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appreciation of it which Wordsworth | Woodvil," in Simon's reply to the queshas taught us. The nearest approach tion: "What sports do you use in the tragedy of "John forest ?"

thereto is in his

66

"Not many; some few, as thus:

To see the sun to bed, and to arise,

Like some hot amorist with glowing eyes,
Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him,
With all his fires and travelling glories round him.
Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest,
Like beauty nestling in a young man's breast,
And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep
Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep.
Sometimes outstretcht, in very idleness,
Naught doing, saying little, thinking less,
To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,

Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare,
When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn
Filched from the careless Amalthea's horn;
And how the woods berries and worms provide
Without their pains, when earth has naught beside
To answer their small wants.

To view the graceful deer come tripping by,

Then stop and gaze, then turn, they know not why,
Like bashful younkers in society.

To mark the structure of a plant or tree,
And all fair things of earth, how fair they be."

But this, with its quaint Elizabeth- that I can ever again. Glorious creaan tone, is altogether sophisticated. It tures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, etc. I seems absurd to a generation taught by never shall forget ye, how ye lay about Wordsworth to look nature full in the that night, like an intrenchment; gone face. That most beautiful essay of Elia to bed, as it seemed, for the night, but on Blakesmore in H-shire," takes us promising that ye were to be seen in to no wilder scenes than the "costly the morning. Coleridge had got a fruit-garden, with its sun-baked south- blazing fire in his study, which is a ern wall; the ampler pleasure-garden, large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an rising backward from the house in old-fashioned organ, never played upon, triple terraces. . . the firry wilderness, big enough for a church, shelves of the haunt of the squirrel, and the day- scattered folios, an Eolian harp, and long murmuring wood pigeon, with that an old sofa, half bed, etc. And all antique figure in the centre, god or looking out upon the last fading view goddess I wist not." Only when the of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted Londoner for once beheld nature in her brethren: what a night!" In this charnobler forms, visiting Coleridge in Cum-acteristic haunt of the poet who sang of berland, his imagination was stimulated.

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"Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair, And Dungeon Ghyll so foully rent," to Manning, "the degradation I felt at Lamb and his sister stayed three weeks; first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among mountains, and and he confesses that he came to believe bathe in rivers without being controll- that "there is such a thing as that ed by any one, to come home and work, which tourists call romantic, which I I felt very little." Coleridge was living very much suspected before." upon a small hill by the side of Kes- climbed Skiddaw: he waded up the wick, in a comfortable house, quite en-tion from Skiddaw's summit is as fine rugged bed of Lodore. veloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great floundering bears and monin its way as Wordsworth's sonnet on the hill, sters they seemed, all couchant and asleep." "Such an impression," Lamb proceeds, "I never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose

His exclama

"Which shrouds

His double front among Atlantic clouds!" "Oh! its fine black head, and the bleak air

atop of it, with a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure, in my life."

If Charles Lamb had been among mountains in his childhood, instead of in the Temple of Christ's Hospital, he might perhaps have shown that there was something in Talfourd's opinion about the many points of resemblance between him and Professor Wilson. But the one was a student born, the other a born athlete-whence a definite dissimilitude.

Lamb was drawn to the drama by his Elizabethan studies, and by the fact that in his youth it was still a strong element in London life.. He had no dramatic faculty. He could paint a character, but not call it into action. Besides "John Woodvil," he wrote a farce, entitled "Mr. II-." It is a pleas

ant whim, but bodiless; a mere phantom of a farce; but the eager anticipations which preceded it, and the delightful way in which its utter failure was taken, cause a pleasant episode in Lamb's life. So completely was the author, sitting in the front of the pit, carried away by the displeasure of the audience, that he hissed as loudly as anybody. And he was not qualified to be a story-teller; in these days, when there is a cataclysm of three-volume novels, he would have been puzzled what to do. "Rosamond Gray" is, as Mr. Procter says, very daintily told; a virgin nymph, born of a lily [surely this is a sweet style of criticism], could not have unfolded her thoughts more delicately." Lamb was only twentythree when he wrote it, and there is something in it akin to the "Endymion" of Keats. It might, indeed, be described in a phrase from that poem as

"A bunch of blooming plums Ready to melt between an infant's gums."

But as essayist and humorist-sometimes even as poet-Lamb produced what rather resembled "Brown filberts fine,

Which sound teeth crack, sound palates taste with wine."

Among his poems, the "Farewell to Tobacco," with its strong antitheses and sudden transitions"Roses, violets, but toys

As converser and stimulator of witty, | stone" in the next world, while his scholarly converse, Lamb was unap- real sympathy with all humanity is adproachable. The anecdotes recorded mirably conveyed in the following: "I of him show that his coruscations of hate So-and-so," he once said. "Why, wit were not mere fireworks, let off ab- you have never seen him," was the surruptly, but falling stars, generated by prised reply. "No," said Lamb, "certhe atmosphere of the night. Hence tainly not; I could not hate any man I many of the best of his jokes read rug- had once seen." gedly, torn away from the circumstances which produced them. But when he remarks, in reference to some eccentric person, that "he seems to have tired out his guardian angel," you "agnize" the spirit of Elia. Mr. Procter has spoilt the story of the naïve lady who said of somebody, "I know him, bless him! "I don't," said Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind!"— Lamb, "but him, at a venture." is one of the most characteristic. In a His remark about L. E. L.-that she similar vein does he rail at musical ought to be locked up and kept on bread and water till she gave up men: writing poetry-might be applied to a good many female novelists of this later time. And his "imperfect sympathy" with Scotchmen is observable in his condemning them to "fire without brim

For the smaller sort of boys,
Or for greener damsels meant;
Thou art the only manly scent.
Stinking'st of the stinking kind,

"Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,

Just as the whim bites; for my part,
I do not care a farthing candle
For either of them, or for Handel.”

But the ballad of "Youth and Age,"

|

and especially the "Old Familiar which shows that they are the poet's in-
Faces," while curiously antique in their voluntary utterances:
style, have a depth of natural pathos

"I have had playmates, I have had companions
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

"I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her-
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces."

In this there is the true "lyrical cry."
Charles Lamb died in 1834, at the
age of 59-"the same age as Crom-
well," says Mr. Procter, "between
whom and himself there was, of course,
no other similitude.". The remark is
obvious. But Mr. Procter sometimes
says things rather more important, and
here is one: "It should not be forgot-
ten that Lamb possessed one great ad-
vantage. He lived and died among his
equals. This was what enabled him to
exercise his natural strength as neither
a parasite nor a patron can." It should
also not be forgotten that Lamb dwelt
among his equals from choice. Al-
though a thoroughly modest man, he
was not unconscious of his own genius,

and he was keen-sighted enough to see that there was nothing to be gained (though much to be lost) by aspiring to society above his own. He deliberately preferred an old folio to a fine gentleman; the parlor of the Salutation tavern with Coleridge to any elegant trivial drawing room; the genial to the genteel. He was preeminently human, and detested all the fopperies and elegancies which dehumanize a man. The great burthen of his life we have seen; the great felicity of his life was that, among his equals, he found friends so like himself, yet so different, true lovers of literature, men who thought for themselves, intellects that aided the development of his own.

Saturday Review.

ARABIC POETRY IN SPAIN AND SICILY.*

be ruled any longer by the arbitrary governors sent to them from distant Arabia. At the same time, a change of dynasty took place in the heart of the Empire-a change sealed by one of the most dastardly massacres known even in Eastern history. Abu'l Abbas, the first of the new Abbasside rulers, not satisfied with having completely super

PERHAPS the most interesting period of Arabic history and literature, and the one which has most directly influenced European culture, belongs to the time of the Moorish possession of Spain. It is well known how the almost demoniacal power which, in scarcely two genera-seded the Omayyads, resolved to stamp tions after Mohammed, had carried bis them out even to their last trace. Abflag from the Chinese mountains to the dallah, the Governor of Damascus, reAtlantic began to collapse shortly after ceived the order to invite all the scions these gigantic conquests were achieved. of the unhappy house of Omayyas to a The Empire of the Chalifs, more colossal feast of reconciliation and good-will. than either the Roman Empire before or At that feast, the recital of an approthe Mongolian after it, broke down al-priate poem having given the signal, most simultaneously at its two extreme they were all, about ninety in number, ends. While in the far-away East, in the hollows of Paropamisus, the primeval banner of Iran was lifted up anew by the Tahirites, the Sheikhs of " Andalus," as all Spain was called, refused to

*Poesie und Kunst der Araber in Spanien und Sicilien. Von A. F. von Schack, Berlin: Hertz,

suddenly fallen upon and murdered. Carpets were drawn over the dying victims, and louder waxed the revel while the hall swam in their blood. Nor did this hecatomb satisfy the enthusiastics of the new era. The royal tombs were opened, and their ashes were given to the winds.

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But the star of the Omayyads that | Yet while all branches of literature seem had gone down in the East shone forth to have been cultivated with nearly anew in the West. Abdarrahman, a grandson of Hisham, had escaped. Of his many and strange adventures during his flight the Arab legend sings and says. At last, in the depths of the African desert, the Andalusian Sheikhs discovered him, and offered him the crown of Spain. In August, 755, he crossed the Straits, and was received in triumph by his new lieges. What internal and external foes there were, he swiftly subdued, and when Roland had broken his good sword Durenda at Ronceval, and the forlorn wails of his horn had died away, the last danger that threatened the independence of the realm seemed passed for ever. Soon the new Empire began to outshine all contemporary Europe in power and glory. Cordova, the city chosen as the capital by Abdarrahman, became the crown of Europe. The fame of its greatness and splendor, its hundreds of thousands of marble houses, its three thousand mosques, its twenty-eight suburbs, all thronged with the richest and happiest population under the sun, spread to the end of the world-even to the convent of Gandersheim in Saxony, to Hroswitha the poetess. In the midst of her lay of the martyrdom of St. Pelagius, she bursts forth into a rhapsody about this heathen city, "the brightest splendor of the world."

equal assiduity and genius, the centre and flower of all was poetry. Abdarrahman I. himself cultivated the art of song. His stanzas to the palm-treewhich, it is said, he was first to introduce into Europe, "the land of his exile"-are full of melody and feeling. In the course of centuries the guild of Moorish singers grew to such an extent that the mere names of the most renowned among them would fill volumes. It had in fact come to this, that from the highest to the lowest in the land everybody more or less spoke the language of poetry. Al-Kazwini mentions some place where every peasant possessed the talent of improvisation, and a work still in existence treats specially of the poetically gifted kings and nobles of Andalusia. The women in the harems, the officials at their desks, the chroniclers in the bewildering midst of their dates and names, the merchants in their business correspondence-all introduced some poetical scrap or other in their spoken or written speech, if they did not indeed burst out into an independent stanza or two. Poetry was the all-pervading element, without which there seemed to be neither light nor life for these Moors. Nor was it to be feared that the literature of Spain should become one-sided and mannered, or its language corrupted by provincialisms, as would have been the case had there been no living contact with the lands of the East, where the well of Arabic flowed pure and undefiled. Not more surely do the literary productions of our day fly from one corner of civilization to the other than did those works of learning or poetry which had seen the light at the foot of the Sierra Morena or in the valleys of the Indian Caucasus reach the extreme ends of the Islamic dominions, carried thither by pious pilgrims or well-equipcaravans.

If the Abbassides made Bagdad" the Athens of the East," the Omayyads made Cordova the centre of all the science and art of the West. Apart from the capital, schools and academies arose through the length and the breadth of the Peninsula, and students from all parts of the world came to sit at the feet of the great masters of philosophy, mathematics, history, medicine, and the rest, who had taken up their abode in that blissful land. The literature that sprang up from such an almost unpre-ped cedented movement of mind was enor- We have on a former occasion endeaNo less than four hundred thou- vored to indicate the peculiar character sand books, mostly the works of Spanish and tone of the poetry before Mohamauthors, are recorded to have formed med, as principally represented in the the library of Haken, one of the later Kasida, the true offspring of the desert. Omayyads, when it was partly destroyed Wild, vague, monotonous, but emphatiby the Berbers. Six months were re- cally tender and passionate, it almost quired to dispose of those literary treas invariably commences with a plaint for ures that had not perished in the assault. the lost love whose tent had been bro

mous.

ken up and carried away during the night, then lovingly dwells upon the revenge to be taken by the aid of the swiftest of camels, most valiant of ́swords, and furthest-reaching of lances, and concludes with maxims of wisdom, expressive of the fleeting nature of life which comes and goes like a dwelling in the desert, while the skies are eternal and the stars will rise and set for ever and ever. Well adapted as were these and similar strains for Bedouins, they began to assume a strange incongruous ness when these same roving shepherds and robbers had become the kings of the world, dwelling in marble palaces which lay by cool streams, in palm and orange groves. When, therefore, the poets, living in the midst of the most refined and luxurious society of the Europe of the day, regardless of altered circumstances, kept on singing in the orthodox strains of the primitive Muallakat or Hamasa, they were swiftly reminded of the reality of things. The "oft-wept ruins of Chaula's dwelling place in the yellow sands," Ibn Bessan, a writer of the period, declares to have become rather oppressive. Nor does he believe that much effect will be given to the too frequent summons, "Here let us halt, O friends, that we may weep." And as regards the question, "Is this the trace of Umm Aufa ?" nobody really could imagine, he says, that the busy winds would have kept the traces of that young lady intact for these many centuries. On the other hand, he suggests that there may be some poetical fields yet unexplored by the ancients, many a graceful thought and pleasing image that belongs to present springs and summers, preferable perhaps even to those strains which seemed universally accepted chiefly because their authors were long dead and gone. And, And here we are led to a highly intrislowly but surely, a change did come cate question to which attention has over Andalusian poetry. Piously em- repeatedly been drawn of late-namely, bodying many of the old traditions of the influence of the East and its literaBedouin thoughts and similes, there was ture, oral or otherwise, upon mediaval yet a newness of sentiment, a sweet European literature. Arthur and his melodiousness, and an almost modern whole Round Table have been traced to variety pervading it which had been the Persian legends of the Court of Kai ntterly unknown to the olden days. Khosru or Nushirwan; the prototype The former passionate outbursts in of the Graal is found in the cup of praise of nature, of love, of hatred, of Djemjid; and whether or not these and arms, of animals, become chastened and similar strikingly parallel sagas have softened. In the religious strains of arisen independently of each other,

this period there is, together with a fervor which at times verges on fanaticism, also perceptible that vague undefinable yearning after the Infinite which is almost a trait of our own day. The elegies and the drinking-songs of those times, their love-strains and their epigrams, are all more or less characteristic of the change. They sing, as was never sung in Arabic before, of nightly boatings by torchlight, of the moon's rays trembling on the waves, of sweet meetings in the depths of rose-gardens, of the Pleiades, of the young cup-bearer, of the King's prowess and generosity, of Spain's glorious cities and rivers, mosques and villas, statuettes and vases, and of the far-away burning desert whence their fathers came. The most successful of these poetical compositions are generally the brief songs which embody the inspiration of the moment. The longer poems lack, to our Western minds, that unity of plan and execution to which classical models have accustomed us. It is surprising how the Arabs-to whom and to the Jews we owe the preservation of the great bulk of antique philosophy and scienceshould not have profited aught from Greek and Roman poets, with whose works they must surely have come in contact. Their ignorance of them is indeed surprising. Ibu Chaldun, that most learned and accomplished littérateur, mentions, in support of his assertion that the Persians and Greeks too had great poets, the fact of Aristotle prais ing Homer, whom he himself only knew from hearsay. Ibn Roshd, the great philosopher's, notion of Greek literature may be gathered from the fact that he defines Tragedy as "the art of approving," and Comedy as "the art of blaming."

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