EDMUND GOSSE

(1849-)

DMUND WILLIAM GOSSE, or Edmund Gosse, to give him the name he has of late years adopted, is a Londoner, the son of P. H. Gosse, an English zoölogist of repute. His education did not embrace the collegiate training, but he was brought up amid cultured surroundings, read largely, and when but eighteen was appointed an assistant librarian in the British Museum, at the age of twenty-six receiving the position of translator to the Board of Trade. Gosse is a good example of the cultivated man of letters who fitted himself thoroughly for his profession, though lacking the formal scholastic drill of the university.

He began as a very young man to write for the leading English periodicals, contributing papers and occasional poems to the Saturday Review, Academy, and Cornhill Magazine, and soon gaining critical recognition. In 1872 and 1874 he traveled in Scandinavia and Holland, making literary studies which bore fruit in one of his best critical works. He made his literary bow when twenty-one with the volume Madrigals, Songs, and Sonnets' (1870), which was well received, winning praise from Tennyson. His essential qualities as a verse-writer appear in it: elegance and care of workmanship, close study of nature, felicity in phrasing, and a marked tendency to draw on literary culture for subject and reference. Other works of poetry, 'On Viol and Flute' (1873), 'New Poems (1879), Firdausī in Exile' (1885), In Russet and Gold' (1894), with the dramas King Erik' (1876) and 'The Unknown Lover' (1878), show an increasingly firm technique and a broadening of outlook, with some loss of the happy singing quality which characterized the first volume. Gosse as a poet may be described as a lyrist with attractive descriptive powers. Together with his fellow poets Lang and Dobson, he revived in English verse the old French metrical forms, such as the roundel, triolet, and ballade, and he has been very receptive to the new in literary form and thought, while keeping a firm grip on the classic models.

As an essayist, Gosse is one of the most accomplished and agreeable of modern English writers; he has comprehensive culture and catholic sympathy, and commands a picturesque style, graceful and rich without being florid. His 'Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe' (1879) introduced Ibsen and other little-known foreign writers to British readers.

Gosse has been a thorough student of English literature prior to the nineteenth century, and has made a specialty of the literary history of the eighteenth century, his series of books in this field including-Seventeenth-Century Studies' (1883), 'From Shakespeare to Pope' (1885), The Literature of the Eighteenth Century' (1889), "The Jacobean Poets' (1894), to which may be added the volume of contemporaneous studies Critical Kit-Kats (1896). Some of these books are based on the lectures delivered by Gosse as Clark Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. He has also written biographies of Sir Walter Raleigh and Congreve, and his 'Life of Thomas Gray' (1882) and Works of Thomas Gray' (1884) comprise the best edition and setting-forth of that poet. In such labors as that of the editing of Heinemann's 'International Library,' his influence has been salutary in the popularization of the best literature of the world. His interest in Ibsen led him to translate, in collaboration with William Archer, the dramatic critic of London, the Norwegian's play The Master Builder.'

Edmund Gosse, as editor, translator, critic, and poet, has done varied and excellent work. Sensitive to many literatures, and to good literature everywhere, he has remained stanchly English in spirit, and has combined scholarship with popular qualities of presentation. He has thus contributed not a little to the furtherance of literature in England.

[The poems are all taken from On Viol and Flute,' published by Henry Holt & Co., New York.]

FEBRUARY IN ROME

THEN Roman fields are red with cyclamen,

WHE

And in the palace gardens you may find,

Under great leaves and sheltering briony-bind,

Clusters of cream-white violets, oh then

The ruined city of immortal men

Must smile, a little to her fate resigned,

And through her corridors the slow warm wind

Gush harmonies beyond a mortal ken.

Such soft favonian airs upon a flute,

Such shadowy censers burning live perfume,
Shall lead the mystic city to her tomb;
Nor flowerless springs, nor autumns without fruit,
Nor summer mornings when the winds are mute,
Trouble her soul till Rome be no more Rome.

DESIDERIUM

IT there for ever, dear, and lean

SIT

In marble as in fleeting flesh,

Above the tall gray reeds that screen
The river when the breeze is fresh;

For ever let the morning light

Stream down that forehead broad and white, And round that cheek for my delight.

Already that flushed moment grows

So dark, so distant; through the ranks

Of scented reed the river flows,

Still murmuring to its willowy banks;

But we can never hope to share
Again that rapture fond and rare,
Unless you turn immortal there.

There is no other way to hold

These webs of mingled joy and pain; Like gossamer their threads enfold

The journeying heart without a strain,—

Then break, and pass in cloud or dew,
And while the ecstatic soul goes through,
Are withered in the parching blue.

Hold, Time, a little while thy glass,

And Youth, fold up those peacock wings! More rapture fills the years that pass

Than any hope the future brings;

Some for to-morrow rashly pray,
And some desire to hold to-day,

But I am sick for yesterday.

Since yesterday the hills were blue
That shall be gray for evermore,
And the fair sunset was shot through
With color never seen before!
Tyrannic Love smiled yesterday,
And lost the terrors of his sway,

But is a god again to-day.

Ah, who will give us back the past?

Ah woe, that youth should love to be Like this swift Thames that speeds so fast,

And is so fain to find the sea,

That leaves this maze of shadow and sleep,

These creeks down which blown blossoms creep,
For breakers of the homeless deep.

Then sit for ever, dear, in stone,

As when you turned with half a smile,
And I will haunt this islet lone,

And with a dream my tears beguile;

And in my reverie forget

That stars and suns were made to set;
That love grows cold, or eyes are wet.

B

LYING IN THE GRASS

ETWEEN two golden tufts of summer grass,

I see the world through hot air as through glass,
And by my face sweet lights and colors pass.

Before me dark against the fading sky,
I watch three mowers mowing, as I lie:
With brawny arms they sweep in harmony.

Brown English faces by the sun burnt red,
Rich glowing color on bare throat and head,-
My heart would leap to watch them, were I dead!

And in my strong young living as I lie,
I seem to move with them in harmony,-
A fourth is mowing, and the fourth am I.

The music of the scythes that glide and leap,

The young men whistling as their great arms sweep,

And all the perfume and sweet sense of sleep,

The weary butterflies that droop their wings,

The dreamy nightingale that hardly sings,
And all the lassitude of happy things,

Is mingling with the warm and pulsing blood,
That gushes through my veins a languid flood,
And feeds my spirit as the sap a bud.

Behind the mowers, on the amber air,
A dark-green beech wood rises, still and fair,
A white path winding up it like a stair.

And see that girl, with pitcher on her head,
And clean white apron on her gown of red,—
Her evensong of love is but half said:

She waits the youngest mower.

Now he goes;

Her cheeks are redder than a wild blush-rose;
They climb up where the deepest shadows close.

But though they pass, and vanish, I am there.

I watch his rough hands meet beneath her hair;
Their broken speech sounds sweet to me like prayer.

Ah! now the rosy children come to play,
And romp and struggle with the new-mown hay;
Their clear, high voices sound from far away.

They know so little why the world is sad;

They dig themselves warm graves, and yet are glad; Their muffled screams and laughter make me mad!

I long to go and play among them there;
Unseen, like wind, to take them by the hair,
And gently make their rosy cheeks more fair.

The happy children! full of frank surprise,
And sudden whims and innocent ecstasies;
What Godhead sparkles from their liquid eyes!

No wonder round those urns of mingled clays
That Tuscan potters fashioned in old days,
And colored like the torrid earth ablaze,

We find the little gods and Loves portrayed,
Through ancient forests wandering undismayed,
And fluting hymns of pleasure unafraid.

They knew, as I do now, what keen delight
A strong man feels to watch the tender flight
Of little children playing in his sight.

I do not hunger for a well-stored mind;

I only wish to live my life, and find
My heart in unison with all mankind.

My life is like the single dewy star

That trembles on the horizon's primrose bar,—
A microcosm where all things living are.