His net of barren shadow, Like those wrestlers' nets of old, Hold the winter dead and cold, Hoary winter, white and cold, While all is green in the meadow. And when you've rested, brother mine, I shall smell the flowering thyme, On its wall the wall-flower. In the tower there used to be A solitary tree. Take me there, for the dear sake Of those old days wherein I loved to lie And pull the melilote, And look across the valley to the sky, To pick their Easter posies, And hear the joy that filled the warm wide hour Bubble from the thrush's throat, As into a shining mere Rills some rillet trebling clear, And speaks the silent silver of the lake. A ceaseless music of her married time, That tremble on the wall And trim its age with airy fantasies That flicker in the sun, and hardly seem As if to be beheld were all, And only to our eyes They rise and fall, And fall and rise, Sink down like silence, or a sudden stream As wind-blown on the wind as streams a weddingchime. But you are wheeling me while I dream, There blows The first primrose, Under the bare bank roses: There is but one, And the bank is brown, But soon the children will come down, The ringing children come singing down, And they'll spy it out, my beautiful, And when I sit here again alone, The bare brown bank will be blind and dull, But when the din is over and gone, I shall see my pale flower shining again; I shall see my pale flower shining again; I shall see my pale flower shining again; Shining across from the bank above, Ere a water-fly wimple the silent pond, I shall see it brighten and brighten to me, As at eve the leafing shadows grow, As the stars come blossoming over the sky, To gather May-day posies; And the bank will bo bare wherever they go, As dawn, the primrose girl, goes by, Blare the trumpet, and boom the gun, And my idle heart is whispering "Bring whatever the years may bring, The flowers will blossom, the birds will sing, And there'll always be primroses." Looking before me here in the sun, I see the Aprils one after one, Years of earth's primroses, Forth from the irreparable tomb, Springs to be, and springs for me Of distant dim primroses. My soul lies out like a basking hound, A hound that dreams and dozes; Along my life my length I lay, I fill to-morrow and yesterday, I am warm with the suns that have long since set, I am warm with the summers that are not yet, Softly afloat on a sunny sea, Two worlds are whispering over me, And there blows a wind of roses From the backward shore to the shore before, And like two clouds that meet and pour A single self reposes, The nevermore with the evermore As my soul lies out like the basking hound, A dreamy eye uncloses, I see a blooming world around, And I lie amid primroses- Years of sweet primroses, Springs of fresh primroses, Springs to be, and springs for me Of distant dim primroses. Oh to lie a-dream, a-dream, To feel I may dream and to know you deem My work is done for ever, And the palpitating fever That gains and loses, loses and gains, And beats the hurrying blood on the brunt of a thou sand pains Cooled at once by that blood-let Upon the parapet; And all the tedious tasked toil of the difficult long en deavour Solved and quit by no more fine Than these limbs of mine, Spanned and measured once for all Bought up at so light a cost On the soldier's bed, And three days on the ruined wall Among the thirstless dead. Oh to think my name is crost From duty's muster-roll; That I may slumber tho' the clarion call, And live the joy of an embodied soul Free as a liberated ghost. Oh to feel a life of deed Was emptied out to feed That fire of pain that burned so brief a whileThat fire from which I come, as the dead come Or as a martyr on his funeral pile And takes the total load Oh to think, thro' good or ill, Will pause to hear me when I will, As tho' my head were gray; And tho' there's little I can say, Each will look kind with honour while he hears. And to your loving ears My thoughts will halt with honourable scars, And when my dark voice stumbles with the weight Of what it doth relate (Like that blind comrade-blinded in the wars— Who bore the one-eyed brother that was lame), You'll remember 'tis the same That cried "Follow me," Upon a summer's day; And I shall understand with unshed tears This great reverence that I see, And bless the day--and Thee, Lord God of victory! And she, Perhaps oh even she May look as she looked when I knew her In those old days of childish sooth, Ere my boyhood dared to woo her. I will not seek nor sue her, For I'm neither fonder nor truer Than when she slighted my love-lorn youth, My giftless, graceless, guinealess truth, And I only live to rue her But I'll never love another, In the ruddy and silent daisies, I'll lift my eyes unto her, And I shall not be denied. And you will love her, brother dear, And perhaps next year you'll bring me here All thro' the balmy April-tide, And she will trip like spring by my side, And be all the birds to my ear. And here all three we'll sit in the sun, SLIP-SHOD IN LITERATURE. [David Masson, M.A., LL.D., born in Aberdeen. 2d December, 1822. Professor of rhetoric and English literature in the Edinburgh University, formerly professor of English language and literature in University College, London. He began his literary career at an early age as a contributor to the quarterlies and to the principal magazines, edited Macmillan's Magazine, from its commencement, for a number of years. From one of his essays contributed to the latter periodical the following extract is taken. His chief works are: The Life of John Milton, narrated in connection with the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of his time; British Novelists and their Styles; Bssays, Biographical and Critical; Drummond of Hawthornden: &c. (Macmillan & Co., publishers). Earnest devotion to his work, freshness, and geniality, distinguish Professor Masson's writings.] There is the vice of the Slip-shod or Slovenly. In popular language it may be described as the vice of bad workmanship. Its forms are various. The lowest is that of bad syntax, of lax concatenation of clauses and sentences. It would be easy to point out faults of this kind which reappear in shoals in each day's supply of printed matter-from the verbs misnominatived, and the clumsy "whiches" looking back ruefully for submerged antecedents, so common in the columns of our hasty writers, up to the unnecessarily repeated "that" after a conditional clause which some writers insert with an infatuated punctuality, and even the best insert occasionally. Should the notice of a matter so merely mechanical seem too trivial, there is, next, that form of the slip-shod which consists in stuffing out sentences with certain tags and shreds of phraseology lying vague about society, as bits of undistributed type may lie about a printing-room. "We are free to confess," "we candidly acknowledge," "will well repay perusal," we should heartily rejoice, "did space permit,' 'causes beyond our control," "if we may be allowed the expression," 'commence hostilities"--what are 99 66 66 these and a hundred other such phrases but undistributed bits of old speech, like the "electric fluid" and the "launched into eternity" of the penny-a-liners, which all of us are glad to clutch, to fill a gap, or to save the trouble of composing equivalents from the letters? To change the figure (see, I am at it myself!), what are such phrases but a kind of rhetorical putty with which cracks in the sense are stopped, and prolongations formed where the sense has broken short? Of this kind of slip-shod in writing no writers are more guilty than those who have formed their style chiefly by public speaking; and it is in them also that the kindred faults of synonyms strung together and of redundant expletives are most commonly seen. Perhaps, indeed, the choicest specimens of continuous slip-shod in the language are furnished by the writings of celeHow dilute the tincture, what brated orators. bagginess of phraseology round what slender shanks of meaning, what absence of trained muscle, how seldom the nail is hit on the head! It is not every day that a Burke presents himself, whose every sentence is charged with an exact thought proportioned to it, whether he stands on the floor and speaks, or takes his pen in hand. And then, not only in the writings of men rendered diffuse by much speaking after a low standard, but in the tide of current writing besides, who shall take account of the daily abundance of that more startling form of slip-shod which rhetoricians call Confusion of Metaphor? Lord Castlereagh's famous "I will not now enter upon the fundamental feature upon which this question hinges," is as nothing compared with much that passes daily under our eyes in the pages of popular books and periodicals-tissues of words in which shreds from nature's four quarters are jumbled together as in heraldry; in which the writer begins with a lion, but finds it in the next clause to be a waterspout; in which icebergs swim in seas of lava, comets collect taxes, pigs sing, peacocks wear silks, and teapots climb trees. Pshaw! technicalities all! the mere minutiæ of the grammarian and the critic of expression! Nothing of the kind, good reader! Words are made up of letters, sentences of words, all that is written or spoken of sentences succeeding each other or interflowing; and at no time, from Homer's till this, has anything passed as good literature which has not satisfied men as tolerably tight and close-grained in these particulars, or become classic and permanent which has not, in respect of them, stood the test of the microscope. We distinguish, indeed, came exquisite at once to the pen's point, and in studying whose intellectual gait we are reminded of the description of the Athenians in Euripides "those sons of Erectheus always moving with graceful step through a glittering violet ether, where the nine Pierian muses are said to have brought up yellow-haired Harmony as their common child." With others of our great writers it has been notably different--rejection of first thoughts and expressions, the slow choice of a fit percentage, and the concatenation of these with labour and usefully enough, between matter and expres- | yet ruled by a logic so resistless, that they sion, between thought and style; but no one has ever attended to the subject analytically without becoming aware that the distinction is not ultimate that what is called style resolves itself, after all, into manner of thinking; nay, perhaps (though to show this would take some time) into the successive particles of the matter thought. If a writer is said to be fond of epithets, it is because he has a habit of always thinking a quality very prominently along with an object; if his style is said to be figurative, it is because he thinks by means of comparisons; if his syntax abounds in inversions, it is because he thinks the cart before he thinks the horse. care. Prevalent as slip-shod is, it is not so prevalent as it was. There is more careful writing, And so, by extension, all the forms of slip-shod in proportion, now than there was thirty. in expression are, in reality, forms of slip-shod seventy, or a hundred years ago. This may in thought. If the syntax halts, it is because be seen on comparing specimens of our present the thread of the thought has snapped or literature with corresponding specimens from become entangled. If the phraseology of a the older newspapers and periodicals. The writer is diffuse; if his language does not lie precept and the example of Wordsworth and close round his real meaning, but widens out those who helped him to initiate that era of in flat expanses, with here and there a tremour our literature which dates from the French as the meaning rises to take breath; if in every | Revolution, have gradually introduced, among sentence we recognize shreds and tags of com- other things, habits of mechanical carefulness, mon social verbiage-in such a case it is because both in prose and in verse. Among poets, the mind of the writer is not doing its duty, Scott and Byron-safe in their greatness is not consecutively active, maintains no con- otherwise were the most conspicuous sinners tinued hold of its object, hardly knows its own against the Wordsworthian ordinances in this drift. In like manner, mixed or incoherent respect after they had been promulgated. If metaphor arises from incoherent conception, in- one were willing to risk being stoned for speakability to see vividly what is professedly looked ing truth, one might call these two poets the at. All forms of slip-shod, in short, are to be last of the great slip-shods. The great slipreferred to deficiency of precision in the con- shods, be it observed; and, if there were the duct of thought. Of every writer it ought to prospect that, by keeping silence about slipbe required at least that he pass every jot and shod, we should see any other such massive tittle of what he sets down through his mind, figure heaving in among us in his slippers, who to receive the guarantee of having been really is there that would object to his company on there, and that he arrange and connect his account of them, or that would not gladly assist thoughts in a workmanlike manner. Any- to fell a score of the delicates with polished bootthing short of this is-allowance being made tips in order to make room for him? At the least, for circumstances which may prevent a con- it may be said that there are many passages scientious man from always doing his best-an in the poems of Scott and Byron which fall far insult to the public. Accordingly, in all good short of the standard of carefulness already literature, not excepting the subtlest and most fixed when they wrote. Subsequent writers, exuberant poetry, one perceives a strict logic with nothing of their genius, have been much linking thought with thought. The velocity more careful. There is, however, one form of with which the mind can perform this service the slip-shod in verse which, probably because of giving adequate arrangement to its thoughts, it has not been recognized as slip-shod, still differs much in different cases. With some holds ground among us. It consists in that writers it is done almost unconsciously-as if particular relic of the "poetic diction" of the by the operation of a logical instinct so power- last century which allows merely mechanical ful that whatever teems up in their minds is inversions of syntax for the sake of metre and marshalled and made exact as it comes, and rhyme. For example, in a poem recently pubthere is perfection in the swiftest expression. lished, understood to be the work of a celebrated So it was with the all-fluent Shakspeare, whose writer, and altogether as finished a specimen of inventions, boundless and multitudinous, were metrical rhetoric and ringing epigram as has appeared for many a day, there occur such pas- | to it, and furnished an almost continuous exsages as these:— "Harley's gilt coach the equal pair attends." "What earlier school this grand comedian rear'd? Illumes one end for which strives all their will; "That talk which art as eloquence admits Must be the talk of thinkers and of wits." "Let Bright responsible for England be, That such instances of syntax inverted to the mechanical order of the verse should occur in such a quarter proves that they are still considered legitimate. But I believe-and this notwithstanding that ample precedent may be shown, not only from poets of the last century, but from all preceding poets-that they are not legitimate. Verse does not cancel any of the conditions of good prose, but only superadds new and more exquisite conditions; and that is the best verse where the words follow each other punctually in the most exact prose order, and yet the exquisite difference by which verse does distinguish itself from prose is fully felt. As, within prose itself, there are natural inversions according as the thought moves on from the calm and straightforward to the complex and impassioned-as what would be in one mood "Diana of the Ephesians is great," becomes in another, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"-so, it may be, there is a farther amount of inversion proper within verse as such. Any such amount of inversion, however, must be able to plead itself naturalthat is, belonging inevitably to what is new in the movement of the thought under the law of verse; which plea would not extend to cases like those specified, where versifiers, that they may keep their metre or hit a rhyme, tug words arbitrarily out of their prose connection. If it should be asked how, under so hard a restriction, a poet could write verse at all, the answer is, "That is his difficulty." But that this canon of taste in verse is not so oppressive as it looks, and that it will more and more come to be recognized and obeyed, seems augured in the fact that the greatest British poet of our time has himself intuitively attended 2D SERIES, VOL. II. ample of it in his poetry. Repeat any even of Tennyson's lyrics, where, from the nature of the case, obedience to the canon would seem most difficult-his "Tears, idle tears," or "The splendour falls,"-and see if, under all that peculiarity which makes the effect of these pieces, if of any in our language, something more than the effect of prose, every word does not fall into its place, like fitted jasper, exactly in the prose order. So! and what do you say to Mr. Tennyson's last volume, with its repetition of the phrase "The Table Round?" Why, I say that, when difficulty mounts to impossibility, then even the gods relent, even Rhadamanthus yields. Here it is as if the British nation had passed a special enactment to this effect:-"Whereas Mr. Tennyson has written a set of poems on the Round Table of Arthur and his Knights, and whereas he has represented to us that the phrase "The Round Table,' specifying the central object about which these poems revolve, is a phrase which no force of art can work pleasingly into iambic verse, we, the British nation, considering the peculiarity of the case, and the public benefits likely to accrue from a steady contemplation of the said object, do enact and decree that we will in this instance depart from our usual practice of thinking the species first and then the genus, and will, in accordance with the practice of other times and nations, say The Table Round' instead of The Round Table' as heretofore." But this is altogether a special enactment. THE GOLDEN WEDDING. BY DAVID GRAY. O love, whose patient pilgrim feet Thine altar, as of old; And what was green with summer then, Is mellowed now to gold. Not now, as then, the future's face |