dicate an unfinished rhyme between lines. Further, he observes that "Sprung Rhythm is the most natural of things. For (1) it is the rhythm of common speech and of written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them. (2) It is the rhythm of all but the most monotonously regular music...." two of the cardinal points upon which contemporary poet-theorists have insisted in their practice of verse libre. Can it be that in the arguments of the last ten years no one has summoned this Jesuit from the Ignatian walls, hailed him out to set (even) the signature of the priest to an apologia for modern forms?

But the sacred fact above all, is that in practising his theories he wrote astonishing poetry. We find many passages that are eccentric, but with the eccentricities of an individuality of positive ideas, not merely of neutral fancies. He took liberties, also, with grammar, such as the occasional omission of the relative pronoun, striving for a greater economy of expression. Such economy is likely to be in the end too much like parsimony, a parsimony which can only barter with confusion and purchase no clarity. But even the verses most complicated in manner reflect a sensitive personality, a consciousness aware of the edge of light, and desirous to touch what is beyond. The form of his poetry is subtle. Its irregularity results not in the particular intimate kind of rhythm in which much modern poetry has been written, but resolves into melody and tempest, struggle and delicacy. "The Leaden Echo" contains the repetition, the insistence, the swing and suspension of a most individual perception of move

ment.

As Hopkins himself requested, his poetry should be read aloud. How to keep is there any any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch or key to keep

Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty from vanishing away?

O, is there no frowning of these wrinkles, ranked wrinkles deep

Down? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey? No, there's none, there's none, O no there's none,

Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,

Do what you may do, what, do what you may, And wisdom is early to despair;

Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay

Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's
worst, winding sheets tombs and
worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there's none; no no no there's none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

Here is an anticipation, too remarkable to be missed, of the manner of Gertrude Stein-"be beginning, be beginning . . .

It is characteristic of Hopkins to compress a rush of suffering into the limits of utterance with such stern economy, such rigid honesty, that the form itself of his poem shares the emotional stress of the man, and is twisted and bent.

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist-slack they may be these last
strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more.
I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan

With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,

O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.

Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,

Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heavenhandling flung me, foót tród O which one? is it each one? That night,that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Me? or me that fought him?

This is difficult to read. There can be no doubt, it was difficult to write. Poetry such as this, that comes up from the hidden blood, from a stung soul and stinging flesh, cannot drip from the pen with ease and brilliance. It resists and struggles beneath the surface of utterance. Only a poet of authentic power could cry, in the midst of this turmoil, "But ah, but O thou terrible . ." In contrast to the tortured but inevitable growth of this poem, there is the casual, natural expansion in "Ash-Boughs," a fragment whose first three lines have the simplicity and directness which Mr. Ford afterward embodied in his recommended principles of poetry that it should be like conversation with some one one loves very much.

Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,

Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep

Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.

There are strange and lovely things in this small volume. Without false effort, but with a naive lack of discrimination between the magical and the unenchanted, he evokes one of the most mysterious moons that ever rose.

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning: The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle, Or paring of paradisaical fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless, Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain; A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quit utterly.

This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,

Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

The allurement of these words, their arrangement, and their music must tempt even those to whom much of Hopkins would be either inaccessible or irritating. But his perverseness is ingenious, with the erratic grace of an experimenting mind, or again so simple and direct as to seem adventuresome. For, in the last analysis, it is always the shortest path he seeks, although it need not be a swift one. He was blest with true originality, rare in men and gods alike. The strange and varied quality of his gift crowns him apart from other poets, and resulted, it must be admitted, in obscurity as well as in beauty. But the one is past remedying now, and both are accepted and sealed by death, the uncritical.

The lesser peculiarities of his inventive freshness as well as the abiding fluency of his verse are evident in the closing lines of "St. Winifred's Well."

As long as men are mortal and God merciful, So long to this sweet spot, this leafy leanover,

This Dry Dene, now no longer dry nor dumb, but moist and musical

With the uproll and the downcarol of day and night delivering

Water, which keeps thy name, (for not in rock written,

But in pale water, frail water, wild rash and reeling water,

That will not wear a print, that will not stain a pen,

Thy venerable record, virgin, is recorded.) Here to this holy well shall pilgrimages be, And not from purple Wales only nor from elmy England,

But from beyond seas, Erin, France, and Flanders, everywhere,

Pilgrims, still pilgrims, more pilgrims, still more poor pilgrims.

As sure as what is most sure, sure as that spring primroses

Shall new-dapple next year, sure as to-morrow

morning,

Among his early poems are lyrics of deft eloquence, for he had at the disposal of heaven and the priesthood a vocabulary both limpid and Latin, and a soul of heights and of humility. These are chaste verses in "The Habit of Perfection',' reluctant and precise.

Elected silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe to me pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent

From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.

Be shelled, eyes, with double dark
And find the uncreated light:
This ruck and reel which you remark
Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet
That want the yield of plushy sward,
But you shall walk the golden street
And you unhouse and house the Lord.

And, Poverty, be thou the bride
And now the marriage feast begun,
And lily-coloured clothes provide
Your spouse not labored-at nor spun.

Hopkins' reaction to the beauty of his God's visible world is markedly spontaneous and even lusty. "Glory be to God for dappled things-" he exclaims, and again, "Long live the weeds and the wilderness. There is about him

nothing didactic or pietistic. He observes first the beauty, then seeks and reveres the cause, but in gratitude and joy, rather than in exhortation alone. Even his most meditative poems are plaintive, with a romantic as well as a spiritual concern for the loveliness that must drift into dust. Let beauty be safe home with God, he prays. The words are those of the shepherd, but the agony to count the sheep safe folded is that of the lover and the artist. There

is little likeness to a Gregory. How near and yet how far from Rome he is! His soul's ancestor is rather Augustine, but an Augustine more keenly strung, less voluptuous, and less powerful than the passionate saint of Hippo. Hopkins has written religious poetry of a quality not to be scorned beside Donne, Verlaine, Thompson, and the great medieval mystics. Hearken back to the "Leaden and the Golden Echoes". Turn to "The Grandeur of God," or to the rapture of "Hurrahing in Harvest", where the poet combines a eulogy of Autumn and of the Saviour.

....the azurous hung hills are his world wielding shoulder

Majestic-as a stallion stalwart,

violet-sweet!—

very

These things, these things were here and but the beholder

Wanting; which two when they once meet, The heart rears wings bold and bolder

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

And again, the opening lines of a poem which ends with knees bent before Christ.

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

there!

In these words of childish and divine

enjoyment are the quick imagination and shifting music of a man, who, had he been but half a priest, might have written of sainted fairies, Capuchin elves, and dark masses said by small immortals.

It is not likely that Father Hopkins will ever attract to him those whose preference is the lyrical cynicism, the keen satire, the studied irony, and rich imagery of so much of modern poetry. He is difficult, often, even when loveli

HERE ARE LADIES INDEED

Ariel, Vie de Shelley, by Andre Maurois, Bernard Grasset, Paris; Ariel. Life of Shelley, by Andre Maurois, translated by Ella D'Arcy,

F

D. Appleton & Co., New York.)

OUR out of each five people, finding "Ariel" readable, will class it at once with Strachey's "Queen Victoria"; and except that it is readable, it doesn't belong there at all. There is much more of Merejkowsky there than Strachy or Guedalla-but this is beside the point.

What M. Maurois has done is to take the authenticated facts of Shelley's life, buried heretofore in those incredibly fine-print introductions to the collected poems and make of them as vivid, as entertaining a novel as one could find in a day's search. And he has done more than this. With a few broad strokes, he has painted a delicate and unforgetable picture of Shelley, not the immortal singer that we, from the beginning of the next century know, but the individual his contemporaries saw-an irresponsible, lovable, beautiful boy, full of amusing conceits, but not to be taken very seriously.

Here Shelley is that inexplicable, that erratic young man who divided his time between writing fine philosophical pamphlets that nobody read and sailing

paper boats on the Thames, the fish ponds of Field Place, Primrose Hill and the Vale of Health, a pool in the heath above Bracknell, the Serpentine River and once, years later, a bowl of quicksilver in Henry Reveley's workshop at Leghorn. He is that tenderhearted and rather simple gentleman from whom Godwin, the Leigh Hunts and his numerous train of female admirers could always obtain money. And he is that restless, capricious person who so amused his friends by settling down in at least fifty places of his brief life-each time "for ever." It is all very lightly and delicately done and the irony is always by implication rather than by predication. Another writer would have said, in so many words, that Shelley was not appreciated during his lifetime (outside that ardent little coterie of ladies that ever surrounded him); that only one of his books ever went so far as the second edition and that fifty pounds would have exceeded all he received his life long for any of them-this the puerile novel, "Zastrozzi". But not SO Maurois. His method is subtler. He does not say that Shelley was unsuccessful; he, like the world in that far, early dix-neuviéme century, hardly mentions Shelley's books at all after they are written. The distinction is fine-and the effect is masterly.

Shelley's lovely child-wife, Harriet, is quite in the traditional manner. Whether Harriet Westbrook, whose father kept a Mount Coffee House (only a few doors from that other Mount Cof