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on the age than on the individual, on the conditions which have nourished, inspired, and moulded the poet, than on the poet himself. Had men gifted and tempered like Collins and Gray lived and worked, not in the deep valley between the heights of Renaissant England on the one side, and the heights of the Revolutionary era on the other, but on either of these elevations, their achievement would have been infinitely greater.

To Mr. Watson's poetry with its limited and unambitious range, its comparatively few notes, its persistent threnody, its joyless agnosticism, its thin and uncertain ethic, the critics of the future will probably point, and point mournfully, as a striking example of a most rare and fine genius struggling with malign and depressing conditions. As he himself writes, contrasting his note and tone with Chaucer's:

Blandly arraigning ghost! 'tis all too true,-
A want of joy doth in these strings reside;
Some shade, that troubled not thy clearer day,
Some loss, nor thou nor thy Boccaccio knew;
For thou art of the morning and the May
I of the Autumn and the eventide.

THE POETRY OF MR. GERALD

MR

MASSEY

ORE than half a century has passed since a volume of poems, falling into Landor's hands, so entranced him that he wrote a letter to a leading London newspaper, proclaiming the appearance of a poet whom he rapturously compared now to Keats, now to "a chastened Hafiz," now to the Shakespeare of the sonnets when the sonnets are at their best. Singling out a poem on Hood, "How rich and radiant," he said, "was the following exhibition of Hood's wit":

...

His wit? a kind smile just to hearten us,
Rich foam-wreaths on the waves of lavish life,
That flasht o'er precious pearls and golden sands.
But there was that beneath surpassing show!
The starry soul, that shines when all is dark!—
Endurance that can suffer and grow strong,

Walk through the world with bleeding feet and smile! And he comments on the "rich exordium" of the same poem:

'Tis the old story!-ever the blind world

Knows not its Angels of Deliverance

Till they stand glorified 'twixt earth and heaven.

Then turning to the lyrics and quoting:

Ah! 'tis like a tale of olden

Time long, long ago;

When the world was in its golden

Prime, and love was lord below!
Every vein of Earth was dancing
With the Spring's new wine!
'Twas the pleasant time of flowers
When I met you, love of mine!
Ah! some spirit sure was straying
Out of heaven that day,

When I met you, Sweet! a-Maying,
In that merry, merry May.

Little heart! it shyly open'd
Its red leaves' love-lore
Like a rose that must be ripen'd
To the dainty, dainty core;
But its beauties daily brighten,
And it blooms so dear;
Tho' a many Winters whiten,

I go Maying all the year.

"I am thought," he says, "to be more addicted to the ancients than to the moderns. . . but at the present time I am trying to recollect any Ode, Latin or Greek, more graceful than this." In many pieces, he continues, "the flowers are crowded and pressed together, and overhang and almost overthrow the vase containing them," and he instances the "Oriental richness" of such a poem as Wedded Love.

Of the poet in whose work he found so much to admire, and in which he discerned such splendid promise, Landor knew no more than that "his station in life was obscure, his fortune far from prosperous," and that his name was Gerald Massey. Had he known all he would indeed have marvelled. Whatever rank among poets may finally be assigned to Mr. Gerald Massey, and we may be quite sure that he will stand higher than some of those who at

present appear to have superseded him, there can be no question about three things—his genius, his singularly interesting personal history, and the gratitude due to him for his manifold services to the cause of liberty and to the cause of philanthropy. If he has not fulfilled the extraordinary promise of his youth, he has produced poems instinct with noble enthusiasm, welling from the purest sources of lyric inspiration, exquisitely pathetic, sown thick with beauties. His career affords one of the most striking examples on record of the power of genius to assert itself under conditions as unfavourable and malign as ever contributed to thwart and depress it. But even apart rom his work as a poet, and the inspiring story of his struggle with adverse fortune, he has other and higher claims to consideration and honour. He is probably the last survivor of that band of enthusiasts to whose efforts we mainly owe it that the England of the opponents of all that was most reasonable in Chartism, the England of the grievances and abominations which Chartism sought to remedy, the England of the Report on which Ashley's Collieries Bill and of the Report on which his Address on National Education were based, the England of the opponents of the Maynooth Grant, of the persecutors of Maurice, was transformed into the England of to-day. His revolutionary lyrics have done their work. The least that can be said for them is, that they are among the very best inspired by those wild times when Feargus O'Connor, Thomas Cooper, James O'Brien and Ernest Jones were in their glory. Of their effect in awakening and, making all allowance for their intemperance and extravagance, in educating

our infant democracy and those who were to mould it there can be no question. How vividly, as we listen to a strain like this, do those days come back

to us:

Fling out the red Banner! the Patriots perish,

But where their bones whiten the seed striketh root:
Their blood hath run red the great harvest to cherish :
Now gather ye, Reapers, and garner the fruit.
Victory! Victory! Tyrants are quaking!

The Titan of toil from the bloody thrall starts,
The slaves are awaking, the dawn-light is breaking,
The foot-fall of Freedom beats quick at our hearts!

If lines like the following had a message for those days which they have not for us, we can still feel their charm:

'Tis weary watching wave by wave,
And yet the tide heaves onward :
We climb, like Corals, grave by grave
That have a path-way sunward.

The world is rolling Freedom's way,
And ripening with her sorrow.
Take heart! who bear the Cross to-day

Shall wear the Crown to-morrow.

And the truth of what their author wrote of these poems many years later few would dispute:

Our visions have not come to naught

Who saw by lightning in the night:
The deeds we dreamed are being wrought

By those who work in clearer light.

So heartily and fully did Mr. Massey throw himself into the life of his time that all that is most memorable in our national history during the most stirring years of the latter half of the last century is

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