But it is time to conclude. The future of American poetry is as dark as that of our own, and criticism is not concerned with prophecy. The immediate prospect is, it must be owned, not encouraging on either side of the Atlantic. In the sphere of intellectual activity, nothing is seriously energetic but Science, or vitally influential but the scientific spirit; and, what that spirit has engendered-the spirit of investigation, analysis and criticism—is ubiquitous. Under this deadly solvent of the spiritual and imaginative faculties of man, their two creations, poetry and theology, seem to be melting away, the one resolving itself into an aesthetic appeal to the senses, the other into a code of ethics. Materialism and wealth-accumulating labour and luxury, with all that accompanies and all that follows in their train, have and must inevitably have the effects which Wordsworth, Emerson and Ruskin attributed to them. Literature generally will degenerate, as it has degenerated, into little more than a means of affording recreation and amusement to those whose serious interests and occupations are elsewhere; and poetry will cease to appeal, or will share, as it now shares, in this degradation. But Man's finer and nobler energies can only be depressed, they can never be extinguished or even lose their vitality. Unerring and inevitable as the law of gravitation in the physical, is the law of reaction in the spiritual, world. Materialism-and let us understand the word in its most comprehensive sense-has still a long course to run, of that we may be quite sure. But all that poetry represents and vindicates can never fail at last to assert itself. Very different, however,

from the poetry of the past must be the poetry of the future. It will not imp its wing from the mythology of Olympus and Hippocrene, or seek inspiration from

Siloa's brook that flowed

Fast by the Oracle of God.

Of that there can be no doubt. It must have other inspiration, other themes. It is more likely perhaps to find the first in the immense, emancipated, undeveloped life, with its infinite potentialities and possibilities, which is unfolding itself in the New World, than in the more contracted, tradition-trammelled life of the Old. Its themes, we may be sure, will be the themes in the treatment of which Whitman fumbled and stammered, its religion and ethics the religion and ethics of which Emerson was the prophet. In a word, it is likely to be a poetry the features of which have been more clearly, if still dimly, adumbrated in the genius typical of America, than in the genius typical of any of the European nations. A reaction against the restless, hollow, degraded life at present characteristic of the great centres of business and fashion is inevitable, and with that reaction poetry may awake,-the poetry of a fuller day,—and the famous prophecy find its realization, not politically only, but in another and nobler sense as well:

Westward the course of Empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past,

A fifth shall close the drama with the day;

Time's noblest offspring is the last.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF LORD

TH

BYRON.1

HE completion of what may be regarded as a final edition of Byron's writings both in poetry and prose is surely a notable event in literary history. Nothing indeed is likely to modify very materially either the estimate which has been formed of his character since the appearance of Moore's work, or the verdict which his countrymen have long since passed on him as a poet. But we are now in a position to understand much in the man himself, and more in his work as an artist, which it was not possible to understand fully and clearly before; we are enabled to review both, if not in any absolutely new light, at least in the light of testimony and illustration so ample, nay, so exhaustive, that probably nothing of any importance will ever be added to it. These thirteen volumes form, in truth, a contribution to biography and criticism to which it would be difficult to find a parallel in

1. The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals. Edited by Rowland E. Prothero. Six vols. London: Murray, 1898

1901.

2. The Works of Lord Byron: the Poetical Works. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Seven vols. London: Murray, 18981904.

modern times. There is no corner, no recess, in Byron's crowded life, from boyhood to manhood, from manhood to the end, into which we are not admitted; we know him as we know Pepys and as we know Johnson.

To say nothing of a correspondence in which his experiences and his impressions, his idiosyncrasies and his temper, are reflected as in a mirror, records intended for no eyes but his own reveal to us his most secret thoughts. He is exhibited in all his moods and in all his extremes. We can watch every phase which, in its rapid and capricious alternations of darkness and light, his extraordinarily complex and mobile character assumed. The infirmities, the follies, the vices which revolted Wordsworth and Browning and degraded him at times to the level of fribbles like Nash and Brummell, and of mere libertines like Queensberry and Hertford; the sudden transitions by which, in the resilience of his nobler instincts and sympathies, he became glorified into the actual embodiment of what at such moments he expressed in poetry; the virtues on which those who admired and those who loved him delighted to dwell, and which could transform him momentarily into the most heroic, the most generous, the most attaching of men; the strange anomalies for which the perpetual conflict between his higher and baser nature, and between his reason and his passions, was responsible; his mingled charlatanry and sincerity, refinement and grossness, levity and enthusiasm; the magnanimity and dignity which could occasionally be discerned in him; the almost incredible paltriness and meanness of

which at times he was capable; his sanity, his good sense, his keen insight into men and life, his admirable literary judgements, so singularly and glaringly contrasted with the childishness, the obliquity, the extravagance which he displayed when under the influence of prejudice or passion-all this makes his autobiography, in other words, his correspondence, memoranda, and journals, a psychological study of the profoundest interest.

Nor is this all. His poetry is so essentially the expression of his character, and was so directly inspired by his personal experiences, that these records form the best of all commentaries on it. From a still more important point of view, they, or at least the greater portion of them, are equally remarkable. Byron's letters will probably live as long as his poems. Voluminous as they are, they never weary us. Social sketches dashed off with inimitable happiness; anecdote and incident related as only a consummate raconteur can relate them; piquant comments on the latest scandal or the latest book; the gossip and tittle-tattle of the green-room and the boudoir, of the clubs and the salons, so transformed by the humour and wit of their cynical retailer that they almost rival the dialogue of Congreve and Sheridan; shrewd and penetrating observations on life, on human nature, on politics, on literature, dropped so carelessly that it is only on reflection that we see their wisdom, keep us perpetually amused and entertained.

Of the conscientiousness and skill with which Mr. Prothero has performed a most difficult task it is impossible to speak too highly. In the first place,