought from thought, and feeling from feeling.

The world is too much with us, late and soon Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

We have given our hearts away-a sordid boon.

It is but too true. We give our hearts away, all in a hundred pages or so, and we give nothing worth the giving. We have not kept them long enough. We have never learnt the great lesson of life-to wait. It was not till the idea of Paradise Lost had lain germinating for half a life, that it sprang into the stately tree. It was not till the calm twilight of existence had fallen round the path of the Great Puritan, that the Epic of England was composed. Then, when the destruction of outward sight had separated him from outward beauty, he took refuge in the still cathedral of his soul, and it was filled with the light of Paradise. But we will not wait. We imagine every moment of feeling to be an age of feeling. When we are morbid, we feel by intuition that the mantle of Byron has descended on us.

In that moment o'er our soul Winters of memory seem to roll.

When we feel permeated with the beauty of the world, and recognize therein somewhat akin to our humanity, we cannot but feel that Wordsworth's muse is ours; and so-we begin to write. But it is one thing to feel, and another to express, To but few of the sons of earth is given the gift divine of "adequate expression." It is true that we are these men in a certain sense; our intuitions do not lie. Wordsworth's, Byron's very beauty to us is that they express what we feel, and what we are, and what we could not put in words. They call up in us feelings which we find that we have possessed, but which we had not recognized before, which lay in the heart, waiting like silent harp strings for the wind to vibrate. In a few words, they supply

us with, and make known to us our own feeling. But the poetasters of our time write as if expression were as easy as feeling, or thinking. Such is the case only when the ideas to be embodied are fully rounded in the mind of the poet. But these men endeavour to clothe in words thoughts whose shadows they have only seen. Like Ixion, they embrace a cloud instead of a goddess, and a monster is produced; whereas, if they had waited a little longer, they would have realized a good, and avoided a fault. They would have gained the idea; and they would not, owing to their imperfect conception of it, have expressed in twenty lines what might have been done in two.

As on a former occasion we have borne witness to the abiding excellence of the highest poetry of the age, and, above all, to the true and filtered purity of the poetic idea, as combining, after years of gradual development, the natural, practical, imaginative, passionate, loving, human, and spiri tual elements, it is but fitting that we should say a few words on the lower classes of poetry at present, which have arisen either by imitation, or by a false admixture of the poetical elements. We cannot but compare the writings of some of the poets of the present day to pâtes de foie grashighly seasoned unwholesome poems. Of this class especially is that to which a living poet has given the sobriquet of spasmodic. It has in reality arisen from an attempt to unite the spiritual and sensual element. In Bulwer's Zanoni, Glyndon, when endeavouring to reach the spiritual existence of a Rosicrucian, is enticed away by sensual pleasure, and attempts to grasp the reward without passing through the stage of trial. It is exactly what these sensualistico-spiritual poets do. They daub the wall with untempered mortar. It is this mixture which causes the indescribable confusion in which the reader finds himself involved, when he is in the centre of a poem like " Balder, or the Life Drama." To poems of this class Horace's description may well apply. "In the upper part a beautiful woman, beneath a loathsome fish." They are essentially unhealthy, certainly in their effect on the generality of readers, and we fear on the minds of the poets themslves. The tendency of youth is to

grasp at crude and wild ideas, attractive from their very crudeness and wildness, without thinking of effects. This is a very trite remark, but it is none the less true. The effect of these poems is to make men discontented with plain thinking and strong thinking. Its teaching is that a poet of the soul must pass through a tornado of passion, and personally feel all he aspires to represent. It is identical with the teaching of some to young men-" Sow your wild oats; the corn afterwards will be all the better." Such may be the case; the crop is sometimes all the better for it, but, as Tennyson well writes on the very point,

Oh, if we held the doctrine sound

For life outliving heats of youth,
Yet who would preach it as a truth
To those that eddy round and round?

We

We may apply the same reasoning to the postulate of this school. A man may make a better poet for having felt passion deeply, but is it necessary? We trow not we doubt whether Shakspeare was ever as jealous as Othello, or as conscience-stricken as Lady Macbeth. Finally, we have no hesitation in saying that the eager recipient of these Poems has ruined his poetic taste, or if not, when he enters real life, he is disgusted with their unreality; and the strength of thought necessary to get rid of them oftentimes ends in a struggle which makes all poetry distasteful.

There is another class of poets who are called, and some of them very falsely so, transcendental. Transcendentalism transferred to poetry has adopted a strange method of explaining itself. What was partially comprehensible before has now become all but incomprehensible. This is owing to the language in which it elothes itself. The Transcendental Poets write for themselves and for no one else. They use a jargon which none but the initiated understand. It is as incomprehensible in common circles as the flash dialect would be in St. James' Square. It is the Mumbo-Jumboism of literature. It is unfortunate that they will make use of their lingual enormities, when Wordsworth has shown us what may be done with simple English, and when Milton has made it almost inspired. It is further unfortunatefor their meaning is oftimes of value.

VOL. XLVIII.-NO. CCLXXXVI.

We do not believe that this strange tongue is natural to them; it is but a grotesque suit of clothes. Let it be thrown off. It is better to be naked to all the world than dressed for a few. We fear that these men who pass, twisting and circling like "the serpent more subtle than any beast of the field," through the fair Paradise of the English language, will finally gain for themselves the serpent's curse. Emerson, who, is perhaps the essence of Transcendentalism, is yet comprehensible enough; for he condescends to use his native tongue in its purity, and frames his sentences according to the understood rules of English grammar. Mr. Browning, for example, whom we recognize as a true poet, and whose dramas are strong with intuitive conception, is yet so strange and uncouth in his modes of expression, that he repels numbers whom he might attract. The story of the great comedian who took up as his first book, on recovering from a fever, Browning's

66

Sordello," and after reading three lines cast it down, and with a face, half terror, half fun, exclaimed, "Merciful Goodness, have I lost my senses?" is but the story of thousands.

Next on the list is another class. The voluminous. This is a more melancholy case than the last. The transcendental expression gives at least a spur to thought. But the characteristic, the essential difference of the poems written by this class of men, is an inexplicable absence of thought. These are men who flow in rhyme as naturally, as copiously, and not so beneficially as the village pump in water, "in one weak, washy, everlasting flood." These are men who to a hundred pages of sentimentality add a single thought as a flavor; whose minds seem diluted to the consistency of weak whey; who can, as the three madmen, get drunk each night on toast and water; who "die of a rose in aromatic pain," and whose only striking fault is that they each and all labor under an inexplicable impulse impart their weaknesses to the public, which wades hopefully as of old thro' volumes of stanzas and sonnets, and poems and poemettes, and finally dozes off to sleep, thankful at least for the innocent nature of the nar cotic.

There is yet another class of poets,

GG