perfect vision seems a pitiless and inscrutable Destiny. Why this divinely gifted being, whose soul seemed all goodness, and whose highest song would have been an inestimable gain to humanity, should have been struck down again and again by blows so cruel, is a question which pricks the very core of that tormenting conscience which is in us all. Ill-luck dogged his footsteps; Sickness encamped wherever he found a home. His very goodness and gentleness seemed at times his bane. At an age when other men are revelling in mere existence he was being taught that mere existence is torture. We have read of Christian martyrs, of all the fires through which they passed; but surely no one of them ever fought with such tormenting flames as did this patient poet, whose hourly cry was of the kindness and goodness of God. From first to From first to last, no word of anger, no utterance of fierce arraignment, passed his lips.

"The best of mer

That e'er wore earth about him was a suffererThe first true Gentleman that ever lived."

And like that "best of men," Sydney

Dobell troubled himself to make no complaint, but took the cup of sorrow and drained it to the bitter dregs. Such a record of such a life stops the cry on the very lips of blasphemy, and makes us ask ourselves if that life did not possess, direct from God, some benediction, some comfort, unknown to us. So it must have been. "Looking up," as a writer on the subject has beautifully put it, he saw the heavens opened. These pathetic glimpses seemed comfort enough.

Doubtless to some readers of this magazine the very name of Sydney Dobell is unfamiliar. To all students of modern poetry it is of course more or less known, as that of one of the chief leaders of the school of verse known by its enemies as "the Spasmodic." With Philip James Bailey and Alexander Smith, Dobell reigned for a lustrum, to the great wonder and confusion of honest folk, who pinned their faith on Tennyson's Gardener's Daughter' and Longfellow's Psalm of Life.' His day of reign was that of Gilfillan's 'Literary

*Matthew Browne, in the Contemporary Re

view.

Portraits,' and of the lurid apparition, Stanjan Bigg; of the marvellous monologue, and the invocation without an end; of the resurrection of a Drama which had never lived, to hold high jinks and feasting with a literary Mycerinus who was about to die. It was a period of poetic incandescence; new suns, not yet spherical, whirling out hourly before the public gaze, and vanishing instantly into space, to live on, however, in the dusky chronology of the poetic astronomer, Gilfillan. The day passed, the school vanished. Where is the school now?

"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" Yet they who underrate that school know little what real poetry is. It was a chaos, granted; but a chaos capable, under certain conditions, of being shaped into such creations as would put to shame many makers of much of our modern verse. As it is, we may discover in the writings of Sydney Dobell and his circle solid lumps of pure poetic ore, of a quality scarcely discoverable in modern literature this side of the Elizabethan period.

Sydney Dobell was born at Cranbrook, in Kent, on April 5, 1824. Both on the paternal and maternal side, he was descended from people remarkable for their Christian virtues and strong religious instincts; and from his earliest years he was regarded by his parents as having "a special and even apostolic mission." The story of his child-life, indeed, is one of those sad records of unnatural precocity, caused by a system of early forcing, which have of late years become tolerably familiar to the public. He seems never to have been strong, and his naturally feeble constitution was undermined by habits of introspection. It is painfully touching now to read the extracts from his father's note-book, full of a quaint Puritan simplicity, and an over-mastering spiritual faith. Here is one :

"I used frequently to talk to him of how delightful and blessed it would be if any child would resolve to live as pure, virtuous, and holy a life, as dedicated to the will and service of God, as Jesus. I used to say to him that if one could ever be found again who was spotless and holy, it was with me a pleasing speculation and hope that such a character might, even in this life, be called as a special

instrument of our Heavenly Father for some great purpose with His Church, or with the Jews."

The seed thus sown by the zealous parent bore fruit afterwards in a disposition of peculiar sweetness, yet ever conscious of the prerogatives and prejudices of a Christian warrior. Out of the many who are called Sydney Dobell believed himself specially chosen, if not to fulfil any divine mission "with the Church or with the Jews," at least to preach and sing in the God-given mantle of fire which men call genius. In his leading works, but especially in Balder,' he preached genius-worship; of all forms of hero-worship, devised by students of German folios, the most hopeless and the most hope-destroying. Thenceforward isolation became a habit, introspection an intellectual duty. With all his love for his fellow-men, and all his deep sympathy with modern progress, he lacked to the end a certain literary robustness, which only comes to a man made fully conscious that Art and Literature are not Life itself, but only Life's humble handmaids. He was too constantly overshadowed with his mission. Fortunately, however, that very mission became his only solace and comfort, when his days of literary martyrdom came. He went to the stake of criticism with a smile on his face, almost disarming his torturers and executioners.

When Sydney was three years old, his father failed in business as a hide-merchant, and, removing to London, started as a wine-merchant. "About this time," says the biographer, "Sydney was described as of very astonishing understanding, as preferring mental diversion to eating and drinking, and very inventive with tales." Strange moods of sorrow and self-pity began to trouble his life at the age of four. At eight, it was recorded of him that he “had never been known to tell an untruth." From seven years of age he imitated the paternal habit, and used "little pocketbooks," to note down his ideas, his bits of acquired knowledge, his simple questions on spiritual subjects. For example : Report of the Controversy of Porter and Bagot. Mr. Porter maintains that Jesus Christ lived in heaven with God before the beginning of the

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world." At the age of ten, he was an omnivorous reader, and the habit of verse-writing was growing steadily upon him. I know nothing more pitiful in literature than the story of his precocity, in all its cruel and touching details. At twelve years of age he was sufficiently matured to fall in love, the object of his passion being Emily Fordham, the lady who only nine years afterwards became his wife. By this time his father had removed to Cheltenham, and had set up in business there. Sydney and the rest of the children still remained at home, and thus missed all the invigorating influences of a public school; for the father belonged to the sect of Separatists, which holds as cardinal the doctrine of avoiding those who hold adverse, or different, religious views.

The account of that dreary life of drudgery and over-work at Cheltenham may be sadly passed over; it is a life not good to think of, and its few gleams of sunshine are too faint and feeble to detain the reader long. From the date of his removal to Cheltenham he acted as his father's clerk. The account of the period extending from his twelfth year to the date of his marriage is one of hard uncongenial toil, varied by scripture-readings of doubtful edification, and a passion morbid and almost pedantic in the old-fashioned quaintness of its moods. The biographer's record may form, as we are told, a one-sided and painful picture," but we suspect that it is a true one, truer, that is to say, than the idea in its author's memory of " light, buoyant, various, and vigorous activity." The truth is, the parents of the poet blundered in blindness, a blindness chiefly due to their remarkable religious belief. His father especially, despite all his kindness of heart, was strenuous to the verge of bigotry. One can scarcely remark without a smile the inconsistency with which one who was "a publican," and by profession a vendor of convivial and intoxicating liquors, held aloof from the non-elect among his fellowcreatures. "Business is not brisk," he wrote; "I can't account for it, except, as usual, in our retired life and habits.' The idea of a sad-eyed Separatist dealing in fiery ports and sherries, shutting out the world and yet lamenting when "business was not brisk," is one of

those grim, cruel, heart-breaking jokes, in which Humanity is so rich, and of which the pathetic art of the humorist offers the only bearable solution.

At the age of twenty, Sydney Dobell was married to an invalid like himself, and one like himself of a strong Puritan bias. The humorist must help us again, if we are to escape a certain feeling of nausea at the details of this courtship and union, with its odd glimpses of personal yearning, its fervent sense of the "mission," and its dreary scraps from the Old Testament. The young couple settled down together in a little house at Cheltenham; and though for a time they avoided all society and still adhered to the tenets of the elect, this was the beginning of a broader and a healthier life. All might perhaps have been well, and the poet have cast quite away the cloud of his early training, but for one of those cruel accidents which make life an inscrutable puzzle. Just as Sydney Dobell was beginning to live, just as his mind was growing more robust, and his powers more coherent and peaceful, he was struck by rheumatic fever, caught during a temporary removal to a Devonshire farmhouse. As if that were not enough, his wife, always frail, broke down almost at the same time. From that time forward, the poet and his wife were fellowsufferers, each watching by turns over the attacks of the other. It may be said without exaggeration, that neither enjoyed one day of thoroughly buoyant physical health. Still, they had a certain pensive happiness, relieved in the husband's case by bursts of hectic excitement.

By this time, when Dobell was fourand-twenty years of age, the great wave of '48 had risen and fallen, and its influence was still felt in the hearts of men. It was a time of revolutions, moral as well as political. Dobell, like many another, felt the earth tremble under him; watched and listened, as if for the signs of a second Advent. Then, like others, he looked, across France, towards Italy. Thus the Roman' was planned; thus he began to write for the journals of advanced opinion. He had now a wine business of his own, and had a pleasant country house on the Cotswold Hills. Having published a portion of the Roman in Tait's Magazine, he was led to correspond with the then

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Aristarchus of the poetic firmament, the Rev. George Gilfillan. Gilfillan roundly hailed him as a poetic genius, and he, not ungrateful, wrote: "If in afteryears I should ever be called 'Poet,' you will know that my success is, in some sort, your work.' Shortly after this, he went to London and interviewed Mr. Carlyle. We had a tough argument," he wrote to Gilfillan, whether it were better to have learned to make shoes or to have written Sartor Resartus.' At the beginning of 1850 he published the Roman.' This was his first great literary performance, and it was tolerably successful that is to say, it received a good deal of praise from the newspapers, and circulated in small editions among the general public.

The subject of this dramatic poem was Italian liberty, and the work is full of the genius and prophecy of 1848. The leading character is one Vittorio Santo, a missionary of freedom, who (to quote the author's own argument) "has gone out disguised as a monk to preach the cause of Italy, the overthrow of the Austrian domination, and the restoration of a great Roman Republic." Santo, in the course of the poem, delivers a series of splendid and almost prophetic sermons on the heroic life and the great heroíc cause. As an example of Dobell's earlier and more rhetorical manner, I will transcribe the following powerful lines :

"I pray you listen how I loved my mother, She loved me, And you will weep with me.

nurst me,

And fed my soul with light.

even

Morning and

The 'Roman' is full of this kind of fervor, and is maintained throughout at a fine temperature of poetic eloquence. Its effect on the ardent youth of its generation must have been considerable. Perhaps now, when the stormy sea of Italian politics has settled down, it may be lawful to ask oneself how much reality there was in the battle-songs and poems that accompanied or preluded the tempest. It is quite conceivable, at least, that a man may sing very wildly about "Italy" and "Rome" and "Freedom" without any definite idea of what he means, and without any particular feeling for human nature in the concrete. This was not the case with Dobell; every syllable of his stately song came right out of his heart. this Christian warrior, like many another, was just a little too fond of appeals to the sword; just a little too apt to pose as an Englishman" and a lover of freedom. He who began with the sonorous cadence of the Roman' wrote, in his latter moods, the wild piece of gabble called 'England's Day.' The Roman,' however, remains a fine and fervid poem, worthy of thrice the

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For

fame it is ever likely to receive. What Mazzini wrote of it in 1851 may fully be remembered at this hour, when it is pretty well forgotten :

"You have written about Rome as I would, had I been born a poet. And what you did write flows from the soul, the all-loving, the all-embracing, the prophet-soul. It is the only true source of real inspiration."

Meantime the air was full of other voices. Carlyle was croaking and prophesying, with a strong Dumfriesshire accent. Bailey had amazed the world with Festus,' a colossal Conversationalist, by the side of whom his quite clerical and feebly genteel Devil seemed a derful Pie of Literary Portraits,' conpigmy. Gilfillan had opened his wontaining more swarms of poetical blackbirds than the world knew how to listen to. Mazzini was eloquent in reviews, George Dawson was stumping the provinces and converting the bourgeoisie. "The world was waiting for that trumpetblast,

To which Humanity should rise at last Out of a thousand graves, and claim its throne."

It was a period of prodigious ideas. Every literary work was macrocosmic and colossal. Every poet, under his own little forcing glass, reared a Great Poem-a sort of prodigious pumpkin which ended in utter unwieldiness and wateriness. No sort of preparation was necessary either for the throne or the laurel. Kings of men, king-hating, sprang to full mental light, like fungi, in a night. Quiet tax-paying people, awaking in bed, heard the Chivalry of Labor passing, with hollow music of fife and drum. But it was a grand time for all

the talents. Woman was awaking to a sense of her mission. Charlotte Brontë was ready with the prose-poem of the century, Mrs. Browning was touching notes of human pathos which reached to every factory in the world. Compared with our present dead swoon of Poetry, a swoon scarcely relieved at all by the occasional smelling-salts of strong æsthetics, it was a rich and golden time. It had its Dickens, to make every home happy with the gospel of plum-pudding ; its Tennyson, to sing beautiful songs of the middle-class ideal, and the comfortable clerical sentiment; its Thackeray, to relieve the passionate, overcharged

human heart with the prick of cynicism and the moisture of self-pity. To be born at such a time was in itself (to parody the familiar expression) a liberal education. We who live now may well bewail the generation which preceded us. Some of the old deities still linger with us, but only "in idiocy of godhead," nodding on their mighty seats. The clamor has died away. The utter sterility of passion and the hopeless stagnation of sentiment nowadays may be guessed when some little clique can set up Gautier in a niche: Gautier, that hairdresser's dummy of a stylist, with his complexion of hectic pink and waxen white, his well-oiled wig, and his incommunicable scent of the barber's shop. What an apotheosis! After the prophecies of '48; after the music of the awakening heart of Man; after Emerson and the newly risen moon of latter Platonism, shining tenderly on a world of vacant thrones !

Just as the human soul was most expectant, just as the Revolution of '48 had made itself felt wherever the thoughts of men were free, the Sullen Tyrant, tired of the tame eagle dodge, perpetrated his coup d'état, stabbed France to the heart with his assassin's dagger, and mounted livid to his throne upon her bleeding breast. It is very piteous to read, in Dobell's biography and elsewhere, of the utter folly which recognised in this moody, moping, and graceless ruffian a veritable Saviour of Society. The great woman-poet of the period hailed him holy, and her great husband approved her worship. Dobell had doubts, not many, of Napoleon's consecration. But Robert Browning and Sydney Dobell both lived to recognise in the lesser Napoleon, not only the assassin of France political and social, but the destroyer of literary manhood all over the world. Twenty years of the Second Empire, twenty years of a festering sore which contaminated all the civilisation of the earth, were destined to follow. We reap the result still, in a society given over to luxury and to to luxury and to gold; in a journalism that has lost its manhood, and is supported on a system of indecent exposure and blackmail; in a literature whose first word is flippancy, whose last word is prurience, and whose

victory is in the orgies of a naked Dance of Death.

Be all that as it may, those were happy times for Sydney Dobell. In one brief period of literary activity, he wrote nearly all the works which are now associated with his name. To this period belongs his masterly review of Currer Bell,' a model of what such criticism should be. The review led to a correspondence of singular interest between Miss Brontë and Dobell. "You think chiefly of what is to be done and won in life," wrote Charlotte; "I, what is to be suffered. . . . . If ever we meet, you must regard me as a grave sort of elder sister." By this period the fountain of Charlotte Brontë's genius was dry; she knew it, though the world thought otherwise, and hence her despair. She had lived her life, and put it all into one immortal book. So she sat, a veiled figure, by the side of the urn called Jane Eyre.' The shadow of Death was already upon her face.

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Dobell now began to move about the world. He went to Switzerland, and on his return he was very busy with his second poem, Balder.' While laboring thus he first heard of Alexander Smith, and having read some of the new poet's passages in the Eclectic Review, wrote thus to Gilfillan : But has he [Smith] not published already, either in newspapers or periodicals? Curiously enough, I have the strongest impression of seeing the best images before, and I am seldom mistaken in these remembrances." This was ominous, of course, of what afterwards took place, when the notorious charge of plagiarism was made against Smith in the Athenæum. Shortly afterwards he became personally acquainted with Smith, and learned to love him well. He was now himself, however, to reap the bitters of adverse criticism in the publication of his poem of Balder.' In this extraordinary work, the leading actors are only a poet and his wife, a doctor, an artist, and a servant. It may be admitted at once that the general treatment verges on the ridiculous, but the work contains passages of unequalled beauty and sublimity. The public reviews were adverse, and even personal friends shook their heads in deprecation. At the time of publica