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A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside Library for Young People. 16mo, 75 cents; Holiday Edition, 16mo, fancy binding, $1.25.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

Boston and New York.

ESSAYS IN IDLENESS

BY

AGNES REPPLIER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1897

Copyright, 1893,

By AGNES REPPLIER.

All rights reserved.

SEVENTH EDITION.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.

Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

To AGNES IRWIN.

CONTENTS.

“Leisure” is reprinted from “Scribner’s Magazine” by permission of the publishers.

ESSAYS IN IDLENESS.

AGRIPPINA.

She is sitting now on my desk, and I glance at her with deference, mutely begging permission to begin. But her back is turned to me, and expresses in every curve such fine and delicate disdain that I falter and lose courage at the very threshold of my task. I have long known that cats are the most contemptuous of creatures, and that Agrippina is the most contemptuous of cats. The spirit of Bouhaki, the proud Theban beast that sat erect, with gold earrings in his ears, at the feet of his master, King Hana; the spirit of Muezza, whose slumbers Mahomet himself was not bold enough to disturb; the spirit of Micetto, Chateaubriand’s ecclesiastical pet, dignified as a cardinal, and conscious ever that he was the gift of a sovereign pontiff,—the spirits of all arrogant cats that have played scornful parts in the world’s great comedy look out from Agrippina’s yellow eyes, and hold me in subjection. I should like to explain to her, if I dared, that my desk is small, littered with many papers, and sadly overcrowded with the useful inutilities which affectionate friends delight in giving me at Christmas time. Sainte-Beuve’s cat, I am aware, sat on his desk, and roamed at will among those precious manuscripts which no intrusive hand was ever permitted to touch; but Sainte-Beuve probably had sufficient space reserved for his own comfort and convenience. I have not; and Agrippina’s beautifully ringed tail flapping across my copy distracts my attention, and imperils the neatness of my penmanship. Even when she is disposed to be affable, turns the light of her countenance upon me, watches with attentive curiosity every stroke I make, and softly, with curved paw, pats my pen as it travels over the paper,—even in these halcyon moments, though my self-love is flattered by her condescension, I am aware that I should work better and more rapidly if I denied myself this charming companionship.

But in truth it is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating little friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more. M. Fée, the naturalist, who has written so admirably about animals, and who understands, as only a Frenchman can understand, the delicate and subtle organization of a cat, frankly admits that the keynote of its character is independence. It dwells under our roof, sleeps by our fire, endures our blandishments, and apparently enjoys our society, without for one moment forfeiting its sense of absolute freedom, without acknowledging any servile relation to the human creature who shelters it. “The cat,” says M. Fée, “will never part with its liberty; it will neither be our servant, like the horse, nor our friend, like the dog. It consents to live as our guest; it accepts the home we offer and the food we give; it even goes so far as to solicit our caresses, but capriciously, and when it suits its humor to receive them.”

Rude and masterful souls resent this fine self-sufficiency in a domestic animal, and require that it should have no will but theirs, no pleasure that does not emanate from them. They are forever prating of the love and fidelity of the dog, of the beast that obeys their slightest word, crouches contentedly for hours at their feet, is exuberantly grateful for the smallest attention, and so affectionate that its demonstrations require to be curbed rather than encouraged. All this homage is pleasing to their vanity; yet there are people, less magisterial perhaps, or less exacting, who believe that true friendship, even with an animal, may be built upon mutual esteem and independence; that to demand gratitude is to be unworthy of it; and that obedience is not essential to agreeable and healthy intercourse. A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the word, its master; the term expresses accurately their mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when applied to the limited possession of a cat. I am certainly not Agrippina’s mistress, and the assumption of authority on my part would be a mere empty dignity, like those swelling titles which afford such innocent delight to the Freemasons of our severe republic. If I call Agrippina, she does not come; if I tell her to go away, she remains where she is; if I try to persuade her to show off her one or two little accomplishments, she refuses, with courteous but unswerving decision. She has frolicsome moods, in which a thimble, a shoe-buttoner, a scrap of paper, or a piece of string will drive her wild with delight; she has moods of inflexible gravity, in which she stares solemnly at her favorite ball rolling over the carpet, without stirring one lazy limb to reach it. “Have I seen this foolish toy before?” she seems to be asking herself with musing austerity; “and can it be possible that there are cats who run after such frivolous trifles? Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity, save only to lie upon the hearth rug, and be warm, and ‘think grave thoughts to feed a serious soul.’” In such moments of rejection and humiliation, I comfort myself by recalling the words of one too wise for arrogance. “When I play with my cat,” says Montaigne, “how do I know whether she does not make a jest of me? We entertain each other with mutual antics; and if I have my own time for beginning or refusing, she too has hers.”

This is the spirit in which we should approach a creature so reserved and so utterly self-sufficing; this is the only key we have to that natural distinction of character which repels careless and unobservant natures. When I am told that Agrippina is disobedient, ungrateful, cold-hearted, perverse, stupid, treacherous, and cruel, I no longer strive to check the torrent of abuse. I know that Buffon said all this, and much more, about cats, and that people have gone on repeating it ever since, principally because these spirited little beasts have remained just what it pleased Providence to make them, have preserved their primitive freedom through centuries of effete and demoralizing civilization. Why, I wonder, should a great many good men and women cherish an unreasonable grudge against one animal because it does not chance to possess the precise qualities of another? “My dog fetches my slippers for me every night,” said a friend triumphantly, not long ago. “He puts them first to warm by the fire, and then brings them over to my chair, wagging his tail, and as proud as Punch. Would your cat do as much for you, I’d like to know?” Assuredly not! If I waited for Agrippina to fetch me shoes or slippers, I should have no other resource save to join as speedily as possible one of the barefooted religious orders of Italy. But, after all, fetching slippers is not the whole duty of domestic pets. As La Fontaine gently reminds us:—

“Tout animal n’a pas toutes propriétés.”

We pick no quarrel with a canary because it does not talk like a parrot, nor with a parrot because it does not sing like a canary. We find no fault with a King Charles spaniel for not flying at the throat of a burglar, nor with a St. Bernard because we cannot put it in our pocket. Agrippina will never make herself serviceable, yet nevertheless is she of inestimable service. How many times have I rested tired eyes on her graceful little body, curled up in a ball and wrapped round with her tail like a parcel; or stretched out luxuriously on my bed, one paw coyly covering her face, the other curved gently inwards, as though clasping an invisible treasure! Asleep or awake, in rest or in motion, grave or gay, Agrippina is always beautiful; and it is better to be beautiful than to fetch and carry from the rising to the setting of the sun. She is droll, too, with an unconscious humor, even in her most serious and sentimental moods. She has quite the longest ears that ever were seen on so small a cat, eyes more solemn than Athene’s owl blinking in the sunlight, and an air of supercilious disdain that would have made Diogenes seem young and ardent by her side. Sitting on the library table, under the evening lamp, with her head held high in air, her tall ears as erect as chimneys, and her inscrutable gaze fixed on the darkest corner of the room, Agrippina inspires in the family sentiments of mingled mirthfulness and awe. To laugh at her in such moments, however, is to incur her supreme displeasure. I have known her to jump down from the table, and walk haughtily out of the room, because of a single half-suppressed but wholly indecorous giggle.

Schopenhauer has said that the reason domestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, the present moment. Life holds no future for them, and consequently no care; if they are content, their contentment is absolute; and our jaded and wearied spirits find a natural relief in the sight of creatures whose little cups of happiness can so easily be filled to the brim. Walt Whitman expresses the same thought more coarsely when he acknowledges that he loves the society of animals because they do not sweat and whine over their condition, nor lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, nor sicken him with discussions of their duty. In truth, that admirable counsel of Sydney Smith’s, “Take short views of life,” can be obeyed only by the brutes; for the thought that travels even to the morrow is long enough to destroy our peace of mind, inasmuch as we know not what the morrow may bring forth. But when Agrippina has breakfasted, and washed, and sits in the sunlight blinking at me with affectionate contempt, I feel soothed by her absolute and unqualified enjoyment. I know how full my day will be of things that I don’t want particularly to do, and that are not particularly worth doing; but for her, time and the world hold only this brief moment of contentment. Slowly the eyes close, gently the little body is relaxed. Oh, you who strive to relieve your overwrought nerves, and cultivate power through repose, watch the exquisite languor of a drowsy cat, and despair of imitating such perfect and restful grace! There is a gradual yielding of every muscle to the soft persuasiveness of slumber; the flexible frame is curved into tender lines, the head nestles lower, the paws are tucked out of sight; no convulsive throb or start betrays a rebellious alertness; only a faint quiver of unconscious satisfaction, a faint heaving of the tawny sides, a faint gleam of the half-shut yellow eyes, and Agrippina is asleep. I look at her for one wistful moment, and then turn resolutely to my work. It were ignoble to wish myself in her place, and yet how charming to be able to settle down to a nap, sans peur et sans reproche, at ten o’clock in the morning!

These, then, are a few of the pleasures to be derived from the society of an amiable cat; and by an amiable cat I mean one that, while maintaining its own dignity and delicate reserve, is nevertheless affable and condescending in the company of human beings. There is nothing I dislike more than newspaper and magazine stories about priggish pussies—like the children in Sunday-school books—that share their food with hungry beasts from the back alleys, and show touching fidelity to old blind masters, and hunt partridges, in a spirit of noble self-sacrifice, for consumptive mistresses, and scorn to help themselves to delicacies from the kitchen tables, and arouse their households so often in cases of fire that I should suspect them of starting the conflagrations in order to win applause by giving the alarm. Whatever a real cat may or may not be, it is never a prig, and all true lovers of the race have been quick to recognize and appreciate this fact.

“I value in the cat,” says Chateaubriand, “that independent and almost ungrateful temper which prevents it from attaching itself to any one; the indifference with which it passes from the salon to the housetop. When you caress it, it stretches itself out and arches its back responsively; but that is caused by physical pleasure, and not, as in the case of the dog, by a silly satisfaction in loving and being faithful to a master who returns thanks in kicks. The cat lives alone, has no need of society, does not obey except when it likes, pretends to sleep that it may see the more clearly, and scratches everything that it can scratch.”

Here is a sketch spirited enough, and of good outline, but hardly correct in detail. A cat seldom manifests affection, yet is often distinctly social, and likes to see itself the petted minion of a family group. Agrippina, in fact, so far from living alone, will not, if she can help it, remain for a moment in a room by herself. She is content to have me as a companion, perhaps in default of better; but if I go upstairs or downstairs in search of a book, or my eyeglasses, or any one of the countless things that are never where they ought to be, Agrippina follows closely at my heels. Sometimes, when she is fast asleep, I steal softly out of the door, thinking to escape her vigilance; but before I have taken a dozen steps she is under my feet, mewing a gentle reproach, and putting on all the injured airs of a deserted Ariadne. I should like to think such behavior prompted by affection rather than by curiosity; but in my candid moments I find this “pathetic fallacy” a difficult sentiment to cherish. There are people, I am aware, who trustfully assert that their pets love them; and one such sanguine creature has recently assured the world that “no man who boasts the real intimacy and confidence of a cat would dream of calling his four-footed friend ‘puss.’” But is not such a boast rather ill-timed at best? How dare any man venture to assert that he possesses the intimacy and confidence of an animal so exclusive and so reserved? I doubt if Cardinal Wolsey, in the zenith of his pride and power, claimed the intimacy and confidence of the superb cat who sat in a cushioned armchair by his side, and reflected with mimic dignity the full-blown honors of the Lord High Chancellor of England. Agrippina, I am humbly aware, grants me neither her intimacy nor her confidence, but only her companionship, which I endeavor to receive modestly, and without flaunting my favors to the world. She is displeased and even downcast when I go out, and she greets my return with delight, thrusting her little gray head between the banisters the instant I open the house door, and waving a welcome in mid-air with one ridiculously small paw. Being but mortal, I am naturally pleased with these tokens of esteem, but I do not, on that account, go about with arrogant brow, and boast of my intimacy with Agrippina. I should be laughed at, if I did, by everybody who is privileged to possess and appreciate a cat.

As for curiosity, that vice which the Abbé Galiani held to be unknown to animals, but which the more astute Voltaire detected in every little dog that he saw peering out of the window of its master’s coach, it is the riding passion of the feline breast. A closet door left ajar, a box with half-closed lid, an open bureau drawer,—these are the objects that fill a cat with the liveliest interest and delight. Agrippina watches breathlessly the unfastening of a parcel, and tries to hasten matters by clutching actively at the string. When its contents are shown her, she examines them gravely, and then, with a sigh of relief, settles down to repose. The slightest noise disturbs and irritates her until she discovers its cause. If she hears a footstep in the hall, she runs out to see whose it is, and, like certain troublesome little people I have known, she dearly loves to go to the front door every time the bell is rung. From my window she surveys the street with tranquil scrutiny, and, if boys are playing below, she follows their games with a steady, scornful stare, very different from the wistful eagerness of a friendly dog, quivering to join in the sport. Sometimes the boys catch sight of her, and shout up rudely at her window; and I can never sufficiently admire Agrippina’s conduct upon these trying occasions, the well-bred composure with which she affects neither to see nor to hear them, nor to be aware that there are such objectionable creatures as children in the world. Sometimes, too, the terrier that lives next door comes out to sun himself in the street, and, beholding my cat sitting well out of reach, he dances madly up and down the pavement, barking with all his might, and rearing himself on his short hind legs, in a futile attempt to dislodge her. Then the spirit of evil enters Agrippina’s little heart. The window is open, and she creeps to the extreme edge of the stone sill, stretches herself at full length, peers down smilingly at the frenzied dog, dangles one paw enticingly in the air, and exerts herself with quiet malice to drive him to desperation. Her sense of humor is awakened by his frantic efforts, and by her own absolute security; and not until he is spent with exertion, and lies panting and exhausted on the bricks, does she arch her graceful back, stretch her limbs lazily in the sun, and with one light bound spring from the window to my desk. Wisely has Moncrif observed that a cat is not merely diverted by everything that moves, but is convinced that all nature is occupied exclusively with catering to her diversion.

There is a charming story told by M. Champfleury, who has written so much and so admirably about cats, of a poor hermit whose piety and asceticism were so great that in a vision he was permitted to behold his place in heaven, next to that of St. Gregory, the sovereign pontiff of Christendom. The hermit, who possessed nothing upon earth but a female cat, was abashed by the thought that in the next world he was destined to rank with so powerful a prince of the Church; and perhaps—for who knows the secret springs of spiritual pride?—he fancied that his self-inflicted poverty would win for him an even higher reward. Whereupon a second revelation made known to him that his detachment from the world was by no means so complete as he imagined, for that he loved and valued his cat, the sole companion of his solitude, more than St. Gregory loved and valued all his earthly possessions. The Pope on his throne was the truer ascetic of the two.

This little tale conveys to us, in addition to its excellent moral,—never more needed than at present,—a pleasing truth concerning the lovability of cats. While they have never attained, and never deserve to attain, the widespread and somewhat commonplace popularity of dogs, their fascination is a more potent and irresistible charm. He who yields himself to the sweet seductiveness of a cat is beguiled forever from the simple, honorable friendship of the more generous and open-hearted beast. The small domestic sphinx whose inscrutable eyes never soften with affection; the fetich animal that comes down to us from the far past, adored, hated, and feared,—a god in wise and silent Egypt, a plaything in old Rome, a hunted and unholy creature, suffering one long martyrdom throughout the half-seen, dimly-fathomed Middle Ages,—even now this lovely, uncanny pet is capable of inspiring mingled sentiments of horror and devotion. Those who are under its spell rejoice in their thralldom, and, like M. Champfleury’s hermit, grow strangely wedded to this mute, unsympathetic comradeship. Those who have inherited the old, half-fearful aversion render a still finer tribute to the cat’s native witchery and power. I have seen middle-aged women, of dignified and tranquil aspect, draw back with unfeigned dismay at the sight of Agrippina, a little ball of gray and yellow fur, curled up in peaceful slumber on the hearth rug. And this instinctive shrinking has nothing in common with the perfectly reasonable fear we entertain for a terrier snapping and snarling at our heels, or for a mastiff the size of a calf, which our friend assures us is as gentle as a baby, but which looks able and ready to tear us limb from limb. It may be ignominious to be afraid of dogs, but the emotion is one which will bear analysis and explanation; we know exactly what it is we fear; while the uneasiness with which many people behold a harmless and perfectly indifferent cat is a faint reflection of that superstitious terror which the nineteenth century still borrows occasionally from the ninth. We call it by a different name, and account for it on purely natural principles, in deference to progress; but the Mediæval peasant who beheld his cat steal out, like a gray shadow, on St. John’s Eve, to join in unholy rites, felt the same shuddering abhorrence which we witness and wonder at to-day. He simplified matters somewhat, and eased his troubled mind by killing the beast; for cats that ventured forth on the feast of St. John, or on Halloween, or on the second Wednesday in Lent, did so at their peril. Fires blazed for them in every village, and even quiet stay-at-homes were too often hunted from their chimney-corners to a cruel death. There is a receipt signed in 1575 by one Lucas Pommoreux,—abhorred forever be his name!—to whom has been paid the sum of a hundred sols parisis “for having supplied for three years all the cats required for the fire on St. John’s Day;” and be it remembered that the gracious child, afterwards Louis XIII., interceded with Henry IV. for the lives of these poor animals, sacrificed to wicked sport and an unreasoning terror.

Girt around with fear, and mystery, and subtle associations of evil, the cat comes down to us through the centuries; and from every land fresh traditions of sorcery claim it for their own. In Brittany is still whispered the dreadful tale of the cats that danced with sacrilegious glee around the crucifix until their king was slain; and in Sicily men know that if a black cat serves seven masters in turn he carries the soul of the seventh into hell. In Russia black cats become devils at the end of seven years, and in southern Europe they are merely serving their apprenticeship as witches. Norwegian folk-lore is rich in ghastly stories like that of the wealthy miller whose mill has been twice burned down on Whitsun night, and for whom a traveling tailor offers to keep watch. The tailor chalks a circle on the floor, writes the Lord’s prayer around it, and waits until midnight, when a troop of cats rush in, and hang a great pot of pitch over the fireplace. Again and again they try to overturn this pitch, but every time the tailor frightens them away; and when their leader endeavors stealthily to draw him outside of his magic circle, he cuts off her paw with his knife. Then they all fly howling into the night, and the next morning the miller sees with joy his mill standing whole and unharmed. But the miller’s wife cowers under the bedclothes, offering her left hand to the tailor, and hiding as best she can her right arm’s bleeding stump.

Finer even than this tale is the well-known story which “Monk” Lewis told to Shelley of a gentleman who, late one night, went to visit a friend living on the outskirts of a forest in east Germany. He lost his path, and, after wandering aimlessly for some time, beheld at last a light streaming from the windows of an old and ruined abbey. Looking in, he saw a procession of cats lowering into the grave a small coffin with a crown upon it. The sight filled him with horror, and, spurring his horse, he rode away as fast as he could, never stopping until he reached his destination, long after midnight. His friend was still awaiting him, and at once he recounted what had happened; whereupon a cat that lay sleeping by the fire sprang to its feet, cried out, “Then I am the King of the Cats!” and disappeared like a flash up the chimney.

For my part, I consider this the best cat story in all literature, full of suggestiveness and terror, yet picturesque withal, and leaving ample room in the mind for speculation. Why was not the heir apparent bidden to the royal funeral? Was there a disputed succession, and how are such points settled in the mysterious domain of cat-land? The notion that these animals gather in ghost-haunted churches and castles for their nocturnal revels is one common to all parts of Europe. We remember how the little maiden of the “Mountain Idyl” confides to Heine that the innocent-looking cat in the chimney-corner is really a witch, and that at midnight, when the storm is high, she steals away to the ruined keep, where the spirits of the dead wait spellbound for the word that shall waken them. In all scenes of impish revelry cats play a prominent part, although occasionally, by virtue of their dual natures, they serve as barriers against the powers of evil. There is the old story of the witch’s cat that was grateful to the good girl who gave it some ham to eat,—I may observe here, parenthetically, that I have never known a cat that would touch ham,—and there is the fine bit of Italian folk-lore about the servant maid who, with no other protector than a black cat, ventures to disturb a procession of ghosts on the dreadful Night of the Dead. “It is well for you that the cat lies in your arms,” the angry spirit says to her; “otherwise what I am, you also would be.” The last pale reflex of a universal tradition I found three years ago in London, where the bad behavior of the Westminster cats—proverbially the most dissolute and profligate specimens of their race—has given rise to the pleasant legend of a country house whither these rakish animals retire for nights of gay festivity, and whence they return in the early morning, jaded, repentant, and forlorn.

Of late years there has been a rapid and promising growth of what disaffected and alliterative critics call the “cat cult,” and poets and painters vie with one another in celebrating the charms of this long-neglected pet. Mr. M. H. Spielmann’s beautiful volume in praise of Madame Henriette Ronner and her pictures is a treasure upon which many an ardent lover of cats will cast wandering and wistful glances. It is impossible for even the most disciplined spirit not to yearn over these little furry darlings, these gentle, mischievous, lazy, irresistible things. As for Banjo, that dear and sentimental kitten, with his head on one side like Lydia Languish, and a decorous melancholy suffusing his splendid eyes, let any obdurate scorner of the race look at his loveliness and be converted. Mrs. Graham R. Tomson’s pretty anthology, “Concerning Cats,” is another step in the right direction; a dainty volume of selections from French and English verse, where we may find old favorites like Cowper’s “Retired Cat” and Calverly’s “Sad Memories,” graceful epitaphs on departed pussies, some delightful poems from Baudelaire, and three, no less delightful, from the pen of Mrs. Tomson herself, whose preface, or “foreword,” is enough to win for her at once the friendship and sympathy of the elect. The book, while it contains a good deal that might well have been omitted, is necessarily a small one; for poets, English poets especially, have just begun to sing the praises of the cat, as they have for generations sung the praises of the horse and dog. Nevertheless, all English literature, and all the literatures of every land, are full of charming allusions to this friendly animal,—allusions the brevity of which only enhances their value. Those two delicious lines of Herrick’s, for example,—

“And the brisk mouse may feast herself with crumbs,

Till that the green-eyed kitling comes,”—

are worth the whole of Wordsworth’s solemn poem, “The Kitten and the Falling Leaves.” What did Wordsworth know of the innate vanity, the affectation and coquetry, of kittenhood? He saw the little beast gamboling on the wall, and he fancied her as innocent as she looked,—as though any living creature could be as innocent as a kitten looks! With touching simplicity, he believed her all unconscious of the admiration she was exciting:—

“What would little Tabby care

For the plaudits of the crowd?

Over happy to be proud,

Over wealthy in the treasure

Of her own exceeding pleasure!”

Ah, the arrant knavery of that kitten! The tiny impostor, showing off her best tricks, and feigning to be occupied exclusively with her own infantile diversion! We can see her now, prancing and paddling after the leaves, and all the while peeping out of “the tail o’ her ee” at the serene poet and philosopher, and waving her naughty tail in glee over his confidence and condescension.

Heine’s pretty lines,—

“And close beside me the cat sits purring,

Warming her paws at the cheery gleam;

The flames keep flitting, and flicking, and whirring;

My mind is wrapped in a realm of dream,”—

find their English echo in the letter Shelley writes to Peacock, describing, half wistfully, the shrines of the Penates, “whose hymns are the purring of kittens, the hissing of kettles, the long talks over the past and dead, the laugh of children, the warm wind of summer filling the quiet house, and the pelting storm of winter struggling in vain for entrance.” How incomplete would these pictures be, how incomplete is any fireside sketch, without the purring kitten or drowsy cat!

“The queen I am o’ that cozy place;

As wi’ ilka paw I dicht my face,

I sing an’ purr wi’ mickle grace.”

This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home. Even the chilly desolation of a hotel may be rendered endurable by these affable and discriminating creatures; for one of them, as we know, once welcomed Sir Walter Scott, and softened for him the unfamiliar and unloved surroundings. “There are no dogs in the hotel where I lodge,” he writes to Abbotsford from London, “but a tolerably conversable cat who eats a mess of cream with me in the morning.” Of course it did, the wise and lynx-eyed beast! I make no doubt that, day after day and week after week, that cat had wandered superbly amid the common throng of lodgers, showing favor to none, and growing cynical and disillusioned by constant contact with a crowd. Then, one morning, it spied the noble, rugged face which neither man nor beast could look upon without loving, and forthwith tendered its allegiance on the spot. Only “tolerably conversable” it was, this reserved and town-bred animal; less urbane because less happy than the much-respected retainer at Abbotsford, Master Hinse of Hinsefeld, whom Sir Walter called his friend. “Ah, mon grand ami, vous avez tué mon autre grand ami!” he sighed, when the huge hound Nimrod ended poor Hinse’s placid career. And if Scott sometimes seems to disparage cats, as when he unkindly compares Oliver-le-Dain to one, in “Quentin Durward,” he atones for such indignity by the use of the little pronoun “who” when writing of the London puss. My own habit is to say “who” on similar occasions, and I am glad to have so excellent an authority.

It were an endless though a pleasant task to recount all that has been said, and well said, in praise of the cat by those who have rightly valued her companionship. M. Loti’s Moumoutte Blanche and Moumoutte Chinoise are well known and widely beloved, and M. Théophile Gautier’s charming pages are too familiar for comment. Who has not read with delight of the Black and White Dynasties that for so long ruled with gentle sway over his hearth and heart; of Madame Théophile, who thought the parrot was a green chicken; of Don Pierrot de Navarre, who deeply resented his master’s staying out late at night; of the graceful and fastidious Séraphita; the gluttonous Enjolras; the acute Bohemian, Gavroche; the courteous and well-mannered Eponine, who received M. Gautier’s guests in the drawing-room and dined at his table, taking each course as it was served, and restraining any rude distaste for food not to her fancy. “Her place was laid without a knife and fork, indeed, but with a glass, and she went regularly through dinner, from soup to dessert, awaiting her turn to be helped, and behaving with a quiet propriety which most children might imitate with advantage. At the first stroke of the bell she would appear, and when I came into the dining-room she would be at her post, upright on her chair, her forepaws on the edge of the tablecloth; and she would present her smooth forehead to be kissed, like a well-bred little girl who was affectionately polite to relatives and old people.”

I have read this pretty description several times to Agrippina, who is extremely wayward and capricious about her food, rejecting plaintively one day the viands which she has eaten with apparent enjoyment the day before. In fact, the difficulty of catering to her is so well understood by tradesmen that recently, when the housemaid carried her on an errand to the grocery,—Agrippina is very fond of these jaunts and of the admiration she excites,—the grocer, a fatherly man, with cats of his own, said briskly, “Is this the little lady who eats the biscuits?” and presented her on the spot with several choice varieties from which to choose. She is fastidious, too, about the way in which her meals are served; disliking any other dishes than her own, which are of blue-and-white china; requiring that her meat should be cut up fine and all the fat removed, and that her morning oatmeal should be well sugared and creamed. Milk she holds in scorn. My friends tell me sometimes that it is not the common custom of cats to receive so much attention at table, and that it is my fault Agrippina is so exacting; but such grumblers fail to take into consideration the marked individuality that is the charm of every kindly treated puss. She differs from her sisters as widely as one woman differs from another, and reveals varying characteristics of good and evil, varying powers of intelligence and adaptation. She scales splendid heights of virtue, and, unlike Sir Thomas Browne, is “singular in offenses.” Even those primitive instincts which we believe all animals hold in common are lost in acquired ethics and depravity. No heroism could surpass that of the London cat who crawled back five times under the stage of the burning theatre to rescue her litter of kittens, and, having carried four of them to safety, perished devotedly with the fifth. On the other hand, I know of a cat who drowned her three kittens in a water-butt, for no reason, apparently, save to be rid of them, and that she might lie in peace on the hearth rug,—a murder well planned, deliberate, and cruel.

“So Tiberius might have sat,

Had Tiberius been a cat.”

Only in her grace and beauty, her love of comfort, her dignity of bearing, her courteous reserve, and her independence of character does puss remain immutable and unchanged. These are the traits which win for her the warmest corner by the fire, and the unshaken regard of those who value her friendship and aspire to her affection. These are the traits so subtly suggested by Mrs. Tomson in a sonnet which every true lover of cats feels in his heart must have been addressed to his own particular pet:—

“Half gentle kindliness, and half disdain,

Thou comest to my call, serenely suave,

With humming speech and gracious gestures grave,

In salutation courtly and urbane;

Yet must I humble me thy grace to gain,

For wiles may win thee, but no arts enslave;

And nowhere gladly thou abidest, save

Where naught disturbs the concord of thy reign.

“Sphinx of my quiet hearth! who deign’st to dwell

Friend of my toil, companion of mine ease,

Thine is the lore of Ra and Rameses;

That men forget dost thou remember well,

Beholden still in blinking reveries,

With sombre sea-green gaze inscrutable.”

THE CHILDREN’S POETS.

Now and then I hear it affirmed by sad-voiced pessimists, whispering in the gloom, that people do not read as much poetry in our day as they did in our grandfathers’, that this is distinctly the era of prose, and that the poet is no longer, as Shelley claimed, the unacknowledged legislator of the world. Perhaps these cheerless statements are true, though it would be more agreeable not to believe them. Perhaps, with the exception of Browning, whom we study because he is difficult to understand, and of Shakespeare, whom we read because it is hard to content our souls without him, the poets have slipped away from our crowded lives, and are best known to us through the medium of their reviewers. We are always wandering from the paths of pleasure, and this may be one of our deviations. Yet what matters it, after all, while around us, on every side, in schoolrooms and nurseries, in quiet corners and by cheerful fires, the children are reading poetry?—reading it with a joyous enthusiasm and an absolute surrendering of spirit which we can all remember, but can never feel again. Well might Sainte-Beuve speak bravely of the clear, fine penetration peculiar to childhood. Well might he recall, with wistful sighs, “that instinctive knowledge which afterwards ripens into judgment, but of which the fresh lucidity remains forever unapproached.” He knew, as all critics have known, that it is only the child who responds swiftly, pliantly, and unreservedly to the allurements of the imagination. He knew that, when poetry is in question, it is better to feel than to think; and that with the growth of a guarded and disciplined intelligence, straining after the enjoyment which perfection in literary art can give, the first careless rapture of youth fades into a half-remembered dream.

If we are disposed to doubt the love that children bear to poetry, a love concerning which they exhibit a good deal of reticence, let us consider only the alacrity with which they study, for their own delight, the poems that please them best. How should we fare, I wonder, if tried by a similar test? How should we like to sit down and commit to memory Tennyson’s “œnone,” or “Locksley Hall,” or Byron’s apostrophe to the Ocean, or the battle scene in “Marmion”? Yet I have known children to whom every word of these and many other poems was as familiar as the alphabet; and a great deal more familiar—thank Heaven!—than the multiplication table, or the capitals of the United States. A rightly constituted child may find the paths of knowledge hopelessly barred by a single page of geography, or by a single sum in fractions; but he will range at pleasure through the paths of poetry, having the open sesame to every door. Sir Walter Scott, who was essentially a rightly constituted child, did not even wait for a formal introduction to his letters, but managed to learn the ballad of Hardy-knute before he knew how to read, and went shouting it around the house, warming his baby blood to fighting-point, and training himself in very infancy to voice the splendors of his manhood. He remembered this ballad, too, and loved it all his life, reciting it once with vast enthusiasm to Lord Byron, whose own unhappy childhood had been softened and vivified by the same innocent delights.

In truth, the most charming thing about youth is the tenacity of its impressions. If we had the time and courage to study a dozen verses to-day, we should probably forget eleven of them in a fortnight; but the poetry we learned as children remains, for the most part, indelibly fixed in our memories, and constitutes a little Golden Treasury of our own, more dear and valuable to us than any other collection, because it contains only our chosen favorites, and is always within the reach of reference. Once, when I was very young, I asked a girl companion—well known now in the world of literature—if she did not grow weary waiting for trains, which were always late, at the suburban station where she went to school. “Oh, no,” was the cheerful reply. “If I have no book, and there is no one here to talk with, I walk up and down the platform and think over the poetry that I know.” Admirable occupation for an idle minute! Even the tedium of railway traveling loses half its horrors if one can withdraw at pleasure into the society of the poets and, soothed by their gentle and harmonious voices, forget the irksome recurrence of familiar things.

It has been often demonstrated, and as often forgotten, that children do not need to have poetry written down to their intellectual level, and do not love to see the stately Muse ostentatiously bending to their ear. In the matter of prose, it seems necessary for them to have a literature of their own, over which they linger willingly for a little while, as though in the sunny antechamber of a king. But in the golden palace of the poets there is no period of probation, there is no enforced attendance upon petty things. The clear-eyed children go straight to the heart of the mystery, and recognize in the music of words, in the enduring charm of metrical quality, an element of never-ending delight. When to this simple sensuous pleasure is added the enchantment of poetic images, lovely and veiled and dimly understood, then the delight grows sweeter and keener, the child’s soul flowers into a conscious love of poetry, and one lifelong source of happiness is gained. But it is never through infantine or juvenile verses that the end is reached. There is no poet dearer to the young than Tennyson, and it was not the least of his joys to know that all over the English-speaking world children were tuning their hearts to the music of his lines, were dreaming vaguely and rapturously over the beauty he revealed. Therefore the insult seemed greater and more wanton when this beloved idol of our nurseries deliberately offered to his eager audience such anxiously babyish verses as those about Minnie and Winnie, and the little city maiden who goes straying among the flowers. Is there in Christendom a child who wants to be told by one of the greatest of poets that

“Minnie and Winnie

Slept in a shell;”

that the shell was pink within and silver without; and that

“Sounds of the great sea

Wandered about.

“Two bright stars

Peep’d into the shell.

‘What are they dreaming of?

Who can tell?’

“Started a green linnet

Out of the croft;

‘Wake, little ladies,

The sun is aloft.’”

It is not in these tones that poetry speaks to the childish soul, though it is too often in this fashion that the poet strives to adjust himself to what he thinks is the childish standard. He lowers his sublime head from the stars, and pipes with painstaking flatness on a little reed, while the children wander far away, and listen breathlessly to older and dreamier strains.

“She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces thro’ the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She look’d down to Camelot,

Out flew the web and floated wide;

The mirror crack’d from side to side;

‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried

The Lady of Shalott.”

Here is the mystic note that childhood loves, and here, too, is the sweet constraint of linked rhymes that makes music for its ears. How many of us can remember well our early joy in this poem, which was but as another and more exquisite fairy tale, ranking fitly with Andersen’s “Little Mermaid,” and “Undine,” and all sad stories of unhappy lives! And who shall forget the sombre passion of “Oriana,” of those wailing verses that rang through our little hearts like the shrill sobbing of winter storms, of that strange tragedy that oppressed us more with fear than pity!

“When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,

And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow,

Oriana,

Alone I wander to and fro,

Oriana.”

If any one be inclined to think that children must understand poetry in order to appreciate and enjoy it, that one enchanted line,—

“When the long dun wolds are ribb’d with snow,”—

should be sufficient to undeceive him forever. The spell of those finely chosen words lies in the shadowy and half-seen picture they convey,—a picture with indistinct outlines, as of an unknown land, where the desolate spirit wanders moaning in the gloom. The whole poem is inexpressibly alluring to an imaginative child, and its atmosphere of bleak despondency darkens suddenly into horror at the breaking off of the last line from visions of the grave and of peaceful death,—

“I hear the roaring of the sea,

Oriana.”

The same grace of indistinctness, though linked with a gentler mood and with a softer music, makes the lullaby in “The Princess” a lasting delight to children, while the pretty cradle-song in “Sea Dreams,” beginning,—

“What does little birdie say

In her nest at peep of day?”

has never won their hearts. Its motive is too apparent, its nursery flavor too pronounced. It has none of the condescension of “Minnie and Winnie,” and grown people can read it with pleasure; but a simple statement of obvious truths, or a simple line of obvious reasoning, however dexterously narrated in prose or verse, has not the art to hold a youthful soul in thrall.

If it be a matter of interest to know what poets are most dear to the children around us, to the ordinary “apple-eating” little boys and girls for whom we are hardly brave enough to predict a shining future, it is delightful to be told by favorite authors and by well-loved men of letters what poets first bewitched their ardent infant minds. It is especially pleasant to have Mr. Andrew Lang admit us a little way into his confidence, and confess to us that he disliked “Tam O’Shanter” when his father read it aloud to him; preferring, very sensibly, “to take my warlocks and bogies with great seriousness.” Of course he did, and the sympathies of all children are with him in his choice. The ghastly details of that witches’ Sabbath are far beyond a child’s limited knowledge of demonology and the Scotch dialect. Tam’s escape and Maggie’s final catastrophe seem like insults offered to the powers of darkness; only the humor of the situation is apparent, and humor is seldom, to the childish mind, a desirable element of poetry. Not all the spirit of Caldecott’s illustrations can make “John Gilpin” a real favorite in our nurseries, while “The Jackdaw of Rheims” is popular simply because children, being proof against cynicism, accept the story as it is told, with much misplaced sympathy for the thievish bird, and many secret rejoicings over his restoration to grace and feathers. As for “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” its humor is swallowed up in tragedy, and the terror of what is to come helps little readers over such sad stumbling-blocks as

“So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,

Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon!”

lines which are every whit as painful to their ears as to ours. I have often wondered how the infant Southeys and Coleridges, that bright-eyed group of alert and charming children, all afire with romantic impulses, received “The Cataract of Lodore,” when papa Southey condescended to read it in the schoolroom. What well-bred efforts to appear pleased and grateful! What secret repulsion to a senseless clatter of words, as remote from the silvery sweetness, the cadenced music of falling waters, as from the unalterable requirements of poetic art!

“And moreover he tasked me

To tell him in rhyme.”

Ah! unwise little son, to whose rash request generations of children have owed the presence, in readers and elocution-books and volumes of “Select Lyrics for the Nursery,” of those hated and hateful verses.

“Poetry came to me with Sir Walter Scott,” says Mr. Lang; with “Marmion,” and the “Last Minstrel,” and “The Lady of the Lake,” read “for the twentieth time,” and ever with fresh delight. Poetry came to Scott with Shakespeare, studied rapturously by firelight in his mother’s dressing-room, when all the household thought him fast asleep, and with Pope’s translation of the Iliad, that royal road over which the Muse has stepped, smiling, into many a boyish heart. Poetry came to Pope—poor little lame lad—with Spenser’s “Faerie Queene;” with the brave adventures of strong, valiant knights, who go forth, unblemished and unfrighted, to do battle with dragons and “Paynims cruel.” And so the links of the magic chain are woven, and child hands down to child the spell that holds the centuries together. I cannot bear to hear the unkind things which even the most tolerant of critics are wont to say about Pope’s “Iliad,” remembering as I do how many boys have received from its pages their first poetic stimulus, their first awakening to noble things. What a charming picture we have of Coleridge, a feeble, petulant child tossing with fever on his little bed, and of his brother Francis stealing up, in defiance of all orders, to sit by his side and read him Pope’s translation of Homer. The bond that drew these boys together was forged in such breathless moments and in such mutual pleasures; for Francis, the handsome, spirited sailor lad, who climbed trees, and robbed orchards, and led all dangerous sports, had little in common with his small, silent, precocious brother. “Frank had a violent love of beating me,” muses Coleridge, in a tone of mild complaint (and no wonder, we think, for a more beatable child than Samuel Taylor it would have been hard to find). “But whenever that was superseded by any humor or circumstance, he was very fond of me, and used to regard me with a strange mixture of admiration and contempt.” More contempt than admiration, probably; yet was all resentment forgotten, and all unkindness at an end, while one boy read to the other the story of Hector and Patroclus, and of great Ajax, with sorrow in his heart, pacing round his dead comrade, as a tawny lioness paces round her young when she sees the hunters coming through the woods. As a companion picture to this we have little Dante Gabriel Rossetti playing Othello in the nursery, and so carried away by the passionate impulse of these lines,—

“In Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

I took by the throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him, thus,”—

that he struck himself fiercely on the breast with an iron chisel, and fainted under the blow. We can hardly believe that Shakespeare is beyond the mental grasp of childhood, when Scott, at seven, crept out of bed on winter nights to read “King Henry IV.,” and Rossetti, at nine, was overwhelmed by the agony of Othello’s remorse.

On the other hand, there are writers, and very brilliant writers, too, whose early lives appear to have been undisturbed by such keenly imaginative pastimes, and for whom there are no well-loved and familiar figures illumined forever in “that bright, clear, undying light that borders the edge of the oblivion of infancy.” Count Tolstoi confesses himself to have been half hurt, half puzzled, by his fellow-students at the University of Moscow, who seemed to him so coarse and inelegant, and yet who had read and enjoyed so much. “Pushkin and Zhukovsky were literature to them,” he says wistfully, “and not, as to me, little books in yellow bindings which I had studied as a child.” But how, one wonders, could Pushkin have remained merely a “little book in yellow binding” to any boy who had had the happiness of studying him as a child? Pushkin is the Russian Byron, and embodies in his poems the same spirit of restless discontent, of dejected languor, of passionate revolt; not revolt against the Tsar, which is a limited and individual judgment, but revolt against the bitter penalties of life, which is a sentiment common to the youth of all nations and of every age. Yet there are Englishmen who have no word save that of scorn for Byron, and I feel uncertain whether such critics ever enjoyed the privilege of being boys at all. If to George Meredith’s composed and complacent mind there strays any wanton recollection of young, impetuous days, how can he write with pen of gall these worse than churlish lines on Manfred?—

“Projected from the bilious Childe,

This clatterjaw his foot could set

On Alps, without a breast beguiled

To glow in shedding rascal sweat.

Somewhere about his grinder teeth

He mouthed of thoughts that grilled beneath,

And summoned Nature to her feud

With bile and buskin attitude.”

There is more of this pretty poem, but I have quoted as much as my own irascibility can bear. I, at least, have been a child, and have spent some of my childhood’s happiest hours with Manfred on the Alps; and have with him beheld

“the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs

In dizziness of distance,”

and have believed with all a child’s sincerity in his remorseful gloom:—

“for I have ceased

To justify my deeds unto myself—

The last infirmity of evil.”

Every line is inexpressibly dear to me now, recalling, as it does, the time “when I was in my father’s house, and my path ran down with butter and honey.” Once more I see the big, bare, old-fashioned parlor, to dust which was my daily task, my dear mother having striven long and vainly to teach my idle little hands some useful housewifely accomplishment. In one corner stood a console-table, with chilly Parian ornaments on top, and underneath a pile of heavy books; Wordsworth, Moore, the poems of Frances Sargent Osgood,—no lack of variety here,—“The Lady of the Lake,” and Byron in an embossed brown binding, with closely printed double columns, well calculated to dim the keenest sight in Christendom. Not that mysterious and malignant mountain which rose frowning from the sea, and drew all ships shattered to its feet, was more irresistible in its attraction than this brown, bulky Byron. I could not pass it by! My dusting never got beyond the table where it lay; but sitting crumpled on the floor, with the enchanted volume on my lap, I speedily forgot everything in the world save only the wandering Childe,

“Who ne in virtue’s ways did take delight,”

or “The Corsair,” or “Mazeppa,” or “Manfred,” best loved of that dark group. Perhaps Byron is not considered wholesome reading for little girls in these careful days when expurgated editions of “The Vicar of Wakefield” and “Paul and Virginia” find favor in our nurseries. On this score I have no defense to offer, and I am not proposing the poet as a safe text-book for early youth; but having never been told that there was such a thing as forbidden fruit in literature, I was spared at least that alert curiosity concerning it which is one of the most unpleasant results of our present guarded system. Moreover, we have Goethe’s word for it that Byron is not as immoral as the newspapers, and certainly he is more agreeable reading. I do sincerely believe that if part of his attraction for the young lies in what Mr. Pater calls “the grieved dejection, the endless regret,” which to the undisciplined soul sounds like the true murmur of life, a better part lies in his large grasp of nature,—not nature in her minute and lovely detail, but in her vast outlines, her salient features, her solemn majesty and strength. Crags and misty mountain tops, storm-swept skies and the blue bosom of the restless deep,—these are the aspects of nature that childhood prizes, and loves to hear described in vigorous verse. The pink-tipped daisy, the yellow primrose, and the freckled nest-eggs

“Hatching in the hawthorn-tree”

belong to a late stage of development. Eugénie de Guérin, who recognized as clearly as Sainte-Beuve the “fine penetration” peculiar to children, and who regarded them ever with half-wistful, half-wondering delight, has written some very charming suggestions about the kind of poetry, “pure, fresh, joyous, and delicate,” which she considered proper food for these highly idealized little people,—“angels upon earth.” The only discouraging part of her pretty pleading is her frank admission that—in French literature, at least—there is no such poetry as she describes, which shows how hard it is to conciliate an exclusive theory of excellence. She endeavored sincerely, in her “Infantines,” to remedy this defect, to “speak to childhood in its own language;” and her verses on “Joujou, the Angel of the Playthings,” are quaintly conceived and full of gentle fancies. No child is strongly moved, or taught the enduring delight of song, by such lines as these, but most children will take a genuine pleasure in the baby angel who played with little Abel under the myrtle-trees, who made the first doll and blew the first bubble, and who finds a friend in every tiny boy and girl born into this big gray world. Strange to say, he has his English counterpart in Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Unseen Playmate,” that shadowy companion whose home is the cave dug by childish hands, and who is ready to share all games in the most engaging spirit of accommodation.

“’Tis he, when you play with your soldiers of tin,

That sides with the Frenchmen, and never can win;”

a touch of combative veracity which brings us down at once from Mademoiselle de Guérin’s fancy flights to the real playground, where real children, very faintly resembling “angels upon earth,” are busy with mimic warfare. Mr. Stevenson is one of the few poets whose verses, written especially for the nursery, have found their way straight into little hearts. His charming style, his quick, keen sympathy, and the ease with which he enters into that brilliant world of imagination wherein children habitually dwell, make him their natural friend and minstrel. If some of the rhymes in “A Child’s Garden of Verses” seem a trifle bald and babyish, even these are guiltless of condescension; while others, like “Travel,” “Shadow March,” and “The Land of Story-Books,” are instinct with poetic life. I can only regret that a picture so faultless in detail as “Shadow March,” where we see the crawling darkness peer through the window pane, and hear the beating of the little boy’s heart as he creeps fearfully up the stair, should be marred at its close by a single line of false imagery:—

“All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,

With the black night overhead.”

So fine an artist as Mr. Stevenson must know that shadows do not tramp, and that the recurrence of a short, vigorous word which tells so admirably in Scott’s “William and Helen,” and wherever the effect of sound combined with motion is to be conveyed, is sadly out of place in describing the ghostly things that glide with horrible noiselessness at the feet of the frightened lad. Children, moreover, are keenly alive to the value and the suggestiveness of terms. A little eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance, who was reciting “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” stopped short at these lines,—

“Adown the glen rode armed men,

Their trampling sounded nearer,”—

and called out excitedly, “Don’t you hear the horses?” She, at least, heard them as if with the swift apprehension of fear, heard them loud above the sounds of winds and waters, and rendered her unconscious tribute of praise to the sympathetic selection of words.

There is, as we know, a great deal of poetry written every year for childish readers. Some of it makes its appearance in Christmas books, which are so beautifully bound and illustrated that the little foolish, feeble verses are forgiven, and in fact forgotten, ignored altogether amid more important accessories. Better poems than these are published in children’s periodicals, where they form a notable feature, and are, I dare say, read by the young people whose tastes are catered to in this fashion. Those of us who are familiar with these periodicals—either weeklies or monthlies—are well aware that the verses they offer may be easily divided into three classes. First, mere rhymes and jingles, intended for very little readers, and with which it would be simple churlishness to quarrel. They do not aspire to be poetry, they are sometimes very amusing, and they have an easy swing that is pleasant alike to young ears and old. It must be a hard heart that does not sympathize with the unlucky and ill-mated gnome who was

“full of fun and frolic,

But his wife was melancholic;”

or with the small damsel in pigtail and pinafore who comforts herself at the piano with this engaging but dubious maxim:—

“Practicing is good for a good little girl;

It makes her nose straight, and it makes her hair curl.”

The second kind of verse appears to be written solely for the sake of the accompanying illustration, and is often the work of the illustrator, who is more at home with his pencil than his pen. Occasionally it is comic, occasionally sentimental or descriptive; for the most part it is something in this style:—

THE ELF AND THE BUMBLE BEE.

“Oh, bumble bee!

Bumble bee!

Don’t fly so near!

Or you will tumble me

Over, I fear.”

“Oh, funny elf!

Funny elf!

Don’t be alarmed!

I am looking for honey, elf;

You sha’n’t be harmed.”

“Then tarry,

Oh, tarry, bee!

Fill up your sack;

And carry, oh, carry me

Home on your back.”[^[1]]

[1]. Oliver Herford in St. Nicholas.

Now what child will read more than once these empty little verses (very prettily illustrated) when it is in his power to turn back to other sprites that sing in different strains,—to the fairy who wanders

“Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough briar,”

seeking pearl eardrops for the cowslips’ ears; or to that softer shape, the music of whose song, once heard, haunts us forever:—

“Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.”

These are the sweet, mysterious echoes of true fairyland, where Shakespeare and little children wander at their will.

Poems of the third class are intended for growing girls and boys, and aspire to be considered literature. They are well written, as a rule, with a smooth fluency that seems to be the distinguishing gift of our minor verse-makers, who, even when they have least to say, say it with unbroken sweetness and grace. This pretty, easy insignificance is much better adapted to adult readers, who demand little of poets beyond brevity, than to children, who love large issues, real passions, fine emotions, and an heroic attitude in life. Pleasant thoughts couched in pleasant language, trivial details, and photographic bits of description make no lasting appeal to the expansive imagination of a child. Analysis is wasted upon him altogether, because he sees things swiftly, and sees them as a whole. He may disregard fine shading and minute merits, but there are no boundaries to his wandering vision. “Small sciences are the labors of our manhood, but the round universe is the plaything of the boy.”

The painful lack of distinction in most of the poetry prepared especially for him chills his fine ardor and dulls his imagination. Subtle verses about moods and tempers, calculated to make healthy little readers emulate Miss Martineau’s peevish self-sympathy; melancholy verses about young children who suffer poverty and disaster; weird and unintelligible verses, with all Poe’s indistinctness and none of his music; commonplace verses about bootblacks and newsboys; descriptive verses about snowstorms and April showers; pious verses about infant prigs;—verses of every kind, all on the same level of agreeable mediocrity, and all warranted to be so harmless that a baby could hear them without blushing. Why, the child who reads “Young Lochinvar” is richer in that one good and gallant poem than the child who has all these modern substitutes heaped yearly at his foolish feet.

For the question at issue is not what kind of poetry is wholesome for children, but what kind of poetry do children love. In nineteen cases out of twenty, that which they love is good for them, and they can guide themselves a great deal better than we can hope to guide them. I once asked a friend who had spent many years in teaching little girls and boys whether her small pupils, when left to their own discretion, ever chose any of the pretty, trivial verses out of new books and magazines for study and recitation. She answered, Never. They turned instinctively to the same old favorites she had been listening to so long; to the same familiar poems that their fathers and mothers had probably studied and recited before them. “Hohenlinden,” “Glenara,” “Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” “Young Lochinvar,” “Rosabelle,” “To Lucasta, on going to the Wars,” the lullaby from “The Princess,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” “Annabel Lee,” Longfellow’s translation of “The Castle by the Sea,” and “The Skeleton in Armor,”—these are the themes of which children never weary; these are the songs that are sung forever in their secret Paradise of Delights. The little volumes containing such tried and proven friends grow shabby with much handling; and I have seen them marked all over with mysterious crosses and dots and stars, each of which denoted the exact degree of affection which the child bore to the poem thus honored and approved. I can fancy Mr. Lang’s “Blue Poetry Book” fairly covered with such badges of distinction; for never before has any selection of poems appealed so clearly and insistently to childish tastes and hearts. When I turn over its pages, I feel as if the children of England must have brought their favorite songs to Mr. Lang, and prayed, each one, that his own darling might be admitted,—as if they must have forced his choice into their chosen channels. Its only rival in the field, Palgrave’s “Children’s Treasury of English Song,” is edited with such nice discrimination, such critical reserve, that it is well-nigh flawless,—a triumph of delicacy and good taste. But much that childhood loves is necessarily excluded from a volume so small and so carefully considered. The older poets, it is true, are generously treated,—Herrick, especially, makes a braver show than he does in Mr. Lang’s collection; and there are plenty of beautiful ballads, some of which, like “The Lass of Lochroyan,” we miss sorely from the pages of the “Blue Poetry Book.” On the other hand, where, in Mr. Palgrave’s “Treasury,” are those lovely snatches of song familiar to our earliest years, and which we welcome individually with a thrill of pleasure, as Mr. Lang shows them to us once more?—“Rose Aylmer,” “County Guy,” “Proud Maisie,” “How Sleep the Brave,” “Nora’s Vow,”—the delight of my own childhood,—the pathetic “Farewell,”—

“It was a’ for our rightfu’ King,

We left fair Scotland’s strand;

It was a’ for our rightfu’ King,

We e’er saw Irish land,”—

and Hood’s silvery little verses beginning,—

“A lake and a fairy boat

To sail in the moonlight clear,—

And merrily we would float

From the dragons that watch us here!”

All these and many more are gathered safely into this charming volume. Nothing we long to see appears to be left out, except, indeed, Waller’s “Go, Lovely Rose,” and Herrick’s “Night Piece,” both of them very serious omissions. It seems strange to find seven of Edgar Poe’s poems in a collection which excludes the “Night Piece,” so true a favorite with all girl children, and a favorite that, once rightfully established, can never be thrust from our affections. As for Praed’s “Red Fisherman,” Mr. Lang has somewhere recorded his liking for this “sombre” tale, which, I think, embodies everything that a child ought not to love. It is the only poem in the book that I wish elsewhere; but perhaps this is a perverse prejudice on my part. There may be little readers to whom its savage cynicism and gloom carry a pleasing terror, like that which oppressed my infant soul as I lingered with Goodman Brown in the awful witch-haunted forest where Hawthorne has shown us the triumph of evil things. “It is his excursions into the unknown world which the child enjoys,” says Mr. Lang; and how shall we set a limit to his wanderings! He journeys far with careless, secure footsteps; and for him the stars sing in their spheres, and fairies dance in the moonlight, and the hoarse clashing of arms rings bravely from hard-won fields, and lovers fly together under the stormy skies. He rides with Lochinvar, and sails with Sir Patrick Spens into the northern seas, and chases the red deer with Allen-a-Dale, and stands by Marmion’s side in the thick of the ghastly fray. He has given his heart to Helen of Troy, and to the Maid of Saragossa, and to the pale child who met her death on the cruel Gordon spears, and to the lady with yellow hair who knelt moaning by Barthram’s bier. His friends are bold Robin Hood, and Lancelot du Lac, and the white-plumed Henry of Navarre, and the princely scapegrace who robbed the robbers to make “laughter for a month, and a good jest forever.” A lordly company these, and seldom to be found in the gray walks of middle age. Robin Hood dwells not on the Stock Exchange, and Prince Hal dare not show his laughing face before societies for leveling thrones and reorganizing the universe. We adults pass our days, alas, in the Town of Stupidity,—abhorred of Bunyan’s soul,—and our companions are Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. Despondency, and Mr. Want-wit, still scrubbing his Ethiopian, and Mr. Feeble-mind, and the “deplorable young woman named Dull.” But it is better to be young, and to see the golden light of romance in the skies, and to kiss the white feet of Helen, as she stands like a star on the battlements. It is better to follow Hector to the fight, and Guinevere to the sad cloisters of Almesbury, and the Ancient Mariner to that silent sea where the deathfires gleam by night. Even to us who have made these magic voyages in our childhood there comes straying, at times, a pale reflection of that early radiance, a faint, sweet echo of that early song. Then the streets of the Town of Stupidity grow soft to tread, and Falstaff’s great laugh frightens Mr. Despondency into a shadow. Then Madeline smiles on us under the wintry moonlight, and Porphyro steals by with strange sweets heaped in baskets of wreathed silver. Then we know that with the poets there is perpetual youth, and that for us, as for the child dreaming in the firelight, the shining casements open upon fairyland.

THE PRAISES OF WAR.

When the world was younger and perhaps merrier, when people lived more and thought less, and when the curious subtleties of an advanced civilization had not yet turned men’s heads with conceit of their own enlightening progress from simple to serious things, poets had two recognized sources of inspiration, which were sufficient for themselves and for their unexacting audiences. They sang of love and they sang of war, of fair women and of brave men, of keen youthful passions and of the dear delights of battle. Sweet Rosamonde lingers “in Woodstocke bower,” and Sir Cauline wrestles with the Eldridge knighte; Annie of Lochroyan sails over the roughening seas, and Lord Percy rides gayly to the Cheviot hills with fifteen hundred bowmen at his back. It did not occur to the thick-headed generation who first listened to the ballad of “Chevy Chace” to hint that the game was hardly worth the candle, or that poaching on a large scale was as reprehensible ethically as poaching on a little one. This sort of insight was left for the nineteenth-century philosopher, and the nineteenth-century moralist. In earlier, easier days, the last thing that a poet troubled himself about was a defensible motive for the battle in which his soul exulted. His business was to describe the fighting, not to justify the fight, which would have been a task of pure supererogation in that truculent age. Fancy trying to justify Kinmont Willie or Johnie of Braedislee, instead of counting the hard knocks they give and the stout men they lay low!

“Johnie’s set his back against an aik,

His foot against a stane;

And he has slain the Seven Foresters,—

He has slain them a’ but ane.”

The last echo of this purely irresponsible spirit may be found in the “War Song of Dinas Vawr,” where Peacock, always three hundred years behind his time, sings of slaughter with a bellicose cheerfulness which only his admirable versification can excuse:—

“The mountain sheep are sweeter,

But the valley sheep are fatter;

We therefore deemed it meeter

To carry off the latter.

We made an expedition;

We met an host and quelled it;

We forced a strong position,

And killed the men who held it.”

There is not even a lack of food at home—the old traditional dinner of spurs—to warrant this foray. There is no hint of necessity for the harriers, or consideration for the harried.

“We brought away from battle,

And much their land bemoaned them,

Two thousand head of cattle,

And the head of him who owned them:

Ednyfed, King of Dyfed,

His head was borne before us;

His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,

And his overthrow our chorus.”

It is impossible to censure a deed so irresistibly narrated; but if the lines were a hair-breadth less mellifluous, I think we should call this a very barbarous method of campaigning.

When the old warlike spirit was dying out of English verse, when poets had begun to meditate and moralize, to interpret nature and to counsel man, the good gods gave to England, as a link with the days that were dead, Sir Walter Scott, who sang, as no Briton before or since has ever sung, of battlefields and the hoarse clashing of arms, of brave deeds and midnight perils, of the outlaw riding by Brignall banks, and the trooper shaking his silken bridle reins upon the river shore:—

“Adieu for evermore,

My love!

And adieu for evermore.”

These are not precisely the themes which enjoy unshaken popularity to-day,—“the poet of battles fares ill in modern England,” says Sir Francis Doyle,—and as a consequence there are many people who speak slightingly of Scott’s poetry, and who appear to claim for themselves some inscrutable superiority by so doing. They give you to understand, without putting it too coarsely into words, that they are beyond that sort of thing, but that they liked it very well as children, and are pleased if you enjoy it still. There is even a class of unfortunates who, through no apparent fault of their own, have ceased to take delight in Scott’s novels, and who manifest a curious indignation because the characters in them go ahead and do things, instead of thinking and talking about them, which is the present approved fashion of evolving fiction. Why, what time have the good people in “Quentin Durward” for speculation and chatter? The rush of events carries them irresistibly into action. They plot, and fight, and run away, and scour the country, and meet with so many adventures, and perform so many brave and cruel deeds, that they have no chance for introspection and the joys of analysis. Naturally, those writers who pride themselves upon making a story out of nothing, and who are more concerned with excluding material than with telling their tales, have scant liking for Sir Walter, who thought little and prated not at all about the “art of fiction,” but used the subjects which came to hand with the instinctive and unhesitating skill of a great artist. The battles in “Quentin Durward” and “Old Mortality” are, I think, as fine in their way as the battle of Flodden; and Flodden, says Mr. Lang, is the finest fight on record,—“better even than the stand of Aias by the ships in the Iliad, better than the slaying of the Wooers in the Odyssey.”

The ability to carry us whither he would, to show us whatever he pleased, and to stir our hearts’ blood with the story of

“old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago,”

was the especial gift of Scott,—of the man whose sympathies were as deep as life itself, whose outlook was as wide as the broad bosom of the earth he trod on. He believed in action, and he delighted in describing it. “The thinker’s voluntary death in life” was not, for him, the power that moves the world, but rather deeds,—deeds that make history and that sing themselves forever. He honestly felt himself to be a much smaller man than Wellington. He stood abashed in the presence of the soldier who had led large issues and controlled the fate of nations. He would have been sincerely amused to learn from “Robert Elsmere”—what a delicious thing it is to contemplate Sir Walter reading “Robert Elsmere”!—that “the decisive events of the world take place in the intellect.” The decisive events of the world, Scott held to take place in the field of action; on the plains of Marathon and Waterloo rather than in the brain tissues of William Godwin. He knew what befell Athens when she could put forward no surer defense against Philip of Macedon than the most brilliant orations ever written in praise of freedom. It was better, he probably thought, to argue as the English did, “in platoons.” The schoolboy who fought with the heroic “Green-Breeks” in the streets of Edinburgh; the student who led the Tory youths in their gallant struggle with the riotous Irishmen, and drove them with stout cudgeling out of the theatre they had disgraced; the man who, broken in health and spirit, was yet blithe and ready to back his quarrel with Gourgaud by giving that gentleman any satisfaction he desired, was consistent throughout with the simple principles of a bygone generation. “It is clear to me,” he writes in his journal, “that what is least forgiven in a man of any mark or likelihood is want of that article blackguardly called pluck. All the fine qualities of genius cannot make amends for it. We are told the genius of poets especially is irreconcilable with this species of grenadier accomplishment. If so, quel chien de génie!”

Quel chien de génie indeed, and far beyond the compass of Scott, who, amid the growing sordidness and seriousness of an industrial and discontented age, struck a single resonant note that rings in our hearts to-day like the echo of good and joyous things:—

“Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!

To all the sensual world proclaim,

One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without a name.”

The same sentiments are put, it may be remembered, into admirable prose when Graham of Claverhouse expounds to Henry Morton his views on living and dying. At present, Philosophy and Philanthropy between them are hustling poor Glory into a small corner of the field. Even to the soldier, we are told, it should be a secondary consideration, or perhaps no consideration at all, his sense of duty being a sufficient stay. But Scott, like Homer, held somewhat different views, and absolutely declined to let “that jade Duty” have everything her own way. It is the plain duty of Blount and Eustace to stay by Clare’s side and guard her as they were bidden, instead of which they rush off, with Sir Walter’s tacit approbation, to the fray.

“No longer Blount the view could bear:

‘By heaven and all its saints! I swear

I will not see it lost!

Fitz-Eustace, you with Lady Clare

May bid your beads and patter prayer,—

I gallop to the host.’”

It was this cheerful acknowledgment of human nature as a large factor in life which gave to Scott his genial sympathy with brave, imperfect men; which enabled him to draw with true and kindly art such soldiers as Le Balafré, and Dugald Dalgetty, and William of Deloraine. Le Balafré, indeed, with his thick-headed loyalty, his conceit of his own wisdom, his unswerving, almost unconscious courage, his readiness to risk his neck for a bride, and his reluctance to marry her, is every whit as veracious as if he were the over-analyzed child of realism, instead of one of the many minor characters thrust with wanton prodigality into the pages of a romantic novel.

Alone among modern poets, Scott sings Homerically of strife. Others have caught the note, but none have upheld it with such sustained force, such clear and joyous resonance. Macaulay has fire and spirit, but he is always too rhetorical, too declamatory, for real emotion. He stirs brave hearts, it is true, and the finest tribute to his eloquence was paid by Mrs. Browning, who said she could not read the “Lays” lying down; they drew her irresistibly to her feet. But when Macaulay sings of Lake Regillus, I do not see the battle swim before my eyes. I see—whether I want to or not—a platform, and the poet’s own beloved schoolboy declaiming with appropriate gestures those glowing and vigorous lines. When Scott sings of Flodden, I stand wraith-like in the thickest of the fray. I know how the Scottish ranks waver and reel before the charge of Stanley’s men, how Tunstall’s stainless banner sweeps the field, and how, in the gathering gloom,

“The stubborn spearmen still made good

Their dark impenetrable wood,

Each stepping where his comrade stood,

The instant that he fell.”

There is none of this noble simplicity in the somewhat dramatic ardor of Horatius, or in the pharisaical flavor, inevitable perhaps, but not the less depressing, of Naseby and Ivry, which read a little like old Kaiser William’s war dispatches turned into verse. Better a thousand times are the splendid swing, the captivating enthusiasm of Drayton’s “Agincourt,” which hardly a muck-worm could hear unstirred. Reading it, we are as keen for battle as were King Harry’s soldiers straining at the leash. The ardor for strife, the staying power of quiet courage, all are here; and here, too, a felicity of language that makes each noble name a trumpet blast of defiance, a fresh incentive to heroic deeds.

“With Spanish yew so strong,

Arrows a cloth-yard long,

That like to serpents stung,

Piercing the weather;

None from his fellow starts,

But playing manly parts,

And like true English hearts,

Stuck close together.

—————

“Warwick in blood did wade,

Oxford the foe invade,

And cruel slaughter made,

Still as they ran up;

Suffolk his axe did ply,

Beaumont and Willoughby

Bare them right doughtily,