matured and developed, the body of the future; a loftier likeness of the old in the new, a transfigured organisation. Every organism is a Communism, but man is not a reproduction of the oyster. Civilisation turned once, in the far-back past, away from the Communism which found no place for private property, and gave no play to individualism. To revert to that Communism would be retrogress not progress, the return to childhood in senility, in poverty if in purity, in ignorance if in innocence. Not thus is man to become a little child that he may enter the kingdom of heaven.

Ruskin finely says: "There is a singular sense in which the child may peculiarly be said to be the father of man. In many arts and attainments, the first and last stages of progress, the infancy and the consummation, have many features in common; while the intermediate stages are wholly unlike either and are furthest from the right. Childhood often holds a truth with its feeble fingers which the grasp of manhood cannot retain, which it is the pride of utmost age to recover."

This is the progress of the race; the action of that law of circularity which, urging civilisation round yet also up, brings society again into the same longitude where once it anchored ages since, but now in far higher latitude; its symbol, the spiral. The world is sweeping round into the meridian of Communism, but it will prove the parallel of a nobler "ism "of common property than that of the past. The Communism of the future will not do away with private property, but will restrain it to healthful proportions, will subordinate its aggregate to the mass of wealth held in common, and will guard against its renewed dangerous development by subsoiling it with a deep, wide, firm basis of common property, held for the people by co-operative associations, economic, social, and religious, and by the State. In that commonage will probably be included all properties which shall prove themselves, in the experience of mankind, essential to the commonwealth, even, if needs be, to the collective ownership of the land, the instruments of production, and the means of exchange.

Between the opposite poles of individualism and association, in oscillating cycles, civilisation gravitates toward the poise of the pendulum, the golden mean of an institution of property in which all needful severalties of personal possession shall form freely within the ensphering body of a vast and noble Communism. The distant goal of this troublous age is once more a stationary period. In the far back past, the calm of the mountain lake, placid and pure as the snow-fields around it; then the wild whirl of the mountain stream, delightedly escaping from stagnation, hurrying away from the old and tranquil haunts, reckless of where and how, so only that, obedient to the resistless yearning which stirs within its bosom, there is motion on; plunging wildly in tumultuous freedom, here in the gay sunlight, there in the gloomy gorges, hurling over huge precipices in untried ventures, shaking into thin mist, splintering on craggy rocks, grinding into white foam in the seething whirlpool, but hasting on; freshening the air for the dwellers in the valleys down which it scampers, greening the grass and goldening the grain and kissing the flowers with its dewy

breath till they blush into iris-hued ripplings of delight; anon bursting its embankments, pouring over the fields of patient industry, deluging, devasting, destroying; spreading at length into the smooth-flowing river, which moves onward still, through mighty continents of being; bearing the burdens of the people of the earth, exchanging their productions, building up fair cities and crowding them with wealth, causing the desert to blossom as the rose; yet clogging here and there into slimy shallows and turgid marshes, where the poison gathered from the heedless life along its shores washes upon the ground and exhales into the air, and makes the great river, on which weary men must toil and from which thirsting men must drink. a deadly curse, blighting the regions round into a land of the shadow of death; at last flowing into the broad sea, where all streams mingle and are one, where all evil elements are purified and precipitated, and clean and wholesome the great deep hushes into the calm of the Pacific, whose waters stir only with the long, low ground-swell and the gentle, steady trade-winds, while they flash beneath the bright beams of an eternal summer, and pulse with the movements of all varied and beautiful life round the happy islands where man is once more a child in the garden of the Lord, wherein stands the tree of life yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations; and there shall be no curse any more."

66

From the mountain-tops, we may see the light of the dawning day on that far-off sea of peace, and cry, with Saint-Simon in his parting breath, "The future is ours.'

R. HEBER NEWTON.

Ten Years of English Poetry.

SWINBURNE, MORRIS, ROSSETTI, 1861 1871.

BETWEEN the first appearance of a great poet and his ulti

mate recognition as one-between the accomplishment of the work which is to win him immortality, and the final ascension of that work to "the abode where the eternal are," there is generally a long interim of, for the most part, fruitless dispute and barren cavilling. "Our enemy is often our helper," says Burke: and the fact that twenty years of generally adverse criticism has had no direr effect upon the three greatest poets of our own generation, than than to make both them and their work famous, is in itself as conclusive a proof tha they are altogether beyond such criticism. as it is certain evidence that such

criticism is altogether unsound and unjust. It is always a valuable aid to a sound and just criticism of any matter, to take, wherever such is possible, some other criticism of the same subject as a kind of centre, or point de repere to work from.

At the moment nothing presents itself better suited to the present purpose, than the brief but comprehensive notice which Mr. Stopford Brooke has accorded these three poets in his Primer of English literature. On the last page of the first edition of that excellent little book, Mr. Brooke says, "Within the last ten years a new class of literary poets has arisen, who have no care for a present they think dull, for religious questions to which they see no end. They too have gone back to Greek and medieval and old Norse life for their subjects. They find much of their inspiration in Italy and in Chaucer; but they continue the love poetry, and the poetry of natural description. No English poetry exceeds Swinburne's in varied melody; and the poems of Rossetti within their limited range, are instinct with

passion at once subtle and intense. Of them all William Morris is the greatest, and of him much more is to be expected. At present he is our most delightful story-teller: he loses much by being too long, but we pardon the length for the ideal charm. The Death of Jason and the stories told month by month in the Earthly

Paradise, a Greek and a medieval story alternately, will long live to delight the holiday-times of men; although it is some pity that it is foreign and not English story." The class of literary poets here mentioned might be more widely defined as a school of literary poets; some flatulent critics have delighted in calling it the PreRaphaelite school of poets, though what that name means when applied to poetry, those who use it may be best able to explain: unexplained it seems about half as sensible as to call our next school of Alexandrian poetry (if we ever have one) the PreTurnerite school. But apart from this, the term Pre-Raphaelite, or any other such term, is misleading in such a case as this: it implies a common workmanship under a common master. Now strangely similar as the three great poets mentioned above may be in minor points, in some small mannerisms, and technicalities, they are eminently dissimilar in all those higher regions of thought and sound, which each has traversed in his own original way; dissimilar in thought no less than in sound, in subject no less than in treatment. The faults and defects of one are to a great extent the faults and defects of all, but the peculiar greatness and high perfection of each are wholly and solely his own.

Mr. Rossetti, the eldest of the three, had completed several of his poems while the others were yet students, "dreaming in classtime;" but Mr. Morris was the first to place any serious work before the public. He began by "rekindling the beauty of the Arthurian legend," and reviving the old ballad form.

It was no discredit to Mr. Morris then, and it cannot detract from his fame now to record, that his Arthurian poems were more than partially eclipsed by Mr. Tennyson's which were published in the following year. Whether the idyll be the best form for the poetic translation of this kind of legend may be matter of doubt, unless it be settled by the fact that Mr. Tennyson has employed this form for this purpose, and that here he is unapproachable by any poet who has ever lived.

In his ballads, which are cast in the simpler metres of the style, Mr. Morris attains a higher standard of perfection than in his poems; but one may be allowed to doubt if he has here a "firmer tread" than the great poet by the light of whose genius he put forth the first-fruits of his work. Unless it be a greater thing to fill a verse with syllabic grace than with general perfection of thought and style, then assuredly it is not a greater thing to have written" Welland River” than to have written "Stratton Water." All the failings of Rossetti's ballad lean to virtue's side, while Mr. Morris has, wisely perhaps, stopped short of the point where such. failings become possible. If Mr. Morris had not inscribed his first fruits to Rossetti, and if Mr. Swinburne had not generously acknowledged both his own and Mr. Morris's indebtedness to the poet-painter, it might be rather unfair to speak of these poems in connection with Rossetti. But in reading them one is often reminded of the fact that many of Rossetti's poems were written between 1847 and 1853. Not that Mr. Morris has imitated Rossetti, but he has been influenced by him. We know the bent of Rossetti's genius at this period, and we oftentimes catch a reflexion of it here.

To say more than this would be truly unjust, for the primal note of all Mr. Morris's work is originality; and where a man has given abundant proof of the possession of such a quality, it is scrupulously unfair to deny it to him in a single instance where it was partially shared by another.

The critic who should affirm that Mr. Morris had here imitated Rossetti, would be almost as blame-worthy as he who should assert that Mr. Morris had here followed Tennyson, albeit his work appeared before that of the laureate.

It is precisely the originality of these poems which makes them so noteworthy and so praiseworthy, and stamps their author as a distinct poet. It is not often so young a writer commences by being original; but these are the work of one who at the outset was not content to follow where another had passed, and who, having opened up a new path, preferred to cover a furlong of his own ground roughly, rather than run a league along any beaten track. It was also the novelty of this book which evoked the chief blame as well as the chief praise bestowed upon it-in other matters it was little noticed.

Far more noteworthy in the annals of contemporary literature will be the record of the appearance of Mr. Swinburne's first volume of collected poems. It was hardly to be expected that such unconventional poetry as "Poems and Ballads" would pass test with the conventional critics, even though they had hailed 66 Atalanta," and maintained a calm demeanour over "Chastelard." But by no comparison of precedent could it have been imagined what a "hideous roar" the "rout would make over this new birth. Since the day when the ephemera of criticism were industriously blaspheming Shelley, while he of the giant's robe assiduously set himself to consign "Endymion" and its author to inexhumable oblivion, and made all his own fame infamous by this one notable blot; from that day when the Society for the Suppression of Vice licensed itself to deal in poetical criticism until now, nothing in all the wide range of English letters has met with such vehement reprobation, such fierce pouring forth of accumulated petty malignance, as, on its initial publication, assailed this first series of "Poems and Ballads.”

One cannot imagine Mr. Swinburne being diffident, or deprecating criticism as Keats did; but one is fain to think that had he suspected what was lying in wait for him, he might have been tempted to have forestalled many of the opprobrious remarks which gained currency; to have someway denied the "pressmen' their dish of hash, and warded off the storm a little from himself.

That he did not do this left him open to the far more effectual way employed by Byron in dealing with his critics. Both these men answered the weak whips of their chastisers with stinging scorpions; Byron in scathing satire, and Mr. Swinburne in fierce vindication of himself and his work; though not, as he made plain, to justify either himself or his work, but for the sake of his publishers, who, fearful for that "immortal part," their reputation, instantly commenced calling in the prints with all the haste. they could.

It is too late in the day to attempt any analysis of the reviews