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fully to apprehend the tendency of their work, or to estimate its value. In all these younger poets is seen the impress of their immediate forerunners-you can tell by their manner and style which of the great generation before them they most loved. But of course, as being genuine poets, they have each something substantially their own, unborrowed from any master. Among the earliest of this new generation stands Keble, for though he published 'The Christian Year' in 1827, he clearly belongs to the period that followed 1830. His youth was steeped in the poetry of Scott and of Wordsworth, and the impress of both of these is visible in his manner, though his substance and sentiment are quite his own. It is touching to read the essay with which the late Dean Stanley introduces the selections from Keble, whose poetry he loved so well. The view which the Dean enforces is characteristic. Keble was not merely a sacred, he says, but, in the best sense of the word, a secular poet. This he tries to show by pointing to the many allusions to classical poets which 'The Christian Year' contains-to the fine and loving eye for the local colouring of English landscape which it shows-to the wonderful exactness with which Keble describes features in the scenery of Palestine, which he had never visited, but which the Dean had noted and verified on the spot. This last was a peculiarity of 'The Christian Year,' on which Dean Stanley often used to dwell. The Biblical Scenery,' he says, 'is treated graphically as real scenery, the Biblical history and poetry as real history and poetry.' Dean Stanley further enlarges on the unecclesiastical spirit of The Christian Year '-its large tolerance, and width of human sympathy-its tenderness even towards the doubting and the erring; and he contrasts this, Keble's early feeling, with the attitude which in later life he was forced to assume as a partisan and a controversialist.

All this is true, yet there is more behind. Many will feel that the qualities in The Christian Year' which come most home to them are unnoted in that essay. They will say that it is because it is so wholly unsecular, so aloof from the mundane world and the passions that move it-so pure, so meek, so saintly, that they have prized 'The Christian Year' above all other poetry.

It may seem strange to find Dean Stanley ranking the 'Lyra Innocentium' higher than The Christian Year,' as having 'more of the true fire of genius-more of the true rush of poetic diction.' The ' Lyra' no doubt contains some of the finest products of Keble's genius, but as a whole it turns too much on ecclesiastical usage and sentiment, ever to command the same width of interest which The Christian Year' has commanded. The earlier volume has awakened a response in many a bosom outside

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outside the Church, which would be insensible to all the subtle grace of the later. The selections from Keble's poems, which follow the essay, do not seem to be the happiest that might have been made. Why are the poems for the Second, the Fourth, and the Twenty-fourth Sundays after Trinity omitted?

It is strange to find next to Keble, in Mr. Ward's fourth volume, a poet of very different temper and fate, who was also a son of Oxford-we mean Hartley Coleridge. He too was a spiritual child of Wordsworth. As he wandered about the mountain roads of Westmoreland, poetic thoughts came to him like instincts unawares, and he wove them naturally into graceful and pathetic melodies. There is a tone of meekness about them, and gentle self-reproach, as of one who had failed in the world, yet had no bitterness against it.

'His poems are all genuine'-as Mr. Dowden, in his kindly essay, says-full of nature, sweet, fresh, breathing charity and reconciliation. In Grasmere Churchyard, close to the body of Wordsworth, rests that of Hartley Coleridge. And hard by a stream goes murmuring to the lake. As a mountain rivulet to a mountain lake, so is Hartley Coleridge's poetry to that of Wordsworth; and the stream has a melodious life and freshness of its own.'

Among the lesser lights contained in this fourth volume, 'The Ettrick Shepherd,' we think, deserved more than the few lines of notice accorded to him, and the one brief song, by no means the best specimen of his work. Some names too we miss, which would seem quite as worthy of a place as several to whom it has been granted. Why has no room been found for Moultrie, one of the sweetest singers of domestic life? Could not some of the space accorded to Peacock and Beddoes have been spared for him?

The last names which close this long roll of England's poets will awaken in many a pathetic interest. As the eye falls on the successive names of Mrs. Barrett Browning, Emily Bronté, Arthur Clough, Charles Kingsley, how much do these recal of what is most pure and elevated, as well as much which is sad, in our time! In these our latest poets, we cannot but be struck with their increased inwardness, their more trembling sensibility, their profounder, more burdened feeling of the mystery of existence. These things, though in different ways, are discernible in each one of them. The estimate given by Mr. W. T. Arnold of Mrs. Barrett Browning is far from satisfying. The faults which we all know are minutely registered-imperfect rhymes, laxity of metre, redundancy of language. Her innocent and heartfelt enthusiasms,' we are told, fall a little dully on the ear of a perverse and critical generation.' So much the worse for the generation! Are poets to bring down their flight to the level of its cynicism? On the whole we turn with some impatience

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impatience from the apologetic tone in which the greatest poetess of England is here spoken of. Not to mention Aurora Leigh,' with its vast sweep of power, though glaring blemishes, her sonnets alone would place her high among the poets of any age. The sonnet form suited her, for it forced her to condense her natural exuberance. Into these sonnets are crowded passion and pathos enough to furnish forth a dozen poets. Let critics say what they will, there is in Mrs. Barrett Browning's poetry a range and power of thought, a rapture of affection, and a penetrating music, which will endear her for all time to the hearts of those who are happy enough not to be critics.

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Of Arthur Clough, as a poet, much might be said, were this the time to say it. Sincerity, absolute sincerity and noble purpose, is in every word he wrote. There is in it an impassioned search, a too importunate demand, for reality—a reality deeper than he could reach, deeper than intellectual plummet has ever sounded.' The straining after this gives, as the editor well says, to his poetry an air of strenuous effort, which is almost greater than verse can bear.'

The song he sang was in low perplexed minors,' and he broke off in the middle of it. But from his spirit, baffled in its search for truth, there escaped sighs which could come only from one of the noblest, deepest-hearted of men.

'So constant as my heart would be,

So fickle as it must,

"Twere well for others as for me
'Twere dry as summer dust.
Excitements come, and act and speech
Flow freely forth; but no,

Nor they, nor aught beside can reach
The buried world below.'

Or again this characteristic cry :

'Is it enough to walk as best we may,

To walk, and sighing, dream of that blest day
When ill we cannot quell shall be no more?'

With these lines we must close this brief retrospect.

The roll of English poetry, reaching through 500 years, contains the essence of the national life-it registers the pulsations of the mighty heart of England during all those centuries. It mirrors whatever is best and brightest, if also what is most mournful and pathetic, in the experience of our countrymen. But the roll, we trust, is not yet filled up. Unless the heart of our people has lost its ancient power, its future throbbings will yet be heard in a new and invigorated poetry, which shall be worthy of the language that Chaucer formed and Shakspeare spoke.

ART.

ART. IV.-1. The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Seigneur of Bousbecque, Knight, Imperial Ambassador. By Charles Thornton Forster, M.A., late Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, Vicar of Hinxton, and F. H. Blackburne Daniell, M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Barrister-at-Law. In two volumes. London, 1881. 2. Busbequius A. G. Legationis Turcice Epistolæ quatuor. Plantin. Paris, 1595.

N these days, when the disintegration of the vast Turkish

Crescent is upon

the wane, it is curiously interesting to go back to the time when there was a very different order of things-to the time when that Crescent was high in the heavens, when the princes of the house of Othman were among the mightiest of the kings of the earth, and when the bare name of the Turk was a terror to Western Europe. From this point of view we regard the 'Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq'-relating a mission to the Porte exactly three centuries before the Crimean war-as a book that deserves to be better known than is apparently the case. As we read it we are back amidst the stormy times of the sixteenth century. Before us rise-looming giant-like through the mists of more than three hundred years

the forms of Charles V., of Ferdinand of Austria, of the great Solyman-men who helped in a large measure to rough-hew the destinies of mankind in that eventful age. The hills around Vienna are once more white with the tents of a Moslem soldiery. The fleets of Barbarossa Khaireddin again sweep the seas. Foremost among the nations stand out, in bold outline, the haughty Osmanlis-fierce sons of the faith of Islam, carrying themselves joyfully in the day of battle; children of a race that had not yet belied its hardy birth on the steppes of the Asian highlands, and was as yet unharmed by the vices of empire and the evils of a corrupt and weak government.

Ogier de Busbecq, whose name is perhaps more familiar to students of history in its Latinized form of Augerius Busbequius, was a native of Flanders, who was sent in the year 1554 on an embassy to the Porte by Ferdinand I. of Austria. An account of his embassy and of his experiences in Turkey is preserved in four Latin Epistles, which at one time had a very considerable European reputation, edition after edition being put forth within the first hundred years after their appearance. They were also translated into German, French, English, Spanish, and other modern languages. Of the two earlier English versions with which we are acquainted, one was published in

London

London in 1694, and another at Glasgow in the next century; but both have long been lost sight of, and the present translators need no apology for once more introducing to English readers these remarkable letters which, besides taking us into Turkey at a time when but little was known about that country to the rest of Europe, possess literary merits of an undoubtedly high order. In addition to the Turkish Letters,' as they are called, the present edition contains a number of letters written by De Busbecq from France, at different times between the years 1574 and 1590, to the Emperors Maximilian II. and Rudolph II., by both of whom, it would seem, he was employed in a confidential diplomatic capacity. Written in the days of the Guises, of Catherine de' Medici, and of the Holy League, these letters from France, which the present translators have brought, for the first time we believe, within the reach of the English reader, are not without a certain value of their own. But it is with his Turkish Letters' that De Busbecq's name is chiefly associated, and it is with them and his embassy to Turkey that we are concerned in the present article.

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De Busbecq's embassy to Constantinople was, we should say, rather interesting in a literary and historical sense, because of the really charming and valuable record he has left of it, than important on account of any political results it achieved. In the excellent biographical sketch of De Busbecq, which is given by the present translators of his letters, we notice, indeed, that great significance is attached to both the political objects and the political issues of his mission-far greater, we consider, than, in the cause of historical accuracy, is justified by the actual circumstances. The object of the mission, say the biographers, was to stay by the arts of diplomacy the advance of the Asiatic conqueror, and to neutralize in the Cabinet the defeats of Essek and Mohacz. In this policy, they assert, De Busbecq was to a great extent successful, because he gained time, and in such a case time is everything. And they continue::

There are victories of which the world hears much-great battles, conquered provinces, armies sent beneath the yoke-but there is also the quiet work of the diplomatist, of which the world hears little. In the eyes of those who measure such work aright, not even the hero of Lepanto or the liberator of Vienna will hold a higher place among the champions of Christendom than Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq.'

The zeal of the biographers has, we think, carried them a little too far, and, indeed, they seem to us to have somewhat misread the chapter of history with which De Busbecq's mission to Turkey was connected. That mission was no doubt one of

the

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