Well, Dear, indoors with you!

True, serene deadness

Tries a man's temper.

What's in the blossom

June wears on her bosom?

Can it clear scores with you?

Sweetness and redness,

Eadem semper!

Go, let me care for it greatly or slightly!

If June mends her bowers now, your hand left unsightly
By plucking their roses-my June will do rightly.

And after, for pastime,

If June be refulgent

With flowers in completeness,

All petals, no prickles,
Delicious as trickles

Of wine poured at mass-time-
And choose One indulgent

To redness and sweetness :

Or if, with experience of man and of spider,

She use my June-lightning, the strong insect-ridder,
To stop the fresh spinning-why, June will consider.

Enthusiasm

While these great writers were waiting patiently for the public to turn to Reason and them, there occurred in our poetical literature a struggle between the sedative and the enthusiastic temperament which has left a certain mark on its history. The influence of Wordsworth and Southey in their old age was towards the encouragement of good sense and "the equipoise of reason" against an extravagant Byronism. During the reign of William IV., passion and enthusiasm were greatly out of mode, and the school of poetic utility found a successful leader in HENRY TAYLOR, who strenuously advocated the supremacy of reason over imagination and irregularity. From 1834, when the famous preface to his drama of Philip van Artevelde appeared, the doctrines of Taylor were almost paramount, until in 1839 PHILIP JAMES BAILEY published his apocalyptic drama of Festus, founded not on Byron, however, but on Goethe, in which a direct counterblast was blown, and the liberty of imaginative speculation proclaimed as from

Photo.]

a trumpet. This counteraction, at a very dead moment of our poetical existence, claims a record in the briefest outline of the national literature.

Sir Henry Taylor (1800-1886) was originally a midshipman, but entered the

B. W. Procter

From a Bust by J. H. Foley

Colonial Office in 1824, and remained a useful civil servant until he retired to Bournemouth in 1872. His works were mainly dramas in blank verse, with lyrics interspersed, of which Philip van Artevelde, 1834, Edwin the Fair, 1842, and St. Clement's Eve are the best known. Philip James Bailey (1816-1902) was born at Nottingham on the 22nd of April 1816. He was brought up to be a poet, and showed astonishing precocity in his Festus, published anonymously in 1839. This promise of his youth was not sustained, and subsequent volumes of verse were coldly received. Festus, however, has preserved its vitality in a very curious way, in spite of constantly being enlarged, for upwards of sixty years, by its author, whose eccentric custom it was to shred portions of his other books into successive editions of Festus. The poem, by this means, steadily lost cohesion and strength,

but it has retained a popularity largely due to its peculiar religious teaching.

FROM "FESTUS."

Time is the crescent shape to bounded eye

Of what is ever perfect unto God.

The bosom heaves to heaven, and to the stars;

Our very hearts throb upward, our eyes look ;

Our aspirations always are divine.

Yet is it in distress of soul we see

Most of the God about us, as at might

Of nature's limitless vast; for then the soul,
Seeking the infinite purity, most in prayer,
By the holy Spirit o'ershadowed, doth conceive

And in creative darkness, unsuspect

Of the wise world, ignorant of this, perfects
Its restitutive salvation; with its source
Reconciliate and end; its humanized

Divinity, say, of life. Think God, then, shows
His face no less towards us in spiritual gloom,
Than light.